“Hmm?” She swayed slightly in her easy chair. “Oh, I borrowed it from one of me flatmates.” She giggled. “I told her I might use it on you.”
“Why did you borrow it?”
“I told you that before, Dermot.” She sighed impatiently at my stupid question. “Your gram whispered in my ear that there were all kinds of dangerous things in her diaries and, like her, I ought to take precautions.”
“She did, did she?”
“She did. Now I’m going to bed and I’ll wake up in the morning and find that this is all a silly dream, won’t I?”
“It’s not a dream, Nuala.” I stood up to assist her to the door of the bedroom.
“Sure, isn’t that what you’d be saying in a dream?”
“Good night, Nuala. God bless.”
“God bless you too, Dermot.” She kissed me quickly. “Sure. It must be a dream. I wouldn’t be sleeping in your bed except in a dream, would I now?”
I flipped on the light, guided her to the bed, helped her off with her robe, eased her into the bed, and tucked the covers around her.
“Terrible soft mattress,” she murmured. “Sinful.”
I kissed her forehead. “Sleep well.”
She nodded, almost asleep already.
I tiptoed to the door out of the bedroom, turned out the light, and closed the door.
Then I helped myself to a large glass of the second bottle of Green Label I had stored away, as I had told myself, for a rainy day—which could be almost any day in Dublin town.
A beautiful woman in scanty attire in my bed and I as devoid of desire as I had ever been in my adult life.
A great Sean Connery I was.
We might have routed them without Patrick’s help. Nuala was a fearsome woman, a terror. Never fight with that one.
Nonetheless, someone would have to pay for the attack on her. I’d start tomorrow morning first thing.
A light knock on the door.
“Yes.”
“Patrick.”
I peered through the peephole in the door. Sure enough, it was Patrick, clad in the approved trench coat and black turtleneck.
“Green Label.” He smiled when he saw the bottle in my hand. “Is herself asleep?”
“She is, with the help of some of this. Want a drink yourself?”
“Wouldn’t dream of taking it from you. . . . She’s all right?”
“Pretty much.”
“Yourself?”
“I’m Sean Connery, it happens to me every day.”
“If you were 007, you’d be in there with her.”
“At as much risk to my life as her friend with the knife.”
“Which reminds me. We have recovered hers for her.” He handed a wicked-looking switchblade to me. “Better you have it than I have it.”
“The Guards will be interested in what happened?”
“I hardly think so, not the regular Guards anyway.”
“Conlon?”
“I think he’ll be very interested, though not so much as to stir out of his secret office in Dublin Castle to visit his four friends in the hospital where they’re being patched up after a fight with a rival gang over in the Liberties.”
“Not Irishtown?”
“Certainly not.” Patrick grinned thinly. “You’re a pretty fierce twosome. I’m glad I’m on your side. We’ll be keeping watch all night. Sleep well if you can.”
“I can’t. And I don’t want to.”
“Oh?”
“I’m planning an assault on Dublin Castle tomorrow. I’ll not let them get away with this.”
Patrick stared at me for a moment, weighing the costs of protecting an Irish-American madman. “I won’t try to talk you out of it. Be discreet.”
“Not a chance.”
He told me where I could find Conlon’s office at the back of the Dublin Castle complex.
–– 41 ––
“BREAKFAST, NUALA.” I pounded on the door of her—my—bedroom.
I had ordered two enormous breakfasts sent up to the suite: juice, cereal, bacon, pancakes with maple syrup (which the Irish don’t do exactly right), brown bread, scones, and lots of jam.
I listened at the door. The shower was running. I opened the door a crack and hooked on the inside door-knob a blue and gold Marquette sweatshirt and an Aran Island pullover with cap and scarf, which I had bought for my sister Linda and of which there were many more to be found in Dublin.
The shower stopped. I closed the door. “Breakfast, Nuala.”
“I’ll be right out.”
I read the Herald-Tribune. Notre Dame and the Bears had both won, a grand weekend. Brilliant.
