Jig (27 page)

‘There may be a way out for you, Joe.'

‘How?'

‘I can't promise anything,' Pagan said. ‘But a little cooperation on your part could be beneficial.'

Tumulty straightened his back and looked for all the world like a prizefighter coming out for a round in which he knew he was going to be demolished. ‘I'm listening.'

Roscommon, New York

Patrick Cairney wasn't able to sleep. He lay in the second-floor bedroom, staring at the darkened window and listening to the old house. He recognised familiar little noises. The way a stair creaked. The sound made by the wind thrusting an elm against a downstairs window. They were echoes of the childhood he'd spent here when he'd convinced himself that a house as large and as solid as Roscommon had to be haunted. Back then, his imagination fired, he'd seen all kinds of apparitions – ghostly hands upon the windows, odd monsters slinking through shrubbery. Harry had conspired with him in this creation of a netherworld.
Of course there's ghosts, boy. Don't let anybody tell you otherwise. What would the Irish be without their banshees?

He hated this house now as he'd hated it then. It was big and cold and furtive, and he always had the very odd impression that it contained undiscovered rooms, hidden chambers he could never quite locate. He remembered Harry's answer when, around the age of nine, he'd mentioned this suspicion to his father.
Sure there are secret passages, Paddy. Where else would I hide fine Irish gunmen on the run from the bloody British?

Fine Irish gunmen, Patrick Cairney thought. Why could he find so few memories of his own goddam father that weren't related in one way or another to Ireland? When he ransacked his own past, when he rummaged his recollections, all he ever heard was the same monotonous drumbeat that was Harry's voice.

Patrick turned on the bedside lamp. Along the hallway was the bedroom his father shared with Celestine. He'd watched Celestine drift along the landing about thirty minutes ago. At the door of her bedroom she'd looked back and smiled and said good night to him and then, disappearing with a languid wave of her hand, she'd left him feeling suddenly lonely there, as if he were the only occupant of the house.

He stepped out of bed. This room was the one he'd had as a kid. All his old books were still stacked on the shelves. He ran a fingertip over the spines.
The Call of the Wild. A Treasury of Irish Legends. Kidnapped
. Relics of a lost boy. In another mood, he might have yielded to the brief comfort of nostalgia. He might have wallowed in that place where a young man sees the child he used to be and wonders about the direction his life has taken since, the crossroads missed, the paths ignored, the fragmented geography of his movements. He was sure that if the boy could talk to the man he'd say how surprised he was that things had turned out like they had. And yet – was it so surprising when you considered the father who had raised the child!

He sat on the edge of the mattress. He looked at his overnight bag, situated on the top of the dressing table. He hadn't even unpacked. Restless, he thought about Rhiannon Canavan, but that kind of image, lascivious as it was, didn't cut into his loneliness. It only underlined it. He remembered the way he'd last seen Rhiannon Canavan at Dublin Airport and how she'd watched him across the terminal building. He'd looked around at her once and for a moment wanted to go back and hold her one final time. Weaknesses, he thought. All his longings were faults.

He shut his eyes, clenched his hands, pictured the way Celestine had raised her fingers in the air at the moment of her departure, and thought he'd never seen any gesture so innocently sexual in all his life. Innocence, he reflected, was the keyword. Sexuality was in the beholder's eye, and he'd done just a little too much beholding, that was all. You didn't go around being attracted to your own stepmother.

He lay back across the bed. The nightcap with Celestine had been two generous brandies, the second of which he'd left unfinished. She'd talked about herself, her first marriage to an architect called Webster. It was closed kind of talk, not very revealing, nothing about her family, her background. Polite chat. A stepmother eager to befriend the son she'd suddenly inherited. Now and then he'd seen a kind of glaze go over her eyes like blinds drawn down on windows, as if she were afraid of getting too close to revealing her own personality. Was that coyness? If so, it was a rare quality and endearing.

He heard the sound of someone knocking at his door, and at first he thought it was just the elm tree rattling again on the downstairs window. But when he realised it wasn't he rose from the bed and quickly took a robe out of his bag, tying the cord and stepping towards the door in one hurried movement.

