‘I’ll give it another shot,’ Fitzjohn said.
‘No. We’ll push. We’ll push this bastard up on to the road. Waddell, get behind the wheel. Fitz, get McGrath and Rorke out of the back,’ and Houlihan shoved the door open quickly, thrusting Fitzjohn out into the freezing rain then following him around to the back of the truck. Fitzjohn opened the rear door.
‘Is it a breakdown or what?’ McGrath asked from the dark interior.
‘Push! Get your shoulder behind this fucker and push!’ Houlihan, who seemed immune to the cold and the relentless rain, was already pressing his body against the back of the truck. All four men strained in the numbing rain, inching the truck up the slope. Fitzjohn, his skull like a block of ice, felt utterly hopeless. How could four of them get this truck up a slushy slope? Maybe on a dry day with no mind-splitting rain to blind you and ruin your footing, maybe you could do it then, maybe. He felt his lungs turn to crystal. There was absolutely no feeling in his ungloved hands. Push! Houlihan was screaming. Push! Fucking push! The truck edged upwards, then Houlihan was screaming again, like some creature who wasn’t flesh and blood at all but a creation of the harsh elements. Push! Push! Push! Waddell, give it some bloody petrol, man!
John Waddell, dragged out of sleep and unhappy at the controls of an unfamiliar vehicle, eased his foot down on the gas pedal. He brought the clutch halfway up from the floor. The rough grinding of the gears sent a series of little shock waves through his body. There was a cramp in his foot, and he wasn’t sure if he could handle this strange vehicle.
For fuck’s sake, Waddy! Give it more petrol!
Waddell’s foot slipped on the clutch. He heard the engine stall and die. He turned the key in the ignition quickly, heard the motor come back to life, then he let out the clutch, but the truck didn’t move. The wheels churned and dense exhaust spumed out into the freezing rain, but the bloody truck wasn’t going anywhere! Pray, Waddell thought. Pray it gets up this damned slope.
Then he was suddenly dazzled, suddenly terrified, by headlights that came lancing down through the rain. He blinked his eyes furiously against the constant glare of the lights. As he did so, the truck died under him again and he had to shove his foot down hard on the brake to stop the thing from rolling back down the incline.
Outside, Fitzjohn wiped water from his eyes and peered into the same bright lights that had startled Waddell. He thought, Jesus, not now, not now. There was the brief glow of the car’s interior light, then a door was slammed and a figure moved in front of the beams with a flashlight that he shone towards the Ryder truck. ‘Don’t move!’ the man from the car shouted in an authoritative voice. ‘Don’t any one of you move or I’ll blow your fucking heads off!’
Houlihan did the strangest thing then. He tossed his head back and laughed, and it was a weird noise that managed to override the pounding rain. The figure started down the incline towards the truck, his flashlight making the rainy air sparkle. Houlihan laughed a second time and shouted, ‘We’re stuck! We ran straight off the bloody road!’
Fitzjohn shut his eyes and pressed his face against the metal panel of the truck. God, if the figure from the car was an agent of the Border Patrol he was going to find Seamus Houlihan’s thick accent very strange indeed. And if he was a cop it was going to be just as bad, because he was surely going to insist on a search of the vehicle, and then what? Fitzjohn stared at the movement of the flashlight. The figure was approaching the truck, and Fitzjohn saw for the first time that the man held a shotgun pressed against his side.
When he was almost level with the Ryder the man said, ‘Let’s see some identification.’
It was the wrong request to make of Seamus Houlihan, who knew only one way to identify himself. Fitzjohn opened his mouth and was about to speak – anything, a lie, anything at all to fill the horrible void – when he noticed Seamus Houlihan’s hand going towards the pocket of his jacket. The man with the shotgun made a gesture with his flashlight.
‘You move that hand too fast and you can kiss it good-bye,’ he said.
‘I was only going to show you my papers,’ Houlihan responded.
