THE CITY WAS a great emptiness. He looked out from the balcony of one of the top flats on Charlemont Street. The wide waste ground below him was empty. He closed his eyes and thought about the other flats on this floor, most of them empty now in the afternoon, just as the little bare bathrooms were empty and the open stairwells were empty. He imagined the houses on the long stretches of suburb going out from the city: Fairview, Clontarf, Malahide, to the north; Ranelagh, Rathmines, Rathgar, to the south. He thought about the confidence of those roads, their strength and their solidity, and then he allowed his mind to wander into the rooms of suburban houses, bedrooms empty all day, the downstairs rooms empty all night, the long back gardens, neat, trimmed, empty too for all of the winter and most of the summer. The sad attics empty as well. Defenceless. No one would notice an intruder scaling a wall, flitting across a garden to scale the next wall, a nondescript man checking the back of the house for a sign of life, for alarm systems or a guard dog, and then silently prising a window open, sliding in, carefully crossing a room, watching for an easy exit. He would open a door without making a sound, so alert as to be almost invisible.
He thought of the emptiness of Clanbrassil Street as his mother made her way to the Dock. It was as though the very air around her, the pavement too and the bricks on the buildings, were aware of the danger she posed and got out of her way. Her blonde hair untidy, her house slippers dragging as she slouched towards the public house. A fake gold ring, and fake bangles, and loud gold earrings hitting against the redness of her lipstick, the green of her mascara, the blue of her eyes. His mother turned now to see whether a car was coming so she could cross the road and found, he imagined, the road completely empty, no traffic at all, the world made empty for her deepest pleasure.
His mother, as she neared the public house, knew that the neighbours were afraid of her sudden kindnesses as much as her tantrums and her drunken rages. Thus a smile from her could be as unwelcome as a scowl. Mainly, she managed a look of indifference. In the street as much as the pub, she did not need to threaten, it was known who her son was, and it was believed that his loyalty to her was fierce. He did not know how she had managed to make everyone believe that he would extract revenge for the slightest insult to her. Her threats too were empty, he thought, emptier than anything.
He stood at the balcony and did not move when his visitor, who had approached the building by the hidden side door of the complex, appeared. He allowed, as he did each week, Detective Inspector Frank Cassidy to pass him and enter the small flat, which was owned by his sister-in-law, and used by him only once a week. Cassidy was in his day clothes, his ruddy face displaying a mixture of furtive guilt and businesslike self-confidence. He paid Cassidy every week, a sum either too much or too little, the amount wrong enough to make him feel that Cassidy was fooling him rather than betraying his own side. In return for the money, Cassidy gave him information he mostly knew already. Nonetheless, he always felt that if the forces of law and order were coming close to him Cassidy would somehow make this clear. Cassidy would let him know, he believed, either as a favour, or as a way of making him panic. Or perhaps both. He himself told Cassidy nothing, but he could never be sure that some day his reaction to a piece of information might not be as much as Cassidy would need.
‘They’re watching the Wicklow mountains,’ Cassidy said by way of greeting.
‘Tell them to watch away. The sheep are eating grass. It’s against the law.’
‘They’re watching the Wicklow mountains,’ he said again.
‘From a cosy armchair in Harcourt Street,’ he said.
‘Do you want to hear it a third time?’
‘They’re watching the Wicklow mountains,’ he imitated Cassidy’s midland drawl.
‘And they’ve put a young fellow on to your case. Mansfield is his name and you’ll be seeing a bit of him, I’d say.’
‘You told me that last week.’
‘Yeah, but he’s busy already. He doesn’t look like a Guard. He’s looking for jewellery.’
‘Tell me something new next week.’
When Cassidy left he went back to the balcony and surveyed the grimy world once more. As he turned away, something came to him, a sharp memory from Bennett’s jewel robbery. They had ordered five of the staff, all men, up against the wall when one of them asked if he could use his handkerchief.
He was alone guarding them with a pistol, waiting for the others to round up the rest of the staff. He had told the guy in a fake lazy American accent that if he wanted to blow his nose then he had better take out his handkerchief all right, but if he took out one other thing, he would be dust. He had sounded casual, trying to suggest that he was not afraid to address such a stupid question. But when the guy removed the handkerchief, all the loose change in his pocket had come too, coins rattling all over the floor. The men looked around until he shouted at them to face the wall again quickly. One coin kept rolling; his eyes followed it and, as he bent to pick the other coins up, he moved to pick that up too. Then he walked over and handed the coins to the man who had needed to use his handkerchief. This made him feel calm, relieved, almost happy. He would rob more than two million pounds’ worth of jewellery, but he would give a man back his loose change.
He smiled at that thought as he came back into the flat and took off his shoes and lay on the sofa; he would wait for an hour or two now that Cassidy had gone. He remembered too that in the heat of that robbery one of the women workers had refused to be hustled into the men’s toilet.
‘You can shoot me if you like,’ she had said, ‘but I’m not going in there.’
His three companions, Joe O’Brien with his balaclava on, and Sandy and that other fellow, suddenly not knowing what to do, had turned to him as though he might give orders that they should in fact shoot her.
‘Take her and her friends to the ladies’,’ he had said quietly.
He picked up the newspaper and looked again at the photograph in the Evening Herald of Rembrandt’s Portrait of an Old Woman, asking himself whether it was the painting which had reminded him of that story, or the story which reminded him to look again at the photograph. There was an article beside it saying that the cops were working on a number of leads which could result in the recovery of the painting. The woman in the painting looked stubborn too, like the woman in the factory, but older. The woman who refused to go into the men’s toilet was the sort you would see coming back from bingo with a group of her friends on a Sunday night. She did not look like the woman in the painting at all. He wondered what the connection between them was until he realized that, except for the stubbornness, there was none. The world, he thought, was playing tricks with his mind.
Your mind is like a haunted house. He did not know where the phrase came from, if someone had said it to him, if he had read it somewhere, or if it was a line from a song. The house from which he had stolen the paintings had all the look of a haunted house. Maybe that was how the phrase had occurred to him. Stealing the paintings had seemed like a good idea at the time, but it no longer seemed so. He had stolen the Rembrandt picture which now appeared two months after the robbery on the front page of the Evening Herald, plus a Gainsborough and two Guardis and a painting by a Dutchman whose name he could not pronounce. The robbery had made headlines for days in the newspapers. He remembered laughing out loud when he read about a gang of international art robbers, experts in the field. The robbery had been linked to others which had taken place in recent years on the European mainland.
