The young man said, “I’ll take the chance, Carl.”
Carl Sundbach poured himself a little tea. His hand trembled. He sipped quietly, then looked over the rim of his cup at Mikhail Kiss. “I never made a bad investment before. I never lost a dollar on anything. You know why? Because I never gambled. That’s why. Except for this,” and he made a sweeping gesture. His eyes were suddenly moist. “Forgive this little display. I was remembering how you came to me years ago, Mikhail. You said you had a plan. I listened. I was the only one who believed in the chance of your success. The others – I’m thinking of Charlie Parming and Ernie Juurman, all the rest of them – they didn’t even want to know. They turned their backs on you, Mikhail. Your own countrymen, fellow patrioots, they turned their backs. Alone, I supported you. But now …”
Carl Sundbach drew the sleeve of his shirt across his face. “I wish you luck. Myself, I’m too old for a doomed adventure. I’m out.”
“Reconsider, Carl,” Mikhail Kiss said, though not with any enthusiasm. In the last analysis, Sundbach was like Charlie Panning and the others. They had all grown old badly. They spoke easily about vengeance when they’d been putting vodka away, or when they got together for reunions that were invariably boastful in the beginning then finally tearful, but when it came down to action they had no iron left in their hearts. America had made them prosperous and soft. Sundbach was a scared old man who’d gotten in over his head, that was all.
Sundbach said, “Reconsider? No. What I want is a situation I can leave with no regrets. I want Andres to drive me back to the boardwalk. Then I can get on with my life.”
Sundbach rose slowly, grabbing his raccoon coat, struggling into it. He thought how the death of Aleksis hadn’t changed a thing. Maybe there was still a chance Mikhail Kiss would come to his senses, maybe he’d be able to look at things clearly and understand that his scheme had been only a gorgeous dream. For a while, for too long, he’d believed in Kiss’s plan himself – but what was he except an old man with too much money, too much time, somebody who wasn’t listening to the way the heartbeat of the world was changing? Then he’d started to listen, he’d started to take the pulse of things, and now he understood that Kiss’s way was the way of doom. There was another way, and it didn’t involve such destruction, only patience.
He looked at Andres Kiss. “I’ll wait for you in the car.”
A few minutes after Sundbach had stepped out of the house, Mikhail Kiss and his nephew went upstairs to the room Kiss called his office. It was stacked with books and pamphlets of the kind issued by the various Baltic Independence societies in Western countries. The Committee for a Free Estonia. The World Legion of Lithuanian Liberation. The Baltic World Conference. Kiss considered all these organisations well-intentioned but powerless, feeble groups of people who did nothing more than release a flood of unwanted paper, diatribes against Russian activities in the Baltic that nobody wanted to read – petitions to the United Nations for recognition of the sovereignty of the Baltic states, telegrams to world leaders, letters to United States congressmen and Australian senators and British MPs, who sent polite supportive replies marked more by impotent indignation at the plight of the Baltic than anything honest and practical. But what did all this verbiage amount to in the end? The answer was, alas, zero.
Kiss had belonged to a number of freedom organisations in the past, but he’d always resigned from them out of a sense of frustration. Endless talk and petition-signing and the drudgery of committees served the purposes of some people – but not those of Mikhail Kiss, who was tired of how the whole Baltic tragedy had been ignored by world opinion, relegated to the backwaters of old men’s memories, a dead issue.
Did nobody care that cultures and languages were being deliberately destroyed and that a completely illegal form of government had been forced upon three nations? That the Baltic was now little more than an arsenal where the Soviets had installed a vast array of weapons and rockets? What Kiss remembered – and this was where the hurt and pain still lay – was the way the three Baltic nations had flourished in that gorgeous period between the wars, a time of economic progress and honest political experiment, of literature and art, a golden age of self-determination, a time for hope and optimism when for twenty short, brilliant years freedom, not fear, had been in people’s hearts. Gone now, all of it, down the slipstream of history.
