Irish Whiskey

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “It was like a medieval painting of quiet devotion,” someone said afterwards.

  “Get out the back door,” Sullivan snapped at the women, as he drew his gun. As they ran by the brand-new ovens at the rear of the store, they heard the crash of glass and the bark of guns, revolvers this time and not tommy guns. They dove under the ovens, listened to the shots, and prayed for their boss.

  Outside on State Street scores of people dove for cover as the fusillade continued, for what, one woman later said, “seemed like ages.” Bullets caromed all around; a ricochet allegedly wounded slightly a fourteen-year-old boy who was a student at Mundelein Cathedral High. The Archbishop himself had emerged from the Chancery next door to the Cathedral (once the home of the University of St. Mary of the Lake) and was walking briskly down the steps from the second-floor entrance when the shooting began. Like everyone else, he fell to the ground. The injury to his archepiscopal dignity was intolerable. “No one who shoots at him can expect Christian burial,” a priest said with a chuckle.

  Then the shooting stopped. There was silence for a moment. No one dared to rise from the ground. One of the three men on the outside leaned against the car, apparently wounded. The other two men, wearing long black topcoats, black fedoras, and masks, gingerly picked their way through the shattered window. There were four quick shots. Then, as calmly as if they were dropping into the Cathedral to say a prayer, they emerged from the shop, helped their wounded and bleeding companion into the Packard, and calmly drove away, their day’s work done.

  For a moment the scene in front of the Cathedral remained frozen. Then as women screamed and men shouted, the crowd in front of the Cathedral scrambled to their feet and quickly emptied the street. Father Joseph Curran, a curate from the Cathedral, reported that the street was virtually empty (his boss had been carried off in his long limousine) when he dashed across the street to send Jimmy Sullivan off to his maker. The only sound he heard was the distant roar of police sirens, as the Chicago Avenue Police Station came alive.

  “Jim was spread out over the ruins of his wife’s birthday cake,” he later told reporters. “He had been wounded several times, a half dozen at least. His blood had turned the frosting on the cake red. His guns were on the counter in front of him. The women in the kitchen were wailing like banshees. All I could think of was that I would have to tell his wife and what a terrible waste Jimmy’s death was. God rest his generous soul.”

  “Now wasn’t that a strange thing to say?” Nuala asked me.

  “How so?”

  “Your man didn’t say that he anointed the poor fella. Or gave him absolution. Or imparted the papal blessing for the end of life. Isn’t that odd?”

  “Now that you mention it.”

  “The poor priest must be dead by now.”

  “I’m sure he is.”

  “But there must be priests alive who knew him as he grew older. I’m sure he told the story over and over again.”

  “Priests like to tell stories,” I agreed.

  “So you’ll ask his rivrence the names of such priests?”

  “Woman, I will,” I said meekly.

  “And then interview those priests.”

  “Woman, I will.”

  “Good. But you won’t get another drop of whiskey.”

  “May I have another sip of Bailey’s?”

  “All right.” She sighed. “Sonia, another drop of Bailey’s, I do mean a drop, for your man.”

  “Thank you, Holmes.”

  She squeezed my arm and smiled affectionately at me. I might almost have said “adoringly.”

  “Aren’t you proud of me for not ordering another whiskey for meself?

  “I’d have to carry you home.”

  “If that were a promise, I just might do it.”

  Then she returned to the article.

  Whatever became of his soul, the cops took James Sullivan’s body to the County Morgue over at Cook County Hospital, where to no one’s surprise he was pronounced dead on arrival. Then he was brought back to Carroll’s funeral home at the corner of State and Superior Streets, a half block away from Sullivan’s Bakeshop and kitty-corner from the Cathedral, where the late Sweet Rolls Sullivan had already been banned by an irate Archbishop.

  The funeral was hailed as the largest funeral in Chicago gangland history with twenty-five flower cars, including a whole car with flowers from “Al Brown.”

