Irish Gold

by Andrew M. Greeley

  Again they had underestimated me, or rather the capacity of a defensive end to absorb pain when he learned from his Japanese martial arts master how to concentrate it temporarily out of existence. There were five men in the old chapel. Conlon still held his billy club and the giant guard seemed firmly in charge of his AK-47. Nolan and Hughes were apparently unarmed and looked scared. Keane carried no visible weapon.

  I could probably take care of them, battered ribs and aching gut and all, if the Russian weapon wasn’t pointed at Nuala.

  She seemed tense but composed. What did she have up her sleeve now?

  Don’t rush the gun, woman.

  “You recognize these documents, don’t you, Dermot? Your grandmother’s diaries, are they not? We had to remove them, illegally, I fear, from the safe at the hotel. A robbery by the IRA is our explanation. Clever, ah? We are going to offer them as a small sacrifice to whatever deities may occupy this place of worship. That should end any question of a search for buried treasure, shouldn’t it?”

  Only if there were no copies in Chicago.

  “Answer the minister.” Conlon jammed his club into my stomach.

  “I guess it will.”

  He lighted his cigarette lighter and touched one of the notebooks. The old paper burned quickly.

  “You see how rapidly they burn.” Keane’s face lit up in a demonic grin. “The past is finished now, isn’t it?”

  It would take more than that to burn Ma’s fierce spirit.

  “I guess so.”

  Nuala’s eyes were warning me: Don’t tell him about the copies.

  Grand.

  A statue of some long-forgotten saint stood just above the head of the man with the gun. On the edge of the pedestal, half on, half off, a rock rested, a hunk of the stone from which the monastery had been built. It had probably broken away from the roof long ago. If it moved a fraction of an inch, it would topple on the head of the gunman.

  Not much hope there. The rock probably had been in the same position for half a thousand years.

  Just the same, I tried to will that it would fall.

  “Isn’t it a pretty fire, my dear?”

  “You’re a focking eejit,” she said calmly.

  “We’ll have to teach you better manners before this little interlude is over.”

  “You promised there’d be none of that,” Dr. Hughes pleaded.

  He spoke with a clipped Oxford accent. A distinguished-looking gray-haired man in a trench coat, his pale face was tight with anxiety. Maybe he could be of some use.

  “That’s right, Brendan,” Professor Nolan, the man who had betrayed me in the first place, begged. “Only the minimum necessary violence.”

  He was short and round and rubicund, a genial Irish academic caught up in a game that was too cute for him by half.

  “Absolutely. Only the minimum necessary. But then who is to say what is necessary, if you take me meaning.”

  Where was Patrick? They couldn’t have abandoned us, could they?

  In the last desperate moment I would have to rush the man with the automatic weapon. I must wait till something distracted him—if something ever did.

  “Now then,” Keane continued leisurely. “Suppose you tell us exactly what ancient history you have gleaned from this foolish search of yours? Come, Dermot, I’m sure you don’t want your young friend to suffer the same, ah, annoyances you’ve suffered.”

  We must not let them know what we had discovered. Maybe they would release us and forget the whole matter. That’s what Nuala was trying to signal me.

  “We know who killed Michael Collins,” I began tentatively. “And who stole Casement’s gold.”

  Nuala nodded slightly.

  “And we know that the killer and the thief were the same man and how he died. We don’t know who paid him off and where the gold is hidden.”

  “Wasn’t I telling you the same thing?” Nuala spoke contemptuously. “And yourself reading the translations on the hard disk of the computer.”

  What translations? Hadn’t she said she’d erased them?

  Later on, when I tried to figure everything out, I realized that she had left on the disk sanitized translations to deceive anyone who might try to read them.

  Dear God, what a woman’

  “I understand, my dear. However, can I be certain that those are accurate translations?”

  “And yourself just burning the diary like an eejit?”

  He slapped her. “Mind your manners, slut!”

  “Here, now,” Hughes protested. “There’s no cause for that.”

