A Glimpse of Camelot
Both men were still laughing from the joke they’d just shared. Cahal Brady walked across the room, kicked-off his shoes and then followed the relaxed wave of his younger half-brother to take the seat opposite him. A drink already awaited him, glinting amber in its glass.
They were hard and determined men who knew they had immense power right across Ireland, although unbeknown to them then even greater influence was just around the corner, and they believed they were in their prime. Cahal was forty-three and Frank O’Neill was two years his junior, and both were the mortal embodiment of alpha males; yet Frank’s achievements were gilded with a subtlety and charisma that set him apart. Coincidentally they were about the same age that Michael McCann would be (although not yet born) nearly half a century later, when Frank would send him on his mission to London in 2013.
Despite the stark and monochrome austerity of 1960s Dublin, Frank’s suite in the Gresham Hotel had a smug grandeur to it; a little like Frank himself. It was seductively lit, lavishly furnished, and it smelled of leather, wood polish and cigars. Sinatra crooned quietly on the wireless and Frank reclined in one of two deep armchairs with his stockinged feet atop a small round coffee table below the window. Cahal put his feet up too and sat like an opposing bookend in the other. He had a hole in one sock. And yet, despite their life-long intimacy and the blood they had mingled – both theirs and others’ – they made sure their toes didn’t quite touch.
The big double bed was turned-down, plumped-up and ready for sleep, but it was for Frank only. Unusually that is. For once something other than a woman had brought him into the capitol and his sheets when he climbed in later would be strangely cold. As their laughter subsided he rolled a cut-crystal tumbler in his mighty hands and blew a swirl of cigar smoke into the air above his sibling. It was the early hours of Wednesday the 5th of June 1968 and a day that would soon resonate right around the world. But that would be in eight hours’ time, when they met-up again for breakfast and at something after 1 am in Los Angeles the same day.
McCann Description:
The novel Easter, Smoke and Mirrors was a story about charm, passion and guile; about revenge, deceit and lethal intent. In short it was about the relentless manipulation of ordinary people to conceal chillingly extraordinary events. But above all it was about human nature and how to exploit it.
This associated collection of short stories, the first in the Cleanskin series, gives colour, texture and context to the life and times of Michael McCann, its central character. It explains how, why and when he grew into the man he became, driven by revenge, vanity and misplaced ideology to become one of the first global monsters of the 21st century.
McCann spans the years from 1968 (and so the earliest rumblings of ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland) to 2015 (and a resurgent Irish Republican Army’s preparations to mark the hundredth anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin). It not only traces McCann’s violent and hedonistic upbringing – indeed his whole life up until the opening chapters of the preceding novel – but it illuminates many other people, places and historic events along the way.
You don’t have to have read Easter, Smoke and Mirrors to appreciate this collection of stand-alone fables, but whether you have or you haven’t it should prompt you to ask once again….do you really know who your neighbours are?
