Mazurka (14 page)

The Commissioner stared at his desk lamp. “Let's hope so, Frank. I hate being in the dark.”

Frank Pagan agreed. The dark, with all its secrets, all its inaccessible corners, was not his place of choice. He thought about Aleksis–drunk, laughing, joking, dancing with a reluctant partner, an embarrassed English rose, in the subdued bar of the Savoy, a man of mirth and boundless energies. But it was clear now that there had been other sides to the man as well – secretive, submerged, hidden from view. And whatever they were they'd led to his own murder, a suicide, and the arrival of a woman, with an unfinished story, in Pagan's apartment.

Aleksis, Pagan thought, you may have been an insignificant Communist Party leader in some minor Soviet colony –
but what were you really up to?

Zavidovo, the Soviet Union

Vladimir Greshko heard the sound of a car and turned his face to the window of his bedroom, seeing the first yellow light of dawn press upon the glass. He was always a little surprised to have lived through another night. Death, with all its dark finality, had been much on his mind during the last couple of weeks. He didn't believe in an afterlife. What would a man do with eternity anyhow, except scheme against his fellows? To form Marxist action committees and provoke Revolution in heaven? To convert angels to Engels and replace God with Communism?

He raised his face, rearranged his pillows, covered the plastic tube with the edge of his bedsheet. The obscene sucking sound of the device filled him with disgust.

He saw the bedroom door open. The Yakut nurse stepped in, nervously wiping her tiny hands in the folds of her white uniform. Behind her stood General Olsky.
Olsky – of all people!
The sight of the new Chairman of the KGB quickened Greshko's tired blood. He wondered what had brought Stefan Olsky all the way from Moscow to this godforsaken place.

Olsky wore a dark pinstriped suit. Greshko considered him a pencil-pusher, a clerk, a man without an ounce of flair in his soul, a colourless bureaucrat so typical of the new breed. He was Birthmark Billy's protégé and therefore a member of the Politburo's inner sanctum. When Greshko had run the organs of State Security, Olsky had been a mere Deputy in the Third Directorate. His rise, engineered by the General Secretary, had been spectacular. At the age of forty-one he was the youngest man in Soviet history to be Chairman of the KGB, which was another source of resentment for Greshko, who hadn't assumed control himself until his sixty-first birthday.

“You look well,” Stefan Olsky said.

Greshko said nothing for a moment. He seethed whenever he imagined Olsky occupying
his
office, sitting in
his
chair. He knew Olsky had had the office redecorated, that all the old paintings had been returned to storage and replaced by charts – charts, sweet Christ! – that the old phone system had been renovated and the six phones Greshko had enjoyed supplanted by a single device that allowed Olsky to hold what were known as ‘conference' calls. Every day new changes. Every day something else swept away.

“I look as well as a dying man can,” Greshko said. “You're trying to be kind, Stefan.”

Stefan Olsky approached the bed. This was his first visit to Greshko's cottage, and he'd heard about the old man's condition, but he hadn't been prepared for the smell that hung in this room – this commingling of human waste and disinfectant, this deathly odour.

Olsky stepped to the window, looked out. He had recently taken to shaving his head, as if to make himself look older, more experienced. He ran a palm self-consciously over his skull. His wife had pleaded with him to let the hair grow back. She said she didn't want to wake each morning and find an egg on the pillow next to her.

“It's pleasant here,” Olsky said. “Greenery. Fresh air. Very nice.”

What had Olsky really come here for? And why so early in the day? Greshko surveyed the Chairman's face. Unmarked by experience, the old man thought. How could such a face frighten anybody? To run the organs you needed
presence
, you needed to be able to instil awe in other men. If Olsky had presence, if he had charisma, it was of a kind Greshko couldn't possibly understand. He was even a
teetotaller
, for God's sake, which fitted very nicely with Birthmark Billy's anti-vodka crusade. But what the General Secretary didn't realise was that vodka was the
fuel
of Mother Russia. To take vodka away, to reduce its production and price it beyond the means of a worker, was a natural disgrace, like yanking an infant from its mother's tit. But none of the new gang had any affinity for the heart of the country, at least not the way Vladimir Greshko, a poor peasant boy from the Stavropol Territory, perceived it. What did they know about the unending struggle against the bitter climate and a countryside racked by famine in the 1930s? They were all college boys, chicken-hearted, cologne in their armpits, educated by the benefits of a Revolution they were now attempting to dismantle.
Ingrates!

