Jig (53 page)

‘Archaeology must have been different for him then,' she said. ‘He's been doing it for years now, hasn't he?'

‘It's the damnedest thing,' the old man said. ‘I sent him to Yale. He was going to do law, he said. He spent a year at Yale, then suddenly I received a postcard from him. He's in Ireland, for God's sake!'

‘Just like that?'

‘Dropped law. Dropped Yale. Wanted to learn more about the past, he said. Wanted to enroll in Trinity College. I didn't mind that. After all, I suppose I'm the one that gave him a taste of the past in the first place – but archaeology!'

Harry gazed into firelight. There was an ache inside him. He realised he was hurting from the way Patrick had so abruptly left. When you were old, even small emotional slights became exaggerated inside you. You wanted to look towards death without that kind of pain.

‘He went overseas a lot,' he continued. ‘This desert. That desert. He was always sending me postcards from strange places.'

Celestine was very quiet for a time. She was trying to imagine Patrick Cairney turning brown under a desert sun. It was a fine image and it was exact. Where else would he have gone but to the deserts of the Middle East?

‘For long periods, I'd hear absolutely nothing from him. Then there'd be a flurry of postcards from places with Arab names. I worried at first, but then I had to let go of that. He was grown-up. It was his life. I couldn't influence him any more.'

‘Did you ever influence him?'

Harry laughed quietly. ‘He's the only one who could answer that.'

Celestine raised her head, sipped some of her drink. She wanted to know more about Patrick Cairney. Tomorrow morning, first thing. That's when she'd know something Harry couldn't possibly tell her. Maybe. Or maybe she was simply tracking a mystery that didn't exist, a construct of her own mind, something to pass the time with the way people whittled on sticks or took up water-colours.
No. She was sure. Damned sure
.

‘Are you proud of him?' she asked.

‘Proud?' Harry Cairney smiled. ‘I never asked myself that.'

Celestine pressed the palms of her hands against her thighs. The loose-fitting cotton robe she wore slipped up to her knees and she could feel the heat from the fire lay a band of warmth against her calves.

‘Why all these questions?' the old man asked.

‘He's my stepson, don't forget. You don't have a monopoly on him. I want to know him better, that's all.'

Cairney looked suddenly rather solemn. ‘Be warned,' he said. ‘He's not so easy to know.'

Celestine closed her eyes again. ‘I don't believe he's as difficult as you suggest,' she answered.

Cairney patted the back of her hand. It was all right to talk about Patrick, it was fine, but finally it only produced in him an illusion of normality. Sitting here by firelight, his wife's head in his lap. The surfaces of the very ordinary. The taste of brandy. Family chatter. He turned his face back towards the window. Out there the world was quite a different place. But he would maintain a front of calm because he was good at that. He had a lifetime of self-control in public office behind him, a decent support-system. He wasn't given to easy panic or impulsive acts. Everything would go on as it had done before the
Connie
was stricken at sea. Life, marriage, love.

‘We need music,' he said, starting to rise.

She shook her head. ‘Let's enjoy the peace, Harry.'

He rose anyhow. He walked to his desk and looked at the Browning once more. It was years since he'd fired the gun.

Celestine, propped up on her elbows, was watching him. ‘What's the big attraction there, Harry?'

He closed the drawer slowly.

He came back across the room and sat down beside her. ‘Nothing will ever happen to you,' he said. ‘I want you to know that.'

Celestine looked surprised. ‘Why would anything happen to me, Harry? This is Roscommon. And nothing ever happens here.'

Harry Cairney closed his eyes. He thought he felt it in the very air around him, a shiver, as if the atmosphere of this house had changed with Mulhaney's phone call. It was a sinister feeling, and he didn't like it. It resembled those disquieting moments when you felt that somebody, somewhere, was walking on your grave.

New Rockford, Connecticut

It was two o'clock in the afternoon when Kevin Dawson received a telephone call from his brother in the White House. Thomas Dawson sounded very weary when he spoke.

‘How was Candlewood?'

‘Candlewood was terrific,' Kevin Dawson replied. ‘You ought to try it some time. That place never lets me down. I always come back feeling refreshed.'

