Mazurka (37 page)

Relentless, Kristina thought. And doomed.

“Hello?” Evi Vaska's voice was distant.

For a second Kristina was tempted to hang up without saying anything. She hesitated. “Mother.”

“Kristina!” Evi Vaska's voice became breathlessly excited. “Are you still in England?”

“Yes,” Kristina said. She pictured the house, the hundreds of miniature figures that rendered the place even more claustrophobic than it was, with its narrow passageways and cramped staircase and low ceilings. Even the garden, a wild green riot, pressed in upon the house as if to isolate it before finally consuming it. Kristina had the thought that the house and its garden were like her mother's mind, a place of lifeless figures and disarray.

“Is there news, Kristina?”

“We'll talk when I come home, mother. I'll drive up to see you and we'll sit down together and we'll talk.”

Kristina pictured her mother's flour-coloured face, the black eye makeup, the deep red lipstick, the dyed yellow hair that lay upon her shoulders like the broken strings of a harpsichord. “In other words there's nothing, is that what you're saying, Kristina?”

“That's not what I'm saying, mother. Look, I'm flying back today. At the weekend I'll drive up to you. I'll come up to the Adirondacks.” She tried to keep impatience and exasperation out of her voice, but she wished she hadn't called in the first place. She sighed. She didn't have the heart for this talk. She didn't have the heart for any of it.

“You didn't see Aleksis? Is that what you're trying to tell me, Kristina? So there's no news of your father? Is this what you're keeping from me?”

Kristina Vaska put the receiver down. She walked to the window, pressed her forehead upon the glass, looked down at the street below. She felt as if she were a victim suddenly, a casualty of history, wounded by forces from the past – forces that had killed some people and driven others, like Evi Vaska who sat in a world of her own creation, totally out of her mind. And her eyes watered, but she didn't weep, no matter how tight the constriction at the back of her throat or the ache around her heart. She was beyond tears. She needed dignity, which came through retribution rather than grief.

14

Virginia Beach

There were days when Galbraith needed to get out of the house in Fredericksburg, when he suffered from a rarified form of cabin-fever and had to step away from the consoles and the never-ending flow of data. A man might choke to death on so many tiny bones of information. Sometimes he sat in the back of his chauffeured car and was driven to Cape Hatteras or Williamsburg or Richmond. On this early Tuesday morning he chose to go to Virginia Beach, city of soothsayers and palmists, tea-leaf readers and cosmic masseurs, hitch-hiking gurus and astral travellers, faith healers and tarot interpreters and astrologers and other fools. It was a city Galbraith found refreshingly silly, all the more so since it took its ‘metaphysics' with grave seriousness. On his last visit here Galbraith had had his chart done by a fey astrologer – just for the hell of it – who told him that the heavenly portents were
far
from pleasing. Galbraith listened to talk about one's moon being in Venus, and how an absence of earth signs indicated a certain abstract turn of mind, utter nonsense over which he nodded his head grimly. He declined the opportunity to have his past lives revealed for the further paltry sum of twenty bucks. One incarnation, in Galbraith's mind, was more than enough. Anything more was arguably masochistic.

He surveyed the ocean from the back of the Daimler, or at least those stretches of it one might spot between high-rise hotels. It was a sunny morning and the sea was calm, and the yachts that floated out towards the Chesapeake Bay did so with slack sails. Galbraith observed the streets, the summer festivities, people strolling through sunshine, men and women in bermuda shorts, kids in funny hats, the kerbs clogged with Winnebagos from faraway states. The great American vacation, he thought. He wouldn't have minded a vacation himself. He hadn't taken one in fourteen years, unless one considered a trip four years ago to Monaco but that had really been business. And this quick jaunt to Virginia Beach, which had the superficial appearance of a leisurely drive, was still connected to work. Nothing Galbraith did was ever done without purpose. Aimless was not in his vocabulary.

The chauffeur, a black man called Lombardy, turned the big car away from the strip and through streets that quickly became dense with trees. Graceful willows hung over narrow inlets of water. There were expensive homes here, many of them refurbished Victorian affairs filled with brass and stained-glass and heavy with a ponderous sense of the past lovingly restored. Galbraith watched the Daimler plunge down a lane and listened to branches scratch the windows. Lombardy parked the car outside a house which was so well-camouflaged by trees that it couldn't be seen from the road. The black man opened the door and Galbraith slid out of the back seat, puffing as he waddled towards the front of the house.

