Jigsaw Read online

  Nimmo’s acumen, Pagan thought. He was a fast man with a bulletin. ‘Are you arresting me?’

  ‘We’ll see,’ said Androtti.

  ‘If you knew I was wanted, why did you listen to my story?’

  Androtti studied the glowing tip of his cheroot. He smiled, shrugged. ‘Let us say you have the desperate look of a man convinced he is telling the truth. If you are not, I will detain you and turn you over to your superiors. If you are …’ The Italian flicked his cheroot into the canal. ‘Then I have no reason to hold you, Pagan. You will go back to London where you will have your own gods to answer to.’

  ‘I don’t have gods,’ Pagan said wearily, ‘only demons.’

  ‘We are all cursed with a little of each, I think.’

  Pagan looked down into the water. Somebody appeared on the other side of the bridge, a young man who was one of Androtti’s people.

  Androtti asked, ‘Well?’

  ‘We found it,’ the young man said. ‘It wasn’t difficult. Whoever placed it must have been very confident. Or arrogant. We calculate it would have blown in about two minutes.’

  ‘Two minutes,’ Androtti said, impressed. ‘Then you are a hero, Pagan.’

  A hero, Pagan thought. He felt no elation, no relief, no sense of achievement. Instead, he was haunted by emptiness and exhaustion. Androtti took Pagan’s gun and ID card from his pocket and handed them back to him. ‘Your property,’ he said, and was quiet for a moment. ‘We need to sit down together, Pagan. I need to hear the whole story. How you got on to this business. How it started. Who is responsible. A great many people will have questions for you, Pagan.’

  Pagan said, ‘It may take some time.’

  ‘I will make the time,’ said Androtti.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Pagan said.

  ‘I prefer tonight. By tomorrow you may have disappeared. Returned to England. I can’t predict your movements.’

  ‘Tomorrow. You have my word.’

  ‘An Englishman’s word,’ said Androtti. ‘What is that worth in today’s world?’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Pagan said again. ‘I need to rest.’

  Androtti appeared uncertain. ‘Telephone me at nine in the morning. Here.’ He produced his card and Pagan took it.

  ‘Nine sharp,’ Pagan said.

  ‘If not, you may be sure I will come looking for you.’

  ‘I imagine you will.’

  Pagan walked back to Barron’s house on the Calle dei Avocati. The night was a black windblown void. He travelled backstreets, passageways, crossed the Rialto, then the dark square of San Marco. He had the sense he was being followed, observed – but not by Androtti or his people. It was Carlotta who dogged him, although whenever he turned to look he saw nobody. Imagination, he thought. He was going to carry her presence around inside him for a long time. He would half-expect to see her whenever he turned a corner or sat in his car at a traffic light or notice her waiting among the trees of the grim little square beneath his apartment. A kind of haunting manufactured from the notion that she was at liberty in the world. She was free.

  When he reached the Calle dei Avocati he saw that the door of Barron’s house was open. He stepped inside. Somebody had tossed a sheet over Barron’s body. There was no sign of the servant, no sign of Katherine Cairney. Broken glass crunched under his feet as he walked toward the stairs. He paused to look down at the sheet; a makeshift shroud.

  He passed on, climbed the stairs until he came to the room from whose balcony Carlotta had jumped. Night had entered the space, carrying the smell of an ancient mildewed basement. He wondered about Katherine. Where was she? Had she seen and heard enough and then walked away from here?

  He looked at the door which led, according to Carlotta, to the soul of Tobias Barron. It was shut, probably locked. He moved toward it, tried the handle; it yielded. Katherine Cairney sat on a swivel-chair and turned her face when Pagan stepped inside. Drawers had been opened in filing cabinets, folders removed, papers spread across the desk. An ungainly length of fax paper hung from her hand.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked.

  ‘We got there in time,’ Pagan answered, wondering if he had the inclination to expand on this, but then his attention was drawn away from the girl to the room. On electronic wall maps coloured cursors moved, blinking like tiny tics of anxiety. Computer screens were lit, displaying a series of menus, curiously named – floral, herbal, delicate names.

