Mazurka (28 page)

“Perhaps,” Pagan said, and drained his glass. The cognac had eased only a little of the pressure inside him.

Martin Burr smacked his lips. “Let's take some air, Frank. I don't want to be here when the cleaners and the fingerprint boys come. They tend to reduce death to a business, which I always find unseemly.”

Pagan followed the Commissioner out of the flat and down the stairs, past the goggling neighbours and their questions. Outside in the early morning darkness, Martin Burr stood under a streetlamp and leaned on his cane. The neighbourhood was silent and sedate in that way of well-heeled neighbourhoods everywhere.

“Is she pretty?” the Commissioner asked suddenly.

“What's that got to do with anything?”

“Touchy, touchy, Frank. All I'm saying is that human nature, being the general old screw-up it is, sometimes allows a fair face to turn a man's head. Has she turned yours?”

“Hardly,” Pagan replied.

“Just watch yourself. Subject closed.” The Commissioner smiled like a one-eyed owl. “As for this Brotherhood, how much does the young lady know?”

“Less than I'd like.”

“Intriguing, though. The idea of some old fellows plotting against the Russians after all this time. Makes you wonder what they're up to. And then there's the wretch Kiviranna. Who sent him to kill Romanenko? Too many unanswered questions, Frank.”

Pagan detected something in Martin Burr, a quality of curiosity that wouldn't leave him. Even if he was about to turn the Epishev affair over to the lords of intelligence, Martin Burr was still intrigued by it all, more so perhaps than he really wanted to admit. The old cop, Pagan thought. The scent in the nostrils. The mysteries. The rush of adrenalin. Martin Burr was animated, perhaps even hooked.

“I'm still thinking aloud, you understand, Frank, but if Epishev is hunting down this piece of paper, then he knew that Romanenko left the Soviet Union with it in his possession – reasonable assumption? Question – if it's
so
damned important that it gets Oates killed, why was Romanenko allowed to leave with the poem in the first place? Answer – because the KGB
wanted
him to make the delivery. Is that also reasonable? It implies that Aleksis, either willingly or unwittingly, was working for the KGB.”

“Or at least for certain KGB personnel,” Pagan remarked quietly.

With a rather thoughtful look, Martin Burr stared up into the light from the overhead lamp, where a flurry of moths battered themselves to pulp against the bulb. “Are you positing the existence of factions within that venerable organisation, Frank? Can of worms, old chap. Somebody else's can.”

“I don't know exactly what I'm positing,” Pagan replied. Can of worms, he thought. He kicked a pebble from the pavement and heard it roll across the narrow street. For somebody about to give up a case, Martin Burr was fretting over it more than a little.

“Pity to turn it over, Frank.”

“Pity's not strong enough,” Pagan said. How could he conceivably walk away from this? More to the point, how could Martin Burr expect that of him?

The Commissioner glanced at his wristwatch. As he did so, a taxi came along the street, slowing as it approached the lamp-post where Pagan and Burr stood. Ted Gunther, the man from the American Embassy, emerged from the vehicle. He paid the driver and the cab slid away. Gunther, wearing a suit over striped pyjamas that were plainly visible at his cuffs, looked apologetic as he entered the circle of light.

“They said at the Yard I'd find you here.” He blinked behind his thick glasses. “I hope I'm not interrupting anything.”

“Nothing that can't wait,” the Commissioner said in the manner of a man whose weekend has been totally ruined anyhow.

Gunther scratched his head. He'd obviously been roused from his bed and had hurried here. His crewcut was flattened in patches across his skull and there was an excited little light in his large eyes. He was also slightly short of breath. “I just received the information you asked for about Jacob Kiviranna, and I thought you'd want it right away. I pulled a few strings, called some old favours home.”

“You got some poor schmucks to work on a Sunday for you,” Pagan said.

“More or less. I sent an inquiry out over the wire immediately after we talked and I made a couple of phonecalls.” Gunther took a couple of sheets of paper from his coat pocket and tipped them towards the glow of the streetlamp. He reminded Pagan of somebody raised in the dead of night to get up and make an impromptu speech, somebody who has welded together a few odd phrases but hasn't had time to develop a theme.