  “There’s cause for whatever I want there to be cause,” Keane yelled at his colleague. “I’ll do what I want to do.”

  “Settle down, Brendan,” fat little Professor Nolan begged. “The diaries are gone. Even if the translations have been edited, and these two little fools are not smart enough to think of that, they can’t prove anything. Let’s drop it all and get out of here.”

  They had not burned the first notebook of the diary. That was in my room at Salt Hill.

  “Slowly, slowly, Seamus, me good friend. Am I not thinking that there might be more of the translations in Miss McGrail’s pretty little head? Ought we not, ah, clear that hard disk too?”

  “No!” the other two pleaded.

  “No choice,” Conlon agreed with his patron. “After we’re having a little fun with her. Sure, it would be a shame to waste all them good looks, wouldn’t it now?”

  I continued to act as if I were dazed and disoriented, which wasn’t very difficult given my condition. The rock above the gunman’s head seemed to move a fraction of an inch. Probably my imagination.

  Nuala stood up slowly; the gunman moved the muzzle of the gun to stay with her.

  Outside the wind was howling more loudly and the rain beating down more fiercely.

  “All right, Mr. Minister,” she said calmly. “I’ll tell you the whole truth. Copies of those diaries are safe in another country. Those were edited translations you read on the computer. But the real translations and the floppy disks that contain them are in the hands of the bishop of Galway.”

  She’d made three backup disks, had she?

  “Very clever, my dear.” Keane sneered. “But you don’t expect me to believe that, do you?”

  “As you please, Mr. Minister. Of course, we know where the gold is and who gave the order of the death of Michael Collins. So does His Lordship, Bishop Hayes. At this very moment he is in the cave with your very good friends, the minister of justice and the commissioner of the Civic Guards.”

  “Brilliantly acted, Nuala, grand altogether. But, alas for you and your battered hero, quite untrue.”

  “His Lordship will give the minister and the commissioner the translations and you and your friends will be finished.”

  Keane cackled gleefully. “I ask you, Seamus, LeMont, isn’t she wonderful?”

  “What if she’s telling the truth?” Hughes sputtered.

  The man with the AK-47 was confused by the argument. He lowered the muzzle of the weapon a fraction of an inch. The play was blitz and the object was a sack.

  “Oh, she’s not telling the truth at all. Come, Nuala, admit to these nice gentlemen that you’re acting and make the end easier on yourself.”

  “Look in me purse there on the floor.” She gestured at the large shoulder bag. “You’ll find a bar of gold in it.”

  Frantically Keane lunged at the purse and tore it open. Sure enough, he pulled out a bar of gold.

  “Bitch!” he screamed insanely. “Cunt!”

  “We’re finished.” Nolan moaned. “And the minister of justice hating your guts!”

  The muzzle of the gun dropped lower. I tensed for my blitz.

  Keane swung around, bar in hand, as if to hit Nuala with it.

  She stepped back.

  “Among the documents the bishop has given to the minister and the commissioner is one that you didn’t know we had—a list of the members of the Consort of St. George and St
. Patrick. Your names are all on it. So is Longwood-Jones’s. You’ll recognize the other names: MacCarthy, Waldron, Rollins, Harcourt, Crawford, McMahon, Clifford, Jackson, Smithers, Clinton, O’Meara, Nicholson, Joyce, Tierney, Clancy, Roberts. . . . Your name isn’t on it, Chief Superintendent, so I guess you’re just a mercenary. But they know about you too.”

  Keane stepped away from her as if from a witch or a demon, gold bar in one hand, her purse in the other. “You’re lying! None of it’s true!”

  The muzzle of the automatic weapon was almost in a position where I could blitz the gunman with a fifty-fifty chance of survival.

  “Oh, it’s true, Mr. Minister. It’s all true,” Nuala went on implacably. “Incidentally, if you’ll take out the photo that’s also in me purse, you’ll find that it is very interesting. It’s only a Xerox copy His Lordship made of the original, but it’s clear enough.”

  Keane dropped the gold bar and frantically tore out of the purse a piece of paper.

