Islandbridge (18 page)

The real item that Lawless wanted to use to crowbar snitch money out of the Guards – “remuneration” Lawless had called it, in that quasi-legal wordiness so typical of a Dubliner chancer – seemed to be the story of the senior Guard on the payroll for someone big here in Dublin. Details to follow on receipt of substantial cash, no doubt. Maybe Jim Kilmartin's instincts were right on: a con.

Minogue realized that Sullivan was still hanging on the divider. He sat back and eyed him. There was always that stray cowlick of hair, a slight crossing of the front teeth, and an earnest, almost startled look to Sullivan, and his squat mesomorphic trunk seemed to insist that his shirt tails erupt out, right from the start of a workday.

“Anything we should consider using right away, Matt?”

Sullivan was talking about the presentation, of course. Minogue looked over, but could not detect any mischief. He took that to be evidence of the contrary. It would be a battle of the straight-faces then. A bit of entertainment was welcome, he decided, now that Minogue realized that part of him believed what Kilmartin had said about a con.

“Well, Tadhg. It was all fascinating entirely. The big picture, as they say?”

“Every little bit helps, I daresay,” said Sullivan. “God knows, we've had it easy here long enough. With the Euro-crime I mean.”

Sullivan shifted his weight. Minogue registered the bulk of the belly shift and swell the shirt over Sullivan's belt.

“How right you are, Tadhg. Part of the package. Now that we're in the big leagues.”

“That's why
ich spreche Deutsch
, Matt. Goes with the territory now. By the by, how's them French lessons going?”

“
Maith go leor
,” said Minogue, in the Munster Irish of his youth, fairly sure that Sullivan wouldn't miss it.
Maith go leaor
, or “good enough,” was a phrase common to any dialect of Irish, alluding to a person who was plenty under the influence.

“Bet your missus has a keener interest in you now, with you enjoying that facility now.”

Minogue might as well be looking at the sphinx. A true son of Kerry, this silver-tongued rogue.

“No success with the German, Tadhg?”

Sullivan scratched himself gently under the arm.

“They're not so hot on the oul pillow talk. That I know of, anyway.”

Minogue looked down at the heap of files he had culled on Intermatic, a recent shell game that Revenue had come up with almost by accident. Intermatic had been a front for smuggling in dirty money that seemed to be coming in through Germany – from Thailand, of all places.

“Tadhg, tell me something. Have you got a minute?”

“Are you sure I'm not interrupting a meeting now, or a conference call with you know who?”

“Who, now?”

“Malone,” said Sullivan.

“Was it that noticeable?”

Sullivan issued a wan smile.

“Matt, you were in a room full of cops. We can't all be iijits at the same time.”

Minogue balanced his anniversary pen, the ten-year one that Kilmartin had paid for personally, for the Squad.

“I hear you, Tadhg. And thank you. But tell me about someone. Emmett Condon?”

Sullivan's eyes lost their glaze.

“Tell you what?”

“Well, you keep your ear to the ground.”

“Why are you asking me, though?”

“Because you're a knowledgeable man.”

“Is that what you're working on?”

“No. The name came up recently.”

“Is this an ‘I have a friend who . . .'?”

“Well, do you know anything?”

“I only know what any Guard in Dublin knows, Matt.”

“Do you mean something like what I was told already, ‘the Condon thing is a shambles'?”

“Couldn't have said it better myself. How bad? Well, some of that might never come out. That's all I heard.”

Minogue waited. He watched Sullivan's fingers tracing something on a file folder.

“Come on. You're the one'd have the contacts, Matt. You're the Murder Squad veteran now. You and Big Jim. Glory days, were they?”

“At the time, you wouldn't think so.”

“Well, how is Kilmartin getting on now, anyway? Still a character, I'll bet you.”

Minogue raised an eyebrow in return for Sullivan's mischief.

“He's great. Nearly too much so.”

In Sullivan's face Minogue now read the signs that he needed to plot a diversion, without delay. The topic, as so often before was: yarns of the Murder Squad, and Jim “The Killer” Kilmartin, its last and legendary section head before its honourable dissolution and folding back into the Garda Technical Bureau. Minogue had yet to hear any request for tales of the Technical Bureau. The Bureau, and the staff of the State Lab contributing to it on so many cases, was merely a body devoted to police science and procedure, a place where striding giants like James Kilmartin were seen plainly of another age.
Oisín I nidaidh
na Féinne
.
¹

Minogue cast about for anything, and was relieved to remember that Sullivan had asked him about a bed-and-breakfast in Paris. Sullivan and his missus, a formidable primary schoolteacher with the red hair and the face of a tinker, had never been there.

He found the address, and said he'd phone for Sullivan and sorry he'd forgotten. Sullivan asked about food, a topic close to his heart, Minogue had discovered a month back when he'd started here on this, his third three-month stint working his way through the Garda sections. Sullivan left happily enough, for lunch, with a yarn that Minogue conceded about Kilmartin stepping on dogshite at a scene a few years ago, and having to put his own shoe in an evidence bag.

Having his own religion, Minogue had for many years now been imposing his own penance also. Today it meant working through lunch, as repentance for slipping away from “Policing the Frontiers of the New Europe.” He used the pretext of Intermatic's money-laundering trail to phone Dan Kiely in Criminal Assets, and half-enjoy a longish exploration of why Limerick city's reputation and nickname – “Stab City” – was undeserved. Then he re-read the statements that had come in this morning from Amrobank, on an island he knew was somewhere in the Caribbean, but was also the name of some kind of spirits – Curaçao.

