The Angel Tapes

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  By the same author

  Copyright

  To the men and women of the Garda Síochána, the Guardians of the Peace

  The author gratefully acknowledges the following, whose kindness, assistance, and inspiration made this book possible:

  Paschal Anders, Neal Bascomb, John Conlon, William Dillon, Derek Guildea, Michael Kelleher, Vere Lenox-Conyngham, Freeman and Geraldine Lynn, Paula Kane, Mary McCarthy, Monika Riethmüller, Rachel Serpico, and Jonathan Williams.

  One

  The searing flash took the beggar-woman by surprise. She shut her eyes and clutched her baby hard to her breast. Then the shock wave rolled.

  The bomb went off on O’Connell Street, a major thoroughfare at the heart of Dublin city. The street is broad enough to accommodate three lanes of traffic on either side and a very wide traffic island in the middle. Some of its buildings date from the eighteenth century. They are stately and imposing—when you can see them properly, when their neoclassic façades aren’t hidden behind the bright lights and primary-colored signboards of fast-food outlets and movie theaters.

  At eight in the morning on Friday, July 3, 1998, there was already much activity on the traffic island. A street cleaner was fishing empty beer cans and other jetsam out of the filthy waters of the Anna Livia Fountain; the early morning drunks had assembled around the reclining bronze nude, and they toasted one another and life in general with the cans that would shortly replace those dredged out by the cleaner.

  Gatherings of sharply dressed commuters waited at the curb for the lights to change. The waiting was long, for this is not a pedestrian-friendly city. The traffic was building up; even now the haze of pollution, mingled with the heat haze of this sultry morning, was blurring the outlines of the statue of Daniel O’Connell at the southern end of the street.

  The panhandlers were out in great numbers, too, knowing that Dublin’s tourists like to make an early start. Most of those asking for handouts were women and children; if you thought to detect a family resemblance between the beggars and the drunks at the fountain, then you would not have been mistaken.

  The beggars were of nomadic stock—Ireland’s traveling people. Their grubby garments were carefully chosen to maximize the wearers’ chances of separating both commuters and tourists from their small change. One of the beggar-women had an infant at her breast, swathed in a thick, plaid shawl, though the morning temperature had reached the high seventies by eight o’clock. She squatted on the paving stones of the traffic island, with her back to the fountain, facing south.

  And so she’d a clear view of the explosion.

  Eyewitnesses who were closer to the blast said later that it was as though the earth had suddenly opened, as though all hell had—“quite literally”—broken loose. Others described the detonation in the language of the cinema: they spoke of glass and other flying objects sailing past in slow motion; of human beings lifted off their feet as if by an invisible hand, and set down again—battered, bloodied, and incomplete—many yards distant. Of a roar like Krakatoa.

  The comparison with an angry volcano was a valid one. The asphalted roadway erupted directly beneath a black taxicab traveling in the middle traffic lane. The vehicle disintegrated. The cabdriver’s death took place in the time needed for flesh and bone and blood to atomize.

  The other deaths—four in all—took a little longer.

  But not much.

  * * *

  Blade Macken woke as his buzzer sounded a third time, more insistent than before. Whoever was at the front door was holding his finger on the button.

  He sat up in bed—and wished he hadn’t. Somebody was crushing his head in a vise; he could feel his brain being forced out through the sockets of his eyes. He could hardly breathe; his torturers appeared to have sealed off the route to his windpipe with a Velcro strip. There wasn’t so much as a lungful of oxygen in the room; he’d left the windows shut and the curtains open. The light was blinding; even when he closed his eyes, it still burned pinkly through the lids.

  “Oh shit, oh Christ, oh Jesus,” Blade moaned, as the buzzer buzzed once more. He shut his eyes again and cupped his palms in front of them. He didn’t know what time it was, what day it was. He barely knew who he was. Hangovers, he reflected, used not to be like this.

  Macken sat on the edge of the bed, and that made things worse. His vision grew faulty, his head pounded, his stomach started to heave. He was still wearing all his clothes, he saw now. Even his shoes. He staggered from the bed, stumbled to the window that faced the backyard, raised it to let in some air. Then he went to the other one, the one that looked out on the street, that allowed in the morning sunlight, and raised that as well. The draft caused the net curtains to flutter and Blade to shiver, though the air was warm and moist.

  The buzzer sounded again.

  “Oh, my fuck,” he said with feeling, left the bedroom, shutting the door behind him, and went to the front door of the apartment. The judas gave him a fisheye-lens view of the back of a woman’s head. There was dark brown hair, worn shoulder-length. Blade opened the door.

  “God, you look terrible,” Orla Sweetman said.

  She didn’t wait to be invited in but walked on past him. She was almost as tall as Macken, five feet and nine inches in her low-heeled shoes. He hadn’t chosen her as his assistant for her striking looks, though that had been whispered throughout the department at the time of her appointment. She’d simply been the best damn detective sergeant the Special Branch could field.

  “Did you stay on or what?” she asked.

  “Stay on … stay on where?” What was she was talking about?

