Pagan reached quickly for the paper. It was covered in Zuboric’s scrawl. He must have taken it all down very quickly over the telephone. ‘It doesn’t add up. It doesn’t make any sense at all. Even if it was some old score being settled, since when has the IRA started to make hits overseas? The Libyans, yes. The Bulgarians, sometimes. But I’ve never heard of the IRA playing that kind of long-distance game.’
‘Maybe there’s a local cell,’ Zuboric said.
‘Maybe.’
Pagan handed the paper back. Zuboric said, ‘There’s another possibility.’
‘Which is?’
‘It could have been Jig.’
Pagan opened his mouth to reply when he heard the sound of Joseph Tumulty banging on the locked door of his room.
Patrick Cairney drove his rented Dodge through the streets of Lower Manhattan. Dressed still in the clothes he’d worn at St. Finbar’s, he realised he’d have to change into something more in keeping with the brand-new vehicle he was driving. When he came to Battery Park he found a secluded place where he could change without being seen. Even when he’d discarded the dirty old clothes and dumped them in a trash container, he felt unclean.
He took out the piece of paper Joe Tumulty had given him. He read it quickly, memorised it, tore the sheet into thin ribbons and tossed them into the wind which ferried them carelessly down towards the river. The name, he thought. It was all he had. No guns. Nothing but the name. What was he supposed to do without a weapon?
As he looked out over Battery Park, he was conscious of the great expanse of the Atlantic beyond Gowanus Bay and The Narrows, and it occurred to him that the tide that rimmed the shores of Staten Island was the same that eventually found its way back to Dingle and Castletown, Galway and Donegal. He listened a moment to the squealing of gulls in the distance, and he wondered about this upsurge of longing that filled him. He’d been in Ireland too long, he thought. It had rubbed off on him, the sentimentality, the emigrant’s yearning.
He didn’t move for a time. His body still shook from the recent effort on the roof-tops of Canal Street. It was the first time in his life he’d ever come close to capture, and he didn’t like the feeling. He’d evaded Frank Pagan in the end, but it was a situation he should never have encountered in the first place. He blamed Tumulty. It should have been possible for Tumulty to warn him not to come inside that bloody soup kitchen. It ought to have been possible for the priest to get some kind of sign to him before he’d taken that first fateful step into the place. But Joe Tumulty, who must have been playing both ends against the middle, had behaved like the deplorable amateur he really was. Why the fuck had Finn put a man like Tumulty in America anyway? Bad judgment on Finn’s part? Or was Tumulty just rusted from inactivity? Cairney, who couldn’t believe that Finn would ever show careless judgment, had no answers to these questions. But he knew one thing for sure – the worst outcome of the whole thing was that Frank Pagan now knew what Jig looked like and the exposure worried Cairney. Suddenly Jig had a face. He had features. Characteristics. He was no longer just a name. His anonymity was gone.
Goddam. Patrick Cairney shut his eyes and let the breeze blow against his skin. For a second he considered aborting the whole thing right then and going back to Ireland and Finn. He thought about telling Finn that his cover, so laboriously assembled and protected, had been shattered. The game could no longer be played by the same rules. What would Finn say? Would Finn simply retire Jig? Put him out to pasture? Patrick Cairney loathed that prospect. He couldn’t stand the idea of Finn patting him on the shoulder and saying that he’d had a good innings but now it was time to close up shop. He’d get the goddam money back! He’d get it back and to hell with the fact that he’d been seen and was now neatly stored in Frank Pagan’s memory. He opened his eyes and took several deep breaths. He realised then that he needed control over his thoughts as much as his actions. What had he been thinking about, for Christ’s sake? Defeat? Retirement? He smiled these notions away. He’d complete the task he’d been sent all this way to do, and nothing, nothing was going to stop him.
He walked back to his car, jammed the key in the ignition and drove away from the park. He went back down through the streets of Lower Manhattan, heading for the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. He was acutely aware of time pressing down on him now. What if Joe Tumulty had given the name to Frank Pagan as well? Inside the tunnel, as if enclosed spaces troubled him, he felt apprehensive. It was the lack of a blueprint that unnerved him, the absence of a concrete plan that concerned him. It was also the realisation that he had no way of knowing what this Nicholas Linney was like and how he was going to receive a caller who had some hard questions to ask and who wanted quick truthful answers.
