16

New York City

Dressed in thrift-store garments, Frank Pagan woke in a cramped position, every muscle in his body locked. He opened his eyes and checked his watch. It was five fifty A.M. and still dark, and he was propped against the wall of the dining room in St. Finbar’s Mission, where he had spent the most uncomfortable night of his life. He stared at the outlines of sleeping men who lay on mattresses all across the floor and he thought of how the entire night had been filled with the strangest sounds – men coughing, wheezing, snoring, wandering blindly around in a manner Pagan found vaguely menacing (he had an image at one point of somebody trying to cut his throat), men stumbling, cursing, spitting, striking matches for surreptitious cigarettes, men hacking their larynxes to shreds, men rattling while they slept as if marbles rolled back and forth in their rib cages, men crying out, sobbing, uttering incomprehensible phrases in the language of sleep. Once, Pagan had been startled into wakefulness by the cry Don’t leave me, Ma! Now the air inside St. Finbar’s was filled with the odour of tooth decay, gum disease, old booze, greasy clothing, yesterday’s smoke, and the incongruous and almost shocking antiseptic scent of air deodorant that Joseph X. Tumulty, awake before anyone else, had sprayed through the room.

Pagan stood up and cautiously stretched. His first conscious thought was always of coffee.

He moved carefully around the mattresses and into the kitchen where he found a jar of instant Maxwell House. He boiled some water in a saucepan, poured it into a large mug, dumped in a tablespoon of the crystals, and sipped. The brew was as subtle as crank oil, but it had the effect of starting his heart.

Joseph Tumulty appeared in the doorway. He looked brisk and freshly showered, hair wet and eyes shining. The priest nodded to Pagan, then went to the refrigerator, where he removed a huge bowl of eggs ready for scrambling. Pagan, anxious about Joe’s mood, his frame of mind, and the depth of his commitment when it came to fingering Jig, watched the priest carefully. He thought that Tumulty looked a little too composed, and he wondered why.

‘Sleep well?’ Pagan asked.

‘Very.’ Tumulty set the bowl of eggs on the table. Then he laid out rashers of bacon, enough to feed an army. He struck a match and lit the burners on the huge stove. After he’d done this he took six loaves of bread from a bin and peeled the cellophane wrapping away.

‘I couldn’t get used to sharing my bedroom,’ Pagan said. Joe Tumulty had spent the night on a mattress by the door. ‘Especially with noisy strangers.’

‘I don’t notice it any more,’ Tumulty replied. ‘Besides, a lot of these men have become my best friends. They’re a mixed crew, but you’ll find that even the worst of them have some small redeeming quality that’s worth exploring.’

My best friends, Pagan thought. There was something about Joe Tumulty to admire. His dedication. His selflessness. He felt sorry that Joe had become ensnared in this whole affair. He could see how it happened – growing up in Ireland, listening to the legends, drifting into a cause almost before he had time to understand what he was doing.

‘How many people do you get for breakfast?’ Pagan asked.

‘Fifty. Sixty. I’ve had as many as a hundred in here and as few as twenty-five.’

‘What time do you serve?’

‘Seven.’

Pagan drained his mug of coffee. ‘You haven’t changed your mind?’

‘About Jig?’ Tumulty was pulling skillets and broiling pans out of a cupboard. ‘I gave you my word, didn’t I?’

Pagan wondered about Tumulty’s word. There had been a change, some small and almost indefinable alteration in the man, and it perplexed him. He watched the priest go about the business of preparing breakfast. There were undercurrents here that Pagan caught, only he couldn’t understand them, couldn’t arrange them into a meaningful alignment. Was Joe planning something? Had he come up with something devious?

‘I’d be very unhappy if you backed out now,’ Pagan said. Which was to phrase it mildly. ‘We understand one another, don’t we?’

‘I think we do,’ Tumulty answered.

‘There’s no going back, Joe.’

‘I haven’t changed my mind, Mr. Pagan. I’ll do exactly as you asked.’