‘My idea of roughing it is to watch black and white TV,' the President said. ‘One Boy Scout to a family is okay. Two would be a travesty of genetic theory.'

Kevin Dawson heard the sounds of his daughters from the foot of the stairs. They were involved in a game of what they'd described as ‘cut-throat poker', which they played to rules of their own random making. It was altogether incomprehensible.

Thomas Dawson said, ‘It's been a long winter.'

Puzzled, Kevin reached out and closed the door of his office with his knee. ‘You didn't call to discuss the length of the seasons,' he said.

‘True.'

Another pause.

Kevin sat down, tilting his chair back against the wall. With one hand he managed to pour himself a scotch. He heard the door of the Secret Service vehicle open and close in the driveway below. Both agents, whom the kids had christened Cisco and Pancho, had spent the weekend in obvious discomfort, sleeping in a two-man tent because there was no extra room in the small cabin. They took their meals alone, laboriously burning things over a Coleman stove and filling the cold, sharp air with a dark brown pollution that smelled, Kitty said, like a skunk on a spit.

‘It's been a long winter, and you're about ready for a vacation,' Thomas Dawson said.

‘It's that bad, huh?'

‘It's that bad. Nicholas Linney has been murdered.'

‘Linney?' Kevin felt an odd tightness in his throat. His voice sounded very high, even to himself.

‘I don't have to spell out the implications.'

‘Was it Jig?' Kevin asked.

‘Almost certainly. By the way, I don't want this news bruited about, Kev. You understand me?'

Kevin Dawson drained his glass. He reached for the bottle, poured himself a second shot. All the invigoration he'd brought back with him from Candlewood was draining away. He had the very strange feeling he'd just been kicked in the stomach and couldn't breathe properly. How in God's name had Jig managed to track Linney down? Kevin curled the telephone cord tightly around his wrist.

He heard Martha and the kids coming up the stairs. Their voices echoed in this great sprawling house.

‘I don't think you're seriously in danger, Kevin. You've got protection there. But why take any needless chances?'

Protection, Kevin thought. What it came down to was the fact that all the security in the world couldn't prevent somebody getting to you, if he was determined enough, and crazy enough, to find a way.

‘What do you suggest?' Kevin asked.

‘Hawaii. Make it a business trip with a little R & R on the side. Check into the family interests out there, but take Martha and the kids as well. Stay until Jig's been caught. How soon can you get out of there?'

Kevin Dawson wasn't sure. There were business meetings of one kind or another on Monday morning and Martha was the guest of honour at a breakfast in Stamford sponsored by the Make-A-Wish Foundation, which was her favourite charity. It would take more than a terrorist threat to make her cancel. ‘Tomorrow afternoon,' he said. ‘I can't see getting away from here before that.'

‘I'd like it if you left earlier, Kevin.'

‘I don't see how.'

Kevin heard his brother light up one of his infrequent cigarettes.

‘I've just been talking with what the press always calls “my closest advisors”, Kevin. Terrorists are the new bogeymen. They've replaced Communists in the American nightmare. If I lose some of the Irish vote by sticking the full fury of the FBI on somebody as famous as Jig, I'm advised I'll pick it up again with the rednecks who have orgasms when they know there's a firm Presidential hand on the old helm of state. The Law and Order Ticket. The Jerry Falwell Brigade. Imagine a Catholic climbing into bed beside those polyester gangsters!'

Kevin Dawson couldn't imagine anything like that. But his brother had gone so far into cynicism that nothing was surprising these days. Thomas Dawson, human being, was almost a lost cause. Not quite gone, but fading fast. Tom would climb into bed with any group that could deliver votes. He was less a President than a calculating machine. If the Irish couldn't be counted on, you dumped them and looked around for substitutes. The politics of expediency, of numbers. Tommy would have sat down to supper with a consortium of the KKK, the John Birchers, the Posse Comitatus and The Unification Church, if he thought this crew could deliver.

‘We were weak on law and order during the campaign,' Thomas Dawson said. ‘I know it lost us the Mid-West and the South. Maybe my advisors are smarter than I think.'

‘Maybe,' Kevin said.

‘Call me from Hawaii.'

