“‘A celebration,’” Kilmartin went on. “None of this, what’s the word? None of this… lugubrious stuff. A lot to admire in that, I must say. Yourself?”

As earnest as Kilmartin seemed, his words were unconvincing to Minogue. It was long an open secret that funerals still put Irish people in quiet good humour.

Minogue said, “Couldn’t agree with you more.”

“Why’s that? — Oh I see now. You’re getting your Irish ready for the mass above. What am I saying, ‘mass.’ Christ. The ceremony, I mean. The service — the celebration. Whatever.”

Minogue had half-forgotten that the service was to be in Irish. There would be paintings, he had learned, hers and her students,’ displayed in the small church. Music was to be a big part of the event also.

The rain had come through here not so long ago. Wet ditches and half-dried roadway now ushered Minogue and Kilmartin up the narrowing road toward Calary, the Peugeot jiggling as it followed the shape of the road, leaning and swaying to its rises and dips — its very camber even, altered as it was yearly by the boggy soil beneath. Minogue struggled to detect which of the puddles might be potholes. It was no use. At least there was no oncoming traffic.

They were almost by a quarry when the bend abruptly revealed cars stopped in the road ahead. Minogue didn’t like the faint squeak from the brake pedal.

There were people out on the road.

“Oh Christ crippled on a crooked crutch,” Kilmartin said with little feeling. “And His Blessed Mother of course. Is that who I think it is, standing on the ditch there? ‘Ill Be Hooves’?”

“Could be him, all right.”

“It is,” Kilmartin added. “And what’s-his-face there. The sidekick. On a mobile, Delahunty. That hoor. Pinky and Perky, the pair of them. Christ.”

Minogue recognized Deputy Commissioner Eoin Burke, sleek in a well-cut navy-blue coat. It was Burke’s MBA-style talk and his fondness for press conferences, more than the suspect touch of dandyism, that had drawn the name on himself. A testy exchange on Meet the Press, a current affairs free-for-all that encouraged what were called stakeholders to vent about anything, had been the occasion of Burke’s folly.