Christine Falls

7

A YOUNG NUN WITH PROMINENT TEETH OPENED THE DOOR AND STOOD aside and motioned her to enter. At the sight of the long, gaunt room something inside her shrank back, and for a moment she was a child again, quaking on the threshold of Mother Superior’s office. Massive mahogany table, six high-backed chairs that no one had ever sat on, glass-fronted bookcases, a coatless coat rack; in a wall niche a three-quarters-life-sized statue of the Virgin stood disconsolate in pale blue and white, holding between two fingertips and a thumb, in an attitude of dainty misgiving, a large white lily, sign of her purity. At the other end, under a muddy picture of some sainted martyr, there was an antique desk with lamp and leather-bound blotter and two telephones-why two? Somehow, without her noticing, the young nun had left, shutting the door behind her without a sound. She stood in the midst of silence, the child in her arms asleep in its blanket. The trees outside the windows were unfamiliar, or did they only seem so? Everything here seemed strange to her, still.

Another door, one that she had not noticed, flew open as if a wind were behind it. What entered was a tall nun, high-shouldered as a man, with a narrow, stark, pale face. She came forward quickly, both hands held out, her heavy black habit audibly displacing air, her face smiling and seeming at the same time surprised at itself, as if smiles were strangers to it. This was Sister Stephanus.

“Miss Ruttledge,” she said, taking Brenda’s free hand in both of hers, “welcome to Boston, and St. Mary’s.”

She had the usual nun’s musty smell. Brenda could not stop herself recalling the stories that were told at the convent when she was a girl about the sisters being forbidden ever to be naked and having to wear a special sort of swimming costume in the bath.

“I’m very glad to be here, Sister,” she said, in a voice that annoyed her by its seeming meekness. She was no longer a child, she told herself, and this nun had no authority over her. She drew up her shoulders and stared back stoutly into the woman’s coldly beaming face. “Boston is very nice,” she added. That, too, sounded weak and silly. The baby kicked her in the side through its blanket, as if demanding to be introduced; quite the little miss already. The nun’s brittle smile slid downwards.

“And this must be the baby,” she said.

“Yes,” Brenda said, and held aside the rim of the blanket with her finger to show the tiny, livid face with its rosebud mouth and permanently startled blue eyes. “This is little Christine.”

8

CLAIRE STAFFORD WAS WONDERING IF THE DRESS SHE HAD CHOSEN was suitable for the occasion. You never knew, with nuns. It was green, with white trimming on the hem, and a scalloped neckline-not low, but maybe showing too much of her throat and the freckled slope under her collarbone. She would keep the green scarf wrapped loosely around her neck, and even keep her coat on, if she was allowed. She had not wanted to ask Andy for an opinion; you never knew with Andy, either. Mostly he did not notice what she was wearing, then suddenly, when she least expected it, he would turn on her and say something, some mean remark, mostly. Once he had told her she looked like a whore. She would never forget it. They were living at the time in the rooming house on Scranton Street. She was wearing jeans and white mules and a scarlet blouse knotted at the waist. He had come in after a long drive down from Albany, looking hot and tired and mad, and walked right past her into the galley kitchen and grabbed a beer from the icebox and said it to her over his shoulder. “Honey, you look like a ten-dollar whore.” He pronounced it hoor, just like her daddy did. She would not let herself cry; that would have made him even madder. Even in her hurt she saw yet again how beautiful he was, leaning against the icebox in his boots and work pants and stained white sweatshirt, his rodeo rider’s forearms gleaming and that lock of hair black as a crow’s wing falling across his forehead. The most beautiful boy she had ever known.

Today he was wearing a pair of pressed dark pants over his cowboy boots, a white shirt with a woollen knit tie, and a sport jacket in tan checks with broad lapels. She had told him he looked nice but he had scowled and said he felt like Bozo the Clown. Now as they walked up the driveway to St. Mary’s he kept running a finger around the inside of his shirt collar and jerking up his chin and sighing. He was nervous, she could see that. He had talked nonstop in the cab, complaining about the pay he was losing by having to come here with her, but now he was silent, squinting up through the fall sunlight at the high, flat front of the orphanage that seemed to grow steadily higher the nearer they got to it. She, too, was a little scared, but not of the place. For she knew St. Mary’s, knew it like a home.

The door was opened by a young nun she did not recognize. Her name was Sister Anne. She would have been pretty but for her buckteeth. She led them across the wide entrance hall and down the corridor toward Sister Stephanus’s office. The familiar smells-floor polish, carbolic soap, institutional cooking, babies-stirred in Claire an excited mixture of emotions. She had been happy here, or not unhappy. Somewhere high above, a choir of children was signing a hymn in ragged unison.

“You used to work here, didn’t you?” Sister Anne asked. She had a South Boston accent. She had avoided looking at Andy, made shy, Claire guessed, by his cowboy’s good looks. “How do you like being a lady of leisure?” It was said good-naturedly.

Claire laughed. “Oh, I really miss the place,” she said.

Sister Stephanus looked up as they entered. She was seated at her desk, with a stack of papers before her. Claire suspected the pose was deliberate, but then chided herself for the bad thought.

“Ah, Claire, here you are. And Andy, too.”

“Good morning, Sister.”

Andy said nothing, only nodded. He had put on a sulky look that was supposed to cover up his anxiousness. Despite herself, Claire experienced a brief surge of exultation: this was her place, not his; her moment.

Sister Stephanus invited them to sit, and Andy brought up a second chair from the six around the table.

“You must be very excited, both of you,” the nun said, leaning forward with her clasped hands resting on the papers on the desk. She smiled brightly from one of them to the other. “It’s not every day you become a parent!”

Claire smiled and nodded, her lips pressed tight. Beside her Andy shifted his legs, making the chair creak. She was not sure how she was expected to take the nun’s words. Such a strange thing to say, straight out like that. In all the years she had spent here-first as an orphan after Ma died and her daddy had run off, then working in the kitchens and later in the nursery-she could never figure out Sister Stephanus, or the other nuns, either, for that matter, never could quite get onto their way of thinking. They had been good to her, though, and she owed them everything-everything except Andy, that is: him she had got by herself, this dark-eyed, drawling, dangerous, lean-limbed young husband of hers. Trying not to, she pictured him as she had glimpsed him in the mirror while he was getting dressed that morning, the neat, unblemished, honey-colored back and the taut line of his stomach where it ran down into darkness. Her man.

Sister Stephanus opened flat before her on the desk a brown cardboard file and put on a pair of wire-framed spectacles, pushing the earpieces in at the stiff sides of the wimple almost as if, Claire thought, she were giving her face a double injection. Claire blushed a little; the strange things that came into her head! The nun riffled through the papers in the file, now and then stopping to read a line or two, frowning. Then she looked up, and this time fixed on Andy.

“You do understand the position, Andy, don’t you?” she said, speaking slowly and separating the words carefully, as if she were talking to a child. “This is not an adoption, not in the official sense. St. Mary’s, as Claire can tell you, has its own…arrangements. The Lord, I always say, is our legislator.” She glanced between them with eyebrows lifted, awaiting acknowledgment of the quip. Claire smiled dutifully, and Andy shifted his legs again, crossing them first one way and then the other. He had not said a word since they had come into the room. “And you understand too, both of you,” the nun continued, “that when the time comes it will be Mr. Crawford and his people who will decide on what education is suitable for the child, and so forth? You’ll be consulted, of course, but all those decisions will be theirs, in the end.”

“We understand, Sister,” Claire said.

“It’s important that you do,” the nun said, in the same grave, unrelenting voice that sounded like a voice on the radio, or something that had been recorded. Although she was from South Boston she had an Englishwoman’s accent, or what Claire thought an Englishwoman’s accent would be, refined and crisp. “All too often we find that young people forget where their child came from, and who it is that has the final say in his or her upbringing.”

There was silence then in the room for a long, solemn moment. Faintly from outside came the children’s voices, singing. Sweet heart of Jesus, fount of love and mercy! Claire felt her mind begin to fidget in that way it did sometimes, when her thoughts seemed to be flying asunder like the parts of a machine breaking up under pressure. Please, God, she prayed, don’t let me have one of my headaches. She forced herself to concentrate. She had already heard all these things that Sister Stephanus was saying. She supposed they had to make sure that everything was clear so no one could come back later and say the conditions that they laid down had not been properly explained. The nun was reading in the file again and now she turned once more to Andy.

“There was something else I wanted to mention,” she said. “Your work, Andy. It must take you away from home for long periods?”

Andy looked at her warily. He began to speak but had to clear his throat and start again. “It can be a few days,” he said, “on a run up to the border, a week or more if I go across to the Lakes.”

The nun was impressed. “That far?” she said, sounding almost wistful.

“But I make sure to call home every day,” Andy said. “Don’t I, sweetheart?” While he was saying it he turned his face full toward Claire, boring his eyes into hers, as if he thought she might deny it. She would not think of denying it, of course, even though it was not strictly true. She loved the way that Andy spoke-Doanah, sweet-hawt?-like she imagined the winds out on the western plains would sound.

Sister Stephanus too seemed to have caught that lovely, lonesome note in his voice, and now it was she who had to clear her throat.

“All the same,” she said, not so much turning to Claire as turning away from Andy, “it must be hard for you, sometimes?”

“Oh, but it won’t be, anymore,” Claire said in a rush, and then bit her lip; she knew she should have denied ever having found life with Andy anything less than sweet and easy; she hoped he would not pick up on it, later. “I mean,” she finished lamely, “with the baby for company.”

“And when we get the new place she’ll have a whole passel of new friends,” Andy said. He had found his confidence now, and was playing up the cowboy act and the crooked, John Wayne smile-after all, the nun was a woman, Claire found herself thinking, with a faint sourness, and there was nothing Andy could not do with a woman, when he put his mind to it.

“Yet I wonder,” the nun said thoughtfully, as though speaking to herself, “if there might not be a possibility of some other kind of work, some other kind of driving. A taxicab, for instance?”

That put a stop to Andy’s smiling, and he sat up as if he had been stung.

“I wouldn’t want to stop working for Crawford Transport,” he said. “With Claire giving up her job here, and then the baby…well, we’ll need all the cash we can get. There’s the overtime, and bonuses for them long draws up to Canada and the Lakes.”

Sister Stephanus leaned back in her chair and made a steeple of her fingertips and studied him, trying to judge, it seemed, if his tone was one of genuine concern or guarded threat. “Yes, well,” she said, with a faint shrug. Her eyes drifted to the file again. “Perhaps I might speak to Mr. Crawford about it…”

“That’d be real good,” Andy said, too eagerly, he knew, and she gave him a quick, sharp glance that made him blink and sit back in his chair. He forced himself to relax then and resumed his cowpoke’s easy grin. “I mean, it’d be good if I had a job nearer home and the baby, and all.”

Sister Stephanus went on studying him. The silence in the room seemed to creak. Claire realized that all this time she had been clutching a handkerchief, and when she opened her fist now it was stuck there, a damp lump in her palm. Then Sister Stephanus shut the file with a snap and stood up.

“All right,” she said. “Come along.”

She led them briskly to the door and out.

“You haven’t been down here before, have you?” she said to Andy over her shoulder, stopping at the end of a corridor and throwing a door wide to reveal a long, low room, painted a dazzling white, with rows of identical cribs facing each other along two walls. Nuns in white habits moved about, some bearing swaddled babies in the crooks of their arms with a sort of cheery, practiced negligence. Something fierce and zealous came into Sister Stephanus’s smile. “The nursery,” she announced. “The heart of St. Mary’s, and our pride and joy.”

Andy stared, impressed, and barely stopped himself producing a whistle. It was like something out of a science fiction movie, all the little aliens in their pods. Sister Stephanus was looking at him expectantly, her head thrown back.

“Lot of babies” was all he could say, in a faint voice.

Sister Stephanus gave a ringing laugh that was supposed to be rueful but sounded a little crazed instead. “Oh,” she said, “this is only a fraction of the poor mites in the world in need of our care and protection!”

Andy nodded doubtfully. It was something he did not like to think of, all those lost and abandoned kids screaming for attention and shaking their fists and kicking their legs in the air. The nun had led them into the room, and Claire was looking about eagerly in that jerky, rabbity way he hated; it even seemed to him sometimes when she was excited that the edges of her pink and nearly transparent nostrils twitched.

“Is…?” she said, and did not know how to finish. Sister Stephanus nodded and said: “She’s having a last checkup before she starts out on her new life.”

“I wanted to ask,” Claire began tentatively, “if the mother-” but Sister Stephanus held up a long, white hand to silence her and said: “I know you’d want to know something about the baby’s background, Claire. However-”

“No, no, I was only going to ask-”

But the nun was unstoppable. “However,” she continued, in a voice edged like a saw, “there are certain rules we must abide by.”

The wadded handkerchief in Claire’s fist was hot and hard as a boiled egg. She had to persist. “It’s only that,” she said, and took a gulping breath, “it’s only that when she’s growing up I won’t know what to tell her.”

“Oh, well,” the nun said, closing her eyes briefly and giving her head a dismissive little shake, “you must decide, of course, when the time comes, whether she should know you’re not her natural parents. As for the details…” She opened her eyes and this time for some reason it was Andy she addressed. “Believe me, in certain matters not knowing is best.-But ah, here’s Sister Anselm now!”

A short, square-shaped nun was approaching. There was something wrong with her right side, and she walked with a wrenching movement, dragging her hip after her like a mother dragging a stubborn child. Her face was broad, her expression stern but not unkind. A stethoscope hung about her neck. She had a baby in her arms, wrapped like a larva in a white cotton blanket. Claire greeted her in a rush of relief-Sister Anselm was the one who had looked after her from her earliest days here at St. Mary’s.

“Well now,” Sister Stephanus said with forced brightness, “here we are, at last!”

Everything seemed to pause then, as in the Mass when the priest lifts the Communion host, and from a distance somehow Claire saw herself reach out, it might have been across a chasm, and take the baby in her arms. How solid a weight it was, and yet no weight at all, no earthly weight. Sister Stephanus was saying something. The baby’s eyes were the most delicate shade of blue, they seemed to be looking into another world. Claire turned to Andy. She tried to speak but could not. She felt fragile and in some wonderful way injured, almost as if she were really a mother, and had really given birth.

Christine, that was what Sister Stephanus was saying, your new little daughter, Christine.

WHEN SHE HAD SEEN THE STAFFORDS OFF AT THE FRONT DOOR SISTER Stephanus walked back slowly to her office and sat down behind the desk and lowered her face into her hands. It was a small indulgence she allowed herself, a moment of weakness and surrender and of rest. Always after another child had gone there was an interval of empty heaviness. She was not sad, or regretful in any way-in her heart she knew she had no very deep feeling for these lost creatures that passed so briefly through her care-only there was a burdensome hollowness that took a little time to fill. Drained, that was the word: she felt drained.

Sister Anselm came in, without bothering to knock. She limped to the window nearest Sister Stephanus’s desk and sat back on the sill and fished in a pocket under her habit and brought out a pack of Camels and lit up. Even after all these years the nun’s habit fitted her ill. Poor Peggy Farrell, onetime terror of Sumner Street. Her father had been a longshoreman, Mikey Farrell from County Roscommon, who drank, and beat his wife, and knocked his daughter down the stairs one winter night and left her maimed for life. How vividly I recall these things, Sister Stephanus thought, I, who have trouble sometimes remembering what my own name used to be. She hoped Peggy-Sister Anselm-had not come to deliver one of her lectures. To forestall the possibility she said:

“Well, Sister, another one gone.”

Sister Anselm expelled an angry jet of smoke toward the ceiling. “Plenty more where that one came from,” she said.

Oh, dear. Sister Stephanus turned her attention pointedly to the papers on her desk. “Isn’t it well, then, Sister,” she said mildly, “that we’re here to take care of them?”

But Sister Anselm was not to be put off so lightly. This was the Peggy Farrell who had overcome all handicaps to win a first-class medical degree and take her place among the men at Massachusetts General before Mother House ordered her to St. Mary’s. “I must say, Mother Superior,” she said, putting an ironic emphasis on the title, as she always managed to do, “it occurs to me that the morals of the girls of Ireland today must be very low indeed, considering the number of their little mistakes that come our way.”

Sister Stephanus told herself to say nothing, but in vain; Peggy Farrell had always known how to provoke her, starting back in the days when they had played together, the small-time lawyer’s daughter and Mikey Farrell’s girl, on the front stoop on Sumner Street. “Not all of them are little mistakes, as you call them,” she said, still pretending to be absorbed in her paperwork.

“By the Lord Harry, then,” Sister Anselm said, “the mortality rate among mothers over there must be as high as the unmarried ones’ morals are low, to produce that number of orphans.”

“I wish, Sister, you wouldn’t talk like this.” Sister Stephanus kept her voice low and even. “I wouldn’t want,” she continued, “to have to institute disciplinary procedures.”

There was silence for a long moment, then Sister Anselm with a grunt pushed herself away from the sill and came forward and stubbed out her cigarette in the cut-glass ashtray on the desk and heaved herself across the room to the door and was gone. Sister Stephanus sat motionless and stared at the hastily squashed cigarette butt, from which there poured upward a thin and sinuous thread of heaven-blue smoke.

9

IN THE PATHOLOGY DEPARTMENT IT WAS ALWAYS NIGHT. THIS WAS ONE of the things Quirke liked about his job-the only thing, in fact, he often thought. Not that he had a particular taste for the nocturnal-I’m no more morbid than the next pathologist, he would insist in the pub, to raise a groaning laugh-but it was restful, cozy, one might almost say, down in these depths nearly two floors beneath the city’s busy pavements. There was too a sense here of being part of the continuance of ancient practices, secret skills, of work too dark to be carried on up in the light.

Quirke had given the Dolly Moran job to Sinclair, he was not sure why-certainly he entertained no squeamish scruples about cutting up the corpse of someone he had briefly known. Sinclair had assumed he was only to assist but Quirke had pressed the scalpel into his hands and told him to get on with it. The young man was suspicious at first, fearing he was being put to a test or led into a professional trap, but when Quirke went off into his office muttering about paperwork that needed catching up on he set himself to the task with enthusiasm. In fact, Quirke ignored the pile of papers requiring his attention, and sat for an hour with his feet on his desk, smoking and thinking, while he listened to Sinclair out in the dissecting room, whistling as he plied the knife and saw.

Quirke had decided to assume, for reasons most of which he did not care to examine, that Dolly Moran’s murder had no connection with the business of Christine Falls. True, it was suspiciously coincidental that she had died only a few hours after his second visit to Crimea Street. Had she known she was in danger? Was that why she had refused to let him in? Something she had said to him through the door kept slithering through his mind like an insistent worm. Not caring how foolish he might look to anyone watching from that row of lace-curtained windows on the other side of the street, he had leaned down to speak to her through the letter box, demanding, out of an anger for which he could not quite account-true, he had been a little drunk still from the wine at Jammet’s-that she tell him about Christine Falls’s child and what had become of it. “I’ll tell you nothing,” Dolly Moran had hissed back at him-her voice, it struck him now, might have been coming through a vent in the lid of a coffin-“I’ve said too much already.” But what was it she had told him, in the smoky pub that evening, that would have constituted the too much she seemed to think she had revealed? While he was leaning there, shouting into the letter box, had he been watched? He wondered now.

No, he told himself, no: he was being fanciful and ridiculous. In his world, the world he inhabited up in the light, people did not have their fingernails broken or the soft undersides of their arms scorched with cigarettes; the people whom he knew were not bludgeoned to death in their own kitchens. And what had he known of Dolly Moran, except that her tipple was gin and water and that she had worked for the Griffin family long ago?

He stood up and paced the narrow length of floor behind his desk. This office was too small-everywhere was too small, for him. He had an image of his physical self, half comic and half dispiriting, as a huge spinning-top, perilously suspended, held upright by virtue of an unrelenting momentum and liable at the merest touch to go reeling off in uncontrollable wobblings, banging against the furniture, before coming helplessly to rest at last in some inaccessible corner. His excessive size had always been a burden to him. From boyhood on he had been built like a bus, and thus had been a natural challenge first to the orphanage toughs, then schoolyard bullies, then rugby types at dances and drunks in pubs at closing time. Yet he had never been involved directly in serious violence, and the only blood he had ever spilled had been at the dissecting table, although there had been rivers of that.

The scene in Dolly Moran’s kitchen had affected him peculiarly. In his time he had dealt with countless corpses, some more abused than hers, yet the pathos of her predicament, lying there on the stone floor bound to a kitchen chair, her head lolling in a gluey puddle of her own gore, had provoked in him a rolling wave of anger and something like sorrow that had not subsided yet. If he could get his hands on whoever had done this terrible thing to her, why, he would…he would…But here his imagination failed him. What would he do? He was no avenger. Yes, dead ones, Dolly had said. No trouble there.

Sinclair came to the glass door and knocked and entered. He was a meticulous cutter-You could eat your tea off of Mr. Sinclair, one of the cleaners had once assured Quirke-and there was hardly a smear on his rubber apron and his green lab boots were spotless. From the back of a drawer in the filing cabinet Quirke brought out a bottle of whiskey and splashed a tot of it into a tumbler. It was a ritual he had instituted over the years, the post-postmortem drink. By now the little occasion had taken on something of the solemn atmosphere of a wake. He handed the glass to Sinclair and said: “Well?”

Sinclair was waiting for him to produce a glass for himself, but Quirke did not care to drink to the memory of Dolly Moran, whose remains he could plainly see, if he glanced through the glass door, glimmering palely on the steel slab out there. Sinclair shrugged. “No surprises,” he said. “Blunt-force trauma, intradural hematoma. Probably she wasn’t meant to die-fell sideways on the chair, smacked her head on the stone floor.” He looked into his drink, which he had hardly touched, held back no doubt by Quirke’s unwonted abstemiousness. “You knew her, did you?” he said.

Quirke was startled. He did not recall having said anything to Sinclair about his dealings with Dolly Moran, and was not sure how he should answer. His dilemma was solved by the appearance in the glass of the doorway at Sinclair’s back of a bulky figure in hat and mackintosh. Quirke went to the door. Inspector Hackett wore his usual expression of mild merriment, and came sidling in like a theatergoer arriving late at a farce. He was as broad as Quirke but a good half a foot shorter, which seemed to trouble him not at all. Quirke was accustomed to the stratagems that people of normal stature adopted for dealing with him: the backward-leaning stance, the vigorous straightening of the shoulders and the craning of the neck, but Hackett went in for none of this. He looked up at Quirke with a skeptically measuring eye, as if he and not Quirke were the one with the advantage, the one with the loftier if slightly laughable eminence. He had a large rectangular head and a slash for a mouth and a nose like a pitted and mildewed potato. His soft brown eyes resembled the lenses of a camera, leisurely scanning everything, taking everything in. Under his glance Sinclair hastily put the glass down on the desk, the whiskey half undrunk, and murmured something and left. Hackett watched him as he crossed the dissecting room, discarding his apron as he went and, hardly breaking his stride, flinging a sheet over Dolly Moran’s corpse with an expert flick of the wrist before passing on and exiting through the green swing doors.

Hackett turned to Quirke. “Delegated the job, did you?”

Quirke was searching in the desk drawer for cigarettes. “He needed the practice,” he said.

There were no cigarettes in the drawer. The detective produced a packet and they lit up. Quirke pushed the ashtray forward on the desk. He felt as if he were embarking on a chess match in which he would be both a player and a piece. Hackett’s easy manner and Midlands drawl did not deceive him-he had seen the detective at work before now, on other cases.

“Well,” Hackett said, “what’s the verdict?”

Quirke told him Sinclair’s findings. Hackett nodded, and perched himself on one broad ham on the edge of Quirke’s desk. He had not taken off his hat. For a moment Quirke hesitated and then sat down too, behind the desk, in his swivel chair. Hackett was contemplating Sinclair’s whiskey where the young man had left it on the corner of the desk; a tiny star of pure white light was burning in the bottom of the glass.

“Will you take a drink?” Quirke offered. Hackett made no reply, and asked instead: “Was she interfered with?”

Quirke gave a short laugh. “If you mean, was she sexually assaulted, then no, she wasn’t.”

Hackett gazed at him expressionlessly for a moment, and the atmosphere in the room tightened, as if a screw holding something vital in place had been given a small, effortful turn. “That’s what I meant, all right,” the detective said softly; he was not a man to be laughed at. The light shining upward from the desk lamp made his face a mask, with jutting chin and flared nostrils and pools of empty darkness in the eye sockets. Quirke saw again, with a clarity that shook him, the woman on the floor, the burn marks on her arms, and the blood that was almost black under the ceiling’s single, bare bulb. “So they weren’t there for fun, then,” Hackett said.

Quirke felt a stab of irritation.

“Did you think they were?” he said sharply. Hackett shrugged, and Quirke went on, “What do you mean by they-how many of them were there?”

“Two,” Hackett said. “Footprints in the back garden, before you ask. No one in the street saw or heard anything, of course, or so they say, even the old biddy opposite, who I’d imagine could hear a sparrow fart-but people like to mind their own business. It would have taken two of them to get poor Dolly trussed up like that. We’re assuming she was conscious all the time. Not easy to tie a woman by the legs, if you’ve ever attempted it. Stronger than you’d expect, even the no longer young ones, like Dolly.” Quirke tried to discern an expression in that shadowed mask but could not. “Would you have any idea as to what they were after?” Hackett continued, almost musingly. “Must have been something worth finding, for they tore the place apart.”

