Mazurka (41 page)

The van, which had the logo
Rivoli's TV & Radio Repair
on the side panel, wheeled into reverse and pulled away from the smashed Dodge. It came to an abrupt halt half-on, half-off the sidewalk and then, roaring madly, lunged straight towards Pagan, breaking open plastic garbage sacks and strewing the air with fishbones and potato peels and clouds of feasting, breeding flies.
Dear Christ!
Pagan, half-blinded by water, threw himself to the side as the van rocketed towards him. He slid down a short flight of steps to the door of a basement apartment, twisting his head in time to see the van roar along the street. He rose, raced back up to the pavement. The van was already turning the corner at the end of the street, leaving a pall of blue exhaust like something conjured out of existence by a flamboyant magician.

He walked to where Max Klein sat. “You okay?”

“I'll live,” Klein said.

Pagan helped Klein to his feet, then stared through the sunlit water at the empty space where the Jaguar had been. Slick, he thought. The whole thing, dead slick. He looked up at the windows of Sundbach's apartment and something caused him to shiver, and he thought he knew what.

“You want to go after the van?” Klein asked.

Pagan saw the way Klein's feathery red hair had been plastered across his scalp with water. “Let's go back to Carl's.”

Saaremaa Island, the Baltic

Colonel Yevgenni Uvarov walked between the computers and the consoles, passing the stern portrait of Lenin, whose eyes seemed to follow one no matter where one moved. The Colonel gazed across the wide expanse of floor towards his desk, then up at the clock on the wall. He couldn't put this moment off for long, not now. He checked his watch, returned his eyes to the clock, as if he were all at once obsessed by time – but he was in reality stalling, delaying the moment from which there was absolutely no return. Burning the bridges, Uvarov thought. Setting them all aflame.

He moved towards his desk. A technician named Agarbekov stepped in front of him. Uvarov was startled by the sudden movement and it must have shown on his face because Agarbekov gazed at him strangely.

“Console eight isn't working, sir,” Agarbekov said.

Why was he being bothered by this utterly trifling detail now? Uvarov wondered. “You know the procedures, Agarbekov.”

Agarbekov was hesitant. “I followed procedures, comrade Colonel, and nothing was ever done. The repairs were never made. Don't you remember?”

Uvarov put one hand up to the side of his face. He was flustered suddenly, thinking he heard reproach in Agarbekov's voice. He couldn't remember, it was really that simple. For weeks he'd been operating on a level where ordinary things receded, and his memory malfunctioned. He was living – not in the now, the present – but in the immediate future. He looked at Agarbekov, a white-faced twenty-year-old from Kiev with a lock of greasy black hair that fell over his forehead and which he kept pushing away.

“Are you unwell, comrade Colonel?” Agarbekov asked.

Uvarov shook his head. “I'm perfectly fine, Agarbekov. I have so many things on my mind. I can't be expected to concern myself about one small repair. Go through the usual procedures a second time.” The sharpness in the voice, the impatience – Uvarov wondered if Agarbekov detected stress in his behaviour. He smiled and tried to appear calm. He placed a hand on Agarbekov's shoulder and made a mild little joke. “Procedures are designed by Moscow with only one purpose, Agarbekov. They weren't written to help you, only to test your ingenuity in getting around them. Didn't you know that?”

“I had my suspicions, comrade Colonel,” Agarbekov said.

Uvarov walked to his desk. He sat down, looked at the clock on the wall. He was aware of Agarbekov watching him from across the room. Had the small joke alerted Agarbekov to something? Uvarov wondered. How could it have done? It was innocent, a simple act of sympathy for Agarbekov, who was caught up in the often stupid rules and regulations and procedures that were a part of military life. Uvarov shut his eyes and wondered if Agarbekov was KGB, if he'd been stationed here to observe men in sensitive positions. He opened his eyes, and now there wasn't any sign of Agarbekov. KGB! You see them everywhere. You imagine them all over the place.

He opened the middle drawer of his desk and quietly removed a sheet of typewritten paper. He scanned the words quickly even though he knew them by heart. Then he looked at the top of the page where bold letters read:
From the Office of the Deputy Minister
. Uvarov picked up his pen and his hand shook and he had to work hard to still it. He carefully signed the name S. F. Tikunov across the bottom of the page, then he rose and walked to the Orders Board, where he pinned the sheet up. He could barely breathe. He looked at the sheet hanging on the board and he had the thought that his forgery was utterly childish, anybody could see through it, it would be spotted at once by the operators who religiously took note of all new material on the Orders Board.