He was going in blind.
And he didn’t like that idea at all, because every success he’d had in the past had come about as a result of good planning, the kind of planning you did with your eyes wide open and your vision uncluttered.
Bridgehampton, Long Island
Nicholas Linney lobbed the tennis ball over the net to where the plump East German, absurd in white shorts and Nike sneakers and a baggy white shirt, lunged with his racket and missed. It was the East German’s habit to stamp his feet petulantly on the concrete court every time he missed an easy return. Linney, playing at halfthrottle, was bored. But it was necessary every so often, for purely commercial purposes, to entertain these yahoos from behind The Iron Curtain.
‘I think I call quits,’ the East German said.
‘Fine,’ Linney answered.
He walked off the court back towards the house. The East German, Gustav Rasch, came flopping alongside him, his mammaries bouncing up and down.
‘I am perhaps too old a little,’ Rasch said, breathing very hard.
‘You’re not old,’ Linney lied. ‘A little out of shape, maybe.’
Linney stepped on to the terrace. The house he owned in Bridgehampton had cost him 2.7 million dollars three years ago. It was a sprawling structure, the result of various owners adding whimsies of their own to the original dwelling – a greenhouse, a glass-walled breakfast room, servant quarters at the rear. Linney sprawled in a deck-chair. The East German, who had heard that Nicholas Linney’s hospitality was always exciting, plopped into a chaise-longue.
Linney offered him a drink. Grapefruit juice and Tanqueray gin spiked with chopped mint leaves. The breakfast speciality of the house. For quite some time neither man spoke. Linney lit a cigarette and looked across the tennis court. Dead leaves, scraps from last fall, blew in little pockets of air stirred up by the wind.
‘Is a nice house,’ Rasch said.
‘Thank you.’ Linney filled two glasses from a flask, passing one to the East German, who drank as if his life were running out.
Linney put his glass down. Rasch had already finished his drink and was helping himself to another.
‘Now,’ Rasch said, and licked his thick lips. ‘Is important we talk money.’
Linney wanted to talk money, but only on his own terms, and only after Rasch had sampled the pleasures of the house. ‘Later,’ he said. ‘If you’re agreeable, that is.’
Rasch crossed his arms on his large chest. He was still smiling. ‘Perhaps we touch on subject briefly now. Then later more?’
‘Very well,’ Linney said.
‘My people are unhappy,’ Rasch remarked.
‘So are mine.’
‘Of course. We are all unhappy. My people see their money go on board a ship and then zoom, no more money. Swallowed up by the sea, no?’
Linney sipped his drink. He had invited Rasch out here to Bridgehampton for the sole purpose of exploring further fund-raising opportunities. It looked, as he’d told Harry Cairney at Roscommon, very bleak. The East Germans and their Soviet overlords could be very tight when it came to disbursing money.
‘There are some of us who do not like this kind of investment,’ Rasch went on. ‘Is money wasted, they say. Bad policy to throw money into Ireland. What is Ireland, the
y ask, but a wart in the Irish Sea? Now, these people are very very happy because they can …’ Rasch faltered.
‘Gloat?’ Linney suggested.
‘Indeed.’ Rasch put his empty glass down. They gloat. ‘They say security is bad and Ireland is unworthy of money anyway and why spend more?’
Linney made a little gesture with his hand. This business about the missing money nagged at him. He’d always enjoyed a good working relationship with his contributors but now, because one of the Fund-raisers had committed an act of treachery, all that was threatened. So far as Linney was concerned, the most likely candidate was Mulhaney. But in the absence of any hard evidence, what could he do about his suspicions? Big Jock was devious and greedy and he’d been plundering Teamster funds in the North-East for years. Linney would have liked to get Big Jock in some white-tiled, soundproofed cellar and hammer the fucking truth out of him.