Quirke had finished his cigarette and Hackett offered another, and after the briefest of hesitations he took it. Smoke rolled along the top of the desk like a fog at night on the sea. Quirke heard Dolly Moran’s voice again: I have it all written down. He coughed, giving himself a moment.

“I’ve no idea what they might have been looking for,” he said, his voice sounding unnaturally loud in his own ears. Hackett was watching him again, his face more masklike than ever. From somewhere far above them, on the upper floors of the hospital, there came a muffled crash. How strange, Quirke thought, with vague inconsequence, the inexplicable noises that the world makes. As if the sound from above had been a signal, Hackett rose from the desk and walked to the door and stood leaning against the jamb, looking out at Dolly Moran’s sheeted corpse. The white light falling from the great lamps in the ceiling seemed to vibrate minutely, a colorless, teeming mist.

“So anyway,” Hackett said, returning to the earlier part of their exchange as if there had been no break, “Dolly knew this girl…what was her name?”

“Christine Falls,” Quirke answered, too quickly, he realized. Hackett nodded, and did not turn. “That’s right,” he said. “But tell me this, now, would you normally give your telephone number to somebody who was a friend of somebody that died?”

Quirke did not know how to answer, yet had to. He heard himself say:

“I was interested in her-in Christine Falls, I mean.”

Still Hackett did not turn but went on looking out through the glass of the door as if there were something of great interest occurring in the other, empty room.

“Why?” he said.

Quirke shrugged, even though the detective was not to see him do it. “Curiosity,” he said. “It goes with the job. Dealing with the dead, you sometimes find yourself wondering about the lives they led.”

He heard the contrivance in the words but could do nothing to correct it. Hackett turned with his easy half smile. Quirke had an almost irresistible urge to tell him to take off, for God’s sake, that damned hat.

“And what did she die of?” Hackett asked.

“Who?”

“This girl, this Falls girl.”

“Pulmonary embolism.”

“What age was she?”

“Young. It happens.”

Hackett stood gazing down at his boots, with the wings of his mackintosh pushed back and his hands in the jacket pockets of his tightly buttoned, shiny blue suit. Then he looked up. “Right,” he said, and moved to the door, “I’ll be off.”

Quirke, surprised, pushed his chair back on its castors and stood up. “You’ll let me know,” he said, sounding faintly desperate-“you’ll let me know, I mean, if you find out anything?”

The detective turned back, the smile broadening on his smudged features, and said in a tone of jovial good humor: “Oh, we’ll find out plenty of things, no doubt of that, Mr. Quirke. Plenty of things.”

And still smiling he turned again to the door and was through it and had shut it after him before Quirke had time to come forward from behind the desk. Hardly noticing what he was doing Quirke picked up Sinclair’s glass and drank off the whiskey in it, then lumbered to the filing cabinet and fished out the bottle again and poured himself another go. Mal Griffin, he thought savagely, you’ll never know how much you owe me.

10

IT WAS NOT EXACTLY WHAT CLAIRE HAD BEEN HOPING FOR, THE TOP half of a two-family house on Fulton Street, but it was a world away from the places they had been living in since they were married, places that were not much better than flophouses, and she knew she could turn it into a home; best of all, it was hers-theirs-for it was all paid for, with nothing owing to the bank, and they could fix it up whatever way they liked. It was gray clapboard with a steep roof and a nice porch at the front with a swing. They had the three rooms upstairs, as well as a kitchenette and bathroom. The living room was full of light, and there was an arched window in the gable end, like the window in the alcove of a church, that looked right into the heart of an old walnut tree growing at the side of the house where squirrels hopped and skittered. Mr. Crawford’s man had sent over the painters from the body shop in Roxbury, and she had been allowed to choose the colors herself, buttercup yellow in the living room, white for the kitchen, of course, and a cool, pale blue for the bathroom. She had not been sure about the shade of candy pink she had picked for the baby’s room, but it looked fine, now that it had dried. The store had promised to deliver the crib this morning, and Andy had arranged for their things to be brought over from the old place on a flatbed by one of his buddies in the afternoon. For now she was enjoying the look of the rooms before they were filled up. She liked the emptiness, the space, the way the sun fell slanting on the wall here in the living room, the way the polished maple floor rang clean and solid under her heels.

“Oh, Andy,” she said, “isn’t it just the prettiest place? And to think, it’s all ours!”

He was on one knee in a corner, jiggling a loose power socket in the wall there. “Yeah,” he said without turning, “old Crawford has a real big heart.”

She went and stood behind him, leaning her hips against his back and draping her arms around his shoulders, savoring his strong, metallic smell that she always thought of as blue, the jukebox blue of spilled machine oil or a sheet of pliant milled steel.

“Come on,” she said, reaching down past his shoulders and patting his chest with her two hands, “don’t be such a sourpuss.”

She was about to speak again, to tell him how handsome he looked in the dark pants and the sport jacket, but just then the baby in the bassinet behind her woke up. Claire was secretly thrilled at the way the baby’s-Christine, she must get used to thinking of her by her name-at the way Christine’s thin, rising wail, like the sound of a flute or some high instrument like that, already affected her, causing something to move in her stomach and making her heart beat faster and more heavily, as though it was a fist thumping softly inside her chest. “What’s wrong with baby then, hmm?” she whispered. “What’s the matter? Don’t you like our nice new housey?”

She wished her mother could be alive to see her now. Daddy would only laugh, of course, and wipe the back of his hand across his mouth, as if to wipe away a bad taste.

She smiled at Andy and snuffed up a deep breath through her nostrils. “Smell that,” she said. “Fresh paint!”

Andy was balancing on one leg, pulling on a boot. “I’m hungry,” he said. “Let’s go get a hamburger.”

She said all right, although she did not want to leave yet, wanted to stay and get used to the place, to let it soak into her. There was a short hall beside the kitchenette with a sort of French door at the end of it that opened onto a set of rickety wooden stairs leading steeply down into the yard at the side; this would be their front door. Andy went first, descending the stairs sideways and holding her by the elbow to steady her as she followed with the baby in her arms. This was one of the things she loved most about him, the easy, graceful way he had of being helpful, not just to her but others, too-women in stores, children, the one-armed old man at the gas station out on the turnpike who looked after the pumps; sometimes Negroes, even.

The backyard was brown after the dry summer and the grass crackled under their feet and gave off dust that smelled like wood ash, and crickets the same color as the grass clicked their hinged back legs and sailed away from them on all sides. There was nothing in this part of the yard, only a gnarled peach tree, its leaves gone already, and an old overgrown dug patch where someone must have raised vegetables, long ago.

“Well,” Claire said, with a rueful laugh, “this is going to take some rethinking.”

“What gives you the idea it’s going to be ours to rethink?” Andy said.

He was looking past her toward the house, and she turned and saw a tall, thin-faced woman standing on the porch, watching them. Her no-color hair was pulled back and tied in a tight ball at the back of her neck. She wore a brown apron.

“Why, hello there,” Claire said, going forward with the baby in one arm and a hand outstretched. It was a strategy she had devised for meeting new people, always to make a move right away, before her shyness had time to stop her. The woman on the porch ignored the hand she was offering and she quickly took it back. “I’m Claire Stafford,” she said.

The woman looked her up and down and was obviously unimpressed with what she saw. “Bennett,” she said. When she shut her mouth her lips made a straight, colorless line.

She must be thirty-five, Claire guessed, but she gave an even older impression. Claire wondered if Mr. Bennett was about, or if there was a Mr. Bennett. “Pleased to meet you,” she said. “We’re moving in today. We were just up there, getting the feel of the place.”

The woman nodded. “I heard the baby.”

Claire held out the bundle in her arms. “This is Christine,” she said. The woman ignored the baby; she was squinting at Andy standing back in the dry grass with his hands in the seat pockets of his jeans and his head on one side, and the look in her eye warmed a half a degree or so, Claire noted. “That’s my husband, Andy,” Claire said. She lowered her voice to a woman-to-woman level. “He’s a mite put out,” she said. “I think he thinks the place is on the small side.”

She knew at once it had been the wrong thing to say.

“That right?” the woman said coldly. “Guess he’s used to grander quarters, is he?”

Andy must have seen from the angle of Claire’s back that she needed rescuing. He came forward with his widest grin.

“Howdy there,” he said, “Miss…?”

“Bennett,” the woman said. “Mrs.”

“No!” He lifted a hand in mock amazement and opened wide his velvety brown eyes. Claire watched him with an amusement in which there was only the faintest touch of jealousy. His charm knew no shame, and always worked, however obvious the lies he told. “Well,” he said to the woman, “I’m mighty glad to make your acquaintance.”

He stepped up on the porch and she let him take her hand, having wiped it first on her apron.

“Likewise, I’m sure,” she said.

Claire saw how he held her fingers in his a moment before releasing them, and how her tight lips twitched into a smile.

There was silence then between the three of them. Faintly, like the rumbling of far-off thunder, Claire felt the first beats of a headache starting up. The baby flexed its arm, pressing out the blanket as if it-she-Christine-also wanted to reach out to this hard-faced, long-boned woman. Claire drew the warm bundle more tightly to her breast.

Andy slapped his hands against his hips. “Well,” he said, “I guess it’s about lunchtime.” He waited a second, but if he expected the Bennett woman to invite them in then he was disappointed. “Let’s go get something to eat, honey,” he said. “I’ll fetch my billfold.”

He went off up the wooden stairway two at a time. Claire smiled at Mrs. Bennett and turned to follow him. The woman said:

“I hope that baby ain’t a bawler. Noise carries easily, in these tiny little houses.”

11

QUIRKE COULD NOT REMEMBER THE LAST TIME HE HAD BEEN IN THE hospital chapel, and he was not sure what he was doing here now. The doors, giving off the corridor that led to radiology, struck an incongruous note, with their fancy handles and the two narrow panels of stained glass that some rich old lady had paid to have installed a couple of years previously in memory of her married daughter who had died. The air in here was always cold, with a special sort of cold not to be felt elsewhere, but which Quirke associated, unaccountably, with the vase of lilies that had stood every summer on the altar of the chapel in Carricklea-he used to believe it was always the same bunch, miraculously undying-into the bell of one of which he had one day dared to put his hand, and the chill, clammy, flesh-like feel of which he had never forgotten. The Holy Family chapel was small, without pillars or side alcoves, so that there was no avoiding the beady eye of the little oil lamp with the ruby-red globe that burned perpetually before the tabernacle. It was there at noon that Quirke found Mal, kneeling with hands joined and head bowed before a statue of St. Joseph. He went forward quietly and sat down in the seat beside where Mal knelt. Mal did not turn, and gave no sign to acknowledge his presence, but after a minute or two he crossed himself and sat back on the seat with a sigh. They were both silent for a time; then Quirke lifted a hand and made a gesture indicating the statue, the sanctuary lamp, the altar with its gold-embroidered white cloth, and said: “Tell me, Mal, do you really believe in all this?”

Mal considered. “I try to,” he said. He looked sidelong at his brother-in-law. “And you-what do you believe in?”

“I was cured of believing in things a long time ago.”

Mal gave an amused little sniff. “You love to hear yourself saying things like that, don’t you,” he said. He took off his spectacles and rubbed a finger hard into one eye and then the other and sighed again. “What do you want, Quirke?”

Now it was Quirke’s turn to consider. “I want you to tell me about Dolly Moran’s death.”

Mal registered no surprise. “I know less about it than you, seemingly,” he said. “I’m not the one going about poking my nose into places where it’s liable to get cut off.”

Quirke gave an incredulous laugh. “Is that a threat, Mal?”

Mal gazed before him stonily.

“You may think you know what you’re doing, Quirke,” he said, “but believe me, you don’t.”

“I know Christine Falls didn’t die of an embolism,” Quirke said, quietly at first, “as you claimed she did, in that false file you wrote up. I know she died having a child, and that her child was stillborn, as you told me, but that it disappeared, or was disappeared, without a trace. I know I told you Dolly Moran kept a diary and that the next day she was tortured and had her head smashed open. Tell me these things are not connected, Mal. Tell me my suspicions are groundless. Tell me you’re not up to your neck in trouble.”

Quirke was surprised at himself. Where did it come from, all this anger? And what injustice was he protesting-the one done to Dolly Moran, or to Christine Falls or Christine Falls’s child, or to himself? But who had been unjust to him, or injured him? It was not he who had died amid the blood and screams of childbirth, or had his flesh burned or his head cracked open. Mal was obviously unimpressed. He made no reply, only gave a brisk nod, as if something had been confirmed, and stood up. In the aisle he genuflected, and rose again and turned to go, but paused. The somber suit gave him a faintly ecclesiastical aspect; even the dark-blue bow tie might have been the elaborate neckwear of a prelate of some ultramontane faction of the church. His expression when he looked back at Quirke was one of cold amusement mingled with a pitying contempt.

“I’ll tell you this, Quirke,” he said. “Stay out of it.”

Quirke, still seated, shook his head. “I can’t,” he said. “I’m in it, up to my neck, just like you.”

Mal walked out of the chapel. After a while Quirke stood up. The red eye before the altar flickered and seemed to wink. He shivered a little. The cold heaven…

12

ANDY STAFFORD LIKED THE NIGHT RUNS BEST. IT WAS NOT JUST THAT the rate of pay was better or that there was less traffic on the highway. Something about that high dome of darkness all around him and the headlights of the big twelve-wheeler cutting through it made him feel in control of more than just this Crawford Transport truck with its load of roof shingles or auto parts or pig iron. What all he did out here was up to nobody but himself. There was only him and the road and some heartsick hillbilly on the cab radio twanging away about hound dogs and lonesomeness and love. Often, standing in the forecourt of a deserted gas station or stepping out of the late-night smoke and fry smells of a roadside hamburger joint, he would feel the breeze on his face and seem to smell clean, sage-scented air coming to him like a message just for him all the way from out West, from New Mexico or Colorado, Wyoming, maybe, or even the high Rockies, all those places he had never been to, and something would well up in him, something sweet and solitary-seeming and full of promise for the day to come, the day that was already laying down a thin line of gold on the horizon before him.

He got onto the turnpike, then ran through Brookline and down across the deserted south city. When he turned onto Fulton Street he cut the engine and let the rig run smooth and silent down the soft incline of the road to the house, the freewheeling tires warbling under him on the asphalt. Mrs. Bennett-“You can call me Cora”-had already started making comments about him parking the truck outside the house, only to Claire, of course, never to him. He swung down from the cab, the muscles in his arms and across the saddle of his shoulders aching and the seam of his jeans wedged like a hot wet lariat rope between his legs. All the houses on the street were dark. Someone’s dog started a halfhearted baying but soon shut up. It was still an hour to dawn and the air had a bite but he sat down anyway on the porch swing to rest a minute and look up at the stars, his hands clasped behind his neck, which was already tingling and beginning to unstiffen. The swing creaked on its chains and made him think of nights in Wilmington when he was a kid, sprawled on the porch like this to smoke a cigarette stolen from the pack in the bib pocket of his old man’s overalls, the smoke harsh and cutting in the cool night air and tasting of all forbidden things, racetrack beer and sour-mash whiskey and girls’ juices, the very taste of what it would be like to be grown up and all the hell away from Wilmington, State of Delanowhere. He laughed to himself. When he was there he’d dreamed of being somewhere like here, now he was here and dreamed of being back there. That was how it always was with him, satisfied noplace, always hankering after other towns, other times.

He stood up and walked around by the side of the house, past what he knew was Cora Bennett’s bedroom, and climbed the wooden stairs and let himself in at the French door. There was still that damned smell of new paint that sometimes almost made him sick to his stomach; he thought he could catch the baby’s smells, too, the usual milk and damp cotton, and the poop that stank like horse feed. He had not bothered to turn on the light and a sort of grayish mist was seeping in from the eastern sky, and he could see the thin, mean-looking spire of St. Patrick’s Church over on Brewster Street outlined against the dawn with the morning star, the only one remaining now, sitting plumb on top of the weathervane. His mood was growing darker the more the morning got light. He wondered, as he had begun to do lately, how long he could stay in this town before the itch to move on got so bad he would have to scratch it.

He sat down in the living room and eased himself out of his boots, then tore off his work shirt. With his arms still lifted he sniffed his armpits; pretty high, but he did not want to bother with a shower; besides, Claire always said she liked his smell. He went on tiptoe in his socks into the bedroom. The shades were pulled, allowing in no chink of dawn light. He could make out Claire’s form in the bed but could not hear her breathing-he liked it that she was a quiet sleeper, when she slept and her headaches were not keeping her awake. Feeling his way about the still unfamiliar room and trying not to make a sound, for he did not want her to wake yet, he got out of the last of his clothes with impatient haste and naked approached the bed and carefully lifted the covers.

“Hey there,” he whispered, putting one knee on the side of the mattress and leaning down to the form lying there, “how’s my baby girl?” There were two, separate stirrings, and two voices, one of them Claire’s, which murmured a blurred “What…?” and the other making an urgent, wet, sucking sound. He reared back. “Jesus Christ!”

It was the kid, of course, lying beside Claire and sucking on its fist. Claire pulled the child from her and sat up, confused and half frightened. “Is that you, Andy?” she said, and had to clear her throat.

“Who the hell did you think it was!” He was lifting the sopping, hot infant out of her arms. “You expecting somebody else?”

She realized what he was doing, and made a grab for the baby.

“She was crying,” she said plaintively, “I was just getting her back to sleep.”

But he was already on his way out of the room, moving through the darkness like a glimmering ghost. She fell back on the pillow, moaning faintly, and thrust a hand into her hair. She tried to see what time it was but the clock on the bedside cabinet was turned away. The baby’s diaper must have leaked, and there was a big wet patch on the front of her nightshirt. She knew she should take it off but she did not want to be naked when Andy came back. It was too late, or too early, for what she knew he would want, and she was tired, for the baby had woken her twice already. But Andy did not notice, or ignored, the wet spot and the faint ammoniac smell, and took the nightshirt off her himself, making her sit up and lift her arms and pulling it roughly over her head and throwing it behind him on the floor.

“Oh, honey,” she began, “listen, I’m-”

But he would not listen. He stretched himself on top of her, forcing her legs apart-his kneecaps were icy-and was suddenly inside her. He smelled of beer, and his lips were still greasy from something he had eaten. She felt chilled, and reached out beside her and found the edge of the bed covers and pulled them over his rhythmically arching back. She could hardly feel him, she was so tired and distracted, but even so she started to slip and slide along with him, and had that familiar, faintly panicky sensation, as if she were sinking slowly, languorously, underwater.

“Honey,” he whispered in her ear, in a hoarse, distressed, lost voice that made her hold him more tightly to her, “oh, honey.”

She heard it before he did, the baby winding out into the dark like a party streamer her thin, demanding, unignorable cry. Andy went still, and lay on her, rigid, his head lifted.

“Jesus,” he said again, and smacked a fist hard into the pillow beside where her head was. “Jesus H. Christ!”

And then, just as she was becoming afraid, he began to laugh.

IN THE MORNING HE WAS STILL IN A FUNNY MOOD. SHE WAS HANGING sheets on the clothesline he had rigged up temporarily for her between a thick branch of the walnut tree and the newel post at the top of the wooden staircase-Mrs. Bennett had said nothing yet about this arrangement; she had some kind of a newfangled electric dryer herself-when he came creeping up behind her and grabbed her around the waist with a whoop and lifted her high off her feet and swung her in a circle. She would have been glad to see him happy but she was not sure this was happiness. He had kind of a wild look in his eye, as if he had been running real hard and had just now come to a stop. When he set her down she was out of breath herself. With the fingers of one hand he pushed aside the collar of her shirt. “Hey,” he said softly, “what’s this here?” There was a hickey the size of a silver dollar on the side of her neck. “Now, where did that come from?”

“Oh,” she said, turning away from him to hang another sheet, “some big old brute came sneaking into my bed sometime around dawn-didn’t you hear him?”

“Why, no. I slept like a baby. You know me, honey.” He put his arms around her again from behind and ground his hips slowly against her. His arms were like two hot steel cables. “Tell me,” he whispered, his mouth hot too against her ear, “what else he do to you, this big old brute?”

She turned, laughing in her throat, and he slipped his arms higher and put his hands on her shoulder blades and pulled her hard against his chest, and she put her open mouth to his and he drank her sweet breath and their tongues touched. A breeze came from somewhere, maybe the faraway Rockies again, and caught the wet sheet on the clothesline and wrapped it briefly around them. Kissing, they did not see, in a downstairs window of the house, a thin-lipped face and a pair of cold eyes, watching them.

13

THE AUTUMN NIGHT WAS CLOSING IN AS QUIRKE WALKED UP RAGLAN Road. There were halos of fog around the streetlamps and smoke was rolling down from the chimneys high above him and he could taste coal grit on his lips. He was rehearsing in his mind the conversation-the word confrontation hovered worryingly-that he was already sorry he had sought. He could avoid it, even yet, if he wanted. What was to stop him from turning on his heel and walking away, as he had walked away from so many things in his life-what made this one any different? He could find a telephone-in his head he heard Dolly Moran saying, I had to go three or four streets to the phone box-and call and make some excuse, say that the matter he had wanted to talk over had solved itself. But even as he was thinking these thoughts his legs carried him on, and then he was at the gate of the Judge’s house. In the dark the autumn garden gave off a rank, wet smell. He climbed the worn steps to the front door. There was a dim light in the transom but none in the tall windows on either side and he found himself hoping the old man might have forgotten their appointment and gone out to the Stephen’s Green Club for the evening, as was his habit. He worked the bellpull and heard the bell jangle echoingly within and his hopes rose further, but then there came the unmistakable sound of Miss Flint’s footsteps approaching along the hall. He prepared his face, forcing onto it the makings of a smile: Miss Flint and he were old adversaries. When she opened the door he had the impression that she was barely keeping in check a smirk of distaste. She was small and sharp-faced and wore her coarse ungraying hair in a helmet shape that made it look like a wig, which it might be, for all Quirke knew.

“Mr. Quirke,” she said, in her driest voice and with the barest hint of an unwelcoming exclamation mark. She was scrupulously, vengefully polite.

“Evening, Miss Flint. Is the Judge in?”

She stepped back, opening wider the door. “He’s expecting you.”

The air in the hall was dead and there was a trace even here of an old man’s musty smell. The bulb in the light fixture dangling from the high ceiling was sixty watts or less, and the shade resembled what he imagined dried skin would look like. His heart contracted. He had been happy here, when Nana Griffin was alive. Shouts in this hall, and Mal on the stairs dodging the rugby ball that Quirke was punting at him, the two of them in short trousers and school ties, their shirttails hanging out. Yes, happy.

Miss Flint took his hat and coat and led him off into the heart of the house, the thick rubber soles of her prison warder’s shoes squeaking on parquet and tile. As so often, Quirke found himself wondering what things she might know, what family secrets. Did she watch Mal, too, with that searching, lopsided stare, on his rare visits to his father’s house?

The Judge had heard the bell and had come to the door of what he called his den. When Quirke saw him standing there in his slippers and his old gray cardigan, nearly as tall as Quirke but stooped a little now, peering anxiously out of the shadows, it occurred to him that the day could not be far off when he would knock at the front door and be met by Miss Flint with a mourning band on her arm and her eyes red-rimmed. He stepped forward briskly, once again making himself smile.

“Get in here, man,” the Judge said from the doorway of the room, making shooing motions with his arm, “this hall is like a refrigerator.”

“Will you be wanting tea?” Miss Flint asked, and the Judge said, “No!” shortly and put a hand on Quirke’s shoulder and drew him into the room.

“Tea!” he said, shutting the door behind them with a thud. “I declare to God, that woman…” He led Quirke to the fireplace and an armchair beside it. “Sit down there and thaw yourself out, and we’ll have a drop of something stronger than tea.”

He went to the sideboard and busied himself with glasses and the whiskey bottle. Quirke looked about him at familiar things, the old leather-covered chaise, the antique writing desk, the Sean O’Sullivan portrait of Nana Griffin as a young wife, calmly smiling, marcel-waved. Quirke had been one of the few people the Judge would permit to enter this room. Even as a boy, half wild still from the years at Carricklea, he was allowed the run of the Judge’s den, and often of a winter afternoon, before he and Mal went off to board at St. Aidan’s, he would perch here, in this same chair, beside a banked coke fire that might have been this one, doing his sums and his Latin prep, while the Judge, still a barrister then, sat at his desk working on a brief. Mal, meanwhile, did his homework at the white deal table in the kitchen, where Nana Griffin fed him wholemeal biscuits and warm milk and quizzed him about his bowels, for Mal was considered to be delicate.

The Judge brought their whiskeys and handed Quirke his and sat down opposite him. “Have you had your dinner?” he asked.

“Yes, I’m fine.”

“Are you sure?” He peered at Quirke closely. Age had not dulled the old man’s keen ear, and he had heard the discomforted note in Quirke’s voice when he had telephoned and asked if he could come and talk to him. They drank in silence for a minute, Quirke frowning into the fire while the Judge watched him. The coke fumes, sharp as the smell of cat piss, were stinging Quirke’s nostrils.

“So,” the Judge said at last, large-voiced and forcedly hearty, “what’s this urgent matter you need to discuss? You’re not in trouble, are you?” Quirke shook his head.

“There was this girl…” he began, and stopped.

The Judge laughed. “Uh-oh!” he said.

Quirke smiled faintly and again shook his head. “No, no, nothing like that.” He looked into the shivering red heart of the fire. Get it over with. “Her name was Christine Falls,” he said. “She was going to have a child, but she died. She was being looked after by a woman called Moran. After Christine Falls’s death the Moran woman was murdered.” He stopped, and drew a breath.

