‘Is he coming to the launch?’ Hickey wanted to know when I got off the call.
The prospect had never occurred to me.
‘Bring him along,’ he said, and it sounded like a challenge. ‘I’d really like to meet the bloke.’
So would I. The shadow of the boom swung over my grave again and I shuddered. Tocka tocka. So would I.
*
‘They’ve started queuing,’ Hickey phoned to tell me not one, not two, but three days before the apartments were due to go on sale. Three whole days. I came down to see it with my own eyes.
The main road was choked with parked cars all the way back to the Burrow Road underpass. Family members were coming and going to sit it out in shifts. How did they sleep like that, with two wheels down on the road and two up on the kerb, the blood either draining from their heads or rushing to it? Ideal conditions for a killing, Hickey observed, rubbing his callused palms.
He had relegated the Site Office and its upended beer crate to a corner and installed a Sales Suite in its place with twin box balls flanking the entrance. Twin box balls were the signal. They were the wink and nod. A pair of twin box balls at a residential entrance was the telltale sign that the occupants had fallen victim to the property-lust plague.
Hickey had laid a tarmac road over the sewage pipes but it was already showing signs of buckling. I kicked at one of the ruckles. It had split in the centre like a soufflé. ‘Shut up,’ he warned me though I hadn’t opened my mouth. The Sales Suite was a large Portakabin carpeted in tan velvet pile with black leather sofas and orange pendant lamps. On a podium was a variation on the original architectural model of the development, displayed like the Book of Kells in a glass case which Hickey clouded up with his breath.
Large-scale floor plans of the individual apartment blocks were mounted on the walls. The plans were peppered with a pox of red stickers. About a fifth of the apartments had already been sold. To whom? I looked at Hickey, who shrugged. ‘A couple a the lads.’ He’d done a few deals to get the ball rolling. At the far end of the suite was the door to the private salesroom where, he said, the sweet magic was going to happen.
It was Hickey’s idea that we sit outside at bistro tables and keep an eye on the Sales Suite from a discreet distance. He wanted to watch his grand plan unfold. He’d had the landscape architect or the balcony dresser or the bespoke furniture designer or all three mock up a sort of afternoon-tea al-fresco vibe to give an impression of… He couldn’t think of the word. ‘What’s it?’ he asked me, clicking his fingers, ‘genteel living?’ but genteel wasn’t quite it. ‘What’s the word I’m looking for, Tristram? Begins with a G.’ ‘Dunno,’ I replied. ‘Anyway,’ he continued, ‘it’s a lifestyle we’re selling here is my point.’
We couldn’t have asked for a better day — the first promise of summer and the show apartments glinted as they glinted in the brochures. Work had been going on around the clock under stadium floodlights which bled a spectral glow into the night sky. The crews were on double and treble pay to get the job done. A second internal wall of glossy hoarding had been erected within the site to screen the prospective buyers from the ongoing construction work. The unfinished blocks were sheathed in green netting. At the end of an avenue lined with flags stood our show block, the Lambay building. Tender new foliage shimmered at its base — the garden had been unloaded the morning before from the back of a truck. As had the Sales Suite, the bistro dining set and even the lawn. The last time I’d seen it, less than a week previously, the site had been a battlefield in Flanders. You had to hand it to D. Hickey. He had pulled off an elaborate scam.
He put on his sunglasses and sat back to contemplate the sales queue with satisfaction, watching the world go buy. The punters had been living in cars for three days by then and were dazed, dehydrated and desperate. The taxi drivers, their wives, anxious young couples, their parents, nurses and guards, all lining up to join the jet set, pressing coins into our palms like medieval supplicants. The smart money — or the slightly less stupid money — hadn’t wasted time viewing the show apartments but had gone straight to the private salesroom to slap down deposits. When they came out the other side with their contracts, they headed across to get an idea of the asset they’d just acquired, calculating the resale value when they went to flip it at completion.
Those still stuck in the queue sized up the people ahead of them, worrying that they had their eye on the same apartment, and so discussing their second choice, and their third. Plan B, Plan C and Plan D. They muttered to their partners, they muttered into their phones, they muttered to their gods, anxious not to be overheard. So preoccupied were they with their quarry that they didn’t register Hickey and I trained on them. They didn’t register that they were the quarry.
Hickey leaned in. ‘Is he coming?’ I didn’t have to ask whom he meant. I was keeping my eyes peeled for M. Deauville too.
‘He says he hopes to be able to make it.’ Tocka tocka over the phone as he had checked airline schedules last night. A nervous tingle on my part at the prospect of coming face to face. ‘But he couldn’t promise. Depends on flights.’
Hickey nodded. ‘Busy man.’
I nodded back. ‘Busy man.’
That’s when Ciara, head of the sales team, emerged from the salesroom with her clipboard. I checked my watch. The apartments had been on sale for an hour and twenty minutes. Hickey lowered his sunglasses to wink at me. ‘Here we are now.’ He pushed the glasses back up his nose.
‘Well?’ he asked when she drew up. ‘Are we in business?’
‘We are, Mr Hickey. Just to confirm that the first fifty-eight units are now sold. A number of investors made multiple purchases. A farmer from Tipperary bought ten.’
Hickey brought his fist down hard on the bistro table: ‘Yes!’ His teaspoon bounced and landed on the gravel. Ciara stooped to pick it up. ‘Good girl. Right. Withdraw the next sixty-five units from sale.’
I jolted upright in my chair. ‘What?’ but Ciara had already Yes-Mr-Hickey-ed him and was marching back to the Sales Suite, bursting with self-importance. I turned to Hickey. ‘Run that past me?’
He punched a number into his mobile phone and raised it to his ear before cocking an eyebrow my way. ‘We decided that if trade was brisk we’d release fifty-eight apartments today an call it Phase One, then hold back the next batch, add 30 per cent to the price, an call it Phase Two. We’ll launch Phase Two in six weeks. Then there’s Phase Three an Phase— Ah, howaya Mr McGee, D. Hickey here. Grand job, grand job.’
I stared at him in his suit. He never looked right in a suit, same as I never looked right in jeans. A tuft of black bristles protruded from his ear, the match of the black bristles sprouting from his nose, as if something were growing inside him, forcing its way out. He was a few rungs behind on the evolutionary ladder, or perhaps a few rungs ahead on the evolutionary ladder, or on some as yet undocumented stretch of the ladder which had taken off on a tangent, so he was not a man but something hybrid, something wolfish, something that wore its pelt on the inside, because they were a new breed, weren’t they, these developers. And their development was escalating. Soon they would take over. They’d enslave us. Too late: they already had. A commotion had broken out in the sales queue. An agent had placed a sign in the window: