Irish Gold

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “This car has only one driver and it’s me.”

  “And you’re acting like a focking amadon.”

  “Do you want to walk from here to Galway?”

  “It would be better than being carried in a casket.”

  So it went until we reached Clonakilty where by unspoken agreement we became civil to one another again.

  Then we had come to the gloomy vale (as one of the books had called it) of Blath—Beal na mBlath in Irish. It was now a dismal day in the pounding rain, with clouds obscuring the tops of the hills on either side of the vale. I turned off the ignition. Now there was no traffic left on the road.

  “I don’t like this place, Dermot,” my companion said again. “Not at all, at all. What do you expect to find here?”

  “I want to see it and get the feel of it.”

  “Do we have to?”

  “I do. You can suit yourself.”

  I climbed out of the car and, oblivious to the rain, tried to drink in the taste and the smell of the place. Nuala stood next to me, holding the umbrella over my head, the second bouquet in her other hand.

  “’Tis a bad place to be at Sahmain time, Dermot,” she said after she had told me that the place was evil. “The dead are everywhere.”

  “You can see why Pa didn’t know what was happening.” I unfolded my ordnance map of West Cork. “The convoy was heading back to Cork through Crookston. He had lost all sense of direction. If they were that far away and dark was falling and the sun behind him, the convoy would have been in deep shadows. There was a mist and a touch of rain too. You wouldn’t be able to tell whether the uniforms were khaki or dark green. He didn’t think the National Army had an armored car. It was a long shot from way up there, that’s why there was no exit wound. O’Kelly must have been a crack shot or very lucky.”

  “Your granda didn’t kill Michael Collins.”

  “The enemy, whoever the enemy was, must have kept O’Kelly informed day by day about the progress of Collins’s tour. Maybe they even tipped off the band of Irregulars who slowed down the convoy. Still, it could have easily gone the other way.”

  “Poor Kit Kiernan.”

  “Poor everyone.”

  Once again the mysterious face seemed to float by, today in the mists around the vale. De Valera? Had he engineered the death of the man who had arranged his escape from prison?

  Many had said through the years that the blood of Michael Collins was on Dev’s hands. Maybe he used the gold too for the campaigns that eventually won him at the polls the political power he could not take by force. Maybe the government of Ireland, administered now by his political heirs, was terrified of the truth being revealed to a nation where Michael Collins was a folk hero even if youngsters like Nuala Anne McGrail were not sure what he had done.

  Had not Dev lamented on occasion that he would never be as popular with the Irish people as Mick Collins had been?

  How then did the Consort fit in? Wouldn’t their goal be the opposite of Dev and his successors?

  Politics made strange bedfellows, did it not?

  “We should leave the dead in peace,” Nuala whimpered besides me.

  “Ma?”

  “She’s not dead.”

  “She’s as dead as Michael Collins and Daniel O’ Kelly.”

  “No, she’s not.”

  “You get in the car, I want to walk up the road a bit.”

  I turned and walked towards the spot where the ambushers had laid the mine, to the very spot where, best as I could estimate, Michael Collins had died, perhaps whispering “Emmet” as he died.

  Not “Kit.”

  Well, maybe. The two words would have sounded pretty much the same.

  “They’re watching us.” Nuala had followed me, holding the umbrella over my bare head—herself wearing a rain slicker.

  “The dead?” I asked incredulously.

  “No.”

  “Patrick and his bunch?”

  “No.”

  “The people who attacked us in front of your apartment?”

  “Maybe.”

  I shivered, more because of Nuala’s fey sensibility than because of any fear of the Consort. It was not unreasonable to assume that they were following us, but I was confident that Patrick would be following them.

  I did trust Patrick, didn’t I?

  I found that I wasn’t so sure anymore.

  I peered into the mists up to where Pa had waited. Was there someone up there with a gun aiming at me?”

  It was my turn to shudder.

  “They were pissed,” Nuala said thoughtfully, sniffing the air, “pissed blind. The whole lot of them.”

  “Huh?”

  She continued to sniff, as if she could smell the alcohol in the air. I should have realized then that I was dealing with a detective of extraordinary, almost scary, talent.

  “They were young men, a lot of them younger than yourself, riding around the country on a hot summer day and stopping at pubs to meet the Big Fella’s friends and neighbors. Sure, they wouldn’t be Irish if they didn’t take the occasional drop now and then, would they? A whole day of occasional drops adds up, doesn’t it now? And the young eejits up there”—she nodded towards the laneway—“wasn’t their headquarters in Long’s pub? Would not they have taken a bit of refreshment more than once in the course of a long summer day? By the time it was twilight and they were shooting at each other, weren’t they all focking fluttered? Wasn’t that why no one else was killed?”

  I was tempted to ask her if she could really smell the booze, but I really didn’t want to know.

  “That seems reasonable, Nuala,” I agreed.

  She nodded solemnly and continued to sniff the air.

  I shivered again.

  We found the entrance to the laneway and walked along the lane up on the left side of the road. It was an ideal spot for an ambush, with plenty of shelter behind hedges as the lane ran parallel to and above the road and the drainage ditch.

