Jig

by Campbell Armstrong

  On a small stage behind Pagan a fiddler was tuning up his instrument. Pagan turned to watch. The fiddler, a tiny man with large ears, had a gnomelike demeanour. When he played the fiddle, his stubby little fingers danced in a blur. Pagan, who had booked a flight for London first thing in the morning, closed his eyes and listened to the opening bars of The Rose of Aranmore. Somebody at the back of the room sang the lines

  But soon I will return again

  To the scenes I loved so well

  Where many an Irish lass and lad

  Their tales of love do tell

  It was a thing about the Irish. They were always leaving Ireland and then composing homesick songs, songs filled with the prospect of a return to their birth-land. A melancholy crowd, he thought. They were never entirely at home anywhere. And even if they did return to Ireland after years of exile, they were usually eager to be gone again as soon as they could. Who could figure them out?

  He finished his drink, decided to have a second. Only four days had passed since the events at Roscommon. In that brief period of time Leonard Korn had been quoted as saying that only the ‘tenacity’ of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had brought about a resolution to an unhappy business, a Senator from Arkansas had introduced a Bill in the House calling for tougher screening when it came to Irish immigrants and their political affiliations, sanctimonious editorialists everywhere had demanded a moratorium on Irish public assemblies for an indefinite period, and investigative reporters, like the good little hotshots they were, had gone scurrying off to dig into the lives of Ivor McInnes and Patrick Cairney and anybody else who might have been associated with them.

  Pagan was tired. For four days he hadn’t been able to rid himself of a disturbing sense of hollowness. It was as if something quite important had gone out of him. Energy, dedication to his work, he couldn’t pin it down. He read the signs in himself and decided they were nothing more than the responses of a man burned-out by the events in which he’d participated. What he needed was a vacation from his life, a period where he wouldn’t be Frank Pagan at all, but some anonymous tourist with a camera, somebody strolling a sunlit Caribbean beach and sipping tall drinks on a terrace while a great red sun went falling into the blue horizon. A little amnesia. A place where he might forget the question and answer sessions with Leonard Korn that had occupied the last couple of days. Had he really seen Zuboric shoot Jig? How far was Jig standing from Zuboric when the fatal shot was fired? How did he explain the fact that Zuboric had killed Jig with an old Browning registered to Senator Harry Cairney? Korn liked the role of Grand Inquisitor. But The Director was too carried away by the possibility of public rapture to be really good in the part. If there were holes in the story – which was reluctantly narrated by a weary Frank Pagan, who wasn’t good at lies, and told them with a kind of white-hot resentment of the FBI because he had nothing but contempt for that organisation and the man who ran it – Korn didn’t pay them the kind of close attention he might have because Leonard M. Korn needed a convincing story that put the FBI in a good light more than he needed the truth. Pagan supplied the flattering light, wondering all the while how Jig would have reacted to the fable that he’d been killed by a valiant FBI man in the line of duty. Maybe it was best that nobody knew he’d been shot by his own bigamous stepmother. God knows, there was scandal enough in all of this.

  Arthur Zuboric had enjoyed his moment in the sun. He’d been called a hero, a description he modestly turned aside. He was only doing his job, he’d said to the reporters who’d clamoured around him. But why was he retiring? they wanted to know. Artie said it was time to take a long break. Besides, he had money from his pension, and he could live for a time before making a career decision. A long vacation? Yes, Artie had said. Perhaps a month or two in Rio might be nice, especially in the company of Charity, his new fiancee. Tyson Bruno, who was uncommunicative and therefore unattractive to reporters, had taken an extended leave of absence and was said to be fishing in the wilds of Canada.

  Pagan smiled. Rio. Canada. Faraway places.

  He turned his glass around in his hand. The fiddle music was strident and loud in his ears. He thought about the Dawsons. The press had been very subdued about Kevin and Martha, apparently respecting their need for privacy, although there was a spate of articles about the lack of security afforded the unfortunate Dawson girls. Kevin and his wife had gone into seclusion at some country estate in Virginia. If the reporters knew of Kevin Dawson’s association with Irish matters, they were discreet enough not to write about it.

