Even the Dead

19

The sun was gone from the sky, but the streets were still hot and the atmosphere itself seemed weary after the long day of heat. Hackett walked the few dozen yards from his office to Mooney’s, across the road, and by the time he got there he was in a sweat. When he took his hat off he thought his head must surely be steaming. He mopped his forehead. The back of his neck felt gritty. The weather would have to break soon; if it didn’t, there would be riots.

Inside the pub it was a little cooler than in the streets, but only a little. He nodded to the barman and slipped into the dark brown snug. All afternoon he’d been looking forward to this moment. He ordered a pint of Smithwick’s and downed a third of it in the first swallow. This beer, too, had a washed, soapy texture, but it had more body than Bass. He leaned back on the dusty plush of the bench seat and lit a cigarette. For the next few minutes he was going to relax. Years of police work had taught him to divide his mind into a number of more or less sealed compartments, so that he could shut away for necessary periods the things he didn’t want to think about.

He was considering ordering a second pint when Quirke arrived. He sat down and put his straw hat on the table.

“What will you have?” Hackett asked.

“I don’t know. What do you drink in this heat?”

“Something cool and refreshing, like the adverts say.”

“I’ll have a tonic water with ice and lemon.”

Hackett smiled. “Are you still off the hard liquor?”

“Most of the time.”

He went to the bar and rapped on it with a coin, and after a minute the barman came and glanced around the partition. Hackett ordered the tonic water for Quirke and another pint for himself, then sat down again.

“I shouldn’t be drinking this stuff,” he said, gazing gloomily at the puddle of suds in the bottom of his glass. “It gives me heartburn.” He studied Quirke. “You’re in good spirits,” he said.

“Am I?”

“You have the look of a man that’s had a spring put in his step. Did you win the football pools?”

Quirke smiled. “What have you to tell me?” he said.

The barman appeared again, and Hackett got up to take the drinks from him and handed over a ten-shilling note. Receiving his change, he returned to his seat. Above the hat line his high forehead was moistly pink.

“I went to see a fellow yesterday that I know,” he said. “In the Civil Service. One of the head bottle washers there.”

“Oh, yes?” Quirke was lighting a cigarette. “What did you go to see him about?”

“To ask him to do a bit of checking on young Corless.”

“And?”

Hackett leaned forward and stubbed out his cigarette, rotating it slowly back and forth in the bottom of the ashtray. He was not a man to be hurried. “Oh, that reminds me, by the way,” he said. “I got the full report back from the boys in forensics.”

“And what did they find?”

Hackett made a contemptuous face. “Bugger all, as usual. They’re a useless shower, so they are. They think Corless’s car might have been pushed rather than driven from the road onto the grass slope, they think it might have had petrol poured over it and set alight, they think there were traces of footprints in the grass but they couldn’t be sure since the Fire Brigade had tramped all over the place in their ten-league boots. Et cetera, et cetera.” If he hadn’t been indoors, he would have spat. “Useless — worse than useless.”

“As a matter of fact, I have some news for you,” Quirke said.

“I hope it’s good,” Hackett replied dourly.

Quirke took out his wallet. “This was delivered to Phoebe in a parcel of laundry.” He unfolded Lisa Smith’s note and laid it on the table. Hackett picked it up and read it, moving his lips silently. Then he put it down on the table again, nodding.

“The Mother of Mercy Laundry rears its ugly head again,” he said.

“I’ve arranged for someone to go up there and make inquiries.”

Hackett looked at him in surprise. “Who?”

“Maisie Coughlan — do you remember her?”

“Maisie that’s working for Dr. Griffin now? Oh, aye, I remember her. I didn’t think she’d be up to setting foot in that place ever again.”

“She took a bit of persuading, all right.”

“How’s she going to manage to get in? That place is like Fort Knox.”

“There’s a nun that she knows there, a decent one, she says, who was nice to her. She’s going to pay her a visit and find out about Lisa Smith. And if she is there, which she must be, I’m going to go up and see about getting her out.”

Hackett formed his lips into a silent whistle. “That won’t be easy.”

“No. But I’m going to do it, all the same.”

Hackett shook his head in amusement. “You’re a fierce man, when you set your mind to a thing,” he said.

