Even the Dead

by Benjamin Black

  She took his panama hat and led him through the house, along the absurdly ornate hallway.

  “How are you getting on, Maisie?” he asked.

  “Oh, I’m getting on grand, Doctor,” she said. “Dr. Griffin is a lovely man.”

  The pointed avoidance of Rose’s name made Quirke smile to himself; he could guess what Maisie thought of the mistress of the house.

  “Here,” he said, “I brought you something.” He handed her a packet of twenty Player’s. “You’re not to say I gave them to you, mind. You shouldn’t be smoking at all.”

  Maisie blushed and grinned and slipped the cigarettes into the pocket of her apron.

  “You have me spoiled, so you have, Dr. Quirke.”

  Maisie’s child, hers and her own father’s, had been born in the Mother of Mercy Laundry and immediately taken away from her and sent she never knew where—to America, probably, for adoption by a Catholic family there. Quirke supposed it had been for the best. How would she have survived in the world, unmarried and with a child to look after, a child that was the product of an act of incest? Yet he wondered what she felt, now, and if she pined still for her lost infant.

  Rose was in the conservatory that gave onto the extensive back garden. She was sitting at a wrought-iron table, in front of a miniature palm tree. She had changed into loose linen trousers and a linen shirt. She had a tall glass before her with ice cubes and a sprig of something green standing in it. “I made myself a mint julep,” she said, “just for old times’ sake. You want to join me, Quirke?”

  “Thanks,” Quirke said, “but I think not. Maybe something cool, though.” He turned to Maisie. “A glass of tonic water would be good. Plenty of ice, please, Maisie.”

  “Right you are, Doctor,” Maisie said. “I won’t be a tick.”

  “Pull up a chair and sit down,” Rose said. “You look hot, all right.” There was a book lying on the table. “Ezra Pound,” she said, giving him a dry glance. She picked up the book and leafed through it. “Cantos, he calls this stuff. I guess they’re poems. I don’t understand them.”

  “I don’t think anyone does,” Quirke said. “I suspect they’re not meant to be understood. Think of them as music.”

  Rose shrugged, and tossed the book back onto the table. “Seems a lot of nonsense to me. No wonder they locked him up in a loony bin. And he sure doesn’t think much of the Jews.”

  He picked up the book and leafed through the pages, stopped at one, and read aloud:

  “What thou lovest well remains

  the rest is dross

  What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee

  What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage.”

  “Nice,” Rose said, with a skeptical look. “You believe that kind of thing, Quirke? You believe anything remains, when we’re gone?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Children, maybe?”

  “Hmm. I haven’t got any of them, so I wouldn’t know.”

  “Sorry, Rose.”

  “For what? I’m not. I didn’t want them—too selfish.”

  Quirke lit a cigarette. The air inside these glass walls was warm and sluggish; he could feel it on his lips and on his eyelids, a heavy, moist lacquer.

  “Where’s Mal?” he asked.

  Rose waved a hand vaguely in the direction of the garden beyond the many panes of glass. “Oh, somewhere off among his beloved flowers. Sometime soon, I think, he’s going to turn into a plant himself.”

  Maisie came back with Quirke’s drink. When she leaned down to set his glass on the table he caught a whiff of tobacco smoke. He thanked her, and she smirked and bit her lip and went away again. Rose watched her go. “That girl,” she said, “was not born to be a domestic servant.”

  “Is anyone?” Quirke said.

  She gave him a hard look. “You’re not going to get all political on me, are you, Quirke?” she said. “The rights of the downtrodden masses and all that stuff?”

  “No, Rose,” Quirke said, smiling, “I wouldn’t dare to lecture you.”

  “Good.” She took a sip of her drink and made a face. “Doesn’t taste the same here, somehow,” she said. “You’ve got to be sitting by the bayou, listening to the frogs and the crickets and those old hound dogs a-howling.”

  “Where exactly was it you were born, Rose?” Quirke asked. It was a thing he had never thought to ask her before.

  “Oh, here and there. I don’t much like to think about those old times. My daddy was a drunk, and my mother—well, the less said about her, the better.”

  “Do you miss it, America?”

