He stopped, and laughed quietly, and leaned forward again. “Forgive me, Dr. Quirke,” he murmured, “I must remember I’m not in the pulpit. In fact, I’m rarely in the pulpit, and not often in church, either, for that matter. My work is carried on in the streets, in the tenements, in the campsites of the traveling people. I don’t flatter myself that this makes me a better minister of God than the monk in his cloister or even the lowly lawgiver in the Vatican. We all have our allotted tasks, our theaters of operations.”
One of the old ladies across the way rose and tottered to the bar, an empty glass in each hand. “Ah, Mags,” the barman said, pretending to be cross, “you should have shouted and I’d have come over to you.”
Outside, in Abbey Street, a lone drunk passed by, singing “Mother Machree” in a high, strained, sobbing tenor voice.
“You’re going to Africa yourself, I hear,” Quirke said.
The priest put on an exaggeratedly doleful expression. “I am — for my sins. Nairobi first, then some godforsaken parish out in the bush that will be twice the size of Ireland, I don’t doubt.”
“Have you been there before?”
“Not that part. I was in Nigeria for a while, some years back. I still come down with fever in the rainy season. What about yourself? Do you ever travel?”
“I used to go to America — worked there years ago, in Boston.”
“Ah, Boston is a grand city.”
The drunk could be heard from somewhere along the rain-washed street, still crooning tearfully.
“Have you family yourself, Dr. Quirke?” the priest asked.
“No. My wife died.”
“But you have a daughter?”
Quirke frowned. “Yes, I have,” he said. “I forget, sometimes.”
The priest gazed at him in silence for a long moment. He seemed to be thinking of something else. “Your father was Garret Griffin,” he said, “am I right?”
“My adoptive father, yes.”
“A fine man, Garret.”
“Did you know him?”
“I came across him now and then. A great friend of the church.”
“A great friend of your man Costigan, too.”
The priest smiled, biting his lip. “I don’t believe Joe has friends, as such.”
“What, then?”
A little flurry of tension gripped the air between them, as if a dust devil had suddenly risen up in a dervish dance on the tabletop. “We’re both men of the world, Doctor,” the priest said. “And a hard and recalcitrant world it is.”
“So there must be people like Costigan to keep it all in check.”
“To keep some of it in check,” the priest said, and smiled, softly reproving. “But even the church’s powers are limited — even Joe Costigan can’t control everything.”
Quirke stood up and went to the bar and asked for two more whiskeys. There was a constriction in his chest and his heart was doing its muffled, trapped-bird thrashings. Was this, he wondered in alarm, the preliminary to another bout of alienation and fantasy, like the one he had undergone at Trinity Manor? He had been in the presence of a priest on that occasion, too. Maybe he was developing an allergy to men of the cloth. Or maybe he was just angry at the thought of Costigan and his endless machinations.
He turned now, while the barman was preparing the drinks, and saw that Father Honan had risen from his chair and was standing by the table where the trio of clerics was seated, his hands in his pockets, saying something and laughing. The three men sat looking up at him with awed expressions. He would be a star in their firmament, of course, the famous Father Mick, champion of the poor and the downtrodden, the kiddies’ friend, the tamer of drunken fathers and lawless tinkers.
Quirke carried the drinks to the table. Father Honan, with a parting quip that left his three admirers shaking their heads and chuckling, came back and sat down. “My Lord, Doctor,” he said, picking up his glass and admiring the whiskey’s amber glow, “you’ll have me under the table.”
“You didn’t know Jimmy Minor, then,” Quirke said.
The priest looked from the glass to him and back again. He took his time before answering. “I think I said, didn’t I, that I’d never met the poor chap?”
“Yet he must have known of you, or something about you.”
The gray eyes narrowed again, glinting. “Something about me?” the priest said, very softly. When he spoke like this, so quietly, he seemed to caress the words, and Quirke thought of a hand with fine pale hairs on the back of it caressing a cheek, fresh, smooth, unblemished.
“He wrote to you,” Quirke said. “He asked to interview you.”
“Apparently he did. But I don’t know what it could have been that he wanted to talk to me about. Do you?”
“I’ll say again — something about your work, maybe.”
“Maybe so, maybe so. We’ll never know, now, will we.”
They watched each other, sitting very still, hunched forward a little in their chairs. One of the turf logs in the fireplace collapsed softly, throwing sparks onto the hearth and rolling another ball of smoke out across the floor. Quirke picked up the cigarette case. “What’s this?” he asked, pointing to the monogram on the lid.
“Fleur-de-lis,” the priest said. “A woman had it done for me, years ago.” He smiled at Quirke’s raised eyebrow. “Oh, yes, Doctor, I too was loved, once.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing happened. She was married, and I was young. She came to me for confession, invited me home to meet her husband. He was a builder — or an architect, was it? I can’t remember. Well-to-do people, anyway. She knitted socks for me, and gave me that”—pointing to the cigarette case—“and nothing, Dr. Quirke, nothing happened. I suppose you can’t imagine a love like that?”
Quirke gazed at the cigarette case where it lay on his palm. “Why did you telephone me, Father?” he said. “Why did you want to talk to me?”
The priest threw up his hands, laughing softly. “Such questions, Doctor, and you ask them over and over! I already said, people told me things about you. I was curious to see what you were like. And now I’ve seen you, and I think you are a very angry man. Oh, yes — I can see it in your eyes. That place — Carricklea, was it? — marked you for life, that’s plain.”
“Are you going to tell me now to forgive and forget?”
“I wouldn’t dream of it. Your pain is your own, Doctor. No man has a right to tell you what to do with it.” He smiled his glinting smile, then suddenly sat upright and clapped his hands on his knees. “And now,” he said, “I must love you and leave you, for the hour is late and Desperate Dan will be fretting that I’m gallivanting about the town and neglecting my priestly duties.” He stood up, and held out a hand. “I’m very glad to have met you, Doctor. I hope our paths will cross again. Good night to you, sir.”