Jig (50 page)

‘Tell him to stuff it,' Pagan said.

‘I think I hear the quiet sharpening of the axe, Frank. Furry Jake is no friend of yours. And you've got all those delicious enemies at the Yard who love the idea of you being away because, heaven forbid, they can make waves. Get the Sec's ear and whisper anti-Pagan slogans into it. It's not a glowing horoscope, is it?'

‘In other words, if I don't get Jig, don't come home.'

‘It's what I'm hearing, Frank. Apropos of Jig, how goes it?'

‘I haven't quite booked my return flight, Foxie.'

‘When you do, I very much hope you won't be travelling unaccompanied.'

‘Take aspirins for your hangover,' Pagan said. ‘And go back to bed.'

Pagan put the receiver down. The sharpening of the axe, he thought. You leave your desk and the vultures start to circle. You step away and suddenly it's The Night of the Long Knives. What else could you expect? People were unhappy with him. People didn't like the way he ran his section. People like Furry Jake thought little of Pagan's tailor and, by extension, little of Pagan too. Scotland Yard wanted control over him. They didn't like an upstart having power. And they revelled,
God did they ever
, in the idea of Jig's eluding Pagan's grasp.

Pagan poured another scotch. Jesus Christ, was this job
that
important to him? He could run security in the private sector and earn twice as much as he was paid now. But what he hated was the idea of scumbags waiting for him to fall, waiting for him to come home empty-handed because then they could pounce on him and denigrate him with that particularly wicked smugness certain pencil-pushers have for those who work out in the field, the real world.

He was agitated by the confinement of his room. He wanted to get out of the narrow little rectangle in which he was trapped. He put on a jacket and went down in the elevator to the piano bar.

Silence. The pianist had gone. The bar was almost empty. Pagan sat up on a stool and ordered a Drambuie. Mandi with an ‘i' was cleaning the surface of a table in the corner. When she saw Pagan she smiled and drifted over to him. She was small and she moved with economy, like a dancer. It was all an illusion of coordination. Halfway towards him she dropped her order-pad and pencil and giggled as she bent to pick them up because loose change tumbled out of her pocket and went off in a series of little wheels across the floor.

He wondered what she'd be like in bed. It was the first time he'd entertained this notion quite so clearly in years and it took him by surprise. There was something else too – a small shiver of ridiculous guilt, almost as if the thought of having sex with this girl were somehow a betrayal of Roxanne. And he wondered at the tenacious hold the dead could sometimes have over the living. Could he ever shake himself free?

‘I drop things,' she said.

‘I never noticed.'

The giggle was high-pitched and, although he wasn't a man enamoured of giggling, he did find something endearing in it.

‘Palsy,' she said. ‘Or is it dropsy?'

Pagan sipped his Drambuie. He studied her over the rim of his glass. She had dark hair naturally curled, creating an overall effect of a head covered with bubbles. She had a small heart-shaped mouth and straight teeth. There was humour in the face. Mandi was a woman who liked to laugh at herself. Going to bed with her would be some kind of romp through innocence, with no serious attachments, no kinks, no entanglements. Quick rapture and a fond goodbye.

‘Enjoying your stay?' she asked.

Pagan shrugged. ‘It's a bewildering city.'

The girl placed her hands on the surface of the bar. She had chubby, cherubic hands, dimpled. Straightforward, good-natured Mandi. An uncomplicated girl. It was all there in the hands and the brightness of the eyes. Simplicity. The uncluttered life.

‘You need a guide,' she said. ‘If you want to see the place properly.'

There was an opening here, but Pagan was slow to move towards it. He was out of touch, rusty.

‘I'm Mandi, by the way.'

He nodded. He was going to say he knew that already but why bother? ‘Frank Pagan.'

‘Good to know you, Frank. You're from London, right?'

‘Does it show?'

‘It's the way you talk. It's like Michael Caine in that picture. God, what was it called?' She pursed her small lips and concentrated. ‘I'm hopeless when it comes to remembering names.'

No memory. Forever dropping things. Why did he find her clumsiness sweet? She must go through her life in a sweet-natured daze. She wouldn't need drugs or alcohol because reality made her dizzy enough.

