Irish Crystal

by Andrew M. Greeley

  By the time I had arrived on the scene, Fiona was shaking hands with the officers and Maeve rolling over on her back.

  “She’s a retired member of the Dublin Garda,” Nuala explained. “She loves cops.”

  “How does she know we’re cops?” the bemused officer asked … . “Good girl, good girl!”

  “Maybe all cops smell alike,” herself said innocently.

  A lovely woman can say something like that to a cop and get a laugh. The second cop bent over and scratched Maeve’s belly. She rolled over and offered to hug him.

  “Maeve, you’ll get the nice man’s uniform dirty.”

  “That’s all right, girl,” the cop said, “you’re a great dog. Someday I’ll bring my kids over to meet you.”

  “I don’t think we’re breaking any laws, officer,” my totally innocent Galway wife, continued. “Aren’t the dogs on leashes and don’t they have all the right tags and aren’t we on the parkway which is public property?”

  “And don’t I have the shite shovel?” I asked, holding up the poop scoop.

  “I don’t see anything wrong,” said the first cop.

  Nuala Anne reached in her pocket and produced two treats for the cops to give to the hounds. They both politely begged for their treats, removed them delicately from the officers’ fingers, and destroyed them altogether.

  The gathered kids cheered. So did the parents who had appeared on the sidewalk. The cops departed in an atmosphere of good feeling as the beasts barked in protest at their leaving without a second treat.

  “What was that all about?” a mother about my wife’s age asked.

  “Oh nothing much … Didn’t Ms. Carson complain to the pastor and didn’t he call the police and tell them we were creating a public nuisance on his school yard and ourselves on the parkway.”

  And didn’t the mothers and the few fathers turn and glare at complainers who were watching from the steps of the church. Then the bell rang and our enemies took advantage of the sudden silence to beat a retreat. Our children fell into the ranks and marched off into the school.

  “Would you ever take the doggies home, Dermot Michael. I want to have a word with your man.”

  She had looked quite satisfied with herself when she returned to our study.

  “And you said?”

  “Didn’t I tell him that he was a loser and that he’d lose every time he tried to hassle us? And didn’t he complain about our not being real parishioners and ourselves going to Old St. Patrick’s on Sunday? And didn’t I tell him that maybe since we weren’t real parishioners we shouldn’t send in the thousand-dollar check every month?”

  “Is that what we give him?”

  “’Tis … besides our extra contribution to the school endowment.”

  “Was he properly frightened?”

  “Nothing like money to threaten a priest … And himself knowing that Father Coyne is your brother!”

  “We did indeed, Dermot Michael,” she said on that afternoon when it seemed, as the lightning crashed all around us, like the whole parish had incurred divine wrath. “But where was your man down the street?”

  “He moved back to his old neighborhood where he belongs. Mike Casey said his wife made him go to AA.”

  “He’s not likely to forget us, is he now? People just don’t like us. I’m not sure about those Curran people either. What do you think they’ve been after saying to their friends?”

  “Will they say anything?”

  “Why else would they invite us to supper?”

  “Well, what do you think they’ve been saying?”

  “The poor sweet little thing is just a peasant girl from the bogs with a nice voice and her husband is a big handsome ape without a brain cell in his head. I don’t know what will happen to them if any big problems happen in their lives.”

  I burst out laughing.

  “’Tis not funny, Dermot Michael Coyne. They’re that kind of people … What did Father George say when you asked him about that uptight priesteen of theirs?”

  I repeated George’s words, which Nuala had already heard.

  “George said that he was just a little too smooth by half. Smart, ambitious, conservative, wanted to study canon law and become a bishop.”

  “And he also said?”

  “That both the Cardinal and Blackie never send people to study canon law who want to do so.”

  “They don’t like us very much either, Dermot. We have people like that all around us.”

  “Are they the ones you dreamed about?”

  “I don’t know. There’s bad things happening and meself not knowing what they are and who’s doing them.”

  “And yourself wanting to be pregnant again.”

