Irish Gold

by Andrew M. Greeley

  She stood up. “Who was this Winston Churchill fella?”

  “Who was Winston Churchill?” I repeated in disbelief.

  “I know he had something to do with one of the wars, but I don’t remember which one.” She did not seem apologetic about her appalling ignorance. But she wasn’t a history major, was she now?

  “Both world wars, Nul. He was first lord of the Admiralty in number one and prime minister in number two. He resigned from the Admiralty after the disastrous attempt to invade Turkey in 1916 and went to the front in France. But he was minister of state for the colonies during the negotiation of the Anglo-Irish treaty. Then the Lloyd George government fell a few months later, partly because a lot of Brits thought that they had given too much to the Irish. He was out of power till 1940 when he became England’s wartime prime minister. Remember his ‘We will never surrender’ speech?”

  “Vaguely.” She bit her lip. “Sure, I’d better look him up too.”

  “First you go swimming, you hear?”

  She stretched leisurely, her elegant breasts pressing against her sweater, much more compelling boobs than those of Lady Liz. “If you say so, melord. But I’ll tell you one thing: It’s the gold a lot of them are worried about and not your ma and pa.”

  “Could be. I keep forgetting about the gold.”

  “Would you be the one to do that?”

  She stretched again, driving me almost out of my mind. I yearned to touch and caress those breasts, to kiss them and nibble at them, to feel her nipples grow firm in my fingers, to fondle her for hours on end.

  I should keep those images, I told myself, out of my fantasy life. It was like telling the tides to take a day off.

  The phone rang; she instantly became the perfect secretary again. “Mr. Coyne’s office. . . . Is that you, Ma? Glory be to God and yourself calling me!”

  Her face lit up in an ecstatic smile and she began to speak in Irish, reaching for a notepad and jotting down what her mother was telling her.

  “Himself?” She glanced at me and returned to Irish.

  It was pretty easy to figure out what she was saying. Her amused smile and mother-with-a-little-boy tone gave it away and deliberately.

  “Ah, sure, he’s harmless enough. A rich Yank who writes stories and wants everyone to like him. No, he makes no passes, worse luck for me. Sure, he’s probably deficient in hormones, if you take me meaning. Am I interested in him? In a manner of speaking, but it’s probably a waste of me time. Should I be serious about him? Well, let’s wait and see what you think on Saturday morning when we arrive in Carraroe. Ah, glory be to God, woman, no, we’ll not put him up at the house. He belongs in one of them fancy hotels in Salt Hill.”

  Good enough for you, Dermot Michael Coyne.

  “Sounds like character assassination,” I muttered when she hung up.

  “I won’t translate a word I said,” she insisted triumphantly. “ ’Tis none of your fock . . . darn business.”

  “It is my business because it was all about me and you don’t have to translate it because, as you very well know, I figured most of it out.”

  “Well, anyway, we found out some things about your family, not that they’ll do us much good. Your grandpa was an orphan and there’s no trace of him either at his parish or at ours, save for his marriage to one Mary Anne Malone in September of 1922. There’s a baptism record for a second Mary Anne Malone born to Timothy Malone (deceased) and Marie or Moire Hurley and a record for the marriage of Moire Hurley Malone to James Flanigan in 1924. The second Mary Anne Malone was married to John Sheerin in San Francisco in May of 1942. So they did migrate because there’s nothing more about Moire and her family. Nor is there any record of the burial of your gram’s parents. They either migrated or moved from Carraroe to somewhere else in Ireland, and a lot of folk were doing that because, sure, you can’t eat scenery, can you now? Me ma says there are few folks who remember the Troubles because there’s been so much immigration, but she thinks old Mike Sean Cussack might remember though he’s too old to be trusted completely. Satisfied?”

  I had never seen my Nuala so animated or so beautiful as when she was talking to her ma. Was that the ur-Nul, the woman behind all the masks? If it was, then she was even more dangerous than I had thought.

  “I’ll have to think about that too.”

  “Well, think away.” She kicked off her shoes. “I’m going to have me swim.”

  “Fine.”

