Quick footsteps moved across the ceiling above.
“Gerry?” McGinty, his voice muffled by the wood and plaster between them. “Gerry, don’t come up here, I’m warning you. Don’t. I’ll . . . I’ll . . . you know I’ll do it.”
Ellen, crying.
The woman stood beside Fegan, pointing to the doorway to the next room. The room where he’d last seen Marie and Ellen. The butcher joined her.
“All right,” Fegan said.
He headed for the door, the Walther leading the way. The old tattered couch still sat against the wall, sodden with damp and blood. Weak fingers of early light clawed through the grimy window. Fegan could see trees beyond what had once been a garden but was now lost under years of neglect.
What was that?
He stopped and listened. Hard, fast breathing. The sound of panic. It came from beyond the far door. The same door Marie and Ellen had come through not so long ago. How long had it been? Fifteen minutes? Thirty? An hour?
The woman and the butcher took their places by Fegan’s side. They cocked their heads, listening. The baby was quite still in its mother’s arms.
She turned to Fegan and smiled. She reached up and brushed his cheek. She nodded.
Fegan looked back to the doorway and the darkness beyond. The breathing drew closer, its urgency growing. He stepped quietly towards the sound, the Walther between him and the shadows.
A stair creaked. The breathing faltered, then came back, quicker than before. Fegan heard the hiss of fabric against wallpaper, someone sliding along the wall.
Steady.
A man’s high, nasal whine. Terror.
Fegan stepped closer, shifting his weight slowly on the ancient floorboards. He kept the Walther drawn at waist level, in case they came in low. Closer. He could almost reach out and touch the door frame now. The breathing grew faster and faster, harder and harder.
Then it stopped.
Quigley burst from the shadow, a small pistol locked in both hands, his eyes bulging, his face burning, his knuckles white. He cried out when he saw Fegan’s Walther aimed at his heart, but he didn’t shoot. He stood frozen, staring, his breath held in his chest. Fegan saw the fear on him; he smelled the panic. This man was no killer.
“Breathe,” Fegan said.
Quigley stared back, veins standing out on his forehead and temples. His hands quaked. They held a .22 target pistol, little more than a toy.
“Breathe or you’ll faint.”
Air exploded from him in a long, desperate hiss. He inhaled with a tremulous gasp, and let it out again in a low moan.
McGinty’s voice came from above. “Shoot him, Quigley!”
Ellen cried.
“You don’t want to die,” Fegan said.
“Just shoot him!”
“You don’t have to die,” Fegan said.
Quigley couldn’t keep the gun aimed in one direction. It danced in his hands.
McGinty’s voice was high and fractured. “For fuck’s sake shoot him!”
“It’s your choice,” Fegan said. “You can live if you want to.”
Despite its leaden weight, he raised his left hand, open. Quigley stared back, his eyes searching Fegan’s face.
“You can live if you want to. Malloy and the Bull are hurt bad. The rest are dead. McGinty’s going to die soon. You don’t have to die with him. Choose.”
Quigley’s eyes fell away and his shoulders slumped.
“Quigley?” McGinty’s voice had lost its anger. “Quigley, what’s happening?”
Quigley placed the gun in Fegan’s outstretched hand, his stare fixed on the floor.
“Go,” Fegan said, slipping the gun into his jacket pocket.
“Thank you,” Quigley said. He hurried to the kitchen door without raising his eyes.
Fegan turned back to the shadows Quigley had emerged from. A door stood slightly ajar on the other side of a hallway. Morning light crept in from somewhere. Fegan pictured the rear of the house. There was a window at the center of the upper floor.
“It must be at the top of the stairs,” Fegan said.
The woman stepped closer to the darkness. With her free arm she signalled in and upwards. Fegan edged up to the door frame.
“Quigley?”
“He’s gone,” Fegan said.
“Bastard! Fuck!”
The voice wasn’t far away. Just at the top of the stairs, it sounded like. It resonated in the narrow hallway. Fegan eyed the door on the other side.
“Don’t come up here, Gerry. I’m warning you.”
Fegan took one breath before diving sideways, his left shoulder aimed at the door across the hallway. He caught a glimpse of McGinty’s silhouette against the window, Ellen writhing in his left arm, a revolver in his right hand. The gun boomed in the narrow passageway just as Fegan’s wounded shoulder connected with the door. The bullet scorched the air above Fegan’s head. The door burst inward, and he cried out in pain as he tumbled into the room. He fell against a stack of wooden chairs, sending them crashing to the floor.
“Stay away, Gerry. Don’t make me hurt them.”
Ellen screamed and cried.
Fegan scrambled to his feet, his mind working fast. A revolver, six shots. He counted.
“He’s fired three,” he said.
The woman turned to him and nodded. Fegan held her burning gaze.
“He’s got three left.”
She stepped back out into the hallway, the baby wriggling in one arm, and pointed upwards with the other. Her fingers formed a pistol. The butcher stood alongside her and did the same.
Together, they took aim at Paul McGinty, firing again and again, their mouths twisted and their teeth bared.
“I know,” Fegan said, feeling a warm trickle down his left arm. Weariness gnawed at the edges of his clarity. “I know.”
57
Fegan listened to the sounds of McGinty’s hard breathing and Ellen’s soft cries. Three shots left. If he didn’t have more ammunition, that was. Fegan had to gamble on that. He had to make McGinty waste them.
It was dark at the foot of the stairs. The only light came from the window behind McGinty and, even then, it was the thin glow of early morning. McGinty knew Fegan was a poor shot and he couldn’t risk hitting Ellen while trying to wing the politician. But McGinty also thought Fegan was crazy enough to try.
