Jigsaw (24 page)

‘But we didn't meet to lament Gurenko, did we?' Vassily asked. ‘How are things in America?'

The General shrugged. ‘The Americans are proud of their efficiency. I suspect this pride is largely unfounded. They go about business briskly, but sometimes their very haste leads to oversights, lapses, errors.'

‘New World energy,' said Vassily, and turned to summon a waitress. ‘I prefer Old World thoroughness. Less speed, of course, but we always had an eye for detail. A great eye, if I may say so.'

‘Indeed,' said the General. ‘But the times demand strange bedfellows.'

‘That doesn't mean we have to think like whores.'

The General forked a sliver of pastry between his lips. ‘I sometimes despair, Vassily. I have moments when all I see are black clouds on the horizon. Then I feel useless. One of yesterday's men.'

Vassily laughed in his staccato way. ‘You overstate, my friend.'

‘Do I? Do I really? I wonder.'

Vassily ate the pastry the waitress set before him. He scrutinized the girl's big hips in his practised way, then he chopped and chewed as if he hadn't eaten in years. He drank his coffee in one quick gulp. He drew a napkin across his mouth. ‘Think of it like this, Erich. We are simply using the Americans. They are not controlling us.'

‘Perhaps. But they write the rules, Vassily. We play by their regulations.'

‘A temporary business,' Vassily said.

‘I'm not so sure. They may make demands later that we can't meet. They may create impossible impositions.'

Vassily said, ‘You were always too much of a worrier. Look. The Americans want only one thing – and you know what that is, don't you, Erich? Profit. In a word. If they profit, they're delighted. They're happy as pigs in shit. Their whole society turns on an axis of profit.'

The General thought this too simplistic. There was more to this than turning a buck, as the Americans were so fond of saying. Admittedly, profit was a motive, but he'd found other stimuli among the Americans with whom he'd had to deal. There was a hard core of belief in what they were doing, a certain self-righteousness that could only come into being when there was an identifiable enemy. Without such an enemy, America was forced to turn inward, to look into its own heart, where there were more failings, more inadequacies than any Congress could deal with. Drug wars, the escalation of home violations, the rising murder rate, social inequities. In the General's view, Americans – certainly those he worked with – were better at looking outward than they were at examining their own flaws. Vassily, who had no experience of the United States, only saw a surface.

The General said, ‘But—'

‘But but but. Forget buts!' Vassily punched the General on the shoulder, a playful gesture delivered with more force than was necessary. ‘We are on the move, Erich. Hardly a day goes by when there isn't some new crisis or an old one that has worsened. The Georgians are at the throats of the Abkhazians. The Chechens are shooting the Ingushetians. The Moldovans don't know if they're coming or going. As for Yugoslavia …' Vassily rattled his coffee cup in its saucer. ‘Germany's reunification is a damned rat's nest. The country's practically bankrupt. They got East Germany, but they inherited more than they imagined. And the Baltic nations aren't exactly prospering. The list is a long one. We're prepared, Erich. We're ready.'

‘I know, I know,' said the General.

‘In big cities, in small towns, in various organizations – we have people of enormous influence. With due modesty, I have to include myself in that category. We didn't vanish off the face of the earth, Erich. We didn't go the way of the dinosaurs, you know. Some of us went to ground, but only to hibernate. Not to sleep the sleep of the dead. We're alive and we're kicking. Don't forget that.'

‘I try to keep it in mind.' The General sat back in his chair. He looked at his watch.

‘Then don't be discouraged.'

‘Discouraged? That isn't it.' The General thought of the young girl in the Manhattan apartment and how far away she seemed. What had she said to him?
Tomorrow is another day?
Something like that. He wondered how many tomorrows were left to him. He leaned forward across the table. ‘I worry more than is good for me, Vassily.'

Vassily laughed once again and punched the General's shoulder a second time. ‘Worry is for old women. Everything will go the way it is planned to go. I have taken the appropriate steps at my end. And if it is going well at your end – how can it turn out badly?'

The General forced a small smile and gazed round the pastry shop, thinking it was time to go back to the airport. But he was reluctant to rise; after so many months in the company of Americans it was good to sit with somebody whose ideological background was much the same as his own, whose goals and ideals resembled his; it was comforting. Even if there had been past differences between STASI and the KGB, these had been buried by circumstance.

