Mazurka (53 page)

There was a strange crossfire here, and Pagan knew he didn't belong in it. He'd gatecrashed. Shadows moved on the edge of his mind, and he didn't want them to take recognisable shape, because he didn't want to see what they really were when they emerged into the light. There was one unmistakable conclusion, and he needed to avoid it.

Kristina moved closer to Mikhail Kiss and asked, “Do you know the last thing Norbert Vaska ever said to me?”

Kiss shook his head slowly.

“They've betrayed me,”
Kristina said. Her voice trembled.
“The Brotherhood betrayed me.”

“Betrayal's an easy word,” Kiss said. “It's too simple.”

“What would you call it?”

“I would call it sacrifice.”

“Sacrificed by his old comrades. His friends. His own Brotherhood.”

Kiss ran the palm of his hand across his eyes. “You have to understand the circumstances,” he said quietly.

“Why? Would they justify everything?”

“They may help you understand, Kristina.”

“I doubt it,” and she was fierce, unrelenting, her expression more intense than Pagan had ever seen it. She was talking to Kiss as if Pagan – having served his purpose in leading the way to the heart of the Brotherhood, a feat she apparently couldn't achieve on her own, a goal obscured by the passage of time and the pseudonyms the Brotherhood had assumed, old trails that had faded, old pathways too weatherbeaten to follow – had ceased to exist. Gone. Shoved aside. Used. Just like that. He didn't know whether to be outraged or bewildered by his own negligent heart. He didn't know whether to admire this woman's tenacity of pursuit. This talk of betrayal and sacrifice – was it vengeance she wanted? He moved his hand very slightly, letting it hover behind him, concealed from view but close to the location of his gun.

“Briefly, it comes down to the fact that Romanenko was in serious difficulties some years ago,” Kiss said. “He occupied, as you may know, a position that created problems for him. He led two lives. And sometimes they came in conflict with each other. You understand this much, of course.”

Kiss paused. Was the story worth telling now? It was fading, because that was how he wanted it, a threadbare memory, something whose shame was no longer so bright and blinding. He glanced at Pagan, aware of the
inglane
's look of confusion, and what was apparent to Kiss was that Pagan and Kristina had enjoyed some kind of relationship, perhaps they'd even been lovers – but Pagan hadn't expected the woman to turn up here in this house, of all places. And there was a shadow of hurt on Pagan's face, an imprint of anxiety on those features that were so used to concealment.

“I'm listening,” Kristina Vaska said. Now she did look at Pagan, and offered him a
brief smile, nothing of consequence. Frank Pagan wondered if he was going to be fobbed off with this trifle. He put out a hand towards her, laying the palm on her arm, but she appeared not to feel his touch. She was concentrating on Kiss.

Kiss went on, “There was a time, when our plan was in its earliest stages, when Aleksis realised he was coming under suspicion from certain factions in the Party. And the KGB had begun a particularly tough campaign in Tallinn. Aleksis's loyalties were in question. There were rumours about his life. Questions he couldn't afford, Kristina. A man in his position had to be above any kind of suspicion, because he was important to the cause.”

Kiss paused. This was the tough part. This was the part he didn't want to utter aloud. But ghosts were pressing against him, forcing him to speak. “It was decided that he had to prove his loyalty to the Party. He had to stop the questions, the whispers. What good would he be if he were arrested and imprisoned? How could he contribute to the cause from a jail cell? Therefore, whatever he was going to do would have to be drastic.”

“I can guess the rest,” Kristina said.

“Maybe, maybe not. Romanenko and I had a meeting in 1971 in Helsinki. Our meetings, you understand, were difficult to arrange and often held hurriedly in strange places. This particular meeting – and I don't remember it with any pleasure, believe me – took place on the ferry to Suomenlinna. I remember the day – it was cold and rainy. Fitting weather for what we had to do. Aleksis outlined a plan to protect his reputation and I agreed to it. Between us, we decided to give Norbert Vaska to the KGB. Everything. His participation in a democratic society. His part in running an underground newspaper. Aleksis gave the information to a certain Colonel Epishev, who then arrested your father.”

