9

Roscommon, New York

Former United States Senator Harry Cairney rose very slowly from his bed and looked from the window at Roscommon Lake, which was sullen and utterly still in the windless morning. Cairney found himself longing for spring, true spring, which sometimes at nights he smelled on the cold air. When each spring came he wondered if it might be his last. Morbid speculations.

He pressed his forehead against the windowpane and saw Celestine riding her black mare, Jasmine, along the shore. Celestine’s yellow hair floated out behind her, and her body rose and fell with the rhythms of the animal. Cairney watched this fluent amalgam of woman and horse until Celestine had galloped out of sight. Then a black four-wheel-drive vehicle appeared between the trees. The jeep had the words DUTCHESS SECURITY painted on it. Cairney had hired them immediately after the emergency meeting with Kevin Dawson and the others a few days ago. Now the black vehicle was always out there, occupied by two men who carried automatic pistols and rifles.

Celestine hadn’t questioned him about the presence of the security men. If she thought about them at all, she presumably attributed them to an old man’s groundless fears for his home and property. He watched a pall of exhaust hang in the wintry air, then he turned from the window.

The light in the bedroom was poor. Misshapen clouds, leaden and dreadful, filled the sky. Sighing, Cairney reflected on the fact that he’d recently fallen into the habit of reminiscing, ransacking his memory and speaking his recollections aloud, even though he knew he was sometimes repeating himself. He’d say I remember the time when Lyndon decided he didn’t want the presidency. I remember he told me he didn’t give a rat’s fuck for the job any more, even though he’d lusted after it all his life, and now here he was with his ambition realised except it was goddam empty, and Celestine would nod her head sweetly and smile, as if she’d never heard Harry’s stories before. Softening of the brain, Cairney thought. A shiver of senility. Old age and death terrified him. He thought nothing could be lonelier than death.

The door of the bedroom opened. Celestine, in blue jeans and a heavy plaid jacket, stepped inside. Her pale skin had been buffed by the cold air. Her cheeks were faintly red and her eyes bright, and she looked to Cairney like something that winter, at its most artful, had created especially for him. Young. So goddam young. He touched her face with his palm. All his morose thoughts dissolved. Celestine was life and vitality – a light that pierced his gloom.

She spread her hands in front of the fire. ‘Why are you out of bed, Harry?’

Cairney coughed loudly, then popped a Kleenex from the box on the bedside table and raised it to the tip of his nose. ‘God, I hate lying in bed, Cel,’ he complained.

‘How the devil are you going to get well if you don’t rest?’

Scolding him. Smiling as she did so. Cairney sometimes felt like a small boy caught raiding the cookie jar. He liked the feeling. ‘Nag, nag,’ he said. His voice sounded strange to him. Thick, coming from a distance. He wondered about the condition of his lungs. It had to be a swamp in there.

‘For your own good, old man,’ Celestine said. She sat on the bed and removed the riding boots from her long legs. She tossed her hair back. Cairney watched her. He had loved his first wife, Kathleen, but not with this kind of intensity. He absorbed every little detail of Celestine, as if he were afraid of her somehow slipping away from him. He made orbits around her sun, like some satellite planet. With Kathleen, the relationship had evolved through the years into one of comfortable friendship, lacking passion but filled just the same with mutual understanding. With Kathleen, Cairney had always been in control. He had no control at all when it came to Celestine. He’d relinquished it cheerfully.

‘Lie down,’ she said, and she patted the bed.

Cairney did as he was told. He made a great show of moaning about her commands. She propped herself up on an elbow and looked at him, tracing a line down his cheek with her fingernail.

‘Are we going to work at getting better, Harry?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he answered.

‘Doctor’s orders, Harry. Listen to your physician.’

‘Tully’s a broken-down old Irish sawbones.’

‘Stop being irascible. It doesn’t become you.’

Cairney smiled. The nearness of his wife was like a cocoon, a place to shelter. ‘Well, he is.’

‘He’s highly experienced –’

‘That’s a euphemism for over the hill.’

‘Harry, Harry, Harry.’ Celestine tapped a fingernail on his lip. ‘I think you like playing the role of an old codger, don’t you?’

‘An old codger is what I am, sweetheart.’

Celestine pressed her face against Harry Cairney’s cheek. ‘You’re not so bad, Harry. You’re not so bad.’ She rolled away from him, staring up at the ceiling.

He glanced at her. She was wearing what he thought of as her secretive expression. It was the look she always had when she was about to surprise him with a birthday present or something unexpected at Christmas. He always saw through it because Celestine, no matter how damn hard she tried, didn’t have the knack for guile.

‘Out with it,’ he said.

