8

New York City

Joseph X. Tumulty couldn’t quite believe that he had received the call after all this time. He had lived with the knowledge that there was always some slight possibility of such a thing, a shadow that lay over the life he had built for himself here, but he’d never actually believed it. But there it was. The call from Ireland. Now he was nervous and tense and possessed with the uneasy feeling that threads were being pulled in the night, that his destiny was being woven by hands he couldn’t see. It wasn’t a good feeling at all. He was a man who liked to be in charge of his own affairs.

He stood in the doorway of St. Finbar’s Mission on Canal Street in the grubby southern part of Manhattan, his black coat drawn up at the collar, his fighter’s nose made red by a chill river wind. From the kitchen behind him came the smell of food and the sounds of hungry men, quite beyond the dictates of good manners, attacking their plates of stew. To many people it might have been an unpleasant noise, but to Joe Tumulty it had a gladdening effect.

He looked along the sidewalk. He’d been thinking about the call ever since he’d received it twenty-four hours ago. He was listening still to the voice of Finn on the telephone – that mellifluous singing voice that could seduce and flatter and cajole and make any man believe that there were indeed fairies at the bottom of his garden. But this time there had been something else in Finn’s voice, and Joe Tumulty had been trying to pin the quality down for almost a day now. What was it? Sometimes Tumulty thought it was weariness, at other times fear. He wasn’t sure. All he knew was that Finn’s call had disturbed the equilibrium of his life and that he didn’t want any conflict between the work he was doing on Canal Street and the demands of the Cause.

A drunk lay about fifteen feet down the sidewalk. Tumulty had been watching him for the last couple of minutes. The man lay face down, arms outstretched. He wore a pair of pants at least three sizes too large for him. His threadbare overcoat was pulled up around his waist, revealing a thin cotton shirt that was no protection from the bitter wind. The man could die there and nobody would care. He could die among the plastic bags of trash and the roaches. But Joseph Tumulty wasn’t about to let any man die within shouting distance of St. Finbar’s, which was named after the sixth-century founder of the City of Cork.

‘Are you going to help him, Father Joe?’

Tumulty turned. The man who’d asked the question was known only as Scissors, which was said to be a reference to the trade of barber he’d once carried out. Now, five nights out of seven, Scissors was drunk. Tonight he happened to be sober. He had a ravaged face and the kind of luminescent eyes you sometimes see on street people – a result of nutritional deficiency, a lack of vitamins, and a totally depleted body. It was a look Joe Tumulty had come to know very well on Canal Street.

‘Of course I am,’ Tumulty said.

He put out one hand and squeezed Scissors’ frail shoulder. There was misfortune everywhere, Tumulty thought. And most of it seemed to congregate here at the southern tip of Manhattan. Tumulty attacked human misery wherever he found it. Father Joe, crusader. The point was, if he didn’t do it, then people like the man who lay there right now would probably perish.

The former barber blinked at the body on the sidewalk. ‘He’s a young one,’ Scissors said.

Tumulty moved down the steps. He knew that alcohol was no great respecter of age. All kinds of people found their way to St. Finbar’s Mission, young and old, skilled and unskilled – and what they had in common was a descent from society, from lives that might have been useful. Tumulty liked to think he could give them back some form of hope. He fed them, often clothed them, prayed for them, counselled them. He entered their broken lives and applied the only salve he knew, which was to care for them even when they had forgotten how to care for themselves.

As he crossed the sidewalk he was conscious of a tan-coloured car parked about half a block away. It had been parked there for the past two hours. The man who sat behind the wheel appeared to be engrossed in a book. The whole thing made Tumulty nervous. It wasn’t exactly the kind of place where a man would station his car to do a quiet spot of reading. His first response was that the car contained an agent of the bloody Internal Revenue Service. The IRS was always on his back these days, ever since he had split from the official Catholic Church to create his own mission on Canal Street. The tax-exempt status of charities and religious orders had been coming under a lot of scrutiny lately. It wasn’t that the government was after Tumulty’s income, because that was laughably small. But they could cause all kinds of nuisances by examining his accounts and asking to see cancelled cheques, just to make sure St. Finbar’s was what it claimed to be – a non-profit venture. Besides – and this was something he didn’t like to think about, something he’d chosen to ignore – there was a certain bank account, held in his own name, that contained money Finn had given him and that he had absolutely no way of explaining.

Maybe he was being paranoid. Maybe Finn’s phone call had made him that way. He suddenly felt that the night was filled with things he couldn’t trust.

