by Anne Emery
“Good for you. You’re enjoying it then.”
“Immensely. Terry flew down to Monserrat to see me, and we lifted a few at the local guzzling den.” Terry was their brother, an airline pilot who lived in New York. “We were nearly wetting ourselves when we got into the old family stories. You featured in many of them, having been the black sheep of the family for so long. Starting with your first day of school in the U.S.A. The new boy in class, right off the boat from Ireland. Remember the note the teacher sent home? You were doing geography, and Sister Mary Dolores asked you to read aloud. You did fine until you came to a certain lake in South America.
“‘I can’t say that,’ you told her.
“And she said, ‘It’s pronounced Lake Titicaca.’
“‘Like fuck it is!’ exclaimed the little gurrier from Dublin.
“That was only the beginning of your career as the boy least likely ever to prostrate himself before the bishop and be ordained a priest. They didn’t know what to make of you at the school; you looked and sang like an angel in the choir but you were such a little hellion. Well, really, that’s still you, isn’t it?”
“The subject of our conversation, I believe, was Monserrat.”
“Right. Terry and I in the bar. Once he got oiled up, he started regaling the locals with all manner of tall tales about his adventures in the cockpit. He had them sitting there with their gobs hanging open in disbelief.”
“And rightly so. Every word out of him past a certain point in the evening would have been a lie.” Terry was renowned for his barroom bullshit.
“Yes, it was great gas. Now, how about you, sweetheart? How have you been?”
“Couldn’t be better.”
“Good. Although you’d say that even if you’d had three limbs lopped off in the morning. You’re like that knight in the Monty Python movie. Everything with you is ‘only a flesh wound.’”
“No flesh wounds here.”
“What’s the news in Dublin? Fill me in while I tend to my cooking.”
Molly busied herself with oven and stove, plates and pans, as Brennan gave her a rundown of the summer’s events. She was well aware of the missing preacher found dead in Carlingford Lough, and the eruptions of violence in the North as a result. Brennan had to hedge a bit on that. He was not about to reveal that he had seen the video of the man being executed by Desmond somebody in the presence of Clancy, nephew of the Bishop of Meath. Brennan would be forced to live with that secret for the rest of his life. The people of Northern Ireland and the United States, and sympathetic observers like Michael O’Flaherty, would be left wondering till Judgment Day who had killed the evangelist. Without anyone to put on trial, who would be made to bear the brunt of Protestant rage? Brennan was powerless in the matter. All he said to his sister was “I’ve heard there’s a Dublin connection.”
“Republicans of Dublin, take cover! Is there anybody in our family mixed up in this? I don’t mean any of us would be so stupid as to snatch the man, but I hope there aren’t any Burkean shadows flitting about behind the curtains.”
Brennan hesitated for a moment, then said, “There may be a degree of Burkean knowledge after the fact. But, as far as I know, nothing more than that.”
She waited for more, but he turned the conversation to the summer’s other developments: the tank-and-barricade Mass, the graffiti and the Christy Burke Four, the Japanese land scheme and Finn’s stint in the Joy.
“Can’t you just take a nice, relaxing holiday, Bren? I’m sure you could use one.”
“I’d probably be bored rigid.”
“But all that carry-on in Dublin and the North . . . And the time you took a trip back to New York, our oul fellow got shot in the chest and nearly died.”
“My good friend Monty made a similar observation about holidays spent with the Burkes. He was on hand for the New York debacle as well.”
“And he’s here for all this now?”
“’Fraid so.”
“Whatever does he think of us?”
“What we’ve got going for us is that he’s seen worse. He defends thieves and killers for a living. Defence lawyer.”
“Maybe we don’t look so bad compared to his clients.”
“Well, there again, you may recall, I was one of his clients.”
“Of course.” She sighed, then stood up. “Let’s eat. Give us a Latin grace before we start. Or maybe an exorcism to clear the room of all the dark shades that seem to have come amongst us in the twilight.” He made the sign of the cross over her and over the offerings she had prepared, and said a prayer of thanksgiving in the ancient tongue before sitting down, whipping his napkin off the table and putting it in place on his lap, and digging in.
The pasta and lamb, served with a loaf of hard-crusted bread and a green salad, was brilliant, and so was the wine, and he told her so. They clinked their glasses and smiled at one another.
“Darling, tell me, how is life in Halifax? Are you enjoying it?”
“Very much.”
“What is your church like? What music are you doing? You composed a Mass, and that went over well, I believe.”
He spent the next few minutes, between bites of food and sips of wine, describing his life as a priest and choirmaster in Nova Scotia.
“Good. Work is going well. Now, what about friends? Do you have people to talk to, if you should ever feel the need to talk? Which I suspect would be a rare event.”
“Amn’t I talking to you?”
“You only see me once every two or three years. So let’s hope you have somebody to fill that gap! As tough as you are, or make yourself out to be, Bren, you need other people in your life. It can’t just be you and the Almighty.”
