‘You’re sure you’re okay?’ Zuboric asked.
Pagan smiled. ‘I’m in great shape.’
Roscommon, New York
Celestine Cairney listened to Harry’s Irish music float out through the open door of his study. She paused on the threshold of the room, watching Harry and his son sit close together near the fire. A flask of brandy and two glasses stood on the coffee table. It was late afternoon and the sun had gone behind the trees, and the only light in the study was the glow of the log fire. Harry leaned towards his son and said something, and the young man laughed, perhaps a little too politely. It was the laughter of somebody who hadn’t quite learned the language of mirth. An artificial sound.
Celestine leaned against the door jamb. The Irish music made her uneasy at times because it was the music of ghosts, the music of Harry’s first marriage, with all its comfortable intimacies. She had mental pictures of Harry and his first wife sitting by the fire while this music wove through the air around them.
She moved very slightly. Neither man was aware of her presence. She liked the idea of observing people when they didn’t know she was watching. She studied Patrick. He was a good-looking man in an intense way. He had serious eyes and a certain strength about him, but there was an aura of privacy, almost a force field, that one couldn’t get through easily. She had the impression of somebody who lived in his own secret fortress. He wasn’t like Harry at all, outgoing and gregarious with that facile Irish charm he could trot out whenever it suited him. These were the gifts of a politician. The necessary equipment.
Come back, Paddy Reilly, to Ballyjamesduff,
Come home, Paddy Reilly, to me.
All Harry’s music was like this. It was all drenched with yearning. Now there was a break in the song and the thin notes of a fiddle filled the room.
Patrick Cairney had seen her. He rose from his chair. Harry smiled and stretched out a hand in her direction.
‘She’s been spying on us,’ he said.
Celestine moved into the room. ‘Why would I do that, Harry? You don’t have any secrets from me, love.’
Harry stood up now too. ‘Want a brandy?’ he asked.
‘I don’t want to interrupt this reunion,’ she said. ‘Besides, I was on my way to take a shower before dinner.’
She gazed at Patrick Cairney. She found his awkwardness in her presence a little touching. The way he’d reacted last night when she’d gone to his bedroom was amusing. He’d been like a kid who’d smuggled a girl inside his dormitory against all the school rules. He seemed now like a man who wished he were someplace else. She knew exactly what kind of effect she had on him. In her lifetime, she’d come to understand that her beauty often devastated people. Certain men didn’t know how to react to her. She had had her share of flowers and lovers’ poems and men who stuttered and fumbled around her. She considered her appearance a genetic accident, useful but finally transient. She never saw in the mirror what other people saw when they beheld her, almost as if her appearance were something apart from what she thought of as her inner self, her reality. Extreme good looks, such as her own, were often interpreted wrongly. Men looked at her and they couldn’t get beyond her appearance and down into the place where she really lived. They couldn’t begin to think their way beyond her surfaces.
Most men anyway.
‘You could never interrupt anything, my dear,’ Harry said.
He had that look on his face. Total devotion. Utter bliss. There were moments when her husband’s love made her feel uncomfortable. Harry gave it so wholeheartedly and without qualification that it was like a light he was forever shining into her eyes. Sometimes she felt blinded by it.
She warmed her hands in front of the fire. Patrick Cairney moved out of her way, but there was a second of contact between them, a tiny friction as her body touched his. She liked the connection. She liked the expression on Patrick’s face, the effort he made to conceal his discomfort.
‘I was riding and I’m grubby,’ she said. She spread her legs in front of the fire. ‘I can’t sit down to dinner in this condition.’
Harry reached for her hand. His skin had the feel of rice paper. She took his fingers in her palm. They were cold with that unfathomable coldness of age. She took her hand away and walked back across the room to the door. What she frequently longed for was warmth – another climate altogether, where she wouldn’t be confronted by the chills of a long winter. What was she doing in this big house located on this huge frozen estate? Why in the name of God had she ever agreed to come here to this place of isolation and snow and security guards who watched her lasciviously through their binoculars whenever she went outside?
