18
Bridgehampton, Long Island
Patrick Cairney parked his car on Ocean Road at the edge of Bridgehampton. Like the other small resorts in the area known as The Hamptons, Bridgehampton had the feel of a place abandoned for the winter. Empty cafés, closed bars, gulls squabbling in a forlornly quarrelsome way in the cloudy sky over the beach. The man known as Nicholas Linney lived in this village. Earlier, in Southampton, Cairney had consulted a local telephone directory and learned that Linney lived at a number 19 Wood Lane. When he’d been inside the phone booth, he’d experienced an urge to call Finn, just to pick up the telephone and make the transatlantic connection and hear Finn’s voice. He’d let his fingertips linger on the black receiver. He had nothing to report to Finn yet.
Wood Lane, a private estate of the kind that suggested wealthy inhabitants and the likelihood of a private security patrol, was a narrow thoroughfare running at a right angle from Ocean Road. In summer, the lane would have been leafy and dense and green, but now the trees were barren, affording him absolutely no cover. He left his car on Ocean Road, the canvas bag locked inside the trunk.
He began to walk. He felt conspicuous even though he understood that many of the houses on the lane, hidden behind shrubbery and walls, had been vacated for the winter. Once, he heard the sound of a child shouting, followed by the noise of a ball bouncing against stone. After that, nothing.
He had no idea of what he was going to do when he found number 19. A great deal depended on the attitude of Nicholas Linney, which was an unpredictable factor. In an ideal world, Linney would be a reasonable man who would discuss the problem of the money calmly, rationally. In this same world Nicholas Linney would know precisely what had happened to the Connie’s cargo and he’d tell Cairney at once. But Finn had talked of the need for caution. Expect them to lie to you. Expect outright animosity towards you.
Take them off guard, if you can.
When he reached number 19 he kept moving, noticing a wrought-iron fence and, some distance beyond, a one-storey house surrounded by sycamores. There were three vehicles parked in the driveway. A Mercedes, a BMW, and a Land Rover painted in camouflage. He came to the place where the iron fence ended, and he stopped. A house built on one level was good because it meant he didn’t have to worry about anybody concealed in upstairs rooms. A small bonus. The cars suggested two things. Either Nicholas Linney collected foreign autos or else he had a visitor.
What Cairney wished for right then was the obscurity of night, darkness. His best plan was to wait for nightfall and hope that Nicholas Linney would emerge alone from the house at some point. But he couldn’t afford to wait. It was really that simple. He couldn’t afford the luxury of time because he had absolutely no way of knowing what Joe Tumulty might have told Pagan. If the priest had pointed Pagan in this direction, then time was truly of the essence. He might be trapped inside an hourglass and slipping with the sands.
He studied the fence. He considered a direct approach, straight up to the front door like a Jehovah’s Witness or a man from the Fuller Brush Company, but he decided against that. It came back again to the fact he couldn’t predict anything in this situation. Linney might be reasonable. Or he might not be. Stealth was the most prudent approach to the house. And if he was going to climb this fence he’d have to do it at the corner where a small stand of pine trees would conceal him from the windows of the place.
The fence was easy. He hauled himself up, dropped quickly down on the other side. As he stood under the pines he was conscious of music issuing from the house. There was a harsh sound of a man laughing. The music stopped. The house was silent again.
It was perhaps fifty feet from the pines to the side of the house where an empty terrace overlooked a concrete tennis-court. For that distance he would have no cover. A man stepped out of the house and moved on to the terrace, where he sat down at a table and propped his feet up and poured himself a drink. Cairney, seeking invisibility, pressed himself against the trunk of a tree. He had the thought that if this were some other situation, the kind he was used to, the kind where it was a matter of bringing down a particular target you fixed through the scope of a rifle, then he wouldn’t feel this uncertain. The man on the terrace, for example. How simple it would have been, in other circumstances, to shoot him. But even if he had been armed, Finn hadn’t given him a mandate for violence.
Now there was more laughter from the house. A girl’s laugh this time, high-pitched. False and polite. Cairney stood very still. Then, tensing his body, he moved out from under his cover and headed in the direction of the front door, passing the parked cars quickly.
He reached out and turned the door handle. The door wasn’t locked. He opened it an inch, two inches, seeing a square of hallway beyond. He stepped into the house, closed the door softly, then stood very still in the centre of the hall, listening, concentrating, wondering about the next step. Other doors, each of them closed, faced him. Which one to try?
Then, suddenly, one of the doors opened and a beautiful oriental girl stood there wrapped in a large white towel, her black hair hanging on her shoulders and her dark eyes wide with surprise.
Cairney stared at her. The girl must have assumed he was a guest in the house because she did something that amazed him then. She let the towel slip from her body, stepped over it and, with her arms held out, came towards him. Cairney reached for her wrist, twisted it, swung her around so that she had her back to him, then held her tightly against him like a shield. The girl’s reaction surprised him. She giggled, almost as if force were a regular occurrence in her life. She expected men to treat her this way. He clamped his hand across her lips.
‘Linney,’ he said. ‘Show me where Linney is.’
The girl made a small sound into Cairney’s palm. He could feel her wet lips, her teeth, the tiny tip of her tongue. She moved forward. Cairney kept his hold on her, following her towards the doorway from which she’d emerged. There was a large bedroom beyond.
A plump man, who wasn’t the one Cairney had seen on the terrace, lay naked on the bed while another girl, remarkably similar to the one Cairney grasped, attended to his needs. She had her face buried deep in the man’s groin. The man sat upright quickly, staring at Cairney with an expression of stunned vulnerability. He shoved the girl away from himself and he grabbed the bedsheet, hauling it quickly up over his body.
‘Who are you?’ the man asked. He had a foreign accent, European of some kind.
Cairney still held the girl tightly. ‘Linney?’ he asked.
The plump man shook his head and looked angry. The girl who’d been shoved so rudely aside gazed at Cairney as if she didn’t know quite what to make of him. There was a dull defensive quality in her face.
‘Who are you?’ the plump man asked again and then started to rise from the bed, his expression now one of alarm. He began to make for the door, the bedsheet hanging loosely from his body. Cairney hesitated only a moment over his options. He could let this man leave the bedroom – but then what? The look on the man’s face suggested that of some outraged burgher searching for the nearest telephone to call the police. And that was a complication Patrick Cairney didn’t need.
