Habit of Fear (22 page)

“I’m not. I’m trying to find the painter Edna O’Shea, and I was told Mrs. Craig might help me.”

“And who told you that?” The woman looked over her glasses as though the better to see her. There was no challenge in her voice, but there was the suggestion of alarm.

“I went upstairs to the gallery first,” Julie said.

“Ah, well, they’re all new up there.” Julie had said the right thing. The woman, her tawny hair straggling out of a twist at the back of her head, poked it into place with a pencil and bade Julie step aside till she took the customer waiting behind her.

“Now then,” she said, getting back to Julie. “It’s several years since we were her agents here in the west. I was working upstairs myself then. She came to a disagreement with Mr. Greely, shall we say, and took her things away from Sligo entirely. I can tell you where they went—a village on Donegal Bay called Ballymahon.”

“You knew her, then,” Julie said and made a note of the place name.

“No, dear. I was a mere clerk.”

“What about her husband?” Julie asked, her heart beginning to pound.

The woman was silent for a moment, thoughtful. Then: “Are you sure she had one?”

“Yes. Or did have.”

“That would be it, then, wouldn’t it?”

Julie could hardly swallow the lump of disappointment in her throat. But she told herself that she had been due for an interruption. She would go on to Ballymahon in any case. She thanked the cashier and left the store without ever meeting Maisie Craig. She wondered, thinking back, what might have happened if she had said she was with the funeral party. Of which, it was to be presumed, Joseph Quinlan was a member.

She also wondered if Gran Garvy’s dire intimation of death referred to her father. Would she grieve if she learned that he was dead? And what was grief? Had she grieved for her mother? No. Not as she understood other people’s grief. But then, her mother wouldn’t have allowed it. Or—and the possibility further shook her—was she still grieving?

She reached the hotel ten minutes late for her meeting with Roy Irwin. He was not in the lobby. Nor had he left a message at the desk. But there was good news: the hotel had a room for her.

She waited the rest of the hour—until seven-thirty—for Irwin and then went upstairs for a quick wash. The room was a fair size, but the wardrobe and the huge old bed with its bolster and its backboard made it seem small. The windows overlooked a courtyard two floors down. She drew the shade, unpacked necessities, washed and went downstairs to dinner. During which she read McNally’s
To Spite the Devil.
Roy Irwin did not show up. Nor did she see the Gray Man again that night.

T
HE HOTEL LOCKED ITS
doors and drew heavy drapes across the front windows as the funeral procession approached. Julie told herself that if she was ever going to be a decent newspaperwoman, she could not run away from the action. She went out and watched from the crowded steps of a nearby church. There was a chilly wind, and the clouds tumbled into one another crossing the sky. The casket was borne by eight young men, while eight old men, honorary pallbearers, struggled to keep in step behind them. Church bells tolled, picking up on one another, all over town. A great number of priests marched, some in red, some in black, some in purple, and some in the brown robes and sandals of the Franciscans. Behind them came the flagbearers with the green, white and orange flag of Eire in the center, flanked by a green and gold banner that featured the Irish harp and by a faded, threadbare flag of the same tricolor as the national emblem: it might have been preserved from the 1916 Rising. Then came a half dozen ominously masked marchers in their dark berets, IRA Provisionals, she assumed, and after them some twenty or so prosperous-looking men of middle age with one white-haired woman among them. They wore green sashes and an air of elitism: they had survived an earlier service to their country. Righteous, militant, arrogant. Julie made up their resumes and hated them because she was sure that one of them was Joseph Quinlan. Three drummers drummed the dead march, and the fifes sounded a dirge. People on the church steps and along the way fell in with the procession—men, women, and children, most of the men with black armbands, and some of the women shrouded in black veils. At the end came women all in black, wailing lamentations. These were such sounds as Julie had never heard, but she knew the word was
keening.
It was a little like flamenco and yet not. Ceremonial yet primitive, savage. Such vocal grief seemed too much, unreal.

A lone woman standing beside her on the steps pulled a long face and said to Julie, but loud enough to be heard around, “They do put it on, don’t they?”

One of the marching mourners whipped up her veil and spat in their direction.

“And
they
want to be called travelers,” the woman said scornfully. “They’ll be nought but tinkers as long as I can call them.”

