On the way out, as they rolled along with the low hedges flying past and the big car swaying on its springs, Hackett reminisced aloud about Packie Joyce, wild Packie the Pike, dealer in metals, tinker chieftain and unstoppable begetter of children — it was said he had fathered as many as twenty-five or thirty offspring on a much put-upon wife, now deceased, and two or three of her redheaded sisters. “One time I got up the nerve to ask him why in the name of God did he have so many babbies,” Hackett said. “‘Listen here to me now,’ Packie said, looming over me with that big mad head of his, ‘when you’re lying in the cold in one of them drafty caravans on a winter’s night, I’m telling you, it’s either fuck or freeze.’” Quirke, sitting beside Hackett in the rear, caught Jenkins’s startled eye in the driving mirror; Inspector Hackett rarely swore, and was a famous frowner on bad language. “Oh, aye,” he said now, chuckling, “he’s some boyo, the same Packie — you’ll see.”
They were not sure where the Joyces’ campsite was, and had to stop at the village post office while Jenkins went inside to ask for directions. Hackett sat with his knees splayed and his palms resting on his thighs and looked out with lively interest upon a scene quick with the tremors of spring. Cloud shadows were pouring across the far hillsides. Quirke watched the detective sidelong and supposed he was thinking of the days of his youth in the windy Midlands. Hackett would always be a countryman.
Jenkins was gone a long time but at last returned and got in behind the wheel. “Well,” Hackett asked the back of the young man’s head, “did you find out the way?”
“Oh, I did,” Jenkins said, and produced a sound that it took the two men in the back a moment to identify as a short low laugh. “It seems Mr. Joyce is a well-known figure in these parts, all right. I had to listen for a good five minutes to the postmistress’s views on him and his tribe.”
“A certain degree of disapproval, I imagine,” Hackett said, and Jenkins once again laughed.
They reached the outskirts of the village and hesitated briefly at a crossroads, Jenkins extending his neck tortoiselike out of his collar and swiveling his head this way and that, and then turned onto an unpaved boreen. Ahead of them they saw a great pillar of rapidly rolling blackish-brown smoke. “That will be the ensign of the Joyces, I don’t doubt,” Hackett said drily. “By their fires shall ye know them.”
They made slow progress, for the narrow little road had many twists and turns and many a deep and spring-tormenting pothole. Jenkins maneuvered the big car with judicious caution. There were primroses in the hedges, and the hawthorn was in leaf already, and over the sound of the engine they could hear the shrill piping of blackbirds and even the robins’ thinner calls. “Haven’t they the life, all the same, the tinkers,” Hackett said wistfully, “out in the good air, under God’s clear sky.” He turned a teasing eye on Quirke. “Wouldn’t you say, Doctor?”
“The average tinker’s life expectancy is twenty-nine years,” Quirke said, “and the death rate among their newborn is one in three.”
Hackett sighed but seemed untroubled. “Oh, I don’t doubt it,” he said. “A good life but a short one, then.”
Quirke said no more. He was not in a mood for Hackett’s raillery; but then, he reflected, was he ever?
He had woken that morning feeling dizzy, and had lain on his back in a tangle of damp sheets for some minutes, watching the light fixture in the ceiling above him; it seemed to be jerking repeatedly from right to left, like the same miniature racing car shooting again and again past the winning flag. When at last he got up, putting one explorative foot after the other gingerly to the floor, he thought he would fall over from light-headedness. He had often suffered vertigo on mornings following drinking bouts, but that was a different sensation, more an annoyance than anything else, a thing to be endured until it wore off, as it inevitably did; that was just ordinary giddiness, and not frightening, like this new kind. He went into the kitchen in his pajamas and sat at the table in the cold, drinking cup after cup of bitter black coffee and smoking a chain of cigarettes. At first the coffee made the dizziness worse, then better, and the nicotine calmed his nerves. Yet it could not be ignored or pushed aside any longer: something was the matter with him, something was amiss.
Was he ill? There had been the hallucinations, accompanied by a general feeling of vague physical distress, and now, this morning, there was this new kind of vertigo. After his experience at Trinity Manor, when he had imagined talking to the old man in the kitchen, he had gone over it all again and again in his mind, trying to understand it, to account for it. But could a damaged mind examine its own processes, and if it could, how were its findings to be trusted? Everything might be a hallucination.
What he felt was not so much fear as a kind of wonderment, tinged with rancor. Why him, why now? The usual, vain protests. Could he not come up with anything better, anything that might actually help? He padded barefoot into the living room, keeping close to the walls for fear of falling over, and made a telephone call to his adoptive brother. Malachy himself answered, sounding wary as always. Quirke asked if he could come round, saying there was something he wanted to ask Mal’s advice on. Mal began to reply but someone spoke behind him — it sounded to Quirke like the voice of Mal’s wife, Rose — and Mal put his hand over the receiver. Quirke waited, hearing himself breathe; telephones, like mirrors, contained inside them another version of the world. Then Mal spoke again, saying that he would be in that evening, if the matter could wait until then. “Thanks, Mal,” Quirke said. “I’ll see you later.” Even the sound of Mal’s voice was some sort of comfort. Help was at hand, it seemed to say; there would be help, even for such a one as Quirke the reprobate. Good old Mal, good old dull, dependable Malachy.
Hackett was speaking again. Quirke turned to him, trying to concentrate. “What?” he said. “Sorry, my mind was…” My mind is decaying, Hackett, it’s crumbling, it’s falling asunder.
“I was saying,” Hackett said, pointing ahead, “there’s the man himself, in all his glory.”
They were approaching the campsite, a long, straggling field that tilted down to a meandering stream with whins and thornbushes along its banks. The place had the look of a battlefield after a prolonged and relentless engagement between two mechanized armies. Rusted hulks of motorcars lay about in attitudes of abandonment, most of them sunk to the axles in mud, windscreens smashed and bonnets gaping like the jaws of crocodiles, and there were torn-out engine boxes and mounds of tireless car wheels and car doors that had been wrenched from their hinges and thrown one on top of another in beetling stacks. There were bundles of steel girders, rusted like everything else, and coils of steel cable so thick and heavy it would have taken two or three men to lift them. Old electric cookers stood at inebriate angles, and half a dozen scarred and pitted bathtubs were ranged upended in a broad ring on the trodden grass, a bizarrely hieratic and solemn arrangement, reminiscent of a prehistoric stone circle.
In the midst of all this, on a low hillock, a great fire of car and tractor tires was throwing up giant spearheads of black-edged flame and dense belchings of greasy, black-and-tan smoke. Tending the inferno were a troop of ragged, stunted children, under the direction of an enormous hulk of a man — built, Quirke observed to himself, on the proportions of an American refrigerator — with a shock of oily hair as black as the blackest of the smoke from the fire. This was, unmistakably, Packie the Pike. The scene was archaic and thrilling, and dismaying, too, in its violence and volatility. “Christ,” Quirke said under his breath, “add music and it’s a scene out of Wagner.”