The Death of a Joyce Scholar

by Bartholomew Gill

  “I heard some moving about. I heard Kinch, the dog, bark. And when—after, say, a dozen minutes—I heard nothing more, I unlocked the door and found them gone, apart from a single bloodstain here between the cutting board and the fridge.” He pointed to a narrow gap between the two objects that looked as though it would be difficult to clean. There was a small dark spot on the tile. “I left it there for just the eventuality that has confronted me this evening. With genetic matching, I’m sure you’ll find it’s Coyle’s definitely.”

  McGarr was surprised that Holderness would know of such a procedure, but then Holderness prided himself on his intelligence and on being informed. It had been the point of contention between him and Coyle. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  “This man is my brother. The child of my parents. And then I was not—I am not—sure of what good it would have done anybody involved: Catty especially, or me, people knowing how Coyle and I had quarreled. As I said, Coyle, with all his early experience, was strong and fierce, and he was drunk. And finally, it wasn’t as though it had been premeditated—at least that part of the crime.”

  McGarr only waited. Holderness had something more to tell them.

  “The other part—the knife appearing under the seat of Hiliary Flood’s car—was pure Jammer. Ever since he’s been a child, he’s had to have somebody to blame. This time it was to be me and my woman friend.”

  Or her father, McGarr thought. How would Jammer have known it was the Floods’ Fiat 500 and not some other? How would he have known where the Floods lived?

  “He’d witnessed Flood dropping Coyle off, and he knew where the Floods lived since he’d been to school with Hiliary. This knife”—Holderness pointed to the new filleting knife in the rosewood sheath—“he replaced a few days later. If you check his police record, you’ll find illegal entry to be one of his specialties. Jammer is, to his pride, a ‘second-story’ man of no mean ability. I also think you’ll find that he recently purchased a set of knives somewhere in the Dublin area. Then—let me see—the clock is still missing as well. I bought another for Catty.” He pointed to a smaller clock hanging below the circle of brighter wall. “She says she’ll have to get the painters in. She has to have everything just so, don’t you know.”

  Did McGarr see a small smile flicker across his thin lips? He thought he did.

  McGarr reached into his jacket and shook a cigarette from its packet. He tapped it on the stove, then lowered his head to light it from the gas ring. He felt the hair of his eyebrows crinkle in the heat of the flame.

  Exhaling, he glanced at Jammer, as though to say, Your turn.

  “He met me and Coyle at the gate. I’d already taken the blazer and stick, but Coyle said I should know that the hat was his and his alone, until somebody more deserving, or something like that—he was drunk—could take it from him.

  “When David here saw us, like I said, he knew yer mahn, who called him ‘the sober solipsist,’ whatever that means, and told him to tell Catty that sensibility, wit, intelligence, and something for the human…something or other had arrived, and it was time to chuck something that sounded like minimalist bullshit and ‘incompetently incompetent, at that’—I remember that part—out on its arse. ‘Well, if you can’t think your way into’ something like ‘the collective unconscious,’ says he, ‘you might as well fuck it. Or’—here the bloke began laughing—‘a motto for you for the nineties, Holderness: fuck it, I’ll fuck it. You can call it Incompetence at its Rawest, or simply, Incompetence in the Raw.’ I remember that ’specially since it stuck in me mind later on.”

  While he was in the cemetery with Sweets? McGarr wondered.

  “The fella was witty. David tried, but he was never really witty. It was then David invited him in, offered him a drink. He took the hat from his head, as though he would hang it up, but when I’d gotten Coyle onto a kitchen chair, he slipped it to me and pointed to that door, like he wanted me to leave. I had…someplace to go, so I left, David closing the gate after me. That was the last I saw of him—Coyle—until me mates and me were coming back through the laneway maybe two hours later. That was when we saw him up against the wall, like I told you earlier.

  “The clock he brought me when he came ’round to ask me to buy the knives in McNabb’s and to give me the hundred pound. Would I have kept the clock or the knives if I’d a known, much less done it? And why? Hiliary Flood and I went to school together, yes. But that was years ago, and she was maybe four forms below me. Just a wee girl then, and now…? I have no idea where she lives.

