‘The only thing I understand is that you’re going straight to jail,’ Pagan said.
‘I don’t think so.’ McInnes smiled. It was an infuriating little movement of the lips. ‘For one thing, Frank, you’ve got nothing in the way of evidence that links me with anything. For another, my dear wife here had no part in the tragedy that took place in this house. Father finds out about son, shoots son, turns gun on himself. You’ve seen the headlines before, I’m sure.’
‘There are some corpses in Hudson,’ Pagan said. ‘The valiant men of the Free Ulster Volunteers. The people you betrayed. How would you explain them away?’
‘Do I have to? They had nothing to do with me. Show me a connection, Frank.’
Pagan hesitated. He saw it now. He saw the flaw in Ivor’s scheme, and he circled it in his mind briefly before pouncing on it joyfully. ‘They had guns, Ivor. Presumably the same guns used in the attack on the school-bus.’
‘Guns?’ McInnes appeared surprised. ‘They didn’t have any guns!’
‘What’s the matter, Ivor? Did you expect them to be unarmed? Was that what you wanted? That they wouldn’t have anything that might tie them to the school-bus? Tough shit. What happened? Did they decide not to follow your orders?’
McInnes said, ‘They were supposed to get rid of the goddam weapons.’
‘Terrible how unreliable the hired help is these days,’ Pagan said. ‘It isn’t going to be difficult to show that these men weren’t members of the IRA. As soon as they’re fingerprinted and run through the computer, everybody’s going to know that they were connected with the FUV. Fingerprints and weapons will prove conclusively that the attacks weren’t carried out by anyone associated with the Irish Republican Army. How does that grab you, Ivor? If only they’d tossed their weapons away, everything would have been neatly blamed on the IRA.’
McInnes was quiet for a time. He seemed rather pale to Pagan. ‘It might change things a little,’ he said and there was a certain raspiness in his voice.
‘It might change things quite a lot,’ Pagan said. He was savouring this moment, the punctured expression on Ivor’s craggy face, the way the man’s mouth had slackened, his smile erased. ‘It demolishes your notion of blaming the IRA. And there goes your case, Ivor. If you hadn’t betrayed your own chums in Hudson, my friend, you might just be able to walk out of here. But you were so bloody anxious to get rid of your own thugs you didn’t stop to think. You didn’t want them around as a potential embarrassment, did you? You slipped up there. You should have let your killers leave the country.’
The woman asked, ‘Is he serious, Ivor?’
‘Deadly,’ Pagan replied. ‘Don’t you hear it? That long drawn-out sound of a man’s scheme dying?’
McInnes made a small fumbling gesture with his hand. He looked lost, but then he appeared to gather himself together again.
‘It could still work,’ McInnes said. ‘I know it could still work.’
‘Ivor,’ Pagan said. ‘It’s not going to work.’
‘Jesus,’ McInnes said angrily. ‘I’m telling you it could still work. I’ll think of a way. I’ll think of something.’
‘How, Ivor? How is it going to work now? You can’t think of anything that could make it plausible now. There are corpses in Hudson. You can’t fucking wish them away, Ivor.’
The woman placed her hand on McInnes’s wrist as if to calm him down. She had a small smile on her face. ‘They still can’t link you with any killings,’ she said. ‘They can’t tie you into anything that’s happened, Ivor.’
Pagan looked at her. It was obvious she provided some kind of support system for McInnes, which made her as crazy as he was. The little wife comforting the distraught husband, laying out his slippers in front of the fire and massaging his weary shoulders. The lethal little woman. But Ivor looked despairing again, a chessplayer who has overlooked some simple strategy, who has made a bad pawn move at a bad time.
Pagan thought for a moment. ‘Even if you could walk out of here, I could make a case, Ivor. You know I could do it. I’d backtrack. I’d go over all your movements. All your associations. I’d go back ten years if I had to, but you know I’d make a damn good case. There are links between you and the killers because somewhere you had to sit down and plan this whole thing out with them. I’d find those links. And when I did, I’d squeeze you like a fucking cherry.’
The woman said, ‘We’re going. We’re leaving, Ivor.’
‘I have a gun,’ Pagan said.
The woman slipped off her glasses. There was a cruelty somewhere in that beauty. The mouth was heartless. The eyes seemed subtly insane. ‘Use it then, Mr. Pagan.’