  “Do I miss it?” She thought about that for a while. “I guess I do. It’s a crazy country, the folks are mad as mules, but it’s exciting. I thought I’d had enough of excitement, which is why I came here.”

  “And now you’re bored?”

  She laughed, and leaned over and made a playful slap at him. “You’re a mischief-maker, you know that, Quirke? You say these things to me in that butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth voice, but I know what you’re up to, I know you’re trying to get me to compromise myself with some injudicious remarks about this green and pleasant land of yours.”

  “That’s Blake,” Quirke said, “and he was talking about an altogether different land from this one.”

  “Oh, you’re so smart, ain’t you,” she said, making another playful slap at him. Then she drifted into silence again, and looked out at the garden. “I wish you hadn’t left us so abruptly, Quirke,” she said. “I liked having you here. So did Mal—Mal especially. He’s real fond of you, you know.” She looked at him. “Or do you?”

  His glance veered quickly away from her. “I don’t think I ever understood him,” he said. “And I don’t think he understood me, either.”

  “Oh, he understands you, Quirke. He recognizes that sadness in you, that—oh, that nameless longing.” She smiled at him, amused and mocking. “He shares some of it himself. Don’t you see that?”

  Quirke shifted uneasily on the metal chair. He could feel the perspiration on his back, between his shoulder blades. He had taken off his jacket but he was still too hot. “I don’t know, Rose,” he said. “I’m no good with this sort of thing. I don’t understand myself, much less others. Surely you’ve realized that by now.”

  “Well, you’ve told me, often enough. So often, in fact, that I wonder if it’s not just a way of assuring yourself that you don’t need to make an effort. Making an effort with people is so tedious, wouldn’t you say, Quirke?”

  She put her head to one side and gazed at him wide-eyed, smiling. Then abruptly she smacked her palms on the table and stood up. “Let’s go find Malachy,” she said. “I told him you were coming.”

  They walked out into the day. After the oppressive air of the glassed-in room, the sky seemed higher than usual and of a richer blue, speckled with motionless small white clouds. The grass underfoot, burnished by a light that seemed not sunlight, was more silvery than green. Birds unseen whistled in the bushes all around.

  “Nature,” Rose said gloomily. “Doesn’t it get you down?”

  They found Mal standing in the midst of a clump of exotic-looking shrubs hung with great bundles of purple blossoms. He was wearing his lamp-shade hat, a khaki shirt, and corduroy trousers balding at the knees.

  “Oh, hello, Quirke,” he said, looking surprised. “Back again?”

  “I told you he was coming, honey,” Rose said. “For lunch? Remember?”

  “Oh, yes, yes, that’s right, so you did.” He smiled at Quirke apologetically. “I’m so forgetful, these days.”

  “How are you, Mal?” Quirke said.

  “I’m fine, I’m fine. You look well too, if a little hot.”

  “I decided to walk out from town. This sun is a killer—you should be careful.”

  Mal smiled again, wistfully, and glanced at his wife. “Yes, I should, I should take care.”

  “Well,” Rose said, “I’m going to leave you two fine gentlemen to your manly conversi
ngs, while I go and check on what that girl has fixed on to burn for our lunch.”

  The two men watched her walk away. “Poor Rose,” Mal said, sighing.

  Quirke glanced at him sharply. “What’s wrong?” he said.

  “What?” Mal’s gaze had a groping quality, as if his shortsightedness had suddenly grown worse. “Oh, I feel she has so much to—so much to put up with.”

  “Such as?”

  Mal chuckled. “Such as me, for a start!”

  He put a pair of secateurs he had been holding into the breast pocket of his shirt and took off his gardening gloves. “Did you get something to drink?” he asked.

  “Yes. I’m fine. I hope Rose really did tell you I was coming, did she?”

  “Oh, she did, she did. As I said, I forgot. Sorry, does that seem rude, to forget you were expected? Everything these days is just—” He lifted his hands in a helpless gesture and let them fall again. “Come,” he said, “let’s sit. You’re right, the sun is tiring.”

  They crossed the lawn to where there was a wooden bench, the legs of which were overgrown with ivy. It was shady here, a cool, greenish spot. They sat down. Mal took off his spectacles and began to polish them with the flap of his shirt.