She was true to her word—no long morning preparations for herself.
“It smells good,” she said.
I turned away from my paper. She seemed a little haggard, but much more attractive in a Marquette sweatshirt than a Notre Dame sweatshirt.
“You look grand in Marquette’s blue and gold. . . . Can you eat?”
She walked slowly over to the table where I joined her and removed the covers from the food. “I can always eat, Dermot Michael. . . . That man didn’t die, did he?”
“He did not.”
She sat down and drank her orange juice in a single gulp. “Ah, that’s good now.” She sighed contentedly.
“How are you, Nul?”
“I’m all right, Dermot, not grand.” She smiled wanly. “And certainly not brilliant, but I’m all right and I’ll be better soon. . . . Who was ringing the chimes last night?”
“St. Bart’s in Clyde Row. Prod noise pollution. After a while you get used to them.”
Her eyes twinkled. “Will I now?”
“You’re a strong woman, Nuala Anne McGrail.”
She smiled again. “I told you I could take care of myself. . . . Are these your American pancakes? Am I supposed to be pouring this syrup stuff on them?”
“You are. After breakfast we’ll go over to Dublin Castle and sort out a thing or two and then I’ll tell you the whole story.”
She nodded as she swallowed a substantial chunk of pancakes. “No rush about that. Ah, this is good now. You Yanks, I’m sorry, Irish Americans, make some nice things to eat.”
“I’m sorry about what happened last night.”
She waved my apology away. “ ’Twas not your fault, I’m sure, and no permanent harm done.”
Why won’t she be angry at me?
“You were so good and kind to me,” she continued, “taking off me bloody clothes and giving me that wonderful whiskey and putting me to bed so gentle and sweet. You’re a grand man, Dermot Michael Coyne. I don’t understand you a lot of the time, but you’re a good man.”
Instead of giving me hell, she was praising me.
“I’m not sure that I am, Nul, but thanks anyway.”
“Did you like undressing me?” She did not look up from the bacon that she had begun to demolish.
No point in denying that.
“I loved it. To undress, however partially, a beautiful and vulnerable woman whom you are protecting is a very pleasant experience, though to tell the truth there wasn’t much desire in me last night.”
She looked up and grinned. “Not a bit?”
“Only a little.” I felt my face turn hot. Hell, she was the one who was supposed to be embarrassed.
“And you liked me?”
“You already know how much I admire you. In white lingerie you’re enough to make a man wonder why he’s been a bachelor so long.”
“Ah, well”—she went back to the bacon—“then the day wasn’t a complete waste, was it now? . . . Eat your breakfast, Dermot, and stop staring at me. We have to go to the castle and then I must attend one of my classes so that they’re not thinking that I’ve gone back to Galway.”
“How will you explain where you were last night?”
“ ’Tis no problem at all, at all.” She stole some of my unconsumed pancakes. “These are quite good actually. . . . Won’t I be telling the
m that I spent the night in your bed?”
“Nuala!”
She laughed and kept on eating my bacon. “I won’t say that I spent it in bed with you, if you take me meaning, will I?”
I ate my breakfast and tried to tell myself that I did not have an enormous desire to take her back into the bedroom and claim her as my own, even if that meant I’d have to take her back to America with me.
Nuala and I walked into Dublin Castle as if we owned it, not that the dilapidated courtyard is guarded at all. The only remnant of the old castle is the record tower, the gate, and some of the wall. The rest is a hodgepodge of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings, all of them ugly, and modern construction even more ugly.
The Garda on the ground floor of the old building where Conlon hid himself was quite polite. I had dressed in my best suit and looked very much the part of the rich Yank, uh, Irish American. Nuala hesitated behind me, wanting to have as little to do with the police as possible.
“Chief Superintendent Conlon, is it, sir?”
“That’s right. Mr. Dermot Michael Coyne to see him.”
“I’ll ring him, sir.”
