Bloodland: A Novel Read online

  He hits a key on his laptop and the screen lights up. He opens Word.

  He takes another sip from his drink, hesitates. Stares at the blank screen.

  But there’s something he needs to do first.

  He gets up and strides out of the room.

  Where’s his phone?

  He finds it on the table in the kitchen. Scrolls down through the list of names.

  V for Vaughan.

  It’s only when it’s ringing that he realises what time it is. That they’re five hours behind in New York. And probably all still asleep.

  It goes into message. ‘You have reached…’

  He waits for the beep.

  ‘Mr Vaughan? It’s Larry Bolger.’ He pauses. ‘How are you?’ His voice sounds strange, heavy, a bit slurred. It sounds drunk. He sounds drunk. He is drunk. ‘I called you a few months ago, left a message on your machine, but you never got back to me. Why didn’t you get back to me?’ Now he sounds like a fucking teenager. It’s how he feels, though – angry, frustrated, thwarted. ‘I don’t see … I don’t see why you couldn’t have got back to me. A simple phone call. Is it … is it because you’re so fucking high and mighty? Is that it? You’re so important?’ He pauses, possibly for a long time, before eventually saying, ‘Prick.’

  Then he holds the phone out in front of him and looks at it, a little confused, as though someone has just called him a prick.

  He puts the phone back to his ear and listens for a second. Nothing. He holds it out again and presses End Call.

  Puts it on the table. Furrows his brow.

  Huh.

  He goes back into the living room.

  What was he doing?

  Oh yeah. A drink. He looks over at the cabinet in the corner. He was going to have another drink.

  * * *

  As he comes off the roundabout and approaches the entrance to Tara Meadows, Dave Conway can’t believe what he’s seeing. It’s only been three weeks since he last came out here and already it’s as if a ravenous Mother Nature has reclaimed substantial sections of the development for her own.

  He goes through the gates and drives on for a hundred yards or so before pulling up at the kerb. He takes a small torch from the glove compartment, puts it in his pocket and gets out.

  He looks around.

  The perimeter fences are entwined with prickly bushes and briars. Nettles are everywhere and weeds – thick, green, poisonous ones – are growing, it seems, at an alarming rate, rushing up in busy clusters overnight.

  The rows of detached houses on the right and left – the only residential units to be completed so far – seem forlorn, as though abandoned after some environmental catastrophe. Windows have been smashed and walls have been daubed with slogans and graffiti. The other houses – the ones on the far side of the so-called town square – have been abandoned, too, but not by their occupiers. These have been abandoned midway through construction by the very people who were building them – the contractors, the bricklayers, the electricians. From what Conway can make out, most of these houses are roofless and surrounded by half-erected scaffolding. Diggers and cement mixers lie awkwardly on the roads in front of them, entrenched in gullies of dried mud, like dinosaur skeletons.

  Conway walks along the left-hand pathway of what was to be called Tara Boulevard. At the end of it lies the town square. They hadn’t decided on an official name for this and had been toying with the idea of simply calling it the Piazza. Or the Plaza. Conway still thinks of it – from the early design and development days – as the Concourse, which is how the architect always referred to it.

  It’s an impressive space – airy and adaptable, at least in theory. Surrounding it are the completed ‘civic buildings’, what were to be the heart of this new urban development – a town hall, a hotel, two apartment blocks and a shopping mall. It’s short on the ‘civic’ perhaps, but all of that stuff was grandiose brochure-speak in any case. The truth is that Tara Meadows was never intended to be much more than an upscale commuter-belt housing development (with an expected first phase of buyers feeding in from the nearby Paloma Electronics and Eiben-Chemcorp industrial plants).

  He walks across the eerily deserted Concourse. It’s midday and this place should be buzzing. There should be cafés open, restaurants, a hairdresser’s, a multiplex.

  There should be people.

  Busily crisscrossing the square.

  With money in their pockets.

  Driving our economy forward.

  Yeah, right.

