Dublin Noir

my ribs just for fun.”

I left her blinking at me, sitting on the floor. I stepped over the beaten Spence and left with my plastic bag of thrills.

Back at the hotel, the fight and fatigue had spent some of my craving. With a little weed, some blasts of the scotch I’d bought earlier, and hopefully mucho head from my visitor, that should keep me tight.

“Darling,” she said. She was laying down, a patch of light across her from the slightly open door to the bathroom.

“They didn’t have any crack.”

“Oh, don’t give out. Come over here and I’ll make it up to you.” She squirmed, that gorgeous ass waiting for me to do something to it.

“You better.” I already had my jacket off.

I was slipping out of my shoes when she came from beneath the covers. The gun she had on me was the business, as they say over here. Not at all like that pop gun of Spence’s

“That’s my lad.” She got out of bed, fully dressed. She grabbed the shit I’d brought back, me sitting there frowning on the end of the bed, watching her, the gun dead on me. “I’d hoped those eejits would get dumb, I think the term is, right, baby? Try to cheat me, would they?”

“And what would have happened if they’d jammed me up?”

She patted my face, doing a kissy thing with her lips. “I had no such worries. You’re too much of a stud to let them do that.”

She was at the door, looking back, halfway into the empty hallway. “I told you I’ve been following your career, Zelmont. I know all about your problems with drugs, how you got exiled over here. And like all of you pampered sportsmen, you can’t imagine a woman not swooning because you have sleek muscles and a lovely dick. Which you do have. You lived up to your reputation.”

“For being stupid.”

“No. I’d say you’re too much a slave of your appetites. That’s going to get you in real trouble someday, love, if you’re not careful. But for my purposes, you were certainly the man for the job.” She left, closing the door quietly behind her.

I curled up on top of the bed, the crack crawlies convulsing my body. I downed half the damn bottle of booze and sweated it out as fast as I took it in. Somewhere around 6:00 in the morning I got to sleep, and at 9:00 I woke up and couldn’t get my eyes shut anymore. I cleaned up and was ready when the bus came to get us for the airport.

Walking through the facility, I spotted a dude reading a Time magazine. There was an article about an expansion football team starting up in Los Angeles called the Barons. L.A. hadn’t had a pro team since the Raiders left. Now that was something. Maybe I had one more chance at the bright lights, just one more shot. Could be last night was a kind of warning.

Get it together, Zee, and there could be the roaring crowds and sweet honeys again, the smack-talkin’ interviews on ESPN and the million dollar endorsement deals pimping glorified grape juice. Yeah, shit yeah. I was going to show Maura and all of them, I was the man for the job. Fuuuck…

THE NEW PROSPERITYBY PATRICK J. LAMBE

The first thing you have to get used to working in the IT field is all the bloody Pakis. They’re stinking up the cubicles of Ireland with their curry stench. I know they’re not all Pakis, they’re not all angling for their seventy veiled virgins in Jihadville. Some of them are Hindus. Some of them talk with refined Cambridge accents. Some of them will spring for a round or get their feed on in a chipper. A generation or two hence, I wouldn’t doubt they’ll be praying to Mohammed and Ganesh in Gaelic.

Megan says I shouldn’t be so hard. She says Ireland went out to the world, now it’s time for the world to come to Ireland. She might have a point. It’s been a few years since I’ve been on the dole. It’s not like any jackeen who wants a job is left out. Everyone seems to be working with the new prosperity. We all have to eat, even the bloody wogs and Pakis. Can’t accuse me of not doing my part, I was feeding one of them: my boot.

Steel-toed solution.

“A race of bloody poets,” the Englishman says. He’d just walked in, got a look at me as I’m cleaning blood off my boot with a rag dipped in a pint of seltzer water, after me mate Freddy and me had finished our jig on the wog. I’d thought I was done, but got a touch of last-minute inspiration, turned heel on the way back to the pub, and kicked him two more times, “One for Molly Maguire and one for the Queen Mother.” Freddy got a kick out of that one, doubled over laughing.

“Fucking blow in, shouldn’t have been trying to pull a Bloom on us. He should be sticking his little brown stick into his own kind,” I say, as I replace the rag with a shotglass, tilt the Jameson down. I winked at Megan when I said it. She was a beauty all right, if not too discerning. I’d often thought about going a round or two with her. Freddy had told me kissing the blarney stone would be more sanitary. He then educated me as to what the lads are up to when the tourists aren’t around. Apparently it’s the biggest cock manger in the whole country.

“Bad form, lads. The Indian fellow works with me. He’s a friend of mine. There’ll be consequences.”

Fred’s bloodlust was still up, but I put my arms around his shoulder before he took a step toward the Englishman; ordered another round of the black, with a Jameson chaser. Something about the Brit’s eyes. I think he lived west side, Tallaght maybe. I felt he was almost one of us, despite the Imperial legacy. He’d been drinking here at the Clannagh for nigh onto a year now, by my best estimate. He’d worked with Fred and me for a few months at the financial institution, babysitting the computers running the new prosperity, feeding off Dublin’s newly ripened teat. A few steps up from the dole, just like the rest of us.

Besides, he had a Celtic surname, as far as I can recall. Figured him for a county boy come back to see how his grandfather lived, before he emigrated to Liverpool to stick rivets in the side of the Imperial Navy. I’d bet he knelt down and genuflected in the direction of the Pope five times a day, just like the rest of the lads throwing back Guinness and Jameson at the pub.

“Fucking wanker. Why don’t ye go back across the sea. We don’t need you stirring the pot over here,” Fred said.

He should be one of the last to speak, Fred. He’s a fucking culchie. Blowed in from County Cork, I think. His company is barely tolerable at the best of times. I wouldn’t have anything to do with him if he didn’t have a throat as often as I did.

The Brit downed his pint in one long, continuous draught, catching my eye the whole time. “There’ll be consequences,” he repeats.

“Call the Gardai if you’ve a mind,” I said.

The Gardai had better things to do than worry about a Punjabi bleeding a Ganges of blood into the gutter. The reason me mate and I were so pissed is because the bank we worked at turned us out early. Couple of lads in Balaclavas had robbed the place; gotten away with a boatload of euros. The cunts worked over the narrowback who had repatriated to guard the stash. The Yank had reclaimed his Irish citizenship, only to have the shit kicked out of him with hurley sticks. Freddy and me had gotten a raise out of that. Score one for Ireland.

The Englishman turned and left.

“I’m shaking in me boots,” Fred says. “Threatened by a scut who can’t hold down a job in this economy.” I remembered then, the Brit had been fired. Incompetence, I think. They’d been so desperate for bodies they’d offered to retrain him. He told them to fuck off, and went back on the dole.

I must have been buckled because I found myself in Megan’s gaff a bit after the holy hour. She was a fine thing, Megan. She had the map of Ireland painted on her face, and since I was going in without me slicker, sweet baby Jesus willing, I’d paint a map of the Hebrides all over her sweet belly, in a shade of white paler than her skin.

I don’t know why she took me home. She’d never fancied me before I defended her wee bit of honor. Maybe it was a deeper need, or maybe she really did like me. I stopped thinking about it as soon as I got a glimpse of her pubes.

I love Dublin in the rain, the drops bouncing off the bricks, the stabbers looking like boats riding little rivers