Bloodland: A Novel Read online

  Rhythm starting.

  She’s wearing that silky dress he likes, it’s a –

  Look, forget it.

  They have their habits, like any couple, stuff they do and say – but only in some alternative universe could the details of this be any of your fucking business. Set up a sting operation and nab J.J., fine, you’d get to justify that on the grounds of public interest, so-called. But not here, not in this case.

  Say hello to the private sector.

  So, between one thing and another, a little time passes.

  Nora then takes off to the bathroom for a shower and Rundle lies back recalling what it was like in his younger days, at this juncture, to smoke a cigarette.

  Just after half past his cell phone rings.

  This could be anyone, but he has a feeling about it. He sits up and reaches over to the bedside table for his phone.

  He’s right.

  ‘J.J.? Shit, how are you?’

  ‘I’m fine, fucking traumatised, but fine. And it’s not like there isn’t plenty going on over here to distract me, or going on over there, I should say with all this stuff being generated.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Rundle slides off the bed. ‘Stuff? What stuff?’ He goes over to the window.

  ‘You haven’t been following it? Seriously?’

  ‘No. What?’

  ‘You’re the one who kicked this whole thing off, man. Stroke of genius.’

  ‘Kicked what off?’

  ‘It’s all over the internet. I’m all over the internet. Senator saves motorcyclist. Senator in Parisian rescue drama. I’ve been getting calls all day, interview requests. I’m telling you, Clark, you couldn’t pay for this kind of exposure.’

  Rundle thinks back. He was busy for most of the morning, paperwork, meetings, this and that. He skipped lunch and came directly here. He doesn’t have time for Twitter or any of that shit, so it’s not like he’s been monitoring developments.

  ‘Jesus…’

  ‘Yeah, it’s amazing. Political coverage, but with a dollop of feelgood on top? I mean come on.’

  ‘OK, I suppose…’

  ‘You suppose? Clark, I’m sitting here in my hospital bed doing a Google news search and it’s like, Washington Post two hours ago, San Francisco Chronicle nineteen minutes ago, it’s just story after story. I mean, look at this, People magazine four minutes ago. I was calling you up four minutes ago. This is phenomenal.’

  Rundle isn’t sure. It’s not what he expected, certainly not what he intended. ‘OK, J.J.,’ he says, ‘but play it down, let them do the work. I mean, this is tricky territory. The bigger the story gets, the more likely they are to go looking for this motorcyclist.’

  ‘Who cares? I’m getting a bump out of it, a chance to build up my profile. This afternoon? Fucking Wolf Blitzer’s people called. I’m telling you, there’s some serious traction to be had here.’

  Rundle throws his eyes up.

  ‘Wolf Blitzer? Jesus Christ, J.J., let me remind you of something, OK? An important detail. There is no motorcyclist. It didn’t happen. So this is a dangerous little game we’re playing.’

  ‘You wouldn’t say that if you saw my hand, Clark.’

  ‘Well, sure, but –’

  ‘Because believe me, this injury is very real.’

  ‘I know –’

  ‘I mean, the whole thing was insane, man. I’ll never forget it, I –’

  ‘OK,’ Rundle says. ‘Sure.’ He glances over his shoulder at the bathroom door. Is the shower still running? ‘We still need to be careful, though.’

  ‘We’re being careful. God. And what about that guy from the Jordan Group? We spoke about an hour ago. He seemed pretty smart. On top of things. They’ll handle it.’

  ‘Yeah, but what I’m saying is, they might have overreached themselves a bit, that’s all. These things can take on a life of their own.’

  A long pause follows. Rundle can hear …

  Is J.J. grinding his teeth?

  It sounds like it. Maybe it’s the medication he’s on, or some kind of adrenaline rush. Maybe it’s the onset of PTSD. According to what Don Ribcoff was able to find out the incident was fairly horrendous, but J.J.’s involvement was minimal, his injury minor, and they managed to get him out of there pretty damn fast. The important thing is it happened after he saw Colonel Kimbela.