The Judge blinked a few times rapidly, then nodded.

“Moran,” he said, “yes, I think I read something about it in the paper. The poor creature.” He leaned forward and took Quirke’s glass, seeming not to notice that there was a finger of whiskey undrunk in it, and rose and went again to the sideboard. Quirke said: “Mal wrote up a file on her-on Christine Falls.”

The Judge did not turn. “How do you mean, wrote up a file?”

“So as to leave out any mention of the child.”

“Are you saying”-he looked at Quirke over his shoulder-“are you saying he falsified it?”

Quirke did not reply. The Judge stood there, still with his head turned and still looking at him, and suddenly opened his mouth slackly and uttered a quavering sound that was halfway between a moan of denial and a cry of anger. There was the squeak of glass sliding off glass and the glugging of whiskey spilling freely from the neck of the bottle. The Judge grunted again, cursing his trembling hand.

“I’m sorry,” Quirke said.

The Judge, having righted the bottle, bowed his head and remained motionless for fully a minute. There was the sound of the spilled whiskey dripping on to the floor. The old man was ashen-faced. “What are you telling me, Quirke?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Quirke said.

The Judge came with their topped-up whiskeys and sat down again.

“Could he be struck off?” he asked.

“I doubt it would come to that. There’s no real question of malpractice, that I know of.”

The Judge gave a sort of laugh. “Malpractice!” he said. “By the Lord, there’s a pun in bad taste.” He ruminated angrily, shaking his head. “What connection did he have with this girl, anyway? I suppose she was his patient?”

“I’m not sure what she was. He was taking care of her, was how he put it. She had worked at the house for a while.”

“What house?”

“Sarah took her on as a maid, to help out Maggie. Then she got in trouble.” He looked at the Judge, who sat with eyes downcast, still slowly shaking his head, the whiskey glass forgotten in his hand. “He says he rewrote the file to spare the family knowing about the child.”

“What business was it of his to be sparing people’s feelings?” the Judge broke out hoarsely. “He’s a doctor, he swore an oath, he’s supposed to be impartial. Bloody irresponsible fool. What did she die of, anyway, the girl?”

“Postpartum hemorrhage. She bled to death.”

They were silent, the Judge scanning Quirke’s face, just as, Quirke thought, an accused before the bench in the old days might have scanned the Judge’s face, looking for leniency. Then he turned aside. “She died at Dolly Moran’s house, is that so?” he asked. Quirke nodded. “Did Mal know her, too?”

“He was paying her to look after the girl.”

“A fine set of acquaintances my son has.” He brooded, his jaw muscles working. “You spoke to him about all this, obviously?”

“He won’t say much. You know Mal.”

“I wonder do I.” He paused. “Did he say anything about this business with the people in Boston?”

Quirke shook his head. “What business is that?”

“Oh, he has a charity thing going out there, him and Costigan and that Knights of St. Patrick crowd, helping Catholic families, supposedly. Your father-in-law, Josh Crawford, funds it.”

“No, Mal said nothing about that.”

The Judge drank off the whiskey in his tumbler in one quick go. “Give us here your glass, I think we need another stiffener.” From the sideboard he asked, “Does Sarah know about all this?”

“I doubt it,” Quirke said. He thought again of Sarah by the canal that Sunday morning, looking at the swans and not seeing them, asking him to talk to her husband, the good man. How could he say what knowledge she might or might not have? “I only know about it because I stumbled on him while he was writing up the file.”

He got to his feet, feeling suddenly overcome by the heat of the room, the fumes from the fire, the smell of the whiskey the Judge had spilled, and the raw, scorched sensation on the surface of his tongue from the alcohol. The Judge turned to him in surprise, holding the two glasses against his chest.

“I’ve got to go,” Quirke said shortly. “There’s someone I have to meet.”

It was a lie. The old man looked put out, but made no protest. “You won’t…?” He held up Quirke’s whiskey glass but Quirke shook his head, and the old man turned and put both glasses back on the sideboard. “Are you sure you’ve eaten? I think you’re not taking care of yourself.”

“I’ll get something in town.”

“Flint could rustle you up an omelette…?” He nodded ruefully. “No, not the most tempting of offers, I grant you.” At the door a thought struck him and he stopped. “Who killed her, the Moran woman-do they know?”

“Someone got into the house.”

“Burglars?”

Quirke shrugged. Then he said:

“You knew her.” He watched the old man’s face. “Dolly Moran, I mean. She worked for you and Nana, and then later on for Mal and Sarah, taking care of Phoebe. That was how Mal knew where to go for help, with Christine Falls.”

The Judge was looking to one side, frowning and thinking. Then he closed his eyes and gave a cry as he had done earlier, softer but more sorrow-laden. “Dolores?” he said, and seemed about to falter on his feet, and Quirke reached out a hand to him. “Merciful God-was it Dolores? I never made the connection. Oh, no. Oh, God, no. Poor Dolores.”

“I’m sorry,” Quirke said again; he seemed to have been saying it since he had arrived. They went into the hall, the Judge walking as if in a daze, his arms hanging stiffly before him, and for a moment Quirke saw his likeness to Mal. “She was very loyal, Dolly was,” Quirke said. “Any secrets she had, she kept them. Mal should be grateful to her.”

The old man seemed not to have heard him. “Who’s in charge of the case?” he asked.

“Fellow called Hackett. Detective inspector.”

The Judge nodded. “I know him. He’s sound. If you’re worried, I can talk to him, or get someone to drop a word…?”

“I’m not worried,” Quirke said, “not for myself.”

They had reached the front door. Suddenly it came to Quirke that what he was feeling most strongly was a sort of shamefaced pleasure. He recalled an occasion when he and Mal were boys and the Judge had summoned him into the den and made him stand by the desk while he questioned him about some minor outrage, a window broken with a stone from a catapult or a stash of cigarette butts found hidden in a cocoa tin in the linen cupboard. Who had fired the stone, the Judge demanded, who had smoked the cigarettes? At first Quirke had insisted that he knew nothing, but in the end, seeing clearly how much of his authority the Judge had invested in this cross-examination, he had admitted that Mal was the culprit, which most likely, he thought, the Judge already knew, anyway. The feeling he had now was like what he had felt then, only now it was much stronger, a hot mixture of guilt and glee and defiant self-righteousness. The Judge that time had thanked him solemnly and told him he had done the right thing, but Quirke had detected in his eye a faint, evasive look of-of what? Disappointment? Contempt?

Now Quirke said:

“The business with the file, all that: I’m the only one who knows about it. I said nothing to Hackett, or anyone.”

The Judge once more was shaking his head. “Malachy Griffin,” he muttered, “you’re a bloody fool.” He laid a hand heavily on Quirke’s shoulder. “I understand your interest in the Falls girl, of course,” he said. “You were thinking of Delia, the same way that she went.”

Quirke shook his head. “I was thinking of Mal,” he said. “I was thinking of all of us-of the family.”

The Judge seemed to be only half listening. His hand was still on Quirke’s shoulder. “I’m glad you told me,” he said. “You did the right thing.” You’re a good boy. “Do you think I should speak to him?”

“To Mal?” Quirke shook his head. “No, best to leave it, I think.”

The Judge was watching him. “And you,” he said, “will you leave it?”

Quirke did not know what he would have answered, for at that moment Miss Flint came forward squeakingly, impassive of expression, bringing Quirke’s coat and hat. How long, he wondered, had she been standing there in the shadows, listening?

14

THE THING THAT ANDY WANTED WAS A CAR. NOT ANY OLD CAR, THAT some nigger with too much cheap liquor in his veins had finished bolting together one rainy Monday morning in Detroit. No, what he had set his heart on was a Porsche. He knew the very model, too, a Spyder 550 coupe. He had seen one, over near the Common, where Claire had dragged him with the baby to take a walk one day. In fact, he heard it before he saw it, a growling roar that for a thrilling moment turned the Common to savannah and a stand of pin oaks into tropical palms. He turned, all his instincts prickling, and there the beast was, throbbing under a red light at the intersection of Beacon Hill and Charles Street. It was small to be making so much noise, jelly-bean scarlet, with tires a foot thick, and so low to the road it was a question how any normal-sized person could get in behind the wheel. The top was down; he wished, later, for the sake of his peace of mind, it had been left up. The driver was just some Boston guy trying to look like one of those Englishmen in the magazine ads, slick-haired and sissyish, wearing a blue blazer with two rows of brass buttons and a loosely tied gold-colored silk scarf inside the open collar of his white sport shirt. But the girl beside him, she was a knockout. She had kind of an Indian profile, with high cheekbones and a nose that came down in a straight line from her forehead. She was no Indian, though, but pure Boston Brahmin, honey-skinned, with big blue wide-apart eyes, a cruel red mouth the same shade as the paintwork of the car, and a heavy mane of yellow hair that she pushed aside from her forehead with a sweep of one slender, pale arm, letting Andy see for a second the delicate blue shadow in her shaved armpit. She felt his hungry eyes on her and gave him a look, amused, mocking, and about a hundred miles distant, a look that said, Hey, pretty boy, you get yourself a college education, a rich daddy and an income of a couple of hundred grand a year and a car like this one, and who knows, a girl like me might let you buy her a Manhattan some evening over there at the Ritz-Carlton.

That Saturday he had been out to Cambridge to a used-auto place where there was a Porsche for sale, not a Spyder but a 356. It had looked good, all polished up like a shiny black evil beetle, crouched there among a fleet of chrome-encrusted jalopies, America’s finest, but two minutes under the hood had told him it was no good, that someone had driven the heart out of it and that it had probably been in a wreck. Anyway, who did he think he was fooling? He did not have the dough to buy it even if they offered it to him at a tenth of the asking price. The trip across the river had taken two bus rides there and two back again, and now he was home and in no mood for entertaining callers.

When he turned onto Fulton Street, footsore and mad as hell, he saw the Olds parked at the curb outside the house. It was no Porsche, but it was big and new and shiny, and he had never seen it before. He was looking it over with a critical eye when Claire appeared around the side of the house with a red-haired priest carrying his hat in his hand. Andy did not know why he fixed first of all on the hat, but it was the thing about the priest that he least liked the look of; it was an ordinary black homburg, but there was something about the way that he carried it, holding it by the crown, like a bishop or a cardinal holding that four-cornered red flowerpot thing that they wore saying Mass-he could not remember the name of it but it sounded like the name of a handgun, Italian, maybe, but he could not remember that, either, and was irritated all the more. Andy did not like priests. His folks had been Catholics, sort of, and at Eastertime his ma would lay off the gin for the day and take him and the rest of the kids on the bus down to Baltimore to go to High Mass there in the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen. He had hated those trips, the boredom on the Greyhound, the baloney sandwiches that were all they would have to eat until they got home again, and the crowds of fat-cat harps in the cathedral making the place stink of bacon and cabbage, and the crazy-sounding guys chanting and moaning up on the altar in their weird robes that looked like they were made of metal, some sort of silver or gold, with purple letters and crosses and shepherd’s crooks embroidered on them, and everyone being so holy it would make you want to puke and muttering along with the prayers in Latin that they did not understand a word of. No, Andy Stafford did not care for priests.

This one was called Harkins, and he was bog-Irish to the roots of his oily red hair. He shook hands with Andy and meanwhile gave him the once-over, all smiles and stained teeth but the little yellowish-green eyes cold and sharp as a cat’s.

“Pleased to meet you, Andy,” he said. “Claire here was just telling me all about you.” She was, was she? Andy tried to catch her eye but she kept her gaze fixed firmly on the Mick. “I was just passing,” Harkins went on, “and thought I’d drop in.”

“Sure,” Andy said. If he had just dropped in, how come Claire was in her best green dress with her hair all done up?

“The baby’s going to have a special blessing from the Holy Father,” Claire said brightly. She was still having trouble meeting his eye. What had this sky pilot been saying to her?

“You going to bring her over there to Italy, are you?” Andy said to Harkins, who laughed, those green eyes of his flickering.

“It’ll be a case of Mohammed coming to the mountain,” he said, “although I’m not sure the Archbishop would appreciate the comparison-His Grace will dispense the blessing on the Pope’s behalf.” Andy was about to speak again but the priest turned to Claire, cutting him off, and showing him he was cutting him off. “I’d best not dally,” he said, “for I’ve a few other calls to make.”

“Thanks for dropping in, Father,” Claire said.

Harkins went to the car and opened the door and threw his hat on the passenger seat and got in behind the wheel.

“God bless, now,” he said, and to Andy, “Keep up the good work!” whatever that was supposed to mean, and slammed the door and started up the engine. Firing on only six cylinders, as Andy heard with satisfaction. As the car pulled away from the curb-burning oil, too, by the look the exhaust smoke-Harkins lifted a hand from the wheel and made a rapid movement with his fingers, as if he were sketching something-was that a blessing? The archbishop would have to do better than that.

Andy turned to Claire. “What’d he want?”

She was still waving good-bye. She shivered, for the day was misty and chill. “I don’t know, really,” she said. “I guess Sister Stephanus might have asked him to call in.”

“Doesn’t trust us, huh?”

She heard what he was really saying-honestly, he was jealous of everyone!-and she sighed and gave him a look. “He’s a priest, Andy. He was just paying a visit.”

“Well, I hope he don’t visit too often. I don’t like priests in the house. My old ma always said it was bad luck.”

There were quite a few things Claire could say about Andy’s old Ma, if only she dared.

They went around the side of the house and climbed the wooden stairway. Claire told him Mrs. Bennett was out. “She called up to ask if there was anything I needed at the store.” She smiled over her shoulder at him teasingly. “Of course, I’m sure it was you she was hoping to see.”

He said nothing. He had been watching Cora Bennett. She was no beauty, with that bony face and mean mouth, but she had a good figure, behind the apron she never seemed to take off, and a hungry eye. He had dropped a few inquiring hints as to the whereabouts of Mr. Bennett but had got no response. Run off, probably; if he had been dead she would likely have said so-widows tended to be real fond of their late husbands, Andy always found, until someone turned up who looked a candidate to take the sainted one’s place.

In the house he walked into the kitchenette, wanting to know what there was for dinner. Claire said she had not thought about it yet, what with Father Harkins visiting and all, and anyway she wished he would say lunch, which is what folk ate in the middle of the day, not dinner, which sounded so low-class.

“So Irish, I guess you mean,” he said over his shoulder, opening a cupboard door and letting it slam shut again.

“No, that is not what I meant, and you know it.” Claire had grown up in a village south of Boston, with picket fences and white frame houses and a white church spire pointing up past the maples, all of which she seemed to think gave her a right to her New England airs, but he knew what she came from-German hog farmers who had lost their few acres to the banks in the hard times and moved upstate to try their hand at running a feed store until that failed too. Now in the kitchenette she walked up behind him and had him turn to her and took him by the wrists and made him put his arms around her waist, and then laid her fists on his chest and smiled up into his face. “You know that’s not what I meant, Andy Stafford,” she said again, softly, and kissed him lightly on the lips, a bluebird’s peck.

“Well,” he said, putting on his slow drawl, “I guess if there’s nothing to eat I’m just going to have to eat you.”

He was leaning down to kiss her when he looked past her shoulder and saw the bassinet on the table in the living room, and the blanket in it stirring. “Shit,” he said, and pushed her away from him and stalked to the table and violently picked up the bassinet by its handles and headed for the baby’s room.

“She’s asleep!” Claire cried. “She’s…”

But he was gone. When he came back he pointed a shaking finger in her face. “I told you, girl,” he said in a quiet voice, “the kid has her own room, and that’s where she stays when she’s asleep. Right?”

She could see how angry he was: his mouth was twitching at the side and he had that flecked look in his eye. He was still mad over Father Harkins being here-could he really be jealous, of a priest? “All right, honey,” she said, making her voice very slow and calm. “All right, I’ll remember.”

He went to the icebox and got a beer. She could never decide which was more scary, his rages or the way they suddenly ended, as if nothing had happened. He knocked the cap off the bottle and threw back his head and took a series of long swallows, his adam’s apple bobbing in a rhythm that made her think, blushing inside, of being in bed with him.

“That guy,” he said, “the priest-did he say if what’s-her-name spoke to old man Crawford yet?” She looked blank and he waggled the bottle impatiently. “Sister…you know…”

“Stephanus?”

“Yeah, her. She said she’d talk to Crawford about a job for me.”

The baby was trying out a few exploratory squeaks that sounded to Claire like the sounds a blind man would make feeling at something shiny with his fingertips; Andy seemed not to hear.

“I thought,” she said cautiously, “you weren’t interested in other work?”

“I’d kind of like to hear what he has to offer.”

Claire stood, half of her listening anxiously for the baby, who seemed to have changed her mind and gone back to sleep, and the other half considering the possibility of Andy not being on the trucks anymore. They would be like an ordinary couple-normal was the first word that came to her mind-but it would be the end of their happy nights alone together, just the two of them, her and little Christine.

15

SARAH HATED THE SMELL OF HOSPITALS, SUMMONING UP AS IT DID vivid memories of a childhood tonsillectomy. She could detect the smell even on Mal’s clothes, a mixture of ether and disinfectant and what she thought must be bandages that no number of dry cleanings could remove. She had never complained or even mentioned it-a fine thing it would be for a doctor’s wife to admit she disliked the smell of doctoring!-but he must have seen her once or twice wrinkling her nose, for nowadays he would vanish upstairs to change as soon as he was in the door. Poor Mal, trying to look after everyone, to take care of everything, and getting no thanks. Yet his side of the wardrobe reeked for her of that moment of childhood terror and pain under the doctor’s knife.

When she walked into reception at the Holy Family, carrying her gloves, the smell hit her at once and it was so strong she thought for a moment she would have to turn around and walk out again. But she forced herself forward to the desk and the dragon lady there-why would anyone choose to wear spectacles with pale pink, translucent frames?-and asked if Dr. Quirke might be available. “Mr. Quirke, is it?” the dragon snapped. Sarah knew of course it should be Mr., and serve her right for her patronizing assumption that she would not be understood if she did not ask for him as Dr. She would never master the rules, never.

She sat on a hard bench by the wall and waited. Quirke had told the dragon to say he would come up right away. She watched the usual procession of the halt and the maimed, the accident cases, the bandaged children, the shock-faced old, the mothers-to-be struggling along in the wake of their enormous stomachs, being bullied already by the unborn. She wondered how Mal could face these women, day after day, year after year. Quirke’s clients at least were conveniently dead. She chided herself: her thoughts were all of an unrelieved bleakness in these days.

Quirke was loosely gowned in green. He apologized for the delay; one of his assistants was off sick, the place was in chaos. She said it was not important, that she could come back another time, yet wondered silently how there could be such urgency to his work-the dead would stay dead, surely? No, he was saying, no, she must stay, now that she was here. She could see him wondering why she was here; Quirke had always been a calculator.

They sat at a plastic-topped table beside a dusty window in the hospital canteen. Down at the serving end there was a counter with rumbling tea urns and glass cases containing triangular sandwiches curled at the tips, and miniature packets of biscuits, and what were called, with what she thought of as stark aptness, rock cakes. Why was it, she wondered idly, when Quirke had gone off to fetch their tea, that hospitals here were so run-down and dingy and uniformly miserable? The window beside the table where she sat looked out on a blockhouse built of bricks the color of old blood, the flat roof of which, apparently made of asphalt, sported at one corner a crooked stovepipe chimney with a cowl, from which smoke was pouring sideways, flattened by the strong October wind. Without her wanting it to, her mind speculated on what in a hospital could require burning that would produce a smoke so dense and black. Quirke returned, bearing mugs of presugared, milky tea, which she knew she would not be able to bring herself to drink. She felt it coming on, that increasingly familiar sense of weakness, of lightness, as if she were somehow floating up out of herself, as if her mind were detaching itself and floating free of her. Was this what they meant in the old books when they spoke of the vapors? She wondered how worried she should be about her health. But would not death, she thought, be a solution to so many things? Though she did not really imagine she would escape that easily, or that soon.

“So,” Quirke said, “I suppose this is about Mal?”

She looked at him searchingly. How much did he know? She wanted to ask, she dearly wanted to ask, but she could not bring herself to speak the words. What if he knew more than she did, what if he was privy to things even more terrible than she had learned of? She tried to concentrate, grasping at her scattering thoughts. What had he asked her? Yes: if it was about Mal that she had come. She decided to ignore this. She said:

“Phoebe wants to marry that young man.” She touched the handle of the mug with her fingertips; it felt slightly sticky. “It’s impossible, of course.”

Quirke frowned, and she could see him readjusting his thoughts, his strategies: Phoebe, then, not Mal. “Impossible?” he said.

She nodded. “And needless to say, there’s no talking to her.”

“Tell her to go ahead and do it,” he said. “Tell her you’re all for it. Nothing more likely to put her off the idea.”

She thought it best to disregard this also. “Would you speak to her?”

He leaned back in the chair and lifted high his head and looked at her along one shallow side of his flattened nose, nodding slowly, grimly. “I see,” he said. “You want to persuade me to persuade Phoebe to give up her inconvenient boyfriend.”

“She’s so young, Quirke.”

“So were we.”

“She has all her life before her.”

“So had we.”

“Yes,” she said, pouncing, “and look what mistakes we made!” The fierceness was gone as quickly as it had come. “Besides, it wouldn’t work. They’d make sure of that.”

Quirke raised an eyebrow. “They? You mean Mal? Would he really want to destroy her happiness?”

She was shaking her head before he had finished speaking, her eyes cast down. “You don’t understand, Quirke. There’s a whole world. You can’t win with a whole world against you, I know that.”

Quirke looked out the window. Clouds the color of watered ink were roiling on the far horizon; it would rain. He was silent a moment, studying her with narrowed eyes. She looked away. “What is it, Sarah?” he said.

“What?” She tried to be offhand and airy. “What’s what?”

He would not let go; she felt like the quarry borne down on by a single, relentless, huge hound.

“Something’s happened,” he said. “Are you and Mal-?”

“I don’t want to talk about Mal,” she said, so fast it might have been not a sentence but a single word. She put her hands on the table before her, beside her gloves, and looked at them. “Then there’s my father,” she said. He waited. She was still frowning at her hands, as if they had suddenly become an object of fascination. “He’s threatened to cut her out of his will.”

Quirke wanted to laugh. Old Crawford’s will, no less-what next? Then he had a sudden, unnervingly clear image of horse-faced Wilkins, his assistant, waiting for him in the lab-Sinclair was having one of his strategic bouts of flu-and shivered at this glimpse of the world of the dead, his world.

“What about the Judge?” he said. “Why not get him to talk to Phoebe, or to Mal-to your father, maybe, too? Surely he’d knock sense into them all and make them solve it?” She gave him a pitying look. He said, “There will have to be a solution, one way or the other, in the end. I say it again: tell her she can marry him, urge her on. I bet she’ll give Bertie Wooster the old heave-ho.”

Sarah would not smile. “I don’t want Phoebe to be tied down in an early marriage,” she said.

He laughed incredulously. “An early marriage? What’s this? I thought it was because Carrington is a Prod?”

She was shaking her head again, her eyes on the table. “Everything is changing,” she said. “It will be different in the future.”

“Oh, yes, in a hundred years’ time life will be beautiful.”

She shook her head stubbornly. “It will be different, in the future,” she said again. “Girls of Phoebe’s generation, they’ll have a chance to escape, to be themselves, to”-she laughed, embarrassed by what she was about to say-“to live!” She lifted her eyes to his and shrugged one shoulder, abashed. “I wish you’d speak to her, Quirke.”

He sat forward so abruptly her gloves on the table seemed to shrink back from him, clasping each other. How lifelike they looked, Sarah thought, a pair of black leather gloves. As if some otherwise invisible third person at the table were wringing her hands.

“Listen,” he said impatiently, “I have no time for that chinless wonder Phoebe has set her heart on, but if she’s determined to marry him, then good luck to her.” She made to protest but he held out a hand to silence her. “However, if you were to ask me to speak to her, for you-not for Mal, or your father, or anyone else, but for you-then I would.”

In the silence they heard the rattle of raindrops blown against the window. She sighed, then rose and picked up her gloves, banishing that other, invisible, anguished sharer of her troubles. As if to herself she said, ruefully, “Well, I tried.” She smiled. “Thank you for the tea.” The two mugs stood untouched, a crinkled wafer of scum floating on the faintly quaking surface of the gray liquid. “I must go.”

“Ask me,” Quirke said.

He had not risen, but sat sideways at the table, poised and tense, one hand on the back of his chair and the other flat on the smeared tabletop. How could he be so cruel, playing with her always like this?

“You know I can’t,” she said.

“Why can’t you?”

She gave a laugh of mild exasperation. “Because I’d be in your debt!”

“No.”

“Yes!” she said, as vehement as he. “Do it, Quirke. Do it for Phoebe-for her happiness.”

“No,” he said again, flatly. “For you.”

16

IT WAS SATURDAY, IT WAS THE MIDDLE OF THE AFTERNOON, AND Quirke was wondering if he should find another pub to drink in. A dry October storm was sweeping through the streets and he had ducked into McGonagle’s with his coat collar up and a newspaper under his arm. The place was almost empty but he had no sooner settled himself in the snug than Davy appeared at the hatch and handed in a glass of whiskey. “Compliments of the gent in the blue suit,” he said, jerking a thumb behind him towards the bar and giving a skeptical sniff. Quirke put his head out at the door and saw him, perched on one haunch on a stool at the bar: suit of a shiny, metallic blue, horn-rimmed specs, black hair swept back from a lumpy forehead. He lifted his glass to Quirke in a wordless salute and smiled, baring his lower front teeth. He was vaguely familiar, but from where? Quirke drew in his head and sat with his hands on his knees and contemplated the whiskey as if expecting it to foam up suddenly and overflow with rancid whorls of smoke.

