"Go on, Father," said Doone, "be merciful!"

"Ah, what the h.e.l.l," said the priest at last, pale but willing, "Shaw, you did not know what you were doing."

Shaw dropped the bag.

There was a nice explosion, m.u.f.fled within the sack, not unlike a chandelier crashed in the dark.

"There goes a whole factory of philosophy," I said.

"Drinks all around!" said Father O'Malley.

"Father, that's the first you've ever bought!" I cried.

"Shut your lip and pull the levers."

I laid out a last brandy for the playwright.

"Ah, no." Shaw shook his head, which made his beard ignite. "It was that first shot, an hour ago, that grew my hooves and ran me to pandemonium. Time!"

Which alarmed the men.

"No, not closing.'" Shaw turned. "Time for me to leave."

"It is," cried Shaw's chauffeur from the door, dirty of hands and drawn of face. "The d.a.m.n beast is fixed!"

Shaw was halfway to the door, practical shoes striking invisible sparks, when Father O'Malley said, "Wait!"

Shaw waited.

"You're not a bad sort," said the priest lamely. "And my temper is fierce. Your shoes do not resemble hooves. It was just a way of speaking. Have you written us down!"

"You," Shaw held up a full page of shorthand, "are immortatt Goodbye, goodbye."

Then his Punch and Judy face popped away from the doors and sailed off to the car. I followed to hear the chauffeur say: "Where to?"

"h.e.l.l," said Shaw smartly. "That will do nicely. Yes, h.e.l.l, I think."

The chauffeur tossed a map into the back seat. "Will you find it, sir, and shout directions!"

"Yes!" Shaw laughed. "So long, Mr. Finn, so long, so long!"

And they drove away.

Heeber Finn finished and was silent.

There was a similar silence in the men lined up as audience along the bar.

Then someone lifted a gnarled hand and a callused palm, to beat it slowly against another of the same. And then one more enthusiast moved his paws and banged the air, followed by some other atheists turned believers, leastwise in Finn if nothing else, until the pub let down dust from the chandeliers and hung its pictures askew.

Finn poured and I said: "Did all that truly happen?"

Finn froze as if he had put wet fingers to a frosted winter pipe and could not free his hand.

"I meant to say," I mumbled, "your facts are right, but were they rearranged!"

"Rearrange," wondered Finn. "Is that a course they teach at Berlitz?"

I lifted my gla.s.s. "Here's to Finn's. And the inhabitants thereof. And to that devil's advocate-"

"Shaw!"

"Who wandered far," I said, "but to come home to truth."

"G.o.d," said Finn. "You sound like US!" US!"

"Drinks," I said, "all around!"

27.

It was at lunch after a long morning of the Pequod becalmed. We were in a Dublin restaurant with two newspaper reporters from London.

Soup had just been served and I had taken up my spoon, when John, looking deep into his broth, made this remark: "You know, it makes me very sad to say this, but I really don't think that our young screenwriter here has his heart in the writing of the screenplay of Moby d.i.c.k."

I froze in place.

The two reporters looked at John and then at me and waited. John did not look up from his soup but went on: "No, I just don't think that our friend here has his heart and his soul in this important film work."

My spoon fell from my fingers and lay on the tablecloth. I could not lift my eyes. My heart pounded, and I felt that at any moment I might leap up and run from the table. Instead I stayed with my gaze on my food, as the soup was taken away and the meat served and the meat taken away and the wine poured, which I did not drink, while John talked with the reporters and did not once look at me.

When it was over I walked like a blind man out of the restaurant and accompanied John up to my room in the Royal Hibernian Hotel. When we got inside I stood, swaying, looking at John, afraid that I might faint.

John looked at me for a long while, questioningly and at last said: "What's wrong, kid?"

"Wrong, John? Wrong!" I cried at last. "Did you hear yourself at lunch today?"

"What, kid?"

"My G.o.d," I said. "Of all the people in the world I wanted to work for, it was you. Of all the novels in the world I would most want to adapt, it was Melville's. I have put my heart, soul, and guts in this day after day, with all my sweat and all my love, and now you, at lunch Jesus! Don't you ever listen to yourself!?"

John widened his eyes and gaped. "Why, h.e.l.l, kid, it was a joke. That's all. A joke, sure, only a joke!"

"A joke!" I yelled, and shut my eyes and burst into tears.

John stepped forward swiftly and took my shoulders and shook me gently and then put my head on his shoulder and let me cry. "Christ, kid," he kept saying. "It was all in fun. Don't you see? Fun."

It took a full minute for me to stop crying. We talked for a while and John left, telling me to head out to Kilc.o.c.k that night with my latest pages for dinner, chat, and late-night whiskey.

When he was gone, I sat at the typewriter for a long while, swaying, not able to see the paper. And then at last, instead of writing "Moby d.i.c.k, page 79, scene 30, shot 2," I wrote something else.

