The Pub and the Tall Man - Excerpt from a Project
The note was taped to the fridge when he went for another beer. Directions to a pub he hadn’t heard of, and a small hand-drawn map.
He had been in the cottage three days. The couple were in Hungary for three months. He had answered the ad. Retired, single, familiar with Beara, references in order. They had liked him on the phone. He hadn’t met them.
The road narrowed past Eyeries and kept narrowing. Grass down the centre. The signposts had been turned. He had been told they would be. He drove slowly and watched the map.
It took longer than it should have.
The pub had no sign. A donkey stood in the yard with a cart behind it, the cart empty, the donkey indifferent. He sat in the car for a minute before he got out. The cold went straight through his jacket.
The conversation stopped when he opened the door. Not for long. Long enough.
He went to the bar. The woman behind it finished pouring a stout for a tall man at the counter, set the glass down, and looked at him.
“Murphys,” he said. “And a Jameson on the side.”
She nodded once and turned to the taps.
The tall man waited until the stout was in front of him before he spoke.
“Fine night.”
“It is.”
“You wouldn’t be one of the tourists, now.”
“I’m minding a house.”
“Whose house would that be.”
“A couple outside Castletownbere. Off to Hungary for three months.”
The tall man took a slow drink. He set the glass down with some care. “Is that right,” he said.
“That’s right.”
“And when did they go.”
“Three days ago.”
The tall man looked at the bar. Then he looked at the woman behind it. She was drying a glass and not looking at either of them.
“Three days,” he said.
“Three days.”
“I see.”
He didn’t say what he saw. He turned back to his stout and drank it in a way that suggested the conversation was over for now but not over.
The stranger picked up his Jameson. He held it without drinking. He had said where he was living, to a man he didn’t know, in a pub he had been sent to by a note he hadn’t written. He was seventy-three years old and he had been trained, a long time ago, not to do any of these things.
He drank the whiskey.
The donkey was still in the yard when he came out.