‘Don’t go any further,’ Cairney said. ‘Stop right where you are.’
The plump man paid no attention. He was about six feet from the door and still hurrying when Cairney said, ‘Don’t take another step.’
The man ignored him.
Cairney clenched his fist and struck the man on the side of the head. It wasn’t the fiercest of blows but it had an immediate effect. The plump man’s eyes rolled and he gasped and then appeared to implode as he staggered back across the floor onto the bed. The bedsheet, like some outsized shroud, collapsed around him. It was crude and Cairney regretted having to do it, but there was no way he could have let the man stroll out of here. He looked down at the unconscious figure, feeling curiously depressed by the sight of the open mouth and the broken skin on the side of the scalp. It shouldn’t have been necessary, it should have been simple and smooth and uneventful. Instead, he’d been drawn into an act of violence that seemed all the more upsetting to him because of its very intimacy, the connection of his flesh with that of another, the moment of harsh contact, bone on bone. It wasn’t violence from a distance, the kind he was accustomed to. It was close up and personal, and it made him unhappy. He was still holding the girl, still staring at the inert figure on the bed, when he heard a man’s voice from beyond the bedroom door.
Rasch? Are you finished in there?
And then the door opened and the man from the terrace stood on the threshhold. He appeared only slightly surprised by Cairney’s presence. There was a momentary widening in the eyes, and then he was smiling, as if the unexpected appearance of a total stranger were an everyday event.
‘You can let the girl go,’ he said. ‘I don’t like having my property mistreated.’
Cairney didn’t release the girl. He ran his eye over the man, but he didn’t notice the presence of any weapon. Besides, since the man was dressed only in shorts and sweatshirt, there were no obvious hiding-places for a gun.
‘Linney,’ Cairney said.
Nicholas Linney nodded. He gazed a moment at Gustav Rasch on the bed. Then he turned his face back to Cairney.
‘You’re the one they sent from Ireland,’ Linney said. This was the one everybody was so worried about. This was the man Harry Cairney had said was going to be so fucking good at his business. Nicholas Linney felt a rush of pleasure to his head, a keen anticipation, an awareness of combat. He’d find out how good this guy was supposed to be. This guy was about to discover that Nick Linney wasn’t some overweight German clerk. All at once Linney’s chest was tight and his heartbeat had the persistence of a funeral drum.
Cairney let the girl go. She sat on the edge of the bed, pushing her glossy black hair out of her eyes. The other girl reached for her friend’s hand and held it.
‘I’m the one,’ Cairney said.
Nicholas Linney took a step back out of the bedroom. Cairney moved after him. Linney glanced at the man’s overcoat, seeing how one hand was thrust inside a pocket now. He has a gun in there. And he wouldn’t carry one unless he intended to use it somewhere down the line. Linney thought of all the weapons he had inside his office. He’d play along, he’d wait for the moment, the opening. It was bound to come. There was a wonderful irony in the idea of killing this hot-shot with one of the M-16A2s that had been intended for Ireland. Linney was enormously pleased by it.
Both men stood inside a large living-room. There was a massive fishtank where small electric colours darted back and forth.
Cairney said, ‘We need to talk. You know what I’ve come for.’
Linney smiled. His goddam heart wouldn’t stop hammering. Here was a situation he’d wanted all along, his own private little war. Right here in his own living-room. He could already feel the stark warmth of the automatic rifle between his hands.
‘Suppose I tell you what I know. What guarantees can you give me you won’t shoot me when you’ve heard everything I have to say?’
‘I don’t give guarantees,’ Cairney said. He wondered why Linney had talked about shooting, and then it dawned on him that the man imagined there was a gun in his pocket. Fine. Let him think so.
‘You pump me dry of information, what fucking good am I to you after that?’ Linney asked. ‘I need something. I gotta have a guarantee. Something.’
Cairney, who saw on Linney’s face a desperation that lay beneath the intensity, felt suddenly relaxed. With barely any effort he’d established control here. He’d taken command. The game was his and he could play it however he liked. Whatever uncertainty he’d felt before fell away from him. He felt the way he had when he’d assassinated Lord Drumcannon, that elation when the man had appeared in the sight of his rifle, that moment when you knew the game was over and the result already sealed beyond doubt and all that was left was the mere bloody formality of the victim falling. You’ve got this one, he told himself. You’ve cornered this one. And all because he thinks you’ve got a gun concealed in your pocket.
‘Somebody broke a contract,’ he said. ‘Somebody screwed the Cause. It’s not the kind of situation where I can offer you immunity, Linney. For all I know, you might be the man I’m looking for.’
Linney shook his head. It was just as he’d expected. This fucker suspected him. ‘Not me, friend.’
Cairney moved forward. He was very close to Linney now.
‘Who gave you my name anyway?’ Linney asked. He glanced a second at the half-open door of his office. He could turn quickly, he could make it inside, slam the door hard behind him. He could do it. He could get to a weapon. It all depended on letting this fucker think everything was going his way. ‘It was that scumbag priest, wasn’t it? He sent you here.’
Cairney said nothing. He had a tremor, a fleeting doubt, that Nicholas Linney was preoccupied with something, that his mind was feverishly working in some other direction. Cairney bunched his hand in his coat pocket and moved it very slightly to emphasise the phantom gun.
Linney saw the gesture. He’d never been faced with a gunman before, and he felt the vibrancy of the challenge. His mind was astonishingly clear and sharp. He had a sense of a steel spring coiled deep inside him. Play along with the guy, he thought. Lull him. Then move.
‘What is it you want? Names? Addresses?’
‘I want everything you can give me, Linney.’
Nicholas Linney had his back flush to the wall now. He looked at the man a moment, then said, ‘In my office. I got all the information there.’ Linney indicated a door to his right.
‘After you,’ Cairney said.
Linney took a step towards his office. He sucked air deeply into his lungs and felt that spring inside him suddenly unwind.
Now!
