The Silver Swan (26 page)

 

"Six months now."

 

"Holy God." She still had the accent, raw and flat, of wherever it was she hailed from, over in the west. "Did you have a conversion, or what?" Their drinks arrived and she clinked the rim of her glass against his. "Well, I hope you get a high place in Heaven."

 

He offered her his cigarette case and flipped the lid of his lighter. She screwed up her mouth and blew smoke sideways, and touched
the tip of a little finger delicately to one corner of her mouth and then to the other.

 

"So," she said. "What is it you're after?"

 

He pretended puzzlement. "What do you mean?"

 

"I know you—you're always after something."

 

"Only your company, Maisie."

 

She flexed a skeptical eyebrow. "Oh, sure."

 

Maisie had spent two stretches in jail. The first time was twenty years before, when she had been charged with running a nursing home, so-called, where women with inconvenient pregnancies came in secret to have their babies, many of which were left for Maisie to dispose of, often in a bundle of swaddling on the side of a country road at dead of night. When her sentence was served she had promptly rented a room in Hatch Street and started in the abortion trade. Shortly afterwards her clinic, as she called it, had been raided by the Vice Squad and she had done another two-year stretch in Mountjoy. Released again, and undeterred, she had gone straight back to work. Maisie was the keeper of many secrets. She knew Malachy Griffin and claimed to have worked with him at the Holy Family hospital in the days when she was still a real nurse, a claim, Quirke reflected, that no doubt Malachy would not wish to hear too often or too loudly put about.

 

"How is business?" Quirke asked now.

 

"Never better." She took a slug of her rum and fitted another of his cigarettes into her ebony holder. "I tell you, Quirke, the women of this town must never have heard of a French letter."

 

"Hard to come by."

 

She cackled, and poked him in the chest with a forefinger. "
Hard to come by
— that's a good one." Her glass was empty already; he signaled to the barman for a refill. "Anyway, they're not," she said. "I have a fellow brings them in by the suitcaseful through Holyhead. I offer them to my clients. 'Here,' I say, 'take a couple of dozen packets of them with you, for I don't want to see you here again for a
good long while, and preferably never.' But will they take them?" She put on a whining tone. "'The priest will give out to me, Nurse. My fella won't hear of it, Nurse.' Bloody little fools."

 

Quirke toyed with his glass. "Ever come across a woman called Hunt?" he asked. "Deirdre Hunt?"

 

She gave him an arch look. "Oho," she said. "Here it comes."

 

"She also called herself Laura Swan."

 

She was still looking at him hard along one side of her nose.

 

"Do you know what it is, Quirke," she said, "but you're a terrible man." Putting on a show of unwilling surrender, she rummaged in her handbag and brought out a dog-eared address book bound in leather. This was her famous little black book, which, as she declared frequently in her cups, she intended one day to sell to the
People
or the
News of the World
, to keep herself in comfort in her declining years. She flipped through the pages, reading off names under her breath. It was all show, Quirke knew: there was not a woman Maisie had treated, in the three decades and more in which she had been in business, whose name, address, and telephone number she could not recite from memory at a moment's notice. "No," she said, "no Hunt. What was the other name—Swan? No Swan, either. Who is she?"

 

Quirke raised one shoulder an inch and let it fall again. "Was," he said.

 

"Ah. So that's the way it is." She shut the address book with a slap and thrust it back into the depths of her bag. "In that case, I certainly do not know and have never known any person or persons of that name or names. Right?" She finished her second drink and fairly banged the glass down on the bar.

 

Quirke lifted a finger to the barman. "In fact," he said, deliberately pausing, as if in judicious scruple, "in fact it wasn't her, Deirdre Hunt, that I was particularly interested in. She wouldn't have been one of your customers." She looked at him. "I did a postmortem on her," he said. "She had never been in the family way."

 

A small man wearing a puce-colored tie, on his way to the gents',
staggered as he was going past and jogged Maisie's elbow, and a drop of rum from her glass splashed onto her chiffon scarf.

 

"Bloody queers,"
Maisie muttered, glaring after the little man and plumping herself up like a ruffled hen. She turned her attention back to Quirke. "So what," she asked, "was the matter with her, then?"

