Mazurka (50 page)

It was time to go home and wait.

18

Glen Cove, Long Island

Without waiting to answer awkward questions from investigators, Frank Pagan, sickened by the stench of fire that clung to him, had walked away from the burning Ford and moved through narrow streets, following the general directions the cashier had given him. These were impressive streets where branches of old trees interlocked overhead, creating barriers against the sky. The houses here were large, built on enormous green lots. These were streets in which money didn't speak, it hummed tastefully. Pagan paused when he reached the corner of Brentwood Drive, where the greenery was even more dense and the houses virtually invisible behind crowded stands of trees and thick hedges.

There was something secretive about the street, the impenetrable shadows, the way the houses were concealed from view. People here wanted to live private lives, and so they'd created their own wilderness in the suburbs of Long Island. A pedestrian in this place stood a pretty good chance of being arrested, because it was the kind of area where walking was something only criminals and cranks ever did.

He looked at the driveways of homes as he passed them. Numbers were so discreetly displayed you had to search for them among shrubbery. He found number fourteen. A hedgerow grew around the property and a gravel driveway disappeared among foliage. The only part of the house that could be seen was the red-tiled roof. Pagan took a few steps along the driveway, which curved suddenly and the house came in view, an ornate turreted construction set just beyond a well-kept lawn. A green awning hung above the columned porch. There were no cars in the driveway, no signs of life. He glanced at the windows, noticed nothing, no face behind glass, no curtain shivering.

He walked up on to the porch. The doorbell was one of those old-fashioned brass affairs that you pulled toward you. He could hear the bell echo within the house, but nobody came to answer. He moved slowly around the back of the house where an impressive rose garden was located. The flowers grew in lavish, meticulous beds.

Pagan looked through the glass walls of a sun room, which had been added to the original structure. But he saw nothing, only the vague outlines of furniture. Then he stared across the rose beds for a time, where there was a white-latticed gazebo draped by willows, and beyond that a thick stand of oleander. None of the surrounding houses was visible because of the dense foliage, which gave this particular dwelling a sense of isolation, of loneliness – as if nobody had ever lived here.

Some of this isolation touched him. He had an urge to sit down and sleep and withdraw, making himself numb to the death of Max Klein, numb to the question that had begun to nag at him ever since he'd strolled away from the gas-station –
how had Epishev known he was in the United States?

Maybe it was no great mystery. He imagined how it might have happened that Epishev came across his information. John Downey, for instance, who was known to have connections in Fleet Street, and who was often the so-called ‘reliable source' in newspaper stories about the Yard, might have run into an intrepid reporter anxious to get some eyewitness details about events in Edinburgh – and Downey, after a few of the Newcastle Brown Ales he so enjoyed, might have let slip the fact that Frank Pagan was off on some junket to New York City. As soon as the scribbler had his information, it would then travel along the Street, passed from the mouth of one crime reporter to the next, from one pub to another, where sooner or later the item would reach the ears of one of those accredited, if vaguely shadowy, journalists who gathered information for the Soviet press. From there it was a cinch that the knowledge of Pagan's trip would find its way back, sooner or later, to a source at the Soviet Embassy. A whisper in the ear of Epishev, and there it was …

Pagan could imagine this sequence, which was less one of malicious exposure than of bloody careless talk loosely bruited about in places where cops and reporters met to sink a few jars.

Epishev, Pagan thought. Everywhere Uncle Viktor went there was death in the vicinity. Everything he touched shrivelled and turned black. It was quite a knack to go through life laying things to waste all around you.

His head still filled with the memory of flames, Pagan peered once again through the glass walls of the sun-room. Then he tried the door, which yielded. Whoever owned this house, whoever Mikhail Kiss might be, he clearly felt he had nothing to fear from burglars, that the quiet authority, the rich seclusion of the street, was enough of a deterrent in itself. Pagan pushed the door, entered the room quietly, stood motionless. There was a strong smell of cut flowers in the air.

