The Silver Swan

by Benjamin Black

  Love. She sipped her tea and in her mind tried out the new word for size, for weight. She would have to use it sparingly. Leslie, she had already learned, did not take kindly to being mauled-that was his word for the kisses and caresses by which, since the day in the shed, she had tried to show how she felt for him. That was because of his being English, she reasoned, since the English were all supposed to be reserved and not willing to let on how they were really feeling. He had a way at times of drawing back from her, his head lifted on its long, pale neck, and looking down at her with an expression that was less a smile than a wince, and giving a little puff of laughter through his nostrils, as if she had done something too foolish for words. He was rough with her, too, sometimes. By now they had a place where they could be together, a bed-sitter in Percy Place, rented, or borrowed, more likely, from another of Leslie's friends. They would go there in the afternoons, and pull the curtains, and he would undress her slowly and almost as if absentmindedly, and then take her in his arms and press himself against her, trembling in the peculiar way that he did-girlishly, almost-which excited her and at the same time made her want not so much to make love to him as to cradle him in her arms and rock him to sleep. But he was no baby. He would bite her lips until they bled, or twist her arm behind her back and make her gasp, and once, when he could not manage to do anything and she laughed it off and said it did not matter, instead of being grateful for her understanding he smacked her across the face, hard, so that her head flew back and banged off the headboard and she saw stars. And then there was the night when she and Billy were getting ready for bed-what a trial it was for her now, being in bed with poor Billy-and he saw the red weals on the backs of her legs where Leslie had whipped her with his leather belt-God, how she had moaned-and she had to make up an excuse, which she could not believe he believed, about having been sitting on a chair that had slats in the seat. And yet she-

  "More tea?" Dr. Kreutz asked.

  She blinked, waking out of her reverie. She noticed again now, as she had already noticed, that he had hardly looked at her directly since she had arrived. She wondered if he might be jealous, for surely he must have guessed that what she and Leslie had going was more than a business partnership. The thought made her flare up in annoyance. She had enough to do keeping Billy's suspicions at bay. Billy had talked to Leslie only once, when the three of them met by arrangement for a drink in the bar of Wynn's Hotel. It was a Sunday evening and behind them three red-faced priests were drinking whiskey and talking loudly about a hurling match they had been to in the afternoon. Billy had been shy of the Englishman with his hoity-toity accent, as he described it afterwards, and his silver cravat, and had looked at his boots and talked in a mumble-not that he had much to say, anyway-his nearly colorless eyebrows meeting in a frown and the tips of his ears bright pink. When she had looked at him she had felt not so much guilty as… sorrowful; yes, that was the only word for it, she felt sorrow for him, the softhearted poor lummox. And, more strangely, it seemed to her that she had never loved him as much, with such tenderness and compassion and simple concern, as she did in that half hour in that smoky bar with the voices of those priests breaking in on them and Leslie and she trying not to look at each other in case they might burst out laughing.

  Leslie had been very good with Billy, had really acted the part of the businessman, going on about overhead and annual turnover and broad profit margins and all the rest of it. She had to admire him-what a bamboozler he was. He pretended to listen to Billy's mumbles, nodding solemnly with his lips pursed, and made sure to remember to call her Mrs. Hunt and not by her first name. To hear him you would think it was a hospital or something the two of them were setting up. When he said that "Mrs. Hunt would make a great contribution to the salon"-he had learned to follow her example and call it a beauty salon instead of a beauty parlor, which she thought sounded common-"because of her long experience as a pharmacist," Billy blinked. She wondered how much of Leslie's palaver he was swallowing. He knew a bit about business himself, and he was no fool when it came to dealing with people. She told herself not to say too much but to keep quiet and let Leslie do the talking. She limited herself to a glass of Babycham and nursed it for the whole time they were there, for drink went straight to her head on occasions like this-although when in her life, she asked herself, had there been another such occasion?-and above all she must not show how excited she was. For the fact was, it was only now, as she stood there in her sensible shoes and the charcoal-gray two-piece costume she had bought to be her business suit, listening to Leslie fast-talking her husband, that the full realization came to her of just what an adventure it was that she had embarked on. The future suddenly was-

  "You must, you know," Dr. Kreutz said, "you must be careful-very very careful."

