Cairney shot him once through the side of his face. Linney was knocked backwards and out of the chair, one hand uplifted to his cheek as if death were a sudden facial blemish, and then the hand dropped like a stone and Linney followed its downward path to the floor. He lay looking up at the ceiling of his gun-room, seeing nothing.
Cairney stared at the body. Jesus Christ. There was a terrible slippage going on here, a downhill slope into destruction. His hand shook. He couldn’t find his own private center. He couldn’t find the place of calm retreat. It was as if a storm had broken out inside himself. Four people had died in this goddam house and all because he’d come here looking for information. Looking for Finn’s money. He shut his eyes a moment. The death of Linney shouldn’t have touched him. He was accustomed to killing. But he’d never shot anyone at such close range before. Okay, Linney had sought death, Linney had manufactured that destiny for himself, but what about the two girls? What was their role in this? Had they ever even heard about The Cause?
He opened his eyes. He heard a car crunch into the driveway. He stepped to the window, saw a dark green Cadillac. Quickly, he moved into the living-room and went to the sliding doors, then out on to the terrace where he saw Frank Pagan climb from the big green car. Nimble and silent, unseen by Pagan, Cairney vaulted the terrace wall and skipped across the tennis-court to the fence, which he climbed swiftly. And then he was back in the lane, hurrying away.
New York City
Ivor McInnes left the Essex House and walked south on Fifth Avenue. He went along Fifty-Seventh Street, checking his watch, looking in shop windows. The whole array of American consumer goods dazzled him as it always did, the flash and the glitter and the sheer availability of such things. He spotted a thrift-shop that sold only furs, and he thought that only in America could such a place exist. Did the rich dames on Central Park toss their used lynx coats this way? Did those blue-rinsed old biddies you saw walking their poodles, manicured little dogs that seemed to shit politely on sidewalks, bring their weary minks to the fur thrift-shop? Amazing America!
When he reached Broadway he headed south. Broadway disappointed. He always expected the Great White Way, showgirls stepping out of limos and maybe the sight of some great actress hurrying inside a theatre, last-minute rehearsals. But it was all sleazy little restaurants and an atmosphere of congealed grease. At Times Square he found the public telephone he needed, then he went inside the booth and checked his watch again. The phone rang almost immediately. Seamus Houlihan was nothing if not punctual.
McInnes picked up the receiver.
‘We’re in place,’ Houlihan said.
‘Good man.’ McInnes ran the tip of a finger between his dog-collar and his neck.
‘I had to take out Fitz,’ Houlihan said. ‘He was trying to skip.’
The disposal of Fitzjohn was of no real concern to McInnes, who had long ago understood that human life, a tenuous business at best, was nothing when you weighed it against ultimate victory. Fitzjohn had been a mere foot soldier, and they were always the first casualties. ‘What did you do with the body?’
Houlihan told him.
McInnes listened closely. He couldn’t believe what Houlihan was telling him. When Houlihan was through with his story, McInnes was quiet for a while, drumming his fingertips on a filthy pane of glass. If he hated anything, if anything in the world aroused his ire beyond the dangerous philosophies of the Catholic Church, it was when a meticulous plan was interrupted by needless variations, such as the variation Houlihan had introduced in Albany.
‘What the hell did you expect to achieve by calling the bloody FBI?’ McInnes asked. ‘Jesus in heaven, Seamus, what the hell were you thinking about?’
‘It seemed like a good idea to set the ball rolling,’ Houlihan said in a curt voice.
‘The ball, Seamus, was not supposed to be set rolling until tomorrow. Sunday, Seamus. White Plains. Remember?’
Houlihan was quiet on the other end of the line. McInnes, who experienced a stricture around his heart, had the feeling of a man who has completed an elaborate jigsaw only to find a piece removed during his absence by a wilful hand.
‘Don’t you see it, Seamus? It’s too bloody soon.’
