Jig (9 page)

Jig shrugged. The compliment was unexpected and quite uncharacteristic of Finn. He wasn't sure how to take it. ‘It went off as we planned.' It was all he could think of to say.

‘And you'll do a fine job in America too, because I want you
and
our money back here in one piece. That money means a lot, boy. Without it …'

‘I understand,' Jig said.

Finn clapped the palm of his hand against the young man's shoulder. ‘Remember this. If it becomes unpleasant at any time in America – and you know what I mean by that – your life is more important to me than any one of the Fund-raisers.' And then, as if this confession were something he regretted, he turned away from Jig.

‘Let's talk about the cash you'll need for this trip,' he said, and once again set the harp strings dancing with flourishes of his hands.

Finn slept for thirty minutes after Jig had gone. It was troubled sleep and he woke with the feeling of having dreamed something disastrous that he couldn't recall on waking. Something to do with Jig.

When he got up, he went into the bathroom to shave. He studied his face in the mirror awhile. It was a lean, chiselled face, crisscrossed by lines and filled with small hollows under the cheekbones. What Finn saw looking back at him from the mirror was a man who had a special sense of history at a special time.

The idea of founding the Association of the Wolfe had come to him when he perceived the general disunity of the Cause, when he had seen the need for strong hands on the financial reins. Secretive centralised planning was the answer to the outrages of the
eedjit
rabble. If you didn't give the hotheads money, how could they buy weapons and explosives for their little sorties in Belfast and on the English mainland, when all they ever got was a damned bad press?

The ultimate goal of the Association was that old dream – to get the British out of the North and unite Ireland once and for all. Two separate Irelands was as much a travesty of history as two separate Germanies. An artificial border, created by the English and maintained by its soldiers, was a farce, a rupture inflicted by the politics of hatred. The Association was named after Wolfe Tone who in 1796 had attempted to land 12,000 French soldiers on Bantry Bay to help overthrow English supremacy. When the mission failed and Tone was captured, he asked for death before a firing squad, cutting his own throat when this request was denied.

Finn believed in selective assassination. He had a list of intended victims, which was composed mainly of British politicians who were against the prospect of a united Ireland. The list also included several Northern Irish diehards, those iron-skulled morons, like Ivor McInnes, who swore on their own lives that the Union Jack would always fly over Belfast, that Ulster would always belong to the Queen. If you systematically assassinated enough of these jackasses, sooner or later the cost in blood was going to prove too expensive to the English. They'd be happy to leave Ulster, which was something they should have done years ago if they'd had any decency – which they clearly did not have.

Finn turned away from the mirror. He had a sense of things slipping away from him. Without control of the purse, how could he control the extremists? But now the purse was gone, and the thought brought a bitter taste into his mouth. Liam O'Reilly was dead. So was the Courier. Finn closed his eyes and observed a quiet moment of mourning for old comrades, both members of the Association.

He went down the stairs. In his small office, a spartan room with a desk and a chair and bare white walls, he picked up the telephone. He began to dial a number but stopped halfway through and set the phone back. What was he going to say? What was he going to tell the Saint? He stood at the window, stroking his jaw. What in God's name was he supposed to say? The Saint didn't believe in credit. He was always in a hurry to deliver his goods and get paid.

Finn picked up the telephone a second time. He dialled nervously. It was a number in the port city of Rostock in East Germany. It rang only once before it was picked up. Finn spoke his name.

The voice at the other end was guttural New York City. ‘I got tired waiting, Finn.'

Finn said nothing a moment. The connection was poor. ‘There's been a problem. A cash problem.'

‘Maybe for you, Finn. I ain't got problems.'

Finn saw a blackbird fly past his window.
Pack up all my cares and woe
, he thought. ‘Listen to me. I need some time.'

‘Time's run out, fella. You know how much it costs when you got a Greek boat to rent? When you got an Arab crew that sits round on its duff all day and they still gotta get paid? Then you add the fact I got harbour personnel to grease here. You know how much that runs, Finn?'

