The man pushed the gun into the soft flesh below Oates’s ear. Oates imagined he heard the weapon ticking like some awful clock measuring his frail mortality. He shut his eyes and tried to swallow.
“P-p-p,” but the word please wouldn’t come out at all.
The intruder came so close now that Oates could feel the man’s breath upon the side of his cheek, and he could smell the gun, the peculiar metal odour of it, the hint of oil. He opened one eye and thought how vast the weapon seemed from his perspective.
“Are you telling me everything you know, Mr Oates?”
“Absolutely,” Oates whispered.
The gun was eased away from his neck and for a moment Oates was flooded with a relief so intense he felt light-headed. It was a sensation that lasted only a fraction of a second. The stranger fired the silenced gun once and Danus Oates, who had no more ambition in life than to become the British Ambassador to a civilised country like Austria or Holland, fell from the bed and toppled to the floor.
V.G. Epishev, struck by vague regret, didn’t look at the body. He put the gun in his coat pocket, then stepped quietly out of the apartment, hearing from far beneath him the scream of a bird. And he thought of Vladimir Greshko and the way the old man lay like some bird himself, an aged buzzard with wings folded, eyes shut, talons always ready to strike.
He moved down the stairs quickly, let himself out into the street. Thin clouds floated over the wet slate rooftops of Knightsbridge. A dreary Sunday, an afternoon in which autumn could be smelled on the air like lead. An afternoon for death and dying.
He walked until he came to the place where he’d parked his hired car, a Ford, then he drove away, watching rain slide over the windshield. He was certain that Oates, poor doomed Oates, had been telling the truth. What had he been in any case but an innocent bystander, an accident of history? The option to allow Oates to live hadn’t really been viable, although Epishev had considered it. As soon as Epishev had left the apartment, the young Englishman would be on the telephone to Scotland Yard, babbling about his mysterious intruder and all the questions he’d asked.
Verse, Epishev thought. A few lines of poetry. If these were a code, then it might be something simple, something a man like Frank Pagan might be able to figure out. Something that contained dates and times and places, the particulars of the Brotherhood’s plot.
He parked his car under a damp tree on a quiet side street. He pinched the bridge of his nose, a characteristic gesture of concentration. His instruction from Greshko had been simple. Eliminate the threat. Epishev made no distinction between real or imagined threats – they were equally menacing. What did it matter if the poem contained a code or not? The important thing was the idea that it might. Uncle Viktor, who had lived for a long time in a world of menace, had a word for this kind of elimination. He called it precautionary.
Frank Pagan and Kristina Vaska left Pagan’s flat and walked across the square, through dripping laburnum and under wet laurels, following a narrow path that led past empty wooden benches. Pagan had wakened with a headache and an urge to walk in the rain, to get out of the apartment and away from the telephone calls from the scribblers of Fleet Street, who wanted his eyewitness account of the murder in Edinburgh.
Kristina Vaska had asked to accompany him and now she stepped along at his side wearing a raincoat she’d borrowed from his wardrobe. It was far too large for her. The sleeves hung three inches beyond her hands, the hem trailed the wet grass. She looked frail and childlike in the oversized coat, but Pagan knew this fragility was more apparent than real.
He surveyed the square, pausing at a place where the pathway divided. It was bleak here, and private, his own rain-shrouded enclave in the heart of Holland Park. The path led past a shelter, a simple wooden edifice with benches that was a retreat for the old people of the neighbourhood. Today it was empty and smelled of damp wood and wet moss. Kristina Vaska paused by the shelter.
She asked, “How long have you lived a life of chaotic bachelorhood?”
Pagan said, “I was married once.”
“What happened?”
“She died.” Two words. She died. Pagan wanted to leave it there, simple and terse, unexplored. He didn’t want to go into that history of pain. He looked the length of the square. The only other life forms were an elderly woman, an eccentric in plastic raincoat and hat, walking an enormously fat, boisterous dalmatian.
“I’m sorry,” Kristina said.
