12

New York City

Joseph X. Tumulty looked from the window of his office down into the darkened street. Earlier, a navy-blue Ford had parked halfway along the block, and the tan Chrysler that had been stationed there drove off. It was the changing of the guard. He peered across the way. There was a light in the office building opposite St. Finbar’s Mission. Tumulty could see a fat man sitting behind a desk. He was counting papers, flicking them back and licking his thumb every so often.

Tumulty turned from the window and went to his desk. He sat down, adjusting the lamp so that the light didn’t shine directly into his face. He unlocked the middle drawer and took out a leather pouch, which he unzipped. There were seven thousand five hundred dollars inside. This money had been given to him by Padraic Finn more than three years ago. A contingency fund, which Finn, with the canniness of a man who understood that money worked for you, had placed in an interest-bearing account under Tumulty’s name. When Tumulty had gone just before closing-time to make the withdrawal – a tense moment, standing in a line that never seemed to move – he had the feeling he’d been followed to the bank. He’d withdrawn all the money and closed the account. Santacroce wanted six thousand dollars. Six thousand would have fed the clientele of St. Finbar’s for about four months.

Tumulty absently regarded the religious artifacts on the walls. The Mexican cross he’d bought that day in Santacroce’s store lay propped against the wall near the window. The Christ figure nailed to the wood was gory in the way Latin Americans loved. Blood filled up the eyes and dripped from the most unlikely places in the wooden body. Tumulty thought Jesus looked more perplexed than sorrowful. It was a distasteful piece but he hadn’t wanted to leave Santacroce’s store empty-handed. For appearance’s sake.

Santacroce had said the merchandise might take some time to get together. Arrangements had to be made. He estimated twenty-four hours maximum, maybe a whole lot sooner. It depended on a variety of factors, none of which the gun merchant volunteered to explain. Tumulty hadn’t asked either. He’d been very anxious to get out of that stifling little shop with its smell of old sandalwood and lacquer and dust. And away from Santacroce too, whose white puffy face and slitlike eyes seemed to suggest he was in the business, plain and simple, of death.

Twenty-four hours. Tumulty wondered a moment about Jig. When was he coming back? He couldn’t remember if he’d told Jig two days or three. And then there was the unpleasant prospect of picking up a package from Santacroce and getting it back to this place. He knew it was crazy to bring weapons inside St. Finbar’s, but what was his alternative? He couldn’t think of a place where he might safely stash guns.

He hated the feeling of St. Finbar’s being under siege like this. The idea scared him. And if it came down to a choice between the Cause and his own little mission here on Canal Street, the desperate souls he cared for, which way would he go? That was the Big One. Would he go to jail before giving up Jig? Or would he quietly surrender the assassin to Frank Pagan so that he might get on with his life’s work in peace – if indeed peace was attainable after an act of treachery?

From the kitchen below there came the sound of voices. Babble. The smell of cooking floated inside his office. It was time, he thought, for prayer, the quest for guidance. He folded his hands together and closed his eyes, inclining his forehead to the tips of his fingers. For most of his life this act had been invigorating for him, although at times God’s responses were difficult to catch. Sometimes Tumulty felt he was pursuing a sweet, silvery thread through empty reaches of the ether, fumbling towards a divine light. But there were other moments when he achieved the light, and then a great calm would come over him and he would glimpse a way through the mysteries of the divinity.

He sat very still. He tried to concentrate on the inner voice that was for him his means of communication when it came to prayer. A secretive little voice, which sometimes sounded like a tiny whisper in the vastness of the cosmos. He opened his eyes, frustrated. It wasn’t happening today. There were crossed wires in his brain, and other thoughts kept intruding. Guns and politics, secular matters. He made fists of his thick hands and clenched them on the surface of the desk. Guidance, dear God. Show me. He stood up and wandered to the window, looked down into the street, saw that the navy-blue Ford was still in place there. Guidance, he thought again. Instead of God’s voice, what he heard was Finn saying The Cause is a holy one, Joe. And God knows that. There’s no conflict, none at all, between serving God and the Cause. You wouldn’t be the first man of the cloth to embrace them both.

Tumulty wanted to believe this. The problem lay in violence and murder, neither of which he could possibly condone. It seemed to him that the Cause and God were diametrically opposed to each other. The former promoted death, the latter life. It was the difference between a total eclipse and the warming light of the sun. Dear Christ, how had he ever stumbled into this dilemma? More to the point, was there any way to resolve it? To square his religious beliefs with the demands of the Cause?

A sound in the doorway of his office made him turn around. The tall, skinny figure who stood there was a man called McCune, who blinked into the room with watery blue eyes. McCune wore a flannel shirt, open at the neck so that his large Adam’s apple was visible, like some kind of growth, in his scrawny throat.

‘We’re wondering when you’re coming down, Father Joe,’ the man said.

