The Death of a Joyce Scholar (14 page)

McGarr stepped back from the Cooper’s open door. He
removed his hat and his suit coat, which he folded neatly on the backseat. He slid his watch off his wrist. He reached below the driver’s seat for the weapon he kept there, and he tasted the gall that he had repressed since learning of the attack on Ward.

Raising the Walther to pull back its slide and load the chamber, he saw nothing but its black matte barrel and the V of its sight. Nobody attacked one of his staff with impunity. Nobody could be excused for smashing in an ear or breaking a wrist or stealing a handgun or, for all he knew, committing murder.

And then it had been Ward, whom in many ways he thought of as a kind of son, who had been assaulted, and McGarr’s anger was suddenly high. The thought of some smarmy bastard with a stick spinning around and waylaying a man who McGarr had seen knock men twice his size to the floor while on duty, and the best of Europe in the ring, augered down into the element of McGarr’s personality that he knew was a weakness: his temper. Which was fierce and explosive.

But there was no help for it now. Blood pulsed behind his eyes and he felt a bit light-headed. The sky had gone grainy, and the buildings were a blur.

Said O’Shaughnessy, “We could get lucky. They could put up a fight,” which didn’t help.

A shout went up from the barricade at the end of the street and a man began running toward them, a camera raised before him. McGarr took no notice. He simply closed the car door gently, easily, hardly making it click (for control was now essential), and stepped around the Cooper.

The man was being chased by two uniformed Guards, and McGarr didn’t notice him until he was directly in front of them, the camera pushed forward into McGarr’s face. The flash exploded in his eyes, and his hand, the one with the
Walther, darted out and whacked the man on the side of his head, sending him into O’Shaughnessy, who snatched away the camera and with a foot launched the photographer into the Cooper. He caromed off its slick surface and fell roughly into the street. The two Guards snatched him up.

“Liam!”
McGarr roared—part curse, part plea—like some Homeric swimmer drowning in the sea of his own emotions. A surge of witless, uncontrollable, irrepressible anger made him think his starred eyes would burst.

“We’ve got him. Don’t worry.” With all his force O’Shaughnessy chucked the camera into a brick wall that separated two shops. He bent and ripped the roll of film from its broken back. “Charge that son of a bitch with unlawful conduct, with assault, and with battery. And let that be a lesson to them all.” He glared at the other journalists, who were shouting now at the barricade.

McGarr’s eyes cleared. He felt as he had years before, after the first hit on a rugby pitch—shocked out of any further concern for himself, and fearless. He would give as well as he got, but he would give first.

There were four uniformed guards with shotguns waiting for him at the side entrance to the church. And the sexton, whose hands shook on the key ring as he asked, “Am I to leave the door open?”

“And get yourself gone,” said the sergeant in command of the other three. “Back behind the barricade.”

“Try not to bust things—”

With a foot McGarr shoved open the heavy arched door; it squeaked on its hinges. Squatting down with his left arm extended and the weapon in the fist of his right, he scuttled into the shadows, keeping close to the wall. If they had a gun, it was the best place to be. If they had the stick too, or a knife, the raised arm could absorb a blow or a blade without him losing his weapon. O’Shaughnessy, quick for his
age and size, followed behind McGarr with three of the Guards.

But the transept was empty. As were the apse and sacristy, which they scoured. The church was cold and dark, and as they passed down the nave toward the choir, they were overwhelmed by the sour odor of damp stone, sweetened only by the altar flowers that had been strewn across the marble floor near the doors to the narthex.

There were other smells there too as he approached the door: cheap sweet wine and cigarettes and urine. McGarr had to step around a wide puddle where someone had pissed. He turned to O’Shaughnessy and to one of the Guards, who wielded a shotgun; holding up three fingers, he counted mutely—one, two, three—before he and O’Shaughnessy, each on a side of the nave, kicked open a door of the narthex and rushed in.

The ashplant stick, falling like a guillotine from beside the door, glanced off McGarr’s back and struck the barrel of the Guard’s shotgun, which discharged with a deafening roar and splattered shot off the stone floor into the stone wall.

The stick came up quickly and caught the Guard under the chin, knocking off his hat. The shotgun dropped from his hands and another shell went off, the load bucking through the wooden paneling of the vestibule. The guard fell back through the doors into the nave.

