Even before it fell to him altogether, Farrell had unofficially headquartered in Whitewells, coopting upper rooms for the private hair-tearing of women sure they’d been followed from Turf Lodge. From early on, he and the hotel were fated for each other. Amid so many alienated factions, Farrell and this institution were alienated from every faction. Where the one solace of having enemies is having allies, where the one comfort of having parts of town you cannot go to is parts you can, Farrell operated alone, equally unwelcome everywhere, only in this lobby at home. They were exiled lovers, on an island made of islands a flagless galleon, precariously afloat; in their grandiosity and hauteur, both anachronistic and often disliked, for they would not apologize for having a little class in a city that exalted tatty wool caps and outdoor toilets as badges of socialist nobility. Technically Catholic, but declared by all sides open season, together they shipped an indiscriminate aversion in a place that recognized as valid any position but none.
For it was inexplicable how either Whitewells or O’Phelan had persisted. When the first rumors circulated of Farrell’s one-man bomb disposal and dirty-tricks squad, locals laughed and acted surprised when they met him alive at the end of the week. Likewise, Whitewells, festooned up there on Royal Avenue, about the only truly splendid architectural enormity left in all of Belfast besides City Hall itself, had about as good a chance of surviving twenty years of bombings as a Methodist all kitted out in his orange sash pounding a Lambeg drum down the back streets of Ardoyne. With the Provos, the Stickies, the Irps, and a whole smattering of Loyalist paramilitaries from the UFF to the Shankill Butchers on the one side, and Farrell, six four maybe, but a Bergen-Belsen 155, and a ten-floor Baroque bull’s-eye on the other, any shrewd bookie would give O’Phelan and his ridiculous hotel fifty to one. Yet despite the odds, Whitewells had still not been intimidated into the loose chippings and landfill of more acquiescent buildings; and Farrell continued to gangle into her lobby without a gun. Farrell and Whitewells recognized each other as being equally implausible.
Besides, the bar served Farrell after hours and didn’t turf him out when he became—ah—expansive. Brandy and port came in snifters large enough for Farrell’s attenuated fingers, where down the road they’d pour VSOP in a water glass, and when a drink looks like swill it could as well be. As for wine, they didn’t stock the whites you could pour over ice cream. But it was whiskey Whitewells understood best, not just Black Bush but Crested Ten and Jameson’s 1780; Islay malts, Bowmore, The Macallan, Laphroaig. When they made it hot, they warmed the glass and dissolved not too much sugar, pressed cloves neatly into the zest, and squeezed the lemon, and as for proportions, they seemed to understand that the charm of the drink did not rest in its hot water.
Then, the generous character of Whitewells was a credit to Eachann Massey, a man whose problems were matched only by his patience in their wake, one of those exemplars who serve as veritable advertisements for suffering: surely if pain produced such grace it was underrated. His wife had walked into the wrong grocery back in ’71 and inadvertently become one of the vegetables—no, you see, this is just the kind of joke Eachann had been easy with himself. Eachann’s life might have been better off with a few more pounds of explosive under that counter, for she lived three more years propped in the kitchen by the radio, spud eyes, her hands moist and flaccid like overdone cabbage. Berghetta had been a lively, sarky woman, with a bit of a sally to her, a wide turn-of-the-century sway to her hips; it had been a fine marriage, and her death dragged out for months in anguish. Yet though the bomb was Provo, it made no impression on Eachann’s politics. He’d told her not to shop the Shankill anymore, but the stores were cheaper and close by and no one told Berghetta where to go. Besides, she’d not liked what was happening, and Berghetta was one of those people convinced enough of her own world that she was sure if she proceeded as if things were as she wished the universe would conform. If she shopped the Shankill as if it were safe, it would be safe. In a way she was right—if the whole Province refused to acknowledge the lines of battle, they would not exist.
