Irish Whiskey

by Andrew M. Greeley

  Mario appeared with tea and cookies and a bottle of sherry, a relatively frugal tea by Irish standards, though the sherry cost at least two hundred dollars a bottle. Wholesale.

  “Would you do us the honors, my dear?” The Angel asked her.

  “I’d be happy to.”

  This was getting a little too thick for me. Maybe I ought to slug Mario and stir up a little action. He was a bit too fat to be all that good in a fight.

  Nuala Anne poured the tea and gave each of us an Irish crystal glass with a few drops of sherry in it.

  Maybe we should have asked for Irish whiskey.

  Oh, whiskey ye’re me darling; drunk or sober.

  “And you were a great football player for Fenwick too,” The Angel said, continuing down the nostalgia road. “Peter really admired you for quitting the team because the coach was too brutal.”

  Maybe Pete had, and maybe he hadn’t. But The Angel was showing that he knew all about me.

  “I didn’t think football was about hurting other people.”

  “And you’re so right, so right. There’s too much brutality in sports these days, I always say.”

  We paused to nibble on cookies, freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. Herself had put three of them on my plate.

  “Before we have our discussion, I wanted to say that if you’d like we could have a little talk with the individual Jared Kennedy and straighten him out. It’s not a good thing he’s doing. He’s not a good boy, I’m afraid. Peter told me that a long time ago.”

  Aha, he was offering us a quid before he asked for a quo.

  “That’s very good of you, sir. In the long run we may need that help, but right now and despite the lies in the media, we think we can take care of him ourselves.”

  “Good, good!” he said with an approving nod. “The media are terrible these days, aren’t they? No respect for anyone … There’s something wrong with that Jared Kennedy individual. He comes from such a good family. These days parents sometimes cannot control what their children do, can they?”

  Nuala and I agreed that this was a shame.

  “Well,” he said with a sigh, “I suppose we should talk a little bit about poor Jimmy Sullivan, if that’s all right with you.”

  “Naturally,” I said. “I’d simply like to repeat what I said to your friend who talked to me this morning …”

  “Friend of a friend.”

  “Of course … We are interested in him because his grave is next to our family plot and because we have discovered in my grandmother’s diary that he gave them our plot …”

  “Did he?” The Angel’s eyes flickered in surprise. “I was not aware of that. He was a very generous individual.”

  He seemed now more uneasy than he had been before. We might know more than he thought we knew.

  “However, it is not our intention to cause any trouble or pain for anyone as a result of our interest. I’m not about to base a novel on his story … In fact, I think my next novel will be about a United States Attorney.”

  The Angel laughed, more with relief than amusement.

  “I’m very glad to hear that from your own lips, Dermot. It’s a source of great happiness to me. I always say that there’s no point in digging up the past. Many of the things that have happened in the past are better forgotten. Why hurt people who were not even alive then?”

  “Absolutely,” I said, as I gobbled down the third cookie.

  “This Jimmy Sullivan individual was a very talented and brave man. Perhaps just a little bit too brave. Now he’s dead and buried and in his tomb. The best thing to do would be to leave him there.”

  “But he’s not in his grave at Mount Carmel, Mr. Albergetti,” my Nuala said demurely. “If he’s dead and buried now—and he probably is—then his body is somewhere else.”

  The Angel picked up his sherry glass for the first time and sipped from it.

  “I’m sure that’s not true, my dear.”

  “It is true, Mr. Albergetti,” Nuala sighed, as though she regretted having to spring her trap. “I’ve seen the inside of his casket.”

  The boss of all bosses sipped from his sherry glass again. Twice. I figured that Dermot Michael Coyne had better sit the rest of this conversation out.

  “You’ve had him dug up? … I heard nothing of this!”

  “I didn’t have to dig it up to see the inside of the casket. There’s nine stones in it, which are exactly his weight before he died.”

  “Holy Mother of God,” Angelo exclaimed, making the sign of the cross.

