Elegy for April by Benjamin Black Read Free Book Online Page A

disguise, slumming it.” His premises, in a mews off Mount Street Crescent beside the Pepper Canister Church, round the corner from Quirke’s flat, consisted of a low, cavelike space, reeking of oil and old exhaust smoke, barely big enough for a car and room to work on it; he had excavated a hole in the floor the length and depth of a grave, that afforded what he called “underbody access,” a formulation from which he derived much innocent glee. At the front there was a single petrol pump, which he locked with a giant padlock at night. He was large and soft and fresh-faced, with a shock of dirty-blond hair and babyishly candid eyes of a remarkableshade of palest green. Quirke had never seen him in anything other than a boilersuit caked with immemorial oil and rubbed to a high, putty-colored shine, shapeless and roomy yet painfully tight-fitting under the arms.
     
Wondering how on earth the new car was to be collected, Quirke had thought at last of Perry Otway, and on his return from the showrooms, when Malachy had departed, he went round to see him.
     
“An Alvis?” Perry said, and gave a long, expiring whistle.
     
Quirke sighed. He had begun to feel like a plain man married to a famously beautiful wife; the purchase of the car was thrilling at first and conducive to quiet pride, but the owning of it was already, before he had even driven it, becoming a burden and a worry. “Yes,” he said, with an attempt at airiness, “a TC 108 Super— ehm—Super—” He had forgotten what the damned thing was called.
     
“Not a Graber?” Perry said breathlessly, with a look almost of anguish. “A Graber Super Coupe?”
     
“You know the model, then.”
     
Perry did his other laugh, the one that sounded like an attack of hiccups. “I know of it. Never seen one, of course. You know there are only—”
     
“—three of them in the world, yes, I know that, and I’ve just bought one of them. Anyway, the thing is, I need someone to collect it for me, from the showrooms”— Quirke could see Perry getting ready to ask the obvious question and went on hur-riedly—”since I haven’t renewed my license. And then I need somewhere to keep it.” He looked doubtfully past Perry’s shoulder into the interior of the workshop, which was lit by a single naked bulb suspended on a tangled flex from the ceiling.
     
“I have a couple of garages along here,” Perry said, pointing up the lane with his thumb. “I’ll do you a good price on the rent,of course. We can’t leave an Alvis sitting out on the street to be ogled and pawed at by any Tom, Dick, or Harry, can we, now.”
     
“Then I’ll phone them and say you’ll be up to fetch it. When?”
     
Perry took an oil-soaked rag from the kangaroo pouch at the front of his boilersuit and wiped his hands. “Right now, old man,” he said, laughing. “Right now!”
     
“No, no— the fellow up there said they’d have to check it over and so on, and let me have it tomorrow.”
     
“That’s rot. I’ll toddle up and get it— they know me at Crawford’s.”
     
Quirke did not go with him, certain that if he did he would be shown up this time for the fraud that he was. Instead he went to his flat and made another pot of tea. Over the past weeks he had come to detest the taste of tea with a passion which it would not have seemed so harmless and commonplace a beverage could call forth. What he wanted, of course, was a good stiff drink, Jameson whiskey for preference, although in the latter weeks of his most recent binge he had developed a craving for Bushmills Black Label, which was a Northern brand not easy to find down here in the South. Yes, a smoky dive somewhere, with a turf fire and dim men talking together in the shadows, and a tumbler of Black Bush in his fist, that would be the thing.
     
Time passed, and with a start he came to and realized that he had been standing in a sort of trance beside the kitchen table for fully five minutes, dreaming of drink. He was angry with himself. Was it not disgust with what drink