Holy Orders A Quirke Novel (16 page)

Now he stood in the doorway of the bar and scanned the room. Three priests sat around a small table near the fireplace, with drinks and a jug of water and an overflowing ashtray between them. In the fireplace a dolmen of turf logs was smoldering sullenly. The priests made Quirke think of a trio of magpies—was it three for bad luck? They were talking about a colleague, another priest, who had been summoned to Rome to work in the Vatican. “God, now,” one of them said in low, envious tones, a young man with black horn-rimmed glasses, “I wouldn’t mind being him. Rome! The fountains, they say, have to be seen to be believed.” The other two nodded, an Italianate radiance reflecting for a moment in their shiny, flushed faces.

Quirke’s eye moved on. Two elderly women in balding fur coats, one with a cluster of fake cherries pinned to the lapel, were ensconced in a corner, demurely sipping glasses of port. At a table in an opposite corner a young man and his girl were arguing with hushed ferocity. The girl wore a pillbox hat pinned to her hair at a sharp angle; each time she snapped a remark at the young man between clenched teeth the hat gave an inappropriately jaunty little nod. The boyfriend’s shirt collar was a couple of sizes too big for him and stuck up at the back. The barman was polishing a pint glass and whistling softly to himself. Quirke recognized the tune. “April Showers.”

Someone walked up quietly behind him. “Dr. Quirke, I presume?”

He was large and ruddy, with reddish-brown hair cropped short so that the paper-pale skin of his scalp shone through. He did not look like a priest. He wore a nondescript gray suit, striped shirt, a dark blue tie, slip-on shoes with small gilt buckles. However, the white socks, which Quirke noted at once, were the giveaway. “Father Honan?” he said.

“Indeed!” They shook hands. The priest’s palm was soft and dry and warm. He smiled. “You weren’t fooled by the mufti, so,” he said, glancing down ruefully at his suit and tie and buckled shoes. “The aim is anonymity, to come and go without being noticed. Fat chance, says you.” His voice had a faint Northern burr—Armagh? Antrim? or Inishowen, maybe, where Aine the traveling saleswoman hailed from—and he spoke softly, in intimate tones, as if they were in the confessional rather than a public bar. “But tell me now,” he said, “what will you drink?”

They moved together to the bar. The priest gave off a strong, pungent waft of cologne. His eyes were shards of gray flint, and the plump backs of his hands were freckled all over and stuck like pincushions with fine, almost colorless hairs. Moisture glistened on his forehead and his upper lip; he was a man who would sweat a lot.

Quirke asked for a Jameson. “Good man,” the priest said. “I’ll join you.”

They stood half facing each other, each with an elbow on the bar, a hand in a pocket, like counterparts, two men of the world, sharing a drink. This was not what Quirke had expected. But then, what had he expected? Someone lean and watchful, thin-lipped, pale, with a jaw like a knife blade, a Nike or a Father Dangerfield, not this thickset golfing-club type with a drinker’s nose and a mesh of broken veins in the shiny skin over his cheekbones. In the light here at the bar his hair was a darker shade of red than it had seemed at first, and beads of sweat were sprinkled through it.

“May I ask,” Quirke said, “how you knew my phone number?”

Father Honan, drolly smiling, let an eyelid briefly droop. “Oh, we have our sources,” he said. He sipped his drink, watching Quirke over the rim of his glass. “Father Dangerfield said you were looking for me. Something to do with this young fellow who was killed?”

“Jimmy Minor, yes.”

“And there was a detective with you?”

“Hackett. Inspector Hackett, Pearse Street.”

“Yes,” the priest said, “Hackett. I’ve heard of him. A good man, they tell me.”

The girl in the pillbox hat stood up suddenly and marched from the room, her eyes fixed straight ahead of her in a furious glare. After a moment the young man rose sheepishly and followed her, clearing his throat and blushing. “Ah, the bumpy road of love,” the priest murmured. He nodded towards the table the couple had vacated. “Shall we?”

They crossed the room with their drinks. The young priest with the horn-rimmed spectacles glanced in Father Honan’s direction and said something to his two companions, who turned to look also. A downdraft in the chimney sent a ball of turf smoke billowing out of the fireplace to roll across the carpet. Through a window beside him Quirke looked out into the glossy darkness and saw the rain dancing on the pavements and the roofs of parked cars.

