Mazurka (9 page)

“If Romanenko was so unimportant, why would anybody want to shoot him?” Pagan asked.

“Now that's hardly a taxing mystery,” Tommy Witherspoon said in an offhand way. “Consider this. There are certain parties outside the Soviet Union, let's call them exiled malcontents, who have very long memories and carry grudges the depths of which would astonish you. Romanenko would be an obvious target for any Baltic exile loony fringe, because he was so clearly in cahoots with the Russian lords and masters. Ergo, the fellow's perceived as being a first-rate rotter, selling his own country out to Moscow. Do you see?”

Witherspoon, in his own aloof way, was echoing what Kiviranna had already told Pagan, which was something of a disappointment because Pagan had somehow expected a different answer, one with more substance, a little more meat on the bones of the affair.

“Now,” Witherspoon said, “I'll throw a little extra fuel on the general bonfire, Pagan. Given the current changes inside the Soviet Union – which may or may not turn out to be window-dressing and only time will tell – there has been something of an upsurge of nationalism in the Soviet colonies. Lithuanians demonstrate for independence. Latvians collect signatures on petitions. Kazakhs gather in Red Square to wave their flag. Given this perception of some freedom, which may be merely an illusion, certain exiled parties feel the time is right to throw some external support behind the nationalist movements inside the Soviet Union. Are you with me?”

Pagan saw Witherspoon's dogs come bounding back, pink tongues flapping. Witherspoon patted them, fed them some kind of tidbits from a cellophane bag. “Good lads,” he said to the eager creatures in the kind of voice a man might have reserved for his two very young sons.

“You're saying that the killing of Romanenko might be a message for the boys back home that they're not alone in their quest for independence. That there's support in the West.”

Witherspoon arched an eyebrow. “Quite. And that's all there is to this business, Pagan. In your shoes, I wouldn't start looking for skeletons in closets. If it amuses you to dig for little mysteries where none exist, be my guest. But if I were you, I'd put aside your policeman's pride, admit you were less than vigilant, thank your lucky stars that the assassin was sufficiently an amateur to be so easily caught, and sit down in some quiet corner to compose your report.”

Pagan ignored Tommy's patronising tone. Amateur was a fair description of the manner in which Kiviranna had shot Romanenko. No telescopic rifle fired from a concealed place, no attempt at diversionary tactics, no planned route of escape. A passionate amateur, someone with at least
one
oar out of the water, who considered Romanenko a stain to be wiped out. Was Witherspoon right? Was Pagan being dictated to by his bruised ego, his failure in Edinburgh to protect a man he'd felt a certain fondness for? Was it on so flimsy an edifice as his own injured vanity that he was playing detective?

“Must be off,” Witherspoon said, leashing his spaniels. “Trust I've been of some help,” and he walked away from Pagan without looking back, straining to keep his mutts in line.

Alone in the centre of Green Park, Frank Pagan continued to watch the sun as it slid inexorably down into darkness, and it was the kind of nightfall in which leaves cease to rustle, and the stillness suggests all kinds of impenetrable secrets. When the sun had finally gone, leaving a brassy layer of thin light over London, Pagan walked in the direction of Mayfair. He wondered about the identity of the person in New York who'd sent Jacob Kiviranna on his mission – if indeed such a man existed or was simply a figment of the killer's imagination. And the feeling hit him again that there was more to this whole business than the easy surfaces of things suggested, but he was damned if he could pin it down.

It was completely dark by the time Pagan reached the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square. He'd walked all the way from Green Park and up through the streets of Mayfair, lost in the kind of aimless speculation that turns a man's mind to blancmange. There were a couple of lights in the American fortress but, apart from a Marine guard and a few clerks on the upper floors presumably performing nocturnal tasks of a clandestine nature – probably the cipher boys of the CIA – the place was lifeless and almost ghostly. The guard, a handsome black with an accent that suggested Alabama, had been expecting Pagan and escorted him inside the building where the man known as Theodore Gunther was waiting in the lobby.

Ted Gunther was a short man with a crewcut. He wore thick-lensed glasses and a striped seersucker suit that hung on him rather badly, crumpled by the humidity of the night. He shook Pagan's hand, glanced at the grubby jacket, but was apparently too well-mannered to mention Pagan's sartorial condition. Frank Pagan sat down and as soon as he did so an exhaustion coursed through him and he could feel the demon of sleep hover on the edges of his mind.

