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He nodded. The waitress came back, swapped him a full flask of sake for his empty one, left again.

“Shoes?” I said.

He laughed, a brief bitter crack of a sound. “Have you ever tried to cobble a Nike?” he said.

I shook my head. It wasn’t something I’d had to try lately, though I’d had enough job worries of my own. The Dublin journalistic grind is not a simple one to navigate. I had gone from features editor to subfeatures editor at one of the CityWatch magazines, always being hurled from scandal to scandal—they would keep publishing badly concealed ads for the less discreet of the massage parlors and lap-dancing joints over by Leeson Street.

“That line of work’s all done now,” he said. “Planned obsolescence . . . it runs straight to the heart of things. People don’t want shoes that last years. They want shoes that maybe last a year.My folk, we couldn’t do that. Against our religion.”

I didn’t say anything, not knowing if it would be wise. I did some interviewing for the magazine I worked for, and had learned to appreciate the sound of a subject that the speaker didn’t want you to follow up on.

“It’s the death of craftsmanship,” the leprechaun said. “Nike and all the other big conglomerates, they’d sooner have slave labor in Malaysia than honest supernatural assistance from a first-world country with good tax breaks . . .”He drank some sake.“No,we’re all in information technology now, or high-end manufacturing, computers and so on. It’s the only place left for skilled handworkers to go. My clan was all out in Galway once: they’re all in Fingal now, for the work. Damn made-up county, nothing real about it but freeways and housing developments. Name me a single hero-feat that was ever done in Fingal!”

“I got from Independent Pizza to the airport once in less than half an hour,” I said: and it was all I could think of. It didn’t count, and we both knew it. All the same, he laughed.

It broke the ice.We were there for a few hours at least, chatting. The belt started up again while we talked, and some more people drifted in; and still we talked while the light outside faded through twilight to sodium-vapor streetlight after sunset. The leprechaun turned out not to be one of those more-culchie-than-thou types, all peat and poitín, but an urbanite—clued-in and streetwise, but also well-read.He knew where the hot clubs were, but he could also quote Schopenhauer as readily as he could Seamus Heaney; and as for culture, he told me several things about Luciano Pavarotti’s last visit to Dublin that made me blink.He was, in short, yet another of that classic type, the genuine Dublin character.When you live here, it’s hard to go more than a few days before meeting one. But you don’t routinely meet “Dublin characters” who saw the Vikings land.

I ordered more sake, and paused. Slipping into a seat around the corner of the sushi bar from us was someone at first sight more faerie-tale-looking than the leprechaun: a baby teen, maybe thirteen if that, in red velvet hooded sweatshirt and fake wolf-claw wristlet. Little Red Riding Hood squirmed her blue-jeaned, tanga-briefed self in the seat as she began picking at some fried tofu. The leprechaun glanced at her, glanced back at me again, the look extremely ironic. By contrast, he was conservatism itself, just a short guy with hair you’d mistake for sixties length, in tweeds and extremely well made shoes.

“She’d have been a nice morsel for one of the Greys in my day,” he said under his breath, and laughed again, not entirely a pleasant sound. “Before the wolfhounds did for them, and ‘turncoat’men ran with the wolf packs, getting off on the beast-mind and the blood feast . . . Just look at all that puppy fat.” His grin was feral. “But I shouldn’t complain. She pays my salary. I bet her daddy and mammy buy her a new computer every year.”He scowled.

“Do you really miss the shoes that much?” I said.

It was a mistake. His eyes blazed as he took a plate of the spiced soba noodles, another of the green plates, the least expensive sushi. He didn’t have a single blue or gold or