The six stopped outside the pub looking up at the sign.
Ah, God, thought Nolan. They’re going in. What will come of it? Who do I warn first? Them? Or Finn?
Then, the door opened. Finn himself looked out. Damn, thought Nolan, that spoils it! Now we won’t be allowed to describe this adventure. It will be Finn this, Finn that, and shut up to us all! There was a long moment when Snell-Orkney and his cohorts looked at Finn. Finn’s eyes did not fasten on them. He looked above. He looked over. He looked beyond.
But he had seen them, this Nolan knew. For now a lovely thing happened.
All the color went out of Finn’s face.
Then an even lovelier thing happened.
All the color rushed back into Finn’s face.
Why, cried Nolan to himself, he’s . . . blushing!
But still Finn refused to look anywhere save the sky, the lamps, the street, until Snell-Orkney trilled, “Sir, which way to St. Stephen’s Green?”
“Jesus,” said Finn and turned away. “Who knows where they put it, this week!” and slammed the door.
The six went on up the street, all smiles and delight, and Nolan was all for heaving himself through the door when a worse thing happened.
Garrity, the elevator operator from the Royal Hibernian Hotel, whipped across the sidewalk from nowhere. His face ablaze with excitement, he ran first into Finn’s to spread the word.
By the time Nolan was inside, and Timulty rushing in next, Garrity was all up and down the length of the bar while Finn stood behind it suffering concussions from which he had not as yet recovered.
“It’s a shame you missed it!” cried Garrity to all. “I mean it was the next thing to one of them fiction-and-science fillums they show at the Gayety Cinema!”
“How do you mean?” asked Finn, shaken out of his trance.
“Nothing they weigh!” Garrity told them. “Lifting them in the elevator was throwing a handful of chaff up a chimney! And you should have heard. They’re here in Ireland for . . .” He lowered his voice and squinched his eyes. “. . . for mysterious reasons!”
“Mysterious!” Everyone leaned in at him.
“They’ll put no name to it, but, mark my declaration, they’re up to no good! Have you ever seen the like?”
“Not since the great fire at the convent,” said Finn. “I—”
But the word “convent” seemed one more magic touch. The doors sprang wide at this. Father Leary entered in reverse. That is to say he backed into the pub one hand to his cheek as if the Fates had dealt him a proper blow unbewares.
Reading the look of his spine, the men shoved their noses in their drinks until such time as the father had put a bit of the brew into himself, still staring as if the door were the gates of Hell ajar.
“Beyond,” said the father, at last, “not two minutes gone, I saw a sight as would be hard to credit. In all the days of her collecting up the grievances of the world, has Ireland indeed gone mad?”
Finn refilled the priest’s glass. “Was you standing in the blast of The Invaders from the Planet Venus, Father?”
“Have you seen them, then, Finn?” the father said.
“Yes, and do you guess them bad, your Holiness?”
“It’s not so much bad or good as strange and outré, Finn, and words like rococo, I should guess, and baroque if you go with my drift?”
“I lie easy in the tide, sir.”
“When last seen, where heading?” asked Timulty.
“On the edge of the Green,” said the priest. “You don’t imagine there’ll be a bacchanal in the park now?”
“The weather won’t allow, beg your pardon, Father,” said Nolan, “but it strikes me, instead of standing with the gab in our mouth we should be out on the spy—”
“You move against my ethics,” said the priest.
“A drowning man clutches at anything,” said Nolan, “and ethics may drown with him if that’s what he grabs instead of a lifebelt.”
“Off the Mount, Nolan,” said the priest, “and enough of the Sermon. What’s your point?”
“The point is, Father, we have had no such influx of honorary Sicilians since the mind boggles to remember. For all we know, at this moment, they may be reading aloud to Mrs. Murphy, Miss Clancy, or Mrs. O’Hanlan in the midst of the park. And reading aloud from what, I ask you?”
“The Ballad of Reading Gaol?” asked Finn.
“You have rammed the target and sunk the ship,” said Nolan, mildly irritated the point had been plucked from him. “How do we know these imps out of bottles are not selling real-estate tracts in a place called Fire Island? Have you heard of it, Father?”
“The American gazettes come often to my table, man.”
