Benjamin Black - Holy Orders

Someone walked up quietly behind him. “Dr. Quirke, I presume?”

He was large and ruddy, with reddish-brown hair cropped short so that the paper-pale skin of his scalp shone through. He did not look like a priest. He wore a nondescript gray suit, striped shirt, a dark blue tie, slip-on shoes with small gilt buckles. However, the white socks, which Quirke noted at once, were the giveaway. “Father Honan?” he said.

“Indeed!” They shook hands. The priest’s palm was soft and dry and warm. He smiled. “You weren’t fooled by the mufti, so,” he said, glancing down ruefully at his suit and tie and buckled shoes. “The aim is anonymity, to come and go without being noticed. Fat chance, says you.” His voice had a faint Northern burr — Armagh? Antrim? or Inishowen, maybe, where Aine the traveling saleswoman hailed from — and he spoke softly, in intimate tones, as if they were in the confessional rather than a public bar. “But tell me now,” he said, “what will you drink?”

They moved together to the bar. The priest gave off a strong, pungent waft of cologne. His eyes were shards of gray flint, and the plump backs of his hands were freckled all over and stuck like pincushions with fine, almost colorless hairs. Moisture glistened on his forehead and his upper lip; he was a man who would sweat a lot.

Quirke asked for a Jameson. “Good man,” the priest said. “I’ll join you.”

They stood half facing each other, each with an elbow on the bar, a hand in a pocket, like counterparts, two men of the world, sharing a drink. This was not what Quirke had expected. But then, what had he expected? Someone lean and watchful, thin-lipped, pale, with a jaw like a knife blade, a Nike or a Father Dangerfield, not this thickset golfing-club type with a drinker’s nose and a mesh of broken veins in the shiny skin over his cheekbones. In the light here at the bar his hair was a darker shade of red than it had seemed at first, and beads of sweat were sprinkled through it.

“May I ask,” Quirke said, “how you knew my phone number?”

Father Honan, drolly smiling, let an eyelid briefly droop. “Oh, we have our sources,” he said. He sipped his drink, watching Quirke over the rim of his glass. “Father Dangerfield said you were looking for me. Something to do with this young fellow who was killed?”

“Jimmy Minor, yes.”

“And there was a detective with you?”

“Hackett. Inspector Hackett, Pearse Street.”

“Yes,” the priest said, “Hackett. I’ve heard of him. A good man, they tell me.”

The girl in the pillbox hat stood up suddenly and marched from the room, her eyes fixed straight ahead of her in a furious glare. After a moment the young man rose sheepishly and followed her, clearing his throat and blushing. “Ah, the bumpy road of love,” the priest murmured. He nodded towards the table the couple had vacated. “Shall we?”

They crossed the room with their drinks. The young priest with the horn-rimmed spectacles glanced in Father Honan’s direction and said something to his two companions, who turned to look also. A downdraft in the chimney sent a ball of turf smoke billowing out of the fireplace to roll across the carpet. Through a window beside him Quirke looked out into the glossy darkness and saw the rain dancing on the pavements and the roofs of parked cars.

“There was a letter, I believe,” Father Honan said. “Desperate Dan told me about it — sorry, that’s Father Dangerfield. We think the world of him, only he’s a bit of a Tartar, as no doubt you noticed.”

“He didn’t seem to know your whereabouts,” Quirke said.

“Oh, Father Dangerfield is the soul of discretion,” the priest said, in his soft, breathy voice, and laughed. His way of speaking, with smiles and winks and little nods, made it seem as if everything he said, even the most innocuous commonplace, were being imparted as a confidence and meant for no one else’s ear. He produced a cigarette case and offered it across the table. “What was it, do you know, that this unfortunate young man wanted to see me about?”

“That’s what we — that’s what Inspector Hackett was wondering,” Quirke said.

The priest sat back in his chair with his elbows on the armrests and his hands clasped before him, a cigarette clamped at a corner of his mouth and one eye screwed shut against the smoke. “May I ask, Dr. Quirke,” he said, “what you…?”

“What’s my interest? I knew Jimmy Minor — he was a friend of my daughter’s.”

The priest nodded, but his eyes were narrowed. He still had the cigarette in his mouth; it jiggled up and down when he spoke. “And Inspector Hackett,” he asked, “is he a friend of yours?”

“The Inspector and I have — what shall I say? We’ve cooperated in the past.”

“Yes. So I’m told.”

Who had told him? Quirke wondered. And if he knew about him and Hackett already, why had he asked? And anyway, why in the first place had he contacted him and not the Inspector?

The three priests at their table had ordered another round. The older two were drinking whiskey, the younger one a glass of Guinness. How did they come to be out together like this on a weekday night, drinking and gossiping in Flynne’s? A birthday? Some other celebration? Flynne’s was a haven for the clergy, a safe house for them in the city.

“I don’t think I ever came across this young man, this Jimmy Minor,” the priest said reflectively. “He was a reporter, is that right?”

“On the Clarion . Used to be with the Mail .”

“I wonder what he wanted to talk to me about.”

“Something to do with your work, maybe? You run clubs and so on in Sean McDermott Street, I hear.”

“And other places.”

The priest kept his eyes narrowed, and Quirke could see only the merest ice-gray glint between the lids. His eyelashes, like the hairs on the backs of his hands, were so pale they were almost invisible.

“Was there something in particular you wanted to talk to me about, Father?” Quirke asked. “If not Jimmy Minor, I mean.”

The priest opened his hands and held them far apart, palm facing palm. “I’ve heard things about you,” he said.

“Oh? What sort of things?”

“Just — things. You know what this city is like: everyone knows everyone else’s business, or thinks he does.” He had taken the cigarette from his mouth and now leaned forward and knocked the ash from it into the ashtray on the table with a deft flick of his wrist. “Anyway, I thought I’d take the opportunity of meeting you. I’m the same as everyone else: I like to keep abreast of what’s going on, and who’s going on with it.” He smiled again, showing a big mouthful of sallow teeth.

Quirke was holding his whiskey glass in front of him and looking into it. “Tell me,” he said, “who it was that talked to you about me, that told you whatever the things are that you heard about me?”

“Oh, various people,” the priest said blandly. “Joseph Costigan was one.” Quirke had gone suddenly still. The priest watched him, seeming amused. “Although I’d say now,” he said, “the good Joe wouldn’t be one of your favorite people in the world.”

Quirke was frowning. “I couldn’t say I know him,” he said. “I’ve met him, a couple of times.” Costigan was a fixer for rich and powerful Catholics in the city, the same Costigan he had told Isabel about, the Costigan who knew how the world worked and where the real power resided.

“He speaks very highly of you, you know,” the priest said, “very highly indeed. You doubt that, I can see, but it’s true, nevertheless.” He lowered his voice to a feathery whisper. “He knows you for an honest man, a man of principle.” He signaled to the barman to bring another round of whiskeys, and leaned back once more in his chair. “I grant you, Doctor, poor Joe would not be, shall we say, the most immediately appealing of men, in general, on a personal level. He takes himself very seriously as a dedicated warrior of the Church Militant. That kind of thing makes for a certain — what’s the word? — a certain abrasiveness.”