The Death of a Joyce Scholar

by Bartholomew Gill

  But he had no luck with sleep. He watched the pale light to the east brighten gradually into a brilliant scarlet blush, until finally a crescent of blinding sun forced him to lower the shade. When he finally checked his watch it was seven, and he abandoned the book a few pages from the end and padded down to the kitchen to make her tea and his coffee. Both would need an early start.

  As the water heated, he put his hands in his pockets and turned to his back garden; he thought of how startling he found a book that detailed a day in 1904 but still seemed current and accurate. Joyce could as well have been describing the Dublin that McGarr knew, with all its gossip, lies, tall tales, and extravagances. In short, its search for a truth that wasn’t too hard to bear.

  Why hard? Because of the poverty that was written into every page of Ulysses. Dublin society then, as now, was stagnant on virtually every level—economic first, but on social, moral, and spiritual levels as well. Back then, the British and the Church and the loss of central, unifying myths could be blamed. Now it was the 6 percent of the population who controlled over eighty percent of the country’s wealth, the crushing, largely foreign-held debt that was three times the per capita debt of Mexico, a powerful Church that intruded into all aspects of life and quashed every social or political reform not decidedly in its interest, and finally the British, who were still with them in the North.

  Hence the need to patch over the tatty reality of Dublin with puns, rhymes, songs, riddles, circular arguments, and references to arcane mythological and philosophical systems that seemed to McGarr more form than content. In short, the need for something to help pass time, to distract, to arrange.

  Like drink.

  That was it. Ulysses was a grand—perhaps the grandest—way to pass time. McGarr could imagine himself reading it over and over and over again, forever finding something new and forever only scratching its surface. And then Leopold Bloom, and even more so Stephen Dedalus, were what he thought of as typical intelligent Dubliners. They were cynical and sophisticated—by which he meant they were not naive—but they were essentially charming loafers. Defensive and guilt-ridden about their purposeless but oddly beguiling city, they wandered about, flirting with her tawdry charms. For Bloom it was an advert here, the promise of another there, many and recurrent stillborn ideas, and a balance sheet of small losses at the end of the day.

  For Dedalus it was an afflatus, a wastrel’s bingey gyre from sobriety, control and frustration through drunkenness, nonsense and violence to the condition of having to borrow from another wanderer a few bob, a blessing and the hope of another day in some better and real place unnamed.

  Yet in all it was a Bloomsday better than Kevin Coyle’s, McGarr supposed, readying (like Bloom himself, he now realized) a breakfast tray for his wife. He now pulled four slices of toast from under the gas and flipped them over. Think of it: Coyle as Stephen Dedalus, right down to his donning Joyce’s (Dedalus’s) boater and carrying an ashplant stick. Flood as Leopold Bloom, with his dark features and weight, his bow tie and professional manner, his being foreign and a Jew, his inconstant wife and equally liberal daughter. Granted Bloom had followed his Molly through her assignation only in his mind, and Maura Flood’s Blazes Boylan was Coyle (Dedalus) himself. But that was life, not art.

  What would Flood have done had he caught them en flagrante, as McGarr had found the daughter and Holderness in Bray? Perhaps he had not required direct evidence, and—after having observed the brilliant Coyle awash in his talents the day long, and having returned to discover that his wife’s appreciation was rather more intense—he had snapped. Certainly the physical evidence suggested the possibility.

  The toast was hot to the touch, and he flicked the slices off on a tray, slathering butter across the crusty tops. The dark, oily aroma of his coffee rose to him, and he thought of Catty Doyle, who would be who in Ulysses? Perhaps one of the Nighttown whores whom Dedalus visits near the end of the book. Certainly Catty had merged her romantic and professional interests with Coyle and Holderness. Could she have derived some as yet unknown benefit from her relationship with Mary Sittonn?

  Lifting the tray and turning from the stove, he decided he was trying too hard to make Dublin then fit Dublin now. For instance, “Kinch” was what Buck Mulligan had called Stephen Dedalus. But Flood (Bloom) had also called Coyle (Dedalus) Kinch, which in Dublin meant—McGarr stopped short and coffee lapped over the edge of his cup—a noose in a rope, the sort that had been used for hanging.

