It was only a small consolation that he’d pulled himself back at the last possible moment when he’d encountered the weak phantom of his own conscience. His private policeman, the one that stopped the flow of traffic inside his head. But that was no consolation to him at all the more he thought about it. The desire was still there. The longing was still strong. His own sense of shame was intact. He picked up a heavy stone, turning it around in his hand, and he remembered her smell, the touch of her fingers on his body, her mouth. The clarity of the recollection shook him. What he suddenly wished for was another world, an alternative reality, in which Celestine wasn’t his father’s wife and Jig didn’t exist. Wishing was a game for fools. It wasn’t going to change the world. And he hadn’t come to America to be embroiled in the sexual dissatisfactions of Celestine Cairney.
He took a deep breath of the cold air. There was a certain madness in the night, an insanity of the heart. He drew his arm back as far as it would go and released the stone and he heard it strike out in the middle of the lake. He wished sensations could be released as easily.
He turned from the lake and went back through the trees. He’d leave Roscommon tonight. He’d drive away now. It was the simplest solution he could think of. Distance was a benefactor. A salve.
Halfway back across the frozen lawn he stopped, looking up at the black house. Upstairs, a light was burning in one of the windows. It was the window of his own room. It could only mean that Celestine had gone back in there. Suddenly he wasn’t thinking about her any more. He was thinking instead of the canvas bag with the cheap lock and Celestine’s curiosity about the small wooden horse.
He hurried inside the house and climbed the stairs quickly. When he reached his own room he pushed the door open and stepped inside. The place was in blackness but he had an intuition that she’d been there only moments before. He switched on the bedside lamp. The room felt different to him, violated in some fashion, and yet nothing had been moved, nothing changed. The bag still sat on the dresser where he’d left it. He stepped closer to look at it. He took out the key from his pocket and turned it in the lock.
Nothing had been touched inside the bag. Nothing had been moved. The wooden horse, the passports, the clothing, everything was the same as it had been. He closed the bag, locked it, wondering about the fear he’d suddenly felt. What possible reason could Celestine have for going through his belongings anyway?
He turned to the bed, where a sheet of violet notepaper was propped against his pillow. This was the reason she’d come back to his room. To leave a message. He picked up the paper and read:
Next time
There wasn’t going to be a next time, he thought.
He picked up his bag, stuffed the note inside his pocket, gazed at the rumpled bedsheets, which suggested a consummation rather than an interruption, then switched off the lamp. He made his way quietly down the stairs. Once outside, he walked in the direction of his rented Dodge.
He wouldn’t be so careless in New York as he had been here at Roscommon. He wouldn’t be so careless, in both heart and action, ever again.
16
New York City
Dressed in thrift-store garments, Frank Pagan woke in a cramped position, every muscle in his body locked. He opened his eyes and checked his watch. It was five fifty A.M. and still dark, and he was propped against the wall of the dining room in St. Finbar’s Mission, where he had spent the most uncomfortable night of his life. He stared at the outlines of sleeping men who lay on mattresses all across the floor and he thought of how the entire night had been filled with the strangest sounds – men coughing, wheezing, snoring, wandering blindly around in a manner Pagan found vaguely menacing (he had an image at one point of somebody trying to cut his throat), men stumbling, cursing, spitting, striking matches for surreptitious cigarettes, men hacking their larynxes to shreds, men rattling while they slept as if marbles rolled back and forth in their rib cages, men crying out, sobbing, uttering incomprehensible phrases in the language of sleep. Once, Pagan had been startled into wakefulness by the cry Don’t leave me, Ma! Now the air inside St. Finbar’s was filled with the odour of tooth decay, gum disease, old booze, greasy clothing, yesterday’s smoke, and the incongruous and almost shocking antiseptic scent of air deodorant that Joseph X. Tumulty, awake before anyone else, had sprayed through the room.
Pagan stood up and cautiously stretched. His first conscious thought was always of coffee.
