The cameraman continued to grind away, more interested in his story than in helping people under assault. I yanked the camera away from him and sent it after the two thugs.
‘That’s my camera, ya focking Yank bastard!” he shouted. “I’ll sue you.”
“Not before I sue you!” I pulled him towards the parapet.
“Don’t hurt me!” he pleaded.
I became aware that there were people screaming all around me.
A guy was in my face shouting that I had ruined his car. Nuala Anne was howling in Irish. A woman assistant of the cameraman was yelling that I had ruined their scoop.
The crowd was bellowing conflicting advice:
“Throw the focker into the canal!”
“Don’t hurt the poor man!”
“Kick him in the balls!”
“You’re a murdering focker!”
I lifted the cameraman to the edge of the wall. “You set us up!”
“I’m not your focking bodyguard.”
He was a little guy with a red face and a high-pitched voice. I held him over the water.
“Dermot Michael,” my wife ordered, switching to English, presumably for my benefit, “put the poor focker down.”
Naturally, I did what I was told.
Then a guy began to pound on my chest. “You ruined my car, you focking Yank. I’m going to sue you.”
“You want to go over the wall, too?”
He scurried away.
Nuala returned to her first language to denounce the crowd. My World Traveler had become Grace O’Malley, the Warrior Witch. They cowered and became silent as she told them in no uncertain terms that they were cowards. At least I assumed that was what she was doing, though I caught only a few Anglo-Saxon words. Such as “focking gobshites!”
I glanced down at the canal. Two of our attackers had pulled themselves out of the murk and were hobbling away. The third man was still lying on the street, moaning softly. Well, he wasn’t dead, though he deserved to be.
I became aware that I was breathing heavily, that my fists were clenched, that I was glowering at the crowd, and that I was desperately looking for someone else to throw into the canal.
As if in response to that wish the Guards arrived, their blue patrol car wailing like a wounded rabbit. It ground to a halt only a couple of feet from the injured thug. A pint size and imperious officer bustled out of the car, waved his transceiver at the crowd, and announced intelligently, “Here now, what’s going on?”
A woman cop in her thirties emerged after him and took in the situation with a worried frown.
Traffic had piled up on both sides of the bridge. Oblivious of our little drama, motorists were leaning on their horns.
“Those men”—I gestured towards the canal—“tried to kidnap me and my wife. Arrest them before they get away.”
“The Garda Siochana,” he informed me, “will make its own decisions about taking people into custody.”
“He ruined my car!” the outraged motorist bellowed.
“Threw this focker into our way!” his wife, a frizzy blonde, screamed.
‘The kidnappers are getting away!”
“He threw my camera into the canal!”
‘They’re focking Yanks.”
“Seamus,” the woman Guard whispered, “I think this is the woman who sings.…”
“I know what I’m doing, woman.”
‘They pulled a knife on me and my wife,” I pleaded, now trying to sound sensible and reasonable.
A low, guttural noise came from the direction of Nuala Anne. She was, I gathered, getting really angry. Galway was not all that far from the Stone Age.
I extended my arm around her. She was as still as a bronze statue.
The fockers might have hurt you, Dermot Michael. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine! The trouble now is that we have a very dumb cop on our hands.”
“I think you’d better come to the station and make a statement, sir,” he informed me pompously. “We cannot have conditions like this on a busy street in Dublin.”
“Seamus, ya oughta call an ambulance!”
“Why?”
We would draw a truly dumb cop.
‘That poor focker lying there on the street!”
“He doesn’t look badly injured!”
“That’s not the point, you eejit. You know the rules.”
“You call them.” He thrust the transceiver at her.
“Now then, sir”—he grabbed my arm—“you and your woman will have to come along with me to the Garda station and make statements.”
I brushed him off like an annoying insect. “Take your hands off me, you nine-fingered shite hawk.”
“I’m placing you under arrest.”
“How do I know that you’re not part of the kidnapping plot?”
He frowned for a moment, puzzled by the suggestion that there might have been an attempted kidnapping.
“We’ll discuss any alleged plot at the station.”
He didn’t mention “alleged” perpetrators or “alleged subjects” like American cops do on television.
“You too, ma’am.” He seized Nuala’s arm, from which hung the tatters of her elegant dress.
That was it. As my teenage nieces would put it, I went postal.
I lifted him off the ground and held him high in the air. “Can you swim, focker?”
I had slipped into the vernacular.
“NO!”
“Grand!”
Into the drink he went.
The woman cop tried to make a call. I pulled the transceiver out of her hands and tossed it after her colleague.
“Good on you, Dermot Michael!” my wife shouted exultantly.
“You’re all a disgrace to the Irish race!” I yelled at the crowd, having learned long ago from Ma (as I called my grandmother) that this was the insult to end all insults. “You stand here and gawk while a man and his wife are assaulted in broad daylight by knifewielding barbarians! With a TV camera there to take it all down. Then this focking asshole of a cop arrives and focks things up worse and you stand there grinning like the pissant gobshites you are! I’m leaving this country and never coming back. I’ll tell everyone in America that the Irish are shite-faced savages!”