‘Reach for them slowly. Very slowly. Slow as you know how. The rest of you characters back off from the truck. The guy behind the wheel – put your brake on and step outside.’
Waddell climbed down from the cab. In his anxiety, he hadn’t checked to make certain that the emergency brake was firmly in place and so the truck, swaying slightly from side to side in the slicing rain, began to drift slowly back down the incline.
The man with the shotgun shouted at Waddell. ‘Get back in there and put the fucking brake on, asshole!’
Waddell moved towards the cab and was reaching up to the door handle when Houlihan – always the opportunist, always seizing the unguarded moment and twisting it to his own advantage – took out his pistol and fired off two shots. The flashlight fell, and the man cried out in pain before going down into the slush, where he lay with his face pressed into the ground. Houlihan walked to the place where the flashlight was located. He picked it up, turning the beam on the man’s face.
Fitzjohn stared at the scene.
A glare of rainy light.
Houlihan standing over the man.
The echo of gunfire.
The runaway truck slithering to a halt in the mud.
John Waddell was the first to speak, and his voice trembled. ‘Who was he?’
Seamus Houlihan turned away from the body. ‘According to his pretty uniform, he was a gentleman from the United States Border Patrol.’
Fitzjohn had a sour taste in his mouth. Even after they had laboured to push the truck onto the highway, after they had shoved the agent’s car down into the hollow and hastily covered the corpse with frozen slush, the taste was still with him, mile after rainy mile.
Roscommon, New York
It was early morning and the sky over Roscommon was the colour of salmon flesh, a pale pink sun slatting through the cloud cover. An unusual day, neither winter nor spring but some uncharted hiatus between the two. Even the snow that covered the landscape was a curious rose tint. Harry Cairney, walking with the help of a cane, stopped at the edge of the lake. He said nothing for a time, then turned to his son, and there was a small look of expectation in his eyes.
‘What do you make of her, Patrick?’
Patrick Cairney tossed a flat stone out across the water, watching it skip three times before sinking. ‘She’s a beautiful woman,’ he answered.
The old man smiled. ‘After your mother died, I thought that was it. End of the ball game. Well, that didn’t happen.’ The senator poked the tip of his stick into the snow. ‘You think God figured he owed me a favour? You think he said there’s one old Paddy needs a good turn?’
Patrick Cairney gazed across the lake. He had spent a restless night after the final brandy with Celestine. What he saw when he lay in bed later and shut his eyes was Celestine’s robe clinging to her body by firelight and the way she sat with her legs spread in front of her, so that there were shadows deepening the length of her thighs. What he couldn’t decide was whether it was the unconscious physical gesture of a woman who’d had too much brandy or something else – and when he reached that borderline, a place of sheer discomfort, he stopped speculating.
‘I was surprised by joy,’ Harry Cairney said. ‘It crept up on me.’
‘I can understand that.’ Patrick Cairney wasn’t sure that he could, though. Joy wasn’t a feeling with which he had any regular acquaintance.
The old man clapped his son on the shoulder. ‘Dear God, it does me good to see you again, Pat. You should come back more often. You shouldn’t be traipsing all over the goddam world digging in tombs or whatever it is you do. What’s the point to all that anyhow? You think it matters to an Appalachian dirt farmer or some Boston longshoreman if King Tut was left-handed or had rotten teeth? It’s not going to change any lives, is it? And what do we live for if it isn’t to try and change a few things?’
Thi
s was an old argument. Whenever he heard it, Patrick was always beset by the feeling that he’d somehow disappointed Harry, let him down in some unforgivable way. That he was to be blamed for failing to meet Harry’s expectations for him. What the hell did the old man want anyhow? A younger copy of himself? A nice buttoned-down young man happy to go into politics, which Harry had made the family business? Patrick Cairney had given law a try once some years back simply to please the old man, and he’d been utterly miserable. It was the last time he’d ever even attempted to gratify his father. If Harry still entertained ambitions on his son’s behalf, they were well and truly doomed to failure. And if this fact disappointed him, then that was a burden the old man had to carry. Patrick couldn’t be responsible for his father’s feelings about him.
