Jig (58 page)

‘Get his ID,' the taller man said.

The other, waving the gun near Pagan's face, plunged his hand inside Pagan's jacket and took out his wallet.

The taller man reached for the wallet and flipped it open. ‘He's a long way from home,' he said.

‘Yeah,' the other man said. ‘You ever seen ID like this before, Marco?'

Marco stepped so close Pagan could smell his aftershave. ‘Never did,' he said.

‘Me neither.' The wallet was flipped shut. ‘We got absolutely no way of knowing if it's authentic.'

‘I came to see Dawson,' Pagan said.

Marco laughed. ‘They all say that, don't they, Chuckie?'

‘Mr. Dawson doesn't just see people who wander in off the street, fella,' Chuckie said.

‘Unhappily, I didn't have time to make an appointment.'

‘Call the cops,' Marco said.

‘Before you call anybody, you better tell Dawson I'm here, because he's going to be damned unhappy with you if he doesn't get to hear what I have to say.'

Marco came closer. He pushed his knee into the back of Pagan's leg, pressing deep into the crook. Pagan was obliged to bend under the pressure. He loathed being shoved around, and if it had been Marco alone he might have taken a swing.

‘I don't have the time nor the inclination for this kind of intimacy, Marco.' Pagan spoke in his best accent, trying hard to sound the way Foxie did. He wasn't very good with upper-class accents and he wouldn't have convinced anyone in the gentlemen's clubs along Pall Mall or Piccadilly, but neither Chuckie nor Marco could tell he was faking it. It was a strange thing about Americans. They had a kind of self-imposed sense of inferiority, possibly some old colonial hangover, that put them in awe of Oxford tones, as if the accent of a BBC newscaster were the way God talked. Pagan had noticed this phenomenon before. It worked now, at least to the extent of Marco removing the pressure from Pagan's leg.

‘Buddy, you and a thousand other guys come here wanting to see
Mister
Dawson,' Chuckie said. ‘Your fancy ID isn't going to cut it here, bozo.'

Pagan turned around and faced the pair. ‘Look. Take my ID card. Show it to him. Tell him it has to do with certain Irish funds. Do that for me.'

‘Irish funds?'

‘You heard me.'

Marco reached out and took Pagan's ID. He flexed the powder-blue plastic card between thumb and forefinger, as if he meant to snap it in half. Then he glanced at Chuckie, who shrugged. It was a bad moment for Pagan. If either of these characters took the trouble to run his name through a computer, and if he was already imprisoned in the complicated circuitry of the FBI's electronic brain, then he was in deep trouble. The only thing to do was to be insistent with Marco and Chuckie. And authoritative, if he could summon the dignity for a decent performance.

‘If Dawson doesn't want to see me, I'll be happy to let you turn me over to any cops you like,' he said. He sounded as if he had a plum in his throat. ‘But I know he'll want to talk to me. It's up to you.'

Marco hummed. He looked at Chuckie again. The black glasses glinted, four sombre discs.

‘I'll take your card inside, fella,' he said. ‘But Chuckie here is going to keep his gun pointed right at your brain, understand?'

Pagan nodded. Marco, who obviously didn't want Pagan to think he was a softie just because he'd consented to something, performed his knee trick again, only this time he pressed so hard that Pagan had to go down on all fours.

‘
Understand?
' Marco asked.

‘I understand,' Pagan replied. He felt like a barnyard animal pawing earth.

‘If he moves shoot him, Chuckie.'

Chuckie said he'd be glad to. Pagan rose slowly, watching Marco go off in the direction of the house, which was very still, silent, the windows reflecting the glacial sun. He moved his feet in an uneasy manner. Marco could at this very moment be running his name across the telephone wires and into the ear of a computer operator. That would be the end of this solo performance, Pagan thought. He brushed little streaks of mud from his overcoat and waited.

Marco appeared in the doorway of the house. He waved an arm. Chuckie, who still had his gun trained on Pagan, jerked his head.

‘Move,' Chuckie said.

Pagan moved. Chuckie walked behind him. When they reached the house Marco said, ‘He'll see you.'

Pagan smiled. Marco ushered him inside and across the hallway with a great show of reluctance. Outside a closed door Marco paused and slipped off his black glasses and stared at Pagan with eyes that were almost the same colour as the lenses.