There was silence in the room for a long time.

“You did a terrific job,” Kristina said eventually. “You must have been very proud of yourselves.”

“We did what we had to do to save the plan. You must try to understand that, Kristina. It was a matter of survival. It was either your father or the death of everything we had ever hoped for and worked for.”

“You made the wrong choice,” Kristina said.

“Choice isn't the word. The solution was forced on us. Dear God, do you think what we did was easy for us?”

Pagan thought how painful it was to see a man obliged to speak a truth he'd clearly contrived to keep from himself for years, the forced words, the pauses, sentences dragged up from a place deep inside. He was filled with a sense of anticipation now, wondering what Kristina would do next. There was an air of unpredictability about her.

Kiss said, “There. I've told you. I owed you that.”

“What do you want now?” Kristina asked. “Absolution?”

“I sometimes think that if he knew, Norbert would understand why we did what we did. But I don't expect forgiveness from you.”

“Forgiveness is the last goddam thing I could give you even if I wanted to,” Kristina said. “I didn't come here to do you favours, Kiss. I came here to look at you. I came here to see what kind of man betrayed my father.”

Mikhail Kiss stared uncomfortably at the floor. He said, “I'd do it again if I had to, Kristina.”

Kristina Vaska walked across the room and looked out at the darkness. She said, “You ruined my family, Kiss. It wasn't Epishev who wrecked it. What did he care? He was only doing his fucking rotten job. But you and Romanenko, you gave my father away, you practically made a donation of him to the Russians. And my mother …” She paused here and there was a slight catch in her voice and Pagan had the urge to go towards her and comfort her, but he didn't move. The space between himself and Kristina had filled up with unexpected obstacles.

“My mother sits in a forlorn little house upstate and she writes letters, Kiss. She writes letters to the Kremlin and the White House and Number Ten Downing Street. Begging letters.
Please help me get my husband released from Siberia
. Year after year she sends off the same letters and it's deadening to go through the same process endlessly – petitions, forms, the whole dumb rigmarole that you know in advance isn't going to work, but you do it anyway because you don't have any other channels …”

Kiss sighed. His mind had drifted away from this room, this house, this girl who had opened the door for ghosts. He was thinking of Andres high above the Atlantic. The journey, the arrival.

Kristina Vaska opened her purse, took out a pistol, turned it on Mikhail Kiss. Pagan stepped toward her, and she waved him away, gesturing with the gun. Her expression was hard and uncompromising, as if whatever beauty she had was destroyed by her murderous intention. Kiss looked at the pistol, watched the way the woman came forward, saw how she held the barrel of the gun towards his head, then he felt the pressure of metal against the side of his face. She pushed it hard into his flesh.

“Kristina,” Pagan said.

“I looked for a long time, Frank. Ever since I first came to this country, I've been looking. Sometimes I thought I was getting close, then it would slip away. I'd get only so far before I'd run into blank walls,” she said. “When I was running out of options, I found you. And you found Kiss.”

Pagan wanted to reach for her and take the weapon away. He saw Kiss's flesh fold like paper where the barrel of the gun made a deep impression in his face. Kiss had his eyes shut. There was the sound of the safety being released and it echoed inside Kiss's skull like the noise of somebody shouting in a tunnel.

“Kristina,” Pagan said. “He's the only link I've got with the Brotherhood's plan. If you shoot him …”

She stared at Pagan. “What do you think I care about that, Frank? What are they going to do? Say boo to the Russians? The Russians will squash them the way they squash everything.” She pushed the gun harder and Kiss, flinching, moaned at the way metal cut into his flesh.

“Let me at least talk to him,” Pagan said.

Kiss, moving his face away from the gun, tapped the side of his skull. “Talk until you're blue in the face, Pagan. The plan is locked in here, and that's exactly where it stays.”

Pagan stepped closer to the old man. “Stay away, Frank,” she said. “Keep out of this. It's got absolutely nothing to do with you.”

“People keep telling me that. And I don't seem to hear them properly.”

