Mazurka (32 page)

“He shot a man in Scotland,” Pagan said.

“It figures.”

“You don't seem surprised.” Remarkable calm, Pagan thought.

Rose Alexander stared at Pagan coolly. He caught a glimpse of her as she might once have been, young and carefree, even beautiful, strutting the crowded streets of the Haight in San Francisco or getting high at Woodstock, her long hair hanging over her shoulders and her jeans flared above bare feet and zodiac signs painted on her cheeks and forehead.

She said, “If I don't seem surprised it's because I'm not. Do you know Jake?”

“I met him briefly …” And here Pagan hesitated. He had half of a sentence still to complete and he was reluctant to do it. “I don't know if you're aware of the fact he committed suicide.”

Perhaps a vague flicker crossed her face, Pagan wasn't sure. But she still looked unperturbed. “Don't get the impression I'm a cold bitch. But nothing you've told me so far surprises me at all. I'm not amazed he killed somebody and I'm not exactly blown away by news of his suicide either.”

Pagan glanced at Klein, who was fiddling with one of those lamps with a transparent base filled with expanding liquid. Great pink bubbles rose up hypnotically. Rose Alexander lit another cigarette. Pagan sat down in a beanbag chair, which immediately reassembled itself around him like a loose fist.

Rose Alexander said, “I had to get a court order restraining Jake from coming near me. Not once, but twice. He forced his attentions on me when I didn't need them and I didn't ask for them. Jake became a nightmare for me.”

Pagan, who wasn't interested in Jake's obsession with this woman, wanted to steer the conversation in the direction of anything Rose might know about Kiviranna's trip to the United Kingdom and the identity of the man who sent him on that fatal voyage. But Rose had other ideas and she wanted to talk about Kiviranna no matter what Frank Pagan desired.

“When I met him first I felt sorry for him,” she said. “It was in some bar on Brighton Beach Avenue. He had a lost look. And I've got a thing for lost creatures. I got drunk and Jake got infatuated. For most people, this would be no big deal. Like a slight cold. You sweat it out, it goes away. Not to Jake Kiviranna. Jake's thing for me was colossal. Flowers. Cards. Gifts. Poems. I couldn't turn around without finding Jake in my shadow. It's nice at the beginning. But it gets old real fast, man. I tried to point this out to Jake, I tried to let him down gently, I was kind – but there are some people you can't get through to and Jake Kiviranna was one of them. They hear only what they want to hear. Nothing else makes a dent.”

Pagan glanced at Klein, who was going through Rose's collection of record albums. Familiar old names flicked past. The Grateful Dead. Jefferson Airplane. Big Brother and the Holding Company. Names out of a history that seemed more distant than a mere twenty years.

“Jake wouldn't go away. I figured if I couldn't let him down gently, I'd try some reality therapy, so I dated a couple of guys, and I hoped Jake would get the message, but the only message he ever got was the desire to beat me up. Which he did. Two, maybe three times. A couple of broken ribs. Three teeth. A split lip. It might have been worse. He'd beat me, then he'd shower me with flowers. That gets pretty fucking stale. I had to go to court to get a restraining order. The next thing, Jake slashes his wrists. He was a sick sonofabitch. He sent me a poem written in his own blood. Think about that one. Slits his wrists and still finds the time to write verse. Bad verse.”

Pagan was quiet for a time, wondering if Rose Alexander had run her course. She stubbed her cigarette out and looked at the rings adorning her fingers, then she tipped back her head and looked at the ceiling and said, “I never wanted to hurt him, you understand.”

“I believe you,” Pagan said. He struggled up out of the beanbag chair, which made a rasping sound as he rose. “When did you last see Jake?”

“Couple of months ago.”

“In what circumstances?”

“He was waiting for me in the street one night. Standard stuff for Jake. He liked to spy on me. He liked to find me with other guys.”

“Did he say anything about how he was going away? Did he mention anything about leaving the country?”

Rose Alexander smiled. “One of the problems with Jake was how you could never tell when he was talking bullshit or when he was being on the level. Sometimes he'd talk in this real wild way, sometimes he'd be calm. But you couldn't tell from his manner if he was into fantasy or reality. I don't think I listened, Mr Pagan. I didn't want him around. Even after I got the restraining order, he'd still call me or try to see me. The bottom line is, Jake scared me.”

