He shook his head. “Nothing like,” the leprechaun said. “None of these people were suicidal. They had good jobs…as good as jobs get for our people these days. Coding over at Lotus, hardware wrangling over at Gateway and Dell. They never seem to stop hiring up there in the Wasteland.” It was a slang name for the jungle of industrial estates that had sprung up around Dublin Airport, and there seemed to be a new one every month, more and more land once full of Guinness-destined barley, or of sheep, now full of Europe-destined PCs and other assorted chippery.
“But it’s not the same,” I said, because I knew what was coming. I’d heard it before.
“No, it’s not,” the leprechaun said with force. “Once upon a time I didn’t even know what the ISEQ was! When did our people ever have to worry about stocks and shares, and ‘selling short?’ But now we have to, because that’s how you tell who’s hiring, when you can’t make a living making shoes anymore.” He scowled again. “It’s all gone to hell,” he said. “It was better when we were poor.”
“Oh, surely not,” I said. “You sound like those people in Russia, now, moaning about how they miss the good old days in the USSR.”
“Poor devils,” the leprechaun said, “may God be kind to them, they don’t know any better. But it’s nothing like what we have to deal with. Once upon a time we gave thanks to God when the leader of our country stood up and announced to the world that we were self-sufficient in shoelaces. Who knew that it could go downhill from that, because of too much money? But people aren’t like people used to be any more. It’s not that the money would spoil them…we always knew that was going to happen, maybe. But it’s how it’s spoiled them. Look at it!”
We looked out the window toward the brick façade that the back of Brown Thomas shared with the Marian shrine that also faced onto the street. You could look through one archway and see a painted life-sized knockoff version of the Pietá, the sculpted Lady raising a hand in a “what can you do?” gesture over her Son’s sprawled body, her expression not of shock or grief but of resigned annoyance—“Never mind, sure he’ll be grand in a few days…” —and through another doorway, a few doors down, you could see Mammon in its tawdry glory, all the Bally and Gucci and the many other choicer fruits of world consumerism laid out for the delectation of the passers-by. The Pietá was not entirely without Her visitors, but plainly Brown Thomas was getting more trade. Closer to us, the street was full of cars; fuller of cars than it should have been, strictly speaking. There was a superfluity of Lexuses and various other glossy, high-wheeled uglies, all double-parked outside the restaurant, next to the entrance to the Brown Thomas parking structure. The cold fact of the Garda Pick-It-Up-And-Take-It-Away fleet working its way around the city had plainly not particularly affected these people. They could soak up the tickets and the impound fees and never even notice.
“In God’s name, what’s happened to us?” the leprechaun said. “What’s happened to us that we don’t care what happens to other people any more? Look at it out there: it’s nothing much right now, but this street’s a bottleneck; in twenty minutes the whole of center city will be gridlocked. And it’s worse elsewhere. The rents are through the roof. It’s a good thing I can just vanish into one of the ‘hills’ in Phoenix Park at night. Otherwise I’d be in a bedsit twenty miles south, in Bray, or somewhere worse—Meath or Westmeath or Cavan or whatever, with a two-hour commute in and back, in a minivan loaded over capacity. And probably with clurachaun as well. Have you ever been stuck in a minivan for two hours between Virginia and the North Circular Road with a bunch of overstressed clurachaun trying to do…you know…what clurachaun do??”
Another unanswerable question, even if I had been. “It’s tough,” I said, “hard all around.”
There wasn’t a lot more out of him after that. All the same, I was sorry when he called the waiter over to get his plates tallied up.
He looked up at me. “It’s not what it was,” he said, “and it’s a crying shame.”
“We all say that about our own times,” I said. “They’ve said it since ancient Greece.”
