Chapter 18

Born of the Dublin slums, Piaras O’Lochlinn was a true Irish Patriot. He would die for the land and more than happily kill for it.

But whose land was it really?

That was a question he never asked himself, because as far as he was concerned it was Ireland’s land and therefore it was his as well land. Because he was Ireland and Ireland was him.

But what was Ireland?

It was a nation.

But what was a nation?

It was Ireland.

He did not take the philosophical position very well. Nor would he talk those who entertained it either.

—Fuck them! Bastards! Stop confusing me with your fucking words! Fuck you all!

Lash out at them and hurt them.

With parents a part of the sixteen Rising these where not the type of questions that ever surfaced into the boy’s brain.

—I will fucking kill you.

That was his favourite line.

I will fucking kill you.

Very original.

His favourite of the dreaded five techniques (things which his father had taught him, who had been taught in turn by the black and tans) was the principal of hooding.

Hooding was the placing of a hood over the entire head of the said person in question. Though considered to be a violation of international law specifically the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions, which demand that persons in the power of occupying forces be treated humanely, this practice was a much-loved activity and the legal standing of it did not concern Piaras greatly.

This was why he enjoyed it.

Hooding is potentially dangerous, especially when a person’s hands are also bound. It is considered to be an act of torture when its primary purpose is sensory deprivation during interrogation; it causes disorientation, isolation, and dread. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, hooding is used to prevent people from seeing and to disorient them, and also to prevent them from breathing freely. Hooding is sometimes used in conjunction with beatings to increase anxiety as to when and where the blows will fall. Hooding also allows the interrogators to remain anonymous and thus to act with impunity. Moreover, if a group of prisoners is hooded, the interrogator can play them off against each other by pretending, for instance, that some of them are cooperating, which the prisoners will be unable to verify.

Are you getting all this.

Write it fucking down.

Down.

Into my head as well as his. What is this? Who knows? Write. Keep writing.

Piaras.

No.

I can’t. Not today. We’ll leave this for another day. For another time. I need to sit down. To.

Chapter 17

The Bossman, whom we have already introduced earlier in our narrative, albeit implicitly, was a very large black man, whose seaside house was situated on Bray strand, on its fashionable north end.

The north end was of course the good end, the end that looked on to the Martello Tower, the end that stood beside the harbour, where the rich and nearly rich kept their boats moored.

Up and down all day in front of those waves.

How do they do it!

So happy and carefree!

The house’s large bay window faced the sea formidably and its veranda was littered with a vast array of exotic plants from both home and abroad. You can imagine it yourself. It seemed that nothing of the house’s exterior did not contribute to the gargantuan character of its owner. Indeed, everything inside said this as well. Any visitors would be mistaken into believing that every object had had to pass some visual test in order to win its place as an object of adornment.

This was not case.

For all it the house just happened to be there when the Bossman arrived, and in truth he liked nothing of its contents. Its previous occupant, one Josey McBride, had been found floating face side down in the Irish Sea just days after the arrival of its new owner.

As usual, police leads led to nothing.

Foundered upon all.

As they usually do.

It transpired that McBride had left all to the Bossman, even his horse. For just days before his death, McBride entered a solicitor on Fleet Street and signed everything over to the Bossman. That is was not his own solicitor meant nothing. But the supervising Garda, Michael O’Rourke (Wash’s predecessor), did not accept this and he attempted (somewhat naively) to pursue this, and several other, leads.

But he too ended up face down for his troubles, alongside the remains of McBride’s horse.

—You think you’re smart, but I’m smarter.

Hahaha.

Indeed. Haha.

The Bossman laughed it all off each time the Detective called out to his new seaside house.

It was a farce.

Over the course of three months, O’Rourke had driven out to Bray in order to shake up the situation.

That was his own expression, not mine.

He liked it.

—If you put one foot on my veranda, I’ll cut it off.

—Is that a threat?

—Whether it is or not, I can assure you it will happen.

