The Emerald Lie (12 page)

Like this,

“I used to be a Guard.”

Him.

“Like, in security?”

He could give a fuck but I was buying rounds so he could fake an interest. I said,

“No, the police.”

He was in his late fifties and, like me, on the run from himself. He was, he said, or used to be,

“Something in the City.”

This is the same gig as being an Internet consultant. I tuned him out for a bit as I watched the horror of
Charlie Hebdo
play out in Paris. It seemed as unreal and awful as my life.

ISIS beheaded another hostage and I told myself I was well out of a world that was so crazy and merciless. Bizarre note: If I saw someone walking a dog, I felt convulsed with guilt. And in the UK, it’s nigh impossible not to see that happen many times a day. Maybe it was some weird loneliness but I took to walking along Kilburn High Road in a vague desire to hear Irish accents. Futile, as a myriad of international voices drowned out even the traffic.

And then.

They say if you walk in London long enough, you will meet just about everybody you ever knew. Fanciful and statistically impossible but a nice notion. My money was taking a hammering and thus preoccupied, I didn’t at first recognize my own name.

“Jack. Jack Taylor!”

Drinking like I’d been, you begin to ignore voices as you suspect they are mostly internal and never the messengers of anything good. Kept going until my arm was grabbed. I thought,

“Nicked and about time.”

Turned to see Father Malachy, the bane of my past life. We had some history and all of it bad. He’d been one of those priests who attach themselves to old women and seep in piety together
to the detriment of all. I’d once memorably helped him out and was he grateful?

Was he fuck?

I almost didn’t recognize him as he was in civilian clothes, quite a smart suit and heavy overcoat. He still had that priest air; it trails behind them like bad news. Not sanctity as much as superciliousness. I asked,

“Did they defrock you finally?”

He threw away a cigarette he’d been drawing on. He was one of those incorrigible smokers, smoked during a smoke. In a weird way, I was kind of glad to see him and that shows the depth of my desperation. He said,

“Who are you on the run from, Taylor?”

I nearly laughed. He was unchanged and, in a world of darkness, he had at least stayed true to his nature. I indicated a pub on the corner, asked,

“You want to grab a pint?”

He gave me that ecclesiastical stare, long on disapproval and short on compassion, and said,

“I’ll consider it penance.”

The bar was quiet, one middle-aged guy tending who greeted,

“Fathers.”

Irish.

They can spot the clergy at close range. That he thought I was one was just more insult to my burdened mind. We ordered some pints and chasers. The guy said,

“Grab a table and I’ll shoot them over to ye.”

We sat and Malachy reached for his cigs. I cautioned,

“You can’t smoke here.”

He tried defiance for a moment then decided not to. When the drinks came, he sank the Jay fast, belched, said,

“Ah.”

I know the feeling, nothing else quite like it, a split second when the world lights up and you have such peace, then …

He asked,

“Why are you hiding out in this heathen land?”

He still spoke like a character from Synge. I said,

“Bit of a break.”

He snickered, started on his pint, said,

“I’m here for a symposium on church and communication.”

He thought for a moment, added,

“Whatever the fuck a symposium is.”

His face took on that flush of the habitual drinker. It could almost pass for ruddy health, seen from a certain angle. He said,

“I don’t think I hate you anymore, Taylor.”

I said,

“Makes me feel all warm.”

He was ready for another round, shouted,

“Bring more drink.”

Then,

“I used to think you were an arrogant drunkard who was the death of his sainted mother.”

There was a time when I might have argued the toss but now I simply didn’t care, said,

“To tell the truth,
Father
, your feelings of me never mattered a good shite to me.”

We continued in this vein for another round, softly exchanging insults. Then he got a wistful look, sighed, asked,

“Did you ever experience love?”

First, I put it down to drink talk and was about to be scathing when I realized he was deadly serious. I stalled by draining my pint, then,

“Years ago, there was a child, she had Down syndrome …”

I trailed off, couldn’t revisit the death of Serena-May, who had died on my watch or, rather, my absolute lack of watch. He actually listened, which was rare. Priests take confessions, have parishioners come with their troubles, but listen?

Not since the penal days.

He said,

“I have never known it.”

I was going to try,
Surely the love of God
, but his expression was so serious that I went with,

“My mother.”

Nearly choked on this but persisted,

“My mother, um, seemed, to
like
you well enough.”

He gave a nasty cough, said,

“Your mother hated the world and everyone in it.”

True enough.

I asked,

“But why did you spend so much time with her?”

He looked up at the ceiling, which was discolored from the years when people smoked, said,

“The oldest reason in the book.”

“To give her comfort.”

“For money.”

I could have lashed him for taking sorely needed cash from our strapped household but what was the point? He seemed to be in a hell that was hot enough already. I had stoked plenty of fires in my life. He said,

“Terrible curse to be in a job you have no faith in and the very people you are meant to serve distrust and loathe you.”

Try as I might, I had no sympathy for the clergy. Even now they ruled with an arrogance that was breathtaking. I said,

“So resign, stop whining, do something.”

He laughed, almost amused, asked,

“And what pray would I do? Where would I live? I know some half-remembered theology and some half-arsed Latin, not exactly cutting-edge stuff.”

I reached for my coat, there is only so much self-pity you can endure. I said,

“I’d like to say it’s been a blast.”

He looked at me, asked,

“How are you fixed?”

I wanted to scream, being touched by a priest, so many ironies therein. I said,

“Keeping the tradition alive are you? Tap the son now?”

He near whispered,

“Couple hundred is all.”

Jesus and his mother.

At the bar, I laid a twenty on the counter, said to the guy,

“Buy him another.”

I didn’t look back.

Park was cruising in his aunt’s BMW, relishing the feel and control of the car. It was like the rules of language, rewarded proper usage. He headed out toward the bay and, as he cleared the promenade, opened her up, letting the speed rise to eighty.