“There was a letter, I believe,” Father Honan said. “Desperate Dan told me about it—sorry, that’s Father Dangerfield. We think the world of him, only he’s a bit of a Tartar, as no doubt you noticed.”

“He didn’t seem to know your whereabouts,” Quirke said.

“Oh, Father Dangerfield is the soul of discretion,” the priest said, in his soft, breathy voice, and laughed. His way of speaking, with smiles and winks and little nods, made it seem as if everything he said, even the most innocuous commonplace, were being imparted as a confidence and meant for no one else’s ear. He produced a cigarette case and offered it across the table. “What was it, do you know, that this unfortunate young man wanted to see me about?”

“That’s what we—that’s what Inspector Hackett was wondering,” Quirke said.

The priest sat back in his chair with his elbows on the armrests and his hands clasped before him, a cigarette clamped at a corner of his mouth and one eye screwed shut against the smoke. “May I ask, Dr. Quirke,” he said, “what you…?”

“What’s my interest? I knew Jimmy Minor—he was a friend of my daughter’s.”

The priest nodded, but his eyes were narrowed. He still had the cigarette in his mouth; it jiggled up and down when he spoke. “And Inspector Hackett,” he asked, “is he a friend of yours?”

“The Inspector and I have—what shall I say? We’ve cooperated in the past.”

“Yes. So I’m told.”

Who had told him? Quirke wondered. And if he knew about him and Hackett already, why had he asked? And anyway, why in the first place had he contacted him and not the Inspector?

The three priests at their table had ordered another round. The older two were drinking whiskey, the younger one a glass of Guinness. How did they come to be out together like this on a weekday night, drinking and gossiping in Flynne’s? A birthday? Some other celebration? Flynne’s was a haven for the clergy, a safe house for them in the city.

“I don’t think I ever came across this young man, this Jimmy Minor,” the priest said reflectively. “He was a reporter, is that right?”

“On the
Clarion
. Used to be with the
Mail
.”

“I wonder what he wanted to talk to me about.”

“Something to do with your work, maybe? You run clubs and so on in Sean McDermott Street, I hear.”

“And other places.”

The priest kept his eyes narrowed, and Quirke could see only the merest ice-gray glint between the lids. His eyelashes, like the hairs on the backs of his hands, were so pale they were almost invisible.

“Was there something in particular you wanted to talk to me about, Father?” Quirke asked. “If not Jimmy Minor, I mean.”

The priest opened his hands and held them far apart, palm facing palm. “I’ve heard things about you,” he said.

“Oh? What sort of things?”

“Just—things. You know what this city is like: everyone knows everyone else’s business, or thinks he does.” He had taken the cigarette from his mouth and now leaned forward and knocked the ash from it into the ashtray on the table with a deft flick of his wrist. “Anyway, I thought I’d take the opportunity of meeting you. I’m the same as everyone else: I like to keep abreast of what’s going on, and who’s going on with it.” He smiled again, showing a big mouthful of sallow teeth.

Quirke was holding his whiskey glass in front of him and looking into it. “Tell me,” he said, “who it was that talked to you about me, that told you whatever the things are that you heard about me?”

“Oh, various people,” the priest said blandly. “Joseph Costigan was one.” Quirke had gone suddenly still. The priest watched him, seeming amused. “Although I’d say now,” he said, “the good Joe wouldn’t be one of your favorite people in the world.”

Quirke was frowning. “I couldn’t say I know him,” he said. “I’ve met him, a couple of times.” Costigan was a fixer for rich and powerful Catholics in the city, the same Costigan he had told Isabel about, the Costigan who knew how the world worked and where the real power resided.

“He speaks very highly of you, you know,” the priest said, “very highly indeed. You doubt that, I can see, but it’s true, nevertheless.” He lowered his voice to a feathery whisper. “He knows you for an honest man, a man of principle.” He signaled to the barman to bring another round of whiskeys, and leaned back once more in his chair. “I grant you, Doctor, poor Joe would not be, shall we say, the most immediately appealing of men, in general, on a personal level. He takes himself very seriously as a dedicated warrior of the Church Militant. That kind of thing makes for a certain—what’s the word?—a certain abrasiveness.”

The barman brought their drinks on a pewter tray. The bespectacled young priest at the other table was watching them again, and again spoke in an undertone to the other two. Quirke sat silent, his eyes fixed on the cigarette case on the table. He was trying to make out the monogram on the lid.

