Ronan Boyle and the Bridge of Riddles Read online

“Mum, Da, this is horrible! You’re the people who do the crossword puzzle in ink. You’re the people who taught me how to apologize in French and five different fun ways to fold napkins! You’re museum people, not prison gang people!” I said, shaking my head in disbelief.

  “Shhh,” said Mum, nodding to a guard nearby. “The walls have ears. And it’s not like we’ve gotten the tattoos yet, Ronan.”

  “Although there has been pressure, and the Kinahans have a pretty smart-looking tattoo, wouldn’t look too bad on the ol’ biceps,” said Da to himself, flexing what he must have thought was his biceps muscle.

  “Tattoos?! No, I forbid it,” I said firmly, “and I want you to go and quit those gangs today.”

  “Well, it’s not that simple, Ronan,” said Mum. “Hutch Gang means Hutch Gang for life.”

  “And Kinahans is to the grave,” added Da. “To. The. Grave.”

  “Plus, not to brag, but I’m the only woman with a PhD in the whole Hutch Gang!” bragged Mum.

  “Stop! That’s quite enough. No more gang stuff, you two!” I said.

  The guard tapped me on the shoulder, telling me visiting time was up. I was certainly concerned about what my parents had just told me, but I also knew in my heart that they were lovely, well-read people who would be a solid addition to any prison gang.

  “There’ll be new evidence soon, I promise. Perhaps by tonight!” I said.

  As I was buzzed through the visitors’ gate, I called over my shoulder with one last warning. “No tattoos, please!”

  I changed into my civilian clothes in the Mountjoy visitors’ loo, putting my cadet uniform and shillelagh into a duffel bag. I took a right out the prison gate and cut down through pretty Blessington Street Park.

  Lord Desmond Dooley’s gallery is in a creepy old building at number 12 Henrietta Street, which is a creepy old street. It had started to thunderstorm by the time I arrived, but I had an umbrella, as I was now a devotee of Yogi Hansra and ready for surprises. I mentally prepared for my impromptu little mission in the Spar Grocery on Bolton Street. Out the window I could keep an eye on Dooley’s gallery—while pretending to read the label on a can of Batchelor’s Mushy Peas for about twenty minutes. Soon the store manager was giving me an annoyed, sidelong glance.4

  I felt like I had suddenly caught the stomach flu. My face felt hot to the touch of my hand. I had never actually met Lord Desmond Dooley before. Would he recognize me from the trial? Perhaps confronting him was not a good idea at all. But I had a plan. To be safe, I pulled my hoodie up and tucked my glasses into my pocket. I set down the peas, which smacked to the floor, as without my glasses I have very little depth perception and missed the shelf by several inches. I took a deep breath and left the Spar, clicking my umbrella up against the downpour.

  A disconcertingly loud digital doorbell chimed as I entered Dooley’s gallery, shaking off my umbrella. The bell was the only modern touch in this spooky place. The gallery is a dank crypt, with the oddly pleasant mold smell of old churches. Stained-glass windows featuring random saints were hung up for sale, with small but steep prices on dangling tags. There were racks with dozens of swords, a few thousand copper bowls, and a variety of pikes, cudgels, and frightening head-smacking devices of the Iron and Bronze Ages. I took a closer look at a pair of ancient leather flip-flops, which were labeled as having belonged to a Saint Colmán of Cloyne, whoever that was. The label read “600”—although I’m not sure if this was the price or the date.

  The face of the man behind the desk was obscured by a copy of Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince and Other Tales, but the withered hand holding the book had the gargoyle quality of the man himself: Lord Desmond Dooley.

  Dooley lowered the book, revealing a face that is more like famous cinema vampire Nosferatu than any actual person you have ever seen.

  I did my best not to gasp. If Dooley recognized me, his face did not betray it at all. He only performed the slowest blink I have ever seen. Dooley moves unhurriedly, like a reptile saving its body heat—because he basically is.

  “This isn’t a souvenir shop,” hissed Dooley as he scanned me up and down. “If you’re looking for knick-knacks or football shirts, there’s a Carrolls on Mary Street.”

  “Oh, no, sir,” I stammered. “You’re the famous Lord Desmond Dooley, and I—well, my employer, that is—is in the market for very old Irish things. Hard-to-come-by things, if you get my gist?”

