Jigsaw

ONE

LONDON

BRYCE HARCOURT SAID GOOD NIGHT TO THE DUTY OFFICER, A BRISKLY courteous young marine from Alabama, and stepped out of the American Embassy. In Grosvenor Square he was assaulted at once by the numbing chill of the early evening. It had been a winter of uncommon savagery across Europe. Ships locked and forlorn in ice-choked Baltic seaports, relentless blizzards in Germany and the Low Countries, scathing frost in the southern regions of Italy: nothing had escaped the ferocity of the arctic months. London, encased in ice, vandalized by rough winds, was a city embalmed.

Harcourt, hurrying to catch an Underground train, considered it a miserable place altogether, the grey parks immense and dismal, drones scuttling into buses and tubes to escape abrasive winds that snapped down the streets of Mayfair with the tenacity of hounds. It had been grim enough when the city had been adorned by Christmas lights – then at least you had an illusion of warmth and cheer – but the decorations were long gone and the first month of the new year had passed with no relief in sight.

Muffled in a heavy black overcoat, Harcourt had an intense longing for his native Florida, some burning Miami heat, palm trees and high blue skies and pastel buildings. He imagined himself in cotton shirt and bermudas on a balcony overlooking the sunlit ocean. He could taste a lime daiquiri in his throat. He saw flamingoes against a red sun and bronzed babes strutting across sands. A fantasy – but hell, it was one way of getting through these godawful times when the mornings were dark and the afternoons icy and short.

He shivered as he entered the Tube station. The rush-hour crowds thronged around him with the concentrated brutality of people anxious to get to their homes in the suburbs. He was jostled by the mob pushing toward the turnstiles. A city of moles, he thought. They had pinched, pale faces. They’d surrendered to the glum season, hostages of winter, yet they went about their business with that peculiarly English stoicism Harcourt could never understand. They waited in disgruntled silence for buses that were late or stood in Underground trains too crammed and overheated for human dignity. The Spirit of England, ho hum; an empire had disintegrated into incompetence and indifference.

Harcourt clutched his briefcase against his side and stepped on to the escalator, where he collided with a woman trying to rush past him. Her mouth was covered by a red wool scarf, but even so Harcourt was immediately struck by familiarity.

The woman stared at him, then was swept down the escalator by the crowds pushing at her back. Puzzled, Harcourt watched her disappear. He’d seen her before, he was sure of that. He couldn’t remember where or when. He ran into a great many people through his work with the Embassy; he couldn’t be expected to recall every one of them. He went to dinner parties and receptions and first nights. He was sought out by anxious matrons in Knightsbridge and Swiss Cottage when an amiable bachelor was required for dinner or as an escort. He was deliberately visible, a charmer known to enjoy the company of women.

When he stepped off the escalator he saw the woman again. Her black hair was cut very short and side-parted. She had a strange white-tinted shock on the right of her skull, a touch of punk. Kinky even. She wore small round glasses. Attractive, Harcourt thought, in spite of the curious hair style. An idiosyncratic loveliness, high-cheekboned, bold, intelligent.

There was more than appreciation to Harcourt’s reaction. Something buried and forgotten, an old bone. His memory was normally a sharp instrument and this unexpected failure concerned him.

For a second she looked round, caught his eye through the crush. He thought he saw recognition in her expression, perhaps even an element of anticipation, as if she expected him to approach and engage her in conversation. Don’t I know you from somewhere? But the very idea of stopping to talk was crazy. He had no choice except to keep moving, squeezed towards the platform by the single-minded momentum of the moles. Maybe she’d get on the same train and stand very close beside him, which would be a good opportunity to clarify this feeling of familiarity in circumstances of forced intimacy. A captive audience, so to speak. She might even be obliged to press against him, especially when the train lurched.

