Jig (28 page)

Zuboric said, ‘You can't just fuck around with the laws of this country, Frank. I don't know what it's like where you come from, but here you can't promise a guy something that's not in your power to give him.'

Pagan stood up. He studied the college diploma on the wall. It had been issued by the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He wondered a moment about the pathways of a man's life that led from a degree in business administration to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, then he thought of Joe Tumulty, who sat along the corridor in a locked room, presumably staring at the blank walls and worrying about his sorry predicament. With a man like Tumulty, whose political affiliation threatened the ruin of his charity work, his shot at sainthood, you couldn't ever really be sure of anything.

‘He'll give us Jig,' Pagan said. Was that a small lack of conviction in his own voice? Confidence, Frank.

‘What makes you think he won't call Jig and warn him?'

Pagan put his hands in his pockets. ‘He doesn't know how to get in touch with him. He doesn't have a phone number. He doesn't have an address. He doesn't know where Jig is.'

‘He isn't exactly a mine of information, is he?'

‘Do you expect him to know more? Do you think Jig goes around giving out personal information, Artie? You think he passes out a nice little business card embossed with his name and number? Occupation, assassin?'

‘Did Tumulty at least give you a description?'

‘Nothing that's going to help. Thirtyish. Five eleven. A hundred and sixty pounds. Dark curly hair.'

‘That's terrific,' Zuboric said. ‘You know what I really think, Frank? Father Joe is jerking you off.'

Pagan smiled now. ‘I think Father Joe and myself have come to an understanding.'

Zuboric lit a cigarette and narrowed his eyes against the smoke. ‘When's Jig supposed to show?'

‘Tomorrow, the next day. Tumulty isn't certain.'

‘Tumulty's a fucking mine of uncertainty.'

Zuboric shook his head. Frank Pagan had given up that one thing any cop should have considered his greatest asset: objectivity. His peripheral vision was severely damaged. Zuboric, for his part, wouldn't trust the mick as far as he could throw a crucifix, and as a reasonably good Catholic he'd never have thrown one anyhow. He sighed again, unhappy with the condition of his life. Was he really supposed to let this character Tumulty walk away from here with a loaded attaché case? What was he going to say to the Director? These questions hung bleakly in his mind.

Frank Pagan was still studying Zuboric's diploma. He was very tired all at once. He covered a yawn with the palm of his hand. ‘I'm going back to my hotel,' he said.

‘I'll ride with you.'

‘Of course.' Pagan turned away from the diploma. ‘We should keep Joe here overnight and release him in the morning. A small taste of imprisonment might be a useful reminder to him.'

Zuboric agreed half heartedly.

Frank Pagan moved to the centre of the room and stood directly under a strip of fluorescent light. ‘Before we release Joe, there's a couple of things we ought to do. First, there's a certain Englishman I'd like to talk to. And second, we ought to pay a visit to a tailor.'

An Englishman and a tailor. Zuboric felt he had just been asked to solve an impossible riddle. ‘What Englishman? What tailor?'

Frank Pagan smiled in the knowing way that so infuriated Zuboric. ‘It can wait until morning,' he replied.

Quebec-Maine Border

A freezing rain had begun to fall all along the border country from Lake Champlain to Edmundston. It pounded on the roof of the Ryder truck with such ferocity that the two men who sat silently in the back with the cargo – McGrath and Rorke – felt they were trapped inside a very large yellow drum.

The headlights of the vehicle faintly picked out trees obscured by the torrent. Behind the wheel, Fitzjohn could see hardly a thing save for great drops of moisture illuminated by the lights. He was nearly blinded. Every now and then the wheels of the truck would spin on old snow that was turning to slush. Waddell slept with his head tilted against the window, his mouth hanging open. Houlihan, who sat in the centre, was truly alert, turning his pistol around every so often in his hands, like a man anxious to keep checking reality.

‘How much farther is it?' Houlihan wanted to know.

Fitzjohn wasn't sure but he lied because it was best to appease Houlihan whenever he could. ‘Five, six miles.'