“Would I be right in thinking, Doctor,” Father Honan said, tipping a little water into his whiskey from the jug the barman had brought, “that you’re not a believer?” He offered the jug to Quirke, who shook his head. “Well, to tell you the truth, neither am I.” Quirke stared, and the priest smiled back happily, pleased with the effect his words had produced. “You’re shocked, I can see.” Quirke took a drink and felt the whiskey spreading hotly through a network of branching filaments behind his breastbone; remarkable how that sensation seemed new every time. “I’d make a further guess,” the priest said, “that you’ve not had the happiest of experiences at the hands of the clergy.”

“I was at Carricklea,” Quirke said. “I spent a long time there, when I was a child.”

The priest turned his mouth down at the corners and slowly nodded. “Ah, yes,” he said. “I thought it would be something like that.”

Quirke looked to the window again. The rain had stopped, and the street out there glistened in the darkness between the pools of light falling from the streetlamps. He had almost forgotten why he was here, in Flynne’s Hotel, drinking whiskey and trying not to think of the past. What did this priest want with him? Why had he spoken of Costigan—why had he brought up that name, of all names? He saw yet again the canal bank in the darkness, the leaning, listening trees.

“When I say I’m not a believer,” the priest said softly, glancing towards the trio at the other table, “I should explain what I mean. The church, Dr. Quirke, like heaven, has many mansions. There’s room in it even for the skeptic.” He chuckled, a fan of fine wrinkles opening outwards at the side of each eye. “I fear our poor old Mother Church doesn’t always act in her own best interest. It’s a broad church, of course, and has to pay heed to all sorts and varieties of belief and opinion and prejudice across the world, in America, in Africa, in Asia, even. But she has an unfortunate way—I think it’s unfortunate—of treating all her children as if they were just that, children. Look at our own benighted little country, hidebound by rules and regulations formulated in the corridors and inner chambers of the Vatican and handed down to us as if graven on tablets of stone. So when I say I’m not a believer, it’s
that
church—which I think of, the Lord forgive me, as the Church of the Blessed Infants—that I turn a skeptical eye towards. No: my church is the one that traces its roots back to Greece and classical Rome, not the arid deserts of Palestine and the childish people who lived there when the Bible stories were written. My church is the church that recognizes the tragic element in our lives. My church is the Mater Misericordiae, the mother of sorrows and forgiveness, who spreads her cape wide and shelters all of us, saint and sinner alike.”

He stopped, and laughed quietly, and leaned forward again. “Forgive me, Dr. Quirke,” he murmured, “I must remember I’m not in the pulpit. In fact, I’m rarely in the pulpit, and not often in church, either, for that matter. My work is carried on in the streets, in the tenements, in the campsites of the traveling people. I don’t flatter myself that this makes me a better minister of God than the monk in his cloister or even the lowly lawgiver in the Vatican. We all have our allotted tasks, our theaters of operations.”

One of the old ladies across the way rose and tottered to the bar, an empty glass in each hand. “Ah, Mags,” the barman said, pretending to be cross, “you should have shouted and I’d have come over to you.”

Outside, in Abbey Street, a lone drunk passed by, singing “Mother Machree” in a high, strained, sobbing tenor voice.

“You’re going to Africa yourself, I hear,” Quirke said.

The priest put on an exaggeratedly doleful expression. “I am—for my sins. Nairobi first, then some godforsaken parish out in the bush that will be twice the size of Ireland, I don’t doubt.”

“Have you been there before?”

“Not that part. I was in Nigeria for a while, some years back. I still come down with fever in the rainy season. What about yourself? Do you ever travel?”

“I used to go to America—worked there years ago, in Boston.”

“Ah, Boston is a grand city.”

The drunk could be heard from somewhere along the rain-washed street, still crooning tearfully.

“Have you family yourself, Dr. Quirke?” the priest asked.

“No. My wife died.”

“But you have a daughter?”

Quirke frowned. “Yes, I have,” he said. “I forget, sometimes.”

The priest gazed at him in silence for a long moment. He seemed to be thinking of something else. “Your father was Garret Griffin,” he said, “am I right?”

“My adoptive father, yes.”

“A fine man, Garret.”

“Did you know him?”

“I came across him now and then. A great friend of the church.”