Where have we met before? he’d ask. It was a bad line, but you did what you could to divert yourself from the horror of the Underground rush hour. And maybe she’d remind him, and they’d strap-hang together, and her breasts would touch his arm, and who could predict where that might lead …

The air in the tunnel was hot and unbreathable. The train would be even worse, a clammy ordeal, a sauna on wheels. He wondered about the woman. He wondered why, out of nowhere, he was at once filled with uneasiness. Was it a result of his own nervous state?

Lately he hadn’t been sleeping well. The apparent calm he demonstrated daily at the Embassy was all surface. He’d been smoking too many cigarettes, sitting up late at night scanning magazines in the fretful manner of a man whose aids to sleep – brandy and downers – couldn’t quite push him over the edge. Insomniac moments, pockets of drowsiness, and then before dawn the blessed vacuum of sleep, albeit shallow and chaotic with dreams. Sometimes Jacob Streik was in these dreams, fat and scared.

Whenever he dreamed of Streik, Harcourt always woke tired. The weary mind, that prankster in the head, played games after a time. You started to imagine things, you were being followed or your phone was bugged. And then you reached a point where you couldn’t tell the real from the illusory.

The woman. In which compartment of his life did she belong? Or was this mere imagination, the result of fatigue? She was memorably good-looking and she appeared to recognize him. How could he have misplaced her?

The train was heard rolling in the darkness of the tunnel. The crowd moved expectantly toward the edge of the platform. Harcourt was urged forward. He felt powerless. A stick on a tide.

He saw the train appear and slide to a halt. The carriages were already overcrowded, every seat taken, every strap seized, aisles packed. He wondered why he hadn’t tried to catch a taxi home, instead of suffering this. He’d begun to vary his routine during the past few weeks – bus, Tube, taxicabs, his Mercedes; although the Merc was presently off the road, courtesy of some recent vandalism.

He didn’t travel the same way two days running. Given the uncertain nature of his situation, it was a simple precaution. Sometimes he thought Streik’s decision had been correct, and that he should have followed Jacob into obscurity. But there were many differences between himself and Streik. He had a position to maintain at the Embassy, Streik didn’t. He was also less prone to panic than the fat man. Streik jumped at the least thing, yielded to intimations of doom, and saw devils after his fourth martini. The last time they’d met, four weeks ago underneath an ancient viaduct in Camden Town – the fat man had a thing about unusual settings – Streik had said: They are going to kill us, Bryce. They are going to put us on ice. Jacob had been drunk that day, and desperate, possessed by dark menace.

Why would they kill us, Jake? Harcourt had asked.

Because we know too much.

What do we really know, Jake? We shuffled some papers, that’s all. That’s all we did.

Streik guzzled vodka. We didn’t just shuffle papers, Bryce. Get your head outta the clouds Chrissakes. It was money, Bryce. Cash. These guys play for keeps. If they think we know too much, that’s good enough for them. I’m being followed. Some pretty weird things are going on. I think we’ve kinda outlived our usefulness and now, shit, we’re a threat.

Streik had never expanded on the nature of these pretty weird things he’d mentioned. He’d been drunk and babbling. The rest of the conversation had drifted off into vagueness.

Later, Harcourt had thought about the money. It had been irregular, sure, but he’d done as he was asked, nothing more. You took orders. You didn’t probe, didn’t raise needless questions. But it had begun to trouble him since Streik had seen fit to vanish, and only a few days ago he’d asked for an appointment with the Ambassador, William J. Caan, who wasn’t always approachable. So Harcourt had been shuffled into Al Quarterman’s office and Al, the Ambassador’s lackey, had seemed impervious to his misgivings. It comes with the territory, Bryce. You should know that by now. It’s a bit late in the day to be having qualms, don’t you think?

Qualms, Harcourt thought.

Now, briefcase jammed against his chest, he was forced into the carriage, thrust against a tall West Indian girl and a man attempting to hold a fragile bunch of flowers aloft. Harcourt had always been acutely conscious of smells, and they came to him now in a clamour – roses, sweat, bad breath, damp clothing. Bit late in the day, he thought. Quarterman’s words had seemed to contain some kind of inner warning, as if locked inside a very simple statement was something deeply sinister.

