27

Roscommon, New York

Frank Pagan was standing at the foot of the stairs when he heard the first gunshot. When he heard the second, he turned and moved back along the hallway. He stepped inside the living room and closed the door, leaving only a small space through which he could observe the staircase. It was a limited field of vision, but it was infinitely more safe than doing something completely reckless, like charging up the stairs with his gun in his hand. If he waited here, sooner or later Jig was going to come down. He wondered about the gunfire. He assumed that Jig had had to shoot Senator Cairney, although he couldn’t understand why two shots had been fired.

He waited.

The room in which he stood was elegantly furnished. There were old prints on the walls, each depicting a Dublin scene at the turn of the century. Kingstown Pier. The Custom House on the banks of the Liffey. Horsedrawn carriages on St. Stephen’s Green. He glanced at them a moment, then returned his attention to the stairs.

Pagan heard a sound from above. A door opened and closed faintly, a slight noise diminished by the mass of the house. Then there were footsteps for a moment. After that there was silence again.

Pagan waited. Earlier, when he’d been poking cautiously through the downstairs rooms, he thought he’d heard a man’s upraised voice, but he hadn’t been certain. The brickwork of this old house trapped sounds and diffused them and created auditory illusions. He passed his pistol from one hand to the other because there was a sudden small cramp in his fingers. The palms of his hands were sticky with sweat.

Now he heard footsteps in the hallway. They were coming from the front door, not from the stairs as he’d expected. He couldn’t see anything in that direction. He heard them come close to where he stood. Heavy steps. A man’s steps. They stopped some feet from the door behind which he was standing.

Frank Pagan held his breath, listened. Now there was more movement, from the stairs this time. He glanced up into the dark brown shadows.

The person coming down wasn’t Jig and it wasn’t Senator Harry Cairney either. Wrong sex.

It was a woman dressed in black cord pants and a black leather jacket. She wore tinted glasses and her yellow hair was held up by a black ribbon. In one hand she carried a small overnight bag, also black, in the other a large satchel. She created a sombre impression as she moved, taking the stairs slowly. Where the hell was Jig? Pagan wondered. And who was this woman?

She reached the bottom step, where she set her bag down and took off her dark glasses. Her smile was suddenly radiant. She had the bluest eyes Pagan had ever seen. She held her arms out. The man who had entered from Pagan’s blind side stepped forward and Pagan could see him for the first time, and he felt a certain voltage around his heart.

‘Celestine,’ the man said.

His voice was unmistakable.

Pagan watched as the couple embraced. There was laughter, the kind of laughter you associate with a reunion. There was relief and happiness in the sound and a maudlin tinge.

‘Too long, too bloody long,’ the man said.

‘Yes,’ the woman whispered. ‘Far too long.’

The woman slid her glasses back over her eyes.

The man made a gesture towards the stairs.

‘It’s over,’ the woman said.

‘Both of them?’

‘Both of them.’

The man laughed again. ‘You were right about Jig then,’ he said. ‘You’re a bloody wonder. You know that?’ The man was quiet before he added, ‘I think I’d like to go upstairs, take a look at the body. I’d like to be sure.’

The body, Frank Pagan thought. Was he talking about Jig? Jig’s body? Pagan felt a cold hand inside his brain.

The woman turned and looked up the flight of stairs. ‘Take my word for it. He’s dead. Let’s get the hell out of here. I’ve been in this place too bloody long. I want to go home to Ireland.’

The big man reached down to pick up the overnight bag.

Frank Pagan stepped out from behind the door, holding his pistol in front of him.

The big man turned around, saw Pagan, and for a second his expression was one of disbelief, but it changed to a restrained kind of amusement. ‘Frank Pagan,’ he said. ‘I can’t seem to shake you.’

‘People always tell me I’ve got a dogged quality, Ivor,’ Pagan replied.

‘People are right.’ Ivor McInnes sighed and turned to the woman. ‘This, my dear, is Frank Pagan. I mentioned him to you once or twice, I believe.’