He stared at a framed photograph on the wall. It showed him in 1974 presenting a petition to President Gerald Ford outside the White House. Ford had made a brave little speech that day about how America would always support the integrity and rights of the Baltic states, a nice speech, but one with all the significance of a munakook, a sponge cake. And then Ford had vanished inside the White House and the petition disappeared into the attaché-case of a Presidential aide, where it would lie forgotten the way all such idiotic papers did. Even then, on the day of Ford’s speech, Mikhail Kiss had already surrendered any belief he’d ever had in the usefulness of paper protests. Even on that fall afternoon he’d understood that the plan, first considered between himself and Romanenko in the middle of the 1960s, was the only possible direction to take.
Kiss moved to his desk where he sat down, picking up a paperweight in the form of a miniature Edinburgh Castle, a recent acquisition whose significance struck him as gruesome now.
“Do you trust him not to talk?” Andres Kiss asked.
Mikhail Kiss looked surprised. “What kind of question is that? If Carl wants out, we let him leave. It’s that simple.”
The young man said, “I don’t like the idea of Carl walking around with the kind of information he has.”
Kiss didn’t care for the clipped coldness in his nephew’s voice. “I’ve known him a long time. Say what you like about his faults, he can keep his mouth shut. Besides, who’s he going to talk to? The nice men at the Soviet Mission in Manhattan?”
Kiss put the small bronze castle down and looked at his nephew. He’d raised Andres from the moment he’d been born, immediately after the death of his widowed sister Augusta in childbirth. It was a responsibility for which Kiss, accustomed to a life of solitude, a life devoted to making money for himself and his Wall Street clients, wasn’t prepared. He often wondered if he’d discharged his obligation in the best way, if he’d done everything he might have to raise Andres.
He shut his eyes against the sunlight streaming into the room. He sometimes thought he’d placed too much emphasis on old stories of the Brotherhood, instilled in Andres too much of his own hatred of the Soviets. He’d told him tales of what it felt like to lie on a forest floor while Soviet warplanes bombed the place where you were hiding. He’d told sad stories about farms burning and farmers being dragged into fields and shot, about the sorrow of having to bury a dead comrade or the elation when the Brotherhood successfully destroyed a Russian convoy. He’d told him of the time he came across an abandoned farmhouse in the attic of which four small children, with piano wire round their necks, hung from the rafters and the way their blackened blood stained the floor beneath them and how he’d never managed to rid his mind of this image, which chilled him still and made his loathing of the Soviets even more intense, if that were possible.
Andres had absorbed all his uncle’s hatred of the Soviets and their system, but there were certain things he couldn’t grasp. He heard war stories and thought only of revenge. He had no insight into the spirit that had existed in the Brotherhood, no idea of the fellowship. How could he have? What could Mikhail Kiss have told him about the compassion between men, the bonds forged in the crucible of a hopeless war? How could this young man, born and raised in America, have understood the kind of camaraderie nurtured by conditions that had never existed within the United States?
Kiss thought that there was a very real sense in which he hadn’t been a good teacher because he’d failed to make the young man’s understanding complete, with the result that some element was missing from Andres’s personality, an elusive quality Kiss wanted to call ‘hea
rt’ or ‘humanity’. As a human being Andres was all angles and abrasive edges, tightly-focused, somebody whose physical beauty concealed his tough-mindedness. He had, at times, a certain charm, but there was something borrowed about it, as if he were a man trying to speak in a foreign language he hadn’t properly learned. He’d never formed close relationships with women, preferring the quick and the casual, simple encounters in dark places. He’d entered the US Air Force at the age of nineteen, ascended through the ranks with chill brilliance, a Major at the age of thirty-one who flew F-16s on NATO missions. On his thirty-second birthday he resigned his commission, because he’d drained the Air Force of all the information he needed to have. It had nothing else to offer him.
The young man’s life was an equation in which his military career was one factor, his inherited hatred of the Soviets another. An equation made in steel, Mikhail Kiss thought, durable and unchanging. It was this steel that made him important in the Brotherhood’s plan, but it was the same alloy that would prevent him from being the kind of man who loved and inspired love in others. And Mikhail Kiss felt at times a little guilty because of the way, inadvertently or otherwise, he’d moulded his nephew – not into a rounded human being, not into a person with compassion and understanding, but into the destructive instrument of the Brotherhood.