However, they did exist for Eachann, who chose a position before or beyond disgust; Farrell respected such people, admired their ability to take a stand, however flawed, take responsibility for the consequences of that position, even as he loathed the rhetoric and closed-mindedness certainty implied. The shrapnel in his wife’s head had not fractured Eachann’s politics, because they were not reactive. He’d maintained an opposition to the British Empire that was thoughtful and impervious, and he never feared anything would happen to challenge his perspective. As a result, he’d been relaxed and relaxing, for he did not have to constantly flog his ideas to other people in order to sell them to himself.
For what the copious flow of foreign Experts so regularly failed to grasp here was the essential integrity of nearly every point of view. Each party had assembled a puzzle that fit together. The North as object was an ingenious curio which from one side appeared an ostrich; another, a postman; another, a washing machine. That’s why arguments never went anywhere: each picture was true. (In fact, the terror of completely looking at anything from another person’s perspective is that he is always right.) However, in the logical reasoning out of these positions, little girls’ scalps plastered to the sides of houses, kneecaps shattered into their cartilage, a great Victorian market mangled and gave way to slapped-up, slick-bricked shops with no memory of high hats and fine, tiny-handled tea sets but only of polyester knits and Tupperware and destruction. From these reasonable positions sprang unreasonable children, who threw petrol bombs not because they were Republican but because they were bored. Though Farrell may have relinquished the satisfactions of surety, he did cling to one vision: that here the cost of conviction had risen too high, and he refused to have its price exacted from his island.
Hence the saving of the hotel over and over, for Farrell would not have Whitewells taken from his world. He imagined that the bomb that got away would crumble him worst if he remained behind. In his nightmares he never dissolved in a flash of white heat, but was left kicking through another rubble in the city center, as he’d once scuffed through Smithfield Market, finding caps of Crested Ten, shards of snifters, spoons, melted picture frames, smoking tufts of brocade, breathing the stink of materials you’d never think would burn. Maybe it was warped to feel so deeply for a building, but Farrell did understand the affection designed into the neutron bomb. Still, it would take him several of these rescues and a last night to feel the same protective passion for his own life.
Bream taught Farrell all he knew, which is not to say they grew fond of one another. Farrell battled for hardcore information about how to neutralize a trembling fuse through a barrage of philosophy. Though the hemorrhaged corporal made an unlikely mystic, every switch had its tract, like the Salvation Army, where you had to sit through “Rock of Ages” to earn your soup. Even the way Bream referred to bombs suggested religious awe, rarely pronouncing B-O-M-B, but euphemizing, the thing, the device, what you’re dealing with, as the Orthodox avoid the real word for Jehovah. “Remember, no matter how many times you’ve seen the same box, the same size, the same switch, treat every device as a stranger.”
“I treat my own mother as a stranger,” Farrell quipped. “It shouldn’t be so hard with a crate.”
“On the contrary,” said Bream. “It’s bastards like you can get quite matey with crates.”
They worked late, and Farrell was not allowed any whiskey until eight—when Porter would intone, Ye-et I wi-ill be me-e-e-e-erry! like the end of Ramadan. Porter himself wouldn’t touch the stuff before the dot of noon.
“Who’s to say,” Farrell commented two weeks in, “I’m not in the IRA? In which case you’re a right eejit.”
“But you’re not.”
“No—”
“So I’m not.”
End of story.
“Besides,” Bream added the next week, picking up the way they did now, all conversations going on at once. “If you were a Provo, you might have had the courtesy to offer me a few quid.”
Farrell shrugged. “You didn’t ask.”
“You’re a taker.”
This was true. He sozzled Bream’s whiskey every night and never once replenished the cabinet. He sat down to meals and didn’t offer to wash up, didn’t question that the two women prepared them, and didn’t even learn their names. Odd, fresh from such a guilty childhood. But Farrell had indexed the population according to how comfortable they were taking, and how much. The more you took, the more you got. Farrell accepted what was given him not because he’d been a spoiled little boy but because he was clever.
