"There’s something wrong with that grave," Nuala Anne McGreal informed me. She was pointing an accusing right hand at a large monument with the Sacred Heart and the Blessed Mother presiding over a grave on which the family name "Sullivan" was carved. I had just helped her off the ground after she had made a sign of the cross to indicate that our period of devotion was over. That she accepted my help was typical of her present mood; normally she would have disdained my assistance and bounded up on her own. Nuala was the bounding kind of young woman.

"Wrong?" I asked, dreading another manifestation of my affianced’s notorious psychic intuitions.

"Who was this man James Sullivan who died in 1927?" she demanded.

It was a bleak Sunday in mid-September. Mother Nature had forgotten there ever was such a thing as summer and was settling in for an early and brief autumn which she would follow with her favorite season in Chicago – endless winter. The lawns of Mount Carmel cemetery were already covered with a carpet of leaves. A chill northeast wind was shaking the trees and adding to the carpet. The dank smell of rain was in the air. A perfect day for a visit to a cemetery – and a perfect day for the dark mood in which the beauteous Nuala seemed to have sunk.

"He was a bootlegger, Nuala. And a very successful one at that. The Italians called him Sweet Rolls Sullivan because he owned a bakery right across from the Cathedral. Where the parking lot is now."

"Whatever in the world was a bootlegger, Dermot Michael?"

Looking like a teenager, she was dressed in the standard utility uniform of young women -- jeans, white Nike running shoes, and a dark blue sweat shirt, the last named in this instance representing one of my alma maters, Marquette University (from which at the end of my four years of college I did not depart with a degree). She wore no make-up and her long black hair was tied back in a brisk pony tale. None of these utilitarian measures affected in the least her radiant good looks.

"A bootlegger," I explained, "was a man who smuggled whiskey."

"To escape the tariffs?" She frowned at the offending grave stone.

"No, it was Prohibition time."

Her frown deepened.

"Well, then, whatever was Prohibition?"

Ah, the innocence of the young.

"There was a time, back in the nineteen twenties, when the Protestants in this country passed a constitutional amendment prohibiting the possession of sale of alcoholic beverages."

"You’re having me on, Dermot," she insisted, huddling close, her arm around my waist. "There never was such a thing as prohibition in this country."

When the Irish say "never" like that they are not so much denying the existence of the reality in question as they are expressing astonishment that such a reality could ever be.

"It’s true," I said. "Obviously it didn’t work. It was a foolish law which almost everyone violated. The saloons were closed, but speakeasies as we called them opened everywhere. Jazz music came to Chicago to entertain the flappers and their dates while they drank bootlegged booze. The bootleggers made tons of money and of course risked their lives in wars with one another."

"The Untouchables were real people then? I thought it was just a film."

Naturally, being Irish, she pronounced that last word as "filum."

"Organized crime as we now have it in this country was the result of Prohibition."

"This poor man was born in 1898," She said, cuddling even closer to me. "He lived only twenty-nine years."

"The Italians were the most ruthless of all the bootleggers. They killed off everyone else. Killer Sullivan down there killed some of them, but they got him eventually."

I knew these things only because my parents had told me about them when we passed the Sullivan grave site on our infrequent visits to the family plot at Mount Carmel.

"His wife isn’t buried here?" she asked.

The gravestone told of one Marie Connor who had been born in 1908, but it gave no date of death.

"She’s still alive, I guess. She’d be in her late eighties now. They’d been married only a year and a half. I think she had a kid. I don’t know whether the kid survives."

"Almost seventy years of widowhood . . . Dermot Michael, don’t you ever do that to me."

"I’m not a bootlegger," I said. "Who killed the poor man?"

"Capone."

"Who was he?"

"Nuala Anne, when you hear the name of Chicago of whom do you think?"

"Michael Jordan," she said promptly, going through the required motion of a jump shot. "Who else?"

I didn’t say, "whom else?" I had learned a few things about women while courting this one. Probably not enough.

"Well, before that, everyone said ‘Al Capone’ and made like they were firing an automatic weapon. He was the king of the bootleggers, the most successful because the most brutal. A violent and vicious Sicilian."

"Was he the one the Untouchables sent to prison because he didn’t pay his taxes?"

"He was."

"Whatever happened to him?"

"He had contracted syphilis before he went to prison. He died in his middle forties. He brain was so diseased at the end that he would sit in front of a tennis net and lob balls into it."

She shivered again.

"What horrible men!"

"The drug gangs make them look like saints."

"Tis true," she said with her monumental West of Ireland sigh.

"Shall we dig up the grave?" I asked her.

"Certainly not!" she exclaimed. "Well, not yet, anyhow."

So. We were on the edge of another one.