In Pagan’s scheme of things, the explosion in the tunnel had priority over a mystifying message and the unhappy death of a young prostitute in Mayfair. He’d give the lampshade back to Scobie; it was Scobie’s business. Let him deal with it. Let him handle the evidence. If he wanted to return the message to Gunderson, that was his affair.
‘All I can say is, I hope you find her,’ Gunderson remarked.
‘Her?’ Pagan asked.
‘The handwriting was done by a woman,’ Gunderson said. ‘Didn’t I mention that?’
‘You’re sure of that?’
‘One hundred and one per cent.’
Pagan stared at the old man. ‘You’d swear on the family Bible, would you?’
‘On a stack of them.’
Pagan went out into the corridor, moving towards the front door. Foxie came after him. Together, they left the basement flat and climbed the steps to the street where a vicious wind, creating a dolorous sound, blew long-dead leaves from the direction of Regent’s Park. A woman, Pagan thought.
The turbulence in his mind cleared a second, a tide receded. He felt as if a tuning-fork were reverberating in his skull.
A woman.
But it couldn’t be, he thought.
Not after ten years, it couldn’t be.
SEVENTEEN
AMSTERDAM
THE GENERAL LEFT HIS LUGGAGE IN A LOCKER AND WALKED THROUGH Amsterdam Airport, passing a variety of glittering stores in which were displayed jewels, expensive clothing, the very latest in electronic gadgetry. He paused here and there to study a wrist-watch, a ring, the latest computer. He had the thought that the basic human lust for such items had brought down an empire. For the sake of a new VCR, societies had dissolved, histories had been eroded, dynasties shattered. It was a strange consideration. In faraway Tokyo or Seoul, electronics experts had inadvertently caused the death of a political system almost eighty years old.
He kept moving in his rather straight-backed fashion. He needed to sneeze and drew from his coat pocket a Kleenex, which he thrust towards his nose. The coat, made out of vicuña by an exclusive tailor in Milan, had been bought for him in New York City. Here were other strange considerations and connections of the kind the General liked to ponder – an animal raised in South America had been shorn of its wool by some Peruvian shepherd and the fleece shipped to a tailor in Italy so that a coat could be purchased in a shop on Fifth Avenue. One could not help but be amazed by such global correlations.
He left the airport at eleven a.m. and took a taxicab into the city, where a variety of drugged-out young people, seemingly immune to the weather, lolled on frigid benches. They passed dope back and forth and looked generally blissed. A few slept on the frosty grass of small park areas where every so often a policeman would try to wake them. Berlin, the General understood, had gone in much the same direction, kids smoking grass on the streets, shooting themselves up with heroin, white-faced young people in leather and earrings whose only known goal in life was to find a way to get high. It was a depressing phenomenon, this lack of direction and discipline. The behaviour of youth – ah, well, it was only a symptom of a more serious condition.
‘A fine sight,’ the cab-driver said. He was a polite Dutch-African with well-kempt dreadlocks. He spoke good English.
The General nodded, said nothing.
‘Is this your first visit?’ the driver asked.
‘No.’ The General preferred to be uncommunicative when it came to taxi-drivers. He didn’t want to be remembered later.
‘Drugs,’ the driver said. ‘A criminal element is always involved in drugs.’
‘Of course,’ said the General. He gazed at an outsized pizza sign which hung in the morning light like a scabrous moon.
The General noticed a lovely teenage girl in torn black leggings and short black skirt weave along the pavement, a tragic angel. He understood that holes in leggings were fashionable, but so were safety-pins in earlobes, hatpins in nipples and gothic tattoos. A whole generation seemed intent on lacerating itself. This desire to disfigure oneself was further evidence of moral decline. He studied the girl as the cab passed, turning his head to see the sad hollow beauty of her young face.
He stepped out of the cab by the Herengracht. A group of tourists, wrapped up against the elements, passed in a barge along the canal; their faces peered out miserably from windows. He turned away from the sight, walking quickly toward his destination, a small pastry shop.
