Quirke 06 - Holy Orders

Andy would have been to start quizzing the reverend fathers—next thing there’d be a thunderbolt from the Archbishop’s Palace, asking”—here he put on a sepulchral voice—“ by what right did the Garda Síochána think it could bring unfounded accusations against a hard-working and well-respected priest of this parish , blah blah blah and Y ours in Christ Our Savior. So it was dropped.”
    Quirke beckoned to Frankie again, pointing to Hackett’s empty glass, and the young man came with the bottle of Graham’s and poured another measure.
    “What was your involvement?” Quirke asked of Hackett.
    “Hmm?” Hackett was attending to his port.
    “With this business about the priest—about the complaint.”
    “I wasn’t involved,” the detective said, “not directly.”
    “But what? Y ou had a hunch?”
    “No no. Not really. But I asked around a bit. Y ou know.”
    Quirke smiled thinly, nodding. “And what did you hear?”
    The detective pressed the butt of his cigarette into an ashtray on the bar, grinding it in slow half circles, thoughtfully. An angry flare of smoke rose quickly and dispersed. “A busy fellow, the same Father Honan. Ran a boys’ club out of one of the tenements in Sean McDermott Street. Athletics, swimming, boxing, that sort of thing. Got local businesses to cough up, persuaded Guinness to sponsor equipment, jerseys, football boots, so on. Made him very popular with the locals.”
    “No complaints like the other one?”
    “No fear! The man was a saint, as far as Sean McDermott Street was concerned. Set up a temperance society too, bringing the men in and persuading them to take the pledge. There was a tontine society that he got going, to pay for the funerals of the poor. Oh, aye, Father Mick was the local hero. Did work for the tinkers, too, trying to get them to settle down and quit stravaiging the country. A busy man, as I say.”
    Quirke was lighting another cigarette. “But you were skeptical.”
    Hackett made a large gesture, rolling his shoulders and lifting up the empty palm of one hand. “I had nothing against the man,” he said. “I never even met him.”
    They were silent again. Behind them the bar was filling up, and the electric light, under siege from the clouds of cigarette smoke, was turning into an almost opaque blue-gray haze. Barney Boyle was somewhere in the crowd; Quirke, hearing the playwright’s loud, slurred tones, kept his head well down. He did not feel up to dealing with Barney, not this evening.
    “So,” he said. “Are you going to follow it up?”
    Hackett made his Spencer Tracy face, pressing his tongue hard into his cheek and screwing up an eye. “I thought we might amble out there and have a word with Father Honan, before he departs for the mission fields, with his pickaxe and spade.”
    “ Y ou mean, you thought you might amble out.”
    “Ah, now, Doctor, you know you’ve a great way with the sky pilots—I’ve noticed it before.”
    “ Y ou have, have you?”
    “I have.” The detective chuckled. “I imagine they think of you as being in the same line of business as themselves, more or less—you handle the bodies, they do the souls.”
    Quirke shook his head. “ Y ou’re a terrible man, do you know that?” he said. “Here, buy me a drink—it’s the least you can do.”
    This time Hackett signaled to Frankie, who came down the length of the bar in a hip-rolling sashay. “What’ll it be, gents?” he asked, and pulled out his bow tie past its limit and released it, smirking. Quirke lowered his head and looked at him narrowly; he might have been sighting along the barrel of a gun.

8

    He had settled down with a nightcap and a history of Byzantium that he had been trying to finish for weeks when Isabel rang up. He sat and looked at the telephone and let it ring a dozen times before lifting the receiver, which he did gingerly, as if it might explode in his hand. He knew it would be Isabel. It was nearing midnight, and he had thought he was safe, that she must have slept through the evening and would not get up so late, but no. Her tone was dispiritingly bright. He tried in turn to sound enthusiastic, loving, happy to hear her voice.
    Isabel said she supposed he was in bed himself by now, with his teddy and his toddy, but that she would come over anyway, and maybe join him there, in the scratcher—she liked to use slang words, pronouncing them with an arch, actorly flourish, stretching out the vowels and rolling the r