  “The bloke—Coyle? I’d seen him, sure, around here now and again. But for me there was always a nod or a wave, and we had a jar together once in the Brian Borimhe when we were both walking across Cross Guns Bridge and it began pelting out cats and dogs. And come ’ere while I tell ya, it was almost like he gave me the stick and the blazer, because he said that was it. He was tired of ‘cloning’ or ‘clowning’ Joyce to a bunch of ‘fallow’—I heard—drunks and foreigners, that after his new ‘fookin’ book came out’ he wouldn’t ‘fookin’ work for ‘fookin’ tips again ever.’ It was how he was talkin’. To me.

  “And let’s get another thing straight—it wasn’t me who was always having to blame things on others, it was him.” Jammer jabbed a finger at his brother. “He was the oldest and best, and they believed everything he ever said about us. Always.”

  McGarr drew on the cigarette. Noreen had told him he’d have to give up the butts, that no daughter of theirs was going to be “invested at an early age” in any “sordid habit.” His drinking, of course, would be next; he could see it coming. And did she say daughter because she knew? When he’d asked, she had only given him a clever, knowing smile and said they’d see how he came along with not smoking in the house. She wouldn’t insist on total abstinence.

  He exhaled the smoke, and thought of how quickly relationships, like things, could change. Change was the order of things, at least on the surface of life. He thought of Ulysses, and at once of how much and how little Dublin had changed over what now amounted to nearly a century. “And where was Catty all this time that Jammer here was struggling with Coyle?”

  “Asleep, I believe,” David Holderness replied.

  “Through the stick being cracked on the table and Coyle complaining and finally falling to the floor?”

  “In the mirrored room. As I said to you before, you really must see it. It’s insulated so completely no sound can get in or out. She was exhausted, and fell asleep there. I myself went into the bedroom. Catty prefers to rise alone. Perhaps she mentioned that herself.”

  She had and she would again. McGarr motioned to Ward, who opened the door to the sitting room. Catty Doyle was standing in the doorway, having overheard the entire exchange.

  Said Holderness, “Tell them about your room, Catty. Maybe they’d like a peek themselves.”

  Her eyes met his directly. “I won’t lie for you, David. Months ago I told Superintendent McGarr how it was, and I won’t change the truth. For you or anybody.”

  “Not even for yourself? Think before you speak. Think of your room upstairs and of Mary Sittonn and even of the Coyle volumes the three of you hoarded against the day that they’d rise in value. Then there’s your relationship with Coyle while ostensibly you were so friendly with his wife. It’ll all come out in the press, I promise. You’ll give publishing and Hollis and Murken a bad name, to say nothing of Irish arts and letters. Why—you might even lose your job.”

  Catty Doyle turned her eyes to McGarr. “As I told you in the Shelbourne on the day of the book launching, Superintendent, it was half-one to the minute when David got to my house. I remember because he asked me what Fergus Flood could possibly be doing in the neighborhood at that hour. I was in my bedroom, waiting for him. He said he’d missed all but the last bus to Phibsborough and he had to walk from the quays. He said he saw the car, the little Fiat, heading up the Finglas Road. He said he saw Flood clearly on the driver’s side, and there was ano
ther figure in the car.

  “I remember nothing more of the night until Kinch’s barking woke me up. We then heard some noise out in the back garden, near Kinch’s house and the back gate. And knocking. David said he’d go down and find out, and I put a pillow over my head and went to sleep.

  “I woke up when I again felt his presence beside me in the bed. He said, and I quote, ‘It was just some punks,’ and he had Kinch with him so the dog wouldn’t bark anymore. When I woke up, he was gone. David. Kinch was in his house in the garden.”

  McGarr turned to Holderness. “Well…?”

  “Well, what?”

  “Don’t you have anything to say?”

  “I don’t know what to say, except that we’ll see how it plays in court.” Holderness even managed to flash his smile.

