Holy Orders A Quirke Novel Read online

  In the gloom of the confessional he settled himself on the narrow seat and heard the two old women enter the penitential boxes to right and left of him, and kneel. He slid back the wooden panel by his right ear and dimly glimpsed the vague old face beyond the grille. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned … He knew already what the list would be—envious thoughts, inattention at Mass, a sixpence diddled from the greengrocer—and he let his mind wander. Africa. His beloved Nigeria, where he had spent three happy years as a missionary. Big-bummed women, the men all grins and gleaming teeth, and the children, with their chocolate skin and potbellies. Simple souls, eager to please, yearning to be loved.

  He closed his eyes. Loving, that was the problem. The image rose before him of two native children, a boy and a girl, brother and sister, naked, standing hand in hand in sunlight with their backs to him, their faces turned, smiling at him over their shoulders. He recalled the feel of their dark, gleaming skin, the softness, the velvety warmth of it. Such innocence, such—such fragility. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.

  He had forgotten about the young woman until her turn came. He was tired, tired of people’s petty weaknesses, of their earnests of contrition, of their self-delusions, their evasions. In Africa, sin was colorful, a joyful glorying in all the dark possibilities the world had to offer. Here, these poor people, his own, were too small in spirit to be damned. Yes: Africa. He was glad to be returning there.

  At first the young woman said nothing. He supposed she was steeling herself, working up her courage. Unmarried, no doubt. “What is it, my child?” he asked softly, leaning his ear towards the grille. “Are you in trouble?”

  “I don’t go to confession anymore, Father,” she said.

  He smiled, sitting there in the shadows. “Well, you’re here now. What have you to tell me?”

  Again she was silent. He tried to make out her features, but she kept her head lowered, and anyway it was difficult to see through the grille. He caught a whiff of her perfume. She was nervous; she seemed to be trembling. This was going to take a long time and require much finesse on his part.

  “I’ve nothing to tell you,” she said. “But I want to ask you something.”

  “Yes, my child?”

  She paused, then gave what seemed a laugh, bitter and brief. “Who forgives you your sins, Father?”

  He felt a shivery sensation, as if a drop of icy liquid had coursed down his spine. “God does,” he said. “Who else?”

  “And does He see into your conscience, do you think?”

  “Of course. God sees everything, inside us and out.” He let his voice go gentle. “But it’s not my conscience we need to speak of here, is it?”

  “Oh, yes, Father, it is.”

  He drew near to the grille again and tried to see her. “Do I know you, my child?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “And I’m not your child.”

  She was doing something to her clothing, fumbling with something. He saw a glint of metal, too. “You’re troubled,” he said. “Tell me what it is.” What was she doing? What was it she had in her hand? “Who are you?” he said. “What is your name?”

  She did not speak. He turned his head away from her and looked down at his clasped hands where they rested on his soutane. The stole around his neck, a tasseled silk collar, was as white as bare bone.

  * * *

  She was afraid her nerve would fail her. She had thought everything out, had gone over it again and again in her mind, hardening herself. This was, she knew, the only way. Phoebe’s father would not do anything; neither would the police. It was up to her to make sure justice was done, and now she was going to do it. Were there people outside, she wondered, in the church? She had waited for nearly half an hour, loitering in the dimness just inside the door, until no more people were coming to join the line awaiting confession, but she could not be sure that latecomers had not arrived since she had slipped into the box. Anyway, a church was never completely empty; there were always those vague old men who tended to things, lighting candles, putting fresh flowers on the altar, whom no one ever noticed. Well, she would have to risk it. Even if she was seen, who would remember what she looked like? The place was barely lit, and people never remembered details, or if they did they always got them wrong.

  She pulled the cushion she had taken from Phoebe’s flat from under her blouse, not without difficulty—there was so little room—and wrapped it around the pistol. He had turned aside, offering her his profile behind the grille. She heard him sigh. Should she say something, give him some warning, however brief? He would want to pray, make an act of contrition. She did not believe in any of that stuff anymore. She drew the cushion tighter around the gun. Her finger was on the trigger.

  James, she said to herself. Oh, Jimmy.

  * * *

  It was a terrible noise. It seemed the confessional had exploded around her, and she was deafened for a moment. The flame from the barrel had set the cushion on fire, and she dropped it quickly and trampled it with her knees, singeing her stocking. The smell too was awful, of powder and burning feathers. She glanced in through the grille, in which there was a ragged hole, the tips of the torn wires still smoking.

  He was slumped to the side, a dark stain spreading below his ear. She heard someone shout, “Oh, Jesus!” She scrambled up and pushed open the narrow door of the confessional with her knee, almost tripped on the smoldering cushion, then was out and running down the aisle. The gun fell out of her hand and skittered along the flagstones; she ran after it and stopped it with her foot, snatched it up, ran on. There were voices behind her, a man shouting and someone screaming. When she got to the door a woman in a head scarf was coming in, and the two of them collided and grappled clumsily for a moment, before she freed herself and got through. She had an urge to keep running but knew that she must not.

