Jig (10 page)

Finn had thought there was something unconvincing about this story. He didn't doubt that it was true, but atrocities were alas commonplace in Belfast. Everybody and his uncle had at least one horror story to tell. By itself, it wasn't enough to produce the kind of venom that was present in Jig whenever he spoke of the English. Was the young man simply trying to say that he was a humanitarian outraged by the casual and utterly useless deaths of small children? Finn didn't buy that. It was too easy, facile. He had the strong feeling that Jig, for whatever reasons, was going through his memory on a highly selective basis. That something was being left out of the narrative. He flirted briefly with the notion that perhaps Jig was one of those psychopathic types that were unfortunately drawn to the Cause because it offered a justification for their violent tendencies, but he dismissed this because there was a certain authenticity in the way the boy had delivered his story. Just the same, Finn still felt dissatisfied. If he was going to find a use for this young man, he needed to be absolutely certain of him.

It's not enough, boy
, Finn said.

What more do you want?
Jig asked.

Hatred doesn't spring from one isolated incident
.

Doesn't it?

Finn shook his head.
There's got to be more
.

The young man had smiled then, which was something he apparently didn't do very often. His normal expression was one of grimness, an unrelaxed look that suggested a life of forever being tense.
Wary
, maybe that was the word Finn had wanted. It was a good quality in a killer. An assassin had to have an edge. But Finn needed more than what this young man had told him before he could recruit him.

Do you want a history lesson, Finn? Is that it? Do you want me to tell you how the British presence in this country sickens me?

You can't tell me anything about bloody history, boy
.

I didn't think so
.

Together, they had walked silently through the sanctuary, scaring birds out of the rushes and puddles and mudbanks. When they paused beneath some trees, Finn asked,
Do you know your way around a gun?

Jig said he did.

Finn paused for a second.
We'll talk again
, was what he had finally said, drifting under the trees and away from the boy, who watched sullenly.

When Finn had gone several yards the young man had called out.
I'm tired of talk. Is that all anybody ever does in this country?

Finn had smiled to himself but hadn't looked back.

Now, staring at the telephone on his desk, Finn felt despair. All the work, all the planning – and the Saint turns around and sells to the first fucking buyer that comes along with a stuffed wallet!

Dear God. He needed to get out of this house for a time. He wanted the sharp morning air on his face and the sea breezes blowing at him and the chance to get his thoughts straight. Maybe he'd go into Dublin. He always had a relaxing time there. Maybe he'd go and see Molly, who had a flat in the suburb of Palmerstown. Molly had ways of unwinding him and God! he needed that now.

He dressed himself slowly in his best suit, a three-piece black worsted with squared shoulders. It was an old-fashioned suit and it looked peculiarly Irish. He dabbed his underarms with deodorant. Then he piled his long hair up on top of his head and covered it with an old black felt hat. He put on a pair of sunglasses. Without these small precautions, his long hair would have drawn attention, and he believed in a low profile when he had to go out in public. He didn't want to look eccentric on the streets, not even in these times when there were punk rockers on Grafton Street with their hair dyed pink and safety pins hanging from their nostrils.

He picked up the telephone and called a number. It was that of the man who usually sat armed out in the gatehouse and who lived nearby.

‘George,' Finn said. ‘Will you bring the car around now?'

George said, ‘Certainly. Where are we headed?'

Finn hesitated a second. ‘Into town. I think a trip into town would be very nice.'

He stepped out of the house and walked down the driveway towards the gatehouse. The March morning was unusually sunny and the only clouds in the sky lay somewhere out in the middle of the Irish Sea – drifting, he hoped, over to England. He sat inside the gatehouse for five minutes, then he saw the old Daimler approach. He hoped America would be kind to Jig. If Jig couldn't get that money back … Finn didn't want to think the worst.

The tyres of the Daimler crunched on gravel. Finn opened the rear door, climbed inside.

‘Palmerstown,' Finn said.

The driver nodded. He had driven the Old Man to Palmerstown many times before.

Dublin

‘No good-byes,' Patrick Cairney told the girl.

‘I want to drive you to the airport. What's wrong with that?'

‘I hate airports. I hate farewells. I get a lump in my throat. My eyes water. I fall to pieces.'

