Jig (40 page)

‘It's my constitutional right.'

‘What right? What constitution? You don't have any rights, Joe. You signed them all away when you helped Jig.'

‘There's something to the effect that a man's innocent until he's proven guilty –'

‘Where did you hear a fairy tale like that?'

Tumulty sighed. ‘Thank God this is a country of litigation and hungry lawyers. I'll sue. You'll see.'

Pagan smiled. ‘What was on the paper, Joe?'

Tumulty shut his eyes again. He tipped his face to one side, away from Pagan. Pagan reached out and deftly took Joe's cheek between thumb and forefinger and pinched very hard. Tumulty's eyes watered before Pagan released his grip.

Pagan stood up. ‘I'll tell you what really bothers me about all this, Joe. It isn't the fact that you'll probably go to jail. It's the end of the road for all that good work you've been doing down on Canal Street. It's curtain time, folks. No more good works. No more charity. You've lost your little bid for sainthood, Joe. Pity.'

‘There isn't a court in the country that would send me to jail,' Tumulty said, rubbing his cheek and looking annoyed.

Pagan shrugged. ‘Even if you don't go to jail, your life's going to be sheer hell, Joe. You know what Zuboric is planning?'

Tumulty shook his head.

‘First, he's contacting some friends in the IRS who owe him a favour. You know how that works. Zuboric reckons his tax pals can hassle you so much you'll
wish
you'd been sent to prison. That's for starters. Second, he's going to arrange for the local health department to go through your establishment hunting for sanitary violations. They also owe Zuboric favours. In other words, they're going to be hard on you.' Pagan paused. He wasn't absolutely sure if Tumulty was absorbing this. ‘I'm not finished yet. He's also making arrangements to bring the local cops down on you.'

‘He can't do that.'

‘He can do anything he likes. The Director of the FBI is God, which makes Artie Zuboric a minor kind of deity by association. He asks for something in this town, everybody is ready to just bloody jump for him. You'll see. As far as the cops coming in, it seems they're going to suspect some of your clients of carrying narcotic contraband and using your place as the source, as it were, of their deals. Suddenly, no more St. Finbar's. Big headlines. Lapsed Priest Runs Drug Ring. Tabloids love anything to do with lapsed priests, don't they?'

Tumulty said, ‘This is blackmail.'

‘Hardly, Joe. All I'm doing is painting you a picture of your dilemma. Bleak days lie ahead. Unless, of course, you decide that cooperation is the best way to go.'

The priest stood up. He studied Frank Pagan a moment. Then, very deliberately, he said, ‘There was no paper. I gave Jig absolutely nothing.'

‘I admire a man who sticks to his story,' Pagan said. He turned to the door. ‘Don't let anybody convince you to change it.'

He went out. He drew a cup of water from the cooler in the corridor and drank it, leaning against the wall and staring at a portrait of Thomas Dawson. He thought Dawson looked vapid, homogenised. But these were the very qualities the American electorate found endearing in its Presidents.

He crumpled his little wax cup. He wondered if Joseph X. Tumulty was pondering the exaggerated portrait of doom Pagan had painted for him. Maybe. God knows, he had to do something to shake Tumulty loose from his posture of innocence.

Pagan moved back in the direction of Zuboric's office just as the agent, looking as if the heavens had parted and God had roared angrily at him, stepped out into the corridor.

‘I thought you'd be in Carlsbad by now,' Pagan said.

Zuboric had a sheet of paper in his hand. ‘I just talked with The Director.'

‘And?'

‘He's angry. He's angry and goddam impatient. He doesn't think a whole lot of you, Frank. Quote. If the limey doesn't shape up, I'll have him shipped back to England so fast his feet won't touch the ground. Unquote.'

‘Harsh words,' Pagan said. He didn't remotely care what Leonard M. Korn had to say about him.

Zuboric waved the sheet of paper. ‘Which brings me to this tidbit of information he gave me. It seems that a man was murdered early this morning in Albany. He'd been garrotted by a length of wire and dumped in a culvert. A very nasty death.'

‘Garroting can be unpleasant,' Pagan agreed.

‘The killer called the local FBI office at two
A.M.
and claimed that the killing had been carried out by the Irish Republican Army.'

‘In Albany?
New York?
'

Zuboric nodded. ‘My precise reaction, Frank.'