Three of these paintings were now buried in the Dublin mountains; no one would ever find them. Two others were in the attic of Joe O’Brien’s neighbour’s house in Crumlin. Between them, they were worth ten million pounds or more. The Rembrandt alone was worth five million. He studied the photograph of it in the Herald, but could not see the point of it. Most of it was done in some dark colour, black he supposed it was, but it looked like nothing. The woman in the painting appeared as though she needed cheering up, like some sour old nun.
Five million. And if he dug the painting up and burned it, it would be worth nothing. He shook his head and smiled.
He had been told about Landsborough House and how much the paintings were worth and how easy the job would be. He had spent a long time thinking about alarm systems and even had an alarm system installed in his own house so that he could think more precisely about how they worked. Then one day it had come to him: what would happen if you cut an alarm system in the middle of the night? The alarm would still go off. But what would happen then? No one would repair the system, especially if they thought that the ringing was a false alarm. All you had to do was withdraw when the alarm went off, and wait. Then an hour later when the fuss had died down you could return.
He drove to Landsborough House one Sunday afternoon. It was only a year since the house had been opened to the public; the signposting was clear. He needed to check the alarm system and to look at the position of the paintings and get a feel for the place. He had known that most visitors on a Sunday afternoon would be family groups, but he hadn’t brought his family with him, he did not think that they would enjoy a trip to a big house or tramping around looking at paintings. He liked getting away on his own in any case, never telling them where he was going or when he would be back. He often noticed men on a Sunday driving out of the city with an entire family in the car. He wondered what that felt like. He would hate it.
The house was all shadows and echoes. Only a section – a wing, he supposed the word was – was open to the public. He presumed that the owners lived in the rest of the house, and smiled to himself at the thought that as soon as he could make proper plans they were in for a shock. They were old, he thought, and it would be easy to tie them up. Old people, in his experience, had a tendency to make a lot of noise; their howls were somehow louder or at least more irritating than those of their younger counterparts. He must remember, he thought, to bring strong and effective gags.
At the end of a corridor there was an enormous gallery, and this was where the paintings were hung. He had the names of the most valuable ones written down, and he was surprised at how small they were. If there were no one looking, he thought, he would be able to take one of them and put it under his jacket. He imagined, however, that there was an alarm behind each painting and that the guards, who seemed sleepy, would, if alerted, be able to move very fast. He walked back down the corridor into the small shop, where he bought postcards of the paintings he planned to steal and posters of the Rembrandt, which would be the jewel in his haul. His brother-in-law later framed two identical posters for him.
He relished the idea that no one – no one at all, not the guards or the other visitors or the woman who had taken his money and wrapped the cards and posters for him – had noticed him or would ever remember him.
THE COPS knew he had the paintings. A few weeks after the robbery, a front-page article in the Irish Independent announced that he was the Irish Connection. He presumed that by now they realized there was no international gang with whom he was associated, that he had acted alone, with merely three helpers. These three helpers had now become the problem, as each one believed he was going to get at least a few hundred grand in cash. All three had instant plans for the money, they continued to ask him about it. He had no clear idea how to make these paintings into cash.
Later that evening, two Dutchmen were going to book into a hotel on the north side. They had made contact with him through a man called Mousey Furlong, who used to be a scrap dealer with a horse and cart and now sold heroin to children and teenagers. He shook his head when he thought about Mousey Furlong. He did not like the heroin business, it was too risky, there were too many people in on each deal, and he hated the idea of having strung-out kids arriving at his door, skinny, pale-faced kids with huge eyes. Heroin also turned the world upside down, it meant that men like Mousey Furlong had contact with Dutchmen, and this, he thought, was an unnatural state of affairs.
Mousey spoke of the Rembrandt as though it were a new and lucrative narcotic on the Dublin scene. The Dutchmen were interested in the Rembrandt, Mousey said, but would need to verify it. They had the money available to them in cash and could come up with it once they had seen the painting. They could talk about the rest of the hoard later, Mousey added.
The Dutchmen had to be careful too, he supposed; if they had the money with them it would be easy from a distance to show them the poster, see their money, and then tie them up and walk away with the loot, leaving them to go back to Holland with a lovely framed poster. He did not plan to show the Dutchmen the Rembrandt until he had taken the measure of them; instead, he would show them a Guardi and the Gainsborough first to prove to them that he had the paintings.
A robbery was mostly simple. You stole money and it was instantly yours; you kept it somewhere safe. Or you stole jewellery or electrical goods or cigarettes in bulk, and you knew how to offload them. There were people you could trust, a whole world out there that knew how to organize such an operation. But these paintings were different. This involved trusting people you did not know. What if the two Dutchmen were cops? The best thing to do was wait, then move cautiously, and wait again.
He stood up from the sofa and went to the small window which looked onto the balcony. Then he walked out onto the balcony itself. He half expected to notice a figure lurking in the grim spaces below, a lone man beside a motorbike, but there was no one, that emptiness again, as though the world had been poured out for his amusement, or as a way of frightening him. He supposed that Cassidy told his colleagues about this flat, and maybe they needed no one to watch him since they had Cassidy who, he thought now, gave the money each week to the Garda Benevolent Fund. It was enough to make him sick. He asked himself if it was time to do something about Cassidy, but he would wait until the paintings had been successfully sold. He had learned over the years that it was always wise to tackle one matter at a time.
He went back and lay on the sofa. He stared at the ceiling and thought about nothing. He slept well at night and was never tired at this time of the day, but he felt tired now. He lay on his side, putting a cushion under his head, and, knowing that it would be a few hours before his sister-in-law returned, he slowly faded into sleep.
When he woke he was nervous and uneasy; it was the loss of concentration and control which disturbed him and made him sit up and look at his watch. He had only been asleep for half an hour, but he realized that he had dreamed again about Lanfad, and he wondered if he would ever stop dreaming about it. It was twenty-four years since he had left it.
He had dreamed that he was back there again, being brought in for the first time, between two Guards, arriving, being shown along corridors. But it was not himself as a thirteen-year-old boy, it was him now, after all the years of doing what he liked, being married, waking in the morning to the sound of children, watching television in the evenings, robbing, making plans and deals. And what unsettled him in the dream was the feeling that he was happy to be locked up, to have order in his life, to keep rules, to be watched all the time, not to have to think too much. As he was led through those corridors in the dream, he had felt resigned to it, almost pleased.
