Mazurka (54 page)

She stuffed the case, closed it, noticed how nervous she was. She sat on the bed and smoked a cigarette, listening to the sounds of the children in the kitchen. They knew they were going on a trip, she simply hadn't told them where. They knew Daddy would be joining them wherever it was, and this made them happy. Valentina touched the small crucifix she wore round her neck and said quietly to herself
Dear Jesus, help us now
. She let her hands fall into her lap and she pressed them together.

We're going away, we're going away, we're going away!

This was the girl's voice, shrill and penetrating. Valentina Uvarova had warned the children to say nothing to anybody. Not to their friends, their relatives, not even to their grandmother. They were to keep completely silent, but for a kid secrets were impossible to maintain. She walked into the kitchen and silenced the children. The boy, who looked like a miniature of his father Yevgenni, was easy. The girl was the spirited one.

“We must keep very quiet,” Valentina said.

The girl asked, “When are we leaving?”

“In a couple of hours.”

“Why can't we go now? Right now?”

“Why? Do you want to wait in the railway station?”

“Yes,” the girl said. “I like stations.”

Valentina considered the prospect, but she didn't want to hang around a station, passing hours before the train arrived. If she stayed here, at least there were still things to keep her occupied. There were dishes to clean. There was rubbish to be removed. Even though she might be leaving this apartment forever, she couldn't possibly leave it in disarray. They'd talk about her after she'd gone, and they'd say
She left the place like a pigsty
, but what can you expect from a traitor's wife anyway? She wouldn't leave the place dirty. Not Valentina Uvarova. She couldn't stand the idea of the women in the neighbourhood saying bad things about her.

She went to the sink, turned the faucet, and lukewarm water spluttered out, and the old gas-heater wheezed on the wall above her.

We're going away
, the girl said in a whisper.
We're going to see Daddy
.

Valentina shushed the child again. She ran some dirty plates under the water, wiped them with a cloth, set them aside to dry. A new life, she thought. The phrase kept running through her head like an inescapable melody. A new life.

She dried her hands on a towel. And that was when she heard the heavy knock on the front door. She felt it then, blood draining from her face, from her hands, her heart turning a somersault in her chest.

Somebody's at the door
, the boy said.

She looked at her son's small upturned face, the eyes that were suddenly wary, and then she stepped along the hallway. She opened the door slowly. It was not one visitor, but two, and they wore uniforms that filled her with dread.

Glen Cove, Long Island

If there was any evidence of what the Brotherhood planned to do, Pagan thought the logical place to find it was in the only room he hadn't so far explored, the office on the second floor. He switched on a light, surveyed the room. It was the desk that interested him primarily, and he walked towards it, scanning the papers spread across the surface. He began to flick them, beset by a sense of urgency. A need to keep busy, that was it. Keep going. Don't stop. He was aware of Krishna Vaska entering the room and he thought,
Ignore the woman
.

He didn't look up. He heard her cross the floor, felt her hands on his shoulders. He didn't move. Her touch stirred him and he resented his own response.

“You must accept one thing, Frank.”

“Tell me about it,” Pagan said.

“I care about you. I didn't want to, but it happened. And that hasn't changed. At first, I just thought you were going to be useful to me, you had resources I could use. But it changed. It became something else, Frank.”

“Terrific,” Pagan said.

“I've hurt you.”

“You're an insightful sort of person. I like that.”

Pagan shuffled the papers around. They were written in Estonian. What else could he have expected? He kept shuffling them anyway, looking for something he might understand.

“Frank, listen to me. I never intended to cause you any harm.”

“I'm not harmed,” he said sharply. “Disappointed, yes. Up to here with you, yes. Disgusted with the idea you used me, absolutely. But harmed? No, love. Not harmed. It's like having something in my eye. It smarts for a few minutes, but a little water flushes it away.”

“I want to talk to you. Look at me.”

He did, but only briefly, then went back to the papers. There were bills, credit card vouchers, letters, but nothing that yielded up the kind of information he could have used.