  Conway approaches the entrance to the as yet unnamed two-hundred-and-fifty-room hotel.

  As yet unfurnished, unfitted, unwired.

  He wanders across the lobby area, glancing in at the vast darkened ballroom over to the right.

  As he enters the stairwell he takes the torch out of his pocket and uses it to light his way.

  He goes up six flights of stairs and comes out onto a long dim corridor. There are no carpets or skirting boards. Cables hang from the ceilings. The air is simultaneously dank and dusty. A few doors are open and these let in enough light from the outside for him to put the torch away.

  He walks along the corridor, slowly, and stops at the first open door he comes to. He looks inside.

  It’s just an empty hotel room. Concrete floor. Plastered walls. Bare, fitted windows. Sliding glass door leading to a balcony. Nothing else.

  He nudges the door fully open and goes inside. He crosses the room, opens the sliding door and steps out onto the balcony. He looks directly down onto the deserted Concourse, and then beyond it to the entire development.

  Tara Meadows has imprinted itself on the landscape, no question about it. From this perspective the whole thing is stunning – so much more than just another soulless grid of housing units.

  Which is why he comes up here every now and again. To see the big picture – quite literally. It gives him a degree of satisfaction, of reassurance.

  He leans forward now, hands on the balcony rail.

  But there’s nothing of that sort on offer today. How could there be? Conway Holdings borrowed a total of two hundred and twenty million euro for this project, with the promise of a further eighty million to keep the wheels turning. One of the banks he borrowed from, however, North Atlantic Commercial, is looking for its money back, and none of the other banks are lending anymore. The problem is, without the further eighty million there’s no way he can keep the wheels turning, and without the wheels turning there’s no way he can hope to pay back any of the original money.

  Naturally, he’s trying to scare up alternative financing – he’s in negotiations at the moment with a team from Black Vine Partners, a private equity fund – but unless he’s prepared to go as far as collateralising the internal organs of his three children there may be no practical way out of this.

  All of which should be enough – you would imagine – for any man to have to worry about.

  But right now this isn’t even the issue for Dave. This is just background noise, like a headache you can’t shift when you’ve got something more important to think about – such as, for instance, that little chat he had earlier on with Larry Bolger. He’d been convinced that Larry had somehow heard the same thing he’d heard, about the Susie Monaghan book, and was rattled about that, needlessly as it would have turned out.

  But that wasn’t it at all.

  The fella they found in the woods.

  What was it Ruth had said last night, about summoning up old ghosts?

  But the weird thing is it’s not the body in the woods he’s worried about. Not only. There are degrees of separation there. It’s Bolger he’s worried about. The man was unhinged this morning. Maybe it’s that he’s bored or frustrated, or that retirement doesn’t suit him and he has too much time on his hands, but it almost seemed as if in some perverse way he was looking for trouble.

  What the man needs is a job. To chair some committee or head up a review group or something.

  Keep him busy, keep him dis
tracted.

  Because the last thing Conway himself needs, as he bargains for his financial survival with these Black Vine people, is to be linked, however tenuously, to the three-year-old disappearance of a security guard … who then turns up in a shallow grave in the Wicklow hills.

  Unable to dwell on this, even for a second, Conway turns and goes back inside. He rushes across the room and out into the corridor. He switches his torch on again and makes his way back to the stairwell. On the way down, he focuses on taking the steps two at a time.

  As he’s approaching the second floor, he hears a weird sound and stops. He remains still for a moment. There is silence. Then he hears the sound again.

  It’s a dog barking.

  He hears it a third time.

  It’s close by.

  He steps out into the second-floor corridor. It’s much darker down here, and the air is heavier, dustier. He stops and listens carefully.

  The dog barks again, a yappy sound – it’s probably some sort of terrier.

  Conway looks at an open door a little further along the corridor and thinks he detects movement inside. He quickly realises that it’s something flickering – a form of light, a flame perhaps, a candle.

  Slowly, he moves towards it.