There. A very tiny tone of irritation in Tumulty’s voice. A quick little flash of light in the eyes that was almost a defiance. What are you up to? Pagan wondered. Maybe nothing. Maybe the expectation of Jig had simply raised Pagan’s own anxieties and now he saw shadows where he should have seen only light.

Tumulty was laying out slices of bread in a tray. Pagan wandered round the kitchen.

‘Jig might not come today,’ Tumulty said. ‘Nothing’s certain. He might not even choose to come at mealtime, in which case my saying the grace you want me to say is going to sound very strange.’

‘He’s going to think mealtime is the safest time. In Jig’s trade, crowds mean security.’

Tumulty looked up from the tray of bread. ‘Shouldn’t you be out there at a table, Mr. Pagan? I don’t allow my customers inside the kitchen. You’ll stand out like a sore thumb.’

Pagan walked into the dining room. Men were waking, sitting on their beds or struggling to their feet, folding the mattresses away, stashing pillows inside the cupboards that lined the walls. There was a great deal of throat clearing and hawking and already the air was thick with cigarette smoke. Pagan sat down at an empty table and took a very crumpled cigarette out of his coat pocket, lighting it and coughing in what he hoped was an authentic way. He looked around the room, watching men stagger into the emptiness of a new day that was going to be exactly like the one before. The debris of the Great Society. It was odd that in the richest country on the planet, and not very far from Wall Street, where the great money machine cranked daily, men were forced to eat and sleep in a slough like St. Finbar’s. Pagan’s old socialism found such a contrast inhuman. What democracy and capitalism really needed, he thought, was a conscience. In a world like that, though, pigs could fly.

He put out his cigarette and thought about Artie Zuboric sitting upstairs in Tumulty’s office, then about the two agents on Canal Street. Orson Cone was located on the roof across the street. Tyson Bruno sat inside an all-night coffee hangout on the corner. Everything was in place, everything was set. It only needed Jig to step into this room for the picture to be complete. Pagan took a deep breath. Something troubled him, something he couldn’t quite define. A sensation of unease. He felt enmeshed by two different strands of spider-webbing. One, sticky and mysterious, led back to Ivor the Terrible and his enigmatic purpose in New York. The other was directly linked to Joseph X. Tumulty and that quietly upbeat mood of his.

Pagan shook his head. He couldn’t allow himself any kind of misgiving. He had no room in his head for anything else except Jig. He stared in the direction of the kitchen. Tumulty turned to look at him.

The priest smiled and winked, then went back to work.

The smile was one thing, Pagan thought. The wink was quite another. How the fuck could Joe Tumulty, who was on the point of betraying a man, look so bloody secretive and confident?

Patrick Cairney left his rented Dodge in an underground parking lot at Broadway and Grand. Every mile he’d travelled from Roscommon had taken him farther from Celestine and closer to his own purpose, and so he’d driven at speeds far in excess of the limit, a curious adrenaline rushing through him. He realised he could put Celestine out of his mind, and all the turmoil she caused, only if he didn’t forget – even for a fraction of time – that he was Jig and Jig had only one reason for being in America.

What Celestine had accomplished was the arousal of an appetite he couldn’t afford to have. She’d succeeded in breaking his concentration, diffusing his energies. It was beyond the consideration of any morality now, beyond the ugly idea that what had almost happened between him and Celestine was akin to some kind of incest. It came down to something more practical, the unsettling realisation of a weakness inside himself, an odd awareness like something left over from another life. He needed strength, singularity of purpose, total focus. He had no use for the distraction of a beautiful young woman locked in a frustrating marriage to an unhealthy old man. What he really sought was that ideal state for a man who had purposely chosen a lonely life – immunity against feelings and the confusion they produced.

When you had that kind of immunity, you had control. Over your urges, your flaws, your limitations. Over yourself.

He’d stopped briefly near Peekskill, changing his clothes in a public rest room. Now he wore the shabby coat and shapeless flannels he’d worn on his first visit to St. Finbar’s, and, as he emerged from the parking lot, he had the appearance of a deadbeat, even to the fashion in which he walked – unsteadily, like a drunk whose whole mind is consumed by the idea of the next drink. He felt comfortable in disguise. He liked the idea of melting into any background he chose. Only at Roscommon had his disguise felt awkward. It was increasingly difficult to be Patrick Cairney, Harry’s boy, the kid who lived in the sad shadows of the Senator.

