Aloysius Tempo Read online

  I go, ‘Right. Thanks.’

  He goes, ‘In the end, it’s probably pretty meaningless to you, but there are eyes and ears, okay.’

  I go, ‘Okay.’

  ‘These guys,’ he says, ‘they know you’re working off a list, okay?’

  And my stomach does some kind of tiny roll.

  I go, ‘Okay,’ try to give nothing away.

  He goes, ‘And here’s the rub.’

  Oh shit.

  I go, ‘What?’

  ‘The list has four names. Two names are scored off. The last name? The word is you’re not going to like it.’

  The details this guy knows are incredible, worryingly bang up-to-date. I have no idea if he’s pulling some move on me, but he knows stuff he should not know, stuff even I do not yet know. At least I know that on one impressive, dangerous level, he is not bullshitting.

  I go to speak, feeling dazed, totally vulnerable, and all I say is, ‘You couldn’t know … ’

  ‘Ya think? Ya fucking think, man? Hey buddy, the guys I know, they look at the world from the inside out, from the screens outward, from the phones outward. They don’t have to get inside anything anymore, they are fucking inside before you come along and press buttons and make calls and look shit up. You can assume they are above your head in drones and satellites 24/7. There is information fucking overload going on. There is more intel out there on people than they know what to do with.

  ‘The shit I’m telling you is so fucking minor, so fucking unimportant, that it isn’t even held in a secure file. It’s in a file called “Ireland”, and it’s got a fucking laughing leprechaun as an icon, you get me?’

  ‘Right.’

  He goes, ‘You go on the dark net and you think you’re hidden? Man, you go on the dark net and you’re more interesting, that’s the truth. There is no hidden. There’s just degrees of how interesting you are. You and your “hard solving”, yes? You and your five stars for doing what you do all over Europe, yes? Guys I know are sitting around watching stories like yours like it’s a fucking soap opera, taking bets on who you will be sent to get next. You think you operate in secret? You’re fucking crazy, man. I heard you just made an old man bleed to death. I heard you spent a day beside someone’s pool and watched them drown. I heard you pulled some guy into a damn dog pit and stood there as he got eaten up. You don’t have any secrets, man. Now isn’t that supremely refreshing?’

  I go, ‘Yeah.’

  Tall Marianne starts humming to herself.

  And I don’t answer, just drink the last of my coffee.

  He goes, ‘You want me to tell you the name on that new passport?’

  And I say, ‘Yes.’

  He goes, ‘Marcus Tempo.’

  I go, ‘Right.’

  He goes, ‘You going to drink whiskey and fuck your boss again?’

  I go, ‘Right.’

  He goes, ‘Right.’

  I say, ‘So finish the conversation.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Tell me the rest.’

  ‘What rest?’

  ‘The last name on the list.’

  ‘I don’t know, man, that’s the truth. It’s written somewhere, not on anything that can connect to the Internet. But the guys picked up chatter, some stuff about it being a hard decision at the end, that it’s a betrayal and that they can’t tell you until the time is right. Said you’re not going to like it, said you’ll have to be bluffed into it. I guess these people – this agency you work with – it wants to close all this shit off, Aloysius. This damn list is final, then it’s over, you know? Whatever that means to you, is whatever it means. Be careful who you trust.’

  And he goes to drink up and there’s no coffee left.

  He says, ‘I guess if you’re the guy doing the what you call “hard solving”, you can at least be sure that number four isn’t you. Or at least that there’s no sign of you on any list, not yet anyways. I’d stay wide awake to that possibility, though. Be careful who you trust, my friend.’

  I smile at Karson.

  ‘Cheers,’ I say.

  He goes, ‘If you get the last name, call me. I’ll tell you the direction of all this shit. Or don’t call me. I don’t give a fuck.’

  I say, ‘Cheers.’

  ‘Hey no problem,’ he says. ‘Let’s go get drunk and baked and not talk about it any more.’