Fegan looked around the room. The chairs lay scattered across the floor, and beyond them was a pile of old curtain material. He righted one of the chairs and draped a thick sheet of dark velvet over it. It was heavy, but he could manage with his good arm. He took quiet steps towards the door and raised the chair so it was level with his own shoulders. The woman and the butcher stepped back to give him room.
He extended his arm, letting the curtain-draped chair’s shoulder creep out into the shadows of the hallway. Inch by inch, centimeter by centimeter, he let the oblique shape reveal itself to McGinty, hoping the folds of darkness might make it seem—
A boom filled the hallway, and the chair jerked from Fegan’s grip to fall to the floor with a wooden clatter, the torn curtain fabric fluttering after it.
Ellen’s scream was followed by seconds of silence, and then McGinty hissed and cursed. One more shot wasted.
“You’ve only two left, Paul,” Fegan said.
“That’s one for each of them, Gerry. You don’t want that to happen. Don’t make me do it. Don’t come up here.”
“I have to, Paul.”
“Don’t! Don’t, or I’ll . . . I’ll . . .”
“You’ll what?”
“Christ,” McGinty said.
“Killing isn’t easy, Paul. Not when it’s your own finger on the trigger.”
“I’ll do it. Believe me, I’ll do it.”
Fegan stood back from the doorway. He saw McGinty’s shadow against the wall as early light made its way down the stairs. “You’ve never had the guts to do it yourself, Paul. It was always people like me. The ones you filled full of hate. You never got blood on your own hands.”
McGinty’s shadow moved back and forth as he paced above, Ellen locked in his grip. “Don’t push me, Gerry.”
“You used people like me. You told us we didn’t have a future. You said we had to fight for it. You put the guns in our hands and sent us off to do your killing for you.”
“You volunteered, Gerry. Just like the rest of us. Nobody made you do anything.”
“You lied to us.”
“Nobody made you pull the trigger, Gerry. Nobody made you plant that—”
“You lied to me.” Fegan rested his forehead against the wall, feeling the cold dampness against his skin. “You said there was a Loyalist meeting above that butcher’s shop. You told me there was UVF and UDA, all sitting together. You said the timer was set for five minutes. Time to get the people out.”
“It was a war. Sometimes innocent people get hurt.”
Fegan laughed. “Sometimes. It’s never the guilty, is it? But everybody pays. What day’s today?”
“What?”
“It’s Sunday, isn’t it? Is it a week ago? Jesus. This day last week an old woman told me everybody pays, sooner or later. A woman whose son I killed. Michael McKenna paid for him. Now you have to pay. Three of them died. A butcher. A baby, for Christ’s sake. A mother and her baby.”
Fegan lifted his forehead from the wall and looked back out to the hall. McGinty’s shadow was still now.
“Just go, Gerry. Just get out of here. No one else has to get hurt.”
“She’s here, Paul.”
“Who?”
“The woman. And her baby. Christ, I don’t know her name. She’s here and she wants you. Her and the butcher. You remember how it happened? It was on the news at the time. He went to pick it up, probably thought someone had forgotten their shopping. Him and the woman were closest.”
“Don’t, Gerry.”
“And what was it for?”
“I was told the same as you. The Loyalists were meeting above the shop.”
“You’re lying. You knew it was just storerooms above that shop. What was it for? Tell her what she died for.”
McGinty’s shadow struggled with a writhing shape. Ellen jerked in his arms, still trying to break free.
“Tell that woman and her baby what she died for, Paul. She deserves to know.”
“There’s nobody there, Gerry. Don’t you understand that? She’s in your head.”
“Tell her, Paul.”
McGinty’s sigh slithered down the walls of the stairwell. “To make my mark.”
Fegan brought his right hand to his left shoulder, feeling the heat there. Blood trickled down to his fingertips. “Make your mark.”
“Yes. To make the leadership notice me. I’d been on the sidelines too long - I needed something big to get the headlines they wanted.”
“You had me plant that bomb, kill those people, for headlines? To make a name for yourself?”
“I had to, Gerry. And it worked. I saw the way things were going, even then. The politics, the elections. I had to get a leg up then, or I never would. I’d just be another foot soldier like you or Eddie Coyle.”
Fegan looked to the woman and her baby. And the butcher with his round, red face. “To make a name for yourself. They died to make your name.”
“But I did good, Gerry. Think about it. I helped build the peace. I kept the boys on the streets in line. Me, Gerry. It would’ve fallen apart if it wasn’t for me. But you’ve risked it all. Do you hear me? All those lives for nothing, all that labor, the heartbreak, the years - you might have wasted them all. And what for? For some figments of your imagination?”
McGinty’s voice had taken on that familiar color: the politician’s sheen, the twisted rhetoric.
Fegan rubbed his eyes with his knuckles, the Walther still in his grip. “What was her life worth?”
“Enough, Gerry.”
“And her baby’s?”
“Come on, you know the—”
“And the butcher. What was his life worth? Or any of them? What were they worth to you, Paul?”
“It was you, Gerry. You killed them. Nobody else.”
Fegan brought his bloodied hands to his temples, the Walther cold against his scalp. “I know.”
McGinty’s voice hardened. “Don’t tell me you didn’t like it. Don’t tell me you didn’t love the power of it.”
“Shut up.”
“All that respect you got. Everywhere you went, people looked up to you. The great Gerry Fegan. And you pissed it all away. What are you now, eh?”
“Shut up.”