It was another lovely autumn morning, Dublin putting on all her charm to persuade me that it could match the glory of a Notre Dame football weekend.
Would Conlon see me? Most likely, if only to see whether I had been properly frightened by last night’s battle.
I was tense and exhilarated, ready for the snap when a blitz has been called. I was about to sack Chief Superintendent Conlon. They might try an unnecessary roughness penalty on me afterward, though that didn’t seem likely.
“You may go in, sir.” The Garda put down the phone and gave me directions to Conlon’s office in one of the back rooms of the old fortress.
“I don’t like this place at all, at all.” Nuala grimaced. “ ’Tis a bad place altogether.”
“It will take centuries to exorcise all the evil things done to Ireland here.”
When Mick Collins took possession of it from the Brits in the spring of 1922, just a couple of months before his death, it was the first time in the more than nine-hundred-year history of the city that it was not under control of an occupying power.
“You’re seven minutes late, General Collins,” the Brit said, sniffing superciliously and glancing at his watch.
“No, General,” Collins replied. “You’re seven centuries late.”
There were two women Guards in Conlon’s outer office, both working away diligently. He must be a pretty big deal. I barged right by them, now a charging end tearing in for the sack of a quarterback.
“Here, sir!” one of them shouted. “You can’t go into the chief’s office!”
“He already has,” my companion informed her.
I shoved open the door. Conlon’s office was small and dusty and old. Light filtered through a tiny window, which may have been washed last in the time of King Billy. Behind his ancient desk with his coat off, he looked exactly like what he was—an overweight, paper-shuffling bureaucrat.
I reached across the desk, pulled him to his feet, and wrapped my arm around his neck.
“You’ve no right—” He gasped.
“The hell I don’t!”
“Should I call security, Chief?” The woman Guard rushed in after me.
“I wouldn’t if I were you,” Nuala commented.
“Go ahead call them.” I tightened my grip on his throat. “I’ll have a grand story to tell them, won’t I, now?”
“Please leave us alone,” he begged her. “It will be all right.”
“The hell it will be all right,” I said when she had closed the door. “Listen to me, Conlon, and listen to me closely. One more caper like last night and I’ll break your neck. It’s real easy to break a cop’s neck. You use the grip I’ve got now and just twist, like this, see?”
He screamed, “You’re hurting me.”
“So the big bully is a coward too? I figured as much.”
“Please let go!”
“Get this, focking asshole: Not only will I kill you, I’ll cut up your wife and daughters so that no man will ever look at them except with disgust. Understand?”
I didn’t know he had any daughters but I didn’t much care about that.
“Don’t hurt them,” he screeched. “They’re innocent!”
“They’re related to a traitor, that’s enough guilt for me! You tried to hurt my woman, so your women are in danger, got it?”
I tightened my grip even more.
In truth, I had no idea how to break someone’s neck, though I could probably choke him to death. I wasn’t going to do that either. And of course I had no evil intentions about his wife and daughters—poor dear women to be stuck with an asshole like him.
“No!” he begged me. “Please, no!”
He was quaking in terror now, the way quarterbacks are supposed to quake when Richard Dent closes in on them.
I pulled Nuala’s switchblade out of my suit pocket and held it at his throat. “Your thugs were going to cut her last night. Why don’t I slice you up a wee bit so you won’t forget my warning!”
“No!” he begged again. “It won’t happen ever again!”
Aha, confession, just what I wanted.
“Yeah”—I held the blade against his ear—“maybe just cut off an ear, what’ do you think?”
“They were told not to disfigure her, just a little cut! Please!”
I touched his scalp with the point of the blade and he began to blubber. I threw him into the corner of his office where he collapsed like a garbage bag.
“This is just a hint of what I can do to you if I want to, Conlon. Don’t ever, ever try to push me around again, understand!”
“I won’t! I won’t!” he sobbed. “ ’Twas all a terrible mistake!”
“You’d better believe it was! Come on, Nul, let’s get out of this shite house!”
