“Her translations sound just like my grandmother. Almost as if she were speaking to us.”
“Ah.” Meg winked at me. “Isn’t our little Nuala the deep one?”
“You’d better believe it.
Over enormous protests from all concerned, I helped wash the dishes—with soap and water pumped from a well and heated on the peat fire.
“Isn’t it nice, Nuala, that you’ve been meeting one of these nice feminist men?”
A number of winks that time.
“ ’Tis. And me da helping you with the dishes every time the tourists come for tea.”
“Wouldn’t I be in terrible trouble, Dermot Michael”—a wink at me—“if I didn’t?”
“Go ’long with you!”
The tourists were scheduled to come almost immediately. I was strictly forbidden to help with the service. “We’d have to teach you how to be polite to the Germans, wouldn’t we now?”
I was, however, permitted to help them set the tables. The bus arrived, the Germans were disgorged, brash and noisy by my Chicago Irish standards, and conducted to the tables. Tea and hot scones were served. The visitors consumed them with loud delight.
A couple of the men attempted to be fresh with Nuala and were stared into silence.
Leaning against the cottage, like a lord of the manor, I tightened my fists. If those damn . . .
Nuala glared at me. Don’t you dare, I can take care of myself.
That was for sure.
The tourists left.
“Them poor Germans, aren’t they the relaxed ones now?” Sean McGrail sighed.
“And they don’t work at all at traveling, do they, Dermot?”
“They travel the way they won the war,” I said, and occasioned more laughter.
The remains of tea were cleared away. Again I insisted on helping.
“Sure, didn’t your mother bring you up to be a grand young gentleman?”
“Write her and tell her that! She never believes me when I tell her the same thing.”
More soft laughter.
Then Nuala and I left to visit what had been the Malone house and see Mike Sean Cussack.
We walked arm in arm—it seemed the natural and the only way to do it—down the lanes, lined with stone fences, to a big stucco house close to a lough. The home was painted yellow and the windows were trimmed with red and blue. Two TV antennas loomed above the slate roof.
“ ’Tis owned by a merchant from Galway City. They’re nice folk. I’m sure they’d let you in.”
“There’s not much of Ma’s house left, is there?”
“Hardly anything.”
“Let’s not bother then.”
The only trace of the ruined cottage where Uncle Billy had been conceived was a stone foundation near one of the loughs, barely visible in the grass.
I kicked at the stones with my foot.
“Disappointed, Dermot?”
“This is a beautiful place, Nuala, as I’ve already told you. I love your parents. . . .”
“They love you too.”
“But I can’t see Ma or Pa or their family and friends. It doesn’t seem the locale for so much passion and energy and enthusiasm.”
“She read her passion into the environment, Dermot.”
“I’m sure she did that.”
“There’s passion here, God knows.” Nuala sighed. “Like everywhere else in the world.”
“Wasn’t I noticing that in your cottage? . . . I guess I feel so empty because I can find no trace of the woman who wrote that diary.”
“She left for America, Dermot, and the world she left behind changed.”
“I guess so.”
“A woman like Nell Pat, however, leaves her mark, even if you don’t see it.”
“She tell you that?”
“She didn’t have to. . . . Now let’s visit Mike Sean Cussack. He’s always claimed to have belonged to the Irregulars.”
The old man, smoking his pipe in front of a rundown cottage, was not much help. He remembered that Daniel O’Kelly had been shot as a traitor, “over at Maam Cross by the order of General Collins himself.”
He also claimed to remember Liam O’Riada, “and wasn’t it a shame himself being shot in the back and his wife expecting a child?”
Nell Pat Malone was a wonderful lass with blond hair that later tended bar in a public house in Galway.
I slipped a ten-punt note into the old man’s hands and thanked him and even praised him for his memory.
“Not much help, was he, Dermot?”
“We didn’t expect him to be, did we? The old fella on the bench at the Grand Canal seemed to remember more accurately.”
I thought about the man and who he almost certainly was and almost told Nuala. Then I decided that there was no reason to do so.
“I’m sorry, Dermot.”
“It’s not your fault.”
We started walking back down the lane to her house. The sun was already sinking in the west, casting magic shadows over the stark, lovely land.
“It’s All Hallows Eve, isn’t it, Nuala?”
“ ’Tis.” She sighed.
“No dead walking yet, are there?”
She glanced at me curiously. “They’re all around us.”
I didn’t pursue the matter.
“I suppose we should put off the visit to Mamene”—I glanced at the mountains in the distance—“till tomorrow morning.”
“May I make a suggestion?” she asked timidly.
“Have I ever said no?”
“The shrine will be filled with people tomorrow and it being the Feast of All Saints. . . . You’ll be coming out here for Mass?”
“I will and to take your Ma and Da to lunch at a good restaurant.”
“Grand! They’ll love it! I’ll make the bookings!”
“Then we go up to the mountain after lunch.”
“No. When it’s about this time tomorrow, you drive back to Salt Hill. I’ll see that another car company parks a wee Ford for you down the street from St. Catherine’s and leaves a key in it. When it’s dark, you sneak out the back door and down the street to it and drive out here. Then we’ll go over to Maam Cross at night. If anyone is watching the hotel, they’ll be after thinking your car has never left and yourself asleep in the hotel.”