  “My fiancée is one of the dark ones, Mr. Albergetti,” I said. “She sees things.”

  Nuala nodded agreement. “Not things I want to see, sir, not things I’d like to see, but things I should see.”

  “Holy Mother of God,” The Angel exclaimed again, and made the sign of the cross again.

  “Dermot Michael spoke the truth, sir. We are not going to make any trouble for anyone. We’re certainly not going to the media with what we know. He will not write a novel about it. But we both feel that there’s more we should know. If you say that you will not let us find that out, then we will wait to another day. But we hope you won’t make us wait.”

  Angelo Albergetti had turned ashen. He coughed a couple of times.

  Mario rushed into the room.

  “Are you all right, sir?”

  “I’m fine, Mario.” He waved the thug out of the room.

  “I had not expected,” he said with another cough, “that our conversation would take this turn … What would you like me to do for you?”

  “We would like to talk to Marie,” Nuala said briskly. “Would that be possible?”

  I hadn’t thought of that, but, hell, I was only the spear-carrier.

  “Marie?”

  “Marie Kavanagh Sullivan … She must be still alive or you would not be concerned about the agreement her husband made with Mr. Capone and which you are vowed to honor.”

  The Angel looked at his sherry glass, picked it up, and drained it.

  “Are you permitted a second glass, sir?” herself asked politely.

  “On certain rare occasions,” he said with a weak smile, “of which this is certainly one.”

  She poured him a second glass, this one filled to the top. She offered me nothing at all, but then, wasn’t I out of the loop?

  “I’m not sure that I can grant your request,” The Angel said cautiously as he sipped from his glass. “I will have to consult. If I cannot do so?”

  “Then we will have to wait,” Nuala replied, shrugging her shoulders. “However, I expect that Mrs. Sullivan might want to talk to us.”

  “Perhaps you are right … I have your word that nothing will be written about these individuals, unless you have proper permission.”

  “Absolutely,” she said.

  “The dark ones never lie,” he said as if to himself.

  “They always keep their promises,” Nuala agreed.

  I had never heard this at all and I doubted that it was true in Irish folklore.

  “I’ll see what we can work out.” He nodded his agreement. “I must thank you both for being so cooperative and so … candid.”

  It sounded to me like he meant it. Nonetheless, I would have Reliable Security keep an eye on us for a couple of weeks.

  We returned to small talk, mostly about what a grand weekend it was, with both Notre Dame and the Bears winning.

  Mario shook hands with me as he showed us out. “Good luck with the book, Mr. Coyne … and with the grand jury.”

  “Thanks, Mario,” I said affably. “I’ll need luck in both.”

  Outside, as the afternoon slipped away in quiet haze, Nuala asked me, “What do you think?”

  “I think you scared the shite out of him.”

  “That’s what I wanted to do.”

  “Will Marie agree to talk to us.”

  “Certainly. Didn’t I say she wanted to talk to us?”

  21

  CINDY AND I waited in the ant
echamber to the grand jury room all morning, a wait designed to unnerve us, just as the waiting at Angelo Albergetti’s house, a plan which in Nuala’s case had no effect at all.

  At all, at all.

  I had told herself that there was no point in her coming down to the grand jury hearing. It was a ritual. No matter what I said or didn’t say, I would be indicted. Moreover, most of the day would be spent in a windowless room furnished with a beige steel federal table and a couple of matching chairs. She most certainly could come to the arraignment later in the week. Better that she spend the day as she had intended—working on the last-minute details for the wedding.

  I was amazed at how calmly I said the words “arraignment” and “indictment.”

  “How do we play it?” I had asked Cindy.

  “There’s two ways. One is to stonewall her. You have the right to come out and ask me whether you should answer a given question. She won’t tell you that of course. But you have the right. You could come out often and frustrate her. Or you could let things go because the ritual doesn’t mean anything anyway.”

  “What would you advise?”

