Jig (54 page)

No, Pagan thought. You don't. He looked at Zuboric's college diploma which hung just over his head and wondered what institution of Higher Learning had been so foolish as to bestow any kind of degree on Zuboric. Obviously it was one that didn't specialise in imaginative pursuits.

‘I'd like to have the original Jig tapes relayed from England,' Pagan said. ‘A comparison would erase any doubt.'

Zuboric was about to make an answer to this when the telephone rang. Pagan watched the agent pick up the receiver. Zuboric's body was suddenly tense, at attention, which meant only one thing. Leonard M. Korn was on the other end of the line. Pagan listened to the occasional ‘Yes sir' which Zuboric dropped into a conversation that was otherwise one-sided. Yessir, yes-sir, three bags full, sir.

Zuboric put the receiver down. ‘Well well.' He was positively beaming. Pagan thought ships could guide themselves by the beacon that was Zuboric's face right then.

‘As of eight o'clock tonight,' Zuboric said, glancing at his wristwatch, ‘The Director is placing himself in charge of the Jig operation.'

‘Ah,' Pagan said. ‘Divine intervention.'

Zuboric rubbed his hands together. ‘Tomorrow morning, one hundred agents will be working fulltime on Jig.
One hundred
.' Zuboric laughed in an excited way. He was like a lottery winner, Pagan thought. Blue-collar, worked hard all his days, liked the occasional sixer of Schlitz, a game of bowling Fridays – and lo and behold! His number has just come up and he doesn't know what to say. I'm happy for you, Artie, Pagan thought. Spend it wisely.

‘The Director estimates we'll have Jig in a matter of days.'

Pagan said nothing. He mistrusted the optimism of law enforcement officers, especially those who dwelt on Olympian heights the way Korn did. Probably the guy in charge of the Jack the Ripper investigation had said much the same kind of thing a hundred years ago, and
he
was still searching.

‘I'm going back to my hotel,' Pagan said. ‘I'm tired.'

‘I'll keep you company, Frank.'

‘Of course you will.'

Pagan did up the buttons of his overcoat. He glanced once at the Grundig machine. He thought again of repeating his proposal to have the original tapes of Jig relayed from London, but suddenly it was redundant, suddenly those tapes wouldn't make a damn bit of difference. The hunt was on and the night was filled with baying hounds. And there was going to be noise, so much noise that nobody was going to stop and listen to tapes of the real Jig. Even if they did, they wouldn't hear them anyway because blood had a way of singing into your ears, making you deaf. The hunt mentality, whether it was Federal agents thrashing around for Jig or plum-rumped English squires intent on diminishing the evil fox population, was akin to insanity. It was blinded, and restricted, and obsessive.

Whoever had called the FBI about White Plains wasn't Jig. He didn't sound
remotely
like Jig. There was no way in the world Jig had made that phone call. Pagan had hoped to use his apparent uncertainty as a ploy, a way of winning a little time and getting the real tapes played. But he saw further manoeuvres as totally useless now. There was no future in arguing, in trying to convince Zuboric. For his own part, he knew what he was going to do. It wasn't the smartest move he'd ever contemplated, but at the same time he couldn't see any alternatives. He had tried to play this whole thing by FBI rules and regulations, but that time was long past. He hadn't come all this way to America to have his quarry trapped in some bloody corner by morons like Zuboric. He hadn't made this trip to see that kind of travesty happen. He wanted Jig, but not on the sort of terms dictated by the hangmen of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Pagan locked the door of his room at the Parker Meridien. He sat for a time on the edge of the bed. He was motionless, like a man in the still centre of meditation. Then, when he moved, he did so with the economy of somebody driven by a solitary purpose. He checked his gun, stuck it in the waistband of his pants at the back. He left the room. It was all movement now. Down in the elevator. Out into the lobby. Heading for the street.

Tyson Bruno came across the lobby towards him.

Pagan swept past the agent into the street, but Bruno came after him swiftly. It was interesting, Pagan thought. There was no effort on Bruno's part to conceal himself, no shadow-work going on. It was out in the open. Maybe Bruno had been surprised by Pagan's sudden appearance and the quickness of his stride and hadn't had time to hide himself. What the hell, it was completely academic now.

Pagan stopped, turned around, waited until Bruno was level with him. Tyson Bruno, who was built like an outhouse, looked very solid in the dusk of Fifty-Seventh Street.

‘Before you even ask me one question, Bruno old boy, the answer is dead simple. I'm going for a walk and I don't want you on my arse. Is that clear enough for you?'