  ‘Anyway, look,’ Rundle goes on, clearing his throat, ‘I’m sure it was awful, but we need to talk.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About what did happen. Beforehand, I mean. The colonel. About what he had to say.’

  ‘Right.’

  Rundle waits. He glances over at the bathroom door again – anticipates it opening, anticipates Nora emerging … her dark glistening skin as it contrasts with the white cotton of her towelling robe, the belt loosely knotted, pullable …

  ‘The thing is, Clark, I…’

  Start of round two.

  ‘Yeah?’

  Value for his four grand.

  ‘I’m a little confused. I –’

  Rundle turns back to the window, his eyes widening all of a sudden. He presses the phone to his ear, listens hard. Is J.J.… is he crying?

  ‘J.J.?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Clark, I –’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look, you’ve no idea what it was like, the noise, looking down the barrel of that gun, blood everywhere, those kids…’

  ‘J.J.’

  ‘And what happened beforehand? Meeting with Kimbela? Talking to him? That’s all a blur now. I’m just not sure I can recall any of it.’

  * * *

  Jimmy spends the rest of the afternoon and that evening in front of his iMac trawling the web for articles about Larry Bolger. He has a knot in his stomach the whole time. The evening is punctuated by three further calls from Phil Sweeney. The first, at around seven o’clock, is to go over a few ground rules – terms of reference, what’s off limits, what isn’t, contractual details, conditions. This is stuff they clear up easily enough. The second, an hour later, is to announce that Bolger has agreed to the arrangement, in principle at least, but would like a face to face with Jimmy before making his final decision – a meeting he thinks should take place quite soon, within the next week or so. The third call, after ten, is to say that Bolger has been in touch again and would actually like to get moving straightaway, so is Jimmy available to meet the following morning?

  At Bolger’s hotel, say, ten o’clock?

  For what will be, in effect, a job interview.

  With the phone cradled on his shoulder, Jimmy stares at an article on the screen about the ‘palace coup’ that originally led to Bolger taking over as Taoiseach. It’s a fascinating analysis of the intrigues, the backstabbings and the fallout, but at the same time, as with so much of this kind of stuff, it is tantalisingly incomplete and raises more questions than it answers.

  Yes, he says.

  Knot still in his stomach.

  One of the conditions – and Jimmy’s not sure if this comes directly from Bolger himself or just from Phil Sweeney – is that the job is to be exclusive. He must suspend or abandon any work he currently has in hand and must turn down any new offers of work.

  For the duration of the project.

  Which could take anything up to six months or a year. And occupy his every waking hour. But also help pay off his mortgage. And enhance his reputation. Phil Sweeney has said he wouldn’t be ghosting the book, he’d be getting a co-credit. Which, in turn, could lead to any amount of other interesting work.

  Jimmy scrolls down through a few more search results.

  Squirming in his chair as he does so.

  Because while this whole thing is clearly a no-brainer, there’s also something deeply insidious about it, about the way it’s making him re-evaluate the Susie Monaghan story … which all of a sudden has begun to seem inconsequential and tawdry. Why should he spend his time and energy writing about some coke-addled soap star, the argument appears to run, when he could
be writing about national politics, and at the highest level?

  Quite.

  But how is he supposed to explain that to Maria?

  In his head, he tries to – spins it one way, then another, contextualises it, rationalises it, brings in the old man …

  Ends up feeling sick.

  At eleven o’clock he turns off the computer. He tries to watch some television, but can’t concentrate. He goes to bed and tries to sleep, but can’t do that either. There is a loud bass sound thumping through the walls from across the corridor. It’s those students in the apartment directly opposite his. Now and again, he can hear their raised voices as well. What are they arguing about? Climate change? Afghanistan? Quentin Tarantino vs. Shakespeare? Which of them left an open tin of beans on a shelf in the kitchen for five days? They’re two guys, maybe three, it varies, modern languages, engineering, he’s not sure. He hung out with them once and after two hits on a joint felt so stoned he forgot his own name.

  The bass thump goes on and on, works its way into his dreams. When he next looks at the bedside clock, it is 4.35, the thump still there, but muffled now, more like a heartbeat.