He shoved the door open and slammed it hard behind him and before Cairney could get a foot in he heard Nicholas Linney bolting the door. And then there was another sound from within the locked room, one that Cairney recognised only too well. It was the click of a magazine being shoved hurriedly into a rifle. And then Nicholas Linney roared aloud, the strange cry of a man exalted by the prospect of battle.
Cairney reacted immediately.
He threw himself to one side, rolling over and over in the direction of the sliding glass-doors, so that he was out of the line of fire. When the sound of automatic gunfire started, he heard it split the silence of the house like a hammer smashing glass, and then the two girls were screaming and grabbing one another for protection against the random, blind assault of bullets that traversed the living-room and buried themselves in plaster.
Cairney blinked involuntarily. Linney was shooting wildly through the door of his office, his bullets tearing huge holes in the wood and spraying the air with splinters. It was desperate stuff and Cairney, cursing himself for having been misled by his own sense of supremacy, closed his eyes and pressed his face down into the floor. Linney kept firing madly, the door shook and vibrated, the splinters flew, the girls screamed. It was insane, a world that had only a moment ago been regulated and under control turned totally upside-down and gone berserk.
One of the oriental girls was struck by the spray inside the bedroom and was screaming because there was an enormous hole in her stomach. The other girl, covered by her blood, lay flat on the floor and cried for a time until she became quiet. The gunfire pierced woodwork and mirrors and windows, creating chaos and debris. A stereo blew up in a violent plume of smoke and sparks, and the chandelier threw out tiny shards of crystal that created a glassy rain. The fishtank exploded like a dynamited kaleidoscope, showering the room with yellow and blue and red fish.
Cairney saw the plump man on the bed slither to the floor in a tangle of bedsheets and a snowstorm of feathers released from a punctured pillow. He lay beside the two girls, both of whom had been hit.
And then abruptly the firing stopped and the silence was the most profoundly unsettling Cairney had ever heard. He raised his face and looked at the door, which was buckled and split and hanging precariously from its hinges. What was Linney doing now? Reloading?
Listening, Cairney heard the sound of dying fish flapping desperately in puddles of shallow water. He crawled through the sliding glass-doors to the terrace where a rough wind rising up off the ocean scoured his face. The carnage, so sudden, so unexpected, had shaken him. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, he thought. It wasn’t supposed to get away from him like this. He had had goddam Linney right where he wanted him – and now, Christ, it had fallen apart.
He heard the noise of the broken door being kicked down, then the sound of Linney moving in the room, feet squelching through the water from the fishtank.
Cairney peered through the glass doors. Linney, his back to Cairney, was holding a pistol out in front of himself as he moved. He walked hesitantly towards the bedroom, trying to keep his balance on the slippery floor. Cairney watched. He knew Linney could turn around at any second and see him framed in the glass doors, a perfect target.
There were twenty feet, twenty-five at most, separating Cairney from Linney, who was standing now in the threshhold of the bedroom. It might be the only chance Cairney would ever have. He would have to move now or not at all.
He stepped through the glass doors back inside the room, moving with all the stealth he’d learned in the desert, moving as the Libyans always said ‘like a man whose feet are the wind’, watching Linney who was regarding the girls inside the bedroom. Fifteen feet, ten. How far could he travel across this watery floor before Linney heard him and turned around and fired his pistol? Ten feet. Nine. Eight.
When Cairney was a mere six feet away, some instinct made Linney swing quickly round, firing one shot that was unfocused and wild and went flying past Cairney’s cheek into the glass panel of the door. Cairney bent low, shoulders hunched, every muscle in his body relaxed and ready now for the move he’d have to make before Linney found his range and fired again. He threw himself across the room with neither grace nor elegance, an anxious linebacker, his shoulder crunching into the man’s face. There was the sound of bone breaking as the man slithered on the watery floor and tumbled back against the wall. The blow confused and pained Linney but didn’t render him unconscious. The pistol clattered across the ceramic tile of the floor and Cairney, turning away from the other man, picked it up.
Linney watched him grimly. Then, using the wall for support, he made it to his feet. ‘I gave it a good fucking shot, didn’t I?’ He seemed very pleased with himself. ‘You’re not bad. You know that?’
Cairney shook his head. None of this should ever have happened. This chaos and destruction. None of it. He could think of nothing to say. He felt brutalised. This was so far removed from any sequence of events he could possibly have anticipated. He couldn’t have dreamed this even if he’d dreamed a hundred years. There’s no thrill in killing, Finn had said once. But there was, if you were a man like Nicholas Linney. What did Linney resemble anyhow but the kind of random killer that Finn had always loathed? A lover of easy death and casual destruction?
‘Mulhaney took the money,’ Linney said. His jaw must have been broken because he spoke as if he had a mouth filled with old socks.
‘Mulhaney?’ Cairney asked.
Linney grimaced in pain. He raised one hand to his lips and probed the inside of his mouth and removed a filling, a small gold nugget that lay in his palm. Cairney glanced a second inside the bedroom. The plump man, whose nakedness in death seemed oddly childlike, like that of an unnaturally huge baby, was surrounded by feathers from the wrecked pillow. The girls, who lay beneath him, looked only mildly surprised.
Nicholas Linney’s face had already begun to swell. ‘Mulhaney runs the North-Eastern branch of the Teamsters. Big Bad Jock.’
Cairney knew the name now. It was one he always associated with questionable labour practices, slush funds, Las Vegas intrigues.
‘What makes you think Mulhaney has the money?’
Nicholas Linney said, ‘Take my word for it. I thought at first it had to be Dawson, but what would he want money for? He’s got it coming out of his ass.’
Dawson. Another name now. ‘Who’s Dawson?’
Linney smiled. The expression caused him obvious pain. His face contorted. ‘You don’t know anything, do you? They really sent you here blind, didn’t they?’
‘I asked about Dawson.’ Cairney made a gesture with the pistol.
‘Kevin Dawson,’ Linney said. ‘Big brother Tommy occupies the White House.’
Kevin Dawson, the quiet member of the Dawson clan, the background figure whose family was sometimes trotted out for the edification of wholesome America. They just adored Kevin and his wife and kids in the heartland. Cairney was surprised by the names Linney tossed out. But how could he trust a man like Linney, who was capable of doing and saying anything?
Linney said, ‘You got my word. You want Mulhaney.’