More paranoia, Harcourt thought.

The fluorescent tubes in the carriage flickered a moment. He thought: Terrific. A power failure. All we need is for the train to stall and the lights go out. All we need is anarchy.

He twisted his head in the direction of the doors. He saw the woman with the red wool scarf on the edge of the platform, watched her thrust out her hand as the sliding doors began to close, saw a dark leather purse fall from her fingers and drop inside the carriage. She made no effort to recover the purse, showed no sign of panic or loss. Instead, she hastily withdrew her hand before the doors finally shut. And then the train lurched forward and Harcourt saw her staring at him from the platform. She drew her scarf from her mouth and smiled at him as the carriage pulled away and she was drawn slowly out of sight.

Something is wrong, Harcourt thought. Something doesn’t make sense here. He wasn’t sure what.

A skinhead close to the doors had picked up the purse and held it uncertainly. It was too late to return the thing to its owner – what was he supposed to do with a lady’s purse, for God’s sake? A woman’s purse didn’t go with the tattooed arms and the gold ring through his nose.

The train cranked into the blackness of the tunnel, then came to an unexpected stop. Passengers lost their balance, collided with one another, shook their heads with restrained impatience.

Harcourt considered the woman. That smile. He had the feeling it had been intended only for him. He ransacked his memory. For God’s sake, where had he seen her before? And if there was meaning in the smile, what was it? The train jumped forward abruptly. The man with the bouquet of flowers said, ‘Bloody hell. Where’s this train going? Dachau?’

Harcourt turned his face away from the man, who had the irrational look of the frustrated traveller. Bodies pressed against unfamiliar bodies; the people in the carriage might have been guests invited to an overcrowded party none had any desire to attend.

The train halted yet again. Harcourt’s face was jerked towards the bouquet of flowers: stop and smell the roses, Bryce. Who was the woman?

‘It’s just like the Nazi transports,’ the man with the flowers said. ‘A journey to hell.’

The overhead lights blacked out for about five seconds. The dark was hot and total. When the lights came on again, the train was still motionless. To distract himself, Harcourt stared at a map of the Underground system, all those coloured lines leading to obscure destinations. Cockfosters. Harrow-on-the-Hill. Rayner’s Lane.

The mysteries of the grid.

The mystery of the woman with the red scarf and the strange white streak of hair and the way she’d smiled. You’re making too much of this, he thought. You haven’t been yourself lately.

Sweat had begun to collect on his forehead. He tried to raise a hand to loosen his necktie but his arm was jammed between the West Indian girl and a sturdy long-haired young man in a fawn duffle-coat. Harcourt experienced a passing light-headedness. He concentrated on the map. The Victoria Line. The Circle Line. The Jubilee Line. Colours shimmered in his vision.

The woman.

It came forcefully back to him them, a name, a photograph stapled to a document, a file in the Security section. The certainty of recognition jolted him. His throat was dry. He had a desperate urge to get off the train. She’d changed her appearance, the hair was different, the glasses were a new attachment, but he knew. Panicked, he stared into the roses, absently noticing droplets of water trapped in the petals. Sweat slid into his eyes and blinded him. He thought of the purse, the way it had fallen from her hand into the carriage just before the doors closed.

No. He opened his mouth as if he were about to address the man who held the flowers.

There was a sudden searing flash of light and for a second Harcourt wondered if he were undergoing a form of seizure, a visual hallucination, but the flash became a fireball that flared the length of the carriage and the West Indian girl screamed, the man with the bouquet looked astonished, the youth in the duffle-coat cried aloud in anguish.

The roses burst into flame.

And Harcourt himself, even as he remembered the woman’s name and its disagreeable connotations, felt an excruciating friction burn through his body. All around him was chaos, screaming, heat, flying glass, and the scent – obscene, redolent of an ancient smell long forgotten – of human flesh on fire.

