Mazurka (19 page)

Derision hadn't fazed Aleksis. It was almost as if he'd wanted to bring some flourish of his own, some form of hope, into a situation of despair. And it had been despair, because daily the Russians were burning farms and shooting farmers who'd supported the fight of the Brotherhood. And they'd been increasing the ferocity of their patrols, pouring more men and more arms into the fight so that the only possible outcome for the Brotherhood was starvation and defeat. In the midst of this turmoil Romanenko had planted his seeds, an act of optimism and grace that Mikhail Kiss remembered, all these years later, with great clarity.

It was odd to think of Aleksis dead now. It was like trying to imagine the inside of a vacuum. He had been closer to Aleksis than to any other member of the old Brotherhood. And now another memory touched him, and his eyes moistened, and he felt a tightness at the back of his throat. He remembered the
Kalevipoeg
and how, on the day when they'd parted company, when their cell had disbanded – hungry, lacking weapons, crushed by a weariness no amount of courage could overcome, numbed by an impossible struggle – he'd given Romanenko a handwritten sheet of paper with four lines of verse on it, written in Livonian, a Finno-Ugric language Kiss had once studied as a student at the university in Tartu. A secret souvenir of a doomed freemasonry, a reminder in an almost extinct tongue, a cryptic memento of a struggle that was dying around them.

When we rise again
, Aleksis had said,
this paper will be the one true sign
. And so Romanenko had kept the sheet for years, more a symbol of a resurrection than a souvenir of a lost cause. It was this same paper that Kiss was supposed to receive on the ramparts of Edinburgh Castle on the night of Aleksis's death – the same four lines of the old patriotic poem that would indicate the time had come for the re-birth. It was a seal to be embossed on the plan, a guarantee from Romanenko that everything was finally in place for the assault, an imprimatur.

Now Kiss recalled the cold shock, the grief, of hearing about Romanenko's murder on British television and the sudden dilemma the murder posed. To proceed or – as Carl Sundbach was advocating – to forget the whole thing. His first reaction had been to abort, but then he knew that if he were to cancel the operation now, he'd live the rest of his life with regret – and what was more appalling than sinking embittered into old age? The architecture of the scheme was too careful, too intricate and lovely, for it to be shelved and forgotten.

He barely listened to the way Sundbach was whining. Carl's trouble was simple. He'd used up all his guts and stamina in his drive to become rich in America. And with riches had come a cautious, conservative way of looking at things.

Kiss looked at Carl who was going on about this grandiose – pronounced
grandyoose
– plan, wondering aloud why he'd gone along with it in the first place, pouring in money, then more money, and still more money, greasing palms and arranging passports for those who'd have to find a way of fleeing the Soviet Union after the event. Why wouldn't a simple assassination have been enough? Why hadn't they just decided to kill somebody, some Russian high-up, and been content with that? Depleted, finally speechless, Sundbach wiped flecks of spit from the corners of his mouth.

Kiss, who had invested money of his own in the scheme, who had spent freely on arms, money he'd earned on the stock markets of the world, said, “Assassinations mean nothing these days. Any crackpot with a gun can go out and shoot anybody he likes. They don't even make the front-page, for God's sake. Never at any time did we seriously consider assassination.”

Sundbach clasped his skinny white hands on the surface of the table. “Listen, if you go ahead now, if you ignore the danger signs, you might be signing the death warrants of everybody involved, including our friends inside the Soviet Union and maybe even ourselves if those KGB scum at the Russian mission also learn about us.”

In a quiet voice, one of restrained impatience, Andres Kiss said, “What Mikhail's saying is that the game is too far along for anything to be changed. All the pieces are in position. Everything is ready. And if we go with the plan, we have to go now. Otherwise, forget it.”

Carl Sundbach said, “I disagree, Andres. The pieces are not all in position. There is one vital piece we don't have and we all know what that is. I'm talking about Romanenko. I'm talking about the very big fact that we don't know if Romanenko was going to tell us to play our hand or throw in our cards. And since we don't know this, it's my opinion we take the loss. All the wasted time. We say it was quite an experience, quite a dream, and we back away.”

