City of Lost Girls Read online

  “Tell him he has my number, we were were due to meet an hour ago, I have somewhere else to be.”

  Madeline clutches my arm.

  “Please,” she says. “I can’t tell you what this is about, but he won’t go to the Guards. He said you were the best. He needs you.”

  I look at her, at her pale cream skin, at her deep blue eyes, stricken with anguished concern and evident adoration for Jack. Poor Madeline. I can recall an Emma, a Susie, an Amanda, two Aprils and a Cindy. It ended in tears every time. I haven’t seen Jack in a while, but from what I’d been told, it looks like it always will.

  Before I can reply, Conor Rowan is there, red brow furrowed, mouth in a mirthless smile, beaded with sweat, perma-hassled and reveling in it.

  “Excuse me folks, Ed. Maddy, I know it’s not your area, it’s not mine either, but Geoff had to go and I said I’d catch you, one of the extras, she’s a friend of yours, Nora Mannion…”

  “She’s a friend’s sister, I put her in touch with the casting agent, I don’t really know her. If she’s not working out—”

  “No, she’s great, Jack’s really happy with her, herself and two other girls have a look he really loves, black hair, blue eyes, that whole Connemara thing you have yourself.”

  “Grand so. Glad it worked out.”

  Madeline’s pale skin reddens as the compliment hits home. She nods to Conor, then inclines toward me to exclude and dismiss him and fixes me with a peremptory look, waiting for me to consent; when Conor speaks again, she flinches visibly.

  “Except, Nora, could be she’s done a runner.”

  “What do you mean, a runner? You know what—”

  “She wandered off late this afternoon. One of the trainee ADs lost track of her. Jack wants to cut away to her first thing tomorrow—”

  “You know what these young ones are like,” Madeline snaps, impatient, side of the mouth, an improbable oul’ one all of a sudden. “She’s probably on the tear.”

  “Geoff followed it up. Her mobile goes straight to message. The girls she was staying with, they said she doesn’t drink, this is not like her—”

  “She’s twenty-one, she’s not old enough to be like anything yet. This is her, finding out what she’s like. Now, I have a thing here, Conor, for Jack, I need to do.”

  Conor gives her his blank smile, as if he understands, and is personally disappointed by his own behavior, but he isn’t going to go away until he gets what he wants. Madeline responds with a young one’s petulant sigh.

  “What?”

  “Ring the sister. Ask if there’s anything, you know. Anything we should know, why she—”

  “She’s just an extra…”

  Conor’s smile intensifies and his face gets redder, and Madeline stops short without him having to interrupt her. When he speaks, it’s as if to a stubborn child.

  “Jack wants to cut away to her tomorrow, do you understand what I’m saying to you? He’s using the three of them like fates, or furies, you know, the way he does. He’s already shot on her, made her focal. So if we can’t get hold of her, it’ll be a fucking disaster. We’d have to reshoot with a replacement, and we can’t afford to do that. Or we’d have to tell Jack to cut the three of them altogether, and that would still entail major reshooting, which would be worse, because not only can we not afford the reshooting but Jack will be pissed off because he can’t do what he wants to do. That will be, if you know anything about this business, and I don’t know if you do since this is your first job, or about Jack Donovan, an apocalyptic fucking crisis. So he’ll want to know everything is being done.”

  Madeline has been torn a new one, and it seems she has to take it. Her tone is as even as she can make it.

  “If it’s so major, why didn’t he tell me about it?”

  “Because he relies on us to do these things without being asked so that he can devote himself entirely to being Jack Donovan, which is his job. And enabling that to take place is ours. You got me?”

  “All right. I’ll find out what I can, I’ll call you with whatever I have. Five minutes. All right, Conor?”

  “Always a pleasure,” Conor says, and wheels away, his mouth set in his trademark grim smile.

  Madeline mutters “asshole,” bites her lip, pushes air through her nose like a thwarted pony, then tosses her hair and turns to me. But I’m not looking at her, I’m reading a text on my phone:

  Girls to bed too late, me too sleepy and too sorry, rain check, will you still xxxx me tomorrow?

