Jig (67 page)

‘You haven't answered my question,' Pagan said.

Cairney couldn't take his eyes from the window. He needed to kill. It was the first time in his life that he felt he really
needed
to shed blood. Beyond that lit window were the men who had slain Finn. The butchers. ‘McInnes is telling the truth. This isn't a trap.'

Frank Pagan sighed. It was when McInnes had mentioned Finn that the atmosphere of the room in the Essex House had changed. Jig bought the whole story. Everything. Lock and stock and all the rest of it. He remembered Finn's name from his files, recalled the mystery of the man who was said to have controlled the finances of the IRA, and what he wondered about now was the nature of the relationship between Jig and Finn. Ever since McInnes had pronounced the man dead, ever since that phone call had been placed to Ireland, Jig had gone into a place that was beyond Pagan's reach. A place where with every passing moment it seemed to Pagan that something quite volcanic was going on inside of the man. Pagan thought about taking his chance now, grabbing the gun in Jig's hand and seizing it. But he wasn't going to be lulled by Jig's apparent distraction or the volatile nature of his mood.

Cairney said, ‘McInnes was right about Finn. He was right about the Ryder truck.'

‘He said four men checked into this hotel. The guy at the desk says three.'

‘McInnes got his numbers wrong. That's all.'

Pagan asked, ‘Have you ever heard of this Houlihan?'

Cairney pressed his fingertips to his eyes. There was a dull pain behind them. He thought he heard the sound of his whole life collapsing inside him. ‘Pagan, I don't know the name of every person associated with the IRA. We're talking about a large and secretive organisation arranged in cells. It's highly unlikely that I'd know the man.'

Patrick Cairney continued to study the motel. A balcony ran the length of the upper floor, studded here and there with dim overhead lights. Across the forecourt two neon signs shimmered. One read VACANCY. The tension he felt was strong, like acid rising inside him. He tried to relax, tried to put his mind in a place beyond Finn. There isn't time for this, he thought. Finn wouldn't want you to grieve over him. What Finn would want was retribution, plain and simple.
Get on with it, boy. Don't dwell on death. People come and people go, only the Cause remains
. All at once Cairney was standing in Glasnevin Cemetery and Finn was handing him a revolver, and Cairney wished now that he'd reached out – just once in the whole time he'd known Finn – and goddam
held
him. On that day. Or any other. Just once. Somewhere. But death took everything away, sealed all the hatches, killed all the possibilities, and whatever he felt now for Finn could never be said.

‘You've only got McInnes's word,' Pagan said, with the air of a man making one last plea which he knows in advance will be useless. ‘You've only got his word that the men in this motel are responsible for all the violence. In my book, Jig, that's a damn frail thing to go on.'

Cairney looked at Pagan. ‘Your own story was also frail, if you remember. And I accepted it, didn't I? I accepted the story you told me about McInnes, didn't I? It was me who decided to take a chance on you, Pagan, and go back to New York City.'

‘There's a difference,' Pagan said. ‘I don't lie.'

Cairney returned his eyes to the balcony. Then he glanced across the parking-area at the yellow truck. It dully reflected the neon signs.

‘So what now?' Pagan asked. ‘Do you go in? Is that your scheme? Do you go in with your six-gun drawn and your fingers crossed?'

Pagan lowered his face wearily against the rim of the steering-wheel. He was tired of arguing the case against McInnes. Besides, Jig was running this show. Jig had the guns. It was Jig's baby. And if Jig wanted to believe Ivor, if he wanted to believe that the men inside this motel were some renegade faction of the IRA, well that was the way it was going to be, and there was nothing Pagan could do or say to change it.

Cairney tapped the barrel of his gun against the dash, a quiet little tattoo. ‘You're going in with me.'

‘Right,' Pagan said. ‘Unarmed, of course.'

Cairney reached inside the pocket of his overcoat and took out Pagan's gun, the Bernardelli.

‘I can't do this alone,' Cairney said.

Pagan stared at his own gun. He made no move to take it from Jig's hand.

Cairney realised that this gesture could easily backfire. He was holding the gun out, reaching across a gulf that was far more than the handful of inches separating him from Frank Pagan. But what was the alternative? If he went in alone against the three men, his chances were very thin. Besides, that would entail leaving Frank Pagan right here in the car – and Pagan might just sneak away to make a phone call, bringing in reinforcements. It was possible. Cairney, who knew he was gambling, dangled the Bernardelli in the air.