His face covered in perspiration, he went unsteadily back to his desk. He passed the computers, two of which were out of order still, and lay exposed to his view – circuit boards, yards of thin wire, the intestinal confusion of broken electronic equipment. He looked at the clock again. At midnight, the message he'd placed on the Orders Board would be routinely transmitted by computer from this installation which – as the major tracking station in the area – was an electronic post office for all pertinent orders issued in Moscow by the Deputy Minister, and relayed to a score of lesser installations along the Baltic coast.

Uvarov sat down. He was conscious of Agarbekov watching from the other side of the enormous room. The young Ukrainian's face was white and expressionless, floating in the bleak fluorescent lighting like a balloon.
Don't stare at me
, Uvarov thought. But then Agarbekov had turned away already and had vanished beyond the banks of screens, leaving Uvarov with a strange sense of unfocused discomfort.

The Colonel looked in the direction of the Orders Board. Even though he couldn't read anything from this distance, he felt that the sheet he'd just pinned there was very distinct, the letters large and bloated. He imagined he could read it plainly.
Routine Electronic Maintenance Order Number 09 06, 1600–1700hrs Wednesday September 6
.

Uvarov got up. For a second he was tempted to remove the notice before anyone had seen it. But he'd made his mind up, and he couldn't cancel now, and besides one of the operators was already standing in front of the board and looking at the faked order pinned there. Uvarov, who expected his forgery to be detected there and then, was filled with relief when the operator turned away from the order without any unusual expression on his face.

Uvarov stepped out of the building. The night air was chilly and he shivered. He listened to the soft sound of the tide, and he thought of the dark waters beyond the range of his vision, and how for one short hour tomorrow the defences of the Baltic coast would be stripped of their eyesight, and in this state of temporary blindness astonishingly vulnerable.

15

Manhattan

Frank Pagan's room had that dreary unlived-in look of hotel rooms all the world over. As soon as he stepped inside, he removed his jacket, still damp from the fire-hydrant, then his shirt. From the inner pocket of the jacket he took out a long brown envelope, which he set on the bedside table. Then he lay across the bed and pondered the ceiling.

He felt the weariness that is an accumulation of things. Travel, frustration, loneliness. And murder. He'd known roughly what he was going to see inside the old man's apartment, he'd guessed it, but even so he hadn't been prepared for the sight of Carl Sundbach with a nylon stocking knotted round his throat. There, surrounded by all his Baltic memorabilia, the old man lay in the middle of the room as if he were himself just another useless, albeit grotesque, keepsake. The broken spectacles, the false teeth scattered over the rug – murder had a way of diminishing a person, of breaking somebody down into his less admirable components. And the killer, assisted by whoever drove the kamikaze van, had slipped neatly away.

Pagan went inside the bathroom, doused his face with cold water, returned to the bedroom, turned on the radio – what this room needed was
noise
. He found a station playing Frankie Ford's classic
Sea Cruise
, and he walked to the window, looking out over mid-afternoon Manhattan. The sun, made hazy by pollution, was the colour of a bruised daffodil. A frolicsome wind flapped along the cross streets and died out in the avenues. Pagan pressed his forehead to the window. Since there existed no such company as Rivoli's TV & Radio Repair – surprise, surprise – the problem now was whether Max Klein could extract some useful information from the registration plate of the Jaguar.

Max had made inquiries just as soon as Sundbach's body was discovered, only to learn that the Jag belonged to an auto-leasing company on Long Island that had leased the car to an entity called Rikkad Inc, with corporate offices in Merrick. It was not apparently leased to any particular individual, but rather to the corporation as a whole, and when Klein had tried to telephone the number of Rikkad Inc he'd received a recorded message saying that Rikkad, a division of something called Piper Industries, was closed for the day and thank you for calling. Piper Industries, with offices in New Platz, had no information to give about Rikkad and suggested Klein try the Merrick number again in the morning.

