Christine Falls: A Novele

by Benjamin Black

  “We did, we warned you,” fat Judy agreed, nodding vigorously his great round head on which a fine sprinkling of raindrops sparkled.

  They had begun to crowd in on him from either side, shoulder to shoulder, squeezing him between them. They were shorter than he was and surely not as strong, yet pincered like this he felt helpless, a great, soft, helpless child. Mr. Punch was making tut-tutting noises. “You’re a very inquisitive man, do you know that?” he said. “A real Nosey Parker.”

  It seemed imperative to Quirke that he should not speak, for if he did it would give them an advantage; he was not sure how, but he knew it was so. They came to the corner of the square. A few motorcars went past, their tires on the wet roadway making a sound like frying fat. One slowed for the turn, its lighted orange trafficator sticking out. Why did he not call to the driver, wave his arms, or run forward, even, and jump onto the running board and be borne away to safety? But he did nothing, and the car continued down the square, trailing gray exhaust smoke.

  The three of them crossed the street to the other corner. Quirke had a sense of almost comic inadequacy. He thought what a trio they must make, the two hunched in their smoke-colored plastic coats and him huge in his old-fashioned tweed ulster and black hat. Those two student types passing along on the other side, would they notice, would they remember, would they be able to describe the scene to the coroner’s court, in their own words, as they might before long be asked to do? Despite the chill of the ending day Quirke felt the sweat along his hairline under the band of his hat. He was afraid, but at one remove, as if his fear had conjured up another version of him for it to inhabit, and he, the original he, was obliged to attend to this other, fearing self and be concerned for it, as he would be, he imagined, for a twin, or a grown-up son. Crazily the thought came to him that he might be dead already, that he might have died of fright back there on the corner, and that this big body stumping along helplessly between its captors was only the mechanical remnant of the self that was out here observing the sad end of his life with pity and shame. Death was his professional province yet what did he know of it, really? Well, it seemed that now he was about to receive firsthand instruction in that dark knowledge.

  It was lightless at the bottom of the area steps and smelled of urban weeds and wet masonry. Quirke was aware of a barred basement window and at his back a narrow door that he felt sure had not been opened for many a year. He had a moment almost of peace, sprawled there with his legs twisted under him, looking up at the railings, each one with an identical, liquid smear of light down its side from the nearest streetlamp, and above them the soiled sky, faintly lit too, with the sickly radiance of the city. The fine cool rain prickled on his face. Seen from this angle his assailants looked almost comic as they came clattering down the steps after him, two jostling, foreshortened figures, their knees and elbows working like piston rods and their plastic raincoats crackling. They began kicking him, in wordless concentration, hampered by the narrow space where he had lodged after the fall. He turned himself this way and that as best he could, trying to protect his vital organs, his liver, his kidneys, his instinctively retracted genitals, knowing what these parts of him would look like when Sinclair opened him up. The pair labored on him with skill and expertise, the thin one displaying an almost balletic finesse while the fat one did the heavier work. He was aware, however, of a certain angry restraint in their efforts—they confined their kicks to his legs and his upper torso and avoided his head when they could—and it came to him that they had been ordered that he was not to die. He greeted this realization with an indifference that was almost disappointment. Pain was what mattered now, more, even, it seemed, than survival itself; pain, and how to bear it, how to—the word came to him—how to accommodate it. In the end his consciousness found the solution for him by letting itself lapse. As he passed out he seemed to see a face, round and rocky as the invisible moon, floating above the railings and regarding him with dispassion, a face he recognized yet could not identify. Whose? It troubled him, not to know.

  IT WAS STILL THERE, THAT FACE, WHEN HE CAME TO THE FIRST TIME. The darkness was different now, softer, more diffuse, and it was not raining. Everything, in fact, was different. He did not understand where he was. It was Mal who was leaning over him, frowning and intent. But how had Mal known where to find him? Someone seemed to be holding his hand, but when he turned his head to see who it was a wave of nausea rose in him and he hastily shut his eyes. When he opened them, no more than a moment later, so it seemed to him, Mal was gone, and the darkness had changed again, was no longer darkness, indeed, but a grayish mistiness with something throbbing slowly and hugely at the heart of it—it was he, he was what was throbbing, in dull, vast, hardly believable pain. Cautiously this time he turned his eyes to the side and saw that it was Phoebe who was holding his hand, and for a moment in his drugged, half-dreaming state he thought she was his dead wife, Delia. She was sitting beside him, on the area steps, was it? Something like fog lay between them, or a bank of cloud, but solid enough for his hand in hers to rest on. For a giddy moment he was afraid he was going to burst into tears. It was not fog, but a white sheet with a blanket under it.

