13

New York City

Arthur Zuboric’s office was located in Lower Manhattan in a building that had absolutely no distinguishing features. Frank Pagan thought he’d never been inside a place with less personality. It was a testimonial to bureaucratic blandness, erected in the sky by architects who lacked any kind of taste. Zuboric, looking very pale beneath his sun lamp tan, stared across the room at a wall where there was a college diploma with his name on it. Pagan imagined he heard Artie ticking like an overwound watch.

Zuboric sighed, then said, ‘First you split, leaving me stranded in that goddam pimpmobile you rented. Then you shoot a guy. You actually shoot a guy, which is a mess I had to clean up with local cops, which I needed like a haemorrhoid. Jesus Christ. I mean, Jesus Christ, Pagan.’

Pagan tilted his chair back at the wall. There wasn’t a great deal to say in the circumstances. He folded his arms against his chest. It was best to let Zuboric continue to tick until his clockwork had run down.

‘Don’t get me wrong, Pagan. Santacroce’s death is no loss to the civilised world. There’s not going to be a great weeping and gnashing of teeth. And his criminal connections aren’t going to cause a run on Kleenex – but holy shit, there was a fucking corpse on the goddam sidewalk and a whole gang of diners with napkins tucked in their shirts, and they saw him lying there.’

‘It probably put them off their osso bucco,’ Pagan remarked. Bad timing. A look of pain crossed Zuboric’s face.

The FBI man got up from behind his desk and strolled around the small room. There was a window looking down over the towers of Manhattan, and Artie Zuboric paused there a moment, surveying the night with a miserable expression. Not more than an hour ago he’d had the Director on the telephone from D.C. The Director never raised his voice, had never been heard to shout, but he had a way with anger like nobody else Zuboric knew. He spoke quietly, clipping his words. Leonard M. Korn terrified Arthur Zuboric. Sometimes Artie had nightmares in which he was alone in an interrogation room with the man and he felt so paralysed, so overawed, he couldn’t answer any of his superior’s questions, including the one concerning his own name. Is there no way, Zuboric, of keeping this Englishman under lock and key? Is he to be allowed to run through the streets as he pleases? There had been a very long pause after which the Director had spoken the most ominous sentence Zuboric had ever heard in his life. For your sake, Zuboric, let us hope that not one word of this unfortunate incident ever reaches a newspaper. This chilled Zuboric to his bones. Suddenly whatever meagre prospects he’d had before appeared to dwindle and then finally disappear in front of his eyes.

Now Zuboric said, ‘You landed me in the shit.’

‘Santacroce drew a gun,’ Pagan answered. ‘It was either him or me.’

Zuboric touched his moustache in a thoughtful way. It was obvious to Pagan whom Zuboric would have preferred between those alternatives.

Artie sat down. There were papers littered across his desk and a computer terminal attached to a printer. Every now and then the printer would hiccup into action and paper would roll out of the device, but Zuboric paid it no attention. He buried his face in his hands a second, then sighed again, looking across the room at the Englishman.

‘And now you tell me you’ve got some cockeyed plan for that mick.’

In the time that had passed since the shooting of Santacroce, Pagan had gone over the scheme a couple of times, approaching it from all the angles he could think of, testing it and weighing it and then giving it his private seal of approval. It wasn’t watertight and he wouldn’t trust it in a storm, but it was the best he could do.

‘Joe Tumulty doesn’t want to go to jail, Artie. It’s a powerful incentive.’

‘What did you do, Pagan? Offer him immunity? Huh? Just take the law into your own hands and tell him he’s walking away scot-free if he plays a little game for you?’

Frank Pagan gazed at the window. Out there in the night sky there were the lights of a passing plane. He felt a small homesick longing. Wintry London. Somehow it seemed farther away than a six-hour plane ride, like an impossible city of his own imagination.

Zuboric said, ‘You can’t just fuck around with the laws of this country, Frank. I don’t know what it’s like where you come from, but here you can’t promise a guy something that’s not in your power to give him.’

Pagan stood up. He studied the college diploma on the wall. It had been issued by the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He wondered a moment about the pathways of a man’s life that led from a degree in business administration to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, then he thought of Joe Tumulty, who sat along the corridor in a locked room, presumably staring at the blank walls and worrying about his sorry predicament. With a man like Tumulty, whose political affiliation threatened the ruin of his charity work, his shot at sainthood, you couldn’t ever really be sure of anything.

‘He’ll give us Jig,’ Pagan said. Was that a small lack of conviction in his own voice? Confidence, Frank.

‘What makes you think he won’t call Jig and warn him?’

Pagan put his hands in his pockets. ‘He doesn’t know how to get in touch with him. He doesn’t have a phone number. He doesn’t have an address. He doesn’t know where Jig is.’

‘He isn’t exactly a mine of information, is he?’