‘It's a hoax. It has to be.'

‘Also my own first reaction. But it becomes more plausible when you hear about the victim.' Zuboric read from the paper. ‘
Alexander Fitzjohn, aged thirty-eight, resident of Camden, New Jersey. Entered the United States legally from Belfast in August 1984.
'

‘Belfast?' Pagan said. He wondered where this was leading.

‘According to what I've got here, Frank, Fitzjohn had once been a member of the Free Ulster Volunteers.'

Pagan reached quickly for the paper. It was covered in Zuboric's scrawl. He must have taken it all down very quickly over the telephone. ‘It doesn't add up. It doesn't make any sense at all. Even if it was some old score being settled, since when has the IRA started to make hits overseas? The Libyans, yes. The Bulgarians, sometimes. But I've never heard of the IRA playing that kind of long-distance game.'

‘Maybe there's a local cell,' Zuboric said.

‘Maybe.'

Pagan handed the paper back. Zuboric said, ‘There's another possibility.'

‘Which is?'

‘It could have been Jig.'

Pagan opened his mouth to reply when he heard the sound of Joseph Tumulty banging on the locked door of his room.

Patrick Cairney drove his rented Dodge through the streets of Lower Manhattan. Dressed still in the clothes he'd worn at St. Finbar's, he realised he'd have to change into something more in keeping with the brand-new vehicle he was driving. When he came to Battery Park he found a secluded place where he could change without being seen. Even when he'd discarded the dirty old clothes and dumped them in a trash container, he felt unclean.

He took out the piece of paper Joe Tumulty had given him. He read it quickly, memorised it, tore the sheet into thin ribbons and tossed them into the wind which ferried them carelessly down towards the river.
The name
, he thought. It was all he had. No guns. Nothing but the name. What was he supposed to do without a weapon?

As he looked out over Battery Park, he was conscious of the great expanse of the Atlantic beyond Gowanus Bay and The Narrows, and it occurred to him that the tide that rimmed the shores of Staten Island was the same that eventually found its way back to Dingle and Castletown, Galway and Donegal. He listened a moment to the squealing of gulls in the distance, and he wondered about this upsurge of longing that filled him. He'd been in Ireland too long, he thought. It had rubbed off on him, the sentimentality, the emigrant's yearning.

He didn't move for a time. His body still shook from the recent effort on the roof-tops of Canal Street. It was the first time in his life he'd ever come close to capture, and he didn't like the feeling. He'd evaded Frank Pagan in the end, but it was a situation he should never have encountered in the first place. He blamed Tumulty. It should have been possible for Tumulty to warn him
not
to come inside that bloody soup kitchen. It ought to have been possible for the priest to get some kind of sign to him before he'd taken that first fateful step into the place. But Joe Tumulty, who must have been playing both ends against the middle, had behaved like the deplorable amateur he really was. Why the fuck had Finn put a man like Tumulty in America anyway? Bad judgment on Finn's part? Or was Tumulty just rusted from inactivity? Cairney, who couldn't believe that Finn would ever show careless judgment, had no answers to these questions. But he knew one thing for sure – the worst outcome of the whole thing was that Frank Pagan now knew what Jig looked like and the exposure worried Cairney. Suddenly Jig had a face. He had features. Characteristics. He was no longer just a name. His anonymity was gone.

Goddam. Patrick Cairney shut his eyes and let the breeze blow against his skin. For a second he considered aborting the whole thing right then and going back to Ireland and Finn. He thought about telling Finn that his cover, so laboriously assembled and protected, had been shattered. The game could no longer be played by the same rules. What would Finn say? Would Finn simply retire Jig? Put him out to pasture? Patrick Cairney loathed that prospect. He couldn't stand the idea of Finn patting him on the shoulder and saying that he'd had a good innings but now it was time to close up shop. He'd
get
the goddam money back! He'd get it back and to hell with the fact that he'd been seen and was now neatly stored in Frank Pagan's memory. He opened his eyes and took several deep breaths. He realised then that he needed control over his thoughts as much as his actions. What had he been thinking about, for Christ's sake? Defeat? Retirement? He smiled these notions away. He'd complete the task he'd been sent all this way to do, and nothing,
nothing
was going to stop him.

