Mazurka (2 page)

But today Pagan felt detached from his dislikes. He had spent the previous evening riotously and quite unexpectedly drinking vodka with Romanenko in the Savoy Hotel in London, and now he was numb, and amazed by Romanenko's resilience. The Russian was in his middle fifties and yet he had the ability of a much younger man to bounce back from all the booze he'd drunk the night before.

Pagan, lulled by the rhythm of the train, looked across the compartment at Romanenko, who was holding forth in an exuberant way about the future of the computer industry in the Soviet Union. He demonstrated freely with his strong red hands, he shrugged, rolled his eyes, smiled a great deal – the kind of energetic man who couldn't keep still for very long and whose enthusiasms had a childlike, contagious quality.

Pagan tried to remember where last night had gone. It had begun with a courtesy call, he recollected that much. He'd visited Romanenko's room at the Savoy to discuss the timetable for this trip, and matters relating to security. Romanenko, with that demanding hospitality common to many Russians, produced a bottle of vodka and two glasses and insisted on drinking a toast to my new friend from Scotland Yard, my security guard, the very first Brottish policeman I am ever meeting in my life' – a toast that inevitably spawned another, then another, until finally a second bottle was opened and Pagan had the feeling he'd known Romanenko all his life. There had been warm handshakes, embraces, enthusiastic talk about a new purpose, a new spirit, inside the Soviet Union.
You will see differences, Frank Pagan, such as you have never dreamed of. Big changes are coming
. And here Aleksis had looked almost sly, a man privy to information Pagan could not have guessed in a thousand years. Given to winks and nudges and physical contact, he had the manner of somebody bursting to reveal crucial information and yet prohibited from doing so.
Big changes. Big surprises. Wait and see, Frank Pagan
.

Pagan thought he remembered the Russian crying tears of joy somewhere along the way and how the toasts had become more and more fulsome, with references to coexistence and peacefulness and how the ‘Rosha' of the future was going to be.
A country, my friend Frank Pagan, for the twentieth century! Yes! Out of the Middle Ages and into the wonderful world of the computer! Yes! A hundred times yes! Let us drink another toast to the new Rosha! And to you and me, Frank Pagan, let us drink to a new friendsheep!
And then they'd gone together down to the bar, because Romanenko had the urge to strike up more
friendsheeps
, this time with women, and all Pagan could remember of the trip was Romanenko's ruddy face surveying the bar with lecherous intent, then the way he'd dragged a reticent young woman out of her chair and danced with her between the tables, his arms thrown around her waist and shoulders and his great laughter sweeping aside her delicate protests.

Pagan had a foggy recollection of making it home in a taxi – but the memory was too dim to fix with any certainty. Now, bright-eyed and irrepressible, Romanenko was laughing as he told some horror story about industrial sloth in the Soviet Union. He had a huge repertoire of jokes on the subject of the inconveniences of Russian life, and he related them with an actor's gusto in an English that was often muddled yet always charming.

Apart from Pagan and Romanenko, there was a third man in the compartment. Danus Oates was a middle level official from the Foreign Office, a young man with a pleasantly bland face and a plummy accent that suggested Eton or Harrow. Oates, whose function was to act as a kind of tour guide for the Russian, wasn't a great conversationalist. His talk was limited to such topics as the weather and some background chat about the history of Edinburgh, which he delivered like somebody who has swallowed a recorded message.

In the corridor of the train there was a man from Special Branch and a sullen character, presumably KGB, from the Soviet Embassy. Security surrounding the Russian wasn't especially tight. There hadn't been any death threats or virulent anti-Soviet propaganda in the newspapers or any outpourings of nationalist sentiment from the rabid groups that despised Russia. And Romanenko, after all, was just one anonymous official from a Russian outpost in the Baltic. The protection afforded him was little more than a courtesy, but it was Frank Pagan's responsibility to make sure that the Russian attended the Festival, heard the music he wanted to hear, Prokofiev's Classical Symphony, and was returned to London the following day in one piece – and Pagan took the job as seriously as he could.

“Are we close to Edinburgh?” Romanenko asked, gazing out of the window with some excitement. Like a boy on his first trip overseas, Pagan thought. The flushed expression, the voice a little too loud.