  I thought it seemed unlikely that a teenager would be in the market for stolen treasures and that me working for a fictional “collector” would be more plausible. Now to get Dooley to slip up and admit that he had stolen the Bog Man.

  Dooley’s lizard hand pulled a pince-nez off his nose. He thought for a long moment; then something resembling a smile formed at the corners of his mouth.

  “And who, exactly, may I ask, is your employer?” he asked.

  “A collector who . . . prefers to remain anonymous,” I bluffed, as I had not thought this far ahead and my caper was starting to feel underplanned. “But I’m certain he would meet your price for any serious artifacts. Very old things. Perhaps even the oldest available things.”

  “Yes. Serious artifacts. Your employer and I share the same taste, boy. Nothing but the best. A moment, please.”

  He ducked behind a purple velvet curtain into a chamber in the back. There was a muted rustling, a clatter, and the sound of something unlocking. A moment later, Dooley’s claw-finger curled out and waved me back.

  “Come, come, lad—I’ve got a little something here that you won’t see anywhere else.”

  My stomach did a little hula. The heat from my flushed face was rising, as if I were peering into a pizza oven to see if the pizza was done. I followed Dooley behind the purple curtain, which was disgustingly damp to the touch.

  Water dripped, creating a little echo. In the blackness, it was impossible to tell the size of the room, but it sounded vast indeed. Only Dooley’s reptile eyes and part of his hand were visible in the flicker of the lamp he held. His hand trembled, and I felt a slight wave of sympathy for the creepy old man.

  He beckoned me deeper into the darkness. I could just make out the shadows of what seemed to be large birdcages. Most seemed empty, their bottoms lined with chewed-up pages of the Irish Times and large bird droppings. Farther off in the dark, I could hear what sounded like the flutter of wings. Large wings.

  “Come closer, lad . . . closer now . . . Ronan Boyle,” whispered Dooley as he grabbed me by the hand. My heart stopped. I felt a zap run through my spine as if someone had stepped on my grave in the future.

  Clearly, Lord Desmond Dooley knew perfectly well who I was. My under-thought plan was precisely that, and he was now going to do something horrid like chop me up with an ax from the Bronze Age and put me into any number of museum-quality bowls.

  “I was wondering when you might pay me a visit, Cadet.”

  Without warning, Dame Judi Dench leaned in to me and said, “Hold my gummy worms, Ronan Boyle—I’m off to the loo.” This is because I had once again gone to my imaginary safe place, and Dame Judi was just ducking out to the loo, which left me defenseless and alone, holding fictional gummy worms. I smacked into reality as Dooley’s hand perched on my shoulder like an Indonesian bat’s feet—hard, his nails taking purchase in the fabric of my hoodie.

  He pulled me toward a stack of old stones arranged like a table, or the kind of Stonehenge-type things you would see out in the Burren. It gave the room the feeling that perhaps this was the altar of some sinister church. My instinct was to flee back to the Spar Grocery, but Dooley’s grip on my shoulder prevented this.

  “Who? What’s this now? I certainly don’t know what you’re talking about. Ronan who?” I stammered, playing dumb, which was not all that far from the truth. “I’ll just go and tell my grown-up employer . . . But he’ll be expecting me, and he gets very cross, so I had better run along right away!”

  “Now listen up, Cadet Ronan Boyle,” hissed Dooley into my ear with breath that w
as surprisingly cold and unsurprisingly rancid. His nails now pinched through my hoodie and into the meat part of my shoulder. I winced. “You’ve come looking for the Bog Man. And why wouldn’t you, with your poor mum and da in the Joy after the scandal? I admire your bravery. As for your folks—they never saw it coming. In some ways, I feel sorry for them. But somebody had to take the fall, you see. It’s not my decision. All of this rawmaish. There are larger forces at work than Lord Desmond Dooley, lad. And If you don’t fear me, that’s fine. But even I fear the others.”

  At this point Dame Judi was back from the loo in the movie theater that exists in my mind. “Buck up, Ronan Boyle—show some spine, you #$@&%! Say something!” said the imaginary Dame, using a filthy expletive that I will not write down, as it’s unbecoming of our generation’s finest actress and a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She yanked the gummy worms from my hand and bonked me across the face with the box. Because even fictional Dame Judi Dench has no problem saying what she feels.

