This was the first time that the sight had affected both me wife and me oldest child. It was a major happening. I must do something. . . .
“All the dwarfs are good in the filum, darlin’. ’Tis the wicked queen who’s the bad ’un.”
“The queen wasn’t in me dream at all, at all, Ma.”
“And the dwarfs are good ’uns, aren’t they?”
“Kinda dorky but they try to be good. . .”
“So it wasn’t a true dream, was it?”
Nelliecoyne dried her tears on the sleeve of her pj’s.
“No, Ma, it’s not going to come true, but we have a lot of work to do.”
“Your da and I always have a lot of work to do and we always get it done, don’t we?”
“You’re the greatest ma and da in the whole world! Katiesue’s ma and da are real nice too.”
“Then you’ll go back to bed now and get a good night’s sleep because we have the show tomorrow night.”
“Yes, Ma.”
“Did you wake up Socra Marie?”
“Och, Ma, the end of the world could happen outside our window and that one wouldn’t wake up.”
“Too true.”
Ma and the small one went hand in hand back to the girls’ bedroom. Me wife rolled her dangerous blue eyes at me as they went.
I had to do something, so I called my friend Dominic.
“Dominic,” he said, polite as always.
“Dermot, Dom. Sorry to call so late.”
“No problem, Dermot. Whole family is in bed, so I’m working on my taxes. What’s happening?”
“We hear there’s a contract out on us. An engineer is going to blow up our car tomorrow night in the parking lot after Nuala’s show. Kill us and a lot of people!”
“Holy shit, Dermot. The mayor and the senator are going to be there. We can’t let this go down. My friends won’t permit it. That’s all. They just won’t permit it! . . . Is it part of this Donlan caper you people are involved with?”
“Probably.”
“Okay, Dermot, thanks for calling me. I gotta get in touch with some of my friends right away.”
“Thanks, Dom.”
“You can count on us, Dermot. Tell your wife, my friends just won’t let it go down. No way. Count on us.”
“Thanks. We will.”
“Your man?” Nuala asked.
She had come back to our bedroom, accompanied by the two hounds who had escorted her and Nelliecoyne back to the girls’ room.
“Good idea,” she said, filling our two Irish crystal tumblers with a large splash of the creature. “Last ones before the show wraps up tomorrow night.”
“Slainte!”
“Slainte!”
My wife had rebounded. Once more she was the Irish Tiger, Granne O’Malley getting ready for a raid on the friggin’ English.
“I’ll call that nice Mr. Casey,” she announced as she sat down at the desk to take charge. She gestured at the other phone for me to listen on.
Mike was always “that nice Mr. Casey.”
“Hi, Annie, Nuala Anne here, sorry to ring so late, but you know what me husband is like. Keeps terrible late hours. . . Could I have a short word with himself.
“Hi, Mr. Casey. Sorry to trouble you, but we have reason to suspect that someone will try to blow up me little fire engine in the parking lot after the show tomorrow night.”
“What kind of reason, Nuala? Ordinary or otherwise?”
He knew her well.
“Otherwise and very powerful . . . Aren’t me poor doggies worried, but me poor little chile saw it in a nightmare. . . . A terrible explosion would kill all of us. . . .”
“And probably the mayor and the senator and their wives,” I added.
“Hi, Dermot . . .”
My presence, of which he was certainly aware, was duly acknowledged. He could assume that I was sharpening up the spears which were what I carried in our joint operations. The spears (imaginary) would be useful should we encounter any vampires. Herself denied their existence. They were a silly English superstition, even if your man was Irish.
“I’ve already talked to my friend on the West Side,” I said, nodding my head toward Taylor Street and beyond, which is de rigueur if you’re talking about “the boys.”
“Good idea. I’ll call John Culhane and we’ll be there for breakfast. . . . Lots of coffee, Nuala. . .”
“Tonight,” she said bluntly.
