Jig

by Campbell Armstrong

  Some people made it out through the madness and the panic to the lawn in front of the church where they saw that the steeple was one ragged mass of blue flame whipped by breeze and spreading in a series of fiery licks across the entire roof. Others, trapped and suffocated inside, barely heard the final explosion as the oil-tank went up because the world of fire had become a silent place for them, all noise sucked out by a vacuum of intense heat, a scorched epicentre where no sound penetrated, no air stirred, the vast parched heart of destruction.

  Stamford, Connecticut

  Seamus Houlihan dialled a telephone number in New York City from a phonebooth beside an industrial park in Stamford. It was eight thirty on a sunlit Sunday morning. As he listened to the sound of the phone ringing, he looked across the street at John Waddell, who sat in the driver’s seat of the yellow rental truck. The truck had begun to bother Houlihan. It was too big, too conspicuous. They’d have to ditch it soon. McInnes had said he wanted them to dump the truck after Connecticut, but Houlihan thought it might be a damn good thing to be rid of it right now, before the next stage. Maybe he’d steal a smaller vehicle, though it would need to have a large trunk to keep the weapons in.

  He winked at Waddell, who looked white. A stolen vehicle was a fucking risk, that was the snag. People actively looked for them. Their numbers and descriptions were put on lists. Cops, who wouldn’t blink at a rented truck, would be on your arse quick enough if they spotted you in a stolen car.

  It was all right for McInnes, Houlihan thought. He sat in his fancy hotel and called all the shots. He wasn’t out here getting himself grubby, doing the deeds, working. McInnes was terrific at organisation, Houlihan had to admit that much, but the man was always at one remove from the centre of it all, the place where things really happened. And he was always getting his name in the papers, always basking in publicity, another thing Houlihan resented.

  Over the phone, Houlihan listened to the ringing tones and wondered if anybody was ever going to answer. Thinking of McInnes irritated him. He hadn’t felt good about McInnes ever since the man had scolded him for the action in Albany. Stick to the blueprint, Seamus. Be a good boy, Seamus. Keep your nose clean, Seamus. Yessir and up yours.

  What McInnes resembled at times was one of those figures of authority from Houlihan’s past. A judge. A cop. A screw. A counsellor. All the fuckers who either sent you to jail or spoke softly to you about taking your place in society. They had you coming and going, those characters did. McInnes couldn’t stand the idea of anyone else showing some initiative, some imagination. That’s what it all boiled down to. McInnes didn’t like the idea of Seamus Houlihan doing something on his own.

  Fuck him, Houlihan thought. McInnes thinks he knows it all.

  The phone was finally answered.

  A man said, ‘Federal Bureau of Investigation. Please hold.’

  ‘I won’t hold,’ Houlihan said.

  ‘Sorry, sir. I have to ask you to wait.’

  ‘I’ve waited long enough, shithead.’

  ‘Sir –’

  ‘Listen close. You’ll hear this only once.’ And here Seamus paused, enjoying himself. He winked at wee Waddy again and smiled.

  20

  New York City

  Patrick Cairney woke in a hotel on Eighth Avenue. It was called The Hotel Glasgow, a peeling old crone of a place with murky hallways and dampness. When he checked his watch he saw that it was almost eight thirty in the morning, and a frigid New York spring sun was streaming through the brown window blind. He’d come to this place very late last night, after Brooklyn, and fallen asleep immediately on the narrow bed, a long sleep filled towards its end with a dream.

  He’d dreamed he was back in the Libyan desert where he was trying to dismantle and clean an automatic rifle. An odd weapon Cairney had never seen before. It was composed of parts that didn’t fit. Once you had the gun stripped down, you couldn’t put it back together again no matter how much you pushed and manoeuvred and tried to force things. The damn gun, a trick weapon, wouldn’t be reassembled. It was a distressing dream, panicky, inexact, one of those insanely catered affairs of the unconscious when streams of incongruous people gatecrash.

  Celestine had been in there somewhere towards the end. She’d picked up the befuddling gun, and with three or four quick movements of her hands she had the whole thing snapped back together again. There, she kept saying to him. There, there, there. What the hell was she doing in his dream anyhow?

