Jig (4 page)

‘Burning the old midnight oil?' Pagan asked.

Foxie smiled. He had one of those sly little smiles you can never quite recall later with any certainty. He sat down in the chair that faced Pagan. He had been with Pagan's section, which dealt exclusively with terrorism (Irish, or related thereto), for about eighteen months. On paper this section was supposed to work with Scotland Yard's Special Branch, but Pagan had eased his own people out from under the men at the Yard, whom he publicly called ‘good civil servants' and privately ‘all-round arseholes'.

Consequently, the section operated with considerable freedom, answerable only to the secretary whose office was responsible for Irish affairs. Foxie was related to the secretary in a minor way – a fifteenth cousin three times removed, or something equally farfetched that Pagan had trouble remembering. (The English were obsessed with bloodlines, to a point that lay somewhere off the coast of reason.)

Foxie said, ‘I have an item of some interest, Frank.'

Pagan saw a slip of telex paper come across the desk towards him. He picked it up, scanned it, then read it a second time more slowly. He put the telex down and tipped his chair back. ‘Well, well,' he said quietly.

Foxie gazed at his superior. There were moments when he thought Frank Pagan represented a triumph of incongruity. Pagan didn't
talk
the way anyone else in the section did because he hadn't been to an expensive public school. Pagan didn't
dress
like his colleagues either. He dispensed with three-piece pinstripe suits in favour of trendy loose-fitting clothes that seemed to have been purchased off the rack in secondhand stores, where they might have been hanging since the middle of the 1950s. Now and then Pagan even wore Hawaiian shirts that lit up a room like a light bulb. An odd bird, Foxie thought, with his tennis shoes and blue jeans and his jazzy American car.

Foxie sat back in his chair. He remembered there had been that awful business about Pagan's wife a few years ago. Foxie had no way of knowing how
that
might have affected his superior, but colleagues who had been with the section since its formation in 1979 whispered that Pagan had gone through a period of heavy drinking, which was understandable in the terrible circumstances.

‘Somebody's been very busy,' Pagan said.

‘Do you think the Americans were behind it?'

‘Does it sound like an American operation to you, Foxie?'

Foxie shrugged. ‘Who else could have done it?' He saw Pagan get up and walk to the window. In a certain light Frank Pagan looked younger than thirty-nine. It was only when you got up close you noticed the thin lines around his eyes and mouth. There were glints of grey in his short dark hair, which he wore brushed back across his head.

‘I can't see them doing this kind of barbarism,' Pagan said. ‘I can see the Yanks seizing the ship, but I can't see them getting this carried away.'

‘They sometimes get a little … overzealous,' Foxie said. ‘Our cousins
are
fond of a little bloodletting, Frank. They think it's good for the soul.'

Pagan stared at the telex. The
Connie O'Mara
had been found drifting in the North Atlantic by a Norwegian freighter, the
Trondheim
. Thirteen bodies had been discovered on board, eleven of them dead from gunshot wounds, one with a crushed skull, the other killed by means that hadn't yet been established. The
Connie
had been towed to New York City where U.S. Coast Guard officials and cops from the New York City Police Department had examined the carnage before calling in the FBI.

The telex, which was a duplicate, had been sent by the FBI to the Special Branch at Scotland Yard because the vessel was suspected of having had a longtime connection with the IRA. The FBI rather cheerfully considered Irish terrorism strictly a British problem. The
Connie
had been in Pagan's own computerised records for the last year or so and presumably in FBI records for at least that long because computers, which Pagan imbued with a malice of their own, had an uncanny way of tapping into one another's data banks. A lack of manpower for surveillance, and the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean, had contributed to the fact that the
Connie
hadn't been high on Pagan's list of priorities.

‘I thought pirates had gone out of fashion,' Pagan said. ‘We've got somebody out there doing a Long John Silver routine.'

‘If it wasn't us and it wasn't the Americans, Frank, who was it?'

