Read The Death of an Irish Tinker Online
Authors: Bartholomew Gill
The Death of an Irish Tinker (10 page)
Biddy could feel her heart pounding in her ears as the Toddler turned and peered down the length of the gallery toward the photograph that she knew she shouldn’t have included in the show. Her mother, Maggie, had said it was wrong. And Ned, her father, had advised against including the piece.
“Yeh just can’t get over livin’ on the fookin’ edge” was how he’d put it, now that he had quit drinking and was “Mr. AA” and could suss out everybody’s “motives.”
And maybe to spite him—since she still had not completely forgiven him for kicking her out of the van when she was nine to be prodded and pricked by sharp and blunt instruments of every description and size—she had decided to hang the picture. But only in the back of the gallery, she had made the owner promise. “It’s not really for sale. I’m just including it because it’s so completely Irish.”
“The Book of Kells, you say? That’s always intrigued me. I must have a look.” He turned and began making his way through the others in the room.
Jordan was right on his heels, saying, “I must tell you, Des, that Beth has said it’s not really for sale. Hasn’t even been priced. But I’m sure we can work something out that’s fair to…”
It was as if an alarm had gone off in the Toddler’s brain, louder with every step that he took closer to the last piece by Beth Waters. A large photograph, it pictured a footpath shaped like a vortex and flagged, supposedly, with other, smaller photographs of pages from the Book of Kells.
The closer he got, the more impossible it seemed that she could have so perfectly sized down the photograph of each flag that the illusion of a vortex was created. And utterly
convincingly. Which would have taken—what?—something like a computer. Yet the Toddler could tell at a glance that the entire effort was traditional photography. After skeet and competition target shooting, it was Bacon’s second hobby.
No. Removing a pair of reading glasses that had become necessary now that the Toddler had entered his forties, he saw instantly that the picture was not an example of rephotography at all. It was an artful deception.
Having been cut in diminishing sizes, the flags had then been arranged in a whorl, and the pages actually painted or drawn in with—he took a step closer and adjusted the glasses—yes, with pastel chalk. The entire composition had then been photographed from above by means of what, a crane? Or some tall building that did not cast a shadow.
But the precision of the drawings. Now that was something he recognized. There was only one person that he knew of who was capable of such fine detailing in chalk.
Stepping back from the photograph, as though to consider it from a distance, the Toddler felt as he had in Vietnam when he found himself cut off from his firebase. Suddenly he knew who Beth Waters was and why she had seemed so reluctant to shake his hand.
Gone were the long, brassy curls, the thick gold Tinker earrings, the fresh complexion from kneeling out on the footpath at the top of Grafton Street in every kind of weather. But he knew it was she from her height, which was tall, her build, which had been angular then but was now full and womanly, and her flat, distrusting, streetwise Tinker eyes. Back then one had been brown and the other blue. But the simple addition of a contact lens could change that.
“Do you like it?” Mal Jordan asked.
“Oh, yes, very much. How could you not?” The Toddler replied automatically, as he racked his brain to think of how he could deal with her and not compound the problem that she represented. Twelve years now and running. He had done everything he could to track her down, hired snoops, computer surveys, even paid government employees to
search tax, dole, and public assistance records in Ireland and England.
With no luck on Biddy Nevins. Because—he now knew—she had been Beth Waters all along, which was a name he recognized from the past, of a doper who had done herself in. When? Around the time he’d had the trouble with Mickalou Maugham and Biddy.
Since then the Toddler had remained very much the Toddler, keeping himself feared and therefore respected in the Trade, as drug dealing was known to its principals. But gradually he had left the dicey realm of street-level dealing to become a wholesaler, often internationally on a scale that he would not even have imagined twelve years earlier.
In fact, the pains he had taken to buffer himself from any possible criminal charge extended to his staff. The Toddler no longer employed a single Irish national. Instead he relied upon ten, skilled operatives from Cambodia, where Lance Corporal Des Bacon had once survived undercover for almost a year during his sniper/scout days with the U.S. Marines.
