Christine Falls: A Novele (19 page)

“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 many mistakes—we all did. But go easy on Mal.” He leaned down closer to the supine form. But Quirke, he saw, was asleep.

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.

And day after day his drug-dimmed thoughts circled upon the question of who it was that had set those two on his trail. He kept doggedly posing the question, he knew, only so that he would not have to answer it. He told himself it was impossible that Mal could have done such a thing—imagine Mal on the step of a dark doorway in Stoney Batter handing out their instructions to Mr. Punch and his fat partner!—yet the vistas that stretched beyond that impossibility were murkier still. When he summoned to mind the image of the face he had seemed to see hovering gloatingly above the area steps that night, watching as he was beaten, its features began to shift and rearrange themselves—or was it he who was shifting and rearranging them?—until it was no longer Mal’s long, unmoonlike countenance, but one squarer and more roughly hewn. Costigan. Yes. But those dim, faceless others crowding in turn behind him, who were they?

PHOEBE PAID HIM A VISIT ON NEW YEAR’S DAY. A FITFUL WIND WAS
driving sleet like spittle against the window, and the smoke from the city’s chimneys no sooner appeared than it was blowsily dispersed. Phoebe wore a black beret pulled down at one side and a black coat with a fur collar. She seemed slimmer than when he had last been awake enough to look at her, and her face was pale, and the cold had given a raw, pink edging to the wings of her nose. There were other changes, less easily identified. He seemed to detect in her manner a certain watchfulness, and a sense of willed restraint, that had not been there before. He supposed this new hardness in her, if that was what it was—he looked at her knuckles, the white shine of them where the small bones were pressing up under the flesh—must be the result of the loss of Conor Carrington, of all the suppressed violence and anger at that loss, against which she had honed herself like a knife against a stone. But then he thought, no, it was not losing him that had embittered her, but the taking of him from her. She had been bested, and she was furious for it. He found her presence, in her grown-up’s coat and ironically tilted Left Bank beret, faintly unnerving. The girl that had been was suddenly a woman.

She did not want to talk about the trip to America, she said. When Quirke mentioned it she shunted her mouth sideways and shrugged her shoulders in faint, listless impatience.

“They’re getting rid of me,” she said. “They want a rest from my accusing eye following them everywhere, as they imagine. Actually, I don’t care about any of that anymore.”

“Any of what?” he asked.

She shrugged again, and scowlingly regarded the Christmas tree on the windowsill, then suddenly turned her eyes to his and, coldly and calculatedly mischievous, said:

“Why don’t you come with me?”

He had noticed that his damaged knee inside its cast seemed to have taken on the task of alerting him at moments of surprise or alarm, moments which he in the narcotic haze in which he was still afloat could not register with sufficient force or instantaneity, so that the pinned-up joint of his leg must bring them to his attention by way of a twinge, a sort of pinch, such as a sadistically jolly uncle might give, meant to be playful but leaving a bruise. Phoebe took his indrawn gasp of pain now for a dismissive laugh and turned her vexed face again to the window. She unclasped her little black handbag—he thought:
All women look the same looking into their handbags
—and took from it a slim, silver cigarette case and a matching lighter. So now she was a smoker in her own right. He made no comment. She opened the case with a flick of her thumb and middle finger and held it toward him spread upon her palm. The cigarettes, fat and flat, were ranked in an overlapping file, like oval organ pipes.

“Passing Cloud,” he said, taking one. “My my, such sophistication.”

She held the lighter for him. When he leaned forward from the bank of pillows he caught from under the lifted sheet a whiff of his new, hospital smell, warm and raw, a meaty stink.

“All we need now is a little drink,” Phoebe said with brittle gaiety. “A couple of gin and tonics would be just the thing.” She twirled her cigarette with inexpert insouciance.

“How is it at home?” he asked.

“How is what at home?” Saying it, she was briefly a girl again, snappish and defiant. Then she sighed, and put the tip of her little finger between her teeth and nibbled on the nail. “Awful,” she said out of the side of her mouth. “They hardly speak to each other.”

“Why is that?”

She let her finger go and took an angry drag at her cigarette and glared at him. “How do I know? I’m not supposed to know anything, I’m a child.”

“And you,” he said, “do
you
talk to
them
?” She looked at her shoes, a slow, deep frown gathering between her eyebrows. “They might need you, you know.”

She decided not to hear that.

“I want to go away,” she said. She looked up. “I want to
get
away. Oh, Quirke”—in a rush now—“it’s terrible, terrible, they’re like, I don’t know what, it’s as if they hate each other, as if they were strangers trapped together in a cage. I can’t stand it, I have to get out.”