‘Out with what?’

‘Whatever it is that’s making you look so smug.’

‘Smug? Me?’

‘Yeah. You.’

She sat up, clutching her knees and smiling.

‘I don’t know if you’re well enough for surprises, Harry. Tully said you needed peace and rest.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ Cairney grumbled. ‘Are you going to tell me what it is that makes you look like a cat that’s swallowed the bloody canary whole?’

‘Patrick called early this morning.’

‘Patrick? My Patrick?’

‘The very same.’

Cairney reached for another Kleenex and sneezed into it, causing a tiny pain in the centre of his chest. ‘Why didn’t you wake me, for God’s sake?’

‘Tully said you needed your sleep.’

Cairney dismissed Tully with a gesture of his hand. ‘I haven’t spoken with Patrick since God knows when.’

Celestine ran her fingers through her hair. ‘You’ll get the chance soon enough, Harry.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He called from Albany. From the airport. He’s on his way to Roscommon, even as we sit here.’

Cairney laid a hand against his chest. ‘Patrick!’ he said. ‘Why the hell didn’t he let me know he was coming?’

‘Don’t get excited, Harry.’

‘He could’ve called. I’d have made arrangements to have him picked up, Cel.’

Celestine massaged Cairney’s shoulders. ‘He said he was going to rent a car in Albany and drive here.’

Cairney sat up, swinging his feet to the floor.

‘Lie down, Harry.’

‘And have my son come here and see me like an invalid?’

‘Which is what you are.’

Cairney wandered to the fireplace. Patrick. His only child. The boy who left Boston University to go to Dublin and study archaeology. When he wasn’t off digging in some ridiculous desert, he was deep inside books and old documents and God knows what. He was thirty years old, and Harry Cairney thought it was time his son stopped being the eternal student and did something useful with his life. He wasn’t going to say so to Patrick because all the arguments were old and had been used up years ago and Patrick was an independent soul who’d go his own way anyhow. What Cairney couldn’t understand was the boy’s infatuation with ancient things. He loved his son fiercely. Differences of opinion didn’t inhibit that feeling. Just the same, he wished Patrick would come back to America permanently and take up something less … esoteric than digging in the graves of long-dead men. But Patrick had never expressed the desire to leave Dublin nor any interest in anything other than useless archaeology. Now he was coming home to a sick father and security men crawling over the estate. Terrific.

Celestine stood behind him, blowing warm breath on the back of his neck. ‘Shouldn’t we be killing the fatted calf or something?’ she asked.

Cairney turned to her with a smile. ‘You’ll like him. I know you will.’

‘I hope he likes me,’ Celestine said. She was quiet a moment. ‘I’ll make you a deal. I’ll let you get dressed and come downstairs on the condition you don’t do anything strenuous and you limit your intake to one glass of brandy. A small one.’

Cairney coughed again. ‘You drive a hard bargain, woman.’

Celestine said, ‘I want a husband who’s healthy, Harry.’

‘Okay,’ Cairney said. ‘It’s a deal.’

Celestine removed her plaid jacket and tossed it over a chair. ‘I’m going to take a shower and dress in something suitable for my stepson.’ She paused, laughed quietly. ‘He’s only five years younger than me, Harry! How can I possibly be somebody’s stepmother?’

She moved towards the bathroom, pausing in the doorway.

‘You really ought to tell your guard-dogs out there that we’re expecting company, Harry. You wouldn’t want them shooting at your own son, would you?’

Cairney nodded. He watched his wife discard her shirt, saw how it slipped from her body as she stepped inside the bathroom. The door shut and then there was the rattle of water falling inside the shower stall and after a moment the sound of Celestine singing.

Patrick Cairney parked his rented Dodge Colt at the side of the road and stepped out, leaving the engine running. He’d come off the Taconic Parkway near Rhinebeck where a minor road branched in the direction of Roscommon. Out here, miles from any major city, the air smelled good and he took it into his lungs deeply. The landscape was covered with crusted snow. He stared across the frozen fields and the stark clumps of woodland. It was the landscape of his childhood and he knew it thoroughly, all the tracks, the hiding places, the best trees to climb. When he considered his boyhood now, the recollection was touched by a strange little sense of emptiness, as if his only memories were forlorn ones – which wasn’t entirely true. Harry had provided a few good things to look back on – a camping trip one summer to the deep woods of Maine, or the time one humid August when they’d gone together up into the Adirondacks and fished Sacandaga Lake. Even there, though, Harry had never strayed too far from civilisation and the nearest phone booth because he always wanted to keep in touch, which to Senator Cairney meant placing one call every day to his Washington office.

