Jig (45 page)

There was another possibility, of course, that the FBI might automatically associate Jig with the slaying of Fitzjohn, which would fit McInnes's scheme of things very nicely indeed. Jig was a pain in the arse, but he wasn't the whole IRA by any stretch of the imagination.

Bloody Houlihan. What a nuisance.

McInnes stopped in front of a movie poster. The star of
PUSSIES IN BOOTS
was a girl with the unlikely name of Mysterioso McCall. She had breasts that suggested two of God's more inspired miracles. Either that or silicone. For a second McInnes experienced a terrible pang of longing.

He took a last look at the poster and turned north on Broadway, stepping back in the general direction of his hotel. On the corner of Fifty-Second Street he stopped, looked back the way he'd come, saw no sign of anyone following him, then he made a right turn. Inside a darkened cocktail bar on Fifty-Second he ordered a ginger ale which he took to a corner table by the telephone.

He checked his watch again. Almost noon. He sipped his drink, waited, staring now and again at the phone. He was in the right place at the right time, but when the phone hadn't rung by twenty past twelve he finished his ginger ale and went back out on to the street again, a little lonely suddenly, a little forlorn, thinking of warm flesh and the consolations of love and how a silent telephone could bring a very special dismay all its own.

Bridgehampton, Long Island

Frank Pagan stared at a gorgeous angelfish that expired in the middle of the floor, slowly flapping its body and looking for all the world like the wing of an exotic bird. The fish hypnotised him, held him captive. If he didn't take his eyes away from the sight of the pathetic thing shuddering down into its own doom, then he wouldn't have to look again at the wreckage of this house. Having gone once from room to room, he had no desire to do so again. It was best left to somebody like Artie Zuboric, who seemingly had the stomach for this kind of wholesale destruction. Businesslike, brisk, Zuboric was flitting here and there and his Italian shoes squelched on the sodden floor.

‘Two men, two girls,' Zuboric said, bending to look at the dying fish.

Two men, two girls. Zuboric could make this tally of death sound like a football result. Pagan took his eyes from the fish and moved towards the room that was filled with guns. In there lay one of the dead men, minus a major portion of his face. There was something depressing in the sight of so much death. It ate at your spirit, filled your mind with darkness, numbed you. There was an automatic rifle on the floor.

Zuboric came into the gun-room. He was holding an imitation leather wallet, flicking it open and checking the various cards inside.

‘I guess this belonged to the guy in the bedroom,' Zuboric said. ‘A certain Gustav Rasch. There's a bunch of stuff here in German. Can you read kraut?'

Pagan, who had an elementary knowledge of German, took the wallet. He scanned the cards, each sealed inside a plastic window. There was a Carte Blanche, a Communist Party membership card issued in East Berlin, a Visa – a mixture of gritty socialism and suave capitalism. At the back of the wallet was a small plastic card identifying Gustav Rasch as a member of the East Berlin Trades and Cultural Mission, which was one of those meaningless societies they were forever inventing to send men into the West. Trade and culture, Pagan thought. Tractors and Tolstoy. Plutonium and Prokofiev. Pagan closed the wallet. The smell of death was overwhelming to him. He shoved a window open and caught a scent of the sea, good cleansing ozone with a dash of salt. There was blood on his fingertips, which he wiped clean against the curtains.

Zuboric took the wallet back. ‘What was Gustav Rasch doing here?' he asked. ‘What's the connection between an East German and Nicholas Linney?'

Pagan shook his head. The bizarre bedfellows of terrorism again, odd couples coming together in the night like hungry lovers, consuming each other before parting as total strangers. He didn't feel up to discussing the nebulous terrorist connections that were made in all the dark corners of the planet.

‘If the guy in the bedroom's Rasch, this character lying here must be Nicholas Linney,' Zuboric said.

Pagan said nothing.

‘Our friend Jig,' Zuboric said. ‘He had a field day here.'

Pagan stepped around the body on the floor. He tried to imagine Jig coming here and going through this house and leaving such wreckage behind him. Pagan's imagination wasn't functioning well. All the pictures he received were shadowy transmissions. If Jig had been responsible for all this, then the man's style had undergone drastic changes. Whoever had shot this place up had done so indiscriminately. Jig's violence had never been like this in the past. Why would he change now? What kind of circumstances would force him to perpetrate these horrors? There was nowhere in all of this a trace of Jig's signature. There was no elegance here.