Andres Kiss smiled his most brilliant smile. “It's not a dream for me, Carl,” he said. And it wasn't. He had anticipated the conclusion of the scheme so many times that it had come to have something of the texture of an event already past, already history. In a sense, Andres Kiss had lived his own future.

Sundbach fingered the string to which his eyeglasses were attached. “I say we get out now. If it fails, too many people may die. Listen to me. Maybe Aleksis was going to tell us to wash our hands of the whole business. Maybe he was going to tell us that something had gone wrong. How can we know
anything
for sure?”

Andres Kiss stood up. “It's a pity you're not a gambling man, Carl. Then you'd realise there's a fifty-fifty chance Aleksis was going to give us the okay to proceed.”

“And you'd take that chance?” Sundbach asked.

Andres nodded confidently. “I'd take it.”

Sundbach looked at Mikhail Kiss. “And you?”

“Without hesitation,” Kiss replied.

“You're both crazy,” Sundbach said. “Both
hullud
. What is it with you pair? You both in love with tragedy? Personally, I don't like the feeling of putting my goddam head under a guillotine. I figure suicide isn't one of my options. And I don't want to be responsible for the deaths of other people either.”

There was an awkward silence in the room. Then Sundbach sighed. It was an old man's sigh, filled with sorrow and disbelief. He stared out into the roses, thinking how their bright colours seemed suddenly gloomy, like flowers round a sick-bed when the patient is terminal. He had the feeling his was the only voice of reason here.

“So,” Sundbach said. “This is the way it goes. Aleksis is dead in Scotland, you don't know who killed him, you don't know if he was carrying the message,
but you're going ahead anyway
.”

Neither Mikhail Kiss nor his nephew said anything. Their silence was eloquent, and united, a combination against which Sundbach couldn't compete.

Sundbach put out one thin hand and laid it on the back of Andres Kiss's wrist. “What if they're waiting for you? Bang! You fall out of the sky. No more Andres Kiss.”

The young man said, “I'll take the chance, Carl.”

Carl Sundbach poured himself a little tea. His hand trembled. He sipped quietly, then looked over the rim of his cup at Mikhail Kiss. “I never made a bad investment before. I never lost a dollar on anything. You know why? Because I never gambled. That's why. Except for this,” and he made a sweeping gesture. His eyes were suddenly moist. “Forgive this little display. I was remembering how you came to me years ago, Mikhail. You said you had a plan. I listened. I was the only one who believed in the chance of your success. The others – I'm thinking of Charlie Parming and Ernie Juurman, all the rest of them – they didn't even want to know. They turned their backs on you, Mikhail. Your own countrymen, fellow
patrioots
, they turned their backs. Alone, I supported you. But now …”

Carl Sundbach drew the sleeve of his shirt across his face. “I wish you luck. Myself, I'm too old for a doomed adventure. I'm out.”

“Reconsider, Carl,” Mikhail Kiss said, though not with any enthusiasm. In the last analysis, Sundbach was like Charlie Panning and the others. They had all grown old badly. They spoke easily about vengeance when they'd been putting vodka away, or when they got together for reunions that were invariably boastful in the beginning then finally tearful, but when it came down to action they had no iron left in their hearts. America had made them prosperous and soft. Sundbach was a scared old man who'd gotten in over his head, that was all.

Sundbach said, “Reconsider? No. What I want is a situation I can leave with no regrets. I want Andres to drive me back to the boardwalk. Then I can get on with my life.”

Sundbach rose slowly, grabbing his raccoon coat, struggling into it. He thought how the death of Aleksis hadn't changed a thing. Maybe there was still a chance Mikhail Kiss would come to his senses, maybe he'd be able to look at things clearly and understand that his scheme had been only a gorgeous dream. For a while, for too long, he'd believed in Kiss's plan himself – but what was he except an old man with too much money, too much time, somebody who wasn't listening to the way the heartbeat of the world was changing? Then he'd started to listen, he'd started to take the pulse of things, and now he understood that Kiss's way was the way of doom. There was another way, and it didn't involve such destruction, only patience.

He looked at Andres Kiss. “I'll wait for you in the car.”