‘Alfie!' she said. ‘That's the one.'

‘I remember it vaguely.'

‘Are you on your own?' she asked. Another opening.

Pagan was about to say that he was, he was about to say that he was weary of his own company, that he needed a bout of companionship and would she be interested, when he noticed Tyson Bruno sitting in a dark corner of the bar. Whatever nascent appetite he'd begun to feel abruptly shrivelled inside him. The mood was spoiled, sullied. He pushed his glass away and got down from the stool, glancing at Bruno's hardened wooden face.

‘I'd like to be,' he said. The waitress looked puzzled.

Pagan moved across the thick carpet of the bar and out into the lobby towards the banks of elevators. For a moment there he'd felt an old mood returning, a need rising inside him, a desire to do something simple and natural, like touching a woman, like bringing quickness back into his circulation, yesterday's heats, yesterday's passions, something that would slash away at his ghost. But Tyson Bruno's face had risen out of the darkness to spoil things, reminding Pagan of the contrast between his own sorry little world where men and women died painfully and treachery was a viable currency, and the world of a cocktail waitress in a 57th Street hotel who dropped things and laughed at herself and lived an uncomplicated life. Two planets, different orbits.

He travelled up in the empty elevator, thinking of himself as perhaps the first man in history to suffer from a case of premature exorcism. When the car reached his floor, the doors slid open and he looked down the long corridor towards his room. Fuck it, he thought. He needed life and liveliness. And the real trick to that was to say no to self-analysis and no to your history. If you wanted to live, you just went out and did it.

He stepped back into the elevator and returned to the bar.

Mandi was gone.

But Tyson Bruno was still there, coming across the floor with an ape's grace.

‘Don't run out on me again, Pagan,' Bruno said. ‘I don't like being made stupid.'

‘That takes no great effort, Tyson.' Pagan felt weary.

‘I hate smartasses,' Bruno said. ‘Where did you go anyhow?'

‘I always wanted to see Brooklyn by moonlight.'

‘Sure.' Tyson Bruno folded his thick arms across his chest. He had a mean, dangerous look all at once, that of a man who lives with violent solutions to tough questions. Pagan stared at the tiny eyes, which resembled the pits of a cherry.

‘See it doesn't happen again,' Tyson Bruno said.

‘I never promise the impossible, Tyson.'

Pagan turned away and headed back towards the elevators.

White Plains, New York

It was eight minutes past seven
A.M.
when the Reverend Duncanson began his Sunday morning sermon in Memorial Presbyterian Church. The congregation numbered about two hundred people, and Duncanson was pleased to see so many young people in attendance. He wondered if the Englishman who had telephoned was among the worshippers. His sermon, perhaps a little too heavy for the spring weather that had suddenly surfaced this day, concerned the confession of sins and God's ability to refresh and cleanse the sinner. It was a dark, wintry speech, and it tended, like most of Duncanson's sermons, to ramble through thickets of personal anecdote, non-sequiturs, and erudite attempts at word-play.

His eyes scanned the congregation as he spoke. A bright March sun fell upon the stained-glass, creating a nice dappled effect along the central pews. He spoke of confessional needs, carefully making a distinction between the
inner
need of man to ask forgiveness, and the
outer
compulsion, a Catholic notion that would bring momentary uneasiness to some of his members. The very word
confession
was loaded.

The Reverend Duncanson glanced at his watch, which he always took from his wrist and laid alongside his notes. He had been speaking now for thirteen minutes. He needed to pick up the pace and bring everything to a conclusion within the next two minutes. After years of sermonising he had the ability to edit his own material in his head. He sometimes thought he was like a stand-up comic who intuited his audience's mood and shuffled his material accordingly.

Seven fifteen
.

The second hand of Duncanson's watch swept forward.

He closed his sermon after he'd talked for fifteen minutes. He nodded in the direction of the organist, a middle-aged woman who raised her hands above the keyboard, ready to strike. The congregation rose, hymnbooks open.

‘We will now sing the Twenty-Third Psalm,' Duncanson announced. ‘The Lord is My Shepherd.'

