Jigsaw Page 3

  Pagan had gone to the young man’s funeral outside Albany, an affair attended by thousands of mourners, Irish-Americans from New York and the New England states, from Chicago and California. An Irish Republican flag had been laid across the coffin. A solitary piper had played laments. Pagan had watched the coffin being lowered into muddy black ground on an incongruously gorgeous spring day and he’d thought how Jig’s enthusiasms and passions, his belief in the rightness of the Irish Republican cause, had been responsible for his own destruction. Pagan had been struck that day by a sense of waste so potent he could almost taste it in the sunny air. The waste of money donated by misguided Irish-Americans to the Cause, the wasted fervour; above all, the waste of the young man’s life.

  He’d listened to the bagpiper, watched a lark hover in the high clear air, and he’d realized that in another reality he and the dead young man might have been friends. Jig, finally, had died for nothing. The real tragedy. Lives gutted – and for what? He remembered Artie Zuboric, the acerbic FBI agent who’d grudgingly worked alongside him in pursuit of Jig, standing in the funeral crowd and whispering, ‘I don’t get you, Pagan. The guy was a fucking assassin. A terrorist. So why are we here? Why did I let you drag me to this goddam gathering of the clans? What was he supposed to have been – some kinda saint, for Chrissakes?’

  ‘If you don’t know, I can’t tell you,’ Pagan replied quietly.

  ‘Sometimes you come out with this mystifying bullshit,’ Artie Zuboric had said, and sighed with irritation. ‘I must be missing something.’

  Pagan switched off the TV. He got up and went to the window and looked down at Stephen’s Green. A man and woman walked arm-in-arm below, lovers under cold lamplights. Theirs was not a world in which terrorism intruded. They were secure in each other’s company. Pagan experienced a pang, a rush of blood to his heart. Terrorism could touch anybody at any time, it came out of nowhere and twisted your world beyond recognition; he knew that only too well.

  Inevitably, he thought of Roxanne. He’d long ago given up the sad regular trips to the cemetery, the bouquets of flowers laid against his wife’s simple stone. Now he went only twice a year, once on her birthday and again on the anniversary of their marriage. The graveside visits were morbid; he’d always felt locked inside a love that no longer existed. He’d stare at the name on the headstone, shocked by the fact of death, of endings. There had been a time shortly after her death when he’d sensed her presence in the apartment, when he’d heard her voice, the movement of her body, and he’d gone from room to room looking for her, calling out her name in the dislocation of grief.

  Let it go, Frank. You can’t change it now. He closed his eyes; he had a sense of gears grinding without purpose in his brain.

  His telephone rang. The sound, so unexpected, shocked him. He picked up the receiver.

  ‘Frank?’ It was Robbie Foxworth calling from London.

  ‘Foxie,’ Pagan said, astonished. ‘How did you hunt me down, for Christ’s sake?’

  ‘It wasn’t easy,’ Foxie said. His next words were partly lost amidst whistling sounds, interference. ‘You leave a pretty tangled trail. I’ve probably talked to every hotel between Cork and Connemara tonight.’

  ‘Now that you’ve found me, what do you want?’

  ‘There’s a problem. Something in your line of work.’

  ‘I thought I was supposed to be on quote unquote an extended leave of absence.’

  ‘Hearts have obviously been changed, Frank. Your expertise is needed. They want you back here on the next plane.’

  ‘Do they now?’

  ‘That comes straight from the top. From Mr Nimmo.’

  ‘The bastard could have called me himself,’ Pagan said.

  ‘Mr Nimmo doesn’t make conciliatory calls, Frank. Don’t shoot me. I’m only the messenger.’

  ‘So they want me back.’

  ‘Call me when you know your ETA. I’ll meet you.’

  ‘What if I told you to tell Nimmo to fuck off?’

  ‘Somehow I think not. I know you better than that.’

  Pagan smiled. It was strange how exuberance could come out of nowhere, how quickly your blood could be made to surge. It only took a disembodied voice at the end of a telephone.

  ‘Have you been listening to the news?’ Foxie asked.

  ‘I’ve made a point of avoiding it.’

  ‘I’ll bring you up to date when I see you. But you’ll read about it in the papers before then. It’s a biggie, Frank.’

