Jig (47 page)

‘Get your arse over to the office,' Pagan said. ‘I need some information. The name is Alex Fitzjohn. Got it?'

‘My arse is hungover,' Foxie complained, his voice made small by distance and drink.

‘Move it, sonnie. I'll call you back in a couple of hours.'

‘Yes, master.'

Pagan hung up. He was tired but the inside of his head had come to resemble a pinball machine in which balls ricochetted maddeningly back and forth. He looked at his precious piece of paper again. Mulhaney wasn't far away. Brooklyn was nearer than either Rhinebeck or New Rockford, Connecticut. Would it do any good to go and talk to Mulhaney? Or simply to stake out the place where Mulhaney lived? Pagan was undecided. If Jig decided not to go to Brooklyn but went instead to either Rhinebeck or New Rockford, you would be wasting a great deal of time. This whole dilemma needed a small army of men, and Pagan knew he wasn't going to get them from Zuboric. Nor did he want them, not if they were afflicted by Zuboric's lack of insight. It wasn't the first time in Frank Pagan's career that he wished he were more than one individual. Three or four Pagans, clones, would have been useful.

Where now? he wondered. What next? He couldn't just
sit
here in his room. And it made no sense to visit Ivor until he had some word on Fitzjohn.

He wondered what Brooklyn looked like at night.

He put his overcoat on and stepped out into the corridor. He rode the elevator to the third floor, got out, took the stairs. He knew Zuboric would have a man nearby, maybe Orson Cone or good old Tyson Bruno, probably seated right now in the piano bar, chewing peanuts and nursing a Virgin Mary and watching for a sight of the tricky Pagan. Crossing the lobby, Pagan found himself surrounded by a jabbering party of fashionable French tourists who were seemingly agitated about the non-arrival of their luggage from Air France and were talking litigation, in the intensely shrill way of excited Parisians. Pagan merged smoothly with the French party. It was good cover – though not absolutely good enough. He saw Tyson Bruno come hurrying across the lobby towards him, coat flapping, face anxious. Pagan smiled and gave Bruno a victory sign even as Tyson, looking altogether unhappy with the course of events, collided with one of the Parisians, a woman who might have stepped from the pages of
Elle
.

Pagan hurried past the front desk and out on to Fifty-Seventh Street and then he was lost in the inscrutable Manhattan night as he headed, with a bright feeling of truancy, towards the place where he'd parked his Cadillac.

White Plains, New York

The Memorial Presbyterian Church dated from the early years of the twentieth century. A large white frame construction with a steeple and a cast-iron bell that hadn't yet been replaced by an electronic sound system, it occupied a huge corner lot of prime White Plains real estate. Its congregation had dwindled steadily over the years and now numbered about three hundred and fifty members, of which two hundred or so were active churchgoers. Adorned by stained-glass windows, an enormous organ, and polished mahogany pews, it was a rich church, a highly profitable enterprise which received generous endowments from the estates of past members. During the hours of darkness, a solitary floodlight shone upwards at the steeple, bathing the front of the church in a white light that suggested purity and cleanliness. One might imagine God himself perched up there in a place beyond the light, a materialisation of spirit just out of the range of the human eye.

John Waddell, who had always been a religious man despite the violent deaths of his wife and child – which might have damaged any man's faith – thought that Memorial Presbyterian was like no other church he'd ever seen. He was accustomed to grubby little halls, joylessly dark places of worship in Belfast, where the hymnbooks fell apart in your hands and the congregation sang in a dirgelike way and everything smelled of gloomy dampness. Memorial, on the other hand, might have passed as God's private residence. Waddell was awed by the artful floodlight and the shadows up there in the belfry. Inside, after McGrath had forced a rear door open, Waddell was overwhelmed by the beauty of stained-glass and the rich reflective wood of pews and pulpit and the way the pipes of the vast organ rose up into vaulted shadows. He felt humbled. He had an urge to sit in one of the pews and pray. Only Houlihan's impatient glance prevented him.

