The Death of an Irish Sea Wolf (12 page)

“The years go by, people move, they die, they leave the country, even. But yet their assets, managed by the proper firm, often carry on without them. In fact, since the inception of the new banking laws, persons of foreign nationality, investing in Irish instruments, might actually nominate a third party to act as a nominal fiduciary agent. The level of privacy they enjoy at least equals that of other tax havens, such as Switzerland or the Cayman Islands.”

“Do you represent many foreigners?” Ward asked.

“Some.”

“How many?”

“Twelve on last count. Really, I’m afraid I must get back to my office.”

“How many clients has Monck and Neary all told?”

Neary began moving toward the door. “Forty-three.”

“Then in summary—one last question, please”—Bresnahan rose from her chair and followed the smaller, older woman into the hall. “Monck and Neary might have a client of Irish citizenship or otherwise who asked you to secure and invest assets, the sources of which were not known to you because, at the time, it was not necessary to report them.”

Neary stopped on the first step of the stairs to the first floor. She turned to them. “Yes, I suppose so. Years ago. But, as I said, the success of this firm has been based upon its judi
ciousness in everything, and, as I’ve said, we represent almost exclusively only the most well-known and respected interests in the country.”

“Or, more recently,” Bresnahan pressed, “a foreign national might have been accorded the same treatment, because of the new laws.”

“That’s it, in a nutshell.”

“And you’ve never heard of Clem or Clement Ford?”

The smile cracked the slightest bit. “We do not represent a person by that name.”

“Did you ever?”

Shaking her head in polite exasperation, Neary offered Bresnahan her hand. “You are as clever as you are beautiful, my dear. Did you ever consider the law as a profession?”

Her small hand was dwarfed in Bresnahan’s. “I practice it daily.”

“Oh,
touché
. A
bon mot
if I ever heard one. I hope you don’t mind if I repeat it to my friends.” Doubtless a tale laced with class prejudice, Bresnahan thought.
You should have seen this woman. Big? And wearing a dress the color of a hay field in her native Kerry. Barged right into our office asking the most indiscreet….
“Did you ever represent Clem or Clement Ford?” She had not let go of the hand.

“Not that I remember, my dear. I wonder if you could release my digits? I’m in pain.”

Bresnahan complied. “Would you mind if we asked solicitor Monck?”

“Capital idea.” Neary turned and began climbing the stairs. “Ask him anything you please. Even to lunch, if you’re brave.” In the shadows near the landing, the older woman checked her wristwatch again. “He’s notorious within at least a long mile of this place. And rightly so.”

“No, I don’t recall any Clem or Clement Ford,” said Monck from his desk where he was now scanning a computer screen; on it ticks from various stock markets were flowing by. “But then, I can scarcely remember my own name most days.”

Bresnahan and Ward exchanged glances; somehow neither believed he was as dotty as he made out. “How many people work here?” asked Ward. “Do you have staff?”

“We don’t
work
here, young sir. We
practice
the law and sound, fiduciary, investment banking. Now and again Astrid hires in somebody to type and file and so forth. Low expenses, low fees. Our clients prefer it that way.”

“And how many clients do you have?” Bresnahan pressed.

Without taking his eyes from the computer screen, he said, “Last count, forty-three. Eighteen foreign nationals, the balance resident citizens.”

“Would you have a list of them?” Bresnahan brought herself within range of his vision.

Like a puppet, his head swung to her. “For you, I would, were there any such thing. But there’s not.”

“Not even in that computer?”

“
This
computer? Bloody thing’s a bloody brute and costly. See this key? I press that to buy, and this one to sell. Used to be you had to think about these things, ring up a broker, get his opinion, chew the fat, with luck perhaps even be taken to lunch. Only then would you plunge.” His old eyes again ran over Bresnahan. “Tell you something?”

Bresnahan nodded.

“We’d all be better off the way we were before.”

“Which is?”

“Ignorant. It’s the best advice I can offer today.” Monck’s gaze returned to the screen.

COLM CANNING THOUGHT his head was one of the bells when his old Bakelite telephone began ringing shortly before noon. The phone was on the pillow beside his head, and his hand shot out and smacked the receiver from its yoke.

He had placed the telephone there prior to collapsing the night before so he wouldn’t miss a “water taxi” summons from any of the well-heeled O’Malleys from Parts Unknown. They would begin arriving some time soon and might think forty-five quid spare change.

“Call-em! Call-em!” the voice on the other end kept saying. Whoever he was, he was local, which would mean no bobs for Canning. But, reaching for the can of Guinness on the nightstand with one hand and the plunger with the other, he also heard, “Call-em, this is
Fisherman’s Friend
”—Packy O’Malley’s boat. It also sounded like O’Malley’s distinctive, gravelly voice, the result of drinking whiskey and smoking unfiltered Woodbines for the better part of fifty-seven years.