She reached the doorway. She shivered slightly. ‘Dinner will be ready in about thirty minutes,’ she said. ‘I’ll meet you in the dining room.’
‘What are we having?’ Harry asked.
‘The speciality of the house. Corned beef and cabbage. What else?’ If there had been such a thing as Irish wine, a Cabernet Killarney or a Château Galway, say, she would have served that as well. She disliked the stodge of Irish food.
‘Ah,’ Harry said, delighted. He was showing off his wife for the benefit of his son. ‘Didn’t I tell you, Pat? Didn’t I tell you she knows how to warm an old man’s heart?’
Patrick nodded. He fiddled with the stopper of the crystal brandy flask. He wasn’t looking at Celestine. She left the room and moved along the landing. She paused outside the door of Patrick’s bedroom. What she remembered was how furtive he’d been last night about his canvas bag and the small wooden horse, which he’d practically seized from her hand and stuffed back inside the bag as if it were a souvenir too precious for anyone else to sully. Curious. She was tempted to sneak inside the room and explore it in his absence. Instead, she continued towards her own bedroom.
She went inside the bathroom and removed her clothes, catching glimpses of herself in the mirror. She had small breasts and a flat stomach. She thought her hips were probably a little too narrow, but otherwise it was a good body, firm and smooth and untouched as yet by age. She let her hair fall over her shoulders as she turned to the shower stall. The water was very hot, the way she liked it. Steam rose against her flesh, glistened in her hair, filled her nostrils. She took soap from the dish and made lather all over her body, smoothing the soap slowly over her breasts and across the surface of her stomach. She tilted her head back against the tiled wall, closing her eyes.
She slid the soap between her inner thighs to her pubic hair, as though it were a lover’s hand she was directing. She moved it back and forward slowly between her legs and then the bar slipped from her hand and now there was nothing between herself and her body. With the tips of her fingers she stroked herself gently, very gently, anticipating the pleasure. Her fantasies were always tropical. There were always exotic flowers and a suffocating humidity and a hint of danger, like an indistinct presence just beyond her field of vision. Her imaginary lover’s face kept changing, first one of the men she’d known in her life, then another and another coming at her in quick succession until she settled on the one who could please her fantasies best. But this time the face that finally came before her was that of a man who’d never been her lover, and this realisation excited her, this new perspective made her nerves tingle.
He remained stubbornly fixed in her mind.
Faster now. Faster. She had a sense of something warm flowing through her body, something molten that was located deep inside her. She heard herself moan. She bit the knuckles of her left hand and she gasped, and for a second her whole body was rigid before she fell apart inside, as if she were destroyed by the astonishing ferocity of pleasure. She slid down slowly against the tiled wall to a sitting position, her eyes still shut against the pounding water, her hand limp between her thighs.
She didn’t move for a long time.
She thought it weird she’d allowed Patrick Cairney to participate in her fantasy. Out of all the men she’d known in her life, she’d selecte
d one who was off limits, who was forbidden by the fact of her marriage. She stood up, reached for a towel, started to dry herself carefully.
Patrick Cairney, she thought. My fantasy lover.
She rubbed condensation from the mirror, making a small space in which she could see her face. Her smile was enigmatic, even to herself.
New York City
Dressed in the clothes he’d purchased at the thrift shop, Frank Pagan put down the half-empty bowl and said, ‘It’s pretty bland, Joe. It needs a dash of something. Tarragon, Paprika. Something to spice it up. Some Worcester sauce would do it.’
Joseph X. Tumulty wore a crucifix about his neck, a small flash of gold against his black shirt. Every now and then his hand went to it, his ungainly fingers fumbling with the miniature Jesus. ‘The men here are better served by nutrition than haute cuisine, Mr. Pagan.’
‘You may have a point.’ Pagan stared into the bowl, which sat on Tumulty’s desk. ‘Have you got everything straight in your mind, Joe?’
Tumulty nodded. These men were playing with him, and he resented them for it. He laid his hands in front of him and saw how the skin glistened with sweat. He was beginning to discover that fear had various strata of intensity. The fear he’d felt before when Frank Pagan had burst into the room on Mulberry Street and shot Santacroce was nothing to what he was going through now at the prospect of facing Jig again.