None of his staff spoke English, making testifying against him difficult, and if some problem arose, the Irish government would probably just deport them as illegal aliens. Whereupon the Toddler would merely bring in some others—most likely their brothers and sisters or cousins or neighbors—as replacements with the next shipment of heroin. They’d do anything to get out of that hellhole, and what the Toddler paid was for them and their families a small fortune. Consequently, they were loyal to a fault and would do anything he asked.
Also, Des Bacon had become almost respectable, at least among the merchants and tradespeople who supplied the goods and services he required. Since his granny’s death a decade ago he had moved out to Hacketstown in the Wicklow Mountains, where he now had a large estate, horses, a shooting range, and more Cambodians as staff and who thought him a god. And told him as much. In short, the
Toddler had not been threatened by anybody—a rival, the police even—in so long he hardly remembered the feeling, which he now found…intolerable. There was no other word for it.
Scanning the vortex of pages from the Book of Kells, he suddenly panicked, imagining it sucking him down. But panic was good. It was what had kept him alive, scuttling on his belly through the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam, and would here, could he just channel the fear.
It occurred to him that the biographical statement by the door said “Beth Waters” was an Englishwoman who now lived in Dublin. He would buy the photograph and pretend he had not sussed who she was. For the price, however, he’d get her address. The rest—how to take her out without incriminating himself—would come to him as it always did, as a fully formed plan of action. But it had to come fast. Maybe this time she’d go straight to the police, now that she was no longer just another Knacker wench out begging in the streets.
“So, d’you want it?”
The Toddler nodded. “I can’t resist it.”
Jordan’s smile was triumphant. “Let me see if she’ll put a figure on it—one that’s fair to both of you.”
Which meant as high as he thought the Toddler would go, working, as he was, on commission.
Forcing what felt like a pleasant smile into his face, the Toddler slowly turned and glanced down the length of the gallery toward where the woman—“Beth Waters,” née Biddy Nevins—had been standing. But she was gone.
That was it then. She knew he knew, and he’d have to act fast.
“I can’t understand it. She said she was going to the loo, but she’s not in there either. My assistant checked.”
“Maybe she nipped out for a drink.”
“Well”—Jordan glanced at the wine on the table in the center of the room—“I was under the impression that she did not drink.”
“I wonder—would you have her address?”
The other man’s brow suddenly furrowed.
“Not to worry, Mal; if I buy anything else, it’ll be through you exclusively. I appreciate your thinking to invite me here and your concern for my collection.
“Now then—the address, please. I’m in a bit of hurry. And let me pay you for what I just bought.”
The Toddler was carrying a weapon that he was never without. But it was small caliber, meant for defense only. And he’d have to drive all the way out to Hacketstown—twenty mainly mountain miles each way—to equip himself more completely. By then she’d be gone, he was sure.
Better to catch her now, before she went to ground. Given the chance, he’d take her with his hands and have done with the problem. But at the very least he’d know where she was.
BIDDY NEVINS WAS shaking with fear and anger by the time the taxi dropped her off in front of her large Victorian house in Ballsbridge, and she could scarcely fit the key in the lock. Her eyes were blurred with tears.
Suddenly the door opened, scaring her more to think that the almighty Toddler might have beat her there.
“My God in heaven,” said her mother, Maggie, “ye’re a wreck, so. In bits.” She craned her head to look beyond Biddy into the street. “Where’s Mal? And the limousine?” The gallery owner had arranged for one to pick Biddy up and bring her back as part of the “show” of the opening. With the expense entirely justified by all the pictures that had been sold, was Biddy’s bitter thought, as she stepped around Maggie and rushed into the house. And never again.
“What be the matter, child?”
Biddy stopped in the hallway, where the others, alerted by Maggie’s voice, now appeared: her father, Ned, and Tag Barry, her young lover, from the sitting room. On the stairs above her stood Cheri Cooke. Even her daughter, Oney, now seventeen, came out of the kitchen and began moving up the long hall.
