—8—

I SUPPOSE it was my fault that they thought they could kidnap Nuala.

Everyone thinks I’m a pushover. I’m a big blond lug with a pleasant disposition and a sweet smile. Not too bright, they say, and not very ambitious and certainly not a fighter. Didn’t he quit the football team in high school and refuse to go out for the Fighting Irish? One solid punch and he’s flat on his back. You unleash a big tough on him and he’s dead meat. Right?

I admit that the image is generally accurate. Like the Adversary says, DERMOT, YOU DON’T HAVE THE HORMONES TO BE AN ALLEY FIGHTER, SO YOU SHOULDN’T TRY IT.

He forgets, like I often do, that, in addition to an Adversary, there’s also a Daemon inside me. The Daemon is very dangerous.

Naturally, we made love when we got back to our room, mostly because Nuala seemed to want it, even need it. Love exorcised the scene down in Booterstown. She slept peacefully. Then we had a swim and a turn in the whirlpool and another swim. She seemed to have left behind the death of Kevin O’Higgins and become once again Nuala Anne the World Traveler.

This was a persona who appeared often on our honeymoon—a gorgeous, flawlessly dressed, sophisticated woman of the world, polite, reserved, gracious, and infinitely superior. This lovely Irish contessa could walk across the lobby of, let us say, the Hassler hotel in Rome like she had stayed there twenty times before. All the time, her shrewd eyes would be taking in every detail of the place so she could be even more superior when she rode down on the elevator to cross the lobby again.

You’d think she was nobility of some sort or at least a world-class celebrity. In fact, she was nothing more than a shy peasant child from the Gaeltacht in Connemara in whose home there were no “conveniences” for most of her life. Mind you, the World Traveler was not a fraud. It was simply one of the people my wife could become when she made up her mind to do so.

I never did figure out whether she dressed to fit the persona or her clothes created the persona.

That night the dress oozed sophistication—a summer-weight black minidress with a thin gold belt and a low scoop in back and front. For jewelry she wore diamond studs, her engagement and wedding rings, and a gold salmon pendant, a sign of wisdom in Celtic mythology. The ensemble (and the accompanying perfume) said that she was someone so sophisticated that she didn’t need to pretend to be sophisticated.

Got it?

The young women at the desk in the Towers gasped audibly as Nuala Anne sailed by them, myself in tow.

“You look wonderful, Nuala Anne!”

“What a beautiful dress, Nuala Anne!”

Mind you, the first name tainted the image a little. Better that they called her milady.

She did not object to their familiarity. “Sure, haven’t youse both swallowed the focking Blarney Stone.”

We could have gone out the door of the Towers and found a taxi on Landsdowne Road. Instead she led the way to the main lobby of the hotel, without consulting her poor spear carrier. Hence the sensation she created in the main lobby of Jury’s was self-conscious and deliberate, just as was the awe she caused the first time she had done that on what was technically our first date. There was not an eye in the lobby that was not following her progress out the door in the early evening sunlight.

“Nice exit, Nuala Anne.”

“Sure, don’t the poor things have nothing else to talk about?”

She created the same sensation in the lobby and the dining room at the Shelbourne.

Was this the same woman who, T-shirt soaking wet, had cowered in my arms only a couple of hours before?

That was not just a rhetorical question.

Supper was a delight. She imitated all the people who were involved in the rehearsals for the concert, especially poor Father Placid and the “media bitches” who had tried to harass her.

She was still the World Traveler but now the World Traveler as Comedienne, a frequent companion at our honeymoon suppers. I often wondered whether the show was entirely for my entertainment, to keep poor Dermot happy after another hard day of travel. Now I presume it was certainly that, but not only that.

We decided to walk back to Jury’s in the long spring twilight, down Baggot Street, across the bridge over the Grand Canal, and then on Pembroke Road to the hotel. The evening was perfect, a light breeze, a touch of delicate warmth in the air, glowing Dublin light, strolling couples, many of them with arms around one another just like us.