The woman removed her glasses and stared at Pagan. She didn’t say anything. She gazed at Pagan’s gun, then turned her face back to McInnes. She shrugged, almost as if Pagan’s presence made no difference to her.

Ivor McInnes was still smiling. ‘What brings you all the way up here to this wild place, Frank?’

‘Jig,’ Pagan said. He found it difficult to take his eyes away from the woman’s face. She had a rare beauty that seemed somehow innocent to him and he couldn’t begin to imagine what her association with McInnes might be. There was intimacy between them, in the way they stood close together, the way they’d embraced before. And, almost as if some of this woman’s beauty had affected Ivor McInnes, the man looked suddenly handsome there in the hall, distinguished and proud and pleased.

‘Jig’s dead,’ McInnes said. ‘And his father along with him.’

‘His father?’ Pagan asked.

‘Senator Harry Cairney.’

Pagan was quiet. The fact that Harry Cairney was Jig’s father took a very long time to make its way into that part of his brain that absorbed information. It had to pass through filters of disbelief first. It had to make its way around the confusion of emotions Pagan felt at the news of Jig’s death. Disappointment. Anger. And sorrow – was there just a touch of sorrow in there or was he simply sad that the chance to take Jig back to London with him had gone? He wasn’t sure of any of his feelings right then.

‘I see it perplexes you, Frank,’ McInnes said.

‘To put it mildly.’

McInnes shook his head and made a long sighing sound. ‘It would seem that neither man knew of the other’s activities,’ he said. ‘It’s what you might call a lack of communication. The son doesn’t know what the father’s doing. And the father has no idea about his son. Ah, modern families.’

Pagan didn’t say anything for a while. He’d come a long, long way to take Jig back to England, and now there was nothing left of that ambition. But there was Ivor still, and Ivor would have to suffice. There was also this woman, Ivor’s accomplice. Somehow, though, he felt strangely empty. He felt he was moving through the demands imposed upon him by a role, a job of acting, doing the things expected of him even if his heart weren’t entirely in it. He’d been after Jig too long, and now Jig was gone.

He looked at the woman and said, ‘You killed them.’

The woman gave him a look of mild disgust. ‘Do you expect me to admit that?’

Frank Pagan didn’t know what to expect. He stared at her a moment, then turned towards Ivor. If he couldn’t have Jig, then by Christ he’d bring McInnes to some kind of justice.

He said, ‘I almost didn’t see your plan, Ivor. I almost missed it. I was looking for the complex when I ought to have been looking for something simple.’

Ivor McInnes moved just a little closer to the woman, cupping her elbow in the palm of his hand.

‘You brought your thugs into this country,’ Pagan said. ‘You orchestrated acts of violence and placed the blame on the IRA.’

‘Is that what you think, Frank?’

‘It’s what I know,’ Pagan said. He was hoarse all at once, depleted. ‘I only fully realised it when I found the body of John Waddell. You lied to me from the start, McInnes. And then you compounded your lies with even more lies. Bullshit about trying to make some kind of peace with an IRA faction. I never bought that story. Jig did. But not me. Unfortunately, I was in no position to argue with him at the time. You set out to discredit the IRA in the most callous way imaginable. You set out to turn public opinion totally against them by directing the FUV to act as it did.’

McInnes was quiet for a moment. He said, ‘Northern Ireland is a sad society, Frank. You’ve been there. You’ve seen it. You’ve seen what happens when warring factions can’t find a peace plan. And the sorry thing about it is that there’s no possibility of any peace in the future unless the IRA is squashed.’

‘Along with the Free Ulster Volunteers,’ Pagan said.

‘I agree with you, Frank. In the Ireland I want, there’s no place for hoodlums.’ McInnes glanced at the woman. ‘When you want to provoke outrage, you strike at the innocent, Pagan. It does no good in this day and age to assassinate a President. People expect that kind of atrocity. They’re numbed by that. But blow up a church and then massacre some children on a school-bus, and suddenly you’ve got the public attention. They howl. Jesus, how they howl! And then they strike back with a vengeance at the perpetrators. In this case, Frank, the Irish Republican Army is the culprit.’

