Graf, Detroit Free Press. Is there any evidence to suggest that the IRA plans future attacks?
We have no such evidence at this time, Mr. Graf.
But why would they come into this country just to blow up one church and then leave again?
As I said, we have no evidence to support the view that the IRA plans further terrorist activities.
McInnes sat on the edge of the bed. He saw Lawrence W. Childes move away from the podium, and he gathered that the press conference had come to an abrupt end. There was one of those uncertain moments when the cameraman loses his focus and the camera swings wildly, shooting a ceiling, an empty doorway, the faces of flustered journalists – but then Childes was back behind the podium again, holding a sheet of paper in one hand. He was calling for quiet and the picture was steady now.
McInnes leaned towards the TV.
Lawrence W. Childes said that he had just learned of a new development. He cleared his throat and read.
At approximately two fifty this afternoon a school bus was attacked outside New Rockford, Connecticut, by gunmen who claim to be members of the Irish Republican Army.
On board this bus were the nieces of The President of the United States. The President has no statement to make at this time.
There was a long silence. Then the questions, held in check a moment by the fragile sea-wall of concern and decency and outright shock, came bursting forward. Were the Dawson girls injured? How many were on board the bus? What was the number of casualties? Was this the same group that had destroyed the church in White Plains? Was this the work of Jig? Lawrence Childes, face drained and voice shaking, clasped his hands and said that he had no information to add to what he’d already said. Tracked by reporters, who now showed all the demeanour of crazed ladies at a hat sale, he moved away from the podium. Security officers blocked the newsmen as Lawrence Childes vanished down a hallway without looking back.
McInnes turned the TV off.
There. It was out now. It was common knowledge.
And McInnes experienced a feeling that was jubilation suffused with relief. The road had been mapped and travelled and was behind him now. He had won. He zipped up his suitcase, then turned the small key in its lock. He tossed the key in the air and snapped it up in his hand as it fell back down. He uttered a small whoop of exhilaration.
It was out now and all America knew it. The Irish Republican Army had blown up a church and then attacked a schoolbus. The IRA had sunk to a level that defied description. Already, McInnes was anticipating the next day’s headlines and editorials, the anger and dismay that would yield to the call for blood, for violent responses to violent men, an eye for an eye. He could hear the knives being released from their sheaths and sharpened. Revenge, when it came, would be devastating.
He didn’t hear the knock on his door at first. Even when he became conscious of it, it barely registered. An intrusion from another world. He turned. Whatever it was, whoever, he could handle it. He could handle anything now. There was nothing that was beyond his capabilities.
He opened the door. Somehow he wasn’t altogether astonished to see Frank Pagan. The presence of a second man, somebody McInnes had never seen before, did surprise him, but he quickly took it in his stride. He was in a place where even Frank Pagan couldn’t harm him.
‘Why, Frank,’ he said. ‘And you’ve brought a friend. How very nice.’
Pagan’s face was dark. His forehead was broken into deep ridges and his jaw was set at a belligerent angle. His large hands were clenched and they hung at his sides, as if restraining them required effort. The other man had drawn a gun. Curiously, though, he didn’t aim it directly at McInnes. Instead, he seemed to point into the space between Pagan and McInnes as if he wanted to cover both men. McInnes stepped back.
‘Talk to me,’ Pagan said. ‘Start at the beginning and talk to me.’
‘We’ve talked already,’ McInnes replied. He glanced at his suitcase.
‘Packed, are we? Ready to leave?’ Pagan asked.
‘Quite ready.’ McInnes looked briefly at the gun in the young man’s hand. ‘There’s nothing left for me to do here.’
‘Wrong, Ivor. You’ve got unfinished business.’
McInnes shook his head. ‘Tell your friend to put his gun away, Frank.’
‘I can’t tell him anything like that,’ Pagan said. He widened his eyes and smiled. ‘Bad manners on my part. I forgot to introduce you. Ivor McInnes meet Jig.’
