He heard the sound of someone knocking at his door, and at first he thought it was just the elm tree rattling again on the downstairs window. But when he realised it wasn’t he rose from the bed and quickly took a robe out of his bag, tying the cord and stepping towards the door in one hurried movement.
‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she said.
Cairney felt awkward. He made a meaningless gesture with one hand. Celestine entered the room. She wore a pink satin robe, floor-length, and her yellow hair was tied up at the back of her head.
‘Am I disturbing you, Pat?’
‘No,’ and Cairney closed the door, glancing along the hallway as he did so.
Celestine looked around the room. ‘I’ve often wondered about the boy whose room this used to be.’
‘Now you know.’
‘I don’t really know,’ she answered him. She fiddled with the cord of her robe, working the knot with her finger. Cairney didn’t move. He had the uneasy feeling that any movement on his part could be misconstrued. He didn’t want this woman in his bedroom. He didn’t want any of the odd little responses she caused him to have.
‘I see a boy’s books, but that’s all,’ she said. Her blue eyes seemed stark and glassy in the light from the lamp. ‘You needn’t look so pale, Patrick.’
‘Pale?’
‘When I was a child I had this fish that died by jumping out of the bowl. When I found it, it was exactly the colour you are right now. Does my presence in this room upset you?’
Cairney watched Celestine wander around the room, touching things as she moved. The edge of the drapes. The spines of books. She stopped at the dressing table. Lamplight made small delicate shadows in the folds of her robe, which clung to her flat stomach. She was lean, and Cairney knew that the body beneath the robe was hard and taut and yet that it would yield in the right places. Harry’s wife, he thought. The Senator’s wife. He tried to absent himself from his responses to her, to step away from his own reactions. God, it was difficult. It was just so damned hard to shut your eyes and ignore this woman’s compelling beauty and her nearness and the faint notion he had that he could go to her now and slip the robe from her body and draw her down to the bed with him. Was her presence here telling him that? Was she saying she was available?
She was standing very close to his canvas bag. ‘The truth is, Harry’s been snoring worse than usual since this recent attack. I know he can’t help it but it drives me up the wall.’ She put the palm of her hand on top of his bag, which was lying open. He felt a tension in his throat.
‘So here I am,’ she said. ‘I thought we might go down and have one last nightcap. It might help me sleep. And I don’t like to drink alone. There’s something a little pathetic about it.’
He couldn’t take his eyes away from her hand. He realised he should have closed the bag after moving his robe, but he’d been hurried. It was a mistake. He saw that now. He should have taken the time.
‘I like this room,’ Celestine said. ‘It gets a lot of light in summer. It must have been a pleasant room for you, Patrick.’
‘I have some good memories,’ Cairney said, and turned towards the door. ‘Shall we go downstairs?’
‘Are you rushing me, Patrick? It just so happens that this is one of my favourite rooms in the entire house. Sometimes I come here and I sit. I just sit in the chair by the window. There’s a good view of the lake. Sixteen rooms in this big house and this is the one I like best.’
Cairney realised something then. The two brandies Celestine had drunk before had affected her more than he’d realised. Her speech was just a little slurred. Not much, just enough to notice. There were red flushes on her cheeks.
He reached out, turned the door handle. ‘A nightcap sounds like a great idea,’ he said.
‘You’re in such a hurry,’ Celestine said. She looked at him, her mouth open a little way, the tip of one finger pressed to her lower lip. There was something mischievous in the gesture.
Then Cairney saw her palm slide along the top of the bag. He started towards her, thinking he’d slip the bag away from her, perhaps pretend there was something in it he needed, but before he could make his move she was lifting an object out and turning it over in her hand, her expression one of interest.
He could feel his blood turn cold.
‘Where did you get this?’ she asked.
‘It’s just a souvenir I picked up at the airport.’
Celestine fingered the object, stroking it with the tips of her fingers. ‘It’s very pretty,’ she said.
Cairney shivered. A draught came up the staircase and moved along the hallway through the open door of the bedroom. He stepped towards Celestine, took the object from her hand, then dropped it back inside the bag, where it lay on top of his passport.
It was a miniature wooden horse, a Scandinavian import.