Patrick Cairney tossed another stone out on the lake. A wintry bird rose up out of the trees. Both men moved a little way along the shore. For a moment Patrick wanted to tell the old man that he was trying to change a few things but in his own way.
Harry Cairney caught his son’s arm. ‘Tell me about Dublin. I want to hear about Ireland.’
Patrick Cairney knew what the old man wanted to hear and it wasn’t the hard brutal world of northern cities like Belfast and Derry with their burned-out buildings and bloody casualties. He wanted to hear only the same unchanging litany of heroes and martyrs. Patrick Cairney said nothing. It was cowardly of Harry to dream his time away in the comfort and security of Roscommon, to hide behind his record collection and his Celtic documents, and ignore the real troubles in his homeland. Patrick – who had gone to Ireland expecting to find the glowing island of song and poetry that Harry had always pictured for him, only to discover something relentlessly terrible behind the romance and the myth – felt contempt for the old man and everything he represented.
‘I used to meet a pretty young girl under Waterhouse’s clock on Dame Street in Dublin,’ the old man remarked. ‘I sometimes wonder if that clock’s still there. She was very fond of a shop called Butler’s by O’Connell Bridge. It sold musical instruments. Polly liked to browse in that place for hours. Sweet girl.’
Patrick Cairney smiled thinly. He wanted to say that it was gone, it was all gone, that another world had taken the place of everything the old man remembered. He glanced across the lawn at the house, which had a pink tint in the hallucinogenic morning light. He was thinking of Celestine moving through the rooms of that big house. He was thinking of the lithe way she moved, the slight forward thrust of hips and the fair hair bouncing against her shoulders and that strange little electric light in her eyes, which he found indefinable and puzzling. He didn’t need these thoughts, for God’s sake. He didn’t need to wander in this direction. He had come to the United States for one reason only and nothing, not a goddam thing in the world, was going to interfere with his purpose.
Harry Cairney let his hand fall from his son’s arm. He drew a sinewy line in the snow with the tip of his cane. ‘When are you going to this symposium of yours?’
‘Tomorrow,’ Patrick Cairney replied.
‘And after that – will you come back here?’
‘I hadn’t planned on it.’
‘You don’t need the excuse of a symposium to visit me. This is still your home, Patrick.’
‘I know,’ Patrick said. He thought how remarkable it was that he had developed a knack for believing in his own fictions. It was the simplest thing in the world to believe that there really was a symposium of archaeologists in New York City he was going to attend. He could picture the room in which the event would take place. He could invent faces, and he could give those faces names. Afterwards he could describe, if anyone asked, how the room smelled and the kind of cigarettes Professor So-and-So smoked and what the lecturer from Oxford had to say about Etruscan pottery. When you lived a life grounded in lies and deception, all the lines of reality became blurred.
He remembered the simple lie he’d told Rhiannon Canavan about his father’s heart attack the night Padraic Finn had telephoned with the news of the Connie. Had he known that his father was really unwell, he might have chosen a different fabrication, but in the end it made no difference at all. Even his identities were lies. He was no longer Patrick Cairney. Neither was he John Doyle, traveller in Scandinavian trinkets.
He was Jig and all his experiences were Jig’s.
The months spent training in the savage wasteland of the Libyan desert with Qaddafi’s mad guerillas, who valued human life as much as a match flame. The endless days crawling over burning sand when you had nothing to drink and your throat had the texture of sandpaper and the gun and back-pack you carried became the heaviest burden in all your experience. Freezing nights when you slept naked under a moon of relentless ice and shivered so badly you felt your skin was coming loose from your skeleton. These were Jig’s experiences. And it was Jig who had become the hardened professional under Padraic Finn’s guidance, who had sworn allegiance to the Association of the Wolfe and the goal of Irish unity, achieved through a programme of political assassination. A programme carried out by professionals who had no desire for the old ways of martyrdom and considered self-destruction beneath contempt. It wasn’t a dreamer’s Ireland. It was a hard place, and there were hard goals to accomplish, and these couldn’t be left to the amateurs, the homemade grenade groups, the desperate little losers who tossed bottles of fiery gasoline at British soldiers and thought they were brave for doing so. Sad, misguided men who dreamed the dreams of hooligans. Finn’s programme would eventually change everything. Jig had a complete belief that in the end, weary of death and the assassinations of its political figures, the British would have no choice but to withdraw.