  Marie Sullivan did not appear at the three-night wake. Shrouded in black, her face hidden behind a veil, she appeared at the funeral, leaning on her father’s arm. She also was present at Mount Carmel Cemetery when her husband’s bullet-ridden body was lowered into the ground. Then she disappeared from sight. All attempts to locate her for this article failed.

  They will show you pockmarks on the Cathedral steps which, it is alleged, had been caused by Jim Sullivan’s last gunfight, just before, as they will say, his luck finally ran out.

  His luck certainly ran out that afternoon.

  While researching the story of Sweet Rolls Sullivan, I spoke with an elderly reporter, long since retired from the journalistic fray. He had been a young reporter at the time of the shooting. He was sitting in Billy Goat’s having his first drink after breakfast—vodka, straight up. It would not be his last drink of the day. Nor would he leave Billy Goat’s till late at night.

  “Why didn’t he kill Capone before Capone killed him?”

  “Jimmy liked the game, you see. He loved danger. Probably couldn’t live without it. Some folks back then said that he didn’t have to stay in the bootleg business. That was true. He had plenty of money. But he needed the game. Had to have it. He liked the game to be fair. He didn’t get Capone in front of the hotel. Now it was Scarface’s turn.”

  “But he didn’t have any bodyguards with him?”

  “That was the way it was with Jimmy. He liked to think he was afraid of nothing. Invulnerable. He had escaped death so often, he thought he was immune to it.”

  “Like Michael Collins?”

  “The Big Fella had never really been shot at before the bullet that killed him. Jimmy had been shot at hundreds, thousands of times.”

  “Bravado?”

  “Something like that … I don’t know if Chicago would be a better place if Jimmy had lived. Your Italians would have taken over the game eventually. But it would have been a better world without Capone.”

  I waited while he ordered his second drink. His wife would join him at noon and drink with him the rest of the day.

  “There were some that said he didn’t want to live any longer. That he was tired of the game. That there was too much killing. Or that he had cancer and figured that this was a quick way to die. Or that Marie was sleeping with someone else, which might have been true, heaven knows. She was nothing more than a spoiled, crazy kid. Great looker, but nothing inside.”

  “So we’ll never know why he died?”

  “Who’s going to tell us? God knows, but we’ve never been able to get an interview with him.”

  I waited again.

  “Strange story,” he went on. “He came with mystery behind him and left with mystery. I figure that’s the way he wanted it … Odd, some people thought he was still alive and would come back later to get Capone. Closed casket at the wake started that story. Kind of like King Arthur sleeping on Avalon until Britain needed him again. But he never did come back. Not yet anyway.”

  “If he were still alive, he’d be seventy-two years old.”

  “If he were really sleeping in a place like Avalon, he wouldn’t have aged.”

  I dismissed this Celtic folklore as the result of vodka and Irish imagination. In equal parts.

  Yet it is not a bad way to end the story of James “Sweet Rolls” Sullivan. He was a Gaelic warrior of a sort, a legend on his own battlefields just as Arthur was. A gangster, a war-lover, a killer (though perhaps only in self-defense, certainly not a hero).

  Yet nonetheless a legend.

  There’s no epigraph on the splendi
d tombstone which marks his grave in Mount Carmel Cemetery, just his name and his years and his wife’s name without a date of death. Her grave, the management at Mount Carmel tells me, remains empty.

  But a fitting inscription might well be “All Irish Heroes Die Young!”

  6

  NUALA SHUDDERED as she put the manuscript aside.

  “Well, we know that both graves are empty. Do you think he could have faked it all?”

  “Is that possible? Could he have bribed enough people to fake the shooting and his burial? Sure it’s possible, but extremely unlikely. Eventually someone would have talked and the secret would be out. Your article was written a quarter century ago. A lot of people would have read it. Surely the whole story would have come out then.”

  “Maybe.” She frowned, deep in thought.