  “The garden looks well,” Quirke said. “You’ve done a lot with it.”

  “Yes, it’s not too bad. We have some nice things, despite our Mr. Casey’s best efforts to thwart me and kill off everything that can’t be eaten. I’m putting in ornamental grasses now. They’re much undervalued, grasses.” He smiled, ducking his head shyly. “But all this bores you, I know.”

  “It’s just my ignorance,” Quirke said. “I can’t tell one flower from another.”

  “Oh, you’d soon learn. It’s not so difficult.” He paused, looking about at the plants and the bushes with vague satisfaction. “I planted some new roses, too. I don’t think they’ll blossom this year—it’s too late in the season already.” He nodded slowly. “It all goes so quickly.”

  Quirke was watching him. “What is it, Mal?” he said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Wrong?”

  “Rose came in this morning to summon me here. It was for a reason, wasn’t it?”

  For a long moment Mal said nothing, and seemed almost not to have heard. Then he put his glasses on again and squinted at the sky, as if searching for something up there, in the blue, among those little floating cloudlets. “Fact is, Quirke,” he said, “I’m not well.”

  How strange it was, Quirke thought, the way certain things, the most momentous, seemed to come not as something new and unexpected but as mere confirmations of things already known. “Tell me,” he said.

  Mal was still looking at the sky. “Cancer,” he said. “The pancreas.”

  “I see.” Quirke let go a long, falling breath. “When did you hear?”

  “The other day. I had the tests done last week.”

  “How bad is it?”

  Mal smiled. “It’s in the pancreas,” he said. “What do you think?”

  “Does Rose know?”

  “Of course. She’s been very good. No tears, no histrionics—well, you know Rose.”

  Not right now, Quirke thought; right now I don’t know anything.

  “We’re too young for this, Mal,” he said. “It’s too soon.”

  “Yes, well, it always is, I imagine. When we were student doctors, in Boston all those years ago, I treated an old fellow for something or other, I can’t remember what. Something trivial, an ingrown toenail, that kind of thing. He told me he was ninety-seven. ‘You know, young man,’ he said to me, ‘people say, “Oh, I wouldn’t want to live to be your age, to be ninety-seven,” but all that changes when they get to be ninety-six.’”

  They rose from the bench and walked back together towards the house. They were silent; then Quirke, to be saying something, spoke of Leon Corless’s death and Phoebe’s strange encounter with Lisa Smith. He could see Mal was only half attending. He had an air about him of soft, slightly dazed amazement; he was like a man who after a long and dreamless sleep awakes to find himself in a world he doesn’t recognize.

  “Is Phoebe all right?” Mal asked.

  “She’s concerned, that’s all.”

  Mal nodded. “It must be upsetting for her, the young woman disappearing like that. Phoebe is a good girl. She cares about people, always did. Of course, it gets her into trouble.”

  Quirke hesitated. “Have you told her—?”

  “No, not yet. I’ve so many things to think about, to consider. I should make a list. But I will tell her.”

  “I could do it for you, if you like.”

  “No, thank you, Quirke. I’ll do it myself, soon.” He paused. “It’s all so—so new.”

  They were approaching the conservatory. They could see Rose inside, an indistinct figure behind the shadowy reflections on the glass. They stopped.

  “What’s it like, Mal?” Quirke said. “I mean—knowing.”

  Mal smiled gently. “Quirke, you’re the only person I can think of who’d have the nerve to ask such a question.”

  “I’m sorry, I—”

  “Don’t apologize. It’s what everyone wants to know.” He looked up at the sky yet again, thinking. “It’s strange,” he said. “I haven’t got used to it yet. I feel a kind of—a kind of lightness, as if everything has just fallen away. There’s only me, now, facing myself. Does that make sense? I feel almost relieved. It’s all suddenly simple.”

  “You have religion. That must help.”

  “No, no. That’s one of the things that have fallen away. Oh, I suppose I still believe, in some fashion. I’m sure something of me will go on, somehow, I’m sure I won’t be entirely annihilated. But all the old stories, God and Saint Peter and the pearly gates, all that stuff, that’s gone.”

