“It’s a job, John,” Pagan said. “Think of yourself as a delivery boy. One Russian brought to Edinburgh, then hauled back to London again. And everybody’s happy.”
Downey appeared to consider this, as if he suspected a buried insult in the reference to a delivery boy. Then Downey’s face changed to a leer. “At least he’s not Irish. Is he, Frank?”
Pagan smiled in a thin way. Men like Downey, when they had the hold of a bone, never quite managed to let it go. For many months now, Downey had brought up the subject of Ireland on any pretext. It was infantile, Pagan knew, but it appeared to feed some deep, ludicrous need inside Downey’s heart. What a life Downey had to live, Pagan thought. He had his football games and the task of waxing his bloody moustache and what else – beyond making tasteless remarks at Pagan’s expense? It was a life that was difficult to imagine in its entirety. And yet not difficult, perhaps just appallingly easy. Despite himself, despite his resolve never to respond to sorry barbs, Pagan had an urge to slash back at Downey in some way – but that required an energy he hadn’t been able to find in himself lately. He was treading water, going through the motions, listless. The death of the IRA gunman had pleased some people inside the hierarchy at Scotland Yard. They could at least claim that the man known as Jig was no longer a menace. And there had been a half-hearted attempt to make Frank Pagan some kind of hero, but it was doomed to failure because it was a role Pagan didn’t have the heart for. Besides, credit for the gunman’s death – if credit was an appropriate word – had been attributed to the FBI. In the end, there had been nothing remotely heroic in the death of the Irish assassin, and it had left Frank Pagan with a sour taste in his mouth.
Now, following the dissolution of his own Irish section, he’d been doing odd jobs for months, mainly guarding visiting dignitaries from African and Commonwealth countries, or Communist tourists like Aleksis Romanenko, who came to Britain to do a little business and squeeze in some sightseeing in this quaint green land.
He stared at Downey. “As you say, John. He’s not Irish.”
Downey’s smile was like a bruise on his face. He enjoyed scoring points against Pagan, especially when Pagan failed to rise to his own defence. “Because if he was a mick, Frank, they wouldn’t let you near him with a ten-foot pole, would they?”
Pagan slid the window open a little further and rain blew into Downey’s eyes, making him mutter and blink and reach for a handkerchief in his coat pocket. Such a small triumph, Pagan thought. The trouble with a man like Downey was how he reduced you to his own idiotic level. He watched John Downey rub his face with the handkerchief. Moisture had caused the wax moustache to lose some of its glossy stiffness, and now it curled above Downey’s upper lip like a furry caterpillar.
“Sorry about that, John,” Pagan said. “I hope you brought your waxing kit with you,” and he shut the window quickly, stepping back inside the compartment. The train was already beginning to slow as it approached Waverley Station.
Romanenko looked up expectantly. “Are we there?” he asked.
“A minute or so,” Pagan replied.
“Excellent, excellent.” Romanenko stood up, clutching his briefcase to his side. He wore a very British Burberry raincoat and shoes of fine Italian leather, soft and gleaming.
“Do we see the Castle soon?” Romanenko asked.
“Very,” Danus Oates answered.
Pagan watched the platform loom up. When the train came finally to a halt, Pagan opened the door of the compartment and climbed down. Romanenko came immediately after him and almost at once John Downey fell into step beside the Russian, who was sniffing the air deeply and saying how railway stations smelled the same the world over, an observation with which Oates, whose experience of railways was minimal, readily agreed. The sullen man from the Soviet Embassy walked several feet behind the group looking this way and that, his head, reminiscent of a pumpkin, swivelling on the thick stalk of his neck.
Pagan stared the length of the platform, aware of people disembarking from the train, being met by relatives, little reunions, porters hauling baggage, mail sacks being unloaded – too much activity to follow at one time. Too many people. Pagan, who was walking about five or six feet ahead of the Russian, looked in the direction of the ticket-barrier, some twenty yards away. Beyond the gate there were more crowds. The bloody Festival, he thought. And a local soccer game into the bargain. There was no real control here. The environment wasn’t properly sealed. And that made him uneasy. But uneasiness was something that plagued him these days, a sense of groundless anxiety. He supposed it was part of his general mood, his indecision, the feeling that his life and career were a pair of bloody mongrels going nowhere in particular.
