Well who could blame them, Kilmartin had quietly explained to Minogue. They probably thought he was gone off the deep end. Or maybe being seen with him might affect their careers. Kilmartin had chuckled to himself then, Minogue recalled. Career, Kilmartin had mused wryly later on, and raised a smile. He had turned the word from a noun back into a verb, hadn’t he?
The point was, Kilmartin was owed, and that was that. Minogue wasn’t going to budge on that. It had been James Kilmartin who had set up the shaky Matthew Minogue in his Murder Squad years ago, when Minogue himself was damaged goods. Jittery, inert, and numbed by his own near-miss with death, Minogue was soon a probationer with Kilmartin’s Squad, and the years that followed had been Minogue’s best, working with Kilmartin, close to the dead.
A few cars passed faster now as the city traffic fell away. Minogue again pretended to check his far mirror. He saw that Kilmartin had fallen asleep.
Chapter 5
Colm Breen did a lot of his trademark slow nodding while Fanning talked. He kept his spoon going, carefully turning it on the tablecloth in a series of quarter rotations clockwise, stopping every now and then to rotate it back. Fanning refused to be distracted, or irritated, by it.
Fanning was aware that he was nearing the end of his time.
“It’s so intense,” he said. “Dublin, the real Dublin. No U2 concerts, no trendy apartments by the Liffey stuff. Life in the raw.”
“Gritty, Dermot. That’s the key.”
“Gritty doesn’t go near it. Think of it as a medieval city all over again.”
Breen nodded again.
“What I’m trying to get across,” Fanning went on, “is something beyond any genre, you know. That’s the thing about it being a medieval city.”
“Right,” said Breen. “Not a lot of people would see that.”
“Dublin itself is the story — now I know that sounds corny.”
“No way. You’re not one of those fellas trying to rewrite Ulysses. Thank God.”
“There’s the nobility, if you want to call them that, behind their railings and burglar alarms. Then there’s the ones with nothing, nothing to lose, I mean.”
“‘Two Irelands,’” said Breen. “‘Two Dublins’?”
“Exactly. It’s its own world, unto itself. But universal, like a city is a city.”
“Well, they say it’s worse than we think it is. Worse than the Guards let on.”
Fanning had expected this. He had his sombre tone ready.
“That it definitely is, without a doubt. A senior Guard has told me exactly that.”
He felt sure that this quiet affirmation had had an effect on Breen.
“The underworld,” Breen murmured thoughtfully. He looked out the window.
“Tell you something else,” said Fanning. “Going around with the guy I’m with, it’s pretty scary. It’s like a completely foreign city. And I know Dublin.”
“Your guide to the underworld,” said Breen, another wry smile creeping into his fleshy face. “This Orpheus, let’s call him. Is he a big thing, what they say, ‘connected’?”
“Well he talks a lot. Watches too many gangster flicks probably.”
“Scarface? Tony Soprano?”
“Pretty much.”
“Living the dream, is he.”
“We could talk about the semiotics of it.”
Breen actually smiled.
“Jesus, Dermot. Spare me. Remember all that crap?”
It was another test, but Fanning had a lot of ground to give. He smiled, and he shrugged. Breen uncrossed his legs and sat up.
“So what’s the going rate for this, em, tour of the underworld?”
“The usual thirty pieces of silver.”
Breen seemed to enjoy that.
“But he gets me places,” Fanning went on. “Even if he is a name-dropper.”
“Names?”
“Not any big scandal, well not yet. ‘You’d be amazed who buys heroin in this city,’ he says. Things like that. And he talks about his sources in the Guards.”
“Bent ones?”
“Hasn’t said outright. He has a contact in the Drug Squad, the Central one.”
Breen’s face became fixed in an expression of kind interest.
“‘The Wire’ you’re talking about, maybe?” Fanning knew he had to be careful.
“Possibly, sure. Why not. Let’s say it’s a starting point, but better.”
“Take the bad guys’ side then? The O’Sopranos, maybe?”
He almost forgot to acknowledge Breen’s quip.
“It could go that way,” he said. “I mean it could be done. But the real star of the story? The real star is Dublin. Local. Vernacular. Right in your face.”
Immediately, Fanning wished he hadn’t uttered those words.
“I’m not saying it right, Colm — but you know what I mean. The Dublin we know, or at least we think we know. But in fact we don’t?”
Breen’s brow creased.
“But Dublin’s a destination now,” Fanning said. “We’re on the map, right? Boomtown, the Celtic Tiger, all that. I know it’s jaded by now — for us, like. But the U.S. viewers? No, they’re behind, obviously.”
“No more colleens and shamrock, thank you very much. The Quiet Man done gone.”
“Listen. Have you ever stopped on any street here and just listened?”
“Listened?”
“I mean the languages. Arabic, I heard the other day. Polish, lots obviously — but I mean, it’s kind of like we missed out on some stage. Like we went straight from the past, and we woke up in the future, and found the place is full of foreign — immigrants, I mean. New faces, is what I mean, I suppose.”
“Well you can certainly hear them when you buy a cup of coffee, or a pint.”
“Absolutely,” said Fanning. “You’re right there.” He wondered when Colm Breen had last walked into an ordinary pub and bought an ordinary pint to drink with ordinary people. Decades.
“Let me just fire a few images your way,” he said to Breen. “Then I’ll be off. You know me, I’ve been around. But this place today — no-one, I mean no-one has this. Ready?”
Breen smiled, and nodded.
“Everyone who can get their hands on one carries a gun.”
“Really,” said Breen.
“Broad daylight, I swear. People I’m seeing are not just thieves, or B and E go-boys. These are serious people. You can feel the voltage off them. It’s nothing for them to go to Amsterdam and do deals, or Bangkok — anywhere.”
“I heard that.”
“The cops don’t want people to know the situation. Oh sure, they make statements and they talk about the new seizure laws and all the rest of it. What they don’t say, is that they’re not on top of this at all.”
“Scary.”
“You’re telling me. The hair stands up on the back of my neck. It’s life or death stuff. There are no laws for these people, no rules. Psychopaths.”
“Russians, I heard? Eastern Europe stuff?”
“You’re reading my mind! That’s in the story too. When the old guard, the Dubs let’s call them, decide to