  She looked at him blankly. What was he talking about?

  "Careful of what?" she asked.

  He shrugged uncomfortably. Today he was wearing a blue silk caftan-it was another of the exotic words and names for things that he had taught her-and under it his shoulders looked more than ever like a coat hanger.

  "Why, all this," he said, "this business you have started." There was a new, plaintive note in his voice, she noticed, and between phrases he kept making a sort of humming sound under his breath. "Mr. White's previous enterprise failed, you know-hmm hmm-and Mr. White himself maybe is not-hmm-everything that he seems."

  Well! she thought. Talk about the kettle calling the pot black. She felt like inquiring where his camera was today, and how many clients he had taken pictures of recently. But she could not be indignant with him for long. In her newfound state of bliss she could not be indignant with anyone, even Billy, or not for long, anyway. Of course Leslie was not all that he seemed, but she knew that if he was anything, he was more of it rather than less. Only that more, of course, was something Dr. Kreutz would not understand. Now she pushed her cup away-it had a peculiar aftertaste, cloying and sickly sweet-and said that she must be going. When she stood up, however, she felt suddenly light in the head, and it seemed for a moment that she might fall over. The doctor was on his feet in a flash and holding her hand, and with his other hand under her elbow he led her to the sofa-that sofa-and lowered her gently onto the cushions and stood back, watching her, his head on one side and his lips set in that down-turned way that he had, which was the nearest he ever came to a smile.

  "Rest," he said softly. "Rest now, my dear lady, my dear dear lady."

  She thought of all the women who had lain down there, naked and showing themselves off. She wondered what it would feel like to be exposed like that, not in front of a man, exactly, but a camera. And wondering that, she fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  6

  MAISIE HADDON-OR NURSE HADDON, WHICH WAS HOW SHE LIKED TO be known, in private as well as in public-had a soft spot for Quirke, and frequently assured him so, especially after a second or a third rum and black-currant cordial, which was her tipple. They had arranged to meet, as they usually did, in a murky little pub on a side street behind the Gaiety Theatre. They arrived simultaneously, he on foot and she in her open-topped miniature red sports car that always reminded him of a scuffed and slightly battered ladybird. She wore dark glasses with white frames, and was smoking a cigarette in an ebony holder. Despite the warmth of the day she sported a mink jacket and a long yellow chiffon scarf, one end of which was flung back dramatically over her right shoulder. She pulled in to the curb with a shriek of tires and the little car mounted the pavement and stopped and the engine gave a final, rivet-loosening roar before she switched it off.

  "Howya, handsome," she said, leaning over the low door and offering him a lace-gloved hand.

  He bowed and brushed his lips against a bony knuckle, catching a sharp waft of her perfume. "I tell you, Maisie," he said, "one day you'll end up like Isadora Duncan."

  She took up her handbag from the passenger seat and clambered out of the car. "Who's she when she's at home?"

  "Dancer. Her scarf
got caught in the back axle of a sports car and broke her neck."

  "Jesus," she said, "what a way to go."

  They entered the pub. It was a Saturday afternoon and the usual rackety crowd was in. When Maisie paused on the threshold to scan the room through her white-framed specs a dozen heads lifted; there were few here who did not know who Nurse Haddon was. She walked to the bar with Quirke in her wake and perched herself on a high stool, smoothing her tight skirt over her knees with a demure little gesture that made Quirke smile. In his way he, too, had a soft spot for her, this preposterous creature. He wondered what age she was, exactly-it was impossible to tell from her looks or figure. Her big, square, countrywoman's face showed hardly a wrinkle, and her hair, if it was dyed, was blond to the roots, so far as he could see-he did not dare look too closely for Maisie was quick to anger and was said to have once knocked out cold a Garda detective who was trying to arrest her. It amused Quirke to think, not for the first time, that he was probably putting his professional reputation at grave risk by being seen with her, and in a public house, at that. For Maisie Haddon was the city's most notorious, most successful, and busiest back-street abortionist.

