A young mother had thanked Nuala Anne for the story, “Sure, ‘tis wonderful to take time with these brats and yourself preparing for the concert, day after tomorrow.”
Of course the woman knew who she was. Didn’t everyone?
“They’re more fun than the whole crowd in the Point,” my wife had replied. “I wish we could fill it with kids. Maybe next time.”
“Weren’t you grand last night on the telly? Don’t let them awful women who write the articles in the papers get to you. Aren’t they just envious gobshites?”
“Ah, the poor things. Don’t they need to find the corner in their souls where neither time nor flesh gets in the way?”
The young matron nodded in solemn agreement, as if she knew all about that corner.
“Who said that?” I had asked as we emerged on Grafton Street.
“Wasn’t it Meister Eckhart?” she said as if everyone knew that.
Eckhart’s wisdom did not seem to help much as we walked down Rock Road to Blackrock Park and the adjoining strand.
Her hand clutching mine, her voice soft, Nuala began to describe the events of Kevin O’Higgins’s death:
“He woke up early in the morning—there had been a party the night before and a bit too much of the drink had been taken—and he came down here for a swim to clear his head.”
“Ah,” I said, as if I understood.
“It was a blazing hot day, much hotter than today. He came out of the water feeling grand. He’d been to a meeting of the Commonwealth countries in November and a session in Geneva about warships. He was optimistic for the future of Ireland. He thought the Irish were the brightest people at both meetings.”
“Naturally.”
“Would you ever put your arm around me, Dermot Michael? I’m perishing with the cold, and it being a warm day.”
I did.
Out on the bay white cruisers, sailboats with multicolored jibs, and sailboards crisscrossed the blue water, a peaceful, quiet spring festival on the waves.
“Not much of a beach there anymore,” I observed. “No one using it.”
“Everyone has cars. They can drive to other strands.”
I frivolously wondered whether she thought of our place in Grand Beach as Grand Strand. Not likely; she made the shift from one version of English to the other without much difficulty. But what did I know about what went on in her head?
“All right,” she continued, “we’ll walk back to Booterstown Avenue now.”
She huddled against me, as though I could keep the horror away from her.
After a quarter-mile or so, we took a left turn down a street with lovely late Victorian villas on either side, shaded by comfortable old trees. Except for an occasional mother pushing a stroller, the street was deserted. I tried to feel some sense of terror or horror, but all I sensed was a pleasant spring afternoon.
“He lived at the lower end of the street,” she said, “twenty minutes’ walk. Do you ever mind walking that far, Dermot Michael?”
“Not with you,” I replied.
She smiled faintly.
We passed a school and a small marketplace with a few prosperous-looking shops. The first cross street we came to was appropriately called Cross Avenue.
“The church is down to your left,” Nuala informed me. “On the right is a villa called Sans Souci Park.”
We stopped.
“His wife went to an early Mass while he was swimming. She was pregnant, you know. … See this bench here?” She pointed at a worn stone bench at the corner.
“Yes.”
“When his wife came home from Mass, she noticed a couple of men sitting on it.”
“Indeed.… Do we go down to the church now?” I asked, nodding in the direction of a church steeple a block down on our left.
“No.… We’ll go to his house. It’s farther along Booterstown Avenue. It was called Dunamase.”
In a few minutes we stopped.
“This is the house,” she said simply.
The villa was on the left-hand side of the street, now almost hidden by the trees that had had seventy years to add height and foliage since the Minister of Justice and External Affairs left it for the last time in the summer of 1927.
“By the time he got here, some of his optimism had faded. His party had won the last election but not by much. There wasn’t much flair in his colleagues. He feared that De Valera would eventually take over the country and it would stagnate.”
“Which it did.”
“He also had an idea to bring unity to Ireland of which he was quite proud.… The King of England would come to Dublin and be crowned King of Ireland. He’d spend six weeks here every year. They would replace the tricolor with a flag of St. Patrick’s blue with a harp on it.”
“Dual monarchy?”
She glanced at me. “I suppose you’d call it that.…
Would it have worked, Dermot Michael?”
“I doubt it. Maybe it was worth trying, however.”
She nodded. “He ate a big breakfast and played with his daughters for a while.”
“You can see all this, Nuala?”
“Not exactly, Dermot love.… I feel it. I feel what’s inside of him.… Sometimes he thinks that he is not going to live long.… No, he knows it. But he doesn’t think that this will be the day. He also feels guilty. There’s another woman.… He’s obsessed by her. Wants to break away. Is trying. Prays that he can do it.”
“Hazel.”
“I suppose so.… She drives him out of his mind.”
“Some women do that.”
“He loves his wife, too. He kisses her very tenderly as he leaves the house. She is arranging flowers. They had made love the night before. She is the center of his life, he tells himself. He comes out of the house. There’s a Guard standing outside. He exchanges a joke with the Guard and walks out the gate. He thinks that perhaps he should bring along his personal bodyguard and then dismisses the idea. He didn’t need him to go to the strand this morning. He certainly won’t need him to walk to Mass.”
