Superintendent Lawlor tweaked his nose and turned to talk to frog-woman. I know her, Minogue thought, I do. Who the hell was she anyhow? He watched her feign an interest in what Lawlor was saying with some newfound fervor. Her eyes went toward Kilmartin again. Lawlor kept talking. She looked down at the empty glass Lawlor was pushing around on the countertop. Lawlor’s face eased when she reached for her bag. He nodded to Minogue as he passed on the way to the door.
Derek Mitchell turned away from the gusts. He looked at the sky again.
“Make up your bloody mind,” he groaned.
The raindrops were beginning to bead and run together on the car roofs now. He’d come back around by the long-term car park again, on the trot this time. Ahead of him were the rows of cars he had passed earlier. It’d be no use saying that it was raining. Five minutes and he’d be finished, anyway. Or drowned, shag it.
He slowed to look in the window of a newish Volvo. The stick thing must be a control for the stereo. The CD changer was probably in the boot and — His hat flew off and sailed over the roof. He watched it bounce off the roof of an Opel. He was beyond being annoyed. There was a certain elegance to it, he had to admit. It rolled down onto the bonnet and fell on the tarmacadam. He stepped around the front of the Opel in time to see the hat on the move again. It rolled on the edge of its crown, wobbled, and changed direction. Drops of rain hit his forehead. The hat began to roll in a circle, it rebounded off a wheel, and fell over. Gusts still stirred it.
He took his time strolling over. He picked up the hat and rubbed it with his sleeve. To hell with that stupid folder of regulations: this bloody hat was staying under his arm until he got back indoors. He looked down at the mossy growth already working its way into the tarmacadam here. Then he slowly returned to his hunkers. He stayed there for a half a minute, moving from foot to foot, staring at it from different angles. He had already decided to call in. He just didn’t want to make an iijit of himself.
No, it wasn’t the color that had caught his eye, he thought while he waited for the shift super to show up. It wasn’t even red, for God’s sake. But somehow he’d known right away what it was. That was before he’d checked the car, even. It was only after he’d stood up again that he’d realized it went right back under the bumper of the car anyway. He’d walked around the back of the car, seen the sticker: Emerald Rent-A-Car. The Emerald Isle, he murmured: if this was what he thought it was, this was trouble. His fingers kept the hat rotating in his hands. He hardly noticed the rain soaking into his hair.
He looked over at the Escort again. It looked different now, as though everything had moved away from it and it stood alone, changed. It wasn’t what might be in the car that was getting to him. It was how normal everything seemed, how weirdly ordinary and dull and boring. More than creepy: the hairs were still standing on the back of his neck.
No sirens, no squad cars. Where the hell were they? He tugged on the antenna, rolled the volume dial until it hissed. No one was talking, why not? He didn’t want to call in again. It’d sound like he was losing it or something. The drone of lorries slowing on the dual carriageway carried over the hiss of traffic. He watched a jet rise above the terminal and followed the quivering trail from the exhaust. The rain was getting heavier.
When he looked back he saw Fogarty and two Guards heading his way. Fogarty, the fat bastard, was huffing and puffing. Derek Mitchell stepped back to the bumper of the Escort and thumbed his notebook open.
“All right there, er,” he heard Fogarty call out. “Derek?”
Mitchell watched squad car lights flicker from across the car park. More of them, well finally, like. He held onto his hat. What if it wasn’t blood though? The two Guards looked him up and down. A handset came alive with a staticky country accent. Fogarty gave up on the hair.
“Over there,” he said to Fogarty. He had to clear his throat again. “In there, under the exhaust pipe. You have to get down here to really see it.”
Malone hit eighty in spots on the airport road. Minogue didn’t ask him why he was driving like a bloody lunatic. Maybe he was trying to keep pace with two unmarked Opels that had passed them near Whitehall. The Nissan leaned hard into the bend as they closed on the roundabout at the entrance to the airport. Minogue felt the tires bite. He looked at the shredded supermarket bags fluttering in the hedgerows.
