The Bloomsday Dead (12 page)

He led me out of the room and along the corridor to a big set of double doors. He knocked and we entered the presidential suite at last. Belfast spread out before me through the rainy windows. Black Mountain, Divis Mountain, new hotels, new offices, and the River Lagan slaking its way through the mudflats. From up here, you could see down the gray lough to Kilroot and maybe all the way to Scotland.

It was more like a command center than a hotel room. There were several burly-looking guys, a police officer in uniform, a detective, a girl carrying a water bottle, a man with a—

And there she was.

After all this time.

The most attractive woman I had seen in a decade. The most attractive woman I had ever seen.

Devastating still.

Bridget. Beyond rhetoric. Beyond words. Describing the shades of green and blue that her eyes took on in different moods could fill the book.

And, yes, she was a woman now, not a girl.

Her hair, the subtlest of copper tints. Her skin like pages from the New Testament. Her body placed on Earth by Lucifer’s minions to ruin marriages, to start fights, to cause accidents, to send four young men to their deaths in Mexico.

Bridget was thirty now. At the height of her powers. Every man in the room looking at her. It was impossible not to.

The eyes of a martyr, the lips of a killer, dangerous curves.

You’d run traffic lights on Fifth Avenue to get a glimpse of her. You’d propose to her on the subway.

Her black skirt was quiet elegance. Her low-heeled shoes simplicity itself. The sort of simpleness that cost fifty thousand dollars. The sort of elegance that kept Vera Wang up all night, sewing the thing by hand.

Bridget.

Where have you been all these years?

I never knew how empty I felt until this moment.

The sum multiplied by zero, the shaken Etch A Sketch, the black hole radiating itself to nothingness.

A void, a nonplace.

Oh, Bridget.

She saw me. She turned. She’d been crying.

She came across the room in slow motion.

The sun went behind a cloud.

She opened her mouth.

“Michael,” she said.

Her hands folded on her lap. Her face drained of color. Her eyes ashen and restrained. She looked knackered. I could tell she hadn’t slept in four nights. She had refused the pills they had no doubt offered her.

She was sitting forward on the sofa, her bum barely on the leather cushion.

A maid brought a pot of green tea with one cup.

She closed her tired eyes, wiped the tear-clotted lashes, mouthed “thank you” to the maid, who couldn’t leave fast enough.

There’d been no hello, no apologies. Just a hand gesture and everyone had fled. She sat, I sat.

She sipped the tea.

We both waited for the other to begin.

Bridget broke first.

“Michael, I know there’s a lot of history between us . . .” she began, her voice trailing off into the silence.

“You don’t even need to say it,” I said.

“I do. It’s not that I don’t want to talk about it. I have a lot of things I want to tell you, there’s a lot of things I want to ask you. But not now. I don’t want to hear your reasons for what you did. I know you have reasons and I know you believe in them. But I don’t want this to be about you and me. I called you in because of Siobhan. I only want to talk about her.”

Her breasts heaved under her silk sweater.

So this was how it was going to be.

What was it Dan had told me? This woman is a killer, a general, an archmanipulator.

I looked at those big hooded eyelids. I don’t recall what color they used to be but now they were as dark as soot. They didn’t tell me anything.

I’d go careful.

“Bridget, I completely agree. I don’t want to talk about the past. I’m sure you did what you thought was right and I did what I thought was right. Let’s leave it there,” I said, not believing a bloody word of it. There were no two sides to this case. Darkey had brought his death upon himself.

Bridget nodded, breathed out. This was the first difficult hurdle dealt with. There was an awkward silence. She seemed almost too exhausted to continue now. How much was act and how much was real?

“You’ve come a long way,” I said, thinking of Dan’s list of corpses; of those frozen faces I’d seen in the newspaper. Any one of them could have been me. And what had Moran said? “We had to struggle in the early years.” I’ll bet you did. You got your hands dirty. You personally.

I waited for her reply, but instead she looked at me briefly, turned away, and chose not to answer.

A different approach.

“I didn’t even know you had a baby,” I said.

“The FBI didn’t tell you?”

“No.”

Bridget was shocked.

“Well, they knew. It wasn’t a secret. The DA knew. The feds knew.”

“No one told me. I didn’t notice it in the press, although I avoided reading the press as much as possible.”

“Well, that was me. I insisted that we didn’t mention her. I wanted to keep her name out of the news. My lawyers wanted to use my baby to hurt your credibility. You know, ‘We’re supposed to believe this man who robbed a girl of her father,’ that kind of argument. But I didn’t want Siobhan’s name mentioned at all.”

Bridget wasn’t aware that she was making me angry. I’d thought we weren’t going to talk about the past. I thought we weren’t going to go down that road because, hell, honey, I could give as good as I got in that department.

“Why?” I asked.

“I want Siobhan to have as normal an existence as possible, Michael. I don’t want her name connected to a murder trial. I don’t want her photo in the papers, ever, unless she’s winning the Nobel Prize.”