  See? More the fool he for reading the book. Were it indeed a “literary” crime, Coyle would have been hung, not stabbed once, neatly, in the chest.

  But a few steps down the hall his imagination was off again: David Holderness, who was he in Ulysses? Buck Mulligan? McGarr remembered what Flood said Coyle had said about Holderness: “Beckett without Beckett’s intelligence, wit, or sympathy for the human condition.” Or here Mulligan’s wit. The trot that McGarr had followed in reading Ulysses had said that the character Buck Mulligan had been patterned on Oliver St. John Gogarty, legendary Dublin physician and eccentric whose writing McGarr had read and who had been witty. What was that quote of his, describing an infamous Dublin madame? “She had a face upon which avarice was written like an hieroglyphic, and a voice like a guffaw in hell.”

  No, Holderness was not much of a Mulligan or a Gogarty, or even much of a Beckett. He hardly stood out in any way; after all, there was not a Dubliner of McGarr’s acquaintance who wouldn’t have had something humorous to say when having been discovered en flagrante. And the way the man then insisted upon clasping Hiliary Flood to him, as though either to further humiliate her or—could it be?—to flaunt his prowess with women, had been cruel. Could he have been trying only to conceal his own nakedness? The erection and so forth?

  Perhaps. And, given the name Holderness, he could well not be a Dubliner or an Irishman at all. From the little McGarr knew of him, he could be from Iowa or Nebraska, like Fergus bloody Flood. McGarr shook his head. The man had fooled him. He would have to learn more: about Flood, about Holderness, about literature, which he was now bloody tired of. He thought about the book-launching party later in the afternoon.

  With a toe he eased open the bedroom door.

  Who else was there? Katie Coyle, the victim’s wife. Even though he had not until that night read Ulysses, McGarr knew something about Joyce, at least the biographical parts, and it struck him now how much Katie Coyle physically resembled Nora Barnacle, Mrs. James Joyce. Both were large women. Both had dark hair—Barnacle’s a deep red—and dark eyes. Both had been wife and little else to their husbands.

  Wife. His own refused to wake up, moving away from his touch and deeper into the covers and pillows.

  “C’mon now—all up. Tea’s hot. Buttered toast.” McGarr placed the tray on the table between the bed and the wing-back chair, which he turned around so they could breakfast together. He stepped into the bathroom, switched on the hot-water tank and the infrared light to heat the tiles.

  There he was himself playing Bloom to his Molly, he again thought, closing the bathroom door behind him. And not for the first time did he, a man of a certain age, wonder if there were any Boylans in her life. Well—“Up now! I’ve lit the gas for your bath”—that was something you couldn’t worry about. But did.

  “You sound tired.”

  “Me? Been up for hours.”

  He had not quite gotten himself back into the chair when the phone began ringing.

  It was Sinclaire. The couple who lived in the flat on the Finglas Road overlooking the murder scene had returned from their holiday in West Cork; he could see them in a half hour, before they went off for work.

  “I’ll be there,” said McGarr.

  Noreen had fallen back to sleep, her chin pointed, like a dart, at the ceiling.

  FOURTEEN

  IT WAS AN ATTIC FLAT in a tall Victorian building, and both policemen were puffing by the time they had climbed to the door. The day was dark, muggy, and hot, and McGarr took the p
recaution of removing his tan straw hat and swabbing its band before setting it back on his head. Noreen had selected a light brown linen suit for him, and it wouldn’t do to arrive at the Shelbourne all damp or mussed.

  When the door opened and a face appeared, McGarr nearly asked if the girl’s mother were at home. She was young, not out of her teens, as was the boy she introduced as her husband. Behind them, nearly dwarfed by him, the tiny flat was neat and clean and packed with many new things. Both were dressed for office work—shirt and tie for him, for her a tight black dress that flexed over her backside as she moved.

  “We’re not usually light sleepers, and we sleep here.” She meant the room, no more than a large closet, that was closest to the door. “But the sound of the car was so strange. Blatty, like a small tractor or something. Michael got up first and looked out, and when he didn’t come back to bed, I followed him here to see what was wrong.” She took the boy’s arm.

