‘I’m genuinely sorry about your wife,’ she said.
‘Excuse me if I doubt the sincerity of that.’ He could still smell the morgue if he tried hard enough, a medicinal aroma suggestive of bleach. He could still see the white tiles, the steel drawers where they stored the dead.
‘Think what you like, Pagan. It doesn’t matter to me. Nothing you say changes what I have to do.’
‘I didn’t imagine it would. Not for a moment. You have your orders, don’t you? And you have to carry them out like the good little foot-soldier you think you’re supposed to be.’ He looked into the girl’s face, glanced down at the gun she held against his ribs. He thought: It would take a sudden movement, it would have to be swift, a blurred motion of his hand. But it was chancy, the turn of a card, she only had to squeeze off one shot and that would be the end of it. A sense of timing was the thing – and lately he’d lost his. He was tense, wondering if he could pull it off, wondering if he had time and space, wondering about the contest between his reactions and hers.
‘You know, I feel sorry for you,’ he remarked.
‘Spare me your pity. I don’t need it.’
‘I also feel regret. I thought we had something real between us. For a while, you uplifted me.’
‘We had a nice moment, that was all. It’s over.’
‘It was more than a nice moment for me. I was starting to feel some sense of … call it life, if you like. Funny, don’t you think? I’m talking about life. And you’re about to end it.’
‘Yes. I’m about to end it,’ she said – and he thought he heard a tiny note of regret in her voice. Or maybe that was just what he wanted to hear. Something undeniably human.
‘Then why don’t you just pull the goddam trigger? There’s nothing to it.’ He stared into the eye of the gun, half-expecting the blast. This is the last sound you’ll ever hear, Frank. ‘Make sure of one thing. Go for the heart. Don’t waste your time with some pissant shot that goes into my stomach or hits me in the shoulder, because I want it to be quick. I don’t want to lie here bleeding from tissue and nerve damage. So do it properly. Right here.’ He raised a hand, indicated the centre of his chest. ‘Here. What they call …’ and he paused, weighing the next word, ‘the heart. You know where the heart’s located, don’t you?’
He saw it in her, the slightest flicker of hesitation. It wasn’t much, just enough to let him see that she’d never done this kind of thing before. She was new to violence. She drew the gun back from his ribs a matter of a few inches.
‘Good thinking,’ he remarked. ‘Otherwise you’d get my blood all over yourself. And we don’t want that, do we? We don’t want a mess. Executioners don’t stain themselves with their victims’ blood.’
She looked into his eyes. ‘You’re through talking.’
He gazed at the gun: time was seeping away. He imagined he heard shutters being slammed across windows. He imagined total darkness. Move, he thought. Move yourself. She was still pulling back from him, but the gun never wavered, she held it steady, directed toward his chest. She was a foot away at best. Force yourself to move, Pagan, or this is the place where the train finally stops. The gun stayed firm in her hand. In her mind, he thought, I am already dead, she’s already walking the corridors to the exit, gun securely tucked inside bag …
‘Mr Pagan?’
He hadn’t heard the door open.
The Vietnamese nun stepped quietly inside the room. She held a tray with a glass of water. ‘Time for your medication,’ she said, then noticed the girl, the gun, and she was suddenly very still.
The girl turned her face to the intruder and Pagan, in a flurry of sheets, forced himself up, lunged forward, seized her hand and twisted the gun to one side and a silenced shot went off with the sound of air rushing from a puncture. The shot struck the nun in the forehead. The tray clattered, the water-glass broke, the small woman – Pagan’s angel of mercy – dropped to the floor, surrounded by the collapsed folds of the white habit she wore. Enraged, Pagan forced the girl’s hand down, twisted it, making the gun slip from her fingers. She fought back with fierce determination, clawing at his face and neck. She tried to bring a knee up into his groin but he sidestepped her, slapped her across the lips, knocked her down on the bed, slapped her again. She rose quickly, rushed him, punching wildly, blows he parried for the most part against his arms. He backswiped her and she dropped on the bed and he picked up the fallen gun. He walked to where the nun lay. He looked at her wide eyes, the pleasant mouth slightly parted; blood ran over her forehead and along her eyebrows.