‘Do you expect him to know more? Do you think Jig goes around giving out personal information, Artie? You think he passes out a nice little business card embossed with his name and number? Occupation, assassin?’

‘Did Tumulty at least give you a description?’

‘Nothing that’s going to help. Thirtyish. Five eleven. A hundred and sixty pounds. Dark curly hair.’

‘That’s terrific,’ Zuboric said. ‘You know what I really think, Frank? Father Joe is jerking you off.’

Pagan smiled now. ‘I think Father Joe and myself have come to an understanding.’

Zuboric lit a cigarette and narrowed his eyes against the smoke. ‘When’s Jig supposed to show?’

‘Tomorrow, the next day. Tumulty isn’t certain.’

‘Tumulty’s a fucking mine of uncertainty.’

Zuboric shook his head. Frank Pagan had given up that one thing any cop should have considered his greatest asset: objectivity. His peripheral vision was severely damaged. Zuboric, for his part, wouldn’t trust the mick as far as he could throw a crucifix, and as a reasonably good Catholic he’d never have thrown one anyhow. He sighed again, unhappy with the condition of his life. Was he really supposed to let this character Tumulty walk away from here with a loaded attaché case? What was he going to say to the Director? These questions hung bleakly in his mind.

Frank Pagan was still studying Zuboric’s diploma. He was very tired all at once. He covered a yawn with the palm of his hand. ‘I’m going back to my hotel,’ he said.

‘I’ll ride with you.’

‘Of course.’ Pagan turned away from the diploma. ‘We should keep Joe here overnight and release him in the morning. A small taste of imprisonment might be a useful reminder to him.’

Zuboric agreed half heartedly.

Frank Pagan moved to the centre of the room and stood directly under a strip of fluorescent light. ‘Before we release Joe, there’s a couple of things we ought to do. First, there’s a certain Englishman I’d like to talk to. And second, we ought to pay a visit to a tailor.’

An Englishman and a tailor. Zuboric felt he had just been asked to solve an impossible riddle. ‘What Englishman? What tailor?’

Frank Pagan smiled in the knowing way that so infuriated Zuboric. ‘It can wait until morning,’ he replied.

Quebec-Maine Border

A freezing rain had begun to fall all along the border country from Lake Champlain to Edmundston. It pounded on the roof of the Ryder truck with such ferocity that the two men who sat silently in the back with the cargo – McGrath and Rorke – felt they were trapped inside a very large yellow drum.

The headlights of the vehicle faintly picked out trees obscured by the torrent. Behind the wheel, Fitzjohn could see hardly a thing save for great drops of moisture illuminated by the lights. He was nearly blinded. Every now and then the wheels of the truck would spin on old snow that was turning to slush. Waddell slept with his head tilted against the window, his mouth hanging open. Houlihan, who sat in the centre, was truly alert, turning his pistol around every so often in his hands, like a man anxious to keep checking reality.

‘How much farther is it?’ Houlihan wanted to know.

Fitzjohn wasn’t sure but he lied because it was best to appease Houlihan whenever he could. ‘Five, six miles.’

The Ryder truck rattled and shook. Fitzjohn was a proficient driver who’d made scores of nocturnal runs from Northern Ireland over the border into the Republic, driving through some hostile terrain to do so, but he’d had no experience of anything quite like this. The wipers worked furiously backwards and forwards but they couldn’t keep up with the deluge. How in the name of God could John Waddell sleep through all this?

Trees and more trees and nothing beyond the feeble reach of the lights except a darkness the like of which Fitzjohn had never known. If there was a God, he’d forsaken this stretch of country for sure.

Houlihan whistled quietly for a time. Fitzjohn recognised the tune as that Protestant anthem, The Battle of the Boyne, which celebrated the defeat of Catholic forces by King William of Orange in July 1690. Old hatreds. Very old hatreds.

In a tuneless voice Houlihan sang a couple of lines. ‘With blow and shout put our foes to the rout/The day we crossed the water.’ And then he was silent, which made Fitzjohn nervous. He understood something he’d known all along but had refused to acknowledge – that Seamus Houlihan could quite casually blow off the top of his head and dump him by the side of the road, if such a whim ever moved him. It was a numbing insight.

‘Are you sure you know where you’re going, Fitz?’ Houlihan asked.

Fitzjohn nodded and said, ‘I didn’t expect this kind of weather. It’s a bad time of year for country like this.’

‘Aye,’ Houlihan said. Something in the way he used simple words, little negatives and affirmatives, suggested that Seamus Houlihan was a man to whom language had all the firmness of quicksand. It was as if everything he uttered could be construed in different ways on different levels. Treacherous and shifting, Fitzjohn thought.

Ahead, quite suddenly, there were lights.

Houlihan leaned forward, straining to see through the rain. ‘What’s that?’ he asked, and the gun was back out in his hand, the barrel propped against the dash.

