Callous, page 1
CALLOUS
Ken Bruen
Mary Casey, seventy-nine years old, a tough Galway woman.
Her home was her absolute pride.
A small house in Claddagh, one of the rare, precious, coveted original fishermen’s cottages. You had to be intimately connected to procure one of these sought-after homes.
Alone in her own home, she was trying to get accustomed to the silence. Her late husband, Tom, would have been proud of her, but then, he most always was.
A fisherman, he had been drowned during the great storm of 2009.
The sea giveth
The sea taketh away.
Another pride of possession was a cross from the penal times, carefully framed in a heavy wood.
A picture of Tom, alongside.
Late on the first evening, she was in the kitchen, having a wee dram of poitín to ease the solitary air.
An almighty crash came from the sitting room.
Not a woman easily spooked, she went to investigate. The frame containing the cross was in three broken pieces on the floor; the cross itself was high on the wall.
Inverted.
She blessed herself.
On the mantel was a photograph of a young woman, Kate Mitchell, her only niece, living in Brooklyn. After Tom passed, she had had what the Irish call a dark premonition, so she’d made a will, leaving her only possession, her home, to the girl.
A faint sound came from upstairs.
Giggling?
No.
Couldn’t be.
Kids?
She sat in the kitchen for hours, her rosary beads moving through her frail fingers. But there were no further occurrences and she went to bed, slowly, with a sense of unease.
Midnight, a horrendous scream woke her, Mary sat up, rigid with fear.
A man at the foot of her bed. He said,
“We gave you a chance to move.”
He pointed to three huge water bottles, said,
“Uisce beatha.” (Holy water)
Mary was discovered two days later, sitting upright in bed, the cross from the beads embedded in her eye.
An autopsy
Dismayed the pathologist.
He redid it four times, muttered,
“What in God’s name…?”
Reluctantly, very, he gave the results to the Guards, said,
“This is very odd.”
The commissioner, cynical in a fashion that passed for banter, said,
“Odd we can handle.”
The pathologist thought,
Oh, yeah?
Said,
“She was drowned.”
An American tourist exclaimed,
“Gee, I love Galway in the fall!”
They were having a drink in McSwiggan’s, where a tree is growing in the center of the bar (don’t even ask; it’s an Irish thing, i.e., beyond explanation)
A local, barely concealing his scorn, inquired,
“You mean, ’tis autumn.”
The visitor, taken aback, said,
“Yeah, I guess, right.”
The local pushed,
“You’d like it a whole lot better if you spoke right.”
The visitor turned to his wife, a hardy lady from Salt Lake City, asked,
“Did he just, like, diss me?”
His wife, a diplomat, tried,
“Maybe it’s that Irish irony.”
She didn’t believe that for a second, but as a Mormon, she was experienced in verbal abuse, leaned over to the local, suddenly pinched his cheek, said
“Cheeky devil, aren’t you?”
The Irish dismiss hauntings
As
Too much drink
Or
Not enough
I became a priest
Because of Naïveté.
I stopped being a priest
Because of Despair.
If you saw my CV
It would read like this:
Ex-priest.
Ex-cop.
Ex-ile.
My father was a cop.
And one of the 9/11 first responders.
My mother was Irish.
A seamstress.
Who works at that anymore, outside of the Eastern sweatshops?
My sister, Kate, part-time junkie, full-time missing person.
She was the much-loved niece of her aunt who lived in Galway, and she was heartbroken to learn of this lady’s horrible death.
My dead brother, Patrick, had Down syndrome.
My elder brother, Colin, was a marine and deployed in Afghanistan.
I don’t believe in ghosts.
I do believe in hauntings.
My name is Tommy Mitchell, but I’ve always been called Mitch. Even in my time as a priest, I was Father Mitch. I was born, raised in Brooklyn, with my mother’s heavy emphasis on Ireland riding point.
Shamrock cushions, stew for Sunday dinner, spuds and cabbage most every day, John F. Kennedy, interchangeable popes in tired frames on the tired wallpapered walls.
The Clancy Brothers on the turntable.
Irish dancing for my sister, hurling for the boys. The soft t barely lurking in our Brooklynese, a tiny lilt in our narrative.
Alongside hurling, we played baseball. Hurling gives you an edge for that, except no Irish sport focuses on throwing the ball so we washed out automatically as pitchers. But boy, I could bat like a banshee.
And did.
My father, he’d been attached to Brooklyn South and his squad was in Manhattan on 9/11 as a team-building exercise. When the North Tower came down and that maelstrom of dust came rushing up the street, people fleeing in terror from it, my dad and his buddies rushed
Into
It.
Years later, he developed the respiratory disease from the gases, fumes, toxic waste, and he and the other responders had their benefits stopped. The heroes were forgotten.