‘I couldn't sleep,' she said.

Cairney felt awkward. He made a meaningless gesture with one hand. Celestine entered the room. She wore a pink satin robe, floor-length, and her yellow hair was tied up at the back of her head.

‘Am I disturbing you, Pat?'

‘No,' and Cairney closed the door, glancing along the hallway as he did so.

Celestine looked around the room. ‘I've often wondered about the boy whose room this used to be.'

‘Now you know.'

‘I don't really know,' she answered him. She fiddled with the cord of her robe, working the knot with her finger. Cairney didn't move. He had the uneasy feeling that any movement on his part could be misconstrued. He didn't want this woman in his bedroom. He didn't want any of the odd little responses she caused him to have.

‘I see a boy's books, but that's all,' she said. Her blue eyes seemed stark and glassy in the light from the lamp. ‘You needn't look so pale, Patrick.'

‘Pale?'

‘When I was a child I had this fish that died by jumping out of the bowl. When I found it, it was exactly the colour you are right now. Does my presence in this room upset you?'

Cairney watched Celestine wander around the room, touching things as she moved. The edge of the drapes. The spines of books. She stopped at the dressing table. Lamplight made small delicate shadows in the folds of her robe, which clung to her flat stomach. She was lean, and Cairney knew that the body beneath the robe was hard and taut and yet that it would yield in the right places.
Harry's wife
, he thought.
The Senator's wife
. He tried to absent himself from his responses to her, to step away from his own reactions. God, it was difficult. It was just so damned hard to shut your eyes and ignore this woman's compelling beauty and her nearness and the faint notion he had that he could go to her now and slip the robe from her body and draw her down to the bed with him. Was her presence here telling him that? Was she saying she was available?

She was standing very close to his canvas bag. ‘The truth is, Harry's been snoring worse than usual since this recent attack. I know he can't help it but it drives me up the wall.' She put the palm of her hand on top of his bag, which was lying open. He felt a tension in his throat.

‘So here I am,' she said. ‘I thought we might go down and have one last nightcap. It might help me sleep. And I don't like to drink alone. There's something a little pathetic about it.'

He couldn't take his eyes away from her hand. He realised he should have closed the bag after moving his robe, but he'd been hurried. It was a mistake. He saw that now. He should have taken the time.

‘I like this room,' Celestine said. ‘It gets a lot of light in summer. It must have been a pleasant room for you, Patrick.'

‘I have some good memories,' Cairney said, and turned towards the door. ‘Shall we go downstairs?'

‘Are you rushing me, Patrick? It just so happens that this is one of my favourite rooms in the entire house. Sometimes I come here and I sit. I just sit in the chair by the window. There's a good view of the lake. Sixteen rooms in this big house and this is the one I like best.'

Cairney realised something then. The two brandies Celestine had drunk before had affected her more than he'd realised. Her speech was just a little slurred. Not much, just enough to notice. There were red flushes on her cheeks.

He reached out, turned the door handle. ‘A nightcap sounds like a great idea,' he said.

‘You're in such a hurry,' Celestine said. She looked at him, her mouth open a little way, the tip of one finger pressed to her lower lip. There was something mischievous in the gesture.

Then Cairney saw her palm slide along the top of the bag. He started towards her, thinking he'd slip the bag away from her, perhaps pretend there was something in it he needed, but before he could make his move she was lifting an object out and turning it over in her hand, her expression one of interest.

He could feel his blood turn cold.

‘Where did you get this?' she asked.

‘It's just a souvenir I picked up at the airport.'

Celestine fingered the object, stroking it with the tips of her fingers. ‘It's very pretty,' she said.

Cairney shivered. A draught came up the staircase and moved along the hallway through the open door of the bedroom. He stepped towards Celestine, took the object from her hand, then dropped it back inside the bag, where it lay on top of his passport.

It was a miniature wooden horse, a Scandinavian import.

