15

Albany, New York

It was a cheap joint at the edge of the Interstate – unpainted cinderblock, a flamingo-coloured neon sign with the words CAPITOL CITY MOTEL, a cracked swimming pool, drained for the winter. Fitzjohn walked round the pool, Waddell in tow. He paused when they reached the diving board. On the other side of the pool was the motel bar, where Rorke and McGrath had gone for a drink. Seamus Houlihan was up in his room – resting, he’d said. Seamus always looked as if he was carrying the bloody world on his shoulders and enjoying its weight regardless.

The five merry men, Fitzjohn thought. He heard Rorke’s weird laughter float out of the bar. It had the staccato quality of a pneumatic drill. Fitzjohn put his hands in the pockets of his pants and shivered in the night wind. The lights that hung around the entrance to the bar gave the place all the cheer of a pauper’s Christmas.

Waddell said, ‘I suppose you’ll be leaving tomorrow, Fitz.’

Fitzjohn nodded. ‘After I drive you to Tarrytown, I’m going home to New Jersey. That’s my arrangement.’

Waddell raised his sharp little face and smiled. ‘Back to the family, eh?’

‘Back to the family,’ Fitzjohn said.

‘You’ll be looking forward to it, I expect.’

‘You don’t know how much.’

Waddell moved to the rim of the pool. He made a funny little plunging gesture with his hands, then stepped back. ‘I had a wife and a kid once,’ he said. ‘About ten years ago. We had a small house in Ballysillen. I was second engineer on a ship at that time. The day they died I was on board a Liberian vessel called the Masurado, somewhere in the Gulf of Oman. I’m working in the engine room when the captain himself comes down to see me. He says to me he just received a message. My wife and kid are dead.’ Waddell’s voice was very flat, unemotional.

‘What happened was they got burned to death,’ he went on. They were trapped inside the house when some soldiers and the local IRA started a gun battle. Snipers everywhere. Explosions. Somehow the house started to burn. Nobody ever told me who was responsible for that. I don’t suppose it matters much.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Fitzjohn said. Another waste, another tragedy in the ongoing horror that was Ulster. He wondered how Waddell coped with the pain.

‘It’s a fucking long time ago.’ Waddell looked very sad as he turned his face to Fitzjohn. ‘It’s best to bury it.’

‘Yes,’ Fitzjohn said.

Waddell ran the back of his hand over his lips. ‘About a month after it happened, I ran into Seamus Houlihan. I’d known him for years. I told him about the wife and kid. You know what Seamus did?’

Fitzjohn shook his head.

‘Seamus went out that same night and killed two men. One was a high-up in the IRA, a man called Costello. The other was a British soldier. Seamus said it was retribution.’

‘Retribution?’ Fitzjohn asked.

‘It was to help even the score, you see.’ Waddell reached out to touch the diving board. ‘I never asked him to do anything like that, you understand.’ He took a cigarette out of his coat pocket, a Woodbine. He lit it in a furtive way, cupping both hands against the wind. ‘I always felt I owed him something for that.’

Fitzjohn thought it was a strange kind of debt, a murderous obligation. ‘You didn’t ask him to do anything for you, so how can you owe him?’

Waddell shrugged. ‘It’s the way I see it.’ He sucked the Woodbine deeply in the manner of a man who has spent time deprived of tobacco. ‘I know Seamus and I know what his faults are, you see. But he’s been a bloody good friend to me.’

The emphasis was on ‘bloody’, Fitzjohn thought. He wondered how many victims Houlihan had left strewn behind him. He had the sudden desire to leave Albany tonight and get away from the madman and whatever atrocities he was planning, because he was afraid. Maybe, after the work he’d done finding the airfield and the long hours spent driving the Ryder, Houlihan would be understanding. Jesus, that was a contradiction in terms! Houlihan would probably shoot him if he mentioned anything about leaving. On the other hand, he didn’t exactly relish the idea of driving this gang to Tarrytown and discovering there that he’d outlived his usefulness, that he was destined to stare down the barrel of Seamus’s gun. He had no intention of being pressed into premature retirement.

‘What are the plans after Tarrytown?’ he asked Waddell.

Waddell said, ‘That’s not for me to say.’

Fitzjohn thought about the crates inside the rental truck. In a hesitant way he asked, ‘Don’t you get sick of it all, John? Don’t you want an end to all the killing?’ As soon as he’d phrased the questions, he wondered if Waddell would report them to his bloody good friend. Houlihan, a product of Protestant Belfast street gangs and Armagh Jail, which was where Fitzjohn had first encountered him, would regard such questions as a sign of unacceptable weakness. In Houlihan’s world, chaos and violence were moral constants, necessities.

Waddell didn’t answer immediately. He tossed his Woodbine away and turned up the collar of his coat. ‘Sometimes I think a peaceful life would be very pleasant,’ he said. ‘I suppose that’s what you’ve got for yourself in New Jersey?’

