Mazurka (11 page)

In Roxanne's day, of course, everything had been different. But there was an abyss of self-pity here Pagan didn't want to encounter. Recollections of a dead wife were at best numbing, at worst excruciating. Loneliness had a gravity all its own and it pulled you down into its bleak centre. He stepped into the bedroom and wondered how long it had been since he'd laid flowers on Roxanne's grave. Weeks now, he supposed. There had been a time when he'd gone daily to that terrible fucking place and stared at the headstone as if, through the sheer mystic effort of will, he might conjure the dead woman up out of the cold earth and love her again.

He sat on the edge of the unmade bed and stared into his drink. He wondered if he was somehow getting better, if he was finding a quiet place to put his grief, like some safe-deposit box of the heart where it could be left locked and hidden. He'd removed Roxanne's photograph from the bedside table three months ago but in some odd way it was still there and he imagined it always would be. He closed his eyes again and sipped his drink and tried not to think about his wife and the way she'd died that Christmas because of the festive activities of a mad Irish bomber who'd detonated a killing device on a crowded London street. All he knew was that the planet without her was not exactly a better place. And perhaps this was the loneliest and most dreadful realisation of all – the world was reduced, diminished, by her absence.

These painful recognitions dismayed him. He rose, wandered to his stereo, found a record and set it on the turntable. It was an old Bo Diddley tune named
Mona
, with the kind of hard, driving rhythm that was almost a form of anaesthetic. He turned up the volume and let the noise crowd the room. Pure therapy, raucous and uncomplicated. Then, as if compelled to move by the music, he strolled around the room.

Consider simpler things that are not connected to love and grief. Consider the violence that had taken place at Waverley Station – when? Had it only been ten hours ago? The music had stopped now and the apartment was eerily quiet and he poured himself a second Glenlivet.

Perhaps it was more than his injured ego that made him want to impose a mystery on the event in Edinburgh, that made him want to look for hidden depths where Tommy Witherspoon claimed there were none. Perhaps it was the fact that his life, which had been about as exciting as that of a guppy mooning around inside an aquarium, had taken an interesting turn. It might be nothing but a brief illusion of mystery – even that was more intriguing than the blunted way things had been before.

He turned his thoughts once more to the contents of Romanenko's briefcase and as he was wondering whether Danus Oates had translated the material, he was surprised to hear the sound of his doorbell ringing. He went to the intercom and turned it on.

A woman's voice, distorted by the outmoded electrical system, said, “Mr Pagan?”

“Speaking,” was all Pagan could think to reply.

“I know it's late, but I'd like to see you.”

The accent was American. Pagan looked quickly around the apartment. How in the name of God could he have a visitor in a dump like this, especially a woman?

“My name's Kristina Vaska,” the woman said. “I realise we don't know each other, Mr Pagan.”

“Can it wait?” Pagan asked. “It's been a long day and I'm tired.”

“I appreciate that. But if's very important I see you. It concerns Aleksis Romanenko.”

“You better come up. I'm on the second floor.”

He pressed the buzzer that unlocked the front door. Immediately he began to clear some of the mess from the dining-room table, a futile effort because no sooner had he carried the glass of penicillin and the milk bottle into the kitchen than he heard the woman knocking lightly on his door.

She was in her late twenties, possibly early thirties, and as soon as he looked at her Pagan realised it was the person he'd seen driving the yellow VW around Grosvenor Square. He was struck at once by the intensity of her eyes, which were that shade of brown that comes close to blackness, the absence of light. And yet there
were
lights, tiny flecks that seemed almost silver to Pagan. She had a wonderful square jaw that suggested tenacity. Her dark hair, cut very short, was curled tightly against her head. There was no makeup on her face. She wore a white linen jacket and blue jeans, all very casual, and she carried a bulky shoulderbag. She was lovely in the effortless way some women seem to be, as if by pure chance, a happy collision of disparate elements. The word Pagan wanted was serendipity.