When he turned on to Canal Street it was barely daylight, a sombre morning with a scavenging wind pushing itself through the gulleys of Manhattan. He shuffled along, a pitiful figure to anyone who observed him. But this was New York and nobody who passed paid him any attention other than the cursory one of steering away from his path. He paused to look at himself in the window of a store. Almost perfect. The oversized coat concealed the muscularity of his body and the grey flannel shirt, worn outside the pants, hid the money belt. Only the face and hands bothered him. Too clean. He stepped into an alley and plunged his hands inside a trashcan, bringing out an assortment of garbage. Damp newspapers were best for what he wanted because the ink came off on his fingers and he could rub it lightly over his face. When he came out of the alley back into Canal Street his face was smudged and his hands black.

It was about six blocks to St. Finbar’s. He crossed Center Street, then he stopped. He bent to tie his lace. It was more than a matter of being vigilant now. He had to listen to his own keen instincts and keep his eye on the internal compass. There were factors involved he didn’t like. For one thing, he was uncertain of Tumulty. Had the priest obtained the weapons yet? Or had he collapsed under pressure? For another, there was the distinct possibility that Frank Pagan was still around. Cairney felt he was weighing intangibles, like a man placing feathers on scales that didn’t register.

He continued to the next corner. Carefully, his eyes swept along Canal Street. Among the parked vehicles there was none that immediately suggested the presence of the FBI. This meant nothing, though. It might indicate only that agents had taken the trouble to conceal themselves more thoroughly in the neighbourhood. He had the feeling he was walking through a minefield. A man with few choices. He needed the weapons. Even more, he needed information from Tumulty. A name, an address, anything at all that would lead him in the direction of the stolen money. If Tumulty let him down on that score, where else could he possibly turn? He’d go back to Ireland with nothing achieved. He’d be letting Padraic Finn down, which was something he hadn’t ever done. Something he intended never to do.

He kept moving.

Outside the entrance to St. Finbar’s there were half a dozen or so derelicts standing on the steps. A faint aroma of fried food drifted towards Cairney, and he stopped again. He had an inherent suspicion of anything that looked normal, the way St. Finbar’s did right now. He might have been staring at a painting whose detail seemed bland and absolutely right, but at the same time this very banality suggested a sinister occurrence just under the surface.

He scanned the parked cars again, then the windows of the street, roof-tops, doorways, but he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Swaying like a man who had just stepped out of a wrecked train, he kept walking. When he reached the steps he paused. He stuffed his hands in the pockets of his coat and glanced quickly at the faces around him. They were stunned, glazed by defeat. One or two had the desperate hardened look of men who have had a lifetime of crime imposed upon them. Cairney felt a kind of affinity for them.

‘What time’s breakfast here?’ he asked.

One of the men, a gnarled character with a silvery beard, said, ‘Seven. If you turn up at seven-oh-five, you miss grace. Don’t matter none. You eat anyways.’

Cairney peered inside the dining room. He saw groups of men at tables, but no sign of Tumulty.

‘Religion and breakfast, they don’t mix so good for me,’ the man with the beard said.

Cairney nodded. He guessed it was probably close to seven by now.

‘You new around here?’ the man asked.

‘Yeah.’

‘Seems I seen you one time before.’

Cairney said nothing. Inside the dining room men were shuffling in the direction of the serving area. Still no Tumulty. It crossed Cairney’s mind that if he could somehow catch the priest’s eye Tumulty might give him a sign, a gesture to reassure him that it was safe to enter.

‘Last week maybe,’ the man was saying. ‘Was you here last week?’

‘Could be.’

The little group was silent now, as if they were weighing information of a vital nature. One of them, a short man with a face mottled by alcohol, eventually said, ‘I had a Rolex one time. Good timepiece.’

