[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Manpower problem solved in one swoop.Maybe that’s a little too logical for you, though.’Zuboric wasn’t going to respond to this.He wasn’t going to be drawn into another argument with Pagan over human resources.He lit a cigarette and coughed a couple of times.The trouble with Frank Pagan was his sheer fucking persistence.He wouldn’t let something go once he’d taken a bite out of it.He kept digging, kept trying to operate on his own.He was the same goddam way with Jig.He was consumed by Jig.Probably he dreamed Jig at nights.Had Jig for breakfast.Zuboric sighed.What he really wanted to do was bust Tumulty and Santacroce both, because that was one way of putting Jig out of circulation.Deprive the guy of his connections.Isolate him.He’d mentioned this briefly to Pagan but good old Frank dismissed it.It was clear Frank Pagan wanted to run this show his own way, which was something Zuboric couldn’t allow.He shut his eyes, let his cigarette dangle from his lip, and thought about Charity, and wondered where she was right this moment and whether she’d ever consent to marry him.The last time he’d asked, Charity told him she’d think about it when he wasn’t married to the goddam Bureau and his prospects had improved.Prospects, he thought now.Sitting in a draughty Eldorado with a cop who was manic and argumentative – his prospects didn’t seem entirely rosy.Maybe he should never have fallen quite this heavily for a gorgeous girl in a topless bar, but that was the way the cards had been dealt and what could you do but pick them up, see if you could play them? The trouble was, Charity was used to high rollers, and Artie Zuboric couldn’t compete on that level.Pagan stuck the key in the ignition.He played with the power switches.He made his seat go backwards and forwards, then he had the windows going up and down.There was a certain kind of limey, Zuboric reflected, who was enchanted by American flash.Big cars and loud music and Hawaiian shirts.Pagan was one of them.Zuboric attributed it to a kind of insecurity, cultural inferiority, as if the Tower of London and Shakespeare and Stonehenge weren’t enough to be going on with.They had to immerse themselves in things American.Pagan was like a kid in a whole new playground.Zuboric suddenly wondered if Frank Pagan was afraid of the threshold of forty, if the way he dressed and behaved had something to do with his reluctance to face the big four-oh.Pagan leaned forward against the steering wheel.‘Ah-hah,’ he said.‘There goes our boy.’Zuboric looked along the street at the sight of Joe Tumulty coming out of St.Finbar’s.Here we go again, he thought, as Frank Pagan slid the huge car slowly forward.Ivor McInnes stepped out of the Essex House and walked along Central Park South.It was eight o’clock and he’d just eaten a satisfying dinner in the hotel.He turned onto Fifth Avenue, looking at the lights along the thoroughfare.He had in mind a specific destination, but first he intended to walk as far as 49th Street.He looked at his wristwatch and checked the time; then he thought a moment about J.W.Sweeting, the lackey from the State Department.McInnes had fought a great many battles with bureaucracy in his life, most recently with the asinine leaders of his own Presbyterian Church, who were dismayed by the controversy that had always surrounded him and had stripped him of his parish.They were men of limited imagination.What the hell did it matter? McInnes had never been a truly religious man.All along he’d seen the Presbyterian pulpit as a convenient place from which to influence the politics of Northern Ireland, an attitude that had embarrassed Presbyterian churchmen, who failed to notice a very obvious fact of life in the country – that churches weren’t just places where people went to sing hymns and hear sermons, they were instruments of social and political usefulness.The Catholic Church, cunning as ever, had always known that.Priests hid IRA members in their chapels or carried weapons back and forth.The Protestant clergy, on the other hand, had been slow on the uptake, immersed in the drudgery of committees and do-good schemes.For Ivor McInnes, that simply wasn’t enough.And now the time for talking, the time for conciliation, had passed.He stopped outside St.Patrick’s Cathedral.A priest appeared on the steps, said something to a tourist with a camera, then agreed to have his picture taken with the cathedral in the background.McInnes saw a flashbulb pop.St.Patrick’s made him uneasy.It was a vast stronghold of Catholicism, and in McInnes’s world anything remotely connected to the Vatican was distasteful.He thought that any church that took ordinary tap water and did some abracadabra over it and called it holy was still locked into the superstitions of the Dark Ages.Therefore backward.Therefore a breeding ground for ignorance.There were times when he felt sorry for people who had been indoctrinated by the Roman Catholic Church, which he placed at the level of a cult, with its brainwashing tactics and Latinate mumbo jumbo and the highly curious notion of confession.It wasn’t that he detested individual Catholics as such – he considered them merely misguided, suckers swayed by a holy carnival of stained-glass mysteries and enthralled by the stigmata and prone to the hysteria of seeing wooden effigies shed salt tears.No, it was more the fact that he completely resented the enormous power and riches and influence of the Vatican, from whence all Catholic conspiracies emanated – including the one that threatened to engulf Northern Ireland.He reached 49th Street.He was in love with New York.It was a city with a delightfully sinful face.Every human weakness was pandered to somehow here [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]