Christine Falls: A Novele by Benjamin Black

want you to talk to Mal.”
    He glanced at her, his eyebrows lifting. “What about?”
    She walked to the water’s edge. The two swans turned and swam towards her, etching a closing V on the flawless surface of the water. They must think she had food, and why not? Everyone expected something of her.
    “I want you and Mal to stop fighting,” she said. “I want you to be…reconciled.”
    She laughed self-consciously at the word, the florid sound of it. Still he looked at her, but he was frowning now, his brows drawn down.
    “Did Mal ask you to come here?” he asked suspiciously.
    Now it was her turn to stare.
    “Of course not!” she said. “Why would he?”
    But Quirke would not relent.
    “Tell him,” he said evenly, “I’ve done all I can for him. Tell him that.”
    The swans before her were turning from side to side slowly on their own reflections, growing impatient with her failure to produce whatever it was that her stopping and standing like this had seemed to promise, this woman in her blood-colored coat and archer’s hat. She paid the birds no heed. She was looking at Quirke, not understanding what he meant, and saw she was not expected to understand. But what could it be that Quirke had done for Mal, Quirke of all people, Mal of all people?
    “I’m pleading with you, Quirke,” she said, appalled at herself, at the abjectness she was reduced to. “I’m begging you. Talk to him.”
    “And I’m asking you: what about?”
    “Anything. Phoebe—talk about Phoebe. He listens to you, even though you think he doesn’t.”
    The swan again made its peculiar hoot, calling to her querulously.
    “Must be the female,” Quirke said. Sarah, baffled, frowned. He pointed to the birds behind her. “They mate for life, so it’s said. She must be the female.” He smiled his crooked smile. “Or the male.”
    She shrugged aside the irrelevance.
    “He’s under a great deal of strain,” she said.
    “What sort of strain?”
    He was, she realized, becoming bored, she could hear it in his voice. Patience, tolerance, indulgence, these had never been among Quirke’s anyway not numerous virtues.
    “Mal doesn’t confide in me,” she said. “He hasn’t, for a long time.”
    Again she had pushed at that door into the darkness, again he declined her invitation to enter with her.
    “You think he’d confide in me?” he said, with intended harshness.
    “He’s a good man, Quirke.” She lifted her hands to him in a gesture of pained supplication. “Please—he needs to talk to someone.”
    He in turn lifted his great shoulders, let them fall again. There were moments, such as when he flexed his great broad frame like this, that he seemed made not of flesh and bone but of some more dense material, hewn and carved.
    “All right, Sarah,” he said in a voice cavernous with weary impatience. The swans, discouraged at last, turned and glided serenely, disdainfully, away. “All right,” he said, a deeper fall. “All right.”

     

    HE INVITED MAL TO LUNCH AT JAMMET’S. THE CHOICE, HE WAS WELL aware, was a mild piece of mischief on his part, since fine food was not among the rich things that Mal coveted, and he was uncomfortable amidst the restaurant’s down-at-heel splendeurs . He sat vigilantly on a chair that was as spindly as his own frame, with his long neck protruding from his white shirt collar and the fingers of both hands—a strangler’s delicate, shapely hands, Quirke always thought—clamped on the table edge as if he might leap up at any moment and hurry out of the place. He wore his habitual pinstripes and bow tie. Despite the elegant cut of his clothes he never seemed quite squared up in them; it was as if someone else had dressed him with fussy care, as a mother would dress her unwilling son in his Confirmation suit. The maître d’ descended on them flutteringly and offered M’sieur Kweerk and his guest an aperitif, and Mal sighed heavily and looked at his watch. Quirke enjoyed seeing him