Finn’s advice might have been to withdraw from the vicinity of Dawson until the heat had gone out of the situation and an approach to Dawson involved less risk. Maybe. But Finn would also have been angry about somebody maligning the Cause by blowing up a church. And Finn’s outbursts of anger were fierce things to behold, as if the whole person were on the volcanic rim of exploding into lava. Finn might have done precisely the same thing as Jig was doing now. Let’s find out what bloody McInnes is up to and put a stop to that bastard once and for all.
Cairney turned the gun over in his hand. He was unsure of the decision he’d made. Thoughts crowded him, cramped him. His sick father. The missing money. The possibility that Ivor McInnes might know something about it. The notion that Pagan could be setting a trap.
And Celestine. The last thought he wanted or needed right then. But there was her face, her face floating through his mind, the remembered feel of her mouth, the vibrant warmth of the woman. There she was, a bright, enticing intruder on his thoughts. He closed his eyes for a second. The retreat into darkness. The calm centre of himself. It wouldn’t come. He couldn’t find it.
He opened his eyes, looked at Frank Pagan’s face as Pagan drove the winding road that led narrowly through the hills. He suspected Pagan was telling the truth about McInnes being in New York and the attack on the church, but he wasn’t certain if Ivor McInnes knew anything about the money. How the hell could he? And how could the FUV have informed Pagan about the American trip anyway – something only he and Finn knew about?
This last question buzzed in his head. The obvious answer – that there was a traitor within the ranks of The Association of the Wolfe – was disheartening. But Frank Pagan might have been lying from start to finish, fabricating everything he’d said. He’d have to be wary from here on in, supersharp, each one of his senses prepared for some sudden occurrence – a move from Pagan, a car following too close behind, anything. If Pagan was as tenacious as he thought, this truce was going to be as substantial as ice in springtime. And if it melted – if it melted he’d shoot Frank Pagan without any further thought.
What had Pagan said? Be a martyr? Isn’t that what the Cause expects of you anyhow? That remark had stung Cairney more than anything else, because Pagan had somehow managed to centre in on the one thing that was anathema to Jig – the idea of martyrdom, the notion that that was what the Cause was all about finally. To succeed you had to be dead. To win you had to have died a soldier’s death. A loser’s death. To win you had to have old women light penny candles to your memory in cold churches and old men drink Guinness over your sanctified name. The old Irish ways, your name immortalised in song and dredged up on every anniversary of your death, which was usually premature and always fruitless.
And something else Pagan had said had struck a chord inside him. You’re out of your depth in this country, Jig. Too much is stacked against you. Maybe. But it didn’t matter now. It was too late for it to matter. Finn had sent him into this, Finn with his hopes and ambitions, his conviction that Jig could do anything. He’d prove Finn right in the end. When he went back to Ireland with the money it would prove that Finn’s decision to send Jig to America had been the right one all along, that Finn’s faith in him was completely justified.
‘I wonder why Kevin Dawson left in such a hurry,’ Pagan said. He was turning the Dodge into a sharp bend, driving in a fashion that was a little cavalier. The squeal of tyres on pavement seemed to delight him.
Cairney said nothing. He’d been just as curious as Pagan at the sight of Dawson hurrying out of the house and racing off in a car with the two Secret Servicemen. Shortly after, the FBI agents and the two state cops had also departed. If Cairney had been indecisive about his next step, then the knowledge that Kevin Dawson had left the house made his mind up for him. What was the point of watching an empty house when you had no way of knowing if and when Dawson was coming back?
Pagan swung the Dodge into a hairpin turn and looked at Cairney as he did so. ‘Does my driving make you nervous?’
Cairney shook his head. He wouldn’t give the Englishman any small satisfaction. Pagan, as if Cairney’s refusal to be upset rattled him, put his foot harder on the gas pedal and the car went whining into the next turn. Pagan took his hands from the wheel for a second. The speedometer was approaching seventy-five and the small Dodge was quivering.
