Lawrence Block - Out on the Cutting Edge

“The draught Guinness is as good as you’ll get this side of the ocean,” Ballou said. “I wouldn’t carry the bottled stuff, it’s thick as syrup.”

“I’ll have a Coke.”

“You don’t drink,” he said.

“Not today.”

“You don’t drink at all, or you don’t drink with me?”

“I don’t drink at all.”

“And how is that?” he asked. “Not drinking at all.”

“It’s all right.”

“Is it hard?”

“Sometimes. But sometimes drinking was hard.”

“Ah,” he said. “That’s the fucking truth.” He looked at the bartender, who responded by drawing a Coke for me. He put it in front of me and moved off out of hearing range.

Ballou picked up his glass and looked at me over the top of it. He said, “Back when the Morrisseys had their place around the corner. Their after-hours. I used to see you there.”

“I remember.”

“You drank with both hands, those days.”

“That was then.”

“And this is now, eh?” He put his glass down, looked at his hand, wiped it across his shirtfront, and extended it toward me. There was something oddly solemn about our handshake. His hand was large, his grip firm but not aggressively so. We shook hands, and then he took up his whiskey and I reached for my Coke.

He said, “Is that what ties you to Eddie Dunphy?” He lifted his glass, looked into it. “Hell of a thing when the booze turns on you. Eddie, though, I’d say he never could handle it, the poor bastard. Did you know him when he drank?”

“No.”

“He never had the head for it. Then I heard he stopped drinking. And now he’s gone and hanged himself.”

“A day or so before he did it,” I said, “we had a talk.”

“Did you now?”

“There was something eating him, something he wanted to get off his chest but was afraid to tell me.”

“What was it?”

“I was hoping you might be able to answer that.”

“I don’t take your meaning.”

“What did he know that was dangerous knowledge? What did he ever do that would weigh on his conscience?”

The big head swung from side to side. “He was a neighborhood boy. He was a thief, he had a mouth on him when he drank, he raised a little hell. That’s all he ever did.”

“He said he used to spend a lot of time here.”

“Here? In Grogan’s?” He shrugged. “It’s a public house. All sorts of people come in, drink their beer or whiskey, pass the time, go on their way. Some have a glass of wine. Or a Coca-Cola, if it comes to that.”

“Eddie said this was where he used to hang out. We were walking one night, and he crossed the street to avoid walking past this place.”

The green eyes widened. “He did? Why?”

“Because it was so much a part of his drinking life. I guess he was afraid it would pull him in if he got too close.”

“My God,” he said. He uncapped the bottle, topped up his drink. The two ice cubes had melted but he didn’t seem bothered by their absence. He picked up the glass. Staring into it he said, “Eddie was my brother’s friend. Did you know my brother Dennis?”

“No.”

“Very different from me, Dennis was. He had our mother’s looks. She was Irish. The old man was French, he came from a fishing village half an hour from Marseilles. I went there once, a couple of years ago, just to see what it looked like. I could see why he left. There was nothing there.” He took a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket, lit one, blew out smoke. “I look just like the old man,” he said. “Except for the eyes. Dennis and I both got our mother’s eyes.”

“Eddie said Dennis was killed in Vietnam.”

He turned the green eyes on me. “I don’t know why the hell he went. It would have been nothing at all to get him out of it. I told him, I said, ‘Dennis, for Christ’s sake, all I have to do is pick up a phone.’ He wouldn’t have it.” He took the cigarette and ground it out in an ashtray. “So he went over there,” he said, “and they shot his ass off for him, the dumb bastard.”

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.”