by John McEvoy
As Mickey waited for her injuries to heal, Doyle remembered her telling him, “Thoroughbreds use rein tension to keep their balance. That leads to a constant downward pull on a jockey’s hands and arms. We have to have extremely good hand, forearm, and core strength.”
Mickey laughed, “People don’t realize that riders even have to have very strong neck muscles. Try putting on a helmet that weighs a pound and a half or so when you’re not real fit, then try keeping your head up for a couple of minutes so that you can see where you’re going. Doesn’t sound hard, Jack. But it is. Especially when you’re on top of a horse going forty miles an hour.”
Jack had come to learn plenty about racing. But not until booking mounts for Mickey had he come to fully appreciate what it took to be a professional athlete in a sport so dangerous that an ambulance followed the contestants around during every race “just in case.”
Jack felt a surge of pride as little Mickey moved purposefully to the podium. She grasped the microphone but had to lower it slightly before beginning a brief and well received acceptance speech in which she thanked the Sports Association, her parents, “my sister Nora, who is here tonight. And Jack Doyle, my American agent who is sitting with Nora and was gracious enough to fly over and attend tonight. This award is more than I could ever have dreamed of winning. I thank you all so much.” After a wave of cheers and clapping, Mickey said, “And now, I’ll answer a few questions. If you have any,” she grinned.
A large, well-fed man at a front table raised his hand. “Do you get ‘up’ for the bigger races?”
“No, not at all. I get ‘up’ for all of them. I remember reading something that the great American jockey Bill Hartack said many years ago. He said he rode ‘every race like it was the Kentucky Derby.’ I can identify with that, all right. To my mind, the man who owns the cheap horse deserves the same treatment as the man with a good horse. I would consider it dishonest to try harder on one man’s horse than on another’s.” She paused before saying, “I believe my famous brother Kieran feels exactly the same way. You could call it The Sheehan Way.”
That answer drew enthusiastic applause. Mickey grinned before concluding, “I’ve always believed that, whether it’s a small race or a big race, there’s no honor in riding and losing. There’s only honor in winning.”
Nora and Doyle looked on proudly as they joined in the audience’s rousing standing ovation for the now blushing little jockey. Ms. Trainor announced that the program was over and thanked everyone for coming. Mickey remained near the podium, signing autographs for several of the admiring attendees.
“The kid did great,” Jack said.
Nora nodded. “That she did, indeed.”
Walking with Nora toward the exit, Doyle felt a tug on his sleeve. He looked down at the friendly face of Niall Hanratty’s wife, Sheila. “Hello,” he said. “Didn’t know you were here, Sheila. Where’s the Prince of Irish Bookmakers?”
Sheila frowned. “He’s over in London on business. Jack, have you got a wee minute? I need to speak to you about something.”
Doyle introduced Sheila to Nora, told Nora he’d meet her at the front door “in a couple of minutes.” Sheila led him to a now vacant nearby table. They waited for a busboy to clear it before pulling out chairs.
“It’s always a pleasure to see you, Sheila. Did you come up by yourself from Kinsale?”
She gestured toward a small group of women near the door, one of whom waved as the others looked expectantly at her. “No, I came up with the friends you see over there. I don’t want to delay them, so I’ll get right to the point, Jack. I am very worried about Niall. There have been some things happening, some recent incidents that scare the bejesus out of me. And he pays them no mind.”
Doyle frowned. “What kind of incidents? What do you mean?”
She leaned forward to say quietly, “I think someone, or some people, intend to do him harm.” She took a deep breath. “First, there was the morning in Kinsale when he was nearly run over by a hurtling van that didn’t stop. He just barely dodged out of the way. He never even told me about that. His man Barry Hoy mentioned it to me a few days later.
