Budenny laughed. ‘Pretty girls. One should always appreciate them. To my mind, they’re, the real works of art. Not stuffy old canvases hanging on a mouldy wall.’
Gurenko looked at the dead screen. He concluded that Budenny’s soul was a lost cause. Tomorrow’s schedule,’ he said. ‘It includes the Scuola Grande di San Rocco?’
‘Of course it does. Did you think I’d overlook your request?’ Budenny pretended to be offended. He was a great ham with a huge repertoire of exaggerated expressions.
‘I simply wanted to be sure,’ said Gurenko. Tomorrow, he’d at least have the chance to be in the presence of the Tintorettos in the Scuola – even if he couldn’t actually give them the study they required because he didn’t have the time. But they’d be all around him in their luminous glory. The Adoration of the Magi. The Flight into Egypt. The Slaughter of the Innocents.
Budenny yawned, covered his mouth with his hand. ‘I’ll leave you. Let you get some sleep. If you need me, my room is next door.’
Gurenko said good night, watching Budenny go. Alone, he undressed, opened his suitcase, took out a brown bathrobe. Then he lay down on the bed. He picked up a small guidebook to Venice, flicked the pages until he came to the Scuola. The Crucifixion, in his own modest view the painter’s best work. The Miracle of the Manna, The Punishments of the Serpents. He knew he’d experience the kind of awe that always overcame him in the presence of genius, that reverential hush of his heart, the dumbstruck silences of his mind. Great art had a way of putting things in perspective for him; it reminded him of his own mortality.
He closed the book, opened a small plastic bottle, and dutifully swallowed two multi-vitamin capsules as Svetlana had instructed him.
Vassily Budenny locked the door of his suite. He rubbed his hands together briskly. His blood pressure was high, his pulses too fast, his heart quick. Earlier, on the flight from Paris, he’d gone inside the toilet and taken a mild tranquillizer. He’d studied his face in the mirror for such a long time he’d experienced a sense of unfamiliarity in the reflection; he might have been looking at a stranger. What will history have to say about Vassily Budenny? Would it vilify him? applaud him? Or would there only be silence? Perhaps his role would never be known, perhaps a century might pass before his significance was discovered. What did it matter?
Historical judgements lay in the hands of people as yet unborn. It was an odd consideration. Even as he’d gazed at himself in the mirror he’d imagined coupling on some double bed in a strange city, two people copulating in Minsk, say, the passage of sperm from man to woman, the fertilization of the egg, an embryo that would become an historian of the future, an eager young man or woman whose eventual academic labours would be a doctoral thesis on the life and times of Vassily Budenny. Heroism or denunciation – it made no difference. His patriotic duty was clear.
He lay down on the sofa, kicked off his shoes, turned on the TV, enjoyed the dancing girls. Pert little bottoms. Poor Gurenko, he thought. The man would have been happier as the administrator of an obscure province, scribbling poetry in the evenings, contemplating the mystery of moths that, attracted to light, fluttered under his desk lamp.
THIRTY-TWO
LYON
‘JUST WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU?’ PAGAN ASKED. HE LOOKED INTO THE girl’s face and thought: Some things you couldn’t absorb at once. You needed time and distance. You had to be far away from the epicentre of the blast before you grasped the extent of the damage. She was gazing at him with a serious expression.
‘You didn’t trust me,’ she said. ‘You had to do some checking, didn’t you? You couldn’t stop yourself.’
‘Old habits.’
‘And bad ones,’ she said quietly.
A smell haunted him, fiery turpentine, canvases devoured by flame. His unruly thoughts stampeded. He was unable to harness them. He thought: Fool. Middle aged and pathetic. A lonely man too careless with the remains of his heart. He remembered how they’d made love, that passion.
‘Who are you?’ he asked again.
‘Who do you think I am?’
‘Do me a favour. Spare me the enigmatic questions.’
She was quiet. She appeared to be gathering herself for an explanation of some sort, and although she seemed calm Pagan had the feeling it was a superficial thing taking enormous effort. He was sensitive to other people’s anxieties, but not, seemingly, to his own. He’d staggered blindly into an affair with this girl, he’d plunged without pause, and when he’d taken a step back to survey his situation it was too late. Questions crowded him. Her identity. The fact she knew where to find him in Lyon. Her motive for lying. For the façade, all the sweet words.