  Pagan shut his eyes a moment. A beach was a tempting prospect. But he wouldn’t want to vacation alone. He was afraid of solitude suddenly. He’d had enough of it. He looked at his wristwatch, took another sip of his drink.

  The other Dawson, Thomas, was off in the Southwest somewhere, campaigning under the rubric of law and order, and generally bearing up under what one journalist called ‘the stress of recent grief’. He had given an interview to Newsweek on the Irish question, during the course of which he wondered about the possibility of the U.S. playing a greater role in bringing peace to Ireland. He wasn’t specific, for which all his advisors were thankful.

  Pagan shook his head. The world moves on, he thought. It keeps turning. And you couldn’t keep the Irish down for very long.

  The fiddler had begun to play that great Irish weepy The Rose of Tralee. Sometimes Pagan thought that there were only about twenty Irish songs in existence and they just kept circulating endlessly. The crowd in the bar was singing along with the musician. Pagan finished his drink. Tomorrow, London. A report for the Secretary. Question and answer sessions. Reporters at the airport. He couldn’t shake the feeling he’d come all this way for nothing. Screw London. Why didn’t he change his plans? If he decided to step on another plane destined for a remote sunny place, what could anybody do to stop him? London seemed a drab prospect to him now, a cold season, wet streets and rooftops, sad little parks.

  He looked inside his glass. He wondered if you could possibly tell your future from the pattern left by the froth of a Guinness. You’re going on a long journey, Frank.

  He pushed his empty glass away. He was thinking of Ivor McInnes and the woman called Celestine. Foxie, who had done some legwork in London, had called with the information that Ivor had indeed married the woman in a private ceremony in the Ulster town of Enniskillen in 1978. As for Celestine, it appeared that she’d been born in Belfast but raised in Boston by Irish–American parents, both of whom were fervent anti-Catholics. What she had drummed into her from the start was hatred. The hard line stuff. Catholics are evil. They breed like rabbits. One day they’ll dominate the world. We have to do something about them. Celestine Cunningham, as she was known, went back and forth between America and Ireland, where she became attached to the concept of Protestant supremacy in Ulster. She had bought the whole package, hatreds intact, bigotries in place. She was naturally suited to Ivor. And she was a natural for the Free Ulster Volunteers – indeed, their only female member. Northern Ireland wasn’t a place where women went in great numbers into terrorist groups. Their role was expected to be more domestic.

  Celestine and Ivor McInnes. Pagan tried to imagine the inner workings of Ivor McInnes. It was tough. Pagan could see the obsession somewhat, but he knew his insights were superficial and limited. There was no way in the world he could grasp the depths of Ivor, the byzantine workings of the brain, nor did he understand what the heart was made out of. There had to be as much patience as there was loathing in Ivor. That plan of his, for instance. Devious, time-consuming, having to make each play slowly. The bigamous marriage of Celestine to Harry Cairney – how long had it taken for McInnes to orchestrate that affair? He had somehow contrived to put Celestine Cunningham in Boston, in a position where she’d inevitably meet Harry Cairney and where her beauty would overwhelm the old man to the extent that he’d want to marry her. Pagan supposed that he might never know now how McInnes had latched on to Harry as one of the Fund-raisers i
n the first place. Maybe it had started with nothing more than a rumour, an item of gossip produced by one of McInnes’s sources of intelligence, a thin possibility that Celestine, as soon as she was ensconced at Roscommon as the bride of the former Senator, confirmed for him. It had to be a strange precarious existence for the woman, watching Harry’s activities, listening, spying, and then somehow reporting back to Ivor. Clandestine phone calls. Secret letters. Pagan realised he’d never know the extent of the communication between them.

  He wondered if there were ever moments in McInnes’s life when he lay awake thinking about his absent wife or if his cause were more important than the matter of sexual jealousy. Did he lie in a dark room and envisage his wife in Senator Cairney’s bed? Did he sweat and clutch the bedsheets and stare at the window in anger and envy? Or was he more pragmatic than that, more patient, was his love for the woman subjugated to her usefulness to him? Pagan would never know.

