All the Dead Voices Read online

  Dessie wanted to fly back and knock some sense into Paul straightaway, but he felt that, given his past, he lacked a certain credibility on that front, so he asked me to have a word. I told him I wasn’t in the business of mentoring waifs and strays, and Dessie said that was just as well, since he didn’t think he could afford my mentoring fees, let alone my investigator’s rates, and when was I going to come out to Greece and get a tan on the Delaney brothers?

  So there I was walking down Gardiner Street toward the Viscount, calling Paul Delaney on his mobile and leaving a voice mail. He had been happy to meet me last night after training in the Crowne Plaza, a shiny new conference hotel set in a mature woodland park off the Santry Road, where he sat drinking water and glowing with rude health and giving every impression of never having taken or even heard of any drug stronger than aspirin. He talked of his ambitions in the game, of the importance of discipline and fitness and diet for athletes over the course of a short career, of how the appointment of the new Irish national team manager, the veteran Italian Giovanni Trappatoni, was a major step in the development of Irish soccer. He talked like a press agent’s dream.

  Afterward, in the car park, I smoked a cigarette and Delaney smiled indulgently at me, as if I were taking snuff, and I took in the car he was driving, a red Mazda MX-5 1.8i that the wages Shelbourne FC paid couldn’t have financed.

  “Nice car,” I said, although it looked to me like the kind of thing a trophy wife might drive to the beauty parlor.

  “I’m lucky to have it,” Paul Delaney said without missing a beat. “The girlfriend’s father has a Mazda dealership. Mad into Shels he is. It’s not a gift, but as good as, he lets me drive it as if it’s mine.”

  He smiled at me, his cornflower blue eyes wide with what looked like boyish excitement. I had run out of strategy; moreover, I wanted him to be on the level.

  “I have to ask you, Paul—because Dessie and Liam want me to—what’s the deal with you and Jack Cullen? Because there’s been a lot of talk—”

  Delaney smiled wryly and held his hand up.

  “I’ve heard the talk too, Mr. Loy, and do you know something? That’s all it is. And I’ll tell you where it stems from: one incident in the Viscount nightclub. I’m not a regular, I don’t drink, and I don’t enjoy keeping company with people who do. But I went in one Friday night, because the lads insisted, it was after we beat Bray Wanderers six–one—”

  “And you got a hat trick,” I said. Delaney winced slightly, as if it was bad taste, or excessive flattery, on my part to bring it up.

  “And I was there, and Jack Cullen had a table with all his…his people. I was at school with some of them, or their brothers. And everyone knows he owns the place, or at least someone owns it on his behalf. And it’s all, Jack sends over a drink, and then I have to go over and thank him, and I’m stuck at his table while he talks for about three days about Shelbourne in the eighties, and in the seventies, and what his oul’ fella told him about Shelbourne in the sixties and the fifties and tradition and locality and Irish football and all this. And then he has to give me a lift home in the big Merc, drops me off in the street outside my apartment block. And of course, the next day, everyone is talking, and some reporter from the Daily Star rings me up asking if I’m…what was it…Druglord Cullen’s Football Front? I mean, come on. What would you have done? ’Cause he’s a heavy guy, and if he wants to talk to you…it wasn’t as if he was cutting up lines on the table, there was nothing like that, he wasn’t even drinking. I mean, I know who he is, we all know who he is, but you can’t just ignore him…but then everyone puts two and two together, now the lads themselves, my own teammates, some of them think I’m sneaking into the opposition’s dressing room dealing coke after matches, it’s ridiculous. End of.”

  Fair enough. It helped that Paul hadn’t got angry once, or asked me who I thought I was; before he took off in his little red Mazda, he offered to arrange a ticket for me for the Monaghan United game.

  “It won’t be pretty,” he said. “Not one for the connoisseurs. But if you want to come along…”

  CHAPTER 2

  I had wanted to come along. And now, instead of the clean bill of health I’d been hoping to phone Dessie with, I was passing the plaque outside 94 Talbot Street where the IRA man Sean Treacy was shot and killed by British soldiers during the War of Independence in 1920 and crossing the road and joining the line waiting to get into the Viscount. Six or seven shiny girls in shorts and halter tops were giggling and squealing in front of me while the doorman flirted dutifully with them. Once they had finally sailed inside on a cloud of cheap perfume, alcopops and pheromones, he beckoned me to one side.

