Vengeance: A Novel (Quirke)

by Benjamin Black

  He did not know what young people expected of each other nowadays. In his time the rules had been rigid—a hand inside the blouse but outside the bra, a caress of the bare skin above the stocking tops but no farther, a French kiss on only the most special of occasions. What must it have been like for girls, to be constantly under siege? Had they found it flattering, funny, annoying? Had they found it humiliating? He glanced at Phoebe covertly again with a spasm of helpless affection. His feelings for her were an unpickable knot of confusion, doubt, bafflement.

  “I suppose,” he said, “he must have been in some kind of trouble.” Both of them looked at him blankly. “Delahaye.”

  Phoebe turned her gaze now to a spark of light glinting in the bottom of her wine glass. “Yes, he must have been, surely. People don’t kill themselves for nothing.”

  “Sometimes they do,” Sinclair said. “Sometimes there’s no apparent reason. They just do it, on a whim. I had a cousin, when I was young, hanged himself in the stairwell one morning when my aunt was out shopping. He’d just got a place in college, was going to study medicine.”

  “His poor mother,” Phoebe murmured.

  “Yes,” Sinclair said, “it was her that found him, when she came home from the shops. My Aunt Lotte. It nearly killed her.”

  A heavy silence fell. Quirke watched as his daughter touched Sinclair’s maimed hand again in a quick gesture of sympathy.

  “I don’t think,” Quirke said, “Victor Delahaye was the kind of man to do anything on a whim.”

  They finished dinner soon after that. There was a wrangle over the bill, until Phoebe plucked it out of Quirke’s hand and passed it to Sinclair. He produced his wallet while she delved in her purse. “Don’t worry,” she said to Quirke, “we’re going halves.”

  For a second Quirke saw himself and Phoebe’s mother, at this very table, a long time ago, bickering over something—what was it? He looked out at the trees, trying to remember.

  When they were leaving the hotel, and Phoebe and Sinclair had gone through the revolving door, Quirke stood back to let someone come in. It was Isabel Galloway. She wore a slim blue suit and a pillbox hat pinned at a jaunty angle to the side of her head. They both halted, staring. “My God,” Isabel breathed, then quickly recovered herself. “Quirke!” she said brightly, and pressed her elbows into her sides as if to shore herself up. “You’re looking well.”

  Quirke smiled queasily. “Isabel,” he said. “How are you? You look…” He fumbled after words but could not find them.

  Isabel’s smile glittered. “Silver-tongued as ever,” she said, then frowned, annoyed with herself it seemed, and dropped her eyes and moved past him quickly and strode on into the lobby. He let her go, and stepped between the turning panels of the door, hearing behind him the familiar sharp clicking of her high heels on the marble floor.

  Phoebe and Sinclair were waiting for him on the pavement. The last of the daylight was a greenish, crepuscular glow above the trees.

  “Wasn’t that—?” Phoebe began, but stopped, seeing Quirke’s look.

  Quirke realized he had left the Yeats book behind him, on the windowsill beside the table where they had sat. He turned back, muttering, and pushed his way through the heavy paneled door again.

  * * *

  Rose Griffin maintained a stoic view of life and the misfortunes that life piles upon what, in her best southern-belle drawl, she would describe as us poor lost creatures of the Lord. Not that she believed in the Lord, or disbelieved in Him, either. She rarely let her thoughts dwell on things beyond this world, this world being, as she felt, enough of a conundrum. She was intolerant of complainers, since, as she said, there was little to be gained from complaining, unless a body considered the pity of others a thing worth having. She felt pity for no one, on inclination as much as on principle. To pity people was to cheapen them, in her opinion. She realized this could make her seem hard-hearted, but she did not care. She was hard—what was wrong with that? Too much softness about, too much floppy, warm emotion. She had pointed it out once to Quirke, what they had in common: a cold heart and a hot soul.

