Mazurka (8 page)

Pagan listened to the man's toneless voice, then picked up the US passport, flipped the pages. “You're an American citizen, Jake. How come you give a damn about Romanenko anyway? I don't see how he could have affected your life.”

“I got family left over there,” Kiviranna said. “Cousins, a couple of uncles, aunts.”

Revenge, Pagan wondered. Did it come down to a motive as basic as that? “Had Romanenko threatened your family? Had he done something to them?”

Kiviranna didn't say anything for a time. He smoked another cigarette and the small windowless chamber clouded up and the young cop by the door coughed a couple of times. Kiviranna gestured with the cigarette and looked very serious. “He didn't
have
to do anything
personal
to them, man. He was a Communist and a traitor to his own people. That's enough. We're talking about evil. I eliminated evil. That's the only thing that matters. You see evil, man, you wipe it out. The more evil you get rid of, the more good there is in the world. That's what it's all about. It's logical.”

Evil – now there was a fine melodramatic word you didn't hear a great deal these days unless you frequented certain extreme religious sects or moved in mad terrorist circles, where it was used to describe anyone who didn't believe in either your choice of a God or your cause. Pagan studied Kiviranna's face again, wondered about his background. Had this wild-eyed character, who impressed Pagan as the kind of man you saw speaking to himself in the reading-rooms of public libraries, come three thousand miles to commit a murder because he believed that Aleksis Romanenko was
evil?
Was he driven by a missionary sense of bringing goodness and light into the world? Had he planned this killing all alone? Had he walked around with a dream of death in his head for weeks, perhaps months on end? An obsessive, a sociopath, the kind of guy who suddenly pops up with a handgun and makes a name for himself by killing a person of some standing in a political system he thought deplorable.
I
eliminated evil
. Jake the avenger, the equaliser, the mad angel of light.

“So wiping out this evil was your own idea, Jake? Is that what you're telling me?”

“You got it.”

Pagan was unhappy with this reply. It didn't answer the question of how Kiviranna had come into possession of the gun. Somebody had presumably passed the weapon to him after his arrival in Britain, and when you had two people you had a conspiracy, and so much for a lone killer theory. For another, Pagan had the feeling, which he couldn't readily explain and which surfaced in his mind at the end of a chain of unanalysable instincts, that Jake, albeit lonely and out of touch, was basically a gullible soul, and that the killing of Romanenko was an idea that had been
encouraged
in him. It wasn't a conclusion he'd reached without some kind of assistance, some kind of
persuasion
.

“How did you know Romanenko was going to be in Edinburgh, Jake?”

“I read it in a paper, I guess.”

“An American paper?”

“I guess so, I don't remember.”

Pagan's eyes were watering in the smoky room. It was hardly likely that Romanenko's visit to Britain had been mentioned in any US newspaper. It wasn't entirely newsworthy in America to print a story about an obscure Communist Party official making a quick business trip to the United Kingdom. It was even less likely that any press item would mention something so utterly unimportant as the side-trip to the Edinburgh Festival. So here was another question:
how had Jake come across his information?
There was only one answer – it had come from the same person or persons who provided the gun.

Pagan got up from his chair and walked round the room.

“Let's go back to the weapon. How did you get it, Jake?”

“I bought it here in London. I don't remember the store.”

Pagan wheeled around quickly and strode back to the table. “You don't just walk into a shop and buy a gun in this country, Jake. You fill in forms, there's a waiting-period, the police run a thorough check on applicants. You haven't been in England long enough to acquire a weapon legally.”

Kiviranna looked down at the surface of the table. His hands shook, and he pressed his palms together to keep them steady. “I need a favour,” he said.

“Let's hear it.”

“I had some medication in my backpack. I'd like it.”

Pagan nodded at the young policeman, who went out of the room to fetch Kiviranna's medicine.

“Nerves trouble you, Jake?”

“I have some problems, man. I'm getting over them.”

Pagan looked sympathetic. “Back to the gun, Jake.”

Kiviranna shut his eyes and rocked his body back and forth for a time. “Okay. I got it in Soho. I went into a club, I asked around, guy sold me the gun. It was easy.”

“You're trying my patience, Jake. You don't walk inside some club in Soho, a complete stranger, an outsider, and find somebody to sell you a gun. It doesn't happen that way. You need an inside track. Think again.”