  I sat on the couch trying not so much to figure out how all the pieces fit, but groping for the picture that kept flashing across my brain and then disappearing, like Irish sunlight, before I could grasp it.

  It was someone’s face, that I knew for sure. But whose face and where had I seen it?

  Nuala reemerged, robe open over her bikini. Ah, how soon modesty vanishes and—passing thought—how solid she is with the muscles of a well-disciplined athlete. Was there anything at which Nuala was not good?

  Would she be good in bed, I wondered again, inexperienced at first but exciting like Ma must have been?

  Foolish question. Nuala would put on the mask of an accomplished mistress and play that role to perfection too.

  I was filled with longing for her—her breasts and her belly and her thighs and her heart and mind and soul. The yearning for was not as imperious as ordinary lust. Rather it was something far more subtle and far more dangerous. Nuala Anne McGrail could be an addiction from which one would never escape.

  I thought of a wisecrack about fastening her robe before she went into the corridor and decided against it. “Have a nice swim, Nul.”

  “Won’t I do just that?” She swished out of the room, a galleon under full sail—and with guns loaded and ready to fire.

  I pictured her running naked through the woods, black hair flowing in the wind and rain.

  Naked in the rain?

  Well, if you were a goddess, you had to spend a good deal of time naked, didn’t you? And that meant, if you were an Irish goddess, you’d have to get used to running naked in the rain, didn’t it?

  Maybe I had too much of the drink taken in Merrion Square, too much altogether. I should get up out of my couch, desist from my lewd thoughts about my employee, and get on with the serious work of the day, if I could only remember what that was.

  I remained in the parlor for perhaps a quarter of an hour, thinking about Nuala and about my life. She was too young and too talented for me to interfere in the possibilities of her own life. If I did so and cut short her career, in the years to come she would never forgive me.

  I was attractive because I treated her with respect and because I represented a world she had never experienced. But once she had recovered from her adolescent crush on me, she’d discover that she was wasting her talents and her opportunities.

  We’d never be happy under those circumstances.

  Would we?

  Thus reassured, I donned a raincoat and wandered out of Jury’s for a walk along the Grand Canal. The rain was intermittent, interludes of fierce downpour alternating with periods of rapidly moving clouds and an occasional hint of sunlight: Dublin weather teasing us with the possibility that the rain was about to stop and then turning the bucket upside down on us.

  Dublin was a tricky lover, promising loveliness and then dancing away when one reached out to grasp her.

  Would Nuala dance away?

  Had Nell Pat?

  The Irish, used to living in an island that had been a sponge for thousands of years, seemed to be philosophical about the rain. I thought of the sonatina of colors in River Forest at this time of the year and was thoroughly homesick.

  Would Nuala like River Forest?

  Is the Pope Polish?

  Would my family like her?

  Is the Pope Catholic?

  The sooner I left for home, the better it would be for both of us.

  After we found the gold in Mamene, right?

  I forced my thoughts away from home and Nuala—and the very dangerous subject of
Nuala at home with me—and tried to concentrate on my mystery, if that was the proper label for it.

  Again the explanation, the complete picture, the key to the puzzle, the face for which I was looking floated through my brain, hazy like the Cathal Brugha barracks in the distance, and disappearing sometimes in the rain, just out of reach like a woman who was attainable if not yet attained.

  Damn, I don’t want to think about Nuala. Why does she obsess my metaphors? Why does she disrupt my thought processes, like a virus in a computer program?

  An image of her naked on a bed—pale, vulnerable, and eager for me—tore at my brain. I winced with the painful pleasure of it.

  A sly thought warned me that I would never be able to think constructively about the Consort of St. George and St. Patrick until I possessed her. A wiser thought replied that if I possessed her, she would then possess me, and I wouldn’t be able to think constructively about anything.

  So back to Martin Longwood-Jones. Why the lunch? Why the lecture? Was he a member of the Consort? Was he the head of it perhaps? How did I even know that there was such a shadow group? Only from Angela Smythe who, however desirable, was by no means thoroughly trustworthy.

  Patrick had hinted at the same group, had he not? I could trust Patrick, couldn’t I?