She linked her arm through McInnes’s.
‘Use it,’ she said again. ‘Shoot me.’
Frank Pagan marvelled at her calm. He raised the gun, levelled it. He didn’t want these people dead. He wanted them tried and imprisoned. Imprisoned for a very long time, the rest of their lives. Death was altogether too quick, too generous.
The woman smiled at him. ‘Goodbye, Mr. Pagan.’
‘I’ll shoot,’ Pagan said.
The woman, who had infinitely more nerve than McInnes, put her hands on her hips. It was a gesture of defiance. She had seen into the heart of Frank Pagan, and she understood that he wasn’t capable of cold-blooded murder. She knew she was free, that all she had to do was walk with Ivor McInnes to the door.
The smile on her face chilled Pagan.
‘Goodbye,’ she said again.
Ivor McInnes placed his arm once more around the woman’s shoulder.
And then he lurched suddenly, sinking to his knees, a horrified expression on his face. His face travelled down the length of the woman’s leg as he slipped. Blood spilled from the side of his jaw. The woman screamed. She turned, kneeled alongside McInnes, and then the back of her scalp was shattered with a sound Frank Pagan could feel in his own head. She toppled forward over the body of McInnes, and she lay there motionless, hands outstretched.
Pagan turned and looked up the flight of stairs.
The shots had come from the landing up there. From the shadows. Pagan thought he saw somebody move. He went towards the stairs quickly.
It was Finn’s voice Jig heard, it was Finn’s voice inside his head. A sea breeze, a gull’s wing, it floated through his brain with a soft insistence, quiet and reassuring and coming from a place nearby. Even when you don’t think you’ve got it, boy, you’ll always find some strength from somewhere.
The strength.
He didn’t have any strength left.
What life he still had was going out like the tide in Dublin Bay.
He didn’t hear the shots he fired, nor the sound of the gun slipping out of his fingers and toppling down the stairs. He didn’t feel any kind of pain. He saw Celestine, the lovely, venomous Celestine, look clumsy in death.
Dying isn’t any great business. When you took the oath, you committed yourself to death. It’s nothing to fear because it’s been a close companion all along.
Dear Finn. He had loved Finn more than he’d ever loved his father. More than any other human being.
Jig closed his eyes. He lay down on the landing. He wondered what death was going to be like.
It was all weariness now, and fatigue such as he’d never felt before.
He didn’t see Frank Pagan come up the stairs, didn’t hear him. He didn’t feel Frank Pagan’s fingers touch his arm.
And he never heard Frank Pagan turn away and go back down the stairs because all the doors to his mind had closed tight shut and there was only darkness – and somewhere, at the very last, a sweet note that might have been plucked on the string of a harp, one of Finn’s harps, echoing and echoing, then finally silent and still.
Frank Pagan opened the dead woman’s satchel, looked inside, saw what he guessed was there all along, then went out onto the steps of the house. Over the lake lay some low clouds, heavy and thick. Pagan walked towards the shore, moving very slowly. He had a bad taste in h
is mouth and his head felt as if it were filled with stones. When he reached the reeds at the shoreline he sat down.
He tossed a pebble out into the water lethargically. He was beyond tiredness now. His condition felt more serious. There was a numbness inside him. It was almost as if he were out of contact with himself. He couldn’t get in touch with ground control. He heard the lyrics of a song he’d listened to only a day or so before on his car radio.
With your long blond hair and your eyes of blue
The only thing I ever get from you
Is sorrow …
Celestine Cairney. Sorrow and teachery.
Treachery, he thought. It bruised you, left you shaken. It shouldn’t have surprised you, but it always did. Call me naive, Pagan thought. What is it about you that keeps bringing you back to the untenable idea that the human soul is not so awful as it sometimes seems?
He flipped another stone out into the sombre lake.
He would go home, and he’d take nothing with him, unless you counted a narrative of deception and violence. At least it was something he didn’t have to declare at Customs. And he was dissatisfied too, because the total story eluded him. The bits and pieces you could put together only after you’d started to dig around. He wasn’t sure he had the energy for that. He wasn’t certain he had the inclination to go around tagging the corpses, trying to understand the roles of people who no longer had any part left to play.