He crossed the sidewalk. He bent down beside the young man and very lightly placed a hand on the man’s arm. The young man didn’t move. Joe Tumulty moved his hand to touch the side of the man’s face. The smell of booze was strong, as if it had been stitched into the threads of the man’s coat. Tumulty turned his face to one side a moment. His eyes watered.

‘Get up,’ Tumulty said.

The man was still.

Tumulty slipped his hand under the man’s face and raised it slowly up from the hard sidewalk. He was about thirty and appeared to be in good health. His face was pale but showed none of the usual signs of decay Tumulty had come to expect on people like this. The lips were open a little way, and the teeth were good. Whoever this drunk was, he hadn’t been on the streets for very long. Tumulty stared a moment in the direction of the parked car. The shadowy figure inside had his head tilted back and appeared now to be asleep.

‘Can you get up?’ Tumulty asked. ‘I’ll help you.’

The young man’s eyes opened.

‘Put your arm round my shoulder,’ Tumulty said. ‘We’ll get you indoors.’

‘Who are you?’ the young man asked.

‘Joseph Tumulty. They sometimes call me Father Joe.’

The young man closed his eyes again. There was a faint smile on his lips.

‘Is it safe?’ he asked.

‘Safe?’

‘Is it safe to come inside?’

‘Of course it is. What do you –’ Tumulty didn’t finish his question because the young man’s eyes opened again, and they were clear, bright, with no bleariness, no bloodshot quality. Joseph Tumulty was remembering Finn’s phone call again. He was remembering Finn saying Take good care of him, Joe. He’s a fine lad. This is the one, Tumulty thought, and he felt a strange little sensation around his heart. He had a slight difficulty in catching his breath.

‘You can never be too sure,’ the young man said. He slung his arm around Joe Tumulty’s shoulder and raised himself to a standing position.

‘You’re from Finn,’ Tumulty said, and his voice had become a whisper.

The young man nodded.

Tumulty stared at the light falling from the doorway of St. Finbar’s and the outline of the man known as Scissors who stood at the top of the steps, then he glanced once in the direction of the parked car.

Take good care of him, Joe.

‘You’re Jig,’ Tumulty said.

‘The very same.’

The wind that blew off the Hudson brought ice with it, hardening dead branches and imparting a spare look to the skyscrapers. Frank Pagan thought the city resembled a large ice palace. He had a room at the Parker Meridien on West 57th Street, a costly hotel that his per diem expenses didn’t cover. When he’d last been in New York he’d stayed with Roxanne at the Gotham, which was now a hollow locked shell with boarded-up windows on the corner of 55th and 5th. A deserted hotel was fitting somehow. A black epitaph.

Four years ago. The first year of their marriage. An anniversary trip. What he recalled now was Roxanne’s flushed excitement in Manhattan, how like a small child she’d been, going on Fifth Avenue and strolling through Tiffany’s and Cartier’s and Harry Winston’s, asking endless questions of patient sales clerks. Pagan had bought her a silver locket at Fortunoff’s, which she’d been wearing the day she died. Pagan wore the locket now. City of Memories. How could he feel anything but uneasy in this town?

On his first night at the Parker, when he was still groggy from jet lag, Pagan had a meeting with an FBI agent called Arthur Zuboric in the piano bar. Zuboric, a squat man with a Zapata moustache and a suntan achieved under the lamps of a health spa, had the look of a mournful bandit. He wasn’t exactly happy with the notion of helping Frank Pagan, since he had a caseload up to here, but the order had come down from Bureau headquarters in Washington, so what could he do? Reciprocity was the catchword here. I’ll scratch your back, sometime in the future you’ll scratch mine. So here he was scratching Frank Pagan and listening to Broadway show tunes on a piano and wondering about the limey’s clothes.

Baggy tweed jacket, bright shirt, blue jeans, no tie. The casual look. Zuboric had the feeling, though, that there wasn’t anything casual about Frank Pagan himself. The face was too intense. The mouth reminded Zuboric of a tight rubber band, and the grey eyes had a fierce quality. The word Zuboric had heard about Frank Pagan was determined.

The guy had built himself a solid reputation in the Special Branch at Scotland Yard, where he’d specialised in anti-terrorist tactics. Once, Pagan had been involved in a shoot-out with Libyan terrorists in a London street. He killed three that day. On another occasion, he’d captured some Italian anarchists after a chase through London Airport. Somewhere along the way he’d been given his own section, practically independent of the Yard, thus causing some resentment among the older hands, who didn’t like Frank Pagan’s style or the way he dressed or the fact he wasn’t quite forty yet. They envied his autonomy. The term for Frank Pagan, Zuboric decided, was maverick. All this stuff was in the file Washington had hurriedly put together for Zuboric. It was impressive material, but he wished the English wouldn’t go dragging their Irish problem into the United States. Who the fuck needed that? Bunch of micks with guns, spouting shit about freedom.