Now Kiss rose from the desk. “Carl’s waiting for you,” he said.
Andres stood in the window, and the sun made his hair gold. Although he was used to obeying his uncle, he thought Mikhail too trusting. He wanted to say that Carl shouldn’t be dismissed this way, that an old man who’d turned his back on the Brotherhood shouldn’t be allowed to walk away unconditionally – but he knew Mikhail would counter with a sentimental argument about the history he shared with Sundbach. So he didn’t argue. He never quarrelled with Mikhail. He kept his objections quietly to himself. Men like Mikhail and Carl Sundbach, with their old attachments, their facile nostalgia, made him impatient. He walked to the door, opened it, gazed across the landing towards the stairs. There he paused.
Seeing the young man’s hesitation, Mikhail Kiss said, “Trust me. Carl won’t speak to anybody.”
Andres Kiss looked about as relaxed as he ever did. He stepped out of the room, drawing the door shut behind him. He went down the stairs and out on to the porch. Sundbach sat in the passenger seat of the Jaguar. His glasses glinted in the sunlight. He turned his head impatiently and said, “What kept you? I was going to send a search-party.”
Andres Kiss moved in the direction of his car. He clenched his fists at his side as he moved, his fine hands turning an angry white colour.
Fredericksburg, Virginia
Galbraith said, “I love the way they shape the world according to how they think it ought to be. They refuse to contemplate disagreeable alternatives. Kiss and Kiss are going ahead no matter what! They want to make a statement about that diddlyshit corner of Europe the Soviets stole and half the world hasn’t heard about and the other half can only do some pooh-poohing over because it’s a goddam fait accompli anyhow. I love their dedication.”
The fat man, who wore a small acupuncture stud in his right ear – placed there only that morning by a Filipino practitioner everyone in DC swore by – reached up to rub the little globe of metal, which was said to curb the craving for food. With growing exasperation he rubbed for about thirty seconds, then dipped his hand inside a box of Black Magic chocolates by Rowntree Mackintosh, and said, “So much for the ancient healing arts of the goddam East.”
He stuffed a chocolate into his mouth, then he reached out to the tape-recorder and rewound the reel to the part where Andres Kiss could be heard to say It’s not a dream for me, Carl.
“There,” Galbraith said. “That’s probably my favourite part. You can hear the kid gloat when he says that. His voice practically drips. Frankly, I’m glad Sundbach dropped out. I was never convinced he had the right stuff. A little too fond of the cherry brandy. I always felt he’d come undone eventually.”
Iverson, seated beneath the banks of video consoles, heard old Carl say I don’t like the feeling of putting my goddam head under a guillotine. The meetings in the house in Glen Cove had been taped for more than a year now, and Galbraith had come to regard them as regular Sunday afternoon listening.
“Does he worry you, Gary?” Galbraith asked.
“Sundbach?” Iverson frowned, gave a little shrug.
Galbraith nodded. This morning he was dressed in a dark suit instead of the robes he usually favoured. He wore a blue carnation in his lapel. “He worries young Andres. You can tell that much.”
“Andres worries about everything, sir,” Iverson said. “When he was in the Air Force he worried about making the grade. Nothing was more important to him than learning to fly. He spent more hours in an F-16 simulator than any man in the history of the Force. He worried about his physical exams. He worried about his eyesight. The clue to Andres is his compulsive personality. He’s a perfectionist.”
“Which is why we have him,” Galbraith said. He had discovered one of his favourite chocolates, a dimpled, strawberry-centred rectangle that he popped into his mouth before closing the box and shoving it across the glass-topped table. At least he was trying. “The trouble is, Sundbach worries me. I don’t like the idea of the old fellow walking out at this stage of the game.”
Galbraith killed the tape-recorder just as Mikhail Kiss was saying, Trust me. Carl won’t speak to anybody. He wandered around the room for a while. Iverson watched him. For a fat man he moved smoothly, seeming to glide at times, like a hydrofoil on a cushion of air. He finally returned to the sofa where he sat down, glanced at his watch.
