Aloysius Tempo Read online

  I’VE TOLD Martin I should drive. He hasn’t a clue what’s happening or where we’re going, but we’re going fast.

  ‘Trust me,’ I say.

  ‘I do,’ he says. ‘Is Imelda okay?’

  ‘She’ll be fine,’ I say. ‘Trust me.’

  We take the tolled tunnel, spitting us out on the top side of Dublin, onto the M1 motorway, heading north, the far side of the speed limit.

  He’s gripping the assist handle above the door, asks, ‘You stressed out or what?’

  ‘Just making progress, Martin. Just moving ahead with things.’

  ‘I’ve got a 7 PM dinner with a TD in Ballsbridge,’ he says. ‘I need to be there.’

  ‘You need to be here first,’ I say.

  We tear on and my brain is racing like the wheels. I won’t tell him right now, but I will tell him that I am running from the certainty that Imelda is seeking to have me take his life.

  I am running because she knows I have found out what she insisted I must not know, that everything she has told me has been an act of betrayal. I am running before she has set me up with the murder of Martin. I am running in anger.

  She wants me to be her hard-fanged puppy, some kind of cruel fool for her, and she believes she can get me to do that? Her patriotism is poison. Her loyalty is piss weak. She is the one who deserves to be thrown off a building.

  I saw this coming. I’ll say it again, I saw it coming. I die, that’s what happens at the end of this story. I die in the moments after I kill Martin.

  Maybe armed police catch me in the act, tipped off in some random call, and have been encouraged to shoot. Maybe it’ll be some undercover tough that who kills me, who gets lauded for taking out the unknown, homeless fucker who took down one of the nation’s best servants.

  That’s what will happen – you can be sure of it – because then there will only be Imelda, the forever friend of whoever it was in the high place that paid for all of this. Only fucking Imelda and dead men with their secrets.

  There is dirt in my throat now, some bits of grit and filth crawling coarsely up from the back of my tongue, and I want to spit, to shout and rage at the fucking world with a mouth full of mud.

  *

  There’s a sprawling service station, a pull-in plaza, and I drop the gears and cruise in, tucking up in the furthest corner of the car park. I reverse into the space, facing the building, the back of the vehicle against a field dotted with cud-chewing cows.

  I cut the engine and note that it’s busy, that there’s dozens of other cars, other four-by-fours, lorries, vans, parents, children. And I’m thinking busy is good, that people and CCTV and daylight are all good because there are two men in this vehicle who are due to be killed, one after the other.

  It hits me now, this second, as Martin looks at my face, that I didn’t look up my own name on that bloody laptop. I didn’t even get to look for a second italic marking me for death, but then maybe such a detail was too dirty even to write.

  He goes, ‘This what you wanted to show me? A fucking shop?’

  I hear myself sigh, maybe a bit of sadness. It’s maybe some tiredness and maybe some sliver of relief all mixed into one.

  ‘I wish it was that simple,’ I say. ‘I had to get out of Dublin. I had to get us both out of Dublin, just until I can get a grip on all of this.’

  ‘Explain,’ he says. ‘Calm down, Aloysius, and explain.’

  And I breathe in deep, look all around. The cows in the mirror looking our way, contented, uncomplicated, unknowing and, therefore, unbothered by their fate.

  I see a mum chuckling as she walks her three-year-old by the hand, as the little boy talks excitedly about everything that comes into his head.

  ‘Dangerous days,’ I say, turning to him. ‘And they didn’t have to be. I have some information you need to know.’

  He opens his door and the noise makes me jolt.

  ‘Come on,’ he says, ‘let’s chat.’

  The air eases around me, nicely, comfortably, as we walk across the car park and into the café.

  ‘I’ve made mistakes in my life,’ I say to him, a hot, paper-cupped coffee in my hand. ‘All sorts of shit, stuff that nearly got me killed, some stuff that at times made me want to get killed. Truth is, I sometimes don’t trust my thinking. Fact is, I sometimes put too much trust in my gut, sometimes too little. It’s all done often without taking full stock of all the circumstances. I don’t know if that balancing act keeps me sane or keeps me mad.’