Pagan touched his eyelids with his fingertips. The violent fate of one small boat, which might or might not have been ferrying arms to Ireland, didn't excite him. What he kept coming back to was the idea of catching Jig, and he couldn't see any kind of connection between the
Connie O'Mara
and the elusive killer. At some other time, maybe, the piracy might have intrigued him more than it did, but not now. Besides, whoever had hijacked the
Connie
had done Pagan's section a favour. It was one less problem, in the whole morass of Irish affairs, to worry about. He was under pressure from the press, the secretary, and the public to put Jig out of business. So what did one small ship matter when you were working like hell to keep from buckling beneath the weight of clamorous demands?

He tossed the telex down. ‘Let Special Branch worry about it, Foxie. Let them have this one. The commissioner used to be in the navy. He'd relish a mystery with a nautical flavour.'

Foxie looked a little disappointed. He had expected a more enthusiastic reaction to the telex. He picked the piece of paper from Pagan's desk and said, ‘I adore that gruesome touch at the end, don't you?'

‘Appeals to your darker side, does it, Foxie?'

‘It does,' Foxie said, grinning. ‘I mean, what's the point in hacking off a fellow's hand?'

Pagan was quiet for a moment. He was thinking of going home. He was thinking of sleep. The empty apartment. The hollows of his life.

‘Presumably because something was attached to his wrist,' Pagan answered, pressing a hand to his mouth to cover a yawn.

English – Welsh Border

On the rare occasions when he drank, the man known as Jig preferred Jameson's Irish Whiskey. In the empty buffet car of the train that carried him from London to Holyhead in Wales – where he would take the ferry across the Irish Sea to Dublin – he sipped the whiskey slowly, occasionally swirling it around on the surface of his tongue. He looked the length of the car, conscious of his solitude.

He set his glass down on the table and the liquid shivered to the rhythms of the locomotive. He stared from the window at the darkness of the English countryside. The platforms of small stations whisked past as the train hammered through the night. Some of them, he noticed, were no longer in operation. They'd been closed down and boarded up, economy measures taken by an English government that nevertheless always seemed to have the means of funding a standing army in Northern Ireland.

He shut his eyes. He realised he wanted a cigarette, but he'd given up smoking several weeks ago although the desire was always there. It was a matter of will to deny yourself. And he had become accustomed to a life of such denials, a life lived in doorways and the dank rooms of cheap hotels, a life of watching and waiting, surrounded by shadows. It was an existence lived at one remove from yourself, as though you were nothing more than a transient in your own body.

He looked from the window again. He wouldn't sleep until he was safely back in Dublin, even though he understood he wasn't ever safe anywhere these days. From his canvas bag he took out a copy of
The Daily Express
and saw the headline:

JIG'S DANCE OF DEATH

He turned to the inside pages. There was a shrill editorial about the inadequacy of British security forces. The writer posed the question:
Are we utterly incapable of catching this monster? Are we always to be victims of vicious Irish terrorism?

A monster, Jig thought. He never thought of himself as either monster or terrorist. These were threadbare labels applied by the enemy, terms intended to elicit revulsion and horror from the British public and to obscure the real issue which, in Jig's mind at least, was that of a people fighting for the right of national unity, without British intervention.

There was a terse comment from an official called Frank Pagan, who was apparently in charge of the office conducting the investigation into the murder of Walter Whiteford. It said:
Every possible line of inquiry is being pursued
. Nothing else.

Jig tossed the paper aside. Every possible line of inquiry, he thought. It was the standard comment of any bewildered official. What did it actually mean? He wondered about this Pagan a moment. He imagined a tight-lipped humourless man, a sombre bureaucrat who wore dark suits and overcoats. A man of plodding technique. Maybe he wasn't that way at all. Maybe he had moments of inspiration, little hunches he played now and again. It was interesting to know your adversary's name. It was like being one small point ahead in the game.