  “You might be happier beyond in the Celt there bud. Man’s pub, know I mean? Crowd a little young inside, you might find, and the pint is rubbish, to be honest with you.”

  He was round-faced and pale with red blotchy skin and a big beer gut, at maybe six four an inch or so taller than me. His eyes were watery gray and twinkly; his hands were weathered bludgeons of callus and gristle and raw bone.

  “Charlie Newbanks, is it? Is Ray Moran around tonight?”

  “How’d you know my name bud?”

  “Dave and Ollie said to say hello.”

  I gave Newbanks my card. He looked over his shoulder into the club, then leant into me. I could smell cheese and onion crisps on his stale breath.

  “We don’t want any trouble here bud. You saw for yourself, it’s kids we have in tonight just.”

  “No trouble. Just a message for Ray. From Dave and Ollie. No trouble at all.”

  “Are they all right, the same lads?”

  “They were yesterday,” I said.

  Newbanks weighed this with his head inclined, then gave me what looked like a don’t-say-I-didn’t-warn-you smile and nodded me in.

  The Viscount had a faux-eighteenth-century thing going on, ruched curtains and elaborate chandeliers and gilt-framed mirrors and cheap prints of Hogarth’s Marriage à la Mode sequence hanging on candy-pink-and-lemon-yellow Regency stripe wallpaper. This was underlaid with an eighties disco bar theme, black lacquer tables and chairs and black floorboards and mirror balls sending broken shards of light across the hot excited faces of girls in short dresses and short shorts who didn’t look old enough to be out this late, or wearing makeup at all, let alone drinking and on the prowl. Even if it was only half eight, and they were all in their twenties, and I was too old, just like Newbanks had said. The few lads who were there looked like Gay Best Friends. However scrubbed up Dublin had become in the past ten years, Irish men were never going to break their habit of tanking up on booze before braving a den of women; they’d probably start filtering in around ten.

  The barman was Chinese. Amid the candy-store selection of alcopops and light beers, vodka looked the safest bet. I ordered a large Stoli on the rocks and asked for Ray. A generously proportioned woman with short plum-colored hair cut in heavy bangs stood too close to me at the bar. I could feel her eyes on me, smell her musk of hair spray and nicotine and cheap booze. After it became clear that she wasn’t going to go away, I turned around. She rolled her heavily made-up eyes as if that wasn’t the first mistake I had made this evening.

  “Well?” she said.

  “Well what?” I said.

  “Well, d’ you fuck, or wha’?”

  “Wha’,” I said, without hesitation, no expression on my face. She was five six and maybe five or six stone overweight, and she looked like fighting was the other activity in her repertoire. Her densely plastered orange face moved from umbrage through pique to resignation.

  “A fuckin’ homo, is it? Place is lousy with fuckin’ homos. How’s a girl to get the ride and the lads all canin’ it ’round in Farrell’s?”

  I made my face do a sorry-for-your-trouble thing, and then suggested she might go around to Farrell’s herself.

  “Nah, ’cause Charlie won’t let girls in here when we’re locked. The lads he’s not bothered, or they can hide it better. I
t’s a what-doyoucallit? Catch, catch…situation.”

  “Twenty-two,” I said.

  “I’m twenty-eight, actually, but thanks, even if you are a fuckin’ homo. And of course, again they get here, I’ve had too fuckin’ many of these,” she said, brandishing a half-empty bottle of something that looked like lemon bleach. “So even if I get me hole, I don’t get the good of it, know I mean? It’s like, I may as well not, yeah?”

  “Same again?” I said.

  “Ah cheers,” she said.

  I ordered from the Chinese barman, but the guy who brought them was tall and well built in a dark blue suit with a long thin face, dark hair slicked back and a black pencil mustache.

  “Go on and enjoy yourself, Bernie,” he said.

  “In a pub full of homos? You need to bring in a rule,” Bernie said, clinking the second bottle against the first and wheeling away from the bar.

  “Ed Loy,” I said. “Are you Ray Moran?”