  And Jig.

  Frank Pagan didn’t want to think about Jig. He ordered a third Guinness, sipped it slowly. He could see, if he wanted to, the set of Jig’s face as he lay dead at Roscommon. He could see the blood soak into the rug and the closed eyelids and the way the shadows on that landing left small scarlike marks across the skin. But these were images and had nothing to do with the substance of the man. And besides, he didn’t want to entertain them. All he knew was that in some inexplicable way he felt a strange sense of loss. Strange because he hadn’t known Jig well. Hadn’t really known him at all.

  He drank from his glass.

  The fiddler was playing The Mountains of Mourne. Pagan thought he could have taken bets on that one. Later, it would be Kevin Barry and Galway Bay and Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye.

  He didn’t intend to hang around for those tunes. He looked at his watch. He’d finish his drink, and if nothing had happened by then he’d leave. He didn’t care if he never heard another Irish tune. He drained his glass, reluctant to set it down and go. But he couldn’t linger here.

  He thought of how Foxie had told him that all the known members of the Free Ulster Volunteers were being rounded up in Ireland and questioned about the Connie O’Mara and the missing money.

  The money, Pagan thought. Long gone. Artie was on his way to Rio and Tyson Bruno was in Canada and the money had disappeared in such a manner that soon it would have the substance of legend and, like any lost treasure, attract all kinds of crackpots who claimed they had half of a map to its burial place and needed only the other section to disinter the cash. They came out of the woodwork when huge sums of money were inexplicably missing.

  He saw his face in the bar mirror and thought, Pale, Pagan. Far too white. He wanted sandcastles and tides and exotic drinks and a woman’s mouth.

  He turned around when he felt the girl’s hand on his sleeve.

  She said, ‘Sorry I’m late. I couldn’t get my money to add up. I was short about nine dollars.’

  ‘A hanging offence,’ Pagan said.

  She nudged him and smiled. ‘It’s quite serious.’ She removed her shoulder-bag, which somehow managed to slip out of her grasp and tumble on the bar, where it fell open, showering out tubes of lipstick, a wallet, combs, hairgrips and tissues.

  ‘Christ,’ she said. ‘It’s like I can’t help myself. Butterfingers.’

  ‘It’s endearing. Don’t worry about it.’

  The girl scooped up the items back inside her purse. Pagan, thinking about his beach, turning over the sorry prospect of London in his mind, asked her what she wanted to drink.

  ‘Something green,’ she said.

  ‘Green?’

  ‘For St. Patrick’s Day.’

  Pagan looked into her eyes. He felt a strong affection for this clumsy girl. He placed his hand over hers, surprised by his movement, his boldness. It was strange to be touching a woman after so long a time. It was strange and exciting and it took his breath away.

  ‘You’re not Irish, are you?’ he said.

  ‘With a name like Mandi Straub? You’ve got to be kidding.’

  ‘So why a green drink!’

  ‘Everybody’s a little bit Irish on St. Patrick’s Day,’ she replied.

  Pagan put his hand inside the pocket of his coat. He took out an emerald ring he’d found in the hallway of the house at Roscommon. It had been lying close to the body of Ivor McInnes, hidden in the shadows of the staircase. He wasn’t even sure now why he’d bothered to pick it up. He didn’t know to whom it had belonged. It was a souvenir he didn’t want to keep.

  ‘This is green,’ he said. He gave it to the girl. ‘I want you to have it.’

  She held it in the palm of her hand and smiled. ‘I can’t accept this.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I hardly know you.’

  Pagan was silent for a while. Before the night was out, he would somehow remedy that situation. He reached for her hand and closed her fingers gently over the ring.

  ‘Keep it,’ he said.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘It’s the appropriate colour.’

  The girl smiled at him. ‘Are you a little bit Irish too?’ she asked.

