“Nerves trouble you, Jake?”
“I have some problems, man. I’m getting over them.”
Pagan looked sympathetic. “Back to the gun, Jake.”
Kiviranna shut his eyes and rocked his body back and forth for a time. “Okay. I got it in Soho. I went into a club, I asked around, guy sold me the gun. It was easy.”
“You’re trying my patience, Jake. You don’t walk inside some club in Soho, a complete stranger, an outsider, and find somebody to sell you a gun. It doesn’t happen that way. You need an inside track. Think again.”
Kiviranna was silent. He stroked his beard. “I got a real bad headache.”
The door of the room opened and the young policeman stepped inside, handing the brown prescription bottle to Pagan, who laid it on the table and rolled it back and forth as he studied Jake’s anxious face.
“Tell me about the gun and you get one of your pills.”
Kiviranna was silent a moment. “Okay. The gun was in a luggage locker at that station – what’s it called? King’s Cross?” He stuck a hand out towards the bottle, but Pagan covered it quickly with a palm.
“How did you know the gun was going to be there, Jake? Who told you? Who gave you the key to the locker?”
Kiviranna didn’t take his eyes away from the bottle in Frank Pagan’s fist. The look on his face was one of subdued desperation and Pagan, clutching the pills Jake was aching for, felt a surge of sympathy for the man and a slight disapproval of his own cruelty.
“He was an old guy I met in New York.”
“Did he just walk up to you on the street? Did he say here’s a key, fly to England, fetch the gun, shoot Romanenko?”
Kiviranna shook his head. “He got my name from somewhere, he called me. We met a few times. I never knew his name, and that’s the truth.”
“How come he approached you, Jake? What made him choose you?”
“I guess he heard I had certain sympathies.”
“Were you offered money?”
“Expenses, that’s all. I wasn’t going to take money for ridding the world of a guy like Romanenko.” Kiviranna sounded a little offended by the suggestion. “We met a few times, we talked, I agreed to do the job.”
“Where did your meetings take place?”
Kiviranna was speaking more frankly now. “Different places, man. Sometimes Manhattan. Sometimes Brooklyn. One time we met at Coney Island, next to the old parachute jump. Another time the boardwalk at Brighton Beach.”
“Tell me the man’s name, Jake.”
“I don’t know it, I swear. He wasn’t anxious for me to know, and I wasn’t anxious to find out.”
Pagan took the cap off the bottle. “Why did he want you to kill Romanenko?”
“Because he felt the same way I did.”
“Tell me more about this mystery man.”
Kiviranna’s forehead glistened with sweat. “What’s to tell? He was maybe seventy, in there somewhere. He spoke with a thick accent. Shabby clothes. He didn’t look like he had two nickels to rub together. But I guess he got money from somewhere, enough for my expenses anyway. I don’t remember much more.”
“And even if you could remember more, you wouldn’t tell me,” Pagan said. He tilted the bottle and a few capsules slid on to the table. He examined them carefully, checking the name of the manufacturer, Lilley, imprinted on the side of each one.
“I’ve told you everything,” Kiviranna said.
“I don’t think so, Jake.” Pagan pushed one of the pills across the table to Kiviranna, who picked it up quickly and tossed it into his mouth. “Enjoy. We’ll talk again tomorrow. Maybe you’ll find your memory has improved after a good night’s sleep.”
Pagan put the medicine bottle in his pocket together with Kiviranna’s passport, stood up, walked towards the door. He was struck by fatigue but he knew that it was something he was going to have to carry around with him for some hours yet.
“What if I don’t have anything new to tell you in the morning?” Kiviranna asked. “What then?”
Pagan turned, looked at the man, smiled in a thin way. He didn’t answer the question but hoped that his smile, so devoid of mirth, suggested an unspeakable threat. Closing the door, he went out into the corridor and dipped his face into a drinking-fountain, letting a jet of lukewarm water splash against his eyes and forehead. A gun in a left-luggage locker, a nameless man in New York who’d sent Jake all the way to England – maybe it was all very simple, nothing more than a straightforward political assassination planned by Jake’s anonymous acquaintance and carried out by Kiviranna who, through his own strange filter, saw the world in terms of black and white, evil and good. Maybe that’s all there was to the affair.
But there was a dark area at the back of Pagan’s mind, a room in which assorted problems lay like unlit lightbulbs awaiting a surge of electricity to illuminate them. And in this room there lived Pagan’s muse, his own inner policeman, his personal inspector, who was rarely satisfied with simplicity and who hated darkness passionately. He loathed puzzles too, such as the plain white envelope, sealed and unaddressed, that Aleksis Romanenko had carried in his briefcase.
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Acknowledgments
My gratitude is due to Tom Congdon, whose editorial wizardry approaches that magical condition – alchemy. And to Richard Pine, who encouraged and helped and offered all kinds of wonderful assistance from the start of the Irish dance. And to Arthur Pine, whose staunch, supportive feeling about this novel made a world of difference. I would also like to thank Dave Post of Computer Services, Sedona, Arizona, and Chief Engineer Mike Wilson for their kindness, as well as my English editor, Nick Sayers, for all his help and thoughtful co-operation.
About the Author
Campbell Armstrong (1944–2013) was an international bestselling author best known for his thriller series featuring British counterterrorism agent Frank Pagan, and his quartet of Glasgow Novels, featuring detective Lou Perlman. Two of these, White Rage and Butcher, were nominated for France’s Prix du Polar. Armstrong’s novels Assassins & Victims and The Punctual Rape won Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Awards.
Born in Glasgow and educated at the University of Sussex, Armstrong worked as a book editor in London and taught creative writing at universities in the United States.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Portions of the lyric “Bye Bye Blackbird” by Ray Henderson and Mort Dixon. Copyright 1926 Warner Bros, Inc. (renewed), used by permission. All rights reserved.
For permission to quote from “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On,” the author gratefully acknowledges the composer, Mr. David Curlee Williams.
Portions of “Sorrow” by The Merseybeats, copyright 1965, reprinted by kind permission of Grand Canyon Music, Inc.
Copyright © 1987 by Campbell Armstrong
Cover design by Angela Goddard
ISBN: 978-1-5040-0704-7
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