Houlihan still didn’t speak. What McInnes felt down the line was the young man’s hostility. The killing of Fitzjohn had presumably been necessary in Houlihan’s questionable judgment, but the next step – which Seamus had taken without consultation – was not very bright. But then you couldn’t expect anything bright out of Seamus. He was great when it came to demolition work. Beyond that he was useless. McInnes thought about Houlihan’s unhappy background. Perhaps allowances could be made for a man who was the offspring of an absentee Catholic father and a Protestant mother who had become a drunken bigot of the worst kind. Houlihan must have spent years hating the man who had fathered and abandoned him.
McInnes said, ‘It removes the element of surprise, Seamus. Don’t you see that? It’s like sending them a bloody telegram. You were instructed to wait until you’d done your work in White Plains before calling.’
Sweet Jesus Christ, McInnes thought. It had long been one of the problems of the Free Ulster Volunteers, this lack of good responsible men and the need to draft street scum who killed for the joy of killing and who were misled, by their own acts of violence, into thinking they were actually smart. McInnes had always been troubled by this. For every good man he brought into the FUV, there was always a psychopath with a terrible need for blood. What McInnes longed for was a figure like Jig, somebody who killed but who always obeyed instructions. Somebody who didn’t step outside the limits of his authority. Jig, he thought. Even somebody like Jig was running out of time. And luck. And sometimes luck, that erratic barometer, swung away from you in the direction of your enemies. Jig’s time was coming.
‘Now they’re going to be out beating the fields with sticks,’ McInnes said. ‘And all because you took it into your thick head to make a bloody phonecall, Seamus. God in heaven, I didn’t want them to have an inkling until the work in White Plains is done with.’
Houlihan was heard to clear his throat. ‘They can beat the fields with sticks all they want. They’re not going to find us, are they?’
McInnes stared across the street at a movie-house marquee. There was a double feature, PUSSIES IN BOOTS and G-STRING FOLLIES. Somewhat incongruously, two nuns went past the theatre, hobbling in their black boots. McInnes watched them, two middle-aged brides of Christ, their juices all dried up. A lifetime of celibacy was likely to drive you mad, he thought. It was no wonder they believed in such unlikely things as holy water and the infallibility of the Pope and that philosophical absurdity The Holy Ghost. And these women ran schools and influenced the minds of small children, venting all their accumulated frustrations on the souls of infants. Dear God! McInnes turned his thoughts to what he perceived as the final solution for Ulster, and it had nothing to do with the persecution of Catholics or denial of their rights to their own schools and churches. The answer was so bloody simple nobody had ever thought it could work. You repatriated the Catholics, that’s what you did. You sent them to the Republic of Ireland. There they could pursue their religious beliefs until doomsday in a society already priest-soaked and dominated by His Holiness, the Gaffer of The Vatican. There would be no more civil strife, no more violence. Ulster would be free, and the Catholics happy. So damned simple.
‘No, they’re probably not going to find you, Seamus. All I’m saying is you didn’t follow my instructions. I didn’t just sit down and make everything up on the spur of the moment. I worked bloody hard and I planned a long bloody time, Seamus. And I won’t have it bollocksed by somebody who takes it into his head to change my plans.’
McInnes fell silent. What good did it do to scream at Houlihan, whose temperament was unpredictable at best? If you didn’t butter up people like Seamus, they were likely to fold their tents. And then where would you be? McInnes controlled himself. When the time was ripe, he’d find a
way to dispose of Houlihan and the others. In the future he perceived for himself, there was no room for thugs.
‘We’ll forget it this time,’ he said. ‘But next time follow the blueprint, Seamus.’
Houlihan said nothing.
‘Good luck tomorrow,’ McInnes said.
He stepped out of the stale phonebooth and wandered through Times Square. He had a slippery sense of his own fate lying in the clumsy hands of a man like Seamus Houlihan. By calling the FBI, what Seamus had done was to set that whole federal machine in motion too soon. McInnes thought he could already hear the wheels grinding away, the cogs clicking. If they ran a check on Fitz, they’d discover his affiliation with the Free Ulster Volunteers, which might in turn lead them directly to himself. Naturally, he’d deny everything, but just the same he saw little connecting threads here he didn’t remotely like. The whole point of the exercise had been to keep the FUV name out of everything. But now it was likely to come up, and there was nothing he could do about it except look totally innocent if anyone asked about Fitzjohn. There was Frank Pagan to consider as well. When Pagan learned about the death of Fitzjohn, if he hadn’t already done so, he’d be back sniffing around like some big bloodhound. Pagan was desperate to pin something, anything, on the Reverend Ivor McInnes.