She stopped, and something dark crossed the window, the shadow of a bird, or something else, passing in the sky. She had lowered her face again and was watching him from under her eyelashes, trying to judge, he could see, how much of her distress he believed in, how much he would help her in her plan to escape. She was a simple creature, after all. He asked her:

“When do you go to Boston?”

She drew her knees tightly together and gave a shiver of annoyance. “Oh, it’s not for ages—weeks and weeks. The weather is too bad there, or something.”

“Yes, they get blizzards at this time of year.”

“Huh,” she said. “Blizzards!”

He shut his eyes and saw Delia and Sarah in snow boots and Russian-style fur hats walking arm and arm out of an ice storm toward him, an impossible sun that was shining from somewhere, making thousands of miniature rainbows around them, the rims of their nostrils pinkly translucent, like Phoebe’s now, and their perfect teeth agleam—Quirke had never before known such white, such pristine, teeth, they seemed the very promise of all that might await him in this easeful and sleekly appointed land. They were on the Common, Mal was there too. They could hear the myriads of tiny slivers of ice tinkling against one another as they fell. It was—what? 1933?—the hard times were starting to ease and the bad news from Europe seemed no more than rumors, not to be credited. How innocent they had been, the four of them, how full of eagerness and assurance, how impatient for the future. Wearily he opened his eyes:
And here it is,
he thought,
the future we were so impatient for
. Phoebe, brooding, sat hunched forward with her knees crossed and one hand under an elbow and the other under her chin. The end of her cigarette was stained with lipstick, the smoke ran up by the side of her face. She hefted the cigarette case lightly in her hand.

“That’s nice,” Quirke said.

“This?” She looked at the silver trinket. “It was a present. From him”—she dropped her voice to a comical bass boom—“my lost love.” She sketched a regretful laugh, then rose and crushed the last of her cigarette into the tin plate that was still acting as an ashtray. “I’ll go,” she said.

“So soon?”

She did not look at him. What was it really that she had come to him in need of? For he knew she had come looking for something. Whatever it was he had been unable to supply it. Perhaps she was unclear herself as to what it was.

The afternoon was waning.

“You should think of it,” she said. “You should think of coming with me, to Boston.”

Then she was gone, leaving a faint wraith of cigarette smoke on the air, the pallid blue ghost of herself.

Alone, he watched vague flakes of snow flickering down into the lighted window like moths and then spinning away quickly into the darkness. He speculated again as to what it was she had wanted of him, he could not let it go. She should have known she was wasting her time, for what had he ever given her?—what had he ever given anyone? He shifted uneasily, his huge leg tugging at him like a surly, intractable child. He began a kind of reckoning, unwillingly; it made him squirm inside himself. There was Barney Boyle, poor Barney, burnt-out and steadily drinking himself to death: what sympathy or understanding had he ever given him? Young Carrington, fearful of the damage Mal Griffin and his father the Chief Justice might do to his career, why had he mocked him, and tried to make him appear a coward and a fool in front of Phoebe? Why had he gone to the Judge and planted suspicions in his mind about the son who was already a painful disappointment to him, the son who as a child was sent to be with his mother in the kitchen while Quirke the cuckoo sat in the Judge’s den toasting his shins at the fire and sucking toffees from the brown-paper bag the Judge kept specially for him in a drawer of his desk? And Nana Griffin, what regard had he granted her, who had to invent a delicate constitution for Malachy, her son, in the hope of winning for him a little of his father’s love or even a moment of his full attention? There were so many, suddenly, so many to be reckoned with, they crowded in upon him, and he shrank from them, but in vain. Sarah, whose tender affections he played on for his amusement, Sarah with her dizzy spells and her loveless marriage; Mal, floundering in God knows what depths of trouble and sorrow; Dolly Moran, done to death for the keeping of a diary; Christine Falls and Christine Falls’s child, both lost and soon to be forgotten; all of them, all scorned by him, unvalued, ignored, betrayed even. And then there was Quirke himself, the Quirke he was taking grim measure of, Quirke dodging into McGonagle’s of an afternoon to drink his whiskey and laugh at the memorials in the
Mail
—what right had he to laugh, how much better was he than the joxer scratching his balls over the racing pages or the drunken poet contemplating his failures in the bottom of a glass? He was like this leg, cocooned in the solid plaster of his indifference and selfishness. Again that face with the black-rimmed glasses and the stained teeth rose before him in the darkness of the window like a malign moon, the face, he realized, that would be with him always, the face of his nemesis.