Jig (12 page)

Jig had a sense of sleep coming in on a dark cloud, so he rose and stood in the corridor with the window open and the rainy air blowing against his face. The fresh smell of the nearby sea came rushing towards him.

He had left Dublin before on other missions. But this time, with the wind blowing at his face and the rain on his skin, this time was different for reasons he didn't altogether understand.

He stood at the window and he thought about the great love he had for this country. He thought of the valleys of Glendalough and Imaal and Clara. The bewitching landscape of Kerry and the great peninsulas of Iveragh and Dingle. The towns of Tralee and Inch and Kenmare and that strange uninhabited group of islands called the Blaskets, which sat lonely in the Atlantic tide. Once, the largest of the Blaskets had been called the next parish to America.

America. And good-bye, Mr. Pagan.

He watched the rails slide past under the March sky, and he wondered when he'd see Ireland and Finn again.

London

Frank Pagan lived alone in a flat at the top of a Victorian house in Holland Park. There had been a time in his life when he had enjoyed the place, when he'd found himself hurrying home from the office and taking the steps two at a time in his haste. Now when the street door closed behind him, he went up through the dark slowly.

He took out his key when he reached the apartment.

Inside, the air was trapped and stale. He turned on the living room lamp and poured himself a glass of scotch, which he carried inside the bedroom. The bed was unmade, the room cold. He sat on the edge of the bed without taking off his raincoat. Bleak House, he thought.

His usual method of cutting back the edge of bleakness was to play rock music loudly. He liked it full blast and raucous enough for dainty Miss Gabler in the flat below to rush upstairs complaining about that ‘dreadful Negro music' and Pagan would say, Now, now, Hedda (even though her name was Cynthia), we mustn't criticise music on racial grounds, must we? A dose of Little Richard or some early Jerry Lee Lewis usually worked for him, but tonight he didn't want to play the stereo.

His condition was paralysis of the heart.

He reached out across the clutter of the bedside table and touched a framed photograph of his wife, Roxanne, then drew his hand away as if it had been scalded. There was still too much pain here. Sometimes he wondered if it would ever go away entirely. It had been more than two years now and there was still the same old nightmare, there were still times when he'd sit up in the darkened bedroom and smoke cigarettes and imagine he heard the sounds of Roxanne moving in the other rooms.

Once, when he'd drunk too much Chivas Regal, he stumbled through the apartment calling out her name. Banging doors open, slamming them shut, saying his wife's name over and over like some incantation, he stalked her. The rooms were all empty, all dark. He'd never encountered anything like that kind of emptiness before. It was worse than any pain he could ever have imagined.

Dreams, Pagan thought. Roxanne was gone. He glanced at the photograph. It was a fine face with wide bright eyes that were filled with an amused intelligence. The mouth suggested great depths of humour. It was the kind of mouth that had been built for smiling. Sweet Christ, how he had loved her! Even now, he loved her.
But Roxanne was gone
. Then why in the name of God did he keep sensing her presence in this bloody flat?

He got up from the bed and wandered inside the kitchen. There were eggshells in the sink and coffee stains on the surface of the stove. He sat at the kitchen table and finished his drink and his eyes brimmed with moisture. He wiped them with the sleeve of his coat. Maudlin behaviour. He was being drawn down into the morbid centre of himself. He poured a second drink.

‘Roxanne,' Pagan whispered. ‘Dear Roxanne.'

Outside, a March wind came rushing out of the night, springing through the shrubbery. He heard the branch of a tree knock against the side of the house.

Pagan sat down, fidgeted with his glass. He liked to think of himself as a practical man living in a practical world, one without psychic interference. He liked to think his personal radio was tuned only to what was broadcast in reality, not to ghosts, not to dreams. But what was this presence of Roxanne he kept feeling? Why did he keep talking aloud to a woman who was no longer alive?

Pagan closed his eyes tightly. He didn't need to remember any of this.

Roxanne Pagan, twenty-seven years of age, had died at Christmas, 1984, killed on a Kensington street. She had been doing some last-minute Christmas shopping. She didn't know that a man called Eddie Rattigan had planted a bomb inside a waste-basket beside a bus stop. She didn't know that her own life was destined to collide with the violent longing of Eddie Rattigan, who later told the police he wanted to make a political statement on behalf of all IRA soldiers held in Northern Irish jails.

