Holy Orders A Quirke Novel

by Benjamin Black

  “And that’s Lily,” the woman said, indicating the child with a lift her chin.

  “Is she your—is she your daughter?” Quirke asked.

  Molly went on gazing at him, as if she had not heard, as if he had not spoken. Her mind seemed permanently elsewhere, engaged in some subtle and absorbing calculation. “She’s aras,” she said, and seeing his blankness she touched a finger to her temple and gave it a half turn clockwise. “Born that way, and nothing to be done for it.” She turned to the child and spoke in a loud, calling voice: “Are you all right there, Lily?” The child said nothing, only shifted her slow gaze from Quirke to the woman, as if turning some heavy thing on a pivot, with much effort. “Ah, you’re grand,” the woman said to her soothingly. “You’re grand, so you are.”

  The dog gave a final, angry yelp, and they heard it trotting away, grumbling to itself.

  “Were them two nyaarks outside, did you see?” Molly asked of Quirke. “Mikey,” she said, “and Paudeen.”

  “I don’t know who they are,” Quirke said.

  “Packie’s sons. I saw them giving you the eye, yourself and the peeler, when the two of yiz were going off today.”

  “No,” Quirke said, “I didn’t see anyone, except you.” He did not know why he had lied.

  She gave a grim little laugh. “That’s good,” she said. “Them boys would make short work of you.”

  “Would they? Why?”

  This time she laughed aloud. “Oh, aren’t you the innocent, now,” she said merrily.

  There was a brief pause. “Is Packie here?” Quirke asked.

  “And where else would he be?”

  “I don’t know. I thought he might have business somewhere.”

  This amused her. “Business, is it? He always has business, but he don’t move much from the home place here.”

  “Is he your—your husband?”

  She scowled faintly. “I’m his mull.”

  “Mull,” Quirke said. “Does that mean wife?”

  “Mull is woman,” she said, and turned her face aside with a grimace of distaste, as if something sour had come into her mouth. After a moment she spoke again. “My sister was his missus. She died.”

  He lowered his voice to a murmur. “And Lily? Is she yours?”

  She wrinkled up her face in disgusted incredulity. “Are you joking me?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to…”

  Cinnamon, that was what he had been smelling: cinnamon, a soft brown fragrance. For a moment in his mind he saw a desert under moonlight, the clifflike dunes glimmering, their edges sharp as scimitars, and in the distance, at the head of a long plume of dust, a line of camels and their drivers, and mounted on the camels swarthy sharp-faced men in turbans, and behind them their women, veiled, bejeweled, plump as pigeons.

  “There was a young man,” he said. “He worked for the newspapers, Jimmy Minor was his name. Small fellow, small as a child, almost. Smoked a lot. Did he come here? Did you see him, ever?”

  She moved sideways along the bed to the stove, and with a metal hook opened the fire door and threw the butt of her cigarette into the flames, and shut the door again. No, Quirke thought, he was wrong; what he was smelling was not cinnamon but some kind of sweet wood that was burning in the stove, maybe rosewood, or cedar. He wondered again if he was really here. Yet would he be smelling this smell if it was all in his imagination? This woman sitting before him, the girl on the bed, would they be so real? He made a fist of his right hand and dug the nails into his palm. He could feel that, all right. Yet how could he be sure his nerves were not deceiving him? Thinking this, he felt the by now familiar dizziness, as if he were standing on the rim of a precipice and the dark emptiness were calling to him to jump, to jump. But he would not jump, no, he would not. He had so many things to do yet, so many things. He would not die.

  The woman was rolling another cigarette. She was expert at it, shaping the slim white cylinder between her fingers and licking the gummed edge of the paper with the sharp moist tip of her scarlet tongue. When she had finished the cigarette she offered it to him. He took it, and thanked her. She began to roll another for herself.

  “Did Jimmy Minor come here?” Quirke asked. “Did you see him?”

  “The sharog?” the woman said, tapping one end of the rolled cigarette on her thumbnail.

  “Sharog,” Quirke said. “What’s that?”