  She drew me over to her couch and wept in my arms.

  YOU KNEW SHE WAS A WEIRDO WHEN YOU MARRIED HER.

  She’s not a weirdo. She’s just a little different.

  9

  Wasn’t that brilliant altogether! Isn’t me poor dear husband the most brilliant lover in all the world! I keep saying that to You. But I must give thanks every time. And himself not sure that I really want him or I’m just trying to get meself pregnant. Well, can’t I want both? Me husband is not just a sperm machine … Well, I’m sure you know that. I would want him pushing into me tonight regardless of the kid … Every night … I hope You don’t mind me desire for another child … It’s all up to You … I’m grateful for the three wonderful ones I have. I’m not complaining. It would be nice to have four but I’ll not question your decisions … Still … Och doesn’t he play me body like I play a harp … Sure, don’t I know how to delight him too … you’re the Dermot beyond Dermot … the Love to which all loves lead. I’ve known that since I was a small one … When I don’t treat him right I don’t treat You right … Forgive me ingratitude … Also protect me from the evil that’s around us … Whether it be Homeland Security or people who want to hurt my doggies … What’s that noise … Who’s ringing the doorbell this time of night …

  10

  “Federal Bureau of Investigation!”

  I held the door half-open despite the efforts of these two sleazy characters in trench coats to shove their way into the house.

  “Special Agents Dowd and Dunn.”

  They both flashed warrant cards. In the dark and the rain the cards looked authentic. I didn’t trust them. Never trust the Feds, my sister Cindy always said, especially when they come in the middle of the night like the Gestapo used to do.

  “What do you want?”

  “We want to talk to Ms. Marie Coyne.”

  “There’s no Marie Coyne in this house.”

  “You’ve just committed perjury, sir.”

  “You have lied to federal agents.”

  “We arrest you on suspicion of perjury.”

  “The only Marie in the house is my three-year-old daughter Socra Marie … I’m not about to wake her up for two goons.”

  They had pushed their way into the house and were greeted by two menacing growls.

  “Sir, please restrain your dogs!”

  “Their presence constitutes resisting arrest.”

  “As long as you stay right where you are, you’re safe. Take one more step and we will resist home invasion.”

  “We demand to talk to your wife.”

  “We have reason to believe that she is a threat to the national security of this country.”

  After our romp earlier I had fallen into deep sleep. I wasn’t sure that these two creeps were not a rather tasteless nightmare.

  “We have a warrant for her arrest.”

  He flashed a document at me. Fiona growled loudly. Her affection for cops did not extend to the Feds.

  I picked up the phone and punched a rapid-dial number.

  “Tom Hurley,” said my long-suffering brother-in-law.

  “Tom, the Feds are in our house with a warrant for my wife’s arrest, though they have the wrong name.”

  Cindy took the phone.

  “Feds!”r />
  “Special Agents, they say.”

  “What are their names?”

  “Gog and Magog.”

  “Why do they want to arrest Nuala?”

  “She’s a threat to national security … They think her name is Marie Coyne. That’s what the warrant says.”

  “Homeland Security creeps. Is there a woman agent with them?”

  “I don’t see one.”

  “Let me talk to them.”

  “Our attorney, Ms. Cynthia Hurley … Stay, girls.”

  The pooches withdrew a couple of inches.

  I turned on the speakerphone.

  “We have a warrant for the arrest of Ms. Marie Coyne who we believe is a resident in this house. Your client has already perjured himself by denying her presence.”

  “First, Special Agent, I hereby notify you that I am turning on a tape recorder. Secondly, do you have a woman Special Agent with you?”

  “We do not,” said Gog. Or maybe it was Magog.

  “Then even if you had a proper warrant, which you do not, we would not permit you to take Ms. McGrail into custody. You can’t be such an asshole as to be ignorant of your own regulations.”

  “We have reason to believe that she is a threat to national security, whatever her name is.”

