The Glorious Heresies (19 page)

“I've heard the circumstances.” She straightened, and looked over at Ryan, and said, “Let me tell you something, young man. Are you listening?”

“Yes, Judge.”

“There's a very specific kind of boy I see whenever I come here. A lot of them have no family support; a lot of them have no education; a lot of them have been, most likely, led astray. But you are not like my typical young offender. Mr. McEvoy has shown me that you're intelligent, that you've got a good father, that you did well in school, that when you apply yourself to something you achieve it without struggle. Would you say that's accurate, Ryan's father?”

Tony cleared his throat. “Yes, Judge.”

She looked back again at the boy. “And, Ryan, this is what frightens me about you. You are smart, and you do apply yourself. And you have no qualms about pointing your brains or your determination in the wrong direction entirely. When I see boys coming up here before me, there's a fair amount of them who don't know any better. Genuinely. They don't know any better. But you do. And Mr. McEvoy tells me that you have learned the error of your ways and that if I apply conditions to your parole, I won't see you here again. I don't have any faith in that.

“I have to bear in mind that you refused to cooperate with the Gardaí who questioned you and that every time you've appeared in this court, it was for the same offence. And what worries me, Ryan, what really worries me, is that you don't seem to be learning anything except how to do this better.

“What is he like at home, Mr. Cusack?”

Tony went to stand up, stopped, gripped the back of the seat in front of him. “Your typical teenager, I suppose.”

“What I'm concerned about is how easily he can switch between being your typical teenager and your not-so-typical criminal. Other than the loss of his mother, are there any family circumstances that could be contributing towards this behaviour?”

Tony said, “No.”

“Do you feel you have any measure of control over him?”

To which arose, unbidden, an image of Jimmy Phelan bellowing for answers, seizing the boy for a search of the city, sending him into drug dens and tenements to flush out the Georgie girl, having her dealt with, having him dealt with, uncovering ugly truths and dismantling whatever peace they'd forged during the curfew.

“Oh, God,” he breathed.

“Mr. Cusack?”

“I don't have any control over him,” said Tony.

The boy turned in his seat and said, “Dad…,” and Tony looked down as the judge hushed them, and directed Ryan to look at her, and said, “In light of the circumstances, and in light of the seriousness of this crime, something it's clear you are gravely and deliberately underestimating, I feel the best sentence is one of nine months' detention in Saint Patrick's Institution, wherein, my lad, you'll find a school to blaze a trail through.”

It's supposed to look like a shopping trip. My mam spins it as a pre-exam treat, in case any of the neighbours twig.

On Tuesday morning, instead of putting on my uniform, I go with her into town to the airport bus. She's trying to talk to me but I don't feel like talking. Everything she says is slapped back. I guess I'm sulking. I dunno.

We buy our tickets and walk around by the side of the station and she sees them before I do and I hear her go, “Oh dear Jesus.”

There's four of them, two men and two women. They've set up a trestle table and they've got big signs saying “Abortion stops a human heart from beating” and “For unto us a child is born” and this picture of a haloed foetus and you'd think my heart would fly up my throat and out my mouth or something but instead I am just instantly raging.

My mam is horrified. Like, she doesn't know where to look. I call over at them and she grabs my arm but it's too late, the words are flowing. “You sick bastards,” I say. “You sick, shaming fucks. Why can't you mind your own business and keep your glorious mysteries to yourselves?”

The two fellas and one of the women are old as balls but the second girl is only in her twenties I'd say, and you'd think at that age she'd know better. She's sitting behind the trestle table. When I get close I see why. She's pregnant. Massively pregnant. She's like a blimp pregnant. So I say to her, “You're down here shaming when you're having your own baby and you don't see anything wrong with that?”

And she's like, “Well, we're just campaigning for—”

But I stop her because honestly, I could hop off her. “How many girls walking past here might have had to terminate even though they don't even want to? What about the ladies whose babies have no brains and stuff? What about girls who were raped? Oh, my God, you know what you are? You're fucking evil. You're a fucking evil cow.”

The oldest guy, the one with a grey ponytail and big stupid eyes too close together, says, “Please move along, this is a peaceful protest.”

“You should be moved along, you miserable bastards.”

