The Accidental Detective and other stories: Short Story Collection. Laura Lippman

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СКАЧАТЬ herself whether she needed to gag him—he might awaken and start to struggle—and decided it was essential. She disconnected the phone, turned the television on so it would provide a nice steady hum in the background, then helped herself to his passport, Visa card, and all the cash he had. Then, as Barry slept the rather noisy sleep of the dead-drunk, she raided the minibar—wine, water, cashews. She was neither hungry nor thirsty, but the so-called honor bar was the one thing that Barry was cheap about. “It’s the principle,” he said, but his indignation had a secondhand feel to it, something passed down by a parent. Or, perhaps, a girlfriend. Moira, she suspected. She opened a chocolate bar but rejected it. The chocolate wasn’t quite right here.

      They were e-ticketed to Dublin, but that was a simple matter. She used the room connection to go online, and never mind the cost, rearranging both their travel plans. Barry was now booked home via Shannon, while she continued on to Dublin, where she had switched hotels, choosing the Merrion because it sounded expensive and she wanted Barry to pay. And pay and pay and pay. Call it severance. She wouldn’t have taken up with Barry if she hadn’t thought he was good for at least two years.

      It had been Barry’s plan to send her home, to continue to Dublin without her, where he would succumb to a mounting frenzy of Moira-mourning. That’s what he had explained in the pub last night. And he still could, of course. But she thought there might be a kernel of shame somewhere inside the man, and once he dealt with the missing passport and the screwed-up airline reservations, he might have the good sense to continue home on the business-class ticket he had offered her. (“Yes, I brought you to Ireland only to break up with you, but I am sending you home business class.”) He was not unfair, not through and through. His primary objective was to be rid of her, as painlessly and guiltlessly as possible, and she had now made that possible. He wouldn’t call the police or press charges, or even think to put a stop on the credit card, which she was using only for the hotel and the flight back.

      Really, she was very fair. Honorable, even.

      “MR. GARDNER WILL BE JOINING ME LATER,” she told the clerk at the Merrion, pushing the card toward him, and it was accepted without question.

      “And did you want breakfast included, Mrs. Gardner?”

      “Yes.” She wanted everything included—breakfast and dinner and laundry and facials, if such a thing were available. She wanted to spend as much of Barry’s money as possible. She congratulated herself for her cleverness, using the American Express card, which had no limit. She could spend as much as she liked at the hotel, now that the number was on file.

      It was time, as it turned out, that was harder to spend. For all Barry’s faults—a list that was now quite long in her mind—he was a serious and sincere traveler, the kind who made the most of wherever he landed. He was a tourist in the best sense of the word, a man determined to wring the most experience from travel. While in Galway, they had rented a car and tried to follow Yeats’s trail, figuratively and literally, driving south to see his castle and the swans at Coole, driving north to Mayo and his final resting place, in the shadow of Ben Bulben. She had surprised Barry with her bits of knowledge about the poet, bits usually gleaned seconds earlier from the guidebook, which she skimmed covertly while pretending to look for places to eat lunch. Skimming was a great skill, much underrated, especially for a girl who was not expected to be anything but decorative.

      Of course, it had turned out that Yeats’s trail was also Moira’s. She had been a literature major in college and she had a penchant for the Irish and a talent, apparently, for making clever literary allusions at the most unlikely moments. On Barry and Moira’s infamous trip, which had included not just Ireland but London and Edinburgh, Moira had treated Barry to a great, racketing bit of sex after seeing an experimental production of Macbeth at the Festival, one set in a Texas middle school. And while the production came off with mixed results, it somehow inspired a most memorable night with Moira, or so Barry had confided, over all those pints in Galway. She had brought him to a great shuddering climax, left him spent and gasping for breath, then said without missing a beat: “Now go kill Duncan.” (When the story failed to elicit whatever tribute Barry thought its due—laughter, amazement at Moira’s ability to make Shakespearean allusions after sex—he had added: “I guess you had to be there.” “No thank you,” she had said.)

      She did not envy Moira’s education. Education was highly overrated. A college dropout, she had supported herself very well throughout her twenties, moving from man to man, taking on the kinds of jobs that helped her to meet them—galleries, catering services, film production offices. Now she was thirty—well, possibly thirty-one, she had been lying about her age for so long, first up, then down, that she got a little confused. She was thirty or thirty-one, maybe even thirty-two, and while going to Dublin had seemed like an inspired bit of revenge against Barry, it was not the place to find her next position, strong euro be damned. Paris, London, Zurich, Rome, even Berlin—those were the kinds of places where a beautiful woman could meet the kind of man who would take her on for a while. Who was she going to meet in Dublin? Bono? But he was married and always prattling about poverty, a bad sign.

      So, alone in Dublin, she wasn’t sure what to do, and when she contemplated what Barry might have done, she realized it was what Moira might have done, and she wanted no part of that. Still, somehow—the post office done, Kilcommon done, the museums done—she found herself in a most unimpressive townhouse, studying a chart that claimed to explain how parts of Ulysses related to the various organs of the human body.

      “Silly, isn’t it?” asked a voice behind her, startling her, not only because she had thought herself alone in the room, but also because the voice expressed her own thoughts so succinctly. It was an Irish voice, but it was a sincere voice, too, the beautiful vowels without all the bullshit blarney, which had begun to tire her. She could barely stand to hail a cab anymore because the drivers exhausted her so, with their outsize personalities and long stories and persistent questions. She couldn’t bear to be alone, but she couldn’t bear all the conversation, all the yap-yap-yap-yap-yap that seemed to go with being Irish.

      “It’s a bit much,” she agreed.

      “I don’t think any writer, even Joyce, thinks things out so thoroughly before the fact. If you ask me, we just project all this symbolism and meaning onto books to make ourselves feel smarter.”

      “I feel smarter,” she said, “just talking to you.” It was the kind of line in which she specialized, the kind of line that had catapulted her from one safe haven to the next, like Tarzan swinging on a vine.

      “Rory Malone,” he added, offering his hand, offering the next vine. His hair was raven black, his eyes pale blue, his lashes thick and dark. Oh, it had been so long since she had been with anyone good looking. Perhaps Ireland was a magical place after all.

      “Bliss,” she said, steeling herself for the inane things that her given name inspired. Even Barry, not exactly quick on the mark, had a joke at the ready when she provided her name. But Rory Malone simply shook her hand, saying nothing. A quiet man, she thought to herself. Thank God.

      “HOW LONG ARE YOU HERE FOR?”

      They had just had sex for the first time, a most satisfactory first time, which is to say it was prolonged, with Rory extremely attentive to her needs. It had been a long time since a man had seemed so keen on her pleasure. Oh, other men had tried, especially in the beginning, when she was a prize to be won, but their best-intentioned efforts usually fell a little short of the mark and she had grown so used to faking it that the real thing almost caught her off guard.

      “How long are you staying here?” he persisted. “In Dublin, I mean.”

      “It’s … open-ended.” She could leave in a day, she could leave in a week. It all depended on when Barry would cut off СКАЧАТЬ