Sitting up in bed brought on an instant, piercing headache. But Canning knew enough not to say the man’s name. “Where are you?”

“Well, the fish is runnin’ great guns, so they are. But them scuts of seals is slashin’ through our nets like butter, and we’re lucky if we come up with a fish or two unmarred for
sellin’ in any one net. A nip gone here, a mouthful there. The rest is cannery fare, if we can get them there on time. I tell you it’s a dreadful scene altogether.”

It was Packy right enough, being cagey because of the cops.

Cops! Christ!
Canning’s face went red as beet root, he could see in the dim dresser mirror, and his heart started thumping just to think of the public…drubbing the old gouger had given him in Packy’s own kip in the harbor. The fecker had to be, like…sixty! Sucker-punched him, so he did—Canning’s ego now decided—there with two hundred and fifty pounds of blue uniform backing him in the shape of Tom Rice, the superintendent from the Louisburgh barracks.

“Call-em, are ye’ there?”

Canning grunted and remembered his other humiliation—the one in the hotel. That had been yet more unfair because he’d been drinking. It nearly got him barred from the place! By Christ, he hated all the thundering mainland gobshites who thought they could come out here and play Puck because they had readies.

The Guinness can was empty. He chucked it at the dusty shelves of books his wife and he had read in university and humped out here seven years before, after his mother died and left him the house. They had thought they could make a go of the place—him fishing and writing, her painting and picking up whatever jobs she could get in computers, which she had studied and were now big.

But with all the high-tech foreign fleets in Irish waters, the fishing was poor for one man in a small old boat, and the writing…well, just never materialized. The two children who did, however, took the wife away from the family’s only real income. Shortly after warning Canning that she would not allow her kids to live in “quaint, West of Ireland poverty,” she scraped up plane fare and skipped with them to her sister in California. A year now, come July.

At first Canning had felt that she had stolen his heart and soul. But time had passed, and now at moments like this, he knew the truth—that there was something far wrong with him altogether. He was a different, but not better, man than when he first returned to Clare Island.

“Call-em, I want to ask you if you’d bring us out some equipment, like.”

“Like what? Out where?” In the scullery, he opened the refrigerator. He had left the radio on, and RTE was playing the “Angelus.” Noon already!

“Like equipment with a bit o’ metal in it. With some steel.”

No Guinness. In fact, no nothing. There wasn’t so much as a bite to eat in the fridge; even the cheese looked like a wedge of China plate with blue mold all around. The butter smelled rancid. “I don’t bloody know what you mean—steel nets? Don’t tell me you intend to drag for salmon?”

“No, not drag. Plink, like—if you know what I mean. Use your imagination. Didn’t you always say you wanted to be a writer? We need something so we don’t come back to the island empty-handed.”

Nothing in the cupboards either. Just all the baking powders and spices from when the wife cooked. Canning pincered his aching temples. Use his bloody imagination? And what was this “always…
wanted
to be a writer?” Wasn’t he only bloody thirty-one years of age; Joyce didn’t publish
Ulysses
until he had gone forty. “Who’s we?”

“The big fella and me. My backer and yours.”

Clem Ford, Canning thought. So, he had survived; he should have known as much. The fucker was immortal. Steel…so they wouldn’t come back to the island empty-handed. “Where would I get this steel?”

“You know the place.”

Now Canning knew what O’Malley meant. Guns. Even before Packy got his new fast boat with the wide hold and few bulkheads, he had run guns off trawlers into the North for the I.R.A. But with the mangled hand, he had needed help of the sort that Canning could supply. The money had been good and the jars—usually a whole night of them—even better. Canning liked coming home to the wife with all the money still intact but enough of a load on to make him amorous. She could hardly refuse.

It was that, however, that had kept him from the writing, he was now sure of it. He simply did too much, trying to keep up with the cost of four mouths to feed. Christ, wasn’t
there a beer in the entire kip? He stormed out into the cubby. When the wife had been around, he had always kept a nip there for just this sort of emergency. “What would you need from there?”

“All that’s there.”

So they could return—two old men—armed to the oxters on his boat? He’d lose it sure, if they shot somebody and it ever got out.

“You’ll not find much, you’ll see. But we need it at the moment.”

Canning prized up a floorboard, and there it was—a jam jar of
potín
that he must have hidden there maybe two years ago, when the wife had put her foot down about the pubs and the money he was spending. No, “Pissing our life’s blood over the bar” was her timeless mixed metaphor. But, then, she had done sciences not arts.