Rhiannon Canavan was dressed in her nurse's uniform, over which she wore a green coat with the sleeves dangling empty. Cairney thought she looked particularly lovely.

‘Didn't I slip away from the hospital just so I could take you to the airport?'

‘I'll call you from the States,' he said.

‘Oh, sure you will.'

‘Why do you doubt that?'

She shrugged. ‘Maybe there's something just a wee bit thrust-and-run about you, Cairney. I don't see you calling me at all.'

‘Cross my heart.'

‘I'll drop you off. I won't even come with you
inside
the blasted place!'

Cairney relented. ‘Promise?'

‘I give you my word.'

Cairney reached out to touch her face.

‘Will you come back to me when your father's better?'

‘Or worse.'

Rhiannon put a fingertip against his mouth. ‘Don't say that. I'm sure he's going to be just fine.'

Cairney looked at the sky from the window. There was somewhere a weak suggestion of the sun that had been in the heavens earlier but that now lay behind a clutch of miserly clouds. He took Rhiannon Canavan in his arms and held her tightly.

She said, ‘Some people make complete recoveries from mild heart attacks, you know. I've seen it happen hundreds of times.'

Cairney didn't speak.

There was a dryness at the back of his throat. He played with the idea that it would be perfect to stay right here where he was. Just him and this lovely girl in this small apartment. Their own uninterrupted love nest. Silence and exhaustion and the sweetness of flesh. They could lie here and make love and die of malnutrition.

‘I've never been in America,' the girl said. ‘Sure, I have millions of aunts and uncles and cousins I've never seen. I think most of them live in Union City, New Jersey. Is it pretty there?'

‘In New Jersey?'

‘Yeh. Is it pretty?'

‘It has its moments. I don't think Union City is one of them, though.'

Rhiannon Canavan looked at her small wristwatch. ‘Are you packed?' she asked, all at once practical. ‘You don't have a lot of time, Patrick.'

‘I'm packed.'

‘We don't even have time for a quickie, do we?'

‘How quick's a quickie?' he asked.

‘Now that depends entirely on you, doesn't it?'

Patrick Cairney smiled. He wondered if he could lose himself a moment in sheer blind passion, if there was an oxygen bubble inside the vacuum he felt.

Rhiannon kissed him on the lips. It was a warm kiss and he was drawn down into it where he found himself in a well-lit place where there existed neither airplanes nor schedules nor long journeys to make. It was like drowning in tepid, scented water, peacefully and without panic, watching yourself circle and go down and circle and go down again, until there was no further place left to sink to and you were blissfully on the bottom. He slid his hands between the buttons of her uniform, feeling the small breasts under his palms. Her nipples were hard. He worked the uniform open, pushing it back from her shoulders. Her green coat fell to the floor. He traced a line with his fingertips from her breasts to her navel and then down across her smooth stomach, which had a lustrous silken texture.

Afterwards, Rhiannon said, ‘I hate heart attacks.'

George Scully, the driver of the Daimler that dropped Finn off in Palmerstown, parked the car on St. Stephen's Green and walked until he came to the large covered marketplace known as the Powerscourt Townhouse, which he entered from South William Street. He passed stalls selling earrings and lace items and Celtic crosses carved in stone and recordings of the Clancy Brothers, and he rose to the upper tier where he entered a coffee shop. He bought a milky coffee, took it to a table, sat down, drummed his fingers impatiently. He knew he didn't have much time before he would have to get back to the car and pick up the Old Man.

Presently, he heard the sound of somebody whistling tunelessly and a shadow fell across the table. The driver looked up and smiled. The newcomer wore a navy-blue seaman's coat and a woollen hat drawn down over his ears.

‘I'll be quick,' George Scully said.

The other man nodded. He sat down, looking around the coffee shop.

The driver leaned across the table. ‘It's just like we thought it would be. He's sending Jig.'

‘Is he now?'

George Scully said, ‘I couldn't hear this very well because the Old Man takes precautions like nobody's business, but he's definitely sending Jig.' Scully paused and ran the tip of a finger round the rim of his cup. ‘Sometimes Jig uses a passport in the name of John Doyle. Sometimes not. I happened to be the one who picked up the passport for him, so what I'm telling you is reliable.'

