Irish Gold

by Andrew M. Greeley

  She bit her lip again. I had better stop being a bastard.

  “Quite true, yet it was an important symbolic concession for Ireland to make. Frankly, Her Majesty’s government went much further than that. Several years ago when we agreed to establish the Anglo-Irish Secretariat in Northern Ireland, we acknowledged that the Government of Ireland had the right to a legitimate and formal interest in the problems of the North. In sum, the two governments now agree that there would be no forced union between the two Irelands but no denial of the right of the Irish government to be concerned about what happens in Ulster. You must admit that the agreement represents progress.”

  “And Mr. Major has not backed away from it despite the fact that the Prots reject the agreement.”

  “Nor is he likely to back away from it. . . . I have had the honor of having served on the Secretariat in Ulster. I must tell you, Dermot, that the civil servants of the two countries have made considerable progress, undramatic perhaps, but we are developing a tradition of cooperation between the two countries that shows great promise.”

  “Lucky guys to have you around.”

  “Is that a chauvinist remark?” she demanded furiously.

  “No, ma’am.” I tried my most charming dimpled smile. “It’s a statement of fact. An able and dedicated woman must make that bunker up there a more pleasant place.”

  “It’s not really a bunker.” She calmed down a bit. “Only a former secondary school. It is rather bleak, I admit. Yet we . . . forgive me for sounding like a starryeyed idealist instead of a civil servant. . . . I think we have a fair chance of ending a thousand years of conflict and suffering.”

  She was, however, a starry-eyed idealist, the kind that might appeal to a Yank who had a few vague ideals of his own.

  “All possible success.” I raised the wine glass in a toast to her. “And I think you are an idealist and that it becomes you.”

  “Thank you.” She blushed. “But then you understand how important the current initiative is and how fragile are its chances?”

  “Why is it fragile? John Major has so involved his future in the initiative that he is no more going to back down than the Pope will become a Mormon. The government here has nothing to lose by supporting it. The Catholics in the North are in favor of it, except for the gunmen. The Prots are against it, but some of their younger leaders and a lot of their people are beginning to talk ‘deal.’ Where’s the problem?”

  And, more important, how do I fit into this Irish civics lesson?

  She was trying to catch up with my devastating attack on the grouper, now persuaded that she had won me over. “Your assessment of the situation here in the republic is not perfectly accurate, Dermot. Perhaps nine-tenths of its citizens do not approve of the terrorists. The same proportion, as you said, do not put the North high on their agenda of priorities. Yet they are not totally unsympathetic to the goal of a united Ireland; and, however friendly they may be to individuals from my country, they don’t trust the British government. . . . Before you make the ritualistic comment, Dermot, that they have reason not to trust my government, let me say I agree with you.”

  “So if there was some major problem, the government here might pull the plug on you folks up at the bunker and on the peace initiative in which Albert Reynolds and John Major have invested so much?”

  “Precisely.” She sighed with relief, having made her case—one with which I agreed and which I had understood before the free lunch.

  “Like what?”

  “A more spectacular repetition of the Gibraltar incident where our SAS gunned down three unarmed terrorists. I make no case for either side in that incident, Dermot.” She reached out and touched my hand. “Believe me, I have little affection for the SAS. I thought I was in love with one of them once and then discovered that they are beasts.”

  “Like all gunmen.”

  “Indeed so. Suppose that the SAS should gun down a group of innocents by mistake. The agreement would become a dead letter.”

  “It could happen,” I said slowly. “Not very likely, but it could happen.”

  “You hardly can blame my colleagues and me for being careful.”

  “Not at all. . . . But how do I fit in?”

  She shook her head, as if puzzled herself. “I’m afraid I can’t answer that question specifically. Candidly I don’t know. I was merely informed that you were engaging in some kind of behavior that seemed innocent to you but that could have serious implications for our efforts.”

  “Did you search my rooms at Jury’s yesterday?”