Fitzjohn braked. The big yellow truck slowed. The lights disappeared, then returned a second later. In a nervous voice Fitzjohn said it was the highway, that the lights were those of passing cars.

‘America,’ Houlihan said. He nudged Waddell, who woke suddenly and peered out into the dark.

‘Here we are, John. Here we are in America.’

Waddell mumbled something. Ever since the airfield he’d been either asleep or ashen and withdrawn, and Fitzjohn suspected that the man had no stomach for any of this business. But John Waddell had always gone along with Houlihan, no matter what. It was almost as if Houlihan had cast a spell over the man. Or was it some form of hero worship, with Waddell always tagging along behind?

‘Well?’ Houlihan asked Fitzjohn. ‘Are we going to sit here and wait for the bloody weather to change?’

Fitzjohn took his foot from the brake and the truck, its hood steaming with rain, rolled in the direction of the highway. This was the worst part, Fitzjohn knew that. Although he understood that an illicit border crossing at this godforsaken point was simpler, say, than crossing from Mexico, just the same his nerves were abruptly shrill. The concept had seemed easier than the reality, which was cold and wet, dreamlike and menacing.

The disaster happened about fifty yards from the pavement. The faint track along which the truck had been moving suddenly ended and the land dipped into a basin before rising up a slope to the highway. The hollow was muddy and impossible, and the truck, straining as hard as it might, didn’t make it up the incline. It slithered, then slid back down through slush, wheels spinning noisily and dense exhaust rising into the icy rain. Dear Christ, Fitzjohn thought. This was the last thing he’d anticipated. He’d imagined only a clear run onto the highway, not this, not anything like this bloody great ditch.

Seamus Houlihan angrily slapped his pistol on the dash. Fitzjohn swore, shoved his foot down hard on the gas pedal, and tried to ram the truck back up the slope again but failed a second time as the Ryder slipped down into the hollow, where it sat with its big wheels uselessly turning.

‘Try it again!’ Houlihan shouted.

Fitzjohn plunged the truck into first gear, thrust the gas pedal to the floor, and tried a third time to force the heavy vehicle up the incline to the highway, which was suddenly lit by the lights of a passing car. He turned off his own headlights and prayed for invisibility even as he felt the truck lose traction about halfway up the slope. It rolled down again with a terrible inevitability. Fitzjohn shut his eyes and wanted to weep out of sheer bloody frustration. Beside him in the cab, Seamus Houlihan was very quiet all of a sudden. It was the kind of brooding silence in which Fitzjohn could sense the man’s capacity for danger.

‘I’ll give it another shot,’ Fitzjohn said.

‘No. We’ll push. We’ll push this bastard up on to the road. Waddell, get behind the wheel. Fitz, get McGrath and Rorke out of the back,’ and Houlihan shoved the door open quickly, thrusting Fitzjohn out into the freezing rain then following him around to the back of the truck. Fitzjohn opened the rear door.

‘Is it a breakdown or what?’ McGrath asked from the dark interior.

‘Push! Get your shoulder behind this fucker and push!’ Houlihan, who seemed immune to the cold and the relentless rain, was already pressing his body against the back of the truck. All four men strained in the numbing rain, inching the truck up the slope. Fitzjohn, his skull like a block of ice, felt utterly hopeless. How could four of them get this truck up a slushy slope? Maybe on a dry day with no mind-splitting rain to blind you and ruin your footing, maybe you could do it then, maybe. He felt his lungs turn to crystal. There was absolutely no feeling in his ungloved hands. Push! Houlihan was screaming. Push! Fucking push! The truck edged upwards, then Houlihan was screaming again, like some creature who wasn’t flesh and blood at all but a creation of the harsh elements. Push! Push! Push! Waddell, give it some bloody petrol, man!

John Waddell, dragged out of sleep and unhappy at the controls of an unfamiliar vehicle, eased his foot down on the gas pedal. He brought the clutch halfway up from the floor. The rough grinding of the gears sent a series of little shock waves through his body. There was a cramp in his foot, and he wasn’t sure if he could handle this strange vehicle.

For fuck’s sake, Waddy! Give it more petrol!

Waddell’s foot slipped on the clutch. He heard the engine stall and die. He turned the key in the ignition quickly, heard the motor come back to life, then he let out the clutch, but the truck didn’t move. The wheels churned and dense exhaust spumed out into the freezing rain, but the bloody truck wasn’t going anywhere! Pray, Waddell thought. Pray it gets up this damned slope.

Then he was suddenly dazzled, suddenly terrified, by headlights that came lancing down through the rain. He blinked his eyes furiously against the constant glare of the lights. As he did so, the truck died under him again and he had to shove his foot down hard on the brake to stop the thing from rolling back down the incline.