“It’s not anything I want to talk about.” He moved past the shelter, listening to the tick of rain on leaves. “Let’s talk about Kristina Vaska instead.”
“I can think of more interesting topics. What do you want to know?”
“Where you live. What you do for a living. The usual stuff.”
She smiled. “I live in New York City. I work as a researcher.”
“What kind of research?” Pagan was unhappy with vague terminology, and the word ‘researcher’ fell into a category of occupations that included financial consultants, management analysts and Members of Parliament.
“Let’s say a writer or an organisation wants information. They come to me, tell me what they need, and I find out. I spend a lot of time in libraries. Is there anything you need to know about Sargon the Great, King of Akkad? Are you having a problem about the habitat of Leadbeater’s possum? Do you have an urgent desire to find out how the Ashanti live and what they worship? Then I’m the person to see.” She looked at him with her head tilted a little to one side. “Among other things, I’ve also done considerable research – unpaid, entirely on my own initiative – into the Brotherhood, which wasn’t altogether easy because the literature isn’t extensive.”
Pagan tried to imagine her hauling heavy volumes from dusty shelves in obscure libraries and somehow couldn’t fix a clear image in his head. “What brought you to England?”
“Am I being interrogated, Frank?”
Pagan shook his head. Had it been so long since he’d carried on any ordinary discourse that he’d forgotten how? Was there a tone in his voice that suggested he suspected everybody he met of something? “I didn’t mean to make it sound that way. Force of habit, I suppose.”
“I guess in your line of business you think everyone has ulterior motives. So you don’t take anybody on trust. Including me. I sneak into your little world – a mine of information, a source of intrigue, only you don’t know exactly who I am or what my motives are. What makes it even more perplexing is the way I turn up at the same time as Romanenko – and wham! You’re sitting on one of those really bizarre coincidences cops aren’t supposed to swallow. Correct?”
Pagan, thinking how close Kristina Vaska had come to describing his state of mind, picked up a damp stick and tossed it through the air and watched it fall with a mildly expectant look on his face, almost as if he expected an invisible dog to fetch it for him. “When I get information, I like to know as much as I can about the source.” He sounded more defensive than he would have liked.
“Makes sense,” she said. She walked ahead of him now, leaving the path and pushing through damp shrubbery. He went after her, noticing the way her hair was flattened by rain against her scalp. One of the most provocative images in Pagan’s sexual cosmology was the sight of a woman stepping from a shower or coming up out of the ocean after a swim, her hair wet and uncombed and falling carelessly. Something in the randomness, the basic disarray, appealed enormously to him. As she parted damp shrubbery and rain blew across her face and hair, Kristina Vaska was attractive to him in just that way.
She stopped moving, turned to him, grinned. Her whole look teased him. She raised her hands in a gesture of surrender. “Okay. You got me cold, Pagan. I confess. I was the one supposed to meet Romanenko in Edinburgh. I was his contact. He was supposed to pass the poem to me. I’m the Brotherhood’s messenger. Please don’t send me to the big house, I don’t want to grow old and wrinkled in a cell, please find some charity in your heart.”
She clutched the lapel of his
coat and shook him slightly and he laughed aloud at her sudden pantomime, thinking how the sound cut through his unease. Then she released him and turned away from him once again and moved between the trees. He walked behind her, blinking against the rain.
She stopped between two elegant willows whose branches trailed the ground. In this location, this secret heart of the park, it was impossible to see the houses around the square. It was an intimate place, a green island afloat on the wet afternoon, and Pagan felt the unexpected impulse to reach out and touch the woman, perhaps something as simple as laying his fingertips against her lips. With some difficulty he resisted the urge.
She wiped raindrops from her eyelashes and smiled at him. “Actually, the real truth’s boringly simple, Frank. I came to London because I hoped I’d get a chance to talk with Romanenko. I read in somewhere that the Soviets were interested in buying computers in the UK, and that Romanenko was being sent. I had a notion he might just be able to use his influence to help get my father released. I wasn’t sure how I was going to engineer a meeting, because I know the KGB’s usually in attendance – but I thought it was worth a shot. Unfortunately, I never got the chance to see him. I went to the Savoy, but he’d already left for Edinburgh. Then I figured I’d wait for him to return. The rest you know.”