  She took a light again from his lighter and leaned back and expelled a cone of smoke upwards into the vault of the ceiling. “The redhead,” she said.

  Quirke nodded. “Yes, that’s right—Jimmy Minor had red hair.”

  She edged along the bed again, and took up a kettle from somewhere on the floor, and with the metal hook lifted the cover of the stove and put the kettle on the hot plate. A few drops of moisture hissed and skittered on the glowing metal.

  Again Quirke was aware of the child’s labored breathing. Asthmatic, he thought, distractedly. She stirred herself now and got on all fours and crawled along the bed, past the loop of lace curtain, and reached out a hand towards Quirke and made to take the cigarette from his fingers. He drew back instinctively but the child reached after him, until he felt he had no choice but to relinquish the cigarette. She took it, holding it between two fingertips and a thumb, and sat back against the wall as before and took a deep draw of smoke. The woman laughed. “You’ll be grit,” she said to the child, who ignored her, and took another puff.

  The water in the kettle began to grumble in its depths.

  The woman, with her eyes still on the child, spoke to Quirke: “Did you ask himself about the sharog?”

  “Packie, you mean?” he said. “Yes, I asked him.”

  The woman nodded. “That’s why the shade was here, I suppose?”

  “The shade?”

  “The peeler,” she said impatiently, “the police fellow.” She stood up and opened a small cupboard on the end wall near the stove and took out a billycan and a Campbell’s yellow tea tin. She spooned leaves from the tin into the billycan. They did not seem to be tea leaves; they were of a lightish brown color and looked weightless and brittle. She poured water from the kettle over them, standing close by Quirke, and the odor of her unbathed flesh, biscuity and warm, filled his nostrils.

  The child, still smoking Quirke’s cigarette, was caught by a fit of coughing. She leaned forward, hacking and gasping, until her face took on a bluish pallor. The woman paid her no heed, and at last the attack passed, and the child leaned back again and sat with her head bowed, panting. Quirke took the remaining half of the cigarette from her fingers and dropped it to the floor and ground it under his heel.

  “He was killed,” he said to the woman, “murdered. The young man, I mean, the—what was the word?—the sharog.”

  “Was he now,” the woman said, showing no surprise. She went to the cupboard again and took from it two unmatched teacups and handed one to Quirke; he held it out to her and she filled it from the billycan. “Take a swallow of that,” she said.

  Quirke sniffed at the drink. It had a dry, bitter aroma, like wormwood. He sipped. A sharp taste, too, whiskeyish, slightly rancid, with a hint of peat in it. “What is it?” he asked. The woman did not answer, only watched him. He drank some more of the strange brew. The child’s eyes too were on him again now. Was this woman trying to poison him? It did not seem to matter, really. He leaned back on the bed, and only when the muscles of his back relaxed did he realize how tensely he had been holding himself since he had first sat down.

  He took another drink of the hot, bitter brew. The cup had things painted on it, figures in kimonos, a little lake with a crane flying over it, or a stork, perhaps, and distant, snow-fringed hills. All these tiny details—they had to be real. “Will you tell me about Jimmy Minor?” he said to the woman.

  “Tell you what about him?”

  “Someone, some people, murdered him, and threw his body in the canal.”

  The woman sat down again on the bed. She ha
d poured a little of the stuff from the billycan for herself, but she had hardly touched it. She gazed before her, blank-eyed. “He was here, aye,” she said. “He come to ask about the other one.”

  Quirke waited a moment, then spoke. “What other one?”

  “The cuinne.”

  He drew in a deep, slow breath. “The cuinne,” he said. “The priest, yes?” He had a swoony sensation, and something inside him seemed to dip and then right itself again with a soundless effort. He heard afar that music again, a soft lament on mouth organ or melodeon. Hohone, hohohonan … “What priest?” he asked. “Father Honan, was it? He came here too, didn’t he? Father Honan?” The name sounded strange to him; it had a soft, keening sound: hohonan, hohone. “Father Mick, they call him.”

