Jig (75 page)

1

Edinburgh, Scotland

There were too many things wrong with Edinburgh in late August. The crowds that filled Princes Street and spilled over into the old thoroughfares leading up to the Castle, which floated in the drizzling mist like a great galleon, gave Jacob Kiviranna a sense of claustrophobia. He was distressed by crowds, especially those that consisted mainly of American and Japanese tourists, restless as magpies, searching for quaint bargains in stores with none to offer. And then there was the weather, which was wet and joyless. It had been raining in a slow, merciless way ever since he'd arrived in the city the day before and checked into a small hotel behind Hanover Street – and now he couldn't rid himself of the feeling that his lungs were waterlogged.

He looked at his watch, an old Timex, and saw he had thirty minutes until the train arrived at Waverley Station. He moved along Rose Street, Edinburgh's famous street of bars, passing open doorways through which he could see flocks of hurried drinkers. He stepped inside one of the pubs, sat on a stool at the far end of the counter – a solitary spot – and ordered gin.

In the mirror behind the bar he gazed at his reflection. The eyes were deeply set and bright and somehow made people uneasy when they looked into them. The few acquaintances Jacob Kiviranna had made in his lifetime – other than analysts and therapists – had invariably found pretexts for drifting out of his orbit and slipping from sight. There was an intensity about him, an other-worldliness, that deterred friendships. Even as he sat now in the bar his lips moved almost imperceptibly in the way of people who have lived lives of extreme loneliness and who converse, if at all, with the voices they hear in their own skulls.

Stitched to the left shoulder of his khaki combat jacket was a Disneyland legend, the face of Mickey Mouse. On the right sleeve was a small American flag. Kiviranna's ponytail was held tightly in place with a brown rubber band. He wore a wispy beard and looked like a superannuated hippie, a relic of another place and time. To a casual onlooker, he might have seemed like a raddled casualty of the drug culture, somebody who had taken one trip too many and hadn't quite managed to make it back and who now lived, poor soul, in a crazy world of his own making. And yet there was something more to Kiviranna than just this impression of being out of touch. There was something purposeful in his air of vague bewilderment, the kind of look aspirant saints carried back with them from the wilderness.

He sipped his drink, looked once again at his watch. If British Rail obeyed its own inscrutable timetables there were now twenty-five minutes until the train arrived on platform three at Waverley Station. He reached inside the pocket of his jacket and touched the gun. It was an Argentinian nine-shot Bersa 225. When he'd handled it in his hotel room this morning, he'd liked the icy blue finish of the pistol, the silken, almost fleshy sensation.

Twenty minutes. He left the bar without finishing his drink. It was a mere ten minutes to Waverley Station, hardly any distance at all, but he'd stroll there slowly.

On Princes Street he stared up at the Castle. It reminded him now of a natural artifact, something hacked by nature out of wind and rock and still in some weird process of change. Along the gardens of Princes Street flags fluttered bleakly. Posters advertising this or that Festival event were limp and soggy and indifferent. Avant-garde plays. Mime shows. Mozart. Pipe and drum bands.

Ahead, Kiviranna saw the entrance to the station. He paused, jostled on all sides by people with umbrellas and shopping bags. A group of boys wearing the green and white scarves of a local soccer team went banging past him, singing something unintelligible and irritating. He put his hand against the outline of the gun as he moved closer to the station. There was a familiar pain that had come out of nowhere to take root deep in his head.

He heard the shunting of a locomotive and the shouts of newspaper vendors and the screeching brakes of maroon double-decker buses. For the first time now he felt a sudden fluttering of nerves, something that moved around his heart and made him cold. Something that had nothing to do with the external weather. He adjusted his backpack, stopped to look at the headline on one of the local newspapers, then he moved on.

He took a thin guidebook out of his jeans, pretended to examine it, flipping through the pages but seeing little.

Edinburgh has always been known as the Athens of the North
.

The print seemed to slither in front of his eyes. The words might have turned to grey liquid. He put the guidebook away. He went down the steps that led to Waverley Station. He touched the gun once more, a small reassuring gesture. He wiped slicks of rain from his face, ran one hand through his damp beard. And there it was again, that sense of nervousness, of a tremor going through his heart, like some extra pulse added to the rhythms of his body. He'd have to bring that under control. He couldn't afford any rebellion inside himself.

He entered the station, a place of enormous confusion, late trains, loudspeaker announcements, stacks of luggage, discarded newspapers. Porters stood around like impatient gravediggers awaiting the end of a eulogy they'd heard a million times before. Kiviranna wandered through the huge station, scanning the platforms. The loudspeaker announcements bewildered him. Strange place names were uttered in strange accents.
Inverkeithing
.
Kirkcaldy. Kinghorn
. He studied the arrivals and departures board.

The pain in his head pulsated now and his jawbone felt locked. He hated the sensation because sometimes in the past it had given rise to the irrational fear, the suffocating fear, that his mouth would one day close and never open again.
Anxiety, Jake, sheer anxiety
. All the shrinks he'd ever encountered in institutions had told him that. And they gave him drugs with mellow names to assuage his fears, and sometimes they worked, sometimes not, and when they failed he'd sit for long, insomniac hours on the edge of his bed, wrapped in a blanket, shivering, imagining all manner of terrible things, hearing all kinds of weird sounds float up from the hostile street below the window of his apartment.