  ‘How big?’

  ‘Disastrously so.’

  ‘I’ll be in touch.’ Pagan put the phone down.

  They want me back, he thought. They find my presence necessary. Well well. Hearts had indeed been changed. He was going home after all.

  FOUR

  DURBAN, SOUTH AFRICA

  TOBIAS BARRON WAS DRIVEN NORTH OUT OF DURBAN IN AN AIRCONDITIONED limousine with tinted windows. The heavy sunlit humidity, which bore the gaseous stink of the streets, seemed to penetrate the car in an unpleasant way. Barron sat in the back alongside a small man called Mpande, who represented the Department of Education and who kept wiping streaks of perspiration from the lenses of his glasses. At one point on the outskirts of Durban, Barron pressed a button to roll down the electric window of the car and found himself gazing across a vacant lot where a crowd of black kids in American-style jeans watched the limo with an almost hostile curiosity. Mpande reached out, touched the button, the window rolled shut.

  ‘A car of this kind makes certain people both envious and suspicious,’ Mpande said, and smiled.

  He smiled, Barron thought, a great deal. Perhaps he was proud of his two gold front teeth. Barron settled back, and after some miles felt the rhythm of the car change as it moved from a paved surface to dirt. Mpande was fond of talking, usually in statistics, which bored Barron more than a little, but he listened anyway, and sometimes nodded his head. The percentage of blacks enrolled in universities – this was one of Mpande’s favourite themes, and he rattled off a sequence of stats concerning the number studying the humanities, or engineering, or medicine. Mpande talked in the sepulchral tones of a born-again actuary.

  Two hours out of Durban the car finally came to a stop. Mpande said, ‘Be warned. There will be a welcoming committee. You will find its members perhaps a little overenthusiastic, but that is understandable. After all, you are a celebrity. A philanthropist. You bring, shall we say, hope into their lives?’

  Barron said nothing. He wondered if there might be a slight mockery, a sarcastic edge, in Mpande’s tone. He stepped from the car when the driver opened the door. The heat was horrendous, a force, a great white foundry of light. Unaccustomed to this blinding ferocity, Barron took a little time to absorb his surroundings and the people who were waiting under the shade of a blue canvas awning to greet him. Mpande made polite introductions, the mayor of the township, various elders, the minister, the schoolteacher – more faces and names than Barron could possibly remember. Later, he’d reflect on how indistinct everything was, the smiles, the harsh sunlight, the scrubland, the aroma of putrefaction which came from an open sewer nearby, the shanties cobbled out of any available material, cardboard, corrugated tin, flimsy wood, metal pipes. A fragile place: one storm would destroy it utterly.

  The mayor made a speech in English expressing the huge gratitude of the people of the township for Barron’s extraordinary generosity in establishing an educational trust fund for the youth of the place. Now the brightest children could go on to colleges and universities. Now they had – and here the mayor paused, and closed his eyes, swaying a little as if to give his choice of word extra significance – a benefactor. The crowd sighed with satisfaction and pleasure. Barron, sweating and uneasy in his white suit, listened with disguised impatience to all this. He wanted to get back to his air-conditioned hotel in Durban. He didn’t enjoy the feeling he had of himself as the great white saviour. He was only doing the kind of thing he’d done before in many underprivileged parts of t
he world – Guatemala, Somalia, Ethiopia: if it wasn’t money for education, then it was medicine; if it wasn’t medicine, then it was nutrition. Philanthropy – it was just one of the things he did.

  Somebody took his photograph and he smiled, a reflex gesture. Then he was escorted across a dusty plaza to the local school, which was clearly an establishment of some pride to the township, even if the grey concrete was cracking in places and weeds grew from fissures in the play-yard and windows were broken. He was shown inside boxy rooms where rudimentary desks and chairs had been neatly aligned, clearly for the occasion of his visit. The rooms smelled of chalk-dust and rust and were filled with flies. He noticed a blackboard on which had been written the phrases Welcome, Mr Barron and Thank You, Mr Barron.

