Jig (71 page)

Patrick Cairney said, ‘You're lying, Celestine.'

She tossed her hair back with a gesture of her head that reminded Cairney of a small girl bothered by flies. ‘You're careless, Patrick. You carry a passport made out in the name of John Doyle. You don't take the precautions you should. You're not as good as people say you are. The great Catholic avenger. The Irish freedom fighter. But you're weak, Patrick. Weak where it really matters. Shall I tell your father how weak you really are? Would you like that?'

Cairney stared at her. He understood that it didn't matter to her whether she hurt Harry or not. ‘I'd prefer it otherwise,' he said feebly.

The old man had a fleck of spit at the cranny of his mouth. He reminded Patrick Cairney of a man plunged down in the centre of some totally unfamiliar spectator sport whose rules he has to guess. He stepped towards his wife and asked, ‘Even if he happens to have a passport in somebody else's name, how the hell does that make him Jig?'

‘Because Jig travels under that name at times.'

The old man's face was suddenly florid. ‘How do you know that? How do you know any of this?'

Celestine ignored his question. The look on her face dismissed him, relegated him to some unimportant corner of her life. She turned her attention to Patrick Cairney.

‘I liked the archaeological symposium bit,' she said. ‘It's a pretty good cover. It explains all the trips you must take if anybody ever asked, but it's fake. Totally fake. Tell your father, Patrick. Tell him the truth.'

Cairney felt the room spin around. He wondered how much blood he'd actually lost. He wanted to sit down but didn't move. He had the feeling that if he did sit he'd never rise again. He gazed at the gun in Celestine's hand and experienced an odd little hallucinatory moment when it seemed to him that metal and skin had become fused together. He blinked, rubbed his eyes, focused on Celestine's face, trying to associate what he saw there with the woman who'd whispered
Trust me, trust me
on the sofa downstairs. He had the thought that if she was capable of sexual treachery, what else could she bring herself to do? There were no limits, no boundaries. Anything was possible.

‘You've been wasting your time from the start, Jig,' she said. ‘It's been a lost cause from the beginning. But you must be used to lost causes by this time. You'll never see that money, Jig. You know that, don't you?'

Harry Cairney, who felt betrayed by all his senses, couldn't take his eyes from his wife. ‘What do you know about the money?' he asked.

‘Harry, Harry,' she answered. ‘We used your boat to steal it.'

‘My boat?'

Celestine shrugged. ‘Why not? You hardly ever find any use for it, do you?'

Harry Cairney was trembling. ‘Who used the boat? Who are you talking about?'

‘Ask your son,' Celestine said.

‘I'm asking you,' the old man said. ‘I'm asking my wife.'

‘Your wife,' Celestine said.

‘Yes. My wife.' The old man held his arms out. ‘The woman I love.'

‘Funny. I never really thought of you as my husband.'

Harry Cairney was moving forward, propelled by notions of love, convinced even now that all this was a travesty, some kind of breakdown on Celestine's part, something he could put right the way he'd put things right all his life. In his time he'd been capable of fixing anything. It didn't matter what. And he could fix this, whatever it was. Hadn't some of the most powerful men in the whole goddam nation come to him at one time or another and asked him to bail them out of their problems?

‘I don't want to hear that, I don't want to hear you say that kind of thing.' He had both hands extended in front of himself. ‘We've been happy. I know we have.'

‘Dear Harry,' she said. ‘We've had our moments. But they're finished now.'

‘
What are you saying?
'

Celestine was very quiet. Patrick Cairney watched her, knew what was coming, understood he was powerless to do anything about it. He watched Celestine shoot the old man through the side of the neck.

Harry Cairney cried out and dropped to the floor, turned over on his back, raised one hand up in Celestine's direction, and then he was finally still. Celestine turned the gun towards Patrick.

Cairney said, ‘You're on their side.'

‘The right side, Jig. The side of the angels.'

Cairney kneeled beside the body of the old man. He lightly touched the side of his father's jaw. There was a grief in him, but he realised he wasn't going to live long enough to express it. The tightness behind his eyes, the awful parched sensation in his throat.
Do something
.