  *

  I sit at the Sunflowers, try to find a simple, uncluttered place in my head. Everything that had been blossoming feels now like it’s closing, everything that had fitted is now gripping too tight.

  I’ve gone from being all fully charged to flat. I’ve been hit by a smart missile, a know-nothing boy from the sticks, hit around the head by a professor. My ducking and diving has just been a dance for some to watch, a stupid little set of moves watched by judges who couldn’t help themselves but laugh.

  Frankly, it’s fucking embarrassing.

  I need to see Imelda, to ease some truths in and out of her. Yet the one thing I cannot do, until I am face-to-face with her, in a neutral space, a thousand miles from fucking anywhere, is talk to her about this stuff.

  I go and look at a self-portrait and mull over all the people that Van Gogh sees every day. I think how the greatest trick in the world would be to have the world walking before him, with not one of them ever knowing he was looking back, noting what they’re looking for, the shape of their faces, the glisten of their eyes and pondering how to paint them as they stare innocently at his concentrating face.

  I find myself reaching for my ear, ludicrously working out a way to slice it off just like the Van Gogh story says. I’m here now and thinking how I could cut it off in this museum and bleed all over the place. I’d be on the front of every newspaper in the land, being read about on screens across the world, and it would give me more control over who sees me than living in some shadow world ever does.

  And it’s all the opposite of what I want. The exact opposite. I want nothing out there on me, no notoriety. I wanted to find a warm cave in which to be, an easy place for my mind, body and soul. I asked Imelda for that and she promised she could deliver it. And now what? I am a sitting, quacking duck.

  This entire operation, this ridiculous dirty, dreamy Irish PR scam, is a farce.

  I should not have had that joint.

  I need to lie fucking down.

  I need to go and find a bed and lie fucking down.

  I need to lie down, sleep, wake up and, as best I can, be still and silent.

  I need to watch the watchers, those people who pass by to take a look. I need to see what they are thinking, what shapes their faces are making when they look at me. I need to know who’s who and what’s what and why.

  I can no longer be in the dark.

  I am insulting my own intelligence by being in the dark.

  I need to watch the watchers.

  And how the hell do I do that?

  I don’t know.

  I no longer know.

  You know what? I’m no longer smart. I’m now stupid. And I’m smart enough to know that I’m stupid.

  You know what?

  No, here’s the craic, here’s the point I’m trying to reach in my own head here.

  Fuck this for a life.

  Chapter Twenty

  February 2017

  I’M IN an Internet café at the Hook of Holland, and put in a Facetime call to Imelda. She has always told me to speak my mind with her yet now there’s so little I can say.

  She beams out of the screen, tells me she’s glad to see me looking so well, wonders how I feel about my trip to Italy?

  ‘Peachy,’ I say, and she fires me a sideways glance.

  ‘Nice,’ she says, a little suspicious. And then, right away, ‘I want you to head to Belfast, Aloysius. Ring me when you get there, okay?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Number three on the list,’ she says. ‘That workable?’

  I say, ‘Yeah, grand.’

  Whatever. Fuck it. I might as well
go to Belfast and do number three while standing in the middle of the road. I might as well do number three in a live television studio.

  Going to Belfast is like going anywhere in this world now, I have no anonymity, no privacy, no space of my own. And, I’m thinking, if the Americans already know absolutely everything, then surely the British at least know a large amount of it. And if the British know it then, one way or another, MI5’s massive operation in Belfast knows it. They probably already know about this call.

  I reckon I might do number three on stage in front of an invited audience of security officials. I might do number three in a police station while shouting out my name. I might do number three all over the fucking Web while confessing at high volume to numbers one and number two.

  I book the car on the ferry to Harwich and, onward, on the Liverpool-Belfast.

  It’s raining now, a cold and wet spring, and I’ve hardly slept on the rowdy, boozy weekend vessel to the Northern Ireland capital.

  There’s a cursory glance from a customs official as I drive off the boat and into the city, a half wave of a wet hand as the wipers half reveal who I am.