  The road was far enough away so the four men, firing as they moved along the lane, could not see whom they might hit.

  Nor could they see anyone who might be hiding across the way on the higher hill, even though there was less cover over there.

  I stopped at the point above the shrine that marked the place of Mick Collins’s death. On the other side, far up on the hill, there was a group of trees and bushes—the place where Pa and O’Kelly had hidden.

  “Come on, Nul, let’s get out of here!”

  I strode back to the car, now as eager as she was to flee Beal na mBlath. She trotted along side me, still struggling to keep the umbrella over my head.

  “Just a minute, Dermot.” She shoved the umbrella in my hand, dashed up to the raised platform of the shrine, and placed her waterlogged bouquet at the foot of the crucifix. She made a quick sign of the cross and ran back to the shelter of the umbrella.

  I opened the car door, took the umbrella from her, and pushed her gently inside. Then I hurried around to the other side and jumped in. I started the car immediately and drove cautiously down the road towards the end of the vale and the town of Clonakilty—the town near Collins’s birthplace at Sam’s Cross.

  Nuala grabbed my arm. She was trembling.

  “Are we in danger now?” I asked her, now fully prepared to believe that the vale was swarming with evil spirits living and dead.

  “Not at the moment,” she replied, “but they don’t like us.”

  “Is Mick Collins here?”

  “He is not. He’s one of those waiting for us in Carraroe.”

  She clung to my arm till we came to the first string of farmhouses on the edge of Crookston. Then she sighed, released me, and relaxed.

  I stopped the car. We must end our quarrel.

  “Thanks for the umbrella out there, Nuala. I think the place sort of got to me.”

  She leaned her head against my chest, her black hair right beneath my chin. “I’m sorry that I’ve been fighting with you, Dermot Michael. I have a ter
rible nasty streak in me when I become angry. Me ma says I’m the worst of all her children for sulking.”

  “It was my fault, Nuala. I was shaken by those two translations last night.”

  “Me ma says the only good thing about me sulks is that they don’t last more than a day.”

  “I’m sorry.” I put my arm around her.

  “So am I.”

  “Friends again, Nuala Anne?”

  “Haven’t I said so, Dermot Michael?” She straightened up and grinned at me. “Now, why don’t we have a cup of tea in Crookston to tide us over to till we get to Killarney and a proper lunch?”

  “That was a terrible place,” I said as we ate our first scones of the day.

  “You shouldn’t pay attention to me when I get in one of my spooky moods,” she replied. “I act a little daft. Was your gram that way?”

  “Not that I can remember.”

  “But I do think we’re being watched. I felt that ever since we left Dublin.”

  “I suppose we should expect that.”

  “Aye. I hope your man Patrick is good at what he does.”

  “He should be if he’s some sort of relative of Mick Collins.”

  “Oh, he’s that all right. Isn’t his name Patrick Michael?”

  “He never said that it was.”

  “But it is just the same, and now would you mind if I ordered another plate of scones?”

  Would a Jesuit mind teaching at the high school he attended?

  Patrick Michael, was it?

  And my Uncle Micky, the second of Pa and Ma’s kids, the one that was the psychiatrist in the family (and the one who introduced my mother to my father), was he named after Michael Collins? It was Michael C. Ready, wasn’t it?

  How did a sane, sensible, sometime commodity trader distinguish between the real and the phantasmagoric in the West of Ireland at Sahmaintide, especially when his guide and umbrella carrier seems to cross the lines (which at this time of the year were supposed to be thin) between the two with considerable ease?

  Did Uncle Mike know the meaning of his name? Probably Ma had told him something about the Troubles; not much I’d bet.

  And my second name was owed to him.

  So in a manner of speaking I was named after the man who carried her laundry basket back to the house in Carraroe.

  The man who, according to Nuala’s spooky mood, would be waiting for us at Carraroe when we got there.

  The area around Skibbereen in West Cork and from there up to Bantry Bay and Kenmare and the Ring of Kerry is, by all travel book accounts, the most beautiful in Ireland. We didn’t see much of the beauty because the rain continued to pelt us and the wind to rock the Benz as we followed the winding roads. We did, however, take pictures and imagine what the region must look like on a sunny day.

  Nuala scribbled away at the translation of the last entry in Ma’s first notebook and we talked about the puzzle.

  I told her my theory about De Valera.

  She considered it for a moment. “The government wouldn’t have to be so sneaky, would it? Couldn’t they just expel you from Ireland on some trumped-up grounds?”

  “I feel like I’ve left Ian Fleming’s world and entered John le Carré’s.”

  “His is much more realistic, isn’t it? The world in which a lot of amadons make eejit mistakes?”

  “I think we can rule out the modern IRA. I don’t see why they would care about the death of Michael Collins or anything else in which we’re engaged.”

  “They’re daft, so there’s no telling what they’d do. But right now they seem more interested in blowing up British barracks and killing women and children.”

  “Attacking British soldiers in their barracks is the strategy Michael Collins invented.”

  “And himself having enough sense to stop it when the time came.”

  “The IRA might want the gold.”