‘I'll do that.'

‘Goodnight, Kevin.'

Kevin Dawson put the telephone down. The door of his office swung open and Martha stood there. She was dressed in faded blue jeans and an old red parka. There were streaks of mud on her hiking boots. Her Candlewood Collection. Kevin loved it.

‘The girls and I are going to watch some Disney thing on TV,' she said. ‘Wanna join us?'

Kevin Dawson nodded. He reached for his wife, held her wrists in his hands. ‘Later,' he said.

Martha smiled. ‘I want you to know I had a wonderful weekend. I didn't even mind Pancho and Cisco and their awful cooking. I just had a terrific time.'

‘Me too.'

Kevin wondered how to approach the subject of a trip to Hawaii. Martha hated to travel very far from her home. A day trip to Stamford was as far as she liked to go.

‘Why don't you watch your movie, then we'll put the kids to bed as early as possible. You can slip, as they say, into something more comfortable, and I'll open a bottle of wine.' Kevin thought that a couple of glasses of burgundy would make the notion of Hawaii palatable to her. She might not cancel her luncheon in Stamford, but she might be persuaded that Waikiki was a good idea. Sometimes you had to coax Martha along, seduce her into acceptance. Besides, nothing was more pleasurable in Kevin Dawson's world than the act of making love to his own wife.

‘You've got a funny look in your eyes,' she said.

‘Don't I.'

‘I know that look, Kevin Dawson.'

‘You should. You're the one that put it there.'

She raised her face up and kissed him, standing on tiptoes. ‘I look like somebody from the combat zone,' she said. She went to the door, turned back to him. ‘Next time you see me I'll be gorgeous.'

‘You always are,' Kevin Dawson said, but his wife had already gone.

He sat alone in his room, staring absently at a pile of business papers. He couldn't keep Nicholas Linney out of his mind. He kept seeing Nick as he'd seen him last at Roscommon, kept hearing Linney say he could take care of himself. Well, he hadn't. He hadn't taken care of himself at all. He thought now of Harry Cairney and Mulhaney and he considered calling them. But what was there to say? And neither of them had troubled to call him, which meant they had nothing to say either.

Kevin Dawson walked to the window. He looked down at the Secret Servicemen. One of them – Cisco, Pancho, Kevin wasn't sure – stared up at him and smiled. A fleeting little expression, then it was gone. Kevin stared across the meadowlands that stretched all the way from his house to the road. Beyond the ribbon of concrete the hills rose up, pocked with mysterious shadows and dark trees. It was a landscape he had been familiar with all his life, except that now it appeared strange to him, and threatening, as if it might conceal the Irishman somewhere in its crevices.

New York City

The voice on the tape said:
I'm claiming responsibility on behalf of the Irish Republican Army for the explosions in the Memorial Church at White Plains. Have you got that, shithead? I don't intend to repeat it
. And then the tape went silent, the line dead. Frank Pagan pressed the rewind button on the Grundig and listened for the third time. Zuboric drummed a lead pencil on the surface of his desk, watching Pagan carefully. You couldn't tell, from the surfaces of the Englishman's face, what he might be thinking.

The voice filled the room again. Pagan pushed the stop button. He looked at Zuboric.

‘It's Irish. There's no mistaking that,' Pagan said.

Zuboric stroked his moustache. There was something in Pagan's eyes he didn't like. He wasn't quite sure what it was, but a strange little film had appeared in the ashen greyness. A sneaky quality. It was as if Pagan's eyes were being bleached of what colour they possessed. Zuboric wished he had a passport valid for entry into the Englishman's mind.

‘Is it Jig?' the FBI agent asked.

Pagan stared down at the reels of the Grundig. ‘It could be,' he said.

‘You're not convinced, naturally.'

‘I'm just not sure. There's distortion. And maybe he's disguising the voice. It could be Jig.'

Zuboric appeared satisfied with this. Frank Pagan walked up and down the office and then returned to the Grundig, as if he needed to hear the voice one last time to be absolutely sure. He pushed the play button, listened, killed the machine.

‘I'm still not one hundred per cent certain,' Pagan said.

‘We don't
need
one hundred per cent certainty, Frank.'