There was no point in arguing. Still, for the record, I had to make my point.
“It might be dangerous out there on the Shannon Estuary.”
“No more dangerous than on the Grand Canal here or in Carraroe. Sure, might we not have a tidal wave wipe us out in Connemara?”
“The Gulf Stream doesn’t do tsunamis.”
“Besides, won’t me darlin’ lass here take good care of us? And won’t the Gardai be everywhere?
“They’re not around this morning.”
“Are you daft, Dermot Michael? Aren’t their two men over beyond behind those trees? And the woman who’s pushing the empty baby buggy down below? And the red car up beyond us on Fitzwilliam Place? Are you blind altogether?”
“And won’t you see the tsunami coming at us in Connemara?”
“Is that what they call tidal waves?”
“ ’Tis.”
“Then it’s all settled, isn’t it now?”
IF YOU HAD ANY SENSE AT ALL, AT ALL, the Adversary informed me, YOU’D LAY DOWN THE LAW NOW. SAY THAT YOU’RE GOING HOME TO AMERICA AND THAT WILL BE THAT.
He might be right about sex, but he was wrong about how to deal with Nuala Anne. We had to take our chances.
“If you say so. I just want to go on the record …”
“So, if something goes wrong, you can say, ‘I told you so.’ Well, Dermot Michael, nothing’s going wrong. And anyway, you wouldn’t dare say, ‘I told you so.’ ”
“ ’Tis true,” I said with a sigh.
“I promise nothing will go wrong.”
“You know that for sure?”
“I do. … Now what is your man not telling us?”
“Which man?”
“Your fancy Gardai Commissioner.”
“He’s not telling us things?”
“Certainly not!” she said with the forced patience of a mother with a dense little boy. “Isn’t he telling us more than he wants to tell us because they can’t find the kidnappers? Still he doesn’t want us to find out anything more about the murder of Kevin O’Higgins, does he now?”
“It was seventy years ago, Nuala!”
“That’s only yesterday in this country, Dermot love. His job is to keep peace in Ireland. That means keeping secrets that would stir up trouble today. So he tells us that the people that everyone thinks killed O’Higgins really didn’t, but we know that already, don’t we? He tells us about General Hugh Tudor, and ourselves not knowing about that one. But he figures that we’re going to find out. Then he tells us that there is a connection between the death of Lady Augusta Downs and the death of Kevin O’Higgins. … Don’t you see the problem, Dermot?”
I thought I’d better see it or I’d be written off as a terrible eejit altogether.
“He told me,” I said slowly, “that O’Higgins was responsible for the execution of the men who burned Castle Garry. Then the men who killed him were seeking revenge. But he didn’t mention the names of the killers.”
She patted me approvingly on my thigh. ‘The connection is very obscure, isn’t it now? And why was General Tudor in such disgrace? Because he had an affair with Lady Downs? Would he be the first English officer to have an affair with the wife of a dead comrade? Why was he afraid to live in England? What really happened the night they burned Castle Garry to the ground? He didn’t tell us that, and I’m sure he won’t.”
“Maybe he doesn’t know?”
She removed her head from the place it had found on my shoulder and sat up straight, like she had been startled.
“Maybe he doesn’t! But then what’s he afraid of?”
“What could have happened seventy-five years ago at Castle Garry that might trouble this prosperous country today?”
I extended my arm around her waist and rested my hand on her belly, brushing against a luscious breast in the process. She leaned comfortably against me.
“If it wasn’t for your man, it might not be prosperous.”
“And if it wasn’t for De Valera it might have been prosperous long ago … but where does that get us?”
“The mystery, Dermot Michael, is not down below in Booterstown. It’s out on the Shannon!”
“Out in the real Ireland!”
She leaned closer to me. “You’ve got the right of it, man, haven’t you now!”
“I have a hunch that Hugh Tudor is the key to it all.”
