Jig (6 page)

He had first come to this country as a bright young man of eighteen in the spring of 1928 from Dublin, yet he'd never really left his homeland entirely, nor had he ever forgotten the Troubles that divided and ruptured his country. He might talk with an American accent and have served as a public figure during several administrations in Washington, but his heart was still through and through Irish. Now, as he looked at the faces of the men in the room and imagined the small dark ship machine-gunned, he realised that all he truly wanted was peace and privacy and a chance to spend his last years uninterrupted by the demands of the Cause. He wanted to spend this precious time with Celestine and nobody else. If the Fund-raisers were to continue, they would have to go on without him. But this wasn't the time to announce his retirement.

‘Can the money be replaced?' he asked. He was trying to steer the meeting into less troubled areas. A little diplomatic sleight of hand, which he knew would be futile.

‘Not through my sources,' Linney said. ‘They're not going to be happy to invest again in the present circumstances. Besides, they're tightening the purse-strings these days.'

Cairney knew that the millions of dollars that flowed through Linney's hands came mainly from Arab countries, especially from Libya, whose leadership was keen to promote revolution wherever it might be found. Linney also had access to funds from the Soviet bloc, from dour men who perceived the creation of a kind of Cuba off the coast of Great Britain, a socialist thorn in the pale white English thigh.

‘And
my
people have given too much already,' Mulhaney said. ‘Hell, you all know that. I can't go back and dip into the funds. It's not like the old days when a union boss could treat union funds like his own private bank. I've got lawyers and shit-headed accountants to explain things to. I can't even get twenty bucks out of petty cash without signing in triplicate. As it stands, the membership of my union wouldn't be completely happy to know where their contributions go. Except the fellows from the old country.' Mulhaney drew on a cigar and looked bleakly convincing.

Cairney stared across the table at young Kevin Dawson.

Dawson shook his head. ‘I don't think I would have very much luck either. The families are all tired of giving. And they're all getting weary of the bloodshed. It gets more difficult all the time.'

Cairney stood up and walked to the window. The families Dawson had referred to were mainly New England Irish – third or fourth or even fifth generation – great clans of wealthy American–Irish who were happy to contribute money so long as they weren't involved by name. Most of them had returned once in their lifetimes to the old country to look at ancient parish records in obscure villages and come home clutching Irish lace or Waterford glass or Donegal tweed. And for most of them one sentimental journey to the motherland, the mythical Erin, was enough to last forever.

Cairney turned away from the window now. He was aware of the intricate complexities of financing the IRA, the networks that were made, the delicate interconnections of disparate elements, the secret cells and the chains invisibly linked. He was aware of how frail, how tenuous, everything was, and he knew that the lost money could not be replaced for many months, perhaps even years.

He moved slowly back to the table. He sat down. He poured himself one small shot of brandy. One beneficial little snifter he held in a hand noticeably shaking. The currents in this room upset him. Was there anything more destructive than unfocused paranoia?

‘Let's get back to the biggie,' Mulhaney said. ‘Let's get back to the missing money. Let's imagine that somebody in this room, somebody with total knowledge of the
Connie
and her cargo, decided to line his own pockets. Let's play with that notion.'

Nicholas Linney looked up from an open folder that lay in front of him. ‘Which one of us do you have in mind, Jock?'

Mulhaney looked mysterious. ‘I have my own ideas,' he said quietly.

‘You want to share them with us?' Linney asked. An aggressive vein appeared in his forehead, a mauve cord. ‘You want to let us know the name of the person you suspect? Is it me? Do you think I had something to do with it? Say what you're thinking. Don't keep us in the fucking dark, Jock.'

Harry Cairney cleared his throat and said, ‘It doesn't have to be one of us, Jock. The British could have seized the
Connie
.'

‘Which poses another question, Senator,' Mulhaney replied. ‘If the British took the money, how the hell did they
know
what was aboard the
Connie?
Unless somebody in this goddam room told them. It keeps coming back to the same fucking thing. Somebody in this room.' And Mulhaney turned his face slowly, gazing at each man in turn, as if he were privy to information he wasn't about to share with anyone else.

