“HERSELF WOULDN’T run all the way with you?” Nuala was sitting at the table with a late morning cup of tea, reading the Fitzpatrick manuscript. She did not look up at me.“She did not. She sat down halfway and waited patiently for me to return.”
“Stubborn wench … We’ll be having puppies making a mess in a couple of days. You’ll have to clean up after them and myself with such a delicate stomach.”
“You’re having me on, woman, and yourself with the least delicate stomach in the world.”
She giggled and turned a page.
“Aren’t the children watching Barney? Herself will be along soon. She did well in her exams.”
Had Ethne phoned from Galway or had Nuala merely picked up a signal? Better not to ask.
The exuberant, passionate woman of yesterday had disappeared. My wife was now a cool and disciplined professional woman in a severe blue suit, with her hair tied into a bun: Nuala Anne the accountant and the detective.
“Well,” she said, closing the manuscript and returning it to the folder from which it came, “’tis clear, isn’t it, who the chief killer was and probably why?”
“You’ve figured it out?”
“Haven’t you?”
“What’s the motive for the violence?”
“What it usually is: sex.”
“Won’t you tell me?”
“No, you’ll have to figure it out yourself.”
Ethne bounced in, overjoyed that she had done well on her examination.
“Now I’ll be able to go to postgraduate school, like the priest says I should.”
“And in the United States!” Nuala chimed in, hugging our mother’s helper.
It was all settled. Naturally.
The small ones dashed into the room, the Mick crawling furiously. Fiona ambled in after, wagging her tail. Family celebration.
“I’m so grateful for all your help, Mr. Coyne!” Ethne said to me, her eyes shining.
I had not done anything at all.
Our celebration was interrupted by the Mick’s grabbing the leg of a chair and tottering forward a step. He promptly fell on his rear end and gurgled with pleasure.
Nuala picked him up and hugged him.
“Aren’t you getting to be the great big grown-up boy?”
He gurgled again.
My feeling was that he would milk the one-step phenomenon for a long time before he tried the second step. It is alleged, probably untruly, that his father had done the same thing.
“Well, Dermot Michael, isn’t it time that you got dressed? Don’t we have lunch at the Renvyle House at half one?”
“We do indeed.”
Later, as we strolled up the road to the hotel with ocean pounding on either side and Inishboffin glowing in the sunlight, my wife gave me an envelope.
“Isn’t the solution to the Maamtrasna mystery in there, Dermot love?”
“If you say so … . Does it ruin the story for you to know how it’s going to end?”
“Sure, we don’t know. I only know who was behind the murders. I don’t know what happens to Nora. I don’t think she’s as strong as your man thinks she is and himself such a fine young man.”
“He probably wants to bring her to America with him.”
“Och, nothing good will come of that, will it? Yanks shouldn’t marry immigrant Irish women.”
“Especially if they’re from Galway.”
“More especially if the girls are from Connemara.”
“No good will come of that at all, at all.”
“Just so,” Nuala said, concluding the banter.
Then she added, “Your man is a lovely, sweet boy, but he isn’t as tough as you are, and she’s a brave lady, but not as tough as I am.”
“Who is?”
She slapped my arm in protest, gently however.
Renvyle House is a charming old place, though there’s probably not much left of the seventeenth century home of the Blakes. Still, the various restorations had paid proper attention to the past while adding the conveniences of the present—heated swimming pool, nine-hole golf course, and tennis courts.
Nuala and I had bought rights to use the sports facilities. We had engaged in fierce tennis matches in which she had won more than she lost and in sullen golf matches that I always won and herself having a handicap. We tried to swim in the pool a couple of times a week. Nuala—in a one-piece suit because she wasn’t sure that she wasn’t still too fat—had, needless to say, created a sensation.
Oliver St. John Gogarty’s paragraph about the hotel hung in the lobby and at every table in the dining room. As “stately, plump Buck Mulligan” had put it, “My house
stands on a lake, but it stands also on the sea, water lilies meet the golden seaweed. It is as if, in the fairy land of Connemara at the extreme end of Europe, the incongruous flowed together at last, and the sweet and bitter blended. Behind me islands and mountainous mainland share in a final reconciliation at this, the world’s end.”
He was a good poet who lived long enough to be tarred with the Buck Mulligan label. How he must have hated Jimmy Joyce.
The comfortable dining room, casual and restrained but charming and homey, provides striking views of the lake and the ocean and the islands beyond. The food, river trout today, was superb, and the smell of smoldering peat reminded one that one was indeed in Ireland.
