Holy Orders A Quirke Novel (25 page)

“Shakos?”
Hackett said, elaborately frowning. “That’s another one I never heard of.”

“Their sins,” Packie said, with a dismissive shrug.

“God, Packie,” Hackett said, “we’re getting a great education here today.” He turned to Quirke. “Isn’t that so, Doctor? Words you never knew before.”

The tinker glanced towards Quirke with a sardonic eye. “The Hacker here,” he said, “thinks he’s a great speaker of the Cant—that’s our talk, you know, our own lingo.” He turned back to the detective. “The
cuinnes
love to hear the women telling their sins. It gives them a rise, so I hear, and sure who’d begrudge them, the poor hoors, with their yokes lashed tight to the inside of their leg to keep them from doing harm.” Again he threw up his head and gave the hooting laugh that was not a laugh.

Hackett put the glass pot on the table and picked up his hat, seeming about to depart. He stopped, however, and raised a hand to his forehead, acting the part of a man suddenly struck by a thought. “Did I mention, by the way, Packie,” he said, “that Minor, the newspaper chap, got himself killed—murdered, in fact?”

Again Quirke seemed to feel the curved walls around them drawing inwards sharply. The poteen had set up a buzzing in his head that was distracting in a faintly euphoric way—he was getting drunk, in other words, and was glad of it. He looked about. He had finished his cigarette and did not know what to do with the butt. He wondered, with vague inconsequence, where the woman kept her things, her clothes, and so on—under one of the beds, maybe? How did they live, these people? He realized he knew nothing about them or their ways. Maybe the woman did not keep her clothes here; maybe there was another caravan, for sleeping in, and dressing in. He thought of the dark glance she had cast at him, of her shining black mane of hair, of the careless slouch of her hips. He thought too of the child’s glance out of those wounded eyes. They knew something, those two, and he wondered what it was. He swallowed more poteen. His temples were tightening and his cheeks had taken on that glassy sensation that drink always brought.

Packie was still leaning against the potbellied stove, gazing with studied interest at the little glass jar he was holding in his fingers.

“You know Father Mick is going away, do you, Packie?” Hackett said. “They’re sending him off to Africa, to convert the Hottentots.” He paused. “He’ll be a great loss to your people, I’d say?”

“I told you,” the tinker said, “I have no truck with them fellows.”

“Ah, but Father Mick isn’t like the rest of them, now, is he?”

Packie gave him a sullen look. “The priests is the priests.”

“I won’t deny that,” Hackett said, turning the brim of his hat in his fingers. “Does he come out here often, Father Mick?”

“He don’t come out at all, anymore,” Packie said. He lifted the glass jar to his lips and emptied it. “He’s not welcome here,” he said. “We don’t need him or his like.”

Hackett smiled wistfully. “So the women have no one to tell their sins to, anymore?”

The tinker banged the glass pot down on the little table and glared at the detective, thrusting his great shaggy head forward, his stony eyes widening. Quirke felt a surge of blood in his throat. He wanted something to happen, he realized, wanted violence, sudden lunges, the sound of fists on flesh. He thought:
I would like someone to die
.

Hackett made no move. His hat was still in his hands, and he was still calmly smiling, looking up at the tinker, who was towering over him, enraged and glaring. “What did you say was the word for a sin?” he said. “
Shako,
was it? I must remember that. Yes—a handy word to know.”

He stood up from the bed, a short pudgy man with a few wisps of black hair combed across his balding pate and a frog’s wide slash of a mouth. Suddenly Packie the Pike laughed again, and leaned back, the bulging muscles of his neck relaxing. “You’re a fierce man, Hacker,” he said. “A fierce man.”

Hackett smiled, those bloodless lips wider and thinner than ever. “No fiercer than yourself, Packie,” he said quietly. He looked at the tinker in silence for a moment, smiling. “You wouldn’t be lying to me, now, would you? For as you know”—his smile softened, the outer corners of his eyes wrinkling—“I’m not a man to be lied to.”

They stood a moment, the detective and the tinker, regarding each other. Quirke felt again that rush of anticipation in his throat. What would he do, if Packie were to launch himself at the detective? He pictured the three of them locked together in a grunting struggle, the caravan rolling and pitching, the stove’s crooked chimney toppling and the windows shattering. He grinned to himself blearily.