—We’ll see about that.

The Bossman imagined taking a hack-saw to O’Rourke’s leg and cutting it right off.

Filthy bastard.

Sometime after this (the last incident) O’Rourke was found face down with a large open wound in his head. It seems he had been beaten with something extremely solid, a lead pipe of some kind, blunt perhaps. It was not known whether or not he was still alive when the ramped the pipe up some unspeakable place and twisted and pushed it until all was very damaged and broken but it was that pipe that was certainly used to bash his brains in.

Out.

They knew this, because there was lead in his head. But they choose not to do anything. Because hours earlier the Bossman had called head office and told them that was just the start and if they wanted more bodies then they should proceed as before. All he wanted to do (as far as he was concerned) was to sit out on his veranda in his rocking chair and read a bit and smell the fauna and floral and watch the tide come in and go out again and see its ebb and flow. That was all.

To be calm.

Content and confident.

To not want anything that much. To try to achieve a certain sense of tranquillity.

Like the Buddhists.

Whether or not this actually happened, some guy at head office called Walsh the following day and told him to cease with his investigations. There was nothing to be done and there was no point annoying a good upstanding citizen. The last three words especially pissed Walsh off.

A good.

Upstanding.

—The motherfuckingbitchsbastardsshithole. Bollox as well.

He had a way with words.

−I concur.

All his subsequent calls to head office were either differed or unanswered.

And so it was.

They left him alone.

Or so it seemed.

But Walsh knew, in his heart of hearts, that he would have to go it alone.

And so he did.

Chapter 16

The Year 1955 (MCMLV) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar.

Notable events.

January 2^nd – José Antonio Remón Cantera, president of Panama, is

assassinated at a race track in Panama City.

January 6^th - 1,200 people meet in Dublin to form the National Farmers' Association.

I was not at this meeting.

January 18^th–January 20^th – Battle of Yijiangshan Islands: The Chinese Communist People's Liberation Army seizes the islands from the Republic of China (Taiwan).

January 25^th – Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union announces the end of the war between the USSR and Germany, which began during World War II in 1941.

January 28^th – United States Congress authorizes President Dwight D. Eisenhower to use force to protect Formosa from the People's Republic of China.

February 1^st – Ray Kroc opens a McDonald's fast food restaurant (the company's 9th since it was founded in 1940), but Kroc later takes over the company and oversees its worldwide expansion.

February 10^th – Seventh Fleet of the United States Navy helps the Republic of China evacuate Chinese Nationalist army and residents from the Tachen Islands to Taiwan.

February 12^th – U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower sends the first U.S. advisors to South Vietnam.

March 2nd – Claudette Colvin (a fifteen year old African American girl) refuses to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, to a white woman after the driver demands it. She is carried off the bus backwards whilst being kicked and handcuffed and harassed on the way to the police station.

March 5^th – WBBJ-TV signs on the air in the Jackson, Tennessee, with WDXI as its initial call-letters, to expanded American commercial television in mostly-rural areas.

March 17th – The Richard Riot occurs in Montreal.

March 20th – Evan Hunter's movie adaptation of the novel Blackboard Jungle premieres in the United States, featuring the famous single, Rock Around the Clock, by Bill Haley and His Comets. Teenagers jump from their seats to dance to the song.

They were exciting times.

27^th March - Patrick McCabe, novelist, is born.

April 1st – EOKA A starts a revolution against British who had taken over Cyprus with the Ottoman empires agreement in 1878 and as a Crown Colony since 1925.

April 5th – Winston Churchill resigns as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

April 11^th – The Taiwanese Kuomintang put a time-bomb on the airplane Kashmir Princess, killing 16 but failing to assassinate the People's Republic of China leader, Zhou Enlai.

April 12^th – The Salk polio vaccine, having passed large-scale trials earlier in the United States, receives full approval by the FDA.

