“No damn Commie’s son was going to dirty my family’s reputation!” he snarled. “You think I’d let that get out, that Sam Corless’s whelp had got my daughter in the family way? You think I’d allow that? No, by Christ. No Corless was going to destroy Joe Costigan, that’s for sure.”
Quirke retrieved his glass from the table, where Costigan’s white-knuckled fist was still braced. “I know you had him killed, Costigan. Your people followed him that night, and stopped him, and hit him on the head and doused the car with petrol and set it on fire and then ran it into a tree to make it look like an accident, or a suicide. Abercrombie, was that who you sent? If so, he botched the job. It didn’t look like an accident. It didn’t look like anything other than what it was. My second-in-command at the hospital spotted straightaway that before he died Corless was unconscious from a blow to the head. That’s part of your trouble—you’re careless, and the people you hire to do your dirty work are more careless still.”
Costigan was smiling. “It’s what I say, Quirke: you have some imagination.” He lit another cigarette and blew smoke up at the window. Then he sat thinking for a while. “We were always disappointed in you, Quirke,” he said, “your father and I.”
“What father?”
“‘What father?’ he asks.” Costigan’s smile widened. “As if you didn’t know.” Quirke stared at him for a moment, then lifted his glass and threw back his head and gulped down the last of the whiskey. Costigan nodded, grinning, those lenses flashing reflected rainlight from the window. “That’s right,” he said, “have another drink—maybe you’ll forget all the things you’d rather not know.” He chuckled contemptuously. “‘What father?’” he said again.
Quirke felt dizzy, and his head swam, but not from the alcohol. Something had given way, like the bulkhead of a ship. He had kept it all from himself for so long, for so many years, the known thing that he refused to know. Now, suddenly, as he gazed into Costigan’s grinning face, the barrier was breached, and the truth surged in, and at last he acknowledged to himself his true origins, his true identity.
Costigan was speaking again, in a low, urgent, menacing voice: “Now listen to me, Quirke, and listen carefully. You have a daughter, just like I have. You’re going to return mine to me, from wherever you’ve hidden her. And I’d better get her back, if you want your girl safe. You know me, Quirke. You know the lengths I’ll go to.” He sat back, and took a drag at his cigarette, and expelled two slow streams of smoke from his nostrils. “So,” he said, “I’m asking you for the last time. Where is she?”
23
Abercrombie’s battered blue Ford nosed its way around the corner from Baggot Street into Herbert Place and pulled up under the dripping trees on the canal side of the road, opposite No. 12, which was where Costigan had told him Phoebe lived. It was still afternoon but the rain made it seem like twilight. He turned off the motor and peered out through the rain-streaked windscreen.
He had two men with him, hard cases who had worked for him before, and he knew he could trust them. One of them, Hynes, tall and thin, with a crew cut, had got out of Mountjoy only the week before. He had wanted to lie low and stay out of trouble for a while, but he owed Crombie a big favor—there was a fellow who’d been sniffing round his missus while he was inside, and Crombie had made him disappear—and so he had no choice but to come with him on this job.
The other one, Ross, sitting in the back seat smoking a cigarette, was a kid of sixteen with a little pinched white face and a widow’s peak. He looked like he wouldn’t hurt a fly, but he’d already done time for maiming a tinker his ma had been shacked up with and who’d been in the habit of giving her a beating every Saturday night. It was Ross who had gone down with Abercrombie that night to Wicklow to get Costigan’s daughter.
“What house is it?” Hynes asked.
“That one,” Abercrombie said, pointing. “The black door.”
“Is she in there?”
“Whether she is or not, we’re going in. If she’s not there, we wait. She has to come home sometime.” He turned to Ross. “You stay here, keep an eye out. We’ll watch from the window. You see her coming, tip us the nod.”
“How will I do that?”
“Open your window and wave, you stupid little fuck!”
“Can I not go in with you?” Ross said, disappointed. His voice was a nasal whine that always set Abercrombie’s teeth on edge.
“Why don’t I stay?” Hynes said. “Let him go. He’s good with locks.” He turned in the seat. “Aren’t you, Rossie?”
