Jig (81 page)

The Commissioner shook his head. “As I said, Frank, I'm leaving it entirely to you. In any case, I'm sure to have some Russians to deal with very shortly.” He adjusted his eyepatch. “One last thing. Change your suit first chance you get. You look like something the cat dragged in.”

Jacob Kiviranna was being held in an interrogation room on the second floor, a bare chamber with no windows, a table, a couple of uncomfortable chairs. He chain-smoked, tilting his chair back against the wall and blowing rings up at the ceiling. He'd undone the ponytail and now his long brown hair fell around his shoulders. He had a glum expression on his face, disturbed only by the occasional tic of a pulse beneath his right eye. Pagan's impression was of a man whose life was a closed book which, once you opened it, would contain a drab little story of childhood neglect, lonely adolescence and fruitless adulthood, a serial of failures and pitiful vignettes.

He glanced at the young uniformed policeman who stood, arms folded, in the corner of the room, then sat down facing Kiviranna and tossed the US passport on the table. It fell open at the photograph. Pagan wondered about the ethnic origin of the name Kiviranna.

“Jake or Jacob?” he asked.

“I don't care,” Kiviranna replied. He had a flat, lifeless voice, like that of a man whose verbal interplay with others has been strictly limited.

“Let's start with the biggie, Jake. Why did you kill Romanenko?”

Kiviranna didn't answer. He dropped a cigarette on the floor, crushed it with his ragged sneaker.

“It's going to make my life a whole lot easier if you answer my questions, Jake,” Pagan said.

Kiviranna shut his eyes, placed his arms on the table, then lowered his face. His mouth hung open and he made exaggerated snoring noises. Bloody comedian, Pagan thought. He glanced again at the cop who stood in the corner. The young man looked about nine years of age. Every year's influx of new recruits seemed younger than ever and they made Pagan, at forty-one, feel old and weatherbeaten.

“Let's try another question,” Pagan said. “Where did you get the gun?”

Kiviranna opened one eye. He smiled at Pagan but remained silent. He had brown teeth misaligned in his dark gums. Pagan studied the man's combat jacket, the Mickey Mouse patch on one sleeve, the small US flag on the other. He gazed at the beard, which was shapeless. He had the feeling he was peering into the past, confronting a species that, if not extinct, was at the very least threatened. You rarely encountered hippies these days. Now and then an old DayGlo van would chug past you on the street and it would be plastered with faded peace signs and weathered bumper-stickers bearing mellow messages, or you'd see some clapped-out forty-year-old flower-child sliding quietly along the sidewalk – but they didn't seem to come in bunches any more. Pagan remembered a time when he'd admired the lifestyle, before it became ugly and drugged.

He wandered around the room, pausing when he reached the door. “I wish you'd talk to me, Jake,” he said. “If it's something simple, if it's just that you don't like Russians and you think the only good Commie's a dead one, I wish you'd say so.”

Kiviranna sucked on a cigarette. There was some tiny response just then when Pagan had mentioned the Russians, a very slight thing, a small change in the man's expression.

Pagan decided to pursue the opening. “By the way, Jake, they want you. Did I mention that already? They'd like to talk to you. In the circumstances, I can't say I blame them.”

“Who wants me?”

Pagan went back to the table and sat down. “The Soviets. They'd like me to turn you over to them. They're being pretty persistent about it. And I'm not sure I can prevent it.”

“You're out of your mind,” Kiviranna said. “No way would you hand me over.”

Pagan shrugged. Sometimes when you interviewed a person you got lucky very quickly and you managed to touch a little nerve of fear. And it was apprehension that showed now on Kiviranna's gaunt face.

“I don't know, Jake. You shot one of their own. They're not happy with you. Come to think of it, I'm not exactly delirious about you either. Take your pick. Either you talk to me, or you take a short car ride to the Soviet Embassy, where you get to sit in a dark room and they shine lights in your eyes and smoking isn't allowed. You'll meet some men whose coats seem just a little too tight and who make loud noises with their fists.”

Kiviranna sat upright now. “I killed the guy on British soil. I know the law, man.”