Finn's throat was dry. ‘I need a week. Maybe more than a week.'

‘Tough titty,' the guy said. ‘I'm trying to tell ya, Finn. You're shit outta luck, man.'

‘What do you mean? What do you mean I'm out of luck?'

‘I got tired waiting. I already sold the cargo, Finn.'

‘
You did what?
' Finn shouted. ‘
You did what?
'

‘Guy came up with a good offer. I said sure thing. What the hell. I wanna sit round in Rostock for the rest of my life, Finn? Wait for you?'

‘This is a joke,' Finn said. His voice was very low, even. A nerve had begun to work at the side of his head.

‘No joke. I don't joke about my cargo –'

‘You sold it! How could you
do
such a thing like that, in the name of Jesus!'

‘Hey, it ain't like you and me had a written contract, pal. You wanna sue? Be my guest.'

Finn shut his eyes tightly. First the money. Now a whole boatload of arms and explosives. The very air he breathed seemed poisoned with treacheries.

‘You're trying to tell me a buyer just came along? Out of the bloody blue?'

‘Right,' the Saint said. ‘I'm a businessman, Finn. This is a business. I gotta sell. I gotta eat.'

‘Who was this buyer?'

‘I can't answer a dumb question like that.'

‘Who was he?' Finn trembled with rage.

‘Hey, Finn. I don't ask questions. Guy paid, I delivered. Simple and clean. Now I just wanna get my ass outta this town, which I intend to do in the next few hours. This ain't exactly a day at the beach, Finn. You ever been in Rostock?'

‘I'd like to know the name of this person.'

There was a crackling sound over the line. The Saint said, ‘Listen, Finn. I keep confidences. Understand? The guy who took delivery of the cargo, he was a South American. A Venezuelan or something. He waved cold cash and I took it. That's all I'm saying.'

Finn said, ‘I'll go elsewhere. I'll find another supplier! Damn you –'

The line was already dead. Finn slammed down the receiver. He sat, dismayed, spreading his arms on his desk and laying his face against them.

The shipment was gone
.

He raised his face. A bloody Venezuelan! A bloody Venezuelan had purchased the whole boatload of arms and high-tech explosives, for Christ's sake! Probably to waste them in some fucking futile border skirmish that didn't matter a damn in the scheme of things. An arms shipment like that took
months
to put together. If Jig recovered the missing money, Finn thought he could set up another deal, but not through the Saint, who, like most of his mercenary kind, didn't have much in the way of honour and loyalty. But it would take time to make another deal, and Finn wasn't very patient. God in heaven, he'd lived all his life with his dream of a free Ireland, from the time he was a small boy in Bantry and all through his years of service with the IRA, when he'd done everything a man could do. He'd planted bombs in England. He'd robbed mail trains. During the Second World War he'd gone into Northern Ireland to sabotage a British troop ship that was carrying soldiers to fight in Europe. A lot of blood had been spilled in pursuit of the dream. A lot of fine men had died.

But without weapons and explosives, you might as well hang a
CLOSED
sign on your door. If Jig didn't recover the money, it was back to homemade hand grenades and other dubious devices that were absolutely undependable. Which meant he couldn't keep up the pressure on the English to get out of Ulster. If Finn was truly afraid of anything, it was the idea of dying before he saw his dream come true.

He turned his thoughts to Jig.

There was a lot riding on that young man's shoulders. Jig had never let him down in the past, no matter how difficult or complicated the task. But this was something altogether different. Apart from Tumulty, Jig would have no support in America. There was no network in place to assist him if he needed help over there. And there was no network for the simple reason that Finn had never imagined the need for Jig to operate in the USA. Scoundrels, he thought. All of them, from the Fundraisers to the Saint, a scurvy blackhearted bunch.

