Jig

by Campbell Armstrong

  He walked slowly, like a man skirting the blades of open razors. When he reached the broken glass doors he paused, making one huge, concentrated effort to catch his breath. He stepped inside the reception room and saw Mulhaney sitting on one of the huge black leather sofas, surrounded by anxious men in evening wear and green sashes. Mulhaney had a bloodied handkerchief up to his mouth.

  Pagan pushed his way towards the sofa, elbowing men out of the way. Mulhaney, enjoying the attention he was getting, peered over the top of the handkerchief at him. Pagan showed his ID in a swift way, sweeping it in front of Mulhaney’s eyes before the union boss had time to register it.

  ‘I’ve got a few questions,’ Pagan said.

  Mulhaney dabbed at his lip. His bare gums were pink and bloody. ‘What kind of ID was that?’

  Pagan ignored the question. ‘You have a private office somewhere? I’d like to talk to you alone.’

  Mulhaney looked puzzled. ‘I’m perfectly happy where I am,’ he said.

  ‘Okay.’ Pagan shrugged and lowered himself on to the arm of the sofa. ‘What did the guy want with you, Jock?’

  ‘He was a mugger, for Christ’s sake. What the fuck you think he wanted?’

  Pagan shook his head. ‘He was sent here from Ireland. You know that. I know that.’

  ‘Ireland?’ Mulhaney looked blank. He appealed to the other men around him. ‘Who is this guy? Who let him in here?’

  ‘What did you tell him?’ Pagan asked.

  ‘Hey,’ Mulhaney said. ‘Let’s see that ID again, fellah.’

  ‘Did you tell him where he could find the money? Or did you send him somewhere else?’

  Mulhaney stood up. His eyes had a bruised, angry look. ‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. Somebody toss this knucklehead outta here. Ireland, for Christ’s sake! My man Keefe’s been shot dead and you’re babbling about fucking Ireland!’

  ‘Keefe?’

  ‘My bodyguard. Mugger shot him.’

  Another corpse. One way or another, Jig was leaving bodies strewn behind him. What had happened to the fastidious assassin? Pagan hesitated a second before reaching out to grip Mulhaney’s wrist tightly. ‘What did you tell him, Jock? Did you send him to Dawson? Did you tell him Cairney was the man to see? Or did you tell him something else altogether? What did you say to him?’

  Mulhaney made a gesture of exasperation. ‘Out,’ he said.

  Pagan felt various hands grab him. It hadn’t been terrific strategy to come in here and confront Jock, but on the other hand there was always the chance that Mulhaney might be taken off guard and give Pagan the answers he was looking for. Big Jock, though, was set on a course of complete denial, which wasn’t entirely surprising. Pagan wished he could have had time alone with the man. It might have made a difference in Mulhaney’s attitude. Surrounded by his sycophants, Big Jock was forceful and stubborn.

  Pagan pulled himself free of his assailants. He stepped to one side. ‘It’s important, Jock. I need to know.’

  ‘I’ve had it with you,’ Mulhaney said. He looked at the faces of the men. ‘Toss this nut out.’

  Pagan was still struggling to catch his breath. ‘If I leave here, I walk. Under my own steam.’

  ‘Walk then,’ Mulhaney said.

  Pagan pushed his way back through the crowd towards the glass doors. He moved out on to the street, where he turned and glanced back through broken glass at the sight of Mulhaney holding forth for his audience. I hit the guy a couple of times, he was saying. Then he pulls this piece on me, which is when poor Keefe walks in.

  I bet you hit him, Pagan thought.

  He moved away from the building, just as two patrol cars turned the corner into the street, their lamps slashing holes in the darkness and their sirens screaming like voices in purgatory.

  New York City

  ‘It’s raining in Piccadilly Circus,’ Foxie said, his voice unusually crisp and clear, given the great distances of the Atlantic. ‘Doesn’t that make you homesick?’

  ‘Why? I’m having a ball here,’ Pagan replied. The muscles in his legs throbbed from running. He lay on the bed and stared up at the ceiling of his room in the Parker Meridien. ‘What have you got for me?’

  ‘Straight to the point, eh?’ Foxie’s voice faded a second. ‘According to my little screen, Alex Fitzjohn did time in Armagh Jail in 1977 for possession of grenades. Six months. Somewhere in this period he must have thrown in his lot with the FUV. They recruit in jails, of course.’ Foxie paused. ‘My head hurts and my throat’s dry. There are gremlins inside my brain doing things with dental drills.’