‘Let’s have that drink,’ he said, and he was conscious of an awkward tone in his own voice. He clasped her arm and led her gently out of the room. On the landing, the relief he felt was intense. She had come within a mere half inch of the passport made out in the name of John Doyle.
13
New York City
Arthur Zuboric’s office was located in Lower Manhattan in a building that had absolutely no distinguishing features. Frank Pagan thought he’d never been inside a place with less personality. It was a testimonial to bureaucratic blandness, erected in the sky by architects who lacked any kind of taste. Zuboric, looking very pale beneath his sun lamp tan, stared across the room at a wall where there was a college diploma with his name on it. Pagan imagined he heard Artie ticking like an overwound watch.
Zuboric sighed, then said, ‘First you split, leaving me stranded in that goddam pimpmobile you rented. Then you shoot a guy. You actually shoot a guy, which is a mess I had to clean up with local cops, which I needed like a haemorrhoid. Jesus Christ. I mean, Jesus Christ, Pagan.’
Pagan tilted his chair back at the wall. There wasn’t a great deal to say in the circumstances. He folded his arms against his chest. It was best to let Zuboric continue to tick until his clockwork had run down.
‘Don’t get me wrong, Pagan. Santacroce’s death is no loss to the civilised world. There’s not going to be a great weeping and gnashing of teeth. And his criminal connections aren’t going to cause a run on Kleenex – but holy shit, there was a fucking corpse on the goddam sidewalk and a whole gang of diners with napkins tucked in their shirts, and they saw him lying there.’
‘It probably put them off their osso bucco,’ Pagan remarked. Bad timing. A look of pain crossed Zuboric’s face.
The FBI man got up from behind his desk and strolled around the small room. There was a window looking down over the towers of Manhattan, and Artie Zuboric paused there a moment, surveying the night with a miserable expression. Not more than an hour ago he’d had the Director on the telephone from D.C. The Director never raised his voice, had never been heard to shout, but he had a way with anger like nobody else Zuboric knew. He spoke quietly, clipping his words. Leonard M. Korn terrified Arthur Zuboric. Sometimes Artie had nightmares in which he was alone in an interrogation room with the man and he felt so paralysed, so overawed, he couldn’t answer any of his superior’s questions, including the one concerning his own name. Is there no way, Zuboric, of keeping this Englishman under lock and key? Is he to be allowed to run through the streets as he pleases? There had been a very long pause after which the Director had spoken the most ominous sentence Zuboric had ever heard in his life. For your sake, Zuboric, let us hope that not one word of this unfortunate incident ever reaches a newspaper. This chilled Zuboric to his bones. Suddenly whatever meagre prospects he’d had before appeared to dwindle and then finally disappear in front of his eyes.
Now Zuboric said, ‘You landed me in the shit.’
‘Santacroce drew a gun,’ Pagan answered. ‘It was either him or me.’
Zuboric touched his moustache in a thoughtful way. It was obvious to Pagan whom Zuboric would have
preferred between those alternatives.
Artie sat down. There were papers littered across his desk and a computer terminal attached to a printer. Every now and then the printer would hiccup into action and paper would roll out of the device, but Zuboric paid it no attention. He buried his face in his hands a second, then sighed again, looking across the room at the Englishman.
‘And now you tell me you’ve got some cockeyed plan for that mick.’
In the time that had passed since the shooting of Santacroce, Pagan had gone over the scheme a couple of times, approaching it from all the angles he could think of, testing it and weighing it and then giving it his private seal of approval. It wasn’t watertight and he wouldn’t trust it in a storm, but it was the best he could do.
‘Joe Tumulty doesn’t want to go to jail, Artie. It’s a powerful incentive.’
‘What did you do, Pagan? Offer him immunity? Huh? Just take the law into your own hands and tell him he’s walking away scot-free if he plays a little game for you?’
Frank Pagan gazed at the window. Out there in the night sky there were the lights of a passing plane. He felt a small homesick longing. Wintry London. Somehow it seemed farther away than a six-hour plane ride, like an impossible city of his own imagination.
Zuboric said, ‘You can’t just fuck around with the laws of this country, Frank. I don’t know what it’s like where you come from, but here you can’t promise a guy something that’s not in your power to give him.’