  Sweetman didn’t reply because her cellular phone, switched to silent mode, began to pulsate.

  Macken waited awkwardly in his tiny hallway, smoothing his tousled hair, sick as a dog, throat dry as the Sahara, as she spoke quietly into the instrument, waited, listened, spoke again, broke the connection. Then she frowned and went to the place where Blade’s house ph
one lay in disarray, under the little table in the hall. He heard faintly the busy signal before she replaced the receiver and returned the unit to its rightful place. He saw that his mother’s painting, the one she’d done all those years ago for his twenty-first birthday, was hanging askew above the table—and wondered about that.

  “God, I’ve only been trying to reach you for the past hour,” Sweetman said. “They want us in O’Connell Street”—she looked at her watch—“in ten minutes.”

  He shook his head in incomprehension; a bad mistake—he swore he felt something drift loose.

  “Duffy and the deputy commissioner. Ten minutes. Do you think we can make that—sir?”

  He glanced at his own watch. It was a little before nine; he wasn’t scheduled for duty until eleven today—that much he could remember.

  Sweetman saw his troubled look.

  “The bomb,” she said.

  “Bomb?”

  “The car bomb.” Something resembling pity crossed her face. “You really haven’t heard, have you, sir?”

  Blade hated it when she called him “sir” when there was no one else present. He knew she did it for the same reason others prefaced a scathing remark with the words, “With all due respect…” He knew very well that Detective Sergeant Sweet-man’s “sir” meant: “Macken, you’re a slob, and if I outranked you or if I was a detective superintendent, too, I’d be only too pleased to tell you just what a clapped-out, drink-sodden slob I think you are.” Sweetman’s “sir” made him feel guilty, as if in some way he’d betrayed her trust, broken a promise he’d never made.

  “Somebody’s after putting a bomb under a taxi in O’Connell Street.”

  “Jesus.”

  “There’s feck all left of the taxi—or the driver. We think there may be at least five people dead; God knows how many injured. The morning rush hour, Blade—in O’Connell Street. Feeney says there were arms and legs and bits of bodies everywhere. Can you imagine?”

  Macken could—all too clearly, and he wished then that he didn’t have such a vivid imagination. His stomach heaved again; he tasted sour whiskey in his mouth and felt his face go white. Sweetman was at the door of the bathroom before him, had the handle turned as he came charging through. Tactfully, she shut the door as he headed for the toilet.

  When he was finished, he brushed his teeth with a liberal worm of toothpaste and it tasted much sweeter than usual, in contrast with the acid bitterness of the bile that was still in his mouth. He swallowed cold water, threw some more in his face, and raised his eyes to the mirror.

  Blade saw a stranger. Agreed, the retching had caused his eyes to turn even redder than they had been. Nevertheless, the face in the mirror belonged to a man fourteen or fifteen years his senior, someone pushing sixty. He was horrified by that image because it bore no relation to the one he carried within him. He was accustomed to thinking of himself as a young man—late twenties, say. A young man who was aging at a rate far slower than that which governed the rest of the human race. Small wonder, then, that he was always surprised to see himself in photographs; he’d to do a double take on recognizing himself, so at odds with reality was his self-image.

  Did mirrors lie? He thought they did. For some reason the man in his shaving mirror never seemed to have so much gray at the temples; nor were his cheeks and chin so flabby as photographs claimed they were; the skin of the man in the shaving mirror possessed far fewer wrinkles about the eyes and mouth. And as for those dangerous-looking liver spots: surely they were caused by flaws in the photographic emulsion?

  Blade Macken had begun thinking more and more about mortality ever since he’d turned forty-four. Forty-four. It was no longer middle age; thirty-five was middle age, halfway to three score years and ten. Maybe, just maybe, he would make seventy, if he cut down on his drinking and gave his throat a rest from the Hamlets. But ninety? No bloody way. His grandmother-in-law was all of ninety-two, and looked it. She also sounded it, smelled it, behaved it, and that was one road Blade didn’t want to travel down.

  He was aware that Orla Sweetman was pounding on the bathroom door.

  “Are you dead or what?”

  He wished to fuck she didn’t have to be so damn noisy about it. Why is it, he wondered, that the sober always take a sadistic pleasure in exploiting the vulnerability of those suffering from a hangover? A perverse strain of Puritanism, that’s what it was.

  “Be right with you,” he called out.

  He squirted some aerosol lather on his cheeks and ran the razor over them. Only when he’d completed the cursory shave did he notice the seven digits scrawled in ballpoint on his left palm. A phone number, now practically illegible. Blade couldn’t remember having written it down, or who it belonged to. He shrugged, and scrubbed his palm clean. It was probably not important.

  Sweetman was sitting on the sofa in the tiny living room. She’d made two mugs of instant coffee and he accepted one gratefully. It was strong; the first mouthful caused him to shiver. He noticed she’d removed the battery from his cellular phone, lying on the table. She caught his glance.

  “No wonder I couldn’t raise you,” she said in a tone you might use to reprove a child. “Do you have a spare?”

