A Death in Summer (23 page)

She looked at him and narrowed her eyes. “Give us a fag,” she said. “I don’t want your money.”

He got out his packet of Gold Flake and turned so that she could reach into his pocket and find his lighter. When they had lit up he asked her name. “Teri,” she said. “With one
r
and an
i.
”

“Teri,” he said. “That’s nice.” The first lungful of smoke made his head swim.

“It’s Philomena, really,” she said. “Teri is my professional name. What about you?”

“John,” he said without hesitation.

She gave him another narrow-eyed look. “No, it’s not,” she said.

He was about to protest, but her expression stopped him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s David. Really it is.”

“David. That’s a good name. Not Dave, or Davy?”

“No. Just David.”

They heard a siren starting up in the distance.

“I’d have let you into my room,” Teri said, “only my fellow might have arrived in on top of us.”

“Your fellow?”

She shrugged. “You know.”

He was astonished all at once to feel his eyes prickle with tears. “I wish you’d take that fiver,” he said, with sorrowful fervor. “It’s only a way of saying thanks.”

She considered him for a moment, and her eyes hardened. “Saying thanks to the whore with the heart of gold, eh?” she said, sounding all at once far older than her years. Way down at the end of the long avenue a flashing blue light appeared. “Here’s your ambulance.”

She turned and walked away, her heels clicking.

His hand throbbed.

*   *   *

And then there was the strangeness of being in hospital, where everything was familiar and at the same time topsy-turvy. The ambulance brought him to the Holy Family—of course, where else, given the grotesqueness of all that was happening? His place of work was in the basement but they put him upstairs, in the new wing, in a big ward with thirty or more beds in it. He had been treated first in Emergency by an Indian intern whom he knew from seeing about the place, a whimsical fellow with a high-pitched laugh and remarkably beautiful slender hands that were the color of cocoa on the backs and brick pink in the palms. “Oh dear oh dear,” the Indian said when he saw the wound, “what happened to you, my friend?”

He did not know what to answer. There had been two of them, the fellow in the windcheater and the one who had come up behind him and hit him expertly behind the right ear with something solid but pliant—a cosh, he supposed, if there really were such a thing outside of gangster pictures. He had been unconscious when they lopped off the ring finger of his left hand, not with a knife but with some kind of metal shears, for the skin at the knuckle was bruised and the bone had been crushed and severed rather than cut clean through. The Indian injected a shot of morphine and cleaned up the wound; then he was taken into the operating theater, where he was given local anesthetic. The surgeon, a red-faced fellow by the name of Hodnett, trimmed back the stub of bone and pulled the skin forward in a flap and sewed it along the rim of the palm, all the while discussing with the anesthetist the Royal St. George regatta due to take place the following Sunday in Dun Laoghaire. Sinclair was offered no sympathy, the fact that he was himself a Holy Family man precluding it, apparently. At the end Hodnett had leaned over him and said, “Someone certainly doesn’t like you, Sinclair my lad,” and laughed grimly and departed with his surgeon’s slouch, whistling.

*   *   *

Upstairs, he slept, thanks to exhaustion and the effects of the morphine. He woke at four, and that was when the pain went to work on him in earnest. His heavily bandaged hand was suspended in a sling attached to a metal stand, so that he had to lie on his back with his left arm lifted straight before him as if he had been felled and left frozen in the act of delivering a martial salute. Pain was a dark giant that seized him wordlessly and pummeled him, slowly, methodically, monotonously. Never before in his life, he realized, had he known what it was to concentrate, to the exclusion of all else, on one particular, relentless thing. The noises that the other patients made, the moans and mutterings, the fluttery sighs, came to him as if from somewhere high above him, on another level of existence. He and the giant were at the bottom of what might be a deep ravine, a secret cleft cut into the ordinary landscape of the world, and it seemed there was to be no getting free.

Yet at dawn the pain abated somewhat, or perhaps it was just that the light of day gave him more strength of spirit to cope with it. The night nurse had largely ignored him and his pleas for painkillers. Her successor on the morning shift was a bright-faced girl whom he had danced with at a staff party the previous Christmas; he could not recall her name, but thought the other nurses called her Bunny. She remembered him, and with his morning tea gave him clandestinely a large purple capsule, even the name of which she would not divulge—“The ward sister would have my hide!”—but which she assured him would do the trick, and winked, and went off, swinging her hips.

Quirke arrived first thing, accompanied by the detective, Hackett. It was all very awkward. Sinclair, blissfully groggy after taking the purple pill, was reminded of the time when he was at the Quaker school in Waterford and contracted mumps and his parents came to visit him. They were led into the infirmary by the form master, a nice man with the apt name of Bland. Sinclair’s mother had thrown herself onto the bed and wept, of course, but his father had kept himself at a safe distance, saying that his “doctors”—as if there had been a team of them, grave men with beards and white coats—had cautioned him not to approach too near to the patient for fear of consequences that he did not specify but that would be, it was understood, very serious indeed.

Quirke sat on a metal chair beside the night locker while Inspector Hackett loitered at the foot of the bed with one hand in a pocket of his trousers and the other hovering pensively near his blue-shadowed chin. Sinclair described what little he remembered of the attack, and the two men nodded. Quirke, for all his questions and commiserations, seemed distracted. “Was it the fellow on the phone?” he asked.

Sinclair knew who it was he meant. “No,” he said, “he had an educated voice—this one was just a thug.”

Hackett spoke up. “What fellow on the phone was that?”

“Someone called him at work the other day,” Quirke said, still sounding distracted.

“And?”

“Called me a Jewboy,” Sinclair said drily, “told me to keep my Jew nose out of other people’s business or I’d get it cut off. At least they settled for a finger.”

