Dublin Noir - Ken Bruen [16]
Burke’s eyes hurt. Bad. His head hurt too. Worse. He tried to open his eyes. Couldn’t. Sunlight grilled him through the open blinds. Eyes closed, fighting to stay awake, he slid out of bed, stood up, and felt his way to the window. Gripping the blinds, he yanked them closed and then risked opening his eyes. They still hurt but he could see. Turning around, he stopped dead, halfway between the window and the bed. Pia lay there, naked, one leg dangling on the floor, a trickle of blood from her lips forming a small red pond between her breasts.
PART II
THE MANHATTAN CONNECTION
PORTRAIT OF THE KILLER
AS A YOUNG MAN
BY REED FERREL COLEMAN
Jaysus Christ, I hate feckin’ Americans! The donkeys worst among ’em. And them arse-licking cops worst of all. Them with their fifty-two paychecks and pensions, their red noses and “Danny Boy” tears. They think glen to glen is a conversation of like-named punters. Cunts, every last one. Them that sees romance in the famine and the troubles. Yah, romance in a bloody holocaust and the smell of cordite in the streets of Derry. And they ease their guilt and fancy themselves Provo men because they open their wallets and sing Pogues songs and drown themselves in pubs with a gold harp above the threshold. What a load a shite.
Oh, and how they imagine us Irish in the worst possible sense; a race of toothless spud farmers in white cableknit sweaters and black rubber boots, spouting Joyce or Yeats, herding lambs with a switch in one hand and a pint of Guinness in the other. And what of our race of red-haired colleens? Why, they’re out in lush pastures in their white blouses and green plaid skirts gathering clover and hunting for pots of gold. Bollix!
I hadn’t meant to kill the first one. I had dreamed of it, for sure. Taking one of the cheery bastards who hopped into me cab and opening him up like an Easter lamb, tossing his innards out my windows as I drove the M-road back from Shannon. But like with sex, it never quite happens the way you dream it. I s’pose if I had planned it, it would never have come off at all. I had sat patiently for a year at the wheel and listened to my American cousins affect cartoon brogues, recite bad jokes, and spew inanities at the back of me head.
“Would you like a seven-course Irish meal? A six-pack and a patata.”
“Top a the mernin’ to ya, boyo.”
“Where do you keep the leprechauns? In the trunk?”
“Hey, where’s me Lucky Charms?”
“Is it true about the Irish Curse?”
“You don’t have red hair!”
“Irish Spring. Sure it smells good on him, but I like it too.”
What eejits!
I took all of it and more; let it build up like steam in the kettle. It got so that the loathing felt warm as the shame of me Irish blood. I learned to bathe in it so that the thought of killing one of me American fares made me hard as a hurly soaked through with water and left to cure in a baking hot oven. Hate had always been a comfort to me. What’s more natural than hate, save rage? I hate Pakis, tinkers even more. But nothing I had known before compared to how I hated Americans. It was my coming of age.
Then, out of the blue, I was triggered. A blowsy Yank, all muzzy and hog-eyed, got in me cab just outside Davy Byrne’s Pub in Duke Street and asked to go to the Gresham Hotel in O’Connell Street Upper. He went quiet on me after first announcing he was ex of the NYPD. As if I gave a shite. For fuck’s sake, did he expect me to kiss his ring? So many sheets to the wind was he that he seemed to lose his voice as well as his senses. Then catching his breath, he began to rant about the weather, but that isn’t what set me off.
No—it was when he complained bitterly that us Irish drive as the Brits do, on the wrong side of the road. In America, he assured me, they would never put up with that shit. It was at that point I decided to no longer put up with his. Well, it wasn’t so much a decision as a reflex. Why, of all things that should have