‘Brennan Carberry was convenient,’ she said. ‘She served her purpose.’
‘You got a copy of a dead girl’s birth certificate, then applied for a passport in her name.’ Pagan heard himself speak in a flat fashion, one that belied his bewilderment.
‘The paper game,’ she said. ‘You know how easy it is to play. One phone call gets you a copy of a birth certificate. The rest is plain old sailing.’
Plain old sailing, he thought. He had a flash of her body in the hotel bedroom. The image was curiously inverted in his head, and strange, as if he were looking at the behaviour of another person altogether, another Frank Pagan. He felt suddenly drained, all energy depleted. Systems down, wires disconnected.
She moved as if to lay her fingers across his wrist. He pulled his hand away quickly. He said, ‘I couldn’t take disappointment. I don’t handle it well. I’m not built for heartbreak.’
‘You have a good memory, Frank,’ she said. She reached for something beyond his range of vision, a large leather handbag. She set it in her lap, opened the clasp, put her hand inside.
‘Some things just stick,’ he remarked. ‘Especially bullshit.’ He had a surge of raw bitterness, a sharp awareness of loss.
‘You think that’s all it was?’
‘It was a bad script,’ he said. ‘Who wrote your lines for you? Or did you manage to make them up on the spur of the fucking moment all by your little self?’ He reproached himself for the crude anger in his voice, but what was he supposed to do? Stay detached? He didn’t have the capacity for icy disinterest. She’d lied to him, and the lies ran deeper than the matter of assuming the identity of a dead woman: how had she known where to find him? What exactly was being played out here in a hospital room in a rainy French city?
She stared into his eyes. He detected in her look a quality of melancholy he wanted to believe was genuine – but he set the notion aside. She’s fake. An actress. Everything about her is false. Nothing else is worth remembering.
Her hand still lingered inside her bag, almost as if she’d forgotten the reason for putting it there in the first place.
‘It was planned,’ he said. ‘Planned from the start. Right?’
‘You’re quick—’
‘The way you ran into my car. The way you infiltrated my life. The way you were supposed to make me … feel. All that was deliberate. More extracts from the same bloody shabby script. Did you rehearse it beforehand? Did you run through your lines with your script director or whoever the hell it was? Frank Pagan, pushover, been on his own too long, shouldn’t be too hard to crack open his shell, bring a little light into his dreary life. Oh, sure, just get him into bed and screw him until he sees rainbows and starts hallucinating about the possibilities of love.’ He gave into the anger completely now. He recognized it was not one emotion pure and simple, but several tributaries of feeling – pain, sadness, humiliation.
‘It started like that.’ She smiled at him rather gently. ‘But I was beginning to like you. And that wasn’t supposed to be part of the deal. I was beginning to have feelings. Dangerous things.’
Feelings, he thought. Even now he had the urge to reach for her, the longing to hear her say Hey, I’m joking – a cruel one, but a joke just the same. Hah hah, let’s get on with our lives, Frank. But he knew it wasn’t going to be like that.<
br />
‘Who instructed you?’ he asked. ‘Who pressed your button and set you in motion? Who told you to play this role? What’s the point behind it?’
She didn’t answer the questions. Instead she said, ‘I want you to understand, Frank.’ She removed a document from her bag, which she placed before him; but he didn’t want to touch it, whatever it was.
‘Look at it,’ she said.
He didn’t move. In small back rooms of his head he heard the angry slamming of doors, keys turning in heavy locks. Rooms he’d never visit again.
‘Look at it …’
Slowly, his hand unsteady, he reached for the document. It was an American passport. ‘So what,’ he said.
‘Look inside.’
He flipped the passport open. He stared at the page where her photograph was located. She looked innocent and vibrant with youth and she was gazing into the camera in a straightforward manner. There was no guile about this face. You would put your faith in those features. And I did, he thought. I truly did.
He raised his eyes, stared at her, said nothing.
‘Look at it closer,’ she said.