He had felt like this for much of the time when he served his only adult sentence in Mountjoy Jail. He had missed his wife and their first child, and missed going where he liked, but he had not minded being locked up every night, he enjoyed having all that time to himself. Nothing unpredictable occurred and that made him content; the other prisoners knew not to come too close to him. He hated the food, but he paid no attention to it, and he hated the screws, but they knew to be careful of him as well. He made sure when his wife came on visits once a week that he gave nothing away, no emotion, no sense of how lonely and isolated he sometimes was. Instead they spoke about what would happen when he would get out, as she slowly put her finger into his mouth, a finger she had just wriggled around inside herself, so that he could take in the smell of her, and hold it, letting her talk about the neighbours and her family while she made it fresh again for him. He touched her hand so that the smell might stay with him for the rest of the day.
His first days in Lanfad were the ones which lingered most in his mind. Perhaps because it was in the midlands and he had never been outside the city before. He was stunned by the place, by how cold and unfriendly it was and how he would have to stay there for three or four years. He had allowed himself to feel nothing. He never cried and when he felt sad he made himself think about nothing for a while; he pretended that he was nowhere. That was how he dealt with his years at Lanfad.
In the time he was there he was beaten only once and that was when the entire dormitory was taken out one by one and beaten on the hands with a strap. Usually, however, he was left alone; he kept the rules when he knew there was a danger of being caught. He realized that it was easy to slip out on a summer’s night as long as you waited until everything was quiet and you chose the right companion and you did not go too far. He learned how to raid the kitchen and made sure not to do it too often in case they set a trap for him. As he thought about it now, lying back on the sofa, he realized that he had liked being on his own, standing apart from the others, never the one caught jumping from bed to bed, or locked in a fight, when the brother in charge entered the room.
On one of his first nights there, there was a fight in the dormitory. He heard it starting, and then something like: ‘Say that again and I’ll burst you.’ This was followed by cries of encouragement. So there had to be a fight; there was too much energy in the dormitory for something not to happen. Although it was dark, you could make out shapes and movements. And he could hear the gasping and the pushing back of beds and then the shouting from all around. He did not stir. Soon, it would become his style not to move, but at this early stage he had not developed a style. He was too uncertain to do anything. Thus when the light was turned on and one of the older brothers, Brother Walsh, arrived, he did not have to scramble back into his bed like the rest of them, but still he felt afraid as the brother loped menacingly about the dormitory. There was now an absolute silence. Brother Walsh spoke to no one but walked around the beds looking at each boy as though he would pounce on him. When the brother looked at him, he did not know what to do. He met his gaze and then looked away and then back again.
Eventually, the brother spoke.
‘Who started it? Stand out who started it.’
No one replied. No one stood out.
‘I’ll pick two boys at random and they’ll tell me who started it, they’ll tell me all right, and it’ll be worse for you now, whoever started it, if you don’t stand out.’
The accent was strange. He could not think what to do except pretend fiercely that this was not happening at all. If he were picked on, he would not know what to say. He did not know anyone’s name, and had not seen whoever it was who had started the fight enough to identify him now. Also, he did not know what the rules were, if it were agreed among the boys never to tell on anyone else, no matter what. He was puzzled as to how all the rest of them had learned each other’s names. It seemed impossible. As he thought about this, he looked up and saw that two boys were now standing beside their beds, their eyes cast down. One of them had the top of his pyjamas torn.
‘Right,’ Brother Walsh said. ‘The two of you will come with me.’
The brother went back to the door and turned the lights out, leaving pure silence behind. No one even whispered. He lay there and listened. The first sounds were faint, but soon he heard a shout and a cry and then the unmistakable sound of a strap, and then nothing and then a howl of pain. He wondered where it was happening, he thought it must be in the corridor outside the dormitory, or the stairwell. Then the beating became regular with constant crying out and yelping. And soon the sound of voices shouting ‘No!’ over and over.
Everyone in the dormitory remained still; no one made a sound. It did not stop. Finally, when the two boys opened the door and tried to make their way to their beds in the darkness, the silence became even more intense. As they lay in bed crying and sobbing, the other boys did not make a sound. He wished he knew the names of the boys who had been punished and he wondered if he would know them in the morning, if they would look different because of what had happened.
In the months which followed it seemed to him unbelievable that the boys around him could lose any sense of caution and forget what had happened that night. Fights would regularly break out in the dark dormitory and boys would shout and get out of bed and leave themselves wide open to being caught when the lights came on and Brother Walsh or some other brother, or sometimes two brothers together, stood there watching as everyone scampered back to bed. And each time the main culprits would be made to own up and then taken outside and punished.
Slowly, the brothers noticed him; they realized that he was not like the others and gradually they began to trust him. But he never trusted them, or allowed any of them to become too friendly with him. He learned instead how to look busy and seem respectful. In his time there he never had a friend, never let anyone come close to him. At the beginning, when he had trouble with Markey Woods, a bloke older than him and bigger, he had to put thought into how to deal with him.
It was always easy to get a companion, someone who would work for you if you offered them protection and attention. He found a wiry fellow called Webster, but he did not tell Webster what he had in mind. He told him to let Markey know that there were cigarettes hidden in the bog, a good distance from the school but within its grounds. He let Markey threaten Webster that if he did not lead him to the hidden cache, he would beat him up. Thus he found himself walking with Markey and Webster towards the outer and remote limits of the Lanfad estate. He had primed Webster to run at Markey at an agreed signal, simply knock him to the ground. He had been experimenting with knots and ropes, having stolen a length of rope from the workshop, so he knew how to tie Markey’s legs quickly and then extend the rope to his hands and tie them too. This would be the difficult part, but with his legs tied, Markey could struggle all he liked, he would not have a chance.
All this took more time than he had imagined as Markey struck blow after blow at Webster, causing him to become afraid, almost useless. Eventually he pinned Markey down and got the knot around one wrist, jerking it so that it almost broke his arm and then turning him face down so he could tie his wrists together. He had worked out that there was no point in trying to beat Markey up. It would mean nothing to him. Which was why he had brought a blindfold, and a small pair of pliers he had also found in the workshop. Once the blindfold was on, he turned Markey on his back and told Webster to start kicking him in the ribs, and as Webster was doing this with relish Markey had his mouth wide open roaring threats at him.
He studied Markey’s mouth for a second as he continued to roar, and then he moved in quickly with the pliers gripping hard on one of Markey’s upper back teeth on the left-hand side. Even though Markey instantly clamped his mouth shut in shock, the pliers held fast.
He began to loosen and pull at the tooth, worried now about the noise, the hysterical set of screams coming from Markey. He knew that the pliers had precisely a single tooth in their grip, but he could not understand the length of time it was taking to loosen and extract the tooth. In his own single visit to a dentist, when he had realized how simple and effective this would be, the tooth had come out very quickly.