Something else crossed his mind now. It was the two M-16A2s he had inside the house. It was no major deal, but about six months ago he’d come into possession of the two automatic rifles as well as a half dozen Fabrique Nationale assault rifles, those lovely Belgian babies, from a gun dealer he’d met at a survivalist training-camp in the Poconos. The dealer, who was the kind of man Linney ran into at these camps, where quiet machismo and boastful innuendo were the common currency of conversation, claimed he had a shipment of a hundred guns he was interested in selling to any interested party, if such a thing could be arranged. Linney, with more bravado than prudence, had allowed – with a small show of self-importance – that he was at least in the position of exploring the possibility of sending the guns to a buyer he knew in Ireland. He offered to transport the two automatic rifles and the six FN weapons as samples and if there was interest he’d get back to the dealer. All this was discussed discreetly, and it had intrigued Linney enormously to be involved in the clandestine business of running guns.
He’d taken the weapons, and sent the FN rifles to the address of an acquaintance in Cork, but he’d kept the M-16A2s for himself because they were prized weapons and difficult to acquire. Linney had paid cash for all the guns and hadn’t heard from the gun merchant again. Nor had he been surprised, because those kinds of deals fell through more frequently than they ever came to fruition. But the thing that worried him slightly now was the possibility of this business coming to light. He hadn’t done anything dishonest. He’d simply kept the guns he wanted for himself and sent the rest. And he hadn’t screwed the Irish out of any money to do so, which was something he’d never dream of doing. But they were a sensitive, touchy crew in the old country, and if they heard that two precious samples of the M-16A2 had been diverted, they could quite possibly be upset. When it came to The Cause, the people in Ireland hated the idea of anybody fucking with it. And Linney’s decision to keep the two guns could be interpreted as interference. It wasn’t much – but it bothered Linney. What if they’d heard over in Ireland about the two samples they never received? What if, in the murky world of gun-dealing, information had come up? What if the gun-dealer asked some Irish acquaintance By the way, what did you think of the M-16A2s?
It wasn’t likely. But Nicholas Linney’s mind had a twist that often exaggerated possibilities. He had the thought that if they found out about the two guns, they could leap to the conclusion that Linney wasn’t altogether loyal – and that could perhaps lead to more stinging accusations. Such as the hijacking of a small ship. The idea of being falsely accused filled him with a certain little jolt of excitement. It wasn’t going to happen that way, of course, but the possibility was enough to increase the voltage of his adrenalin.
‘More contributions are conditional,’ Rasch was saying. He beamed as if he were pleased with his mastery of English. ‘One, your security measures in the future we must approve.’
‘In triplicate?’ Linney asked.
Rasch didn’t know the word so he ignored it. ‘And two, no more money will be donated until you have catched the criminals and they are very punished.’
Nicholas Linney pulled a sliver of mint leaf from his glass and rolled it between his hands. How could security plans be submitted to some fucking committee in East Berlin? Apart from the fact that such a process would take forever, Linney realised that with so many people involved agreements could never be reached. The whole business of raising money would become bogged down in forms, those fucking forms of which the East Europeans were so fond and which seemed to Linney the paper foundation on which all Communism was built. If the Arab patrons were going to be as difficult as the East Europeans, you could practically kiss everything off. Linney sniffed mint on the palms of his hands. He was suddenly very impatient and restless and more than a little annoyed by the way things were turning out.
Rasch settled back in the chaise-longue. ‘I must know if you are soon catching the pirates. Is expected of me.’
‘That’s a police matter, Gustav.’ Even as he said this Linney knew that no American agency, neither the FBI nor the cops nor the Coast Guard, gave a flying fuck about a ship with Liberian registry and an Irish crew that had been attacked in international waters.
‘No,’ Rasch said. ‘Is a matter of your own house being in order, Nicholas.’
Linney said nothing. He was thinking of the two M-16A2s he had in his study.
Your own house in order, he thought.