This brought a silence; then Hackett said, “The fellow that waylaid you in the lane, this thuggish fellow, what did he look like?”

“I don’t know—ordinary. In his twenties, thin face.”

“And the accent?”

“Dublin.”

“And the second one, who came up behind you?”

“Him I didn’t see at all,” Sinclair said. He lifted his good hand to touch the aching place behind his ear. “Felt him, though.”

Quirke offered Sinclair a cigarette but he said he would prefer one of his own. “In my jacket, in the locker there.”

Quirke brought the packet of Gold Flake and held out the flame of his lighter.

“The one on the phone,” Hackett said, “you had no idea what he meant by ‘other people’s business’? What did he say, exactly?”

Sinclair was growing tired of what felt like an interrogation, and besides, the effect of Nurse Bunny’s magic purple philter was wearing off. “I can’t remember,” he said shortly. “I thought it was just some joker playing tricks.”

The detective glanced at his bandaged hand. “Some trick, though,” he said.

An old man in one of the beds opposite began to cough, making a noise like that of a suction pump hard at work in some particularly deep and viscous sump.

“Was there no one around, when these two buckos tackled you?” Hackett asked.

“I saw no one. When I woke up there was a tramp there, a wino, trying to get my wallet.”

“You still had your wallet?” The detective looked surprised. “The other two hadn’t taken it?”

“They took nothing. Except my finger, of course.”

“So there was this tramp,” Quirke said, “that’s all?”

The old man had stopped coughing and was gasping for breath. No one seemed to be paying any heed to him.

“There was a girl,” Sinclair said.

“A girl?”

“On the corner, waiting for business. It was her that phoned for the ambulance.”

“What was her name?” Hackett asked.

“She didn’t say.” One
r
and an
i
. He wished she had taken the fiver he had offered her, the whore with the heart of gold.

The two men left shortly after that, and a nurse came to look at the ancient cougher opposite, and then a doctor was fetched and the curtain was pulled around the old man’s bed and everyone else lost interest.

*   *   *

He fell into a restless doze and dreamed of being chased down an endless broad street in the dark by unseen pursuers. Teri with an
i
was there, too, standing on the corner by the railings in her little black hat and yet at the same time somehow keeping pace with him as he ran, chatting to him, the pennies in her handbag jingling.

It was Bunny the nurse who put a hand on his shoulder and woke him, telling him he had another visitor—“You’re fierce popular, so you are.” His arm had gone numb but the hand at the end of it was throbbing worse than ever. The curtain was no longer around the bed opposite, and the old man was no longer in it. How long had he been asleep? The nurse moved back and Phoebe Griffin stepped forward tentatively, with a pained and sympathetic smile. “Quirke told me what happened,” she said. “You poor thing.”

He was not glad to see her. He was tired and dazed and in pain and wished to be left alone, to deal with himself and sort out his thoughts. That fitful sleep had only served to bring home to him more sharply how dreamlike and implausible all this was—the abusive phone call, the attack in the street, his lost finger, this bed, that old man dying in the bed across the way, and now Phoebe Griffin with her jittery smile and her handbag clasped to her breast and her hat that reminded him of the one the whore had worn. “I’m all right,” he said gruffly, forcing a smile of his own and struggling to raise himself on his elbow.

“But your finger,” Phoebe said, “… why?”

“I can only tell you what I told Quirke: I don’t know.” Oh, he was tired, very, very tired. “How are you?”

She shrugged that aside. “I’m all right, of course. But you—my God!”

He sank back against the pillows. He was thinking again of the infirmary at Newtown school, and of his mother at her lavish weeping and his father standing back looking bored. He had believed for a while that he was falling in love with Phoebe Griffin, and now the awful realization that he must have been mistaken clanged in him like a cracked bell. At once, of course, he felt a rush of tender concern for her; had he been able he would have taken her in his arms and rocked her like a baby.

“You were good to come,” he said weakly, trying for another smile.

She was still leaning over him, but now she stiffened and drew back an inch. She too was seeing the realization that had come to him; he saw her seeing it, and he was sorry.

“Well, why wouldn’t I come!” she exclaimed, with a breathily unsteady little laugh. She hesitated a moment, then sat down on the metal chair where Quirke had sat. “You needn’t tell me about it, if you don’t want to. It must have been dreadful.”

“I can’t remember much.”

“That’s good, I’m sure. The mind protects itself, by forgetting.”

“Yes.” Was she thinking, he wondered, of the things that she, for her part, needed to be protected against remembering? He knew so little about her—how could he have thought he loved her? Again he felt a hot rush of tenderness and pity. What was he to do with her? How was he to be rid of her? “I spoke to Dannie,” she said.

This brought a cold stab of alarm that he could not quite account for. “Oh?” he said. The thought of Phoebe and Dannie in communication, without him present, was unsettling. How did Phoebe come to have Dannie’s number, even?

“I hope it wasn’t a mistake,” Phoebe said. She had caught his look. “I thought she’d want to know.”

“It’s fine,” he said, “fine.” He looked away distractedly. “What did she say?”

“She was upset, of course. And of course she was baffled, as we all are.”

“Yes. She gets … excited.”

“I know.”

There was a pause. The hubbub in the ward had been steadily growing as the morning advanced, and by now they might have been conversing on the corner of a busy city street. It always fascinated him, the noises that hospitals made—for it seemed as if the place itself were producing all this clamor, this ceaseless buzz of talk, these distant hortatory calls and unsourced crashes, as if whole drawersful of cutlery were being dropped on the tiles.

“You don’t think,” Phoebe said tentatively, “… you don’t think this attack had something to do with Dannie’s brother’s death?”

He stared at her. That was exactly what he thought, although until this moment he had not known that he was thinking it. “How?” he said. “What connection could there be?”