‘Yeah. No problem.’
‘And listen. There’s someone else I want you to keep an eye on. I think it might be that other fella you mentioned, the one she met earlier.’
Norton’s voice has a slight tremor in it. He finds this, in equal measure, embarrassing and annoying.
He’s not sure how noticeable it is.
‘Right,’ Fitz says, seemingly oblivious, and taking a small notebook out of his pocket. ‘What can you tell me about him? Shoot.’
2
The Dáil chamber is packed for Leaders’ Questions, and there’s an air of excitement about the place that you normally wouldn’t get unless something major was in the offing. In the front row of the government benches, three seats along from the Taoiseach, Larry Bolger sits stony-faced, keenly aware of the cameras, keenly aware that he’ll be in frame whenever the Taoiseach is speaking. On the other side of the chamber, opposition party leaders limber up, consult their notes, confer with colleagues.
These will be key exchanges this afternoon and may even have a bearing on the outcome of the next election. They’ll certainly have a bearing on Bolger’s future. A lot will depend, of course, on how the Taoiseach chooses to play it. Most commentators agree he’s in a very difficult position and has only two options. In the first, he comes on strong and hangs the minister out to dry. This addresses the issue at hand and sees off a challenger, making him look strong and decisive. But it’s also quite risky because what if he comes on too strong? What if he appears disloyal or even vindictive? As well as bringing Bolger down, he could very well take a serious hit himself. In the second option – the path of least resistance – he gives his unequivocal support to the minister. But this is also inherently risky for the Taoiseach because it means he’d be throwing a lifeline to someone who everyone knows has been plotting against him for months. And that would only make him look weak.
Clearly, this second option is what Bolger wants, and needs – though there isn’t much he can do to bring it about now. Apart, that is, from sitting there with a serious look on his face. And regardless of how he does that, he’ll still be perceived in a variety of different ways – as defiant, or contrite, or reflective, or baffled, or bored even.
All of which, in a sense, he is.
Not to mention exhausted, and anxious, and angry.
As the leader of the main opposition party gets to his feet and starts framing a predictably labyrinthine question for the Taoiseach, Bolger fixes his gaze on a section of carpet in the middle of the floor. To look at him you would think he was concentrating hard on the question being asked, analysing and parsing it, but in fact his thoughts are elsewhere. What he’s doing – and has been doing all day – is analysing and parsing the brief, cryptic conversation he had the previous evening in Buswell’s Hotel.
Because he’s extremely upset about it. It’s not the fact of being accosted in a toilet that’s troubling him; it’s the shocking and downright scandalous reference to his brother. Initially, and after speaking to Paddy Norton, he dismissed it as a tabloid hack’s calculated attempt to provoke him. But later on he wasn’t so sure. On reflection, the young man didn’t seem like a hack at all. There was something odd about him, something tentative, a nervousness that didn’t square with the lizardlike weariness you get with most working journalists.
Later still, when he was in bed and unable to sleep, Bolger gave some thought to the charge itself. Once again, he dismissed it out of hand – but as he lay there in the dark, as he tossed and turned, it kept re-forming in his mind.
Inevitably, it gained a certain traction.
The thing is, Bolger’s recollection of that whole period is patchy at best. He wasn’t even around when the accident took place – he was a junior associate for a legal firm in Boston, a job he’d got through a cousin of his mother’s a couple of years earlier – so his take on the event is the received one, i.e. what happened was a simple road accident, a tragedy, a statistic. He was very upset of course, but by the time he got back from the States pretty much everything had been settled and it was straight into the funeral. Almost immediately after that, he was taken in hand by the party, and the grooming process began.
At the time, Bolger had a sense that he was being shielded from certain things, that information was being carefully managed, not to say manipulated. Nevertheless, he does have a vague recollection of someone mentioning alcohol, and in reference to the driver of the other car.
But then last night in the toilet of a hotel, and according to this total stranger… it was Frank all of a sudden? Frank was the one who was drunk? The one who caused the accident?
It was certainly the first time Bolger had ever heard this. Even though the idea, if he thinks about it, is hardly outlandish. Back in those days it was common practice for people to drink and drive – three, four, five pints, whatever – it was almost expected, and Frank, like anyone, was fond of a jar, so…
Bolger stops.
He knows full well what’s at work here. It’s the insidious nature of rumour and hearsay. It’s the impulse to believe, the instinctive rush to judgement, the feeling that if someone says something to your face, and with conviction… then it must be true.
It’s a dynamic, after all, that on a professional level Bolger is familiar with.
He glances around the chamber. The opposition leader is shaking a finger in the direction of the government benches.
‘And furthermore, let me put this to the Taoiseach…’
Bolger can see the sprays of spittle from here.
His own mouth feels thick and grainy. He didn’t get much sleep last night, and he’s been drinking coffee non-stop since he got up.
He shifts his weight in the seat.
In any case, if it is true about Frank, he can understand why they kept quiet about it, at least on one level – because he wouldn’t be sitting here in this chamber today if they hadn’t.
But what if the story gets resurrected now? It would be awful, a PR disaster. Even though it’d be impossible to prove, a story like this, a sort of Chappaquiddick by proxy, would in all likelihood scupper any chances Bolger had of bouncing back from the current crisis.
But what he really can’t get his head around – and it’s been working on him like a slow burn since late the previous evening – is how this rewrites everything, and not just the facts, the circumstances surrounding a terrible tragedy; it rewrites his own personal history, his reasons for going into politics in the first place.
Actually, talk about a slow burn.
That one’s been working on him for the best part of twenty-five years – resentment of his father for putting so much pressure on him, frustration at a career he never truly ‘owned’, a sense of loss for the life he could have led, and in fact had been leading, over there in Boston.
It pains him to think of it even now, of how young he was, and idealistic, and of how stimulated by everything he was: the summer heat, the atmosphere around Cambridge, the exotic fare on offer at Faneuil Hall (exotic back then, to him), his apartment on Comm Ave, his colleagues at the law firm, the conversations, the women he met.
To say nothing of the money he could have earned.
Larry really wanted to stay, and if he had known the truth, the alleged truth at any rate, about Frank – that he got into his car that night drunk as a fucking lord and killed all those people as well as himself, he would have stayed. He would have had the moral advantage, the leverage to resist, the courage to stand up to his old man.