Pagan felt a numbness in the hand that held the gun. He was thinking now of the school-bus and the dead children and the fact that Jig had been murdered, and all the deaths congealed inside him, a knot in the centre of his chest. He realised he wanted to kill McInnes then and there. Shoot the man on the precise spot where he presently stood. Shoot him directly between the eyes. All along McInnes had been manipulating events, plotting destruction.

‘You knew the names of the Fund-raisers, didn’t you, Ivor?’

‘Of course I did.’ McInnes smiled at the woman. ‘Mrs. Harry Cairney kept me well informed.’

‘Mrs. Cairney?’ Pagan asked.

The woman smiled coldly at Pagan from behind her dark glasses. Frank Pagan wondered what inestimable treasons had been going on in this large gloomy house.

‘You could have made my life easier if you’d supplied me with the names, Ivor,’ he said.

‘I’m not in the business of making my enemy’s life easier, Frank. Why tell you their names? It was nice to think of you busily running around trying to find out. It kept your mind off me for a while.’

‘And you knew Jig was coming to the States,’ Pagan said.

‘All along, Frank. From the moment Finn first sent him. We knew he was coming here to find the money. We told you about that. We wanted you to have a gift from your friends inside the FUV, Frank. We wanted you to come over here and catch him. We were much too busy to be sidetracked into getting him ourselves. Besides, we didn’t have the expertise for that. And I assumed you did. You and the FBI. But you failed to catch him. You let me down there. It doesn’t matter now, of course. We didn’t expect to find Jig was part of this particular household, but you know what they say about gift-horses. And Jig did us a favour by rendering the Fund-raisers obsolete.’ McInnes was lightly rubbing the woman’s neck. ‘Besides, Jig wasn’t what I was after. Jig was only a part of a larger entity. I want the IRA in its entirety, Frank. Not just one assassin.’

Pagan said nothing. He kept looking at the woman’s expressionless faces. Mrs. Harry Cairney.

McInnes looked suddenly solemn. ‘The trouble is, Frank, your government hasn’t done a damn thing about the IRA. They pussyfoot around, the problem. They send in bloody soldiers, young kids who’re too scared to act. And then when they do get their hands on the IRA, it’s your court system that protects the bastards. It’s your courts that say these gangsters have rights. They can’t be hanged. They can’t be flogged. They can’t be tortured. Good heavens, don’t lay a hand on them or else they’ll be sending out for their lawyers and making depositions to the bloody Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Jesus Christ! The IRA aren’t people, Pagan. They aren’t human beings. They’re rodents. And you people don’t have a clue about what to do with them.’

Rodents, Pagan thought.

McInnes said, ‘I’m sick and tired of violence, Pagan. I want an end to it. I want an end to the IRA. I want to see peace in Belfast and through the rest of Ireland. And if the British can’t do it, then perhaps the Americans will.’

The Americans. Frank Pagan rubbed the corner of an eye. Here he was now, standing on the precipice of Ivor’s dream and looking down a dark slope into the abyss. ‘Was that it, Ivor? You brought violence into the United States because you hoped it would outrage Americans enough that they’d send some troops over there to wipe out the IRA?’

‘It’s going to happen,’ McInnes said. ‘People in this country are sick to death of terrorists and their threats. They’re tired of all the anti-American activities that go on throughout the world. The Americans hate two things, Frank. They hate being put on the defensive, especially in their own country. And they hate to be inconvenienced. My God, do they ever hate that! They can’t go to Europe, because they’re afraid. They can’t cruise the Med, because the bloody Libyans will likely hijack their ships. They can’t do business in the Middle East without fearing for their lives. They’re tired of it all, Frank. And now they’re ready to hit back. And they’ve got a target all set-up for them. The IRA. It’s going to happen because there’s a weak President in the White House who’s going to be swayed by public outrage. A man who’s personally suffering at this very moment from his own loss. His two nieces, Frank. His brother’s children. The IRA killed his own flesh and blood. Tell me he won’t react to that.’