Tumulty stared at the man. McCune had been one of his earliest successes. When he’d first encountered him, McCune had been a suicidal drunk with violent tendencies, a former railway engineer canned by the railroad for hauling eight hundred tons of coal through Pennsylvania while extremely intoxicated. McCune had lost wife and kids, home, and any sense of his own dignity. It had taken time and patience, but Tumulty had given him back the dignity at least. McCune had been sober for almost a year and worked as a night clerk in a hotel on Eleventh Avenue. It wasn’t much – but self-worth, Tumulty knew, was a quality you retrieved only in small stages.

‘I almost forgot,’ Tumulty said.

McCune looked a little surprised. ‘You’ve never forgotten before.’

Tumulty nodded, smiling at McCune. This man trusts me, he thought. This man thinks he owes his life to me.

‘I’ll be down in a minute,’ Tumulty said. Every night at the same time he conducted an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in the kitchen. It was an event for which he was always punctual because he believed that one of the basic ingredients for sobriety was commitment to responsibility. And he had to show the men at the meeting that he took his own responsibilities in earnest. He had to set examples. You could show how much you cared only by your actions.

‘I’ll tell the others,’ McCune said, then hesitated. ‘Is something troubling you?’

Tumulty was about to answer when the telephone on his desk rang.

He stared at the sound. Two rings, then silence. Followed by two more rings. It was Santacroce’s signal.

So soon.

Too soon. He hadn’t expected to hear from Santacroce until next morning at the earliest. He felt panicked. He stared at McCune, then at the Christ on the Mexican cross, but all he found in the eyes was an impossible blankness.

‘I’m fine,’ he said to McCune. It was the first time he’d ever lied to any of his clients at St. Finbar’s.

Frank Pagan sat behind the wheel of a rented 1974 Eldorado convertible. He’d found a place in the Village that specialised in renting old convertibles and, since he’d always wanted to drive a Cadillac, he’d hired this big dark-green monster with battered upholstery and a cracked dash and a rusted-out body. The radio worked. Pagan had it tuned to an FM rock station that was playing the entire cycle of Fats Domino’s hits.

Zuboric, who felt in the Eldorado like a pimp fallen on hard times, said, ‘I grew out of that music. When the sixties came to an end, I was into more jazz. Modern jazz. Dizzie Gillespie, like that.’

Pagan looked at the FBI man. The tone in Zuboric’s voice was admonitory, as if he were really advising Frank Pagan to grow up. Rock and roll was for kids. Pagan had come to think of Artie Zuboric as an appendage he couldn’t shake, a hump on his back, a growth attached to his body. He might not have minded so much if Zuboric had simply been a tail, someone who followed his movements unobtrusively, but the FBI man was a constant physical presence.

Pagan rubbed his gloved hands together. The chill inside the car was pervasive, bleeding through his bulky leather jacket. Along Canal Street, where he was parked, was a navy-blue Ford occupied by Orson Cone’s relief, an older man called Tyson Bruno. Tyson Bruno was taciturn and morose. He had one of those wooden faces upon which expressions have a very hard time. He sat inside his Ford like a block of cement, defined by his duty, which was simply that of observing the comings and goings at St. Finbar’s. Like Orson Cone, Tyson Bruno was also a kind of decoy, somebody in place for Tumulty to spot. Orson Cone and Tyson Bruno. Americans had the most peculiar names. When he’d been in New York before with Roxanne, they’d drunk too much champagne one night and in a hilarious mood they’d gone through the pages of the Manhattan phone-book, discovering such oddities as Neddy Bummer and Bobbi Plapp, which Roxanne had laughed over, saying it sounded like a baby farting into a diaper. Harmless times, he thought now. Laughter before dying.

‘We should’ve put somebody outside Santacroce’s,’ Pagan said. It wasn’t the first time he’d made the suggestion. He recalled what he’d said that afternoon when they’d tracked Tumulty to a bank. Nobody is watching Santacroce. Artie Zuboric hadn’t seemed very interested.

‘I told you. Lack of manpower, Frank.’ Zuboric shrugged. Pagan had still to learn that his problems got low priority here.

‘Lack of manpower. No phone tap. One agent in the street. This is a shoestring operation. If you and I split up, one of us could watch Tumulty, the other Santacroce. Manpower problem solved in one swoop. Maybe that’s a little too logical for you, though.’

Zuboric wasn’t going to respond to this. He wasn’t going to be drawn into another argument with Pagan over human resources. He lit a cigarette and coughed a couple of times. The trouble with Frank Pagan was his sheer fucking persistence. He wouldn’t let something go once he’d taken a bite out of it. He kept digging, kept trying to operate on his own. He was the same goddam way with Jig. He was consumed by Jig. Probably he dreamed Jig at nights. Had Jig for breakfast.