“My humble abode,” he said, thinking he might make some excuse about how his cleaning lady had the pox and couldn't come, poor old dear, and he was sorry about the shambles.

Pagan stared at breadcrumbs on the soiled table linen and cursed the odd nervousness that had afflicted him suddenly, the unease. It was almost as if the ghost of Roxanne Pagan sat in the bedroom, resentful at the intrusion of a woman into the apartment. Pagan underwent a mild sense of guilt. It was pure bloody nonsense, he thought. It was something a man had to grow out of. The spirits had their own lives to lead. And the living had living to do. But why was it so
difficult?

The woman held out her hand and Pagan shook it a little too quickly. Her skin was cool against his own.

“I'm sorry it's this late,” she said.

Pagan was too restless for sleep anyway. He gestured towards a chair and Kristina Vaska sat down. He noticed she was very slender in the way dancers sometimes are, that she moved as if her body were an instrument she played unconsciously. Pagan was so unaccustomed to company in this place that he didn't think to offer her a drink. Besides, now that she had impressed him with her appearance, now that he'd looked carefully at her, he had a more important question to ask.

“Do you usually follow people around?”

Kristina Vaska smiled. “Would you believe I was in Grosvenor Square at the same time as you by pure chance?”

“I've been known to entertain a few weird beliefs in my time,” he answered. “That wouldn't be one of them.”

“I wanted to talk to you.”

“And so you followed me.”

She nodded her head, still smiling. It was the smile that did it, he thought. He'd always been a sucker for a mischievous grin, for that certain elfin quality. He saw at once that Kristina Vaska was the kind of woman with whom you couldn't be angry for very long, which put him at an emotional disadvantage because he'd lost one of his more potent wéapons – the forceful annoyance, the irritated flash of the eyes, which sometimes made people very wary of Frank Pagan because they sensed dangerous levels inside him.

“I've been following you ever since you left Scotland Yard. I trailed you all the way here. Then I got nervous. So I drove around for a while. After that, what the hell,” and she shrugged. “I just pulled out the old courage and rang your doorbell. I figured I had nothing to lose.”

The quality of persistence, Pagan thought, and a suspicion formed in his mind that he didn't much like. “Let me guess,” he said. “You want a story. You want Frank Pagan's eyewitness account of murder in Edinburgh. Sorry to disappoint you, love, but I don't talk to the press.”

Kristina Vaska gazed at him, and her look was as cool as her hand had been a moment before. “I don't have any association with the press, Mr Pagan.”

Pagan said nothing for a moment. He had a sense of sheer awkwardness. He fussed with the tablecloth, moving crumbs around. Empty gestures. He wished he could find something terrific to do with his hands. “You mentioned Romanenko,” he said finally. “Is there something you want to tell me?”

“Let me ask you a question first,” she said. “What do
you
know about him?”

Pagan had an interrogator's dislike of having questions directed against him. “Not much,” he replied.

“What do you know about the country he came from?”

“Russia?”

Kristina Vaska shook her head. “Estonia, Mr Pagan.”

“I only know if's part of the Soviet Union –”

“According to whom?”
The tone of her question was as sharp as the point of a needle.

Pagan saw it coming. He knew what he was in for and he felt himself cringe. She was going to be one of those slightly cracked ladies, all spit and intensity, who had a firm political stand she shouted about at every opportunity, a portable platform she could assemble in no time at all out of the carpentry of her convictions. Apolitical himself, despite some left-wing leanings that had been stronger in his twenties, Pagan was very uncomfortable with zealots. In his personal experience they were either dangerous or deranged, and sometimes both at once. They had a habit of shaping the world to meet their own political requirements. To Pagan's way of thinking, zealots were first cousins to terrorists. It was just a matter of degree.

“The United States doesn't recognise Estonia as Soviet territory,” Kristina Vaska said. “Nor does your own country. So far as the US and the UK are concerned, the Soviet Union illegally seized all three Baltic nations in 1940, after they'd been independent for twenty years.”