“I understand we have a car waiting outside the station,” Danus Oates said. “We’re to dine at the George Hotel, which is said to be the best in the city. The chef is preparing Tay salmon in an unusual manner in honour of your visit.”
Pagan wondered what was meant by ‘unusual’ in this case. He hoped it wasn’t going to be some nouvelle cuisine monstrosity, salmon in raspberry sauce with poached kiwi fruit. He had a sudden longing for plain old fish and chips smothered in malt vinegar and eaten out of a greasy newspaper, preferably The News of the World with its lurid tales of child-molesting vicars. He had an urge to whisk Romanenko away from any official arrangements and plunge with him into the side-streets of this city, into the dark little pubs and alleyways and courtyards, into the places where people really lived their lives. This is the way it really is, Aleksis. This is what you don’t find in the restaurant of the George Hotel.
“We must visit the Castle after we’ve eaten,” Romanenko said. The eagerness in his voice was unmistakable. He had a thing about the Castle.
“Of course,” Oates replied.
Pagan looked towards the ticket-barrier. Crowds were milling around. Loudspeaker announcements reverberated in the air. Through the station exit, some distance beyond the barrier, Pagan saw a square of rainy grey sky. A bleak Saturday afternoon in August in what he considered the most austere of European capitals. Behind him, Romanenko was staring up at the vast glass ceiling of the station.
They reached the ticket-barrier, Pagan still a few feet in front of Romanenko and the others. Which was when it happened.
When Jacob Kiviranna saw the train come to a dead halt, he was standing about six feet beyond the ticket-barrier. He took a few steps forward, pushing his way through the crowd, his hand covering the pocket that contained the gun. It was strange now how utterly detached he felt.
He watched Romanenko’s group approach the barrier. There were five in all. Romanenko was talking to a man in a camel-hair coat and pinstriped suit. On Romanenko’s left side was a well-built man with a dark moustache. In front of the Russian was a tall short-haired man in a tan suit, who moved with a watchful sense of purpose. And in the rear was the fifth man whose overcoat and haircut identified him as Russian, most likely KGB.
Kiviranna focused on Romanenko as he came through the barrier. Then he stepped closer, squeezing himself between a porter and a group of genteel elderly Scottish women with walking-sticks and umbrellas who were trying to induce the porter to carry their luggage. Kiviranna reached into his pocket and removed the Bersa, concealing it in the palm of his hand. He needed one clear shot, that was all. One clear shot at Romanenko.
Kiviranna brought the gun up. The sound of loudspeaker announcements detonated inside his head and then dissolved in a series of meaningless echoes, because he was conscious now of nothing save the short distance between his pistol and Romanenko’s face.
With an expression of horrified disbelief, Romanenko saw the gun and raised his briefcase up in front of his eyes, a futile attempt to protect himself. Kiviranna fired directly into the Russian’s heart, and as Romanenko screamed and collapsed on the ground and his briefcase slithered away from him and panicked pigeons flapped out of their roosting places in the high roof, Kiviranna turned and started to run. But the tall man in the ta
n-coloured suit, who had hesitated only a second in the aftermath of the gunfire, seized him roughly around the waist in the manner of an American football or rugby player and dragged him to the ground.
Frank Pagan, struggling with the gunman, disarming him, clamping cuffs on his wrists, was conscious of old ladies yelping and porters hurrying back and forth and the appearance of two uniformed policemen who immediately began to keep curious onlookers away – including a group of soccer fans who had apparently decided that the violence in Waverley Station was more authentic than any they might see on a soccer field. There was chaos, and that was a state of affairs Pagan did not remotely like. There was chaos and gunfire and he hadn’t been able to prevent this awful situation from happening and that galled him as much as anything.