He marvelled a lot less about the ingenuity of the laundering operation now after working on it for two days. Last week it had been a builder Mulcahy. That had been a right monkey puzzle that involved fake invoices for cement, the Cayman Islands, and the hospitalization of a foreman on a building site of the shopping centre in Baldoyle.

After a half-hour, Minogue ate a bit of a Mars bar and some crisps and he headed to the toilet. It was too early for coffee. Actually it wasn't, he reflected as he stood with his hands under the dryer, staring at his own face in the mirror, and wondering yet again how much more of this dream job he could take.

It was half past two before Malone finally phoned. Right away he wanted to know what he thought of Lawless, and what the latter had said. Minogue tried to evade him.

“Ask Jim first, why don't you,” he said.

“I know what he'd think before we even went there. It's you I want to hear.”

Minogue thought of the flickering candlelight on Lawless's face, his incessant blinking and his fidgetiness. Lawless had reminded him of that American actor they raved about, what was his name – of course, De Niro. He remembered that Lawless's teeth were grey, they went in, instead of out. Like a rat, maybe. Was it drugs did that?

“Look, Tommy,” he said after a while. “It all means nothing. That's what I really think.”

He wasn't aware of having decided to be brutal about it. Malone fell silent.

“Your informant spent a bit of time on his script, Tommy. Mr. Lawless.”

“Well, what about the woman that Condon was with?”

“Supposedly with.”

“You don't take even one bit of it seriously?”

“Well where is she then? I'll listen in on what she tells you, if that'll keep you happy.”

“Come on,” said Malone. “If I could do that, don't you think I would've already?”

Minogue pushed his chair back. Kilmartin's words came to him too, no matter what he tried, and he couldn't dislodge them from his brain: Malone was losing it.

“Listen, Tommy. Did you pass this to the people on the Condon case?”

“I won't until I figure out if it's a con or not. And anyway, that is iced. They're just going through the motions, I found out. It's pretty clear Condon was bent.”

“Then just pass it on, and walk away from it. You have enough to be doing, I'm thinking.”

Minogue did not like to hear silence from Malone's end again. He thought of the contented look he'd been seeing on Malone's face this past while, especially when he had met him with Sonia Chang, Malone's on-again girlfriend whose family ran a take-out in Rathmines. The flak from her family hadn't let up, flak about dating an Irish policeman, or more to the point, a Dublin Northsider who looked more like the bad guys than their idea of a cop.

“So tell me,” Minogue said, brightly. “Any happy news coming our way as regards to yourself and Sonia?”

“We're doing so-so,” said Malone. “But it's not Sonia I'm phoning about, is it.”

There was a pause. Minogue sort of knew what was coming.

“You think I'm being pumped,” Malone said. “Go on. You can say it.”

“Tommy, look. Why not hand over what you have to them that can folley up on it?”

“What, a pack of amateurs, where is it, down in Kilmainham or wherever they found Condon? Six months it's been, and they haven't found the girl, you know.”

“What does that tell you then?”

“I don't actually want to say it,” Malone replied. “Do you? So I'm going to think, well maybe she's out there somewhere.”

Malone was right, Minogue believed. He sat back.

“Look,” Malone went on in a quieter voice. “If Condon really was so bent before he, well, before what happened let's say, there's people who won't want that known. People on our side, right?”

“You mean the Guards in general?”

“More than that. Like, if there are others in the same line as Condon.”

“Do you believe that, Tommy?”

“If, I'm saying–
if
.”

“That'd be part of the script from your informant, Tommy.

Your Mister Lawless.”

“Jaysus, give me a fair trial before the hanging here, will you?”

Minogue waited a few moments.

“I can't help but wonder,” he said then, “just how much planning and conniving and rehearsing went into it. I have to say that, Tommy. Sorry.”

“Don't be sorry. It's straight talk I want. So here: you and Kilmartin think Lawless came to be because of Terry. Right?”

“God rest him,” said Minogue.

Immediately he wanted to give himself a right good clout for letting this reflex expression trip out of his mouth. It was another rock from his upbringing, he realized sourly, one he couldn't hope to dislodge, his pagan ways notwithstanding. For a moment he thought back again to the funeral for Malone's brother: a life so different, a life wasted in the grip of addiction.

“Right?”

“Right, Tommy.”

“I do.”

“Look, I
know
he's a junkie,” said Malone. “I
know
. You think I don't know how junkies are? But still, I'll give the bastard ten minutes, I says to myself back when Coughlin passed on the request. The due diligence bit. You know Coughlin works with them, right?”

“Right.”

“Lawless is trying to go clean. Father Larry told me that. That's what got me persuaded to listen, that monk.”

“Friar, Tommy. Franciscan friar.”

“Right. So Lawless is in this 3R thing of Coughlin's. Repent Rebuild Re–?”

“Renew?”

“Yeah. So I says to him after I hear him out, I says: Lawless, you just talked a load of bollocksology. That was last week. But Lawless comes back, so he does. So then I go to the next step. You know the routine: ‘Are you willing to repeat what you said, to another Garda officer?' Well, he rears up a bit, but he still wants to push it. Then he lands a name on me, a ‘witness,' he calls him: and up comes Kilmartin's name.”

“That got you listening then, no doubt.”

“Especially when he says he actually doesn't want Kilmartin in on what he says – just to see him there would be enough. So I told him I'd try but it'd be another cop would listen to what he was saying. And he wanted Father Larry there, as a ref.”

Malone was waiting for some reaction.

“Tommy. Again. Hand it over to someone. Would you like me to get you a name?”

“What if Lawless is right? That no-one wants to hear what he says?”

“Let them figure it out.”

He heard the breathing at Malone's end and the detached tone he'd half expected.