  “Special Agent, you will have a desk job in Tupelo, Mississippi, by the time we’re finished with you … Mr. Coyne’s wife has a proper legal name and as long as it is not on your warrant, we will not honor it. Nor will we permit her surrender into your custody unless there is a woman agent present.”

  “We will not leave this house unless she is in custody.”

  “Yes, you will, Special Agent. Since your warrant is patently flawed, Mr. Coyne has every right to order you from the house and take whatever means is appropriate to remove you. In the interest of expediting this matter, we will surrender his wife at the Dirksen Federal Building tomorrow at ten o’clock. We insist that both the Special Agent in Charge and the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois be present for the interview. I’d advise you to leave that home immediately. I will go into the United States Court for the Northern District of Illinois tomorrow to seek relief from your idiocy. You are already in serious trouble.”

  My sister is a sweet, pretty, strawberry blond mother of three lovely kids. She thinks I’m a slugabed and a layabout (as the whole family does) and she adores my good wife. In her lawyer mode, however, she is hell on wheels.

  Egged on perhaps by Cindy’s tone of voice, the dogs growled loudly.

  “We will wait outside and make sure she is delivered to the Dirksen Building.”

  “Wait wherever you want. Only get out of the house.”

  They left. As soon as the door closed, the two hounds went wild. They rushed the door, howled, barked, then howled again.

  “Good dogs,” Nuala Anne said as she appeared in an elaborate white robe, her hair combed, and her minimum makeup in place. “Now settle down. The bad men are all gone.”

  “I want a couple of Maeve’s puppies the next time you breed her,” Cindy murmured. “Is herself there?”

  “I am.”

  “Don’t worry about those gobshites, Nuala Anne. We’ll take care of them. They’re frigging eejits.”

  My wife laughed uncertainly.

  “Sounds like fun.”

  “Dermot,” Cindy said to me, “have your good friend Mike Casey provide a limo and a couple of bodyguards. I’ll meet you and Nuala in the lobby of the Dirksen Building at five minutes to ten. We’ll sink them without a trace.”

  My wife extended her arms around me. I noticed that’s she’d used mouthwash and scent. You confront Gog and Magog only with the proper persona.

  “Och, Dermot Michael, isn’t it the same thing all over again!”

  “A little different this time, Nuala Anne. We hold all the cards.”

  “Well, if they send me back, they’ll have to pay the plane fare and that will save me a lot of money … sure, didn’t I want to be here for Nelliecoyne’s First Communion?”

  “I guarantee that you will be.”

  Yet anxiety stirred within me. Homeland Security and the Patriot Act had edged us pretty far along the road to a police state, especially if you were an immigrant. We might hold all the cards, but the United States was not the country that it used to be.

  Herself went right back to sleep. I tossed and turned and worried.

  The limo from Reliable Security appeared promptly at nine-fifteen, after the kids were safe in school and Danuta and Ethne in charge. My wife was wearing her black trousers, her black sweatshirt trimmed in crimson, and her black leather jacket. She was carrying a very large black purse, also trimmed in crimson. The outfit was complemented by nylons and very high heels. It was, I thought, one of her shite-kicking ensembles.

  Mike himself walked over to the FBI car and had a word with Special Agent Gog. Then he and his two assistants—Sergeant Carmen Lopez and Officer John “Buck” Jones, old friends from previous battles—walked up the steps to the second floor of her house (where the entrance was). The pooches went crazy at the sight of them. Nuala calmed them down as we descended to the Lincoln Town Car.

  “You are calm, cool, and self-possessed, Ms. McGrail,” Mike said, as he held the door open for her.

  “Didn’t me sister-in-law say that we’d beat the friggin’ gobshites and meself ruining her vocabulary.”

  “The Bureau car is following us, sir,” Buck Jones reported. “Should I lose them?”

  “Why not?”

  They were nowhere in sight when we pulled up to the Everett McKinley Dirksen Federal Building. The media, however, were already there.

  “Is it true you’re being arrested, Nuala Anne?”

  “’Tis true.”