“We’ll have themselves here for supper over the weekend,” my wife informed me. “Sure, shouldn’t we eat here more often?”
“We’ll have to bring the kids.”
“They’ll be perfectly well-behaved.”
Sure.
“After our golf match.”
The sensible thing for Nuala Anne would have been to give up on golf. However, she never gives up on anything, except singing. She’ll never be able to beat me on the golf course because there’s no way she can hit a drive as far as I do. Even on our small course here at the hotel, where drives are not so important, she doesn’t have the calm required to one-putt a green.
“I’ll beat you this time,” she promised. The dining room was practically empty at half one because the fishermen from all over Europe were out taking advantage of the May fly season.
Seamus Redmond, the manager, joined us. He was a trim, handsome man in his early forties, with a red face and a touch of white at the sideburns of his black hair. Immaculately dressed and unflappable, he was a product
of the best hotel management school in the world—not that he needed to learn about charm.
“I’m sorry to be late,” he said smoothly as he joined us. “Things have been a bit dicey all morning, as you may imagine. I think, Nuala Anne, you’ll find the trout to be to your taste.”
“Wouldn’t I be astonished altogether if I didn’t?”
Her brogue became thicker when she was talking to someone from this part of the world she had not met before.
“I would imagine you don’t have mornings like this very often.”
“No.” He sighed. “Thank God.”
“Will the killings hurt business?”
“If there’s no more of them they won’t. On the contrary, they’ll probably attract the curiosity seekers … . Isn’t that the place where they did for the three Russians? …”
“Have you had them before?”
“Not this particular group. They come, surprisingly enough, for the May fly season. Russians, same as everyone else, love to fish.”
“Did you know they were military officers?”
He shrugged.
“I did not. If you ask me did I think they were into some kind of crooked business, I would have said that probably they were. Most Russians with money are. They didn’t bring women along, as they do in other places, and generally the kind of women you don’t think are their wives. I assumed they liked to fish. I still do as a matter of fact.”
“The Gardai have no clues?”
“Not that they’re telling me. The murders, they say, were ‘professional.’ We don’t have anyone staying here who looks like a professional killer, whatever they look like.”
The trout was served. My wife tasted a delicate bit of it with a fork and rolled her eyes.
“I’m glad you like it, Nuala Anne … . We have Russian cops coming out here tomorrow with their ambassador and people from our foreign office. We don’t exactly need that. The Russians characteristically assume that if someone dies in a hotel, the hotel is responsible. I’ll be diffident and polite since it’s all for show anyway.”
“Do you see any connection between their deaths and the other incidents around here?”
“Like that gobshite shooting at you? I honestly don’t know. I suppose there must be a connection, but no more than the Garda
do I know what to make of it.”
do I know what to make of it.”“No one has been trying to buy the hotel?”
“Scores of people have been trying to buy it for the last several years. It’s a gold mine, as you might imagine. The Station House down in Clifden isn’t really competition. Indeed, I think we actually help one another. The company that owns Renvyle House will never sell it because it will simply become a richer and richer gold mine. There are not”—he swept his hand—“many views like this.”
Nuala cautiously raised the wineglass to her lips. She rolled her eyes again. The doctor said that an occasional half glass or even a small full glass would do her no harm. This was, however, the first time she had experimented with it.
“And with a heated swimming pool,” my wife said innocently.
“Yes.” Seamus Redmond grinned. “The rugged West of Ireland coast and a heated swimming pool. I’m told, Nuala Anne, that you swim in the ocean.”
“Sure,” she said, “I’m a Galway woman. Where else would I swim? I don’t mind the heat in the pool at all, at all, because haven’t I become half Yank? No one grimly determined to buy it, come what may?”
“Not really. There’s so many places around the world,
the big companies don’t waste their time on someone who is reluctant to sell. There’s also gombeen men in Dublin and even in Galway City, who would like to develop this stretch of the world. However, we’re not about to sell any of our land and none of the major landowners are either. Bungalows like yours are fine, and we could even stand a few more. We don’t want a Bull Island beach out here.”
My wife winked at me. Bull Island had marked a kind of turning point in our relationship.
“I imagine that the environmentalists,” Nuala remarked gently, “would have a grand time altogether if anyone seriously tried to ruin Renvyle.”
“They would indeed and, the way things are now, they’d probably win.”
“You bought up the land before Ireland’s burst of prosperity?” I asked.