‘I can't do this alone,' he said again.

‘Goddam,' Pagan said.

‘I
need
you, Pagan. Take the gun.'

‘Then what?'

Cairney said, ‘I don't think you're going to shoot me in the back, Pagan. You had a chance at that already on Canal Street.'

Pagan still didn't take the weapon. He kept his hands clamped to the wheel.

Cairney thrust the Bernardelli forward. ‘There are three men in this place, Pagan. They shot up a school bus, and they bombed a church. More than that, they killed Padraic Finn. That's all I need to know.'

Pagan suddenly hated the idea that he was transparent to Jig. Jig saw straight through him. Jig understood there was no way in the world, given Pagan's private code of behaviour – which was bound up with such antiquated notions as decency and honour and justice, the very sounds of which suggested they belonged in their own room in the British Museum – that Pagan would turn the weapon on him. Frank Pagan wished he were devious, that he had hidden lodes of cunning and could simply take his gun back and shoot Jig through the eyes and drive away from this place, forgetting the three men allegedly responsible for so many deaths. Praise from The Yard. Love and kisses from Furry Jake. Fuck them. Fuck them all. He didn't need their pressures. He'd do this thing his own way. And if it meant going up to that balcony with Jig, then that's what he'd do.

He raised his hand, brought it out towards the gun, didn't touch it.

‘Imagine this, Jig,' he said. ‘We go in there. There's gunplay. We come out again intact. What then? Do you expect me to hand this weapon back like a good little boy? Because I have no bloody intention of doing that.'

Cairney didn't respond to the question. He couldn't see that far into the future. Nor did it matter. He turned his face back to the balcony.

‘It's one of those unanswerable questions, is it?' Pagan asked. ‘We play it as it comes.'

‘There's no other way.'

Pagan took the pistol from Jig's fingers.

Jig opened the door of the Dodge. The night air that came in was cold and smelled of damp leaves and the musty odour of the river. Honour and decency and a sense of justice, Pagan thought. They weren't always wonderful qualities to bring into a situation, but they were inherent in him, a perception that irritated him. Why couldn't he have been more
sly?
He opened his own door now and stared up in the direction of the balcony. Another man might simply have shot Jig there and then. But he wasn't that man, nor could he ever be.

A figure appeared overhead.

Cairney and Pagan, drifting into the gloom beneath the balcony, heard the footsteps rap on concrete. There was the sound of a key turning in a lock, a door opening, closing. Some yards away a flight of iron stairs led to the upper storey. Cairney and Pagan moved quietly towards them.

Jig started to climb. Pagan was surprised by the way the man moved, swiftly and yet without a whisper of sound. He was like a bloody shadow rising, something created by the moon amid latticed metalwork. He appeared not to have substance, weight. Pagan felt clumsy and leaden and
old
by comparison. When they reached the balcony Jig stopped. Two lit windows threw lights out at an oblique angle ten yards ahead of them.

Pagan pressed himself flat against the wall, echoing the way Jig moved. He didn't like the idea of creeping towards the window where the lights now seemed rather bright to him. If
he
had been running this show, he might have chosen to wait outside in the parked car until morning, when at least there would be the definite benefit of visibility.

There was a noise from along the balcony. A door swung open. Framed faintly by electricity from the room behind him, a man appeared. He was holding what looked like two automatic rifles, one stuck under either arm. He struggled to remove a key from his pocket, which he did do in an awkward way, then he turned and somehow contrived to lock the door.

When he'd done this to his satisfaction he started to move towards the place where Pagan and Jig stood. Then, seeing them for the first time, he stopped dead. His features were indistinct but Pagan had the impression that the man's mouth hung open in astonishment.

For a long time there was no movement. It seemed to Pagan that the place had been drained of air, that there was nothing to breathe. Then the man stepped forward and, as if it were the most natural thing in the whole world to be carrying automatic weapons under your arms, moved to the door of the room adjacent to the one he'd just left. He raised his knee and rapped it upon the wood panels.

