Close Call

by John McEvoy

  “A couple of years later,” Moe continued, “I went to a wake for a good friend of mine, Owen Mahony. Years before he had hired, then quickly fired Riley from the law firm he started. Owen was a south side alderman for years. He and Riley grew up in Canaryville. Then they had a bitter falling out.

  “Anyway, Art Riley shows up at the funeral home for Mahoney’s visitation. When Riley gets up to the coffin, he starts carrying on loudly about his ‘dear lost friend.’ He looked like he was going to collapse from grief. When Riley bends over the coffin for a final look, a guy behind me says, ‘I know that phony bastard Riley. Watch his hands. He’s probably going through poor Owen’s pockets, looking for loose change.”

  The waiter set down their food, a platter of shrimp and garlic pasta for Moe, a chicken parmesan sandwich for Doyle. Dino himself appeared carrying another Negroni for Moe. Doyle said he’d like another beer to go with his sandwich and Dino sent the waiter off to get it before asking, “How is everything, Mr. Kellman?” Moe gave Dino a thumbs up with his left hand, his right in use forking a rapid stream of food into his mouth. The only thing Doyle had ever seen Kellman do in a hurry was eat. “It’s from my childhood,” the little man had once told him. “I was the youngest, and smallest, of six kids with a father who struggled to put food on the table. He didn’t put much. We ate like starving wolves.”

  Within minutes, Kellman had polished off his pasta platter and was sitting back in the booth, relaxing, Negroni in hand. He said, “Maybe you’ll hit it off with this Hanratty, convince him to go along with Celia. Maybe it’ll all go smoothly. Though, you got to admit, things rarely do for you.” He smiled as Jack’s face reddened.

  “I’m only joshing you, kid,” Moe said. “Take it easy. Don’t get mad.”

  “I’m not mad.”

  Moe said, “Just be on your toes when you’re over there among your own kind.”

  “I’m well aware that ‘my kind’ aren’t to be trusted any more or less than any other kind. That’s not news to me.”

  Moe took a long drink of Negroni. “Sometimes our ‘own kind’ need more watching than anybody else, that’s all I’m saying. I’m not talking about just you Micks. Did I ever tell you about the two young rabbis, twin brothers mind you, Isaac and Isadore Epstein, and the ecumenical conference?”

  “I am certain I would have remembered if you had. Go on.”

  Moe said, “The brothers had been invited to attend this important religious gathering here in Chicago, at the Hilton. Naturally, they wanted to look their best for this occasion. So they decided to order new suits, black, from Pincus, the neighborhood tailor they’d gone to since they were bar mitzvahed. Pincus greeted them warmly. Told of their plans and the upcoming conference, he said, ‘Young men, you are in luck. I am having a big sale on black cloth. I’ll give you a great deal on these suits and have you fixed up in a week.’ The brothers thank him and leave.

  “A week later they go back to try on the new suits, which fit them perfectly. But Isadore looks closely at his jacket. And he says to Pincus, ‘Are you sure this cloth is black? I’m not color blind, but this looks more like midnight blue to me.’

  “‘Ha ha,’ says Pincus, dismissing this notion. Pincus rings up the sales and ushers the twins out the door.

  “A couple of days later there they are, in the lobby of the Hilton, all set for the big conference. But Isadore is still kvetching about the color of their new suits. Isaac says to him, ‘Look, there’s a group of Catholic nuns over there, wearing their black habits. Go over, say hello, and ask one of them if your suit isn’t the same color as what she’s wearing.’

  “Isadore goes over, introduces himself, and strikes up a conversation with one of the sisters. Isaac watches as they talk for a few minutes. Then Isadore holds his arm next to the nun’s habit. She says something to him, shaking her head. Isadore bids her goodbye and, looking very depressed, goes back over to where his brother is standing.

  “‘Well,’ Isaac says, ‘what did the sister say about the color of our suits?’

  “Isadore said, ‘It was an expression that sounded like Latin.’

  “‘What was it?’

  “‘Pincus fucked us.’”

  Doyle, laughing, raised his beer glass in a toast to Kellman. Moe laughed, too, before returning to the subject of Niall Hanratty. He said, “Well, at least you’ve got some things in common. He’s Irish, so he probably likes to drink and gamble like you.”