  His heart jumps when the dog barks again.

  He peers in through the door. The windows have been blacked out with plastic sacks. Protruding from a bottle on the floor is a red candle. In the middle of the room there is an empty shopping trolley and tied to the trolley with a dirty piece of rope is the dog, a scruffy little terrier.

  The place reeks of piss.

  The dog barks again.

  Conway shines his torch over the room. In one corner he sees what at first appears to be a bundle of old clothes and newspapers. After a second he realises that the bundle is moving, that there’s someone lying there. A pair of eyes stare up at him, squinting, a hand raised to block out the light from the torch.

  ‘Ah fuck, pal.’ It’s a man. ‘What’s going on? What do you want?’

  For a fleeting moment it is on the tip of Dave’s tongue to respond, ‘What do I want? What do you mean? This is my hotel.’

  Pal.

  But he knows how absurd that would sound.

  He goes on pointing the torch, and staring.

  The man goes on squinting and holding up his hand but he doesn’t say anything else – all resistance spent, seemingly, in those first few words.

  The dog, who has been quiet for a bit, starts yapping again. It tugs at the rope and causes the shopping trolley to move.

  Conway is startled by this. He retreats, walks quickly back to the stairwell and down to the ground floor. He rushes across the lobby and out onto the Concourse, all the time wondering how many of the other rooms are … occupied? Is that the correct word? And how many of the houses? There’s no security here, there’s no surveillance. The money ran out, work stopped and the place was just abandoned.

  With a sick feeling in his stomach Conway makes his way back along Tara Boulevard and gets into his car.

  Holy fuck.

  What is happening?

  These bastards at Black Vine had better come through with the funding, otherwise this place will be devoured.

  His life will be devoured.

  And not just by overgrowth and weeds and graffiti and tramps and squatters.

  He starts the car.

  It will be devoured by lawyers and creditors and injunctions and journalists.

  Appalling vista number two.

  He does a three-point turn and heads for the exit.

  But going back to the first appalling vista, the more immediate one, what does he do about Larry Bolger? There’s no way he can possibly allow this sad sack of a man – who also lives in a hotel, as it happens – to jeopardise everything Conway Holdings has built up.

  He stops at the exit.

  And then it hits him.

  That other little pulse of anxiety, the one from yesterday afternoon …

  Misdirection.

  Displacement.

  He pulls out his mobile, finds the number and dials.

  As he waits, he glances to the right and up at the peeling billboard for Tara Meadows. It shows an artist’s impression of the development – spectral, stick-insect people with shopping bags crisscross the Piazza. The strap reads: ‘First line of defence, last word in sophistication.’

  ‘Dave?’

  He refocuses.

  ‘Phil.’

  ‘Two days in a row? This must be a record.’

  ‘Yeah. How are you?’ He leans forward, over the steering wheel. ‘But listen, Phil, that thing we were talking about yesterday? I’ve just had an idea.’

  * * *

  It is reported in an afternoon edition of France-Soir that a middle-aged man, believed to be an American tourist, has been seriously injured at the scene of a motorcycle accident in central Paris. The incident took place at about 6 a.m., not far from the man’s hotel.

  The story gets picked up straightaway and within an hour three different American news websites are speculating that the ‘tourist’ in question might be none other than US Senator John Rundle, who is currently in Paris as part of a trade delegation. The story is then confirmed a couple of hours later on another website. Sitting in his office now, Clark Rundle is going through this report line by line.

  The Senator was apparently out jogging alone in the early hours when he witnessed a motorcyclist careering out of a laneway and colliding with a barricade. He ran to help, but in attempting to get the man out from underneath his bike, the senator slipped in some oil, lost his grip and fell. Part of the motorcycle, a 1500cc Kawasaki, then collapsed on the senator’s hand, crushing two fingers and breaking several bones. He remains in the American Hospital in Paris and a spokesperson says that although surgery will definitely be required the fifty-year-old pol is nevertheless in good spirits.

