Grief Street

after a shadow, having stupidly lost my weapons. I was Sweeney in the play. Fool blind, too stupid to walk ’round and find the gas wick...
    And where else would a fool like me be running this night but to Sweeney’s comfort and joy?

Thirty-nine

    “ H e should be coming right along.” The man in the wet cape peering out the grimy window to the street disagreed. “He’s stupid, but he ain’t entirely stupid.”
    “Oh, ain’t he now?”
    “Talking proper ain’t the point, old man. The point is, Hockaday showed at the park. Which means he went and took the bait tossed to him in the play. So he’s probably figured just about all the other bait, too. Which means he’s now running smack into my net. Hah! The copper who’s going to save the fucking USA!”
    “Oh, please—stop it with your disgusting American blovi-ations,” said Eoin Monaghan. He reached a gloved hand across the mahogany table for the whisky decanter. “I mean, really—good God!”
    “Shut up then with your fooking God yap.”
    “I need another drink.”
    “Aye, go on—you’re getting yourself good and smashing pie-eyed. Speaking of fooking godly things—and as you’re whisky loose—will you be confessing your crime against the nun to Hockaday?”
    “It wasn’t I, fiend.”
    “But you know of it, aye? So in the eyes of the law, keeping quiet about a horrifying crime’s the same as doing it.”
    “Sister was my neighbor and friend.” Monaghan poured whisky into his glass, more than it could hold. He had drunk many prior whiskies, and his sense of proportion was affected accordingly. Whisky trickled from the table to the floor. Monaghan lifted the glass and drank straight back, a good part of it dribbling down the satin lapels of his robe and down over his silk waistcoat. “She was my generation, we shared the same sorrows and infirmities. I could hardly... Oh, but I would never—”
    “Hah! You’re a spry old bastard.”
    “You’re spryer!”
    “The state of New York’s got a death penalty again, Monaghan. They stick you with a needle now. Did you know that? Aye, they kill you like a decrepit cat. Can’t you just see yourself strapped to the prison table, the needle plunging its poison into you?”
    “You know I’m not the one!”
    “Can you imagine in all New York a lawyer who’d defend a nun-fooking murderer such as yourself?”
    “I’m no murderer!”
    “As you wish. Let’s suppose it wasn’t you that grabbed himself a nun and fooked her, Monaghan. Let’s suppose it wasn’t you hacked off her holy paw, leaving her poor body to the mucking garden worms as blood feast. But what’s it matter?”
    “Matter?” Monaghan poured another whisky, again overdoing it and becoming all the more slobbery. “Good God— good God!”
    “Shut up! Shut the fook up!”
    “Fiend! Liar! Demon! Stinking demon!”
    “Aye, like a hundred baboons ailing with the running shits, that’s how I stink! And true, I’m the demon you made me. Ain’t I, Dr. Monaghan?”
    “God—O God!”
    “Ain’t I, dear old Grandfa’r? Or is it Grand-Uncle you truly are?”
    “I told you—never call me those names!” Monaghan, roaring and snorting heavily, attempted to stand and throw his glass, only to come crashing back down in his chair.
    The glass broke in his liquor-soaked hand; crystal splintered through kid glove into palm and wrist, blood flowed into whisky. “Never—never!”
    “But here now, it must be so. I see how you’re so accustomed to my nauseating whiff you’re snorting like a racehorse. Not even bothering to block my stink by breathing through your mouth. Ah, Grandfa’r, how sweet of you to know the rotten scent of your own flesh.”
    “You’re no flesh and blood of mine, you wicked bastard! You’re no flesh of any decent soul!”
    “Now ain’t that a strange and inter-restin’ stew of lies and truth and consequences?”
    “Wicked...!” Monaghan tossed the slur weakly, like an exhausted boxer throwing a lazy punch.
    “Sure but I’m yours, and sure I’m a wicked one. But— here you say I’m a bastard? Nae born of any decent mortal? Would you be saying the same of Jesus Christ, who was the right son not of the mortal Joseph but of your amorphous God? Would you be saying then your son of God’s a bastard same as me?”
    “Truth-twisting fiend!”
    “Fiend. How easy the word comes to your lips, Monaghan.”
    “Damn you!”
    “And damn you, too, Grandfa’r.”
    “Never call me