Mazurka (20 page)

Andres had absorbed all his uncle's hatred of the Soviets and their system, but there were certain things he couldn't grasp. He heard war stories and thought only of revenge. He had no insight into the spirit that had existed in the Brotherhood, no idea of the fellowship. How could he have? What could Mikhail Kiss have told him about the compassion between men, the bonds forged in the crucible of a hopeless war? How could this young man, born and raised in America, have understood the kind of camaraderie nurtured by conditions that had never existed within the United States?

Kiss thought that there was a very real sense in which he hadn't been a good teacher because he'd failed to make the young man's understanding complete, with the result that some element was missing from Andres's personality, an elusive quality Kiss wanted to call ‘heart' or ‘humanity'. As a human being Andres was all angles and abrasive edges, tightly-focused, somebody whose physical beauty concealed his tough-mindedness. He had, at times, a certain charm, but there was something borrowed about it, as if he were a man trying to speak in a foreign language he hadn't properly learned. He'd never formed close relationships with women, preferring the quick and the casual, simple encounters in dark places. He'd entered the US Air Force at the age of nineteen, ascended through the ranks with chill brilliance, a Major at the age of thirty-one who flew F-16s on NATO missions. On his thirty-second birthday he resigned his commission, because he'd drained the Air Force of all the information he needed to have. It had nothing else to offer him.

The young man's life was an equation in which his military career was one factor, his inherited hatred of the Soviets another. An equation made in steel, Mikhail Kiss thought, durable and unchanging. It was this steel that made him important in the Brotherhood's plan, but it was the same alloy that would prevent him from being the kind of man who loved and inspired love in others. And Mikhail Kiss felt at times a little guilty because of the way, inadvertently or otherwise, he'd moulded his nephew – not into a rounded human being, not into a person with compassion and understanding, but into the destructive instrument of the Brotherhood.

Now Kiss rose from the desk. “Carl's waiting for you,” he said.

Andres stood in the window, and the sun made his hair gold. Although he was used to obeying his uncle, he thought Mikhail too trusting. He wanted to say that Carl shouldn't be dismissed this way, that an old man who'd turned his back on the Brotherhood shouldn't be allowed to walk away unconditionally – but he knew Mikhail would counter with a sentimental argument about the history he shared with Sundbach. So he didn't argue. He never quarrelled with Mikhail. He kept his objections quietly to himself. Men like Mikhail and Carl Sundbach, with their old attachments, their facile nostalgia, made him impatient. He walked to the door, opened it, gazed across the landing towards the stairs. There he paused.

Seeing the young man's hesitation, Mikhail Kiss said, “Trust me. Carl won't speak to anybody.”

Andres Kiss looked about as relaxed as he ever did. He stepped out of the room, drawing the door shut behind him. He went down the stairs and out on to the porch. Sundbach sat in the passenger seat of the Jaguar. His glasses glinted in the sunlight. He turned his head impatiently and said, “What kept you? I was going to send a search-party.”

Andres Kiss moved in the direction of his car. He clenched his fists at his side as he moved, his fine hands turning an angry white colour.

Fredericksburg, Virginia

Galbraith said, “I love the way they shape the world according to how they think it ought to be. They refuse to contemplate disagreeable alternatives. Kiss and Kiss are going ahead
no matter what!
They want to make a statement about that diddlyshit corner of Europe the Soviets stole and half the world hasn't heard about and the other half can only do some pooh-poohing over because it's a goddam
fait accompli
anyhow. I love their dedication.”

The fat man, who wore a small acupuncture stud in his right ear – placed there only that morning by a Filipino practitioner everyone in DC swore by – reached up to rub the little globe of metal, which was said to curb the craving for food. With growing exasperation he rubbed for about thirty seconds, then dipped his hand inside a box of Black Magic chocolates by Rowntree Mackintosh, and said, “So much for the ancient healing arts of the goddam East.”

He stuffed a chocolate into his mouth, then he reached out to the tape-recorder and rewound the reel to the part where Andres Kiss could be heard to say
It's not a dream for me, Carl
.

