Jig

by Campbell Armstrong

  And that was the death of Jig.

  Korn looked at The President. ‘We haven’t prepared for terrorism from this quarter,’ he said. ‘From the Libyans, of course. From some of the Arab countries, certainly. We routinely keep such people under scrutiny. But the Irish …’ And he flapped one of his small white hands.

  Thomas Dawson wasn’t interested in what Korn had to say. He was remembering the previous summer when he’d taken his nieces out on the Presidential yacht and they’d cruised Chesapeake Bay. He was remembering a quality in those girls which had struck him as rather unDawson-like. They were without guile, that’s what it was. You couldn’t imagine them conspiring about anything. This had to be on account of Martha’s influence. Dawson gulped down more smoke, which was harsh at the back of his throat. He wondered how Martha was doing. She was a steadfast little woman, one with reserves of strength, but how could anybody pull out of a situation like this?

  The Dawsons would survive. They always did. They had their own shock-absorbers for family tragedies. They retrenched, regrouped, and came out stronger in the end. But there was a very bad time ahead. He stared from the window. The lights of Manhattan had gone and there were stretches of black landscape below.

  ‘We could have done more,’ he said again. He wasn’t really speaking to Leonard Korn, but rather to himself. As far as he was concerned, Korn’s career was coming dangerously close to an end.

  Korn could see, even in the darkened cabin, that Thomas Dawson had all the mannerisms of a shellshocked man. The tremor in the fingers, the toneless voice, the way his eyes were quite without life.

  ‘I give you my solemn vow, Mr. President,’ Korn said, ‘that we’ll settle this Irish business –’

  Thomas Dawson interrupted. ‘The British have been saying the same thing for centuries, Korn. And what have they actually achieved?’ Dawson turned so that the instrument lights around the pilot’s seat threw eerie little colours, stark reds and chill greens, against his face. ‘The answer is nothing. In several centuries, the British have accomplished absolutely nothing.’

  Korn chewed on a fingernail. It was hard to talk to a man in Thomas Dawson’s present distraught condition.

  The President put out his cigarette and continued to speak in the same unemotional voice. ‘Tomorrow, the next day, I’ll meet with the British and Irish ambassadors. I won’t push the matter too strongly – at least not yet – but I’m coming very close to recommending that they consider some form of American assistance in combating the IRA.’

  ‘An American presence?’ Korn asked. ‘In Ireland?’

  Thomas Dawson nodded. ‘A handful of advisors, in the beginning. People with some expertise in counterterrorist tactics. Twenty, say. Twenty-five. Whatever the situation calls for. Later, of course, we could add to that number if need be.’

  Korn asked, ‘Will the Irish and the British accept this?’

  Dawson shrugged. ‘Who knows? It’s a friendly suggestion. One ally to a couple of others. They haven’t exactly handled it well on their own, have they? Besides, I’m not talking about sending in armed forces. Advisors only. There’s a big difference.’

  Korn sat back in his seat. He wasn’t interested in the President’s plans for Ireland.

  Thomas Dawson said nothing more on the subject. He was conscious of the helicopter losing height. He looked out of the window and saw, like a submarine rising on an empty dark sea, the pale lights of an isolated dwelling. And then he was dropping towards it, down and down to his brother’s house of sorrow.

  25

  Hastings, New York

  The River View Motel was a brown brick building located five miles from State Highway 87. It was inappropriately named. Unless you had an excellent telescope and a forty-foot high platform on which to stand, you’d never get a glimpse of any river. The view, such as it was, was obstructed by the roof-tops of surrounding houses and by trees. Seamus Houlihan stood on the balcony outside his room and looked out across a concrete forecourt at two small neon lights that said OFFICE and VACANCY. He saw the shadow of the man who sat behind the window down there. Then, changing his angle of vision, he saw the yellow truck. It was the only vehicle in the whole bloody place. Scratched and dented and splattered with mud, it resembled some old wagon of war.

  Houlihan leaned against the rail. So far as he could tell this place had no other residents besides himself and Rorke and McGrath. He yawned, turned around, stepped inside his room. He locked the door, sat down in his armchair, picked up his M-16 from the floor and wondered why bloody McInnes had been so insistent when he’d called a while back. The man had turned into a nag. He was like an old woman, Houlihan thought. Worrying over this, over that, fretting and whining. He’d be taking up crochet next. Dump the weapons indeed!