The organist rippled off the introductory chords.

The great pipes took the sound, transformed it, scattered it through the uppermost parts of the church. It swelled, died, then came back again, a vast flood of music. As Duncanson opened his mouth to sing, he saw a sudden ball of flame rise up from the keyboard and engulf the organist, surrounding her with a wall of fire that spread upwards with a horrific crackling. The force of released heat was so intense he felt it burn the skin at the side of his face. Then there was an explosion from the dead centre of the church, a blast that shook the entire building and blew out the stained-glass windows.

Duncanson rushed down from the pulpit, unaware in all the smoke and screaming and confusion that his robe had caught fire. Another blast rocked the area around the pulpit, a violent outburst of flame and dark smoke that suggested something released from the fissures of hell. By this time, the ceiling was ablaze, wooden beams consumed by flame. The hymnbooks were burning. The pews were burning. People were burning too, screaming as they tried to rush through the suffocating smoke towards doorways they couldn't find. Babies. Young men and women. The fire attacked everything.

And then there was still another explosion, the last one Duncanson heard. It brought the organ pipes down out of the walls, a tumble of plaster and bolts and woodwork and electrical wires which conveyed flame down into the basement of the church where the oil-fuelled central heating system was located. When the oil caught fire the air became dead air, unbreathable, filling lungs with a searing poison.

Some people made it out through the madness and the panic to the lawn in front of the church where they saw that the steeple was one ragged mass of blue flame whipped by breeze and spreading in a series of fiery licks across the entire roof. Others, trapped and suffocated inside, barely heard the final explosion as the oil-tank went up because the world of fire had become a silent place for them, all noise sucked out by a vacuum of intense heat, a scorched epicentre where no sound penetrated, no air stirred, the vast parched heart of destruction.

Stamford, Connecticut

Seamus Houlihan dialled a telephone number in New York City from a phonebooth beside an industrial park in Stamford. It was eight thirty on a sunlit Sunday morning. As he listened to the sound of the phone ringing, he looked across the street at John Waddell, who sat in the driver's seat of the yellow rental truck. The truck had begun to bother Houlihan. It was too big, too conspicuous. They'd have to ditch it soon. McInnes had said he wanted them to dump the truck after Connecticut, but Houlihan thought it might be a damn good thing to be rid of it right now, before the next stage. Maybe he'd steal a smaller vehicle, though it would need to have a large trunk to keep the weapons in.

He winked at Waddell, who looked white. A stolen vehicle was a fucking risk, that was the snag. People actively looked for them. Their numbers and descriptions were put on lists. Cops, who wouldn't blink at a rented truck, would be on your arse quick enough if they spotted you in a stolen car.

It was all right for McInnes, Houlihan thought. He sat in his fancy hotel and called all the shots. He wasn't out here getting himself grubby, doing the deeds,
working
. McInnes was terrific at organisation, Houlihan had to admit that much, but the man was always at one remove from the centre of it all, the place where things really happened. And he was always getting his name in the papers, always basking in publicity, another thing Houlihan resented.

Over the phone, Houlihan listened to the ringing tones and wondered if anybody was ever going to answer. Thinking of McInnes irritated him. He hadn't felt good about McInnes ever since the man had scolded him for the action in Albany.
Stick to the blueprint, Seamus. Be a good boy, Seamus. Keep your nose clean, Seamus
. Yessir and up yours.

What McInnes resembled at times was one of those figures of authority from Houlihan's past. A judge. A cop. A screw. A counsellor. All the fuckers who either sent you to jail or spoke softly to you about taking your place in society. They had you coming and going, those characters did. McInnes couldn't stand the idea of anyone else showing some initiative, some imagination. That's what it all boiled down to. McInnes didn't like the idea of Seamus Houlihan doing something on his own.

Fuck him, Houlihan thought. McInnes thinks he knows it all.

The phone was finally answered.

A man said, ‘Federal Bureau of Investigation. Please hold.'

‘I won't hold,' Houlihan said.

‘Sorry, sir. I have to ask you to wait.'

‘I've waited long enough, shithead.'