The boy dropped the stick and was reaching for the shotgun when McGarr’s foot smacked into the side of his head, sending him sprawling. Somewhere a girl was shrieking, and McGarr’s other foot had just come down on another hand that was reaching for the stick when he was tackled from behind and driven into the tall church doors in front of him, which cracked under the force of both their bodies.

He went down, rolling to get whoever it was off him and
away from the Walther that four hands were now reaching for. His elbow went back again and again, pumping into something soft; the screaming grew louder.

Feeling the grip on his arm loosening, he glanced up to see what looked like a witch—hair frazzled, wide red mouth open, the tongue pulsing with the effort of her scream—rushing toward him until she was brought up short by O’Shaughnessy. He reached out and snagged her hair. Her feet flew out from under her, and he swung her roughly down onto the marble floor. He held another one by the neck, and he threw her on top of the first.

Still down, McGarr spun around and struck out with the butt of the Walther. It thwacked off the temple of the boy beneath him, whose head bounced back into the stone of the wall. Then McGarr was up again, quickly scanning the area to see O’Shaughnessy with his weapon out and pointed at the girls. With the barrel of a shotgun, one of the other Guards had pinned the second boy to the floor by the neck. He kicked the stick back into the shadows, where it clattered against the wall.

McGarr jerked the first boy to his feet and drove a fist deep into his stomach—once, twice. He hit him again and again, driving him back into the door. He was taller and wider than McGarr, and he loosed a single wild punch that passed over McGarr’s head and exposed an ear.

It was there McGarr struck him, loading all the force of his body into his left hand. The blow spun the boy around and, like something wet flung against the door, he began to ooze down the paneling, until McGarr stayed him.

The kidneys were next. McGarr would have to lead them through a gauntlet of journalists, and the less obviously pummelled they looked, the better.

“The Beretta,” McGarr asked before his punch stapled the sagging boy to the door. “The one you took from the man in
the brown suit. Where is it?” If they had had it, they would have used it, he was sure.

“Fook yourself, asshole,” one of the girls shouted, and the point of O’Shaughnessy’s polished brogue flashed. She cried out. It flashed again, more quickly, and she groaned.

“Where?” McGarr let the boy sink to his knees before his own foot came up and caught him in the arse, launching him into the door. And it was then that the anger he had been feeling earlier, and the pain—in his back, where he had been struck with the stick, in his shoulder and the side of his face, where he had struck the wall, in his knee, where he had fallen with the weight of two bodies—welled up. “Where?”

“Ah, for chrissake, he don’t know. It wasn’t him, it was Jammer.”

“Jammer, who?”

“Just fookin’ Jammer, is all.”

McGarr’s foot lashed out, and the boy howled as he again lunged forward into the door. “And your Jammer has the gun?”

“He gave us the stick when he got the gun.”

“Where did he get the stick?”

McGarr moved to kick the boy again, but he swung around and held up a hand. “In Glasnevin. On the Finglas Road. Near the cemetery.” His forehead was swollen and raw. His nose was bleeding. His tongue darted out to wipe the blood off his upper lip.

“You were with him?”

His eyes moved away.

“Don’t say nuttin’, Bang,” one of the girls warned. “Not on Jammer.”

Said O’Shaughnessy, “One more word—”

“With him when?” he asked when McGarr leaned toward him. He touched a fist to his swelling forehead. The back of
his hand was wrapped in a kind of fingerless, black, leather glove, studded with silver spikes.

“The park first. With that stick.”

“Fook if I knew he’d do it. Fook if I even knew the cop was there.”

“Tout! Stoolie!” one of the girls hissed, and O’Shaughnessy touched her up with his toe.

“Well—you know yourselves how Jammer is,” the boy pleaded with the others. “Never know what he’s up to. What he’ll get you into.”

Not from the way it had been reported: the two others had dropped down when the stick had rounded on Ward. They had known he was there and had waited to reach a deserted part of the park before striking. But McGarr let it pass. The truth would come out later, when they were charged. “Like three nights earlier, when you got the stick, the boater, and that blazer,” he said, pointing to the girl in the striped jacket that was too big for her. She had pushed the sleeves up on her biceps; the collar was raised.