Pagan thought McInnes had to go down as the worst kind of monster. The monster who dreams and who doesn’t care what his dreams destroy or whom they touch or the lives they shatter. He thought about Kevin Dawson for a second. He thought about dead kids and a shattered school-bus and a silent country house near New Rockford, Connecticut. For the rest of his life Kevin Dawson would only have pictures of his daughters to look at. Pictures on a mantelpiece.

‘You want your own fucking little Vietnam in Ireland.’

‘I don’t think so,’ McInnes said. ‘It wouldn’t take the Americans long to crush the IRA.’

‘No, Ivor,’ Pagan replied. ‘It would take forever. You don’t see very far, do you? The IRA would thrive in the end because it’s always thrived in one form or another. The English couldn’t kill it. The Irish themselves couldn’t stamp it out. It passes between father and son. It goes from one generation to the next. The Americans might subdue them for a while, but sooner or later the Americans would have to go home. That is, if the governments of Ireland and Britain approved of their intervention in the first place, which is highly unlikely.’

‘No, Frank. It’s the logical step for this country. And do you think the governments of Ireland and Britain are going to turn down a helping hand when it comes to a problem they’ve been battling with miserable success one way or another for centuries? I don’t think so.’

Pagan was quiet again. Ivor’s dream, grandiose, elaborate, made a jarring sound inside his head. He said, ‘If it hadn’t been for your own troops killing Fitzjohn in Albany and calling the FBI, the name of the Free Ulster Volunteers wouldn’t ever have entered into the picture, would it?’

McInnes nodded. ‘It was a bad moment for me, but it doesn’t matter now,’ he said.

The woman, who’d been listening to this in a distant kind of way, tugged at McInnes’s sleeve impatiently. McInnes looked at her, taking his hand away from her neck. It suddenly occurred to Frank Pagan that this pair expected to walk out of the house and take their leave as if nothing had ever happened here, as if McInnes had nothing to answer for.

McInnes said, ‘You’ll excuse us now, Pagan.’

‘Don’t make me laugh, Ivor. Where the hell do you think you’re going?’

McInnes looked at the gun. ‘I haven’t seen my wife in two long years, Frank.’

‘Your wife?’

McInnes slung an arm round the woman’s shoulder. Pagan couldn’t see her expression for the dark glasses.

‘You sound surprised, Frank.’

‘You said she was Mrs. Cairney.’

‘So I did, so I did.’ McInnes smiled. ‘You can figure it out for yourself, Frank. I know you’re capable of it. But you shouldn’t sound so surprised. Why shouldn’t an old warhorse like me have a wife as beautiful as Celestine?’

A match made in hell, Pagan thought. He stared at McInnes’s large hand on the woman’s shoulder.

‘Two years is a long time,’ McInnes said. ‘And I’ve come a long way to take her back home, Frank. I’m sure you understand.’

‘The only thing I understand is that you’re going straight to jail,’ Pagan said.

‘I don’t think so.’ McInnes smiled. It was an infuriating little movement of the lips. ‘For one thing, Frank, you’ve got nothing in the way of evidence that links me with anything. For another, my dear wife here had no part in the tragedy that took place in this house. Father finds out about son, shoots son, turns gun on himself. You’ve seen the headlines before, I’m sure.’

‘There are some corpses in Hudson,’ Pagan said. ‘The valiant men of the Free Ulster Volunteers. The people you betrayed. How would you explain them away?’

‘Do I have to? They had nothing to do with me. Show me a connection, Frank.’

Pagan hesitated. He saw it now. He saw the flaw in Ivor’s scheme, and he circled it in his mind briefly before pouncing on it joyfully. ‘They had guns, Ivor. Presumably the same guns used in the attack on the school-bus.’

