On the way out, he put the proprietor off with his story of a check coming at the end of the week. Actually, it was the dole, though these days they called it unemployment insurance. Just enough to keep from starving, if managed, but hardly enough for a drinking man.

The hotel was located within sight of the Guiness brewery, the second largest in the world. The first largest was in England and also a Guiness establishment. Sean Ryan passed it and went up to Usher’s Quay, and turned right, paralleling the River Liffey which wound through Dublin as the Seine did through Paris. He headed in the direction of O’Connell Street and the center of town. He made his way to the Pearl bar on Fleet street and entered. The Pearl bar, which boasted in one back corner possibly the smallest urinal Sean Ryan had ever seen. It had once occured to Ryan that every playwright and poet in over a hundred years of Irish literature had relieved himself in that urinal, from Oscar Wilde to Brendan Behan, by the way of Sean O’Casey, Synge, and all the rest. It was a writer’s bar in the oldest Dublin tradition. No women allowed, of course. There was a tiny room off to one side where a man could leave his wife, if she wasn’t too particular about the drabs she associated with, and she could sit at a table and have half a pint, while he stood at the bar in the saloon proper.

Sean Ryan went to the bar, immediately in front of the row of old style spigots, climbed shakily up onto a stool and said, “A pint.” The bartender had already begun to draw it before the words were out.

An Irish pint is a full twenty ounces, almost as much as an American fifth. The Pearl served foreign export, the double charged Guiness stout. The bartender held his hand on the glass until Sean Ryan had put forth his money. He recognized his man.