It was Padraic Finn who had smoothed the abrasive surface of Patrick Cairney. It was Finn, surrogate father, mentor, who had insisted on Libyan training and then, in a further process of refinement, six months at the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow where Cairney had learned the uses of high-tech explosives. If Harry had provided the early, relentless indoctrination, then it was Finn who had carried this out of the realm of vague impracticality and vapid rhetoric into the real world. He thought of Finn now, and the remote possibility that something might have happened to the old man in Ireland caused him fleeting concern – but what he came back to was Finn’s own maxim. I’m expendable. You’re expendable. Only the Cause has permanence. Cairney lifted his face and looked up at the sky. He could still picture Finn, in baggy cord pants and fisherman’s sweater, standing at the window in the room of harps. He could still hear Finn say The Cause is a killing mistress. It seeks your total devotion and never excuses your weaknesses. It demands your complete commitment and it rewards your infidelity, not with forgiveness and understanding, but with death …
‘Let’s walk back,’ Harry Cairney said. ‘It’s damn cold out here. Besides, we shouldn’t neglect Celestine. You ought to get to know her a little better.’
A harmless suggestion, Patrick Cairney thought. But there was no such thing in his life anymore. He couldn’t make the ordinary connections other people made. He lived in the shadows he’d created for himself.
They moved across the lawn in the direction of the house. The young man clutched his father’s elbow when they reached the steps, which were slick underfoot. He noticed how his father puffed as he climbed. Inside the house Celestine appeared at the foot of the stairs.
‘Did you walk far?’ she asked.
‘Just to the lake,’ the old man said. He started to take off his coat. Celestine helped, fussing around him.
Patrick Cairney watched her. She had her yellow hair pulled back tightly, making her sky-blue eyes prominent in her face. She wore faded blue jeans and a red silk shirt and she was barefoot. She looked impossibly young. She might have been a young girl strolling through the grass at an open-air rock concert, someone you followed with your eyes and wondered who was lucky enough to be screwing her. And then you might track her through the crowd and lose her, knowing you’d never see her again.
&nb
sp; She moved towards him now. There was a scent of perfume in the air around her. She laid her fingertips on his wrist and said, ‘I’ll make breakfast. I expect you’re both hungry.’
Patrick Cairney hung his coat on the rack, turning his face away from Celestine. He had developed a sense of danger that was like having some kind of internal compass whose needle would vibrate whenever danger was near, and he had the awareness now of that needle swinging madly inside his brain – and it had nothing to do with the idea that a man called Frank Pagan was in New York City looking for him, it had nothing to do with whatever calamity might have happened to Finn in Ireland, it had nothing to do with his reason for being in the United States. It was connected entirely to the touch of this woman’s fingertips on his bare skin, which provoked a warm and unsettling physical response inside him. Sometimes there was an inexplicable chemistry between two people, instant, like a small Polaroid of emotion. If that was the thing happening between himself and Celestine, he had no room for it in his world.
He said, ‘I could eat.’
But he still didn’t look at her because he knew he had absolutely no mastery right then over his own expression. He didn’t like that. He didn’t like yielding up any of his control over himself. Without control he was a dead man. Finn had told him once that Jig was an instrument, a very fine instrument of destruction. But what Patrick Cairney felt as he avoided Celestine’s eyes was a distressing knowledge of flaws in the structure of this instrument – a damaged reed, a faulty valve, something he’d have to repair in such a way that it would never fail him again.
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