The Death of an Irish Lass (9 page)

“Is he successful?”

O’Connor snorted. “I don’t know how he has the energy left for the little work he does.”

“Please don’t misunderstand the intent of this question, but do you think he was successful with May?” McGarr, of course, had read a letter that implied as much.

“No,” said O’Connor without hesitating. “May wasn’t that sort of girl. She might have gone out with a lot of men, but she didn’t sleep around. Especially not with Sugrue. He was too transparent. She told me so herself.”

Probably, McGarr thought, to keep O’Connor passive. Perhaps May Quirk had not been a loose woman, but he couldn’t believe that she had had only one affair. He said, “But the German. Schwerr. She was pregnant by him.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” O’Connor clarified. “May probably slept with several men.”

McGarr listened closely to O’Connor’s tone. It seemed perfectly regular. Most good writers were good actors, too.

“The German included. It’s just that I don’t think Paddy Sugrue was her type. She used to like to banter with him in Finn’s. They had the same approach to people, you know, as much as to say, ‘I know that beneath your calm exterior you’re really a desperado with a heart as big as a cabbage and you can’t hide it from me,’ and they both set about revealing it in the same wheedling, jesting way.

“It was marvelous to hear them squaring off against each other. I don’t think May lost once, whether he was always letting her or not. Anyhow, it was plain he’d walk through coals for her.

“I once came into the bar and saw him mauling some big black fellow who had tried to pick her up. As small as he is, he made a mess of the man and chucked him into the street. The fellow later turned out to be a dope peddler and tried to rub Sugrue out. But Sugrue has his friends as well. Half the New York police force is Irish. Their relatives were either kicked out or forced to leave Ireland by the very people whom Sugrue purports to be fighting. The dope peddler tried to shoot Sugrue in a parking garage. Somebody called the police. An hour later there was one dead dope peddler down there and no sign of Sugrue. The bullet that
killed the man was not from a police gun. Nobody—not even May—asked any questions.”

McGarr glanced at Noreen. She was studying the road and probably thinking, as he was, of New York and all the terrible stories they had heard about the place. Doubtless, New Yorkers had heard the same about Ireland and had promised themselves they’d never go there.

He said to O’Connor, “What’s your approach to the I.R.A.?”

Without hesitating, O’Connor said, “I support their cause, I deplore the violence. They’re never going to bomb the British people into surrendering the Six Counties. Hitler tried bombs with a whole bloody air force, and he failed.”

“Do you expect them to love the Unionists to death?”

“Not if death is the point they’re trying to make. If they had just held pat in ’69, maybe Britain—. But as it is, she can’t. The bloodbath would be horrible.”

“That sounds like hindsight, Rory.”

“I suppose it is.”

Suddenly McGarr was famished.

O’Connor said, “It strikes me that you don’t think Schwerr murdered May.”

“I’ve been trying to keep myself from thinking anything at all, until I learn the facts. And even if I had them, I couldn’t draw a conclusion without some food in my belly.” But yet another thought struck McGarr. “What brought you home after…”

“Thirteen years,” said O’Connor. “I guess I wanted to take a look at the place again. And see my mother and cousins, of course.”

“She lives alone, I understand.”

“But I have seven brothers and sisters, Inspector.
Half of them live in England. She has company much of the year. Twice since I went to the States she’s come over to New York to stay with my sister Agnes.”

“And your father.”

“Dead. Five years now.” O’Connor’s face was impassive. McGarr couldn’t read an emotion in it.

THEY STOPPED
at a large roadside restaurant. The parking lot was crammed with cars. Inside, they were lucky to find an unreserved table that had just been cleared.

Once the building had been a common roadside pub, and the new owner had taken every care to preserve the exposed ceiling beams, limed walls, tall hearth, and fireplace of gray stone while providing his guests with modern amenities such as indirect lighting, central heating for the winter, and comfortable chairs. The tables were covered with spanking white linen. The simple good taste of the restaurant cheered McGarr—so many new restaurants in Ireland tried too hard to be modern or Continental—until he saw the menu.

