Jig (14 page)

He wished Jig were beside him in this house. He needed the young man's nerve, because his own wasn't what it had been in the old days when he'd been as sharp as a razor and as daring as anything that ever cavorted on a trapeze. The old days! Jesus, the old days had been fine, but they were gone, and what faced him now was the stark reality of danger. With his pistol in front of him, he stepped back into the hallway and moved towards the room with the harps. He went to the window and looked in the direction of the gatehouse.

George Scully, reliable George, was on guard tonight.

Finn breathed on the windowpane. The guardhouse was in darkness, which meant nothing in itself because Scully might have turned out the light simply to enjoy the quiet of the night. George, who had been with Finn for years, had been known to turn the light off and lean against the wall and prop up his feet and breathe the sea air into his lungs while he recited the poems of W. B. Yeats quietly to himself.

A shiver went through Finn. The hairs on the back of his neck bristled. Something was going on out there. Something that pressed upon the whitewashed house and set up a vibration audible only to his ears. He shut his eyes, listened. He thought suddenly of that poor boat hijacked on the high seas, he thought of the dead men and the missing money, and the shipload of arms that had slipped away from him. He was sick to his heart.

Eyes open now, pistol forward.
Beware, Finn
. It was the voice of his angel. He could hear it clearly.

He moved among the harps, his pistol trained on the doorway.

He held his breath and stood very still. It was always possible, he supposed, that someone had overpowered Scully down there in the gatehouse. But there would have been shooting, wouldn't there? Scully would have fired off one of his weapons, wouldn't he? Unless he'd been taken out suddenly, with no warning and no time to defend himself.

Finn moved very slightly.

His heart, his bloody heart, thumped upon his ribs like a rabbit stuck in a snare. He moved an inch, two inches, edging between harps, going in the direction of the doorway. Dan Breen's Mauser was heavy in his hand.

Out in the hallway now. Facing the front door. Waiting.

Was that the wind that rattled the shrubbery and set it shaking?

He moved slowly down the narrow hallway.

He placed one hand on the door handle.

Then he drew the door open and peered out into the night, his Mauser raised for action.

There were two men outside, both holding automatic weapons. Finn barely had time to register this fact before he heard the first few rounds. He thought it strange that he felt nothing although he knew he'd been hit.

He staggered backwards down the corridor into the room of harps, aware of blood seeping out of his body, conscious of the hushed voice that said
I told you, Finn. Beware. I told you that
. Finn skidded across the floor of the big room, his legs abruptly cut out from beneath his body, his feet slithering over pools of his own lost blood, and he stumbled against a harp, his head tipping forward between the strings of the instrument so that he was stuck there like some beast cruelly trapped, aware of death coming in on wings. Finn gazed at the window where the halfhearted moon floated in the terrible night sky. There were footsteps behind him. There were other voices in the room. They made sounds he was beyond understanding because he was listening to something else.

He was listening to his angel, whom he had come to recognise as Death.

Come to me, Finn
.

He blinked his eyes.

Then the room was filled with more gunfire, which he heard as a deaf man might hear thunder. Vibrations, not sounds. His face slid between harp strings, and the pistol dropped from his hand, and he went down slowly into his own blood where he lay very still.

Waddell placed the Stoeger Max II rifle on the floor. He was shaking violently, and when he looked down at Finn's body, the long white hair covered with great scarlet slashes, he wanted to be sick. He put one hand up to his mouth. Houlihan came into the room and stared at the wasted body and there was no expression at all on his face.

‘I thought he'd never die,' Houlihan said. ‘Did you see the way he was bouncing like a rubber ball about this fucking room? I thought he'd never go down! Tough old shit.'

Waddell nodded his head. There was excitement in Houlihan's voice.

‘He had a lot of heart,' Houlihan remarked.

Waddell wanted to be elsewhere. Another city. Another galaxy. He needed a drink, something to settle him down. Something to calm him. He looked around the room, found a bottle of schnapps and drank from it quickly.

‘Ah, John, you need to develop an attitude,' Houlihan said. ‘You need to be hard as a nail.'