Pagan stood up. He studied the college diploma on the wall. It had been issued by the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He wondered a moment about the pathways of a man’s life that led from a degree in business administration to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, then he thought of Joe Tumulty, who sat along the corridor in a locked room, presumably staring at the blank walls and worrying about his sorry predicament. With a man like Tumulty, whose political affiliation threatened the ruin of his charity work, his shot at sainthood, you couldn’t ever really be sure of anything.
‘He’ll give us Jig,’ Pagan said. Was that a small lack of conviction in his own voice? Confidence, Frank.
‘What makes you think he won’t call Jig and warn him?’
Pagan put his hands in his pockets. ‘He doesn’t know how to get in touch with him. He doesn’t have a phone number. He doesn’t have an address. He doesn’t know where Jig is.’
‘He isn’t exactly a mine of information, is he?’
‘Do you expect him to know more? Do you think Jig goes around giving out personal information, Artie? You think he passes out a nice little business card embossed with his name and number? Occupation, assassin?’
‘Did Tumulty at least give you a description?’
‘Nothing that’s going to help. Thirtyish. Five eleven. A hundred and sixty pounds. Dark curly hair.’
‘That’s terrific,’ Zuboric said. ‘You know what I really think, Frank? Father Joe is jerking you off.’
Pagan smiled now. ‘I think Father Joe and myself have come to an understanding.’
Zuboric lit a cigarette and narrowed his eyes against the smoke. ‘When’s Jig supposed to show?’
‘Tomorrow, the next day. Tumulty isn’t certain.’
‘Tumulty’s a fucking mine of uncertainty.’
Zuboric shook his head. Frank Pagan had given up that one thing any cop should have considered his greatest asset: objectivity. His peripheral vision was severely damaged. Zuboric, for his part, wouldn’t trust the mick as far as he could throw a crucifix, and as a reasonably good Catholic he’d never have thrown one anyhow. He sighed again, unhappy with the condition of his life. Was he really supposed to let this character Tumulty walk away from here with a loaded attaché case? What was he going to say to the Director? These questions hung bleakly in his mind.
Frank Pagan was still studying Zuboric’s diploma. He was very tired all at once. He covered a yawn with the palm of his hand. ‘I’m going back to my hotel,’ he said.
‘I’ll ride with you.’
‘Of course.’ Pagan turned away from the diploma. ‘We should keep Joe here overnight and release him in the morning. A small taste of imprisonment might be a useful reminder to him.’
Zuboric agreed half heartedly.
Frank Pagan moved to the centre of the room and stood directly under a strip of fluorescent light. ‘Before we release Joe, there’s a couple of things we ought to do. First, there’s a certain Englishman I’d like to talk to. And second, we ought to pay a visit to a tailor.’
An Englishman and a tailor. Zuboric felt he had just been asked to solve an impossible riddle. ‘What Englishman? What tailor?’
Frank Pagan smiled in the knowing way that so infuriated Zuboric. ‘It can wait until morning,’ he replied.
Quebec-Maine Border
A freezing rain had begun to fall all along the border country from Lake Champlain to Edmundston. It pounded on the roof of the Ryder truck with such ferocity that the two men who sat silently in the back with the cargo – McGrath and Rorke – felt they were trapped inside a very large yellow drum.
The headlights of the vehicle faintly picked out trees obscured by the torrent. Behind the wheel, Fitzjohn could see hardly a thing save for great drops of moisture illuminated by the lights. He was nearly blinded. Every now and then the wheels of the truck would spin on old snow that was turning to slush. Waddell slept with his head tilted against the window, his mouth hanging open. Houlihan, who sat in the centre, was truly alert, turning his pistol around every so often in his hands, like a man anxious to keep checking reality.
‘How much farther is it?’ Houlihan wanted to know.
Fitzjohn wasn’t sure but he lied because it was best to appease Houlihan whenever he could. ‘Five, six miles.’
The Ryder truck rattled and shook. Fitzjohn was a proficient driver who’d made scores of nocturnal runs from Northern Ireland over the border into the Republic, driving through some hostile terrain to do so, but he’d had no experience of anything quite like this. The wipers worked furiously backwards and forwards but they couldn’t keep up with the deluge. How in the name of God could John Waddell sleep through all this?
