Christine Falls: A Novel

by Benjamin Black

  Mal considered. “I try to,” he said. He looked sidelong at his brother-in-law. “And you—what do you believe in?”

  “I was cured of believing in things a long time ago.”

  Mal gave an amused little sniff. “You love to hear yourself saying things like that, don’t you,” he said. He took off his spectacles and rubbed a finger hard into one eye and then the other and sighed again. “What do you want, Quirke?”

  Now it was Quirke’s turn to consider. “I want you to tell me about Dolly Moran’s death.”

  Mal registered no surprise. “I know less about it than you, seemingly,” he said. “I’m not the one going about poking my nose into places where it’s liable to get cut off.”

  Quirke gave an incredulous laugh. “Is that a threat, Mal?”

  Mal gazed before him stonily.

  “You may think you know what you’re doing, Quirke,” he said, “but believe me, you don’t.”

  “I know Christine Falls didn’t die of an embolism,” Quirke said, quietly at first, “as you claimed she did, in that false file you wrote up. I know she died having a child, and that her child was stillborn, as you told me, but that it disappeared, or was disappeared, without a trace. I know I told you Dolly Moran kept a diary and that the next day she was tortured and had her head smashed open. Tell me these things are not connected, Mal. Tell me my suspicions are groundless. Tell me you’re not up to your neck in trouble.”

  Quirke was surprised at himself. Where did it come from, all this anger? And what injustice was he protesting—the one done to Dolly Moran, or to Christine Falls or Christine Falls’s child, or to himself? But who had been unjust to him, or injured him? It was not he who had died amid the blood and screams of childbirth, or had his flesh burned or his head cracked open. Mal was obviously unimpressed. He made no reply, only gave a brisk nod, as if something had been confirmed, and stood up. In the aisle he genuflected, and rose again and turned to go, but paused. The somber suit gave him a faintly ecclesiastical aspect; even the dark-blue bow tie might have been the elaborate neckwear of a prelate of some ultramontane faction of the church. His expression when he looked back at Quirke was one of cold amusement mingled with a pitying contempt.

  “I’ll tell you this, Quirke,” he said. “Stay out of it.”

  Quirke, still seated, shook his head. “I can’t,” he said. “I’m in it, up to my neck, just like you.”

  Mal walked out of the chapel. After a while Quirke stood up. The red eye before the altar flickered and seemed to wink. He shivered a little. The cold heaven…

  12

  ANDY STAFFORD LIKED THE NIGHT RUNS BEST. IT WAS NOT JUST THAT the rate of pay was better or that there was less traffic on the highway. Something about that high dome of darkness all around him and the headlights of the big twelve-wheeler cutting through it made him feel in control of more than just this Crawford Transport truck with its load of roof shingles or auto parts or pig iron. What all he did out here was up to nobody but himself. There was only him and the road and some heartsick hillbilly on the cab radio twanging away about hound dogs and lonesomeness and love. Often, standing in the forecourt of a deserted gas station or stepping out of the late-night smoke and fry smells of a roadside hamburger joint, he would feel the breeze on his face and seem to smell clean, sage-scented air coming to him like a message just for him all the way from out West, from New Mexico or Colorado, Wyoming, maybe, or even the high Rockies, all those places he had never been to, and something would well up in him, something sweet and solitary-seeming and full of promise for the day to come, the day that was already laying down a thin line of gold on the horizon before him.

  He got onto the turnpike, then ran through Brookline and down across the deserted south city. When he turned onto Fulton Street he cut the engine and let the rig run smooth and silent down the soft incline of the road to the house, the freewheeling tires warbling under him on the asphalt. Mrs. Bennett—“You can call me Cora”—had already started making comments about him parking the truck outside the house, only to Claire, of course, never to him. He swung down from the cab, the muscles in his arms and across the saddle of his shoulders aching and the seam of his jeans wedged like a hot wet lariat rope between his legs. All the houses on the street were dark. Someone’s dog started a halfhearted baying but soon shut up. It was still an hour to dawn and the air had a bite but he sat down anyway on the porch swing to rest a minute and look up at the stars, his hands clasped behind his neck, which was already tingling and beginning to unstiffen. The swing creaked on its chains and made him think of nights in Wilmington when he was a kid, sprawled on the porch like this to smoke a cigarette stolen from the pack in the bib pocket of his old man’s overalls, the smoke harsh and cutting in the cool night air and tasting of all forbidden things, racetrack beer and sour-mash whiskey and girls’ juices, the very taste of what it would be like to be grown up and all the hell away from Wilmington, State of Delanowhere. He laughed to himself. When he was there he’d dreamed of being somewhere like here, now he was here and dreamed of being back there. That was how it always was with him, satisfied noplace, always hankering after other towns, other times.

