“It’s a goddam stupid idea,” Andres said. “Nothing’s going to be cancelled. No way, Carl. Not now.”
“A terrible thing happened in Scotland. A man is dead, for God’s sake.”
“I know, Carl. I just got back from Edinburgh. Remember?” Andres was always made impatient by Sundbach. It was tough to practise the composure Mikhail Kiss advocated. Give him respect, Andres. He’s an old man now, but he used to be a real fighter. Andres forced his mouth into a smile, which brightened his handsomely sullen face. He looked quite angelic right then, the cherubic boy who’d been the joy of the boardwalk as a baby, clucked over by babushkas, stroked by teenage girls overwhelmed that anything could be so beautiful, a golden little heartbreaker who always held on tightly to Uncle Mikhail’s hand.
“We didn’t reckon on murder, Andres.” Carl Sundbach, whose raccoon coat reeked of mothballs, peered in the direction of the window where he could make out, barely, the old gilt letters on the glass. Some of the letters were missing now, scratched out by weather and vandals. Brook yns Best H t Dogs. Roo Beer. Once, he’d fantasised about reopening his shop when the boardwalk returned to its former glory, but in recent years he’d become disenchanted. It wasn’t going to happen. Now now. Not ever. All the good days were gone. What you had now were kids guzzling beer and humping under the boardwalk, leaving their battered cans and discarded condoms, which looked like hollowed-out snails, all over the place.
Nevertheless, he kept this place, and he came here sometimes, usually on Sundays when Andres picked him up, riding by train all the way down from Manhattan, where he had a rent-controlled apartment on the lower East side. He’d sit in the space behind the refrigerator and he’d reminisce about the days when Sundbach’s had been a going concern and sometimes he even imagined he heard the ringing of the cash-register.
Sundbach shivered. He was perpetually cold, even in sunlight. Andres went to the door and opened it, glad of the sea air. He clutched the old man’s spindly elbow as they moved along the boardwalk. Every now and then Carl would nod his head at an acquaintance or he’d tip his ancient hat at a passing female who caught his eye. He still fancied himself something of a lady’s man, a seelikukütt, a hunter of skirts.
They walked slowly to the side-street where Andres had parked his Jaguar. He opened the passenger door for Carl Sundbach and watched him climb in.
“You ought to drive an American car,” the old man said when Andres had the Jaguar going along Brighton Beach Avenue, past the Russian delicatessens and the pharmacies and under the shadow of the El. “The English don’t know how to make cars no more.”
It was always this way. Always the complaints, always something to whine about. Andres glanced at the front of the Black Sea Bookstore where a couple of guys leaned against their bicycles and argued. Politics, Andres thought. What else would they argue around here? He was of the opinion that such arguments were finally pointless. Talk achieved nothing. What you really needed was another kind of vocabulary – one of action.
Andres rolled his window down. The stench of camphor was clogging his nostrils.
Sundbach said, “I had a British car, a Rover, in Tallinn. Before the Russians came into the Baltic. After the tiblad arrived, you couldn’t get parts. You couldn’t get gasoline. The English knew how to build cars in those days. I must have driven that Rover thousands of miles. Kahula to Narva. Tartu. Mu jumal, Tartu was beautiful then.” Sundbach sighed. “I used to have this feeling I’d see the old country again one day. Now,” and he made a small fluttering gesture with his hand, “I know better.”
Carl Sundbach could go on and on, rambling, reminiscing. Pretty soon he’d be remembering the time he ate the rancid heeringas hapukoorega – herring with sour cream – at a roadside restaurant in Jogeva and came down with food-poisoning bad enough to kill a dozen weaker men, or the day the Brotherhood blew up a Soviet munitions dump outside Haapsalu in 1949. He had one of those memories that resurrect every small detail of the past, every trifle, the kind of clouds that were in the sky on such and such a day or the colour of a guy’s eyes. When he told a story, Carl Sundbach digressed encyclopaedically, feasting on a sumptuous banquet of recollections.
