smoking,” she announced. Kilmartin looked up into an impassive face. Minogue clamped his jaw muscles in an effort not to smile: she was holding a paperback and he recognized the title as one he had borrowed from Iesult, The Rights and Wrongs of Women. The woman left when Kilmartin topped his cigarette.
“Sorry for breathing,” he said in a savage undertone.
Minogue could resist the temptation no longer. “See the book? The Rights and Wrongs of Women.”
“Jesus Mary and holy Saint Joseph. Everywhere you look there’s a fuckin’ WAMmer. She knew I was a Guard, too, of course. And she and the likes of her sitting in Bewley’s instead of being out at work somewhere. Bad cess to the bitch, the dying leper’s vomit,” Kilmartin growled. “If it was a man that was in it, I would have told him where to go and made no bones about it,” he added. “Taking advantage of my breeding to be polite to the fair sex.”
Minogue did not wish to provoke trouble beyond amusement by noting aloud that Kilmartin’s amour courtois politesse had gone the way of the cigarette, and about time too.
“Judo or something, Jimmy. You never know. Smoking is a vice, anyway.”
Kilmartin’s eyelids narrowed in a glittering contempt. “The niff of her hairy armpits is more of a health hazard as far as I’m concerned. Let’s get back to those two Holy Joes above in Churchtown Road.”
“All right,” said Minogue, bolstered by the first of the coffee. “Not a mention from them of Paul Fine, not a hint: that’s the most significant thing that I got out of it.”
“Until Drumm asked us how the phone call was taped, like?”
“Right. I think they were genuinely ignorant about it. Drumm turned a bit white at the gills. I don’t like them sitting on a possible membership list, though.”
“I think you got the message across to them pretty well there. They might work on excommunicating you.”
“Too late, Jimmy, I’m the white elephant that fled the circus a long time ago. I had the feeling that Heher was daring me to slap a court order on the organization, knowing damn well I couldn’t get one. Even if I could, they could bog me down by giving me a phone number in Rome and telling me to learn Italian very rapid.”
“Heher and Drumm,” murmured Kilmartin, now in the grip of the coffee. “Sounds like a tobacconist’s shop.”
“Or a sexual disorder,” said Minogue. “Out of Krafft-Ebing.”
“Kraft what? Margarine?”
“Interesting idea,” said Minogue mimicking Heher. “Margarine on the wane. No. Krafft-Ebing wrote a compendium of human sexual behaviour. Heavy emphasis on disorders.”
“Do you know,” Kilmartin said earnestly as he leaned forward, “you seem to have a dirty mind. I hope to God I’m not due for this mental fit that has your brain fried up like an egg. All this talk about sex and the Ryan woman butchering her husband-middle-age crazy, the Yanks call it. With all due respect, you were cracked enough to start out with.”
“Jimmy, I’ve been thinking. Maybe the Women’s Action Movement had put something in the coffee here that has us dancing in our heads and being rude to priests.”
“Very shagging funny. Do you see me laughing?”
“After all, things are only getting going. First it’s Fran Ryan done in by his wife. Maybe there’s a secret signal like a dog whistle over the radio that signals women to go out and get the kitchen knife and — ”
“Mad. You’re barking mad. I don’t doubt but that you’ll be running up and down O’Connell Street on all fours in a minute, waving your mickey and biting people and lathering at the mouth.”
“Remember the thirty-seven, James Kilmartin,” Minogue intoned in the most lugubrious West Clare- Transylvanian accent he could muster. “Your number vill be fifty-four-”
“Fifty-three until 7 October, if it’s all the same to you. Stop acting the bollocks. There might be someone in here who knows us. Control yourself.”
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“Listen. They didn’t make any bones about saying it was Kelly’s voice on the tape? No funny stuff there?”
“Right,” said Minogue emphatically, launching himself into the bun. “That went a long way toward deciding me too. No humming and hawing. I’m pretty sure they were on the level.”