Roxanne Pagan had been passing the waste-basket when the explosion took place. Eddie Rattigan's bomb killed seven people and injured a dozen others. Eddie Rattigan's ‘political statement' killed Roxanne and tore the heart out of Frank Pagan's life, shattering his world in a matter of a second.

Pagan blinked at the window. He remembered Eddie Rattigan's trial. He recalled the small man's interminable smirk during the whole proceedings. Rattigan was
pleased
with himself.
Pleased
that his bomb had actually worked! After Rattigan was sentenced to life imprisonment Pagan had worked for months on a wild plan to get inside Wormwood Scrubs and kill the man. But the notion of vengeance passed, and he was left with an emptiness that had been with him ever since.

Pagan went into the bedroom. He wanted to sleep but he didn't want to close his eyes because he knew the nightmare would rush in at him again. In this awful dream he was running down that Kensington street towards Roxanne and he was always too late to warn her. He shouted her name until his throat ached but she never heard him, never turned in his direction. Turn! For God's sake, turn! Pagan would scream. Screaming, running. And then the explosion came. Which was when Pagan always woke, shivering and afraid and racked by unspeakable grief.

He removed his coat and tossed it across a chair. Then he kicked off his shoes and sat with his back to a pillow, his glass in his hand. He understood that he was a lonely man, but he'd come to terms with that. Once or twice since Roxanne's death he'd gone out, hitting a couple of bars where single people stared morosely at one another and casual sexual assignations were made with all the passion of people selecting lamb chops out of a butcher's window. The whole scene depressed Pagan. If he didn't belong there, where did he belong? Here in this apartment with a phantom? Was that his future?

He smoked a cigarette. He had a third drink. Halfway through it his front doorbell rang. He glanced at the bedside clock: 9:45. He went inside the living room, where he switched on the intercom button.

‘Who is it?' he said.

‘Drummond, Mr. Pagan. It's Jerry Drummond.' The voice crackled up from the street.

‘What do you want?'

‘I have a message for you.'

‘I'm listening, Jerry.'

‘Not like this. Let me come up, Mr. Pagan.'

Pagan sighed. He pressed the buzzer that opened the street door. He heard the sound of footsteps on the stairs. Then Drummond's soft knock at the door.

A small man with pointed ears, Jerry Drummond wore long side-whiskers and invariably had a green silk scarf knotted at his throat. His nickname, perhaps predictably, was the Leprechaun.

‘I'm not meaning to disturb you, Mr. Pagan,' Drummond said as he came into the room.

‘It's late, Jerry.'

‘So it is, so it is.' Jerry Drummond sat down, taking a flat tin from his overcoat. There would be, Pagan knew, the usual elaborate performance of rolling a cigarette, which Drummond did with all the intensity of an architect designing a cathedral.

‘And how is yerself today?' the Leprechaun asked.

Pagan nodded. ‘I've known better days, Jerry.'

The little man lit his cigarette and his cheeks subsided into huge hollows as he puffed. ‘Haven't we all known better days?'

‘What do you have for me, Jerry?' Pagan asked.

‘Oh,' said the Leprechaun mysteriously, twinkling like a Christmas tree light.

‘I haven't got all night. You said you had a message, Jerry.'

The little man smoked furiously. At one time, he'd been a promising apprentice jockey at a stable in New-market, but a fondness for alcohol and a lack of discipline had finished his career quickly. Now, he was an odd-job man who was also one of Pagan's many connections to the puzzle known as Ireland.

‘It's from some of the boys,' the Leprechaun said.

‘Which boys?'

‘I'm not at liberty to say, Mr. Pagan.'

‘Then I don't want to hear, Jerry. You know what I think about anonymous messages.'

Jerry Drummond was using his open left hand as an ashtray. ‘I do, I do,' he said. ‘But I'm just a simple messenger. I can't tell you everything you think you want to know, can I? A messenger has only limited information, after all. He's like a walk-on part in a play, when you think about it –'

Sighing, Pagan interrupted. He knew the little man could gab all night long, going off at tangents. ‘Who sent you, Jerry?'

