The Bloomsday Dead by Adrian McKinty Read Free Book Online Page B

Wednesday.”
    “No, no, no, it’s Bloomsday. June 16, 2004. It’s the hundredth Bloomsday,” she said, doing little to disguise her contempt for my ignorance.
    “Flower festival, is it?” I asked.
    “What?”
    “Bloomsday is some sort of flower festival?”
    “Good God, no, not that kind of bloom. Leopold Bloom. You haven’t read Ulysses then?” she asked, holding up her complimentary copy.
    “How could I? Only just got it.”
    “Previously,” she said with a touch of exasperation.
    “No, I haven’t. I heard it was a dirty book,” I said and took a swig of my champagne. The woman’s thin lips thinned even more.
    “It is most certainly not. It is the greatest work of literature of the last or perhaps of any other century.”
    “Aye, that’s what people say about Moby Dick, too. I wouldn’t read that either, it must be filthy with that title,” I said and smiled at a sudden remembrance of a time, years ago, when I dragged an old pal of mine called Scotchy to visit Melville’s grave in the Bronx. A used-car dealer we knew had refused to pay the increased protection money and we were there in the dead of night breaking the windows and slashing the tires of every third vehicle on his lot. Woodlawn Cemetery was just next door and of course Scotch and I had both read Billy Budd for school. Scotchy cracked up when he saw that the author of Moby Dick had pussy willows growing on his grave.
    And of course like every other Mick in the world, I’d tried to read Ulysses a couple of times.
    “And tomorrow is when the book was published, is it?” I asked for the entertainment value.
    “Tomorrow, June 16, is when Leopold Bloom spent the day walking around Dublin in the book.”
    “Leopold Bloom. Something to do with Mel Brooks, right? Hope there’s going to be singing.”
    The woman shook her head impatiently.
    “It’s really when Joyce met Nora Barnacle. There will be a big parade and lots of festivities,” the woman said, and bored with my ignorance, turned away.
    I swallowed a gag about Nora Barnacle and the Little Mermaid and examined the book. Joyce looked chic in eye patch and bow tie. I put it in the seat pocket in front of me. Not really my cup of tea and I only hoped that the festivities wouldn’t impede a successful navigation through Dublin to Connolly Station and the train to Belfast. Still, if this was as big a deal as the old lady was saying, the traffic would be coming south, not north, and I’d have no bother getting to my home city.
    And, who knew, maybe Bridget would be waiting there with open arms. Maybe I’d ask around my old haunts and we’d find darling Siobhan together. Maybe all would be forgiven and tonight I could sleep easily for the first time in a dozen years.
    I smiled. Sure. Shut-eye, though, was going to be essential whatever happened. I swallowed an Ambien, finished another glass of champagne, turned off the light, and closed the window shade.
    The pill took about fifteen minutes to kick in.
    The sky darkened, the stars came out, the 777 raced east to greet the dawn.
    I pulled the blanket around me and drifted into a chemical sleep.
    The Atlantic, heaving silent and black five miles below us; and I dreamed of it, of words and things, of whale boats, barnacles, eye-patched Irish men, Leopold Bloom in and out of Dublin pubs, Star-buck and Scotchy and Siobhan, all of them missing, and Ishmael’s rescuer, the devious cruising Rachel, seeking out her lost children, but only finding another orphan.

3: OXEN OF THE SUN (DUBLIN—JUNE 16, 4:15 A.M.)
     
    T he fucking coca leaves. Perfectly legal in Peru, useful for calming nausea and helping you get through the night shift. Really quite benign. You stick a couple in your cheek, they slowly dissolve, and you’re set. Almost impossible to refine cocaine from the leaves in their dried form and completely impossible with the tiny amount I had left in my backpack. But even so, most western governments had declared them illegal