Mazurka

by Campbell Armstrong

  In the centre of the roof a table had been set up for afternoon tea in the English style. Silver teapot, china plates, scones and assorted jams, small cucumber sandwiches. Two men in dark suits sat at the table. One was Senator Crowe, a Texan, the other Senator Holly from Iowa, both senior members of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. John Crowe had been in Washington so long that it was said he’d been consulted on the original plan for the White House. He was an emaciated man with the demeanour of an undertaker. His face, which consisted of hundreds of tiny squares of wrinkled flesh, a parchment patchwork, always made Galbraith think of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Holly, on the other hand, was younger, pot-bellied, a man with a smile that apparently left his face only when he slept. Galbraith thought of him as Jolly Holly, even thought there was something vaguely sinister in the fixed grin.

  “These sandwiches have no damned crusts,” John Crowe snarled in the throaty voice that made him famous and widely impersonated.

  Galbraith sat down, thinking how Crowe always had a vaguely depressing effect on him. Access to the kind of power Crowe had – in the intelligence community, the Foreign Relations Committee, and the Senate Committee on Military Expenditure – had made him a grave, gloomy figure, and wraithlike. He reminded Galbraith of a satirical, spectral version he’d seen of the figure of Uncle Sam in a rabid left-wing movie on the Vietnam War some years ago.

  “It’s an English affectation,” Galbraith said.

  Crowe, nodding his head in acknowledgement of this information, put his sandwich back on his plate as Galbraith poured tea. Galbraith noticed there was a slight tremor over the old fellow’s upper lip and a waxiness to Crowe’s complexion, as if he’d been dipped in a melted candle.

  Senator Joseph Holly picked up a knife, neatly dissected a scone and opened it. He spread the surface of one of the halves with Dundee marmalade. When he spoke he did so in a nasal manner, his voice seeming to emerge from the cavities behind his eyes. “So this is where the taxpayer’s money goes,” he said.

  “This is window-dressing,” Galbraith replied. “Where the money really goes is elsewhere, Senator.”

  Holly kept on smiling. “You spooks know how to spend.”

  “Keeping the world safe for democracy is no Macy’s basement, gentlemen,” Galbraith said in a cordial way. He hated fiscal matters, pennypinching, keeping accounts, all the tedious chores involved in his relationship with official Washington.

  John Crowe said, “The cost is goddam high, and getting higher.”

  “By the minute,” Galbraith agreed cheerfully.

  Joseph Holly ate a small mouthful of scone. A bee floated close to the open jar of marmalade and the Senator swatted it away. It promptly returned, clinging to the underside of Holly’s saucer. Holly asked, “Are we being recorded right now?”

  “This is the one place where I don’t allow recordings,” Galbraith replied. It was true that he wasn’t taping any of this conversation. He might have done so by activating a small button located on the underside of the table. But this wasn’t the kind of talk Galbraith wanted to have any record of – quite the opposite.

  “Good,” Holly said. “Senator Crowe and myself – we’re not interfering, keep that in mind, Galbraith – we want to know if this operation is still go on the scheduled date. We hadn’t heard from you –”

  “ – And I consider your silence arrogant, Galbraith,” Crowe said. “You don’t bite the goddam hand that feeds you. You don’t misinterpret the freedom we give you as a goddam licence to do whatever the hell you like. You keep us posted, for Christ’s sake.”

  Galbraith raised his eyebrows. “I can only plead pressures of office. No excuse, I know, gentlemen.” He twiddled his fingers and watched the slow movement of the satellite dishes. He understood Crowe and Holly had come down to Fredericksburg to throw a little weight around because they’d been pressured by their allies – a group that included two generals, three congressmen, and a smattering of anonymous industrialists – to find out what the hell was going on. Besides, Crowe was the nominal Director of the DIA and Holly his titular assistant, although neither man was involved in the daily business of the agency.

  Was the bird going to fly? That was the question they wanted answered. That was why they were really here in Fredericksburg. Galbraith smiled. He looked plumply reassuring. “Senators, everything is going according to schedule. There are no snags, no snafus, no unexpected scenarios. The clockwork ticks even as we sit here surrounded by all this pleasing greenery.”