Chirp … the beep of the siren and he saw the Guard car in his mirror. Considered giving them a run but sighed and slowed, pulled into the verge.

Waited.

Watched as Sergeant Ridge sauntered toward him, arrogance in all her bearing. This woman was becoming a serious nuisance, like an apostrophe in all the wrong places. She signaled for him to roll down the window, said,

“License and registration.”

He took a deep breath, letters spun and whirled before his eyes. He had to push down the compulsion to grab her and smash her head against the road. He said,

“It is my aunt’s vehicle. I, alas, don’t have my own license with me.”

She gave a hollow laugh, said,

“Now that is too bad. Get out of the car.”

Waited a beat,

Then added,

“Sir?”

He got out slowly, a cloud of letters dancing before his eyes

K H e

     i

r    ll

He stared at the formation and Ridge took a step back, not liking the expression of fascination on his face.

He cupped his hands and arranged the letters.

Exhaled as they danced, whirled, then formed,

Kill

Her.

He said,

“Not yet.”

Ridge put her hand on the baton fastened to her tunic, asked,

“Are you all right, sir?”

He gave her a beatific smile, said,

“Completely.”

She composed herself, shaken more than she wanted to admit, said,

“As you have no license, I’m afraid I will have to forbid you from driving this vehicle. I could bring you to the station but your lawyer would throw a fit.”

Park stared at her, a dreamy slant to his eyes, said,

“You are right about that.”

She asked,

“What?”

“Being afraid.”

Sergeant Ridge was more rattled by Park than by anyone else in a long time. For a Guard, threats were a daily occurrence. You took note of them without letting them run riot. You were supposed to log the threat and time at the station lest, God forbid, you got hurt. That way they had not only evidence but a written record.

She didn’t log it.

There was something so radically different about this case. It kept her off balance and she had the uneasy feeling that Park was so off the radar that normal rules didn’t apply. Back at her apartment, she tried to relax, had a glass of white wine, but her taste ran to something with more bite. She’d been born and raised in the Gaeltacht, the Irish-speaking part of Connemara. Wine was viewed as penance, what you had when you gave up drinking for Lent.

Jack Taylor had introduced her to the joy of books and had been guiding her in the canon of crime writers. Had said,

“You can’t go wrong with James Lee Burke.”

She put the latest Burke aside, and paced her living room.

Taylor.

AWOL.

Again.

Word was that he’d gone on a mighty skite. Few could lash the booze like him. Her feelings toward him veered from outright hatred to an affection she couldn’t fathom. Their great friend, a Zen-practicing former drug dealer, had been killed and she blamed Jack’s negligence for that.

Stewart.

Just to speak his name scalded her heart. She’d made a connection with him unlike any other. As the modern idiom put it,

He got her.

There was a lot to get. A gay woman in the Guards. Didn’t come much more difficult than that. Add her habitual simmering anger and she made a hard person to befriend. She had so many defenses and buttresses that she no longer even knew what she was so fucking angry about.

He cut through all that.

By kindness.

The only other man who’d been kind in her life was her dad. He had that basic integrity that is so rare as to be mistaken for altruism. Sad now as she recalled the expression on her father’s face when she announced she was joining the Guards. He’d flexed his fingers, a sure indicator, with him, of being both vexed and bitterly disappointed. He said, and worse, said very quietly,

“I’d prefer you to be a fucking nun than a Guard.”

Later, when he’d heard she was coming out as gay, he’d asked,

“Why do you have to tell the world?”

Indeed.

She, to her shame now, had lectured him on honesty.

Jesus.

He had very little, as James Lee Burke characters might have said,

“Book learning.”

But he could rise to near elegance when he was moved. He said with infinite sadness,

“There are valid reasons almost for poverty but none for ignorance.”

Rigid even then, she’d pushed,

“What does that even mean?”

He had looked her full in the face, said,

“True poverty is a dedicated selfishness disguised as polished principle.”

Her mother had said,

“Your father will come round.”

She was wrong.

At his funeral, Ridge, still seeking endorsement, had whined to her mother,

“I was a disappointment to him.”

Never, ever seek false endorsement from fierce Irishwomen. They won’t tell you what you want, they will tell you what they think, and it is never pretty. She answered simply,

“You were.”

Live with that.

Later, after her mother had given his clothes to St. Vincent de Paul, she said to Ridge,

“You may want his rosary beads?”

Not really.

I mean, WTF?

She said,

“I would love that.”

They had been blessed by one of the popes or indeed many of them and had touched the hem of Padre Pio, thus acquiring a slight aroma of roses. Her mother relayed all this with a very tiny note of skepticism, as in hedging her eternal bets.

As Irishwomen are expert at.

The beads were truly beautiful, a heavy gold cross and white ivory links. She said,

“Try not to think of them as handcuffs.”

Thus scoring many points with one simple utterance. They were on the small table by Ridge’s bed until one of her lovers asked they be put away as they induced guilt.

Surely the whole point.

Ridge was unable to settle. She replayed the arrest of Park so many times that she could actually see the expression on his face, a blend of arrogance and a surprising kind of naïveté. Later, she’d gone back to the house as the crew collected anything that might be used in evidence. They desperately needed this to be a sure thing.

On a bookshelf was just about every volume on grammar ever published. The books seemed obscure and impenetrable to her. Irish was her first language and English literally the language of work. She was ignorant in the workings of both and cared less.

She’d run her hand along the middle shelf and a sheet of paper fell out. She’d scanned it and, with a jolt, felt it could be vital. But she didn’t trust her male colleagues to credit her with this and needed to think on it further. She had stuffed it into her jacket and now unfolded it, read anew.

From

The Serpent Papers