  The woman, still gazing before her, now smiled an angry smile. “Aye,” she said, in almost a whisper. “Aye—Father Mick. The other sharog.”

  * * *

  Leaning for support against the wet railings Phoebe watched the man march swiftly away in the rain, swinging his arms, his cap pulled low and his sheepskin jacket drawn tight around him and his boot heels banging on the pavement. Later she remembered thinking that he must have been a soldier at some time. She saw him turn right and cross the little stone bridge, and then he was gone.

  She had thought he was going to kill her. He had seized her wrist and held it in his iron grip, crushing it, and put his face up close to hers and spoken to her in a low harsh voice. His breath was hot and had smelled of drink and of something meaty. She had not wanted to see his eyes and watched his mouth instead. He had a lantern jaw and as he spoke to her he bared his lower teeth. She could barely understand the words he was spitting into her face. He spoke a name, Costigan, that she recognized, but she did not know how, or from where.

  She had been terrified and she was shaking still; she could hear her own teeth chattering and she was afraid she would wet herself. All she could think of was that the man might come back, might grab her by the wrist again and call her names and warn her to warn her father …

  She pushed herself away from the railings and began to walk. She was trembling so badly by now she was surprised her bones did not rattle. She was going in the same direction as her attacker; should she not go back to the flat? But Sally was there—she did not want to see Sally. She went on. She had difficulty keeping in a straight line; her knees knocked together and her feet kept getting in the way of each other and she felt she was going to trip at any moment and fall headlong onto the wet pavement.

  She turned into Mount Street Crescent. The flank of the Pepper Canister Church loomed above her, foursquare and reassuring. Sanctuary. That was what she was in need of.

  In Mount Street itself the air was gauzy. She put her hand up to her face and found that she was crying. She searched in her pockets for a handkerchief but could not find one. Why had she come out without her handbag? Or had she brought it with her and had the man stolen it? No, he had not meant to steal from her; that had not been what he was about.

  Before she knew it she had mounted the steps shakily and was ringing Quirke’s doorbell. Please, Quirke, she thought, please be home. She pressed the button again, and kept her finger on it, and heard, very faintly, from three flights up, the bell shrilling in her father’s flat that she knew now with certainty was empty. All at once her knees gave way, and even though she clutched at the brass doorknob she could not hold herself upright, and slowly she slid down with her back against the door until she was sitting in a heap in a corner of the doorway, weeping.

  * * *

  A moment had passed, it seemed no more than a moment, yet all at once everything was different. He was no longer sitting, with the china cup in his hand, but lying, rather, lying full length, on his back, on the narrow bed. How could that be? He let his eyes roam over the vaulted black ceiling above him. He was quite calm, quite at ease, and this surprised him. He looked to the side. The child was asleep in the other bed, with a blanket pulled over her and her thumb in her mouth. Her eyelids were pale pink and burnished, like the inside of a seashell, and it seemed to him he had never before seen anything so delicate, so lovely.

  He braced his hands on either side of him on the bed and raised himself up a little way. The woman was leaning on the open half door again, with her head and shoulders outside, just as she had been leaning when he arrived. He must have made a sound for now she turned and looked at him. He sat up, still pressing his hands against the bed for support, but there was no need, he was no longer dizzy. In fact, his head was wonderfully clear. He had been sleeping. The woman must have drugged him; there must have been something in the drink she had given him. He did not care. He had not felt so rested in a very long time.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “I seem to have…” He did not know what to say. It did not matter. Nothing mattered.

  The woman shut the window and advanced slowly between the beds and stood looking down at him. Her expression was one of mild interest, tinged with amusement. “I was keeping an eye out for himself,” she said. “Had he of found you here he’d say we were spurking and that’d be the end of you.”

  “Spurking?” Quirke said.

  “Doing it, you know.” She bit her lip, laughing a little. “Spurking, we call it.”

  “You said this was your place,” he said, “that no one would come here.”

  “Himself knows no bar,” the woman replied darkly.

  Quirke looked again at the sleeping child. She was breathing through her mouth, making eerie animal sounds, little yelps and whinnies. “Dreaming,” the woman said, looking too at the girl. “What about, God knows.”

