All the Dead Voices Page 10

  We clapped and drank the toast. Doyle looked neither flattered nor embarrassed. Rory made a halfhearted attempt to get him to respond, but he seemed to dismiss the idea with a small wave of his hand. I was waiting for a look from Donna, an indication that at the very least, she found what we had just sat through a little on the ripe side. But Donna’s eyes were set to survey at medium, and her smile was fixed and official. Fair enough. She worked for Doyle. Everyone had to eat. Just when it seemed like the moment had passed, Bobby Doyle began to speak. He used that high status trick of starting in a very low, undemonstrative voice, so that his audience had to lean in fast, in a mounting panic, already fearing they might have missed the best bit, maybe the bit where they’re singled out for thanks and praise.

  “…and I don’t make any great claims for what I do. I see myself as a builder—there’s no fake humility about that, it’s what I’ve always been, whether it’s houses for the local authority or a bridge across a river, I’m a builder first and last. And I’ve done it because I was looking after number one in the first instance. If there wasn’t any money in it, I wasn’t interested. And it’s still the same today. But I’ve always loved my country. And I’ve always wanted to do what’s right by it. And thanks in large part to my friend here, Martin McBride, who backed me when I—I was going to say, when I couldn’t get arrested in this country, but that wouldn’t be strictly true—”

  This remark was greeted with a lot of knowing laughter. Dee Dee’s eyes darted around the company, her glassy smile that of the prude who wants to make clear that she gets the dirty joke, but dissociates herself from it, her white-gold charm bracelet rattling as she fanned herself with her extended left hand.

  “Anyway, Martin McBride saw something in me—I don’t know what exactly, I’ve always been afraid to ask him—but let’s just say, I hope I didn’t let him down. My friend and partner Sean’s still beyond in San Fran, the company we built there’s thriving and surviving. I’ve come back here and, with Martin’s help, we’ve built something together that…let’s put it this way, there’s civic receptions and lunches for architects and what have you all over Easter in aid of Independence Bridge. I’m eating for Ireland, I can tell you. This is the smallest gathering I’m having by far, but it’s the dearest to me. This is for people I trust—with my life, if I had to. Raise your glasses—to Ireland! Sláinte go léir!”

  As we drank, it seemed to me that Bobby Doyle was staring directly, pointedly, in my direction. I returned his gaze, and he nodded and looked toward Donna Nugent; when I turned to Donna, she smiled, but the smile was for Bobby Doyle, not for me.

  The starters came, and I got into a long, one-sided conversation with Dee Dee Doyle about charity balls, and which disease attracted what kind of crowd, or “social profile,” as Dee Dee put it, and as a result netted the best yield for the charity concerned. AIDS was over, Rory, who did the same kind of thing in San Francisco, chipped in, and Dee Dee agreed, unless you linked it to Africa, and you didn’t want to do that unless you could get Bono, or at least Geldof—not that it wasn’t worthy, just that it could end up mixing the messages. Nowadays, rare diseases were very big: cystic fibrosis, Guillain-Barré syndrome. But cancer was the big one, Dee Dee and Rory agreed. People had an investment in cancer. Cancer was always going to top the charts. Dee Dee actually said this, and then, looking at me, recognized the absurdity of what she had said, rolled her eyes and burst out laughing.

  She had a dirty, Dublin laugh, a cackle with banshee grace notes; it was a laugh that evidently embarrassed her, and she popped her hand over her mouth to convey this to me; I warmed to her greatly on the strength of it. A woman’s laugh rarely lies, not if it’s true; a man has spent half his life bellowing at bullshit with the lads till it gets so laughter is just another loud roar he makes.

  I ate the rest of my starter—jumbo shrimp cocktail with a lot of bread for soakage—listening to Bobby Doyle and Martin McBride expounding on the property downturn: the cycle was nearly at the bottom, it was time to buy, and buy big, because there was only one direction values were heading, and that was up, the people who had to sell now, well, that was their bad: step up and get the bargains before someone else did, or the market turned. Business is business: either you’re winning or the other guy is, as George Halligan almost put it.

