Jigsaw (40 page)

McLaren's drinking career had been a long one, involving hospitalizations, treatment centres, detox units, AA, the whole thing. The only reason he managed to cling to his job was because of his solid connections and the fact that people, for reasons of misplaced compassion, usually indulged him; he was just being himself, good old Alistair, basically a sound chap. He wasn't allowed to wander into any sensitive areas; his job description was strictly limited. He'd been demoted gradually over the years but was probably too addled to realize it. When you stripped him of any official titles he might have had, he was, Foxie thought, a filing clerk.

‘So Foxie, old devil, what have you been up to? Still slaving for Pagan, are we?'

‘Still slaving.' Foxworth ordered a brandy for himself and a scotch for McLaren.

‘Can't abide Pagan,' McLaren said.

‘He's not from your side of the tracks,' Foxie said.

McLaren shook his large rugged head. ‘My dear fellow, class isn't involved in this. No, no, no, class is passe. Haven't you heard? All that bullshit has gone out of the window.' He made a gesture with his hand suggestive of a bird taking flight. ‘Pagan rubs me the wrong way. I like a man who knows how to enjoy himself. Have a bit of fun.'

‘I'm sure Pagan has his own definition of fun, Alistair.'

McLaren slapped his glass down, picked up the new one. ‘I wouldn't want him as a drinking buddy, that's what I'm saying.'

‘I don't know. I've had a few good times with him.'

‘I can't quite imagine Pagan having a good time,' McLaren said. ‘They say he's mad about vintage rock and roll. That tells you something right there. Stuck in the past. Glued to an old groove. Doesn't move with the times. Get with it.' He clicked his fingers, as if to suggest he was with it himself: a man of the moment, the cutting edge.

Foxie, resisting the urge to defend Pagan because he wanted to be in and out of the pub quickly, said nothing. He tasted his brandy, then set his glass aside. McLaren was quiet for a while, searching the pockets of his old tweed suit for cigarettes. He found a broken one, lit it, couldn't get it going properly even though he puffed at it furiously.

‘Cheers,' he said, when he'd given up on the cigarette. ‘So you've come seeking favours.'

‘I need them,' Foxie said.

‘All this in-fighting's a bit of a cock-up, don't you think? One department pitted against the other. You on one side, me on another, this branch of Intelligence snubbing that branch, and on and on. If we had more co-operation, Robbie, we'd all be better off. What's wrong with a bit of bloody sharing anyway? We're on the same damn side, correct?'

‘Correct.'

‘Under one flag, old son. It might be slightly tattered these days, but it's still one flag.'

McLaren fished through his cavernous pockets, bringing forth all manner of items – streaks of cellophane, coins, matches, flakes of tobacco. ‘When you phoned I went to the files. I think I found something for you. Took a bit of searching, all the same. You mind doing the honours while I rummage?' He nudged his empty glass toward Foxworth who bought him a second shot, a double, even as he wondered about the shambles of McLaren's life.

‘Thanks. Got it here somewhere for you.' McLaren tasted his drink then poked at the articles he'd stretched out on the counter. Foxie surveyed with some dismay the collection of garbage McLaren produced. Now McLaren was going through another pocket, fishing out more trash, more shreds and scraps and bits and pieces, a few creased baseball cards.

‘What in God's name are you doing with baseball cards?' Foxie asked.

‘Old hobby of mine. When the father shipped me off to Yale for a year after I flunked Cambridge, I fell under the spell of the summer game. Hot dogs and coke and blue afternoons. Ah.' McLaren smacked his lips. ‘Miss all that in a funny way. Miss the lazy humidity. America's a bit of a dream, really.'

Now McLaren was going through the trouser pockets, the two front, the hip.

‘Ah-hah. Got it.' McLaren produced a crumpled sheet of paper and smiled triumphantly. ‘Here's what you're after.' He pushed the sheet toward Foxie, who picked it up.

‘This Streik,' McLaren said. ‘Beats me why you're interested in him.' He belched quietly, trying to suppress it at the last moment by tucking his chin into his neck. ‘Strictly small-time. Delivered the occasional message for CIA. Usually Prague, sometimes Warsaw. We used him once or twice on joint operations. Elusive bugger, though. No fixed abode. Last known address Manhattan.'

