Jig (44 page)

Nicholas Linney said, ‘Take my word for it. I thought at first it had to be Dawson, but what would he want money for? He's got it coming out of his ass.'

Dawson. Another name now. ‘Who's Dawson?'

Linney smiled. The expression caused him obvious pain. His face contorted. ‘You don't know anything, do you? They really sent you here blind, didn't they?'

‘I asked about Dawson.' Cairney made a gesture with the pistol.

‘Kevin Dawson,' Linney said. ‘Big brother Tommy occupies the White House.'

Kevin Dawson, the quiet member of the Dawson clan, the background figure whose family was sometimes trotted out for the edification of wholesome America. They just adored Kevin and his wife and kids in the heartland. Cairney was surprised by the names Linney tossed out. But how could he trust a man like Linney, who was capable of doing and saying anything?

Linney said, ‘You got my word. You want Mulhaney.'

Your word
. ‘Where do I find him?'

Linney shuffled towards the broken door, beyond which was a room whose walls were stacked with gun-racks. There were all kinds of weapons, competition rifles, shotguns, black powder muskets, handguns. On the floor lay the automatic rifle that had been used to blast through the door. Linney, who was thinking about the pistol he kept in the center drawer of his desk, slumped into a chair and punched some buttons on a computer console. A small amber screen lit up and a disc-drive whirred.

‘There,' Linney said.

A name, and address. Cairney studied them. He committed them to memory. He felt strangely removed from himself now, like somebody going through the motions. He concentrated on pulling himself together. It didn't matter what had happened here, he still had his work to do. He still had Finn's task to carry out. He couldn't afford to dwell on the outrage perpetrated by Nicholas Linney. He stared at the shimmering little letters. His eyes began to hurt. He looked at Linney, who had his hands in his lap.

Linney said, ‘You're thinking I'll call Mulhaney, right? If you let me live, I'll call him. Isn't that what's on your mind? Hey, I give you my word, I won't warn him. Why should I? If he stole the goddam money, he deserves to die.'

‘What do you deserve?' Cairney asked with contempt. ‘You think
you
deserve to live?'

Linney forced a little smile. He moved one hand towards the center drawer of his desk.
Nobody beats Nicholas Linney
, he thought.
Nobody leaves my house thinking I'm some fucking loser. I trained myself for exactly this kind of situation
. ‘I gave you what you wanted, guy. That merits some consideration.'

‘The price was high, Linney.'

Linney shrugged. He drummed his fingertips on the handle of the drawer. This guy was fast, but Linney believed he could be even quicker. ‘Sometimes you have to pay it.'

Cairney felt the weight of the pistol in his hand. It would be the simplest thing in the world to turn the gun on Linney. If he left Linney alive, who could predict what the man would do then? He couldn't afford to step out of this house and walk away from Linney, who could start making frantic little calls. It was a strange moment for Cairney. He could see a vein throb in Linney's head. He had an unsettling sense of Linney's life, the blood coursing through the man's body. This was a living presence, not a distant figure fixed in the heart of a scope. There were only a couple of inches between Cairney and the man, and he found himself longing for space, longing for the lens of a scope, longing for
distance
. If he had that kind of separation from this monster, he'd kill him without blinking an eye.

Linney stared at the gun. He curled one finger around the handle of the drawer.
Go for it, Nick. Just go for it. You got nothing to lose because this fucker is going to kill you anyway
. ‘Mulhaney's in bad shape financially. He needed money more than the rest of us.'

The rest of us
. ‘How many are there, Linney?'

‘Come on, guy. I gave you what you wanted. Don't get greedy.'

‘How many, Linney?'

Linney did something desperate then. He swivelled his chair around, a gesture that was meant to be casual, easygoing, just a man turning his chair in preparation for getting up out of it – but it was a feint, a sorry kind of deception, because all at once there was a pistol in the center of his hand, a weapon he'd slipped from the desk in a very smooth motion, and he was bringing it round very quickly in Cairney's direction –

Cairney shot him once through the side of his face. Linney was knocked backwards and out of the chair, one hand uplifted to his cheek as if death were a sudden facial blemish, and then the hand dropped like a stone and Linney followed its downward path to the floor. He lay looking up at the ceiling of his gun-room, seeing nothing.