Lying to him. Entrapping him. Setting him up. He felt very small and very weak. But a promise had been held out to him like a carrot to a donkey. If he did what was asked of him, he wouldn’t go to jail. It was that simple. Who would run this place if he was incarcerated? He couldn’t depend on volunteers to keep the whole thing going, and he couldn’t stand the idea of St. Finbar’s being shut down, his people having to go hungry. God knows, they had little enough in their lives as it was. They relied on him and how could he deprive them of that? And what would happen to people like McCune, people he had saved, if their mentor went to prison? Tumulty saw only sheer disaster. His night of solitude in a cell had convinced him that he could stand the strain of being locked up, but he couldn’t take the notion of being removed from Canal Street. He had prayed in the small cell. He had gone down on his knees and searched his mind for God. God, the great problem solver, the unlocker of puzzles, had responded only with a roaring silence, as if he had abdicated his place in the firmament. And Tumulty understood what the absences were saying to him. He was on his own in this situation.
‘When Jig comes into the kitchen,’ he told Pagan in a monotone, ‘I’ll say a specific blessing when we sit down to eat. “The Lord hath done great things for us, whereof we are glad.” After we’ve eaten, I’ll signal for Jig to follow me up to my office. You’ll come up behind to block his retreat. Jig and I will come in here. Mr. Zuboric will be waiting.’
Pagan thought there was something incongruous about Psalm 126, verse 3, when you spoke it aloud inside a soup kitchen, but the choice of phrase had come from Arthur Zuboric who didn’t believe Tumulty could be trusted to devise his own code. Pagan suspected there was some spiteful part of Artie that wanted to see this whole scheme fall to pieces so he could quietly gloat. A gloating discontent was apparently built into Artie’s circuitry.
Tumulty asked, ‘Do you enjoy this, Mr. Pagan? Do you enjoy seeing me squirm?’
Pagan didn’t answer. He hardly heard the question. He was wondering about fear. He was wondering whether Joe Tumulty’s fear was going to be strong enough to lead him into betraying Jig. Or whether at the last moment the priest might experience some spasm of courage. He was sure that Tumulty had courage inside him – otherwise he wouldn’t have gone to the meeting with Santacroce in the first place. Pagan glanced at the attaché case that sat on the floor beside the desk. It contained the two customised weapons, but as a precaution all the ammunition had been removed.
Tumulty looked at Frank Pagan. ‘It’s a hell of a thing you’re asking me to do. You know that?’
‘You got yourself into it in the first place, Joe. I didn’t enroll you in the IRA, did I?’ Pagan asked. ‘Just remember this. Don’t fuck around with me when it comes to Jig. Don’t even think about it.’
Tumulty wandered in the direction of a painting of the Virgin Mary that hung at the back of the room. He looked up at it for a moment, drawn into the eyes. He was being asked to betray more than an individual called Jig. He was being asked to betray the Cause and himself along with it. He found a little consolation in the fact he hadn’t exactly told his captors very much. He hadn’t said anything about the deliveries in Maine, and he hadn’t mentioned Nicholas Linney, and his description of Jig had been vague at best. Small consolations. He turned away from the Virgin.
Something else occurred to him for the first time. The notion of reprisals. If he gave these men Jig, he might just as well be signing his own execution order, because a day would come when another gunman would be sent from Ireland to even the score. There was nothing more terrible than a traitor so far as the Cause was concerned. No crime was greater than treason.
A rock, Tumulty thought. And a very hard place. Somewhere, if only he could find it, there had to be a solution, a compromise. Guidance, he thought. But he knew that God wasn’t about to show him the way. Prayer, this time, was a dead connection.
He said, ‘I’ll do it. You don’t need to worry.’ Even as he committed himself, he was still frantically searching. How could he even think of betraying the Cause? He’d been raised with a belief in the sanctity of the Cause, just as he’d been brought up in the seminary to believe that God’s authority was the only one. Little divisions of the heart. Pangs. If he couldn’t get the weapons to Jig – and he was certain that that was out of the question now – then what small thing could he do to help the man? Think, Joseph. Think hard. There has to be a way.