Your word. ‘Where do I find him?’
Linney shuffled towards the broken door, beyond which was a room whose walls were stacked with gun-racks. There were all kinds of weapons, competition rifles, shotguns, black powder muskets, handguns. On the floor lay the automatic rifle that had been used to blast through the door. Linney, who was thinking about the pistol he kept in the center drawer of his desk, slumped into a chair and punched some buttons on a computer console. A small amber screen lit up and a disc-drive whirred.
‘There,’ Linney said.
A name, and address. Cairney studied them. He committed them to memory. He felt strangely removed from himself now, like somebody going through the motions. He concentrated on pulling himself together. It didn’t matter what had happened here, he still had his work to do. He still had Finn’s task to carry out. He couldn’t afford to dwell on the outrage perpetrated by Nicholas Linney. He stared at the shimmering little letters. His eyes began to hurt. He looked at Linney, who had his hands in his lap.
Linney said, ‘You’re thinking I’ll call Mulhaney, right? If you let me live, I’ll call him. Isn’t that what’s on your mind? Hey, I give you my word, I won’t warn him. Why should I? If he stole the goddam money, he deserves to die.’
‘What do you deserve?’ Cairney asked with contempt. ‘You think you deserve to live?’
Linney forced a little smile. He moved one hand towards the center drawer of his desk. Nobody beats Nicholas Linney, he thought. Nobody leaves my house thinking I’m some fucking loser. I trained myself for exactly this kind of situation. ‘I gave you what you wanted, guy. That merits some consideration.’
‘The price was high, Linney.’
Linney shrugged. He drummed his fingertips on the handle of the drawer. This guy was fast, but Linney believed he could be even quicker. ‘Sometimes you have to pay it.’
Cairney felt the weight of the pistol in his hand. It would be the simplest thing in the world to turn the gun on Linney. If he left Linney alive, who could predict what the man would do then? He couldn’t afford to step out of this house and walk away from Linney, who could start making frantic little calls. It was a strange moment for Cairney. He could see a vein throb in Linney’s head. He had an unsettling sense of Linney’s life, the blood coursing through the man’s body. This was a living presence, not a distant figure fixed in the heart of a scope. There were only a couple of inches between Cairney and the man, and he found himself longing for space, longing for the lens of a scope, longing for distance. If he had that kind of separation from this monster, he’d kill him without blinking an eye.
Linney stared at the gun. He curled one finger around the handle of the drawer. Go for it, Nick. Just go for it. You got nothing to lose because this fucker is going to kill you anyway. ‘Mulhaney’s in bad shape financially. He needed money more than the rest of us.’
The rest of us. ‘How many are there, Linney?’
‘Come on, guy. I gave you what you wanted. Don’t get greedy.’
‘How many, Linney?’
Linney did something desperate then. He swivelled his chair around, a gesture that was meant to be casual, easygoing, just a man turning his chair in preparation for getting up out of it – but it was a feint, a sorry kind of deception, because all at once there was a pistol in the center of his hand, a weapon he’d slipped from the desk in a very smooth motion, and he was bringing it round very quickly in Cairney’s direction –
Cairney shot him once through the side of his face. Linney was knocked backwards and out of the chair, one hand uplifted to his cheek as if death were a sudden facial blemish, and then the hand dropped like a stone and Linney followed its downward path to the floor. He lay looking up at the ceiling of his gun-room, seeing nothing.
Cairney stared at the body. Jesus Christ. There was a terrible slippage going on here, a downhill slope into destruction. His hand shook. He couldn’t find his own private center. He couldn’t find the place of calm retreat. It was as if a storm had broken out inside himself. Four people had died in this goddam house and all because he’d come here looking for information. Looking for Finn’s money. He shut his eyes a moment. The death of Linney shouldn’t have touched him. He was accustomed to killing. But he’d never shot anyone at such close range before. Okay, Linney had sought death, Linney had manufactured that destiny for himself, but what about the two girls? What was their role in this? Had they ever even heard about The Cause?
He opened his eyes. He heard a car crunch into the driveway. He stepped to the window, saw a dark green Cadillac. Quickly, he moved into the living-room and went to the sliding doors, then out on to the terrace where he saw Frank Pagan climb from the big green car. Nimble and silent, unseen by Pagan, Cairney vaulted the terrace wall and skipped across the tennis-court to the fence, which he climbed swiftly. And then he was back in the lane, hurrying away.
New York City
Ivor McInnes left the Essex House and walked south on Fifth Avenue. He went along Fifty-Seventh Street, checking his watch, looking in shop windows. The whole array of American consumer goods dazzled him as it always did, the flash and the glitter and the sheer availability of such things. He spotted a thrift-shop that sold only furs, and he thought that only in America could such a place exist. Did the rich dames on Central Park toss their used lynx coats this way? Did those blue-rinsed old biddies you saw walking their poodles, manicured little dogs that seemed to shit politely on sidewalks, bring their weary minks to the fur thrift-shop? Amazing America!
When he reached Broadway he headed south. Broadway disappointed. He always expected the Great White Way, showgirls stepping out of limos and maybe the sight of some great actress hurrying inside a theatre, last-minute rehearsals. But it was all sleazy little restaurants and an atmosphere of congealed grease. At Times Square he found the public telephone he needed, then he went inside the booth and checked his watch again. The phone rang almost immediately. Seamus Houlihan was nothing if not punctual.
McInnes picked up the receiver.
‘We’re in place,’ Houlihan said.
‘Good man.’ McInnes ran the tip of a finger between his dog-collar and his neck.
‘I had to take out Fitz,’ Houlihan said. ‘He was trying to skip.’
The disposal of Fitzjohn was of no real concern to McInnes, who had long ago understood that human life, a tenuous business at best, was nothing when you weighed it against ultimate victory. Fitzjohn had been a mere foot soldier, and they were always the first casualties. ‘What did you do with the body?’
Houlihan told him.
McInnes listened closely. He couldn’t believe what Houlihan was telling him. When Houlihan was through with his story, McInnes was quiet for a while, drumming his fingertips on a filthy pane of glass. If he hated anything, if anything in the world aroused his ire beyond the dangerous philosophies of the Catholic Church, it was when a meticulous plan was interrupted by needless variations, such as the variation Houlihan had introduced in Albany.