Somebody laughed at this, and Cairney smiled. There was a certain incoherence about these men, conversational leaps difficult to follow. The death of synapses, he thought. He moved closer to the threshold of the dining room. The smell of bacon was strong, nauseating. He experienced a familiar tingling in his nervous system. It was what he’d come to think of as the Moment, that point in time when either he committed himself or he stepped back. It was that place where he could choose to pull the trigger or press the detonating device or else abort his plans entirely. He listened to himself, the sound of his blood, the way his heart thumped. His body, in that peculiar vocabulary it had developed, was talking to him.

He quickly scanned the street again. He saw nothing unusual. It occurred to him that if anything had gone wrong, Joe Tumulty would have managed to give him a sign of some kind. In the absence of any warning, what else could he assume except that everything was fine? Like a swimmer cautiously testing water, he put one foot inside the dining room. And then he had momentum going and was moving towards the serving area, picking up a tray, a plate, cutlery, shuffling in line behind the other men. He faced Joe Tumulty, who stood behind trays of simmering food with a large spatula in his hand. There was nothing on the priest’s face, no recognition, no surprise, nothing. Cairney watched two strips of bacon, a slab of toast and a spoonful of scrambled eggs fall on his plate, and then he turned away, carrying his tray in the direction of a table.

When he sat down he saw Frank Pagan on the other side of the room.

Calmly, Cairney cut one of the bacon strips in half. He didn’t let his eyes linger long on Pagan. He stared at his food as he chewed on the rasher. He tasted absolutely nothing. In one sense, now, he seemed to stand in a place outside himself, figuring, assessing possibilities like a meteorologist studying a cloud formation. Objectively. Coolly. If Frank Pagan had infiltrated the place, there was the chance that he wasn’t alone. Perhaps others, dressed as Pagan was, sat in the dining room at this very moment. This was the first consideration. The second was even more bleak. Tumulty must have known that Pagan was here. Why then hadn’t the priest warned Cairney? Had Tumulty sold out? Had Tumulty betrayed him? Be still, he told himself. Be very still. To run now would bring Frank Pagan chasing after him. Besides, there was always another possibility, that Tumulty was simply playing along with Pagan’s game and had no intention of betraying Jig.

Cairney sought the quiet centre of himself. The place of supreme calm, detachment. It had always been easy to locate in the past but now, as if Celestine had tampered with it and damaged it, he couldn’t quite find the correct frame of mind. He came close, but there was an uneasiness that made clear thinking difficult. He worked at suppressing his nerves, his heartbeat, the way his thoughts were beginning to race.

Tumulty had come to the middle of the room. He was calling for prayer. He held his hands up in the air but he didn’t turn his face in Jig’s direction.

‘You all know the rules,’ Tumulty was saying, over the clacking of forks and knives. ‘You all know we say grace at St. Finbar’s before we eat.’ Nobody was paying much attention to him. ‘Silence, please,’ Tumulty said.

When he had some semblance of quiet, which was broken by coughing and the occasional belch, Joseph X. Tumulty closed his eyes and inclined his head.

He said, ‘We thank Thee, Heavenly Father, for what we are about to receive.’

A long silence. Tumulty looked as if he were locked in some internal struggle. Then he added, ‘The Lord hath done great things for us, whereof we are glad. Amen.’

Cairney glanced at Frank Pagan, who was digging heartily into his breakfast. Tumulty, after his quick little prayer, was threading his way between tables, finally approaching the one where Cairney sat. Cairney looked up at the priest. Tumulty made a small gesture with his head, indicating that Cairney should follow him. The young man rose just as Tumulty disappeared through the doorway in the direction of the stairs. Cairney walked very slowly, turning to glance at Frank Pagan again. The Englishman had stopped eating. He was staring bleakly at his empty plate.

Cairney stood very still on the threshold of the dark hallway. He’d caught something just then. A vibration. Something in the way Frank Pagan gazed at his plate. It was the look of a person pretending to study, when his mind was elsewhere. The sideways movement of the eyes. The apparent absentmindedness of expression that was an attempt to conceal a highly focused brain. Cairney knew that look. Suppressed excitement. Hidden tension. He understood that Frank Pagan was going to get up from the table at any moment and follow him out into the hallway.