  “What’s the charge?”

  “They say I’m a threat to the national security of the United States?”

  “Is that true?”

  “’Tis not.”

  “Do they want to deport you?”

  “’Tis true.”

  “Will they?”

  “They won’t.”

  Cindy had set this up. My wife would be on the noon news and probably the evening news, maybe even nationally. She behaved with poise and charm and a bit of mischief in her eyes. Her dolt of a husband, blond, blue-eyed trailed uncertainly behind, looking like he wanted to find a special agent whose face needed bashing.

  Cindy met us as soon as we came in the door. Mike’s people were sent to park the car and wait for a call on the cell phone. He and Cindy led us through the security machines. One young Mexican woman asked her for an autograph. Nuala Anne produced a disk from her purse and signed it for her.

  We had to wait in the Homeland Security office for a half hour before Agents Gog and Magog, looking much the worse for wear, stumbled in.

  “Get lost?” Mike Casey asked.

  We were led to a very small interrogation room. On one side of the government-issue metal desk Gog, Magog, and a U.S. Attorney identified as Tim Novak, barely out of law school, arranged themselves and their sheaves of paper. They played the role of businesslike, professional defenders of the United States of America. On our side, cramped in limited space, the suspect and her legal team and her husband seemed outnumbered.

  “Might I ask you in what capacity you are here, Mr. Casey?” Tim Novak inquired pompously.

  “I’m a backup to Ms. Hurley,” he said mildly. “I have some experience in matters of proper police procedure.”

  Indeed he had written the book on it, which none of these losers knew.

  I felt a lot better.

  “It is ten-forty-three,” Novak continued his role as a TV prosecutor. “Present in the room are Special Agents Dunn and Dowd, United States Attorney Novak, Marie Coyne, the suspect, her husband ah …”

  “Dermot Michael Coyne,” my wife said helpfully.

  “Dermot Coyne and her attorneys Cynthia Hurley and Michael Casey.”

  “Michael Patrick Vincent C
asey.”

  “Now we can get down to business.”

  “No, we cannot,” Cindy interrupted. “I specified that I want the United States Attorney and the Special Agent in Charge present for this conversation. We will not continue until they are present.”

  Nuala Anne removed from her purse the latest book of poems by Seamus Heaney.

  “You have no right to impose that condition, Ms. Hurley.”

  “Look, sonny boy,” Cindy replied, her voice dripping with contempt, “you tell both of them that I want them here and they’ll come a-running. They’re afraid of me and with good reason. You should be too.”

  A quarter hour later, the two gentlemen arrived, tall, silver-haired Irishmen in dark blue suits. They both looked quite upset.

  “What the hell is this about, Cindy?” the Agent in Charge asked.

  “You’ll see soon enough … Very well Agent Dunn, you may begin the questions.”

  “Your name Ms. Coyne, I believe, is Marie Coyne.”

  “’Tis not.”

  “Your Irish passport says you are”—he tried to read it—“Marie Phinoulah Annagh McGrail Coyne, is that not correct?”

  “’Tis me Irish name. And the first word is pronounced Mary, the mother of Jesus like.”

  “Mary” with a west of Ireland accent sounds mystical, a hint of music over the bogs.

  “So that is your real name, Mary Coyne.”

  “’Tis not. I’ve never been called that in all me life.”

  “We’ll stipulate,” Cindy broke in, “that my client’s legal name is Nuala Anne McGrail. If you had that name on your warrant, it might be legal. We are here this morning to expedite a situation created by your poor legal work.”

  “’Tis true,” Nuala said brightly. “’Tis me real name in America.”

  “Damnation,” muttered the Agent in Charge.

  “And your occupation, Ms. McGrail.”

  “Housewife,” she said even more brightly.

  “You earn a lot of money for a housewife.” Agent Gog looked at her tax return.

  “I note that you may have illegally taken her tax return,” Cindy observed.

  “I do a little singing on the side.”

  “And where do you sing?”

  “Here and there.”