  He ordered drinks, her rum and black, and a tomato juice for himself.

  "Are you off the gargle?" she said, incredulous.

  "Six months now."

  "Holy God." She still had the accent, raw and flat, of wherever it was she hailed from, over in the west. "Did you have a conversion, or what?" Their drinks arrived and she clinked the rim of her glass against his. "Well, I hope you get a high place in Heaven."

  He offered her his cigarette case and flipped the lid of his lighter. She screwed up her mouth and blew smoke sideways, and touched the tip of a little finger delicately to one corner of her mouth and then to the other.

  "So," she said. "What is it you're after?"

  He pretended puzzlement. "What do you mean?"

  "I know you-you're always after something."

  "Only your company, Maisie."

  She flexed a skeptical eyebrow. "Oh, sure."

  Maisie had spent two stretches in jail. The first time was twenty years before, when she had been charged with running a nursing home, so-called, where women with inconvenient pregnancies came in secret to have their babies, many of which were left for Maisie to dispose of, often in a bundle of swaddling on the side of a country road at dead of night. When her sentence was served she had promptly rented a room in Hatch Street and started in the abortion trade. Shortly afterwards her clinic, as she called it, had been raided by the Vice Squad and she had done another two-year stretch in Mountjoy. Released again, and undeterred, she had gone straight back to work. Maisie was the keeper of many secrets. She knew Malachy Griffin and claimed to have worked with him at the Holy Family hospital in the days when she was still a real nurse, a claim, Quirke reflected, that no doubt Malachy would not wish to hear too often or too loudly put about.

  "How is business?" Quirke asked now.

  "Never better." She took a slug of her rum and fitted another of his cigarettes into her ebony holder. "I tell you, Quirke, the women of this town must never have heard of a French letter."

  "Hard to come by."

  She cackled, and poked him in the chest with a forefinger. "Hard to come by- that's a good one." Her glass was empty already; he signaled to the barman for a refill. "Anyway, they're not," she said. "I have a fellow brings them in by the suitcaseful through Holyhead. I offer them to my clients. 'Here,' I say, 'take a couple of dozen packets of them with you, for I don't want to see you here again for a good long while, and preferably never.' But will they take them?" She put on a whining tone. "'The priest will give out to me, Nurse. My fella won't hear of it, Nurse.' Bloody little fools."

  Quirke toyed with his glass. "Ever come across a woman called Hunt?" he asked. "Deirdre Hunt?"

  She gave him an arch look. "Oho," she said. "Here it comes."

  "She also called herself Laura Swan."

  She was still looking at him hard along one side of her nose.

  "Do you know what it is, Quirke," she said, "but you're a terrible man." Putting on a show of unwilling surrender, she rummaged in her handbag and brought out a dog-eared address book bound in leather. This was her famous little black book, which, as she declared frequently in her cups, she intended one day to sell to the People or the News of the World, to keep herself in comfort in her declining years. She flipped through the pages, reading off names under her breath. It was all show, Quirke knew: there was not a woman Maisie had treated, in the three decades and more in which she had been in business, whose name, address, and telephone number she could not recite from memory at a moment's notice. "No," she said, "no Hunt. What was the other name-Swan? No Swan, either. Who is she?"

  Quirke raised one shoulder an inch and let it fall again. "Was," he said.

  "Ah. So that's the way it is." She shut the address book with a slap and thrust it back into the depths of her bag. "In that case, I certainly do not know and have never known any person or persons of that name or names. Right?" She finished her second drink and fairly banged the glass down on the bar.

  Quirke lifted a finger to the barman. "In fact," he said, deliberately pausing, as if in judicious scruple, "in fact it wasn't her, Deirdre Hunt, that I was particularly interested in. She wouldn't have been one of your customers." She looked at him. "I did a postmortem on her," he said. "She had never been in the family way."

  A small man wearing a puce-colored tie, on his way to the gents', staggered as he was going past and jogged Maisie's elbow, and a drop of rum from her glass splashed onto her chiffon scarf.