Patrick Cairney stepped back inside his car. He drove carefully on slippery pavement. When he reached the gates of the estate he got out and pushed them open. A black jeep came out of the trees towards him. There were two men inside. One carried a rifle across his knees, the other climbed out and approached Cairney. He was a stocky man with a pistol strapped to his belt and he came over the snow cautiously. Across the side panel of the vehicle were the words DUTCHESS SECURITY.

‘You Patrick?’ the man asked.

Cairney nodded.

The man hitched up his belt. ‘Okay. You’re expected.’

Cairney studied the man a second. He had the look of security guards everywhere. His face had become pinched from years of scrutinising people. Around his eyes was a dense mass of wrinkles. ‘What’s with all the security?’ Cairney asked.

The man shrugged. He didn’t answer Cairney’s question. He turned and went back to the jeep, where he climbed in beside his partner. Cairney returned to the Dodge Colt and watched the black jeep reverse. It vanished behind a clump of trees. Security guards. What was Harry worried about? His collection of old Celtic manuscripts he’d gathered over the years? Or was it those mouldy manuscripts of Yeats and George Bernard Shaw and Joyce that bothered him? Cairney wondered if there were burglars of a literary persuasion in the area, masked men planning to heist the precious scrap of beer-stained paper on which Brendan Behan had written: To my pal Harry Cairney, may he colonize Amerika. The old man had that one framed and prominently displayed on the desk in his office.

The house came in view. Patrick Cairney had always thought of it as a monstrosity, sprawling across the landscape like an immense mausoleum. Given a smokestack, it might have passed as a crematorium. It wasn’t a house that invited you inside. It lacked any welcoming warmth. Cairney pulled up at the foot of the steps, glancing a moment at Roscommon Lake, then he got out of the car. He marvelled at it all – the mansion, the estate, everything that one poor but overwhelmingly ambitious Irish immigrant had pulled together in his lifetime. There was something to be said, after all, for making your career one of public service in America.

The door at the top of the steps opened. Celestine Cunningham Cairney stood there, looking down at him. She wore tailored tan slacks, a chocolate-brown sweater, a peach-coloured chiffon scarf. Her soft blonde hair hung at her shoulders. Patrick Cairney, who had always thought his father must exaggerate Celestine’s beauty in his letters because he was blinded by love, felt astonishment. The woman had the kind of loveliness that stopped men dead in their, tracks, that made all heads turn in crowded rooms and silenced cocktail-party conversations. She moved down the steps without any of the self-consciousness of beautiful women, as if she were quite unaware of the way she looked.

She reached the bottom step and she laid one hand on her stepson’s arm. ‘Welcome,’ she said. ‘Harry’s told me a lot about you.’

She leaned forward and kissed Cairney on the cheek. A stepmother’s kiss, tentative and quick and just a little awkward. Cairney wasn’t sure what to say. He was still trying to recover from his surprise. What had he expected anyhow? A good-looking matronly woman, maybe, somebody with the face and body of a sympathetic head nurse. Somebody, at best, handsome. But not this. This vision. And, although he didn’t like the question, it entered his mind anyway: What did she see in an old man like Harry Cairney?

‘Harry’s waiting for you.’

Patrick Cairney looked over Celestine’s shoulder. His father appeared in the doorway, smaller than Cairney remembered him, shrunken, his silver hair thinner than before and his eyes, under the great overhanging forehead, set in deep shadow.

‘Let me hear it, Pat,’ Harry Cairney called out in a voice that was curiously cracked.

Patrick Cairney hesitated before he sang. ‘You haven’t an arm and you haven’t a leg,/You’re an eyeless, noseless, chickenless egg –’

His father sang the next two lines hoarsely. ‘You’ll have to be put with a bowl to beg,/O Johnny, we hardly knew ye!’

‘With drums and guns, and guns and drums,/The enemy nearly slew ye –’

‘My darling dear, you look so queer,/O Johnny, I hardly knew ye!’

Then the old man was laughing, and Patrick Cairney climbed the steps quickly, thinking how the way they greeted each other never changed. It was a ritual as well preserved as his father’s mythical vision of Ireland. And Patrick found it empty and meaningless, a routine first developed in his childhood. It had been embarrassing even back then. Now it was worse because it was forced and ridiculous. Both men embraced, then Harry Cairney stepped back and said, ‘Let me look at you, Pat. Let me take a good long look at you. You’ve put on some muscles since I last saw you. It must be all those Irish potatoes you’ve been eating.’

Patrick Cairney glanced at Celestine, who was coming up the steps. She said, ‘Did somebody give you permission to come out here into the cold, Harry?’