“Brilliant!”
Siobhan Connery!
“You’ll be thinking I’m a know-it-all,” she said dubiously.
“I’m thinking I’m glad you’re with me.”
I did, however, think she was a know-it-all.
Just like Ma.
–– 60 ––
THERE WAS no moon, as I would have known if I had bothered to look in the papers. Moreover, the road up to the Little Cell of Patrick was rocky and steep.
Mamene (or Maumean), the Pass of the Birds—so called because of the clouds that fly through it—is a windy passage through the Maamturk Mountains. It’s about three miles west of Maam Cross on T71 and connects the County Galway, where the paths begin, with the County Mayo, which starts halfway up the mountain. As you climb the path up to the shrine, you have Galway Bay behind you. At the top in the distance you can see Lough Corrib. In the pictures it’s a wild and fierce place. At night it is even more scary.
Cautiously I kept the beam of my flashlight on the path immediately ahead of me. My guide leaped up the trail like a mountain goat.
“Just think, Dermot Michael,” she enthused. “Pilgrims were walking up this path to pray to God in the time of Abraham.”
“On dark nights?”
“If it was the time of the year for a pilgrimage, they’d climb to the shrine regardless of the moon. On their bare feet. Can’t you see the thousands of torches and hear them chanting their heathen hymns!”
“Not really.”
She slapped my arm. “ ’Tis because you don’t want to. Should I insist that you take off your shoes like a good pilgrim?”
“I will if you will.”
“I don’t want
to embarrass you.”
We had attended Mass, in Irish, at the same parish church where Ma and Pa had been married, as Ma’s parents before her. Then we drove up to Costelloe for lunch at the hotel there. It did not look very promising, but the food was wonderful.
“Not as good as your lunch, Meg,” I assured Nuala’s mother.
“Did your young man kiss the stone while you were driving through Cork?”
“Faith, Ma, he doesn’t need it. He was born that way.”
I wasn’t her young man and never would be, but her parents did not seem opposed to the prospect, not at all, at all.
That night it was a long, hard climb up the mountain. I was glad I was wearing shoes.
“Is this it?” I asked as we picked our way with flashlights to a level place.
“Sure, don’t you sound like a young one? Och, we’re not even halfway up to the shrine, are we?”
“I don’t think I was cut out to be a pilgrim, Nuala Anne.”
“ ’Tis night after all.”
“Is it now?”
She laughed and on we went.
Finally, it seemed years later, we arrived at another level spot.
“Almost there,” she said. “Dermot, would you ever look back at the bay?”
The view was spectacular. Every star in the sky seemed to be caught in the net of Galway Bay.
“No wonder they thought this was a sacred place.”
“Be real careful now. Aren’t there lots of loose rocks?”
“What if I sprain my ankle?”
“It won’t be as bad as breaking your leg, will it?”
We stumbled to the very summit of the mountain. On the top, looking as if he owned the whole world, was himself, St. Patrick, carved out of solid granite by a modern sculptor who believed that a saint should be strong and broad and imposing—like a good shepherd guarding his sheep.
There was a path cut out of the rocks for Stations of the Cross, each of the fourteen stations marked by a Celtic cross.
“Nice statue.”
“Isn’t it now? Me cousin Mihail, and himself a Jesuit, is the man responsible for restoring the shrine. . . . There’s the ledge where St. Patrick was supposed to have slept. We’ll have to measure out thirty paces and poke around.”
“I don’t think I’d want to sleep on that bed.”
“And yourself alone in it just like you were a monk.” An unnecessary comment, I thought.
Just beyond the pass was a little lake that looked very cold and forboding. Nuala pointed out the pagan “station,” a holy well that was supposed to have great power.
“A well at this altitude?”
“Sure, ’tis only a cistern. . . . Now we must walk around it seven times, throwing seven pebbles in during each circle. Pick up some pebbles, Dermot Michael.”
“Pagan superstition.”
“It doesn’t have to be, not if you say seven Hail Marys for each turn.”
“In the dark?”
“In the dark . . . so the Mother of Jesus will take care of us.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in her.”
“Up here I do.”
“We spent more than an hour “poking around” at various thirty-pace distances from the Little Cell.
I was tired enough by then to settle for Patrick’s bed.
“Nuala, it isn’t here,” I said wearily.
“Sure, herself wouldn’t be making it up, would she?”
“Maybe it was filled in long ago.”
“Why would they do that? No one ever came up here until the shrine was restored and when that happened, wouldn’t they be afraid that they’d be seen if they tried to carry the gold away? I know it’s here, Dermot, I absolutely know it.”
“Well, we won’t find it at night.” I leaned against the rocks. “Even if we did, what difference would it make . . . hey!”
The rock on which my hand was resting slipped away and fell to the ground.
“Here it is, Nuala! They piled up stones to hide the entrance!”
Hurriedly we pulled the stones away and directed the beams of our flashlights into the tiny crevice.
“It’s there! Dermot, look at it glittering!”
“Gold!”
“Irish gold, Dermot, not futures contracts!”