After a moment the blue suit appeared in the doorway. “Mr. Quirke,” he said, holding out a hand. “Costigan.” Quirke gingerly shook the proffered hand, which was square, blunt-fingered, and slightly damp. “We met at the Griffins’, the day of the party for the Chief Justice. The day the honor from the Pope was announced?” He pointed to the place beside Quirke. “May I?”

A coincidence, of a sort: Quirke had been thinking about Sarah, her face like Ophelia’s floating up pale but insistent out of the newspaper pages and their quag of reported grim goings-on-the Yanks testing a bigger and better bomb, the Reds rattling their rusty sabers, as usual. He was wondering still why she had come to him at the hospital and what it was exactly that she wanted of him. People seemed forever to be asking him for things, and always just the things he could not give them. He was not the man they took him for, Sarah, and Phoebe, even poor Dolly Moran; he had no help for them.

He often recalled the first unsupervised postmortem he had performed. He was working in those days with Thorndyke, the State Pathologist, who was already going gaga, and Quirke that day had been called on at short notice to stand in for the old boy. The cadaver was that of a large, silver-haired, antiquated gentleman who had died when the car in which he had been a passenger had skidded on a patch of ice and toppled into a ditch. His daughter had been bringing him back after a day out from the old folks’ home where he was living; she was elderly herself, the daughter, and had been driving cautiously because of the freezing conditions, but had lost all control of the machine when it began its sedate slide across the ice. She had escaped without injury, and the car was hardly damaged, but the old boy had died, instantly, as the newspapers liked to put it-who could say, he often asked himself, how long that instant might seem to the one who was doing the dying?-of simple heart failure, as Quirke was able quickly to establish. When the dissecting-room assistant had begun to undress the corpse with the usual, rough adroitness, there had slipped out of the fob of the waistcoat an old and beautiful pocket watch, an Elgin, with Roman numerals and a second hand in an inset dial. It had stopped at five twenty-three exactly, the moment, Quirke was certain, when the old man’s heartbeat too had stopped, heart and watch giving up the ghost together in sympathetic unison. So it had been with him, he believed, when Delia died: an instrument that he carried at his breast, one that had been keeping him aligned and synchronized with the rest of the world, had stopped suddenly and never started up again.

“A lovely day, that was,” Costigan was saying. “We were all so happy for the Judge, happy and proud. A papal knighthood, that’s a rare honor. I’m a knight myself”-he pointed to a pin in his lapel, in the form of a little gold staff twined about by a gold letter P-“but of a humbler order, of course.” He paused. “You never thought of joining us, Mr. Quirke? I mean the Knights of St. Patrick. You’ve been asked, I’m sure. Malachy Griffin is one of us.”

Quirke said nothing. He found himself fascinated, almost hypnotized, by the steady, omnivorous regard of Costigan’s magnified eyes, suspended like two deep-sea creatures in the fishbowl lenses of his spectacles.

“Lovely people, the Griffins,” Costigan went on, undeterred by Quirke’s wordless and resistant stare. “Of course, you were married into the family, weren’t you.”

He waited. Quirke said:

“My wife was Sarah’s-Mrs. Griffin’s-sister.”

Costigan nodded, assuming now an expression of unctuous solemnity. “And she died,” he said. “In childbirth, wasn’t it? Very sad, a thing like that. It must have been hard for you.”

Quirke hesitated again. Those undersea eyes seemed to be following his very thoughts. “It was a long time ago,” he said, maintaining a neutral tone.

Costigan was nodding again.

“Still and all, a hard loss,” he said. “I suppose the only way to cope with a thing like that would be to try to forget it, to put it out of your mind altogether. Not easy, of course. A young woman dead, a child lost. But life must go on, mustn’t it, Mr. Quirke?” There was the sense of some large, dark thing stirring soundlessly between them in the little space where they sat. Costigan pointed to the whiskey glass. “You haven’t touched your drink.” He glanced down at another lapel pin, declaring him a member of the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association. “I’m strictly t.t., myself.”

Quirke leaned back on the bench seat. Davy the barman hovered by the serving hatch, polishing a glass and eavesdropping.

“What exactly is it you’re saying to me,” Quirke asked, “Mr… what was the name again?”

Costigan ignored the second question, smiling tolerantly, as at a childish ruse. “I’m saying, Mr. Quirke,” he said softly, “that some things are best forgotten about, best left alone.”

Quirke felt his forehead go hot. He folded the newspaper and clamped it under his arm and stood up. Costigan watched him with what seemed a lively interest and even a touch of amusement. “Thanks for the drink,” Quirke said. The whiskey sat untasted in the glass. Costigan nodded again, briskly this time, as if something had been said that demanded his assent. He was still seated, but Quirke, towering over him, felt that somehow it was he who was on the inferior level.

“Good luck, Mr. Quirke,” Costigan said, smiling. “I’ll see you around, I’m sure.”

IN GRAFTON STREET GUSTS OF WIND WERE SWOOPING MORE STRONGLY than ever and the Saturday evening shoppers were hurrying homeward with their heads down. Quirke was aware of his quickened breathing and a thick, hot sensation in his chest that was not fear, exactly, but a kind of dawning alarm, as if the smooth, empty little island on which he had been happily perched had given a preliminary heave, and would presently reveal itself to be not dry land at all but the humped back of a whale.

17

ANDY STAFFORD KNEW HE WAS NOT THE SHARPEST TOOL IN THE BOX. It was not that he was stupid, but he was no genius either. This knowledge did not trouble him. In fact, he considered that he was pretty much of a good balance. He had known guys who were all brawn, and one or two who were all brain, and both kinds had been a mess. He was between the two extremes, like the kid standing in the middle of the seesaw, having a good time without the effort of all that swinging up and down. So he just could not understand why it had not struck him, before he had agreed to Claire taking the kid, what the consequences might be for his reputation. It was in Foley’s one night that he first heard, behind his back, that particular laugh he would come to hear often, too often.

He had arrived in from a night and most of a day on the road, and had stopped to drink a beer before going home to the house that these days seemed to smell of nothing else but baby things. Foley’s was crowded and noisy, as it always was on Friday night. On his way to the bar he passed a table of five or six guys, truckers like him, most of whom he knew, sort of. One of them, a big meaty fellow with sideburns the size of lamb chops, name of M’Coy, known as Real-ha ha, big joke-said something as he went past, and that was when he heard it, the laugh. It was low, it was dirty, and it seemed to be directed at him. He got his beer and turned and stood with his elbows behind him on the bar and one boot heel hitched on the brass foot rail and lazily surveyed the room, not looking at M’Coy’s table but not avoiding it either. Be cool, he told himself, be easy. Besides, he did not know the laugh well enough yet to be absolutely sure it was him they had been laughing at. But it was him M’Coy was grinning at, and now he called out: “Hello, stranger.”

“Hello, M’Coy,” Andy answered. He would not call him Real; it sounded so dumb, even for a nickname, though M’Coy himself was proud of it, as if it really did make him someone special. “How’s it going?”

M’Coy took a drag from his cigarette and shoved his big gut against the table and pushed himself back, then leaned up his face and blew a fan of smoke at the ceiling, settling in for some fun. “Don’t see much of you, these days,” he said. “Gotten too good for us, now that you’ve moved out to Fulton Street?”

Easy, Andy told himself again, nice and easy. He shrugged. “You know how it is,” he said.

M’Coy, grinning wider, gave him a measuring look, while the others at the table, grinning too, waited for what was coming next.

“I was telling the boys here,” M’Coy said, “I heard you had a miracle over at that new place of yours.”

Andy let a beat or two pass by. “How’s that?” he said, making his voice go soft.

By now M’Coy was almost laughing outright. “Didn’t your old lady have a kid without ever being knocked up?” he said. “I call that miraculous.”

A heave of suppressed merriment passed along the table. Andy looked at the floor, his lips pursed, then sauntered forward, carrying his beer glass. He stopped in front of M’Coy, who was wearing a checked lumberjack shirt and denim overalls. Andy had gone chill all over, as if he was breaking out in a cold sweat, although his skin was dry. It was a familiar feeling; there was almost a kind of joy in it, and a kind of happy dread that he could not have explained. “Better watch your mouth, pal,” he said.

M’Coy put on a look of innocent surprise and lifted his hands. “Why,” he said, “what’ll you do, give me the one you can’t give your old lady?”

The others were still scrambling out of the way when Andy with a quick spin of the wrist threw the beer from his glass into M’Coy’s face and broke the rim of the glass against the table edge and thrust the crown of jagged spikes against the side of the fat man’s fat soft throat. The quiet spread outward from the table like fast, running ripples. A woman laughed and was abruptly silenced. Andy had a clear picture in his head of the barman directly behind him reaching down cautiously for the baseball bat he kept slung on two coat hooks behind the bar.

“Put down the glass,” M’Coy said, trying to sound tough but his eyes showing just how scared he was. Andy was trying to think of something good to say in reply, maybe something about M’Coy not seeming so Real now, when from behind him someone’s fist swiped him clumsily along the side of the head, making his ear sing. M’Coy, seeing him stunned, gave a shout of terror and reared away from the spikes of glass, and his chair tipped over and dumped him backwards on the floor, and despite the hurt to his ear Andy almost laughed at the thud of the man’s big head as it banged on the boards and the soles of his boots came flying up. There were three or four of them behind him, and he tried to turn and defend himself with the glass but already they had him, one clasping him about the waist from behind while a second one got both hands on his wrist and wrenched it as if it was a chicken that was being choked, and he dropped the glass, not from the pain but from fear that he would gash himself. M’Coy was on his feet again, and advanced now with a shit-eating smile smeared on his fat face and his left fist bunched and lifted-Andy with a sort of dreamy interest was wondering why he had never noticed before that M’Coy was a southpaw-while the others held him fast by the arms so that M’Coy could take leisurely aim and sink the first, sickening punch into his belly.

HE CAME TO IN A NARROW CONCRETE PASSAGEWAY THAT SMELLED OF sour beer and piss. He was lying on his back, looking up into a strip of sky with stars and rags of flying cloud. He tasted blood and puke. Pains in various parts of his body were competing for his attention. Someone was leaning over him, asking him if he was okay, which seemed to him pretty funny in the circumstances, but he decided not to risk letting himself laugh. It was the barman, Andy could not remember his name, a decent guy, family man, kept the place quiet, mostly. “You want me to call you a cab?” he asked. Andy said no, and got himself to a sitting position, and then, after a pause, and with the barman’s help, succeeded in hauling himself by stages to his feet. He said his truck was out front, and the barman shook his head and said he was crazy to think of driving, that he could be concussed, but he said he was all right, that he should get home, that his wife would be worrying, and the barman-Pete, that was his name, Andy suddenly remembered it, Pete Somebody-showed him a steel door at the end of the passageway that led out into an alley along by the side of the bar to the deserted street and the lot across the way where his rig was parked. The rig looked accusing, somehow, like a big brother who had waited up late for him. His brain seemed swollen a size bigger than his skull and his stomach muscles where M’Coy had landed that first punch were clenched on themselves like a bagful of fists.

It was midnight when he coasted the rig down Fulton Street and drew to a squeaking stop outside the house. The upstairs was dark, and there was only a faint line of light under the blind in the window of Cora Bennett’s bedroom; he suspected lonesome Cora slept with the light on. He got himself down from the cab, jangling all over with pain but feeling still the excitement of the fight, a tingle like foxfire all along his nerves. The fall night air was chill and he had only his windbreaker to wear but he did not feel like going inside yet. He climbed the porch steps, dragging a leg-someone had kicked him on the ankle-and sat down on the swing, careful not to set it going and make the chains creak: he did not want Claire coming down in her night things and fussing over him, not just yet, anyway. His head ached, his left knee as well as his ankle was aching, his mouth was all cut up at one side and a molar there was loose, but he was surprised not to have been more badly hurt. He had done a deal of damage himself, had landed a few good punches, and kicked M’Coy in the nuts and got his thumb up someone’s nose and tore it half off, before one of them, he did not see who it was, came up behind him and cracked him over the skull with what must have been a chair leg. He leaned his head back on the swing and eased out a long sigh, holding his aching chest in both hands. It was gusty, and clouds were racing across a sky black and shiny as paint, and the walnut tree at the side of the house was rattling its dry leaves. There was a full moon, peering in and out of the clouds; it looked like M’Coy’s grinning fat face. A miracle, M’Coy had said. Some miracle. He lit a cigarette.

He was thinking over it all, or thinking at least how much figuring he had to do about it all-it had simply not occurred to him before tonight that everyone would know the kid was not his; how dumb can you be?-when he heard the porch door opening behind him. He did not turn, or move at all, just went on sitting there, looking at the sky and the clouds, and for a moment he saw the whole scene as if from outside it, the windy street, the moonlight coming and going on the yard, the porch all in shadow, and him there, hurting and quiet, and Cora Bennett standing behind him with an old coat pulled on over her nightshirt, saying nothing, only raising her hand slowly to touch him. It was like one of those scenes in a movie when the whole audience knows exactly what is going to happen yet holds its breath in suspense. He did not flinch when her fingers found the knot on his skull where the chair leg had landed. Then, instead of sitting down beside him on the swing, she came around in front of him and knelt down on both knees and put her face close up against his. He smelled the sleep on her breath and the stale remains of the day’s face powder. Her hair was untied and hung in trailing strands like a slashed curtain. He flicked the last of his cigarette into the yard; it made a red, spiraling arc. “You’re hurt,” she said, “I can feel the heat from your face.” She touched with her fingertips the bruises on his jaw and the swollen place at the side of his mouth, and he let her, and said nothing. When she leaned closer still her face framed by her hair was shadowed and featureless. Her lips, cool and dry, were nothing like Claire’s, and when she kissed him there was none of Claire’s eagerness and anxiety; it was like being kissed in a ceremony, by some kind of official; it was as if something was being sealed. “Hnn,” she said, drawing away, “you taste of blood.” He put his hands on her shoulders. He had been wrong: she was not wearing a nightshirt, but was naked under the coat.

IT WAS STRANGE. CORA WAS, HE GUESSED, TEN YEARS OLDER THAN HE was, and her stomach had marks on it that made him guess she must have had a child herself at some time in the past. If so, where was the kid, and where was the kid’s father? He did not ask. The only photograph he saw, in a fancy silver frame on the night table beside her bed, was of a dog, a Yorkshire terrier, he thought it was, wearing a bow around its neck and sitting up on its hind legs and grinning with its tongue out. “That’s Rags,” she said, reaching out a bare arm and picking up the frame. “God, did I love that mutt.” They were sitting on her bed, she at the top end, naked, with a pillow on her lap, and he at the foot, leaning back against the wall, wearing only his shorts and drinking a beer. The bruises on his ankle and knee and all around his rib cage were coming up blue already; he could imagine what his face looked like. The only light was from a shaded lamp on the night table, and in it everything in the room seemed to droop downward, as if the whole place was wilting in the rank heat of the steam radiator humming and hiccuping under the window. He had hardly spoken in the hour he had been here, and then only in a whisper, uneasily aware of his wife’s sleeping presence somewhere close overhead. He could see his nervousness amused Cora Bennett. She watched him now with a faint, skeptical smile through the smoke of her cigarette. Her breasts were flat along their fronts, adroop like everything else in the place; they gleamed, amber-colored in the lamplight; she had pressed his throbbing face between them, and a drop of her sweat had run into his mouth and stung his burst lip. He had never been with a woman as old as she was. There was something excitingly shameful about it; it had been like sleeping with his best friend’s mother, if he’d had a best friend. At the end, when the fierce storm they had whipped up between them was over, she had cradled him against her, nursing his bruised and burning body, as he had sometimes seen Claire hold the child. He could not remember his own mother ever holding him like that, so tenderly.

Then he found himself telling her about his plan, his big plan. He had never spoken of it to anyone else, not even Claire. He sat with his bare back against the bedroom wall, nursing the beer bottle between his knees-the beer was warm by now but he hardly noticed-and laid it all out for her, how he would get hold of a top-class auto, a Caddy or a Lincoln, and set up a limo service. He would borrow the money from old man Crawford, who liked to think of himself as John D. Rockefeller, the help of the workingman; he was sure he would have the loan repaid inside a year, with maybe enough left over to start thinking of a second limo and another driver. In five years there would be a fleet of cars-he wrote the title on the air with a sweep of a flattened palm: Stafford Limo Service, A Dream of a Drive-and he would be sitting behind the wheel of a crimson Spyder 550, driving west. Cora Bennett listened to all this with a thin smile that in any other circumstances would have made him mad. Maybe she thought it was just a truck driver’s dream, but there were things she did not know, things he had not told her-for instance, that Mother Superior’s promise to talk to Josh Crawford about getting him off the trucks and into some other, better-paid work. She had mentioned a taxicab, but he would never drive a lousy cab. All the same, maybe the nun could fix a meeting for him with Josh Crawford. He was sure he could persuade the old man, one way or another, to advance him the cash. They did not know, Sister What’s-her-name or Josh Crawford or any of them, just how much he knew about this thing they had going with the babies. He saw himself at the Crawford place down there in North Scituate, sitting at his ease over a cup of fine tea in a big room with palms and a glass wall, and Josh Crawford before him in his wheelchair with a blanket over his knees, ashen-faced, his hands shaking, as Andy calmly told him how much he had found out about the baby smuggling, and that a check for, say, ten grand would be a great help to him in keeping his mouth shut…

Cora Bennett had moved down in the bed and now her foot came out from under the sheet and started trying to wriggle its way into his shorts. He got up and put on his shirt and pants. He was sitting on the end of the bed pulling on his boots when she scrambled to her knees and waded forward and draped herself over his back, the way Claire liked to do, and he could feel her naked breasts and belly pressing against him. “It’s late,” he said, trying not to sound irritated, which he was. She breathed a hot, low laugh into his ear, her hands reaching down to his crotch. He had to admit, she certainly was something. That thin mouth of hers could do some special things, things no one, certainly not Claire, had ever done for him before. She asked when she would see him again, but he said nothing, only turned and kissed her quickly and stood up, buckling his belt. “So long then, Tex,” she said, with that smile again, kneeling there on the bed naked in the lamplight, with those flat breasts, the nipples dark and shiny like his bruises. Tex, she was calling him. He did not think he liked that. It felt as if she was laughing at him.

He went out by the front door and around by the side of the house-something skittered in the boughs of the walnut tree-and hauled himself up the wooden stairs and through the French door. The place was silent, and still there were no lights burning, he was relieved to see. He was bone tired, and his knee and his cut mouth hurt like hell. He limped into the bedroom, making hardly a sound, but of course Claire woke up. She raised herself on an elbow and peered at the luminous hands of the clock beside her. “It’s late,” she said, “where were you?” and he said “Nowhere,” and she said his voice sounded funny, and when he did not answer she switched on the lamp. When she saw his mouth and the swelling on his cheekbone she jumped up from the bed like she had been scalded, and then there was the usual palaver. What happened? Who did it? Was there a fight? He stood motionless in the middle of the floor, arms hanging and eyes cast down, waiting for her to finish. Did women really feel all this stuff, he wondered, or were the fluttering and squeaking and hand-wringing just their way of getting through the first minute of a crisis while they figured out what to do? She soon calmed down and went off to the bathroom and came back with wads of cotton wool and Lysol or something and warm water in an enameled bowl. She made him sit down on the side of the bed and began dabbing at him with the disinfectant, which stung. He thought of Cora Bennett, lying below in the dull yellow light of the lamp beside her bed, and his anger flared again. He felt weakened, as if he had let her take something away from him, something inside him that no one should ever even be allowed to see. Yet what angered him most was not the memory of what they had done together in her bed and how it might have affected him, but the fact that he had told her his plan for Stafford Limos.

“What happened?” Claire said again, calm now that she had something to be busy at. “Tell me,” she said, almost commanding, “tell me what you were fighting about.”

She was standing over him, pressing a pad of wet cotton against his face; he could feel the blanket warmth of her body. Her hands were capable and strong, surprisingly strong for such a skinny girl. He was being, he realized, mothered, for the second time that night, but how differently this time, with none of Cora’s hot tenderness. Claire put her hand to the back of his head to make him sit steady and pressed the swelling there and he flinched. Suddenly it came to him, out of nowhere, that it was not one of M’Coy’s buddies who had whacked him with a chair leg, but the barman, Pete the goddamned barman, with his baseball bat! He recalled him in the passageway, a tough little harp with a boxer’s nose, leaning over him and asking him if he was okay. Of course, it had to have been him-he would naturally have sided with M’Coy and the others. Andy clenched his fists on his knees. Somehow this betrayal was the thing that made him most angry now, angrier even than he had been when he broke the beer glass and stuck it at M’Coy’s throat. He could just see Pete, the little bastard, sidling out from behind the bar and taking up a batter’s stance, hefting the bat in his hands, waiting for just the right moment to give it to him across the back of the head. Well, he would get his, would Pete; some night at closing time after he had locked up and was stepping out by that steel door into the alley on his way home to his harp wife and his harp kids Andy would be there, waiting for him, with a tire iron-

Claire had taken the cotton pad away from his forehead and was leaning down to look into his face. “What is it, Andy?” she said. “What’s wrong?”

He stood up quickly, a red flare of pain exploding in his gut, and pushed her aside and limped to the window. “What’s wrong?” he said with a furious laugh. “What’s wrong? Half of goddamned Boston is laughing behind my back-that’s what’s wrong. Andy Stafford, the poor schmuck who can’t get it up!”

Claire gave a little mousey cry. “But that’s…” She faltered. “How can they say that?”

He glared out at the walnut tree where it stood shivering in the wind. She knew, he had heard it in her voice, she knew what they had been saying about him; she had known all along how it would be, how they would talk about it, and distort it, and laugh at him behind his back, and she had not warned him. For all his anger there was a part of him that was ice-cold, standing off to the side, calculating, judging, thinking what to do next, thinking what to think next. It had always been like this with him, first the rage and then the icy chill. He thought of Cora Bennett again and another wave of anger and resentment rolled over him, resentment at Cora, at Claire and the baby, at this house, at South Boston, at his job, right back all the way to Wilmington and his lowlife family, his old man who was not much more than a hobo and his mother in her brown apron like Cora Bennett’s, smelling of cheap booze and menthol cigarettes at nine o’clock in the morning. He wanted to put his fist through this windowpane, he could almost feel it, the glass smashing, slicing his flesh, cutting down to the clean, white bone.

Claire was so quiet behind him he had almost forgotten she was there. Now in that little-girl voice that set his teeth on edge she said:

“We could try again. I could see another doctor-”

“-Who’ll tell you the same thing the other one did.” He had not turned from the window. He gave a bitter laugh. “I should do up a sign to hang it around my neck. It’s not me, folks, I’m not the dud one!”

He heard her quick intake of breath, and was glad.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m sorry, too. Sorry I ever let you persuade me to take in that kid. Whose is it, anyway? Some Irish whore’s, I suppose.”

“Andy, don’t…” She came and stood behind him and put up a hand to massage the back of his neck, as he sometimes let her do. Now he jerked his head away and then was sorry he had, but only because of the pain, which had a liquid feel, as if his skull was filled partway to the top with some sluggish, oily stuff that swayed sickeningly at every sudden movement he made. A car passed by on the street, going slowly, its headlights dimmed; a Studebaker, light green, it looked to be, with a white top. Who would be driving down this street at four in the morning? “Come to bed,” Claire said softly, her voice heavy with weariness, and he turned, suddenly exhausted, and followed her meekly. As he was taking off his shirt he wondered if she would smell Cora Bennett on him, and realized he did not care, not at all.

18

QUIRKE DID NOT CONSIDER HIMSELF A BRAVE MAN, MAYBE NOT EVEN A courageous one. The fact was, his courage, physical or otherwise, had never been tested, and he had always assumed it never would be. Wars, murders, violent robberies, assaults with blunt instruments, the newspapers were full of such things, but they seemed to take place elsewhere, in a sort of parallel world ruled and run by a different, more violent, altogether more formidable and vicious species of human being than the ones he normally encountered. True, casualties from this other place of strife and bloodletting were brought to his expert attention all the time-often it seemed to him that he was in a field hospital far behind the front line, a hospital to which never the wounded but only the dead were delivered-but it had not occurred to him that one day he might himself be wheeled into the dissecting room on a trolley, bloodied and broken, like poor Dolly Moran.

When the two toughs materialized behind him out of the fog that autumn evening he knew at once that they were from that other world, the world that up to now he had only read about in the papers. They had an air of jaunty relentlessness; they would stick at nothing, these two. Early rage or hurt or unlovedness had hardened for them into a kind of indifference, a kind of tolerance, almost, and they would beat or maim or blind or kill without rancor, going about their workaday task methodically, thinking of something else. They had a smell, flat, sweetish yet stale, which was familiar to Quirke but which for the moment he could not place. He had stopped on the corner of Fitzwilliam Street to light a cigarette and suddenly they were there, on either side of him, the thin, red-faced one on his left, on his right the fat one with the large head. The thin one grinned and touched a finger to his forehead in a sort of salute. He looked uncannily like Mr. Punch, with those chafed red cheeks and a nose so hooked the sharp tip of it almost touched his lower lip.