  I could trust no one if it came to that, but, as a working hypothesis, there was indeed, on both sides of the Irish Sea, a group that was waiting patiently for the chance to reunite the two British Isles into one nation, ruled in the final analysis from Westminster. That group might well have existed since the time of the treaty. Martin’s father and grandfather might have been involved in it. Perhaps membership was passed on from father to son.

  Yet Martin and Liz seemed to reject the notion that the Irish couldn’t govern themselves. They both seemed to accept and indeed approve of an independent Ireland. Then why the long lunch with the lecture about the uncertainties in the time of the Troubles?

  Martin’s occasion to begin the lecture was my remarks about Pa and the Galway Brigade opposing Collins. Maybe the purpose of the lunch was to determine how much I knew.

  I had spilled it all when I said that Pa might have been the man who killed Mick Collins. Both Martin and Liz had seemed shocked, horrified. Were they Collins supporters? Of course they were, they were on the pro-treaty side, were they not? They knew how much longer and more ruthless the Civil War had been after his death.

  “Surely there’s no way to determine with any certainty whether he fired the gun after all these years,” Martin had murmured.

  There was a way: Ma’s diaries. The diaries were still my wild card.

  “And it doesn’t matter anymore, does it?” Liz had said, her pretty face grim. “You really should let the dead bury their dead, shouldn’t you, Dermot?”

  Liz knew that I found her sexually appealing and was pleased with that knowledge. She didn’t exactly flirt with me, much less tease me, yet there was a hint of invitation, the barest hint, in her manner towards me.

  Just a tiny bit of a hooker, as Nuala had shrewdly noted. A rainy afternoon in bed with me, she seemed to be insinuating by the amused look in her gray eyes, is not totally out of the question.

  That was not fair, I told myself. You have no reason to think that she’s not totally faithful to her husband.

  True enough. Besides, you’re not supposed to be thinking about her buxom charms. You’re supposed to be thinking about the Consort of St. George and St. Patrick.

  What if she phoned you and suggested a tête-à-tête, lunch or a drink, perhaps at her house? Would you accept?

  In the interest of learning more about the mystery, sure.

  Who are you trying to kid, Dermot Michael Coyne?

  Nuala was responsible for these absurd fantasies. She was the one who had incited the flow of hormones into my bloodstream.

  Nuala and the God who put the hormones there in the first place.

  Maybe I should let the dead bury their dead. The only reason anyone had to fear me was my search for the gold. Maybe the Consort, or whatever it was, had used the gold to pay its expenses—Imperial German gold of the Second Reich, sent for the cause of Irish freedom, now picking up the tab for a long-term, and faintly batty, plot to subvert that freedom.

  Batty . . . yes, that was the word. The whole story was batty. The scheme described by Patrick was, as I had told him, a load of shite. The fear in the eyes of Martin and Liz was absurd. The shadowy organization at which Patrick had hinted sounded like a premise for a comic film.

  Why all the bother?

  The gold, as herself had said?

  Well, if all of it was still up there in the cave, it would be worth approximately twenty million pounds. That was a lot of coin of the realm admittedly, but barely the cost of a wrench to repair a B-2 in a Pentagon budget.

  I was missing something.

  My trouble had started when I began to ask questions about the Galway Brigade of the Irish Volunteers, later renamed the Irish Republican Army. That seemed to suggest that they were fearful I would find a connection to the gold.

  How did the death of Mick Collins fit in, or did it? Gold is more important than a long-dead patriot, even if the latter was a genius.

  I was missing something.

  For a moment I had it. I saw what the key question was and why its answer might be devastating. I saw the face I was looking for.

  Then I lost it.

  “Wasn’t I wondering if you were ever coming by here again?”

  I looked up in surprise. It was the old fella, the one who had claimed to know Ma and Pa, sitting on the same bench on the bank of the Grand Canal, a rain slicker over his black suit, the thorn stick still firmly grasped in his hands.

  “Have you been waiting every day?”

