Jigsaw (23 page)

Foxie said, ‘We want your opinion, Hans.'

‘I was asking Pagan, not you.' Gunderson squinted at Pagan. ‘Well?'

Pagan nodded his head slowly.

Gunderson said, ‘I didn't hear you, Pagan.'

‘Yes. Yes, we want your opinion, Hans.'

Gunderson, having scored a small victory, smiled. He had tiny chipped teeth, like those of an aged rodent. ‘I know you think I'm a crank, Pagan. But handwriting analysis is respectable. I wouldn't expect you to believe that, of course. But consider: somebody writes something, they shape their letters in a certain way, they apply different pressures at times – all of which suggests some internal state of mind. Anxiety. Insecurity. Fear. There are those in your own Scotland Yard who consider me most reliable, Pagan. And insightful. But why should I waste my time justifying myself in front of you, for God's sake?'

Pagan had it in mind to mention a case two years ago when Gunderson had blundered in a matter of forgery, attributing handwriting to quite the wrong person. But he said nothing: what was the point? He watched Gunderson shuffle round the shade, then reach inside a drawer for a magnifying glass. The old man peered through it, his face close to the handwriting. Every now and then he whistled snatches of something tuneless or issued his drawn-out characteristic mmmmmm sound.

‘Interesting loops,' said Gunderson. ‘This was written with enormous care by somebody who felt no pressure. Somebody unhurried. Very neat.'

Expert analysis indeed, Pagan thought. He glanced at Foxie, who was listening to old Hans with a look of concern. Often Foxie's manners were just a little too good. He belonged, Pagan thought, in the diplomatic service, taking tea with unpredictable warlords in dry tropical places and trying to explain, in plain reasonable English, the position of Her Majesty's Government.

‘Notice the alignment,' Gunderson said. ‘Notice how straight it is, despite the curvature of the writing surface. The writer has envisaged invisible lines, such as you see in a child's exercise book. This is an imaginative person. Given the medium in which the letters have been written, this imagination is also capable of great cruelty.'

Pagan frowned, wandered the room, passing the stacks of books, looking at framed diplomas on the walls, each attesting to Gunderson's proficiency. He'd never heard of any of the institutes named on these certificates. On the bookshelves were several glass jars containing old-fashioned sweets, which presumably explained the perfume of marzipan that hung around Gunderson.

Pagan listened to Gunderson whistle; sometimes the old fellow sighed or clucked, but it was impossible to tell what these sounds meant. Little discoveries?
Insights?
Pagan paused by the curtained window, turned, saw Hans's bloodshot right eye enlarged by the lens of the magnifying glass.

‘Whoever wrote this has an ambivalent attitude toward you, Pagan,' Gunderson said.

‘How do you figure that out?' Pagan asked.

‘It would take too long to explain to a sceptic such as yourself,' Gunderson said. ‘But sometimes letters – how shall I put this in a way you might grasp – emit sounds, tones. You can almost
hear
the words. You can hear the way in which they might have been spoken. It's like reading a poem. You get a feel for the tone of the writer's voice. The attitude behind the language. The person who wrote this, Pagan, appears on one level to respect you. But on another level the writer means mischief toward you.'

‘Mischief?' Pagan asked.

‘The writer wants to stir you up, to goad you.'

‘And you can tell all that from a few words?'

‘That's only the beginning,' said Gunderson. ‘I've barely begun. Keep this in mind. I've been doing this for more than thirty years. I like to think I've learned a few things along the way.'

Pagan tried to ponder Gunderson's statement without prejudice, which wasn't easy.
Somebody who respects me but who also means me mischief
. It wasn't exactly helpful in establishing the identity of the writer. Gunderson's description could cover a number of people, criminals he'd caught, terrorists he'd outwitted. Pagan found an armchair, sat down, crossed his legs, closed his eyes: he felt the real solution lay in the recesses of his memory, not in Hans Gunderson's speculations.
Been a long while since Heathrow, Mr Pagan
. He sensed an echo, a whisper from a faraway place, but it faded out on him before he could grasp it. He got out of the chair, walked to the desk, stood directly behind Gunderson.