Pagan watched Zuboric go out across the living-room to the bedroom, saw him bend over the body of one of the dead girls whose stomach had been ripped open. A wave of pain coursed through Pagan's head. He thought, perhaps inevitably, of Roxanne, whose body they had not allowed him to see after her death. He had yearned for a sight of her back then, driven by a sickness to look one last time at what was left of the woman he'd loved. That desire struck him now as mad and morbid, but grief derailed you, leaving you empty and haunted and bewildered.

Pagan gazed at the racks of guns. He tried to reconstruct the events that had taken place here, but it was a maze with an impossible centre. He looked at the door, which was riddled and splintered and lay off its hinges. This damage had obviously been done by the M-16, but who the hell had been firing the thing? Had Jig somehow been trapped inside this room and forced to shoot his way out?

Pagan could hear Zuboric sloshing around in the living room. The aquatic sleuth. What the hell did he think he was going to find amidst puddles of salt water and slivers of broken glass and the demolished innards of an expensive stereo system?

Pagan turned his attention to the surface of the desk. A variety of papers lay around in disarray, most of them computer print-outs with references to ostmarks, roubles and zlotys. If Linney dabbled in Communist currencies, what Pagan wondered was just how much of this funny money found its way, via the United States, into Ireland. Nicholas Linney gathered roubles here, coaxed ostmarks there, and sent them, suitably converted into U.S. currency, to the IRA, using Joseph X. Tumulty as a link in the chain. But how long was that chain? And where did it reach?

Pagan looked at the illuminated screen of a computer console. There was a name and address in amber letters. Pagan stared at it in wonderment. Jock Mulhaney. Mulhaney was known even in Britain for his good-will publicity tour of Ireland, both North and South, when he'd made a tour of what the press called ‘the trouble spots,' giving impressive speeches in small border towns about how the real tragedy of Ireland was unemployment. At the time, carried away by his own rhetoric, Big Jock had pledged to do what he could about steering U.S. industry into Ireland, which was a promise he could never deliver upon. Ignoring the fact that he had a vested interest in keeping jobs in America, the Irish considered Big Jock something of a proletarian hero. And here he was on Linney's little screen. Well, well.

Connections
.

Pagan stared at the keyboard. There was a scroll key, which he touched rather gingerly, because he didn't have an easy rapport with the new technology. The screen whisked Big Jock's name away, replacing it suddenly with two others.

Pagan gazed at the letters with astonishment. The amber treasure trove of information. He felt a sudden quickening of his nerves as he recognised the names that glimmered in front of him. More connections. Lovely connections. He scribbled them down on a piece of paper torn from Linney's printer, then put the paper inside his pocket. He heard the sound of Zuboric coming back across the living room. He quickly scanned the keyboard, looking for an off key, anything to kill the screen before Zuboric came inside the room. There was no way he was going to share this stuff with the FBI agent. He couldn't find an appropriate key so he yanked the plug out of the wall and the screen went wonderfully blank, carrying the names of Kevin Dawson and Harry Cairney off into some electronic limbo. With a look of innocence, Frank Pagan turned to see Zuboric enter.

‘Here's the way I see it,' Zuboric said. ‘Jig comes in. He gets inside the gun room somehow. Something goes wrong. Maybe Linney says he doesn't know anything about the money. Who knows? Jig becomes more than a little upset and decides to vent some spleen, the results of which are obvious,' and Zuboric made a loose gesture with his hand. ‘Put it another way, Frank. Your cunning, clever assassin, the guy you seem to admire so much, is no better than a fucking fruitcake going berserk inside a crowded tenement on a hot summer evening in Harlem with a cheap twenty-two in his hand.'

‘It's one scenario,' Pagan answered, still thinking about the names on Linney's computer. Connections, threads linking one powerful name with another. ‘It's not the only one, Artie. Even if you're half in love with it.'

‘Frank Pagan, attorney for the defence,' Zuboric said.

