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30 January 2008

Flashback: Last Monday

Filed under: private eye — Will @ 23:32

Monday, 21 January 2008, nine am.

The workers around the park seemed a little less tolerant of my presence on Monday morning. Maybe they didn’t like the idea of starting a new week without getting a weekend. Maybe they finally decided that I was nothing but bad news. Either way, my little hobby got a lot harder.

Old Patrick gave me a good tip, and I felt obliged to follow up on it. The movies tell you that these guys aren’t interested in anything but money, but they have more pride on the line than money. They have more pride than money, period. On any given day, I was more accountable to the old man than to my clients. And, honestly, I need him more than I need any one of them.

So I strolled once around the fence that surrounds the park. On an ordinary day, I could use my key and just walk right in. Today, big guys in fluorescent vests were milling around every gate but the west one. And that gate was in the wide open, making me feel like a rat in an empty lot next to the home of a bored insomniac with a .22 and a sniper’s citation from his soldier days.

Worse yet, one of the dowagers from the neighbourhood was tottering down Pembroke with her grandson in tow. These two watched the park like they had a marijuana plot inside, and for all I know, it was their little party getting underway. They doddered up to the same break in the trees that I was looking through, and stopped.

I said hello, but they must have thought that I was a part of the scenery, possibly some tree branch that the groundskeeper forgot to prune.

The old woman made a strangled clucking sound and started to educate her get on the situation before us. She had an accent that sounded like she was raised by a Victorian English lady on one side and a culchie shepherd on the other. My elbow practically rested on her shoulder, but I could only make out about a quarter of what she said.

“They’re just interested in the money and they couldn’t care less about what that monstrosity will do to the lawn,” I managed to hear. “No sense in those people.” That was good news. If she gave me trouble, I could easily satisfy her sense of common courtesy. But I wouldn’t learn anything from her today; if I spoke, she’d probably jump right out of that blue cashmere coat and hit me over the head with her cane on the way back down.

Without a reason to delay any longer, I opened the gate and walked through. As I carefully closed the gate, I caught a look of total astonishment from the Duchess of Richmond. She was probably wondering how I could have a key — after all, she’d never had tea with me, and I wasn’t wearing a yellow safety jacket.

A lot of time with little news

Filed under: private eye — Will @ 16:53

29 January 2008.

It’s four o’clock, and I’m sequestered, i.e. stuck in an office with as much character as a Best Western. I’m killing time in Chicago, and it’s killing me right back. Nobody’s keeping me here, but I may as well be behind bars and razor wire.

If there’s one weakness you don’t want in my business, it’s a sense of obligation. When you feel responsibility for other people, you’re caught in a net like a 20-kg tuna off the coast of Newfoundland. And a single thread of fidelity pulled me into this one.

How I wound up here is a short story: I ran away from trouble in Dublin and then ran smack into it in Chi-town.

You’d think that an empty office with cinder-block walls and a big desk would be a good place to tell a story, but it’s not. All my mind does is bounce between how wondering long it’s gonna take before the lawyers get done and savoring the silken idea of yet another cigarette in the cold air.

I can’t get my thoughts together in this place, and that’s a problem if the legal eagles decide to take another whack at my testimony. So for now, I’ve got to concentrate on my job for today. Tomorrow, I’ll start thinking about Dublin again.

23 January 2008

Warning

Filed under: private eye — Will @ 7:53

Tuesday, 22 January 2008.

“You need to hear what I got to say.” I’d barely reached the top of my stairs when Old Patrick whirled from his seat next to my mailbox. He must have been sitting on the sidewalk, with his back to the wrought-iron fence. From what I know, that was risky in this neighbourhood — I assume that there’s a reason why there aren’t beggars in Fitzwilliam Square.

“I wandered into the park yesterday; the Old Drunk act works better than yer Tourist, ya know. I saw some things, but right away, this guy in a suit came from nowhere.

“He said that he had a message for ye. He knows who ye are, and that you had better watch yerself as well.

“Com’ere — there’s a sign in there that you should see. But I did not read much of it before the gorilla tossed me out. And Little Peter won’t give it a go. I said that you’d give him a tenner, but he’s wary of the place. But mostly, I wanted ta warn ya.”