“I don’t know how it happened,” she said, her eyes searching the pattern of the Persian carpet on the floor. “But didn’t the miserable, murderin’, little bastard show up at the opening?”
“Who? The Toddler?” her father asked.
“Lookin’ for you like?” Eyes wide, Maggie scanned the street before closing the door.
“Maybe it was by chance. But one thing’s for sure, he’d been in there before, buyin’.”
“But how’d he cop on to you?” Although only in her early sixties, Cheri Cooke was arthritic, and she now began hobbling down the stairs, her feet angled to the side, both hands gripping the rail. “Didn’t you have your contact in?”
Disgusted with herself, Biddy swirled her head; nobody else was to blame. “Ach, wasn’t it the bleedin’ footpath picture?”
“The one with the pages from the book?” Tag swirled his right hand, which, as usual, clutched a bottle of beer. “Didn’t I tell yiz all it was a fookin’ mistake? How could yiz have let her put it in?”
Biddy glanced at the handsome young man, who was often mistaken for her brother or Ned’s son, the three of them looked so much alike. Out the night long, Tag had not been back to stop her from taking the final picture as…an afterthought, she’d felt so confident of its merit. So much time had passed. And she had been so secure for so long in her identity as Beth Waters.
“But the pic was rapid all the same,” said Oney, who resembled Mickalou more than Biddy. She was tall, thin, and dark with curly black hair and hazel eyes flecked with silver chips. Or so they appeared to an adoring mother. As Oney had begun to fill out, Biddy—with her artist’s appreciation—had judged her to be one of the most beautiful creatures that she had ever seen. Which made Biddy fear for her child’s future, and never more than now. “Deadly.”
Precisely, thought Biddy. “Well, he knows, and now there’s nothin’ for it but to quit this place. Now.”
Her eyes took in the lovely hall with its sculptured plaster ceiling and period furnishings. Even the Victorian wallpaper was special, made to a pattern that Biddy had copied out of a book and Cheri had commissioned a craftsman in Nottingham to make at great cost. “Nothing’s too good for you,” Cheri had said. Biddy might now be well off, but Cheri was rich.
Tag took a few unsteady steps closer, the bottle clutched to his chest. “But why, Bid? The fook does he t’ink he is he can roust people from their own bloody kips?”
Biddy had met Tag in Belfast only the year before, and although he fancied a drop, he did no drugs. When sober, as was now seldom, he could be good company. “I’ll ring up some o’ me lads on the Falls Road. We’ll sort the shagger out!”
Looking at him, Biddy felt her nostrils flare. It would be one thing, did he mean a word of it—she might even let him—but Tag was all piss and wind, like the proverbial Tinker’s mule. He would not stand a chance against the Toddler, who, if anything, was probably more powerful than he had been a dozen years earlier. Biddy thought of how…self-possessed he seemed and how easily he had purchased the three photographs, splashing out 22,500 pounds as if it were nothing.
No, there was nothing for it but to bolt. Again. Spreading her fingers wide. “If you tried that or anything like it, he’d only kill more of us. You don’t know the man. He’s hard and capable, and he’d snuff you, me, all of us without a second thought.
“Now then, we’re leaving, and that’s that. You”—she pointed at Oney—“you go with Maggie and Ned. Right now.”
“Me? Why me? I’ve me friends and school and”—boyfriends was the next thought—“and can you not see you’ve allowed this man, this fuckin’
Toddler
—”
“Mind your mouth, you.”
“—to control you and to control
our
lives from my earliest memory right up to this very moment.”
Which you would not be knowing had his Bookends dashed you from the top step of the caravan that night in Tallaght, Biddy thought. She had been told of it by Maggie, to whom she now turned. “Do you mind?”
“Oh, aye, I mind. This place is heaven,” said Maggie, her eyes wide with concern. In recent years her face had become a system of loose, sallow wrinkles from all the weather she had endured. Always thin, she was now gaunt, and dressed in Biddy’s old clothes, which Maggie wore with pride, she looked rather like a scarecrow. “But I mind death more.
