“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.
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.
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?