Jig Page 4

  She was lovely and fair as the rose of the summer.

  Yet ’twas not her beauty alone that won me …

  Harry Cairney closed his eyes a moment. It seemed to him that McCormack’s voice on this old recording came from a place beyond the grave. He sighed, turning from the window, crossing the floor to the landing. Voices drifted up from below. He could hear Mulhaney over everyone else, because that was the big man’s style, loud and blustery and forever dying to be heard. A little dizzy, Cairney looked down the long staircase. He was filled with dread. The meeting was necessary: no, more than that – it was urgent. But he didn’t have the heart for it anymore. It was odd how age sucked the guts out of you, strange the way it eroded your fighting spirit. Age took away and, like some terrible miser, seemed to give nothing back. Not even wisdom. Not even that small consolation. Membership in the Fund-raisers, he reflected, was definitely a young man’s game.

  He moved to the stairs.

  ‘Darling?’

  Celestine stood in the door of the bedroom. Her beauty affected him as it always did. It made his heart roar inside his chest and chased his blood pressure up a ladder, and he wasn’t old Harry Cairney any more, he wasn’t the retired senator from New York, he was a giddy young man enchanted by love, blinded by his own desires. Celestine, his wife. She had her yellow hair pulled back tight the way she sometimes wore it and it gave her beauty a rather gaunt quality, almost stark, as if her soul were laid bare. Her blue eyes were filled with all the electricity that might ever have been issued by lightning and trapped in conductors. Harry Cairney thanked the God in whom he’d lately come to believe for sending Celestine to him at this stage of his life.

  And – wonder of wonders! – it was no classic case of a young woman marrying an old man for his money and esteem, no thirty-five-year-old fortune hunter, a power groupie, marrying a former United States senator for whatever cachet this might bestow upon her. She had married Harry Cairney the man, not the politician who had been part of the Kennedy inner circle and who’d known every major figure that had moved across the stage of the times and who’d had his picture taken with Jack and Lyndon and de Gaulle and Willy Brandt and Harold Macmillan and Eamon de Valera. It was, Harry Cairney thought, a miracle in a time when miracles were rare as unicorns. And this miracle was that Celestine, who might have been nothing more than a paid companion in the winter of his life, a mercenary, actually loved him. She loved him even in his age and frailty, and she drove him to moments of desire that would have been indecent in a much younger man.

  ‘Do you have to meet these people?’ she asked, and there was concern in the blue eyes that subtly altered their colour, darkening the shade of cobalt to something no rainbow could ever register.

  ‘Yes,’ the senator said. ‘I have to.’

  ‘Who are they anyhow?’

  ‘Business associates.’ He smiled at his wife.

  Celestine wore nothing more fancy than blue jeans and a plaid shirt, but she would have looked astonishingly lovely in an A & P grocery bag. She came across the hallway and laid her hand on his arm. ‘I don’t want you to overdo it,’ she said. She pressed her mouth against the side of his face. Harry Cairney, who came alive whenever his wife touched him, patted her carefully on the cheek.

  ‘I won’t overdo anything. I promise,’ he said.

  ‘Be sure,’ she said. ‘I love you.’

  Cairney moved away from his young wife reluctantly and began to go down the stairs where, around the long oval table in the dining room, the three men who had come to Roscommon by helicopter were already drinking shots of brandy poured from a crystal decanter.

  Mulhaney, his face the colour of a radish, was already on his second brandy when Harry Cairney stepped into the dining room. Mulhaney, who was a big man with enormous hands, crowded a room somehow, filling more space and sucking in more air than an individual had a right to. Harry Cairney moved to his place at the end of the oval table and sat down, smiling briefly at Mulhaney and then looking at the faces of the other men. Only young Kevin Dawson stood up at Cairney’s entrance as a gesture of respect. God bless you, Kevin, the senator thought.

  At the age of thirty-seven, Kevin Dawson had a sense of what Cairney considered decency. He was a conciliatory person, someone who seemed forever anxious not to give offence. Nice was a word that came to Cairney’s mind. Kevin’s brother Thomas, known to his political enemies as Grinning Tommy, was the President of the United States. Cairney often wondered if Kevin Dawson’s membership in the Fund-raisers was the young man’s way of compensating for the fact that his brother occupied the White House, as if Kevin were carving out his own special territory where his imposing brother couldn’t and wouldn’t go.