Danus Oates said that it would be another ten minutes or so. Romanenko smiled, lit a cigarette, a Player's, and fell silent for perhaps the only time since the train had left London.

Pagan stared out of the window. It was one of those leaden Scottish afternoons – drab skies and a low heaven, beneath which the granite houses, stained by rain, looked squat and depressing.

“Wish we'd had a better day,” Danus Oates remarked. He had an upper-class Englishman's attitude to Scotland. It was an English colony where there were only two things of conversational significance – grouse-shooting and salmon-fishing.

The Russian shrugged. “Rain is not a problem to me, my friend. In Rosha, finding a good umbrella – that's the problem.”

Pagan smiled, closed his eyes, drifted for a time.

Romanenko and Oates were, of all things, discussing roses now, a scarlet clutch of which Romanenko had just noticed in a back yard. Oates didn't know a rose from a rhododendron but he'd been trained in the craft of small talk and he made it with consummate ease. It transpired that Romanenko's hobby was rose-growing and he discussed it with the same enthusiasm he had for everything else, his hands caressing the air around him as if it were a delicate flower. He apparently had quite a garden at his dacha on the shores of the Baltic.

He took a wallet out of his pocket and showed Oates some photographs. Oates went into his head-nodding mode.

Pagan, who needed to stretch his legs and check to see if his hungover circulation was still functioning, excused himself and stepped out into the corridor, where he slid one of the windows open and enjoyed the feel of cold rain on his skin.

The man from Special Branch who stood in the corridor considered Pagan eccentric. To his way of thinking, Pagan didn't belong in the club. His clothes – brown shirt, beige necktie undone, a slightly baggy two-piece tan suit, brown canvas espadrilles – were wrong. His manner was wrong. He didn't have the right attitude. The man from Special Branch, who was called John Downey, resented the idea of Pagan being in charge of the security around Romanenko and so he thought sullen thoughts when it came to Frank.

With the special kind of malice that is often found inside a bureaucracy, certain members of Special Branch had been jubilant when Pagan had returned empty-handed last year from the United States where he'd gone in pursuit of an IRA gunman. There were even a few who had rowdily celebrated the disbandment of Pagan's own anti-terrorist section over drinks in a pub called The Sherlock Holmes. From the accounts Pagan had heard, it was an evening of gloating merriment. For his own part, Pagan didn't give a damn what his colleagues thought of him. He had never lived his life to please other people and he wasn't about to let the opinions of morons trouble him now.

John Downey's waxed moustache suggested something faintly colonial. He had the face of a man who might have watched the last flag of the British Empire come down from the flagpole at the final outpost. He had the deflated cheeks of an old bugler.

“I had better plans for Saturday than this,” Downey said. “Spurs are at home to Arsenal. I wanted to be at White Hart Lane.”

Frank Pagan didn't share the great British passion for soccer. He watched the daylight disappear as the train plunged briefly into a tunnel, then the darkness was gone again and Downey's face came back into focus.

Downey peered into the compartment at the Russian. “He's not much to look at for a First Secretary of the Communist Party.”

Pagan wondered if Downey would have been more impressed by a hammer and sickle tattoo on Romanenko's forehead. He found himself gazing at a globule of moisture that clung to the impenetrable hairs of Downey's moustache. The sight amused him.

“It's a job, John,” Pagan said. “Think of yourself as a delivery boy. One Russian brought to Edinburgh, then hauled back to London again. And everybody's happy.”

Downey appeared to consider this, as if he suspected a buried insult in the reference to a delivery boy. Then Downey's face changed to a leer. “At least he's not Irish. Is he, Frank?”

