Pagan moved back from the sight of the burning car and sat down against the wall of the gas-station, paralysed by utter dismay. He hadn’t acted quickly enough, hadn’t drawn his gun when the van had first aroused his interest, hadn’t done a goddam thing to alert Klein. He listened to the sound of the car flaring and he turned his face to the side because he could still feel the awful blast. The cashier came out of the glass booth and touched him on the shoulder and asked if he was hurt. Pagan shook his head. He hadn’t even suffered a superficial burn. The woman pressed a wet cloth into his hand and he covered his face with it. Poor fucking Max Klein, the department handyman. Whoever had tossed the grenade hadn’t meant it to be for Klein alone, he was sure of that.
Whoever. He rose, threw the damp doth away, drew his sleeve across his forehead. For an instant, just before the blast, before the rich, deathly smoke had covered everything, he’d seen the face of the van driver with striking clarity, and he remembered the last time he’d seen that face on a London street. Viktor Epishev, impassive behind the wheel of the van, his expression one of complete concentration, like that of a man who loved control. Pagan wondered bitterly if Uncle Viktor had ever done anything in a spontaneous way. Had he ever seduced a girl? Fallen hopelessly in love? Yielded to a casual whim like rolling up the cuffs of his pants to walk the edge of a tide or gone out and bought a brightly-coloured shirt just for the sheer hell of it?
Control and violence.
Pagan, shocked by the suddenness of things, numbed by his last image of Max Klein behind the screen of fire, wandered inside the men’s room and filled the wash-basin with cold water and plunged his head into it, holding it there until he thought his lungs might explode. Gasping, he raised his face up from the water, and grabbed a handful of paper towels, then he walked back out to where the Ford was burning like some awful pyre whose colours kept changing. He shook his head from side to side, wondering if Epishev had mistakenly thought both Pagan and Klein had been in the Ford. Perhaps, blinded by sunlight, he hadn’t seen clearly. Perhaps even now Epishev imagined that Pagan was dead in the ruined car. Whatever, it was painfully clear that Pagan was to be prevented at any cost from visiting the house of Mikhail Kiss – whose address he held, scribbled on a piece of creased paper by Max Klein, a name and a number surrounded by half-sketched faces and interlocking circles and three-dimensional squares, the work of the failed artist.
Throat parched, Pagan watched as a bright red fire-engine drew into the gas-station, a flurry of sirens and dark hoses unrolling and men who worked at a speed that suggested the whole gasoline station was going to blow up at any moment. In silence Pagan watched them blast the blazing car with their high-pressure sprays, but then he walked away because he didn’t want to be anywhere nearby when they doused the flames sufficiently to pull the remains of Max Klein from the crematorium.
Kennedy Airport, New York
Mikhail Kiss found the bright lights of the terminal painful to his eyes, and he blinked a great deal, although sometimes he wasn’t sure if it was the harsh light or the prospect of tears he was struggling against. He watched Andres at the Scandinavian Airlines desk, the check-in procedure, the way the female clerks fawned around him. He didn’t have a suitcase, only an overnight bag. There was no luggage to go on board. Andres returned to the place where Mikhail sat and took the seat next to him, saying nothing, just tapping his fingertips on his knees or every so often checking his boarding-pass.
Mikhail Kiss lit a cigarette and for the first time in many years inhaled the smoke deeply into his lungs. He took his eyes from Andres and looked across the terminal floor, seeing two security cops move side by side with vacant looks on their faces. They passed through the glass doors and out into the failing light. Mikhail Kiss examined the departures board. Soon they’d begin boarding the plane that would take Andres to Norway. Mikhail stubbed out the cigarette and sighed. Why was there nothing to say? Why, at the very point he’d worked so long and hard to reach, were words so reluctant to form in his mouth? He laid his hand on his nephew’s sleeve, a gentle gesture, perhaps more meaningful than any words could be. But it was a small thing, and it didn’t go very far to dispel the feeling of estrangement from the young man that Mikhail Kiss experienced.