Pagan listened in silence. There was still a shadow across his mind. “Why do you want to help me? Why bother to tell me about Romanenko and the Brotherhood? Altruism? Or am I missing something?”
“You’re not missing anything. Your viewpoint’s just a little jaded, that’s all. You don’t expect people to be helpful. I don’t have any concealed motives, Frank. I heard about the killing on TV, I thought you might need information you weren’t going to get anywhere else. Here I am. That’s it.”
He stepped a little closer to the woman. She ran her fingers through her wet hair. Pagan felt an odd sense of longing. The last yearning he’d had like this belonged in quite another lifetime, in the dead seasons of his past. Eroticism in the rain, he thought. A fine sexual fever under the damp trees. She was bewitching in the oversized coat, a child-woman.
She ducked a little too quickly under a branch, moving beyond his reach, heading out of this leafy corner and back in the direction of the path. Pagan was a little startled by his feelings, which Kristina Vaska must have read in his eyes – given the haste with which she’d stepped away from him. Was he supposed to feel foolish now? Embarrassed by his obviousness?
Saying nothing to each other, they walked back along the path. Pagan gazed at the empty lawns, the damp flowerbeds, the low sky that hung above the square and emphasised the desolation, the emptiness, of the place. The fat dalmatian and the elderly woman he’d seen before weren’t visible now, even though the barking of a dog could still be heard through the rain.
“Can you remember where you read about Romanenko’s visit?” he asked.
She smiled as if his suspicions were a constant source of amusement to her. “You’re priceless, Frank. What difference does it make where I read about it?”
“I’m curious, that’s all.”
She closed her eyes, looked thoughful. “The Economist. US edition. Any more questions?”
Pagan gazed at the small wooden shelter in the centre of the square. “I don’t think so,” he said.
“Did I pass the test?” “Was there a test?”
“From the moment I first stepped inside your flat.”
They were approaching the shelter now. Pagan stared beyond it, through the trees, seeing the dim windows of his own apartment. The curtains were still drawn from the night before. He could see the narrow street lined with parked cars. Kristina Vaska was perfectly correct, of course. He’d been testing her all along, and he hadn’t quite finished yet. He might be attracted to her, but he wasn’t going to get downright careless on that account. An earlier version of Pagan, a younger self, might have had a more romantic lack of caution, a willingness to be indiscreet with his heart – but at the age of forty-one Pagan had crossed a demarcation line on one side of which lay blind ardour, on the other wariness.
“Let’s go back indoors,” he said. “I need a drink.”
V.G. Epishev sat inside the parked car, listening to the quiet sound of the engine running. He watched Frank Pagan and the woman crossing the square in the direction of the street. It was the presence of the woman that threw him off balance. He hadn’t expected a companion in Pagan’s life. For some reason he’d assumed Pagan’s life would be as solitary as his own.
His view of Pagan and the woman was impeded for a moment by a shelter in the middle of the park, then they re-emerged, pausing to exchange some words. They inclined their heads towards each other, and Epishev detected intimacy in this gesture. He wondered if Pagan and his companion were lovers. He tried to imagine them that way, but it was like the taste of an exotic food he hadn’t sampled in a long time – and yet he could vaguely remember the tantalising flavour.
Something about the woman disturbed him. She provoked a strong sense of familiarity in him. It was the kind of feeling you had when a word lay on the tip of your tongue but you couldn’t quite utter it. He thought he’d seen her before somewhere. No, he knew he had.
Pagan and the woman were still moving towards the exit. They walked about two feet apart from each other and there was no apparent intimacy now. Epishev put his hand into the pocket of his coat that contained the gun. He rested the other hand on the door handle, looked along the quiet, rainy street.
