She didn’t ask the obvious question, which was why then had I been meeting him alone in the middle of the night, and I wasn’t sure I knew the answer to that myself any more. Instead her eyes still seemed to be searching me for signs that I was lying about my relationship with her brother.
For now, it seemed I had passed the test.
‘You’d better come in,’ she said.
Alice stepped out of the archway and brushed past me to the door, taking tiny steps like a dancer, like her shoes didn’t quite fit. Something about her reminded me of the story of the little mermaid, whose every step on land felt like she was laying her bare feet on broken glass. I recalled Fitzgerald’s description of her too. Face like a mask. It was that all right.
She could have been anyone. Fitzgerald had told me Alice had some kind of career as an art critic, but she looked vaguely out of place in the more laid-back environs of Temple Bar, and I wondered if it had been her choice to live here or Felix’s. His, I could only imagine.
She didn’t look at me. Just fished out a key from her pocket, took a couple of tries to get it into the lock (was I making her nervous?), and finally pushed open the door and stepped inside to a narrow hallway with a flight of stairs at the far end leading up. Without a word she began hurrying up them, taking off her coat and tossing it over the banister as she did so, and I had no choice but to step inside, close the door and follow.
At the top of the stairs the house opened out into one wide-open space with high windows at either end looking out on other houses and other windows with squashed slivers of sky between them. Floorboards and bare brick walls alike were painted white, and there was little furniture save for a few chairs, a couch, and one long refectory table of a sort monks might sit at, scattered with books and prints. There were no pictures hanging anywhere, nothing personal, only a single plain calendar covered with handwriting on the wall behind the long table. In fact I don’t think I’d ever been in a house with less decoration.
Apart from mine.
‘You want a drink?’ said Alice with an unexpected brightness, breaking my concentration. ‘I was going to have a brandy.’
She must have seen some apprehension in my face.
‘Don’t panic,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to get drunk and start weeping all over you. I always have a drink at this time of day. Helps concentrate the mind.’
‘In that case, I’ll join you,’ I said, and I watched as she walked over to the table, moving aside some books, lifting a bottle and two glasses and pouring.
I hate brandy, it burns in the throat, but what was I going to do? Ask her to go and fetch me a decent malt whiskey instead?
‘Sit down, won’t you?’ she said over her shoulder, and I did, but I felt awkward. Was this the point when I was meant to say how sorry I was? I’d never been good at that.
Breaking the news to someone that their loved one had died was different, there was a point to such exchanges, some focus to hone in on. This just felt like ritual, and I couldn’t do it.
‘How did you find out?’ I said clumsily instead as she carried back the drinks, hands steady as a bomb disposal expert, and passed one to me before taking a chair opposite.
‘About Felix?’
What else?
‘There was a knock about six. I left it for Felix to answer. He was always up first, he liked the mornings, and I’d come in late last night. I was tired. But the knocking went on and on. Eventually I had to go down and answer it. It was a policeman. He asked me if I was Alice Berg. The rest,’ she smiled and took a sip of her drink, ‘is history. His story, literally. Even if we have now come to The End.’ She gave a faint testing smile. ‘Have I offended you?’ But she didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Forgive me if I have. That’s what Felix and I were like. Tough as stones. We weren’t sentimental. That was always our way since we were children. No point changing now. There is nothing so dark that it can’t be laughed at, wouldn’t you agree? Nothing so terrible that it can’t be mocked.’
‘It’s a good creed.’
‘I wouldn’t call it a creed,’ she said with a shrug. ‘But we’d been through a lot, my brother and I. We realised long ago that there was nothing life could throw at us that we couldn’t overcome, that we couldn’t defeat. We faced everything together. Until last night. I didn’t even realise he was going out, you know. I didn’t go out myself until after nine and he was still in the house then. He said goodnight. Everything was ordinary.’
I wanted to ask where she’d gone and what time she’d got back, then realised I was thinking like an investigator again, not the concerned bystander I was meant to be. I’d have to watch myself. As it was, Alice saved me from wondering what to say next anyway.
‘The policewoman, the Chief Superintendent, told me it was quick at least,’ she said.
That’s what the police always say to the victim’s family, whether it’s true or not, because that’s what any victim’s family wants to hear. Quick, however, can be a grimly relative concept when it comes to death. In Felix’s case, it probably had been. According to Fitzgerald, Felix had been shot through the eye, and there was a powder burn on the eye socket showing that the gun had been placed against the skin when it was fired. It would have been quick enough.
Besides, I figured Alice wouldn’t be up for a lecture on estimating survival rates for a brain with a bullet in it, so I contented myself with nodding dumb agreement.
‘At least that’s something,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t have wanted him to suffer. What I don’t understand is why you were there meeting a man you insist you didn’t even know.’
‘Did the police not tell you anything?’
‘They said something about . . . you wanted to tell him something, is that right?’
She didn’t exactly sound convinced.
Put like that, who would be?
‘It was the other way round,’ I said. ‘He wanted to talk to me. He called me last night. He said’ – I steeled myself for the hard part – ‘that someone was trying to kill him.’