“It’s not real grief, is it?” Julie asked.

“They’re paid for it. It’s all part of the show and a mockery of the tradition.”

Following the procession came an ambulance and two cars marked Press. Roy Irwin stepped out of one of them and ran alongside until he got his balance. He came to Julie. “Come with us. There’s room in the car. I’ll walk alongside.”

“I don’t mind walking. I’d rather.”

“I’m sorry I stood you up. When I got there, they told me you had a room. You’d gone up an hour before.”

“It’s all right.”

“Well, it has to be. There’s an American here you might find interesting. Joe Quinlan. I got wind of a meeting last night and went round and got an interview with him after. An exclusive.”

“Congratulations.”

“Wait till you hear. You know who he is, don’t you?”

She nodded.

“Walk along with me so we won’t fall behind.” She fell in step with him. “A craven lot pounced on me as soon as I was alone and took the tape off me. Look.” He turned his head so that she could see the purple lump at his hairline.

“Do you know who they were?”

“They didn’t identify themselves, but I’d say they were part of a breakaway lot of extremists—the ONI—One Nation Indivisible. Next to them the Provos are as mild as Quakers.”

One nation indivisible: they’d have one foot in America, Julie thought. “Are they for Quinlan or against him?” she asked.

“They’re for themselves and whoever’s useful. I’ll publish the interview, bedamned to them. I’m not lost without the tape. It was only that I wanted his voice saying what he had to say.” As they passed through the cemetery gates, Irwin took her arm and tried to hurry her past the crowd. “I want to get up front.”

She disengaged her arm, but gently. “You go on ahead. I won’t be going back to Dublin with you, Roy. I’m going on to Donegal.”

“Are you so?” he said as though she had betrayed him.

“I’m very grateful to you and I’ll call you as soon as I get back to Dublin. Okay?”

He shook off his pique and gave her his hand. “Good luck to you, then. I hope you find the old boy.” When he had strode a few feet, he turned back. “I saw the Gray Man in the hotel last night. And while I was looking round for you, didn’t he link up and go off with one of the bastards who roughed me up? I’ve no idea what it means. But take care of yourself.”

“You too.”

The best care she could take would be to leave town now, to get her things from the hotel and find the earliest transportation to Donegal. But she stayed.

Tributes and reminiscences, on and on, while the cold wind plucked at the women’s veils and children tried to wrap themselves in their mother’s skirts. Quinlan spoke at last. He belittled the accord signed between the British prime minister and the president of the Irish Republic. “Consultation,” he mocked, throwing back his mane of gray hair. He had the flamboyance of an evangelist. “What is consultation to the party without the means to implement their position? When the lamb teams up with the lion, I ask you, which comes out the goat?” He spoke for over an hour, and amazingly, only the children were restive; a mixture of politics and economics, a course in Irish revolutionary history. He gave chapter and verse of the church interference, bowing deeply to the assorted clergy present with every ironic reference. Julie suddenly wondered if Quinlan might know her father, who shared his historical interests. The thought did not thrill her. Too many things were tightening, as though she were in the embrace of an octopus. As soon as Quinlan stepped down, she turned back toward the town.

A volley of shots rang out behind her, then the bugle and the priestly voice leading the crowd in prayer. Intermittently, as the wind willed, she heard a high tenor voice singing “The Minstrel Boy.” She was well into the deserted town when she heard the roar of a motor that soon struck a rhythmic acceleration; a helicopter rose from near the cemetery and soared overhead on its way, she supposed, to an airport. Was Joseph Quinlan on his way back to New York?

A porter unlocked the hotel door to let her in. She asked if someone could give her her bill.

He looked at his watch. “Within the hour, say, one o’clock.”

Julie looked at hers. Three hours had been a lot of funeral. The urge to get on with her journey was very strong. Closely examined, it might reveal itself as the urge to go home. Then she stopped to think what home was like these days. She went behind the desk and took her own key from the hook. A choice of any number was available, and they all looked suspiciously alike. She went upstairs, where the carpeting was so thin and the quiet of the hallways so pronounced she could hear the little thuds of her own footfalls. She thought of the night in Dublin when she’d asked the porter to go to her room door with her. She had not seen the Gray Man at the funeral. Would he show up in Donegal? If he did, she resolved, she would go to the police.