Porter was a regular anthology of grim fairy tales, but Farrell didn’t always find these instructive—like the time Porter leaned over a clock and found the long hand actually touching the contact. The corporal ran. Nothing happened. Later he found that a blob of luminescent paint on the hand had insulated the metal from completing the circuit.
“So?” asked Farrell, annoyed. “You were lucky. Save the pointless anecdotes for the Rose and Crown.”
“There is a point. Never reduce yourself to luck. I shouldn’t have been bending over any clock.”
“Then get a desk job,” Farrell muttered.
“You have GOT to concede to operate remote!”
“I am tired of operating remote!” and though this was one more running argument, the cry came from so deep inside the Catholic that Porter retreated.
When Farrell left Beverly, Bream handed him a package of army pigsticks, all tied up like a pencil box for Farrell’s first day of school. There was no smooching, no promises that Farrell would be in touch. Farrell did hear, not much later, that Porter had snuffed it. His off-license, the Rose and Crown, even the taxi company that slopped the corporal into the back seat evenings—all sent flowers. Farrell didn’t. He felt no more grief over the old man’s death than he would have over his own.
Besides, in Belfast Farrell had his hands full, with a lot to learn. Bream was right, the technology was always evolving; you had to keep pace with the state of the art. “Irish, don’t study history for once!” Bream opined, warning that most of what he’d taught Farrell was outdated. “And every device captured alive is an informant.” For neutralized bombs weren’t simply triumphs but tiny universities you could take back home.
Farrell spent the evenings he was not out on call reconstructing the latest ingenuity, so when the circuit connected a light bulb went on. Good practice, lousy symbolism: explosion as bright idea. His homework grew more demanding by the day. The Provos were getting crafty at packaging, scrambling their tokens of affection with irrelevant wiring, so that radiograms looked like the scribbling of disturbed children. Some of these boxes, too, were so rife with anti-handling devices that getting inside was a Houdini demonstration in reverse, all locked with chains and ropes and handcuffs with a clock ticking.
Still, those were the days, when disposal had a little variety. Lately all you heard was Semtex, Semtex, Semtex—Coca-Cola to British Telecom, every product line suffered monopoly over time. In the latter seventies, you found Frangex, Gelamex, Quarrex, and piquant blends of HME, from the sharp diesel of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil to the fragrant marzipan of nitrobenzene. (ANNI made you dizzy, and Farrell knew British operators who could no longer eat certain Christmas cakes, since the smell of almonds made them sick. Farrell, on the other hand, would walk in bakeries just to breathe. The smell was nostalgic.) Back then commercial was scarce and the opposition was resourceful. “I can walk into any kitchen and make a hole in the room,” Porter had declared. “Soap suds, flour, seltzer; throat lozenges, sugar, cream of tartar, even dried bananas: add ten minutes of education and stir.” Dead on, for Farrell dismantled bombs made of anything from fermented garbage to Styrofoam coffee cups, in casings from a tampon incinerator to a stuffed toy bear.
As a result Farrell’s relationship to ordinary objects electrified. Piles of shoe boxes, a pocketbook by an empty chair, sacks of rice delivered to Chinese restaurants all shivered with menace; mailings from the Ulster Museum threatened more than harassment for checks. Not to mention cars. Farrell couldn’t walk down the street without noting whether the Cortina there was riding low, or pass pubs without knocking on arriving barrels of Tennants, confirming by the cong that they were only full of beer. They weren’t always, either. Farrell’s whole world anthropomorphized. Call it paranoia, insanity, but for Farrell, whose environment had more the ugly tendency to go numb, in whose former life people had become objects rather than the other way around, the animation was delightful, like living in a cartoon where clocks danced, refrigerators talked, the cow jumped over the moon. So did Farrell, if he wasn’t careful.