“You better start listening,” Kristina said. She tightened her finger on the trigger, conscious of the vulnerability of Kiss's flesh, the veins at the side of the skull, the fragile arrangement of bone and flesh and tissue she could blow away in a fraction of time. And then it wasn't Mikhail Kiss she was seeing, suddenly it was her father, it was Norbert Vaska, and she envisioned him in his white wasteland and wondered if he'd died there, or whether he was alive and still remembered his daughter, if he remembered love and all the things that had been taken from him. She imagined him with his eyes shut in death and then she had an image of gravediggers spading half-frozen ground, not yet thawed after winter but softening in the growing warmth of spring, and then they laid Norbert Vaska into this chilly earth. She shut her eyes a second. These pictures were more than she could bear. The frozen white hands, crystals of ice clinging to eyelashes, the lips silent and blue, the eyes – perhaps open – staring into an arctic nothingness. She thought she heard his voice say
The Brotherhood betrayed me
. Is this what you want me to do, father? she wondered. Do you want me to pull this goddam trigger? To avenge you? Or would you tell me now that Kiss and Romanenko did what they had to, that in any war – even a lost one like this, even a pathetic little struggle like this – all useful tactics are justifiable? Confused suddenly, enraged by her own bewilderment, Kristina Vaska stared at the side of Kiss's face, seeing one expressionless blue eye, a faint shadow of white hair on the damp upper lip.
Kiss and Romanenko riding a ferry in the rain, and planning Norbert Vaska's death
– how plain, how straightforward, how civilised. Would you have agreed with them, Norbert Vaska? If it had been you and Romanenko on that ferry discussing Mikhail Kiss, how would you have behaved? There was madness here, the madness of patriotism, of men fighting for a totally hopeless cause, creating their little make-believe reality in which they see themselves bravely evicting the Soviets, pitchforks against submachine guns, Molotov cocktails against tanks, sorry dreams. Anger went through her, a dark red rage filling her brain. It was uncontrollable.

“Kristina,”
Pagan said.

She saw him reach for the gun and she said, “Get the fuck away, Frank.”

“Kristina,” he said again.

“Goddam you!” Her eyes were moist and she couldn't quite see Kiss clearly now, but enough. She said,
“You piece of shit, you useless piece of shit,”
and she understood she couldn't shoot him. She couldn't do it. She smacked him across the lips with the pistol and as his head tilted away from her she struck him again, bringing the barrel of the gun down upon his forehead, and his whole face swung back, blood pouring from his brow, from his split lip. She raised her hand up and started to bring it down a third time in a violent arc, a mindless movement, but Pagan caught her hand in the air and took the gun from her, and all her terrible fury collapsed and she slid to the floor where she sat cross-legged, staring at Mikhail Kiss, who had his face covered with his hands. She thought
A worthless piece of shit, and I can't even shoot him
, and she closed her eyes and imagined she felt the misty rain fall across the Suomenlinna ferry where two men planned her father's betrayal. And she had the thought that even though he was absent, even though he knew nothing about the plot against him, just the same Norbert Vaska
would have agreed, he would have given his consent to his own condemnation because he lived with the taste of the Brotherhood in his mouth, he lived in the past, when the enemy was somebody you could see at the end of your rifle and your native land hadn't altogether yielded to the Russians …

Mikhail Kiss, his hands covered in his own blood, sat down in a chair. He was breathing hard. Pagan bent over him.

“When is it going to happen?” Pagan asked.

“Go fuck yourself,” Kiss replied quietly.

“When and where, Mikhail?”

“Vabadus Eestile,”
Mikhail Kiss whispered.

Moscow

In her apartment near Izmailova Park, Valentina Uvarova hurriedly packed clothing. She'd been told to travel lightly which was no great problem because there wasn't much she wanted to bring along with her in any event, there was nothing here worth remembering, or keeping, except for a couple of toys – sentimental favourites of the two children – and a few necessary items of clothing. She was a small woman with a tiny oval face and cheekbones so high her eyes seemed deeply recessed into her head. People who knew her spoke most often of her determination.
Valentina's such a determined person
, they'd say, as if grit were a fault. But her determination concealed something else, a basic discontentment with the barren prospects of her life.