  My champagne glass was empty and I dodged a refill, instead drinking a lot of water; there were bottles of Saint-Émilion on the table that Donna, who had been conferring with the waiter and the sommelier throughout, had ordered; I was looking forward to a glass of that with my steak frîtes. Just before the steaks were served, Donna rose and swapped seats with Bobby Doyle. Doyle poured red wine into my glass and quietly said:

  “So you think I might have murdered Brian Fogarty? And you thought it was good manners to put it up to me on a night like this, a night with family and friends, to take advantage of your friend Donna’s good nature? Just as well Donna has my best interests at heart, isn’t it?”

  That shook me, as Dubliners say. I hadn’t told Donna about the Fogarty case. She hadn’t asked why I was nosing around after her boss. But I might have guessed, given how well she knew me, that she would take whatever precautions were necessary. I caught her eye across the table where she was nodding in emphatic agreement with something Martin McBride was saying, and she gave me a little wave and waggled her tongue at me. You’re welcome.

  “I wasn’t exactly going to ‘put anything up to you.’ And I don’t think you killed anyone.”

  “That’s not what Donna heard.”

  “Well, Donna didn’t hear everything. Donna, as we know, is something more than human, but she’s not been granted omniscience, not yet, at any rate. Although I’m sure she’s working on it.”

  “I don’t think she’s too far off, to be honest with you.”

  “Well, I hope it’ll be taken into account in her remuneration package.”

  “I pay her more than I do myself as it is.”

  The steaks arrived, and we devoted ourselves to them for a while in relative silence. Mine was a twelve-ounce filet mignon, cooked rare to blue; I noticed Bobby Doyle glance at my plate and wince at the blood; he was eating a well-done rib eye on the bone. The wine was very good, but I took it slowly; it had been a long day, and it wasn’t over yet.

  “I know all about you, Edward Loy,” Doyle said once we’d got to the pushing-food-about-our-plates stage. You had to hand it to him, he had a flair for the dramatic conversational opener.

  “Is that so? I don’t know very much about you at all,” I said.

  “I know what you’ve done here: John Dawson, the Howard case, F. X. Tyrrell and his brother the priest at Leopardstown—live on TV, that was a good one—you’re not exactly hiding your light under a bushel, are you? Can’t be much of a help in keeping your detective work private.”

  “Small country. I get by.”

  “I don’t doubt that. See, I know about you from before, as well, Ed Loy. I know about you when you were in L.A., when you were tailing up and down the coast after our Donna here. I know about the Henderson case.”

  The Hendersons lived in Cole Valley, near the Haight, in San Francisco. Brendan Henderson was an attorney at 30 Articles, a law firm specializing in human-rights cases, and his wife Amy wrote a cookery column for the San Francisco Chronicle and looked after their two small children. When she didn’t look after their two small children, fourteen-year-old Suzi Berger, a neighbor’s child, babysat. She came on holidays with them. It was like she was a part of the family. She was only fourteen, but she was mature for her age, and her family circumstances weren’t great: her father had left, and her mother drank. Suzi practically lived in. It was a great situation both ways. Suzi wanted to be a journalist and Amy had given her a lot of help with her writing. Suzi had real promise.

  And then a friend of Amy’s said she thought she had seen Brendan and Suzi in a car together at Big Sur. It was only a fleeting glimpse, so she couldn’t be sure. And Brendan had be
en at a residential human-rights conference 30 Articles had hosted in Berkeley that weekend. And Suzi had never been to Big Sur, but would love to go. And Amy wasn’t the kind of woman who got jealous, and my God, the whole thing was such a cliché, but looking back, things hadn’t been quite right between her and Brendan for a while, and she’d even noticed a kind of reserve, an awkwardness that had developed in Suzi. But she was probably just imagining it.