  Sleep, he must sleep.

  When he next awoke it was daylight, and Mal was there again, and Sarah was sitting beside the bed where Phoebe had sat, and off behind her there were other people, moving, speaking, and someone laughed. There were colored paper shapes strung across the ceiling.

  “Quirke,” Sarah said. “You’ve come back.” She smiled. It seemed to cost her an effort, as if she, too, were in some pain.

  Mal, standing, took a deep breath grimly in through his nostrils. “You’re in the Mater,” he said.

  Quirke shifted, and his left knee buzzed like a beehive. “How bad is it?” he asked, surprised to find that his voice worked.

  Mal shrugged. “You’ll live.”

  “I meant my leg,” Quirke said. “My knee.”

  “Not so bad. They put a pin in it.”

  “Who did it?”

  Mal’s eyes skittered off to the side. “The Guards don’t know,” he said, mumbling. “They’re assuming it was an attempted robbery.”

  Quirke’s aching ribs would not allow him to laugh. “The pin, Mal,” he said. “Who put in the pin?”

  “Oh.” Mal looked sheepish. “Billy Clinch.”

  “Billy the butcher?” The sheepish look turned cold.

  “He was on a skiing holiday. We got him to come back specially.”

  “Thanks.” A big red-headed nurse approached.

  “There you are,” she said to Quirke in a broad accent—Cork, was it, or Kerry? “We thought you were never going to wake up at all.”

  She took his pulse and went away, her departure leaving the three of them somehow more at a loss than they had been before. Mal screwed up his lips and put his hands into the pockets of his tightly buttoned jacket with his thumbs outside and studied the toe caps of his shoes. He had not looked at Sarah once, nor she at him. Mal’s suit was light blue, and he wore a yellow bow tie. How incongruous on him they looked, Quirke thought, these festive glad rags.

  “You’ll come to us, of course, when they let you out?” Sarah said.

  But they both knew she did not mean it.

  THE JUDGE VISITED HIM THE NEXT AFTERNOON. BY THEN HE HAD BEEN moved from the accident ward to a private room. The redheaded nurse ushered the old man in, impressed and excited by the coming of so eminent a visitor. She took his overcoat and hat and offered him tea, which he declined, and she said she would leave them in peace, so, but added, addressing the Judge, that if he, meaning Quirke, got in any way obstreperous, Your Honor had only to give a call and she would be here in a tick. “Thank you, nurse,” the Judge said, with his crinkliest smile, and she beamed at them both and departed. The old man looked at Quirke and arched an eyebrow. “Is that the way it is?” he said. “It’s true what they say, a doctor can’t afford to get sick.” He sat down on a chair beside the bed. Behind him a
tall window looked out on a confusion of roofs and smoking chimneys and a sky filled with the flying debris of snow clouds. “Merciful God, Quirke,” he said, “what happened to you at all?”

  Quirke, propped against a bank of pillows, gave a ruefully apologetic grimace. “Fell down a set of steps,” he said.

  Outlined under the bedclothes his left leg, encased in plaster, was the size of a log.

  “They must have been steep, the same steps,” the Judge said. In the window behind his shoulder a flock of small, black birds spurted raggedly from behind the rooftops and twirled about the tattered sky and then fell back in ones and pairs to wherever it was they had come from. “Are you all right?” The old man shifted awkwardly on the chair, chafing his squarish, liver-spotted hands. “I mean, is there anything you need?”

  Quirke said no, and added that the Judge was good to come. At the top of his nose and between his eyes he had again that tremulous, hollow sensation of incipient weeping, an effect, he assumed, of delayed shock—his system, after all, would be in turmoil still, working desperately to fix itself, and why would he not want to weep?

  “Mal and Sarah were here,” he said. “Phoebe, too, at some stage, when I was still half comatose.”

  The Judge nodded. “Phoebe is a good girl,” he said, with a faint note of insistence, as if to forestall an objection. He molded his hands against each other again in a washing motion. “She’s going to America, did she tell you?”