  “Certainly not!” She threw down her fork. “I’m a diplomat, not a spook!”

  “Someone did.”

  “I have no knowledge of it.” A tinge of angry color blazed on her cheeks. “My invitation to you was based on no such search.”

  I thought about it. Maybe it was only a coincidence. “I’ve no previous experience with my rooms being ransacked. So I don’t know whether they were good or bad at it. They didn’t make a mess, but there were a few traces.”

  “Perhaps deliberately.” She was watching me intently.

  “Perhaps. All they took was a book about Michael Collins and a stack of clippings from my grandmother’s archives.”

  She shook her head again. “How bizarre!”

  “You know who Collins was.”

  “Vaguely. Wasn’t he one of the anti-Free State terrorists?”

  “Just the opposite. He was commander of the Free State army. He signed the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, and it turned out to be his death warrant.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know much about that era.”

  “Neither does anyone else. Now, Angela Smythe, pretty and intense idealist, let me tell you what I have done to stir up this concern in at least two governments. My maternal grandparents”—I took out their pictures—“left Ireland in 1922, never to return. They died last year. Ma, my grandmother, told me that if they came back they would be shot. All I have done”—I put the photos on the table, took her chin firmly in my hand, and tilted it up so our eyes locked (pretty gray eyes—and vulnerable after all; she too was a shy child)—“and this, believe me, is the honest truth, all I have done is to try to find out why they couldn’t come back.”

  She licked her lower lip, but did not try to pull out of my grasp. “Is it important to you to answer that question?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Then perhaps you should drop it. . . . Your grandparents had long and happy lives?”

  “Indeed yes.”

  “I don’t know why such an investigation would cause a problem. Truthfully I don’t. But my colleagues must be convinced that it would or they would not have asked me to have lunch with you.”

  I fear that my thumb was caressing her chin. She was a very appealing woman, and she’d been hurt and she was afraid of me. “Can I propose a deal?”

  “Of course.” She smiled. “I make no promises.”

  “If they’d sent you in the first place instead of a pushy Irish cop, I’d probably have forgotten about the whole thing. I’m a terrible loafer, Angela Smythe with the haunting gray eyes, terrible altogether, as they say in this country. My proposal is that I’ll agree to forget the whole thing if someone in some government will explain to me, in strictest confidence, what the mystery is.”

  “Why these people”—she pointed at my pictures—“such sweet, handsome people, could not return to Ireland after they migrated?”

  “That’s right. And they were sweet people. They were never involved in IRA fund-raising or anything like that. Yet they left Ireland behind, definitively.”

  “May I propose a counter deal to you. Dermot Coyne?” She captured my chin, a fair enough turnabout.

  “If you promise to let me take you to lunch the next time.”

  “Agreed. . . . I’ll do everything I can to find the explanation you want. I promise that. On my honor.” She brushed her fingers against my lips, oblivious to the waiter who was proffering the desser
t menu.

  “And?”

  “And if I can’t find out or can’t tell you if I do find out, but can assure you that it is essential that you not know, will you keep your promise?”

  “We’ll have tea, and sherry trifle with double cream and a bottle of your best dessert wine,” I told the waiter. “And yes, Angela Smythe, I will if you agree that the dessert wine is on me.”

  She laughed happily. “I’m sure Her Majesty would approve.”

  We left an hour later, the last couple to desert the restaurant, both of us slightly tipsy. In the alley outside the mews, Angela Smythe glanced in either direction, threw her arms around me, and, standing on tiptoe, kissed me.

  “I want to establish”—she paused in her ferocious assault—“that this is personal and not part of my assignment for Her Majesty’s government.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.” I dug my fingers into her rear end, lifted her off the cobblestones, and responded to her kiss in kind. Her lips tasted of wine and tea and fish sauce as I broke through them into her mouth. We locked ourselves in a furious embrace that seemed to last for a couple of eternities.