  He looks over at the window.

  It’s dark, too early to get up, but he knows that further sleep is out of the question. His thoughts are up. And it’s the same queasy merry-go-round – excitement about meeting Larry Bolger, shame at having to blow off Maria, excitement about meeting –

  He climbs out of bed.

  What better way to start a new assignment anyway than in a full-on state of jangly-nerved sleep-deprived anxiety?

  Over the next few hours, Jimmy sits at his desk, drinking coffee and trawling through more of the same kind of stuff he was trawling through yesterday. He takes copious notes. He may not be entirely comfortable about the arrangement but he still wants to be prepared. Nor does he have any illusions about Larry Bolger and the kind of book he’ll probably want to write. As a senior politician, Bolger’s impulse will be to whitewash everything, to be self-serving and epically disingenuous. But the process itself will be fascinating – watching the big beast up close, getting to see how his mind works.

  There was a time when Jimmy and his old man shared a fascination for another and considerably bigger beast, Richard Nixon – a man about whom they conversed and theorised endlessly. A key event in this shared mythology was the occasion in 1972 when Hunter S. Thompson rode with Nixon in the back of a presidential limousine between campaign stops. All they talked about, apparently, was football, but Thompson still managed to transmute the base metal of this banal conversation into psychological gold.

  As a result, in some obscure corner of his mind – and the feeling has been building slowly, quietly, since yesterday – Jimmy sees the Bolger assignment as his chance for a backseat ride in that same limo. He knows this is a bit fanciful, but he also knows that it’s how the old man, if he were alive today, would see it too.

  At eight o’clock, Jimmy has a shower and gets dressed. He puts on a jacket and tie. He eats a bowl of cereal and drinks more coffee. He checks his e-mails and does a quick round of a few newspaper websites. He puts his notebook into his jacket pocket. He heads out a few minutes after nine.

  The hotel is up in Ballsbridge, so he can walk there in about twenty or thirty minutes. Jimmy has a motorbike, an old Honda, but he only uses it occasionally. He prefers to walk whenever he can.

  It’s a beautiful morning, sunny and fresh, though it’s supposed to rain later.

  Walking along Strand Road, towards Sydney Parade Avenue, Jimmy slows down and stops. His plan was to phone Maria later on and tell her what he was doing, but now he doesn’t think he should wait. Now he thinks he should tell her what he’s going to do, not what he has done.

  Be straight with her.

  Whatever about hedging his bets with his editor, doesn’t he owe Maria that much?

  As he crosses the road and walks towards a seafront bench, he takes out his phone and looks for her number.

  He sits down. The tide is in and is lapping gently up onto the strand.

  A middle-aged lady walking her dog strides past.

  He presses Dial.

  It rings. She’ll be at work. Maybe this is unfair, maybe he should –

  ‘Jimmy?’

  ‘Hi, Maria.’

  The knot tightens in his stomach.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  How does she know something is wrong?

  ‘Nothing is wrong … well, I mean, in the sense that –’ He pauses for a moment and regroups. The whole point of this was not to dissemble. To be straight. He breathes in, looks across the bay at Howth. He starts explaining.

  It doesn’t take him long.

  Then silence.

  Oh fuck.

  ‘I’m sorry, Maria.’

  He can hear her breathing.

  ‘Don’t be. I’m the one who’s sorry. I’m the one who opened up and talked. I’m the one who trusted a journalist.’ Her voice rising. ‘I believed you, Jimmy, I really did, but … Larry Bolger’s memoirs? You’ve got to be –’

  ‘Look, I –’

  ‘No, Jimmy, don’t, please.’

  He doesn’t.

  After a long pause, she says, ‘My sister, right? She was a fuck-up, a disaster-zone, and maybe she was responsible for what happened, I don’t know, but I was prepared to face up to the fact, and to live with it. Because I thought you were interested in getting at the truth. That’s what you told me.’ She pauses. ‘But Larry Bolger?’ She laughs at this, her tone cold, almost harsh. ‘Jimmy, do you really think that someone like Larry Bolger is going to tell you the truth?’