Cairney stared at the body.
Jesus Christ
. There was a terrible slippage going on here, a downhill slope into destruction. His hand shook. He couldn't find his own private center. He couldn't find the place of calm retreat. It was as if a storm had broken out inside himself. Four people had died in this goddam house and all because he'd come here looking for information. Looking for Finn's money. He shut his eyes a moment. The death of Linney shouldn't have touched him. He was accustomed to killing. But he'd never shot anyone at such close range before. Okay, Linney had sought death, Linney had manufactured that destiny for himself, but what about the two girls? What was their role in this? Had they ever even
heard
about The Cause?

He opened his eyes. He heard a car crunch into the driveway. He stepped to the window, saw a dark green Cadillac. Quickly, he moved into the living-room and went to the sliding doors, then out on to the terrace where he saw Frank Pagan climb from the big green car. Nimble and silent, unseen by Pagan, Cairney vaulted the terrace wall and skipped across the tennis-court to the fence, which he climbed swiftly. And then he was back in the lane, hurrying away.

New York City

Ivor McInnes left the Essex House and walked south on Fifth Avenue. He went along Fifty-Seventh Street, checking his watch, looking in shop windows. The whole array of American consumer goods dazzled him as it always did, the flash and the glitter and the sheer availability of such things. He spotted a thrift-shop that sold only furs, and he thought that only in America could such a place exist. Did the rich dames on Central Park toss their used lynx coats this way? Did those blue-rinsed old biddies you saw walking their poodles, manicured little dogs that seemed to shit politely on sidewalks, bring their weary minks to the fur thrift-shop? Amazing America!

When he reached Broadway he headed south. Broadway disappointed. He always expected the Great White Way, showgirls stepping out of limos and maybe the sight of some great actress hurrying inside a theatre, last-minute rehearsals. But it was all sleazy little restaurants and an atmosphere of congealed grease. At Times Square he found the public telephone he needed, then he went inside the booth and checked his watch again. The phone rang almost immediately. Seamus Houlihan was nothing if not punctual.

McInnes picked up the receiver.

‘We're in place,' Houlihan said.

‘Good man.' McInnes ran the tip of a finger between his dog-collar and his neck.

‘I had to take out Fitz,' Houlihan said. ‘He was trying to skip.'

The disposal of Fitzjohn was of no real concern to McInnes, who had long ago understood that human life, a tenuous business at best, was nothing when you weighed it against ultimate victory. Fitzjohn had been a mere foot soldier, and they were always the first casualties. ‘What did you do with the body?'

Houlihan told him.

McInnes listened closely. He couldn't believe what Houlihan was telling him. When Houlihan was through with his story, McInnes was quiet for a while, drumming his fingertips on a filthy pane of glass. If he hated anything, if anything in the world aroused his ire beyond the dangerous philosophies of the Catholic Church, it was when a meticulous plan was interrupted by needless variations, such as the variation Houlihan had introduced in Albany.

‘What the hell did you expect to
achieve
by calling the bloody FBI?' McInnes asked. ‘Jesus in heaven, Seamus, what the hell were you
thinking
about?'

‘It seemed like a good idea to set the ball rolling,' Houlihan said in a curt voice.

‘The ball, Seamus, was not supposed to be set rolling until tomorrow. Sunday, Seamus. White Plains. Remember?'

Houlihan was quiet on the other end of the line. McInnes, who experienced a stricture around his heart, had the feeling of a man who has completed an elaborate jigsaw only to find a piece removed during his absence by a wilful hand.

‘Don't you see it, Seamus? It's too bloody soon.'

Houlihan still didn't speak. What McInnes felt down the line was the young man's hostility. The killing of Fitzjohn had presumably been necessary in Houlihan's questionable judgment, but the next step – which Seamus had taken without consultation – was not very bright. But then you couldn't expect anything bright out of Seamus. He was great when it came to demolition work. Beyond that he was useless. McInnes thought about Houlihan's unhappy background. Perhaps allowances could be made for a man who was the offspring of an absentee Catholic father and a Protestant mother who had become a drunken bigot of the worst kind. Houlihan must have spent years hating the man who had fathered and abandoned him.