They drank their drinks. They could hear the noise of the traffic outside. Now and then a waft of exhaust smoke came in at the open doorway and made its way even into the snug, where they were seated.

“Dr. Griffin is very ill,” Quirke said.

Hackett turned to him. “Is that so?”

“Yes. He’s dying.”

“Ah, is he, now. I’m sorry to hear that. He’s a decent man. That will be a great shock for his wife. For you and your daughter, too. I know”—he coughed—“I know Miss Phoebe was very close to him.”

“Yes, she was. Still is.”

“Does she know he’s dying?”

“She does. I told her.”

Hackett clicked his tongue. “Ah, that’s very sad.”

Quirke stood up, pointing to Hackett’s empty glass. “Can I get you another?”

“I hate drinking on my own.”

“I’ll have something with you.”

“Good man! I’ll take a ball of malt, so.”

Quirke went to the bar and when the barman came he ordered two small Jamesons. He waited for the drinks to be poured, paid for them, set them on the table, and sat down. For a minute neither man touched his glass. Quirke gazed at the whiskey with the air of a man standing on the edge of a cliff and trying to gauge how deep the drop would be. Hackett watched him sidelong, and said nothing. At last Quirke picked up his glass and sniffed at the whiskey. “Here’s to life,” he said.

“While we have it,” Hackett answered.

And they drank.

“So,” Quirke said, leaning back against the plush, “what did your civil servant have to say?”

“A lot, as it happens. It seems our young Mr. Corless was off on a frolic of his own, gathering information about a project that would not be unfamiliar to you and me.”

“Don’t tell me,” Quirke said. “Babies, and what to do with them.”

Hackett nodded. “It seems, according to my informant, that the scheme Judge Garret Griffin and his associates used to run, taking babies from unmarried mothers, or mothers they deemed unfit for motherhood, and smuggling them to America and other parts is still going strong. Only now it’s being carried out on a financial footing.”

“What does that mean?”

“The people running it are making a fortune. Babies are being sold to rich American families for two, three thousand dollars apiece. That’s a lot of money, for a scrap of a child, wouldn’t you say, Doctor?”

In times to come, Quirke thought, people will look back and say, How could it happen? The future never understands the past. He and Hackett had tried to destroy the network that Garret Griffin operated, in collusion with Rose Griffin’s first husband, Josh Crawford, but they had failed, overruled and overborne by the forces ranged against them — the Archbishop, the Knights of St. Patrick, and all the other shadowy figures of power, wealth, and influence who knew how the world should be run and ran it according to their own, unwritten laws. He picked up the whiskey glass. Could he have done more? Should he have persevered, should he have carried the fight into the belly of the beast itself? Pathetic notion. The beast would have belched him out and turned its back and slouched off about its beastly business.

This, at least, is what he told himself; and he was half convinced.

Drink the whiskey, and then order another. That had always been a solution to his doubt and his dread.

He set the glass down on the table.

“Come on,” he said, “let’s go for a walk.”

Hackett looked at him, startled. “You haven’t finished your drink.”

“No,” Quirke said. “I haven’t, have I.”

* * *

They strolled by the river in the gathering dusk, under a lavish mackerel sky. The tide was low. Couples passed them by, hand in hand, the young men with their shirt collars turned up fashionably at the back, the girls in sandals, with cardigans draped over their shoulders. The world is not what it seems, Quirke reflected. However tranquil the scene before us, beneath our feet another world is thrashing in helpless agony. How can we live up here, knowing what goes on down there? How can we know and not know, at the same time? He would never understand it. Had Joe Costigan been there, he would have been able to explain it to him, as he had done before, though the lesson hadn’t sunk in.

They had not spoken since they left the pub. At Capel Street Bridge Hackett stopped, and leaned on the embankment wall, and looked down at the river, a trickle of quicksilver meandering through the mud.

“Do you know who’s in charge of the undertaking now?” he said. “Have a guess.”

Quirke didn’t have to guess. “Costigan,” he said.