  Houlihan heard Rorke and McGrath move along the balcony. They knocked quietly on his door. He got up, slid the chain, let them come inside. Rorke was carrying a sixpack of Genesee Cream Ale, and McGrath had a pint of Johnny Walker Red Label.

  Houlihan produced a deck of cards from his duffel bag and shuffled them. ‘Want to play a few hands?’ he asked.

  ‘Aye, why not,’ McGrath said. He and Rorke sat down at the small table by the window. Houlihan popped one of the beers and proposed a game of three card brag, nothing wild.

  They played a hand for American pennies and Houlihan won it with a queen high. Rorke had a ten, and McGrath the worst hand possible in brag, a five high. Houlihan smiled and sipped his beer, which tasted like soapsuds in his mouth.

  Rorke dealt a second hand, which Houlihan also won, this time with a pair of eights.

  ‘Shitty cards,’ McGrath said, turning over a four, a six and a nine.

  McGrath dealt another hand. Houlihan received three threes, called a prile, the highest hand in the game. He had quite a collection of pennies by this time, a small coppery heap in front of him.

  ‘You’re a lucky sod,’ McGrath said.

  Houlihan scooped the pennies towards himself. He liked the simple pleasure of winning.

  Rorke yawned. McGrath shuffled his feet. Neither of them ever enjoyed playing cards with Houlihan for long. Seamus had a way of always winning. When he started to lose he’d begin to cheat, palming cards in the most obvious fashion. Nobody ever complained when he cheated.

  From the forecourt below the window there was the sound of a car. Houlihan stepped to the drapes, parted them deftly, saw a small red car go past the truck and then it disappeared around the other side of the building. After that there was silence again. Houlihan dropped the curtains back in place.

  ‘Anything wrong?’ Rorke asked.

  ‘Just a car,’ Houlihan replied.

  McGrath ran a tattooed hand through his short brown hair. ‘I don’t mind saying, I’ll be glad when we’re out of this place. It gives me the willies being the only people in this whole dump.’

  Even though the car had gone, force of habit kept Houlihan listening. He experienced a small shrill sensation of unease, and he had been trusting such instincts for a long time now. He reached down and picked up his automatic weapon, a movement that was almost involuntary.

  He looked at the other two men. ‘Where are your guns?’ he asked.

  ‘In our room,’ Rorke replied.

  ‘Get them and come back here.’

  ‘Get them?’ Rorke asked.

  ‘Do as I tell you.’

  Both men turned towards the door.

  ‘One of you,’ Houlihan said. ‘It doesn’t take two men to pick up the weapons.’

  McGrath went outside, closing the door behind him. Houlihan, stepping back to the drapes, saw him move along the balcony. Outside, the forecourt was still, lit only by a couple of pale lamps and the neon signs burning above the office.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Rorke wanted to know.

  Houlihan didn’t answer. He wasn’t sure anyhow. There were times when he had feelings he just couldn’t explain. Some people called it a sixth sense, but to Seamus Houlihan it was nothing more th
an a survivor’s caution. One time, in Armagh Jail, he’d known in advance that some Catholics were lying in wait for him in the lavatories. Nobody had actually told him this. He hadn’t seen anything unusual either. It had simply occurred to him. There had been a slight pricking sense of danger, nothing he could truly identify, but he’d heeded the sensation with enough attention that when he stepped into the lavatories he was armed with a lead-pipe wrapped in a rag. The Catholics had been there all right, but when they saw what he was carrying they dispersed quickly. Consequently, Seamus had a healthy respect for his own antennae. With his fingers holding the drapes about a half-inch apart he scanned the forecourt.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Rorke asked again.

  ‘Probably nothing,’ Houlihan answered. ‘But I’m not in the business of taking chances.’

  ‘How do you know this isn’t an elaborate trap?’ Pagan asked. ‘How do you know that this isn’t something McInnes and I cooked up between us? We play out a dramatic scene. I get to punch Ivor. But it’s all fake. It’s all done for the purpose of luring you here to Arsehole-on-the-Hudson so we can kill you. How do you know that isn’t true?’

