NINE

VENICE

BARRON SPENT SEVERAL HOURS IN THE SMALL ROOM THAT WAS THE heart of his various enterprises. He made phone calls on his private line to different parts of the world, to associates in Tbilisi, Johannesburg, Havana, New York, Kiev. He read incoming faxes, arranging them in appropriate folders, each of which was labelled under specific code-names he’d devised for his projects – Helix, Hibiscus, Jacaranda, Blackthorn. He had a fondness for poetic words, especially those relating to plants or flowers. He enjoyed the notion that there was an organic element to his business dealings: he planted seeds and, with a little care and attention, they flourished.

When he finally stepped out of the tiny cold room and locked the door behind him, he stood at the foot of the spiral staircase; the woman still slept in the bedroom at the top of the stairs. He thought about the sullen withdrawal she’d made from him last night when, with her cold back to him, she’d fumed her way into a deep sleep. The strangeness of her moods, the swift way her passions changed, the shifting nature of her focus – a lovely irritating conundrum. He pondered the idea of climbing the stairs to wake her. Sometimes when he forced her out of sleep there were unpredictable consequences.

He parted the curtains: Venice on a wintry morning. Blue smoke drifted across rooftops, pigeons clustered along the bank of the canal below. He let the curtain fall from his hand just as Schialli knocked and came inside the room, carrying as he always did at this time of day the newspapers. Schialli laid the papers on the table, then left the room without looking at Barron, who went inside the kitchen and prepared two cups of cappuccino and, with a large metal press, squeezed juice from blood oranges. If he was going to wake the woman, it was best to do so with domestic offerings – coffee and the dark red citric juice she enjoyed.

He laid these out on a tray, tucked the newspapers under his arm, climbed the spiral staircase. He stepped inside the bedroom. He was surprised to see she was already awake, sitting up, a cigarette burning in her fingers. She looked at him without great interest, blowing a stream of smoke in his direction.

‘Your wake-up call,’ Barron said, and laid the tray on the bedside table, then dumped the newspapers beside her.

She reached for the blood orange juice, which she drank thirstily.

‘Sleep well?’ he asked.

‘I had dreams.’

‘Good ones? Bad?’ He laid his hand on her naked arm.

‘Who remembers dreams,’ she said.

He looked at her, tried to assess her frame of mind, but sleep seemed to have drained expression from her face. She looked pale, distracted, nothing more.

‘I brought the papers,’ he said.

‘I’m always suspicious when you’re kind, Barron.’

‘Why?’

‘I was under the impression you reserved all your good deeds for lepers in the Sahara Desert or starving kids in Peru, wherever.’

‘You do me an injustice,’ he said. He lay alongside her a moment, enjoying her proximity, the smell of her skin, the way his flesh and hers fused at various points of contact – arms, fingers, thighs. A sense of tranquillity descended on him. You could lie here all day like this, not moving, pretending nothing existed in the world beyond the house, that the planet was all your own. He kissed her on the forehead, then reached for one of the newspapers, The Times.

The front page displayed a photograph of a carriage that had been bombed in the London Underground system. He stared at the picture. The wrecked carriage was turned on its side; illuminated by strong lamps, smoke could be seen issuing from crushed metal. He set the paper down, picked up the others, scanned them. Each newspaper – French, Italian, German – carried the same story, the same wretched photograph. The stories echoed one another. They all contained a reference to the strong possibility that the attack had been carried out by the IRA, although this was uncertain because nobody had as yet apparently claimed responsibility.

‘Look,’ he said.

She turned her face, regarded the newspaper idly; a photograph, an ugly event in London, it didn’t seem to hold her interest. Barron sat back, head propped against the pillow, and was quiet a moment. He was aware of a slight depression closing in on him. A train in London, rush hour, casualties.

She balanced herself on one elbow, and swept a small lock of hair away from her brow. She set aside her empty glass; pulpy citrus strands clung to the inside. She reached for her coffee, sipped, leaving a pale line of milky froth on her upper lip. She licked it away.

He gazed at the photograph again. The murky shapes of figures could be seen in shadow alongside the carriage. Firemen, cops, investigators. ‘If it wasn’t the IRA, who was it?’ he asked. ‘Who else would do something like this?’

‘Oh, I can think of a few candidates. The Iranians. The Iraqis. Disenchanted Argentinians who never quite got over the Falklands fiasco. Any number of people with a grudge against the Brits.’

He turned to face her. He watched her hand go out to touch the newspaper picture and he remembered how he’d met her, the first time he’d gone to Palestine years ago, the conversation with Arafat in which the little man had spoken of his persistent desire for peace in the Middle East even as he understood the urgent need for armed vigilance. He thought Barron some form of semi-official conduit for this information. Besides, it was a good photo-opportunity for the Palestinian, who was a pragmatist above anything else. He knew Barron was fair gossip-column fodder. Later, at a large party Arafat had thrown, she’d appeared around midnight, lovely, seemingly indifferent to her surroundings, exotic.

She’d gone to bed with Barron that first night.

From the very start he’d known there was something off-centre about her. She was a hostage to her own moods. She could be gentle and vicious by turns. Her highs were scintillating, her lows manic. When she was up she tended to speak gunfire sentences. Down, she could be nasty, mean-spirited, sarcastic. You never knew which persona you were going to encounter. She was many women in one and she had a furious need to keep changing her appearance.