  Kids clustered around him, pressing themselves against him, as if any brief contact with his flesh might bring them good fortune. A nun, Irish and freckled and withered from years in a climate vastly different from that of her native County Clare, said God bless you. She had tears in her pale green eyes. Barron modestly dismissed his contribution as a drop in the ocean, and the nun agreed there was much to be done in the world, but if there were only more men like himself so willing to give, wouldn’t life be better …

  ‘Education,’ she said with all the solemnity of belief, ‘is one means of curbing violence.’

  Barron agreed with that.

  He was escorted back to the shade of the blue awning, where he was expected to give a speech to the people of the township. He looked out across the five hundred or so black faces and spoke, as he always did on such occasions, in platitudes concerning the fulfilment of ambition and how, if you had the right attitude, anything was possible. He wondered if anybody ever truly understood what he was saying, or if the message was somehow too American in its optimism, too foreign – but they always applauded and cheered him anyway. A small girl in a gingham dress was ushered forward to present him with a keepsake, a tiny hand-crafted copper medallion on which his initials had been inscribed.

  When the visit was over – it had taken slightly more than ninety minutes – he waved and stepped back inside the limousine, accompanied by the smiling Mpande.

  ‘You have made them happy,’ he said to Barron.

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘No perhaps. When you provide hope, you are also providing a lifeline to joy.’

  Barron settled back in his seat for the trip to Durban. He stretched out his legs and noticed that a streak of pale red dust adhered to the turn-ups of his white trousers.

  His hotel suite had a view of Durban harbour in which ships of varied registration lay at anchor. The sun was slipping out of the sky but the intensity of the day’s heat hadn’t dwindled. The sky over the harbour was hazy. The windows of the suite were warm to touch. He poured himself a glass of iced water and sat at the table by the window, where the air-conditioning unit was located.

  He spread before him several folders which contained information about some future projects. Apart from the educational trust fund north of Durban, he had plans to raise finance for a glaucoma clinic in Haiti, and an agricultural research centre in the Guantánamo Province of Cuba – if he could ever find a way of bypassing Fidel’s leaden bureaucracy. He skimmed through the files, evaluating the reports of experts and bankers which were written in the kind of droning English guaranteed to induce sleep. Tired of reading, he pushed the folders to one side, then looked at his watch. It was a few minutes after seven; he was due to leave South Africa in an hour.

  He rose, wandered the room, listened. At seven-fifteen precisely he heard the sound of Nofometo knocking on his door – a distinctive two raps, a pause, then three further raps. Barron unlocked the door and Nofometo, a lean black man whose face was scarred from the lobe of his right ear to the corner of his mouth, a yellowy zigzag disfigurement, entered the room. Nofometo wore a red T-shirt and baggy beige shorts; he had simple open sandals on his bare feet.

  They shook hands. Nofometo walked to the table, opened the folders, scanned the pages, laughed. Barron had always thought Nofometo’s laugh suggestive of an exotic bird.

  ‘You are still busy doing good, I see,’ Nofometo said. He had the accent of a man educated in an English public school. He lay down on the sofa and put up his feet. He closed his eyes and added, ‘You are too perfect, Tobias. A perfect man in an imperfect world. How do you manage it?’

  ‘Practice,’ Barron said.

  Nofometo opened his eyes, the whites of which were faintly pink. He twisted his face, looked at Barron. ‘A perplexing saint. Saint Tobias. Saint Toby has a better ring to it, I think.’

  Barron sat in an armchair facing his visitor. He said nothing.

  ‘Don’t I merit a welcoming drink? Have you mislaid your manners?’ Nofometo made a clucking sound of disapproval.

  Barron smiled. ‘I have a plane to catch.’

  Nofometo swung himself into a sitting position. He tapped his bare knees with his fingertips. He took from the back pocket of his shorts a folded brown envelope. He gave it to Barron, who opened it and scanned the two handwritten sheets of paper inside.

  ‘Fine,’ he said.

  ‘Now you are going to ask about money,’ Nofometo said.

  Barron said nothing. He had times when he enjoyed silences and the small discomfiture of other people. He stared quietly at the black man. Nofometo got up from the sofa and walked to the table, where he filled a glass from the jug of iced water. He took a sip and ran the back of one hand across his lips. ‘The usual wire transfer,’ he said. ‘Into the usual bank, I assume?’