‘Another casualty for your side,’ he said. ‘Another accident – isn’t that what you’d call it?’
‘I didn’t make it happen.’ Breathless, she was sitting on the edge of the bed. ‘You forced the shot.’
He walked back to the bed and shoved the gun directly under the girl’s chin. He resisted the deranged impulse to shoot her where she sat. But that was what he wanted to do – eliminate her, snuff her out, just blow her away. He thought how frail she looked all at once, her features collapsed in dejection and uncertainty. Another man might possibly have found in himself reservoirs of forgiveness, might have made allowances for her background, her indoctrination, the way she’d been misled and manipulated, might have taken into account the way she’d lived under the mythic shadow of her famous brother: another man might. A saint maybe. But Pagan didn’t have that expansive generosity of spirit when it came to Katherine Cairney; it had been killed inside him. It had been injured years ago in a foul-smelling morgue; and in the last thirty minutes it had been fatally wounded. His anger was like a vast field with no horizon. He pushed the gun into her soft flesh until her neck was distended. ‘Talk to me,’ he said, and his voice was tight.
She closed her eyes. She said nothing.
‘Talk.’
‘I don’t have anything to say.’
He forced her down on the bed, his knees pressed into her body, the full weight of him upon her, and he thrust the gun deeper into her skin. And he remembered the last time they’d been in a bed together and he thought how his tenderness and affection had been corrupted. Was that what angered him more than anything else? The dead woman on the floor, who’d walked into all this innocently, seemed like a tragic coda to his emotions.
‘Who briefed you? Who gave you your instructions?’
‘Why the hell should I tell you?’
There was, Pagan thought, a limit to all things. And he’d reached his. He was prepared for the descent into brutality. He was ready to do real violence. It was strange how the heart could turn like this. It was weird and disturbing, the dark reactions you found in yourself. He raised the gun and held it in the air the way you might hold a knife before you plunged it downward. He thought of the butt smacking against bone, hard metal slicing open this lovely deceitful face. He knew what he must look like through her eyes – demented, beyond the reaches of reason, infinitely dangerous. And he knew she’d never encountered anyone in his condition before.
She stared up into the gun, as if she were already seeing its descent and feeling it come down on her face with shattering impact. Now she was afraid – he could see it in her eyes, smell it on her; all the bravado was falling away. On one level she seemed to understand that he wasn’t going to kill her just yet. But she also understood there was going to be pain instead, and pain wasn’t what she wanted to encounter.
‘Answer me,’ he said. He moved his arm higher, more threateningly. He was outside of himself, a spectator, fascinated by what he saw and at the same time repelled by his own behaviour. The beast set free, the cage broken. Pagan unhinged.
‘The name wouldn’t mean anything to you.’
‘Try me.’
‘Goddam you, let me up, I can’t breathe.’
‘Too bad.’
Blood was rushing to her face. She was struggling. She spoke in a gasp. ‘Tobias Barron.’
‘Barron,’ he said.
The name was one he’d seen in gossi
p columns, columns he never read because they were no more than fluff, idiocy, documenting the comings and goings of that class of people for some reason deemed celebrities. But somehow these columns infiltrated your head even if you never actually read them; pictures came at you as you skipped newspaper and magazine pages, and the brain, that insomniac limpet in the skull, stored all manner of needless trivia, including the names of flimsy celebrities.
‘The well-known philanthropist. The walking charity. Mister Goodheart. Friend to the famous. And he gave you your instructions. He told you what to do.’
She tried to push him away, then gave up. He enjoyed listening to her fight for air even if he didn’t like himself for it.
‘What did he tell you exactly?’
‘You were an enemy of the Cause … you needed to be kept under surveillance … Please. Let me get up.’
