He was leaning towards the mirror and fluffing his thick hairpiece with a comb when the door swung open behind him. He saw a young man come in. Dark hair, blue suit, well built, unknown to Mulhaney. But with three hundred guests here, how could he know everybody?
‘Good speech,’ the young man said.
Mulhaney smiled. He slapped the young man on the back.
‘We’ve met before,’ Mulhaney said. He had a practised way of pretending to remember everyone, as if names were forever on the tip of his tongue. ‘Aren’t you with the Syracuse contingent?’
The young man shook his head. ‘I don’t think we’ve ever met.’
‘I never forget a face.’ Mulhaney farted very quietly just then, and looked cheerful. ‘Better an empty house than a bad tenant, huh?’
‘Right.’ Cairney turned on the cold water faucet full blast but made no move to dip his hand in the stream.
Mulhaney gazed into the fast-running stream of water a second. He was conscious of the way the young man stared at him in the mirror. What was about the intensity in those hard brown eyes that disturbed Mulhaney just then? He turned away from the young man, which was when he felt a circle of pressure against the base of his spine and the warmth of the man’s breath upon the back of his neck. Glancing into the mirror, Mulhaney saw the gleam of the pistol pressed into his back. Horrified, he heard himself gasp, felt his body slacken. In his entire lifetime it was the first time anyone had ever pulled a gun on him. How did some fucking mugger find his way inside this place?
‘My inside pocket,’ he said. ‘The wallet. Take the whole fucking wallet. There’s probably a couple hundred bucks in it.’
The young man jammed the gun hard against the backbone. ‘I’m looking for more than that, Jock,’ he said.
Pain brought moisture into Mulhaney’s eyes. There was an awful moment here when he felt himself slip into cracks of darkness, saw his own hearse roll through the streets of Brooklyn, heard Father Donovan of All Saints deliver the graveside eulogy in that hollow voice of his – He was a flawed man, but a good one. Even imagined the wake, for Chrissakes, boiled ham and stale sandwiches curling and flat Guinness and drunks babbling over his open coffin.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Mulhaney said. Darkness had become realisation. And realisation brought him a sense of horror. This young man was The One.
‘Linney said you took the cash.’
‘Linney?’
‘Don’t bluff it out with me, Jock. Just point me to the money.’
‘I don’t have it, Linney’s a fucking liar.’
The gun went deeper this time. Mulhaney, catching a glimpse of his face in the mirror, barely recognised himself. His big red face had turned pale like a skinless beet boiled in angry water.
‘Where is it?’ the young man asked.
‘I told you, I don’t know,’ and Mulhaney wondered why nobody was looking for him, why his goons weren’t stalking the goddam corridors for him right now. God knows, they were paid enough to take care of him.
The pressure of the gun was enormous. Mulhaney thought it would bore a hole in his spine. The young man sighed. ‘I’m tired, Jock. And I don’t have a whole lot of time.’
‘I don’t know where the money is, I swear it.’
Cairney thought about bringing the gun up, smacking it against Mulhaney’s head. Something to underline his seriousness. Some token violence. It was tempting, and he felt pressured, but he didn’t do it, didn’t like the idea of it. He just kept the pistol riveted to Mulhaney’s spine and hoped he wouldn’t have to use force.
‘Linney said you took it. Talk to me, Jock. Talk fast. Don’t make me hurt you.’
Mulhaney twisted his head around, looked at the young man. It occurred to him that he could play for time here. Sooner or later somebody was going to come looking for him. He could stall, though the hard light in the man’s eyes suggested that stalling was a precarious business. But he didn’t like the position he was in and he didn’t care for being at someone else’s mercy, and his pride, that cavernous place where he lived his life, was hurt. And he hadn’t scratched his way to the top of the union without having more than his share of sheer Irish pig-headedness.
‘You’re not going to walk out of here,’ he said, and his voice was stronger now. ‘You’re not going to walk away from this, friend. I’ve got a small army out there. I’ve got people who take care of me.’
Cairney rammed the pistol deeper into Mulhaney’s flesh and the big man moaned. ‘I don’t have time for this, Jock. Tell me what I need to know and I’m gone.’