“Weren’t he and Kevin O’Higgins doing the same thing?”
I let that sink in.
“You mean they both were trying to end the violence by using violence?”
She nodded.
“And weren’t they both committing adultery with enchanting women?”
My fingers touched the breast for which they had yearned.
“Dermot Michael, you’re feeling me up!”
“I am!”
“Why?”
“Because you’re my wife!”
“With all them coppers watching us?”
“I forgot about them.”
“I didn’t say stop, did I? Just be a little less obvious, if you take me meaning.”
We both giggled. I became a little less obvious.
“And,” she went on, “weren’t they both heroes whom history has written off as villains?”
“Fair play to you, Nuala Anne,” I admitted.
“One died young and one died very old, but wasn’t Hugh Tudor half-dead when he went off to Newfoundland a disgrace?”
“So much a disgrace that he was humiliated when the King of England remembered who he was a decade and a half later.”
We were silent for a moment.
“Can’t you just see the headlines, Dermot Michael? ‘Reveal Link Between Death of O’Higgins and Disgrace of British War Hero!’ Wouldn’t that stir up the pot now, and with all the negotiations going on up above in Storemont? And wouldn’t your man rather not have that pot bubble over and himself on the Gardai bridge, especially since it’s all been covered up?”
“We are running far ahead of ourselves, Nuala Anne.”
She sighed. “We’re not. I am.… Come on, darlin’ girl; let’s go home.”
Fiona, still slobbering, bounced to her feet, ready for anything and everything.
Nuala decided to walk back to Jury’s “the long way around,” which meant Mount Street and Northumberland Road. If there was any immediate change in deployment of the “coppers,” I didn’t notice it.
“You want to read the book about Hazel?” I asked. “It’s interesting in a way. Chicago beauty keeps most interesting literary and political salon in Europe. Sleeps with rich and famous. Dies unhappy.”
“Should I?”
“I think so. … There’s one interesting difference between her account of O’Higgins’s death and that of DeVere White.”
“And what would that be, Dermot Michael? Be careful! The cars come from opposite directions here!
She pulled me back on the curb. Fiona nudged me as if I were a focking eejit.
“Thanks.”
“The difference between the two accounts?” she persisted impatiently.
Watson must concentrate on the subject when he’s talking to Holmes, even if he looks the wrong way for cars.
“According to White, the killers had been lying in wait for him all morning. According to McCoole, it was a chance meeting. They happened to be driving through Booterstown and saw him coming down the street.”
“Hmm … so there are different stories still floating around. Just like about who killed Mick.”
“What do you think?”
She shrugged her shoulders as we crossed the Grand Canal. “I don’t know, Dermot. … The boy was local, I know that. He knew the priest and went to get him. He might not have known what the gunmen were up to … Dermot!”
This time the near-accident was not my fault. The light at the corner of Haddington Road and Northumberland Road had changed to green. I stepped into the street. A large blue sports car ran the light and bore down on me. I jumped back. He
missed me by inches.
Fiona went wild. Straining at the leash in Nuala’s hand, she barked furiously at the escaping car. She turned to us and barked angrily because we wouldn’t let her go. Then she tried to break lose again.
“Easy, me darlin’, easy now. Himself is all right! You are all right, aren’t you, Dermot love?”
She clung to me with the arm that was not engaged with enraged Fiona.
“It wasn’t my fault,” I replied, for the moment dazed and disoriented.
“Och, it wasn’t your fault at all, at all! You had the right of it, didn’t you?”
A man in a dark double-breasted suit with a vest, commodity trader I thought, stepped up to us.
“Are you all right, sir?”
“They missed,” I said in an utterly phony display of nonchalance.
“I got the license number, sir.”
Copper.
“What do you want to bet that it’s stolen?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Tell my friend the Commissioner that this is a very dangerous city.”
“Yes, sir … a fragile city, too, isn’t it?”
“I’ve read O’Seadhil, too, Officer.”
