Mazurka (27 page)

He came to another narrow street now and the fear passed as suddenly as it had come. He was in the vicinity of Fordham University, where expensive apartment buildings flourished on side-streets. He might have taken a more direct route to this neighbourhood than he'd done, but he never came here the same way twice. He crossed Amsterdam Avenue and went inside an old building, a former warehouse converted into studios and apartments.

He climbed to the third floor. At the end of the hallway he knocked on a door, which was opened almost at once by a man Kiss knew only as Iverson. He was probably in his late forties, but the lack of lines and creases, the lack of
animation
in the face made it impossible to guess. Kiss couldn't recall Iverson ever smiling or frowning. There was something decidedly spooky about the man, as if he had no inner life whatsoever, and that what you saw on his face was all there was. Kiss always thought of him as a
külm kala
, a cold fish.

The suite of rooms was completely devoid of furniture. There was white fitted carpet throughout and the walls were glossy white, reflecting the recessed lights. It was a strange apartment, Kiss thought, neat and always spotless, and yet without any sign of ever having been lived in. He assumed that Iverson used it only for these meetings. Kiss took off his homburg and wiped his damp forehead with his palm and considered how perfectly this empty apartment matched Iverson's personality.

“Do we go or don't we?” Iverson asked.

Always straight to the point, Kiss thought. For a moment he hesitated. He walked to the windows, which had a view of the dark river. A barge, bright yellow upon the blackness, floated past.
Do we go or don't we?

Kiss turned and looked at the man. “We go,” he said.
There. It was done. And there was no going back
.

“You've had confirmation?” Iverson asked.

“Yes,” Kiss lied.

“I never had any doubts.”

Kiss smiled now. What he felt was a rush of pure relief, like a chemical flooding through his body. It was the sensation Americans called ‘high'. He had a tangible sense of the network he'd created, an adrenalin flowing out of this building and through the darkness, a powerful vibrancy that went untrammelled across land and sea to stop, finally, in Moscow. He had a sense of all the links he'd spent years hammering into place coming together at last, as if each link had been galvanised suddenly by a surge of lightning.

Iverson leaned stiffly against a wall. Even the pinstriped suit he wore was bland and unremarkable. He was a man who courted the prosaic avidly. “All you have to do is make sure your man is in Norway. We'll take it from there.” For the first time in any of their meetings, Kiss thought he detected an emotion in the man.

Iverson said, “Now it's finally happening, I've got this strange feeling in my gut. You ever ride a rollercoaster, Kiss? It's that kind of thing.” And he allowed a very small smile to cross his lips. It looked as if it had been airbrushed on to his face.

Kiss had to come to understand that Iverson – who was either an officer in the United States Air Force or had been at one time, an anomaly Iverson deliberately failed to clarify – feared the Russians. But Kiss, whose focus was limited to three countries with an area of some sixty thousand square miles and a population of eight million, had no particular interest in Iverson's motives. Andres, who had maintained all kinds of connections in the armed forces, had brought Iverson in about eighteen months ago, saying he was a completely dependable man who could provide an essential service. And that recommendation was enough. Whether Iverson was acting alone, or whether he represented a consortium of men who shared his views, some shadowy congregation of figures who preferred to stay offstage, Kiss didn't know, even though he sometimes felt that Iverson was merely a spokesman. But without Iverson's help the whole scheme would have been more difficult, perhaps even impossible.

Strange bedfellows, Kiss thought. An old Baltic guerilla fighter and a mysterious figure with military connections who saw a way to undermine a regime he feared.

“Well,” Iverson said. “I guess we don't see each other again.”

He held his hand forward and Kiss shook it. Iverson's clasp was ice-cold, bloodless.

“Nägemiseni,”
Iverson said. Goodbye.

Kiss was touched by Iverson's effort to learn a word in Estonian, a language totally alien to him.

“I practised it,” Iverson said.

“You did fine.” Kiss, smiling, went towards the door. There he turned and said,
“Head aega,”
which was also goodbye.

