ofguises - Tumblr blog

[ofguises]

fmackeys‌:​

Frank had been working out of this building for almost a fuckin’ decade now, but he still almost walked past the door every morning; it just didn’t fit with where he imagined it to be. A disgrace, it was, he should complain, say, “uh, actually, in my head we work two doors down, so could we buy up the rest of the tenement and move? yeah, to the right. cheers, thanks.” At least then he wouldn’t look like such a fucking twat, pausing and swearing at the exact same time every morning, turning on his heel, and storming back five paces to the right door.

Luckily, he wasn’t often actually here - though he was more now. He reckoned he had one more undercover mission in him ‘fore he’d have to really retire and take a desk job; Dublin wasn’t that big, and his ugly mug was well-close to the line of recognition in certain more unsavoury parts of the city. He’d always thought he’d end up headfirst in the Liffey encased in concrete at some point in his life, but he wanted to delay that moment for as long as possible - that was all Undercover work was, pushing off the moment of truth like a rat in a trap, paws frantically digging while the Indiana-jones-esque boulder approached over your shoulder, ready to crush you; he accepted it, but didn’t exactly want to hurry headfirst into his fate. So: one more mission, and until that time came he’d keep on being a handler, meddling in as many cases as he could, and angering with all the stick-up-their-arses suits at Murder, which was way easier than it should’ve been.

He’d lived through, what, four shootings? a solid couple of stabbings? one drug overdose (not his fault), a twenty foot fall (maybe his fault), and a brain injury (definitely his fault), and all of that combined to mean he was pretty much left to his own scheming devices, something that suited him just fine - the higher-ups checked in occasionally to make sure no one was getting killed, and other than that they had abandoned the office on Marlborough St to him, and the underlings that scuttled out of his way; he was like a Princess in a tower, if the Princess had ultimate, almost god-like authority, and continued to smoke indoors despite the Polish cleaner threatening him with various forms of incomprehensible death every time she caught him (he fancied her a bit, actually).

Speaking of fancying: he had his boots up on the desk and an unlit cigarette tucked behind his ear and a report from Organised Crime propped on his knee when Emilia walked in. He hadn’t slept enough to come up with a snarky reply (no one had told Olivia, it turned out, that you could conduct a divorce in cold painful awkward silence; no, she was more the screaming and bollocking type, it turned out - not that he was surprised, he had married her voluntarily, after-all, but it seemed unfair that she had left him and yet still yelled at him) so he just grunted and waved the heavy sheaves of paper to the seat in front of his desk. Why the fuck, he thought, did he always want to shag the posh ones? What was wrong with a good auld tenements girl who’d had six kids and no uni education? It was psychological, he was sure of it. He ostentatiously finished reading the page he was on, then tilted his chin up at her, automatically on the defensive - not her fault, but she reminded him of Olivia. “You made it, yeah? Didn’t burst into flames at the threshold?” He didn’t wait for a response, but tossed the report down onto the desk between them; it landed with an ominous thump. On the front it said, in bold black letters, VIKTOR SANDOV. 

“Prove t’me you’re not stupid - why have I called you all the way to the balls of beyond on this fine Tuesday morning?”

And there it was. The down to business approach, with a solid insult thrown in for good measure, the sleazy air cultivated with as much care as any designer front. All rolled into one: the reason she had never made Murder. Or Undercover, for that matter, its younger, delinquent brother. Gender wasn’t it, not unless you wanted to go all psychological about it, deconstructionism and whatever else came with the bag. Talent wasn’t it, either; she wasn’t a genius, right proper, but then neither was half the squad. In the back of Emilia’s mind, she unfurled the banner of Murder’s greatest hits, in all of ten, fifteen years, along with their greatest washouts. No; genius had nothing to do with it.

