Aloysius Tempo Read online

  ‘What is this?’ he goes.

  I say, ‘You got a screwdriver?’

  We look at each other. He’s got the look of a man who is thinking, but doesn’t know what about. He’s a man struck by confusion, bogged down and trying not to show it.

  I look into his van, scanning for a screwdriver or something like it.

  ‘Or something like it,’ I say. ‘A strong knife will do.’

  He raises a thumb, jabs it in the direction of the tiny kitchen unit behind him. I look, can see a kettle steaming on the hob. There’s a steel knife sitting on top of a plate. I push him to one side, reach across, grab it.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Doing a minor redecoration of your van,’ I say.

  ‘You’re Irish?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where from? North?’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘No need for that language. I’m only asking.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  I have the knife pushed under the strip. I lever upwards and it comes away easy enough. I bend the strip back and, brittle, the top of it breaks off leaving three inches of sharp silver shard jammed upwards. He looks down at it, this new, nasty point, this fierce new danger beside him.

  I pocket the knife, slip off my shoes, push him to one side and climb in. There’s a laptop charging from the leisure battery.

  I say, ‘What do you use with this? Disks? Flash drive?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I said,’ I say, ‘do you use any disks or flash drives? How do you save your work?’

  And he has stood, is walking away, slowly hobbling towards the road.

  I rifle quickly around me. There are a thousand good places to hide something so small in here. I’m going to need his help.

  I step out, shoes back on, and go after him, walking fast. I grab him by the arm and he tries to pull away.

  ‘Hey,’ I say, ‘I’ll make you answer me.’

  He goes, ‘Fuck you.’

  I put him over my shoulder. He hits at my back, elbows me in the neck. His weight isn’t troubling, but it’s more than I expected. I drop him on the ground at the side door of the van and he’s winded.

  I grab the little finger of his right hand and bend it at its knuckles, folding it in three. I press the top of the nail hard, suddenly deep into the base of the finger, ramming intense pain through him, a red-hot, barbed spear.

  He exhales hard, his jaw wide open, false teeth loosened. It’s just air rushing out, just the stench of his stinking guts.

  ‘Where do you store your writing?’

  He points at his pocket with his other hand and I reach down, find a flash-drive shape in it, let him go.

  ‘Oh Jesus,’ he says, and falls onto his side, exhausted by pain.

  I take it out of his pocket, look at it and put it in mine.

  ‘Are there other copies?’

  He looks up, rubbing his hand now, his eyes not open, not closed, not steady.

  ‘Once more,’ I say, ‘are there other copies?’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Your book.’

  ‘On the laptop and that thing you have. Nowhere else.’

  ‘I’ll ask you once more and then I’m going to repeat what I just did anyway. Any comment?’

  He pulls back, pulls his hands back, tries to pull his old bones into the foetal position.

  ‘What?’

  I reach down, yank him upright, grab that little finger again and he goes, ‘That’s all, I swear.’

  And I fold it over in three, put my thumb on the top of his nail and I push now as hard as I can.

  His pain is again silent, yet almost visible in its emptiness, almost total. Only his back moves, sucking his spine in, his body slow-writhing, warping from the agony.

  I reduce the pressure, let it go.

  ‘Are there any other copies?’ I say.

  He shakes his head and I can’t see tears but it’s a face that deserves them. It’s a face where they are noticeably absent. It’s a face where tears are needed to finish the effect.

  ‘I swear,’ he says. ‘I swear to God.’

  I pocket the flash drive and lift Marley from the ground. I feel him relax, collapse in my arms as I step closer to the van. I lower him back to almost where he was, down onto the floor of the van so that his skinny, sickly legs will be hanging off the side.

  His eyes refocus and fix on me when he feels the piercing tip of that aluminium spike on the back of his right thigh. He’s going to say something when I force his descent, when I ram him down now onto the spike. His weight and the weight of my shove combine, and the cruel, sharp steel rips into the back of his thigh, right to the bone.

