Irish Love

by Andrew M. Greeley

  So, for that matter, did I.

  Then she was very generous with herself. She deftly directed my efforts. I was very patient and gentle and tried not to rush. We both experienced great joy.

  Then, suddenly and without warning, we seemed to be snatched up in an overpowering love that for a few moments made our human passion tiny and united us with all the joy in the universe.

  Afterwards, we laid next to each other in bed, our bare shoulders touching.

  “Was I satisfactory, Mr. Fitzpatrick?”

  “Superb, Mrs. Fitzpatrick.”

  “You are quite good with a woman, sir. You take away all our secrets.”

  “I’m glad you are pleased,” I said tentatively.

  “Very pleased, sir.”

  I wasn’t good with women and I didn’t take away any secrets as far as I could remember. But I was a young husband with a beautiful wife and her words were the kind of approval for which I hungered.

  Then she sighed and continued.

  “You deceived me that day in the valley when you threatened to carry me away.”

  “Oh?”

  “You did not speak of love.”

  “I was afraid if I did I would lose you.”

  “You surely would have … . Now I feel that I am bound by my bargain to permit you to love with all the skill and the passion you possess.”

  I did not like the way the conversation was turning.

  “That troubles you?”

  “Only that I must tell you that I will never love you in return.”

  What does a new husband say to that?

  He doesn’t say a thing because his wife sobs wildly and mutters terrible things in Irish.

  Instead of talking, I put my arms around her and let her sob.

  Finally she stopped. She did not try to escape from my embrace.

  “I am sorry, Mr. Fitzpatrick. My behavior was thoroughly inappropriate. I did not mean to say that.”

  I drew her closer. Both of us were too exhausted to have bothered to put on our nightshirts. She was soaking with perspiration.

  “I must say some things to you, sir, perhaps to make amends for ruining this sacred night for you.”

  “I don’t think it’s ruined.”

  “The first thing I must say is that I have known all along where Josie found the money that kept us alive. I am deeply grateful for that gift.”

  I said nothing.

  “Second thing,” she went on, “is that I also read the article you wrote about me in the Chicago Daily News. My brother sent it to me. It made me blush. It makes me blush at this very moment. I can’t believe that I was the person you described. Nonetheless, I was vain enough to be pleased for a moment and then the horror of what was happening recaptured me. Since Mary Elizabeth was born I reread it often when I was ready to give up and die. That woman, I told myself, would never give up.”

  “And didn’t.”

  “She came very close … . The third thing is very difficult for me to discuss, but I must on this night while we lie in each other’s arms.”

  “Naked in each other’s arms.”

  She laughed.

  “I have noticed that … . Did you ever talk to Myles about me?”

  “No. I never spoke to him about anything.”

  “I thought not. Yet he told me the last time I saw him the day before he died that you would come for me to take me away and I should go with you. He described you as that nice-looking young American journalist with the blond hair.”

  “He did!”

  So I told her of Myles’s smile of approbation and invitation in the Green Street Court.

  “How very like him!” She sighed. “It was the sort of man he was.”

  I remained silent.

  “Then that day up in the valley when you finally came as Myles had promised, in my stubborn pride and despair, I almost refused you. I would have if you hadn’t been clever enough to mention Josie. While I was preparing to reject your offer, I knew that up in heaven Myles was greatly displeased with me.”

  “He is pleased now?”

  “Oh, yes. Naturally.”

  I searched for something to say.

  “Would you really have carried me off?”

  “I would certainly have carried you off before John Casey had a chance to kill you as he killed the John Joyce family.”

  “Yes, I think you would have. You are such a romantic, thank God.”

  “Tell me mother that when you meet her.”

  “You can depend on it, I will … . There is one other thing I must say and then I am yours to do whatever you want.”

  “And that is?”

  “Oh, Neddie, my dearest, I love you so much! I will always love you!”

  Neddie is it, I thought to myself, as the wedding night continued. I think I have won the woman.

  Even though I am still an unseasoned young man with little knowledge of the world and practically no knowledge of women, I am at least a little more mature than I was a year ago.

  Or even yesterday.

  29

  “I’M NOT sure whether those behind these crimes ever wanted to kill anyone,” Nuala began her presentation in the dingy conference room of the Clifden police barracks. “They wanted to scare certain people. To scare them, they tried to scare others. They were greedy, but their greed, unlike that of others, did not extend as far as murder. It might be easier for them if they admit their plots now. While the Gardai don’t yet have the detailed evidence that would justify the public prosecutors in bringing charges, they will eventually collect that evidence. Since their plan has backfired and will never work, they would be wise to admit it and accept lesser charges than attempted murder while they still can, especially since while they came close to murdering many of us, I don’t think they intended to do so.”

  No one would have guessed that this poised, professional-sounding woman had suffered from depression. Or that indeed she was from the West of Ireland. Now she was the sophisticated Trinity College graduate, almost a West Brit. Almost, God help us all, a Yank.

