The men continued to talk; Nelson returned to the bar and danced the deft and pleasing little move that took him beneath the hatch.

Well? Jimmy Earls said.

They’re talking about the liver and chips above in the Uptown Grill.

None finer in the town, Jimmy Earls said, and sipped his stout, grimaced.

I think they could be working themselves up to it, Nelson said.

Outside, the last few taxis drifted as stoically as old cows. The drivers looked lonely in the warm handsome yellow of their cabs. The squad cars, with disinterest, took slow turns about the town. The guards knew well of the Judas Iscariot and silently approved – it was a system of containment.

Nelson took the cloth to the bar’s counter and worked it with the turn of the knot and the run of the wood’s grain. He eyed the significant table and wondered how long before he might swing by again. Or maybe send Jimmy Earls by?

Jimmy Earls took the instruction eager as a small dog taking a stick and headed for the facilities. He went by their table unseen – even at twenty-two and a half stone he could disappear in a room the size of this, and smaller again.

As he went past, he heard –

What way did it happen, Charlie? Was there stuff that you said to her?

The moment was approaching. I could be as well staying in the jacks altogether, Jimmy thought, with the lad in me hand. The way things might be shaping out there. He stood and sighed and counted off the drops as they spattered the urinal tile. With the maggot in me hand, he thought – it’s the maggots is the cause of half the consternation around this place.

Nelson beneath the counter gripped the whitethorn cosh for its heft. There had been blood on the premises too recently, necessitating a conversation with the superintendent at the Bridewell Station and a month’s closure – Nelson Lavin had been a month at home on his ownsome watching Judge Judy at five in the morning. Jimmy Earls reappeared, noiselessly, in that shattering way of his. His hoarse, soft, whoremaster’s voice came across the counter –

They’re getting into it now, he said. Goodo.

The hot face on Jimmy read Showtime. Something in the air had changed. There was information in the room like a waft. It was strong as the singe of burnt hair. Vinnie Keogh glanced over his shoulder with morbid unease. Sylvia tipped the back of Rita’s hand – don’t look now.

But somehow all eyes were drawn to the table at precisely the moment Maurice Hearne picked up the glass of vodka and flung its contents in Charlie Redmond’s face. He sat there smiling as he set the glass down again and Charlie, who had not flinched, neither did he now react. He sat there perfectly still and he did not wipe the vodka from his face. He just let it roll down his cheeks and drip onto the table, his expression impassive.

Now Maurice addressed his old friend quickly, directly, neither smiling nor unsmilingly, and Charlie’s expression remained even and calm. Jimmy Earls reached for his overcoat set on the hook beneath the bar’s rim but as quickly he replaced it there – this night could be legend.

Nelson worked the bar cloth along the counter’s wood and grain. The gums were alive in his mouth. Over the motion of the cloth he watched as Maurice aimed more words across the table, and Charlie Redmond did not in any way respond. Was it accusation only that flew, or was there a sense of litany, an outpouring of long grievance? It was impossible to predict what turns might be taken when a woman got in the middle of things. He believed that both men had in the past killed. Jimmy Earls exhaled luxuriously to savour the trouble on the air even before it came properly to pass – I was there on the night of it.

What way you reading it, Nelson?

Jesus only knows.

You think something should be said?

You feeling valiant, Jimmy?

You could fetch ’em a drink over maybe? Innocent little face on you. Make light of it, kind of?

Maybe.

In the gesture there would be word that no harm was yet done. We can proceed gently even still. He took down the bottle of Grey Goose, picked up two fresh glasses, ducked and turned beneath his hatch. He reached back to lay the bar cloth over his forearm. That proper fucking order might be maintained. He carried his saintly face to their table – Maurice leaned back, his eyes widened; Charlie allowed half a natty smile. Nelson primly but without remark mopped the few spits of vodka from the table, placed the two fresh glasses, halfways filled them and returned to the bar.

When he was behind it again he turned to find the men raise their glasses in salute to him. The room was in the grip of all this wonderfully now. Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond leaned in again to talk. Jimmy Earls blinked rapidly to pass an admiring remark on Nelson’s poise.

Outside, there was an eerie night music. The wind moved across the river, the wires swayed, and the lights of the city broke up on the water to mix their colours, but these reformed again sharply as the wind rested.

It was a little after five bells.

Now Charlie Redmond was doing all the talking. It was painful stuff, was Nelson’s read, and Jimmy Earls agreed – the way that Charlie’s lips moved, his sombre grey eyes.

A heart-to-heart we have on us hands, Jimmy said.

Indeed.

You know what they say about the beore?

What’s that, Jimmy?

She run the show. She call the moves. She name the moment.

They always say that about the beore.

Maybe it’s account of her way they says it. She be a put-manners-on-you type.

At the far table the men’s voices came up. The room as one turned to the voices. They were by no means roaring but an agitation was evident, and passion. Nelson Lavin took the whitethorn in his hand. He watched the situation stony-faced, like a referee. Their voices quietening again, Maurice and Charlie leaned in. Eyes elsewhere in the room averted. Jimmy Earls leaned in –

Will I swing past again?

Do, Jimmy. Take the feel of things.

Noiselessly the fat whoremaster glided across the floor. Jimmy Earls the brothel creeper. A very tidy sort in his great bulk. Aim for the porcelain, swing by the hard table. The creased fold thick as a pound coin on the back of Maurice Hearne’s neck – there was a great tension there, while a certain blitheness, unhelpfully, in Jimmy’s opinion, had descended over Charlie Redmond’s eyes. As he moved past their table, again unseen, he caught from the Redmond these words –

Because Karima’s a schemin’ cunt.

Jimmy Earls across no-man’s-land made it again to the facilities. He stood once more with the lad in his hand. He looked to the small window set high – there was no way he’d wriggle through. What if a weapon was now produced? Already, even as he passed through the events of the night, Jimmy at the back of his mind was framing the narrative – he was thinking how he would tell it.

When he passed by the table again, he saw that Maurice had clamped Charlie’s hand to it and he was speaking to him intensely, urgently.

Nelson had one hand under the bar – we all knew what that meant.

Well?

Who the fuck’s Karima and she at home?

Who?

A Karima?

Foreign-sounding.

And a cunt apparently.

This is getting heated, Jimmy.

Hope it’s not someone’s old doll getting put down?

Should I put them out?

Might only push it to the edge of things.

The events quickened –

Charlie Redmond shot up from the table so quickly he sent his chair toppling backwards.

Maurice Hearne reclined, and cruelly smiled, and knit his hands behind his head.

Charlie picked up his glass of vodka and crossed the floor and stood alone at the end of the bar and there he held himself with grace. He sipped from his drink. He looked directly ahead.

Hard to gauge how long had passed – the air of the room was suspended, taut – before Maurice rose and crossed the floor, glass in hand, and he stood beside Charlie Redmond then and tipped the rim of his glass against his friend’s.

Of the dozen or so unreliable narrators left in the room at this small hour, all would claim to have seen precisely what happened next – except for Nelson, who considered himself fortunate to be on the other side of the bar – and, in fact, Jimmy Earls would claim even to have heard what happened next, heard precisely the sound that was made when Maurice Hearne in a single movement took the knife from his pocket, dropped to a kneeling position and plunged the knife into the cup of Charlie Redmond’s right knee, but it was the withdrawal of the knife that did the damage, for it was in this motion that he sliced the ligament, and it was this ripping sound that Jimmy Earls vowed he would carry with him to the deadhouse walls, and with it the single dull gasp that Charlie made.

And it was no more than that, no more than a dull gasp.