“Evening, Captain,” he said.

Quirke glanced from one of them to the other and without a word set off swiftly across the road. The two came with him, still to right and left, keeping pace effortlessly, even the fat one, whose globular head was prodigiously huge and set with tiny eyes like glass beads; his coarse hair hung about his face like the strings of a mop; he was Judy to the other’s Mr. Punch. Quirke commanded himself not to hurry, and to walk as normal-but what was normal? In a conversational tone the red-faced one said:

“We know you.”

His fat friend agreed. “That’s right, we do.”

Gaining the corner of Mount Street Quirke halted. Office workers were passing by, hunched against the misty air-witnesses, Quirke thought, innocent bystanders-but Punch and Judy seemed oblivious of them.

“Look,” Quirke said, “what do you want? I have no money on me.”

This seemed to amuse Mr. Punch greatly. He leaned his head forward to look past Quirke at fat Judy.

“He thinks we’re beggars,” he said.

Fat Judy laughed and shook his huge head incredulously.

Quirke thought it necessary to maintain an air merely of irritation and exasperated bafflement; after all, he was a citizen returning home from work, and this impudent pair were keeping him from the blameless pleasures of the evening. He looked about. The twilight was much farther advanced than it had been a minute ago, and the fog was much more dense.

“Who are you?” he demanded. He had aimed for righteous indignation but it came out sounding merely peevish.

“We’re a caution,” Mr. Punch said, “that’s what we are,” and he laughed again, pleased with himself; pleased as Punch.

Quirke gave an angry grunt and threw away his cigarette-he had forgotten about it, and it had gone out-and strode off along the pavement in the direction of his flat. It was like the moment in McGonagle’s that day after he had realized the true import of what Costigan had said to him: he was not exactly frightened, being in a public place and so near to home and shelter, but he had a sense of something being about to shift enormously and send him sprawling. All efforts at flight seemed unavailing, as in a dream, for no matter how he hastened, still Punch and Judy easily kept pace with him.

“We’ve seen you, hanging around,” Mr. Punch said. “Not advisable, in this sort of weather.”

“You could get a cold,” the fat one said.

Punch nodded, his hooked nose going up and down like a sickle.

“You could catch your death,” he said. He glanced past Quirke at his companion again. “Couldn’t he?”

“You’re right,” fat Judy said. “Catch his death, definitely.”

They came to the house and Quirke halted; only with an effort did he keep himself from scampering up the steps.

“This your gaff?” Mr. Punch asked him. “Nice.”

Quirke wondered wildly if the two intended to come inside with him, to climb the stairs and elbow their way through the door into the flat and…and what? By now he really was afraid, but his fear was a kind of lethargy, hampering all thought. What should he do? Should he turn and run, should he burst into the hall and shout for Mr. Poole to call the police? At that moment the two at last moved away from him, stepping backwards, and the red-faced Mr. Punch made that salute again, tipping a finger to his forehead, and said, “So long, then, Captain, we’ll be seeing you,” and suddenly they were gone, into the gloom and the fog, leaving behind only the faintest trace of their smell, which Quirke at last identified. It was the smell-stale, flat, spicily sweet-of old blood.

HE WOKE WITH A SHOCK TO THE SHRILLING OF THE DOORBELL. HE HAD fallen asleep in an armchair beside the gas fire. He had dreamed of being pursued through a version of the city he had never seen before, down broad, busy avenues and under stone arcades, through sunlit pleasure gardens with statues and fish ponds and crazily elaborate topiary. He did not see his pursuers but knew that he knew them, and that they were relentless and would not stop until they had run him down. When he woke he was sprawled in the chair with his head askew and his mouth open. He had kicked off his shoes and peeled off his socks. A spill of rain clattered against the window. He squinted at his watch and was surprised to find that it was not yet midnight. The bell rang again, two sustained, angry bursts. He could hear not only the sound of the bell but the electric whirring of the little clapper as it vibrated, beating on the metal dome. Why arcades? Why topiary? Widening his eyes and blinking he got himself up and went to the window and drew up the sash and put his head out into the tempestuous night. The fog was gone and all was wind and rain now. Below, Phoebe stood in the middle of the road, clutching herself about the shoulders. She was wearing no coat.

“Let me in!” she cried up at him. “I’m drowning!”

He fetched a key from a bowl on the mantelpiece and dropped it down to her. It spun through the darkness, flashing, and rang on the roadway with a money sound, and she had to scramble to retrieve it. He shut the window and went and stood in the doorway of the flat and waited for her, not willing to go down and risk an encounter with the unsleeping Mr. Poole. The yoke of his shirt had got wet when he leaned out of the window and was damp across his shoulders. It made a pleasant coolness, and his bare feet too were cool. He heard the front door open and a moment later a faint breath of the night came up the stairs and wafted against his face. He always found affecting the air’s little movements, drafts, breezes, the soughing of wind in trees; he was, he realized, still half in a dream. There were voices briefly below-that would be Poole accosting Phoebe-then the sound of her uneven footsteps ascending. He went down to the return to meet her. He watched her rise towards him, a Medusa head of wet hair and a pair of naked, glistening shoulders; she was barefoot, like him, and carried a shoe dangling from each hand, hooked by a back strap on an index finger, and had her purse under her arm. She wore a frock of midnight-blue satin. She was very wet. “For God’s sake,” Quirke said.

She had been to a party. A taxi had brought her here. She thought she must have left her coat behind. “The fact is,” she said, molding her lips with difficulty around the words, “I’m a bit drunk.”

He walked her to the sofa, the satin of her dress rustling wetly, and made her sit. She looked about, smiling inanely.

“For God’s sake, Phoebe,” he said again, wondering how he might get rid of her, and how soon.

He went down to the bathroom on the return and fetched a towel and came back and dropped it in her lap. She was still gazing about her blearily. “I’m seeing two of everything!” she said, in proud delight.

“Dry your hair,” he said. “You’re ruining the furniture.”

She spoke with her head inside the towel. “I’m only wet because you left me standing out there so long. Plus the fact that I got out of the cab in Lower Mount Street by mistake.”

He went into the bedroom in search of something for her to wear. When he returned to the living room she had dropped the towel to the floor, and sat blinking and frowning, more of a gorgon than ever, with her toweled hair standing on end.

“Who was that man downstairs?” she said.

“That would be Mr. Poole.”

“He was wearing a bow tie.”

“He does.”

“He asked me did I know where I was going. I said you were my uncle. I think he didn’t believe me.” She snickered. “Ooh,” she said, “I have a drip,” and wiped her nose on the back of her hand. Then she asked for a drink.

He went into the kitchen and filled the coffee machine and put it on the gas to brew. He laid out a tray with cup, sugar, milk jug. “Where was this party?” he called to her.

Her answer came back muffled. “None of your business.”

He went and glanced through the crack of the kitchen door into the living room but drew back when he saw her standing in her underwear with her arms lifted, pulling the blue frock over her head. She had the slightly thick waist of the Crawford girls, her mother and her aunt, and their long, shapely legs. The coffee was rumbling in the pot but he delayed a while before he brought it in, waiting for her to be finished changing.

He carried the tray into the living room. Phoebe, wearing the pullover and clownishly outsized slacks he had given her, was fiddling with the wooden mannequin.

“Stop that,” he said sharply. She let her hands fall from the doll but did not turn, and stood with her head bowed and her arms hanging at her side, herself a slack-stringed marionette. “Come on,” he said, less sharply, “here’s your coffee.” She turned then and he saw the big, childish tears sliding down her cheeks. He sighed, and put the tray on the floor in front of the sofa and went and took her, gingerly, in his arms. Limply she allowed herself to be held, and put her face against his shoulder and said something. “What?” he said, trying to keep the harsh edge from his voice-how was it that women, all women, wept so much? “I can’t hear you.”

She drew away from him and spoke through burbling sobs. “They won’t let me marry him! They won’t let me marry Conor Carrington!”

He turned from her and crossed to the fireplace and took a cigarette from the antique silver box on the mantelpiece. The box had been a wedding present from Sarah and Mal.

“They say I can’t marry him because he’s a Protestant!” Phoebe cried. “They say I’m not to see him anymore!”

His lighter was empty of fuel; he patted his pockets; he had used his last match to light the gas fire. He went to the marble-topped sideboard, where there was a copy of yesterday’s Evening Mail, and tore a strip from the bottom of a page, revealing a theater advertisement on the page underneath. He returned and lit the slip from the gas flame. His hands were quite steady, quite steady. The cigarette tasted stale; he must remember to put fresh ones in the box.

“Well?” Phoebe said behind him in consternation, indignantly. “Are you not going to say anything?”

Punch and Judy, the advertisement had said, the new hit comedy!-last three performances! Oh, Mr. Punch, what have you done?

“Tell me what you’d like me to say,” he said.

“You could pretend to be shocked.”

She had stopped crying, and gave a great sniff. She had not expected much from him in the way of support but she had thought he would at least be sympathetic. She studied him with an indignant eye. He looked even more remote than usual from the things around him. He had lived in this flat for as long as she could remember-when she was a child her mother used to bring her with her on visits here, as a chaperone, she had suspected even then-but he seemed no more at home in it now than he had in those days. Padding barefoot about the floor, all shoulders and little feet and big, broad back, he had the look of some wild animal, a bear, maybe, or an impossibly beautiful, blond gorilla that had been captured a long time ago but still had not come to understand that it was in a cage.

She went and stood beside him, facing the fireplace, with her elbows resting on the high mantelpiece, which he was leaning back against. She was not drunk anymore-she had not really been drunk, in the first place, but had wanted him to think she was-only sleepy, and sad. She studied the framed photographs on the mantelpiece.

“Aunt Delia was so lovely,” she said. “Were you there when…?” Quirke shook his head. He did not look at her. His profile, she thought, was like the profile of an emperor on an old coin. “Tell me,” she urged, softly.

“We had a fight,” he said, flat and matter-of-fact and a touch impatient. “I went out and got drunk. Then I was in the hospital, holding her hand, and she was dead. She was dead, and I was still drunk.”

She went back to studying the photographs in their expensive, silver frames. She touched the one of the foursome in their tennis whites, tracing their faces with a fingertip: her father, and Sarah, and Quirke, and poor, dead Delia, all of them so young, smiling, and fearless-seeming. She said:

“They looked really alike, didn’t they, even for sisters, Mummy and Aunt Delia? Your two lost loves.” To that he would say nothing, and she shrugged, tossing her head, and walked to the sideboard and picked up the newspaper and pretended to read it. “Of course,” she said, “you don’t care that they won’t let me marry him, do you?”

She threw down the paper and crossed to the sofa and sat down and folded her arms angrily. He came and knelt on one knee and poured the coffee for her. “I meant a real drink,” she said, and turned her face away from him in childish refusal. He replaced the coffeepot on the tray and went and took another cigarette and then tore another spill from the newspaper-tore the theater advertisement itself, this time-and leaned down and touched it to the gas flame.

“Do you remember Christine Falls?” he said.

“Who?”

She made it into a rebuff. She still would not look at him.

“She worked for your mother for a while.”

“You mean Chrissie the maid? The one who died?”

“Do you remember her?”

“Yes,” shrugging. “I think Daddy was soft on her. She was pretty, in a washed-out sort of way. Why do you ask?”

“Do you know what she died of?” She shook her head. “A pulmonary embolism. Know what that is?”

Things were stirring in him like mud at the bottom of a well. Who had sent those two thugs to frighten him? We’re a caution, that’s what we are.

“Something to do with the lungs?” Phoebe said. Her voice was growing drowsy. “Did she have TB?”

She drew up her legs beside her on the sofa and lay down and leaned her cheek on a cushion. She sighed.

“No,” Quirke said. “It’s when a blood clot finds its way into the heart.”

“Mnn.”

“Saw a remarkable case of it only the other day. Old chap, bedridden for years. We opened him up, sliced along the pulmonary artery, and there it was, thick as your thumb and a good nine inches long, a huge great rope of solid blood.” He paused, and glanced at her, and saw that she had fallen asleep, with the curtness of youth. How frail and vulnerable she looked, in his ragged pullover and corduroy bags. He took a throw that was folded on the back of the armchair by the fireplace and draped it over her carefully. Without opening her eyes she drew in a quivery breath and rubbed a finger vigorously under her nose and mumbled something and settled down again, snuggling into the warmth of the throw. Quirke returned to the fireplace and stood with his back against the mantelpiece again and contemplated her. Although he tried to resist it, the thought of Christine Falls and her lost child entered his mind like a knife blade being forced between a door frame and a locked door. Christine Falls, and Mal, and Costigan, and Punch and Judy…“Mind you,” he said softly to the sleeping girl, “that’s not what poor Chrissie died of at all, a pulmonary embolism. That’s only what your daddy, who was soft on her, wrote in her file.”

He went to the window on which it was his habit never to draw the curtains. The rain had stopped; when he put his face close to the glass he could see a speeding moon and the livid undersides of clouds lit by the lights of the city. He glanced again at Phoebe, and went and opened the sequined purse she had left on the table and found in it the calf-bound red address book he had given her on her last birthday and riffled through the pages; then he went to the telephone and picked up the receiver and dialed.

HE WAS STILL AT THE WINDOW WHEN CONOR CARRINGTON ARRIVED, and he opened the window and dropped the key down to him, too, before he could ring the bell, for even from three floors away Mr. Poole, unlike his wife, had the hearing of a bat. Phoebe, on the couch, was still asleep. He had draped her things, her frock, her slip, her stockings, on a chair in front of the gas fire to dry. He had to shake her hard by the shoulder before she would wake up, and when she did she looked at him hare-eyed in terror and seemed as if she would leap from under the throw and take to her heels.

“It’s all right,” he said brusquely. “Young Lochinvar has come to rescue you.”

He gathered her clothes from the chair while she got herself upright and sat a moment with her head hanging and then rose shakily to her feet. Licking her lips, which were dry from sleep, she took the bundle of clothes in her arms and let him steer her towards the bedroom.

Conor Carrington was, Quirke noted, the kind of person who enters sideways through a doorway, slipping rather than stepping in. He was tall and sinuous with a long, pale face and the hands, slender and pliant and white, of the phthisic heroine of one of the more mournfully romantic novels of the Victorian era. Or at least that was the view of him Quirke took in his jaundiced fashion. In reality, Quirke had to admit, Carrington was a good-looking if somewhat meager young man. In his turn Carrington obviously disapproved of Quirke, but he was, too, Quirke could see, not a little nervous of him. He wore a shortie tweed overcoat over a dark, pin-striped suit that would have been worthy of the man who was not now, it seemed, likely to be his father-in-law, and carried a trilby hat, holding it by the curled brim in the fingers of both hands: he had the look, Quirke thought, of a man arriving unwillingly at the wake of someone with whom he had been barely acquainted. He handed the door key to Quirke, who also took the trilby from him, noting the hesitancy with which the young man relinquished it, as if he feared he might not get it back.

Entering the living room, on the bias, again, Carrington glanced about inquiringly, and Quirke said:

“She’ll be ready in a minute.”

Carrington nodded, pursing lips that were unexpectedly full and rosy-tinted; a hand-reared boy. “What happened?” he asked.

“She was at a party, not with you, evidently. You should keep a closer eye on her.” Quirke pointed to the tray on the floor. “Cup of coffee? No? Just as well-it’ll be cold by now. Cigarette?” Again the young man shook his head. “No vices at all, eh, Mr. Carrington? Or may I call you Conor? And you can call me Mr. Quirke.”

Carrington would not take off his coat. “Why did she come here?” he said peevishly. “She should have phoned me. I waited up all evening.”

Quirke turned aside to hide his curled lip; what time was the fellow usually in the habit of going to bed at? He said: “She tells me they won’t let her marry you.” Carrington stared at him. They appeared to be of almost equal height, the broad man and the slim, but that was only, Quirke thought with satisfaction, because he was barefoot. “They don’t like your crowd, I’m afraid,” he said.

Carrington’s brow had taken on a pinkish sheen. “My crowd?” he said, and delicately cleared his throat.

Quirke shrugged; he saw no profit in continuing along that line. He said:

“Have you actually popped the question?”

Again Carrington had to cough softly into his fist. “I don’t think we should be having this conversation, Mr. Quirke.”

Quirke shrugged. “You’re probably right,” he said.

Phoebe came in from the bedroom. At the sight of her, Conor Carrington raised his eyebrows and then frowned. Her hair was still kinked from the rain, and the skirts of her frock clung damply to her legs. In one hand she carried her stockings, which were still grayly wet at heel and toe, and in the other her high-heeled slingback shoes; Quirke’s corduroy trousers were draped over her arm. “What are you doing here?” she said.

Carrington gave her back a baleful look. “Mr. Quirke telephoned me,” he said. It came out flat and ineffectual-sounding. He dropped his voice to a huskier level. “Come on, I’ll take you home.”

“Oh, will you, now.”

“Please, Phoebe,” he said to her, in a brusque, reproving murmur.

Quirke had positioned himself by the fireplace again and was regarding each in turn, like a spectator at a tennis match. He said:

“I’d put her in a taxi, if I were you, old boy. Won’t go down too well chez Griffin when you pull up in the old roadster at three in the morning with Honoria Glossop here slumped beside you drunk and singing.”

Phoebe gave him a quick, sly, complicitous smile.

“Come on,” Carrington said to Phoebe, his voice shrill again and a little desperate, “put on your shoes.”

But Phoebe was already putting them on, standing unsteadily storklike on one leg with the other crossed and supported on her knee, her face going through contortions of discomfort and vexedness as she worked her foot into the wetly resistant leather. Carrington took off his overcoat and laid it over her shoulders, and Quirke despite himself was touched by the tender solicitude of the gesture. Where was it Carrington was from-Kildare? Meath? Rich land down there, rich heritage. Probably when he had played at the law for a few years he would return happily to tend the ancestral acres. True, he was young now, but that would be remedied presently. There were, Quirke considered, worse choices that Phoebe could make.

“Conor,” he said. The couple stopped and glanced back in unison, two clear, young, expectant faces. Quirke lifted an admonishing finger. “You should fight them,” he said.

19

QUIRKE HAD ARRANGED TO MEET BARNEY BOYLE AT BAGGOT STREET bridge. They strolled along the towpath where Quirke had walked with Sarah the Sunday that seemed so long ago now. It was morning, and a vapid sun was struggling to shine through the November mist, and there was a ghostly silence everywhere, as if the two men were alone in all the city. Barney wore a black overcoat that reached almost to his heels; beltless and buttonless, it swirled about his short fat legs like a heavy cloak as he toddled along. Outdoors, in daylight, he had a slightly dazed and bashful air. He said it was a long time since he had seen the world in the morning, and that in the interval there had been no improvement at all that he could make out. He coughed raucously. “Too much fresh air for you,” Quirke said. “Here, have a cigarette.” He struck a match and Barney leaned forward and cupped a babyish fist around the flame, his fingertips touching the back of Quirke’s hand, and Quirke was struck as he always was by this peculiar little act of intimacy, one of the very few allowed among men; it was rumored, he recalled, that Barney had an eye for the boys. “Ah, Jesus,” Barney breathed, blowing a trumpet of smoke into the mist, “that’s better.” Barney, the people’s poet and playwright of the working class, in fact lived, despite those rumors of queer leanings, with his long-suffering wife, a genteel water-colorist and something of a beauty, in a venerable white-walled house in leafy Donnybrook. But he still had his contacts in the old, bad world that had produced him. Quirke wanted information and Barney had been, as he put it, asking around the place.

“Oh, all the brassers knew Dolly Moran,” he said. Quirke nodded. Brassers were whores, he assumed, but how? Brass nails, rhyming with tails, or was it something to do with screws? Barney’s slang seemed all of his own making. “She was the one they went to when they were in trouble.”

“What sort of trouble?”

“Up the pole-you know.”

“And she’d fix it for them? Herself?”

“They say she was a dab hand with the knitting needle. Didn’t charge, either, apparently. Did it for the glory.”

“Then how did she live?”

“She was well provided for. That’s the word, anyway.”

“Who by?”

“Party or parties unknown.”

Quirke frowned ahead into the mist.

“Look at them fuckers,” Barney said, stopping. Three ducks were paddling through the sedge, uttering soft quacks of seeming complaint. “God, I hate them yokes.” He brightened. “Did I ever tell you the one about my Da and the ducks?”

“Yes, Barney, you did. Many times.”

Barney pouted. “Oh, well, excuse me.” He had finished his cigarette. “Will we go for a pint?” he said.

“For God’s sake, Barney, it’s eleven o’clock in the morning.”

“Is it? Jesus, we better hurry up, then.”

They went to the 47 on Haddington Road. They were the only customers at that hour. The stale stink of last night’s cigarette smoke still hung on the sleepy air. The barman in shirtsleeves and braces leaned on his elbows on the bar reading the sports pages of yesterday’s Independent. Barney ordered a bottle of porter and a ball of malt to chase it. The porter reek and the stinging scent of the whiskey made Quirke’s nostrils flinch.

“And the pair that came after me,” he said, “did you manage to find out anything about them?”

Barney lifted his baby’s little red mouth from the rim of his glass and wiped a fringe of sallow froth from his upper lip. “The one with the nose sounds like Terry Tormey, brother of Ambie Tormey’s that used to be with the Animal Gang.”

Quirke looked at him. “Ambie?”

“Short for Ambrose-don’t ask me.”

“And the other one?”

“Name of Callaghan-is it Callaghan? No: Gallagher. Bit slow, not the full shilling. Dangerous, though, when he gets going. If it’s the same fellow.”

Now he lifted the whiskey glass with a dainty flourish, a stiff little finger stuck out, and drank off the whiskey in one gulp, grimaced, sucked his teeth, set down the glass, and looked at the barman. “Arís, mo bhuachailín,” he said. Slow-moving, mute, the barman poured another go of the amber liquor into a pewter measure and emptied it, tinkling, into the tumbler. The two watched in silence the little ceremony, and Quirke paid. Barney told the barman to leave the bottle. He said, “I’d rather a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy,” and gave Quirke a quick, shy, sideways glance; by now all Barney’s jokes were secondhand. The thought came to Quirke: He’s Falstaff grown inconvenient, which did not, he knew, make himself the king. He ordered what was called a coffee: hot water and a dollop of tarry syrup from a square bottle: Irel, the Irish Coffee! He stirred into the brew three heaping spoonfuls of sugar. What am I doing here? he asked himself, and Barney, as if he had read his mind, turned on him a quizzical eye and said, in his Donnybrook voice: “Bit out of your depth here, aren’t you, Quirke? Terry Tormey and his loony pal, that crowd-Dolly Moran that got murdered. What are you up to?”

IT WAS ANOTHER MISTY MORNING WHEN QUIRKE IN HIS BLACK COAT and carrying his hat stepped out of the front door of the house in Mount Street and encountered Detective Inspector Hackett, also hatted and in his policeman’s gabardine, loitering on the footpath, smoking a cigarette. At the sight of the policeman, with his big flat face and deceptively affable smile, Quirke’s heart gave a guilty joggle. Three young nuns on high black bicycles went past, three sets of shrouded legs churning demurely in unison. The wettish morning air reeked of smoke and the fumes of car exhaust. It was winter, Quirke gloomily reflected, and he was on his way to cut up corpses.

“Good morning Mr. Quirke,” the detective said heartily, dropping the last of his cigarette and squashing it under his boot. “I was just passing, and thought I might catch you.”

Quirke descended the steps with measured tread, putting on his hat. “It’s half past eight,” he said, “and you were just passing.”

Hackett’s smile broadened into a lazy grin. “Ah, sure, I’ve always been an early riser.”

They fell in step and turned in the direction of Merrion Square.

“I suppose,” Quirke said, “you used to be up at five to milk the cows when you were a boy.”

Hackett chuckled. “Now, how did you know that?”

Quirke, thinking to get away, was covertly scanning the street for a taxi. He had been in McGonagle’s the night before and did not trust himself or know what he might be led into saying, and Hackett was at his most insinuatingly friendly. But there were no taxis. At Fitzwilliam Street they found themselves among a crowd of mufflered office workers making their way towards the government buildings. Hackett was lighting another cigarette. He coughed, and Quirke closed his eyes briefly at the sound of the strings of mucus twanging in the fellow’s bronchioles.

“Have there been any developments in the Dolly Moran case?” Quirke asked.

For a moment Hackett was silent and then began to laugh wheezily, his shoulders shaking. The tall, high-windowed housefronts seemed to peer down upon him in surprise and cold disapproval. “Ah, God, Mr. Quirke,” he said with rich enjoyment, “you must go to the pictures an awful lot.” He lifted his hat and with the heel of the same hand wiped his brow and resettled the hat at a sharper angle. “Developments, now-let me see. We have a full set of fingerprints, of course, and a couple of locks of hair. Oh, and a cigarette butt-Balkan Sobranie, I recognized the ash straightaway-and a lucky monkey’s paw dropped by a person of Oriental origin, a lascar, most likely.” He grinned, showing the tip of his tongue between his teeth. “No, Mr. Quirke, there have been no developments. Unless, of course, you’d call it a development that I’ve been directed to drop the investigation.” Quirke stared at him and he tapped a finger to the side of his nose, still smiling. “Orders from on high,” he said softly.

Before them was the domed bulk of the parliament building; it had to Quirke’s eye suddenly a malignant aspect, squatting behind its gates, a huge stone pudding.

“What do you mean,” he said, and swallowed. “What do you mean, orders from on high?”

