A Death in Summer

by Benjamin Black

  “He’s in the hospital.”

  Quirke closed his eyes and pressed a thumb and two fingers to the bridge of his nose. “I don’t understand-what happened?”

  “He’s all right. He took a going over, but he’s not bad. Only”-Hackett paused, and his voice sank a tone-“he lost a finger.”

  10

  The pain had been a surprise, and a corrective, too, of a radical kind. It was as if a great brusque arm had swept away all the toys and colored baubles that he had mistaken for the stuff of a grown-up life and left him with only the stony bare floor. This, he suddenly saw, this was reality, all else but pretense and play. Everything had narrowed to a few crucial points, the main one located at the third knuckle of his left hand.

  When he woke to find himself dumped like a sack of refuse on the cobbles in a corner of that lane, he was aware at first only of a huge confusion, and thought a great mistake must have been made but one that in a moment would be set right. Nothing made sense. He was not supposed to be lying here like this; how had it happened? It was dark, and there was someone leaning over him, breathing foul fumes of alcohol and general bodily rot. He felt a hand scrabbling inside his jacket and instinctively clamped his arm against his side, and the figure above him reared back. “Whoa, Jesus!” a rough voice said in fright. “I thought you were dead.”

  He was not dead, certainly not, for if he were he would not be feeling this remarkable, quite remarkable, pain. There was a pounding in his head, too, and something was wrong with his back, and his left ankle was twisted under him, but none of this compared to what was happening in his hand. Before he looked at it he imagined it surrounded by a pulsing crimson fireball, as if such pain must be visible. When he lifted it to his face there was no flame, but the perspective was wrong, or the angle, and it did not look like his hand. Was that blood? Yes, a great deal of blood. And a part of his hand, unaccountably, was missing.

  “You’re in a bad way, Captain,” the foul-breathed voice said. “Can you get up on your feet, at all?”

  He was worried about his wallet. That must have been what this fellow leaning over him had been searching for inside his jacket. He kept it in his right-hand breast pocket, which meant he would have to reach for it with his left hand, but that would not be possible, not with his left hand in the state that it was. He tried with his right hand, but it was too awkward, and the effort made him feel dizzy, which in turn made him feel sick. He leaned aside and vomited briefly onto the ground. “Jesus,” the voice said again, in sympathetic wonderment. That this stinking fellow was still here was a good sign, for if he had found the wallet he would surely have run off.

  A cat was sitting on top of the wall on the other side of the lane; he could see it outlined against the last faint luminance in the western sky. What must the animals make of us and our doings, he found himself wondering; we must seem to them mad beyond measure.

  The figure above him was a young man with a wispy beard and no front teeth. He smelled like a Christmas dinner gone bad. Somehow, together, they got themselves to their feet-it seemed to Sinclair that he was helping the young man as much as the young man was helping him. This was funny, and if he could have managed it he would have laughed. Clinging to each other the two lurched up the lane and out onto Fitzwilliam Place. It was nearing midnight and the street was empty. He gave the young man a half crown that he found in the watch pocket of his waistcoat, and the fellow saluted smartly, and called him Captain again, and asked him if he would be all right, and shuffled off.

  Now what? He tried flagging down a taxi, but when the driver drew close enough to see the state he was in he shook his head and drove on. He could try walking home, but he had definitely pulled something in his back, and the ankle that had been twisted under him felt as delicate as glass and at the same time heavy and hot as a lump of smoldering wood. His left arm he held close across his chest, the hand with the missing finger pressed protectively into the hollow of his shoulder. The pain in it made an enormous steady dull beat. He wondered how much blood he had lost-a lot, given the light-headedness he was feeling.

  He crossed to the square and hobbled along by the railings, under the silent trees, assailed by the heartlessly tender perfumes of the night. A girl was standing in inky shadows at the corner. As he approached her he caught the wary flash of an eye.

  “It’s all right,” he said, “I was in an accident. Will you help me?”