  “Don’t frown that way, Nuala Anne,” I said, erasing the frown line from her forehead. “You’re so much prettier when you’re smiling.”

  “Go long wid ya,” she said as she thumped my arm. “Aren’t you grand with the blarney?”

  “We’d better walk you home now. You’ll sleep well and yourself with two jars of the creature in your belly.”

  “Sonia,” she said as we got up, “your man is making me leave early and himself such a short hitter?”

  “Are you all ready for the wedding, Nuala?”

  “Ah, I’m way ahead of the game … You’ll be coming, won’t you now?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  It was a quiet, comfortable evening, no wind, gentle air, warm without being hot. A lover’s evening.

  I wrapped my arm around her waist. She snuggled close to me.

  “These tops that you women are wearing today are a serious temptation to a fella.”

  “That’s what they’re supposed to be. But, sure, you shouldn’t be looking at me all evening like you want to tear it off.”

  “Shouldn’t I?”

  “Well of course you should. That’s the whole idea, isn’t it now? But you shouldn’t be so obvious.”

  “I shouldn’t reveal my fantasies to you?”

  “I don’t mind them at all, at all. But you embarrass me when others see what you’re thinking.”

  I didn’t believe a word of it. Instead of arguing, I tickled her.

  “Stop that, Dermot Michael.” She giggled, squirming in my arm. She did not, however, try to escape.

  “You’d better get used to it, Nuala Anne, because starting on the second Friday in October, that’s likely to happen every day.”

  “I suppose I’ll have to resign myself to it,” she said with a loud sigh. “Till you get tired of me.”

  “That will never happen.”

  We were under an old oak tree, shielded from the streetlights. I took her in my arms—or maybe she took me in her arms—and threw myself into a wildly passionate embrace and kiss.

  “We’re out in public, Dermot,” she said before I silenced her with my lips.

  She didn’t seem to mind at all. At all.

  We clung to each other, caressing and kissing, for what might have been only a few moments or might have been eternity.

  “Do you promise,” she asked, as we drew away, “that you’re going to assault me like that every day?”

  “I think I was the one assaulted, but, sure, every day. At least once.”

  “Well, then.” She sighed her sigh of contentment which was different from a sigh of self-pity. “I suppose I might just show up for the wedding.”

  We held hands as we walked up Southport.

  “Would it be terrible unromantic of me to want to talk about the article?”

  “Anything you do is romantic, Nuala. And enchanting.”

  “Well, didn’t you get the impression that your man was not telling us the whole story, not even all that he knew?”

  “What evidence is there of that?” I asked, knowing that was my assigned line.

  “Well, he didn’t wonder about what the priest told the journalists, did he? He was obviously a Catholic and Father Curran’s words were kind of strange. He might have been alive in 1970. Yet your man doesn’t say he tried to interview him. Nor does he seemed to have followed up on herself. He simply avoids the subject. He does tell us the King Arthur legend, but then rejects it without any further discussion. I think he knows a lot more than he’s telling us. Is he still alive, Dermot?”

  “I still see his articles. He teaches history, I think, at Loyola. I’ll see if I can find him … But why would he not tell us all he knew?”

  “Because it might have been very dangerous to do so.”

  “After all those years? Even today?”

  “Maybe, Derm. But don’t we know that both graves out there at your Mount Carmel place are empty?”

  “We do,” I said, unwilling to challenge her second sight.

  “Maybe that gives us a whole different perspective.”

  “I suppose it does. If he’s not in the grave, then there’s a major part of the story missing. You might think someone’s covering something up. But it doesn’t make sense. Why disappear that way when it would be so much less complicated simply to get out of town?”

  “Don’t you know us Irish well enough to know that we love complexity?”

  “I’ve suspected that for some time,” I said. “But still the plot you suggest is too elaborate by half. There must be something we’re missing.”

