Ordinary Decent Criminals

“Politics?”

“Reactive. Depends on whom she’s browned off with—and sooner or later, that’s everyone she’s ever laid eyes on. I’ve wondered if she’s carrying on with MacBride to spite her mother. She’d never tell her ma outright. But it might satisfy Roisin if the news slipped under the back door.”

“Republican?”

“You’re not getting the picture. Sure, stuck on the right boyfriend, she’d smuggle bazookas in her boot across the border with the best of them. With Angus I expect she’s stitching Union Jacks for the Apprentice Boys.”

“You don’t seem to think much of Miss St. Clair.”

“I’m getting catty. It isn’t attractive, is it?”

“No, it’s entertaining, but I’m beginning to wonder what MacBride sees in her besides the obvious. And the affair’s been on for a couple of years.”

“She is nice to look at. She’s no dozer once you get her intrigued. And with all that resentment, well—she can get scrappy in a corner. I imagine Angus likes a good fight.”

“As long as he can win.”

“Exactly. Besides, there’s a beguiling frailty to Roisin. One of those women who can spend all day in bed. I don’t know if she gets migraines, but she should. She makes you want to take care of her.”

“So far you’ve described a well-dressed rabbit.”

“That’s not fair,” Constance insisted, with discipline. “Roisin can be fractious, but when you smooth her back down she is sweet. And to see her thrive on the merest tidbit, that you like her blouse or her sofa—her childhood must have been appalling.”

“Aye,” Farrell murmured. “What’s sad is, she’s still looking for what the rest of us gave up on long ago.”

“Farrell O’Phelan, if you think you’ve given up on it, you’re fooling yourself.”

He put his arm around her shoulder, but absently. She liked it when he absorbed himself elsewhere so she could discreetly study his face. It never bored her. The eyes so deep-set, the nose so lumpy and Roman, those drastic bumps and hollows sculpture for the blind. She could see leading a pair of pale, unsighted hands to his head: Now, this is a face. This is a real face.

Because Farrell himself never bored her. And she knew everything—his distaste for red cabbage, his shirt size. Name a season and a year for the last forty-three and she could tell you precisely what he was doing and even when he got up in the morning—though a few years there were easy: at noon to drink till 5 a.m., like reporting for work. Yet there remained something insoluble about him; he was like Flann O’Brien’s infinite bureaus within bureaus, so that every time when you thought you had drawn his very self out of his own drawer there was one more inscrutable bit inside; she would have to pick out the next speck with tweezers, and would shortly be found scuffling the floor, having dropped him, the part she didn’t understand and therefore the only part that mattered, the clue.

Farrell stirred. “You’re cold,” said Constance. “Let’s head back. There’s a powerful lot of phone calls to return. And two boys from Turf Lodge rang up, with word they’re to be knee-capped. They want to spend the night in your office.”

“Check their story; only the outer room; no beer.”

“Then it’s time for Oscar’s, isn’t it? I know the food is desperate, but when you ignore them they’re hurt. They miss you.”

“What they miss is our sixty-quid checks. No, I’ve something on this evening.”

“Oh.” She did not know everything.

“I’ll ring you when I get home,” he offered.

“That would be lovely.”

“… We had dinner together last night,” said Farrell.

“Yes.”

“… and the night before.”

“Yes.”

“And lunch! And probably will dine tomorrow night as well!”

“Of course, if you like,” she said graciously. “If you’ve nothing else planned.”

“What do you bloody want, then?”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You didn’t have to!”

Farrell scowled into the collar of his overcoat. They did not hold hands.

chapter three (#ulink_5d09b6c1-3571-5499-b8fa-7d279e060870)

The Green Door, or Everybody Likes Lancaster (#ulink_5d09b6c1-3571-5499-b8fa-7d279e060870)

The Green Door had no such thing. Caged across the front, the club was coiled with razor wire; even the little neon sign, burned out, was fenced in. The entrance wasn’t green but brown, its peephole rheumy.

“O’Phelan,” the guard at the door grunted. “Trouble himself.”

“I’ve gotten as many pillocks out of trouble as in. A good record, for this town.”

“Right you are, our own Captain Marvel. Though I hear tell, you don’t muck in as you used. Keep the nails clean and that.”

“Excuse me, but at eight o’clock,” Farrell towered, “I have a date in there with a curvaceous little glass of wine.”

“For you, O’Phelan, the glass is sure only as wee as a mate could do laps in.”

“I don’t swim.” Farrell made a move for the door.

“We’ve yet to explore,” the guard said grandly, barring the way, “what makes you feel so comfortable in these parts.”

“In the last ten years,” said Farrell calmly, “I’ve been credited as a Provo, a Stickie, an Irp, and a legman for branches of the IPLO you haven’t even heard of; as a propagandist for the UDA, eccentric fop for the SDLP, CIA agent, Special Branch hit man, British supergrass, and IDA occupational safety inspector. I imagine with those credentials I can waltz into any pub in town.”

“Och, you think it’s all a game, man.”

“Yes.”

After three separate grillings to get in, each more suspicious than the last, Farrell was bewildered why he bothered. He hated catering to their self-importance.

Inside Farrell shook his head—a whole city full of warm, intimate bars, the Crown, the Morning Star, the Rotterdam, and West Belfast crammed into these grotty drinking clubs. By what poor guidance or misfortune did the American drink here? For the Green Door was the worst: bare bulbs overhead, long, laminated tables, crumbling ceiling tiles. A wooden Armalite mounted like a marlin over the bar; a collection of plastic bullets on the counter, long, round, heavy boles fondled gray, like merchandise from a secondhand sex shop. The usual Gerry Adams posters and H-block brouhaha covered the walls: REMEMBER BLOODY SUNDAY!; DON’T FRATERNIZE! THIS BRIT COULD BE STANDING BESIDE YOU—WATCH WHAT YOU SAY; SOLDIERS ARE WE, WHOSE LIVES ARE PLEDGED FOR IRELAND; BRIT THUGS OUT; SS RUC … but Farrell had read these so many times before that they faded into so much wallpaper. The best thing about propaganda is its short shelf life—successfully familiar, it disappears.

“Hulloo, Farrell!” Though they hadn’t seen each other for five years, Duff hailed him as if that were just the other day—and in Duff’s way of thinking, Farrell supposed, it was. Time was like everything else in Duff’s life that he swallowed in quantity—Guinness, sausage rolls, other people’s stories. “How are you keeping?” As he pressed Farrell’s hand, Shearhoon’s eyes squeezed tight. Strange, for such an expansive character he had a nervousness, a flinch. Then, Farrell had spent enough time around rapacious politicians to enjoy the more leisurely ambitions of Shearhoon tonight. He was one of those affable men out to take over the world simply by consuming it. Duff’s steady advance on occupying space would make a pleasant low-budget horror film.

“Wasn’t I talking you up the other day, just. Remembering back in ’72 on the barricades, do you know? Brits lined up just outside the no-go all confused like, mothers and wains about, houses afire. Every wee soldier sure he’s tomorrow’s headline in the Irish News for shooting a toddler. It’s the lads! your women all cry. Make way for the lads! And if Farrell O’Phelan doesn’t climb on top of the burning bus like Moses, do you follow? Hair out to here and eyes out farther. Farrell, you missed your calling as a priest, so you did. You’d put the fear of hell in a bottle of Baby Cham.”