  “I’m on to you, mate. And you’ll pay if it’s the last thing you do!” I blurted into Dooley’s face.

  Dooley stumbled, startled, losing his grip on my shoulder. I also fell backward. I was as startled as he was.

  Dooley’s dead eyes lit up. He seemed to laugh, but no sound came out of him.

  “Good on you, Boyle. If our places were flipped, I’d take the stuffing out of you, too. But I assure you, you won’t find the Bog Man around here, because I don’t have him. And contrary to what you’ve heard, I did not sell him. You have any idea what a four-thousand-year-old Irish mummy is worth, Boyle?”

  “. . . Not really?” I said.

  “LESS THAN YOU WOULD THINK!” howled Dooley, shaking his clenched little claws in frustration. He lurched toward me, trying to loom over me, even though I am a good deal taller than him. He picked a moldy box up off the stone slab, about the size of a child’s coffin, because it was, in fact, a child’s coffin.

  “But don’t let my pity turn to anger. If I ever see you poking around again, you’ll get a surprise like this one.”

  He put the coffin in my hands. The lid burst open.

  The next moment was a blur in its brevity and violence. A wee woman with bright red eyes and a nose that looked like it was accidentally put on upside down leaped out of the coffin. She was truly hideous, with the underbite of a shih tzu. She stood less than sixteen inches tall. She was musking hard, clearly riled up, and the smell of old fish heads blasted from her every pore. She poked both my eyes with her brass shillelagh and bit me squarely on the nose. I tumbled backward, and she pounced onto my chest. Most of her body weight seemed to actually be contained in her dense, gold shoes. She gave a kick to my chin, causing me to bite down on my tongue. She made a gesture so rude and insulting that I had to look it up later in the library at Collins House. She blew her nose at me, misting my face with a light drizzle of leprechaun snot. She then turned about, pointed her bum at me, and delivered a brief but angry toot—as if to add a nasty exclamation point to this whole mess.

  My tongue hurt too much to scream, so I made a Frankenstein sound. I could taste the blood in my mouth. Obviously, nothing quite like this had ever happened to me before. I have no specific recollection of how, exactly, I got out of Dooley’s gallery, but I must have bolted right quick. The next thing that I remember I was standing in the Spar Grocery again, sticking my poor nose and tongue into a freezer filled with Cadbury Flake Twinpot desserts and missing my umbrella.

  An hour or so later, I was on the train from Heuston Station, still trembling and holding my nose, which now displayed several small teeth marks. I ate six of the frozen Cadbury Flakes that the annoyed Spar store manager had insisted I purchase after touching them with my cut nose and tongue. They were wonderful and greatly helped to settle my distressed body and mind.

  I’m certain that Lord Desmond Dooley meant to frighten me away forever. But deep down I knew that the next time I crossed paths with him . . .

  I would be more prepared.

  Also, I would get my umbrella back at some point, as it is a nice umbrella.

  * * *

  1 The Spring Solstice, 21 March, is New Year’s Day for the faerie folk. It’s a busy day for the Special Unit, as the wee folk make merry, and more than a few of them end up in custody after crashing stolen pigs that they know perfectly well they are too inebriated to ride. Later, I would make a series of public service announcements for the wee folk about the dangers of drinking and riding pigs, starring my friend Aileen, Whose Luscious Eyes Sparkle Like Ten Thousand Emeralds in the Sun.

  For those keeping track of the wee folks’ calendar—you would be fools, as there are no clocks or calendars in Tir Na Nog. Time is a constraint that you and I understand. The wee folk marvel at our obsession with time, and they attribute it to the fact that we live such short lives in comparison to theirs. Have you ever been told about how a housefly lives for just one week? That’s how it feels to leprechauns when they hear that we only live to ninetyish. It makes them sad, and then it makes them laugh, because they drink too much, and pretty much everything makes them laugh.

  2 I would meet Dan the Troll again three months later when he was captured after devouring two badly behaved children on a field trip in the lovely town of Cong. But Dan the Troll always lands on his enormous feet, and the schoolteacher leading the field trip even testified on his behalf—seems that these two kids were real eejits. Trolls eating children is really just nature’s lint catcher—filtering out some of the ones that shouldn’t get through.