Here he was within sound of the sea along a coast so singularly well provided with fish that the Russians and Japanese sent whole navies to exploit the resource, and only fillet of sole was offered. More than any other fish McGarr had ever tasted, sole did not take kindly to hav
ing been frozen. The rest of the menu was standard Continental dishes that were now usually bad, even at their points of origin, where the youngest and as yet unjaded chefs early learned to shudder at their mention: Cassoulet Toulousain, Kasseler Ribchin, Sauerbraten und Kartoffelkloss, Pork Chops Robert, Chicken Kiev, Côte d’Agneau, and Vitello Arrosto. McGarr asked the waiter if the sole had been frozen. He said no, but McGarr disbelieved him and thus ordered the soup de jour—onion—and found it undistinguished. It was thick. The gratinée was a rubbery Emmenthaler and not Gruyère.

While sipping this, McGarr watched the women who assisted the waiter in carrying appetizers to neighboring tables: the inevitable paté maison either canned or, McGarr guessed unfairly, a pork liver concoction with freeze-dried truffles; prawn cocktail swimming in some red sauce; clams casino, and a melon that hadn’t seen anything but the inside of a refrigerator for the last month.

When McGarr asked the waiter if roast beef was offered, he received a peremptory reply that such fare was offered in the barroom.

O’Connor said, “That’s for me. I’ve seen this menu maybe a thousand times before.”

“You’ve eaten here?” Noreen asked.

“Never been here in my life.” O’Connor was adjusting the belt of his pants. It was thick, with a silver buckle and a large turquoise stone in the center. The cowboy gesture of stuffing his shirt down his pants seemed out of place in that setting. People at other tables turned to look at the large young man. Eyebrows were being raised. He then pulled his fisherman’s knit sweater over his belt. It was the sort only New Yorkers now wore. Otherwise he was wearing jeans and black
cowboy boots with green cacti and bright red pears embossed on the sides. “Thousands of pretentious joints like this all over Manhattan,” he said loud enough for the waiter and most of the guests to hear. He then ambled out to the bar. He soon returned with a slab of roast beef and two pints of lager. The waiter said not a word to O’Connor.

Noreen ordered veal.

McGarr sighed and said, “I had wanted fish,” and waved the waiter off when he tried to point out the sole. McGarr nearly got his first wish, however. He ordered the Côte d’Agneau, which tasted like fish.

When the three of them climbed back in the car, he said to Noreen, “You know, good cooking has nothing to do with sauces and oils and expensive, complicated preparations. Good cooking should enhance the individual flavors of the materials the chef is working with. For instance, lamb has an exquisite and delicate flavor all its own, and anything applied to it that takes from that flavor is a mistake.”

Noreen didn’t say anything, though she knew he expected a reply. After a while she said, “Well, the atmosphere was pleasant.”

“Ah. Even the waiter was a loss. He was trying to be snide, without knowing how.” McGarr was feeling grumpy. He was still hungry, too. “How was your entree?”

“Tasted like duck.”

“That’s it! I thought my lamb tasted like fish. I was wrong. It tasted like duck.”

“At least they could have served us a trencher of candied cherries.”

McGarr laughed. “The sempiternal bing cherry! The necessary item in the creation of an unabashedly third-
rate restaurant. How was the roast beef, Rory?”

O’Connor removed a fat cigar from his mouth. The back seat of the little car was a cloud of fine blue smoke. “Quack, quack.”

McGarr chuckled. His mood had changed.

A half hour later they arrived in the vicinity of the dance hall in Salthill. They knew they were there because for at least a half mile both sides of the highway were solid with parked cars and both lanes were jammed. Young boys with pocket torches were directing cars into the driveways and onto the lawns of their families’ bungalows for fifty pence. McGarr quickly tired of waiting in traffic and swung through a gate, around a garage, and under a clothesline.