TWO

LONDON

THE WOMAN, WHO CARRIED AN AMERICAN PASSPORT IN THE NAME OF Karen Lamb, had reached the street when she heard the explosion. It was far off, muffled, but she felt it more than she heard it; it might have been the aftershock of a small earthquake. She walked quickly, turning away from Piccadilly in the direction of Shepherd Market.

She entered a crowded pub, all brass and open fires and businessmen trying to get a little extra-curricular activity going with their secretaries. She immediately headed for the toilet. She locked the door and took off the wig, which she tossed up into the cistern. She removed the glasses, snapped the frames in several places, then dropped the fragments inside the toilet, which she flushed. One lens was sucked away, the other floated back and lay on the surface of water like a strange transparent eye.

She left the pub and continued to walk the narrow streets of the neighbourhood in the general direction of her hotel. Although it wasn’t quite dark, a few girls were already trawling the alleyways and passages, black girls mostly, with moussed hairdos and too much lipstick and street expressions – something of boredom, something of nonchalance. They were hard girls. They’d seen everything and were beyond shellshock. Nothing about human behaviour astonished them.

Karen Lamb thought of the Underground train. She thought of fire and destruction and the massacre of passengers trapped in a metal tube hundreds of feet below street level. An extravaganza, a light-show of death. She was suddenly buzzing, heart hammering, adrenalin humming through her.

She stepped into an alley. Lost in the glow of her own imagination, she was unaware of the chill on the early evening air. Lights illuminated shop windows, people drifted in and out of pubs, a few bars of synthesized rock music floated a moment through an open doorway. Life went on in little moments, cameos, apparitions. She felt distant from the general flux of things, a spectator. She looked in a shop window, gazed without interest at framed prints of Victorian hunt scenes.

She pressed her forehead against the glass. All at once she was aware of a familiar sense of crashing. Anti-climax. You were tense and electrified before the event, but afterwards there was something unfinished, a craving. It was always this way. The edge had gone and there was a downward rush. Destruction, a craft in which she’d served a long apprenticeship, wasn’t enough. It kindled other urges.

She wandered down the narrow street, moving slowly now. The sense of urgency she’d had before was gone. The planning was over, the work accomplished. She entered a call-box, stuck a phonecard in the slot and dialled. On the second ring a man picked up.

Karen Lamb said, ‘I scored.’ She pictured him in his hotel suite. He always had suites, never rooms. The idea of him in a simple room was inconceivable.

‘Excellent,’ he said. He paused before adding, ‘See you soon. Take care of yourself.’ He hung up before she could respond. She replaced the phone and continued to walk. She reached a corner, stopped, observed one of the hookers strolling along the pavement.

The girl wore a short black leather skirt and a jacket of imitation leopardskin. Her hair was piled up on her scalp and her lipstick was glossy pink, almost luminous: she had a mouth that might shine in the dark. She was maybe sixteen, seventeen, you couldn’t tell. A child. Karen watched her for a time before she said, ‘You must be very cold.’

The girl looked at her. ‘Freezing,’ she said. ‘You American?’

‘God. Does it show?’

‘The accent,’ said the girl, drawing the collar of her jacket up to her chin.

‘You can’t hide anything.’ Karen Lamb touched the girl’s sleeve and let her hand linger. She was thinking of the man’s parting statement. Take care of yourself. What did that really mean? Stay out of trouble? Keep cool? How typical of him not to ask questions, not to ask after details. Somewhere along the graph of his life he’d developed the capacity for shunting distasteful images into a remote siding of his head where they became unreal. He had places where he was able to park unpalatable matters, as if they were worn-out cars. What he didn’t know couldn’t hurt him.

‘You got something to hide, have you?’ the girl asked.

‘Don’t we all,’ Karen Lamb said, and laughed.