“Come you,” she said to Oney. “And you too, Ned. The sooner we take to the road, the better.”
“In the Merc,” said Biddy. “It’ll get you farther faster.”
“No!” Cheri Cooke complained, finally having reached the bottom of the stairs. “
My
Mercedes? You won’t take my Mercedes!”
Biddy spun around on her, suddenly hating the woman’s niggardliness in spite of her millions. The only time Cheri opened her hand was when she saw some advantage with Biddy herself—to control her.
For no small time Cheri had been good for—no,
essential
to—Biddy, who wouldn’t be where she was today without her, but in recent years her presence in the house had been…stifling at best. “Answer me this: Did I not buy and pay for the car myself?”
Cheri had never been a pretty woman. She was short, round, dumpy even with rounded shoulders and a pommel of flesh at the back of her neck that you could grasp, like a soft leather bag. With large, round eyes that always seemed to be brimming with wet and a mouth that curved down at the corners, she appeared to be what she had become in recent years: bulldoggish and severe. Her hair was cropped short “Only to replace my own.”
Biddy sighed. An argument was the last thing they needed. “But you’ll be going with them.”
Her liquid eyes swelled with resentment. “I’ll be…what?”
“Going with Ned, so you will. It’s how I want it.”
Biddy turned to her father for his agreement, which she knew she’d have, since the power in the family had switched to her all of five years earlier.
“I will not. I’ll be going with you wherever
you
go. It’s where I belong.”
Biddy shook her head. She’d be far better off alone, and certainly not with a carping, crippled old shrew. No matter her money. “Or to Reigate. Why don’t you go back to there?”—where Cheri still had a house and family nearby. “If you leave now, you’ll be safe there. I’ll get in touch, I promise.”
“No!” The flesh under Cheri’s chin wagged like wattles. “I go where
you
go. That’s what I said, what we agreed to years ago, and only what I’ll abide by now. In spite of my sorry condition.”
Which was martyr to their failed relationship, even more than her arthritis, which Biddy had always considered mostly a ruse. Cheri turned and began a laborious, puffing climb up the staircase to pack, Biddy guessed. But by that time Biddy would be gone, and Cheri would have to fend for herself. But she’d manage; she always did.
“Tag?”
“Me?” The beer bottle came out again. “I’ll be humped if any…bullyin’, pudgy scut who calls himself a Toddler will drive me from me digs.” He glanced around at the others, obviously for their approbation, but they were staring at Biddy. “And you.” Tag went on, touching the fist with the bottle against Ned’s arm, man to man. “Don’t tell me ye’re pissin’ off on yehr daughter’s orders?”
Ned ignored him, moving toward the door, and Biddy wondered if she could ever have loved Tag Barry. Or had it simply been narcissism, since they looked so much alike?
Or some attempt to regain her youth. Every now and then Tag showed the same joy and zest for living that Mickalou had, once he got off the gear. But Tag had none of Mickalou’s kindness or his generosity and spirit.
“So”—Biddy turned to her mother and daughter—“you’re off.”
“Ah, no—Jaysis. This is shtew-pid and t’ick!” Oney complained in an argot that was part Dublin street slang and part the language of other young Travelers. For some reason unfathomable to Biddy, Oney had chosen mots and bowsies as friends when at school she had the daughters of the country’s elite.
She supposed that Oney had to make her own mistakes in life, as she had herself, but it was a thought that only ever made her worry more.
“Wha’ about the
shadog,
the one copper ye’re only after tellin’ me about, Granny? The one who took after the Toddler back then.”
“And failed, it’s plain.” Maggie reached for Oney’s hand. “Remember the name Archie Carruthers?” Maggie pulled Oney toward the door.
“The limo driver, the one who died in jail.”
“No, the one who was
murdered
in jail. Now, since you do be lovin’ the Travelin’ people, here’s your chance to live with them.”
Biddy pulled Oney to her for one last hug.
“Isn’t there any way we can stop him?” Oney asked in her ear.