He moved carefully around the mattresses and into the kitchen where he found a jar of instant Maxwell House. He boiled some water in a saucepan, poured it into a large mug, dumped in a tablespoon of the crystals, and sipped. The brew was as subtle as crank oil, but it had the effect of starting his heart.
Joseph Tumulty appeared in the doorway. He looked brisk and freshly showered, hair wet and eyes shining. The priest nodded to Pagan, then went to the refrigerator, where he removed a huge bowl of eggs ready for scrambling. Pagan, anxious about Joe’s mood, his frame of mind, and the depth of his commitment when it came to fingering Jig, watched the priest carefully. He thought that Tumulty looked a little too composed, and he wondered why.
‘Sleep well?’ Pagan asked.
‘Very.’ Tumulty set the bowl of eggs on the table. Then he laid out rashers of bacon, enough to feed an army. He struck a match and lit the burners on the huge stove. After he’d done this he took six loaves of bread from a bin and peeled the cellophane wrapping away.
‘I couldn’t get used to sharing my bedroom,’ Pagan said. Joe Tumulty had spent the night on a mattress by the door. ‘Especially with noisy strangers.’
‘I don’t notice it any more,’ Tumulty replied. ‘Besides, a lot of these men have become my best friends. They’re a mixed crew, but you’ll find that even the worst of them have some small redeeming quality that’s worth exploring.’
My best friends, Pagan thought. There was something about Joe Tumulty to admire. His dedication. His selflessness. He felt sorry that Joe had become ensnared in this whole affair. He could see how it happened – growing up in Ireland, listening to the legends, drifting into a cause almost before he had time to understand what he was doing.
‘How many people do you get for breakfast?’ Pagan asked.
‘Fifty. Sixty. I’ve had as many as a hundred in here and as few as twenty-five.’
‘What time do you serve?’
‘Seven.’
Pagan drained his mug of coffee. ‘You haven’t changed your mind?’
‘About Jig?’ Tumulty was pulling skillets and broiling pans out of a cupboard. ‘I gave you my word, didn’t I?’
Pagan wondered about Tumulty’s word. There had been a change, some small and almost indefinable alteration in the man, and it perplexed him. He watched the priest go about the business of preparing breakfast. There were undercurrents here that Pagan caught, only he couldn’t understand them, couldn’t arrange them into a meaningful alignment. Was Joe planning something? Had he come up with something devious?
‘I’d be very unhappy if you backed out now,’ Pagan said. Which was to phrase it mildly. ‘We understand one another, don’t we?’
‘I think we do,’ Tumulty answered.
‘There’s no going back, Joe.’
‘I haven’t changed my mind, Mr. Pagan. I’ll do exactly as you asked.’
There. A very tiny tone of irritation in Tumulty’s voice. A quick little flash of light in the eyes that was almost a defiance. What are you up to? Pagan wondered. Maybe nothing. Maybe the expectation of Jig had simply raised Pagan’s own anxieties and now he saw shadows where he should have seen only light.
Tumulty was laying out slices of bread in a tray. Pagan wandered round the kitchen.
‘Jig might not come today,’ Tumulty said. ‘Nothing’s certain. He might not even choose to come at mealtime, in which case my saying the grace you want me to say is going to sound very strange.’
‘He’s going to think mealtime is the safest time. In Jig’s trade, crowds mean
security.’
Tumulty looked up from the tray of bread. ‘Shouldn’t you be out there at a table, Mr. Pagan? I don’t allow my customers inside the kitchen. You’ll stand out like a sore thumb.’
Pagan walked into the dining room. Men were waking, sitting on their beds or struggling to their feet, folding the mattresses away, stashing pillows inside the cupboards that lined the walls. There was a great deal of throat clearing and hawking and already the air was thick with cigarette smoke. Pagan sat down at an empty table and took a very crumpled cigarette out of his coat pocket, lighting it and coughing in what he hoped was an authentic way. He looked around the room, watching men stagger into the emptiness of a new day that was going to be exactly like the one before. The debris of the Great Society. It was odd that in the richest country on the planet, and not very far from Wall Street, where the great money machine cranked daily, men were forced to eat and sleep in a slough like St. Finbar’s. Pagan’s old socialism found such a contrast inhuman. What democracy and capitalism really needed, he thought, was a conscience. In a world like that, though, pigs could fly.
