Mazurka

by Campbell Armstrong

  Kiss had to come to understand that Iverson – who was either an officer in the United States Air Force or had been at one time, an anomaly Iverson deliberately failed to clarify – feared the Russians. But Kiss, whose focus was limited to three countries with an area of some sixty thousand square miles and a population of eight million, had no particular interest in Iverson’s motives. Andres, who had maintained all kinds of connections in the armed forces, had brought Iverson in about eighteen months ago, saying he was a completely dependable man who could provide an essential service. And that recommendation was enough. Whether Iverson was acting alone, or whether he represented a consortium of men who shared his views, some shadowy congregation of figures who preferred to stay offstage, Kiss didn’t know, even though he sometimes felt that Iverson was merely a spokesman. But without Iverson’s help the whole scheme would have been more difficult, perhaps even impossible.

  Strange bedfellows, Kiss thought. An old Baltic guerilla fighter and a mysterious figure with military connections who saw a way to undermine a regime he feared.

  “Well,” Iverson said. “I guess we don’t see each other again.”

  He held his hand forward and Kiss shook it. Iverson’s clasp was ice-cold, bloodless.

  “Nägemiseni,” Iverson said. Goodbye.

  Kiss was touched by Iverson’s effort to learn a word in Estonian, a language totally alien to him.

  “I practised it,” Iverson said.

  “You did fine.” Kiss, smiling, went towards the door. There he turned and said, “Head aega,” which was also goodbye.

  Iverson said, “One thing. We never met. We never talked. This apartment ceases to exist as soon as you step out the door. If you ever have any reason to come back to this place, and I hope you don’t, you’ll find strangers living here. And if anybody ever asks, Kiss, I don’t know you from Adam.”

  London

  Frank Pagan looked at the corpse of Danus Oates only in a fleeting way, before turning his back. Oates’s splendid silk pyjamas were soaked with blood. Martin Burr, who had come up to London by fast car from the depths of Sussex – where on weekends he lived the life of an English country squire – gazed down at the body with sorrow.

  “Damned shame,” he said to Pagan and he swiped the air with his cane in a gesture of frustrated sadness. “I wish the cleaners would get here and remove the poor lad. Let’s go into the living-room.”

  Frank Pagan followed Burr out of the bedroom. The Commissioner sat in an armchair, propping his chin on his cane and gazing thoughtfully through the open door of the flat. A uniformed policeman stood on the landing and three neighbours – two emaciated women and a leathery man, the latter having discovered the body while making a social call – were trying to sneak a look inside the place with all the ghoulish enthusiasm of people who consider murder a spectator sport.

  “Shut that bloody door, would you?” Burr asked.

  Pagan did so. When they’d first come to Oates’s flat, Pagan had told the Commissioner what he’d learned about Epishev from Kristina Vaska, and Burr had absorbed the information in silence. Now Pagan said, “The way I see it is Epishev came here because he’d learned Oates had worked on the translation. He wanted to know what Oates had found out. The answer was, of course, very little – a few lines of verse in an obscure language. What else could poor Oates say? Maybe all he could tell Epishev was that I had the thing in my possession – who knows? Epishev, covering his tracks like any dutiful assassin, killed him. And I was the next name on the list, because I’d come in contact with the verse as well.”

  “The damned poem’s like a bloody fatal virus,” Burr said angrily. “You touch it, you have a damned good chance of dying.” He was genuinely shocked by this murder and the presence of a KGB killer in London, and the fact that his own dominion was tainted by international political intrigue. He liked, if not a calm life, then one of logic and order and watertight compartments.

  Pagan stuck his hands in his pockets. “If it’s a virus, it acts in very peculiar ways. The thing I haven’t been able to figure out is why the KGB would want to come after people like Oates and myself. Obviously, they imagine I know something, and they don’t like me knowing it, whatever the hell it is. But what’s the big secret? If the Brotherhood’s working on an act of terrorism against the Russians, let’s say, why would the KGB want to destroy the people who might have evidence of it? Unless the KGB is involved in the plot as well – or at the very least doesn’t want it to fail.”

  “And that’s a rather odd line of reasoning, Frank.”