‘We'll be right here, Pagan,' he said. ‘Right on this spot.'

‘Of course,' Pagan said.

‘Go in.'

Pagan pushed the door open and stepped inside a large sitting-room which was furnished in a fussy Victorian way, heavy furniture and belljars, and which was scented with violets. Children's toys and books were scattered on the floor, as if there had been small untidy intruders in the museum. A blind was drawn halfway down on a window, tinting the room a faint yellow. The man who stood by the fireplace cleared his throat and looked at Pagan unsmilingly. Kevin Dawson was taller than his photographs suggested. He held Pagan's ID card in one hand.

‘Let's get one thing straight. I don't know anything about any Irish funds,' Dawson said.

The defence of ignorance. Kevin Dawson talked like a man conscious of a hidden tape-recorder, somebody who wanted to leave an exonerating cassette for posterity. He understood Dawson's attitude – after all, the brother of the President of the United States couldn't confess to a complete stranger that he had any involvement with the finances of the IRA. There were laws against the unreported export of huge sums of cash. And Kevin Dawson couldn't be seen to break the law.

‘So why did you agree to see me?' Pagan asked.

‘Your ID made me curious,' Dawson said. ‘But if you've come here to question me, I think you're going to be very frustrated.'

‘I'm not the one who's going to be frustrated,' Pagan said. He moved to the window and looked out beyond the trees at the surrounding hills. It was a view he found depressing and somehow fascinating in a melancholic way. He rapped his fingertips on the pane of glass. ‘I don't give a damn one way or another about IRA money or the misguided people who collect the stuff. I'm only interested in Jig, who is either going to come here looking for you, or else is on his way to a place called Roscommon to see Harry Cairney. I'm guessing here, but I may be completely wrong. If he
does
come here, I want to be somewhere nearby. I don't want your buffoons out there getting him first.'

‘Hold on, Pagan. You're losing me. I don't know anything about the IRA. I don't know who Jig is. The only connection I have with Ireland is that I'm third-generation American–Irish. That and the fact I've visited the place a couple of times. Nothing more.'

Pagan smiled. Dawson's deadpan expression wasn't very successful. The man was palpably uneasy. If he was in control of himself, it was only with a great effort. There was sweat on his upper lip.

‘Regardless of what you say, Jig's going to get here sooner or later. He wants his money back, and he's not going to be in the most pleasant frame of mind by this time,' Pagan said.

Kevin Dawson made a small gesture with one hand, a flutter. ‘I don't know anything about any money.'

‘That's what you say. But Jig isn't going to believe that one.' Pagan glanced through the window again. This whole side of the house was exposed to the hills. And something about those hills kept drawing him. The shaded pockets in the landscape, the sunlight. They had a certain mysterious quality, similar to the landscape of the English Lake District which Pagan had always found brooding and hostile. A landscape for poets and manic depressives.

But it wasn't just those qualities that made him keep looking up there. He was thinking about something else. He placed an index-finger on the glass and drew a tiny circle, which he peered through as if it were the sight of a gun.

‘Good view,' he said.

‘Some people think it's too severe,' Dawson remarked.

Dawson moved to the mantelpiece and adjusted a photograph. Pagan saw that it was of two girls, presumably Dawson's daughters. Dawson turned around, faced Pagan. ‘This Jig,' he said, then paused a moment. ‘Do you have any hard evidence he's in this vicinity? Or is it only guesswork?'

‘Nicholas Linney wouldn't think it was guesswork,' Pagan said.

‘Who?'

‘It doesn't matter.' Pagan glanced back up into the hills. Sunlight turned to deep shadow in the high hollows. Dawson was a very poor liar. He didn't have the flair for it. Therefore he had no future in politics, Pagan thought. ‘How did you get into it in the first place?'

‘Into what?'

‘You know what I'm talking about. How did you get into the patriot game?'

‘When did I stop beating my wife?' Dawson said. ‘It's that kind of a question.'

