‘In New Jersey?’
‘Yeh. Is it pretty?’
‘It has its moments. I don’t think Union City is one of them, though.’
Rhiannon Canavan looked at her small wristwatch. ‘Are you packed?’ she asked, all at once practical. ‘You don’t have a lot of time, Patrick.’
‘I’m packed.’
‘We don’t even have time for a quickie, do we?’
‘How quick’s a quickie?’ he asked.
‘Now that depends entirely on you, doesn’t it?’
Patrick Cairney smiled. He wondered if he could lose himself a moment in sheer blind passion, if there was an oxygen bubble inside the vacuum he felt.
Rhiannon kissed him on the lips. It was a warm kiss and he was drawn down into it where he found himself in a well-lit place where there existed neither airplanes nor schedules nor long journeys to make. It was like drowning in tepid, scented water, peacefully and without panic, watching yourself circle and go down and circle and go down again, until there was no further place left to sink to and you were blissfully on the bottom. He slid his hands between the buttons of her uniform, feeling the small breasts under his palms. Her nipples were hard. He worked the uniform open, pushing it back from her shoulders. Her green coat fell to the floor. He traced a line with his fingertips from her breasts to her navel and then down across her smooth stomach, which had a lustrous silken texture.
Afterwards, Rhiannon said, ‘I hate heart attacks.’
George Scully, the driver of the Daimler that dropped Finn off in Palmerstown, parked the car on St. Stephen’s Green and walked until he came to the large covered marketplace known as the Powerscourt Townhouse, which he entered from South William Street. He passed stalls selling earrings and lace items and Celtic crosses carved in stone and recordings of the Clancy Brothers, and he rose to the upper tier where he entered a coffee shop. He bought a milky coffee, took it to a table, sat down, drummed his fingers impatiently. He knew he didn’t have much time before he would have to get back to the car and pick up the Old Man.
Presently, he heard the sound of somebody whistling tunelessly and a shadow fell across the table. The driver looked up and smiled. The newcomer wore a navy-blue seaman’s coat and a woollen hat drawn down over his ears.
‘I’ll be quick,’ George Scully said.
The other man nodded. He sat down, looking around the coffee shop.
The driver leaned across the table. ‘It’s just like we thought it would be. He’s sending Jig.’
‘Is he now?’
George Scully said, ‘I couldn’t hear this very well because the Old Man takes precautions like nobody’s business, but he’s definitely sending Jig.’ Scully paused and ran the tip of a finger round the rim of his cup. ‘Sometimes Jig uses a passport in the name of John Doyle. Sometimes not. I happened to be the one who picked up the passport for him, so what I’m telling you is reliable.’
The man in the seaman’s jacket nodded. ‘Jig,’ he said quietly. ‘Well now. Isn’t that something?’
Scully said, ‘The New York connection is a certain Father Tumulty. Your friends in Belfast will want to know that, I’m sure.’ Scully was silent a second. He bit uncertainly on his lower lip. ‘Come to Dun Laoghaire around ten. The Old Man’s with his fancy woman right now, and he’s going to be drunk when he gets home.’
‘We’ll be there.’
‘The gates will be unlocked. I won’t be in the gatehouse.’
‘Fine,’ the man in the seaman’s jacket said.
George Scully stared into his coffee. He said, ‘Ten years I’ve been with the Old Man. Ten years of guarding him, running his bloody errands. Long before he started getting all his grand ideas. He wasn’t always the way he is now, a bloody big shot. And what have I got to show for it? Sweet fuck all.’
The man in the seaman’s jacket took a brown envelope from inside his shirt and pressed it down on the table and George Scully picked it up quickly, hiding it under his coat.
‘It’s all there, Scully. Twenty-five thousand English pounds.’
George Scully looked unhappy. ‘I never thought I’d see this day,’ he remarked.
‘You’ve earned the cash,’ the other man said.
‘There’s a bad name for what I’m doing,’ Scully said solemnly.
‘Aye. But you could think of it another way. You’re making your own little contribution to ending the Troubles, aren’t you?’
Scully placed a hand around his coffee cup. ‘We’ll see, won’t we?’