  ‘Don’t drink until you’re grown up,’ Pagan said.

  ‘Whenever. Back to Fitz. Suspected of participation in at least three border incidents. One the bombing of a pub. Two, the attempted assassination of a priest. A failure, that one. Three, a brief shoot-out with the Garda. An inconclusive affair, it would seem.’

  Pagan was suddenly impatient. ‘Is there anything that ties him directly with McInnes?’

  ‘Ivor’s a careful sort of chap,’ Foxie said. ‘You know how damned hard it is to get reliable documentation on whether he’s running the FUV or not. However …’ and here Foxworth paused.

  ‘I’m all ears,’ Pagan said.

  ‘There is one very grubby photograph in our possession. It’s about seven years old. Somebody stored it in Fitzjohn’s file, which is on the inactive list. It really ought to have been put in Ivor’s. There’s a lot of clerical idiocy around here, Frank.’

  ‘Foxie, please,’ Pagan said.

  ‘One description coming right up. The picture shows Ivor stepping out of his church. He’s robed up to sermonise, so we can assume he’s just delivered himself of one of his brimstone jobs. Around Ivor are a few other people. There’s a lot of smiling going on. Somebody is reaching out to shake Ivor’s hand. Maybe to congratulate him on his words of wisdom? Whatever. In the midst of the people gathered on the steps of the church is one Alex Fitzjohn. He’s about five feet away from Ivor, and he’s smiling. But Ivor isn’t looking at him. Ivor’s staring at the man offering the handshake.’ Foxie paused. ‘That’s it, Frank.’

  Pagan massaged the side of his head, which had begun to ache. It had been a long day, and he was exhausted now. A peculiar kind of exhaustion too, as if a rainy mist were crawling through his brain. He was thinking of Jig and how the man had managed to slide away from him once again on the streets of Brooklyn. What had Mulhaney told Jig?

  ‘It’s not a hell of a lot, is it?’ Pagan said. ‘I’m looking for a connection and all we’ve got is a photograph that doesn’t even show Ivor and Alex making eye-contact.’

  ‘It doesn’t exactly confirm that they’re bosom buddies,’ Foxworth agreed. ‘The best case you could make is that they probably knew each other. Probably.’

  Pagan sat down on the edge of his bed. He’d hoped for something more substantial than an old inconclusive photograph. Something definitive. Something Ivor couldn’t possibly deny. But all he really had was a weak hand that was useful for a couple of bluffs, nothing more.

  ‘By the way, Frank. The Secretary popped into the office.’

  ‘That’s a first,’ Pagan said. ‘Did you call the Guinness Book of Records?’

  ‘He came in the day after you left. Quite the grand tour. He expressed some – shall we say misgivings – about your sojourn in the Americas? Doesn’t think you should be gallivanting about over there. Thinks your information from the FUV about Jig is spotty and doesn’t justify your trip. People don’t say spotty much these days, do they?’

  ‘Tell him to stuff it,’ Pagan said.

  ‘I think I hear the quiet sharpening of the axe, Frank. Furry Jake is no friend of yours. And you’ve got all those delicious enemies at the Yard who love the idea of you being away because, heaven forbid, they can make waves. Get the Sec’s ear and whisper anti-Pagan slogans into it. It’s not a glowing horoscope, is it?’

  ‘In other words, if I don’t get Jig, don’t come home.
’

  ‘It’s what I’m hearing, Frank. Apropos of Jig, how goes it?’

  ‘I haven’t quite booked my return flight, Foxie.’

  ‘When you do, I very much hope you won’t be travelling unaccompanied.’

  ‘Take aspirins for your hangover,’ Pagan said. ‘And go back to bed.’

  Pagan put the receiver down. The sharpening of the axe, he thought. You leave your desk and the vultures start to circle. You step away and suddenly it’s The Night of the Long Knives. What else could you expect? People were unhappy with him. People didn’t like the way he ran his section. People like Furry Jake thought little of Pagan’s tailor and, by extension, little of Pagan too. Scotland Yard wanted control over him. They didn’t like an upstart having power. And they revelled, God did they ever, in the idea of Jig’s eluding Pagan’s grasp.