Suddenly, instead of putting pressure on the pliers and trying to loosen the tooth, he yanked the tooth back and forward and then he pulled the pliers hard. Markey let out a howl. It was finished. The tooth was out. Webster, when he came to examine it, seemed almost as pale as Markey.
He took off Markey’s blindfold and showed him the tooth. He knew that it was important now not to let Markey go in a hurry, to keep him tied up, to let him bleed a bit as he talked to him quietly, letting him know that if anyone in the school ever touched him or Webster again, he would take out another tooth until Markey would only have gums left. But, he explained to Markey, if one of the brothers ever got word of what had happened, he would not take out teeth, he would go for Markey’s mickey. Did he understand? He moved the pliers down between Markey’s legs and tightened them around his penis. He spoke gently as Markey sobbed. Did he understand, he asked him. Markey nodded. I can’t hear you, he said. Yes, Markey said, yes, I understand. He released the pliers and untied Markey, forcing him to walk back to the school with them as though they were friends.
From then on, the other boys in Lanfad were very afraid of him. Soon he felt unthreatened. He could, if he wanted, stop fights, or take the side of someone who was being bullied, or let a boy depend on him for a while. But it was always clear that this meant nothing to him, that he would always be ready to walk away, to drop someone, including Webster, whom he had to threaten in order to stop him from being his friend.
The brothers allowed him to work out on the bog and he loved that, the silence, the slow work, the long stretch of flatness to the horizon. And walking home tired at the end of the day. Then in his last year they allowed him to work in the furnace, and it was when he was working there – it must have been in the winter of his last year – that he realized something he had not known before.
There were no walls around Lanfad, but it was understood that anyone moving beyond a certain point would be punished. In the spring of each year, as the evenings became longer, boys would try to escape, making for the main road, but they would always be caught and brought back. All the cottages in the area seemed to have figures posted at the windows ready to report escaping boys to the brothers. Once, in his first year, two such boys were punished with the whole school watching, but that did not appear to deter others who wished to escape as well. If anything, it egged them on. He found it hard to understand how people would escape without a plan, a definite way of getting unnoticed to Dublin, and maybe then to England.
That last winter two boys who were a year or two older than he was had had enough. They were in trouble almost every day and seemed afraid of nothing. He remembered them because he had spoken to them once about escaping, what he would do and where he would go. He became interested in the conversation because they said they knew where to get bicycles, and he believed that this was the only way to escape, to start cycling at midnight or one in the morning and go straight to the boat. He added, without thinking, that before he left he would like to stuff one or two of the brothers into the full blazing furnace. It would be easy enough to do, he said, if you had two other guys with you and you gagged the brother and moved fast. The blaze was strong enough, he said, that there would not be a trace of them. They would go up in smoke. If you were lucky, you could stuff four or five of them where the fuel normally went. No one would know a thing about it. You could start with one of the doddery old fellows. He said this in the same distant, deliberate way he said everything. He noticed the two boys looking at him uneasily as it struck him that he had said too much. As he stood up abruptly and walked away, it struck him that he should not have done this either. He was sorry that he had spoken to them at all.
In the end the two boys escaped without bicycles and without a plan and they were brought back. He heard about it as he was bringing a bucket of turf up to the brothers’ refectory. Brother Lawrence stopped him and told him. He nodded and went on. At supper he saw that the two boys were still not there. He supposed that they were being kept somewhere. After supper, as usual, he went down to the furnace.
It was a while later, close to lights-out time, when he was crossing the path to get more turf, that he heard a sound. He knew instantly what it was, it was the sound of someone being hit and crying. He could not make out at first where it was coming from, but then he understood that it was happening in the games room. He saw the lights were on, but the windows were too high for him. He walked back stealthily to the furnace to fetch a stool; he put it down under the window. When he looked in he saw that the boys who had tried to escape were face down on an old table with their trousers around their ankles and they were being beaten across the buttocks by Brother Fogarty with a strap. Brother Walsh was standing beside the table holding down with his two hands the one who was being beaten.
Suddenly, as he watched this scene, he noticed something else. There was an old light-box at the back of the games room. It was used to store junk. Now there were two brothers standing in it, and the door was open so they had a clear view of the two boys being punished. He could see them from the window – Brother Lawrence and Brother Murphy – realizing that the two brothers administering the punishment must have been aware of their presence too but perhaps could not see what they were doing.
They were both masturbating. They had their eyes fixed on the scene in front of them – the boy being punished, crying out each time he was hit with the strap. He could not remember how long he watched them for. Before this, he had hated it when boys around him were punished. He had hated his own powerlessness amid the silence and the fear. But he had almost come to believe that these punishments were necessary, part of a natural system of discipline in which the brothers were in charge. Now he knew that there was something else involved, something which he could not understand, which he could not bring himself to think about. The image had stayed in his head as though he had taken a photograph of it: the two brothers in the light-box did not look like men in charge, they looked more like old dogs panting.
HE LAY BACK on the sofa knowing that he was going over all this again as a way of not thinking about the paintings. He stood up and stretched and scratched himself and then walked out onto the balcony again. Something beyond him, he felt, was beckoning; he wanted to leave his mind blank, but he was afraid. He knew that if he had done the robbery alone he would dump the paintings, burn them, leave them on the side of the road. When he was finally let out of Lanfad, he brought with him the feeling that behind everything lay something else, a hidden motive perhaps, or something unimaginable and dark, that the person on display was merely a disguise for another person, that something said was merely a code for something else. There were always layers and beyond them even more secret layers which you could chance upon or which would become more apparent the closer you looked.
Somewhere in the city, or in some other city, there was someone who knew how to offload these paintings, get the money and divide it up. If he thought about it enough, if he sat back on the sofa and concentrated, would he know too? Every time he considered it, however, he came to a dead end. There had to be a way. He asked himself if he could go to the others who took part in the robbery – and they were so proud of themselves that night, everything had gone perfectly – and explain the problem. But he had never explained anything to anyone before. Word would get around that he was weakening. And also, if he could not work this out, then they certainly could not. They were only good at doing what they were told.
He studied the waste ground in front of the flats. There was still nobody. He wondered if the cops had decided that they did not need to watch him, that he would make mistakes now without any encouragement from them. Yet that was not how their minds worked, he thought. When he saw a cop, or a barrister, or a judge, he saw the brothers in Lanfad, somebody loving their authority, using it, displaying their power in a way which only barely disguised hidden and shameful elements. He walked back into the flat and over to the sink in the kitchen, turned on the cold tap and splashed his face with water.