When she took in Mackey — the whole length of him, down to the frayed-leather tips of his boots, the idle wrist curl, the way his entire body sprawled somewhere too big to spell — she realized it was never about rising, about making ranks. It was simply a matter of who you were. In this box, or outside. On the fringes, no matter if you liked them, no matter if they felt right to you; they were still the periphery of the brighter spots. She retraced her daily routine: waking up curled in a two-room apartment, ten degrees too cold under the yellow duvet, mincing her way through various coffee settings until getting the machine just tame enough. Strolling into work focused, yet miles far from looking straitlaced. Far from rumpled, too. No rebel without a cause, no man of the people act; there simply wasn’t time. She liked the shrill, sparrow mating-call ring of the phone. Liked picking it up, transcribing the details, filing them according to priority and assets. House visits, she liked less; but the necessity of them hoodwinked her, every time, left her pliant and awed. So few things were necessary, these days. So few things could be deemed that by an objective eye. It was nice, being part of one. And the banter that went among the squad room was lukewarm, almost fictitious — had nothing in common, not a sliver, with what went on in the higher floors of the Castle. Or up here, wherever this was, this lemon carpet cleaner, hardwood haze.

Frank Mackey would’ve said she was talking bollix within an inch of her life. Licking her own wounds, he would’ve penned it perhaps; licking a number other things, if he felt inspired. But this was no second-runner consolation. Domestic Violence was fitting. It clicked just so with her own jumbled mix of detachment and delicacy, chronicler of cataclysm one moment, saviour the next. It clicked just right with a whole many pieces. Like not wanting a fella within a mile of her bed. Like being alright, stellar, even, with always reverting back to square one. Her own private allegory. In Undercover, a success was bringing down empires, the heels of your Docs crushing down through the rubble; a minor victory was replacing the emperors with puppets. In DV, a success was another hour; a quiet room and an MP3 playing something the girl never gets to listen to these days, not anymore. Swapping healthcare tips and holding fast through the downpour, onto each other, and onto the little things, legs braced down.

Emilia smiled, a breezy thing, and curled her leg under her on the chair. She unwrapped the pastry, watching each crumb litter the desk with minute precision, soft-pedaled to a fault. She didn’t even move a hair’s breadth for the file. If this is what Mackey expected to see, the younger detective had no problem delivering. More the fool him. For a moment, she almost gave into it, quipping back something about how loneliness gets the best of us, and she looked only a stunner in the winter light. Then, no. An IA investigation was something so far off her list, she couldn’t even squint to see it. “I would assume”, Emilia began, steadying herself, a quick hand movement along the same easy smile, “it’s about the only case I’ve got that’s not, like, a total blank wall. You want to get to Marina Sandova: a woman who you think is so far off her tits she might just squeal anything of note.” Noncommittal shrug, more diving into the food. By this point, Frank’s desk could pass for a postmodern art installation. Speckles of white, of sugar dust like pearls. She licked her lips twice, before resuming: “Scientifically put: no chance in hell.”

[ofguises]

The air was still, crossed by small shivers of electricity, almost from the moment she stepped inside. Undercover headquarters were different from the squad’s — not better, not even more furtive, at that; just something else. The location was still in walking range from most corners of the city, and yet it felt outer, remote. The building was hardly inconspicuous: all narrow windows, hemmed in stories, with electric scanners at every entrance on the leeway. But when it came to it, anything might’ve been hosted there, no one possibility more convincing than the next. An off-brand calling center, a minor, up-and-coming corporation, one of those private health centers that keep jutting out in Dublin like all its inhabitants woke up one morning with florid skin diseases to check up on the quiet. It was not easy to find, and that, Emilia supposed, was its main advantage. Once you were inside, it looked ten times more inhabited than from a distance. She wondered if it was because no one was supposed to work there, not on the clock; if it was just a place to moor your ship, discard the papers, drift off once more. She also wondered if Frank had taken the piss and left her taking the elevator in a derelict building.

On her way, she had picked up a spice and nutmeg swirl, the type of pastry that can make any room smell either like holidays or cheap car deodorant, take your pick. In the sweep of crosswalks and car fumes outside, where people brushed next to her seeping in their own artificial scents — body spray and Starbucks traces and windshield cleaner, the tangy, almost animal smell of business, rustling and crisp — it had been easy to conceal. Now that she was inside, and in such an antiseptic place, too, vacuumed to the last dust mote, it felt as if she walked straight out of a gingerbread house. A slight smile tugged at one corner, just the once. Emilia gave a half shrug, to nobody in particular, and reviewed the facts: the ones she could be sure of, the ones she still found pleasure in doubting, and those that confounded her to no end. She sat them down in wobbly piles in her mind: a tiny mound for the certainties, two large, looming towers for the doubts. She surmised them in triplicate.