The girl smiled and looked for a moment oddly innocent. In the expression you might imagine her background, school drop-out, pregnant, family squabbles, a quick abortion followed by flight from somewhere like Luton or Northampton to the streets of London where the only thing she had going for her was her body.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Candice.’

Candice. Sure. She would be a Rita or an Angela. Candice would be her working name. They always had working names, fanciful or exotic, dream names. ‘Do you have a place, Candice?’

‘Yeh. I got a room.’

‘Where?’

The girl appeared hesitant, licked her lips, looked sideways at Karen Lamb, who wondered: Does she smell blood? Is there danger about me, something of desperation? Maybe the girl saw into a core of loneliness and didn’t like it.

‘This way,’ the girl said. She moved off. Karen Lamb, watching how the leather skirt attracted creases of light from windows, followed.

The girl turned. ‘I don’t get many like you.’

‘Like me?’ Karen Lamb asked.

‘You know.’

Karen said nothing. She walked with the girl down an alley and through the doorway of a narrow building. A corridor led to a wooden staircase. A wall-light in the shape of a clam shell threw out a thin glow. Cans of paint were stacked against a wall. The air smelled of fried bacon, turpentine, bleach. Signs of cluttered lives, scuff marks, footprints on the steps. Karen climbed after the girl. On the landing she put her hand against Candice’s thigh.

‘Now now, patience is a virtue,’ the girl said and stuck a key in the lock of a door.

‘What would you know about virtue?’ Karen asked.

‘You’d be surprised.’

The room was furnished plainly. A double bed, a nightstand on which lay combs, hairbrushes clamped together, mouthwash, a jar of moisturizing cream, an ashtray filled with cigarette ends. A simple brown velvet curtain hung at the window. The girl dumped the ashtray into a rubbish bin.

‘Sandra,’ she said.

‘Sandra?’

‘I share with her. She smokes and I get the dirty work.’

Karen Lamb put her gloved hands on Candice’s hips and drew the girl towards her. She heard the buzz of blood in her head.

‘Let me get out of this first.’ And Candice took off the jacket, placing it carefully over a chair as if it were genuine fur.

Karen sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Take everything off,’ she said. ‘Everything.’

‘You’re in a right old rush,’ said the girl. She stripped briskly, stepping out of the leather skirt, then removing her blouse. She wore dark-green satin underwear, which she discarded quickly. She balanced nimbly on one leg as she slipped out of her panties. With no sign of self-consciousness she stood in front of Karen, who looked at the white breasts, the nipples that were barely visible, the bony angle of hip. She ran her palms across the girl’s stomach, passing over a small appendectomy scar. She moved her hands between the girl’s thighs.

‘You shave,’ she said.

‘It’s healthier,’ the girl remarked.

‘I like it.’ Karen pressed her face against the girl’s stomach and shut her eyes. For a long time she didn’t move. She enjoyed the faintly soapy scent of flesh, the softness. In this place it was possible to imagine you never knew solitude, that your world wasn’t one of disguises and fake passports, that you had no connection with violence and death. A fragile illusion. The trouble was you kept coming back to yourself in the end. All you know is destruction, nothing of love. The blood in her head roared now.

Candice sat on the bed. ‘We need to talk money.’

‘Later,’ Karen said.

‘Not later. Before you go any further.’

Karen pushed the girl back across the mattress, straddled her. Just a whore. A streetwalker. Disposable human material. Garbage. She caught the girl’s wrists and forced them to her side. She kissed the chilly unresponsive mouth. The taste of lipstick was strong, candy-like.

‘Wait,’ the girl complained.

‘Wait for what?’

‘You don’t think I do this for free, do you? I’m not running a bleeding charity. Dosh first. Goods later.’

Karen pressed her hands to the sides of the girl’s thin face. Goods later. She was thinking of the Underground again. The man’s eyes, his puzzlement. She saw him being drawn into the darkness of the tunnel on a train going nowhere.