Ross only looked at him. Ross’s eyes were funny; they turned up at the outer corners, like a Chinaman’s. Hynes always wanted to ask him if his ma had done it with a Chink, only he was afraid to. He’d never come across anyone like Ross; Ross had no fear, no fear at all. It was uncanny.
“I told you,” Abercrombie said to Ross. “Keep your trap shut and your eyes open. Right?”
Hynes got out of the car and held the door for Abercrombie, and together they set off across the road. Abercrombie pulled the collar of his jacket tight around his neck. “Fucking weather,” he said. “Sun splitting the trees for weeks on end but today it had to rain.”
Hynes had lit a cigarette but it was sodden by the time they reached the other side of the road. He threw it into the gutter and swore.
They went up the granite steps to the front door. Hynes kept watch while Abercrombie worked on the lock. It gave him no trouble, and within seconds they were inside.
Ross saw them go in, and leaned his head back on the seat and settled down to wait. He was angry that Crombie had chosen Hynes to go in. Crombie had shown him a picture of the girl; he’d have liked to have a bit of fun with her, before they took her away.
Inside the house, the two men crept up the stairs. The place was silent, the people who lived in the other flats probably all off at work. Maybe she was, too. It didn’t matter; they could wait.
They reached the second-floor landing and stood outside the door, looking at each other, listening. No sound. Abercrombie nodded, and got to work on the lock.
The car, coming up from the Mount Street direction, had no markings, but as soon as Ross saw it he sat up. It was moving slowly, the tires throwing up little waves of rainwater on either side. Ross watched it, his eyes narrowed. Then he wriggled sideways through the gap in the seats and got behind the wheel. Crombie, the fucker, had taken the key with him. He looked out at the car again, trying to see who was in it. There were four of them, two in the front and two in the back. He couldn’t make them out; the rain was coming down too heavily. The car didn’t stop, and he relaxed.
Abercrombie and Hynes were in the flat now. They put their heads into the kitchen. Nobody. Then they walked into the living room, and stopped. Hynes turned immediately and tried to make a break for it, but when he got to the door he met two plainclothes detectives coming up the stairs. Abercrombie, standing in the doorway, heard the scuffle outside, and Hynes cursing and then giving a gasp of pain. Hackett was sitting in an armchair by the fireplace, with his hat on his knee. There were two more detectives by the window, one of them on either side. Hackett stood up.
“Well now,” he said, “if it isn’t Mr. Abercrombie. Come in, come in.”
Down in the street the car with the four men in it did a rapid U-turn, its tires squealing. Ross was already out of the Ford, sprinting along the pavement, under the dripping trees. The car pulled up and the four doors flew open and the men inside, all wearing hats and gabardine raincoats, scrambled out. Ross dodged through a gap in the railings and ran along the towpath, head back, his elbows sawing and his knees going like pistons.
And Crombie had called him a stupid fuck. He didn’t have the breath to laugh, as he ran. Behind him there were shouts. Too late, boys, too slow.
He raced on.
* * *
When the phone rang, Quirke smiled at Costigan. They were still sitting at the table, and Quirke had poured himself another whiskey. It was his third, but all
three measures had been small, and the dizziness was gone and his head was clear. Costigan was watching him suspiciously, his black-framed glasses riding high on his nose. The telephone kept ringing.
“Are you going to answer it?” Costigan said.
Quirke stood up and went into the living room.
Costigan sat motionless, listening. He heard Quirke pick up the receiver and speak a word or two that he couldn’t catch. Then Quirke came back and stopped in the doorway.
“It’s for you, Costigan,” he said. “Inspector Hackett would like a word.”
24
Dr. Blake gave a dinner party, a very small one. She invited Quirke, her nephew, Paul Viertel, and Phoebe. The doctor lived in a tiny mews house in a lane behind Northumberland Road that she had bought and moved into after her husband’s death. Inside, the little house had the sequestered atmosphere of a well-appointed and comfortable underground den. This impression was compounded by the tremendous summer storm that had been threatening for days and that finally broke over the city on the evening of the dinner. It was a windless night and the rain was an incessant and thrilling drumbeat on the roof. Rolling thunderclaps made the windowpanes buzz, and flickers of lightning left a whiff of sulfur in the crepitant air. There were repeated brief power failures, until, sometime after nine o’clock, the lights went out and stayed out, and the rest of the dinner took place by candlelight.
