course, you were married into the family, weren’t you.”
He waited. Quirke said:
“My wife was Sarah’s-Mrs. Griffin’s-sister.”
Costigan nodded, assuming now an expression of unctuous solemnity. “And she died,” he said. “In childbirth, wasn’t it? Very sad, a thing like that. It must have been hard for you.”
Quirke hesitated again. Those undersea eyes seemed to be following his very thoughts. “It was a long time ago,” he said, maintaining a neutral tone.
Costigan was nodding again.
“Still and all, a hard loss,” he said. “I suppose the only way to cope with a thing like that would be to try to forget it, to put it out of your mind altogether. Not easy, of course. A young woman dead, a child lost. But life must go on, mustn’t it, Mr. Quirke?” There was the sense of some large, dark thing stirring soundlessly between them in the little space where they sat. Costigan pointed to the whiskey glass. “You haven’t touched your drink.” He glanced down at another lapel pin, declaring him a member of the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association. “I’m strictly t.t., myself.”
Quirke leaned back on the bench seat. Davy the barman hovered by the serving hatch, polishing a glass and eavesdropping.
“What exactly is it you’re saying to me,” Quirke asked, “Mr… what was the name again?”
Costigan ignored the second question, smiling tolerantly, as at a childish ruse. “I’m saying, Mr. Quirke,” he said softly, “that some things are best forgotten about, best left alone.”
Quirke felt his forehead go hot. He folded the newspaper and clamped it under his arm and stood up. Costigan watched him with what seemed a lively interest and even a touch of amusement. “Thanks for the drink,” Quirke said. The whiskey sat untasted in the glass. Costigan nodded again, briskly this time, as if something had been said that demanded his assent. He was still seated, but Quirke, towering over him, felt that somehow it was he who was on the inferior level.
“Good luck, Mr. Quirke,” Costigan said, smiling. “I’ll see you around, I’m sure.”
IN GRAFTON STREET GUSTS OF WIND WERE SWOOPING MORE STRONGLY than ever and the Saturday evening shoppers were hurrying homeward with their heads down. Quirke was aware of his quickened breathing and a thick, hot sensation in his chest that was not fear, exactly, but a kind of dawning alarm, as if the smooth, empty little island on which he had been happily perched had given a preliminary heave, and would presently reveal itself to be not dry land at all but the humped back of a whale.
17
ANDY STAFFORD KNEW HE WAS NOT THE SHARPEST TOOL IN THE BOX. It was not that he was stupid, but he was no genius either. This knowledge did not trouble him. In fact, he considered that he was pretty much of a good balance. He had known guys who were all brawn, and one or two who were all brain, and both kinds had been a mess. He was between the two extremes, like the kid standing in the middle of the seesaw, having a good time without the effort of all that swinging up and down. So he just could not understand why it had not struck him, before he had agreed to Claire taking the kid, what the consequences might be for his reputation. It was in Foley’s one night that he first heard, behind his back, that particular laugh he would come to hear often, too often.
He had arrived in from a night and most of a day on the road, and had stopped to drink a beer before going home to the house that these days seemed to smell of nothing else but baby things. Foley’s was crowded and noisy, as it always was on Friday night. On his way to the bar he passed a table of five or six guys, truckers like him, most of whom he knew, sort of. One of them, a big meaty fellow with sideburns the size of lamb chops, name of M’Coy, known as Real-ha ha, big joke-said something as he went past, and that was when he heard it, the laugh. It was low, it was dirty, and it seemed to be directed at him. He got his beer and turned and stood with his elbows behind him on the bar and one boot heel hitched on the brass foot rail and lazily surveyed the room, not looking at M’Coy’s table but not avoiding it either. Be cool, he told himself, be easy. Besides, he did not know the laugh well enough yet to be absolutely sure it was him they had been laughing at. But it was him M’Coy was grinning at, and now he called out: “Hello, stranger.”
“Hello, M’Coy,” Andy answered. He would not call him Real; it sounded so dumb, even for a nickname, though M’Coy himself was proud of it, as if it really did make him someone special. “How’s it going?”