  ‘I found the key to this room on Barron,’ she said. ‘I’m glad I did.’ She handed Pagan the roll of fax paper, which he took and studied slowly. He read and re-read. Where did everything begin and end? It went beyond this room, beyond Tobias Barron, it spread in threads so intricate it might take years to unweave the magnitude of Barron’s embroidery.

  ‘I’ve been trying to imagine him sitting here,’ she said in a quiet voice. ‘The whole world spread out in front of him.’ Her voice was expressionless. She might have been reciting from memory some meaningless doggerel. ‘I’ve been trying to feel what he must have felt with all this at his fingertips.’

  She gestured toward the folders, then at the roll of paper dangling in Pagan’s hand. ‘It makes interesting reading.’ She looked small, depressed. ‘Wherever there was chaos, that was where you’d find Barron doing business. Requests for arms from Somalia. Angola. Cuba. Bosnia … You name it, Barron was involved in it somehow. And when there wasn’t sufficient chaos to suit him, it seems he was very busy igniting it, funnelling dollars from sympathetic contributors into all the fragile places he could find. Berlin. Prague. Moscow. The idea apparently was to destabilize weak regimes, provoke bloodshed, stoke the fires of anarchy and disorder. A sound investment. You throw in a few million dollars here and there to create conditions that suit your purpose and you reap dazzling benefits in the sales of arms. You can read it for yourself. It’s all there. And God only knows what’s in the computers …’

  Pagan tilted back his head and looked up into the strip of fluorescent lighting, his attention drawn there by a vague noise. A dying moth, born too soon in the cold year, adhered to the glowing tube. Its wings thrummed. He had a great sympathy for the creature.

  ‘Requests for money and material from Germany. Georgia. Poland. Afghanistan. Acknowledgements of cargoes despatched to South Africa, Guatemala, Panama … And Ireland. Dear old Ireland.’ She paused, smiled in a sad way. ‘He supplied any cause that could come up with the cash. At least you can always say that much about Barron. He didn’t take sides. IRA. Loyalists. It didn’t matter to him. He catered to them both.’

  She indicated the desk, the open drawers, the folders. ‘And then there’s all the other stuff, requests for endowments, charity donations, good causes everywhere – Calcutta, Mozambique, Peru, they come from all over the world.’ She drew a hand over her face, a tired gesture, containing an element of disappointment and puzzlement.

  ‘I thought I knew him,’ she said. ‘I really thought I knew him.’

  Pagan looked at the screens. Experts would come here and break into the system, gathering all the secrets of Barron’s harvest, examining every stalk, tracing the roots of whatever Barron had planted. They would scrutinize every fibre, every link. Peace is bad for business, he thought. Yes. In all human history, there had never been profit in peace. It was a profoundly depressing consideration.

  ‘I can’t imagine it ever being completely unravelled,’ she said. ‘I can’t imagine the people with whom Barron did business are simply going to wither away. Whatever he was involved in …’

  ‘It’s not going to be stopped overnight,’ Pagan said.

  ‘No, it’s not.’

  On the desk beside one of the computers was a framed photograph of Carlotta, a studio shot, posed. Her hands were carefully positioned, fingertips touching just under her lips. Scrawled across the photograph were the words For Barron, love Carlotta. Pagan picked up the picture. Love, Carlotta, he thought. He set it back down. He felt a chill.

  The girl rose from her seat. Pagan stared
at her. She came very close to him, reached out, laid her fingers on his arm. Then she dropped her hand by her side and shrugged. She stepped past him, moved to the door, hesitated there.

  ‘What do we say to each other now?’ she asked.

  Pagan wasn’t at all sure.

  ‘You were right about Barron. I was wrong,’ she said.

  ‘That doesn’t make me feel good,’ he replied. The urge was there; through all the layers of his fatigue, through all the logical objections he could think of, the urge to touch her was still there.