What the hell, Andres Kiss thought, when you’d hauled yourself up from being a poor Baltic immigrant to one of the wealthiest men in the state, when you owned a chain of motels and fast-food restaurants, when you had property all over Brighton Beach, maybe you deserved the luxury of indulgent nostalgia. Andres had often heard the story of Carl’s financial success, the sheer toughness involved, the ambition, the way business enemies had been bulldozed. There was still this suggestion of flint to the old man.
Andres said, “You’ll see it again, Carl.”
Sundbach shook his head. “I’m trying to be a realist, boy.”
“You sound more like a defeatist.”
“There’s a difference?” Sundbach asked.
The younger man never tried to answer Carl’s rhetorical questions. He took the Jaguar on to the Interborough Parkway, heading out to the Island. He stared through the window at a sign for the Harry S. Truman Expressway. Overhead, in a cloudless, sunny sky, a small silvery twin-engined Piper flashed. Andres Kiss, filled with a longing to be up there at the controls of the craft, watched it until it went out of sight.
He took a pair of dark shades from the visor, where they’d been clipped in place. He put them on. He liked the way the sun was dulled now. Too much unfiltered brightness could damage your eyes. When he’d been in the Air Force he’d known men who were grounded because of poor eyesight. Andres wasn’t going to run the risk of hurting his vision because there wasn’t a thing in the world like soaring up there – not sex, not drugs, nothing. It was undiluted freedom when you were twenty or thirty thousand feet high and rolling through cloudbanks. What thrilled him was the idea of defying gravity, of being suspended in a frail craft that could, if the engine stalled, come crashing down through space. And sometimes, as if he were locked in a delicious place between life and death, Andres imagined that fall and was fascinated by the prospect. To smack the earth at eight hundred miles per hour seemed to him an appropriate way to check out, the flyer’s way.
In Glen Cove he travelled leafy back roads until he reached the house, which occupied several acres of prime Long Island real estate. Grey and huge, with turrets and cupolas, and a lawn so immaculate it might have been groomed by a hairdresser, it was situated at the end of a gravel driveway. He parked the Jaguar alongside a black Mercedes. Then he opened the door of his car and looked up at the front of the house. A lime-green awning hung over the porch. Sundbach, who’d dozed for much of the journey the way he usually did, opened his eyes.
“We’re here?” he asked hoarsely.
“We’re here,” Andres Kiss replied.
In the sun-room at the back of the house, where glass walls overlooked prolific rose gardens that blazed with colour, Mikhail Kiss poured tea from a silver pot into dainty china cups. His big hands made the china seem like something plundered out of a doll’s house but he poured almost tenderly, a man engrossed in a ritual he respects.
He looked up when Carl Sundbach and Andres came into the room. He thought of the contrast between the young man and the old warrior, the present and the past, strength and frailty. It was important to remember how closely linked past and present were, how much they owed to each other. Without that sense of history, everything they were involved in, everything they’d planned, would be no more than an act of vandalism, a mindless terrorism of the kind that so appalled him.
Carl Sundbach reached for a tea-cup, poured a shot of cognac into it, and sniffed the steam. Andres, declining the offer of tea, stared out into the garden. Through the open doorway a faint gust of wind blew the seductive scent of roses into the room.
Mikhail Kiss, who believed in coming straight to the point, asked, “This tragic event in Edinburgh – is it going to influence us?”
Carl Sundbach made a windy little noise of surprise. “You h
ave a habit of asking questions in the wrong order. What you’re asking now isn’t what I’d ask myself first. The most important question is obvious. Why was Romanenko killed? Then comes the next question. Who shot him?”
Mikhail Kiss, weary after the long sleepless flight back from Britain, regarded Sundbach’s questions as irrelevant. But Carl had poured thousands of dollars into this whole affair and felt he’d purchased the right to ask any questions he wanted.
“Your priorities are wrong, Carl,” he said.
“My priorities are wrong?” Sundbach asked. “Tell me, tell me how you figure that.”
“Carl, does it make any difference who killed Aleksis, or why? It was probably some dangerous oddball with a crazy notion and a gun. What would you have me do? Stop everything? Send out messages saying everything has to be halted? Have you any idea how complicated that would be?”
“I hate complicated,” Carl Sundbach said. “Give me simple every time.”