‘Look, Linney’s a liar. Linney wouldn’t know the truth if it hit him in the goddam eyes. He makes shit up all the goddam time. If he sent you here it was to make a fucking idiot out of you.’
Cairney felt the intensity of fluorescent light against the top of his head. ‘Where’s the money?’ There was a note of desperation in the sound of his question. He didn’t like it, didn’t like the way he had begun to sound and feel. He know that at any moment somebody was bound to come inside this room, that his time alone with Mulhaney was very limited.
‘I won’t ask you again, Jock.’
Mulhaney thought he had seen something in the young man’s eyes. A certain indecision. The signs of some inner turmoil. He said, ‘Even if I knew anything, do you honestly think I’d fucking tell you?’
Cairney brought the gun up and smacked it against Mulhaney’s mouth. Blood flowed out of Big Jock’s lips and over the small shamrock he wore in his lapel. The pain Mulhaney felt was more humiliating than insufferable. He lost his balance and went down on his knees. His expensive bridgework, three thousand dollars worth of dental artistry, slid from his mouth and lay cracked on the tiled floor. He reached for it, but Cairney kicked it away, and the pink plate and the gold inlays and the plastic teeth went slithering towards one of the cubicles where it struck the pedestal of a toilet and broke completely apart.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Mulhaney muttered.
Cairney was trembling slightly. He felt sweat under his collar. He shoved the gun against Mulhaney’s forehead and pressed it hard upon the bone. ‘Talk, Mulhaney. And make it fast.’
Mulhaney, whose vanity was as enormous as his pride, covered his empty mouth with his hand. There were streaks of blood between his fingers. He blurted out his words from behind his hand. ‘Kev Dawson. You’re looking for Kevin Dawson. He’s the only one who could have taken it. It couldn’t have been the Old Man.’
‘The Old Man?’
‘He’s been at this game too long to start thieving now,’ Mulhaney said. He was conscious of the pistol on his brow. It was a terrible feeling.
‘Tell me about The Old Man, Jock.’
Mulhaney looked down at his blood on the white-tiled floor. ‘The Old Man had nothing to do with this,’ he said, and his voice sounded funny to him when he spoke. Without his teeth, the inside of his mouth felt like a stranger’s mouth. He’d give this bastard Dawson, but he wasn’t about to give him the Old Man immediately. He’d do it in the end, he’d be a damn fool not to, but meantime he’d hand Dawson over gladly. ‘My bet is Kev took some heat from his big brother. There was pressure. Something like that. It had to be politically too tricky for Tommy. The Old Man couldn’t have had a goddam thing to do with it.’
As Mulhaney spoke, the toilet door swung open and a middleaged man in a black tuxedo stepped inside from the hallway. He wore a frilly pink shirt and matching cummerbund, into which was tucked a pistol. The man was called Keefe and he was one of Mulhaney’s bodyguards, a Union heavy who was paid a hefty fee to protect his boss.
‘Keefe,’ Mulhaney cried out.
Keefe, formerly a bouncer in a Las Vegas nightclub, was a tough man but slow. He reached inside his cummerbund for his gun and even as he did so Cairney, possessed with a feeling of inevitability, with a sense of things sliding away from him in a manner he couldn’t stop, shot Keefe once through the centre of his chest. The sound of the gun roared in the white-tiled, windowless room. Keefe
staggered across the slippery floor, his legs buckling and his hands stretched out in front of him. He collided with a cubicle door and he fell forward against the john. His gun dropped to the floor and slipped across the slick tiles to Mulhaney’s feet. Cairney watched Big Jock’s hand hover above the gun a moment.
‘Don’t,’ Cairney said. ‘Don’t even think about it.’
Jock Mulhaney pulled his hand back to his side. It wasn’t worth it. The young guy would shoot him if he even moved an inch towards Keefe’s weapon. And Jock had no appetite for violent death.
Cairney kicked the gun away. The music had stopped. The whole building had become quiet. The only sound he registered was Mulhaney’s heavy breathing.
