No, the biggest variable in all of this, the least predictable one – the great unknown known – is Gina Rafferty. She wasn’t mentioned in any of the radio reports, so… where is she? Weighed down at the bottom of a river somewhere? Hidden in the boot of a car? Would that be too much to hope for?
Miriam places a few segments of orange before him on a plate. ‘There you are,’ she says. ‘Vitamin C.’
‘Thank you, darling.’
What kick-started the rapprochement last night was an email from their daughter in Chicago. At the very end of it, and almost as an afterthought, she mentioned that she’d be home for Christmas. This was great news, and enough to alter Miriam’s entire mood, taking her in seconds flat from chilly to warm, from clipped monosyllables to a torrent of chatter. Patricia’s last visit over two years ago hadn’t gone at all well, and here would be a rare chance for mother and daughter to regain some lost ground.
For his part, Norton was – and still is – relieved. But he knows from experience that this will now become a major project for Miriam – doing up rooms that don’t need to be done up, organising lunches and drinks parties, as well as endless shopping. He knows her propensity to obsess. He also knows from experience that ten minutes off the plane and Patricia will be choking on all the attention. Ten minutes inside the house and she’ll be on the phone to see if she can’t bring the date of her return flight forward.
But at least it means that for the moment Miriam will no longer be giving a shit about him and his supposed dependency on prescription painkillers.
Vitamin C?
Thanks a lot.
Half an hour later he’s in the car on Pembroke Road – but instead of going straight on to Baggot Street, to the office, he turns right at the canal and heads down towards the quays.
He phones his secretary and tells her he’s going to be late.
‘But not too late, I hope,’ she says, ‘because you have -’
‘I know, I know.’
He has an eleven o’clock meeting with the Amcan people to iron out the final details of the tenancy contract. He gave in to Ray Sullivan last night on the question of the additional security measures, and there’s no reason now why they can’t close the deal, and soon – the beginning of next week or maybe even as early as tomorrow.
‘I’ll be all right,’ he says, glancing at his watch. ‘I’ve plenty of time.’
It’s a crisp late-autumn morning, calm and clear after the high winds of last night. As he moves along South Lotts Road, Norton glances to the left. Dominating the city skyline, defining it, is Richmond Plaza. Then he looks to the right. It used to be that wherever you happened to find yourself in Dublin, you could pretty much rely on the red-and-white-striped twin chimneys of the Poolbeg power station to find you. Situated in the bay, these were a sentimental reference point for many people – they defined the city, they were the first thing you saw, through mist and cloud, on the flight path into Dublin Airport. But that has all changed. Because what immediately catches the eye these days is the considerably taller glass and steel structure rising up out of the docklands. It’s a more appropriate structure anyway, in Norton’s opinion. Better to have office and retail space, a hotel, condominiums – he thinks – than a brace of ugly industrial smokestacks.
Stopped at a red light on Pearse Street a few minutes later, he reaches into his pocket and takes out his Nalprox. He wasn’t sure about these yesterday. Compared to the Narolet they seemed weaker somehow, but at the same time… stronger? Is that possible? Differently calibrated? He doesn’t get it. They’re all he’s got, though. He pops two of them into his mouth, hesitates briefly, and then pops a third one in as well. For good measure.
The traffic moves and he turns right onto Tara Street. They crawl along and stop at another red light. He reaches over with his left hand and opens the glove compartment. He waits a moment and then looks. There it is, the grey barrel sticking out from under his pouch of AA documents. Before leaving the house earlier, he got this from the safe in his dressing room. He’s never used it, nor does he have a licence for it – but he’s always liked the idea of having a gun. Fitz got it for him some years back after there’d been a spate of burglaries in the neighbourhood.
Apparently it can’t be traced.
The light changes. Norton flips the glove compartment closed.
He crosses the river and turns right onto Custom House Quay.
Gina Rafferty has an apartment down around here somewhere – that’s what she told him the day they met – and he’s guessing it’s in one of these new complexes.
Fitz would have been able to give him the exact address.
But even with the address – and assuming she’s still alive – how likely is it that he’ll just see her here, spot her walking along the pavement or coming out of her building?
Not very.
In any case, the traffic is moving at quite a clip, and in seconds he has already gone too far. He cruises past Richmond Plaza. At the end he takes a right and goes over the toll bridge. He’ll loop around through Ringsend, make his way back to the other end of the quays and start again.
At this point, he doesn’t know what else to do.
As Larry Bolger steps into the shower, he wonders if this delay isn’t going to scupper everything. If the moment isn’t going to pass.
Bracing himself, he turns on the water and lets it run cold for a while.
The plan was hatched late last night in a fug of nervous exhaustion – with Bolger himself and a few others working the phones to drum up support. But then, at the last minute, there was a complication.
Isn’t there always?
Just after 2 a.m. news broke of a horrific gangland massacre in the west of the city, three dead apparently – so they decided at once to abort. There was no point in going head to head with a story like that. It would dominate the news cycle and upstage any other story, especially a political one, for at least twenty-four hours.
He adjusts the temperature of the water and reaches for the soap.
But in a way he’s relieved – because although he’s been working up to this for years, now that it’s within his grasp he feels deeply uneasy about it. Over these last two days he hasn’t had a chance to make any enquiries into the circumstances surrounding his brother’s death, but he’s determined to rectify that. What he’d really like to do, in fact, is to visit the old man out in the nursing home in Wicklow – and today, if possible. When else is he going to be able to do it? This may be the last chance he gets for a while.
He’ll have a look at his schedule.
As he scrubs away the anxiety and tension of a long night, it occurs to Bolger that there’s something else he should be relieved about, too – the ease with which he appears to have seen off this recent so-called scandal. The affair part of it was a non-starter – in post-Catholic Ireland no one had the stomach to get into that. And as for the gambling debts, well, they were eventually seen as just a personal-finance issue, nothing that could be spun as improper ‘contributions’ or that involved any obvious conflict of interest. So although the media gorged themselves on the story and wanted more, the opposition parties folded quickly.
He puts the soap back in the dish, turns, closes his eyes and lets the jet of hot water massage the back of his neck.
Besides, as often happens in politics, the story moved on all by itself, in this case mutating over the space of forty-eight hours into a full-blown backbench revolt. The thing is, while the Taoiseach’s spineless performance in the Dáil on Tuesday may not have been enough to trigger the long-anticipated leadership crisis, an imminent leak to the media revealing the source of the original Bolger story almost certainly will be.