notebook. Hoey began copying them.
“If you think that Paul was by way of being very religious, you’d be wrong there,” said Fitzgerald. “I don’t know if there are lapsed Jews like there are lapsed Catholics but he didn’t wear his religion on his sleeve. I asked him when he came to me with the bit about the Arabs, the students, if he hadn’t an interest to declare there. He laughed it off, treated it as a joke.”
“A joke,” Minogue echoed with a leaden emphasis.
“Yes. Because being a Jew he’d necessarily be expected to have it in for any Arab. Stereotyping. Get this, now: Paul was an unashamed progressive, like a lot of people here. Your mob call it Leftie, I don’t doubt. Let’s just say that Paul wasn’t a gobshite. We have to fight our corner here on this programme. There’ll always be complaints, and dinosaurs from the bog wanting to put us off the air and have more ‘entertainment’, less looking at the Emperor. Paul wouldn’t have been working here if he was a bread and circuses man. It was a personal challenge to him to go out and meet these students, he said. He actually had a lot of sympathy for Palestinians. We think there are no shades of opinion in Israel, you know, and we assume that every Israeli-and therefore, every Jew the world over-supports what has happened in Israel over the last ten years. Not so.”
“It’s getting a bit murky for me,” Minogue murmured. “It seems odd to me that he should be murdered for being a Jew who was apparently taking an interest in Arab goings-on as regards Ireland.”
“That’s putting it a bit crudely. I don’t think any of those students would do that, even if they knew Paul was Jew. Remember that he was an Irishman, a Dubliner. Would you have known him for anything but that if you’d met him in the street?” asked the rhetorical Fitzgerald. Dead with a hole the size of a tenpenny piece in his forehead, Minogue wanted to reply. The back of his head pulped too, Mr. Smart-arse Fitzgerald.
“Point taken. What if there are more militant students coming here now? Like you were wondering about, ones with some brief to be involved with our crop of IRA? What if one of them knew precisely that Paul was a Jew?”
Fitzgerald shrugged. Minogue drained his cup and he watched as Fitzgerald rummaged in a drawer of his desk. A grainy newspaper photograph of Daniel Ortega fluttered to the floor by Minogue’s feet. He picked it up and laid it on Fitzgerald’s desk. Fitzgerald smiled then and laid a key by Minogue’s cup. Minogue couldn’t suppress a snigger.
“There: now you know for sure. Don’t tell the bishops,” said Fitzgerald.
“I didn’t think you kept pictures of the Sacred Heart in there, Mr. Fitzgerald. Don’t be worrying about shocking me.”
Fitzgerald announced that he had to get back to work. He had allotted nearly an hour to the Gardai, holding off calls and conferences for this interview. Now he had to get on top of this evening’s programme.
Minogue asked him what other stories Paul Fine had been working on.
“Bren will tell you those. I knew some of them. He did a story on chemists down the country refusing to stock contraceptives. Em, he trimmed something we got about Thatcher’s own constituency, you know, how the locals view her. What else? The Arab student thing, of course. Oh, I forgot: it was his turn to hunt for some scandal.”
“Scandal? Journalists?” said Minogue, not quite carrying it off.
“We’re always interested in what sulking backbenchers might be bellyaching about. Especially with the Ard Fheis, our glorious governing party’s convention, coming up in a week and a half. Not a lot of Party members will talk to our programme, you see-before the Ard Fheis, I mean. We have the name of stirring up trouble, making mountains out of molehills because our format pretty well dictates that we can’t give them a half an hour to gab. Still, we try. There’s always a grumbling TD out there, a fella who would like to air his notions.”
“I take it you mean a bit of muck-raking.” Fitzgerald affected shock. “Seeing as we’re talking man-to-man here,” Minogue added.
“You’re not a bishop in disguise, are you?”
“I’m merely a pawn,” replied Minogue.
