“LET ME read your report about Kevin O’Higgins again, Dermot love?”“LET ME read your report about Kevin O’Higgins again, Dermot love?”
Arguing that she wanted to approach the data in the same order I had, Nuala had studied Gene Keenan’s two memos before she read my account of Ireland during its Civil War. Then she had returned to Keenan’s memos.
I gave her my report about Kevin O’Higgins. She handed me back my notes about Garrytown and the photocopy of Augusta Downs’s book.
We were sitting on a bench in Merrion Square, enjoying the delightful spring warmth that had won its most recent confrontation with the Irish mist. Fiona was curled up at our feet, panting contentedly. Nuala was wearing white jeans and a purple knit shirt. She was sufficiently lovely that everyone who passed us by had to have a second look. Man with a beautiful woman and a beautiful dog. Lucky guy.
The beautiful woman was all business this morning, no time for lollygagging.
Somewhere near cops were lurking, but I didn’t see any of them.
“So much suffering,” Nuala said, giving me back the report, which I put in my briefcase with our other files.
“There is certainly plenty of that.”
“Look at all the marriages that were destroyed—Brigid O’Higgins, Augusta Downs, Eve Tudor, maybe even Hazel Lavery. If that ever were a marriage.”
“He certainly loved her.”
“That doesn’t make a marriage, Dermot Michael.”
“ ’Tis true.”
“Don’t think that’s going to happen to our marriage,” she warned. “I’m not about to let you get away.”
“I wasn’t planning on it.”
“You’d better not,” she said, patting my knee. “We’re not going to let him get away, are we, Fiona girl?”
The wolfhound wagged her tail and slobbered.
“Do you think Birdie O’Higgins knew about Hazel?” I asked.
“Sure she did. … Did she write a letter to Hazel after Kevin’s death?”
“I think so,” I said, taking Sinead McGoole’s book out of my briefcase. “Yeah, here it is.”
“ ‘I want to thank you and Sir John Lavery for your loving messages on the death of our dauntless hero, my beloved Kevin. You were his dear, dear friends—he loved you both and he will be with you in and by your sides when death comes. His own death was an inspiration—quiet—great, beautiful! ! ! ! ! ! Sometime I want to tell you about it! I’m sorry you were not here to say adieu to his noble spirit, for “Nothing in his life/Became him like the leaving it.” It was magnificent. He conquered death as he conquered life. He was serene. But oh! for those who are left … it is unthinkable—and yet with dying breath he charged us all “to be brave and to carry on” and “orders is orders.” ’ ”
“She knew all right,” Nuala said. “And she is telling Hazel that he died as her husband. I bet Hazel didn’t like the letter at all.”
“She showed it around to people and remarked on how strange it was. … Hazel had a lot of lovers in her life. Men who were captivated by her, wrote poetry about her, risked everything for her. Churchill, Ramsey MacDonald, who was the first Labour Prime Minister, Lord Londonderry, Lord Brinkenhead. None of them, however, gave up their wives and family for her.”
“Poor woman,” Nuala said with a shake of her head. “She was a pet like Fiona here. Her life depended on men showing her attention. Unlike Fiona, she served no other useful function in life. She wasn’t a great watchdog, was she, adorable little girl.…” She bent over and petted the dog’s huge head. Fiona responded by slobbering.
“She thought the cause of a free Ireland gave purpose to her life for a while.”
“Did Sir John marry her so he would have a model to paint?”
“Probably,” I replied. “He even painted her on her deathbed.”
Nuala shivered. “It gives me the creeps, Dermot Michael. … No children, I suppose?”
“Actually, she had a daughter and a stepdaughter. Her first husband, a New York society M.D., died six months after they were married of a pulmonary embolism—in her presence. Her daughter, Alice, was born six months later. Sir John had a daughter who was Hazel’s age. He was twenty-five years older than Hazel.”
“You’re wrong, Dermot, to say she wasn’t attractive.” Nuala took the book away from me and glanced at the pictures. “Not the kind which would attract you, thanks be to God, but still enchanting.”
“I guess she had to be to have had so many lovers.”
Nuala handed the book back to me. “If she really did, poor woman. … Did Birdie O’Higgins remarry?”
“She did.”
Nuala nodded her approval. “If I die before you do, Dermot Michael, I want you to marry again.”
“You’ll outlive me. According to Prester George, you have ten more years of life expectancy.”
She snorted, dismissing that possibility. “Anyway, Lady Hazel,” she continued, “is probably only a distraction. She’s not part of our problem.”
“And what is our problem?”