“It’s that serious? Okay, I’ll ask John to call Terry Glen, the deputy superintendent. He’ll be skeptical, but if we win him over, we’ll have all the good guys on our side as well as the guys out on the West Side. Make the coffee anyway.”
“Come quietly,” I said, “and park in the alley behind the house. No cop cars.”
“Won’t we be letting you in the back door on the ground floor? You just have to walk down the steps.”
So me wife and I put on our black jeans and our black sweaters and she tied her long hair up in a businesslike knot. We carried our black leather jackets and our ski caps and the sound monitors for each of the kids’ bedrooms downstairs to the ground floor. The kids’ playroom was in only mild disarray.
“Let’s leave it as it is,” she said, “so they won’t think we planned all this. I’ll take the soda bread out of the freezer and heat it up. You get the balls off the floor so no one will slip on them. Would you ever, Dermot love, turn on the coffee and teapot in the archive room?”
Me woman believed as a matter of faith that soda bread should be served fresh out of the oven. Then she saw her ma heat it up in the micro wave we had given them for Christmas a couple of years ago.
The archive room was an L-shaped corner on the ground floor adjoining the playroom, but separated from it by a soundproof door. When we bought the house it had been a storage for old newspapers, some very old, and documents. We saved a few of the documents and papers, installed cabinets, paneled the walls, and provided a table with easy chairs around it. There was also a police radio scanner, a TV, and maps of Chicago on the wall and a bank of phones, a wet bar, a fridge, and coffee-and tea makers. I called it “the Situation Room” because Nuala had the room of that name from The West Wing in mind when she furnished and decorated it. We also had a bank of monitors from which we could survey the approaches to our house. I turned them on so we would be ready for the Chicago Police Department when they appeared. For the first time I realized that snow had been falling for several hours. The alley outside the house was already covered with snow. Four to six inches possible, the weatherman had promised, though most of it would be on the South Side and the southern suburbs.
A blizzard was all we needed.
The cops arrived just as Nuala descended with a platter of steaming soda bread. I opened the door and assured them that they didn’t have to worry about tracking snow on the floor. I poured the coffee and tea and herself distributed scones, clotted cream, and jams and jellies, most of them imported from Ireland. There were four cops, Mike Casey, John Culhane, Deputy Superintendent Terry Glen, and Lieutenant Nikos Mashek, head of the bomb squad. Mike Casey acted as chair.
“As some of you know, the Sixth District has worked with the Coynes for some time on various puzzles and problems that have occurred in the district. Reliable Security has also worked with them in certain matters. We do not believe that Mrs. Coyne—professionally known as Ms. McGrail—is either psychic or fey. We do know, however, that she often puts together components of a problem in a way that escapes our skills. We have rarely discarded her insights and we have never been wrong in listening to her.”
And so as the wind assailed our old wooden home and howled through the crannies and the snow continued to fall in our alley, we discussed the problem of whether we should cancel the taping of the Lullaby Christmas special.
“’Tis all part of the plot against the Donlans,” she insisted. “It escalates each time. First it was just a leak in a gossip column, then it was a lie to stop a wedding, then an assault on Ja
ck Donlan, then an attempt to kidnap Maria Donlan with intent to gang rape, now a car bomb in a crowded parking lot to kill hundreds of people. There is madness behind this escalation. The plotter grows increasingly angry as his clumsy schemes are foiled. He now plans mass murder.”
“We should understand,” John Culhane continued, “that Nuala’s insights have never led us astray. When she senses trouble, there is trouble brewing, as we learned in the matter of the attempted kidnap in front of St. Joseph’s Hospital. I believe we have to take this insight very seriously. The risks are too great if we do not.”
Deputy Superintendent Glen, a tall, solid, charging-end person, was uneasy with the prospect of police involvement with what seemed a supernatural matter, as he should be. Reliable Security was a private company. If it wanted to take seriously the uncanny, that was its right, but the Chicago Police Department could ill afford the risk of media ridicule. The soundstage was not in Area Six’s jurisdiction, but it could offer the usual protection for public events, though it would be better if Reliable Security took that responsibility. Ms. McGrail would be within her rights to postpone the taping.
