Irish Crystal

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “Even your family’s kind of law turns out to be very dangerous?”

  “Only when it is unfortunate enough to encounter the random sociopath … The third case is more interesting. The gentleman in question is one Paul Barnabas McGovern, a sometime successful tort lawyer who by the way lives in the Lincoln Park District, not far from River House or from your home, as a matter of fact. He made considerable sums of money for himself by settling cases with insurance companies for sums that may not have been equitable for his own clients. In this profession he was known as ‘Settle Now’ McGovern. Some of the other members of the tort bar argued that they could have obtained far more for the clients—and of course for themselves, but they would have had to prepare to go to trial. The insurance companies knew that if Mr. McGovern was involved, a trial would not be necessary.”

  “Nice man.”

  “Indeed yes. As his career and income advanced he seems to have acquired the notion that he was the greatest lawyer in Chicago and should be elected president of the Chicago Bar Association. He rallied a group of colleagues and friends to advocate his cause. Some of them, it was later alleged, had received financial considerations from him for their loyalty. It was of course a hopeless cause. Lawyers often find it easy to hold their noses in the presence of such a man, but there was no way they would have elected him to represent the legal profession in Chicago. Moreover, the media found him an easy target for their attention. Some of the cartoons of him were, quite frankly, scurrilous and very funny. Moreover, the most appealing of the other candidates was Thomas Fitzsimmons, a man of impeccable integrity and good friend of the Curran family—fellow admirers of the Society of Jesus. Dad backed him vigorously, as he would have even if Paul Barnabas McGovern had not been running.

  “Well, as you may imagine, Mr. McGovern was roundly rebuked for his presumptions. He did not accept defeat lightly. He attacked all those who had opposed him, Dad being his main target. He promised that he would get even with all of them. He retired from the practice of law and sealed himself up in his Lincoln Park citadel. He fires off letters of complaint about homosexuals, abortionists, immigrants, adulterers, fornicators, and other varieties of sinners to every Chicago publication. He remembers enough law to avoid libel actions. The media use his tirades because they’re always good copy. He even appears on some television talk shows when they’re looking for a conservative voice that does not have to appear as sane. He is also an active, if secret, informant for the Department of Homeland Security. He or those who work for him are active in hunting down suspicious immigrants especially if they live in the near North Side neighborhoods. He has a particular dislike for immigrants who have achieved some sort of success in American society. He apparently takes delight in breaking up immigrant families.”

  “Well,” I said, “a thoroughly evil man.”

  “He is not known for blowing up homes. However, it is believed that he is becoming more bitter and more angry with each passing year.”

  We had one of Nuala’s spies!

  “Thank you very much,” I said, rising with three dossiers in my briefcase. “I’ll pass them on to my wife and summarize them for Commander Culhane.”

  Her lovely face twisted into a worried frown.

  “Tell Nuala to please find the criminals. We are terribly worried about Mom and Dad. We love them so much. This has been a shattering experience for them.”

  I rode down the elevator to Wacker Drive and considered what a good spear-carrier would do next. First thing he would do would be to call John Culhane and summarize the dossiers for him.

  “Those are very interesting, Dermot. We’ll look into them at once. I note that all these possible suspects have at hand motives to cause trouble for the Curran family … Where did you find out about them?”

  “From a database.”

  “May I ask which database?”

  “I don’t know and I didn’t want to ask.”

  “They’ll be on one of our files, likely enough. But they won’t have all that detail. Everyone is in the cop business these days. I wish we could buy into some of the others. Maybe when I retire … Anyway, thanks a lot, Dermot. I’ll get back to you.”

  Information overload, I thought. Everyone knows something about everyone else. Nuala is right. The spies are everywhere. I needed a nap, just like the tiny one.

  Instead of napping, however, I rode back up the elevator to the heights of 333 Wacker to the law offices of Stone, Hurley, and Levi—the middle name of which was my sister’s long departed father-in-law. Both Tom and Cindy claimed that they had inherited the title.

  I had to wait a quarter hour before my sister could squeeze me into her schedule. Her assistant frowned when I confessed I did not have an appointment.

  “Dermot! What a pleasant surprise!”

  She really didn’t mean it.

  “Would it help your case against the government of the United States and its various agencies if you knew that a certain Paul Barnabas McGovern was a secret Homeland Security spy on the near North Side?”

  Her eyes brightened with the gleam of battle!

  “Would it ever! Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure all right. No proof.”

  “No need of proof,” she said, grinning impishly. “I’ll subpoena him and them all on the spot. Even if he won’t talk and they back him for national security reasons, the media attention will put him out of business … How do you know?”

  “Information received.”

  “Not from one of your wife’s trances, I hope.”

  “Nuala Anne doesn’t have trances. And, no, she is not my source.”

  “You’re lucky to have her, Dermot. I hope you know that.”

  “I’ve heard that remark often.”

  She leaned back on her desk, pleased and complacent, thinking already of the first document she would dictate.

  “Dermot, this is wonderful news. Thank you very much!”

  “Have fun with it!”

  “I will … Say hello to Nuala.”