Kiviranna was silent. He stroked his beard. “I got a real bad headache.”

The door of the room opened and the young policeman stepped inside, handing the brown prescription bottle to Pagan, who laid it on the table and rolled it back and forth as he studied Jake's anxious face.

“Tell me about the gun and you get one of your pills.”

Kiviranna was silent a moment. “Okay. The gun was in a luggage locker at that station – what's it called? King's Cross?” He stuck a hand out towards the bottle, but Pagan covered it quickly with a palm.

“How did you know the gun was going to be there, Jake? Who told you? Who gave you the key to the locker?”

Kiviranna didn't take his eyes away from the bottle in Frank Pagan's fist. The look on his face was one of subdued desperation and Pagan, clutching the pills Jake was aching for, felt a surge of sympathy for the man and a slight disapproval of his own cruelty.

“He was an old guy I met in New York.”

“Did he just walk up to you on the street? Did he say here's a key, fly to England, fetch the gun, shoot Romanenko?”

Kiviranna shook his head. “He got my name from somewhere, he called me. We met a few times. I never knew his name, and that's the truth.”

“How come he approached you, Jake? What made him choose you?”

“I guess he heard I had certain sympathies.”

“Were you offered money?”

“Expenses, that's all. I wasn't going to take money for ridding the world of a guy like Romanenko.” Kiviranna sounded a little offended by the suggestion. “We met a few times, we talked, I agreed to do the job.”

“Where did your meetings take place?”

Kiviranna was speaking more frankly now. “Different places, man. Sometimes Manhattan. Sometimes Brooklyn. One time we met at Coney Island, next to the old parachute jump. Another time the boardwalk at Brighton Beach.”

“Tell me the man's name, Jake.”

“I don't know it, I swear. He wasn't anxious for me to know, and I wasn't anxious to find out.”

Pagan took the cap off the bottle. “Why did he want you to kill Romanenko?”

“Because he felt the same way I did.”

“Tell me more about this mystery man.”

Kiviranna's forehead glistened with sweat. “What's to tell? He was maybe seventy, in there somewhere. He spoke with a thick accent. Shabby clothes. He didn't look like he had two nickels to rub together. But I guess he got money from somewhere, enough for my expenses anyway. I don't remember much more.”

“And even if you could remember more, you wouldn't tell me,” Pagan said. He tilted the bottle and a few capsules slid on to the table. He examined them carefully, checking the name of the manufacturer, Lilley, imprinted on the side of each one.

“I've told you everything,” Kiviranna said.

“I don't think so, Jake.” Pagan pushed one of the pills across the table to Kiviranna, who picked it up quickly and tossed it into his mouth. “Enjoy. We'll talk again tomorrow. Maybe you'll find your memory has improved after a good night's sleep.”

Pagan put the medicine bottle in his pocket together with Kiviranna's passport, stood up, walked towards the door. He was struck by fatigue but he knew that it was something he was going to have to carry around with him for some hours yet.

“What if I don't have anything new to tell you in the morning?” Kiviranna asked. “What then?”

Pagan turned, looked at the man, smiled in a thin way. He didn't answer the question but hoped that his smile, so devoid of mirth, suggested an unspeakable threat. Closing the door, he went out into the corridor and dipped his face into a drinking-fountain, letting a jet of lukewarm water splash against his eyes and forehead. A gun in a left-luggage locker, a nameless man in New York who'd sent Jake all the way to England – maybe it was all very simple, nothing more than a straightforward political assassination planned by Jake's anonymous acquaintance and carried out by Kiviranna who, through his own strange filter, saw the world in terms of black and white, evil and good. Maybe that's all there was to the affair.

But there was a dark area at the back of Pagan's mind, a room in which assorted problems lay like unlit lightbulbs awaiting a surge of electricity to illuminate them. And in this room there lived Pagan's muse, his own inner policeman, his personal inspector, who was rarely satisfied with simplicity and who hated darkness passionately. He loathed puzzles too, such as the plain white envelope, sealed and unaddressed, that Aleksis Romanenko had carried in his briefcase.

