Mazurka (46 page)

“A conspiracy against your country, and you didn't want to
know?
”

“I worked with Colonel Epishev for twenty years –”

“And you're close friends –”

“Yes, we are –”

“And you couldn't let him down –”

“Correct, General.”

Olsky sighed. “Tell me your impressions.”

Volovich put his tea-cup down. “I understood the plot's aim was an act of terrorist aggression inside the Soviet Union.”

“But not in the Baltic republics?”

“I don't think so, General.”

Olsky asked, “Where in the Soviet Union? And when?”

“I don't know.”

“Moscow? Leningrad? Kiev?”

“I swear I don't know –”

“And what kind of terrorism? Bombs? Assassinations?”

“My impression is that there's a plane involved. The attack will come from the air – but I'm guessing now.”

“From the air?”

“Yes, General.”

“But that's impossible,” Olsky said, just a little too quickly. Ever since a foolish West German teenager had contrived to fly a small aeroplane directly into Red Square two years ago – to the general humiliation of the authorities – defences had been strengthened. It was boasted now that they were impregnable, even if Olsky knew that ‘impregnable' was one of those illusory words of which the military was so fond.

“One would have thought so,” Volovich said. “I just wish I knew more.”

Volovich lapsed into an uncomfortable silence. General Olsky walked around the room, examining books and phonograph records. He picked up a copy of
Trud
from the table and flipped through the pages. He believed Volovich because he understood that a minion like Dimitri would not be made privy to essential information. He'd drive cars, and carry messages, and act as liaison, and he'd pick up information here and there, but his role would never be very significant. Greshko, even more possessive in old age than he'd ever been, more like a sharp-clawed cat than before, would have seen to that.

“What happens to me, General?” Volovich asked.

“Until I decide, you're under house arrest. You'll answer your telephone as you usually do, and if anybody calls from your office you'll say you're sick with cold, whatever. Apart from having this very severe chill, you'll sound otherwise perfectly normal.”

“And when my cold is cured?”

Olsky didn't answer the question. He stepped out of the apartment and stood on the landing. He looked down the stairwell, seeing through pale lamps the shadow of Colonel Chebrikov waiting in the foyer. Olsky descended, nagged by the realisation that he'd been looking for the sources of this Baltic business in all the wrong places. Common dissidents, writers, dreamers, Jews, applicants for exit visas – he had reached into the predictable areas for suspects, when he should have been looking elsewhere.
An aeroplane
. What kind of people were in a position to help an aeroplane carry out an act of aggression, an act of terrorism, against the Soviet Union? The answer was obvious, and yet painful because it involved powerful men who were sensitive when it came to their domain, which was nothing less than the air defences of the country.

He crossed the lobby to where Chebrikov was standing. The young Colonel, who stood at attention whenever Olsky was within his line of vision, said, “There was a call for you on the car radio, General. From the Kremlin. The General Secretary wants to see you. Urgently, sir.”

Manhattan

“I'm sorry, I didn't know you had company, Frank,” Max Klein said when he stepped inside the hotel room and heard the sound of Kristina singing in the bathroom. He fidgeted with his bow-tie, a polka-dot affair that drooped, then sat down in one of the two easy-chairs in the place. He had a way of entering rooms, softly on sandals, that suggested the movements of a retired cat-burglar a little embarrassed by his habitual stealth. Even his feathery hair seemed stealthy on his skull, as though it would whisper secretively were a breeze to blow through it.

“It doesn't matter,” Pagan said. He didn't have time for explanations of Kristina. He might have told a narrative of Soviet repression, the story of a man whose family had been destroyed years ago, and how Norbert Vaska was imprisoned in Siberia, but Pagan had no real urge to familiarise Klein with all this background, nor with how Kristina Vaska had swept into his world. The sound of the shower stopped, but Kristina didn't emerge and there was only silence from the bathroom for a long time.

