Even the Dead

by Benjamin Black

  They descended the stairs, their heels ringing on the marble steps.

  “All these buildings,” Hackett remarked, “they remind me of hospitals. I suppose you wouldn’t have the same impression, since you work in a real hospital.”

  They reached the ground floor. The girl behind the hatch smiled at them; she looked like a framed snapshot of herself.

  Outside, the heat was pounding down. Wallace had got out of the car and was standing in the shade, having a smoke. When he saw them approaching, he dropped the cigarette hastily and trod on it. He opened the back door and Hackett climbed in, while Quirke went round to the other side. The upholstery of the seats was hot to the touch.

  Wallace got behind the wheel and started the engine. Hackett leaned forward and tapped Garda Wallace on the shoulder. “Open them air vents, will you?” he said. “We’re suffocating back here.” They nosed their way out through the narrow gate and onto Merrion Street.

  “Well,” Quirke said, “what did you make of that?”

  Hackett didn’t answer at first. Quirke noticed again his way of sitting in a car, upright, with his back straight and his hands on his knees, like a child being taken for a treat.

  “I’ll tell you what I think,” he said at length. “I think we’re getting into a sticky place with the powers that be.”

  “Again?” Quirke said drily, with a faint smile.

  * * *

  Hackett got out at Pearse Street and told Wallace to drive Quirke on to the hospital. Hackett said he would telephone as soon as he got a report from the two detectives he had sent with a search warrant to the house in Rathmines. Then he strolled into the station with his hat on the back of his head, and Wallace swung the big car away from the curb, into the afternoon traffic.

  Quirke, in the back seat, watched the simmering streets roll past. A double-decker bus had broken down on O’Connell Bridge, and even though Wallace put the siren on, it still took them a good ten minutes to negotiate their way through the jam of cars and lorries and horse-drawn drays. It was low tide, and the river was a soupy trickle between two banks of shining blue mud. The stench from the water made Quirke cover his nose and breathe through his mouth, but it did little to block out the noxious fumes. At last they were free of the snarl-up, and sped along O’Connell Street and on to Parnell Square.

  “What’s he like to work for, the Inspector?” Quirke asked.

  The Guard’s eyes sought his in the rearview mirror. “Oh, he’s a fair man,” he said, “if you don’t cross him.”

  “And what happens if you do cross him?”

  The young man chuckled. “You don’t, that’s the thing.”

  “Right,” Quirke said. “Right.”

  When he got to the hospital, he was told that Sinclair had used some of his time in lieu and gone off for the afternoon. He started to become angry, but checked himself. Why shouldn’t Sinclair take an afternoon off? It was useless—and worse than useless, it was childishly vindictive—to look so eagerly for grievances to hold against his assistant.

  He went into his office, hung his hat on the stand, and sat down at the desk. There was paperwork to do, but he couldn’t face it. He felt that tickle along his spine that was, he knew, the harbinger of boredom. In the ordinary run of things, being bored was one of Quirke’s keenest fears. He opened the bottom drawer of his desk, where in former times he kept a naggin of whiskey, for emergencies, which used to occur with remarkable regularity. The drawer was empty. Had he thrown away the last bottle? He couldn’t remember. He was sorry it wasn’t there; he liked to have a tot of booze on hand, just for the comfort of it, even if he had no intention of drinking it.

  He had been reduced to reading an article, in an old copy of the Lancet, on new research into the classification of blood groups when Hackett rang. His men had poked Abercrombie out of his lair and made him let them into the house in Rathmines. They had gone through all the flats and found no trace of Lisa Smith. One of the flats was vacant and had been for a long time, according to Abercrombie. They had searched it anyway, but found nothing. Hackett had called Phoebe at Dr. Blake’s office and given her his men’s description of the empty flat, and she had said it sounded like the one that Lisa Smith had brought her to. If it was the same flat, someone had scrubbed it of all traces of the missing girl, in the same way that they had cleared out the house in Ballytubber.

  “What do you think, Doctor?” Hackett asked.