Bridget paused here. It was a laugh break, and although it didn’t make me laugh, it touched me a little that she was at least trying to be civil. I smiled.

“No, Michael, I didn’t want her connected with that mess. Especially when she was just a little baby. She’s my girl, Michael, and I love her. No one has a right to publish her picture or use her in a court case.”

“I understand that.”

“So you really didn’t know?” she asked with a look of skepticism.

“No. No one told me. I suppose they didn’t want me to feel guilty and retract my testimony,” I said.

“You must have seen that I’d put on some weight after the birth when I came to the trial,” she said, still with a touch of doubt.

“I didn’t notice. You were sitting at the back most days.”

She nodded.

“Maybe not that much weight. I wasn’t nursing anyway. My sister, Anne, in Seattle looked after Siobhan for the first couple of years, while all the unpleasantness was going on. While everything settled down. Perhaps that’s why . . . Perhaps I missed something there, some bond, maybe that’s the reason we fight so much. . . .” Bridget said, her voice guttering into a guilty silence.

“And I’m not sure I would have done what I did that December night if I’d known you were pregnant,” I just about stopped myself from saying.

“Well, all I can say, Michael, is that she’s a blessing. She’s my whole life. There is nothing I wouldn’t do to get her back,” Bridget said.

“And that’s why I’m here and still alive,” I said.

“That’s why you’re here,” she agreed, her tone of voice eager, anxious.

I could tell that she was itching to be done with the formalities, to talk about her missing daughter. She was already a little impatient with me. That’s what happened when you were surrounded by yesmen. When you could click your fingers to get what you wanted. And that’s also what happened when you were the general, up above the action, away from the kill box, away from the rifle sight. You got impatient, you got sloppy, you let your guard down.

And she’d been bloodied now and that not only was bad but it looked bad too.

You should be careful about showing your vulnerable side.

Do you ever cry in front of Moran back there? I wouldn’t. Weakness kills you, Bridget. Word gets around. It’s a vicious circle. And the more you’re fucked, the more you look fucked and the more you are fucked. Moran won’t tell you that. Sure, he seems to care and he probably does care about you and Siobhan, but everyone has another persona and he can’t forget that if you fall, he rises. And then there’s me. What I want. This isn’t just about you. I need my goddamn guarantee.

“Look me in the eye and tell me that if I find Siobhan you’ll never go after me again. I need you to say it and I need you to look at me,” I said.

She put down her cup. Pushed the hair from her face.

“I gave you my word that if you find Siobhan, I will wipe the slate and make sure everyone knows it’s wiped.”

She offered me her hand and I shook. There was no spark between us and her hand withdrew.

I believed her. At least that was the thought in her mind at the present moment. It would be the best I could ever get.

“I’m . . .” but I couldn’t finish the thought. She had unsettled me with that touch.

Bridget sipped her tea. I had nothing to do with my hands. They were fidgeting nervously. I sat on them. She remembered her manners.

“Thank you for coming, Michael. It must have taken some courage,” she said.

“You’re welcome, Bridget.”

“Moran didn’t want me to ask you, but his men have turned up nothing. And the police have drawn a blank too. You were the only one I could think of. You lived here. You were born here and you know the city. You know the rackets.”

“I do, Bridget, you did right calling me. It was the right thing to do.”

She bit her lip, wiped tears from her eyes.

“Do you really think you can find her? Do you think you can help?”

“Do you still want me to look into it?”

“What do you mean?”

“In light of the current developments?”

“Oh God, yeah, that could be a crank, it could be anything. We won’t know a thing until we get that phone call. There was the hair, Michael, but I’ll tell you the truth, I can’t be a hundred percent sure it was hers. . . . Everyone probably thinks I’m a terrible parent,” she said, angry at herself for being unable to tell what no mother could tell.

“No, no,” I said. “You’re not.”

She shook her head, sobbed, internally beating herself up over that and a million other things that proved she was the worst ma in the world.

“Anyway, yes, I want you to do what you can, despite this new stuff,” she said.

“Well, Bridget, in that case I can tell you this. If Siobhan is in Belfast, I’ll find her. I promise, I’ll find her. I know this city like the back of my hand. I have contacts in the police, in the Protestant paramilitaries, in the Catholic paramilitaries. I even have an old pal who’s a rising politician. If anyone can find her, it’s me.”

She seemed reassured a little. She wiped her cheeks.

“Why don’t you tell me what happened? Why were you in Belfast in the first place?” I asked.

“We come here every year. My grandparents were from Ulster. We usually spend a day in Belfast and then we go to Donegal; I bought a house out there. It’s nice. It’s on the beach, Siobhan loves it. It’s not like the Hamptons. It’s totally isolated. We have horses.”

“So you were in Belfast just for the day?”

“No, this year was a little different. This year I had some business to take care of. We were going to be here for a week and then we were supposed to go to Donegal for another week.”

“What was the business?”

“I don’t think that’s relevant,” Bridget said curtly. Her tone of voice changing, her eyes narrowing, her persona falling back into business mode. Wary, hostile, sure of herself.