I didn't say anything, and we let the silence stretch. For a moment I had the thought that the room was
filling up with dead people— Eddie, Dennis, Ballou's parents, and a few ghosts of my own, all the people who'd passed on but still lingered on the edge of consciousness. If I turned my head quickly, I thought, I might see my aunt Peg, or my own dead parents.
'Dennis was gentle,' he said. 'Maybe that was why he went, to prove a hardness he didn't have. He was Eddie's friend, and Eddie came to the service for him. After that he would come around sometimes. I never had much for him to do.'
'He told me he watched you beat a man to death one night.'
He looked at me. Surprise showed in his eyes. I didn't know if it was surprise that Eddie had told me this or that I was repeating it. He said, 'He told you that, did he?'
'In a basement somewhere around here, he said it was. He said you were in a furnace room and you had some guy tied to a post with a length of clothesline, and you beat him to death with a baseball bat.'
'Who was it?'
'He didn't say.'
'And when did it happen?'
'Some years ago. He didn't get any more specific than that.'
'And was he there?'
'So he said.'
'Or do you suppose he just put himself into the story?' He picked up his glass but didn't drink from it.
'Though I don't think much of it as a story, do you? One man beats another with a ball bat. It's nasty, but it doesn't make much of a story.
You couldn't dine out on a story like that.'
'There was a better story going around a couple of years ago.'
'Oh?'
'A fellow disappeared, a man named Farrelly.'
'Paddy Farrelly,' he said. 'A difficult man.'
'They said he gave you trouble, and then he disappeared.'
'Is that what they said?'
'And they said you went into half the saloons on Ninth and Tenth Avenues carrying a bowling bag, and you would open the bag and show everybody Farrelly's head.'
He drank some whiskey. 'The stories they tell,' he said.
'Was Eddie around when that happened?'
He looked at me. There was no one anywhere near us now. The bartender was all the way down at the end of the bar, and the men who'd been closest had left. 'It's godawful warm in here,' he said. 'What do you need that suit jacket for?'
He was wearing a jacket himself, tweed, heavier than mine. 'I'm comfortable,' I said.
'Take it off.'
I looked at him, took off the jacket. I hung it over the back of the stool next to me.
'The shirt, too,' he said.
I took it off, and the T-shirt after it. 'Good man,' he said. 'God's sake, put your clothes back on before you catch cold. You got to be careful, a bastard'll come in and start talking about old times, and the next thing you know it's all recorded, he's wearing a fucking wire. Paddy Farrelly's head? My mother's father was from Sligo, he used to say it was the hardest thing in the world to find a man alive in Dublin that wasn't in the GPO during the Easter Rising. Twenty brave men marched into that post office, he said, and thirty thousand marched out. Well, it's that hard to find a son of a bitch on Tenth Avenue who didn't see me showing round the bloody head of poor Farrelly.'
'Are you saying it didn't happen?'
'Oh, Jesus,' he said. 'What happened and what didn't? Maybe I never opened the fucking bowling bag.
Maybe a fucking bowling ball was all it ever contained. They all love a story, you know. They love to hear it, they love to tell it, they love the little shiver it puts between their shoulder blades. The Irish are the worst that way. Especially in this fucking neighborhood.' He drank, set the glass down. 'It's rich soil around here, you know. Plant a seed and a story grows like weeds.'
'What happened to Farrelly?'
'Why should I know? Maybe he's in Tahiti, drinking the milk of coconuts and fucking little brown-skinned girls. Did anyone ever find his body? Or the legendary fucking head?'
'What did Eddie know that made him dangerous?'
'Nothing. He didn't know a damn thing. He was no danger to me.'
'Who could he have been a danger to?'
'Nobody I can think of. What did he ever do? He did some thieving. He went along with some boys who took a load of furs out of a loft on Twenty-seventh Street. That's the biggest thing I can think of that he was a part of, and there'd be no stink coming off that one. It was all arranged, the owner let them have the key. He wanted the