  He gestured vaguely in the direction of his drinks cabinet. Sweetman went to it and rummaged among the whiskey, gin, vodka, and wine bottles, many depleted. Eventually she found the recharger and slotted the fresh battery into the phone. In the meantime Macken had retrieved his jacket from behind the sofa; he took the phone from her and thrust it in his pocket.

  There was a slim, yellow cigar pack on the coffee table. Hamlet, the Mild Cigar. Blade picked it up, saw it was empty, and flung it in the fireplace in disgust. It joined more of its fellows lying crumpled and discarded amid the ash, cigar ends, orange peel, and miscellaneous debris that were already encroaching on the hearth. Sweetman did her best not to look.

  Blade looked at his watch and switched on the radio. He’d missed the main news item.

  “—in Downing Street, dismissed allegations made yesterday by the Liberal Democrats that no trace of explosives had been found on board the hijacked plane. He questioned whether the—”

  Macken had silenced the radio.

  “What is it about the summer?” he asked. “Everybody goes mad. Imagine, Sweetman: being stuck on that runway for three days in this heat. Desperate altogether.”

  “We’d better be off,” she said. “We can pick up a sandwich or something later.”

  She drove with all the car windows open. They traveled north from Ranelagh, crossed the canal that shimmered with a heat haze, and headed toward St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Macken was grateful to be in the passenger seat because the sun on Sweetman’s side was already strong and hot. Following on the heels of a cold, late spring, the July of 1998 was unexpectedly hot and humid; Blade couldn’t remember a warmer summer. It altered Dublin in subtle ways, made it somehow more cosmopolitan, more foreign.

  Now it must be said that Blade Macken didn’t know many cities apart from this one. He’d been in London three times, once in New York, a few times in Stuttgart, and once in Barcelona. (He’d also visited Jerusalem, when assigned to the UN peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon. But that wasn’t so much a visit; more a pilgrimage—when he still believed.)

  He didn’t know many cities. Yet, when they’d descended the steep hill that ran from ancient Christchurch Cathedral down to the river Liffey, and waited at the lights to allow the heavy traffic to thunder westward, he suddenly remembered a trivial thing. All the cities he’d known had smelled the same. Not everywhere, just in certain areas, the places that have always known heavy industry. If he shut his eyes, he could be in any of the cities he’d visited, and it was because of certain odors. They were the odors you associate with diesel exhaust fumes, carbide, and old metal left to dry and disintegrate in the sun. There was nothing human about these smells; they were the smells of a technology that marched almost without human intervention, thumbing its nose at mankind.
<
br />   The funny thing was, he liked them.

  They crossed the Liffey, turned right, and headed into the sun, up along the quays toward the place where O’Connell Street began. Sweetman drove fast—she always did—but this time Macken made no comment; the rush of air from all sides was doing wonders for his head. He didn’t flinch when she drove at speed through a gap between two double-decker buses, a maneuver that Blade would barely have attempted on a motorcycle. He sat back and considered the previous night.

  His recollections were vague. Vague? Who was he codding? Half the bloody night was missing; whole chunks had been erased from his memory. Sweetman had asked if he’d “stayed on.” For the life of him he couldn’t remember where he’d been after, say, eleven o’clock. Evidently he had stayed on. He wondered about consciousness; if his mind was a blank now, as far as those missing hours were concerned, had it been blank during those hours? Had he done things, said things, while in a state of unconsciousness? Christ, it was a frightening thought and Blade dismissed it quickly. On days like this, he was beset by guilt, and by disgust with the man he’d become.

  Sweetman had said something.

  “Sorry?”

  “I said: The cover story is that it was an accident. A gas main.”

  “I don’t understand.” He really didn’t.

  She turned to look at him, but had to swerve then to avoid colliding with a taxicab.

  “Well, they had to make something up, with the state visit just around the corner.”

  “State visit?”

  “Ah, Blade, I swear to God I’d do something about that drinking if I was you. Your mind’s gone. Sure it’s only the president of the United States who’s paying us a little visit on the fourteenth.”

  * * *

  A cordon had been thrown across the roadway on either side of the devastation, between the O’Connell Monument and Abbey Street. Hundreds of curious onlookers lined the sidewalk, held in check by uniformed police officers and lengths of taut, plastic tape that read GARDA—NO ENTRY. Sweetman showed her ID and they were allowed to pass.

  The crater was smaller than Blade had expected, yet the force of the explosion had utterly demolished the taxicab; twisted pieces of metal lay scattered over a wide area. What was left of the engine and gearbox had come to rest in a blackened heap on the traffic island, close under the statue of William Smith O’Brien, the nineteenth-century freedom fighter. One of his stone legs had been sheared from the knee down by the blast. The island’s beeches were leafless and scorched, like trees on a battlefield. Other vehicles had taken some of the explosion; they stood abandoned at crazy angles in the roadway and on the traffic island, amid shards of windshield glass, many of them bloodied. Blade had seen bomb damage before and wasn’t surprised that every store window within a wide radius had been shattered. The great arched doorway of a branch office of the Bank of Ireland had suffered most; nothing remained of its glass panes.