Fitzjohn said that it was.

‘Then why did you agree to be a part of all this if your life’s so bloody wonderful?’ Waddell asked.

Fitzjohn answered quietly. ‘You know what they say, John. Once you’re in the FUV, you’re always in.’

A slight despair touched Fitzjohn just then. Here he was in the United States of America, a new life, and when he’d been asked to do a job for the FUV he’d jumped at it without consideration, like a man programmed into the ruts of old hatreds. He hadn’t known the nature of the job, nor had he ever stopped to ask. It was only now that he truly realised the FUV was the culmination of feelings he should have left behind in Northern Ireland, otherwise he was doing nothing more than hauling used baggage into his new life.

He wondered if he could sneak away in the night, if he could wait until the others were asleep and then vanish swiftly. Maybe he could hitch a ride to Albany County Airport and fly back to New Jersey. Home. He’d forget he ever participated in any of this insanity. He didn’t belong with people like Seamus Houlihan these days, or with thugs like Rorke and McGrath. They stood for the old world and the senselessness of a war whose roots were buried in a history that should have been forgotten long ago. He turned the prospect of departure around in his mind. A risky business. Maybe. But waiting might prove fatal.

A movement on the balcony caught his eye and he looked up. Houlihan was standing there, legs apart, hands on the rail.

‘Waddell, Fitz,’ Houlihan called down. ‘I’d like to see you and the others in my room right away.’

‘Right, Seamus,’ Waddell replied.

Fitzjohn started towards the stairway, looking back once at the empty swimming pool. He wondered how long Houlihan had been standing on the balcony and whether he’d heard any of the conversation with Waddell.

Roscommon, New York

Patrick Cairney had drunk just a little more of his father’s brandy than he intended. When he went inside his bedroom and lay down, his. head was spinning. He didn’t close his eyes because that way the spinning was worse. He had to sit up and concentrate on something inside the room, an object he could focus on until the nausea had passed. He stared hard at his canvas bag, which sat locked on the dresser. After dinner there had been several toasts proposed by Harry. Sentimental toasts, tributes to the composers of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic written at Easter 1916 at the time of the Rising.

All Harry’s heroes had been signatories of the Proclamation, and he could recite the entire document by heart. Certain words came back to Cairney. Supported by her exiled children in America … Ireland strikes in full confidence of victory … We pledge our lives and the lives of our comrades-in-arms to the cause of Irish freedom … We pledge our lives, Cairney thought, though not necessarily our brains or our skills. During the toasts he’d fought with the urge to silence Harry and stuff the empty words down his throat and tell him how little significance they had, how meaningless they really were. This streak of cruelty inside himself wasn’t surprising, but what astounded him was the forceful way it had suddenly risen. Harry’s beatific expression, the way he sniffed as he recited the sacrosanct old sentiments – Patrick Cairney despised it all, the facile nature of Harry’s words, the easy emotions. He despised a life given over to talk, endless talk, and no action.

The Cause needed action. Not the empty rattling of old men.

He let his thoughts drift back to the beginning, the very beginning, when he had first come to Finn’s attention. In those days he’d gone around the fringes of clandestine political groups in Dublin as if his head were going to explode. Here he was in a divided country where injustice was a commonplace event and, if you excluded the mad bombers and the angry snipers, nothing much was being done to correct the situation and get the English out. Here he was on an island whose northern section was constantly on the edge of apocalypse. When he’d visited Ulster he’d been sickened by the flames and the raddled buildings and the rubber bullets fired by British soldiers and the checkpoints and the Saracen cars and tanks and the kids who mindlessly parroted a hatred they had inherited, a whole desolate world galaxies removed from Harry’s green dreams that had been spoon-fed to him throughout childhood. And he’d been impatient back then, insanely so, driven by an urge to transform his emotions into direct physical action. People were suspicious of him because he was American. Because he hadn’t been born and raised in Ireland. He wanted to tell them he knew more about Ireland and its history than any of them.

But it wasn’t until he’d gravitated into Finn’s orbit that the opportunity came up to serve the Cause. He remembered now the precise moment in Glasnevin Cemetery when Finn had given him a gun and a mission to accomplish. It was the most perfect moment in his life. He’d stepped through a door into a different world where justice was something you pursued outside courts of law, where you moved beyond the realms of the Queen’s laws and her lawyers and judges, those bewigged fools whose only interest lay in the maintenance of a status quo that had always protected them and their privileges. You created your own justice. And it was fair, the way it was supposed to be.

Finn said once, It’s a monastic life this. There’s no glamour and no comfort. You can’t have a family and kids. You can’t hold down some regular job. You’re always going to be standing outside of things, and every bloody shadow you see will make you wonder if there’s a gun concealed in it. You want that, Jig?

