Holy Orders A Quirke Novel

by Benjamin Black

  Father Dangerfield nodded. “I see,” he said again. He crossed himself quickly. “May the good Lord have mercy on his soul.” The piety was perfunctory, and seemed feigned. Abruptly he got up, in a flurry of black serge, and strode to the window and stood with his hands clasped behind himself, looking out at the lawn and the bare trees at its far edge. Thin sunlight was on the grass, giving it a lemonish hue. “What I don’t see,” he said without turning, “is the connection there could be between the unfortunate young man’s death and your wanting to see Father Honan.”

  “Well, there was a letter,” Hackett said, twisting sideways in his chair, the better to study the priest’s tall, gaunt figure dark against the window’s light. “A letter from you, in fact.”

  Now the priest did turn. “From me? To whom?”

  “To Jimmy Minor. About Father Honan.”

  “Ah.”

  Quirke had not said a word since they had come in; Hackett turned his head and glanced at him. He was slumped in his chair with eyes downcast, studying his hands where they lay clasped in his lap.

  The priest returned and sat down again.

  Quirke produced his cigarette case and held it aloft inquiringly. “Do you mind?”

  “Please, go ahead,” the priest said, his tone distracted. He seemed to be thinking hard.

  Quirke lit his cigarette. Hackett noticed that the hand holding the lighter trembled slightly. As the smoke drifted across the desk, the priest’s nostrils quivered. From outside came the ratcheting chatter of a magpie, followed by a blackbird’s sentinel pipings.

  “When,” Father Dangerfield asked, “did I write to him?”

  “The letter was dated last week. The seventeenth.”

  “Last week.” The priest looked down at the desktop with its inlay of green leather. Then he lifted his eyes again. “Have you got it, this letter?”

  “We have,” Hackett said. He had set his hat on his knees.

  “And may I see it?”

  Hackett passed over this blandly. “You don’t remember writing it?” he asked.

  “Yes yes,” the priest said, “of course, I remember now. I didn’t connect the name. You must understand, a great deal of correspondence crosses my desk. He asked if he could see Father Honan. If he could interview him, I believe.” He was watching Quirke take a second long drag at his cigarette.

  “Did he say,” Hackett inquired, “what it was he wanted to interview Father Honan about?”

  “What?” The priest dragged his eyes away from Quirke’s cigarette and gazed at Hackett with his big pale eyes, seeming at a loss.

  Hackett smiled tolerantly. He brought out a packet of Player’s and offered it across the desk, with the top open. “Would you care for a smoke, Father?” he asked in a kindly tone.

  Father Dangerfield shook his head. “No, thank you,” he said, with a tense, pained frown. “I’ve given them up.”

  “Ah.” The detective began to take a cigarette for himself but thought better of it and closed the packet and put it away. He clasped his fingers together and twiddled his thumbs. “Did Jimmy Minor say,” he asked again, “what it was he wanted to talk to Father Honan about?”

  “When he wrote to me, you mean? No, I don’t think so. I can check his letter, if you wish.” He looked down at the desk again, as if the letter might magically appear there.

  “That would be helpful,” Hackett said.

  Suddenly Quirke stirred and got to his feet, seemingly with a struggle, and stood swaying. The other two men stared at him. “Sorry,” he said, with a wild look. His face was gray and filmed with sweat. “Sorry, I—”

  He hurried to the door, but had trouble opening it. Hackett and Father Dangerfield stood up together, as if to rush to his aid. They hovered irresolutely, looking at each other. At last, with a great wrench, Quirke got the door open and plunged through it and was gone.

  “Good heavens,” the priest said, and looked at Hackett again. “Is he—?”

  Slowly the heavy oak door, impelled by a draft, swung to and shut itself with a sharp click.

