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.