He stuffed some peanuts in his mouth. The piano was giving him a royal headache. ‘We ran your Father Tumulty through the computer, Frank. Mind if I call you Frank? Call me Artie. Arthur’s an old man’s name, I always think.’

Pagan didn’t mind what the agent called him. He was only interested in Tumulty.

‘Clean as a whistle,’ Zuboric went on. ‘So I put a field agent on it who tells me there’s only one priest in the whole of New York City called Tumulty. Joseph X.’

Zuboric tasted his rum and Coke and made a face. ‘Uncommon name,’ he said. ‘The thing is, this Joseph X. Tumulty isn’t a priest any more. Seems he either left the RC Church or got himself thrown out for some reason. Whatever, Tumulty runs a mission called St. Finbar’s down on Canal Street.’

Pagan looked at the pianist absently, then turned his thoughts to the idea of a lapsed priest having a connection with Jig. Irish labyrinths, little connections between this person and that, this furtive group with some other, on and on into the maze. Pagan thought a moment about the Leprechaun and the Free Ulster Volunteers and their alleged leader, the Reverend Ivor McInnes. Now there was a strange link, a failed jockey and a Presbyterian minister. And here was another, a lapsed priest and an assassin. Only in the murky world of Irish terrorism, Pagan thought. Only there could you find these weird bonds.

Zuboric said, ‘The Immigration and Naturalisation Service records say that Father Tumulty entered the United States in October 1978 from Ireland. He came complete with permanent residence status as a priest. His church was Our Lady of the Sorrows on Staten Island, where he stayed two years. Since then he’s been caring for broken souls on Canal Street.’

Zuboric drained his glass. ‘According to INS records, Joseph Tumulty came fresh out of a seminary in Bantry to the United States. The INS always runs a police check on potential immigrants in their country of origin. Tumulty was clean in Ireland too, Frank.’

‘Clean or very clandestine,’ Pagan said. ‘I’ve known priests sympathetic to the IRA. They get involved in a little gun-running on the side. Or they skim the collection plate to make contributions. A little adventure compensates for the stresses of celibacy.’

‘No doubt,’ Zuboric remarked. ‘Maybe this Tumulty is a sympathiser. But if he is, he’s playing his cards pretty close to his chest.’

Pagan sat back in his chair. ‘If he’s Jig’s contact in the United States, then he can’t be Mr. Clean altogether.’

Zuboric fidgeted with his empty glass. ‘I guess,’ he said. ‘I put a man on Canal Street. But what am I supposed to tell him, Frank? Keep your eyes open for a guy you don’t know what he looks like?’

‘Has your man talked to Tumulty?’

Zuboric shook his head. ‘I didn’t want to take that step before I talked to you.’

‘Good,’ Pagan said. He didn’t like the idea of some FBI field agent trudging over territory he thought of as his own.

Zuboric said, ‘So far as somebody using a passport in the name of John Doyle, Immigration has no record of anyone by that name. It doesn’t mean much. Your man could have entered illegally through Canada, or he could have come into the U.S. under another name.’ Zuboric paused. ‘What’s your next move?’

‘Canal Street. Talk to Tumulty.’

Zuboric sighed. He wondered what kind of metal Frank Pagan was made of. Guy gets off a plane after a five-hour flight through time zones and wants to start work right away. Zuboric played with the word obsessed for a moment. He’d seen obsessed law enforcement officers before. He’d seen how something unsolved just nibbled away at them until they were completely devoured and more than somewhat insane. Maybe Frank Pagan was wandering towards the abyss.