Those days, too, the business was surprisingly personal, if sometimes infantile—like the wine case left in Whitewells Magic Markered in three-inch-high letters, IRA on one side, TE-HEE, HE-HEE, HO-HO, HA-HA! on the other. He grew to recognize the style of particular bombmakers, each with their explosives of choice, a distinctive twist to their connections, pet booby traps. He gave them names, too: Rat, Mole, Toad, and Mr. Badger. Farrell had favorites. Irrationally, he preferred the better-made bombs. He scorned sloppy wiring. Inaccurate switches made of clothespins and rubber bands filled him with the same disdain he felt toward incompetence anywhere. Elegant devices filled him with admiration. He had to remind himself they were intended to spread old ladies on Fountain Street like sour cream, because prizing open a carton all neatly layered with Semtex and fresh herring, Farrell wanted to shake somebody’s hand.
Farrell had run his private bomb disposal service for five years. However inconceivably, he was still alive and that made him cocky. They had been far more active years than he’d ever have predicted, for potty as locals considered his project at first Farrell found he filled a need. In the mid-seventies, Provisional bombings of other Catholics were not so rare. Weary of the dole, the odd Taig would join the army or RUC, double targets for being Crown forces and turncoats. “Known” informers could consider themselves fertilizer. For a time, Catholic bakers, lorry drivers, even binmen who served the army would sometimes notice fishing line over the gates to their walkways. (The Provos had a faddish side—for a while there, fishing-line trip switches were all the rage, and Farrell would constantly reach into his suit pockets to find stray lengths of nylon tangled with his change.)
Furthermore, in the absence of police protection for large parts of West Belfast, the Provos had assumed law enforcement; their courts were quick, their sentences simple, since—well, you could hardly blame them—they couldn’t maintain a private Long Kesh of their own. Robbery on behalf of the IRA was respectable, but the organization looked askance at lads who asked chip shops for donations to more obscure causes. As a result, Farrell had rescued more than one lowlife hood the world was surely better without, but O’Phelan’s service was ever distinguished by its indiscrimination.
For Farrell’s clients were by no means all Catholic. While at first none too eager to call in a papish bomb man, plenty of Prods were even less anxious to call in the army to complain those Provy wankers had hit their brothel, their unlicensed bookie joint, their cache of Kalashnikovs. Uncooperative victims of Loyalist protection rackets had often preferred Farrell to the RUC likely to press for names, and it was healthier not to turn in these civil servants on either side of the divide. Protestant businessmen sometimes planted bombs on their own premises to collect government compensation; Farrell had twice been asked to disassemble devices by next-door shopkeepers unwilling to inform, but equally unenthusiastic about getting in on the scheme. Besides, as far as the Prods were concerned, why not a Catholic bomb man? The thing goes off, one less Taig.
Just practically, it was sometimes simpler to drag that lanky bastard in, with an unclaimed package on a shoemaker’s bench that could as well be cakes as Togel. The army would ship the whole block up the road and divert traffic and string that bloody white plastic cordon everywhere, all very well if the whole panto was still interesting, which it wasn’t the third time in a week. O’Phelan was sure enough a wog, some even claimed not the full shilling, but he worked well and fast and alone and didn’t fuck about, just sent you down the way, and by the time you’d scoffed a pack of fags he was done, like. The army would tinker for hours with their wretched robot, which never seemed to work, and send it into the shoemaker’s from half a mile away, all for three sticky buns. O’Phelan? He looked in the bag. Took a bite. You bought him a drink, and that was that.
While the Provos were none too delighted to have their gratuities waylaid, they could only applaud Farrell’s undermining of Orange racketeering and compensation fraud, and they took particular pleasure, being themselves keen for panache, in some of O’Phelan’s more outlandish pranks, particularly the ones involving cattle—Paisley’s ram, or the bull he rented for the Apprentice Boys parade. More than one pint was raised up Andytown Road after the Great Bonfire Sabotage of ’79. No one ever figured out what exactly got sprayed or sprinkled or nested into the piles of planks and tires and shipping flats compiled over the months to celebrate William of Orange’s tired old triumph over James at the Battle of the Boyne, but once those monsters went up, this unbelievable reek rose over the whole of the Shankill, to drift in a noxious cloud all the way to City Hall, with a smell so censorious it amounted to political commentary.