‘You’re hurting me,’ the girl said.

‘I don’t mean to. I don’t want to hurt you.’ The blood hammered, pounded, her brain might have been filled with hot mercury.

‘Then fucking let go of me.’

Karen squeezed her palms harder against the girl’s cheeks. Candice twisted her face away. ‘Hey, I don’t like this. I’m not into this. Why don’t you just leave.’

Making a claw of her hand, Karen pressed her fingertips tightly around the girl’s lips and silenced her. From nearby came the noise of sirens. Ambulances, fire engines, police rushing through the streets of Mayfair and along Piccadilly. Too late.

She stared into the girl’s face. Candice’s eyes registered fear, uncertainty. A volatile customer, the hooker’s nightmare: in bed with the deranged. She struggled to free herself. She raised her legs as if she might kick Karen.

‘Don’t,’ Karen said.

The girl looked at her imploringly. Karen lowered her face, brushed the girl’s forehead with her lips. She had the urge to tell this child about the Underground train, the explosive in the purse. This idiot desire to talk – what did it mean? Guilt? But that was absurd. She never felt guilty about anything. She had nothing to confess. Maybe it came down to something else, the need to shock and impress.

Suddenly she released the girl, who sat upright and moved to the other side of the bed, where she covered her breasts with her hands.

‘I don’t do this. I don’t do this sick shit. I’m not into pain. Get somebody else. Plenty of people do pain. I could give you names.’

‘I don’t want names.’ Karen rose, strolled to the window, drew the curtain back. The alley below was dark save for the yellowy stab of a single lamp. Was it sick to look for a human connection, something to fill the void? She heard the hum of her blood change suddenly; a tumultuous melody echoed inside her skull.

The girl said, ‘I want you to go. Now.’

Karen let the curtain fall and approached the bed. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you.’

‘Right. You didn’t mean to hurt me. But you did.’ The girl touched her mouth as if she expected to find blood. ‘I told you. I don’t do pain.’

‘Everybody does pain,’ Karen said.

‘You maybe. Not me.’ The girl gestured in the direction of the door. Her fear had yielded to sullen defiance. ‘Just go. You scare me. Just get the hell out. Go on.’

Karen didn’t move. The room seemed altogether confining to her now, and the child on the bed plain and unappealing. What was she doing here? It was weak to give in to these yearnings, to seek out these situations. She always came to the same conclusion: she didn’t belong. She was a captive in that other world of featureless air terminals and drab railway stations and night journeys, hard concrete and steel, a world of strangers, passengers shuttling through the dark to unknown destinations. It was a place of casual monosyllabic conversations with men who, drawn to her looks, wanted to force themselves on her, men she never encouraged.

She sat on the bed and reached for the girl’s hand, but Candice drew her arm away. ‘Piss off, for Christ’s sake.’ The girl pressed her back against the wall.

Karen caught the girl’s chin and twisted the small face to one side. ‘I leave when I want to. Only when I want to. Do you understand that?’

‘Fuck sake. You’re hurting me again.’

Karen squeezed the girl’s lips between her fingers. A loose crowned tooth popped unexpectedly out of the girl’s mouth and bounced across the back of Karen’s hand. Candice yanked her face this way and that, unable to free herself. She brought up her hands, flailed. She kicked her legs, twisted her body around, tried to bite into Karen’s palm. Again the whine of sirens filled the small room.

She gazed into Candice’s face and she thought: the pain of other people is as near as you ever get to them. She was aware of the girl’s warm saliva in the palm of her hand. The human condition: spit and fear and a sad little broken false tooth. It didn’t amount to very much in the long run.

She released Candice, who gasped for air and tried to scramble from the bed. She looked undignified, undesirable, her white buttocks upraised. Karen caught her, dragged her down, pinned her to the mattress. Tears flooded the girl’s eyes.

