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So it was a shock, the next day, to find that he was dead.

LEPRECHAUNS DON’T DIE the way we do: otherwise, the Gardai would have a lot more work on their plates than they already do with the burglaries and the joyriders and the addicts shooting up in the middle of Temple Bar.At the scene of a leprechaun’s murder, you find a tumble of clothes, and usually a pair of extremely well made shoes, but nothing else. That was all the Folk found the next morning, down the little back alley that runs from the Grafton Street pedestrian precinct to behind Judge Roy Bean’s.

At first everyone assumed that he’d run afoul of some druggie desperate for money and too far separated from his last fix. They may be of the Old Blood, but leprechauns can’t vanish at will without preparation: you can get the drop on one if you’re smart and fast. Various pots of gold were lost to mortals this way in the old days, when there was still gold in Ireland. But the leprechauns had the advantage of open ground and nonurban terrain into which to vanish. It’s harder to do in the city. There are too many eyes watching you—half of a leprechaun’s vanishing is skillful misdirection—and, these days, there are too many dangers too closely concentrated. The sense of those who knew him was that he just got unlucky.

I confess it was partly curiosity that brought me to the wake, where I was told all this. But it was partly the astonishment of having another of the leprechaun’s people actually look me up at the magazine. There he stood, looking like a youthful but much shorter Mickey Rooney in tweeds, waiting in the place’s glossy, garish reception area and looking offended by it all. I came out to talk to him, and he said, “Not here . . .”

My boss, in her glass-walled inner office, was safely on the phone, deep in inanely detailed conversation with some publishing or media figure about where they would be going for lunch. This happened every day, and no one who went missing from now to 3:00 P.M., when the Boss might or might not come back, would be noticed. I stepped outside with the leprechaun and went down to stand with him by the news kiosk at the corner of Dawson Street.

“You were the last one to see him alive,” the leprechaun said. I knew better than to ask “who?”; first because I immediately knew whom he meant, and second because you don’t ask leprechauns their names—they’re all secret, and (some say) they’re all the same.

“He was all right when he left,” I said. “What happened?”

“No one knows,” said the leprechaun.“He wasn’t drunk?”

“He didn’t have anything like enough sake.” Privately I doubted there was that much sake in the city. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen someone try to drink a leprechaun under the table.

The leprechaun nodded, and he looked as grim as my dinner companion had the other night.

“He was murdered,” he said.

I was astounded. “How? Why?”

“We don’t know. But he’s not the first. More like the tenth, and they’re coming closer together.”

“A serial killer . . .”

“We don’t know,” said the leprechaun. “Come to the wake tonight.” And he was off down Dawson Street, quick and dapper, just one more self-possessed businessman, if shorter than most.

Who would kill the Old Folk, though? I thought. Who stands to profit? It’s hard enough for most mortals even to see them, let alone to kill them. One or two might have been accidents. But ten? . . .

THERE WERE NO ANSWERS for my questions then. I went back to work, because there was nothing better to do, and when my boss still wasn’t back by four, I checked out early and made my way down to the Long Hall.

The place doesn’t look very big from the frontage on South Great Georges Street. A red-and-white sign over a wide picture window, obscured by ancient, dusty stained-glass screens inside; that’s all there is. The place looks a little run-down. Doubtless the proprietors encourage that look, for the Long Hall is a pint house of great fame, and to have such a place be contaminated by as few tourists as possible is seen as a positive thing in Dublin. If you make