  She wasn’t just imagining it. I installed wireless covert pinhole video cameras the size of quarters in every room in their house and connected the receiver to a VCR in Amy Henderson’s home office. It didn’t take long. Seeing her husband fucking the babysitter in the marital bed was one thing, but watching her blow him on the floor of their ten-year-old daughter’s room was probably what finished her. She confronted him, and he broke down, and confessed, and apologized, and begged for forgiveness. She confronted Suzi, and at first Suzi tried to play it like the Other Woman, like some scheming bitch she had seen on a daytime soap. But then she lost it: she started to wail, and knead and nuzzle a soft toy, a pink-and-purple kangaroo that had seen better days. That was when Amy Henderson decided she was going to the cops.

  And that was when I got a call from Donna Nugent. I had run into Donna a few months earlier, down in L.A., and we had hit it off. I didn’t know it, but she had recommended me to Amy Henderson. I never really got the full picture clear in my head, but from what I understood, a couple of lawyers at 30 Articles had done some work on behalf of a couple of Irishmen the British authorities wanted to extradite in connection with IRA terrorist activity, work that kept them in the USA. Brendan Henderson was the most prominent and able of these lawyers.

  There were many within the Irish-American community who felt that, in those days before the peace process in Northern Ireland, they could ill afford to lose such a man. In any case, they said, the babysitter was nearly fifteen, and look at her, any man would have taken her for twenty-five, and any red-blooded man would have taken her, no need to lose the head altogether, even if it was San Francisco. A divorce could be arranged and paid for, and Amy would own the house outright, and this was what Donna Nugent had been sent to say to me. Along with the strong implication that things might not look good for me in terms at very least of my PI license if I was unable to persuade Amy Henderson to accept these terms.

  And what I said to Donna Nugent boiled down to six words: you didn’t see the soft toy.

  And Donna Nugent burst into tears.

  And Amy Henderson went to the cops, and her husband went to jail, and I went back to L.A. and never thought much about it again until now.

  “You know, that was when I hired Donna, the Henderson case,” Doyle said. “She was working for a friend of mine at the time. There were a few of us in the room. Donna made her report, and…well, let’s just say the consensus was for giving you a very strong warning indeed, the kind of warning you’d be keen to pass on to Mrs. Henderson.”

  I shook my head.

  “Wouldn’t’ve worked,” I said.

  Doyle looked at my left ear, which I could feel throbbing and burning more and more as the evening progressed, and grinned.

  “Not on you, maybe. But the evidence of it might well have persuaded Mrs. Henderson. Anyway, that was the consensus, and then Donna said it was wrong to think of the babysitter as older than her years, and she mentioned the wee pink-and-purple soft toy. A kitten, was it?”

  “A kangaroo.”

  “That’s right. So I said, listen lads—and there was some right bad lads in that room, I can tell you—I said, listen lads, we might be fighting for Irish freedom, but it’s no type of freedom to turn a blind eye to the degrading of an innocent child. And that was that.”

  “So I’ve you to thank.”

  “I wouldn’t look at it that way.”

  “I don’t intend to. So what were you then, officer commanding of the San Francisco IRA?”

  Bobby Doyle grimaced with irritation, and ran a hand over the dome of his glowing head.

  “You southerners, you’re all the same, it’s always black-and-white with yous: Are you now, or have you ever been? Are you in or out? For most people it was never as simple as that. You have to understand, in the seventies, there was soldiers on the streets, a majority that didn’t want to share power and didn’t see why it should, the loyalist gangs were legal, for, for…Pete’s sake. It was a different time.

  “Now, I was never, as it happens, a member of the IRA. I never fired a gun, I never planted a bomb, I never even threw a stone. Did I understand why shots were fired and stones were flung? Aye right, I did. Did I look the other way when a mark was singled out in a pub? Did I identify a car that could be stolen for a job? Did I let a fellow change his clothes in my house, even stop overnight till he saw how the land lay? I certainly did. But eventually…you know, that’s as much as I’d say. When you’re in the thick of it, it’s just the way things are.

  “But when you step back, you understand, people are being slaughtered and nothing is changing. That’s when I got out. I can’t even remember which straw was the last one, someone’s granny shot, someone’s kids blown to bits. It was no use. And it stayed no use for a long time.”

  “But you were in San Francisco, helping to harbor the people who were making it no use.”