Zuboric sighed. What he really wanted to do was bust Tumulty and Santacroce both, because that was one way of putting Jig out of circulation. Deprive the guy of his connections. Isolate him. He’d mentioned this briefly to Pagan but good old Frank dismissed it. It was clear Frank Pagan wanted to run this show his own way, which was something Zuboric couldn’t allow. He shut his eyes, let his cigarette dangle from his lip, and thought about Charity, and wondered where she was right this moment and whether she’d ever consent to marry him. The last time he’d asked, Charity told him she’d think about it when he wasn’t married to the goddam Bureau and his prospects had improved. Prospects, he thought now. Sitting in a draughty Eldorado with a cop who was manic and argumentative – his prospects didn’t seem entirely rosy. Maybe he should never have fallen quite this heavily for a gorgeous girl in a topless bar, but that was the way the cards had been dealt and what could you do but pick them up, see if you could play them? The trouble was, Charity was used to high rollers, and Artie Zuboric couldn’t compete on that level.

Pagan stuck the key in the ignition. He played with the power switches. He made his seat go backwards and forwards, then he had the windows going up and down. There was a certain kind of limey, Zuboric reflected, who was enchanted by American flash. Big cars and loud music and Hawaiian shirts. Pagan was one of them. Zuboric attributed it to a kind of insecurity, cultural inferiority, as if the Tower of London and Shakespeare and Stonehenge weren’t enough to be going on with. They had to immerse themselves in things American. Pagan was like a kid in a whole new playground. Zuboric suddenly wondered if Frank Pagan was afraid of the threshold of forty, if the way he dressed and behaved had something to do with his reluctance to face the big four-oh.

Pagan leaned forward against the steering wheel.

‘Ah-hah,’ he said. ‘There goes our boy.’

Zuboric looked along the street at the sight of Joe Tumulty coming out of St. Finbar’s. Here we go again, he thought, as Frank Pagan slid the huge car slowly forward.

Ivor McInnes stepped out of the Essex House and walked along Central Park South. It was eight o’clock and he’d just eaten a satisfying dinner in the hotel. He turned onto Fifth Avenue, looking at the lights along the thoroughfare. He had in mind a specific destination, but first he intended to walk as far as 49th Street. He looked at his wristwatch and checked the time; then he thought a moment about J. W. Sweeting, the lackey from the State Department. McInnes had fought a great many battles with bureaucracy in his life, most recently with the asinine leaders of his own Presbyterian Church, who were dismayed by the controversy that had always surrounded him and had stripped him of his parish. They were men of limited imagination. What the hell did it matter? McInnes had never been a truly religious man. All along he’d seen the Presbyterian pulpit as a convenient place from which to influence the politics of Northern Ireland, an attitude that had embarrassed Presbyterian churchmen, who failed to notice a very obvious fact of life in the country – that churches weren’t just places where people went to sing hymns and hear sermons, they were instruments of social and political usefulness. The Catholic Church, cunning as ever, had always known that. Priests hid IRA members in their chapels or carried weapons back and forth. The Protestant clergy, on the other hand, had been slow on the uptake, immersed in the drudgery of committees and do-good schemes. For Ivor McInnes, that simply wasn’t enough. And now the time for talking, the time for conciliation, had passed.

He stopped outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral. A priest appeared on the steps, said something to a tourist with a camera, then agreed to have his picture taken with the cathedral in the background. McInnes saw a flashbulb pop. St. Patrick’s made him uneasy. It was a vast stronghold of Catholicism, and in McInnes’s world anything remotely connected to the Vatican was distasteful. He thought that any church that took ordinary tap water and did some abracadabra over it and called it holy was still locked into the superstitions of the Dark Ages. Therefore backward. Therefore a breeding ground for ignorance. There were times when he felt sorry for people who had been indoctrinated by the Roman Catholic Church, which he placed at the level of a cult, with its brainwashing tactics and Latinate mumbo jumbo and the highly curious notion of confession. It wasn’t that he detested individual Catholics as such – he considered them merely misguided, suckers swayed by a holy carnival of stained-glass mysteries and enthralled by the stigmata and prone to the hysteria of seeing wooden effigies shed salt tears. No, it was more the fact that he completely resented the enormous power and riches and influence of the Vatican, from whence all Catholic conspiracies emanated – including the one that threatened to engulf Northern Ireland.

He reached 49th Street. He was in love with New York. It was a city with a delightfully sinful face. Every human weakness was pandered to somehow here. There was a sense of freedom that didn’t exist in Belfast. Poor dear Belfast, a broken-hearted city with its military checkpoints and burned-out buildings. A city of fear. McInnes mainly blamed the Catholics for the atmosphere. They bred like flies in such RC ghettos as Ballymurphy and Turf Lodge and Andersonstown, which were nothing more than nurseries for future IRA gunmen. A time would come, McInnes had warned his congregation in his parting sermon, when Catholics would outnumber Protestants in Northern Ireland – and then what? It would be like bloody South Africa, a minority straining to hold on to power in the face of a hostile majority. A prescription for doom. A prescription Ivor McInnes wasn’t going to see filled.