Cairney winked at his son. ‘She never lets up,’ he said. ‘She keeps an old man in check.’

‘Somebody has to,’ Celestine said. She slipped her arm through Harry’s and she smiled at her stepson. It was a good smile, the kind Patrick Cairney thought you could bask in on a chilly winter’s day. Like having your own private sun.

‘Now let’s all go indoors,’ Celestine said. She shivered as she ushered Harry inside the house.

‘I’ll fetch my luggage,’ Patrick Cairney said.

He went back down the steps to the Dodge Colt. He reached inside and lifted his bag from the rear seat. He closed the door. He saw the black security jeep appear on the shore of Roscommon Lake, idling between bare trees.

John F. Kennedy Airport, New York

The man from the State Department was called J. W. Sweeting. He wore a three-piece suit and his hair was immaculately brushed over his broad skull. He had a brown leather briefcase with his initials embossed on it. He sat in the arrivals lounge at John F. Kennedy Airport and studied the man he’d just met from the London flight. The Reverend Ivor McInnes was big, weighed somewhere in the region of two hundred and twenty pounds, none of it flab. He had a large, craggy face that was handsome in a fleshy way. He was about fifty, Sweeting reckoned. The eyes were green and lively and burned into you whenever you looked at them. The British press called him Ivor the Terrible, which Sweeting thought he understood. There was the scent of brimstone hanging all around the Reverend McInnes. Sweeting knew he wouldn’t like to sit through one of McInnes’s sermons, which would be all thunder and spit. And yet like many people before him J. W. Sweeting realised that there was something attractive about McInnes, a certain quality of roguish charm which, as a political tool, could be extremely useful. It was easy to imagine Ivor swaying large crowds, shaping them any way he wanted.

Sweeting tapped his briefcase. ‘I’ll go over the conditions of entry for you,’ he said.

McInnes smiled. ‘No need, no need,’ he said in an accent that reminded Sweeting of a Liverpool rock singer. ‘I know them all. Your embassy people in London, the gargoyles of Grosvenor Square, already put me through their wire-mesh procedures.’

Sweeting rubbed his embossed initials with a fingertip. ‘In case there’s any misunderstanding, Reverend, you were granted an entry visa on the condition that you refrain from speaking in public places or giving inflammatory interviews to the press. State is adamant about that.’

McInnes swivelled his green eyes up to the high ceiling and looked very impatient. ‘I know all this, young man.’

Sweeting sighed. It was the sigh of a man carrying out his duty regardless. ‘You are to refrain from all and any public assemblies. You are also ordered to refrain from addressing any private assemblies, clubs, and associations, organisations, and the like, which are considered partisan in nature. You are prohibited from activities designed to raise funds for any partisan organisations with which you might be associated in Northern Ireland.’

‘Can I actually breathe?’ McInnes asked. ‘Or am I forbidden the use of your air as well?’

Sweeting ignored this. ‘You are also deterred from making political statements concerning British or American policy in Ireland, the Irish Republican Army, the conditions of Irish political prisoners in British jails, and any remarks, ambiguous or otherwise, about the Roman Catholic Church.’

‘Did somebody tear up your Constitution? Did somebody just decide to disregard that wonderful document in my case?’ McInnes was looking amused rather than annoyed.

Sweeting went on, ‘Your stay is limited to ten days and restricted to New York City and its environs. Any other movements must be cleared in advance with a representative of the State Department. To wit, me. And I’ll turn down any and all requests you might make. Is all this clear?’

McInnes nodded. ‘Loud and clear.’

‘Any violation of these conditions will result in your expulsion from the United States. Between you and me, I think you’re lucky to get this visa. The fact is, State pursues a policy of fairness towards both sides in the Irish question. If we let in, say, a priest from Tipperary, then we can’t keep out a minister from Belfast. Even one whose own church has rejected him.’

‘Are you a Catholic?’ McInnes asked.

‘Is that relevant?’

McInnes grinned. He had strong white teeth. He brought his face very close to Sweeting’s. It was a characteristic of his, this closing of the distance between himself and his listener, and it forced an uneasy intimacy on whoever Ivor was talking to. ‘I have this reputation, Mr. Sweeting. They say I hate Roman Catholics. I admit I have my differences with the Church of Rome, friend, but as far as individual Catholics are concerned, I don’t hate them. They’re misguided people, that’s all.’ McInnes paused. His grin created little squares of puckered flesh all across the expanse of his face. ‘My own church failed to understand that, Mr. Sweeting. They interpreted my objections to Rome as attacks on individual Catholics. Which wasn’t what I intended. Far from it.’

Sweeting stepped back a pace. McInnes had been talking very loudly and several people were staring at him.