‘Let's have that drink,' he said, and he was conscious of an awkward tone in his own voice. He clasped her arm and led her gently out of the room. On the landing, the relief he felt was intense. She had come within a mere half inch of the passport made out in the name of John Doyle.

13

New York City

Arthur Zuboric's office was located in Lower Manhattan in a building that had absolutely no distinguishing features. Frank Pagan thought he'd never been inside a place with less personality. It was a testimonial to bureaucratic blandness, erected in the sky by architects who lacked any kind of taste. Zuboric, looking very pale beneath his sun lamp tan, stared across the room at a wall where there was a college diploma with his name on it. Pagan imagined he heard Artie ticking like an overwound watch.

Zuboric sighed, then said, ‘First you split, leaving me stranded in that goddam pimpmobile you rented. Then you shoot a guy. You actually
shoot
a guy, which is a mess I had to clean up with local cops, which I needed like a haemorrhoid. Jesus Christ. I mean, Jesus
Christ
, Pagan.'

Pagan tilted his chair back at the wall. There wasn't a great deal to say in the circumstances. He folded his arms against his chest. It was best to let Zuboric continue to tick until his clockwork had run down.

‘Don't get me wrong, Pagan. Santacroce's death is no loss to the civilised world. There's not going to be a great weeping and gnashing of teeth. And his criminal connections aren't going to cause a run on Kleenex – but holy shit, there was a fucking corpse on the goddam sidewalk and a whole
gang
of diners with napkins tucked in their shirts, and they
saw
him lying there.'

‘It probably put them off their osso bucco,' Pagan remarked. Bad timing. A look of pain crossed Zuboric's face.

The FBI man got up from behind his desk and strolled around the small room. There was a window looking down over the towers of Manhattan, and Artie Zuboric paused there a moment, surveying the night with a miserable expression. Not more than an hour ago he'd had the Director on the telephone from D.C. The Director never raised his voice, had never been heard to shout, but he had a way with anger like nobody else Zuboric knew. He spoke quietly, clipping his words. Leonard M. Korn terrified Arthur Zuboric. Sometimes Artie had nightmares in which he was alone in an interrogation room with the man and he felt so paralysed, so overawed, he couldn't answer any of his superior's questions, including the one concerning his own name.
Is there no way, Zuboric, of keeping this Englishman under lock and key? Is he to be allowed to run through the streets as he pleases?
There had been a very long pause after which the Director had spoken the most ominous sentence Zuboric had ever heard in his life.
For your sake, Zuboric, let us hope that not one word of this unfortunate incident ever reaches a newspaper
. This chilled Zuboric to his bones. Suddenly whatever meagre prospects he'd had before appeared to dwindle and then finally disappear in front of his eyes.

Now Zuboric said, ‘You landed me in the shit.'

‘Santacroce drew a gun,' Pagan answered. ‘It was either him or me.'

Zuboric touched his moustache in a thoughtful way. It was obvious to Pagan whom Zuboric would have preferred between those alternatives.

Artie sat down. There were papers littered across his desk and a computer terminal attached to a printer. Every now and then the printer would hiccup into action and paper would roll out of the device, but Zuboric paid it no attention. He buried his face in his hands a second, then sighed again, looking across the room at the Englishman.

‘And now you tell me you've got some cockeyed plan for that mick.'

In the time that had passed since the shooting of Santacroce, Pagan had gone over the scheme a couple of times, approaching it from all the angles he could think of, testing it and weighing it and then giving it his private seal of approval. It wasn't watertight and he wouldn't trust it in a storm, but it was the best he could do.

‘Joe Tumulty doesn't want to go to jail, Artie. It's a powerful incentive.'

‘What did you do, Pagan? Offer him immunity? Huh? Just take the law into your own hands and tell him he's walking away scot-free if he plays a little game for you?'

Frank Pagan gazed at the window. Out there in the night sky there were the lights of a passing plane. He felt a small homesick longing. Wintry London. Somehow it seemed farther away than a six-hour plane ride, like an impossible city of his own imagination.