My wife was calm and articulate. She would inform the network of a threat to the taping and recommend that it be canceled. Doubtless they would take her advice. They would have to say that there was a threat with which the Chicago police were not prepared to deal.
Sometimes when I watch my wife, I feel that I couldn’t possibly be married to this beautiful woman and experience the evanescent desire that attacks a man’s brain when he sees a beautiful young woman walking down the street. It would be nice to make love to her, but in a civilized society men don’t do that kind of thing, don’t even dwell on it in their imagination. Therefore I could not entertain lustful emotions in the present circumstances, whatever they might be.
No way.
The conversation was polite. Glen and Casey called each other “superintendent,” though the former was only a deputy superintendent and the latter a retired superintendent.
In the repetition of the lines required in the discussion, Mike Casey played the role of the sophisticated Irish politician who sought in all disputed matters a sensible compromise.
“Reliable could always provide a security net around the soundstage and search every car that comes in. It would delay the event. It would be better if we could deploy a massive cordon of force.”
“I can’t see my way clear to doing that, Superintendent.”
“And you’re prepared to say that, Superintendent, if we should lose the mayor and the senator and their wives to a terrorist’s bomb?”
“I don’t think that will happen, Superintendent. . . . What’s that noise?”
“It’s our two Irish wolfhounds,” I said. “They’re retired police dogs. They’ve been upset all afternoon. They’ve been trained to sniff trouble.”
Glen sighed patiently.
“You realize that you’re asking me to accept the warnings of a psychic and the instincts of a couple of dogs?”
“I’m not a psychic,” Nuala said. “I’m one of the dark ones.”
“My wife means,” I insisted, “that she’s a mystic.”
“whatever!” He threw up his hands.
The dogs shut up. Nuala can tell them to shut up without speaking a word to them.
I consider that scary. She also sees the auras around their heads, halos if you will. I would consider that creepy if the halo around my head hadn’t convinced her that she would have to sleep with me someday.
Or so she would later tell me.
“There is no way we can keep this out of the media,” Commander Culhane insisted. “If we go ahead with a massive security cordon, it will be news and if the network cancels the taping, then there will be tough questions asked at the news conferences tomorrow morning.”
“Mike, that’s not for me to decide. What I need is a better reason for that cordon than signals picked up from the supernatural.”
The dogs began to howl again.
“Well, then, I suppose that we’ll have to take the bombs off me motorcar won’t we?”
“Now?”
Lieutenant Nikos Mashek spoke for the first time, his quiet Slavic face shining brightly.
“How do you know that the bombs are in the car?” Terry Glen demanded.
“Weren’t we after telling you that the hounds are police dogs? That car makes them nervous. It has all day long.”
“We can’t disarm a bomb here in the middle of a snowstorm!”
“Depends on the bomb, sir. I can inspect the car and see if there is explosive material on it. Then I can activate my unit and do whatever is necessary.”
“Do you mean evacuate the whole block?”
“That’s what we’re trained to do, sir.”
“How do you know that it won’t explode while we’re looking it over?”
“It hasn’t blown up yet. If Ms. McGrail’s suspicions are correct they intended it to explode tonight.”
“It didn’t explode when I was driving it home from down below this afternoon, it’s not likely to explode now. They put the bombs or whatever into the car so that it would blow up during the concert tonight. There’d be no point in it exploding now. . . .”
“Unless they were careless or sloppy,” the lieutenant said. “There’s always that possibility.”
Reluctantly the cops donned their overcoats. I helped me wife on with her black leather jacket.
“Well, Dermot, we’ll go to heaven with all our kids, won’t we now?” she whispered.
“They’ll only let me in on your say-so.”
“Sure, don’t they know up there, that you’re a livin’ saint?”