Thoughts of Olsky provoked rage. What made things worse was that Greshko, at the time of his abrupt removal from office, had come into possession of information which alleged that Olsky had investments in Western European money-markets held, of course, in fictional names, dummy corporations and the like – but if the allegations were true, what kind of Communist did that make Stefan Olsky?

Greshko wished he'd been able to present this information to the Politburo, which would have been distressed by the furtive capitalism of Comrade Stefan, but by the time he decided to do so it was too damned late. All the doors had been slammed shut in his face with a finality that even now sounded through his brain. Too slow, old man, he thought. And perhaps just a little too complacent. But he still had the information, and a time might come when it would prove useful. One of the lessons of his long life was that you never threw
anything
away.

Olsky turned from the window and smiled. He had dark eyes and high cheekbones and a wide mouth that was rather pleasant and generous. “I imagine it could get lonely here,” he said. “You're lucky to have a great many friends, Vladimir.”

“I've been blessed,” Greshko remarked. What was Olsky driving at? “I'm not completely forgotten by my old comrades.”

“Some of whom are very dedicated to you. Some of whom travel considerable distances to visit you,” Olsky said.

“Only to pay their last respects, Stefan.”

Olsky had always found Greshko to be slippery and devious. There was a certain charm about the old fart, which Olsky acknowledged rather grudgingly, although he'd never been a fan of Greshko's way of running the organs – autocratic, secretive, possessive. Olsky had heard Greshko referred to within the Politburo as King Vladimir, and not always jokingly.

Like a monarch, Greshko had ruled the KGB as if it were a court, with courtiers who curried favours and engineered palace intrigues in an atmosphere of distrust and malice. What underlay this regal technique of management was paranoia and fear – which had also forged durable loyalties between Greshko and many of his former subordinates, a fact that troubled Stefan Olsky. He didn't intend to run the organs the way Greshko had done. He believed in inter-departmental cooperation and an open-door policy – concepts that were not readily grasped by the old guard, who grumbled and complained at every little change and sometimes even reminisced openly, brazenly, about how things had been different under the control of General Greshko. It was going to be difficult and slow, and very demanding, to change the KGB.

“Is that why you've come, Stefan?” Greshko asked. “To pay
your
last respects?”

“Not entirely. The fact is, some of your visitors … disturb me, Vladimir.”

Greshko smiled. “Don't tell me you
spy
on me?” he asked in mock horror. He knew that some of the foresters who worked around Zavidovo sent information back to Moscow about who had been seen in the vicinity, what they'd done, where they'd gone. During his own tenure he'd received information from the same men who nowadays provided the service for Olsky.

“Reports have a way of reaching me,” Olsky said. “Rumours are like homing pigeons.”

“And what do you hear, General?”

“Some of your friends have nostalgic longings. Some of them belong to certain organisations, Vladimir, that call themselves by such names as ‘Memories' or ‘Yesteryear' – consisting of men who have a dangerous yearning for the way things were. War veterans. Factory managers. Party members. And they have some sympathetic ears inside the Central Committee. Obstructionists, Vladimir. People who cling to the past.”

“I can't be held responsible for the sympathies of my friends,” Greshko said. “People are slow to change their ways, Stefan. Give them time. Sooner or later, they'll get used to this new Russia you're building.”
This new Russia
. Greshko had uttered these words in a way that was almost sarcastic.

“What about you?” Olsky asked. “Are you getting used to it?”

“I'm dying,” Greshko answered. “I don't have time to get used to anything.”

Olsky was quiet a moment. The old boy could put on a good act, he could smile and look altogether innocent, but Olsky was wary. “There's talk of a conspiracy, Vladimir. I hear rumours in Moscow. I hear them too often.”