  She sat down beside Quirke on the bed. He looked at her toes braced on the bare planks of the floor. Feeling his look, she waggled them. “What did you give me to drink?” he asked.

  “’Twas tea”—she pronounced it tay—“and nothing but. You had a great sleep, all the same. You’re the weary man, surely.”

  He smiled sidelong at her. “Yes, Molly,” he said, “I’m the weary man.” He took out his cigarettes and offered her one, but she shook her head, with a flick of disdain. He found his lighter. He wondered if his wallet was still in his pocket—she could have stolen it, while he was enjoying his great sleep—but he did not bother to check. It was pleasant and restful, sitting here beside her in companionable warmth; he was at peace, after so many tempests. “Tell me about the priest,” he said. “Tell me about the two of them, the two sharogs.”

  “Tell you what?” she asked. She was smiling sideways back at him now, a teasing light in her eye.

  “Tell me who killed the young one. Tell me who killed Jimmy Minor.”

  She went to the stove and opened the fire door with the metal hook and lifted a log from a wicker basket under the bed in which the child was sleeping. She dropped it into the glowing embers and shut the door again. Quirke looked to the half door that was open at the top and saw the moon shining low in the sky, a strangely small but intensely bright silver disk. When had the rain stopped? He drew back his cuff and looked at his watch, and was astonished to see that it was just coming up to ten o’clock. It seemed to him he must have been asleep for hours, but it could hardly have been for more than a few minutes. How had he come to be lying down, in the first place? He had no memory of stretching out on the bed—had Molly helped him? Strangely, it did not trouble him not to know these things. His muddy shoes had begun to dry out; he could feel the tightness of the leather.

  The stove tended to, Molly sat down again, but this time she sat opposite him, on the bed in which the girl was sleeping. Quirke looked into the opening of her blouse, at the slope of her breasts and the soft shadow between them. Spurking: he smiled to himself.

  Molly had set a hand lightly on the girl’s narrow forehead. Nothing, it seemed, could wake her from her sleep. “’Twas the cuinne that done it,” Molly said.

  The dog had returned, and was outside, whimpering to be let in.

  “The priest?” Quirke said. “What
did he do?”

  A long interval passed before Molly spoke again. The moon shone in the window; the dog still whined. Quirke saw again the priest leaning against the bar in Flynne’s Hotel, smoothing his tie with his hand and lifting the whiskey glass in the other and smiling at him over the rim.

  “They’re a queer crowd, them priests,” Molly said. “I’ll have naught to do with them. Himself it was that brought him here.”

  “Packie, you mean?” Quirke said. “It was Packie who brought Father Mick here?”

  “Aye.” The child in the bed gave a little mewling cry, as if she were in pain, and Molly laid her hand once more on her forehead. “Took a great interest in this one, he did,” she said. “Told Packie he could help her, could teach her book learning and the like. What book learning, I said to himself—what book learning could he teach her, and her with no more than a scrap of understanding? Oh, no, he says, Father Mick will learn her, Father Mick is the man.” She was looking down at the girl, and her mouth tightened. “So he started coming out here, every week, of a Sunday night. I knew by the look of him what he was.”

  “And what was that?” Quirke asked.

  She seemed not to have heard him. “Taught her, all right, he did—oh, aye, he taught her.”

  “What kind of things did he teach her?”

  She looked at him, her face tightening. “The like that you wouldn’t find in any decent reading book. Had them all at it, at the learning, so called, all the lads and the girleens in the camp. Himself was delighted. Oh, they’ll all be great scholars, he’d say, they’ll get grand jobs and keep me when I’m old. The mugathawn.”

  She stopped. Quirke eyed the moon in the window, and the moon eyed him back. His throat had gone dry. He saw again the priest standing at the bar in Flynne’s Hotel that rainy night and turning with a smile of broad disdain to watch the red-faced young man walking stiffly in the wake of his angry girlfriend. What was it he had said? Something about love, and love’s difficulties.