Quirke 06 - Holy Orders

had settled into a shade somewhere between dark blue and shiny black. The knot had a soldered look to it, and obviously had not been untied in months—in years, perhaps—only yanked loose at the end of each day so that the tie could be lifted over Hackett’s head and hung on the knob of the wardrobe door or on a post at the end of the bed. Hackett’s domestic arrangements were the subject of occasional idle speculation on Quirke’s part. There was, for instance, the question of Mrs. Hackett. She was rarely on public display; in fact Quirke had never yet managed to get even a glimpse of her, so that she had taken on for him the trappings of a mythological figure, hazy and remote. All he knew about her for certain was that her name was May.
    “That priest phoned me,” he said now. “Honan—Father Mick.”
    Hackett widened his eyes. “Is that so?” He was sitting back in his swivel chair with his fingers interlaced over his belly. “What did he want?”
    “A chat, he said. ‘A bit of a chat.’ I met him in Flynne’s Hotel.”
    “Did you, indeed. And what did he have to say for himself?”
    “Not much.” Quirke was lighting a cigarette. “Well, a lot, in fact, but little of it of any consequence. He’s a smooth customer.”
    “In what way?”
    “A flatterer. Only simple folk are expected to swallow the pap that Mother Church spoons out for them, while you and he, being so much more sophisticated, know what’s really what.”
    “Ah, yes,” the detective said, amused. “I know the type. What about Jimmy Minor? Did he say he knew him?”
    Quirke shook his head. “Claimed to know nothing about him, nothing at all.”
    “What about the letter Minor wrote? What about the request for an interview?”
    “He said he’d heard there’d been some such letter. Implied Dangerfield had taken it on himself to ignore what was in it, and hadn’t even shown it to him.”
    There was a pause.
    “And did you believe him?” Hackett asked. He was scrabbling about in the pile of papers before him on the desk; Quirke knew it as a sign that he was thinking.
    “It wasn’t a matter of believing or disbelieving,” Quirke said. “The Father Honans of this world don’t deal in anything so obvious and clumsy as mere fact. All, according to him, is relative.” He was thinking again of Isabel as he had seemed to see her this morning, sitting at the table in the kitchen in her blue dress, as vivid as life.
    He tried to concentrate. His mind seemed to him suddenly a machine he did not know how to operate that yet had been thrust into his control; he was the passenger who had been called upon to land the airplane after the pilot had died. His head ached, and his pulse was beating in his ears again with unnatural intensity. “He’s of the opinion,” he said, making an effort, “that God doesn’t bother himself with us.”
    Hackett’s eyes grew wide again, and he gave a faint whistle. “Is he, now. I wonder is that what he tells them over in Sean McDermott Street when he’s coaching young fellows to be boxers and making their daddies take the pledge.” He fumbled again through his papers. “What’s he like, anyway?”
    “Fiftyish, red hair, in a suit and tie.”
    “In civvies, was he? That’s interesting. I always wonder about priests that think they have to get themselves up in disguise.”
    “He was wearing white socks.”
    Hackett gave a throaty chuckle. “Ah, yes,” he said. “By their socks shalt thou know them.”
    Through the small window behind Hackett’s desk Quirke could see sunlight on chimney pots, and distant seagulls circling against piled-up clouds that were as white and opaque as ice. He knew this roofscape well, since he had sat here so often before, in this fusty office with the jumbled desk and the wind-up telephone, that out-of-date calendar hanging beside the door, the dried magenta smudge on the wall that was all that remained of a swatted fly. He looked again at the sky, those clouds. Every day he dealt with death and yet knew nothing about it, nothing. For a second he saw himself on the slab, a pallid sack of flesh, all that he had been come suddenly to nothingness.
    Hackett threw himself forward and smacked both palms briskly on the desk. “Come on,” he said, “we’ll go out and take a stroll in this fine, fresh morning.”
    * * *

    Pearse Street smelled of horse dung and recent rain. Behind the high wall of Trinity College the tops of sea-green trees sparkled in thin