‘What the hell did you expect to achieve by calling the bloody FBI?’ McInnes asked. ‘Jesus in heaven, Seamus, what the hell were you thinking about?’
‘It seemed like a good idea to set the ball rolling,’ Houlihan said in a curt voice.
‘The ball, Seamus, was not supposed to be set rolling until tomorrow. Sunday, Seamus. White Plains. Remember?’
Houlihan was quiet on the other end of the line. McInnes, who experienced a stricture around his heart, had the feeling of a man who has completed an elaborate jigsaw only to find a piece removed during his absence by a wilful hand.
‘Don’t you see it, Seamus? It’s too bloody soon.’
Houlihan still didn’t speak. What McInnes felt down the line was the young man’s hostility. The killing of Fitzjohn had presumably been necessary in Houlihan’s questionable judgment, but the next step – which Seamus had taken without consultation – was not very bright. But then you couldn’t expect anything bright out of Seamus. He was great when it came to demolition work. Beyond that he was useless. McInnes thought about Houlihan’s unhappy background. Perhaps allowances could be made for a man who was the offspring of an absentee Catholic father and a Protestant mother who had become a drunken bigot of the worst kind. Houlihan must have spent years hating the man who had fathered and abandoned him.
McInnes said, ‘It removes the element of surprise, Seamus. Don’t you see that? It’s like sending them a bloody telegram. You were instructed to wait until you’d done your work in White Plains before calling.’
Sweet Jesus Christ, McInnes thought. It had long been one of the problems of the Free Ulster Volunteers, this lack of good responsible men and the need to draft street scum who killed for the joy of killing and who were misled, by their own acts of violence, into thinking they were actually smart. McInnes had always been troubled by this. For every good man he brought into the FUV, there was always a psychopath with a terrible need for blood. What McInnes longed for was a figure like Jig, somebody who killed but who always obeyed instructions. Somebody who didn’t step outside the limits of his authority. Jig, he thought. Even somebody like Jig was running out of time. And luck. And sometimes luck, that erratic barometer, swung away from you in the direction of your enemies. Jig’s time was coming.
‘Now they’re going to be out beating the fields with sticks,’ McInnes said. ‘And all because you took it into your thick head to make a bloody phonecall, Seamus. God in heaven, I didn’t want them to have an inkling until the work in White Plains is done with.’
Houlihan was heard to clear his throat. ‘They can beat the fields with sticks all they want. They’re not going to find us, are they?’
McInnes stared across the street at a movie-house marquee. There was a double feature, PUSSIES IN BOOTS and G-STRING FOLLIES. Somewhat incongruously, two nuns went past the theatre, hobbling in their black boots. McInnes watched them, two middle-aged brides of Christ, their juices all dried up. A lifetime of celibacy was likely to drive you mad, he thought. It was no wonder they believed in such unlikely things as holy water and the infallibility of the Pope and that philosophical absurdity The Holy Ghost. And these women ran schools and influenced the minds of small children, venting all their accumulated frustrations on the souls of infants. Dear God! McInnes turned his thoughts to what he perceived as the final solution for Ulster, and it had nothing to do with the persecution of Catholics or denial of their rights to their own schools and churches. The answer was so bloody simple nobody had ever thought it could work. You repatriated the Catholics, that’s what you did. You sent them to the Republic of Ireland. There they could pursue their religious beliefs until doomsday in a society already priest-soaked and dominated by His Holiness, the Gaffer of The Vatican. There would be no more civil strife, no more violence. Ulster would be free, and the Catholics happy. So damned simple.
‘No, they’re probably not going to find you, Seamus. All I’m saying is you didn’t follow my instructions. I didn’t just sit down and make everything up on the spur of the moment. I worked bloody hard and I planned a long bloody time, Seamus. And I won’t have it bollocksed by somebody who takes it into his head to change my plans.’
McInnes fell silent. What good did it do to scream at Houlihan, whose temperament was unpredictable at best? If you didn’t butter up people like Seamus, they were likely to fold their tents. And then where would you be? McInnes controlled himself. When the time was ripe, he’d find a way to dispose of Houlihan and the others. In the future he perceived for himself, there was no room for thugs.
‘We’ll forget it this time,’ he said. ‘But next time follow the blueprint, Seamus.’
Houlihan said nothing.
‘Good luck tomorrow,’ McInnes said.
He stepped out of the stale phonebooth and wandered through Times Square. He had a slippery sense of his own fate lying in the clumsy hands of a man like Seamus Houlihan. By calling the FBI, what Seamus had done was to set that whole federal machine in motion too soon. McInnes thought he could already hear the wheels grinding away, the cogs clicking. If they ran a check on Fitz, they’d discover his affiliation with the Free Ulster Volunteers, which might in turn lead them directly to himself. Naturally, he’d deny everything, but just the same he saw little connecting threads here he didn’t remotely like. The whole point of the exercise had been to keep the FUV name out of everything. But now it was likely to come up, and there was nothing he could do about it except look totally innocent if anyone asked about Fitzjohn. There was Frank Pagan to consider as well. When Pagan learned about the death of Fitzjohn, if he hadn’t already done so, he’d be back sniffing around like some big bloodhound. Pagan was desperate to pin something, anything, on the Reverend Ivor McInnes.
There was another possibility, of course, that the FBI might automatically associate Jig with the slaying of Fitzjohn, which would fit McInnes’s scheme of things very nicely indeed. Jig was a pain in the arse, but he wasn’t the whole IRA by any stretch of the imagination.
Bloody Houlihan. What a nuisance.
McInnes stopped in front of a movie poster. The star of PUSSIES IN BOOTS was a girl with the unlikely name of Mysterioso McCall. She had breasts that suggested two of God’s more inspired miracles. Either that or silicone. For a second McInnes experienced a terrible pang of longing.
He took a last look at the poster and turned north on Broadway, stepping back in the general direction of his hotel. On the corner of Fifty-Second Street he stopped, looked back the way he’d come, saw no sign of anyone following him, then he made a right turn. Inside a darkened cocktail bar on Fifty-Second he ordered a ginger ale which he took to a corner table by the telephone.