  “Hanratty might be a teetotaler for all I know,” Doyle said, “there are plenty of them over there. And he’s a bookmaker, not a gambler. If they’ve got any smarts at all, bookmakers don’t lose money.” He looked at Kellman over the rim of his nearly empty beer glass. “And another thing. Your ethnic generalization reeks of political incorrectness. Not to mention startling ignorance.”

  “I didn’t say all Irishmen drink and gamble. But I think a great many of them do, or would like to be able to do so without ruining their psyches, families, and livers. I’m well aware many of the men have ‘taken the pledge’ not to drink, as they put it. It’s just that I, personally, have never known a non-drinking Irishman. Just like I’ve never known a combative barber,” he added, “or a reticent lawyer.”

  Doyle pushed his empty beer glass to the side and signaled the attentive waiter. “Bushmills on the rocks, please,” he said. Turning back to Moe, Doyle grinned. “Mark Twain put it best: ‘beer corrodes an Irishman’s stomach. Whiskey polishes it.’”

  “Twain put a lot of things best,” Moe said. “Cheers. Have a great trip, Jack.”

  Chapter 19

  Doyle’s cab dropped him off at the bustling International Terminal of O’Hare Airport. It was early evening. The heat of the blistering Chicago summer day lingered. After checking his bag and displaying his passport, he joined the long line leading to the security entrance. It was moving very, very slowly.

  Starting to sweat a little bit, even in the cavernous, air-conditioned area, Doyle listened with growing irritation as several of the people in both his and the adjacent lines talked on their cell phones. Like many users of those devices in public places, they did not murmur. As a result, Jack and the other phone-less people in the area were forced to listen to a woman arguing loudly with husband about how often he (“Ron, she’s on a schedule”) should walk their darling dog Cindy while she was away; an all-business looking guy barking instructions to an underling about an upcoming Golden Tier Salespersons’ Weekend Retreat; and an excited teenage girl, wearing low slung jeans revealing her fat-rimmed waist, describing how she had “just, like, coming through the terminal,” nearly bumped into a retired Chicago basketball legend, one of the world’s most famous athletes, going the opposite way. The girl was shifting her weight from foot to foot, revealing a vivid tattoo riding her lower spine. Doyle thought of comedian George Carlin’s wise warning: “Just because your tattoo has Chinese characters in it doesn’t make you spiritual. It’s right above the crack of your ass. And it translates to ‘beef with broccoli.’”

  The girl talked rapidly as she struggled to nudge her bulging carry-on case forward with her foot. “No,” she said, “I couldn’t, like, ask him for an autograph. He was with a bunch of guys and they walked past, like, really fast. But he is soooo fine! I heard them talking about Vegas, I think they were coming back from there.”

  Doyle smiled at that, remembering Moe Kellman’s description of this famed athlete’s betting habits. “He loves to gamble, and he’s not real good at it,” Moe had said. “He also fancies himself as a golfer. A few years back he got roped into some very high stakes golf matches at a country club up on the north shore. Some of the fellows I grew up with on the old West Side set him up like a ball on a tee.”

  Doyle knew who the fellows were, since he had a few years earlier been apprised of Kellman’s boyhood spent among people who today ran what was left of the Chicago Outfit. “They brought in a very good golfer, a guy who could have been a pro but who worked for them in
other capacities,” Moe had continued, “and arranged for him to play the local star every day for almost two weeks. Every day the imported golfer won by a stroke or two. Just enough to keep the big fish on the line. No matter how good or how bad the star athlete played, no matter what score he shot, he always just barely lost. To a man with a competitive nature like his, pride like his, it was torture. He kept increasing the bets, coming back for more, convinced he could beat the imported shooter. He wound up getting taken for about a half-million, in cash. Which, of course, with his salary and endorsements, he could well afford,” Moe said.

  It wasn’t until the passenger line had reached the conveyor belt and wand waving security people that the cell phone users shut up. On the other side of the check point, Doyle hurriedly put on his shoes. The dog-owning woman had resumed berating her husband as Doyle hustled past her and into one of the numerous airport bars. There were cell phone users in there, too, but at least he could sit near a television and watch and listen to the local news while he sipped a Bushmills. The cell phone annoyance made Doyle recall the comment made by one of his former bosses in advertising, a notorious lecher, who’d said that the “best thing cell phones are for is arranging adulterous meetings.”

