You do not make it clear in what connection you wish to interview Father Honan, but in any case it is not possible for you to do so. Father Honan is extremely busy at present, as he is about to embark for the mission fields in Africa, and is therefore unable to comply with your request.
If you require information about the work of the Trinitarian Fathers, here or abroad, please address your questions directly to Msgr. Farrelly, or to me.
Yours in the Grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ,
Daniel Dangerfield, FHT
Quirke read it over twice, then looked at Hackett. “‘Daniel Dangerfield,’” he said. “That’s a mouthful.” He put the paper down on the bar, where it slowly closed itself along its folds, like a fly-eating flower. “What’s it mean?”
“Don’t know,” Hackett said shortly.
“Then why…?”
“The name was familiar,” Hackett said. He took out a packet of cigarettes from his jacket pocket, offered one to Quirke, took one himself, and flipped up the lid of his Zippo lighter. He thumbed the blackened wheel to make a spark. “Honan,” he said, narrowing one eye against a cloud of cigarette smoke.
“Familiar in what way?”
“I couldn’t think, at first, only I knew I knew the name. Then I remembered.” He drank the last of the port, smacking his lips, and held the darkly smeared glass up to the light and peered through it. “There was a complaint made against him — this was a few years ago. Father of one of the young fellows at Windsor College — it’s run by the Holy Trinity order — came in with some story about his son being mistreated by this same Father Honan — or I presume it’s the same.”
“Mistreated?” Quirke said.
“Aye. It wasn’t clear what was meant — the boy, it seems, wouldn’t go into details about it, even to his father. The Super at the time, Andrew O’Gorman — do you remember him? Not the most imaginative fellow, our Andy — he tried his best to get out of the father what the whole business was about, but it was all very vague.”
“And what happened?”
Hackett shrugged. “Nothing. There was nothing to go on. I think the Super sent someone out to talk to the lad, but he still wasn’t forthcoming, so the thing fizzled out.” He chuckled. “You can imagine how eager Andy would have been to start quizzing the reverend fathers — next thing there’d be a thunderbolt from the Archbishop’s Palace, asking”—here he put on a sepulchral voice—“by what right did the Garda Síochána think it could bring unfounded accusations against a hard-working and well-respected priest of this parish, blah blah blah and Yours in Christ Our Savior. So it was dropped.”
Quirke beckoned to Frankie again, pointing to Hackett’s empty glass, and the young man came with the bottle of Graham’s and poured another measure.
“What was your involvement?” Quirke asked of Hackett.
“Hmm?” Hackett was attending to his port.
“With this business about the priest — about the complaint.”
“I wasn’t involved,” the detective said, “not directly.”
“But what? You had a hunch?”
“No no. Not really. But I asked around a bit. You know.”
Quirke smiled thinly, nodding. “And what did you hear?”
The detective pressed the butt of his cigarette into an ashtray on the bar, grinding it in slow half circles, thoughtfully. An angry flare of smoke rose quickly and dispersed. “A busy fellow, the same Father Honan. Ran a boys’ club out of one of the tenements in Sean McDermott Street. Athletics, swimming, boxing, that sort of thing. Got local businesses to cough up, persuaded Guinness to sponsor equipment, jerseys, football boots, so on. Made him very popular with the locals.”
“No complaints like the other one?”
“No fear! The man was a saint, as far as Sean McDermott Street was concerned. Set up a temperance society too, bringing the men in and persuading them to take the pledge. There was a tontine society that he got going, to pay for the funerals of the poor. Oh, aye, Father Mick was the local hero. Did work for the tinkers, too, trying to get them to settle down and quit stravaiging the country. A busy man, as I say.”
Quirke was lighting another cigarette. “But you were skeptical.”
Hackett made a large gesture, rolling his shoulders and lifting up the empty palm of one hand. “I had nothing against the man,” he said. “I never even met him.”
They were silent again. Behind them the bar was filling up, and the electric light, under siege from the clouds of cigarette smoke, was turning into an almost opaque blue-gray haze. Barney Boyle was somewhere in the crowd; Quirke, hearing the playwright’s loud, slurred tones, kept his head well down. He did not feel up to dealing with Barney, not this evening.
“So,” he said. “Are you going to follow it up?”
Hackett made his Spencer Tracy face, pressing his tongue hard into his cheek and screwing up an eye. “I thought we might amble out there and have a word with Father Honan, before he departs for the mission fields, with his pickaxe and spade.”
“You mean, you thought you might amble out.”
“Ah, now, Doctor, you know you’ve a great way with the sky pilots — I’ve noticed it before.”
“You have, have you?”
“I have.” The detective chuckled. “I imagine they think of you as being in the same line of business as themselves, more or less — you handle the bodies, they do the souls.”
Quirke shook his head. “You’re a terrible man, do you know that?” he said. “Here, buy me a drink — it’s the least you can do.”
This time Hackett signaled to Frankie, who came down the length of the bar in a hip-rolling sashay. “What’ll it be, gents?” he asked, and pulled out his bow tie past its limit and released it, smirking. Quirke lowered his head and looked at him narrowly; he might have been sighting along the barrel of a gun.
8
He had settled down with a nightcap and a history of Byzantium that he had been trying to finish for weeks when Isabel rang up. He sat and looked at the telephone and let it ring a dozen times before lifting the receiver, which he did gingerly, as if it might explode in his hand. He knew it would be Isabel. It was nearing midnight, and he had thought he was safe, that she must have slept through the evening and would not get up so late, but no. Her tone was dispiritingly bright. He tried in turn to sound enthusiastic, loving, happy to hear her voice.
Isabel said she supposed he was in bed himself by now, with his teddy and his toddy, but that she would come over anyway, and maybe join him there, in the scratcher — she liked to use slang words, pronouncing them with an arch, actorly flourish, stretching out the vowels and rolling the r’s. He could think of no reasonable means of putting her off. Good, she said, she would jump in a taxi right now. He put down the phone and gazed unseeing at the book lying open in his lap. It always annoyed him, that way she had of saying Bye-ee! with another theatrical trill.
Yet when she arrived and at the front door flew into his arms and kissed him, breathing hotly into his ear, his heart gave a familiar gulp. She was a warm, happy, grown-up woman, after all, and she loved him, so she said, and to prove it she had tried to kill herself for his sake. He held her now, at once desiring her and wishing she had not come. What did he want from her? he asked himself, for the thousandth time. The self-canceling answer was everything and nothing, and therefore it was all impossible. Cringing with guilt he pressed her all the more tightly to him, while in his mind, suddenly, longingly, he had a vision of the towpath by the dark canal, and how it would be there, the hushed trees bending low, the moon shimmering in the water and the dry reeds whispering together, and not a soul anywhere about.