  His eyes, wide open yet yellowed and dimmed, take all this in, encourage more of this lid-lifting.

  And I go, ‘I have to tell you that, all along, I’ve had doubts about this whole project. Where my head said everything is fine, my gut said it’s too easy, said go easy, keep looking over your shoulder, keep looking at Martin, at Imelda.

  ‘You know I’m not what you might call someone who set out to kill or die for his country. Yet you know too that I’ve been looking for a place, a part to play, some kind of sense of creating some kind of half-sensible life story. So I’ve been playing the part, Martin. And I’ve been out in the field hard-solving your problems, Ireland’s problems, and it’s been working for me. It’s been like coming home, but coming home on my terms, coming home as so much more of a human being than I was when I left. But I’ve kept my eyes open. And now I’ve got some information on this little organisation of yours, of ours.

  ‘I got to hear, loud and clear, that the Americans know every detail of it, that they’re tracking the whole thing, by the day, by the hour. And today I got to learn that Imelda doesn’t care about that, or doesn’t care enough to even look into it, as if it is all ending, as if the end is already certain and all she wants to do is close the book.

  ‘And today I also got to learn that she won’t tell me who’s number four on the list. So when we were in my flat, I did a bit of digging.’

  He takes a drink, ‘And what did you find out?’

  I say, ‘It’s you, Martin,’ and his big face is unmoved, the face of the practiced professional, the show of the diplomat who thinks and calculates and plans before he gives anything away.

  ‘At some stage, pretty soon,’ I say, ‘Imelda is planning to talk me into killing you. She’s going to set you up, I think, maybe lead me to believe I am under threat from you, I don’t know. But, much as she knows she can talk me into many things, I’m not going to do that. I can’t do that. It is a betrayal, cruel and, I think, very unfair, very un-Irish.

  ‘My own name may not be on that list, but you can be sure my fate is as certain as yours, my death will be the direct result of yours, and our two deaths clean this whole thing up very neatly for her, for the government, for whoever it is that funds this show. I need you to believe that Imelda Feather is not on your side, hard as it may be to swallow. She is the opposite, and she is the most dangerous person in this whole thing.’

  And I know I haven’t even given him a moment to think, to digest this heavy load. All there is now, and it’s barely perceptible, is a little smirk, a micro mocking of what I have just said.

  He goes, ‘How do you know this?’

  ‘The list.’

  ‘That massive document on her laptop?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘With one letter in the names in italics?’

  ‘Yes. That’s it. You’re the fourth name.’

  ‘I am,’ he says. ‘And I knew that, you big clart.’

  ‘You knew that?’

  ‘Yes,’ he goes, and breaks into laughter now. ‘Of course I did, fuck’s sake, Aloysius, you prick.’

  And he’s still laughing, waving a hand to let it all clear from his belly, wiping an eye and enjoying it.

  I can’t help but laugh too, smile and laugh at his reaction.

  I say, ‘You knew that I’m supposed to kill you?’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he says. ‘Fuck’s sake, yes, I know all of that.’

  ‘What the fuck, Martin? So you’re some kind of mole in this outfit?’
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  ‘No, no,’ he goes, chuckling again. ‘No, for fuck’s sake. Jesus Christ, you’re getting carried away now. I know you’re supposed to kill me and, what’s more, I damn well hope you do.’

  Martin gets up, goes and buys two brownies, and I watch him all the way, leaner than he has been in a while, beaming happily at the woman behind the counter. He comes back, plops one in front of me.

  ‘Not hungry, thanks,’ I say, making a face that says he’s doing my head in.

  He eats and chuckles again and I watch him.

  Martin tells me I wasn’t supposed to have received this information for months, that I had broken in and seen something I shouldn’t have seen.

  ‘There are no betrayals, Aloysius,’ he says. ‘There are just complications, things that don’t seem to make sense on the surface. It’s the kind of business we have all chosen to get into, y’know? You’re looking for black and white and the whole thing is multi-coloured.

