“Choice isn’t the word. The solution was forced on us. Dear God, do you think what we did was easy for us?”
Pagan thought how painful it was to see a man obliged to speak a truth he’d clearly contrived to keep from himself for years, the forced words, the pauses, sentences dragged up from a place deep inside. He was filled with a sense of anticipation now, wondering what Kristina would do next. There was an air of unpredictability about her.
Kiss said, “There. I’ve told you. I owed you that.”
“What do you want now?” Kristina asked. “Absolution?”
“I sometimes think that if he knew, Norbert would understand why we did what we did. But I don’t expect forgiveness from you.”
“Forgiveness is the last goddam thing I could give you even if I wanted to,” Kristina said. “I didn’t come here to do you favours, Kiss. I came here to look at you. I came here to see what kind of man betrayed my father.”
Mikhail Kiss stared uncomfortably at the floor. He said, “I’d do it again if I had to, Kristina.”
Kristina Vaska walked across the room and looked out at the darkness. She said, “You ruined my family, Kiss. It wasn’t Epishev who wrecked it. What did he care? He was only doing his fucking rotten job. But you and Romanenko, you gave my father away, you practically made a donation of him to the Russians. And my mother …” She paused here and there was a slight catch in her voice and Pagan had the urge to go towards her and comfort her, but he didn’t move. The space between himself and Kristina had filled up with unexpected obstacles.
“My mother sits in a forlorn little house upstate and she writes letters, Kiss. She writes letters to the Kremlin and the White House and Number Ten Downing Street. Begging letters. Please help me get my husband released from Siberia. Year after year she sends off the same letters and it’s deadening to go through the same process endlessly – petitions, forms, the whole dumb rigmarole that you know in advance isn’t going to work, but you do it anyway because you don’t have any other channels …”
Kiss sighed. His mind had drifted away from this room, this house, this girl who had opened the door for ghosts. He was thinking of Andres high above the Atlantic. The journey, the arrival.
Kristina Vaska opened her purse, took out a pistol, turned it on Mikhail Kiss. Pagan stepped toward her, and she waved him away, gesturing with the gun. Her expression was hard and uncompromising, as if whatever beauty she had was destroyed by her murderous intention. Kiss looked at the pistol, watched the way the woman came forward, saw how she held the barrel of the gun towards his head, then he felt the pressure of metal against the side of his face. She pushed it hard into his flesh.
“Kristina,” Pagan said.
“I looked for a long time, Frank. Ever since I first came to this country, I’ve been looking. Sometimes I thought I was getting close, then it would slip away. I’d get only so far before I’d run into blank walls,” she said. “When I was running out of options, I found you. And you found Kiss.”
Pagan wanted to reach for her and take the weapon away. He saw Kiss’s flesh fold like paper where the barrel of the gun made a deep impression in his face. Kiss had his eyes shut. There was the sound of the safety being released and it echoed inside Kiss’s skull like the noise of somebody shouting in a tunnel.
“Kristina,” Pagan said. “He’s the only link I’ve got with the Brotherhood’s plan. If you shoot him …”
She stared at Pagan. “What do you think I care about that, Frank? What are they going to do? Say boo to the Russians? The Russians will squash them the way they squash everything.” She pushed the gun harder and Kiss, flinching, moaned at the way metal cut into his flesh.
“Let me at least talk to him,” Pagan said.
Kiss, moving his face away from the gun, tapped the side of his skull. “Talk until you’re blue in the face, Pagan. The plan is locked in here, and that’s exactly where it stays.”
Pagan stepped closer to the old man. “Stay away, Frank,” she said. “Keep out of this. It’s got absolutely nothing to do with you.”
“People keep telling me that. And I don’t seem to hear them properly.”