“Well, do you remember the great hurricane of nineteen-and-fifty-six when the waves washed over Fire Island there in New York? An uncle of mine, God save his sanity and sight, was with the Coast Guard there which evacuated the entirety of the population of Fire Island.
It was worse than the twice-a-year showing at Fennelly’s dressworks, he said. It was more terrible than a Baptist Convention. Ten thousand men came rushing down to the stormy shore carrying bolts of drape material, cages full of parakeets, tomato-and-tangerine-colored sport coats, and lime-colored shoes.
It was the most tumultuous scene since Hieronymus Bosch laid down his palette after he painted Hell for all generations to come. You do not easily evacuate ten thousand Venetian-glass boyos with their great blinky cow-eyes and their phonograph symphonic records in their hands and their rings in their ears, without tearing down the middle. My uncle, soon after, took to the heavy drink.”
“Tell us more about that night,” said Kilpatrick, entranced.
“More, hell,” said the priest. “Out, I say. Surround the park. Keep your eyes peeled. And meet me back here in an hour.”
“That’s more like it,” cried Kelly. “Let’s really see what dread thing they’re up to!”
The doors banged wide.
On the sidewalk, the priest gave directions. “Kelly, Murphy, you around the north side of the park. Timulty, you to the south. Nolan and Garrity, the east; Moran, MaGuire, and Kilpatrick, the west.
Git!” But somehow or other in all the ruction, Kelly and Murphy wound up at the Four Shamrocks pub halfway to the Green and fortified themselves for the chase, and Nolan and Moran each met their wives on the street and had to run the other way, and MaGuire and Kilpatrick, passing the Elite Cinema and hearing Lawrence Tibbett singing inside, cadged their way in for a few half-used cigarettes.
So it wound up with just two, Garrity on the east and Timulty on the south side of the park, looking in at the visitors from another world.
After half an hour of freezing weather, Garrity stomped up to Timulty and said, “What’s wrong with the fiends? They’re just standing there in the midst of the park. They haven’t moved half the afternoon. And it’s cut to the bone is my toes. I’ll nip around to the hotel, warm up, and rush back to stand guard with you, Tim.”
“Take your time,” called Timulty in a strange sad wandering, philosophical voice as the other charged away.
Left alone, Timulty walked in and sat for a full hour watching the six men who, as before, did not move. You might almost have thought to see Timulty there, with his eyes brooding, and, his mouth gone into a tragic crease, that he was some Irish neighbor of Kant or Schopenhauer, or had just read something by a poet or thought of a song that declined his spirits.
And when at last the hour was up and he had gathered his thoughts like a handful of cold pebbles, he turned and made his way out of the park. Garrity was there, pounding his feet and swinging his hands but before he could explode with questions, Timulty pointed in and said, “Go sit. Look. Think. Then you tell me.”
Everyone at Finn’s looked up sheepishly when Timulty made his entrance. The priest was still off on errands around the city, and after a few walks about the Green to assuage their consciences, all had returned, nonplussed, to intelligence headquarters.
“Timulty!” they cried. “Tell us! What? What?”
Timulty took his time walking to the bar and sipping his drink. Silently, he observed his own image remotely buried beneath the lunar ice of the barroom mirror. He turned the subject this way. He twisted it inside out. He put it back wrong-side-to. Then he shut his eyes and said:
“It strikes me as how—”
Yes, said all silently, about him.
“From a lifetime of travel and thought, it comes to the top of my mind,” Timulty went on, “there is a strange resemblance between the likes of them and the likes of us.”
There was such a gasp as changed the scintillation, the goings and comings of light in the prisms of the little chandeliers over the bar. When the schools of fish-light had stopped swarming at this exhalation, Nolan cried, “Do you mind putting your hat on so I can knock it off!?”
“Consider,” Timulty calmly said. “Are we or are we not great ones for the poem and the song?”
Another kind of gasp went through the crowd. There was a warm burst of approval. “Oh, sure, we’re that!” “My God, is that all you’re up to?” “We were afraid—”
“Hold it!” Timulty raised a hand, eyes still closed.
And all shut up.
“If we’re not singing the songs, we’re writing them, and if not writing, dancing them, and aren’t they fond