Pagan left the handcuffed gunman face down beneath the watchful eyes of one of the uniformed policemen, then he turned to look at Romanenko, who lay flat on his back with his eyes open, as if it were not death that had paralysed him but a catatonic trance. There was a dreadful wound in Romanenko’s chest, and Danus Oates kept saying “Oh my God, my God,” as if the killing would mean a demotion for him inside the Foreign Office. John Downey, who at least knew how to behave around a murder scene, was wading into the spectators and cursing as he roughly pushed them back. It was all madness, that special kind of disorganised lunacy which surrounds any scene of blood. It was the way flies were drawn to feed and bloat themselves on a fresh carcass, and in this case the carcass was one Frank Pagan had been supposed to protect. But he’d failed and Romanenko, the ebullient Romanenko, the enthusiast, the new friend, lay dead.
You weren’t supposed to let this kind of thing happen, Pagan thought. This was going to be an easy job. The kind of work any nanny should have been able to accomplish without breaking sweat. And now suddenly it was a mess and he felt the muscles of his stomach knot. Oates, like a somnambulist, was reaching down to pick up Romanenko’s briefcase, which had fallen alongside Aleksis’s body.
The man from the Soviet Embassy, who hadn’t uttered a word all the way from London, said, “Please, the case,” and he made a move in Oates’s direction, stretching out his hand to take the briefcase away from the young Englishman.
Pagan stepped between Oates and the Russian. He seized the case from Oates and held it against his side. “It stays with me,” he said.
“On the contrary, Mr Pagan,” the Russian said in immaculate English. “It goes back to the Soviet Embassy. It may contain business documents that are the property of the Soviet Union. Private material. Confidential matters.”
“I don’t care if it contains the Five Year Plan for the whole of bloody Siberia,” Pagan said. “It stays with me. A man has been murdered and the case may contain material evidence of some kind. If it doesn’t, you’ll get it back.”
Danus Oates muttered something about the possibility of a diplomatic incident, as if there were no words more blasphemous in his entire vocabulary. Pagan gripped the briefcase fiercely.
The Russian looked at Oates. “Explain to Mr Pagan that the briefcase is Soviet property. Explain international law to him, please.”
Oates stammered. His tidy little world had collapsed all about him and he appeared unsure of everything – diplomatic protocol, international law, perhaps even his own identity. He had the expression of a man who suddenly discovers, late in life, that he’s adopted. “I’m not sure, it’s outside my province,” was what he finally blurted out. Pagan almost felt sorry for him. Good breeding and all the proper schools hadn’t prepared Danus Oates for violence, other than the kind in which pheasants were despatched by gentlemen with shotguns.
“I keep the case,” Pagan snapped. “And that’s final.”
The Russian wasn’t easily appeased. He reached towards Pagan and tried to pull the briefcase away. Pagan placed a hand upon the Russian’s shoulder and pushed him back – a moment of unseemly jostling that might quite easily have led to further violence had it not been for the fact that there were policemen everywhere now, plainclothes men from the Edinburgh Criminal Investigation Department, uniformed cops dragged away from soccer duty, sirens whining, ambulances roaring – through the rain. Pagan, clutching the briefcase to his side, was suddenly drained by events – and at the same time angered by what he saw as his own delinquency in performing a task that should have been as simple as sucking air.
A tall man with white and rather theatrical side-whiskers appeared at Pagan’s side. He introduced himself as Inspector Dalrymple of the Edinburgh CID. He had a melancholy manner and he surveyed the scene with the unhappy expression of a drama critic at an amateur performance. Pagan took out his ID and showed it to the Inspector, who looked suitably impressed.
“I wish this hadn’t happened in respectable old Edinburgh, Mr Pagan. Gives the place an awfully bad name.” He stared first at the corpse, then at the handcuffed gunman, who lay motionless on the ground. “I’ll give you a hand getting the body out of the way. The least I can do. Keep Edinburgh clean, eh? Don’t frighten the tourists. After all, this isn’t Glasgow,” and Dalrymple chuckled briefly, because Glasgow’s reputation as a rough, criminal city was something Edinburgh people never tired of gloating over.
The Inspector, stroking his copious whiskers, began to issue orders to various policemen. Ambulance men, those attendants of injury and death, had appeared with a stretcher. Pretty soon there would be nothing left, no traces of the violence that had happened in this place. Pretty soon there would be nothing but dried bloodstains and a memory of murder. Pagan watched the body of Romanenko being raised on to a stretcher with a certain finality. But nothing was final here at all and Frank Pagan knew it.