  I had been so captivated by my heady brew of thought and fantasy I had not noticed that the late afternoon sun had definitely, if temporarily, appeared and that the streets of Dublin were glistening red and gold, as if someone had placed a color transparency over the city, and that the canal was a dusky rose band sprinkled with glittering rubies, Dublin’s last alluring trick for the day.

  Somehow I had turned around short of the barracks and walked back toward Pembroke Street.

  “I have not,” said the old fella, “but wasn’t I thinking to myself that I’d wait here some afternoon in case you’d be after strolling by. Grand day, isn’t?”

  “Brilliant.”

  We had thus disposed of two crucial Dublin words.

  I sat down next to him.

  “So they haven’t driven you out of Ireland, like they did Nell and Liam?”

  “They have not.”

  “Good enough for you.” He nodded his approbation.

  “Did me granda kill Mick Collins?” I demanded bluntly.

  The old fella laughed at that and his laugh turned into a cough. “Sure, you don’t understand anything at all, at all, if you’re thinking that.”

  “Who did?”

  “ ’Tis a mystery, now isn’t it?” There was a sly gleam in his faded blue eyes.

  “Were you there?”

  “When they killed the Mick, God be good to him, and himself maybe a hero and maybe a traitor and who is to say?”

  “Were you there?”

  “Wasn’t I saying I was not?”

  “Did my granda kill Daniel O’Kelly?”

  “Aren’t you missing the point altogether?”

  “Did he kill O’Kelly?” I leaned forward and stared in the old man’s face and was overwhelmed by the smell of tobacco.

  “Would it have mattered if he had, and I’m not saying he did?”

  “O’Kelly was a traitor?”

  “Sure, aren’t you on the right track now?”

  “Were you there when he died?”

  “He deserved to die for what he did to all of us, didn’t he?”

  “I suppose so.”

  I wasn’t going to get any direct answers from the man, though he’d confirmed some of my hun
ches. Once more the truth slipped out of the mists in the back rooms of my brain and leaped at me.

  I missed it and then it disappeared into the now deep purple waters of the Grand Canal.

  “Sure”—the old man sighed loudly—“weren’t the worse ones those for whom he was working?”

  “Ah, isn’t that the truth?”

  “The politicians, you know?”

  “Haven’t I said so?”

  “And didn’t your gram find out all about them?”

  “She didn’t miss much, that one.”

  “Not at all, at all.”

  Another long pause.

  “And wouldn’t she want the truth to be told at last?” I tried again.

  “As sure as the sun will rise tomorrow morning.”

  A declarative sentence from the man!

  More silence.

  “Sure, weren’t they thinking on going to America anyway, but they saved Ireland, didn’t they now, and wasn’t exile a cruel thing for them?”

  Saved Ireland! Ma and Pa?

  What the hell!

  “Weren’t they”—I’d try to play his game to the end—“the real heroes of the Troubles in Galway?”

  The old fella’s eyes, normally dull and lifeless, glowed for a moment in memory of great events and great people.

  “And aren’t you a smart one for figuring that out? If it hadn’t been for them, we never would have got the guns we needed, would we now?”

  Guns?

  “Not at all, at all!”

  “Aye.” The old fella struggled to his feet. “And myself worrying all these days that you really weren’t herself’s grandson and wouldn’t sort it all out. Well, won’t I enjoy a fine night’s sleep, Liam? We’ll sort it all out at last, won’t we, you and Nell and I?”

  The old man hugged me—almost suffocating me with the smell of tobacco—and tottered off, his thorn stick at a jaunty angle.

  “Dermot, not Liam,” I said under my breath.

  As dusk rolled rapidly off the Irish Sea and pulled down the curtain on Dublin’s late afternoon show, I hurried back to Jury’s, somehow exhilarated. My grandparents had saved Ireland! Ma wanted the story to be told at last! Well, damn it all, the story would be told!

  In that exhilaration I wanted a woman, any woman would do. No, that wasn’t true. Only one would do, and herself asking for it all these days. Well, we’d see what she was like in bed, wouldn’t we now? And after that we’d have to see whether she was able to drag me to the altar as Nell Pat had dragged Liam.