  He felt comfortable now, in air-conditioning, out of range of the phone yappers. He felt himself relaxing. Thinking about his impending trip, he marveled at how quickly he’d acquiesced to Celia’s request. It wasn’t like him to give in so readily to anything of that nature. He smiled, remembering Celia’s lovely face, but the smile disappeared when he thought of her husband’s pitiful plight. “How mixed our days can be,” he said to himself.

  That thought triggered a memory of one of the young men on Doyle’s AAU boxing team more than twenty years earlier. Horace Knox was a lanky, slow talking, tow-headed light heavyweight who had grown up in a small Kentucky mining town before moving north with his family as a high school student. Horace was frequently stunned by aspects of life in Chicago, turns of events involving weather, crime, the vagaries of humanity in a big city. Horace would shake his head at unusual happenings and comment, “Life’s a funny old dog, ain’t it?” Doyle and the other boxers would laugh hearing the man they called Hillbilly Horace say that. But Doyle wasn’t laughing now as he waited for his first flight to Ireland, thinking of how Horace’s observation applied to this mission he was about to embark upon.

  ***

  The Aer Lingus flight from Chicago to the Dublin and Shannon airports was, as usual, full. Many of the passengers were Irish-Americans excited about visiting the home of their ancestors. There was also a sprinkling of Irish citizens, most of them happy to be going back after visits to the States. Doyle had a window seat next to a shy, quiet, middle-aged nun, who worked her rosary beads all the way across the Atlantic. The only thing she said to Doyle for hours was while they were still on the tarmac in Chicago. Glancing briefly at him, she whispered, “Hello, this the first time I’ve ever flown.”

  “There’s nothing to be worried about,” Doyle assured her. She nodded, far from convinced, and looked straight ahead from then on, fingers on her beads, lips moving in silent prayer. She declined all food and drink and attempts by the friendly flight crew to engage in her conversation. She was dressed in one of the traditional nun’s habits now only worn by a few orders. Doyle couldn’t help but think of the twin rabbis and the “midnight blue” hustle by Pincus the tailor.

  After a surprisingly decent airline dinner, Doyle read the newspaper and magazine articles that he’d printed out of his computer before departing Monee Park. They dealt with contemporary Ireland, a country transformed in the last decade or so from economic laggard into the Celtic Tiger. A very good educational system producing an eager work force, combined with major tax breaks for business investors, had resulted in newly thriving computer, pharmaceutical and auto production industries. The number of people employed had doubled and the gross national product mushroomed four hundred percent. Ireland, Doyle was surprised to learn, ranked second only to Japan in the percentage of engineers and scientists in its population. A fifth of America’s investment abroad was flowing into the Erin Isle. This onset of wealth had undoubtedly aided Niall Hanratty’s business, Doyle thought, for the Irish were mad about horses, and betting on them. Now, they had more money than ever before with which to do so.

  Doyle had also extracted from the great internet repository of information details about Hanratty’s bookmaking operation. It was headquartered in the Dublin suburb of Dun Laoghaire, he read, a town whose name was pronounced “Done Leery.” Hanratty also owned shops in Dublin as well as others in small towns scattered around many of the two dozen counties of Ireland’s south. Hanratty’s chain did not rival the giant Paddy Powers company, but it was extensive. According to a brief biography, Hanratty had grown up in subsidized housing in a poor section of Dun Laoghaire. He now owned a very upscale seaside residence located near that of Irish rocker Bono in his hometown, as well as a country house near Kinsale in County Cork. The rise of this ambitious, self-made man had obviously been rapid. “A hard man entirely.” Wasn’t that how Moe had heard Hanratty described?