“Let me calm down the puppies. Like I said they’re police dogs. They love cops and they’ll know you’re cops and will want to be friendly. Tell them how wonderful they are.”
In the kids’ playroom, the hounds stopped howling and erupted in joy at the smell of cops. Perhaps I should say “other cops.”
“Chill out!” Nuala ordered.
Reluctantly, they sat back on their haunches and awaited further instructions, troops prepared for battle. Superintendent Glen gingerly ignored them. Lieutenant Mashek patted them on their heads.
“Nice doggies,” he said.
The hounds were delighted. They were working with cops again. If we were all blown up, they would go off to doggie heaven happy to the bitter end.
“You have the keys to your car, Nuala?” he asked.
Silently she handed a set of keys to him, keys to every room in our home and in a pinch a useful weapon.
“Superintendent Glen,” he said at the door. “You’ve been on the force for how long? Twenty-eight years? How many members of my unit have we lost in that period of time?”
“None, Nikos,” he said, “and we’re proud of the unit’s work.”
“And no civilians?”
“Not a one.”
“We won’t break that record tonight.”
“You’ll be needing this floodlight.” Nuala handed him a floodlight that she always kept in a closet on the ground floor. There were a few streetlights in the alley, not much use in the blizzard which was wrapping everything in a thick white blanket.
“You’d better stay in here,” Nikos said to us, “until I come back from my car with my tools. In fact you can stay inside all the time. If the car should blow up, you won’t be safe inside or outside.”
He tried to push out the door to the alley but the wind resisted. I pushed with him.
“Thanks, Dermot,” he said with a wicked grin. “I guarantee you there’s no danger here, not much anyway.”
“I am reassured,” I said with a touch of irony in my voice.
He chuckled, a guy from the neighborhood, not this one, but a neighborhood somewhere.
The hounds gamboled out after him and leaped through the snow, ecstatic to be back on the force again and at the same time playing in the snow.
In a few moments Nikos re
turned carrying two small briefcases.
“Not many tools,” I whispered to me wife.
“Hush, Dermot,” she said to me, “isn’t he a nice young man with two sons and a daughter on the way?”
She was showing off.
We walked to the Lincoln which was just a few feet away from the door.
“I’ve activated my night unit,” he announced. “They’ll be here soon. And quietly, like I told them.”
Then he began to examine the car with some of his mysterious instruments, a medieval wizard plying his secret craft. Cautiously he opened the door of the Navigator and opened the hood. I was fingering my rosary. Me wife was peering over his shoulder. I stood next to her.
“Where are the explosives?” I whispered.
“Isn’t it obvious? Aren’t they in the boot? The puppies are letting him do his work and then they’ll tell us all.”
He examined the motor and the ignition and the gas tank with great care, moving an instrument like a long thermometer in and out of the innards of the car’s machinery. Then he crawled under the huge vehicle and explored its underbelly.
My sweater and leather jacket were poor protection against the winds and the whirling snow. I was shaking with the cold. The snow assaulted the skin of my face. My feet were wet from the slush and the wind shook me from head to toe. My wife of course wasn’t shivering at all, at all.
Finally, covered with snow and grease and looking like a circus clown, Lieutenant Mashek crawled out from under the Navigator.
“Sir,” he said to the superintendent, “there are no explosives linked to the ignition and none in any of the usual places in the motor or under the car where they are usually placed. . . .”
The hounds bounded to the back of the car and growled at the fender. Then they howled.
“The boot,” Nuala shouted above the wind and the wailing hounds.
In Dante’s inferno, hell is a frozen place. I felt that I was in its antechamber.
We huddled over the trunk, Nuala, Nikos, Glen, and myself. I was hoping that I was in the state of grace as we used to call it and realized once again that the God of Jesus was not a hanging judge. The father of four children should not be out in a blizzard and himself watching a nerveless cop try to open the trunk of a car which, if the snarling hounds were to be believed, was filled with high explosive.
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