Holy Orders A Quirke Novel

by Benjamin Black

  What was she to do with him? It was a question she asked herself repeatedly, in no expectation of an answer. One day he would leave her again, she had no doubt of that. The thought, for a reason she could not fathom, made her feel all the more tenderly towards him, as if it were his suffering that was in prospect, not hers. She had once wanted to die because of him, or thought she had; but that had been another self, one she had left behind in the hospital bed where she had lain, recovering from the overdose, and readjusting her life. She was a different person now, harder, more detached, more determined to protect herself. And yet she still loved Quirke, she could not deny it, poor sap that she was.

  “Had a peculiar experience,” Quirke said now, still not looking at her.

  “Not funny funny, you mean?”

  He took a drink of his whiskey, followed by the familiar grimace that he did, drawing his lips back and making a sharp hissing sound between his teeth. “No, not funny funny,” he said. “I’m not sure I know how to describe it.”

  “Well, it’s left you in a peculiar state, that’s certain.”

  Now he did look at her, giving her a sidelong glance, and she saw again that glint of panic that made him seem impossibly young, as if there were a frightened little boy inside him, peering out—which, in a way, she supposed, there was. He told her how he and Hackett had gone to Trinity Manor, and about the priest there, Father Dangerfield, who had reminded him of Nike, and how the memory of Nike had upset him so much he had broken into a cold sweat and had almost run out of the room. “And then the old doorman, who said his name was Thady, took me into the kitchen and gave me Powers whiskey to drink, and told me about this other priest that Hackett wanted to see, and where he was.”

  Isabel was listening intently. “What was strange about that?” she asked.

  Quirke shook his head and gave a sort of laugh. “That wasn’t the strange part,” he said. “The strange part was when I left the kitchen. Suddenly I was—” He stopped, and signaled to the barman.

  “You haven’t drunk the one you have,” Isabel said, pointing to his glass and the whiskey in it.

  “What?” He stared at the whiskey, and frowned, a look of confusion in his eyes. “Yes. Right.”

  Bill the barman came, and Isabel said she would have another gin and tonic, even though her glass, too, was still half full. “And the good doctor here,” she added drily, “will have another Jameson, in case you might suddenly run out of the stuff.”

  A customer came in, and between the opening and the shutting of the door Isabel glimpsed the pale yellow April sunlight on the pavement outside and the slanted, damp purplish shadows there. At the party in Mullingar, Jack Fenton, who had been playing Torvald to her Nora, had made a pass at her. It was a surprise—she had vaguely assumed he was queer—and rather flattering. She had considered taking him up on his offer, but then had thought better of it. She wondered if she should tell Quirke about him, about how he had put his hand on her bum and smiled his lopsided, cajoling smile. Quirke might be amused, and of course, although he would not admit it, he would be secretly gratified—all men loved to hear of their rivals being spurned. But no, she thought; Quirke was hardly in the mood this evening for romantic banter.

  “The strange thing is,” he said, his eyes fixed on a point in space in front of him, “after I left the kitchen I must have had a kind of blackout, because the next thing I knew I was in a lavatory, standing by an open window with the rain blowing in my face.” He shook his head again, like an animal trying to shake off a cloud of flies. “Then I found Hackett waiting for me in the hall, and it seems only five minutes or so had elapsed, even though I thought I’d been with the old man in the kitchen for—I don’t know, half an hour, at least. And then…”

  There was a side to Quirke, the uncertain, baffled side, that frightened Isabel, a little. She had thought about this in Mullingar, after the party, lying sleepless and a bit drunk in a lumpy hotel bed. A girl had to consider the future, especially a girl in her uncertain profession, and at her age, unmarried and childless. She did not think she had it in her to devote her life to looking after a weak man. She was weak herself, and needed strong people around her, to lean on. But what could she do? Love was love, and always demanded more than a lover was capable of giving. All the same, maybe she should not have shaken off Jack Fenton’s hand quite so brusquely.

  “And then,” Quirke resumed, “the old man appeared, to see us out, but when I called him Thady he said that wasn’t his name.”