Granted,
potín
wasn’t something to be guzzling at any time, to say nothing of the noon hour. You could never tell what it was made from or what yeasts had entered the mix. Ketones were created, some molecules of which were poisons, others hallucinogens; a wild batch of
potín
had been the ruination of many a man in Mayo and the West.

But a wee taste would take the edge off his humor and get him on track. He only wished there was something to cut it with. “Need it where?” He twisted open the cap and took a slug, even before he got to the tap at the sink.

“Killala. Nobody’ll think much of your coming and going, but take precautions. You’re to set off to Roonagh Point, like you’re puttin’ in there. No, better yet, do it. Then, comin’ back, feint a wee bit south toward Inishturk, before cuttin’ west of the island where Paulie can’t see you. If he thinks anything, he’ll think you’re out for a few mackerel,” which had just begun to run.

The acrid liquor scorched down Canning’s throat along with the enormity of the request. Killala was seventy long miles north of Clare Island around Achill, Erris, Benwee, and Downpatrick heads, and then into Killala Bay. With either wind or tide against him or both, a trip like that would take him most of a day and night, all else running smooth.

Twisting on the tap, Canning sucked the cold water straight from the spigot. “Can’t.” He sucked again.

“What?” O’Malley asked unbelievingly.

Canning straightened up and felt the heat work down through his body, warming his back and ribs which, he now realized, had been galling him only slightly less than his head and
ear
! “I said I can’t. Not today, not tomorrow, not for the next week!” Some of the O’Malleys arrive early; others might tarry on the island for a week. Canning’s trade would be brisk for at least that long.

“Why ever not?” The old man was aghast. Mate to mate, islander to islander—helping out in a pinch was something that was done, no questions asked. You might need it yourself someday.

“Because it’ll burn the arse out of any chance of my making a few quid during the rally, is why. Why can’t you get some of your friends up there to provide what you need?” Canning meant the Republicans.

“You scut you, you know why.”

Because, after what had happened on the island, the Republicans would want no part of it. And what O’Malley and Ford needed in addition to arms was an anonymous boat. Packy’s was probably now under cover in a shed or scuttled.

“Well, I can’t, and I won’t, and there’s the end to it.” Canning tugged on the jam jar. Second sip he did not need a chaser. His young, strong body could cope with it, he thought heroically.

“By Jaze, buck—you need a good beatin’, so you do,” Packy began giving out to him. “Would you remember, now, how ye’ got yehr bloody boat? Can ye’ tell me who’s responsible for that?”

Stepping quickly to the counter, Canning slammed the handset into the cradle. And he had only just got into the toilet to throw some water on his face, when the phone began ringing again.

“Colm—we know you’ve had trouble of late, but can you not come up here and give us a hand?” Clem Ford asked in his straitlaced English voice but with Irish syntax.

It was all so fecking false Canning could scarcely contain himself. The son of a bitch had bought his way on to the
island way back when and had the gall to stay; well, now he could bloody well buy his way back on. But, first, Canning would have his bit of fun with him. He moved back into the kitchen and the jam jar. “Whatever happened to ye’ now that ye’ need my help?”

“I’m sorry, I can’t tell you at the moment. But sometime I will, please God.”

The invocation was plain wrong in Ford’s mouth, and Canning felt his scalp tighten. “You brought the law down on us, so you did.” He raised the jar.

There was a pause, and then, “And, I suppose, you’d like me to pay.”

Canning nearly choked on the
potín;
now he was talking, and without Canning having to bring it up. Ford was a blow-in but a smart blow-in at that.

“I’ll need to be paid for all the business I’ll have missed.”

Canning heard Packy grousing in the background, “After all the help, the money, the jars—he’s just a cunt, a greedy cunt!” Which was the ultimate term of abuse, man to man, on the island. But Ford said evenly, “By all means. And what do you think that might be?”

Ten trips, thought Canning. No, twenty, the
potín
told him. “A thousand pound!”

“How much?” O’Malley demanded to know.

But Ford said to him, “Please, Packy. Get a grip on yourself.” And to Canning, “Just so, Colm. Whatever you say.”

There was more roaring in the background.

“When do I get me money?” Canning killed off the jar, thinking that he should soon lay some ballast on his belly or he’d be in no form to take any wheel. But with a thousand quid in the offing—hell, he’d treat himself to a slap-up meal at the hotel.

“Don’t worry, you’ll get it.” Ford said in a voice that sounded tired and—was it?—disappointed, which put a bit of wind up Canning. But another little voice counseled, It’s only the
potín
, Colm. Calm yourself. Eat, get on the boat, make your killing. By age or by enemies Ford will soon be gone, and you will have taken your last bite out of him. And a good bite at that.

Still he managed, “When we get back here?”

“If you like. I’ll see if I can manage it then.”

“And if you can’t?”

“I said you’ll get your money.” Ford rang off.