“They’re after shutting the whole airport down?” Malone asked again.
Another unmarked, a Granada, came up behind, flickering light askew on the roof.
“That’s what they told me,” Minogue said.
Maybe he could get a sandwich. But the grub in the terminal restaurant always had a peculiar taste. It had taken a few years to dawn on him that the taste of everything he’d eaten or drunk there over the years had something to do with him sitting across the table from his son with the minutes winding down for the boarding call. The lump in his throat, Daithi Minogue’s pale, slack face. Hangovers, the dull and persistent pain that came up his chest to his throat. Daithi’s “it’s only six hours away, Ma,” didn’t wash with Minogue either. Well it wasn’t six anymore, it was more like twelve to the West Coast
The Minogues’ only son liked the States. Kathleen Minogue still sent him the Positions Available every Wednesday. He was in no hurry to get married. Semiconductors seemed to be most of his work. Why not head back to Silicon Valley here in Dublin, the new economy? Well… Daithi Minogue was sure he was being earmarked for an operation in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley was where it all came together, Daithi had explained.
“So it’s a full-scale thing,” said Malone. “Since that incident with your man. In Monaghan?”
“I suppose,” said Minogue
The tires began to growl. Malone let the steering wheel drift a little. The Nissan tilted suddenly to the right as Malone turned off the roundabout.
“Brian Whelan,” Malone said. “Right?
Minogue nodded. Garda Brian Whelan, two years on the force, had been making what he and his partner believed was a routine check of a vehicle parked on a street in Castleblayney, County Monaghan, two weeks after Christmas. The car had disintegrated when Whelan opened the passenger-side door. The remains of Joseph Brogan, known as a tout of checkered reliability to the RUC and the Guards, were found among the wreckage of the car. The talk was still that it was settling scores and staking out territory for a gang made up of IRA men. This was during a cease-fire.
The first roadblock was next to a landscaped knoll that hid the cargo terminals from the traffic. The shrubs hadn’t flourished in the four years Minogue had begun noting them on his trips here. He wound down his window and slipped out his photocard. A Guard with watery eyes and blond hairs growing high on his cheeks laid his hand on the roof of the Nissan. Had the bomb squad arrived yet, Minogue wanted to know.
“Ten minutes or so,” the Guard replied. “No smoke yet, but.”
Shrmooaak, Minogue registered. County Cork, and not inclined to hide it.
“There’ll be a site van along by and by,” he said. “Steer them right, like a good man, will you.”
“I will.”
No “sir.” Minogue looked up at him.
“Ye’d better meander over that way,” the Guard said. “Everything that side of the hill is locked up tight, so it is.”
“Tighter than that Munster cup you have below in Cork, I hope,” Minogue said. The Guard’s smile revealed pointy teeth. A fox, Minogue thought. A Cork fox.
“Clare, are ye?”
“Not on your shagging life,” said Malone.
Malone coasted down the empty road. Minogue’s belly growled again. He strained to catch a glimpse of the car parks on the far side of the shrubs. A Guard in full motorbike regalia waved them down a roadway away from the car park. A line of flagpoles followed the curb. Most of the flags were tangled in their ropes. Snapping and straining, the American one still floated free.
Caty, his son’s fiancee, with no h because it was the Polish version, had fallen in love with Ireland. Minogue wasn’t sure what or whose Ireland she was in love with. She wanted to live here, learn Irish, walk the back roads, talk to everyone, learn everything. Caty was a sociologist, raised in a devout Polish-American family in an outer suburb of New York City. Her grave accounts of immigrants in American cities impressed Minogue. He didn’t understand how she could see Poles and Irish as similar though, the centuries of oppression thing.
He remembered her sitting on an outcrop over the Burren not two months ago, writing notes. A strange sight entirely, with the stone fields all about her. It was one of those pet days, with roaring sunshine and the clouds low
