Jigsaw (50 page)

She stared into his eyes. He detected in her look a quality of melancholy he wanted to believe was genuine – but he set the notion aside. She's fake. An actress. Everything about her is false. Nothing else is worth remembering.

Her hand still lingered inside her bag, almost as if she'd forgotten the reason for putting it there in the first place.

‘It was planned,' he said. ‘Planned from the start. Right?'

‘You're quick—'

‘The way you ran into my car. The way you infiltrated my life. The way you were supposed to make me … feel. All that was deliberate. More extracts from the same bloody shabby script. Did you rehearse it beforehand? Did you run through your lines with your script director or whoever the hell it was? Frank Pagan, pushover, been on his own too long, shouldn't be too hard to crack open his shell, bring a little light into his dreary life. Oh, sure, just get him into bed and screw him until he sees rainbows and starts hallucinating about the possibilities of love.' He gave into the anger completely now. He recognized it was not one emotion pure and simple, but several tributaries of feeling – pain, sadness, humiliation.

‘It started like that.' She smiled at him rather gently. ‘But I was beginning to like you. And that wasn't supposed to be part of the deal. I was beginning to have feelings. Dangerous things.'

Feelings, he thought. Even now he had the urge to reach for her, the longing to hear her say
Hey, I'm joking
– a cruel one, but a joke just the same. Hah hah, let's get on with our lives, Frank. But he knew it wasn't going to be like that.

‘Who instructed you?' he asked. ‘Who pressed your button and set you in motion? Who told you to play this role? What's the point behind it?'

She didn't answer the questions. Instead she said, ‘I want you to understand, Frank.' She removed a document from her bag, which she placed before him; but he didn't want to touch it, whatever it was.

‘Look at it,' she said.

He didn't move. In small back rooms of his head he heard the angry slamming of doors, keys turning in heavy locks. Rooms he'd never visit again.

‘Look at it …'

Slowly, his hand unsteady, he reached for the document. It was an American passport. ‘So what,' he said.

‘Look inside.'

He flipped the passport open. He stared at the page where her photograph was located. She looked innocent and vibrant with youth and she was gazing into the camera in a straightforward manner. There was no guile about this face. You would put your faith in those features.
And I did
, he thought.
I truly did
.

He raised his eyes, stared at her, said nothing.

‘Look at it closer,' she said.

What was he supposed to see? He wasn't sure. He gazed at the picture again, and then his eyes strayed to the passport owner's name. But he'd reached a place where names had no validity, they shifted, you couldn't expect stability.

He said the name aloud and it didn't sound right.

She stared at him, waiting. He spoke the name again.

Katherine Cairney. But when you said anything long enough or looked at the particles of a word hard enough, they gave up any references to the real world.
Katherine Cairney
. It might have been an anagram whose solution was too dreadful to discover.

‘You killed my brother, Frank.'

Brother …
This statement baffled him. Language was tunnelled by flaws.

‘Patrick Cairney was my brother,' she said. ‘And you killed him. You killed him, Frank.'

Patrick Cairney.
Jig
.

Pagan sagged back against the pillows, letting the passport slither from his hands. He wished the medication would kick in again and free him from the straitjacket of this bad dream.

‘I was only supposed to watch you, Frank. That was my brief. Keep an eye on him. Report anything he does, anything he tells you. Get inside his head. Get information. The rest … the rest came kind of naturally because I was drawn to you.'

Drawn to me, he thought. Like a crow to carrion. Blood on a wet road and the fevered beat of wings and claws in his dead flesh. ‘Your brief,' he said.

‘Yes,' she said.

‘Who the hell briefed you?'

‘It doesn't matter.'

‘It matters to me.'

She shook her head. ‘It's not important now. The situation's changed.' She put her hand back inside the bag and brought out a small gun attached to which was a silencer. Pagan stared at the weapon, which seemed toylike, plastic, and his mind went scurrying into dead-end passageways. She pointed the gun at him and he turned his face to the side a moment.

