When the Doves Disappeared (42 page)

Tallinn, Estonian SSR, Soviet Union

I
N HIS LETTER
to Karl Andrusson, Parts had sent greetings from Mrs. Vaik, saying his wife had “always kept in touch with her.” He also mentioned how Mrs. Vaik had been delighted that Karl had used his skills and become a pilot. The reply came unusually quickly, in spite of Postal Control—it only took a few weeks. Parts was so eager to open it that he tore the Canadian stamps, and it didn’t even upset him. Karl was happy to hear about Mrs. Vaik and asked Parts to give her his address. The Andrussons’ mother had lost contact with Mrs. Vaik when she moved in with her daughter, but she’d heard rumors that her granddaughter was studying to be a bank manager at the university in Tallinn.

Parts had his confirmation—he’d been following Mrs. Vaik’s granddaughter the whole time. There was nothing else of importance in Karl’s letter, just musings about whether Mrs. Vaik missed her home province as much as he did, though there was an ocean separating him from it and she was at least living in her native country. Parts cursed himself. If he’d had any relationship with his wife, he would have known about this and wouldn’t have had to get the news by rowboat from Canada. Karl Andrusson might even have information about Roland, but Parts didn’t dare ask—he didn’t want to get the Office interested in Roland. Using a false
name, though, would arouse Karl’s suspicions, make him start asking the wrong questions. Parts popped a piece of pastilaa in his mouth and wiped his hands on his handkerchief. He let the window-rattling train pass and closed his eyes to see the pattern better, not pausing to lament that it hadn’t occurred to him to use Karl before. He’d clearly let himself be blinded by his research: a disease of the profession. The more he weighed the matter, the more improbable it seemed that the Office would have trained him and transferred him to surveillance simply by chance. His real Target was, in fact, Kask, or the Kask family, and perhaps the real goal was for Parts to apply preemptive methods to Evelin Kask or her parents, or to try to gain the girl’s confidence. Was she really such a significant target? All this trouble for one young girl—what was the larger purpose? He already had plenty of compromising material. It would probably be enough just to hint to her how easy it was to get expelled from the university, what a snap it would be to put her grandmother on a train headed for a cold country. Parts listened to himself. Confusion was one of the Office’s methods, and they had confused him, he had to admit it. If he started using the girl to hunt for Dog Ear, he had to be careful not to alert the Office. But perhaps he would take the risk and switch his interest from the Target to the girl. Just for a little while. Would anyone notice?

THE END OF
the Moskva Café operation was approaching and it lightened Comrade Parts’s mood as he melted along behind Evelin Kask when she came out of class. He looked at her with new eyes, greedily, catching her scent. A good, old-fashioned chase, though she behaved as she always had. Parts adjusted his steps to the cobblestones along Toompea, his coat dissolving into the walls, sensing his own invisibility. The length of the girl’s skirt was more modest than the others’, and she had on white Marat summer gloves that patted and tugged at her hair every third step. Her metal heels slipped on the stones and rose clumsily onto the bus, wobbling a little as she got off at a stop near the dorms. Parts kept a sufficient distance as she went into a building, letting her reach the second floor before he followed. He dug some empty pen cartridges out of his money pouch and let the line grow a bit before he got into it himself. The woman sitting behind the counter was focused intently on her work. She removed the
balls from the ends of the pens, pushed each cartridge into the machine, turned the crank, handed back the filled cartridge, and took the kopeks. The line whispered and murmured, moved forward. He didn’t see any of the students from the café. Suddenly the girl’s face tensed and she held the bag she was carrying a little farther from her body, her arm straight. A tech student came up and said hello to her, but left quickly. Parts looked around, saw the boy go out the door with the girl’s bag in his hand, and slipped out of the line, letting the boy gain a little distance and walk between the tall buildings alone, past a gigantic Dove of Peace mural to a bus stop. Parts waited for a while before joining the group of people at the stop, got on the bus last, and exited last. When the boy left the road to push his way into the bushes, Parts almost tripped over his own feet and understood his mistake—he’d lost the Target several times on this same road, but had blamed his own fatigue and overcautiousness. Only now did he realize that it hadn’t been an accident. Those skillful disappearances were a sign that the Target knew someone was following him. The Target was simply better at evasion than this boy was. This boy wasn’t careful at all; his steps were noisy, he swore as he stumbled among the thistles. Parts saw him slip into the back door of a gray house and made a note of the time. He’d already guessed that the bespectacled man who let the boy into the house was conducting illegal activities.