Kevin Dawson said, ‘The ship might have been taken by agents of our own federal government.'

‘And they'd slaughter the crew, would they?' Mulhaney made a scornful little noise. He didn't believe the feds capable of such carnage. He had a curiously naïve faith, common among self-made men, in the inherent fairness of law-and-order agencies.

‘All I'm saying,' Kevin Dawson answered, ‘is that the British aren't the only candidates. And it doesn't follow that somebody in this room betrayed us. We might have been under surveillance for a long time. The British, the feds – they have their own sources of intelligence. They wouldn't necessarily need the help of anybody here.'

Harry Cairney held up one hand. ‘I really don't think it much matters who took the money, gentlemen. I really don't think that's the issue here.'

‘Of course it fucking matters,' Mulhaney said.

Cairney shook his head. Mulhaney could be very tiresome. Cairney said nothing for a moment. He raised a finger to his dry lips and glanced around the faces in the room. They were all watching him and he felt exposed beneath their eyes.

‘The point is, Ireland believes that
we're
responsible for the loss,' he said, pronouncing his words very slowly. ‘Our Irish connection believes – rightly or wrongly – that one of us, perhaps even more than one, was behind the piracy.'

Harry Cairney heard the sound of Celestine playing her piano overhead. It was very soft, distant, oddly moving. She was playing something baroque and intricate and it suggested tranquillity.

‘And I have the very strong impression,' he added, pausing, raising his eyes to the ceiling, ‘that they will send somebody to find the missing money because they're not going to sit back and shrug their shoulders over the loss. It's not their style.'

‘Did they say they were sending somebody?' Mulhaney wanted to know.

‘I was led to believe so,' Cairney answered, remembering the angry Irish voice over the transatlantic phone connection that had said
We need that bloody money and we need it badly. And I have just the person to get it
. It had been an unpleasant conversation, one in which Cairney had been obliged to listen to a tirade that was no more palatable for being uttered in a lilting, musical accent.

Mulhaney asked, ‘And how is this
somebody
supposed to get the money back, for Christ's sake? If one of us in this room took the goddam stuff, how would this
somebody
even know where to
find
any one of us? How would he even know where to start looking?'

Cairney felt a little flutter in an eyelid, as if a moth had landed there. The sound of Celestine's piano had stopped. ‘I have no idea, Jock.'

‘Ireland doesn't even know our names. Our identities. So what do they think they'll accomplish by sending some asshole over here? What's he going to do? Huh? We've always operated in secrecy, Harry. Is this messenger boy going to unmask us?'

‘I can't answer your questions, Jock. I don't have the answers. But my best guess is that they're not going to send any messenger boy. They'll send a man who knows his business. And whoever he is, he's going to be goddam determined to find out what happened to the entire operating budget of the Irish Republican Army for one whole year.'

Nicholas Linney closed his buff-coloured folder. He blinked his narrow eyes. ‘Let me get this straight. Are we meant to understand that this guy represents a
threat
to our personal safety? Is he going to come here armed?'

There was an unmistakable relish in Linney's voice. He sounded like a man who had been confined too long to the drudgery of paperwork and whose blood quickened at the possibility of physical menace. For a moment Cairney wondered if Linney had played a role in the murderous hijacking, but he dismissed the speculation as fruitless. Linney, Mulhaney, Dawson – any one of this trio might have had his own reasons for arranging the piracy. Cairney, who disliked the track of his own suspicions, pushed the thought out of his mind.

He said, ‘I can only assume this man would carry a weapon, Nick. But if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about.'

Linney smiled. It was a humourless little movement of his mouth. ‘Believe me, Senator, I'm not remotely worried. I can take care of myself.'

‘I'm sure you can,' Cairney said. ‘What really concerns me is the fact that we can't predict how this person will behave. We don't know how he operates, if he's rational, if he's given to violence. We're in the dark as much as he is. And since that's the case, it would be wise for each of us to take whatever precautions we think necessary. At least until the situation is resolved.'