“I admit,” she said. “I wanted to kill him. Or I thought I did. But when it came right down to it, Frank …” She touched his arm. “I thought I wanted to kill Romanenko too, but I don't know if I would have been able to do that either. Circumstances prevented me from finding out anyway.”

He said, “Look, you drift into my life. We spend a couple of pleasant hours passionately fucking –”

“It was more than that, and you know it –”

Pagan shook his head. Taken for a ride, he thought. The careless heart. The alchemy of attraction that transmuted blatant lies into shining truths, changed dross into lovely little gems. He remembered one of the first things she'd ever said to him.
I don't have any concealed motives, Frank. I heard about the killing on TV, I thought you might need information you weren't going to get anywhere else. Here I am. That's it
. And you bought it, Frank. You laid your money out and you bought the whole gooseberry patch. She's been working you from the very start, twisting you and shaping you, oiling you so you'd run smoothly along the right tracks. And, boy, didn't you ever? Wind my clockwork, sweetie, see how I run.

He looked at the typewriter on the desk, scanned a sheet of paper in it. That damned language again. He swivelled the chair around, turning his face away from Kristina Vaska.

She said, “It doesn't have to end like this, Frank. We could walk away. We could leave this place right now. What goddam difference does the Brotherhood's plan make to us? Does it matter if it succeeds or fails? Who cares?”

“I care,” he said.

Mikhail Kiss appeared in the doorway, a blood-stained towel clutched against his face. When he spoke he did so through swollen lips and a mouth that no longer felt associated with his face. “Feel free,” he said. “Papers, letters, documents – look at anything you like, Pagan. I'm a hospitable man, but you'll find absolutely nothing.” And then Kiss turned and went into his own bedroom, where he sat on the edge of the bed with his eyes closed and the towel pressed to his lips.

Pagan watched him go. There was something smug in the way Kiss had spoken and Pagan wondered if there was a bluff going on. Ransack my office all you like, you won't find a goddam thing. No, it wasn't a simple bluff. If Kiss had kept anything important in this house he wouldn't have gone out and left the place unlocked, and he wouldn't be allowing Pagan easy access to this office. He tore the sheet of paper from the typewriter and handed it to Kristina and asked her to translate it. She looked at the paper a moment before she said it was a recipe for a dish called
mulgikapsad
. She looked at the other papers that lay across the desk, the ones Pagan had leafed through, and they were all recipes, every single one of them.

“He must be compiling a cookbook,” she said.

Pagan got up and walked to the window.
A cookbook. A bloody hobby
. He parted the curtains and looked down into the darkness of the garden.
Think. Just think. You're supposed to have some kind of knack for hunches, little flashes of intuition. They served you beautifully when it came to Kristina Vaska, didn't they?
He heard the woman come up behind him and lay her hands on his shoulders and he loved the way she touched him, despite himself.

“Forgive me, Frank.”

Forgiveness was hard. There was always the spectre of deceit. My little actress, he thought. But it couldn't all have been an act. There must have been moments of truthfulness. He wanted to think that the lovemaking – at least that – had been real. Besides, what had she done but harbour the desire to avenge her father's betrayal? It wasn't as if she'd found in herself the capacity to kill anybody, was it? Pagan turned to look at her, but gazing into her face was as difficult as finding forgiveness. He'd been fooled, and that was a tough one to digest.

“How long is it going to take?” she asked.

He raised a hand and lightly touched the side of her face a moment. “If you'd been straight with me from the start –”

“And you would have helped me, Frank? You would have gone out of your way to help a crazy lady with vengeance on her mind? I thought my way was better. The anxious daughter worried sick about her father's health – I figured that was the one most likely to succeed. And if it sounds calculated, you're absolutely right. It
was
calculated. I could have used a goddam slide-rule.”

Calculated, he thought. He walked back to the desk. Through the open door and across the landing he could see inside Kiss's bedroom. Kiss still sat motionless on the edge of the bed, the red towel pressed to his mouth, his eyes shut. He seemed absurdly calm, removed from the situation, secure in the knowledge that Pagan would find nothing in any of the rooms of this house.