He entered, took a table against the wall, looked at his wristwatch. He was some eight minutes early for his appointment. He ordered coffee and a concoction of light pastry and strawberries, a taste of summer and sunlight in the core of this wintry city. An obsessive checker of time, he glanced again at his watch after five minutes had passed. He was due back at the airport in two hours for his connecting flight. Exactly eight minutes after he’d arrived, the door opened and a man in a black fur coat came inside.
Although Vassily looked different from the old days, although his silvery hair had been layered and blow-dried and his eyebrows plucked and the pouches under his eyes surgically removed, the General would have recognized him anywhere. Nothing had changed in the way Vassily moved, certainly not that sense of volcanic energy held in check. There was no physical space that seemed capable of containing him. It was as if he were in constant combat with the limitations of his environment. He came in swift strides to the table, sat down, laid his hand on the General’s wrist and patted it two or three times with a vigour that was almost painful.
‘My friend Erich, how very good to see you,’ Vassily said and dragged his chair close to the table.
‘Likewise,’ said the General.
‘America is good to you, I see.’ Vassily fingered the cuff of the General’s coat.
‘Materially. Which isn’t everything.’
Vassily raised a finger to the side of his face. The General noticed that where once there had been a magnificent hairy wart, there was now only a small unremarkable blemish. So Vassily had had more than his eyebags removed.
‘And yourself?’ the General asked.
‘Moscow is changed.’ Vassily looked vaguely forlorn but such expressions never remained for long on his face. ‘We have a new class of entrepreneurs, which is in reality the old class except they’ve come out from the shadows. We have more criminals, of course. And they’re armed with every weapon known to man. Rocket-launchers, anti-tank guns, automatic weapons. We even have our own neo-Nazis. But that is to be expected in the present climate. People are discontented. Gurenko leads them into mazes with trapdoors. He doesn’t see things the way they are. Now he’s about to play the role of international statesman, shaking hands with the mighty of Europe, reassuring them. Blah blah blah.’
The General couldn’t resist a little humour. ‘Among all your other social changes, I see you also have new cosmetic surgeons.’
‘Ah. You notice. Vanity is good for the soul. I’m a vain bastard, Erich. Always have been.’
The General looked round the pastry shop. What did they see, those Dutch matrons sipping coffee and eating cream cakes? A couple of retirees with nothing better to do than meet for coffee and pastries? How deceptive appearances could be, he thought. You could never trust surfaces. He suddenly thought about the missing man, Jacob Streik, and wondered if Streik, like Vassily, had managed to alter his appearance in some way. Even though he’d been reassured by Saxon, the matter of Streik still dogged him.
‘But we didn’t meet to lament Gurenko, did we?’ Vassily asked. ‘How are things in America?’
The General shrugged. ‘The Americans are proud of their efficiency. I suspect this pride is largely unfounded. They go about business briskly, but sometimes their very haste leads to oversights, lapses, errors.’
‘New World energy,’ said Vassily, and turned to summon a waitress. ‘I prefer Old World thoroughness. Less speed, of course, but we always had an eye for detail. A great eye, if I may say so.’
‘Indeed,’ sai
d the General. ‘But the times demand strange bedfellows.’
‘That doesn’t mean we have to think like whores.’
The General forked a sliver of pastry between his lips. ‘I sometimes despair, Vassily. I have moments when all I see are black clouds on the horizon. Then I feel useless. One of yesterday’s men.’
Vassily laughed in his staccato way. ‘You overstate, my friend.’
‘Do I? Do I really? I wonder.’
Vassily ate the pastry the waitress set before him. He scrutinized the girl’s big hips in his practised way, then he chopped and chewed as if he hadn’t eaten in years. He drank his coffee in one quick gulp. He drew a napkin across his mouth. ‘Think of it like this, Erich. We are simply using the Americans. They are not controlling us.’
‘Perhaps. But they write the rules, Vassily. We play by their regulations.’
‘A temporary business,’ Vassily said.
‘I’m not so sure. They may make demands later that we can’t meet. They may create impossible impositions.’
