7

Dun Laoghaire, Republic of Ireland

Finn woke in his dark bedroom, his throat dry. He pushed himself into an upright position, and there was a pain at the back of his head. It was the whiskey he’d drunk at Molly’s. Now he had one hell of a hangover. He should have known better – his old body couldn’t take the drink the way it used to. Sweet Jesus! He could remember times when he’d wake with a big black dog of a hangover and start drinking right away and go on for three or four days at a time.

He left the room and stepped out onto the landing.

Halfway down the stairs he stopped. He listened to the darkness. He had a fine instinct for the night. He thought sometimes he had a personal angel who whispered nocturnal warnings in his ear. In the distance he heard the cry of an owl. But there was some other thing too, something he couldn’t altogether place, like the soft sound of an animal moving in the undergrowth.

He reached the bottom step and looked across the room filled with harps. There was thin crystal moonlight falling through the window. He stood motionless, listening. The owl had gone. But there was still something else, an undercurrent.

Finn padded inside the kitchen, bare feet slapping floorboards. He drew a glass of water from the tap and devoured it quickly. He rinsed the glass, because he was a tidy man and had always been fastidious in his way, perhaps because he’d lived a solitary life without a wife to help him. He was married to the Cause like a bloody nun married to Christ. If he could turn back the clocks of his life, what he’d do was marry Molly Newbigging and get a decent job and settle down with a big brood of kids. He thought of Molly’s white thighs and her large rounded breasts and that way she had of seeing straight through to the bones of him.

He left the kitchen, moving along a narrow hallway in the direction of his small study. There was a loaded pistol in his desk. It was a Mauser that dated from the 1920s and it had once belonged to old Dan Breen, commandant of the Third Tipperary Brigade of the IRA. The pistol was of great sentimental value to Finn because it had been given to him personally by Breen shortly before the old fellow died in 1969.

Finn stepped inside his study. He stared at the gun, then reached down for it and picked it up, holding it loosely in his right hand. The feel of the weapon made him think of the first time he’d ever entrusted Jig with a task. It had happened during their third or fourth meeting, which had taken place on a cold morning at Glasnevin Cemetery.

Finn, who was invariably spooked by places of death because he resented anything as disruptive as the act of dying, had stared for a long time into the boy’s eyes. What the hell did he really know about this young man anyway? After a few clandestine encounters, what could he really say he’d learned about the young man’s history? The boy constantly dismissed his past as irrelevant. He was as much a mystery as he’d been in the beginning, and the only thing Finn didn’t doubt was his commitment to justice and his yearning for action. These were real enough. But there were walls around him still, and Finn was uneasy with men who erected barricades. If he was ever to know this young man, if he was ever to cross the wall, he was going to have to take the first step himself. A big step – because its only basis was Finn’s own hunch, his instinct that the boy could prove valuable to the Association of the Wolfe and the Cause in general. There were times in one’s life when intuition overrode the dictates of sweet reason, and this was going to be one of them. And Finn, who had an almost arrogant pride in his ability to judge character, had an instinct about the boy that was almost as clear as a melody in his head.

A certain man has to be eliminated.

Who and where? Jig asked.

Don’t you want to know the why of it, boy?

Jig shook his head and looked between rows of tombstones. I know what you stand for. If you consider this man your enemy, what else do I need to know?

I’m flattered by your trust in me, Finn had answered. But you’ve got a lot to learn. You trust too easily. You react too quickly. You’re too bloody impatient.

Maybe I need a teacher, Finn.

Finn had strolled among ancient graves, noticing broken crosses and moss climbing over stone and a bedraggled cat asleep on a fallen marker. He’d studied the names of the dead. O’Hara. Ryan. Corcoran. Fine Irish names. Brendan Behan, whom Finn remembered as a hotblooded young IRA recruit, was buried somewhere at Glasnevin, dead and wasted by drink.

Teach me, Finn, the boy said.