She turned to face me. “Dermot love, I haven’t the foggiest. I don’t know why we should be interested in Kevin O’Higgins or Birdie O’Higgins or Arthur Downs or Gussie Downs or Sir Henry Hugh Tudor. I don’t know what connection they have with our lives. I don’t see how they can be connected with them focking eejits who tried to kidnap me or who make those crazy phone calls. All I know is that I felt Kevin’s death and I felt the fire.”
“And knew that the girl didn’t start it. … What girl?”
She shrugged. “They’re not video replays, Dermot Michael.”
“I understand.”
Two young men were walking towards us on our side of the park. They looked tough and dangerous, but that was the way even the most innocent of students from Trinity College was supposed to look these days.
Fiona, however, did not approve of them. She stood up, then sat on her haunches and glared at them, her tail wagging dubiously. Me shillelagh cane rested next to me on the bench.
“It seems to me that we usually encounter these phenomena when we become involved with something from the past that causes you to feel vibrations. Like visiting Pa and Ma’s and at Mount Carmel1 or living in Lettitia Walsh’s home.2 Do you think that making a reservation at Castlegarry is what started it this time?”
The young men were coming closer. They were grim and unsmiling. Fiona uttered a low, ominous growl.
“Maybe, Dermot,” Nuala said with a sigh. “It’s a reasonable idea, but this dark talent of mine—if it’s a talent at all—isn’t exactly reasonable.”
The received wisdom, promulgated by George the Priest, is that Nuala’s psychic sensitivity to “vibrations” from the past is a trait inherited by a few of us modern humans from a proto-hominoid ancestor, Homo antecessor, or Homo habilis, or even Homo erectus—not from the Neanderthals, which, according to the priest, are not now thought to be our ancestors. At one time, before language evolved as fully as it has in us, this ability was useful for survival. Now it carries with it no evolutionary advantage.
The little bishop had listened skeptically to that explanation. “Maybe,” was all he’d said.
“Dermot Michael,” Nuala had said with a big smile, “is His Rivirince suggesting that I ought to be living in a tree?”
“More likely a savannah in Kenya.”
Then we had to explain to her Kenya and that a savannah was not merely a newly popular woman’s name or a city in Georgia.
“Well,” she had said, “I’d never call a daughter of mine Savannah.”
Later I had asked her what she’d thought of George the Priest’s analysis.
“Och, isn’t His Rivirince a grand man, and himself being so smart. But then sometimes he’s really full of cow shite, isn’t he?”
I tentatively subscribe to the priest’s theory, but mainly because I need some kind of explanation.
There’s no doubt, however, about her “sensitivity”—if that’s the right name for it. She knew that my sister-in-law was pregnant with her first child before the young woman herself did. She also knew the sex of the child.
There are, of course, purely rational explanations for these individual phenomena. As far as that goes, there’s surely a purely rational explanation for all of it. Only it’s still spooky.
And scary.
“Anyway,” she said, continuing our conversation in Merrion Square, “the answer to it all is out there in Limerick. So we have to go there after Galway.”
“I’m not so sure. …”
Fiona growled again, more loudly.
“Shush, darlin’,” Nuala whispered. “They only want me to sing a song for them.”
The two lads stopped a few feet away from us. Fiona apparently accepted Nuala’s reassurance. She remained on her haunches, however.
“Good morning, ma’am,” one of them said shyly.
Herself replied in Irish. I knew the sound well enough to know that she said, “Jesus and Mary and Patrick be with you all this day.”
“ ’Tis a lovely dog you have there,” said the other.
“ ’Tis me darlin’ Fiona.”
I was out of the loop, apparently where I belonged.
“Could we pet her?”
“Fiona, these nice young men from TCD want to pet you.”
The lads, who were surely no older than eighteen, didn’t seem to think it strange that she knew where they went to school.
I, however, thought that it was strange beyond belief that my gorgeous woman knew these kids were harmless before the Guard’s wolfhound did.
Where was that tree?
They approached the good dog gingerly. Fiona put her paw out to greet them, a new trick. Both lads solemnly shook hands with her and then patted her massive head. She responded by slobbering all over them, much to their delight.
“I went to Trinity meself.”
“We know, ma’am.”
“We saw you on the telly.”
This is me husband, Dermot.”
“You played American football, didn’t you, sir?” one of them said as we shook hands.
“A little,” I said.
I was not being modest. I had played only a little and had quit after my junior year because I disliked the brutality.
“Would you ever sing a song for us, Ms. McGrail?”
“Ms. McGrail is me ma. I’m Nuala Anne. … I bet you want to hear The Cloud’s Veil.’ ”
They nodded their heads solemnly.
She sang only the refrain, which was what they wanted to hear from The Cloud’s Veil.”