McInnes felt a pulse throb at the back of his throat. He looked into the young man’s eyes, which were harder even than Pagan’s, and had an odd sideways quality, a shiftiness. McInnes wondered how this state of affairs added up. Pagan and Jig. Now there was a combination that God and Scotland Yard and the FBI hadn’t exactly intended. How had it come about that Frank Pagan and Jig were together? How had this pair managed to find one another, and who was the quarry, who the hunter now? It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. Not at all.
‘Jig isn’t pleased, Ivor,’ Pagan said. ‘He isn’t pleased at all. Which goes for me too.’
McInnes saw a narrowing of Jig’s eyes. It was hardly perceptible, but it was as obvious as a neon to McInnes.
‘I’m sure you’re making some kind of sense, Frank,’ he said. ‘But it escapes me.’
Jig spoke for the first time. ‘Tell us about the church, McInnes. Tell us about the schoolbus.’
‘Terrible things,’ McInnes said, shaking his head.
‘We’re all agreed that they’re terrible things,’ Pagan said. ‘But we haven’t come here to make little sympathetic noises, McInnes.’
‘What do you know?’ Jig asked.
‘What do I know?’ McInnes smiled. ‘Only what I see on TV.’
‘Try again,’ Pagan said.
There was a smell of violence about both Pagan and the other man, and nothing quickened the brain quite like that odour. McInnes stepped to the window and looked out at the park. The ghost of a decision was beginning to take shape at the back of his mind. Sometimes, from out of nowhere, he had an inspiration, a flash, an insight that seemed to transcend the usual laboured workings of logical thought. He had one now.
Pagan stepped closer to him. And then one of Pagan’s hands was clamped on his shoulder, turning McInnes around as if he were nothing more than a sack of frail kindling.
McInnes hated violence. On one broad level it was a political tool of some use, but when it descended to the personal arena it was loathsome. It wasn’t even cowardice on his part either. He’d boxed one year when he’d been a university student in Liverpool, accumulating a fair record, but something about crunching his glove into an opponent’s face had repelled him. As indeed he was repelled now by the way Pagan was holding him.
‘We’re reduced to this, are we?’ he asked.
Pagan held a fist beneath McInnes’s jaw. ‘This is nothing,’ Pagan said. ‘I haven’t even worked up a sweat yet, Ivor.’
‘I don’t think there’s any need for this, Frank.’
Before McInnes could say anything, Pagan had swung the fist in a low trajectory. It dug into the fleshy lower part of McInnes’s belly, doubling him over, expelling all the air from his lungs and causing his eyes to register fiery sparks.
McInnes gasped and sat down on the bed and blinked up at Frank Pagan.
‘It’s like I said, Ivor. We don’t have time for any further bullshit. It’s pain and more pain from here on in.’
Through layers of pain, McInnes realised he had perceived the outline of a plan that would serve two purposes at once. It would get Pagan off his back, which was admittedly a priority right now. But more than that, it would rid him of Seamus Houlihan, whose work was finished and whose continued existence could easily become an embarrassment over the long run. Besides, Seamus had shown a tendency to take the initiative in situations where intervention on his part wasn’t needed. The man was a thug, a cold-blooded killer, and McInnes perceived no kind of future for such a man in his scheme of things. Houli
han was like some kind of primitive weapon that Ivor McInnes had no further use for.
Frank Pagan reached down and grabbed the lapels of McInnes’s jacket.
‘Easy,’ McInnes said.
‘Don’t stop me, Ivor. Not unless you’ve got something sensible to say.’
McInnes raised a hand defensively.
‘Do we talk, Ivor?’ Pagan asked.
McInnes nodded. He was struggling to catch his breath. The lie that had presented itself to him was ingenious, all the more so since it would contain elements of truth. All the best lies had fragments of truth in them.
‘We talk,’ he said.
Pagan folded his arms against his body. Jig, who had been observing this situation without comment, still had his gun trained in front of him.
McInnes rubbed his stomach where it hurt. He turned the lie around in his mind, preparing to float it in front of these two hostile men. ‘I heard a story in Belfast,’ he said. ‘I have my sources, you know.’
‘Go on,’ Pagan urged. His tone was sceptical.