“No, Jesus, I swear. None of us was with him. Jammer was alone, goin’ home. He’s got a little spot there in one of the outbuildings, right over the high wall in the graveyard itself. Abandoned, it is. Or forgotten. And don’t nobody visit him there, apart from Sweets.” He meant the girl in the jacket. “The bloke was jarred. Couldn’t walk, only speak. Some car’d just dropped him off, and he says to Jammer, he says, ‘They’re yours—the stick and the jacket—if you can just get me to my back door.’ He told us that, di’n’ he?” Bang implored the others. Then, “He can be like that, Jammer.” There was a pause before he added, “Considerate.”

McGarr thought of how Ward might describe Jammer. He also thought of the gangs of roving urchins who had infested the city in the last few years, and wondered if in the future
there would be only two classes, the haves and the have-nots. Or, rather, the lawmakers, who possessed things, and the lawbreakers, who appropriated whatever they could. And all with the Irish Revolution that was to end all that only seventy years old.

He thought of Coyle and asked himself if—practicing Dubliner and Joyce scholar that he was—the Trinity professor would have voluntarily surrendered the stick and blazer. Perhaps only if he felt threatened, as a kind of bribe. The hat, which was authentic, was another matter, but Jammer had gotten that as well. “Then he was alive, the man with the boater?”

“Oh, aye. So said Jammer.” Bang’s accent was from the North, and his eyes searched McGarr’s face. “Why?”

“Don’t you read the papers?”

One of the girls piped her contempt, “Bang? He don’t read nothin’. Not a street sign. Not even the names of shops. Can’t.”

“And yourself, now?” O’Shaughnessy inquired of the girl. “Why would we be asking?”

None of them knew, and McGarr tried to imagine what their lives were like on a daily basis. An odyssey, and doubtless lifelong. A trek from pillar to post, with the future as sustaining as the immemorable past.

“What time was all that?”

Bang hunched his shoulders. “We met him about two, and he had only just come by them things. We were headed to the cemetery ourselves, though not his place, like I said. Fair night and all.”

“Where exactly did you meet him?”

“The botanic gardens. It joins the cemetery there by the lane.”

Then it had been roughly two hours and a half between Coyle’s having left the pub in Foley Street and having ar
rived in the lane behind Catty Doyle’s house in De Courcy Square. During that time he had phoned Maura Flood and asked for her to meet him at the Drumcondra Inn.

How long would he have waited for her? McGarr would have to find out. Could Coyle himself have driven the Fiat to the lane? By all reports Coyle was well beyond it, and his wife had said that he didn’t drive and hated automobiles. It had been long enough for Mary Sittonn to have delivered Catty back home after their “date,” and before Catty’s assignation with David Holderness.

And certainly long enough for Fergus Flood to have driven out to his Foxrock address and, not finding his “prowling” wife and daughter at home, to have returned to the city to search for them “at the usual venues.” Which may have included the Drumcondra Inn. They’d have to check. But it was from in front of that hotel that the Fiat had disappeared, only to appear briefly in a lane at the rear of Bengal Terrace where the body was discovered, and finally to be returned to the Flood driveway with the murder weapon under the front seat.

And then Flood would most likely have had a key for the Fiat.

If
what Bang had said about Jammer could be believed. And Bang hadn’t himself murdered Coyle for the boater, the stick, and the jacket. Why? As the final “and all” of their fair night?

“We?”
McGarr asked.

“Mick, me, and…” His head moved toward the girls. “Jammer, he come along.”

McGarr considered the numbers: three boys, two girls; and he tried to guess what all and how long that might take. “Did you come back through the lane?”

Bang nodded.

“How long after?”

One of the girls spoke up. “Half-three,” she said through a wet smile. “That’s Jammer, that is.” Which answered one question.

“Did you notice the man again?”

“He was there, all right. Never made it in. Jammer points to him, says, ‘Old woman must’ve put him out. Busted his fuckin’ glasses,’ says Jammer. He was propped against the cemetery wall, looking up at the sky. Smiling like. We left him be.”

“Did he have the hat on then?” O’Shaughnessy asked.

Bang shook his head. “Jammer had it from the start. From when we met him in the bone yard. Made the girls wear it, you know, while we were partyin’, like.” His eyes flickered up at the girls and he attempted a thin, prurient smile.