Outside, Fitzjohn wiped water from his eyes and peered into the same bright lights that had startled Waddell. He thought, Jesus, not now, not now. There was the brief glow of the car’s interior light, then a door was slammed and a figure moved in front of the beams with a flashlight that he shone towards the Ryder truck. ‘Don’t move!’ the man from the car shouted in an authoritative voice. ‘Don’t any one of you move or I’ll blow your fucking heads off!’

Houlihan did the strangest thing then. He tossed his head back and laughed, and it was a weird noise that managed to override the pounding rain. The figure started down the incline towards the truck, his flashlight making the rainy air sparkle. Houlihan laughed a second time and shouted, ‘We’re stuck! We ran straight off the bloody road!’

Fitzjohn shut his eyes and pressed his face against the metal panel of the truck. God, if the figure from the car was an agent of the Border Patrol he was going to find Seamus Houlihan’s thick accent very strange indeed. And if he was a cop it was going to be just as bad, because he was surely going to insist on a search of the vehicle, and then what? Fitzjohn stared at the movement of the flashlight. The figure was approaching the truck, and Fitzjohn saw for the first time that the man held a shotgun pressed against his side.

When he was almost level with the Ryder the man said, ‘Let’s see some identification.’

It was the wrong request to make of Seamus Houlihan, who knew only one way to identify himself. Fitzjohn opened his mouth and was about to speak – anything, a lie, anything at all to fill the horrible void – when he noticed Seamus Houlihan’s hand going towards the pocket of his jacket. The man with the shotgun made a gesture with his flashlight.

‘You move that hand too fast and you can kiss it good-bye,’ he said.

‘I was only going to show you my papers,’ Houlihan responded.

‘Reach for them slowly. Very slowly. Slow as you know how. The rest of you characters back off from the truck. The guy behind the wheel – put your brake on and step outside.’

Waddell climbed down from the cab. In his anxiety, he hadn’t checked to make certain that the emergency brake was firmly in place and so the truck, swaying slightly from side to side in the slicing rain, began to drift slowly back down the incline.

The man with the shotgun shouted at Waddell. ‘Get back in there and put the fucking brake on, asshole!’

Waddell moved towards the cab and was reaching up to the door handle when Houlihan – always the opportunist, always seizing the unguarded moment and twisting it to his own advantage – took out his pistol and fired off two shots. The flashlight fell, and the man cried out in pain before going down into the slush, where he lay with his face pressed into the ground. Houlihan walked to the place where the flashlight was located. He picked it up, turning the beam on the man’s face.

Fitzjohn stared at the scene.

A glare of rainy light.

Houlihan standing over the man.

The echo of gunfire.

The runaway truck slithering to a halt in the mud.

John Waddell was the first to speak, and his voice trembled. ‘Who was he?’

Seamus Houlihan turned away from the body. ‘According to his pretty uniform, he was a gentleman from the United States Border Patrol.’

Fitzjohn had a sour taste in his mouth. Even after they had laboured to push the truck onto the highway, after they had shoved the agent’s car down into the hollow and hastily covered the corpse with frozen slush, the taste was still with him, mile after rainy mile.

Roscommon, New York

It was early morning and the sky over Roscommon was the colour of salmon flesh, a pale pink sun slatting through the cloud cover. An unusual day, neither winter nor spring but some uncharted hiatus between the two. Even the snow that covered the landscape was a curious rose tint. Harry Cairney, walking with the help of a cane, stopped at the edge of the lake. He said nothing for a time, then turned to his son, and there was a small look of expectation in his eyes.

‘What do you make of her, Patrick?’

Patrick Cairney tossed a flat stone out across the water, watching it skip three times before sinking. ‘She’s a beautiful woman,’ he answered.

The old man smiled. ‘After your mother died, I thought that was it. End of the ball game. Well, that didn’t happen.’ The senator poked the tip of his stick into the snow. ‘You think God figured he owed me a favour? You think he said there’s one old Paddy needs a good turn?’

Patrick Cairney gazed across the lake. He had spent a restless night after the final brandy with Celestine. What he saw when he lay in bed later and shut his eyes was Celestine’s robe clinging to her body by firelight and the way she sat with her legs spread in front of her, so that there were shadows deepening the length of her thighs. What he couldn’t decide was whether it was the unconscious physical gesture of a woman who’d had too much brandy or something else – and when he reached that borderline, a place of sheer discomfort, he stopped speculating.

‘I was surprised by joy,’ Harry Cairney said. ‘It crept up on me.’

‘I can understand that.’ Patrick Cairney wasn’t sure that he could, though. Joy wasn’t a feeling with which he had any regular acquaintance.

