"Six months now."
"Holy God." She still had the accent, raw and flat, of wherever it was she hailed from, over in the west. "Did you have a conversion, or what?" Their drinks arrived and she clinked the rim of her glass against his. "Well, I hope you get a high place in Heaven."
He offered her his cigarette case and flipped the lid of his lighter. She screwed up her mouth and blew smoke sideways, and touched the tip of a little finger delicately to one corner of her mouth and then to the other.
"So," she said. "What is it you're after?"
He pretended puzzlement. "What do you mean?"
"I know you-you're always after something."
"Only your company, Maisie."
She flexed a skeptical eyebrow. "Oh, sure."
Maisie had spent two stretches in jail. The first time was twenty years before, when she had been charged with running a nursing home, so-called, where women with inconvenient pregnancies came in secret to have their babies, many of which were left for Maisie to dispose of, often in a bundle of swaddling on the side of a country road at dead of night. When her sentence was served she had promptly rented a room in Hatch Street and started in the abortion trade. Shortly afterwards her clinic, as she called it, had been raided by the Vice Squad and she had done another two-year stretch in Mountjoy. Released again, and undeterred, she had gone straight back to work. Maisie was the keeper of many secrets. She knew Malachy Griffin and claimed to have worked with him at the Holy Family hospital in the days when she was still a real nurse, a claim, Quirke reflected, that no doubt Malachy would not wish to hear too often or too loudly put about.
"How is business?" Quirke asked now.
"Never better." She took a slug of her rum and fitted another of his cigarettes into her ebony holder. "I tell you, Quirke, the women of this town must never have heard of a French letter."
"Hard to come by."
She cackled, and poked him in the chest with a forefinger. "Hard to come by- that's a good one." Her glass was empty already; he signaled to the barman for a refill. "Anyway, they're not," she said. "I have a fellow brings them in by the suitcaseful through Holyhead. I offer them to my clients. 'Here,' I say, 'take a couple of dozen packets of them with you, for I don't want to see you here again for a good long while, and preferably never.' But will they take them?" She put on a whining tone. "'The priest will give out to me, Nurse. My fella won't hear of it, Nurse.' Bloody little fools."
Quirke toyed with his glass. "Ever come across a woman called Hunt?" he asked. "Deirdre Hunt?"
She gave him an arch look. "Oho," she said. "Here it comes."
"She also called herself Laura Swan."
She was still looking at him hard along one side of her nose.
"Do you know what it is, Quirke," she said, "but you're a terrible man." Putting on a show of unwilling surrender, she rummaged in her handbag and brought out a dog-eared address book bound in leather. This was her famous little black book, which, as she declared frequently in her cups, she intended one day to sell to the People or the News of the World, to keep herself in comfort in her declining years. She flipped through the pages, reading off names under her breath. It was all show, Quirke knew: there was not a woman Maisie had treated, in the three decades and more in which she had been in business, whose name, address, and telephone number she could not recite from memory at a moment's notice. "No," she said, "no Hunt. What was the other name-Swan? No Swan, either. Who is she?"
Quirke raised one shoulder an inch and let it fall again. "Was," he said.
"Ah. So that's the way it is." She shut the address book with a slap and thrust it back into the depths of her bag. "In that case, I certainly do not know and have never known any person or persons of that name or names. Right?" She finished her second drink and fairly banged the glass down on the bar.
Quirke lifted a finger to the barman. "In fact," he said, deliberately pausing, as if in judicious scruple, "in fact it wasn't her, Deirdre Hunt, that I was particularly interested in. She wouldn't have been one of your customers." She looked at him. "I did a postmortem on her," he said. "She had never been in the family way."
A small man wearing a puce-colored tie, on his way to the gents', staggered as he was going past and jogged Maisie's elbow, and a drop of rum from her glass splashed onto her chiffon scarf.
"Bloody queers," Maisie muttered, glaring after the little man and plumping herself up like a ruffled hen. She turned her attention back to Quirke. "So what," she asked, "was the matter with her, then?"
The fumes of the rum she was breathing over him were making Quirke's head swim. His mouth was dry and his fingers had the arthritic ache in the joints that came on when he was most in need of a drink. Would it never abate, he wondered, this raw craving? Perhaps he was an alcoholic, after all, and not just the heavy drinker he had always told himself he was. Suddenly he wanted to be away from here, from this reeking place, these jabbering, reeling people, this woman with the blood of countless embryos on her hands, and of more than one misfortunate mother, too, if the stories whispered of her were true.
"Do you know-" he began and had to stop. His thirst was a rage now, his mouth drier than ever, and his forehead moist with a chill sweat. He ran a hand over his eyes, his nose, his mouth. "Do you know a man called Kreutz?" he asked, clenching his fists under the rim of the bar and digging his fingernails into his palms.
She focused on him, frowning. "How do you spell that?" He spelled it. "Oh, I know him, all right," she said, and gave a low laugh. "'Dr.' Kreutz, so-called. The darkie. Has a place in-where is it? Adelaide Road, that's right." She chuckled again. "I've had a few of that gentleman's patients referred to me."
"What does he do?"
"I don't know, some kind of mumbo jumbo. Healing for the spirit. Incense and fruit diets, that kind of thing. Women go to him."
"And he sent some of them to you?"
She grew wary, and looked into her drink and shrugged. "A couple. Why?"
"Was it the usual trouble?"
"What do you mean?"
"The reason he sent these women to you, was it the usual?"
"No," she said with harsh sarcasm, "they were in need of further spiritual guidance and advice on their complexions." She leaned her face into his. She was not drunk, but she was not any longer sober, either. "Why the fuck do you think he sent them to me?" She guzzled another go of her drink. A thought struck her. "What has he to do with the other one, what's her name-Hunt?"
"I don't know," Quirke said. He slid himself cautiously off the stool. This was how their meetings most often ended, with Maisie tipsy and morose and him sidling for the door and escape. Behind Maisie's back, and with a finger to his lips, he paid the barman for another rum and black and stepped away from the bar nimbly. Maisie looked over her shoulder and watched him go. For such a big fellow, she blearily mused, he could move awful fast.
The sunlight in the street blinded him. An enormous Guard was examining Maisie's car, skewed at an angle with two of its wheels on the pavement. Quirke veered aside and made off.
Everywhere he turned in the business of Deirdre Hunt, things that had seemed substantial evaporated into smoke and air, and what had appeared open and inviting entryways were suddenly slammed shut in his face.
WHEN HE HAD ROUNDED THE CORNER FROM MERRION SQUARE AND was walking up Mount Street he spotted a figure sitting in the sun on the steps outside No. 39 and knew at once who it was. Even at that distance there was no mistaking the big head with its cap of carroty hair and monk's tonsure. He thought of turning back before he was spotted himself, but instead went on, for lack of will. His rage for a drink had abated but he had a dry hangover now; there was a pounding in his head, and his eyes scalded in their sockets.