  I descended to the main floor and marveled once again at the so-called winter garden in the lobby. It reminded me of nothing so much as the ruins of a German factory destroyed during the war, which the local greenery had invaded.

  Out on Wacker Drive my cell phone rang.

  “Dermot Coyne.”

  “Jack Curran, Dermot. There’s been another attempt on my parents, a car bomb in the Four Seasons parking lot.”

  “What happened!”

  “Mr. Casey’s men found a bomb in their car! In the Four Seasons parking garage. They’re evacuating the building. The police bomb squad is on the way!”

  The garage is a ten-story building, for public parking as well as for hotel guests. It is part of a single structure, including the hotel, condos, and a multilevel mall. Evacuating it would be a huge mess. An explosion inside. It could be like the first World Trade Center blast.

  We were up against big-leaguers who were playing hard ball.

  21

  I returned to Dublin briefly in June. I had made up my mind. Father was right. I would be pushing my luck too far if I became involved in Bobby’s frivolous rising. Even if it were successful, which I doubted, I wanted no part of it. As for Sarah …

  She was his woman. Or he thought she was. And if he were killed … Well, I’d see what happened then.

  You can see that, close as I was to the priesthood, I was still having doubts.

  I spent some of my summer in Wexford again to work for the bishop.

  “Is there going to be another rising?” he asked me.

  “I suspect so. Don’t worry, I won’t be a part of it.”

  “Will it fail?”

  “Almost certainly … There’s even less support for it here than there was in the ’98.”

  “You may remember that there was a lot of support here in ’98.”

  “You think, Bishop, that Wexford would support it again despite the terrible losses the last time?”

  “S
ome will, probably not enough … In a way that’s a shame.”

  A radical thing for my bishop to say.

  I would later learn that in Dublin there were conflicting arguments. Some of the leaders—including I suspect Bobby himself—were uneasy. Promises from the different counties were weak. Kildare and Wicklow would surely send troops, Wexford probably. The rest of the country was quiescent. Thomas Russell, the leader of the United Irishmen in Belfast (and like Bob a Protestant), was confident that the Presbyterians in the North would rise, but admitted that anti-Catholic sentiments in the North were increasing. Arms were in short supply All they really had were pikes. Yery few muskets and blunderbusses were available.

  However, a large French fleet had definitely left Brest according to Arthur O’Connor, and Bonaparte was waiting for a show of strength from the Irish.

  In fact, as I’ve said before, the feet that had left Brest slipped through the English blockade and headed for the Mediterranean. Bonaparte did not trust the Irish any more than they trusted him. On the strength of this rumor, the more hotheaded leaders insisted that the Rising be brought forward to July 23. Preparation for a rising leads to anxiety and eagerness—let’s do it and be done with it. It also leads to a disposition to accept any wild rumor. I would have hoped that Bob might have resisted such panic. I’ll never know this side of paradise. (Yes, I believe that Protestants go to heaven. I look forward to meeting Lord Edward and Wolf Tone and Bob Emmet in the world to come).

  (And Sarah too!)

  Bob later wrote from jail to his brother Thomas that there was little chance of stopping the Rising at the last minute. The Kildare men were out for only three days. Indeed at 7:00 in the evening some of the Kildare men left.

  So they went ahead. The Rising was timed for 9:00 at night, still twilight in midsummer. By 7:00 it was apparently clear to Bob that the Rising was doomed. They would have to make a brave show of it, then retreat to the mountains.

  In his full green uniform he boarded a carriage and rode to Dublin Castle, where he would meet with a force of three hundred men who had marched up from Coal Quay on the river. To his astonishment the Castle gates were open. If the men from Coal Quay had appeared on Thomas Street then, they could have seized the Castle and raised the green flag over it. The English were completely surprised. A disorderly revolution, little better than a mob, battled with a disorganized government. The outcome could have gone either way.

  Bob returned again to the Castle with a small group of men, but the gates were closed and locked by then. The mob that had gathered at the gates succeeded only in piking Lord Kilwarden in the groin, leaving him to bleed to death. He was the judge who issued the writ that sought to save Tone. The mob had killed a man who was to some extent sympathetic to their cause.

  Bob, having lost complete control, then withdrew his forces back into the mountains, where he had hoped to go if there had been a chance to postpone the Rising at the last minute. The battle in Dublin, now completely disorganized, went on for the rest of the night, until the English forces finally managed to get themselves organized. The Irish fighters gave a good account of themselves, much better than anyone had expected.

  Some say even today that it was a foolish, childish rebellion led by an immature and romantic young man. They blame Bob Emmet for being a fool.

  My opinion, for what it’s worth, is that even if the expected fighters did not arrive, there still was a chance of victory. The Rising had been well planned and, unlike its predecessor, achieved complete surprise. The Castle spies had been fooled this time. The failure was ultimately the result of a complete breakdown in communications, a phenomenon which affects all wars. Bob was naive to assume that plans organized before the Rising would work during the confusion of battle. To me it seems that the open gate of the Castle stands as a sign of what might have been.

