Jig (5 page)

Of anyone called Jig, there would be absolutely no trace at all.

3

Roscommon, New York

Former United States Senator Harry Cairney stood at the window of his second-floor library, a room lined with books and filled with dark antique furniture that reflected everything with the accuracy of mirrors. He watched the helicopter come in view over the slate-coloured waters of Roscommon Lake. There were four men in the chopper, three who had come to Roscommon to meet with Cairney, and a pilot who would unload his human cargo and fly promptly away, counting his improbably high fee and forgetting anything he ever knew about his passengers and their destination. Amnesia, Cairney thought, did not come cheaply.

The senator stared past the chopper now, out beyond the far shores of the lake where the trees were deep and secretive in the snow. When he had purchased this estate in 1958, it had been nine hundred acres of jungle and a rundown Victorian mansion owned by a senile German brewer who, in his madness, travelled the world collecting broken nude statues, most of them missing limbs and noses and, in extreme cases, their entire heads. The old German had been proud of his huge collection.
They remind me, Senator Cairney
, the brewer had said at the time of escrow,
of human infirmity
.

Cairney, forty-eight at the time, lacked any desire to be reminded of anything so undignified as human infirmity. He had removed the statues, renovated the big house, redesigned the gardens, and stocked the lake – known then as Lake Arthur – with rainbow trout and bass. Then he had renamed the property Roscommon, after the castle built in 1280 in Ireland by Robert de Ufford, although there were still old-timers in the nearby town of Rhinebeck who referred to the estate as Old Franz's place, Brewmeister Palace. Nine hundred acres of prime Dutchess County real estate – a mere ninety minutes up the leafy Taconic Parkway from Manhattan – surrounded by dense trees and rectangles of meadowland. A safe retreat from the problems of the world, except that the world had a tiresome tendency to intrude on the senator's sense of security.

He watched the chopper land slowly on the vast front lawn. Bare rosebushes shook from the power of the big whirring blades. Clouds, weighted with more snow, floated away over the lake. The senator watched three men get out of the chopper and saw them scurry beneath the beating blades in the direction of the house. He thought for a second of the telephone call he had received only some eight hours before from Ireland. He was going to have to convey the message to his visitors, an unpleasant prospect. But the whole thing was unpleasant, a calamity of enormous proportions. He caught his breath and heard a wheezing sound in the depths of his chest. Lately, he'd begun to experience human frailty for himself – waking in the night, struggling for oxygen, feeling himself skirt the edges of a panic, like a man who looks down from a great height to see below him the abyss of death.

He was reluctant to move from the window. The stereo, which he had built into the study walls, was playing one of his favourite records, John McCormack singing
The Rose of Tralee
. He never tired of listening to it because it reminded him of his first wife, Kathleen, who had died some seventeen years before.

She was lovely and fair as the rose of the summer
.

Yet 'twas not her beauty alone that won me
…

Harry Cairney closed his eyes a moment. It seemed to him that McCormack's voice on this old recording came from a place beyond the grave. He sighed, turning from the window, crossing the floor to the landing. Voices drifted up from below. He could hear Mulhaney over everyone else, because that was the big man's style, loud and blustery and forever dying to be heard. A little dizzy, Cairney looked down the long staircase. He was filled with dread. The meeting was necessary: no, more than that – it was urgent. But he didn't have the heart for it anymore. It was odd how age sucked the guts out of you, strange the way it eroded your fighting spirit. Age took away and, like some terrible miser, seemed to give nothing back. Not even wisdom. Not even that small consolation. Membership in the Fund-raisers, he reflected, was definitely a young man's game.

He moved to the stairs.

‘Darling?'

Celestine stood in the door of the bedroom. Her beauty affected him as it always did. It made his heart roar inside his chest and chased his blood pressure up a ladder, and he wasn't old Harry Cairney any more, he wasn't the retired senator from New York, he was a giddy young man enchanted by love, blinded by his own desires.
Celestine, his wife
. She had her yellow hair pulled back tight the way she sometimes wore it and it gave her beauty a rather gaunt quality, almost stark, as if her soul were laid bare. Her blue eyes were filled with all the electricity that might ever have been issued by lightning and trapped in conductors. Harry Cairney thanked the God in whom he'd lately come to believe for sending Celestine to him at this stage of his life.