  ‘Who knows?’ she said. ‘Maybe we’ll run into one another somewhere along the line. Maybe we’ll have a reunion and a glass of wine and look back at this with some kind of detachment. Or bewilderment. Whatever.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  He turned away, gazed in the direction of the balcony. He wanted to look round, but he didn’t – not when he heard her move, not when he heard her footsteps on the stone staircase, not even when the sound of the big front door slamming shut reached him. He gazed down into the motionless canal and wondered about loss and renewal. The house held and trapped the echo of Katherine Cairney’s departure and there was a sad quality in the way it finally faded.

  EPILOGUE

  IT RAINED FOR DAYS, AN ENDLESS DRUMMING THAT MADE DRAINPIPES roar and gutters flood. Even so, Pagan sensed that it was the last outrage of winter, a dying squall; in the air was a hint of spring, a freshness on the night wind. After his meeting with Androtti, the details of which aroused the interest of the Central Intelligence Agency, MI6, Special Branch, and investigators representing the security interests of various foreign governments, he’d left Venice and skipped from place to place, from city to city, staying one step ahead of those who chased him with questions.

  Pagan took the view that anything they wanted could be found inside Barron’s computer system, or in Streik’s papers, which he’d left with Androtti, and that he was entitled to his privacy; besides, he had no great fondness for seeing his name in print, nor did he enjoy the prospect of interrogations, the wholesale intrusion and ransacking of his life – which had suddenly become public property. Gurenko wanted to see him. The Italian Government had undying gratitude to express because he’d saved priceless works of art in the Scuola, to say nothing of the reputation of the country’s security forces. He was in the papers constantly, and longed for anonymity.

  He followed the news, the unfolding story of Barron’s life and times, the scary designs of the man, the pyramid of terror he’d created. The Press, indulging its propensity to pop psychology, spoke of a man who represented the black and white aspects of the human soul – the former epitomized by the chaos he’d created and the weaponry he’d sold, the latter by his valuable acts of charity. Did he not represent the dichotomy in every man’s heart? one hack asked rather grandly.

  Bullshit, Pagan thought. Barron hadn’t done any good deeds except in places where he could also do bad ones. The perfect balance. He knew the economics of what he was doing. He sold to anyone wanting to buy. Where business was poor, he had his friends pump in money to make sure it picked up again. It was deadly simple. It was predatory, and cunning.

  From one rainy city to the next, slogging journeys by train, by bus, Pagan travelled in an aimless manner into obscure corners of Europe where he’d install himself in small hotels under assumed names, pretending he spoke no English. He was just a stranger who came and went. He stopped shaving. Some days he lay in bed and listened to the rain, and when it was time to move on he sneaked off under cover of darkness, even though he knew his anonymity was not everlasting. Sooner or later he’d have to surface. But only when he was ready.

  In Saint-Etienne he read that William J. Caan had been taken into custody, although no reason was given. In Clermont-Ferrand he read that a number of agents of the US Defense Intelligence Agency had been suspended from duty, a small item on an inside page. By the time he reached Limoges, scandals were dominating the headlines of the world’s Press – prominent businessmen arrested in America and the UK, law-enforcement officers jailed in Germany, politicians under house-arrest in Russia; Fidel Castro had denounced the ease with which American weapons found their way into the hands of Cuban guerrillas, a member of the Kuwaiti royal family had committed suicide – the old poisoned chalice routine, Pagan noticed. A couple of four-star generals had taken early retirement from the Pentagon – for ‘budgetary reasons’ it was reported. And in London a man called Montgomery Rhodes, described as ‘an American security expert’, had been found in a sleazy bed-and-breakfast joint near Euston, wrists slashed, an incomprehensible suicide note discreetly placed under an HP sauce bottle.

  It was never made plain that these events were linked to Tobias Barron directly, but his name occurred in several of the reports, usually in a vague aside or the kind of innuendo that fooled nobody. Sometimes Carlotta’s name appeared; she’d been seen in Mexico City, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and once by a mushroom-eating commune leader in Montana. And some hayseed loony, driven to madness by the tedious flatlands of Kansas, had spotted her being beamed up by a UFO. A wisp, an enigma, her profiles in the Press were invariably melodramatic; she was linked with whacko satanic cults, volatile charismatic movements, and every conspiracy going. Old lovers emerged from the dry rot of her past to sell revelatory first-person accounts of their sexual experiences with her. One was an impecunious marquis, another a fashion designer, another a former runway model from Pakistan. By general consent, Carlotta was found to be more than a little weird in bed.