  Cairney got out of the hard little bed. He dismissed dreams as messages from nowhere, sediment stirred by the uncontrolled brain. He didn’t see in dreams the things soothsayers did, prophecies and portents, future disasters. He went inside the small showerstall and drummed tepid water all over his body. When he was finished he dressed quickly. He packed his canvas bag, locked it, left the room. But the dream, as if it were a narrative in a seductive tongue, still whispered in his mind.

  He travelled down to the lobby by the stairs because elevators were always too claustrophobic for him. Outside, where the sun was cold, he crossed the street and walked in the direction of the garage where he’d parked the Dodge. It was a sleazy stretch of Eighth Avenue, pawnshops and fastfood places and porno stores. He entered the dimly lit garage cautiously, distrustful of dark places. He found the car on the second level exactly as he’d left it. Unmolested, unvandalised. He unlocked it, drove it past the ticket booth, paid his fee, and then he was out into harsh white sunshine, heading north. By the time he reached Columbus Circle he was hungry but he didn’t want to stop until he was clear of the city.

  Finally, when he was close to Yonkers, he pulled into a twenty-four hour place that served the whole staggering array of American roadside cuisine. He took a table near a window and chewed on a strange red hot-dog, which he left half-eaten. He drank two cups of coffee, and for the first time that day his brain, which had been numb and unresponsive, kicked into gear. Low gear.

  You’ll have times when you can do nothing but abort, boy. You’ll have times when circumstances are stacked up against you. The trick then is to step away without despair.

  Without despair, Cairney thought. But he could feel a certain sickness in his heart. Ever since he’d entered the United States, he’d encountered one set of circumstances after another that provoked nothing but despair in him. But he wouldn’t abort. Not now. Not ever. Was it his fault that Tumulty had been playing both ends against the middle? Was it his fault that Linney had turned out to be some kind of frantic madman? Was it his fault that Mulhaney’s bodyguard had chosen to come through the door of the restroom when he did and then draw his goddam gun? You were sometimes faced with extremely limited choices. And sometimes you had no choices at all, because events narrowed all around you and went off at their own uncontrollable speed, and the only thing you could do was follow the track of chaos and make the best of what you had.

  Finn’s money, the Cause’s money, had taken on a grail-like quality in his mind. It shimmered and tantalised and then, as though it were a mirage, vanished even as you thought you were close to it. He had moments now when he wondered if it even existed or, if it did, whether it was buried forever in some inaccessible place beyond human reach. All he knew was that the money was surrounded by accusations and treacheries and suspicions. People told lies. They made up stories. Linney had been sure that Mulhaney was responsible for the theft. Mulhaney had pointed to Kevin Dawson. And he’d also mentioned somebody enigmatically known as The Old Man, who appeared to occupy a position of authority that put him in a place beyond suspicion.

  What Cairney suddenly wondered was how a man like Frank Pagan would have gone about the task of searching for the money. Pagan, presumably, had been trained in investigative skills, quietly gathering data, knowing the questions to ask, knowing how to assess the answers. Frank Pagan, perhaps, had insights that were denied Jig, a deeper human understanding, an ability to cut through lies and deceptions and misleading statements. Frank Pagan understood people because he lived in th
eir midsts. Jig didn’t. Jig didn’t know people. Jig had cut himself off from ordinary society by his own choice. Cairney could imagine Pagan operating on some intuitive level, knowing when he was hearing bullshit and when he was hearing the truth. Cairney, trained to assassinate, trained to track, to plant explosive devices, to use rifles, to survive in extreme conditions, in arctic cold and desert heat – Cairney had never learned a goddam thing, in all his training, about the puzzlingly intricate clockwork of the human heart. And it was hurting him now.

  He picked up the half-eaten hot dog and shredded it surgically into fragments between his fingers. It was useless to speculate on what gifts he had and didn’t have. It was the wrong time. It was the wrong time to entertain even the smallest kind of doubt. To think that Finn – in his anger and frustration – had sent the wrong kind of man to America.

  Cairney pushed the dissected hot-dog aside.

  I’ll get the money, he thought.