Something was wrong, and he couldn’t define it. It was more than the goddam dream that kept coming back at him like a bad taste. The face of Norbert Vaska. The music in that white restaurant. They don’t go away, he thought. They come back to haunt you, no matter what you do. What did he feel? he wondered. Was it sorrow? Or resentment at the tenacity of ghosts? But it was more than just the persistent image of Norbert Vaska that troubled him, and he searched his mind fruitlessly.
A bad feeling. Like the one he’d had that night in Edinburgh. That was close to the sensation.
Andres Kiss smiled. For a second Mikhail thought he detected a slight tension in the expression, and he was caught in a memory of when Andres had been a young boy, ten, maybe eleven, stepping into a boxing-ring for the first time, his face hidden behind a protective headpiece too large for him, his hands dwarfed by enormous gloves. He remembered how Andres had turned to him at the last moment and how frightened he’d looked and Mikhail, touched by this vulnerability, had felt needed then – but the moment passed and Andres went inside the ring and demolished his opponent with fierce speed and Mikhail realised that night he’d never really be needed in this young man’s life, that Andres could achieve everything he wanted on his own, without help. And so it was now.
There was an announcement that the flight to Oslo had begun to board. Mikhail looked at his watch. 9:30. Andres examined his ticket and boarding-pass again, saying, “Round-trip. I appreciate your optimism, Mikhail.”
Was this meant to be a small joke? “I wouldn’t send you anywhere one-way, Andres,” and he reached out to embrace the young man, whose body was stiff and unyielding, as if human contact distressed him. It was then Mikhail noticed a scratch on his nephew’s forehead, which had apparently been covered by some kind of makeup, a powder of the kind women use, and he was going to ask about it. But now there wasn’t time. And he didn’t want to know anyhow.
Andres Kiss stood up. “I guess this is it,” he said.
Mikhail Kiss felt moisture forming behind his eyes, but he blinked it away. It was a time for strength, not for useless sentimentality. He wished Carl Sundbach could have been here, because there was a sense of incompleteness, of somebody missing from the circle. Maybe he’d call Carl later, tell him that Andres was on his way to Norway, keep him informed. And maybe by this time Carl would be over his weird paranoia that somebody was following him through the streets and watching his apartment. Old age, Kiss thought, feeling the phantom of it move through him. It rendered men absurd, magnified their fears, expanded their anxieties.
Andres said, “The day after tomorrow, Mikhail. Until then.”
“Until then,” Mikhail Kiss said quietly. He watched Andres walk to the gate, then pass through without looking back. Mikhail had an attack of sudden panic and was filled with the urge to go after his nephew and call him back and tell him that everything was cancelled, there was no need to fly. Even if he’d done so, it would have been a futile gesture because the scheme had a life of its own now, a force that couldn’t be halted, not even by the man who’d first set the whole thing in motion. It had grown, and matured, like a child over whom you no longer have dominion.
His work was finished. He walked out of the terminal. He stepped under lamps and signs and moved between taxis and buses. He felt his age again, a decay, a sense of internal slippage. And his memory was surely going. He’d forgotten to say to Andres at the last moment the words Vabadus Eestile – freedom for Estonia. But it was too late now even if the unspoken words seemed very important to him. He walked into the parking garage and took the stairs up to the second level, where he’d parked his Mercedes.
It was time to go home and wait.
18
Glen Cove, Long Island
&nbs
p; Without waiting to answer awkward questions from investigators, Frank Pagan, sickened by the stench of fire that clung to him, had walked away from the burning Ford and moved through narrow streets, following the general directions the cashier had given him. These were impressive streets where branches of old trees interlocked overhead, creating barriers against the sky. The houses here were large, built on enormous green lots. These were streets in which money didn’t speak, it hummed tastefully. Pagan paused when he reached the corner of Brentwood Drive, where the greenery was even more dense and the houses virtually invisible behind crowded stands of trees and thick hedges.
There was something secretive about the street, the impenetrable shadows, the way the houses were concealed from view. People here wanted to live private lives, and so they’d created their own wilderness in the suburbs of Long Island. A pedestrian in this place stood a pretty good chance of being arrested, because it was the kind of area where walking was something only criminals and cranks ever did.