  "Bloody queers," Maisie muttered, glaring after the little man and plumping herself up like a ruffled hen. She turned her attention back to Quirke. "So what," she asked, "was the matter with her, then?"

  The fumes of the rum she was breathing over him were making Quirke's head swim. His mouth was dry and his fingers had the arthritic ache in the joints that came on when he was most in need of a drink. Would it never abate, he wondered, this raw craving? Perhaps he was an alcoholic, after all, and not just the heavy drinker he had always told himself he was. Suddenly he wanted to be away from here, from this reeking place, these jabbering, reeling people, this woman with the blood of countless embryos on her hands, and of more than one misfortunate mother, too, if the stories whispered of her were true.

  "Do you know-" he began and had to stop. His thirst was a rage now, his mouth drier than ever, and his forehead moist with a chill sweat. He ran a hand over his eyes, his nose, his mouth. "Do you know a man called Kreutz?" he asked, clenching his fists under the rim of the bar and digging his fingernails into his palms.

  She focused on him, frowning. "How do you spell that?" He spelled it. "Oh, I know him, all right," she said, and gave a low laugh. "'Dr.' Kreutz, so-called. The darkie. Has a place in-where is it? Adelaide Road, that's right." She chuckled again. "I've had a few of that gentleman's patients referred to me."

  "What does he do?"

  "I don't know, some kind of mumbo jumbo. Healing for the spirit. Incense and fruit diets, that kind of thing. Women go to him."

  "And he sent some of them to you?"

  She grew wary, and looked into her drink and shrugged. "A couple. Why?"

  "Was it the usual trouble?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "The reason he sent these women to you, was it the usual?"

  "No," she said with harsh sarcasm, "they were in need of further spiritual guidance and advice on their complexions." She leaned her face into his. She was not drunk, but she was not any longer sober, either. "Why the fuck do you think he sent them to me?" She guzzled another go of her drink. A thought struck her. "What has he to do with the other one, what's her name-Hunt?"

  "I don't know," Quirke said. He slid himself cautiously off the stool. This was how their meetings most often ended, with Maisie tipsy and morose and him sidling for the door and escape. Behind Maisie's back, and with a finger to his lips,
he paid the barman for another rum and black and stepped away from the bar nimbly. Maisie looked over her shoulder and watched him go. For such a big fellow, she blearily mused, he could move awful fast.

  The sunlight in the street blinded him. An enormous Guard was examining Maisie's car, skewed at an angle with two of its wheels on the pavement. Quirke veered aside and made off.

  Everywhere he turned in the business of Deirdre Hunt, things that had seemed substantial evaporated into smoke and air, and what had appeared open and inviting entryways were suddenly slammed shut in his face.

  WHEN HE HAD ROUNDED THE CORNER FROM MERRION SQUARE AND was walking up Mount Street he spotted a figure sitting in the sun on the steps outside No. 39 and knew at once who it was. Even at that distance there was no mistaking the big head with its cap of carroty hair and monk's tonsure. He thought of turning back before he was spotted himself, but instead went on, for lack of will. His rage for a drink had abated but he had a dry hangover now; there was a pounding in his head, and his eyes scalded in their sockets.

  Billy Hunt was sitting on the steps with his back sloped and a hand under his chin, like Rodin's Thinker. Quirke wondered what had possessed him to get involved with the likes of Deirdre-what was her maiden name?-Deirdre Ward. But then, what possessed any man to fix on any woman, or any woman to fix on any man? In the case of his own marriage the answer had been simple, and Sarah, dead Sarah, his dead wife's sister, had enunciated it clearly for him: Delia had been willing to sleep with him without a wedding ring, and Sarah had not, and on that basis he had made his choice. But Delia, the lovely, dissatisfied, dangerous Delia, why had she accepted him, knowing, as she must have known-for Delia was clever, and missed nothing-that it was her sister he had really wanted? Had she, he wondered now-it had never occurred to him before-had she done it to spite her sister? God knows, Delia would have been capable of it; Delia, he thought, would have been capable of anything.