“All the way from Shannon,” said the boy’s grandfather, who was sitting on the back stoop smoking a pipe filled with Yachtsman, a dark, pungent smoke that after O’Connor’s expensive cigar smelled to McGarr like scorching donkey cack. “Yerra, I wish I was young and had me choice of all the women in Ireland of a Saturday night. Had I that,” said he, “I’d look no farther. Evening, ma’am.” He tipped his cloth cap to Noreen. He was toothless. A small portable radio next to him was playing a reel and he was tapping a heavy boot in the dirt. A glass by his side held an amber fluid. “Can ye dance?” He stood and nearly fell. He reached down and turned up the radio. He reached out for Noreen’s hand. She took it and they danced a bit, moving only their legs and feet. It was like a tap dance, only less mechanical. The old man’s brogans beat a tattoo in the dust, and a lit coal sputtered from his pipe and fell on his sleeve. He batted it off and stopped. “I’m tuckered. That was grand.” He wrapped his arm around her and gave her a squeeze. “If I could wipe the slate clean of
fifty—no, sixty—no seventy years you could forget those two gombeen men and we could make a night of it, girl.”

“Go on with you,” she said. “Forty, thirty, or twenty is more like it.”

He released her and stepped away from them. “’Tisn’t. James P. Creon is ninety and two if he’s a day.”

McGarr said the compulsory, “Sure and you don’t look sixty-two.”

“Hear that? Hear that, Midge?” he roared into the open back door of the house.

Somebody swore inside.

McGarr tried to place a fifty p. coin in his hand. “Cripes,” said the old man. “How could I take that from you after you letting me dance with your pretty sister?” He gave Noreen a buss on the cheek. “If it was up to me I’d let the whole world park out here.”

“You bring that money right in here, J. P.,” a sharp old voice called out from the kitchen. McGarr could see a gray head bent over the sink.

“It’s my daughter,” he whispered. “A shrew. Can’t dance a step.” He put the coin in his pocket and sat.

Once a movie theater, the dance hall had a long stage at one end and a level wooden floor laid over its formerly sloping aisles. It was as hollow as a drum and roared under the dancers’ feet.

Looking around at the meticulously coiffured hair styles, high shoes, tight pocketless pants, and open-neck shirts, McGarr believed he could well have been in London or Paris or Rome, but when the young people began to dance he knew he could be in only one place, for their step was little different from that of the old man where they’d parked the car. What was more,
everybody seemed to be dancing together. The whole crowd moved up and down as one.

McGarr said, “I wonder if this building has been inspected recently.”

Many of the young men standing near them were darting glances at Noreen. One girl nudged her friends and turned her head toward O’Connor. Another rolled her eyes.

“Do you dance?” Noreen asked O’Connor.

“I don’t feel like it tonight, thanks.”

“Oh, you’ll not be able to refuse the girls here so easily.” She took his hand and led him out onto the dance floor.

For a moment McGarr was a bit miffed that she hadn’t asked him, but he realized the situation was best for the business at hand. After inquiring at the bar for the manager of the dance hall, he was led up a circular iron staircase to the former projection room of the building. The bar girl pointed to a door at the end of a dark hall, then slipped back down the stairway.

McGarr could hear muffled voices behind the door. The hallway smelled sour, like cigarette smoke and old tea.

When he knocked on the door, the voices stopped short. He heard somebody push back a chair, approach the door, then hesitate before asking, “Yeah?”

“I’d like to speak to the manager.”

“What about?”

“About Barry Hanly and Max Schwerr.”

McGarr then heard several more chairs slide back and he wished he had brought more with him than the folder of money he had gotten from Schwerr. He took several steps back from the door and said, “I’m stand
ing far back from the door, in the middle of the hall. I have my hands raised over my head.”

He heard somebody within the room say, “I know that voice. Let me handle it.”

A few seconds later, the light under the crack of the door went off and the door opened slightly, then farther, then a man stepped out. McGarr could barely see him in the darkness. He wasn’t any taller than McGarr. He carried the tobacco and tea smell with him. Beyond that there was a sweet reek of porter and the bodies of many men. “Is that you, Peter?”

“Yes, it is. Who are you?”

“I was half expecting you, once we heard you’d lifted Hanly. What’s this about Schwerr?”