He left Fifth Avenue and walked until he came to a phone booth located outside a bar called Lonnigan’s, one of those Irish pubs scattered around Manhattan. Posters in the window advertised ceilidhs, nights of folk singing and dancing. McInnes went inside the booth. He checked his watch again. He felt apprehensive now. A taste of the duck he’d eaten came back into his mouth, a film of scum on the surface of his tongue. What if something had gone very wrong? What then? He laid his hand on the receiver and inclined his forehead on the glass. By nature he was a relentless optimist, and like others of this persuasion he was sometimes prey to a certain brief dread of failure.

He drummed his fingers on the receiver.

The telephone rang. He picked it up immediately.

He heard Seamus Houlihan’s voice.

‘We’re crossing tonight,’ Houlihan said. He sounded as if he were trapped inside a tunnel.

‘Fine,’ McInnes said. He was flooded with relief that Houlihan had at least arrived. At the same time, the idea that the border crossing was yet to take place pricked his capacity for dread again. Tension made a nerve move in his eyelid. ‘Has Fitzjohn found a place to cross?’

‘He says so.’

McInnes looked into the street. A high-stepping girl went past, and he tracked her with his eyes. ‘The flight was uneventful?’

‘It was,’ Houlihan said.

McInnes paused. He wasn’t exactly happy about Seamus Houlihan having any responsibility. Seamus was the kind of man who’d kill somebody if they happened to look at him with any trace of hostility. He didn’t have much going on in the brain department. People like Houlihan were useful, but only up to a point. When they’d outlived their functions, they could become utterly embarrassing.

‘Same time tomorrow night, Seamus. And good luck.’

McInnes put the receiver back. He moved out of the phone booth and went along the sidewalk. The girl was just ahead of him, her hips swaying beneath her overcoat. On other trips to this city, at a time when he hadn’t been banned by his own church and harassed by the State Department, he’d been struck by the number of beautiful women here. It seemed to him they came dropping out of the sky like bright pennies.

He reached the Hotel Strasbourg, stopping only a moment outside the dimly lit lobby. He looked up and down the sidewalk, then he went inside the hotel and moved towards the stairway, passing the night clerk who didn’t even glance up at him. The carpet under his feet was threadbare and elaborately stained. On the second floor McInnes looked for Room 220. When he found it he knocked quietly on the door. He heard the girl’s voice call out to him. He stepped into the room, which was lit only by a weak bulb in a lamp on the bedside table.

‘Am I on time?’ he asked. He felt only the smallest misgiving. He had needs, and they had to be satisfied, and this was nothing more than a transaction of skin – although he knew he would change it, by an act of his imagination, into something more than that.

The girl, who wore only the underwear McInnes had requested by telephone, smiled at him. ‘You’re the one talks like John Lennon,’ she said. ‘It’s cute. You’re kinda cute yourself.’

McInnes moved to the bed. He looked down at the girl. In a moment he was going to take the short-cut out of his tension, but right then he just wanted to look. She was skinny and her breasts were very small, and she must have been just sixteen. McInnes took off his coat and laid a hand on the girl’s thin thigh. The girl didn’t move. She stared at him coolly. Then she slid languidly down the pillow and stretched her long legs, parting them a little as she moved. He brought his hand up to the edge of her red panties. He continued up to the cups of her red bra, which fastened in the front. He undid the clip, pushed the bra aside.

‘Tell me your name,’ he said.

‘Elva.’

‘Elva.’ McInnes moved her long fair hair between his fingers. It was a moment that took his breath away. Here, in this shabby room, touching this delightful yellow-haired girl, he could pretend. Pretend he was elsewhere in another room at another time and that he held Somebody else in his arms, and then there wouldn’t be any sense of shame or treachery.

‘Elva,’ he said again. It was the wrong name and it had the wrong number of syllables, but he could still pretend anyhow. He closed his eyes and lowered his mouth to her nipples, lost in the pungent scent of her perfume and her supple young flesh.

The girl held on to the big man tightly. She couldn’t know that this same man who whimpered in her ear and pretended that she was another woman altogether had set in motion a sequence of events she’d read about in the newspapers in the days ahead. She thought he was just another weirdo who liked to fuck with a dog collar around his neck.

If Joseph Tumulty knew there was a big green car tracking him a block away, he gave no indication of it. He walked slowly, calmly, pausing every now and then to study menus in the windows of Chinese restaurants along Mott Street. Frank Pagan, who had to concentrate on a variety of driving problems – stop lights, impatient drivers behind him, kamikaze pedestrians in front, and the fact he was driving on the wrong side of the road – found the Cadillac as unresponsive as a broken-down horse. Something clanked under the hood and the vehicle had a tendency to stray to the left. There was also an ominous smell of burning oil.

Zuboric said, ‘You should’ve let me drive.’

‘Why should you get all the fun, Artie?’

‘Fun?’