  Pagan kept moving. He had come to favour the bus as the best means, because the trips were longer. You could draw a rug over your lap, and ride through hours of lonely darkness surrounded by sleeping passengers.

  From Rouen, Pagan placed a phone call to Foxworth at his home number in London.

  ‘Where the devil are you, Frank?’ Foxie asked.

  ‘Somewhere in France.’

  ‘And that’s all you’re saying?’

  ‘That’s all.’

  ‘Everybody and his uncle is looking for you.’

  ‘Let them look. Are you recovered?’

  ‘Sick leave. I’m reading Anselm. Then it’s on to Thomas Merton. I’m considering a career in mysticism. Are you coming back to London?’

  ‘Soon,’ Pagan answered.

  ‘Nimmo’s going around like he’s about to get a bloody knighthood or something, Frank. His halo is gleaming. It dazzles all who come in sight of it. He’s the man whose stroke of genius brought Frank Pagan back into the fold, after all. And just look how well it turned out. God’s truth. Sir George Nimmo. He was on the telly the other day saying more or less that he knew your present whereabouts but he understood your need for privacy.’

  ‘Good luck to him,’ Pagan said. Nimmo: the name was a small dull echo in his head.

  ‘I’ve had reporters phoning me to ask about you, Frank. What was he like to work with? What kind of man is he? What can you tell us? Any little thing of human interest. You’re famous.’

  ‘Fame lasts about ten minutes,’ Pagan remarked.

  ‘Of course, I tell them rotten things, your dictatorial attitude, your despotic ways, your notorious rudeness.’ Foxie laughed quietly. ‘You’re missing some of the fun, though. The CIA has practically seized the US Embassy, causing all manner of uproar. Nobody can get near the place. Apparently they’ve uncovered documentation that is utterly damning to Caan. The President has ordered the House of Representatives to conduct an extensive inquiry, the Home Secretary has lodged a complaint about abuse of diplomatic privilege and the way Caan used the Embassy as his personal conduit for cash, and the whole thing’s a bloody circus. I lie awake at nights and I can hear the whisper of the axe, I swear it.’

  Pagan moved on again. Sometimes, in a remote way, he contemplated the future, but that was an unreadable map. When he reached Paris he booked into an hotel on the Rue Mazarine; from his window he could see the corner of the Boulevard St Germain. He thought about Katherine Cairn
ey. He’d promised her Paris: a lifetime ago. Now and then she entered his thoughts, and sometimes he found himself brooding over her, wondering where she might be and if she was thinking about him in much the same way – but he disliked the romantic impulse behind these indulgences. She was gone. History. A memory. Nothing could come of all that now.

  Even so, when he left his hotel on the Rue Mazarine and strolled along St Germain to St Michel, he could feel a shadow of her. He wandered down in the direction of the Seine, crossed over into the narrow streets of the Ile de la Cité, and there he was particularly struck by her absence.

  He went inside a small café and drank coffee and thought it ironic, if you were in the mood for such interpretations, that he was back where he’d been before she entered his life: on his own. Whether it was Paris in the rain, a riverbank in Cork, a street in Dublin, or watching a full moon rise over Alba – he was alone, and loneliness was an abscess.

  He wondered if this was his destiny, to go through life unattached. He finished his coffee and set the cup down and stared through the rainy window at the street. He found himself entertaining the idea that the girl, like a heroine in a romance, would materialize in the rain and come running towards him over glistening cobbles, losing a shoe and laughing about it and not giving a damn—

  Nothing in life happened that way.

  He played with the edge of his cup, opened a pack of cigarettes, tore off the cellophane. He struck a match, watched it go out, dropped it in the ashtray. Absorbed in his thoughts, he didn’t notice the woman passing outside, a slender figure dressed in a man’s black pin-stripe suit, hat drawn down over her forehead, her hands hidden in black silk gloves.

  She glanced at him through the window, and then moved on through the rain. By the time Pagan left the café, the street was empty.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Frank Pagan Novels