All day long Seamus had been in a grim mood. It was connected, Waddell guessed, with the disappearance of Fitzjohn. Suddenly, in the night, Fitzjohn had gone. Nobody asked questions, though. Nobody went up to Houlihan to inquire about Fitz, because Seamus had that look on his face which meant
don't fuck with me
. Now, as he ran a hand over the smooth surface of a pew, Waddell watched Houlihan move towards the pulpit. McGrath was standing and staring at the reaches of the organ pipes. Rorke, fingering the scar on his face, looked bewildered by the whole display of Presbyterian opulence. Wasn't Presbyterianism meant to be a grim little religion with no display of ostentation? Not here in America. Nobody in the Land of Plenty wanted to buy the original Scottish package, which was spare and hard and gritty and had been exported intact to Northern Ireland by the fervent followers of John Knox and Calvin. But Americans preferred a little comfort with their God. There were even pillows lining the pews!

‘It's like a chapel,' Rorke said, referring to Roman Catholic churches. ‘It's like a fucking Fenian chapel.'

Houlihan stood in the pulpit. Waddell thought he looked satanic up there.

‘Get over to the organ,' Houlihan said to Rorke, who moved immediately, stopping only when he reached the keyboard.

Waddell, raised in a tradition where the authority of the Protestant Church was unquestionable, sacrosanct, thought it odd to hear voices raised beyond a whisper. And Rorke's earlier profanity was wildly out of place. But there was a whole uncharted area here that confused John Waddell. On the one hand, there was the Ulster cause. On the other, the authority of the Protestant Church. Normally, these went hand in hand without causing him any kind of dilemma. But now, now that he knew what Houlihan was planning to do in this place, he felt a curious sense of division. In the end he knew he'd go along with Seamus, because that was what he always did, but the doubts he entertained were not easily cast off. The work Seamus planned to do here was something unusual for the FUV, something that ran at a right angle to Waddell's understanding of the Volunteers. If Memorial were a Catholic church – no problem. But it wasn't. It wasn't a Roman church.

Houlihan came down from the pulpit. ‘We don't have all fucking night,' he said. ‘I'd like to get this done and get the hell out of here.'

Waddell listened to the vague echo made by the sound of Houlihan's sneakers. Every small sound was amplified inside this place. As a kid he'd imagined that if you swore in church God's long finger – a huge talon in the boy's mind – would come down out of the sky and pierce you. He wasn't so very far removed from this kind of image now. He felt dread. The thing they were doing here was wrong, no matter how you looked at it. And God was still up there, sinister and birdlike, His claw ready to strike.

Houlihan approached. He seemed very tall in the dim interior of the church. ‘What's
your
problem?' he asked.

Waddell said, ‘I just don't like being here, that's all.'

Houlihan smiled. ‘You're a superstitious wee fart, Waddy. Because I like you as much as I do, I'm going to let you in on a secret.' Houlihan brought his face very close. ‘There's no such thing as God. Or if there is, he fell asleep a long time ago.'

Waddell returned the young man's smile although rather nervously. He would have followed Houlihan to the gates of hell and back, but this was the first time Seamus had ever spoken so openly about his religious attitudes. Waddell traced the line of the organ pipes up into the ceiling. You could imagine Something stirring up there in the darkness, no matter what Seamus thought.

‘God's for nuns, John,' Houlihan said. ‘God's for priests and nuns and RCs. And if he exists he's become so bloody addicted to incense fumes by this time his mind's addled. So let's get this fucking show on the road. Okay?'

John Waddell nodded. Across the vast stretches of the pews he saw Rorke bent under the keyboard of the organ. McGrath, standing close to Rorke, wore a backpack from which he took an object that he passed down to Rorke. The scarfaced man grunted and took it.

‘Are we ready?' Houlihan asked.

‘Aye. Just about,' McGrath called back.

John Waddell held his breath. He had never wanted to be out of a place so badly in all his life. There was the sudden sound of air escaping from the organ pipes. It was a single musical note that echoed briefly.

‘Jesus Christ,' Houlihan said.

‘Sorry,' Rorke mumbled. ‘Accident.'

‘Clumsy bastard,' Houlihan said.

Waddell could hear the echo of that single note, so deep, so profound, long after it was inaudible to anyone else inside the church. He had the distinct feeling that Somebody was trying to tell him something.