  Pagan poured another scotch. Jesus Christ, was this job that important to him? He could run security in the private sector and earn twice as much as he was paid now. But what he hated was the idea of scumbags waiting for him to fall, waiting for him to come home empty-handed because then they could pounce on him and denigrate him with that particularly wicked smugness certain pencil-pushers have for those who work out in the field, the real world.

  He was agitated by the confinement of his room. He wanted to get out of the narrow little rectangle in which he was trapped. He put on a jacket and went down in the elevator to the piano bar.

  Silence. The pianist had gone. The bar was almost empty. Pagan sat up on a stool and ordered a Drambuie. Mandi with an ‘i’ was cleaning the surface of a table in the corner. When she saw Pagan she smiled and drifted over to him. She was small and she moved with economy, like a dancer. It was all an illusion of coordination. Halfway towards him she dropped her order-pad and pencil and giggled as she bent to pick them up because loose change tumbled out of her pocket and went off in a series of little wheels across the floor.

  He wondered what she’d be like in bed. It was the first time he’d entertained this notion quite so clearly in years and it took him by surprise. There was something else too – a small shiver of ridiculous guilt, almost as if the thought of having sex with this girl were somehow a betrayal of Roxanne. And he wondered at the tenacious hold the dead could sometimes have over the living. Could he ever shake himself free?

  ‘I drop things,’ she said.

  ‘I never noticed.’

  The giggle was high-pitched and, although he wasn’t a man enamoured of giggling, he did find something endearing in it.

  ‘Palsy,’ she said. ‘Or is it dropsy?’

  Pagan sipped his Drambuie. He studied her over the rim of his glass. She had dark hair naturally curled, creating an overall effect of a head covered with bubbles. She had a small heart-shaped mouth and straight teeth. There was humour in the face. Mandi was a woman who liked to laugh at herself. Going to bed with her would be some kind of romp through innocence, with no serious attachments, no kinks, no entanglements. Quick rapture and a fond goodbye.

  ‘Enjoying your stay?’ she asked.

  Pagan shrugged. ‘It’s a bewildering city.’

  The girl placed her hands on the surface of the bar. She had chubby, cherubic hands, dimpled. Straightforward, good-natured Mandi. An uncomplicated girl. It was all there in the hands and the brightness of the eyes. Simplicity. The uncluttered life.

  ‘You need a guide,’ she said. ‘If you want to see the place properly.’

  There was an opening here, but Pagan was slow to move towards it. He was out of touch, rusty.

  ‘I’m Mandi, by the way.’

  He nodded. He was going to say he knew that already but why bother? ‘Frank Pagan.’

  ‘Good to know you, Frank. You’re from London, right?’

  ‘Does it show?’

  ‘It’s the way you talk. It’s like Michael Caine in that picture. God, what was it called?’ She pursed her small lips and concentrated. ‘I’m hopeless when it comes to remembering names.’

  No memory. Forever dropping things. Why did he find her clumsiness sweet? She must go through her life in a sweet-natured daze. She wouldn’t need drugs or alcohol because reality made her dizzy enough.

  ‘Alfie!’ she said. ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘I remember it vaguely.’

  ‘Are you on your own?’ she asked. Another opening.

  Pagan was about to say that he was, he was about to say that he was weary of his own company, that he needed a bout of companionship and would she be interested, when he noticed Tyson Bruno sitting in a dark corner of the bar. Whatever nascent appetite he’d begun to feel abruptly shrivelled inside him. The mood was spoiled, sullied. He pushed his glass away and got down from the stool, glancing at Bruno’s hardened wooden face.

  ‘I’d like to be,’ he said. The waitress looked puzzled.

  Pagan moved across the thick carpet of the bar and out into the lobby towards the banks of elevators. For a moment there he’d felt an old mood returning, a need rising inside him, a desire to do something simple and natural, like touching a woman, like bringing quickness back into his circulation, yesterday’s heats, yesterday’s passions, something that would slash away at his ghost. But Tyson Bruno’s face had risen out of the darkness to spoil things, reminding Pagan of the contrast between his own sorry little world where men and women died painfully and treachery was a viable currency, and the world of a cocktail waitress in a 57th Street hotel who dropped things and laughed at herself and lived an uncomplicated life. Two planets, different orbits.

