A school-bus. Cairney felt very cold. He was fumbling towards the sense of it all, groping for a revelation that he knew was going to be denied him.
He opened his eyes, turned his face towards her. ‘Who the fuck are you?’ he asked, thinking maybe, just maybe, he could fish his weapon out of his pocket, if he could be quick enough, slick, but even as he reached for it she took one step forward and fired her gun a second time.
Cairney didn’t feel the entrance of the bullet into his chest. He fell back, knocking a chair over as he dropped, and he lay face down on the rug. He was barely conscious of hearing her footsteps as she approached him.
She bent down to touch the nape of his neck. ‘We had some moments too,’ she whispered.
Calmly, carefully, Celestine changed her clothes. She stepped out onto the landing, without once looking at the two figures who lay on the bedroom floor. The heels of her boots made soft clicking noises on wood floorboards as she entered Patrick Cairney’s bedroom. She stood by the window, gazing out a moment.
She saw a car come up to the front of the house.
She pressed her face against the glass, then she turned away. It was time now. It was time to leave this place.
She opened the closet in Patrick’s bedroom and began to remove old books, boxes that contained ancient board-games, a battered microscope, running shoes, a football, crumpled pennants, a dusty framed wall map with the title LEGENDARY IRELAND in Celtic script. The relics of Jig, she thought.
There was a satchel stored at the very back of the closet. She reached for it and drew it towards her. And then she turned around and, with one last glance at Patrick Cairney’s bed, she left the room.
27
Roscommon, New York
Frank Pagan was standing at the foot of the stairs when he heard the first gunshot. When he heard the second, he turned and moved back along the hallway. He stepped inside the living room and closed the door, leaving only a small space through which he could observe the staircase. It was a limited field of vision, but it was infinitely more safe than doing something completely reckless, like charging up the stairs with his gun in his hand. If he waited here, sooner or later Jig was going to come down. He wondered about the gunfire. He assumed that Jig had had to shoot Senator Cairney, although he couldn’t understand why two shots had been fired.
He waited.
The room in which he stood was elegantly furnished. There were old prints on the walls, each depicting a Dublin scene at the turn of the century. Kingstown Pier. The Custom House on the banks of the Liffey. Horsedrawn carriages on St. Stephen’s Green. He glanced at them a moment, then returned his attention to the stairs.
Pagan heard a sound from above. A door opened and closed faintly, a slight noise diminished by the mass of the house. Then there were footsteps for a moment. After that there was silence again.
Pagan waited. Earlier, when he’d been poking cautiously through the downstairs rooms, he thought he’d heard a man’s upraised voice, but he hadn’t been certain. The brickwork of this old house trapped sounds and diffused them and created auditory illusions. He passed his pistol from one hand to the other because there was a sudden small cramp in his fingers. The palms of his hands were sticky with sweat.
Now he heard footsteps in the hallway. They were coming from the front door, not from the stairs as he’d expected. He couldn’t see anything in that direction. He heard them come close to where he stood. Heavy steps. A man’s steps. They stopped some feet from the door behind which he was standing.
Frank Pagan held his breath, listened. Now there was more movement, from the stairs this time. He glanced up into the dark brown shadows.
The person coming down wasn’t Jig and it wasn’t Senator Harry Cairney either. Wrong sex.
It was a woman dressed in black cord pants and a black leather jacket. She wore tinted glasses and her yellow hair was held up by a black ribbon. In one hand she carried a small overnight bag, also black, in the other a large satchel. She created a sombre impression as she moved, taking the stairs slowly. Where the hell was Jig? Pagan wondered. And who was this woman?
She reached the bottom step, where she set her bag down and took off her dark glasses. Her smile was suddenly radiant. She had the bluest eyes Pagan had ever seen. She held her arms out. The man who had entered from Pagan’s blind side stepped forward and Pagan could see him for the first time, and he felt a certain voltage around his heart.
‘Celestine,’ the man said.
His voice was unmistakable.
Pagan watched as the couple embraced. There was laughter, the kind of laughter you associate with a reunion. There was relief and happiness in the sound and a maudlin tinge.