‘I’m not worried,’ Pagan said. He managed to keep the tension out of his voice. But he was concerned. When you backed a man into a corner, any man, there were sometimes reserves of surprising defiance. Was Joe going to find that nerve of resistance?
Tumulty sat down. He experienced a moment of calm. What he realised was that Jig, who had seen Frank Pagan before, was going to recognise the man, no matter Pagan’s ridiculous old clothes and his unkempt hair. Jig was going to know.
Then what?
15
Albany, New York
It was a cheap joint at the edge of the Interstate – unpainted cinderblock, a flamingo-coloured neon sign with the words CAPITOL CITY MOTEL, a cracked swimming pool, drained for the winter. Fitzjohn walked round the pool, Waddell in tow. He paused when they reached the diving board. On the other side of the pool was the motel bar, where Rorke and McGrath had gone for a drink. Seamus Houlihan was up in his room – resting, he’d said. Seamus always looked as if he was carrying the bloody world on his shoulders and enjoying its weight regardless.
The five merry men, Fitzjohn thought. He heard Rorke’s weird laughter float out of the bar. It had the staccato quality of a pneumatic drill. Fitzjohn put his hands in the pockets of his pants and shivered in the night wind. The lights that hung around the entrance to the bar gave the place all the cheer of a pauper’s Christmas.
Waddell said, ‘I suppose you’ll be leaving tomorrow, Fitz.’
Fitzjohn nodded. ‘After I drive you to Tarrytown, I’m going home to New Jersey. That’s my arrangement.’
Waddell raised his sharp little face and smiled. ‘Back to the family, eh?’
‘Back to the family,’ Fitzjohn said.
‘You’ll be looking forward to it, I expect.’
‘You don’t know how much.’
Waddell moved to the rim of the pool. He made a funny little plunging gesture with his hands, then stepped back. ‘I had a wife and a kid once,’ he said. ‘About ten years ago. We had a small house in Ballysillen. I was second engineer on a ship at that time. The day they died I was on board a Liberian vessel called the Masurado, somewhere in the Gulf of Oman. I’m working in the engine r
oom when the captain himself comes down to see me. He says to me he just received a message. My wife and kid are dead.’ Waddell’s voice was very flat, unemotional.
‘What happened was they got burned to death,’ he went on. They were trapped inside the house when some soldiers and the local IRA started a gun battle. Snipers everywhere. Explosions. Somehow the house started to burn. Nobody ever told me who was responsible for that. I don’t suppose it matters much.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Fitzjohn said. Another waste, another tragedy in the ongoing horror that was Ulster. He wondered how Waddell coped with the pain.
‘It’s a fucking long time ago.’ Waddell looked very sad as he turned his face to Fitzjohn. ‘It’s best to bury it.’
‘Yes,’ Fitzjohn said.
Waddell ran the back of his hand over his lips. ‘About a month after it happened, I ran into Seamus Houlihan. I’d known him for years. I told him about the wife and kid. You know what Seamus did?’
Fitzjohn shook his head.
‘Seamus went out that same night and killed two men. One was a high-up in the IRA, a man called Costello. The other was a British soldier. Seamus said it was retribution.’
‘Retribution?’ Fitzjohn asked.
‘It was to help even the score, you see.’ Waddell reached out to touch the diving board. ‘I never asked him to do anything like that, you understand.’ He took a cigarette out of his coat pocket, a Woodbine. He lit it in a furtive way, cupping both hands against the wind. ‘I always felt I owed him something for that.’
Fitzjohn thought it was a strange kind of debt, a murderous obligation. ‘You didn’t ask him to do anything for you, so how can you owe him?’
Waddell shrugged. ‘It’s the way I see it.’ He sucked the Woodbine deeply in the manner of a man who has spent time deprived of tobacco. ‘I know Seamus and I know what his faults are, you see. But he’s been a bloody good friend to me.’
Jig Page 25