Cairney pressed his gun hard into Pagan’s ribs. ‘I see how it would suit you if we were pulled over by the highway patrol. But I don’t think I’d care for that personally. Anyway, guns behave unpredictably at high speeds, Pagan. Keep that in mind. Never play games with me.’
Pagan caught the wheel, braked gently, and the car slowed. ‘I’ll drive like a senile dowager,’ he said.
Cairney pulled the gun back from Pagan’s body. ‘So long as we have an understanding.’
Pagan nodded. ‘I’m sure we have,’ he said. He was concerned about the tension in Jig, the extreme wariness. He didn’t like the proximity of the gun either, the way Jig had it pointed directly at his side. He sighed, jabbed the radio, heard only static. Jig reached out and turned the radio off.
‘Let’s get some groundrules straight upfront, Pagan. No noise. No music. No conversation. If we get to New York and I find out all this is bullshit, you’re dead. On the other hand, if Ivor does know something, I decide the next step. Is that clear?’
‘Clear,’ Pagan said, thinking how he wasn’t cut out for this chauffeur business. He hated being in an inferior position.
On either side of the road now the hills were flattening, drifting down gently into meadows. Roadsigns appeared, indicating the thruway some miles ahead. Older signs pointed out backroads, cattle crossings, deer warnings. Everything was lit by the same filmy ivory sunlight, which had an illusory quality. Here and there an old farmhouse or barn was visible, framed by trees. There was a bucolic assurance about everything, a timelessness.
The road curved suddenly, a long sweeping turn that almost took Pagan by surprise. He braked lightly as he took the Dodge into the curve. And then, surprised by what he saw ahead of him, he slowed the speed of the car so abruptly that Jig was momentarily thrown forward. Not enough to make him careless with the gun, but enough to irritate him.
‘For God’s sake, Pagan –’
And then Jig saw what it was that had so surprised Frank Pagan, and his first thought was that if this were the trap, then it was elaborate and cunning, involving all kinds of incongruous vehicles – a shattered school bus, a sedan that issued a thin cloud of smoke, a couple of state police cruisers, two ambulances, and several other vehicles all parked carelessly around the pathetic relic of the yellow bus, whose windows had been broken and side panels blitzed. Then Jig became conscious of something else, the sight of bodies lying in a clearing between the trees, with men in white coats hovering over them. The realisation that many of these bodies were unmistakably children caused his heart to freeze. He put his hand involuntarily up to his mouth. Kids. And his mind was spinning back to a street-scene he’d once witnessed in the Shankill Road area of Belfast when two kids, both bloodied from random gunfire, had been stretched out on a sidewalk, small casualities of a conflict that was beyond their understanding – but that had only been two kids, now he was staring at about ten, a dozen, he wasn’t sure. He heard his own blood pound inside his skull, and ice laid a terrible film the length of his spine.
Pagan was travelling past the scene at about ten miles an hour. A cop came across the road and waved an arm impatiently at the Dodge, gesturing for it to pass and mind its own goddam business. Pagan’s nostrils filled with the stench of burning rubber and gasoline.
‘Keep moving,’ Cairney said. He poked the gun into Pagan’s hip, concealing the weapon under the folds of his overcoat.
Pagan winced. ‘I’ve got no bloody intention of stopping. Do you imagine I’m going to try and turn you over to some local cop? Take that fucking gun away from me.’
Pagan pressed his foot on the gas pedal as
the car drew closer to the cop. Smoke drifted thickly across the road, obscuring the cop for a moment. When it cleared the policeman was about fifteen feet away, still waving his arm. Pagan stared past him at the clearing. What the hell had happened here? It looked as if the schoolbus had been used for target practice. It was an unreal scene, yet the air of authentic tragedy hung over it. Those small bodies under sheets. The ambulance lights flashing. The men sifting around the wreckage. Pagan’s eye was drawn quickly to an area at the rear of the clearing.