‘Give me a minute, Frank. Breathless.’ McInnes stood up now, just a little unsteady. He took a couple of deep breaths. ‘I heard an interesting little yarn about a group of disaffected IRA men who were planning an action in America.’ McInnes paused, looking first at Pagan, then at Jig. Both of them were bloody poker-players, he decided.
‘It appears that this IRA cell, unhappy because money wasn’t coming down the pipeline as fast as they wanted it, decided to branch out. Well, you have some idea of how the IRA is, don’t you? They’re forever splitting into factions. They’re always squabbling and going for each other’s throats. Anyhow, this group, which needed finances for various projects – presumably of a criminal nature – came up with the notion of doing a couple of outlandish things in America. The idea behind their thinking was quite simple. They felt that if they went off at a tangent in America, they’d be making a point with the powers back in Ireland. It would be a form of blackmail, you see. They’d come here and make a mess, which would be like holding a pistol to the head of the people in the IRA who mind the purse. Are you with me?’
Frank Pagan didn’t move a muscle. No nod, no expression. McInnes swallowed and continued. ‘This little group of the disaffected decided on outrages. Human outrages. Acts that would alienate public opinion. A church would be first. What’s more innocent than a church after all? Then they thought of the answer to that one, didn’t they? They came up with something even more vile. A schoolbus. Better yet, what if that particular bus carried two rather important children? You see the wicked way some people think.’
‘Spare me the moral judgments, Ivor.’
‘Well, apparently they’ve come here and they succeeded in doing what they set out to do. Now they think they’ll go home and suddenly the purse-strings will be wide open for them because if they’re not then it’s an easy matter to come back to the United States and do something else.’ McInnes paused. He wished he had a litmus paper he could dip into Frank Pagan’s brain to check the effect of his story on the man. ‘You understand what I’m telling you, don’t you?’
Pagan said nothing.
McInnes went on, ‘Blackmail, Pagan. Blackmail on a terrible scale. You and I might not understand that way of thinking, but certain people come to it quite naturally. And the people responsible for these horrors are quite capable of anything. As you well know.’
‘Where do you fit in, Ivor?’
McInnes stood up, a little shaky. A lie was always more convincing if it involved a detail that cast the liar himself in a bad light. And this was the tactic McInnes pursued now. ‘I know how many people perceive me, Frank. They think that because I’m socially and philosophically opposed to Catholicism, that I’m behind Protestant violence.’
‘Get on with it, Ivor.’
‘You’re an impatient man, Frank Pagan.’
‘You have that effect on me.’
McInnes smiled slightly. ‘Well, to be perfectly honest, I saw an opportunity to do myself some good. Call it selfish thinking. I’m not without a certain vanity, after all. Most people have some. What I genuinely believed was that I could come here, make contact with these people and perhaps negotiate something that wouldn’t involve the violence we’ve seen in the last few days. In other words, I misled myself into thinking I could contact these men and reason with them. It didn’t matter that I was on a different side from them. The point was, I thought I could sway them, I thought I could make a gesture that had nothing to do with the partisan nature of life in Ireland. I believed I could spare the United States a taste of the strife that has torn Ireland apart for so long.’
McInnes paused. He stared at Frank Pagan with a look of grief and misery in his eyes.
‘I failed, obviously.’
‘You thought you could be a saint, did you?’
‘Not a saint, Frank. Just the voice of reason.’
‘The voice of reason,’ Pagan said flatly. ‘Do I applaud now?’
‘Applaud?’
‘Quite a little performance, Ivor.’
‘You don’t believe me?’
‘In another world I might. In a world where cows played bagpipes and money grew on trees, I might be convinced.’
McInnes shrugged. ‘I’m telling you the truth.’ He looked at Jig, who had been listening motionlessly to the story.
Pagan said, ‘Let me see if I can get this straight, Ivor. You came after these men, without telling anyone in authority, because you imagined you could do your Henry Kissinger bit and get them to sit down like reasonable men at a table? You imagined some bloodthirsty IRA characters were going to pay attention to the man they think of as the Protestant anti-Christ?’