“Yes, sir,” he said, impressed.
Poetry-reading cop. Unarmed, too, thanks to Kevin O’Higgins.
“Are you all right, Dermot?” My wife now clung to me with both arms. Fiona’s leash had somehow tangled itself around both of us. The wolfhound alternately barked in the direction of the sports car and nudged me to make sure I was still alive.
“We linebackers move pretty quickly for big men,” I said with a laugh.
Linebackers don’t scare, do they? Not real linebackers!
“That’s quite a dog, ma’am,” the Guard said, now speaking to the obvious head of the family.
“Copper dog,” I remarked.
We assured him that we would be able to walk back to Jury’s. I noted that some of the other watch persons whom herself had spotted were lurking in the background. There was definitely no baby in the stroller.
“Maybe we should go home right away.” Nuala took my arm as we crossed Haddington Road.
“No way,” I said firmly. “Now it’s personal.”
JERK, said the Adversary. BIG MACHO AMADON.
1 Irish Whiskey
2 Irish Lace
—23—
“THAT ONE’S real, Dermot Michael,” Nuala Anne informed me as our Mercedes limousine crossed the Shannon River at the Athlone Bridge and entered the “real” Ireland.
I opened my eyes, which I had been resting on the drive under gray and gloomy skies across the trim waist of Ireland from Dublin to Galway. This time we had a limo and a driver and a chase car. Our driver was almost certainly a Guard.
“Sorry I woke you up,” Nuala murmured, not at all sorry.
“I wasn’t asleep.”
“You were so, ever since we left Maynooth.”
“Was I now?”
“You were … Anyway, we’re in the real Ireland now. You should be awake.”
There wasn’t much left of the real Ireland. As Ireland changed from an agricultural society to a modern society, the best and the brightest of the young people had gone off to the cities—Dublin, Cork, Galway. While Galway was in the west, it had changed rapidly and indeed was now the fastest-growing city in Europe. There were still farms, mostly cattle and dairy farms, and the farmhouses were often new and comfortable bungalows like the ones that the elder McGrails had built with help from the government, the European Union, and Nuala and meself. Myself. The old stone houses with the thatched roofs (perhaps replaced by corrugated iron) and the newer gray stucco places survived, but many of them were empty.
I was willing to bet, though I had not asked, that Gerry and Annie had kept their stone hut near, if not attached to, their new place. It would have been “bad luck” to tear it down. Perhaps they used it as a historical curiosity for the tourists—mostly German—who stopped by their place for “tea.”
There was plenty of room in the limo, so Fiona was curled up at our feet, sleeping soundly. Somehow, custody, if not outright ownership, had been transferred to us.
“Och,” said the young Guard who had been her trainer. “Hasn’t the poor thing worked hard enough? Isn’t she entitled to have a family, and meself not ready to start one quite yet?”
I was sure that Nuala had made the arrangements for this transfer without bothering to burden me with the details. Not that I minded, because I kind of liked the large, slobbering pooch meself. Myself, damn it.
“I agree that Augusta Downs is real,” I said as if to show that I was, too, awake. “Are the cops still following us?”
“They are and when we stop at the pub in Ballinasloe for a pint and a sandwich we should invite them to join us. I don’t think anyone will try to harm us out here, not in the real Ireland!”
My wife was exuberant. She was returning, however temporarily, to her roots, the holy ground from which her character and her talent had sprung. What we had all seen the other night at the Point was a product of that slowly dying “real” Ireland.
If the slow death of rural Ireland meant her parents could move out of the stone hut in which Nuala’s ancestors had lived for centuries, that was a great improvement. But would it mean the end of the creativity that flowed out of my beautiful wife?
I was sounding like a local with that worry. You don’t have to be impoverished to be creative. What about our children? Could they be both Irish and American?
How could they not be, given their mother? Still we ought to keep them in touch with Ireland by bringing them over here often.