The other man went back out through the Powerscourt Townhouse to the streets. He walked rapidly, pausing only at the Market Arcade to place a coin in the can of a blind penny-whistle player.
The blind man was playing The Minstrel Boy.
The Minstrel Boy to the war is gone,
In the ranks of death you’ll find him.
The ranks of death.
Jesus, there was going to be a lot of dying.
The man, whose name was Seamus Houlihan and who four nights ago had been employed as an ordinary seaman on the Connie O’Mara, found a taxi to take him to Connolly Station, where he’d be in time to meet Waddell coming off the train from Belfast.
6
London
‘Vile,’ said Sir John Foulkes, who had a flamboyant handlebar moustache and Edwardian sideburns. ‘This business with Walter Whiteford. Utterly vile, Frank.’
Frank Pagan looked from the window of the Undersecretary’s office. A barge was making its way up the River Thames, leaving a wake like a water beetle.
‘Why are these assassinations always so vile?’ the Under-secretary asked. It was not so much a question as a reflection on the lack of common decency in the world. The Under-secretary defined decency in terms of the right breeding, the right schools, and ultimately something that was called ‘good form,’ itself a consequence of being expensively raised and expensively educated. It was a vicious circle of privilege, and Pagan sometimes resented it.
Pagan was surrounded every day of his working life with members of the Old School Tie Network, characters who talked casually about going up to Scotland where they had property reserved entirely for grouse shooting or salmon fishing. It was hard at times for Pagan to believe that this was the late twentieth century. He had moments when he leaned towards a form of primitive socialism in which there wouldn’t be an aristocracy and the land would belong to everybody. Dream on.
The Under-secretary fidgeted with the cuffs of his white shirt. Pagan turned away from the view of the Thames. Today, because he knew he was meeting the Under-secretary, Pagan had made a few concessions. He’d left his blue jeans and sneakers at home. He wore an olive-coloured suit and brown slip-on shoes and his slim silk necktie was pale green. All good earth tones, he thought, and by his own standards subdued.
‘I am certain to figure somewhere in a future assassination plan,’ the Under-secretary said. He swept a hand through the air. ‘It’s not a prospect I relish.’
Pagan moved his head slightly. The Under-secretary was new to Irish affairs. Previously, he had been considered an expert on trade unions. Pagan wondered about his credentials. A knowledge of wage negotiations and how to talk with mining or railway leaders – tasks at which he hadn’t been very successful, a fact that perhaps explained his present posting (which was more of a punishment than a job) – wouldn’t help him in the quicksands of Irish matters. Pagan understood how these unsuitable appointments happened. It was pal helping pal, one Old Boy to another, and to hell with credentials. Only your school background mattered. Incompetence in the higher echelons of power, Pagan thought, could always be traced back to the fact that unqualified men had gone to the right public schools. It was a good way to run a country.
Sir John had his cuffs to his liking now. ‘Ireland is a nightmare to me, Frank. I have times when I think I’ve penetrated its various complexities. But then it seems to slip away from me.’ He stroked his enormous moustache. The satirical magazine Private Eye had christened
him Furry Jake.
‘It does that,’ Pagan agreed.
‘Why in the name of God are we still in Northern Ireland?’
Pagan smiled. He wondered if the Under-secretary really wanted an answer or whether he’d just asked another of those rhetorical questions in which, like all politicians, he specialised. Pagan decided he’d answer anyway. ‘Because it’s what the Protestant majority wants, Sir John.’
‘We should just get the hell out of Ulster and say “There, chaps, go work out your own differences with the South.”’
Pagan laid a hand on the Under-secretary’s huge desk. There wasn’t a piece of paper anywhere. He glanced at the bookshelves. Several histories of Ireland were stacked there. They looked as if they hadn’t been opened. ‘We can’t let them settle their own differences so long as the Protestant majority in the North wants to remain a part of the United Kingdom,’ he said. ‘If the day comes when the North wants to be a part of a unified Ireland, fine. Personally I don’t see that happening. There’s too much hatred between Catholic and Protestant.’
The Under-secretary leaned back in his padded leather chair.