Yes. Yes he wanted that. He wanted that the way he had never wanted anything else. He had given up his life for the Cause. But where would the Cause be if he didn’t get that missing money back?

Now he pushed the window open, hoping the cold air would clear his brain. Four brandies had brought him to this condition, but then he wasn’t accustomed to alcohol. He looked out at the shadowy waters of Roscommon Lake. The night was intensely cold, moonless. He drew the window shut. He was suddenly anxious to get away from Roscommon, anxious for action, anxious to locate Finn’s money.

He was thirsty. He opened the door and gazed down the flight of stairs to the first floor. The house was silent and dark, save for a thin light that burned dimly somewhere below. He moved towards the stairs and went down. He stepped inside the large kitchen – stainless steel surfaces and high-tech appliances, he noticed, which meant Celestine had redecorated the room since Kathleen’s time, when the kitchen had been chintzy and floral. He found a glass and pressed it against the ice dispenser, then he filled it with water from the faucet. He drained the glass quickly, and stood with his back pressed against the sink. Once, this kitchen had been the warm heart of the house. Now it seemed more like a transplant, a triumph of the new technology. What did it tell him about the difference between Kathleen and Celestine? he wondered.

He became conscious of a voice drifting very faintly towards him through the open door. It was Celestine’s. For a moment he wondered if she and Harry had come back downstairs for a nightcap, but as he strained to listen he realised he heard only one voice. He set his glass down inside the sink and went out of the kitchen. There was a thin light that burned through the crack of a doorway at the end of the hall. He moved towards it, even as he realised that he should have gone the other way to the stairs and back up to his bedroom. This was none of his business. Nothing that happened at Roscommon had anything to do with him.

He stopped outside the sitting room. Celestine was standing with her back to the door, a telephone receiver held in place between shoulder and jaw. She wore a blue silk robe that shimmered in the light from a nearby lamp and in one hand she held a glass of whiskey. Cairney heard her say, ‘I’m not making it up,’ and then she turned around and saw him in the doorway, and her expression was one of restrained surprise, almost as though she’d expected to find him standing there. She put the receiver down, perhaps a little too quickly, and the first thing Cairney thought was that she had a lover somewhere, somebody she talked to when Harry was fast asleep upstairs. He didn’t like the idea, but it made some kind of sense. How could Harry satisfy her at his age and in his health? Why wouldn’t she look elsewhere for consolation? I’m not making it up. He wondered what she was referring to.

‘I spy,’ she said lightly, like a child involved in a game of hide-and-seek.

He pushed the door open. ‘I didn’t mean to creep up on you.’

‘Enter.’ She gestured with her glass. It was an expansive motion, a little careless. She was slightly drunk. Cairney had a small insight into her life. A beautiful young woman married to a man forty years older than she was, probably lonely in the isolation of Roscommon – what was there to do at times but blur her life with liquor? And perhaps a lover she met now and again.

‘Harry’s physician,’ she said, pointing to the phone. ‘I make my daily progress report. Dutifully.’

Patrick Cairney wondered if that was a lie. He’d become so good at telling them himself, he should have been expert at detecting them in others, but he wasn’t. She had hung up so quickly, though, without any farewell, and it was so late in the evening for a routine medical report, that he assumed it wasn’t Harry’s physician on the other end of the line. He watched her go to an armchair and sit, crossing her legs. Between the folds of the robe a stretch of pale thigh was visible briefly before she rearranged the garment.

‘Want a drink?’ she asked.

‘I’ve had too much already.’

‘People talk about the Irish Problem, but they miss the point,’ she said. She indicated her drink. ‘This is the Irish Problem. Jameson’s elixir of life.’

Cairney smiled. Maybe he was mistaken. Maybe there wasn’t any man in Celestine’s life other than Harry. He was so accustomed to paranoid thinking, to looking for levels of meaning beneath the superficial, that it was difficult to regard things in any normal fashion. An assassin’s habit. You came to think that every situation was fraught with hidden significances. Nothing was ever ordinary, nothing innocent.

Celestine put her glass down on the coffee table. She let her hands fall into her lap. ‘Why don’t you sit down, Patrick?’

He didn’t move. ‘I was thinking of going back upstairs. I need some sleep.’

She turned her face slowly towards him. At a certain angle, her beauty seemed to have been sculpted in delicate, fragile detail. The fine mouth, the perfectly straight nose, the strong jaw that suggested a streak of determination. ‘Harry told me he wanted you to go into politics.’

‘He had some notion I’d follow him into the Senate, I guess.’

‘Why didn’t you?’

‘I’m not a committee man,’ he answered. ‘I don’t work well in collaboration with others.’

‘A loner. Or was it rebellion against Daddy?’

Cairney shrugged. ‘Maybe both.’