Tumulty, balanced on the bottom step, had a finger to his mouth for silence.

‘You’ve sold me,’ Cairney whispered.

‘Will you please shut up?’ Tumulty said.

‘You bastard, you sold me.’

Tumulty shook his head. ‘They forced me. It’s not what you think.’

Cairney said nothing. He wondered how much force it had taken to turn Joe Tumulty around.

‘Is Pagan alone?’ he asked.

Tumulty said, ‘There’s another one in my office upstairs.’

‘I’m in a hell of a spot then,’ Cairney said. He looked up the stairway. He was thinking wildly now, which wasn’t the way Jig had been trained to react. But all the placebos his instructors had drummed into him about turning adversity to your own advantage meant absolutely nothing right then. He had walked straight into this.

‘There’s one way out,’ Tumulty said.

‘How?’

Tumulty was moving quietly up the stairs. Cairney, who felt he had little to lose, followed. They reached the landing. The door of Tumulty’s office stood open. On the other side of the landing was a second door.

‘In there,’ Tumulty whispered. ‘The bathroom window.’

As Cairney moved towards the door, Tumulty pressed a piece of paper into his hand like an uncle surreptitiously passing a five-dollar bill to a favourite nephew.

‘They took the weapons,’ Tumulty said, his quiet voice filled with apprehension. ‘This is the best I can do. Now go. For God’s sake, go.’

Before Cairney could open the bathroom door he heard Frank Pagan coming up the stairs. At the same time he was conscious of a man standing in the door of Tumulty’s office. He had a pistol in his hand. It was clear from the expression on the man’s face that he’d use the gun without weighing ethical questions beforehand. Indeed, he had his arm extended now and was going into the kind of crouch universally favoured by law enforcement officers. Only Joe Tumulty stood between Cairney and the weapon.

‘Stand very still,’ the man said. ‘Don’t even breathe.’

Cairney, shielded by the priest, saw Frank Pagan rushing upwards. From the folds of his clothing Pagan had produced a weapon. There was a curious little smile on Pagan’s face that wasn’t quite triumph. It contained fatigue.

Pagan reached the landing. With the gun held out in front of him, he approached cautiously. ‘I want a damn good look at what we’ve caught.’

Cairney turned his face away. There was one slender chance left to him. It would take a quick smooth movement, a moment of sudden imbalance in the group of people around him, temporary confusion. He concentrated hard, reaching down into the depths of himself for the answer. One perfect motion. That was all. He felt elated all at once, anticipating the moment of action, his entire being consumed by the notion of movement. He was alert now, and sharp, and his senses had the efficiency of surgical instruments. Tumulty’s frightened face, Pagan’s smile, the other man’s hard little eyes – all these things made a heightened impression on him. And then he was out in a place where there was no thinking, no rationalising, nothing but pure movement and the overwhelming instinct to survive, a place that was quicksilver, where he ceased to exist except as an embodiment of action.

He did two things at once in a movement so fluid, so swift, that it was a blur to the other people around him. He pushed Tumulty forward, thrusting him forcefully across the landing in the direction of the man with the Mexican moustache, and he simultaneously swung his leg upwards at a right angle to his body, his foot connecting with Frank Pagan’s hand. Pagan didn’t drop the gun and the blow barely affected him, but it was the opening Cairney knew he had to achieve, the fraction in time when the concentration all around him was punctured, the only time he’d ever have.

He lunged towards the bathroom door, which swung away from him, and then he was inside, kicking the door shut at his back and sliding the bolt in place hurriedly before he ran towards the window at the far end. He heard two gunshots, wood tearing, the rattle of a bullet on the lock, all sounds from another world. He lashed at the window with his foot. Glass shattered and the rotted wood frame collapsed, creating a jagged opening out on to the roofs above Canal Street. He squeezed through to the roof. He heard, distantly, the bathroom door being kicked open, and then Frank Pagan was shouting, but Cairney wasn’t about to stop and listen. He scampered gracelessly along the roof, struggling to maintain his balance on a surface made slick by morning frost.

