“Someone like Shovie, maybe?”
“Shovie adored him, but she is smart enough to see that there’s probably no future there. She’s looking for a husband eventually and she should. I’m different. I adore him and he’s my brother and always will be, know what I mean?”
“You think he’ll come back from Iraq?”
“Whenever he’s ready to.”
She dug into her Italian salad and I started working on my fettuccine Bolognese. Both of us ordered iced tea to drink.
“Did he talk to you about it before he left?”
“He came down to the Dome to watch a football game. He told me when we were walking back to his car that he had a big deal coming up and he’d be out of touch for a while and I shouldn’t worry about him. I asked where he was going and he grinned and said that it was a big secret. He always loved his big secrets.”
“Did you tell him that your parents would worry about him?”
“Of course I did! He really loves them too, always making excuses for them. He said he’d not be gone for long and that they would worry about him wherever he was and whatever he was doing.”
“Wasn’t that a kind of cavalier attitude?”
The pasta was truly excellent. I tried to slow down my consumption of it because Jenny was very deliberate in eating her salad.
“I have to say, Dermot, that he could either act that way or give up his life because they would take it away from him. Mom’s worries about Uncle Joe were a form of emotional blackmail.”
“You asked him how long he would be gone?”
“He grinned like a little leprechaun, and said, ‘Peace Corps more or less.’”
“Two years, give or take?”
“Except that was before the war started,” she frowned. “That might have changed his time frame.”
“Did you notice any unusual behavior before he left?”
“No, not at all, not by Des’s standards of unusual.”
She frowned thoughtfully.
“Well he seemed to trade in the Lebanese for the Assyrians.”
“Huh!”
“Des used to spend time with the Arab merchants around town, talking to them in their own language, which pleased them greatly. Then he began to spend more time with those Assyrians, Iraqi Christians I guess. You know, the kind of handsome people who run all the camera stores around the city.”
“Also called Chaldees.”
“Except that they don’t like that name as much as Assyrian because they claim that they’re descended from the ancient Babylonians and some of them speak the same language Jesus spoke, know what I mean?”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“Des said that most of them speak Arabic too, but the ones from northern Iraq around Mosul also speak Aramaic as do some of the Kurds up there.”
This was the first solid hint we had of where in Iraq he might have gone.
I changed the subject. “Did you exchange e-mail often?”
“A couple of times a week usually. He sort of felt that it was his responsibility to help me to resist Dad and Mom—they’d already picked out a ‘nice young man’ for me. The guy was a prime nerd. I didn’t mind Des giving me advice. It was good advice usually but I made my own decisions.”
“Did he send e-mail from Africa when he was there?”
“They didn’t have the facilities. Now they do in Iraq but maybe he can’t use them … He’d be in touch with me if he could.”
“You have a lot of faith in him, Jenny.”
“He’s never done anything which would cause me to lose faith in him, Dermot. He’ll come home, sooner rather than later.”
“And then?”
“Mom will cry and Dad will be very stern and Conor will talk about the joy of marital happiness and none of that will make any difference. He’s immune to them.”
“And then?”
“He’ll probably go back to UIC and get his doctorate.”
“And then?”
“I don’t know, Dermot. I don’t have a clue. It will certainly be something that will be generous and good.”
So we turned to the important question of the Notre Dame team next year and she expressed surprise and approval that I had quit the team and talked about her plans to do Teach America when she graduated.
“Will your parents like that?”
“They won’t but at least I will be with Americans and they can check up on me every night.”
“Mexican immigrants more likely.”
She grinned impishly.
“I won’t tell them that.”
Back at my house, I found Nuala playing with the kids, young Patjo clinging to the back of the delighted Maeve, who barked approvingly at her charges’ efforts.
“Whose idea was that?” I demanded.
“Mommy’s,” Socra Marie said all too quickly.
“really?”
“Really, Da!”
Maeve rose up to stroll across the room. Patjo grew uneasy and began to wail. Nuala swept him off his mount. Maeve, upset that the game was over, stood up on her hind legs and nuzzled me wife, just to make sure she wasn’t in trouble.
“It’s all right, Mae-Mae,” she assured the white bound, hugging her. “The little fella isn’t quite ready yet. Isn’t that true, Socra Marie?”
“Yes, Ma.”
“Nelliecoyne, I have to put this little sleepyhead down and then Daddy and I must have a little chat Can I leave you in charge?”
“Certainly, Ma!”
“I’ll turn on the monitor, so you can yell if you need help.”
“Yes, Ma.”
“That one,” Nuala Anne protested to me, “is entirely too responsible for her age.”
“She’ll probably rebel when she’s a teen and run away from home.”
“Give over, Dermot Michael, she won’t give up the time to boss me around.”
I rehearsed my interview with Jenny.
“A bright young woman, isn’t she now?”
“And herself a Domer.”
“Who can’t figure out why you ever left there?”
“I didn’t leave. They threw me out.”
“That was before I was around to settle you down,” she said with a wicked laugh.
That was the conventional wisdom in my family and not without an element of truth. Nuala rejected it flatly.