 

The fumes of the rum she was breathing over him were making Quirke's head swim. His mouth was dry and his fingers had the arthritic ache in the joints that came on when he was most in need of a drink. Would it never abate, he wondered, this raw craving? Perhaps he was an alcoholic, after all, and not just the heavy drinker he had always told himself he was. Suddenly he wanted to be away from here, from this reeking place, these jabbering, reeling people, this woman with the blood of countless embryos on her hands, and of more than one misfortunate mother, too, if the stories whispered of her were true.

 

"Do you know—" he began and had to stop. His thirst was a rage now, his mouth drier than ever, and his forehead moist with a chill sweat. He ran a hand over his eyes, his nose, his mouth. "Do you know a man called Kreutz?" he asked, clenching his fists under the rim of the bar and digging his fingernails into his palms.

 

She focused on him, frowning. "How do you spell that?" He spelled it. "Oh, I know him, all right," she said, and gave a low laugh. "'Dr.' Kreutz, so-called. The darkie. Has a place in—where is it? Adelaide Road, that's right." She chuckled again. "I've had a few of that gentleman's patients referred to me."

 

"What does he do?"

 

"I don't know, some kind of mumbo jumbo. Healing for the spirit. Incense and fruit diets, that kind of thing. Women go to him."

 

"And he sent some of them to you?"

 

She grew wary, and looked into her drink and shrugged. "A couple. Why?"

 

"Was it the usual trouble?"

 

"What do you mean?"

 

"The reason he sent these women to you, was it the usual?"

 

"No," she said with harsh sarcasm, "they were in need of further spiritual guidance and advice on their complexions." She leaned her face into his. She was not drunk, but she was not any longer sober, either. "Why the fuck do you think he sent them to me?" She guzzled another go of her drink. A thought struck her. "What has he to do with the other one, what's her name—Hunt?"

 

"I don't know," Quirke said. He slid himself cautiously off the stool. This was how their meetings most often ended, with Maisie tipsy and morose and him sidling for the door and escape. Behind Maisie's back, and with a finger to his lips, he paid the barman for another rum and black and stepped away from the bar nimbly. Maisie looked over her shoulder and watched him go. For such a big fellow, she blearily mused, he could move awful fast.

 

The sunlight in the street blinded him. An enormous Guard was examining Maisie's car, skewed at an angle with two of its wheels on the pavement. Quirke veered aside and made off.

 

Everywhere he turned in the business of Deirdre Hunt, things that had seemed substantial evaporated into smoke and air, and what had appeared open and inviting entryways were suddenly slammed shut in his face.

 

 

WHEN HE HAD ROUNDED THE CORNER FROM MERRION SQUARE AND was walking up Mount Street he spotted a figure sitting in the sun on the steps outside No. 39 and knew at once who it was. Even at that distance there was no mistaking the big head with its cap of carroty hair and monk's tonsure. He thought of turning back before he was spotted himself, but instead went on, for lack of will. His rage for a drink had abated but he had a dry hangover now; there was a pounding in his head, and his eyes scalded in their sockets.

 

Billy Hunt was sitting on the steps with his back sloped and a hand under his chin, like Rodin's
Thinker
. Quirke wondered what had possessed him to get involved with the likes of Deirdre—what was her maiden name?—Deirdre Ward. But then, what possessed
any man to fix on any woman, or any woman to fix on any man? In the case of his own marriage the answer had been simple, and Sarah, dead Sarah, his dead wife's sister, had enunciated it clearly for him: Delia had been willing to sleep with him without a wedding ring, and Sarah had not, and on that basis he had made his choice. But Delia, the lovely, dissatisfied, dangerous Delia, why had
she
accepted
him
, knowing, as she must have known—for Delia was clever, and missed nothing—that it was her sister he had really wanted? Had she, he wondered now—it had never occurred to him before—had she done it to spite her sister? God knows, Delia would have been capable of it; Delia, he thought, would have been capable of anything.

 

He stopped at No. 39 and stood with one foot on the lowest step, his hat tipped back and his jacket over his shoulder with a thumb hooked in the tag.

 

"Hot day," he said.

 

Billy lifted a hand to shade his eyes and squinted up at him. "Ah, Quirke, there you are. I said I'd buy you a drink."

 

Quirke shook his head. "I told you, Billy, I don't drink."

