“Ha ha! Such a panic yiz are. Fella here looks like a farmer.”
Minogue stared back into Egan’s eyes.
“Well, as long as yous’re only cops, I don’t mind.”
Egan tapped on the roof and cleared his throat.
“All right so, lads. Keep it up. We all feel real safe here now, knowing that yous are around and all. Here-go in and support local enterprise here. Buy a packet of fags or something. The brother needs the money.”
He hawked and spat across the roof.
“Be seeing yous. By the way, where’s the other van, the telephone one? All the video and gear? Did one of the young lads around here rob it on you?”
Heffernan grinned and flicked his eyes skyward.
“Helicopter, Bobby,” he said. “One of the new ones, a spy one from the States. Can’t see it, can’t hear it-but it’s there all the time.”
Egan glanced up and sniggered.
“Oh, you had me there! Yous are gas! Funnier every day.”
Minogue watched Egan climb into the Lancia. He tooted the horn as he drove away.
“Bastard,” said Kilmartin. “He doesn’t know how close he is. I’d like to be there when the time comes.”
“Now you’re talking,” said Minogue. Heffernan looked over.
“How close is he to getting his wings clipped anyway?” Minogue asked.
“Well, you’d need to be up on the, em…”
“ ‘The Big Picture’?”
Heffernan’s meaty hands tapped the steering wheel.
“That’s the size of it,” he said. “I know, I know. We heard ye wouldn’t back down at all. But we’ve been after the Egans for years. We have to go for the whole thing, the whole racket, you understand? It’s not just one, well…”
“Just one murder,” said Minogue.
Heffernan pursed his lips and shrugged.
“Do you think it’s fun and games for us?” asked Macken. He sat forward in the seat, his face not a foot from Minogue’s. “See the names at the bottom of the sheet? Me and O’Hare? It’s our surveillance work that puts Bobby in the clear for the night of that murder you’re trying to sort out.”
Minogue nodded.
“So don’t be asking us what Tynan asked us here a few months back,” Heffernan added.
“Tynan?” asked Kilmartin.
“The very X,” said Heffernan. “Never in sixteen years did I hear of a Garda Commissioner sitting in on a surveillance unannounced. Drove up here one day on his own, didn’t he, Ger?”
“An Alfa Romeo,” said Macken. “Flag-red. Like a fire engine. Street threads.”
“Oh, yes,” said Heffernan. “Waltzes over to us. I’m having a stroke, I don’t mind telling you-”
“Thought it was something he et,” said Macken. “Seeing things, like?”
“ ‘Mind if I sit in?’ says Tynan. What am I going to say?”
“Ask him if he has a twin brother who’s the Commissioner,” said Macken, “and then tell him to shag off?”
Minogue smiled.
“So in he gets,” said Heffernan. “Just like you sitting there. Sits there for about twenty minutes watching the comings and goings. Hardly says one word. Gets up then, goes across the street and into the shop. Comes out a few minutes later. Throws a few bags of crisps in the window-”
“Mars bar too.”
“-Mars bar too. Don’t know whether to laugh or what. ‘Thanks,’ says I.”
“Cheese and Onion,” said Macken. “The crisps, like.”
“I mean, we all heard that Tynan’s a real pit bull when he gets his teeth into something. Look out, etcetera. You could tell he was bulling when he came out of the shop. Livid, like. Face didn’t change expression, of course.”
“That a fact,” said Kilmartin.
“Lips didn’t move,” said Heffernan, nodding. “Doesn’t get back in the car. Just stands there, staring back at the shop. Like he’s sizing it up for demolition. The fingers doing drum rolls on the roof. Says-and I’m sure he was talking to himself now-says, ‘How is it that those reptiles are still abroad?’ Didn’t he, Ger?”
Macken nodded.
“Dead on,” he said. “ ‘Abroad,’ I was thinking, you know? Thought he meant a holiday or something. Didn’t twig, the way he said it.”
“And that was when the big push started. Revenue woke up, Customs and Excise fellas started to attend the meetings. Branch Inspectors. Technicals. Task Force fellas who would step over your dead body in the hall in the normal run of things. Staff; equipment; overtime coming out our ears. Jam on the bread, the whole bit. I don’t care what anyone says about Tynan. The Iceman; the Monsignor. Tell you this: he’s the man to nail the Egans.”
“Reptiles,” said Kilmartin. He elbowed Minogue and nodded toward the Citroen.
Heffernan looked over at him.
“Are you going in to see Eddsy then?”
Eddy Egan, Eddsy, thought Minogue. A crippled reptile who commissioned pornographic pictures of girls trapped in poverty, in lousy jobs, desperate for a better life.
“I think we will.”
Kilmartin’s jaw was hanging but his eyes told Minogue enough. He put on his best blithe smile. Maybe he should have two pints of beer every lunch-time while the heat wave lasted. He stepped out onto the road and looked across the roof of the Toyota at Kilmartin.
“Are we right, Jim?”
Kilmartin caught up with Minogue before he reached the door of the shop.
“Right for what? What the hell are we up to? Wait a minute there!”
TWENTY-FOUR
Minogue stood to the side of the doorway as two teenagers stepped out of the shop. One was already tearing the cellophane from a packet of cigarettes. Recruits, he wondered. Start them with packets of fags, let them graduate to fencing stuff they robbed.
“I’m curious, Jim. Aren’t you?”
“Curious? You’re cracked, is what you are. What’s here for us?”
“Remember the man you’ve been chopping at, the man unfortunate enough to be born in Dublin? The one-”
“Voh’ Lay-bah? What’s this got to do with him?”
“Terry, the brother, he’s causing ructions since he got out of the ’Joy the other day.”
“So? So?”
“Well, Tommy had to take time off-”
“I know, I know! Stop telling me things I know!”
“Bear with me now, James. Terry’s in there right now. We can kill a few birds with the one stone now.”
Kilmartin grabbed his arm.
“What are we up to here? Running messages? We have to keep to our own side of the bed with this mob, man!”
“Tommy was out looking for him and called in here. Nearly had a row.”
“Why am I only hearing about this now? This is going to make a hames of the case if-”
“It’s okay, Jim. I read him the Riot Act. I told him I’d have a word with the brother if I could. I, er, asked the lads to phone if they spotted Terry. He’s in there. That’s why I’ve come by.”
“Oh Christ! Now he tells me! First he buys me a dinner, then he tries to soften me up with a few pints! And I, poor iijit, thought we were celebrating something.”
“And I want the Egans to know that we’re out there too, about Mary.”
“Back up there a minute. You want to come the heavy with Malone’s brother here?”
Minogue was in the door now. The shop was small and cluttered and hot. It smelled of newsprint and tobacco and the trays of penny sweets. There was another smell mixed in, the Inspector realized, a beery smell. A radio talk show was on, but not so loud that Minogue could hear more than snatches of the conversation about pollution. The elderly woman Minogue had seen enter the shop several minutes before was effusive.
“Ah, tanks, Eddsy! I knew I could depend on you, tanGod. You’re a star! Jesus…”
She nodded at Minogue and shuffled toward the door. The man leaning against the wall held a cigarette down at his side. He brought it up slowly, rubbed his nose with his thumb and drew on the cigarette.
“Well, fuck me,” he murmured. “Hey, Eddsy. Will you lookit these two?”
The face that Minogue found after several moments of baffled searching was at counter level. Eddsy Egan’s face reminded him of a butcher’s window display. Sausages, he thought: puffy, grey and pink. The eyes were dull like a resting dog’s and there was a cast of tired pain across his face. The face of a man beaten down with a migraine, he thought. Egan looked from him to Kilmartin.