Hours of Gladness Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC

  UNREELING

  TINSEL TOWN

  HAPPY DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN

  DAMSEL IN DISTRESS

  WELCOME TO PARADISE BEACH

  HOME THOUGHTS FROM ABROAD

  THERE WILL ALWAYS BE AN ENGLAND

  A THOUSAND WELCOMES, ALMOST

  LONG LIVE THE REVOLUTION

  SHOOT ’EM UP

  A MAN FOR ALL SERMONS

  MICK OF THE WOODS

  WHEN IRISH EYES START SMILING

  AT HOME WITH MRS. LAZARUS

  BURIAL PARTY

  MIDNIGHT MERRY-GO-ROUND

  STRANGERS IN THE NIGHT

  NOW WE ARE ENEMIES

  THIS IS THE END MY FRIEND

  IRISH EYES UNSMILING

  LOVE IS A SOMETIME THING

  THE REVENGER’S TRAGEDY

  BY THE WATERS OF BABYLON

  GLITZ

  PILGRIMAGE

  PRAY FOR US SINNERS NOW AND AT THE HOUR OF OUR DEATHS

  MARCHING ORDERS

  A SLIP OF THE TONGUE

  SPIRITUAL TRANSACTION

  POSSESSION

  LOVE AMONG THE RUINS

  COME ALL YE

  A TERRIBLE BEAUTY

  VICTORY AT SEA

  THE OPEN BOAT

  SUCH DEVILS ARE DRIVEN OUT ONLY BY PRAYER AND FASTING

  FATHER, OH, FATHER, COME THROUGH FOR ME NOW

  THE IRON CHANCELLOR

  SWEATING IT OUT

  RENDEZVOUS

  LOVE IN THE SHADOWS

  APOCALYSPE NOW

  A CYNIC’S TEARS

  HAIL AND FAREWELL

  ALSO BY THOMAS FLEMING FROM TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES

  Praise

  Copyright Page

  To Dave and Sharon

  I am of Ireland,

  And the Holy Land of Ireland

  —William Butler Yeats

  A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC

  “Mick. Rose just called. You better go get ’im.”

  It was Tom Brannigan, the night sergeant. Michael Peter Ignatius O’Day, known to everyone in Paradise Beach as Mick, was checking the last empty house on Leeds Point. A northeast wind was coming off the ocean, carrying icy rain and spray with it. He could see the combers lifting their white manes in the darkness. It was cold enough outside to freeze your hand to the metal skin of the police car, if you were dumb enough to touch it for more than twenty seconds.

  Was Brannigan okay? Did he have the tape off? All radio communications of the Paradise Beach Police Department were recorded. It was one of many ways that Chief William P. (for Patrick) O’Toole guaranteed that nobody was on the take from some Mafia slime or one of their casino front men in Atlantic City. Being Irish, O’Toole understood that there were times when the equipment should be turned off, and he made sure it contained the appropriate switches.

  Mick decided Tom Brannigan was still okay, in spite of having a wife who had joined some sort of charismatic Catholic group who thought you could talk directly to Jesus. She had been going nuts ever since their oldest son, Jack, got it in the Granada show.

  “Where is he?”

  “At Rose’s place,” Brannigan said. Even with the tape off, he was taking no chances. Three or four retired bozos listened to the police radio on shortwave sets.

  “I just checked Leeds. Everything’s like a cemetery as usual.”

  “No sign of the devil?”

  “He moved to Atlantic City ten years ago.”

  According to a local legend, a devil lived on Leeds Point, a leftover from Revolutionary War days, when deserters from both armies caroused there, screwing whatever the tide washed up. One of the whores had supposedly given birth to a creature with horns and cloven feet.

  “I’ll have Yummy cover for you.”

  Yummy O’Keefe was curled up in the back of his squad car behind the regional high school. Only guys like Mick, with trouble on their records, guys who owed something for their jobs, got the beachfront patrol in the winter. Mick could practically hear Yummy cursing.

  It was 3 A.M. He would be in Atlantic City in fifty minutes, if the Garden State Parkway was not iced up. He drove slowly through Paradise Beach, a habit inflicted by the summer months, when you never knew whether a drunk or several drunks would come roaring through an intersection. At Maryland Avenue and the Parkway, he slowed almost to a stop before a big, two-storied house with an open porch in front and a glassed-in sunporch on the side. It had prestige written all over it, even if it was not one of the huge piles sitting out on the dunes south of town.

