‘A fine purchase,’ Rasch said. ‘Very fine. Is no problem to bring them to United States?’
‘There were visa considerations,’ Linney answered.
‘Paperwork.’ Rasch looked as if he understood the labyrinthine requirements of bureaucracy.
‘Which one do you favour?’ Linney asked.
The East German strolled around the girls, nodding his head. This was precisely what he had come to Nicholas Linney’s home for, the satisfaction of appetites that went undernourished in East Berlin, where he had a wife who resembled a Sumo wrestler. He weighed a delicate breast in his hand, fingered a fine hip, patted a lean buttock. The girls didn’t move. They were accustomed to being assessed by Linney’s associates, men of Western culture who regarded them like oxen.
Rasch turned to Linney with a grin on his face. ‘Such pretty little birds,’ he said. ‘I like them both.’
Patchogue, Long Island
‘It’s not Jig’s style,’ Frank Pagan said. ‘For one thing, he never claims he’s made a kill on behalf of the Irish Republican Army. He never says anything like that. If he had reason to kill somebody in Albany, why would he change his usual message?’
Zuboric, sitting in the passenger seat of Pagan’s Cadillac, had his hands clenched tensely in his lap because he didn’t like Pagan’s idea of driving, which was to occupy the fast lane at around ninety-five miles an hour and keep a leaden foot on the gas-pedal, ignoring anything in his way. Pagan was a fast man on the horn, thrusting his palm down and holding it there until the driver in front switched lanes.
‘If it wasn’t Jig, who was it?’ Zuboric asked.
Pagan shrugged. He had the alarming habit of not looking where he was going. He forced the Cadillac up to a shaky eighty-five and turned his face to Zuboric. ‘I don’t have an answer to that. None of it makes sense. I can’t imagine some local IRA cell in Albany doing anything like this. I can’t even imagine the existence of a cell in Albany. Christ, what would they do anyway in the middle of New York State? Hold jumble sales to raise funds for weapons? Coconut shies? Sell little flags you can stick in your lapel?’
‘Watch the road, Frank,’ Zuboric said.
Pagan banged his horn again, and the car in front, a canary-yellow Corvette, moved into the slow lane. ‘Another thing that bothers me is the connection. An old FUV man turns up dead in Albany at the same time as Ivor McInnes is here in New York.’
They don’t have to be connected,’ Zuboric said. He favoured the Jig hypothesis plain and simple. It was the only logical one and besides he was tired of bird-dogging Pagan. How sweet it would be to have a quick wrap on this whole business and be rid of Frank fucking Pagan once and for all. Then he could go back to the tangled affair that was his own life. A topless bar, for Chrissakes. Shaking her wonderful tits for all and sundry to see. Drooling men with hard-ons under their overcoats. Zuboric couldn’t take any of this. He had to get Charity away from that life.
‘Maybe not,’ Pagan answered.
‘Jig had time to kill a man in Albany and then get to New York.’
‘He had time, certainly,’ Pagan said. ‘I don’t know why he’d want to kill Fitzjohn, though.’
‘Consider this.’ Zuboric opened his eyes. ‘Jig finds out this character Fitzjohn had something to do with the missing money. Fitzjohn won’t tell him anything. Jig kills him.’
Pagan was unconvinced. ‘Why kill somebody who might have information you want? What sense does that make? If Fitzjohn knew something, Jig wouldn’t kill him. He’d try everything he could to get the information out of the man, but he wouldn’t kill him. That would be a sheer waste of resources.’ Pagan rubbed his eyes, taking both hands off the wheel to do so. Zuboric sat straight forward in his seat like a drowning man looking for something to clutch.
‘Frank, for Chrissakes.’
Pagan returned his hands to the wheel. ‘It just doesn’t add up. Jig came back to St. Finbar’s for two reasons. One was guns. The other was a name. And Tumulty only knew one name. Nicholas Linney. He said he’d never heard of Fitzjohn, so he couldn’t tell Jig that one.’