Maybe, he thought, it was all simpler than he imagined. These Dutchmen would come, he would take them to see the paintings, they would agree to pay him, he would drive them to where they had left the money. And then? Why not just take the money from them and forget about the paintings? But the Dutchmen must have thought of that too. Perhaps they would threaten him and make clear that, if he broke any agreement, they would have him shot. Nonetheless, he was not afraid of them.
He could not decide if the Dutchmen were a trap or not. He sat down and found that he would do anything now to avoid thinking that led to no conclusion. He trusted no one. That thought gave him strength, and he went on to feel almost proud that he felt love for no one – maybe love was not the word – but he felt no need to protect anyone. Except, he thought, his daughter Lorraine, she was two now. Everything about her was beautiful and he looked forward to waking in the morning and finding that she was awake too and waiting for him to come and pick her up. He liked it when she was asleep upstairs. He wanted her to be happy and secure. He did not feel this about his other children. He had felt the same, however, about his younger brother Billy, but Billy was killed in a robbery, stabbed with a knife and left to bleed to death. So he supposed that he did not really feel much about Billy anymore, he knew how to stop his mind thinking about him.
If he could get rid of these paintings he would be fine, he thought. He could go back to normal. Maybe he should take a risk with these Dutchmen, try to work out a way to get the money from them in exchange for the paintings without any further complications. But, he thought, he mustn’t do that. He must be very careful.
HE DID NOT drink and did not like bars, but the hotel he had told Mousey to put the Dutchmen into had a quiet bar and a good side entrance close to the car park. Nonetheless, he felt unsafe, watching a loudly dressed American woman at the bar ordering a drink and wondering for a moment if she were a cop. He caught her eye and glanced away as quickly as he could. From the cops’ point of view, he thought, it made sense to send a woman dressed like an American into the bar. It would also make sense for Mousey Furlong to make a deal with the cops, set this up as a first step towards rehabilitation. Soon, he thought, Mousey’s wife would open a crèche or a posh off-licence with all his heroin money and they would raise funds for charity when Christmas came round. On the other hand, the American woman might just be a tourist and Mousey might not have changed very much.
When the two Dutchmen came, he recognized them instantly. He had never been out of Ireland in his life and he had never, to his knowledge, met anyone Dutch before. But these were Dutch, he thought, they just looked Dutch. They could not have been anything else. He nodded at them. They would recognize him, too, he supposed.
He wrote on a piece of paper ‘Stay here’ and handed it to the skinnier one as soon as he sat down. He put his finger to his lips. Then he walked out into the car park and sat into his car. That would give them something to think about, he imagined, Dutch or not. The car park was empty. He watched out for the slightest movement, but no one appeared, no car came to park. He would wait here for a while more, having decided to resist the temptation to go and check out the front of the hotel and the lobby. It was important, he knew, to remain calm, to stay hidden, to make the minimum number of moves necessary. He did not play chess, but he had watched someone once playing the game on television and he had liked how slow and careful and calculating they were.
They were both drinking coffee when he returned. He waited until the barman was out of sight and wrote on a piece of paper: ‘Is the money in Ireland?’ One of them nodded. ‘So?’ he wrote. ‘We need to see,’ came the reply. Then, having checked again that the barman was not within hearing distance, he said in an audible voice: ‘You need to check the paintings, I need to check the money.’
He tried to look controlling and menacing and wondered if the Dutch had a different way of doing this. Maybe, he thought, wearing glasses and being skinny and drinking coffee meant tough in Holland. They looked, in any case, professional. He motioned them to follow him out to the car park. He drove first to the North Circular Road and then down through Prussia Street to the quays. He crossed the river and made his way to Crumlin. No one in the car spoke. He hoped that his two companions did not know what part of the city they were in.
He drove down a side street and then a lane, turning into a garage whose door had been left open. He got out of the car and pulled down the sliding door of the garage. They were now in darkness. When he found a light and turned it on, he signalled to the Dutchmen to stay in the car. He went out of a door into a small yard and tapped on the kitchen window. Inside, three or four children sat around a table, a woman stood at a sink; the man standing beside her turned and said something. It was Joe O’Brien. The children rose at once and took their plates and cups and left the room without looking at the window. Joe, he realized, had them well trained. The woman soon gathered up her things as well and left the kitchen.
Joe O’Brien opened the door and walked out into the yard without speaking. They crossed to the garage and took a look at the Dutchmen through a small, dirty window. Both men were sitting motionless on the bonnet of the car.
He nodded to Joe O’Brien, who went into the garage and motioned to the two Dutchmen to follow him. They went into the lane and through a door further along to the yard of the neighbouring house. There was an old man at the kitchen table reading the Evening Herald who stood up to let them in when Joe tapped at the window. He went back to reading the paper straight away. They closed the door and walked past him and went upstairs into the back bedroom.
He did not know whether the uncomfortable look they wore was a fundamental part of the Dutchmen, or if they looked uncomfortable just now, and it was unusual. They peered into the upstairs bedroom as though they had been allowed one glimpse of outer space. He was tempted to ask them if they had never seen a bedroom before as Joe put a ladder against the small opening in the ceiling which led to the attic, climbed up and came down with two paintings – the Gainsborough and one of the Guardis. The two Dutchmen looked intensely at the paintings. No one spoke.
One of them took out a notebook and wrote: ‘Where is the Rembrandt?’
He took the notebook brusquely and wrote: ‘Pay for these two. If there are no hitches, we get you the Rembrandt tomorrow.’ The Dutchman took the notebook back and wrote: ‘We are here for the Rembrandt.’ Instantly, while the Dutchman still held the notebook, he wrote: ‘Are you deaf?’ Both Dutchmen read this carefully as though it had some deep and hidden meaning, knitting their brows in unison, their expressions hurt and puzzled.
He took the notebook again and wrote: ‘The money?’ When he handed the notebook back to the Dutchman, he noticed that the next remark was written in much clearer handwriting: ‘We need to see the Rembrandt.’ He snatched the notebook and wrote quickly, almost illegibly: ‘Buy these paintings first.’ The other Dutchman now took the notebook: ‘We came here to see the Rembrandt,’ he wrote in writing like a child’s. ‘Since there is no Rembrandt, we have to get instructions. We will get in touch again soon, via Mousey.’
