“Where am I going to spend those coins, Mad Sweeney?” Shadow asked. “Are there a lot of places you can turn your gold into cash?”
He thought the Irishman was going to hit him for a moment, but the moment passed and Mad Sweeney just stood there, holding out his gold-filled cap with both hands like Oliver Twist. And dien tears swelled in his blue eyes and began to spill down his cheeks. He took the cap and put it—now empty of everything except a greasy sweatband—back over his thinning scalp. “You gotta, man,” he was saying. “Didn’t I show you how to do it? I showed you how to take coins from the hoard. I showed you where the hoard was. Just give me that first coin back. It didn’t belong to me.”
“I don’t have it anymore.”
Mad Sweeney’s tears stopped, and spots of color appeared in his cheeks. “You, you fucken—” he said, and then the words failed him and his mouth opened and closed, wordlessly.
“I’m telling you the truth,” said Shadow. “I’m sorry. If I had it I’d give it back to you. But I gave it away.”
Sweeney’s grimy hands clamped on Shadow’s shoulders, and the pale blue eyes stared into his. The tears had made streaks in the dirt on Mad Sweeney’s face. “Shit,” he said. Shadow could smell tobacco and stale bepr and whiskey-sweat. “You’re telling the truth, you fucker. Gave it away and freely and of your own will. Damn your dark” eyes, you gave it a-fucken-way.”
“I’m sorry.” Shadow remembered the whispering thump the coin had made as it landed on Laura’s cajjket.
“Sorry or not, I’m damned and I’m doomed.” He wiped his nose and his eyes on his sleeves, muddying his face into strange patterns.
Shadow squeezed Mad Sweeney’s upper arm in an awkward male gesture.
“ ‘Twere better I had never been conceived,” said Mad Sweeney, at length. Then he looked up. “The fellow you gave it to. Would he give it back?”
“It’s a woman. And I don’t know where she is. But no, I don’t believe she would.”
Sweeney sighed, mournfully. “When I was but a young pup,” he said, “there was a woman I met, under the stars, who let me play with her hubbies, and she told me my fortune. She told me that I would be undone and abandoned west of the sunset, and that a dead woman’s bauble would seal my fate. And I laughed and poured more barley wine and played with her bubbies some more, and I kissed her full on her pretty lips. Those were the good days—the first of the gray monks had not yet come to our land, nor had they ridden the green sea to westward. And now.” He stopped, midsentence. His head turned and he focused on Shadow. “You shouldn’t trust him,” he said, reproachfully.
“Who?”
“Wednesday. You mustn’t trust him.”
“I don’t have to trust him. I work for him.”
“Do you remember how to do it?”
“What?” Shadow felt he was having a conversation with half a dozen different people. The self-styled leprechaun sputtered and jumped from persona to persona, from theme to theme, as if the remaining clusters of brain cells were igniting, flaming, and then going out for good.
“The coins, man. The coins. I showed you, remember?” He raised two fingers to his face, stared at them, then pulled a gold coin from his mouth. He tossed the coin to Shadow, who stretched out a hand to catch it, but no coin reached him.
“I was drunk,” said Shadow. “I don’t remember.”
Sweeney stumbled across the road. It was light now and the world was white and gray. Shadow followed him. Sweeney walked in a long, loping stride, as if he were always falling, but his legs were there to stop him, to propel him into another stumble. When they reached the bridge, he held onto the bricks with one hand, and turned and said, “You got a few bucks? I don’t need much. Just enough for a ticket out of this place. Twenty bucks will do me fine. Just a lousy twenty?”
“Where can you go on a twenty dollar bus ticket?” asked Shadow.
“I can get out of here,” said Sweeney. “I can get away before the storm hits. Away from a world in which opiates have become the religion of the masses. Away from.” He stopped, wiped his nose on the side of his hand, then wiped his hand on his sleeve.
Shadow reached into his jeans, pulled out a twenty and passed it to Sweeney. “Here.”