The day we buried him was the day I joined the cops.
Came out of the academy near top of my class, got assigned to a beat in Williamsburg.
I lasted barely a year, my final call-out a domestic, a man was bent over his wife, who was lying on the floor. First, I thought, He’s applying CPR.
He wasn’t.
Using a blunt tin opener, an old-fashioned one, he had managed to sever most of her head, turned to me, wailed,
“I can’t cut through the bone.”
I had my Glock out, fired point-blank into his face.
It jammed.
The force had long complained of this weapon being likely to do just that. My partner pulled me away, screaming at me to
“Get a grip.”
The man got off the floor, sunk the tin opener in my partner’s carotid. He bled out in minutes. My Glock worked on the next try and I emptied it into the man.
End of my career.
From a cop to a priest?
I mean
Really?
Like this:
Kate, my beloved sister, recently weaned from heroin, simply disappeared.
Colin, my elder brother, was MIA in Fallujah. Patrick, my Down syndrome younger brother, died of a heart defect and my mother lost the plot.
Utterly.
Spun off into a madness consisting of leprechauns, Jameson, séances, hysteria, and a dark fundamental Catholicism. In one moment of rare clarity, she lamented,
“Oh, Mitch, if only you’d been a priest.”
I became a priest.
Madness?
Or perhaps the great Irish tradition of sons joining the priesthood to please mothers who could never truly be appeased.
Those days, the hierarchy was having a serious shortage of recruits. The scandals had seriously battered the usual influx of novitiates.
So they literally fast-tracked my, let’s be sarcastic and call it vocation, and, in jig time I was a curate in the small parish of my neighborhood.
I was a lousy priest.
Lack of belief.
Though that has hardly been much of a stumbling block to the high-flyers in the Church.
Confessions.
They fucked my head entirely.
I felt like I was just killing time as a witness to domestic abuse and, whereas as a cop I could kick the shit out of perpetrators, now I had to suck it up.
I quit.
Told the bishop,
“I quit.”
He was outraged, near spat,
“You can’t quit, there’s a process.”
I threw my clerical collar on his huge, adorned desk, said,
“I just did.”
My mother said,
“You’ll burn in hell.”
Maybe.
IN
GALWAY
NO
ONE
CAN
HEAR
YOU
GRIEVE
Diogenes Ortiz
Styled himself
As
A
Benign
Thug.
His father was Colombian, and his mother?
Long gone.
He’d been six when he watched his father stab his mom in the eye with the crucifix fr om her special rosary beads, blessed by Pope John the twenty-third, not that that provenance much helped her, really.
Dad got shit-rich from coca, cocaine.
Sent his only son stateside for education and protection.
Señor Ortiz had most of his business dealings with the Gentlemen of Cali, who, despite their description, dispatched his daddy in brutal fashion.
Using the “Colombian necktie,” which involves pulling your tongue out and the face pulled back.
You get the drift.
Diogenes disappeared into the American Midwest soon after.
Resurfaced as an adult, in Galway.
Made his appearance in
The fall.
September 2019, the month of his mother’s anniversary.
Autumn, if you will.
Dio, as he became known, suggested a somewhat down-home boy, mellow even.
Phew-oh.
Nothing could be further from the predatory truth.
In appearance, he cultivated the style of an ascetic. Tall, gaunt, bald head, intense burning eyes, dressed always in black, hand-crafted black leather long jacket. Silk T-shirts, black brogues made in London.
He had few passions, but chief were:
Maria Callas.
Philosophy.
Rumor had it he’d studied metaphysics at the Sorbonne, been a brief tutor at Yale, but the most deadly rumor was he’d been embedded with the Zetas.
The Zetas were the most ruthless of all the cartels, possibly the only outfit the cartels feared. Composed of ex-Mexican Special Forces, hardcore mercenaries, they brought ruthlessness to a whole other level.
Whatever the truth in this, it was around this time that Dio enlisted an ex-CIA black-ops guy, name of Keegan.
It was Keegan who introduced Dio to the water gig: pour gallons of water down a victim’s throat. Drowning on dry land, he called it.
Dio brought his crucifix-in-the-eye signature to the mix and they joked they almost had a religious form of killing.
Mostly, they enjoyed the combination of the two bizarre methods.
Their plan for Galway was to bring crystal meth to the city, envisaging a megafortune in jig time.
Unknown to Keegan was Dio’s other main reason to stay a time in Galway.
Love.
Obsession.
Passion.
For a girl who looked like Maria Callas.
When he and Keegan had first tried by normal means to buy the cottage from Mary, Dio was transfixed by a photo on Mary’s mantelpiece.
He gasped in near wonder,
“Is that Maria Callas?”