Zuboric said nothing for a moment. His present caseload involved a kidnapping in White Plains, a group of Communist dissidents suspected of illegal arms purchases in the Bronx, and a Lebanese diplomat who was smuggling dope in the diplomatic pouch. He didn’t need Frank Pagan’s problems. He didn’t need a priest who might be an IRA sleeper. He didn’t need some Irish assassin wandering around his turf. There were times in Artie Zuboric’s life when he wondered what it was that he did need, periods of uncertainty when he played with such notions as ‘career moves’ and ‘upward mobility’, neither of which seemed appropriate within the structure of the Bureau, where promotion depended on the incomprehensible whim of the Director. Zuboric often longed for a life where the pressures were less weighty and the rewards somewhat more tangible. What had the goddam Bureau ever done for him anyhow? He had one broken marriage behind him and now he was in love with a girl called Charity who danced in a topless bar, a girl whom he wanted to marry but who had continually spurned him because she wanted no part of any man gung ho enough to be associated with the feds. Zuboric spent a lot of time thinking about ways of getting Charity to accept him. Money and good prospects might have helped. It galled Zuboric to think of his beloved Charity flashing her tits in front of drooling strangers. He wanted to take her away from all that.

‘I don’t understand why you can’t settle this Irish crap once and for all, Frank. Why don’t you just pull your soldiers out of Ulster and tell the Irish to go fuck themselves? What is it? Some colonial hangover?’

Frank Pagan smiled. ‘Why don’t you do something about stopping the flow of American money into IRA coffers?’ he asked.

Zuboric said, ‘Tell me how I can dictate what private citizens do with their money, Frank. Then maybe I can help you. Besides, we have a President who’s a stage Irishman, and he’s got an enormous Irish–American vote around here, which he isn’t going to throw away by legislating against mick fund-raisers. And if they choose to send bucks to some rebels, what’s he gonna do? Anyhow, I’m not absolutely convinced there’s much more than chump change flowing from here to Ireland.’

Chump change, Pagan thought. Colourful Americanism. But Zuboric was quite wrong. There was far more than chump change leaving the United States. Both men went outside. The wind off the East River blew scraps of paper along the sidewalks. Zuboric shivered. He thought Pagan looked immune to the cold.

‘You got a weapon, Frank?’

‘I brought a Bernardelli in my luggage,’ Pagan replied.

Zuboric shivered again. ‘Don’t go waving it in public. The local cops frown on that kind of ostentation. They don’t like foreigners with guns, even if your business here is lawful.’

‘It’s a precaution,’ Pagan said. ‘I don’t like guns.’

‘Yeah,’ Zuboric said. He whistled for a cab. A dirty yellow vehicle slid towards the sidewalk. Zuboric told the driver Canal Street.

‘You’re coming with me?’ Pagan asked.

‘I’m instructed to extend to you every courtesy, et cetera et cetera. But my orders don’t stop there, Frank. I go where you go.’

‘It isn’t necessary,’ Pagan replied. ‘I work better alone.’

‘Yeah, I bet you do.’ Zuboric settled down in the back of the cab. ‘But as long as this character Jig is on U.S. territory, your problem is my problem. I wish it was otherwise, believe me. I don’t care about the Bog People, Frank. They can blow one another up every hour on the hour, so long as they don’t do it in the United States of America. And if Jig has it in mind to track down some missing money, there’s probably a good chance of bloodshed. In which case, I want to be around.’

Pagan watched the lights of Broadway flicker past. He didn’t like the notion of being dogged by an FBI agent. He liked to work on his own. He had never been a team player, which was why he hadn’t fitted in at Special Branch. Too many team players. Too much paperwork. He supposed the FBI was exactly the same. Compartments. People in boxes. Rivalries and grudges and tiny jealousies.

Zuboric said, ‘You think this Tumulty guy is going to talk to you, Frank?’

Pagan looked at the agent a moment. Zuboric’s suntanned face was incongruous in a wintry city. ‘I’m an optimist, Artie.’

‘Priests take vows of silence. They’re pretty good at keeping secrets.’

‘We’ll see,’ Pagan said.

There were fifty or sixty men inside St. Finbar’s Mission. They sat at tables or wandered aimlessly around trying to scrounge cigarettes from one another. The kitchen was a large room with an enormous stove located at one side. Stacked against one wall was a large pile of thin mattresses enveloped in sheets of clear plastic. Smoke and cooking smells and the sweaty aroma of despair mingled in the air. A crucifix hung to the wall. Here and there were slogans from Alcoholics Anonymous. THE TWELVE STEPS OF AA. EASY DOES IT. ONE DAY AT A TIME.

Frank Pagan stood on the threshold of the room, gazing in the direction of the counter that surrounded the stove. Faces turned towards him, then away again. They had the nervously furtive expressions of men who have reached the bottom and can’t find their way up from the pits.

Pagan moved to the cooking area. Soups and stews were simmering in big aluminum urns. He raised a lid and peered at carrots and onions floating on a greasy brown surface. He realised he hadn’t eaten anything since the alleged Beef Wellington on the flight, but his hunger was at one remove from himself, like somebody else’s sensation.

