Mazurka (26 page)

Witherspoon stood up quickly. “Oh, really, Pagan. That was frightfully clumsy of you,” and he began to dab at his groin with a handkerchief.

“Sorry, Tommy. Really.”

Witherspoon glared at him. “Did you do that deliberately?”

“Hardly. What do you take me for?”

Witherspoon let his wine-red handkerchief drop on the table. He looked highly doubtful. “I've got an answer for that, Pagan. I take you for somebody who's completely out of his league. I take you for somebody Uncle Viktor could have for his bloody breakfast and still not be satisfied. I've got a suggestion for you – let intelligence handle all this. Let the big boys cope with Epishev. You're strictly second division, old chap.”

Pagan smiled. “Your nastiness is showing, Tommy. If you're not careful, they'll blackball you out of this place for failing to show civility to your guests.”

“Guests? I didn't
ask
you here, Pagan.”

“If you had, Tommy, I wouldn't have come.” And Pagan turned, moving past the nodding heads of dozing old men in the direction of the lobby. When he looked back he saw a waiter hurrying towards Witherspoon's table with a dripping sponge.

Business as usual, Pagan thought. The servant classes cleaning up the mess made by the overlords. Wondering bleakly when this whole calcified system might change, Pagan stepped out into Piccadilly.

Ninety minutes after Frank Pagan had gone, Kristina Vaska lay in the darkened bedroom with her eyes closed. What she was remembering was the way Pagan had looked at her, first in the park, then just before he left the apartment, an unmistakable look, a light in the eye that had all the hard clarity of a gem. Frank Pagan, who liked to think he played his cards close to his chest, who imagined he went through the world with tight-lipped wariness, had dropped his defences – he had become, on both occasions,
obvious
.

There was a quality to Pagan that drew her, a combination of self-confidence and a lack of polish, a sense of rough and smooth coming awkwardly together in the man. He reminded her of a stone she'd once found on the bank of the Pirita River, a curious stone that seemed to have been welded out of two distinct elements – glassy on one side, gritty on the other, an unlikely amalgam, a small paradox of nature. That was how she saw Frank Pagan.

She hadn't intended to like him. She hadn't set out to be drawn to him. She wondered what kind of lover he'd be, and she imagined honesty, an absence of subterfuge, quiet consideration.

She sat upright, looked at the bedside clock. It was ten o'clock. She took off her clothes and dropped them on the floor and headed in the direction of the bathroom. She glanced at the door as she passed, unconsciously checking the security of the deadbolt. She was going to be safe here. Epishev had no means of getting inside. And if Epishev couldn't come through the front door, then her past couldn't gain entrance either, that nightmare that had taken concrete shape in a rainy London street fifteen years and a thousand miles from where it had first begun.

She imagined her father's face, but there were times when she couldn't see him with any clarity. There were panicked moments when the face wouldn't come to her, but remained in shadow, an ancient ghost she couldn't summon. And then she had a sense of internal slippage, as if her memories had begun to disintegrate. She shut her eyes, imagined Norbert Vaska's hands, strong and firm, the long fingers that brushed a strand of hair from his daughter's face or held her by the waist and drew her up from the ground – the fingers, yes, but the face, she couldn't see the face except in brief glimpses, like a holograph fading.

As she drew back the shower-curtain, turned on the faucet, adjusted the temperature, she heard the telephone. Her first impulse was to ignore it. Then she thought the least she could do was to take a message.

She wrapped herself in a towel, went back into the living-room, lifted the receiver. “Frank Pagan's residence,” she said. Residence was too genteel a word for what Pagan had here. It conjured up visions of order, serenity, well-oiled servants going smoothly about their duties.

The man who answered introduced himself as Martin Burr. He said he had an urgent need to talk to Frank Pagan.

11

Riga, Latvia

Three Soviet Army trucks with full headlights burning clattered along Suvorov Street toward the Daugava River. It was dark and the covered vehicles moved with the illusory urgency peculiar to military trucks, a briskness that suggested high speeds to anyone watching. In reality, the trucks were travelling at no more than forty miles an hour. They crossed the river and entered the area of Riga known as the Pardaugava, the industrialised left bank of the sprawling city. They passed an isolated green area, a rather rundown park, and then an old cemetery, beyond which there stretched a district of factories and warehouses.