There was another possibility, of course, that the FBI might automatically associate Jig with the slaying of Fitzjohn, which would fit McInnes’s scheme of things very nicely indeed. Jig was a pain in the arse, but he wasn’t the whole IRA by any stretch of the imagination.
Bloody Houlihan. What a nuisance.
McInnes stopped in front of a movie poster. The star of PUSSIES IN BOOTS was a girl with the unlikely name of Mysterioso McCall. She had breasts that suggested two of God’s more inspired miracles. Either that or silicone. For a second McInnes experienced a terrible pang of longing.
He took a last look at the poster and turned north on Broadway, stepping back in the general direction of his hotel. On the corner of Fifty-Second Street he stopped, looked back the way he’d come, saw no sign of anyone following him, then he made a right turn. Inside a darkened cocktail bar on Fifty-Second he ordered a ginger ale which he took to a corner table by the telephone.
He checked his watch again. Almost noon. He sipped his drink, waited, staring now and again at the phone. He was in the right place at the right time, but when the phone hadn’t rung by twenty past twelve he finished his ginger ale and went back out on to the street again, a little lonely suddenly, a little forlorn, thinking of warm flesh and the consolations of love and how a silent telephone could bring a very special dismay all its own.
Bridgehampton, Long Island
Frank Pagan stared at a gorgeous angelfish that expired in the middle of the floor, slowly flapping its body and looking for all the world like the wing of an exotic bird. The fish hypnotised him, held him captive. If he didn’t take his eyes away from the sight of the pathetic thing shuddering down into its own doom, then he wouldn’t have to look again at the wreckage of this house. Having gone once from room to room, he had no desire to do so again. It was best left to somebody like Artie Zuboric, who seemingly had the stomach for this kind of wholesale destruction. Businesslike, brisk, Zuboric was flitting here and there and his Italian shoes squelched on the sodden floor.
‘Two men, two girls,’ Zuboric said, bending to look at the dying fish.
Two men, two girls. Zuboric could make this tally of death sound like a football result. Pagan took his eyes from the fish and moved towards the room that was filled with guns. In there lay one of the dead men, minus a major portion of his face. There was something depressing in the sight of so much death. It ate at your spirit, filled your mind with darkness, numbed you. There was an automatic rifle on the floor.
Zuboric came into the gun-room. He was holding an imitation leather wallet, flicking it open and checking the various cards inside.
‘I guess this belonged to the guy in the bedroom,’ Zuboric said. ‘A certain Gustav Rasch. There’s a bunch of stuff here in German. Can you read kraut?’
Pagan, who had an elementary knowledge of German, took the wallet. He scanned the cards, each sealed inside a plastic window. There was a Carte Blanche, a Communist Party membership card issued in East Berlin, a Visa – a mixture of gritty socialism and suave capitalism. At the back of the wallet was a small plastic card identifying Gustav Rasch as a member of the East Berlin Trades and Cultural Mission, which was one of those meaningless societies they were forever inventing to send men into the West. Trade and culture, Pagan thought. Tractors and Tolstoy. Plutonium and Prokofiev. Pagan closed the wallet. The smell of death was overwhelming to him. He shoved a window open and caught a scent of the sea, good cleansing ozone with a dash of salt. There was blood on his fingertips, which he wiped clean against the curtains.
Zuboric took the wallet back. ‘What was Gustav Rasch doing here?’ he asked. ‘What’s the connection between an East German and Nicholas Linney?’
Pagan shook his head. The bizarre bedfellows of terrorism again, odd couples coming together in the night like hungry lovers, consuming each other before parting as total strangers. He didn’t feel up to discussing the nebulous terrorist connections that were made in all the dark corners of the planet.
‘If the guy in the bedroom’s Rasch, this character lying here must be Nicholas Linney,’ Zuboric said.
Pagan said nothing.
‘Our friend Jig,’ Zuboric said. ‘He had a field day here.’