Besides, the Provies themselves had found Farrell handy on occasion, while not about to give the Brits the satisfaction, still happy to let O’Phelan risk scrapping with Loyalist car bombs rather than endanger their own personnel. And while the Provisionals were a professional crew whom, on a technical level, Farrell respected, you got the odd gombeen who’d made a bollocks of the science-fair project in his own basement and turned up in Whitewells very pale. Often enough they didn’t want their cell leader to discover the cock-up, and there was that Seamus character a few years back whose gelignite had gone volatile under the floorboards of his own mother’s sitting room—not only the gelignite was weeping. In these cases, no Provo was about to call in to the police: “Gee, we were about to blow two hundred pounds in a hijacked post van outside your barracks on Malone Road, but damned if John didn’t bump the dowel and set the timer ticking. So could you possibly disarm the thing and keep it from decimating an entire block of Beechmont, including my house, or could you take it back with you so the little bundle of joy can explode in the bosom of the RUC, where it belongs?”
For what made Farrell O’Phelan’s service possible was he didn’t tout. In a city where everyone needed protecting from everyone else, there was a place for neutral resort. Surely any number of Farrell’s customers would have turned to the army rather than no one had he remained curled around a bottle of Talisker five more years. But given a choice, it was often a gentler business to dismantle than to betray. And there was no question that a critical contingent of Farrell’s customers would never have informed on their husbands, brothers, lovers if that meant taking the bus the next fifteen years to the Kesh. Sure that poor Sandy Row frazzle terrified by a Smith & Wesson in the house would never have offered any soldier as she had Farrell a hundred quid to burgle the gun from her own linen closet.
Because so many of his tip-offs came from women. Women who were tired of propping for hours in the emergency waiting room of the Royal Victoria, the cushions liver red, as if not to show stains, maybe a son this time, maybe only a cousin, the nurses lovely as can be but strained, running out of compassion, of comprehension, finished even with rage and just onto their jobs because it was the fourth gunshot wound that night. It was with the women that the “party” Estrin observed wore off first; the Royal Victoria is one shithouse party. So once more the lads would be a-scurry all important like, looking for an alligator clip, angry their black turtleneck was in the wash, and it wasn’t hard to get the scoop if you were determined (they weren’t supposed to tell you, but of course you were married, he was your brother). Nor was it hard to imagine later that night, back in the Royal, running out of cigarettes, forced to worry back and forth between the boy and that rattletrap car; the nurses always warned you not to leave it overnight or the joyriders would plow it through checkpoints and you could pick it up in the morning smoking in front of Divis Flats. Well, that was when they crept out as if for milk or some air or a jar and nipped to a phone box or down to Whitewells, to return utterly terrified, and later to suffer the consternation of their men cursing that fuckwit O’Phelan up one side and down the other, come three in the morning to sleep, maybe not well exactly but at least at all.
It was early 1982 and the hunger strikes were over. As in most pauses here, the Province was both relieved and deflated. While Protestants had pretty much ignored the strikes and were now glad to get back to Princess Di, with big color photos of horses and swish outfits on the front page of the Telegraph, Catholics were demoralized. Once more the mood of this city had seemed apocalyptic, promising to climax in—they didn’t even know what; and once more the place had subsided. The Provisionals had won a whole new flush of converts, thanks to the careful, perfectly alienating maneuverings of the British government; Farrell suggested that Britain’s every move in the strikes had been so brilliantly calculated to recruit for the IRA that you had to suspect Margaret Thatcher of being an undercover Irish terrorist herself, and when she died they were sure to plant her in Milltown Cemetery right next to Bobby Sands. However, the new ranks were at a loss—the final hunger strikers had been taken off and were back to potato bread and rashers; all the energy focused at ten funerals began to disperse.