  I stand back, look at him sitting there, one leg higher than the other, three inches pushing his right leg up, a thigh skewered like a chunk of chicken. He doesn’t know whether to lean forward or back.

  ‘Oh, Jesus Christ,’ he says, frozen still. ‘Oh Jesus Christ.’

  He looks at me, his hands raising up and cupping below his face in some international sign of poverty, of innocence, some worldwide plea for any help of any kind at this minute.

  He’s giving it the ‘why me?’ treatment, and I know he knows why. I know a man like him always has the possibility of a terrible happening at the back of his mind, because even a man as buckled as Marley has, somewhere, somehow surviving amid all the misery, a simmering little pool of guilt.

  I grab his right leg, work it back and forwards, needing to be as sure as I can that I rip through enough old muscle to tear open the femoral artery.

  I feel bone grind against metal as I grip and shove, as I give it the 360-degree treatment and really get that wound opened. I see he is fainting, about to fall backwards as I work it, and I grab him by his throat.

  ‘Stay with me, Marley,’ I say. ‘Stay with me, you bastard.’

  I pull him up, see the blood on the spike, some on the floor, and I see it pissing out of the back of his leg like a busted wine box.

  I drop him on the ground and he is trying his crawl into a ball thing, but gives up to stretch his neck, to make some kind of animal sound, something that would come from an abattoir.

  ‘Move,’ I say. ‘Crawl forward.’

  ‘Je … sus,’ he goes, a shivering hand, grasping at a twig on the ground, his right leg quivering as blood bubbles and pumps out at high speed, rolling off his skin and soaking onto the soil and grass below.

  ‘Move it,’ I say, and kick his arse. ‘Crawl forward you fucker. You’ve had a DIY disaster. Don’t you want to get help?’

  He tries, makes another gurgle sound, hasn’t the strength to go further. He has maybe a minute now, if he’s lucky, his blood spreading over the thirsty, blotting ground beneath him.

  And he tries again to crawl, a pathetically weak grasp at a tuft of grass, and I reckon he’s had enough.

  I go to his face as he puts it on the ground, his eyes open. I go down on my hunkers, look at this old, dying man. I smile knowing this is no life wasting away, this is a waste wasting away.

  ‘I fucking love my job,’ I tell him, and he has no words for me. ‘You know, it’s times like this, I wish there really was a Hell.’

  I say, ‘It’s good when something that must happen goes ahead and happens, don’t you think?’

  The blood slows now and I can see that little, blurred light of life he had in his face has faded away.

  The final pumps and he is leaving fast, and I say, ‘Goodbye, Father Marley.’

  I watch as he breathes in once more, and I think maybe that’s his last breath. I think this is another one biting the dust, another one who has bought the farm, another one popping the clogs.

  That’ll be the last stretch of this one’s lungs, the last beat of this one’s rotten, tired heart.

  And this is one to remember, this evil old cunt. This is one for the memoirs, this view I have right in front of me right now.


  I wave a hand, a friendly farewell to the imminently dead man from the guy who just killed him.

  ‘Be sure,’ I say, ‘to tell God everything.’

  And with his last, failing breath he says it, very slow: ‘Aloysius.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  February 2017

  I USE my time, my space, my car, and take a long drive north on long roads, sleeping on and off on the back seat, stopping at cafés and neon-lit fast-food flytraps as the need arises.

  There’s a viewpoint in Austria that catches my eye and breath, and I stop for a break, a stretch, a piss.

  I climb over a wall, find a rock, bring it back to the car, and smash the old priest’s computer and flash drive to smithereens. I scatter some of the pieces into the roadside bin, take the rest with me to ditch in another bin somewhere else along the way.

  In half a week I’m used to Germany and closing in on the Netherlands, a place I’ve been missing a little, a nation with guts, class, brains, ambition and the strongest sense of fair play of them all, except they don’t force that information upon you. For some reason, for a little moment, I just can’t remember having had a bad day in Amsterdam, but I have to stop thinking about it right away before a few memories make themselves known.