4

London

Thomas Maclehose Witherspoon, who had a first-class degree in Political Science from St John's College, Oxford, was walking his cocker spaniels in Green Park when Pagan met him shortly after eight-thirty. He was a tall man with an adam's apple that suggested something stuck in his windpipe. He wore a navy blue blazer with some kind of crest on the pocket and white flannels, as if he were a fugitive from a cricket game. Witherspoon's thin hair was combed flat across the enormous dome of his head. The pedigree spaniels, named Lord Acton and Gladstone, were romping in the distance, and ignoring Tommy Witherspoon when he called their names.

When Witherspoon spoke, in a voice that might have been sharpened by razor blades, there was a scent of port on his breath. Pagan wondered if he'd dragged Tommy away from some polite little dinner party, causing the man a terrible inconvenience.

Witherspoon picked up a fallen branch and called after his dogs again. “Highly-strung buggers,” he said.

Pagan thought a good kick in the arse might have induced in the creatures a sense of obedience, but he didn't say so. Witherspoon tossed the branch in the air and watched it fall.

“So you're the notorious Frank Pagan, eh? Heard about your Irish business.”

Pagan, wondering when his name would cease to be associated with Ireland, made no reply. He studied the sky a moment, watching the August sun slide down between trees of an impossible greenness. London could still amaze him at times with its verdancy.

“So you lost Romanenko,” Tommy Witherspoon said, in a weary way, as if Pagan's problems were a total bore. “I must say I thought it damned careless of you.”

Pagan, irked by Witherspoon's manner, wanted to come back with a barbed comment, but resisted the temptation. He sniffed the air instead. There was a smell of diesel, ruining all this summer greenery and presumably pumping toxic materials into the bodies of nightingales.

Tommy Witherspoon asked, “What can I do for you anyhow?”

“What do you know about Romanenko?” Pagan asked.

“Isn't that an irrelevant question, Pagan? The fellow's dead and I understand you have the assassin in custody, and I don't see how any further knowledge of Romanenko could possibly be of assistance to you.”

What an unbearable toad, Pagan thought. “There are some things I want clarified, that's all,” he said.

“Ah, clarified,” Witherspoon said. “You're on a personal quest, are you, Pagan? A man with a burning mission?”

“Personal?”

“The old ego. The policeman's pride. Can't stand the idea of being involved in a royal fuck-up, so you've got to start poking around to make yourself look somewhat less useless, eh?” There was raw snideness in Witherspoon's tone.

Pagan had a sense of something chill coiled around his heart. Maybe all it came down to was the inescapable fact that – as John Downey had so cruelly and succinctly put it, and as Tommy Witherspoon had echoed it – he'd fucked up. And maybe he was doing nothing more than turning over stones and trying to look busy because the more conscientious he appeared the better he'd feel. It was a sorry little insight and he hoped there was no truth to it. What came back to him again were Aleksis's drunken words –
big changes, big surprises
. He supposed the big changes referred to the reconstruction of Soviet society, but what were the big surprises? What had Aleksis, with his sly winks and nudges, intended to suggest with that expression?
Wait and see, Frank Pagan
, Romanenko had said. Wait for what? It was one of the problems of death – it left silences and unanswered questions behind.

“Look, Romanenko was shot and I want some background,” he said. He put a little steel into his voice now, a cop's impatience.

Witherspoon yawned. “Well, Pagan, if it's going to calm you down, I'll give you the quick tour. Romanenko was First Secretary of the Communist Party in Estonia. Estonian national, in fact. Don't be too impressed with his grandiose title, though. It's common practice for Russians to put nationals in charge in their colonies, but the real power always lies with the Second Secretary of the Party, who's invariably a Central Russian, a Soviet, handpicked by the Kremlin. Romanenko was just another titular head, a symbol, a sop. You find people like Romanenko all over the Russian Empire. Latvia. Lithuania. Georgia. Armenia. You'll find them in every one of the fifteen so-called autonomous republics – which is a laughable name for colonies – of the Soviet Union. It's designed to keep the natives restful and the dissidents asleep at night if one of their own is nominally the boss. It's a bloody sham, of course. Chaps like Romanenko don't have much in the way of real power. And they can't blow their own noses unless they get a direct order from the Kremlin – provided the Five Year Plan has manufactured enough hankies to go around.” Witherspoon smiled at his own little joke.