  He travelled up in the empty elevator, thinking of himself as perhaps the first man in history to suffer from a case of premature exorcism. When the car reached his floor, the doors slid open and he looked down the long corridor towards his room. Fuck it, he thought. He needed life and liveliness. And the real trick to that was to say no to self-analysis and no to your history. If you wanted to live, you just went out and did it.

  He stepped back into the elevator and returned to the bar.

  Mandi was gone.

  But Tyson Bruno was still there, coming across the floor with an ape’s grace.

  ‘Don’t run out on me again, Pagan,’ Bruno said. ‘I don’t like being made stupid.’

  ‘That takes no great effort, Tyson.’ Pagan felt weary.

  ‘I hate smartasses,’ Bruno said. ‘Where did you go anyhow?’

  ‘I always wanted to see Brooklyn by moonlight.’

  ‘Sure.’ Tyson Bruno folded his thick arms across his chest. He had a mean, dangerous look all at once, that of a man who lives with violent solutions to tough questions. Pagan stared at the tiny eyes, which resembled the pits of a cherry.

  ‘See it doesn’t happen again,’ Tyson Bruno said.

  ‘I never promise the impossible, Tyson.’

  Pagan turned away and headed back towards the elevators.

  White Plains, New York

  It was eight minutes past seven A.M. when the Reverend Duncanson began his Sunday morning sermon in Memorial Presbyterian Church. The congregation numbered about two hundred people, and Duncanson was pleased to see so many young people in attendance. He wondered if the Englishman who had telephoned was among the worshippers. His sermon, perhaps a little too heavy for the spring weather that had suddenly surfaced this day, concerned the confession of sins and God’s ability to refresh and cleanse the sinner. It was a dark, wintry speech, and it tended, like most of Duncanson’s sermons, to ramble through thickets of personal anecdote, non-sequiturs, and erudite attempts at word-play.

  His eyes scanned the congregation as he spoke. A bright March sun fell upon the stained-glass, creating a nice dappled effect along the central pews. He spoke of confessional needs, carefully making a distinction between the inner need of man to ask forgiveness, and the outer compulsion, a Catholic notion that would bring momentary uneasiness to some of his members. The very word confession was loaded.

  The Reverend Duncanson glanced at his watch, which he always took from his wrist and la
id alongside his notes. He had been speaking now for thirteen minutes. He needed to pick up the pace and bring everything to a conclusion within the next two minutes. After years of sermonising he had the ability to edit his own material in his head. He sometimes thought he was like a stand-up comic who intuited his audience’s mood and shuffled his material accordingly.

  Seven fifteen.

  The second hand of Duncanson’s watch swept forward.

  He closed his sermon after he’d talked for fifteen minutes. He nodded in the direction of the organist, a middle-aged woman who raised her hands above the keyboard, ready to strike. The congregation rose, hymnbooks open.

  ‘We will now sing the Twenty-Third Psalm,’ Duncanson announced. ‘The Lord is My Shepherd.’

  The organist rippled off the introductory chords.

  The great pipes took the sound, transformed it, scattered it through the uppermost parts of the church. It swelled, died, then came back again, a vast flood of music. As Duncanson opened his mouth to sing, he saw a sudden ball of flame rise up from the keyboard and engulf the organist, surrounding her with a wall of fire that spread upwards with a horrific crackling. The force of released heat was so intense he felt it burn the skin at the side of his face. Then there was an explosion from the dead centre of the church, a blast that shook the entire building and blew out the stained-glass windows.

  Duncanson rushed down from the pulpit, unaware in all the smoke and screaming and confusion that his robe had caught fire. Another blast rocked the area around the pulpit, a violent outburst of flame and dark smoke that suggested something released from the fissures of hell. By this time, the ceiling was ablaze, wooden beams consumed by flame. The hymnbooks were burning. The pews were burning. People were burning too, screaming as they tried to rush through the suffocating smoke towards doorways they couldn’t find. Babies. Young men and women. The fire attacked everything.

  And then there was still another explosion, the last one Duncanson heard. It brought the organ pipes down out of the walls, a tumble of plaster and bolts and woodwork and electrical wires which conveyed flame down into the basement of the church where the oil-fuelled central heating system was located. When the oil caught fire the air became dead air, unbreathable, filling lungs with a searing poison.