Galbraith pushed a screen-door, entered a yellow entrance room which led along a yellow hallway to rooms the colour of daffodils. He felt like a man plummeted without warning into a strange monochromatic world, a place of yellow sofas and chairs, yellow lampshades, yellow rugs, a house in which even the mirrors had a faint yellow tint. The effect, he decided, was to make one feel rather jaundiced.

“I liked it better when it was red,” Galbraith said.

The small man who appeared at the foot of the stairs wore a saffron kimono. “Red is rage,” he said. His black hair, heavily greased, had been flattened on either side of the centre parting.

“And yellow's mellow, I dare say,” Galbraith remarked.

“Yellow is springtime and rebirth, Galbraith. Yellow is the colour of pure thought.”

“Also yellowjack fever and cowardice.”

The man inclined his head. He had some slight oriental lineage that showed in the high cheekbones and the facial colouring. He had exceptionally long fingers.

“Colour and harmony, Galbraith. In your hurried world, you don't take the time to plan your environment. You eat fast and hump fast and read fast and think fast. What an ungodly way to live. The gospel according to Ronald MacDonald.”

“When I want to hear about taking time to sniff the goddam flowers, Charlie, I'll read Thoreau. Meantime, I've got other things on my mind.” Galbraith wandered to the window and released a blind, which sprung up quickly, altering the monotonous light in the room. “Do you mind?”

“What if I did, Galbraith?”

“I'd ignore you anyhow.” Galbraith wandered to a sofa and lay down on his face, closing his eyes. “It hurts here and here,” and he pointed to a couple of places at the base of his spine. Charlie tugged Galbraith's shirt out of his pants and probed the spots. Charlie, who had built an expensive clientele among the richly gullible, and employed a hodge-podge of massage techniques together with some oriental mumbo-jumbo, always managed to fix Galbraith for a couple of months or so.

“You're too fat,” Charlie said. “No wonder you hurt.”

“I didn't drive down here to be abused, Charlie. Mend me. Spare me bullshit about the Seventh Temple of Pleasure and the Six Points of the Dragon and the Jade Doorway to Joy and all that other piffle you fool people with, just fix me.”

Charlie pressed his fingertips into the base of Galbraith's spine and the fat man moaned. “You're carrying around an extra person, Galbraith. For that you need two hearts. Do you have two hearts, fat man?”

Galbraith closed his eyes and felt little waves of relaxation spread upward the length of his spine and then ripple through his buttocks as Charlie went to work with his sorcerer's fingers. For a while Galbraith was able to forget his usual worries, drifting into a kind of hypnotic state. There were times in his life when he needed a retreat from the vast panorama of detail that was his to oversee, an escape from the insidious pressures of his world, the network of responsibilities that each year seemed to grow more and more elaborate. Power, he realised, was an ornate construction, delicate membranes imposed one upon another, creating strata that sometimes perplexed him, sometimes made him nervous. He'd realised in recent years that he couldn't carry the weight of his job alone. He had to rely on other people. There was no escape from this fact. The best you could do was make sure you didn't delegate important matters to total idiots. If Galbraith had one dominant fear it was the idea that a dark deed would be traced back to his own outfit, even to his own office, and that some form of public exposure would follow. Sweet Jesus – there were freshfaced youngsters in Congress who fancied themselves investigative officers of the people,
ombudsmen
for the commonfolk, and they were like hounds out of hell if they had the smell of any illicit expenditure of the taxpayer's money, the more so if it were used in a covert manner.

He came suddenly alert when Charlie said, “Your associate is here, Galbraith. I'll leave you now.”

Charlie draped an ochre towel across the exposed lower part of Galbraith's body before he left the room. Galbraith twisted his face to see Gary Iverson looking uncomfortable in the middle of the floor. Galbraith had almost managed to forget that he'd arranged to meet Iverson here.

“Pull up a pew, Gary,” Galbraith said. If he had more men like Iverson – reliable, loyal, patriotic, devious – he might eat less and sleep more. A svelte, well-rested Galbraith – it was quite a thought.