  ‘Maria –’

  She hangs up.

  Jimmy swallows. He lowers his hand slowly and stares at the phone. After a few seconds he flips it closed and puts it away.

  He stands up.

  He could have made a stronger argument. He could have pointed out that the truth of what had happened on that day would always elude them. That all they could ever do was speculate.

  Whereas with Bolger …

  But to what end?

  No amount of logic can reverse what he has just done.

  He pictures Maria sitting opposite him, talking like an express train.

  Those eyes, the freckles around her nose.

  After a moment, he refocuses. He has no choice. He stares out to sea, follows the line on the horizon. Then he turns away. He looks at his watch and starts walking. He has thirty minutes to get to the hotel.

  He doesn’t want to be late.

  * * *

  Bolger paces back and forth across the living room. He’s got a large mug of black coffee in his hand and takes occasional sips from it. He’s wearing a suit and tie. The place has been aired, a combination of open windows and multiple assaults from a pine-fresh aerosol spray. The stench of cigarette smoke lingered for most of the previous evening, heavy and acrid – not unlike the atmosphere between himself and Mary.

  But that’s all been taken care of now.

  He came clean with her as they were going to bed, or at any rate made it appear that he was coming clean. First, he apologised – cried and begged her to forgive him. Then he explained. The two things you’re never supposed to do. Who was it said that? Wellington? Disraeli? Anyway, he’s pretty sure it doesn’t apply to wives. What he told her wasn’t untrue, but it was still something of a convenient retrofit. He told her he was in utter despair over this book he’s writing and that that’s why he’d fallen off the wagon. He also told her that Dave Conway’s phone call had been fortuitous. That Dave might just have come up with the perfect solution.

  A bit too neat, perhaps, but it did the job. Besides, where else could Mary go with this? He’d only had a lousy few drinks, after all. It’s not like he was off with someone’s wife, or having his way with one of the hotel maids. Apropos of which, however – he did see a tiny flicker of panic in Mary’s eyes when he told her what Dave Conway had in mind, i.e. that a young journalist would come here t
o the hotel and help him out. He’d said ‘journalist’, not specifying male or female, and he let her stew in that for a while, let her picture some gorgeous young bird with a degree in politics and history from Trinity, someone she’d be forced to leave him alone with for hours on end each day, as they debated, and exchanged views, he inevitably becoming aroused in the presence of such an attractive, brainy young woman, and she, with equal inevitability, falling under the spell of the older man’s undoubted charms.

  But at that point he had her where he wanted her, so he casually dropped in a gender-specific pronoun. ‘He’ll be here at around ten in the morning.’

  He.

  Checkmate.

  Mary was all for it after that, of course – suddenly conciliatory and accommodating. She had stuff to do in town and would get out of his way. Then she apologised. To him. For overreacting. He waved this off.

  The soul of magnanimity.

  Bolger doesn’t feel quite so smug now, though. He didn’t sleep well last night, tossing and turning until the early hours, his mind teeming with partial reconstructions of the previous afternoon. When he got up he felt irritable and had to restrain himself from snapping at Mary. Now he’s afraid he might snap at this young journalist. Even though he’s quite ambivalent about the whole thing anyway.

  Feels Dave Conway maybe railroaded him into it.

  The journalist’s name is Jimmy Gilroy, Dec Gilroy’s son, as it turns out. Of Marino Communications. Dave Conway says he’s perfect for the job – smart and fairly experienced, but not to the extent that he has an ego to fuel, or an agenda to push. The balance is just right and Bolger should have no problems getting him to do what he wants.

  Still.

  Can you trust these bastards? Because what he’s also reticent about is exposing his inner demons – not to mention his indolence, and indiscipline – to a complete stranger …

  For all his notoriety, Bolger considers himself a very private person, even a shy one, and there’s nothing about this situation that he finds reassuring.

  He looks into his coffee.

  And then glances at the time on one of the displays.

  9:47.

  He looks over at the drinks cabinet.

  What do the Italians call it? Caffè corretto. A corrected coffee.