Luckily the house had a gas cooker. They ate clear chicken soup and poached salmon and asparagus, followed by ice cream with raspberry sauce. Quirke was careful with the wine, and drank moderately. Paul Viertel and Phoebe talked together a great deal, and the two older people were happy to sit for long periods in silence, glancing at each other now and then through the glitter and flash of the candle flames and exchanging secret smiles.
This was Quirke’s first time in the house. The furniture was sparse, and what there was of it was discreetly elegant. Evelyn collected primitive art, and savage wooden heads and fierce-looking masks were set on tables and on windowsills, or lurked menacingly in gaps among the books on the bookshelves. The room where they ate was dominated by an Egon Schiele drawing, startling in its anatomical frankness, of an emaciated and naked young woman seated on the ground, languorously leaning back and supporting herself on her elbows, with one leg flexed and the other slackly splayed. There was an upright piano, on which stood an assortment of framed photographs. Evelyn showed Quirke a miniature of her late husband in an oval frame—“He was young then, you would not have known him”—and some blurred snapshots of her family taken in the 1930s. There was a photograph too of her son, Hanno, who had died in childhood; Quirke gazed at the slightly out-of-focus image of the boy, soft of face and sad-eyed like his mother.
“He looks like you,” Quirke said.
“Do you think so? He was such a sweet child.”
“What happened—”
She lifted an admonishing finger. “Ssh,” she said softly. “Perhaps another time. Not now, not tonight.”
When they had finished their salmon, the two women cleared away the plates, and Quirke and Paul Viertel talked about Paul’s studies. His field was immunology. He intended, when qualified, to go to Africa and and work there.
“Malaria,” he said, “river blindness, even smallpox—these things can be eradicated, I am convinced of it. All that’s required is funding, and personnel.”
“It’s an ambitious program,” Quirke said. “I can’t see it being carried out in my lifetime.”
“No,” Paul said, and smiled, “but perhaps in mine.”
After dinner they settled into pairs, Paul and Phoebe remaining at the table, deep in conversation about Cold War politics—Paul was radically of the left—while Quirke and Evelyn sat beside each other on the sofa, balancing coffee cups on their knees.
“I’ve made a discovery,” Quirke said.
“Yes, I thought there was something.”
He glanced at her sharply. “What sort of something?”
“Something momentous.”
Quirke nodded to himself. “Momentous, yes, I suppose that’s the word.” He took a sip of his coffee. “What it was,” he said, “was that I realized who my parents were.”
“You realized?”
“Acknowledged. I’ve known it for a long time, I think.” He smiled. “Strange, isn’t it, how you can know something and not know it at the same time?”
“Not so strange,” Evelyn said. “Many people are capable of it—whole nations are. What happened?”
Quirke shook his head in puzzled wonderment. “It was strange,” he repeated. “A man came to my flat—broke into my flat, in fact—a man who knew my father. A very wicked man. A kind of devil.”
“Ah, yes. It is usually the Devil who whispers momentous things into our ears.” She touched a finger to his wrist. “Do you want to tell me who they were, your parents?”
A beat of silence passed. “My father was a judge,” Quirke said. “Judge Garret Griffin.”
“I know the name.”
“Oh, he was a power in the land. He’s dead now.” He turned his head aside, frowning. “He adopted me, but I think at some level I knew he was my father.”
Evelyn was watching him, her dark eyes darker and larger than ever. “And your mother?”
“I think she was a servant in the Judge’s house, a maid who used to work for him and his wife. Moran was her name. Dolores Moran.”
“And where is she now?”
“Dead, too. She was murdered. In fact”—he leaned forward suddenly, as if he had felt a stab of pain—“in fact, the man who came to my flat, Joseph Costigan, he was responsible for her death. Him, and Judge Griffin.”
Now Evelyn put a hand over his. “This is a terrible story,” she said.