Celestine reached out for her glass. She raised it to her lips but didn’t drink. ‘Why archaeology?’ She said this last word in a manner that might almost have been mocking, as if she couldn’t bring herself to believe that he was really what he said he was.

‘Why not?’

‘It just seems so quaint, that’s all. I have this image of you in khaki shorts and a pith helmet, directing a bunch of Arabs to dig holes in the sand. You never wanted to be famous like Harry? You never wanted your name to become a household word?’

‘Never.’ Cairney moved towards the door. The security of the unlit hallway. I never wanted to be anything like my father.

‘Why is it I always get the impression you’re running away from me? What is it? Don’t you care for my company?’ she asked.

‘I’m just tired.’

She stood up. She drained her glass, set it down. ‘Don’t go. Stay a little longer.’

Her hands were stretched out towards him, and the expression on her face was one he couldn’t quite read. A look of anxiety? He wasn’t certain. But he recognised one thing beyond any doubt – his compass was going crazy again. He couldn’t cross the space between himself and Celestine, couldn’t possibly move towards her and clasp those hands in his own. Couldn’t touch her. And then he thought: I could, I could go to her so goddam easily. He felt like a man flirting with the notion of his own ruin. Yet it appealed, the whole idea caught his fancy. There, Harry. I had your wonderful wife. How does that affect your gorgeous dreams? Your infallibly beautiful wife and your cosy little world at Roscommon where you live your life falsely?

He stared at her. He imagined how readily his father must have fallen in love with this woman. He could see the old man losing his heart like a bird deliriously set free.

‘Please stay,’ she said.

He looked at the paleness of her shoulders and the way the silk robe hung loosely against her body.

‘You’re leaving in the morning, I understand,’ she said.

Cairney nodded his head. Why was he still here in this room, this danger zone? He had no business in this place.

Her hands were still held out to him. ‘I have the feeling you won’t be coming back.’

‘Maybe,’ he said.

She lowered her hands slowly to her side. ‘You’re afraid of me,’ she said.

He wanted to say he was more afraid of himself than anything else. But he didn’t speak.

‘You don’t have to be,’ she said. ‘Why are you always so twitchy around me?’

‘I didn’t notice.’

‘I come near you, you jump. I ought to get one of those little bells lepers used to carry. I’d ring it whenever I moved within ten feet of you.’

Cairney pressed his fingertips to his eyelids to ease his headache. Harry’s wife, he thought. Keep remembering that.

‘I make you tense,’ she said.

‘No –’

‘Look at yourself, Patrick. You can’t wait to get away from me, can you? Can’t wait to hurry upstairs to your little bedroom.’ She picked up her empty glass and sighed. She looked very fragile just then. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be talking to you like this. Forget I ever said anything. I drink too much sometimes and say things I don’t mean, that’s all. My mouth has a mind of its own. Change the subject.’

He leaned against the wall. ‘I think you’re unhappy,’ he said. Jesus, it was the wrong thing to say. It was provocative, which meant it needed explanation. He should have simply said good night and gone upstairs, but now, in a sense, he’d committed himself.

Celestine poured herself another shot of Jameson’s. ‘Is that how you see me?’

‘I think so.’

‘And I thought I kept it hidden.’

‘Not very well.’

She passed her glass from one hand to the other. ‘Certain days. Certain moods. I’m not unhappy all the time. You catch me on a bad day, that’s all.’

‘Maybe it’s Roscommon at winter. I remember how it used to drive me stir-crazy as a kid.’

‘Maybe.’ She sipped the whiskey. ‘I try to be cheerful for your father’s sake, but it isn’t easy. Sometimes I feel I’ve buried myself here in a large grey tomb and my whole life’s come to a dead stop. But this is his home. How can I tell him I can’t stand it here at times? How can I say that to him? It’s not his fault I get into these moods. He tries very hard to make me happy.’ She paused. ‘I didn’t use to drink this way.’

Cairney said, ‘When Harry’s better, why don’t you get him to take you on a trip? Maybe you could talk him into a Caribbean cruise on that boat of his.’

‘I get seasick and I don’t like ocean cruises,’ she said. She raised the glass to her mouth and then, changing her mind, stuck it down on the table. ‘The last time we went anywhere I kept throwing up all the way from Maine to St. Barthélmy. I don’t want to be unhappy. It seems so goddam ungrateful somehow.’

‘Harry wouldn’t think so. You only have to tell him you’d like a change of scenery, that’s all.’

She was quiet for a very long time before she said, ‘I took a trip to Boston last fall. Alone. The whole New England in fall bit. I drove through Maine and Vermont and Connecticut. Harry understood I needed to get away. I missed him, so I came home after a couple of days. But I need more than just getting away, Patrick. I don’t think a change of scenery’s going to cut it.’

She came very close to him now, looking at him in a searching way. He felt the air around him change. It was suddenly charged with electricity. He thought, No, it’s wrong, it doesn’t happen like this, but he didn’t move out of her way.

