Mazurka (44 page)

She thought a moment, then shook her head.

Pagan said, “One other thing. Before you pick up these pictures, I want you to be prepared for the fact that your father's in a couple of them.”

“My father?”

Pagan nodded. “I found the pictures in the apartment of a man called Carl Sundbach who was just murdered.”

She reached for the photographs. There were three in all. Pagan looked over her shoulder as she gazed at them. They were all similar, as if they'd been taken within minutes of each other. Similar and very familiar.

The first depicted three men in shapeless jackets, photographed against a backdrop of wintry trees. The men had rifles, which they held loosely against their sides. One of the men had a bandoleer strapped over his jacket. In the second photograph, there were also three armed men, but one of them was different from the first picture, as if the person he'd replaced had gone behind the camera. In the last photograph there was still another permutation of three men. In each picture the same stark trees formed the background. Taken quickly, Pagan thought. Hasty souvenirs of war snapped by cameramen in rotation. Guns and four tired, grubby men. Guns and weariness. And a sense of camaraderie, as if the men in the photographs were prepared to die together in a common cause.

In two of the photographs Norbert Vaska and Aleksis Romanenko stood side by side, looking exactly the way they had in the snapshot Kristina had shown Pagan days ago. In the third picture Vaska was missing, and Romanenko, who looked impossibly youthful, had been photographed between the other two men. It was this picture that Pagan picked up now.

He said, “The man on the left is Carl Sundbach. The one in the centre is Romanenko. Have you ever seen the big man, the one on the right?”

She shook her head. “Never.”

Pity, he thought. There had been a chance that if she'd been able to identify the stranger, she might have presented Pagan with a clue to the Brotherhood, a step closer to the elusive core of things. Since Sundbach and Romanenko were dead, and Norbert Vaska in Siberia, that left only the big man with the broken nose and the high forehead. Was he still alive? If he wasn't, then the Brotherhood would remain what it had always been – a locked room.

“I've never seen Sundbach either,” Kristina said. “Who was he?”

Pagan went inside the bathroom, ran a glass of cold water, returned to the bedroom and sat down again. He said, “He was associated with the Brotherhood – but he was also seemingly instrumental in bringing about Romanenko's murder. Presumably this treachery was frowned upon, and it got old Carl eliminated.”

“Who killed him?”

Pagan shrugged. “I can give you an eyewitness description of the alleged killer, and I can tell you the make and registration of the car he was driving, but that hasn't helped much so far. A young man with some tricky back-up in the vicinity – which perhaps suggests the Brotherhood is still doing active recruiting.”

Kristina ran the palm of her hand over the surface of the old pictures. She touched her father's face with a fingertip, then she gathered the pictures together quickly and put them back in the envelope. “So Sundbach betrayed the Brotherhood,” she said.

“It looks that way to me,” Pagan remarked.

Betrayal
. Kristina got out of bed and went to the bathroom. She closed the door. She sat on the edge of the bathtub, her head tilted slightly to one side. She sat this way for a long time, turning the word
betrayal
over and over in her mind, remembering the very last thing Norbert Vaska had ever said to her, and she saw her father as she'd last seen him and remembered the way he'd whispered to her before they took him away and she heard his grim words again and again. An unchanging litany of whispered echoes. She wondered if she was doomed to listen to those same echoes for the remainder of her life. Or if Frank Pagan was going to provide the means to silence them once and for all.

She opened the door. Pagan came to her and held her very tightly.

“You make me feel good,” she said. “I want you to know that, Frank.”

“It's one of those reciprocal things,” Pagan replied, infusing his words with a flippancy that wasn't remotely appropriate to his feelings. But he was an amateur at the heart's games and he'd lost once before and he didn't think he could stand losing again. And already he was beginning to feel the first soft warmth of seriousness.

There was a knock on the door. He assumed it was room service but when he opened the door he saw Max Klein standing in the hallway, looking a little agitated.

“We should talk,” Klein said.

Pagan said, “One moment.”