Zuboric leaned out of the window and flipped his middle finger at the honking car immediately behind. It was a standard sign of the road in New York City. Pagan hunched over the wheel and tried to keep an eye on Tumulty, who was lingering too long this time outside a place called Yang. Was he going inside to eat? Was this outing nothing more than an innocent Chinese dinner? Frank Pagan braked as a couple of teenage Chinese boys walked directly in front of the Cadillac. Ahead, almost a block away, Tumulty was moving again. Pagan let the car roll slowly forward, knowing it was only a matter of time before Tumulty would become aware of the vehicle, if he hadn’t done so already.

Tumulty kept walking. He had begun to move a little faster. Then, quite suddenly, he disappeared. It was almost as if he’d vaporised right there on the street. Pagan pressed his foot down hard on the gas and drove to the place where the Irishman had vanished. It was a narrow alley, a crevice between two buildings. Even if he’d wanted to, he couldn’t have taken the Cadillac into that tiny space. There was only one thing to do.

Bye-bye, Arthur.

He pushed his door open and stepped out into the street. He said to Zuboric, ‘You wanted to drive, Artie. She’s all yours,’ and he headed towards the alley, ignoring Zuboric, who was shouting at him to get back in the car. Behind the Cadillac there was a knot of cars occupied by impatient drivers, every one of them hammering on horns. Pagan smiled and felt a pleasant sense of liberation as he went into the alley and saw Joe Tumulty turning a corner at the far end.

Pagan made his way past piles of garbage in plastic bags, trash cans, old cardboard boxes jettisoned by restaurants and stores. He reached the corner where Tumulty had turned, and he saw Joe moving along the street about a block ahead, his black coat flapping around his ankles. Tumulty hesitated, looked back. Pagan stepped into the doorway of a store that sold electronic gadgets. Fuzz-busters. Listening devices. There was, as yet, no gadgetry that could render you invisible. Tumulty, on the move again, went around a corner. Pagan followed. If he had his geography correct, the Irishman was heading towards Mulberry Street.

On Mulberry, Tumulty didn’t head for Kenmare Street and Santacroce’s store as Pagan had expected. Instead, he went inside a tenement whose ground floor was occupied by an Italian restaurant and whose upper floors appeared to be apartments. The restaurant called Il Tevere, was one of those chintzy places with red-checked tablecloths and candles stuck in Chianti bottles, a whole style Pagan thought had gone out of fashion. A smell of garlic and tomato sauce poured out into the cold air. Pagan gazed up at the windows over the restaurant, wondering how many apartments were in the building and which one Joe Tumulty might have entered.

He moved towards the door through which Tumulty had gone. It wasn’t locked. It opened into a long very narrow hallway covered with faded black-and-white lino, like some ancient, cracked chessboard. There was a flight of stairs at the end. They faded up into gloom at the top. Pagan went quietly along the corridor. At the foot of the stairs he stopped, tilting his head and listening, but the building was quiet save for music coming through the wall from the next-door restaurant. O Sole Mio. Accordion music yet. There was something intrinsically absurd about any instrument you had to squeeze. He climbed the stairs, pausing only when he reached a landing.

A single closed door faced him. At the end of the landing there was a second flight of stairs. Pagan ignored the door for the moment and climbed upwards. He reached another landing, another door. This one was halfway open, revealing an unlit apartment beyond. Removing his gun from the holster he wore in the small of his back, he went inside cautiously. He saw total disarray – bags of cement, bricks, stacks of wood, step-ladders, all kinds of building materials. He noticed that the walls of the apartment had been ripped out, exposing old beams. Somebody was renovating this place. Room after room had been tom apart. Windows were covered with sheets of thick plastic, and there was the smell of fresh paint in the air.

He turned, went back to the stairs, descended slowly. When he reached the first landing again he looked at the closed door. There were only two apartments in the building, and if one of them was empty, then Tumulty had to be in the other.

He waited. He had no way of knowing how many people were inside the place. He glanced down the stairway into the hall. The music from the Italian restaurant was louder now. Funiculi, Funicula. It was a song he particularly disliked. If that kind of music continued to assail him, he wasn’t sure how long he could stand it before he took a chance and kicked the door down. Screw waiting. Screw the torture of Italian opera. The only thing worse than Italian opera was probably Vic Damone or Al Martino. It was a toss-up.

He heard a sound from behind the door. The creak of a floorboard, it was hard to say. Then there was silence again. What the hell was Tumulty doing in there? What if he was simply visiting a friend? Pagan frowned. He wished Tumulty had gone back to Santacroce’s little shop, because then at least he’d have guessed that a gun transaction was under way. Here, it could be anything.

He wasn’t very good at waiting. His concentration slackened. He moved a little, back to the stairs going upwards. He had the protection of shadows there. If somebody were to open the door quite suddenly, he wouldn’t see Frank Pagan. There was another sound now from the apartment, and he brought his gun up again. He tensed, filled with a sense of expectancy. He saw the door open a little way. A bar of pale light from the room caused him to blink.