Finn had turned to look at the young man again. He’d seen it then in the boy’s face, almost as if a guard had slipped and fallen away. It was the face of a kid anxious to please an elder, a vulnerable look that Finn wouldn’t have thought belonged in the boy’s repertoire of expressions. It was uncharacteristic and eager, without a hint of toughness, and it was Finn’s first real encounter with what he thought of as the young man’s inner self. For the first time, too, Finn felt a strong affection for the boy, a sensation that took him by surprise. It was this moment, in which he perceived Jig’s naked enthusiasm, that made Finn take the revolver from the pocket of his overcoat and pass it slowly to the young man.

There’s no pleasure in killing, boy; if you’re after thrills, I don’t need you. Let’s get that straight from the start. I don’t need a vandal or a hooligan. I want somebody who understands the reasons behind his actions.

I’m not looking for thrills, Finn.

And when you work for me there’s no money in it. You’ll get enough to keep yourself in food and shelter, but nobody ever got rich from the Cause.

I don’t remember ever asking for money, Finn.

It was the answer Finn had expected. You’d have to go to Belfast, he said. A man called Cassidy is doing some damage to us.

That was all. Cassidy’s offence, which the boy hadn’t asked about, hadn’t even seemed to care about, was that he had been talking too freely with the British Army about IRA operations. Jig had gone to Belfast before the end of that same week and shot Cassidy as he was stepping out of a public house called the Butcher’s Arms at closing time. One shot, delivered with accuracy. One shot, then Jig was gone. He had the eye of a natural marksman and the affinity of a night creature for the crevices of darkness in which to hide. Later, when the young man had returned to the Republic, Finn had told him that in future he’d need a nom de guerre. We’ll call you Jig, he’d said. If you’re the dancer I think you might be, it’s a damn good name. I moulded you, Jig, he thought. You gave me the basic edifice and I improved it. And somewhere along the way we came to understand and maybe even love one another a little bit too. And where are you now, Jig? Where the hell have I sent you?

He wished Jig were beside him in this house. He needed the young man’s nerve, because his own wasn’t what it had been in the old days when he’d been as sharp as a razor and as daring as anything that ever cavorted on a trapeze. The old days! Jesus, the old days had been fine, but they were gone, and what faced him now was the stark reality of danger. With his pistol in front of him, he stepped back into the hallway and moved towards the room with the harps. He went to the window and looked in the direction of the gatehouse.

George Scully, reliable George, was on guard tonight.

Finn breathed on the windowpane. The guardhouse was in darkness, which meant nothing in itself because Scully might have turned out the light simply to enjoy the quiet of the night. George, who had been with Finn for years, had been known to turn the light off and lean against the wall and prop up his feet and breathe the sea air into his lungs while he recited the poems of W. B. Yeats quietly to himself.

A shiver went through Finn. The hairs on the back of his neck bristled. Something was going on out there. Something that pressed upon the whitewashed house and set up a vibration audible only to his ears. He shut his eyes, listened. He thought suddenly of that poor boat hijacked on the high seas, he thought of the dead men and the missing money, and the shipload of arms that had slipped away from him. He was sick to his heart.

Eyes open now, pistol forward. Beware, Finn. It was the voice of his angel. He could hear it clearly.

He moved among the harps, his pistol trained on the doorway.

He held his breath and stood very still. It was always possible, he supposed, that someone had overpowered Scully down there in the gatehouse. But there would have been shooting, wouldn’t there? Scully would have fired off one of his weapons, wouldn’t he? Unless he’d been taken out suddenly, with no warning and no time to defend himself.

Finn moved very slightly.

His heart, his bloody heart, thumped upon his ribs like a rabbit stuck in a snare. He moved an inch, two inches, edging between harps, going in the direction of the doorway. Dan Breen’s Mauser was heavy in his hand.

Out in the hallway now. Facing the front door. Waiting.

Was that the wind that rattled the shrubbery and set it shaking?

He moved slowly down the narrow hallway.

He placed one hand on the door handle.

Then he drew the door open and peered out into the night, his Mauser raised for action.