I was relieved that the words sounded nowhere near as implausible as I’d feared.
‘He said the same thing to me,’ she admitted quietly. ‘My response was to reassure him that everything was fine, that he had nothing to worry about. I thought he was imagining things. Felix could be . . . sensitive. Then the police knock on the door and tell me he’s dead.’
‘And now you think maybe he’d been telling the truth all along?’
‘And I hadn’t listened,’ she said. ‘Yes.’
She stared at the light on the wall, dancing, fractured.
‘Do you have any idea why someone would want to kill him?’ I asked tentatively.
Her face remained unreadable.
‘Wait here,’ she said, and she rose and went to the stairs.
I heard her footsteps crossing the bare floorboards above my head from one side of the room to the other and then back again. She had something in her hands, I saw when she returned. A clear plastic folder. She handed it to me and sat down to watch as I opened it.
I shook out the sheets of paper inside on to the couch.
They were press clippings dating back to January, when the Marxman killings began, all variations on a theme.
Victim Slain In City Street.
Marxman Claims Another Victim.
No Witnesses As Marxman Evades Police Again.
Newspapers rarely try to break bad news gently. In each report, the name of the street where the victim had died had been underlined in stark red ink. There were psychological profiles of the killer too, from some of the quality newspapers, and magazine cuttings, one from one of the Sundays speculating that the killer was a professional hitman who had gone insane and was now doing the job for pleasure rather than money – like it was better to kill as a profession rather than a hobby; like hitmen never took the same pleasure from their work as freelance killers; like it made any difference to the victims or their families. And here too, at the bottom o
f the pile, were my own articles from the American magazine, stapled together in order.
‘This is quite a collection,’ I said. ‘What did the police make of it?’
‘They haven’t seen it.’
‘You didn’t show it to them?’
‘They didn’t ask,’ said Alice. She looked puzzled. ‘I suppose I wasn’t thinking too clearly. I was just thinking about Felix . . .’ She trailed off.
‘You’re showing them to me,’ I pointed out.
‘I’m trying to be honest with you. I have nothing to lose. Felix was obsessed by the killings, right from the start. He taped the news programmes whenever there was another killing and played them back constantly. Bought all the newspapers. Trawled the Net for details. He was always interested in crime, in murder, from a little boy. He read widely about the subject. He said the way to understand a city was to look at how the people in it killed one another. Have you ever heard of Weegee?’
I shook my head.
‘He was a photographer. Austrian, originally. His real name was Usher Fellig. He worked in Manhattan in the 1930s for the news agencies, bringing back pictures of things that happened in the city each night, murders mainly. He had a police radio in his car so that he could get to the scene at the same time as the police. Quicker sometimes. Felix was a great admirer of his work. He said that was the way to understand a city. That was where its true nature could be appreciated. And he always wanted to understand what life in the city was about. But with these killings there was something different. He was just consumed by them, and the longer they went on, the more obsessed he became.’
‘How did you feel about that?’
‘I was worried for him. Felix was not’ – she rummaged for the right word – ‘always well. I feared he might be pushing himself too hard, working too much; sometimes he rarely slept for weeks on end. I thought he might have a breakdown. He’d had one before. At the time I thought he’d never recover. I feared this was tipping him over the edge again, and I didn’t want to indulge that side of him. I didn’t want to encourage it. I ignored it. But—’
I finished the sentence for her. ‘The Marxman didn’t.’
She nodded numbly.
‘And now you think he knew something and that’s why he was killed? Did he ever say straight out that he had information about what was happening?’
‘No.’
‘Could he have told someone else?’
‘Felix wasn’t like that. He hardly knew anyone.’
‘There must have been others. Friends, lovers, other photographers. If I could talk to them, or if the police could—’
‘There was no one.’
‘Not even a girlfriend?’
‘We had each other. It was all we needed,’ Alice insisted flatly. ‘That’s why I don’t understand why he called you. You say you’d never met before. How can you even be sure that it was my brother?’
‘How can I be sure it was him who called?’ I said. ‘I guess I can’t be. Not totally. I’d never spoken to him before. All I got was a call to my apartment last night. I went to the lighthouse like the caller asked. I waited. I was cold. He didn’t show. I was irritated. Thought he’d been wasting my time. I was about to give up and leave when I found him.’
‘His body,’ she said, whispering the word with something near embarrassment.
‘I had no reason to doubt it was him I was talking to,’ I said. ‘If you have a tape somewhere of his voice, perhaps I could . . .’ But she was shaking her head already, whether because she didn’t have a tape or because she didn’t want me to hear it, I couldn’t tell. ‘What makes you think,’ I said carefully, ‘that it mightn’t have been your brother who called me?’
‘Oh, nothing at all,’ she said with sudden agitation. ‘Nothing except that it doesn’t make any kind of sense, that’s all. Felix never said anything to me about meeting you.’
‘I got the idea it was something he wanted to keep to himself.’