Somebody opened the door from inside. Pagan saw a heavy shadow fall across the threshold. The character holding the weapons made to step inside when Jig, suddenly going down on one knee like a determined marksman, fired off a shot. Pagan heard it whine in the dark, glancing against concrete. The man with the weapons turned and faced them and this time Pagan was certain that the expression on his face was one of pure astonishment. The man dropped one of the rifles and clutched at the other, trying to swing it into a firing position. Before he could even get a decent grip on the gun, Jig had shot him.

The man was knocked sideways, sprawling against the handrail. The rifle flew out of his arms and clattered across the balcony. Somebody ducked out of the room, grabbed the automatic weapons up, then vanished back inside, slamming the door shut.

All this happened so swiftly that Pagan felt like a spectator at a deadly game. He looked at the body lying halfway along the balcony, face tipped back, legs crooked. Jig was still incautiously pressing forward, his spine flat against the wall. There was more determination than foresight in the way Jig was conducting business here, and Pagan didn't like it, but he felt trapped inside a sequence of events over which he had no control. He weighed his own gun in his hand and realised that the back of Jig's skull made a perfect target for him. The simplest thing in the world, he thought. One shot. One well-placed shot.
Finis
. But it wasn't simple at all.

He saw Jig going towards the light that spilled out of the open doorway five yards ahead. Pagan crouched and followed.

Seamus Houlihan shoved one of the weapons into McGrath's arms. It was rammed with such force into McGrath's body that the man was momentarily winded.

‘Who the fuck is out there?' McGrath asked. His face was white. One minute there had been cards and beer and the prospect of going home to Ireland, the next gunfire.

‘The enemy,' Houlihan replied. He went closer to the door, opened it a fraction.

‘What bloody enemy?' McGrath asked.

‘You name it, McGrath. People like you and me don't have many friends.' Houlihan sniffed the air coming in through the open door. He could see, even though the angle was narrow, the outline of Rorke's body lying some feet away on the balcony. When he'd stepped outside a moment ago to retrieve the weapons there hadn't been time to assess the strength of the enemy. Houlihan had been conscious only of the need to get the guns as fast as he could, which he'd done successfully because the enemy was concentrating on Rorke at that point.

Seamus Houlihan picked up the pint of Johnny Walker from the table, took a long swallow, then slid the bottle to McGrath. McGrath drank. When he was finished he set the bottle down on top of the playing cards. He noticed that his last hand, which had gone unplayed, was a reasonable flush. Good hand. But Houlihan would have beaten it somehow. The big man always did.

‘We better get the fuck out of here,' Houlihan said.

McGrath appeared hesitant. ‘We don't know how many are out there,' he said.

‘Does it make any difference? Do you want to sit here and let them come for you? Fuck that!' For a long time now Houlihan had expected to die a violent death. His whole world had been so circumscribed by violence that the notion of a peaceful death, of slipping away in his sleep, was a bad joke. His father had been shot by the IRA in Derry. His brother, Jimmy Houlihan, had been blown up inside a Protestant bar in Belfast at Christmas 1975. Why would he expect his own end to be any different? He clutched the M-16, checked the clip.

He'd gone out once before, and his luck had held. But he wasn't going to risk going out again unless he had the gun blazing in front of him. He had absolutely no fear of death. It neither mystified nor terrified. He had chosen combat as a way of life, and the simple fact was that you lived through combat or you died in the throes of it. Death had no metaphysical implications for him. He believed more in an M-16 than in any God. He was thinking suddenly about Waddy, who'd held some superstitious beliefs, and what he hoped was that he could live through any forthcoming conflict because he'd promised himself that he'd give Waddy a decent burial. Poor wee Waddy.

Houlihan went closer to the door. It occurred to him for the first time that he and the others had been sold out. And that the seller had to be McInnes. Even this realisation neither distressed nor surprised him. In his world treachery was just another fact of life. People said one thing, then did the opposite. It had always been this way, and it always would be. He just wished he'd been better prepared. But at least he hadn't obeyed Ivor's demand to toss the guns. At least there was that, and he was glad he'd made that decision. He looked out into the darkness. There was perfect silence. The night held all sounds like a bloody miser, giving nothing away. He glanced at McGrath, whose face was colourless. Then he turned his eyes back to the door.