And he thought again of Streik, an abysmal shadow falling across his private landscape. Vassily knew nothing of Streik, nothing of Harcourt. He knew only of the big picture, as the Americans might say.

Vassily said, ‘Now! Why don't we find ourselves a couple of little whores and have some fun?'

‘I have a plane to catch, Vassily.'

‘The beauty of planes is if you miss one you can always catch another. Forget planes! There are other kinds of flying much more interesting.'

‘You haven't lost the appetite, I see.'

‘The day I lose that will be the day they shovel earth on my face.' Vassily was already standing up, tugging at the General's sleeve.

They stepped out of the pastry shop and Vassily put an arm around the General's shoulder. The General looked toward the still dark water of the Herengracht. A wind blew up suddenly, fracturing the surface. A duck flew under a bridge, a rich streak of white.

‘We'll take a taxi to the red-light district, Erich. We'll window-shop until you see something that takes your fancy.'

The General relented. ‘I can always catch a later plane.' He walked alongside the canal with a certain buoyancy in his step. It was only when he passed two drugged teenage boys, both red-eyed and laughing hysterically, that his mood underwent a change. He looked at the boys. Their laughter was crazed. As his young lady in Manhattan might have said: They were airheads. Space cadets.

‘Look, Vassily. Look.'

Vassily pawed the air in a gesture of dismissal. ‘Kids on drugs. So what?'

‘It's the same in Berlin. In Moscow. The same all over Europe. Is this the generation for which we're working?'

‘They've lost their way, that's all.'

The General put a hand on Vassily's sleeve. ‘Are they worth it? Are they worth the effort?'

‘Erich, Erich. They have lost their gods. They have no heroes. How are they supposed to find commitment? Where is the structure for them? We need to give them structure. Think of it that way.'

‘It's hard.' The General looked dejectedly into the water.

‘For God's sake! Have faith!'

The General sighed and reminded himself that he should be hurrying to the airport and not into the arms of some whore. He looked away from the Herengracht and into his comrade's eyes, which had lost none of their liveliness. In Vassily's eyes you could see a whole world of possibilities.

Vassily put his hand in the inside pocket of his coat and took out a plain brown sealed envelope. ‘Before I forget,' and he handed it to the General.

‘Ah, yes. Of course.' The General slipped the envelope into his coat.

Business concluded, both men went, in the manner of two sprightly elderly satyrs, in search of a taxi.

The General said, ‘You're a bad influence, Vassily Budenny.'

‘The worst,' Budenny answered.

EIGHTEEN

LONDON

T
WO HOURS AFTER LEAVING
G
UNDERSON,
P
AGAN WENT UP INTO THE
attic at Golden Square, a chilly space filled with a complex arrangement of pipes that ran between floors down to the ill-tempered boiler in the basement. It was in the attic that Foxie, unable to find a suitable space elsewhere in the building, had set up an old-fashioned slide projector and a makeshift screen fashioned from an old dust-cover.

I can call you Frank, can't I? If we're going to spend hours in each other's company, why bother with formalities? Or do you prefer Mr Pagan?
Pagan remembered this now: fine hands, fine long fingers slightly spatulated, slender wrists. Her fingernails are varnished a secretive black. She crosses her long legs, her very short black suede skirt rides her thigh, her legs are bare, Pagan looks away. She knows her power. She knows exactly. She knows how to hold, how to captivate.
You smoke too much, you know. You should really cut down. Think of your lungs. Have you ever seen pictures of cancerous lungs?

Foxworth fidgeted with the projector and a beam of white light created a circle on the screen. ‘Give me a minute before I get this thing running properly.'

‘Why isn't this material on computer?' Pagan asked.

Foxie said, ‘Actually it is. But we can't access it yet.'

‘We're not linked up, is that it?'

‘Interfaced is the word, Frank. We're not one hundred per cent interfaced with the mainframe.'

Pagan loathed these computer terms. He understood the need for the new technology, the way facts could explode on screens before your eyes, the hours of slog from which you were liberated, the information that could be summoned from a thousand sources at the press of a couple of buttons, but the language – pixels, batch processing, fact allocation files: they made him feel he belonged to a new class of illiterates.