“Who am I talking to?” The door was wide open now, and McGarr could hear the shuffling of feet in the dark room. He could also have sworn he heard the click of a hammer being eased back from the cocked position on a large-bore pistol. Or was that just his imagination? He knew his own figure was silhouetted on the yellow glimmer up the circular stairwell in back of him.

That was why, when the other man struck a match and held it to the end of his cigarette, McGarr said with somewhat more than usual enthusiasm at seeing his old friend, “Phil! Good to see you.”

“And you, Peter. How’s your missus?” Dineen had come to McGarr’s wedding and they had been boyhood chums. Dineen had gone into the British army and risen through the ranks to become a major before he had a change of heart. He was a quiet man with thin features and the gentle demeanor of a pastor, which masked well his present activities. Dineen was the man who planned many of the Provo maneuvers in the
North and elsewhere. In the past, McGarr and he had talked, argued, almost come to blows about the use of terrorist tactics. They were still good friends, however, in the way one feels very special about a person with whom he has passed the carefree days when the world was just revealing its sunny side. They had explored Dublin together, ducked under the fence at Croke Park, swiped apples on Moore St. and golf balls at the Royal course on North Bull Island. Once they had hopped on a C. I. E. coal barge together and taken it to Mullingar, where a Garda gave them, each in turn, the first lift back toward Dublin, on the toe of his boot.

“Fine. Noreen’s downstairs dancing.”

From inside the room McGarr heard a sharp report like a hand slapping the back of a head. Somebody whimpered, then a gruff voice said, “Get your arse down to that door or I’ll pound the tripes out of you.”

“But he’ll see me.” The voice was young.

“Let’s hope his luck is better than that,” said yet another voice.

“I know what it is,” said the young voice. “You got me muney and now you chuck me out.”

McGarr imagined they’d been playing cards.

“Pardon me a moment,” said Dineen. He walked into the room and shut the door. McGarr heard a groan and the sound of somebody being driven up against the wall. Suddenly the door opened again and a form fell into the hall. That person scrambled past McGarr.

The glowing coal of Dineen’s cigarette appeared in the hall again.

The whole building was rocking with the sound of the band and dancers below.

“Let’s go in here and let the boys continue their game.” He opened another door on the hall, stepped
into a room, and switched on an overhead bulb that hung from the ceiling by its cord.

Although the light was dim, McGarr could see Dineen had lost a lot of hair since the wedding three years before. At that time McGarr had just taken the job with the Garda and necessarily he and Dineen could not continue to meet each other socially. What was more, Dineen had been implicated as an accessory in several I.R.A.–related crimes. In spite of their longstanding friendship, McGarr’s approach to Dineen was little different from his approach to other I.R.A. members: many of the things Dineen and his cohorts did McGarr abhorred, but he looked upon their actions as mostly political. If no innocent party was hurt, he tended to turn a blind eye to them. McGarr disliked politics. It made things too simple, either black and white or good or bad. It ignored the fact that people are complex and various. In short, he wished his friend Dineen had had more sense than to involve himself in a cause that so often had been responsible for killing and injuring many innocent persons in Britain, the Six Counties, and in Ireland itself.

Dineen motioned to a chair around a large circular table the top of which was mottled with cigarette burns. He sat next to McGarr and produced a bottle and two paper cups. He half filled each. It was poteen, and very good at that.

“So,” McGarr said, “how’s the life.”

“Any day now I’ll grow a goatee and they’ll start calling me the Ho Chi Minh of Connaught.” Dineen smiled. Unlike many of his comrades, he had a pleasant sense of humor.

“Better than the British army, though?”

Dineen looked away. His eyes were hazel. McGarr
noticed that his neck was getting scrawny. “Bridie wouldn’t say so—no steady pay, no pension, no sick leave, no dispensary.” He looked around. “Nothing but the back rooms of dance halls—if you’re lucky; and a few pounds tax free to send home in a plain brown envelope. That’s twice yearly. I haven’t seen my family in a month of Sundays.”

“Having second thoughts?”

“No man is without them.” He glanced at the door, then said in a lower voice, “I can’t say I agree with everything that’s going on.”