‘Look.’ She put her glass down heavily and spoke as if explaining to an idiot how a light switch worked. ‘As I told you already, Felix didn’t keep anything to himself. He didn’t have a private life. A secret life. I did everything for him. Everything. I kept this house going. I made all his phone calls. Handled all his money. I made the deals; I chased up all the payments from dealers, buyers, galleries; I paid all the bills, made sure he had enough cash in his wallet when he went out. I was the one who knew where everything was when it was needed. I was the one who made his appointments. All of them.’ She gestured towards the calendar I’d seen earlier on the wall. ‘Sometimes I practically had to write down what he had to do each day on the back of his hand so he wouldn’t forget. He was an artist, a very great one I happen to believe, so I never objected. But he couldn’t do a thing without me. If he needed to be somewhere, it was me who booked the flights, made all the hotel reservations; if I couldn’t be there with him, I made sure he had lists of all the places he needed to go, places to eat. That was just the way things were. Felix and I were more than just brother and sister. We were two parts of the same person. The idea that there was something he wasn’t telling me . . . something he could only discuss with you . . . well, it’s nonsense.’
And her voice made it clear this wasn’t something she intended discussing further.
‘You know you’ll have to tell the police about all this?’ I said to change the subject, indicating the cuttings that were now scattered across the couch. ‘About Felix’s obsession?’
‘I couldn’t face them again,’ she said. ‘Going down to identify his body was bad enough. I just had to tell myself that it wasn’t him, that he’d gone, this was only a body. I could bear it that way. I know it’s a lot to ask, but would you do it for me? Just take all this stuff with you. I don’t want it in the house. Give it to the police.’
‘If that’s what you want—’
‘It is.’
I reached out and began to gather Felix’s collection together, and as I did so something slipped between the sheets and fluttered to the ground.
I bent to pick it up.
It was a photograph, not a print like those scattered across the refectory table, but an ordinary snapshot showing . . . yes, the lighthouse in Howth. It was taken from quite far away, but it was just about possible to see that there was a figure standing before the red door.
The figure of a man.
‘What’s that?’
‘It fell out of Felix’s papers,’ I said, and handed it to her.
‘Did he take this?’
‘He couldn’t have done,’ she said firmly. ‘This is just an ordinary Polaroid. You can tell by looking at it. It comes from one of those cameras where each print comes out after you’ve taken it. Felix didn’t have a camera like that. And anyway—’
‘What?’
‘I think this is Felix. It’s hard to tell, it’s so far away, but it looks like him. There, you can see a glint on the face like glasses. It couldn’t be a recent shot, though. He hadn’t worn his hair long like that since he went to the States.’
‘You ever see the picture before?’
She shook her head.
So where did Felix get it?
Chapter Eight
One thing I knew. If I was going to get anywhere with this, I needed to find out more about Felix. Find out anything about him. And I knew just where to start.
Thaddeus Burke knew everything.
Which was to say, everything that was worth knowing. He was an American too, which engendered a certain solidarity in a town that wasn’t always sympathetic to Americans, and a former Marine to boot, not to mention a committed communist – a fact he’d wisely kept hidden from his commanding officers for over thirty years, not least through three tours of duty in Vietnam, where he’d been decorated for valour and mentioned in numerous dispatches. All of which I only knew because his former colleagues had whispered the details to me one night when we were drinking and he was out of earshot, not a word about hi
s military career ever having passed his lips in my presence.
He got his name from his father – most people did – a poor man who’d left Dublin sometime in the early 1940s for New York and somehow managed to only get poorer and drink more than he’d ever done back home, leaving his son with nothing to remember him by except a bunch of old tales about the old town – which was how a black former Marine (his mother had come from Louisiana originally and had washed up in her turn on the Lower East Side, where she met Thaddeus’s father) wound up in Dublin in his fifties after bagging an honourable discharge and casting off his former life like a snake shedding its skin.
Here he now ran a precarious business in a second-hand bookstore down by the quays, together with some bedraggled stray cat which had dragged itself in the back door one night when it was raining hard and which he called Hare, hence the name of the store: Burke and Hare’s, so-called, he told me, after a pair of infamous body-snatchers of the nineteenth century.
Whether Burke ever sold any books was still a matter of debate. He had fewer customers than a teetotal bar, which was what left him so much time for reading anything and everything he could get his hands on, and that seemed to be just the way he liked it. The only times I ever saw him we were generally sitting playing poker and drinking his coffee or, if I was lucky, his Scotch; someone else’s Scotch always tastes better. He seemed to pick up stray people the way he picked up the cat, or perhaps the way other people collect stamps or first editions or animal skulls, like we were specimens. He was a sucker for a hard-luck story and never seemed to turn away anyone who just wanted to talk or waste his time.
‘Time I got,’ he used to say. ‘Money I not.’
And wasn’t likely to get any either, since he specialised in stocking books the other stores didn’t bother to carry, mainly because no one wanted to read them, together with more tracts of communist history and theory than even Fidel Castro would’ve ever wanted to read. And I rarely saw Burke reading them either. It meant he had plenty of time for poker, mind, and the place was as empty as usual when I finally arrived that afternoon after Alice’s.
The Dark Eye (The Saxon & Fitzgerald Mysteries Book 2) Page 4