Perhaps it was fear of an era having peaked that had made Farrell such a soft touch for one more job. The strikes had provided the freelancer with busy months, his favorite kind, grabbing taxis and snatching two hours’ sleep at a time; having come into Whitewells the year before, he was more mobile than ever, jubilantly irresponsible with cash. However, even in this frenzy he had begun to feel insidiously irrelevant. Dismantling devices never changed why they were there and why another would spring up tomorrow live as ever down the road. Many of those days were so thick he didn’t even have time for whiskey, and with a clearer head he had eyed the H-blocks, priests and Red Cross whisking in and out as Farrell raveled on the fringe.
For Farrell’s disposal service uncomfortably recalled Uncle Malachi’s vigorous attack on jellyfish in Donegal. At the time Farrell had admired his uncle’s netting in the shallows as a tide of men-of-war forced vacationers from the shore. Uncle Malachi was the first independent disposal man in Farrell’s memory, burying the stinging creatures by the dozen in gelatinous pits. Farrell had shouldered in to dig and fill the six-foot graves of sand. However, the holocaust was ineffectual: amid thousands of men-of-war his uncle barely dented the population. At the end of the week, even at the age of seven, Farrell had to admit his uncle’s self-important trooping of the beach with his net dripping glutinous red strings was silly. The tide brought the creatures in; only the tide could take them away.
So Farrell envied the more celestial bodies, princes of tides; his peripheral mischief seemed childish, failing to satisfy his growing appetite for the center. Farrell may have made a career out of isolation, but less by choice than because he’d been an asthmatic little boy, bound in coverlets while the neighbors played rugby.
The boy who showed up at Whitewells that night, tousled brown hair and sporty red cheeks, must have reminded Farrell of the footballers outside his bedroom window as a child, and of the others later, with anoraks and cigarettes and girls. He couldn’t have an anorak, it wasn’t warm enough, so his mother bundled him even at sixteen in an enormous wool coat that reached below his knees—not unlike the coat he wore now, come to think of it, though so much of what Farrell was at forty-three he’d taken years to grow into. As for cigarettes, he tried one once and it sent him shamefully to his inhaler. And girls? He’d skipped straight to women.
The kid had scuttered across the lobby and clutched Farrell’s sleeve. “Farrell—I mean, Mr. O’Phelan,” he stumbled, breathing fast. “Just the man I need, so you are. For fuck’s sake, clear the bloody hotel. There’s a bomb—”
“Where?” Farrell steadied the boy’s shoulders with both hands. The jacket, he remembered, was oily.
“They put a bleeding gun to my head, mate! Nipped me into a black taxi and some big tube skelps me with a gun, like.” The boy displayed a rather unremarkable wound on his temple. “On Castle Street they stick me with a shopping bag—”
“Skip the yarn, boyo. Where’s the bag now?”
But the kid stubbornly told the story. “Don’t take it wrong, sir, but when they cart me to Whitewells I’m relieved like. This is Mr. O’Phelan’s hotel, I think. I’m to take the bag in and not come out with it, and Lord, Farrell, I’m shaking and I carried it to the roof, I hope that’s all right. I figure it’s safest like? Where you can take it on? ’Cause haven’t I seen you slick as you please snip up a car bomb outside me brother’s in Ballymurphy. I wouldn’t call the frigging Brits if it were a live Pershing missile in this hotel. O’Phelan, that’s what I say to anyone cares to know: you got something that ticks, you call Farrell O’Phelan—”
Right: over the top. How often had Farrell rehearsed the picture since, the shine in those eyes not fear but excitement, a tugging about the mouth where he might have found the twitch of pride, in the breath an intake of triumph. Farrell stooped solicitously to hand the kid a fizzy orange. An orange! The boy’d have half a bottle of Power’s down him in the hour, and barely feel it, too. Wet bleeding-heart meddler, with nothing better to do than cock up his own people, in a tie—Well, see what would happen to that dandy pinstripe in ten minutes’ time. Aye, that was the breath when Farrell remembered it later: as if the boy were taking in lungfuls of smoke, as if so close to Farrell he could smell meat cooking.