  Quirke felt a breathless, lifting sensation in the region of his heart. He said nothing and the Judge went on: “Yes, to Boston, to her Grandfather Crawford’s.” He was looking everywhere except at Quirke. “A holiday, only. Or vacation, as I believe they say out there.”

  He fished in the pocket of his jacket and brought out his tobacco pipe and pouch and busied himself with them, plugging the damp dark strands into the bowl with the discolored ball of his thumb. Quirke watched him from the bed. The afternoon light was failing fast in the room. The old man struck a match and put it to the pipe and smoke and sparks flew up. Quirke said:

  “So the boyfriend has been given his final marching orders, has he?”

  The Judge was looking about for an ashtray in which to deposit the spent match. Quirke made no attempt to help, but lay and watched him, unblinking.

  “These mixed marriages,” the Judge said, trying to sound unconcerned, “they never work.” He leaned forward and placed the match carefully on a corner of the wooden locker beside the bed. “Besides, she’s…what is she?”

  “Twenty, in the new year.”

  At last the Judge looked at him, the glimmer from the window making his faded blue eyes seem paler still. He said:

  “A life is easily ruined, at that young age.”

  Without lifting his head from the pillows Quirke put down a hand beside the bed and tried gropingly to open the locker, but in the end the Judge had to help him, and found his cigarettes for him and gave him one and struck a match. Then Quirke rang the nurse’s bell and the nurse came and he told her to fetch an ashtray. She said he should not be smoking but he ignored her, and she turned to the Judge and threw her eyes to heaven and asked him if he did not think Quirke was a holy terror, but went back into the corridor and a moment later returned with a tinfoil pie plate and said that would have to do them for it was all she could find. When she had gone they smoked in silence for a while. The old man’s pipe had fouled the air and Quirke’s cigarette tasted to him of burning cardboard. The last of the daylight was dying away into the shadowed corners of the room but neither man made a move to switch on the lamp beside the bed.

  “Tell me,” Quirke said, “about this Knights of St. Patrick business that Mal is involved in.” The Judge put on a puzzled frown but Quirke saw that he was feigning. “The thing in America, with the Catholic families, that Josh Crawford funds.”

  The old man took from his pocket a smoker’s penknife and used the blunt end of it to tamp the tobacco in his pipe, sucking away meanwhile at the mouthpiece and blowing out busy clouds of blue smoke.

  “Malachy,” he said at last, with heavy emphasis, “is a good man.” He looked Quirke directly in the eye. “You know that, don’t you, Quirke?”

  Quirke only looked back at him; he recalled yet again Sarah saying the same thing: a good man. “A young woman died, Garret,” he said. “Another woman was murdered.”

  The Judge nodded. “Are you suggesting,” he inquired, as if he had no more than the mildest interest in hearing what the reply might be, “that Mal was involved in these things?”

  “He was—he is. I told you so. He arranged for Christine Falls to—”

  The old man waved a hand wearily. “Yes yes, I know what you told me.” In the gloom now, with the window behind him, his face was a featureless mask. Quirke could see the burning dottle in the pipe bowl flare and fade, flare and fade, a slow, fiery pulse. “He’s my son, Quirke. If he has things to tell me, he’ll tell me, in his own time.”

  Quirke reached out cautiously and crushed the last of his cigarette in the tin plate on the locker, the stub exhaling its final, bitter fume. The nicotine had reacted with whatever the painkillers were they had given him and his nerve ends were fizzing. The old man went on:

  “When I was a boy I used to go to school with my boots tied around my neck to spare the shoe leather. Oh, I’m telling you—they laugh about that sort of thing these days, saying people of my generation are exaggerating, but I can tell you, it’s no exaggeration. The boots around the neck, and a roasted spud and a bottle of milk with a bit of paper for a stopper and that was our rations for the day. Josh Crawford and myself, two lads from the same townland. Half the time we had no backsides to our trousers.”

  “And look at you now,” Quirke said, “you the Chief Justice and him a Boston millionaire.”

  “We were the lucky ones. People talk about the good old days, but there was precious little that was good about them, and that’s the sad truth.” He paused. The room was almost in darkness now, the lights of the city coming on and twinkling fitfully afar in the window. “We all have a duty to try to make the world a better place, Quirke.”

  “And the likes of Josh Crawford are out to make a better world?”

