Mazurka (39 page)

That smile. That face
.

Why had Norbert Vaska come back after all these years to make Mikhail Kiss shudder in the warm morning light?

Manhattan

Of the four properties vacant on the Brighton Beach boardwalk, two belonged to a massive mortgage company in New Jersey, one to a pair of brothers who lived in a retirement home in Manhassett, and the last to a company called Sundbach Incorporated, with corporate offices given as an address in lower Manhattan. On the basis of geographical convenience, Frank Pagan decided that the address in Manhattan was the first one to check, then the retirement home in Manhassett, and finally, if need be, the mortgage company in New Jersey. He had Klein drive him from the Warwick down through the midday sunshine of Manhattan. It was one of those gorgeous late summer days that bless the city all too infrequently, the air marvellously clear, a blustery breeze blowing through the canyons, no humidity, blue skies, skittish little clouds more suggestive of spring than fall.

The address in lower Manhattan turned out to be a rundown brownstone carved into three or four apartments. An assortment of bells were arranged at the side of the door, but the names written on small cards were faded. Pagan squinted at them, locating one that had the name Carl Sundbach on it in very faded blue ink. He glanced at Klein, who said that as corporate edifices went this one was more than a little inauspicious, then pressed the button. After a while the face of a man appeared behind the glass panel set in the door. He stared at Pagan and Klein without opening the door.

“Who is it? What do you want?”

Pagan took out his credentials and pressed them to the window and the old fellow, putting on spectacles, stepped forward to look. Klein did the same thing with his NYPD badge, but still the old guy didn't open the door.

“What do you want with me?”

“Just a couple of questions,” Pagan said.

“Go ahead. Ask!”

Pagan, exasperated by having to shout through a closed door, said, “It's going to be a whole lot easier if you open up and let us come inside.”

Carl Sundbach stared at the two cops, whose appearance bewildered him, especially the one with the Scotland Yard ID. He was inclined to panic a little, because if somebody had come all the way from London then it had to be connected with Kiviranna. What else? Now he had the thought that the man who'd been following him in the streets and markets was also a cop. For one dark moment, Sundbach had an urge to throw the damn door open and spill the whole story, keeping nothing back. But he couldn't do that, not even if he lived through a thousand years of torture.

Pagan pressed his face against the pane. “A few questions, that's all. We'll take five minutes of your time at the most.”

Sundbach wondered if the failure to open the door was going to be construed as suspicious, if the most reasonable course of action was to admit this pair of jokers, remain extremely cool with them, and send them away satisfied. Cups of tea, perhaps, some quiet hospitality. This was the behaviour of a man with nothing to hide. Lurking behind a locked door, on the other hand, was probably a strategic mistake.

“Okay. Five minutes,” and he opened the door, turning towards the stairs even as the cops entered. “This way,” he said, leading them up into the gloom. He took a key out of his pocket, opened the door to his apartment, and showed the policemen inside, smiling now and bobbing around them. “You fellows drink on the job? I got some nice Yugoslavian wine somewhere.”

Both Pagan and Klein declined. Pagan looked around the apartment, absorbing the sheer quantity of items here, the overstuffed furniture, the heavy curtains, the shelves of books, the scores of old prints that covered everything save for what must have been Sundbach's special wall, reserved for photographs of the old fellow in the company of celebrities. It was a suffocating apartment, overloaded with Sundbach's possessions, many of which must have had nostalgic significance for him. Pagan had the strong feeling of having stepped into another era – back, back to the turn of the century, when people lived around their possessions in rooms where you couldn't breathe and where you just knew a tubercular child lay white and still in a shuttered attic bedroom. There was dust here, and the dampness of old paper, a sense of an unindexed life collected and stored in these rooms.

Carl Sundbach took the stopper from a fine old decanter and poured himself a glass of dark red wine. The glass, he said in a thick accent, had once belonged to the last Tsar's uncle, General Alexei Alexandrovich. He was making conversational noises. Pagan wandered to the bookshelves, glancing at titles, most of them in foreign languages.
L'Entente Baltique. Die Nationalen Minderheiten Estlands
. And pamphlets, scores of them, stacked in bundles, held by string or elastic and stuffed with sheets of notes. They were mainly in languages Pagan couldn't identify. He stepped away from the shelves and gazed at various prints on the walls even as Sundbach was proudly explaining some of his celebrity photographs to an interested Klein.