Farrell quizzed the proxy with the overenunciation of an uncle probing a three-year-old for what the nasty man had done to him in the park: Did he look in the bag? What did he see? Exactly. Did they tell him to do anything to the bag? Where did he put it, exactly? How heavy was it? Did he smell anything? Did it make any noise? The boy answered with the precision of someone who had looked in the bag a long time.
For, Farrell assured Estrin, there was such a thing as real humility and this was it. How often had he listened in pubs as men chatted up some frumpy clart. They told her she was beautiful and she believed them! Didn’t the wretched girl have a mirror? Yet Farrell the savvy, the suspicious, was only another skirt, wasn’t he, because the boy had chatted him up, isn’t that right? And Farrell wouldn’t see it because he wanted, like any girl, to feel pretty, when really he was about to get fucked.
Relating this, Farrell spoke of himself with contempt, but this time with no aftertaste of self-congratulation, no oh-what-a-worm-am-I. It was one thing to feel I am so competitive, so manipulative, such a good liar; I am a raving self-serving loner, which was all very nice actually, with a big isolated grandeur like Whitewells; quite a different business to feel I am so credulous, I must seem like a prat. Farrell would gratefully take the label of egomaniac over ordinary patsy. He would gladly be a drunk, but not a popinjay, trussed up and easily fooled by a fifteen-year-old boy ogling up at Farrell as if having just won an audience with Michael Jackson. Lord, vanity makes you a sitting duck.
The kid skidded out the door along with the evacuating top-floor guests, perhaps to keep his face from any of Farrell’s surviving friends. Then, what friends? Farrell’s careful dearth of affiliation lightened the consequences of his disposal.
Farrell smoothed into the lift. The gate sang shut. The right angles of the car seemed unusually perfect, each straight edge serene. The brass lattice shone a defiant white-gold; he admired the exquisite symmetry of its diamonds. The compartment resonated with such cold, mechanical accuracy that it was as if he weren’t in a real lift at all, one of those poor approximations most human projects come to, but an earlier, purer stage of design—his feet rested on the draftsman’s table. His own motions, too, achieved this quality—he reached for the button with that same precision he later observed in Estrin when she was half-jarred. The guests would be shuttled down the stairs, so the car sped uninterruptedly up; Farrell stood in the exact middle, so straight it was less like taking an elevator than growing rapidly tall enough to reach the top floor.
Before walking the last flight to the roof, he checked his kit, spreading the heavy leather case open on the floor; there was a loop for every cord, hook, and grip, snips, and one mangled paper clip he’d used for five years. Frankly, aside from pigsticks, it was a treasure trove of ordinary bits, like the desk drawers of a boy.
Up the stairs, his step sounded not loud exactly, but slowed from a single sound to a series of discreet grittings and slidings. His depression of the panic bar dissected, tick-squeal-thunk.
Farrell had often been asked, Isn’t defusion exciting? or, Don’t you get scared? He answered, “No,” unable to explain that you didn’t enjoy the luxury of emotion. Not only did the niceties of what you would order for dinner or whether you wanted a drink slough off, but so did your mother, your country, your age, the date, your sex; certainly your religion was one of the first frills to go, for bomb disposal was a regular short course in nonsectarianism. All that remained was yourself and the device, together so enormous that there was no space left for any feelings about either of you. He had heard of Brits losing their bowels, but only after the job was through. Because at the time you feel nothing. Farrell, who often enough when he felt anything felt rotten, revered this condition, though you were not catatonic—you felt nothing and everything, for he would recognize the exact temperature of that air as it hit his face when he opened the door for the rest of his life, and he could tell Estrin precisely what that roof looked like, down to which slates were loose, which were splattered with pigeon shite. He could tell her the shopping bag by the wall was from Brown Thomas; Treasures of use and beauty/Pretty toys for children gleamed in the light of his torch. Next to the bag was an ancient mattress with a pattern of mildew like the Shroud of Turin. While he did not have any feelings about these things, he did know they were there with a profundity which perhaps amounted to an emotion at that—a seeingness we have no name for.
