The Death of a Joyce Scholar (16 page)

“Caught in the act. I should fetch me camera. It’s a shot for the papers, so it is. They could run it front page: ‘Murder Squad Chief Closet Ineffectual.’ Given the errata rife in those pages, people’d think it a typo. They’d also get letters from the country, whole barge loads, demanding your resignation. I quote, ‘To think of the cheek of the man, masquerading as a top Guard, when in fact he was photographed center forward in his back garden reading a bloody
boook
of all immarh-al t’ings. Question: Did it have pictures, and of what, and of whose anatomy, and don’t give me that bull it’s about forensics. Or smutty jokes about aborigines and Kerrymen? And finally, was it written, edited, produced, or printed in the U.K. or the USA?’ Pronounced, ‘Uck’ and ‘Ooza.’”

McGarr smiled. Viner wasn’t half wrong: sure, an EEC study had just discovered that the Irish bought and read more books per capita than any other European nation, but McGarr did not doubt that Irish bibliophiles were a narrow elite who indulged themselves heroically. He knew of whole voting districts in Dublin that were virtually book-free. People there never read more than the price of hake. Or porter.

“So, what’s the title, and if you tell me it’s
Pathological Curiosities
or, rather,
Curiosities of Pathology,
I’ll never speak to you again, so help me, Dante.”

McGarr sighed. Viner was irrepressible. Worse, he was cultivated, and his roots in Dublin were as long-standing as McGarr’s own. McGarr could lie and say he was
re
-reading
Ulysses,
“…as I do every so often,” but lying wasn’t his style, especially to a man of the cloth who was also a good friend and an entertaining neighbor.

Sheepishly he said, “It’s
Ulysses.
”

“Ah, the Kevin Coyle case,” Viner said with an alacrity that revealed his purpose in disturbing McGarr. Like most
Dubliners, there was little in the city that was not of interest to him, especially murder, and McGarr could imagine Viner, for all his undoubted discretion, confiding to an intimate, “Peter McGarr is my immediate neighbor. I speak to him daily and—”

McGarr said nothing and kept his eyes in the book.

“To think that Flood would throw away so much…position, academic acclaim, his little business there in Nassau Street. What does he call it? Joyce’s Ireland, I think. And him with a handsome wife and child. Is it her it was over?”

McGarr tried to raise his head slowly.

“It’s in all the papers:”

McGarr couldn’t keep the surprise from his face.

“I’ll go get them if you’d like. Splashed all over the front page of the
Press.”

“Charged?”

“No—not exactly charged. But they’re aware that Flood has been helping you in the investigation, and…” Viner’s glance at McGarr was expectant and hopeful. “Helping” was the euphemism used to imply that a person, while not charged with a crime, was being interviewed in that connection.

“And to think to have come to a foreign land,” Viner went on hopefully, the declining sun making his face look round and moonish over the top of the wall, “and established a brilliant career, only to have such a thing happen in the middle, the very best part of his life.” Viner himself was approaching fifty, and mid-life potentialities were a present concern.

But it was the earlier allusion that pricked McGarr’s interest. “Foreign land?”

“Sure you knew, Superintendent McGarr, that your helper is an American?” Again Viner tried to read McGarr’s face. “From some place out on the Great Plains. Iowa, I believe. Or Nebraska. Don’t you like the names they have over
there? Listen to the sound of that:
Ne-bras-ka,”
he intoned. “Why, the very sound of it conjures up visions of rolling, windy, treeless hills with solitary farmhouses and immense barns and nothing but an horizon sweep of buffalo dung.”

Opined McGarr, “The buffalo has been largely extincted, I hear.”

“A progressive people, the Americans. Nobody would say they’re not. And a Jew—Flood, I mean. In the beginning here—his at Trinity, mine in my congregation—I saw a good deal of him. But like others who have come to this seductive little isle, he soon became more Irish than the Irish.” It was a phrase an historian had used to describe what had happened to the early Normans in Ireland. “And I regret to say I lost him. Entreaties ignored. Cards, letters, the same. He sends me a few quid every year with a little note that we should—”

As Viner spoke on, McGarr reconsidered Fergus Flood—an
American,
he who had seemed so much the urbane, educated Dub, right down to the Ath Cliath dialect he seemed able to employ at will and condescendingly? He had the accent, the gestures, and the mannerisms down pat (or, rather, Paddy), and McGarr wondered immediately what else he might have “adopted” in regard to the death of his colleague and rival, Kevin Coyle. Flood hadn’t told them all of the truth. Of that McGarr was certain.