The old man clapped his son on the shoulder. ‘Dear God, it does me good to see you again, Pat. You should come back more often. You shouldn’t be traipsing all over the goddam world digging in tombs or whatever it is you do. What’s the point to all that anyhow? You think it matters to an Appalachian dirt farmer or some Boston longshoreman if King Tut was left-handed or had rotten teeth? It’s not going to change any lives, is it? And what do we live for if it isn’t to try and change a few things?’

This was an old argument. Whenever he heard it, Patrick was always beset by the feeling that he’d somehow disappointed Harry, let him down in some unforgivable way. That he was to be blamed for failing to meet Harry’s expectations for him. What the hell did the old man want anyhow? A younger copy of himself? A nice buttoned-down young man happy to go into politics, which Harry had made the family business? Patrick Cairney had given law a try once some years back simply to please the old man, and he’d been utterly miserable. It was the last time he’d ever even attempted to gratify his father. If Harry still entertained ambitions on his son’s behalf, they were well and truly doomed to failure. And if this fact disappointed him, then that was a burden the old man had to carry. Patrick couldn’t be responsible for his father’s feelings about him.

Patrick Cairney tossed another stone out on the lake. A wintry bird rose up out of the trees. Both men moved a little way along the shore. For a moment Patrick wanted to tell the old man that he was trying to change a few things but in his own way.

Harry Cairney caught his son’s arm. ‘Tell me about Dublin. I want to hear about Ireland.’

Patrick Cairney knew what the old man wanted to hear and it wasn’t the hard brutal world of northern cities like Belfast and Derry with their burned-out buildings and bloody casualties. He wanted to hear only the same unchanging litany of heroes and martyrs. Patrick Cairney said nothing. It was cowardly of Harry to dream his time away in the comfort and security of Roscommon, to hide behind his record collection and his Celtic documents, and ignore the real troubles in his homeland. Patrick – who had gone to Ireland expecting to find the glowing island of song and poetry that Harry had always pictured for him, only to discover something relentlessly terrible behind the romance and the myth – felt contempt for the old man and everything he represented.

‘I used to meet a pretty young girl under Waterhouse’s clock on Dame Street in Dublin,’ the old man remarked. ‘I sometimes wonder if that clock’s still there. She was very fond of a shop called Butler’s by O’Connell Bridge. It sold musical instruments. Polly liked to browse in that place for hours. Sweet girl.’

Patrick Cairney smiled thinly. He wanted to say that it was gone, it was all gone, that another world had taken the place of everything the old man remembered. He glanced across the lawn at the house, which had a pink tint in the hallucinogenic morning light. He was thinking of Celestine moving through the rooms of that big house. He was thinking of the lithe way she moved, the slight forward thrust of hips and the fair hair bouncing against her shoulders and that strange little electric light in her eyes, which he found indefinable and puzzling. He didn’t need these thoughts, for God’s sake. He didn’t need to wander in this direction. He had come to the United States for one reason only and nothing, not a goddam thing in the world, was going to interfere with his purpose.

Harry Cairney let his hand fall from his son’s arm. He drew a sinewy line in the snow with the tip of his cane. ‘When are you going to this symposium of yours?’

‘Tomorrow,’ Patrick Cairney replied.

‘And after that – will you come back here?’

‘I hadn’t planned on it.’

‘You don’t need the excuse of a symposium to visit me. This is still your home, Patrick.’

‘I know,’ Patrick said. He thought how remarkable it was that he had developed a knack for believing in his own fictions. It was the simplest thing in the world to believe that there really was a symposium of archaeologists in New York City he was going to attend. He could picture the room in which the event would take place. He could invent faces, and he could give those faces names. Afterwards he could describe, if anyone asked, how the room smelled and the kind of cigarettes Professor So-and-So smoked and what the lecturer from Oxford had to say about Etruscan pottery. When you lived a life grounded in lies and deception, all the lines of reality became blurred.

He remembered the simple lie he’d told Rhiannon Canavan about his father’s heart attack the night Padraic Finn had telephoned with the news of the Connie. Had he known that his father was really unwell, he might have chosen a different fabrication, but in the end it made no difference at all. Even his identities were lies. He was no longer Patrick Cairney. Neither was he John Doyle, traveller in Scandinavian trinkets.

He was Jig and all his experiences were Jig’s.

The months spent training in the savage wasteland of the Libyan desert with Qaddafi’s mad guerillas, who valued human life as much as a match flame. The endless days crawling over burning sand when you had nothing to drink and your throat had the texture of sandpaper and the gun and back-pack you carried became the heaviest burden in all your experience. Freezing nights when you slept naked under a moon of relentless ice and shivered so badly you felt your skin was coming loose from your skeleton. These were Jig’s experiences. And it was Jig who had become the hardened professional under Padraic Finn’s guidance, who had sworn allegiance to the Association of the Wolfe and the goal of Irish unity, achieved through a programme of political assassination. A programme carried out by professionals who had no desire for the old ways of martyrdom and considered self-destruction beneath contempt. It wasn’t a dreamer’s Ireland. It was a hard place, and there were hard goals to accomplish, and these couldn’t be left to the amateurs, the homemade grenade groups, the desperate little losers who tossed bottles of fiery gasoline at British soldiers and thought they were brave for doing so. Sad, misguided men who dreamed the dreams of hooligans. Finn’s programme would eventually change everything. Jig had a complete belief that in the end, weary of death and the assassinations of its political figures, the British would have no choice but to withdraw.