He checked his watch again. Almost noon. He sipped his drink, waited, staring now and again at the phone. He was in the right place at the right time, but when the phone hadn’t rung by twenty past twelve he finished his ginger ale and went back out on to the street again, a little lonely suddenly, a little forlorn, thinking of warm flesh and the consolations of love and how a silent telephone could bring a very special dismay all its own.
Bridgehampton, Long Island
Frank Pagan stared at a gorgeous angelfish that expired in the middle of the floor, slowly flapping its body and looking for all the world like the wing of an exotic bird. The fish hypnotised him, held him captive. If he didn’t take his eyes away from the sight of the pathetic thing shuddering down into its own doom, then he wouldn’t have to look again at the wreckage of this house. Having gone once from room to room, he had no desire to do so again. It was best left to somebody like Artie Zuboric, who seemingly had the stomach for this kind of wholesale destruction. Businesslike, brisk, Zuboric was flitting here and there and his Italian shoes squelched on the sodden floor.
‘Two men, two girls,’ Zuboric said, bending to look at the dying fish.
Two men, two girls. Zuboric could make this tally of death sound like a football result. Pagan took his eyes from the fish and moved towards the room that was filled with guns. In there lay one of the dead men, minus a major portion of his face. There was something depressing in the sight of so much death. It ate at your spirit, filled your mind with darkness, numbed you. There was an automatic rifle on the floor.
Zuboric came into the gun-room. He was holding an imitation leather wallet, flicking it open and checking the various cards inside.
‘I guess this belonged to the guy in the bedroom,’ Zuboric said. ‘A certain Gustav Rasch. There’s a bunch of stuff here in German. Can you read kraut?’
Pagan, who had an elementary knowledge of German, took the wallet. He scanned the cards, each sealed inside a plastic window. There was a Carte Blanche, a Communist Party membership card issued in East Berlin, a Visa – a mixture of gritty socialism and suave capitalism. At the back of the wallet was a small plastic card identifying Gustav Rasch as a member of the East Berlin Trades and Cultural Mission, which was one of those meaningless societies they were forever inventing to send men into the West. Trade and culture, Pagan thought. Tractors and Tolstoy. Plutonium and Prokofiev. Pagan closed the wallet. The smell of death was overwhelming to him. He shoved a window open and caught a scent of the sea, good cleansing ozone with a dash of salt. There was blood on his fingertips, which he wiped clean against the curtains.
Zuboric took the wallet back. ‘What was Gustav Rasch doing here?’ he asked. ‘What’s the connection between an East German and Nicholas Linney?’
Pagan shook his head. The bizarre bedfellows of terrorism again, odd couples coming together in the night like hungry lovers, consuming each other before parting as total strangers. He didn’t feel up to discussing the nebulous terrorist connections that were made in all the dark corners of the planet.
‘If the guy in the bedroom’s Rasch, this character lying here must be Nicholas Linney,’ Zuboric said.
Pagan said nothing.
‘Our friend Jig,’ Zuboric said. ‘He had a field day here.’
Pagan stepped around the body on the floor. He tried to imagine Jig coming here and going through this house and leaving such wreckage behind him. Pagan’s imagination wasn’t functioning well. All the pictures he received were shadowy transmissions. If Jig had been responsible for all this, then the man’s style had undergone drastic changes. Whoever had shot this place up had done so indiscriminately. Jig’s violence had never been like this in the past. Why would he change now? What kind of circumstances would force him to perpetrate these horrors? There was nowhere in all of this a trace of Jig’s signature. There was no elegance here.
Pagan watched Zuboric go out across the living-room to the bedroom, saw him bend over the body of one of the dead girls whose stomach had been ripped open. A wave of pain coursed through Pagan’s head. He thought, perhaps inevitably, of Roxanne, whose body they had not allowed him to see after her death. He had yearned for a sight of her back then, driven by a sickness to look one last time at what was left of the woman he’d loved. That desire struck him now as mad and morbid, but grief derailed you, leaving you empty and haunted and bewildered.
Pagan gazed at the racks of guns. He tried to reconstruct the events that had taken place here, but it was a maze with an impossible centre. He looked at the door, which was riddled and splintered and lay off its hinges. This damage had obviously been done by the M-16, but who the hell had been firing the thing? Had Jig somehow been trapped inside this room and forced to shoot his way out?
Pagan could hear Zuboric sloshing around in the living room. The aquatic sleuth. What the hell did he think he was going to find amidst puddles of salt water and slivers of broken glass and the demolished innards of an expensive stereo system?
Pagan turned his attention to the surface of the desk. A variety of papers lay around in disarray, most of them computer print-outs with references to ostmarks, roubles and zlotys. If Linney dabbled in Communist currencies, what Pagan wondered was just how much of this funny money found its way, via the United States, into Ireland. Nicholas Linney gathered roubles here, coaxed ostmarks there, and sent them, suitably converted into U.S. currency, to the IRA, using Joseph X. Tumulty as a link in the chain. But how long was that chain? And where did it reach?
Pagan looked at the illuminated screen of a computer console. There was a name and address in amber letters. Pagan stared at it in wonderment. Jock Mulhaney. Mulhaney was known even in Britain for his good-will publicity tour of Ireland, both North and South, when he’d made a tour of what the press called ‘the trouble spots,’ giving impressive speeches in small border towns about how the real tragedy of Ireland was unemployment. At the time, carried away by his own rhetoric, Big Jock had pledged to do what he could about steering U.S. industry into Ireland, which was a promise he could never deliver upon. Ignoring the fact that he had a vested interest in keeping jobs in America, the Irish considered Big Jock something of a proletarian hero. And here he was on Linney’s little screen. Well, well.
Connections.
Pagan stared at the keyboard. There was a scroll key, which he touched rather gingerly, because he didn’t have an easy rapport with the new technology. The screen whisked Big Jock’s name away, replacing it suddenly with two others.