Some of these factories were new, but there was a general deterioration the farther the vehicles travelled. They left behind the kind of showplace industrial plants so beloved by Intourist officials and Party chairmen and penetrated a darker, less attractive area of early twentieth-century warehouses and factories and sites where old buildings had been gutted. The air smelled of mildew, and the corrosive aroma of rust, and from elsewhere, borne on a breeze, the salty suggestion of the Bay of Riga. The trucks rolled down streets that became progressively more narrow, little more than lanes built in an age when horse-drawn cabs pulled factory owners from one business to the next, and men filled with inchoate hatreds and resentments planned revolution in sweatshops.

Killing their lights, the trucks stopped finally in a dead-end street, the kind of place city mapmakers conveniently overlook and then ultimately forget and future generations of city planners rediscover with total amazement. For many minutes nobody emerged from the vehicles, which were parked close to a decrepit building that over the years had housed companies manufacturing window-shades, then shoelaces, then tobacco pipes, and most recently camera lenses. It was abandoned now, although four years ago it had been briefly used as a rehearsal studio for an outlawed rock and roll band called Gulag.

A door opened and a man appeared with a flashlight. He blinked it twice, switched it off. The drivers, dressed in the uniforms of the Soviet Army, emerged from the trucks and hurried towards the building. From the rear of each truck, from under canvas, other soldiers appeared. A mixed crew – a couple of corporals, a sergeant, a major, and a colonel.

The interior of the old factory had a basement, reached by descending a staircase that hung on the crumbling wall in a precarious way. The man with the flashlight went down carefully, warning the soldiers to follow him with caution. The basement, lit by a single kerosene lamp, was filled with all the detritus of all the industries that had ever occupied the building – lengths of twine, slivers of broken glass, unfinished pipes and stemless bowls, tassels of the sort that hung to blinds. There were also thirty wooden crates, the only things in the basement that interested the men.

The man with the flashlight kicked aside the lid of one crate and the uniformed men gathered round in the yellow-blue paraffin flare to look. The weapons, American M-16 rifles, Swiss SIG-AMT and Belgian FN auto rifles, lay in no particular order. There were handguns in some of the other crates – Brownings, Colts, Lugers – and ammunition. One crate contained Czech-made grenades, another Uzi pistols. It was as if whoever had purchased this supply of arms had scoured all the darker bazaars of the international weapons market, buying a lot here, another lot there, an oddment in a third place.

The men were thoroughly delighted with the delivery. They knew the number of weapons was comparatively puny, the task ahead of them overwhelming, but the guns represented support from a world beyond the Soviet Union, and that made the men both glad and touched, and less isolated than they'd ever felt before.

The man with the flashlight, who was known only as Marcus, said they had better hurry. He didn't like staying in this basement any longer than he had to, and the crates had to be moved and the sooner the better. His nervousness was contagious. The uniformed men worked quickly and silently, carrying the crates up from the basement and placing them in the trucks, under canvas. The whole operation took about five minutes before the trucks were ready to roll again. One was headed for Tallinn in Estonia, a second for Vilnius in Lithuania, and a third had only a short distance to travel – a concealed place in the forest around Kemeri, some thirty miles from Riga.

The men took only a few moments to part, even though they knew it was highly unlikely they'd ever meet again. There was handshaking, some edgy laughter, some back-slapping, but mainly there was a sense of grim fatalism about them. Their trips were hazardous ones, their ultimate actions bound to be deadly. But they had no qualms about dying. Even so, there was a moment in which the agitated banter stopped, a profound silence of the kind in which people realise, as if for the very first time, the exact nature of their commitment.

And then the trucks left the area, travelling in convoy for several miles until they reached the bank of the river again, the place where each vehicle went its own way. Headlights flashed three times in the dark, a signal that might have meant good luck or farewell. They moved away from one another now through the streets of the city, past the dark windows of closed shops, unlit office towers, silent houses, past the eyes of patrolling militiamen who, if they paid much attention at all, would see only army trucks hurrying on some military task, and the faces of uniformed men in the high cabs.

These same militiamen wouldn't have any way of knowing that the trucks had been stolen weeks ago, that their cargoes were illegal and their registration plates fake, that the transportation dockets carried by the men were forged and that the men themselves were no soldiers – but a collection of assorted dissidents in stolen uniforms, Baltic deserters from the Soviet Army in Afghanistan, some students from the University of Vilnius, a couple of patriots from the last days of the old Brotherhood, and a few men who had spent time in Soviet jails for their democratic beliefs.