  I’ll get it and take it back to Finn and say There, there’s your money. And Finn would receive it with a small smile of pleasure, the smile Cairney liked, the one that made him feel as if he were basking in his own private sunlight. The kind of smile he’d never seen on his own father’s face. I knew you’d do it, boy. I never had any doubt. And the Cause is forever grateful to you.

  Kevin Dawson. He had to concentrate on Kevin Dawson. Given the amount of documentation on the private lives of the Dawson clan, given all the reams of publicity so loved by the tabloids, it wasn’t going to be very difficult to locate the Dawson home. But Cairney knew that Dawson was going to be surrounded by the kind of protection afforded brothers of The President. Which meant extreme caution. And then there was always Frank Pagan to consider.

  Cairney stared through the window at a stream of traffic sliding north. Hundreds of Sunday afternoon travellers, whole families complete with dogs, hurrying to dinners with in-laws or visits to the zoo or places of worship. He watched them with solemn detachment for a time.

  He stood up, paid for his food, then moved in the direction of the door. There was a payphone in the lobby. He stopped. Glancing through the glass door at his small red Dodge, he was seized by an impulse to pick up the receiver. He dialled a number, punched in coins.

  Celestine’s voice was thin when she answered. ‘Hello?’

  Cairney listened. Didn’t speak. Why the hell had he made this call? It wasn’t as if he needed to hear his father’s voice, was it? It was something else, something he didn’t want to think about.

  ‘Hello?’

  Cairney opened his mouth, but he remained silent.

  ‘Is anyone there?’ she asked.

  He took the receiver away from his ear. He pictured her standing with the telephone pressed to the side of her face, perhaps a lock of fair hair hanging falling across a cheekbone, her slim legs set slightly apart. The image was strong in his mind, and teasing, and desirable. The sound of her voice brought back to him the night she’d come to his bedroom, and he trembled very slightly.

  ‘Patrick? Is that you?’

  Now why would she think that? Why would she think of his name? He replaced the receiver and went outside to the parking-lot. He unlocked his car, stepped in behind the wheel. He drove away from the restaurant, the sun laying a white film over his rear window.

  The White House, Washington

  Shortly after Seamus Houlihan’s anonymous phone call had been logged by the FBI in New York City, Leonard M. Korn stepped inside the Oval office like a man with a mission in life. Thomas Dawson saw this at once. Magoo had fire in his myopic eyes. If it were any hotter there, his contact lenses would melt. The President understood Korn’s manner. The man had come here looking for a free hand. He wanted to hear Dawson say that the wolves could be released now, the pack liberated, the time was ripe. The FBI could tear apart the whole goddam Eastern seaboard, if that’s what it took to catch one Irish terrorist.

  Korn saw indecision in Thomas Dawson. Indecision and subterfuge. But how could Dawson explain away the bombing of a church in White Plains to the soothed satisfaction of the public? A faulty boiler? Or would he go with some natural phenomenon, like spontaneous combustion? Korn’s Bureau, his agency, his love, was like a caged leopard clawing bars, ready to pounce. This time it wasn’t four casualties in a house in Bridgehampton. This one couldn’t be kept under wraps.

  Dawson ran a fingertip over his lower lip and said, ‘It doesn’t make any sense to me, Len. Why come to the United States and blow up a goddam church, for Christ’s sake?’

  Korn enjoyed Dawson’s discomfort. The changing currents of international terrorist policy meant nothing to The Director. He was interested only in apprehending the culprit. More specifically, he was interested in being seen to do it.

  ‘I can understand the death of Linney,’ Dawson continued. ‘He was involved in these clandestine Irish affairs. But a whole churchload of people? Come on. Why the hell this escalation?’

  ‘Jig may have been after just one person in that church,’ Korn suggested. ‘It’s possible.’

  Dawson sighed. ‘If it was Jig,’ he said. ‘Do we have any really hard evidence that he’s responsible?’

  Korn considered this a naïve question. ‘He’s our only candidate, Mr. President.’

  Thomas Dawson stood up. He could hear Korn panting at the leash.

  ‘Jig only came here to recover money,’ the President said. ‘I don’t see where bombing churches fits on his agenda.’

  ‘Terrorists aren’t like you and me,’ Korn said. ‘They don’t function with normal motives. They aren’t driven by normal impulses. We know absolutely nothing about Jig, so how can we say what he is or isn’t capable of doing?’