A figure appeared. Pagan made out the shape of a fat man in a navy-blue three-piece suit. A jewelled tie-pin glinted against the man’s white shirt, and his cuff links sparkled. He went to the edge of the landing and looked down into the hallway. Then he turned and stood on the threshold of the apartment. He made a curious grinding noise with his teeth, and he wheezed as he moved, as if his bulk were a little too much for his lungs. His eyes were tiny, surrounded by mounds of pallid flesh. Pagan, hidden by shadow, watched him.

The fat man called back into the apartment, ‘Thought I heard something.’ Whoever he’d spoken to inside didn’t answer. The fat man waddled back to the top of the stairs again.

Pagan felt perspiration form between his skin and the surface of his pistol. Fattie took a handkerchief out of his pocket and pressed it between his plump hands as he peered down into the hallway. There was an expression of doubt on his face. He turned towards the apartment.

‘Say, did you lock that door down there when you came in?’

Again there was no answer from inside. The fat man shook his head.

Irritated by the lack of response from inside, the fat man pushed the door wide open. Pagan had a glimpse of the interior. A lamp, a coffee table, and an armchair occupied by Joseph X. Tumulty, who looked white and rather unhappy.

The fat man turned to shut the door behind him. Pagan moved. In four quick steps he was across the landing before Fattie had a chance to react. The fat man swore in surprise and tried to slam the door but Pagan kicked it back and heard the wood strike the man’s head. It was a satisfying noise, like the whack of a cricket bat on a ball. The fat man slumped against the wall, holding a hand to his forehead. Joe Tumulty, whose astonishment had frozen him into the armchair, made a small moaning sound. He stared at Pagan blankly.

The fat man, bleeding from his brow, managed a mirthless smile. ‘You the law?’

‘Joe knows who I am. Don’t you, Joe?’ Pagan said.

Tumulty nodded. There was no colour in his face.

The fat man looked at Tumulty with disgust. ‘Fucking Irish,’ he said. ‘I always get problems when it comes to the fucking Irish. Goddam.’

‘Welcome to the club,’ Pagan said. ‘Are you Santacroce?’

The fat man nodded and wiped his brow with his handkerchief. ‘You let this fucker follow you, Joey? Not smart. Not at all smart.’

Pagan moved towards Tumulty’s armchair. There was a leather attaché case on the floor. ‘Open it,’ he said to Tumulty, jerking the hand that held the gun.

Trembling, Tumulty set the case on his lap and flipped it open. It contained a pistol, a rifle with a collapsible stock and three sets of sights. Everything had been neatly packed inside the case, fitted into compartments that had been specially made to hold the weapons. They were handcrafted weapons, tailored for the needs of a professional killer.

‘Very nice, Joe,’ Pagan said. ‘Jig would love them.’

‘What happens to me now?’ Tumulty asked in a hoarse voice.

‘You oughta have your fucking head blown off,’ Santacroce said.

‘It’s a consideration,’ Pagan said. He looked across the room at Santacroce. The man was calm, unreasonably so in the circumstances. But he knew the score. He knew the jeopardies of his trade. He’d been here before. Even so, he was too acquiescent, and Pagan didn’t like it.

‘So,’ Santacroce said. ‘They sending the English in these days to help out?’

‘Something like that,’ Pagan said.

Tumulty asked his question again. ‘What happens to me?’

‘You’re going to fucking jail,’ Santacroce said.

‘Is that right?’ Tumulty asked Pagan.

Pagan said, ‘It doesn’t look too good, Joe.’

Santacroce laughed. ‘Amateurs. Jesus. I shoulda known better. I gotta call my fucking lawyer. Awright with you?’

The fat man walked calmly across the room to the telephone, which was located on a small desk beneath the window. Pagan, suddenly uncertain about the legality of criminals making phone calls in this country, saw him apply the handkerchief to his forehead as he moved. Santacroce picked up the receiver and started to punch in numbers. Without really thinking, Pagan was mentally counting the digits the fat man pressed on the push buttons. The count wasn’t right. It came only to six. On a level of awareness that was instinctive more than anything else, Pagan realised the Saint was talking into a dead phone.

Santacroce said, ‘Sam? I got a problem.’

Pagan saw the fat man turn away so that he was facing the window with his back to the room.

‘Yeah,’ Santacroce mumbled. ‘I’ll hold.’

Pagan tightened his grip on his pistol. What the hell was the fat man doing? Did he take Pagan for a complete fool?

‘Yeah, I’m still holding,’ Santacroce said. ‘Don’t leave me hanging too long, Sam.’

‘Put the phone down,’ Pagan said. ‘Put the fucking phone down.’

Santacroce turned with a cold smile on his face.