He put out his cigarette and thought about Artie Zuboric sitting upstairs in Tumulty’s office, then about the two agents on Canal Street. Orson Cone was located on the roof across the street. Tyson Bruno sat inside an all-night coffee hangout on the corner. Everything was in place, everything was set. It only needed Jig to step into this room for the picture to be complete. Pagan took a deep breath. Something troubled him, something he couldn’t quite define. A sensation of unease. He felt enmeshed by two different strands of spider-webbing. One, sticky and mysterious, led back to Ivor the Terrible and his enigmatic purpose in New York. The other was directly linked to Joseph X. Tumulty and that quietly upbeat mood of his.
Pagan shook his head. He couldn’t allow himself any kind of misgiving. He had no room in his head for anything else except Jig. He stared in the direction of the kitchen. Tumulty turned to look at him.
The priest smiled and winked, then went back to work.
The smile was one thing, Pagan thought. The wink was quite another. How the fuck could Joe Tumulty, who was on the point of betraying a man, look so bloody secretive and confident?
Patrick Cairney left his rented Dodge in an underground parking lot at Broadway and Grand. Every mile he’d travelled from Roscommon had taken him farther from Celestine and closer to his own purpose, and so he’d driven at speeds far in excess of the limit, a curious adrenaline rushing through him. He realised he could put Celestine out of his mind, and all the turmoil she caused, only if he didn’t forget – even for a fraction of time – that he was Jig and Jig had only one reason for being in America.
What Celestine had accomplished was the arousal of an appetite he couldn’t afford to have. She’d succeeded in breaking his concentration, diffusing his energies. It was beyond the consideration of any morality now, beyond the ugly idea that what had almost happened between him and Celestine was akin to some kind of incest. It came down to something more practical, the unsettling realisation of a weakness inside himself, an odd awareness like something left over from another life. He needed strength, singularity of purpose, total focus. He had no use for the distraction of a beautiful young woman locked in a frustrating marriage to an unhealthy old man. What he really sought was that ideal state for a man who had purposely chosen a lonely life – immunity against feelings and the confusion they produced.
When you had that kind of immunity, you had control. Over your urges, your flaws, your limitations. Over yourself.
He’d stopped briefly near Peekskill, changing his clothes in a public rest room. Now he wore the shabby coat and shapeless flannels he’d worn on his first visit to St. Finbar’s, and, as he emerged from the parking lot, he had the appearance of a deadbeat, even to the fashion in which he walked – unsteadily, like a drunk whose whole mind is consumed by the idea of the next drink. He felt comfortable in disguise. He liked the idea of melting into any background he chose. Only at Roscommon had his disguise felt awkward. It was increasingly difficult to be Patrick Cairney, Harry’s boy, the kid who lived in the sad shadows of the Senator.
When he turned on to Canal Street it was barely daylight, a sombre morning with a scavenging wind pushing itself through the gulleys of Manhattan. He shuffled along, a pitiful figure to anyone who observed him. But this was New York and nobody who passed paid him any attention other than the cursory one of steering away from his path. He paused to look at himself in the window of a store. Almost perfect. The oversized coat concealed the muscularity of his body and the grey flannel shirt, worn outside the pants, hid the money belt. Only the face and hands bothered him. Too clean. He stepped into an alley and plunged his hands inside a trashcan, bringing out an assortment of garbage. Damp newspapers were best for what he wanted because the ink came off on his fingers and he could rub it lightly over his face. When he came out of the alley back into Canal Street his face was smudged and his hands black.
It was about six blocks to St. Finbar’s. He crossed Center Street, then he stopped. He bent to tie his lace. It was more than a matter of being vigilant now. He had to listen to his own keen instincts and keep his eye on the internal compass. There were factors involved he didn’t like. For one thing, he was uncertain of Tumulty. Had the priest obtained the weapons yet? Or had he collapsed under pressure? For another, there was the distinct possibility that Frank Pagan was still around. Cairney felt he was weighing intangibles, like a man placing feathers on scales that didn’t register.