“You say that as if the Almighty is less than all mighty, less than complete, and needs to be supplemented by earthly —”
“Go on out of that and answer my question. Tell me about your friends.”
“Well, there’s Michael O’Flaherty. You’ve spoken with him on the phone. Probably more frequently than you’ve spoken with me.”
“You always seem to be out on the town when I call. Michael says, ‘Yer man’s at the Grafton Street Mission,’ which, upon interrogating Michael, I discover is an institution called the Midtown Tavern.”
“I minister to the drinking community there.”
“You lead by example, I assume, Father. God bless you. So, there’s Michael. A lovely man, if his telephone conversations are anything to go by.”
“He is a lovely fellow. And in fact he was caught in a cleft stick coming over here.”
“Here, meaning England?”
“Yes, he’s here, but not in London. His dilemma is that he would love to meet you, but that would mean blowing the cover story he gave me about his reasons for the voyage to England in the first place. He would have me believe he’s always wanted to explore Cambridgeshire. So I kept a straight face on me and went along with it. The man is incapable of deception.”
“What is he really getting up to?”
“It has to do with this vandalism at Christy’s. One of the pub regulars was swindled, or his family was, by an English lawyer. I suspect the lawyer is in Cambridgeshire somewhere, and Michael is on his trail.”
What Brennan didn’t say was that he had long held the suspicion that O’Flaherty had a bit of a crush on Molly, arising from their telephone chats; if Michael hadn’t made a point of coming to London to meet her in the flesh, that suggested Kitty Curran had turned his head. All the Barolo in Europe wouldn’t be enough to make him say that aloud.
“This graffiti business,” Molly said, “wouldn’t you think it’s most likely a comment on Finn himself?”
“It’s hard to avoid that suspicion, even though Finn dismisses it out of hand.”
“That’s Finn’s version of events, but keep in mind he was so convincing that enough
Japanese to fill an airliner took his word that they owned land in the Republic of Ireland.”
“True. But, whatever the case, Michael O’Flaherty is keen to assist in the graffiti investigation, so I’ve left him to it. I’m sure whatever he learns here in the U.K. will be of no value — the lawyer is hardly going to confess to unethical or illegal conduct — so Michael will have missed meeting you for nothing.”
“No worries. We’ll make a point of meeting another time. And you told me a while back that he’s your confessor. You were a little hesitant when you first arrived there from New York.”
“It was just that Mike is so, well, innocent. I didn’t want to disillusion him about his new curate.”
“You’re not a saint. How could you be? Michael’s been around long enough to understand that.”
“True. It’s turned out fine. He’s a wonderful priest and a very astute confessor.”
“So, you have Michael as a friend. Who else?”
“Some of the other priests are mensches. Good company.”
“And this Monty you mentioned. He’s a good pal as well. So, you have some blokes to go about with. Now, what about women?”
“What about them?”
“Well, I hope your circle isn’t limited to men. Do you have some women friends as well? And I don’t mean a gaggle of church ladies who incessantly contrive to attract your attention and who worship the very soil on which you tread.”
“You may rest assured that all of my acquaintances fall into the category of not worshipping me or my footsteps or the sacred ground over which I pass. That being said, there are a couple of women at the choir school, teachers, I’m friendly with. And, em . . .”
“Em, what?”
“There’s the MacNeil.”
“And that would be who? Head of a Scottish clan or something?”
“You could say that, I suppose. She’s Monty’s wife. Or, well . . .”
“Well what? She’s Monty’s wife, or she isn’t. Which is it?”
“I’ve descended into gossip here.” He picked up his glass of wine, drank it almost to the dregs, then pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He was about to light one, then remembered his manners; he looked to his sister for permission.
“Go ahead.” She reached behind with her left arm and grasped a small plate, which she offered as an ashtray. Brennan lit up and inhaled a lungful of smoky relief.
Molly then took up where she had left off. “Brennan, identifying a person as someone’s wife, or even ex-wife, if that is the case, hardly qualifies as vicious gossip. It is simply a fact. Neville is my ex-husband. So this couple . . .”
He could see her thinking, then coming to a realization about something.
“This is the couple you told me about on the phone that time. I called, and it was clear something was on your mind, and you gave voice to your frustration over your efforts to counsel a family of your acquaintance. You didn’t name them, of course, being discreet as always; you implied that they were members of your parish.”
“They are.”
“But even then, I had the impression they were more to you than parishioners.”
“Is that so?”
“Because halfway through your story, you departed from the standard priestly vocabulary and went on to describe the man as a stubborn fecking bonehead on whom God had wasted the gift of superior intelligence, because if he didn’t have enough sense to appreciate what he had in the person of his wife, then he would lose her to some other man who would take the husband’s place and be the luckiest man in Christendom, and then where would the husband be, and wouldn’t it serve him right, the fecker!” Molly took a sip of wine and smiled at her brother. “Or words to that effect.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“You remember everything.”
“Your point?”