“Bad business in Edinburgh,” Gunther said.

Pagan agreed. A very bad business.

“Martin Burr mentioned something about a passport I might check out for you.”

Pagan took the document from his pocket. Gunther flipped quickly through the pages, looking for God knows what. He stared at Jacob Kiviranna's photograph then, like a connoisseur sniffing a wine, held the document up to his nose and smelled the binding. He held the passport between thumb and forefinger and bent it slightly, a bibliophile assessing the authenticity of a first edition.

“It seems one hundred per cent the genuine article,” Gunther said. “It hasn't been tampered with. It even smells good. Sometimes the paper smells wrong when it's a fake. I doubt it's a forgery. But if you don't mind, I'll hold on to it in the meantime and take a more clinical look-see.”

“Be my guest,” Pagan said, gazing across the lobby where a dim light burned.

“I guess you want a little more from me than verification of Kiviranna's passport. You'd like to know something about his background, if he belonged to any organisations, whether the FBI has anything on file. A radical association. A crime or two.”

“Anything you can turn up,” Pagan said. “He claims he has an accomplice in the United States. I'd like to know if you can shed a little light on the identity of the mysterious associate. Maybe there's even more than one. I can't get a handle on whether Kiviranna's telling me the truth or whether he's making up stories as he goes along.”

Theodore Gunther took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I'll help you all I can, of course. Always glad to be of some use to our allies, Frank. You can count on it.” And Gunther smiled for the first time. It was one of those open American smiles that suggest placing each and every relationship on an easy first-name basis because formalities have no place in friendships between historic partners.

“Tell me, Frank. What kind of fellow is this Kiviranna anyhow? How does he strike you?”

Frank Pagan shrugged. “He wouldn't be on anybody's guest-list for an intimate dinner-party, I'll say that much. And I'm not going to be astonished if you find a background of mental illness and/or drug problems. He looks more harmless than vicious, but that's not a compliment. I get the distinct impression he's out to lunch more often than he's home.”

Pagan tilted his head back in his chair. He was reluctant to get up and return to the streets of Mayfair. Ted Gunther took a packet of mints from the pocket of his limp jacket and placed one on his tongue. He said, “It's a sorry fact, but there are all kinds of fringe outfits back home who see Communism as the numero uno enemy of the free world. Most of them are harmless, thank God, but every now and then some weird fish slips through the net. Perhaps that's all Kiviranna will turn out to be. A weird fish who wriggled through a hole.”

Pagan rose from his comfortable chair. He saw the Marine guard from the corner of his eye, the stiff uniform, the boots that shone like two black mirrors, the glossy visor of the cap pulled down flat against the nose.

“I'll get back to you as quickly as I can,” Gunther said.

“I'd appreciate it.” Pagan walked across the lobby and Gunther, who had a funny little stride, like a man with artificial hip sockets, came after him. Together, both men went out of the Embassy and stood on the steps.

Pagan looked across Grosvenor Square, that corner of London that had virtually become an American colony. He wasn't sure, at the time or much later, why his attention was so suddenly drawn to a dirty yellow Volkswagen beetle which was turning left on the Square even as he watched it. Perhaps it was the pall of exhaust smoke that hung behind it like a dark shroud. Perhaps it was the rattling sound made by the loose exhaust pipe or the horrible squeal of faulty brakes. Or perhaps it was the face of the pretty young woman at the wheel – who glanced at him briefly as the grubby little car passed out of sight, leaving nothing behind but the odious perfume of its passing.

Gunther held out a hand to be shaken. Pagan took it, thinking it was slack and pawlike and, despite the humidity of the evening, a little too damp just the same.

“I'll make some calls right away,” Gunther said. “Rouse some folks out of bed.”

“Which will make you popular,” Pagan remarked.

“I'm more interested in answers than winning any popularity contest, Frank,” and Gunther smiled again, the very essence of Anglo-American friendship.

Pagan walked down the steps away from the Embassy, crossed Grosvenor Square, searched the traffic for a taxi. When he reached the other side of the Square he looked back at the darkened Embassy and saw Theodore Gunther go inside the building, the glass doors swinging shut behind him.