There were two men outside, both holding automatic weapons. Finn barely had time to register this fact before he heard the first few rounds. He thought it strange that he felt nothing although he knew he’d been hit.

He staggered backwards down the corridor into the room of harps, aware of blood seeping out of his body, conscious of the hushed voice that said I told you, Finn. Beware. I told you that. Finn skidded across the floor of the big room, his legs abruptly cut out from beneath his body, his feet slithering over pools of his own lost blood, and he stumbled against a harp, his head tipping forward between the strings of the instrument so that he was stuck there like some beast cruelly trapped, aware of death coming in on wings. Finn gazed at the window where the halfhearted moon floated in the terrible night sky. There were footsteps behind him. There were other voices in the room. They made sounds he was beyond understanding because he was listening to something else.

He was listening to his angel, whom he had come to recognise as Death.

Come to me, Finn.

He blinked his eyes.

Then the room was filled with more gunfire, which he heard as a deaf man might hear thunder. Vibrations, not sounds. His face slid between harp strings, and the pistol dropped from his hand, and he went down slowly into his own blood where he lay very still.

Waddell placed the Stoeger Max II rifle on the floor. He was shaking violently, and when he looked down at Finn’s body, the long white hair covered with great scarlet slashes, he wanted to be sick. He put one hand up to his mouth. Houlihan came into the room and stared at the wasted body and there was no expression at all on his face.

‘I thought he’d never die,’ Houlihan said. ‘Did you see the way he was bouncing like a rubber ball about this fucking room? I thought he’d never go down! Tough old shit.’

Waddell nodded his head. There was excitement in Houlihan’s voice.

‘He had a lot of heart,’ Houlihan remarked.

Waddell wanted to be elsewhere. Another city. Another galaxy. He needed a drink, something to settle him down. Something to calm him. He looked around the room, found a bottle of schnapps and drank from it quickly.

‘Ah, John, you need to develop an attitude,’ Houlihan said. ‘You need to be hard as a nail.’

Waddell said nothing.

‘Finn’s a casualty of war. That’s all,’ Houlihan said. He took the bottle from Waddell. He didn’t drink. Instead, he turned the cap over in the palm of his hand so that Waddell could see several perforations in the metal.

‘Tricky,’ Houlihan said. ‘But we won’t be needing this any more.’

‘Is that what I think it is?’ Waddell asked.

‘A small microchip listening device. The blessings of Yankee technology. But our man Scully won’t be listening to Finn any more, will he?’ Houlihan stuck the cap in his pocket. ‘For one thing, Scully’s probably a thousand miles away by this time. And God knows, nobody will be listening to Finn any more.’ Houlihan laughed. It was an empty, mirthless sound, like a cough.

Waddell felt the schnapps heat his chest. He looked into his companion’s eyes, which were hard and cold.

Houlihan said, ‘Call Belfast, John. Tell them we succeeded. They’re waiting to hear. Take your share of the credit.’

Waddell went out of the room. Credit, he thought. He didn’t need credit like this. He found a telephone in Finn’s office. Houlihan came into the room behind him.

‘What are you waiting for, John? We don’t have all night.’

Waddell put his hand on the receiver. He felt weak all of a sudden.

‘Go on,’ Houlihan said. ‘I know they’ll be anxious to hear Finn’s out of the way. It means the green light for America.’

America, Waddell thought.

He picked up the telephone.

‘It’s a strange thing about blood,’ Houlihan was saying. ‘It’s all the same, John. Black man or white man. Protestant or Catholic. It’s the same taste. No difference. English blood or American. It all looks and tastes the same.’

American blood, Waddell thought. He wondered how Houlihan knew about the taste of the stuff.

He dialled the number in Belfast, and after a few moments it was answered by the Reverend Ivor McInnes, who spoke with a pronounced English mainland accent that Waddell knew was Liverpool.

‘It’s done,’ Waddell said.

‘On the contrary,’ the voice answered. ‘It’s only just beginning.’