said.
'Take all the time you want, Marty.'
'I'll be sweetly and resoundingly fucked,' he said. 'You know who the cocksucker was quoting?'
'Who?'
'Me,' he said, eyebrows raised high in indignation. 'He was quoting me. Or paraphrasing me, or whatever the hell you want to call it.'
'No kidding?'
'You wouldn't know it,' he said, 'because nobody knows it, but once upon a time I had the bad taste and ill fortune to write a play.'
'The Tumult in the Clouds.'
'My God, how would you know that? It's from Yeats, the poem's
'An Irish Airman Foresees His Death.' Sweet Christ, it was awful.'
'I'm sure it was better than that.'
'No, it was a stinker, and you don't have to take my word for it.
The reviews showed rare unanimity of opinion on that subject. Nobody objected to the title, though, even though it had nothing to do with flying.
There was plenty of tumult, however. Short on clouds, long on tumult. But it was Irish as all getout, my heartfelt autobiographical take on the Irish-American experience, and nothing gets an Irish book or play off to a better start than a title from Yeats. It's good the old boy wrote a lot.'
'And the line's from your play?'
'The line?'
'The one about the withered hand and the nation's throat.'
'Oh, that Will did a turn on. In the play the withered hand was Queen Victoria's, if I remember correctly.
And the throat was that of Holy Ireland, you'll be unsurprised to learn. It was a tinker woman who delivered the line. Mother of Mercy, what did I know about tinker women? Or Ireland either, for that matter.
I've never been to the poor benighted country, and never want to go, either.'
'You're pretty good,' I said.
'How's that, Mattie?'
'Not recognizing the line at first. Then realizing that I must know where it's from, and deciding to come up with it first yourself. And pretending that you're unaware that I know where the line's from, but how could you be? Because how would I know the original line if I didn't know about the play?'
'Hey, you lost me around the clubhouse turn.'
'Oh?'
He hefted his glass. 'You sober sons of bitches,' he said, 'you just don't understand how this stuff slows down the thought processes. You want to go over that again? You must have known because I had to know because you knew because I said you said—you see what I mean, Mattie? It's confusing.'
'I know.'
'So do you want to run it by me one more time?'
'I don't think so.'
'Hey, suit yourself. You're the one brought it up, so—'
'Give it up, Marty.'
'How's that?'
'I know you did it. You wrote the letters and you killed Regis Kilbourne.'
'That's fucking nuts.'
'I don't think so.'
'Why would I do any of that? You want to tell me that?'
'You wrote the letters to stay in the limelight.'
'Me? You're kidding, right?'
'Will made you really important,' I said. 'You wrote a column and the next thing anybody knew a killer was knocking off prominent people all over New York.'
'And Omaha. Don't forget Omaha.'
'Then Will killed himself, and it turned out the Wizard of Oz was just the little man behind the curtain. He was Adrian Whitfield, and he wasn't larger than life anymore. There was no more story, and that meant no more front- page headlines for you. And you couldn't stand that.'
'I got a column runs three times a week,' he said. 'You know how many people read what I write, Will or no Will?'
'Quite a few.'