Mary had scoffed at him in the fashion only a Galway woman can, answered,
“Don’t be an eejit, ’tis my gorgeous niece Kate, and if anyone was to get the cottage, t’would be Kate.”
Her name was
Kate Mitchell.
Sister of the ex–priest/cop/ile.
Dio had intended staying only long enough in Galway to set up the meth houses, but now a whole new idea blitzed him.
He’d kill the old bitch who called him an eejit, and that had to bring Maria Callas to Galway, where he’d woo her.
As he and Keegan walked away from the old woman, she shouted,
“Nil aon blain ag fanadh leat!”
This is difficult to exactly explain in English, but approximately it means,
“You have fuck-all time to live, you shithead.”
(It doesn’t actually have “fuck” or “shithead,” but it gives a nice zing to pretend it so.)
Dio asked Keegan,
“What is she saying?”
Keegan thought,
The fuck would I know? It’s Gaelic.
But
Said,
“I think she was sending you an Irish blessing.”
Dio stopped, looked at Keegan with his reptile/lizard eyes, warned,
“You’re my go-to guy, but don’t ever …”
Pause.
“Ever think you can jerk me off.”
THEY
NEVER
FOUND
HIS
HANDS.
—Bradford Morrow, The Forgers
If you were to picture Maria Callas, in her prime, the triumphant years of La Scala, you’d see the haunting eyes, like an intense burn—the long, slim face that Callas had worked so hard to achieve, to be, as she’d prayed, sylph-like.
The tiny figure, the days of being fat, overweight, never to be repeated, never.
Her face in half-shadow was truly beautiful.
The specter type of beauty that you know is not going to last, that it holds the sense of death in its luminosity.
Kate was the spit of her.
An uncanny identical twin in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Like some cruel psychic joke.
You wanted to seriously piss Kate off, mention the resemblance to her.
Kate loved the Ramones, adored the Pixies, the Clash.
But Callas?
Forgeetit (heavy lean on the vowels).
Kate had one real heroine and, in line with her quirky worldview, or skewed, more like, it was a fictional character.
The wonderful Claire DeWitt, private investigator in the trilogy by Sara Gran.
Claire DeWitt, private eye, junkie, mystic, practitioner of all kinds of witchery.
Kate did get clean, mostly, bar the odd line of coke and, like in Sara Gran’s novels, she decided to disappear.
To Ireland, where she’d been willed a cottage in Galway.
By her aunt, the late Mary Casey, murdered in the Claddagh.
She arrived in Galway on the sixteenth of September.
The date on which Maria Callas died.
Minna’s Court Street
Was the old Brooklyn:
A placid ageless surface
Alive underneath
with talk with deals, with
casual insults
All was talk
Except for what mattered most,
Which were unspoken understandings.
—Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn
Keegan was the enforcer for Dio.
His current job was to procure houses to use as meth labs. The thinking was,
Get up to a dozen houses, then if one or more was busted, production still continued. The murder of Mary Casey was just—fuckit—collateral damage.
In a stupendous lack of research, Keegan didn’t know Mary Casey was the aunt of Kate Mitchell, the obsession of Dio, but Keegan was nothing if not resourceful. He’d spin it as a dastardly scheme to lure Kate into Dio’s orbit.
Keegan was a master of spin—how he’d managed to leave the Zetas alive.
No one walked away from a cartel.
Keegan was blond to his boss’s black. He had shaggy hair, a face blasted by sun, a surfer’s lean, knotty physique, and could go full minutes without blinking, a vital asset in a man to whom intimidation was survival.
He’d never been on a surfboard but cultivated the dopey surfer-dude persona, even to the point of having a battered, shark-bitten surfboard as center point in his office.
His only reading material was Savages by Don Winslow. It had the ultimate surfer dudes, dope, and cartels.
He had a total, almost psychotic, devotion to his boss. Dio had rescued him from a hellhole of a prison cell in Nogales.
His only concern regarding Dio was the lunatic fixation Dio had for Maria Callas, and now Kate Mitchell.
Something in the whole scenario spoke to him of weakness.
Keegan was a heavy-rock headbanger, Guns N’ Roses being his go-to band.
He’s played their version of
“Sympathy for the Devil”
As he said, with fake mockery,
“To death.”
Keegan had been in Galway for a year before Dio arrived, laying the groundwork, recruiting foot soldiers. He especially favored ex-paramilitaries; they shared his ruthlessness.
He focused on acquiring houses close to the water, to the ocean, for shipments to be brought by cargo freighters. He was surprised how many householders sold up without too much of a struggle, maybe as he was prepared to pay over the odds.
Mary Casey was one of the holdouts, so she got murdered.
No biggie.
One other man, named Charlie Fox, proved difficult, told Keegan,
“Go fuck yourself.”