“Right first time!” Hackett cried. “Give that man the prize money!” He chuckled. “Yes, the same Joseph Costigan, the fixer of fixers. And he’s getting fat on the proceeds. Oh, fat as a spring pig. He has a new house out in Monkstown, among the quality, and a big American car with two fins on the back of it that would frighten a shark. His eldest daughter recently had a wedding in the Shelbourne that was the talk of the town for weeks.”

“It’s not like him,” Quirke said, “to flaunt his money.”

“They always get careless,” Hackett said complacently, “even the most cautious of them.”

Outside a pub on the other side of the quay, two young men were engaged in a drunken fight. At the sound of it, Hackett turned and contemplated the scene. They swung their arms wildly, capering like monkeys, and cursed and grunted, then grappled clumsily and fell over, rolling on the pavement.

“Where are the Guards when they’re needed?” Hackett muttered sardonically.

Now a third young man appeared, also drunk, and began indiscriminately kicking the pair on the ground. A small crowd was gathering, enjoying the spectacle. Quirke and Hackett walked on.

“Do you ever think of leaving the city,” Quirke asked, “and going back to the country?”

“I do, when I see the likes of that,” Hackett said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the fight. “But May wouldn’t have it. What would she do without Switzers department store and the tram out to Howth on Sunday afternoons?”

They crossed the bridge and turned right and walked back along the other side of the river in the direction they had come from. Why are smoky summer evenings like this always so sad? Quirke wondered.

“So what are we going to do?” he said.

“What are we going to do about what?” Hackett inquired mildly, with lifted eyebrows.

There were times when Quirke felt a deep sympathy for the long-suffering Mrs. Hackett.

“About,” he said patiently, “Leon Corless and what he found out regarding Costigan and his American money. What did your civil servant panjandrum say, exactly?”

“Well now,” Hackett said with a laugh, “the man is a civil servant, so there’s not much chance of him saying anything exactly. It seems Corless had a bee in his bonnet about Costigan and this thing he’s carrying on with the babies. I don’t know how he heard about it in the first place, but when he did he made it his business to record every scrap of information he could lay his hands on.”

“And what became of it, all this information?”

“Ah, that’s the question. If I were to guess, I’d say it’s likely to have been mislaid by now, or it might even have disappeared, mysteriously. Costigan and his pals tend to be thorough, where incriminating documentation is concerned.”

They were silent for some paces; then Quirke spoke. “You know what we’re talking about here,” he said. “We’re talking about the distinct possibility — in fact, the distinct probability — that Joe Costigan was behind the murder of Leon Corless.”

Hackett had begun nodding while Quirke was still speaking.

“Yes,” he said, “that is what we’re talking about, Dr. Quirke.”

They walked on in somber silence. Gulls were wheeling above the river, ghostlike in the twilit air. Why, Quirke wondered, do they go silent as night approaches? Making no sound, they seemed even more eerie.

“I’ve just realized something,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“I’m tired of this country, of its secrets and its lies.”

“That’s easily understood. But tell me this, Doctor: where is there a place with no secrets, and where people all tell the truth?”

Faint wisps of music came to them on the breeze. “It’s the dance band in the ballroom in Jury’s Hotel, over on Dame Street,” Hackett said. “Did you ever go to a dance there, in the day when you were sowing your wild oats? Wild stuff, it is — shoe salesmen and solicitors’ clerks, and nurses from the Mater and the Rotunda, looking for a husband.”

Quirke tried to picture the detective, younger, slimmer, in a sharp suit and a loud tie, gliding round and round the dance floor, in the spangled light and the blare of the band, with a girl in his arms.

“What’s funny?” Hackett asked.

“Oh, nothing,” Quirke said.

He wanted another whiskey. He craved another whiskey. Why hadn’t he finished the one he had?

In fact, he recalled, he had been to one of those dances in Jury’s, a long time ago. And it was a nurse he had gone with, on a date. He tried to remember her. Tall, with dyed black hair. Her hand cool and damp in his. When he stepped on her toes — he was always a terrible dancer — she put on a brave face and said it was all right, that he was not to worry, that she was used to farmers’ sons walking all over her at harvest festival dances, when she went home for the weekend to — to where? Where had home been? Somewhere down the country. That was where home was for most of them, the women he had known in those early days. The nurse that night had explained to him, as they sat at the bar, that for a girl like her there were three choices: be a wife, be a nun, or be a nurse. The first and third options were not mutually exclusive, except that of course you couldn’t be both at the same time; either you worked and looked after your patients, or you stayed at home and looked after your man. The nunnery she hadn’t fancied. In the taxi back to the nurses’ hostel she had let him put his hand on her leg, above her stocking, but that had been the limit.