‘You’re misunderstood, is that what you’re saying?’ Sweeting asked.

‘I’m damned in certain quarters whenever I open my mouth.’

‘Maybe you should keep it shut more often,’ J. W. Sweeting said.

Ivor McInnes smiled. He placed one of his big hands on Sweeting’s shoulder and rocked the man from the State Department very slightly back and forth. Sweeting once more stepped away. McInnes reminded him of one of those TV salesmen who pitched Herbalife or urged you to send your dollars to some church beamed into your living room from a satellite in the sky. He made you feel you were the most important thing in his life when he talked to you. It was the way the green eyes concentrated on your face and the easy manner, the quiet little touches, the familiarity. He was convincing, Sweeting thought, but so were all the blow-dried evangelists of the air-waves. Where McInnes had the edge over his electronic rivals was in the way he looked – he was rumpled instead of embalmed in polyester, and his silver hair had never been styled beneath a dryer but was unkempt and grew down over his collar.

‘You’re not a stuffy little man, are you, Mr. Sweeting?’ McInnes said. ‘I thought everybody in the State Department had had their sense of humour expunged at birth. I thought they had their wit circumcised along with their foreskins.’

J. W. Sweeting passed the palm of one hand over his forehead. He was inexplicably nervous all at once. In theory, he should have loathed a man like McInnes. In practice, he was finding it difficult. The green eyes suggested amusement and a benign tolerance for the sorrows of the human condition, and the smile, that big wide-mouthed expression, was magnetic. What Sweeting had expected to encounter was a hateful bigot, which would have been easy to handle. McInnes didn’t come across that way at all. Indeed, he appeared reasonable and easygoing, a man given to instant friendships, huge handshakes, intimate gestures. A man who played on your sympathies by insisting, with a down-turned mouth, that he was misunderstood by his enemies, which was a terrible cross he had to carry. He was goddamn likeable.

McInnes rubbed his chin. ‘You’re not a bad fellow, Sweeting. And because I like you I’ll make life easy for you. I’ll go along with all your restrictions. I’ll whistle any tune you care to hear whether I like it or not, because I’m not here on any political mission. I’ll tell you something else. I smell The White House behind all these conditions of yours. I smell Tommy Dawson at work.’

‘Like the State Department, the President is neutral in the Irish question,’ Sweeting said.

McInnes laughed. It was a curious sound, a throaty wheeze. ‘Neutral? Tommy Dawson’s a black-hearted Catholic Irishman who makes pilgrimages to the dear little town of Ardare in the Republic of Ireland where his grandparents were born. He’s about as neutral as the Pope, Mr. Sweeting. And he hates anybody from the North. He hates Ulster.’

Sweeting wasn’t going to be drawn into the question of Thomas Dawson’s Irish heritage or the matter of his sympathies. He returned to the only subject he was interested in. ‘If you restrict yourself to the research you say you want to do here, then we’ll get along just famously.’

McInnes nodded his head. ‘What could be more peaceful and worthy than writing the saga of Ulster labourers in the history of the American railroad? All that sweat and toil. All the sadness of the immigrant worker. The longings. The hopes. The dreams. By God, it’s a rich tale. And a complicated one. Besides, I’m a minister without a congregation, and a man has to make a living somehow.’

‘Indeed,’ Sweeting said. He thought of how, in support of his visa application, McInnes had submitted a copy of a contract with a small university press for his projected history. It was one book Sweeting would manage not to read, if indeed it was ever likely to see the light of publication.

McInnes picked up his suitcase from the floor. ‘I’m booked into the Essex House on Central Park, Mr. Sweeting.’

‘I know,’ Sweeting said.

McInnes winked at the man. ‘I thought you might.’

Wildwood, Long Island

Big Jock Mulhaney drove his four-wheel-drive vehicle slowly over damp sands. He had a view of Long Island Sound, which looked dismal and abandoned in the sullen light of afternoon. He wore a thick flannel jacket and waterproof pants, and he had a baseball cap pulled down squarely on his head. It wasn’t the kind of clothing he usually favoured. His tastes ran to rather bright three-piece suits, large checks and flashy herringbones, accompanied by wide-knotted neckties. But today he wasn’t travelling in his usual environment either, which was bounded by his penthouse over union headquarters in Brooklyn and the midtown Manhattan clubs he patronised, where his fellow members regarded him with all the suspicion Old Money has for the nouveau riche. He was viewed, he knew, as an upstart, a man who didn’t belong in the more rarefied heights of society. He was a brawler, a climber, a loudmouth, and he suffered from the most heinous condition of all – which was naked ambition – but there was a certain shrewdness to him that nobody disrespected.