  ‘You have the account number.’

  ‘Scorched into my heart,’ said Nofometo. He gazed at the envelope in Barron’s hand. ‘When can I expect delivery?’

  ‘Three or four days.’

  Nofometo nodded. ‘Things go from bad to worse here. There is anger, impatience, people grow restless because the political process takes so long. Meantime, the killing goes on.’ His voice had become serious.

  ‘I’ll do everything in my power, Nofometo.’

  ‘Don’t you always?’

  ‘Always,’ said Barron. St Tobias, he thought.

  VENICE

  Barron slept on the private Lear jet that took him to Marco Polo Airport. He boarded a motor-launch named Desdemona which ferried him toward the Grand Canal. In Venice he felt more at home than anywhere else in the world – of which he owned a considerable amount, including property in Telluride, Hong Kong, Costa Rica, and Coral Gables. He collected apartments and houses the way some men are driven to accumulate butterflies, rare coins, or women. He stood alongside the driver of the launch, a squat Venetian called Alberto, and he sniffed the night air, which was cold – especially after Durban – and smelled faintly of old herring. A pale moon was visible in the sky, illuminating the palaces in their splendid clutter along the banks.

  Alberto said, ‘Welcome home, Signor Barron. You will find nothing changed. Venice. Does she ever change?’

  Tobias Barron said only that he was glad to be back. He wore a black cashmere coat over his white suit, and a black silk scarf knotted at his neck. Gulls, disturbed by the engine of the launch, flew out of the vaporetto stations and winged toward the moon like large moths mesmerized by light. Barron gazed at the lit structures that leaned against the water, admiring as he always did the sheer persistence of beauty, the way grandeur prevailed against floods of pollution.

  The imagination of men, he thought. It encompassed creation and destruction; he found no paradox in this. The same inscrutable organ that could build was also able to destroy with equal facility. The human heart was a chamber in which dark and light might coexist.

  He drew his scarf a little tighter at his neck. Venice was icy, cold to its soul. The Desdemona left the Grand Canal, steering into quieter waters, passing under low bridges. There were lights from cafés and trattorias. Lovers stood on a bridge and watched the launch pass under them. Laundry flapped against the sides of crumbling houses. Discarded plastic bottles
that had once contained acqua minerale were agitated in the quiet wake of the boat and shuddered in pale white eddies. The smell here was stronger than it had been on the Grand Canal, danker, greener, as if just beneath the water fish were mysteriously decomposing.

  ‘We have arrived,’ Alberto said. He moored the launch and made sure in his fussy fashion that Signor Barron disembarked without hindrance. Then he gathered together Barron’s suitcases and stacked them on the dock where another man waited, Schialli, a taciturn fellow who had been Barron’s servant for years. Schialli, like Alberto, was armed; both men carried automatic pistols. It was a sorry fact, Barron thought, that he had made a number of enemies, that his rivals were ambitiously bloodthirsty.

  Schialli and Alberto gathered the luggage and walked alongside Barron down a narrow thoroughfare called Calle dei Avocati, where at number 3720 Barron owned a house. He used only the upper two floors, converted into a large apartment; the rest of the place, although sumptuously decorated, was usually unoccupied.

  Schialli, who always made a great business of the heavy keys, rattling them with a show of importance, unlocked the big door, which was sixteenth century and adorned by the carved heads of angry lions. The three men entered a flagstoned foyer, then stepped into an elevator. Schialli pressed a button, and the lift rose with a quiet cranking sound.

  ‘Is the woman here?’ Barron asked when the elevator stopped.

  ‘She is,’ said Schialli, with a slight inclination of his head.

  Barron got out of the elevator, followed by the two men hauling his bags. The upper two floors of the house were joined by a spiral staircase; Barron’s bedroom was directly above the drawing-room. He directed the suitcases to be unpacked as soon as he entered the drawing-room. The central-heating system was blowing forced air throughout the apartment. He removed his coat and scarf, and walked to the unlit marble fireplace and stood with his back to the hearth, as if this was the source of heat. Alberto had silently withdrawn, and Schialli, having unpacked the luggage in the bedroom and hung the clothing away, brought Barron a negroni and soda.