Standing, he said, “Excuse me, Sol—I must use the phone.”

Viner gloated, “You mean you didn’t know Flood was a tribesman of mine? Or is it the American connection? You know, I bumped into him on D’Olier Street a couple of years ago and was amazed how he carried off the donnish, Foxrock bit without batting an eye. To me
who knew,
mind. But then, I’m but a poor man of God. Trusting, compassion
ate, believing. You, however, are a nag of another—”

The back door closed. McGarr liked Viner, he enjoyed his company, often sought him out. But, to appropriate an American turn of phrase, Viner could also be a humongous (albeit helpful) pain in the arse, especially when he was right.

McGarr dialed three different numbers and finally found McKeon at his favorite pub. “Didn’t I see the name of an American reporter on the list that Hughie got from Joyce’s Ireland and Bloomsday Tours?”

“You did indeed.
Boston Globe.
Goldfarb’s the name. He’s on assignment in the North. They sent him down here for a contradiction.”

McGarr waited. The pub was busy and filled with noise.

“A working breather, he said they called the Bloomsday thing, which reminds me. How dare you disturb me while I’m on orificial business?”

“He still here?”

“Goldfarb? As of this morning. You busy, or is the wife in state? Why don’t you pop down here, and we’ll—”

“I’d like you to phone him up. Make it sound like a tip for a story, you know, him having been helpful and all. Tell him that it’s come to light that Professor Fergus Flood of Trinity College is actually a Jewish American from someplace like Iowa or Nebraska, and you thought it might be a story he’d be interested in. If he’s any class of journalist, he’ll know about Flood and the Coyle case.”

There was a pause, and then, “Flood?”

“None other.”

“Christ—I’m slippin’. The bugger codded me. I would have sworn he was one of
us
.”

There it was again. “Me too, but we’ll let the press sort him out. Somebody with contacts better than ours.”

McGarr had no sooner settled himself back in the chair at
the corner of the garden than Noreen appeared. She was wearing a deep orange dress, just the color of her hair, and he could tell from her step as she approached him that she had been drinking. He wondered where and with whom, though he knew better than to ask. She would
not
be questioned on her actions, especially when in her cups.

Hand on hip, she stopped before him, looking ravishing, like flame, in the golden hues of the setting sun. Her green eyes flickered down on the book. “So—I’m glad to see you’ve gotten to it at last. I’d be mortified to have a husband of mine admit in public that he hadn’t read
Ulysses.
”

Me? he wanted to say.
I’ve
been trying to read the thing for days now.

“And you needn’t bother me tonight. I must get my rest. Tomorrow’s the book launching at the Shelbourne.”

Him bother
her?

“I stopped by and helped Catty arrange the flowers.” Raising her chin, she presented McGarr with the profile of her face, which was striking: the aquiline nose; high forehead; a definite, if small, chin below a slightly protrusive upper lip. “An intelligent and talented and beautiful young woman, don’t you think?”

McGarr waited until the turquoise of her eyes flashed down on him for an opinion. “Her? G’wan,” he said in his most obvious Dublin dialect. “She’s a scrawny dark mot, all bone and gristle. Blue veins, didn’t you notice? She’ll age, so, and fast. Like a quayside mist.”

“Blue veins where?”

“Her legs. The side of her neck, which she conceals with her hair.”

“Well, it’s true that she has fine skin. Today she was wearing a full-skirted dress of exquisite pink crinoline.” Pink was a color Noreen believed she could not wear. “It must have cost heaps. She looked like a little…” The green eyes
searched the top of the wall, her smooth brow glowered. In three months she would be thirty, and already they were in full, if covert, crisis.

“Doll?” he suggested.

“No, not
doll.
Do you think I’d ever say that about one of my—”

“Friends?”