‘I'd say the writer isn't British,' Gunderson said.

‘How do you arrive at that one?' Pagan asked.

‘A British native would be more inclined to say
time
instead of
while. While
suggests an American.'

Pagan wasn't sure he agreed with this judgement, but didn't say so. He didn't want to get involved in a prolonged discussion about American usage of the English language with Hans. He watched as Gunderson, in a hunched position, continued to scan the message.

‘The two ells in “still” are almost twins,' the old man said in an enthusiastic manner. ‘Same height, same range. You don't often see that kind of exactitude.'

‘Does it mean anything?' Foxie asked.

‘Oh, it can mean a number of things,' Gunderson answered. Pagan could have predicted this uninformative reply, but again chose to refrain from comment.

Gunderson said, ‘It could indicate a desire for emotional balance in the writer, for one thing. It could suggest that the writer likes to weigh opposing elements in the personality – a search for symmetry that may be lacking in the writer's life. Careful writing isn't necessarily the work of a balanced individual. It may be quite the opposite, in fact. I have personally seen the finest copperplate style produced by psychotic personalities.'

A pontifical note had come into Gunderson's voice. He had the bearing of a man about to launch himself into a lecture. Pagan fretted around the desk, watching Gunderson lower his face once again to the writing. After a few minutes, the old man stepped back from the lampshade and put down his magnifying glass.

‘I'll need to spend more time on it, of course,' he said. ‘Give me a day, I'll write you up a full analysis.'

Pagan, yielding to a fresh burst of impatience, reached for the lampshade, picked it up, held it against his side. ‘Sorry, Hans. I can't leave police evidence lying around unsecured. This isn't my case anyway.'

‘That's your prerogative, Pagan.'

In Pagan's scheme of things, the explosion in the tunnel had priority over a mystifying message and the unhappy death of a young prostitute in Mayfair. He'd give the lampshade back to Scobie; it was Scobie's business. Let him deal with it. Let him handle the evidence. If he wanted to return the message to Gunderson, that was his affair.

‘All I can say is, I hope you find her,' Gunderson remarked.

‘Her?' Pagan asked.

‘The handwriting was done by a woman,' Gunderson said. ‘Didn't I mention that?'

‘You're sure of that?'

‘One hundred and one per cent.'

Pagan stared at the old man. ‘You'd swear on the family Bible, would you?'

‘On a stack of them.'

Pagan went out into the corridor, moving towards the front door. Foxie came after him. Together, they left the basement flat and climbed the steps to the street where a vicious wind, creating a dolorous sound, blew long-dead leaves from the direction of Regent's Park. A woman, Pagan thought.

The turbulence in his mind cleared a second, a tide receded. He felt as if a tuning-fork were reverberating in his skull.

A woman.

But it couldn't be, he thought.

Not after ten years, it couldn't be.

SEVENTEEN

AMSTERDAM

T
HE
G
ENERAL LEFT HIS LUGGAGE IN A LOCKER AND WALKED THROUGH
Amsterdam Airport, passing a variety of glittering stores in which were displayed jewels, expensive clothing, the very latest in electronic gadgetry. He paused here and there to study a wrist-watch, a ring, the latest computer. He had the thought that the basic human lust for such items had brought down an empire. For the sake of a new VCR, societies had dissolved, histories had been eroded, dynasties shattered. It was a strange consideration. In faraway Tokyo or Seoul, electronics experts had inadvertently caused the death of a political system almost eighty years old.

He kept moving in his rather straight-backed fashion. He needed to sneeze and drew from his coat pocket a Kleenex, which he thrust towards his nose. The coat, made out of vicuña by an exclusive tailor in Milan, had been bought for him in New York City. Here were other strange considerations and connections of the kind the General liked to ponder – an animal raised in South America had been shorn of its wool by some Peruvian shepherd and the fleece shipped to a tailor in Italy so that a coat could be purchased in a shop on Fifth Avenue. One could not help but be amazed by such global correlations.