Mulhaney said, ‘You got a problem, kid. In about ten seconds three hundred guys are gonna descend on this room.’
Cairney looked at the door. Three hundred guys. The suddenness of silence was unsettling to him. He glanced at Mulhaney, who was still on his knees. Blood ran down from the big man’s mouth.
Cairney opened the toilet door a little way. He stared across the reception room. Drawn by the sound of gunfire, men in tuxedoes were emerging slowly from the banquet room. Cairney bit his lower lip. If he acted now, if he moved promptly, he could get out of this toilet and through the reception area to the street before any of the men could reach him. Provided none of them were armed. He glanced back at Mulhaney, who was staring at him open-mouthed.
‘Get up on your feet, Jock.’
Mulhaney gripped the rim of the washbasin and hauled himself to a standing position.
‘Now move over here,’ Cairney said.
Mulhaney came across the floor.
‘In front of me, Jock. You’re about to be useful.’
Cairney pressed his gun into the small of Mulhaney’s back and pushed the big man through the door, out into the reception area. Men were still coming down the corridor that opened into the reception room.
‘Tell them, Jock. They move and you’re dead. They call the cops and you’re history.’
Mulhaney, whose vanity caused him to hold a hand up against his toothless mouth, mumbled. ‘You hear that, you guys?’
Cairney, moving sideways towards the front doors with Mulhaney as a shield, stared at the faces that watched him. Each one had the slightly imbalanced look of a man wrenched suddenly out of inebriation into sobriety. Their eyes bored into him, and Cairney realised he’d never felt quite this exposed before. It didn’t matter now. It didn’t matter because his anonymity had already been shattered by Frank Pagan. The only important thing was to get out of here in one piece. He felt fragmented, though, as if the whole reason for coming to America had broken and, like smashed glass, lay in shards all about him. He was halfway across the reception room now and none of the watchers had moved and Mulhaney, he knew, wasn’t brave enough to try and break away. He was going to get out of here, but he was leaving empty-handed, and the perception depressed him. Finn had entrusted him with a task and he wasn’t even close to achieving it. Maybe it was luck. Maybe that was it. Maybe he’d been lucky in the past and now that vein had run completely dry. And maybe he wasn’t the man Finn thought he was, that all his achievements in the past had been purely fortunate. Jig, the dancer. Why am I not dancing now? he wondered. He didn’t feel like the man who had assassinated Lord Drumcannon and had blown up Walter Whiteford on a Mayfair street. He didn’t feel daring and carefree and composed and cold-blooded. His past actions seemed like those of some other man.
‘Keep moving, Jock.’ Six feet to the plate-glass doors. The street.
He pressed the gun into Jock’s spine and heard the big man grunt quietly.
‘Only a few more feet, Jock,’ he said.
‘Fuck you,’ Mulhaney said. He was playing to his audience. He was showing that he was still a brave man who could talk back even when the pressure was on. And if he could talk to some fucking hoodlum like this, think how he could ram it home to builders and contractors when he didn’t have a goddam gun in his back!
Cairney reached the doors and knocked them open with his foot. The air in the street was cold and sharp. He wondered how much time he had before the cops arrived. He knew it was inevitable that somebody inside the building had sneaked away into an office to place a quiet call, that pretty soon the street would be filled with patrol cars.
‘Okay,’ Mulhaney said. ‘You’ve made it out of the building. What now?’
Cairney said, ‘We’ve got unfinished business. You were going to tell me about the Old Man, Jock.’
‘I gave you Kev Dawson.’
Cairney shoved the gun into the nape of Mulhaney’s neck. ‘Don’t stall, Jock.’ He looked the length of the dark street in both directions. It was silent now, but it wasn’t going to stay that way for very long. Through the glass doors he was conscious of the men inside. They stood around indecisively, but that was a situation that could change at any moment. They were Irish and they’d been drinking, and they might decide to move into boisterous action, regardless of the fact that Mulhaney had a gun at his head.