Pagan sat on the edge of the desk.
Think, Frank. Relax, and think
. Kiss doesn't want to tell you where Andres went. Why not? Answer: because he's up to something and Kiss doesn't want you to know. Such as? Such as? Answer: he has to be part of the plot. Unavoidable conclusion. What part, though? What role? Pagan walked out of the office and went inside Andres's bedroom and Kristina followed.

Pagan sat on the edge of the bed. On the bedside table there lay a couple of books, a paperback novel detailing the exploits of a deformed avenger in post-holocaust America, a daily meditation book, and a world atlas. Frank Pagan glanced at the paperback and read
Bosco kicked the door down and fired his machine-gun, splattering the hooded figures until the room turned red with blood and spilled brains
. Pagan set the book down, flipped through the meditation book and saw underlined the sentence
How many of the world's prayers have gone unanswered because those who prayed did not endure to the end?
Pagan put the book aside, then glanced at the atlas. On the map of Europe somebody had drawn thin red lines seemingly at random, inscribing them over Britain, then across the North Sea, where they ended in Scandinavia, a whole meaningless tangle of lines. He closed the atlas, stood up. The clues to Andres Kiss, he felt, were all here, except that he couldn't read them.

And when you couldn't find inspiration, you fell back on that other policeman's tool which, though blunted from constant repetition, was still a useful device. You fell back on that old standby – the sheer doggedness of inquiry. He returned to Kiss's office and dragged the telephone directory out of a drawer and turned to the section marked Airlines, dismayed when he saw how many there were. He'd start with the As and just keep working until he could locate the airline on which Andres Kiss had left the country – provided he
had
flown overseas, as Mikhail had said. Provided, too, that he was travelling on an authentic passport under his own name. Long shots, long odds.

Pagan picked up the telephone. He glanced through the open door and across the landing, seeing Mikhail Kiss observe him with mild interest as he dialled.

Tallinn, Estonia

The man known as Marcus drove the Red Army truck along Gagarini Street in the direction of the harbour. He saw KGB agents everywhere he went. He saw them milling around the railway station, some of them in uniform, others trying to look inconspicuous in plain clothes. By now, of course, the murders of the KGB officers would have been discovered, and consequently more men would be poured into the streets. By mid-afternoon Tallinn would have the atmosphere of a convention city accommodating a thousand or so KGB. It was not a festive thought.

He checked his wristwatch. Four more hours. He thought of his comrades in Latvia and Lithuania and wondered how many of them were presently looking at their watches and counting minutes away into hours and feeling the same apprehension as he.

He drove the army vehicle in the direction of the harbour. The rendezvous was to take place in an old warehouse close to the docks. He entered the narrow street where nothing moved but plump pigeons flying out from the protection of eaves. Nothing out of the ordinary. He passed the building, a dilapidated brick structure. He slowed the vehicle, swung it round, went back the way he'd come. When he reached the warehouse again, he parked the truck, making sure the engine was still running. He approached the large door of the warehouse, pushed it open, then drove the truck inside the building.

There was a score of people inside already. Among them, Marcus saw Erma and the old man Bruno, who had made their way to this place separately. Marcus opened the tarpaulin that covered the back of the truck. The three boxes contained rifles and handguns. He passed them out quickly and quietly, thinking how there was nothing left to say because everything had been said already, the speeches had been made, the toasts drunk. He looked at the faces of those present, and he saw grim expectation in the expressions, and a certain fatalism. What they were going to do in a few short hours was inevitable – and so was the outcome.

Glen Cove, Long Island

It was dawn when Frank Pagan, who had spent hours having airline personnel wakened from their sleep, finally received the information he wanted. He put the receiver down and rubbed the back of his neck wearily. He looked at Kristina Vaska, who was curled in a chair, half asleep. Mikhail Kiss stood in the doorway of the office.