I walked Patrick to a diner in Rathfarnham, and we had a full Irish breakfast. He rambled through a number of topics, as usual. He was especially interested in the American dollar, and said, “I don’t know that I want those worthless notes from the tourists in the spring.”

On this morning, the state of the US economy was the least of my concerns.

22 January 2008

Close Encounters, Monday Night

Filed under: dublin,entertainment — Will @ 22:00

I don’t believe people who say they saw a UFO. Ninety-nine percent of the time, when you look at one of these people’s lives, there’s a good reason to be skeptical.

When I see something unusual, I always think, “I’d better get out of here.” That instinct has served me well. If I decide to stick around, then I’m not going to stick with “unidentified.” I’ll find out what’s out there.

When I climbed out of our subterranean apartment, I saw something unusual. fitzlights.jpgI was following my girl up the stairs, so I couldn’t just run back down. Eerie lights streamed from the Park, and the air filled with a thrumming noise that sounded like an idling tractor-trailer.

I took some photos, of course, and tracked down my woman. She was talking with the call-girls who work across the street. They were just as worried as me. The girls looked to me for an explanation for what was happening to our neighbourhood. I had no answer. As we returned to the increasingly fragile safety of our home, the lights in the park began flashing: green, blue, purple, red.

This investigation isn’t just a hobby anymore.

Monday on the street

Filed under: dublin,entertainment — Will @ 16:29

Monday morning, I took more photos of the jobsite, hoping for a lead. I found some interesting details, but I couldn’t get my head around them. I was still in a fog from the effects of an all-night stakeout for one of my other cases. So I went back to bed to sleep it off.

As the sun set in the afternoon, I walked toward the seedier side of town, to follow a lead on the same case that kept me away from home last night. On the way, I stopped to talk to Old Patrick, one of the beggars that makes a meagre living from the softer emotions of the Irish who got lucky from the Celtic Tiger.

He dropped his usual mumble and leaned in to speak: “They say you’re looking into Fitzwilliam Square, like.”

I knew the routine quite well. I found a crisp ten euro note in my wallet and I wrapped it around a cigarette. Old Patrick prefers that his presents be gift-wrapped. And everything costs more in Dublin these days.

He laughed. “Well, I don’t know anyting yet, meself. But thanks a million for the smoke. I’ll keep one eye on the Fitz while yer doin’ business. Com’ere — do ya wanta know what I tink is going on?”

I knew that Old Patrick’s favorite game was spinning stories that started from a shred of truth and led to a few pints apiece at the nearest pub. That sounded like a good way to spend the rest of my day. But I had to make some progress on my bread-and-butter work, if I was going to have time for my unpaid moonlighting gig on Fitzwilliam Square.

21 January 2008

File under Fitzwilliam Square, Sunday

Filed under: dublin,entertainment — Will @ 22:05

Sunday, 20 January 2008.

Word on the street is that the blue-bloods of Dublin like to chum around my turf during the gray days of late winter. Nobody asked me to the clambake. Then again, they never do. There’s an upstairs-downstairs smell to this town, like everybody wants to be an English duke or something. To these American eyes, Dublin’s uppercrust drips with hypocrisy.

I can’t assume that this thing is just a shindig for the silk-stockings set. Assumptions get you killed in my line of work. So Sunday afternoon, I looked for more facts, hints, anything that would give me a clue. I need to know who’s behind all this. More important, I want to see who has something to lose.

More photos posted on Flickr. This time, some of the pics are in full resolution, so you can zoom in, on your computer, and look for hidden details. To see the photos in the highest resolution, click on “ALL SIZES” above the smaller version.

20 January 2008

Bugle Private Investigations, Ltd

Filed under: dublin,entertainment — Will @ 19:02

Friday, 18 January 2008.

It was a rainy night in Dublin, and it was winter, but the cold snap was over. As I rounded the corner on the way to our local pub, I was blinded by a bluish-white light that burned through the mist and onto my retinas. I guarded my eyes and trudged onto the local, seeking my whiskey and beer. I passed a few box-trucks that were full of unidentifiable steel equipment and ducked into The Pembroke for the warmth of the fireplace and the alcohol.

