“Most people couldn’t tell the difference, either.”
“Your young woman was right on.”
“John Culhane, in matters like this, she always is.”
I went back to my apartment and, since I had been solemnly forbidden to call Nuala at work, returned to my stories.
On both the five- and six-o’clock news, the commander mentioned Nuala by name as the one who had solved the case. “If she ever gets tired of being an accountant, we’ll have a job for her at Area Six.”
The feds were going to take the case against Julia Armacost. The United States Attorney said that so far she had been very candid and very cooperative, and naturally that would be taken into account.
My phone rang.
“Is this the famous celebrity detective?” I said on picking it up.
“Och, Dermot, he shouldn’t have mentioned me name at all, at all, should he?”
Translated, that meant she was delighted.
“You deserve all the credit, Nuala, especially after all you’ve been through.”
“I won’t be able to show me face at the office tomorrow, will I now?”
“I imagine you can work up your courage and do it just the same.”
“Wasn’t it grand, Dermot Michael, altogether grand!”
Having gone through the motions of protesting, she was now free to delight in it. She added, “They’ll still have to haul in that gobshite Billy Hernon.”
“They’ll get him eventually.”
“I hope so … . Can we get together tomorrow night?”
“I was hoping you’d ask that … . Sure we can!”
“I’ll call you from work in the late afternoon, and you can tell me where you’ll meet me.”
“Grand!” I replied.
She didn’t say she loved me, and I didn’t say that to her.
There was still another conspiracy working that we hadn’t thought about.
16
I BEGAN to worry about Nuala when I had not heard from her at a quarter to five. I called her office, despite the threat of permanent interdict reserved to the Holy Father himself.
“Nuala didn’t come in today, Mr. Coyne.”
“Did she call in?”
“No. It’s not like her. She’s always super responsible.”
“You called her?”
“Yes, we did. There was no answer. We kind of think she slept in and was entitled to it.”
“Thanks.”
I then punched her phone number.
A long ring and no answer.
I called Reliable. They patched me through to Joannie.
“Joannie, have you seen Nuala?”
“No, Mr. Coyne. I have been around all day, but she didn’t come out of her apartment after Mass. I figured she wanted to escape all the celebrity.”
“She didn’t call her office and she didn’t call me and she doesn’t answer the phone.”
“My Gold!”
“Did you see her go into the house, Joannie?”
“Not exactly, Mr. Coyne. I stayed behind to light a candle. She always runs across the street to her apartment; she’s rushing all the time.”
“Check the apartment and call me back.”
In five minutes, she was back on the line.
“She’s not in there. I’ll try to find out where she is. I’ll be back.”
Billy Hernon, I thought. He’s got her. I’ll tear the bastard apart.
I called Area Six. John Culhane was still in his office.
“Billy Hernon’s got Nuala.”
“He’s not in the country, Dermot. What’s happened?
I told him.
“It sounds more like our friend Zack O’Hara. I’ll check with those assholes at Immigration.”
He called back in fifteen minutes while I planned how I’d deck Zack O’Hara.
“I was right. They lifted her this morning, took away her visa, and shipped her off on Delta. That’s against the law.”
“That doesn’t seem to matter.”
“Your sister can get a writ ordering them to return her. That should be no problem. Then she can file a huge damage suit. They can’t do this to her.”
But they had.
That morning when Nuala came out of St. Josephat’s, still in her running clothes, two Immigration agents picked her up, handcuffed her and dragged her into a car. The took away her Morrison visa, which she always carried in her purse. They held her in the tank at the Federal Correction Center at the south end of the Loop, still handcuffed, till noon. Then they took her to O’Hare and put her on the 3:15 Delta flight to Atlanta and the 6:15 flight to Dublin. They removed the handcuffs only a few minutes before the Dublin plane took off. She was already over the Atlantic before I knew she was missing.
Everyone would say in the days and weeks ahead that they can’t do what they did. But somehow that didn’t seem to mean anything.
Ten minutes later, Joannie called with new information. Her voice was strained with grief.
“Two people actually saw these men in a government car kidnap her. They didn’t want to say anything to anyone about it because they figured, if it was the government, it was all right … . It’s all my fault, Mr. Coyne. I’m so sorry.”
Though I was very angry at the woman, I held my tongue. It was not her fault at all. In this country, no one grabs women coming out of church in broad daylight. Except the government. Not even the Outfit would dare do that.
“It wasn’t your fault, Joannie,” I said. “No one could possibly have expected them to pull a trick like that. Don’t blame yourself. We’ll get her back.”
“Thank you, Mr. Coyne,” she sobbed. “Thank you.”
I called Cindy.
“Hurley residence,” said a very polite little boy voice.
“Marty, this is Uncle Dermot … .”
“Hi, Uncle Dermot.”
“May I speak to your mother?”
“Just a moment, Uncle Dermot. I’ll see if she’s home.”
“Hi, Dermot! The little rascal never lets anyone talk to me without clearing it with me first. Too much television, I think.”