After a moment Packie smiled, showing a mouthful of big crooked teeth the color of old and stained ivory. “Ah, sure now, wouldn’t I know better than to be lying to you, Hacker, my old
sreentul
,” he said.

The Inspector nodded skeptically. “Of course, Packie,” he said. “I know you’re the soul of honesty.”

He turned, and ducked through the half door and stepped down by the upturned bucket to the ground. Quirke made to follow him but the tinker put a hand on his arm. “What class of a doctor are you, anyhow?” he asked.

“Pathologist,” Quirke said, his thickened tongue giving him a slight lisp. “Corpses.” For a second he saw again Jimmy Minor lying on the trolley, the bruised face, the weals on his chest and flanks, the mangled pulp at his crotch.

Packie the Pike chuckled. “Begod,” he said, “the Hacker brings his own sawbones around with him, do he? That’s a good one.”

Outside, a watery sun was shining but it had begun to rain, fat glistening drops falling at an angle and smacking against the side of the caravan. Hackett, wearing his hat, was halfway to the car already. Quirke, glancing about quickly in search of the black-haired woman, spied two young men sitting in the front seat of one of the wrecked cars, smoking cigarettes and watching him through the glassless windscreen. One of them, a raw-faced boy of sixteen or seventeen, was the one who had looked briefly in at the little window behind Packie’s shoulder. He had greasy black curls and a snub nose and a mouth breather’s sagging lower lip. The other one was older, in his mid-twenties, swarthy as a flamenco dancer, with a face as sharp as an axe blade. They watched him impassively as he went by, following in Hackett’s wake.

Jenkins started up the car and the exhaust pipe burbled a bubble of ash-blue smoke. The far hills crouched, getting ready to spring. Quirke turned up the collar of his overcoat. He glanced back once at the two young men, watching him, then opened the rear door and climbed in beside Hackett.

As they drove back towards the city Hackett sat in silence, drumming his fingers on the armrest beside him.

“So,” Quirke said, “what do you think? Was he lying?” He widened his eyes and blinked, trying to keep the world in focus. He had not drunk enough poteen to account for this fuzziness. He put the palm of his hand against his forehead, cupping it tenderly. His poor head; his poor brain.

Hackett went on gazing out the window. “Was Packie lying?” he said. “Oh, he was lying, all right.”

“About Jimmy Minor?”

The detective laughed softly. “About everything.”

17

David Sinclair, stepping ahead of Phoebe through the doorway of the flat, paused and went very still, his face settling into a blank mask. Phoebe thought, not for the first time, how uncanny it was, the way he could control himself, showing hardly a sign of what he was thinking, what he was feeling. Weren’t Jewish people supposed to be emotional and demonstrative?

He did not often call on her unannounced, but this evening—this evening of all evenings!—he had just appeared at the front door with his hands in the pockets of his overcoat and his collar turned up. When he rang the bell she had gone down to let him in, and as they were coming up the stairs she had tried to think how to tell him about Sally being in the flat, but somehow there seemed no way of saying it that would sound natural. Now, of course, David was surprised to see this stranger standing in front of the fireplace, applying her lipstick in the mirror over the mantelpiece. He would assume Sally was a friend of Phoebe’s who had called in, for he would have no way of knowing who she was, much less that she was staying here; what would he say when he found out the true circumstances? David did not like surprises. He had been away for the weekend, visiting his aunt in Cork. Sometimes Phoebe wondered about this aunt, if she really existed and were not a convenient invention. But where had he been, if not in Cork? She had no reason to be suspicious, and yet she was.

Phoebe stepped past him in the doorway, arranging a smile as she did so. “Sally, this is David Sinclair,” she said with a brightness that sounded fake even to herself. “David, Sally Minor—Jimmy’s sister.”

Sally turned from the fireplace as David advanced, and the two shook hands. Sally knew who he was, for Phoebe had told Sally about him. But Sally’s knowing about David was all the more reason for Phoebe to have told David about Sally. She began to feel slightly sick. It was teatime and she and Sally had been getting ready to go to the Country Shop. Why had David not telephoned to say he was on his way to the flat? He rarely did anything unannounced or unplanned for. She did not dare to look at him directly—had she felt his attention sharpen at the way she had said Sally’s name? She told herself she was being ridiculous. What had she to feel guilty about? A kiss? She was no longer sure it had really happened, that she had not imagined it.