Foxie looked at the paper, on which was scribbled an address on East 23rd Street. Useless, if Streik had vanished. Under the New York address was written a name he could barely read because McLaren's handwriting suggested the tremors of a hangover.

‘What's this?' Foxie asked.

McLaren screwed up his eyes and looked at the paper. ‘Ah, yes. Audrey Roczak.'

‘Who?'

‘Former small-time operative in Prague. Warsaw. Very long association with Jacob Streik. Best of pals. Maybe even more than that if you listen to gossip. If you're looking for Streik, you might try through her. Lives in Lyon.'

‘You don't have an address for her?'

‘Sorry and all that. Just Lyon. Shouldn't be too hard, though.'

Foxie nodded, moved away from the bar, most of his brandy untouched.

‘I say, you're not leaving, are you?' McLaren seemed shattered at the prospect of drinking alone.

‘Got to, Alistair.'

‘Is there no charity in that heart of yours?'

Foxie shrugged. He called to the bartender and set up another double scotch for McLaren and then he left the pub.

In his office, Pagan stood at the window and stared down at the square. Daylight, grey and scummy, caused the place to look neglected, like something imported from a dreary East European city. The only thing missing, he reflected, was a dismantled statue of Lenin. He was thinking of Caan, trying to suppress a small admiration for the way the Ambassador had attempted to manipulate him.
Yes, we have some dubious characters in the Embassy. No, there's no such thing as The Undertakers
. The first statement was a confidential admission designed to give the imprimatur of validity to the second. A rhetorical trick, and Caan had worked it as well as it could be worked.

But Pagan wasn't buying. The strident, panicky tone in Streik's recorded voice impressed him more than Caan's silvery manner. Nor did Caan's weak explanations of Streik's message convince him.

He pressed his forehead against the glass: his thoughts drifted away from Caan, back to Brennan Carberry, back to the first meeting on the Embankment, the collision. She had caused more than a dent in his Camaro; she was doing a number on his emotions as well. She was fogging his brain, eroding his concentration, and he felt curiously destabilized. Somebody blows in out of nowhere and snags your heart and suddenly you're losing the thread of things and you don't really know why, you don't know your own mind, you don't know her, or whether in her scheme of things you're just some holiday recreation, the old shipboard romance that enhances a long cruise, a diversion …

He moved back from the window, ran a hand across his face, frowned, picked up the telephone, and even as he began to dial he experienced a feeling of resentment against himself, and a certain sadness, because he'd lost something essential from his life: he'd forgotten how to trust. He stopped dialling, put the phone back down. Don't do this, Frank, he thought. Leave it alone and see where it goes. But his hand strayed to the receiver again and he picked it up and this time dialled the number without stopping. It rang for a long time before it was answered. Pagan spoke his name.

He heard Artie Zuboric's voice, the bearlike growl of a man disturbed from sleep. ‘You any idea what time it is here, Pagan?'

‘About five a.m.,' Pagan said.

‘Fuck's sake,' Zuboric said. ‘I don't hear from you in what – five, six years, and you wake me in the middle of the goddam night? This better be good, Pagan.'

Pagan hesitated. You can still hang up, he thought. Apologize to Zuboric and put down the phone and forget you ever considered this.

Zuboric, who had no acquaintance with charm at the best of times, snarled. ‘I'm waiting, Pagan.'

Pagan said, ‘I need a favour.'

‘Big or small?'

‘Small,' Pagan replied.

‘Let's hear it.'

Pagan made his request and Zuboric asked, ‘That's it?'

‘That's it.'

‘Fuck you. You wake me for that? I'll get back to you.' The line went dead abruptly and Pagan set the receiver down. Dogged by doubt, he wandered back to the window. OK. It was done. Zuboric would get back to him. But he felt bad, sneaky, as if he'd done something underhand. He could call Zuboric again and tell him to forget it.

He looked down from the window.

A man in a dark green overcoat stood in the middle of the square, gazing up at the office. There was a moment of eye contact with Pagan and then the man drew from the folds of his overcoat a gun and raised it quickly, arm stretched, aiming at the window. Shocked, Pagan barely heard the two shots. Before he could react he was aware of glass breaking all around him, chips of wood flying from the rotted old frame, fragments of plaster clouding the air about his skull – and then the man was rushing across the square in the direction of Lower James Street.