The sound of a gunshot split the air around his head. He heard the bullet burst into the concrete casing of a chimney just beyond him. The shot had come from across Canal Street, not from behind as he’d expected. He glanced at the other side of the street, seeing a figure on the roof opposite. Crouching low, he crossed the roof. The firing continued, kicking up fragments of asphalt and brick. He kept his head down as he moved in the direction of the next building. How many men had Pagan planted in the vicinity? When he leaped the narrow space from one rooftop to the next, he heard Pagan call out again and he turned to look. The Englishman was two buildings behind and running, and his breath left small clouds on the chill air.

‘Jig!’ Pagan shouted.

Cairney smiled and slithered down the incline of the roof that faced away from Canal Street so that at least he was out of the line of fire from across the way. He heard Pagan grunting, and then there was the sound of gunfire coming from Pagan’s direction. The first shot was erratic, whining several feet from Cairney’s head and crashing uselessly into brickwork. The second, closer and more urgent, cleaved the air about three feet from his shoulder. Either Frank Pagan wasn’t a very good shot or else he wasn’t shooting to kill.

Why would he want to kill Jig anyhow? Cairney wondered. Like the curator of a zoo who has coveted a certain exotic animal for years, Pagan wanted to capture the creature that had tantalised him for so long – he didn’t want a corpse. He couldn’t put a dead man on display. Where was the satisfaction in that? Pagan wasn’t going to shoot his own prize.

Cairney found something amusing in this perception. He took a deep breath, listened to Pagan calling out his name, then he ran. He reached the roof of the next building, a flat expanse of concrete with a couple of wooden tubs in which the brown wreckage of dead plants wilted in hard soil. Two deck chairs and a plastic table. Somebody’s summer eyrie dead in the grip of winter. At the centre of the roof there was a door. He dashed towards it. A season of moisture had swollen the wood, jamming the door tightly. Cairney kicked at the handle, then thrust his shoulder against the wood and the door flew backwards, revealing a flight of steps. He plunged down into the darkness below. It was an empty office building, a shabby place that seemed to house a variety of small companies.

On the first landing Cairney stopped. He looked back up the way he’d come. He heard the sound of Frank Pagan on the rooftop. Then he moved to the next flight of steps and went down quickly. Now, free from the exposure of the roof, he thought about his predicament. Unless there was a rear exit to this building he’d have to leave by the front door, which would lead him straight back on to Canal Street. A sorry prospect. Another alternative, which he rejected immediately, was to conceal himself somewhere inside the building and wait the whole thing out – but that was a trap he wasn’t going to encourage. The building would be sealed off and thoroughly ransacked, and he’d be discovered sooner or later. There was one other possibility, also rejected, and that was to confront Frank Pagan, somehow overpower him and get the gun away, but he knew that the Englishman, taken by surprise once, wasn’t going to allow himself to be caught off balance a second time.

He heard Pagan on the floor above. He took the next flight of stairs and found himself on the first floor, a hallway with a glass door to Canal Street. He turned in the opposite direction, back along the hall. Pagan was directly overhead and coming down loudly, his feet clattering on the wooden steps. Cairney ran to the end of the corridor. There, the only possible route he could take was down to the basement. If there were no rear exit from the basement, then his chance of escape was screwed. He shoved the basement door open and found himself going down into the dark heart of the building. It was a large room of angular steam-pipes and the kind of dampness no boiler could ever dispel, and the air, like that inside a box locked for years, was still and rancid and unbreathable. He could see nothing save for a slot of pale light in the distance. It had to come from a window, and if there were a window then there might also be a door if the original architect, in his infinite wisdom, had included both in his plans. Moving, hands outstretched in the dark like a blind man, he crossed the basement floor, which was strewn with objects – boxes, rags, bundles of papers, tools.

He heard Pagan call out to him again. The man’s voice sounded muffled down here in this stifling space.

‘You can’t get away, Jig. There’s no place for you to go. Even if you got out of here, there are twenty or thirty men outside. Think about it.’