The Ryder truck rattled and shook. Fitzjohn was a proficient driver who'd made scores of nocturnal runs from Northern Ireland over the border into the Republic, driving through some hostile terrain to do so, but he'd had no experience of anything quite like this. The wipers worked furiously backwards and forwards but they couldn't keep up with the deluge. How in the name of God could John Waddell sleep through all this?

Trees and more trees and nothing beyond the feeble reach of the lights except a darkness the like of which Fitzjohn had never known. If there was a God, he'd forsaken this stretch of country for sure.

Houlihan whistled quietly for a time. Fitzjohn recognised the tune as that Protestant anthem,
The Battle of the Boyne
, which celebrated the defeat of Catholic forces by King William of Orange in July 1690. Old hatreds. Very old hatreds.

In a tuneless voice Houlihan sang a couple of lines. ‘
With blow and shout put our foes to the rout/The day we crossed the water
.' And then he was silent, which made Fitzjohn nervous. He understood something he'd known all along but had refused to acknowledge – that Seamus Houlihan could quite casually blow off the top of his head and dump him by the side of the road, if such a whim ever moved him. It was a numbing insight.

‘Are you sure you know where you're going, Fitz?' Houlihan asked.

Fitzjohn nodded and said, ‘I didn't expect this kind of weather. It's a bad time of year for country like this.'

‘Aye,' Houlihan said. Something in the way he used simple words, little negatives and affirmatives, suggested that Seamus Houlihan was a man to whom language had all the firmness of quicksand. It was as if everything he uttered could be construed in different ways on different levels. Treacherous and shifting, Fitzjohn thought.

Ahead, quite suddenly, there were lights.

Houlihan leaned forward, straining to see through the rain. ‘What's that?' he asked, and the gun was back out in his hand, the barrel propped against the dash.

Fitzjohn braked. The big yellow truck slowed. The lights disappeared, then returned a second later. In a nervous voice Fitzjohn said it was the highway, that the lights were those of passing cars.

‘America,' Houlihan said. He nudged Waddell, who woke suddenly and peered out into the dark.

‘Here we are, John. Here we are in America.'

Waddell mumbled something. Ever since the airfield he'd been either asleep or ashen and withdrawn, and Fitzjohn suspected that the man had no stomach for any of this business. But John Waddell had always gone along with Houlihan, no matter what. It was almost as if Houlihan had cast a spell over the man. Or was it some form of hero worship, with Waddell always tagging along behind?

‘Well?' Houlihan asked Fitzjohn. ‘Are we going to sit here and wait for the bloody weather to change?'

Fitzjohn took his foot from the brake and the truck, its hood steaming with rain, rolled in the direction of the highway. This was the worst part, Fitzjohn knew that. Although he understood that an illicit border crossing at this godforsaken point was simpler, say, than crossing from Mexico, just the same his nerves were abruptly shrill. The concept had seemed easier than the reality, which was cold and wet, dreamlike and menacing.

The disaster happened about fifty yards from the pavement. The faint track along which the truck had been moving suddenly ended and the land dipped into a basin before rising up a slope to the highway. The hollow was muddy and impossible, and the truck, straining as hard as it might, didn't make it up the incline. It slithered, then slid back down through slush, wheels spinning noisily and dense exhaust rising into the icy rain. Dear Christ, Fitzjohn thought. This was the last thing he'd anticipated. He'd imagined only a clear run onto the highway, not this, not anything like this bloody great ditch.

Seamus Houlihan angrily slapped his pistol on the dash. Fitzjohn swore, shoved his foot down hard on the gas pedal, and tried to ram the truck back up the slope again but failed a second time as the Ryder slipped down into the hollow, where it sat with its big wheels uselessly turning.

‘Try it again!' Houlihan shouted.

Fitzjohn plunged the truck into first gear, thrust the gas pedal to the floor, and tried a third time to force the heavy vehicle up the incline to the highway, which was suddenly lit by the lights of a passing car. He turned off his own headlights and prayed for invisibility even as he felt the truck lose traction about halfway up the slope. It rolled down again with a terrible inevitability. Fitzjohn shut his eyes and wanted to weep out of sheer bloody frustration. Beside him in the cab, Seamus Houlihan was very quiet all of a sudden. It was the kind of brooding silence in which Fitzjohn could sense the man's capacity for danger.

