Uptown Local and Other Interventions (19 page)

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. The 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.”

To my surprise, then, he turned to me. “Would you help us with that?” he said. “We could use a mortal’s eye on this. You know the city as well as we do, but from the mortal’s side. And you’re of good heart, otherwise the deceased wouldn’t have given you a word. He was a shrewd judge of character, that one.”

“How can I help?” I said.

“Walk some patrols with us,” he said. “That’s how we’ll have to start. We can get more of our city People in to help us if it’s shown to work.”

My first impulse would have been to moan about my day job and how I had little enough time off as it was. Then I thought
,  What the hell am I thinking? I wanted to know more about these People—

“Sure,” I said. “Tell me where to meet you.

“Tomorrow night,” said the Eldest. “Say, down by the bottom of Grafton Street, by St. Stephen’s Green. We’ll ‘beat the bounds’ and see what we can find.”

*

And so we did that for five nights running, six… and saw nothing. People’s spirits began to rise: there was some talk that just the action we’d taken had put the fear on whatever we were trying to guard ourselves against. It would have been nice if that was true.

We walked, most of the time, between about nine at night and one in the morning: that was when the last few who’d been taken had vanished. I was out with a group including one of the merrow babes—I could never tell them apart—and two more leprechauns from my first one’s clan, over on the north side of the Liffey, not far from the big “industrial” pubs that have sprung up there, all noise and no atmosphere. As we went past the biggest of them, heading east along the riverbank, we heard something that briefly froze us all. A shriek—

As a mortal I would have mistaken it for a child’s voice. But the People with me knew better. The three of them ran across the Ha’penny Bridge, past startled tourists who felt things jostle them, saw nothing, and (as I passed in their wake) started feeling their pockets to see if they’d been picked. The People sprinted across the Quay in the face of incoming traffic, just made it past, and ran up the stairs and through the little tunnelway that leads into Temple Bar. And there, just before the alleyway opens out into the Square, when I caught up with them, I saw them staring at the cracked sidewalk, and on it, the empty tumble of clothes.

It was another of the People, but a clurachaun this time, stolen things spilling out of the clothing’s pockets—billfolds, change, jewelry, someone’s false teeth. But the threadbare tweeds were all shredded to rags as if by razors.

The merrow began to tremble. She pointed into the shadows, between the kebab place next to us, and the back door of the pub down at the corner.

Something green, yes. A green shadow melting out of the courtyard by Temple Street, turning, looking to left and right…and when it looked right, it saw us.

The great round eyes were yellow as lamps, and glowed green at their backs with the reflection of the sodium vapor lights back on the Quay. Humans walked by it and never saw; and it looked through them as if they were the mist curling up off the water of the Liffey, as if they didn’t matter. Massive, low-slung and big-shouldered, swag-bellied but nonetheless easily two tons of hard lean muscle, the size of a step van, the big striped cat put its tremendous round plate of a face down, eyeing us, and the whole block filled with the low, thoughtful sound of its growl, like a tank’s engine turning over.

It saw the leprechauns. It saw the Washer. It saw me…or at least I think it did, as someone who could see the Old Folk and was therefore of interest. It didn’t need us, though, for tonight. It had had enough. It gazed yellowly at us for a moment more and then padded leisurely away across Temple Bar Square into the shadows behind the Irish Film Centre—the lighter-colored stripes, livid green like a thunderstorm sunset, fading into grimy city shadow as it went, the darker stripes gone the color of that shadow already, vanishing into it as the lighter ones faded. Only the shape of the slowly lashing tail remained for a moment under the stuttering light of the streetlamp at the corner of the Square…then slipped into the dark and was gone.