  Quirke thought that the affair of Lisa Smith was looking blacker with each hour that passed. He felt something tighten in the pit of his stomach, like a hand forming itself into a fist.

  13

  Late in the afternoon Quirke took a taxi to Fitzwilliam Square. He had thought he would meet Phoebe after work and take her for a drink; that, at least, was what he told himself. It was just short of five-thirty when he got there, and he decided to wait, loitering by the railings, under the trees that to him always smelled, mysteriously, of cat piss. The latening sun on the fronts of the houses made them seem assembled out of ingots of baked gold. He still had a headache, and he fingered gingerly the place on the side of his skull under which the lesion in his brain was located. It was, he realized, exactly the same area where Leon Corless had been struck on the head. Coincidence. Quirke didn’t like coincidences; they seemed to him flaws in the fabric of the world, and, as far as he was concerned, none of them was ever happy.

  At a few minutes after half past, when Phoebe appeared, Dr. Blake was with her. The two women came down the steps from the house, not speaking, but certainly together. His heart had set up a dull, slow thumping. Dr. Blake wore a white sleeveless dress with a design of crimson flowers strewn diagonally across it. The effect, at this distance, was dramatic and unsettling; the flowers looked like an untidy splash of blood.

  He hung back in the gloom under the trees. Should he cross the road and speak to them, and if not, why not? They were obviously going somewhere together, down to the Shelbourne, maybe. Against the rich gold of the evening sunlight, and in contrast to the encrimsoned woman beside her, Phoebe in her neat black dress with the white collar looked more nunlike than ever.

  Just when he had decided to let them go on ungreeted, Phoebe spotted him, and came towards him across the road. She peered at him, and laughed.

  “What are you doing,” she said, “lurking there in the shadows? You look like somebody up to no good.”

  “I was passing by,” he lied. Dr. Blake was waiting on the other side of the street. “I thought I’d stop and say hello, but I see you and the good doctor are off somewhere.”

  “We’re not. She was just walking home with me. Her car is in a garage behind Herbert Place, being repaired.”

  He hesitated; he didn’t know what to say, didn’t know what he wanted to do. His heart was still going at that ridiculous, rumbling pace.

  “You heard what Hackett’s people had to say about the house in Rathmines?” he said.

  “Yes, he called me. They found no trace of Lisa Smith. I can’t understand it.”

  He went with her back across the road.

  “Hello, Dr. Blake,” he said.

  She said nothing, only gazed at him with that peculiar, penetrating light in her huge dark eyes.

  “I was telling him,” Phoebe said, “that your car is in the garage.”

  “Yes,” the woman said, “it was, it seems, very ill but now is cured.”

  She didn’t smile, yet managed to show her amusement, not only at the predicament of her motorcar, but also, somehow, at the world’s absurdity in general.

  “Shall we walk down together?” Phoebe said.

  They set off along the square. Quirke found himself in the middle, with the women on either side of him. He felt pleasantly hemmed in. Phoebe talked, while he and Dr. Blake were silent. He thought it must be his imagination, but he seemed to sense a faint tingle in the space separating him from this strange, unruffled, heavy-footed woman in her white-and-blood-red dress. But then, when did he ever walk beside a woman
and not feel the air vibrating? He noticed that she carried no handbag; it seemed to him he had never come across a woman without a handbag before. Without something to hold on her arm she walked like a man, heavily, with her fists at her sides.

  Phoebe soon ran out of topics of conversation, and they went on in silence. They turned along Baggot Street and presently came to the canal, and descended the steps to the towpath. Here they had to walk in single file, Phoebe leading, then Dr. Blake, and lastly Quirke. A moorhen and her chicks sailed beside them along the glassy water, each tiny creature sending out behind it a tiny fan-shaped wake. The sedge was green; Quirke had never noticed green sedge before. The soft fragrance of cut planks wafted to them from the sawmill on the other bank. A man with his dog passed them by. The man saluted each woman in turn, and glanced at Quirke with a jocular eye. What did he see, what was it he thought he saw? A girl-woman in a thin black dress, a large grave lady with pensive eyes, and, drawing up the rear, a sheepish fellow with a shifty look to him.