‘I'll give it another shot,' Fitzjohn said.

‘No. We'll push. We'll push this bastard up on to the road. Waddell, get behind the wheel. Fitz, get McGrath and Rorke out of the back,' and Houlihan shoved the door open quickly, thrusting Fitzjohn out into the freezing rain then following him around to the back of the truck. Fitzjohn opened the rear door.

‘Is it a breakdown or what?' McGrath asked from the dark interior.

‘Push! Get your shoulder behind this fucker and push!' Houlihan, who seemed immune to the cold and the relentless rain, was already pressing his body against the back of the truck. All four men strained in the numbing rain, inching the truck up the slope. Fitzjohn, his skull like a block of ice, felt utterly hopeless. How could four of them get this truck up a slushy slope? Maybe on a dry day with no mind-splitting rain to blind you and ruin your footing, maybe you could do it then, maybe. He felt his lungs turn to crystal. There was absolutely no feeling in his ungloved hands. Push! Houlihan was screaming.
Push! Fucking push!
The truck edged upwards, then Houlihan was screaming again, like some creature who wasn't flesh and blood at all but a creation of the harsh elements.
Push! Push! Push! Waddell, give it some bloody petrol, man!

John Waddell, dragged out of sleep and unhappy at the controls of an unfamiliar vehicle, eased his foot down on the gas pedal. He brought the clutch halfway up from the floor. The rough grinding of the gears sent a series of little shock waves through his body. There was a cramp in his foot, and he wasn't sure if he could handle this strange vehicle.

For fuck's sake, Waddy! Give it more petrol!

Waddell's foot slipped on the clutch. He heard the engine stall and die. He turned the key in the ignition quickly, heard the motor come back to life, then he let out the clutch, but the truck didn't move. The wheels churned and dense exhaust spumed out into the freezing rain, but the bloody truck
wasn't going anywhere
! Pray, Waddell thought. Pray it gets up this damned slope.

Then he was suddenly dazzled, suddenly terrified, by headlights that came lancing down through the rain. He blinked his eyes furiously against the constant glare of the lights. As he did so, the truck died under him again and he had to shove his foot down hard on the brake to stop the thing from rolling back down the incline.

Outside, Fitzjohn wiped water from his eyes and peered into the same bright lights that had startled Waddell. He thought, Jesus, not now, not now. There was the brief glow of the car's interior light, then a door was slammed and a figure moved in front of the beams with a flashlight that he shone towards the Ryder truck. ‘Don't move!' the man from the car shouted in an authoritative voice. ‘Don't any one of you move or I'll blow your fucking heads off!'

Houlihan did the strangest thing then. He tossed his head back and laughed, and it was a weird noise that managed to override the pounding rain. The figure started down the incline towards the truck, his flashlight making the rainy air sparkle. Houlihan laughed a second time and shouted, ‘We're stuck! We ran straight off the bloody road!'

Fitzjohn shut his eyes and pressed his face against the metal panel of the truck. God, if the figure from the car was an agent of the Border Patrol he was going to find Seamus Houlihan's thick accent very strange indeed. And if he was a cop it was going to be just as bad, because he was surely going to insist on a search of the vehicle, and then what? Fitzjohn stared at the movement of the flashlight. The figure was approaching the truck, and Fitzjohn saw for the first time that the man held a shotgun pressed against his side.

When he was almost level with the Ryder the man said, ‘Let's see some identification.'

It was the wrong request to make of Seamus Houlihan, who knew only one way to identify himself. Fitzjohn opened his mouth and was about to speak – anything, a lie, anything at all to fill the horrible void – when he noticed Seamus Houlihan's hand going towards the pocket of his jacket. The man with the shotgun made a gesture with his flashlight.

‘You move that hand too fast and you can kiss it good-bye,' he said.

‘I was only going to show you my papers,' Houlihan responded.

‘Reach for them slowly. Very slowly. Slow as you know how. The rest of you characters back off from the truck. The guy behind the wheel – put your brake on and step outside.'

Waddell climbed down from the cab. In his anxiety, he hadn't checked to make certain that the emergency brake was firmly in place and so the truck, swaying slightly from side to side in the slicing rain, began to drift slowly back down the incline.