‘You are the bonus,' Celestine said. ‘I never expected you. Not in this house.'

Without looking at her Cairney said, ‘They put you here. You told them about the money. The ship.'

‘Yes,' she said quietly. ‘I told them a lot of things, Patrick. I told them about the money. The route taken by the
Connie
. It wasn't difficult to find out. Your father always thought he was such a hot-shot at keeping secrets, but he wasn't. Not really.' She paused a moment. Then, ‘I also told them about the route taken by a certain school-bus – that New England trip I mentioned, remember? Does that surprise you, Jig?'

A school-bus
. Cairney felt very cold. He was fumbling towards the sense of it all, groping for a revelation that he knew was going to be denied him.

He opened his eyes, turned his face towards her. ‘Who the fuck are you?' he asked, thinking maybe, just maybe, he could fish his weapon out of his pocket, if he could be quick enough, slick, but even as he reached for it she took one step forward and fired her gun a second time.

Cairney didn't feel the entrance of the bullet into his chest. He fell back, knocking a chair over as he dropped, and he lay face down on the rug. He was barely conscious of hearing her footsteps as she approached him.

She bent down to touch the nape of his neck. ‘We had some moments too,' she whispered.

Calmly, carefully, Celestine changed her clothes. She stepped out onto the landing, without once looking at the two figures who lay on the bedroom floor. The heels of her boots made soft clicking noises on wood floorboards as she entered Patrick Cairney's bedroom. She stood by the window, gazing out a moment.

She saw a car come up to the front of the house.

She pressed her face against the glass, then she turned away. It was time now. It was time to leave this place.

She opened the closet in Patrick's bedroom and began to remove old books, boxes that contained ancient board-games, a battered microscope, running shoes, a football, crumpled pennants, a dusty framed wall map with the title
LEGENDARY IRELAND
in Celtic script.
The relics of Jig
, she thought.

There was a satchel stored at the very back of the closet. She reached for it and drew it towards her. And then she turned around and, with one last glance at Patrick Cairney's bed, she left the room.

27

Roscommon, New York

Frank Pagan was standing at the foot of the stairs when he heard the first gunshot. When he heard the second, he turned and moved back along the hallway. He stepped inside the living room and closed the door, leaving only a small space through which he could observe the staircase. It was a limited field of vision, but it was infinitely more safe than doing something completely reckless, like charging up the stairs with his gun in his hand. If he waited here, sooner or later Jig was going to come down. He wondered about the gunfire. He assumed that Jig had had to shoot Senator Cairney, although he couldn't understand why
two
shots had been fired.

He waited.

The room in which he stood was elegantly furnished. There were old prints on the walls, each depicting a Dublin scene at the turn of the century. Kingstown Pier. The Custom House on the banks of the Liffey. Horsedrawn carriages on St. Stephen's Green. He glanced at them a moment, then returned his attention to the stairs.

Pagan heard a sound from above. A door opened and closed faintly, a slight noise diminished by the mass of the house. Then there were footsteps for a moment. After that there was silence again.

Pagan waited. Earlier, when he'd been poking cautiously through the downstairs rooms, he thought he'd heard a man's upraised voice, but he hadn't been certain. The brickwork of this old house trapped sounds and diffused them and created auditory illusions. He passed his pistol from one hand to the other because there was a sudden small cramp in his fingers. The palms of his hands were sticky with sweat.

Now he heard footsteps in the hallway. They were coming from the front door, not from the stairs as he'd expected. He couldn't see anything in that direction. He heard them come close to where he stood. Heavy steps. A man's steps. They stopped some feet from the door behind which he was standing.

Frank Pagan held his breath, listened. Now there was more movement, from the stairs this time. He glanced up into the dark brown shadows.

The person coming down wasn't Jig and it wasn't Senator Harry Cairney either. Wrong sex.