“Nothing’s simple,” Mikhail Kiss said. “All this has taken a very long time to stitch together, and I can’t undo the whole embroidery now, even if I wanted to.”
Sundbach took off his raccoon coat. His concave chest gave the impression of a man in the throes of malnutrition. He was sweating slightly. “Suppose this killer knew what Aleksis was up to. Let’s say this killer knew everything there is to know. Imagine that. Just try. Tell me you don’t see the consequences.”
Mikhail Kiss said, “Only a scared man worries about consequences he can’t possibly predict, Carl.”
“One thing I hate is a man sounds like he just read a fortune-cookie,” Sundbach replied. “This is my point – if Aleksis was killed, then it was because somebody knew what he was involved in. Which makes it likely the whole damn scheme’s blown. Forgive me, but that’s too risky for me. This was supposed to be a big secret – but I told you all along it was too complicated to keep quiet. I kept saying. Make it simple. Short and simple. No, you knew better, didn’t you? You had to have grand plans.”
Mikhail Kiss stood up and looked out into the garden, turning his back to the room. The way sunlight struck roses always touched him. He remembered how Aleksis Romanenko had been proud of his flower garden around his house on the bank of the Pirita River. My peasant instincts, Aleksis used to say. If I don’t grow things I betray my heart and I die a little – the theatrical kind of thing Aleksis was given to saying.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s both Kiss and Romanenko had been active in the armed struggle against the Russians in the Baltic. There had been some of the predictable differences between two strong-willed men locked in a useless struggle, but they had common bonds – a passion for the land, and a profound attachment to the Brotherhood of the Forest.
Kiss remembered how, during the cold spring of 1951, Aleksis had planted marigold seeds on a wooded hillside north of Kuusiku. Grubby, lice-ridden, undernourished, facing the prospect of annihilation at the hands of Soviet patrols, Aleksis had planted his precious seeds with all the poignant care of a man who expects eventually to see the flowers grow. He also remembered Carl Sundbach, at that time a gaunt man in his late thirties, saying that if seeds could grow to be rifles, he’d be sowing them himself day and night. But since war was not a horticultural event, why bother?
Derision hadn’t fazed Aleksis. It was almost as if he’d wanted to bring some flourish of his own, some form of hope, into a situation of despair. And it had been despair, because daily the Russians were burning farms and shooting farmers who’d supported the fight of the Brotherhood. And they’d been increasing the ferocity of their patrols, pouring more men and more arms into the fight so that the only possible outcome for the Brotherhood was starvation and defeat. In the midst of this turmoil Romanenko had planted his seeds, an act of optimism and grace that Mikhail Kiss remembered, all these years later, with great clarity.
It was odd to think of Aleksis dead now. It was like trying to imagine the inside of a vacuum. He had been closer to Aleksis than to any other member of the old Brotherhood. And now another memory touched him, and his eyes moistened, and he felt a tightness at the back of his throat. He remembered the Kalevipoeg and how, on the day when they’d parted company, when their cell had disbanded – hungry, lacking weapons, crushed by a weariness no amount of courage could overcome, numbed by an impossible struggle – he’d given Romanenko a handwritten sheet of paper with four lines of verse on it, written in Livonian, a Finno-Ugric language Kiss had once studied as a student at the university in Tartu. A secret souvenir of a doomed freemasonry, a reminder in an almost extinct tongue, a cryptic memento of a struggle that was dying around them.
When we rise again, Aleksis had said, this paper will be the one true sign. And so Romanenko had kept the sheet for years, more a symbol of a resurrection than a souvenir of a lost cause. It was this same paper that Kiss was supposed to receive on the ramparts of Edinburgh Castle on the night of Aleksis’s death – the same four lines of the old patriotic poem that would indicate the time had come for the re-birth. It was a seal to be embossed on the plan, a guarantee from Romanenko that everything was finally in place for the assault, an imprimatur.