  Patrick Cairney stared through the windshield of the Dodge at the side of the motel building. He wasn’t really listening to Frank Pagan. He was looking up at the balcony. At the lit windows of one room. There was a pain inside him that throbbed endlessly. He shut his eyes a second, and what he saw pressed behind his lids was Finn, Finn the indestructible, the immortal. Finn in his baggy cords, standing by the window in the room of harps. Finn’s finger tunelessly plucking strings. Everywhere he searched his mind he saw images of Finn.

  Cairney opened his eyes and stared hard at the yellow rectangle of window above. When he’d called the house near Dun Laoghaire, an unfamiliar voice had answered the telephone. Not Finn. Finn, who always answered the phone himself because there was never anybody else in the house to do it, would have picked up the receiver if he’d been there to do it. And he wasn’t. The strange voice had been hard and sharp and edgy. Who is this? Who’s calling? Patrick Cairney had a mental image of Garda officers going through the house, and somewhere lay Finn’s body covered in a plastic sheet, surrounded by photographers and fingerprint men and all the other officials who attended so clumsily to violent death. A murder investigation, Finn’s house ransacked by careless fingers, files opened and read, correspondence analysed for clues.

  Finn was dead.

  Patrick Cairney tried not to think. But this one incontrovertible fact kept coming back at him. Again and again. It surged up out of all the hollows he felt inside. It echoed, died, returned with vigour. Finn was dead. He’d never felt loneliness like this before.

  ‘You haven’t answered my question,’ Pagan said.

  Cairney couldn’t take his eyes from the window. He needed to kill. It was the first time in his life that he felt he really needed to shed blood. Beyond that lit window were the men who had slain Finn. The butchers. ‘McInnes is telling the truth. This isn’t a trap.’

  Frank Pagan sighed. It was when McInnes had mentioned Finn that the atmosphere of the room in the Essex House had changed. Jig bought the whole story. Everything. Lock and stock and all the rest of it. He remembered Finn’s name from his files, recalled the mystery of the man who was said to have controlled the finances of the IRA, and what he wondered about now was the nature of the relationship between Jig and Finn. Ever since McInnes had pronounced the man dead, ever since that phone call had been placed to Ireland, Jig had gone into a place that was beyond Pagan’s reach. A place where with every passing moment it seemed to Pagan that something quite volcanic was going on inside of the man. Pagan thought about taking his chance now, grabbing the gun in Jig’s hand and seizing it. But he wasn’t going to be lulled by Jig’s apparent distraction or the volatile nature of his mood.

  Cairney said, ‘McInnes was right about Finn. He was right about the Ryder truck.’

  ‘He said four men checked into this hotel. The guy at the desk says three.’

  ‘McInnes got his numbers wrong. That’s all.’

  Pagan asked, ‘Have you ever heard of this Houlihan?’

  Cairney pressed his fingertips to his eyes. There was a dull pain behind them. He thought he heard the sound of his whole life collapsing inside him. ‘Pagan, I don’t know the name of every person associated with the IRA. We’re talking about a large and secretive organisation arranged in cells. It’s highly unlikely that I’d know the man.’

  Patrick Cairney continued to study the motel. A balcony ran the length of the upper floor, studded here and there with dim overhead lights. Across the forecourt two neon signs shimmered. One read VACANCY. The tension he felt was strong, like acid rising inside him. He tried to relax, tried to put his mind in a place beyond Finn. There isn’t time for this, he thought. Finn wouldn’t want you to grieve over him. What Finn would want was retribution, plain and simple. Get on with it, boy. Don’t dwell on death. People come and people go, only the Cause remains. All at once Cairney was standing in Glasnevin Cemetery and Finn was handing him a revolver, and Cairney wished now that he’d reached out – just once in the whole time he’d known Finn – and goddam held him. On that day. Or any other. Just once. Somewhere. But death took everything away, sealed all the hatches, killed all the possibilities, and whatever he felt now for Finn could never be said.

  ‘You’ve only got McInnes’s word,’ Pagan said, with the air of a man making one last plea which he knows in advance will be useless. ‘You’ve only got his word that the men in this motel are responsible for all the violence. In my book, Jig, that’s a damn frail thing to go on.’