  So now I have all the time in the world.

  “Where’s the car?” I say, feeling not a little thwarted myself.

  Madeline asks me if I need her to come with me. I tell her that since I don’t work in the film business, I can probably survive traveling by car without an assistant with my ego unbruised, and that in any case, she evidently has better things to be doing than minding me. Like keeping her job, I think. As I leave, the slight figure of Josh Tyler is surrounded by a ring of adoring women, their faces aglow with the light of his celebrity. All the stars in heaven.

  CHAPTER 2

  In the nightclub, which is overfurnished and -carpeted and -decorated and has always felt to me a bit like being in your granny’s good room, except with a bunch of drunken idiots looking over their shoulders to see if anyone famous is in, Jack Donovan is ensconced behind the velvet rope with a lively group that includes an Oscar-winning film director and two former supermodels (you’d know their names), neither of whom looks like she’s getting any older, and a couple of world-famous Irish rock stars (you’d know their names, too). Jack beckons me to the table, but I shake my head and hang by the bar. Everyone looks happy enough to see me, and I wave and smile to assure them I love them all dearly, but I’ve had enough glamour for one night. Maybe if I was drinking it would be another matter. Even if all my sobriety has been in vain, it’s too late to start now. Isn’t it?

  Jack joins me at the bar and claps a beefy arm around my shoulder.

  “All work and no play, Ed,” Jack Donovan says.

  “This is work, Jack.”

  Jack takes a step back and looks at me, his expressive face and flashing eyes crinkling into a thousand questions and insinuations.

  “Man alive, you look well, Ed. The eyes, the skin. More than just off the booze. There’s a rare bounce of light coming off you, a fine old glow.”

  That’s how Jack Donovan talks sometimes. Like the opera he sang, it’s corny, and then beyond corny, and then suddenly more real than anyone else’s speech, until you wish everyone could talk like that all the time.

  “Am I permitted to inquire after the lady’s name?” Jack says.

  “Anne. Anne Fogarty.”

  “And she has kids, does she?”

  “Two daughters. How did you know that?”

  Jack shrugs, an elaborate affair that involves his entire frame, his outstretched hands turning like the arms of a crane shifting in the wind.

  “You’re not the type to go running after young ones, Ed. And with women our age, if they’re not married, it’s usually because they don’t want to be, or they used to be. And if they used to be, they often have children.”

  “That’s neat reasoning, Jack. Seems to me you don’t need a detective. Whatever this problem you have is, you can solve it on your own.”

  “Besides, Tommy Owens gave me the lowdown.”

  “Tommy Owens?” I say. “I didn’t know you knew Tommy.”

  “We met that time he was out in L.A. with you. Remember? He gave me his number. Still the same. Thought I’d talk to him first. Get the lay of the land when it came to Ed Loy, this year’s model.”

  I nod. A lot had happened between Jack and me. We had been friends, and I had worked for him, and then we stopped being friends and I didn’t want to work for him anymore, hadn’t wanted anything to do with him, until now. Now, in the flesh, I’m more than pleased to see him. It has been too long.

  “I never got the chance to say I was sorry, Ed—”
/>   I shake my head, put an arm on his shoulder.

  “It wasn’t me that needed an apology. But I know you tried to make things right. Another lifetime, Jack.”

  “Never since, Ed, I assure you—”

  I cut him off again with an upheld palm. I don’t want to talk about it, don’t want to think about it. Sooner or later, we would get to it anyway. The past is always out there, a land mine buried and forgotten about, ready to blow the present apart at any moment. I know that. But I don’t want to let it in tonight. However bad it seems, and God knows it got pretty bad back in L.A., it was a long time ago, and in another country, and tonight, it’s good just to see an old friend. And if that isn’t worth breaking a few weeks off the booze, I don’t know what is. Which is probably why I end the night with a dawn swim in the Forty Foot, drunk as a lord.