  Outside, a heavy shower of rain had started, and the people in the street were hurrying along through the gloom of twilight with their heads down. No one looked at her; no one paid her any heed. She walked on, with her hands in her pockets, clutching the pistol. It was still hot.

  She got on a bus. It was crowded, and rolled drunkenly through the rain-washed streets, trumpeting now and then like an elephant. She watched the blurred windows of the shops passing by. Her mind was numb; she felt nothing, nothing. They would cover it up, she supposed, as they covered up everything, every scandal.

  No, she did not care. Yet it came to her that of all the things she had done in her life, most of them could have been undone. But not this.

  In the station she set off to collect her bags from the left luggage place, but first went into the ladies’. It was only then, looking in the mirror there, that she saw the speckles of blood on her face. His blood. She did not care. She had got justice for her brother. She had done what was needed.

  21

  When she looked out the window she was startled to see Quirke standing on the far pavement, by the railings above the towpath, in a splash of sunlight under the trees, where that other time she had seen the man in the cap and the sheepskin coat with the cigarette in his fist. Quirke spotted her at the window and lifted his hand in an oddly tentative wave that seemed to her more like a gesture of farewell than greeting. What was he doing out at this hour? For Quirke was anything but an early bird.

  She had been about to leave for work, and now she put on her coat and took up her handbag and ran down the stairs, thinking something must be wrong, that something calamitous had happened, and Quirke had come to tell her about it.

  He was lighting a cigarette as she crossed the road. Instead of greeting her he pointed a finger upwards at the cloudless, china-blue sky. “Do you realize,” he said, “that it hasn’t rained in the last ten hours?”

  She laughed, mostly from relief—if there had been bad news Quirke would have told her at once. “How do you know?” she said. “Have you been up all night, watching the sky?”

  “More or less. I’m not sleeping much, these days.”


  She regarded him quizzically. “Why didn’t you ring the bell?”

  “It was pleasant, standing here.” He glanced about. “Memory Lane, for me, around here.”

  “Quirke, I’m on my way to work.”

  He smiled at her vaguely, thinking of something else, she could see. “Take an hour off,” he said.

  She laughed again. “I can’t! How can I?”

  “Oh, come on. I’ll square it with Mrs. Cuffe-Dragon. There’s something I want us to do.”

  “What is it?”

  “You’ll see. It’s on the way.”

  He took her by the elbow and they turned and set off in the direction of Baggot Street. It was indeed a fine spring morning, bright and clear, the air all flashes of gold and fragile blue. The trees above them bustled with birds. The sawmill on the other side of the canal was busy already, and the fragrance of freshly cut wood was a kind of grace note amid the smell of exhaust fumes and the smoke from buses.

  They had gone some way before either of them spoke again. “Have you heard from her?” Quirke asked.

  “From Sally? No, of course not. What about Inspector Hackett? Has he had news of her?”

  “They traced her as far as Holyhead and the London train. She didn’t return to her flat. She may not be in London—she could have got off that train anywhere along the way.”

  “She’s disappeared, then.” She smiled wryly. “Maybe she and April Latimer will meet up somewhere. My two vanished friends.”

  Quirke glanced at her. “Was Sally your friend?”

  “Yes. Yes, she was, in a way, I think.”

  Again they walked in silence. Then Quirke said, “You didn’t have to tell me about the gun. Why did you?”

  “When she disappeared, I knew she was going to do something.” She paused. “Why didn’t you warn that priest?”

  Quirke did not answer. They walked on. Baggot Street was a sweep of sunlight, hard-edged, pale gold, glistening. Mr. Q and L was standing in the doorway of his shop, sunning himself and smoking a cigarette. He was wearing his canary-yellow waistcoat today; it fairly glowed in the sunlight. Even though she was on the other side of the street he recognized her, and sketched a comically elaborate bow, inclining his big round head and making a hoop with his hand from chin to navel and showing her his palm, cavalier-fashion.

  “I spoke to Hackett about Costigan,” Quirke said, “about him sending that fellow after you.”

  She said nothing. She was not sure she wanted anyone knowing what had happened that night in the rain when the man in the sheepskin coat had overtaken her and grabbed her by the wrist. She wanted to forget it herself, as if it were something indecent that had been done to her and the only way to get rid of the stain would be to expunge even the memory of it. “It seems,” Quirke went on, “he’s been fiddling his tax, the same Mr. Costigan. Hackett thinks he can get him that way.”

  “Like Al Capone,” Phoebe said, drily.

  “Exactly,” Quirke said, ignoring or perhaps not noticing her sarcasm. “Like Al Capone.”

  “And what about those tinkers, the ones who killed Jimmy?”

  “Disappeared too, like your friend Sally, into the depths of darkest Palantus.”

  “Palantus?”

  “It’s their name for England.”

  The trees along Baggot Street leading into Merrion Row were delicately dusted with the season’s first green buds. “I’m thinking of going away,” Phoebe said.

  “Oh, yes? Where to?”

  “I don’t know. London, maybe.” She smiled. “Palantus.”

  “For how long?”

  “I don’t know that, either.” She looked down at the toes of her shoes. How odd it was, sometimes, to see oneself in motion, one foot going in front of the other, turn and turn about. “On my next birthday I’ll have my money from Grandfather Crawford.”