‘Guns?’ McInnes appeared surprised. ‘They didn’t have any guns!’

‘What’s the matter, Ivor? Did you expect them to be unarmed? Was that what you wanted? That they wouldn’t have anything that might tie them to the school-bus? Tough shit. What happened? Did they decide not to follow your orders?’

McInnes said, ‘They were supposed to get rid of the goddam weapons.’

‘Terrible how unreliable the hired help is these days,’ Pagan said. ‘It isn’t going to be difficult to show that these men weren’t members of the IRA. As soon as they’re fingerprinted and run through the computer, everybody’s going to know that they were connected with the FUV. Fingerprints and weapons will prove conclusively that the attacks weren’t carried out by anyone associated with the Irish Republican Army. How does that grab you, Ivor? If only they’d tossed their weapons away, everything would have been neatly blamed on the IRA.’

McInnes was quiet for a time. He seemed rather pale to Pagan. ‘It might change things a little,’ he said and there was a certain raspiness in his voice.

‘It might change things quite a lot,’ Pagan said. He was savouring this moment, the punctured expression on Ivor’s craggy face, the way the man’s mouth had slackened, his smile erased. ‘It demolishes your notion of blaming the IRA. And there goes your case, Ivor. If you hadn’t betrayed your own chums in Hudson, my friend, you might just be able to walk out of here. But you were so bloody anxious to get rid of your own thugs you didn’t stop to think. You didn’t want them around as a potential embarrassment, did you? You slipped up there. You should have let your killers leave the country.’

The woman asked, ‘Is he serious, Ivor?’

‘Deadly,’ Pagan replied. ‘Don’t you hear it? That long drawn-out sound of a man’s scheme dying?’

McInnes made a small fumbling gesture with his hand. He looked lost, but then he appeared to gather himself together again.

‘It could still work,’ McInnes said. ‘I know it could still work.’

‘Ivor,’ Pagan said. ‘It’s not going to work.’

‘Jesus,’ McInnes said angrily. ‘I’m telling you it could still work. I’ll think of a way. I’ll think of something.’

‘How, Ivor? How is it going to work now? You can’t think of anything that could make it plausible now. There are corpses in Hudson. You can’t fucking wish them away, Ivor.’

The woman placed her hand on McInnes’s wrist as if to calm him down. She had a small smile on her face. ‘They still can’t link you with any killings,’ she said. ‘They can’t tie you into anything that’s happened, Ivor.’

Pagan looked at her. It was obvious she provided some kind of support system for McInnes, which made her as crazy as he was. The little wife comforting the distraught husband, laying out his slippers in front of the fire and massaging his weary shoulders. The lethal little woman. But Ivor looked despairing again, a chessplayer who has overlooked some simple strategy, who has made a bad pawn move at a bad time.

Pagan thought for a moment. ‘Even if you could walk out of here, I could make a case, Ivor. You know I could do it. I’d backtrack. I’d go over all your movements. All your associations. I’d go back ten years if I had to, but you know I’d make a damn good case. There are links between you and the killers because somewhere you had to sit down and plan this whole thing out with them. I’d find those links. And when I did, I’d squeeze you like a fucking cherry.’

The woman said, ‘We’re going. We’re leaving, Ivor.’

‘I have a gun,’ Pagan said.

The woman slipped off her glasses. There was a cruelty somewhere in that beauty. The mouth was heartless. The eyes seemed subtly insane. ‘Use it then, Mr. Pagan.’

She linked her arm through McInnes’s.

‘Use it,’ she said again. ‘Shoot me.’

Frank Pagan marvelled at her calm. He raised the gun, levelled it. He didn’t want these people dead. He wanted them tried and imprisoned. Imprisoned for a very long time, the rest of their lives. Death was altogether too quick, too generous.

The woman smiled at him. ‘Goodbye, Mr. Pagan.’

‘I’ll shoot,’ Pagan said.

