“Oh, various people. You know what this town is like; everyone knows everyone else’s business.”
Malachy, Quirke was thinking- would Malachy have spoken to this vehement little man? What if he had? None of what Latimer had said was a secret. He gazed along the length of the bar. The light indoors was brownish, dim, and outside it was gray. He felt he was in a cave, far at the back, crouched and watching.
“I mention all this,” Latimer said, “to make the point that you can’t possibly know anything about families. How could you? There are ties you wouldn’t feel- blood ties.”
“Blood ties? I thought we dispensed with stuff like that when we left the caves.”
“Ah, but there, you see? The very fact that you say that shows your ignorance, your lack of experience in these things. The family is the unit of society and has been since the very beginning, when we were still going on all fours- you know that much, at least, surely. Blood is blood. It binds”- he clenched one of those little hands into a fist and held it up before Quirke’s face-”it holds.”
Quirke signaled to the barman and asked for a whiskey- Bushmills Black Label- slurring the words as if to pretend he was not really speaking them. The barman gave him another look, more knowing than the first one, more complicit.
Latimer was picking up crumbs from his plate rapidly with the wetted tip of a finger and putting them into his mouth. His head was small, too small even for that neat little body. A tomtit, Quirke thought, that is what he is like, a tomtit bird, quick, bright, hungry, watchful.
“Tell me the truth,” Quirke said quietly. “Tell me where April is.”
Latimer widened his eyes, putting on a look of large, mild innocence. “What makes you think I know?”
The barman brought the whiskey, and Quirke drank off half of it in one swallow. The feeling of it spreading through his chest made him think of a small, many-branched tree bursting slowly into hot, bright flames.
“Your sister disappears, vanishes without trace,” he said, shifting his weight on the stool. “There’s blood on the floor beside her bed that someone has cleaned up. It’s a very particular type of blood. Her family’s reaction is to hush up the whole thing-”
“Hush up!” Latimer said, with an ugly laugh. “You make us sound like the Borgias.”
Quirke said nothing to that. “I think you know where she is,” he said in a harsh undertone. “I think you all know- you, your mother, your uncle.”
“They don’t.”
“What?” Quirke turned to look at him. “What do you mean, they don’t? Does that mean that you do? Tell me.”
Latimer calmly drank the last of his drink, then wiped a fringe of foam from his silly mustache with a busy finger, more like a cat now than a bird. “I mean,” he said, “that none of us knows.” He chuckled again, shaking his head as if at something childish. “You’re quite wrong about all this, you know, Quirke. It’s what I said earlier, you don’t understand families, and especially you don’t understand a family such as ours.” Quirke too had finished his drink, and Latimer signaled to the barman to bring him another one. “Tell me, what, really, do you know about the Latimers, Dr. Quirke?”
Quirke was watching the barman reaching for the Bushmills. “I only know,” he said, “what everyone else does.” There is, he was thinking, something special about the way light congregates inside a whiskey bottle, the way it glows there, tawny and dense, as it does nowhere else; something almost sacramental.
“To belong to a family like mine,” Latimer said, tapping the tip of an index finger on the bar for emphasis, “is like being a member of a secret society- no, a secret tribe, one that has accepted all that’s demanded of it by the invading mercenaries and missionaries but on the quiet still keeps to its own ways, its own customs, its own gods- especially its own gods. Outside, in the world, we look like everyone else, we talk like everyone else, we might be everyone else- in other words, we blend in. But among ourselves we’re a breed apart. It comes, I suppose, from being obsessed with ourselves- I mean with each other.” He paused. Quirke’s whiskey arrived. He had determined he would not touch it until a full minute had gone by. He looked at the blood-red second hand of his watch making its round, steadily and, so it seemed to him, smugly. “My father,” Latimer said, “was a very proud man. Everybody knew him for a hell-raiser and all that, but it was only a front. Inside the house he was nothing like the image the world had of him.”
The minute was up. In Quirke’s breast another small tree flared and flamed.
“What was he like, then?” Quirke asked, taking a second sip of whiskey and holding it in his mouth, savoring the scald of it.
“He was a monster,” Latimer said, without emphasis. “Oh, not in the conventional sense. A monster of pride and determination and- and dauntlessness. Do you know what I mean? No, you don’t, of course. How I loved him, how we all did. I suppose I should have hated him. He was a big man, with a big heart, handsome, dashing, brave- all the things that I’m not.”
He paused, gazing into the creamy dregs of his glass. Quirke’s whiskey glass was almost empty again, and he was measuring off another minute on his watch. “You’ve made a success of your life,” he said. “Look at the reputation you have, at- what age are you?”
“Anyone can become a physician,” Latimer said dismissively, “but you have to be born a hero.” He turned to Quirke again. “I suppose my uncle told you how he and my father fought side by side in the General Post office in 1916? My father fought, all right, but Uncle Bill did nothing more than carry a few messages and was nowhere near the GPO that week. That didn’t stop him getting elected on the patriotic ticket. My father despised him. Little Willie, he used to call him, the man in the gap.”
The minute had fled, and Quirke was gazing pensively at his reemptied glass. “How did he and April get on?”
Latimer laughed. “You just won’t let the subject of poor April alone, will you?” He shrugged. “She loved him as I did, of course. His death was a disaster in both our lives. It’s as I say, Quirke, you wouldn’t understand that kind of closeness. And then my mother erected the monument to her beloved, lost husband. It was more like a totem pole, but carved out of the living tree and set solidly in the middle of the living room floor. It kept growing all the time, sending its branches along the hall and up the stairs into the bedrooms, and under its shade we clung to each other. The leaves never fell off those limbs.”
His voice had grown husky, and Quirke wondered uneasily if he were going to weep.
“Yes,” Quirke said, “I suppose it would be hard, living in the shadow of a man like your father.”
Latimer sat quiet for a long moment, then, suddenly gone pale, he turned on Quirke a look of deep and furious scorn. “I don’t want your pity, Quirke,” he said. “Don’t you dare.”
Quirke said nothing, only signaled for another drink.
16
THE EARLY DARK HAD FALLEN BY THE TIME HE GOT BACK TO the hospital. He descended with careful steps the grand marble staircase that led to nothing but the dim lower regions of the building. The pathology department was empty- Sinclair must have decided to let himself go home early. He went into his office and sat down in his overcoat at his desk and lit a cigarette, encountering a difficulty in aligning the tip of it with the match flame. He could hear the heavy sound of his own breathing. He scowled. He could not remember what it was he was supposed to be thinking about. It might be best, he thought, to lie down for a while. He took off his coat- was there rain, had he been walking in it?- and curled up on the old buttoned-down green leather sofa in the corner and at once pitched headlong into riotous sleep, in which he dreamt of being lured along endless, dark, and winding corridors by something he could not see but only sense, a catlike, purring presence retreating ahead of him, always around the next corner, and then the next. He woke with a muffled cry and did not know where he was. He had dribbled in his sleep, and his spit had dried and made his cheek stick to the leather of the sofa. He sat up, gouging the heels of his hands into his eyes. His mouth felt as if it had been reamed of two or three layers of protective membrane. His innards, too, were burning. Insult- the word came to him, reverberant-a gross insult to the system. It was a judgment he had handed down himself on many a cadaver.