Klein stared at the bathroom door a moment, then took some papers out of his jacket. Like everything else that found its way into his pockets, the papers were crumpled and creased, and he had to spread them on the table and smooth them before they were manageable. “Do you know how easy it is to set up a corporation in this country, Frank?” he asked. “It doesn't take much, I'll tell you. A lawyer draws up articles of incorporation, you pay the guy his fee – anything from three hundred to a thousand dollars – and you file the articles with the Corporation Commission, and that's it. Unless you're a known felon, you're the President of your own company within a matter of moments. A piece of cake.”

Pagan leaned across the table to look at the papers Klein had spread out. Klein said, “These documents represent a triumph of corporate maze-making, Frank,” and he pushed some photostat sheets toward Pagan, who was hoping only to hear a bottom line, not a digression on the illusory nature of corporate structures.

“Carl Sundbach operated a company called Rikkad Inc.”

“Then
he
was responsible for hiring the Jaguar?”

“Not quite,” Klein said. “He turned ownership of Rikkad over to another company named Piper Industries – they make belts for vacuum cleaners – but he stayed on as Chairman of the Rikkad board. Rikkad, incidentally, supply paper products to hotels. Not only was he Chairman of Rikkad, he was also CEO of Piper, so he'd sold his company to himself. High finance baffles me, so don't ask questions about tax strategies, because I don't have answers.”

“Where is this going, Max?”

“I'm getting there, I'm getting there.” Klein turned over some more sheets of paper. “Look at this. Piper Industries, in turn, is a subsidiary of something called – drum rolls, please – Sundbach Enterprises, which was sold five years ago to none other than Rikkad Inc. The snake swallows its own tail and Carl was lying when he said he'd sold his company to another outfit. When you look at the names of the corporate officers in each case, only two names reappear. Carl's, and somebody called Mikhail Kiss, who is apparently the financial VP of all three companies.”

“But who the hell leased the bloody Jaguar?” Pagan asked.

“To find the answer to that baby, we have to ask Kiss, don't we? If he's financial Vice President, he's got to have some kind of information about what flows in and out. And since it costs approximately eight grand a year to lease a Jag with insurance from the company on Long Island – I checked it, Frank – it's the kind of expense he's not exactly going to overlook.”

Corporate mazes, funny paperwork, networks that swallowed themselves. Pagan gazed at the papers just as Kristina stepped out of the bathroom. Affected by slight awkwardness, Pagan made the introduction. Kristina, with a social charm he hadn't noticed about her before, shook Klein's hand and showered him with attention, as if he were suddenly the most important thing in her world – it was quite a knack and the small man looked as if he'd had an encounter with an angel. Pagan marvelled at the easy way she made small talk with Max Klein, then the grace with which she apologised for interrupting. She drifted to the window, turned her back on the two men, saying she hadn't meant to disrupt them. Max Klein protested –
her kind of interruption, hey, he could stand that any day of the week
.

Pagan watched her, saw the way her shirt tapered into the narrow belt of her blue cotton pants, and how her damp hair glistened in the fading sunlight. He was struck by wonder at the way she commanded his attention, by her grace and quiet elegance, and how the sunlight made a soft outline of her at the window.

“I've got an address for Kiss,” Klein answered. He opened his notebook and found the page he needed. He showed it to Pagan, to whom the address meant absolutely nothing.

“He lives in Glen Cove, on the Island,” Klein said. “The phone's unlisted. I could get it if you needed it.”

“I don't,” Pagan said. “I'd rather go in person.”

“Now?” Klein asked.

“Why not?”

Kristina moved directly behind Pagan, one hand laid on his shoulder with a proprietary intimacy he enjoyed. She said, “I'll wait for you here if you like, Frank.”

Pagan stood up. He looked directly into the woman's dark eyes, seeing sympathy in them, and insight, and he realised nobody had looked at him in quite that way since Roxanne. He was moving in other dimensions here, and enjoying them, even if he wasn't sure where they were ultimately taking him. She kissed him lightly on the side of his face.

“Take care,” she said.