Pagan clenched his large hands. There was this terrible urge to hit Zuboric. Nothing damaging, nothing that would leave an ungodly bruise or break a bone, just a straight solid punch that would silence the guy for a time. Zuboric's attitudes, his way of doing business, were beginning to pall.

Zuboric, who didn't like the expression on Pagan's face, turned away. ‘You can also assume Jig's armed by now,' he said. ‘He sure as hell wouldn't leave without helping himself to a gun or two. Don't you wish you'd shot the fucker when you had the chance?'

Pagan understood the process going on here. Jig was going to be blamed for this massacre, and he, Pagan, was standing nicely in line to take some of the heat as well. That was the Bureau's tactic. When things go wrong, blame Frank Pagan. And all the blue-eyed boys in Leonard Korn's Army stayed Kleenex-fresh.

‘Jig didn't do this,' he said.

Zuboric had a thin smile on his face. ‘You say. How do you know what Jig did or didn't do?'

It was a fair question and one Frank Pagan had no specific answer for.

‘And that killing in Albany,' Zuboric said. ‘How can you say it wasn't Jig?' The agent shook his head. ‘I'll tell you. He's on a goddam rampage, Frank. He's got the taste of blood in his mouth.'

‘And that's what you'll tell Washington?'

‘I'll give them my considered opinion,' Zuboric said.

Pagan saw Zuboric step out of the room, heard him move inside the kitchen. There was the sound of the telephone being lifted. Then Zuboric was talking in a low voice.

Pagan looked at the body of Nicholas Linney. He wished somebody in this house could come back, even on a temporary basis, from death, and tell him the exact truth about what had happened here. But there were only stilled pulses and hearts that no longer beat and voices forever silenced.

Camp David, Maryland

It was five o'clock in the afternoon before Thomas Dawson finally met with Leonard M. Korn. The President didn't like to conduct business on a Saturday, which was the day he habitually set aside for reading, catching up on the voluminous amount of material his aides and cabinet members prepared for him. It was a bleak afternoon, already dark, and there was a nasty rain slicing through the trees around the Presidential compound at Camp David. Leonard M. Korn, who arrived in a black limousine, had the kind of presence that made a dark day darker still. What was it about him? Dawson wondered. He somehow seemed to absorb all the light around him and never release it, like a black mirror.

When Korn stepped inside the Presidential quarters, Dawson was lounging on a sofa wearing blue jeans and boots and a plaid flannel shirt, all purchased from L. L. Bean. He sat upright, shuffled some papers, smiled coldly at Korn. Korn was a leftover from the previous administration, an appointee made by Dawson's predecessor who'd been a Republican in the cowboy tradition, an old man who dreamed nights of a world policed by U.S. gunboats.

‘Take a pew,' the President said.

Korn sat stiffly in his black gabardine overcoat. He removed several sheets of paper from his briefcase.

‘Here is the information we've gathered on the casualties,' he said, thrusting the sheets towards Thomas Dawson, who waved them aside.

‘Suppose you give me the details briefly, Len,' Dawson said. His eyes were tired from reading reports on such arcane matters as the butter glut in the Midwest, farm foreclosures on the Great Plains, proposals to alter corporate tax structures.

‘Nicholas Linney ran a company called Urrisbeg International,' Korn said. ‘Linney had fingers in a great many pies, Mr. President.'

Korn paused. Dawson had grown immune to the clichés of language that surrounded him on a daily basis. A great many pies. Too many cooks. People in glass houses. Imaginative language was the first casualty of any bureaucracy.

‘He had been investigated by Treasury two years ago. There was some suspicion of illegal dealing in foreign currencies,' Korn said. ‘East European mainly. He was cleared.'

Thomas Dawson nodded. He remembered Nicholas Linney well, and the recollection troubled him. He stood up. Once or twice, in the years before he had become President, he had played tennis with Nick Linney at fund-raising tournaments that were described under the general umbrella of Celebrity Invitationals. The celebrities were always ambitious politicians, game-show hosts, bargain-basement actors and tired comedians who had bought real estate in Palm Springs when that place was just a stopover in the desert. He squeezed his eyes shut very tightly. He was thinking of his brother now. He wished he'd never heard of the Fund-raisers. He wished even more that Kevin had stuck to running the family empire, keeping his nose out of Irish matters, and staying away from people like Linney.