“But it’s truer now than it ever was,” said the leprechaun. “Look at the world we were in a hundred years ago. Sure we had poverty, and starvation, and unemployment from here to there, and people being forced out of their homes by greedy landlords. But we still had each other; at least we had a kind word for each other when we passed in the road. Now we have immigrants begging in the street who’re poorer than we ever were; and people getting fat and getting heart attacks from the crap ready-made food that’s nine-tenths of what there is to eat these days; and work that kills your soul, but it’s all you can get. And forget being forced out of anywhere to live, because you can’t afford to get in in the first place. The only kind word you hear from anybody nowadays is when you take out your wallet…and it’s not meant. Things are so wrong.”
He eyed me. “But you’ll say there are good things about it too,” he said.
“You’ve been here longer than I have,” I said. “Maybe I should keep my opinions to myself.”
“It was different once,” the leprechaun said. “It was different when She ran things.” And he stared into his last of his sake, and past it at the black granite of the sushi bar, and looked even more morose than he had before we’d started talking.
He tossed the rest of his sake back in one shot. “Good night to you,” he said at last, slid off the cream-colored bar stool, and went out into the night.
So it was a shock, the next day, to find that he was dead.
*
Leprechauns don’t die the way we do: otherwise the Gardaí would have a lot more work on their plates than they already do with the drug-gang warfare and the joyriders and the addicts shooting up in the middle of Temple Bar. At the scene of a leprechaun’s murder, you find a tumble of clothes, and usually a pair of extremely well-made shoes, but nothing else. That was all the Folk found the next morning, down the little back alley that runs from the Grafton Street pedestrian precinct to behind the Porterhouse Central brewpub.
At first everyone assumed that he’d run afoul of some druggie desperate for money and too far separated from his last fix. They may be of the Old Blood, but leprechauns can’t vanish at will without preparation: you can get the drop on one if you’re smart and fast. Various pots of gold were lost to mortals this way in the old days, when there was still gold in Ireland. But the leprechauns had the advantage of open ground and non-urban terrain into which to vanish. It’s harder to do in the city. There are too many eyes watching you—half of a leprechaun’s vanishing is skilful misdirection—and, these days, there are too many dangers too closely concentrated. The sense of those who knew him was that he just got unlucky.
I confess it was partly curiosity that brought me to the wake, where I was told all this. But it was partly the astonishment of having another of the leprechaun’s people actually look me up at the magazine. There he stood, looking like a youthful but much shorter Mickey Rooney in tweeds, waiting in the place’s glossy, garish reception area and looking offended by it all. I came out to talk to him, and he said, “Not here…”
My boss, in her glass-walled inner office, was safely on the phone, deep in inanely detailed conversation with some publishing or media figure about where they would be going for lunch. This happened every day, and no one who went missing from now to three PM, when the Boss might or might not come back, would be noticed. I stepped outside with the leprechaun and went down to stand with him by the news kiosk at the corner of Dawson Street.
“You were the last one to see him alive,” the leprechaun said. I knew better than to ask “who?”; first because I immediately knew who he meant, and second because you don’t ask leprechauns their names—they’re all secret, and (some say) they’re all the same.
“He was all right when he left,” I said. “What happened?”
“No one knows,” said the leprechaun. “He wasn’t drunk?”
“He didn’t have anything like
enough saké.” Privately I doubted there was that much saké in the city. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen someone try to drink a leprechaun under the table.
The leprechaun nodded, and he looked grim as my dinner companion had the other night.
“He was murdered,” he said.
I was astounded. “How? Why?”
“We don’t know. But he’s not the first. More like the tenth, and they’re coming closer together.”
“A serial killer…”
There were no answers for my questions then. I went back to work, because there was nothing better to do, and when my boss still wasn’t back by four, I checked out early and made my way down to the Long Hall.
The place doesn’t look very big from the frontage on Great Saint George’s Street. A red and white sign over a wide picture window, obscured by ancient, dusty stained-glass screens inside; that’s all there is. The place looks a little run down. Doubtless the proprietors encourage that look, for the Long Hall is a pint house of great fame, and to have such a place be contaminated by as few tourists as possible is seen as a positive thing in Dublin. If you make it past the genteelly-shabby façade and peeling paint, you find yourself surrounded by ancient woodwork, warm and golden-colored, and glossy wallpaper and carved plaster ceilings that were white in the 1890s, but are now stained down by time and pre-ban smoke to a warm nicotine brown.