The woman, who had infinitely more nerve than McInnes, put her hands on her hips. It was a gesture of defiance. She had seen into the heart of Frank Pagan, and she understood that he wasn’t capable of cold-blooded murder. She knew she was free, that all she had to do was walk with Ivor McInnes to the door.

The smile on her face chilled Pagan.

‘Goodbye,’ she said again.

Ivor McInnes placed his arm once more around the woman’s shoulder.

And then he lurched suddenly, sinking to his knees, a horrified expression on his face. His face travelled down the length of the woman’s leg as he slipped. Blood spilled from the side of his jaw. The woman screamed. She turned, kneeled alongside McInnes, and then the back of her scalp was shattered with a sound Frank Pagan could feel in his own head. She toppled forward over the body of McInnes, and she lay there motionless, hands outstretched.

Pagan turned and looked up the flight of stairs.

The shots had come from the landing up there. From the shadows. Pagan thought he saw somebody move. He went towards the stairs quickly.

It was Finn’s voice Jig heard, it was Finn’s voice inside his head. A sea breeze, a gull’s wing, it floated through his brain with a soft insistence, quiet and reassuring and coming from a place nearby. Even when you don’t think you’ve got it, boy, you’ll always find some strength from somewhere.

The strength.

He didn’t have any strength left.

What life he still had was going out like the tide in Dublin Bay.

He didn’t hear the shots he fired, nor the sound of the gun slipping out of his fingers and toppling down the stairs. He didn’t feel any kind of pain. He saw Celestine, the lovely, venomous Celestine, look clumsy in death.

Dying isn’t any great business. When you took the oath, you committed yourself to death. It’s nothing to fear because it’s been a close companion all along.

Dear Finn. He had loved Finn more than he’d ever loved his father. More than any other human being.

Jig closed his eyes. He lay down on the landing. He wondered what death was going to be like.

It was all weariness now, and fatigue such as he’d never felt before.

He didn’t see Frank Pagan come up the stairs, didn’t hear him. He didn’t feel Frank Pagan’s fingers touch his arm.

And he never heard Frank Pagan turn away and go back down the stairs because all the doors to his mind had closed tight shut and there was only darkness – and somewhere, at the very last, a sweet note that might have been plucked on the string of a harp, one of Finn’s harps, echoing and echoing, then finally silent and still.

Frank Pagan opened the dead woman’s satchel, looked inside, saw what he guessed was there all along, then went out onto the steps of the house. Over the lake lay some low clouds, heavy and thick. Pagan walked towards the shore, moving very slowly. He had a bad taste in his mouth and his head felt as if it were filled with stones. When he reached the reeds at the shoreline he sat down.

He tossed a pebble out into the water lethargically. He was beyond tiredness now. His condition felt more serious. There was a numbness inside him. It was almost as if he were out of contact with himself. He couldn’t get in touch with ground control. He heard the lyrics of a song he’d listened to only a day or so before on his car radio.

With your long blond hair and your eyes of blue

The only thing I ever get from you

Is sorrow …

Celestine Cairney. Sorrow and teachery.

Treachery, he thought. It bruised you, left you shaken. It shouldn’t have surprised you, but it always did. Call me naive, Pagan thought. What is it about you that keeps bringing you back to the untenable idea that the human soul is not so awful as it sometimes seems?

He flipped another stone out into the sombre lake.

He would go home, and he’d take nothing with him, unless you counted a narrative of deception and violence. At least it was something he didn’t have to declare at Customs. And he was dissatisfied too, because the total story eluded him. The bits and pieces you could put together only after you’d started to dig around. He wasn’t sure he had the energy for that. He wasn’t certain he had the inclination to go around tagging the corpses, trying to understand the roles of people who no longer had any part left to play.

He thought of Jig’s face in death. How to describe that? Composed? Indifferent? He wasn’t sure. He shut his eyes and felt the frosty morning breeze scurry across the surface of the lake, blowing through his hair, against his face. It might have been refreshing in other circumstances. But not now. He hardly felt it.