He continued to the next corner. Carefully, his eyes swept along Canal Street. Among the parked vehicles there was none that immediately suggested the presence of the FBI. This meant nothing, though. It might indicate only that agents had taken the trouble to conceal themselves more thoroughly in the neighbourhood. He had the feeling he was walking through a minefield. A man with few choices. He needed the weapons. Even more, he needed information from Tumulty. A name, an address, anything at all that would lead him in the direction of the stolen money. If Tumulty let him down on that score, where else could he possibly turn? He’d go back to Ireland with nothing achieved. He’d be letting Padraic Finn down, which was something he hadn’t ever done. Something he intended never to do.
He kept moving.
Outside the entrance to St. Finbar’s there were half a dozen or so derelicts standing on the steps. A faint aroma of fried food drifted towards Cairney, and he stopped again. He had an inherent suspicion of anything that looked normal, the way St. Finbar’s did right now. He might have been staring at a painting whose detail seemed bland and absolutely right, but at the same time this very banality suggested a sinister occurrence just under the surface.
He scanned the parked cars again, then the windows of the street, roof-tops, doorways, but he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Swaying like a man who had just stepped out of a wrecked train, he kept walking. When he reached the steps he paused. He stuffed his hands in the pockets of his coat and glanced quickly at the faces around him. They were stunned, glazed by defeat. One or two had the desperate hardened look of men who have had a lifetime of crime imposed upon them. Cairney felt a kind of affinity for them.
‘What time’s breakfast here?’ he asked.
One of the men, a gnarled character with a silvery beard, said, ‘Seven. If you turn up at seven-oh-five, you miss grace. Don’t matter none. You eat anyways.’
Cairney peered inside the dining room. He saw groups of men at tables, but no sign of Tumulty.
‘Religion and breakfast, they don’t mix so good for me,’ the man with the beard said.
Cairney nodded. He guessed it was probably close to seven by now.
‘You new around here?’ the man asked.
‘Yeah.’
‘Seems I seen you one time before.’
Cairney said nothing. Inside the dining room men were shuffling in the direction of the serving area. Still no Tumulty. It crossed Cairney’s mind that if he could somehow catch the priest�
��s eye Tumulty might give him a sign, a gesture to reassure him that it was safe to enter.
‘Last week maybe,’ the man was saying. ‘Was you here last week?’
‘Could be.’
The little group was silent now, as if they were weighing information of a vital nature. One of them, a short man with a face mottled by alcohol, eventually said, ‘I had a Rolex one time. Good timepiece.’
Somebody laughed at this, and Cairney smiled. There was a certain incoherence about these men, conversational leaps difficult to follow. The death of synapses, he thought. He moved closer to the threshold of the dining room. The smell of bacon was strong, nauseating. He experienced a familiar tingling in his nervous system. It was what he’d come to think of as the Moment, that point in time when either he committed himself or he stepped back. It was that place where he could choose to pull the trigger or press the detonating device or else abort his plans entirely. He listened to himself, the sound of his blood, the way his heart thumped. His body, in that peculiar vocabulary it had developed, was talking to him.
He quickly scanned the street again. He saw nothing unusual. It occurred to him that if anything had gone wrong, Joe Tumulty would have managed to give him a sign of some kind. In the absence of any warning, what else could he assume except that everything was fine? Like a swimmer cautiously testing water, he put one foot inside the dining room. And then he had momentum going and was moving towards the serving area, picking up a tray, a plate, cutlery, shuffling in line behind the other men. He faced Joe Tumulty, who stood behind trays of simmering food with a large spatula in his hand. There was nothing on the priest’s face, no recognition, no surprise, nothing. Cairney watched two strips of bacon, a slab of toast and a spoonful of scrambled eggs fall on his plate, and then he turned away, carrying his tray in the direction of a table.
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