Pagan turned from the window, suspecting that Klein, if he discovered anything, was going to find himself ensnared in one of those corporate mazes, an auditor's nightmare, where the structure of ownership is complicated and one corporate entity is laid upon another – the point being to obscure responsibility and evade direct culpability in the event of law-suits or tax claims. Klein had decided to look at records in the offices of the Corporation Commission and Pagan, needing some quiet time alone, had walked back to the Warwick.

He wondered what he was left with after the death of Carl Sundbach. Certain facts, certain connections, but they suggested empty railway cars connected to a locomotive going nowhere. He'd hoped that Sundbach was going to be the entryway to the Brotherhood – but that particular little light had been blown out and the entryway was a cul-de-sac in darkness now. And if he was no closer to the Brotherhood, then he was also no nearer to an understanding of their scheme, nor why certain Russians apparently stood in the shadows behind it.

He turned from the window, picked up the envelope on the bedside table, sat on the edge of the mattress. He stood up when he heard the sound of somebody knock lightly. When he opened the door and saw Kristina Vaska there, a small charge of electricity coursed suddenly through him, a voltage almost adolescent in its intensity.

“Frank Pagan?” she asked, smiling.

“The very same.”

She stepped inside, closing the door behind her. She sat on the bed. “I wanted to get here sooner, but I went to my apartment to drop off my luggage.”

Pagan, filled with the desire to touch her and yet postponing the moment, had ignored the essentials of the woman's life. She lived in this city, therefore she had to have an apartment. Somehow the information surprised him, as if he'd stumbled into a concealed corner of her world. You go in this direction, he thought, and before long you're asking all the old, half-scared questions – is there a boyfriend somewhere? is there somebody else? a rival? even more than one?

“I don't even know where you live,” he said.

“Eighty-sixth and Amsterdam.”

“How was the flight?” he asked, dismayed by his own question.
How was the flight? Was it raining in England? Did you have the plastic stroganoff for lunch on the plane?
He was staggered by his sudden knack for the inane.

There was a long silence in the room, an abyss into which all sounds were abruptly sucked, as if this narrow hotel bedroom were an island of sheer soundproofed quiet afloat on the turbulence of Manhattan. Pagan stepped towards the bed.

Kristina said, “Oh fuck the flight, Frank. I don't want to talk about airplanes and luggage. That's just stuff. Sit down beside me. I want to forget
stuff
.”

He sat down. He reached for her hand and held it. She twined her fingers through his and he couldn't recollect any gesture more intimate in years.

“Look at me, Frank. I'm
trembling
, for Christ's sake.”

How unlike Roxanne she was, he thought. Roxanne, with a certain coyness, had been passionate in less direct ways. She would have gone at her desire indirectly, using touches, gestures, as if she couldn't quite trust speech to convey her needs. Kristina, less subtle perhaps, was no less exciting. She lay back, curling her legs under her body. There was a lull, a quietness, one of those intolerably enjoyable moments of anticipation. He remembered when he'd walked with her in the park. He remembered the dampness of laurels and laburnum, moisture on old wood, raindrops on a coat. The effusiveness of recollected perfumes. The swift touch of passion he'd felt, the urge to invade this woman's world.

She held one hand out in front of her face and laughed. “I'm shaking like a schoolgirl. I feel idiotic.”

Pagan kissed her and the warmth of the kiss, the confident way she returned it, shook him. He undid the buttons of her shirt and slid his hand over a breast and saw how she raised her face back and upwards, her mouth open and her throat in shadow, and it was one of those sublime perceptions he knew would return years later even after this passion had gone, one of those pictures that are immediately luminescent in the memory and against which other encounters are inevitably judged. He was hungry, emptier than he'd ever imagined, driven by an excitement and urgency that surprised him.

Naked, she was perfect. He ran his hand between her breasts and down over the surface of her stomach to her thighs, astonished by the sweet geometry of her body and by his own need to enter her.
Now
, she said.
Do it to me now, Frank
. And her voice was hushed and hoarse, like that of a tantalising stranger. She was a verbal lover, whispering over and over, sometimes his name, sometimes words that might have been vulgar in other situations but now seemed magical to him, sometimes simply making sounds in his ear that drove him to utter distraction. He buried himself in the act of love. He buried himself in a place beyond all the mysteries, beyond Romanenko, beyond the Brotherhood and their secret poetry and old wars, beyond Epishev and gunfire in a railway station. It was a place where all the clamour and the mysteries dissolved and the only truth was this woman and the intimacy he shared with her.