“Not till we get to Garrytown anyway,” I said.
“Maybe you should go back to sleep,” she said.
“Not now that I’m wide awake.”
I nudged the wolfhound with the toe of my shoe. She opened one eye, dismissed me, and closed her eye. The two of them had bonded against me.
“Well, do you agree with me about herself?”
I stretched and shifted my position in the car. “I think that the book is honest and authentic. I don’t know about her getting mixed up with Hugh Tudor.”
“At the most,” my wife informed me, “once or twice. Until she found out he was married.”
“People do strange things in wartime, Nuala Anne,” I said. “Please God we can avoid that.”
“And our children.”
“And our children.”
Silence while she worried about the absence of children.
“I would imagine,” I went on, “she’s buried next to her husband on the grounds of the castle.”
“And that there’s a great focking picture of her in the drawing room.”
If Nuala Anne thought so, it would certainly be there.
“Maybe we’ll get something out of the relatives who own it now.”
“Not if they can help it, Dermot Michael. They have a legend, I’m sure, which they don’t want to sully.”
“But they’ll know something, won’t they?”
“People in the west of Ireland have long memories. There’ll be plenty of stories floating around. We’ll have to figure out what ones to believe.”
“You mean you can’t believe all the stories they tell out here in the real Ireland, Nuala Anne?”
“Sure, Dermot, you know very well that they’re not told to be believed.”
We had a grand time at the pub in Ballinasloe. Six “coppers” plus the two of us and our driver. And naturally Fiona, who made friends with everyone in the pub and cleaned up every bit of sandwich that had been left on our plates. No more than one pint a person, because two pints brought too close to a violation of the stern new Irish laws about driving under the influence of alcohol. Several of the Guards were Irish speakers and the rest of them understood the language, so there was a lot of babble from which I was excluded. I didn’t mind because I was still half-asleep. I had the impression, as I often do when I hear them talking in that strange-so
unding tongue, that it provides your Irish with far greater opportunity for indirection and circumlocution than does plain old English.
Linearity is not an Irish hang-up—and it’s less a hang-up once you cross the bridge at Athlone.
The closer we came to Galway City, the more agitated my wife became, as did Fiona, who had never been there.
“Isn’t it glorious, Dermot Michael! Isn’t it the most beautiful place in all the world! Wasn’t it nice of God to turn on the sun for me as soon as we got out here! I can hardly wait to see the bay!”
Good-dog Fiona barked enthusiastically at the prospect!
“I’ve been thinking, Nuala Anne. …”
“Have you now?”
“You don’t have to sound so skeptical. I do it on occasion. …”
“When you’re not resting your eyes.”
“Right. … Anyway, I’ve been thinking we should buy a house over here. …”
She went, as the proverb puts it, bananas. She laughed; she cried; she shouted; she kissed me and then laughed and cried all over again.
“Dermot! You’re a wonderful man altogether! I’ll pay for it out of me royalties. Won’t it be wonderful! Southport Avenue and Galway Bay!”
Nuala still believed that we were not able to afford things—just as did all my own family. It was fine with her that I didn’t have a job. But, when she quit her job at Arthur Andersen to devote all her time to singing, she felt that we had lost all steady employment and were living on the cusp of financial disaster. Since she was an accountant, she appreciated theoretically that I had put the money I had made (by mistake) in my years on the Mercantile Exchange into various investment portfolios, all of which were riding up with the various markets. She also realized that the royalties from my novel were in tax-free municipals. But her west of Ireland caution made her suspicious of all such speculation, even though her accounting instincts told her that the stock market was (presently) the place to be.
However, she refused to check the market reports to find out how we were doing. Indeed, when by accident she saw on the telly what the DJ and NASDAQ were doing she screamed in alarm: they were too high altogether! She was not interested in my arguments about the “New Economy.” What goes up, Dermot Michael, must come down.
Irish Mist Page 19