‘There,’ she said. ‘You’re doing it again.’

‘Doing what again?’

‘Looking tense.’

She placed one hand against the side of his face. Her flesh was surprisingly cool. There was a fragrance from her skin suggestive of lime. Cairney didn’t move. He shut his eyes. He felt the silk of her robe against his arms, the pressure of her small breasts against his chest, her hair upon the side of his face. He expected it, he knew it was coming, and he knew he ought to resist it, but the kiss took him by surprise anyhow, the movement of her lips against his and the way her fingers touched the back of his neck and the contact of her tongue against his. Dear God, it was easy to drift out into a dream, into an unreal world where there were no rules to govern this kind of situation, a place where Celestine was a perfect stranger to him.

Suddenly she stepped back from him. ‘Forgive me,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean that to happen. I’m more drunk than I thought.’

He opened his eyes. The yearning he felt was intolerable.

‘I’m sorry,’ was all he could think to say, cursing himself for his own weakness. He heard one of Finn’s old warnings. If you lose concentration, you’re history. He remembered the day Finn had said this. They’d been walking together close to the Martello Tower in Sandy-cove, where James Joyce had once lived. He remembered the seriousness in Finn’s voice. Concentration will save your life one day.

He turned away from her and went quickly out into the hallway. What the hell was he doing? What was he playing at? He climbed the stairs and when he reached the landing he stopped, listening to the silences of the big house all around him. He had a driving urge to go back down again. Instead he went inside his bedroom and closed the door.

He checked his wristwatch. It was almost midnight. In a few hours he’d be gone from Roscommon. He’d be out of Celestine Cairney’s life.

He took off his clothes and lay down with his hands tucked behind his head and just before he drifted into sleep it all came back to him, the touch of silk, her scent, the feel of her hair and the intimate warmth of her mouth. He realised, with an awareness that was painfully sharp and very depressing, that he desired the woman as much as he’d ever desired anyone.

He wanted his father’s wife.

New York City

Joseph X. Tumulty stepped inside his office. He saw Zuboric dozing in an armchair. The FBI man opened his eyes as soon as Tumulty came in and squinted into the light from the desk lamp.

‘What time is it?’ Zuboric asked.

‘Twenty past midnight.’ Tumulty moved to his desk and sat down. He was glad to notice that his hands didn’t tremble, that he’d somehow managed to control his nervousness. The idea that had come to him was inspired less by God than his own desperation. But he was in a position where the question Why not? didn’t merit an answer. He simply had to do something.

‘Is Pagan downstairs?’ Zuboric asked.

‘Yes.’ Tumulty thought of Frank Pagan, dressed like a hobo and propped against the kitchen wall downstairs. When Tumulty had been shelling eggs to scramble for the morning breakfast, he’d been aware of Pagan watching him intently, his eyes two keen scanning instruments that constantly measured and analysed, studying the other men in the big room as they spread mattresses on the floor and started settling down for the night.

Tumulty leafed through a variety of invoices. He was conscious of the FBI agent observing him.

He said to Zuboric, ‘Paperwork. I used to imagine God’s work would have nothing to do with bureaucracy.’

Zuboric grunted. He wasn’t very interested.

Tumulty picked up a pen and began to make calculations on a scratch pad. When he’d written a column of figures that were utterly meaningless, he glanced at Zuboric again. The agent was looking at him blankly.

‘I’m hopeless at maths,’ Tumulty said, in what he assumed was a lighthearted kind of voice. ‘I need a calculator. But all I could probably afford is an abacus, and I don’t know how to work those things.’

The agent looked glum and uncomfortable in the armchair. Tumulty scribbled again. He hoped he looked like a man struggling over figures that would never add up no matter how hard he worked. He tore off the top sheet and began to write on the one underneath, conscious all the time of Zuboric watching him.

‘I don’t know how the Chinese manage,’ the priest said, smiling. Was this silly banter convincing the agent? It was hard to tell anything from Zuboric’s face, except that the man was vigilant.

Tumulty pressed the pen down on the new sheet of paper. He would have to do this quickly. He muttered in the manner of somebody calculating as he wrote, but what he set down on the paper had nothing to do with sums of money. He ripped the sheet from the pad and crumpled it, setting it to one side. Then he tossed his pencil down and stood up, scooping up the crumpled paper and smuggling it into the pocket of his pants. He felt pretty damn good, but was he going to get away with it?

‘Ah, well,’ he said. ‘I’m too tired to go on.’

He was sure Zuboric hadn’t noticed anything, hadn’t seen the writing on the piece of paper, hadn’t caught him slipping the sheet into his pocket. The real problem would come later when he tried to pass the paper to Jig. But at least he’d committed himself to a course of action, a move designed to appease his conscience. Perhaps it was possible, after all, to serve both God and the Cause provided you fudged round some delicate ethical questions. And if God disapproved, Joseph Tumulty trusted that he could win forgiveness somehow.