  “Maybe, if people knew he were alive, wouldn’t they try to get him to come back? Maybe he had to go to Glastonbury Tor to escape from crime.”

  “Maybe.”

  We had come to the steps leading to the second-floor entry to her house—our house.

  “Aren’t you going to walk up the steps to our house and kiss me good night, Dermot Michael?”

  “I just might.”

  “Grand,” she said, leaning her head against my shoulder.

  “Should we keep the stairway here when the house is finished?”

  “Och, Dermot love, I’ll leave that to you. Don’t you know what’s best?”

  Once again she was the pliant, passive, shy child, ready to surrender to me in all things. That was close as I would ever get to the ur-Nuala, the vulnerable kid from Carraroe. I was overwhelmed by my love for her.

  “Just a simple good-night kiss, Dermot Michael,” she begged. “Mind you, nothing like your previous assault.”

  “Just a simple good-night kiss,” I agreed.

  I meant that when I said it. But she caressed my face with a silk-like touch. Then when our lips touched, my passionate love for her turned into a firestorm of longing to which she was instantly responsive. We clung together in ecstasy as time stood still and all the love in the world flowed through our bodies.

  “Dermot,” she gasped finally, “you’ve destroyed me altogether.”

  She did not, however, try to extinguish the fire which had enveloped us.

  Somehow her clothes were in disarray. She was naked to her waist, her breasts glowing in moonlight, as I devoured them with my lips, her nipples hard against my tongue. I exulted in her submission and my conquest. My brain exploded in love, desire, and pride. I would prolong this moment of joy forever.

  I really wasn’t doing this was I?

  Yeah, I was. I’d better stop.

  So I did.

  She rested her head against my chest. I gently caressed her bare back.

  “Och, Dermot … We’re outside, aren’t we?”

  “Woman, we are.”

  “You’re a terrible desperate man.”

  “Woman, I am.”

  “I’m a desperate woman, too.”

  “Terrible.”

  “Do you really love me that much?”

  For some reason tears stung my eyes …

  “That was only a hint of how much I want you and love you.”

  She sighed, her contented, complacent sigh.

  “I’m yours, Dermot. Yours for now and forever. All yours.”

  “And I’m yours, N
uala.”

  “Tis different but tis the same.”

  “Two weeks from Friday seems like a long time.”

  “It does that … Are we really outside?”

  “We are.” With great reluctance I began to rearrange her clothes.

  She giggled at my clumsiness as I tried to put together the hooks of her bra.

  “Did anyone see us?”

  “The street is empty.”

  “You know what I suspect about you, Dermot Michael Coyne?”

  “No, what?”

  “That you’re the kind of friggin’ eejit who thinks that a man can fuck a woman outdoors if he wants to.”

  “As long as she also wants to.”

  “Shocking, outrageous, disgusting, degenerate … So I guess that’s one more reason for showing up at the Cathedral for that ceremony you’re talking about.”

  “That might be a nice idea.”

  “Promise me one thing?”

  “And what’s that?”

  I had finished my ministrations. Now she leaned against the door to the house. She took my hands and pressed them against her now well-covered breasts.

  “That we’ll make love outdoors during our honeymoon.”

  “First week.”

  “I’ll hold you to that promise, Dermot Michael.”

  “And I won’t let you change your mind, even though you’ll try to.”

  She released my hands just in time or we would have started over again.

  She sighed. “Probably … Do I look awful disheveled?”

  “Delightfully so.”

  Then my conscience, silent through the whole ecstatic interlude, finally caught up with me.

  “I’m sorry, Nuala Anne, I’m afraid I was carried away. I shouldn’t have …”

  “Tis nothing wrong with us preparing for our ultimate intimacy, if you take me meaning.”

  “I’m afraid I was pretty brutal.”

  “You’re an amadon.” She brushed her lips against mine. “But a nice amadon. Now, Dermot Michael, I’m going into my apartment. I’m going to take a nice cold shower and then I’m going to bed.”