  Dawson poked his blotting-pad with the tip of a silver letter-knife. ‘The latest count is seventy-eight,’ he said. ‘Seventy-eight, for Christ’s sake!’

  ‘It may rise,’ Korn said.

  Dawson ignored what he felt was a rather distasteful eagerness in Korn’s voice. Seventy-eight people was a hell of a tally. What was he going to tell America? What would he announce into that great ear out there? So far, the only information it had received was of an explosion inside a church. No explanation given, a simple headline on news programmes. But by this time the journalists would be scavenging the disaster-site like vultures. Sometimes Dawson thought that freedom of the press was the enemy of democracy. Why couldn’t it be muzzled?

  All at once he felt a real need to draw people around him, cabinet members, image-makers, advisors, counsellors, poll-takers, speechwriters, he wanted every possible scenario thoroughly analysed before he did anything. Would this act of Jig’s alienate the Irish from their hero when – and if – they learned about it? Would there be outrage? Or would it somehow draw the clans tighter together? Imponderable questions.

  He stared at Korn who gazed back at him with expectation.

  The American public could wait, the journalists could dig, the rumours could fly and multiply with the speed of maggots in a rancid stew, Korn could pop some bloodcells. But Thomas Dawson wasn’t going to drop the starter’s flag for the FBI until he’d consulted with his own policy-makers.

  He saw he had savaged his blotter with the letter-opener. ‘It’s not my decision alone, Len. I can’t tell you to go ahead with this manhunt of yours until I’ve talked with my Cabinet.’

  Korn was annoyed, but not absolutely surprised. He’d always thought Tom Dawson the wrong man for number 1600. He was in too many people’s pockets, for one thing. This whole love affair he conducted with the Irish–Americans was way out of whack. There was one group that had him by the balls. And the Irish–Americans weren’t the only ones. He was in deep with the Italians, the Puerto-Ricans, the farmers. If it moved in sufficient numbers, if it had the capability to organise itself and knew how to pull a voting-lever, then Tommy Dawson was probably obligated to it.

  ‘While you consult, Mr. President, an Irish terrorist is out there, planning God knows what next move, and we have a total of four
men on the case – four, count them – one of whom is an Englishman that two of the remaining three spend most of their time watching, for God’s sake.’

  Dawson held a hand in the air. ‘You’ll have a decision soon.’

  ‘How soon is soon?’ Korn asked. ‘And will it be soon enough?’

  Korn moved to the door. He had a flair at times for melodramatic exit lines. He enjoyed the one he left hanging on the air as he reached for the door handle.

  Dawson was damned if he was going to give Korn the satisfaction of the last word. Angered by Korn’s manner, he said, ‘If your goddam Bureau wasn’t like some goddam elephant that hollers because it fears extinction, if it knew how to conduct an investigation with any kind of tact and discretion, if it wasn’t manned by so many fuck-ups and psychopaths, I’d say go ahead. I’d give you my blessing. But we know what it would really be like, don’t we, Len? There would be inexplicable leaks to the press. There would be interviews with Len Korn, master of counter-terrorist tactics. It would become a full-blown media circus for the glorification of King Korn and his personal adversary, Jig. Black and white! Good guys and bad guys! All the lines of conflict nicely drawn for the masses to understand! God bless the FBI and goodnight!’

  Leonard Korn had the black sensation that he’d overstepped the mark. He turned to the President with a small insincere smile on his face. ‘I spoke out of turn,’ he said.

  ‘Damn right you did.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  Dawson smiled back with an equal lack of warmth. ‘Too much tension, Len. Too much stress. And stress kills.’

  ‘So they say, Mr. President.’

  When Korn had gone, Thomas Dawson did something he never did in public. He lit a cigarette, a Winston, and sucked the smoke deeply inside his lungs. It was the most satisfying thing he’d done in a long time. He put the cigarette out carefully, dropped the butt in a wastebasket, then sprayed the air with a small can of Ozium he kept in his desk. He sat back and shut his eyes. It wasn’t just the violence done against the Memorial Presbyterian Church in White Plains that troubled him. It was also the old Irish thread, that dark green bloodsoaked thread, linking the late Nicholas Linney to brother Kevin.