After a moment the blue suit appeared in the doorway. “Mr. Quirke,” he said, holding out a hand. “Costigan.” Quirke gingerly shook the proffered hand, which was square, blunt-fingered, and slightly damp. “We met at the Griffins’, the day of the party for the Chief Justice. The day the honor from the Pope was announced?” He pointed to the place beside Quirke. “May I?”
A coincidence, of a sort: Quirke had been thinking about Sarah, her face like Ophelia’s floating up pale but insistent out of the newspaper pages and their quag of reported grim goings-on-the Yanks testing a bigger and better bomb, the Reds rattling their rusty sabers, as usual. He was wondering still why she had come to him at the hospital and what it was exactly that she wanted of him. People seemed forever to be asking him for things, and always just the things he could not give them. He was not the man they took him for, Sarah, and Phoebe, even poor Dolly Moran; he had no help for them.
He often recalled the first unsupervised postmortem he had performed. He was working in those days with Thorndyke, the State Pathologist, who was already going gaga, and Quirke that day had been called on at short notice to stand in for the old boy. The cadaver was that of a large, silver-haired, antiquated gentleman who had died when the car in which he had been a passenger had skidded on a patch of ice and toppled into a ditch. His daughter had been bringing him back after a day out from the old folks’ home where he was living; she was elderly herself, the daughter, and had been driving cautiously because of the freezing conditions, but had lost all control of the machine when it began its sedate slide across the ice. She had escaped without injury, and the car was hardly damaged, but the old boy had died, instantly, as the newspapers liked to put it-who could say, he often asked himself, how long that instant might seem to the one who was doing the dying?-of simple heart failure, as Quirke was able quickly to establish. When the dissecting-room assistant had begun to undress the corpse with the usual, rough adroitness, there had slipped out of the fob of the waistcoat an old and beautiful pocket watch, an Elgin, with Roman numerals and a second hand in an inset dial. It had stopped at five twenty-three exactly, the moment, Quirke was certain, when the old man’s heartbeat too had stopped, heart and watch giving up the ghost together in sympathetic unison. So it had been with him, he believed, when Delia died: an instrument that he carried at his breast, one that had been keeping him aligned and synchronized with the rest of the world, had stopped suddenly and never started up again.
“A lovely day, that was,” Costigan was saying. “We were all so happy for the Judge, happy and proud. A papal knighthood, that’s a rare honor. I’m a knight myself”-he pointed to a pin in his lapel, in the form of a little gold staff twined about by a gold letter P-“but of a humbler order, of course.” He paused. “You never thought of joining us, Mr. Quirke? I mean the Knights of St. Patrick. You’ve been asked, I’m sure. Malachy Griffin is one of us.”
Quirke said nothing. He found himself fascinated, almost hypnotized, by the steady, omnivorous regard of Costigan’s magnified eyes, suspended like two deep-sea creatures in the fishbowl lenses of his spectacles.
“Lovely people, the Griffins,” Costigan went on, undeterred by Quirke’s wordless and resistant stare. “Of course, you were married into the family, weren’t you.”
He waited. Quirke said:
“My wife was Sarah’s-Mrs. Griffin’s-sister.”
Costigan nodded, assuming now an expression of unctuous solemnity. “And she died,” he said. “In childbirth, wasn’t it? Very sad, a thing like that. It must have been hard for you.”
Quirke hesitated again. Those undersea eyes seemed to be following his very thoughts. “It was a long time ago,” he said, maintaining a neutral tone.
Costigan was nodding again.
“Still and all, a hard loss,” he said. “I suppose the only way to cope with a thing like that would be to try to forget it, to put it out of your mind altogether. Not easy, of course. A young woman dead, a child lost. But life must go on, mustn’t it, Mr. Quirke?” There was the sense of some large, dark thing stirring soundlessly between them in the little space where they sat. Costigan pointed to the whiskey glass. “You haven’t touched your drink.” He glanced down at another lapel pin, declaring him a member of the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association. “I’m strictly t.t., myself.”
Quirke leaned back on the bench seat. Davy the barman hovered by the serving hatch, polishing a glass and eavesdropping.
“What exactly is it you’re saying to me,” Quirke asked, “Mr… what was the name again?”
Costigan ignored the second question, smiling tolerantly, as at a childish ruse. “I’m saying, Mr. Quirke,” he said softly, “that some things are best forgotten about, best left alone.”
Quirke felt his forehead go hot. He folded the newspaper and clamped it under his arm and stood up. Costigan watched him with what seemed a lively interest and even a touch of amusement. “Thanks for the drink,” Quirke said. The whiskey sat untasted in the glass. Costigan nodded again, briskly this time, as if something had been said that demanded his assent. He was still seated, but Quirke, towering over him, felt that somehow it was he who was on the inferior level.
“Good luck, Mr. Quirke,” Costigan said, smiling. “I’ll see you around, I’m sure.”
IN GRAFTON STREET GUSTS OF WIND WERE SWOOPING MORE STRONGLY than ever and the Saturday evening shoppers were hurrying homeward with their heads down. Quirke was aware of his quickened breathing and a thick, hot sensation in his chest that was not fear, exactly, but a kind of dawning alarm, as if the smooth, empty little island on which he had been happily perched had given a preliminary heave, and would presently reveal itself to be not dry land at all but the humped back of a whale.
17
ANDY STAFFORD KNEW HE WAS NOT THE SHARPEST TOOL IN THE BOX. It was not that he was stupid, but he was no genius either. This knowledge did not trouble him. In fact, he considered that he was pretty much of a good balance. He had known guys who were all brawn, and one or two who were all brain, and both kinds had been a mess. He was between the two extremes, like the kid standing in the middle of the seesaw, having a good time without the effort of all that swinging up and down. So he just could not understand why it had not struck him, before he had agreed to Claire taking the kid, what the consequences might be for his reputation. It was in Foley’s one night that he first heard, behind his back, that particular laugh he would come to hear often, too often.
He had arrived in from a night and most of a day on the road, and had stopped to drink a beer before going home to the house that these days seemed to smell of nothing else but baby things. Foley’s was crowded and noisy, as it always was on Friday night. On his way to the bar he passed a table of five or six guys, truckers like him, most of whom he knew, sort of. One of them, a big meaty fellow with sideburns the size of lamb chops, name of M’Coy, known as Real-ha ha, big joke-said something as he went past, and that was when he heard it, the laugh. It was low, it was dirty, and it seemed to be directed at him. He got his beer and turned and stood with his elbows behind him on the bar and one boot heel hitched on the brass foot rail and lazily surveyed the room, not looking at M’Coy’s table but not avoiding it either. Be cool, he told himself, be easy. Besides, he did not know the laugh well enough yet to be absolutely sure it was him they had been laughing at. But it was him M’Coy was grinning at, and now he called out: “Hello, stranger.”