He thought of Jig’s face in death. How to describe that? Composed? Indifferent? He wasn’t sure. He shut his eyes and felt the frosty morning breeze scurry across the surface of the lake, blowing through his hair, against his face. It might have been refreshing in other circumstances. But not now. He hardly felt it.
He opened his eyes when he heard the sound of footsteps coming towards him. The swishing of reeds. He saw Artie Zuboric and Tyson Bruno looming up, two men in a raging hurry, flustered and out of breath. Artie’s moustache hadn’t been combed, and it drooped sadly. Tyson Bruno needed a shave. His jaw looked like sandpaper.
Pagan smiled at them. ‘Welcome,’ he said.
Zuboric took a gun out of his raincoat. ‘You’re up shit creek, Frank.’
‘A place I know well,’ Pagan replied. He turned away from the two agents and looked out at the gloomy lake. He was going to pretend that Zuboric didn’t have a gun in his hand. He wanted to see how far that might get him. A little make-believe.
But Zuboric wasn’t going to be ignored. He shoved the barrel of the gun into the back of Frank Pagan’s neck.
‘Artie, please,’ Pagan said. ‘It’s a tender spot.’
‘I’m trying to think of one good reason why I shouldn’t shoot you.’
‘I’ll give you one,’ Pagan said. ‘I don’t want to die.’
‘Not good enough, Frankie. Not convincing.’
Pagan pushed the gun away with his fingers. He hated anyone calling him Frankie.
Tyson Bruno, no doubt remembering the day Pagan struck him, plucked a reed out of the ground and bent it between his hands. ‘Shoot him,’ he said with a certain exuberance. ‘You’ve got the authorisation to do it. Shoot him. Nobody’s going to give a fiddler’s fuck anyway.’
Zuboric poked the gun back into the nape of Pagan’s neck. Frank Pagan stood up, feeling the edge of irritation. These characters had quite spoiled his lakeside meditation.
‘One fucking good reason,’ Zuboric said again.
Pagan stared into the agent’s face. He didn’t like what he saw there. Meanness, a lack of imagination, a narrow human being at best. Artie and Tyson, a couple of lovely specimens. Pagan looked out once more across the water. He wasn’t absolutely sure if Zuboric intended to use the gun. He had no confidence in his own predictions when it came to Zuboric.
‘You been in the house?’ Pagan asked.
‘Not yet.’
Pagan smiled. ‘You should. Jig’s dead.’
‘Dead? How?’
‘Does it matter?’ Pagan asked. He had a thought just then. It was cynical and thoroughly without any redeeming qualities, unless you happened to be Artie Zuboric. When it occurred to him he wanted to laugh out loud. But Artie had a gun, and Pagan didn’t want to make any sound the agent might misinterpret. He didn’t want to die right here and now.
‘Artie,’ he said. ‘How would you like to be a hero?’
Zuboric looked mystified. ‘What are you trying to say?’
‘How would you like to be known as the man who killed Jig?’
Zuboric said nothing. He was scrutinising Pagan, his whole face filled with mistrust.
‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Artie? Think of it. Think of the fame. Your standing in Korn’s eyes. Your stock would go up overnight. You’d be a big bloody hero.’
‘I’m not with you,’ Zuboric said.
‘It’s dead simple. I saw you do it, after all. I’m your eyewitness. Jig was about to kill me, when all of a sudden you just popped up and saved my life.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Never more so, my old dear. Never more so.’
Tyson Bruno cleared his throat. ‘It sounds like bullshit to me. I’d shoot the sonofabitch, Artie.’
‘Wait,’ Zuboric said.
‘It’s a nifty idea,’ Pagan remarked. ‘I’ll tell you what. For good measure, I’ll throw in Ivor McInnes as well. I’ll say you gunned him down because he drew a pistol on you.’
Zuboric narrowed his eyes. ‘McInnes?’
‘Absolutely.’ Pagan looked at Tyson Bruno. ‘You could pick up a consolation prize, Ty. We can say you were forced to shoot McInnes’s wife because she’d just shot Senator Cairney. Christ, there are enough bodies to go round. Regular funeral parlour up there.’
‘Senator Cairney?’ Bruno asked.
‘The very same,’ Pagan said.
‘Hold on,’ Zuboric said. ‘Just wait a minute. What about ballistics tests? They’ll find out I never fired this gun at anybody.’