Vassily said, ‘You were always too much of a worrier. Look. The Americans want only one thing – and you know what that is, don’t you, Erich? Profit. In a word. If they profit, they’re delighted. They’re happy as pigs in shit. Their whole society turns on an axis of profit.’
The General thought this too simplistic. There was more to this than turning a buck, as the Americans were so fond of saying. Admittedly, profit was a motive, but he’d found other stimuli among the Americans with whom he’d had to deal. There was a hard core of belief in what they were doing, a certain self-righteousness that could only come into being when there was an identifiable enemy. Without such an enemy, America was forced to turn inward, to look into its own heart, where there were more failings, more inadequacies than any Congress could deal with. Drug wars, the escalation of home violations, the rising murder rate, social inequities. In the General’s view, Americans – certainly those he worked with – were better at looking outward than they were at examining their own flaws. Vassily, who had no experience of the United States, only saw a surface.
The General said, ‘But—’
‘But but but. Forget buts!’ Vassily punched the General on the shoulder, a playful gesture delivered with more force than was necessary. ‘We are on the move, Erich. Hardly a day goes by when there isn’t some new crisis or an old one that has worsened. The Georgians are at the throats of the Abkhazians. The Chechens are shooting the Ingushetians. The Moldovans don’t know if they’re coming or going. As for Yugoslavia …’ Vassily rattled his coffee cup in its saucer. ‘Germany’s reunification is a damned rat’s nest. The country’s practically bankrupt. They got East Germany, but they inherited more than they imagined. And the Baltic nations aren’t exactly prospering. The list is a long one. We’re prepared, Erich. We’re ready.’
‘I know, I know,’ said the General.
‘In big cities, in small towns, in various organizations – we have people of enormous influence. With due modesty, I have to include myself in that category. We didn’t vanish off the face of the earth, Erich. We didn’t go the way of the dinosaurs, you know. Some of us went to ground, but only to hibernate. Not to sleep the sleep of the dead. We’re alive and we’re kicking. Don’t forget that.’
‘I try to keep it in mind.’ The General sat back in his chair. He looked at his watch.
‘Then don’t be discouraged.’
‘Discouraged? That isn’t it.’ The General thought of the young girl in the Manhattan apartment and how far away she seemed. What had she said to him? Tomorrow is another day? Something like that. He wondered how many tomorrows were left to him. He leaned forward across the table. ‘I worry more than is good for me, Vassily.’
Vassily laughed once again and punched the General’s shoulder a second time. ‘Worry is for old women. Everything will go the way it is planned to go. I have taken the appropriate steps at my end. And if it is going well at your end – how can it turn out badly?’
The General forced a small smile and gazed round the pastry shop, thinking it was time to go back to the airport. But he was reluctant to rise; after so many months in the company of Americans it was good to sit with somebody whose ideological background was much the same as his own, whose goals and ideals resembled his; it was comforting. Even if there had been past differences between STASI and the KGB, these had been buried by circumstance.
And he thought again of Streik, an abysmal shadow falling across his private landscape. Vassily knew nothing of Streik, nothing of Harcourt. He knew only of the big picture, as the Americans might say.
Vassily said, ‘Now! Why don’t we find ourselves a couple of little whores and have some fun?’
‘I have a plane to catch, Vassily.’
‘The beauty of planes is if you miss one you can always catch another. Forget planes! There are other kinds of flying much more interesting.’
‘You haven’t lost the appetite, I see.’
‘The day I lose that will be the day they shovel earth on my face.’ Vassily was already standing up, tugging at the General’s sleeve.
They stepped out of the pastry shop and Vassily put an arm around the General’s shoulder. The General looked toward the still dark water of the Herengracht. A wind blew up suddenly, fracturing the surface. A duck flew under a bridge, a rich streak of white.
‘We’ll take a taxi to the red-light district, Erich. We’ll window-shop until you see something that takes your fancy.’
The General relented. ‘I can always catch a later plane.’ He walked alongside the canal with a certain buoyancy in his step. It was only when he passed two drugged teenage boys, both red-eyed and laughing hysterically, that his mood underwent a change. He looked at the boys. Their laughter was crazed. As his young lady in Manhattan might have said: They were airheads. Space cadets.