He walked back to his car, jammed the key in the ignition and drove away from the park. He went back down through the streets of Lower Manhattan, heading for the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. He was acutely aware of time pressing down on him now. What if Joe Tumulty had given the name to Frank Pagan as well? Inside the tunnel, as if enclosed spaces troubled him, he felt apprehensive. It was the lack of a blueprint that unnerved him, the absence of a concrete plan that concerned him. It was also the realisation that he had no way of knowing what this Nicholas Linney was like and how he was going to receive a caller who had some hard questions to ask and who wanted quick truthful answers.

He was going in blind.

And he didn't like that idea at all, because every success he'd had in the past had come about as a result of good planning, the kind of planning you did with your eyes wide open and your vision uncluttered.

Bridgehampton, Long Island

Nicholas Linney lobbed the tennis ball over the net to where the plump East German, absurd in white shorts and Nike sneakers and a baggy white shirt, lunged with his racket and missed. It was the East German's habit to stamp his feet petulantly on the concrete court every time he missed an easy return. Linney, playing at halfthrottle, was bored. But it was necessary every so often, for purely commercial purposes, to entertain these yahoos from behind The Iron Curtain.

‘I think I call quits,' the East German said.

‘Fine,' Linney answered.

He walked off the court back towards the house. The East German, Gustav Rasch, came flopping alongside him, his mammaries bouncing up and down.

‘I am perhaps too old a little,' Rasch said, breathing very hard.

‘You're not old,' Linney lied. ‘A little out of shape, maybe.'

Linney stepped on to the terrace. The house he owned in Bridgehampton had cost him 2.7 million dollars three years ago. It was a sprawling structure, the result of various owners adding whimsies of their own to the original dwelling – a greenhouse, a glass-walled breakfast room, servant quarters at the rear. Linney sprawled in a deck-chair. The East German, who had heard that Nicholas Linney's hospitality was always exciting, plopped into a chaise-longue.

Linney offered him a drink. Grapefruit juice and Tanqueray gin spiked with chopped mint leaves. The breakfast speciality of the house. For quite some time neither man spoke. Linney lit a cigarette and looked across the tennis court. Dead leaves, scraps from last fall, blew in little pockets of air stirred up by the wind.

‘Is a nice house,' Rasch said.

‘Thank you.' Linney filled two glasses from a flask, passing one to the East German, who drank as if his life were running out.

Linney put his glass down. Rasch had already finished his drink and was helping himself to another.

‘Now,' Rasch said, and licked his thick lips. ‘Is important we talk money.'

Linney wanted to talk money, but only on his own terms, and only after Rasch had sampled the pleasures of the house. ‘Later,' he said. ‘If you're agreeable, that is.'

Rasch crossed his arms on his large chest. He was still smiling. ‘Perhaps we touch on subject briefly now. Then later more?'

‘Very well,' Linney said.

‘My people are unhappy,' Rasch remarked.

‘So are mine.'

‘Of course. We are all unhappy. My people see their money go on board a ship and then
zoom
, no more money. Swallowed up by the sea, no?'

Linney sipped his drink. He had invited Rasch out here to Bridgehampton for the sole purpose of exploring further fund-raising opportunities. It looked, as he'd told Harry Cairney at Roscommon, very bleak. The East Germans and their Soviet overlords could be very tight when it came to disbursing money.

‘There are some of us who do not like this kind of investment,' Rasch went on. ‘Is money wasted, they say. Bad policy to throw money into Ireland. What is Ireland, they ask, but a wart in the Irish Sea? Now, these people are very very happy because they can …' Rasch faltered.

‘Gloat?' Linney suggested.

‘Indeed.' Rasch put his empty glass down. They gloat. ‘They say security is bad and Ireland is unworthy of money anyway and why spend more?'

Linney made a little gesture with his hand. This business about the missing money nagged at him. He'd always enjoyed a good working relationship with his contributors but now, because one of the Fund-raisers had committed an act of treachery, all that was threatened. So far as Linney was concerned, the most likely candidate was Mulhaney. But in the absence of any hard evidence, what could he do about his suspicions? Big Jock was devious and greedy and he'd been plundering Teamster funds in the North-East for years. Linney would have liked to get Big Jock in some white-tiled, soundproofed cellar and hammer the fucking truth out of him.