But my mam is dragging me away and I'm letting her, because the rage is making me cry. I hate that: when you get so angry you start crying and then people think they've beaten you when in reality you're just so wound up you can't stop yourself. My mam stops in front of our bus; it's not boarding yet. “Don't mind that now,” she hisses. “Don't think about it.”

“When am I allowed to think about it? On the plane home again?”

I wished she hadn't noticed this mess in the first place but that's what mams are for, isn't it? Noticing.

They were the worst two weeks of my life. At the beginning I get a call from Ryan's phone and I answer it all, “Oh hey, baby boy, go on, what happened?” and it's his bloody dad, not him and I'm crying even before he tells me: “He got nine months, girl, I'm sorry, he's gone, they took him straight up.” I couldn't eat for days I was stressing so much, and everything I did eat I threw up again, till my mam came into my room one morning and shut the door behind her and said, “I know you say you're sick from stress, hon, but…”

And she was right. The second she noticed she made it real. And I wish she hadn't noticed, I really wish she hadn't, because then I might have been too far gone to talk out of it, I dunno. Stupid to think that, isn't it? Ryan would do the entire time inside, away from me. Yeah, nine bloody months. And how would I cope with that? I've never been this long away from him and I cry every night because I miss him and I'm scared for him and I want to fucking kill him.

My mam said, “Can you not see what a bad match you are? A time when you needed him and he's in prison, Karine. Prison!” My dad was way harsher but only because I've never seen him so close to bawling. “That's the kind of waster he is, girl, gets you into trouble and fucks off. How much school and grinds did you miss for this fucker in a fucking exam year? And there you go now, isn't it a roaring lesson for you?” He's always hated Ryan.

And you know what? They're right. I did need him and look what happened. I could be here with him now, working this out, deciding how to manage because if he was around I'd be keeping this baby but he's not, is he? He's not around and if he keeps dealing he'll never be around and if I can't trust him how can I have his baby for him?

The driver gets on the bus and opens the door and my mam and me get on.

She sits near the front but I walk a few rows back from her and sit by the window with my iPod turned all the way up.

As the bus pulls off I put my hand on my tummy. It's still flat, because what's in there is only the size of a grain of rice, it's not a baby yet and it never will be and I'm crying again, because I know this is the right thing but I'm so cross that I have to do it, cross with my mam and dad and cross with Ryan and missing him and hating him and loving him and I'm scared, above all. I'm so fucking scared.

Frank Cotter: they called him General Franko. He had a head of curly black hair and wind-tanned skin; he looked like a lighthouse keeper, or a shepherd, something that spent its days in the elements rather than in the back rooms of shuttered casinos, breaking fingers and cracking skulls.

He was waiting in the yard when Jimmy arrived, the waves on his head lifting with the coastline bluster, dressed in a faded jumper and jeans, dirt on his shoes and a gleam in his eye.

“Thanks for meeting me, Franko.”

“No bother, boy. You know me. I'm not afraid of hard work.”

From his jacket pocket Jimmy fished a pair of black gloves and pulled them on as he rounded the other side of the Volvo.

Though cleaned from his chin and lips and philtrum, the blood had caked around Tony Cusack's nostrils; Jimmy guessed he'd decided not to spend his last hours picking his nose. When he opened the door Cusack chanced weight on legs unable to hold it. He flopped out of the car and onto the dirt, then got to his knees, holding on to the inner fittings of the door to steady himself.

“Come on, Cusack,” Jimmy offered. “Jellyleggedness is so unbecoming in a grown man. And father of six.”

“Why are we here?” Cusack croaked.

“Because I can't trust you. And those I can't trust I don't keep around.”

Cusack started keening his own wake. He put his hands to his face and his fingers dragged at the skin under his eyes. “Oh God,” he said. “Oh God.” Jimmy gestured to Franko and he came around the car and pulled Cusack upright. “Oh God,” he said, again, and then for variety's sake, “Oh Jesus.”

The yard was trimmed with nets and rope, the substantiation of a forsaken hobby or a career left to rust in old age. Later on, when Dougan arrived, they would take the boat out. They would wrap the body in rope and weigh it down with shale and quarry blocks. They'd drop it where it would never wash up again.

Jimmy Phelan hadn't been able to swim in the sea for many years.

“I don't know this one,” Franko said. “What's he done on you?”

“Why would you think I'd answer that?” Jimmy said.