Moscow

The office of the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was located in the Palace of Congresses at the Kremlin. It was painted in shades of brown and lit by concealed spotlights, each of which played quietly and artfully on the man's large desk, creating the impression that the Secretary was on a stage, the central player in an unfolding drama. The room, though vast, was stark in its furnishings. Thick brown curtains hung day and night at the window and the outer edges of the room were forever in gloomy shadow, and impenetrable. The General Secretary was middle-aged, the youngest leader of the Soviet Union since the Revolution, and wore no medals upon his chest in the fashion favoured by his bombastic predecessors. His style of governing was relaxed, at least in public, and low-key, and he enjoyed the rapport he'd established with the ordinary people. He took frequently to the streets, plunging among the workers, shaking hands until his flesh was bruised, listening to complaints and disappointments and promising to put things right. His was a new Russia, a different kind of Soviet society which, while forging ahead into unmapped regions, had to take pains not to offend and isolate the old – a difficult and rather delicate balancing-act, and a conundrum whose solution would take many years.

But the General Secretary was a determined man, and steely, and he'd been playing Party games for most of his adult life and so knew how to bend Party opinion in his direction, at least much of the time. He knew how to use patience to work the older members, those quietly sullen men who remembered Lenin and had survived the ravages of Stalin's ways. He knew how to use charm when he encountered stubbornness, and when charm failed him he knew the best way to be rid of the ‘ideologically backward' was to send them to distant
oblasti
where they assumed grand titles and exercised absolutely no power. He knew how to use persuasion when it came to slowing down those of his own followers who wanted to hurry everything, men of excess and unbounded impatience, whose qualities of dedication were needed but whose temperaments were not.

Now, raising his face from the sheets of paper that contained the working draft of the speech he intended to deliver to the Praesidium in twelve hours' time at the Palace of Congresses, he capped his fountain-pen and looked at the figure of General Olsky, who sat facing him.

“This speech, Stefan, which may be the most audacious I've made,” – and here the General Secretary tapped the papers with his pen – “is going to be called incautious by some, bold by others, and heresy by all the rest. The hardline Marxists are going to say I'm soft on Western capitalism, which is anathema to Communism. The so-called democrats among us are going to say I've bent over backwards to appease the Marxists and leftover Stalinists who got our economy into a mess in the first place. I want to make unemployment a fact of Soviet life, for example. A bad worker should be fired. Others should compete for his job. Isn't that perfectly natural? And the old men will nag me and say there can be no official unemployment in a socialist society. And the military – I see apoplectic generals when I announce my intention to cut military spending by twenty per cent over two years. I take a little from some, give a little to others, and hope it balances in the end.”

The General Secretary took off his glasses. It was two a.m. and he was weary. He surveyed the banks of telephones on his desk. Directly below his office was the main auditorium of the Palace where Communist Party Congresses had been held ever since 1961, when the Palace had been constructed. It was an impressive building, containing eight hundred rooms and a banqueting hall that could seat a couple of thousand people, but it wasn't the General Secretary's favourite building at the Kremlin by any means. He much preferred the sumptuous halls that housed the possessions of the Royal Family – the Regalia Hall with its extraordinary thrones and crowns, or the Hall of Russian Gold and Silver where there were elaborate candlesticks, goblets, rings, earrings and likenesses of saints. These displays stimulated a quiet yearning for Russia's past that most people might have found strange in a progressive General Secretary, but he'd read widely in Russian history, and perceived his own roots in these readings, as well as his own designs for the future. This great sluggish bear that was Russia, bogged down in its own muddy past, had to be set free to survive.

Olsky, always awed in the presence of the General Secretary, gazed across the massive desk. Socially, he was comfortable with the Secretary when they met for drinks, or once in a great while to play cards, but when it was a matter of official business he could never bring himself to feel easy.

The General Secretary said, “About an hour ago, I spoke with Nikolai Bragin. At his insistence, let me add. He was most anxious.” He opened a drawer in his desk and drew out some photocopied sheets of paper, which he slid toward Olsky, who read them slowly, once, twice, three times. He tried to keep his hand from shaking.