  * * *

  It took him a long time to find his way through the house. He stumbled along what he took to be the hallway down which the crippled old man had led him and Hackett after he had first let them in, but instead of arriving at the front door he found himself facing a floor-to-ceiling stained-glass window, or wall, rather. Behind it was a chapel, for he could dimly see through the lurid panes the pinprick ruby-red glow of what must have been the sanctuary lamp. He turned and blundered back the way he had come. The silent building seemed deserted—where could they be, the priests, the people who worked here, the officials, the secretaries, the cleaners, even? Yet how familiar it was, this poised stillness all about him, familiar from long ago, longer than he cared to remember. His heart was beating very fast; it felt as if it had come loose somehow and were joggling about inside his rib cage. It occurred to him that he might be having a heart attack, or suffering a stroke—that he might, in fact, be dying. Far from being frightening, the idea was almost funny, and despite his distressed state he gave a wheezy laugh, which made his pulse beat all the faster and started up a burning sensation in his chest. He put a hand to his face. His cheeks and forehead were chill and stickily moist. The word infarction came to him, but for the moment he could not think what it meant, which was absurd—was his memory going, too?

  What seemed to be an electric bell was dinning somewhere nearby; he could not decide if it was in his head or if a telephone was ringing. Here, around a corner, was another hallway, or corridor, with heavy-framed paintings on the walls, large, muddy, and very bad portraits of venerable clerics interspersed with martyred saints writhing in picturesque agony. His heart, still hammering, now seemed to be swelling and rising slowly up through his chest, pressing from beneath against his esophagus, robbing him of breath. He stopped and stood still and shut his eyes, pressing the lids together tightly. He told himself he must stay calm. This would pass. It was a seizure of some kind, but he was sure now it would not kill him. In the darkness inside his head great whorls of multicolored light formed and burst, like fireworks going off in silent slow motion. He opened his eyes and stumbled on. Was there no one to help him? Then suddenly there was the front door, at last. Panting, he dragged it open and almost fell through it, onto the stone step outside, gulping mouthfuls of air.

  The sky was overcast now, yet the light was as intense as a magnesium flare, and he had to shut his eyes again for a moment. He felt exhausted, as if he had all at once become very old and infirm, and he sat down on the step, slowly and carefully. The granite was comfortingly cool to the touch. Through slitted eyelids—the light was searing still—he peered this way and that about the grounds. The yellow-green grass now had an even more unnaturally acid cast, and the stark branches of the trees looked like so many arms flung upwards in surprise or horror or both. He put a hand to his heart; it was still struggling behind his ribs like a big heavy bird in a too-small cage. Yet he was aware of a calm descending on him, as if a veil of some transparent, gossamer stuff were being laid gently over him from head to foot. Was he dying, after all? Was this how it would be, not violence and terror but a calm, slow sinking into oblivion?

  A blackbird alighted on the lawn just beyond the ring of gravel and began busily stabbing at the turf with its orange beak, its rounded gleaming blue-black head moving jerkily, like the head of a clockwork toy. He watched it at its delving. The bird seemed to mean something, to be something, something beyond itself. He had a sense of dawning wonderment, as if he had never really looked at the world before, had never before seen it in all its raw vividness.

  The door opened and he heard a step behind him. It was the old man with the crooked back. “Ah, Lord, sir, what ails you at all?” he said.

  The blackbird flew off, sounding a shrilly urgent, repeated note.

  Quirke tried to scramble to his feet but his knees refused to work. They felt as if they were made not of bone but metal, as if they were
two hinged metal boxes that the rivets had fallen out of, and he was afraid the loose flanges would tear the skin covering them and break through and bleed and begin to rust in the harsh April air. The old man was bent so far forward that although he was on his feet his face was at the same level as Quirke’s where he sat. The eyes were a whitish-blue color—cataracts, Quirke thought distractedly.

  “Felt a bit queer,” Quirke said, his voice sounding unnaturally loud. “Just having a rest here for a minute.”

  He tried again to get his legs to work, flexing the muscles gingerly, afraid that those hinges in his knees would come asunder if he put pressure on them. It was a novel sensation—comical, yes—sitting here in a heap on the stone step with the old man’s face in front of him on a horizontal and so close up to his own that he could see the gray stubble on the other’s ancient, wrinkled chin.