“Ah, I'm only asking. It'd be a rare time you wouldn't know the feen, is all.”

“You're all mouth, Franko.”

Cotter simpered.

The yard was at the bottom of a boreen bordered by overgrown hedges and divided by a thick ridge of thriving grass. Sometimes you got dog-walkers and joggers chancing the stretch; they never got close enough to worry about. Half a mile along the wild shoreline, over flaking gates and on a path beaten only by shuffling gangsters when there was an undesirable trussed up to use as pollock bait, you reached the little harbour, and the dinghy that would take you out to the fishing boat. It was a good spot. Jimmy and his boys had used it for a couple of years, longer than he was comfortable with, but the yard was a hard habit to break.

Besides, he liked getting out of the city.

“Right,” said Franko. He pulled Cusack forward, to a tearful yelp.

Jimmy shook his head. Cowardice was nobody's darling. So much of a man was stripped away when notice was given of his demise; it was no surprise to see them cry and beg and empty their bladder all over their shoes, but it was an ugly thing. What use was a man who couldn't stand up straight to face his mortality?

He saw Cusack clearly now, a prolific weakling, a creature at his peak in his teens who'd been steadily sinking since.

Franko had begun the prep. The tarpaulin was laid flat. The hose was extended to sluice the inevitable mess from the concrete; they were promised rain later, too. Jimmy raised an eyebrow, and Franko produced the prearranged weapon and handed it over.

Jimmy crooked a finger around the trigger. It had been years since he'd taken on a job himself, but he had the same good reason for keeping Cusack from his crew now as he'd had when the waster had first clawed at his patience. Dougan knew nothing about the O'Donovan corpse and the brief maternal glitch that had produced it. It followed that he couldn't be told about Cusack's flapping insurrection, his spilling the dead man's name in front of Maureen. It followed then that he couldn't be told about Cusack's reluctant reveal of yet another damned aggravation: a visit from a panicked ex-girlfriend on the direction of that ridiculous cunt Duane. For what could Jimmy tell Dougan on that cock-up? That his mother was a loon and that his attempts to provide a smokescreen had backfired and left him blind and gasping?

It was a skit of the highest fucking order.

Franko stood Cusack in the middle of the yard, shaded his eyes, and searched the skies.

“Why are you here, Cusack?” asked Jimmy, and his old friend whined, “This isn't something that needs to happen, boy. You know I'm no danger to you. I'm a father, for fuck's sake. They're already missing a mam; don't do this to them.”

“D'you know your problem?” Jimmy brooded. “You don't know when to stop. I asked you why you were here and you went off on a tangent. I don't know what Maureen asked you but you went off on a tangent there, too. So many angles are bound to ride your arse eventually. Why are you here, Cusack?”

“Because of a fucking accident, boy, a stupid slip-up, a name and a surname is all, dear God.”

“You'd think that'd be all, but what happened? You left it unchecked because you thought Maureen might neglect to tell me. You retreated to your hovel on the hill and quaked into a bottle and you let your slip-up grow and grow until there was a whore prying at your door for a dead man. See what happens when you think shit'll just work itself out?”

“I get it, I get it.” There were two colours a man could turn out here, apart from the pervading yellow backdrop: ashen or dribbling puce. Cusack was white from forehead to knuckles. “But I'm not the problem, boy. All I did was make a mistake. I'm no danger to you. Why can't you see that? Why can't you…” Whatever force had fed his voice ran dry.

“You're a waste of space, Cusack.”

“I was there when you needed me,” Tony rasped.

“And look where that brought me.”

He'd been sniffling even when he'd come crawling to Jimmy. Panic about a mourning girl turning up on his doorstep, two years after he'd done his good deed for his old friend, compounded by the fact she'd been directed there by Tara Duane.
It might just be one of Duane's notions,
he'd said, flaccid and wheedling
. She may have only just remembered that we used to drink in the same pub, some shit like that.
Jimmy had cursed the bitch under his breath, warned Cusack to let him handle her, and assuaged his anxiety through gritted teeth.

Alone in the aftermath he'd wondered if Tim Dougan was his good luck charm. It had been decades since he'd tried unpicking complications without his old buddy's help, and his efforts had double-knotted the thing and bound his hands with it.

This morning he'd determined to have a final lash of it, called General Franko, hounded the retching Cusack into his car and made for West Cork.