“This was taken when Bobby came through here on his campaign. A young man, much vigour. I had raised money for him, you understand. You see where he signed the picture? Look there. To my friend Carl, it says. Now this one over here, taken with Perry Como, that came about when he opened the wing of a hospital in Brooklyn. I give a little to charity now and then. America's been good to me.”

Pagan found himself looking at a copy of an engraving made by a certain Merian in 1652. It depicted a walled city with steeples and according to the brass plate attached to the frame the city was Tallinn. There were others, views of castles, tall ships in a harbour, churches, all carefully framed and labelled, all pictures of old Estonia.
Bingo
, Pagan thought. He had an equation, a connection between Carl and Jake Kiviranna, an ethnic bond. But it was too easy, too thin. Unless anybody could prove beyond doubt that Sundbach had sent Jake overseas on a mission of murder, unless there was solid evidence of the kind so loved by prosecutors and judges, Carl could fly the Estonian flag from his window day and night and it wouldn't mean a damned thing. It certainly wouldn't connect him to a murder in Edinburgh.

Carl poured himself a second glass of red wine. The New York cop was simple to deal with. He was the kind of American impressed by celebrity. He probably read
People
magazine. The tall
inglane
on the other hand worried Sundbach because he prowled, taking everything in with a quiet, hooded look. And those grey eyes were cold and unreadable. Warmed by the wine, Sundbach felt a flood of confidence. Let them ask their questions and be on their way. He had nothing to hide. He sat down at his desk.

Pagan asked, “What exactly is Sundbach Enterprises?”

Carl Sundbach replied, “A few hotels, a couple of small-town newspapers, a little real estate here and there.”

“And you operate this yourself?”

Sundbach smiled. “Nowadays, no. Sundbach Enterprises is part of a big corporation called Van Meer Industries, which is part of something else. IBM for all I know! It's too complicated for me. I got nothing to do with it other than some financial interest.”

“You own an old shop on the boardwalk,” Pagan said. “Is that yours personally or part of this big corporation?”

Sundbach sipped his wine. The old shop, he thought. They knew about it. So what? It wasn't exactly a secret. “That I keep as my own,” he said.

“Any reason?”

Sundbach stood up and, a little flushed, pointed to a framed dollar bill that hung above his desk. “This, my friend. Look carefully. The first dollar I ever made in my own business in this country and I made it on the boardwalk. So I keep the shop. It's sentimental. Do you understand me?”

Pagan nodded. “When did you come to America?”

“Early 1950s,” Sundbach said.

“Have you kept up an interest in the politics of the old country?” Pagan asked.

“The old country?”

“Estonia,” and Pagan waved a hand at the prints.

“Pardon me, I don't think there's any such place. There used to be, and it was a wonderful country, but now it's called the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic and soon you won't even see that much on a goddamned map.” Sundbach smiled sadly at the Englishman. “You said you had questions, Mr Pagan. Maybe you could come to the point?”

Pagan turned to look at the old man. Shoot from the hip, Frank. “Do you know a man called Jacob Kiviranna?”

Sundbach, whose heart skipped only a little, looked puzzled. “No, I don't.”

“Think,” Pagan said.

“What's to think?” Sundbach asked.

“Somebody saw you with Kiviranna on the boardwalk.”

Sundbach shook his head. He stared at the
inglane
. This was all bluff, it had to be. Even if somebody
had
seen him with Kiviranna, what did that prove? “I don't know the man. Your information's wrong.”

Pagan came a little closer to the old man. He smelled the wine on Sundbach's breath. “Kiviranna shot a man named Aleksis Romanenko.”