  “If you want to exert an influence, you have to get involved. You can sit back and keep your hands clean and your motives pure and achieve fuck all, safe and smug in your judgment of who’s right and who’s wrong. Or you can get stuck in and try and change people’s minds—the kind of people who don’t like changing their minds—and of course you’re going to get your hands dirty. You’re going to go out on a limb for some sectarian sociopath who shot up a bar full of Protestant laborers and is now running guns via Miami into Rosslare Harbor, and campaign on his behalf as if he’s Nelson Mandela. You know it’s shite, and you know three-quarters of the people who are campaigning alongside you know it’s shite too, only a lot of them would be delighted to see those guns go back up to Belfast and take out the Prods he didn’t plug the last time, but you keep the faith.

  “And then Enniskillen happens, and even the mad dogs get a bit sickened at that, and the Eksund happens, and we know there’s a spy in the ranks, and the penny begins to drop with more than the few of us who’ve known all along that the war is unsustainable, not just in military, but in human terms.”

  On Remembrance Day, November 8, 1987, the IRA detonated a bomb near the Cenotaph in Enniskillen, killing twelve civilians and wounding hundreds. A couple of weeks earlier, the Eksund, a ship carrying a deadly cargo of AK-47s, grenades, rocket launchers, SAM-7 ground-to-air missiles, assorted machine guns, 106-millimeter cannons, a million rounds of ammunition and two tons of Semtex was on its way from Tripoli to Ireland. The weapons were intended to launch a “Tet Offensive,” a spectacular and ferocious onslaught that would drive the British out of Ireland once and for all. The steering failed off the coast of Brittany, and the crew evacuated. However, when they went about triggering the timing device to blow the craft up and sink it, they discovered the firing unit had been sabotaged. The Eksund was discovered, and the weapons traced, and the IRA’s last half-realistic plan for victory had been scuppered.

  “So what were you then, an outrider for the peace process?”

  “I don’t know if I’d go that far.”

  “I thought you already had.”

  The waitress took our dinner plates away. Dee Dee was bucking to speak to me; indeed, had started to say something about a multiple sclerosis gala at the National Concert Hall and did I think I might bring someone; but before I could turn, Bobby Doyle flicked a hand in her direction and she faded dutifully away.

  “Just remind me,” he said. “Because I’ve been busy, and I’m at an age when I’m apt to forget things. Just when was it I was supposed to have killed this Brian Fogarty fellow?”

  “I’m looking into Brian Fogarty’s killing in 1991. Before his death, he was preparin
g reports on three individuals whose tax affairs didn’t seem in order. You’re one of them. That provides you with a motive.”

  “Who are the other two?”

  “I’ll let you find that out yourself. You seem to have better sources than I do anyway.”

  Bobby Doyle smiled.

  “Is it enough to say I didn’t do it?”

  “It’s a start. Of course, the kinds of people you knew, maybe someone did it on your behalf.”

  “And never showed up looking for payback? I’ve never had the good fortune to run into those kinds of people, as it happens. Where do they live?”

  Rory McBride’s cawing voice suddenly soared above the table and pounced on her host.

  “Bobby, do we not get a look in here? We’ve come a long way to see you and what do you do, spend the whole meal with Tall Happy Irish Guy. And see, he’s not even happy anymore.”

  Bobby Doyle rose to his feet, grinning.

  “You’ve come a long way, baby!” he crooned, Sinatra style, as he circled the table and brought Rory to her feet and, much to her apparent delight, waltzed in place with her for a moment.

  There was a flurry of puddings and coffees and digestifs, but the evening was dwindling down. I spent ten minutes with Martin McBride, who was very earnest about Ireland, past, present and future. You would never have guessed from his words about the invaluable work Sinn Féin had put in that the peace process had become possible only when the IRA agreed to stop killing people who didn’t agree with them, and that had they not started killing them in the first place, there might have been something resembling peace all along. But I guess he would have called that my bias, and maybe Bobby Doyle had a point: maybe I was happier being right than I was trying to persuade the people who were wrong to change.