Waddell said nothing.

‘Finn's a casualty of war. That's all,' Houlihan said. He took the bottle from Waddell. He didn't drink. Instead, he turned the cap over in the palm of his hand so that Waddell could see several perforations in the metal.

‘Tricky,' Houlihan said. ‘But we won't be needing this any more.'

‘Is that what I think it is?' Waddell asked.

‘A small microchip listening device. The blessings of Yankee technology. But our man Scully won't be listening to Finn any more, will he?' Houlihan stuck the cap in his pocket. ‘For one thing, Scully's probably a thousand miles away by this time. And God knows,
nobody
will be listening to Finn any more.' Houlihan laughed. It was an empty, mirthless sound, like a cough.

Waddell felt the schnapps heat his chest. He looked into his companion's eyes, which were hard and cold.

Houlihan said, ‘Call Belfast, John. Tell them we succeeded. They're waiting to hear. Take your share of the credit.'

Waddell went out of the room. Credit, he thought. He didn't need credit like this. He found a telephone in Finn's office. Houlihan came into the room behind him.

‘What are you waiting for, John? We don't have all night.'

Waddell put his hand on the receiver. He felt weak all of a sudden.

‘Go on,' Houlihan said. ‘I know they'll be anxious to hear Finn's out of the way. It means the green light for America.'

America, Waddell thought.

He picked up the telephone.

‘It's a strange thing about blood,' Houlihan was saying. ‘It's all the same, John. Black man or white man. Protestant or Catholic. It's the same taste. No difference. English blood or American. It all looks and tastes the same.'

American blood, Waddell thought. He wondered how Houlihan knew about the taste of the stuff.

He dialled the number in Belfast, and after a few moments it was answered by the Reverend Ivor McInnes, who spoke with a pronounced English mainland accent that Waddell knew was Liverpool.

‘It's done,' Waddell said.

‘On the contrary,' the voice answered. ‘It's only just beginning.'

8

New York City

Joseph X. Tumulty couldn't quite believe that he had received the call after all this time. He had lived with the knowledge that there was always some slight possibility of such a thing, a shadow that lay over the life he had built for himself here, but he'd never actually believed it. But there it was.
The call from Ireland
. Now he was nervous and tense and possessed with the uneasy feeling that threads were being pulled in the night, that his destiny was being woven by hands he couldn't see. It wasn't a good feeling at all. He was a man who liked to be in charge of his own affairs.

He stood in the doorway of St. Finbar's Mission on Canal Street in the grubby southern part of Manhattan, his black coat drawn up at the collar, his fighter's nose made red by a chill river wind. From the kitchen behind him came the smell of food and the sounds of hungry men, quite beyond the dictates of good manners, attacking their plates of stew. To many people it might have been an unpleasant noise, but to Joe Tumulty it had a gladdening effect.

He looked along the sidewalk. He'd been thinking about the call ever since he'd received it twenty-four hours ago. He was listening still to the voice of Finn on the telephone – that mellifluous singing voice that could seduce and flatter and cajole and make any man believe that there were indeed fairies at the bottom of his garden. But this time there had been something else in Finn's voice, and Joe Tumulty had been trying to pin the quality down for almost a day now. What was it? Sometimes Tumulty thought it was weariness, at other times fear. He wasn't sure. All he knew was that Finn's call had disturbed the equilibrium of his life and that he didn't want any conflict between the work he was doing on Canal Street and the demands of the Cause.

A drunk lay about fifteen feet down the sidewalk. Tumulty had been watching him for the last couple of minutes. The man lay face down, arms outstretched. He wore a pair of pants at least three sizes too large for him. His threadbare overcoat was pulled up around his waist, revealing a thin cotton shirt that was no protection from the bitter wind. The man could die there and nobody would care. He could die among the plastic bags of trash and the roaches. But Joseph Tumulty wasn't about to let any man die within shouting distance of St. Finbar's, which was named after the sixth-century founder of the City of Cork.

‘Are you going to help him, Father Joe?'