“You let me manage that, darlin’. If there’s a way, I’ll find it, I promise.” Which Biddy meant. In the twelve years that had passed, she had changed radically, and she’d sooner go out with a bang than a whimper. She thought of the gun she had bought years ago and now kept above the door inside the landing to the cellar.
Biddy held her daughter away and looked into her hazel eyes. “May God bless and keep you. Remember, your
mother loves you, and you’re to respect that love and love yourself. It’s the only way.”
Oney nodded, having heard the advice many times in the past.
Biddy then reached for Maggie. “Take care of yourself, Mammy.”
“It’s not me we’re worried about, luv. Wherever will you go?”
“I haven’t a clue,” though she had.
“England again?”
Biddy only shook her head. “I’ll be in touch through the Maughams,” who, after all, were Maggie’s family too and were a close-knit Traveling family. Biddy would only have to contact one of them for her message to be conveyed to Maggie via the “Traveler telegraph,” as their way of communicating among themselves was called. They might even speak Gammon to make a conversation most private.
Biddy turned to her father. “Have you money?”
“Sure, is there ever enough?” By which he meant they’d make do. Ned Nevins had turned over a new leaf as he had aged and was now a careful, conservative man with a craggy face and dark hair that he kept short in a brush cut, like a teenager. He was wearing a good but rumpled gray suit, one of several that Biddy had given him. On his feet were a pair of good brogues; on his wrist was a Rolex.
“Are yeh comin’, Tag?” he asked when Biddy had released him.
They watched the young man’s eyes sweep the handsome hall, then glance down at the bottle of beer that he wiggled and held up. Empty. But he had a dozen more longneck Budweisers—his drink of choice—in the fridge and boxes more in the cellar.
In his notecase Tag Barry could count maybe a thousand pounds that he’d skimmed from Biddy in the past month alone, whenever she sent him out on a message. Then there was the sex, which he’d been missing with her for a while now, only to have discovered that there were much younger
and better rides in town for the taking with a few quid in your pocket. And now with Biddy gone and a “pad” like this? Why, he’d run through half the easy young women in Dublin.
All in all, it was as if he’d died and gone to desperado heaven. He’d ring up Belfast the moment she closed the door and bring down a few mates to share in the
cracque.
“Ah, no—thanks. Why don’t I just nail down the premises like? Make sure nothing’s carried away. By the Toddler. I get the chance—why, I might put an end to him as a problem.” With index finger pointed and thumb cocked, he pretended to shoot the chandelier.
It was the same gesture that the Toddler had used in the picture gallery, thought Biddy. But from Tag only pitiable drunken bravado. “If you stay, you should mind yourself.”
He stepped to the hallway mirror. “Whenever I’m lost, I’ll only have to look there.”
Cheri Cooke was now back on the stairs, dragging her traveling case down, step by step.
“Then we’re gone,” said Biddy to her family, pointing to the door. “You’re first. He’ll not want you, until he can’t find me. God bless!”
“Ah, Mammy, can’t we just stay?” Oney complained. But Maggie and Ned had her out the door and them after her.
Biddy turned and fled down the hall past Tag toward the back of the building. And the kitchen.
“What? No kiss, Bid?”
Kiss yourself, Biddy thought, now finally deciding that she was done with him. Stopping at the cellar door, which she opened, she reached up into the shadows by the transom and felt for the velvet-lined case that she had placed there as “insurance” against this day. She opened it to make certain it contained the thousand quid in fifty-pound notes and the torc that was worth much more. She placed it and the thousand quid in her purse.
Made of pure braided gold encrusted with diamonds and rubies, the torc was like something out of the Book of Kells, which was not the only reason that Biddy had bought it with nearly all her profits from her best year. It was her kind of “legs,” as Mickalou had spoken of their bank account. Pawned, the torc would carry her anywhere in the world. Poor Mick. No—silly Mick to think he could trust buffers in a bank.
Reaching up again, Biddy removed a second item that was wrapped in an oiled rag that she had been told would preserve the thing. Beside it were two boxes, one of which she also took down.