Benjamin Black - The Silver Swan

No, Billy Hunt was no fool. He knew what was what, he knew his way round the world. For years he had been handling the big shots on his visits over at head office in Switzerland-those boys would make short work of the likes of Quirke-not to mention the fancy whores hanging around the city of Geneva's hotel lobbies. And he could sell anything; he could have sold suntan lotion to niggers. Not that he got any respect for it. Most people when he told them what he did immediately saw him as some poor joe shuffling from door to door, trying to fool housewives into buying vacuum cleaners. They had no idea what a real salesman did, how much thought went into it, how much psychology. That was the point of selling: you needed to know people's minds, to see into the way they were thinking. Not that they did much thinking. People, customers, clients-they were all fools.

He had not expected to fall so hard for Deirdre Ward. At his age, he had thought he was past that kind of thing. The Geneva whores had been sufficient to keep that old itch scratched. That was until he met Deirdre. He knew he was too old for her. He could hardly believe it when she agreed to go with him. What a dolt he had made of himself, boasting about his job, the big deals he was always clinching, and the trips to Switzerland, all that stuff. He had supposed she really expected he would do as he had promised and take her with him over there, introduce her to his bosses, Herr This and Monsieur That-"Call me Fritz, gnädige Frau !" "Call me Maurice, chčre Madame !"—and treat her to grand dinners and put her up in deluxe hotels, show her the Matterhorn, take her skiing. What a shock it was for him when she turned out to be the one with ambitions, and a business head to realize them. And what a pity it was that she, unlike him, was such a poor judge of people. From the start he had spotted Leslie White for what he was. But, of course, there was no talking to her. Stubborn, she was, stubborn as a stone.

In a way, though, it had been a relief that it was White she chose to take up with. Billy's real fear, from the start, was that she would get tired of him because of his age and find herself some young fellow. He did not want to be like the old fools in the old songs who were a laughingstock because they could not satisfy their young wives. What was that one they used to sing?

Oh, eggs and eggs and marrow bones

Will make your old man blind…

Yes, that he would not have been able to bear, having people nudging each other and laughing at him behind his back. Anything was preferable to that, or almost anything.

As it turned out, he was just as blind as any fond fool in a ballad. The evidence was there before him, if he had only allowed himself to see it. The change in her moods, the laughter and the tears for no reason, the flare-ups of irritation out of nowhere, the dreamy, almost sorrowful look in her eye, all these things should have told him something was up. The clincher was the way she suddenly became all lovey-dovey towards him, cooking him special dinners, the ones he was supposed to be so fond of, and sitting at the table with him while he ate, her chin on her hand and her shining eyes fixed on him, pretending to be fascinated by some story he was telling her about a tricky sale he had made, a crafty deal he had pulled off. She had not wanted him to touch her, either-she had allowed him to, but she had not wanted it, not as she had wanted it when they were together first, all over him like a cheap suit then, not able to get out of her knickers quick enough. Twice he had noticed marks on her, red weals high up on the backs of her legs, as if she had been whipped, and another time scratches down her shoulder blades, which anyone but him would have known were nail marks. Oh, yes, it was all there, plain as plain, but he had not seen it because he had not wanted to see it; he knew that now. He had wanted it not to be true.

How long would it have gone on, he wondered, his blindness, his willed stupidity, if White had not sent him the photograph? And why had White sent it? Just for a joke? When it arrived that morning it made him sick, literally sick-he had to go up to the lavatory and throw up the bacon and eggs and fried bread she had cooked him for his breakfast. He was like an animal that had been poisoned. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before; he had never experienced this kind of thing, this awful jumble of pain and anguish and fury, and something else, too, when he looked at the photo, something worse, a throb, a dull spasm in the gut, lower than the gut, a hot boneache at the fork of his thighs, the same that he had felt as a boy in school when he leaned over the shoulders of a ring of fellows in the senior lav and saw what they were crouching over, a picture torn from a smutty magazine of a tart lying back on a bed with her knees up, showing off all she had. But this thing that had arrived in the post, this was no tart but his wife, sprawled there with her skirt round her hips and everything on view.

The moment he saw it he knew who had taken it. He had never met Kreutz, had never even seen him, but the way Deirdre had talked about him and, more significantly, the way she had suddenly stopped talking about him had been enough to alert him to the fact that this Kreutz was a wrong one. But why would Kreutz, having taken the picture of Deirdre, then send it to her husband? For at this stage he had thought it must have been Kreutz who had sent it. At first Billy assumed that Kreutz was going to try to get money out of him. He had seen it often enough in gangster pictures, fellows getting women drunk or drugged and taking compromising snaps of them-you never saw the snaps onscreen, of course-and sending them to the women's husbands to blackmail them and force them to pay up. They always ended in gunplay, these plots, with bodies, much too neat and unrumpled, all over the place, lying in pools of black blood.

He could not think why it had not occurred to him that it might have been Leslie White and not Kreutz who had sent him the photo, except that there had been no reason why White would have had the photo in the first place. Nor was it clear to him why, after Deirdre was dead, he did not go looking for Kreutz straightaway but instead concentrated on Leslie White. He had been following him for a long time, tracking him, monitoring him. He had seen him with the girl. He did not know she was Quirke's daughter. He did not know anything about her. But he liked the look of her. Or "liked" was not the word. He felt, even across the distance that he always made sure to keep between them, a sympathy for her, or with her; they were, he felt, somehow alike, himself and her. She was a loner, like him-and he was a loner, he had no doubt of that. He began to look out for the girl, to look out for her welfare, though it was true he had no idea what he could do to help her. He even used to phone her up now and again, just to check that she was all right, though of course he never said anything, only listened to her voice, until in the end she, too, started to say nothing, and there they would be, the two of them, at either end of the line, silent, listening, somehow together.

Maybe it was for her sake, for the girl's sake, and not for Deirdre's, that he had sent the three lads to give White a hiding. They were good lads, Joe Etchingham and Eugene Timmins and his brother Alf; Joe was on the football team with him, a handy fullback, while the other two were hurlers; the three of them were in the Movement and had done a few jobs on the border; they would keep their mouths shut, he could count on that. Yes, maybe it was-what was her name?-maybe it was Phoebe he was trying to protect by arranging for the lads to go after White with hurley sticks and give him a good going-over.