  He nodded and flicked his head toward the door. I followed him up two flights of stairs and into a dingy box room that served as an office. There was a desk with a computer and an old telephone/fax machine, shelves with box and concertina files and a year planner and a soft-porn calendar on the ocher walls.

  Ray Moran sat by the desk, crossing his long legs; he had polished black wingtip oxfords, just like I did, and French cuffs fastened by silver links inlaid with small emeralds; his jacket had two buttons and narrow lapels, just like mine; as he twirled an elegant hand aloft to suggest that nothing in this room had anything to do with him, a white-gold Patek Philippe flashed beneath his cuff. What he did not look like was a man who relied on a tacky bar and nightclub in Talbot Street to pay the bills.

  I sat on a recessed windowsill and watched a double-decker bus roll past, momentarily sucking all the sound out of the room. When I turned back, Moran was studying me through intelligent chestnut eyes.

  “Dave and Ollie?” he said.

  “It’s about Paul Delaney,” I said. “They told Paul’s brother about the rumors. And Paul’s brother told me.”

  “And you would be Ed Loy, the private detective who exposed F. X. Tyrrell and Dr. John Howard, who sent Podge Halligan down and lived to tell the tale,” Moran said.

  “I would be Ed Loy. But this is not exactly a case.”

  “By which you mean…what is it, exactly?”

  “By which I mean, Dessie Delaney hasn’t hired me, for a start. I’m a workingman, and I don’t give my living away for nothing, not even as a favor, not even to a friend. I mean, where would that end?”

  “So this is a favor to Dessie Delaney?”

  I nodded.

  “And what, you find out what Paul’s up to, you call Dessie up and report, end of story?”

  “I might give the lad a talking-to,” I said.

  Ray Moran shook his head.

  “Young people today,” he said. “You can try talking to them…”

  “Stop,” I said. “Anyway, that’s about as far as I want to take it. I don’t know what you’ve heard about me, but a lot of it’s not true, and the rest is exaggerated.”

  “I’ve heard you’re trouble, Ed Loy. I’ve heard you start off exactly like this, finding someone’s missing garden furniture or luring an old lady’s kitten down from a tree. And you end up there’s eight people dead and the Garda Commissioner is setting up a new organized crime unit and everyone in this town is looking over his shoulder wondering if he’s next. George Halligan should have finished you off when he had the chance.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said. “Glad Dave and Ollie didn’t hook me up with someone who was gonna be really hostile. But if it’s important for you, or whoever you represent, to keep things low-key and discreet, a madman with a submachine gun spraying Tolka Park when Paul Delaney’s playing is probably not the way to go about it.”

  Ray Moran kept his head very still, but he did something inside his mouth that caused his upper lip to quiver.

  “You heard about that,” he said, as if it had happened behind closed doors.

  “I was there. But everyone will have heard about it by now. I’d say it’ll make the nine o’clock news, wouldn’t you?”

  “I don’t think anyone knows what that was about,” Moran said, his face coloring. “Some madman, as you say. What has that to do with anything?”

  “Indeed,” I said. “But you could equally say it’s the type of thing that happens when there’s uncertainty in the ranks.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I don’t know. Ollie and Dave stop Lamp Comerford from making a show of himself in Jack Cullen’s club, Comerford comes back and shoots the door up and Ollie and Dave have to go on the run? I mean, what does Lamp Comerford have over Cullen? This place is supposed to be legit, right?”

  “It is legit—”

  “Of course it is. How could it launder all Jack Cullen’s drug money otherwise? So fine, it’s not exactly where Bono or Liam Neeson bring their mates when they’re out and about in Dublin but it’s sound enough, and Jack’s old Provo mates apparently have enough clout now to keep him relatively free from low-level Garda hassle. But there’s a big difference between Jack popping in once in a while for a friends-and-family drink and Lamp firing on his boss’s business. You managed to keep that out of the papers, well done. Still, it’s not good for the troops’ morale, is it? And there’s a limit to what the Guards can turn a blind eye to, isn’t there?”

  Again Moran’s face was a mask; again the only movement came from his mustache, which seemed to have a will of its own.

  “What do you want, Mr. Loy?”