He tossed the newspaper aside and rose from his seat, stepping out into the corridor of the car. Through open windows a cold night wind rushed against him and he shivered, drawing the collar on his unremarkable grey coat up against his face. He thought of Finn sitting inside the house in Dun Laoghaire, and he had a mental image of the gaunt old man smiling as he read about the death of Ambassador Whiteford in
The Irish Times
. Finn never showed any excitement when a mission was successfully accomplished.
You're a professional, boy
, he'd once said.
And professionals don't expect praise for success. Only criticism for failure
. Finn had other ways, quiet ways, of expressing his pleasure. A quick soldierly hug, a couple of glasses of the wretched peppermint schnapps he seemed to adore – often to his detriment – and a bright youthful light in his blue eyes which belied his age and the exhausting years he'd given to a struggle that at times seemed endless.

Jig removed a thin thread from the lapel of his coat and let it drift out of the window into the darkness. Then he turned to look along the corridor, past the doorways of compartments lit by thin yellow-brown light bulbs. Three policemen, two in uniform and one dressed in a bulky gabardine raincoat, appeared at the end of the corridor. Jig watched them peer inside empty compartments as they approached him. The plain clothes man was enormous, his head almost reaching the ceiling. He had the smallest mouth Jig had ever seen on another human being. The two uniformed cops were ridiculously young, their bland faces covered with adolescent fuzz. Jig looked out through the open window just as the train plunged into a tunnel and the wheels roared in a deafening way and the carriages clacked and echoed. He had known that sooner or later cops would board the train, just as they would be swarming airports and seaports in the wake of Walter Whiteford's death.

The plain clothes policeman was clumsily polite and spoke with a Welsh accent, a kind of dull singsong. ‘Do you have any papers, sir?' he asked.

‘Papers?' Jig asked.

‘Passport. Identification. Anything like that.'

The train came out of the tunnel and there was a slender crescent of moon in the black sky. ‘Are you looking for somebody in particular?' Jig asked. He opened his canvas bag and rummaged around inside. He felt no tension, no sense of danger. Whatever anxiety he might have experienced at the fear of discovery he kept under control. Any such feeling would have been irrational. The cops didn't know what he looked like, they had no description of him. They were operating in total darkness.

The plain clothes man looked into Jig's face. ‘You read the newspapers, sir?'

‘Now and again.'

‘Then you'll have read about Whiteford, I expect.'

Jig, who enjoyed this part of the game, who liked the sport of coming close to his pursuers, feigned a look of surprise. ‘You're looking for Jig?' he asked.

The cop nodded. He uttered a weary sigh. The two uniformed officers, who might have been hatched out of the same pod, were staring at Jig's bag as if they expected it to contain bombs or grenades. Young and nervous and raw.

‘I hope you find him,' Jig said, removing a passport from his bag and handing it to the plain clothes cop.

The cop took the passport, which had been issued by the Republic of Ireland, and leafed through it. He glanced at the photograph, then at Jig's face before handing the document back. ‘You live in Dublin?'

Jig nodded.

‘What kind of work do you do, Mr. Doyle?' he asked.

Jig took a small wooden toy out of his bag. It was a miniature rocking horse, immaculately carved, finely detailed. He watched the policeman take it and examine it.

‘I sell toys,' Jig said.

‘Very pretty,' the cop said.

‘Danish. Sturdy. Won't break easily.'

The policeman returned the miniature to Jig, who placed it back inside the bag.

‘Thanks for your time,' the policeman said.

‘No problem, Officer.'

Jig watched the three cops continue along the corridor. He wanted to call out to them. He wanted to tell them that he wished them luck in their hunt and that Jig was the kind of bastard who gave decent Irishmen a bad name and deserved the hangman's rope, but he restrained himself. Playing the game with them was one thing, but drawing attention to yourself was another. If they remembered anything about him later they'd mainly remember the small wooden horse, not his face nor how he was dressed nor the way he spoke. He saw them disappear through the door at the end of the corridor, and then he was alone again.

He caught a faint reflection of himself in glass and he had the thought that if he were to die now of some sudden ailment the only identification in his possession would be that of a certain John Doyle, commercial traveller in wooden toys imported from Scandinavia. His bag would yield up nothing more sinister than samples of his line – a small toy drummer, the miniature horse, a puppet tangled up in its own strings.