Inside, locals mixed with some new folk, including a skirt with a radio and an earpiece, who darted around like a mouse in a tenement apartment’s only bedroom. She wouldn’t meet my eye, so I slugged back some more firewater, flipped a one-euro coin to the bartender and walked back into the rain. It was then that I noticed that the single bank of lights was focused on the opposite site of the street. It lit up a posh restaurant called FXB, where a guy like me wouldn’t get past the doorman and wouldn’t know what to do if he did. The light spilled onto the next building, so I couldn’t be sure that the steak joint was the real focus of attention.

Normally, you’d see movie-types hustling around, or at least a photographer. This was a remarkable scene because those lowlifes were not around. Just the trucks. After the week that I had, I wasn’t looking for trouble, so I didn’t ask. I just went home.

Saturday, 19 January 2008.

Even a stiff like me needs to go shopping for groceries once in a while. And my doll wanted me to take her to some fancy museum close to our place. It was going to be an ordinary Saturday. As I reached the top of the stairs that led up from my basement apartment, blinking into the dim light of day, I knew that there was nothing ordinary about this Saturday in Fitzwilliam Square. A crane leaned over the park, and there was a lot of noise for eleven in the morning, at least for my neighbourhood.

A PI’s instincts don’t take holidays, so I grabbed my camera and did my best Stupid Tourist act as I took pictures of everything in sight. Something was going on in Fitzwilliam Park, and I’ve had one eye on the Park since I moved in across the street. Almost a six months ago, the rich folks of the Park’s board held their noses and let me into their club. Of course, I had an angle. If I could get some business from these stuffed shirts, I’d have a whole new kind of clientele. Maybe I’d finally be able to take my lady out for a holiday and leave this dingy city for a while.

Editor — The story continues on Flickr, where you can see the photos that our protagonist took on Saturday. You can try to solve the Mystery of Fitzwilliam Square! Click here to help sort out the evidence.

18 January 2008

Locutionary Confectionary

Filed under: consumer,ireland — Will @ 19:00

At the 2007 retreat, the Bugle staff decided to become your best-in-class source for information about the Irish and British sugar- and syrup-oriented products. The BB Procurement Department obtained the first sample for 2008: Fry’s Turkish Delight.

The wrapper for Fry’s Turkish Delight presents itself as a typical, old-fashioned British candy bar. The wrapping promises the intensely sugary quality that seems to hold an extraordinary appeal for Angles and Saxons (and the Irish too). The motto, “Full of Eastern Promise,” is odd. Does Fry make good on the promise? Is it appropriate to talk about “Eastern” (presumably as opposed to “Western”) flavours in the 21st century? Fry may be a bit of an orientalist.

Inside the wrapper lies a medium-brown chocolate rectangle that tastes like ordinary chocolate. It’s a little too big to eat in one bite. Biting off half the bar leaves its gooey innards exposed, frysturkishdelight.jpgwith teeth marks slowly melting back into the mass. The chocolate skin is barely a millimeter thick.

The innards are the Turkish Delight from which the delicacy derives its name. It is a block of goo that resembles plastic explosive more than food. It appears that the Ottoman Turks generated a gelatenous substance of supersaturated sucrose, perhaps by following ancient Greek methods re-discovered during the Islamic Renaissance. The strangely solid, yet sticky result could be delicious, or it could be a derivative of napalm. [The author’s implicature, which advances a harmful stereotype, should not be taken as an endorsement of the historically suspect idea of a clash of civilizations, nor does the Bakker Bugle endorse the suggestions herein. — Editor]

So I had taken my first bite of Turkish Delight. After my fight-or-flight instinct subsided, I paused to consider the remaining part of the treat. The delicate supporting structure of chocolate was ruined, and the lightest pressure of my fingers — just enough to keep the candy from slipping to the floor — was smashing the Delight into an amorphous wad. My brain protests, but I have no choice. I must eat the remainder or be condemned to hours alternating between washing with caustic soaps, and walking around, fingers akimbo, as if I received a fresh manicure of some misbegotten nail-polish glacé.