  She was no more than sixteen or seventeen, painfully thin, with a peaky face under a black scrap of a hat pinned at an angle meant to be jaunty but that only increased the overall melancholy of her aspect.

  She was still eyeing him with misgiving. He asked her again to help him and she said that she was a working girl, and what kind of help did he want, anyway? He said he needed an ambulance, and that his hand was injured, and that he had taken a tumble and was finding it difficult to walk; would she telephone for an ambulance?

  “What happened to you, anyway?” she asked. “You don’t look to me like you were in an accident.”

  Her fear was abating, he could see.

  “No, you’re right,” he said. “I was attacked.”

  “Was it that fellow that was helping you? I know him, he’s a drunken bowsy.”

  “No, I don’t think it was him. In fact, I’m sure it wasn’t.”

  “He wouldn’t be able to, anyway, that fellow.”

  He closed his eyes briefly. “My hand is paining very badly,” he said. “Will you telephone for me, will you ring nine-nine-nine?”

  She hesitated. She was no longer afraid, now, only impatient and put out, but still, she was a woman and therefore, as he guessed, could not be entirely unsympathetic. “There’s a box down at the corner,” she said. “Have you pennies?”

  He gave her the coins, and waited, watching her walk down to Baggot Street, wobbling a little on her high heels, and step into the lighted phone booth. The pain in his hand made him grind his teeth. He was worried that he might faint. Presently the girl came back. “They’re sending the ambulance,” she said. “You’re to stay here.”

  He leaned his back against the railings and she began to move away. “Will you wait with me?” he said. He suddenly felt very sorry for himself, but at a remove, as if he were not himself but some suffering creature that had come crawling to him for help, as he had come to the girl. “Please? I’ll pay you-here.” He reached his right hand fumblingly under the right flap of his jacket, and managed this time to find his wallet, which amazingly was there, untouched. He held it open to her. “There’s a five-pound note in there,” he said. “Take it.”

  She looked at him and narrowed her eyes. “Give us a fag,” she said. “I don’t want your money.”

  He got out his packet of Gold Flake and turned so that she could reach into his pocket and find his lighter. When they had lit up he asked her name. “Teri,” she said. “With one r and an i. ”

  “Teri,” he said. “That’s nice.” The first lungful of smoke made his head swim.

  “It’s Philomena, really,” she said. “Teri is my professional name. What about you?”

  “John,” he said without hesitation.

  She gave him another narrow-eyed look. “No, it’s not,” she said.

  He was about to protest, but her expression stopped him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s David. Really it is.”

  “David. That’s a good name. Not Dave, or Davy?”

  “No. Just David.”

  They heard a siren starting up in the distance.

  “I’d have let you into my room,” Teri said, “only my fellow might have arrived in on top of us.”

  “Your fellow?”

  She shrugged. “You know.”

  He was astonished all at once to feel his eyes prickle with tears. “I wish you’d take that fiver,” he said, with sorrowful fervor. “It’s only a way of saying thanks.”

  She considered him for a moment, and her eyes hardened. “Saying thanks to the whore with the heart of gold, eh?
” she said, sounding all at once far older than her years. Way down at the end of the long avenue a flashing blue light appeared. “Here’s your ambulance.”

  She turned and walked away, her heels clicking.

  His hand throbbed.

  ***

  And then there was the strangeness of being in hospital, where everything was familiar and at the same time topsy-turvy. The ambulance brought him to the Holy Family-of course, where else, given the grotesqueness of all that was happening? His place of work was in the basement but they put him upstairs, in the new wing, in a big ward with thirty or more beds in it. He had been treated first in Emergency by an Indian intern whom he knew from seeing about the place, a whimsical fellow with a high-pitched laugh and remarkably beautiful slender hands that were the color of cocoa on the backs and brick pink in the palms. “Oh dear oh dear,” the Indian said when he saw the wound, “what happened to you, my friend?”