The pub’s name is deserved. It’s a narrow place, but it goes on and on, nearly the width of the block in which it resides. There are bar stools down the right side, and behind them a bar of great height, antiquity, and splendor—faded, age-splotched mirrors, bottles of every kind racked up to the ceiling, and most importantly, long shelves running the length of the back of the bar, to put pints on.
I wandered in, pushed between a couple of occupied barstools, and ordered myself a pint. This by itself gives you plenty of time to look around, as a well-pulled pint of Guinness takes at least seven minutes, and the best ones take ten. Right now, the front of the bar was full of people who had left work early. It was full of the usual sound of Dubliners complaining about work, and the people they worked with. “So I said to him, why don’t you tell him to go to the F ing Spar and get a sandwich and then sit down for five F ing minutes, sure she’ll be back then. …Are you F ing nuts? he says. I can’t spare the time in the middle of the F ing day—“
I had to resist the urge to roll my eyes... yet still I had to smile. This is how, when I return home, I know for sure that I’m in Dublin again. The second you’re past passport control in Dublin Airport, you hear it...and after that, until you’re well past the city limits, you hear it everywhere else, from every one between nine and ninety-five. Only in Dublin do people use the F word as casually as they use “Hey” or “Sure” or “Listen” in the US. It’s an intensifier, without any meaning whatsoever except to suggest that you’re only mildly interested in what you’re saying. Only in Ireland would such a usage be necessary: for here, words are life.
I glanced toward the back of the bar. Between the front and the back of the pub was a sort of archway of wood, and looking at it, I realized that it was a line of demarcation in more ways than one. A casual glance suggested that the space behind it was empty. But if you had the Sight, and you worked at seeing, slowly you could see instinct shapes, standing, gesturing. You couldn’t hear any sound, though; that seemed to stop at the archway.
It was an interesting effect. I guessed that the wizards the leprechaun had mentioned had installed it. I walked slowly towards the archway, and was surprised, when I reached it, to feel strongly as if I didn’t want to go any further. But I pushed against the feeling and kept on walking.
Once through the archway, the sound of conversation came up to full as if someone had hit me “un-mute” button on a TV remote. There had to be about eighty of the Old People back here, which was certainly more warm bodies than the space was rated for; it was a good thing all the occupants were smaller than the normal run of mortals.
There was just as much F-ing and blinding going on back here as there had been in the front of the bar, but otherwise, the back-of-the-pub people were a less routine sort of group. There was very little traditional costume in evidence; all these Old People seemed very city-assimilated. I glanced around, feeling acutely visible because of my height—and I’m only five foot seven. Near me, a tall slender woman, dressed unfashionably all in white, turned oblique eyes on me, brushing her long, lank, dark hair back to one side. Only after a long pause did she smile. “Oh, good,” she said. “Not for a while yet...” And she clinked her gin and tonic against my pint.
“Uh,” I said. A moment later, next to me, a voice said, “It’s good of you to come.”
I glanced down. It was the leprechaun who had come up to the office. “This is one of the Washers,” he said.
Even if I’d thought about it in advance, the last thing I’d have expected to see in a city pub would’ve been a banshee, one of the “Washers at the Ford” who prophesy men’s deaths. I was a little too unnerved right then to ask her what her work in the city was like. She smiled at me—it was really a very sweet smile—and said, “It’s all right…I’m not on duty. Days I work over in Temple Bar, in a restaurant there. Dishwashing.”
“Dishwashing??”
She took a drink of her G and T, and laughed. “Most of us give up laundry right away. Won’t do their ‘shell suits’ and the rest of their F ing polyester!”