  The motorcyclist himself received only minor injuries and has praised the senator for his quick reflexes and extraordinary courage.

  Hhmmmm.

  Clark Rundle turns away from his computer terminal.

  Slightly overcooked, he would have thought.

  It’ll do the job, though.

  He hasn’t heard from J.J. in person yet but understands that because he’s still on strong pain-relief medication he might need a little more time to clear his head.

  Rundle will have to talk with him, however, and soon. Because J.J. is the only one who can fill him in on what the colonel is thinking – and not just in relation to the Chinese, but now in relation to this Buenke incident, as well.

  Details of which conversation Rundle himself will then have to pass on to Jimmy Vaughan.

  It’s a delicate set of circumstances, a delicate balance. You’ve got a PR nightmare on two fronts, each one potentially feeding into the other, which means if either one of them blows up they both do, and if that happens the whole fucking shebang blows up.

  He rubs his stomach.

  But even if they’re successful in extracting J.J. from the equation and in smoothing over Buenke, there’s still no guaranteeing the whole shebang won’t blow up anyway. No guaranteeing the colonel won’t side with the Chinese and take their infrastructure deal. No guaranteeing he won’t unravel years of hard work on BRX’s part and sign away the rights to … whatever it is …

  They worked it out last night.

  Utterly unthinkable.

  But what do they do?

  Rundle rubs his stomach again. He presses it at different points. There’s something going on in there, ulcers or …

  Or what? Go on, say it.

  Stomach cancer.

  It’s what killed his mother. Came out of the blue, then bam, six weeks and she was gone.

  He takes a deep breath.

  But that was after six decades of corrosive boredom, of Pall Malls and dissatisfaction, of private education and public marriage, of being an heiress, a corporate wife, a matriarch.

 
A socialite and a churchgoer.

  Rundle stands up.

  This isn’t boredom, though. This is coiling, knotty anxiety. It’s fear. Fear of losing control, of not measuring up, of not having measured up in the past. It’s any number of unresolved issues.

  He glances around the office, wondering which is more corrosive, boredom or fear, and if it has to be a competition.

  Newly redesigned, the office is all ultra-thin tempered glass and different coloured metals.

  All transparency and jagged edges.

  It gets on his nerves.

  What he needs is an hour or two with Nora. He’ll call her later. He might even call her this afternoon. Arrange to meet her at the Wilson.

  He swallows, rubs his stomach one more time.

  Maybe it’s indigestion. Unresolved dinner.

  They were all pretty tense in there last night, in the Orpheus Room – talking over each other, mapping out different scenarios, calculating the potential loss in offtake, working their BlackBerrys like a trio of hopped-up beboppers. And Orpheus food is good, but it’s not that good. It wouldn’t ever be his first choice, and certainly not for dinner.

  Rundle stands up suddenly, grabs the Times from his desk and rushes across the office to the door in the corner that leads to his private washroom.

  * * *

  Jimmy watches as Maria stirs three sugars into her double espresso, an energy fix he imagines she’ll need to make up for the energy she’s just expended in talking to him about her sister.

  He takes his own espresso without sugar. Not that he even needs the caffeine. Listening to Maria for the last hour or so has energised him in a way he hasn’t experienced for ages, and had almost forgotten could happen.

  They met here at Rastelli’s just after one o’clock, found a table and got straight into it. Maria said she’d been thinking about their conversation non-stop since last night and couldn’t see that she had a choice. Once Jimmy had put the idea out there – released the genie from the bottle, so to speak – there was no going back. They had to do this.

  And for Susie.

  Not that Maria imagined the book would turn out to be some kind of cheesy tribute or anything, a hagiography – more an honest account of how Susie had lived her life, but with no backing away from the ugly stuff either, the behaviour, the compulsions, the stuff that had made her sister who she was. Maria said she hated the word ‘closure’, didn’t even know what it meant, but felt that after three years here might be a chance to grab a little of it, see what everyone was talking about.