  “Let her know that she has a fight on her hands,” she said, jabbing her finger at me as a sign that we were in a fighting mood.

  “Yeah, that’s what I feel like doing.”

  At noon one of Quade’s subordinate amadons, same pinched face, same lean and hungry look, same angry eyes, same studied rudeness, entered the anteroom.

  “We’re breaking for lunch,” she said curtly. “Be back at 1:00.”

  Cindy glanced at her watch.

  “One-thirty, Counselor. We’re entitled to time for a decent lunch.”

  A spasm of rage crossed the woman’s face. “Suit yourself, it’s your funeral.”

  “Whose funeral it will be,” Cindy said, gathering her purse and notes, “remains to be seen.”

  “Can we really nail them for malicious prosecution, Cindy?” I asked as we rode down the elevator.

  “Certainly. They have pushed the envelope too far on this one. They’ve been getting away with more outrageous behavior each time they go after someone, so what they’re trying to do to you looks like a gradual step, but it goes into a whole other area of depravity.”

  “Fine,” I said with considerable lack of enthusiasm.

  “With any luck at all, we can charge them with criminal conspiracy,” she said, jabbing her finger again. “That will be a little trickier. We’d need some kind of special prosecutor and a confession from Jarry. A sympathetic judge might go along.”

  “That would be a nice irony, an informant turning informant.”

  “I’d love it.”

  “I’m sure you would.”

  She did not notice my irony. I mentally offered a prayer of gratitude to the deity that my bride-to-be had chosen accounting and music as a career instead of law. She would make my sibling seem noncompetitive by comparison.

  About three in the afternoon, the witch de camp came into the windowless room again.

  “OK, Coyne, your turn.”

  “Mr. Coyne,” Cindy reminded her.

  The woman’s eyes burned.

  “Very well, MR. Coyne.”

  On the way in I encountered Jarry Kennedy, a triumphant grin on his fat face.

  “You’re dead, Dermy Boy, totally dead.”

  I smiled affably. “No, Jarry, you’re the one who’s dead.”

  Inside, twenty-four men and women were distributed on a two-tiered grandstand. The walls were oak panels. The United States Attorney’s staff sat in comfortable chairs behind an oak table. I stood in the front of the jury, most of whom seemed bored, even half asleep after their lunch.

  It was a charade. Grand juries always indict.

  (Excerpts from testimony of Dermot M. Coyne before the grand jury in the United States Court for the Northern District of Illinois.)

  US: What is your occupation, Mr. Coyne?

  DMC: I’m a writer.

  US: You support yourself entirely from your writing?

  DMC: From my writing and from my investments.

  US: What proportion of your income does your writing support?

  DMC: I’ll have to ask my attorney whether I should answer that question.

  (DMC: leaves room.)

  (He returns.)

  US: Well?

  DMC: My attorney directs me to refuse to answer that question because it is irrelevant.

  US: Is it not true that you worked for four years at the Mercantile Exchange?

  DMC: Yes, it is.

  US: Were you a very good trader?

  DMC: No, ma’am. I was not.

  US: Why were you not a very good trader?

  DMC: I don’t have the mind of a good trader. They must make decisions very rapidly. I like to take time to make decisions.

  US: Yet you remained there?

  DMC: Yes, ma’am.

  US: Why?

  DMC: It left me time to write.

  US: About how much money did you lose during your years at the Mercantile Exchange?

  DMC: I didn’t lose money, ma’am.

  US: I mean up till the time of your surprising windfall?

  DMC: I didn’t lose money, ma’am, even before that

  time. I didn’t make much, but I didn’t lose much either.

  US: How much did you make?

  DMC: I can’t recall. I’m sure it’s in my tax returns, which the Internal Revenue Service has examined very carefully.

  US: Is it not true that you were thrown out of Notre Dame?

  DMC: No, ma’am.

  US: Why did you leave then?

  DMC: I had failed all my courses during the second semester of my sophomore year. I could have remained out of school for a semester and then reapplied for admission. I elected not to do so.