Pagan went to the drawer of his desk, took out his Bernardelli and hurried from his office, striding quickly toward the stairs, rushing out into the street and heading in the same direction as the gunman. But there was no sign of him; already the figure in the green overcoat had vanished towards Piccadilly Circus.

Pagan kept moving anyway, looking this and that way through the crowds trudging up from the Circus, unaware of the startled expressions of those who saw him with the gun in his hand and shrank away, expecting the worst, a madman on the loose, a massacre in the making.

When he came to Piccadilly Circus, he gave up. Taxicabs, buses, cars, pedestrians, the place was choked. You could never find anyone here. He walked to the corner of Regent Street where a vendor had on display an array of the morning's newspapers, one of which carried the lurid headline TERROR IN BERLIN, a proclamation that registered only slightly in Pagan's head – because he was thinking of the man in the green coat, he was remembering the chase through the streets of Mayfair, the gunman who had shot Quarterman.

He gazed toward the statue of Eros, which seemed to fade into the threadbare morning light.

TWENTY-SIX

LONDON

‘A
RE YOU SURE IT WAS THE SAME MAN
?' F
OXWORTH ASKED
.

‘I didn't see him from the front when Quarterman was shot. So I can't be one hundred per cent. But I'm reasonably sure.'

Pagan and Foxworth sat in a pub on Beak Street. It was jammed with midday trade. The air smelled of sausages, beer, damp umbrellas, the sulphuric stench of struck matches. The lunch had been Pagan's suggestion. He put down a half-eaten tuna salad sandwich. The acrid taste of grey fish and mayonnaise clung to his tongue like a fur.

‘It's an interesting coincidence, don't you think?' Pagan asked. ‘An hour or so after I talk with William Caan, somebody takes a couple of pot-shots at me.'

Foxie sipped his half-pint of lager. ‘Caan doesn't like the direction of the investigation—'

‘So he wants to … interrupt it,' Pagan remarked. His voice was calm but the gunshots had shaken him. The marksman had come just a little too close.

‘And you think he sent down an instruction.'

‘It's a reasonable assumption.'

‘To The Undertakers.'

‘Another reasonable assumption.'

Foxie pondered this. On the circuitously careful walk to lunch, Pagan had brought him up to date on business: the talk with Burr, the interview with Caan, the putative existence of The Undertakers. Foxie had been overwhelmed by a sense of wheels spinning inside wheels, a carousel endlessly revolving.

Pagan was quiet for a time, listening to the roar of voices around him, the click of cutlery on plates, somebody telling a bawdy joke whose punchline hinged on some weak play on the word
beaver
. ‘It might be that the gunman's instruction was only to scare me. A warning to back off. Ease up a little. I don't know.'

He picked up his scotch, tasted it, found it watery. He heard the shots again as you might hear faraway echoes. ‘I've been giving some thought to the idea that Caan might be a candidate for Carlotta's paymaster,' he said.

‘Except he'd be too cautious, too careful. Direct involvement would be out of the question for him, Frank.'

‘I'm not saying he'd
meet
Carlotta or pick up the phone and call her. He wouldn't go near her in a hundred years. He wouldn't make a silly move like that. I don't trust the guy, but I don't think for a moment he's the one
immediately
behind Carlotta. There's got to be somebody else. A go-between. Look. Imagine Caan wants to be rid of Harcourt. Maybe he doesn't want to involve The Undertakers in killing one of their own. Maybe he doesn't want it to be an in-house job. He prefers secrecy, a hired assassin, somebody
without
connections to The Undertakers. So he contacts a third party who brings in Carlotta … Possibly without Caan's knowledge or permission.'

It was all very vague, Pagan knew. Straws, some short, some long, blew around in his head. ‘Even if it didn't happen like that, what it boils down to is the fact that we have to keep as much information away from Caan as possible. If I feed everything to George, George sees it as his duty to spoon it out to Caan. And Caan, not content with the privilege of an inside track, wants to cover all his bases – which includes finishing me off along the way.'