Once there, he would stand for hours gazing at the colorful posters of faraway places on the travel-agency windows. Someday soon he would be sunning himself by the pool on a cruise ship or sprawled on a beach or eating in some exotic restaurant surrounded by a loving family. One night soon he’d roll up the baize, wish everyone “Safe home, please God,” and disappear as though he had never been. All you need is luck, he told himself.
How funny it would be to leave the old watchman with palm outstretched for the tenner that would never come; and what a relief to abandon the furtive, half drunk chancers, to leave them flat with no candlelit room in which to bet away their week’s wages. There they’d all be, grumbling in the cobbled laneway outside the locked high-raftered room, getting wet in the soft rain, while he, Patrick William Slattery, necklaced with flowers, would be washing down breadfruit with rum-laced coconut milk on some palm-studded island.
Sundays he spent at home poring over travel brochures, dreaming of long-legged women, tawny Polynesian maidens with silken skin and hibiscus blossoms in their hair. Lovely creatures who would wind their fingers in his auburn curls and press their soft lips against his as they greeted him fresh from a swim, sea water glistening on his sun-browned body.
It was on one such Sunday morning that the toughs came. The door slammed shut, heavy shoes scuffed noisily up the stairs, and the three were upon him before he could move. They were young, with crew-cuts, and they wore wide-bottomed trousers.
“Where’s the ready?” one with a black eye asked, pushing Peewee back down on the bed among the travel brochures.
“It’s in the bank,” Slattery answered quickly. Black-eye’s fist slammed his head against the wall.
“Now would yuz believe the little runt’s keepin’ his money in the bank same as a regular full-sized yoke that isn’t sawed off at the knees?” the tall one by the door said as he moved toward the bed. “No, little sawed-off yokes keep their ready close by.” As he came close, Slattery recognized him. He was the watchman’s nephew. Peewee had seen him several times when he’d come to hustle his uncle for money. Once or twice he had stood at the edge of the candlelight watching the play around the oblong of green baize.
“Will a fist in the face be refreshin’ your memory, Troll?” the nephew asked Peewee.
The dwarf wondered how they had found him. Nobody knew where he lived. He had taken care each Friday to walk home by a different route, at different times.
The nephew sank his fist in Peewee’s stomach. “Where’s the money, runt?” he asked, taking a drag on his cigarette and blowing the smoke into Peewee’s face. The dwarf coughed and clamped his lips shut. “O.K., Ferg, he’s yours,” the nephew told the third man, who moved his lit cigarette toward Slattery’s cheek while Black-eye pressed open a switchblade knife.
The blade slashed the laces on Peewee’s right shoe before it travelled up the short leg, slitting the cloth of the trousers from ankle to waist. Angry red circles marked the progress of Ferg’s cigarette upward along the dwarf s thigh. It wasn’t long before the bundles of pound notes were gone, the nephew and his two friends along with them.
The day was paling to dusk before Slattery rose, bathed the burns with cold water, and put on his other pair of pants. He had spent the afternoon figuring out ways to recover his lost fortune, then realized that money could be replaced but these creatures had shattered his dream. It was vengeance he wanted — vengeance, pure and simple.
The following Friday at the usual time, he arrived at the Coffin Factory with the roll of baize cloth underneath his arm. He gave the watchman his ten pounds and moved about preparing the storeroom for the night’s play as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened. He watched the old man carefully but the man was just as open, just as helpful as always. Slattery was relieved. Poor scrawny wisp, he’d been wronged by him, Slattery, just as Slattery had been wronged by the nephew — more fuel to feed the fire of vengeance, if such was needed.
As the weeks passed, Peewee kept to a schedule, rising early and falling exhausted into bed well after midnight. It would take time to save enough money again to build a life elsewhere, and each Saturday new bundles of notes joined the ones already beneath the loose floorboard in the kitchen. Oddly, he had no fear of being robbed again. He had seen the nephew and his mates wearing new clothes and driving cars paid for with his money. They wouldn’t rob him again — yet. As long as the first money lasted, they would leave him to get on with the saving up of a respectable sum — then they would strike.
At last the day came when he was as ready as he ever was going to be and the number of bundles beneath the floorboards had grown to seventy-nine. The night was warm and dry, with no slick wet surface underfoot to trip him up. It was time to put the first part of his plan into action. He made one final check in the mirror before setting out.
The next morning the late editions carried the story of a body found floating face down in the canal near the meat cannery. It had been identified as belonging to one Fergus McGonigle of Summerhill. Foul play was suspected.
A few weeks later, when the rain had gone somewhere else to fall and the packets of money had reached ninety, Slattery set out once again. This time it was Macker O’Boyle, the one Peewee thought of as Black-eye, who was found dead. The body had been found in Mountjoy Square by a drunk in the early hours of the morning. A switchblade was imbedded in the heart.
By now the newspapers had decided to link the two murders beneath the streamer headline: NEW RASH OF IRA BRUTALITY ASKS CARDAI. In the story following, a tall blond man was mentioned; the police hoped he would come forward to help in their investigations.
By the time the so-called IRA murders were shunted to the inside pages by a spate of pub bombings in the North, the devaluation of the Green Pound, and u Middle East hijacking, Slattery’s winnings had reached the exact sum the three toughs had appropriated. Once again the dwarf prepared to go out into the dry still night.
Later, in the small hours before dawn, Slattery returned to the safety of the little house condemned to the bulldozer. Closed into the firelit warmth, he undid his belt letting the long trousers fall to the floor. With relief he unbuckled the wooden legs it had taken so many months of pain to learn to use. But it had been worth it, he thought, recalling the fear-rounded eyes of the watchman’s nephew.
It had all been so simple, like plucking grapes from a stem. The nephew had enjoyed his stout in the same pub as his one-time companions as though he alone among the three was somehow immune to death. Slattery almost laughed out loud when the pub lights flickered “closing time” and the nephew drifted into the street with the other late drinkers. A few die-hards hovered in the locked entrance as though in hope the publican, realizing the error of his ways, would rush them out an extra pint. Others trailed off singly or in pairs. The nephew flipped a hand in farewell and headed toward the quays with Peewee following a discreet distance behind.
Slattery caught up with him when he paused to light a cigarette halfway along a shadowed laneway near the coffin factory. His hand shot out and encircled the turtle neck of the nephew’s sweater.