  Although the house sat in shadow, beyond the glow of the corner streetlight, Mick could see it as vividly as if it were high noon. He had grown up here. He remembered when its bright green color had been a defiant announcement to the WASP natives and their mostly WASP summer visitors that the Irish had arrived to stay.

  For a moment Mick’s head was filled with music. He was remembering the family parties on the Fourth of July and Labor Day. Inevitably they ended with everyone grouped around the piano, singing Irish songs: “Danny Boy,” “The Rose of Tralee,” “I Met Her in the Garden.” The parties always ended with his grandfather “Sunny Dan” Monahan singing his favorite in a rich baritone.

  Oh the days of the Kerry Dancers!

  Oh the ring of the piper’s tune!

  Oh for one of those hours of gladness

  Gone! Alas, like our youth, too soon.

  Oh to think of it!

  Oh to dream of it!

  Fills my heart with tears …

  Now more than youth was gone. The house’s insolent green had bleached and faded and peeled in the heartless summer sun and cruel winter wind. It had been five years since the house had been painted, five years since there was any reason to rejoice in being Irish in Paradise Beach.

  Mick sat there remembering what had happened five years ago. It was the reason why he was going to Atlantic City. Five years ago, two cars full of U.S. Treasury agents had pulled up in front of the house. Mick had answered the door. He had been working nights as usual and he had just gotten up. It was about three o’clock on a hot afternoon in May.

  The lead guy looked like he had seen too many reruns of the Eliot Ness TV show. He did not smile. He did not introduce himself. He just said, “Is this the house of Daniel Brendan Monahan?”

  “He’s not home,” Mick said.

  “We’ve got a federal warrant,” the lead said. “We’re going to search the place.”

  “Let me see it,” Mick said.

  The guy produced the warrant. It looked legal all right. What the hell were they looking for? “You guys wait here while I talk to my uncle. He’s the chief of police,” Mick said.

  “Look, pal,” the lead said, “we’re in a hurry. We want to be back in Newark by five o’clock to catch a plane to Washington. We don’t care what your uncle says. This thing is signed by the U.S. attorney for New Jersey. You try to stop us and you’ll go to Newark with us—in handcuffs.”

  “Gee, I’m real scared,” Mick said. “Wait here anyway.”

  He slammed the door in their faces and called William O’Toole at police headquarters. When Mick described the visitors and their warrant, Uncle Bill almost gave birth over the wire. “Is your grandfather there?” he said.

  “He’s at the Shamrock playin’ poker. Mom’s at school teachin’ the remedials.”

  “Keep those guys out. I don’t care how you do it. Keep them out until I get hold of Dan. We’ll be there in five minutes.”

  Mick came back and put the inside chain on the door. He opened it a crack and said, “My uncle and my grandfather’ ll be here in five minutes.”

  “Open
this door, wise guy,” the lead said.

  “Five minutes,” Mick said. “Set your watches. Guaranteed.”

  Mick stepped back about ten feet. Two of them hit the front door and tore it off the hinges. They landed on their knees in the hall. Mick kicked the first guy in the teeth and the second one in the belly. The other guys swarmed him. He got off one good punch before they had him on his back. They kicked him and rabbit-punched him a few times to get even for the two door crashers, who were moaning low in the corner of the front hall. They dragged him into the parlor and handcuffed him to a chair.

  “Find the cellar door,” the lead said.

  “Probably in the kitchen,” someone else said.

  Mick noticed two of them were carrying shovels.

  In about five minutes the grandfather’s clock in the hall bonged 3 P.M. All 250 pounds of Bill O’Toole charged into the front hall in his gold-braided chief’s uniform. After him labored Mick’s tall, beak-nosed grandfather, Sunny Dan Monahan, gasping and wheezing on his cane, his pale old man’s mouth working spasmodically. The two door crashers were on their feet now, discussing what they would do to Mick when they got him to Newark.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Bill O’Toole shouted.

  The door crashers just looked contemptuously at him. Even under ordinary circumstances, federal cops found it hard to talk to small-town cops. “What the hell’s going on?” Bill shouted again.