Dutifully she trailed along after me.
The two women Guards were crying in the outer office.
“You can’t get away with this!” one of them screamed at me.
“Ah, but we can,” Nuala said, dismissing her.
Dear God, she really is Grace O’Malley returned from the dead, not Ma but a pirate queen.
Most women would have reproved me for my violence. Nuala didn’t seemed to mind.
“Was that necessary?” she asked me as we reentered the courtyard.
“It was, Nuala. They have been trying to frighten me. Now that they know that the only result is I get meaner, I think they’ll leave us alone.”
That notion was a miscalculation if I ever made one.
“You’re a good bluffer, Dermot Michael Coyne,” she said as we stomped out of Dublin Castle. “You had those gobshites scared to death.”
“Bluffing, was I?”
“Sure you were, but wasn’t it a good act? I don’t think we’ll have any trouble with him again, not at all.”
I didn’t even have to explain why I had sacked Conlon.
Patrick was leaning against the outside wall, waiting for us.
“Good morning, Dermot,” he said cheerfully. “Have a pleasant morning so far?”
“Reasonably pleasant all things considered.”
“I’m glad to hear it.” He smiled. “And I believe I met this young woman last night, at the wrong end of a trash can. I’m Patrick, Nuala Anne. Nice to meet you in the daylight.”
“Dustbin,” she murmured.
“Quite right, two peoples separated by a common language, as another Irishman said, and himself a Protestant, for which God forgive him.”
“You’re Mick Collins.” Nuala shied away from him like a skittish filly.
Patrick’s face froze. “Mick Collins died of a single bullet wound in the back of his neck on August 22, 1922.”
“You look just like him!” She pointed at him. “Just like him.”
“Lots of Irish and Irish Americans do, Nuala. My name is Patrick.”
“If you
’re not Mick Collins, you’re a relative.” We were all standing still near the entrance of the castle. Nuala was still pointing at him.
“I’m not even Irish.” He managed to smile again. “I’m an Irish American, a Yank, as you would say.”
“You’ve come back to take vengeance on those who killed you!” Nuala was positively terrified.
“Nuala!” I said. “You’re letting yourself be carried away!”
She hardly noticed me. “I know what I know.”
“In my line of work, my dear”—he grinned—“we don’t have time for personal vendettas.”
“I don’t mind if you have your revenge,” she said. “It’s only that you scare me.”
He took her arm to guide her down the sidewalk of Dame Street and away from the castle. “As your man Dermot would tell you, Nuala, the rules of our little game are that you and he don’t ask me any questions unless I indicate I’m ready to answer them. Understand?”
She glanced at me, as if seeing me for the first time. “Yes, Patrick,” she said slowly. “I guess I’m frazzled this morning. I’m sorry.”
“Not at all, my dear.” He relinquished her arm to me. “I’m sure last night was a very trying experience.”
So we had survived that weird little interlude.
Patrick did look like Michael Collins, astonishingly like him. Maybe he was a relative. I would never persuade Nuala that he was not. When she thought she smelled revenge in the air, she would not be talked out of it.
Maybe she was right.
“I think I can assure you”—Patrick was his usual bright self again—“that our opponents are properly terrified of you, Dermot. They now believe that you have a large group of very talented agents at your beck and call, which is not altogether false, is it? Their present intent is to have nothing more to do with you, an intent that I suspect you strongly reinforced in your little têteâ-tête with the super just now.”
“Bent cop!”
“Quite, but not part of the conspiracy. Paid help, if you take my meaning. In any case, should there be any change in their plans, we will be made aware of it and will pass on our information to you. Naturally, we shall continue to be in, ah, attendance seems to be the right word, doesn’t it?”
“We might be planning to go to Cork and Galway on the weekend.”
“Are you now?” He smiled, a Mick Collins smile, I was sure. “I see no reason not to. Who knows who may bump into us out here, though not if we’re careful enough? Leaving Friday?”
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