Iverson said, “One thing. We never met. We never talked. This apartment ceases to exist as soon as you step out the door. If you ever have any reason to come back to this place, and I hope you don't, you'll find strangers living here. And if anybody
ever
asks, Kiss, I don't know you from Adam.”

London

Frank Pagan looked at the corpse of Danus Oates only in a fleeting way, before turning his back. Oates's splendid silk pyjamas were soaked with blood. Martin Burr, who had come up to London by fast car from the depths of Sussex – where on weekends he lived the life of an English country squire – gazed down at the body with sorrow.

“Damned shame,” he said to Pagan and he swiped the air with his cane in a gesture of frustrated sadness. “I wish the cleaners would get here and remove the poor lad. Let's go into the living-room.”

Frank Pagan followed Burr out of the bedroom. The Commissioner sat in an armchair, propping his chin on his cane and gazing thoughtfully through the open door of the flat. A uniformed policeman stood on the landing and three neighbours – two emaciated women and a leathery man, the latter having discovered the body while making a social call – were trying to sneak a look inside the place with all the ghoulish enthusiasm of people who consider murder a spectator sport.

“Shut that bloody door, would you?” Burr asked.

Pagan did so. When they'd first come to Oates's flat, Pagan had told the Commissioner what he'd learned about Epishev from Kristina Vaska, and Burr had absorbed the information in silence. Now Pagan said, “The way I see it is Epishev came here because he'd learned Oates had worked on the translation. He wanted to know what Oates had found out. The answer was, of course, very little – a few lines of verse in an obscure language. What else could poor Oates say? Maybe all he could tell Epishev was that I had the thing in my possession – who knows? Epishev, covering his tracks like any dutiful assassin, killed him. And I was the next name on the list, because I'd come in contact with the verse as well.”

“The damned poem's like a bloody fatal virus,” Burr said angrily. “You touch it, you have a damned good chance of dying.” He was genuinely shocked by this murder and the presence of a KGB killer in London, and the fact that his own dominion was tainted by international political intrigue. He liked, if not a calm life, then one of logic and order and watertight compartments.

Pagan stuck his hands in his pockets. “If it's a virus, it acts in very peculiar ways. The thing I haven't been able to figure out is why the KGB would want to come after people like Oates and myself. Obviously, they imagine I know something, and they don't
like
me knowing it, whatever the hell it is. But what's the big secret? If the Brotherhood's working on an act of terrorism against the Russians, let's say, why would the KGB want to destroy the people who might have evidence of it? Unless the KGB is involved in the plot as well – or at the very least doesn't want it to fail.”

“And that's a rather odd line of reasoning, Frank.”

Pagan agreed. He moved up and down the room in an agitated manner. He was remembering now how Witherspoon had talked about a struggle between the old regime and the new, and how Epishev had belonged in the Greshko camp along with the old power-brokers, those who had been sent scurrying into reluctant redundancy. It was an elusive thought, a sliver of a thing, but perhaps what was unfolding in front of him was some element of that power struggle, some untidy aspect of it, the ragged edges of a Soviet situation that had become inadvertently exported to England. He turned this over in his mind and he was about to mention the thought to Burr when the Commissioner said, “This Vaska lady. Do you think her information is on the level?”

“I had a few doubts at first,” Pagan replied.

“But not now?”

“I'm not so sure.”

“But you want to believe her.”

“I think what she says about this Brotherhood and Romanenko's part in it is true. And I believe her when she says she came here in the hope of seeing Romanenko about her father. I also have the strong feeling she wasn't mistaken when she identified Epishev.”

Oates's living-room was cluttered with very tasteful antiques. There was a photograph on one wall that depicted Danus, around the age of fifteen, in the straw-hat of a Harrow schoolboy. Fresh-faced, rather chubby at the cheeks, all innocence. Pagan paused in front of it, shaking his head. You couldn't begin to imagine Oates's doomed future from such a guilelessly plump face. It was all going to be sunshine and a steady if unspectacular climb up the ladder of the Foreign Office.