“About two weeks after that, when Niall was driving home from work one night, somebody roared up from behind and banged into him on the coast road just miles from our house. He fought to keep his car off the side leading to the edge of the cliff. Managed to pull up short just in time. Again, it was a van, and it sped away. No, he did not get the license number. This, he at least did tell me about when he finally got home. I’d never seen him shaken like that. That’s why I pressed him about what had happened before this second incident. I had to administer a large cognac and some heartfelt pleading before he would talk about it. But the next morning, it was as if he’d erased these incidents from his mind and expected me to do the same. I can’t do that, Jack. My dear husband can be a very stubborn, self-confident person. You might call him bullheaded. And, as a matter of fact, I have.”
Doyle smiled. “I have observed certain bullheaded traits in your husband. But did Niall report these things to the police? Your Garda?”
“Only after I kept after him and after him for a whole day and night to do so! But nothing came of that. Without anyone witnessing these events, there was really nothing for the Garda to go on. And now, Niall has gone back to just playing down the whole situation. He refuses to discuss it with me. Says there’s nothing to be worried about. You know how obstinate he can be! He’s always been on about the virtues of self reliance. And I admire that attitude, up to a point. But this has me worried sick.”
One of the women near the door called out, “Sheila,” and pointed to her watch. Sheila nodded. Getting to her feet, she said, “Niall greatly respects you, Jack, after all your dealings with him over that Chicago racetrack. So, here comes me asking you a big favor. Could you come down and talk to Niall? Find out what he thinks might really be going on? God knows he won’t tell me. He’s made a career out of protecting me from any worrisome news. But I can’t sleep until I’m assured he’s safe. The business he’s in, as you well know, is not entirely populated by role model citizens.” She picked up her purse and dinner program. “He’ll be back from England and in the Kinsale office tomorrow.”
Doyle thought of the much-needed assistance he’d received from the bookmaker and his bodyguard, Hoy, two years before in that backstretch barn at Monee Park, his life on the line.
“My flight home is Tuesday morning, Sheila. Please tell your husband I’ll see him in his Kinsale office tomorrow. Tell him I’ll buy him lunch.”
Sheila gripped his hand and kissed him on the cheek. “God bless you, Jack, and thank you.” She stood up and walked away.
Nora took Doyle’s arm as they left Mansion House. “What was that all about with Sheila Hanratty?”
“The Inquiring Reporter wants to know, eh? I’ll tell you on the drive to your house.”
Chapter Eleven
Doyle awakened to the inviting odor of frying bacon. For a brief, pleasant moment, he thought he was back in his childhood home on an early Saturday morning, awaiting his mother’s call to breakfast. He rolled over in the rumpled queen-size bed to see that Nora was not there.
He found her in her kitchen, scrambling eggs. “Turn on the toaster now, will you Jack?” She looked over her shoulder to smile at him. She was already dressed in sweater and jeans. “I thought after your estimable efforts of last night, you’d need some caloric fortification.”
Doyle, wearing only his boxer shorts, nuzzled her neck as he stood behind her, laughed. “Caloric fortification? The striving journalist in you comes out early this morning.”
Their romp in the bed the night before had left them pleasured and ready for sleep. He had never been with a woman he found so sexually compatible. Their lovemaking the summer Nora had spent in the U.S. with Mickey had been great but never as enjoyable as last night, and Doyle told her so
. “Ah, but now I’m operating on my home turf,” Nora said. She turned to kiss him. “Tend to your eggs and rashers, now.”
He’d always had trouble taking orders, especially from women. Sister Mary Margaret, his eighth grade teacher at St. James Parochial School, was one exception, being young, bright, and blessed with a sense of humor. Nora was another, but her commands were usually issued while naked in bed with him.
Doyle mopped the egg remnants on his plate with his final piece of brown bread. She looked at him admiringly. “I’ve never known a person to eat so rapidly and with such relish.”
“It’s what keeps me energetic. Like, right now, I am completely revived and restored.” With a leering nod toward the nearby bedroom, he said, “I’ve got some time now before I have to leave.”
Nora said, “So you may. But you’ll not be enticing me to share it with you in there. Not this morning, at least.” She began to gather and wash the dishes. Doyle went to get dressed.