  He stood up and walked around by the side of the house, past what he knew was Cora Bennett’s bedroom, and climbed the wooden stairs and let himself in at the French door. There was still that damned smell of new paint that sometimes almost made him sick to his stomach; he thought he could catch the baby’s smells, too, the usual milk and damp cotton, and the poop that stank like horse feed. He had not bothered to turn on the light and a sort of grayish mist was seeping in from the eastern sky, and he could see the thin, mean-looking spire of St. Patrick’s Church over on Brewster Street outlined against the dawn with the morning star, the only one remaining now, sitting plumb on top of the weathervane. His mood was growing darker the more the morning got light. He wondered, as he had begun to do lately, how long he could stay in this town before the itch to move on got so bad he would have to scratch it.

  He sat down in the living room and eased himself out of his boots, then tore off his work shirt. With his arms still lifted he sniffed his armpits; pretty high, but he did not want to bother with a shower; besides, Claire always said she liked his smell. He went on tiptoe in his socks into the bedroom. The shades were pulled, allowing in no chink of dawn light. He could make out Claire’s form in the bed but could not hear her breathing—he liked it that she was a quiet sleeper, when she slept and her headaches were not keeping her awake. Feeling his way about the still unfamiliar room and trying not to make a sound, for he did not want her to wake yet, he got out of the last of his clothes with impatient haste and naked approached the bed and carefully lifted the covers.

  “Hey there,” he whispered, putting one knee on the side of the mattress and leaning down to the form lying there, “how’s my baby girl?” There were two, separate stirrings, and two voices, one of them Claire’s, which murmured a blurred “What…?” and the other making an urgent, wet, sucking sound. He reared back. “Jesus Christ!”

  It was the kid, of course, lying beside Claire and sucking on its fist. Claire pulled the child from her and sat up, confused and half frightened. “Is that you, Andy?” she said, and had to clear her throat.

  “Who the hell did you think it was!” He was lifting the sopping, hot infant out of her arms. “You expecting somebody else?”

  She realized what he was doing, and made a grab for the baby.

  “She was crying,” she said plaintively, “I was just getting her back to sleep.”

  But he was already on his way out of the room, moving through the darkness like a glimmering ghost. She fell back on the pillow, moaning faintly, and thrust a hand into her hair. She tried to see what time it was but the clock on the bedside cabinet was turned away. The baby’s diaper must have leaked, and there was a big wet patch on the front of her nightshirt. She knew she should take it off but she did not want to be naked when Andy came back. It was too late, or too early, for
what she knew he would want, and she was tired, for the baby had woken her twice already. But Andy did not notice, or ignored, the wet spot and the faint ammoniac smell, and took the nightshirt off her himself, making her sit up and lift her arms and pulling it roughly over her head and throwing it behind him on the floor.

  “Oh, honey,” she began, “listen, I’m—”

  But he would not listen. He stretched himself on top of her, forcing her legs apart—his kneecaps were icy—and was suddenly inside her. He smelled of beer, and his lips were still greasy from something he had eaten. She felt chilled, and reached out beside her and found the edge of the bed covers and pulled them over his rhythmically arching back. She could hardly feel him, she was so tired and distracted, but even so she started to slip and slide along with him, and had that familiar, faintly panicky sensation, as if she were sinking slowly, languorously, underwater.

  “Honey,” he whispered in her ear, in a hoarse, distressed, lost voice that made her hold him more tightly to her, “oh, honey.”

  She heard it before he did, the baby winding out into the dark like a party streamer her thin, demanding, unignorable cry. Andy went still, and lay on her, rigid, his head lifted.

  “Jesus,” he said again, and smacked a fist hard into the pillow beside where her head was. “Jesus H. Christ!”

  And then, just as she was becoming afraid, he began to laugh.

  IN THE MORNING HE WAS STILL IN A FUNNY MOOD. SHE WAS HANGING sheets on the clothesline he had rigged up temporarily for her between a thick branch of the walnut tree and the newel post at the top of the wooden staircase—Mrs. Bennett had said nothing yet about this arrangement; she had some kind of a newfangled electric dryer herself—when he came creeping up behind her and grabbed her around the waist with a whoop and lifted her high off her feet and swung her in a circle. She would have been glad to see him happy but she was not sure this was happiness. He had kind of a wild look in his eye, as if he had been running real hard and had just now come to a stop. When he set her down she was out of breath herself. With the fingers of one hand he pushed aside the collar of her shirt. “Hey,” he said softly, “what’s this here?” There was a hickey the size of a silver dollar on the side of her neck. “Now, where did that come from?”

  “Oh,” she said, turning away from him to hang another sheet, “some big old brute came sneaking into my bed sometime around dawn—didn’t you hear him?”

  “Why, no. I slept like a baby. You know me, honey.” He put his arms around her again from behind and ground his hips slowly against her. His arms were like two hot steel cables. “Tell me,” he whispered, his mouth hot too against her ear, “what else he do to you, this big old brute?”

  She turned, laughing in her throat, and he slipped his arms higher and put his hands on her shoulder blades and pulled her hard against his chest, and she put her open mouth to his and he drank her sweet breath and their tongues touched. A breeze came from somewhere, maybe the faraway Rockies again, and caught the wet sheet on the clothesline and wrapped it briefly around them. Kissing, they did not see, in a downstairs window of the house, a thin-lipped face and a pair of cold eyes, watching them.