‘I'm to be killed,' he said. ‘And you're the designated hitter.'

She tightened her hand on the gun. He strained forward a little. ‘I don't give a shit what anybody told you, I didn't shoot your brother.'

‘Sure, Frank,' she said. ‘You tracked him, you hunted him down. You pulled the trigger. You did that, Frank.'

Pagan looked at the girl's face, this stranger's face, this Katherine Cairney. ‘Listen. And listen well. I went after Patrick. My job was to bring him in. That was the extent of it. I didn't want him dead. That was the last damn thing I wanted. He was a key IRA player. But I didn't pull the trigger. He was shot by his own stepmother, for Christ's sake.' He thought:
I already told you that in another lifetime
.

‘Jesus Christ. You're still clinging to that crap. That was the official line, Frank. That was pabulum dispensed to satisfy the public and let the police and the Feds walk away without blood on their hands. Pure fabrication. And you're still sticking to it—'

‘Who told you I killed him? Who are you working for anyway?' he asked. ‘What are they paying you?'

‘There's no pay—'

‘You work for nothing, is that it?'

‘I work for the Cause.'

‘Ah, of course, the Cause, forgive me for letting it slip my mind. The precious Cause, capital C. Patrick Cairney's Cause.' His voice was hard with forced sarcasm. He closed his eyes a moment: connections were rippling outwards from some central point, only he couldn't quite detect the core, the place where the surface of water broke and where disturbances were created. Rings were interlocked with other rings, and they kept shimmering. If she was working for what she called the Cause, where did The Undertakers figure in this? Who had sent her here to Lyon? Ambassador Caan? Nimmo could have updated Caan on the situation and Sweet William might have turned the heat up on the girl. Pagan's gone too far, Caan might have said. It was possible … The world seemed to him a great sphere of derangements in which he was doomed to search for loose connections that, in the end, would always elude him.

She pushed the gun toward him, a strange little motion of the hand, as if some force had compelled her from behind. Pagan looked directly into her eyes. ‘Are you capable of killing?'

‘I think so.'

‘You'll have to do better than that,' he said. ‘You'll have to be one hundred per cent certain. Even more than one hundred. Are you that sure of yourself?' He glanced at the wall, the place where his raincoat hung; he thought of the holstered pistol dangling under the coat, but he'd never be able to reach it before she pulled the trigger.

‘I'm sure,' she said.

He wondered if it was certainty he heard in her voice, or bravado. He couldn't tell. What he needed was space, room in which he might manoeuvre, test her capabilities.

‘Brennan, Katherine, whoever you are, what the hell do you think you're involved in here? The Cause, for Christ's sake. The good old murderous Cause. Let me see if I can guess. You made regular contributions to NORAID or some fund-raising group that specializes in tugging soft Irish hearts in exile, and somewhere along the way they pressed you into active service, and now you find yourself about to kill a man – based on some absurd lie that he shot your brother. Well, I'm sorry about Patrick, but I didn't kill him.' Pagan paused, but knew he had to keep talking, because the longer she listened the longer he survived. That simple.

She said, ‘You're so full of shit. You haven't got a clue, Pagan.'

‘No? Let me keep guessing. Stop me when I get it wrong. Shoot me when I step out of line. Here's what I see. A young girl who's brought up by a father who happens to be the principle American fund-raiser for the IRA. He talks of old glories, the bold fight for freedom, he throws in the Easter Rising because that's always good for a quickening of the heartbeat. God, it's wondrous stuff. Comrades in arms. Fighters. Hard men of courage. He force-feeds you martyrs, great old tales of heroes shot down in cold blood by the Brits. Maybe you even learn a few rebel songs on Daddy's lap, and it's cute, you're like some little Shirley Temple mouthing songs she doesn't even understand—'

‘You're wrong, you're way off—'

‘But the old songs have nothing to do with reality, they don't have a bloody thing to do with the way people are dying in Ireland or England, do they? Anyway, you're nicely indoctrinated at an early age – exactly the way your brother must have been – and you grow up believing in all the garbage you've been fed. And now somebody's playing you like a bloody instrument. Somebody's spooning out lies, stirring the truth around, manipulating you into an act of murder. And you know what? I look at you and I see a lovely scared young woman who hasn't got a clue what she's doing.'