  “So what was he called?” Isabel said, trying to keep the note of impatience out of her voice.

  “I don’t know. Richie or something. But not Thady, anyway. And from his demeanor, the way he looked at me, and spoke, it seemed he had forgotten our talk in the kitchen. In fact, he behaved as if I hadn’t been with him in the kitchen at all.”

  Isabel took a drink from her glass, playing for time. Now, affected by what Quirke was telling her, and the tone in which he told it, she too felt unsettled. “Well,” she said, “yes, I see what you mean about it being peculiar.” There was a brief silence. “So did you imagine it all, do you think? How could that be?”

  “I don’t know,” Quirke said. “I must have blacked out somehow and dreamed the whole thing. But it wasn’t like a dream—it felt completely real.”

  He was still staring before him, frowning hard. Isabel had the image of a man trapped in a dark maze, groping his way along leaf-strewn paths, helplessly. “Had you been drinking?” she asked.

  “No, no—I told you, it was morning.”

  She allowed herself a wry smile. “That wouldn’t necessarily mean you were stone-cold sober. Anyway, you probably had a hangover, like every other morning.”

  He gave her a dark and louring look. “You don’t understand,” he said. “It wasn’t that kind of experience.”

  “People have nervous attacks,” she said. “They imagine the strangest things. I had an aunt—”

  “It wasn’t anything to do with my nerves,” Quirke snapped through gritted teeth.

  “I’m only trying to—”

  “I know, I know. I’m sorry.” He picked up the second whiskey and drank it off in one go, throwing his head back, and put down the empty glass, wincing, and making that hissing sound again. Isabel reached out to touch his hand but he drew away from her, pretending not to have noticed her gesture. “Let’s go,” he said, stepping down from the stool. “I don’t want to drink any more.”

  The sun had gone and it was twilight in the streets now, and there was the metallic smell of rain on the way. Seagulls were swooping in great circles above the dome of the Rotunda Hospital. Isabel took Quirke’s arm and pressed it against her side. “I’m cold,” she said. He did not reply, and seemed not to have heard.

  They went to his flat. She insisted that he sit in the armchair at the fireplace and went into the kitchen and made coffee. When she came back into the living room he was sitting as she had left him, hunched forward with his forearms resting on his thighs, gazing emptily at the unlit gas fire. “Put a match to that, will you?” she said. “It’s bloody freezing in here.”

  While he fumbled with the matches she set down his cup on the coffee table beside the armchair. When he had lit the fire he sat back in the chair. His cheeks had a grayish tinge. She knelt in front of him, with her fists on his knees. “Are you worried?” she said.

  He blinked; he seemed to be having difficulty focusing on her. “What do you mean?”

  “About this—whatever it was, this blackout, this nervous attack.”

  His eyes slid away from hers. “I don’t know,” he said. “If I could understand it, I could deal with it. As it is I’m just puzzled. I—”

  The telephone rang, causing them both to start. Quirke made to rise but she would not let him. “Leave it,” she said. “Whoever it is will call back.”

  But he put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her to one side and rose from the chair and stepped past her. She almost lost her balance and ha
d to hold on to the chair arm to keep from falling over. Both her kneecaps were sore from kneeling. She was suddenly angry.

  Quirke crossed to the telephone and picked up the receiver.

  “Dr. Quirke?” the voice said. “Honan is the name. Father Michael Honan.”

  TWO

  12

  Quirke had an aversion of long standing to Flynne’s Hotel. It was not the threadbare carpets or the greasy armchairs or even the pervasive smell of boiled cabbage that he most objected to. The place was a throwback, shoddily preserved from an older, harsher time. When he thought of Flynne’s he thought of cobwebs and musty dampness and the particular glistening blackish-brown shade of the varnish that was smeared over every inch of every exposed wooden surface, of floors, banisters, chair backs, even the flanks of the grandfather clock that stood in the shadows in the narrow lobby, half hidden by a tasseled brocade drape, ponderously ticking off the time that seemed to pass more slowly here than anywhere else.