Pagan gazed at the letters with astonishment. The amber treasure trove of information. He felt a sudden quickening of his nerves as he recognised the names that glimmered in front of him. More connections. Lovely connections. He scribbled them down on a piece of paper torn from Linney’s printer, then put the paper inside his pocket. He heard the sound of Zuboric coming back across the living room. He quickly scanned the keyboard, looking for an off key, anything to kill the screen before Zuboric came inside the room. There was no way he was going to share this stuff with the FBI agent. He couldn’t find an appropriate key so he yanked the plug out of the wall and the screen went wonderfully blank, carrying the names of Kevin Dawson and Harry Cairney off into some electronic limbo. With a look of innocence, Frank Pagan turned to see Zuboric enter.
‘Here’s the way I see it,’ Zuboric said. ‘Jig comes in. He gets inside the gun room somehow. Something goes wrong. Maybe Linney says he doesn’t know anything about the money. Who knows? Jig becomes more than a little upset and decides to vent some spleen, the results of which are obvious,’ and Zuboric made a loose gesture with his hand. ‘Put it another way, Frank. Your cunning, clever assassin, the guy you seem to admire so much, is no better than a fucking fruitcake going berserk inside a crowded tenement on a hot summer evening in Harlem with a cheap twenty-two in his hand.’
‘It’s one scenario,’ Pagan answered, still thinking about the names on Linney’s computer. Connections, threads linking one powerful name with another. ‘It’s not the only one, Artie. Even if you’re half in love with it.’
‘Frank Pagan, attorney for the defence,’ Zuboric said.
Pagan clenched his large hands. There was this terrible urge to hit Zuboric. Nothing damaging, nothing that would leave an ungodly bruise or break a bone, just a straight solid punch that would silence the guy for a time. Zuboric’s attitudes, his way of doing business, were beginning to pall.
Zuboric, who didn’t like the expression on Pagan’s face, turned away. ‘You can also assume Jig’s armed by now,’ he said. ‘He sure as hell wouldn’t leave without helping himself to a gun or two. Don’t you wish you’d shot the fucker when you had the chance?’
Pagan understood the process going on here. Jig was going to be blamed for this massacre, and he, Pagan, was standing nicely in line to take some of the heat as well. That was the Bureau’s tactic. When things go wrong, blame Frank Pagan. And all the blue-eyed boys in Leonard Korn’s Army stayed Kleenex-fresh.
‘Jig didn’t do this,’ he said.
Zuboric had a thin smile on his face. ‘You say. How do you know what Jig did or didn’t do?’
It was a fair question and one Frank Pagan had no specific answer for.
‘And that killing in Albany,’ Zuboric said. ‘How can you say it wasn’t Jig?’ The agent shook his head. ‘I’ll tell you. He’s on a goddam rampage, Frank. He’s got the taste of blood in his mouth.’
‘And that’s what you’ll tell Washington?’
‘I’ll give them my considered opinion,’ Zuboric said.
Pagan saw Zuboric step out of the room, heard him move inside the kitchen. There was the sound of the telephone being lifted. Then Zuboric was talking in a low voice.
Pagan looked at the body of Nicholas Linney. He wished somebody in this house could come back, even on a temporary basis, from death, and tell him the exact truth about what had happened here. But there were only stilled pulses and hearts that no longer beat and voices forever silenced.
Camp David, Maryland
It was five o’clock in the afternoon before Thomas Dawson finally met with Leonard M. Korn. The President didn’t like to conduct business on a Saturday, which was the day he habitually set aside for reading, catching up on the voluminous amount of material his aides and cabinet members prepared for him. It was a bleak afternoon, already dark, and there was a nasty rain slicing through the trees around the Presidential compound at Camp David. Leonard M. Korn, who arrived in a black limousine, had the kind of presence that made a dark day darker still. What was it about him? Dawson wondered. He somehow seemed to absorb all the light around him and never release it, like a black mirror.
When Korn stepped inside the Presidential quarters, Dawson was lounging on a sofa wearing blue jeans and boots and a plaid flannel shirt, all purchased from L. L. Bean. He sat upright, shuffled some papers, smiled coldly at Korn. Korn was a leftover from the previous administration, an appointee made by Dawson’s predecessor who’d been a Republican in the cowboy tradition, an old man who dreamed nights of a world policed by U.S. gunboats.
‘Take a pew,’ the President said.
Korn sat stiffly in his black gabardine overcoat. He removed several sheets of paper from his briefcase.
‘Here is the information we’ve gathered on the casualties,’ he said, thrusting the sheets towards Thomas Dawson, who waved them aside.
‘Suppose you give me the details briefly, Len,’ Dawson said. His eyes were tired from reading reports on such arcane matters as the butter glut in the Midwest, farm foreclosures on the Great Plains, proposals to alter corporate tax structures.
‘Nicholas Linney ran a company called Urrisbeg International,’ Korn said. ‘Linney had fingers in a great many pies, Mr. President.’
Korn paused. Dawson had grown immune to the clichés of language that surrounded him on a daily basis. A great many pies. Too many cooks. People in glass houses. Imaginative language was the first casualty of any bureaucracy.
‘He had been investigated by Treasury two years ago. There was some suspicion of illegal dealing in foreign currencies,’ Korn said. ‘East European mainly. He was cleared.’
Thomas Dawson nodded. He remembered Nicholas Linney well, and the recollection troubled him. He stood up. Once or twice, in the years before he had become President, he had played tennis with Nick Linney at fund-raising tournaments that were described under the general umbrella of Celebrity Invitationals. The celebrities were always ambitious politicians, game-show hosts, bargain-basement actors and tired comedians who had bought real estate in Palm Springs when that place was just a stopover in the desert. He squeezed his eyes shut very tightly. He was thinking of his brother now. He wished he’d never heard of the Fund-raisers. He wished even more that Kevin had stuck to running the family empire, keeping his nose out of Irish matters, and staying away from people like Linney.
‘The second male victim was Gustav Rasch,’ Korn said. ‘An East Berlin party hack. He came to the U.S. periodically. General gopher. Sometimes he wanted to buy a piece of U.S. technology. Sometimes he wanted to tout a touring ballet company.’
Leonard M. Korn placed the sheets flat on the briefcase that lay on his lap. The expression on the Presidential face struck him as a little queasy, sea-sick.