John Downey had appeared out of the crowd and stood beside him. Crow, Pagan thought.
Downey blew his nose loudly, then studied the centre of his handkerchief, grotesquely fascinated by his own effluence. “Well, Pagan,” he said, folding the handkerchief into his pocket. “This is what I’d call a fine kettle of fish.”
“One thing I always liked about you, John, is your original turn of phrase.”
Downey smiled, and it was a brutal little twist of his lips. “You’re up shit creek, Frank. Romanenko was your baby and you let him slip down the plughole with the bathwater. The Commissioner’s going to need an extra dose of the old digitalis to cope with this one, chum.”
Shit creek, Pagan thought. It was a stagnant waterway he knew intimately. He stared at Downey. There was an urge to strike out suddenly, a longing to stifle the man. He resisted the desire even as he realised that it was the first really passionate yearning he’d felt in many months. There was spirit in him yet, he thought – and despite the chaos around him it warmed his blood and it made his nerves tingle and it kicked his sluggish system into some kind of life. All this might be a mess, but it was his own to straighten out. He had become the proprietor of a bad situation, like a man who has unexpectedly inherited a house he later discovers has been condemned.
The goon from the Soviet Embassy, who had been lingering close to Pagan as if he might still get a chance to snatch the briefcase away, said, “I promise you, Pagan. Unless you hand over the case, you have not heard the last of this.”
That promise was the one thing of certainty, Pagan thought, in an uncertain state of affairs. He turned and walked back to the place where the handcuffed gunman lay motionless.
The big man who stood that same night on the ramparts of Edinburgh Castle wore a charcoal suit especially made for him by an exclusive tailor who operated out of basement premises on East 32nd Street in Manhattan. He also wore a matching fedora, pulled down rather firmly over his head. He had a craggy face dominated by a misshapen nose. It was the kind of face one sometimes saw on former boxers but the eyes were clear and had none of that dullness, that dead-dog quality, that afflicts old fighters. He was sixty years old and still muscular and hard the way he’d always been because condition was important to him. In the past, it was condition that had saved his life. He was still proud of his
body.
He removed a cigarette from a silver case and lit it with a gold Dunhill lighter on which his initials, M.K., had been engraved in a craftsman’s script. He never inhaled smoke. He blew a cloud from his mouth and looked down across rainy Edinburgh, marvelling at the damp nimbi that glowed here and there in the night and the floodlit monuments. The rain, which had been sweeping relentlessly across the city, had slowed now to little more than a drizzle and the night had a quite unexpected beauty, almost a magnificence, that touched the man.
From the distance he could hear a sound of bagpipes and although it was strange music to him, nevertheless the despair in the notes, the unfulfillable longing, moved him. Scotland was not his own country – but very little separated him from his native land. The North Sea, Scandinavia, the Baltic. It was hardly any distance at all. He felt a painful twinge of homesickness. But then he’d grown accustomed to that sensation over the years and whereas it had troubled him deeply in the past, now he was in control of it. But only up to a point, he thought. Because every so often he was still astonished by the way the sensation could creep up on him and, like some wintry vulture, claw his heart.
He crushed his cigarette underfoot. Tonight was not the night for those old predatory birds. Tonight was not the time for remembering that he hadn’t seen Estonia since 1949, when he’d been captured by Soviet forces and shipped inside an overcrowded freight car to Siberia, where he’d survived along with other Baltic freedom fighters, along with many thousands of the dispossessed – brave Latvians, valiant Lithuanians, headstrong, determined men who might have lost the battle but would one day win the war, because they had a secret weapon Stalin and all his butchers could never strip away from them. They had hatred.
He moved along the ramparts, wishing – dear God, how he wished – he was strolling along the cobblestones of Pikk Street, past Mustpeade clubhouse, through the Suur Rannavarav and down to Tallinn Harbour to look at the ships. Or passing the medieval Kiek-in-de-Kök cannon tower and the Linda statue to reach Hirve Park where he had walked hand-in-hand many times with his wife Ingrida on those summer nights in June when it seems the sun will never sink in the sky. It had become a dream to him, a dream of a dead city, a beautiful corpse bathed in pearly light.
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