A few minutes after Sundbach had stepped out of the house, Mikhail Kiss and his nephew went upstairs to the room Kiss called his office. It was stacked with books and pamphlets of the kind issued by the various Baltic Independence societies in Western countries.
The Committee for a Free Estonia. The World Legion of Lithuanian Liberation. The Baltic World Conference
. Kiss considered all these organisations well-intentioned but powerless, feeble groups of people who did nothing more than release a flood of unwanted paper, diatribes against Russian activities in the Baltic that nobody wanted to read – petitions to the United Nations for recognition of the sovereignty of the Baltic states, telegrams to world leaders, letters to United States congressmen and Australian senators and British MPs, who sent polite supportive replies marked more by impotent indignation at the plight of the Baltic than anything honest and practical. But what did all this verbiage amount to in the end? The answer was, alas, zero.

Kiss had belonged to a number of freedom organisations in the past, but he'd always resigned from them out of a sense of frustration. Endless talk and petition-signing and the drudgery of committees served the purposes of some people – but not those of Mikhail Kiss, who was tired of how the whole Baltic tragedy had been ignored by world opinion, relegated to the backwaters of old men's memories, a dead issue.

Did nobody care that cultures and languages were being deliberately destroyed and that a completely illegal form of government had been forced upon three nations? That the Baltic was now little more than an arsenal where the Soviets had installed a vast array of weapons and rockets? What Kiss remembered – and this was where the hurt and pain still lay – was the way the three Baltic nations had flourished in that gorgeous period between the wars, a time of economic progress and honest political experiment, of literature and art, a golden age of self-determination, a time for hope and optimism when for twenty short, brilliant years freedom, not fear, had been in people's hearts. Gone now, all of it, down the slipstream of history.

He stared at a framed photograph on the wall. It showed him in 1974 presenting a petition to President Gerald Ford outside the White House. Ford had made a brave little speech that day about how America would always support the integrity and rights of the Baltic states, a nice speech, but one with all the significance of a
munakook
, a sponge cake. And then Ford had vanished inside the White House and the petition disappeared into the attaché-case of a Presidential aide, where it would lie forgotten the way all such idiotic papers did. Even then, on the day of Ford's speech, Mikhail Kiss had already surrendered any belief he'd ever had in the usefulness of paper protests. Even on that fall afternoon he'd understood that the plan, first considered between himself and Romanenko in the middle of the 1960s, was the only possible direction to take.

Kiss moved to his desk where he sat down, picking up a paperweight in the form of a miniature Edinburgh Castle, a recent acquisition whose significance struck him as gruesome now.

“Do you trust him not to talk?” Andres Kiss asked.

Mikhail Kiss looked surprised. “What kind of question is that? If Carl wants out, we let him leave. It's that simple.”

The young man said, “I don't like the idea of Carl walking around with the kind of information he has.”

Kiss didn't care for the clipped coldness in his nephew's voice. “I've known him a long time. Say what you like about his faults, he can keep his mouth shut. Besides, who's he going to talk to? The nice men at the Soviet Mission in Manhattan?”

Kiss put the small bronze castle down and looked at his nephew. He'd raised Andres from the moment he'd been born, immediately after the death of his widowed sister Augusta in childbirth. It was a responsibility for which Kiss, accustomed to a life of solitude, a life devoted to making money for himself and his Wall Street clients, wasn't prepared. He often wondered if he'd discharged his obligation in the best way, if he'd done everything he might have to raise Andres.

He shut his eyes against the sunlight streaming into the room. He sometimes thought he'd placed too much emphasis on old stories of the Brotherhood, instilled in Andres too much of his own hatred of the Soviets. He'd told him tales of what it felt like to lie on a forest floor while Soviet warplanes bombed the place where you were hiding. He'd told sad stories about farms burning and farmers being dragged into fields and shot, about the sorrow of having to bury a dead comrade or the elation when the Brotherhood successfully destroyed a Russian convoy. He'd told him of the time he came across an abandoned farmhouse in the attic of which four small children, with piano wire round their necks, hung from the rafters and the way their blackened blood stained the floor beneath them and how he'd never managed to rid his mind of this image, which chilled him still and made his loathing of the Soviets even more intense, if that were possible.