‘And there are too many suspicions on both sides,’ Pagan continued, wondering if it was easier for Furry Jake to get his history in small doses like this instead of having to crack open the tomes on the bookshelf. Sometimes Pagan encountered an almost wilful simple-mindedness in the higher reaches of power that appalled him. People like the Under-secretary, in defiance of the tenets of Darwinism, hadn’t evolved since the days when the British Empire could put down a Zulu uprising with a handful of rifles and some good men.
Pagan said, ‘The Protestants in the North are scared shitless by the predominance of the Catholic Church in the South. They think that in a unified Ireland they’d be discriminated against because then they’d be in a minority. They don’t like giving up their present status. Right now they’re the lords of all they survey, but there’s a tide rising against them.’
The Under-secretary didn’t look very interested. He had the expression of an unwilling participant in a crammer course. There was also the fact that he wasn’t absolutely sure of Frank Pagan’s loyalties. Some said Pagan was just a little too soft on the South.
Pagan went on regardless. There was a certain wicked enjoyment in the idea of instructing the Under-secretary in his job and knowing that you were causing him a minor irritation. ‘The Catholics in the Republic don’t trust the Protestants in the North because of their allegiance to England. And there’s been too much English misbehaviour in the past.’ Misbehaviour, he thought. There was a neat little euphemism. ‘People don’t forget quickly. They can’t forget how the English have treated Ireland over the centuries. They can’t put aside the fact that the English have gone periodically into Ireland and filled the streets with Irish blood.’
‘That’s ancient history, Frank.’ Sir John made a small gesture of impatience.
‘To you, maybe. But England has a dirty name over there. It stands for Oliver Cromwell slaughtering the inhabitants of Wexford in 1649 and then as a gesture of real goodwill, committing atrocities on priests of the Roman Catholic Church. It’s a potato famine and starvation, which was exploited by English landowners who didn’t exactly shed tears when they saw Irishmen either starve to death or being packed into emigrant ships – coffin ships – because it meant they didn’t have to rent their land to the bloody peasants. It’s the fact that in six miserable years in the late 1840s, one million people died as a result of famine, while the English landlords didn’t suffer a bit. Quite the opposite; the buggers prospered.’
The Under-secretary frowned. Pagan leaned against the bookshelves. Instant history, he thought.
‘And the Irish can’t forget that in our own century the English crushed the Easter Rising of 1916 with more enthusiasm than the event merited. Somehow we managed to kill about five hundred men of the Irish Volunteers, a militant group of really dangerous men who were poorly armed and badly trained and were never any match for English field guns. And then we went on to execute the leaders of the Rising in front of firing squads. We did a wonderful job all round, didn’t we?’
Sir John stood up. A joint cracked in his leg. He didn’t say anything for a time. With his back to Pagan he looked down at the river. ‘You sound rather sympathetic to the Irish, Frank.’
‘I’ve tried to understand them, that’s all. You might give it a shot yourself, Sir John. Open a book or two. Do yourself a favour.’
The Under-secretary stared at him curiously. He wasn’t happy with Pagan’s tone, but then he wasn’t sure if Pagan was really the right man for the job anyway. His search for Jig, for example, hadn’t exactly been a resounding success. ‘IRA gunmen wander the streets of Belfast,’ he said after a while. ‘They shoot British soldiers. Protestants arm themselves in basements to fight against Catholics and the IRA. And we’ve got this lunatic fellow Jig doing all kinds of damage.’ The Under-secretary fingered his moustache and quietly suppressed a belch, pulling his chin down into his neck. It was all very polite, Pagan thought.
The Under-secretary went on, ‘Damned troublesome island, Frank. Hardly worth the bother. It’s not as if we actually get anything out of it save for a great deal of grief, is it? It’s not as if they’re one of the OPEC nations sitting on millions of barrels of oil or something like that. Sooner we’re out of it, the better.’
Pagan said nothing. Furry Jake’s ignorance and insensitivity were really quite impressive.
‘How do you propose to catch Jig, Frank?’
This question echoed inside Pagan like a minor chord struck on piano keys. ‘I wish I had the answer to that,’ he said, a bleak little response to the problem that dogged him constantly.