Pagan started to interrupt, but it was impossible.

“The pretext – and the Russians aren't exactly subtle when it comes to such matters – was that the Baltic had to be defended against the Nazi menace. When World War II started, the Germans drove the Russians out of the Baltic, which was only a temporary condition. The Russians came back in 1944 to take up where they'd left off – as the great liberators of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.” Kristina Vaska paused a moment and what Pagan saw in those dark eyes was more than anger, it was a deeply-held resentment, the kind that lodges unshakably in the soul. She stood up and walked around the room now and Pagan, entranced by her movements, that indefinable harmony of motion called grace, watched her.

“The point is, Mr Pagan, the people of the world are very familiar with Nazi atrocities. They know about what happened to the Jews of Europe. But when it comes to Soviet atrocities in the Baltic, there's a kind of ignorance that frustrates the hell out of me. I'm talking about the mass deportations of Baltic nationals to Siberia. I'm talking about hundreds of thousands of people from three separate nations with their own language and cultures who were uprooted and shipped out of their homelands and if they were lucky enough to survive inconceivable journeys in railroad cars, they found themselves in labour camps, where most of them died anyway. This is a horror story, Mr Pagan. This is genocide, plain and simple. And it's going on to this very day. It's going on, perhaps in more subtle ways, but it's still happening because the KGB sees to that. The KGB makes sure, at every level of Baltic society, that the native peoples of the Baltic countries are being Russified – which is just a polite fucking word for extermination.”

She stopped moving and stared at him. He had the feeling he'd been hit across the skull with a stout wooden plank. She went on about how native languages were falling into disuse, cultures dying, how TV stations broadcast only in Russian, how young people were being conscripted into the Soviet Army and shipped to Afghanistan to fight a war they didn't care about on behalf of a system they despised, and Baltic peoples were being dispersed to other parts of the Soviet Union, and anybody who raised his voice to complain had the nasty habit of disappearing from view.

There was an aura of energy about her, almost a force-field. Pagan, who could think of nothing to say because she'd somehow managed to make him feel a little ashamed of his own neglect of recent history and uncomfortable with what she surely perceived in him as insensitivity, wondered about her background. She talked with an American accent, but what was her family history?

“I'm sorry,” she said.

“Sorry?”

“Sorry you don't know more about it. And sorry I went on at you. I hate to lecture.”

“And I hate being lectured,” Pagan said. But he was intrigued just the same. He had run into many of the disenfranchised persons of Europe in his life. The Poles, the Hungarians, the sad exiles who formed social clubs in London suburbs and held dances and sometimes wrote letters to newspapers. It was just that he hadn't considered the Baltic nations as countries with identities as singular as those of Poland or Hungary or Czechoslovakia. He'd always thoughtlessly assumed they were iridivisibly a part of the Soviet Union and if he ever considered them at all it was a process that took place on some far edge of his awareness, a subject that never troubled him, never came into focus in a place where he could see it clearly. Every now and then he'd read about a student riot in Latvia or some form of protest by the Catholic Church in Lithuania, every now and then he'd absently read about petitions delivered to the United Nations by people with strange, unpronounceable names – but there was a distance to these things, as if he were seeing them down the wrong end of a telescope. It was, he realised, unforgivably parochial of him. And it was no real justification to tell himself that cops weren't exactly famous for their interest in affairs beyond their own particular parish, which was usually small and well-defined, a tidy little patch where you knew all the scams that were going on.

“People forget,” Kristina Vaska said. “That's the problem. When a wrong isn't righted immediately, it becomes the status quo, and people just don't think about it any more. It's easy, you see. It's the complacent way.”

“And I'm complacent,” Pagan said.

“And ignorant. Which pisses me off.” She looked around the room. “And you also live like a pig, which pisses me off even more.”

Pagan smiled. Her earnestness had suddenly gone and there was levity in her expression and he could see, behind the features that had become so damned stern a moment before, a sense of humour, a warmth. “I'm not here a great deal,” he said feebly.