April 16^th – Burma-Japanese peace treaty, signed in Rangoon on November 5^th, 1954, comes into effect, formally ending a state of war between the two countries that had not existed for a long time.

April 17^th – Imre Nagy, the communist Premier of Hungary, is ousted for being too moderate.

May 1^st – Warsaw Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance signed (Warsaw Treaty Organization) (effective June 6^th).

May 5^th – West Germany becomes a sovereign country recognized by important Western foreign countries, such as France, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States.

May 12^th – New York's Third Avenue Elevated runs its last train between Chathem Square in Manhattan and East 149th Street in the Bronx, thus ending elevated train service in Manhattan.

May 14^th – Eight Communist Bloc countries, including the Soviet Union, sign a mutual defence treaty in Warsaw, Poland, that is called the Warsaw Pact. May 15^th – Austrian State Treaty, which restores Austria's national sovereignty, is concluded between the four occupying powers following World War II (the United Kingdom, the United States, the Soviet Union, and France) and Austria, setting it up as a neutral country.

June 11^th – Le Mans disaster: eighty-three people are killed and at least 100 are injured after two race cars collide in the 1955 24 Hours of Le Mans.

June 13^th – Mir Mine, the first diamond mine in the Soviet Union, is discovered.

June 16^th – Stanislaus Joyce, scholar and writer, brother of James Joyce, (b.1884) dies.

July 4^th - Denis Larkin is elected Lord Mayor of Dublin defeating 73-year old Alfie Byrne.

5 July - Sebastian Barry, playwright, novelist and poet is born.

July 13^th – Ruth Ellis (born 1926) is hanged for murder in London, becoming the last woman ever to be executed in the United Kingdom.

Poor Ruth.

July 17^th – The American Broadcasting Company broadcasts a sneak preview of Disneyland in Anaheim, California.

July 18^th – Disneyland opens to the public in Anaheim, California.

July 27^th – El Al Flight 402 from Vienna, Austria to Tel Aviv-Yafo via

Istanbul is shot down over Bulgaria. All 58 passengers and crewmen aboard the Lockheed Constellation airplane are killed.

August 3^rd - English language première of Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot, directed by Peter Hall, opens at the Arts Theatre, London.

August 19^th – Hurricane Diane hits the northeastern United States, killing over 200 people, and causing over $1.0 billion in damage.

August 20^th – Hundreds of people are killed in anti-French rioting in Morocco and Algeria.

August 22^nd – Eleven schoolchildren are killed when their school bus is hit by a freight train in Spring City, Tennessee.

August 25 – The last Soviet Army occupation forces leave Austria.

August 27^th – First edition of the Guinness Book of Records is published, in London.

September 2^nd – Under the guidance of Dr Humphry Osmond, Christopher Mayhew ingests 400 mg of mescaline hydrochloride and allows himself to be filmed as part of a Panorama special for BBC TV that was never broadcast.

September 6^th – Istanbul Pogrom: Istanbul's Greek minority is the target of a government-sponsored pogrom.

September 15^th – Vladimir Nabokov's controversial novel Lolita is published in Paris by Olympia Press.

September 19^th – Hurricane Hilda kills about 200 people in Mexico. September 22^nd – Independent Commercial Television (ITV) begins broadcasting in the United Kingdo.

September 23^rd – Alec Guinness meets the actor James Dean. Guinness supposedly has a premonition of Dean's death.

September 24^th – Dwight D. Eisenhower, President of the United States suffers a coronary thrombosis while on vacation in Denver, Colorado.

September 30^th – Actor James Dean is killed when his automobile collides with another car at a highway junction near Cholame, California. Dean is just 24 years old.

Hello Mr. Maker.

October 2^nd – Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV program debuts on the NBC-TV network in the United States.

October 3^rd – The Mickey Mouse Club TV program debuts on the ABC-TV network in the United States.

October 4^th – The Reverend Sun Myung Moon is released from prison in Seoul, South Korea.