Martin Burr was quiet for a while. “If what she says about this Epishev chap is correct, I don't think this whole business belongs to us any more, Frank. I really don't think this is anything we can keep. If Epishev is KGB, it's no longer our game.”

Pagan felt a flush of sudden irritation. “We give it away? Is that what you're saying?”

Martin Burr frowned. “I don't think we
give
it away, Frank. Rather, it's
taken
from us. There's a certain kind of skulduggery that doesn't come into our patch, Frank. We're not equipped. And you may bitch about it, but sooner or later you have to face the fact that intelligence will want this one. No way round it, I'm afraid. Besides, I understand our friend Witherspoon has already dropped the word about Epishev in the appropriate quarters.”

“Good old Tommy.”

“He was only doing what he perceived as his duty, no doubt.”

“I bet.”
Frank, you should have seen that one coming
. What else would Tommy do but run to his pals and gladly confide in them that Uncle Viktor had surfaced in England and that a certain incompetent policeman was handling things? Pagan could hear Witherspoon's voice, a cruel whisper, maybe a snide laugh, as he chatted to his chums in intelligence.
La-di-da, don't you know?

“You want me to forget Epishev, is that it?”

“Frank,” the Commissioner said. “Don't make me raise my voice. I'm trying to tell you how things are. Consider it a lesson in reality.”

“I may forget about Epishev, Commissioner, but is he going to forget about me? I've got something he believes he wants. Keep that in mind.”

Martin Burr shook his head. “Ah, yes, I'll expect you to trun your translation of the poem and the original over to intelligence when they ask for it – and they surely will – and then wipe the whole damned thing out of your mind.”

“Commissioner, if Epishev shot Oates, that makes it murder in my book, and I don't give a damn if Epishev's KGB or an Elizabeth Arden rep, he's a bloody killer. What makes this very personal,
sir
, is the fact that this killer has my number. And you want me to turn him over to some characters who call themselves intelligence – which so far as I'm concerned is a terrible misnomer. Anyway, Epishev's going to believe I've got what he wants whether I turn it over or not.”

Martin Burr ran a hand across his face. “Sometimes I see a petulantly stubborn quality in you that appals me.”

Pagan knew he was playing this wrongly, that he was coming close to alienating the Commissioner, who was really his only ally at the Yard. He took a couple of deep breaths, in through the nostrils and out through the mouth – a technique that was supposed to relax you, according to a book he'd once read on yoga. But spiritual bliss and all the bloody breathing exercises in the world weren't going to alleviate his frustration.

The Commissioner said, “It upsets me, too. I want you to know that. I wish there was some other way.”

“Then let me stay with it.”

“There's nothing I can do. I wish it could be otherwise. But sooner or later, Frank, I'm going to feel certain pressures from parties that I don't have to name. And I'll bow to them, because that's the way things are. Those chaps know how to press all the right buttons.”

“I could always work with them,” Pagan said halfheartedly.

Martin Burr smiled. “The idea of you working with
anyone
is rather amusing.”

“I could give it a try.”

The Commissioner shook his head. “Damn it all, how many ways can I tell you this? Intelligence doesn't like the common policeman. Let's leave it there.”

Pagan opened a decanter of cognac that sat on an antique table. He poured himself a small glass. There had to be some kind of solution to all this, something the Commissioner would accept. But Martin Burr, even though he'd complained about Pagan's stubbornness, could be pretty damned intractable himself. It was a knot, and Pagan couldn't see how to untie it. What he felt was that he was being brushed carelessly aside, and he didn't like the sensation at all.

The Commissioner reached for the decanter now and helped himself to a generous measure. He returned to his armchair and turned the balloon glass slowly around in his hand. He said, “I like you, Frank, perhaps because I think your heart's in the right place. Even at your worst, I've never questioned either your heart or your integrity. But this –” and Martin Burr made a sweeping gesture with his hand – “this tale of a Baltic clique that a young gal weaves and the presence of this Epishev and a dead Communist up in Scotland into the bargain, all
this
, my dear fellow, is not your private property, alas. Do we understand one another?”