The detective only shrugged. “Just what I say.” He was looking at his boots. “You’re on your own, Mr. Quirke, in the matter of Dolly Moran, deceased. If there are to be developments in the case, as you call them, then somebody else will have to do the developing, I’m afraid.”

They came to the corner of Merrion Street. From across the road the policeman guarding the parliament gates was eyeing them with lax curiosity where they had halted in the midst of the morning crowd of functionaries and typists hurrying to their desks. He had probably recognized Hackett, Quirke thought, for Hackett was famous in the force.

“I wonder, Mr. Quirke, have you anything you might want to tell me?” the detective said, squinting off to the side. “For the fact is, you seem to me a man burdened with a secret.” He swiveled his eyes and fixed them on Quirke’s face. “Would I be right?”

“I’ve told you all I know,” Quirke said, sounding almost sulky, and looked away.

“Because here’s the thing,” Hackett went on. “Before I was called off the case-and maybe, for all I know, it was the reason I was called off it-I discovered that Dolly Moran used to work for the family of Chief Justice Griffin himself. It’s something you omitted to mention, when we had our little talk at the hospital that day, but I’m sure it just slipped your mind. Anyway, now here you are, that used to be married into that same family, asking after developments in the investigation of Dolly’s murder. Not at all elementary, I’d say, Dr. Quirke. Eh?” He smiled. “But I’ll let you get on to your work, now, for I’m sure you’re a busy man.” He made to move away, stopped, turned back. “By the bye,” he said in a conversational tone, “did Dolly Moran mention anything to you about the Mother of Mercy Laundry?” Quirke shook his head. “Place up in Inchicore. They take in girls that have got themselves in trouble and work them till they’ve-what’s the word?-expiated their sin. There was some talk of Dolly Moran being connected with the place. I had a word with the head nun up there, but she swore she’d never heard of anyone of that name. I’m ashamed to say I was almost inclined to disbelieve the holy woman.”

Quirke cleared his throat. “No,” he said, “Dolly didn’t say anything about a laundry. In fact, she said very little. I think she didn’t trust me.”

Hackett, his head on one side, was studying him with the careful but detached attention of a portrait painter measuring up his subject. “She was good at keeping secrets, all right, it seems,” he said, and sighed. “Ah, God rest her, poor old Dolly.”

He nodded once and turned and strolled away in the direction in which they had come. Quirke watched him go. Yes, poor old Dolly. A gust of wind caught the skirts of the detective’s overcoat and made them flap around him like furling sails, and for a moment it was as if the man inside the coat had vanished, vanished entirely.

“…I’M SORRY, MR. QUIRKE,” THE NUN SAID, “BUT I CAN’T HELP YOU.” Her look was distracted and flickering, and she kept passing an invisible set of Rosary beads agitatedly through her fingers, which were bony and tapered, like pale twigs. He had been startled to see, despite the wimple, that she was, or had once been, beautiful. She was tall and angular of frame, and the floor-length black habit that she wore, falling from her waist in fluted folds like a classical column, gave her an aspect of the statuesque. Her eyes were blue and so clear it seemed that if he peered deeply enough he would see all the way through into the narrow white chamber of her skull. She was called Sister Dominic; he wondered what her own, her given, name had been. “You tell me that she died,” she said, “this girl?”

“Yes. In childbirth.”

“How very sad.” She drew her lips together until the blood was pressed out of them. “And what became of the child?”

“I don’t know. That’s one of the things I would like to find out.”

They were standing in the icy stillness of a checkerboard-tiled hallway. From within the body of the building he could feel rather than hear the rumble of hand-operated machinery and the raucous voices of women at work. There was a wet smell of heavy, woven things, wool, cotton, linen.

“And Dolores Moran,” he said, “Dolly Moran, she was never here either, you say?”

She looked down quickly, shaking her head. “I’m sorry,” she said again, hardly more than a murmur.

A young woman, short, thick-waisted, with a shapeless mop of bright-red hair, came along the corridor pushing an enormous cane basket on wheels. The basket must have been full of laundry, for she had to use all her strength to propel it along, leaning into the effort with her arms stretched out straight before her and her head down and her knuckles white on the worn wooden handles. She was dressed in a loose gray smock, and gray stockings that were concertinaed around her thick red ankles, and what looked like a man’s hobnailed boots, laceless and several sizes too big for her. Not seeing Quirke and the nun she came on steadily, the wheels of the basket squealing in a repeated, circular protest, and they had to step back and press themselves against the wall to allow her to pass by.

“Maisie!” Sister Dominic said sharply. “For goodness’ sake, watch where you’re going!”

Maisie stopped, and straightened, and stared at them. It seemed for a moment that she might laugh. She had a broad, freckled, almost featureless face, with nostrils but hardly any nose to go with them and a little raw mouth that looked as if it had been turned inside out. “Sorry, Sister,” she said, but seemed not sorry at all. She regarded Quirke with a lively interest, scanning his herringbone tweed suit, his expensive black overcoat, the soft felt hat he was holding in his hands. One of her eyelids flicked-was it a tic, he wondered, or had she actually winked at him?

“Get on, now,” Sister Dominic said, not without a certain softening of tone; Sister Dominic, Quirke thought, appeared not entirely suited to the work here, whatever that work was, exactly.

“Right-oh, Sister,” Maisie answered, and giving Quirke another humorously big-eyed look she bent to the basket and trundled off with it.

Sister Dominic, increasingly anxious to be rid of him, was edging along the wall towards the stained-glass vestibule through which he had been admitted. Following after her, he turned the brim of his hat slowly in his fingers, as she had turned the invisible Rosary in hers. He was convinced, despite the nun’s denial, that Christine Falls had been here at least for some time before Dolly Moran took her to the house in Stoney Batter. He pictured the girl trailing along these corridors in a mouse-gray smock like Maisie’s, her dyed yellow hair turning back to its original nondescript brown, her knuckles red and broken, and the child already stirring restlessly inside her. How could Mal have condemned her to such a place?

“As I say,” Sister Dominic was saying, “we had no Christine Falls here. I would remember. I remember all our girls.”

“What would have happened to her baby, if she had it here?”

The nun kept her gaze directed in the vicinity of his knees. She was still sidling towards the exit and he was forced to keep moving in her wake. “She wouldn’t have,” she said.

“What?”

“This is a laundry, Mr. Quirke, not a lying-in hospital.”

Spirited for a moment, she allowed herself to look him defiantly in the face, then lowered her eyes again.

“So where would it have been born?”

“I’m sure I don’t know. The girls who come to us have…they have already…given birth.”

“And what would have become of the babies they would have left behind them when they were sent here?”

“They would have gone to an orphanage, of course. Or often they-” She stopped herself. They had arrived at the glass door of the vestibule and with undisguised relief she pushed it open and stood back to let him go through. He paused in the doorway, however, and stood facing her. He tried by staring hard at her to make her yield, to make her give him something, however little it might be, but she would not. “These girls, Mr. Quirke,” she said coldly, “they find themselves in trouble, with no one to help. Often the families reject them. Then they are sent to us.”

“Yes,” he said drily, “and I’m sure you are a great comfort to them.”

The transparent azure irises of her eyes seemed to whiten for a moment, as if a gas had formed briefly behind them. Was it anger that was flaring there? The stained-glass panels of the door at her back had the look of a lurid, storm-riven sky, and he was startled and not a little appalled to find himself picturing her naked, a stark white impassioned figure by El Greco.

“We do our best,” she said, “in the circumstances. It’s all any of us can do.”

“Yes, Sister,” he said, in a forced contrite voice, embarrassed as that conjured image of her nakedness hovered still, refusing to fade. “I understand.”

ONCE OUTSIDE HE TURNED AND MADE HIS WAY DOWN THE HILL IN THE direction of the river. The sky was heavy with a seamless weight of putty-colored cloud that looked to be hardly higher than the rooftops of the houses on either side of the road, and flurries of heavy wet snow scudded before the wind. He turned up his coat collar and pulled low the brim of his hat. Why was he persisting like this? he asked himself. What were they to him, Christine Falls, or Christine Falls’s bastard, or Dolly Moran, who was murdered? What was Mal to him, for that matter? And yet he knew he could not leave it behind him, this dark and tangled business. He had some kind of duty, he owed some kind of debt, to whom, he was not sure.

20

MOSS MANOR’S FAMOUS CRYSTAL GALLERY COULD ACCOMMODATE three hundred people and still not seem overcrowded. The Irish millionaire who had built the house, back in the 1860s, had handed his architect a picture of the Crystal Palace in London torn from an illustrated magazine and ordered him to copy it. The result was a huge, ungainly construction of iron and glass, resembling the eye of a giant insect, fixed to the southeastern flank of the house and glaring out across Massachusetts Bay toward Provincetown. Within, the great room was steam-heated by a latticework of underfloor piping, and palms grew in profusion, and dozens of species of orchids, and nameless dark-green creepers that wound their tendrils around the iron pillars that were themselves molded in the shape of slender tree trunks shooting up dizzyingly to spread in sprays of metal fronds under the gleaming canopy of glass a hundred feet above. Today, long trestle tables were set up under the palms, bearing heaping platters of festive food, sliced turkey and ham and goose, and silver tubs of potato salad, and thick slices of fruitcake, and glistening plum puddings shaped like anarchists’ bombs. Bowls of fruit punch were ranged at intervals along the tables, and there were ranks of bottled beer for the men. From a stage at one side a band of musicians in white tuxedos was blaring out show tunes, and couples were dancing restrainedly between the tables. Sprigs of plastic holly were tucked incongruously among the palm leaves, and streamers of colored crepe paper were strung from trunk to trunk and from pillar to metal pillar, and above the stage a white satin banner pinned with red block letters wished all the staff of Crawford Transport a Merry Xmas. Outside, the already darkening afternoon was dense with frost smoke, and the ornamental gardens were hidden under snow and the ocean was a leaden line in front of a bank of lavender-tinted fog. Now and then a pane-sized square of snow would slide from the roof and burst into powder and cascade in eerie silence down the glass wall and disappear into the drifts that had already built up at the edges of the lawn, white into white.

The party had hardly been going an hour and already Andy Stafford had drunk too many bottles of beer. Claire as usual had wanted to be at a table at the front, to see everything that was going on, but he had insisted on getting as far away as he could get from that band-Glenn Miller types, average age a hundred or so-and now he was sitting on his own, glowering at his wife where she was dancing with that son-of-a-bitch Joe Lanigan. The baby was in her bassinet at his feet, though he did not understand how she could sleep with all the noise going on. Claire had said he would get used to the kid in time, but the months had passed and he still felt that his life had been invaded. It was like when he was a kid himself and his cousin Billy came to live with them after his old man blew his brains out with a hunting rifle. The baby was always there, just like cousin Billy had been, with his farm boy’s big hands and straw-colored eyelashes, watching and listening and breathing on everything.

Joe Lanigan was a trucker like Andy, a big, freckle-faced Irishman with a boxy head and arms as long as an ape’s. He danced like a hillbilly, lifting his knees high and lunging down sideways until his fist with Claire’s hand folded in it almost banged on the floor. Andy eyed them sourly. Claire was talking nonstop-what about?-and grinning in that way she did when she was excited, showing her upper gums. The number came to an end with a brassy shout from the trumpet, and Lanigan stepped back and made an exaggerated, sweeping bow, and Claire pressed her clasped hands to her breast and put her head to one side and batted her eyelashes, like she was some heroine out of the silent movies, and she and Lanigan both laughed. Lanigan went back to his table, where that sidekick of his whose name Andy could not remember, a little fat guy with slicked-back hair who looked like Lou Costello, was sitting with a couple of pizza-waitress types. As Lanigan sat down he glanced back over his shoulder at Claire making her way between the tables toward Andy, smiling to herself, and he said something, and the fat guy and the two broads laughed, and the fat guy looked across at Andy with what seemed a pitying sort of grin.

“Oh, I’m dizzy!” Claire said, arriving at the table.

She sat down opposite him and swung her knees in under the table and lifted a hand to touch her hair, still being the movie star. She did not seem dizzy to him. Her blouse had damp patches under the arms. He stood up, saying he was going to get another beer, and she asked in her sweetest little voice if he did not think that maybe he should take it easy, and even though she made herself smile as she said it he scowled at her. Then she said that since he was up he could get her a glass of punch. As he was walking away she leaned forward eagerly and peered into the bassinet with another one of those loony smiles of hers.

He knew he should not do it, but when he had got the drinks he made a detour that would bring him past Lanigan’s table. He stopped and said hello. Lanigan, whose back was to him, made a show of being surprised, and swiveled his big square head and looked up at him, and asked him how he was doing, and called him pal. Andy said he was doing all right; he was being friendly, not making any big point about anything. The others, the two women and the fat guy-Cuddy, that was the little creep’s name, suddenly he remembered it-were watching him from across the table; they seemed to be trying not to grin. Cuddy’s womany little pursed-up mouth twitched at one side.

“Hey, Cuddy,” Andy said, still keeping it light, keeping it calm. “See something funny, do you?” The fat man raised his eyebrows, which were heavy and black and looked painted on. “I said,” Andy repeated, making his voice go hard, “do you see something funny?”

Cuddy, too near to laughter to risk answering, looked at Lanigan, who answered for him. “Hey, hey,” he said, lightly laughing himself, “take it easy, Stafford. Where’s your Christmas spirit?”

One of the women giggled and leaned sideways to the other one until their shoulders met. The one who had laughed was large and blowsy, her big front teeth flecked with lipstick; the other was thin and Spanish-looking, showing a bony expanse of broiled chicken breast in the loose V-shaped neck of her blouse.

“I’m just asking the question,” Andy said, ignoring the women as if they were not there. “Do either of you guys see anything funny around here?”

People at nearby tables had turned and were staring at him, all of them smiling, thinking he was making some joke. He heard someone say, Look, it’s Audie Murphy, and someone else gave a stifled shout of laughter.

“Listen, Stafford,” Lanigan said, starting to sound nervous, “we don’t want any trouble, not here, not today.”

Where, then, Andy was about to ask, and when? but felt a touch on his arm and turned quickly, defensively. Claire was beside him, smiling. In her bright little baby-doll voice she said:

“That punch is going to be warm before I get to taste it.”

He did not know what to do. People three tables away were looking at him now. He saw himself as they would see him, in his white shirt and jeans and cowboy boots, with that glass of pink stuff in his hand and a nerve jumping in his cheek. Lanigan had turned sideways on his chair and was looking up at Claire, signaling to her silently to take her little man away and keep him out of trouble.

“Come on, honey,” she murmured. “Let’s go.”

When they were back at their table Andy’s left knee began to twitch up and down very fast, making the table vibrate. Claire was pretending nothing had happened. She sat with her chin propped on a crook’d finger, watching the dancers and humming, and weaving her shoulders to the rhythm. He imagined himself snatching the punch glass from her hand and breaking it on the edge of the table and thrusting the shattered rim into her defenseless soft white throat. He had done it once before, long ago, when he slashed the face of that high school prom queen who had laughed at him when he had asked her to dance, which was another reason for him never to go back to Wilmington.

JOSH CRAWFORD WAS IN ALMOST A LIGHTHEARTED MOOD TODAY. HE liked to savor the fruits of his success, and the sight of his staff disporting themselves amid the greenery in this glass pleasure dome was sweet to him, he who these days had to taste so much of bitterness. He knew there would be few more such occasions; this might even be, for him, the last. The air around him grew thinner by the day; he sucked at it in a kind of slow panic, as if he were slowly sinking underwater with only a tube to breathe through that was itself becoming increasingly fine, like one of those glass tubes he remembered from his school days, few and long ago though his school days had been-what were they called, those tubes? He found in a strange way comical the process of his accelerating dissolution. His lungs were so congested he was swelling up and turning blue, like some species of South American frog. The skin on his legs and feet was as taut and transparent as a prophylactic; he joked with the nurse when she was cutting his nails, warning her to be careful not to puncture him with the scissors or they might both end up in trouble. Who would have thought that time’s betrayal would strike him as funny, at the end?

He rapped his knuckles now on the arm of the wheelchair to make the nurse stop pushing and attend him. When she leaned down from behind him and put her face beside his he caught her pleasing, starchy smell; he supposed it must in part be a smell he was remembering from his long-dead and long-forgotten mother. So much of his concern now was for the past, since there was so little of the future left to him.

“What’s the name of those things that chemists use,” he said hoarsely, “those thin glass tubes that you put your finger on the top of to keep the liquid held inside-what do you call them?”

She gave him that skeptical, half-smiling, sidelong look that she did when she suspected he was teasing her. “Tubes?” she said.

“Yes, glass tubes.” His patience was fraying already, and he beat again at the arm of the chair. “You’re a nurse, damn it, you’re supposed to know these things.”

“Well, I don’t.”

She straightened, disappearing behind him, and began to push him forward again. He could not stay angry at her for long. He liked people who stood up to him, although with her, he believed, it was less a case of courage than of stupidity: she did not seem to realize just how dangerous he was, or how vindictive he could be. Or maybe she did know, and did not care? If no man is a hero to his valet, he thought, then maybe no man is a monster to his nurse. On her first day at the house he had offered her a hundred dollars to show him her breasts. Fifty bucks apiece! She had stared at him and then laughed, and, stung, and unexpectedly discomfited, he had tried to bluster his way out of it, telling her it was something he asked all his female staff to do, by way of a test, which by refusing she had passed. That was the first time he had seen that archly mocking, faint smile of hers. “Who says I’m refusing?” she said. “I might have shown you them for nothing, if you’d asked me nicely.” But he never did ask again, nicely or otherwise, and she had not repeated the offer.

The couples at the edge of the dance floor had noticed him by now, and they had stopped dancing and stood watching his approach, awkwardly together, two by two, like children, he thought contemptuously, in their gaudy party outfits. Unlike the nurse, they knew his reputation, and what he could do, and had done, when provoked. One of the women began tentatively to applaud, then her partner joined in, and then so did the rest of the stalled dancers, and after a few moments the great glass hall was filled with a storm of clapping. It was a sound he hated; it made him think of penguins, or was it seals? He lifted a hand in a limp, papal gesture, nodding acknowledgment to one side and then the other, wishing they would stop this awful racket, in which the band members now joined, rising to their feet and launching with their instruments into a string of farts and whistles that he dimly recognized as a parody of “Hail to the Chief.” At length, when the last, would-be ingratiator had let fall his or her hands, and the band had sat down again, he made an attempt to address the crowd, to wish them the happiness of the season, but of course his voice failed him, and then he began to cough, and soon he was doubled over on himself, almost falling forward out of the chair, gasping and shuddering and dribbling mucus on the blanket covering his knees, and the nurse was fumbling with the stopcock of the oxygen tank that was slung under the chair between the wheels, and then a hand was laid on his shoulder and a voice said:

“You called, dear?”

ROSE CRAWFORD WAS A HANDSOME WOMAN, AND SHE KNEW IT. SHE was tall and slim with narrow shoulders and a narrow waist and a panther’s stalking stride. Her eyes were large and black and lustrous and her cheekbones high-it was rumored she had Indian blood-and she looked down upon the world in general with undisguised, sardonic amusement. Josh Crawford liked to boast that she was his most prized possession and joked that he had swapped a Rembrandt for her, though there were some who thought it might not be entirely a joke. She had appeared in his life seemingly out of nowhere, sporting a ring on her wedding finger with a diamond set in it that was surely the size, someone had said, of Josh’s prostate. There had been a previous Mrs. Crawford-two, in fact, the first of whom had died-but she had been bundled away into a fancy nursing home and now no one could remember clearly what she had looked like, the memory of her eclipsed entirely by the far more ritzy Rose. It seemed something out of a fairy tale, or maybe one of those stories out of the Bible, more like, the union of this hard but beautiful woman and the bad old man. People looked at Josh Crawford looking at his so much younger wife and were reconciled for a moment to being not as rich as he was or as good-looking as she.

Rose took the plastic face mask brusquely from the nurse’s hands and pressed it over Josh’s nose and mouth. The hiss of oxygen in the rubber pipe always made her think of snakes-with brittle affection she often called Josh her old cobra. Today, crouched hugely in the wheelchair with rounded shoulders and gasping into the muzzle of the mask, he resembled more a wounded moose. The interrupted dancers had been gaping at him with anxious interest as he struggled for breath-he was their meal ticket, after all, she reflected, though he certainly did not overfeed them-but at one sweeping glance from those inky eyes of hers they turned hastily away.

Josh tore the mask from his face and flung it aside. “Get me out of here!” he snarled, gasping. He was furious at being seen like this by the workers. The nurse made to take the handles of the chair but he twisted about and swung a fist at her. “Not you!” There was white froth on his lips. Rose smiled at the nurse in her blithe, bland way and turned the chair about and set off toward the archway that led into the house proper. Josh was scrabbling now with his nails at the leather armrests of the chair and muttering to himself some word that sounded like pipit. Birds, Rose asked herself-why was he talking about birds? From the dropsical caverns of his chest he produced a deep, rolling rumble that she recognized as laughter. When he spoke again she had to lean forward and put her face beside his, as the nurse had done earlier.

“Not a bird!” he croaked. He had heard what she was thinking, as he so often did; it impressed and alarmed her, in equal measure, this uncanny telepathic knack he had. “A pipette,” he said, “that’s what it is, the thing that chemists use.”

“Whatever you say, darling,” she answered with a sigh, “whatever you say.”

WHEN CLAIRE GOT ANDY ONTO THE FLOOR HE WOULD NOT DANCE, could not, he was that drunk. The room was spinning around him and everywhere he looked there were faces shiny and red from laughing. Claire, worried at what he might do-the expression in his half-closed eyes was truly scary now-drew him by the hand back to their table, making sure to keep on smiling so no one around her would see how she was really feeling. Little Christine had woken up and the woman at the next table had her on her knee and was talking to her. The baby was dressed in the white satin christening robe that a young nun at St. Mary’s had made for her; she had nearly grown out of it by now, but it was long in the skirt and hung down sideways like, Claire thought, the tail of a star. She took her, her little shooting star, her little angel, and sat down with her on her own knees, and thanked the woman for minding her, and then felt bad, for she guessed from the look the couple exchanged, smiling but sad, that they were childless themselves, and she knew how that felt. She pretended not to notice Andy standing over her, breathing heavily and swaying a little and glaring, she was sure, at the child, as he always did when he had drunk too much. He grabbed a beer bottle by the neck and threw back his head and poured the beer into his open mouth; the look of him as he swallowed made her think this time not of being in bed with him but of a mule her father had on the farm that used to hold up its head like that and hee-haw, because it was lonesome for love, or so her brother Matty told her with a leer, Matty who years later was to die in a helicopter crash in Korea. Poor Andy, she thought, lonesome, too, because no one had loved him until she came along, to which although she tried not to she heard herself adding, too late.

Somebody Andy knew, one of the drivers he worked with, had promised them a ride back to town. They went to look for him, Claire moving ahead quickly with the baby in her arms and Andy slouching after her in a beer sulk, belching and muttering to himself and lugging the empty bassinet. They had to go through the double doors that led out of the Crystal Gallery into a high, stone hall with a huge fireplace with a bearskin in front of it and animal heads and old brown paintings on the walls. The place was noisy and crowded with people putting on storm coats and galoshes and calling good-bye and wishing each other a merry Christmas. Claire, looking back to make sure Andy was still following her, bumped into someone who had stepped backwards into her path, and gave a little cry, afraid she would let the baby fall, which she might have done had the other person not put out a strong hand to steady her. Claire recognized Mr. Crawford’s nurse. She had a real Irish face, wide and friendly, from which her reddish hair was pulled back in two shells that covered her ears and were pinned under her cap at either side. She had been talking to one of the young truckers, flirting with him, by the look of it, for there were spots of color on her cheekbones and she was still smiling when she turned and put a hand instinctively under Claire’s arm that was holding the baby. Oh, sorry! both women said at the same time, and both looked down at little Christine, who was watching them in her puzzled, inquisitive way out of the folds of the pink blanket she was wrapped in. The nurse was about to say something more but Andy pushed forward, breathing his beer breath, and the trucker the nurse had been talking to moved aside, seeing that Andy was drunk and not caring to be in his way, for Andy had a reputation, and Claire said thanks to the nurse and they smiled at each other and Claire and Andy moved on, Andy squeezing Claire’s arm hard to make her move faster. When they had gone past, Brenda Ruttledge stood frowning to herself a moment, then shook her head and turned back to look for the trucker, but he had disappeared into the crowd.

CLAIRE HAD NOT KNOWN SHE WAS ASLEEP UNTIL THE CRYING FROM the baby’s room wakened her. She had been dreaming she was still at the party and the dream had been so real it had seemed she was really there and not here, at home, in her own bed, in glimmering snow-light, with nothing to disturb the huge hush coming in from the snowy streets all around except the baby’s familiar, coughing cry that always made her heart beat faster the way she knew it was only supposed to do if she was the natural mother. Natural! What could be more natural than the love she lavished on her little Christine? She put out a hand and felt only a warm but already cooling space beside her where Andy should have been. He must have heard the baby before she had and got up to see to her. She could hear his voice, talking, and saying, Ssh, ssh! She must have fallen back to sleep then for a minute. When she woke again it was the silence that awakened her, a silence that had something wrong with it. She did not leap up straightaway, as she knew she should, but lay there motionless, fully alert, all senses atingle. She thought afterward that she must have known, known without knowing, that these were the last few moments of innocence and peace that she would have on earth.