  Crowe leaned across the table, blocking the sunlight. “I’m happy to hear you say that, Galbraith. I’m very happy. I haven’t been sleeping lately. Worry, I guess. I liked the world the way it was, Galbraith. I liked the old world better. The way things are going now …” Crowe didn’t sustain his line of thought. He faded out into a dark silence, his mottled fingers playing with a disc of cucumber that had fallen out of his sandwich.

  Galbraith said, “We all liked that world better, Senator. It had a certain predictability about it, which was extremely comforting.”

  “It surely was,” Holly said.

  “And well-balanced,” Galbraith added.

  Crowe suddenly picked up his unfinished thought and added, “We’re going to hell in a goddam handbasket. That’s where we’re headed.”

  Galbraith watched the bee slide out from under Senator Holly’s saucer. He said, “I think that trip to hell is something we intend to stop, Senator Crowe.”

  John Crowe raised his waxy face. Galbraith noticed a film of membranous material covering one of the old man’s eyes.

  Crowe said, “One of the problems is the quality of the people these days. Men who aren’t big enough for their jobs. Dwarves and midgets, Galbraith.”

  Galbraith made a sound of agreement.

  Crowe went on, “And I’m not just talking about Washington, no sir. I’m talking about the other side as well. I’m talking about how difficult it is to replace a Brezhnev. Even an Andropov. When we had the Chernenko interregnum I really thought we were in hog heaven. And Christ, we had such goddam high hopes for Vladimir Greshko until he fell ill and they gave him the boot. He was a mean sonofabitch and you couldn’t trust him further than you could spit, but he knew his goddam place. I’ll tell you this, if he was running the show over there we’d be in a damn sight better position. All this hanky-panky we get nowadays wouldn’t be going on. Greshko never had the time for that bullshit.”

  Galbraith plucked a gooseberry-tart from a plate and nibbled it. Its sourness made him wrinkle his face a moment. He said, “What I liked about Greshko was how you couldn’t trust him, but you could always count on him.”

  “Damn right,” Crowe said. “How is the old bastard anyhow?”

  “Alive, so I believe,” Galbraith replied.

  Neither Crowe nor Holly needed to know more than that. The secret of success as Galbraith perceived it lay in controlling the spigot of information, knowing how much to release, how much to hold back. When it came to politicians, who traded in the currency of gossip, you withheld the maximum amount possible and doled out a mere trickle. You slaked a thirst, you didn’t release a flood.

  Galbraith finished his tea, wiped his fingers in the folds of his napkin. “I think we can safely say, Senators, that the status quo will be restored before the week is out.”

  Crowe looked happy. Holly smiled his unchanging smile – at least until he stood upright suddenly and slapped the palm of his hand upon his neck.

  “Shit,” Holly exclaimed. There was a squashed bee, still living, fluttering, in the dead centre of his hand. “Bastard stung me.”

  Galbraith clucked sympathetically. “At least you have the certain pleasure of knowing your assailant is mortally wounded, Senator. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if politics worked with such admirable symmetry?”

  9

  London

  Danus Oates lived alone in a three-room flat in Knightsbridge, not far from Sloane Square. The other tenants of the house were a pair of
elderly sisters, both quite mad, who kept macaws in enormous cages, and a retired coffee plantation manager from Kenya whose face had the texture of cowhide left too long in direct sunlight. It was a quiet house and Oates moved about it with stealthy consideration. He was well-bred and well-mannered and, until the horror yesterday in Edinburgh, had always considered his life rather humdrum. He had a future in the Foreign Service, so he was told, and he hoped one day to emulate his father – Sir Geoffrey Oates, Her Majesty’s Ambassador to Norway. Like many patriotic men dedicated to public service, he was neither greatly ambitious nor overwhelmingly imaginative, but he was pleased, in a general kind of way, with his existence.