It was more than the lack of a network, though, that troubled Finn now. And it was more than the treachery of men. It was the fact that Jig, who had been highly trained to kill men, was going into a situation where his particular form of expertise wasn't going to be of any damned use to him. He wasn't going to be called upon to plant explosive devices or track some potential victim through the scope of a sniper's rifle. He was being asked to do something in which he had utterly no experience. He was being asked to
investigate
a crime. To solve a specific problem.
To sleuth
.

Finn had a strange lurching sensation around his heart.
You're sending an assassin into a situation that calls for a detective's talents
. In the name of God, Finn, what have you done? Have you asked the impossible of that boy? Have you packed him off to be devoured by bloody Yankee vultures?

But there was nobody else to send. There was no other man Finn could trust. It was really that simple. He could have enlisted some young hothead who would have gone blundering into America, but what good would that have done? If anybody could get that money back, it was Jig. From the very start of their association Finn had seen a dark streak in the boy, an unrelenting determination in his heart. He was the stuff of an assassin. He had nerves of marble and a hawk's fastidious eye for detail. He had required careful shaping, of course. He had needed the rough edges smoothed away. Some of his political notions had been naive and idealistic back when the young man had first been brought to Finn's attention. Finn remembered now how Jig had hung around the fringes of political action groups in Dublin, acquiring a certain notoriety for his habit of espousing extremism and advocating grand gestures – such as the bombing of Buckingham Palace or the Houses of Parliament. For security reasons, Finn never attended such meetings himself. They were too easily infiltrated by plainclothes Garda and other enemies of the Cause, but the old man had a network of people who brought him reports – who was saying what, the kinds of schemes being plotted, anything that might intrigue Finn. In enthusiasms and energy, in the stark apocalyptic suggestions he carelessly made, Jig had put Finn in mind of his own younger self – the raw boy from Bantry who wanted to change the world with one grand stroke. Ah, the innocence of it all! The sheer unfettered naïvety! But the possibilities inherent in the young man – these were the things that had interested Finn most.

His first private meeting with the boy took place in an isolated bird sanctuary at Booterstown on Dublin Bay where, surrounded by squalls of gulls and anxiously watchful wading birds, Finn had talked of the need for patience and careful judgment when it came to the problem of getting the British out. He had deliberately circled his real purpose in interviewing the young man, which was his own need for a person who could become the kind of assassin required by the Association of the Wolfe. Was this boy the one? Or was his impulsive streak unharnessable? These were the early days of the Association and Finn, disgusted by the outbreak of IRA bombings and killings on the British mainland, spoke of the importance of selective assassination. There, at Booterstown, knocked by a harsh wind and the cuffs of his pants caked with soft mud, Finn made his distinction between an ordinary IRA gunman, a hothead, and the kind of dedicated assassin the Cause really needed.

The young man had listened, his mind seemingly elsewhere, his eyes distant and unresponsive. Each of Finn's questions had been answered in short, unrevealing sentences. The boy's background, his interests – these were dismissed, as if they had absolutely no relevance and Finn was impertinent to ask so many questions. Finn had the feeling that the young man thought his time was being unforgivably wasted. Dragged out in the first light of dawn to some bloody bird sanctuary and for what? So that a nosy old man could pose silly questions?

What's the point of all this?
the boy had asked.

Finn, a little irritated by the young man's abrasive edge, had answered this question with one of his own.
Why do you hate the English so much?

Does it matter?
Jig asked.

Finn had watched a flock of seagulls rise up and go screaming towards the sea, which was barely visible in the muffled fog of the early morning.
Answer my question
, he'd said.

The young man had replied tersely, almost as if he were editing his own material in his head. He had been in the North about two years ago, he said, and in Belfast, that ruined city, he had come across the bagged bodies of two infant children on the sidewalk outside a house that had been ravaged by British soldiers because they suspected the place was filled with arms. Armoured cars and tanks and soldiers milled around in confusion. It transpired that the two children had been alone in the house when the British assault took place. But what Jig remembered most were the two bundles on the sidewalk and the way blood soaked through the material of the bags and the sounds of old women sobbing, like the sombre women of Greek tragedies, in the doorways of the street.