Pagan didn’t know where it came from, but there was a gun in the fat man’s hand, a weapon that must have been concealed somewhere in his clothing. It caught the light, flared as Santacroce started to go into a defensive crouch, his big body bending at the hips, the gun hand held out in front of him, his other arm raised in the air for balance. For a fat man he seemed almost dainty right then, his whole body coordinated delicately as if in some dance.

Frank Pagan fired one shot.

Santacroce clutched his arm and cried out in pain, dropping his gun and falling backwards, the drapes at the window coming loose from their clips in a series of harsh little clicks and folding all around him like a collapsed tent. And then he was gone in a confusion of shattered glass and buckled frames. Pagan rushed to the window and looked down. The fat man lay on the sidewalk, the curtains still covering his body in the fashion of a shroud. People were emerging from the restaurant, crowding around the corpse, then staring up and pointing at the broken window.

Joe Tumulty asked, ‘Is he dead?’

Pagan said nothing. He backed away from the window.

‘Oh, God.’ Tumulty got up from the armchair.

Pagan wondered what Artie Zuboric was going to say about all this. He speculated on the depths of Artie’s wrath. What was he supposed to have done anyway? Let Santacroce shoot him?

Tumulty said, ‘I can’t go to jail, Pagan.’

Frank Pagan stared a moment at the broken glass, feeling the cold wind blow in off Mulberry Street. The curtain rings rattled on the brass rod. The idea of Santacroce lying down there on the concrete depressed him. He turned his gun over in his hand. The death-maker. The eliminator. He had no rapport with guns the way some cops had, cleaning them endlessly, refining them, always reading gun literature, even naming their guns as if they were pets. He put the weapon back inside his holster and looked at Tumulty.

‘There may be a way out for you, Joe.’

‘How?’

‘I can’t promise anything,’ Pagan said. ‘But a little cooperation on your part could be beneficial.’

Tumulty straightened his back and looked for all the world like a prizefighter coming out for a round in which he knew he was going to be demolished. ‘I’m listening.’

Roscommon, New York

Patrick Cairney wasn’t able to sleep. He lay in the second-floor bedroom, staring at the darkened window and listening to the old house. He recognised familiar little noises. The way a stair creaked. The sound made by the wind thrusting an elm against a downstairs window. They were echoes of the childhood he’d spent here when he’d convinced himself that a house as large and as solid as Roscommon had to be haunted. Back then, his imagination fired, he’d seen all kinds of apparitions – ghostly hands upon the windows, odd monsters slinking through shrubbery. Harry had conspired with him in this creation of a netherworld. Of course there’s ghosts, boy. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. What would the Irish be without their banshees?

He hated this house now as he’d hated it then. It was big and cold and furtive, and he always had the very odd impression that it contained undiscovered rooms, hidden chambers he could never quite locate. He remembered Harry’s answer when, around the age of nine, he’d mentioned this suspicion to his father. Sure there are secret passages, Paddy. Where else would I hide fine Irish gunmen on the run from the bloody British?

Fine Irish gunmen, Patrick Cairney thought. Why could he find so few memories of his own goddam father that weren’t related in one way or another to Ireland? When he ransacked his own past, when he rummaged his recollections, all he ever heard was the same monotonous drumbeat that was Harry’s voice.

Patrick turned on the bedside lamp. Along the hallway was the bedroom his father shared with Celestine. He’d watched Celestine drift along the landing about thirty minutes ago. At the door of her bedroom she’d looked back and smiled and said good night to him and then, disappearing with a languid wave of her hand, she’d left him feeling suddenly lonely there, as if he were the only occupant of the house.

He stepped out of bed. This room was the one he’d had as a kid. All his old books were still stacked on the shelves. He ran a fingertip over the spines. The Call of the Wild. A Treasury of Irish Legends. Kidnapped. Relics of a lost boy. In another mood, he might have yielded to the brief comfort of nostalgia. He might have wallowed in that place where a young man sees the child he used to be and wonders about the direction his life has taken since, the crossroads missed, the paths ignored, the fragmented geography of his movements. He was sure that if the boy could talk to the man he’d say how surprised he was that things had turned out like they had. And yet – was it so surprising when you considered the father who had raised the child!

He sat on the edge of the mattress. He looked at his overnight bag, situated on the top of the dressing table. He hadn’t even unpacked. Restless, he thought about Rhiannon Canavan, but that kind of image, lascivious as it was, didn’t cut into his loneliness. It only underlined it. He remembered the way he’d last seen Rhiannon Canavan at Dublin Airport and how she’d watched him across the terminal building. He’d looked around at her once and for a moment wanted to go back and hold her one final time. Weaknesses, he thought. All his longings were faults.

He shut his eyes, clenched his hands, pictured the way Celestine had raised her fingers in the air at the moment of her departure, and thought he’d never seen any gesture so innocently sexual in all his life. Innocence, he reflected, was the keyword. Sexuality was in the beholder’s eye, and he’d done just a little too much beholding, that was all. You didn’t go around being attracted to your own stepmother.