“They’ve lifted Nuala,” I said.
“What? Who?”
“Immigration. Presumably with the help of Zack O’Hara. More likely at his instigation.”
“Is she down at the Federal Correctional Center?”
“She’s on her way back to Ireland!”
“They can’t do that!”
“Cindy, they have done it!”
“They won’t get away with it. I’ll have her back inside of a week, at the most. When does she get home?”
I ran the numbers through my head. They didn’t come out right.
“Let me see, the plane probably gets to Dublin between nine and ten tomorrow morning their time. If they left her any of her money, she’ll ride the bus into the city and take the train to Galway. The bus and the train will take between four and five hours. Then she’ll have to take another bus from Galway out to Carraroe. They don’t run very often.”
“Can’t her parents pick her up?”
“Cindy, all they have is a bicycle and a donkey cart.”
“They really are poor?”
“Very.”
“So what time will that be?”
“Maybe six o’clock their time. Noon our time.”
“Damn, I can’t go into Federal Court with a petition till the day after tomorrow. I’ll have to interview her first.”
“What will you ask for?”
“An order mandating the State Department to return her Morrison visa and an injunction to the INS to cease and desist their harassment of her. We’ll get her back, Dermot, never fear. They can’t get away with it.”
That’s what everyone kept saying.
“Can I direct-dial to her house?”
“It’s a modern country, Cindy. Even the people who own nothing more than a donkey cart can direct-dial anywhere in the world.
The McGrails had such a p
hone because I had installed one when Nuala came to America and persuaded the Irish Ministry of Post and Communications to send the bill to me every month.
“What is it?”
I told her.
“I’ll call her at noon our time.
“Let me call her first. She may need some persuasion to fight back.”
“Hell, Dermot, whether she wants to come is up to her. We still have to make them give back her visa.”
“Fine, but I’d better talk to her first. I’ll call you.”
“OK. Tell her we can’t let them get away with this.”
“Is this routine for them?”
“Sure. They pick up a Mexican or a Pole or an Asian in one of their sweeps and the man or woman has a green card. They think the person has gone back to the native land and then come in here illegally a second time, they take the card and ship him home. They don’t need to have much proof. Often they don’t need any proof. The poor guy doesn’t know any better. In his life, government is always arbitrary. No one bothers to tell them that they have a right to a lawyer and an appeal to an immigration court.”
“And they get away with it?”
“They’re protecting their country’s borders, little bro—who cares how? Pick up something like a Morrison visa, that’s pushing their luck a little far. Now get some sleep.”
“Sure.”
Instead of trying to sleep, I put on walking shoes and, in T-shirt and shorts, walked north along the lakeshore as far as Loyola University and then walked back, maybe fifteen or sixteen miles. I returned about midnight, dehydrated and exhausted, took a shower, and slept a few hours.
Everyone in the family, including Prester George, called to promise me that they would get her back.
“We’ll get the cardinal to issue a statement condemning them,” he said. “We’ll go after them tooth and nail.”
The Priest is as fierce a fighter as I am when he gets his Irish up.
Tom (psychiatrist) said that the action was the kind that concentration-camp guards used to pull in Nazi Germany. His wife Tracy, a woman with her own very successful public-relations firm, told me that she had spoken to Cindy and that she would launch a national campaign on Nuala’s behalf.
They all said that the opposition couldn’t get away with it. I was not so sure. I’d seen enough xenophobia in the country in the last two years to realize that it was a magic potion for demagogues.
Promptly at high noon, I punched in the number of the little cottage in Cararoe.
A familiar voice greeted me with a burst of musical Irish words.
“Nuala?”
She continued to speak the language of the Gaeltacht.
“It’s Dermot,” I said. “Would you ever mind speaking English?”
“Glory be to God, Derm, how did you know where I was?”
“Commander Culhane found about what was done to you.”
“I just this minute came into the house. I’m destroyed altogether. Me ma and da haven’t come in yet. Won’t they be surprised!”
“Did they take your Morrison visa, Nuala?”
“They did, Derm,” she said with a weary sigh. “They kept me in handcuffs from right after Mass in the morning till the plane left Atlanta, twelve hours later.”
“Don’t worry about it, Nuala. First thing tomorrow morning, Cindy is going to go into a federal court with a petition demanding that the State Department give you back your visa and that Immigration readmit you to the country.”
“I’m tired of fighting them, Dermot, and I’m tired of a country where they can do such things to you because you’re a foreigner. I don’t want to come back. I’m so tired and so mixed up, I just want to be left alone.”
I had been afraid of that reaction.
“That’s a decision you must make for yourself, though if you decide to stay there, you’ll disappoint a lot of us and break a few hearts, mine included. However, you have to let us fight them if only to prevent them from doing what they did to you to others. Let us get your visa back, and then make up your mind.”
“I don’t know, Dermot. It’s been a terrible three months for me. I don’t think I belong over there. I know I don’t. I belong here in Cararoe.”
“Cindy will call you in a few minutes. Promise me that you’ll talk to her.”