October 11^th – 70-mm film for projection is introduced with the theatrical release of Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical film, Oklahoma!

October 20^th – The first footage of Elvis Presley is filmed as part of a film short about the Cleveland, Ohio, disc jockey Bill Randle.

October 26^th – After the last Allied troops have left the country and following the provisions of the Austrian Independence Treaty, Austria declares its permanent neutrality.

October 28^th - Irish première of Waiting for Godot at the Pike Theatre, Dublin.

October 29^th – Soviet battleship Novorossiysk explodes at moorings in Sevastopol Bay, killing 608, the Soviet Union's worst naval disaster.

October 26^th – Austria free.

November 1st – A time bomb explodes in the cargo hold of United Airlines Flight 629, a Douglas DC-6B airliner flying above Longmont, Colorado, killing all 39 passengers and 5 crew members on board.

November 5^th – Racial segregation is outlawed on trains and buses in Interstate Commerce in the United States.

November 19^th – C. Northcote Parkinson first propounds 'Parkinson's Law', in The Economist.

November 20^th – Bo Diddley makes his television debut on Ed Sullivan's Toast Of The Town show for the CBS-TV network.

December 5^th – The Montgomery Improvement Association is formed in Montgomery, Alabama, by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and other Black ministers to coordinate a Black people's boycott of all city buses.

December 14^th – Albania, Austria, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Finland, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Jordan, Laos, Libya, Nepal, Portugal, Romania, Spain, and Sri Lanka join the United Nations simultaneously, after several years of moratorium on admitting new members that began during the Korean War.

December 22^nd – American cytogeneticist Joe Hin Tjio discovers the correct number of human chromosomes, forty-six.

December 31^st – General Motors Corporation becomes the first American corporation to make a profit of over one billion dollars in one year.

World population: 2,755,823,000

Africa: 246,746,000

Asia: 1,541,947,000

Europe: 575,184,000

South America: 190,797,000

North America: 186,884,000

Oceania: 14,265,000

—There are too many people in this world. That is why there are people

like us. To get rid of a few. I hope you have enjoyed my presentation.

—I have.

—Let it be educational.

—Indeed.

Does it better help me understand that year? His year? The year that represents him. That made him. That broke him.

Chapter 15

It was the world.

The was the problem.

It had always been the problem and it would always be the problem.

The fucking world!

The pain was excruciating. It went up his legs and into his head.

Fuck.

Fucking fuck.

Fucking cunting fuck.

It went up his legs and into his head. It went into his hands. It went into his head.

Fucking cunting fucking cunt.

He limped slowly along Lombard Street and turned gracelessly onto Townsend Street.

Everything seemed black and grey.

Not a batch of colour in this blasted place.

Grey.

He proffered his hands to those who passed him, but by and large, he was ignored.

Closed windows.

Taken no notice of. Not to worry. Think I’m. Someone else.

Fuck them.

On up.

The odd couple looked with pity upon him and passed him a penny or two.

—Thank you. Thank you.

Terrible, she said to herself, and she passed it to him.

—And the smell!

The fucking smell.

Absolutely terrible.

Blasted fucking life.

The pain in his back made his eyes screw up, as if he was constantly scrutinizing some invisible thing. Or looking inwards towards some imaginary hope.

He limped on, crossing the intersection of Shaw and Moss.

Children passed him

If only he had a stick.

Might make walking easier.

Rather not walk at all.

One of the children brushed past him, causing him to become unbalanced.

—Fuck ya.

The child stopped and turned to face him.

—Ah would ya piss off mister.

He said nothing in reply.

Better not antagonise him.

Might be others.

Could end up in hospital.

When he looked up again they had gone. Disappeared. Turning, he saw again the odd couple, turning on to Spring Garden lane.

Must live down there.

Did they know it was a street in Wan Chai, Hong Kong? That it was one of the first focal areas developed by the British in the 1840s? He doubted it.

Over run by the commies now.

Fuck them.

There was little he could do.