He smiled and said, “One that no one of my generation believes can possibly last, even though it seems evident that we have crossed a critical turning point.”
“Higher standard of living than the bloody Brits,” my wife, who didn’t used to be a Nationalist, added.
“Indeed yes. Besides our holdings, the T.D. has some good stretch of land. If he tried to develop it, he’d be voted out of office the next time around, and that would be the end of his political career. That’s why he’s as astonished as everyone else at the destruction of his bungalow.”
“He wants to be the Taoiseach?”
The word is pronounced something like “tay-shock” and is what they call the Prime Minister of Ireland.
“Well, a minister first. He’s an able man, concerned about both the economy and the environment of the West of Ireland, which isn’t an easy course to steer … . Incidentally, he came up here this morning and would very much like to have coffee with you after dinner … . Or lunch as you would call it, Dermot.”
“’Tis the only thing himself and I fight about,” Nuala said in a blatant lie.
“’Tis the only thing I’ve won so far,” I added truthfully enough.
“We’d be delighted to have lunch with the T.D.,” Nuala said. “Dermot and I have a tennis match sometime this afternoon, but there’ll be plenty of time for that.”
“Golf,” I said.
“Tennis,” she said, and that was that.
“Lord and Lady Ballynahinch own most of the rest of the land along the coast,” Seamus Redmond said, returning to the question of land ownership. They are even more committed environmentalists than our own Greens. Heaven knows they don’t need the money.”
“Lord and Lady!” I exclaimed. “I thought most of the Brits were out of here.”
“Most of them are, thanks be to God. Lord Ballynahinch, or Matt Howard, to use his real name, is the head of a large group of insurance companies in London. Labor, friend of Tony Blair, in favor of the Northern Ireland peace agreement, technically a hereditary Lord, though the family lost its lands here over a century ago, mostly because of incompetence. Attends the Lords these days because he’s keeping an eye on things for Tony until he can shut it down completely. Matt has made a lot of money. He decided that he would put some of it into acquiring some of the old family holdings. Rebuilt the ruins of a manor house out in Maamtrasna. Not his family house, but a nice enough place. Kind of hobby of his. His wife is more interested in being Lady Ballynahinch than he is in being Lord Ballynahinch. Only reason he’d want to sell his lands around here would be if he needs money, which he doesn’t. Moreover he hired an expensive architect named Tomas O‘Regan to design the house. O’Regan is a bit of a gombeen man, if you ask me. You can count on him to lecture Matt on the importance of the house.”
“Down in Carraroe where I come from,” Nuala Anne commented, “they think Lord Ballynahinch is a bit of a gombeen man.”
“Well, Nuala Anne, they wouldn’t be completely wrong, but he’s a charming one and basically honest.”
We chatted amiably for a few minutes more and then he asked to be excused because he had to make preparations for the arrival of the Russian military tomorrow.
“Will they put ashore in a rubber boat from a nuclearpowered sub?” I asked innocently.
“I don’t think …”
“Pay no attention to the man, Seamus Redmond. Hasn’t he seen too many films on television!”
“Film” is pronounced in Ireland with a u as in “filum.” The Irish not unreasonably assume that there should be a vowel between the two consonants.
“Well,” she said, as the manager of the Renvyle House Hotel drifted away, “that was all a crock of shite, wasn’t it, Dermot Michael Coyne?”
It had not seemed so to me. However, I agreed with her. Her detective modality did not take kindly to disagreement.
“It was all of that.”
“As though even the May fly fishermen would keep coming if Renvyle had a ritual of sacrificing guests every week or so, especially if they were foreigners.”
“Right!”
“And as though any big hotel company in the world would not sell this place or any other property if the price was high enough.”
“Right!”
“And as though they give a good shite about your environmentalists.”
“Right!”
“And as though a T.D. from out here would not trade
a minister’s post for an opportunity to find a big pot of gold.”
“Right!”
“And as though you and I are dumb enough to be taken in by all that shite!”
“Right!”
“The Gardai know better too, but like us they can’t figure out what’s the point of the local terrorism.”
“Russian money laundering!”
“I told you before that you had the right of it. They’re involved somehow and offended someone, someone very powerful and very wicked.”
“Like your gombeen man from down below on the road?”
“Wasn’t I thinking the same thing meself?” she agreed. “Why would Seamus Redmond bother to lie to us?”
“Maybe because he was told to?”
“Och, Dermot, you’re the quick one!”