Pagan was quiet for a time. He had a mental image of the way he'd seen Kiviranna in the cell in London. The scorchmarks, the elaborate electrocution carried out with a madman's patience, a death that was both simple and ugly. “What did he talk about the last time you saw him?”

“He was completely out of it,” she answered. “He said he was going to make some kind of statement against international Communism – he had this thing about how the Russians had murdered his parents and grandparents in one of those stupid little countries that don't exist any more and how he had to do something about it. I wasn't exactly happy to see him, Mr Pagan. Forgive me if I'm forgetting anything – I wasn't a captive audience. He was talking crazy. I just wanted to get the hell away from him.”

“Did he say anything else? Did he talk about friends?”

The woman laughed. “Friends? Jake didn't have any, Mr Pagan. Friendships were off limits to him. How could anybody befriend a guy who was sweet one day, then out of his tree the next? Would you want Charlie Manson for a friend?”

Pagan was frustrated. If this proved to be a dead-end, if Rose Alexander knew nothing about any accomplice, he might as well fold his tent and go home. He said, “Think. Anything at all might be useful.”

She was pensive for a time. “Okay. Here's something. The last night I saw him he asked me to give him a ride. He had to be in a certain place at a certain time. The guy he was meeting had a thing about punctuality. Remember, I wanted him out of my life in a hurry, Mr Pagan. So I said I'd drive him where he had to go. Which is exactly what I did. And that was the last I saw of him.”

“Where did you take him?”

“To the boardwalk at Brighton Beach.” Rose Alexander lit another cigarette, which she held in a hand that fluttered like a small injured bird. It was obvious that any conversation about Kiviranna agitated her.

“Did he say who he was going to meet?”

She shook her head slowly. “He didn't say. It was just somebody he had to meet on the boardwalk, that's all.”

Pagan noticed for the first time that she had a collection of freckles around her nose and cheeks. “But no names.”

“No names,” she said.

Pagan looked across the room at Klein, who had an expression on his face of frustration. “Did he give you any kind of impression of the person he was supposed to meet?”

The woman blew a long stream of smoke and for a moment her face was lost to Pagan. She said, “Sorry. I draw a blank. I guess if he told me anything I must have suppressed it. Or else I never really heard it in the first place.”

Pagan was disappointed. He stood very still a moment, looking at a picture on the wall, a sepia-tinted mushroom, a doper's picture, and rather ominous. “If I need to ask anything more, I'll be in touch,” he said. “Thanks for your time.”

She smiled in an insipid way. “Yeah, sure.”

Pagan stepped out of the apartment with Klein. Then he started to go down the stairs. He was aware of Rose Alexander watching from the open doorway.

“I just remembered something,” she said, and her voice echoed in the stairwell. “It's not very much, but you never know.”

Pagan stopped, turned around, climbed back up to the landing. The woman had her hands in the pockets of her jeans and was leaning against the door frame, her hips thrust forward in a way Pagan found mildly provocative, all the more so for the lack of self-consciousness in her manner.

“Like I said, it might not be much, but here it is.” She smiled at Pagan, perhaps a little sadly, as if all she were throwing him was a scrap. “Jake was going to meet the guy in some kind of old shop on the boardwalk. He mentioned that in passing. Maybe it amused him, I don't know. It just came back to me. I didn't ask any questions about it, because I didn't want to know.”

Pagan thanked the woman again. Outside in the street he walked toward Klein's car. He got in on the passenger side and Klein climbed behind the wheel. Pagan said, “Suddenly I'm overcome by an urge to get some good sea air into my lungs.”

“You got it,” Klein said.

Klein drove the Dodge in the direction of Brighton Beach Avenue and the boardwalk. Neither he nor Pagan noticed the pea-green Buick that moved half a block behind them, a stealthy vehicle, the kind of car nobody ever wanted except for people whose need for total anonymity overwhelmed their desire for attention and their good taste. It followed, always half a block behind, all the way to Brighton Beach.

