Fiona sensed that we were with cops again. She sat up on her haunches and panted tensely, eager to do her police duty. I took her collar in my hand.
We waited twenty minutes, then a half hour. Stevie strolled out of the pub and in our direction.
“You’ll be happy to know, Mr. Coyne, that your man’s arm is still broken. The information received is correct Isn’t Ms. Doyle in there, swilling down the pints with the best of them?”
“Do they look like they’re going to be in there awhile longer?”
“I don’t think so, Chief. They look like they’re on the last pint.”
“Damn! What’s taking them eejits from Limerick so long! Climb in, Stevie.”
He spoke into his mike and started the car. We inched down the street till we were only a few yards away from the door of the Limerickman. A whitepainted table and two chairs stood outside the door. I wondered how hot it had to be in Ireland before you drank your daily pint outside. The chase car followed us and then stopped maybe thirty yards behind.
Fiona slobbered happily. She knew the drill.
“I’m ordering you two to stay in the car,” Inspector Murphy said briskly. “You’ve already proven you’re better than these amadons.”
“Yes, sir,” Nuala said fervently. “Me man and me never look for a fight if we can find someone else who will do it for us.”
“If they come out, we will apprehend them at once. This time they don’t get away.”
Thanks to Kevin O’Higgins they weren’t carrying guns. What if the alleged perpetrators, as American cops would call them, were armed?
We waited. Then we waited some more. Irish mists were slowly rolling in from the estuary.
What were they up to? Were they planning to have another go at us tonight?
“I thought it might be Father Placid’s friends,” I said to Nuala Anne.
“Oh, no,” she said, “it couldn’t be them.”
That settled that. Watson had been wrong again.
The door of the pub opened. Maeve Doyle swayed out, followed by the dark giant who was her husband. Then the two thugs, one with his arm in a sling. Not very smart of them to show up here. But then they were not a very smart bunch.
Our two Guards moved quickly out of the car.
“It is my duty,” the Inspector said solemnly, “to place you all under arrest on the charge of disturbing the peace and criminal assault. I advise you to come along quietly.”
“Fock quietly,” said the thug without the broken arm as he pulled a knife and advanced on the Inspector. “Get out of me way, Garda, or I’ll stick this in your heart.”
I kicked open the door of the car and released Fiona’s collar. “Go get him, girl!”
With a howl of outrage and a single mighty bound, she hit the thug and knocked him off his feet. He dropped his knife as he fell. She fastened her teeth on his throat. He was too frightened to scream.
Maeve’s husband also pulled a knife. They had come prepared for serious cutting business.
The cops were unarmed, but I wasn’t.
I had never used a shillelagh in a fight before. It turned out to be a very useful weapon.
I hit the dark giant’s arm with it. He dropped the knife.
“I’II strangle you!” he shouted at me.
“Not with a broken leg you won’t!”
I hit his leg and he crumpled to the ground. Maeve was suddenly all over me, kicking, punching, screaming, cursing.
Then she, too, was on the ground. My wife stood over her, brandishing the pub’s white chair.
“Won’t you ruin your voice, sweetie, shouting like that?”
I collected the two knives and handed them to Stevie.
Then the reserves from the chase car arrived and took the whole sorry bunch of them into custody. Nuala had to persuade Fiona to release the man with the knife.
“Good doggy, good, good doggy. Now let him go so our friends can take him off to the lunatic asylum where he belongs.”
The publican, in his white apron, and a couple of patrons stumbled out.
“Here, what’s going on?”
“Gardai!” I said nonchalantly. “Taking criminals into custody.”
Maeve Doyle was back on her feet now, sobbing hysterically as a woman Guard cuffed her.
“Poor woman,” Nuala said, carefully returning the chair to its proper place. “Dermot Michael, we don’t need that shillelagh anymore.”
“I like the feel of it.”
My victim lay on the ground, moaning softly. I was pretty sure that I had not hit him hard enough to break his leg.
Then, sirens roaring, the Guards from Limerick arrived. Major Reno coming too late to the Little Bighorn. Except that the outcome was a little different, due mainly to Fiona and me shillelagh.
My shillelagh.
“I thought I told you two to stay in the car,” Inspector Murphy complained, not too seriously.
“Weren’t we just giving Kevin O’Higgins a hand?” Nuala said innocently.
Just as she had done at the Point, Fiona was prancing around nervously, wanting praise and reassurance.
“Good dog,” I said, bending over to hug her. “Grand dog, super dog, brilliant dog!”
She licked my face in gratitude.
“Inspector,” the woman Guard said, “this woman has a scalpel in her purse.”
“Intended for my face, no doubt,” Nuala observed grimly.
The criminals were herded into a squad car, moaning and screaming and protesting. Maeve’s husband, Pete “Pig” Doyle as he was called, was loaded into an ambulance.
“The Commissioner wants to talk to talk to you, Dermot,” Inspector Murphy said, handing me the phone.
“Dermot Michael Coyne,” I announced serenely.
“You’re out of your focking mind!” Gene Keenan exploded.
“You gave us the wolfhound and me the shillelagh. Didn’t we have to use it now when it looked like some of your people were about to be hurt?”