  I think I was the one who stopped.

  “Oh, my,” she said weakly. “Neither of us did that, did we?”

  “Certainly not,” I agreed, shaken by the burst of passion.

  “The second bottle of wine.”

  “Definitely.”

  I commandeered her right shoulder and caressed her firmly, breast, belly, flank, thigh, and then up the other side.

  “Dermot.” She shivered and leaned against me. “Please “

  It could as well have meant “please don’t stop” as “please do stop.” I rested my hand a little longer on her breast, solid and appealing to my fingers under her dress.

  It would be so easy to take her back to my hotel room.

  I captured her other breast. She sighed deeply but made no attempt to escape.

  “Don’t . . . I beg of you, don’t!”

  I tightened my grip on her for a moment, then I heard footsteps at the other end of the alley and released her from my prison.

  “Definitely the dessert wine.” My own voice was unsteady.

  We walked quickly back to Pembroke Road.

  “I’m sorry,” I murmured.

  “Don’t be.” She laughed uneasily. “I liked it. But we shouldn’t—”

  “I know.”

  “I’m walking back towards the embassy,” she said, more calmly this time. “We’d better not stay together.”

  “I agree.”

  We both laughed, our animal natures suppressed and our rational confidence restored.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again.

  “Oh, Dermot.” She smiled gently. “I did start it, you know. And got back what I richly deserved in the circumstances. Don’t blame yourself, please.”

  “One more lightly affectionate kiss.” I brushed her lips hastily.

  “Perfect way to end. . . .” Her gray eyes caught mine. “I’ll be back to you about our arrangement. You can reach me at the embassy any day. For either governmental or”—her voice wavered again—“personal reasons.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  –– 11 ––

  “SURE, DON’T you look exactly like himself.” The old man on the bench next to me sighed loudly. “The spittin’ image, isn’t it now?”

  I’d been sitting on the bench across from Sussex Terrace, just down from the Grand Parade watching the ducks and the seabirds and trying to figure out my problems with women. The old fella had sat down so quietly next to me that I became aware of his presence only when he spoke to me.

  “Who?”

  “Whom,” he corrected me with a dry cackle. “You must forgive a retired schoolteacher, must you not?”

  “All tight, whom?”

  “Wouldn’t it be Liam O’Riada?”

  I had been staring gloomily at the dull gray waters of the Grand Canal, telling myself that I was not drunk. Perhaps I had the drink taken, in the happy phrase of this ingenious people, but, no, I was not drunk.

  Nor had I made a fool of myself because of the drink taken with Angela Smythe. It was merely a mild exchange of interested affection, nothing more than that.

  Nuala was responsible. If she hadn’t stirred up my emotions yesterday, I would not have been so open to womanly attractions. Yes, it was all Nuala’s fault.

  The truth is that I am not a practiced drinker and that with the “creature,” as the Irish call it, I am one of your short hitters.

  I bunt at best.

  So two sherries and the better part of two bottles of wine put me out of the ball game pretty quickly. Oh, yes, it was the dessert wine that really did me in.

  Hadn’t I said that already?

  I had been pondering the Grand Canal and trying to make sense out of what had happened at Julio’s. I thought I had struck a pretty good deal with Angela, though I could not quite remember all the details. I regretted my passionate embrace with her as a drunken pass; and I also regretted that I had not carried her off, figuratively speaking, for a romp in my bed at Jury’s. Love on a gloomy afternoon in Dublin.

  Nothing seemed to make very much sense.

  As I have said before, I’m not much good as a man of action. I have to think things out before I make a decision.

  When I have finally thought them out, often the decision has already been made for me by events.

  The Grand Canal, as you know if you’ve ever been to Dublin, is not all that grand, just a tiny ribbon of dirty water wending its way through Dublin, hardly as wide as the Little Calumet River picking its way through Gary, Indiana, which Dublin looked like as the mists and the rain and the smell of dead fish moved in again from the sea.