Fredericksburg, Virginia

Galbraith dined in a moody way alone on the roof, consuming a simple Indian meal prepared for him by the chef of a famous Washington restaurant and sent to Virginia by fast car. He ate spinach rice coloured with saffron, tandoori prawns, cucumber raita and mariel mimosas, those delightful little puff pastries that contain grated coconut, sultanas and cardamom seeds. He pushed his plate away, sat back, belched delicately into his napkin, then gazed across the roof at the satellite dishes. He stared beyond, into the mysterious sky the dishes scanned and analysed. He dropped his napkin on his empty plate, rose, crossed the roof and re-entered the house, climbing down and down into the basement.

His digestive juices made rumbling sounds. The Indian meal lay uneasily inside him. He ought never to have eaten in his present mood. And the spicy food he'd just consumed – well, really, he ought to have known better. He moaned as he settled down before the consoles, which he regarded with impatience.

When Iverson came into the room Galbraith didn't turn his face to look. He drummed his stubby fingers on his knees in a gesture Gary Iverson took to be one of exasperation. Iverson also knew, from long experience of Galbraith's behaviour, that the fat man would be the first to speak, that any question on Iverson's part would be utterly ignored.

Galbraith made a plump little fist, misleadingly cherubic in appearance. He spoke in a very flat tone of voice. “I am an anxious man, Gary. Do you want to know
why
I'm such an anxious man, Gary?”

Iverson mumbled something meaningless.

Galbraith smacked the coffee-table with his fist and an ashtray jumped. “Where do I begin? Ah, yes, let's deal with the home front first, shall we? Let's discuss our own shortcomings. A telephone conversation between Carl Sundbach and Mikhail Kiss was logged here two hours ago. It appears that Sundbach has spotted our man. A man of ours, presumably a professional, has been rumbled by an old fellow whose eyesight isn't the best and whose reflexes are arguably threadbare – and yet
he made our man
, Gary.”

Iverson looked up briefly at one of the consoles, absently noticing a NATO message, white letters on a black background, a detailed outline of the next day's strategic naval manoeuvres.

“Incompetence, Gary,” Galbraith said. “I will not stand for that kind of thing. Now we have Sundbach worrying about who in the name of God is watching him. Do I overreact, Gary? Do I hear you think that? Consider. Sundbach knows he's under surveillance. He can't figure out who's doing the watching. He's an old guy, maybe he gets scared, what does he do?”

Iverson shook his head.

Galbraith hopped up from the sofa, causing vibrations and making motes of dust rise. “I am dealing in possibilities, Gary, which is what I always do. And here's one to stick in your throat. Sundbach, a terrified old man, a man with a gun licence, decides to shoot his pursuer. It's not beyond feasibility, Gary.
The mess! One of our operatives dead in the street!
I am speaking here of shame, Gary. The involvement of the local police. Homicide detectives.
Newspapermen
. Horror!”

Iverson considered this scenario unlikely, but didn't say so. He had seen Galbraith react this way before in situations where he thought the professional reputation of the agency was endangered or where the threat of exposure lurked. He was more than normally sensitive, it seemed, when it came to his beloved White Light project.

There was a silence in the basement. Galbraith, who had the kind of vision that enabled him to see around corners, who had the sort of imagination that allowed him to explore possibilities even as he juggled them, who liked to predict human behaviour as if his brain were a series of actuarial tables or psychological logarithms, returned to the sofa and sat down and his monk's robe flopped open, revealing enormous hairy white thighs.

“Take that useless surveyor out of the street, Gary, and send in the Clowns.” Clowns was the in-house term for those highly-skilled and expensively-trained employees whose functions within the Agency were many and various, but always clandestine. Sometimes the Clowns were called upon to erect smokescreens or manufacture diversions when such strategies were needed. They staged car wrecks, set alarm bells off, lit fires, fucked up telephone lines, forged documents, tampered with computer networks, pretended to be insurance salesmen or window-cleaners or Swiss bankers or Italian lawyers or whatever role was required in a given situation. When specialised surveillance was needed, when the ordinary watcher in the street had been exposed, the Clowns were the people you sent for. They were inventive men and sometimes just a little arrogant in the way of all specialists. Galbraith had introduced the concept of the Clowns years ago – a budgetary secret concealed under the vague rubric of Miscellaneous – and they'd been useful on many occasions. They prided themselves on the fact that only rarely had they resorted to real violence. Theirs was a pantomime world, a place of appearances and illusions, flash and noise when needed, or quiet play-acting if that was preferred.