  “Oh, my God!” he shouted, clasping his hand to his forehead.

  The two other members of the Consort rushed to look over his shoulders.

  One more second and I rush the gunman.

  “That’s right!” Nuala was triumphant. “The man who ordered the death of Michael Collins. Your great focking British superhero, Winston Spencer Churchill!”

  –– 63 ––

  [Translator’s Note: This entry, made in January of 1950, was attached to the final page of the first notebook, glued to the back of it in fact, and written on thin paper, so that you wouldn’t even know it was there unless you decided to look for it. It is written in English, not Irish like the first book of the diary, and in American script, not the old Irish style she used in the early years. I’m not sure when she changed to English. But the answer to that question is in the copies Father George Coyne has in America.]

  It’s time now that I record the rest of the conversation I had with your man that day at the pub near Lettermullen, with Time making him the “Man of the Half Century,” which I suppose he is, though I think FDR might have been a better choice. I’ll never forget a word of that conversation.

  “He was ready to die for Ireland,” he says. “I am ready to die for England. I suppose you Irish feel that no one else in the world is capable of patriotism. I assure you that, as in so many other matters, you are quite in error.”

  “What does patriotism have to do with murder?”

  “He ordered the murder of my friend Sir Henry Wilson just as I ordered his murder. . . . You Irish are quite incapable of governing yourselves for long. This foolish civil war demonstrates that. We gave you the best agreement we could possibly permit. As it is, our government will probably fall before long because of it. Collins was the one man who could hold the country together for a while, but he too would have failed. Then there would be anarchy and eventually some military dictatorship that would be hostile to England.”

  He had a fine speaking voice, which everyone in the world knows now, and a grand flair with words.

  “So?” I’m still gripping my poker and wondering about whether I ought to use it on him too.

  “Do not think we came to Ireland because there was much wealth to be had here. Oh, a few men made a lot of money at various times, and others led a comfortable life. But England did not need Ireland for that. Our purposes from King John on were always defensive.”

  “Defensive?” I snort.

  “You are not well educated, child, so you cannot understand. England cannot be safe if there is a hostile government in Ireland. Were not your rebels allied with the Hun during the war? And Bonaparte a hundred years ago? We must control Ireland, we must maintain peace here by force if necessary for our own protection, indeed for our own survival.”

  “Indeed!”

  “Yes, indeed! There will come another war with the Hun, probably in my lifetime. If we do not control Ireland, then the Hun will make common cause with whatever demagogue happens to be in power here and England will be vulnerable. I cannot permit that to happen!”

  “How do you know that we’ll be on the side of the Germans?”

  “Because they will take advantage of your weaknesses, which everyone in the world knows. Even if through some miracle they do not occupy all of Ireland, your government, such as it may be, will deny us the use of the ports which the treaty promised. I saw that as soon as I read the accounts of the absurd debate in your Dáil. The unterseeboots will prowl like wolves again, devouring all that they can. The lives of thousands of English and American, and, yes, Irish men will be lost because of Irish stubbornness. I cannot permit that to happen.”

  You can image the drama in his voice as he said those words. Blood, sweat, toil, and tears indeed.

  “So why did Collins have to die?”

  “Because when your young fools tear the country apart, as they will now that he’s gone, the whole world and most of the Irish people will know that this land cannot govern itself, and there will be little resistance to our restoring order.”

  Well, he was wrong or mostly wrong, wasn’t he now?

  But almost thirty years later and myself a grandma several times over, I’ve maybe learned a few things. God knows he’s an English patriot and there’s nothing wrong with that. And he was right about the Germans. And about the treaty ports. He even claims to have thought about seizing them during the war, but he wouldn’t have done that because we Americans would not have tolerated it. Yet I can see his point. The Mick was a killer and so is your man, though the Mick never ordered the death and destruction of a hundred thousand people in the bombing of Dresden at the end of the war, just to keep Stalin happy. They’re all idiots, I say now, just as I did then.