He looked round the room. What he felt in the air was mainly a sense of hopelessness that came in waves towards him. Casualties of the system. The unemployed. The alcoholic. The mentally defective. He glanced at Zuboric, who was clearly uneasy here. Pagan leaned against the wall, folding his arms. All those faces: he wondered if any one of them could be Jig.

‘Can I be of assistance?’

Pagan turned. The man who asked the question was probably in his early thirties, unshaven, his dark blue coat covered with scuff marks, his dark curly hair uncombed. There was a smell of liquor on his breath and dark circles under his eyes.

‘I’m looking for Father Tumulty,’ Pagan said.

The man looked quickly in Zuboric’s direction, then back at Pagan. ‘Who shall I say is asking for him?’

Pagan hesitated. ‘He wouldn’t know my name.’

Zuboric stepped forward and said, ‘Just point us in Tumulty’s direction.’

The man rubbed his hands together. ‘Father Joe’s pretty busy right now.’

‘Look,’ Zuboric said. ‘Either you go get him or we’ll go looking for him. It’s all the same to me.’

The big-stick approach, Pagan thought. It wasn’t always the most fruitful. He watched the man go across the room and out through a door into a hallway. The door closed behind him. Without hesitation, Pagan headed after the man. Zuboric, sighing, followed. The corridor was narrow, badly lit, the air even more stale than inside the kitchen.

There was a flight of stairs at the end of the hallway. Pagan saw the man disappear into the gloom at the top. He went after him. Zuboric, his overcoat flapping, came up behind. When they reached the landing, which was lit by a solitary bare light bulb, they saw a halfway open door in front of them. Through the crack Pagan observed a desk and a lamp. There was no sign of the man they had followed. Instead, another figure appeared in the doorway, a squat man with crewcut hair and powerful arms that hung from rolled-up shirt sleeves.

‘Is it taxes?’ the man asked.

‘Taxes?’ Pagan said. He shook his head.

‘Only I’m having trouble with the IRS, you see. They questioned my nonprofit status. They’re always sending people around to see me. People that look a lot like you,’ and the man gestured towards Zuboric. ‘All I do is feed those poor folk downstairs. I don’t see why the IRS would bother me. Are you sure you’re not with them?’

‘Positive,’ Zuboric said.

‘I’m Joe Tumulty,’ the man said. He looked at Zuboric warily. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘Let’s go in your office,’ Zuboric said.

‘Certainly, certainly.’

It was a small room. The walls were covered with religious portraits, the desk strewn with papers. Mostly bills, Pagan noticed. He had the impression that St. Finbar’s Mission wasn’t exactly a solvent concern. Many of the invoices had demands stamped on them in red ink. There were several envelopes from the Internal Revenue Service, pale brown and unopened. If Father Joe was a conduit for American money going to Ireland, he certainly wasn’t skimming any off the top for himself.

‘Please sit,’ Tumulty said. He had short blunt fingers. His face was not the kind you’d automatically associate with anything so ethereal as the priesthood. He reminded Frank Pagan of the kind of priest who liked to get down in the dirt with his parishioners or instruct street urchins in the arts of pugilism. There was a quiet toughness about the man, a quality of having been seasoned on the streets. He’d need that kind of quality working in a place like this. ‘I don’t know your names, gentlemen.’ His accent was Irish, but it had become refined. There were small American inflections.

‘Zuboric. Arthur Zuboric. Federal Bureau of Investigation.’ The agent flipped a wallet open, showing his ID.

Tumulty said, ‘Impressive.’ Then he looked at Pagan. ‘And you?’

‘Frank Pagan.’

‘London. Am I right?’

‘Right.’

‘I have an ear for accents,’ Tumulty said. He took the IRS envelopes and stacked them in a small pile.

Pagan said, ‘You’re doing good work downstairs.’

‘God’s work,’ Tumulty said. ‘Which you can’t always do within the confines of the established Church, alas. It isn’t easy either. I locked heads with my church to create this place. And ever since then I believe the bishop has been pulling all kinds of delicate little threads behind the scenes to make life more difficult for me. Sometimes there are inexplicable shortages of food from the city’s food banks. Delays in delivery that don’t make sense. I often think the bloody bishop is behind this business with the IRS. Spiteful little man.’

‘Is that why you left the Church? To do God’s work?’