They asked herself for an autograph in each of their notebooks, shook hands with the three of us, and departed.
They didn’t ask for my autograph,” I said.
“Washed up linebacker! … Anyway, as I was saying, Dermot Michael, we have to go out to Limerick; that’s all there is to it. I must sing those hymns with the monks!”
“We don’t have to stay at Castlegarry.”
“Yes, we do; that’s what the mystery is all about.”
The place is haunted.”
“All castles in Ireland are haunted, Dermot You know that. ’Tis only the cottages which can’t afford ghosts.”
There was no point in arguing. Still, for the record, I had to make my point.
“It might be dangerous out there on the Shannon Estuary.”
“No more dangerous than on the Grand Canal here or in Carraroe. Sure, might we not have a tidal wave wipe us out in Connemara?”
“The Gulf Stream doesn’t do tsunamis.”
“Besides, won’t me darlin’ lass here take good care of us? And won’t the Gardai be everywhere?
“They’re not around this morning.”
“Are you daft, Dermot Michael? Aren’t their two men over beyond behind those trees? And the woman who’s pushing the empty baby buggy down below? And the red car up beyond us on Fitzwilliam Place? Are you blind altogether?”
“And won’t you see the tsunami coming at us in Connemara?”
“Is that what they call tidal waves?”
“ ’Tis.”
“Then it’s all settled, isn’t it now?”
IF YOU HAD ANY SENSE AT ALL, AT ALL, the Adversary informed me, YOU’D LAY DOWN THE LAW NOW. SAY THAT YOU’RE GOING HOME TO AMERICA AND THAT WILL BE THAT.
He might be right about sex, but he was wrong about how to deal with Nuala Anne. We had to take our chances.
“If you say so. I just want to go on the record …”
“So, if something goes wrong, you can say, ‘I told you so.’ Well, Dermot Michael, nothing’s going wrong. And anyway, you wouldn’t dare say, ‘I told you so.’ ”
“ ’Tis true,” I said with a sigh.
“I promise nothing will go wrong.”
“You know that for sure?”
“I do. … Now what is your man not telling us?”
“Which man?”
“Your fancy Gardai Commissioner.”
“Certainly not!” she said with the forced patience of a mother with a dense little boy. “Isn’t he telling us more than he wants to tell us because they can’t find the kidnappers? Still he doesn’t want us to find out anything more about the murder of Kevin O’Higgins, does he now?”
“It was seventy years ago, Nuala!”
“That’s only yesterday in this country, Dermot love. His job is to keep peace in Ireland. That means keeping secrets that would stir up trouble today. So he tells us that the people that everyone thinks killed O’Higgins really didn’t, but we know that already, don’t we? He tells us about General Hugh Tudor, and ourselves not knowing about that one. But he figures that we’re going to find out. Then he tells us that there is a connection between the death of Lady Augusta Downs and the death of Kevin O’Higgins. … Don’t you see the problem, Dermot?”
I thought I’d better see it or I’d be written off as a terrible eejit altogether.
“He told me,” I said slowly, “that O’Higgins was responsible for the execution of the men who burned Castle Garry. Then the men who killed him were seeking revenge. But he didn’t mention the names of the killers.”
She patted me approvingly on my thigh. ‘The connection is very obscure, isn’t it now? And why was General Tudor in such disgrace? Because he had an affair with Lady Downs? Would he be the first English officer to have an affair with the wife of a dead comrade? Why was he afraid to live in England? What really happened the night they burned Castle Garry to the ground? He didn’t tell us that, and I’m sure he won’t.”
“Maybe he doesn’t know?”
She removed her head from the place it had found on my shoulder and sat up straight, like she had been startled.
“Maybe he doesn’t! But then what’s he afraid of?”
“What could have happened seventy-five years ago at Castle Garry that might trouble this prosperous country today?”
I extended my arm around her waist and rested my hand on her belly, brushing against a luscious breast in the process. She leaned comfortably against me.
“If it wasn’t for your man, it might not be prosperous.”
“And if it wasn’t for De Valera it might have been prosperous long ago … but where does that get us?”
“The mystery, Dermot Michael, is not down below in Booterstown. It’s out on the Shannon!”
“Out in the real Ireland!”
She leaned closer to me. “You’ve got the right of it, man, haven’t you now!”
“I have a hunch that Hugh Tudor is the key to it all.”
“Weren’t he and Kevin O’Higgins doing the same thing?”
I let that sink in.
“You mean they both were trying to end the violence by using violence?”
She nodded.
“And weren’t they both committing adultery with enchanting women?”
My fingers touched the breast for which they had yearned.
“Dermot Michael, you’re feeling me up!”