In the early days of our romance I had resented the fact that she was Holmes to my Doctor Watson (or Poirot to my Captain Hastings, or Flambeau to my Father Brown). I broke up with her, well, tried to break up with her, because Dermot Michael Coyne was no spear-carrier, right?
Wrong.
Now I didn’t mind anymore. Well, not much.
Colm S. MacManus, who waited for us in the lounge for tea, would have perhaps made Ward Committeeman in the Cook County Democratic Organization, but only if there was no real talent in the ward. The media, however, would certainly not describe him as a “key Daley adviser.”
In white sport coat and light blue trousers, Colm S. was a round man, with a round body, a round bald head, a round face, and a round mouth that was never shut.
“Ah, Ms. McGrail … So happy to know you and yourself,
I believe, a constituent … We’re so proud of you out here … . You prove that the great Irish cultural traditions of the West can speak loudly to the modern world … .
“’Tis a grand time for Ireland with young women and young men like yourself … . And, Mr. Coyne, your family was from out here too I believe … . An important part of the Irish Diaspora … . I was delighted when my estate agent told me that you had bought one of my bungalows … .
“We built only three you know … . Yours and Mr. Redmond’s, just up the road … And, of course, mine, which was tragically destroyed the other day … I’m sorry if the explosion caused you any inconvenience … . And terribly troubled by the dastardly attempt on your life … And the Gardai swarming all around … I hope your vacation will not be ruined … .”
Would he ever run down, I wondered. Well, it was Ms. Holmes’s job to intervene.
“Wasn’t it a terrible shame to have your new house blown up by them shitehawks? I hope nothing valuable was destroyed.”
She sighed loudly, and so did the T.D. In that blessed interval of silence, I sat down and signaled to the expectant waitress to bring over the tea and scones. There was no reason to let the tea turn cold. Nuala Anne thanked the waitress, not in Irish but in Spanish, much to that young woman’s delight.
“Ah, no, not at all … Just the usual summer cottage furniture … Everything covered by insurance, of course … Terrible inconvenience to have to rebuild, don’t you know … And then this horrid murder right here in the hotel last night … . I must say I am not happy at the prospect of having a lot of rich Russians around … . Still, everyone is welcome in Ireland, aren’t they? …”
“Even your Romanians?”
“Well, no, they’re not part of the EU, you know … .
That young Italian woman you spoke to, on the other hand, her kind is always most welcome … .”
“Spanish.”
The man was patently a fool. It did not follow, however, that he was not using his folly to cover something up or that he was not a dangerous fool. Whatever he was hiding, however, was not something that could be completely unknown to the Gardai.
“This woman from down below, Margot Quinn, seems very interested in the land around here, doesn’t she now? Wanted to buy our house for a condominium development, didn’t she?”
“That woman is not to be trusted, Ms. McGrail,” he said, his jowls trembling with outrage. “She does not know the meaning of truth. Worse still, she is in league with thoroughly corrupt speculators. I would not want to deal with her if I were you … . And I trust you are not considering selling your bungalow.”
“Not at the moment … A lot of money to be made out here, isn’t there now?” Nuala interrupted his free-association flow.
“Oh, yes indeed. West Galway and South Mayo are potentially great resources for Ireland and indeed the whole European Union. Tourism, minerals, skilled workers. It has become increasingly clear that the government should direct more funds out here to balance the enormous riches of the East.”
That was a campaign speech. It meant everything and nothing. Come to think of it, he would never rise beyond the precinct captain role in Chicago.
“Minerals?” my wife asked innocently.
“Recent studies … Offshore oil … deep but still there … recoverable at costs not far above present-day prices … Zinc in the mountains … Maybe gold …”
“Like that under Cro Patrick?”
“Improbable … Environmentalists wouldn’t let us explore … Good people … Sometimes a bit unreasonable … Still and all … Can’t dig up a holy mountain, can you? …”
“I suppose not. However, I would think, sir, that the greatest source of income here in Connemara would be from tourists. Expand the Galway airport so that flights from New York or Frankfort could land, a score more places like Renvyle House or Ashford Castle. Lakes, inlets, harbors, marinas, concert halls, casinos and theater, local talent which, as we all know, is quite good, better roads, vast possibilities with little damage to the authentic countryside …”
I doubted that she believed a word of it. Yet it was a very good show. The woman was dangerous. I had known that, however, for a long, long time.
The T.D. bubbled ever more rhapsodically as he perceived in my innocent wife a kindred visionary spirit.