Now Kiss recalled the cold shock, the grief, of hearing about Romanenko’s murder on British television and the sudden dilemma the murder posed. To proceed or – as Carl Sundbach was advocating – to forget the whole thing. His first reaction had been to abort, but then he knew that if he were to cancel the operation now, he’d live the rest of his life with regret – and what was more appalling than sinking embittered into old age? The architecture of the scheme was too careful, too intricate and lovely, for it to be shelved and forgotten.
He barely listened to the way Sundbach was whining. Carl’s trouble was simple. He’d used up all his guts and stamina in his drive to become rich in America. And with riches had come a cautious, conservative way of looking at things.
Kiss looked at Carl who was going on about this grandiose – pronounced grandyoose – plan, wondering aloud why he’d gone along with it in the first place, pouring in money, then more money, and still more money, greasing palms and arranging passports for those who’d have to find a way of fleeing the Soviet Union after the event. Why wouldn’t a simple assassination have been enough? Why hadn’t they just decided to kill somebody, some Russian high-up, and been content with that? Depleted, finally speechless, Sundbach wiped flecks of spit from the corners of his mouth.
Kiss, who had invested money of his own in the scheme, who had spent freely on arms, money he’d earned on the stock markets of the world, said, “Assassinations mean nothing these days. Any crackpot with a gun can go out and shoot anybody he likes. They don’t even make the front-page, for God’s sake. Never at any time did we seriously consider assassination.”
Sundbach clasped his skinny white hands on the surface of the table. “Listen, if you go ahead now, if you ignore the danger signs, you might be signing the death warrants of everybody involved, including our friends inside the Soviet Union and maybe even ourselves if those KGB scum at the Russian mission also learn about us.”
In a quiet voice, one of restrained impatience, Andres Kiss said, “What Mikhail’s saying is that the game is too far along for anything to be changed. All the pieces are in position. Everything is ready. And if we go with the plan, we have to go now. Otherwise, forget it.”
Carl Sundbach said, “I disagree, Andres. The pieces are not all in position. There is one vital piece we don’t have and we all know what that is. I’m talking about Romanenko. I’m talking about the very big fact that we don’t know if Romanenko was going to tell us to play our hand or throw in our cards. And since we don’t know this, it’s my opinion we take the loss. All the wasted time. We say it was quite an experience, quite a dream, and we back away.”
Andres Kiss smiled his most brilliant smile. “It’s not a dream for me, Carl,” he said. And it wasn’t. He had anticipated the conclusion of the scheme so many times that it had come to have something of the texture
of an event already past, already history. In a sense, Andres Kiss had lived his own future.
Sundbach fingered the string to which his eyeglasses were attached. “I say we get out now. If it fails, too many people may die. Listen to me. Maybe Aleksis was going to tell us to wash our hands of the whole business. Maybe he was going to tell us that something had gone wrong. How can we know anything for sure?”
Andres Kiss stood up. “It’s a pity you’re not a gambling man, Carl. Then you’d realise there’s a fifty-fifty chance Aleksis was going to give us the okay to proceed.”
“And you’d take that chance?” Sundbach asked.
Andres nodded confidently. “I’d take it.”
Sundbach looked at Mikhail Kiss. “And you?”
“Without hesitation,” Kiss replied.
“You’re both crazy,” Sundbach said. “Both hullud. What is it with you pair? You both in love with tragedy? Personally, I don’t like the feeling of putting my goddam head under a guillotine. I figure suicide isn’t one of my options. And I don’t want to be responsible for the deaths of other people either.”
There was an awkward silence in the room. Then Sundbach sighed. It was an old man’s sigh, filled with sorrow and disbelief. He stared out into the roses, thinking how their bright colours seemed suddenly gloomy, like flowers round a sick-bed when the patient is terminal. He had the feeling his was the only voice of reason here.
“So,” Sundbach said. “This is the way it goes. Aleksis is dead in Scotland, you don’t know who killed him, you don’t know if he was carrying the message, but you’re going ahead anyway.”
Neither Mikhail Kiss nor his nephew said anything. Their silence was eloquent, and united, a combination against which Sundbach couldn’t compete.
Sundbach put out one thin hand and laid it on the back of Andres Kiss’s wrist. “What if they’re waiting for you? Bang! You fall out of the sky. No more Andres Kiss.”
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