  “Watch out,” Phoebe called back, “there’s a dead bird here, don’t step on it.”

  It was a fledgling, a featherless sack with a scrawny neck and beak agape. Harsh world, Quirke thought, in which the weakest die.

  Ahead, Phoebe stopped, turned. “Well,” she said, “this is me. Good-bye, Dr. Blake, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  She held Quirke briefly by the arm and kissed him on the cheek—when was the last time she had kissed him?—and smiled a thin, complicit smile into his face, then turned again and walked up to the gap in the railings and, casting one last, playful glance at her father, was gone.

  “Will you go also?” Dr. Blake asked, brushing a leaf from the shoulder of her dress.

  “I might walk with you,” Quirke said, “to the garage.”

  “Certainly.”

  She set off along the path, and he followed after her.

  What age was she? he wondered. Younger than he was, but not by much. Her arms, he saw, thanks to the sleeveless dress, were firm and shapely. The upper parts of women’s arms, so plumply vulnerable, he always found affecting, the elbows too, those little wizened whorls.

  “What was wrong with your car?” he asked, to be asking something.

  “I have no idea,” she said, without turning her head or slowing her step. “I know nothing about cars. Indeed, there are many things I know nothing of.” This seemed to amuse her. “And you, Dr. Quirke, are you—what do you say?—mechanically minded?”

  “No, I’m afraid not.”

  It was strange, speaking to the back of her head like this.

  “Like me, then. That’s good.”

  Why, he wondered, was it good?

  She was wearing gilded sandals, like the ones Rose Griffin had worn yesterday. The skin over her Achilles tendons was wrinkled and a little chafed, like her elbows. He imagined holding her foot in his hand; he imagined holding both of them—her feet, in his hands. He thought: How strange life is, sometimes!

  They came to Huband Bridge and crossed the road to the Pepper Canister Church and turned left into Herbert Lane. He knew, with a dreamlike certainty, what their destination was to be. He had kept a car here once, an Alvis, a beautiful machine, in a rented lock-up garage that David Sinclair had somehow inherited and now kept his Morris Minor in. It was up the lane a little way from Perry Otway’s repair shop, and sure enough, here was Perry himself, Perry of the soiled blond hair and rolling gait, in his putty-colored boilersuit, coming out of his workshop, wiping his hands on an oily rag.

  “Dr. Quirke!” he exclaimed, in his plummy accent. “And Dr. Blake, too! My, my, it’s a small world.”

  Dr. Blake’s car was a Volkswagen; it lurked in the narrow recess of the workshop, shiny black and somehow menacing, like a giant scarab. Perry explained at some length what the trouble had been and how he had fixed it. Dr. Blake listened gravely, her head bent forward a little, her eyes fixed on Perry’s broad, bland face. Quirke noticed her upper lip, babyish, heavy, shaped like a child’s stylized drawing of a seagull, with a plump little bleb of almost transparent flesh in the middle of it.

  Perry, his surgical report done with, handed over the key, holding it daintily between the tips of an oily finger and thumb and dropping it into Dr. Blake’s palm.

  “You will send me a bill,” she said, “yes?”

  Perry, wiping his hands with the rag again, turned to Quirke. “Ah, that motor of yours,” he said, shaking his head, “she was a beauty.” He turned back to the woman, who was edging her way between the flank of the car and the greasy workshop wall. “An Alvis, it was,” he said to her. “And not just any old Alvis—a TC 108 Super Graber Coupe. Magnificent beast!”

  Quirke wished Perry would shut up. Quirke had crashed the Alvis and let it topple over the side of a cliff into the sea. It was not a happy memory.

  Dr. Blake had managed to get the door open and slide in behind the wheel at last. She started the engine, and the two men stood aside to allow her room to maneuver out of the narrow space in which it seemed the little car had been wedged. She rolled down the window and said to Quirke, “Can I bring you somewhere?”

  “No, no,” he said, “thank you. I live round the corner here.”