Tumulty nodded. ‘I grew dissatisfied. Bishops play golf with realtors. They belong to country clubs. I didn’t join the Church to develop a taste for sherry and a knack for parish politics.’ He smiled. When he did so the face, which had a slightly battered look, resembled a baseball glove that has seen one season too many. Pagan guessed Tumulty was somewhere in his late forties.

‘So you know I left the Church, do you? It doesn’t surprise me. I heard somebody had been asking questions on the street. I thought it was a tax snoop. The FBI indeed! Should I be flattered or afraid?’

Zuboric tapped a foot impatiently. ‘You don’t have anything to be afraid of, do you?’

‘Now that depends.’ Tumulty leaned forward into the direct light of the desk lamp and said, ‘Since you gentlemen know a little something about me, isn’t it fair that you tell me something of yourselves? What brings you to St. Finbar’s? It can’t be the cuisine, I’m sure.’

‘Your name cropped up in connection with an investigation –’

‘My name?’ Tumulty laughed. ‘I can’t imagine my name coming up in the context of any investigation unless it’s something to do with the bloody IRS. What are you investigating anyway?’

‘Murder,’ Zuboric said.

‘Ahhh.’ Tumulty sat back in his chair. ‘And who’s been killed?’

Frank Pagan stood up. Instead of answering Tumulty’s question, he asked one of his own. ‘What connections do you have in Ireland, Joe?’

‘By connections, d’you mean family? Friends? I have a great many –’

Pagan shook his head. ‘I’m talking about political contacts.’

‘I’m not a political animal.’

Zuboric hunched over in his chair and said, ‘That’s not what we hear, Joe.’

‘You’ve got poor information then.’

Pagan walked around the room. He paused under a garish portrait of the Virgin Mary, who regarded him with technicolour sorrow.

‘The taste in art isn’t very sophisticated, is it?’ Tumulty said. ‘I’d especially throw that one out except some of my patrons here are devout men in a simplistic way. Icons console them.’

Zuboric asked, ‘What does the name Jig mean to you?’

Pagan was annoyed. He wanted to play this more slowly, wanted to wander around the subject of Jig in an indirect way before deciding whether to spring the name on Tumulty, but Artie Zuboric, an apparent graduate from the bulldozer school of questioning, was off and running in his own direction. Pagan could see that it was going to be difficult to work with the FBI agent.

‘It’s a dance, of course,’ Tumulty said.

‘Can it,’ Zuboric said. His tone was one of irritation. Pagan thought Zuboric looked like a heavy in some low-budget Spanish western with his Mexican-style moustache and drooping eyelids. All he needed was a toothpick, something to dangle from his lips.

‘Should it mean anything else?’ Tumulty blinked.

Frank Pagan went back across the room and sat on the priest’s desk. ‘Not a dance exactly. Not this time, Joe.’

‘Tell me then. If it isn’t a dance, then what are you talking about?’

‘A killer,’ Pagan said.

‘Preposterous,’ Tumulty said. ‘A killer! What would I be doing with a killer, for God’s sake?’

‘We understand he has plans to visit you. Maybe he’s already done so. Has he? Has Jig been here already, Joe?’ Zuboric asked.

Pagan rubbed his eyes. He was feeling fuzzy, fatigued. He had one of those waking moments when the lack of sleep causes a slight hallucination. Joseph Tumulty’s desk lamp seemed to shimmer in front of his eyes and the walls of the room become darker beyond the reaches of electricity.

‘Why should this killer come to see me?’ Tumulty asked.

‘Suppose you tell me, Joe.’

Tumulty stood up. ‘I think this has gone far enough, gentlemen. I’ve got hungry people waiting. If you don’t mind.’ He took a step towards the door, and Zuboric reached out, fastening his hand round the Irishman’s wrist.

‘Stick around,’ Zuboric said.

Pagan looked at the FBI man’s hand clamped on the priest’s wrist. Tumulty didn’t look unduly concerned about being grabbed and held. The expression on the Irishman’s face was one of pity. It might have been the look of a priest listening to something especially pathetic in the confessional.

‘Is it a nightstick next?’ Tumulty asked. ‘Or have nightsticks gone out of fashion? Do you use the butt of your pistols these days?’

‘No nightsticks. No guns.’ Pagan shrugged. ‘All we want is a little information.’

Tumulty said, ‘Which I don’t have. Sorry and all that. How often do I have to say it, Mr. Pagan?’ Zuboric let his hand fall back to his side.

‘Now can I go and feed my people?’ Tumulty asked. ‘They expect that of me downstairs.’

Pagan nodded wearily. ‘We’ll talk again, Joe.’