He left the airport at eleven a.m. and took a taxicab into the city, where a variety of drugged-out young people, seemingly immune to the weather, lolled on frigid benches. They passed dope back and forth and looked generally blissed. A few slept on the frosty grass of small park areas where every so often a policeman would try to wake them. Berlin, the General understood, had gone in much the same direction, kids smoking grass on the streets, shooting themselves up with heroin, white-faced young people in leather and earrings whose only known goal in life was to find a way to get high. It was a depressing phenomenon, this lack of direction and discipline. The behaviour of youth – ah, well, it was only a symptom of a more serious condition.

‘A fine sight,' the cab-driver said. He was a polite Dutch-African with well-kempt dreadlocks. He spoke good English.

The General nodded, said nothing.

‘Is this your first visit?' the driver asked.

‘No.' The General preferred to be uncommunicative when it came to taxi-drivers. He didn't want to be remembered later.

‘Drugs,' the driver said. ‘A criminal element is always involved in drugs.'

‘Of course,' said the General. He gazed at an outsized pizza sign which hung in the morning light like a scabrous moon.

The General noticed a lovely teenage girl in torn black leggings and short black skirt weave along the pavement, a tragic angel. He understood that holes in leggings were fashionable, but so were safety-pins in earlobes, hatpins in nipples and gothic tattoos. A whole generation seemed intent on lacerating itself. This desire to disfigure oneself was further evidence of moral decline. He studied the girl as the cab passed, turning his head to see the sad hollow beauty of her young face.

He stepped out of the cab by the Herengracht. A group of tourists, wrapped up against the elements, passed in a barge along the canal; their faces peered out miserably from windows. He turned away from the sight, walking quickly toward his destination, a small pastry shop.

He entered, took a table against the wall, looked at his wristwatch. He was some eight minutes early for his appointment. He ordered coffee and a concoction of light pastry and strawberries, a taste of summer and sunlight in the core of this wintry city. An obsessive checker of time, he glanced again at his watch after five minutes had passed. He was due back at the airport in two hours for his connecting flight. Exactly eight minutes after he'd arrived, the door opened and a man in a black fur coat came inside.

Although Vassily looked different from the old days, although his silvery hair had been layered and blow-dried and his eyebrows plucked and the pouches under his eyes surgically removed, the General would have recognized him anywhere. Nothing had changed in the way Vassily moved, certainly not that sense of volcanic energy held in check. There was no physical space that seemed capable of containing him. It was as if he were in constant combat with the limitations of his environment. He came in swift strides to the table, sat down, laid his hand on the General's wrist and patted it two or three times with a vigour that was almost painful.

‘My friend Erich, how very good to see you,' Vassily said and dragged his chair close to the table.

‘Likewise,' said the General.

‘America is good to you, I see.' Vassily fingered the cuff of the General's coat.

‘Materially. Which isn't everything.'

Vassily raised a finger to the side of his face. The General noticed that where once there had been a magnificent hairy wart, there was now only a small unremarkable blemish. So Vassily had had more than his eyebags removed.

‘And yourself?' the General asked.

‘Moscow is changed.' Vassily looked vaguely forlorn but such expressions never remained for long on his face. ‘We have a new class of entrepreneurs, which is in reality the old class except they've come out from the shadows. We have more criminals, of course. And they're armed with every weapon known to man. Rocket-launchers, anti-tank guns, automatic weapons. We even have our own neo-Nazis. But that is to be expected in the present climate. People are discontented. Gurenko leads them into mazes with trapdoors. He doesn't see things the way they are. Now he's about to play the role of international statesman, shaking hands with the mighty of Europe, reassuring them. Blah blah blah.'

The General couldn't resist a little humour. ‘Among all your other social changes, I see you also have new cosmetic surgeons.'

‘Ah. You notice. Vanity is good for the soul. I'm a vain bastard, Erich. Always have been.'

The General looked round the pastry shop. What did they see, those Dutch matrons sipping coffee and eating cream cakes? A couple of retirees with nothing better to do than meet for coffee and pastries? How deceptive appearances could be, he thought. You could never trust surfaces. He suddenly thought about the missing man, Jacob Streik, and wondered if Streik, like Vassily, had managed to alter his appearance in some way. Even though he'd been reassured by Saxon, the matter of Streik still dogged him.