 

"Did you? I forget things all the time, these days. There's a permanent fog in my head. Anyway, you must drink something—tea? coffee? a bottle of minerals?"

 

Quirke smiled.
A-boddle-a-minerls
. Billy would always be the boy from Waterford.

 

They went round by the Peppercanister Church and crossed the road to the canal. They did not speak. The trees, hotly throbbing, hung their heads out over the unmoving water. A Swastika Laundry van, comically high and narrow, appeared on Huband Bridge, its electric engine purring. Billy Hunt was tall, Quirke had no more than an inch or two on him, and he walked with a sportsman's muscle-bound shamble. Percy Place was cloven down the middle, with glaring sunlight along one side and a wedge of shadow along the other. At the door of the
47
Quirke caught the familiar pub reek of alcohol and male sweat and ancient cigarette smoke that he used to savor so and that now made him feel nauseous. When they were at the bar Billy
Hunt asked him what he would have and he asked for a soda water—by now he thought he might never again manage to drink another tomato juice—and Billy ordered it without comment, and a pint of stout for himself. Quirke watched him drink off the pint in two goes. He seemed to have no swallow mechanism, merely opened his mouth impossibly wide and tilted the heavy black liquid straight down his throat.

 

"So," Quirke said, hearing how wary his own voice sounded, "how is it going?"

 

Billy tucked his chin into his chest and belched.

 

"I appreciate you doing that thing for me," he said. Quirke said nothing. Billy Hunt belched again, less loudly. "That detective called me in," he said. He was looking at his reflection in the mirror behind the bar, above a shelf full of bottles. He rubbed a hand back and forth on his chin, making a rasping sound. "What's his name? Hackett."

 

"Oh, yes?" Quirke said. Johnnie Walker, Dimple Haig, Jameson twelve-year-old. A tin sign assured him that PLAYERS PLEASE. "And?"

 

"You may well ask." He put his empty glass on the bar and looked at the barman, who took the glass and produced a clean one and set it under the Guinness tap and pulled the club-shaped wooden handle. All three men watched the sallow gush of stout turning black in the bottom of the glass. "He talked about the weather," Billy said. "Wanted to know if Deirdre was able to swim. Asked me where I was the night she died." He turned suddenly and looked at Quirke with his ox's injured eyes. "He wasn't fooled."

 

"Wasn't fooled about what?"

 

Suddenly he saw, for the first time, really, just how angry Billy was. Anger, he realized, was his permanent condition now. And that would never change. Not only his wife, but the whole world had wronged him.

 

"He knows it wasn't an accident," Billy said.

 

"Knows? Knows for a fact, or is guessing?"

 

Billy's new pint arrived. He considered it, turning the glass round and round on its base.

 

"The coroner didn't believe it either, did he?" he said. "I could see it in his eye. And yet he let it go." Quirke said nothing, but Billy nodded, as if he had. "What did you say to him?"

 

"You heard the evidence I gave."

 

"And that was all?"

 

"That was all."

 

"You didn't have a word with him beforehand?" Once more Quirke chose not to answer, and Billy nodded again. "There wasn't anything in the papers," he said.

 

"No."

 

"Did you fix that, too?"

 

"I haven't got that kind of influence, Billy."

 

Billy chuckled. "I bet you have," he said. "I bet you have a cozy little arrangement going with the reporters. You're all the same, you crowd. A cozy gang."

 

This time Billy sipped his pint instead of devouring it, pursing his mouth into a beak and dipping it delicately into the froth like a waterbird breaking the scummed surface of a rock pool. Then he wiped the back of a hand across his lips and frowned into the mirror before him, the surface of which had a faint, inexplicably pink-tinged sheen.

 

"That's the thing I can't understand," he said. "She would never have wanted to make a show of herself like that. Being found on the rocks, with no clothes on her." He paused, thinking, remembering. "I never saw her naked, you know, when she was alive. She wouldn't let me."

 

Quirke coughed. "Billy—"

 

"No no, it's all right," Billy said, waving one of his great, square hands. He bent his face, waderlike again, over his pint, and drank, and again swabbed his lips with the back of his knuckles. "That's the way she was, that's all. So I can't understand it, her doing what she did." He looked at Quirke. "Can you?"