Very slowly, I typed these words: BANSHEE.

A story And then I wrote steadily for the next two hours.

It was one of those nights, crossing Ireland, motoring through the sleeping towns from Dublin, where you came upon mist and encountered fog that blew away in rain to become a blowing silence. All the country was still and cold and waiting. It was a night for strange encounters at empty crossroads with great filaments of ghost spiderweb and no spider in a hundred miles. Gates creaked far across meadows, where windows rattled with brittle moonlight.

It was, as they said, banshee weather. I sensed, I knew this as my taxi hummed through a final gate and I arrived at Courtown House, so far from Dublin that if that city died in the night, no one would know.

I paid my driver and watched the taxi turn to go back to the living city, leaving me alone with twenty pages of screenplay in my pocket, and my employer waiting inside. I stood in the midnight silence, breathing in Ireland and breathing out the damp coal mines in my soul.

Then I knocked.

The door flew wide almost instantly. John was there, shoving a gla.s.s of sherry into my hand and hauling me in.

"Good G.o.d, kid. Get that coat off. Give me the script. Almost finished, eh? So you say. You got me curious. The house is empty. The family's in Paris. We'll have a good read, knock the h.e.l.l out of your scenes, drink a bottle, you can stay over, be in bed by two and-what's that?"

The door still stood open. John took a step, tilted his head, closed his eyes, listened.

The wind rustled beyond in the meadows. It made a sound in the clouds like someone turning back the covers of a vast bed.

I listened.

There was the softest moan and sob from somewhere off in the dark fields.

Eyes still shut, John whispered, "You know what that is, kid?"

"What?"

"Tell you later. Jump."

With the door slammed, he turned about and, the grand lord of the empty manor, strode ahead of me in his hacking coat, drill slacks, polished half-boots, his hair, as always, wind-blown from swimming upstream or down with strange women in unfamiliar beds.

Planting himself on the library hearth, he gave me one of those beacon flashes of laughter, the teeth that beckoned like a lighthouse beam swift and gone, as he traded me a second sherry for the screenplay, which he had to seize from my hand.

"Let's see what my genius, my left ventricle, my right arm, has birthed. Sit. Drink. Watch." He stood astride the hearthstones, warming his backside, leafing the ma.n.u.script pages, conscious of me drinking my sherry much too fast, shutting my eyes each time he let a page drop and flutter to the carpet. When he finished he let the last page sail, lit a small cigarillo and puffed it, staring at the ceiling, making me wait.

"You son of a b.i.t.c.h," he said at last, exhaling. "It's good. d.a.m.n you to h.e.l.l, kid. It's good!"

My skeleton collapsed within me. I had not expected such a midriff blow of praise.

"It needs a little cutting, of course!"

My skeleton rea.s.sembled itself.

"Of course," I said.

He bent to gather the pages like a great loping chimpanzee and turned. I felt he wanted to hurl them into the fire. He watched the flames and gripped the pages.

"Someday, kid," he said quietly, "you must teach me to write."

I was relaxing now, accepting the inevitable, full of true admiration.

"Someday," I said, laughing, "you must teach me to direct."

"The Beast will be our film, son. Quite a team."

I arose and came to clink gla.s.ses with him.

"Quite a team we are!" He changed gears. "How are the wife and kids?"

"They've arrived and are waiting for me in Sicily, where it's warm."

"We'll get you to them, and sun, straight off! I-"

John froze dramatically, c.o.c.ked his head, and listened.

"Hey, what goes on ..." he whispered.

I turned and waited.

This time, outside the great old house, there was the merest thread of sound, like someone running a fingernail over the paint, or someone sliding down out of the dry reach of a tree. Then there was the softest exhalation of a moan, followed by something like a sob.

John leaned in a starkly dramatic pose, like a statue in a stage pantomime, his mouth wide, as if to allow sounds entry to the inner ear. His eyes now unlocked to become as huge as hens' eggs with pretended alarm.

"Shall I tell you what that sound is, kid? A banshee!"

"A what?" I cried.

"Banshee!" he intoned. "The ghosts of old women who haunt the roads an hour before someone dies. That's what that sound was!" He stepped to the window, raised the shade, and peered out. "Shh! Maybe it means . . . us"

"Cut it out, John!" I laughed quietly.

"No, kid, no." He fixed his gaze far into the darkness, savoring his melodrama. "I've lived here two years. Death's out there. The banshee always knowsl Where were we?"

John broke the spell as simply as that, strode back to the hearth and blinked at the script as if it were a brand-new puzzle.

"You ever figure, kid, how much the Beast is like me? The hero plowing the seas, plowing women left and right, off round the world and no stops? Maybe that's why I'm doing it. You ever wonder how many women I've had? Hundreds! I-"

He stopped, for my lines on the page had shut him again. His face took fire as the words sank in.

"Brilliant!"

I waited, uncertainly.