We were crossing the bridge with its low red-brick parapet. I had said something about the Brendan Kennelly whose statue now sat on a bench on which he himself had reflected every day for many years. She reminded me that I was to write her a report the next day while she was at her rehearsal.

Everything happened very quickly, as it does in such a situation. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a black Humbler pull up next to us and three big guys with stocking masks pour out of it. A bright light went on across the street—someone with a TV minicam. One of the guys grabbed me from behind and pinned me against the brick wall of the bridge. The other two dragged Nuala towards the car. Women were screaming.

That’s when the Daemon took over. I became a mixture of Finn MacCool, Conan the Barbarian, and Dick Butkus.

The guy who had pushed me to the wall had a choke hold around my neck and was trying to crush my ribs with his other arm. Big, I thought, and not really very tough. Beer on his breath. Stupid and half-drunk. With a single quick movement, I pushed both arms away, spun him around towards the street, and hurled him into the path of a car. A screech of brakes and more screams. The car hit him. He rolled over on the hood and then fell on the street.

My poor wife, her dress torn, was giving a good account of herself, as she always does in a street fight. She poked with her elbows, jabbed with her knees, and kicked with her feet. Her assailants screamed with pain after every blow.

What was the name of Conan’s woman?

“Hold still, you focking bitch,” one of the guys ordered, “or we’ll cut off your tits.”

I had yet to see the flash of metal, but I wasn’t about to wait for that.

I grabbed the bigger of the two, pulled him off her, chopped at his neck, lifted him up in both hands, and threw him over the bridge into the Grand Canal.

He landed with an angry shout and a loud splash.

The man with the TV camera had closed in on the scene. He stood only a few feet away from me. The light temporarily blinded me. I’d take care of him later.

In the brief moment that I blinked, the remaining thug had produced a knife and was threatening Nuala’s face with it. She kneed him in his private regions. He yelled and raised the knife to strike. She tore away. I reached out, grabbed his arm, twisted it so he dropped the knife, and then broke his arm. He screamed again, more loudly. I seized him, spun him through the air, and tossed him into the Grand Canal.

The cameraman continued to grind away, more interested in his story than in helping people under assault. I yanked the camera away from him and sent it after the two thugs.

‘That’s my camera, ya focking Yank bastard!” he shouted. “I’ll sue you.”

“Not before I sue you!” I pulled him towards the parapet.

“Don’t hurt me!” he pleaded.

I became aware that there were people screaming all around me.

A guy was in my face shouting that I had ruined his car. Nuala Anne was howling in Irish. A woman assistant of the cameraman was yelling that I had ruined their scoop.

The crowd was bellowing conflicting advice:

“Throw the focker into the canal!”

“Don’t hurt the poor man!”

“Kick him in the balls!”

“You’re a murdering focker!”

I lifted the cameraman to the edge of the wall. “You set us up!”

“I’m not your focking bodyguard.”

He was a little guy with a red face and a high-pitched voice. I held him over the water.

“Dermot Michael,” my wife ordered, switching to English, presumably for my benefit, “put the poor focker down.”

Naturally, I did what I was told.

Then a guy began to pound on my chest. “You ruined my car, you focking Yank. I’m going to sue you.”

“You want to go over the wall, too?”

He scurried away.

Nuala returned to her first language to denounce the crowd. My World Traveler had become Grace O’Malley, the Warrior Witch. They cowered and became silent as she told them in no uncertain terms that they were cowards. At least I assumed that was what she was doing, though I caught only a few Anglo-Saxon words. Such as “focking gobshites!”

I glanced down at the canal. Two of our attackers had pulled themselves out of the murk and were hobbling away. The third man was still lying on the street, moaning softly. Well, he wasn’t dead, though he deserved to be.

I became aware that I was breathing heavily, that my fists were clenched, that I was glowering at the crowd, and that I was desperately looking for someone else to throw into the canal.

As if in response to that wish the Guards arrived, their blue patrol car wailing like a wounded rabbit. It ground to a halt only a couple of feet from the injured thug. A pint size and imperious officer bustled out of the car, waved his transceiver at the crowd, and announced intelligently, “Here now, what’s going on?”

