Jig (25 page)

‘I almost forgot,' Tumulty said.

McCune looked a little surprised. ‘You've never forgotten before.'

Tumulty nodded, smiling at McCune.
This man trusts me
, he thought.
This man thinks he owes his life to me
.

‘I'll be down in a minute,' Tumulty said. Every night at the same time he conducted an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in the kitchen. It was an event for which he was always punctual because he believed that one of the basic ingredients for sobriety was commitment to responsibility. And he had to show the men at the meeting that he took his own responsibilities in earnest. He had to set examples. You could show how much you cared only by your actions.

‘I'll tell the others,' McCune said, then hesitated. ‘Is something troubling you?'

Tumulty was about to answer when the telephone on his desk rang.

He stared at the sound. Two rings, then silence. Followed by two more rings. It was Santacroce's signal.

So soon.

Too soon. He hadn't expected to hear from Santacroce until next morning at the earliest. He felt panicked. He stared at McCune, then at the Christ on the Mexican cross, but all he found in the eyes was an impossible blankness.

‘I'm fine,' he said to McCune. It was the first time he'd ever lied to any of his clients at St. Finbar's.

Frank Pagan sat behind the wheel of a rented 1974 Eldorado convertible. He'd found a place in the Village that specialised in renting old convertibles and, since he'd always wanted to drive a Cadillac, he'd hired this big dark-green monster with battered upholstery and a cracked dash and a rusted-out body. The radio worked. Pagan had it tuned to an FM rock station that was playing the entire cycle of Fats Domino's hits.

Zuboric, who felt in the Eldorado like a pimp fallen on hard times, said, ‘I grew out of that music. When the sixties came to an end, I was into more jazz. Modern jazz. Dizzie Gillespie, like that.'

Pagan looked at the FBI man. The tone in Zuboric's voice was admonitory, as if he were really advising Frank Pagan to grow up. Rock and roll was for kids. Pagan had come to think of Artie Zuboric as an appendage he couldn't shake, a hump on his back, a growth attached to his body. He might not have minded so much if Zuboric had simply been a tail, someone who followed his movements unobtrusively, but the FBI man was a constant physical presence.

Pagan rubbed his gloved hands together. The chill inside the car was pervasive, bleeding through his bulky leather jacket. Along Canal Street, where he was parked, was a navy-blue Ford occupied by Orson Cone's relief, an older man called Tyson Bruno. Tyson Bruno was taciturn and morose. He had one of those wooden faces upon which expressions have a very hard time. He sat inside his Ford like a block of cement, defined by his duty, which was simply that of observing the comings and goings at St. Finbar's. Like Orson Cone, Tyson Bruno was also a kind of decoy, somebody in place for Tumulty to spot. Orson Cone and Tyson Bruno. Americans had the most peculiar names. When he'd been in New York before with Roxanne, they'd drunk too much champagne one night and in a hilarious mood they'd gone through the pages of the Manhattan phone-book, discovering such oddities as Neddy Bummer and Bobbi Plapp, which Roxanne had laughed over, saying it sounded like a baby farting into a diaper. Harmless times, he thought now. Laughter before dying.

‘We should've put somebody outside Santacroce's,' Pagan said. It wasn't the first time he'd made the suggestion. He recalled what he'd said that afternoon when they'd tracked Tumulty to a bank.
Nobody is watching Santacroce
. Artie Zuboric hadn't seemed very interested.

‘I told you. Lack of manpower, Frank.' Zuboric shrugged. Pagan had still to learn that his problems got low priority here.

‘Lack of manpower. No phone tap. One agent in the street. This is a shoestring operation. If you and I split up, one of us could watch Tumulty, the other Santacroce. Manpower problem solved in one swoop. Maybe that's a little too logical for you, though.'

Zuboric wasn't going to respond to this. He wasn't going to be drawn into another argument with Pagan over human resources. He lit a cigarette and coughed a couple of times. The trouble with Frank Pagan was his sheer fucking persistence. He wouldn't let something go once he'd taken a bite out of it. He kept digging, kept trying to operate on his own. He was the same goddam way with Jig. He was consumed by Jig. Probably he dreamed Jig at nights. Had Jig for breakfast.