  Quirke’s father, or, rather, his adoptive father, Judge Garret Griffin, used to come in here on Sunday afternoons to drink whiskey with his cronies and swap courtroom gossip, and sometimes he would bring Quirke with him. Quirke recalled those seemingly interminable afternoons with a shiver. Garret had thought he was bestowing a rare treat on the boy, letting him sit with him and the other dusty denizens of the Law Library in a private dining room in the dim back regions of the hotel, surrounded by talk and tobacco smoke, a glass of fizzy orange slowly going flat on the table in front of him. And now, this evening, when he sprinted from the taxi—a shower was imminent—and climbed the granite steps and entered the lobby, his heart quailed before the awful familiarity of the place, while behind him, in the lamp-lit street, the inevitable April rain began to fall.

  He made for the bar, and paused in the doorway. Low-wattage lamps in brackets on the walls lent a sullen glow to the flocked crimson wallpaper. The air reeked of turf smoke and the spicy tang of alcohol; he swelled his lungs with a deep draught of these mingled savors. He found bars like this dispiriting and yet mutedly exciting, too, despite himself. They were, he supposed, the kind of shabby-genteel place, dimly lit, forlorn, and slightly sinister, where he felt most at home.

  And then of course there was the sense too of all sorts of louche possibilities, of chance encounters, of passing and, as it usually turned out, ill-advised liaisons. One night he had met a woman, in another bar in the city, and she had brought him here to Flynne’s, where she was staying, and they had spent the night together in her room. He recalled how they had crept past the night porter and up the creaking staircase. The woman had been a little tipsy, and had leaned against him, giggling, and whispering lewdly in his ear. On the first landing she had made him stop and turn and kiss her, and she had thrust her hand into his trousers pocket. This token of wantonness had filled him with sudden misgiving. What was her name? Anne? Amy? Aileen? Something like that. She told him she was a saleswoman for a Donegal weaving firm, down in Dublin to do the rounds of the big stores in hopes of securing orders. Her room was at the front of the hotel and looked down into a deserted Abbey Street. He noticed her slipping off her wedding ring and putting it under the pillow on what was going to be her side of the bed before she went into the bathroom. Between the sheets she had been unexpectedly shy. She swore she had never gone to bed like this with a strange man before, though he did not believe her. He liked her accent, the soft northern lilt of it. In the morning they did not know what to say to each other, and she turned away from him to fasten garters. Aine! That was her name. Aine from Inishowen, way up there in the wild north.

  Now he stood in the doorway of the bar and scanned the room. Three priests sat around a small table near the fireplace, with drinks and a jug of water and an overflowing ashtray between them. In the fireplace a dolmen of turf logs was smoldering sullenly. The priests made Quirke think of a trio of magpies—was it three for bad luck? They were talking about a colleague, another priest, who had been summoned to Rome to work in the Vatican. “God, now,” one of them said in low, envious tones, a young man with black horn-rimmed glasses, “I wouldn’t mind being him. Rome! The fountains, they say, have to be seen to be believed.” The other two nodded, an Italianate radiance reflecting for a moment in their shiny, flushed faces.

  Quirke’s eye moved on. Two elderly women in balding fur coats, one with a cluster of fake cherries pinned to the lapel, were ensconced in a corner, demurely sipping glasses of port. At a table in an opposite corner a young man and his girl were arguing with hushed ferocity. The girl wore a pillbox hat pinned to her hair at a sharp angle; each time she snapped a remark at the young man between clenched teeth the hat gave an inappropriately jaunty little nod. The boyfriend’s shirt collar was a couple of sizes too big for him and stuck up at the back. The barman was polishing a pint glass and whistling softly to himself. Quirke recognized the tune. “April Showers.”

  Someone walked up quietly behind him. “Dr. Quirke, I presume?”

  He was large and ruddy, with reddish-brown hair cropped short so that the paper-pale skin of his scalp shone through. He did not look like a priest. He wore a nondescript gray suit, striped shirt, a dark blue tie, slip-on shoes with small gilt buckles. However, the white socks, which Quirke noted at once, were the giveaway. “Father Honan?” he said.

