Free The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty by Sebastian Barry

that’ll be the day, the day we get him, the long bollocks that he is. The Reprisal Man, in all his glory. That’ll be the day of history, the time we get that shite. But he’s no easy sparrow like yourselves. We’ll get him too some day, some day. In the meantime, your ticket’s come good, Doyle, and we know you’re mixed up in it.’
    ‘I hadn’t got a finger in it,’ says Doyle. ‘I never even met the man.’
    ‘Arra,’ says the murdering man, ‘isn’t that a big fib. Ha? Didn’t you go to school with the fella, up with the brothers in Mount Temple? Aren’t you on the old register there, and anyway, don’t I know you knew him, because he told me himself, with his dying breath. Said he’d know your skin on a board. After the Reprisal Man put bullets in his face at point-blank range and the poor bastard came running down Cook Street with his life leaking from his ears, blind from blood and pain, and into my arms like a boy, oh yes, and the last thing he said was it must have been yourself put his name in the Big Man’s way, because you were pals in the school on the hill with the Brothers.’
    And Eneas looks at Doyle to see if this could be accurate, at least about the schooling together, and he can see from Doyle’s simple face that there’s no lie in it.
    ‘We’ve been waiting for you to make something of your old associations, you hooer’s melt, ye. And didn’t your grandfather make his money in the hungry days, you poor witless cunt, ye?’
    ‘That’s just an ould story, men,’ says Doyle. Now Eneas smells a strange smell, a smell he’s smelt once or twice only, and it’s the stink of fear that rises from a man when he’s in mortal dread.
    ‘You had a hand in it as sure as cowshite, and if you didn’t, aren’t you peeler enough for our intentions?’
    And Doyle hangs now in the man’s arms, as if every grain of energy’s gone out of him. And his face acquires a complete deep look of stupidity and gracelessness. Eneas himself stares like a calf. No course of action presents itself. A few people even going home late in their raincoats pass up the street but he doesn’t feel inspired to call out to them, with the thin knife sparking at Doyle’s scraggled throat. The four of them know something is going to happen, they are united at least in that certainty. It could be the flicks or a dark penny dreadful, the way the four of them know all that. And their different histories, their different childhoods, their different ages and faces and hopes even, their different souls sullied up by different matters, all seem to tend towards the same event, this cold and shadowy event in the little granite slipway of the cathedral priests.
    ‘Say goodnight, Doyle,’ says the speaking man, and never a word from the other. ‘May God forgive me.’
    And he takes a snug gun from his coat of darkness and places it up against the bullocky face of Doyle no doubt just as the Reprisal Man did with Stephen Jackson, Doyle’s childhood companion in the roistering schoolyard, and he prints the O of the little barrel against the right cheekbone and fires into the suddenly flashing face. And places the gun a second time into the left cheekbone, or where it might well be if the blood and splinters and scraps of flesh were cleaned off, and fires again and Eneas looks into the face of the killer and it has the set effort in it of a person struggling for precision in a world of vagueness and doubt, struggling with a physical task in a world of Godless souls and wormy hearts.
    ‘Will I do this poor bastard too?’ says the trembling killer to his friend, turning the little gun on Eneas.
    ‘One’s enough for the night,’ says the other man. ‘One’s enough. The whole town will be stirring now. That’s McNulty, the Sligoman. Let Sligo look after him, if they want. I’m not killing a simpleton like that. Look at the gawmy stare of him. Look at the stare of him.’
    So he looks at Eneas for a second, the killer