“Obviously someone is trying to frighten the rest of you off,” she said softly as she interrupted a particularly big bubble, “why else the bombing and the murder?”
It was like she had pricked a child’s balloon.
“I really cannot understand it,” he said, suddenly dejected. “Clearly we’ve had offers from respectable companies. We are determined not to sell this land to anyone. It is part of Ireland’s natural treasure. The sheep herders up in the mountains are unlike anyone else in Europe. The songs they sing … the stories they tell …”
“Like the Maamtrasna story?”
The conversation came to a dead halt.
“I think that’s more legend than story,” he said fretfully. “It was so long ago.”
“I have often wondered,” Nuala mused, “whether the ghosts of Johnny Joyce and his wife and mother and children don’t haunt that old cemetery up above beyond.”
If you did it right you had to combine three such prepositional adverbs in an Irish sentence.
She had stopped the T.D. dead in his tracks.
“Oh, that cemetery is gone. Matt Howard built his house on top of it.”
“He moved the graves?” my wife asked in horror, whether mock or real I didn’t know.
“No, that would have been impossible. His wife loved the spot. They simply built over it.”
“And tore down the little church?”
“There wasn’t much left of it. Actually, the cemetery was an untidy place. Eyesore. Scattered gravestones and such like. No one to keep it up. Local people didn’t protest.”
The T.D. seemed so surprised by the question that it never occurred to him to wonder how Nuala knew about the cemetery if it had been covered over. Perhaps he thought she had seen it as a child.
“Well, there was certainly a miscarriage of justice up there … .” Nuala said soothingly. “I would be inclined to guess that your three Russians represented a group that was attempting to outbid another group, perhaps also laundered Russian money lifted from the International Monetary Fund.”
“Oh, I certainly hope not. It’s all too complicated and evil for our lovely bit of ground here on the far end of Europe.”
“Or,” I said, “the near end of Long Island.”
“While we’re thinking of development projects,” my wife continued, “isn’t it time we thought of doing something for them poor folk out on the Aran Island?”
“Aran!” The T.D. almost choked on his scone.
“Wouldn’t it be brilliant altogether to have three luxury hotels, one on each island. Each one would have its own heated swimming pool, its own eighteen-hole championship golf course, its own convention center, and its own condominium development for Yanks or Germans or even Russians who wanted to own a piece of Irish history.
Wouldn’t such a scheme mean hundreds of jobs for the poor natives, maybe thousands of jobs? Isn’t it time to end the poverty out there once and for all?”
Colm S. MacManus hesitated.
“Clearly the idea is brilliant, Nuala Anne … . I don’t think the time is quite right for it now. I quite agree, however, that we need ingenuity and imagination to create parity between the West and Dublin.”
“Couldn’t we have artists’ colonies and theater companies which would create permanently an enclave of Irish-language culture for the whole world, kind of a Gaelic culture museum?”
The T.D. remembered an appointment he had with a constituent and pleaded to be excused. He rolled out of the lounge as if he were a pastel, multicolored balloon pursued by a Russian clown with a knife.
“You scared the shite out of him, Nuala Anne,” I said.
“I thought I was very persuasive … . Give the poor man a couple of days and he’ll be whispering me scheme into the ear of any gombeen man who wants to listen.”
Absently she buttered a scone, drenched it in strawberry preserves, and plunked it into my mouth—with the same reverence a priest might have put the host on the mouth of an elderly person who did not want to receive the Eucharist in the hand. It was an old ritual between us with a deeply erotic overtone.
“I don’t know why I mentioned Maamtrasna, Dermot Michael. I really don’t. It scares me now.”
“The dead can’t hurt us, Nuala Anne.”
“I know that, Dermot. They can only help us if they want. ’Tis the living that scare me.”
She lightly buttered a piece of scone for herself.
“What are they all so worried about, Dermot?” she said, resting her chin—a determined chin, I might remark—on the pyramid of her fingers. “Both he and Seamus Redmond are worried about something. Maybe there’s a deal
about to go down, as you Yanks would say, that would make them all a lot of money. Now someone else, more powerful perhaps and certainly more dangerous, is trying to edge into it. And those poor Russian fellas got in the way.”
“We must talk to Lord and Lady Ballynahinch.”
“Won’t I ring them up and tell them we’re coming up because of our interest in the Maamtrasna affair? That will scare the living shite out of them, won’t it?”
“It will that.”
“Well, Dermot Michael Coyne, let’s go home and change into our golf togs. This time I’m going to beat you.”