  He was tall and had to stoop to look out the window of the back porch that had been closed in to form another small room. “We keep our bicycles in the garden.” He pointed to the clip that contained the right leg of his trousers. “And I need mine to get to work.”

  A careful young couple watching their pennies, McGarr thought. In the nook that was their kitchen he had seen an oatmeal tin and a packet of the least expensive bulk tea. In another room was a sewing machine and a computer terminal; he concluded they’d make excellent witnesses in court.

  “The car was a Fiat,” the boy said. “One of the first models. I had a toy car like it when I was a child. A Five hundred. The interior stayed dark forever, it seemed, with me hopping from foot to foot in the chill.

  “Then the door opened and a heavy-set guy got out. He had a hat on, but when he reached the other side of the car, the light from the street lamps on Finglas Road caught his face. A dark man, fleshy face, maybe forty or fifty, hard to tell which. And steady. Not the other one, who couldn’t walk at all. I didn’t hear what was said, but the heavy one kept trying to get the slim one up the alley, where the car wouldn’t fit.

  “Laurel and Hardy stuff. First Laurel dropped the stick he was carrying, but, bending over, the hat came off. When he reached for that he fell and lost the stick. Eventually the other man raised a wrist and looked at his watch. He pulled the slim man over near the wall, seemed to debate taking the hat and stick with him, but then laid them down on the drunk’s chest.”

  “Took him forever to turn the car around and get it back out between the auto stops there at the head of the lane,” said the girl. “Motor sounded like it would burst.”

  “Or the clutch.”

  Sinclaire traded glances with McGarr, who asked, “Bow tie?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Was the driver wearing a bow tie?”

  They looked at each other. She nodded. He said, “Now that you mention it, he was. Large man. Powerful. He moved the other around like he was nothing at all. It was only the shouting that kept him from picking him up and carrying him. When he tried, the drunk started shouting something like ‘old’ or ‘hold.’ I only caught the first part of it.

  “After a while I got tired of watching them and went back to bed. I reckoned it was a fair night and nearly over by then, and we were to get an early start on our holidays. If he was there in the morning, I’d try to get him some help. But as we were leaving I heard barking and looked out. A woman who I think lives up the lane in De Courcy Square was out there with her dog, bending over the chap, speaking to him. Jet-black hair, older. You know”—his eyes surveyed McGarr and then shied to Sinclaire’s snow-white hair, but it was too late to phrase the thought differently—“in her thirties.” He looked away.

  “By then my father-in-law had arrived, and he’s not a man to be kept waiting. We thought nothing of it until we got home and the landlord told us what had happened.”

  “The hat and the stick. When you saw the woman leaning over the man, did you notice if he still had those two things with him?”

  The boy thought for a moment and shook his head. “I didn’t notice, but I don’t think he had. At least I can remember definitely that he didn’t have the blazer on. With the red stripes, you couldn’t miss that day or night. He had gotten himself over to the wall proper and was sitting against it. His shirt was open and the glasses he’d been wearing were off. But…” He hunched his shoulders to mean that was all.

  Said Sinclaire, “The woman. Do you know her?”

  “Only on sight,” the boy said all too readily, and the girl looked up at him, her eyes searching his face. “At the bus stop, in the shops. The neighborhood’s a small place.”

  McGarr had stepped closer to the window and looked beyond the immense gray stones of the wall into the cemetery. “You seem to know the area. How about a couple of punks. You know—spiked hair in outrageous shades, like pink and green. All leather and denim and studs. I understand they’re living somewhere in the cemetery.”

  The girl joined him at the window. “Right over there, but there’s only one. A fella. Doesn’t seem to want to be seen much. Like a cat, he is—out the door and up over that great height of wall as quick as you please.” She turned suddenly to her husband. “Michael will tell you that up until five weeks ago I was home during the day. I brought my sewing over here to the window where it’s cooler and there’s good light.” Her eyes flickered down at her dress.

  “A work of art,” said Sinclaire, who, apart from Ward, was considered the handsomest man on the Squad. “Smashing, really.”

  She blushed.

  “Shaved head but for a patch of blond running down the center,” said McGarr. “About six two or three. Thirteen or fourteen stone. A punk?”