Brooklyn, New York

Big Jock Mulhaney had spent his professional life pumping flesh and slapping backs and eating chicken dinners at fund-raisers. He was a gregarious animal, at home in the company of men, sharing a confidence here, eliciting a favour there, joking, smoking, and yet always scanning the company for the important faces the way a bat will use radar to seek out prey.

Mulhaney, who sipped a glass of wine and chomped on his cigar, was presently seated at the head table in his own banquet-hall, a very large room inside his union's headquarters in Brooklyn. Teamster Tower had been constructed in 1975 to Jock's specifications. Apart from the banquet-hall, it contained a dancehall, five reception rooms, six floors of offices and, perched at the very top, Jock's private quarters, a two-storey penthouse decorated in what Jock's fag designer called ‘oatmeal', but which Mulhaney referred to as porridge. He adjusted his cummerbund and stared across the diners at the other tables.

The event taking place was the annual March bash, a stag affair Jock threw for the prominent Irish members of the union the week before St. Patrick's Day. In the course of the year, the Italians, Poles, Scandies and Latinos would all have dinners of their own, but the Irish one was closest to Mulhaney's heart. The diners, some three hundred of them, had eaten their way through a menu of Dublin coddle, imported Dublin prawn, french fries and mint-green gelato, and now they were embarking on the important course of the meal, Irish coffee.

The Irish–Americans in the banquet hall belonged to scores of different organisations. The Loyal Order of Hibernia, The Sons of Killarney, The Ancient Order of St. Patrick, The Society of Galwaymen, The Loyal Boys of Wexford, The Clans of Kilkenny. Some of them wore green sashes with gold lettering attesting to their particular affiliation. There were even a couple of local priests, men made red-facedly benign by brandy. Mulhaney, who was a member of every society, who joined clubs and fraternities like a man with no tomorrows, had a simple green shamrock in the lapel of his tux.

The waiters moved swiftly around dispensing Irish coffee when it was time for Jock's speech. Six brandies and a bottle of fine claret inside him, he stood up and acknowledged the round of applause from the tables. His people were blindly loyal to him. He gazed cheerfully across the faces, cleared his throat, held up his hands for silence. He had a standard speech he made every year at the same time with only minor variations.

He rambled on a while about union solidarity, made a token reference to the state of unionism in the Soviet countries, spoke with embarrassing nostalgia about his mother and the way she had with Irish stew back in the old days in Boston, and then asked for a moment of prayer for peace in the Old Country. After that, he suggested everyone adjourn to the bar and listen to the live music, which was provided every year by three middle-aged men from Cork who called themselves The Paul Street Brothers, after a famous thoroughfare in their native city. The room cleared out. The corridors become clogged with men seeking fresh drinks in the commodious bar established in one of the reception rooms, where the musicians were already singing
If You Ever Go Across The Sea to Oireland
…

Patrick Cairney, who sat at the back of the room alongside the contingent from Union City, New Jersey, considered the speech the tiresome kind of thing Harry might have loved. He went out into the corridor, pressed on all sides by men wearing green sashes. The cigar smoke and brandy fumes created an altogether dizzying perfume that suggested the complacency of affluence. They were all affluent men here with soft hands. There was nobody in this assembly who laid bricks or carried hods or dug ditches these days. Cairney, who had a plastic shamrock fixed to the lapel of his dark blue suit, watched Mulhaney work the crowd.

Big Jock pumped flesh vigorously, traded jokes, heard secrets whispered in his ear, promised a favour here, a favour there. He was like some pontiff strolling through a herd of lowly cardinals. It wouldn't have been surprising to see somebody's mouth pressed against his ring.

Now Jock shoved his way towards the bar where a waiter immediately served him a double brandy on a silver tray. Unlike the lesser prelates, the minor bishops and the insignificant abbots, Mulhaney didn't have to stand in line. He had a confidential conversation with a member from Buffalo, he made expansive promises to a man from Schuylerville, and he swore on his mother's grave he'd hammer certain fuckers to the wall when it came time to negotiate a new contract on behalf of his members in Wilmington, Delaware. He was basking in warmth, smoke, adulation, and the glow of good drink in his body. There was a narcotic effect here he couldn't get anywhere else. It was the life of Riley, and he'd worked damn hard to get here, and what he felt now was that he deserved every second of it. This was his world, and he dominated it like a large red sun.