The man in the seaman's jacket nodded. ‘Jig,' he said quietly. ‘Well now. Isn't that something?'

Scully said, ‘The New York connection is a certain Father Tumulty. Your friends in Belfast will want to know that, I'm sure.' Scully was silent a second. He bit uncertainly on his lower lip. ‘Come to Dun Laoghaire around ten. The Old Man's with his fancy woman right now, and he's going to be drunk when he gets home.'

‘We'll be there.'

‘The gates will be unlocked. I won't be in the gatehouse.'

‘Fine,' the man in the seaman's jacket said.

George Scully stared into his coffee. He said, ‘Ten years I've been with the Old Man. Ten years of guarding him, running his bloody errands. Long before he started getting all his grand ideas. He wasn't always the way he is now, a bloody big shot. And what have I got to show for it? Sweet fuck all.'

The man in the seaman's jacket took a brown envelope from inside his shirt and pressed it down on the table and George Scully picked it up quickly, hiding it under his coat.

‘It's all there, Scully. Twenty-five thousand English pounds.'

George Scully looked unhappy. ‘I never thought I'd see this day,' he remarked.

‘You've earned the cash,' the other man said.

‘There's a bad name for what I'm doing,' Scully said solemnly.

‘Aye. But you could think of it another way. You're making your own little contribution to ending the Troubles, aren't you?'

Scully placed a hand around his coffee cup. ‘We'll see, won't we?'

The other man went back out through the Powerscourt Townhouse to the streets. He walked rapidly, pausing only at the Market Arcade to place a coin in the can of a blind penny-whistle player.

The blind man was playing
The Minstrel Boy
.

The Minstrel Boy to the war is gone
,

In the ranks of death you'll find him
.

The ranks of death.

Jesus, there was going to be a lot of dying.

The man, whose name was Seamus Houlihan and who four nights ago had been employed as an ordinary seaman on the
Connie O'Mara
, found a taxi to take him to Connolly Station, where he'd be in time to meet Waddell coming off the train from Belfast.

6

London

‘Vile,' said Sir John Foulkes, who had a flamboyant handlebar moustache and Edwardian sideburns. ‘This business with Walter Whiteford. Utterly vile, Frank.'

Frank Pagan looked from the window of the Undersecretary's office. A barge was making its way up the River Thames, leaving a wake like a water beetle.

‘Why are these assassinations always so vile?' the Under-secretary asked. It was not so much a question as a reflection on the lack of common decency in the world. The Under-secretary defined decency in terms of the right breeding, the right schools, and ultimately something that was called ‘good form,' itself a consequence of being expensively raised and expensively educated. It was a vicious circle of privilege, and Pagan sometimes resented it.

Pagan was surrounded every day of his working life with members of the Old School Tie Network, characters who talked casually about going up to Scotland where they had property reserved entirely for grouse shooting or salmon fishing. It was hard at times for Pagan to believe that this was the late twentieth century. He had moments when he leaned towards a form of primitive socialism in which there wouldn't be an aristocracy and the land would belong to everybody. Dream on.

The Under-secretary fidgeted with the cuffs of his white shirt. Pagan turned away from the view of the Thames. Today, because he knew he was meeting the Under-secretary, Pagan had made a few concessions. He'd left his blue jeans and sneakers at home. He wore an olive-coloured suit and brown slip-on shoes and his slim silk necktie was pale green. All good earth tones, he thought, and by his own standards subdued.

‘I am certain to figure somewhere in a future assassination plan,' the Under-secretary said. He swept a hand through the air. ‘It's not a prospect I relish.'

Pagan moved his head slightly. The Under-secretary was new to Irish affairs. Previously, he had been considered an expert on trade unions. Pagan wondered about his credentials. A knowledge of wage negotiations and how to talk with mining or railway leaders – tasks at which he hadn't been very successful, a fact that perhaps explained his present posting (which was more of a punishment than a job) – wouldn't help him in the quicksands of Irish matters. Pagan understood how these unsuitable appointments happened. It was pal helping pal, one Old Boy to another, and to hell with credentials. Only your school background mattered. Incompetence in the higher echelons of power, Pagan thought, could always be traced back to the fact that unqualified men had gone to the right public schools. It was a good way to run a country.