‘I thought I could do myself some good,’ McInnes said. ‘Call me vain. Call me egocentric. Call it a normal human response.’
‘Call it bullshit,’ Frank Pagan said.
McInnes looked down at the floor. He felt suddenly very calm, in control of things. Even the sight of Frank Pagan’s incredulous face didn’t trouble him.
‘You asked for the truth,’ McInnes said.
‘And what did I get? Tripe.’
‘Have it your own way, Frank.’
Pagan glanced at Jig, then said, ‘What about Fitzjohn? How does he fit into this fable of yours?’
McInnes looked sheepish. ‘I’m afraid I lied to you there, Frank.’
‘Well, knock me down with a feather,’ Pagan said.
‘Fitzjohn was acting on my instructions to arrange a meeting between myself and this IRA faction.’
‘Your personal emissary.’
‘Exactly.’
‘And?’
‘They killed him. They aren’t reasonable men. I thought they were. But I was wrong again. Poor Fitzjohn.’
Frank Pagan sat down on the bed now. ‘If any of what you’re telling us is true, you’re covered in blood. You’re up to your thick neck in blood. You claim you knew in advance of situations that could have been prevented if you’d gone to the authorities. Jesus Christ; we’re talking about innocent kids here! We’re talking about kids travelling home on a schoolbus.’
‘Ask yourself this. Would the authorities have listened to me?’
‘I don’t believe a word of this. That’s the problem I’m having, Ivor.’
Jig moved slowly across the floor. McInnes imagined that the gun in the young man’s hand was going to come up through the air and smack him straight across the face and he braced himself for it. But it didn’t happen.
Jig asked, ‘How did your source happen to come upon all this information in the first place?’
McInnes’s mind was like a needle laying threads across what had already been embroidered. He knew how he could convince Jig of his story at least. He knew which name to drop into the conversation for maximum effect. He said, ‘I can’t reveal that. But I can tell you this much. A man called Padraic Finn was in control of finances, which didn’t please certain people. It obviously didn’t please
the faction I’m talking about, the ones who are here in America right now.’
‘Finn?’ Jig asked.
‘That’s right.’
Jig stared at McInnes. There was a flicker of interest in his eyes now. ‘How did your source know about Finn?’
McInnes smiled in a weary way. ‘There’s a very old craft called infiltration, Jig. No doubt you’re familiar with it.’
Jig absently fiddled with the tuner of the bedside radio. ‘What do you know about the missing money?’
‘Money?’ McInnes replied.
‘Money from the Connie O’Mara,’ Pagan said.
‘I’m a couple of steps behind you,’ McInnes said in a puzzled way. ‘You’re talking in another language.’
There was silence inside the room.
‘I don’t believe Finn was infiltrated,’ Jig said finally.
McInnes gazed down at his suitcase. ‘He wasn’t just infiltrated, my friend. No, it was more than that.’
Jig stared at McInnes. ‘What more?’
‘This same IRA faction murdered Padraic Finn at his home near Dun Laoghaire.’
Jig didn’t move. McInnes saw the face change. He saw the lips open and the skin turn white. He saw all the light sucked from the eyes, drawn backwards into some unfathomable area of the skull. McInnes had never seen a face alter so quickly, so profoundly.
Jig shoved his gun directly at McInnes’s head, the barrel pressing in a spot just above McInnes’s ear.
‘You lying bastard, McInnes.’
McInnes tried to move away from the weapon, but Jig was pressing it hard.
‘I’m not lying,’ McInnes said.
‘They couldn’t infiltrate Finn. They couldn’t murder him.’
‘But they did. They went at night to his house. They’d already bribed the watchman, George Scully. With nobody to protect the house, it must have been easy for them.’
Jig took the gun from McInnes’s head as suddenly as he’d placed it there. He opened his mouth to say something, but no words came. He was like a man trying to still some awful internal turmoil to which he was totally unaccustomed. A man experiencing some new and terrifying sensation that he couldn’t name, couldn’t identify, didn’t want to believe.
Jig Page 49