Suddenly, he realized that these two men were serious about the rules which had been established. He had agreed to show them the Rembrandt and now he had broken the rules. It was done for the sake of caution. He would not weaken or adjust his tactics, but move slowly, taking as few risks as possible. They knew now that he was in possession of the other paintings from the heist, and he presumed that they were not being followed by the cops, although he could never be totally sure about that. Even though, by their sullenness, they suggested that the deal was in danger, he was sure that he had done the right thing, aware all of the time that Joe O’Brien was watching him. He felt an urge to grab one of the guys and tie him up and tell the other guy to go and get the money or they would kill his companion, but he had a sense that these two Dutchmen had that eventuality and many other such possibilities covered. They did not themselves act on impulse, but he felt that they would know what to do should he go down that road. It was, he thought, a mistake dealing with foreigners, but there was no one in Ireland with either the money or the inclination to pay ten million for a few paintings.
They both, as they walked out through the house, passing its owner in the kitchen, remained calm. It was their calmness which disturbed him, held him back, made him think. And then it made him unable to think. He could not tell anything about these two men. It was hard to imagine they had ever spent time in jail, unless Dutch jails taught skin care and inscrutable manners. Whoever sent them, he thought, chose them not only for their calmness, which must, he believed, mask a toughness, but also for their skill in knowing the difference between a real Rembrandt and a fake. Maybe that is all they knew, he thought, and they were going to leave the rest to real criminals. Maybe they were art professors, indeed they had the same look as some of the men who came on television to discuss the value to humanity of the paintings he had stolen.
He did not want the Dutchmen to go without some further promise or enticement. He signalled that Joe O’Brien would take them back to their hotel and then he asked for the notebook and he wrote: ‘This day next week, I will have the painting here.’ One of the men wrote in reply: ‘We will have to get instructions.’ He nodded to Joe O’Brien and threw him the keys of the car.
He wondered now if it might be a good idea to get Joe to frighten the two other accomplices in the robbery, let them know they were not being cheated or anything like that, but let them know also that they had best lower their expectations for quick money, and make clear to them that any demands or even requests from them for cash would be dealt with briskly.
Joe O’Brien was the only man he had ever worked with who would always do precisely what he was told, who would never ask questions, never express doubts, never turn up late. He also understood things, such as wiring and locks, explosives, and the engines of cars. When he had wanted to blow up Kevin McMahon the barrister, send him flying into kingdom come, Joe O’Brien had been the only man he approached and told about it.
That was when his brother Billy was up on robbery charges. He had sat in the court watching McMahon strut and prance for the prosecution and win a conviction on the basis of trumped-up evidence. And then when Billy was up for murder, McMahon became very personal about Billy’s entire family, saying things in court which were none of anyone’s business and must have come from Billy himself or from his mother or from someone who knew them all, knew too much about them all. McMahon seemed to be not just doing his job, but relishing it.
He paid good money to have two members of the jury frightened enough to do their duty and have Billy let off, but he decided, as he watched McMahon sum up, that he would get him, as a warning to other barristers of his kind and maybe a few judges as well. It would have been easy to shoot him, or have him beaten up, or burn his house down, but instead he decided to blow McMahon sky-high when he was in his car, to remind everyone that more people than the IRA could put bombs in cars. It happened in the North all the time; the aftermath, he thought, always looked good on television. It would give the rest of the legal profession something to think about.
Even now, he smiled when he thought about it. How foolish these people were! The more they were paid, the more they were careless. McMahon left his car every night in the driveway of his house. And, once more, the emptiness helped. Between three and four in the morning on weekdays nothing moved in those streets. It was as though the dead were sleeping. There was silence and you could do anything. It had taken Joe O’Brien five minutes to put the device under the car and attach it to the engine.
‘It’ll blow up the minute he starts the ignition,’ Joe O’Brien had told him. He had never asked why McMahon was being blown up. He never displayed any form of curiosity. He would do anything. He wondered if Joe were like that at home. If his wife asked him to do the washing-up, or stay in babysitting while she sat in the pub, or let her stick her finger up his arse, would he just say yes.
In the end the bomb had not gone off when McMahon started the car, but about fifteen minutes later when the barrister had reached a busy roundabout. It had not killed McMahon, merely blown his legs off, and this, he thought, was a better result as McMahon hopping around the Four Courts on wooden legs was a daily reminder to his kind what could so easily happen to them too. McMahon dead could be quickly forgotten.
He remembered meeting Joe O’Brien a few days later and neither of them mentioning the car or McMahon for a while, and then him saying to Joe that the entire affair, denounced by the Taoiseach as a threat to democracy, gave the phrase ‘getting legless’ a whole new meaning. O’Brien had just grinned for a moment, but said nothing.
THE DAY AFTER the Dutchmen had seen the first two paintings, Mousey Furlong came to visit him. Mousey wore a sad look, like a priest disappointed by the amount of sin in the world.
‘The Dutch,’ he said, ‘are different. They listen to what you say and they think that you’ll do what you say, down to the letter. That’s the Dutch. They have no imagination.’
‘When are they coming back?’ he asked Mousey.
‘It will take a lot to get them back,’ Mousey said.
‘What will it take?’
‘And don’t underestimate them either,’ Mousey said. ‘One of those gentlemen yesterday could kill you in one second with his bare hands. He’s the best in the business.’
‘Which of them?’ he asked Mousey.
‘That’s the problem,’ Mousey said. ‘I don’t know.’
‘And who’s the other?’
‘He’s the art expert and he wasn’t too impressed with the art you showed him. It was worth fuck-all.’
‘How do you know these guys are straight?’
‘Because they’re Dutch,’ Mousey said. ‘If a Dutch guy is going to stick a knife in your back, he’ll let you know a few weeks in advance, and there’s nothing you can do because on the day his knife will meet your back. That’s the Dutch. If they say Monday they mean Monday, if they say they’ll pay then they’ll pay and if they want to see the Rembrandt, then there’s no need for me to spell it out, is there?’
‘Who wants the painting?’
‘One of the top men in the drugs trade wants to be the only person in the world, barring a few close friends, who will ever lay eyes on it,’ Mousey said. ‘That’s the Dutch. They are not like us. They want this painting the way one of us might want a week in the Canaries or a great big ride or a hacienda in Baldoyle.’
TWO DAYS before he was due to present the Rembrandt to the Dutchmen, he had his weekly meeting with Detective Inspector Frank Cassidy. He noticed, as he watched him approach, that Cassidy had more bounce in his step than usual. He was carrying a briefcase.
‘Have you been promoted?’ he asked. ‘Are you going to drive the Taoiseach around his constituency?’
‘Are you sure we’re safe here?’ Cassidy asked.
‘You’re the cop,’ he said. ‘I’m just a poor criminal.’
Cassidy walked into the flat.
‘You’re in trouble,’ he said.
‘They found Shergar?’