‘Maybe Jig brought the name with him from Ireland,’ Zuboric said. He felt weary. It seemed to him that the whole Irish situation, at least so far as it had been imported into the United States, was too complex to contemplate. Complicated allegiances, obscure motivations. He understood it was best to keep it all simple in his mind. It was Catholic against Protestant, basically. Any side issues, any sudden tributaries, were not worth exploring if you wanted to retain your sanity, a possession Frank Pagan had almost relinquished.
‘If he knew of Fitzjohn before he left Ireland, why would he go to all the trouble of getting a name from Tumulty? He understood the risks involved in going to Canal Street. Why take those risks if he already had a lead to the missing money? And if he did have a lead, why kill it?’ Pagan peered into the rearview mirror. He changed lanes abruptly, overtook a large Mayflower van, then swung back out into the fast lane and gave the big Caddie more gas.
Zuboric had an image of the Cadillac, and all who sailed in her, crashing off the highway and plummeting down an embankment. A fiery death. This whole trip across Long Island wouldn’t have been necessary if Pagan had used his gun on Jig the first time round, a perception that made Zuboric resentful.
‘Maybe we’re going to Bridgehampton for nothing.’
Pagan didn’t think so. He had the feeling that poor Joe Tumulty, faced with premature eviction from St. Finbar’s and the end of all his humanitarian labours, had finally been truthful. And if it hadn’t been for Artie Zuboric blurting out Jig’s name at that first meeting with Tumulty, if Pagan had been given the chance to take slower steps, more circumspect ones, the chance to run things his own way, then Tumulty would have been less defensive and more easily caught unawares. And perhaps Jig would have been simpler to snare. Hindsight, blessed hindsight, Pagan thought. It was an overrated quality.
‘We’ll find out soon enough,’ he said.
‘What if Jig’s already been there?’ Zuboric asked.
‘That’s something else we’ll find out,’ Pagan replied.
He pressed the gas pedal to the floor, rolled his window down, turned on the radio just as the town of Patchogue slipped past on the edge of Highway 27, and heard the sound of Freddie Common singing Palisades Park, an anthem from an innocent time.
Roscommon, New York
Celestine Cairney listened to her husband’s music drift out through the open door of his library. It seemed more melancholy than usual this morning. It fitted Harry’s mood, certainly. Ever since he’d learned that his son had gone abruptly in the middle of the night he’d retreated behind the wall of his music, his silence chilly and his face pale and haunted. Patrick’s manner of departure had disappointed him. No farewell. No final hug. No promises to keep in touch.
She stood on the threshold of the room, looking across the floor at her husband. He sat in a large wing-back chair beside the fireplace, unaware of her. He appeared very frail, his skinny white hands clasped in his lap, his eyes closed under white lids, his head moving very slightly in time to the music. She didn’t have the heart to talk with him. She had no way of explaining Patrick’s departure to him, even if she’d wanted to.
She went down the long flight of stairs to the hallway below. Inside the sitting room she stood at the window and looked out over the expanse of land that sloped down to the shore of the lake. She twisted her fingers together. When she tried to remember her visit to Patrick Cairney’s bedroom her memories were evasive. The taste of the man, the way he felt – these things came back to her with a clarity. But there was something else that eluded her. What did she want to call it? His essence? His private self? Perhaps it was the simple mystery of the unattainable, longing for the thing you can never have.
No. It had nothing to do with the ache of remembered desire or the way it clawed at her heart or the fact that Patrick Cairney was her husband’s son.
It was another kind of
mystery altogether, concrete and tangible.
She pressed her cheek against the cold glass. Outside, the early morning sun had a faint mist hanging around it. A veil. Like the veil Patrick Cairney drew over himself.
She turned away from the window. Her hand went out to the telephone and lingered over it. The obvious place to begin was with the archaeological departments of universities, but today was Saturday and those offices would be shut. It would have to wait, she thought. She sat down, struggling with her impatience and the sense of excitement she suddenly felt. She knew she was on to something, but precisely what she couldn’t quite say. It was almost as if Patrick Cairney were a book she had somehow opened in the middle at a suspenseful part, a tease that would compel her to read to the end where everything enigmatic would be clarified in one stunning revelation.
Harry came inside the room, moving slowly. Celestine took his hand and held it against her breasts.
‘I can’t understand it,’ he said. ‘Why did he leave like that?’