‘Too long, too bloody long,’ the man said.
‘Yes,’ the woman whispered. ‘Far too long.’
The woman slid her glasses back over her eyes.
The man made a gesture towards the stairs.
‘It’s over,’ the woman said.
‘Both of them?’
‘Both of them.’
The man laughed again. ‘You were right about Jig then,’ he said. ‘You’re a bloody wonder. You know that?’ The man was quiet before he added, ‘I think I’d like to go upstairs, take a look at the body. I’d like to be sure.’
The body, Frank Pagan thought. Was he talking about Jig? Jig’s body? Pagan felt a cold hand inside his brain.
The woman turned and looked up the flight of stairs. ‘Take my word for it. He’s dead. Let’s get the hell out of here. I’ve been in this place too bloody long. I want to go home to Ireland.’
The big man reached down to pick up the overnight bag.
Frank Pagan stepped out from behind the door, holding his pistol in front of him.
The big man turned around, saw Pagan, and for a second his expression was one of disbelief, but it changed to a restrained kind of amusement. ‘Frank Pagan,’ he said. ‘I can’t seem to shake you.’
‘People always tell me I’ve got a dogged quality, Ivor,’ Pagan replied.
‘People are right.’ Ivor McInnes sighed and turned to the woman. ‘This, my dear, is Frank Pagan. I mentioned him to you once or twice, I believe.’
The woman removed her glasses and stared at Pagan. She didn’t say anything. She gazed at Pagan’s gun, then turned her face back to McInnes. She shrugged, almost as if Pagan’s presence made no difference to her.
Ivor McInnes was still smiling. ‘What brings you all the way up here to this wild place, Frank?’
‘Jig,’ Pagan said. He found it difficult to take his eyes away from the woman’s face. She had a rare beauty that seemed somehow innocent to him and he couldn’t begin to imagine what her association with McInnes might be. There was intimacy between them, in the way they stood close together, the way they’d embraced before. And, almost as if some of this woman’s beauty had affected Ivor McInnes, the man looked suddenly handsome there in the hall, distinguished and proud and pleased.
‘Jig’s dead,’ McInnes said. ‘And his father along with him.’
‘His father?’ Pagan asked.
‘Senator Harry Cairney.’
Pagan was quiet. The fact that Harry Cairney was Jig’s father took a very long time to make its way into that part of his brain that absorbed information. It had to pass through filters of disbelief first. It had to make its way around the confusion of emotions Pagan felt at the news of Jig’s death. Disappointment. Anger. And sorrow – was there just a touch of sorrow in there or was he simply sad that the chance to take Jig back to London with him had gone? He wasn’t sure of any of his feelings right then.
‘I see it perplexes you, Frank,’ McInnes said.
‘To put it mildly.’
McInnes shook his head and made a long sighing sound. ‘It would seem that neither man knew of the other’s activities,’ he said. ‘It’s what you might call a lack of communication. The son doesn’t know what the father’s doing. And the father has no idea about his son. Ah, modern families.’
Pagan didn’t say anything for a while. He’d come a long, long way to take Jig back to England, and now there was nothing left of that ambition. But there was Ivor still, and Ivor would have to suffice. There was also this woman, Ivor’s accomplice. Somehow, though, he felt strangely empty. He felt he was moving through the demands imposed upon him by a role, a job of acting, doing the things expected of him even if his heart weren’t entirely in it. He’d been after Jig too long, and now Jig was gone.
He looked at the woman and said, ‘You killed them.’
The woman gave him a look of mild disgust. ‘Do you expect me to admit that?’
Frank Pagan didn’t know what to expect. He stared at her a moment, then turned towards Ivor. If he couldn’t have Jig, then by Christ he’d bring McInnes to some kind of justice.
He said, ‘I almost didn’t see your plan, Ivor. I almost missed it. I was looking for the complex when I ought to have been looking for something simple.’
Ivor McInnes moved just a little closer to the woman, cupping her elbow in the palm of his hand.
‘You brought your thugs into this country,’ Pagan said. ‘You orchestrated acts of violence and placed the blame on the IRA.’
‘Is that what you think, Frank?’