  Was the dead fish smell worse than the soap factory smell from Hammond and the oil refinery smell from Whiting?

  Hard question to answer.

  Then the old fella accosted me.

  “I look like my grandfather?”

  “Wasn’t I just saying so? Though he was even younger than you when I last saw him, wasn’t he?”

  “You knew him?”

  “And your grandmother too. Wasn’t she the most beautiful colleen in the whole County Galway in those days?”

  I closed my eyes and shook my head. Was this another part of the crazy game in which I had been caught up? Or was it a drunken dream?

  “They’re both dead now,” I said. “God be good to them.”

  “Ah, aren’t almost all of us dead? But they were great times, weren’t they?”

  “Were they?”

  “’Tis a pity they never came back. Sure, they never came to Dublin and only to Cork the morning they caught the boat and just in time, let me tell you.”

  If I could clear the alcohol out of my bloodstream, I might be able to question this visitor from the past. “How did you know I would be sitting here?”

  “Weren’t they telling me that you were after walking along the Grand Canal often? And didn’t I say to meself that if I sat here long enough, you’d come by?”

  “Who are they?

  “Themselves.” He waved his hand vaguely.

  I tried to focus on this old man. He was tall and thin, perhaps at one time as solid and strong as Pa. His suit, overcoat, tie, and hat were black, but clean, well pressed, and fashionable. His face was lined with creases and wrinkles but retained traces of past distinction. His gnarled hands, perhaps crippled with arthritis, gripped an expensive-looking black thorn stick. His blue eyes, pale blue behind thick glasses, seemed to be gazing at a distant scene. A Jesuit-educated schoolteacher, I told myself, probably a lifelong bachelor who had always regretted that he had not become a priest.

  He reminded me of pictures of Eamon De Valera when that tall, ramrod-stiff old man, almost completely blind, had been president of Ireland, one of the last survivors of the Easter Rising.

  “What did they say about me?”

  “Didn’t they say you were trying to p
uzzle out why Nell and Liam had to run away?”

  “Did they now?”

  He waved vaguely again, as if his consciousness was fading. “Terrible things happened in those days. . . . The gold and all, if you take my meaning?”

  “The gold? What gold?”

  “Roger Casement’s gold, who else’s?” He pounded his thorn stick against the canal bank as if any fool should know whose gold.

  “I see.”

  “The only man who knew where it was is long since dead, do you understand?”

  “O’Kelly?”

  “Now you’ve got it, boy.” He patted my arm briskly. “Sure, you’re a chip off the old block. Terrible thing that happened to him and Nell.”

  “Ma and Pa had happy lives in America.” Somehow I wanted to reassure this old man who seemed to be living in a world of his own dreams. Or nightmares.

  “Weren’t they entitled to be happy? Hadn’t they both fought for Ireland? Wasn’t I saying that losing Liam was almost as bad as losing Michael Collins, and some called himself a traitor too, didn’t they?”

  I sighed loudly, figuring that such a response was sufficiently noncommittal to keep the old man going.

  “Didn’t I always say that it was good for Liam and Nell that they left but bad for the rest of us?”

  “I’m sure you did.”

  He matched my sigh. “Mind you, it was not right what was done to him, not at all, at all.”

  “He never talked about it.”

  “And the little woman was as brave as ever lived in the County Galway, wasn’t she? Ah, wasn’t I half in love with her myself?”

  “That showed good taste.”

  “Didn’t it ever, sonny.” He laughed dryly and patted my arm. “Sure, who wouldn’t have been half in love with her?”

  “She was a grand woman, wasn’t she?”

  “And wasn’t she as brave as any man, braver in fact?”

  “Braver in fact.” I adopted Pa’s technique of repeating the last few words.

  “All of that. . . . Well, wasn’t I telling them that you wouldn’t be her grandson if you let them talk you out of finding out the truth?”

  Well! “But what is the truth, sir?”