Now, as the four-wheel-drive vehicle slithered into ruts and a vicious wind stirred the waters of the sound, Mulhaney wondered if it was bad judgment to be out here at all. For one thing, expanses of nature made him nervous. He couldn’t take too many trees. He couldn’t stand silences and great spaces. For another, he wasn’t sure he should be meeting with Nicholas Linney anyhow, but who else was he going to confide in? He couldn’t go to Harry Cairney with his theory unless he had some backing. So he needed Linney’s approval and support.

Besides, there was another reason for his uneasiness, one he didn’t want to think about. It was the simple fact that he had recently been obliged to cover some very bad investments with money that had been earmarked for Ireland. It wan’t any great sum, a mere $450,000 skimmed from his total contribution of $1.9 million, and he was going to return it next time funds were raised, and nobody was going to find out about it anyway – but just the same the mere prospect of discovery made him feel apprehensive. What if one of the other Fund-raisers found out about the shortage? Hell, that would make Big Jock the prime suspect in the hijacking of the Connie. How could it not? A man who could ‘borrow’ from Irish funds for his own private purposes wasn’t a man who could be trusted. It had been a stupid thing to do, admittedly, but he’d been pressured by creditors, and he hadn’t been thinking clearly, and he didn’t want any kind of public scandal attached to his name. Thomas Dawson had recently announced a committee of inquiry into the financial practices of unions, and Mulhaney didn’t like the idea of coming under the scrutiny of a bunch of congressional jerk-offs who were bound to ask tough questions. He’d covered his shortage this time, and so had spared himself some potential embarrassment, but he’d done it only at the expense of the Irish. But it wasn’t something he intended to continue doing. Fuck Tommy Dawson, he thought. Always pointing a mighty finger at the unions, slinging accusations, digging for dirt.

Mulhaney’s vehicle became bogged down in the soft wet sands. He switched off the engine and stared the length of the beach. What if this Irishman they were all so goddam afraid of found out about the shortage? He shook his head. The Irishman wasn’t going to get within a hundred miles of him, so he wasn’t going to worry about that notion.

He got out of the vehicle and turned the collar of his jacket up against the whining wind. In the distance there was the sound of gunfire, a constant rapid knocking that was muted by the churning waters. He walked a little way. He moved awkwardly because the heavy sands inhibited his progress, and every now and again spray splashed up and blinded him. Christ, he hated this place. He stopped and removed a small silver flask from his pocket. He opened it, sipped some cognac, then stuck the flask away again. Ahead, a hundred or so yards along the seafront, he could see Linney’s Land-Rover, which had been painted in camouflage colours. The trouble with Nick Linney, Mulhaney thought, was the guy was some kind of nut. He read Soldier of Fortune and believed every word of it. He was into weaponry and combat and guerilla techniques, and he went through the pages of Soldier of Fortune with a big yellow marker in his fist, circling stories and advertisements that interested him.

Mulhaney kept walking. Now he could see Linney lying flat on the sand. The sound of gunfire was constant. Blap-blap-blap. As he got closer, Mulhaney noticed the targets Linney was using. Close to the shoreline, the guy had set up row after row of cantaloupes, and he was currently blasting away at them. Every now and then one of them would explode and rise up in the air in pulpy smithereens. Linney was from outer space, Mulhaney thought.

‘Nick!’ he called out.

Linney stood up, raised one arm in greeting. He was dressed in combat clothing. He even had a beret, which he wore at a precarious angle. Mulhaney noticed the heavy army boots. Grenades lay on the sands alongside an assortment of weapons. Jesus, the guy was a one-man militia.

Linney stared in the direction of the cantaloupes. Then he held out the weapon he’d been using as if he wanted Mulhaney to inspect it and give it some seal of approval. Mulhaney wasn’t happy around firearms.

‘The M-16A2,’ Linney said proudly.

Jock Mulhaney nodded. The melons, most of them shattered, were being sucked at by the tide.

‘Feel it, Jock.’ Linney thrust the weapon out in the manner used by gun freaks the world over when they’re in apprehensive company. Cavalier. A little too casual.

Mulhaney held the gun for a moment before returning it. He wondered how Linney got hold of weapons that private citizens weren’t supposed to have. ‘Yeah. Feels solid,’ was all he could say.

‘Excellent piece,’ Linney said. He pointed out some features, such as the new muzzle brake/compensator and the integral brass deflector, and Mulhaney made humming sounds, as if he might be remotely interested. Mulhaney hoped that if any one of the Fund-raisers ever found out about the ‘borrowed’ cash it wouldn’t be Nick Linney.

