Ordinary Decent Criminals

“This is Ireland. We should begin with what I was.”

“Sixty-nine?”

“A drunk.”

“Seventy?”

“Keep going.”

“Drink is all you did?”

“It’s a full-time job!”

“Until?”

“Well into my twenties. I lived at home. My father lambasted me, my mother sighed and left St. Patrick’s medals dangling inside my overcoat. It was quite satisfying. Might have continued indefinitely but for the Troubles. I lived in Glengormley, a mixed neighborhood that has yet, even now, to see many tiffs. Horrifically, people get along. Watching news reports, you Americans must have assumed the whole Province was smoking. But swaths grazed on placid as sheep. We watched that footage just as you did. And the peace pockets were the hellholes. Och, sure I ended up in the odd fracas on the Falls, a good place to find drink after hours. But I didn’t spend every Friday out rioting with the rest. I wasn’t invited. I began to feel left out.”

“You’re included now?”

“Of course not. Exclusion is an emotion; you don’t live it down. I was a sickly child. I couldn’t play football. Later, when the boys around me were nipping off to smoke on Sundays, I was still an altar boy, fasting, writing religious sonnets, forswearing sugar in my tea.”

“And you promised yourself every night you wouldn’t wank under the covers. It didn’t work.”

Farrell’s fork paused halfway to his mouth. “Please.”

“You have a prim side.”

“I prefer the word discreet.”

She trailed a nail down the heartline of his palm and kissed the pulp of his fingertip, like sucking the oyster from a quail. “I don’t often meet men I can embarrass.”

“You can be one smutty item, I must say.”

“See? When was the last time I heard smutty? Ireland. The last bastion of real sex. Real sex is disgusting. Real sex is repressed. Mash down on anything that hard and it just spurts out higher somewhere else. Because every night you plonked away despite yourself, right? And it was great. It’s never been that great since. I’m telling you, all that Catholicism did you a world of good.”

“I thought at one time of becoming a priest.”

“Naturally! Walking around with a hard-on sixteen hours a day, what else was there to do but become a priest?”

Farrell wiped his chin, following Estrin’s hands as she ran them over her arms and bare shoulders. He liked watching a woman touch her own body. “We’re still on the starter,” he pointed out. “I can’t imagine how we’ll make it to coffee without getting arrested.”

“Still, you’re no priest, with that American Express card.”

He shrugged. “Whitewells.”

“The hotel?”

“My hotel.”

Estrin sat back. “How did you come into that?”

“I saved its life so many times, it thinks I’m its mother.”

“Say what?”

“The man who owned Whitewells, Eachann Massey, was a Catholic. But even Republican sympathies and a son in the Officials couldn’t protect the hotel. Once the Provos and Stickies started feuding, the son was a fair liability. Whitewells has always housed plenty of journalists and foreign politicos, and makes an attractively high-profile target.”

“Oh,” Estrin sighed, “I would hate to see that place blown up.” Locals felt the same way, for Belfast’s notoriety was often priced with simple disappointment: just, Och, no. My parents honeymooned in that hotel; they still tell stories about the fruit. We couldn’t afford to stay there ourselves, but some days it’s worth a few extra p to take the weight off in those enormous chairs downstairs and have coffee with whipped cream and scones with wee jars of black currant conserve—And then someday you’re shopping downtown and the pressure changes in your ears; all the windows in Anderson McAuley rattle. You feel nervous, excited, and stretch with everyone else who knows nothing as the peelers cordon off Royal Avenue with white tape. But the excitement dies down and the klaxons leave off until it’s next Saturday and there’s nowhere for coffee but the top floor of C & A or dingy old Kelly’s, where it’s weak as water, and freaking hell, you’d just as well go home.

“I’d hate that, too,” said Farrell. “Why I’ve taken measures downstairs.”

“The security is new?”

“The place was wide open in the seventies. Threats, car bombs out front every month. But Eachann’s IRA connections and Republican politics made it awkward to call the army. So he called me, several times—’81, his sons picked off, one by the Provos, one by the UFF, wife long gone, middle of the hunger strikes Eachann dies, of all things, from natural causes. He left the hotel to me. Claimed if it hadn’t been for O’Phelan there’d be nothing but a carpark to leave.”

“Why had he called you in for bomb scares?”

Farrell looked pained, for he liked to tell his stories systematically. Conversations with Estrin didn’t work that way. “For five years I was an independent bomb disposal man.”

“Independent? Why didn’t you just work for the army?”

“If you’re going to pretend to know me so instinctively, my dear, you’re going to have to ask better questions.”

“No, I can see you in the military. An officer. Shaving in the desert with two tablespoons of water, and no one understands where you keep finding a clean shirt. Brilliant but unorthodox campaign, blind dedication of the men …”

“T. E. Lawrence. They don’t make them like that anymore.”

“I guess I was observing: they do.”

He smiled. “All the same, you’re hardly describing any of those poor grubby bastards stationed in these hinterlands. And I’m Catholic; as an Ammunitions Technical Officer I’d likely be shot by my ‘own people.’ Mark the inverted commas, please.”

“Who are your people?”

“I am affiliated with no one. Which has driven the entire Province to distraction.”

“And more than a few women,” Estrin hazarded.

“You have a terrible time staying on politics for more than fifteen seconds.”

“Not really.” She would not be ruffled. “I just don’t see politics as separate. More stuff.”

“How adroitly put,” he said sourly. “At any rate, it took effort to keep the business from growing. Countless eejits wanted to join. I said no. I worked alone. I refused to become one more woolly do-gooder coalition. Mother of God, look at the Peace People: in no time, a snarl of hostile camps scuffling over their constitution, while every streetcorner busybody sniffed about Betty’s mink coat. Envious, divided, a model of the conflict more than a solution to it. I aimed to avoid that.

“At first, I’d do anything to save a life, a knee, or property I happened to like—Whitewells. Anything to take the mickey out of a load of rubbish. I’ve snipped up Gerry Adams’s sound system. I’ve bribed an army helicopter pilot to hover over an Ian Paisley rally close enough that no one could make out a word and women lost their hats. I ran my own dirty-tricks squad. It was all supremely down-to-earth, if sometimes adolescent.”

“Why are you still alive?”

“Good question. You’re getting the knack of this place.”