Go on up.

Little he could do.

To Fleet Street, maybe.

He could see the distant tops of Trinity.

On to Luke Street he turned, and made his way up to Tara Street Station.

Could take Train.

Out to Bray.

Stop here.

He gazed listlessly around him.

Nothing. Wait. Who’s?

It was Mac. Coming straight for him.

Ah Jesus, would you ever leave me alone.

—Thomas.

—Mac.

He wondered who the bitch was. Don’t recognise her.

—Where you headed?

—No where in particular.

He was lying.

—Was has you down this side of town? Is your area not.

—It is. But I was doing a spot of undercover.

—For?

—You know.

—Fair enough. What’s with your leg?

He looked down at it.

My leg.

Does he know Fahey? Should he give a flying fuck?

I was up visiting a friend. And I fell down the stairs.

The stairs, said the woman.

Who the fuck was she to open her mouth? Bitch. I should.

—Yes. The stairs.

—Looks nasty.

He looked at her.

—Not as nasty as your fucking face will look when I stick this into you fat fucking face.

She abhorred unnecessary repetition.

—Easy now Tommy.

She took a step towards him and exhaled.

Squaring up.

Bitch.

—Easy now children.

Mac stood between them and pushed them both in their respective ways.

You were saying, Mac said.

—What was I saying?

—You were off to?

—Bray. I was getting the train to.

—To Bray. Funny. We were going to take the bus out.

—The train is better.

—Is it business or pleasure?

—Is it not always a bit of both?

—It is either one or the other. I take no pleasure in killing.

They looked at each other.

They.

Leave them.

Leave them there. The three of them. Standing there. The one wanting to kill the other and the other wanting to the kill the one.

—And Mac?

—He had enough killing on his plate. He only had one left to kill. The rest were dead.

—Who was that?

—The Bossman.

Chapter 14

Physical laws, as currently understood by the vast majority of people in the know, left no room for non-computable phenomena.

In other words, if you can’t say it, it can’t be fucking said.

Or so his father told him when he was a boy.

But this did not matter to him now.

All that mattered to him now was that there were bad guys who had to be caught and he was the man to do it.

An air of torpid melancholia pervaded his office. Sullen as he sat, mourning the passing morning, Walsh wondered why things were going the way they were going.

Why not another way?

Why not?

Could it be. Or. Maybe. Not.

Was this not his fair city?

Was this the Dublin that he had grown to cherish, to love, to accept as an integral and important part of himself?

Granted he was not a nationalist.

But he had been born on Dorset Street, and all pubs and shops and peoples were a part of him.

They were in him.

Even the lovely tramps with their little bells and their small bowls for begging.

All were him and all were Dublin.

He remembered as a boy playing among the tenements. Throwing things. Running about. Oh yes. That was remembering. But he was happy then, oblivious to all the misdeeds and misfits in the world.

He was one of the chosen ones.

He had survived.

Evidently, he was being blindly nostalgic, for his youth had been anything but happy. With his parents dead before he was four, it was he who was left to uphold a household that could not by any account be upheld.

The Lockout.

The Rising.

The fucking DMP.

The fucking DMP.

What could be said about anything? He had witnessed the rise of organised crime: the Barons, the Burhcills and the Bossman.

All of them.

Walsh sat down at his desk and gazed out over the skyline.

Weather.

Fucking weather.

If it wasn’t black it was grey. If it wasn’t grey it was raining. It was never blue.

That was how it was.

Is.

Having just received word regarding the traffic warden, he contemplated the said man’s situation.

Driven through the window.

Head first.

Ouch.

He cleared his throat and turned his head slowly from left to right, trying to imagine how ones head would look after something like that.

These people needed to be stopped.

Stopped!

But it was not simply a case of stopping them. It was a case of travelling to the root of the matter and making sure every ounce of life was strangled out of it.

Bastards.

The Burchills.

Where they behind this?

He thumped his fist loudly on the desk.