Drummond was quiet for a time. ‘Shall we just say it's a certain party interested in bringing Jig to justice?'

‘Jig?'

‘Right.'

‘What about Jig?' A tiny flutter went through Pagan's heart.

Drummond leaned forward, looking conspiratorial. ‘I'm to tell you that Jig is on his way to the United States of America, Mr. Pagan.'

‘And why would Jig be going to the United States, Jerry?'

‘I understand there's a small matter of some missing money to be settled, Mr. Pagan.'

Pagan finished his scotch and set the glass down. ‘How do you know this, Jerry?'

‘Tut-tut,' Drummond said, his eyes wide.

Pagan said, ‘If you expect me to believe your story, Jerry, you'd better tell me its source. Otherwise, I'm going to throw you out of here. Bodily.'

‘Ah, the English don't know the meaning of hospitality, do they now?' the Leprechaun smiled. He tilted his tiny pear-shaped face back and stared at the ceiling. ‘Let me say this much, seeing as how you threatened me with physical violence just then and me being a peaceable sort of fellow and all. Let me just say the message comes from members of the Free Ulster Volunteers, Mr. Pagan.'

‘That bunch of scum?'

‘They're fine men, Mr. Pagan. They believe in keeping Northern Ireland for Britain. Could anybody have a finer goal than that, eh?'

The Free Ulster Volunteers. In recent years Frank Pagan had become bewildered by the proliferation of groups and sects that had arisen in Ireland. There was a thicket of them, each with its own initials. And they spawned themselves on almost a daily basis. Even with the help of computers, it was impossible to keep track. On the Protestant side, Pagan had heard such names as the Tartan Hand, Tara (an allegedly homosexual group of anti-Catholics), the Ulster Defence Association, the Ulster Freedom Fighters, the New Apprentice Boys, the Free Ulster Liberation Army. The Catholic IRA had split into cells and groups, some of them of a religious nature, some with Marxist objectives, others with ties to terrorist groups in Germany and Italy. Disenchanted IRA members had formed their own outfits. The Irish Liberation Army. The New Sinn Fein. The Catholic Brotherhood. More recently Pagan had heard whispers concerning something called the Association of the Wolfe, supposedly run by a man named Finn, who appeared nowhere in Pagan's data banks. Some of these organisations were chimerical. Others exaggerated their membership. A few had power. Finn was said to have his hands on the bankbooks, but whoever Finn was – and Pagan suspected the name was a pseudonym – he obviously led a secluded life, far removed from the conflicts of Belfast and Derry. Certainly, none of Pagan's sources knew the man.

Pagan sighed. Irish goulash. Rich, impenetrable, inedible, filled as it was with alphabet macaroni.

The Free Ulster Volunteers was a Belfast-based clandestine group of Protestant thugs who specialised in torturing and killing anybody with a connection to the IRA. When they couldn't find a bona fide IRA member, any passing Catholic would do. Now and then, they slipped over the border into the Republic to make a hit.

The FUV was allegedly connected, in tenuous ways, with a Belfast zealot called the Reverend Ivor McInnes, a pastor without a church. He'd been ejected from the official Presbyterian Church for preaching sermons designed to encourage his congregation in the belief that Catholicism, like cigarettes, was bad for your health and should therefore be abolished. McInnes still wore his dog collar and drew huge crowds of Ulster Loyalists to hear him speak in public places. He was one of those fire and brimstone shouters who could raise the temperature of a mob to boiling point. He was a man of many gifts – charm, eloquence, and that nebulous quality called charisma – but Pagan considered them wasted ones. Ivor was utterly committed, some would say blindly so, to a Northern Ireland free of any Catholic influence. He didn't want his own little domain, all five thousand square miles of it, all one million and a half souls, tainted by popery, dogged by priests and nuns. Pagan had never been able to prove conclusively that Ivor was the power behind the FUV. If he was, he somehow contrived cunningly to keep himself removed from the organisation.

‘Exactly who in the Free Ulster Volunteers sent you here? Ivor McInnes?'

‘Now, Mr. Pagan. We all know the Reverend isn't associated with the FUV, don't we?'

‘Don't make me laugh, Jerry.'

The Leprechaun smoothed out the folds in his coat. ‘Can't we just say the FUV sent me here and leave it at that?'