Celestine didn’t speak.
Cairney inclined his head so that it touched his wife’s shoulder. ‘Did he strike you as being unhappy about something? Did I say something to upset him?’
She shook her head and said no, he hadn’t.
‘There’s something restless about that boy,’ Cairney said. ‘There’s always been this restless centre to him. It’s like he’s never fully at ease anywhere.’
‘I can’t imagine why,’ Celestine replied.
Harry Cairney, who felt very old this morning, closed his eyes. His sense of unhappiness was strong, like a blade in his chest. He’d been looking forward to spending the morning with his son, talking of his favourite subject, Ireland, reminiscing, reliving a past that was going to die when he did. He’d awakened that morning with old memories vitally refreshed, things he wanted to tell Patrick, sights and sounds he wanted to convey to the boy – the clattering old trams that used to run all over the city with their Amstel Lager Beer and Bovril and Neaves Food signs, along the North Circular Road and Rathmines Road and Sackville Street out to Phoenix Park (although he couldn’t remember the exact routes now, as if the geography of his beloved Dublin had collapsed in his memory), the smells of loose tea in Sheridan’s on North Earl Street, how he’d bought his first real pair of shoes at the Popular Boot Emporium on South Great George’s Street, and Croke Park where on March 14, 1921, the British had surrounded a crowd of ten thousand at a football game and opened fire, volley after volley, wounding and killing the blameless. Fourteen dead. Fifty-seven injured. His memory had become all at once a crowded place, but what goddam good were memories when you didn’t have your boy to share them with? Patrick would have been interested in hearing these things. He was always interested in his father’s recollections. He loved Ireland just as the old man did.
Celestine put her arms around Harry and drew him against her body. ‘I’m sure he’ll call,’ she said.
She stroked the side of his face very deliberately, almost as if she were seeking resemblances between the old man to whom she was married and the young man who had left her, in the dead of night, with enigmas.
‘Love me,’ Harry Cairney said.
‘Here? Now?’
‘Here and now.’
She put her hand between the folds of his robe, cupping his testicles in her palm. His skin was cold. She worked her fingers over the shaft of his penis, which was infirm and soft until she began to stroke it energetically. She listened to the low sound he made as he grew excited – a quiet moaning, a whispering of words she could never quite catch. His breath quickened and there was rasping from his tired lungs.
She parted his robe and went down on her knees. Looking upwards once at the whiteness of his body, the sagging pectoral muscles, the folds of his neck, she shut her eyes and transported herself to an imagined place and time, where she knelt, exactly as she was doing now, at the feet of another man, whose body was Patrick Cairney’s.
18
Bridgehampton, Long Island
Patrick Cairney parked his car on Ocean Road at the edge of Bridgehampton. Like the other small resorts in the area known as The Hamptons, Bridgehampton had the feel of a place abandoned for the winter. Empty cafés, closed bars, gulls squabbling in a forlornly quarrelsome way in the cloudy sky over the beach. The man known as Nicholas Linney lived in this village. Earlier, in Southampton, Cairney had consulted a local telephone directory and learned that Linney lived at a number 19 Wood Lane. When he’d been inside the phone booth, he’d experienced an urge to call Finn, just to pick up the telephone and make the transatlantic connection and hear Finn’s voice. He’d let his fingertips linger on the black receiver. He had nothing to report to Finn yet.
Wood Lane, a private estate of the kind that suggested wealthy inhabitants and the likelihood of a private security patrol, was a narrow thoroughfare running at a right angle from Ocean Road. In summer, the lane would have been leafy and dense and green, but now the trees were barren, affording him absolutely no cover. He left his car on Ocean Road, the canvas bag locked inside the trunk.
He began to walk. He felt conspicuous even though he understood that many of the houses on the lane, hidden behind shrubbery and walls, had been vacated for the winter. Once, he heard the sound of a child shouting, followed by the noise of a ball bouncing against stone. After that, nothing.
He had no idea of what he was going to do when he found number 19. A great deal depended on the attitude of Nicholas Linney, which was an unpredictable factor. In an ideal world, Linney would be a reasonable man who would discuss the problem of the money calmly, rationally. In this same world Nicholas Linney would know precisely what had happened to the Connie’s cargo and he’d tell Cairney at once. But Finn had talked of the need for caution. Expect them to lie to you. Expect outright animosity towards you.