“You better start listening,” Kristina said. She tightened her finger on the trigger, conscious of the vulnerability of Kiss’s flesh, the veins at the side of the skull, the fragile arrangement of bone and flesh and tissue she could blow away in a fraction of time. And then it wasn’t Mikhail Kiss she was seeing, suddenly it was her father, it was Norbert Vaska, and she envisioned him in his white wasteland and wondered if he’d died there, or whether he was alive and still remembered his daughter, if he remembered love and all the things that had been taken from him. She imagined him with his eyes shut in death and then she had an image of gravediggers spading half-frozen ground, not yet thawed after winter but softening in the growing warmth of spring, and then they laid Norbert Vaska into this chilly earth. She shut her eyes a second. These pictures were more than she could bear. The frozen white hands, crystals of ice clinging to eyelashes, the lips silent and blue, the eyes – perhaps open – staring into an arctic nothingness. She thought she heard his voice say The Brotherhood betrayed me. Is this what you want me to do, father? she wondered. Do you want me to pull this goddam trigger? To avenge you? Or would you tell me now that Kiss and Romanenko did what they had to, that in any war – even a lost one like this, even a pathetic little struggle like this – all useful tactics are justifiable? Confused suddenly, enraged by her own bewilderment, Kristina Vaska stared at the side of Kiss’s face, seeing one expressionless blue eye, a faint shadow of white hair on the damp upper lip. Kiss and Romanenko riding a ferry in the rain, and planning Norbert Vaska’s death – how plain, how straightforward, how civilised. Would you have agreed with them, Norbert Vaska? If it had been you and Romanenko on that ferry discussing Mikhail Kiss, how would you have behaved? There was madness here, the madness of patriotism, of men fighting for a totally hopeless cause, creating their little make-believe reality in which they see themselves bravely evicting the Soviets, pitchforks against submachine guns, Molotov cocktails against tanks, sorry dreams. Anger went through her, a dark red rage filling her brain. It was uncontrollable.
“Kristina,” Pagan said.
She saw him reach for the gun and she said, “Get the fuck away, Frank.”
“Kristina,” he said again.
“Goddam you!” Her eyes were moist and she couldn’t quite see Kiss clearly now, but enough. She said, “You piece of shit, you useless piece of shit,” and she understood she couldn’t shoot him. She couldn’t do it. She smacked him across the lips with the pistol and as his head tilted away from her she struck him again, bringing the barrel of the gun down upon his forehead, and his whole face swung back, blood pouring from his brow, from his split lip. She raised her hand up and started to bring it down a third time in a violent arc, a mindless movement, but Pagan caught her hand in the air and took the gun from her, and all her terrible fury collapsed and she slid to the floor where she sat cross-legged, staring at Mikhail Kiss, who had his face covered with his hands. She thought A worthless piece of shit, and I can’t even shoot him, and she closed her eyes and imagined she felt the misty rain fall across the Suomenlinna ferry where two men planned her father’s betrayal. And she had the thought that even though he was absent, even though he knew nothing about the plot against him, just the same Norbert Vaska would have agreed, he would have given his consent to his own condemnation because he lived with the taste of the Brotherhood in his mouth, he lived in the past, when the enemy was somebody you could see at the end of your rifle and your native land hadn’t altogether yielded to the Russians …
Mikhail Kiss, his hands covered in his own blood, sat down in a chair. He was breathing hard. Pagan bent over him.
“When is it going to happen?” Pagan asked.
“Go fuck yourself,” Kiss replied quietly.
“When and where, Mikhail?”
“Vabadus Eestile,” Mikhail Kiss whispered.
>
Moscow
In her apartment near Izmailova Park, Valentina Uvarova hurriedly packed clothing. She’d been told to travel lightly which was no great problem because there wasn’t much she wanted to bring along with her in any event, there was nothing here worth remembering, or keeping, except for a couple of toys – sentimental favourites of the two children – and a few necessary items of clothing. She was a small woman with a tiny oval face and cheekbones so high her eyes seemed deeply recessed into her head. People who knew her spoke most often of her determination. Valentina’s such a determined person, they’d say, as if grit were a fault. But her determination concealed something else, a basic discontentment with the barren prospects of her life.