  EIGHTEEN

  WITH A FEELING that was much like loss, Bresnahan read the last words and closed the book nearly a year after first having begun. It had taken her that long to finish Ulysses, but at least now no know-it-all American exchange student or Japanese tourist who could scarcely speak the language, or worse, a pint-sized pugilist detective inspector, could presume to explain to her one of the high points of the country’s culture.

  It was Sunday, and she was sitting up in bed in her new “mews” apartment off the fashionable Morehampton Road, which she had bought, mind, with her own money and a small mortgage on the idea—cunningly formed in childhood in her native Kerry—that a woman should possess a place of her own and not be kept unless and until there arose a binding contract which also entailed a change of name.

  Ward himself had been gone from the bed when she awoke, and had left a note saying he had jogged into town to the gym for a workout, after which he’d probably have a jar with the lads and “catch the action” while he was at it. He meant the boxing on the telly, which was a feature of nearly every weekend; she’d thought she’d like it, but had actually found it boring when Ward wasn’t in the ring, pointless when he was and risked getting his lovely body or head smashed, brutal when he did, which—thank St. Alyoisius, patron saint of the thick and dumb—wasn’t often. It was also a Nelson’s Pillar-sized pain in the bottom every bleeding weekend, though she’d never let on and had never seen it. Not a “cute” culchie like her.

  It—the pillar, which was mentioned at least a half-dozen times in Ulysses—had been blown up by some anti-British patriots as a “symbolic gesture” when she was still a little girl, and she understood that if she let Ward have his way in a few big things, like boxing and anything else “physical”—he always had to be moving, the little tyke—she could toss him around mostly on the rest, which was gratifying.

  Hefting Ulysses, she fanned the pages. All those words in so many different voices of so many characters. As the paper flowed under her thumb in a white-edged blur, she thought of water tumbling over a weir, of streams and rivers, of the Liffey and Dublin Bay and the Irish Sea beyond. And of the ocean, and how the book was like an island in the river of the mind. She had read somewhere in one of the innumerable trots she’d bought to get through the thing that to read and understand even a part of Ulysses, but mostly to enjoy it, was to become a Dubliner, the experience marked and stayed with one so.

  But was the experience of the book different from the Dublin she lived in every day? She thought for a while, looking out the narrow-paned casement windows onto the flagstone courtyard with the imminence of the grand house—of which her apartment had once been the stable loft—in the distance, and decided that it was. Everything in the book seemed constantly moving, changing, flowing, and wasn’t her life that only a year before seemed like something out of Gerty MacDowell, now more the class of thing that a Mrs. Bandman Palmer might enjoy, what with the way she was now being accepted by the Squad and all Ward’s up-market friends?

  And then, just as it was hard to get a hold on the characters in Ulysses—they seemed so slippery—so too were the people she knew in the here and now, and what they did. The reality of things—how it was—kept changing right before her eyes almost as much as though to make her out a fool or, worse, an ejit who couldn’t know what was going on. She pushed herself up in the pillows and reached for the thermos pitcher of hot coffee that Ward had left on the night stand, the imp.

  Take the Coyle case, for instance, which had been in court the past five weeks and was now awaiting a verdict. She herself had been called to testify, and was astounded at how Mr. Seamus Donaghy—aped slavishly in the papers—could make David Holderness out to be an innocent university intellectual and pacifist, and his brother Jammer a lout and a thug of the type who were making the city unlivable for law-abiding Dubliners, especially after dark. The Holderness she knew of wasn’t the Holderness that was presented in court, and Donaghy then proceeded to raise three other veils of illusion. Bresnahan glanced down at the book and smiled, congratulating herself on the felicity of the thought.

  Donaghy made it seem as though Jammer were such a vile wretch that he was now fingering his own brother to save himself from being convicted of a murder which was without a doubt only one of his many. Hadn’t he beat Ward over the head with a truncheon and left him for dead? Hadn’t he later pulled a knife in a public place and tried to finish him a second time? Hadn’t Jammer’s “mates” desecrated St. Michan’s church? And weren’t there three other unsolved murders in Dublin this year alone?