Zuboric sighed. What he really wanted to do was bust Tumulty and Santacroce both, because that was one way of putting Jig out of circulation. Deprive the guy of his connections. Isolate him. He'd mentioned this briefly to Pagan but good old Frank dismissed it. It was clear Frank Pagan wanted to run this show his own way, which was something Zuboric couldn't allow. He shut his eyes, let his cigarette dangle from his lip, and thought about Charity, and wondered where she was right this moment and whether she'd ever consent to marry him. The last time he'd asked, Charity told him she'd think about it when he wasn't married to the goddam Bureau and his prospects had improved. Prospects, he thought now. Sitting in a draughty Eldorado with a cop who was manic and argumentative – his prospects didn't seem entirely
rosy
. Maybe he should never have fallen quite this heavily for a gorgeous girl in a topless bar, but that was the way the cards had been dealt and what could you do but pick them up, see if you could play them? The trouble was, Charity was used to high rollers, and Artie Zuboric couldn't compete on that level.

Pagan stuck the key in the ignition. He played with the power switches. He made his seat go backwards and forwards, then he had the windows going up and down. There was a certain kind of limey, Zuboric reflected, who was enchanted by American flash. Big cars and loud music and Hawaiian shirts. Pagan was one of them. Zuboric attributed it to a kind of insecurity, cultural inferiority, as if the Tower of London and Shakespeare and Stonehenge weren't enough to be going on with. They had to immerse themselves in things American. Pagan was like a kid in a whole new playground. Zuboric suddenly wondered if Frank Pagan was afraid of the threshold of forty, if the way he dressed and behaved had something to do with his reluctance to face the big four-oh.

Pagan leaned forward against the steering wheel.

‘Ah-hah,' he said. ‘There goes our boy.'

Zuboric looked along the street at the sight of Joe Tumulty coming out of St. Finbar's. Here we go again, he thought, as Frank Pagan slid the huge car slowly forward.

Ivor McInnes stepped out of the Essex House and walked along Central Park South. It was eight o'clock and he'd just eaten a satisfying dinner in the hotel. He turned onto Fifth Avenue, looking at the lights along the thoroughfare. He had in mind a specific destination, but first he intended to walk as far as 49th Street. He looked at his wristwatch and checked the time; then he thought a moment about J. W. Sweeting, the lackey from the State Department. McInnes had fought a great many battles with bureaucracy in his life, most recently with the asinine leaders of his own Presbyterian Church, who were dismayed by the controversy that had always surrounded him and had stripped him of his parish. They were men of limited imagination. What the hell did it matter? McInnes had never been a truly
religious
man. All along he'd seen the Presbyterian pulpit as a convenient place from which to influence the politics of Northern Ireland, an attitude that had embarrassed Presbyterian churchmen, who failed to notice a very obvious fact of life in the country – that churches weren't just places where people went to sing hymns and hear sermons, they were instruments of social and political usefulness. The Catholic Church, cunning as ever, had always known that. Priests hid IRA members in their chapels or carried weapons back and forth. The Protestant clergy, on the other hand, had been slow on the uptake, immersed in the drudgery of committees and do-good schemes. For Ivor McInnes, that simply wasn't enough. And now the time for talking, the time for conciliation, had passed.

He stopped outside St. Patrick's Cathedral. A priest appeared on the steps, said something to a tourist with a camera, then agreed to have his picture taken with the cathedral in the background. McInnes saw a flashbulb pop. St. Patrick's made him uneasy. It was a vast stronghold of Catholicism, and in McInnes's world anything remotely connected to the Vatican was distasteful. He thought that any church that took ordinary tap water and did some abracadabra over it and called it holy was still locked into the superstitions of the Dark Ages. Therefore backward. Therefore a breeding ground for ignorance. There were times when he felt sorry for people who had been indoctrinated by the Roman Catholic Church, which he placed at the level of a cult, with its brainwashing tactics and Latinate mumbo jumbo and the highly curious notion of confession. It wasn't that he detested individual Catholics as such – he considered them merely misguided, suckers swayed by a holy carnival of stained-glass mysteries and enthralled by the stigmata and prone to the hysteria of seeing wooden effigies shed salt tears. No, it was more the fact that he completely resented the enormous power and riches and influence of the Vatican, from whence all Catholic conspiracies emanated – including the one that threatened to engulf Northern Ireland.