Sundbach turned over the palms of his hands. There was a forced smile on his face. What he wondered was how any kind of connection had been made – had that
perse
Kiviranna talked? But what could Jake have said anyhow? Sundbach had always taken the greatest care to conceal his identity from crazy Jake, who wasn't a man who asked too many questions anyhow. They'd held their very first meeting at the shop on the boardwalk and Sundbach had made a great pretence at forcing entry, as if he wanted to show Jake Kiviranna that he was beyond the law, he broke into abandoned shops, he had a bandit's disregard for other people's property. He was a goddam anarchist, the kind of guy Jake could trust without losing any sleep.

Carl Sundbach cleared his throat. “Aleksis who? You got any more names to throw at me?”

“Just those two,” Pagan said.

Carl Sundbach made his chair swivel as he reached for his wine. “I like to help policemen, Mr Pagan. I think they do a great job without much thanks, you understand. But you've given me nothing except puzzlement. I don't know the men you mention. And a shooting – what would I know about a thing like that? I'm a retired businessman, not a gangster.”

Pagan said nothing for a time. He studied Sundbach's face in silence. The old man was pouring a third glass of wine in a composed fashion. Pagan wandered round the room, glanced through open doors, saw a bedroom with a vast four-poster bed, an enormous bathroom with an antique tub, a kitchen with an old-fashioned black stove. There was the scent of camphor from somewhere. Pagan imagined closets packed with clothes and mothballs.

Sundbach, he realised, could maintain his innocence until the sun froze over. Perhaps he was telling the truth anyhow, perhaps he knew nothing about the killing in Edinburgh, but Pagan had one of those niggling little instincts that told him otherwise. He stopped moving, leaned against the wall, folded his arms.
It's all here, Frank. Everything you're looking for is in this room. Crack the bastard open
.

“Talk to me about the Brotherhood, Carl,” he said.

The Brotherhood
. How did the English policeman know about the
vendlus?
How had he stumbled into that one? Sundbach, the essence of serenity, sipped his wine. “The what?”

“Tell me why you wanted to wreck the Brotherhood's plan, Carl. Why did you send Jake to Edinburgh to murder Romanenko? Are you KGB? Is that it? Did you get an order from Russia? Or straight from the Soviet Mission in New York?”

Sundbach, as if astonished, blew a fine spray of wine through his teeth and laughed. He looked at Klein in the manner of a man appealing to reason. “Is your English friend here on a day-release programme from some kind of institution? Does he have to check back in at six o'clock every night?”

Pagan stepped quickly towards the desk, looming over the figure of Sundbach, who was still seated. “Does the KGB tell you what it needs, Carl? Does it tell you what hoop to jump through – the hoop in this case being the murder of Romanenko? You get poor Jake Kiviranna to do the job because you know there's something loose in his attic, therefore he's a loony, exactly the kind of fellow to pull a political assassination. You don't get any blood on your hands that way. Keep them nice and clean, don't you, Carl?”

Sundbach had an urge to scream at the
inglane
and to tell him how very wrong he was, how his conclusion might be correct but his reasoning was all bent out of shape – but that would have meant telling the truth about the Brotherhood and he wasn't going to do that. The trick was to let the moment pass, let this man's accusations fade into silence, and stay very calm.

“You through, Mr Pagan?”

“I'm through,” Pagan said.

“I lost my two brothers between 1945 and 1949,” Sundbach said. The anger he felt made it difficult to talk. “The KGB killed them. And you accuse me of working
for
the KGB. I don't want to say any more to you. I don't want you in my house. Go. Go now.”

Pagan walked towards the door. He longed for fresh air and sunlight and the breeze scampering along the streets. In this apartment it was hard to draw air into your lungs unless, like Sundbach, the air you breathed was from the past. He opened the door and stepped out on to the landing, and Klein followed.

Sundbach, decanter in one hand, glass in the other, stared across the room at both men. “I would die before I worked for the KGB,” he said. “That's the truth.”

Pagan drew the door shut and stood for a second on the gloomy landing before turning and going down into the street.

Pagan sat in the passenger seat of Klein's car, which was parked four or five doors from Carl's building. He stared across the street at the windows of Sundbach's apartment. Klein said, “I think I heard one of the old guy's blood vessels pop. You backed the wrong horse there, Frank, when you said the magic letters KGB.”