  Said the boy, “Last I saw, the patch was pink and spiked. His eye shadow was pink too. He’s only about six feet and no more than twelve stone.” He pointed a finger at his own shoulders, which were broad. “Pads. They’re all wearing them these days.”

  “I wonder if you two would like another sort of holiday?” McGarr asked, turning to them. “Courtesy of the Garda Siochana—”

  The boy held up a palm. “Ah, thanks, but we have to work.”

  “And work you will, but from the comfort of some hotel—the Gresham or the Shelbourne, wherever you like.”

  They looked at each other. “Really?” she asked. “You’ve got to be joking. Those places cost hundreds of pounds a night.”

  “We’d like the use of your flat here, for…” He pointed toward the cemetery and the long shed that she had indicated. In the deep shadows glass could be seen, as though somebody had taken old windows and constructed a kind of shelter. “Provided I can be certain of your utter confidentiality.” He made sure that their eyes met his. “No parents, no friends, nobody should know of this. You can tell people you hit the lottery and you’re blowing it on a little high life.”

  “Ah, but nobody would be—” she began to say before she blushed and looked away. “I mean, we’re saving for a house, and—”

  Said her husband, pulling her into him, “We’ll think of something.”

  With Sinclaire in the window of the attic flat, McGarr strolled leisurely along the exterior face of the cemetery wall until he got to the area—roughly fifty yards from Catty Coyle’s back garden door—that he guessed was in line with the shed he had seen from the window above.

  There he stepped closer to the wall and allowed his eyes to run over its surface until he found what he sought. Jammer himself might be able to climb like a cat, but Bang had said that all five of them including their women had scaled the wall, and at least one of them had to be as ungainly as a fifty-year-old gardener/investigator in what McGarr liked to think of as not half-bad condition. Chinks, they were, that looked to have been chipped out of the mortar of the wall at easy increments to the top.

  Careful of the toes of his woven-leather brogues and of the tan, linen suit, McGarr made his way steadily but slowly to the top of the wall. There he found a rope hanging from the limb of a
tree; he let himself down. It was cool on the other side, and damp even on a summer’s day, but quiet and still; it was as though he had lowered himself into another world. Few noises from the busy Finglas Road reached here. Above him in the trees two jackdaws were quarreling, and deep into the cemetery he caught the distant whine of a hedge trimmer.

  McGarr scanned the rows of stone monuments, the empty drive, and the deep grass near the shed. It was a little-visited corner of the cemetery, and he imagined that at night the watchman shined a quick light on the shed and moved on. From his belt McGarr now pulled his Walther, checking it to make sure a bullet was chambered.

  He moved to a side of the shed and with his hat off pressed an ear to the gray weathered boards.

  He listened for minutes that seemed like hours, but heard nothing save the dripping of a tap. No moving about, no cough, no noise from within. He rounded the building and stepped quietly into the shadows that he had seen from the window of the attic apartment across the top of the wall. Sinclaire was there. He raised a hand.

  McGarr was surprised to find that the windows had been fitted to a precise frame, with most of the lower runs blacked in. All of the work, with obviously “found” materials, looked professional, with tight joints and not a “holiday” in a painted surface that McGarr could see. He tried the door, which was open, and why not? Anybody wanting to get in to the shed would merely have to break the windows. With the barrel of the Walther he scanned the single, open room. Nobody. Only a table, a chair, a cot, a sink, a towel, a bar of soap, and a stool. On the table was a two-ring electric cooker and a set of dishes, neatly stacked. McGarr stepped farther into the room.

  The cot was made to what McGarr judged were army specifications; the covers were pulled taut enough to make any packet of cigarettes bounce on the top blanket. At the foot was a fluffy eiderdown which wore like a badge of honor its Brown, Thomas price tag and plastic cord on an outer seam. It had cost 122 Irish pounds. McGarr was acquainted with the security at the fashionable department store, and he wondered how, given the way he looked, Jammer had gotten it out. Below the bed was a single pair of shoes, perfectly aligned and polished to a mirror sheen. Wing-tipped bluchers, by Church; McGarr would not mind owning a pair himself. Another hundred pounds at least.