  US: Then you enrolled in Marquette University?

  DMC: Yes, ma’am.

  US: Where you also failed?

  DMC: No, ma’am. I passed all my courses during my two years there but it would have taken several more years of school to make up for my failing grades at Notre Dame.

  US: So you have been pretty much a failure at everything in your life?

  DMC: I’ll have to ask my attorney whether that is an appropriate question.

  (DMC: exits room.)

  “You must be driving her out of her mind, Derm,” Cindy said to me.

  “She does seem frustrated. The jury members like me.”

  “Poor, affable, honest Dermot, everyone’s inept friend! Well, they’ll still have to vote for an indictment, but keep it up.”

  “She is one sick woman. She doesn’t look at you while she’s asking her questions. Then suddenly she turns on you and stares directly into your face, her eyes glowing with revulsion.”

  “Oh yes, she should not be permitted to be a prosecutor. Poor kid, that husband of hers drove her round the bend, but that’s not our problem. Maybe we can drive her over the top.”

  “What should I tell her?”

  “Tell her that your attorney said she should know better than to ask a question like that.”

  I went back in the room and repeated Cindy’s words. Some of the African-American women tittered. Quade’s face turned crimson. She drove on relentlessly, taking apart my life and creating the image of an inept, hapless failure, an image which was, heaven knows, not totally inaccurate.

  US: Is it not true, Mr. Coyne, that the commodity pits are nothing more than gambling casinos?

  DMC: Socially useful gambling casinos.

  US: How can gambling be socially useful?

  DMC: All mature capitalist economies have commodity markets. Farmers can hedge against bad weather, companies that depend on oil can hedge against fluctuations in oil prices, investment funds against sudden changes in stock prices.

  US: And traders like yourselves can make large fortunes out of those events.

  DMC: And lose large fortunes.

  US: But you made a large fortune?

  DMC:
Yes, ma’am.

  US: Because of your skill as a trader?

  DMC: No, ma’am.

  US: How then?

  DMC: Luck.

  US: Luck, Mr. Coyne? Come now, that won’t do.

  DMC: It’s true though.

  US: Why don’t you try to explain to us how your, ah, luck worked.

  DMC: Well, it would be like someone wanted to bet on a horse and by mistake bet on the wrong horse and the wrong horse won.

  US: And that way you won, if I may use the word, three million dollars?

  DMC: That’s right.

  US: Do you think you earned that money?

  DMC: (hesitates) When a person goes onto the trading floor he accepts all the risks, including bad luck. By so doing, he also opens himself—or herself—to the possibility of good luck.

  US: Do good luck and bad luck occur in equal amounts?

  DMC: It often seems that there is more bad luck than good luck, but over the long run the coin will come up heads as often as it comes up tails.

  US: Very interesting, Mr. Coyne. So you think it is all right to accept good luck?

  DMC: Yes, ma’am.

  US: Even if you cheat to get it?

  DMC: It is not right to cheat. Moreover, cheating is not luck. It’s cheating.

  US: Since you earned three million dollars in a single trade by cheating, you were not lucky after all, were you?

  DMC: I did not cheat, ma’am.

  US: Do you expect the grand jury to believe that?

  DMC: I hope they do, ma’am.

  US: Suppose you explain to the grand jury how you made your lucky fortune.

  So I explained my good luck. The jurors seemed to understand. Yet I was a trader and therefore they would indict me.

  US: So you made yourself a fortune?

  DMC: Yes, ma’am.

  US: With your client’s money?

  DMC: No, ma’am. He called at the end of trading Monday and said that he hoped I had enough sense to bail him out before he lost too much. I told him that he hadn’t lost a thing. I explained why.

  US: His reaction to that?

  DMC: He was delighted that the two of us had been so lucky. He hadn’t lost the money he thought he was going to lose. And I’d made a lot. He did advise me to get out of trading because he said I’d never be that lucky again. I had already made up my mind to do that.