‘Look, Vassily. Look.’
Vassily pawed the air in a gesture of dismissal. ‘Kids on drugs. So what?’
‘It’s the same in Berlin. In Moscow. The same all over Europe. Is this the generation for which we’re working?’
‘They’ve lost their way, that’s all.’
The General put a hand on Vassily’s sleeve. ‘Are they worth it? Are they worth the effort?’
‘Erich, Erich. They have lost their gods. They have no heroes. How are they supposed to find commitment? Where is the structure for them? We need to give them structure. Think of it that way.’
‘It’s hard.’ The General looked dejectedly into the water.
‘For God’s sake! Have faith!’
The General sighed and reminded himself that he should be hurrying to the airport and not into the arms of some whore. He looked away from the Herengracht and into his comrade’s eyes, which had lost none of their liveliness. In Vassily’s eyes you could see a whole world of possibilities.
Vassily put his hand in the inside pocket of his coat and took out a plain brown sealed envelope. ‘Before I forget,’ and he handed it to the General.
‘Ah, yes. Of course.’ The General slipped the envelope into his coat.
Business concluded, both men went, in the manner of two sprightly elderly satyrs, in search of a taxi.
The General said, ‘You’re a bad influence, Vassily Budenny.’
‘The worst,’ Budenny answered.
EIGHTEEN
LONDON
TWO HOURS AFTER LEAVING GUNDERSON, PAGAN WENT UP INTO THE attic at Golden Square, a chilly space filled with a complex arrangement of pipes that ran between floors down to the ill-tempered boiler in the basement. It was in the attic that Foxie, unable to find a suitable space elsewhere in the building, had set up an old-fashioned slide projector and a makeshift screen fashioned from an old dust-cover.
I can call you Frank, can’t I? If we’re going to spend hours in each other’s company, why bother with formalities? Or do you prefer Mr Pagan? Pagan remembered this now: fine hands, fine long fingers slightly spatulated, slender wrists. Her fingernails are v
arnished a secretive black. She crosses her long legs, her very short black suede skirt rides her thigh, her legs are bare, Pagan looks away. She knows her power. She knows exactly. She knows how to hold, how to captivate. You smoke too much, you know. You should really cut down. Think of your lungs. Have you ever seen pictures of cancerous lungs?
Foxworth fidgeted with the projector and a beam of white light created a circle on the screen. ‘Give me a minute before I get this thing running properly.’
‘Why isn’t this material on computer?’ Pagan asked.
Foxie said, ‘Actually it is. But we can’t access it yet.’
‘We’re not linked up, is that it?’
‘Interfaced is the word, Frank. We’re not one hundred per cent interfaced with the mainframe.’
Pagan loathed these computer terms. He understood the need for the new technology, the way facts could explode on screens before your eyes, the hours of slog from which you were liberated, the information that could be summoned from a thousand sources at the press of a couple of buttons, but the language – pixels, batch processing, fact allocation files: they made him feel he belonged to a new class of illiterates.
He shut his eyes, waited. Perhaps I’ll join you in a cigarette, Frank. I like one from time to time. It’s one of my lesser vices. Do you want to know what the others are? Some of them are amusing. Shall I tell you? Shall I confess the things I like to do? Are you blushing, Frank? He remembers: he reaches across the table, a struck match held in one hand. He tries to light her cigarette but she pulls her face back and the flame burns his fingertip. He realizes she has done this deliberately. Let’s try that again, Frank. I don’t understand why your hand is shaking. Am I having a bad effect on you? He offers a second match, applies it to her cigarette. She doesn’t inhale. She blows a stream of blue smoke straight at him and smiles and his eyes are caught in hers and he has the feeling he’s a fleck of iron drawn into a magnetic field, can’t resist it, the pull, the energy, the sheer dazzling fact of her beauty. To her, beauty is power. Beauty is what you inflict on other people. A punishment, a surgical instrument.
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