A woman cop in her thirties emerged after him and took in the situation with a worried frown.

Traffic had piled up on both sides of the bridge. Oblivious of our little drama, motorists were leaning on their horns.

“Those men”—I gestured towards the canal—“tried to kidnap me and my wife. Arrest them before they get away.”

“The Garda Siochana,” he informed me, “will make its own decisions about taking people into custody.”

“He ruined my car!” the outraged motorist bellowed.

“Threw this focker into our way!” his wife, a frizzy blonde, screamed.

‘The kidnappers are getting away!”

“He threw my camera into the canal!”

‘They’re focking Yanks.”

“Seamus,” the woman Guard whispered, “I think this is the woman who sings.…”

“I know what I’m doing, woman.”

‘They pulled a knife on me and my wife,” I pleaded, now trying to sound sensible and reasonable.

A low, guttural noise came from the direction of Nuala Anne. She was, I gathered, getting really angry. Galway was not all that far from the Stone Age.

I extended my arm around her. She was as still as a bronze statue.

The fockers might have hurt you, Dermot Michael. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine! The trouble now is that we have a very dumb cop on our hands.”

“I think you’d better come to the station and make a statement, sir,” he informed me pompously. “We cannot have conditions like this on a busy street in Dublin.”

“Seamus, ya oughta call an ambulance!”

“Why?”

We would draw a truly dumb cop.

‘That poor focker lying there on the street!”

“He doesn’t look badly injured!”

“That’s not the point, you eejit. You know the rules.”

“You call them.” He thrust the transceiver at her.

“Now then, sir”—he grabbed my arm—“you and your woman will have to come along with me to the Garda station and make statements.”

I brushed him off like an annoying insect. “Take your hands off me, you nine-fingered shite hawk.”

“I’m placing you under arrest.”

“How do I know that you’re not part of the kidnapping plot?”

He frowned for a moment, puzzled by the suggestion that there might have been an attempted kidnapping.

“We’ll discuss any alleged plot at the station.”

He didn’t mention “alleged” perpetrators or “alleged subjects” like American cops do on television.

“You too, ma’am.” He seized Nuala’s arm, from which hung the tatters of her elegant dress.

That was it. As my teenage nieces would put it, I went postal.

I lifted him off the ground and held him high in the air. “Can you swim, focker?”

I had slipped into the vernacular.

“NO!”

“Grand!”

Into the drink he went.

The woman cop tried to make a call. I pulled the transceiver out of her hands and tossed it after her colleague.

“Good on you, Dermot Michael!” my wife shouted exultantly.

“You’re all a disgrace to the Irish race!” I yelled at the crowd, having learned long ago from Ma (as I called my grandmother) that this was the insult to end all insults. “You stand here and gawk while a man and his wife are assaulted in broad daylight by knifewielding barbarians! With a TV camera there to take it all down. Then this focking asshole of a cop arrives and focks things up worse and you stand there grinning like the pissant gobshites you are! I’m leaving this country and never coming back. I’ll tell everyone in America that the Irish are shite-faced savages!”

That was not bad for an American anyway. Yet I was a long way from a character in a Roddy Doyle novel.

The growl that been lurking in Nuala’s throat exploded into an ear-piercing roar, a wild Gaelic war cry rising from the Irish soil of antiquity. Or perhaps it was only, as she would explain later, the shout of a hurling player running down the pitch.

The onlookers, properly terrified though my good wife held neither a pike nor a hurling stick, quickly faded away, save for the camera crew, the motorist and his wife, and one very frightened woman Guard.

And one masked thug who was still lying on the street groaning. Traffic was now crossing the bridge again. None of the drivers seemed to notice the injured man. The shades of night were rushing down the street.

Nuala bent to take his pulse.

“My name,” I informed the terrified Guard as I shoved my business card at her, “is Dermot Michael Coyne. I am a poet. My wife is Nuala Anne McGrail. She sings. You can reach us at the American embassy, where we are taking sanctuary until such time as the Guard and the Irish government apologize for this incident and guarantee us that it is safe to walk the streets of this savage city at twilight.”