Iverson dragged a wingbacked chair close to the sofa where the fat man lay. He'd come directly from New York, travelling by helicopter to Norfolk and from Norfolk by car. It seemed to Iverson that he spent most of his life in motion, like a pinball in Galbraith's private machine, banging between Fredericksburg and DC and New Jersey and Manhattan and Norfolk.

“Ever had one of Charlie's specials?” Galbraith asked.

Iverson shook his head.

“Remind me to give you one for Christmas.” Galbraith rolled over on his back. “He issues gift certificates good for one bath and a rub-down. Highly recommended, Gary. Besides, this is probably the most discreet place I know. Charlie appreciates how much some people treasure privacy.”

Iverson looked round the room. Yellow wasn't his colour. He gazed at the square of window where the blind had been released. He was very glad to see greenery brush against the pane. He said, “Early this morning Frank Pagan and his sidekick Max Klein made inquiries concerning certain vacant properties on the boardwalk at Brighton Beach.”

“Did they now? Whatever for?” Galbraith sat upright. He had the feeling he wasn't going to like anything he heard from Gary.

Iverson said, “They went to the boardwalk last night after interviewing Rose Alexander.”

“Ah, yes, Kiviranna's unwilling friend. I recall her name from your report. And she sent them scurrying off to Brighton Beach?”

Iverson nodded. Galbraith closed his eyes a moment. He had times in which he could literally see trouble as one might witness thunderheads gathering on a distant hill. There were connections here that made him very unhappy indeed.

“Do we know what she told them, Gary?”

“An inquiry was made, sir.”

Galbraith frowned. Inquiry was a word that could conceal a multitude of sins. “I trust this inquiry was peaceful?”

“The woman was cooperative. She had nothing to hide. She told us exactly what she'd told Pagan. Shortly before he left for London, Jake Kiviranna had an appointment with somebody on the boardwalk – in one of the old shops.”

“Ye gods,” the fat man said. “You don't suppose there's coincidence here, do you?” Galbraith asked this question with heavy sarcasm. He thought of coincidence the way an atheist might think of God. Acceptable if you were naive enough to have faith, preposterous if you gave it only a moment's consideration. He stood up, adjusting his pants, discarding the towel. “You understand where this is leading, don't you, Gary?”

Iverson nodded. He had a quick eye for complexity. Galbraith raised a finger in the air and said, “Jake goes to an old shop on the boardwalk. Carl Sundbach just happens to own such an establishment. Carl Sundbach also happens to know that Romanenko is due to arrive in Edinburgh.” Galbraith paused, then paced the room, speaking very slowly. “Sundbach tells Kiviranna … go to Edinburgh … shoot Romanenko …”

“Why though?”

“Why indeed? Why participate at considerable expense in the Brotherhood only to make an attempt to scotch the entire goddam operation by using a hired gun? Do you see any sense in that?”

Both men were silent for a time. Galbraith said, “We know Sundbach wasn't happy with the plan. Good Christ, he walked out on it. It's all there on the tape of that last meeting in Glen Cove. But was he so unhappy with it that he decided he'd ruin the goddam thing himself if he could? And then when he realised he couldn't halt the Kiss express, no matter what, he walked away …”

“A change of heart,” Iverson said.

“Fear maybe. An old man's terror. Old age and terror – there's a combination made in hell. And utterly unpredictable.” Galbraith looked thoughtful for a while. “What worries me, you see, is this fellow Pagan getting too close to the flame of the candle. I don't want him singed, Gary, unless it's essential. And if it's essential, I don't want us to be involved. Not even remotely.”

In an unhappy voice Iverson said, “It may very well be essential, sir.”

“Meaning?”

“I've heard from London.”

“And?”

Iverson gathered his thoughts, parading them in an orderly manner in his mind as if they were foot soldiers with a tendency to be unruly. He noticed a pitcher of iced water, rose, poured himself a glass, returned to his chair. “It seems that Frank Pagan has been travelling in some interesting company, sir. The daughter of a former member of the Brotherhood, a man who vanished into Siberia some years ago, has become a companion of Pagan's. The assumption is that this young lady, Krishna Vaska by name, has provided Pagan with some information about the Brotherhood. We're not sure what. But Pagan may be able to come to certain conclusions. He knows something about the Brotherhood, he's about six inches away from Sundbach – it's a situation fraught with danger.”