  Pagan agreed. He moved up and down the room in an agitated manner. He was remembering now how Witherspoon had talked about a struggle between the old regime and the new, and how Epishev had belonged in the Greshko camp along with the old power-brokers, those who had been sent scurrying into reluctant redundancy. It was an elusive thought, a sliver of a thing, but perhaps what was unfolding in front of him was some element of that power struggle, some untidy aspect of it, the ragged edges of a Soviet situation that had become inadvertently exported to England. He turned this over in his mind and he was about to mention the thought to Burr when the Commissioner said, “This Vaska lady. Do you think her information is on the level?”

  “I had a few doubts at first,” Pagan replied.

  “But not now?”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  “But you want to believe her.”

  “I think what she says about this Brotherhood and Romanenko’s part in it is true. And I believe her when she says she came here in the hope of seeing Romanenko about her father. I also have the strong feeling she wasn’t mistaken when she identified Epishev.”

  Oates’s living-room was cluttered with very tasteful antiques. There was a photograph on one wall that depicted Danus, around the age of fifteen, in the straw-hat of a Harrow schoolboy. Fresh-faced, rather chubby at the cheeks, all innocence. Pagan paused in front of it, shaking his head. You couldn’t begin to imagine Oates’s doomed future from such a guilelessly plump face. It was all going to be sunshine and a steady if unspectacular climb up the ladder of the Foreign Office.

  Martin Burr was quiet for a while. “If what she says about this Epishev chap is correct, I don’t think this whole business belongs to us any more, Frank. I really don’t think this is anything we can keep. If Epishev is KGB, it’s no longer our game.”

  Pagan felt a flush of sudden irritation. “We give it away? Is that what you’re saying?”

  Martin Burr frowned. “I don’t think we give it away, Frank. Rather, it’s taken from us. There’s a certain kind of skulduggery that doesn’t come into our patch, Frank. We’re not equipped. And you may bitch about it, but sooner or later you have to face the fact that intelligence will want this one. No way round it, I’m afraid. Besides, I understand our friend Witherspoon has already dropped the word about Epishev in the appropriate quarters.”

  “Good old Tommy.”

  “He was only doing what he perceived as his duty, no doubt.”

  “I bet.” Frank, you should have seen that one coming. What else would Tommy do but run to his pals and gladly confide in them that Uncle Viktor had surfaced in England and that a certain incompetent policeman was handling things? Pagan could hear Witherspoon’s voice, a cruel whisper, maybe a snide laugh, as he chatted to his chums in intelligence. La-di-da, don’t you know?

  “You want me to forget Epishev, is that it?”

  “Frank,” the Commissioner said. “Don’t make me raise my voice. I’m trying to tell you how things are. Consider it a lesson in reality.”

  “I may forget about Epishev, Commissioner, but is he going to forget about me? I’ve got something he believes he wants. Keep that in mind.”

  Martin Burr shook his head. “Ah, yes, I’ll expect you to trun your translation of the poem and the original over to intelligence when they ask for it – and they surely will – and then wipe the whole damned thing out of your mind.”

  “Commissioner, if Epishev
shot Oates, that makes it murder in my book, and I don’t give a damn if Epishev’s KGB or an Elizabeth Arden rep, he’s a bloody killer. What makes this very personal, sir, is the fact that this killer has my number. And you want me to turn him over to some characters who call themselves intelligence – which so far as I’m concerned is a terrible misnomer. Anyway, Epishev’s going to believe I’ve got what he wants whether I turn it over or not.”

  Martin Burr ran a hand across his face. “Sometimes I see a petulantly stubborn quality in you that appals me.”

  Pagan knew he was playing this wrongly, that he was coming close to alienating the Commissioner, who was really his only ally at the Yard. He took a couple of deep breaths, in through the nostrils and out through the mouth – a technique that was supposed to relax you, according to a book he’d once read on yoga. But spiritual bliss and all the bloody breathing exercises in the world weren’t going to alleviate his frustration.

  The Commissioner said, “It upsets me, too. I want you to know that. I wish there was some other way.”

  “Then let me stay with it.”