  ‘Whatever,’ I say, driving off. ‘I’m a mass murderer, so I am.’

  Booked into a cheap hotel, I feel the gloom like fog around me, a cloud reminding there is now a complete pointlessness to all of this cloak-and-dagger bullshit.

  I see the corner of a bible in a drawer and I hoak it out, wish there really was some book with all the answers. I flick open its pages for no reason and see two thick, black pubic hairs pressed between the pages of Exodus.

  I go, ‘Fuck’s sake.’

  I take myself to a dive bar for some mood symmetry and, standing at the doorway, make the call to Imelda, a pint of thick, cold Guinness in my hand. I believe she may be a woman who wants me to kill someone I don’t want to kill, and I don’t understand. This is, right now, a woman who may very well want me dead very soon, and that makes clear sense. This is the sort of shit I expected at the outset. This is the stuff my instincts warned me about.

  ‘There’s a wonderful up-and-coming politician in Belfast called Martha McStay,’ she says, before I say anything.

  I go, ‘Right. And what’s your opinion on caution, on security?’

  ‘I’m all for it. What’s yours?’

  ‘Don’t you think you’re maybe a little loose with it sometimes, given what we know about the prowess of our bigger brothers in the world?’

  ‘Aloysius,’ she says, ‘don’t make the mistake of overemphasising the importance of what we are doing to the rest of the world. This is about us, the Irish. Everyone else has their own troubles, okay?’

  I say, ‘You’re not as forward thinking as I used to think.’

  ‘You’d be surprised,’ she says.

  ‘That’s what people say when they have no useful answer.’

  There’s a silence.

  She goes, ‘Maybe you should take a break, come in for a while. Maybe this is proving too much for you.’

  And I can’t say any more to her. I can’t tell her what I know about Karson, that I know she has just plotted another murder in someone’s ears, that the word ‘betrayal’ has been shooting around in my head like a rock on fire. I can’t tell her that I know what is going on here, and that at the same time I haven’t a fucking clue. The more the picture clears, the more it moves away from me.

  She says, ‘I cannot have any shivering and pissing yourself and crying out there. Get away to fuck with your weakness. It’s time for a talk.’

  ‘You misunderstand,’ I say, ‘completely.’

  She snaps it back, ‘I don’t. I assess and draw conclusions, and I’m fucking good at it. Don’t try and trump me, young man, you haven’t got the brains.’

  She pauses again.

  I go, ‘I have no issue with this job and I don’t give a shit who this next person is. I just don’t think you’re considering all the options or looking around all the corners. Not when it comes to your communications. Let’s leave it at that.’

  ‘You’re boring me, Aloysius,’ she says. ‘You’re boring me during what is an extremely important set of moments for our nation, during an extremely delicate conversation we are having which impacts directly on the future of our country. I need a strong, bold and complete performance from you in the very near future while you are in Belfast. I need potatoes, vegetables and I need fucking meat. Is that going to happen?’

  I say, ‘Yes,’ and I sink a third of my pint.

  She goes, ‘Good. Right. See that it does. We will talk in Dublin.’

  I go, ‘Right.’

  She says, ‘I have to say, Aloysius, this is the first time I’ve felt disappointed by you. You always give me more than I expect to get, which is a charming way to behave. But this is the first time any of your communications with me have not met that standard. It’s the first time they have been, what shall I say, below par.’

  I go, ‘Maybe you’ve been spoiled. And, anyway, below par is a good thing. Look it up.’

  The silence crackles with her rage, or maybe it’s some American guys laughing at our chat.

  She goes, ‘Do not get smart with me.’

  I say nothing. I cannot say what I need to say, cannot steer this conversation. I kind of want to laugh, or sniff or shout or speak in tongues, give her something completely off-centre, some kind of code, that gets her thinking, not judging.

  But I can’t. I just have to let her say her bit.

  She goes, ‘I’ll see you in the fair city.’