He shut his eyes, waited.
Perhaps I'll join you in a cigarette, Frank. I like one from time to time. It's one of my lesser vices. Do you want to know what the others are? Some of them are amusing. Shall I tell you? Shall I confess the things I like to do? Are you blushing, Frank?
He remembers: he reaches across the table, a struck match held in one hand. He tries to light her cigarette but she pulls her face back and the flame burns his fingertip. He realizes she has done this deliberately.
Let's try that again, Frank. I don't understand why your hand is shaking. Am I having a bad effect on you?
He offers a second match, applies it to her cigarette. She doesn't inhale. She blows a stream of blue smoke straight at him and smiles and his eyes are caught in hers and he has the feeling he's a fleck of iron drawn into a magnetic field, can't resist it, the pull, the energy, the sheer dazzling fact of her beauty. To her, beauty is power. Beauty is what you inflict on other people. A punishment, a surgical instrument.

Pagan said, ‘She's been inactive for years.
Years
. Why make a comeback now? It doesn't make any sense.'

‘We're not even sure this
is
the woman, Frank,' Foxie said. ‘We don't have fingerprints. We don't have evidence. All we've got is Gunderson's hypothesis that the message was left by a female – that, plus your memory. And memory isn't always reliable.'

It's reliable in this case, Foxie, Pagan thought. Believe me. The attic made him feel claustrophobic. Ten years ago the windowless interrogation room he'd shared with the woman had made him feel the same, but even more so, because she dominated the space, she controlled the mood, she played on his tensions as if they were keys on a clarinet.
I unsettle you, don't I? I can't think why I should bring that response out of you. Why don't we relax, try to make this easier?
Her voice had a sultry quality, sometimes a low-pitched whisper, sometimes the half-hoarse cadence of a torch-singer. He remembers: she crushes her cigarette on the floor and reaches across the table to touch his hand, a moment of intimacy unnerving in its unexpectedness, her flesh is soft and warm and her fingertips slide across the ridges of his knuckles,
and he doesn't pull back his hand, doesn't move, he simply lets her skin remain in contact with his, because he likes it, because he enjoys the feeling, because for a few crucial seconds he's completely lost in the woman's force field. And he recognizes in himself the unmistakable sensation of desire
. She says:
It might have been fun to meet under other circumstances, don't you agree? I think we might have had a fine old time of it
. He turns his face to the side, embarrassed because she's intuited his desire. And then he feels her foot under the table, she's kicked off a shoe and is stroking his leg with her toes—

Foxie pressed a button. Pagan opened his eyes. The image on the screen was almost black, lacking contrast. ‘I need to adjust this gismo, Frank. A minute.'

Pagan leaned against the wall, a web touched his forehead, he brushed it aside. From tunnels to attics, he thought. This investigation was all over the place, which he certainly didn't like. Give me form. Shapes. He felt like a man puzzling over an abacus on which somebody of malice had rearranged all the beads. And one of those beads was a woman he hadn't seen in ten years, hadn't thought about in a long time, somebody shipwrecked in his memory.

‘Ah,' Foxie said. ‘There we are.'

On the screen was a photograph of a long-haired woman of about twenty-three. It had clearly been taken without the woman's knowledge. Her face was turned to one side; a good profile, beautiful and strong and determined. She was dressed in the style of the early seventies, beaded jacket, flared jeans. A ribbon flowed from her hair. The background was that of a European city, evidenced by the kinds of car and licence-plate numbers that were also in the shot.

Foxie said, ‘Nineteen seventy-eight. Athens.'

Yes
, Pagan thought. ‘Keep going.'

‘Click,' said Foxworth.

The second image was ostensibly that of the same woman, but the difference between the pictures was remarkable. Her hair was shorn in an irregular way and she appeared boyish. She wore a two-piece suit that might have been tailored for a man. She had a necktie loosely knotted at her throat. Androgynously lovely. There was even an element, altogether misleading, of vulnerability about her in this shot. Behind the woman was another figure, shadowy, slightly out of focus. Whether he was in her company or merely a pedestrian who'd come into range, it was hard to tell.