Cairney said nothing in reply. He went towards the source of light. He heard Pagan come after him. The man was moving with great caution, measuring his steps.

‘In your situation, Jig, I’d call it a day,’ Pagan said.

Cairney put his ear towards the origin of the sound. How far, how near, was Frank Pagan? He cursed this abominable darkness that prevented him from estimating distances. Pagan could be thirty feet away, or a lot closer. He just couldn’t tell.

He ducked his head beneath an overhanging pipe and saw, just ahead of him, the rectangle of a window, light filtering in from outside. It was perhaps fifteen feet from where he stood. The problem with light was the fact that, as soon as he reached the window, he’d create a silhouette for Frank Pagan to see. A cobweb brushed his forehead and he wiped it aside. Still keeping his head low and his shoulders hunched, he approached the source of the light.

There was no goddam door, only the window, ridiculously small and streaked with dirt, impossible for him to squeeze through.

‘Jig,’ Pagan called out. ‘You don’t have a chance, man.’

Cairney wanted to tell Pagan that he could talk all day and it would make no difference because Jig hadn’t been programmed to surrender, but he said nothing. He went down on the floor now, crawling towards the light. Tilting his head up, he stared at the pane of glass. He’d have to be a midget to get out through that space. He pressed his face into the dirt of the floor, thinking, thinking. Finn had once told him that there was no box a man couldn’t get out of except despair, and it was despair, like a cold-gloved hand, that touched the fringes of his mind now.

Twenty or thirty men. Was Frank Pagan lying? Cairney had only seen three, Pagan included.

He went forward on his hands and knees.

Out of the dark he heard Pagan’s voice again. ‘Jig? Why don’t you talk to me?’

Cairney, flat against the wall under the window, moved his head slightly. Pagan was very close now. He could hear the man breathing.

Cairney stretched his hand along the wall. His fingers encountered a hollow rectangle of metal, an opening that puzzled him only a moment before he understood what it was.

A coal-chute.

Unused probably for forty, fifty years, filled with dirt and stuffed with garbage, it was a goddam coal-chute, a way out! He gripped the inside of the metal opening and drew himself slowly up into the black funnel, which ran at a sloping angle towards the street. There would be a lid, of course, but beyond that cover there would be air and daylight and opportunity. He climbed, shoving aside the assorted detritus of whoever had used this basement over the years, through the dank narrow tube where the trapped air was even worse than in the basement itself. Beer bottles and cans and ancient newspapers and the pervasive stench of cat urine. Straining, he reached the cover and thumped it desperately with the heel of his hand, and it yielded in a shower of rusted flakes that fell into his eyes, but at the same time there was daylight, glorious daylight, streaming against his face from the alley behind the building.

A few more feet. That was all. A few more feet and he’d be clear.

He felt Frank Pagan’s hand clutch his ankle. It was a ferocious grip, powerful, and it threatened to bring him down out of his precarious position inside the chute and back into the basement. He freed one of his legs in the cramped space and kicked out as hard as he could, bringing his foot down on Pagan’s fingers. He heard Pagan say Bastard, then felt his fingers slacken. He was free. With one last thrust, he shoved his face up beyond the lid of the chute and hauled himself out into the alley. It was empty. No men. No cars. Nothing. He reached down and slammed the cover shut before he turned and ran.

Washington, D.C.

The Director of the FBI was a small man called Leonard M. Korn. He wore rimless glasses to correct his notorious short-sightedness, and he shaved his head so that it resembled a blunt little bullet. He spoke always quietly, never raising his voice, not even when angry. To his subordinates, he was perhaps the most frightening man on the face of the planet. His sense of control, both of himself and the Bureau, was awesome. His taste for punishment, when an agent had disappointed him, was absolutely merciless. Many good agents, with otherwise meticulous records, had found themselves posted to places like Nebraska and South Dakota because they had made a single slip. With more bitterness than affection, some said the middle initial of his name stood for Magoo, the cartoon character Korn resembled in appearance though not in action.