  She glanced around the room—Colm MacManus, Seamus Redmond, Sean O‘Cuiv, Margot Quinn, Matt and Daphne Howard, Simon Tailor, Tomas O’Regan. None of them moved. Declan McGinn and Deputy Commissioner Keenan watched impassively. Other Gardaf stood around the room. One sat at a writing table taking notes. Detective Sergeant Peig Sayers, blond and attractive despite her dark suit and pinned-up hair, stood at the door next to a recording machine. She kept her eyes on the ground so that she didn’t have to look at Simon Tailor.

  “No volunteers?” Nuala glanced around. “Very well. When the time comes for a trial your lawyers will doubtless work for a plea bargain. That will become more difficult as we tell more of the story. The first critical point is that there is gold under the Ballynahinch manor house. Not a lot of gold, mind you, but enough for a couple of million pounds of profit. The relevant ministry has kept this fact a secret, even from the Garda, lest there be demonstrations and protests at the prospect of tearing down the hill and the old cemetery. However, some few people knew about it and others suspected it. If you, for reason of your position in society began to suspect, what better time to find out for sure than when the manor house was being restored?”

  Nuala looked around the room again. Still no volunteers.

  “It seemed interesting that the cemetery would be covered up with park land. Despite what we were told at our lunch with the Howards, the cemetery was clearly evident as such. I have here a picture which shows it only ten years ago. I don’t imagine the quiet people who remain in the hills much liked the thought of it being desecrated, but they assumed that His Lordship was up to the same tricks as his ancestors and were no more eager to get into a battle with him than were their ancestors a century and a half ago. By covering the cemetery the builders also covered the strain of gold, which, if you can imagine it, was a bed on which the dead of Maamtrasna had rested for centuries. If those who had discovered it might have told others abou
t their discovery, prospectors searching for the cemetery of the Church on the Hill, as it was called, would never have found it. Moreover, those who wanted the gold knew that when the day came that they could claim it, they would have to move very quickly, perhaps under the pretext of excavating to recover the cemetery. Whether preservationists would have let them get away with it is another matter. I think they would not have. That suggests to me that this scheme, so dramatic in its manifestations, was ill conceived from the beginning and badly executed in its actuality. Any comments?”

  There were none.

  Nuala sighed, the first West of Ireland trait in her discourse.

  “Why then did they hire someone to blow up the T.D.’s house and someone else to shoot at a water-skier whose name they did not know? Obviously they wanted to scare someone. But the T.D. was not likely to leave his district, the owners of Renvyle House are not likely to sell, and Dermot and I will be going back to America shortly. Who then was the target? Obviously they were building up to frightening off Lord Ballynahinch. Or to give the illusion that he had been frightened off. Might he have done it himself? He is obviously a very rich man and a few million pounds more or less should not matter to him. But money always matters to people. Moreover, he has incurred many extra expenses from his public service for Mr. Blair’s administration. If he discovered gold on his land, he might find it useful to desert the house because of the threats to himself and his family and return permanently to England. Then his people could move in and quickly strip away the gold before anyone could stop them.”

  Sweat was pouring down Matt Howard’s face. He didn’t seem very genial anymore. His wife was holding his hand. Simon Tailor looked dour.

  “Anyone want to say anything?” Nuala asked.

  Not a sound.

  “Very well. You may think you can bluff it out, but I assure you that you are wrong.”

  Obviously this was an informal hearing. Those who might be involved could easily demand to call in their solicitors. To do so, however, would be to admit their guilt.

  “A professional car bomber, of whom there are all too many on this island still, could easily have planted the bomb the night before in the Rolls. The Gardaf already have leads as to the name of the bomber. It was known that no one would use the car the next day. An absent conspirator, probably up on the mountain where the John Joyces lived, could wait for the proper moment and detonate the explosive device by a radio signal. One imagines the horror the conspirators experienced when we parked our car behind the Rolls and then the plumbers, poor men, parked their car behind ours. Still, not to worry. No one would be driving the Rolls that day. Even if someone would drive it, perhaps the ignition would not set off the bomb. I am told, however, that sometimes the starter mechanism will ignite a car bomb that is designed to be controlled remotely. Whether our friends knew this or not remains to be seen. Nonetheless, they surely must have been frightened when they saw Ona Howard rush from the house towards the Rolls. Not only might she die, everyone in the house could well die from what would now likely be an explosion of three cars, two of them vans. Fortunately, in the event, Ona did not enter the car. Someone up on the mountain watching the subsequent events must have watched with astonishment. Perhaps he did not know that there might be a danger that the bomb would explode when Ona turned the key in the ignition. Perhaps he did not know what three—or as it turned out—four explosions would do to the people in the house, especially as shattered window glass rained on them. Surely he was astonished by the hasty evacuation engineered so ably by Mr. Tailor. He didn’t know what was happening. He did see the then Constable now Sergeant Sayers peer under the car. He knew then that the Gardaf knew of the bomb. He wondered desperately what to do. He was not, I repeat, a cruel man, only venal and stupid. He did not want to do physical harm to anyone. He could not understand perhaps the reason for the retreat of those present in the house to a mound that marked the edge of the cemetery. He had no desire and no reason as it first seemed to him to detonate the bomb—and probably no idea of what it could do. But the Garda bomb squad was on its way. They would disarm the bomb and, as he knew well, easily discover who had made it. Desperate with fear, he hesitated. Then when he saw the blue cars and vans rushing up the valley, he made his decision. He pushed the button that activated the countdown mechanism in the bomb and took a hasty departure.