  And I’m pressing the button when I hear her say, ‘And good luck.’

  Whatever.

  And whatever luck is coming, bad or good, it won’t have a problem finding me because everyone knows I’m standing here big and plain as day.

  *

  Eight days later, we’ve hit March 2017, and I have all I need to know. Matha McStay, an elected MLA in Northern Ireland’s parliament, is twenty-nine. She has a community-worker boyfriend and was pregnant last year but miscarried. She lives alone on the seventh floor of a ten-storey tower block on a working class, north Belfast estate. She runs marathons, likes to box and has many enemies, many friends. She was once handed a three-month suspended sentence for attacking a man who got too fresh with her.

  There are two mean-looking guys who drive her around, take her to Stormont, to meetings, to events, to her lover’s place. They wait for her, take her back, take her wherever she needs to go, and they look like they will kill anyone who threatens to bring her any harm.

  They’re not police, these guys. They’re not official, but more likely supporters, two heavies attached to her because they are attached to her hard political views, to listening to the specific sounds she is making in a place where politics is mostly noise.

  I’ve watched Martha McStay in a number of situations, often smiling, often sparking smiles on the faces of those who meet and greet her. Her body language, and the language of those around her, tells me that no one, male, female, rich or poor, ignores Martha McStay. I’ve watched people fawning, I’ve watched people come close to bowing in front of her.

  Whatever she has done in her past, it is completely overshadowed by her presence in the here and now.

  She impresses, she sexes-up every environment she enters, and I find it hard to take my eyes off her.

  On Monday, two days ago, Martha McStay spent an hour with a psychiatrist who has a reputation for working with people suffering from the hardest effects of post-traumatic stress disorder.

  On Tuesday, Martha had her goons take her to a chemist’s where, with a prescription, she loaded up with strong anti-depression medications before she disappeared into her flat alone, and sat up late into last night.

  During the evening, she pulled her coat collar up and a hat down before walking twenty minutes to the back of a pub. And there a member of staff privately passed her two bottles of vodka, which she put into a little rucksack, and carried home.

  Today is Wednesday, the day
when, without fail, Martha McStay takes a yoga class in a community centre on the estate where she lives.

  I watch now as she leaves it, laughing and chatting and smiling with a friend at the door, bidding farewell as she walks across the car park, past two shops and into her own building. She is not escorted for this class so close to her home, her two heavies – as with last week – nowhere to be seen.

  From behind, as she stands at the lift doors, checking her mobile, I see a short, petite, crafted body in Lycra. There isn’t an ounce too much flesh, not an ounce too little. Her bottoms are black, the runner’s boob tube pink, the towel slung over her shoulder, white. Her arse cheeks are smooth as boiled eggs, as hard as apples, would get a second look from a man with no head. I cannot resist informing myself loudly and clearly that there is very little, if any, underwear going on there.

  I’m moving as the lift doors open. She finishes on her phone, looks up, sees an older woman exiting.

  ‘Hiya Fiona,’ she says. ‘How’s life?’

  ‘Not too bad, love. Keeping well.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  Martha and I get inside and she looks at me, smiles, almost makes me smile back.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she says, hitting button seven, her face all sweet and quizzical, a little Audrey Hepburn meets a little Demi Moore, a flaming firecracker who must have been asked out a million times.

  ‘Ten please.’

  The doors close and I can smell piss and bleach and a thousand Saturday nights and I feel like mentioning it, but what’s the point in doing anything like that with someone who is about to die.

  And up we go.

  She stretches her neck a little as we approach seven. The lift stops, the door clicks, is about to open.

  I step in front as she’s about to move.

  ‘You’re going to ten,’ I say.

  And she smiles, ‘Nope, you’re going to ten. I live on seven.’

  And I’m stern now, ‘You’re going to ten.’

  I stand with my back to the door and she doesn’t blink, looks into my eyes the whole time, getting some kind of measure of me. And I know she is not scared.