He shut the door, surveyed Kristina Vaska's splendid nakedness. It was almost a crime against nature to cover such wonder up, but he suggested she get dressed. She gathered her clothes together, stepped into the bathroom, and then into the shower. Pagan could hear the sound of her singing
Are You Lonesome Tonight?
over the thunder of falling water as he admitted Max Klein into the room. She had a good strong voice, but she didn't know the words.

Moscow

The telephone rang in Dimitri Volovich's apartment – once, twice, a third time before Volovich answered it. He knew as soon as he lifted the receiver, as soon as he heard interference that sounded like wind whistling through a wet tunnel, that this phonecall was coming from a great distance. He wasn't surprised, then, when Viktor Epishev's voice came across the line.

“I'll be brief,” Epishev said.

“I can hardly hear you, Viktor!”

“Tell him this …” The voice was swept away for a few seconds. “…
reason to believe there may be a threat to the plan
…”

“A threat?”

“Just tell the old man that I think I can make things secure in time
…”

“How bad is the damage?”

“…
can't hear a thing
…”

“Viktor? Viktor?”

The line had gone dead in Volovich's hand. He put the receiver down and stood motionless for a moment. The palm of his hand was damp with sweat. He looked around his living-room, the functional leather armchairs, the table piled with books and newspapers, the old family photographs on the wall. He moved, somewhat listlessly, into the narrow kitchen, made a cup of tea, and considered the prospect of having to deliver Epishev's message to the old man. All the bloody way to Zavidovo with so slim a message, for God's sake! And the risk involved! Exactly what was this threat he'd mentioned? The old man was certain to ask, and Volovich didn't have the answers to give.

He carried his tea into the living-room and made himself comfortable in one of the leather chairs. He loved this apartment, enjoyed the kind of tenants who lived in the other flats. Right now, for example, he could hear the child called Katerina Ogoridnikova practise her piano on the floor above – a sweet sound that drifted gently down, a little Mozart. A talented child, young Katerina, and very pretty, the daughter of a man who operated a chemical plant and a woman who translated foreign journals for one of the ministries. The tenants in this building had a certain social standing, and Volovich appreciated the fact. He had no great desire to go out into the darkness, leaving all this comfort behind, to make the trip to Zavidovo, but he supposed he'd do it in any event since it was his duty to inform Greshko of any communication from the Colonel.

He set his empty tea-cup down on the table. He went inside the bedroom for his overcoat. Sighing, he did up the buttons, placed his key in his pocket, then stepped across the living-room to the door.

He opened the door, went out on to the landing, turned to lock the door. Startled by shadows that moved behind him, he dropped the key and heard it clatter on the floor, a sound that seemed to reach him from a long way down, like a stone dropped in a very deep well. He turned his face in the direction of the shadows.

There were two of them, and they wore the uniforms of corporals in the KGB. Volovich recognised neither of them, but they didn't immediately worry him because of their inferior rank. He glanced down at his key, seeing how it shone under the lamp on the landing.

“Comrade Lieutenant,” one of the corporals said. He was a chubby man with a Stalinesque moustache. “You are ordered to stay in your apartment tonight.”

“Ordered? By whom?” Volovich infused his voice with a certain indignation, but he wondered if he succeeded or whether he sounded unconvincing to this pair.
Ordered
, he thought. He didn't like the sound of the word at all.

“We have our instructions, Comrade Lieutenant,” the same corporal said.

“And who issued these instructions? Show me paper. Show me documentation. If you don't have it, step out of my way.”

There was a sound from the stairs now, the click of heels upon linoleum, and Volovich turned his face in the direction of the noise. A figure loomed up and a face took shape in the light that fell across the landing.

“Let us talk, Dimitri.”

Volovich, his heart pounding, stepped back against the wall. He watched General Olsky, in full uniform, bend down to pick up the key, which he then placed in the lock of Volovich's door and twisted. The door creaked open.

“After you,” the Chairman said.

