Irregulars

Irregulars Read Free Page A

Book: Irregulars Read Free
Author: Kevin McCarthy
Tags: Fiction, Historical, Mystery & Detective, Crime
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was whiskey involved and the heady miasma of perfume and sweat. The laughter of women and a crackling gramophone.
    Noon or sometime after, O’Keefe rises and finds the bottle of Jameson on the desk beside his table. It is a bottle he has no recollection of buying but is glad he did. He pours stagnant water from a pitcher into a glass and adds whiskey, and in half an hour he starts again in Slattery’s, and keeps at it until he falls down outside of Kehoe’s on South Anne Street. He is lifted to his feet by a man he has met in the pub, and guided to a hack and driven back to his digs, stopping twice to be sick, once at the top of Stephen’s Green and again at Harcourt Street. Shortly after this, a quarter mile from his family home, he tells the hackney man to stop. The driver waits in silence, his horse’s breath a lazy billow in the night air. ‘Fuck it, drive on,’ O’Keefe says, before passing out.
    He awakes early and is sick again, but blessedly back in his digs in the faded darkness of night on the cusp of morning. A darkness that will not grant sleep. He eyes the whiskey bottle, a quarter full, takes up the pitcher of water in shaking hands and pours it into his one glass and adds whiskey. And starts again. To help him sleep. Today, he thinks, he will see his father, his mother. But sleep first.
    Again to Slattery’s, where Davey asks him has he not had enough, at half twelve in the afternoon, and from there in his memory he has only a dim, flickering reel of pubs and flashing blasts of conversation until a kindly constable and again a hack, and this time he gives the driver the address to his home instead of his digs.
    His father answers his sloppy knocking and O’Keefe is dimly aware of the surprise on his father’s face, and then a strange blankness as if he does not recognise his son, but it is gone in an instant, replaced by a smile and then his mother is there. And then he is aware of nothing until he awakes in the bed he had slept in as a boy, in the bed he had shared with his brother.

2
    S o you’re saying Detective Officer Kenny was dead before you got him to Jervis Street Infirmary in the taxi …?’
    ‘Yes, he was,’ the woman from the front desk of Burton’s Hotel says.
    Her interrogator looks up from the file he is reading. His gaze is unnerving because one of his eyes is made of glass, replacing the one that had been gouged out by Auxiliaries who’d captured and questioned him more than a year ago in a different and far simpler conflict. This man, she thinks, knows more than any man should about interrogation. As if reading her thoughts, he dons a pair of round spectacles under which the glass eye is less noticeable.
    The woman, Nora Flynn, shakes her head and gazes out the second-floor window at the offices across the busy Westland Row thoroughfare. She can see men in shirtsleeves and ties, women at typewriters. The bustling business of a life assurance company, clacking and scribbling away in search of profit as if there was no way on earth men could be killing each other just a street or two away. Bustling , she thinks, liking the word, the innocent industry it implies.
    These offices too are busy. There are men in shirtsleeves and women at typewriters, but over the shirtsleeves the men wear leather shoulder-holsters stuffed with pistols and in the typists’ desk drawers, Nora knows, there are loaded Colt revolvers and files bearing the names of dead men and men marked for death. Bustling is not a word one would use, she decides, bringing her eyes back to the man with the file.
    Nervous under the weight of her interrogator’s silence, she continues. ‘Sure, didn’t they have a car? The Ford they were using. Why didn’t they use it to take him to the hospital?’
    Nora remembers running down Abbey Street, trailing a member of the surveillance squad whose name she does not know, an agent who moments earlier had burst through the hotel doors bellowing for Nora to help, that they had a

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