  The other man in the room, Nicholas Linney, barely glanced at Cairney as he sat down. Linney was a man of the New Age, happy with spreadsheets and computerised data and satisfied, in a way that was almost sexual, with vast networks of interconnected intelligence. Linney’s face had a peculiar hue, something like the colour of an unroasted coffee bean. Maybe, the senator reflected, it came from staring at small green letters on screens all the day long. But there was a sense of controlled violence about Linney, hidden pressures. Harry Cairney always had the feeling that Linney would gladly have blown up his computers and torched his spreadsheets for a chance to go out into the direct line of battle. He could imagine Nick Linney skulking the alleys of Belfast with a rifle stuck underneath his overcoat and hatred for British soldiers in his heart. He was, in fact, a gun freak, and it was rumoured that he took himself off to isolated beaches with his firearms and shot round after round into watermelons or pumpkins or any kind of fruit or vegetable that suggested, however remotely, a human skull.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ Cairney said when he was seated. There was a breathless quality to his voice, the result of the simple act of coming down a flight of stairs. He felt as if his lungs were dried out and useless, withered inside his chest like two prunes.

  The three men watched him now, each seemingly wary of what he might have to say. He clasped his hands on the table. ‘Big Jock’ Mulhaney, as the press always called the man who led and allegedly mismanaged a branch of the most powerful trade union in the United States, puffed his lips out like a bloated goldfish and remarked, ‘Let’s get down to it, Senator. Let’s get down to the brass tacks. Let’s just cut the fucking gentlemen shit.’

  The former senator winced. Mulhaney had been born with a talent for gracelessness, the way some people are cursed with muscular dystrophy.

  Harry Cairney looked down at the polished surface of the table. He was aware of the sound of his young wife moving in the room immediately above.

  ‘We’ve been ripped off,’ Mulhaney said. ‘Why don’t we boil it down to that? We’ve been shafted.’

  ‘As you say,’ Harry Cairney agreed. ‘We’ve been shafted.’

  ‘So the only question is who the fuck did it,’ Mulhaney said.

  There was a quietness in the room now, as if all sound had seeped out from a crack in the wall. Harry Cairney recognised what lay under the silence – there was mistrust, a sense of treachery, a certain lopsided tension that went back and forth between the four men in the room. This animus was sharp and cutting and fearful. The Fund-raisers had been contaminated. The suspicion in the room was as tangible as the presence of an uninvited guest.

  Linney opened a folder and said, ‘The total loss is ten point two million dollars in used currency and negotiable bonds.’

  ‘I don’t think figures are in dispute,’ Cairney said, and his voice was feeble.

  ‘Damned right they’re not in dispute,’ Mulhaney said. For a second he grinned his most charming grin, the one he always used when he walked in the vanguard of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade on Fifth Avenue, his green sash across his big broad chest and his lips faintly green from the dye neighbourhood bars introduced into their beers. ‘What we’ve got to consider here, friends, is a matter of betrayal.’

  Harry Cairney rubbed his eyes.
‘You don’t imagine that somebody in this room is responsible for the piracy?’ This idea shook him, but it was a reality he knew he had to face even if the notion of a traitor in the ranks was a blasphemy. But if it hadn’t been one of the Fund-raisers, then who the hell had taken the money? His eyes moved from one man to the next around the table, but what could he possibly tell from their faces? Mulhaney’s accusative look, Dawson’s tentative expression, Nick Linney’s tightly drawn lips – appearances could hide almost anything.

  Mulhaney ran a fingertip round the rim of his brandy glass. ‘There are four of us in this goddam room, and each one of us knew the destination of the ship as well as the route and the cargo she carried.’ The big man paused. ‘The conclusion’s goddam obvious.’

  ‘We can’t assume that one of us is responsible,’ Kevin Dawson said in his high-pitched voice. It was a voice that would keep Dawson out of public politics because it didn’t fill a room and it couldn’t be used to project anything solemn. Whenever he grew excited, he could sound like a man on helium gas. ‘I don’t see any justification for that.’

  ‘Don’t you now?’ Mulhaney, who had always disliked anything to do with the Dawsons and resented what he thought of as Kevin Dawson’s privileged world – old Connecticut money, the fucking landed gentry with all its feudal powers, big brother in the White House – was adopting one of his characteristic attitudes, a certain snide belligerence. ‘Do you have a better suggestion, Dawson?’

  Kevin Dawson answered in a patient way. ‘I don’t see any merit in leaping to conclusions, Jock. That’s all.’

  ‘Conclusions,’ Mulhaney snorted. He had a habit of forcing words out through his nasal passages. ‘You’re a fence-sitter, Dawson. You’re never happy unless you’re politely perched on some fucking fence.’

  Dawson tilted his chair back, said nothing.

  Again silence. Cairney stared through the window at the waters of Roscommon Lake. He thought of a small dark ship gunned on the high seas. Blood on the waters. For too many years now, back as far as the old days at the Clan-na-Gael in Philadelphia and the Irish Republican Brotherhood, back as far as the times when the Cause had been glad to receive a few Thompson submachine guns and several thousand cartridges in the 1930s from their American sympathisers, he’d been promoting the Cause and raising funds secretively and nothing was more demanding, more exhausting, than secrecy, a darkly brooding mistress. Even Celestine, and Kathleen before her, had no idea about Cairney’s activities.

  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 th
ink 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.’