Benjamin Black - Even the Dead

“It’s for you, Costigan,” he said. “Inspector Hackett would like a word.”

Dr. Blake gave a dinner party, a very small one. She invited Quirke, her nephew, Paul Viertel, and Phoebe. The doctor lived in a tiny mews house in a lane behind Northumberland Road that she had bought and moved into after her husband’s death. Inside, the little house had the sequestered atmosphere of a well-appointed and comfortable underground den. This impression was compounded by the tremendous summer storm that had been threatening for days and that finally broke over the city on the evening of the dinner. It was a windless night and the rain was an incessant and thrilling drumbeat on the roof. Rolling thunderclaps made the windowpanes buzz, and flickers of lightning left a whiff of sulfur in the crepitant air. There were repeated brief power failures, until, sometime after nine o’clock, the lights went out and stayed out, and the rest of the dinner took place by candlelight.

Luckily the house had a gas cooker. They ate clear chicken soup and poached salmon and asparagus, followed by ice cream with raspberry sauce. Quirke was careful with the wine, and drank moderately. Paul Viertel and Phoebe talked together a great deal, and the two older people were happy to sit for long periods in silence, glancing at each other now and then through the glitter and flash of the candle flames and exchanging secret smiles.

This was Quirke’s first time in the house. The furniture was sparse, and what there was of it was discreetly elegant. Evelyn collected primitive art, and savage wooden heads and fierce-looking masks were set on tables and on windowsills, or lurked menacingly in gaps among the books on the bookshelves. The room where they ate was dominated by an Egon Schiele drawing, startling in its anatomical frankness, of an emaciated and naked young woman seated on the ground, languorously leaning back and supporting herself on her elbows, with one leg flexed and the other slackly splayed. There was an upright piano, on which stood an assortment of framed photographs. Evelyn showed Quirke a miniature of her late husband in an oval frame—“He was young then, you would not have known him”—and some blurred snapshots of her family taken in the 1930s. There was a photograph too of her son, Hanno, who had died in childhood; Quirke gazed at the slightly out-of-focus image of the boy, soft of face and sad-eyed like his mother.

“He looks like you,” Quirke said.

“Do you think so? He was such a sweet child.”

“What happened—”

She lifted an admonishing finger. “Ssh,” she said softly. “Perhaps another time. Not now, not tonight.”

When they had finished their salmon, the two women cleared away the plates, and Quirke and Paul Viertel talked about Paul’s studies. His field was immunology. He intended, when qualified, to go to Africa and and work there.

“Malaria,” he said, “river blindness, even smallpox — these things can be eradicated, I am convinced of it. All that’s required is funding, and personnel.”

“It’s an ambitious program,” Quirke said. “I can’t see it being carried out in my lifetime.”

“No,” Paul said, and smiled, “but perhaps in mine.”

After dinner they settled into pairs, Paul and Phoebe remaining at the table, deep in conversation about Cold War politics — Paul was radically of the left — while Quirke and Evelyn sat beside each other on the sofa, balancing coffee cups on their knees.

“I’ve made a discovery,” Quirke said.

“Yes, I thought there was something.”

He glanced at her sharply. “What sort of something?”

“Something momentous.”

Quirke nodded to himself. “ Momentous, yes, I suppose that’s the word.” He took a sip of his coffee. “What it was,” he said, “was that I realized who my parents were.”

“You realized?”

“Acknowledged. I’ve known it for a long time, I think.” He smiled. “Strange, isn’t it, how you can know something and not know it at the same time?”

“Not so strange,” Evelyn said. “Many people are capable of it — whole nations are. What happened?”

Quirke shook his head in puzzled wonderment. “It was strange,” he repeated. “A man came to my flat — broke into my flat, in fact — a man who knew my father. A very wicked man. A kind of devil.”

“Ah, yes. It is usually the Devil who whispers momentous things into our ears.” She touched a finger to his wrist. “Do you want to tell me who they were, your parents?”

A beat of silence passed. “My father was a judge,” Quirke said. “Judge Garret Griffin.”

“I know the name.”

“Oh, he was a power in the land. He’s dead now.” He turned his head aside, frowning. “He adopted me, but I think at some level I knew he was my father.”

Evelyn was watching him, her dark eyes darker and larger than ever. “And your mother?”

“I think she was a servant in the Judge’s house, a maid who used to work for him and his wife. Moran was her name. Dolores Moran.”

“And where is she now?”

“Dead, too. She was murdered. In fact”—he leaned forward suddenly, as if he had felt a stab of pain—“in fact, the man who came to my flat, Joseph Costigan, he was responsible for her death. Him, and Judge Griffin.”

Now Evelyn put a hand over his. “This is a terrible story,” she said.

“Yes,” Quirke said, “yes, it is, it is terrible.”

“Your father knew she had been murdered? Did he mean it to happen?”

“He swore to me it was all Costigan’s fault, that it was the fault of the men Costigan sent to her house to get something from her, a diary. There was another girl, another of the Judge’s girls, also a maid in the house, like Dolly Moran. Her name was Christine Falls. She died in childbirth.”

“This child was also the Judge’s?”

“Yes, and Dolly Moran had kept a record of it, and that’s why she was murdered.”

“Were they caught, the people who killed her?”

“No,” Quirke said. “The police knew who they were, but they could do nothing. The Judge was a very powerful man, with very powerful friends, in the church and in the government. He was untouchable. Costigan, too — all of them were untouchable.”

Phoebe and Paul Viertel were arguing in friendly fashion about Israel and the Palestinians. Quirke watched them, smiling. He had not seen such a light in Phoebe’s eyes for a very long time.

“You must be in pain now, yes?” Evelyn said.

“No,” Quirke answered, “ pain isn’t the word. What I mostly feel is relief, or something like it. And sadness, of course, for Dolly Moran, for poor Christine Falls.”

“And for yourself?”

He thought about it. “No,” he said, “I don’t feel sad for myself. I think I’m cured of that. It’s as if I had been walking through what seemed an endless night and suddenly the dawn has come up behind me. Not a very welcome dawn, but dawn nevertheless.”

“And will it show you the path to follow, from now on? It seems to me you have much work to do.”

“You mean, I should embark on the talking cure? Will you take me on?”

She only smiled.

Later, the two of them were in the kitchen, and she said, “Phoebe, I think, is falling a little in love with my Paul.”

“Do you think so?”

“Yes, of course.” She was at the stove, making another round of coffee, while he leaned against the sink, smoking a cigarette. A single, tall candle stood on the draining board. “Do you like him?” she asked.

“Paul? He seems a decent fellow.”

“Decent. Hmm. That is a good word. Am I decent, would you say?”

She turned to him, and he took her in his arms. “You know that I’m falling a little in love with you ? More than a little.”