A child was spinning a top next to a sandbox that smelled of the neighborhood cats. The child was happy to take a ruble from him and tell him the name of the poet who lived in the house.

Parts went to the library to acquaint himself with the man’s poetry. He’d published poems in praise of the rising of the workers at just the right time and in just the same tone that Roland had cursed in the works of Dog Ear years ago. Of course, it could be a coincidence, but how many poets could there be who were mixed up in illegal dealings and used the same code name?

Tallinn, Estonian SSR, Soviet Union

T
HE FOLLOWING EVENING,
Comrade Parts dozed over coffee, truffles, and a Moscow salad in the Café Moskva. His vigilance was taxed by the late working hours and by his attempts to familiarize himself with poetry. When his chin dropped onto his chest, he straightened up and looked around. The Target’s circle was joined by a group of art students in violet caps, though some were bareheaded, and one girl wore a tooshort skirt and held her hand tight against her legs as she walked, either to pull the hem down or simply to prevent it from creeping up any farther. The cornflower-blue skirt was topped with a white blouse—he should remember to mention the nationalist colors in his report.

THE VIOLET CAPS WERE
followed by a small, dark man with hair that straggled like an unkempt woman’s and a beard that hid his features. Parts recognized him—a tasteless painter of anti-Soviet works. The Office had no doubt been alerted to the man’s activities long ago. His appearance alone, with its nod to capitalist fashion, exuded imperialism. The café’s limp-wristed pianist played his usual tunes, the long-haired painter flirted with the girls. Then one of the girls gave a little cry of
surprise that cut through the smoke like a sharp brushstroke and woke Parts from his torpor. His eyes flew open. What was that tune? Had it come out of his own head? Out of his mouth? Was he dreaming? The music still had a jazzy beat. The girls had fallen silent. A smoker at the next table forgot to flick the ash from her cigarette and it fell onto the table. The Target stood up. Parts furtively looked around. The group of students had turned toward the pianist. The woman at the next table was beaming, her hand lifted to touch the shoulder of her companion, her mouth silently moving.
Saa vabaks Eesti meri, saa vabaks Eesti pind
. Parts blinked. The music changed to a march rhythm that flowed through the pianist as he improvised, the stirring cadence slipping away and reappearing again. The woman’s lips continued their soundless song, and now the bearded man had stood up and so had the twittering girls on his arms, and soon the entire group was on its feet. Parts could hear himself gasp. He looked at his colleague at the table in the corner. He, too, was standing, his posture stiff, as if ready to leap, his gaze alert, sweeping over the dining room, meeting Parts’s eyes for a moment, and at that moment the march slowed and the bearded man and the Target opened their mouths.
Jaan sull’ truuiks surman, mu kõige armsam oled sa.…
 Parts’s colleague swept across the room like a wind, slammed the lid shut over the piano keys, stopped in front of the bearded man’s gaping mouth and, waving his arms, said something to him, and then, just as windily, left the café. His coattails brushed Parts in passing, his face splotched, his eyes slits. After he’d stomped out of the room and down the stairs, the pianist opened the piano and began playing his regular evening repertoire. The bearded man’s friends dashed to the top of the stairwell, their foreheads shining with sweat, their frenzied whispers echoing. They didn’t look around as they went, and no one looked at them, as if they’d become invisible, yet the whole room rippled like the sea before a storm. Parts had heard a few snatches of words, but he didn’t want to believe his ears. Had his colleague really gone up to the bearded man and said, “For God’s sake, be quiet! I’m with the KGB!”

IT WAS
the same pianist the next day, and the next, and Parts started to wonder if his colleague had even reported the incident. In any case,
he didn’t come back to the café—another colleague had replaced him. The bearded man stayed away, too. There was already more than enough compromising information on him. The group was obviously planning something, perhaps a student march, in which case Parts’s assignment to the Moskva would end before it happened, or right afterward. He would have to hurry if he wanted to confirm his suspicions while the group with all its tentacles was still free and easy to access.

THE POET HIMSELF
opened the door. The house was as gray as before, the man’s clothes fading into the walls as he adjusted his glasses, his eyes barely visible behind the thick lenses. Parts smiled politely and said:

“Dog Ear.”

The moment was undeniably delicious. Parts knew that the man still had a chance. The skills of a good actor, a proper defense, could save him. Parts had seen many liars in his day who could mount a wonderful deflective battle. But the man in front of him wasn’t one of them. The expression on the poet’s face collapsed like a house whose timbers have rotted away, taken down with one strategic blow of an axe.