That was not bad for an American anyway. Yet I was a long way from a character in a Roddy Doyle novel.
The growl that been lurking in Nuala’s throat exploded into an ear-piercing roar, a wild Gaelic war cry rising from the Irish soil of antiquity. Or perhaps it was only, as she would explain later, the shout of a hurling player running down the pitch.
The onlookers, properly terrified though my good wife held neither a pike nor a hurling stick, quickly faded away, save for the camera crew, the motorist and his wife, and one very frightened woman Guard.
And one masked thug who was still lying on the street groaning. Traffic was now crossing the bridge again. None of the drivers seemed to notice the injured man. The shades of night were rushing down the street.
Nuala bent to take his pulse.
“My name,” I informed the terrified Guard as I shoved my business card at her, “is Dermot Michael Coyne. I am a poet. My wife is Nuala Anne McGrail. She sings. You can reach us at the American embassy, where we are taking sanctuary until such time as the Guard and the Irish government apologize for this incident and guarantee us that it is safe to walk the streets of this savage city at twilight.”
The Irish take poets very seriously. Indeed, they are just a little afraid of them. Long ago, when there was no law enforcement in the country, a king who fancied he was injured would hire a poet to denounce his enemy. You had to be careful with your poets.
“You shouldn’t have thrown poor Seamus over the bridge.” She took the card and stepped away from me. “That wasn’t right.”
“I don’t like people pushing my wife around.”
I was still breathing heavily. Indeed, I was still looking for someone to toss into the canal.
&n
bsp; Poor Seamus was clinging to the bank, crying pathetically for help.
“I think the shite hawk will live,” Nuala announced as she stood up. “Maybe the Garda will finally get an ambulance to take him away.… You”—she turned contemptuously to the woman Guard—“had better go down there and help the focking amadon out of the canal. We wouldn’t want him to drown before we get him into the courtroom.”
Ah, it was a country of litigators.
She rearranged her torn dress, accepted my jacket as a wrap, linked my arm in hers, and led me down Pembroke Road.
“Weren’t we something else altogether, Dermot Michael Coyne?”
“We were that, woman,” I agreed.
A postberserk reaction was creeping into my body. I wasn’t sure that I could walk the couple of blocks to Jury’s. My wife, now the warrior queen returning from battle, seemed serenely confident.
“What was that all about?” I asked as I slipped into a daze.
“Och, that’s for you to figure out, Dermot love. Aren’t you the great detective?”
She signaled for a taxi and ushered me into the car. “Sure, Dermot Michael, you aren’t the man you used to be after these street fights. Too much sexual intercourse, probably. It saps one’s strength.”
YOU’RE REAL ASSHOLE, the Adversary informed me.
“We had to defend ourselves.”
WHAT WAS THE POINT OF THROWING THEM INTO THE CANAL?
“Immobilize them.”
EVEN THE GUARD?
“He pushed Nuala.”
SHE CAN TAKE CARE OF HERSELF.
“What was going on back there?” she asked the driver.
“Didn’t some drunk throw a couple of fellas into the Grand Canal?”
“Did he now?”
“Even threw in a Garda.”
“Good on him!”
“Me very words,” the driver admitted with a laugh. “They could throw the whole focking force into the canal and it wouldn’t bother me.”
An interesting position.
Maybe throwing the pompous punk in had been a bit much. Still, if it came to a court action I would plead that I couldn’t believe he was a police officer because he refused to apprehend the alleged perpetrators and therefore I thought he was part of the plot.
My sister Cindi, the lawyer in the family, would like that defense.
At the door of the Towers, Nuala took charge. I was a nice little boy who had worn himself out in a street fight with some other unruly boys.
Actually, I was Conan the Barbarian, wasn’t I?
Or Finn MacCool?
Or Mike Singletary?
“You’d better get your security people in to block the door,” she told the startled young woman at the desk. “Them media gobshites will show up. We don’t want to see them. Turn off our phones. We’ll use me portable. If the Gardai show up, tell them we’re at the American embassy.”
Then, without waiting for a response, she stalked to the elevator, guided me into it, and pushed the button.
“We’ll have you in bed in just a minute, Dermot love.”
She called room service and told them to bring up a double Bushmill’s Green Label.
Not on the rocks, of course. That would be sacrilege.
She hung up her tattered dress and muttered, “Someone is going to pay for that.”
“The Guards.”
“Maybe … Now let’s get you into bed, Dermot love; you need a nice long nap.”
Even though she was now wearing only negligible bits of transparent black lace, I was in no condition to frolic with her.
My drink arrived and I was instructed to drink every drop of it.
“Sure isn’t it better than that Prozac thing?” she said as she kissed me good night.
As I fell off to sleep, I heard her making phone calls on the portable phone that I had not seen before. It seemed that she was talking to the American Ambassador, the President of Ireland, my sister Cindi, her own mother, and Mike Casey, a former Superintendent of Chicago police and now the head of a group called Reliable Security.
I collapsed into the land of nod thinking that I had nothing to worry about. Sherlock Holmes was on the case.
I remembered just as I went into the pleasant black pit that we had no idea who had tried to kidnap my wife.