Pagan felt a small flare of anger. People like Dawson played at being Irish. They bought their way into it from the safety of their big houses in America. They sent money as if they were investing in offshore developments. Well, their houses just weren't so safe any more. ‘Do you have any idea of the sheer human misery your money can buy in Ireland? Do you know what explosive devices can do to a person? Have you ever seen the victim of a machine-gun? Or did you just get caught up in the
romance
of it all?' And Pagan made the word ‘romance' sound obscene. ‘If people like you didn't send money there in the first place, maybe there wouldn't be weapons, and maybe we'd be moving in the direction of some kind of peace. Who knows?'

‘There are always going to be weapons,' Dawson said.

Pagan shrugged. ‘Here's the funny consequence of it all, Dawson. If you run into Jig, you'll be looking directly down the barrel of a gun that you probably paid for yourself. How does that thought grab you?'

‘Is your lecture over?' Dawson asked.

‘It's over,' Pagan replied. Ease off, he told himself. You're here looking for Jig, not to moralise on terror in Ireland. He felt a cord of tension at the side of his head. There was stress in him, and fatigue, and he felt like a traveller who wasn't sure he'd come to the right place anyway. No, he couldn't afford to go off at tangents like that. He'd come too far and he had the feeling, that astonishing lightbulb of intuition, that he was on the right track.

‘I'm sorry if I can't help you,' Dawson said. ‘Maybe you'll have better luck at the other place you mentioned.'

‘You mean Roscommon?' Pagan asked.

‘I believe that's what you said. Roscommon.'

‘Where Harry Cairney lives. But you don't know that name either, do you?'

Dawson shook his head. ‘I know it in a political context. That's all.'

‘And I suppose Jock Mulhaney means nothing to you?'

‘He's some kind of union figure,' Dawson said.

‘You might say that.'

Dawson stepped towards the door. He pulled it open, looked at Pagan with a smile that was almost all desperation. He couldn't be honest, couldn't admit his connections. Denials were vouchers for limited amounts, valid for limited durations. And no matter how hard Dawson denied his involvement, it wasn't going to make a damn bit of difference to Jig. If Jig came here and somehow sneaked past Mannie and Moe outside, if he got into the house and confronted Dawson, he wasn't going to be even remotely convinced by Dawson's squeaky claims of innocence.

‘Good luck, Pagan,' Kevin Dawson said.

‘I wish you the same, only more of it.'

Pagan stepped out into the hallway where the two bodyguards were waiting for him. Behind him, the door of the room closed, and Kevin Dawson was gone.

‘We'll see you out,' Marco said.

‘No need.' Pagan headed to the door. Chuckie and Marco tailed him anyhow.

Outside in the thin light Pagan studied the view of the hills again. They seemed to him the most interesting aspect of his visit to this place.

From the place where he lay concealed in the hills, Patrick Cairney stared down at the house below. He saw Frank Pagan walk to his car.

Frank Pagan. Always Frank Pagan. Always one step behind him. He wondered where Pagan's information came from. Maybe Mulhaney had talked. Maybe Mulhaney had told Pagan the same thing as he'd told Cairney.
Kevin Dawson took the money. Dawson is the one
.

Ten minutes ago he'd seen Pagan arrive. There had been a confrontation with the two men who guarded the house, then Pagan had gone indoors. Had he come to warn Kevin Dawson about Jig? Was that it?

Now he saw Pagan get inside the car, then drive along the narrow road. Cairney followed him with the binoculars until he was out of sight. He swung the glasses back towards the house and tried to concentrate on how he was going to get inside. He had to get past the two guards. How, though? And how long was it until nightfall now? His body was cold, and he felt cramped. He lowered the binoculars and looked along the ridge, his eye sweeping the wintry trees and the dead grass that swayed limply in the wind. He couldn't concentrate. His mind kept slipping away from him and the wind made him shiver.

There were spectral images.
His father trapped under an oxygen tent like something immersed in ectoplasm
. He couldn't shake this one loose. Harry Cairney, close to the end of his life, propped up inside an oxygen tent with tubes attached like tendrils to his body. There was a terrifying sadness inside Patrick Cairney, and a sense of loss – it came from the thought that he might never see Harry again. It didn't matter whether he loved his father or not. It didn't matter whether he even respected the man. Like any son facing the imminent death of his father, he felt he was about to lose some essential part of himself.