The Under-secretary turned. ‘It has to be given top priority, Frank.’
‘It has,’ Pagan replied.
‘I mean top, Frank.’
Pagan nodded. The Under-secretary annoyed him the way all his kind did. They issued their orders and then went out to lunch at their clubs. Fine old sherry and quail eggs and men dozing in leather armchairs behind copies of The Daily Telegraph. The death of the British Empire in microcosm in the fancy clubs of Pall Mall, where you needed a pedigree from Debrett’s Peerage before you could actually breathe the air.
‘What about this business with the ship?’ the Undersecretary asked.
Only that morning Foxie had brought him another telex on the matter, this time one sent from the FBI to Scotland Yard. Pagan had read the thing quickly.
‘Special Branch is handling that,’ he said. ‘My whole section is busy with Jig. Exclusively.’
‘Mmmm,’ the Under-secretary said. ‘Just the same, Frank, I wish you had paid it some attention yourself. It does come under your domain, after all.’
The little arsehole was scolding him. Pagan studied his fingernails a moment. ‘My latest information is that we’ve had a positive ID of the individual whose hand was severed at the wrist. One Sean Riordan, aka the Courier, a resident of Philadelphia. His function was the delivery of capital to his sources in Ireland from sources unknown in the United States. So it’s fair to assume the Connie was carrying an amount of cash.’
‘Why do the Americans insist on sending money to those brutes?’
Pagan shrugged. He could have made an easy answer: historic ties. But it went deeper than that, down into the mists of darker emotions and old sentiments and an idealised conception of Ireland that was aroused in many Irish–Americans whenever they heard the first few bars of Danny Boy. This sedimentary yearning had a way of opening wallets.
The Under-secretary asked, ‘Do you have any opinion on who seized this money?’
‘No, I don’t. But you can bet that the IRA will be more than unhappy about the whole thing. What I wonder is how they’re going to react.’
Furry Jake smiled. The idea of the IRA suffering a setback pleased him hugely. ‘One other thing, Frank. I don’t much care for the press we’ve been getting. I don’t think you
should say anything to reporters. Let the commissioner do any talking that has to be done. He likes to see his name in print.’
‘All I ever said was “no comment”.’
‘I know that, but some of our journalists take that as an admission of defeat. The commissioner has more … experience in handling the press than you, Frank.’ The Under-secretary looked at his watch. ‘Well, Frank. Keep me posted, will you?’
‘I will, Sir John.’
‘And will you make sure Special Branch keeps its vigilance?’
‘I’ve already requested that security at your home be doubled,’ Pagan said.
‘My wife worries,’ said the Under-secretary, smiling thinly.
And you don’t, of course. Pagan went to the door. He heard Sir John clear his throat.
‘Catch him, Frank. Catch Jig.’
Pagan stopped at the door.
The Under-secretary said, ‘No matter what it takes, you must catch this fellow.’
‘Exactly how do you want him?’ Pagan asked. There was a faint hint of sarcasm in his voice, which the Under-secretary didn’t notice. Catch Jig. Just like that. What the hell did the Under-secretary think Frank Pagan had been trying to do?
The Under-secretary looked a little puzzled. ‘What do you mean how do I want him?’
‘Dead or alive?’ Pagan asked. Poached? Toasted? Pickled? Take your pick, Sir John.
‘Ah.’ The Under-secretary was quiet a moment. ‘I don’t think it matters one way or another with scum like that, do you?’
‘Quite,’ Pagan said and stepped out into a carpeted corridor. Catch Jig.
The Under-secretary called out to him, ‘Been meaning to ask. Who’s your tailor, Frank?’
Pagan stopped. He looked back into the office. ‘Nobody in particular. Sometimes Harry’s Nostalgia Boutique on the Portobello Road. Sometimes Crolla on Dover Street. Why? You want the addresses?’
‘Not really,’ said the Under-secretary.
Dublin
The man known as Jig did not leave the Republic of Ireland from Dublin Airport, although he went there initially. He was accustomed to creating a maze of his own movements. At the terminal he went inside the men’s room and locked himself in a cubicle where he changed his clothes.
Jig Page 8