But he wasn’t ready yet to release her, he wanted her under him, to keep up the pain of pressure.
‘I can’t … breathe,’ she said.
‘You already told me that.’
He looked down into her eyes, remembering something else about Barron now, something that floated up to him from a submerged place in the mind: the photograph taken of Carlotta in Rio, the teasingly familiar face of the man walking alongside her.
Barron.
Barron and Carlotta …
… his mind was back into the tunnel, he saw the wreckage, the body-bags aligned on the platform, he imagined Carlotta threading her way slyly through rush-hour crowds on her murderous mission. That was no IRA brutality, no sectarian savagery carried out in the name of the struggle against British occupation; the Cause wouldn’t have employed Carlotta, they’d have used their own killers, people close to the heart of command, because strangers couldn’t enter the inner sanctum. Carlotta’s instructions hadn’t come out of Dublin or Belfast. They’d been issued elsewhere.
‘You’ve never heard of Bryce Harcourt or Jake Streik, have you? You’ve never heard of an outfit called The Undertakers.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about …’
He released the pressure on her. He stepped back from the bed, reached quickly for his clothes. She watched him with a look of frightened uncertainty. She’d seen something savage in him and she had no way of knowing if the animal had been incarcerated or if it was still loose. He tossed aside the hospital gown, pulled on his shirt, strapped his holster in place and put the girl’s weapon in the pocket of his coat, everything done quickly.
‘You’ve been used, love,’ he said. ‘Used and abused. Welcome to the club.’
She was coughing into her hand, a series of quick spasms. When she stopped, she raised her sleeve to her lips. ‘I’m not following you—’
‘Used, abused and sold down the river,’ he said. ‘Here’s the way it is. Barron sends you out on what he says is IRA business because he knows you’ll go along with it. He plays on your sympathies for all they’re worth. Maybe he’s associated in some way with your so-called Cause. Fine. But it’s more than that. It goes way beyond the IRA. It goes into areas you couldn’t even start to guess. You’ve been taken. Swindled. Call it what you like. What it comes down to is this: you’re a stupid little bitch who’s way out of her depth.’
She coughed again and shook her head rapidly. ‘You don’t know anything—’
‘This is what I know. Listen and digest. The Undertakers work secretively out of the US Embassy. They handle vast amounts of money, apparently with the knowledge of the Ambassador. Where this cash goes, I don’t know yet. Maybe a fraction finds its way into the treasury of the IRA, I’m not sure. But the rest …’ He shrugged. ‘The money was handled mainly by two men. One called Streik, the other Harcourt. Streik’s dead. Harcourt was killed in the Underground bombing, courtesy of a certain Carlotta. Presumably you’ve heard of her.’
‘I know her reputation, sure. What the hell are you getting at?’
‘I don’t suppose Barron ever informed you of a plan to kill a hundred people on a subway carriage, did he?’
‘We had nothing to do with that,’ she said. ‘You can’t possibly believe that.’
We, he thought. We. She belonged. She was up to her neck. Only she didn’t know the true nature of what she belonged to.
‘Carlotta planted that bomb. And right now I’m starting to think she was working under instructions from your master – Tobias Barron.’
She shook her head. ‘No way. Absolutely no goddam way. You’re really going downhill fast, Pagan.’
‘Why? If he’s capable of giving you the order to kill me, why wouldn’t he be just as capable of giving Carlotta a mandate to blow up an Underground carriage? You think he’d be deterred by the numbers of casualties involved? Is that what you think? One murder is fine. One murder is acceptable. A hundred – unthinkable. Oh dear, such delicate sensibilities. Christ’s sake. Open your eyes.’
‘You don’t know Barron. He wouldn’t sanction death on that scale. You’re out of your mind.’
‘Maybe I’m mad as a fucking hatter,’ Pagan said. ‘I must say I find your belief in him touching. In the circumstances, I’m naturally a little more sceptical.’ He paused, assessing the look on her face, the same fretful apprehension. ‘Did he ever tell you why the simple order to keep me under surveillance was upgraded to an execution command?’