She was not conscious of running, of her legs carrying her, of her feet striking the floor, but only of moving, effortlessly and unhindered-like the wind, those were the very words that came to her-across the bedroom, and the passage outside, and into the open doorway of the baby’s room, where she stopped. The light was not switched on in the room, yet she saw the scene as if lit like the film sets there were sometimes pictures of in movie magazines, with a harsh, unreal brightness. Andy was standing beside the baby’s crib, motionless, his shoulders hunched, knees bent, his eyes shut and eyebrows lifted, as if, she thought, as if he were waiting for a sneeze to arrive. What he was holding in his hands might have been a wadded-up sheet, but she knew, of course, that it was not. They remained like that for an impossibly long time, she in the doorway and he by the crib, and then, hearing her, or maybe just sensing her there, he opened his eyes and blinked two or three times like a hypnotized person coming out of a trance and gave her a guilty, furtive look, frowning, trying, she could see, to think of something to say.

It was all so strangely calm. She walked to him and he handed her the bundle he had been holding, pushed it into her arms almost as if it were a gift he was presenting her with, a bunch of flowers, say, that he had grown tired of holding while he waited for her. The baby was in her sleep-suit, a limp, warm weight lying in her hands. Claire cradled the head in her palm, feeling the familiar texture of the skin, like a patch of velvet, loose over the skull.

“Oh, Andy,” she said, as if he and not what she was holding were the child. “What have you done?”

An accident, he said it was. An accident. He kept saying it over and over; it might have been something he had been set to learn by heart. They were in their own room now, and she was sitting on the side of the bed, upright, her back very straight, with the baby laid out unmoving across her knees. Andy was pacing in front of her, running a hand repeatedly through his hair from his forehead all the way to the back of his neck. He was in his jeans and undershirt-when they came home he had started to undress and then, too drunk to finish, had collapsed into bed in his clothes-and a pair of white, ankle-high socks. She could smell the stale beer on his breath. Yet he seemed so young, in that undershirt and the little socks. She stopped looking at him; she wished, in a weary, wistful way, that she might never have to look at him again. The baby’s eyelids were not quite closed, she noticed, and something glittered between them. Dead. She spoke the word to herself as if it were a word in a foreign language.

“She was crying,” Andy was saying. “She was crying and I shook her.” He spoke in a low, urgent voice, not to her but not to himself, either; he was like an actor desperately trying to memorize the lines that presently, when the curtain went up, he would have to deliver with such force and sincerity that the whole house would be convinced. “It was an accident. A terrible accident.”

She felt a prickle of impatience. “Phone St. Mary’s,” she said.

He stopped, stared. “What?”

She was so tired, suddenly; so tired. “Sister Stephanus,” she said, speaking again in a slow, distinct voice, again as if to a child; perhaps, she thought, from now on she would never be able to talk any other way, to anyone. “At St. Mary’s. Phone her.”

He narrowed his eyes suspiciously, as if suspecting a trick. “What will I tell her?”

She shrugged, and at the movement little Christine’s lifeless arm lolled sideways, her tiny fat hand upturned, as if she too were about to ask a question, demand guidance, plead for help.

“Tell her,” Claire said, in a tone of sudden, harsh sarcasm, “tell her it was an accident.”

Then something broke in her, she felt it like the snapping of a bone, and she began to weep.

He left her there, sitting on the bed in her cotton nightdress with the baby lifeless on her splayed knees and the tears running down her face. There was something about her that scared him. She looked like a stone figure some red Indian or Chinaman might worship. He threw a coat over his shoulders and hurried down the outside stairs. Ridges of frozen snow on the steps were glass-hard under his bare feet. The storm had cleared and the sky was high and clear and hung all over with glistening stars. Cora Bennett was awake-did she ever sleep?-and let him in at the back door. The telephone, he told her before she could speak, he needed to use the telephone. She had thought he had come for something else but when she saw his face and heard the way he spoke she just nodded and gestured toward the front hall, where the telephone was. He hesitated. She wore a slip and nothing else. He could see the goose bumps on her forearms.

“What happened?” she said.

He told her there had been an accident and she nodded. How come, he wondered, women never seemed surprised when things went wrong? Then he saw something in her eyes, a light, an eager flash, and he realized she thought it was Claire the accident had happened to.

He had to look up the number of the orphanage in the phone book. There were dozens of churches, convents, schools, all called St. Mary’s. The telephone was the old-fashioned kind, a spindle with a dial and mouthpiece, and a receiver slung on a hook at the side. Again he hesitated. It was the middle of the night-would anyone be awake there to answer his call? And even if there was, what chance was there that he would be put through to the Mother so goddamned Superior? He began to dial the number, then stopped, and stood with his finger resting in the little hole, feeling with vague satisfaction how tensely the sprung dial pressed itself against the side of his nail. Cora came up silently and stood beside him. He had never noticed before how much taller than him she was. He never minded when women were taller, even liked it, in fact. She asked whom he was calling but he did not answer. The coat had slipped from one of his shoulders and she lifted it and set it tenderly back in place. Her fingers brushed his neck. He closed his eyes. He could not remember picking up the kid from her crib. She had been crying, and would not stop. He had not shaken her hard, he knew that, but how hard was hard? There must have been something wrong with her, some weakness in her head, it would have shown up sooner or later. It had been an accident. It was not his fault. He put the receiver back on the hook and turned to Cora wordlessly with his head bowed and she took him in her arms, pressing his face to her cold breast, as if he was her child.

21

AFTERWARDS QUIRKE TRIED TO PUT IT ALL BACK TOGETHER IN HIS mind like a jigsaw puzzle. It would never be complete. The bits he remembered most clearly were the least significant, such as the smell of the drenched laurel behind the railings in the square, a streetlamp’s rain-pocked reflection in a puddle, the cold, greasy feel of the area steps under his desperately scrabbling fingers. There was, throughout, a sense of deep embarrassment-that must have been the reason he did not cry out for help. Embarrassment, and a kind of incredulity. Such things simply did not happen, yet this one did, he had the wounds to prove it. He had thought, when he reached the bottom of those steps, in the wet, glistening darkness there, that he was going to die. An image had flashed before him of his pallid corpse laid out on the dissecting table under merciless lights and Sinclair, his assistant, standing over him in his green apron, flexing his rubber-gloved hands like a virtuoso about to set to at the piano. Pain had come flying at him from all directions, sharp, black, angular, and he thought of another image, of rooks at nightfall wheeling and spinning above bare trees against a winter sky. Or no, that was what he thought of afterwards, when he was reassembling the bits and pieces of what had happened. At the time he was not aware of his mind working at all, except to register trivial things: wet laurel leaves, the lamp’s reflection, the slimed steps.

It had seemed at first an absurd instance of events repeating themselves, and in the confusion of the initial moments he had thought a joke was being played on him. It was the end of twilight and he was walking homewards along the square. There had been a Christmas drinks party at the hospital in the afternoon, a staid and wearying affair which Malachy had presided over with uneasy bonhomie, and although Quirke had drunk no more than a few glasses of wine he felt blurred and heavy-limbed. A halfhearted wind was blowing, and it was raining in a desultory way, and smoke from chimneys was flying this way and that in the sky above the square. Just as they had done the previous time, and at just the same place, the two appeared as silently as shadows out of the gloom and fell easily into step on either side of him. They were bareheaded and wore cheap, transparent plastic raincoats. The thin one, Mr. Punch himself, gave him a regretfully reproving smile. “Compliments of the season, Captain,” he said. “Out in the damp and the dark again, are you? Didn’t we warn you about that?”

“We did, we warned you,” fat Judy agreed, nodding vigorously his great round head on which a fine sprinkling of raindrops sparkled.

They had begun to crowd in on him from either side, shoulder to shoulder, squeezing him between them. They were shorter than he was and surely not as strong, yet pincered like this he felt helpless, a great, soft, helpless child. Mr. Punch was making tut-tutting noises. “You’re a very inquisitive man, do you know that?” he said. “A real Nosey Parker.”

It seemed imperative to Quirke that he should not speak, for if he did it would give them an advantage; he was not sure how, but he knew it was so. They came to the corner of the square. A few motorcars went past, their tires on the wet roadway making a sound like frying fat. One slowed for the turn, its lighted orange trafficator sticking out. Why did he not call to the driver, wave his arms, or run forward, even, and jump onto the running board and be borne away to safety? But he did nothing, and the car continued down the square, trailing gray exhaust smoke.

The three of them crossed the street to the other corner. Quirke had a sense of almost comic inadequacy. He thought what a trio they must make, the two hunched in their smoke-colored plastic coats and him huge in his old-fashioned tweed ulster and black hat. Those two student types passing along on the other side, would they notice, would they remember, would they be able to describe the scene to the coroner’s court, in their own words, as they might before long be asked to do? Despite the chill of the ending day Quirke felt the sweat along his hairline under the band of his hat. He was afraid, but at one remove, as if his fear had conjured up another version of him for it to inhabit, and he, the original he, was obliged to attend to this other, fearing self and be concerned for it, as he would be, he imagined, for a twin, or a grown-up son. Crazily the thought came to him that he might be dead already, that he might have died of fright back there on the corner, and that this big body stumping along helplessly between its captors was only the mechanical remnant of the self that was out here observing the sad end of his life with pity and shame. Death was his professional province yet what did he know of it, really? Well, it seemed that now he was about to receive firsthand instruction in that dark knowledge.

It was lightless at the bottom of the area steps and smelled of urban weeds and wet masonry. Quirke was aware of a barred basement window and at his back a narrow door that he felt sure had not been opened for many a year. He had a moment almost of peace, sprawled there with his legs twisted under him, looking up at the railings, each one with an identical, liquid smear of light down its side from the nearest streetlamp, and above them the soiled sky, faintly lit too, with the sickly radiance of the city. The fine cool rain prickled on his face. Seen from this angle his assailants looked almost comic as they came clattering down the steps after him, two jostling, foreshortened figures, their knees and elbows working like piston rods and their plastic raincoats crackling. They began kicking him, in wordless concentration, hampered by the narrow space where he had lodged after the fall. He turned himself this way and that as best he could, trying to protect his vital organs, his liver, his kidneys, his instinctively retracted genitals, knowing what these parts of him would look like when Sinclair opened him up. The pair labored on him with skill and expertise, the thin one displaying an almost balletic finesse while the fat one did the heavier work. He was aware, however, of a certain angry restraint in their efforts-they confined their kicks to his legs and his upper torso and avoided his head when they could-and it came to him that they had been ordered that he was not to die. He greeted this realization with an indifference that was almost disappointment. Pain was what mattered now, more, even, it seemed, than survival itself; pain, and how to bear it, how to-the word came to him-how to accommodate it. In the end his consciousness found the solution for him by letting itself lapse. As he passed out he seemed to see a face, round and rocky as the invisible moon, floating above the railings and regarding him with dispassion, a face he recognized yet could not identify. Whose? It troubled him, not to know.

IT WAS STILL THERE, THAT FACE, WHEN HE CAME TO THE FIRST TIME. The darkness was different now, softer, more diffuse, and it was not raining. Everything, in fact, was different. He did not understand where he was. It was Mal who was leaning over him, frowning and intent. But how had Mal known where to find him? Someone seemed to be holding his hand, but when he turned his head to see who it was a wave of nausea rose in him and he hastily shut his eyes. When he opened them, no more than a moment later, so it seemed to him, Mal was gone, and the darkness had changed again, was no longer darkness, indeed, but a grayish mistiness with something throbbing slowly and hugely at the heart of it-it was he, he was what was throbbing, in dull, vast, hardly believable pain. Cautiously this time he turned his eyes to the side and saw that it was Phoebe who was holding his hand, and for a moment in his drugged, half-dreaming state he thought she was his dead wife, Delia. She was sitting beside him, on the area steps, was it? Something like fog lay between them, or a bank of cloud, but solid enough for his hand in hers to rest on. For a giddy moment he was afraid he was going to burst into tears. It was not fog, but a white sheet with a blanket under it.

Sleep, he must sleep.

When he next awoke it was daylight, and Mal was there again, and Sarah was sitting beside the bed where Phoebe had sat, and off behind her there were other people, moving, speaking, and someone laughed. There were colored paper shapes strung across the ceiling.

“Quirke,” Sarah said. “You’ve come back.” She smiled. It seemed to cost her an effort, as if she, too, were in some pain.

Mal, standing, took a deep breath grimly in through his nostrils. “You’re in the Mater,” he said.

Quirke shifted, and his left knee buzzed like a beehive. “How bad is it?” he asked, surprised to find that his voice worked.

Mal shrugged. “You’ll live.”

“I meant my leg,” Quirke said. “My knee.”

“Not so bad. They put a pin in it.”

“Who did it?”

Mal’s eyes skittered off to the side. “The Guards don’t know,” he said, mumbling. “They’re assuming it was an attempted robbery.”

Quirke’s aching ribs would not allow him to laugh. “The pin, Mal,” he said. “Who put in the pin?”

“Oh.” Mal looked sheepish. “Billy Clinch.”

“Billy the butcher?” The sheepish look turned cold.

“He was on a skiing holiday. We got him to come back specially.”

“Thanks.” A big red-headed nurse approached.

“There you are,” she said to Quirke in a broad accent-Cork, was it, or Kerry? “We thought you were never going to wake up at all.”

She took his pulse and went away, her departure leaving the three of them somehow more at a loss than they had been before. Mal screwed up his lips and put his hands into the pockets of his tightly buttoned jacket with his thumbs outside and studied the toe caps of his shoes. He had not looked at Sarah once, nor she at him. Mal’s suit was light blue, and he wore a yellow bow tie. How incongruous on him they looked, Quirke thought, these festive glad rags.

“You’ll come to us, of course, when they let you out?” Sarah said.

But they both knew she did not mean it.

THE JUDGE VISITED HIM THE NEXT AFTERNOON. BY THEN HE HAD BEEN moved from the accident ward to a private room. The redheaded nurse ushered the old man in, impressed and excited by the coming of so eminent a visitor. She took his overcoat and hat and offered him tea, which he declined, and she said she would leave them in peace, so, but added, addressing the Judge, that if he, meaning Quirke, got in any way obstreperous, Your Honor had only to give a call and she would be here in a tick. “Thank you, nurse,” the Judge said, with his crinkliest smile, and she beamed at them both and departed. The old man looked at Quirke and arched an eyebrow. “Is that the way it is?” he said. “It’s true what they say, a doctor can’t afford to get sick.” He sat down on a chair beside the bed. Behind him a tall window looked out on a confusion of roofs and smoking chimneys and a sky filled with the flying debris of snow clouds. “Merciful God, Quirke,” he said, “what happened to you at all?”

Quirke, propped against a bank of pillows, gave a ruefully apologetic grimace. “Fell down a set of steps,” he said.

Outlined under the bedclothes his left leg, encased in plaster, was the size of a log.

“They must have been steep, the same steps,” the Judge said. In the window behind his shoulder a flock of small, black birds spurted raggedly from behind the rooftops and twirled about the tattered sky and then fell back in ones and pairs to wherever it was they had come from. “Are you all right?” The old man shifted awkwardly on the chair, chafing his squarish, liver-spotted hands. “I mean, is there anything you need?”

Quirke said no, and added that the Judge was good to come. At the top of his nose and between his eyes he had again that tremulous, hollow sensation of incipient weeping, an effect, he assumed, of delayed shock-his system, after all, would be in turmoil still, working desperately to fix itself, and why would he not want to weep?

“Mal and Sarah were here,” he said. “Phoebe, too, at some stage, when I was still half comatose.”

The Judge nodded. “Phoebe is a good girl,” he said, with a faint note of insistence, as if to forestall an objection. He molded his hands against each other again in a washing motion. “She’s going to America, did she tell you?”

Quirke felt a breathless, lifting sensation in the region of his heart. He said nothing and the Judge went on: “Yes, to Boston, to her Grandfather Crawford’s.” He was looking everywhere except at Quirke. “A holiday, only. Or vacation, as I believe they say out there.”

He fished in the pocket of his jacket and brought out his tobacco pipe and pouch and busied himself with them, plugging the damp dark strands into the bowl with the discolored ball of his thumb. Quirke watched him from the bed. The afternoon light was failing fast in the room. The old man struck a match and put it to the pipe and smoke and sparks flew up. Quirke said:

“So the boyfriend has been given his final marching orders, has he?”

The Judge was looking about for an ashtray in which to deposit the spent match. Quirke made no attempt to help, but lay and watched him, unblinking.

“These mixed marriages,” the Judge said, trying to sound unconcerned, “they never work.” He leaned forward and placed the match carefully on a corner of the wooden locker beside the bed. “Besides, she’s…what is she?”

“Twenty, in the new year.”

At last the Judge looked at him, the glimmer from the window making his faded blue eyes seem paler still. He said:

“A life is easily ruined, at that young age.”

Without lifting his head from the pillows Quirke put down a hand beside the bed and tried gropingly to open the locker, but in the end the Judge had to help him, and found his cigarettes for him and gave him one and struck a match. Then Quirke rang the nurse’s bell and the nurse came and he told her to fetch an ashtray. She said he should not be smoking but he ignored her, and she turned to the Judge and threw her eyes to heaven and asked him if he did not think Quirke was a holy terror, but went back into the corridor and a moment later returned with a tinfoil pie plate and said that would have to do them for it was all she could find. When she had gone they smoked in silence for a while. The old man’s pipe had fouled the air and Quirke’s cigarette tasted to him of burning cardboard. The last of the daylight was dying away into the shadowed corners of the room but neither man made a move to switch on the lamp beside the bed.

“Tell me,” Quirke said, “about this Knights of St. Patrick business that Mal is involved in.” The Judge put on a puzzled frown but Quirke saw that he was feigning. “The thing in America, with the Catholic families, that Josh Crawford funds.”

The old man took from his pocket a smoker’s penknife and used the blunt end of it to tamp the tobacco in his pipe, sucking away meanwhile at the mouthpiece and blowing out busy clouds of blue smoke.

“Malachy,” he said at last, with heavy emphasis, “is a good man.” He looked Quirke directly in the eye. “You know that, don’t you, Quirke?”

Quirke only looked back at him; he recalled yet again Sarah saying the same thing: a good man. “A young woman died, Garret,” he said. “Another woman was murdered.”

The Judge nodded. “Are you suggesting,” he inquired, as if he had no more than the mildest interest in hearing what the reply might be, “that Mal was involved in these things?”

“He was-he is. I told you so. He arranged for Christine Falls to-”

The old man waved a hand wearily. “Yes yes, I know what you told me.” In the gloom now, with the window behind him, his face was a featureless mask. Quirke could see the burning dottle in the pipe bowl flare and fade, flare and fade, a slow, fiery pulse. “He’s my son, Quirke. If he has things to tell me, he’ll tell me, in his own time.”

Quirke reached out cautiously and crushed the last of his cigarette in the tin plate on the locker, the stub exhaling its final, bitter fume. The nicotine had reacted with whatever the painkillers were they had given him and his nerve ends were fizzing. The old man went on:

“When I was a boy I used to go to school with my boots tied around my neck to spare the shoe leather. Oh, I’m telling you-they laugh about that sort of thing these days, saying people of my generation are exaggerating, but I can tell you, it’s no exaggeration. The boots around the neck, and a roasted spud and a bottle of milk with a bit of paper for a stopper and that was our rations for the day. Josh Crawford and myself, two lads from the same townland. Half the time we had no backsides to our trousers.”

“And look at you now,” Quirke said, “you the Chief Justice and him a Boston millionaire.”

“We were the lucky ones. People talk about the good old days, but there was precious little that was good about them, and that’s the sad truth.” He paused. The room was almost in darkness now, the lights of the city coming on and twinkling fitfully afar in the window. “We all have a duty to try to make the world a better place, Quirke.”

“And the likes of Josh Crawford are out to make a better world?”

The Judge chuckled. “When you think of the material God has to work with,” he said, “you have to feel sorry for Him, sometimes.” Again he paused, as if to test what he would say before he said it. “You’re not much of a believer, are you, Quirke? You realize it’s a great disappointment to me, that you left the church.”

The effect of the cigarette had worn off and Quirke was sinking again into a dull fatigue. “I don’t know,” he said, his voice growing thin, “that I was ever in it.”

“Ah, but you were-and you’ll come back, sooner or later, don’t you mistake it. The Lord stamps his seal on every soul”-he gave a coughing laugh-“even one as black as yours.”

“I’ve cut up a lot of corpses in my time,” Quirke said, “but I’ve never found the place where the soul might have been.”

Feeling himself rebuked, the Judge fell huffily silent. Quirke did not care; he wanted to be left alone now, so that he might sleep. Pain was a pyramid, heavy and dull at the bottom and excruciatingly sharp at the top, the top being his shattered kneecap. The Judge upended the bowl of his pipe and knocked it on the tin plate. He was shaking his head.

“You and Mal,” he said. “I thought you’d be like brothers.”

Quirke had a sensation of drifting into himself, a self that had grown cavernous and dark. “Mal was always jealous,” he murmured. “So was I. I wanted Sarah and got Delia.”

“Aye, and were sorry you did, I know that.” The Judge stood up and reached above Quirke’s head and pressed the nurse’s bell. He waited in the dark, looking down at what he could see of Quirke, the great white-swathed bulk of him laid out corpselike on the narrow bed. “I realize, Quirke,” he said, “that your life didn’t go as you hoped it would, and as it should have, if there was any justice. You made too many mistakes-we all did. But go easy on Mal.” He leaned down closer to the supine form. But Quirke, he saw, was asleep.

22

FOR QUIRKE THE YEAR ENDED AND A NEW ONE BEGAN IN A BLUR OF days each one of which was hardly distinguishable from its predecessors. The gaunt hospital room reminded him of the inside of a skull, with that high ceiling the color of bone and the window beside him looking out like an unblinking eye on the wintry cityscape. Phoebe on one of her visits had brought him a miniature plastic Christmas tree complete with plastic ornaments; forlornly festive, it stood a little lopsided in the deep embrasure of the window, growing increasingly incongruous as that seemingly interminable first week dragged itself painfully toward New Year. Barney Boyle came to see him, furtive and lightly sweating-“Christ, Quirke, I hate hospitals”-bringing two naggins of whiskey and an armful of books. When he asked what had happened to him Quirke said what he had said to everyone else, that he had fallen down the area steps in Mount Street. Barney did not believe him, but made no mention of Ambie Tormey’s brother or Gallagher who was not the full shilling; Barney knew when to mind his own business.

On New Year’s Eve the staff held a party somewhere in the upper regions of the building. The night nurse when she came with his sleeping pill was halfway tipsy. He listened to the city’s bells at midnight crazily ringing in the new year and lay back against the pillows and tried not to feel sorry for himself. Billy Clinch, a fierce little sandy-haired terrier, had come to tell him, with a certain relish, Quirke could see, that his leg would never be right-“The patella was in bits, man!”-and that most likely he would have a limp for life. He took the news calmly, even with a certain indifference. He went over and over in his mind those minutes-he knew it must have been no more than minutes-at the dank bottom of the area steps. There was something in it, in what had happened there-a lesson, not the one that Mr. Punch and fat Judy had been out to teach him, the nature of which he more or less understood, but one that was at once more profound and more commonplace. As they toiled over him with their blunt toecaps the two had been, it seemed to him now, like a pair of common laborers, coal heavers, say, or butchers maneuvering an awkward carcass, vengefully resentful of the job in hand, grunting and sweating and getting in each other’s way and wanting to be done. He had thought he was going to die and was surprised at how little he feared the prospect. It had all been so shabby and shoddy, so ordinary; and that, he now realized, would be the manner of his real death, when it came. In the dissecting room the bodies used to seem to him the remains of sacrificial victims, spent and inert after the frightful, bloody ceremony of their souls’ leaving. But he would never again view a cadaver in that lurid light. Suddenly for him death had lost its terrifying glamour and become just another bit of the mundane business of life, although its last.

And day after day his drug-dimmed thoughts circled upon the question of who it was that had set those two on his trail. He kept doggedly posing the question, he knew, only so that he would not have to answer it. He told himself it was impossible that Mal could have done such a thing-imagine Mal on the step of a dark doorway in Stoney Batter handing out their instructions to Mr. Punch and his fat partner!-yet the vistas that stretched beyond that impossibility were murkier still. When he summoned to mind the image of the face he had seemed to see hovering gloatingly above the area steps that night, watching as he was beaten, its features began to shift and rearrange themselves-or was it he who was shifting and rearranging them?-until it was no longer Mal’s long, unmoonlike countenance, but one squarer and more roughly hewn. Costigan. Yes. But those dim, faceless others crowding in turn behind him, who were they?

PHOEBE PAID HIM A VISIT ON NEW YEAR’S DAY. A FITFUL WIND WAS driving sleet like spittle against the window, and the smoke from the city’s chimneys no sooner appeared than it was blowsily dispersed. Phoebe wore a black beret pulled down at one side and a black coat with a fur collar. She seemed slimmer than when he had last been awake enough to look at her, and her face was pale, and the cold had given a raw, pink edging to the wings of her nose. There were other changes, less easily identified. He seemed to detect in her manner a certain watchfulness, and a sense of willed restraint, that had not been there before. He supposed this new hardness in her, if that was what it was-he looked at her knuckles, the white shine of them where the small bones were pressing up under the flesh-must be the result of the loss of Conor Carrington, of all the suppressed violence and anger at that loss, against which she had honed herself like a knife against a stone. But then he thought, no, it was not losing him that had embittered her, but the taking of him from her. She had been bested, and she was furious for it. He found her presence, in her grown-up’s coat and ironically tilted Left Bank beret, faintly unnerving. The girl that had been was suddenly a woman.