  She was shocked to discover that her friend Marguerite Delahaye was a blubberer. She would not have thought it of Maggie, whom she had always taken to be, underneath her spinster’s genteel veneer, as tough as she was herself. It was midafternoon and the two women were taking tea together in the drawing room of Rose’s large gaunt house on Ailesbury Road. It was a splendid day and they were seated in a splash of sunlight at a little table in the deep bay of a window that overlooked the front garden and the quiet street. To distract herself from Maggie’s sniffles, Rose was admiring the undulating spiral of steam rising from the spout of the teapot, and the pink roses painted on the dainty china cups, and the rich gleam of the antique silver cutlery. She could never understand why people seemed to pay so little regard to the small but, to her, essential pleasures of life—this knife, for instance, a fine old piece of Georgian silver, the blade worn thin from use and the handle solid and weighty as an ingot in the hand. She thought of all the people who had used it over the years, all of them gone now, while she was here.

  “I’m sorry,” Maggie said, dabbing at her red-rimmed nose with an absurdly dainty handkerchief with a lace edging. “It’s just that I can’t believe that Victor is … I can’t believe he’s gone!”

  “Yes, dear,” Rose said soothingly, “I understand.” Did she? She did sympathize, more or less—she had suffered her own losses—but she was not sure she understood. Maggie was behaving as if she had lost not a brother but a husband, or even a lover. Rose had siblings herself, but she rarely thought of them, and for long periods forgot about them altogether. Had she ever cared enough for her brothers that the loss of one of them would have reduced her to the kind of extravagant grief her friend was displaying? She thought it very unlikely. “Yes, I’m sure a sudden death like that is hard to accept,” she said. She paused. “They’re certain it was—I mean, they’re satisfied he was the one that pulled the trigger, yes?”

  Maggie nodded, and a fresh spasm of sobbing made her shoulders shake.

  When she had heard of Victor Delahaye’s death, Rose had first been surprised, and then not. Killing himself was just the sort of damn-fool thing that man would do, and the way he had done it—the boat, the deserted sea, the pistol, and young Clancy for a witness—was, of course, typically melodramatic and self-serving. He had entertained large notions of himself, had Victor. She had not known him well, had only met him a few times, on social occasions, but she had taken the measure of him straight off. Vain, pompous, humorless. Victor Delahaye had seen himself, preposterously, as a Renaissance figure, one of the great merchant princes, say, heir to a dynasty and father in turn to twin princelings who would carry on and embellish the grand family traditions. But inside every self-proclaimed great man there crouched in hiding a shivering boy terrified of being discovered and hauled out by the ear, wriggling and whimpering. Rose knew about these things: her first husband, the late Josh Crawford, had been one such great man.

  Still, it was a puzzle. What had happened that had led Victor Delahaye to knock himself off his own pedestal? Something must have hit him where it hurt most, in his pride, or in his pocket, or maybe in both. No, his pride; he would not have killed himself over money. Something had damaged his estimate of himself. She pictured Mona Delahaye smiling, that thin scarlet mouth of hers turned up at the corner.

  Maggie was talking again, between sniffs, about her brother, saying what a wonderful man he had been—a faithful husband, diligent father, loving sibling. An all-round saint, in fact. Rose suppressed an impatient sigh. The dead get so much more than their share of praise, she thought, and all just for being dead. “Come now, Maggie dear,” she said, “don’t upset yourself so—think of your asthma.”

  She wondered what would happen now to Delahaye’s business. She doubted his partner, what’s-his-name, would be taking over. The company might be called Delahaye & Clancy, but everyone knew who it was
that ran it. Nor did she think the Delahaye twins would be picking up the reins, at least not right away, while they were still busy planting their wild oats all over town. Those boys had a reputation, oh, they certainly did.

  The Delahayes were Protestant, of course, while the Clancys were Catholics. That distinction, she knew, meant everything here. She had spent a deal of time in this country, over the years; Josh Crawford had been more Irish than American, and now she was married to a man who was one hundred percent a native son. All the same, there was an awful lot she still did not understand about life here, and probably never would understand, try though she might. The people’s fear of the priests, for instance, never failed to surprise her; also—and, you might say, on the other hand—their reverence for the Protestants. The Protestants were a tiny number, yet the Catholics had only to hear one of them speak, in that drawling, cut-glass accent, to start doffing their caps and tugging their forelocks and all the rest of such nonsense. This fascinated her, and pleased her, too, in a silly sort of way. It was as if, living here, she had gone back to an olden time, to a civilization that was both developed and primitive—Byzantium, somewhere like that?—where the mass of the people were held in thrall and ruled over by a secret, aristocratic caste whose power was so pervasive the members of it did not even have to reveal themselves except now and then, by certain offhand yet subtle signs. Yes, that was it: she felt like an anthropologist who had been magically transported through time to an archaic world of mysteries and strange laws, strange rituals and taboos.