  ‘I told you from the start that you could trust Imelda with anything, and I meant that. It’s truer now than it ever was. She would die before she’d turn her back on you. And she would do the same for me.’

  And I’m saying, ‘I don’t understa—’

  ‘No,’ he goes, ‘because you’re the blunt instrument. You’re the hammer head, not the guy deciding if he should swing the thing. There’s a structure to all of this, an order. Don’t you worry about how that all fits together, we just need each person to do their bit for the operation to run cleanly.’

  ‘Martin,’ I say, ‘you wanker. You seriously want me to kill you?’

  ‘Look in my eyes, Aloysius. Look at these tired eyes. I’m dying, my friend. I have four to six months before I shuffle off this mortal coil. I am rotten with cancer. I have it all over me like a wet week, bones to bollocks. I was too slow to find out and I’m way too long in the tooth for a massive dose of chemo, and for surgery that has a 5 percent chance of working.

  ‘But I’m living the lives of ten men with what we’ve been doing. I’ve never been happier, never prouder, never more ready to die. I’ve never seen justice like it, I’ve never seen the whip so fairly cracked in Ireland in my life and, at the back of every mind in the nation, there’s a happy little song, even if they don’t know where it came from.’

  He tells me his own murder is his best way out, and that it must very clearly be a murder. He tells me it’s the fastest, cleanest way, that it unlocks a massive insurance bundle for his estranged wife, and for his daughter if she ever comes home. Under his policy, he says, a suicide or death by cancer would never provide as much.

  ‘But you know what the real craic is?’ he asks.

  ‘No.’

  ‘The real craic is that if you don’t get me first, the Americans or the British will.’

  ‘Kill you?’

  ‘In the end, as good as. But they’ll disappear me, it’s a certainty. They will take me and interrogate the living fuck out of me, and I can’t go through that. I can’t face that, can’t survive that. They don’t know and, the fact is, they wouldn’t care that I’m a dying man. They have very serious unfinished business with me and they want to move when we have finished the list, when I’ve stepped away from you and Imelda into obscurity, living alone, they want to pick me up and take me away.

  ‘They can’t do it now because I’m with Imelda every day, regularly in touch with people in high places, but they need to do it soon. I’m told they will move when number four goes down. For me, Aloysius, that would be a fate, literally, worse than death. And that’s why I’m number four.’

  Walking to the door, heading back to the vehicle, he says, ‘When we started this whole thing, me, Imelda, a couple of guys in the civil service, a couple of political people, we started with fuck all. In fact we started with less. As soon as we did anything, they knew. The Yanks, the Brits. They just had so many ears on our phones and software, red-flagging every conversation that they knew of, even if the topic was of no interest to them at all.

  ‘But we couldn’t have that. It left us vulnerable. So we turned the tables, succoured them in, started conversations that made us more interesting to them. Mad stuff. Stuff we made up. And when we got them closer, when they felt we really did have a few direct lines into people and places of interest to them, we got to asking them for help. And the help came.

  ‘And, Jesus, it was a hoot. We were spinning fucking tales about the Brits to the Yanks and vice versa. We were filling them with shite about what the hard left were up to, about what all sorts of terrorists are up to. You know the sort of twats that like to wander about Belfast and Dublin in revolutionary T-shirts, hoping to smell blood and talk about bombs? We told the Yanks we knew a load of those guys were setting up a cyber terrorist camp in Athlone. They believed it, too.

  ‘Then when Kiera went off to Iraq – my daughter – our contacts went apeshit with joy, asked me if I thought she could be turned to work for the west and all of that and I said “Oh aye definitely, not a bother”, and they formed a whole unit aimed at finding her and getting word to her.’

  He holds the door open for me and he’s saying, ‘Sure I told the posh boys at MI6 there was a secret American base in Galway where they were torturing some Islamic State fellas, for fuck’s sake. The whole county had drones flying over it before I was home for dinner.

