Victor O'Reilly - Games of The Hangman

The thunderstorm was working itself up to a climax. Rain drummed against the glass. Lightning split the sky into jagged pieces.

"It's the weather for metaphysics," said Fitzduane, "though scarcely the time."

Fifteen minutes later Kilmara was connected by telephone to a white-tiled room in Cork.

A smallish man with salt-and-pepper hair and the complexion of a fisherman was given the phone by the lab technician. The smallish man was wearing a green smock and trousers and rubber apron. His white rubber gloves were splashed with blood.

"Michael," said Kilmara after the proprieties had been observed, "I want you to take a break from cutting the tops off of Irish skulls with that electric saw of yours in a fruitless search for gray matter. I'd like you to take a friend of mine out to dinner and do a wee bit of talking."

"What about?" asked the smallish man. There was the sound of dripping from the open body into the stainless steel bucket below.

"A Berlinese hanging."

"Ah," said the smallish man. "Who's paying for dinner?"

"Now, is that a fair question from a friend to a friend about a friend?"

"Yes," said the smallish man.

"The firm."

"Well now, that's very civilized of you, Shane," said the smallish man. "It will be the Arbutus, so."

He decided he would have a nice cup of tea before returning to the corpse.

Kilmara phoned Switzerland.

Fitzduane soaked in the bath, watching his yellow plastic duck bob around in the suds. That was the weakness of showers. There was nowhere to float your duck.

The music of Sean O'Riada wafted through the half-open door.

Fitzduane didn't hear the phone. He was thinking about O'Riada – an outstanding composer who was dead of drink by early middle age – and Rudi von Graffenlaub and the fact that killing yourself, if you included drugs and alcohol, wasn't really such an uncommon human activity. It was just that hanging was rather more dramatic. The duck caught his eye. It was riding low in the water. He had a horrible feeling that it had sprung a leak.

He heard Etan laughing. She entered the bathroom and pulled a towel off the heated rail. "It's Shane. He asks would you mind leaving your duck for a moment. He wants to talk to you."

Fitzduane picked up the phone in a damp hand. There were bubbles in his hair. He leaned over and turned the music down lower. "Still alive?" he said into the mouthpiece.

"You're a real bundle of laughs," said Kilmara. It was late on a wet March evening, and it would take him well over an hour to get to his home in Westmeath. He was feeling grumpy, and he thought it quite probable he was coming down with a cold.

"Developments?" asked Fitzduane. "Or are you just trying to get me out of the bath?"

"Developments," said Kilmara. "The man in Cork says yes, but you'll have to drive down there. The man in Bern says well-behaved tourists are always welcome, though he gargled a bit when he heard the name von Graffenlaub. And I say, if I'm not in bed with acute pneumonia, will you take a stroll over to

Shrewsbury Road in the morning? I want to talk about the dead and the living. Clear?"

"In part," said Fitzduane.

Three hours later, Kilmara felt much improved.

Logs crackled in the big fireplace. An omelette fines herbes, a tomato salad, a little cheese, red wine – all sat especially well when prepared by a Frenchwoman. He heard the whir of the coffee grinder from the kitchen.

He lay back in the old leather wing chair, the twins snuggled in close. They were cozy in pajamas and matching Snoopy robes, and they smelled of soap and shampoo and freshly scrubbed six-year-old. Afterward, when the cries and the squeals and the “But, Daddy, we can't go to bed until our hair is really, really dry” had died down, he talked with Adeline. As always when he looked at her or thought about her, he felt a fortunate man.

"But why, cheri, does he want to do this thing?" said Adeline. She held her balloon glass of Armagnac up to the firelight and enjoyed the flickering rich color. "Why does Hugo go on this quest when nothing is suspicious, when there seems to be no reason?"

"There's nothing suspicious as far as the authorities are concerned," said Kilmara, "but Hugo marches to the beat of a different drum. The point is that it doesn't feel right to him, and that, to him, is what counts."

Adeline looked skeptical. "A feeling – is that all?"

"Oh, I think it's more than that," said Kilmara. "Hugo is something of a paradox. He's a gentle man with a hard edge – and he's spent most of his adult life in war zones. In the Congo he was a natural master of combat while in action, though he had qualms of conscience when it was all over. Combat photography was his compromise. Well, now he's heading toward middle age, and that's a time when you tend to take stock of where you've been and where you're going. I suspect he feels a sense of guilt about having made a living for so many years out of photographing other people's suffering, and I think this one death on his doorstep is like a catalyst for his accumulated feelings. He seems to think he can prevent some future tragedy by finding out the reasons for this one."

"Do you think anything will come of all this?" said Adeline. "It seems to me he's more likely to have a series of doors slammed in his face. Nobody likes to talk about a suicide – least of all the family."

Kilmara nodded. "Well," he said, "ordinarily you'd be right, of course, but Fitzduane is a little different. He'd laugh if you mentioned them, but he's got some special qualities. People talk to him, and he feels things others do not. It's more than being simpatico. If I believed in such things, I'd call him fey."

"What is this word fey?" asked Adeline. Her English was excellent, and she sounded mildly indignant that Kilmara had come up with a word that she did not recognize. Her nose tilted at a pugnacious angle, and there was a glint of amusement in her eye. Kilmara thought she looked luscious. He laughed.

"Oh, it's a real word," he said, "and a good word to know if you are mixing with the Celts." He pulled a Chambers dictionary from the bookshelves behind the chair. He leafed through the pages and found the entry.

"‘Fey’," he read. "‘Doomed; fated to die; under the shadow of a sudden or violent death; foreseeing the future, especially a calamity; eccentric, slightly mad; supernatural.’"

Adeline shivered and looked into the firelight. "Does all of that apply, do you think?"

Kilmara smiled. He took her hands between his. "It isn't that terrible," he said. "The son of a bitch is also lucky."

Adeline smiled, and then she was silent for a while before she spoke. Now her voice was grave. "Shane, my love," she said, "you told me once about Hugo's wife: how she died; how she was killed; how he did nothing to save her."

"He couldn't," said Kilmara. "He had orders, and his men were grossly outnumbered, and frankly, there wasn't even the time. It was quite terrible for him – hell, I knew the girl and she was quite gorgeous – but there was nothing he could do."

Adeline looked at him. "I think Anne-Marie is the reason," she said. "She is the reason he can't let this thing go."

Kilmara kissed his wife's hand. He loved her greatly, and it was a growing love as the days passed and the children grew. He thought Adeline was almost certainly right about Fitzduane, and he worried for his friend.

Fitzduane drove and decided he'd better think about something more cheerful than conditions on the Dublin to Cork road, because the alternative was a heart attack. He decided to review the aftermath of the hanging.

The obvious place to start his quest was DrakerCollege – only it wasn't that simple. The impact of the tragedy of Rudolf von Graffenlaub's death on the small, isolated community of the college had been considerable. Immediately, it had been made quite, quite clear to Fitzduane that the sooner the whole episode was forgotten, the better. Nobody in the college wished to be reminded of Rudi's death. The attitude was that these things happen. It was pointed out, as if in defense, that suicide was the most common cause of death among young people. Fitzduane, who had never thought twice about the matter in the past, found this hard to believe, but investigation showed it to be true.