Artie Zuboric was standing there, ash-coloured, his usually upright body set in a slouch, as if the weight of whatever had happened in this place were too heavy for him. At the centre of the clearing, flanked by his Secret Servicemen and a group of cops, stood Kevin Dawson.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Pagan said, horrified by the scene, by the awful expression on Dawson’s face.
Jig, who had also recognised Dawson, asked, ‘What the hell’s going on here?’ And his voice was hushed, his question phrased in a tone Pagan hadn’t heard from him before.
Pagan barely had time to absorb the whole situation before the scene dwindled in the rearview mirror and was finally lost beyond a curve in the road. But the look on Dawson’s face stayed with him. It was that of a man shattered, a man bewildered by events that defy description, someone who has seen his world tilted on its axis.
It was grief.
It was a look Frank Pagan had seen on his face, when reflections in mirrors threw back the countenance of a stranger undergoing an impossible trauma, an experience beyond the language of loss. It was an alien voice whispering in your brain over and over and over Roxanne is gone, gone, gone.
Dawson’s daughters, Pagan thought.
It struck Pagan then with the force of a hammer.
Somebody had ambushed that schoolbus which must have had the Dawson girls on board otherwise why would Kevin Dawson be there looking so utterly grief-stricken?
Somebody.
Dear God. He felt his stomach turn over.
Somebody, he thought again. It was violence as pointless and as brutal as that done to the church in White Plains. And what he heard suddenly was Ivor McInnes’s voice saying If it’s the IRA, it’s not going to stop with some church. Once those fellows get the taste of blood, they don’t know when to stop.
Pagan had a raw sensation in his heart.
There is going to be a telephone call. A man will speak in an Irish accent. He’ll say that the bus was attacked by members of the Irish Republican Army.
And Jig, who was still looking at Pagan, still waiting for an answer to the question he’d asked minutes before, was going to be blamed for this new monstrosity. It had all the texture of the completely inevitable. Jig would be blamed, then crucified.
Pagan thumped his foot down hard on the gas-pedal. Had Ivor McInnes known about this outrage? If he’d known, as Frank Pagan felt he did, about an IRA presence in the USA, had he also known that this was going to happen?
A small nerve began to work in Pagan’s cheek as he thought of McInnes, that smug, bloody man with his poisonous hatreds. And something moved through Pagan’s brain, an anger he hadn’t felt in years, a turmoil of rage, a searing emotion that he couldn’t bring entirely under control. He knew this much – he knew he was looking forward to tearing that mask away from Ivor’s face and getting down to the truth of things. It would be a slippery descent, because in McInnes’s world truth was never something you ascended to, it was a quality concealed in deep places, dank places, down at the fetid bottom of the man’s heart.
‘I asked you a question,’ Jig said. ‘What the hell do you think happened back there?’
‘I can only guess,’ Pagan said.
‘Let me hear it anyway.’
Frank Pagan told him.
Harrison, New York
Seamus Houlihan called the FBI from a phone booth at a shopping plaza at twenty minutes past five. The man he spoke with attempted unsuccessfully to keep Houlihan talking. But Houlihan delivered his terse message without hesitation, then hung up. He looked across the plaza to the place where the yellow Ryder truck was parked. It was strange, Houlihan thought, not to see John Waddell’s face staring out through the windshield. Waddy had deserved to die, it was as simple as that. Like Fitzjohn, he’d been weak when strength was needed.
Houlihan entertained no regrets at the act. There was hardly anything in his life he regretted. Since Waddell had been his friend, though, he felt it was his duty to give the man a decent burial. That was the very least he could do. He had, after all, his own sense of honour.
He paused, staring into the window of a Carvel ice-cream shop. He went inside, ordered a single scoop of vanilla. He had to repeat this order three times because the eedjit girl behind the counter didn’t understand his accent. He came out, licking the ice-cream, which was too soft for his taste. By the time he reached the Ryder truck the ice-cream was already melting, running down the sleeve of his jacket. He tossed the cone away in disgust.