  “Yeah,” Sunny Dan Monahan said in his old man’s croak. “What the hell is goin’ on?”

  The lead appeared from the kitchen carrying two canvas bags. Dirt dribbled off them onto the floor. He had a pleased smile on his television face. “What the hell you doin’ with that?” Dan Monahan said.

  “I’m taking these bonds to the U.S. attorney’s office in Newark,” the lead said.

  “Those bonds belong to me!” Dan said.

  “I doubt that very much,” Eliot Ness Jr. said.

  Bill O’Toole and Dan Monahan stood there while agent after agent paraded past them with bags of bonds, dribbling more and more dirt on the parquet floor of the front hall. They each made two trips. They must have taken out at least fifty of the things. Dan Monahan stood there quavering about “my property.” Toward the end he started calling them thieves. “I earned that money! I put in ten thousand days and nights earning that money.”

  Through it all Bill O’Toole said nothing. But halfway through the parade, he started to crumble. His huge chest sank first, then his marine spine sagged, then his linebacker’s shoulders slumped. By the time the last bag man left, he was looking more like a stuffed dummy than a commander of men.

  Eliot Ness Jr., returned and said he was going to give them a break. He would not take Mick back to Newark. That might save them some attorney’s fees. He took the cuffs off Mick and left without another word. Mick sat there, rubbing his wrists. Outside the feds started their motors and pulled away.

  “Oh my God, Bill,” Sunny Dan Monahan said. “Who could have done it? Who ratted?”

  “I don’t know,” Bill O’Toole said. “But if I ever find out, he’s a dead man.”

  That was how the Monahans, the O’Tooles, the O’Days, and the rest of the clan became $5 million poorer in a single afternoon. That was why Bill O’Toole was playing craps in Atlantic City. It was not the only reason why sadness seeped into Mick’s soul like the winter chill, in spite of the full blast of the heater in the car. But it was one reason.

  UNREELING

  In another six blocks of cautious driving, Mick reached the west side of Paradise Beach, where houses clustered along the shore of the great bay, and the slope-roofed bulk of the Paradise Beach Yacht Club, shuttered for the winter, loomed against the expanse of dark whitecapped water.

  Over the causeway Mick boomed and down the straightaway through the pines, letting the motor’s rpms mount, his mind deep in the engine he had rebuilt to Ferrari specifications on his own time. His gift to the Paradise Beach Police Department. Had anyone even bothered to say thank you? Of course not.

  About ten miles down the road Mick slowed the car from its 90 mph pace. It gave him time to glance through the pines at a white mobile home there in the moonless, starless darkness. Trai was sleeping beside Phac inside that freezing tin box. Where he would never sleep, thanks to the Catholic Church and the Communist Party.

  Hit it, Mick told himself, slamming the accelerator to the floor. Get out of here, out of the past, the stupid double-crossing past. Into the double-crossing present.

  It did not mean anything anymore, Vietnam. It was gone like World War I and World War II and Korea. Like high school football and basketball. Only the trophies were different. The high school gave you golden statues for your mother to park on the mantel. Vietnam gave you a dishonorable discharge. That was what everybody had gotten, when they finally figured it out. Only some discharges were more dishonorable than others.

  Up the parkway ramp Mick roared onto a sheen of ice. The squad car slewed like a boat in a heavy cross sea. Mick rode it out until he found concrete under his tires and headed south for the devil’s new playground, Atlantic City. A four-year-old could drive the parkway, with its wide empty lanes and carefully calculated curves.

  In the monotonous darkness, memory stirred like a VC in the bush. Slowly, inevitably, Mick was in Binh Nghai again, twelve thousand miles and fifteen years away from this frozen Atlantic landscape, strolling across the dusty, sunbaked marketplace with his M16 on his shoulder.

  There sat Trai in her father’s doorway with that round straw hat on the back of her neck. “What’s up?” he said.

  She giggled, revealing the whitest, brightest smile in Quang Tri province. “Nothing is up, Marine,” she said. “But something is soon down.”

  “What?” he said, already knowing the answer.

  “Soup, hot soup is soon down, Marine.”