We turned and walked slowly down Booterstown Avenue. I thought to myself that all she was telling me was in the closing four pages of DeVere White’s book. Was it not possible that she was merely reading my mind?
“As he walks along the street he prays to God that he can forget the other woman.”
We approached the fatal crossroad.
“The car is parked over there—just around the corner where that Audi is now. As he comes to the corner, a boy on a bicycle gives a signal to the three men in the car. One of them rushes out and …”
Nuala screamed as if the first bullet had pierced her body. She began to sob.
“He runs across the street, trying to escape into Sans Souci. But he doesn’t make it.… Oh, Dermot Michael, ‘tis terrible! Terrible!”
She leaned against me. I extended both my arms around her and held her close.
“He falls on the pathway across the street,” she went on, not looking at the spot where his helpless body had lain. “Two more men jump out of the car. They stand over him, pumping shells into his body. They stop because they know he’ll die. …”
She was sobbing now. The story came in gasps.
‘Then he talks to them. He recognizes them. He says he understands why they would want to kill him and forgives them. They’re frightened by his forgiveness.
Now they feel guilty for shooting a man on his way to Mass. They turn and run to the car, and it drives away. The boy on the bicycle is weeping. He goes down to the church to get the priest. The poor man is bleeding terribly.”
None of that was in the book. She was really there on that summer day in July of 1927.
“The priest comes,” she continued, controlling her sobs. “The doctor, the ambulance. They bring him back to the house. He’s very brave. He jokes; he warns his wife to forgive those who killed him just as he has; he talks to his friends and colleagues … tells them to be careful of Dev.… Do I have to go on, Dermot Michae
l?”
“I don’t think so, Nuala. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Limp and spent, she held me fast, shivering like she was in the middle of a Chicago winter. Her T-shirt was soaked through to the skin. I helped her put on the windbreaker.
“He was such a brave man.”
“He was indeed.”
“We can leave now,” she said, reaching for a tissue in her shoulder purse. “It’s over.”
It had been over seventy years before.
Hand in hand, in silence, we walked back to the DART station. I decided that I wanted never to return to Booterstown.
“What did it all mean?” I asked her as we waited for the green train.
“I don’t know, Dermot Michael. I don’t know at all, at all. I know I had to be there.”
“Who were the men who shot him?”
She seemed surprised by the question.
“Weren’t they the men from the burning house?”
“Oh.… Did you hear their names?”
“Not exactly.… I’d remember them if I heard them, I think.”
“The booksays they were Archie Doyle, Tim Gannon, and BillMurphy.”
“No,” she said firmly. “Those weren’t the names. They were … Liam, Paddy, and Tommy.”
Maybe wewere supposed to find out who the killers really were. Butwhy?
“It doesn’tmake any sense, Nuala,” I said as the DART train rushed towards us.
“I know it doesn’t, Dermot Michael. But we have to find out more.”
On the train as we pulled away from the Booterstown station, she leaned against me and said, “While I’m rehearsing for the concert, would you write one of your nice little reports for me?”
“I will.”
After the concert, perhaps I could talk her into canceling the visit to the Benedictines out in County Tip and going home to the United States, where beaches are beaches, not strands.
—7—
IF IT is all the same to You, I don’t want to do this anymore. Can’t You get some other fat Irish cow to solve mysteries from the past? I don’t want to be fey. I don’t want to be a detective. I want to be a good wife and mother and sing songs occasionally.
And beat poor dear Dermot at golf.
Didn’t I know as soon as we got on the train to ride back to Landsdowne Road and Jury’s that I would make love with me poor husband as soon as we got into our room? Even if there’re no skyrockets, I says to meself it’s nice and I need to be loved.
So there were no skyrockets, but poor Dermot was pleased with me and himself thinking that it helped me to get over that horror in Booterstown. I don’t have to tell it takes days for one of those things to wear off. Sure, I’m good at faking that, too.
Good at faking everything.
What are we supposed to do now?
Why don’t we make a deal? Why don’t I solve whatever mystery You want me to solve and You make me a good wife and a good mother?
Isn’t that fair?
I know that You don’t make deals, but, sure, couldn’t You do it just this once?
No comment, huh?
I didn’t think so.
You insist that You love me?
Don’t I know that?
—8—
I SUPPOSE it was my fault that they thought they could kidnap Nuala.
Everyone thinks I’m a pushover. I’m a big blond lug with a pleasant disposition and a sweet smile. Not too bright, they say, and not very ambitious and certainly not a fighter. Didn’t he quit the football team in high school and refuse to go out for the Fighting Irish? One solid punch and he’s flat on his back. You unleash a big tough on him and he’s dead meat. Right?
I admit that the image is generally accurate. Like the Adversary says, DERMOT, YOU DON’T HAVE THE HORMONES TO BE AN ALLEY FIGHTER, SO YOU SHOULDN’T TRY IT.
He forgets, like I often do, that, in addition to an Adversary, there’s also a Daemon inside me. The Daemon is very dangerous.
Naturally, we made love when we got back to our room, mostly because Nuala seemed to want it, even need it. Love exorcised the scene down in Booterstown. She slept peacefully. Then we had a swim and a turn in the whirlpool and another swim. She seemed to have left behind the death of Kevin O’Higgins and become once again Nuala Anne the World Traveler.
