Benjamin Black - Holy Orders

“What was your involvement?” Quirke asked of Hackett.

“Hmm?” Hackett was attending to his port.

“With this business about the priest — about the complaint.”

“I wasn’t involved,” the detective said, “not directly.”

“But what? You had a hunch?”

“No no. Not really. But I asked around a bit. You know.”

Quirke smiled thinly, nodding. “And what did you hear?”

The detective pressed the butt of his cigarette into an ashtray on the bar, grinding it in slow half circles, thoughtfully. An angry flare of smoke rose quickly and dispersed. “A busy fellow, the same Father Honan. Ran a boys’ club out of one of the tenements in Sean McDermott Street. Athletics, swimming, boxing, that sort of thing. Got local businesses to cough up, persuaded Guinness to sponsor equipment, jerseys, football boots, so on. Made him very popular with the locals.”

“No complaints like the other one?”

“No fear! The man was a saint, as far as Sean McDermott Street was concerned. Set up a temperance society too, bringing the men in and persuading them to take the pledge. There was a tontine society that he got going, to pay for the funerals of the poor. Oh, aye, Father Mick was the local hero. Did work for the tinkers, too, trying to get them to settle down and quit stravaiging the country. A busy man, as I say.”

Quirke was lighting another cigarette. “But you were skeptical.”

Hackett made a large gesture, rolling his shoulders and lifting up the empty palm of one hand. “I had nothing against the man,” he said. “I never even met him.”

They were silent again. Behind them the bar was filling up, and the electric light, under siege from the clouds of cigarette smoke, was turning into an almost opaque blue-gray haze. Barney Boyle was somewhere in the crowd; Quirke, hearing the playwright’s loud, slurred tones, kept his head well down. He did not feel up to dealing with Barney, not this evening.

“So,” he said. “Are you going to follow it up?”

Hackett made his Spencer Tracy face, pressing his tongue hard into his cheek and screwing up an eye. “I thought we might amble out there and have a word with Father Honan, before he departs for the mission fields, with his pickaxe and spade.”

“You mean, you thought you might amble out.”

“Ah, now, Doctor, you know you’ve a great way with the sky pilots — I’ve noticed it before.”

“You have, have you?”

“I have.” The detective chuckled. “I imagine they think of you as being in the same line of business as themselves, more or less — you handle the bodies, they do the souls.”

Quirke shook his head. “You’re a terrible man, do you know that?” he said. “Here, buy me a drink — it’s the least you can do.”

This time Hackett signaled to Frankie, who came down the length of the bar in a hip-rolling sashay. “What’ll it be, gents?” he asked, and pulled out his bow tie past its limit and released it, smirking. Quirke lowered his head and looked at him narrowly; he might have been sighting along the barrel of a gun.

He had settled down with a nightcap and a history of Byzantium that he had been trying to finish for weeks when Isabel rang up. He sat and looked at the telephone and let it ring a dozen times before lifting the receiver, which he did gingerly, as if it might explode in his hand. He knew it would be Isabel. It was nearing midnight, and he had thought he was safe, that she must have slept through the evening and would not get up so late, but no. Her tone was dispiritingly bright. He tried in turn to sound enthusiastic, loving, happy to hear her voice.

Isabel said she supposed he was in bed himself by now, with his teddy and his toddy, but that she would come over anyway, and maybe join him there, in the scratcher — she liked to use slang words, pronouncing them with an arch, actorly flourish, stretching out the vowels and rolling the r ’s. He could think of no reasonable means of putting her off. Good, she said, she would jump in a taxi right now. He put down the phone and gazed unseeing at the book lying open in his lap. It always annoyed him, that way she had of saying Bye-ee! with another theatrical trill.

Yet when she arrived and at the front door flew into his arms and kissed him, breathing hotly into his ear, his heart gave a familiar gulp. She was a warm, happy, grown-up woman, after all, and she loved him, so she said, and to prove it she had tried to kill herself for his sake. He held her now, at once desiring her and wishing she had not come. What did he want from her? he asked himself, for the thousandth time. The self-canceling answer was everything and nothing, and therefore it was all impossible. Cringing with guilt he pressed her all the more tightly to him, while in his mind, suddenly, longingly, he had a vision of the towpath by the dark canal, and how it would be there, the hushed trees bending low, the moon shimmering in the water and the dry reeds whispering together, and not a soul anywhere about.

“Did you miss me?” she whispered, grazing his neck with her lips. “Tell me you did, even if you didn’t.”

“Of course I missed you,” he said, making his voice go thick as if with emotion. “How can you ask?”

When they were in the flat she looked about with lively interest, as if she had been away for years. She took off her head scarf and shook out her dark-bronze hair. She was wearing the short fur coat that he had bought her for her birthday, over a dark blue silk suit with a narrow skirt that accentuated the curve of her bottom. When she had taken the coat off she turned her head back sharply and glanced down to check the seams of her stockings, and seeing her do it, as she did so often, he felt himself smile. He had missed her, he told himself; it was not entirely untrue.

“Can you light a fire or something?” she asked. “It’s bloody freezing in here.”

He squatted in front of the fireplace and put a match to the gas fire, and the gas ignited with its usual soft whomp! That was another thing that irritated him about Isabel, that she seemed always to be cold.

He made coffee for them both and laced it with whiskey. He asked if she was hungry, and offered to make an omelette for her, but she said no, that she had been forced to endure enough boardinghouse meals in the past six weeks to cure her of wanting to eat anything ever again. “Do you think I’ve put on weight?” She surveyed herself critically in the big and incongruously ornate mirror behind the sideboard. “I think I have. God!”

Quirke was admiring the way the hem of her buttoned-up short jacket flared out over her slim hips. “You look wonderful,” he said, and was relieved to realize that he meant it.

“Do I?” She turned from the mirror and looked at him, measuring him up and down with an arched eyebrow. “I wish I could say the same for you. I suppose you’ve been boozing nonstop since I left.”

“Oh, nonstop,” he said. “Blotto every night.”

“You should let me marry you,” she said.

“Should I?”

“Yes, you should. I’d see to it that you were set straight. Cook proper meals for you, iron your shirts, put you to bed at night with a warm flannel on your chest to ward off the chill. And if you came home late I’d be standing behind the door with a rolling pin, to teach you the error of your ways. Can’t you see it?”

“I can. Andy Capp and Flo.”

“Who?”

“Andy Capp and his battle-axe missus — cartoon characters in the paper.”

She put her head to one side, smiling thinly. “A cartoon strip,” she said, in a voice suddenly turned brittle, “is that how you see us? Give me a cigarette.”

She sat on the arm of the armchair by the fireplace and crossed her legs, while he went to the mantelpiece and took two cigarettes from the silver box there, lit both, and gave one to her. She was leaning across to look at the book he had left lying open on the chair’s other arm. “Belisarius,” she read. “Who’s he when he’s at home?”