At best, the piece of paper would be helpful to Jig. At worst, like an atheist on his deathbed turning to prayer, Tumulty felt he had covered all his bets.

Albany, New York

Houlihan’s allocation of rooms at the Capital City Motel meant that Fitzjohn shared with Waddell, while Rorke and McGrath were together in the next room. Only Houlihan had a place to himself. Fitzjohn wished it had been otherwise. It was going to be difficult to leave because he wasn’t sure that Waddell was sound asleep yet. Fitzjohn turned over on his narrow bed and looked across the room at his companion. Waddell’s mouth was open and his eyes were closed, but every now and then he’d mumble and change the position of his body.

Earlier, Houlihan had convened a brief meeting in which he talked about an early morning departure. The destination was White Plains, New York. He wanted everybody to be up and ready to leave by six A.M., which caused Rorke to grumble briefly. Houlihan had pointed out that this was no bloody vacation they were on and when he said six A.M. sharp he meant sharp. After that, Rorke had been very quiet.

‘What’s in White Plains?’ Fitzjohn had asked.

‘What does it matter to you, Fitz? You get off in Tarrytown, don’t you?’ Houlihan had pronounced the word Tarrytown as though it were a bad taste in his mouth. ‘You’re going to be out of it. You’ve done your work. And we’re all grateful.’

Houlihan hadn’t looked remotely grateful, Fitzjohn thought. There was something just a little guarded in the man’s eyes. The expression had struck a chord of concern inside Fitzjohn, and now he was glad he’d committed himself to leaving. If he didn’t go now, he knew he wouldn’t get another chance. The prospect of dying in Tarrytown, or anywhere else for that matter, didn’t enthrall him. And he didn’t trust Houlihan to let him go with a cheery farewell. Cheery farewells were not exactly Houlihan’s style. The best you could find to say about Seamus was that he wasn’t big on the social graces.

Fitzjohn sat upright. He stared at Waddell, whose hands were limp on his chest. Waddell’s breathing was regular and deep, but he still made occasional sounds suggestive of a man deprived of oxygen on the ocean floor. Fitzjohn moved from the bed. He went to the closet and very quietly took out his holdall. Waddell chose that moment to kick his legs so abruptly that the blanket flew from his bed.

Fitzjohn saw Waddell sit up, grope for the blanket like a blind man, then draw it over his body once more. For a long time Fitzjohn didn’t move. He listened to the sound of Waddell’s shallow breathing. When he was absolutely certain the man was asleep, Fitzjohn reached for the door handle and turned it gently, then he stepped out onto the balcony. He noticed that the window of Houlihan’s room was dark as he moved cautiously towards the stairs.

The motel bar was still open below. He turned up the collar of his coat against the biting chill of the night air, then he started to descend slowly. He looked towards the swimming pool. A cat slunk around the rim, then was gone with a rattle of leaves into the shrubbery. The whole night around him seemed like some large dark satellite dish that caught every noise, every movement, and amplified them.

At the bottom of the stairs he shifted his bag from one hand to the other. Now he had only to cross the pool area and he was gone.

He moved away from the stairs, passed the door of the bar, walked around the edge of the empty pool. He could see the road beyond the pink neon sign. The highway to freedom. New Jersey and home. He’d be safe there. Nobody would bother him again. Nobody would come looking for him.

He slid between a couple of parked cars and reached the spot where earlier he’d parked the Ryder truck. It looked luminously yellow under the pale lamps of the motel. Grinding his teeth nervously, he started to pick up his pace, walking away from the truck and heading for the road.

‘What’s your hurry, Fitz?’

Fitzjohn froze. He heard the noise of something inside him slipping and crumbling.

Houlihan climbed down from the cab of the Ryder. Fitzjohn, filled with bottomless dread, watched him. It had never occurred to him that Houlihan would be in the truck. Such a possibility hadn’t crossed his mind. But then he hadn’t thought any of this through. He’d been impetuous instead of careful. Fool.

‘I just came down to fetch a map,’ Houlihan said. ‘Wasn’t that a stroke of good fortune?’

Fitzjohn’s tongue was cold lead in his mouth. He wanted to speak, couldn’t think of anything to say. The dread was worse now. It was a sensation into which he sank like a man swallowed by swamp. As he looked at Houlihan he was conscious of the highway at his back. He could run. He could just drop the bloody bag and turn and run because the darkness out there would cover him.

‘I thought you seemed a wee bit uncomfortable with all this.’ Houlihan, smiling, made a gesture with his hand. ‘Marriage does that to some people. Makes them forget where they started out from. Puts soft ideas into their heads. You’re not the man you used to be, Fitz. I’ve been thinking that ever since Quebec. You’re soft. It’s amazing you lasted this long.’