“I have an afternoon tea affair on the roof in about five minutes, Gary. Do we have anything to discuss before I leave?”
Iverson took out a small notebook, flipped the pages. “One, there’s nothing new from London. A cop called Frank Pagan’s in charge of the affair, but I haven’t heard anything more.”
Galbraith said, “Keep on that one just the same.”
Iverson said, “Two. I don’t have anything new on Jacob Kiviranna except for sketchy details. Where he went to school, where he was born, the fact he spent a couple of years in jail for offences ranging from public nuisance to aggravated assault. We should know more any moment.”
“Aggravated assault? That’s promising. I think we need to know if Vabadus’s killer was a psycho or something else. So keep pressing on that one. Make sure any information we get on Kiviranna reaches Scotland Yard too. It ought to keep this Pagan busy around the edges of things in the meantime. Clear the material with me first, though, won’t you?” Galbraith stood up. “We might also do ourselves a small favour by keeping an eye on Carl Sundbach. I’m only thinking aloud now, you understand, but I’m also wondering if it might be necessary to do a dark deed where Sundbach’s concerned. Call it a feasibility study, that’s all. I don’t want you coming in here with blood on your hands, Gary.”
Galbraith looked thoughtful. Ever since a DIA employee – they were never known to Galbraith as agents, a term he considered theatrical – had been apprehended last year carrying a case containing one point three million dollars into Cuba, money earmarked for certain persons who were anxious to see Fidel unseated and who needed weaponry, ever since this embarrassing little fiasco had been hinted at in a variety of newspapers and periodicals, Galbraith had become hypercautious and overprotective when it came to his department of the agency. He had devised a new policy, which was to use only outsiders, if possible, when it came to the truly dirty deeds. Doing something nefarious wasn’t the problem. Being found out was.
“You might want to probe Andres,” Galbraith said. “You might want to take his temperature, see if he really thinks Sundbach’s a danger. After all, we don’t want to jump in and do something irrevocable if the old fellow’s simply harmless, do we?”
Iverson agreed.
On his way to the door, Galbraith stopped. “Do you think Andres ever suspects anything?�
�� he asked.
Iverson considered this, then shook his head firmly. “I really don’t think he’s gifted in the area of peripheral vision, sir.”
Galbraith looked thoughtful a moment. He stroked his little acupuncture stud and said, “The one thing I wish is that these Balts weren’t so goddam sentimental. It’s the only problem I have with them. I was never very happy with the sealed envelope business and the poem. To them it’s like some holy relic. To me it’s unadulterated nostalgia and inefficient to boot. I can see the Brotherhood getting off on using their old call sign – but I keep thinking it would have been so much more damn simple if Romanenko had just telephoned Kiss when they were both in London.” Here Galbraith stared morosely at the chocolate box, his expression that of an addict pondering a cure. “Still, who am I to interfere with the rituals of men whose purpose I support and admire wholeheartedly? If that’s the way they felt they had to do things, who am I to criticise their habits, Gary? Anyhow, I hate to give you the impression I’m ungrateful to the Baits, because that’s far from the truth. On the contrary, I regard their cause as sacred. Without it, where would White Light be?”
Galbraith, smiling, climbed out of the basement. The effort made him short of breath. He rode in the private lift to the roof, which had been transformed into a garden, surrounded on all sides by bulletproof glass. Three satellite dishes scanned the skies silently. There was a view of the countryside around Fredericksburg, a secretive, green landscape. Galbraith walked to the centre of the roof, pushing aside a variety of shrubs and flowers – dense, spreading acacia, red bougainvillaea, dwarf pomegranate bearing inedible dwarf fruit, bromeliads. It was all a little too much, Galbraith thought. When he’d asked for a garden up here, some greenery to give the roof aesthetic appeal, he hadn’t taken into consideration the ego of the gardener, a man who considered himself no mere potter of shrub and fern but a ‘landscape architect’. It had become a world in which ratcatchers were rodent-control agents, and plumbers sanitation consultants.
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