Resurrection Man (6 page)

Ryan noticed how newspapers and television were developing a familiar and comforting vocabulary to deal with violence. Sentences which could be read easily off the page. It involved repetition of key phrases. Atrocity reports began to achieve the pure level of a chant. It was no longer about conveying information. It was about focusing the mind inwards, attending to the durable rhythms of violence.

Coppinger pointed out how the essential details of an attack, the things which differentiated one incident from another, were missing. Points which he considered vital were being omitted from eyewitness accounts. Whether the killer spoke the victim’s name before firing. Whether or not the victim wore a mask, a combat jacket, a boilersuit. It was rare for paramilitaries to wear a stocking mask. It was a question of vanity. It made you look like an ancient bare-knuckle boxer. It suggested mild brain damage. Parkas were popular, berets, sunglasses. The black balaclava was a favourite and Coppinger held that this was due to commando films popular in the city. The Cockleshell Heroes.

They agreed that the reporting of violent incident was beginning to diverge from events. News editors had started to re-work their priorities, and government and intelligence
agencies
were at work. Paramilitaries escorted journalists to secret locations where they posed with general purpose
machine-guns
and RPG7 rocket launchers. Car bombings were carried out to synchronize with news deadlines.

Coppinger was following up incidents where the attackers went unmasked.

‘It means they’re cocky bastards. It means they don’t give a shit if they get caught. Else it means they’re protected somehow.’

Ryan gave it a more ominous meaning. The killer was compelled to form a liaison with the victim. To wear their fear and disbelief like a garment of compulsive desire. It was the full-screen close-up: the lips parted, the eyes half-closed, the rapt expression.

It was eleven o’clock on Saturday morning when Coppinger rang Ryan at his flat on the junction of the Antrim Road and the Cavehill Road. Ryan had been drinking in the Markets the night before. He had started to take on the role of the lone drinker. He went to bars where he would not be recognized, drinking heavily. He began to regard it as an austere calling, demanding stamina and focus. After a while he started to recognize others. Slight men around fifty years old with flecked lips and watery red eyes as if from endless contemplation of limited resources. Starting in the afternoon they moved from bar to bar, having no more than one or two drinks in each. Normally they sat beside a doorway, sometimes moving their lips as if to address some verified and private rancour. He had paid them little attention before although he had seen them sitting in a packed bar at closing time or walking home with their heads down. Contained, resentful, unhurried. It was the most dangerous time of night. There was no activity on the street and the men followed the same route each time. It seemed like an invitation to violence, abduction, drive-past shootings, but they were oblivious to the threat. They were sunk in delusion and indifference and other devices of the solitary.

Ryan began to walk home alone himself. Often taxis would not come to the bars he frequented. Normally he would pass through the city centre to the bottom of the Antrim Road. The city centre had been heavily bombed with the emphasis on
commercial premises. These attacks had glamour. Damage estimates running into six figures were quoted with admiration, part of an awesome and impersonal civic expenditure.

Once he had gone from Royal Avenue to the Antrim Road the dereliction was on a more intimate scale. Acres of pre-war housing had been abandoned because of intimidation. The windows and doorways had been bricked up. The official explanation for this was to prevent vandalism and arson, but Ryan always felt an overwhelming sense of violently
interrupted
lives when he walked past. He imagined the houses kept spotlessly clean, the doorsteps worn from scrubbing. It was a dark place. These streets retained a sense of worked lives. It was for this that the windows and doors were bricked, to restrain vengeful domestic spirits.

Often he passed small groups of youths, a metallic taste of alcohol in his mouth. His walk was a drunk’s precarious experiment with motion, a struggle with memory. He felt it offered immunity. It drew on an ancient respect for the afflicted and infirm. The youths wore Wrangler jackets and parallel jeans. He could not anticipate their reactions. You had to know the structure of the gang. The implacable codes.

When the telephone rang he was looking at himself in the bathroom mirror. Attempting to distinguish age and damage from the glass’s liverspots and seeping watermarks. He
wondered
how long it would take before he began to resemble the men who drifted from pub to pub. The bleakness. The dark thought that no longer beholds itself.