Her nostrils flared and the interesting curves of her chest heaved as she tried to clear the thought through the haze of the wine.

“Acquaintance? Associate? Don’t tell me Dawson Galleries, Limited, is actually hanging canvases at this authorless book launching?”

The twilight flared briefly in her eyes. “It’s the premiere cultural event of late summer. A coup, really.
Everybody’
ll be there, and the other gallery owners will be green.”

Better than pink, he thought. “What’s she like?”

“Catty? Most professional. Everything has to be just so and she certainly knows how to build a media event. I suspect that years from now publishing people will speak of the launching of
Phon/Antiphon
with a kind of awe. If, however, you mean from a police perspective, you offend me. How you could suspect such a considerate, intelligent, and tasteful young woman of anything but the highest motives and impeccable conduct, points up what I have long considered perhaps your most distressing flaw.”

His baldness? His stature? His incipient obesity? McGarr awaited the punch line, as it were, with no little trepidation.

“Your conception of human nature, which is debased. Warped, I should imagine, from your dealings with the dark side of human experience. This may come as a surprise to you, but not everybody compromises her integrity.”

McGarr reflected on the bookcase of Kevin Coyle volumes in Mary Sittonn’s antique shop, Catty Doyle’s extra
professional approach to Kevin Coyle and David Holderness and her complex relationship with her “sisters,” especially with Sittonn, who had tattooed her shoulder with what McGarr suspected was a Catty logo. But he mentioned none of that. “What does one wear to such an event?” he asked instead.

Noreen had begun making her way grandly toward the house, taking precise steps, fanning her dress with her hands. “Oh—stylish, trendy things,” which meant that a large box containing at least one extravagantly priced item sat in the hallway.

Pity, for him a poor summer suit would have to suffice.

“Why, are you thinking of attending?”

“Perhaps,” he lied. She could count on him.

She stopped and turned. “In what capacity, may I ask?”

McGarr raised the book, “Police artist manqué, what else?”

“What about the suit?”

“Your choice.”

She smiled slightly. “But please, Peter, no—”

“Gaffs,” he supplied.

“And if you have to play Grand Inquisitor, try not to make it—”

“While you’re involved in a sale.”

“
No
—to hell with sales. I mean
obvious.
” There was another pause before she asked, “Hungry?”

He knew what that meant too. “Not really.”

“Good. I’m shattered, really, and there’s that roast in the fridge. Would you mind…?”

“Not at all. Get some sleep. I’d like to put a bit of the book by before I come to bed. If I’m hungry, I’ll help myself.”

But McGarr never got to his roast. From the garden he removed himself to the study, then to the sitting room, where,
after midnight, he lit a small fire in the grate to dispel the chill, and finally to a tall, wing-back chair in the bedroom, where Noreen was already in bed and he hoped he would soon doze off.

But he had no luck with sleep. He watched the pale light to the east brighten gradually into a brilliant scarlet blush, until finally a crescent of blinding sun forced him to lower the shade. When he finally checked his watch it was seven, and he abandoned the book a few pages from the end and padded down to the kitchen to make her tea and his coffee. Both would need an early start.

As the water heated, he put his hands in his pockets and turned to his back garden; he thought of how startling he found a book that detailed a day in 1904 but still seemed current and accurate. Joyce could as well have been describing the Dublin that McGarr knew, with all its gossip, lies, tall tales, and extravagances. In short, its search for a truth that wasn’t too hard to bear.

Why
hard?
Because of the poverty that was written into every page of
Ulysses.
Dublin society then, as now, was stagnant on virtually every level—economic first, but on social, moral, and spiritual levels as well. Back then, the British and the Church and the loss of central, unifying myths could be blamed. Now it was the 6 percent of the population who controlled over eighty percent of the country’s wealth, the crushing, largely foreign-held debt that was three times the per capita debt of Mexico, a powerful Church that intruded into all aspects of life and quashed every social or political reform not decidedly in its interest, and finally the British, who were still with them in the North.

Hence the need to patch over the tatty reality of Dublin with puns, rhymes, songs, riddles, circular arguments, and references to arcane mythological and philosophical systems that seemed to McGarr more form than content. In
short, the need for something to help pass time, to distract, to arrange.