M’Coy took a drag from his cigarette and shoved his big gut against the table and pushed himself back, then leaned up his face and blew a fan of smoke at the ceiling, settling in for some fun. “Don’t see much of you, these days,” he said. “Gotten too good for us, now that you’ve moved out to Fulton Street?”
Easy, Andy told himself again, nice and easy. He shrugged. “You know how it is,” he said.
M’Coy, grinning wider, gave him a measuring look, while the others at the table, grinning too, waited for what was coming next.
“I was telling the boys here,” M’Coy said, “I heard you had a miracle over at that new place of yours.”
Andy let a beat or two pass by. “How’s that?” he said, making his voice go soft.
By now M’Coy was almost laughing outright. “Didn’t your old lady have a kid without ever being knocked up?” he said. “I call that miraculous.”
A heave of suppressed merriment passed along the table. Andy looked at the floor, his lips pursed, then sauntered forward, carrying his beer glass. He stopped in front of M’Coy, who was wearing a checked lumberjack shirt and denim overalls. Andy had gone chill all over, as if he was breaking out in a cold sweat, although his skin was dry. It was a familiar feeling; there was almost a kind of joy in it, and a kind of happy dread that he could not have explained. “Better watch your mouth, pal,” he said.
M’Coy put on a look of innocent surprise and lifted his hands. “Why,” he said, “what’ll you do, give me the one you can’t give your old lady?”
The others were still scrambling out of the way when Andy with a quick spin of the wrist threw the beer from his glass into M’Coy’s face and broke the rim of the glass against the table edge and thrust the crown of jagged spikes against the side of the fat man’s fat soft throat. The quiet spread outward from the table like fast, running ripples. A woman laughed and was abruptly silenced. Andy had a clear picture in his head of the barman directly behind him reaching down cautiously for the baseball bat he kept slung on two coat hooks behind the bar.
“Put down the glass,” M’Coy said, trying to sound tough but his eyes showing just how scared he was. Andy was trying to think of something good to say in reply, maybe something about M’Coy not seeming so Real now, when from behind him someone’s fist swiped him clumsily along the side of the head, making his ear sing. M’Coy, seeing him stunned, gave a shout of terror and reared away from the spikes of glass, and his chair tipped over and dumped him backwards on the floor, and despite the hurt to his ear Andy almost laughed at the thud of the man’s big head as it banged on the boards and the soles of his boots came flying up. There were three or four of them behind him, and he tried to turn and defend himself with the glass but already they had him, one clasping him about the waist from behind while a second one got both hands on his wrist and wrenched it as if it was a chicken that was being choked, and he dropped the glass, not from the pain but from fear that he would gash himself. M’Coy was on his feet again, and advanced now with a shit-eating smile smeared on his fat face and his left fist bunched and lifted-Andy with a sort of dreamy interest was wondering why he had never noticed before that M’Coy was a southpaw-while the others held him fast by the arms so that M’Coy could take leisurely aim and sink the first, sickening punch into his belly.
HE CAME TO IN A NARROW CONCRETE PASSAGEWAY THAT SMELLED OF sour beer and piss. He was lying on his back, looking up into a strip of sky with stars and rags of flying cloud. He tasted blood and puke. Pains in various parts of his body were competing for his attention. Someone was leaning over him, asking him if he was okay, which seemed to him pretty funny in the circumstances, but he decided not to risk letting himself laugh. It was the barman, Andy could not remember his name, a decent guy, family man, kept the place quiet, mostly. “You want me to call you a cab?” he asked. Andy said no, and got himself to a sitting position, and then, after a pause, and with the barman’s help, succeeded in hauling himself by stages to his feet. He said his truck was out front, and the barman shook his head and said he was crazy to think of driving, that he could be concussed, but he said he was all right, that he should get home, that his wife would be worrying, and the barman-Pete, that was his name, Andy suddenly remembered it, Pete Somebody-showed him a steel door at the end of the passageway that led out into