  13

  THE AUTUMN NIGHT WAS CLOSING IN AS QUIRKE WALKED UP RAGLAN Road. There were halos of fog around the streetlamps and smoke was rolling down from the chimneys high above him and he could taste coal grit on his lips. He was rehearsing in his mind the conversation—the word confrontation hovered worryingly—that he was already sorry he had sought. He could avoid it, even yet, if he wanted. What was to stop him from turning on his heel and walking away, as he had walked away from so many things in his life—what made this one any different? He could find a telephone—in his head he heard Dolly Moran saying, I had to go three or four streets to the phone box—and call and make some excuse, say that the matter he had wanted to talk over had solved itself. But even as he was thinking these thoughts his legs carried him on, and then he was at the gate of the Judge’s house. In the dark the autumn garden gave off a rank, wet smell. He climbed the worn steps to the front door. There was a dim light in the transom but none in the tall windows on either side and he found himself hoping the old man might have forgotten their appointment and gone out to the Stephen’s Green Club for the evening, as was his habit. He worked the bellpull and heard the bell jangle echoingly within and his hopes rose further, but then there came the unmistakable sound of Miss Flint’s footsteps approaching along the hall. He prepared his face, forcing onto it the makings of a smile: Miss Flint and he were old adversaries. When she opened the door he had the impression that she was barely keeping in check a smirk of distaste. She was small and sharp-faced and wore her coarse ungraying hair in a helmet shape that made it look like a wig, which it might be, for all Quirke knew.

  “Mr. Quirke,” she said, in her driest voice and with the barest hint of an unwelcoming exclamation mark. She was scrupulously, vengefully polite.

  “Evening, Miss Flint. Is the Judge in?”

  She stepped back, opening wider the door. “He’s expecting you.”

  The air in the hall was dead and there was a trace even here of an old man’s musty smell. The bulb in the light fixture dangling from the high ceiling was sixty watts or less, and the shade resembled what he imagined dried skin would look like. His heart contracted. He had been happy here, when Nana Griffin was alive. Shouts in this hall, and Mal on the stairs dodging the rugby ball that Quirke was punting at him, the two of them in short trousers and school ties, their shirttails hanging out. Yes, happy.

  Miss Flint took his hat and coat and led him off into the heart of the house, the thick rubber soles of her prison warder’s shoes squeaking on parquet and tile. As so often, Quirke found himself wondering what things she might know, what family secrets. Did she watch Mal, too, with that searching, lopsided stare, on his rare visits to his father’s house?

  The Judge had heard the bell and had come to the door of what he called his den. When Quirke saw him standing there in his slippers and his old gray cardigan, nearly as tall as Quirke but stooped a little now, peering anxiously out of the shadows, it occurred to him that the day could not be far off when he would knock at the front door and be met by Miss Flint with a mourning band on her arm and her eyes red-rimmed. He stepped forward briskly, once again making himself smile.

  “Get in here, man,” the Judge said from the doorway of the room, making shooing motions with his arm, “this hall is like a refrigerator.”

  “Will you be wanting tea?” Miss Flint asked, and the Judge said, “No!” shortly and put a hand on Quirke’s shoulder and drew him into the room.

  “Tea!” he said, shutting the door behind them with a thud. “I declare to God, that woman…” He led Quirke to the fireplace and an armchair beside it. “Sit down there and thaw yourself out, and we’ll have a drop of something stronger than tea.”

  He went to the sideboard and busied himself with glasses and the whiskey bottle. Quirke looked about him at familiar things, the old leather-covered chaise, the antique writing desk, the Sean O’Sullivan portrait of Nana Griffin as a young wife, calmly smiling, marcel-waved. Quirke had been one of the few people the Judge would permit to enter this room. Even as a boy, half wild still from the years at Carricklea, he was allowed the run of the Judge’s den, and often of a winter afternoon, before he and Mal went off to board at St. Aidan’s, he would perch here, in this same chair, beside a banked coke fire that might have been this one, doing his sums and his Latin prep, while the Judge, still a barrister then, sat at his desk working on a brief. Mal, meanwhile, did his homework at the white deal table in the kitchen, where Nana Griffin fed him wholemeal biscuits and warm milk and quizzed him about his bowels, for Mal was considered to be delicate.

  The Judge brought their whiskeys and handed Quirke his and sat down opposite him. “Have you had your dinner?” he asked.

  “Yes, I’m fine.”

  “Are you sure?” He peered at Quirke closely. Age had not dulled the old man’s k
een ear, and he had heard the discomforted note in Quirke’s voice when he had telephoned and asked if he could come and talk to him. They drank in silence for a minute, Quirke frowning into the fire while the Judge watched him. The coke fumes, sharp as the smell of cat piss, were stinging Quirke’s nostrils.

  “So,” the Judge said at last, large-voiced and forcedly hearty, “what’s this urgent matter you need to discuss? You’re not in trouble, are you?” Quirke shook his head.

  “There was this girl…” he began, and stopped.

  The Judge laughed. “Uh-oh!” he said.