‘Linney was involved in raising funds to be sent to Ireland,’ Korn continued. ‘This much we’ve learned. As for Rasch, perhaps he was an investor, perhaps not. It doesn’t matter very much at this stage, especially to Gustav Rasch. The two dead girls were probably Linney’s personal harlots. He imported them from Cambodia as housemaids. They simply got in Jig’s way.’
Harlots, Dawson thought. Quaint puritanical word. He remembered Nick Linney’s fondness for oriental girls. He coughed quietly into his hand then asked, ‘Can we assume Jig retrieved the stolen money and has returned to Ireland?’ It was the kind of question a man asked with his fingers crossed.
Leonard M. Korn shook his head, as if the question were too naive to contemplate. ‘We can’t assume anything, Mr. President. If Linney didn’t have the money, Jig would go looking elsewhere for it. It’s that simple. Until we have evidence to the contrary we have to work on the understanding that he’s still in the country, still actively searching. And the killing isn’t going to stop. One man in Albany isn’t very significant. But four people in Bridgehampton – well, that’s a different kettle of fish.’
Dawson walked to the window. He’d never seen fish in a kettle in his whole life. Outside, under the rainy trees, Secret Servicemen stood around like drenched though vigilant birds. He thought of the two men he had supplied to brother Kevin. He wondered if, in the circumstances, two was enough.
‘Do you have any suggestions?’ Dawson turned to look at Korn.
Leonard M. Korn stood up. In his platform shoes, which were made specially for him by a discreet shoemaker on Atlantic Avenue in Virginia Beach, he stood five foot nine inches tall. It wasn’t imposing but the shaved head added a quality of menace to his appearance.
Korn took a deep breath. ‘Thus far, my agency has had only minimal involvement. As per your own instructions, sir. And thus far the show has been run, so to speak, by the Englishman Pagan. With marked lack of success.’ He lowered his voice on this last sentence, a tone he hoped would not presume to question the President’s judgment. ‘I’d advise a fullscale manhunt,’ he went on. ‘I could activate every available agent in and around New York. That way, I firmly believe we could see conclusive results, which is something we haven’t been getting from Frank Pagan.’
Thomas Dawson returned to the sofa and sat down. He understood Korn’s need to blame this character Pagan, but the idea of a fullscale manhunt was totally unacceptable. Given the Bureau’s heavy-handedness, there would inevitably be publicity. And where you had publicity you also had public reaction, which was a scandalously fickle barometer.
He was certain of only one thing. He was not about to alienate his precious, dependable Irish–American Catholic vote. So slender was the margin between further residency in the White House and the unseemly role of useless ex-President, fitted out in pathetic plaid knickerbockers and paraded on the golf circuit, that Dawson needed all the support he could muster. Publicity would be fine for Korn and his Bureau, especially if Jig were landed in the FBI net. But it could well be another matter for Thomas Dawson. Things were getting out of hand, admittedly, but he was going to turn down Korn’s gung-ho suggestion.
‘I’ll think about it,’ he finally said.
An objection formed on Korn’s lips, but he said nothing. He understood the meeting was over. He was waiting only for the President to dismiss him.
‘In the meantime,’ Dawson said, ‘we continue to play it all very quietly. Sotto voce.’
Korn nodded. Although he wondered how long it could continue to be played sotto voce, he wasn’t going to voice this aloud. Presidents, like sticks of dynamite, had to be handled with care. They needed flattery, reassurance, agreement.
‘Thanks for coming, Len,’ Dawson said. ‘Remember. Quietly. Very quietly. And keep me informed.’
When Korn had gone, Thomas Dawson lay down on the sofa and stared at the rain sweeping the window. He thought again of Kevin. If Jig had found his way to Linney, how long before he reached Kevin?
He pondered the prospect of calling Kevin. He had given his brother two seasoned Secret Servicemen – what else could he possibly do? If he stepped up the Secret Service detachment at his brother’s house, for example, sooner or later somebody was going to notice. There was always somebody, deep in a Washington cellar, who kept tabs on such things. There were always gossip columnists as well, who were drawn like doomed little moths to the Dawson flame and who were never very far from the centre of Kevin’s life. Dawson-Watchers who reported each and every Dawson social engagement with a shrill passion and who knew, courtesy of their sensitive antennae and inside informers, the things that went on around Kevin’s household. And if these snoops observed a goddam battalion of Secret Servicemen lingering in New Rockford, they’d be pecking away at their portable Olivettis like a crowd of clucking birds.
The trouble with being President of the United States, he thought, was the sheer weight of the secrets you felt you had to keep. Jig’s presence in the country, the murder of Nicholas Linney, Kevin’s fund-raising activities. It was all just a little too much.
There was one simple solution to the immediate problem of Kevin’s safety, and when it occurred to him he picked up the telephone and dialled his brother’s number in Connecticut. It was answered by the woman who ran the Dawson household in New Rockford, an old family retainer named Agatha Bates. Agatha, ageless and humourless, was one of those stiffbacked examples of New England spinster who were bred less frequently these days. She had been connected with the Dawson family one way or another for most of her life.
‘Kevin’s gone,’ she said. She wasn’t impressed by young Tommy being President. He’d always been the least of the Dawsons in her mind. Too ambitious. Too sneaky. Character flaws.
‘Gone?’
‘Took the family,’ she said.
‘Where?’
‘Up to the cabin.’
The cabin was a primitive wooden shack located thirty miles from Lake Candlewood. It was a place without electricity. No telephone. No amenities. It was where Kevin took his wife and kids when he wanted privacy, when he felt the need to retreat. Kevin had this notion, which Thomas Dawson found quaint and yet politically useful at times, about family unity, togetherness. He was always dragging Martha and the girls out into the wilderness. Backpacking, camping, fishing, communing with nature.
‘Did he say when he was coming back, Agatha?’
‘Sunday night,’ she answered.
‘What time?’
‘Didn’t say. And I didn’t ask. Just threw some stuff into the station wagon and left. The two men from Washington went up there with him.’
‘Fine,’ Dawson said. ‘I’ll call him Sunday night.’
He put the receiver down. At least Kevin would be safe up at Lake Candlewood with the Secret Servicemen protecting him. At least he’d be safe until he returned to New Rockford, which was when Thomas Dawson was going to suggest that Hawaii or the Virgin Islands would be a pleasant change of pace this time of year.