“You didn’t need any settling down at all, Dermot Michael Coyne, at all, at all,” she would say. “Wasn’t it yourself that was settling me down?”
“A work in progress,” I said.
“Beast,” she said, pounding my arm gently or at least more gently than she used to. “Where is this Mosul place? Who are the Kurds? How would one get hisself there?”
I spun the huge globe I keep in the office.
“Here is Iraq, between Iran and Syria and Kuwait. Up there in the north is the place where a few of the remnants of the once enormous Church of the East still survive. Here is Mosul where the Neo-Aramaic-speaking Christians live. It contains the largest oil field in the country. The Assyrians share the land with Kurds and Arabs and are a tiny minority. Many of them have left and migrated to America, especially to Chicago and Detroit and Los Angeles. They are intelligent, hardworking, and dedicated people. The Muslims in Iraq don’t like them because they are so successful and because they are infidels. Saddam protected them because he was running a secular state. His foreign minister was one of them. Now that the religious Muslims tend to be in charge, life over there is very dangerous for them. They do very well here, another boon to America from immigration. They are usually merchants who run small shops, like many of the early Jewish and Chinese immigrants. They are a handsome folk, characteristically with very dark skins. To the bigoted eyes of Americans they often seem sinister because they look like the bad guys in the old movies. In fact, they are very nice and friendly folk, especially if you ask them whether they’re Assyrians. They will insist, sometimes in anger, that they are not Arabs. They are rather, they will say
, descendents of the ancient Babylonians. They claim that the real name of Baghdad is Babylon. Their women tend to be gorgeous …”
“Och, Dermot, aren’t you the brilliant one, and yourself knowing practically everything? I don’t think I ever saw one of them folk.”
“When you bought that digital Nikon for me at the camera shop over on Halsted Street, you met some of them. They own a chain of camera and electronic stores. Instant jobs for immigrants
“Them folk are your Assyrians, are they now? You have the right of it, Dermot love, they are handsome and very well educated. The young woman who waited on me was terribly beautiful and darker than most of your African-Americans. She made me feel like I was an ignorant peasant and meself with a degree from a school for peasants like Trinity College.”
“I think the Jesuits have or maybe had a college in Baghdad.”
“Your Jesuits, is it now?”
“That suggests something, doesn’t it? … I suppose there might be a link here somewhere?”
“’Tis the first clue we’ve got, thanks be to God and Mary and Brigid!”
In Nuala’s coterie of saints, this is the first string.
“Now who are your Kurds?”
“A fiercely independent Islamic people who got squeezed out of having a country of their own after World War L They’re spread out all over the Middle East—Turkey, Iraq, Iran, maybe some of them in Russia. They’re always revolting against someone. The revolutions are usually bloody disasters, but they keep trying. Their wars with the Turks are especially fierce, there are ten million of them in Turkey, maybe a fifth of the country. The Turks hate them and they hate the Turks, though they’re probably a Turkish people. During the first Gulf War, they set up an enclave up here north of Mosul and the CIA moved in to support them. With the help of the United States, they drove Saddam’s army back and have had a free Kurdistan up there, an American beachhead, so to speak.”
“Why would America ever need a beachhead in that part of the world?”
“The idea was that if we were to fight Iraq again, we’d move a division or two through Turkey and attack from the north as well as the south. The Turks agreed and we maintained an airfield up in Izmir here on the Turkish coast. Naturally they cooperated at a price and naturally we paid it.”
“Did we do that?”
“We did not. The Turks wouldn’t stay bought.”
“These Kurds speak Arabic?”
“No way. They have their own language, a version of Iranian Farsi.”
“So if your man is wandering around up there, he would have to know three languages?”
“He could get by with Arabic of which everyone in Iraq knows some. Being the kind of language freak he is, he’d probably be working on Farsi and Assyrian by now.”
“From what we know, Dermot”—she slowly spun the globe as she thought—“your man would love a situation like this place … Do the Kurds hate the Christians?”
“As a matter of principle, they hate everyone. However, they may have allied themselves with the Christians to drive the Shiite Iraq out of Mosul, whose oil fields they have commandeered. They also currently like Americans because we helped them set up their little Kurdistan up here. They expect to be betrayed by everyone. Once we get out of Iraq we’ll indeed betray them. The Turks as you might imagine don’t like the enclave because it will encourage the Turkish Kurds to revolt again … On the other hand if the Turks want to get into the EU, they’ll have to provide the Kurds with some kind of autonomy.”
“Will that be enough?”
“I doubt it.”
She sighed her most agonized Connemara sigh.
“Och, Dermot, the world is in a terrible mess, isn’t it?”
“’Tis, woman, a terrible mess altogether. Makes Ireland look simple.”
“I had a nice conversation with your Assyrian woman after she noticed me St. Brigid Cross.”
My good wife does not leave our house on Sheffield Avenue without some token of identification with that great saint of poetry and spring and new life and, as Nuala maintains, song.
“She tell you anything useful?”
“Well we bonded because we’re both immigrants, strangers in a foreign land. Like meself, she loves this country. They have their own businesses, their own homes, their own churches, and they don’t have to worry about the police or fanatics or Saddam’s planes with poison gas. She hopes that all her people can get out of Iraq and come to Chicago.”