Fitzjohn had never felt this paralysed in his life. Why the hell couldn’t he run? ‘This isn’t what you think, Seamus.’

‘No? I see my man leaving in the middle of the night with his bag packed and all – what am I supposed to think?’

Fitzjohn put the bag down. It occurred to him that a swift movement might take Houlihan off guard, a sudden kick, a punch. It might buy him a little extra time. The problem was how to get within striking range of Houlihan without making him suspicious. If it came down to a fair test of strength, Fitzjohn knew it wouldn’t take Seamus long to overpower him. The key lay in speed and accuracy and surprise.

‘Are you going to tell me you didn’t like this fine motel, Fitz? Are you going to tell me you decided to find yourself something more comfortable?’

Fitzjohn moved nearer to Houlihan. One swing, he thought. One almighty swing. ‘Let me explain,’ he heard himself say.

Houlihan laughed. ‘Save your fucking breath.’

Fitzjohn lunged. It was a sad effort. Houlihan sidestepped and tripped him and Fitzjohn went sprawling, colliding with the side of the truck. Dizzy, he slid to the ground and lay there looking up at the other man. Somehow his mouth had filled with blood. He must have split his gum when he hit the truck.

‘You don’t cross me,’ Houlihan said. ‘Nobody crosses me, Fitz.’

Houlihan bent down. He had his gun in his hand now. With the other hand he took a length of wire from the pocket of his seaman’s jacket.

‘Get inside the truck, Fitz. I think we ought to discuss your future in private.’

Fitzjohn pushed himself to a standing position. He couldn’t take his eyes away from the wire in Seamus’s hand, ‘I don’t want to go into the truck,’ he said.

‘The way I see it, you don’t have a fucking choice, Fitz.’

Roscommon, New York

Celestine stepped inside the bedroom, which was dark and cold, and she stood motionless until her eyes had become accustomed to the absence of light. Now she could make out the window and the moonless sky beyond and the branches of black trees. Her body was chill under the silk robe and her nipples hard and there were goose bumps all over her flesh. She went towards the bed, where she hesitated again. Then, reaching out, she caught the sheet and drew it back quietly. He didn’t move. She could make out the dim shape of his naked body. He lay fast asleep in a foetal position.

She sat on the edge of the mattress. With the tips of her fingers she traced a line on his thigh and then moved her hand, light as air, to the flat hard surface of his belly. It had been too long a time since she’d touched flesh as firm as her own, and it took her breath away. She shut her eyes and remembered the kiss, wondering if her drunken act had really fooled him. She’d been drinking, but not enough to make her do anything she hadn’t wanted to. She ran her fingers up his side, then pressed them softly on his lips, feeling the warmth of his breath. She lowered her face and brushed her lips against the curve of his hip and the desire she felt was unbearable, as if all her self-awareness had crystallised in this one thing, a beautiful naked young man stretched out before her.

‘Wake,’ she whispered. She leaned close to his face and ran her tongue in the folds of his ear, whispering over and over, ‘Wake, wake.’

He stirred and moaned quietly and she drew her hand down to his cock, which was hard almost as soon as she began to stroke it. She could feel the veins beneath the skin. She touched the tip, the opening, which was moist under her finger.

‘There’s nothing wrong,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing wrong in any of this. It’s right, Patrick. It’s very right. You know that, don’t you?’

He turned his body, lying now on the flat of his back. She felt his hands press down on her shoulders, as if he wanted to force her head into his groin and take him in her mouth, but he didn’t need to force because she was more than willing. She licked the pubic hair that grew up around the navel and then she started to move her face down slowly, feeling his cock stiff against her cheek. She took strands of her hair and made a web round the penis, stroking it slowly, feeling it grow harder and harder as she touched it. She parted her lips and sucked him for a moment, then she drew her body up over his so that she was straddling him, climbing him, struggling out of her robe at the same time. She wanted all of him, wanted everything he could possibly give of his strength and his youth, she wanted to feel his mouth upon her cunt, and then she’d take him deep inside her, far into the privacy of herself where it was warm and black and nothing that lived in the outside world mattered.

She said his name over and over. It came to have a mystical sound the more she repeated it, the syllables of some magical ritual. She felt his lips against her navel, and she squeezed her eyes tightly shut because she was no longer interested in anything she might see in this dim bedroom. This was the world, here and now, this blind place where she burrowed and where her blood rushed.

And then he was limp and motionless and she thought he must have come prematurely in his excitement, but that wasn’t it because she didn’t feel any wetness on her.

‘What’s wrong?’

He moved out from under her without saying anything. She reached over him and turned on the bedside lamp and watched him rub his eyes as he rolled away from her.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

He looked round for his robe, found it, put it on.