With the second and final bite, I discovered that this goodie has a flavor as well as a texture. It resembles, slightly, the generic fruit flavor one finds in American hard candies. The wrapper told me that Turkish Delight consists of sugar, gelatin and rose water. There was something natural about the taste, unlike the supposedly “fruit-flavored” Now-and-Later. But I don’t know how a rose tastes. The purply gel in my mouth didn’t taste like fruit, and it didn’t smell like a grandmother’s perfume, so “rose water” didn’t help me much. I’ll assume that this confection’s origins are botanical, even if a process rendered it into something that cannot be one of God’s own creations.

After two bites, I found the solid-gel texture intriguing, and the taste was compelling. Now I want more. I can’t recommend it to you, and I can’t say that it tastes good. But I find myself thinking about the Eastern Promise several times an hour. Fry, you are a cruel candy-pusher, but you are also the exotic Mata Hari of the bonbon-industrial complex!

17 January 2008

Coldest Week in Dublin

Filed under: dublin,ireland — Will @ 15:14

Last week was the coldest week for us since our move to Dublin. Some weeks this summer felt cooler, relative to normal temperatures and particularly relative to our US summers. Nevertheless, I am ready to declare the week of 6-12 January 2008 as the crappiest week of weather for the Bakkers in Ireland. I created a chart to prove my point: the blue columns indicate daily rainfall totals, the grey zone is the temperature, Weather Chart Jan 2008and the red line is average wind speed.

There was no snow last week. A little bit of snow-like substance fell from the sky, but it was more like hail or sleet. Snow doesn’t make “tick” noises when it hits the ground! And Anita did need to scrape her windshield two or three mornings, before driving into the pre-dawn darkness.

The story was much different for us on Saturday the 5th. We drove to Belfast. In Northern Ireland, and even the higher elevations of County Louth, the ground was lightly covered in snow. In the city of Belfast, the snow and slush stood in low piles along the streets, like a minor snowfall in Chicago. The roads were perpetually wet, as the snow on the tarmac was moved aside mostly by the tires of ordinary vehicles.

Back to Dublin: Last week, almost everyone still wore light coats, scarves, and sometimes a hat. I now believe that most Dubliners don’t own heavy winter coats. Lots of Southsiders have skiing gear, and a few wore their ludicrously coloured ski jackets on the coldest days. And the cold didn’t inhibit people from walking to get coffee and lunch. The early mornings were dead, as usual, but I didn’t notice any change in the number of pedestrians out at midday and in the evening.

Belfast was another story. Nearly everyone, including motorists, had heavy winter coats in the LLBean style, and stocking caps.

Anita reports that her co-workers believe the worst weather is yet to come, in February. I’m skeptical, especially given the gusty, rainy nature of last week. This week is gray and rainy, but noticeably warmer. And my maxim from the summer still works: There is sunshine every day, for at least a little while. The oppressive mat of dark clouds that sits over the American Midwest in wintertime just can’t resist the constant wind. As I walked around last week, I thought, “Coming here as a tourist during this week wouldn’t be terrible, especially if you adapted each day’s sights to the sunshine.”

I’ll finish with the immortal words of André 3000, “You can plan a pretty picnic, but you can’t predict the weather.”

15 January 2008

Staff Hijinks

Filed under: administrative — Will @ 12:24

The BB staff are filled with the spirit of a new year and, also, they are bored due to the lack of recent content from myself. Their playful demeanor led them to adopt a less than respectful attitude toward their superiors — albeit with generally good intentions.

So it was that the latest poll proposed a course of self-improvements for Anita and myself. You may have noticed the new poll yesterday, which asked, “How should Anita & Will improve in the coming months?”

It’s a reasonable question and a good idea for a poll of our readers. Nevertheless, in the staff meeting today, I clarified the hierarchy of the Bakker operation. The result was a slight change to the poll.

As always, your suggestions are most welcome. Please add your own entries to the ballot of improvements, and remember that the poll is completely anonymous.

I think the Staff will find that they have plenty to do in the coming weeks: Winter Break is over.

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