  ‘At one stage we had them telling themselves the Irish were their best friends. We had them thinking, Ack sure the Irish chat away and everyone chats away to the Irish and sure maybe the Paddies will be of use to us. And, by fuck, I filled them with a load of dung, so I did. Never enjoyed myself more, to be honest with you. With even the little bits of feedback I was getting from a few old, good contacts, it wasn’t long at all before we knew how they did their listening, where they did it and the sort of stuff they were most interested in. Great craic altogether.’

  And we stop walking when I ask, ‘And in return?’

  ‘Well, I got a few favours from them. I found out about my daughter, where she is, who she’s with, about her health, if there were grandchildren on the way. They got me enough to know she’s a lost cause, but that she’s found some kind of happiness.

  ‘To be honest, we got all we needed to know about a few dozen people. We couldn’t possibly have done all the work ourselves. Wouldn’t have had the resources, the manpower, the experience. Basically, we just bluffed the holes off ourselves. It wasn’t even too hard. We got to learn things we could never have known. We found out who says what about us around the world, who owes us, who is planning to fuck us in one way or another. We got what we needed, got watching who we wanted and, one day, we stopped pissing around and drew up a little PR plan, a little list.

  ‘And then we went looking for the right man and found out all about you, Aloysius. We got to learn what you’ve done, where you’ve been, your deadly wee business on the dark net. Most of it anyway. We evaluated you for a long time before moving in. We knew you were the man for the job.

  ‘But now the curtain is closing and I have a few bills to pay, one way or another. They want to know how much of this and that and the other is true, how much is a load of balls, and they will not be leaving any of us alone until they get what they need, I’m afraid. It was only a matter of time until we were rumbled, and that time is now.

  ‘They want me to know I cost them all millions and learned too much in the process, that I basically stole a pile of their information. They really do not like the fact I had the fucking nerve to do it in the first place, y’know? You talk about this mad thing in your head about Imelda wanting to bump you off because you know too much. You? Fuck’s sake, you wouldn’t believe what I know about the CIA and MI6 and what they’re up to and who’s who and what’s what. In their world, I have become a very dangerous man.’

  And his words are making sense, and a pattern is forming. I can see how the Americans are sitting it out until the coast is clear, I can see how that clearly says they are taking him. I can see why Martin has been so carefu
l to keep his illness such a close, close secret. Clearest of all, I can see how all of what he found was handed to him on a plate by people who are angry they didn’t know better. Wounded pride can make nations act in the wildest of ways, nations like the US, like the UK, like Ireland.

  And, right on cue, I see now three vehicles I don’t like in this car park. I see there are men in all of them, and that all of the men are watching without speaking.

  ‘But,’ he says, walking now, ‘it’s left us with some good smarts, and a good reputation in places where we needed it. We might be the silly little guys to the big guys, Aloysius. But it’s like the cat and the lion, just a matter of scale, nothing else. And it’s no bad thing when the lion feels he has to keep an eye on the cat from now on because he knows the cat is as smart and sleek and as stout-hearted as he is.

  ‘So, aye, of course they’re watching us, watching us like hawks, but they don’t know the details of what’s ahead, and we do. And, Aloysius, my friend, you have a job to do.’

  I’m about to tell him not to say any more when he makes the point.

  ‘You’re about to tell me they’re here,’ he says, stopping now, checking out what he can of my thoughts from my face.

  My instinct is to run. To run at them. To run from them. Right now, immediately, fast as hell.

  ‘Take it easy, just walk with me back to the car,’ he says.

  ‘They’ll take you now, Martin. They know something’s changed. I’ve landed you in this shit and they’ll take you now while they can.’

  ‘They will,’ he says. ‘They’ll have had shotgun mikes on us, they’ll have heard everything I just said to you, in which case they’ll not want the man who’s going to kill me to be around for long either.’

  We get to the vehicle and I open the passenger door for him, looking back at the cars. I spit on the ground, sending a message, marking my turf as I go to the driver’s seat, climb in, close the door, watch.

  ‘They will take me, Aloysius, and they will leave you here,’ he says. ‘They know who you are and they won’t feel the need to do you any favours. You will be stretched across the seat, maybe a drugs overdose. But they will leave you here, dead, unable to tell the story I just told you. You understand?’