We giggled hysterically and hugged one another.
“Five crates,” I said, “and part of a sixth. Half the gold is still here! Ten million pounds sterling!”
“Sure, ’tis crowded for making love, isn’t it?”
“Not if you’re almost married.”
That was all we said on that subject.
We replaced the stones.
“What next, Dermot?”
“I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it.”
We hiked down the side of the mountain. I drove her back to Carraroe and then, utterly exhausted, I returned to Salt Hill.
I fell asleep, knowing that I would have to make some important decisions the next day—after giving long thought to the problems.
My last thought as I slipped into sleep was “We found the gold, Ma! We found it! Just as you said we would!”
–– 61 ––
WHEN I woke up Monday morning, I knew the name of the man in the touring car. Of course. Who else could it have been? And about whom else would everyone be so worried? I had been an eejit not to have seen his face before.
Damn. I pounded the bed. Why has it taken me so long? Well, I’d beaten Nuala to it.
Outside rain was falling again and a wind was roaring in off the beach—nothing between it and North America, as the locals say.
I lay back and thought about it carefully. I couldn’t prove my conclusion, not yet. Maybe I wouldn’t have to. Somewhere later on the diaries, perhaps after the second war, Ma would have given a name to the face.
Even if she didn’t, I had enough proof to seek Bishop Hayes’s help. I reached for the phone to call him and then thought better of it. There was no point in trusting the phone. I’d get in my Renault and drive over to his house in Galway City.
I glanced at my watch. Time for a quick breakfast before I left. It was all over now. We’d take the train back to Dublin this afternoon. I’d pack tomorrow, make the final arrangements with Nuala for finishing the translation, and then leave on the Wednesday plane for Chicago.
I’d be home in time for the Notre Dame-Southern Cal and Bear-Packer games.
I showered, went down to the dining room, devoured all the brown bread in sight, and returned to my room to pack my things so that after my meeting with the bishop I could collect Nuala and board the early-afternoon train.
Someone knocked at the door. I opened it.
Chief Superintendent Conlon forced his way in and stuffed a nine-millimeter Beretta in my stomach. Two other men rushed in behind him. One of them snapped cuffs on my hands.
“Come along, me fine lad. We have a score or two to settle. I don’t like being humiliated in my own office, if you take my meaning.”
One of the others tapped me lightly on the head and I lost consciousness.
I woke up in an abandoned farmhouse.
“He’s awake now.” Conlon grinned. “Time to get to work.”
He produced a massive billy club and beat me till I lost consciousness.
Someone threw a bucket of cold water on my face. Conlon, his face red with effort, his eyes wide with pleasure, sweat pouring down his face, beat me again and again. He enjoyed his revenge.
Finally they dragged me out of the house and threw me in the backseat of a car.
“We’re going to church.” Conlon giggled. “Sure, won’t your girlfriend be waiting there for you?”
–– 62 ––
“SO, MY dear, as I promised, we’ve brought your lover for you. He seems a bit the worse for wear, doesn’t he? Take the handcuffs off him, Chief Superintendent, we’re going to have a pleasant little chat.”
Brendan Keane’s eyes shone with the frantic glow of the madman.
> “He might still be dangerous,” Conlon warned.
“Do as I say!” Keane shouted hysterically. “I am the minister. I give the orders! Moreover, he’s not likely to do anything with our automatic weapon pointed at his young woman’s pretty tits, is he?”
Grudgingly and with a little twist at my aching arms, he removed the cuffs.
Mistake, I thought.
We were inside what had once been a monastery chapel, a room perhaps forty-five feet long and twenty feet wide with low arches, and a roof that had half fallen in, empty windows, and the remnants of a stone altar at the front in a small sanctuary. So many such ruins littered the fields of Ireland that you hardly noticed them as you drove by.
God damn Oliver Cromwell.
The chapel provided some shelter against the rain, though it still swept down the nave from the broken rose window in back. It did not, however, keep out either the cold or the biting wind. The cold made the pain in the various parts of my anatomy feel worse.
Conlon was an expert at torture. He had hurt me badly enough, but I could still walk, still think, still talk, still suffer more when he wanted me to, and still anticipate that suffering.
I recalled again what the Japanese master who had taught me martial arts said about controlling pain and concentrated on his exercises.
I was more awake than Conlon realized and more capable of fighting back if I had a chance.
“Dermot, I’d like you to meet my colleagues, Professor Nolan and Dr. Hughes. I believe you spoke with Professor Nolan about certain issues of Irish history before I had my first conversation with you. They are rather interested in the outcome of your search for the origins of our little group. First of all, we have a small ritual to perform.”
There was another man in the room, a blond giant in a black jacket. He held an AK-47, by the looks of it, and it was pointed right at Nuala.
“You two, outside,” Conlon snapped at his men. “Take care of any of his friends that might show up.”
Keane piled Ma’s diaries in front of the altar. “I rather think,” Keane mused, “that this would be a good place to offer our little sacrifice. Safe from the wind and the rain, don’t you know? Sorry we had to choose such a drafty spot, Dermot, but we were forced to act quickly, if you take me meaning.”
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