  “There’s nothing I can do. I wish it could be otherwise. But sooner or later, Frank, I’m going to feel certain pressures from parties that I don’t have to name. And I’ll bow to them, because that’s the way things are. Those chaps know how to press all the right buttons.”

  “I could always work with them,” Pagan said halfheartedly.

  Martin Burr smiled. “The idea of you working with anyone is rather amusing.”

  “I could give it a try.”

  The Commissioner shook his head. “Damn it all, how many ways can I tell you this? Intelligence doesn’t like the common policeman. Let’s leave it there.”

  Pagan opened a decanter of cognac that sat on an antique table. He poured himself a small glass. There had to be some kind of solution to all this, something the Commissioner would accept. But Martin Burr, even though he’d complained about Pagan’s stubbornness, could be pretty damned intractable himself. It was a knot, and Pagan couldn’t see how to untie it. What he felt was that he was being brushed carelessly aside, and he didn’t like the sensation at all.

  The Commissioner reached for the decanter now and helped himself to a generous measure. He returned to his armchair and turned the balloon glass slowly around in his hand. He said, “I like you, Frank, perhaps because I think your heart’s in the right place. Even at your worst, I’ve never questioned either your heart or your integrity. But this –” and Martin Burr made a sweeping gesture with his hand – “this tale of a Baltic clique that a young gal weaves and the presence of this Epishev and a dead Communist up in Scotland into the bargain, all this, my dear fellow, is not your private property, alas. Do we understand one another?”

  “Perhaps,” Pagan said, and drained his glass. The cognac had eased only a little of the pressure inside him.

  Martin Burr smacked his lips. “Let’s take some air, Frank. I don’t want to be here when the cleaners and the fingerprint boys come. They tend to reduce death to a business, which I always find unseemly.”

  Pagan followed the Commissioner out of the flat and down the stairs, past the goggling neighbours and their questions. Outside in the early morning darkness, Martin Burr stood under a streetlamp and leaned on his cane. The neighbourhood was silent and sedate in that way of well-heeled neighbourhoods everywhere.

  “Is she pretty?” the Commissioner asked suddenly.

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Touchy, touchy, Frank. All I’m saying is that human nature, being the general old screw-up it is, sometimes allows a fair face to turn a man’s head. Has she turned yours?”

  “Hardly,” Pagan replied.

  “Just watch yourself. Subject closed.” The Commissioner smiled like a one-eyed owl. “As for this Brotherhood, how much does the young lady know?”

  “Less than I’d like.”

  “Intriguing, though. The idea of some old fellows plotting against the Russians after all this time. Makes you wonder what they’re up to. And then there’s the wretch Kiviranna. Who sent him to kill Romanenko? Too many unanswered questions, Frank.”

  Pagan detected something in Martin Burr, a quality of curiosity that wouldn’t leave him. Even if he was about to turn the Epishev affair over to the lords of intelligence, Martin Burr was still intrigued by it all, more so perhaps than he really wanted to admit. The old cop, Pagan thought. The scent in the nostrils. The mysteries. The rush of adrenalin. Martin Burr was animated, perhaps even hooked.

  “I’m still thinking aloud, you understand, Frank, but if Epishev is hunting down this piece of paper, then he knew that Romanenko left the Soviet Union with it in his possession – reasonable assumption? Question – if it’s so damned important that it gets Oates killed, why was Romanenko allowed to leave with the poem in the first place? Answer – because the KGB wanted him to make the delivery. Is that also reasonable? It implies that Aleksis, either willingly or unwittingly, was working for the KGB.”

  “Or at least for certain KGB personnel,” Pagan remarked quietly.

  With a rather thoughtful look, Martin Burr stared up into the light from the overhead lamp, where a flurry of moths battered themselves to pulp against the bulb. “Are you positing the existence of factions within that venerable organisation, Frank? Can of worms, old chap. Somebody else’s can.”

  “I don’t know exactly what I’m positing,” Pagan replied. Can of worms, he thought. He kicked a pebble from the pavement and heard it roll across the narrow street. For somebody about to give up a case, Martin Burr was fretting over it more than a little.