“Let me just read you what I've got,” Gunther said. “Kiviranna lived in Brooklyn –”

“Brooklyn?” Pagan asked. He remembered that Kristina had told him that some members of the Brotherhood had settled in Brooklyn in the 1950s. He found himself stimulated suddenly, his interest aroused the way it always was when he confronted correspondences and connections, even when they consisted only of thin threads, such as this one.

“Brooklyn,” Gunther said in a slightly testy way, as if he resented having his narrative interrupted. “He had no known family – he was apparently smuggled out of the Baltic as a baby by relatives who are now dead. We don't know anything about his parents. He worked as a freelance carpenter, drifting from job to job, making sure he was paid in cash for his labours. Cash is always hard to trace, and it's easy not to declare it, which meant that Kiviranna managed to steer clear of the scrutiny of our Internal Revenue Service. In other words, for all his adult life, Kiviranna paid no taxes. In fact, I'd say he might have avoided all public records of his existence if it hadn't been for his jail sentences. To begin with, he did five days in 1973 for public nuisance.”

“Meaning what?” Pagan asked.

Gunther read from his sheets. “He urinated on a diplomatic car registered to the Soviet Mission in Manhattan then he tried to punch his way inside the Mission itself.”

“He didn't like Russians,” Pagan said drily, and glanced at Martin Burr, whose face was expressionless. But Pagan had the distinct sense that something was churning inside the Commissioner's head, that even as Gunther recited Kiviranna's history Burr was partly elsewhere.

“It's a running theme in his life,” Gunther agreed. “In 1974 he attacked a policeman outside the Soviet Embassy in Washington. In 1977, he drove a motorcycle into a limousine occupied by the Soviet Ambassador, causing considerable damage both to himself and the vehicle.”

“A kamikaze sort,” Pagan remarked.

Gunther swatted a moth away. “He did five months for that little escapade and underwent psychiatric evaluation. Which …” Here Gunther shuffled his papers. “Which revealed that Kiviranna was something of a loner, didn't join clubs, didn't make friends, felt inferior, that kind of thing.”

Predictable
, Pagan thought. Assassins tended to be loners. They weren't usually renowned for having social graces and joining clubs.

“In 1980 he became involved in narcotics. He was busted for possession of heroin. Probation, more psychiatric evaluation. Then he appears to have behaved himself until 1984, when he formed an attachment with a woman, or thought he did – the lady thought otherwise. Kiviranna became obsessed with her. When she spurned him, he slit his wrists. He was committed for a period to a psychiatric unit in upstate New York and diagnosed as schizophrenic.”

Schizophrenic
. What else? Pagan felt impatient. Nothing he'd heard here was compelling enough to explain Gunther's appearance after midnight. There was nothing spectacular in any of this. Why hadn't Gunther waited until morning? The eager ally, Pagan thought. Throwing on his suit over his pyjamas, making haste in the darkness. Pagan thought suddenly of Kristina Vaska in his apartment, and the patrol car in the street, and he realised he wanted to be away from this place and back home with the woman. A little twinge he recognised as something akin to panic rose up inside him.

“He was released in 1985, tried to contact the woman in 1986, was rejected a second time, then he attacked the Soviet Ambassador to the United Nations. Somehow, he managed to smuggle himself inside the UN building, waited for the Ambassador to appear, then stabbed him with a flick-knife. The wounds were superficial, thankfully. He got two years for that one. He was released only five months ago.”

Gunther folded the sheets. “That's the story, gentlemen.”

Pagan sniffed the night air. He knew why the narrative didn't satisfy him. There was a missing element, and that was the shadowy figure who'd been Kiviranna's accomplice, the person who sent Jake overseas to a rainy Scottish city with a gun in his hand. It was like looking upon the bare bones of a life, a bloodless synopsis from which all detail has been omitted and an important character suppressed.

“You've been very helpful,” Martin Burr said to Gunther.

Pagan made a small noise of gratitude because he felt he had to, but he still couldn't keep from thinking that this brief history was hardly worth getting up in the middle of the night to deliver. It rang a slightly false note, only he wasn't sure why. It was as if Gunther had been commanded to deliver this scant information by the powers over him. A sop to the Yard from its Americans chums, Pagan thought. Sheer condescension. No, it was his own state of mind, he decided. It was frustration that made him create whole chapters out of thin nuances.

The three men were quiet for a time as a slight wind picked up along the street and blew through greenery. Martin Burr took a small cheroot from his jacket and lit it, cupping one hand against the breeze.