It kept coming back to nag him, this feeling that somewhere in the distant past there had been an encounter with the woman. He was sure of it now. He gazed across the grass at her face, which was partly hidden by the upturned collar of her outsized raincoat. A lovely face, but tantalising. She made a gesture with her hand, threw her head back, laughed at something Pagan said. Epishev turned the handle of the door.
Pagan and the woman were about a hundred yards from the low stone wall that surrounded the square. Now the woman was staring almost directly at the car and Epishev brought his hand up to his lips and coughed into it, a reflex action, a gesture to conceal himself from her attention.
Who was she? And where had he seen her before?
He had a little memory trick he sometimes used. It was to envisage the environment in which he’d seen a particular face. It was to recall physical details – dress, weather, the colour of wallpaper, the curtains – and then set the remembered face against these recollections.
Tallinn, he thought. He had the feeling it had to be Tallinn. He recalled a flight of stairs, a bicycle propped against the wall on the landing, an open doorway that led inside a large apartment, a well-furnished set of rooms.
He almost had it then. But the memory was like a badly-tuned television station, a picture that fluttered, blemished by static. Damn. Now Pagan and the woman were a mere fifty yards away and they were walking more briskly than before. They wanted to get out of the rain, of course. To dry themselves off. Epishev undid the safety catch on the gun, and ran the tips of his fingers over the surface of the weapon. He’d step out of the car, approach Pagan with the gun, and the rest would be easy, a matter of getting back Romanenko’s mysterious verse, which was presumably inside Pagan’s apartment or even on his person, and then he’d dispose of both the Englishman and the woman, right here on this street if he had to –
A young girl in braided hair, a yellow print dress, bare feet in sandals, a child sobbing …
Pagan and the woman were approaching the stone wall now, the exit, the pavement. For a second they were lost behind a clutch of dense trees, then they reappeared.
A child sobbing …
And that was when it came to him, reaching across the years, echoing out of the past, it came to him with sudden clarity. He could see a young girl’s face and the way her hair was braided and how she’d cried and scratched viciously at his hands as her father was being led out of the apartment in Tallinn on a cold morning more than fifteen years ago. Fifteen long yea
rs ago – how had Frank Pagan come into the orbit of the daughter of Norbert Vaska, the child called Kristina?
She turned her face towards the car then, for some reason. She turned, looking damp and pale, her black hair plastered across her scalp, her mouth a dark circle. Epishev wasn’t sure whether it was recognition that crossed her face, whether his appearance provoked memories inside her of that same chill morning so long ago, when she’d been twelve, perhaps thirteen. He saw something in her features change, and then she was reaching for Pagan’s arm and pulling it, and hurrying him across the street to the house. Pagan, running alongside her, his overcoat billowing around him, looked puzzled and reluctant as if the woman had drawn him suddenly into a game he couldn’t follow.
Epishev, his sense of timing skewed by the sudden movement of the couple, tightened his grip on the gun and was about to step out of the car when he was aware of the enormous black and white dog thumping and pounding along the pavement towards him, a massive spotted creature, perhaps two hundred pounds in weight, pursued by a woman in a plastic raincoat. This monstrous animal had sighted Epishev stepping out of the car and now it charged with crazed canine friendliness toward him, a dumb light in its eyes, paws upraised, tail flailing the air like a whip. Epishev drew the car door shut and watched the creature slobber against the glass before losing interest and padding huffily away. The damned English and their damned pets! But he’d lost the initiative, the element of surprise, even before the appearance of the mutt.
Across the street Pagan and Kristina Vaska had vanished inside the house, and the dark brown door was shut behind them. Epishev cursed, stared up at the windows. Had she recognised him? Of course – how else could one explain the speed with which they’d crossed the street and entered the house? How else to explain that urgency?
Epishev drove the Ford along the street, passing the dalmatian, which had its leg cocked against a wall. He glanced once more at Pagan’s house, and then he was turning out of the narrow street, wondering what had brought Kristina Vaska into the policeman’s world, and what it would mean if indeed she’d recognised him.
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