Green Hell (4 page)
“I don't do sharing.”
But somewhere in there, he wasn't entirely resistant. Sometime later, he said,
“Perhaps you could do a Tom Waits.”
Lost me.
I said,
“Lost me.”
He sighed, said,
“For a young guy, part of the most sophisticated techno-savvy generation, you are pig ignorant of the things that matter.”
Annoyed, I tried,
“And like . . . Tom . . . whoever . . . matters?”
He was shaking his head.
“Fuck me, that's like asking if the Clash are relevant.”
I sat down, waited, then got,
“Tom Waits said,
âShall I tell you the truth or just string
You along?'”
Getting no comment from me, he went on,
“I like the idea of the unreliable narrator.”
Why was I not surprised?
That evening a book dropped through my mailbox.
Patricia Highsmith,
Edith's Diary
.
A note enclosed:
Kid,
About the best unreliable narrator you could read. Maybe pick up a few pointers.
J.T.
Was he asking/telling me a lie?
After my visit to Superintendent ClancyâI'm not going to lie to youâI felt bad, real shitty. I'd not only done a pretty dubious act but damn, it had blown up in my face. Clancy had not only dismissed me but oh, Lord, effectively called me a rat, a fink.
I took the Jack solution, I went to a bar, Jury's, and who knows, maybe I thought I might run into the South American specter. The bar was pretty much empty, mirroring accurately how I felt.
Two young women were at a corner table poring over a magazine. I ordered a 7 and 7 and got a look from the bar guy.
“Seagram's 7 and 7-Up.”
His look said . . . “Then, that's what you should have said.”
Day just kept giving!
I was considering a second one when a voice said,
“Oh, go on, live a bit.”
One of the girls ordering wine spritzers. I noticed how pretty she was, verging on seriously hot.
Because I'd been around Jack his, shall I say, “terseness” rather than “blunt rudeness” had rubbed off.
I snapped,
“How would it be if you minded your own business.”
A beat.
Then,
She laughed out loud, said,
“A guy with balls. You're a rare breed.”
I sank back into my funk. Twenty dire minutes later, I finished the drink and, if anything, it had deepened my despair. Asked myself if it was too late to get back on my Beckett or cut my literary loss, head stateside. On the way to the door, the girl blocked my path. And her looks? She could be a ringer for Meadow, Tony Soprano's daughter and, in my fragmented book, that was solid. She asked,
“Are you some kind of mature student?”
Mature was imbued with a weight of scorn.
I tried for Jack's “wipe the floor” with her but I had nothing. Her face, just truly lovely, had unnerved me. She stood there for a moment assessing me.
Man, there are few analyses like that of an Irishwoman. It's not even so much what you are as
“what they might make of you.”
Scary shit.
She asked,
“If I marry you will I get a green card?”
I spluttered,
“What the . . .”
She gave a radiant smile, said,
“But let's play by the rules. Meet me here at eight tomorrow and buy me dinner.”
I managed,
“Like a date?”
She was turning on her heel, then,
“Well, it's hardly like a . . . tragedy.”
A shopping mall in Nairobi was seized by terrorists brandishing automatic weapons. They screamed at anyone who was a Muslim to leave. A young non-Muslim, an Englishman, managed a few nervous words of Arabic and was released. They then began to systematically murder the remainder. At least fifty people were killed.
My dinner date with Aine (it was, she said, Irish for Ann) went well. After I asked her to my apartment for a coffee, she said,
“You just want a fuck.”
Good Lord!
Then she added,
“Let's see if you're worth screwing.”
I thought her use of the most basic obscenity was a test and, heavens to Betsy, it certainly was testing, but I felt I could hang in there. Bottom line being that she kept me off balance and that in itself was a rush. She said to me,
“If a man says no to a woman, she wants to die. If a woman says no to a man, he wants to kill.”
I told her a partial truth, said,
“That's very provocative.”
And got that Irish look, mix of amusement and derision, as she answered,
“But provocative to whom?”
Van Veeteren assumed that in this simple
way he was obtaining permission to proceed
from a higher authority and wondered
in passing if this might be one of the motives
for all religious activities: the need to pass responsibility on to someone else.
(HÃ¥kan Nesser,
The Strangler's Honeymoon
)
I was attempting to explain to Aine why I'd started writing a book on Jack Taylor, began with,
“The guy saved my ass.”
She was skeptical, said,
“He stopped a street fight! It hardly merits you devoting your life to him.”
As I've said, Aine was hot but, truth to tell, exasperating. I continued,
“One book is hardly devotion.”
She fixed on me that intense no-prisoners Irish gaze,
“You got some high-flying scholarship to study Samuel Beckett and you're jeopardizing that to write about a worn-out alky nobody?”
I tried to explain that mystery and Ireland would be a surefire combination in the States. Then I could, having sold film rights, return to Beckett at my leisure. She was raging.
“Are you three kinds of eejit! A book about a broken-down Kojak in the west of Ireland is going to fly?”
I said, rattled,
“I know about books.”
She rolled her eyes, said,
“And sweet fuck-all about the real world.”
A single entry in Jack Taylor's journal/notes for all of September 2013:
“Cuir fidh se anois a chuid gaoither anois”
(Now it shall please his conscience now).
Jack's TV viewing had once been a learning curve all of itself. He asserted that American television was the new literature, that the finest writing was contained in the scripts of
Breaking Bad
Game of Thrones
Low Winter Sun
reaching back to
The Sopranos
and excelling onward. But like the darker turn in his psyche, he was now enthralled by
Hardcore Pawn
A pawnshop set in the middle of Detroit's 8 Mile, it was
Jerry Springer
meets
American Horror Story
.
Pawnshops, he said,
“We're the new Church of Ultimate Despair.”
