Quirke 06 - Holy Orders

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. Y ou 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. Y ou 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. “ Y ou’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