“Yes,” Quirke said, “yes, it is, it is terrible.”
“Your father knew she had been murdered? Did he mean it to happen?”
“He swore to me it was all Costigan’s fault, that it was the fault of the men Costigan sent to her house to get something from her, a diary. There was another girl, another of the Judge’s girls, also a maid in the house, like Dolly Moran. Her name was Christine Falls. She died in childbirth.”
“This child was also the Judge’s?”
“Yes, and Dolly Moran had kept a record of it, and that’s why she was murdered.”
“Were they caught, the people who killed her?”
“No,” Quirke said. “The police knew who they were, but they could do nothing. The Judge was a very powerful man, with very powerful friends, in the church and in the government. He was untouchable. Costigan, too—all of them were untouchable.”
Phoebe and Paul Viertel were arguing in friendly fashion about Israel and the Palestinians. Quirke watched them, smiling. He had not seen such a light in Phoebe’s eyes for a very long time.
“You must be in pain now, yes?” Evelyn said.
“No,” Quirke answered, “pain isn’t the word. What I mostly feel is relief, or something like it. And sadness, of course, for Dolly Moran, for poor Christine Falls.”
“And for yourself?”
He thought about it. “No,” he said, “I don’t feel sad for myself. I think I’m cured of that. It’s as if I had been walking through what seemed an endless night and suddenly the dawn has come up behind me. Not a very welcome dawn, but dawn nevertheless.”
“And will it show you the path to follow, from now on? It seems to me you have much work to do.”
“You mean, I should embark on the talking cure? Will you take me on?”
She only smiled.
Later, the two of them were in the kitchen, and she said, “Phoebe, I think, is falling a little in love with my Paul.”
“Do you think so?”
“Yes, of course.” She was at the stove, making another round of coffee, while he leaned against the sink, smoking a cigarette. A single, tall candle stood on the draining board. “Do you like him?” she asked.
“Paul? He seems a decent fell
ow.”
“Decent. Hmm. That is a good word. Am I decent, would you say?”
She turned to him, and he took her in his arms. “You know that I’m falling a little in love with you? More than a little.”
“Ah. That’s good. I like that.”
The flame under the percolator was too high and the coffee began to overflow the lid. She stepped away from him, and turned down the gas.
“Why don’t you marry me?” he said.
She threw him a sidelong glance. “How funny you are,” she said.
“I didn’t mean to be.”
She took the percolator off the stove and put it to stand on a cork mat on the table. “Let me tell you my joke,” she said. “It is the only one I know, but it is such a good joke I don’t need to know any others. The schlemiel—you know what is a schlemiel?”
“I think so.”
“Well, the schlemiel is having his breakfast. He butters a slice of toast, which he accidentally lets drop to the floor. It falls with the buttered side up—up, you understand? ‘Oy vay,’ the schlemiel says, ‘I must have buttered the wrong side!’” She smiled. “Is good, yes? But you’re not laughing.”
“Is that me,” he said, “am I the schlemiel?”
“A little bit, sometimes. But it doesn’t matter. The dawn is coming up, remember, behind you. Here, carry the coffee for me.”
He didn’t move. They stood facing each other. They could hear the rain beating on the little garden outside. Thunder muttered in the distance—the storm was moving away. Neither spoke. A plume of steam rose from the spout of the coffeepot. In the other room, Phoebe and Paul Viertel were debating the future of mankind. Evelyn put out her hand, and Quirke took it in his. The candle flame wavered and then was still again, a glowing, yellow teardrop.
* * *
When his taxi came he offered Phoebe a lift, but Paul had said he would walk her home, and the two set out together in the glistening darkness. When they had gone, Evelyn stood with Quirke at the front door for a minute, amid the damp odors of the night. The taxi waited, exhaust smoke trickling out at the rear and its windows stippled with raindrops. Quirke had wanted to stay, but they had become suddenly shy of each other again, and now Evelyn kissed him, brushing her lips lightly against his, and stepped away from him, back into the house. They had agreed they would meet tomorrow for lunch. They would talk about everything, everything. The taxi man revved his engine impatiently.
Even the Dead Page 25