‘O’Neill’s Car Parts warehouse,’ Coppinger said. He
pronounced
each word carefully and Ryan knew that he had been drinking. He thought of a pilot losing altitude, a last positional report.

‘The location is right for our boys. Between the Falls and the Shankill. Easy access. Four men without masks. There are four dead, two men shot in the back of the head while in a kneeling position.’

‘Robbery?’

‘There’s no money missing as far as anyone can tell. Apparently all they took was two headlights for a fucking Ford Capri.’

‘What makes you think it’s the same people did the knife jobs?’

‘I’m telling you, you go sniffing about this place looking for who done this one there’ll be a massive big silence. Like nobody talking. People looking over their shoulders. People making excuses not to meet you. There’s something about it.’

‘What?’

‘The two men made to kneel.’

‘What? Prayer? Attitude of submission.’

‘Something there yes, and no money took or anything. Except the headlights. Too impatient to rob the place. Fucking bodies all over the place and somebody thinking there’s a new headlight for the car, I’ll have that. There’s blood everyplace. There’s a smell of cordite and this fucker’s taking headlights.’

‘Petty.’

‘Yes.’

‘Doesn’t give a shit.’

‘No. Something else.’

‘Gratuitous.’

‘That’s not it. It’s the calculation in it. The insult to the dead.’

‘Maybe.’

There was a wistful pause in which they were both aware of the telephone line between them, miles of resonant cable. The speech of the city. A dreamtime of voices. A residual hum on the line like the vexed, insistent voices of the dead. Ryan was still holding the receiver in his hand minutes after
Coppinger
had hung up, dried shaving foam on his face. He wiped it off with a towel and ran the hot tap again. Please. Kill me.

Victor and his team were in the Pot Luck celebrating the O’Neill job. Following the collapse of the identification evidence the
police had no grounds to hold him and he had felt that a big job was needed to mark his return. Big Ivan was behind the bar setting up the large bottles of Red Hand as fast as he could move. Victor was playing darts with Willie Lambe. The bar was listening open-mouthed to Big Ivan’s history of
obscenity
. It was late afternoon and they had been there since eleven o’clock, sunshine coming in through the window. A day you couldn’t put the brakes on.

‘You and me, Victor,’ Willie Lambe was saying, putting his arm around Victor’s shoulders. ‘You and me, the best of mates, right?’ He moved closer to Victor’s ear. Victor laughed and pushed him away. Physical contact between men was a thing he disliked.

Willie had a scheme. He knew where they could rob a tanker of alcohol from an industrial alcohol plant. They would syphon it into 40-ounce Blue Smirnoff bottles and sell it to Taig pubs who’d take anything they could lay their greedy mitts on, he knew that for a fact. The raw alcohol would cause blindness, impotence and other unknown symptoms exclusive to the destitute of heart.

‘Armaggedon,’ Willie whooped, ‘the wrath of Victor.’

Victor recognized it as a bootleg plan which belonged on celluloid. Heavily laden trucks going without headlights on a precarious road skirting the edges of uncertainty. He had other things on his mind. The quiet face on Hacksaw McGrath after they had done the two in the office. The fact that McGrath hadn’t been seen since. He had already got Big Ivan to ditch the weapons.

Heather watched them from the bar. When she liked she could withdraw into her mind so it was as if she wasn’t there. She thought of herself as disconnected at these moments. The men treated her with absentminded gentleness. She was the only woman permitted to sit in at these gatherings. She would withdraw into the stance of a domestic mascot whose presence bestowed indulgence without obligation.

When Victor was around Big Ivan treated Heather as an
accomplice in matters of love and consulted her on the doings of women. It was a perpetual problem for him. He put his longing on furtive display for her like some valuable treasure removed by looters, a fragile reliquary with associations of national yearning. Big Ivan acted as if it had fallen unwanted into his hands. He wanted to make amends for possessing it.