  They were silent, standing there on the grass. Quirke noticed how the air seemed to have dimmed, though the sun shone as brightly as ever; it was as if a speck of ink had been dropped into a bowl of clear water.

  “This poor chap who died,” Mal said. “What did you say his name was? Corless?”

  “Yes. Leon Corless. Sam Corless’s son.”

  “The politician? Ah. And you think there was foul play involved?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “It sounds like a murky business,” Mal said. “I presume your friend Inspector Hackett is investigating? And you’ll be helping him, of course.” He smiled. “I must say, you didn’t take long to get back into the swim.”

  “You know I’m grateful to you and Rose for putting me up for so long—and for putting up with me for so long, too.”

  “Of course, I know that,” Mal said. He paused, seeming to cast about for words. “We’ve had our difficulties, over the years, you and I, Quirke. Some things I did wrong, some very bad things, and I regret them now, bitterly. I hope you understand that.”

  Quirke looked away. Years ago Mal had tried to shield his father from the consequences of his wrongdoings, wrongdoings that Quirke had been instrumental in exposing, or that he had attempted to expose. It was all still there in Quirke, the outrage, the frustrated anger, the unexpressed recriminations, but what did any of that matter, now? Mal and he had grown up as brothers, with the jumble of emotions that brotherhood entailed. From here on they would have to find a new accommodation with each other; they wouldn’t have much time in which to do it.

  As they went through the French doors, into the conservatory, Mal stepped to one side and put a hand on Quirke’s shoulder to let him go ahead, and for a moment Quirke saw himself stumble, not actually, but inwardly.

  “Well, boys?” Rose said with forced gaiety, rising from the table, glass in hand. “Have you been having a heart-to-heart?”

  “Let’s go and eat our lunch,” Mal said. “I’m hungry, all of a sudden.”

  * * *

  They ate in the small dining room at the back of the house, overlooking the garden. The wallpaper was gold flock with dark blue stripes, and the domed ceiling was painted wi
th a scene of gods and garlanded maidens and frolicking cherubs that always set Quirke’s head spinning when he made the mistake of looking up at it. Maisie served them vichyssoise and, after that, smoked salmon garnished with slices of cucumber, and potato salad on the side. There was a bottle of dry Riesling in a bucket of ice. Mal, Quirke noticed, wasn’t drinking. He spoke of his sweet peas and his flowering shrubs, and Rose teased him in a bright, brittle tone, determinedly smiling, and avoiding Quirke’s eyes.

  After a lull in the conversation, if it could be called a conversation, Mal said to Rose, “Did you know Quirke is off on another of his investigations?”

  “Oh, yes?” Rose said, turning to Quirke with that steely smile. She had drunk three glasses of wine in quick succession and there was a giddy glitter in her eye. “Is that why you left us so suddenly—the call of the chase?”

  “A young man was killed in a car crash, in the Phoenix Park,” Mal said. “The Guards suspect foul play.”

  “How awful,” Rose exclaimed. She turned to Quirke again. “Why, you must be so excited. Though I always find it peculiar, that phrase: ‘foul play.’ Sounds like something you’d have to give a kid a whipping for.”

  Quirke knew enough to be wary of Rose when she was like this, drinking too fast and putting on her southern drawl.

  “Phoebe is involved too, in a sort of way,” Mal said.

  Rose was still concentrating on Quirke. “Is that so?” she said. “That girl sure is your daughter, Quirke. What has she done to get herself mixed up in the murder of a young man—I take it murder is what we’re speaking of here?”

  Quirke told her about Lisa Smith, and how Phoebe had taken her to the house in Ballytubber. Rose widened her eyes exaggeratedly. “Well, I declare!” she said. “I do think she might have checked with us before she started offering a stranger the hospitality of our vacation home.”

  “Maybe you’ve forgotten, my dear,” Mal said quietly, “I’ve left the Ballytubber place to Phoebe, so it’s almost hers.”

  “Oh, wonderful,” Rose said sourly. “Now we’re going to discuss wills, are we?”

  Mal reached out and laid a hand on hers. She twitched, and seemed about to snatch her hand away, but didn’t.