‘I mean trouble,’ Cassidy said. ‘There’s a tout in your camp.’
‘I don’t have a camp,’ he said.
‘You do,’ Cassidy said and took a small cassette player from his briefcase. He looked around for somewhere to plug it in.
‘You remember Mansfield?’ Cassidy asked as he plugged out the television and plugged in the cassette player.
‘The fellow who thinks he doesn’t look like a cop? The chap who looks like a cop trying to look like a North Side hippie?’
‘Yeah,’ Cassidy said. ‘Him.’
‘What about him? He’s been fiddling his expenses again?’
‘No, he has a new friend, a drinking companion.’
Cassidy fiddled with the tape.
‘What’s that got to do with me?’
‘He’s been drinking a lot with his new friend,’ Cassidy said.
‘Malcolm MacArthur?’
‘No.’ Cassidy stood up and looked at him evenly. ‘Mansfield has been drinking with your mother.’
Immediately, his mind fixed on some point in the distance, something both remote and precise. He smiled for a moment.
‘I hope he’s paying, because I’m broke.’
‘Yeah, he’s paying,’ Cassidy said.
He had shot a few guys and, once, stabbed a man who later died, but he had never strangled anyone. He wished now he had learned that skill.
‘Do you want to hear it?’ Cassidy asked.
‘That’s what I pay you for.’
‘Sit down so.’
At first there was nothing, the sound of static and something hitting against the microphone and then complete silence broken by the waves of the cassette going around in the cheap machine.
‘Turn it up,’ he said.
Cassidy put his hand out signalling to him to be quiet. Slowly, a voice could be heard, a woman’s voice, but he could not make out any words. Then it was clear that someone was fumbling with the machine, moving it, bringing it closer until his mother’s voice could be heard and each word understood. She had been drinking.
‘I don’t see him all the time. He does be busy, oh he’s busy, I’ll say that much for him now, he’s never idle like some are idle. And this is a rough area, it’s rough and it’s tough, and I’d like to say that I have lovely neighbours but I don’t. The rats live all around. They shouldn’t be talking to the Housing Department of the Corpo, but the rodent department, because they are rats. And they all know that if one of them even let their dogs do a poo in front of my house, my son would deal with them. And it would be hard and heavy. If they looked at me sideways, they’d know what would be coming. So I feel very safe here.’
The sound then became muffled again. Somebody was moving. He could hear drink being poured into a glass, her large gin he supposed, and then the clink of ice cubes and then a more generous pouring of tonic. And then the noise of a can of beer being opened. And her voice again unclear as she moved away from the hidden microphone and, after a while, easy to understand when she sat back in her chair. She was in mid-sentence.
‘… that’s where things are safe and there’s no Guard knows his way around there. Sure, he’s been going there all his life. He’d know his way around it in the dark. Oh, the things that are buried down there! You could run the country on it. Sure they can look away. They could look every day of the year and they’d find nothing. He’s a quiet fellow, you know. No smoking. Never took a drink in his life. And you’d never notice him. He’s a bit like a fox. And that’s his nature and there’s nothing anyone can do. All the same I don’t know where I’d be without him. His other brother was no good. Oh no good! Billy was no good for anything.’
He could imagine her now taking a gulp of her drink and staring into the false gas fire as though life had made her sad. In the silence that followed the tape came to an end.
‘That’s it,’ Cassidy said. ‘I can’t leave the tape with you. I’ll have to bring it back before it’s missed.’
‘Did they tell you to play it for me?’ he asked.
‘Who?’
‘The bosses.’
‘I’m doing you a favour,’ Cassidy said. ‘Your ma is a squealer.’
‘Thanks,’ he said, and handed Cassidy the money in an envelope. Cassidy plugged out the cassette player and put it back into his briefcase.
HE ALWAYS parked the three cars he used in unlikely places not associated with him or his like. Early that evening he checked he was not being followed. He walked into a city centre car park and then waited, out of the sight of the CCTV cameras, on the top floor, which was open to the sky and often empty, to see if anyone would appear. When, after ten minutes, he had not been disturbed he walked down the stairs and out into the street, and caught a taxi to where one of his cars was parked. That night he drove out to the mountains, stopping regularly and pulling into a siding to see that no one was coming behind him. It was only nine thirty. He wanted to be back early enough in the city not to be noticed. Once off the main road there was no traffic; any car on the lookout would see him now, he would have to be vigilant, ready to turn back if there was the slightest suspicion that he was being followed. When he finally stopped the car and turned off the ignition, there was absolute silence, a silence that came to him like power. If anyone approached or moved, he would hear them. Until then, he was alone.
He could work in peace. He had a shovel and a large torch hidden under the back seat of the car. He knew where he was, everything was carefully marked. As long as he was alive these paintings could easily be brought back to the city. Were anything to happen to him, they would never be found, they would remain unseen for ever. Joe O’Brien knew the general area where they were buried but not the exact spot. He walked up a small clearing until the ground to his left began to slope away. Then he counted seven trees and then turned right and counted five more, and just beyond that there was a rough space overhung by trees.
Even though the ground was soft, the digging was not easy. He stopped after each heave and listened for sounds, but he heard only stillness and a mild wind in the trees. Soon, he was out of breath from digging. But he enjoyed working like this when he did not have to think and let anyone else bother him. He wished he could do this all night so that his mother’s voice could be erased from his memory. It was not the voice on the tape that seemed to seep through the great guard he had placed around himself. It was an earlier voice, more shrill and more insistent, a voice that he had managed most of his life never to think about or allow into his conscious day.
There were strange gaps when he tried to remember that morning in the court, the time the judge sentenced him to complete his education at Lanfad. For example, he had no idea how he got to the court. He thought that he must have been collected by a Garda car, but he had no memory at all of that. He did not think that he went there by himself, and he had no memory either of a summons, or how he knew that he must go to court that day and not any other. His life at home in the short period before Lanfad was a blank to him now as well. He had no memory whatsoever of his mother mentioning the court or the trouble he was in.
What he remembered came after the sentence as the Guards got ready to lead him away. No other defendant had yet appeared in the dock, the social workers and the probation officers and the solicitors were busy with files and papers. The judge was waiting. All of this was clear in his mind. There was maybe a minute of this and then the Guards motioned him to follow them. There were no handcuffs or anything like that.
As he moved away from the bench with the Guards, his mother appeared from nowhere. She was, he saw, in a bad mood. Her hair was untidy and her coat was open. She began to shout. He stepped back until he realized that she was not shouting at him, but at the judge.
‘Oh, God Almighty, O Lord, what am I going to do?’ she screamed.