“You
think
you know the law, Jake. But when it comes down to tricky stuff like the death of a Russian, it starts to get pretty complicated. Diplomatic considerations raise their ugly little heads, chum. Her Majesty's Government might owe the Soviets a favour, let's say, and that favour might just turn out to be you.”

Kiviranna leaned back against the wall. “I set one foot inside that Embassy and I'm history. I'm past tense.”

“Right, Jake. It's not a healthy prospect.”

“It's a fucking political game. And I get shuffled like a pawn.”

“Pawns don't get shuffled, Jake. You're thinking about cards.” Pagan smiled, and leaned across the table so that his face was a mere six inches away from the other man's. “Let's just talk, okay? No more rubbish. Let's start with motive.”

“Motive?”

“Why did you kill Romanenko? Money? Political conviction? Or was it something else?”

“He was a fucking asshole, man.”

Breathtaking
. Pagan had expected some high-flown political cant, the kind of platitude assassins and terrorists so enjoy, that overblown rhetoric which was ultimately meaningless.
He was a fucking asshole, man
wasn't the kind of thing he'd anticipated at all. He stared at Jacob Kiviranna for a while before he said, “If that was sufficient cause to blow a man away, the streets would be practically empty.”

“Okay. He sold out to the Russians. Is that enough for you?”

“Exactly how did he do that?”

“You name it. He carried out Kremlin policies in Estonia. He kissed all the Russian ass going. Guy was never off his fucking knees. An order came down from Moscow, Romanenko was the first to implement it. Didn't matter what it was. He'd get the job done. He was the Kremlin's rubber stamp. It didn't matter he was born in Estonia, he was the Kremlin's boy through and through. Which made him a goddam traitor.”

Pagan listened to the man's toneless voice, then picked up the US passport, flipped the pages. “You're an American citizen, Jake. How come you give a damn about Romanenko anyway? I don't see how he could have affected your life.”

“I got family left over there,” Kiviranna said. “Cousins, a couple of uncles, aunts.”

Revenge, Pagan wondered. Did it come down to a motive as basic as that? “Had Romanenko threatened your family? Had he done something to them?”

Kiviranna didn't say anything for a time. He smoked another cigarette and the small windowless chamber clouded up and the young cop by the door coughed a couple of times. Kiviranna gestured with the cigarette and looked very serious. “He didn't
have
to do anything
personal
to them, man. He was a Communist and a traitor to his own people. That's enough. We're talking about evil. I eliminated evil. That's the only thing that matters. You see evil, man, you wipe it out. The more evil you get rid of, the more good there is in the world. That's what it's all about. It's logical.”

Evil – now there was a fine melodramatic word you didn't hear a great deal these days unless you frequented certain extreme religious sects or moved in mad terrorist circles, where it was used to describe anyone who didn't believe in either your choice of a God or your cause. Pagan studied Kiviranna's face again, wondered about his background. Had this wild-eyed character, who impressed Pagan as the kind of man you saw speaking to himself in the reading-rooms of public libraries, come three thousand miles to commit a murder because he believed that Aleksis Romanenko was
evil?
Was he driven by a missionary sense of bringing goodness and light into the world? Had he planned this killing all alone? Had he walked around with a dream of death in his head for weeks, perhaps months on end? An obsessive, a sociopath, the kind of guy who suddenly pops up with a handgun and makes a name for himself by killing a person of some standing in a political system he thought deplorable.
I
eliminated evil
. Jake the avenger, the equaliser, the mad angel of light.

“So wiping out this evil was your own idea, Jake? Is that what you're telling me?”

“You got it.”

Pagan was unhappy with this reply. It didn't answer the question of how Kiviranna had come into possession of the gun. Somebody had presumably passed the weapon to him after his arrival in Britain, and when you had two people you had a conspiracy, and so much for a lone killer theory. For another, Pagan had the feeling, which he couldn't readily explain and which surfaced in his mind at the end of a chain of unanalysable instincts, that Jake, albeit lonely and out of touch, was basically a gullible soul, and that the killing of Romanenko was an idea that had been
encouraged
in him. It wasn't a conclusion he'd reached without some kind of assistance, some kind of
persuasion
.