  He did not know what to answer. There had been two of them, the fellow in the windcheater and the one who had come up behind him and hit him expertly behind the right ear with something solid but pliant-a cosh, he supposed, if there really were such a thing outside of gangster pictures. He had been unconscious when they lopped off the ring finger of his left hand, not with a knife but with some kind of metal shears, for the skin at the knuckle was bruised and the bone had been crushed and severed rather than cut clean through. The Indian injected a shot of morphine and cleaned up the wound; then he was taken into the operating theater, where he was given local anesthetic. The surgeon, a red-faced fellow by the name of Hodnett, trimmed back the stub of bone and pulled the skin forward in a flap and sewed it along the rim of the palm, all the while discussing with the anesthetist the Royal St. George regatta due to take place the following Sunday in Dun Laoghaire. Sinclair was offered no sympathy, the fact that he was himself a Holy Family man precluding it, apparently. At the end Hodnett had leaned over him and said, “Someone certainly doesn’t like you, Sinclair my lad,” and laughed grimly and departed with his surgeon’s slouch, whistling.

  ***

  Upstairs, he slept, thanks to exhaustion and the effects of the morphine. He woke at four, and that was when the pain went to work on him in earnest. His heavily bandaged hand was suspended in a sling attached to a metal stand, so that he had to lie on his back with his left arm lifted straight before him as if he had been felled and left frozen in the act of delivering a martial salute. Pain was a dark giant that seized him wordlessly and pummeled him, slowly, methodically, monotonously. Never before in his life, he realized, had he known what it was to concentrate, to the exclusion of all else, on one particular, relentless thing. The noises that the other patients made, the moans and mutterings, the fluttery sighs, came to him as if from somewhere high above him, on another level of existence. He and the giant were at the bottom of what might be a deep ravine, a secret cleft cut into the ordinary landscape of the world, and it seemed there was to be no getting free.

  Yet at dawn the pain abated somewhat, or perhaps it was just that the light of day gave him more strength of spirit to cope with it. The night nurse had largely ignored him and his pleas for painkillers. Her successor on the morning shift was a bright-faced girl whom he had danced with at a staff party the previous Christmas; he could not recall her name, but thought the other nurses called her Bunny. She remembered him, and with his morning tea gave him clandestinely a large purple capsule, even the name of which she would not divulge-“The ward sister would have my hide!”-but which she assured him would do the trick, and winked, and went off, swinging her hips.

  Quirke arrived first thing, accompanied by the detective, Hackett. It was all very awkward. Sinclair, blissfully groggy after taking the purple pill, was reminded of the time when he was at the Quaker school in Waterford and contracted mumps and his parents came to visit him. They were led into the infirmary by the form master, a nice man with the apt name of Bland. Sinclair’s mother had thrown herself onto the bed and wept, of course, but his father had kept himself at a safe distance, saying that his “doctors”-as if there had been a team of them, grave men with beards and white coats-had cautioned him not to approach too near to the patient for fear of consequences that he did not specify but that would be, it was understood, very serious indeed.

  Quirke sat on a metal chair beside the night locker while Inspector Hackett loitered at the foot of the bed with one hand in a pocket of his trousers and the other hovering pensively near his blue-shadowed chin. Sinclair described what little he remembered of the attack, and the two men nodded. Quirke, for all his questions and commiserations, seemed distracted. “Was it the fellow on the phone?” he asked.

  Sinclair knew who it was he meant. “No,” he said, “he had an educated voice-this one was just a thug.”

  Hackett spoke up. “What fellow on the phone was that?”

  “Someone called him at work the other day,” Quirke said, still sounding distracted.

  “And?”

  “Called me a Jewboy,” Sinclair said drily, “told me to keep my Jew nose out of other people’s business or I’d get it cut off. At least they settled for a finger.”

  This brought a silence; then Hackett said, “The fellow that waylaid you in the lane, this thuggish fellow, what did he look like?”

  “I don’t know-ordinary. In his twenties, thin face.”

  “And the accent?”

  “Dublin.”

  “And the second one, who came up behind you?”

  “Him I didn’t see at all,” Sinclair said. He lifted his good hand to touch the aching place behind his ear. “Felt him, though.”

