Benjamin Black - Holy Orders

What could they mean, these convincingly vivid hallucinations, first the old man at Trinity Manor and now Isabel — what did they signify?

He left the house and walked to the corner of Merrion Square. Sunlight glared on the wet pavements, though in the great trees the shadows of dawn still lingered. He hailed a taxi, and sat in the back seat, eyes fixed unseeing on the streets passing by. He felt as if he were made of an impossibly fine and breakable form of crystal.

Inspector Hackett, it seemed, had not been as careful as Quirke with the morning razor, and had cut himself. A piece of lavatory paper with a stain of dark blood at its center was stuck to the side of his chin. He took his boots off his cluttered desk and stood up as Quirke was shown in. “There you are, Doctor!” he said brightly. “Isn’t it a grand morning? Do you like the spring, the birdies singing, all that?”

Quirke did not bother to reply. The Inspector pointed him to the only chair in the room other than his own, a spindly hoop-backed affair that had seen better days. He sat down. Hackett had his jacket off and was in his shirtsleeves, his braces on display. Quirke eyed that tie of his. It was broad and greasy, and had once been red but was now so old and ingrained with dirt that in patches it had settled into a shade somewhere between dark blue and shiny black. The knot had a soldered look to it, and obviously had not been untied in months — in years, perhaps — only yanked loose at the end of each day so that the tie could be lifted over Hackett’s head and hung on the knob of the wardrobe door or on a post at the end of the bed. Hackett’s domestic arrangements were the subject of occasional idle speculation on Quirke’s part. There was, for instance, the question of Mrs. Hackett. She was rarely on public display; in fact Quirke had never yet managed to get even a glimpse of her, so that she had taken on for him the trappings of a mythological figure, hazy and remote. All he knew about her for certain was that her name was May.

“That priest phoned me,” he said now. “Honan — Father Mick.”

Hackett widened his eyes. “Is that so?” He was sitting back in his swivel chair with his fingers interlaced over his belly. “What did he want?”

“A chat, he said. ‘A bit of a chat.’ I met him in Flynne’s Hotel.”

“Did you, indeed. And what did he have to say for himself?”

“Not much.” Quirke was lighting a cigarette. “Well, a lot, in fact, but little of it of any consequence. He’s a smooth customer.”

“In what way?”

“A flatterer. Only simple folk are expected to swallow the pap that Mother Church spoons out for them, while you and he, being so much more sophisticated, know what’s really what.”

“Ah, yes,” the detective said, amused. “I know the type. What about Jimmy Minor? Did he say he knew him?”

Quirke shook his head. “Claimed to know nothing about him, nothing at all.”

“What about the letter Minor wrote? What about the request for an interview?”

“He said he’d heard there’d been some such letter. Implied Dangerfield had taken it on himself to ignore what was in it, and hadn’t even shown it to him.”

There was a pause.

“And did you believe him?” Hackett asked. He was scrabbling about in the pile of papers before him on the desk; Quirke knew it as a sign that he was thinking.

“It wasn’t a matter of believing or disbelieving,” Quirke said. “The Father Honans of this world don’t deal in anything so obvious and clumsy as mere fact. All, according to him, is relative.” He was thinking again of Isabel as he had seemed to see her this morning, sitting at the table in the kitchen in her blue dress, as vivid as life.

He tried to concentrate. His mind seemed to him suddenly a machine he did not know how to operate that yet had been thrust into his control; he was the passenger who had been called upon to land the airplane after the pilot had died. His head ached, and his pulse was beating in his ears again with unnatural intensity. “He’s of the opinion,” he said, making an effort, “that God doesn’t bother himself with us.”

Hackett’s eyes grew wide again, and he gave a faint whistle. “Is he, now. I wonder is that what he tells them over in Sean McDermott Street when he’s coaching young fellows to be boxers and making their daddies take the pledge.” He fumbled again through his papers. “What’s he like, anyway?”

“Fiftyish, red hair, in a suit and tie.”

“In civvies, was he? That’s interesting. I always wonder about priests that think they have to get themselves up in disguise.”

“He was wearing white socks.”

Hackett gave a throaty chuckle. “Ah, yes,” he said. “By their socks shalt thou know them.”

Through the small window behind Hackett’s desk Quirke could see sunlight on chimney pots, and distant seagulls circling against piled-up clouds that were as white and opaque as ice. He knew this roofscape well, since he had sat here so often before, in this fusty office with the jumbled desk and the wind-up telephone, that out-of-date calendar hanging beside the door, the dried magenta smudge on the wall that was all that remained of a swatted fly. He looked again at the sky, those clouds. Every day he dealt with death and yet knew nothing about it, nothing. For a second he saw himself on the slab, a pallid sack of flesh, all that he had been come suddenly to nothingness.

Hackett threw himself forward and smacked both palms briskly on the desk. “Come on,” he said, “we’ll go out and take a stroll in this fine, fresh morning.”

* * *

Pearse Street smelled of horse dung and recent rain. Behind the high wall of Trinity College the tops of sea-green trees sparkled in thin sunlight. Quirke had again that sensation of everything having been swept away in the night and deftly replaced with a new-minted version of itself. One push and that wall would fall back with a creak and a crash, the trees would collapse, the sky slide down like a sheet of plate glass.

They crossed Westmoreland Street and passed under the Ballast Office on to the quays. The river had the dull sheen of polished lead. Two young priests went by on bicycles, the bottoms of their trouser legs neatly clipped. Gulls screeched, wheeling and diving.

“Did Jimmy Minor ever mention,” Hackett asked, “a certain Packie Joyce, otherwise known as Packie the Pike?”

“Not in my hearing,” Quirke said. “Why? Who is he?”

“Scrap metal dealer, based out in Tallaght. Tinker, from God knows where. There’s a whole gang of them, sons, daughters, wives, a brood of brats. For years the county council has been trying to get them to move on, but Packie likes it there and refuses to budge. A hard man, by all accounts. Killed his brother, they say, in a fight over one of their women.”

They walked over the hump of the Ha’penny Bridge, the wind coming up from the river and whipping at their coats. Hackett had to hold on to his hat.

“What’s the connection to Jimmy Minor?” Quirke asked.

Hackett shrugged. “Don’t know,” he said. “Might be nothing.” They turned along Ormond Quay. Quirke’s heart had settled down, and he felt better. Perhaps Isabel had been right; perhaps he was just suffering an attack of nerves. A Guinness dray went past, the Clydesdale’s big hoofs sounding a syncopated tattoo on the metaled roadway.

“The name turned up in notes in Minor’s desk at the Clarion, ” Hackett said. He was picking his teeth with a matchstick.

“Notes on what?”

“Just names and things, contacts. Packie Joyce’s name was underlined, with three big question marks after it.”

“Signifying what?”

“Didn’t I just say? — I don’t know. But they’re a fearsome crowd, the Joyces.”