“There,” Galbraith said. “That's probably my favourite part. You can hear the kid gloat when he says that. His voice practically drips. Frankly, I'm glad Sundbach dropped out. I was never convinced he had the right stuff. A little too fond of the cherry brandy. I always felt he'd come undone eventually.”

Iverson, seated beneath the banks of video consoles, heard old Carl say
I don't like the feeling of putting my goddam head under a guillotine
. The meetings in the house in Glen Cove had been taped for more than a year now, and Galbraith had come to regard them as regular Sunday afternoon listening.

“Does he worry you, Gary?” Galbraith asked.

“Sundbach?” Iverson frowned, gave a little shrug.

Galbraith nodded. This morning he was dressed in a dark suit instead of the robes he usually favoured. He wore a blue carnation in his lapel. “He worries young Andres. You can tell that much.”

“Andres worries about everything, sir,” Iverson said. “When he was in the Air Force he worried about making the grade. Nothing was more important to him than learning to fly. He spent more hours in an F-16 simulator than any man in the history of the Force. He worried about his physical exams. He worried about his eyesight. The clue to Andres is his compulsive personality. He's a perfectionist.”

“Which is why we have him,” Galbraith said. He had discovered one of his favourite chocolates, a dimpled, strawberry-centred rectangle that he popped into his mouth before closing the box and shoving it across the glass-topped table. At least he was
trying
. “The trouble is, Sundbach worries
me
. I don't like the idea of the old fellow walking out at this stage of the game.”

Galbraith killed the tape-recorder just as Mikhail Kiss was saying,
Trust me. Carl won't speak to anybody
. He wandered around the room for a while. Iverson watched him. For a fat man he moved smoothly, seeming to glide at times, like a hydrofoil on a cushion of air. He finally returned to the sofa where he sat down, glanced at his watch.

“I have an afternoon tea affair on the roof in about five minutes, Gary. Do we have anything to discuss before I leave?”

Iverson took out a small notebook, flipped the pages. “One, there's nothing new from London. A cop called Frank Pagan's in charge of the affair, but I haven't heard anything more.”

Galbraith said, “Keep on that one just the same.”

Iverson said, “Two. I don't have anything new on Jacob Kiviranna except for sketchy details. Where he went to school, where he was born, the fact he spent a couple of years in jail for offences ranging from public nuisance to aggravated assault. We should know more any moment.”

“Aggravated assault? That's promising. I think we need to know if Vabadus's killer was a psycho or something else. So keep pressing on that one. Make sure any information we get on Kiviranna reaches Scotland Yard too. It ought to keep this Pagan busy around the edges of things in the meantime. Clear the material with me first, though, won't you?” Galbraith stood up. “We might also do ourselves a small favour by keeping an eye on Carl Sundbach. I'm only thinking aloud now, you understand, but I'm also wondering if it might be necessary to do a dark deed where Sundbach's concerned. Call it a feasibility study, that's all. I don't want you coming in here with blood on
your
hands, Gary.”

Galbraith looked thoughtful. Ever since a DIA employee – they were never known to Galbraith as agents, a term he considered theatrical – had been apprehended last year carrying a case containing one point three million dollars into Cuba, money earmarked for certain persons who were anxious to see Fidel unseated and who needed weaponry, ever since this embarrassing little fiasco had been hinted at in a variety of newspapers and periodicals, Galbraith had become hypercautious and overprotective when it came to his department of the agency. He had devised a new policy, which was to use only outsiders, if possible, when it came to the truly dirty deeds. Doing something nefarious wasn't the problem. Being found out was.

“You might want to probe Andres,” Galbraith said. “You might want to take his temperature, see if he
really
thinks Sundbach's a danger. After all, we don't want to jump in and do something irrevocable if the old fellow's simply harmless, do we?”

Iverson agreed.

On his way to the door, Galbraith stopped. “Do you think Andres ever suspects anything?” he asked.

Iverson considered this, then shook his head firmly. “I really don't think he's gifted in the area of peripheral vision, sir.”