“Doesn’t everyone!”
“They even have two dioceses of their own, one in Detroit and one in Los Angeles and they expect to have one here soon … Dermot, is there any way we can tell whether your man is up there?”
“Well, we can find out which way he flew. I had always assumed that he flew to Kuwait—the Kuwaiti airline has worldwide services—and then hitched a ride with GIs or Marines into the country. But he might have flown Turkish Air into Ankara and hitched a ride into northern Iraq, that might have been more dangerous …”
“Can we find out which way he chose?”
“I’ll call Mike Casey.”
“Would the Turks let him in?”
“As an American citizen he wouldn’t have much trouble getting in. As a scholar working in Middle Eastern languages, they might be glad to have him. Getting from Ankara to Mosul might be more difficult unless the CIA was helping him, but there would have to be a good reason for doing it, at least good from the CIA’s point of view.”
She thought a minute.
“Nelliecoyne, why is it so quiet down there?”
“Didn’t I put Socra Marie down and aren’t the doggies taking naps with them? And don’t the Mick and I like to do our work quietly?”
“Thank you very much, Nellie. Aren’t you the wonderful one?”
“Sure, Ma, don’t I like hearing you say that, even if it’s true?”
Nuala switched off the button.
“Isn’t that one a handful?”
“Matriarch in training.”
“In five years, Dermot, she’ll be a teen. Do you think she’ll be after turning into a rebel?”
“Since she’s her mother’s daughter, won’t she become a manipulator?”
“’Tis true. It will be hard, Dermot. I’m scared thinking about it.”
“Won’t it be glorious fun altogether, woman of the house?”
“You have the right of it, Dermot Michael. That’s the only way to think! … Now call that nice Mr. Casey and find out how your man got into Iraq.”
On Saturday afternoon, Mike would be at the Reilly Gallery (the proprietor was his wife, Annie Reilly), not at the office of Reliable Security.
“It will take a couple of days, but we’ll do it, Dermot. Is herself tuning in to the spirits?”
“That comes only when all other matters fail … Would you ever find out how he might have got across the border into Iraq?”
“We’ll try. It will have to be informal and I might have to pay a Turkish official to find out. That’s the way of it over there.”
“We’d appreciate any information.”
To Nuala, I said, “A couple of days.”
“You’re not going over there, Dermot Michael Coyne, do you understand that?”
“I wouldn’t go to northern Iraq, Nuala Anne McGrail, even if you ordered me to do so!”
“And ourselves with a preteen in the house!”
I took advantage of the preteen problem to shift a little bit of the investigation onto her shapely shoulders.
“Tell you what, wife of my youth, while I’m waiting here for Mike’s call on Monday, why don’t you go over to the camera store and talk to your good friend. Show her the picture of your man and see if he ever came in to talk about the Assyrian church in northern Iraq.”
“You know, Dermot love, she was wearing a diamond even bigger than mine.”
“On an erotic exotic it might be appropriate. On an Irishwoman from Carraroe, wouldn’t it be vulgar altogether?”
“W
asn’t I saying the very same thing to meself?”
14
“Ja, ja, Herr Ambassador, I said it could not be you, when the attendant said you were down in the gun room.”
“Just making sure I’m not rusty.”
Three targets popped up simultaneously. I nailed them with a .25mm bullet between the eyes in 1.5 seconds.
“A little slow.”
“The Wehrmacht could use you as an assassin. So could the Secret Germany.”
A curt phone message suggested that we meet for lunch at this target practice club just below the Potsdamer Platz.
“If I had brought my own .25, I might have been quicker.”
“You shoot targets for fun.”
“I like to imagine that I’m a cowboy in Dodge City—or Wyatt Earp in Tombstone, even if you couldn’t stop a varmint with a .25 unless he was pretty close to you … Let’s eat.”
“Did you not tell me in Heidelberg that you do not hunt animals?”
“Gave that up, much to my Old Fella’s surprise and to the Galway woman’s delight. So I took up small arms, just to prove I had a good aim. If were faced with a human, I’m sure I’d freeze.”
I had taken up handguns when the IRA were burning homes of English lords during the troubles. I was young enough to think my revolver would deter a group of drunken gunmen.
Only drunks would have attacked us. We were known as Catholics who provided work for Catholics in our linen mills. As I grew older, I began to wonder whether I could shoot anyone, even a gunman. I did win a marksmanship prize at Oxford, but now it had become a sport rather than a tool of self-defense.
“Would you,” he whispered, “consider killing a Fuhrer for us?”
“Not my war,” I said. “I would have made a very bad soldier.”
We sat on a wooden bench at a wooden table on which were placed almost immediately two large steins of beer, a loaf of dark brown bread, and a large platter of sausages.
“Sausages?” I said.
“Ja, but very good sausages.”
They were.
“You are a strange man, Herr Ambassador.”
“Call me Herr Viscount, please.”
He laughed, that wonderful infectious, self-deprecating laugh of his, which enabled him to say almost anything and not make another angry.
Irish Linen Page 17