It was Padraic Finn who had smoothed the abrasive surface of Patrick Cairney. It was Finn, surrogate father, mentor, who had insisted on Libyan training and then, in a further process of refinement, six months at the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow where Cairney had learned the uses of high-tech explosives. If Harry had provided the early, relentless indoctrination, then it was Finn who had carried this out of the realm of vague impracticality and vapid rhetoric into the real world. He thought of Finn now, and the remote possibility that something might have happened to the old man in Ireland caused him fleeting concern – but what he came back to was Finn’s own maxim. I’m expendable. You’re expendable. Only the Cause has permanence. Cairney lifted his face and looked up at the sky. He could still picture Finn, in baggy cord pants and fisherman’s sweater, standing at the window in the room of harps. He could still hear Finn say The Cause is a killing mistress. It seeks your total devotion and never excuses your weaknesses. It demands your complete commitment and it rewards your infidelity, not with forgiveness and understanding, but with death …

‘Let’s walk back,’ Harry Cairney said. ‘It’s damn cold out here. Besides, we shouldn’t neglect Celestine. You ought to get to know her a little better.’

A harmless suggestion, Patrick Cairney thought. But there was no such thing in his life anymore. He couldn’t make the ordinary connections other people made. He lived in the shadows he’d created for himself.

They moved across the lawn in the direction of the house. The young man clutched his father’s elbow when they reached the steps, which were slick underfoot. He noticed how his father puffed as he climbed. Inside the house Celestine appeared at the foot of the stairs.

‘Did you walk far?’ she asked.

‘Just to the lake,’ the old man said. He started to take off his coat. Celestine helped, fussing around him.

Patrick Cairney watched her. She had her yellow hair pulled back tightly, making her sky-blue eyes prominent in her face. She wore faded blue jeans and a red silk shirt and she was barefoot. She looked impossibly young. She might have been a young girl strolling through the grass at an open-air rock concert, someone you followed with your eyes and wondered who was lucky enough to be screwing her. And then you might track her through the crowd and lose her, knowing you’d never see her again.

She moved towards him now. There was a scent of perfume in the air around her. She laid her fingertips on his wrist and said, ‘I’ll make breakfast. I expect you’re both hungry.’

Patrick Cairney hung his coat on the rack, turning his face away from Celestine. He had developed a sense of danger that was like having some kind of internal compass whose needle would vibrate whenever danger was near, and he had the awareness now of that needle swinging madly inside his brain – and it had nothing to do with the idea that a man called Frank Pagan was in New York City looking for him, it had nothing to do with whatever calamity might have happened to Finn in Ireland, it had nothing to do with his reason for being in the United States. It was connected entirely to the touch of this woman’s fingertips on his bare skin, which provoked a warm and unsettling physical response inside him. Sometimes there was an inexplicable chemistry between two people, instant, like a small Polaroid of emotion. If that was the thing happening between himself and Celestine, he had no room for it in his world.

He said, ‘I could eat.’

But he still didn’t look at her because he knew he had absolutely no mastery right then over his own expression. He didn’t like that. He didn’t like yielding up any of his control over himself. Without control he was a dead man. Finn had told him once that Jig was an instrument, a very fine instrument of destruction. But what Patrick Cairney felt as he avoided Celestine’s eyes was a distressing knowledge of flaws in the structure of this instrument – a damaged reed, a faulty valve, something he’d have to repair in such a way that it would never fail him again.

New Rockford, Connecticut

The two Secret Service agents were of Hispanic descent. One was called Lopez, the other Garcina. They sat motionless and squat in a blue car parked in the driveway beneath Kevin Dawson’s study. Now and again Dawson would walk to the window and look out at them. They never seemed to move. What did they do down there in the car he wondered.

Dawson went towards his desk. It was strewn with papers. Many of them were invitations of the kind routinely extended to a brother of the President of the United States. The opening of a new office block in Manhattan. A fund-raising banquet on behalf of scientific research in Antarctica. Kevin Dawson attended as many of these functions as he could because he considered it his duty to wave the Dawson flag in public whenever possible. Duty was an important word in the Dawson lexicon. Sometimes Kevin thought that the entire Dawson clan had been selectively bred with public service in mind.