—9—
IF YOU don’t mind, I think I’ll keep this poor man as me husband. Wasn’t he wonderful out there on the bridge? What terrible things might have happened to me if he weren’t so strong and so quick?
Isn’t he quick, thought In a few seconds them fellas were routed and I was safe in his arms. They never thought he was so quick, did they? The next time they try to kidnap me, they’d better send three fellas to hold him down, and won’t that not be enough?
He really doesn’t like fighting though he’s terrible good at it, isn’t he? When we got rid of all them gobshites—pardon me language, but that’s what they were—I thought he was going to collapse on me. He’s fine now, but he’ll ache all over tomorrow morning and himself having to write that report for me.
I love him so much. I really do. Lying here in bed with him in me arms and meself all naked, I know I’m the happiest woman in all the world.
And just maybe the best protected, too.
I won’t ever let go of him. Never. Do You hear that?
Well, as long as it’s all right that I hang on to him. If You want to take one of us home first, I’II go—though You’ll have to find someone to take care of him. Someone to order those double shots when he needs them.
Without the ice.
If only I were the kind of wife he deserves.
Maybe me ma is right. Maybe that will all work itself out. Maybe I’m too obsessive. Maybe I want to control everything, even the things you can’t control.
We Irish women have that temptation, don’t we now?
“Mary Fionnuala Anne,” me ma says to me, “you think you have to control everything. But you can’t. Aren’t you dealing now with things you can’t control?”
I don’t like that, but I suppose You don’t like it when I try to budget Your time for You.
Anyway, he’s mine and I won’t let him go.
Unless You insist.
And I don’t think You will.
—10—
“WAKE UP, Dermot Michael! Aren’t we on the telly!”
My body a single solid ache, I rolled over and peered out at a hostile world through narrow eyes. My wife was standing next to our bed, a towel wrapped around her loins.
With that view, the world seemed much less hostile.
Yielding their possession of her reluctantly, my eyes focused on the television monitor.
Sure enough, we were on the telly.
I was amazed at how quick the action was, twenty seconds at the most. The three thugs piled out of the car; two of them grabbed herself; one of them pinned me to the parapet of the bridge. I threw him out into the street Nuala was engaged in a fierce tugging match with the other two. With what looked like a single motion I pulled one of them away and threw him into the canal. Then, in the tiniest fraction of a second, I twisted the other man’s hand so he dropped the knife, broke his arm with a single quick twist, and sent him into the river. The camera was in my face. I glowed with a wild cheerful smile. Then the camera twirled in a circle and caught a brief moment of the Grand Canal rushing up towards it.
The woman anchorperson, in a soft Dublin accent, announced that the cameraman intended to sue for the destruction of his property.
“Not too badly destroyed if he could rescue his film,” herself snorted.
‘The Gardai reported that there was apparently an attempted kidnapping of Nuala Anne McGrail, the singer,” the woman continued with a faint smile, “and that they were investigating the matter further. They also reported that one of their officers had also been thrown into the canal. Perhaps”—her smile broadened—“he got too close to Ms. McGrail’s husband, a young man who is clearly to be reckoned with.”
“Isn’t he ever!” my wife chortled, clapping her hands and bounding around the room. “A man to be reckoned with!”
“That one, at least, is on our side,” I said.
“Won’t they all be on our side! Sure, Dermot Michael, and wasn’t it a good thing the tape wasn’t ruined!”
“They’re still invading our privacy!”
“Be nice to them now, Dermot Michael. Don’t they all think you’re a man to be reckoned with!” She clapped her hands.
“Pretty quick,” I admitted. “Not really quick enough to be a great linebacker, but still pretty quick.”
“Dermot Michael Coyne! Stop looking at me that way! You’ll be giving me dirty thoughts and meself with a rehearsal in an hour. … Come on, put your clothes on; don’t we have to go down to the lounge and eat our breakfast?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Wasn’t it a good thing,” she observed as she discarded the towel and drew an almost nonexistent pantie over her loins, “that the water destroyed the sound? Sure, didn’t we use terrible language altogether? And wouldn’t me poor ma have been shocked?”
I didn’t think that her poor ma would be shocked by anything at all, at all. Nonetheless, we had to keep up the pretense that Nuala’s vocabulary had not been ruined by her time in Dublin. Not to say Chicago.
“It was really a quick fight,” I said, rolling out of bed. “Scary quick.”
“Into the shower with you,” she insisted, swatting my rear end. “Don’t we have a busy day ahead of us, and yourself going to write that report for me!”
In the elevator riding down to the Tower’s lounge, she kissed me solidly. “I love you something awful, Dermot love. Won’t it be grand for me to have dirty thoughts when I come back from the rehearsal?”
“If I finish my report.”
She was genuinely shocked—and perhaps a little hurt. “I wouldn’t do that to you, Dermot. Not at all, at all.”
“Woman”—I hugged her—“don’t I know that?”
The elevator door opened before we could continue, but she was beaming happily.
Outside, the Irish mist had turned to Irish rain, a soft rain—that is, one that drizzles all day or even all week. Rain would not keep us out of the pool. Herself did not approve of permitting rain to interfere with exercise.
Irish Mist Page 7