‘You have no idea, Pagan. You think you know so much. You think you're such a hot shot, don't you?' She pressed the gun into his chest and he tilted his head forward, squinting down at the silencer and wondering if he'd gone too far, goaded her more than was good for him. There was a delicate balance here and he didn't know which way it was going to shift and his heart was a jackhammer.

‘I'm not blaming you,' he said. ‘You can't help yourself. You've been brainwashed and your brain's been hung out to dry—'

‘Shut up—'

‘And you don't know how to distance yourself from Daddy's old stories, do you? You're a prisoner of a history that was never as romantic as your father led you to believe. It was sordid and squalid and too many people have died for nothing. And here's a small irony, love, if you're in the mood for it. You're not even
Irish
. You're an
American
, you don't know Ireland, you might think you do, but you only see it from a distance and your view is so limited it's laughable—'

‘I suppose
your
view is the only acceptable one,' she said. ‘Why don't you just shut the fuck up?'

‘Why? Am I bothering you?'

‘I don't need to listen to you moralize. It's trite, Pagan. It's trite and it's tired.'

‘You don't
want
to hear anything that undermines your creed, because it's inviolate, it's beyond criticism. Would you like me to describe what my wife looked like after she'd been blown up by one of your crowd's bombs? You want details of that? You want to hear what was left of her? You want me to tell you what it felt like going down to the morgue and identifying the remains of Roxanne? Merry Christmas, Frank. Here's a little present from the IRA. Enjoy.'

‘It's war, and there are always casualties, because that's the way it is—'

‘Casualties of war? A woman standing at a bus stop on Christmas Eve? Right. She's an enemy. She's most definitely an enemy. Let's blow her and a few other Christmas shoppers to pieces. You never know. Instead of gift-wrapped boxes in their bags they might be carrying guns for the Loyalists.' He was weary suddenly, talked out, depressed by memory. He looked into the girl's face. Her expression was one of annoyance and determination: her loveliness was altered, as if it had been an illusion from the start. He remembered how, when he'd first met her, she'd been upset by the story of Roxanne's death. Another piece of playacting, that's all.
I'm sentimental, Frank. I weep at movies. I'm a little soft-hearted
. More lies. Lies all the way along the line. And you, Pagan, you paid the price of admission, you willingly picked up your ticket and entered the hall of mirrors.

‘I'm genuinely sorry about your wife,' she said.

‘Excuse me if I doubt the sincerity of that.' He could still smell the morgue if he tried hard enough, a medicinal aroma suggestive of bleach. He could still see the white tiles, the steel drawers where they stored the dead.

‘Think what you like, Pagan. It doesn't matter to me. Nothing you say changes what I have to do.'

‘I didn't imagine it would. Not for a moment. You have your orders, don't you? And you have to carry them out like the good little foot-soldier you think you're supposed to be.' He looked into the girl's face, glanced down at the gun she held against his ribs. He thought: It would take a sudden movement, it would have to be swift, a blurred motion of his hand. But it was chancy, the turn of a card, she only had to squeeze off one shot and that would be the end of it. A sense of timing was the thing – and lately he'd lost his. He was tense, wondering if he could pull it off, wondering if he had time and space, wondering about the contest between his reactions and hers.

‘You know, I feel sorry for you,' he remarked.

‘Spare me your pity. I don't need it.'

‘I also feel regret. I thought we had something real between us. For a while, you uplifted me.'

‘We had a nice moment, that was all. It's over.'

‘It was more than a nice moment for me. I was starting to feel some sense of … call it life, if you like. Funny, don't you think? I'm talking about life. And you're about to end it.'

‘Yes. I'm about to end it,' she said – and he thought he heard a tiny note of regret in her voice. Or maybe that was just what he wanted to hear. Something undeniably human.