He lay back across the bed. The nightcap with Celestine had been two generous brandies, the second of which he’d left unfinished. She’d talked about herself, her first marriage to an architect called Webster. It was closed kind of talk, not very revealing, nothing about her family, her background. Polite chat. A stepmother eager to befriend the son she’d suddenly inherited. Now and then he’d seen a kind of glaze go over her eyes like blinds drawn down on windows, as if she were afraid of getting too close to revealing her own personality. Was that coyness? If so, it was a rare quality and endearing.

He heard the sound of someone knocking at his door, and at first he thought it was just the elm tree rattling again on the downstairs window. But when he realised it wasn’t he rose from the bed and quickly took a robe out of his bag, tying the cord and stepping towards the door in one hurried movement.

‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she said.

Cairney felt awkward. He made a meaningless gesture with one hand. Celestine entered the room. She wore a pink satin robe, floor-length, and her yellow hair was tied up at the back of her head.

‘Am I disturbing you, Pat?’

‘No,’ and Cairney closed the door, glancing along the hallway as he did so.

Celestine looked around the room. ‘I’ve often wondered about the boy whose room this used to be.’

‘Now you know.’

‘I don’t really know,’ she answered him. She fiddled with the cord of her robe, working the knot with her finger. Cairney didn’t move. He had the uneasy feeling that any movement on his part could be misconstrued. He didn’t want this woman in his bedroom. He didn’t want any of the odd little responses she caused him to have.

‘I see a boy’s books, but that’s all,’ she said. Her blue eyes seemed stark and glassy in the light from the lamp. ‘You needn’t look so pale, Patrick.’

‘Pale?’

‘When I was a child I had this fish that died by jumping out of the bowl. When I found it, it was exactly the colour you are right now. Does my presence in this room upset you?’

Cairney watched Celestine wander around the room, touching things as she moved. The edge of the drapes. The spines of books. She stopped at the dressing table. Lamplight made small delicate shadows in the folds of her robe, which clung to her flat stomach. She was lean, and Cairney knew that the body beneath the robe was hard and taut and yet that it would yield in the right places. Harry’s wife, he thought. The Senator’s wife. He tried to absent himself from his responses to her, to step away from his own reactions. God, it was difficult. It was just so damned hard to shut your eyes and ignore this woman’s compelling beauty and her nearness and the faint notion he had that he could go to her now and slip the robe from her body and draw her down to the bed with him. Was her presence here telling him that? Was she saying she was available?

She was standing very close to his canvas bag. ‘The truth is, Harry’s been snoring worse than usual since this recent attack. I know he can’t help it but it drives me up the wall.’ She put the palm of her hand on top of his bag, which was lying open. He felt a tension in his throat.

‘So here I am,’ she said. ‘I thought we might go down and have one last nightcap. It might help me sleep. And I don’t like to drink alone. There’s something a little pathetic about it.’

He couldn’t take his eyes away from her hand. He realised he should have closed the bag after moving his robe, but he’d been hurried. It was a mistake. He saw that now. He should have taken the time.

‘I like this room,’ Celestine said. ‘It gets a lot of light in summer. It must have been a pleasant room for you, Patrick.’

‘I have some good memories,’ Cairney said, and turned towards the door. ‘Shall we go downstairs?’

‘Are you rushing me, Patrick? It just so happens that this is one of my favourite rooms in the entire house. Sometimes I come here and I sit. I just sit in the chair by the window. There’s a good view of the lake. Sixteen rooms in this big house and this is the one I like best.’

Cairney realised something then. The two brandies Celestine had drunk before had affected her more than he’d realised. Her speech was just a little slurred. Not much, just enough to notice. There were red flushes on her cheeks.

He reached out, turned the door handle. ‘A nightcap sounds like a great idea,’ he said.

‘You’re in such a hurry,’ Celestine said. She looked at him, her mouth open a little way, the tip of one finger pressed to her lower lip. There was something mischievous in the gesture.

Then Cairney saw her palm slide along the top of the bag. He started towards her, thinking he’d slip the bag away from her, perhaps pretend there was something in it he needed, but before he could make his move she was lifting an object out and turning it over in her hand, her expression one of interest.

He could feel his blood turn cold.

‘Where did you get this?’ she asked.

‘It’s just a souvenir I picked up at the airport.’

Celestine fingered the object, stroking it with the tips of her fingers. ‘It’s very pretty,’ she said.

Cairney shivered. A draught came up the staircase and moved along the hallway through the open door of the bedroom. He stepped towards Celestine, took the object from her hand, then dropped it back inside the bag, where it lay on top of his passport.

It was a miniature wooden horse, a Scandinavian import.

‘Let’s have that drink,’ he said, and he was conscious of an awkward tone in his own voice. He clasped her arm and led her gently out of the room. On the landing, the relief he felt was intense. She had come within a mere half inch of the passport made out in the name of John Doyle.