The Third Person

‘You missed Happy Hour,’ he told me as he pulled the beer I ordered.

I looked around. Everybody had settled back into their depressed, isolated states, like dogs in the pound do when nobody’s looking to buy.

‘So I see.’

Another burst of froth as he hung back on the tap.

‘Happy Hour’s six to nine.’

‘Well, I missed my taxi.’

‘Yeah,’ he grunted. ‘Oh yeah.’

‘Yeah,’ I agreed, passing him a five pound note and not really understanding.

‘Two-fifty.’

Bizarrely, he gave me three pound coins as change. Behind me, on the jukebox, the Irish music grew more raucous, and the tramp started slamming the pinball machine into musical life. The woman at the other end of the bar stubbed out her cigarette as though slowly squashing a wasp, and then exhaled with grey satisfaction. She seemed to be on the verge of approaching me, so I beckoned the bartender back over.

‘I’m looking for someone,’ I said. ‘A guy called Jim Thornton.’

The woman was on her way over, as bone-thin and dry as a skeleton wrapped in prune-skin. Enormous, gaudy, plastic earrings brushed at her shoulders.

‘What do you want with Jim?’ she said.

‘He’s looking for Jim,’ the barman said helpfully.

She glared at him.

‘I heard that!’ she said. ‘I want to know what he wants with Jim.’

He walked off. ‘Shit, woman.’

‘I just want to talk to the guy,’ I said. ‘Is he here? Or do you know where I might find him?’

She appraised me. If she’d still had her cigarette, she would probably have blown some smoke at me.

Finally, she said, ‘Well what you want to talk to him about?’

I sipped my beer and tried a different tack.

‘Between me and him. Business.’

‘Business, huh?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What kind of business have you got with the man?’

I realised that the sound of pool-playing had stopped. The builders were watching us, and the woman’s voice was carrying a bit too far. I turned back to her.

‘Look – you know him or not?’

‘Maybe.’ She was having none of it. ‘Maybe I’m just real protective of him. Fed up at reporters coming round bothering the man. Hasn’t he lost enough? You tell me. I’d say he has.’

Reporters?

I took another sip of my beer and tried to remain calm. Having a gun in your jacket pocket should do a lot to allay fear and, truth be told, it was helping a bit. I wasn’t actually scared of the men – who were now gathering like a storm cloud around the near end of the pool table – but I was scared of this whole thing going wrong, the way that everything else seemed to have done today.

‘I’m not a reporter,’ I told her. ‘I don’t know anything about the guy.’

‘You some kind of fan boy, or something?’

‘I told you. I don’t know the guy from Adam. I don’t know who he is, or what he’s been through. I just know I need to talk to him about something.’

She leaned her head to the opposite side.

‘If you tell me why, then maybe I can help. Or else maybe my friends over at the pool table can.’

Five of the men were approaching. One of them – the leader – was holding his cue. The other four, at least, seemed unarmed.

I sipped my beer again, thinking: nonchalance.

Think it to display it.

‘I really wouldn’t do that,’ I suggested quietly, my hand moving casually to where my gun was resting.

Two of the unarmed men reached beneath their shirts and pulled out pistols, and held them pointing casually at the floor. The remaining two each produced knives. The first man tapped the ball end of his cue on the floor and sounded real pissed off when he spoke.

‘This fuck bothering you, Steph?’

I sipped my beer and pretended I didn’t exist.

Steph bent down slightly to get under my gaze and lift it back up to her. Then, she thumbed in the the direction of the man with the cue, glaring at me.

‘This here’s Joe Kennedy. And these are his boys.’

One of them grunted, right on time.

Steph said, ‘Maybe you can tell them why you want to see Jim.’

I was starting to be under the impression that Jim had better be worth it after all this trouble. Jim had better do fucking cartwheels. Play the piano and take requests.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’m gonna reach into my pocket, okay?’

I held my hands – palms out – in a pacifying gesture.

‘There’s a piece of paper in my left-hand trouser pocket. I’m gonna reach in and get it out.’

Nobody told me not to, so I dug in, retrieving the paper I’d taken from Walter Hughes’ house.

‘It’s about this. Here – who wants it?’

Steph held out her hand and clicked her tanned, ringed fingers twice.

‘Give.’

I passed it over, and she pulled it taut between her witch’s hands, frowning as she read it.

‘I just want to speak to him about that,’ I said. ‘And where he got it from.’

Steph looked up at Joe Kennedy and his friends.

‘It’s all right, boys. You go back to your pool now.’

‘You sure?’

‘I’m sure,’ she said. ‘Go on.’

They wandered away, putting their weapons back into whichever tight and revolting spaces they’d pulled them from. Steph looked me over again, evaluating me. I smiled and took a sip of beer.

‘All right,’ she said, turning around. ‘Put that candy-ass beer down and follow me. Bob!’

The landlord was polishing a pint glass with a rusty-looking bar towel.

‘Yeah?’

‘You order us down a big old bottle of liquor in back. And three glasses, and that’s all.’

‘Right up.’

He didn’t move, but I did – following Steph through a flimsy door by the side of the bar and wondering exactly how alive I was going to be ten minutes from now.

It was actually a revelation: exactly how much there was, hidden beneath the surface of the city. I supposed I shouldn’t have been surprised: in cities, like the people that live in them, the most interesting things happen beneath the surface. O’Reilly’s itself was subterranean, but the door by the bar led to steps that took Steph, and me behind her, down to another level entirely, and by the time we’d finished I figured we must have been a good two storeys beneath the streets of the city. We trailed along a dim corridor and then turned the corner into an enormous room.

Which, I guessed, was probably the real O’Reilly’s.

Loud music was playing from a battered old stereo behind a bar at one end, hooked up to building-sized speakers. Not Irish fiddle music here, either – but harder, harsher sounds: the sort of music you might play in your head while you fuck someone up. There were probably forty or fifty lost souls, half of them dancing, the rest just shuffling and talking. A card game was going on at a table over by the far end. A few jagged flashes of pale blue light from the strips on the ceiling took photos of everybody’s silhouettes, and the air was so filled with sweet, hazy smoke that it was like the floor was made from marijuana and on fire.

‘Bar,’ Steph shouted over her shoulder. ‘Try to keep up, now.’