  “’Tis true.” She stirred uneasily beside me. “All we need is to have them eejits after us.”

  “How much do we know about the puzzle?” I slowed down to avoid a motorcyclist who was passing a lorry on a hill.

  “Eejit!” exclaimed my companion, who watched every move on the highway. “Well, we know who killed Michael Collins. We know who killed the man who killed Michael Collins. We half know why your granda and gram couldn’t come back to Ireland, and we’ll know all of that when we finish this section I’m after translating. She’s on the boat and she’s talking about Dick Mulcahy.”

  “We know where the gold is or at least where it was. We know pretty much how it got there and who stole it.”

  “We’re not absolutely sure who the man in the car was. Or are you?”

  “I see his face often, Nuala, but it fades away on me.”

  She did not comment so I went on. “I don’t know what there’s left to figure out, except to make sure the gold is still up at the shrine in . . .”

  “Mamene.”

  “Now, how much do we know that they don’t know we know?”

  “That really sounds like John le Carré.”

  We both laughed again, our friendship cautiously restored.

  How long could I resist the woman’s charm?

  “We have to assume that they come into my suite when I’m not there and read your translation on hard disk.”

  “No, we don’t.”

  “Why not, Nul?”

  “Because being only a partial eejit and not a total one, don’t I back up each translation on two of them cute little three-inch floppies that don’t flop and erase the text from the hard disk?”

  “And what do you do with the floppies?”

  “Don’t I send one to his Reverence with the translation and deposit the other in the vault at the hotel?”

  “How long have you been doing that?”

  “Since the night in Irishtown.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I demanded stiffly.

  “Wasn’t it a small detail of me work that was not worth bothering you about?”

  And wasn’t I a total eejit altogether for not realizing then that Grace O’Malley was light-years ahead of James Bond?

  “They could have come into the suite and read Gram’s diary if they brought an Irish speaker along with them.”

  “Sure, they could have, couldn’t they? So unless I was round the bend completely wouldn’t I have put the book in the vault too each day when I went back to me flat?”

  “Did you now?”

  “Haven’t I said that I did?”

  I ground to a halt as a dog herded a band of cattle across the road. He seemed bored by his work and uninterested. Then when he heard us he began to bark, as if to convince us that he was competent.

  The cattle didn’t move any more quickly.

  “That mutt is the typical Irishman,” I said.

  “Faith, isn’t he more energetic than most of us?”

  The cattle finally crossed the road and we started up. The mutt barked a friendly greeting at us.

  “Friendly too.”

  “We can’t help ourselves, I’m afraid.”

  “I suppose you had no problem explaining to that nice manager what you were putting into the vault?”

  “Wasn’t I telling the God’s honest truth? Wasn’t I even showing him some of the darling passages herself wrote about the countryside?”

  “He could have read it, couldn’t he?”

  “Not without disturbing the tiny piece of wax I had glued to the envelope before I put in the box and himself giving me the key.”

  Nuala could probably get a job working for Patrick and his bunch of eejits.

  “So they don’t know that we know the secret of Collins’s death.”

  “Probably not.”

  “And they have no idea whether we know about the visits to Lettermullen. They may not even know that such visits ever occurred.”

  “Wouldn’t you think”—Nuala waved to a countryman who had waved his pitchfork at us—“they’d be knowing that the man, whoever h
e was, ordered the murder of Collins? They’d not be wanting us to find out.”

  “Why not, Nuala? Why ever not? It was so long ago. The man is certainly dead by now.”

  “If you ask me”—she laughed—“and I know you are, wouldn’t I be thinking that these people aren’t killers or they would have killed you at the start? They don’t want you to find out either who killed Michael Collins or where the gold is. They knew enough about what happened in those days to know that your gram and granda were involved. When you began to search for the reason why they had to leave Ireland and never came back, they were afraid you’d find out the other things. When you do, if you do, won’t they be trying to persuade you to keep it all a secret for the good of both the countries?”

  “So I can expect a conversation after we search for the gold.”

  “If they don’t know where it is or if they’ve hidden it somewhere else, then it doesn’t matter. But if we find it and discover they’ve been using it, they’ll be terrible upset.”

  “They will indeed. How would they know about Ma and Pa’s involvements or about the gold?”

  “They’d know about Nell Pat and Liam from the man in the car. I reckon he was a friend of your man Martin’s granda. Maybe the man in the car found out about the gold and left it to them for their work.”

  It was a very plausible scenario.

  “They don’t know that I have the list of their members.”

  “Not unless your man Patrick Michael told them, which I don’t think likely since he wants revenge.”

  I wasn’t about to argue that with her.

  I did not, however, tell her my little secret about the list. That seemed irrelevant.

  “They may not be a tightly organized group at all, Nul. It would be hard to maintain a communications link among all those people. Perhaps only a few people know who the members are. So it may be that some of them are working independently of the others.”

  “And aren’t they not really professional spies like your man?”

  “So all we have to find out is whether the gold is at Mamene and who the man in the car was.”

  “Then our job is finished.”

  “Maybe I’d better let you have some peace so you can finish the translation.”

  “I do want to see the lakes of Killarney when we get there.”