The Irish take poets very seriously. Indeed, they are just a little afraid of them. Long ago, when there was no law enforcement in the country, a king who fancied he was injured would hire a poet to denounce his enemy. You had to be careful with your poets.

“You shouldn’t have thrown poor Seamus over the bridge.” She took the card and stepped away from me. “That wasn’t right.”

“I don’t like people pushing my wife around.”

I was still breathing heavily. Indeed, I was still looking for someone to toss into the canal.

Poor Seamus was clinging to the bank, crying pathetically for help.

“I think the shite hawk will live,” Nuala announced as she stood up. “Maybe the Garda will finally get an ambulance to take him away.… You”—she turned contemptuously to the woman Guard—“had better go down there and help the focking amadon out of the canal. We wouldn’t want him to drown before we get him into the courtroom.”

Ah, it was a country of litigators.

She rearranged her torn dress, accepted my jacket as a wrap, linked my arm in hers, and led me down Pembroke Road.

“Weren’t we something else altogether, Dermot Michael Coyne?”

“We were that, woman,” I agreed.

A postberserk reaction was creeping into my body. I wasn’t sure that I could walk the couple of blocks to Jury’s. My wife, now the warrior queen returning from battle, seemed serenely confident.

“What was that all about?” I asked as I slipped into a daze.

“Och, that’s for you to figure out, Dermot love. Aren’t you the great detective?”

She signaled for a taxi and ushered me into the car. “Sure, Dermot Michael, you aren’t the man you used to be after these street fights. Too much sexual intercourse, probably. It saps one’s strength.”

YOU’RE REAL ASSHOLE, the Adversary informed me.

“We had to defend ourselves.”

WHAT WAS THE POINT OF THROWING THEM INTO THE CANAL?

“Immobilize them.”

EVEN THE GUARD?

“He pushed Nuala.”

SHE CAN TAKE CARE OF HERSELF.

“What was going on back there?” she asked the driver.

“Didn’t some drunk throw a couple of fellas into the Grand Canal?”

“Did he now?”

“Even threw in a Garda.”

“Good on him!”

“Me very words,” the driver admitted with a laugh. “They could throw the whole focking force into the canal and it wouldn’t bother me.”

An interesting position.

Maybe throwing the pompous punk in had been a bit much. Still, if it came to a court action I would plead that I couldn’t believe he was a police officer because he refused to apprehend the alleged perpetrators and therefore I thought he was part of the plot.

My sister Cindi, the lawyer in the family, would like that defense.

At the door of the Towers, Nuala took charge. I was a nice little boy who had worn himself out in a street fight with some other unruly boys.

Actually, I was Conan the Barbarian, wasn’t I?

Or Finn MacCool?

Or Mike Singletary?

“You’d better get your security people in to block the door,” she told the startled young woman at the desk. “Them media gobshites will show up. We don’t want to see them. Turn off our phones. We’ll use me portable. If the Gardai show up, tell them we’re at the American embassy.”

Then, without waiting for a response, she stalked to the elevator, guided me into it, and pushed the button.

“We’ll have you in bed in just a minute, Dermot love.”

She called room service and told them to bring up a double Bushmill’s Green Label.

Not on the rocks, of course. That would be sacrilege.

She hung up her tattered dress and muttered, “Someone is going to pay for that.”

“The Guards.”

“Maybe … Now let’s get you into bed, Dermot love; you need a nice long nap.”

Even though she was now wearing only negligible bits of transparent black lace, I was in no condition to frolic with her.

My drink arrived and I was instructed to drink every drop of it.

“Sure isn’t it better than that Prozac thing?” she said as she kissed me good night.

As I fell off to sleep, I heard her making phone calls on the portable phone that I had not seen before. It seemed that she was talking to the American Ambassador, the President of Ireland, my sister Cindi, her own mother, and Mike Casey, a former Superintendent of Chicago police and now the head of a group called Reliable Security.

I collapsed into the land of nod thinking that I had nothing to worry about. Sherlock Holmes was on the case.

I remembered just as I went into the pleasant black pit that we had no idea who had tried to kidnap my wife.