McInnes said, ‘It removes the element of surprise, Seamus. Don't you see that? It's like sending them a bloody telegram. You were instructed to wait until you'd done your work in White Plains before calling.'

Sweet Jesus Christ, McInnes thought. It had long been one of the problems of the Free Ulster Volunteers, this lack of good responsible men and the need to draft street scum who killed for the joy of killing and who were misled, by their own acts of violence, into thinking they were actually
smart
. McInnes had always been troubled by this. For every good man he brought into the FUV, there was always a psychopath with a terrible need for blood. What McInnes longed for was a figure like Jig, somebody who killed but who always obeyed instructions. Somebody who didn't step outside the limits of his authority. Jig, he thought. Even somebody like Jig was running out of time. And luck. And sometimes luck, that erratic barometer, swung away from you in the direction of your enemies. Jig's time was coming.

‘Now they're going to be out beating the fields with sticks,' McInnes said. ‘And all because you took it into your thick head to make a bloody phonecall, Seamus. God in heaven, I didn't want them to have an inkling until the work in White Plains is done with.'

Houlihan was heard to clear his throat. ‘They can beat the fields with sticks all they want. They're not going to find us, are they?'

McInnes stared across the street at a movie-house marquee. There was a double feature,
PUSSIES IN BOOTS
and
G-STRING FOLLIES
. Somewhat incongruously, two nuns went past the theatre, hobbling in their black boots. McInnes watched them, two middle-aged brides of Christ, their juices all dried up. A lifetime of celibacy was likely to drive you mad, he thought. It was no wonder they believed in such unlikely things as holy water and the infallibility of the Pope and that philosophical absurdity The Holy Ghost. And these women ran schools and influenced the minds of small children, venting all their accumulated frustrations on the souls of infants. Dear God! McInnes turned his thoughts to what he perceived as the final solution for Ulster, and it had nothing to do with the persecution of Catholics or denial of their rights to their own schools and churches. The answer was so bloody simple nobody had ever thought it could work. You repatriated the Catholics, that's what you did. You sent them to the Republic of Ireland. There they could pursue their religious beliefs until doomsday in a society already priest-soaked and dominated by His Holiness, the Gaffer of The Vatican. There would be no more civil strife, no more violence. Ulster would be free, and the Catholics happy.
So damned simple
.

‘No, they're probably not going to find you, Seamus. All I'm saying is you didn't follow my instructions. I didn't just sit down and make everything up on the spur of the moment. I worked bloody hard and I planned a long bloody time, Seamus. And I won't have it bollocksed by somebody who takes it into his head to change my plans.'

McInnes fell silent. What good did it do to scream at Houlihan, whose temperament was unpredictable at best? If you didn't butter up people like Seamus, they were likely to fold their tents. And then where would you be? McInnes controlled himself. When the time was ripe, he'd find a way to dispose of Houlihan and the others. In the future he perceived for himself, there was no room for thugs.

‘We'll forget it this time,' he said. ‘But next time follow the blueprint, Seamus.'

Houlihan said nothing.

‘Good luck tomorrow,' McInnes said.

He stepped out of the stale phonebooth and wandered through Times Square. He had a slippery sense of his own fate lying in the clumsy hands of a man like Seamus Houlihan. By calling the FBI, what Seamus had done was to set that whole federal machine in motion too soon. McInnes thought he could already hear the wheels grinding away, the cogs clicking. If they ran a check on Fitz, they'd discover his affiliation with the Free Ulster Volunteers, which might in turn lead them directly to himself. Naturally, he'd deny everything, but just the same he saw little connecting threads here he didn't remotely like. The whole point of the exercise had been to keep the FUV name out of everything. But now it was likely to come up, and there was nothing he could do about it except look totally innocent if anyone asked about Fitzjohn. There was Frank Pagan to consider as well. When Pagan learned about the death of Fitzjohn, if he hadn't already done so, he'd be back sniffing around like some big bloodhound. Pagan was desperate to pin something,
anything
, on the Reverend Ivor McInnes.