For once, she was here to meet Frank Mackey, in what was possibly the first meeting that did not entail a scrambled-signal phone call or a rushed elbow-grab in a cafe. At head level, as if they were equals, she had been called to what could pass for his office. That was not nothing — but where he was concerned, who could tell where somethingness began, where the lines of it fitted into view? Second, unless her da’ had been trading AK-47 with Bulgarians instead of squandering his pension on petunias, on double-decked gardening sheds, there was nothing in her life Frank could want except one thing. One case, and it wasn’t even her most intractable. Marina Sandova, thirty-four if a day, who had blissfully gone and wedded the kind of man who brings down property values on a range of sixty miles. The kind of man, and she envisioned this happening, who squatted fruit flies with a flamethrower. This is the thing with DV: you’re never allowed to say What you see is what you get. Granted, her colleagues always did, especially those with twenty years under belt, who think they’ve earned the right — a penis and a clean job record can get you a long way, in terms of righteousness. Can get you all the ways. Her, not so much. She rarely felt tempted to. Emilia saw herself, fresh off Templemore’s benches (or, better yet, fresh off her third-year degree in Criminal Psych) falling for your average Joe who tricks on the dole and says he likes his girls exotic. She’d fancied her men rough, her. Some suppressed middle class inching she never had time to get into. She’d also fancied them vapors-smart, the kind that lifted off in waves, like steam, like ammonia. It was quite the long years ‘til she realized it only meant another kind of dumb. There but for the grace of God.

So, she never sighed. Never simpered. Never filled in that cause-and-effect chain, not even when the boyfriends she’d been called to report waited for her in the doorway, the woman peering out from behind his arm’s angle on the frame. People make so many mistakes, painstaking, surreptitiously, as if it was a blood-embedded art form. If doctors are allowed to treat you the minute after you pluck smokes from your handbag, if insurance can fill you in after they’ve seen your car, if the fellas up in the Murder squad can deal with whatever brain splatters the recession made of men, then she should be able to as well. But then Marina came her way. An angry, slap-sharp accent, a breathy phone call. A string of curses so intricate she’d almost wanted to jot them down. Plastic, they were. They stretched between them like the landline. And she had gone to meet her, in a tacky cupcake bistro that lived up to its tag, not selling anything under twenty quid or twenty inches of frosting. They talked, a patchy,  lopsided conversation that kept on keeping on. They talked until last cupcake call and then some more, on the bench in front. Tackled the world up and down. Made plans: incipient, in between two snorts, two bedchamber confessions, but they were there. A safehouse. A ticket somewhere, a chance at alimony. It was the smoothest anything had ever gone, with long-term victims (though that word, violence victim, jumbled next to Marina, looked like satire, a caricature of a caricature of her job). And then they parted, and the next morning Viktor had called, apologized for his wife, a snarling, animal smack of a laugh. A compliment towards Emilia’s accent, but. That was the thick of it.

They’d kept in touch, every now and then. For the better half of a year. Mostly texts, emails, Whatsapp, you know yourselves. She’d figured it was always going to be just this thing, like Murder has cold cases, like Vehicles has incinerated bits. A victim that slipped away in all the ways that mattered, yet still clung to the exit lane, to the proverbial fringe of light. But, so you have it, Frank Mackey started asking about it. About Marina and whoever handled her complaint, back when it was filed up — received the due answer, Emilia Shaw, two years with us to date. And he doesn’t just inquire, this Francis doesn’t. He sniffed around, foxhound style; went through all her paperwork as if he were blasted Internal Affairs. He never said come around, then. She never said yes, or no. Except: now, pastry bag in hand, crinkling under her cold fingertips, where gloves hadn’t reached, she was signing her name at the front office. No receptionist in sight, either. The whole main hallway was stripped bare, three-four doors on each side of it, locked by the look of them. When Emilia felt someone staring at the back of her neck, watching her watching herself, she didn’t stop to think whether she even wanted to be here. Whether she had any place to be. She inclined her head, one inch closer to seeing who stood behind her — to seeing Frank, in office drab and all, because of all the things on Earth she knew no one was enough of a drama queen to bet so much on the silence. “Ate all your workmates, have you?” // @fmackeys​

[ofguises]

I’m behind the other students. They find everything easier. You aren’t, and they don’t, okay?