‘I don’t doubt that. But you’ll keep getting the same answers.’

Pagan watched him a moment, thinking about the small things that gave a man away. A little sweat. The nervous motion of an eyelid. A flutter of hands. The human body as lie detector. He moved towards the door. ‘What would your people have to eat if you weren’t around to care for them? If, for example, you were to find yourself lodging in Attica?’

Tumulty said, ‘They might starve. They might end up sleeping on the streets. God knows, the kind of people I take in here aren’t always welcome at some of the more genteel missions. But then I don’t have any plans to abandon them, Pagan. And I most certainly don’t plan on Attica.’

Frank Pagan smiled. ‘The best-laid plans, and so forth,’ he said. ‘You know how it goes, don’t you?’ He pushed the door open and stepped out onto the landing. He turned back to Tumulty and added, ‘Be seeing you.’

It was very cold in the attic. Jig huddled deep inside his overcoat. For a time he’d been listening to the sounds of voices that floated up through an air-conditioning vent, but then there had been silence, followed by footsteps. When the attic door opened a little way he found himself looking into the yellow beam of a flashlight. Tumulty stood there.

‘You live dangerously,’ Tumulty said.

Jig stared into the light. He smelled food. Tumulty was carrying a plate in one hand. Jig took the plate and the plastic fork and started to eat. He hadn’t eaten in a long time. With his mouth full, he said, ‘All I did was go downstairs for food. When I saw those characters, I couldn’t resist the impulse.’

Tumulty sat cross-legged on the floor. He produced a pack of cigarettes and lit one.

‘Suppose they’d somehow gotten hold of a picture of you?’ Tumulty said. ‘Suppose they had a description from somewhere?’

‘But they didn’t.’

Tumulty sighed. ‘How did they know you were coming here anyhow?’

Jig set the plate aside. ‘Good stew,’ he said.

‘I asked a question.’

‘I don’t have the answer,’ Jig said.

‘It doesn’t worry you?’

‘I came to America to do a job. Nothing else.’

Tumulty sighed again. ‘How did they find out about me? Only myself and Finn knew you were coming here. Since I didn’t tell anybody, there’s only one conclusion. Something went wrong at Finn’s end.’

Jig thought a moment about Finn. He couldn’t afford to worry about the old man. The money had to be found. Nothing changed that. The only thing of any importance was the task he’d been sent to do. Despite himself, he felt a small chord of concern echo in his head, but he rejected it. Finn would have been the first to tell him that worry only weakened a man’s concentration, disrupted his single-mindedness. Worry was a peripheral pastime and an unworthy one.

He adjusted his grubby overcoat, which smelled of alcohol. He had soaked the material of the coat with a half pint of very cheap rum, and now the pungent aroma was irritating him.

‘They’ll come back,’ Tumulty said.

‘And you’ll tell them nothing.’

‘I’ve never been tested,’ Tumulty said. ‘I don’t know my limits.’

‘You’ll tell them nothing,’ Jig said again.

Tumulty rubbed his leg. He had a cramp suddenly. ‘I think they’ve got a man outside on the street.’

Jig nodded. ‘I saw him before. He was a cinch to spot. Looks like a boy in the Marines, all short hair and jaw. He’s sitting inside a tan Chrysler. He looks very conspicuous and very bored, Joe. Anyway, what did he see? Another bum staggering along the pavement, that’s all. Another drunk falling down.’

Tumulty said, ‘You look like a derelict, I’ll grant you that.’ He stood up, still clawing at his leg. ‘But this whole situation worries me. What happened at Finn’s end? And how much does this Pagan know?’

‘Worry about something else, Joe. Worry about how you’re going to help me.’

Tumulty was quiet. From the kitchen far below came the noise of a drunk singing. The Irish members of the flock think they’re the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sometimes. I better get back down there. It’s a bloody zoo.’

Jig reached out and touched Tumulty’s arm. ‘I’ll need a decent pistol.’

Tumulty nodded but said nothing.

‘And if it can be done, I’ll feel better if I have a collapsible rifle as well. Just in case.’

‘It’s going to take a little time.’

‘I don’t have much time.’

‘I can’t hurry a thing like this,’ Tumulty said. ‘Especially now, when I’ve got those two characters breathing down my neck.’

Tumulty turned towards the attic door. The singing from below was growing louder.

My feet are here on Broadway this blessed harvest morn

But O the ache that’s in them for the spot where I was born …

Jig said, ‘I’ll also need names, Joe. Names of anyone connected with the Fund-raisers.’