16

Manhattan

Gary Iverson stood in the empty apartment in the vicinity of Fordham University, conscious of starkness, white-painted empty rooms and high bright ceilings. The lack of furniture caused a lack of shadow, hence of texture, and he always had the feeling in this place that he was about to be prepped for surgery. He could hear the sound of the other man's voice coming from one of the rooms at the back, and then the voice was silent, and a door opened at the end of the hallway.

Iverson looked at the man who came along the hallway to the living-room. He had an uninteresting face, if somewhat kindly, but it wasn't in any way memorable. Had anyone asked Iverson to close his eyes there and then and describe his companion, he would have found the task difficult.

“Did you get through?” Iverson asked politely.

“Terrible connection. Impossible to hear anything.”

“Too bad.” Iverson stepped inside the open-plan kitchen, looked in the refrigerator, found a couple of bottles of ginger beer. A recipe on the label informed him that this soda was an ingredient in something called a Moscow Mule – highly appropriate. He took out two bottles and gave one to his companion.

“I wish we had something stronger, Colonel,” Iverson said.

Epishev opened the bottle, swallowed, made a face. Then he wandered to the large window that looked out across the river, which had a strange lemon tint in the early evening sun. He had been in the United States on two previous occasions – once to provide security at the Soviet Mission, the second time to investigate the activities of the Soviet Deputy Ambassador to the United Nations, a man suspected of being
soft
on the West, and therefore a possible security risk. Epishev liked the country, or the little he'd seen of it. He understood he wasn't going to see a great deal of it this time either.

Iverson chugged his ginger beer. Then he said, “Welcome to America,” and smiled in an artificially charming way. It was also a slightly strained expression because this apartment never failed to make Iverson a touch uneasy – he was forever conscious of Galbraith, ensconced in his basement in Fredericksburg, listening to everything that was said in these rooms. And today he was more than usually sensitive because he knew that Galbraith, having heard of the death of Sundbach at the hands of the unpredictable Andres Kiss, was bound to be wrathful. And when the fat man was angry, it wasn't a pretty sight.

V. G. Epishev turned from the window. He was still dislocated from the trip, the suddenness of it, his own lack of preparation and insight. He'd known about US involvement in the plan all along, of course – where else was an American plane going to come from if not from the Americans? – but it was only when Malik had introduced him in London to the man known as Gunther that he became aware of the
extent
of American interest, how it reached inside the US Embassy and spread, if Malik was to be believed, into the upper reaches of American military circles and God knows where else.
There's more to all this than you and I have ever been told, Victor
, Malik had said.
US involvement doesn't begin and end with an Assistant Ambassador at the US Embassy. It goes higher, and it goes deeper, and some of the most influential men in America are involved…

What was painfully obvious to Epishev was how Greshko had kept a certain amount of information from him, but that fact shouldn't have surprised or irritated him. Greshko had done what he always did so very well. He'd concealed information, and juggled it, doling a little out to one person, some to another, so that the total picture was known only to himself. Devious Greshko, master of deception and legerdemain, creator of his own myth, saviour of Russia. Love and hatred, Epishev thought. Greshko inspired extreme responses in other people, as if any form of relationship with the old man took place on a moving pendulum.

Epishev, who always imagined he occupied a special place in the old man's affections, felt resentful of Greshko just then. The old man had excluded him. Yet – and here lay the hold Greshko had, the true nature of the loyalty Epishev felt – he was no less anxious to please Greshko than before. It was a kind of magic, Epishev thought, a sorcery. At a distance of four thousand miles, Greshko's grip was as strong as it had been at a mere six feet.

He stared at Iverson and said, “Why is there no furniture in this apartment?”

“We keep it for meetings,” Iverson said. “Nobody lives here.”

Epishev said, “In the Soviet Union, this kind of apartment would be occupied by two families.”

Iverson shrugged and drained his ginger beer. He wasn't sure what to say to this. He had a script written for him by Galbraith and he had no desire to deviate from it. He put his empty bottle down on the kitchen counter and said, “Let's talk about Frank Pagan, Colonel.”