Pagan smiled in a thin way. Men like Downey, when they had the hold of a bone, never quite managed to let it go. For many months now, Downey had brought up the subject of Ireland on any pretext. It was infantile, Pagan knew, but it appeared to feed some deep, ludicrous need inside Downey's heart. What a life Downey had to live, Pagan thought. He had his football games and the task of waxing his bloody moustache and what else – beyond making tasteless remarks at Pagan's expense? It was a life that was difficult to imagine in its entirety. And yet not difficult, perhaps just appallingly easy. Despite himself, despite his resolve never to respond to sorry barbs, Pagan had an urge to slash back at Downey in some way – but that required an energy he hadn't been able to find in himself lately. He was treading water, going through the motions, listless. The death of the IRA gunman had pleased some people inside the hierarchy at Scotland Yard. They could at least claim that the man known as Jig was no longer a menace. And there had been a half-hearted attempt to make Frank Pagan some kind of hero, but it was doomed to failure because it was a role Pagan didn't have the heart for. Besides, credit for the gunman's death – if credit was an appropriate word – had been attributed to the FBI. In the end, there had been nothing remotely heroic in the death of the Irish assassin, and it had left Frank Pagan with a sour taste in his mouth.

Now, following the dissolution of his own Irish section, he'd been doing odd jobs for months, mainly guarding visiting dignitaries from African and Commonwealth countries, or Communist tourists like Aleksis Romanenko, who came to Britain to do a little business and squeeze in some sightseeing in this quaint green land.

He stared at Downey. “As you say, John. He's not Irish.”

Downey's smile was like a bruise on his face. He enjoyed scoring points against Pagan, especially when Pagan failed to rise to his own defence. “Because if he was a mick, Frank, they wouldn't let you near him with a ten-foot pole, would they?”

Pagan slid the window open a little further and rain blew into Downey's eyes, making him mutter and blink and reach for a handkerchief in his coat pocket. Such a small triumph, Pagan thought. The trouble with a man like Downey was how he reduced you to his own idiotic level. He watched John Downey rub his face with the handkerchief. Moisture had caused the wax moustache to lose some of its glossy stiffness, and now it curled above Downey's upper lip like a furry caterpillar.

“Sorry about that, John,” Pagan said. “I hope you brought your waxing kit with you,” and he shut the window quickly, stepping back inside the compartment. The train was already beginning to slow as it approached Waverley Station.

Romanenko looked up expectantly. “Are we there?” he asked.

“A minute or so,” Pagan replied.

“Excellent, excellent.” Romanenko stood up, clutching his briefcase to his side. He wore a very British Burberry raincoat and shoes of fine Italian leather, soft and gleaming.

“Do we see the Castle soon?” Romanenko asked.

“Very,” Danus Oates answered.

Pagan watched the platform loom up. When the train came finally to a halt, Pagan opened the door of the compartment and climbed down. Romanenko came immediately after him and almost at once John Downey fell into step beside the Russian, who was sniffing the air deeply and saying how railway stations smelled the same the world over, an observation with which Oates, whose experience of railways was minimal, readily agreed. The sullen man from the Soviet Embassy walked several feet behind the group looking this way and that, his head, reminiscent of a pumpkin, swivelling on the thick stalk of his neck.

Pagan stared the length of the platform, aware of people disembarking from the train, being met by relatives, little reunions, porters hauling baggage, mail sacks being unloaded – too much activity to follow at one time. Too many people. Pagan, who was walking about five or six feet ahead of the Russian, looked in the direction of the ticket-barrier, some twenty yards away. Beyond the gate there were more crowds. The bloody Festival, he thought. And a local soccer game into the bargain. There was no real control here. The environment wasn't properly sealed. And that made him uneasy. But uneasiness was something that plagued him these days, a sense of groundless anxiety. He supposed it was part of his general mood, his indecision, the feeling that his life and career were a pair of bloody mongrels going nowhere in particular.

“I understand we have a car waiting outside the station,” Danus Oates said. “We're to dine at the George Hotel, which is said to be the best in the city. The chef is preparing Tay salmon in an unusual manner in honour of your visit.”

Pagan wondered what was meant by ‘unusual' in this case. He hoped it wasn't going to be some nouvelle cuisine monstrosity, salmon in raspberry sauce with poached kiwi fruit. He had a sudden longing for plain old fish and chips smothered in malt vinegar and eaten out of a greasy newspaper, preferably
The News of the World
with its lurid tales of child-molesting vicars. He had an urge to whisk Romanenko away from any official arrangements and plunge with him into the side-streets of this city, into the dark little pubs and alleyways and courtyards, into the places where people really lived their lives. This is the way it really is, Aleksis. This is what you don't find in the restaurant of the George Hotel.