  I join Jack’s table for an hour or so, and am handed a champagne flute full of a dark pink liquid I recognize as a Bellini: Prosecco and peach puree. One of the famous Irish rock stars is as famous for talking as he is for being a famous rock star, and the other film director had been an actor not known for his diffidence, but neither can get a hearing tonight. Jack is in full flow, talking up his movie as if he was pitching it to investors, rather than in the middle of shooting it.

  “It’s the fulcrum of our emotional, our sexual, our psychic history: Monto, the largest red-light district in the whole of Europe for over a hundred years, Nighttown, Joyce calls it in Ulysses, where most of the girls have been trafficked, as we’d say now, lured, bewitched by the brothel-keeping madam, the enchantress, the Greek goddess Circe, and then kept virtually as slaves, and it lasts right through the war of independence and the civil war until the mid-twenties, when the Legion of Mary puts an end to it—and what replaces the brothels? The Magdalene laundries, the reform schools, and the industrial schools run by the Church, where women and children were trapped and abused for decades. All the lost girls: stretching back, children of empire, stretching forward, children of the Republic, and at the center, the two wars, the first between the IRA and the British army, and then between factions of an IRA torn asunder by a disputed treaty. And amid the warren of brothels, there are safe houses for both sides, hiding holes for spies and informers, whispering johns and whores telling tales, all manner of intrigue and betrayal and hypocrisy, of passion and heartbreak and death: the unwanted babies drowned, the diseased whores smothered. And that’s the bloody heart of the movie, the violent, delirious, debauched birth pangs of a nation in the filthy side streets of the red-light night town, dirty old town, Dublin town…”

  There is a pause after this, everyone punch-drunk on the rhetoric, Jack Donovan stealing the air out of the room once again. Jack drains his glass and grips it like a trophy. Then the rock star who likes to talk picks up the jug of Prosecco and peach juice and says:

  “Federico Fellini…will you have a Bellini?”

  At which, the entire table explodes in mirth, a blessed release from the intensity. Jack laughs, too, but within minutes, he starts to look ill at ease, agitated, unhappy in his own skin. It’s a contrast I remember well in him, the soaring leap of imaginative fancy, as if he was singing an aria, followed by the descent to cold hard earth, the well-worn flight path from elation to despair. After a few minutes, during which he affects a show of attention to the rock star, who is saddling up his own winged horse of speculation and reminiscence, and then, with apologies and embraces, indicating to all that he has an early start and business still to do, Jack and I retire to a small room equipped with an antique desk, leather armchairs, a wall planner and a couple of wooden filing cabinets. A trim lady in her fifties in a low-cut ivory dress with luminous blond hair and skin that glows burnt orange, like glazed pottery, appears. Jack looks at our drinks and makes a face. I drain mine and do the same.

  “Two Irish Manhattans, Glenda, Jameson whiskey, of course, with the vermouth half and half sweet and dry.”

  “Will you be wanting cherries, boys?” Glenda says, laying it on thick, a Northside Circe tempting us with dubious potions.

  “Always, Glenda, always,” Jack says, licking his lips and laughing a big barroom laugh. When Glenda departs, Jack frowns, as if he is preparing with difficulty to unburden the contents of his troubled mind. What he says, however, is:

  “A Manhattan made with scotch is called a Rob Roy. There should be a proper title for one made with Irish whiskey. Ed?”

  “Are you sure they can make a mixed drink at all here? Dublin has not gotten any better at that, Jack,” I say. “There are still a lot of places where you ask for a Martini, they give you a tumbler of vermouth and ice.”

  “Which is why I’ve been in here tutoring them in the occult ways of the bartender. Now they can manufacture a perfectly respectable Sidecar, Old-Fashioned and Negroni, and a superior Martini. The point being, the Irish Manhattan. A Robert Emmett?”

  “Too many syllables. An Oscar Wilde?”

  “Too hackneyed. And we’d risk appealing only to a niche market.”

  “A niche market who buy cocktails.”

