Free The Last Storyteller by Frank Delaney Page B

until his last moments, just before the consciousness quits his eyes. Then tell him. Tell him why. Tell him that he has no place left. Tell him that he deserves to die
.
    He said, “Venetia, is it?”
    I nodded again. The same slow nod. Never taking my eyes from his mouth. He said, “What good will it do you? She won’t go back to you. The children don’t know that you exist.”
    I hate the power of the banal. It controls our lives more than we acknowledge. The shop owner came out and spoke to Gentleman Jack.
    “Sir, you forgot your change.”
    “Actually,” said Jack, “I need something else,” and he ducked back through the door.

PART TWO
Gentleman Jack and His Friend

26
    Jimmy Bermingham could sulk for Ireland—and had mastered that old Irish art form, reproach.
    “An hour and a half I’m here. In the pours of rain.”
    I could have said to him, “Why didn’t you wait inside?” But when “normal” I didn’t possess a confronting spirit, not even with people I didn’t fear.
    Children, you will soon ask yourself,
How in God’s name did my father get in tow with Jimmy Bermingham?
I have two explanations, one simple, one professional.
    Remember that I met him just after my first visit to Mr. O’Neill. I think the afterglow blurred my judgment of character—I wanted to think everyone as fine as John Jacob. And I was flattered that he had known of me.
    Secondly, as a collector of legends, traditions, and lore, I (obviously) kept a detailed official record. I also maintained a private journal, and I wrote it up almost every night. In it you’ll find all kinds of people who never made it into any official report. At times it reads like a freak show, and the more eccentric the person, the more vivid my entry. That, if you like, was my private collection.
    And that’s how I first allowed myself to keep the company of wild men. Such as Jimmy Bermingham. He called himself a poet, but he never wrote a line of verse. He said he was a patriot, but he was paid as a mercenary killer. He thought himself a demon lover, but—well, we’ll come to that.
    I soon perceived a man desperate not to see himself for what he was:a rake above rakes, a drinking, seducing fellow, weak and willful, a low-grade actor who could start a riot in an empty yard. Or turn a law-abiding man such as me into a criminal.
    Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t have given such a man the time off my watch, but I was lonely. My forty-second birthday had just sped by, and loss still filled me up like moonlight in a grove—all light, shade, and sometimes beauty. I believed that I had come to terms with it—up to a point. Slowly, but sometimes in a rush, I had learned how to take rewards from everyday life. Jimmy, exuberant and smart, looked like such a reward.
    It also helped that I loved my job and felt secure in it. The Folklore Commission had only a few official collectors. I was a permanent and pensionable civil servant.
    Thus, some of that ancient anguish had dulled. Its weight had changed. Once I had been as bowed as Atlas with the world on his shoulders; then it grew lighter, a heavy knapsack of grief that I could leave aside now and then.
    Until I saw the Gentleman Jack posters. Until Randall needled me. And until, most savage of all, I saw what true yearning looked like in a man twice my age for whom love was a form of truth. Who could possibly wish to grow old as pained and tearful as that?
    I asked Jimmy, “Where do you want to go?” The lapel of his shattered coat still hung loose.
    “There’s a tailor in Limerick,” he said.
    I swear to you that I picked up no ambiguity; what man in such a moment wouldn’t have needed a tailor?
    In the car he said to me, “I’m glad I found you, Ben.”
Found
me?

27
    Paddy Collopy was a tailor from a bad fairy tale. Cranky as a bitten mule, sitting cross-legged on a table, his waistcoat bristling with pins—if he’d ever stood straight he’d have made five foot three. Wires of