“Conspiracy!” Greshko laughed, a rich, hearty sound. “Listen to me, Stefan. A few old friends get together here and there. They talk about the old days. They drink vodka, get sentimental, they weep a little. Where's the conspiracy in that? One of the first lessons you must learn is that Moscow has a hidden rumour factory. My advice to you, comrade, is not to listen. Or if you must listen, be selective.”

Olsky walked back to the window. He had been Chairman for only five months now and the last thing he needed as he reorganised State Security was a conspiracy of hard-liners, diehards, old reactionaries whose imaginations could carry them no further than the idea that the greatest of all Russian leaders had been the murderer Stalin. Rumours, whispers, shadows – sometimes Olsky had the feeling he was listening to voices inside a dosed room, voices that fell silent as he approached the door. He turned his face once more to Greshko. Even sick and dying, the old man managed to give off a glow that suggested residual power. What you had to remember about Greshko was that he still had friends in high places, that when you approached him you did so cautiously.

“Is that why you came here?” Greshko asked. “To warn me about the company I keep?”

The atmosphere in this room was cloying. Olsky was anxious to go, to get inside the car and have his driver return him to Moscow. That night he'd promised to take his wife, an amorous woman called Sabina, to a new drama at the Sovremennik Theatre. For some reason, perhaps because of their air of freedom and licence, experimental plays always excited her, an excitement she brought back home to the bedroom. Olsky never tired of his wife's advances.

“There's one other thing,” he said.

“Go ahead.”

“I've been conducting an inventory, Vladimir. Of files. Computer data. Current cases.”

An inventory
. Greshko thought how sadly typical it was of Olsky to make the organs sound like a damned haberdashery. “And?”

“A certain file is unaccounted for, Vladimir. I don't have to remind you of how serious that is.”

“You don't have to remind me of anything.” Greshko thought of the documentation he'd removed and he felt a quick little shiver of tension. “Clerks and computer operators are notoriously slipshod. They've probably made some kind of idiotic mistake.”

Olsky was silent a moment. “We were able to establish that the missing file was that of somebody called Aleksis Romanenko, First Party Secretary in Tallinn. Whoever removed the file forgot to delete the name and number from the central directory.”

Damned computers, Greshko thought. He'd never really grasped all this new technology. He wondered if this was something that should worry him. Did it matter that Olsky knew Romanenko's file had been removed? Probably not. So long as he didn't know what was in the file, then it wasn't worth bothering about.

“What makes you so sure that the file was
removed
, Stefan? Sometimes there are glitches, and computers destroy their own data. Or so I've heard.”

“True,” Olsky said. “But in this particular instance there was a date when the file disappeared. The computer recorded the date automatically, which it would not have done if the program were malfunctioning. So I'm led to believe the material was
deliberately
taken.”

“By whom?” Greshko asked.

Olsky shook his head. “I have no idea. I thought perhaps you might be able to throw a little light on the matter. You had charge of the files at the time when this particular data was taken.”

“One file among hundreds of thousands? Are you serious? I've never even heard of this fellow – what did you say his name was?”

“Romanenko.”

Greshko looked incredulous. “Really, Stefan. What's so damned important about one missing file in any case? What's such a big deal that the Chairman himself has to worry about a trifle like this?”

Olsky went to the door, which he opened. He looked across the kitchen at the Yakut woman, who was stirring food in a saucepan over the wood stove. She turned her face, regarded him briefly, then looked away again.

Olsky said, “Normally, it might mean nothing. But Romanenko was assassinated yesterday.”

“Assassinated?”

“In the circumstances, the missing file struck me as an odd coincidence.”

Greshko placed his hands together on the surface of his quilt. “Ah, now I understand your puzzlement.” He tapped the side of his skull. “The name means nothing to me, but if I remember anything, I'll be sure to get in touch with you. The trouble is, my memory's like some damned dog that won't come when I call it. I'll try, though. I promise you. I'll try.”