Tyson Bruno grinned. He was a man who enjoyed adversity. If he hadn't stepped inside the labyrinthine clasp of the FBI, he would have been a happy bouncer in a sleazy strip-joint. ‘I go where you go, Pagan. This time, you don't take a hike on me.'

Pagan turned, continued to walk. Bruno was still coming up behind him. On Fifth Avenue, Pagan made a right. Bruno was still behind him.

‘Your last warning, Ty,' Pagan said, looking back at the man.

‘You shouldn't be doing this,' Bruno said.

Pagan moved away. He was tired of boxes. Tired of restrictions. Tired by fools who, left to their own devices, courted lunacy. He paused at a stoplight. Bruno was right behind him, still grinning. Pagan glanced at him.

‘I just keep coming,' Bruno said.

Pagan made as if to step off the sidewalk and cross the street. He moved an inch or two then stopped abruptly, bunching his hands together and swinging them as if he held a hammer. The connection with Bruno's jaw made a delicious crunching sound. Reverberations created ripples, like tiny springs, all the way up Pagan's arms to his shoulders. Tyson, off balance, hopeless, sat down on the edge of the kerb and said, ‘Hey!' He was bleeding from the lip, and his eyes looked like two glazed pinballs under the bleak glow of the streetlamps.

Pagan didn't stop. He ran to the other side of the street and began to move along Fifty-Sixth, past the windows of closed restaurants and travel agencies, past the plastic sacks of garbage and a solitary sleeping wino, a failed candidate for St. Finbar's Mission. Pagan stopped running only when he had reached Fifty-Fifth and Broadway and was certain that Tyson Bruno was nowhere near him. Winded, he paused in the doorway of a closed Greek sandwich shop, where the scent of yesterday's fried lamb filled his nostrils.

It occurred to him that he had done more than burn his bridges. He had exploded them in such a way that the whole bloody river was on fire.

21

New York City

With a newspaper rolled up under his arm Ivor McInnes stepped into Central Park. It was barely dawn and the sky above Manhattan was the colour of milk. McInnes followed a narrow pathway between the trees until he came to an unoccupied bench. He wiped a layer of thin frost from the wooden slats, then sat down and unfolded his newspaper.

Photographs, headlines. They leaped out at him. For a moment he couldn't read because his eyes watered and his hand trembled. But there it was! McInnes had the feeling, given to very few men, that something he'd long dreamed was finally taking form in reality.

He stared at the newspaper again. He didn't see what other men might see there, a story of outrageous vandalism. He saw glory instead. He looked at the pictures of the smoking church, the tight little crowds of people gathered on the sidewalk, the shots of firemen aiming their hoses into the carnage. He felt for the victims, of course. It was only natural. A man without feelings was a dead man. But these feelings were small considerations compared with the balance of history. And it was history, or rather his personal piece of it, that enthralled Ivor McInnes.

He folded the newspaper over. For a while he stared into the trees. There was a breath of spring in the chill early morning around him. A sense of fresh breakthroughs, newness. He spread the newspaper flat on the bench and read the story through, unable to control the excitement that overcame him.

There was of course no mention yet of the IRA. Nobody was going to release that information to the public so soon. There hadn't been time to analyse Houlihan's call, there hadn't been time in Washington to prepare a public face or concoct a feasible story to cover this incident. A church had blown up. Why? What had caused it? The paper didn't say. The reporter didn't know. There wasn't even speculation. McInnes smiled and rubbed his face with the palm of a hand. The powers of law and order could sit on this one, he realised. They could stall and prevaricate, if they didn't want to alarm the public with the news that IRA terrorists were suddenly operating within the continental United States. But they couldn't stall forever.

After today, they couldn't even stall for a moment.

McInnes folded the newspaper again and was about to rise when he became conscious of somebody sitting down on the bench beside him.

Frank Pagan said, ‘Interesting reading.'

‘A damn tragedy,' McInnes said and glanced at Pagan's big hands, which were bone-white and tense on the man's knees. There was a sense of power about Pagan, a force held narrowly in check as if by some enormous inner effort. What had he come for at this time of the bloody morning? McInnes wondered.

‘What do you think caused it, Ivor? A whole church gone in a flash. I mean, what do you think really caused such a thing to happen?'

‘The paper doesn't say,' McInnes answered. Was Frank Pagan baiting him? McInnes dismissed the suspicion. Pagan was groping in the dark.

‘Your opinion, Ivor. You must have one. You usually do.'

McInnes shrugged.

‘God works in mysterious ways,' Pagan remarked.

‘Isn't that the truth?'

A jogger went past. A pot-bellied middle-aged man with a scarlet headband and expensive sneakers. There was total desperation in his eyes.