He’d learned very little about her upbringing save for the bare facts of her childhood in North Carolina, the weirdo parents she sometimes referred to as a couple of monstrosities. She rarely spoke of her past, and only with distaste. He had to accept her the way she was. It was a condition of the relationship. Don’t inquire, don’t interrogate, don’t go too far. And so he hadn’t pried, hadn’t investigated her life; her history was skeletal.

But he knew enough. He’d gleaned enough over the years. He had carefully compiled a dossier on her, the existence of which she never suspected.

He rose from the bed, wandered round the room, clenching and unclenching his fists. He was still thinking of the incident in London.

‘I’m going to make a few calls,’ he said. He descended the spiral staircase, unlocked the door of his office, picked up the telephone. He dialled a number in Belfast. His call was answered on the first ring. He pictured O’Neill in his small cluttered office situated over a drab tobacconist’s shop behind the Smithfield Market. Belfast, that splintered city, that zone of death and hatred, wasn’t one of Barron’s favourite places.

Barron asked about London, about the Underground.

O’Neill, who had a raw Ulster accent, said, ‘Nobody here knows anything, Mr B. And that’s being honest with you now. We’ve been turning the city upside down and inside out, and there’s not a bloody word. It wasn’t done by us, I can tell you that much. And I don’t believe it was done by the other side either. They’d be crowing if they were behind it. They’d be giving bloody press conferences by telephone. You have to ask yourself what the Loyalists would gain from doing a number on the London Underground anyway. I know they’re stupid bastards, but not that stupid.’

Barron was quiet a moment. ‘What about one of the splinter groups?’ he asked.

O’Neill was heard to strike a match and inhale a cigarette. ‘No chance. No fucking chance. We’d know about them. We take some pride in our information network, Mr B. It’s a bloody puzzle. But I’m damn sure it didn’t originate in the Province.’

‘Keep me posted,’ Barron said.

‘You’ll be the first to know. Haven’t we always worked in the spirit of true co-operation, after all?’

‘Always,’ Barron said. ‘And I’d like to keep it that way.’

Barron put the receiver down. He lingered a second with his hand on the instrument, then he picked it up and dialled another number in Northern Ireland, this time in Derry. It rang for a long time before a woman answered. She had a soft mellow accent, quite unlike that of O’Neill. Barron knew her as Sophie McGuire, but that was a nom de guerre. A middle-aged widow with a couple of young grandchildren, she lived an ostensibly respectable life in a row of solid terraced houses near the city centre. That she’d avoided the attentions of the Ulster security forces for years was a remarkable testimonial to the commonplace surface of her life. She paraded her grandchildren proudly on the streets, attended Presbyterian church unfailingly on Sundays, played bingo every Thursday, and made regular donations to pacifist enterprises. Once, she’d even ridden the Peace Train from Dublin to Belfast, clutching a wreath of flowers and looking sad. Her veneer, Barron thought, was immaculate.

‘I thought I’d be hearing from you,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you straight away, none of us was responsible for the business in London. If I knew otherwise, I’d say so. Usually I’d put my money on the Provos, because this is their kind of savagery. But not this time. Not this time. I don’t know who the hell’s behind this one because there isn’t a word anywhere. Not a cheep. I don’t think you’ll find any answers in Ulster.’

Barron gazed at the cursors on his wall map. He watched the flickering little beeps and was seized by a small sense of unease: if there was no Irish connection behind the Underground bomb, then it left him with the kind of puzzle he didn’t like. He’d always enjoyed free access to a world of clandestine information from all manner of sources, and now something had happened that was beyond his range of knowledge, and he felt limited, excluded from events.

Sophie McGuire said, ‘I think you’ve got to look outside all the usual circles on this one. Somebody we don’t know. That’s about all I can tell you.’

Barron sighed. Somebody outside all the usual circles. He thought how very fragile the situation was in Ulster; a massive drag-net conducted by Scotland Yard, the Royal Ulster Constabulary and British Army Intelligence could be upsetting. All kinds of people might be trawled in such an investigation. And who knew what they might say, what they might give away in the interests of self-preservation? Barron had worked hard and long in Ulster; his future business in the Province depended on a delicate balancing act.

‘It could be a one-off,’ the woman said. ‘Some murderous eedjit whose identity we’ll never know. Some louse who’ll crawl back in the woodwork and vanish.’

‘Maybe,’ Barron said. He severed the connection. He locked his office, went back up the staircase to the bedroom, where the woman – sprawled across the bed – was studying the newspapers. She looked up as Barron came in.

‘Well?’ she asked.

Barron shrugged. ‘Nothing.’

‘Poor Tobias. You don’t like states of ignorance, do you? You like to be well informed, don’t you? You like to know everything in advance, don’t you? You hate loose ends.’

Barron sat on the bed. If, as Sophie had suggested, the destruction of the carriage had been a one-off carried out by a maniac, then the chances of ever discovering the identity of the bomber were slim – in which case he couldn’t fault his network of information. It was some consolation. But still the thought of the train distressed him.

‘According to the papers, a man called Frank Pagan is in charge of the bomb investigation,’ she said. She tossed one of the newspapers toward him.

He didn’t pick it up. He said, ‘Frank Pagan. He has quite a reputation for being tenacious, I understand.’

The woman said nothing. She rolled on her side, reached for her cigarette lighter and struck it for flame, which she held toward the wick of the candle. Barron felt the tension drain out of his body and he leaned conspiratorially toward the woman, holding her face against his shoulder – hearing her sweep all the newspapers away from the bed, hearing them slither to the floor, the world turned aside, discarded, the bomb in the London Underground forgotten, leaving nothing but this room illuminated by the small steady flame of the candle.