  His one extraordinary talent was for languages, which came to him with an ease that was inexplicable, all the more so since there was no history of this affinity in his lineage. He spoke not only the usual languages of commerce and diplomacy – French, German, Russian – but he had an excellent knowledge of Greek (ancient and modern), Spanish, Italian and Swedish. He could read and speak two of the three Baltic languages – Estonian and Latvian (in its Upper dialect) – and he understood to a useful degree some of the arcane forms associated with them, Livonian and Low German. He had a smattering of the Carpathian dialect of Ukrainian, more than adequate Hungarian, and he was fluent in Moldavian, which was really a version of Rumanian. He was presently teaching himself Ottoman Turkish, or Osmanli, from cassette tapes provided by the Foreign Office Library. Quite often Oates dreamed in foreign tongues.

  Because he’d spent hours translating the Livonian material at Scotland Yard, he hadn’t returned to his apartment until six a.m. that Sunday morning. He’d been made groggy too by the twenty milligrams of Valium he’d taken in an attempt to restore his ruined nerves. Consequently, he fell into a sound sleep as soon as his head hit the pillow, and he dreamed for an odd reason of the Estonian word for ‘potato’ in some of its various grammatical cases. Kartul meant potato, but because prepositions in Estonian were suffixes, kartuli meant ‘of the potato’ and kartuliga meant ‘with the potato’ and kartulil ‘on the potato’. His long sleep and his strange dream of kartulid – potatoes, plural – was interrupted at approximately four o’clock in the afternoon by a hand clamped over his mouth.

  Oates woke abruptly, and found himself looking up into a kindly face, that of a man who might generously toss coins in the cup of a blind beggar. Oates couldn’t breathe because the hand was forced very hard over his lips. His sleepy mind, shocked into alertness, considered a number of possibilities. He was being burgled. Or he was about to be raped. Or this intruder with the gentle face was in reality a madman who’d slit his throat any second with a razor.

  Oates kicked at the bedsheets and tried to twist his head away, but the older man was astonishingly strong.

  “The rules are simple, Mr Oates. I ask some questions. You answer them honestly. You understand?”

  Oates blinked his eyes furiously. The stranger took his hand away and Oates sucked air into his lungs. With the return of oxygen to his brain came a defiant urge. After all, what the hell was this chap doing in Oates’s flat? What gave him the bloody right to come stealing inside another fellow’s bedroom? Oates, who wore black and red striped pyjamas, a present last Christmas from his fiancée Fiona, stepped out of bed, brushing past the intruder.

  “Where are you going?” the stranger asked in his accented English.

  Oates didn’t answer, just kept moving. He was thinking of the telephone in the corner of the bedroom. Calling the gendarmes. Getting some law and order established around here. He’d almost reached the phone when he felt it – a searing pain between his shoulderblades. It rocked his spine, settled somewhere in the middle of his skull like a small glowing coal. He collapsed on the floor and moaned. He looked up at the man, who stood directly over him, shaking his head in a gesture of regret.

  “Take me seriously, Mr Oates. Don’t force me to strike you again.”

  Danus Oates moved his head very slightly. The idea of violence terrified him. He stammered the way he’d always done when he’d been a schoolboy at Harrow and an object of cruel fun. “What d-d-do you want?”

  “Your cooperation,” the stranger said. He squatted beside Oates, who felt paralysed, though whether through fear or because the intruder had struck some vital nerve centre he couldn’t tell.

  “I believe you may have done some translating, Mr Oates.”

  That bloody Livonian stuff! So that’s what all this was about! Oates was a little relieved to discover that the fellow wasn’t an escaped lunatic after all. But only a little. He looked up into the sympathetic brown eyes, the concerned expression.

  “What precisely was it you translated?”

  “Business d-documents, some business c-c-c-correspondence.”

  “Is that all?”

  “There was also a p-poem,” Oates said. He saw no harm in admitting this. After all, he was a budding diplomat, and if this was all some kind of cloak and dagger nonsense he wanted no part of it.

  “Tell me about it, Mr Oates.”

  Oates felt a little surge of security. He was on familiar ground now. “There were four lines of verse,” he said. “They were written in a form of Livonian, which is rather obscure. Do you know anything about that language?”

  The intruder shook his head. “I don’t have time for an academic discourse, Mr Oates. The contents of the poem, please. That’s all I ask.”