Galbraith looked thoughtful a moment. He stroked his little acupuncture stud and said, “The one thing I wish is that these Balts weren't so goddam sentimental. It's the only problem I have with them. I was never very happy with the sealed envelope business and the poem. To them it's like some holy relic. To me it's unadulterated nostalgia and inefficient to boot. I can see the Brotherhood getting off on using their old call sign – but I keep thinking it would have been so much more damn simple if Romanenko had just telephoned Kiss when they were both in London.” Here Galbraith stared morosely at the chocolate box, his expression that of an addict pondering a cure. “Still, who am I to interfere with the rituals of men whose purpose I support and admire wholeheartedly? If that's the way they felt they had to do things, who am I to criticise their habits, Gary? Anyhow, I hate to give you the impression I'm ungrateful to the Baits, because that's far from the truth. On the contrary, I regard their cause as sacred. Without it, where would White Light be?”

Galbraith, smiling, climbed out of the basement. The effort made him short of breath. He rode in the private lift to the roof, which had been transformed into a garden, surrounded on all sides by bulletproof glass. Three satellite dishes scanned the skies silently. There was a view of the countryside around Fredericksburg, a secretive, green landscape. Galbraith walked to the centre of the roof, pushing aside a variety of shrubs and flowers – dense, spreading acacia, red bougainvillaea, dwarf pomegranate bearing inedible dwarf fruit, bromeliads. It was all a little too much, Galbraith thought. When he'd asked for a garden up here, some greenery to give the roof aesthetic appeal, he hadn't taken into consideration the ego of the gardener, a man who considered himself no mere potter of shrub and fern but a ‘landscape architect'. It had become a world in which ratcatchers were rodent-control agents, and plumbers sanitation consultants.

In the centre of the roof a table had been set up for afternoon tea in the English style. Silver teapot, china plates, scones and assorted jams, small cucumber sandwiches. Two men in dark suits sat at the table. One was Senator Crowe, a Texan, the other Senator Holly from Iowa, both senior members of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. John Crowe had been in Washington so long that it was said he'd been consulted on the original plan for the White House. He was an emaciated man with the demeanour of an undertaker. His face, which consisted of hundreds of tiny squares of wrinkled flesh, a parchment patchwork, always made Galbraith think of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Holly, on the other hand, was younger, pot-bellied, a man with a smile that apparently left his face only when he slept. Galbraith thought of him as Jolly Holly, even thought there was something vaguely sinister in the fixed grin.

“These sandwiches have no damned crusts,” John Crowe snarled in the throaty voice that made him famous and widely impersonated.

Galbraith sat down, thinking how Crowe always had a vaguely depressing effect on him. Access to the kind of power Crowe had – in the intelligence community, the Foreign Relations Committee, and the Senate Committee on Military Expenditure – had made him a grave, gloomy figure, and wraithlike. He reminded Galbraith of a satirical, spectral version he'd seen of the figure of Uncle Sam in a rabid left-wing movie on the Vietnam War some years ago.

“It's an English affectation,” Galbraith said.

Crowe, nodding his head in acknowledgement of this information, put his sandwich back on his plate as Galbraith poured tea. Galbraith noticed there was a slight tremor over the old fellow's upper lip and a waxiness to Crowe's complexion, as if he'd been dipped in a melted candle.

Senator Joseph Holly picked up a knife, neatly dissected a scone and opened it. He spread the surface of one of the halves with Dundee marmalade. When he spoke he did so in a nasal manner, his voice seeming to emerge from the cavities behind his eyes. “So this is where the taxpayer's money goes,” he said.

“This is window-dressing,” Galbraith replied. “Where the money really goes is elsewhere, Senator.”

Holly kept on smiling. “You spooks know how to spend.”

“Keeping the world safe for democracy is no Macy's basement, gentlemen,” Galbraith said in a cordial way. He hated fiscal matters, pennypinching, keeping accounts, all the tedious chores involved in his relationship with official Washington.

John Crowe said, “The cost is goddam high, and getting higher.”

“By the minute,” Galbraith agreed cheerfully.

Joseph Holly ate a small mouthful of scone. A bee floated close to the open jar of marmalade and the Senator swatted it away. It promptly returned, clinging to the underside of Holly's saucer. Holly asked, “Are we being recorded right now?”