  There was an attractive Vacation Planner on Ireland in the pocket of the seat in front of Doyle. He examined it thoroughly, being particularly struck by the page pointing out that the native Irish language, Gaelic, did not “historically include the words ‘yes’ or ‘no.’” That fact, the brochure continued, “explains a lot,” including the roundabout ways many Irish citizens deal with such matters as the offer of a drink. “Ah, ye will! Ah, I’d better not. Ah, go on…Well, maybe a small one.” The travel writer speculated that this fact “could also explain Ireland’s tremendous success in the literary world, with such giants as Yeats, Joyce, Wilde, and Beckett, because if you can’t say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ in your own language, when you come to speak and write in another one you’ve already got a head start in playing around with words.”

  Doyle smiled as he pondered this theory, thinking, Hanratty and I won’t be chatting in Gaelic. I’ll settle for a resounding “yes” from him in good old English.

  ***

  At seven a.m. Dublin time, an hour before the scheduled landing and five and a half hours after departing O’Hare, the brightly efficient Aer Lingus flight crew began to serve a light breakfast, even offering coffee along with tea, croissants, and scones. Doyle was thankful he’d had three solid hours of sleep. In recent weeks, Monee Park problems on his mind, he had, in the words of the old blues song, not gotten much rest in his slumber. He felt great this morning approaching the small island which his forebearers had been forced to flee so many years before.

  The plane crossed the shoreline near Bray, then circled north to begin its approach to Dublin Airport. Looking out his window, Doyle was surprised to see hundreds of small lakes, like tears formed on a green blanket, dotting this part of the island. The hues of green varied, but all the flecks of water glistened in the early sun. These numerous shining surfaces reminded him of what he’d seen during a flight over northern Minnesota.

  Doyle looked at his seatmate. Though she had stayed awake praying through the dark Atlantic night, the nun appeared to be rested. He was glad to see she had accepted tea and a scone from the stewardess and put her rosary beads down next to the little jam packet on the plastic tray. She smiled at Jack as she leaned forward to look out his window. “Not so bad at all,” she said, voice full of confidence and relief.

  ***

  Some of Doyle’s fellow passengers were barely half awake as they approached Customs in the Dublin Airport. Soon, however, they were alert and responding to the enthusiastic, loud-voiced official whose function it was to steer them into either the line for returning Irish citizens, or the line for others. He was a tall, lanky, brown haired man wearing a baggy, light brown suit, a laminated badge on its left lapel, and a yellow knit tie on a white shirt that had seen its prime. He stood at the dividing point between the two lines, dispensing warm welcomes, a huge smile n
ever leaving his long, animated face. His name tag read F. Flynn.

  Doyle watched and listened with amusement as Flynn energetically greeted the arrivals. To a chunkily built young woman in the Irish citizens line, Flynn said, “Ah, it must be Miss Ireland, returned from her vacation. Welcome back, darling.” The woman beamed, a blush the color of a pink carnation spreading across her plain features. “Ah, go on with you,” she said, playfully nudging Flynn with her elbow as she moved forward. A grumpy businessman couldn’t help but grin when Flynn patted him on the shoulder, saying, “You’re a sight for sore eyes, you are. Travel must agree with you, sir.”

  Flynn occasionally asked to see a passport before waving the person through to Customs. He asked Doyle for his. “Mr. Doyle, is it? Comin’ from the States. Welcome home,” Flynn said, reaching to shake Doyle’s hand.

  Waiting for his suitcase at carousel two, Doyle heard an elderly woman say to her husband, “That fella Flynn is a lively item, is he not? Talk about blarney!”

  Smiling as he reached down for his suitcase, Doyle thought, I don’t know about blarney, but I can certainly appreciate bullshit of a very high caliber.

  Doyle took a taxi to the city. In contrast to his experiences in Chicago, the driver, after asking Doyle’s destination, politely inquired if Doyle would mind him making a call on his cell phone. Doyle was startled at this request, having frequently sat behind Chicago cabbies who never stopped talking on their phones, even when accepting fares and tips.

  Before pulling away into traffic exiting the airport, the cabbie asked, “Is it time you’ll be needing to save?” He was a broad shouldered man, mostly bald, with a neatly trimmed fringe of brown hair on his large head. “I’m in no great hurry,” Doyle said.

  “That being the case, I’ll drive you through the city instead of bypassing on the M50. Same fare, of course.”

  “Fine with me,” Doyle said. “This is my first time in Dublin. I’d like to get a good look at it.”