Moments later, just as Pagan successfully hailed a cab and was about to step into it, a light went on in a second-floor window. Pagan glanced up and saw Gunther's silhouette pass briefly in front of the glass.

Panicked, Jacob Kiviranna woke in the dark holding-cell, his body drenched in sweat, yet he was cold and his teeth rattled together and he couldn't keep his hands still. He sat on the edge of his bunk, his blanket wrapped round his body. He was afraid, more afraid than he could remember having been in his life before. Was it this sense of terror that made him so fucking cold? He wished he had more downers because the first one had worn off and now he was frazzled and disoriented and it was only with a great effort that he could remember where he was.

He shut his eyes and rocked his body back and forth and remembered the face of the old guy who'd given him the key to the luggage locker and the airline ticket and an envelope that contained five hundred dollars for expenses. He remembered the tiny glasses the guy wore, and the way they were perched on the end of his long nose, and how frayed the cuffs of his jacket were – but that was all he could bring to mind. And when the cop called Pagan came back in the morning to ask for the old guy's name, he wasn't going to believe it when Kiviranna told him once again that he didn't know it, that he'd never known it, never asked. He could point out the places where he'd met the old guy, he could take him to the boardwalk or show him the apartment building in Manhattan where the guy lived or where they'd walked at Coney Island, or even his own coldwater apartment in the Village where the old guy had come one time. But when it came to a name, forget it. There were some situations when you just didn't want to know names, when secrecy was everything.

And Pagan wasn't going to believe that.

Without batting a fucking eyelid, Pagan would turn him over to the Russians. And the Russians would stick him on board an Aeroflot flight to Moscow, and that would be the end of it. Kiviranna opened his eyes and looked around the dark little cell, vaguely making out the door, the unlit lightbulb overhead. There was no way he was going to Russia. Under no circumstances. Never. What they'd do to him over there – they'd interrogate him and beat him and then finally prop him up against a stone wall and shoot him. His perceptions of the Soviets had been shaped by stories he'd heard from older relatives in the USA, men and women who'd survived Stalin's various holocausts and who remembered wholesale executions and famine and even rumours of cannibalism during the 1930s and who told horror stories about how, to this very day, immigrants sometimes disappeared from their homes in New York City and were smuggled back to Russia by the KGB. And they were never heard from again.

He got to his feet and, still draped in the blanket, wandered up and down the cell. In the corner of the room was a porcelain washbasin and a paper-towel holder. Kiviranna ran the hot water faucet until it scalded his palms. That was one kind of pain, and he could just about stand it, but he knew the Soviets had ways of inflicting unthinkable agonies. No, he wasn't going to Russia to be executed for the murder of Romanenko – which wasn't murder at all, but a justifiable act, a moral act. That's what the old guy had drummed into him every time they met.
Romanenko doesn't deserve to live. Look what's he done to our people. He's scum, he's not human. There's a good word for him. And that's evil. He sold us down the goddam river. You kill him, your name's going to be legend. A hero
.

Kiviranna, who had been attracted by the possibility of heroism, went back to the bunk. He pulled the mattress to the side, revealing the metal frame, the springs. He touched the frame, his hands trembling. Sweat ran from his forehead into his eyes and he blinked because the salt stung. He stepped back from the bed, stared up at the lightbulb. The thought that came into his head just then seemed totally logical to him. He bent over the bed, laid a hand on the interlocking pieces of thin wire. Totally logical. He was surprised he hadn't thought about it before.

In a life that had often been puzzling, and lonely, and brutally drab, in a cold world where most people inexplicably shunned or avoided him, he understood he'd reached a pinnacle by killing the monster known as Romanenko. A summit. It was as if he stood on the crest of a hill and could see his whole past stretched out below him, a sequence of worthless menial jobs, a couple of jail stretches for petty offences, months of hospitalisation in institutions without windows where he was given injections and subjected to all kinds of humiliating tests, a clumsy infatuation with a woman who despised and ridiculed him. He could see all of this vanishing towards the horizon and he knew that his existence had amounted to a total waste of goddam time. Until the killing of Romanenko.