It was a woman dressed in black cord pants and a black leather jacket. She wore tinted glasses and her yellow hair was held up by a black ribbon. In one hand she carried a small overnight bag, also black, in the other a large satchel. She created a sombre impression as she moved, taking the stairs slowly. Where the hell was Jig? Pagan wondered. And who was this woman?

She reached the bottom step, where she set her bag down and took off her dark glasses. Her smile was suddenly radiant. She had the bluest eyes Pagan had ever seen. She held her arms out. The man who had entered from Pagan's blind side stepped forward and Pagan could see him for the first time, and he felt a certain voltage around his heart.

‘Celestine,' the man said.

His voice was unmistakable.

Pagan watched as the couple embraced. There was laughter, the kind of laughter you associate with a reunion. There was relief and happiness in the sound and a maudlin tinge.

‘Too long, too bloody long,' the man said.

‘Yes,' the woman whispered. ‘Far too long.'

The woman slid her glasses back over her eyes.

The man made a gesture towards the stairs.

‘It's over,' the woman said.

‘Both of them?'

‘Both of them.'

The man laughed again. ‘You were right about Jig then,' he said. ‘You're a bloody wonder. You know that?' The man was quiet before he added, ‘I think I'd like to go upstairs, take a look at the body. I'd like to be sure.'

The body, Frank Pagan thought. Was he talking about Jig? Jig's body? Pagan felt a cold hand inside his brain.

The woman turned and looked up the flight of stairs. ‘Take my word for it. He's dead. Let's get the hell out of here. I've been in this place too bloody long. I want to go home to Ireland.'

The big man reached down to pick up the overnight bag.

Frank Pagan stepped out from behind the door, holding his pistol in front of him.

The big man turned around, saw Pagan, and for a second his expression was one of disbelief, but it changed to a restrained kind of amusement. ‘Frank Pagan,' he said. ‘I can't seem to shake you.'

‘People always tell me I've got a dogged quality, Ivor,' Pagan replied.

‘People are right.' Ivor McInnes sighed and turned to the woman. ‘This, my dear, is Frank Pagan. I mentioned him to you once or twice, I believe.'

The woman removed her glasses and stared at Pagan. She didn't say anything. She gazed at Pagan's gun, then turned her face back to McInnes. She shrugged, almost as if Pagan's presence made no difference to her.

Ivor McInnes was still smiling. ‘What brings you all the way up here to this wild place, Frank?'

‘Jig,' Pagan said. He found it difficult to take his eyes away from the woman's face. She had a rare beauty that seemed somehow innocent to him and he couldn't begin to imagine what her association with McInnes might be. There was intimacy between them, in the way they stood close together, the way they'd embraced before. And, almost as if some of this woman's beauty had affected Ivor McInnes, the man looked suddenly handsome there in the hall, distinguished and proud and pleased.

‘Jig's dead,' McInnes said. ‘And his father along with him.'

‘His father?' Pagan asked.

‘Senator Harry Cairney.'

Pagan was quiet. The fact that Harry Cairney was Jig's father took a very long time to make its way into that part of his brain that absorbed information. It had to pass through filters of disbelief first. It had to make its way around the confusion of emotions Pagan felt at the news of Jig's death. Disappointment. Anger. And sorrow – was there just a touch of sorrow in there or was he simply sad that the chance to take Jig back to London with him had gone? He wasn't sure of any of his feelings right then.

‘I see it perplexes you, Frank,' McInnes said.

‘To put it mildly.'

McInnes shook his head and made a long sighing sound. ‘It would seem that neither man knew of the other's activities,' he said. ‘It's what you might call a lack of communication. The son doesn't know what the father's doing. And the father has no idea about his son. Ah, modern families.'

Pagan didn't say anything for a while. He'd come a long, long way to take Jig back to England, and now there was nothing left of that ambition. But there was Ivor still, and Ivor would have to suffice. There was also this woman, Ivor's accomplice. Somehow, though, he felt strangely empty. He felt he was moving through the demands imposed upon him by a role, a job of acting, doing the things expected of him even if his heart weren't entirely in it. He'd been after Jig too long, and now Jig was gone.

He looked at the woman and said, ‘You killed them.'