“How did you know Romanenko was going to be in Edinburgh, Jake?”

“I read it in a paper, I guess.”

“An American paper?”

“I guess so, I don't remember.”

Pagan's eyes were watering in the smoky room. It was hardly likely that Romanenko's visit to Britain had been mentioned in any US newspaper. It wasn't entirely newsworthy in America to print a story about an obscure Communist Party official making a quick business trip to the United Kingdom. It was even less likely that any press item would mention something so utterly unimportant as the side-trip to the Edinburgh Festival. So here was another question:
how had Jake come across his information?
There was only one answer – it had come from the same person or persons who provided the gun.

Pagan got up from his chair and walked round the room.

“Let's go back to the weapon. How did you get it, Jake?”

“I bought it here in London. I don't remember the store.”

Pagan wheeled around quickly and strode back to the table. “You don't just walk into a shop and buy a gun in this country, Jake. You fill in forms, there's a waiting-period, the police run a thorough check on applicants. You haven't been in England long enough to acquire a weapon legally.”

Kiviranna looked down at the surface of the table. His hands shook, and he pressed his palms together to keep them steady. “I need a favour,” he said.

“Let's hear it.”

“I had some medication in my backpack. I'd like it.”

Pagan nodded at the young policeman, who went out of the room to fetch Kiviranna's medicine.

“Nerves trouble you, Jake?”

“I have some problems, man. I'm getting over them.”

Pagan looked sympathetic. “Back to the gun, Jake.”

Kiviranna shut his eyes and rocked his body back and forth for a time. “Okay. I got it in Soho. I went into a club, I asked around, guy sold me the gun. It was easy.”

“You're trying my patience, Jake. You don't walk inside some club in Soho, a complete stranger, an outsider, and find somebody to sell you a gun. It doesn't happen that way. You need an inside track. Think again.”

Kiviranna was silent. He stroked his beard. “I got a real bad headache.”

The door of the room opened and the young policeman stepped inside, handing the brown prescription bottle to Pagan, who laid it on the table and rolled it back and forth as he studied Jake's anxious face.

“Tell me about the gun and you get one of your pills.”

Kiviranna was silent a moment. “Okay. The gun was in a luggage locker at that station – what's it called? King's Cross?” He stuck a hand out towards the bottle, but Pagan covered it quickly with a palm.

“How did you know the gun was going to be there, Jake? Who told you? Who gave you the key to the locker?”

Kiviranna didn't take his eyes away from the bottle in Frank Pagan's fist. The look on his face was one of subdued desperation and Pagan, clutching the pills Jake was aching for, felt a surge of sympathy for the man and a slight disapproval of his own cruelty.

“He was an old guy I met in New York.”

“Did he just walk up to you on the street? Did he say here's a key, fly to England, fetch the gun, shoot Romanenko?”

Kiviranna shook his head. “He got my name from somewhere, he called me. We met a few times. I never knew his name, and that's the truth.”

“How come he approached you, Jake? What made him choose you?”

“I guess he heard I had certain sympathies.”

“Were you offered money?”

“Expenses, that's all. I wasn't going to take money for ridding the world of a guy like Romanenko.” Kiviranna sounded a little offended by the suggestion. “We met a few times, we talked, I agreed to do the job.”

“Where did your meetings take place?”

Kiviranna was speaking more frankly now. “Different places, man. Sometimes Manhattan. Sometimes Brooklyn. One time we met at Coney Island, next to the old parachute jump. Another time the boardwalk at Brighton Beach.”

“Tell me the man's name, Jake.”

“I don't know it, I swear. He wasn't anxious for me to know, and I wasn't anxious to find out.”

Pagan took the cap off the bottle. “Why did he want you to kill Romanenko?”

“Because he felt the same way I did.”

“Tell me more about this mystery man.”

Kiviranna's forehead glistened with sweat. “What's to tell? He was maybe seventy, in there somewhere. He spoke with a thick accent. Shabby clothes. He didn't look like he had two nickels to rub together. But I guess he got money from somewhere, enough for my expenses anyway. I don't remember much more.”