He thought of Evelyn Blake. I want to swallow you, all of you, into me.

“The thing is,” Hackett said, breaking in on his thoughts, “I’m not sure at all that there’s much we can do. I could bring in Costigan and question him, but on what grounds? And then think of the ructions he’d kick up, afterwards. The Commissioner, by the way, is a Knight of St. Patrick. It’s a thing to keep in mind.”

“Maybe the girl, Lisa Smith, will know something, if we can get her out of that damn place. She was Leon Corless’s girl, after all, and she’s going to have his baby.”

They came to O’Connell Bridge. It was night now, yet still the sky retained a delicate glimmer above the western rooftops.

“Aye, maybe she’ll be able to help us,” Hackett said. He sighed. “I can tell you, Doctor, you’re not the only one tired of this place.”

They had stopped on the corner by the bridge. Crowds were going home after the pictures, and there were long queues at the bus stops. Somewhere unseen a drunk was singing “Boolavogue” in a quavery, tearful wail. “Will you come for a nightcap?” Hackett asked. “There’s a good twenty minutes to go before closing.”

“No, thanks,” Quirke said. “I have an early postmortem in the morning.”

“Right, so. Good night to you, Doctor. Oh, and let me know how that young one, Maisie, gets on at the Mother of Mercy.”

They turned from each other and went their separate ways.

Quirke, on Westmoreland Street, thought again of Evelyn, of her pale smooth flesh and huge dark eyes, of her lovely, mismatched breasts. Was he making a mistake? Probably. He didn’t care. How often again in his life would he be offered love?

* * *

The postmortem proved difficult, he wasn’t sure why. Some were like that. The corpse was that of a girl of nineteen, a shop assistant in Lipton’s, who had been taken ill behind the counter and was rushed to the Holy Family but was dead on arrival. He searched first for the likeliest causes of death, an embolism or a cerebral hemorrhage, but found neither. Sinclair, assisting him, was puzzled too. At last they decided on ventricular fibrillation — the poor girl’s heart had stopped, for reasons unknown to reason.

“Maybe she was crossed in love,” Sinclair said.

Quirke gave him a searching look, to see if this had been meant as a joke. But Sinclair’s face, as usual, gave nothing away.

Afterwards they went up to the canteen and drank mugs of bitter tea sweetened with too much sugar, and sat in silence for a long time. Then Sinclair began to talk of his plan to go to Israel. Quirke was only half listening.

“Israel?” he said vaguely, as if he had never heard of the place. “How long would you stay? Haven’t you used up all your holidays for this year?”

“I’m not talking about a holiday,” Sinclair said, making patterns with the tip of his cigarette in the ash in the ashtray.

“What, then?” Quirke asked, trying to seem interested.

The Tannoy speaker in the corner of the ceiling behind them crackled into life, summoning Quirke to the telephone. He groaned. “Christ,” he said, “what now?”

He stubbed out his cigarette and went down the stairs to his office, taking his time. He didn’t feel like talking to anyone. Then it occurred to him that it might be Evelyn, and he quickened his pace. He shut the office door behind himself and sat down at his desk and picked up the phone. The new girl at Reception hadn’t got the hang of how to transfer calls, and he had to wait for fully a minute before at last he heard Phoebe’s voice. She sounded breathless.

“What is it?” he said. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, nothing,” she said. “I just spoke to Maisie. She went to the laundry.”

“Oh, yes? And what happened?”

“She saw her friendly nun. She didn’t know of any Lisa Smith.” Quirke began to say something, but she interrupted him. “No, listen. There is a Lisa there, but she’s not Lisa Smith.”

“Then who is she?”

There was a rattling noise on the line and he didn’t catch her answer, and had to ask her to repeat it.

“Her name is Costigan,” Phoebe said. “Elizabeth Costigan.”