  “A Padraig Pearse. A De Valera. A Michael Collins.”

  “A Manhattan is not a Collins drink. A Great O’Neill.”

  “Red Hugh O’Donnell. A Red Hugh. H-U-E.”

  “Red Hue is good.”

  So when Glenda brings the drinks, Jack tells her about the christening with great excitement, and Glenda gives us a smile pitched judiciously between flirtatious and maternal and brushes the side of Jack’s face, a gesture that is part stroke of the cheek, part pat of the head.

  The Red Hues are very good, so good, in fact, that my reason for being there at all almost deserts my mind until Jack pulls an envelope from his breast pocket and takes a few sheets of notepaper from it.

  “The Mystery of the Spiteful Letters. Wasn’t that an Enid Blyton, Ed?”

  “I think so.”

  “The Famous Five, or the Secret Seven?”

  “The Five Find-Outers, I think.”

  “That’s right! Who’s this they were again, Julian, Dick—”

  “That was the Famous Five. Are they the problem, Jack? Is this why you needed to see me? Those letters?”

  Jack Donovan nods his head, suddenly unwilling to meet my eyes. He is shielding the letters with his meaty hands, an embarrassed expression on his face, as if, after all this time, he’s made it to the doctor’s waiting room and his cough has mysteriously disappeared. He makes fluttering movements with his fingers and twists a grimace of a smile onto his face, as if he is about to dismiss the likelihood of the letters amounting to anything serious. But no sound comes out of his mouth.

  “Probably best to let me see them so,” I say.

  Jack passes the letters across the table, drinks the remainder of his Red Hue and leaves the room.

  There are three letters, and they have been assembled in the traditional fashion by cutting out words from magazines and newspapers and pasting them together so that they make a sentence. They read as follows:

  1. All praise to God the Father, all praise to God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, eternal Three-in-One.

  2. Flanked by thieves, Jesus remained Lord. But all three died the same death.

  3. Once, twice, three times a dead man. He will know neither the day nor the hour.

  Jack comes back into the room with two drinks. I am still halfway through my first, and feeling every sip, unlike, apparently, Jack, who takes a long hit on his fresh drink before he sits down.

  “Stupid stuff really, not sure why they have me so rattled,” he says, making his eyes twinkle and his brows rise as he asks me to reassure him that everything is all right and there is no need to worry. With every client (for that is what Jack had just become), there is a moment like this. Just as you hope your doctor will tell you that all you need is to go home and have a cup of hot tea and two paracetamol and your cough will magically vanish. Anonymous letters often fulfill their purpose simply by being sent; the idea that the threats they make
would ever be acted upon never enters the sender’s head. Often, but not always.

  “So why do they have you rattled, Jack? Do you have a notion of who they could be from? Do you think it’s someone who might be threatening you, who actually wants to turn you into a dead man?”

  Jack shakes his head.

  “I didn’t think I knew anyone who would send something like this. But that said…I meet a lot of people, you know what I mean?”

  This last comes with a lubricious gleam, I guess in the unlikely event that I’ll have difficulty understanding what he means.

  “We’re assuming it’s a woman, then.”

  “Well, it’s a woman’s thing, isn’t it? Anonymous notes. Ringing you up and not saying anything.”

  “You’ve had calls also?”

  “Not from this one.”

  “From which one?”

  “Ah, that’s not relevant. A mad one, she was…sitting up with a bottle of brandy and a telephone, I sorted it out. You know the kind of thing I’ve always had to put up with, Ed.”

  Of course I know, Jack. That’s why I stopped wanting to have anything to do with you. Don’t go back there, Loy. You go back there, you’ll remember why you should have nothing to do with Jack. But you want to take this case. Why? Because…it’s time. Because you’re ready, at last. Because no matter what, Jack Donovan is a friend of yours, and a man sticks by his friends, even if—especially when—they do things you don’t agree with. And because the little voice in your head says you should, and the day you stop listening to the little voice in your head, you’re finished.