Meet Collins and Burke by Anne Emery

Author:Anne Emery
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2017-11-07T18:55:34+00:00

Chapter 8

Though we’re not free yet,

we won’t forget until our dying day

How the Black and Tans like lightning

ran from the rifles of the IRA.

— Unknown, “Rifles of the IRA”

March 22, 1991

Brennan Burke was hammered when I met him at O’Malley’s Friday night. I didn’t have to be a psychoanalyst to infer that Earl’s revelations of the previous night accounted for Brennan’s presence in the bar, at a table by himself, with an ashtray full of butts and a skinful of whiskey.

“A Guinness,” I said to the bartender, “and a glass of chocolate milk for my friend here.” The bartender laughed and started to pour him a shot of whiskey. Burke, his eyes at half-mast, waved a weak hand to fend off another drink.

“Mickey, no, no. This is Monty.” Never mind that Mickey and I had already met. “Mickey is the Brian Boru, the high king, of bartenders. He served me my first legal pint.”

“Good to see you, Monty,” the man replied diplomatically, in an old-country brogue. I noticed he made it a point to have a bottle of Tullamore Dew at hand, and took a nip whenever he served a customer. It kept him in good cheer.

“It’s not often I see you in this condition, Burke,” I began, as I took my seat beside him.

“It’s not often,” he answered in a slurry voice, “I get the news that some poor fellow, a young husband and father, loses his life in a completely random, vicious attack that could have happened to anyone, but happened to him just because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, put there by my father, who seduced him into taking part in an armed robbery for what the poor lamb of a misguided idealist believed was a good cause, and —” He ran down at that point, and fumbled to light a cigarette. He smoked moodily for a few minutes, then started up again. “I can’t explain to myself why this troubles me more than if the man had been killed by someone in the organization, to keep him quiet. I don’t know what’s wrong with my thinking, that that would have been preferable somehow. Maybe I’d console myself with some kind of rationalization: he knew what he was getting into; this turned out to be part of it. But what happened didn’t have to happen at all. He would have done his few years — terrible enough, to be sure — and then rejoined his wife and children. Ah, I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about. And for Declan just to sit back and let this fellow suffer all the consequences by himself —”

“Your father couldn’t have predicted what happened in the prison. I don’t make light of it, obviously, but he would have thought along the lines you just expressed: imprisonment was the risk, part of the deal. Same way he did his own time — and undoubtedly kept his own mouth shut — when he got caught in Ireland.

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