  “Does anyone wish to comment?”

  The bells of the Anglican parish church of Clifden rang the twelve chimes of noon.

  Sherlock McGrail glanced around the room. No one said anything, no one moved.

  “Very well, I will now loosen your tongues. The Garda have learned from some of those who worked on the restoration of the house that assayists dug holes in the ground of the old cemetery during its construction … .”

  “It was all his idea.” Tomas O’Regan leaped to his feet and waved his hands at Colm MacManus. “He had heard rumors in the Dail about gold out here. He persuaded me to investigate when we were restoring the manor. He was right, there was gold; not a lot perhaps, but enough. He said we ought to cover the cemetery as a precaution because those few who knew about the gold all said it was under a cemetery. He said he would take care of the rest. I didn’t even know there was a bomb under the car or that he was up on the mountain waiting for the family to leave in the other car. I came for lunch only because Matt insisted. I had no part in his crazy scheme of bombs and shootings. I didn’t think Matt would back off. I didn’t do anything!”

  We all turned towards the T.D.

  He jumped from his chair and ran from the room.

  “Off to see his solicitor,” Declan McGinn murmured. “Do you want to make a statement to us, Mr. O’Regan? If you do, I hereby advise you of your right to a solicitor and tell you that anything you have said so far cannot be admitted as evidence.”

  “Yes,” O’Regan said truculently, “I’ll make a statement. No need for a solicitor. I am one …”

  His face crimson with rage, Matt Howard jumped towards O’Regan.

  “You fucking bastard! I trusted you and helped your career and you tried to kill my wife and daughter!”

  I intercepted him. He struggled for a bit and then relaxed in my grip.

  “Linebacker, I suppose?”

  “A long time ago.”

  “Dear, wonderful Dermot.” Daphne sighed.

  “Who was the spy?” Matt demanded. “It couldn’t have been Simon. He could never keep the schedule straight and probably didn’t know it.”

  Simon blushed and smiled ruefully.

  “I guess there are advantages in being absentminded.”

  “We know who she was,” Declan cut in. “We talked to her earlier. Her family was beholden to Colm. She didn’t know what he was up to.”

  “I’m sure the Gardai don’t need me to tell them that the T.D. was conspiring with the Russians to ship the gold out of the country, maybe by Aeroflot or maybe by one of their submarines. He’s a gombeen man but not a very smart one.”

  “He’ll spend time in jail for one or the other of his crimes,” Commissioner Keenan assured us. “He’ll wiggle and evade, but at the end of the day we’ll get him.”

  “Dermot and I knew all long that O‘Regan wasn’t telling the truth because he lied about the cemetery. Father O’Laighne had shown us a picture of it taken not ten years ago.”

  Dermot didn’t know that at all, at all. Nuala, however, did not want me to feel like Doctor Watson.

  THAT’S ALL RIGHT, YOU ARE HER WATSON.

  “I know THAT.”

  “I knew that there were hints in the Maamtrasna murders about the crimes in the valley and vicinity today. But I didn’t understand what the hints were. Then I realized that John Casey was a man of political power in the valley, a man willing and able to corrupt others and to persuade them to risk their lives for him. Myles Joyce was a man everyone respected, but he lacked wealth and more importantly a propensity to corruption. As Lord Action said of the Vatican, power corrupts and a
bsolute power corrupts absolutely. John Casey’s power was not absolute by the standards of the outside world, but it was by the standards of the valley.

  “Who had that kind of power down here today? The T.D. was a man of limited powers on the world stage, but in this corner of the West of Ireland he had collected a lot of obligations. In Dublin he had enough power to track down the rumors about the gold beneath Diamond Hill that even the Garda had not heard. So I began to ask myself whether this comic little man might be corrupted not so much by the power that he actually had but by the power he thought he had.

  “Then I wondered why he would pay someone to blow up his own house. The answer was obvious. No one would suspect him for the more serious plans he had devised. The plans would not have worked, you say. Lord Ballynahinch is not the kind of man who runs away. Nor sells his property at a loss. I believe that to be the case. Then I realized that the only danger to me when I was skiing was that the shooter might make a mistake. The only danger to anyone in this story was that a mistake might have been made in the plot. Everyone in the manor house might have died by mistake just as Myles Joyce died by mistake. It is time and past time to protect both Renvyle and the valley from more of Colm MacManus’s mistakes.”

  The participants in our seminar drifted away. Tomas O’Regan was led by two Gardaf to another room, where he would make his statement. The Howards shook hands vigorously. Peig whispered something in Simon’s ear. He blushed and nodded his head.

  Finally only Gene Keenan and my wife and I remained in the room.

  “We would have figured all of that out eventually, Nuala Anne,” he said with a grin.

  She grinned back. “Even without my telling you about the gold?”

  “Fair play to you! … You and your family must return to Ireland often—only give me advance warning if you don’t mind.”