Kevin Dawson smiled uncertainly. ‘You don't really imagine we're in danger, do you?'

Cairney shrugged. ‘I don't know. Ireland sends a man who doesn't know our names, doesn't know if one of us is responsible for this terrible situation, a man whose only mission is the recovery of the money by whatever means. Put yourself in his shoes. How would you act if you had been entrusted with a task like this one? How would you behave?'

Cairney listened to the silence that followed his questions. He thought now of the faceless figure who would come from Ireland. He imagined somebody stalking the Fund-raisers, a shadowy man driven by his sense of justice, of setting right a terrible wrong. He tried to envisage such a man, and even as he did so he experienced an unsettling chill. People who betrayed the Cause always paid an awful price because it was the one crime that was neither forgiven nor forgotten – and if somebody in this room
had
played a part in the seizure of the
Connie's
cargo, then Cairney could almost feel sorry for the culprit. Almost.

As he turned away from the window and the cold sight of the frozen trees around the lake, he wondered how this Irishman was going to proceed with his efforts. What if he did find out the identities of the Fund-raisers? What then? Was he going to come and knock on the front door and ask polite questions? Cairney severely doubted that approach. The Irishman would have other ways, quite possibly unpleasant ones, of getting to the truth. Cairney shivered slightly. He was too old to face the prospect of physical threats, even violence. But he understood one thing – that whoever came from Ireland was sure to be a man who was determined to get results, no matter what lengths he might have to go to achieve them.

‘The whole thing's academic anyway,' Mulhaney said, blowing smoke rings. ‘The guy has absolutely no way of finding us.'

‘I wish I could be as certain as you, Jock,' Cairney said unhappily, staring down into the polished wood surface of the oval table where the reflected faces of the Fundraisers, like men drowning in clear water, looked back at him.

4

Dublin

The girl told Patrick Cairney he had the eyes of a devil, which he found amusing. She was called Rhiannon Canavan and she was a tall red-haired girl with wide hips and small sculpted breasts, and she lay in Cairney's bed in his tiny flat near the Fitzgibbon Street Garda Station, which was close to the main road between Swords and Dublin and not the quietest place in which to live. Cairney stretched out alongside her, feeling himself slip into that dreamy place at the end of intense lovemaking. He placed the flat of his hand against her belly, and she purred as a cat might, rolling her long body towards him and circling his legs with her own.

‘The eyes of a devil,' she said again, and she bit Cairney lightly on the side of his neck.

‘And you're a vampire,' he answered.

‘A hussy is what I am. Or it's what you've made me anyhow. For the love of God, what am I doing here? Did you put something in my drink, Patrick Cairney?'

‘I didn't think you noticed.'

‘I remember seeing this funny little envelope in your hand.'

‘Himalayan Fucking Powder,' he said. ‘Ancient Tibetan secret recipe. Guaranteed.'

‘You say wicked things.' She sat upright, straddling him. Her breasts swung slightly in the half light of the room. In the distance, the sound of a police car could be heard whining in the night.

‘I don't think I'd personally like to live with the police on my doorstep,' she said.

‘Why? What have you got to hide?'

‘Obviously nothing,' and she arched her back, tilting her face away from him. She was, so she had told him in the pub, a nurse in the Richmond Hospital, and he wasn't to think that just because nurses had poor reputations she was going to hop into the sack with him straight off the bloody bat, even if he did have the eyes of the devil and his charming American manners into the bargain.

‘Nurse Canavan,' he said in a fraudulent Irish accent. ‘I am having this Jaysus of a pain between my legs. Can you do anything about it, out of daycent Christian kindness?'

‘I think I have the prescription for you,' and she swung her body around, lowering her face to his groin and taking him softly into her mouth. And then she moved away from him, rolling on her back, and he entered her even as he continued to hear the sirens of police cars outside in the night. There were depths here, Cairney thought, and he was afraid of them. In the half light of the room Rhiannon Canavan had her eyes closed and her mouth open, and she was holding on to Cairney as if he were a carnival ride that scared her. Spent, Cairney fell away from her, but she still held on to him.