There were too many people around her for the Guards to get to her quickly. She was pushing her way towards the bench.
‘He’s the best son, the best boy, oh don’t take him, don’t take him from me, don’t take him from me.’
That became her cry as the Guards grabbed her and tried to prevent her moving closer to the bench. Her arms flailed about her. When they seemed to have caught her, she got free of them by letting them have her coat. Then she became even wilder.
‘Give him a second chance, your honour.’
One of the Guards held him to the side as the other Guards gathered to stop his mother moving any closer to the judge. They had her now by the arms and they turned her and marched her through the crowd as she shouted at them to leave her alone. When she saw him as she passed, she tried to free herself so she could touch him, but he moved away from her. She was shouting all the time. When they put him into the van, she banged on the windows, but he was careful not to look at her. He did not want to see her as they drove away.
During his years at Lanfad, she visited him every few months. She was belligerent with the brothers when she arrived, and she always had to be dragged away from him at the end. In the middle part, where they were facing each other across a table, she said nothing much, but sighed and tried to hold his hand until he pulled it away. She sometimes asked him questions but he never told her anything. When the brothers instructed him to write to her to tell her when he was getting out, he gave her the wrong date in the letter. He came home on his own, and soon he drifted away. He did not see much of her until Billy got into trouble. The only way he could see Billy was by seeing her. He had begun then to give her money.
He was still digging, working quickly and mechanically, stopping for a second so that he could concentrate harder, and keep other thoughts at bay, when every so often the spade hit the hard frame of one of the paintings. It was tough work then to pull them out. They were protected by masses of plastic sheeting. He laid them all out, filling in the hole again. Then he left the shovel down and walked back to the car. He remained still for as long as he could, checking that there was no one else around.
It struck him for a moment that he would be happy if everything were dark and empty like this, if there were no sound at all in the world and no one living to make any sound, just this stillness and almost perfect silence. He would be happy at the thought that it might go on for ever like this.
He carried the paintings to the car. He would leave them with the others in the attic of Joe O’Brien’s neighbour’s house. Still, he felt depressed about them, and sorry he had ever stolen them. The idea that he had no power over them or the Dutchmen or Mousey made him feel in danger, but it also gave him a strange fearlessness, a sense that he could do anything now if he got the opportunity. He felt an extraordinary surge of energy as he drove back into the city.
Once the paintings had been stored safely, he walked down through the south city to his house and let himself in quietly. He took his shoes off and left them in the hall. The others had all gone to bed. Silently now, he made his way up the stairs, glad this was a new house where the stairs did not creak.
He opened the door to the room which Lorraine shared with her sister and went in. She was still in a cot and he could see from the landing light that she was fast asleep. He knew not to touch her, not to stroke her face, because he did not want to wake her or disturb her in any way. Looking at her like this was enough. He got down on his knees so he could be closer to her and he stayed there for as long as he could watching his daughter. Then he tiptoed away and closed the door to the room without making a sound.
IN THE morning he went to see his mother. She was usually wrecked in the morning, half-dressed, smoking one cigarette after another, drinking cups of cold tea. When she opened the door to him she walked back into the sitting room without greeting him.
‘I brought you money,’ he said.
‘Sit down.’
‘I won’t stay.’
‘That’s all right.’
She began to cough and once she had finished, she suddenly seemed better, more relaxed.
‘I’d make you tea, only—’
‘I don’t want tea,’ he said.
‘I’d say you’re very busy.’
‘Ma, I have to say something to you.’
‘Oh, say away.’
‘You’re not to be talking about me to people. You could get us all into a lot of trouble.’
‘I know that well. I hate idle talk myself. There’s too much of it.’
‘You’re not to be talking about me,’ he said, his voice quieter and his tone more direct than before.
She sipped her tea.
‘You might be better to quit that drinking altogether,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to tell them in the Dock to keep an eye on you.’
‘They’re afraid of their lives of you. You should keep a mile away from them.’
‘Yeah, good, well, I’m going to tell them to serve you one or two, and that’s it.’
‘They wouldn’t go against me.’
‘You should stop drinking.’
‘Oh, we all should stop doing something.’
‘And, Ma, you should never say anything bad about Billy to anyone.’
‘About Billy? What would I say about him? My own son. Lord have mercy on him.’
‘Nothing, that’s what you would say about him, Ma. Nothing. Do you get that?’
‘Something bad? Are you saying I said something bad?’
‘Yeah, you said something bad about him and I heard it back.’
‘Don’t believe—’
‘I believe it all right. Are you listening to me? I’ll take action against you if I hear another word. Do you get me?’
‘You should stop blaming yourself for Billy.’
She looked at him and shook her head.
‘You have yourself eaten alive about it. It wasn’t your fault,’ she said.
‘You keep quiet now. I don’t want to hear another word against him.’
‘Give over. It wasn’t your fault, son. No one blames you.’
‘Anyway, I’ve said what I had to say.’
He stood up and left a wad of money on the table.
‘I’ll go now. But I don’t want to hear any more yapping from you.’
‘You are very good to look after me the way you do.’
ONCE HE HAD left her house, he knew that he could not do business again with Mousey Furlong. It was as though he had gone to his mother’s house to be washed in the use of reason. As he walked away, he felt that he was thinking clearly for the first time in months. He also, as he moved towards the city centre, had that lovely feeling that he had become oddly invisible. No one, he believed, saw him or noticed him; no one would remember him. He was, he felt, at his most powerful.
He would burn the paintings, all of them. He was sure that was the right thing to do. With Joe O’Brien, he could manage a spectacular robbery, and they could pay off their two accomplices then, having warned them not to ask for the money before they got it, but having explained to them too that the paintings could not be sold, the risk was too high. If they did not see this as wisdom, then Joe O’Brien could help them to do so.
He would take the paintings some night in his car, working alone, explaining nothing to anyone. He would find a special place for them, the emptiest place. He might even go out west towards the big stretches of bog, but he did not think so. He would stick to his mountains, to the great barren emptiness which lay south of Dublin. He would bring fire-lighters rather than petrol so that he could burn each one slowly, letting the canvases shrivel up in the flame, leaving Rembrandt’s sour old woman until last until it was a heap of ash. It would make a vivid emptiness in the space where it had once hung. The people who had come to look at it could look at nothing now. It hardly mattered. What mattered was the small flickering flame he would start in the night, a hissing sound as something old and dry was set alight, and then slowly, as he stood over it, the painting would disappear and then the frame would also begin to burn. He would go back to the city renewed, unafraid, smiling to himself at what he had done. He had the solution now. He was sure he was right.