  3 Falafels still taste great after being smashed up, as they are made from chickpeas that have already been smashed up. There’s really nothing you can do to falafel that hasn’t already been done to it.

  4 The ingredients of Batchelor’s Mushy Peas are: “peas (89%), water, sugar, salt, colour.” You can read them in approximately two seconds.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE MALTON HOTEL ROBBERY

  It was late in the day when I arrived back at the barracks, and it took me several tries to nail the song that reveals Collins House. My tongue was throbbing, and the tricky middle part eluded me. I lugged myself up the spiral stairs and related the day’s strange events to Log. This was the first time in ages that she did not chuckle under her breath. Seeing that I was deeply distressed, Log sang me a song in the language of the animals, which was lovely, even though I did not understand the words.

  I am a touch embarrassed to say it, but I fell asleep in Log’s huge arms, and it was the deepest I had slept in months. When I awoke, she was giggling softly in her sleep, in her usual deranged manner. But at this point I had come to find it comforting.

  At dusk, when I was getting into my cadet uniform, the intercom in the barracks buzzed.

  “Boyle! Report to Captain de Valera at the porte cochere,”1 whinnied Jeanette O’Brien’s voice, in what sounded like her horse manifestation.

  I adjusted the optional cadet beret that I love and hustled to the porte cochere, which was an eight-minute run to the opposite end of the house.

  When I arrived, dripping sweat, Captain de Valera was scratching the neck of a rust-colored Irish wolfhound so large that, on first sight, I thought it was a pony.

  “This is Lily,” said the captain, nodding to the wolfhound. “Lily, this is new cadet Ronan Boyle. Say hello.”

  I waited for the dog to say something and then realized that Captain de Valera intended for me to say hello to the dog.

  “She doesn’t talk. She’s a dog, of course,” said the captain.

  “Oh, right,” I stammered. “Nice to meet you, Lily. I’m Ronan Boyle.” I put out my hand, and the hound put her massive paw in it, almost pulling me to the ground.

  “Now, to the Malton Hotel—on the double, Boyle. There’s been a robbery,” she said as she tossed me a set of keys. I stared at them dumbfounded—one of my best skills.

  “But I don’t drive, Captain,” I protested. “Never have. Haven’t got a license. Ca
n’t even get one for a year, even if I wanted to.”

  “Then you’d better not get pulled over,” she quipped as she hopped into the back of the jeep. “Pat Finch has been my driver for years. But I’m afraid his latest psychological evaluation by the Special Unit deemed him Class One: T.A.T.D.—Too Angry to Drive—even in Ireland. Can you imagine, Boyle?”

  “Finch? Too angry? Yes, I can.”

  “You’ll never catch me driving on this island, Boyle—I’m not an eejit.” She was not kidding. From this point on I would be her new driver, even though this was both technically and not technically illegal.

  After several false starts, sputters, stalls, and a brief jaunt in reverse, just eighteen minutes later I was driving the captain’s jeep—the camouflaged one with the mysterious plates that I had seen out at Clifden Castle. It turns out that the harp on the license plate is the classification of Special Unit vehicles; the number is always seven, just because it’s lucky and because Irish people are superstitious.

  My fingers were gripped on the wheel so hard that they cramped up, and it was a bit of an effort to remove them later. I did my best to keep the vehicle to the far left of the road, running into the ditch a few times and keeping well below the speed limit. The captain was engrossed in a report and seemed not to notice or care that I was doing a rubbish job of driving her.

  Captain de Valera was in the backseat with her high leather boots up, and Lily was in the passenger seat to my left. This would become our standard seating arrangement. To this day, I have never really known why Captain Siobhán de Valera picked me to be her protégé. The closest I have come to understanding was when I once overhead her telling another officer that I had a “nice-seeming face, yet is not so bright as to get fancy and insubordinate.”

  When we arrived at the charming Malton Hotel in Killarney, two local garda led the captain, Lily, and myself into the office, where the manager, one Mr. Doherty—a sweaty, redheaded man of about fifty—was nearly in tears.