He sat and pushed his chair back against the wall. From another part of this large Victorian house, which had been in the Dawson family for more than eighty years, he could hear the sounds of his daughters, Louise and Kitty, getting ready for school. Running water. The rattle of a spoon in a bowl. Kitty’s high-pitched laughter. Martha, Kevin’s wife, drove the girls every morning to the stop where they boarded the big yellow bus that took them to a grade school in New Rockford. At one time Martha had argued that the girls ought to attend a private school, but Kevin, pressured somewhat by his own brother who saw the chance to score some points for democracy and egalitarianism, insisted they go to a public school like normal kids. Thomas Dawson, locked into a marriage that seemed destined to be childless, was always bringing such minor pressures to bear on the family, the kids especially. He saw them, Kevin Dawson thought at times, as the children he didn’t have himself.

There was the sound of footsteps on the stairs and then Louise and Kitty came running into his office to say good-bye to him. Kevin Dawson embraced his daughters, hugging them hard. A small ritual of family. Sometimes, when he stood in the doorway of their bedroom and watched them sleep, he was filled with an awesome love.

Louise, grown-up at eleven and graceful in the way of a ballet dancer with her long skinny body, wanted to know about the men parked in the driveway. Dawson stepped back from his daughters. They had a way of scrutinising him that made him feel as though he were made of glass. The eyes of innocence, he thought.

‘The President ordered those men to be here,’ he said slowly. ‘For our protection.’

‘Protection from what?’ Kitty asked. She was balanced on one foot like a stork. At the age of nine, Kitty resembled her mother in a manner that could take Kevin’s breath away.

‘Well, the President has enemies. And because we’re part of the President’s family, we have the same enemies.’ He let this casual lie hang in the air, wondering if the girls were really buying it the way Martha had done. He had muttered vaguely about a rash of Dawson hate mail when he’d explained the presence of the Secret Service agents to his wife. Apart from Martyns, the agent who accompanied the kids to school and remained there all day long, Kevin had always refused Secret Service protection in the past even if, as the President’s brother, he was entitled to it.

‘It isn’t anything that should worry you guys, though. It’s a precaution, that’s all.’

Louise said to her sister, ‘It’s politics as usual.’

Kitty looked thoughtful. ‘Politics is a dirty game.’ Her small oval face was earnest.

‘Where did you hear that?’ he asked.

‘Everybody knows that, Daddy,’ Kitty said.

‘Everybody,’ Louise agreed. ‘Didn’t you know that about politics, Daddy?’

There were moments when Dawson understood that his daughters liked to bait him in tiny ways. Affectionate little jibes, jokes, verbal conspiracies.

Martha appeared in the doorway. She was a small woman whose looks had deteriorated since the birth of Kitty. Kevin, who adored his wife beyond any means of measurement, didn’t notice changes in her. He didn’t see the wrinkles edging the eyes. He didn’t see the thin lines that stretched from the corners of her mouth, nor did he notice the streaks of silver that had appeared in her black hair. All he ever saw was the girl he’d proposed to one wet afternoon in Bayville when a summer storm had raked the waters of Long Island Sound and Martha had pressed her lips against the back of his hand and whispered Yes. Kevin had built his whole life around that whisper of acceptance.

‘Let’s go, girls,’ she said. ‘We don’t want to miss the bus, do we?’

‘I don’t think you want an honest answer to that question, Mom,’ Louise said.

Martha kissed Kevin. ‘I’ll be right back,’ she said, herding the girls out of the room. She blew another kiss at her husband as she drew the door shut.

From the window Kevin watched his family get inside the station wagon. Martyns followed in the blue sedan. Kevin gazed until both cars had gone out of sight down the long curve of the driveway and the stand of ancient elms. He went back to his desk and began to sift through the papers.

He was searching for the file that contained a monthly computerised printout detailing the ebb and flow of the Dawson family fortune, which came from such diverse sources as condominiums in Dallas and Houston, dairy farms in Wisconsin, New York, and Ohio, a chain of small-town newspapers that extended from Oregon to Florida, and a pineapple plantation in Hawaii. The whole thing was a maze of corporations, and it was Kevin Dawson’s function to manage this labyrinth, which grew more complex every month.

He found the file and flipped it open. He stared at the columns of figures, prepared by a centralised computer bank in Jersey City, which recorded every business transaction in the Dawson empire from the purchase of paper clips to the financial lubrication of some local politician. It was difficult to concentrate. His mind kept drifting to Jig and to the crazy idea that he was in danger. He tried to persuade himself he was safe – after all, there were Secret Service agents stationed outside – but he couldn’t still the anxiety he felt.