Linney swung the weapon back towards the rows of cantaloupes and fired off a couple of shots. Mulhaney watched one of the melons explode and then hit the water, carried away like a mutant jellyfish.

‘Very nice, Nick,’ Mulhaney said.

Linney smiled, then put the gun inside his Land-Rover and lit a cigarette. There were oilstains on the backs of his fingers. He smoked in silence for a time, his face turned out towards the waters, before he tossed the cigarette away and looked at Mulhaney.

‘What’s on your mind, Jock?’ he asked.

‘You have to ask?’

Nicholas Linney beat the palm of one hand upon the panel of his vehicle. ‘I get the impression you suspect me, Jock. I got that feeling when we were at Roscommon.’

Mulhaney shook his head. ‘I considered it, I admit.’

‘And you changed your mind?’

Mulhaney took his flask out again. He wished he’d brought a cigar with him to complement the flavour of the cognac, but he’d left his case behind. He swallowed, offered the flask to Linney, who declined.

Mulhaney said, ‘Yeah. I changed my mind. Which is why I drove all the fucking way out here to see you.’

Linney pulled a pair of sunglasses over his eyes even though the sky was gloomy and overcast. ‘I’m listening, Jock.’

‘Okay. First, I ruled out Cairney. He’s been in this business for nearly fifty goddam years and I can’t see him screwing the Irish at this stage of the game. He’s been on the Cause’s side since I was in fucking diapers and you weren’t even born, so why would he dump on it now?’

Linney said, ‘I’ll go along with that. It wasn’t Cairney.’

‘Okay. I ruled out myself because I know I didn’t have anything to do with the Connie.’

Linney smiled. ‘I’m supposed to take your word for this, Jock?’

‘Hear me out,’ Mulhaney said. ‘Okay. I eliminated Cairney and myself. Leaving you and Kev Dawson.’

‘Don’t keep me in suspense, Jock.’

‘First, I figured it might be you. You wanna know why? Because you’re the guy that physically takes the money to the Courier –’

‘I never saw the Courier in my lfe,’ Linney said.

‘Okay. Let me put it another way. You give the money to a guy who gives the money to the Courier. Right?’

Linney adjusted his dark glasses. ‘Something like that.’

‘Fine,’ Mulhaney said. He glanced at the demolished melons, understanding now why Nick Linney had an effect on him. It was more than just the gun thing, it was something in Linney’s physical qualities that unsettled him. That strangely coloured face, which reminded Mulhaney of a lime. The guy’s general air of self-confidence and the feeling you got that when a nuclear holocaust came, Linney was going to be among the survivors, bottled up in some fucking concrete cellar with his guns and dried fruits and astronaut foods. Linney always looked as if he knew something the rest of the human race had either ignored or forgotten.

Mulhaney played with the surface of his flask. ‘I ruled you out, Nick, because I couldn’t see you turning against the Cause. I couldn’t quite get a fix on that. I mean, you bring in more money than the rest of us put together, and if you wanted to steal it you’d find an easier way than going to the trouble of hijacking a fucking ship. You could have stolen the money at the source, for Christ’s sake! You could have pocketed the money you raised and then told us that your donors just couldn’t come through and who the hell would have been any the wiser?’

Nicholas Linney crossed his arms on his chest. He looked like some tinpot general in a South American jungle army. ‘And that leaves Kevin Dawson,’ he said.

‘Kevin Dawson.’ Mulhaney gouged out a pattern with the heel of his shoe in the damp sands.

‘He’s got money coming out his ears. Why would he want more?’

Mulhaney smiled. ‘It wasn’t the cash he was after, Nick. His family owns about half of fucking Connecticut, so he wasn’t looking for financial gain. You wanna know what I think?’

Linney took off his sunglasses. ‘Tell me, Jock.’

‘Okay. I see it happening like this. Let’s say he gets a call from Tom Dawson in the White House. Big Brother’s unhappy. He doesn’t like money flowing out of America and into Ireland. He’s in a flap because all that money coming from the States makes him look bad with his bosom buddies in London, who are about the only fucking allies he’s got in the world, and they’ve been bitching about American aid to Irish terrorists. He says to Kev that it’s got to stop. And Kev, who’s never been a man to deny Big Brother anything, tells him about a certain shipment aboard a certain small vessel. Wonderful, Tommy thinks. We’ll put a stop to that one. He gets on the phone, talks to some of his cronies, and these cronies put together a bunch of fucking killers. Vets. Former marines who’ve been twiddling their thumbs since the Bay of Pigs. Whatever. The money’s taken. Tommy is happy, Kev hasn’t let Big Brother down, the crew isn’t around to point the finger at anyone, and there’s no awkward publicity.’