  “Will I give you a hand?” the old fellow said, speaking with measured distinctness, as if he were addressing a child. Quirke had an image of himself being hauled to his feet and of the two of them tottering together down the steps hand in hand, both of them bent over, with limbs akimbo, like a pair of chimps, the old one leading the younger and hooting soft encouragements. “No no,” he said, “no, I’m fine.”

  At last he got himself up and stood swaying. His knees seemed to be all right, after all. The old man squinted up at him, that tawny side tooth bared again. “Come inside and we’ll get you a cup of tea,” he said.

  They made their way through the house again, the old man going ahead, hobbling along crablike at a surprisingly rapid pace, paddling the air beside him as before with a long and seemingly boneless hand. The pounding in Quirke’s chest had subsided, though he was weak all over, as if he had come to the end of some extended and inhumanly demanding task. Yet he was certain now that he would survive. This knowledge afforded him curiously little comfort. On the contrary, he had a vexed sense of having been let down, by someone, or something. There had been a moment, out there on the front step, while he had watched the questing blackbird, when everything had seemed on the point of a grand, final resolution. It was not death he had been cheated of, he thought, for even death was incidental to whatever it was that had been coming and had not come, that had been withheld from him, at the last instant.

  “How are you doing there?” the old man asked, twisting round and glancing back at him. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” Quirke said, “yes, I am, I’m all right.”

  It came to him suddenly: Nike. It was Nike, the memory of him, that had sent him stumbling in a panic out of Father Dangerfield’s room. Nike, with his thin smile, an eyebrow permanently cocked, a cigarette smoldering in his slender fingers. Nike the Inevitable.

  The kitchen to which the old man led him was an enormous room with grayish-white tiled walls and a long refectory table of scrubbed deal, and two big twin stone sinks with old-fashioned copper taps stained with verdigris. There was a mighty stove, too, the top of it black and the sides the color of porridge, and there were ranks of pots and pans, venerable and battered, hanging on hooks about the walls. A big metal-framed window looked out on a concrete yard where dustbins loitered, their lids askew, like mendicants waiting in hope of scraps. All this was somehow familiar.

  “Sit yourself down there now,” the old man said, and went to fill a kettle at one of the sinks.

  Quirke sat. It seemed to him that he was suspended inside himself, intricate and frail, like a ship in a bottle.

  The dissecting room, that was what this kitchen looked like. The light was the same, stark white and shadowless, and there was a sense of chill numbness, as if the very air had been anesthetised.

  The old man, still holding the kettle under the running tap, gave him a sly, backwards glance. “Or maybe you’d prefer something a bit stronger?” he said, and winked.

  Quirke said nothing, but the old man nodded knowingly and put the kettle aside. He went out through a narrow door into what must have been the scullery, whence there came a clink of glass, and he reappeared cradling in both hands, like a baby, a bottle of Powers Gold Label. “Would you ever,” he said, “get yourself down one of them tumblers off of that shelf.”

  Nike, at Carricklea. Dean of Discipline; the title had always struck Quirke as absurdly grand. His name was Gallagher, Father Aloysius Gallagher. No one knew why he had been called after a Greek goddess, for the nickname had been conferred on him immemorially. He was tall and thin, like Father Dangerfield, had the same scraped-looking dry jaw, and wore the same kind of wire-framed spectacles. He had sour breath and his soutane always smelled of stale tobacco. He chain-smoked, holding the cigarette in a curious fashion, not between the first and middle but between the middle and third fingers of his left hand, even though he was right-handed. Sitting at his desk, with his bony knees crossed under his soutane and that hand held upright with the fag in it, like the hand of the Sacred Heart statue lifted in benediction, he had indeed the look of some celestial figure seated in judgment. Or no, no, what he was like was someone pretending, pretending to be a judge, playing the part of one, for a joke, but a joke that no one would dare laugh at, and that would end with whoever it was who was on trial being found guilty, and sent away red-faced and sobbing, with bruised and swollen palms clamped under his armpits and his bare knees knocking. Nike affected a little cough, it was hardly more than a dry clearing of the throat, which in the corridors of Carricklea the boys had learned to listen out for, since it was the only warning they would have of his approach, for he moved with wraithlike quiet, seeming not to walk but glide, on soundless soles.