He closed the file and stood up, stretching his arms. He disliked being vulnerable. All Kevin Dawson had ever really craved was a peaceful life, the life of a family man. Wife and kids. Dogs and roses. But destiny, that crooked schemer, had arranged for him to be born into the Dawson clan with all its political ambitions, its history of ruthless business intrigues. His grandfather had been impeached by the House of Representatives in 1929 for ‘immoral and unacceptable’ trading in the stock market. His father, the one-time United States ambassador to Italy, had been maligned in the late 1930s for his uncritical attitude towards Mussolini and criticised even more strongly in the fifties for having a tumultuous affair with a Greek opera singer, a histrionic woman the press called ‘Dawson’s Diva’. It was as if the Dawson clan went out of its way to court turbulence and self-destruction. What chance did he have for a peaceful life with a background like that?

His telephone rang. He picked up the receiver and heard the voice of Nicholas Linney.

‘Mulhaney thinks he’s got it all figured out,’ Linney said.

Dawson pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘Figured what, Nick?’

‘Who took the money.’ Linney had a flat nasal accent, like that of a man with stuffed sinuses. ‘He figures you.’

‘Me? Why me?’

‘He’s got some cockeyed reasons of his own.’

‘I’m sure he has,’ Kevin Dawson said. ‘Do I want to hear them?’

Linney was quiet a moment. ‘I didn’t find them convincing. He’s full of shit. I think he’s laying down smokescreens, if you want my opinion.’

‘Smoke-screens?’

‘Yeah. He makes an accusation like that, it takes the heat off him.’

‘Why would he feel any heat, Nick?’

‘If he had a hand in the hijacking he would,’ Linney answered.

‘You think he did?’

‘I hear rumours. I hear things about Mulhaney privately investing union funds and losing some hefty change on Wall Street. I hear things about auditors moving in on his union, wanting to check the books. I think maybe he’s been skimming. Chipping away at the Irish money. Mending fences.’

There was a long silence. Dawson thought about the wholesale paranoia that the hijacking of the Connie O’Mara had brought, and he doubted that the Fundraisers could ever function as a unit again. He realised he welcomed this prospect. It was a step in the direction of the untroubled life he sought. His ambitions for Ireland belonged to another time in his life, to his youth when he’d been less prudent than he was now. Dawson turned his thoughts briefly to Mulhaney. If Jig ever got to Big Jock, then it was a pretty sure bet that Mulhaney would send the killer here to Connecticut. Kev Dawson’s the one, Mulhaney would say. Kev Dawson took the money. Mulhaney hated the Dawson family, and Thomas especially, ever since the President had created a commission to look into union funds. Big Jock would love to create problems for the Dawsons. Kevin Dawson understood that he feared Mulhaney almost as much as Jig. Mulhaney, dictated to by blind hatreds and prejudice and the fear of seeing his power eroded by a presidential commission, would go out of his way to make life difficult for anyone connected to the Dawson family. If he couldn’t get Tommy directly, then Kevin would do.

‘You really believe any of this, Nick?’

‘It’s a possibility, that’s all. Guy’s got a cash-flow problem.’

‘Here’s something else to consider, Nick. Maybe you’re the one setting up a smoke-screen.’

‘I like that,’ Linney said.

‘My point is, Nick, when this kind of suspicion starts, where the hell does it stop? Where do we draw the line, for God’s sake? None of this mutual accusation shit is going to get the money back. It’s sick to go around blaming somebody when there isn’t a goddam shred of evidence.’

‘I’m not accusing anybody,’ Linney answered calmly. ‘I’m examining options, that’s all.’

‘Examining options,’ Dawson said. He had always found Nick Linney to be a cold character, somebody whose personality seemed indefinable at bottom. A human enigma. His encounters with Linney invariably left him feeling faintly depressed, as if he’d run into somebody hovering on the sociopathic margin of things. For a second Dawson had the urge to mention Jig, but he’d promised his brother – and Kevin, no matter what, always tried to keep his word.

‘You come up with any bright ideas, you call me,’ Linney said.

‘Immediately,’ Dawson replied.

‘And if you see any strange-looking Irishmen hanging around, you be careful.’

‘Is that supposed to be funny?’

‘Take it any way you like,’ Nicholas Linney said.

When Dawson had hung up he opened the bottom drawer of his desk and took out a bottle of Dewar’s White Label. He poured himself a small shot and sipped it. Drinking just after breakfast. A bad sign, he thought.

Carrying his shot glass, he got up and wandered to the window. The hills on the other side of the road appeared secretive and barren. He looked across the lawn at the wrought-iron fence that faced the narrow road. It seemed oddly flimsy to Kevin Dawson just then, as if even the slightest breeze might flatten it.

He finished his drink.

He saw the station wagon come up the driveway. Martha stepped out. She looked tiny to Dawson. Vulnerably pale beneath the monochrome of the sky. He raised one hand and waved, but she didn’t see him. When she’d passed out of his sight in the direction of the house, a wave of cold fear ran through him. It wasn’t just the wrought-iron fence that was fragile. It was his whole life.