‘It’s what I know,’ Pagan said. He was hoarse all at once, depleted. ‘I only fully realised it when I found the body of John Waddell. You lied to me from the start, McInnes. And then you compounded your lies with even more lies. Bullshit about trying to make some kind of peace with an IRA faction. I never bought that story. Jig did. But not me. Unfortunately, I was in no position to argue with him at the time. You set out to discredit the IRA in the most callous way imaginable. You set out to turn public opinion totally against them by directing the FUV to act as it did.’
McInnes was quiet for a moment. He said, ‘Northern Ireland is a sad society, Frank. You’ve been there. You’ve seen it. You’ve seen what happens when warring factions can’t find a peace plan. And the sorry thing about it is that there’s no possibility of any peace in the future unless the IRA is squashed.’
‘Along with the Free Ulster Volunteers,’ Pagan said.
‘I agree with you, Frank. In the Ireland I want, there’s no place for hoodlums.’ McInnes glanced at the woman. ‘When you want to provoke outrage, you strike at the innocent, Pagan. It does no good in this day and age to assassinate a President. People expect that kind of atrocity. They’re numbed by that. But blow up a church and then massacre some children on a school-bus, and suddenly you’ve got the public attention. They howl. Jesus, how they howl! And then they strike back with a vengeance at the perpetrators. In this case, Frank, the Irish Republican Army is the culprit.’
Pagan felt a numbness in the hand that held the gun. He was thinking now of the school-bus and the dead children and the fact that Jig had been murdered, and all the deaths congealed inside him, a knot in the centre of his chest. He realised he wanted to kill McInnes then and there. Shoot the man on the precise spot where he presently stood. Shoot him directly between the eyes. All along McInnes had been manipulating events, plotting destruction.
‘You knew the names of the Fund-raisers, didn’t you, Ivor?’
‘Of course I did.’ McInnes smiled at the woman. ‘Mrs. Harry Cairney kept me well informed.’
‘Mrs. Cairney?’ Pagan asked.
The woman smiled coldly at Pagan from behind her dark glasses. Frank Pagan wondered what inestimable treasons had been going on in this large gloomy house.
‘You could have made my life easier if you’d supplied me with the names, Ivor,’ he said.
‘I’m not in the business of making my enemy’s life easier, Frank. Why tell you their names? It was nice to think of you busily running around trying to find out. It kept your mind off me for a while.’
‘And you knew Jig was coming to the States,’ Pagan said.
‘All along, Frank. From the moment Finn first sent him. We knew he was coming here to find the money. We told you about that. We wanted you to have a gift from your friends inside the FUV, Frank. We wanted you to come over here and catch him. We were much too busy to be sidetracked into getting him ourselves. Besides, we didn’t have the expertise for that. And I assumed you did. You and the FBI. But you failed to catch him. You let me down there. It doesn’t matter now, of course. We didn’t expect to find Jig was part of this particular household, but you know what they say about gift-horses. And Jig did us a favour by rendering the Fund-raisers obsolete.’ McInnes was lightly rubbing the woman’s neck. ‘Besides, Jig wasn’t what I was after. Jig was only a part of a larger entity. I want the IRA in its entirety, Frank. Not just one assassin.’
Pagan said nothing. He kept looking at the woman’s expressionless faces. Mrs. Harry Cairney.
McInnes looked suddenly solemn. ‘The trouble is, Frank, your government hasn’t done a damn thing about the IRA. They pussyfoot around, the problem. They send in bloody soldiers, young kids who’re too scared to act. And then when they do get their hands on the IRA, it’s your court system that protects the bastards. It’s your courts that say these gangsters have rights. They can’t be hanged. They can’t be flogged. They can’t be tortured. Good heavens, don’t lay a hand on them or else they’ll be sending out for their lawyers and making depositions to the bloody Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Jesus Christ! The IRA aren’t people, Pagan. They aren’t human beings. They’re rodents. And you people don’t have a clue about what to do with them.’
Rodents, Pagan thought.
McInnes said, ‘I’m sick and tired of violence, Pagan. I want an end to it. I want an end to the IRA. I want to see peace in Belfast and through the rest of Ireland. And if the British can’t do it, then perhaps the Americans will.’