Trees and more trees and nothing beyond the feeble reach of the lights except a darkness the like of which Fitzjohn had never known. If there was a God, he’d forsaken this stretch of country for sure.
Houlihan whistled quietly for a time. Fitzjohn recognised the tune as that Protestant anthem, The Battle of the Boyne, which celebrated the defeat of Catholic forces by King William of Orange in July 1690. Old hatreds. Very old hatreds.
In a tuneless voice Houlihan sang a couple of lines. ‘With blow and shout put our foes to the rout/The day we crossed the water.’ And then he was silent, which made Fitzjohn nervous. He understood something he’d known all along but had refused to acknowledge – that Seamus Houlihan could quite casually blow off the top of his head and dump him by the side of the road, if such a whim ever moved him. It was a numbing insight.
‘Are you sure you know where you’re going, Fitz?’ Houlihan asked.
Fitzjohn nodded and said, ‘I didn’t expect this kind of weather. It’s a bad time of year for country like this.’
‘Aye,’ Houlihan said. Something in the way he used simple words, little negatives and affirmatives, suggested that Seamus Houlihan was a man to whom language had all the firmness of quicksand. It was as if everything he uttered could be construed in different ways on different levels. Treacherous and shifting, Fitzjohn thought.
Ahead, quite suddenly, there were lights.
Houlihan leaned forward, straining to see through the rain. ‘What’s that?’ he asked, and the gun was back out in his hand, the barrel propped against the dash.
Fitzjohn braked. The big yellow truck slowed. The lights disappeared, then returned a second later. In a nervous voice Fitzjohn said it was the highway, that the lights were those of passing cars.
‘America,’ Houlihan said. He nudged Waddell, who woke suddenly
and peered out into the dark.
‘Here we are, John. Here we are in America.’
Waddell mumbled something. Ever since the airfield he’d been either asleep or ashen and withdrawn, and Fitzjohn suspected that the man had no stomach for any of this business. But John Waddell had always gone along with Houlihan, no matter what. It was almost as if Houlihan had cast a spell over the man. Or was it some form of hero worship, with Waddell always tagging along behind?
‘Well?’ Houlihan asked Fitzjohn. ‘Are we going to sit here and wait for the bloody weather to change?’
Fitzjohn took his foot from the brake and the truck, its hood steaming with rain, rolled in the direction of the highway. This was the worst part, Fitzjohn knew that. Although he understood that an illicit border crossing at this godforsaken point was simpler, say, than crossing from Mexico, just the same his nerves were abruptly shrill. The concept had seemed easier than the reality, which was cold and wet, dreamlike and menacing.
The disaster happened about fifty yards from the pavement. The faint track along which the truck had been moving suddenly ended and the land dipped into a basin before rising up a slope to the highway. The hollow was muddy and impossible, and the truck, straining as hard as it might, didn’t make it up the incline. It slithered, then slid back down through slush, wheels spinning noisily and dense exhaust rising into the icy rain. Dear Christ, Fitzjohn thought. This was the last thing he’d anticipated. He’d imagined only a clear run onto the highway, not this, not anything like this bloody great ditch.
Seamus Houlihan angrily slapped his pistol on the dash. Fitzjohn swore, shoved his foot down hard on the gas pedal, and tried to ram the truck back up the slope again but failed a second time as the Ryder slipped down into the hollow, where it sat with its big wheels uselessly turning.
‘Try it again!’ Houlihan shouted.
Fitzjohn plunged the truck into first gear, thrust the gas pedal to the floor, and tried a third time to force the heavy vehicle up the incline to the highway, which was suddenly lit by the lights of a passing car. He turned off his own headlights and prayed for invisibility even as he felt the truck lose traction about halfway up the slope. It rolled down again with a terrible inevitability. Fitzjohn shut his eyes and wanted to weep out of sheer bloody frustration. Beside him in the cab, Seamus Houlihan was very quiet all of a sudden. It was the kind of brooding silence in which Fitzjohn could sense the man’s capacity for danger.
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