We chatted casually about business, and weather, and about the departed, while I glanced around at the rest of the company, trying not to stare. There were plenty of others there besides leprechauns and bansidhe and clurichauns. There were a few pookas—two of them wearing human shape, and one, for reasons best known to himself, masquerading as an Irish wolfhound. There were several dullahans in three-piece suits, or polo shirts and chinos, holding leisurely conversations while holding their heads in their hands (the way a dullahan drinks while talking is worth watching). There was a gaggle of green-haired merrows in sealskin jackets and tight pants, looking like slender biker babes but without the tattoos or studs, and all looking faintly wet no matter how long they’d been out of the Bay. There was a fat round little fear gorta in a sweatsuit and glow-step Nikes, staving off his own personal famine by gorging on bagged-in McDonalds from the branch over in Grafton Street. And there were grogachs and leanbaitha and other kinds of the People that I’d never seen before; in some cases I never did find out what they were, or did, or what they were doing in town. There was no time, and besides, it seemed inappropriate to be inquiring too closely about everybody else while the purpose was to wake one particular leprechaun.
They waked him. It wasn’t organized, but stories started coming out about him—how much time he spent down around the Irish Writers Center, how he gave some mortal entrepreneur-lady the idea for the “Viking” amphibious-vehicle tours up and down the river Liffey: endless tales of that kind. He was well liked, and much missed, and people were angry about what had happened to him. But they were also afraid.
“And who the F are we supposed to tell about it?” said one of the dullahan to me and the banshee at one point. “Sure there’s no help in the Guards—we’ve a few of our own kind scattered here and there through the force, but no one high up enough to be paid any mind to.”
“We need our own guards,” said another voice, one of the clurachauns.
“And you’d love that, wouldn’t you? You’d be the first customers,” said one of the leprechauns.
There was a mutter. Clurachauns are too well known for their thieving habits, which make them no friends among either the “trooping” people like the Sidhe or the “solitaries” like the leprechauns, dullahans and merrows. The clurachaun only snickered.
“What do you call a northsider in a Mercedes? Thief!” said one of the leprechauns, under his breath. “What’s the difference between a northsider and a clurachaun? The northsider is better dressed!”
The clurachaun turned on him. T
he others moved back to give them room for what was probably coming. But there was one of the People I’d earlier noted, a grizzled, older leprechaun whom the others of his kind, and even the clurachauns, seemed to respect: when he’d spoken up, earlier, they’d gotten quiet. “The Eldest,” the banshee had whispered in my ear. Now the Eldest Leprechaun moved in fast and gave the younger leprechaun a clout upside the head. To my astonishment, no fight broke out.
“Shame on you, and the two of you acting like arseholes in front of a mortal,” said the Eldest. The squabblers both had the grace to look at least sullenly shamefaced. “Here we are in this time of grief when no one knows what’s happening, or who it might happen to next, and you make eejits of yourself. Shut up, the both of you.”
They turned away, muttering, and moved to opposite sides of the pub. The Eldest nodded at me and turned back to the conversation he’d been having with one of the merrows, who looked nervous. “I did see it, Manaanan’s name I did,” she said, shrugging back the sealskin jacket to show that strange pearly skin underneath: it was hot in the back of the pub, with so many People in there. “Or… I saw something. I was comin up out of the river the other night, you know, by where the coffee shop is on the boardwalk. I wanted a latte. And I saw it down the street, heading away from the Liffey, past one of those cut-rate furniture stores. Something… not normal.”
“What was it?” the Eldest said.
She shook her head, and the dark wet hair sprayed those standing nearest as she did. “Something big and green.”
No one knew what to make of that. “Aah, she’s got water on the brain,” said one of the clurachauns standing nearest. “It’s all just shite anyway. It’s junkies doin it.”
The Eldest glared at him. “It might be,” he said, “and it might not. We don’t dare take anything for granted. But we have to start taking care of ourselves now. Everybody so far who’s been taken has been out in some quiet place like a park, or in the waste places around housing estates. Now whatever’s doing this is doing it in the city. Nowhere’ll be safe soon. We have to put a stop to it. We need to start doing a neighborhood-watch kind of thing, such as mortals do.”