The Bloomsday Dead

‘McKinty is a cross between Mickey Spillane and Damon Runyon – the toughest, the best. Beware of McKinty’ Frank McCourt

First published in Great Britain in 2008 by
SERPENT’S TAIL
an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
3a Exmouth House
Pine Street
London
EC1R 0JH
www.serpentstail.com

This eBook edition first published in 2010

Copyright © Adrian McKinty 2008

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, dead or alive, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

eISBN: 978-1-84765-157-0

Contents

I set the binoculars on the wall, took the note, and put it in my pocket. Hector was watching my face to see if there was annoyance or even dread in my eyes, but I was giving nothing away.

The sun was rising over the Andes, turning the Pacific a pinkish blue. The sky to the east was a long golden gray and in the west the Southern Cross and the moon had set into the sea.

I thanked Hector with a nod and put my sunglasses on.

Wild lilacs were growing among the cacti and a warm breeze was blowing through the poplars. There was, as yet, no traffic and normally it would be peaceful up here. Just the cliffs and the beach and the whole of the sleeping city behind me. Fog burning off the head-land and a few early-morning dog walkers demonstrating that Latin love for miniature poodles and Lhasas.

“Lovely, isn’t it?” I said in English.

Hector shook his head uncomprehendingly.

I smiled, watched the usual dazzling collection of seabirds rising on the thermals off the cliffs. Occasionally you’d see an albatross or a peregrine falcon and rarer still sometimes a lost condor or two.

The smell of orange blossom and oleander.

“Lima has a bad rap, but I like it,” I said in Spanish.

Especially this time of day before the two-stroke motors and the diesel engines and the coal fires really got going. Hector nodded, pleased with the remark and happy that he’d found me before I retired to bed. He knew that after the night shift I liked to come here with a cup of coffee. Last week I came to watch the first transit of Venus in living memory but mostly it was either to do some amateur ornithology or, he suspected, to stare through the binocs at the pretty surfer girls catching the big rolling breakers at the meeting of the continent and the ocean.

Today about a dozen early surfers, all of them in their teens, wearing full wet suits, booties, and gloves. Half of them female, a new feature of the scene in the city. None of them looked like Kit, the surfer girl I’d been forced to kill in Maine a long time ago, but they all reminded me of her—I mean, that’s the sort of thing you never get over.

I sipped the coffee, frowned at the sound of a power drill. This particular morning, much to my annoyance, it was not quiet up here. There were a score of grips and roadies building the set for a free concert by the Indian Chiefs. They were working with un-Peruvian noise and diligence and it didn’t surprise me at all to see that their supervisor was an Australian.

Hector blinked at me in that obvious way of his, to prod me into action.

“Thanks for the note, Hector, you go on home,” I said.

“Is everything ok, boss?” he asked.

“No, but I’ll take care of it,” I responded.

“It seems a bit early for this kind of nonsense,” he said with a resigned shake of the head. He was talking about the contents of the note.

“It’s either very early or very late,” I agreed.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to deal with it, I don’t mind,” Hector said with another look of sympathy.

He knew I’d had a rough night of it. A kid from Sweden had taken an overdose and I’d had to see him to the hospital, then I kicked some whores out of the lobby, and then we’d dealt with an elderly American couple who claimed they couldn’t breathe in the polluted air and wanted an oxygen machine. Later today the Japanese ambassador to Peru was coming for an informal breakfast talk on the possibility of extraditing disgraced Peruvian ex-president Fujimori from his bolt hole in Tokyo. The talks wouldn’t go anywhere but it was good for all parties to be seen looking for a solution. Good for the hotel especially. The ambassador had his own security people, but we didn’t need a disturbance wrecking the tranquility of the visit.

“No, I’ll fix it, Hector, you can go on home,” I said.

Hector nodded, walked back across the street to change into his jeans and T-shirt for the scooter ride to the slums. He’d been on the night shift, too, and was bound to be tired.

The surfers were doing lazy cutbacks and the sun was inching over those high, dry mountains that someday I’d go and visit. A blind man had recently climbed Everest, so surely I, a man challenged merely with an artificial foot, could hike the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu.

I took a big swig of the coffee and set down the cup.

A few schoolgirls had come by to see if the roadies could give them backstage passes to the Chiefs; the roadies had none to give away but they chatted up the girls anyway.

“Get your backs into it, you dago bastards,” the Australian foreman barked. Without the note drawing me away to business I might have gone over and smacked that bugger for spoiling my meditations.

I looked at the message. It was easy enough to decipher.

In stateroom LY (that is, the fiftieth floor, suite Y), a Plum (in other words, a drunk American) named Mr. P. Buck was creating a Mulligan (i.e., a disturbance). The codes had been established by the previous head of security at the Miraflores Hilton, an avid golfer. At some point I was going to drop the references to Mulligans, Eagles, Birdies, and the like. But I’d only been here for a few months and there were other, more pressing priorities.

