Billy Hunt was sitting on the steps with his back sloped and a hand under his chin, like Rodin's Thinker. Quirke wondered what had possessed him to get involved with the likes of Deirdre-what was her maiden name?-Deirdre Ward. But then, what possessed any man to fix on any woman, or any woman to fix on any man? In the case of his own marriage the answer had been simple, and Sarah, dead Sarah, his dead wife's sister, had enunciated it clearly for him: Delia had been willing to sleep with him without a wedding ring, and Sarah had not, and on that basis he had made his choice. But Delia, the lovely, dissatisfied, dangerous Delia, why had she accepted him, knowing, as she must have known-for Delia was clever, and missed nothing-that it was her sister he had really wanted? Had she, he wondered now-it had never occurred to him before-had she done it to spite her sister? God knows, Delia would have been capable of it; Delia, he thought, would have been capable of anything.
He stopped at No. 39 and stood with one foot on the lowest step, his hat tipped back and his jacket over his shoulder with a thumb hooked in the tag.
"Hot day," he said.
Billy lifted a hand to shade his eyes and squinted up at him. "Ah, Quirke, there you are. I said I'd buy you a drink."
Quirke shook his head. "I told you, Billy, I don't drink."
"Did you? I forget things all the time, these days. There's a permanent fog in my head. Anyway, you must drink something-tea? coffee? a bottle of minerals?"
Quirke smiled. A-boddle-a-minerls. Billy would always be the boy from Waterford.
They went round by the Peppercanister Church and crossed the road to the canal. They did not speak. The trees, hotly throbbing, hung their heads out over the unmoving water. A Swastika Laundry van, comically high and narrow, appeared on Huband Bridge, its electric engine purring. Billy Hunt was tall, Quirke had no more than an inch or two on him, and he walked with a sportsman's muscle-bound shamble. Percy Place was cloven down the middle, with glaring sunlight along one side and a wedge of shadow along the other. At the door of the 47 Quirke caught the familiar pub reek of alcohol and male sweat and ancient cigarette smoke that he used to savor so and that now made him feel nauseous. When they were at the bar Billy Hunt asked him what he would have and he asked for a soda water-by now he thought he might never again manage to drink another tomato juice-and Billy ordered it without comment, and a pint of stout for himself. Quirke watched him drink off the pint in two goes. He seemed to have no swallow mechanism, merely opened his mouth impossibly wide and tilted the heavy black liquid straight down his throat.
"So," Quirke said, hearing how wary his own voice sounded, "how is it going?"
Billy tucked his chin into his chest and belched.
"I appreciate you doing that thing for me," he said. Quirke said nothing. Billy Hunt belched again, less loudly. "That detective called me in," he said. He was looking at his reflection in the mirror behind the bar, above a shelf full of bottles. He rubbed a hand back and forth on his chin, making a rasping sound. "What's his name? Hackett."
"Oh, yes?" Quirke said. Johnnie Walker, Dimple Haig, Jameson twelve-year-old. A tin sign assured him that PLAYERS PLEASE. "And?"
"You may well ask." He put his empty glass on the bar and looked at the barman, who took the glass and produced a clean one and set it under the Guinness tap and pulled the club-shaped wooden handle. All three men watched the sallow gush of stout turning black in the bottom of the glass. "He talked about the weather," Billy said. "Wanted to know if Deirdre was able to swim. Asked me where I was the night she died." He turned suddenly and looked at Quirke with his ox's injured eyes. "He wasn't fooled."
"Wasn't fooled about what?"
Suddenly he saw, for the first time, really, just how angry Billy was. Anger, he realized, was his permanent condition now. And that would never change. Not only his wife, but the whole world had wronged him.
"He knows it wasn't an accident," Billy said.
"Knows? Knows for a fact, or is guessing?"
Billy's new pint arrived. He considered it, turning the glass round and round on its base.
"The coroner didn't believe it either, did he?" he said. "I could see it in his eye. And yet he let it go." Quirke said nothing, but Billy nodded, as if he had. "What did you say to him?"
"You heard the evidence I gave."
"And that was all?"
"That was all."
"You didn't have a word with him beforehand?" Once more Quirke chose not to answer, and Billy nodded again. "There wasn't anything in the papers," he said.
"No."
"Did you fix that, too?"
"I haven't got that kind of influence, Billy."
Billy chuckled. "I bet you have," he said. "I bet you have a cozy little arrangement going with the reporters. You're all the same, you crowd. A cozy gang."
This time Billy sipped his pint instead of devouring it, pursing his mouth into a beak and dipping it delicately into the froth like a waterbird breaking the scummed surface of a rock pool. Then he wiped the back of a hand across his lips and frowned into the mirror before him, the surface of which had a faint, inexplicably pink-tinged sheen.
"That's the thing I can't understand," he said. "She would never have wanted to make a show of herself like that. Being found on the rocks, with no clothes on her." He paused, thinking, remembering. "I never saw her naked, you know, when she was alive. She wouldn't let me."
Quirke coughed. "Billy-"
"No no, it's all right," Billy said, waving one of his great, square hands. He bent his face, waderlike again, over his pint, and drank, and again swabbed his lips with the back of his knuckles. "That's the way she was, that's all. So I can't understand it, her doing what she did." He looked at Quirke. "Can you?"
Quirke was lighting a cigarette.
"I didn't know your wife, Billy," he said. "I'm sure she was…"
Billy was still looking at him. "What?"
Quirke took a long breath. He had the strange and surely mistaken feeling that Billy was laughing at him. He drank his soda water. "It doesn't do, Billy," he said, "to keep going over things. The past is the past. Death is death. It doesn't give up its secrets."
For a moment Billy did not respond; then he made a muffled, snuffling sound which after a moment Quirke realized was indeed laughter. "That's good," Billy said, "'Death is death and doesn't give up its secrets.' Did you rehearse that, now, or make it up on the spot?"
Quirke felt himself flush. "I meant-" he began, but Billy interrupted him by lifting that meaty hand again and laying it with complacent heaviness on his shoulder. Quirke flinched. He did not like to be touched.
"I know what you meant, Quirke," Billy said. Again he twirled his glass slowly on its base. The cork mat it stood on had a cartoon of a pelican with a yellow beak. GUINNESS IS GOOD FOR YOU, yes, and PLAYERS PLEASE. What an agreeable place the world might be, with merely a little adjusting. "One of the things about being in my position," Billy said, in a now seemingly relaxed, conversational tone, "is the way people talk to you. Or I should say, the way they don't talk to you. You can see them watching every word they're saying, afraid they'll make some blunder and remind you of 'your loss,' as they call it, or 'your trouble,' then the next minute they'll suddenly blurt out some saying, or some proverb, you know-'she's in a better place,' or 'time is a great healer,' that sort of thing-which you're supposed to grateful for." He nodded again, amused and sardonic. "And the other thing is that you have to listen to all of them and pretend to be grateful, and not say anything back that might upset them. Because, of course, when someone has died on you, suddenly you must be the nicest, most forgiving, most understanding, most harmless person in the world." He gripped his glass where it stood on the bar, and Quirke could see his knuckles whiten. "But I'm not harmless, Quirke," he said, with almost a sort of grim gaiety. "I'm not harmless at all."