And – wonder of wonders! – it was no classic case of a young woman marrying an old man for his money and esteem, no thirty-five-year-old fortune hunter, a power groupie, marrying a former United States senator for whatever cachet this might bestow upon her. She had married Harry Cairney the
man
, not the politician who had been part of the Kennedy inner circle and who'd known every major figure that had moved across the stage of the times and who'd had his picture taken with Jack and Lyndon and de Gaulle and Willy Brandt and Harold Macmillan and Eamon de Valera. It was, Harry Cairney thought, a miracle in a time when miracles were rare as unicorns. And this miracle was that Celestine, who might have been nothing more than a paid companion in the winter of his life, a mercenary, actually loved him. She
loved
him even in his age and frailty, and she drove him to moments of desire that would have been indecent in a much younger man.

‘Do you have to meet these people?' she asked, and there was concern in the blue eyes that subtly altered their colour, darkening the shade of cobalt to something no rainbow could ever register.

‘Yes,' the senator said. ‘I have to.'

‘Who are they anyhow?'

‘Business associates.' He smiled at his wife.

Celestine wore nothing more fancy than blue jeans and a plaid shirt, but she would have looked astonishingly lovely in an A & P grocery bag. She came across the hallway and laid her hand on his arm. ‘I don't want you to overdo it,' she said. She pressed her mouth against the side of his face. Harry Cairney, who came alive whenever his wife touched him, patted her carefully on the cheek.

‘I won't overdo anything. I promise,' he said.

‘Be sure,' she said. ‘I love you.'

Cairney moved away from his young wife reluctantly and began to go down the stairs where, around the long oval table in the dining room, the three men who had come to Roscommon by helicopter were already drinking shots of brandy poured from a crystal decanter.

Mulhaney, his face the colour of a radish, was already on his second brandy when Harry Cairney stepped into the dining room. Mulhaney, who was a big man with enormous hands, crowded a room somehow, filling more space and sucking in more air than an individual had a right to. Harry Cairney moved to his place at the end of the oval table and sat down, smiling briefly at Mulhaney and then looking at the faces of the other men. Only young Kevin Dawson stood up at Cairney's entrance as a gesture of respect. God bless you, Kevin, the senator thought.

At the age of thirty-seven, Kevin Dawson had a sense of what Cairney considered decency. He was a conciliatory person, someone who seemed forever anxious not to give offence.
Nice
was a word that came to Cairney's mind. Kevin's brother Thomas, known to his political enemies as Grinning Tommy, was the President of the United States. Cairney often wondered if Kevin Dawson's membership in the Fund-raisers was the young man's way of compensating for the fact that his brother occupied the White House, as if Kevin were carving out his own special territory where his imposing brother couldn't and wouldn't go.

The other man in the room, Nicholas Linney, barely glanced at Cairney as he sat down. Linney was a man of the New Age, happy with spreadsheets and computerised data and satisfied, in a way that was almost sexual, with vast networks of interconnected intelligence. Linney's face had a peculiar hue, something like the colour of an unroasted coffee bean. Maybe, the senator reflected, it came from staring at small green letters on screens all the day long. But there was a sense of controlled violence about Linney, hidden pressures. Harry Cairney always had the feeling that Linney would gladly have blown up his computers and torched his spreadsheets for a chance to go out into the direct line of battle. He could imagine Nick Linney skulking the alleys of Belfast with a rifle stuck underneath his overcoat and hatred for British soldiers in his heart. He was, in fact, a gun freak, and it was rumoured that he took himself off to isolated beaches with his firearms and shot round after round into watermelons or pumpkins or any kind of fruit or vegetable that suggested, however remotely, a human skull.

‘Gentlemen,' Cairney said when he was seated. There was a breathless quality to his voice, the result of the simple act of coming down a flight of stairs. He felt as if his lungs were dried out and useless, withered inside his chest like two prunes.