“And herself with a bar stool?”
“Just a little outdoor chair … You know what these west of Ireland women are like, Gene, when they become angry.”
“Focking Grace O’Malley! … She was the one who knew that they were in the pub?”
“Certainly.”
“Just knew it?”
“Isn’t that the way the dark ones work. … Incidentally, you can tell your friend the junior minister that we won’t tell the story about his grandfather.”
“I figured you’d figure that out. He doesn’t mind. He thinks it’s a wonderful story about the power of forgiveness.”
“Does he now?”
“And we picked up those phony Real IRA types who were making the phone calls. A bunch of young punks from out in Tallaght. Drugs mostly. They saw an opportunity and went for it.”
“And Father Placid?”
“He turned up in New York and apologized to everyone. Very contrite. Promised that all the money taken from the fund would be paid back eventually. He’s there begging his American supporters for help, and himself blaming it all on herself because she’s American.”
“Will you extradite him?”
“We’ll sure try. We don’t hold with clerical immunity anymore. Incidentally, all the money from the concert is safe. It will take a couple of months, but it will go to the poor in Central Africa.”
“Grand!”
“So that clears it all up, doesn’t it?”
“Not quite.”
“Oh? What else are you two up to?”
“We want to find out why Lady Augusta Downs was not buried in that grave next to her husband.”
Next to me, Nuala, who had been listening to the conversation, looked startled. Then her face set into a deep frown.
“You’ll never find that out.”
“Never say never, Gene. It’s a hell of a long time.”
I hung up.
“Himself,” Inspector Murphy informed us, “said that you should keep the car t
ill tomorrow, when we’ll get another driver up. Would you ever mind driving it back to the castle?”
“I think we can manage that,” Nuala replied, in her role as family spokesperson.
When the Guards and all their cars had departed, Nuala turned to the astonished publican and said, “Can we have two pints of the best for me and me man and a large bowl of water for me panting friend?”
He sat us on the two outdoor chairs with great ceremony under a rather stunted palm tree and with even greater ceremony served us with two of the best. He also enthusiastically petted Fiona as he served her dish of water. She slobbered over him before she turned to her drink.
“First of all,” I said to my bride, “how was the rehearsal?”
She shrugged indifferently. “It was all right, I suppose. They all keep saying that I’m brilliant, but me da always said that you should never trust these Munster folk when they praise you.”
“You’ll do the actual recording tomorrow at the university?”
“That’s what they say. First thing in the morning. Isn’t it true that they can make the sound more like you’re in a chapel than when you’re really in a chapel?”
“You’ll be happy when it’s over?”
“Won’t I ever? … Don’t they want me to sing two more hymns?”
“Chant?”
“No. Schubert’s ‘Ave Maria’ and a Palestrina ‘Regina Coeli.’ They’re bringing over the Limerick Symphony to back me or maybe to drown me out if I’m too terrible.”
“They had a lot of nerve asking you to do that!”
“Sure, Dermot, they’re such nice people. What difference do two more songs make, especially since they’re both lovely?”
She wasn’t sure she could sing either of them well enough to be recorded, but she was sure that she wanted to try.
That’s my Nuala Anne.
SHE’D BE THAT WAY IN BED IF YOU GAVE HER HALF A CHANCE.
“Leave us alone.”
“The ‘Regina Coeli’ is a wonderful polyphonic melody from the sixteenth century. I’m going to sing the soprano, and the fiddles do the rest.”
“Sounds tricky.”
“ ’Tis, but ’tis kind of fun, too. Right now I’m terrible tired … and, Dermot, I haven’t been doing my voice exercises. Won’t Madam be very angry with me when we go home?”
“I don’t think so.”
Madam was the retired opera singer who, in the rabbit warren called the Fine Arts Building on Michigan Avenue, played the role of Nuala’s voice coach. She was a stern taskmaster, but she adored Nuala.
“How did you know it was Maeve and her mob that were chasing us?”
“Who else would it have been?” She waved her hand impatiently, as if the matter had never been in doubt. “Don’t your man and his crowd have enough trouble now as it is without chasing after us? They’re amadons and gombeen men, but they’re not crazy. Maeve and her man are crazy with envy, and their thugs wanted to get even with you, and themselves thinking the Gardai would never find them.”
I did not observe that the Guards had found them only after Nuala told them where to look.
“Why the TV when they tried to kidnap you?”
“I’m sure one of them will tell your man in Dublin everything, but I suppose they wanted to warn American singers to stay away.”
“Off-the-wall mad!”
“But dangerous just the same. They probably would have held me till after the concert and beaten me up a little, though they certainly liked knives, didn’t they?”
I shivered. And felt a little less guilty about my work with the shillelagh.
“As for the eejits from Tallaght, they were pretty clearly phonies. If they were really affiliated with the lads, they would have kidnapped me and then asked for the money. And the lads wouldn’t have fouled up the kidnapping either. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone in the Real IRA tipped off your man about them.”
She waved her hand again and sipped a tad more of her Guinness.
Amazing, Holmes.
Elementary, Watson.
“And you beat your man today on the links,” she went on, “did you now?”