What was he supposed to see? He wasn’t sure. He gazed at the picture again, and then his eyes strayed to the passport owner’s name. But he’d reached a place where names had no validity, they shifted, you couldn’t expect stability.
He said the name aloud and it didn’t sound right.
She stared at him, waiting. He spoke the name again.
Katherine Cairney. But when you said anything long enough or looked at the particles of a word hard enough, they gave up any references to the real world. Katherine Cairney. It might have been an anagram whose solution was too dreadful to discover.
‘You killed my brother, Frank.’
Brother … This statement baffled him. Language was tunnelled by flaws.
‘Patrick Cairney was my brother,’ she said. ‘And you killed him. You killed him, Frank.’
Patrick Cairney. Jig.
Pagan sagged back against the pillows, letting the passport slither from his hands. He wished the medication would kick in again and free him from the straitjacket of this bad dream.
‘I was only supposed to watch you, Frank. That was my brief. Keep an eye on him. Report anything he does, anything he tells you. Get inside his head. Get information. The rest … the rest came kind of naturally because I was drawn to you.’
Drawn to me, he thought. Like a crow to carrion. Blood on a wet road and the fevered beat of wings and claws in his dead flesh. ‘Your brief,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Who the hell briefed you?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘It matters to me.’
She shook her head. ‘It’s not important now. The situation’s changed.’ She put her hand back inside the bag and brought out a small gun attached to which was a silencer. Pagan stared at the weapon, which seemed toylike, plastic, and his mind went scurrying into dead-end passageways. She pointed the gun at him and he turned his face to the side a moment.
‘I’m to be killed,’ he said. ‘And you’re the designated hitter.’
She tightened her hand on the gun. He strained forward a little. ‘I don’t give a shit what anybody told you, I didn’t shoot your brother.’
‘Sure, Frank,’ she said. ‘You tracked him, you hunted him down. You pulled the trigger. You did that, Frank.’
Pagan looked at the girl’s face, this stranger’s face, this Katherine Cairney. ‘Listen. And listen well. I went after Patrick. My job was to bring him in. That was the extent of it. I didn’t want him dead. That was the last damn thing I wanted. He was a key IRA player. But I didn’t pull the trigger. He was shot by his own stepmother, for Christ’s sake.’ He thought: I already told you that in another lifetime.
‘Jesus Christ. You’re still clinging to that crap. That was the official line, Frank. That was pabulum dispensed to satisfy the public and let the police and the Feds walk away without blood on their hands. Pure fabrication. And you’re still sticking to it—’
‘Who told you I killed him? Who are you working for anyway?’ he asked. ‘What are they paying you?’
‘There’s no pay—’
‘You work for nothing, is that it?’
‘I work for the Cause.’
‘Ah, of course, the Cause, forgive me for letting it slip my mind. The precious Cause, capital C. Patrick Cairney’s Cause.’ His voice was hard with forced sarcasm. He closed his eyes a moment: connections were rippling outwards from some central point, only he couldn’t quite detect the core, the place where the surface of water broke and where disturbances were created. Rings were interlocked with other rings, and they kept shimmering. If she was working for what she called the Cause, where did The Undertakers figure in this? Who had sent her here to Lyon? Ambassador Caan? Nimmo could have updated Caan on the situation and Sweet William might have turned the heat up on the girl. Pagan’s gone too far, Caan might have said. It was possible … The world seemed to him a great sphere of derangements in which he was doomed to search for loose connections that, in the end, would always elude him.
She pushed the gun toward him, a strange little motion of the hand, as if some force had compelled her from behind. Pagan looked directly into her eyes. ‘Are you capable of killing?’
‘I think so.’
‘You’ll have to do better than that,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to be one hundred per cent certain. Even more than one hundred. Are you that sure of yourself?’ He glanced at the wall, the place where his raincoat hung; he thought of the holstered pistol dangling under the coat, but he’d never be able to reach it before she pulled the trigger.
‘I’m sure,’ she said.
He wondered if it was certainty he heard in her voice, or bravado. He couldn’t tell. What he needed was space, room in which he might manoeuvre, test her capabilities.