  I’m going to stop by with Tall Marianne, see how she’s doing, tell her I never took her inherited car in the end, ask her if she’s really found love.

  Tall Marianne was always someone I could do business with, someone I could understand, who understood me. There are few questions you can ask Tall Marianne, few that she will answer anyway. And I never really asked her any at all. Likewise, there aren’t many you can ask me, none that are worth your while asking, and Tall Marianne never asked.

  She has no idea what I do, where I’ve been, where I’m going. She doesn’t care. She lives in the now, a dreamy ultra-liberal moment where the past is barely prologue, where the definites of what just happened are just something that was, where the next second means everything and everything is fluid again.

  I park up at 4 AM in the city, slip my seat back, pull the sleeping bag over myself, close my heavy eyes. I’m thinking how I’m thinking less these days, how my head isn’t racing in and out of places I don’t need it to be, it doesn’t have me looking at strangers to add up numbers I don’t need to add.

  I’m exhausted but rested, hungry but feeling much more solid inside. I’ve found some kind of thing to do, some agreeable shape that fits some kind of grumbling hole.

  I sail off to sleep, back in Amsterdam, just a day or so away from being back in Ireland, back to waiting, back to sitting around until I get number three on the list. And I see white lines flashing on long German roads in my mind’s eye and it’s all good.

  *

  Morning and I get three takeaway coffees, assuming Karson is still on the scene, and go to her door.

  She opens, topless, plastic tits even bigger than they were, and beams. She throws her full arms around me and the coffees – one, two, three – smack the floor.

  ‘You raggy Irish bastard,’ she says, delighted. ‘You really did disappear on me.’

  ‘I really fucking did,’ I say. ‘I got a proper job.’

  And yep, Karson is here, wearing only jeans, half awake, halfway through a bottle of Jack Daniels and very stoned.

  ‘Ah bejesus,’ he says in an accent he thinks is Irish, ‘sure it’s that Aloysius fella again.’

  We shake hands and he goes, ‘Oh man, I’ve heard some crazy stuff about you in the last few months.’

  And I go, ‘Don’t believe a word she says.’

  And he goes, ‘I didn’t hear it from her.’

  Then that’s him, turning away, going for his glass of bourbon, going for another smoke of that spliff in the ashtray.

  He did that on purpose, dropped a quick bomb to get me thinking. I reckon that, for some reason, he likes to put me on my guard, to say unusual things. He looks out the window, tapping his feet to some music that no one can hear, and my instinct screams at me there’s something that doesn’t add up here.

  Is this compact little guy just a really bad spy, still hanging around Amsterdam, tipping off his marks? Is he a shit spy who has fallen for this transsexual woman who is half a foot taller than him? Is he rebelling after being told by Langley to get his pants back on, stop drinking and smoking and get the fuck back home?

  I just don’t know, just don’t know and just don’t know. How do I move ahead on that? I just don’t know.

  We have omelettes in a dark, warm café off Vondelpark and, uninvited, Tall Marianne pours Tabasco all over hers and mine and Karson’s and says she has missed me.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve been missed by anyone before,’ I say.

  ‘Aw, too, too sad, baby Aloysius,’ she says. ‘All your playing around in the shadows and shit, all that standing in the park at 5 AM and all that shit – Amsterdam is a tiny little bit less crazy with you gone.’

  And all the time she is touching Karson’s hands, eye contacting with him, kissing him as she chews her breakfast, crunches on her toast. He’s too pissed to notice most of it, too pissed to stop smiling even when he is trying to get his grub into his face.

  She’s in the toilet and I tell Karson she’s in love.

  ‘I think so, yeah,’ he says. ‘A sweet, sweet girl, dude.’

  ‘And you?’ I say.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ he says. ‘She’s hard not to love.’

  And I don’t think he loves her, not as much as she loves him.

  I say, ‘Who told you about me?’

  ‘What’s that, buddy?’

  ‘You said someone had told you stuff about me. What did you mean?’

  He nods, chews on some egg, nods again, chugs some coffee. He goes, ‘Yeah, yeah. How long are you around for?’