“Naturally. I won eight-hundred pounds, half of which I gave to the Archdeacon, and the other half I’ll give to Father MacNamee tomorrow afternoon when we see him.”
“Good enough for him,” she beamed as she sipped very carefully on her pint of Guinness. “You saw Clyde and Vicki, did you now?”
“Saw them and ate lunch with them and killed a bottle of excellent dry sherry with them.”
“And ogled her boobs?”
“Only because you weren’t there.”
She snorted scornfully. “Still,” she said, “I don’t mind so long as you look at me more than you look at her. Her boobs are really pretty. She’s entitled to admiration.”
“That’s generous of you.”
She waved her hand for the third time. “Realistic!”
Then, serious again, she asked, “Did Clyde say that Lady Downs might not have been buried there beside the Shannon?”
“Vicki did, as I remember it. … He had talked to the chaplain at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. Most of the story we already know. General Crozier returning to London and labeling him ‘Bloody Tudor.’ However, it appears that there were also rumors of his ordering the execution of a woman with whom he was romantically linked.”
“And, in those days, if she were a Protestant it would have bothered the IRA a lot less than it would bother the English … especially if she was the wife of a war hero.”
“And, Nuala, a war hero who had been his chief of staff and won the Victoria Cross.”
She nodded sadly and took another very small sip of her pint. “We still don’t know what really happened, do we?”
“We don’t. Maybe Father MacNamee can tell us tomorrow afternoon.”
“And Vicki said she might not have died in the fire?”
“She said that there are tales told around here that she wasn’t in the grave, vague and imprecise tales. You know the kind, a wink, a nod of the head, an obscure phrase or two?”
“Do I ever!”
“Do you, er, sense that those stories might be true?”
She shut her eyes as if she was striving to sense something, anything.
“I know that she’s dead now, but that’s no help. She’d be over a hundred years old. …”
The publican came out and asked if we’d like a bit more. “Wasn’t it grand altogether the way you apprehended them criminals … especially your darlin’ dog here?”
Fiona, who had calmed down and was now preparing to snooze, absorbed a head scratching with great pleasure.
Nuala spoke to him in Irish, apparently asking a question.
He started in surprise, hesitated, and then answered very guardedly.
Nuala persisted.
He relaxed and answered at some length.
“I’ll be driving back, so I won’t need another pint, but sure, isn’t me husband dehydrated altogether?”
As he went back into the pub, she touched my hand with her fingers. “Shush, Dermot; he’s going to tell us something more after he thinks about it while he’s drawing your drink.”
He returned and placed the pint in front of me.
“Sure, don’t you draw it perfectly?” I said. ‘The foam could not be better at all, at all.”
He smiled, his jolly publican smile, and spoke in Irish again. Then he went back into the pub.
“What was that about?”
“I went into me Galway Irish to let him know that I wasn’t some tourist from Dublin. I asked him when Lady Downs was really buried up there at the castle. He said that she was killed by the Tans in 1921. I said that we knew that wasn’t true and that wasn’t it time the whole truth be told. He went through the whole story of what a brave woman she was and how she had saved the lives of a lot of the lads by setting fire to the house. I told him that we knew she didn’t set the fire. He went in to think ab
out that.”
“And then?”
“He came out and said that he didn’t really know anything and didn’t want to be quoted, but, when he was a lad about ten years old, back around 1968, wasn’t there talk of strange goings-on up at the ruins of the castle. And didn’t some of the old women say that wasn’t it Lady Augusta herself coming back to be buried with her husband?”
Wow!
“She would have been in her late seventies then … after General Tudor’s death. … Do you believe your man, Nuala Anne?”
She thought about it. “I believe he’s truthfully telling us about the stories. Does he believe it really happened? In this part of Ireland, that’s a foolish question, Dermot Michael. We half-believe any good story …”
“But full-believe none of them?”
“As I’ve been telling you lately, Dermot love, you’re getting to know me kind all too well.”
“Most of the people in Garrytown must know the story?”
“I’m sure they do … and your man up beyond above has never heard a word of it. He’s an outsider and, worse, a Clare man. Maybe his grandchildren will hear the legend someday, if they still own the castle.”
“Father Mike knows it?”
“Och, has anything at all happened in this town for the last thirty-five years that himself doesn’t know?”
“Wouldn’t he have been here when she was buried if the story is true?”
“And won’t I begin our conversation tomorrow by saying to him that we know he presided over her interment one dark and stormy night?”
We went back, showered, and dressed for drinks and supper, and listened as Paddy MacGarry celebrated my achievements on the golf course.
“You finally ran into a railway train, did you now, Paddy?” his wife said with some amusement.
“One of your 747 jets,” he replied sheepishly.
He was a good sport all right. It was, however, also good business to admit that you didn’t win all your matches on the links.
Nuala sung her four Marian motets after supper, a cappella, and Schubert’s “Ave” with the help of the house harp. Everyone praised her enthusiastically. She blushed modestly, still the shy country lass from Connemara.
Later we made love. It was sweet and pleasurable, as it always was. But there was no fire speaking to fire.
“Tomorrow night,” I promised the Adversary before he had a chance to express an opinion.
Irish Mist Page 28