‘Brennan, Katherine, whoever you are, what the hell do you think you’re involved in here? The Cause, for Christ’s sake. The good old murderous Cause. Let me see if I can guess. You made regular contributions to NORAID or some fund-raising group that specializes in tugging soft Irish hearts in exile, and somewhere along the way they pressed you into active service, and now you find yourself about to kill a man – based on some absurd lie that he shot your brother. Well, I’m sorry about Patrick, but I didn’t kill him.’ Pagan paused, but knew he had to keep talking, because the longer she listened the longer he survived. That simple.
She said, ‘You’re so full of shit. You haven’t got a clue, Pagan.’
‘No? Let me keep guessing. Stop me when I get it wrong. Shoot me when I step out of line. Here’s what I see. A young girl who’s brought up by a father who happens to be the principle American fund-raiser for the IRA. He talks of old glories, the bold fight for freedom, he throws in the Easter Rising because that’s always good for a quickening of the heartbeat. God, it’s wondrous stuff. Comrades in arms. Fighters. Hard men of courage. He force-feeds you martyrs, great old tales of heroes shot down in cold blood by the Brits. Maybe you even learn a few rebel songs on Daddy’s lap, and it’s cute, you’re like some little Shirley Temple mouthing songs she doesn’t even understand—’
‘You’re wrong, you’re way off—’
‘But the old songs have nothing to do with reality, they don’t have a bloody thing to do with the way people are dying in Ireland or England, do they? Anyway, you’re nicely indoctrinated at an early age – exactly the way your brother must have been – and you grow up believing in all the garbage you’ve been fed. And now somebody’s playing you like a bloody instrument. Somebody’s spooning out lies, stirring the truth around, manipulating you into an act of murder. And you know what? I look at you and I see a lovely scared young woman who hasn’t got a clue what she’s doing.’
‘You have no idea, Pagan. You think you know so much. You think you’re such a hot shot, don’t you?’ She pressed the gun into his chest and he tilted his head for
ward, squinting down at the silencer and wondering if he’d gone too far, goaded her more than was good for him. There was a delicate balance here and he didn’t know which way it was going to shift and his heart was a jackhammer.
‘I’m not blaming you,’ he said. ‘You can’t help yourself. You’ve been brainwashed and your brain’s been hung out to dry—’
‘Shut up—’
‘And you don’t know how to distance yourself from Daddy’s old stories, do you? You’re a prisoner of a history that was never as romantic as your father led you to believe. It was sordid and squalid and too many people have died for nothing. And here’s a small irony, love, if you’re in the mood for it. You’re not even Irish. You’re an American, you don’t know Ireland, you might think you do, but you only see it from a distance and your view is so limited it’s laughable—’
‘I suppose your view is the only acceptable one,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you just shut the fuck up?’
‘Why? Am I bothering you?’
‘I don’t need to listen to you moralize. It’s trite, Pagan. It’s trite and it’s tired.’
‘You don’t want to hear anything that undermines your creed, because it’s inviolate, it’s beyond criticism. Would you like me to describe what my wife looked like after she’d been blown up by one of your crowd’s bombs? You want details of that? You want to hear what was left of her? You want me to tell you what it felt like going down to the morgue and identifying the remains of Roxanne? Merry Christmas, Frank. Here’s a little present from the IRA. Enjoy.’
‘It’s war, and there are always casualties, because that’s the way it is—’
‘Casualties of war? A woman standing at a bus stop on Christmas Eve? Right. She’s an enemy. She’s most definitely an enemy. Let’s blow her and a few other Christmas shoppers to pieces. You never know. Instead of gift-wrapped boxes in their bags they might be carrying guns for the Loyalists.’ He was weary suddenly, talked out, depressed by memory. He looked into the girl’s face. Her expression was one of annoyance and determination: her loveliness was altered, as if it had been an illusion from the start. He remembered how, when he’d first met her, she’d been upset by the story of Roxanne’s death. Another piece of playacting, that’s all. I’m sentimental, Frank. I weep at movies. I’m a little soft-hearted. More lies. Lies all the way along the line. And you, Pagan, you paid the price of admission, you willingly picked up your ticket and entered the hall of mirrors.
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