and fast, when even the hills seemed to be on the move. Interrogating him afterward: what had happened to all the families in these ruined villages now hidden under hazel and ivy? Was it true like Daithi had told her, that he’d wanted to move to the States himself years ago? Were Clare people really musical, second-sighted? Was the Celtic Tiger destroying the real Ireland? And why did everyone seem to talk ironically here anyway?
“Jases,” said Malone. “It’s a right bloody maze here.”
He turned the Nissan down toward a collection of dumpsters and airport vans clustered around the back doors of what looked like a warehouse. Several uniforms moved around between the vehicles.
“Yellow,” said Malone. “The lorry. There we are.”
He parked by an airport van. Minogue checked the battery before he pocketed the cell phone.
“Does anyone really think it’s booby-trapped,” Malone said. “Your man’s car?”
Minogue shrugged. A Guard stepped down from the rear door of the communications lorry. Minogue stepped out onto the grass and turned his back to the wind. He looked around the sky. At least it had only been a shower. But instead of the wind slicing at his face, he imagined for several seconds the air full of glass, pieces of torn metal scything through the shrubs, the blast hitting them before they’d even hear it. He stopped buttoning his coat. Couldn’t happen, he almost said. There was a peace deal in the works. The sharp ache in his chest ebbed slowly.
He rapped on the door, stepped in. Two technicians were seated side by side in front of a console. One tugged on his handset and raised the pencil he’d been tapping on the counter.
“How’s things, lads?” Minogue asked.
Someone was smoking. Minogue glanced at the monitors. He stopped at the one that held steady on the hatchback of the Escort. The picture shuddered, shrank to allow other cars in and then closed on the Escort again. The technician closest to the cab of the lorry turned and lifted his cigarette from the ashtray. O’Reilly, Minogue thought.
“Pretty close now,” he said.
Minogue watched him suck hard on the cigarette. Some skin problem, a face like a well-cooked pudding, a wispy mustache. O’Reilly tapped at the partition door into the cab.
“So what,” came the voice from the door as it opened. “Ask them if I give a shit. Go ahead. This isn’t one a their bloody concerts, their gigs here. This is a security shutdown.”
Minogue’s eyes returned to the monitor. The camera was steady on an armored lorry parked sideways across the entrance to a car park.
“Fine and well,” the voice went on “Make whatever calls you want. That’s your business.”
Minogue recognized the soft voice, how the speaker managed to squeeze in a light cough in the middle of a sentence. “ Make whatever ah-uh calls you want.” A mannerism, Minogue wondered, or a conscious put-down.
The speaker backed in through the partition door. The cell phone clenched in his hand was identical to Minogue’s. Superintendent Damian Little stared at the phone as though it had bitten him. He addressed nobody in particular.
“Fucking yobs,” he murmured. “Did you ever hear the like?”
O’Reilly smiled and unplugged his headset. The police radio traffic was constant now. Little straightened up and looked at the two arrivals.
“Will you lookit,” Little said.
“How’s Damian?” Minogue asked. Chisled, they’d call that jaw, action hero model, maybe. Did women really like that class of a fella? The Adam’s apple standing out on his neck, the veins running beside them. Weights, Minogue understood vaguely, something strenuous and even close to a torturous rapture that photos of athletes showed so clearly.
Little grasped Minogue’s hand. The grin spread to a tight smile. Right, Minogue remembered: that little-boy gap between his teeth, what he remembered along with Little’s intensity that came through so strangely in his drawl. The almost slow-mo, gentle tone Minogue associated with teachers on automatic, priests in confession maybe. As though you were on the slow side, and the speaker was taking account of it.
“The undertakers themselves. How’s Matt?”
“Fair to middling, Damian. That wasn’t us you were referring to now was it.”
Little’s leather jacket creaked as he brandished the cell phone. Minogue plucked out his own and waved it. Little smiled.
“For fuck’s sake you wouldn’t believe it,” he said. “Show business.”
Malone stepped around Minogue.
“Well, stop the lights,” Little said. “Tommy Malone. Moving up too, huh?”
“Dead on,” said Malone. “How’s it going.”
“Don’t mind me, I heard you left the Killer whistling over a case there.”
“Only rumors ”
“Ah you should have come over to us when you had the chance, man!” said Little.
For all Malone’s physical abilities and the hard-chaw self he brought to work, Minogue still couldn’t imagine Malone as one of the Emergency Response Unit cowboys.
O’Reilly tapped on the monitor. Little’s smile dropped off his face. He leaned in over the screen. The camera covering the army bomb disposal lorry drew back to reveal a huddle of figures gathered around what looked to Minogue to be a small tank. The gofer, they called it now, this drone that had been bought with much fanfare from an outfit who’d perfected the design in Belfast.
It began to move, stop, move again. A voice on the radio said “Switching over.” Little touched a button by the monitor and the policemen were staring at pavement and the bottom of a tire. The picture jerked and turned to frame a row of parked cars.
“Aw Christ,” said Little, and he turned away. “They’ll be ten minutes before they send in the damn thing. And for what? This isn’t bomb territory, this thing.”
Little clapped his hands and began rubbing them hard together.
“Here,” he said. “Give you a laugh. Do you know who that was on the phone there? Trying to give me grief? Go on, guess.”
“Your daughter’s new boyfriend,” said Malone.
“No. He’s still in a coma. Try again.”
“We don’t know, Damian,” said Minogue.
“Public Works. That’s who.”
“Who are they?”
“Very funny,” said Little. “Don’t you like them? Streets of Shame?
“ ‘Nobody’s home,’ Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
“I bet you have all their CDS, you bollocks.”
“Not gone on them,” said Malone. “I’d be more a GOD man these days.”
Little gave a breathless laugh. It took Minogue a moment. Girls Over Dublin, the latest rage group. Little looked over at Minogue.
“Well, Matt,” he said. “ ‘Do you believe in GOD?’ ”
Minogue kept his eyes on the screen. He remembered the pictures on the ads for their smash hit CD. They were like those Chagall pictures, couples flying over a city. Nice. Only one of them, a Fiona, had claimed she was lesbian, he’d heard, and the bishops and archbishops had been smart enough to keep their mouths shut, let GOD’S publicity genius spin in the wind over the free controversy they wanted.
“Girls Over Dublin,” Minogue said. “Or the Man Himself, Damian?”
“Ah, what’s the use,” Little said. “You’re in the Dark Ages, the pair of you. Get with it. It was their big-shot manager on the phone, not the celebrities themselves. Should have heard him, I’m telling you. You know him — Daly? Baldy, tries to wear a ponytail. Jumped-up gobshite.”
Minogue looked up from the screen.
“So Public Works are held up here are they,” said Minogue. “Along with us ordinary mortals.”
“How’d you get this number, says I to him,” Little went on. “This line is a vital link in our communications. ‘Senior officer at Garda HQ,’ says he. Like I’m supposed to fall down and adore or something. ‘We have a very tight schedule,’ says he. Rules don’t apply to him of course.”
The drone was on the move again. It spun slowly. Minogue caught a glimpse of several cars.