‘He said you knew too much.’
‘Too much about what?’
‘I didn’t ask. I assumed he had good reasons.’
‘I’ll tell you what his good reasons are. I’m getting too close to him, I’m beginning to trespass in forbidden areas. I’m gatecrashing his private party, and he’s uncomfortable. I know about Carlotta, for one thing. Which isn’t conducive to his peace of mind – or he wouldn’t have sent you here. He knew the first attempt to kill me in Lyon had been botched. So he sends you out in the hope you have what it takes to finish the job.’
Pagan stared at her. The desire to hurt her had gone out of him; the outburst of rage was diminishing. Anger of such intensity was hard to sustain. It damaged your system, devoured all your energies. He was calmer now, but troubled by the uncharacteristic way he’d yielded to the notion of brutality, the way he’d snapped.
‘Do you know where Barron is?’ he asked, and his voice was quiet, but it took an effort.
She shook her head.
‘I’m expected to believe that?’ he asked.
‘Believe what you like,’ she answered.
He moved toward her, looked down at her. ‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ he said. ‘But I will. You know I will.’
She said nothing. He wondered if he could find the energy to strike her again and what it would cost him. He decided to try another tactic. ‘You think I’m lying about Barron. Maybe I am. But you’re not sure. You don’t know. You think I’m wrong when I tell you how he manipulated you. Maybe so. But if I was you, I’d want to find out. I’d want to know if I’d been manipulated. I’d want the truth. Of course, you wouldn’t be interested in the truth, would you? It wouldn’t fit into your scheme of things. It might interfere with your nice little black-and-white picture of the world.’
‘Of course I’m interested in the truth—’
‘Well then?’
‘Is this the civilized approach, Pagan?’
‘Would you prefer the other way?’ he asked. ‘I’m capable of it. You know that.’
She raised her face. ‘I know that now,’ she said.
He finished dressing. He picked up Streik’s papers, which had fallen from bed to floor, and carefully placed them in the pocket of his coat. ‘What’s it going to be?’
She didn’t speak. She looked at him with what he took to be the contempt of somebody grudgingly defeated. ‘I have a telephone number, that’s all.’
‘Call him. Tell him you killed me.’
‘And then what?’
‘Tell him you want to see him.’
‘If he doesn’t agree?’
‘Tell him it’s imp
ortant. Impress that on him. Convince him. Act it up. You’re talented in that direction.’
She ignored the barb. She placed her hands on either side of her face. Her hair had become unpinned and was falling across her shoulders and she resembled nothing more than a vulnerable child who had strayed by circumstance into a place where she was lost. But he wasn’t going to be drawn into that picture frame; he wasn’t going to be touched by an outbreak of sympathy.
‘There’s the phone,’ he said, and gestured toward the bedside table. ‘Call him now.’
She picked up the receiver, started to dial, then set it down again. ‘I can’t,’ she said.
‘You don’t want to take the chance I might be right,’ Pagan said. ‘Good old Barron. Can’t do any wrong, can he?’
‘Fuck you.’
‘You already did,’ he remarked.
She picked up the phone again, dialled, tapped her fingers on the bedside table as she waited for an answer. Then he heard her say that Pagan was dead. She was convincing enough; her voice had a quiet shocked quality to it. He heard her ask for a meeting. She listened in silence for a while, then she hung up. She scribbled something on a notepad.
‘It’s arranged,’ she said.
‘Where?’
‘Venice.’
He walked toward the door, looked down at the dead woman, felt the weight of a terrible regret. But this wasn’t the time to linger and be trapped by feelings.
The corridor was empty. Dim lights lit the way to the exit. He gripped the girl by the elbow.
‘Now what?’ she asked.
‘We visit Barron.’
They started off down the corridor, walked past the reception desk, which was unoccupied, then stepped out into the street.
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