Free The Ghosts of Belfast by Stuart Neville Page A

pressure behind his eyes pulsed.
     
     
“I’m only telling you ’cause I respect you, right?” Caffola placed his left hand on Fegan’s chest. His right hand pressed against the tiles above Fegan’s shoulder.
     
     
Fegan kept his eyes on Caffola’s. “Right.”
     
     
“McGinty’s worried about you. You used to be the boy. I mean, everyone knows you were the boy, right?”
     
     
“Right.” Fegan ignored the chill at his center.
     
     
“But now you’re staying away, you’re drinking, acting all mad and stuff. It’s no good, Gerry.” Caffola rested his palm on Fegan’s cheek. “I’ll tell you that for nothing. I’ll tell you that for sweet fuck all. McGinty wants to talk to you. Get things straight, like. He’s worried, but I told him. I says, Paul, don’t you worry about Gerry Fegan ’cause Gerry Fegan’s fucking sound, right?”
     
     
“Right.”
     
     
“He’s the boy, right?”
     
     
“Right.”
     
     
“Then McGinty says to me about Michael, that you was the last one seen him.” Caffola’s eyes darkened. “And that Lithuanian cunt. I gave him a proper going-over, like. And all the time he says he knows nothing. Even when I was showing him his own teeth, he says he knows nothing.”
     
     
Fegan tried to step away from the wall, to slip by Caffola. The big man pushed him back against the tiles.
     
     
“You see my problem, Gerry?”
     
     
Fegan looked over Caffola’s shoulder. The bathroom was empty now, except for the eleven shadows taking form around them. Two separated from the others, hands raised. Could he do it here? No, there’d be no way out.
     
     
“You say you’d nothing to do with it, I believe you. That’s what I told McGinty. I stood up for you, Gerry, so don’t make a cunt of me. Right? You talk to McGinty tomorrow.” Caffola’s finger stabbed at Fegan’s chest. “You talk to him and do what he wants, right?”
     
     
“Right,” Fegan said, remembering a time when Caffola was afraid of him. Yes, he could do it here, do it now. He could get out before anyone knew what had happened. Get out and run. Leave everything and run. Caffola’s throat looked so tender, his Adam’s apple bobbing over the collar of his shirt.
     
     
The door burst open, tearing Fegan’s attention away from the other man’s neck. “There’s trouble brewing,” Patsy Toner said, his little face shining with glee. “There’s peelers all over the place and kids making a barricade. There’s going to be a row. A proper kicking match.”
     
     
Caffola looked from Toner to Fegan, beaming. “Fucking class,” he said.
     
     
     
     
“How the fuck did this start?” Caffola asked, incredulous. He indicated a burning mound of mattresses, wooden pallets and rubbish in the middle of the Springfield Road, just a few feet from the corner where McKenna’s bar stood. A mob of thirty or so youths, children mostly, surrounded it, chanting.
     
     
Half a dozen PSNI Land Rovers idled thirty yards down the street. They looked less intimidating these days, painted white with colorful stripes instead of the battleship grey of the past. The peelers milling about weren’t in riot gear yet, but it was only a matter of time before suitably dressed reinforcements would arrive.
     
     
Fegan felt a strange stirring inside, a quickening of the spirit, as he watched them. The followers had left him; their shadows receded. He stayed on the footpath, close to the wall, as Caffola and Toner paced.
     
     
“Kids,” Toner said. “There’s more patrols about because of the funeral tomorrow. Some of the kids took exception to it and started chucking stuff. The peelers lifted a couple of them, so some more started throwing stuff, then a couple more got lifted and so on and so on.”
     
     
A grin cracked Caffola’s face. “Jesus, we haven’t had a proper ruck in ages. I wonder if we can get some petrol bombs rustled up quick.”
     
     
“There’s hardly time,” Toner said. “We