Pagan stepped around the body on the floor. He tried to imagine Jig coming here and going through this house and leaving such wreckage behind him. Pagan’s imagination wasn’t functioning well. All the pictures he received were shadowy transmissions. If Jig had been responsible for all this, then the man’s style had undergone drastic changes. Whoever had shot this place up had done so indiscriminately. Jig’s violence had never been like this in the past. Why would he change now? What kind of circumstances would force him to perpetrate these horrors? There was nowhere in all of this a trace of Jig’s signature. There was no elegance here.
Pagan watched Zuboric go out across the living-room to the bedroom, saw him bend over the body of one of the dead girls whose stomach had been ripped open. A wave of pain coursed through Pagan’s head. He thought, perhaps inevitably, of Roxanne, whose body they had not allowed him to see after her death. He had yearned for a sight of her back then, driven by a sickness to look one last time at what was left of the woman he’d loved. That desire struck him now as mad and morbid, but grief derailed you, leaving you empty and haunted and bewildered.
Pagan gazed at the racks of guns. He tried to reconstruct the events that had taken place here, but it was a maze with an impossible centre. He looked at the door, which was riddled and splintered and lay off its hinges. This damage had obviously been done by the M-16, but who the hell had been firing the thing? Had Jig somehow been trapped inside this room and forced to shoot his way out?
Pagan could hear Zuboric sloshing around in the living room. The aquatic sleuth. What the hell did he think he was going to find amidst puddles of salt water and slivers of broken glass and the demolished innards of an expensive stereo system?
Pagan turned his attention to the surface of the desk. A variety of papers lay around in disarray, most of them computer print-outs with references to ostmarks, roubles and zlotys. If Linney dabbled in Communist currencies, what Pagan wondered was just how much of this funny money found its way, via the United States, into Ireland. Nicholas Linney gathered roubles here, coaxed ostmarks there, and sent them, suitably converted into U.S. currency, to the IRA, using Joseph X. Tumulty as a link in the chain. But how long was that chain? And where did it reach?
Pagan looked at the illuminated screen of a computer console. There was a name and address in amber letters. Pagan stared at it in wonderment. Jock Mulhaney. Mulhaney was known even in Britain for his good-will publicity tour of Ireland, both North and South, when he’d made a tour of what the pres
s called ‘the trouble spots,’ giving impressive speeches in small border towns about how the real tragedy of Ireland was unemployment. At the time, carried away by his own rhetoric, Big Jock had pledged to do what he could about steering U.S. industry into Ireland, which was a promise he could never deliver upon. Ignoring the fact that he had a vested interest in keeping jobs in America, the Irish considered Big Jock something of a proletarian hero. And here he was on Linney’s little screen. Well, well.
Connections.
Pagan stared at the keyboard. There was a scroll key, which he touched rather gingerly, because he didn’t have an easy rapport with the new technology. The screen whisked Big Jock’s name away, replacing it suddenly with two others.
Pagan gazed at the letters with astonishment. The amber treasure trove of information. He felt a sudden quickening of his nerves as he recognised the names that glimmered in front of him. More connections. Lovely connections. He scribbled them down on a piece of paper torn from Linney’s printer, then put the paper inside his pocket. He heard the sound of Zuboric coming back across the living room. He quickly scanned the keyboard, looking for an off key, anything to kill the screen before Zuboric came inside the room. There was no way he was going to share this stuff with the FBI agent. He couldn’t find an appropriate key so he yanked the plug out of the wall and the screen went wonderfully blank, carrying the names of Kevin Dawson and Harry Cairney off into some electronic limbo. With a look of innocence, Frank Pagan turned to see Zuboric enter.
‘Here’s the way I see it,’ Zuboric said. ‘Jig comes in. He gets inside the gun room somehow. Something goes wrong. Maybe Linney says he doesn’t know anything about the money. Who knows? Jig becomes more than a little upset and decides to vent some spleen, the results of which are obvious,’ and Zuboric made a loose gesture with his hand. ‘Put it another way, Frank. Your cunning, clever assassin, the guy you seem to admire so much, is no better than a fucking fruitcake going berserk inside a crowded tenement on a hot summer evening in Harlem with a cheap twenty-two in his hand.’
Jig Page 34