  The Judge chuckled. “When you think of the material God has to work with,” he said, “you have to feel sorry for Him, sometimes.” Again he paused, as if to test what he would say before he said it. “You’re not much of a believer, are you, Quirke? You realize it’s a great disappointment to me, that you left the church.”

  The effect of the cigarette had worn off and Quirke was sinking again into a dull fatigue. “I don’t know,” he said, his voice growing thin, “that I was ever in it.”

  “Ah, but you were—and you’ll come back, sooner or later, don’t you mistake it. The Lord stamps his seal on every soul”—he gave a coughing laugh—“even one as black as yours.”

  “I’ve cut up a lot of corpses in my time,” Quirke said, “but I’ve never found the place where the soul might have been.”

  Feeling himself rebuked, the Judge fell huffily silent. Quirke did not care; he wanted to be left alone now, so that he might sleep. Pain was a pyramid, heavy and dull at the bottom and excruciatingly sharp at the top, the top being his shattered kneecap. The Judge upended the bowl of his pipe and knocked it on the tin plate. He was shaking his head.

  “You and Mal,” he said. “I thought you’d be like brothers.”

  Quirke had a sensation of drifting into himself, a self that had grown cavernous and dark. “Mal was always jealous,” he murmured. “So was I. I wanted Sarah and got Delia.”

  “Aye, and were sorry you did, I know that.” The Judge stood up and reached above Quirke’s head and pressed the nurse’s bell. He waited in the dark, looking down at what he could see of Quirke, the great white-swathed bulk of him laid out corpselike on the narrow bed. “I realize, Quirke,” he said, “that your life didn’t go as you hoped it would, and as it should have, if there was any justice. You made too man
y mistakes—we all did. But go easy on Mal.” He leaned down closer to the supine form. But Quirke, he saw, was asleep.

  22

  FOR QUIRKE THE YEAR ENDED AND A NEW ONE BEGAN IN A BLUR OF days each one of which was hardly distinguishable from its predecessors. The gaunt hospital room reminded him of the inside of a skull, with that high ceiling the color of bone and the window beside him looking out like an unblinking eye on the wintry cityscape. Phoebe on one of her visits had brought him a miniature plastic Christmas tree complete with plastic ornaments; forlornly festive, it stood a little lopsided in the deep embrasure of the window, growing increasingly incongruous as that seemingly interminable first week dragged itself painfully toward New Year. Barney Boyle came to see him, furtive and lightly sweating—“Christ, Quirke, I hate hospitals”—bringing two naggins of whiskey and an armful of books. When he asked what had happened to him Quirke said what he had said to everyone else, that he had fallen down the area steps in Mount Street. Barney did not believe him, but made no mention of Ambie Tormey’s brother or Gallagher who was not the full shilling; Barney knew when to mind his own business.

  On New Year’s Eve the staff held a party somewhere in the upper regions of the building. The night nurse when she came with his sleeping pill was halfway tipsy. He listened to the city’s bells at midnight crazily ringing in the new year and lay back against the pillows and tried not to feel sorry for himself. Billy Clinch, a fierce little sandy-haired terrier, had come to tell him, with a certain relish, Quirke could see, that his leg would never be right—“The patella was in bits, man!”—and that most likely he would have a limp for life. He took the news calmly, even with a certain indifference. He went over and over in his mind those minutes—he knew it must have been no more than minutes—at the dank bottom of the area steps. There was something in it, in what had happened there—a lesson, not the one that Mr. Punch and fat Judy had been out to teach him, the nature of which he more or less understood, but one that was at once more profound and more commonplace. As they toiled over him with their blunt toecaps the two had been, it seemed to him now, like a pair of common laborers, coal heavers, say, or butchers maneuvering an awkward carcass, vengefully resentful of the job in hand, grunting and sweating and getting in each other’s way and wanting to be done. He had thought he was going to die and was surprised at how little he feared the prospect. It had all been so shabby and shoddy, so ordinary; and that, he now realized, would be the manner of his real death, when it came. In the dissecting room the bodies used to seem to him the remains of sacrificial victims, spent and inert after the frightful, bloody ceremony of their souls’ leaving. But he would never again view a cadaver in that lurid light. Suddenly for him death had lost its terrifying glamour and become just another bit of the mundane business of life, although its last.