She thought about it, sighed, and said, “I’ll always talk to Cindy, Dermot.”
“I love you, Nuala Anne.”
She sighed again. “I love you, too, Dermot Michael.”
I called Cindy on her telecommute line.
“Dermot, Cindy. I just talked to her. She’s a wreck, exhausted, battered, jet fatigued. She’s tired of fighting. As we knew they would, they lifted her visa. She said she’d talk to you.”
“I’ll call her right away and get back to you.”
A half-hour later, Cindy called back.
“I had a hard time with her, Dermot. She is, as I hardly need tell you, a very strong-minded young woman. Those bastards traumatized her. I think we’ll go after them with damage suits—the head of the Chicago office and the whole INS. Anyway, she agreed to at least tell me what happened and let us fight so she could come back if she wanted to. That’s only fair, she says. It was a hard fight to get her Irish up.”
“I know.”
“Anyway, she did let me interview her and she did give me all the facts I need. I’m going into the Federal Court in the Dirksen Building tomorrow morning and asking for emergency relief. We may have her visa back by the end of the day. Tracy has scheduled a press conference for ten o’clock, and we intend to go after the whole lot of them.”
It was a hell of a press conference.
Cindy started out by saying, “The right to due process of law was inherent in the human condition. The framers of the Constitution had merely made it explicit. The whole history of American jurisprudence left little doubt that the right to due process belonged to everyone who lived within our borders. We are not—and never have been—a country which yields to its police agencies the power to abrogate the right to due process. When they do so, immediate action must be taken. The rights of any one person, immigrant or native born, citizen or legal resident, are the rights of everyone. When any of us lose a right, all of us do. When the storm troopers violate Ms. McGrail’s rights, they violate the rights of all of us. Everyone who hears my voice was violated yesterday, when governmentpaid storm troops brutally seized Ms. McGrail in front of St. Josephat’s Church after the morning Mass. What sort of country are we, anyhow? Are we a country in which innocent young women are kidnapped in front of their churches, held without benefit of legal counsel, and expelled from a country in which they have every legal right to be?
“There can be no doubt that under some circumstances the government can lift the visas of those who are not yet citizens. It can do so only when it permits them legal recourse, first to immigration courts and then to the federal judiciary. There are enough cases to leave little doubt of that. I have already cited several score of them in my brief.
“Even if Ms. McGrail were guilty of some heinous crime, she would still have a right to a hearing. However, no charges have been made on the public record against her. Of what was she guilty? She is a hardworking employee of Arthur Andersen, a lovely vocalist, a delighted and dedicated Chicagoan. Everyone who knows her will sing her praises. What can she possibly have done?
“I will tell you what she has done, gentle persons: She has shown up our state’s attorney and wannabe future governor by solving the mystery of a crime that, in his cement-headed stubbornness, he was unable to solve, save by arresting a group of totally harmless immigrants. Doubtless, Mr. O’Hara will deny this. Nonetheless, we propose to prove that the men who kidnapped Ms. McGrail were in fact Mr. O’Hara’s agents working inside the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
“I presume these agents and their supervisors will plead that they expel people like this every day. If that be the case, then the harm done to the rights of all of us i
s enormous. There are perhaps times when clearly invalid or forged or doctored green cards may be lifted. Even then, the people so sanctioned have the right to appeal of which they are often not informed. But Morrison visa? There can be no question of the validity of that visa.
“Therefore, I am initiating the following actions:
“In a few moments I will go into a Federal Courtroom and ask for emergency relief in the form of an immediate order to the State Department to reissue a visa to Ms. McGrail. Tomorrow I will file suits in the Federal District court for Northern Illinois seeking damages of one million dollars against each of the following defendants: the Chicago director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the State’s Attorney of Cook County, the Immigration and Naturalization Service as a corporate body, and the two agents who kidnapped and brutalized her.”
Thus did the firestorm start. Tracy saw that it continued to burn.
The story made national television that night—all four networks—with a clip of Nuala’s statement on her first release, denials from the state’s attorney, a statement from the Chicago Director of the INS that for the moment he was standing by his agents and from the INS office in Washington that they were awaiting a local investigation.
The decisions by the latter two to defend their bureaucracy were serious errors. They could have put out the firestorm then and there by ordering that the visa be returned to Nuala. But in times of crisis, bureaucrats don’t do good things. Rather they do the things they do well.
On local TV, the mayor, the cardinal, the presiding partner of Arthur Andersen, the priest from her parish, and Commander John Culhane spoke in praise of Nuala.
None of this was by chance. Tracy had created a powerful first impression that would be hard to replace, even if she had done nothing else. As time went on, she did much more.
We had bad luck, however in the Federal Court for the Northern District of Illinois.
“We drew the worst possible judge, Dermot. Thomas Winthrop Manley. He is a supercilious, egotistic, fussy, mean-spirited Republican.”
In my family it is the last word which is the worst of them all.
“Will he rule against us?”
Irish Lace Page 27