‘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.’
<
br /> 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.
‘You can never be too sure,’ the young man said. He slung his arm around Joe Tumulty’s shoulder and raised himself to a standing position.
‘You’re from Finn,’ Tumulty said, and his voice had become a whisper.
The young man nodded.
Tumulty stared at the light falling from the doorway of St. Finbar’s and the outline of the man known as Scissors who stood at the top of the steps, then he glanced once in the direction of the parked car.
Take good care of him, Joe.
‘You’re Jig,’ Tumulty said.
‘The very same.’
The wind that blew off the Hudson brought ice with it, hardening dead branches and imparting a spare look to the skyscrapers. Frank Pagan thought the city resembled a large ice palace. He had a room at the Parker Meridien on West 57th Street, a costly hotel that his per diem expenses didn’t cover. When he’d last been in New York he’d stayed with Roxanne at the Gotham, which was now a hollow locked shell with boarded-up windows on the corner of 55th and 5th. A deserted hotel was fitting somehow. A black epitaph.
Four years ago. The first year of their marriage. An anniversary trip. What he recalled now was Roxanne’s flushed excitement in Manhattan, how like a small child she’d been, going on Fifth Avenue and strolling through Tiffany’s and Cartier’s and Harry Winston’s, asking endless questions of patient sales clerks. Pagan had bought her a silver locket at Fortunoff’s, which she’d been wearing the day she died. Pagan wore the locket now. City of Memories. How could he feel anything but uneasy in this town?
On his first night at the Parker, when he was still groggy from jet lag, Pagan had a meeting with an FBI agent called Arthur Zuboric in the piano bar. Zuboric, a squat man with a Zapata moustache and a suntan achieved under the lamps of a health spa, had the look of a mournful bandit. He wasn’t exactly happy with the notion of helping Frank Pagan, since he had a caseload up to here, but the order had come down from Bureau headquarters in Washington, so what could he do? Reciprocity was the catchword here. I’ll scratch your back, sometime in the future you’ll scratch mine. So here he was scratching Frank Pagan and listening to Broadway show tunes on a piano and wondering about the limey’s clothes.
Baggy tweed jacket, bright shirt, blue jeans, no tie. The casual look. Zuboric had the feeling, though, that there wasn’t anything casual about Frank Pagan himself. The face was too intense. The mouth reminded Zuboric of a tight rubber band, and the grey eyes had a fierce quality. The word Zuboric had heard about Frank Pagan was determined.
The guy had built himself a solid reputation in the Special Branch at Scotland Yard, where he’d specialised in anti-terrorist tactics. Once, Pagan had been involved in a shoot-out with Libyan terrorists in a London street. He killed three that day. On another occasion, he’d captured some Italian anarchists after a chase through London Airport. Somewhere along the way he’d been given his own section, practically independent of the Yard, thus causing some resentment among the older hands, who didn’t like Frank Pagan’s style or the way he dressed or the fact he wasn’t quite forty yet. They envied his autonomy. The term for Frank Pagan, Zuboric decided, was maverick. All this stuff was in the file Washington had hurriedly put together for Zuboric. It was impressive material, but he wished the English wouldn’t go dragging their Irish problem into the United States. Who the fuck needed that? Bunch of micks with guns, spouting shit about freedom.
He stuffed some peanuts in his mouth. The piano was giving him a royal headache. ‘We ran your Father Tumulty through the computer, Frank. Mind if I call you Frank? Call me Artie. Arthur’s an old man’s name, I always think.’
Pagan didn’t mind what the agent called him. He was only interested in Tumulty.
‘Clean as a whistle,’ Zuboric went on. ‘So I put a field agent on it who tells me there’s only one priest in the whole of New York City called Tumulty. Joseph X.’
Zuboric tasted his rum and Coke and made a face. ‘Uncommon name,’ he said. ‘The thing is, this Joseph X. Tumulty isn’t a priest any more. Seems he either left the RC Church or got himself thrown out for some reason. Whatever, Tumulty runs a mission called St. Finbar’s down on Canal Street.’
Pagan looked at the pianist absently, then turned his thoughts to the idea of a lapsed priest having a connection with Jig. Irish labyrinths, little connections between this person and that, this furtive group with some other, on and on into the maze. Pagan thought a moment about the Leprechaun and the Free Ulster Volunteers and their alleged leader, the Reverend Ivor McInnes. Now there was a strange link, a failed jockey and a Presbyterian minister. And here was another, a lapsed priest and an assassin. Only in the murky world of Irish terrorism, Pagan thought. Only there could you find these weird bonds.