By the time Dougan showed up Cusack would be gone and Franko certainly wouldn't be talking.

Cusack got a second wind and launched into another petition he'd cobbled together on behalf of his little darlings. Jimmy held up his hand.

“Nothing you say's going to change my mind that you're a maggot and my mistake.”

“Jesus, Jimmy, do you want me to fucking beg?” Cusack sobbed.

“You are begging.”

“Six kids, Jim. Four boys and two girls. Seven to seventeen. What d'you think is going to happen to them? We're so brittle as it is. I've one in prison, I need to be around for them…You have kids of your own!”

Jimmy said, “I have to show you what happens to people who I can't trust, Cusack.”

“Please! Please, for fuck's sake—”

The gunshot shut him up. The second made him wail. Jimmy stood over the little General Franko and put a final bullet in his head.

Tony was on his knees. He heaved. Saliva anchored his head to the ground.

“You see?” Jimmy said.

Cusack said nothing. He was crying.

“One mistake can bring the whole city down around me, Cusack. I take mistakes more seriously than you think. Don't for a second believe that if it had made sense to, I wouldn't have wiped you the fuck out.”

“What did he do?” Cusack blubbered.

“Him?” Jimmy waved a wrist at the former general and his fragments and fluids. “He talked too much. More than you do, even.”

He stepped over to his old friend and caught the back of his head, twisting him on his hands and knees so he could face another future.

“Don't let what happened to him happen to you, Cusack.”

Cusack dispatched to wait in a pub five miles back, Jimmy relaxed in his car with a well-earned cigarette and half a playthrough of
Against the Grain.
On the other side of the yard, beyond the concrete wall and over the rutted sea, cloud begat cloud and the air turned damp and grey. Where Frank Cotter's blood had washed into the muck the flies danced, intoxicated.

Dougan arrived a couple of hours post-mortem. Jimmy watched from the car as he approached the tarpaulin and surveyed the glittering concrete. He was a bulldog of a man: squat, muscular, and stern. He had a stomach lined with iron and a pragmatism that extended to murder and murder's horizon.

He flopped onto the passenger seat and said, “JimBob, you started without me.”

“I was feeling old and fat, Timothy. I thought it was time I got busy again.”

“And how was it?”

“Overrated. We should bring the boat out soon. Rain later. The water'll be choppy.”

Dougan said, “You were down here a lot earlier than you said you'd be, boy.”

“Yeah.”

“Always your plan to do it yourself, was it?”

“Yeah. I suppose I was being a bit snakey about it.”

There was a pause. Dougan considered the tarpaulin. Jimmy watched the clouds.

“Has it happened to you yet,” Jimmy said, “that you thought going into a job that you might feel a bit too old for this carry-on after, that you thought,
Well, this'll be the one to herald my retirement,
and yet when it came down to it you felt the same old familiar nothing?”

“Being honest, boy, I never expect to feel anything, and I remain unsurprised.”

“Twenty years ago this shit used to rise bile. You get used to it, then you wait for a time you'll lose the knack for it. I hadn't pulled a trigger in years up to today. And look at that; I'm still a killer.”

Such blunt language was exceptional, even between old friends. Dougan frowned, but raised his eyebrows nearly as quick, thought about the infraction, let it slide.

“Were you expecting ascension?”

“I was expecting to be older than I am.”

This is how it was usually done. A man would commit an unforgiveable transgression. Maybe he'd screw the wrong fella over, maybe he'd be found in a position where ratting out his betters might seem the only option, maybe his jaw was gaping and clumsy, as General Franko's had become. A decision would be made. Most of the time there was a good run up to the action. A call would be made, a favour called in or loaned out to a contact in the UK. Someone would fly over, find the problem and snuff it out. It was all very neat. Everyone had an alibi. The assassin wouldn't be in Ireland long enough to shit and wipe his arse.

General Franko's demise might have been arranged this way, if Jimmy hadn't found himself with an extra thorn to pluck from his paw.

He doubted that there'd be harm done in having Franko sorted the traditional way. In fact, he was banking on it being constructive. He was still capable of rash decisions if his temper was so stoked; beware of the dog. And if this Robbie O'Donovan thing came to light—the whore had to be found and he didn't think Cusack capable of the task—he wanted there to be no illusion as to the boss's mental faculties. When he needed to be ruthless he was.