A Death in Summer by Benjamin Black

well together, I think.” He paused. “Does he like me ?”
    “Oh,” she said gaily, “we don’t talk about such things.”
    He did not smile. “What things do you talk about?” Few, he supposed, knowing Quirke.
    She considered, tilting her head, birdlike, to one side. “Well, he does talk to me about the work itself. This latest business, for instance—that man Jewell, who was shot.” She was silent for a moment, looking into her cup. “He tells me you know his daughter—no, his sister, is it?”
    “Yes, Denise—Dannie, she’s called. I’ve known her since college.”
    “Do you know her well?”
    He hesitated. That question again, the same one Quirke had asked him. “We play tennis together now and then,” he said.
    “Hmm.” She studied him with a closer intent. “I’m sure,” she said, “you’d be a good friend to have.” She uncurled herself from the bed and went to the little stove in the corner and poured more coffee for herself. She turned to him and lifted the percolator inquiringly, but he shook his head. She went back and crawled onto the bed and composed herself as before.
    He wondered if he might risk a cigarette, and as if she had read his thoughts she said, “You can smoke if you like. There’s an ashtray on the mantelpiece.” She watched him fetch out his cigarettes and light one, and then stand up to take the ashtray and set it on the floor beside his chair. “What’s it like, being a Jew?” she asked.
    Again he stared, expelling a surprised quick stream of smoke. It was a question he had never been asked before, a question he had never expected to be asked. He gave a brief helpless laugh. “I don’t think I do think about it. I mean, you don’t think about what you are, do you?”
    “But I don’t think I am anything, you see. I’m just like everybody else, here. But you—you have an identity, a race.”
    “It’s not really a race.”
    She waved an impatient hand. “I know, I know,” she said, “I know all about that, the Semitic peoples, and so on. But the fact is, you are a Jew, a member of a tiny, a tiny minority. That must feel like something—I mean, you must be aware of it, part of the time, at least.”
    He saw what it was. Despite what she claimed, she did not think she was like everybody else, not at all; she thought she was like him, or what she took him to be, an outsider, an outcast even, a paleface among the Comanches.
    “My people weren’t religious,” he said, “and if you’re not at least a little bit religious then you’re not really a Jew.”
    “But in the war, you must have been—you must have felt…?”
    He set his cup, which still had coffee in it, on the floor beside the ashtray. “I’ll tell you a story,” he said. “The war was ending, and the news of the concentration camps was starting to come out. It was Easter time, when the Catholic Church collects a yearly offering from parishioners, you know? One dark night there was a knock at our front door and my mother sent me to answer it. There, on the threshold, was the biggest, reddest-faced priest I had ever seen, a real clodhopper, his neck bulging over his collar and his little pig eyes popping. He looked down at me along the length of his soutane, and in the thickest Cork accent you can imagine said, ‘ I’m here for the Jews! ’” She put her head to the side again, frowning uncertainly. “The dues, he meant,” Sinclair said, “the Easter dues, only a Cork d always comes out as a j .”
    “What did you do,” she asked, laughing now. “What did you say?”
    “I shut the door in his face and ran into the kitchen and told my mother it was a traveling salesman selling Bibles.”
    “Were you frightened?”
    “I suppose so. They were always frightening in those days, priests and so on—anyone official from their world.”
    She pounced. “You see?” she said, triumphant. “ Their world. You did feel different.”
    “Every child feels different, Jew or