‘Hurry,’ Cairney said. And even as he said this he heard footsteps along the sidewalk and turned his face quickly, seeing somebody move in the soft shadows between the parked limousines and the wall of the building. The figure stopped suddenly and dropped to the sidewalk. There was the sound of a gun going off and a flash of light from the place where the man lay and the plateglass doors shattered, showering the air with bright splinters.
Surprised, Cairney moved back, pressing himself against the wall. He was aware of Mulhaney lunging away from him, the glass doors swinging, Big Jock thrusting himself inside the safety of the building. Cairney fired his weapon at the man along the sidewalk and heard the sound of the bullet knock upon the hood of a limousine. He backed away, sliding against the wall and out of the light that fell from the building. He sought darkness, places where he couldn’t be seen. He fired his gun again. This time the shot slashed concrete. The man returned the fire, and the air around Cairney’s head screamed.
Cairney kept moving away. He was about ten feet from the corner of the building and conscious of the need to get the hell out of this place. He saw the figure move now, scampering behind one of the parked limousines. The man’s face passed momentarily under the light that fell from the reception room.
It was Frank Pagan.
Cairney reached the corner of the buildings, where there was a badly lit side street and rows of shuttered little shops. He was seized by the impulse to stay exactly where he was and fight it out with Frank Pagan, as if what he wanted to prove to the Englishman was that he didn’t have to run away as he had done on Canal Street, but how would that have taken him any closer to the money? Priorities, he thought. And Frank Pagan – despite the fact that the man was always just behind him like some kind of dogged spectre – wasn’t top of his list.
He stared a moment at the car behind which Pagan was crouched. Then he turned and sprinted into the darkness of the side street, weaving between parked cars and trashcans, zigzagging under weak streetlamps, like a man following a maze of his own creation. He could hear Pagan coming after him, but the Englishman wasn’t fast enough to close the gap that Cairney was widening with every stride. The echoes of Pagan’s movements grew quieter and quieter until there was no sound at all. When he was absolutely certain he’d lost Pagan, he lay down beneath a railroad bridge and closed his eyes, listening to his own heart rage against his ribs.
Pagan had known about Linney. Then about Mulhaney.
Cairney opened his eyes, staring up into the black underside of the bridge. Was it safe to assume that Pagan also knew about Kevin Dawson?
Cairney sat with his back to the brickwork now. He felt the most curious emptiness he had ever experienced. It drained his heart and created vacuums throughout his mind. He knew he had to get up and make his way back to the place where he’d left his car, but he sat numb and motionless. There was an uncharacteristic need inside him to make contact, a connection wit
h somebody somewhere. He thought he’d call Finn, but he couldn’t see any point in relating failure to the man. He didn’t want Finn to be disappointed in him. And he didn’t want Finn to think he’d sent the wrong man from Ireland. That he’d sent a man who wasn’t equipped for this task. He couldn’t bear the idea of Finn thinking badly of him.
He shut his eyes again. The face that floated up through his mind, and a warped, pellucid image like something refracted in shallow water, was Celestine’s.
Frank Pagan went back in the direction of the union building. He was breathless, and his whole body, jarred by the effort of running, was a mass of disconnected pulses. Jig’s speed hadn’t surprised him. He’d seen Jig in action before. But this time it was the manner of the man’s disappearance that impressed him. It was almost as if Jig had vaporised down one of the narrow streets. Stepped out of this dimension and into another one. For a time, Pagan had managed to keep the man in his sight, but with every corner Jig turned Pagan realised that his hope of catching up was dwindling. Then, finally, somewhere between a canal and weedy old railroad track, Jig had disappeared in the blackness, with the deftness of a rodent.
Goddam. Pagan resented the idea that Jig was swifter than he, more agile, more attuned to the hiding-places offered by the night. He envied Jig’s affinity for invisibility. Now he had the feeling that even if he were to seal off the surrounding twenty blocks, he still wouldn’t find the man. Goddam again. These close encounters only frustrated him. What also bothered him, even if he didn’t like to admit it, was the insurmountable fact that Jig must have at least ten years on him, that his own youth had long ago begun to recede, and time – the dreaded erosion of clocks – was making impatient claims on his body.
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