‘Stop crying,’ Karen said. ‘I don’t like to see anyone cry. Stop.’ The melody had changed. There was a drone in her skull. She imagined a graph of her brain, an unbroken green line on the screen of a scanner. She heard sounds: beep beep beep beeeeeep.

The girl opened her mouth to speak, but then – seized by an inappropriate sense of vanity about the missing tooth – closed her lips and turned her face to one side.

‘I won’t hurt you again,’ Karen Lamb said. ‘I promise.’ She drew the bedsheet round the girl’s shoulders, then picked up a pillow which she smoothed between her fingers. She listened to the freezing wind roaring through the streets of Mayfair, rattling shop-signs, window frames, fluttering ribbons and scraps of rubbish.

Later, she sat in a chair by the window and took off her gloves and laid them in her lap. With her eyes shut, she rocked very slightly back and forth. After a time she got up and walked toward the bed. The lampshade was askew. She adjusted it carefully. She noticed how a few spots of blood adhered to the surface of the cheap shade. For a moment she saw them, not through her own eyes, but as if from a policeman’s perspective of clues and signs. She put her gloves on and, tapping her hands against her thighs a moment, she smiled and gave in to an impulse that hadn’t been any part of her original plan.

THREE

DUBLIN

SIX WEEKS INTO A LEAVE OF ABSENCE HE HADN’T ASKED FOR, FRANK Pagan sat at one a.m. in the lounge of the Shelburne Hotel on St Stephen’s Green. Here and there groups of wearied tourists, many of them Americans seduced by off-season prices into visiting glacial Europe, sat over pots of tea or glasses of stout which they drank with exaggerated lip-smacking – as if they’d discovered the exlixir of life. The lounge had a dislocating sense of unreality; in this place clocks meant nothing. Only the darkness pressing upon the windows reminded you that it was night outside, and wintry.

Pagan sipped his Guinness. His fifth. Pack it in, he thought. Go upstairs to your room and sleep. But he didn’t get up from the table. He took a picture postcard of Bantry Bay from the inside pocket of his beige woollen jacket and scribbled a message to his associate, Robbie Foxworth, in London. He wrote: What The Yard calls a leave of absence is probably more like a mid-life crisis. My future is about as bright as that of a man selling gynaecological instruments door to door. He put aside his pen and realized the tone of his language came off as more self-pitying than flippant. Flippant was what he wanted. In truth, he was a little dejected. And the Guinness, although it had befuddled his senses somewhat, hadn’t elevated his mood.

He was still an unemployed cop, and you could dress that fact up in any euphemistic phrase you liked, it didn’t alter the reality, the savagery of office politics, power struggles, departmental warfare. When Martin Burr, Pagan’s guardian angel, had retired as Commissioner, he’d been replaced by a brutal upstart called George Nimmo, whose ‘radical reconstruction’ of departments had amounted to a Stalinist purge. Heads had rolled and more than a few people had bloody hands and Nimmo, contriving to rise above the mayhem, had conducted press conferences where he spoke officiously of necessary reforms. And these so-called reforms had resulted in Pagan’s banishment. You’re due some vacation time, Frank. Why don’t you have an extended leave of absence and we’ll figure out your future when you’re gone, old boy.

I never kissed the right ass, Pagan thought. And I never liked Nimmo.

So, rejected, he’d driven for six weeks around the frozen wastes of Europe in a purposeless way, a man chasing unreachable destinations. In a rented Nissan, so unlike the red Camaro convertible he kept in London – a car to which he was irrationally attached – he’d played his vintage rock-and-roll cassettes at maximum volume as he’d driven through Germany from Hamburg to Frankfurt and down to Munich, where he’d spent too many nights in one beer-hall or another, vast tabernacles of lager consumption in which people became more and more sentimental as the hours wore on. Songs were sung, jokes told; there was laughter that would sometimes disappear inside moody silences, as if a sudden cloud of collective sorrow had descended. When he found himself imagining the beer-halls were filled with boisterous Brownshirts and that Hitler was about to make a triumphant entrance, he knew it was time to move on again.