She stuffed the case, closed it, noticed how nervous she was. She sat on the bed and smoked a cigarette, listening to the sounds of the children in the kitchen. They knew they were going on a trip, she simply hadn’t told them where. They knew Daddy would be joining them wherever it was, and this made them happy. Valentina touched the small crucifix she wore round her neck and said quietly to herself Dear Jesus, help us now. She let her hands fall into her lap and she pressed them together.
We’re going away, we’re going away, we’re going away!
This was the girl’s voice, shrill and penetrating. Valentina Uvarova had warned the children to say nothing to anybody. Not to their friends, their relatives, not even to their grandmother. They were to keep completely silent, but for a kid secrets were impossible to maintain. She walked into the kitchen and silenced the children. The boy, who looked like a miniature of his father Yevgenni, was easy. The girl was the spirited one.
“We must keep very quiet,” Valentina said.
The girl asked, “When are we leaving?”
“In a couple of hours.”
“Why can’t we go now? Right now?”
“Why? Do you want to wait in the railway station?”
“Yes,” the girl said. “I like stations.”
Valentina considered the prospect, but she didn’t want to hang around a station, passing hours before the train arrived. If she stayed here, at least there were still things to keep her occupied. There were dishes to clean. There was rubbish to be removed. Even though she might be leaving this apartment forever, she couldn’t possibly leave it in disarray. They’d talk about her after she’d gone, and they’d say She left the place like a pigsty, but what can you expect from a traitor’s wife anyway? She wouldn’t leave the place dirty. Not Valentina Uvarova. She couldn’t stand the idea of the women in the neighbourhood saying bad things about her.
She went to the sink, turned the faucet, and lukewarm water spluttered out, and the old gas-heater wheezed on the wall above her.
We’re going away, the girl said in a whisper. We’re going to see Daddy.
Valentina shushed the child again. She ran some dirty plates under the water, wiped them with a cloth, set them aside to dry. A new life, she thought. The phrase kept running through her head like an inescapable melody. A new life.
She dried her hands on a towel. And that was when she heard the heavy knock on the front door. She felt it then, blood draining from her face, from her hands, her heart turning a somersault in her chest.
Somebody’s at the door, the boy said.
She looked at her son’s small upturned face, the eyes that were suddenly wary, and then she stepped along the hallway. She opened the door slowly. It was not one visitor, but two, and they wore uniforms that filled her with dread.
Glen Cove, Long Island
If there was any evidence of what the Brotherhood planned to do, Pagan thought the logical place to find it was in the only room he hadn’t so far explored, the office on the second floor. He switched on a light, surveyed the room. It was the desk that interested him primarily, and he walked towards it, scanning the papers spread across the surface. He began to flick them, beset by a sense of urgency. A need to keep busy, that was it. Keep going. Don’t stop. He was aware of Krishna Vaska entering the room and he thought, Ignore the woman.
He didn’t look up. He heard her cross the floor, felt her hands on his shoulders. He didn’t move. Her touch stirred him and he resented his own response.
“You must accept one thing, Frank.”
“Tell me about it,” Pagan said.
“I care about you. I didn’t want to, but it happened. And that hasn’t changed. At first, I just thought you were going to be useful to me, you had resources I could use. But it changed. It became something else, Frank.”
“Terrific,” Pagan said.
“I’ve hurt you.”
“You’re an insightful sort of person. I like that.”
Pagan shuffled the papers around. They were written in Estonian. What else could he have expected? He kept shuffling them anyway, looking for something he might understand.
“Frank, listen to me. I never intended to cause you any harm.”
“I’m not harmed,” he said sharply. “Disappointed, yes. Up to here with you, yes. Disgusted with the idea you used me, absolutely. But harmed? No, love. Not harmed. It’s like having something in my eye. It smarts for a few minutes, but a little water flushes it away.”
“I want to talk to you. Look at me.”
He did, but only briefly, then went back to the papers. There were bills, credit card vouchers, letters, but nothing that yielded up the kind of information he could have used.