  Oates said, “I’m simply trying to tell you the poem was written in a language few people speak any more. There were one or two words of modern Estonian mixed in, but mainly the vocabulary was Livonian. So far as I can gather, the poem referred to somebody called Kalev who apparently has the ability to bring joy to Estonia.”

  “Kalev?”

  Oates nodded. He struggled into a sitting position. The pain had diffused itself, and was no longer centralised, but had broken into little tributaries that flickered along his nerve-endings. He rubbed his arms, which for some reason tingled.

  “In your opinion was the verse some form of code?”

  “Code?” Oates blinked. “That sort of thing is really rather outside my province.”

  “This poem wasn’t returned to the Soviet Embassy by Scotland Yard. Do you know why?”

  Oates, remembering how the strange lines of verse had so intrigued the Commissioner, shook his head. “I’m no expert on how Scotland Yard works.”

  The man pinched the bridge of his nose a moment, sighing as he did so. “Does Frank Pagan have the poem in his possession?”

  Danus Oates said he presumed so except he couldn’t be sure, all he’d done was to translate the material, then pass it back to the Commissioner, who would have assigned it to Pagan. He thought the Commissioner wouldn’t have given it to anyone else because Burr had said he didn’t want the existence of the poem bruited about, so the circle of those who knew about the verse was probably very small. But, good Christ, Oates didn’t know anything for certain – he hadn’t even understood the damned poem, he said. In fact he wished he’d never been in Edinburgh in the first place. He had an unwanted memory of Romanenko mentioning how railroad stations smelled and then the loud roar of a pistol and Frank Pagan throwing himself bodily at the assassin. His brain was like a large box in which everything made loud rattling noises.

  Oates made it up as far as his knees, but he was unsteady, and swayed a little. The intruder helped him to his feet, then back to the bed. Oates sat on the edge of the mattress. He still felt curiously dizzy, at one remove from himself. The red stripes of his pyjamas seemed to pulsate at the corner of his vision. The older man had to have the strength of a damned ox to fell him like that. He looked at the man, who was gazing round the bedroom, which was decorated with antique furniture and nineteenth-century equestrian prints, family heirlooms.

  Then the stranger walked to the window and looked out. There was a view of a quiet Sunday street, parked cars, a pub called The Lord Byron on a far corner. Oates gnawed on his lower lip. The man’s silence
was unnerving, even menacing. Surely, though, this was the end of the business. Oates had no information to give, he didn’t have a clue about why the poem wasn’t returned to the Russians, he was actually of very little use to this stranger – who, if he were a reasonable man, would recognise the fact and simply depart. Oates prayed he was exactly that: a reasonable man.

  “I mean, if I didn’t happen to know the language, I wouldn’t have been involved in any of this,” and Oates attempted a nervous little laugh, which emerged as a girlish giggle, a sound he didn’t quite recognise as his own. “As for the poem, well, it didn’t make any damn sense to me, but I can’t speak on Frank Pagan’s behalf, perhaps it means something to him.” He babbled on, driven by his nervousness, words streaming out of him. The stranger turned now, and smiled. It was a warm little expression which chilled Danus Oates to the bone. A few spots of rain struck the window and slithered down the glass. Oates’s attention was drawn to them momentarily, and he thought how very banal the raindrops seemed, how ordinary – but then everything struck him as commonplace all at once, this bedroom, the bed, his striped pyjamas, the things in his room. Everything was sublimely prosaic except for the gun in the intruder’s hand which Oates had noticed when the man turned from the window but had refused to register. A delayed reaction – only now it struck him like a tiny comet flashing through the darkness of his head, and the everyday quality of his surroundings was altered beyond recognition, and all the anchors securing him to the familiar were cut loose.

  “L-l-look here,” Oates said. “You’re not going to use that thing.” His tongue adhered to the roof of his mouth and he had no control over the sudden tic under his eye.

  The stranger moved closer to the bed. He seemed to be turning something over in his mind. Whatever it was, Danus Oates knew it was connected with his own future, a concept that was rushing away from him with the sound of air escaping a punctured balloon.