Take them off guard, if you can.
When he reached number 19 he kept moving, noticing a wrought-iron fence and, some distance beyond, a one-storey house surrounded by sycamores. There were three vehicles parked in the driveway. A Mercedes, a BMW, and a Land Rover painted in camouflage. He came to the place where the iron fence ended, and he stopped. A house built on one level was good because it meant he didn’t have to worry about anybody concealed in upstairs rooms. A small bonus. The cars suggested two things. Either Nicholas Linney collected foreign autos or else he had a visitor.
What Cairney wished for right then was the obscurity of night, darkness. His best plan was to wait for nightfall and hope that Nicholas Linney would emerge alone from the house at some point. But he couldn’t afford to wait. It was really that simple. He couldn’t afford the luxury of time because he had absolutely no way of knowing what Joe Tumulty might have told Pagan. If the priest had pointed Pagan in this direction, then time was truly of the essence. He might be trapped inside an hourglass and slipping with the sands.
He studied the fence. He considered a direct approach, straight up to the front door like a Jehovah’s Witness or a man from the Fuller Brush Company, but he decided against that. It came back again to the fact he couldn’t predict anything in this situation. Linney might be reasonable. Or he might not be. Stealth was the most prudent approach to the house. And if he was going to climb this fence he’d have to do it at the corner where a small stand of pine trees would conceal him from the windows of the place.
The fence was easy. He hauled himself up, dropped quickly down on the other side. As he stood under the pines he was conscious of music issuing from the house. There was a harsh sound of a man laughing. The music stopped. The house was silent again.
It was perhaps fifty feet from the pines to the side of the house where an empty terrace overlooked a concrete tennis-court. For that distance he would have no cover. A man stepped out of the house and moved on to the terrace, where he sat down at a table and propped his feet up and poured himself a drink. Cairney, seeking invisibility, pressed himself against the trunk of a tree. He had the thought that if this were
some other situation, the kind he was used to, the kind where it was a matter of bringing down a particular target you fixed through the scope of a rifle, then he wouldn’t feel this uncertain. The man on the terrace, for example. How simple it would have been, in other circumstances, to shoot him. But even if he had been armed, Finn hadn’t given him a mandate for violence.
Now there was more laughter from the house. A girl’s laugh this time, high-pitched. False and polite. Cairney stood very still. Then, tensing his body, he moved out from under his cover and headed in the direction of the front door, passing the parked cars quickly.
He reached out and turned the door handle. The door wasn’t locked. He opened it an inch, two inches, seeing a square of hallway beyond. He stepped into the house, closed the door softly, then stood very still in the centre of the hall, listening, concentrating, wondering about the next step. Other doors, each of them closed, faced him. Which one to try?
Then, suddenly, one of the doors opened and a beautiful oriental girl stood there wrapped in a large white towel, her black hair hanging on her shoulders and her dark eyes wide with surprise.
Cairney stared at her. The girl must have assumed he was a guest in the house because she did something that amazed him then. She let the towel slip from her body, stepped over it and, with her arms held out, came towards him. Cairney reached for her wrist, twisted it, swung her around so that she had her back to him, then held her tightly against him like a shield. The girl’s reaction surprised him. She giggled, almost as if force were a regular occurrence in her life. She expected men to treat her this way. He clamped his hand across her lips.
‘Linney,’ he said. ‘Show me where Linney is.’
The girl made a small sound into Cairney’s palm. He could feel her wet lips, her teeth, the tiny tip of her tongue. She moved forward. Cairney kept his hold on her, following her towards the doorway from which she’d emerged. There was a large bedroom beyond.
A plump man, who wasn’t the one Cairney had seen on the terrace, lay naked on the bed while another girl, remarkably similar to the one Cairney grasped, attended to his needs. She had her face buried deep in the man’s groin. The man sat upright quickly, staring at Cairney with an expression of stunned vulnerability. He shoved the girl away from himself and he grabbed the bedsheet, hauling it quickly up over his body.
Jig Page 32