‘A piece of cake,’ Pagan said. ‘It’s all a question of logic. Who had what gun and why. I don’t think such a story is beyond us, is it? Not if we put our heads together. It’s no sweat.’
‘I still don’t like it.’ Tyson Bruno snapped another reed. He folded it between his hands and blew into it, creating a humming sound.
‘Ty. Think. Merit badges. Maybe promotion. A rise in salary. A leg up the ladder. Advancement.’
Zuboric had a curious smile on his face. There was a faraway look in his eyes. ‘How can we trust you, Pagan?’
Frank Pagan shrugged. ‘You’ve got two choices. You can shoot me. Or you can use me to back up the authentic story of your heroic deeds. What’s it to be, Arthur?’
Zuboric was silent. He was looking at Tyson Bruno. There was some form of mutual decision-making going on here. Pagan stared up at the sky. A sound forced its way through the cover of clouds, throaty and deep. There, far over the trees on the other side of the lake, two helicopters appeared. Whirring, skimming treetops, they were coming in towards Roscommon like a pair of enormous gnats.
‘Visitors,’ Pagan said. ‘Friends of yours?’
Zuboric peered up. Tyson Bruno did likewise, making slits of his puffy eyes. The helicopters came in across the lake, making the water into tiny whirlpools. They were travelling very low.
The chopper in front banked slightly. There was the unmistakable sight of Leonard Korn’s shaved head in the cabin. He was gesticulating, pointing down towards the three men hunched by the edge of the lake.
‘Your Master,’ Pagan said. ‘Better make up your mind quickly.’
‘One thing, Frank. Why don’t you want credit for Jig yourself?’
Credit, Pagan thought. It was a funny word. ‘I couldn’t do that,’ he replied. ‘I couldn’t deprive you, Artie.’
Zuboric nodded. ‘Okay. It’s a deal. Tyson?’
Bruno looked suddenly quite brutal. ‘It’s okay with me. But there’s something I got to settle first.’
‘Like what?’ Zuboric asked.
> ‘I owe this sonofabitch,’ and Tyson Bruno turned to Pagan, making a hammer out of his fist and raising it in the air with the intention of bringing it down somewhere on Pagan’s face.
Frank Pagan reached up and caught Bruno’s fist in his hand and twisted, just enough to make Bruno gasp and step back.
‘Not today, Ty,’ Pagan said. ‘I’m not in the mood. Believe me.’
There was a wicked look in Pagan’s eye, a murderous light that made Tyson Bruno refrain from trying a second time.
‘Besides,’ Pagan added, ‘I make it a point not to fight with heroes.’
Zuboric and Tyson Bruno looked at one another as if to be sure they had reached agreement regarding Pagan’s proposition. They had. Then they turned and started to walk towards the house.
As Pagan watched them move away, he remembered the satchel in the house. He remembered how it lay alongside Celestine’s body. It contained several million dollars of IRA money. He considered calling out to the two agents, but he didn’t. Let them discover it themselves. Let them decide what to do with all that cash. He thought he knew anyway. They were about to become heroes, after all. And heroes deserved something more in the way of remuneration than any salary the FBI might provide. He shrugged and looked up at the helicopters. Jig’s cash. And Jig was dead. The fate of the money – money that had brought death and treachery, and, for himself, a depression he couldn’t shake, an isolation that penetrated him, money that was bloody and tainted and only valuable now to men without scruples – didn’t matter a damn to him.
He saw the choppers come in low over the front lawn just as Zuboric and Bruno disappeared through the open doorway and were swallowed by the gloomy interior of the house. He sat down among the reeds. The surface of Roscommon lake, recently disturbed by the great blades of the helicopters, was placid again, and as desolate as Frank Pagan felt himself.
EPILOGUE
New York City
On the evening before St. Patrick’s Day, Frank Pagan went inside a bar on the West Side of Manhattan that belonged to a man who had made a good living out of performing Irish folk songs in a rich baritone voice. Pagan ordered a Guinness and scanned the large room. There was a great deal of easy laughter in this place. If there were any tension, if anybody had paid any mind to the editorial writers who had called for the cancellation of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade this year, it didn’t show. You might just as well have tried to cancel New Year’s Eve. Everybody here was having a fine old time.
Jig Page 56