This was Sally’s third day at the flat. On the previous day, Sunday, Phoebe had said there was someone she had to visit. “My aunt,” she had said, taking her inspiration from David, “she’s quite ill—I go to see her every Sunday.” Of course there was no aunt, but the prospect of spending the long, idle day alone with Sally had frightened her. So she had taken herself off to the Phoenix Park—it was the only place she could think of—and had spent a miserable afternoon trailing around the zoo, gazing blankly at the animals in their cages and being gazed back at with matching indifference. That evening Sally, perhaps sensing Phoebe’s nervousness, had gone to the pictures on her own and had not come back until after midnight, by which time Phoebe had made sure to be in bed.

“Actually,” she said to David now, “we were just going out.”

She could feel him looking at her with a darkly quizzical eye. “May I come along?” he asked.

“Of course,” she said. “I’ll just get my coat.”

She hurried into the bedroom. She knew she should not have left the two of them alone together. They were strangers; they would be desperate to think of something to say to each other. She glanced around the room in a faint panic. Everything her eye fell on had a suggestive aspect: the big ugly bed, her slippers beside it, a salmon-colored chemise that had slipped from the back of a chair and lay in a silken heap on the floor, like an illustration of her distraction and helplessness and, yes, of her sense of guilt, too. A thought came to her:
Do I love David?
How strange, that she had never asked herself this question before. Somehow, it had not come up, in her mind; it had not seemed relevant to anything that they had together. Why ask it now? She pressed her eyes tightly shut and stood for a moment with her head bowed, trying to gather together the parts of what seemed her scattered self. How deep the darkness was behind her eyelids, how frightening were those depths. She grabbed her coat from the wardrobe, leaving the metal hangers jangling on the rail.

When she returned to the living room Sally had gone back to the mirror while David was standing by the window with his hands in his pockets, looking into the street. The silence between them seemed contrived, somehow. Had they been talking about her, and stopped when she came in? But what would they have been saying, what would they have had to say about her? “Well then,” she said, trying to sound normal, “shall we go?” But what was normal, now?

When they came out into the street the sun was suspended low in the sky and the pavement before them, lately rained on, was all a shivery glare. Seagulls, unnaturally white, were wheeling at an immense height against an anvil-shaped, lead-blue cloud hanging over Merrion Square. They walked along, she and David, with Sally in the middle. The silence between the other two seemed to Phoebe peculiar. Strangers when they meet always chatter at first, to cover the awkwardness of being new to each other. David and Sally, however, seemed to have nothing to say and, more, seemed not to feel the need of saying anything.

The Country Shop was crowded. The customers were mainly women who had stopped in to drink a restorative cup of tea after a day’s shopping. They found a table at the back, near the service door. Phoebe with a sudden pang recalled that this was one of the places where she used to meet Jimmy Minor, in what already had come to seem to her the old days. David was offering a Gold Flake to Sally, but she smiled and shook her head. “I only smoke these,” she said, taking out her packet of Craven A. “I’m a craven creature.”

David, lighting up, only nodded distractedly. Phoebe watched him. What was he thinking about, that the notch between his eyebrows should have deepened so? He held out the flame of his lighter, and as she leaned down to it Sally for the briefest instant touched a finger to the back of his hand. Phoebe quickly looked away. Sally’s presence was making Phoebe see David with a new eye. How little she knew about him, after all. At once the question rose again in her mind:
Do I love him?

“I’m sorry about your brother,” he said now to Sally. He rotated the glowing tip of his cigarette against the edge of the ashtray before him on the table. “I didn’t know him very well. He was Phoebe’s friend, really.”

Sally frowned and looked off to one side. “I don’t think anyone knew him very well,” she said. “He wasn’t the kind of person who revealed things about himself—not the important things.”

“Yes,” David said. “I had that impression.”

Despite herself, Phoebe was a little shocked by this brief exchange. So much more seemed expressed in it than the words would warrant. Or was she imagining it? “We used to meet here often, Jimmy and I,” she heard herself saying. She gave a little laugh. “He always looked so out of place, among the housewives and the men in tweed suits.”