This was a persona who appeared often on our honeymoon—a gorgeous, flawlessly dressed, sophisticated woman of the world, polite, reserved, gracious, and infinitely superior. This lovely Irish contessa could walk across the lobby of, let us say, the Hassler hotel in Rome like she had stayed there twenty times before. All the time, her shrewd eyes would be taking in every detail of the place so she could be even more superior when she rode down on the elevator to cross the lobby again.
You’d think she was nobility of some sort or at least a world-class celebrity. In fact, she was nothing more than a shy peasant child from the Gaeltacht in Connemara in whose home there were no “conveniences” for most of her life. Mind you, the World Traveler was not a fraud. It was simply one of the people my wife could become when she made up her mind to do so.
I never did figure out whether she dressed to fit the persona or her clothes created the persona.
That night the dress oozed sophistication—a summer-weight black minidress with a thin gold belt and a low scoop in back and front. For jewelry she wore diamond studs, her engagement and wedding rings, and a gold salmon pendant, a sign of wisdom in Celtic mythology. The ensemble (and the accompanying perfume) said that she was someone so sophisticated that she didn’t need to pretend to be sophisticated.
Got it?
The young women at the desk in the Towers gasped audibly as Nuala Anne sailed by them, myself in tow.
“You look wonderful, Nuala Anne!”
“What a beautiful dress, Nuala Anne!”
Mind you, the first name tainted the image a little. Better that they called her milady.
She did not object to their familiarity. “Sure, haven’t youse both swallowed the focking Blarney Stone.”
We could have gone out the door of the Towers and found a taxi on Landsdowne Road. Instead she led the way to the main lobby of the hotel, without consulting her poor spear carrier. Hence the sensation she created in the main lobby of Jury’s was self-conscious and deliberate, just as was the awe she caused the first time she had done that on what was technically our first date. There was not an eye in the lobby that was not following her progress out the door in the early evening sunlight.
“Nice exit, Nuala Anne.”
“Sure, don’t the poor things have nothing else to talk about?”
She created the same sensation in the lobby and the dining room at the Shelbourne.
Was this the same woman who, T-shirt soaking wet, had cowered in my arms only a couple of hours before?
That was not just a rhetorical question.
Supper was a delight. She imitated all the people who were involved in the rehearsals for the concert, especially poor Father Placid and the “media bitches” who had tried to harass her.
She was still the World Traveler but now the World Traveler as Comedienne, a frequent companion at our honeymoon suppers. I often wondered whether the show was entirely for my entertainment, to keep poor Dermot happy after another hard day of travel. Now I presume it was certainly that, but not only that.
We decided to walk back to Jury’s in the long spring twilight, down Baggot Street, across the bridge over the Grand Canal, and then on Pembroke Road to the hotel. The evening was perfect, a light breeze, a touch of delicate warmth in the air, glowing Dublin light, strolling couples, many of them with arms around one another just like us.
We were crossing the bridge with its low red-brick parapet. I had said something about the Brendan Kennelly whose statue now sat on a bench on which he himself had reflected every day for many years. She reminded me that I was to write her a report the next day while she was at her rehearsal.
Everything happened very quickly
, as it does in such a situation. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a black Humbler pull up next to us and three big guys with stocking masks pour out of it. A bright light went on across the street—someone with a TV minicam. One of the guys grabbed me from behind and pinned me against the brick wall of the bridge. The other two dragged Nuala towards the car. Women were screaming.
That’s when the Daemon took over. I became a mixture of Finn MacCool, Conan the Barbarian, and Dick Butkus.
The guy who had pushed me to the wall had a choke hold around my neck and was trying to crush my ribs with his other arm. Big, I thought, and not really very tough. Beer on his breath. Stupid and half-drunk. With a single quick movement, I pushed both arms away, spun him around towards the street, and hurled him into the path of a car. A screech of brakes and more screams. The car hit him. He rolled over on the hood and then fell on the street.
My poor wife, her dress torn, was giving a good account of herself, as she always does in a street fight. She poked with her elbows, jabbed with her knees, and kicked with her feet. Her assailants screamed with pain after every blow.
What was the name of Conan’s woman?
“Hold still, you focking bitch,” one of the guys ordered, “or we’ll cut off your tits.”
I had yet to see the flash of metal, but I wasn’t about to wait for that.
I grabbed the bigger of the two, pulled him off her, chopped at his neck, lifted him up in both hands, and threw him over the bridge into the Grand Canal.
He landed with an angry shout and a loud splash.
The man with the TV camera had closed in on the scene. He stood only a few feet away from me. The light temporarily blinded me. I’d take care of him later.
In the brief moment that I blinked, the remaining thug had produced a knife and was threatening Nuala’s face with it. She kneed him in his private regions. He yelled and raised the knife to strike. She tore away. I reached out, grabbed his arm, twisted it so he dropped the knife, and then broke his arm. He screamed again, more loudly. I seized him, spun him through the air, and tossed him into the Grand Canal.
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