The stillness of the hallway seemed even deeper with the rattle of her key in the lock. A waste hamper stood nearby, as did a laundry cart stacked with clean linens. The smell of the room hit her first—as though exhaust fumes from a car had floated up from the courtyard and got locked in along with something foul like a plumbing backup. The maid had not been in, the bolster still lay where Julie had pushed it onto the floor during the night. The room was in near darkness, the heavy window shade and drapes drawn. The last thing she had done before leaving the room was to open them and let in the daylight. It was the first thing she did now. Next she tried to open the window. It would not budge. She turned back and saw a man stretched his full length on the bed—clothed, even with his shoes on. Stiff with shock, she edged toward the door. Within reach of it, she looked back and shouted, “You!” as though the man were merely sleeping.

The only sound was a slow drip of water in the sink. She had first thought—hoped—the darkness on the pillow was hair, the back of the man’s head. But she knew: what she saw on the pillow was all that remained of the head itself, with no shape to it at all. She heard her own moan and managed to get out of the room. She stood a couple of minutes and breathed deeply. Everything of value to her was in the room, including her shoulder bag, which she had put down on a chair when she tried to open the window. As soon as she knew she wasn’t going to faint, she went back.

There was no way of knowing by sight who the man was, but she felt it was the Gray Man. Why hadn’t the maid discovered—or witnessed—such a noisy crime? Or had she witnessed it and fled? Or had she merely left the laundry cart where it was when it came time for the funeral and now intended to come back and resume her chores? Julie felt the nausea returning and the cold, dank sweat of fear. Nothing of hers looked to have been disturbed. Her notebooks lay on the top of her packed but open suitcase … the clock on the bedside table she must not forget … and the panty hose hung to dry on a hanger over the sink. She touched nothing—not even the hose—only snatching up her shoulder bag from the chair.

When she reached the lobby, the street doors were open wide, the guests returning. Light streamed in through the windows where the drapes had been opened. The staff were at their posts. The scene seemed even more surreal than the abandoned lobby of a few minutes before when the porter had let her in; it was as though she had run downstairs to another facet of the same nightmare.

T
HREE HOURS LATER JULIE
and Roy Irwin were with the young Gardai sergeant in the hotel office awaiting the arrival by air of the Murder Team from Dublin. All that was known at that point was the virtual certainty that the victim was indeed Edward Donavan, their so-called Gray Man. There had been no identification on the body, and Donavan’s car was gone from where it had been parked in the courtyard until at least six o’clock the night before. At that time an assistant chef, out for a quick cigarette, had seen him put his bag into the boot and go off toward the town center. Tentative identification came from the observation by the registration clerk that Donavan was missing half of the forefinger of his right hand. As was the murder victim. The desk man had registered “Edward Donavan” but had no other address than Dublin.

Roy Irwin seemed beside himself, impatient with the restraints the district Gardai put on themselves waiting for the experts. “God’s teeth!” he exploded finally. “I swear to you he was a security operative, private or government. Isn’t there a license board of some sort you can get onto?”

“Mr. Irwin,” the sergeant said, “in the case of murder I am no more than a caretaker government until the central authorities arrive. I’m at a loss to know why they’re delayed, but there’s nothing I can do about that.”

“I can tell you why they’re delayed,” Irwin ranted. “They’re keeping clear until Joe Quinlan can get out of the country.”

“Have you ever thought of trying out yourself for law enforcement, Mr. Irwin?” the young officer said blandly.

Both Irwin’s and Julie’s statements concerning their previous encounters with the Gray Man had been taken, processed and signed. The murder scene, except for the search of the victim for identification, remained undisturbed; her panty hose, Julie assumed, still hung over the wash basin, surely dry by now. Irwin was allowed to file his story on the Roger Casey funeral. He might fume at being detained, but it was mere bombast. He was a newsman, and murder was bigger news than a natural death, even that of a hero. But to keep him otherwise occupied, the sergeant agreed to Julie’s suggestion that he be allowed to drive her to Drumcliffe so that she could visit Yeats’s grave. They made their way through a few restive newsmen still on hand when the murder story broke, who waited without even the solace of the bar: afternoon closing.