“So what we have out of this is…” Kilmartin extended his fingers and held the first, “… one, their assistance in tracking down whoever might have been with Kelly this last while. Heher maintains that Kelly didn’t come to him for ‘guidance’, but he may have gone to someone else if he wanted advice. Two, the names of his acquaintances that had anything to do with Opus Dei. Drumm used to be pally with Kelly up until Kelly left the house last, when was it…?”
“February last year. Over a year and a half ago,” said Minogue. “I think we could press more on the business of Kelly being demoted or whatever they call it. Remember? Kelly’s commitment changing a bit. ‘Such that his work and status better suited the rank of Associate,’ said Heher. That’s a roundabout way of saying that Brian Kelly had had it with that mob. To my way of thinking, they wouldn’t be too happy about losing him from their top rank. Those Numerary fellas seem to be dug in deep and I had the impression that it was a one-way street. They have to have spent years studying, they have to be professionally trained and then devote loads of time to Opus Dei…”
“They don’t kill backsliders, Matt. They were giving him a breather to see if he’d renew his what-you-me-call- it, his vocation.”
Minogue tripped on ‘renew’. Renewal, meaningful, communicate, relationship, interaction, share… He detested the hijacking of these words. What made it worse was that the Church was devious enough to turn to the new religions of pop-psychology to dress up its own vocabulary of salvation. Minogue had been disappointed and then amused to realize that he preferred the Catholic Church to remain flinty and regal, robed majestically in baroque and gilt authoritarianism. He wanted the triumphant church of his youth. His pantheism had been thrust upon him, but that older Church would have been the easier to deny, he mused wistfully, though he’d have missed the panoply. With guitar-wielding priests and personable smilers like Heher and Drumm, Minogue was suspicious. Self-actualization and meaningful communication were all right for Americans. Wouldn’t wash in Ireland.
“I didn’t like the hint about suicide, even if it was oblique. It felt like they were trying to cut him loose and take no responsibility for him now that he might embarrass them,” said Minogue. “All the yapping about pressure and stress of modern society: since when did we have a modern society? As though to say,‘Poor Brian, if only he had stayed with his brothers in Opus Dei, he’d have been all right.’ ”
Kilmartin stirred his coffee. “You can’t deny it though. We’ll never get a definitive from the post-mortem saying that Kelly was bashed on the head,” he said conclusively. “It’s us being pushy because Kelly might have been connected to Fine.”
“Come on, now,” said Minogue. “I never in all my life saw such a suicide. Even if that crack in the skull is due to the heat and so on. A man empties petrol in his car and sits in the back seat without making a move? We know it’s murder.”
He returned to his coffee and bun. He would have liked a second cup but did not wish to press Kilmartin to any more complicity in what Kilmartin regarded as truancy here in Bewley’s.
“Here’s how I see it,” Kilmartin began slowly. “We keep the Fine case to ourselves when we’re taking statements from Kelly’s friends and associates. Say absolutely nothing. Be all ears for even the slightest hint of anything any of them say about Fine being murdered. The ones who give any sign of a connection to Fine are the ones we can turn inside out, right?”
“Yep. Leave it for them to trip over and incriminate themselves.”
“And we’ll hold on to the supposition that Kelly did try to contact or meet with Fine,” said Kilmartin with the slow speech of a bargainer. “Remember, we can’t dismiss the idea that Kelly might have been involved in Fine’s death too and got cold feet afterwards, so that his pals got to him before he decided to spill the beans.”
“But how would they know that he was ready to spill the beans? How would they know he phoned up looking for me, for example?”
“Jases, not so many questions, I’m not a fortune-teller. Save it for this evening when we have the meeting.”
“We could assume that Kelly was being watched, or believed he was being watched. That would account for a few things, like why he went to meet Fine on Killiney Hill last Sunday instead of meeting him in a handier place… Maybe if Paul Fine was told by Kelly to keep something under his hat for the time being… the need for secrecy, do you get what I’m at?”
