But this was the busiest bloody park in Dublin. It was full of dopers. They closed it up when it got dark.
The idea came to him then as a picture of dense woods. That’s where he could go. Hundreds of acres he could get lost in. Did the deer still run wild in the Park? And the zoo. If wild animals could do all right in a park in Dublin, why couldn’t he? He stepped back out onto the path and headed for the city centre. The bags felt lighter now. He’d get a bus down the quays to Islandbridge. There’d be a chipper down there near the gates of the Phoenix Park. He’d even spent a night in the Park once. A crowd of lads had gone into the Park, drinking and smoking dope. Someone got stabbed, he remembered, and everyone cleared out rapid before the cops came.
There was a charcoal of David Bowie down by the Bank of Ireland. A woman was still working on it, a hippy type he hadn’t seen before. There were fifties and pound coins in her hat. She didn’t look Irish. He bought cigarettes and a Coke and caught a bus pulling out from O’Connell Bridge. The bus squealed to a stop by Merchant’s Arch. He’d laid out his stuff there a lot of times. He spotted another chalkie there, one he’d seen before, a fella who specialized in religious stuff. A man who had been leaning against the railings by the Arch turned as the brakes squealed louder. It was the fella who’d chased him from the house. He spread his hand on his cheek and looked down again. He hadn’t been spotted.
The bus shuddered as it pulled away. Terror still rooted him to the seat. They were out looking for him. They knew his spots. Maybe he should just go to the cops and hope for the best. But what could he deal with? Even if he signed a statement for the car jobs, the cops’d want to set him up. They’d turn him into a stoolie or something. They didn’t care. Nobody cared. The panic made his bladder ache. The whole world was closing in on him, punishing him for something he hadn’t done or even imagined. The rest of the journey down the quays passed in a daze. It was suddenly time to get off. He stepped out into a mass of jostling school kids. Everybody seem to be looking at him. His bag caught against a kid’s shoulder and he pulled it free. He skipped across the street.
He looked over his shoulder, back toward the city centre. Was it vibrating? The heat. Jesus. A mirage right here in the middle of Dublin. He passed the Park gates and remembered the time he’d been there as a child. The main road stretched straight as an arrow ahead. He trudged across the grass for a quarter of an hour until he reached a small wood. He paused by the outermost trees and studied the shade and deeper shadows ahead. He entered the wood then and made for the middle. It was cool here, it smelled of clay. He let down his bags and lit a cigarette. The open fields beyond the wood were a dull glare now. He sat down against a tree and watched cars pass almost silently in the distance. It was only one of a hundred spots in the park, he thought. For a moment, he felt again as he had when he was a kid: this wood was a vast, limitless forest, a shelter where he could play and live forever.
“What did she mean?” Kilmartin asked. “Your Sister Joe.”
“That girls move from the streets indoors,” replied Minogue. “Money changes hands still, of course. Doyler agrees. The whole business is impossible to track.”
He looked away from the window. Kilmartin was poised on the edge of his chair looking up under his eyebrows. A smell of salami from someone’s lunch hung in the stifling air of the squadroom.
“Hnnkkk. This bloody flatmate of hers. Patricia Fahy. Christ, she has to start talking.”
Minogue sat back and watched Murtagh writing on the boards: addresses for hard cases and enforcers in the Egan clan. Next to one was the address of a shop owned by Eddsy Egan.
“Probably. We need to go to her with something, Jim. Something which will make her cop on to the fact that the Egans can’t touch her. Something to make her wake up and realize that we’re all she’s got. Any word on Hickey yet?”
“Not a sausage, and bugger-all new from the lab about Mullen’s bloody taxi either. I’ve been going through his log again, minute by minute nearly. We’re down to three or maybe four significant periods of time he could’ve had a chance. Murtagh’s got the file searches for regulars by the canal, the customers, well in hand. The gougers on the parolee list as well as ones on bail are coming up empty. We’ll have to widen the net. Open it up to a year even. Go through the logged incidents reported into stations. Jesus.”
Minogue caught Murtagh’s eye.
“This Balfe character uses the Egans’ shop as his HQ? ‘Painless’ Balfe?”
Murtagh nodded. Minogue swivelled back toward Kilmartin.
“We’re okay to jump on the likes of him, aren’t we? If we can’t poke the Egans directly?”
Kilmartin blew out smoke from under his lower lip.
“Don’t ask. Talked to Keane again. Last resort, says he. And I have to go through him if I want to. Holy God, says I, we have her in and out of one of the Egans’ houses-right from his own surveillance! ‘I know, I know, Jim,’ says he. Told him I could get a warrant as easy as kiss hands. ‘Course you could, Jim.’ All that shite. I talked to him for twenty minutes. Finally he drops the clanger: ‘Well, Jim, you’d really need to get good advice on going it alone with this.’ In other words, check upstairs or I’ll be pissed on. Trouble is, I knew that bloody Keane is right. But I didn’t let on, did I?”
He snorted and stood. A smell of sweat and long extinguished cigars wafted over to Minogue.
“I checked already with a certain party in HQ, you see. Turns out that Keane has all the trumps in the bloody deck. It’s a combo between Drug Squad Central, Revenue Commissioners, Customs and Excise, Serious Crime-with their automatics stuck down the back of their shagging trousers! Then, to put the tin hat on it, I find out that it’s the personal initiative of you-know-who, the Iceman himself. He set it all up. If I want to take the Egans in, it’s bloody Tynan himself I’d have to ask!”
“Well, did you phone him then?”
Kilmartin’s eyes opened wide.
“I could as easy have a nice chat with Tynan as my wife could walk by a shoe shop.”
Minogue looked down at the names again.
“Well, let’s pluck these fellas then.”
He flicked a glance at the boards. Kilmartin looked at the names.
“Doyler put them in order of severity. John’s got their haunts. Start with Balfe there?”
Kilmartin guffawed.
“‘Painless.’ Christ.”
“I’d like a poke at him too,” said Malone. Kilmartin and Minogue looked over at him.
“What class of a poke had you in mind there, Molly?”
“I knew him years ago. He’d remember me. Maybe I can get somewhere with him.”
Malone spoke with no trace of humour.
“Painless is an animal. The other one is a total loop in his own right too. Lollipop Lenehan.”
“Why not, Tommy,” said Minogue. “Will you arrange the pick-up then?”
Malone nodded, looked at Kilmartin and picked up the phone. Minogue stretched.
“God, the air in here,” he groaned. “I have to go out for a bit of fresh air.”
Kilmartin followed him out to the car park.
“Listen, Matt. Don’t let Molly off the lead so quick now. Here he is asking his pick of — ”
“He’s volunteering, Jimmy.”
Kilmartin grimaced.
“I’m saying he’s inexperienced. I don’t want this case banjaxed due to a trainee dropping the ball. It’s bollicky enough yet with all the blanks we have to fill in.”
“Ten-four, James.”
“Here-why’d he ask to see this Painless fella anyway?”
“Maybe Balfe knows the brother-Terry.”
“The Squad that used to be all business seems to be a holding area for comedians. If you ask me-”
Minogue didn’t. He held up his hand to be sure he had heard Eilis’s summons to the phone.
“Da.”
“Hello, love.”
“How’s it going?”
“A minute ago, I was looking for the jacket I never brought with me this morning. The heat has me addled.”
“Don’t be talking,” said Iseult. “I put paper on the windows here to keep the sun off.”
Minogue remembered that the window frames in Iseult’s studio were old metal ones. He had seen a crust of