  Quirke offered Sinclair a cigarette but he said he would prefer one of his own. “In my jacket, in the locker there.”

  Quirke brought the packet of Gold Flake and held out the flame of his lighter.

  “The one on the phone,” Hackett said, “you had no idea what he meant by ‘other people’s business’? What did he say, exactly?”

  Sinclair was growing tired of what felt like an interrogation, and besides, the effect of Nurse Bunny’s magic purple philter was wearing off. “I can’t remember,” he said shortly. “I thought it was just some joker playing tricks.”

  The detective glanced at his bandaged hand. “Some trick, though,” he said.

  An old man in one of the beds opposite began to cough, making a noise like that of a suction pump hard at work in some particularly deep and viscous sump.

  “Was there no one around, when these two buckos tackled you?” Hackett asked.

  “I saw no one. When I woke up there was a tramp there, a wino, trying to get my wallet.”

  “You still had your wallet?” The detective looked surprised. “The other two hadn’t taken it?”

  “They took nothing. Except my finger, of course.”

  “So there was this tramp,” Quirke said, “that’s all?”

  The old man had stopped coughing and was gasping for breath. No one seemed to be paying any heed to him.

  “There was a girl,” Sinclair said.

  “A girl?”

  “On the corner, waiting for business. It was her that phoned for the ambulance.”

  “What was her name?” Hackett asked.

  “She didn’t say.” One r and an i. He wished she had taken the fiver he had offered her, the whore with the heart of gold.

  The two men left shortly after that, and a nurse came to look at the ancient cougher opposite, and then a doctor was fetched and the curtain was pulled around the old man’s bed and everyone else lost interest.

  ***

  He fell into a restless doze and dreamed of being chased down an endless broad street in the dark by unseen pursuers. Teri with an i was there, too, standing on the corner by the railings in her little black hat and yet at the same time somehow keeping pace with him as he ran, chatting to him, the pennies in her handbag jingling.

  It was Bunny the nurse who put a hand on his shoulder and woke him, telling him he had another visitor
-“You’re fierce popular, so you are.” His arm had gone numb but the hand at the end of it was throbbing worse than ever. The curtain was no longer around the bed opposite, and the old man was no longer in it. How long had he been asleep? The nurse moved back and Phoebe Griffin stepped forward tentatively, with a pained and sympathetic smile. “Quirke told me what happened,” she said. “You poor thing.”

  He was not glad to see her. He was tired and dazed and in pain and wished to be left alone, to deal with himself and sort out his thoughts. That fitful sleep had only served to bring home to him more sharply how dreamlike and implausible all this was-the abusive phone call, the attack in the street, his lost finger, this bed, that old man dying in the bed across the way, and now Phoebe Griffin with her jittery smile and her handbag clasped to her breast and her hat that reminded him of the one the whore had worn. “I’m all right,” he said gruffly, forcing a smile of his own and struggling to raise himself on his elbow.

  “But your finger,” Phoebe said, “… why?”

  “I can only tell you what I told Quirke: I don’t know.” Oh, he was tired, very, very tired. “How are you?”

  She shrugged that aside. “I’m all right, of course. But you-my God!”

  He sank back against the pillows. He was thinking again of the infirmary at Newtown school, and of his mother at her lavish weeping and his father standing back looking bored. He had believed for a while that he was falling in love with Phoebe Griffin, and now the awful realization that he must have been mistaken clanged in him like a cracked bell. At once, of course, he felt a rush of tender concern for her; had he been able he would have taken her in his arms and rocked her like a baby.

  “You were good to come,” he said weakly, trying for another smile.

  She was still leaning over him, but now she stiffened and drew back an inch. She too was seeing the realization that had come to him; he saw her seeing it, and he was sorry.

  “Well, why wouldn’t I come!” she exclaimed, with a breathily unsteady little laugh. She hesitated a moment, then sat down on the metal chair where Quirke had sat. “You needn’t tell me about it, if you don’t want to. It must have been dreadful.”