‘Get dressed,’ he said. He picked up her blue silk robe from the floor and tossed it at her.

‘Just like that?’

‘Just like that, Celestine.’

‘What is it, Patrick? An attack of conscience?’

He turned his back on her, walked to the window, looked out. He was shaking his head.

‘Look at me,’ she said.

She went to him, laid her face against his spine. He shivered.

‘You think it’s wrong, don’t you?’ she asked.

‘I don’t think it. I know,’ he replied. His voice was cold and lifeless. ‘Why the hell did you marry him? That’s what I don’t understand.’

‘Because I love him.’

‘You’ll pardon me if suddenly I find that hard to believe,’ Cairney said.

‘I don’t care what you believe! I love him as well as I can. Which is how he loves me, Patrick. As well as he can. And in certain departments that unfortunately isn’t enough.’

‘You didn’t think about that before, did you?’

She had a sense of her life pressing in on her, the barren trees of this huge estate, the unattractive waters of the lake, the forlornness of it all. ‘I didn’t have choices, Patrick.’ She hadn’t meant to utter this sentence. It was bound to puzzle him and she couldn’t begin to explain. She drew her robe around her.

‘You could have chosen not to marry him.’

She shook her head. ‘It wasn’t like that. You don’t know what you’re saying.’

‘Enlighten me then.’

Celestine went towards the door, leaving Cairney’s question unanswered. She turned and smiled at him. ‘It’s in your eyes. It’s in all your behaviour since you came here. You want me. I want you. It’s undeniable. So what happens next?’

‘Nothing,’ Cairney said. ‘Nothing can happen.’

‘We’ll see.’

She went out of the room, closing the door quietly.

It was one A.M. and bitterly cold when Patrick Cairney left the house and walked along the shore. He picked up stones and tossed them out across the water, listening to them hit out there in the darkness. He was angry with himself. He could make petty, unconvincing excuses – he was half asleep when he first felt Celestine touch him. He hadn’t fully understood what she was doing and how he was responding because at first the experience had had the texture of a dream in which he had absolutely no control over events. Excuses, excuses. He couldn’t brush aside the hard animal thing that possessed him or the amazing desire that had almost consumed him. He could wrestle it, certainly, but he couldn’t pin it.

It was only a small consolation that he’d pulled himself back at the last possible moment when he’d encountered the weak phantom of his own conscience. His private policeman, the one that stopped the flow of traffic inside his head. But that was no consolation to him at all the more he thought about it. The desire was still there. The longing was still strong. His own sense of shame was intact. He picked up a heavy stone, turning it around in his hand, and he remembered her smell, the touch of her fingers on his body, her mouth. The clarity of the recollection shook him. What he suddenly wished for was another world, an alternative reality, in which Celestine wasn’t his father’s wife and Jig didn’t exist. Wishing was a game for fools. It wasn’t going to change the world. And he hadn’t come to America to be embroiled in the sexual dissatisfactions of Celestine Cairney.

He took a deep breath of the cold air. There was a certain madness in the night, an insanity of the heart. He drew his arm back as far as it would go and released the stone and he heard it strike out in the middle of the lake. He wished sensations could be released as easily.

He turned from the lake and went back through the trees. He’d leave Roscommon tonight. He’d drive away now. It was the simplest solution he could think of. Distance was a benefactor. A salve.

Halfway back across the frozen lawn he stopped, looking up at the black house. Upstairs, a light was burning in one of the windows. It was the window of his own room. It could only mean that Celestine had gone back in there. Suddenly he wasn’t thinking about her any more. He was thinking instead of the canvas bag with the cheap lock and Celestine’s curiosity about the small wooden horse.

He hurried inside the house and climbed the stairs quickly. When he reached his own room he pushed the door open and stepped inside. The place was in blackness but he had an intuition that she’d been there only moments before. He switched on the bedside lamp. The room felt different to him, violated in some fashion, and yet nothing had been moved, nothing changed. The bag still sat on the dresser where he’d left it. He stepped closer to look at it. He took out the key from his pocket and turned it in the lock.

Nothing had been touched inside the bag. Nothing had been moved. The wooden horse, the passports, the clothing, everything was the same as it had been. He closed the bag, locked it, wondering about the fear he’d suddenly felt. What possible reason could Celestine have for going through his belongings anyway?

He turned to the bed, where a sheet of violet notepaper was propped against his pillow. This was the reason she’d come back to his room. To leave a message. He picked up the paper and read:

Next time

There wasn’t going to be a next time, he thought.

He picked up his bag, stuffed the note inside his pocket, gazed at the rumpled bedsheets, which suggested a consummation rather than an interruption, then switched off the lamp. He made his way quietly down the stairs. Once outside, he walked in the direction of his rented Dodge.

He wouldn’t be so careless in New York as he had been here at Roscommon. He wouldn’t be so careless, in both heart and action, ever again.