  “I want a report on Paul Delaney. Obviously I’d prefer a clean bill of health, but I’ll settle for the truth: is he dealing for Jack, or anyone belonging to Jack, is there anything, ah, improper in their association. I know you take care to avert your eyes from that kind of thing, as befits a man with an accountancy practice on Pembroke Road, but I’m sure you could find out if you put your mind to it. You see, I think you’re a bit alarmed at what’s going on. And obviously you know more about it than I do—”

  “Oh I doubt that very much, Mr. Loy, what with the caliber of your Garda contacts—”

  “None of whom is speaking to me at the moment. Look, I’m not on a crusade here, I don’t care about Jack Cullen and his gang and his drug deals and whatever it is you and he think you’re doing. I don’t like it, but it’s not my job to do anything about it, even if Paul Delaney has been sucked into it. I just want to know.”

  “So you can give Delaney a talking-to. And when he’s ignored that talking-to, you’ll tell his brothers, and they’ll be ’round here annoying everyone. Didn’t Dessie work for Podge Halligan? And Larry Knight before that? Dessie might do well to be cautious about a hometown return.”

  I drained the vodka in my glass.

  “See what you can do,” I said. “Because maybe that wasn’t a madman tonight, maybe that was a warning. But not to Paul Delaney, who is under Jack Cullen’s protection. Maybe it was a warning to Jack Cullen. How well do you know Lamp Comerford?”

  I was running on fumes now. I stood up and passed Ray Moran my card and opened the door.

  “We could clear this up very easily,” I said. “And then you could get on with, ah, business.”

  Moran stroked his mustache with my card and smiled.

  On the street, a group of lads was in line for the Viscount. I wondered if Bernie would be pleased to see them. I wondered if she’d be able to see them. I should have been wondering a bit harder about the two lads in navy-and-gray sportswear, one with a Burberry-check baseball hat and one with a snow-white baseball hat, standing in the doorway of the Spar supermarket across the street. As it was, I didn’t notice them until it was almost too late. I was on Beresford Place when they sideswiped me into the lane that runs up by the Abbey Theatre. Some cardboard boxes broke my fall and I lay still long enough to see a blade flash in the flickering streetlight.

  By the time White
Hat was on me, blade in hand, I was on my feet and hoisting the cardboard carton that had broken my fall at his head. He faltered, and waved the blade around in front of him in an attempt to keep his balance, but he had lost his bearings; it was the work of seconds to grab his arm and take the knife off him and toss it down the lane; close in now, I pounded his guts with blows, keeping him between me and Check Hat; when I felt White Hat sagging, I let him flop forward and brought my knee up into his face; this took him out but let Check Hat in.

  Check Hat fancied himself as a kickboxer, and with good reason: he landed a terrific belt to the side of my head with a trainer-shod foot; had he been wearing shoes, I’d’ve been finished. I went down with the blow, and as he changed feet to keep his balance, I kicked up as hard as I could between his legs. I was wearing new Church’s wingtips, the leather stiff and unstretched.

  Check Hat doubled over and collapsed on the concrete, a high-pitched plaint that sounded like urgent prayer his only sign of life. I tried to get a name out of Check Hat, but he was incoherent with pain. I wasn’t feeling too steady myself.

  I crossed the river at Butt Bridge, walked the length of Tara Street, then cut along Pearse and up around Westland Row. The side of my head was smarting and I could feel a ghostly tinnitus chiming in my left ear. There was blood on my shirt, and I saw that it came from a gash on my hand; I must have got it taking the knife from White Hat. Occasionally I staggered, and on Fenian Street I got very hot and sweaty and short of breath and thought of going into the Alexander Hotel to throw up, but held it down and pushed on through Denzille Lane to Holles Street.

  My building stood across the road from the National Maternity Hospital; my apartment, on the second floor, also had a partial view of Merrion Square; either way, by the time I’d climbed the stairs, I wasn’t much interested in looking out the window. I poured myself a Jameson, added water and swallowed. Seconds later, as if it were the expected outcome, which I suppose it should have been, I was on my hands and knees in the bathroom, bringing back up the whiskey and all that had come before it. When I was done, I splashed cold water on my face, reflecting with some kind of satisfaction that the rest of my head now throbbed as hard as my ear. I couldn’t seem to stand up straight, so in something between a crouch and a stagger, I made it onto my bed and fell into a dreamless sleep.