  “Pity to turn it over, Frank.”

  “Pity’s not strong enough,” Pagan said. How could he conceivably walk away from this? More to the point, how could Martin Burr expect that of him?

  The Commissioner glanced at his wristwatch. As he did so, a taxi came along the street, slowing as it approached the lamp-post where Pagan and Burr stood. Ted Gunther, the man from the American Embassy, emerged from the vehicle. He paid the driver and the cab slid away. Gunther, wearing a suit over striped pyjamas that were plainly visible at his cuffs, looked apologetic as he entered the circle of light.

  “They said at the Yard I’d find you here.” He blinked behind his thick glasses. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

  “Nothing that can’t wait,” the Commissioner said in the manner of a man whose weekend has been totally ruined anyhow.

  Gunther scratched his head. He’d obviously been roused from his bed and had hurried here. His crewcut was flattened in patches across his skull and there was an excited little light in his large eyes. He was also slightly short of breath. “I just received the information you asked for about Jacob Kiviranna, and I thought you’d want it right away. I pulled a few strings, called some old favours home.”

  “You got some poor schmucks to work on a Sunday for you,” Pagan said.

  “More or less. I sent an inquiry out over the wire immediately after we talked and I made a couple of phonecalls.” Gunther took a couple of sheets of paper from his coat pocket and tipped them towards the glow of the streetlamp. He reminded Pagan of somebody raised in the dead of night to get up and make an impromptu speech, somebody who has welded together a few odd phrases but hasn’t had time to develop a theme.

  “Let me just read you what I’ve got,” Gunther said. “Kiviranna lived in Brooklyn –”

  “Brooklyn?” Pagan asked. He remembered that Kristina had told him that some members of the Brotherhood had settled in Brooklyn in the 1950s. He found himself stimulated suddenly, his interest aroused the way it always was when he confronted correspondences and connections, even when they consisted only of thin threads, such as this one.

  “Brooklyn,” Gunther said in a slightly testy way, as if he resented having his narrative interrupted. “He had no known family – he was apparently smuggled out of the Baltic as a baby by relatives who are now dead. We don’t know anything about his
parents. He worked as a freelance carpenter, drifting from job to job, making sure he was paid in cash for his labours. Cash is always hard to trace, and it’s easy not to declare it, which meant that Kiviranna managed to steer clear of the scrutiny of our Internal Revenue Service. In other words, for all his adult life, Kiviranna paid no taxes. In fact, I’d say he might have avoided all public records of his existence if it hadn’t been for his jail sentences. To begin with, he did five days in 1973 for public nuisance.”

  “Meaning what?” Pagan asked.

  Gunther read from his sheets. “He urinated on a diplomatic car registered to the Soviet Mission in Manhattan then he tried to punch his way inside the Mission itself.”

  “He didn’t like Russians,” Pagan said drily, and glanced at Martin Burr, whose face was expressionless. But Pagan had the distinct sense that something was churning inside the Commissioner’s head, that even as Gunther recited Kiviranna’s history Burr was partly elsewhere.

  “It’s a running theme in his life,” Gunther agreed. “In 1974 he attacked a policeman outside the Soviet Embassy in Washington. In 1977, he drove a motorcycle into a limousine occupied by the Soviet Ambassador, causing considerable damage both to himself and the vehicle.”

  “A kamikaze sort,” Pagan remarked.

  Gunther swatted a moth away. “He did five months for that little escapade and underwent psychiatric evaluation. Which …” Here Gunther shuffled his papers. “Which revealed that Kiviranna was something of a loner, didn’t join clubs, didn’t make friends, felt inferior, that kind of thing.”

  Predictable, Pagan thought. Assassins tended to be loners. They weren’t usually renowned for having social graces and joining clubs.

  “In 1980 he became involved in narcotics. He was busted for possession of heroin. Probation, more psychiatric evaluation. Then he appears to have behaved himself until 1984, when he formed an attachment with a woman, or thought he did – the lady thought otherwise. Kiviranna became obsessed with her. When she spurned him, he slit his wrists. He was committed for a period to a psychiatric unit in upstate New York and diagnosed as schizophrenic.”