Tumulty turned. The man who'd asked the question was known only as Scissors, which was said to be a reference to the trade of barber he'd once carried out. Now, five nights out of seven, Scissors was drunk. Tonight he happened to be sober. He had a ravaged face and the kind of luminescent eyes you sometimes see on street people – a result of nutritional deficiency, a lack of vitamins, and a totally depleted body. It was a look Joe Tumulty had come to know very well on Canal Street.

‘Of course I am,' Tumulty said.

He put out one hand and squeezed Scissors' frail shoulder. There was misfortune everywhere, Tumulty thought. And most of it seemed to congregate here at the southern tip of Manhattan. Tumulty attacked human misery wherever he found it. Father Joe, crusader. The point was, if he didn't do it, then people like the man who lay there right now would probably perish.

The former barber blinked at the body on the sidewalk. ‘He's a young one,' Scissors said.

Tumulty moved down the steps. He knew that alcohol was no great respecter of age. All kinds of people found their way to St. Finbar's Mission, young and old, skilled and unskilled – and what they had in common was a descent from society, from lives that might have been useful. Tumulty liked to think he could give them back some form of hope. He fed them, often clothed them, prayed for them, counselled them. He entered their broken lives and applied the only salve he knew, which was to care for them even when they had forgotten how to care for themselves.

As he crossed the sidewalk he was conscious of a tan-coloured car parked about half a block away. It had been parked there for the past two hours. The man who sat behind the wheel appeared to be engrossed in a book. The whole thing made Tumulty nervous. It wasn't exactly the kind of place where a man would station his car to do a quiet spot of reading. His first response was that the car contained an agent of the bloody Internal Revenue Service. The IRS was always on his back these days, ever since he had split from the official Catholic Church to create his own mission on Canal Street. The tax-exempt status of charities and religious orders had been coming under a lot of scrutiny lately. It wasn't that the government was after Tumulty's income, because that was laughably small. But they could cause all kinds of nuisances by examining his accounts and asking to see cancelled cheques, just to make sure St. Finbar's was what it claimed to be – a non-profit venture. Besides – and this was something he didn't like to think about, something he'd chosen to ignore – there was a certain bank account, held in his own name, that contained money Finn had given him and that he had absolutely no way of explaining.

Maybe he was being paranoid. Maybe Finn's phone call had made him that way. He suddenly felt that the night was filled with things he couldn't trust.

He crossed the sidewalk. He bent down beside the young man and very lightly placed a hand on the man's arm. The young man didn't move. Joe Tumulty moved his hand to touch the side of the man's face. The smell of booze was strong, as if it had been stitched into the threads of the man's coat. Tumulty turned his face to one side a moment. His eyes watered.

‘Get up,' Tumulty said.

The man was still.

Tumulty slipped his hand under the man's face and raised it slowly up from the hard sidewalk. He was about thirty and appeared to be in good health. His face was pale but showed none of the usual signs of decay Tumulty had come to expect on people like this. The lips were open a little way, and the teeth were good. Whoever this drunk was, he hadn't been on the streets for very long. Tumulty stared a moment in the direction of the parked car. The shadowy figure inside had his head tilted back and appeared now to be asleep.

‘Can you get up?' Tumulty asked. ‘I'll help you.'

The young man's eyes opened.

‘Put your arm round my shoulder,' Tumulty said. ‘We'll get you indoors.'

‘Who are you?' the young man asked.

‘Joseph Tumulty. They sometimes call me Father Joe.'

The young man closed his eyes again. There was a faint smile on his lips.

‘Is it safe?' he asked.

‘Safe?'

‘Is it safe to come inside?'

‘Of course it is. What do you –' Tumulty didn't finish his question because the young man's eyes opened again, and they were clear, bright, with no bleariness, no bloodshot quality. Joseph Tumulty was remembering Finn's phone call again. He was remembering Finn saying
Take good care of him, Joe. He's a fine lad
. This is the one, Tumulty thought, and he felt a strange little sensation around his heart. He had a slight difficulty in catching his breath.