Every ounce of life, strangled. Every moment, curtailed. You could not shit without someone extracting payment from you.

This had to be stopped.

Every ounce of life, strangled.

He liked this metaphor. He liked it for its violence, for its ability to make him feel like a man again. His fist grew tighter, sweated more. A big man, a man would could stand up and send ten other men to their certain deaths if he so desired.

He was Declan Walsh.

He was a sergeant.

I am a bad and bloody violent man. I am a big man.

He said this to himself, twice, for measured effect.

He stood up from his desk and surveyed the other officers’ close by. Everyone seemed to be working.

But to what end?

To what effect?

Fucking cunts.

Was this the right way of going about it? Surely a more hard line approach was needed. Could he not just get a group of them together to tackle the issue head on?

He looked down at Dick Roche and Pat O’Neill.

They looked savage.

Fucking savage.

All hair and violence. Dirt under the finger nails from dragging the hair from heads and the like. Hands dug into eyes and not hearing a thing.

Not hearing a thing.

He liked it.

He would even say he loved it.

He would even go so far as to say that he desired it.

I want it.

Cigarettes and dirt and blood and nobody looking over your shoulder and no one ever asking you to fill out a report because you could do what the fuck you fucking wanted to do mash and bash and take their little head off the porcelain urinal if you wanted.

Surely they would love a bit of unofficial action? For who would miss a few delinquents? Where there not enough rivers flowing through Dublin to wash them away?

Surely there were, he said to himself.

He looked out the window, out over the skyline.

Fuck them.

He imagined, in his mind’s eye, flying out over the rooftops, down D’Olier Street and over O’Connell Bridge; up O’Connell Street and past the Parnell Monument; over on to Frederick Street and then to Dorset.

That is how he imagined it.

That is how he would get home.

Home.

To his mother’s house.

That is how he would return triumphantly to the space and place of his birth.

He turned away from the window, away from his reverie, and walked down towards the two desks of Roche and O’Neill.

Gentlemen, Walsh said as he approached their desks.

—Detective.

They both spoke at once, each seemingly unaware of the other.

—I think I have a proposition for you, regarding our friend out at Bray. I would say it’s something quite amicable to you both.

He laughed through his nose.

It was disgusting.

The two men looked at each other and smiled.

—If it involves levels of unquestionable violence, then we are all ears. Is that not right O’Neill?

—It is.

—Why let them have all the fun?

You heard about the warden, said Walsh.

—We did.

—It was.

—We fucking know who it was. But is the day we can go out and get them?

—From today it is.

Walsh felt a new dawn arising, a new day: he felt new. The sun would shine again on Dublin. All the bad things would go away and Dublin would be clean again. Dublin would be pure.

Fat chance.

He could see it.

—First to Bray. Then to Burchill. We shall take them both.

—And Baron?

—He’s already on the way out as far as I know. The son wants to kill the father and the father wanted to kill the son.

—How poetic.

—How tragic.

—How convenient.

—True.

They all agreed.

Walsh looked at the skies opening up and at himself looking long at the clouds and all the while knowing it was he: he was the chosen one.

I am.

Fucking nothing.

But Roche and O’Neil could not see it. They were already lost in some reveries of absolute violence, some dreamland where the law of the land was no longer, or just whatever they wanted it to be.

I will fucking kill you.

I will fucking kill you.

The foot on the head. The toe in the eye. The hand on the throat. These were all their favourite strategies.

Walsh turned towards the door, and as he turned the others rose, and they all walked out together, out towards a new dawn, a new day: a world were violence would be done by both parties.

Not just the baddies.

They would return to the days of the DMP, to those great days.

But this time it would be different.

They would not break up a union rally on Dublin's Sackville Street. That Dublin was no more.

It was no more.

They would form themselves resolutely together. They would be untouchable. They would be: The Untouchables.

That was a nice name, thought Walsh.

—It is a great name.

—Well then.

Well then indeed.