From Germany he’d gone into Austria where, in Vienna, he’d passed his time uneventfully in dark coffee-houses flicking the pages of foreign newspapers in the manner of a man stripped of language. It was eerily comforting, he thought, to scan newspapers he didn’t understand; it was as if the events of the world were filtered through an awareness from which he was excluded. Greek newspapers, Hungarian, Italian; he avoided the French and German press because he had a working knowledge of those languages. He might have been marooned in a space station orbiting earth, quite forgotten by those who’d sent him zooming into the heavens in the first place.

He drove into Italy without a particular destination in mind. It was another country on the map, that was all. He went to Milan, and to Florence, and found himself one night in an inexpensive hotel room in Rome, pacing up and down, walking back and forth from door to window, a man trapped in a silent box. What the hell was he doing here? he wondered. What was he looking for? Even the small Christ on the wall gazed at him with neither understanding nor pity, more a kind of puzzlement.

He spoke to no-one. He lived deep within himself. Four nights ago in the town of Alba – why in God’s name had he travelled to Alba anyway? – he’d come belatedly to the conclusion that his disaffection lay in the fact that he was running from his own history, from anniversaries, from memories of loss.

He’d watched a full moon sail in the direction of the Mediterranean and he’d thought how obvious it was: he was a fugitive from himself. The moon, charged with all the desolation of the season, was as indifferent to him as the Christ in the hotel in Rome. He’d driven back to France and taken a ferry to Ireland, imagining he might try his hand at fishing, but a few days on a numbing West Cork riverbank had persuaded him that the fish had succumbed to winter kill and that he didn’t have the patience in any event. The solitary angler, demented in the cold, stubbornly watching his float vibrate to the drumming rain – that wasn’t for him.

He didn’t finish writing the postcard. He stuck it back in his pocket, rubbed his eyes, stretched his arms. He realized he was more inebriated than he liked. The condition tended to arouse a maudlin streak in him. I want the impossible, he thought. I want things the way they were. Roxanne resurrected from the dead, his job back, everything reassembled and welded together, history rewritten. He stared into his glass and contemplated the sombre fact that old sorrows were never quite buried, and more recent grudges hadn’t lost their bitter sting.

Irritated by the tide of his thoughts, he lit a cigarette, then immediately crushed it out. Get a grip, Pagan. Face it. The world isn’t the way you want it to be. You’re not the architect of the universe. And five pints of Guinness aren’t going to make you so. Five pints of Guinness: he was half-jarred. He had no great capacity for the black stuff.

He rose a little unsteadily – the old Guinness shuffle – left the lounge, walked to the elevators, pressed a button, the doors slid open immediately. He rode up to the sixth floor. He unlocked the door of his room, stepped inside, flicked a light-switch. Kicking off his shoes, he lay down on the bed. He didn’t feel sleepy. He picked up the TV remote control and pressed a button and gazed at the picture. He hadn’t looked at TV in days, nor had he felt inclined to buy newspapers.

There was an item on the screen that depicted a street corner in Belfast surrounded by scene-of-the-crime tape and cops whose faces were red from the cold. A Catholic taxi-driver had been shot dead by Ulster Loyalists.

The same old sorry story of sectarian violence. The same lust for blood-letting. Pagan remembered his last experience with Irish terrorism when he’d been in pursuit of the strangely discriminating Irish-American assassin known as Jig. He hadn’t thought about Jig for a long while. Jig represented the acceptable face of terrorism – if indeed such a thing existed. Casual violence, the random killing of taxi-drivers because of their religious affiliations, the butchery of innocent people caught in bombings and crossfire: these things were beneath Jig. He regarded them with contempt. There was, Pagan thought, a certain nobility of purpose to the young man; in a sense he was a throwback to the days of the old IRA. His targets were always political. He always made sure that innocent bystanders were never caught up in his activities.

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 the 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