down on the side of the bed and began dabbing at him with the disinfectant, which stung. He thought of Cora Bennett, lying below in the dull yellow light of the lamp beside her bed, and his anger flared again. He felt weakened, as if he had let her take something away from him, something inside him that no one should ever even be allowed to see. Yet what angered him most was not the memory of what they had done together in her bed and how it might have affected him, but the fact that he had told her his plan for Stafford Limos.
“What happened?” Claire said again, calm now that she had something to be busy at. “Tell me,” she said, almost commanding, “tell me what you were fighting about.”
She was standing over him, pressing a pad of wet cotton against his face; he could feel the blanket warmth of her body. Her hands were capable and strong, surprisingly strong for such a skinny girl. He was being, he realized, mothered, for the second time that night, but how differently this time, with none of Cora’s hot tenderness. Claire put her hand to the back of his head to make him sit steady and pressed the swelling there and he flinched. Suddenly it came to him, out of nowhere, that it was not one of M’Coy’s buddies who had whacked him with a chair leg, but the barman, Pete the goddamned barman, with his baseball bat! He recalled him in the passageway, a tough little harp with a boxer’s nose, leaning over him and asking him if he was okay. Of course, it had to have been him-he would naturally have sided with M’Coy and the others. Andy clenched his fists on his knees. Somehow this betrayal was the thing that made him most angry now, angrier even than he had been when he broke the beer glass and stuck it at M’Coy’s throat. He could just see Pete, the little bastard, sidling out from behind the bar and taking up a batter’s stance, hefting the bat in his hands, waiting for just the right moment to give it to him across the back of the head. Well, he would get his, would Pete; some night at closing time after he had locked up and was stepping out by that steel door into the alley on his way home to his harp wife and his harp kids Andy would be there, waiting for him, with a tire iron-
Claire had taken the cotton pad away from his forehead and was leaning down to look into his face. “What is it, Andy?” she said. “What’s wrong?”
He stood up quickly, a red flare of pain exploding in his gut, and pushed her aside and limped to the window. “What’s wrong?” he said with a furious laugh. “What’s
Claire gave a little mousey cry. “But that’s…” She faltered. “How can they say that?”
He glared out at the walnut tree where it stood shivering in the wind. She knew, he had heard it in her voice, she knew what they had been saying about him; she had known all along how it would be, how they would talk about it, and distort it, and laugh at him behind his back, and she had not warned him. For all his anger there was a part of him that was ice-cold, standing off to the side, calculating, judging, thinking what to do next, thinking what to think next. It had always been like this with him, first the rage and then the icy chill. He thought of Cora Bennett again and another wave of anger and resentment rolled over him, resentment at Cora, at Claire and the baby, at this house, at South Boston, at his job, right back all the way to Wilmington and his lowlife family, his old man who was not much more than a hobo and his mother in her brown apron like Cora Bennett’s, smelling of cheap booze and menthol cigarettes at nine o’clock in the morning. He wanted to put his fist through this windowpane, he could almost feel it, the glass smashing, slicing his flesh, cutting down to the clean, white bone.
Claire was so quiet behind him he had almost forgotten she was there. Now in that little-girl voice that set his teeth on edge she said:
“We could try again. I could see another doctor-”
“-Who’ll tell you the same thing the other one did.” He had not turned from the window. He gave a bitter laugh. “I should do up a sign to hang it around my neck.
He heard her quick intake of breath, and was glad.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m sorry, too. Sorry I ever let you persuade me to take in that kid. Whose is it, anyway? Some Irish whore’s, I suppose.”
“Andy, don’t…” She came and stood behind him and put up a hand to massage the back of his neck, as he sometimes let her do. Now he jerked his head away and then was sorry he had, but only because of the pain, which had a liquid feel, as if his skull was filled partway to the top with some sluggish, oily stuff that swayed sickeningly at every sudden movement he made. A car passed by on the street, going slowly, its headlights dimmed; a Studebaker, light green, it looked to be, with a white top. Who would be driving down this street at four in the morning? “Come to bed,” Claire said softly, her voice heavy with weariness, and he turned, suddenly exhausted, and followed her meekly. As he was taking off his shirt he wondered if she would smell Cora Bennett on him, and realized he did not care, not at all.
18
QUIRKE DID NOT CONSIDER HIMSELF A BRAVE MAN, MAYBE NOT EVEN A courageous one. The fact was, his courage, physical or otherwise, had never been tested, and he had always assumed it never would be. Wars, murders, violent robberies, assaults with blunt instruments, the newspapers were full of such things, but they seemed to take place elsewhere, in a sort of parallel world ruled and run by a different, more violent, altogether more formidable and vicious species of human being than the ones he normally encountered. True, casualties from this other place of strife and bloodletting were brought to his expert attention all the time-often it seemed to him that he was in a field hospital far behind the front line, a hospital to which never the wounded but only the dead were delivered-but it had not occurred to him that one day he might himself be wheeled into the dissecting room on a trolley, bloodied and broken, like poor Dolly Moran.
When the two toughs materialized behind him out of the fog that autumn evening he knew at once that they were from that other world, the world that up to now he had only read about in the papers. They had an air of jaunty relentlessness; they would stick at nothing, these two. Early rage or hurt or unlovedness had hardened for them into a kind of indifference, a kind of tolerance, almost, and they would beat or maim or blind or kill without rancor, going about their workaday task methodically, thinking of something else. They had a smell, flat, sweetish yet stale, which was familiar to Quirke but which for the moment he could not place. He had stopped on the corner of Fitzwilliam Street to light a cigarette and suddenly they were there, on either side of him, the thin, red-faced one on his left, on his right the fat one with the large head. The thin one grinned and touched a finger to his forehead in a sort of salute. He looked uncannily like Mr. Punch, with those chafed red cheeks and a nose so hooked the sharp tip of it almost touched his lower lip.
“Evening, Captain,” he said.
Quirke glanced from one of them to the other and without a word set off swiftly across the road. The two came with him, still to right and left, keeping pace effortlessly, even the fat one, whose globular head was prodigiously huge and set with tiny eyes like glass beads; his coarse hair hung about his face like the strings of a mop; he was Judy to the other’s Mr. Punch. Quirke commanded himself not to hurry, and to walk as normal-but what was normal? In a conversational tone the red-faced one said:
“We know you.”
His fat friend agreed. “That’s right, we do.”
Gaining the corner of Mount Street Quirke halted. Office workers were passing by, hunched against the misty air-
“Look,” Quirke said, “what do you want? I have no money on me.”
This seemed to amuse Mr. Punch greatly. He leaned his head forward to look past Quirke at fat Judy.
“He thinks we’re beggars,” he said.
Fat Judy laughed and shook his huge head incredulously.
Quirke thought it necessary to maintain an air merely of irritation and exasperated bafflement; after all, he was a citizen returning home from work, and this impudent pair were keeping him from the blameless pleasures of the evening. He looked about. The twilight was much farther advanced than it had been a minute ago, and the fog was much more dense.
“Who are you?” he demanded. He had aimed for righteous indignation but it came out sounding merely
