“I know I was drunk,” cried Gypo, responding joyfully to this friendly overture from Gallagher. His anger vanished. His whole soul leaned out eagerly towards Gallagher, craving support. He paused momentarily after uttering the first sentence. He remained silent, leaning forward, looking at Gallagher, intently, as if he expected Gallagher to finish the statement for him. But when Gallagher’s thin lips remained sealed, he hurtled on excitedly, as if he were stumbling recklessly through dangerous obstacles. His voice was uneven and flurried. “But I’d swear be Almighty God that it was him I saw goin’ out the door and runnin’ up the lane after Frankie. An’ if it wasn’t him it must have been somebody else like him, for I’d know the cut of his shoulders anywhere. I would if ye put my head in a bag.”
“You told me,” continued Gallagher in the same friendly scolding tone, “that you followed the Rat across town until you came to … Where was that you said you lost sight of him? I forgot now.”
Gypo started and stuttered. Good Lord, what had he said? He must say the same thing he had said before. But he could not remember saying that he followed the Rat across town. Did he say it in the public-house or did he not? His forehead was burning. The hammering at the top of his skull was blinding his eyes with pain. Almost unconsciously he put his hand to his forehead and blurted out, pathetically, on a peculiar high note, an amazingly childish and hysterical sentence.
“Commandant, I’m all mixed up an’ I can remember nothin’.”
It was horrid, that pitiful, forlorn cry of pain and of absolute despair coming from such a giant.
“All right then,” said Gallagher, “don’t worry yourself. We have to get to the bottom of this business, so we’ll just set to work, the two of us, and maybe we can piece the whole thing together. Now the best thing we can do is to begin at the end and go backwards. We’ll work backwards until we come to the point where you lost that man you saw tracking Frankie McPhillip out of the Dunboy Lodging House. In that case we’ll begin with where you were before you came in here. Bartly Mulholland tells us that you were at Aunt Betty’s, with a woman called Connemara Maggie. You must have been with her, because Bartly saw you with his own eyes giving her two pound notes. There were three empty whisky bottles in the room. They had been bought by you, I suppose. Well? A man is entitled to drink his own whisky that he has bought with his own money, I suppose. That has got nothing to do with our business, has it Gypo? None whatsoever. We merely want to trace that man that tracked Francis Joseph McPhillip out of the Dunboy Lodging House. Well! What do we find next? A friend of yours called Katie Fox, once upon a time a comrade of ours, they are all to the front in this business, all those people that were once comrades of ours, she told Bartly Mulholland that you gave three pounds to an Englishwoman at Aunt Betty’s and two pounds to Aunt Betty to pay a debt for this woman. You wanted to send her back to London. A kind of Barnardo’s Home or something, this Aunt Betty’s, for stray women. Well, of course, that again has nothing to do with us. A man is entitled to do what he likes with his own money. But. … Good Lord, Gypo,” he cried, striking the table and bursting out into a strange hilarious laugh, “you were having a time of it. Where did you get all the money? Ha! Now don’t get excited. I know it’s no business of mine. But if you’re going to be taken back into the Organization … Well! There are ugly rumours flying about. … You know the way silly rumours fly around Dublin. It’s awful. But the fact is, that people are talking about sailors, American sailors, being robbed at the back of Cassidy’s public-house. It’s only a rumour, of course, and again, that friend of yours, Katie Fox—shall we call her one of our ex-comrades?—she is responsible for the rumour, according to Bartly Mulholland. Of course, it’s obviously originated with her. She has very probably invented that story out of spite, simply because you went with the other girl. Or … Tell me, is there any truth in it, Gypo? I mean in the rumour of your having robbed a sailor?”
Gypo started, as if out of a heavy sleep. His brain went thud, thud, thud, trying to think whether he should say “yes,” or “no.” If he said “yes,” would he be caught in the act of telling a lie? If he said “no,” would he be able to find any other means of explaining how he got the money? Several other questions and problems also crowded into his mind simultaneously, in confusion. There were doubts, uncertainties and suspicions. He was completely in a mesh. His mind was like a refuse heap. There was no beginning or end to any chain of reasoning. He gave it up in despair.
“Commandant,” he said, again touching his forehead, “I can make out nothin’. My head is sore. I must be drunk.”
Again it was the same bewildered, agonizing cry of a lost human soul. A weak, thin, childish voice, coming from a giant.
“Well, never mind,” said Gallagher cheerfully, “we’ll leave it at that. We’ll carry on. Before you went down to Aunt Betty’s, Mulholland saw you in a fish-and-chip shop, treating a crowd of people to a free meal. He said you spent about a pound there. Two pounds, three pounds, two pounds, one pound. …