The three men watched him now, each seemingly wary of what he might have to say. He clasped his hands on the table. ‘Big Jock' Mulhaney, as the press always called the man who led and allegedly mismanaged a branch of the most powerful trade union in the United States, puffed his lips out like a bloated goldfish and remarked, ‘Let's get down to it, Senator. Let's get down to the brass tacks. Let's just cut the fucking gentlemen shit.'

The former senator winced. Mulhaney had been born with a talent for gracelessness, the way some people are cursed with muscular dystrophy.

Harry Cairney looked down at the polished surface of the table. He was aware of the sound of his young wife moving in the room immediately above.

‘We've been ripped off,' Mulhaney said. ‘Why don't we boil it down to that? We've been shafted.'

‘As you say,' Harry Cairney agreed. ‘We've been shafted.'

‘So the only question is who the fuck did it,' Mulhaney said.

There was a quietness in the room now, as if all sound had seeped out from a crack in the wall. Harry Cairney recognised what lay under the silence – there was mistrust, a sense of treachery, a certain lopsided tension that went back and forth between the four men in the room. This animus was sharp and cutting and fearful. The Fund-raisers had been contaminated. The suspicion in the room was as tangible as the presence of an uninvited guest.

Linney opened a folder and said, ‘The total loss is ten point two million dollars in used currency and negotiable bonds.'

‘I don't think figures are in dispute,' Cairney said, and his voice was feeble.

‘Damned right they're not in dispute,' Mulhaney said. For a second he grinned his most charming grin, the one he always used when he walked in the vanguard of the St. Patrick's Day Parade on Fifth Avenue, his green sash across his big broad chest and his lips faintly green from the dye neighbourhood bars introduced into their beers. ‘What we've got to consider here, friends, is a matter of betrayal.'

Harry Cairney rubbed his eyes. ‘You don't imagine that somebody in this room is responsible for the piracy?' This idea shook him, but it was a reality he knew he had to face even if the notion of a traitor in the ranks was a blasphemy. But if it hadn't been one of the Fund-raisers, then who the hell
had
taken the money? His eyes moved from one man to the next around the table, but what could he possibly tell from their faces? Mulhaney's accusative look, Dawson's tentative expression, Nick Linney's tightly drawn lips – appearances could hide almost anything.

Mulhaney ran a fingertip round the rim of his brandy glass. ‘There are four of us in this goddam room, and each one of us knew the destination of the ship as well as the route and the cargo she carried.' The big man paused. ‘The conclusion's goddam obvious.'

‘We can't assume that one of us is responsible,' Kevin Dawson said in his high-pitched voice. It was a voice that would keep Dawson out of public politics because it didn't fill a room and it couldn't be used to project anything solemn. Whenever he grew excited, he could sound like a man on helium gas. ‘I don't see any justification for that.'

‘Don't you now?' Mulhaney, who had always disliked anything to do with the Dawsons and resented what he thought of as Kevin Dawson's privileged world – old Connecticut money, the fucking landed gentry with all its feudal powers, big brother in the White House – was adopting one of his characteristic attitudes, a certain snide belligerence. ‘Do you have a better suggestion, Dawson?'

Kevin Dawson answered in a patient way. ‘I don't see any merit in leaping to conclusions, Jock. That's all.'

‘Conclusions,' Mulhaney snorted. He had a habit of forcing words out through his nasal passages. ‘You're a fence-sitter, Dawson. You're never happy unless you're politely perched on some fucking fence.'

Dawson tilted his chair back, said nothing.

Again silence. Cairney stared through the window at the waters of Roscommon Lake. He thought of a small dark ship gunned on the high seas. Blood on the waters. For too many years now, back as far as the old days at the Clan-na-Gael in Philadelphia and the Irish Republican Brotherhood, back as far as the times when the Cause had been glad to receive a few Thompson submachine guns and several thousand cartridges in the 1930s from their American sympathisers, he'd been promoting the Cause and raising funds secretively and nothing was more demanding, more exhausting, than secrecy, a darkly brooding mistress. Even Celestine, and Kathleen before her, had no idea about Cairney's activities.