I sighed, crumpled the note in disgust, and threw it in the nearest garbage can.

A drunk American, probably fighting with a prostitute.

P. Buck—I wondered if R.E.M. were in town, the guitarist was called Peter Buck and had once been arrested and acquitted of being drunk and disorderly on a British Airways flight. I shook my head. If an American rock star had been staying at my hotel, I would have known about it before now. Still, Peter Buck was one of my heroes and I crossed the street with a heightened level of expectation.

The hotel was new, tall, gleaming with glass and curved stainless steel—like something Frank Gehry might have come up with on a bad day.

Tinco, the nervous Ecuadorean night manager, grabbed me at the double doors.

“I heard,” I said before he could open his mouth.

“Stateroom LY, hurry, please, we have the Japanese ambassador arriving this morning,” he said, grasping his hands in front of him in a pleading gesture.

“I know,” I said. “Don’t worry, relax, I’ll take care of it.”

“One of the girls has complained,” he said, looking sadly at the floor.

“Which girls? The hookers?”

“The maid. She’s very young.”

He wanted me to come up with a solution before I’d even assessed what the problem was.

“Ok, I’ll send her away for a week and when she comes back you give her a raise and we’ll keep an eye on her to see if she keeps her mouth shut. Got it?”

Tinco nodded. I yawned and headed for the bank of elevators.

Usually I showered and went to bed now and slept until two or three in the afternoon, when the older, tradition-bound Peruvians were getting up from their siestas. And like I say, it had been a tedious, tiring night and I was looking forward to some shut-eye.

Hopefully, this wouldn’t take too long.

I pressed the P button and the lift sped me up to the penthouses on the fiftieth floor. It was a boast of the hotel that it was one of the tallest buildings in South America but even the express elevators seemed to take forever.

I took the time to adjust my appearance in the mirror.

My hair was in the crew cut of an Israeli commando, dirty blond, but recently I’d noticed a couple of gray strands around the ears. I hadn’t had a chance to shave, and I looked a little rougher than usual, though the Peruvian sun had done much to erase the obvious Paddy pallor in my features. I’d do.

The elevator doors clicked.

I checked guns one and two, hitched down the bottom of my trousers, drank the rest of my coffee. I turned left and strolled toward room LY.

The sound of fighting coming down the hall. No, not fighting, someone smashing things up.

So he hadn’t got himself exhausted just yet.

I hastened my pace.

Nice up here. Plush golden carpets, paintings of the Andes and Indian women in bowler hats. Fresh flowers, views up and down the foggy coast.

I turned the corner. There was a maid I didn’t know and Tony, one of my boys, standing patiently at the stateroom’s entrance. Tony smiled at me and jerked his thumb through the door.

“How bad is it?” I asked.

“Not bad, he’s trashed the room, but he hasn’t hurt himself yet,” Tony said.

“He alone?”

“He’s alone and lonely. He tried to grab Angelika here,” Tony said. “She doesn’t speak Spanish so good; she didn’t know what he wanted.”

Angelika nodded. She was a flat-faced Indian girl, probably just in from the highlands. I pulled out my wallet and removed ten twenty-dollar bills. I gave them to Angelika and said to Tony, “Tell her she didn’t see anything, nothing happened here.”

Tony nodded and told her the same thing in Quechua, the Indian language of the mountains.

Angelika took the money, seemed very pleased, and curtsied to me.

“She can take the rest of the week off,” I said. “Maybe have a little vacation.” I gave her five more Andrew Jacksons.

“It’s nothing, I’m sorry this had to happen to you,” I said and Tony translated.

“He keeps saying that he’s not happy,” Tony said.

“Nobody’s bloody happy.”

“No. Except my dog,” Tony said.

“Hey, it isn’t Peter Buck, the rock star, is it?” I asked.

“Peter Buck? Which group is he a member of?”

“R.E.M.”

“This one I am not very familiar with,” Tony admitted. “But the gentleman is fifty or perhaps sixty years old, bald and fat, he does not look like a rock star to me.”

“Maybe it’s Van Morrison,” I said, took a deep breath, and barged into the room.

The business hadn’t taken long.

I’d forced Mr. Buck to sit down on the bed and we’d talked. Apparently, the maid had refused to have sex with him even though he’d offered her good money. While I sympathized, Tony slipped a Mickey into a gin and tonic that knocked the bastard out. The cleaning service would fix his room while he dozed. Probably wouldn’t remember a thing about it until he got a five-thousand-dollar extra on his hotel bill.

Still, as incidents go, not one to write home about.

I found the key card and opened my door.

The room was dark. I yawned again. I wouldn’t even turn the light on. Straight ahead past the sofa and the boom box, a left turn into the bedroom. Go to sleep, wake up, and have some eggs with steak.

“Señor Michael Forsythe?” a voice asked from the sofa.