  Should Bob have anticipated the communications problem? Certainly he should have, but that was not a lesson he could have learned from the ’98, which never was that close to victory

  Communications between Wellington and von Blucher were nonexistent at Waterloo. The latter appeared with his Prussian troops on the field of battle at the very last minute. The first message the Iron Duke received was when he saw blue-clad soldiers emerge from the forest.

  Bob should have stayed in the mountains. He might have eventually escaped and joined Thomas and his family in America. But he moved back and forth from the mountains to Rathfarnham. I suspect that the reason was Sarah, whom he was trying to persuade to accompany him to America. I think she would have joined him if she had not been so afraid of her miserable father.

  22

  “My wife is here?” I asked the doorman.

  “Yes, sir, Mr. McGrail.”

  “If she tries to leave, tell her to go back upstairs and wait for me.”

  Delaware and Michigan Avenues were swarming with people, the curious, the evacuated, the investigative. Fire trucks, police cars, battered Chevies which had “Feds” stamped all over them were everywhere. I finally found a sympathetic-looking African-American woman cop.

  “Superintendent Casey.”

  “I’ll get him right away, sir.”

  Mike might have more clout than the current superintendent. After all, he dispensed part-time jobs.

  The police were herding people away from the building, mostly north towards the Lake. Panic hung thick in the air, but people were reluctant to leave.

  We went against the flow of the crowd. Mike’s name was the magic that got us through to the elder Currans, who were standing relatively close to the building but across the street on Michigan. The little Archbishop and Father Rory were with them.

  I shook hands, hugged, commiserated. The Currans of both generations looked badly shaken, as well they might.

  Mike explained the situation.

  “My men always check out the cars of clients, just a glance. They spotted the bomb. It was small. It would have destroyed the car and its occupants and any cars in the vicinity but not the building. They alerted the department. We now have every investigative force in the world swarming around here. The bomb squad is upstairs, seeing if they can disarm it on-site. Probably they can.”

  “This is unacceptable in our parish, is it not, Rory?”

  “Nothing can happen here without your permission, can it, Blackie?” Father Rory laughed.

  “Patently.”

  “Your wife and I had a wonderful talk, Dermot. She’s a remarkable young woman.”

  “I never said that she didn’t have some remarkable qualities, did I now?”

  WHY DIDN’T SHE KNOW ABOUT THE BOMB?

  Because she knew Mike’s guys were on the job.

  I stepped away from the Currans, took out my cell phone, and dialed my friend and grammar school classmate Alfie.

  “Alfie, Dermot.”

  “Hey, Dermot.”

  “Hey, Alfie.”

  “I’m watching this stuff on TV. They say the bomb squad is up there disarming it.”

  “You saw what went down the other night up on Webster and the River?”

  “Yeah, a real shame … national landmark like that.”

  “You hear anything?”

  “Out of curiosity I asked some of my friends to ask their friends if they knew about it. The friends of the friends are very upset. Chicago is becoming a lawless town. We can’t let things like that go on.”

  Not unless they had approved first.

  “Are they looking into it?”

  “I hear that they are. They won’t like what’s going down over there, not at all, right out on the Magnificent Mile.”

  “Yeah, well thanks, Alfie. Let me know if you hear anything.”

  “Dermot, you got it … hey, that last book of poems was wonderful. So was the record with your wife singing them. Great stuff.”

  Connected people who read poetry? Why not?

  “Your friends out on the West Side are troubled by this stuff,” I said to Mike Casey. “My source wil
l be back to me.”

  They weren’t his friends, of course, and most of them didn’t live on Taylor Street anymore.

  “They would be. Outsiders aren’t supposed to trespass on their territory.”

  “Not without asking their permission.”

  “They wouldn’t give it.”

  “My source said that they thought Chicago was becoming a lawless city. Poor police force I suppose.”

  Mike laughed sardonically.

  “Not like the old days when they owned us.”

  A cop in protective armor emerged from the hotel and raised his thumb.

  “All clear,” someone said on the PA.

  Everyone laughed with relief, the Currans louder than the rest.

  Annie Reilly emerged from the crowd.

  “Let us take you to dinner … you too, Archbishop Blackie.”

  “We would like to talk to you, Mr. Curran,” said the leader of three suits who were approaching them.

  Bureau.

  “Tomorrow morning,” Mike Casey said.

  “Sir …”

  “I SAID tomorrow morning.”

  The suits were left holding their warrant cards in the wind coming down Michigan Avenue from the Lake.

  Much later Nuala and I were lying in our bed in the studio, covered with a sheet for modesty’s sake.

  She was sleeping soundly. She had insisted on telling me her whole story before we went on to other matters. I was also told that I was totally irresponsible for not calling her to tell her that I would be late—even though she had not warned me that she would be waiting for me.

  Then we went on to other matters.

  I woke her in time for the five o’clock news.

  Mary Alice Quinn began by announcing that a fear of another 9/11 attack had hit the middle of the Magnificent Mile.

  My wife, still covered chastely by the sheet, cried out in dismay. She did that several more times as the story continued. At one point, just before the all clear was announced, she saw me at the edge of the frame.

  “Dermot, ’tis yourself!”