  Second, Donaghy made it seem that it wasn’t so much a man who was on trial but rather Trinity College itself, which had been doubly wronged by the—what were Donaghy’s words?—“scum and canaille” of the city, first in the loss of Coyle and then in the “attempted character assassination of his colleague and friend, David Holderness, which I shan’t allow to continue.”

  The third veil was Donaghy himself. He was a big, handsome, winning man who, after one look, you said to yourself you’d like to know. And he made it seem that in a very direct way he, not Holderness, was on trial, charged by Jammer through the State with an even higher crime than murder—that of false perceptions in regard to the reality of the murder of Kevin Coyle. In such a way Jammer and his accomplice, the easy-to-hate-and-always-suspect State, were impugning Donaghy’s motives. As well, they were standing in the way of the progress of his career, and it would be a world darkening miscarriage of all that was right and holy were Seamus Donaghy (that is to say, David Holderness) convicted of anything.

  He even stated that he would bring a civil action against the state to compensate Mr. Holderness for the way “his name has been dragged through the mud,” thus promising to further attenuate the Coyle affair to the delight of the press and Donaghy’s purse. One million pounds was the asked sum, which nobody thought fantastic coming from Donaghy, “the ballocks-befriending barrister,” as McKeon called him. “He’s a bigger liar than Shames Choice, and the bard’s modern-day equivalent more than Kevin Coyle ever thought of being. Sure, we don’t have poetry anymore, we don’t even have literature. All we have is the theatre of the law. When Donaghy comes to write his memoirs, one guess what he’ll call it. Not Ulysses but…?” None of the staff had a clue. “Y’ all-asses. Donaghy’s from the South. Cork, I believe.”

  The State was no match for him. Under the weight of his tongue, Catty Doyle, whom Bresnahan had thought sophisticated, capable, and worldly, appeared a confused, immature person who had recently been sacked from her job and was probably a consort of Jammer’s. Donaghy pointedly asked her about the pink wig and leather items she had in her wardrobe. No mention was made of the fact that she had lost her coveted position with the publishing company because of her relationship with Holderness.

  Then there was Katie Coyle, who had seemed so plain and matronly. Well, sir (and ms.), wasn’t she now on tour with her husband’s book, continent-hopping from one talk show to another and appearing at the trial looking like a refugee from the West End. She was being heralded as a veritable Molly Bloom. To be fair, she could talk, but so could everybody else in Dublin, and the drill was to sit her down and l
et her babble in Libertese.

  Who else had changed? Mary Sittonn? Well—there was really no changing Mary, who was committed, but she surely established herself as a good friend to Catty, too good perhaps. She accompanied her to and from court, shoving the press out of the way, parking her immensely filmable vintage Jag up on the footpath, where it got ticketed and finally towed away, and with her short haircut, denim jacket, and infantry boots, generally “butchering the prosecution.” (McKeon again.)

  Flood? Because of the murder and the thunderous reception of Coyle’s book, Joyce’s Ireland and Bloomsday Tours had received much free publicity at home and abroad and was thriving. Flood was divorcing his wife, and rumor had it that he would marry a former student who was employed as office manager of Bloomsday Tours. She was a dark little thing who looked no older than twelve. The difficult wife and daughter were presently on a long holiday in France. Her family, it seemed, had money which had recently passed to her, and she told the Sunday Tribune that she was tired of “things self-consciously Irish,” which was interpreted to mean her immigrant husband himself.

  Even Chief Super McGarr had changed. Far from suffering through the trial and all its distortions, he actually seemed to enjoy it. Even though his wife had given birth to a baby girl a month or so before, he seemed almost glad to have to be in the courtroom, waiting to testify, and he insisted on having lunch in places where there was no phone.

  Hers now began ringing.

  “Rut’ie—getcha out of bed, did I?” It was Ward.

  “You must have a crystal ball.”

  “I thought for sure you’d be up by now.”

  The implication was that he had already put miles on his Pumas and hours on the small bag and the big bag and on somebody’s baggy frame. She could tell from the elation in his voice he had just given somebody a good drubbing.