“Is there anything I should know about your car?” he said when he emerged from the bedroom. Before finally going to sleep the night before, they had planned this day. Nora said she would be working from home, so Jack could borrow her five-year-old Peugeot to drive down to Kinsale. “It gets a bit temperamental sometimes,” Nora said, “especially when you do your shifting. Like me, it’s not always an eager starter in the morning. Just be patient. And the steering sort of pulls to the right, I haven’t had a chance to get that corrected. It uses regular petrol. Don’t be afraid to top it up before you return tonight.” They kissed at her doorway before he walked down the block to the red two-door car. It was a 2007 model, the original gloss lost in the sixty or so rainy Irish months preceding this one, but still looking good.
The interior of this vehicle, like that of many busy journalists the world over, was a slum. Newspapers and folders were scattered over all the seats but the driver’s. An assortment of used coffee containers and fast food wrappings littered the floors front and back. “How could a woman who’s such a careful housekeeper live with this mess?” he muttered.
“GPS?” Nora had laughed the night before. “Not on this working girl’s salary. You’ll have to depend on that now-archaic traveler’s aid, the map.”
Doyle reviewed the map he’d placed on the steering wheel before he turned on the ignition. The route looked fairly straightforward. “If I can remember to stay on the left side of the road, I’ll be all right,” he said to himself.
This summer morning was a bright one and traffic moved steadily on M7-M8 toward Cork. Doyle broke up the three-hour journey by stopping for petrol before the turnoff onto N27 for Kinsale and his meeting with Hanratty. As he filled the Peugeot’s tank, he watched with amusement as a young, red-haired woman, dressed in a midriff-revealing tee-shirt and tight shorts, stretched to clean the top of the back window of her dusty blue Golf. Like many of her sex and age, she was evidently either a regular patron of tanning bed salons or a user of the popular spray-on version of skin coloring. Probably the latter, Doyle thought, noticing white patches she’d obviously missed on the backs of her knees. She’d be noticeable in this country’s predominantly pale-skinned populace.
Before returning to the highway, Doyle rummaged in Nora’s music CDs in the left door pocket amidst used tissues and a variety of receipts. He smiled as he found one of his favorite Van Morrison song collections, Irish Heartbeat. He skipped ahead to track four, “The Star of the County Down.”
Listening appreciatively, Doyle thought of one of his college roommates, a budding musicologist named Billy Munger, who frequently declared at late night drinking sessions that “George Ivan Morrison is by far, by far, the best bad-voiced singer ever.”
He turned the CD off when the song ended. “Mr. Morrison,” he said to himself, “your voice is a long way removed from golden, but you sure as hell have got some Hall of Fame chops.”
Doyle switched to the radio and listened to a woman author described by the interviewer as “a great authority on the iconic Irish writer Brendan Behan.” The next few minutes were taken up by the guest’s description of the late novelist/playwright’s father, “…a wily but extremely lazy man. His wife was always after him to dig up their backyard so she could have a garden there. He never would. But after she had long hounded him, one day he dialed the local Garda station to report that he’d received a ‘disturbing phone message from an anonymous caller.’ The message warned that some ‘IRA members had secretly planted explosives for use in bomb-making’ on that part of the Behan property. The Garda sprang into action. They dug up the whole yard but of course did not find anything. That night, when Mrs. Behan returned home, her husband told her the garden was now ready for planting.”
***
Approaching Kinsale on N27, Doyle looked forward to again seeing Niall Hanratty, even though this meeting was sparked by Sheila Hanratty’s concerns for her husband’s safety. Doyle and the Irish bookmaker had become friends during an afternoon a few years before when they shared a box at the Curragh races. That friendship had solidified one night several weeks after that when Hanratty helped thwart a man intent on murder in a horse stall at Monee Park Racetrack south of Chicago.