  “Ah. I see.”

  Still she sat there, her hands on the wheel, looking up at him. He noted again the way she had of concentrating her gaze, on an object or a person, so that it seemed as if everything else around had fallen away, into a fog of insignificance. Quirke felt himself almost blushing; he was not accustomed to being looked at like that, with such calm intensity.

  “Nevertheless,” she said, “let me give you a lift. Get in.”

  He walked around to the passenger side, and she leaned across and unlocked the door for him. Perry, ignored now, waved the filthy rag in farewell, and disappeared into the garage’s oily gloom.

  They drove along the lane, turned right and right again, onto Herbert Street.

  “I’m round the corner, as I say,” Quirke said.

  “I know, yes. But I think I don’t want to go home yet. Will you come with me for a drink, perhaps?”

  “Yes,” Quirke said.

  Yes.

  * * *

  She parked on Merrion Street and they walked up to Doheny & Nesbitt. They drank a whiskey and soda each. Afterwards he couldn’t remember what they had talked about. This was strange, for they had talked for a long time, intensely, about many things. He wondered uneasily if she might have managed somehow to hypnotize him in some mild way—wasn’t that what psychiatrists did to their patients sometimes?—to ensure that he would forget all that had been said. A mad notion, of course. Why would she want him to forget?

  There were to be things about that evening he would not forget, things he would never forget, but they weren’t things to be expressed in words.

  After their drink she drove him to Upper Mount Street, to his flat, but when they reached the house they sat outside in the car for a long time and had another conversation, and this one too he couldn’t recall afterwards. Late sunlight in the street was like a gold river flowing around them.

  They couldn’t part, they didn’t know how, and Dr. Blake—Evelyn—suggested they go for a walk. They left the car and went past the Pepper Canister again, in the opposite direction this time, and across to the canal, and sat on the metal bench by the bridge where Quirke liked to spend his Sunday mornings. He told her about the boys who came here on the weekends to swim, diving from the lock and even from the bridge itself. He told her how Rose Griffin had come and invited him to lunch, and how he had talked to Mal in the garden and Mal had told him he was dying. After that they went back to his flat.

  * * *

  Dense light of evening in the big window above the bed, and a small round cloud seemingly motionless in the western sky. “So funny,” Evelyn said, lying beside him, propped on an elbow, “so funny, the way we had to walk.”

  “What?” he said. “Where?”

  “By the canal, with Phoebe. Her, me, you, l
ike Indians on the trail of something.”

  “On the trail of ourselves.”

  “Yes, yes,” she said, smiling. “That’s it, we were tracking ourselves. I could feel you looking at me, from behind. Did I look nice?”

  “Very nice.”

  “My big bottom.”

  “Your wonderful big bottom.”

  Undressing her had been a delightful operation, like peeling a large smooth pale egg. She watched him as he did it, fiddling with zips, buttons, clasps. She laughed and said he looked like a little boy, eager and clumsy. When they kissed she kept her eyes open, and so did he.

  “Are we not too old for this?” she said.

  “Yes,” he said, smiling, “much too old.”

  When she lay down on her back her breasts splayed out over her rib cage, wobbling. There were stretch marks on her belly. “I had a son,” she said. “He died.” He leaned his head down and traced the marks with the tip of his tongue; they were pearly and smooth and slightly brittle, like dried snail trails.

  “How lovely you are,” he said.

  “Oh, no.”

  “You are.”

  “All right, then.”

  She paid attention to everything he did, as if she had never made love before and were memorizing how it was done. She wrapped herself around him, her arms, her legs. “I want to swallow you,” she whispered, “I want to swallow you, all of you, into me.”

  She was Austrian. “Salzburg,” she said, and made a face. “A Nazi town, always, and still. I will not go back there.” Her maiden name was Nussbaum. “Nut tree,” she said. “Isn’t that nice?” Her family—parents, two sisters, and a brother—had died in the camps. She put a finger to his lips. “Ssh,” she said. “Not to be spoken of. Not speakable.”