“I’m thinking this is your friend Monty that you were ranting about. You wouldn’t have been that worked up about someone you barely knew. So, back to the subject of his wife. Your fudging about her status suggests your matchmaking efforts have not yet borne fruit.”
“I’m still at it.”
“Tell me about her. What’s she like?”
Where to begin? He shrugged, and took another long drag of his cigarette.
“A nonentity, is she? A cipher? A bit of fluff? I thought you said she was your friend. You don’t usually have time for vapid individuals about whom there is nothing to say.”
“The MacNeil is a very strong personality, the farthest thing in the world from vapid or fluffy. She’s got a tongue in her head that would slice through the right foreleg of your horse just as it was coming down the home stretch at Leopardstown, and you’d lose the house all over again.”
“But there’s more to her than that.”
“Oh, yes. Great depths beneath all that armour.”
“Sounds like somebody I know,” she said, holding him in the gaze of her dark blue eyes.
Then she turned up the flames under him. “You know, Bren, at the time of that phone conversation I remember thinking there was a bit of a subtext to it. That you genuinely wanted what was best for this family, no question. But there also might have been an element of temptation, in the form of this woman whom you knew, living apart from her husband, and that the temptation would ease somewhat if he moved back in with her.”
His sister could make a bonfire out of him right here in her kitchen and she wouldn’t be able to force him into that sort of discussion.
“If you met this one, Molly, you wouldn’t be able to imagine her tarting herself up as a temptress to lure a passing priest into her clutches.”
“That’s not what I meant, sweetheart. I was referring to your own state of mind. I’m not suggesting for a minute she’s one of these people who comes to the door with her face newly painted, yet still happens to be in her filmy negligee, when you come calling.”
“Unthinkable! If she could hear this conversation, she would have me reduced in thirty seconds to a quivering heap of gelatinous matter on the floor.”
“Glad to hear it. You’ve met your match in her.”
“On the day I was born, I met my match. In you!”
“Does she have a name?”
“Didn’t I tell you her name?”
“No you didn’t. You said the MacNeil. What’s her name?”
“Maura.”
“Perfect. I knew it wouldn’t be Tiffany. Well, even though I had to pull it out of you, it comes as a relief to hear about this cast of characters in your life. Because I worry about you. You’re a mystic and a man of God, you say a beautiful Mass and your music is brilliant, and the church is damn lucky to have you, and we’re all proud of you. But I worry that you’re too self-contained for your own good.”
“And here I was thinking we already have a shrink in the family, and it’s Paddy, not yourself.”
“You’re my little brother. And since you don’t worry about yourself, or talk about your troubles, if you have any troubles, just as you would never admit to any pain when you’d get hurt and bloodied in your old Gaelic football days, and you just a wee boy at the time, and since you haven’t changed one iota since that time —”
“Where’s that sentence going? You lost me several sinces ago.”
“Don’t change the subject, which is that you haven’t changed since you were that hard-headed little scrapper in the streets of Dublin.”
“My dear, nobody has changed as much as I have.”
“Think so, do you?”
“Do you have another bottle of this?” he said, indicating the empty wine bottle.
“I rest my case. And no, I didn’t have two bottles of that, but I do have a nice Chianti.” She got up and found the wine, opened it, filled her brother’s glass, and poured half a glass for herself.
“All righ
t,” Brennan announced, “I’m roasted and done. Now let’s talk about you.”
Molly told Brennan that her divorce from Neville would soon be finalized, that she had kicked him out of the house a couple of years earlier because she refused to allow anyone to treat her with so little consideration, and their son and daughter, who, as Brennan knew, were grown and living in Devon and Oxford, respectively, backed her up. Once Brennan was brought up to date on all of that, he and his sister went back to their childhood and relived old times until Brennan reluctantly parted from her at two in the morning, with a promise to take care of himself and all belonging to him, and returned to his hotel.
Chapter 16
Michael
Michael and Brennan met at the Holyhead ferry terminal on Friday and boarded the ship to Ireland. Brennan filled Michael in on his conversation with Abigail Howard. The incident at the Public Record Office had really occurred, even if not quite in the way Motor Mouth McCrum had reported it. Then Brennan asked how Michael’s tour of Cambridgeshire had gone and, of course, Michael came clean and reported on the real reason for his visit. Brennan didn’t seem surprised, but he was dismayed to hear that it was not the lawyer, but Rod O’Hearn himself, who had swindled the family. Michael did not know what to do with that knowledge. He would have to reflect on it.
But right now Michael was more interested in what he had just learned about Eddie Madigan. The ex-cop really had been drummed out of the Dublin police force following a disastrous attempt to break into the secret archives in London. The action was considered so serious that Madigan would rather be thought a crooked cop, taking payoffs from drug pushers, than have the truth get out. And his employer, the Garda Síochána, felt the same way. They were saved public embarrassment by making a deal with the British authorities to give up a criminal or a spy — someone they had in custody in Dublin. The exchange satisfied the British and allowed the Irish to keep the incident under wraps. What was in those records that prompted Madigan to take such desperate action?