During their initial meeting, the bookmaker had taken some pains to explain his first name. “Not a common name here, Jack. There was an Irish king named Niall centuries ago. He was called ‘Niall of the Nine Hostages’ because he was in the business of ransoming people. A most industrious sort of fella back around 400 A.D. His best known captive was none other than St. Patrick. King Niall was said to have let him go free for nothing. And Patrick, of course, went on to become the patron saint of Ireland.”
Doyle smiled. “Wasn’t St. Patrick supposed to have driven all the snakes out of Ireland?”
“Have you ever seen one here, Jack?”
Not wanting to rile his friend, Doyle answered, “Not in person, no.”
“And I doubt that you will,” Hanratty laughed.
Doyle said, “I assume the bookmaking business has been enough to keep you out of your predecessor’s ransoming trade?”
“Indeed it has. Evidently, King Niall and I have only one thing in common. Now, this is Sheila’s view, understand.”
“What’s that?”
“The woman has long considered me to be a control freak, which I admit is somewhat the case. But not to the extent of old King Niall. Legend has it that, as he lay on his deathbed, he insisted his family and friends rehearse their planned spoken memorials to him. He was said to have done quite a bit of editing of these statements before he passed on.”
Chapter Twelve
Kinsale hadn’t changed since Doyle’s only previous visit more than two years earlier. Nor had it changed in the many years before that. This popular resort town, some twenty miles south of Cork City on the Celtic Sea, would see its small population of less than three thousand swell throughout the summer with tourists on holiday. Its harbor, from which thousands of Irish citizens had fled the Great Famine of the nineteenth century, featured a yacht marina that today was replete with expensive craft. Very visible in the harbor was the statue commemorating the dozens of survivors and hundreds of corpses brought to Kinsale in the spring of 1915, victims of the Lusitania’s sinking.
He drove slowly down heavily trafficked Market Street, Kinsale’s major thoroughfare, before spotting an open space. “Rarity of rarities,” he muttered as he quickly backed into it, barely beating a big, blue SUV whose driver reacted with a horn blast and fist shaken out of his window. Doyle waved cheerily to the man and locked Nora’s car. He was only a block from the Shamrock Off-Course Wagering Shop.
***
Minutes earlier, seated at his desk in the second-floor office of his shop, Niall Hanratty had looked at the wall clock. He’d expected Doyle a half-hour before and was growing impatient. He said loudly, “Tony, bring in the prelim reports will you? I’ve got time to look at them.”
Niall nodded appreciatively as he quickly perused the columns of computer printout figures. “This should put a bit of a smile even on your serious visage,” he said to Rourke. “The favorite players have gone huge, and got stuffed so far. And the longshot punters, with rare exceptions, failed just as badly.”
He got to his feet, stretched his tall, physically fit frame, and reached for his suit jacket. “Remember Jack Doyle? The wild American boyo? He’s due here soon to have lunch. Would you join us? These figures you’ve compiled, Tony,” he said, tapping the stack of printouts, “warrant a celebratory pint, yeah.”
Hanratty’s jovial mood, as usually the case in the course of their long association, was not contagious. The soft-spoken Rourke shrugged and shook his head no. “You go on, then, Boss. I’ll have the junior lads finish up for me and get a good early start for home.”
“Safe home, then, Tony,” smiled Hanratty. Rourke lived in his native town of Cork City, a place from which he’d never moved. “Tony, on your way out tell Barry he can have the rest of the day, too.” Hoy, a one-time heavyweight boxing champion of Ireland, worked as Hanratty’s driver, bodyguard, retriever of debts overdue, and, as Hanratty put it, “representative-in-waiting to some of our society’s potentially disturbing elements.” Like Rourke, he had been with Shamrock from Hanratty’s launch of the company fifteen years earlier, an enterprise that began in one modest Kinsale storefront and now extended to ten counties in the Republic and parts of the North. Hanratty often remarked to his wife, Sheila, “I’ve had two main men with me all the way. Tony looks like a barely nourished librarian. Hoy reminds me of Victor McLaughlin in that old John Wayne movie about Ireland. I’ve been lucky to have ’em.”