“It’s not muck-raking. It’s called accountability and scrutiny of public officials and it’s rather popular in textbook discussions on democracy. I mean that we might want to check how many holidays a Member of Parliament or councillor takes and if the State purse is being devoted to projects a little too close to home for these boyos. Recreations, expense accounts, that sort of thing. See how they vote on certain issues, who they’re rolling around in the sack with. Who’s on the up-and-up, what Cabinet decisions for whom. Squeeze all that into a quickie magazine format for tired motorists, and you’re a better man than I. There are the obvious limitations.”
“Sounds mighty exciting,” Minogue fibbed.
“I’ll tell you what I like the most about it,” said Fitzgerald. He rubbed his hands together theatrically. “Aside from raising the wrath of the curators of culture and family life here, it’s knowing that the whole mob listen to our programme so they can get any dirt on their rivals. Then they pretend to condemn us for finding something isn’t quite square. I love it.”
“Did Paul do much of this stuff?”
“No he didn’t, actually. He hated it, if you really want to know. I rotate staff through that job. It’s a constant issue, potentially anyway.”
“Did he do well at it?”
“Well… he didn’t, I’d have to say. His strengths were in other areas. He didn’t have the killer instinct really-”
Fitzgerald stopped.
“What a stupid thing to say, after what has happened. What I meant to say was that Paul found this part of the work pretty distasteful.”
“What did he like to cover in the line of his work then?”
“He liked fairy stories.”
“I don’t follow.”
“That’s what we call them here. Sort of like good news, news that has or could have a happy ending. A new centre for adult education, more money for battered wives’ shelters, something progressive in the schools. Paul wasn’t a hungry bollocks like the rest of us, keen to tear at the vitals of those who misgovern and undo us. A bit nice, was our Paul.”
Fitzgerald’s demeanour changed with the last sentence, said slowly as if considering something foreign to him. His eyes were now less alert and guarded, Minogue believed.
“That doesn’t get any one very far, does it?” Minogue said.
Fitzgerald looked glum when he left them with Downey to open Paul Fine’s desk. Minogue had twenty minutes to look through its contents. He found two card indexes, a half-dozen school copybooks, some used, a small cassette-recorder you could shove in your pocket. No cassette in it, none in the drawer. Over a dozen hanging-file folders. Minogue left the files in the cabinet and looked through the copybooks. Fine had apparently kept notes. Minogue could read most of the pages, some home-made shorthand excepted. The most recent date appeared to be almost three weeks previously-notes from an interview which concerned agricultural fertilizers turning up in rivers.
One card index held names and addresses, listed alphabetically. The other, also bound with a rubber band, detailed lists of subjects. Minogue made sense of most of the topics. Fine had dated previous broadcasts on some items. Opening to P, Minogue saw ‘ Papal Visit- expenses’, followed by references to radio and television broadcasts. An idea for a future story on the radio, probably. Minogue checked ‘ Israel’ and found sub-topics too: ‘ Irl-Isl. (dpltc.)’, ‘Isl.- S. Africa’, ‘Isl.-West Bank’. Fine’s system also noted related subjects and programmes with some references to print media: ‘ I.T.’ for Irish Times, ‘Gdn.’ for Guardian, ‘Ind’ for the British Independent. The different media references were colour-coded, yellow for radio programmes, black for newspapers, red for television. Nothing under A for Arab. Stupid to expect that. No ‘ League for Solidarity… ’ either. Minogue found entries for the IRA and Intelligence Services. Methodical fella, Paul Fine. If he was bored some day or short of a topic he could go to his Index and even whet his appetite further by looking at some previous treatments of topics. None of his sources was dated earlier than two years back. Maybe he skimmed off the older entries at the end of every year and started new cards to stay up-to-date…
Hoey was fingering through the file folders in the drawers of the desk. Fitzgerald had indeed stuffed what he had found on the top of the desk into the drawers. A packet of Carroll’s cigarettes, a telephone message on red paper to call Mary. Minogue took the number to check against Mary McCutcheon’s. A small internal phone directory