Nor could the uninquiring policemen have any idea of how the weapons inside the trucks were to be used or the blood that might be shed a couple of days from now.

Manhattan

Dressed in a grey Italian suit and matching homburg, Mikhail Kiss moved along Fifth Avenue. It was ten o'clock and the night had shed some of the clamminess that had characterised the day. He looked down at his wedding-ring as he headed in the direction of Columbus Circle, which loomed up just before him. He hadn't removed the ring in more than forty years and as he gazed at it he realised he'd come to think of it as a natural part of himself. It was a source of heartbreak, even after so much time had passed. But time didn't erase everything. Quite the opposite. Sometimes, through the years, things grew instead of diminishing. And Ingrida's face floated before him, spectral and lovely, and then he felt it, the old pain, the cutting sorrow, the sharp glass in his heart, and what he pictured was how she'd died, with a Soviet bullet buried in her chest.

He squeezed his eyes shut as he paused at a Don't Walk sign. He hadn't seen Ingrida die, and what he knew was only what he'd pieced together from rumour and gossip in the early years of the 1950s. She'd been taken in a truck, along with other women whose husbands were suspected of guerilla activity against the great Russian Empire, to a meadow outside the town of Paide in central Estonia. There, the women had been made to stand in a line, and then a machine-gunner, hidden by trees, had opened fire. Kiss wondered if death had come as a surprise to her or if somehow she'd known it was going to happen, if she'd stepped into that meadow and come face to face with the certainty of her own end even before the gun had fired. What the hell did it matter now? He had an image, and it wouldn't leave him, and it was of Ingrida's face turned up to a wintry Estonian sky and blood flowing from the corner of her mouth and a fat fly, waxy and obscene,
alive
, landing on her lips.
Ingrida, mu suda, mu hing. Ma tunnen puudust sinu jarele
. Ingrida, my heart and soul. I miss you.

For a very long time, even after he'd found his way to the United States via Germany, he'd had a fantasy in which he encountered the machine-gunner. Accidentally – on the street, in a store, anywhere. And what he did in this murderous hallucination was to tear the man apart, to rip his limbs from his body, fibre by agonised fibre. After years had passed, the fantasy started to assume other forms. The gunman, after all, was only obeying orders. And the official who issued the orders to the gunman did so only because he was following policies set by the Kremlin. Therefore, individuals weren't to blame. It was the system, evil and corrupt, which operated from behind the thick walls of the Kremlin that was to blame. So Mikhail Kiss's fantasy had become channelled elsewhere.

He passed the Lincoln Center, moving under lit street-lamps. Then he turned into a narrow street where he paused. Perhaps it was nothing more than the absence of lights, perhaps something he thought he detected in the shadows of doorways, but he was suddenly afraid. He looked back the way he'd come. He realised that the feeling didn't lie in the notion that some local KGB agent might be following him – instead, it was buried inside himself, in the coils of his own nerves. What if Carl Sundbach had been right and this whole affair was doomed? What if Romanenko had been carrying a message that was meant to cancel the project because something
had
gone wrong?

You grow old, he thought. You're thinking an old man's thoughts, fearful and silly. The truth of the matter was simple – he just didn't want to ponder the motives behind Aleksis's murder. Some disaffected emigrant, some crackpot with a pistol, a madman with a political axe to grind – Aleksis's killer might have been almost anyone. He didn't want to think, even for a moment, that anything could have gone wrong with the scheme
itself
. It would go ahead as planned. He and Romanenko had spent too long a time welding their network together, joining each link in secrecy, from the Finnish businessman who carried Kiss's letters to Helsinki to the radical human rights activist from Tartu who placed each communication inside an old windmill at the Wooden Buildings Museum on Vabaohumuuseumitee Road about two miles from Tallinn, from which place it would be retrieved by one or other of Aleksis's trusted associates and delivered to Romanenko. Sometimes, in moments of paranoia, Kiss wondered if along the way there might be a weak link, a treacherous coupling, somebody who revealed the letters to the KGB. But since the operation hadn't been stopped, and Romanenko hadn't been arrested, Kiss always assumed the network had never been penetrated.