He opened his eyes when he heard the sound of footsteps coming towards him. The swishing of reeds. He saw Artie Zuboric and Tyson Bruno looming up, two men in a raging hurry, flustered and out of breath. Artie’s moustache hadn’t been combed, and it drooped sadly. Tyson Bruno needed a shave. His jaw looked like sandpaper.

Pagan smiled at them. ‘Welcome,’ he said.

Zuboric took a gun out of his raincoat. ‘You’re up shit creek, Frank.’

‘A place I know well,’ Pagan replied. He turned away from the two agents and looked out at the gloomy lake. He was going to pretend that Zuboric didn’t have a gun in his hand. He wanted to see how far that might get him. A little make-believe.

But Zuboric wasn’t going to be ignored. He shoved the barrel of the gun into the back of Frank Pagan’s neck.

‘Artie, please,’ Pagan said. ‘It’s a tender spot.’

‘I’m trying to think of one good reason why I shouldn’t shoot you.’

‘I’ll give you one,’ Pagan said. ‘I don’t want to die.’

‘Not good enough, Frankie. Not convincing.’

Pagan pushed the gun away with his fingers. He hated anyone calling him Frankie.

Tyson Bruno, no doubt remembering the day Pagan struck him, plucked a reed out of the ground and bent it between his hands. ‘Shoot him,’ he said with a certain exuberance. ‘You’ve got the authorisation to do it. Shoot him. Nobody’s going to give a fiddler’s fuck anyway.’

Zuboric poked the gun back into the nape of Pagan’s neck. Frank Pagan stood up, feeling the edge of irritation. These characters had quite spoiled his lakeside meditation.

‘One fucking good reason,’ Zuboric said again.

Pagan stared into the agent’s face. He didn’t like what he saw there. Meanness, a lack of imagination, a narrow human being at best. Artie and Tyson, a couple of lovely specimens. Pagan looked out once more across the water. He wasn’t absolutely sure if Zuboric intended to use the gun. He had no confidence in his own predictions when it came to Zuboric.

‘You been in the house?’ Pagan asked.

‘Not yet.’

Pagan smiled. ‘You should. Jig’s dead.’

‘Dead? How?’

‘Does it matter?’ Pagan asked. He had a thought just then. It was cynical and thoroughly without any redeeming qualities, unless you happened to be Artie Zuboric. When it occurred to him he wanted to laugh out loud. But Artie had a gun, and Pagan didn’t want to make any sound the agent might misinterpret. He didn’t want to die right here and now.

‘Artie,’ he said. ‘How would you like to be a hero?’

Zuboric looked mystified. ‘What are you trying to say?’

‘How would you like to be known as the man who killed Jig?’

Zuboric said nothing. He was scrutinising Pagan, his whole face filled with mistrust.

‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Artie? Think of it. Think of the fame. Your standing in Korn’s eyes. Your stock would go up overnight. You’d be a big bloody hero.’

‘I’m not with you,’ Zuboric said.

‘It’s dead simple. I saw you do it, after all. I’m your eyewitness. Jig was about to kill me, when all of a sudden you just popped up and saved my life.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Never more so, my old dear. Never more so.’

Tyson Bruno cleared his throat. ‘It sounds like bullshit to me. I’d shoot the sonofabitch, Artie.’

‘Wait,’ Zuboric said.

‘It’s a nifty idea,’ Pagan remarked. ‘I’ll tell you what. For good measure, I’ll throw in Ivor McInnes as well. I’ll say you gunned him down because he drew a pistol on you.’

Zuboric narrowed his eyes. ‘McInnes?’

‘Absolutely.’ Pagan looked at Tyson Bruno. ‘You could pick up a consolation prize, Ty. We can say you were forced to shoot McInnes’s wife because she’d just shot Senator Cairney. Christ, there are enough bodies to go round. Regular funeral parlour up there.’