  In his years at Carricklea Quirke had not been beaten very often by Nike, and, even if he had, that would not have been the thing that frightened him the most. It was a special kind of fear that Nike instilled, intimate, warm and clammy, and faintly indecent. When the figure of the Dean broke in on Quirke’s thoughts, especially at night, as he lay in bed in the murmurous dark, he would experience a jolt in his chest, like the jolt that would come from suddenly calling to mind some serious instance of wrongdoing, or an unconfessed mortal sin. Even now, thinking of those days, he felt again that same hot qualm of oppressive, objectless guilt.

  He looked at the tumbler before him on the table. It was empty. He had no recollection of drinking the whiskey, yet he must have drunk it, for all that was left was a single, amber drop glistening in the bottom of the glass. The old man was saying something. “What?” Quirke said. “Sorry?”

  “Ah, nothing, nothing,” the old man said, smiling. “You were miles away.” He came to the table and seated himself opposite Quirke. It was an effort for him to maneuver his twisted body up onto the chair. He sighed hoarsely. “Are you feeling any better?” he asked.

  “Yes. Yes, I’m fine now.”

  “It was the nerves that were at you, I’d say. Nerves can be a terrible thing. Thady is the name, by the way. Thaddeus, that is, but Thady I’m called.”

  Quirke brought out his cigarette case, opened it on his palm, and offered it across the table. He noticed the tremor in his hand, very faint, as if an electric current were passing along the nerves. The old man was gazing greedily at the row of cigarettes laid out invitingly before him. “I’m not supposed to,” he said, “due to the bronicals.” He took one, however, and leaned to the flame of Quirke’s proffered lighter. When he drew in the first mouthful of smoke he was at once convulsed by a bout of coughing that caused his wasted frame almost to close on itself, as if there were a hinge at his waist. When the seizure had passed he sat gasping, a baby-pink spot glowing on each cheekbone and his mouth a quivering oval. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he croaked, “they’ll do for me yet, the fags.”

  He poured another go of whiskey into the tumbler on the table. In the aftermath of the coughing fit his hand, too, like Quirke’s, had the shakes, and the bottle rattled against the rim of the glass.

  They talked. The old man had been here, at Trinity Manor, for more than sixty years. “The fathers took me in, you know,
doing odd jobs. I was only a youngster at the time, eleven, I was, or twelve, I can’t remember.” The place had been an orphanage then, he said. He gave Quirke a quick glance from under his leaning brow. “And you?”

  “Me?”

  “You have the look about you—the look of places like this place used to be.”

  “Yes,” Quirke said after a moment. “Yes, I suppose I must have. I was at Carricklea.” It sounded strange, when he said it like that, as if he were speaking of his old school, the alma mater where he had played cricket, and worn the school tie, and had been surrounded by lots of jolly chums; where he had been happy. “Have you heard of it?”

  “Oh, I have, indeed.” The old man nodded slowly. “That was a hard station, so I’m told.”

  “It wasn’t easy, no. I was younger than you were when you started here—I was nine.”

  “And what about before that?”

  “Oh, other places. Most of them I don’t remember now.”

  The old man forgot himself and took a deep draw of his cigarette, and once again had to cough, though this time not so violently as before. He thumped a fist gnarled and waxy like a turkey’s claw into the hollow of his chest. “Ah, God,” he said, gasping softly. “Ah, the bronicals.”

  It occurred to Quirke that Inspector Hackett would be wondering what had become of him. He wondered, himself, how the interview with Father Gallagher had progressed, or if it had progressed at all. No, not Gallagher—that was not the priest’s name. He put a hand to his forehead, trying to remember. Dangerfield! That was it. Nike was Gallagher, but the fellow here, who looked like Nike, was Dangerfield, Daniel Dangerfield. It seemed important to sort out these names, to fix them in his mind. He lifted the whiskey glass but then put it back on the table. The alcohol he had taken already must have gone to his head, that was why his brain was clouded and he could not think straight. Concentrate; he must concentrate. “You’d have known all the priests here, no doubt,” he said, “over the years.”