Mothers and Sons Read Online Free PDF

hotel and then he asked for the notebook and he wrote: ‘This day next week, I will have the painting here.’ One of the men wrote in reply: ‘We will have to get instructions.’ He nodded to Joe O’Brien and threw him the keys of the car.
    He wondered now if it might be a good idea to get Joe to frighten the two other accomplices in the robbery, let them know they were not being cheated or anything like that, but let them know also that they had best lower theirexpectations for quick money, and make clear to them that any demands or even requests from them for cash would be dealt with briskly.
    Joe O’Brien was the only man he had ever worked with who would always do precisely what he was told, who would never ask questions, never express doubts, never turn up late. He also understood things, such as wiring and locks, explosives, and the engines of cars. When he had wanted to blow up Kevin McMahon the barrister, send him flying into kingdom come, Joe O’Brien had been the only man he approached and told about it.
    That was when his brother Billy was up on robbery charges. He had sat in the court watching McMahon strut and prance for the prosecution and win a conviction on the basis of trumped-up evidence. And then when Billy was up for murder, McMahon became very personal about Billy’s entire family, saying things in court which were none of anyone’s business and must have come from Billy himself or from his mother or from someone who knew them all, knew too much about them all. McMahon seemed to be not just doing his job, but relishing it.
    He paid good money to have two members of the jury frightened enough to do their duty and have Billy let off, but he decided, as he watched McMahon sum up, that he would get him, as a warning to other barristers of his kind and maybe a few judges as well. It would have been easy to shoot him, or have him beaten up, or burn his house down, but instead he decided to blow McMahon sky-high when he was in his car, to remind everyone that more people than the IRA could put bombs in cars. It happened in theNorth all the time; the aftermath, he thought, always looked good on television. It would give the rest of the legal profession something to think about.
    Even now, he smiled when he thought about it. How foolish these people were! The more they were paid, the more they were careless. McMahon left his car every night in the driveway of his house. And, once more, the emptiness helped. Between three and four in the morning on weekdays nothing moved in those streets. It was as though the dead were sleeping. There was silence and you could do anything. It had taken Joe O’Brien five minutes to put the device under the car and attach it to the engine.
    ‘It’ll blow up the minute he starts the ignition,’ Joe O’Brien had told him. He had never asked why McMahon was being blown up. He never displayed any form of curiosity. He would do anything. He wondered if Joe were like that at home. If his wife asked him to do the washing-up, or stay in babysitting while she sat in the pub, or let her stick her finger up his arse, would he just say yes.
    In the end the bomb had not gone off when McMahon started the car, but about fifteen minutes later when the barrister had reached a busy roundabout. It had not killed McMahon, merely blown his legs off, and this, he thought, was a better result as McMahon hopping around the Four Courts on wooden legs was a daily reminder to his kind what could so easily happen to them too. McMahon dead could be quickly forgotten.
    He remembered meeting Joe O’Brien a few days later and neither of them mentioning the car or McMahon for a while, and then him saying to Joe that the entire affair,denounced by the Taoiseach as a threat to democracy, gave the phrase ‘getting legless’ a whole new meaning. O’Brien had just grinned for a moment, but said nothing.
    T HE DAY AFTER the Dutchmen had seen the first two paintings, Mousey Furlong came to visit him.