“I am!”
“Why?”
“Because you’re my wife!”
“With all them coppers watching us?”
“I forgot about them.”
“I didn’t say stop, did I? Just be a little less obvious, if you take me meaning.”
We both giggled. I became a little less obvious.
“And,” she went on, “weren’t they both heroes whom history has written off as villains?”
“Fair play to you, Nuala Anne,” I admitted.
“One died young and one died very old, but wasn’t Hugh Tudor half-dead when he went off to Newfoundland a disgrace?”
“So much a disgrace that he was humiliated when the King of England remembered who he was a decade and a half later.”
We were silent for a moment.
“Can’t you just see the headlines, Dermot Michael? ‘Reveal Link Between Death of O’Higgins and Disgrace of British War Hero!’ Wouldn’t that stir up the pot now, and with all the negotiations going on up above in Storemont? And wouldn’t your man rather not have that pot bubble over and himself on the Gardai bridge, especially since it’s all been covered up?”
“We are running far ahead of ourselves, Nuala Anne.”
She sighed. “We’re not. I am.… Come on, darlin’ girl; let’s go home.”
Fiona, still slobbering, bounced to her feet, ready for anything and everything.
Nuala decided to walk back to Jury’s “the long way around,” which meant Mount Street and Northumberland Road. If there was any immediate change in deployment of the “coppers,” I didn’t notice it.
“You want to read the book about Hazel?” I asked. “It’s interesting in a way. Chicago beauty keeps most interesting literary and political salon in Europe. Sleeps with rich and famous. Dies unhappy.”
“Should I?”
“I think so. … There’s one interesting difference between her account of O’Higgins’s death and that of DeVere White.”
“And what would that be, Dermot Michael? Be careful! The cars come from opposite directions here!
She pulled me back on the curb. Fiona nudged me as if I were a focking eejit.
“Thanks.”
“The difference between the two accounts?” she persisted impatiently.
Watson must concentrate on the subject when he’s talking to Holmes, even if he looks the wrong way for cars.
“According to White, the killers had been lying in wait for him all morning. According to McCoole, it was a chance meeting. They happened to be driving through Booterstown and saw him coming down the street.”
“Hmm … so there are different stories still floating around. Just like about who killed Mick.”
“What do you think?”
She shrugged her shoulders as we crossed the Grand Canal. “I don’t know, Dermot. … The boy was local, I know that. He knew the priest and went to get him. He might not have known what the gunmen were up to … Dermot!”
This time the near-accident was not my fault. The light at the corner of Haddington Road and Northumberland Road had changed to green. I stepped into the street. A large blue sports car ran the light and bore down on me. I jumped back. He missed me by inches.
Fiona went wild. Straining at the leash in Nuala’s hand, she barked furiously at the escaping car. She turned to us and barked angrily because we wouldn’t let her go. Then she tried to break lose again.
“Easy, me darlin’, easy now. Himself is all right! You are all right, aren’t you, Dermot love?”
She clung to me with the arm that was not engaged with enraged Fiona.
“It wasn’t my fault,” I replied, for the moment dazed and disoriented.
“Och, it wasn’t your fault at all, at all! You had the right of it, didn’t you?”
A man in a dark double-breasted suit with a vest, commodity trader I thought, stepped up to us.
“Are you all right, sir?”
“They missed,” I said in an utterly phony display of nonchalance.
“I got the license number, sir.”
Copper.
“What do you want to bet that it’s stolen?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Tell my friend the Commissioner that this is a very dangerous city.”
“Yes, sir … a fragile city, too, isn’t it?”
“I’ve read O’Seadhil, too, Officer.”
“Yes, sir,” he said, impressed.
Poetry-reading cop. Unarmed, too, thanks to Kevin O’Higgins.
“Are you all right, Dermot?” My wife now clung to me with both arms. Fiona’s leash had somehow tangled itself around both of us. The wolfhound alternately barked in the direction of the sports car and nudged me to make sure I was still alive.
“We linebackers move pretty quickly for big men,” I said with a laugh.
Linebackers don’t scare, do they? Not real linebackers!
“That’s quite a dog, ma’am,” the Guard said, now speaking to the obvious head of the family.
“Copper dog,” I remarked.
We assured him that we would be able to walk back to Jury’s. I noted that some of the other watch persons whom herself had spotted were lurking in the background. There was definitely no baby in the stroller.
“Maybe we should go home right away.” Nuala took my arm as we crossed Haddington Road.
“No way,” I said firmly. “Now it’s personal.”
JERK, said the Adversary. BIG MACHO AMADON.
1 Irish Whiskey
2 Irish Lace