He smiled at Ted Gunther and asked, “Do we know the name of the woman who treated poor Jake so callously?”

“I don't have that information,” Gunther answered.

“Is it something you can find out?”

“I guess. I don't see a problem there.”

“Mmmm.” Martin Burr tossed his cheroot away, barely smoked. He prodded the pavement with the tip of his cane, then he turned to Frank Pagan, who recognised the Commissioner's
mmm
sound. It indicated an emerging decision, a step he was about to take – but only after due consideration of the protocols involved. Pagan was apprehensive all at once, waiting for Martin Burr to continue.

The Commissioner said, “There's a nice American word to describe Kiviranna, and I think it's patsy. Somebody used him to kill Romanenko. Somebody used Kiviranna's apparently bottomless hatred of the Soviets. Directed him, shall we say, although he dearly needed very little direction. The question I have is this – did the chap who sent Jake all the way to kill Romanenko
know
what Aleksis had in his possession? Was that the reason he wanted Romanenko dead? Did he want the message to go undelivered? And if that was the case, how did he know Romanenko was carrying anything in the first place?”

Burr looked up into the lamp, staring at the suicidal mazurka of moths. Then he said, “Do you see where I'm leading, Frank?”

It was dawning on Pagan, and he wasn't sure he liked the light that was beginning to fill his brain.
You sly old bastard, Martin
, he thought, but he said nothing.

Martin Burr grinned. He glanced at Gunther, as if he'd just remembered the man's presence, then he returned his mischievous one-eyed stare to Pagan. “I may have to hand Epishev over to other parties, Frank. But I don't have to give them Jacob Kiviranna, do I? He's dead, after all. And intelligence isn't likely to give a tinker's curse about him. I rather think Kiviranna, who did commit a murder, is our pigeon, and ours alone. The man wasn't some bloody KGB villain, after all. He was a common killer, exactly the kind we specialise in.”

The Commissioner pressed his fingertips against his eyepatch. “We're perfectly entitled to examine Kiviranna's background, Frank. We're perfectly within our sphere of influence to look into his mysterious life. Nobody's going to take that away from us. And who knows? Perhaps something in the fellow's history will clarify certain matters that are baffling us at the moment. Perhaps you'll even learn more about this odd fellowship – what's it called?”

You know damn well what it's called, Pagan thought. “The Brotherhood, Commissioner.”

Gunther had discreetly drifted several yards away, and stood beyond the reach of lamplight, as if he sensed a private conversation he shouldn't be eavesdropping.

Pagan saw it all now, and he wasn't exactly happy with it. “You get me out of the way, which leaves things open for intelligence. And at the same time you're offering me a bone which may just have some meat on it – enough at least for me to chew on for a time.”

“You're an insightful fellow,” Martin Burr said. “Like I said, Frank, you may turn something up that will surprise us all.”

“You want to have your cake and eat it,” Pagan said. “You should've been a politician.”

“I'd slit my throat first.” Martin Burr looked at Gunther. “How's the weather this time of year in New York, Ted?” he asked.

V.G. Epishev stood for a time in the centre of the darkened square. The rain had blown away, leaving the darkness damp. There were few lights in the windows of the houses around the square – but in what he took to be the windows of Pagan's apartment a lamp burned behind a thick curtain. Epishev parted a tangle of shrubbery, hearing his feet squelch in soft black mud. Nearby, a flying creature – bat, bird, he couldn't tell – flapped between branches.

He moved under trees, stepping closer to the street, glancing up at the lit windows, then observing the police car which had been parked in the same place for hours. He made out the shapes of two policemen inside the vehicle. One, smoking a cigarette, let his hand dangle from the open window. Epishev walked close to the low stone wall.

That afternoon, when he'd first seen Pagan with the woman, he'd driven back to his hotel in Bayswater – a greasy room, an anonymous box overlooking an overgrown yard – and he'd lain for a long time on the narrow bed, pondering the presence of Kristina Vaska. The conclusion he came to was simple: if Pagan had known nothing of the Brotherhood before, he almost certainly knew something now, courtesy of Miss Vaska. Whether the message was coded or not, the fact remained, so far as Epishev was concerned, that Kristina Vaska would have provided Pagan with some insight into the Brotherhood, at least as she understood it. The question that burned Epishev now was the
extent
of the woman's understanding.