He looked at the driveways of homes as he passed them. Numbers were so discreetly displayed you had to search for them among shrubbery. He found number fourteen. A hedgerow grew around the property and a gravel driveway disappeared among foliage. The only part of the house that could be seen was the red-tiled roof. Pagan took a few steps along the driveway, which curved suddenly and the house came in view, an ornate turreted construction set just beyond a well-kept lawn. A green awning hung above the columned porch. There were no cars in the driveway, no signs of life. He glanced at the windows, noticed nothing, no face behind glass, no curtain shivering.
He walked up on to the porch. The doorbell was one of those old-fashioned brass affairs that you pulled toward you. He could hear the bell echo within the house, but nobody came to answer. He moved slowly around the back of the house where an impressive rose garden was located. The flowers grew in lavish, meticulous beds.
Pagan looked through the glass walls of a sun room, which had been added to the original structure. But he saw nothing, only the vague outlines of furniture. Then he stared across the rose beds for a time, where there was a white-latticed gazebo draped by willows, and beyond that a thick stand of oleander. None of the surrounding houses was visible because of the dense foliage, which gave this particular dwelling a sense of isolation, of loneliness – as if nobody had ever lived here.
Some of this isolation touched him. He had an urge to sit down and sleep and withdraw, making himself numb to the death of Max Klein, numb to the question that had begun to nag at him ever since he’d strolled away from the gas-station – how had Epishev known he was in the United States?
Maybe it was no great mystery. He imagined how it might have happened that Epishev came across his information. John Downey, for instance, who was known to have connections in Fleet Street, and who was often the so-called ‘reliable source’ in newspaper stories about the Yard, might have run into an intrepid reporter anxious to get some eyewitness details about events in Edinburgh – and Downey, after a few of the Newcastle Brown Ales he so enjoyed, might have let slip the fact that Frank Pagan was off on some junket to New York City. As soon as the scribbler had his information, it would then travel along the Street, passed from the mouth of one crime reporter to the next, from one pub to another, where sooner or later the item would reach the ears of one of those accredited, if vaguely shadowy, journalists who gathered information for the Soviet press. From there it was a cinch that the knowledge of Pagan’s trip would find its way back, sooner or later, to a source at the Soviet Embassy. A whisper in the ear of Epishev, and there it was …
Pagan could imagine this sequence, which was less one of malicious exposure than of bloody careless talk loosely bruited about in places where cops and reporters met to sink a few jars.
Epishev, Pagan thought. Everywhere Uncle Viktor went there was death in the vicinity. Everything he touched shrivelled and turned black. It was quite a knack to go through life laying things to waste all around you.
His head still filled with the memory of flames, Pagan peered once again through the glass walls of the sun-room. Then he tried the door, which yielded. Whoever owned this house, whoever Mikhail Kiss might be, he clearly felt he had nothing to fear from burglars, that the quiet authority, the rich seclusion of the street, was enough of a deterrent in itself. Pagan pushed the door, entered the room quietly, stood motionless. There was a strong smell of cut flowers in the air.
He stepped out into the hallway. To his left a flight of stairs rose up into darkness. Ahead of him, across the entranceway, were other rooms. Doors lay open and the half-darkened surfaces of wooden furniture gleamed quietly. The silence here was deep and impressive and the dying sunlight that managed to find its way inside rooms, squeezing through drawn-down blinds, was slightly unreal, like light from another planet.
Pagan went to the foot of the stairs, looked up a moment, then walked inside the room just ahead of him, a dining-room with an oval table and rather spare contemporary prints on the walls, a room with a certain sterile quality that suggested meals were never actually eaten here, nobody sat down to dine. It reminded Pagan of a window display in a furniture shop. Unlike the home of Carl Sundbach, with its clutter and disorder and a sense of an unarranged life being lived in its rooms, the house of Mikhail Kiss was imbued with absences and silences.