  She heard the front door opening and, after a moment, softly closing again. That would be Malachy; her husband’s quietness and diffidence of manner could be sensed even through walls. She called out to him—too shrilly, making Maggie jump—and he put his head in at the door, smiling in that vague and vaguely troubled way of his. He was tall, with a narrow head. He wore tweeds and a bow tie. His eyes behind the dully gleaming lenses of his spectacles were pale and slightly watery.

  “Oh, don’t just dither there!” Rose called to him with humorous exasperation. “Come and sit down with us and have some of this good tea—it’s that kind you like, Lapsang Souchong, that smells of old Cathay.” Mal entered and closed the door behind him and came forward creakingly, his smile congealing into a slight queasiness. Rose supposed he could not remember exactly who her guest was; new people always worried him. “You remember Marguerite Delahaye,” she said, loudly, “my friend Maggie.”

  “Ah, yes,” Mal said, relieved, his smile clearing. “Miss Delahaye. How are you?”

  He drew up a chair and sat down. Only now did he notice Maggie’s red-rimmed eyes and the shine on her nose, and faint alarm spread over his face again, and he touched self-consciously the flesh-pink bulb of the hearing aid in his left ear.

  “Maggie has had a bereavement,” Rose said, pronouncing each word distinctly, so that she could not help sounding overbearing and even a little cross. “Her brother—”

  “Lord, yes, of course!” Mal said quickly, half rising from the chair but keeping his back and his long legs bent in a sitting position; what an endearingly absurd man he was, Rose thought, not by any means for the first time. “Of course,” he said. “Your—Mr. Delahaye—your brother.” Slowly he subsided onto the chair. “I’m very sorry for your trouble.”

  It was not convention, he did seem genuinely sympathetic, and this set Maggie off again. Rose threw her eyes to the ceiling. “It’s very sad,” she said, somewhat shortly, “very tragic, of course.”

  Mal was pouring himself a cup of tea. The tea smelled of straw and smoke. Rose watched him, his elaborately slow and deliberate movements, still feeling that exasperated fondness she always felt before the spectacle of Mal’s mole-like ways. Mal had been an obstetrician at the Hospital of the Holy Family but was retired now. She often wondered what he did all day. He would leave the house in the morning, quite early sometimes, and come back in the afternoon looking, she always thought, ever so slightly shamefaced. In their early days together she used to ask him straight out what he had been up to, just for the sake of conversation, but he would take on a look of mousy alarm and say quickly that he had gone for a walk, or that he had met someone he knew. Somehow she never believed him. She had an image of him stalled on some street corner, and just standing there haplessly for hours, gazing at nothing, noticing no one and not being noticed, the passersby stepping around him as if he were a fire hydrant, or a tree that had somehow grown up on the spot overnight. It still surprised her that she had married him. Not that she regretted it, or was unhappy; only they were, as even she could see, a most unlikely couple, whiling away together the autumn of their lives.

  He was asking Maggie if she would take another cup of tea, but she said no, and sat up on her chair and straightened her shoulders, and put the sodden hankie away in her bag and fastened the clasp with a decisive snap. She had a remarkably long neck, and now she extended it in a swanlike fashion, elevating her head and thrusting out her nose and her sharp little chin. Her already graying hair was untended, and had the look of a clump of steel wool, or an abandoned bird’s nest.

  “I want to ask, Dr. Griffin,” she said, “I want to ask—” She stopped, and looked at her fingers fixed on the rim of the handbag in her lap. She tried again: “Do you think that he—do you think my brother—would he have suffered?”

  Malachy frowned. Medical questions were the one thing that were sure to concentrate his attention. Yet Rose could see how torn he felt now, eager to discuss the likely details of Victor Delahaye’s suicide yet hesitant in the presence of the dead man’s close relative.