  Josh Crawford, Rose’s first husband, had left his granddaughter a considerable legacy in his will. “You’ll be an heiress,” Quirke said. “Watch out for fortune hunters.” He paused. “What about Sinclair? David, I mean.”

  She dropped her eyes and looked at her shoes again. “What about him?”

  “Have you told him you’re going away?”

  “I haven’t decided finally, yet,” she said, in a neutral voice.

  They walked on. The doorman at the Shelbourne in his gray coat greeted them, lifting his top hat. Across the street a line of jaunting cars were parked, the horses steaming in the sun.

  “How did they keep it out of the papers?” Phoebe asked.

  “Holy orders, from on high. The Archbishop’s Palace telephoned the newspapers, told them the church was treating Honan’s death as an internal matter and said no report of it was to be printed yet, until they’d completed their inquiry.”

  “Can they do that? Can the church do that?”

  “They can. Carlton Sumner, at the Clarion, raised an objection, of course. The Archbishop himself phoned him. His Grace was prepared, he said, to hurt Sumner where it would really hurt—in his pocket, that is.”

  “What did he mean?”

  “Oh, the usual. If Sumner went ahead and printed the story, the bishops would be directed to write a pastoral letter to be read out from every pulpit in every church in the country next Sunday morning, instructing the faithful to shun not only the Clarion but all of Sumner’s other publications too. And the faithful, as always, would obey. It’s what’s known as a belt of the crozier. It’s very effective.”

  Phoebe was shaking her head incredulously. “Poor Jimmy,” she said.

  They crossed at the top of Dawson Street. A chauffeur in a peaked cap was maneuvering a long sleek Bentley through the narrow entranceway of the Royal Irish Automobile Club.

  “I might be going away myself,” Quirke said, glancing at the sky.

  “Away? Where to?”

  He smiled. “Like you, I’m not sure.”

  Phoebe nodded. “I’ll ask you a version of the same question you asked me: what about Isabel?”

  “No,” Quirke said, “Isabel won’t be coming with me. If I go.”

  In front of Smyth’s on the Green there were daffodils set out in pots. Quirke had never been able to see the attraction of these vehement, gaudy flowers.

  “Where are we going?” Phoebe asked.

  “Just here,” Quirke said, pointing across the road to Noblett’s sweet shop on the corner of South King Street. In the window were displayed all manner of confections set out in the shop’s own royal blue boxes. They crossed the road, and as they entered the shop the little bell above the door gave its silvery tinkle. The girl behind the counter was tall and soulful, with pale features and long black hair. She smiled at them wanly.

  There used to be, Quirke said to the girl, a box of sweets called, if he remembered rightly, Fire and Ice. “They were pineapple-flavored, and came in two sorts, clear amber and a white crunchy kind. Do you still sell those?”

  “Of course, sir,” the girl said. She came from behind the counter and opened a narrow panel behind the display window and reached an arm through.

  Phoebe was watching Quirke with a puzzled smile. “Don’t you remember?” he said. “I used to bring you here every Christmas when you were little and buy you a box of them—Fire and Ice.”

  “Oh, yes,” Phoebe said. “Of course—of course I remember.”

  “Here you are, sir.”

  The girl held up the box for Quirke to see. Under the cellophane covering the sweets were as he had described them, light amber and chunks of snowy white.

  “Yes,” Quirke said, and had to smile. “Yes, that’s them.”

  * * *

  They walked in St. Stephen’s Green, under the budding trees. The sunshine for all its brightness gave little warmth, and the air was sharp. Ducks waddled on the path beside the pond, waggling their tails and quacking. “This is where we used to come, then, too, after we’d been to Noblett’s and you’d had your sweets. Then we’d go to the Shelbourne and you’d drink hot ch
ocolate and put your sweets under the table and eat them on the sly.”

  Phoebe nodded, smiling. She had the box of sweets under her arm. “Tell me where you’re going, Quirke,” she said.

  “Hmm?” He looked at her distractedly, calling his thoughts back from the days when she was young and still thought he was her uncle.

  “You said you were thinking of going away?”

  “Did I? Oh, I don’t know. I may have to go. We’ll see.”

  He stopped, and put a hand on her arm and made her stop with him. “I’m sorry, Phoebe,” he said.

  She gave him a puzzled look. “For what?”

  “For everything.” He gazed at her, still holding her by the arm, smiling at her helplessly. There was so much to say, and, he realized now, no way of saying it. It seemed to him this girl, so pale, so serious, so intent, was the only creature he had ever loved. He had got Delia while wanting Sarah, her sister, but getting and wanting, what had these to do with love? “I wronged you,” he said, “I wronged you grievously, and I’m sorry.”

  She looked at his hand on her arm. “You’re beginning to frighten me, Quirke,” she said.

  “Yes, I know.” He shook his head in annoyance at himself. “I shouldn’t try to—” He stopped, and took his hand from her arm and let it drop to his side. “The fact is,” he said, with a sad, lopsided smile, “it’s too late, isn’t it.”