He looked down over the tennis-court at the willow trees that marked his property line. There was an iron fence beyond the trees. It wasn’t going to keep anyone out who was determined to get in, such as this Irishman old Harry had mentioned. Let him show his face around here, Linney thought. Let him try. He had enough weapons stashed inside the house to keep a goddam army at bay for days. And for quite some time now, in fact ever since he’d been rejected by the draft board for Vietnam because of fallen arches, he’d been frustrated by the fact that all he ever got to shoot were watermelons and cantaloupes and plastic bottles filled with water. It was time to ponder a different kind of target.
The Irishman. Linney had spent some time trying to imagine the guy’s state of mind. He’d reached the conclusion that the Irishman was going to treat each one of the Fund-raisers as a suspect. He wasn’t going to come off like some tightly-wrapped detective with a few penetrating questions to ask and leave it at that. No, this fucker was going to be hard and menacing, which was a prospect Nicholas Linney enjoyed. Besides, Linney didn’t put a whole lot of faith in the value of the Fundraisers’ anonymity. Secrecy always had a weakness in it somewhere. And the weakness here was the priest, Joseph Tumulty, who was the liaison between the Americans and the IRA. Sometimes Linney got the impression that Tumulty knew a little more than he ever said. He’d always meant to get rid of Tumulty and strengthen that weak link in the chain, but he’d never quite done it – and he knew why. It was simply that he liked the vulnerability in the chain because it gave everything a delicious edge, a little tinge of danger in the otherwise mundane chore of delivering large sums of cash. He enjoyed that. It provided spice during the cold nights when you were skulking around Maine with briefcases stuffed with dough.
Nicholas Linney finished his drink. This Irishman is going to suspect everybody, he thought. Including me. Let him come here. Let him show his face.
He turned to Rasch and smiled. ‘Let’s go indoors,’ he said. ‘We can talk about all this later.’
Rasch stood up hastily. ‘I have been waiting.’
Linney draped an arm loosely around Rasch’s shoulder as they moved across the terrace. Sliding glass doors opened into a lounge the length of the house. It was furnished in pastels, the minimalist look, lean chairs and low-slung coffee tables and a couple of sparse paintings of the Anaemic School. Linney liked understatement. He had no taste for the brash. He liked clean lines and crisp angles. Even in his politics he favoured simple alignments and economy. His activities on behalf of the Fund-raisers, for example, served two purposes at once. They satisfied his Irishness, handed down to him from his father, Brigadier Mad Jack
Linney of the IRA, a dashing figure with a black eye-patch who had been shot to death in Belfast in October 1955, and they created useful bonds with the Arabs and the East Europeans which helped in his other commercial enterprises. He often steered foreign capital into foundering Western businesses threatened by either bankruptcy or takeover. It was amazing sometimes to Linney how much Eastern European money had been used to help pump new blood into the arteries of capitalism.
Passing a large salt-water fishtank in which a variety of exotic species flickered back and forth, Linney walked across the floor to a door on the other side of the room. It opened into a very large bedroom. Two girls, neither of whom was more than fifteen, sat listening to rock music. They were easily corrupted, Linney thought. When he first brought them to this country, they had been shy and retiring, delicate little things who understood nothing about Western ways. Now Linney wondered how long he could keep them before they wanted their freedom, a Western concept that, like rock music and whirlpool baths and TV, they’d grasped all too quickly.
Linney indicated for them to come out into the lounge. They wore simple pastel dresses, so that they were coordinated with the room they entered. Their hair, shiny and black and long, lay in an uncluttered way over their shoulders, exactly as Linney liked it. Each girl was long-legged and lithe and small-breasted. When they smiled they did so in a shy manner, turning their dark brown eyes down. They were beautiful and still acquiescent in a way one rarely found among Western girls these days.
‘Ah,’ Rasch said. ‘Supreme.’
‘I’m glad you approve,’ Linney said.
‘Will they undress?’ Rasch asked.
The girls took off their dresses and stood in white underwear that made their skin seem starkly ochre.
‘They have names?’ Rasch asked.
Linney shrugged. ‘I call them Dancer and Prancer.’
‘Pardon?’ Rasch said.
‘Not their real names. I bought them in Phnom Penh.’
Jig Page 31