Into this blinkered concentration one thought did intrude itself; much as Farrell dismissed it as an indulgence, it would not go away. As he crunched closer and the bag mocked, Things for the best-dressed man, the thought insisted itself, petulant. Fair enough; he turned to it at last. But quick now.
Face it, the notion slapped at him. No professional from NIHQ would ever get so close to that bag as to read the ad, save on a fuzzy video screen a block away. The army would use Wheelbarrow, and don’t imagine you couldn’t rustle up a robot if you tried. You could have sent it on the lift, hulking and chunking up those stairs—sure it wouldn’t be as elegant, they’re ungainly monsters, but could do this job as well. And don’t claim you haven’t time to think this through—your right foot is still falling heel to toe. You just don’t want to hear, but you’re going to: because for that matter you could have called the army yourself. No one would be implicated unless the glypes left prints on the putty, and that would be their own fault. So why are you here—from pride? What’s going to happen to your pride if in the next sixty seconds that princely Dublin shopping bag turns into a frog? Answer me, do you want to die? Is that why you drink so much, to dissolve? And if so, why dismantle the bomb? Why not fling matches? Why bother with the bomb at all, why not dive over the edge there—it’s ten stories. Why are you on this roof, boyo?
Farrell was almost angry—his first feeling, which he could ill afford. He bore down on the bag: a simple exercise. The proxy had described a timer and a cigar box with wires—probably one of those 5 p copper dets the Republic had been shipping up by the binful lately. Sounded like commercial, though, which meant the modest size of the bag was no indicator of modest capacity; some of the smallest bombs were the most destructive. But at least commercial didn’t have a mind of its own like HME—commercial went when you told it to. As for switches, he could rule out a tilt, necessarily set once the bag was at rest, which they’d never trust to a proxy; and the kid had described only leaving the bag and streaking downstairs. Likewise, with a clock it wasn’t radio-controlled. He planned, then, to cut in if the wires were accessible, or to plant a disruptor if the mechanism was fully encased.
Farrell shone his torch into the bag. The box was as the boy had said, with the usual Boots clock, whose metal minute hand would hit the contact at twelve. He breathed easier; twenty minutes left. A disruptor was chancier than cutting the detonator free, and commercial wasn’t likely to do anything resentful for being jostled. Gently Farrell rustled the bag open a bit wider, tipping it to get a better look at the sides of the box. The almond scent of Frangex wafted from underneath.
All his information intersected at once: the boy downstairs had talked too long for a fifteen-year-old convinced the building in which he was standing was about to take off for Mars, and the flattery had been too profuse: for the wire straggling from the box was unconnected. More; insulated to its very tip, it had never been connected. The minute hand had not yet moved, nor would it—the clock was not even wound. The proxy was a fake; the timer switch was a fake; but the bomb was not a fake, for in that tiny rustle, with sound so disassembled, there was one sound smallest of all that pierced the drone of traffic below, stiletto: a click. A distinctive click that Farrell had rehearsed up to his ear when laying out his practice toys five years before: the sound of a micro-tilt switch touching its plates. Inside that Brown Thomas bag was a birthday present for Farrell O’Phelan; why, they could as well have included a pink ribbon and a card.
He should have known he would be all right, for he was allowed the moment in which to think he would not be. The bomb that went off he wouldn’t hear; for all his flirtation with explosion, in its most intimate embrace he would see nothing. That was the turn: to want to experience your own death was to want to avoid it. If you tripped your last switch, you never finished its pretty echoes on the plate; if you loved fire, inside a flame its curl and lick were only taken away; if you loved heat, you had to keep clear enough to feel the blaze. To love death was first to love, so that all his attraction to apocalypse was still attraction, live desire, and he’d been a fool, a raving nutter, to assume he actually wanted the Frangex to ignite on any evening—for love of death and dying were not only different; they were antithetical.