Pagan said, ‘Somebody told me the IRA claimed the job in White Plains.'

‘The IRA?'

‘Strikes me as farfetched,' Pagan said. ‘How does it strike you?'

‘Hard to believe,' McInnes answered. ‘They'd be operating pretty far from home, wouldn't they?'

Pagan smiled. He stared at McInnes for a while. ‘It's not their style, is it?' he asked.

‘Styles change. Anything's possible.'

‘Anything's possible. But why bring their war into the United States?'

‘You're asking me? I've always found the Catholic mind unfathomable, Frank. I know this much, though. If it's the IRA, it's not going to end with some church. Once those fellows get a taste of blood, they don't know when to stop.'

Pagan was quiet now. McInnes was conscious of the man's cold stare, which made him uncomfortable. Frank Pagan, with his inside track, would of course know about the IRA story. But why would he casually mention this? McInnes wondered. Pagan was like a bloody submarine, operating way below the surface in a place where the waters were murky. You could never tell where the man was headed or what torpedoes he might fire.

Pagan draped an arm across the back of the bench. ‘It's funny,' he said quietly. ‘Now it's the church. Before that it was Alex Fitzjohn.'

‘Fitzjohn?' So here it was at last. Fitzjohn's name, as McInnes had expected, had finally cropped up. He tried not to appear defensive.

Pagan nodded. ‘Alex Fitzjohn was murdered in Albany, New York. The IRA claimed responsibility for that one too.'

‘I didn't hear anything about that,' McInnes said.

‘It wasn't in the papers, Ivor.'

McInnes, who had the gift of supreme detachment when he needed it, stared blankly into Pagan's face. ‘Well,' was all he said. He tapped the bench with his newspaper.

‘You ever hear of Alex Fitzjohn, Ivor?'

McInnes shook his head.

Pagan said, ‘He was a member of the Free Ulster Volunteers. I thought you might have run into him along the way somewhere.'

‘We're back at that again, are we?' McInnes said. ‘We're back at the FUV again?'

‘Why not,' Pagan said. ‘Do you deny knowing Alex Fitzjohn?'

‘I know a lot of people in Ulster, Frank. I know a lot of Fitzes. Fitzthis, Fitzthat. I told you before, I have absolutely no connection with the Volunteers. To suggest otherwise is a falsehood. I can't remember anyone by the name of Alex Fitzjohn.' McInnes smiled and stared across the park. In the milky light of dawn the trees appeared to have been brushed lightly with an off-white enamel paint. ‘I have enemies, Frank. You know that. Certain people in Ulster have always tried to discredit me. Certain Catholics.' McInnes crossed his legs and leaned closer to Frank Pagan. ‘For years the Catholic Church has been putting out stories about me. Incredible lies. They say I'm the leader of the FUV, among other things. The reason's very simple. They don't like what I have to say, Frank. They don't like my criticisms. They've been in a cave of superstition for centuries. And they don't like what I do.
I shine some light into that cave. I attack their idolatry
. They fight back the only way they know how, which is dirty.'

McInnes paused. His large handsome face was intense now. The light in his eyes, like some laser, could have bored two neat holes in a plank of wood.

‘What I really object to, Frank, isn't just the Roman Catholic attitude to social issues. It's bad enough when they tell some unemployed labourer with nine kids that he can't get his wife on the pill. Keep on breeding, they say, and to hell with the misery. You'll get your rewards in the afterlife, sonny. It's bad enough when they tell people they can erase their sins by mumbojumboing over some set of bloody beads, Frank. But what I truly find deplorable is the damned backwardness of it all. It's late in the twentieth century and we're in the throes of a vast technological revolution and the Catholic Church belongs to another time. It doesn't like progress because it means that people have more information. And more information, as we well know, leads to freedoms. And that's what the Catholic Church doesn't like. People who are free to think, Frank.
They want men and women in bondage.
' McInnes shut his eyes a moment. He moved one hand through the air, inscribing a pattern of some kind. ‘It keeps Ulster in the Dark Ages, Frank. It keeps my country from going forward. It hates the new technology. It doesn't know what to do with it. It wants its adherents to live in blind obedience to the dictates of The Vatican. Consider this, Frank.
In Dublin priests actually bless the fleet of Aer Lingus
! Can you believe that? Priests bless the planes! What does that tell you about the Catholic Church? It's trying to impose superstition upon high technology! It makes me uneasy and it makes me angry because, with the present Catholic birthrate, it won't be long before Ulster is dominated by The Vatican the way The Republic is. Then we kiss the whole of Ireland goodbye. And back to the Dark Ages with
all
of us.'