Willie Lambe kept a photograph of his mother on the dashboard of his car. His mother was twenty years old in the photograph, pretty, with a skin that suggested lacquer. Willie showed Victor the photograph. She looks like a film star from a silent picture, Victor said. Louise Brooks. Some
malnourished
heroine fading out of earshot. Victor laughed when Heather asked him about the mother. Fucking acts like she’s a film star too, he said. He had been in the house which Willie shared with his mother. She was surrounded by photographs of herself in her youth. The photographs were arranged in groups on small tables. There were themes of gaiety,
companionship
, eternal youth. She smoked white-tipped menthol cigarettes, and the butts coated in lipstick smouldered in gift ashtrays. She was a fucking dried-up old hag who treated Willie like a slave, Victor said. Willie wags the tail when she pats the head, he said. Themes of cruelty, maternal neglect.

Heather noticed that each time Victor established a
pattern
he would break it. He would stay two or three nights at her flat then disappear for days. He never travelled by the same route. He never fucked her the same way twice in a row. He arrived with unexpected gifts. He would awake from varied nightmares. A gift for survival, he called it, secrets of a fugitive heart. One night he told her how John Dillinger had undergone plastic surgery to avoid detection. Victor was deeply impressed by the possibilities of transformation. To see yourself altered beyond recognition in a mirror. Heather said imagine looking in the mirror and seeing a squint and a double chin. Imagine seeing Big Ivan. I like you the way you are, she said.

Victor told her to continue with the parties in the flat. He explained to her that McClure was compiling dossiers. He
showed her photographs that McClure had given him. She realized that many of them had been taken in her own flat. There were naked bodies on floors and in beds. They seemed unsurprised by the flashlight, as if the sight of each other’s bodies had already confirmed sorrowful predictions. There were tapes as well, which he played on the car stereo. These were full of noises of sad recognition, a bleak interior language in which it seemed that irretrievable losses were being mourned.

McClure had policemen, civil servants and intelligence personnel in his portfolio. It was a case of finding a vice and exploiting it. He explained to Victor that he was concerned with extending the limits of human tolerance, pushing the victims of blackmail to the edge of logic. There had been suicides, which he regarded as defeat.

McClure had introduced Victor to amphetamine. Using a knife he had cut the top off a Benzidrex nasal inhaler and removed the cotton insert which he tore in half. He gave one piece to Victor, showing him how to dip it in milk to deaden its bitter chemical taste with overtones of dumped chemicals, slow leakage and genetic damage.

They spent the afternoon in a house on Crimea Street. Victor remembered sun in the room elaborated through the nylon net curtains on the small window, a sustaining lightfall. It seemed that they employed the speech of a seemly
diplomacy
– fluent protocols exchanged across a table by
soft-spoken
men whose words were accompanied by elegant
gestures
of goodwill. McClure made strong black coffee to boost the amphetamine. Their words had a soft gleam of meaning. Victor explained the discrimination he had suffered from, being mistaken for a Catholic because of the name Kelly. Their detestation of Catholics was a companionable thing. They agreed upon it as a resource requiring careful nurture.

McClure explained his attraction to the Nazis. Their
elimination
of remorse. The doctrinal simplicity. The massed voices and hushed stadiums. The defined oratorical sorrows.

He opened a cupboard and showed Victor a book which had been produced in Berlin in 1940. The German title was printed in heavy Gothic type, sharp-edged alien characters which seemed beyond anything that could be shaped by the palate. Each page had a single photographic plate of a nude boy who stared at the camera with a sombre, violated gaze.

‘People’s looking for control,’ McClure said. ‘They want somebody to take over, decide things for them, what to do with their lives. They’ll hand over their life and cry tears of fucking gratitude that somebody else’ll take it on for them. All that misery and deciding. They want to dress up and act the hero and fuck the rest. They’ll die for that.’

Victor heard music approaching down the road. They went to the front door. Orangemen were returning from the
dedication
of a new banner, accompanied by several flute bands. The Orangemen walked in ranks between the bands wearing orange silk collarettes and black bowler hats. Two of them carried the banner showing William of Orange on a white charger. Their faces seemed distorted to Victor, as if they had witnessed some corrosive spectacle. The sunlight struck the metal
fittings
of the drums and flutes and the flute-players dipped their instruments to the rhythm of the march.