  ‘A day. Maybe two. What did you mean?’

  He nods again.

  ‘I hear stuff,’ he says. ‘I know you think I’m CIA and all … ’ and he takes another bite.

  And I nod. ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘You more or less said as much. You’re something like that. Maybe not their best man in the field, Karson, but you’re a guy in the field in some way or another. A guy of use to them at the very least. Am I right?’

  He puts his fork down, slurps some more coffee. He may not have cleaned his teeth in a few days.

  ‘Yeah,’ he goes, ‘but I talk too much. It fits with the drinking and falling in love.’ And he laughs at that. I laugh too.

  He says, ‘Some of the guys I work with at the university, some of them come and go, you know? I’m in communications, signals. The uni here is a bit of a hub, you know? We can pick up all sorts of stuff, push the envelope a bit with some of the tech smarts we have. Everyone is a little interested in us – Russians, Brits, Israelis,’ and he laughs again.

  I laugh, let him roll on.

  ‘So much shit flying around Europe, Ireland at the one end and Russia at the other, and we can see a lot of it, man. If we want to, you know? What I’m telling you – and I shouldn’t be telling you anything – is that we have some guys come and go, some of those guys you were referencing, you know?

  ‘They like to use some of the equipment we use, like to piggyback on some of the licences we have to get them into places that it’s not so easy to get to otherwise, gain access to some of the material we can see, you know? We’re basically academics profiling applications for high comms stuff, but if you wanted to see that stuff as potential assets for the US, as ears and eyes, then you could call it that. Explains a lot of the funding that comes our way, you know, from the State Department, you know? Basically, what I’m telling you Aloysius, is that some of our visitors don’t always travel under their own names.’

  Tall Marianne is back, fast finishing her breakfast. She always tells people she has a great appetite for pretty much anything that can be put into one’s mouth.

  ‘Cutting-edge work by the sounds of it, Karson,’ I say. ‘And how does this link back to me?’

&n
bsp; Karson slurps some more. He looks at Tall Marianne, looks at me. He shrugs.

  ‘You got some ears on you,’ he says. ‘Eyes and ears. On you in Dublin, on what’s going on over there, on what you’re doing over there, what you’re doing in other places.’

  I shake my head, acting confused. I know some of this, I know Imelda and Martin asked for me to be tracked. I also know Imelda called it off after I came on board, but I’m not making any confessions to this guy.

  I say, ‘What do you mean?’

  He shakes his head, laughs.

  ‘Aloysius,’ he goes, ‘listen buddy, us two didn’t think we’d ever see you again. I haven’t come looking for you and I’ve never tried to get in touch with you, okay?’

  ‘Yeah, why would you?’

  ‘Well,’ he says, ‘T Marianne wanted to see if I could find you, asked me a favour, wanted to know if you had died or some shit, after she found out that car she gave you never moved. I did a little search, checked out a couple of records. We have good equipment man, I’m telling you. So, yeah, there you were. On records, in Dublin. And these records, you know, they had been opened and compiled by some of the guys we’ve been talking about, you know? And they had a lot of detail and shit, you know? Like they really had been tracking your ass.’

  ‘Okay,’ I go. ‘Well, I’ve travelled a lot, done some stuff I shouldn’t have. I’ll be one of thousands of people they’re keeping an eye on. No biggie.’

  Karson nods. ‘Yep,’ he goes, and eats his last bit of toast. ‘You could think of it that way.’

  And he looks at me, nods again.

  And I say, ‘But?’

  He goes, ‘Listen Aloysius. I’m not talking bullshit. I’m not too interested in bullshit. I just want you to know I’m doing you a favour. I’m doing you a favour because this woman here – who loves the fucking hell out of you – told me thirty minutes ago that she wants me to tell you this stuff. So I’m just telling you. You do what you want with it.’

  I look at her and she’s embarrassed, blushing, munching bacon.

  ‘I’ve heard all this,’ she says. ‘I didn’t know what to do but it was better that you heard it than you didn’t hear it, right?’