  Cairney looked at Pagan. ‘Your own story was also frail, if you remember. And I accepted it, didn’t I? I accepted the story you told me about McInnes, didn’t I? It was me who decided to take a chance on you, Pagan, and go back to New York City.’

  ‘There’s a difference,’ Pagan said. ‘I don’t lie.’

  Cairney returned his eyes to the balcony. Then he glanced across the parking-area at the yellow truck. It dully reflected the neon signs.

  ‘So what now?’ Pagan asked. ‘Do you go in? Is that your scheme? Do you go in with your six-gun drawn and your fingers crossed?’

  Pagan lowered his face wearily against the rim of the steering-wheel. He was tired of arguing the case against McInnes. Besides, Jig was running this show. Jig had the guns. It was Jig’s baby. And if Jig wanted to believe Ivor, if he wanted to believe that the men inside this motel were some renegade faction of the IRA, well that was the way it was going to be, and there was nothing Pagan could do or say to change it.

  Cairney tapped the barrel of his gun against the dash, a quiet little tattoo. ‘You’re going in with me.’

  ‘Right,’ Pagan said. ‘Unarmed, of course.’

  Cairney reached inside the pocket of his overcoat and took out Pagan’s gun, the Bernardelli.

  ‘I can’t do this alone,’ Cairney said.

  Pagan stared at his own gun. He made no move to take it from Jig’s hand.

  Cairney realised that this gesture could easily backfire. He was holding the gun out, reaching across a gulf that was far more than the handful of inches separating him from Frank Pagan. But what was the alternative? If he went in alone against the three men, his chances were very thin. Besides, that would entail leaving Frank Pagan right here in the car – and Pagan might just sneak away to make a phone call, bringing in reinforcements. It was possible. Cairney, who knew he was gambling, dangled the Bernardelli in the air.

  ‘I can’t do this alone,’ he said again.

  ‘Goddam,’ Pagan said.

  ‘I need you, Pagan. Take the gun.’

  ‘Then what?’

  Cairney said, ‘I don’t think you’re going to shoot me in the back, Pagan. You had a chance at that already on Canal Street.’

  Pagan still didn’t take the weapon. He kept his hands clamped to the wheel.

  Cairney thrust the Bernardelli forward. ‘There are three
men in this place, Pagan. They shot up a school bus, and they bombed a church. More than that, they killed Padraic Finn. That’s all I need to know.’

  Pagan suddenly hated the idea that he was transparent to Jig. Jig saw straight through him. Jig understood there was no way in the world, given Pagan’s private code of behaviour – which was bound up with such antiquated notions as decency and honour and justice, the very sounds of which suggested they belonged in their own room in the British Museum – that Pagan would turn the weapon on him. Frank Pagan wished he were devious, that he had hidden lodes of cunning and could simply take his gun back and shoot Jig through the eyes and drive away from this place, forgetting the three men allegedly responsible for so many deaths. Praise from The Yard. Love and kisses from Furry Jake. Fuck them. Fuck them all. He didn’t need their pressures. He’d do this thing his own way. And if it meant going up to that balcony with Jig, then that’s what he’d do.

  He raised his hand, brought it out towards the gun, didn’t touch it.

  ‘Imagine this, Jig,’ he said. ‘We go in there. There’s gunplay. We come out again intact. What then? Do you expect me to hand this weapon back like a good little boy? Because I have no bloody intention of doing that.’

  Cairney didn’t respond to the question. He couldn’t see that far into the future. Nor did it matter. He turned his face back to the balcony.

  ‘It’s one of those unanswerable questions, is it?’ Pagan asked. ‘We play it as it comes.’

  ‘There’s no other way.’

  Pagan took the pistol from Jig’s fingers.

  Jig opened the door of the Dodge. The night air that came in was cold and smelled of damp leaves and the musty odour of the river. Honour and decency and a sense of justice, Pagan thought. They weren’t always wonderful qualities to bring into a situation, but they were inherent in him, a perception that irritated him. Why couldn’t he have been more sly? He opened his own door now and stared up in the direction of the balcony. Another man might simply have shot Jig there and then. But he wasn’t that man, nor could he ever be.