  Pagan considered this question for a time before he said, ‘Only a little.’

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Frank Pagan Novels

  1

  Edinburgh, Scotland

  There were too many things wrong with Edinburgh in late August. The crowds that filled Princes Street and spilled over into the old thoroughfares leading up to the Castle, which floated in the drizzling mist like a great galleon, gave Jacob Kiviranna a sense of claustrophobia. He was distressed by crowds, especially those that consisted mainly of American and Japanese tourists, restless as magpies, searching for quaint bargains in stores with none to offer. And then there was the weather, which was wet and joyless. It had been raining in a slow, merciless way ever since he’d arrived in the city the day before and checked into a small hotel behind Hanover Street – and now he couldn’t rid himself of the feeling that his lungs were waterlogged.

  He looked at his watch, an old Timex, and saw he had thirty minutes until the train arrived at Waverley Station. He moved along Rose Street, Edinburgh’s famous street of bars, passing open doorways through which he could see flocks of hurried drinkers. He stepped inside one of the pubs, sat on a stool at the far end of the counter – a solitary spot – and ordered gin.

  In the mirror behind the bar he gazed at his reflection. The eyes were deeply set and bright and somehow made people uneasy when they looked into them. The few acquaintances Jacob Kiviranna had made in his lifetime – other than analysts and therapists – had invariably found pretexts for drifting out of his orbit and slipping from sight. There was an intensity about him, an other-worldliness, that deterred friendships. Even as he sat now in the bar his lips moved almost imperceptibly in the way of people who have lived lives of extreme loneliness and who converse, if at all, with the voices they hear in their own skulls.

  Stitched to the left shoulder of his khaki combat jacket was a Disneyland legend, the face of Mickey Mouse. On the right sleeve was a small American flag. Kiviranna’s ponytail was held tightly in place with a brown rubber band. He wore a wispy beard and looked like a superannuated hippie, a relic of another place and time. To a casual onlooker, he might have seemed like a raddled casualty of the drug culture, somebody who had taken one trip too many and hadn’t quite managed to make it back and who now lived, poor soul, in a crazy world of his own making. And yet there was something more to Kiviranna than just this impression of being out of touch. There was something purposeful in his air of vague bewilderment, the kind of look aspirant saints carried back with them from the wilderness.

  He sipped his drink, looked once again at his watch. If British Rail obeyed its own inscrutable timetables there were now twenty-five minutes until the train arrived on platform three at Waverley Station. He reached inside the pocket of his jacket and touched the gun. It was an Argentinian nine-shot Bersa 225. When he’d handled it in
his hotel room this morning, he’d liked the icy blue finish of the pistol, the silken, almost fleshy sensation.

  Twenty minutes. He left the bar without finishing his drink. It was a mere ten minutes to Waverley Station, hardly any distance at all, but he’d stroll there slowly.

  On Princes Street he stared up at the Castle. It reminded him now of a natural artifact, something hacked by nature out of wind and rock and still in some weird process of change. Along the gardens of Princes Street flags fluttered bleakly. Posters advertising this or that Festival event were limp and soggy and indifferent. Avant-garde plays. Mime shows. Mozart. Pipe and drum bands.

  Ahead, Kiviranna saw the entrance to the station. He paused, jostled on all sides by people with umbrellas and shopping bags. A group of boys wearing the green and white scarves of a local soccer team went banging past him, singing something unintelligible and irritating. He put his hand against the outline of the gun as he moved closer to the station. There was a familiar pain that had come out of nowhere to take root deep in his head.

  He heard the shunting of a locomotive and the shouts of newspaper vendors and the screeching brakes of maroon double-decker buses. For the first time now he felt a sudden fluttering of nerves, something that moved around his heart and made him cold. Something that had nothing to do with the external weather. He adjusted his backpack, stopped to look at the headline on one of the local newspapers, then he moved on.

  He took a thin guidebook out of his jeans, pretended to examine it, flipping through the pages but seeing little.

  Edinburgh has always been known as the Athens of the North.