He gazed a moment at the discarded confection. It created a bright white puddle on the concrete. He thought of McInnes’s instructions to discard all weapons at the time of getting rid of the truck. They were to be cleaned thoroughly of all fingerprints and then dumped in some isolated place, after which Houlihan and the others were to return to Canada, and from there back to Ireland. The part Houlihan didn’t like was throwing the weapons away, especially his own handgun, a Colt Mark V he’d become attached to. What did McInnes know anyway? The man wasn’t out here doing the fucking dirty work, was he? He wasn’t getting his hands grubby. He’d probably never even fired a gun in his whole bloody life, so how could he understand the personal relationship you could develop with a weapon? Besides, what would happen if the weapons were dumped and then a bad situation cropped up? You’d be totally naked, wouldn’t you!
Houlihan made up his mind to disobey McInnes. It made him feel good. It gave him a pleasing sense of his own authority. He’d keep the guns, all the guns, until he was good and ready to toss them. And he wouldn’t tell McInnes about this decision when he telephoned him next time. He looked at his watch. He had thirty minutes to kill before he was due to call The Reverend again.
He reached up and opened the door of the cab and slid in behind the wheel.
‘What’s next?’ Rorke asked.
‘Another phone call, then a good night’s sleep,’ was how Seamus Houlihan answered.
24
New York City
In his room at the Essex House Ivor McInnes stared at the TV.
A man named Lawrence W. Childes was speaking from the small coloured screen. The President’s Press Officer, he was a solemn figure whose gatherings with the press were reminiscent of a convention of undertakers. He told the assembled journalists that the Government had learned of the presence of the Irish assassin Jig in the United States. That Jig, working either alone or with a group of fellow IRA terrorists, had been responsible for the bombing of the Memorial Church in White Plains. That Irish terrorism, so long contained within the borders of the United Kingdom, had come to the U.S.A. He spoke of an extensive ongoing investigation being conducted by the FBI in association with a variety of local law enforcement agencies. He was convinced that Jig would soon be apprehended and brought to justice.
After the introductory remarks, Childes was besieged by questions. Hands were upraised, papers clutched and shaken, cameras thrust forward, as journalists vied for attention: Lawrence W. Childes accepted a question from a fat woman with an Irish name. She represented a wire service. She wanted to know why the Irish were operating within the continental United States, a question Childes hummed at but couldn’t answer.
McInnes had been packing his suitcase on the bed. He stopped, moving a little closer to the TV. The fat woman was still pursuing her line of inquiry despite the protests of other journalists who, like hopeful adolescent suitors, had claims of their own to press for Childes’ attention.
I have no information, Ms McClanahan.
All of a sudden Irish terrorists start operations inside our borders and you don’t know why? What exactly is this Administration hiding, Mr. Childes?
McInnes smiled. He folded a shirt, put it inside the suitcase. He knew that this press conference was going absolutely nowhere, no matter how shrill were the hyenas of the media in their full-blooded curiosity. He rolled a necktie, placed it neatly beside the shirt. The radio clock on the bedside table said it was 6:39. Since Houlihan had already called, McInnes knew the big man had succeeded in the afternoon’s endeavour and had made his call to the FBI on schedule. Which meant that either Lawrence W. Childes wasn’t being entirely open with the press or else the information about the school bus hadn’t reached him yet. Maybe it had been decided, at levels above and beyond Childes, that an attack on school-kids wasn’t something the American public was geared as yet to hear. What difference did it make? McInnes asked himself. Sooner or later news of the latest outrage would reach them, because a thing like that couldn’t be contained forever.
McInnes adjusted the volume control.
A man with a florid face, a boozer’s face, was asking if there were any important political figures in the congregation of Memorial Church at the time of the bombing.
So far as we can tell, the answer is negative, Childes replied.
Then what we’re talking about is plain random violence and destruction?
It would appear that way.
McInnes placed a pair of pants on top of the shirt. Then he picked up the folder that contained the notes he’d made on the history of Ulster workers in the construction of the railroad and put it inside a side-pocket of the suitcase. He went into the bathroom and splashed some cold water on his face, and when he returned the press conference was still in progress.
Jig Page 48