Benjamin Black - Holy Orders

“I was saying,” Hackett said, pointing ahead, “there’s the man himself, in all his glory.”

They were approaching the campsite, a long, straggling field that tilted down to a meandering stream with whins and thornbushes along its banks. The place had the look of a battlefield after a prolonged and relentless engagement between two mechanized armies. Rusted hulks of motorcars lay about in attitudes of abandonment, most of them sunk to the axles in mud, windscreens smashed and bonnets gaping like the jaws of crocodiles, and there were torn-out engine boxes and mounds of tireless car wheels and car doors that had been wrenched from their hinges and thrown one on top of another in beetling stacks. There were bundles of steel girders, rusted like everything else, and coils of steel cable so thick and heavy it would have taken two or three men to lift them. Old electric cookers stood at inebriate angles, and half a dozen scarred and pitted bathtubs were ranged upended in a broad ring on the trodden grass, a bizarrely hieratic and solemn arrangement, reminiscent of a prehistoric stone circle.

In the midst of all this, on a low hillock, a great fire of car and tractor tires was throwing up giant spearheads of black-edged flame and dense belchings of greasy, black-and-tan smoke. Tending the inferno were a troop of ragged, stunted children, under the direction of an enormous hulk of a man — built, Quirke observed to himself, on the proportions of an American refrigerator — with a shock of oily hair as black as the blackest of the smoke from the fire. This was, unmistakably, Packie the Pike. The scene was archaic and thrilling, and dismaying, too, in its violence and volatility. “Christ,” Quirke said under his breath, “add music and it’s a scene out of Wagner.”

Hackett gave a histrionic start. “Whoa!” he cried. “Did I hear someone speak?”

Quirke glowered at him. “What?”

“I thought you’d lost the power of speech, you’d gone that quiet.”

Quirke turned away and looked out through the window beside him. Those hills seemed closer in, somehow, a stealthily tightening ring.

They entered the encampment by a gateless gateway and the car bumped forward over the grassy ground, Jenkins clutching the juddering steering wheel like a sea captain wrestling a trawler through a sudden squall. “Stop here,” Hackett said, when they were still a good way short of the fire and its capering, dwarf attendants. “We don’t want the heat of them flames getting at the petrol tank and blowing us all to kingdom come.”

When Jenkins applied the brakes the big car slewed on the sodden ground. Hackett and Quirke got out, and Hackett glanced at Quirke’s handmade shoes. “You’re hardly shod for this terrain, Doctor,” he said with undisguised amusement.

Packie the Pike had been watching them from the corner of his eye and he came towards them now, wiping the back of a hand across his mouth. In the other hand he grasped a long metal rod with a sort of hook at the top, which he had been using as a makeshift giant poker, prodding the hooked end among the burning tires and making them vent angry geysers of flame. He wore what must once have been a respectable pin-striped suit, and a soiled white shirt, the collar of which was open on an abundance of graying chest hair. His great long coffin-shaped face was blackened from the smoke and gleaming with sweat, and through the eyeholes of this wild mask a pair of stone-gray bloodshot eyes glared out, ashine with what seemed a transcendent light. These eyes, and the scorched face and the staff with its crook, gave him the look of an Old Testament prophet lurching in from the desert after many days of solitary communing with a tyrannical and vengeful God. “By Jesus,” he called out jovially in a hoarse but booming voice, peering at the detective, “is it the Hacker? Is it the man himself?”

Inspector Hackett went forward and took the big man’s hand and shook it. “Good day to you, Packie,” he said. “How are you?”

“Oh, shaking the Devil by the tail,” the tinker declared. He had to shout to make himself heard above the roar and sizzle of the fire.

“Are you well in yourself?” Hackett asked.

“I am indeed — sure, amn’t I the picture of health?”

Hackett looked beyond him to the fire, where the children had ceased their tending and stood staring in wide-eyed silence at the two strangers and the car behind them with Jenkins sitting at the wheel. “That’s some blaze you have going there,” the detective said.

“It is that,” the tinker agreed.

“And what’s it for, may I ask?”

“Ah, sure, we’re just rendering the old wire, like.”

This meant, as Hackett would later explain to Quirke, that Packie and his band of fiery sprites were burning rubber-encased electric cable to melt the copper wire inside, which they would harvest from the ashes tomorrow, when the fire had gone out and the embers had cooled. It was a lucrative business, for the price of copper was still high, more than a decade after the end of the war.

Now it was Packie’s turn to look past the Inspector to where Quirke stood a little way back with his hat pulled low over his left eye and his hands thrust deep in the pockets of his overcoat. “This is Dr. Quirke,” Hackett said.

Quirke came forward, and Packie squinted at him, measuring him up. Neither man offered a handshake. Hackett looked from one of them to the other, with a faint smile.

“Come on, anyway,” Packie said, addressing Hackett, “come on and have a sup to drink, for I’ve a thirst on me that would drain the Shannon River.”

He turned to the children standing about the fire and shouted something, not a word of which Quirke recognized, a harsh, growling command, and at once the children bestirred themselves and went back busily to tending the fire. Packie, shaking his head, addressed Quirke this time. “Them gatrins ,” he said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder, “have my heart scalded, for they won’t work, no more than they’ll do their learning.”

He led the way across the hummocky ground towards a straggle of wooden caravans drawn up in an untidy circle. Off to the side, a herd of horses, stocky, short of leg, and fierce of aspect, were cropping the scant grass; as the three men approached, a number of these animals looked up, without much interest, flicked a white tail or a mane the color of woodbine blossom, and went back to their grazing. The caravans, cylinder-shaped, had a window at the back and at the front two smaller, square windows on either side of a varnished half door. The rounded roofs were sealed with matte black tar, but the two wooden end walls were decorated with swirls of glossy paint — scarlet, canary yellow, cerulean blue. At the largest one of them Packie halted and banged on the door with his iron staff. He turned to the two men and winked. “You’d never know what state the mull might be in,” he said in a stage whisper, grinning, “putting on her inside wearables or trailing around in none at all!”

There were scuffling sounds inside the caravan, then the soft thump of bare feet on the wooden floor. The half door was drawn open at the top and a woman put her head out of the dimness within and peered suspiciously first at Inspector Hackett and then, more lingeringly, at Quirke. She had a narrow face, with freckled milk-pale skin, and a great mane of hair black and shiny as a raven’s wing, which she raised a hand to now and swept back from her forehead. She wore a white blouse with mother-of-pearl buttons, and a necklace of tiny, unevenly sized pearls. Her eyes were of a flint-green shade, the lids delicate as rose petals. Quirke thought of some wild creature, a she-fox, perhaps, or a rare species of wild cat, lithe and sleek and indolently watchful.