She did not want to talk about the trip to America, she said. When Quirke mentioned it she shunted her mouth sideways and shrugged her shoulders in faint, listless impatience.

“They’re getting rid of me,” she said. “They want a rest from my accusing eye following them everywhere, as they imagine. Actually, I don’t care about any of that anymore.”

“Any of what?” he asked.

She shrugged again, and scowlingly regarded the Christmas tree on the windowsill, then suddenly turned her eyes to his and, coldly and calculatedly mischievous, said:

“Why don’t you come with me?”

He had noticed that his damaged knee inside its cast seemed to have taken on the task of alerting him at moments of surprise or alarm, moments which he in the narcotic haze in which he was still afloat could not register with sufficient force or instantaneity, so that the pinned-up joint of his leg must bring them to his attention by way of a twinge, a sort of pinch, such as a sadistically jolly uncle might give, meant to be playful but leaving a bruise. Phoebe took his indrawn gasp of pain now for a dismissive laugh and turned her vexed face again to the window. She unclasped her little black handbag-he thought: All women look the same looking into their handbags-and took from it a slim, silver cigarette case and a matching lighter. So now she was a smoker in her own right. He made no comment. She opened the case with a flick of her thumb and middle finger and held it toward him spread upon her palm. The cigarettes, fat and flat, were ranked in an overlapping file, like oval organ pipes.

“Passing Cloud,” he said, taking one. “My my, such sophistication.”

She held the lighter for him. When he leaned forward from the bank of pillows he caught from under the lifted sheet a whiff of his new, hospital smell, warm and raw, a meaty stink.

“All we need now is a little drink,” Phoebe said with brittle gaiety. “A couple of gin and tonics would be just the thing.” She twirled her cigarette with inexpert insouciance.

“How is it at home?” he asked.

“How is what at home?” Saying it, she was briefly a girl again, snappish and defiant. Then she sighed, and put the tip of her little finger between her teeth and nibbled on the nail. “Awful,” she said out of the side of her mouth. “They hardly speak to each other.”

“Why is that?”

She let her finger go and took an angry drag at her cigarette and glared at him. “How do I know? I’m not supposed to know anything, I’m a child.”

“And you,” he said, “do you talk to them?” She looked at her shoes, a slow, deep frown gathering between her eyebrows. “They might need you, you know.”

She decided not to hear that.

“I want to go away,” she said. She looked up. “I want to get away. Oh, Quirke”-in a rush now-“it’s terrible, terrible, they’re like, I don’t know what, it’s as if they hate each other, as if they were strangers trapped together in a cage. I can’t stand it, I have to get out.”

She stopped, and something dark crossed the window, the shadow of a bird, or something else, passing in the sky. She had lowered her face again and was watching him from under her eyelashes, trying to judge, he could see, how much of her distress he believed in, how much he would help her in her plan to escape. She was a simple creature, after all. He asked her:

“When do you go to Boston?”

She drew her knees tightly together and gave a shiver of annoyance. “Oh, it’s not for ages-weeks and weeks. The weather is too bad there, or something.”

“Yes, they get blizzards at this time of year.”

“Huh,” she said. “Blizzards!”

He shut his eyes and saw Delia and Sarah in snow boots and Russian-style fur hats walking arm and arm out of an ice storm toward him, an impossible sun that was shining from somewhere, making thousands of miniature rainbows around them, the rims of their nostrils pinkly translucent, like Phoebe’s now, and their perfect teeth agleam-Quirke had never before known such white, such pristine, teeth, they seemed the very promise of all that might await him in this easeful and sleekly appointed land. They were on the Common, Mal was there too. They could hear the myriads of tiny slivers of ice tinkling against one another as they fell. It was-what? 1933?-the hard times were starting to ease and the bad news from Europe seemed no more than rumors, not to be credited. How innocent they had been, the four of them, how full of eagerness and assurance, how impatient for the future. Wearily he opened his eyes: And here it is, he thought, the future we were so impatient for. Phoebe, brooding, sat hunched forward with her knees crossed and one hand under an elbow and the other under her chin. The end of her cigarette was stained with lipstick, the smoke ran up by the side of her face. She hefted the cigarette case lightly in her hand.

“That’s nice,” Quirke said.

“This?” She looked at the silver trinket. “It was a present. From him”-she dropped her voice to a comical bass boom-“my lost love.” She sketched a regretful laugh, then rose and crushed the last of her cigarette into the tin plate that was still acting as an ashtray. “I’ll go,” she said.

“So soon?”

She did not look at him. What was it really that she had come to him in need of? For he knew she had come looking for something. Whatever it was he had been unable to supply it. Perhaps she was unclear herself as to what it was.

The afternoon was waning.

“You should think of it,” she said. “You should think of coming with me, to Boston.”

Then she was gone, leaving a faint wraith of cigarette smoke on the air, the pallid blue ghost of herself.

Alone, he watched vague flakes of snow flickering down into the lighted window like moths and then spinning away quickly into the darkness. He speculated again as to what it was she had wanted of him, he could not let it go. She should have known she was wasting her time, for what had he ever given her?-what had he ever given anyone? He shifted uneasily, his huge leg tugging at him like a surly, intractable child. He began a kind of reckoning, unwillingly; it made him squirm inside himself. There was Barney Boyle, poor Barney, burnt-out and steadily drinking himself to death: what sympathy or understanding had he ever given him? Young Carrington, fearful of the damage Mal Griffin and his father the Chief Justice might do to his career, why had he mocked him, and tried to make him appear a coward and a fool in front of Phoebe? Why had he gone to the Judge and planted suspicions in his mind about the son who was already a painful disappointment to him, the son who as a child was sent to be with his mother in the kitchen while Quirke the cuckoo sat in the Judge’s den toasting his shins at the fire and sucking toffees from the brown-paper bag the Judge kept specially for him in a drawer of his desk? And Nana Griffin, what regard had he granted her, who had to invent a delicate constitution for Malachy, her son, in the hope of winning for him a little of his father’s love or even a moment of his full attention? There were so many, suddenly, so many to be reckoned with, they crowded in upon him, and he shrank from them, but in vain. Sarah, whose tender affections he played on for his amusement, Sarah with her dizzy spells and her loveless marriage; Mal, floundering in God knows what depths of trouble and sorrow; Dolly Moran, done to death for the keeping of a diary; Christine Falls and Christine Falls’s child, both lost and soon to be forgotten; all of them, all scorned by him, unvalued, ignored, betrayed even. And then there was Quirke himself, the Quirke he was taking grim measure of, Quirke dodging into McGonagle’s of an afternoon to drink his whiskey and laugh at the memorials in the Mail-what right had he to laugh, how much better was he than the joxer scratching his balls over the racing pages or the drunken poet contemplating his failures in the bottom of a glass? He was like this leg, cocooned in the solid plaster of his indifference and selfishness. Again that face with the black-rimmed glasses and the stained teeth rose before him in the darkness of the window like a malign moon, the face, he realized, that would be with him always, the face of his nemesis.

23

FEBRUARY BROUGHT A FALSE SPRING AND, ALLOWED FREE AT LAST, Quirke ventured out on walks by the canal in the pale, chill sunlight. On the day that he left the hospital the redheaded nurse, whose face was the first thing he had seen when he woke briefly after Billy Clinch had finished working on his leg, and whose name was Philomena, had given him a present of a blackthorn stick which she said had belonged to her late father-“Big brute of a thing he was, like you”-and with this stout aid he punted himself cautiously along the towpath from Huband Bridge to Baggot Street and back again, feeling ancient, his knuckles white on the knob of the stick and his lower lip gripped between his teeth, mewling in pain like an infant and swearing at every lurching step.

The walking stick was not the only gift that green-eyed Philomena had given him. The day before he was to be discharged, when she was on the afternoon shift, she had come into his room and shut the door and wedged a chair under the handle, and turned and shrugged off her uniform with dazzling ease-it unbuttoned handily down the front-to reveal a complicated armature of ribbed and boned pale-pink underwear, and approached the bed with a playful, ducking smile that gave her a double chin suggestive to Quirke’s suddenly inflamed imagination of other, nether folds, and laughed in her throat and said:

“God, Mr. Quirke, you’re a terrible man-look what you have me doing.”

She was a big girl, with strong limbs and big broad freckled shoulders, but she accommodated herself to his encased leg with tender inventiveness. She had left on her garter belt and her stockings, and when she set herself astride him, a flame-haired Godiva, the taut nylon of the stockings chafed his flanks like fine, warm emery paper. She was delighted with the size of him, huge and helpless lying there, trapped between her plunging thighs. He realized how long a time it was since he had held a woman in his arms and heard her laugh. He wished he too might laugh but something held him back, not just his throbbing knee but some mysterious new access of woe and foreboding.

Next day she put on, merely for his sake, he knew, a sad but stoical face, saying she supposed he would forget her as soon as he was outside the hospital gates. She walked him down the corridor to the main exit, with a hand under his arm to support him and letting her breast brush with fond negligence against his sleeve. He asked for her address, being dutiful in his own way, but she said there was no point, that she only had a room in the nurses’ quarters at the hospital and went home at the weekends, home being somewhere still unspecified down in the deep south. He thought of other country girls, of that other nurse Brenda Ruttledge and, less willingly, of Christine Falls, poor, pale Christine who was fading steadily from his remembering, every day a little more gone of the little of her that had been there in the first place. “And anyway,” Philomena said with a sigh, “I have a fella down there.” She lowered her voice to a husky whisper. “Though he never gets what you got.”

He had told no one the date of his leaving, unable to bear the thought of finding Sarah waiting for him at the gate, bravely smiling like a war bride, or Phoebe with her new, hard-eyed manner, or even, God forbid, Mal, lugubrious in his secret torment that he wore like a penitent’s sackcloth. The anger he had not felt through all the weeks in hospital had suddenly boiled up in him, out of nowhere, so it seemed, and as he lurched along the canal path on Philomena’s father’s blackthorn stick in the eerie silence of those unseasonably sunlit afternoons, with the moorhens scuttling among the reeds in a deluded mating fever, he busied himself devising all manner of vengeful stratagems. He was surprised at the violence of these fantasies. He imagined in almost erotic detail how he would search out Mr. Punch and fat Judy one by one and hurl them down the same area steps in Mount Street where they had hurled him and beat them with his fists until their flesh burst, their bones splintered, their blood gushed from ruined mouths and punctured eardrums. He saw himself snatching off Costigan’s glasses and plucking the Pioneer pin from his lapel and plunging it into his undefended eyes, first one, then the other, feeling the fine steel spike sinking into the resistant jelly and savoring Costigan’s howls of agony. There would be others to be dealt with, the ones whose identities he could as yet only guess at, standing in a huddle behind Costigan and Mal and Punch and Judy. Oh, yes, they too, the faceless Knights, would have to be called out and skewered with their own lances. For Quirke knew by now that all that had happened, to Christine Falls and Dolly Moran and to him, was more than a matter of Mal and his poor, dead girl, that it was a wide and tangled web in which he had become enmeshed.

AND SO, ONE DAY NOT LONG AFTER LEAVING HOSPITAL, HE FOUND himself maneuvering his stiff and still strapped-up leg out of a taxi at the gates of the Mother of Mercy Laundry. The day was clammily cold with the sun shining whitely through the morning mist. It was Saturday and the front of the place was shut and silent like a clenched mouth. He started towards the entrance, intending to ring the bell and wait however long it took for it to be answered, but veered off instead and made his way around the side of the building, not knowing what it was he was hoping to find. What he found was the young woman with the shapeless red hair who on his previous visit had almost run into him in the corridor with the laundry basket. She was standing by a drain emptying a basin of soapy water. She looked different in a way that he could not make out at first. She wore the same gray smock she had worn the last time and the same hobnailed boots. He saw her thick ankles, the skin swollen tight and shiny and diamond-mottled. He could not remember her name. When she saw him she stepped back and looked at him with her head to one side, clutching the emptied basin before her in both hands like a breastplate. In the middle of that featureless face she had Philomena the nurse’s startlingly pellucid green eyes. At first he could not think what to say, what to ask, and they stood for a long moment in silent, baffled regard.

“What is your name?” he said at last.

“Maisie,” she said stoutly, as if in answer to a challenge. Her frown deepened and then cleared. “I remember you,” she said. “You’re the one that was here that day.” She looked at the walking stick, at the scars on his face. “What happened to you?”

“A fall,” he said.

“You were talking to Her Holiness, asking about the Moran one.”

Quirke felt a sort of rapid inward slide, as if he were on board a ship that had listed suddenly. The Moran one.

“Yes,” he said carefully. “Dolly Moran, yes. Did you know her?”

“And the old hake telling you she never heard tell of her!” She gave a short laugh that made her button nose wrinkle and lifted her upper lip. “That’s a good one, and her here every second week, collecting the babbies.”

Quirke, taking a deep breath, produced his cigarettes. Maisie eyed the packet hungrily.

“I’ll have one of them,” she said.

She held the cigarette clumsily between two fingers and a thumb and bent to the flame of the lighter that Quirke was offering. He asked carefully:

“So Dolly Moran came here, to collect babies?”

The smoke of their cigarettes was a deep, dense blue in the misty air.

“Aye,” she said, “for sending off to America.” Her look darkened. “They won’t get mine, that’s for sure.”

Of course! That was the change in her: the swollen stomach. “When are you due?” he asked.

She wrinkled her nose and her rabbit’s lip was drawn upwards again. “When am I what?”

“The baby,” he said, “when will it be born?”

“Oh.” She shrugged, glancing aside. “Not long.” Then she looked at him directly again, a sharp light dawning in those pale green eyes. “Why, what’s it to you?”

He peered beyond her down the gray length of the yard; how long could he manage to keep her here before suspicion and fear drew her away?

“Would they take your baby from you?” he said, trying to make his voice sound like the voices of the do-gooders who would occasionally turn up at Carricklea, asking about diet, and exercise, and how often the boys received the sacraments.

Maisie gave another snort. “Wouldn’t they half!”

He had not succeeded in deceiving her, any more than the do-gooders had deceived him. He said:

“Tell me, how did you come to be here?”

She gave him a pitying look. “My da put me in.”

As if everyone should know that simple fact.

“Why did he do that?”

“He wanted me out of the way, like, in case I might tell on him.”

“Tell what?”

Her eyes grew purposely vague. “Ah, nothing.”

“And the baby’s father?” She shook her head quickly and he knew he had made a mistake. He hastened on. “You say you won’t let them take the baby-so what will you do?”

“I’ll run away, so I will. I have money saved.”

He noted again, with a pang of pity, the laceless boots and bare, mottled legs, her work-roughened hands with their raw knuckles. He tried to picture her making her desperate escape but all he could conjure were images out of Victorian melodrama, of a shawled, stricken-faced girl hurrying along a snowy, rutted road with her precious bundle clutched to her breast and watched by a robin on a twig. The reality would be the mailboat and a rented room down a back street in some anonymous English city. If she got that far, which he very much doubted. Most likely she would not get beyond the gates of this place.

He was about to speak again but she put up a hand to silence him and lifted her head to the side, listening. Somewhere a door creaked on its hinges and slammed shut. Hastily, with an expert flick of her thumb, she knocked the burning tip from her cigarette and hid the unsmoked half inside her smock and turned to go.

“Wait,” he said urgently. “What’s wrong? Are you frightened?”

“You’d be frightened,” she said darkly, “if you knew them crowd.”

“What crowd?” he said. “What crowd, Mary?”

“Maisie.” Her eyes were chips of glass now.

He put a hand to his forehead. “Sorry, sorry-Maisie.” Again he scanned the long yard behind her. “It’s all right,” he said in desperation. “Look, there’s no one.”

But it was too late, she was already turning away. “There’s always somebody,” she said simply. The distant, unseen door opened again, creaking. Hearing it, she crouched in stillness, a sprinter on the blocks. He fumbled the packet of cigarettes from his pocket and held it out to her. She threw him a look, cold and bleak and almost contemptuous, and snatched the cigarettes from his hand and stowed them in the pocket of her smock and was gone.

24

HE WANTED TO GO TO THE MOUNTAINS. EVERY DAY ON HIS WALKS HE looked longingly at them, they seemed to be just beyond the bridge at Leeson Street, snow-clad and as if afloat, like mountains in a dream. It was Sarah who offered to drive him there, and arrived at his door one afternoon in Mal’s leather-upholstered Jaguar. To Quirke’s nose the car inside had what he was sure must be its owner’s smell, thin, sharp, and medicinal. Sarah drove with nervous intensity, pressing her back against the seat and holding the steering wheel at arm’s length, her hands clamped close together on the top quadrant; on left turns she leaned so far to the side that Quirke felt stray tendrils of her hair touch his cheek like filaments of charged electric wire. She was quiet, and he could sense her brooding on something, and he was conscious of a stirring of his own unease. She had said on the telephone that she wanted to talk to him. Was she going to tell him what she knew about Mal? For by now Quirke was certain that she did know, that she had somehow found Mal out. Or perhaps he had broken down and confessed all to her. But whatever all was, Quirke did not want her to tell it to him, did not want to hear those things, in her mouth, did not want to have to sympathize, did not want to take her hand and look into her eyes and tell her how much he cared for her; that was gone, now, there would be no more hand-holding, no more soulful gazing in her eyes, no more of anything. He had gone beyond Sarah, into another, darker place, a place of his own behind another doorway like the doorway through which often in the past she had invited him, in vain, to enter with her.

THEY WENT BY WAY OF ENNISKERRY AND GLENCREE. THE HIGH BOGS were hidden under snow but already there were newborn lambs on the slopes, spindly, dazed-looking scraps of white and black with stumpy, clockwork tails; even through the rubber-sealed windows of the car their plaintive bleatings could be thinly heard. The mountain roads had been cleared but there were patches of black ice, and on a steep bend approaching a narrow stone bridge the back end of the big car slewed sideways and with cowlike stubbornness refused to straighten until they were across the bridge, the parapet of which the left mudguard missed by what Quirke, wildly looking back, saw had been no more than an inch or two. Sarah steered the machine to the side of the road and stopped, and closed her eyes and leaned her forehead in the space between her hands on the rim of the steering wheel.

“Did we hit anything?” she murmured.

“No,” Quirke said. “We would have known, if we had.”

She gave a low, groaning laugh. “Thank God,” she said. “His precious car.”

She switched off the ignition and they sat for a while listening to the cooling engine ticking and plinking. Gradually the wind, too, made itself heard, faint and fitful, whistling in the car’s front grille and thrumming in the limp strands of rusted barbed wire beside the road. Sarah lifted her head from the wheel and leaned it on the seat-back, still with her eyes closed. Her face was drawn and paper-pale, as if the blood had all drained out of it; this could not be solely the effect of the near miss on the bridge. Quirke’s unease deepened. His leg, too, began to ache, because of the thinned air up here, he supposed, or the cold that was seeping into the car now that the heater was off, or perhaps just because of the cramped position he had been forced to hold it in during the journey up from the city. He suggested that they should get out and walk a little, and she asked if he would be able, and he said impatiently that of course he would, and was already opening the door and lowering his leg with grunts and curses to the ground.

They had stopped on the edge of a long, shallow sweep of mountainside at the foot of which there was a black lake, its surface an unmoving sheet of steely shards. Beside them was a low, rounded hill, snowed over and seeming to crouch, somehow, against a stone-dark sky. Snared tufts of soiled wool fluttered on the barbed wire, and here and there a gorse bush or a clump of heather showed starkly through the snow. A turf cutter’s track led slantwise up the hill, and this they followed, Quirke on his stick stepping cautiously over the ice-ribbed, stony ground with Sarah at his side, her arm firmly linked in his. The cold burned in their nostrils and made their lips and eyelids feel glassy. Halfway up the track Sarah said they should turn back, that they must be mad, coming up here, him with his leg in a cast and she in these ridiculous shoes, but Quirke set his jaw and went on, tugging her with him.

He asked after Phoebe.

“She goes to Boston next week,” Sarah answered. “Her ticket is booked. She’ll fly to New York, then on by train.” She spoke with a willed calmness, keeping her eyes fixed on the track.

“You’ll miss her,” he said.

“Oh, dreadfully, of course. But I know it will be good for her. She needs to get away. She’s furious about Conor Carrington-I’m afraid what she might do. I mean,” she went on quickly, “she might make some awful mistake-girls often do, when they’re thwarted in love.”

“Thwarted?”

“You know what I mean, Quirke. She could throw herself at the next young guy who comes along, and lose everything.” She was silent for a moment, walking along with her arm in his and holding her wrist with her other hand. She wore black silk gloves, and the shoes, slimly elegant, that were so incongruous in this wild place. “I wish,” she said suddenly, hurrying the words, “I wish you’d go with her, Quirke.” She glanced at him, smiling tensely, then looked away again.

He watched her profile. “To Boston?”

She nodded, setting her lips tight together. “I’d like to think,” she said, choosing the words carefully, “that there was someone there to look after her.”

“She’ll be with her grandfather. She won’t be throwing herself at any young men with old Josh there to frighten them off.”

“I meant, someone I could trust. I don’t want her to-I don’t want her to become one of them.”

“Them?”

“My father, all that. Their world.” She twisted her mouth into a bitter smile. “The Crawford clan.”

“Then don’t let her go.”

Her grip on his arm tightened. “I’m not strong enough. I can’t fight them, Quirke. They’re too much for me.”

He nodded. “What about Mal?” he said.

“What about him?” Suddenly there was the coldness of steel in her voice.

“Does he want Phoebe to go?”

“Who knows what Mal wants? We don’t discuss these things. We don’t discuss anything, anymore.”

He stopped, and made her stop with him. “What’s wrong, Sarah?” he said. “Something has happened. You’re different. Is it Mal?”

Her answer this time came like the snap of a tautened wire. “Is what Mal?”

They walked on. Quirke felt the ice under his feet, the treacherous smoothness of it. What if he were to slip and fall here? He would not be able to get himself to his feet again. Sarah would have to go for help. He might die. He entertained the thought with equanimity.

They came to the crest of the hill. Before them was another long valley, the floor of which was hidden under a haze of frost. They stood and gazed into that glowing gray immensity as if it were the very heart of desolation.

“Will you go to America?” Sarah asked, but before he could answer a shiver ran through her, he felt the force of it in her arm that was still linked in his, and with a sort of swooning sigh she let all her weight collapse against him, so that he thought his knee might give way. “Oh, God,” she whispered in distress and terror. Her eyes were closed, the lids fluttering like moth wings. “Sarah,” he said, “what is it?” She took a deep, trembling breath. “Sorry,” she said, “I thought I…” He wedged the walking stick under his elbow for support and held both of her hands in his. Her fingers were icy. She tried to smile, shaking her head. “It’s all right, Quirke. I’m fine, really.”

He led her away from the track, the frozen snow snapping like glass under their shoes, to a large, round rock standing in self-conscious isolation on the barren hillside. He brushed the snow from the top of the rock and made her sit. A little color was coming back into her face. She said again she was all right, that it was just her dizzy feeling. She laughed weakly. “One of my turns, as Maggie calls them.” A nerve in her cheek twitched, giving her a bitter aspect. “One of my turns,” she said again.

Nervously he lit a cigarette. At this high altitude the smoke cut into his lungs like a flung handful of blades. A large gray crow with a sharpened chisel of a beak alighted near them on a fence post and uttered a derisive croak. Sarah was looking at her hands clasped in her lap. “Quirke,” she said, “I have something to tell you. It’s about Phoebe. I don’t know how to say it.” In her distress she lifted her hands, still clasped, and shook them before her in a curious gesture, like a dice player preparing to throw but knowing the throw will fail. “She’s not mine, Quirke. She’s not Mal’s, either.” Quirke stood so still he might have been made of the same stuff as the stone on which she sat. Sarah shook her head slowly from side to side in a kind of disbelieving amazement. “She’s yours,” she said. “Yours and Delia’s. You didn’t know she lived, but she did. Delia died and Phoebe lived. The Judge, Garret, he phoned us in Boston that night, to tell us Delia was dead. I couldn’t believe it. He asked if Mal and I would look after the baby-for a while, he said, until you were over your shock. There was a nun coming out from Dublin. She brought Phoebe with her.” She sighed, and cast about her as if vaguely in search of some way by which she might escape, some passageway or hollow in the snow down which she might drop. “I shouldn’t have kept her,” she said, “but I told myself it was for the best. You were already drinking so much, because of Delia, because she wasn’t what you had hoped she’d be. And then she was dead, and there was Phoebe.” He turned, a stone man, and took some steps over the snow, leaning his weight on his stick, and stopped, looking away from her, down again into the frozen valley far below. The bird on the post ducked its head and flexed one wing and this time gave a low, rattling squawk that might have been of entreaty, or mildly regretful deprecation. Sarah sighed again. “I wanted something of you, you see,” she said to Quirke’s enormous, hunched back. “Something that was yours. Terrible of me, I know.” She laughed briefly, as if amazed again, at herself, at what she was saying. “All these years…” She rose to her feet, clenching her fists and holding them at her sides. “I’m sorry, Quirke,” she called to him, making her voice loud, for it seemed to her that when she had stood up the air had somehow grown too thin to carry mere words, and that anyway he was, over on that bare mountain rim, almost beyond hearing her. He would not turn, only stood there in his crow-black coat with his back to her and his head bowed. “I’m sorry,” she said again, and this time it was as if she were saying it to herself.