‘Senator Cairney?’ Bruno asked.

‘The very same,’ Pagan said.

‘Hold on,’ Zuboric said. ‘Just wait a minute. What about ballistics tests? They’ll find out I never fired this gun at anybody.’

‘A piece of cake,’ Pagan said. ‘It’s all a question of logic. Who had what gun and why. I don’t think such a story is beyond us, is it? Not if we put our heads together. It’s no sweat.’

‘I still don’t like it.’ Tyson Bruno snapped another reed. He folded it between his hands and blew into it, creating a humming sound.

‘Ty. Think. Merit badges. Maybe promotion. A rise in salary. A leg up the ladder. Advancement.’

Zuboric had a curious smile on his face. There was a faraway look in his eyes. ‘How can we trust you, Pagan?’

Frank Pagan shrugged. ‘You’ve got two choices. You can shoot me. Or you can use me to back up the authentic story of your heroic deeds. What’s it to be, Arthur?’

Zuboric was silent. He was looking at Tyson Bruno. There was some form of mutual decision-making going on here. Pagan stared up at the sky. A sound forced its way through the cover of clouds, throaty and deep. There, far over the trees on the other side of the lake, two helicopters appeared. Whirring, skimming treetops, they were coming in towards Roscommon like a pair of enormous gnats.

‘Visitors,’ Pagan said. ‘Friends of yours?’

Zuboric peered up. Tyson Bruno did likewise, making slits of his puffy eyes. The helicopters came in across the lake, making the water into tiny whirlpools. They were travelling very low.

The chopper in front banked slightly. There was the unmistakable sight of Leonard Korn’s shaved head in the cabin. He was gesticulating, pointing down towards the three men hunched by the edge of the lake.

‘Your Master,’ Pagan said. ‘Better make up your mind quickly.’

‘One thing, Frank. Why don’t you want credit for Jig yourself?’

Credit, Pagan thought. It was a funny word. ‘I couldn’t do that,’ he replied. ‘I couldn’t deprive you, Artie.’

Zuboric nodded. ‘Okay. It’s a deal. Tyson?’

Bruno looked suddenly quite brutal. ‘It’s okay with me. But there’s something I got to settle first.’

‘Like what?’ Zuboric asked.

‘I owe this sonofabitch,’ and Tyson Bruno turned to Pagan, making a hammer out of his fist and raising it in the air with the intention of bringing it down somewhere on Pagan’s face.

Frank Pagan reached up and caught Bruno’s fist in his hand and twisted, just enough to make Bruno gasp and step back.

‘Not today, Ty,’ Pagan said. ‘I’m not in the mood. Believe me.’

There was a wicked look in Pagan’s eye, a murderous light that made Tyson Bruno refrain from trying a second time.

‘Besides,’ Pagan added, ‘I make it a point not to fight with heroes.’

Zuboric and Tyson Bruno looked at one another as if to be sure they had reached agreement regarding Pagan’s proposition. They had. Then they turned and started to walk towards the house.

As Pagan watched them move away, he remembered the satchel in the house. He remembered how it lay alongside Celestine’s body. It contained several million dollars of IRA money. He considered calling out to the two agents, but he didn’t. Let them discover it themselves. Let them decide what to do with all that cash. He thought he knew anyway. They were about to become heroes, after all. And heroes deserved something more in the way of remuneration than any salary the FBI might provide. He shrugged and looked up at the helicopters. Jig’s cash. And Jig was dead. The fate of the money – money that had brought death and treachery, and, for himself, a depression he couldn’t shake, an isolation that penetrated him, money that was bloody and tainted and only valuable now to men without scruples – didn’t matter a damn to him.

He saw the choppers come in low over the front lawn just as Zuboric and Bruno disappeared through the open doorway and were swallowed by the gloomy interior of the house. He sat down among the reeds. The surface of Roscommon lake, recently disturbed by the great blades of the helicopters, was placid again, and as desolate as Frank Pagan felt himself.