The Americans. Frank Pagan rubbed the corner of an eye. Here he was now, standing on the precipice of Ivor’s dream and looking down a dark slope into the abyss. ‘Was that it, Ivor? You brought violence into the United States because you hoped it would outrage Americans enough that they’d send some troops over there to wipe out the IRA?’
‘It’s going to happen,’ McInnes said. ‘People in this country are sick to death of terrorists and their threats. They’re tired of all the anti-American activities that go on throughout the world. The Americans hate two things, Frank. They hate being put on the defensive, especially in their own country. And they hate to be inconvenienced. My God, do they ever hate that! They can’t go to Europe, because they’re afraid. They can’t cruise the Med, because the bloody Libyans will likely hijack their ships. They can’t do business in the Middle East without fearing for their lives. They’re tired of it all, Frank. And now they’re ready to hit back. And they’ve got a target all set-up for them. The IRA. It’s going to happen because there’s a weak President in the White House who’s going to be swayed by public outrage. A man who’s personally suffering at this very moment from his own loss. His two nieces, Frank. His brother’s children. The IRA killed his own flesh and blood. Tell me he won’t react to that.’
Pagan thought McInnes had to go down as the worst kind of monster. The monster who dreams and who doesn’t care what his dreams destroy or whom they touch or the lives they shatter. He thought about Kevin Dawson for a second. He thought about dead kids and a shattered school-bus and a silent country house near New Rockford, Connecticut. For the rest of his life Kevin Dawson would only have pictures of his daughters to look at. Pictures on a mantelpiece.
‘You want your own fucking little Vietnam in Ireland.’
‘I don’t think so,’ McInnes said. ‘It wouldn’t take the Americans long to crush the IRA.’
‘No, Ivor,’ Pagan replied. ‘It would take forever. You don’t see very far, do you? The IRA would thrive in the end because it’s always thrived in one form or another. The English couldn’t kill it. The Irish themselves couldn’t stamp it out. It passes between father and son. It goes from one generation to the next. The Americans might subdue them for a while, but sooner or lat
er the Americans would have to go home. That is, if the governments of Ireland and Britain approved of their intervention in the first place, which is highly unlikely.’
‘No, Frank. It’s the logical step for this country. And do you think the governments of Ireland and Britain are going to turn down a helping hand when it comes to a problem they’ve been battling with miserable success one way or another for centuries? I don’t think so.’
Pagan was quiet again. Ivor’s dream, grandiose, elaborate, made a jarring sound inside his head. He said, ‘If it hadn’t been for your own troops killing Fitzjohn in Albany and calling the FBI, the name of the Free Ulster Volunteers wouldn’t ever have entered into the picture, would it?’
McInnes nodded. ‘It was a bad moment for me, but it doesn’t matter now,’ he said.
The woman, who’d been listening to this in a distant kind of way, tugged at McInnes’s sleeve impatiently. McInnes looked at her, taking his hand away from her neck. It suddenly occurred to Frank Pagan that this pair expected to walk out of the house and take their leave as if nothing had ever happened here, as if McInnes had nothing to answer for.
McInnes said, ‘You’ll excuse us now, Pagan.’
‘Don’t make me laugh, Ivor. Where the hell do you think you’re going?’
McInnes looked at the gun. ‘I haven’t seen my wife in two long years, Frank.’
‘Your wife?’
McInnes slung an arm round the woman’s shoulder. Pagan couldn’t see her expression for the dark glasses.
‘You sound surprised, Frank.’
‘You said she was Mrs. Cairney.’
‘So I did, so I did.’ McInnes smiled. ‘You can figure it out for yourself, Frank. I know you’re capable of it. But you shouldn’t sound so surprised. Why shouldn’t an old warhorse like me have a wife as beautiful as Celestine?’
A match made in hell, Pagan thought. He stared at McInnes’s large hand on the woman’s shoulder.
‘Two years is a long time,’ McInnes said. ‘And I’ve come a long way to take her back home, Frank. I’m sure you understand.’
Jig Page 55