Nicholas Linney reached for the M-16A2 and held it against his side. He fired off two shots, missing the cantaloupes both times. Mulhaney’s ears rang from the noise of the gunfire. Linney studied the barrel of the weapon for a moment, then turned to look at Mulhaney.

‘What kind of proof do you have that Kev Dawson went running off to the White House, Jock?’

Mulhaney shrugged. He had been so convinced by his own theory that the matter of proof hadn’t occurred to him. To him it was blatantly obvious that Kevin Dawson was the turncoat, and even if he had constructed a scenario that might or might not have been correct, that alone didn’t detract from the basic feeling of rightness he had. And he wasn’t accustomed, in the world of ass-kissers and yes-men in which he insulated himself, to having his judgments questioned because proof was lacking. Kevin Dawson was the one. The only candidate. Everyone knew that the Dawsons weren’t a trustworthy bunch.

Linney said, ‘For all I know you could have come out here to tell me this story because you wanted to avert suspicion from yourself.’

Mulhaney was quiet. Does this bastard suspect me of something? he wondered. The speculation filled him with a cold fear. He said, ‘I could have. But I didn’t.’

‘I’ve only got your word for that, Jock. Which leaves us right back where we started.’ Linney looked out towards Long Island Sound. ‘What makes you so sure that I didn’t arrange the whole thing anyhow?’

Mulhaney felt spray rise up against his face as the wind forced itself over the tide. ‘Because I know it was Kev Dawson, for Christ’s sake,’ he said. ‘A process of simple elimination, Nick.’

‘It’s not so simple, Jock. Show me proof. I need to see proof before I can go along with your story. From where I stand, Kev Dawson’s always been reliable when it comes to raising funds. I need something that might convince me otherwise. I need a smoking gun, friend. Right now, I’m thinking that you dislike Kevin Dawson so intensely you’d hang anything on him. Jesus, you hate that whole goddam family.’

‘There’s nothing personal in any of this,’ Mulhaney said. He sipped from his flask again. Coming out here to talk to Linney – a waste of time. He had hoped that Linney would become an ally and together they’d go see Cairney and lay the story in front of the old man and let him decide how to deal with Dawson. Now Linney was asking for proof, for God’s sake. What did he want? Taped conversations? Transcripts?

‘It’s not exactly the kind of thing where proof’s easy to come by,’ he said, a little deflated. He had revealed himself to Linney and now, having been rebuffed by the man, he felt very defensive. ‘Okay. So maybe my theory isn’t correct. Maybe it happened some other way and Kev Dawson had motives I haven’t even thought about. Maybe the family empire is strapped for cash, I don’t know. But I know he’s the one.’

Linney said, ‘Let me tell you what I think. The money’s gone and that’s a mystery. I’ve never been happy with mysteries, Jock. Detective stories, bodies inside locked rooms, that kind of thing never appealed to me. I like facts. The harder the better. This gun, for instance. It’s a hard fact. Right?’

Mulhaney nodded in a sullen way.

Linney ran the palm of one hand over the weapon. It was almost a lover’s caress. The gun might have been the leg of a mistress. ‘I don’t give a shit right now about who took the money because the only hard fact I can see is that some guy is coming here from Ireland. And that makes me very unhappy. Do you think he’s going to sit down and discuss the missing money over a friendly cup of tea?’

Mulhaney said nothing. He hadn’t given a lot of thought to this shadowy Irishman who seemed to terrify everybody but himself.

‘The fuck he is,’ Linney went on. ‘If I was that guy I’d have a bad attitude. I wouldn’t be disposed towards kindness. I wouldn’t make polite inquiries. I wouldn’t trust a fucking soul. If I was him, I’d be ready to do violence.’ Linney paused, gazing at Mulhaney’s florid face. ‘Suppose this character runs you down, Jock. What would you tell him?’

‘I’d give him Kevin Dawson,’ Mulhaney said quickly.

‘What if he doesn’t believe you? Who would you give him next? Cairney? Me?’

Mulhaney shuffled his feet in the sand. He was always out of his depth when it came to hypothetical matters. Ifs played no role in Mulhaney’s world. He didn’t answer Linney’s question.

‘This guy isn’t going to be your friend, Jock. You better understand that.’

Mulhaney smiled now. He was uncomfortable with the way Linney was talking. ‘How would you behave if he came to you?’ he asked.

Linney made a gesture with the weapon. ‘I’m ready for anything,’ he answered.

‘Jesus,’ Mulhaney said. ‘You talk as if this guy’s going to find us. I think you’re paranoid.’

‘Is there another way to be?’ Nicholas Linney asked.