  But I suppose that many poor boys did die because De Valera wouldn’t turn over the treaty ports—though in most other ways the Irish government, my husband tells me, cooperated closely with the British and us.

  So I don’t know any more who’s right and who’s wrong. I guess we all do what we think we have to do and maybe deceive ourselves into thinking that we’re completely right and they (whoever they are) are completely wrong.

  But the worst irony of all is that if the Big Fella had been alive and in charge in Dublin instead of the Long Fella, he would have honored the treaty and opened the treaty ports to the British and us. Your man himself was responsible for all the sailors who died.

  I wonder if he ever realized that.

  –– 64 ––

  “I’LL STRANGLE you, bitch.” Keane jumped across the room and dug his fingers into Nuala’s throat. “You’ve ruined everything!”

  The man with the AK-47 snapped back to awareness and pointed the gun at me. It would not be quite so easy to sack him. I would almost certainly be killed.

  Where was Patrick?

  The rock above the gunman seemed to be tilting. It must be my pain-crazed imagination.

  Nuala was screaming and fighting back furiously. She kicked and punched and tried to knee him, but Keane, now thoroughly demented, continued to squeeze at her windpipe.

  “Stop, Keane,” Nolan begged. “I say, stop. We’ll be accused of murder!”

  “Die, bitch!”

  I’d have to try to sack the gunman anyhow.

  The rock on the ledge above his head tilted dangerously.

  I took a deep breath. Nuala was turning purple and her screams were gagging. Here goes!

  The rock tumbled and banged the giant’s head. He dropped the gun and collapsed.

  Ignoring the ten thousand needles of pain that raced through my body, I rushed for the gun. Conlon came at me with his billy club.

  I turned and charged him. I didn’t have a helmet on, but spearing a man in his gut is pretty effective with a hard Irish head.

  Conlon fell back and the breath rushed out of his body. I grabbed for the club and wrestled it out of his hands. He reached inside his jacket for his gun. I brought the club down on his shoulder. He screamed with pain and doubled up.

  Brok
en.

  Well, too bad for him. I hardly noticed my own spasms of pain.

  I slugged Conlon in the stomach to make sure he’d be out of action for the next few moments.

  Behind me, Nuala was weakening. In a few moments she would be on the edge of death.

  No way!

  I slammed the club viciously down on Keane’s shoulder. He shrieked with pain and released her. He tried to grab for something in his jacket, so I broke his other shoulder.

  Mess with my woman, will you?

  Hughes and Nolan were cowering in a corner. One of the two guards from outside appeared in the doorway, drawn by the screams of the two agonized men.

  Before he could grasp what had happened and lift his gun, I hit him in the face with my club. He dropped his gun and fell to his knees, hands over his face, yelling with pain as blood poured from his nose.

  I looked around for the other two members of the Consortium.

  Nuala was pointing the AK-47 at them. “One move and I’ll send the lot of you to hell where you belong!”

  Nothing wrong with Grace O’Malley’s voice, it seemed. A little hoarse maybe.

  I advanced on them, vaguely thinking of bashing them with my club. Just for the hell of it.

  Then I remembered the other guard. I had a bit to settle with him.

  It was too late for that final revenge.

  Feet pattered outside. Four men, in black and wearing ski masks, suddenly were in the room. They waved Uzis like they knew how to use them.

  “Good afternoon, Dermot. The Seventh Cavalry again. My, you’ve made your usual mess, I see. The odd lot of people screaming.”

  “The man outside!”

  “Not to fear. We neutralized him . . . and, ah, Nuala, my dear, if you’d be so good to give that weapon to one of my colleagues. You could hurt someone with it.”

  “Yes, Patrick Michael . . . and don’t be angry with me, Dermot! Herself told me to tell the bishop!”

  –– 65 ––

  [Not dated]

  I think this will be my last entry. I looked at the first one over seventy years ago. What a passionate little eejit that child was. Still, I have a soft spot in my heart for her. She wanted happiness and she seized it when she could and never looked back.