“I admit,” she said. “I wanted to kill him. Or I thought I did. But when it came right down to it, Frank …” She touched his arm. “I thought I wanted to kill Romanenko too, but I don’t know if I would have been able to do that either. Circumstances prevented me from finding out anyway.”
He said, “Look, you drift into my life. We spend a couple of pleasant hours passionately fucking –”
“It was more than that, and you know it –”
Pagan shook his head. Taken for a ride, he thought. The careless heart. The alchemy of attraction that transmuted blatant lies into shining truths, changed dross into lovely little gems. He remembered one of the first things she’d ever said to him. 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. And you bought it, Frank. You laid your money out and you bought the whole gooseberry patch. She’s been working you from the very start, twisting you and shaping you, oiling you so you’d run smoothly along the right tracks. And, boy, didn’t you ever? Wind my clockwork, sweetie, see how I run.
He looked at the typewriter on the desk, scanned a sheet of paper in it. That damned language again. He swivelled the chair around, turning his face away from Kristina Vaska.
She said, “It doesn’t have to end like this, Frank. We could walk away. We could leave this place right now. What goddam difference does the Brotherhood’s plan make to us? Does it matter if it succeeds or fails? Who cares?”
“I care,” he said.
Mikhail Kiss appeared in the doorway, a blood-stained towel clutched against his face. When he spoke he did so through swollen lips and a mouth that no longer felt associated with his face. “Feel free,” he said. “Papers, letters, documents – look at anything you like, Pagan. I’m a hospitable man, but you’ll find absolutely nothing.” And then Kiss turned and went into his own bedroom, where he sat on the edge of the bed with his eyes closed and the towel pressed to his lips.
Pagan watched him go. There was something smug in the way Kiss had spoken and Pagan wondered if there was a bluff going on. Ransack my office all you like, you won’t find a goddam thing. No, it wasn’t a simple bluff. If Kiss had kept anything important in this house he wouldn’t have gone out and left the place unlocked, and he wouldn’t be allowing Pagan easy access to this office. He tore the sheet of paper from the typewriter and handed it to Kristina and asked her to translate it. She looked at the paper a moment before she said it was a recipe for a dish called mulgikapsad. She looked at the other papers that la
y across the desk, the ones Pagan had leafed through, and they were all recipes, every single one of them.
“He must be compiling a cookbook,” she said.
Pagan got up and walked to the window. A cookbook. A bloody hobby. He parted the curtains and looked down into the darkness of the garden. Think. Just think. You’re supposed to have some kind of knack for hunches, little flashes of intuition. They served you beautifully when it came to Kristina Vaska, didn’t they? He heard the woman come up behind him and lay her hands on his shoulders and he loved the way she touched him, despite himself.
“Forgive me, Frank.”
Forgiveness was hard. There was always the spectre of deceit. My little actress, he thought. But it couldn’t all have been an act. There must have been moments of truthfulness. He wanted to think that the lovemaking – at least that – had been real. Besides, what had she done but harbour the desire to avenge her father’s betrayal? It wasn’t as if she’d found in herself the capacity to kill anybody, was it? Pagan turned to look at her, but gazing into her face was as difficult as finding forgiveness. He’d been fooled, and that was a tough one to digest.
“How long is it going to take?” she asked.
He raised a hand and lightly touched the side of her face a moment. “If you’d been straight with me from the start –”
“And you would have helped me, Frank? You would have gone out of your way to help a crazy lady with vengeance on her mind? I thought my way was better. The anxious daughter worried sick about her father’s health – I figured that was the one most likely to succeed. And if it sounds calculated, you’re absolutely right. It was calculated. I could have used a goddam slide-rule.”
Calculated, he thought. He walked back to the desk. Through the open door and across the landing he could see inside Kiss’s bedroom. Kiss still sat motionless on the edge of the bed, the red towel pressed to his mouth, his eyes shut. He seemed absurdly calm, removed from the situation, secure in the knowledge that Pagan would find nothing in any of the rooms of this house.
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