He stepped out into the hallway. To his left a flight of stairs rose up into darkness. Ahead of him, across the entranceway, were other rooms. Doors lay open and the half-darkened surfaces of wooden furniture gleamed quietly. The silence here was deep and impressive and the dying sunlight that managed to find its way inside rooms, squeezing through drawn-down blinds, was slightly unreal, like light from another planet.

Pagan went to the foot of the stairs, looked up a moment, then walked inside the room just ahead of him, a dining-room with an oval table and rather spare contemporary prints on the walls, a room with a certain sterile quality that suggested meals were never actually eaten here, nobody sat down to dine. It reminded Pagan of a window display in a furniture shop. Unlike the home of Carl Sundbach, with its clutter and disorder and a sense of an unarranged life being lived in its rooms, the house of Mikhail Kiss was imbued with absences and silences.

Pagan entered another room, a sitting-room, expensively done, white leather sofa, matching chairs, chrome, and again the same spacious emptiness. He walked to the stairs, climbed quietly, reached the landing. Two bedrooms, an office, a bathroom. The first bedroom was large and uninteresting, the bed made up, a book open and face down on the bedside table, an easy chair under the bay window. Pagan glanced at the book, which was in a language he didn't understand, then he noticed a photograph of a woman on the mantelpiece across the room. He didn't pick up the framed picture. The woman wore her hair in the style of the late 1930s. It was a good face, probably beautiful if you liked the gaunt, rather haunted look. Written on the picture, and barely legible, was an inscription – again in a language Pagan couldn't read – and the signature
Ingrida, 1938
. For a reason he couldn't begin to explain, Pagan was touched by a momentary sadness, perhaps caused by the look in the woman's eyes, or the sense he suddenly had that he was gazing upon a picture of the dead. Why did some photographs create the impression that the subject of the picture was dead?

He stepped out of the bedroom, then into the adjoining one. A narrow room, a single bed, prints depicting a variety of aircraft, and trophies – shelves of silver cups and medallions and plaques, awards decorated by miniature figures, a boxer, a runner, a javelin-thrower. It was quite a collection. Pagan picked up a statue of a boxer and read
To Andres Kiss, First Prize in the Junior Boys Section, Long Island Boxing Association, 1969
. All the awards here were to the same Andres Kiss, and there were scores of them, attesting to a disciplined, athletic life, an achiever's life, the kind of existence defined by very definite goals. Did Andres ever have time for fucking around? Pagan wondered. Presumably not, if he spent all his adolescent years training for competitions and winning trophies.

Andres Kiss. Was he Mikhail's son? Pagan replaced the trophy, crossed the room, looking for photographs of the boy wonder. Trophies galore, but no pictures, no casual snapshots. He looked at the posters of aircraft. They were all US and British fighter planes from World War II. So Andres liked athletics and aeroplanes – what did this tell you, Holmes?

Pagan went to the window, looked out across the garden at the back of the house, seeing how darkness, almost complete now, robbed the roses of their colours. He let the curtain fall back in place and was about to turn out of Andres Kiss's room when he noticed some framed papers on the wall above the bed. He had to turn on the bedside lamp to read them. Interesting stuff. A certificate issued by the United States Air Force to Captain Andres Kiss on the occasion of his promotion. An award from the USAF to Captain Andres Kiss for compiling one thousand hours of flying time. An honourable discharge to Major Kiss, dated September 1985. So young Andres went from being a juvenile terror in the boxing-ring to a wizard of the airways, a high-flyer. Pagan turned off the bedside lamp and stepped out of the bedroom to the darkened landing.

He was about to go inside the room that was clearly an office when he heard the front door opening and the sound of a key being tugged out of a lock, then the
chink-chink
of a chain in the palm of a hand. Frank Pagan stood very still at the top of the stairs, watching as a light was turned on in the hallway, illuminating the big man who stood in full view for only a moment before he stepped out of Pagan's vision.

Pagan held his breath. He heard water running inside a glass, then the rattle of ice-cubes, the sound of liquid being stirred. He descended slowly, quietly, watching the square of yellow light falling out of the kitchen and into the hallway. The big man's shadow appeared briefly, then was gone, and a door closed somewhere. The sun-room, Pagan thought.
He makes himself a drink, takes it to the sun-room, sits down, relaxes
.