He reached 49th Street. He was in love with New York. It was a city with a delightfully sinful face. Every human weakness was pandered to somehow here. There was a sense of freedom that didn't exist in Belfast. Poor dear Belfast, a broken-hearted city with its military checkpoints and burned-out buildings. A city of fear. McInnes mainly blamed the Catholics for the atmosphere. They bred like flies in such RC ghettos as Ballymurphy and Turf Lodge and Andersonstown, which were nothing more than nurseries for future IRA gunmen. A time would come, McInnes had warned his congregation in his parting sermon, when Catholics would outnumber Protestants in Northern Ireland – and then what? It would be like bloody South Africa, a minority straining to hold on to power in the face of a hostile majority. A prescription for doom. A prescription Ivor McInnes wasn't going to see filled.

He left Fifth Avenue and walked until he came to a phone booth located outside a bar called Lonnigan's, one of those Irish pubs scattered around Manhattan. Posters in the window advertised
ceilidhs
, nights of folk singing and dancing. McInnes went inside the booth. He checked his watch again. He felt apprehensive now. A taste of the duck he'd eaten came back into his mouth, a film of scum on the surface of his tongue. What if something had gone very wrong? What then? He laid his hand on the receiver and inclined his forehead on the glass. By nature he was a relentless optimist, and like others of this persuasion he was sometimes prey to a certain brief dread of failure.

He drummed his fingers on the receiver.

The telephone rang. He picked it up immediately.

He heard Seamus Houlihan's voice.

‘We're crossing tonight,' Houlihan said. He sounded as if he were trapped inside a tunnel.

‘Fine,' McInnes said. He was flooded with relief that Houlihan had at least arrived. At the same time, the idea that the border crossing was yet to take place pricked his capacity for dread again. Tension made a nerve move in his eyelid. ‘Has Fitzjohn found a place to cross?'

‘He says so.'

McInnes looked into the street. A high-stepping girl went past, and he tracked her with his eyes. ‘The flight was uneventful?'

‘It was,' Houlihan said.

McInnes paused. He wasn't exactly happy about Seamus Houlihan having any responsibility. Seamus was the kind of man who'd kill somebody if they happened to look at him with any trace of hostility. He didn't have much going on in the brain department. People like Houlihan were useful, but only up to a point. When they'd outlived their functions, they could become utterly embarrassing.

‘Same time tomorrow night, Seamus. And good luck.'

McInnes put the receiver back. He moved out of the phone booth and went along the sidewalk. The girl was just ahead of him, her hips swaying beneath her overcoat. On other trips to this city, at a time when he hadn't been banned by his own church and harassed by the State Department, he'd been struck by the number of beautiful women here. It seemed to him they came dropping out of the sky like bright pennies.

He reached the Hotel Strasbourg, stopping only a moment outside the dimly lit lobby. He looked up and down the sidewalk, then he went inside the hotel and moved towards the stairway, passing the night clerk who didn't even glance up at him. The carpet under his feet was threadbare and elaborately stained. On the second floor McInnes looked for Room 220. When he found it he knocked quietly on the door. He heard the girl's voice call out to him. He stepped into the room, which was lit only by a weak bulb in a lamp on the bedside table.

‘Am I on time?' he asked. He felt only the smallest misgiving. He had needs, and they had to be satisfied, and this was nothing more than a transaction of skin – although he knew he would change it, by an act of his imagination, into something more than that.

The girl, who wore only the underwear McInnes had requested by telephone, smiled at him. ‘You're the one talks like John Lennon,' she said. ‘It's cute. You're kinda cute yourself.'

McInnes moved to the bed. He looked down at the girl. In a moment he was going to take the short-cut out of his tension, but right then he just wanted to look. She was skinny and her breasts were very small, and she must have been just sixteen. McInnes took off his coat and laid a hand on the girl's thin thigh. The girl didn't move. She stared at him coolly. Then she slid languidly down the pillow and stretched her long legs, parting them a little as she moved. He brought his hand up to the edge of her red panties. He continued up to the cups of her red bra, which fastened in the front. He undid the clip, pushed the bra aside.