  He hunkered beside her in the doorway and she gave him a bowl of fish soup, full of shark’s fins and octopus eyes. Incredibly delicious. While he ate, he practiced his Vietnamese with her. “I hear you’re going to marry President Thieu.”

  More giggles. “Oh, no. I must save myself for the marine who kills Le Quan Chien. In Vietnam, you know, we believe the gods come down in human form to play the part of heroes. I want to marry a marine god. I will know who he is when he brings me Le Quan Chien’s head.”

  “Why don’t you sell my head to Comrade Chien? He’ll pay you five thousand piastres for it.”

  “Oh, no. Then who would drink my soup?”

  Those delicate hands fluttered, the slim body beneath the black cotton tunic moved in small, subtle ways. Mockery danced in those almond eyes. Woman, whispered the voice in Mick’s body, his mouth full of soup, yet somehow dry with desire.

  Stop, stop, stop, Mick told memory. But memory was impossible to stop. It kept unreeling like an old movie on television. He had seen it 120 times but he could not stop looking at it.

  Worse, you never knew where memory’s movie was going to start. Sometimes it was in the middle. Sometimes it was at the beginning, sometimes at the end.

  The wind boomed against the squad car’s windows, the sleet crunched beneath his tires. Winter sounds. In Vietnam there were other sounds. The swish of a bush, the crack of a twig in the darkness, the splash of a foot in a rice paddy. Each meant death was out there in the night.

  He was back in the cemetery, the night they killed Lam.

  Ap Nguyen Lam, the tired, chain-smoking joker who had given Mick his first training as a cop. Lam, who taught Mick that a good cop never lost track of himself. He always held something back, no matter what he was doing—kidding, arguing, even screwing. A cop was always watching, analyzing, judging. If Mick had remembered that lesson with Trai, his life would be a lot different. But that white smile, that small, lithe body, had blown it out of his mind and he was paying the price.

  Lam had also taught Mick the kind of war they were fighting in Binh Nghai and a thousand other villages like it. Mick would never
forget the night Lam showed him his doomsday book. It contained the names and ranks of sixty-nine VC leaders that he had personally killed in the previous five years. On the next page was a list of eighty-nine friends and relatives—village headmen, schoolteachers, aid workers—that the VC had assassinated.

  That night while Mick crouched among the graves with Sullivan and Lummis and Page and the two Popular Force Vietnamese, Khoi and Luong, Police Chief Lam was having dinner with his mother and nine leaders from nearby villages. Mick had objected to the visit. He said the VC were probably watching the house. Lam said his mother was old and sick and would not live much longer. She was his only living relative. Besides, the marines had the Cong on the run. The night no longer belonged to them.

  For once in his life, Lam was being too optimistic. The night belonged to no one now. The VC were surprised to find the marines, the PFs, challenging them for it. But they had not yet surrendered it. Scarcely a week went by without a firefight between a marine patrol and a VC detachment.

  Mick had no authority over Lam. Mick only commanded the eleven marines who had volunteered to join him in Binh Nghai as part of a program to beat the VC at their own game instead of in set-piece daylight battles—the army’s approach to winning the war. They had spent the last three months living in the village, patrolling the roads each night, ambushing the startled VC a half dozen times.

  Among the Vietnamese, Lam had been one of the strongest supporters of this new policy. That—and his doomsday book—made him a primary assassination target. Lam was just beginning to slice the juicy duck his salary had enabled his mother to buy when the four-man VC team came in the door shooting. Lam was the only man with a gun, and he could not fire because he was afraid of hitting his mother or one of the guests.

  Lam was hit by at least ten bullets. For good measure, the VC dropped two hand grenades on his body. Mick was on his feet, starting to run for the house, when the PF, Luong, grabbed his arm. “No. Ambush,” he hissed.

  Nobody had much use for the PFs. For one thing, they had M1 rifles, unable to fire more than one bullet at a time. Most of them were terrified of the VC and ready to do almost anything rather than fight them. Mick had discovered Luong was the exception. He was a potbellied little guy with protruding teeth, not much bigger than his rifle. He had fought the Japanese and the French on the Cong side and had for some obscure reason switched to the Americans. He was a PF for the $20 a month he got paid, which enabled him to avoid farming or fishing, both of which he detested.