Pagan reached the foot of the stairs, where he paused. Through an open door he could see the man sitting on a wicker sofa, his legs crossed, his head tilted back, a drink held slackly in one hand. Pagan, taking his gun from its holster, moved into the doorway that led to the glass-walled room.

The man stared at him in surprise. Ice-cubes made faint knocking sounds inside his glass.

“Don't bother to get up,” Pagan said. It was the man in the photograph, the one who'd been snapped beside Romanenko and Sundbach. Altered by time, his hair white, his body rearranged by the years, but it was undeniably the same man.

“Mikhail Kiss?” Pagan asked.

“Who wants to know?”

Pagan flashed his ID in front of the man's face. Mikhail Kiss, who had looked alarmed, seemed to relax now, reassured by Pagan's identity card.

“I thought you were, I don't know, a burglar,” he said. “I'm Kiss.”

“You left your side door open, Mr Kiss.”

Mikhail Kiss stood up, sipped his drink, smiled. “I grow careless with age, Mr Pagan. Do me a small favour. Put the gun away.”

Pagan returned the Bernardelli to his holster. “A precaution,” he said.

“Sure. I might have pulled a gun and fired on you. After all, we live in an age of guns,” Kiss remarked, still smiling, running one large hand through his white hair.

Pagan glanced a moment through the glass walls, seeing the ghostly shape of the gazebo out there in the darkness. Then he turned to look back at Mikhail Kiss, who seemed completely at ease now, and hostlike, as if he were wondering what kind of treats he could find to force upon his visitor.

Pagan had an uncomfortable moment suddenly, a light-headed sensation, a flashback to the sight of Max Klein in the burning car, and he wondered if this image was going to recur, if it was going to come into his head when he didn't want it, or enter his sleep when he didn't need nightmares. He pushed the picture from his mind and looked at Kiss, wondering if the big man had noticed his discomfort.

“You've come a long way,” Kiss said. “What can I possibly do for a man from Scotland Yard?”

Pagan needed to sit down. He moved to one of the wicker chairs. He studied Kiss's face, thinking it was good-natured, and cheerful, the face of a man who doesn't come to subterfuge easily. Where to begin? Where to make the first incision? Start with the car. Start with something simple. Go slowly at first.

“I'm trying to trace the driver of a certain Jaguar,” Pagan said.

“A Jaguar?” Mikhail Kiss asked.

“The car was leased to a company called Rikkad, of which you're the financial Vice President.”

“Rikkad,” and Kiss looked like a man ransacking his memory, a man who hears a faint bell ring at the end of a long corridor.

“Rikkad is one of your business ventures with Carl Sundbach,” Pagan said in the manner of a theatrical prompter. There was an act going on here, and Kiss had slipped into some kind of amnesiac role, but Pagan wasn't in the mood to be a gullible onlooker in the balcony.

Mikhail Kiss drained his scotch, set his empty glass down. “We've had so many business ventures, sometimes I forget,” he said. Why in the name of God was an English cop interested in the Jaguar? Only Andres ever drove it, and he'd returned it to the offices of the leasing company late that afternoon, so why was Pagan asking questions about it?

“But you remember now,” Pagan said. “And you remember the Jaguar.”

“Yes, of course, it comes back to me.”

“Did you drive it?”

Mikhail Kiss shook his head. “Too sporty for me, Mr Pagan.”

“Who used it then?”

“My nephew mostly. Andres Kiss.”

Pagan sat back in his chair, and the wicker creaked under his weight.
Andres Kiss, Superboy
. “I'd like to talk to him.”

“Unfortunately, that isn't going to be possible.”

“Why not?”

“He just left on vacation.”

“When?”

“Tonight,” Kiss said.

“Where did he go?”

Mikhail Kiss shrugged. “Europe,” he answered.

That, Pagan thought, was fucking useful information. “Where exactly?” he asked.

“He said he was touring. You know the young, Mr Pagan. They don't make plans.”

“He flew, did he?”

Mikhail Kiss nodded. He had a tight, claustrophobic feeling, and it made his chest ache. What did an English policeman want with Andres, for Christ's sake?