Kennels for the Hound of Heaven.
A linguistics expert has predicted
that the next generation of young Irish
people will speak with American accents.
I was treating Aine to dinner in Fat Freddy's in Quay Street. They do a seriously good chili. Aine was having coq au vin, smiling as she said it to me,
“Irish people can never order that with a straight face.”
We'd just started a carafe of the house wine when I excused myself to answer my cell. Took the call outside on the street amid a riot of hen parties and young people celebrating exam results. The call was from my former tutor in Dublin, who, no frills, asked,
“The fuck are you playing at?”
Meaning, my abandonment of my tenure at Trinity as part of my scholarship.
I lied, said,
“Just taking time out to savor the country.”
Pause, then,
“Savor fast and get your arse back here, you don't want to lose your place.”
Lots of replies to this but I went with brown-nosing,
“Yes, sir, I'll be back in a few weeks.”
Buying time if not affection.
When I returned to the table, a man was sitting in my chair, leaning across the table, apparently engrossed in conversation. I went,
“What the hell . . . ?”
The man stood up, mega smile, hand out, said,
“Boru, forgive me. I was just keeping your lovely lady company.”
Something in the way he said “lovely” leaked a creepy familiarity over the word and I realized who he was:
The professor, de Burgo.
As I put this in some kind of skewed perspective, he rushed,
“I spotted you earlier and just wanted to pop over, ask if there was a chance you'd guest-lecture for my department.”
He then literally ushered me into my chair, handed me a business card, said,
“But let me not spoil your evening. Give me a bell when you get a chance and, truly, we'd be delighted to have you on board.”
And he was gone.
He looked old, like a stranger.
He was someone else, someone whom
he could easily hate.
(Tom Pitts,
Piggyback
)
Jack seemed to get his rocks off on subtly putting me down.
Well, maybe not so subtly.
He'd been telling me of the golden age of TV, when he was a young man, said,
“Fuck, we had
Barney Miller
and the magnificent
Rockford Files
.”
I admitted that, no, I didn't know those shows. He said,
“And you'll look back on what? The Kardashians!”
I went the wrong tack, tried,
“I don't really watch a lot of television.”
And he was off.
Like this,
“Course not, you're too freaking academic to slum, you probably have wet dreams about Kurosawa and Werner Herzog.”
Jesus!
I said,
“That is reverse elitism.”
He laughed out loud, said,
“Bet you're one of those pricks who say, “I don't read fiction,” then sneak into the toilet with the
National Enquirer.
The Irish people were going to the polls, a referendum on two points:
(a) To keep or abolish the senate.
(b) To set up a new court of appeals.
A fast track for cases in reality.
Jack was shucking into his all-weather Garda coat. I asked,
“You have to be somewhere?”
He stared at me, said,
“I'm going to vote.”
I was astounded, said,
“You . . . you vote?”
And he looked as if he might deck me, asked,
“You think alkies don't have rights, that it?”
In exasperation, I said,
“There's no talking to you.”
“No, you mean there's no
lecturing
me!”
A day later I was having a drink with Aine. We were in Hosty's, early in the evening, and a nice air of quiet pervaded. I'd nearly perfected the pronunciation of her name, had it as close to
“Yawn-ah.”
Without the “y,” obviously.
We were doing well, she was telling me about a beauty course she was close to finishing. Then, she hoped to open a nail salon. I asked,
“There's money in nails?”
And got the look.
The door behind me banged open but I didn't turn around. Then a hand grabbed my collar, hauled me off the stool. I crashed to the floor, my pint spilling over a new white shirt I was sporting. Jack stood over me, his fists balled, spit flying from his mouth, he rasped,
“You tout, you piece of treacherous shit, you ratted me out to the Guards . . .”
He had to pause for breath, some control, then,
“And to Clancy, fucking Clancy of all people!”
Aine was trying to grab Jack, pull him back, but he effortlessly shrugged her away, said,
“I thought we had some kind of friendship! If you were anybody else, I'd kick your fucking head in.”
Aine shouted,
“Leave him alone. I'll call the Guards!”
He turned to her and the manic rage seemed to ebb. He said,
“Jesus, the Guards! You two deserve each other.”
He looked down at me, said,
“You sorry excuse for a man.”
And then threw some notes onto the counter, said to the stunned barman,
“Buy these two beauts a drink, something yellow,
And weak as piss.”
I would prefer to be in a coma
and just be woken up and wheeled
out onstage and play and then put back
in my own little world.
(Kurt Cobain)
It was Aine who declared,
“OK, if you're going to do a book on that . . .”
She faltered,
“Asshole,”
Then,
“You're going to have to be the scholar we keep hearing you are.”
I wasn't sure where this was going, said,
“Not sure where this is going.”
She stifled her impatience, explained,
“Sources . . . research, talk to the people who know/knew him.”
Made sense.
Within a few days I had a list.
Like this,
Assorted barpersons.
A woman named Ann Henderson, supposedly the one and only great love of his life. Of course, as used in Taylorland, the affair had ended badly with Ann marrying another Guard, an archenemy of Jack. Indeed, it was hard to find people who weren't enemies of his, arch or otherwise.
Cathy and Jeff, the parents of the Down syndrome child whose death was widely attributed to Jack's negligence.
Ban Garda Ridge, a sometime accomplice, confidante, and conspirator of Jack's.
Father Malachy. A close friend of Jack's late mother and someone who'd known Jack for over twenty years. I was hoping he'd shed some light on Jack's hard-on for the Church. In light of the recent clerical scandals, maybe
hard-on
was a poor choice of noun.
A solicitor who'd haphazardly dealt with Jack's numerous escapades with the Guards.
There was a Romanian, Caz, whose name featured often but he'd apparently been deported in one of the government sweeps.