  “Indeed!” They shook hands. The priest’s palm was soft and dry and warm. He smiled. “You weren’t fooled by the mufti, so,” he said, glancing down ruefully at his suit and tie and buckled shoes. “The aim is anonymity, to come and go without being noticed. Fat chance, says you.” His voice had a faint Northern burr—Armagh? Antrim? or Inishowen, maybe, where Aine the traveling saleswoman hailed from—and he spoke softly, in intimate tones, as if they were in the confessional rather than a public bar. “But tell me now,” he said, “what will you drink?”

  They moved together to the bar. The priest gave off a strong, pungent waft of cologne. His eyes were shards of gray flint, and the plump backs of his hands were freckled all over and stuck like pincushions with fine, almost colorless hairs. Moisture glistened on his forehead and his upper lip; he was a man who would sweat a lot.

  Quirke asked for a Jameson. “Good man,” the priest said. “I’ll join you.”

  They stood half facing each other, each with an elbow on the bar, a hand in a pocket, like counterparts, two men of the world, sharing a drink. This was not what Quirke had expected. But then, what had he expected? Someone lean and watchful, thin-lipped, pale, with a jaw like a knife blade, a Nike or a Father Dangerfield, not this thickset golfing-club type with a drinker’s nose and a mesh of broken veins in the shiny skin over his cheekbones. In the light here at the bar his hair was a darker shade of red than it had seemed at first, and beads of sweat were sprinkled through it.

  “May I ask,” Quirke said, “how you knew my phone number?”

  Father Honan, drolly smiling, let an eyelid briefly droop. “Oh, we have our sources,” he said. He sipped his drink, watching Quirke over the rim of his glass. “Father Dangerfield said you were looking for me. Something to do with this young fellow who was killed?”

  “Jimmy Minor, yes.”

  “And there was a detective with you?”

  “Hackett. Inspector Hackett, Pearse Street.”

  “Yes,” the priest said, “Hackett. I’ve heard of him. A good man, they tell me.”

  The girl in the pillbox hat stood up suddenly and marched from the room, her eyes fixed straight ahead of her in a furious glare. After a moment the young man rose sheepishly and followed her, clearing his throat and blushing. “Ah, the bumpy road of love,” the priest murmured. He nodded towards the table the couple had vacated. “Shall we?”

  They crossed the room with their drinks. The young priest with the horn-rimmed spectacles glanced in Father Honan’s direction and said something to his two companions, who turned to look also. A downdraft in the chimney sent a ball of turf smoke billowing out of the fireplace to roll across the carpet. Through a win
dow beside him Quirke looked out into the glossy darkness and saw the rain dancing on the pavements and the roofs of parked cars.

  “There was a letter, I believe,” Father Honan said. “Desperate Dan told me about it—sorry, that’s Father Dangerfield. We think the world of him, only he’s a bit of a Tartar, as no doubt you noticed.”

  “He didn’t seem to know your whereabouts,” Quirke said.

  “Oh, Father Dangerfield is the soul of discretion,” the priest said, in his soft, breathy voice, and laughed. His way of speaking, with smiles and winks and little nods, made it seem as if everything he said, even the most innocuous commonplace, were being imparted as a confidence and meant for no one else’s ear. He produced a cigarette case and offered it across the table. “What was it, do you know, that this unfortunate young man wanted to see me about?”

  “That’s what we—that’s what Inspector Hackett was wondering,” Quirke said.

  The priest sat back in his chair with his elbows on the armrests and his hands clasped before him, a cigarette clamped at a corner of his mouth and one eye screwed shut against the smoke. “May I ask, Dr. Quirke,” he said, “what you…?”

  “What’s my interest? I knew Jimmy Minor—he was a friend of my daughter’s.”

  The priest nodded, but his eyes were narrowed. He still had the cigarette in his mouth; it jiggled up and down when he spoke. “And Inspector Hackett,” he asked, “is he a friend of yours?”