‘Of course you will. Otherwise, how will you know who to shoot?’

‘Do I detect disapproval in your voice?’

Tumulty said nothing.

‘I never shoot anybody unless I have to,’ Jig said. ‘Does that ease your conscience?’

‘Sometimes the Cause overrides conscience,’ Tumulty said. ‘If it didn’t, I’d still be a priest.’ He waved the flashlight. The beam illuminated the attic, picking out various objects. A dressmaker’s dummy. A heap of old hatboxes. Piles of newspapers. ‘I suggest you vanish from here and come back in two days. I also suggest you don’t use the telephone to get in contact with me.’

‘Two days,’ Jig said.

‘I can’t do anything in less,’ Tumulty said.

Jig watched Tumulty move towards the door.

Tumulty said, ‘I still think you took an unnecessary risk.’

Jig replied, ‘At least I know what my enemy looks like, Joe. Which is more than Frank Pagan knows about me.’

Jig saw the door shut. Tumulty had taken the flashlight with him and the attic was once again completely dark. Jig sat with his back to the wall. Frank Pagan, he thought. A tall straight-backed man with a strong jaw and a face that might have been handsome if it hadn’t looked like it was cast in cement. Frank Pagan. Here in America. Well, well.

Jig listened to the song rising up from the kitchen.

When I was young and restless, my mind was ill at ease

Through dreaming of America and gold beyond the seas …

He closed his eyes. What difference did it make to him if the Englishman was here in the United States? Since Frank Pagan hadn’t identified him, it meant that the Englishman was operating in the dark. Which in turn meant that Finn, no matter what might have happened to him in Ireland, no matter how any information had leaked to Pagan, hadn’t revealed Jig’s identity. It was the one thing that Finn, whom Jig had come to perceive as being somehow immune to harm and danger, an indestructible embodiment of the Cause, would never do. He’d cut out his tongue before he revealed any of the secrets he kept. Anyway, the old man knew how to look after himself.

Jig got up and wandered around the attic, trying to keep warm. He dismissed Frank Pagan from his mind and instead turned his thoughts to the business of passing the next couple of days. He was impatient to do what he’d come to America for, but he was at the mercy of Joseph Tumulty, and he didn’t like the feeling of having to rely on anyone but himself.

He stopped moving.

The maudlin song continued to float up towards him and, even though he disliked the sensation, he felt a prickling of homesickness, a faint longing for the things he’d left behind.

In the back of the cab that headed in the direction of the Parker Meridien, Zuboric said, ‘I think the fucker knows.’

‘Of course he knows. But what would you do, Artie? Beat information out of him? Take him down into a dungeon and kick the shit out of him until he talks?’ Pagan asked.

‘Yeah.’ Zuboric spread his hands, gazed at his fingernails. ‘It’s your ball game, Frank. You want to play it softly, that’s your business. You want to be Mr. Nice, fine by me.’

Pagan thought: Mr. Nice. He could have threatened Tumulty directly. He could have menaced him with a variety of pressures, including physical violence. But what would that have achieved? If Tumulty was IRA, then he’d embrace martyrdom happily. Broken ribs and bruises would be like badges of merit to Father Joe. No, it was better to leave threats hanging in the air, unspoken, veiled, and let Tumulty’s imagination go to work on them. He was still a little unhappy with Zuboric’s blunderbuss attitude and the way the whole interview had been conducted, but he decided not to criticise directly for the moment. He didn’t want to alienate Zuboric, and with him the whole FBI, unless it was completely unavoidable.

Zuboric said, ‘I’ll keep my man in place. Maybe get a tap on the guy’s phone. Maybe.’

‘Which he’ll expect,’ Pagan remarked. He watched the streets. Times Square. He’d photographed Roxanne here, right outside a HoJo’s. She wanted her picture taken there, because the place looked wonderfully sleazy. He had overworked the camera that summer. Roxanne outside the CBS building. Roxanne eating a huge pretzel at the Statue of Liberty. That’s what this place suggested to Pagan. A series of old snapshots. Pictures of another life lived by another man. He remembered suddenly a detail of Roxanne: the way her lips felt when they touched his own. The taste of her. The warmth.

It was details like this that killed him. He felt empty. Restless.

He leaned forward and told the cab driver to pull over.

Zuboric said, ‘Where you going, Frank?’

Pagan stepped out on to the sidewalk. ‘I need a little exorcism,’ he said.

Arthur Zuboric frowned in puzzlement. ‘Whatever,’ he said.