About an hour after Jig had vanished in an alley behind Canal Street, Leonard M. Korn was seated behind his desk at Bureau Headquarters staring at his Special Deputy, a man named Walter Bull. Bull had been with the Bureau all through the Hoover years and was known to be a big-league survivor around whom administrations came and went. A plump man with a face that resembled a used khaki handkerchief, Bull perspired regularly and copiously, no matter the temperature of the day. He was sweating as he stood in front of Korn’s desk right then. His associates called him B. O. Bull.

Korn folded his small white hands on his blotting-pad. He had been listening very carefully to his Special Deputy, and now Bull was quiet, waiting for a response. Korn manipulated silences, an old ploy in the power game. He knew how to use them, how long to let them last. He let this particular silence linger for almost a minute before he said, ‘I think it’s a hoax, frankly.’

Bull didn’t say anything in reply. He was staring at Korn’s bald head, where an enormous vein pulsed just under the skin.

Korn unfolded his little hands. They looked like baby albino rodents to Walter Bull. ‘A man can pick up a telephone and say anything he likes under the cover of anonymity, Walter. He can lay the blame for a certain event on anyone or any party he chooses because he knows he can hang up the phone and disappear without a trace. And nobody is any the wiser.’

Walter Bull nodded. His penchant for longevity within the Bureau came from his natural gift for servility. He had spent many years agreeing with the different men who occupied the chair in which Leonard Magoo Korn now sat. Like a good call-girl, he knew how to give pleasing service.

Korn continued. ‘There are certain people in our society, Walter, who have nothing better to do than send the Bureau off on wild-goose chases. This caller in Albany seems to fit that particular category.’

Bull said, ‘I wondered if it might be connected with Jig.’

Korn narrowed his eyes. The whole subject of Jig was supposed to be secret, the way the White House wanted it. But Korn knew that in the grapevine of the Bureau nothing remained concealed very long, especially from a man like Bull, who had access to almost everything.

‘Jig is persona non grata, Walter,’ Korn said. ‘We ought to keep that clearly in mind. Officially, Jig doesn’t exist.’

‘Of course, sir.’ Bull turned towards the door, stopped. ‘What’ll I tell Albany?’

‘I’ll take care of that,’ Korn replied.

Walter Bull went out, leaving his trademark aroma behind, thick cologne and sweat.

Alone, Leonard Korn realised he would have to place two telephone calls. The first would be to the field office in Albany, giving strict instructions that the crime was to be handled discreetly and that no information was to be given either to the Albany PD or to the newspapers. The second and more important call would be to the White House.

Korn wasn’t altogether sure that it was Jig who had committed this crime in provincial Albany and then called the local FBI office to claim responsibility on behalf of the Irish Republican Army. But why take any chances? President Thomas Dawson, deeply concerned as he was with the Irish assassin, would want to be informed anyway. Korn didn’t plan to place this call at once, though. He wanted to wait until he had heard from Agent Arthur J. Zuboric that the Englishman’s scheme in New York City had worked. It would be very gratifying to tell Thomas Dawson that Jig was safely in custody and that the Bureau, somewhat maligned in recent years, could be counted on to come through in the end. If there was one obsession in Leonard Korn’s life, it was the reputation of the Bureau. He had neither wife nor mistress. Nor had he any intimate friends. The Bureau was all things to him, and he loved it with more passion than he was ever capable of showing to a human being. He loved its computers, its chicanery, its internecine power struggles. But more than anything else, he adored the possibility of its omniscience. He liked to think that a day would come when a sneeze in The Oval Office would register on the Bureau’s data banks before it even tickled the President’s nostrils. Leonard M. Korn’s ideal of the FBI was a huge cyclopean entity made of stainless steel, unblemished, all-seeing, its bloodstream composed of infinite corpuscles of information, its heart one enormous muscle forever pumping data, its brain an insomniac scanning device classifying all this data day and night.

If the plan in New York City worked, excellent. And if it didn’t – well, the blame could always be laid on Frank Pagan, a perfect scapegoat, thus sparing the Bureau any Presidential wrath.

Leonard M. Korn smiled. He liked having things both ways.