  “It depends,” he said, “on where he—on where the bullet entered.” He clasped his hands, moving forward to the edge of his chair. “If the shot penetrates the heart, the person will experience first what we call a prodromal period, very short in duration, which is like the sensation before fainting, with lightheadedness and nausea, and after that there’ll be a neurocardiogenic syncope. Sorry—big words, I know. Most people’s blood pressure on fainting is restored by lying flat, but here, you see, this is impossible, as the pumping mechanism is destroyed. The person would have only moments after being shot before they fell over and exsanguinated—bled to death, that is. Some victims of attack say they didn’t even notice they had been stabbed or shot until they saw the blood. And then—”

  “What he means,” Rose said heavily, “is that your brother would have died instantly.” She turned to her husband, signaling with her eyes. “Isn’t that the case, Malachy?”

  Mal sat back on the chair and issued a soft, sighing sound, like that of a very small balloon very quietly deflating. “Yes,” he said meekly, “of course, that’s what I mean, that he would have died instantly,” then added, faintly, “or almost.”

  Maggie gazed at him unhappily, trying to believe him, Rose saw, yet not succeeding. “It’s what I keep thinking of, you see,” she said, with a tremor in her voice. “I keep imagining him in agony, regretting what he’d done but knowing it was too late.” She was clutching the bag in her lap so tightly now the blood had drained from the joints of her fingers. “I suppose people don’t think, when they’re going to do something like that, of how it will feel, of what the pain will be like. I suppose they’re so desperate they just—” She shut her eyes and two fat shiny tears squeezed out between the lids and rolled down swiftly on either side of her nose. Malachy in alarm looked at his wife, and Rose reached out and covered Maggie’s clasped hands with one of her own.

  “Oh, my dear, don’t,” she said. “You’re just tormenting yourself.”

  “I know,” Maggie said, nodding like a child, with her chin tucked in and her eyes clamped shut and more tears squeezing out between the lids. “But I can’t help it—I can’t stop thinking of him out there in that boat, putting the gun to his chest, and—” She sobbed, her swollen lower lip shaking and the tears flowing down her face. Her breathing was becoming increasingly hoarse, and Rose hoped she was not going to suffer an asthmati
c attack. Her first husband had died of emphysema, and she remembered that awful gasping and hooting he used to do at the end.

  “Malachy,” she said, “why don’t you go and see if you can find something to give to Maggie.” He threw her another wild look, and she smiled patiently. “Some brandy, maybe? Brandy, or something like that?”

  “Oh, no!” Maggie said hastily, like a child again, threatened this time with a dose of castor oil. “I’m all right, really.”

  Mal rose silently and left the room, shutting the door so softly behind himself the catch did not even click.

  “When will the funeral be held?” Rose asked. She was bored now, and wished her friend would drink up her tea and go.

  “Tomorrow,” Maggie said. “I don’t know how I’m going to get through it.”

  “Oh, you’ll manage,” Rose answered brusquely, and smiled to soften the harshness of her tone.

  There was a pause, and, as if to mark it, the shadow of a cloud swept across the garden outside, and in the room the daylight dimmed for a moment as though a switch had been pressed. Rose was trying to recall when it was she had last seen Victor Delahaye. Was it at that reception at the embassy last year, to do with some yacht race or other—the America’s Cup?—that somehow she and Malachy had been lured to, although Rose had never been to sea on anything much smaller than the Queen Mary. Quirke had been at the reception too, she recalled—what had he been doing there, other than soaking up the Ambassador’s bourbon?

  Rose had found herself at one point standing by a window in a small circle of people that included Victor Delahaye and his baby-doll wife. Delahaye had been pronouncing on some point of nautical etiquette. What a donkey he had seemed to Rose, in his navy blue blazer and gray slacks and his slip-on shoes gleaming like mahogany, standing there pontificating about tides and currents and knots and God knows what all. Good-looking, though, in a somehow artificial sort of way, with that craggy profile and his tastefully graying hair swept back from his temples. His wife, standing beside him, had looked as bored as Rose had felt. Rose guessed she must be a good fifteen years younger than her husband, maybe twenty, even. What was her name? Mona. Mona Delahaye. The name suited her. Cat eyes, a mean mouth. Was it she who had caused Delahaye to load up his pistol and take himself out to sea, never to return? Rose had known finer and more sensible men than Victor Delahaye who had been ruined by their women. Used to happen a lot, that kind of thing, where she came from; the noble code of the Southland.