Pagan entered another room, a sitting-room, expensively done, white leather sofa, matching chairs, chrome, and again the same spacious emptiness. He walked to the stairs, climbed quietly, reached the landing. Two bedrooms, an office, a bathroom. The first bedroom was large and uninteresting, the bed made up, a book open and face down on the bedside table, an easy chair under the bay window. Pagan glanced at the book, which was in a language he didn’t understand, then he noticed a photograph of a woman on the mantelpiece across the room. He didn’t pick up the framed picture. The woman wore her hair in the style of the late 1930s. It was a good face, probably beautiful if you liked the gaunt, rather haunted look. Written on the picture, and barely legible, was an inscription – again in a language Pagan couldn’t read – and the signature Ingrida, 1938. For a reason he couldn’t begin to explain, Pagan was touched by a momentary sadness, perhaps caused by the look in the woman’s eyes, or the sense he suddenly had that he was gazing upon a picture of the dead. Why did some photographs create the impression that the subject of the picture was dead?
He stepped out of the bedroom, then into the adjoining one. A narrow room, a single bed, prints depicting a variety of aircraft, and trophies – shelves of silver cups and medallions and plaques, awards decorated by miniature figures, a boxer, a runner, a javelin-thrower. It was quite a collection. Pagan picked up a statue of a boxer and read To Andres Kiss, First Prize in the Junior Boys Section, Long Island Boxing Association, 1969. All the awards here were to the same Andres Kiss, and there were scores of them, attesting to a disciplined, athletic life, an achiever’s life, the kind of existence defined by very definite goals. Did Andres ever have time for fucking around? Pagan wondered. Presumably not, if he spent all his adolescent years training for competitions and winning trophies.
Andres Kiss. Was he Mikhail’s son? Pagan replaced the trophy, crossed the room, looking for photographs of the boy wonder. Trophies galore, but no pictures, no casual snapshots. He looked at the posters of aircraft. They were all US and British fighter planes from World War II. So Andres liked athletics and aeroplanes – what did this tell you, Holmes?
Pagan went to the window, looked out across the garden at the back of the house, seeing how darkness, almost complete now, robbed the roses of their colours. He let the curtain fall back in place and was about to turn out of Andres Kiss’s room when he noticed some framed papers on the wall above the bed. He had to turn on the bedside lamp to read them. Interesting stuff. A certificate issued by the United States Air Force to Captain Andres Kiss on the occasion of his promotion. An award from the USAF to Captain Andres Kiss for compiling one thousand hours of flying time. An honourab
le discharge to Major Kiss, dated September 1985. So young Andres went from being a juvenile terror in the boxing-ring to a wizard of the airways, a high-flyer. Pagan turned off the bedside lamp and stepped out of the bedroom to the darkened landing.
He was about to go inside the room that was clearly an office when he heard the front door opening and the sound of a key being tugged out of a lock, then the chink-chink of a chain in the palm of a hand. Frank Pagan stood very still at the top of the stairs, watching as a light was turned on in the hallway, illuminating the big man who stood in full view for only a moment before he stepped out of Pagan’s vision.
Pagan held his breath. He heard water running inside a glass, then the rattle of ice-cubes, the sound of liquid being stirred. He descended slowly, quietly, watching the square of yellow light falling out of the kitchen and into the hallway. The big man’s shadow appeared briefly, then was gone, and a door closed somewhere. The sun-room, Pagan thought. He makes himself a drink, takes it to the sun-room, sits down, relaxes.
Pagan reached the foot of the stairs, where he paused. Through an open door he could see the man sitting on a wicker sofa, his legs crossed, his head tilted back, a drink held slackly in one hand. Pagan, taking his gun from its holster, moved into the doorway that led to the glass-walled room.
The man stared at him in surprise. Ice-cubes made faint knocking sounds inside his glass.
“Don’t bother to get up,” Pagan said. It was the man in the photograph, the one who’d been snapped beside Romanenko and Sundbach. Altered by time, his hair white, his body rearranged by the years, but it was undeniably the same man.
“Mikhail Kiss?” Pagan asked.
“Who wants to know?”
Pagan flashed his ID in front of the man’s face. Mikhail Kiss, who had looked alarmed, seemed to relax now, reassured by Pagan’s identity card.
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