Zuboric said, ‘The Immigration and Naturalisation Service records say that Father Tumulty entered the United States in October 1978 from Ireland. He came complete with permanent residence status as a priest. His church was Our Lady of the Sorrows on Staten Island, where he stayed two years. Since then he’s been caring for broken souls on Canal Street.’
Zuboric drained his glass. ‘According to INS records, Joseph Tumulty came fresh out of a seminary in Bantry to the United States. The INS always runs a police check on potential immigrants in their country of origin. Tumulty was clean in Ireland too, Frank.’
‘Clean or very clandestine,’ Pagan said. ‘I’ve known priests sympathetic to the IRA. They get involved in a little gun-running on the side. Or they skim the collection plate to make contributions. A little adventure compensates for the stresses of celibacy.’
‘No doubt,’ Zuboric remarked. ‘Maybe this Tumulty is a sympathiser. But if he is, he’s playing his cards pretty close to his chest.’
Pagan sat back in his chair. ‘If he’s Jig’s contact in the United States, then he can’t be Mr. Clean altogether.’
Zuboric fidgeted with his empty glass. ‘I guess,’ he said. ‘I put a man on Canal Street. But what am I supposed to tell him, Frank? Keep your eyes open for a guy you don’t know what he looks like?’
‘Has your man talked to Tumulty?’
Zuboric shook his head. ‘I didn’t want to take that step before I talked to you.’
‘Good,’ Pagan said. He didn’t like the idea of some FBI field agent trudging over territory he thought of as his own.
Zuboric said, ‘So far as somebody using a passport in the name of John Doyle, Immigration has no record of anyone by that name. It doesn’t mean much. Your man could have entered illegally through Canada, or he could have come into the U.S. under another name.’ Zuboric paused. ‘What’s your next move?’
‘Canal Street. Talk to Tumulty.’
Zuboric sighed. He wondered what kind of metal Frank Pagan was made of. Guy gets off a plane after a five-hour flight through time zones and wants to start work right away. Zuboric played with the word obsessed for a moment. He’d seen obsessed law enforcement officers before. He’d seen how something unsolved just nibbled away at them until they were completely devoured and more than somewhat insane. Maybe Frank Pagan was wandering towards the abyss.
Z
uboric said nothing for a moment. His present caseload involved a kidnapping in White Plains, a group of Communist dissidents suspected of illegal arms purchases in the Bronx, and a Lebanese diplomat who was smuggling dope in the diplomatic pouch. He didn’t need Frank Pagan’s problems. He didn’t need a priest who might be an IRA sleeper. He didn’t need some Irish assassin wandering around his turf. There were times in Artie Zuboric’s life when he wondered what it was that he did need, periods of uncertainty when he played with such notions as ‘career moves’ and ‘upward mobility’, neither of which seemed appropriate within the structure of the Bureau, where promotion depended on the incomprehensible whim of the Director. Zuboric often longed for a life where the pressures were less weighty and the rewards somewhat more tangible. What had the goddam Bureau ever done for him anyhow? He had one broken marriage behind him and now he was in love with a girl called Charity who danced in a topless bar, a girl whom he wanted to marry but who had continually spurned him because she wanted no part of any man gung ho enough to be associated with the feds. Zuboric spent a lot of time thinking about ways of getting Charity to accept him. Money and good prospects might have helped. It galled Zuboric to think of his beloved Charity flashing her tits in front of drooling strangers. He wanted to take her away from all that.
‘I don’t understand why you can’t settle this Irish crap once and for all, Frank. Why don’t you just pull your soldiers out of Ulster and tell the Irish to go fuck themselves? What is it? Some colonial hangover?’
Frank Pagan smiled. ‘Why don’t you do something about stopping the flow of American money into IRA coffers?’ he asked.
Zuboric said, ‘Tell me how I can dictate what private citizens do with their money, Frank. Then maybe I can help you. Besides, we have a President who’s a stage Irishman, and he’s got an enormous Irish–American vote around here, which he isn’t going to throw away by legislating against mick fund-raisers. And if they choose to send bucks to some rebels, what’s he gonna do? Anyhow, I’m not absolutely convinced there’s much more than chump change flowing from here to Ireland.’
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