He moved to the gate of platform three. A ticket inspector glanced at him, then looked away. Another Yank. One of the impoverished ones. A middle-aged student doing Europe in five and a half days. The inspector had seen them all in his time. He'd seen fellows who looked exactly like Jacob Kiviranna, ‘beatniks' – which was how the ticket inspector thought of them – coming from Amsterdam with marijuana in their shoes, shifty-eyed scruffs who muttered to themselves.

Kiviranna looked along the platform, which was stacked with mail sacks and trunks. He went to a newspaper stand where he browsed for a time. Then he wandered round the concourse of the station and studied the arrivals board again. Seven minutes. Seven minutes that were going to be very slow ones. Seven minutes before he could dispose of the evil that was presently sliding over slick railroad tracks toward Edinburgh.

Despite a bitch of a hangover, Frank Pagan was enjoying the task of escorting Aleksis Romanenko to Scotland. Normally Pagan had no real fondness for trains, for the musty compartments which, even in first class, were extremely uncomfortable. And views from carriage windows were less than breathtaking – the backs of granite houses and sorry little gardens and ramshackle greenhouses. Now and then a face in a rainy window gazed at the passing train as if such an event were the week's highlight.

But today Pagan felt detached from his dislikes. He had spent the previous evening riotously and quite unexpectedly drinking vodka with Romanenko in the Savoy Hotel in London, and now he was numb, and amazed by Romanenko's resilience. The Russian was in his middle fifties and yet he had the ability of a much younger man to bounce back from all the booze he'd drunk the night before.

Pagan, lulled by the rhythm of the train, looked across the compartment at Romanenko, who was holding forth in an exuberant way about the future of the computer industry in the Soviet Union. He demonstrated freely with his strong red hands, he shrugged, rolled his eyes, smiled a great deal – the kind of energetic man who couldn't keep still for very long and whose enthusiasms had a childlike, contagious quality.

Pagan tried to remember where last night had gone. It had begun with a courtesy call, he recollected that much. He'd visited Romanenko's room at the Savoy to discuss the timetable for this trip, and matters relating to security. Romanenko, with that demanding hospitality common to many Russians, produced a bottle of vodka and two glasses and insisted on drinking a toast to my new friend from Scotland Yard, my security guard, the very first Brottish policeman I am ever meeting in my life' – a toast that inevitably spawned another, then another, until finally a second bottle was opened and Pagan had the feeling he'd known Romanenko all his life. There had been warm handshakes, embraces, enthusiastic talk about a new purpose, a new spirit, inside the Soviet Union.
You will see differences, Frank Pagan, such as you have never dreamed of. Big changes are coming
. And here Aleksis had looked almost sly, a man privy to information Pagan could not have guessed in a thousand years. Given to winks and nudges and physical contact, he had the manner of somebody bursting to reveal crucial information and yet prohibited from doing so.
Big changes. Big surprises. Wait and see, Frank Pagan
.

Pagan thought he remembered the Russian crying tears of joy somewhere along the way and how the toasts had become more and more fulsome, with references to coexistence and peacefulness and how the ‘Rosha' of the future was going to be.
A country, my friend Frank Pagan, for the twentieth century! Yes! Out of the Middle Ages and into the wonderful world of the computer! Yes! A hundred times yes! Let us drink another toast to the new Rosha! And to you and me, Frank Pagan, let us drink to a new friendsheep!
And then they'd gone together down to the bar, because Romanenko had the urge to strike up more
friendsheeps
, this time with women, and all Pagan could remember of the trip was Romanenko's ruddy face surveying the bar with lecherous intent, then the way he'd dragged a reticent young woman out of her chair and danced with her between the tables, his arms thrown around her waist and shoulders and his great laughter sweeping aside her delicate protests.

Pagan had a foggy recollection of making it home in a taxi – but the memory was too dim to fix with any certainty. Now, bright-eyed and irrepressible, Romanenko was laughing as he told some horror story about industrial sloth in the Soviet Union. He had a huge repertoire of jokes on the subject of the inconveniences of Russian life, and he related them with an actor's gusto in an English that was often muddled yet always charming.

Apart from Pagan and Romanenko, there was a third man in the compartment. Danus Oates was a middle level official from the Foreign Office, a young man with a pleasantly bland face and a plummy accent that suggested Eton or Harrow. Oates, whose function was to act as a kind of tour guide for the Russian, wasn't a great conversationalist. His talk was limited to such topics as the weather and some background chat about the history of Edinburgh, which he delivered like somebody who has swallowed a recorded message.

In the corridor of the train there was a man from Special Branch and a sullen character, presumably KGB, from the Soviet Embassy. Security surrounding the Russian wasn't especially tight. There hadn't been any death threats or virulent anti-Soviet propaganda in the newspapers or any outpourings of nationalist sentiment from the rabid groups that despised Russia. And Romanenko, after all, was just one anonymous official from a Russian outpost in the Baltic. The protection afforded him was little more than a courtesy, but it was Frank Pagan's responsibility to make sure that the Russian attended the Festival, heard the music he wanted to hear, Prokofiev's Classical Symphony, and was returned to London the following day in one piece – and Pagan took the job as seriously as he could.

“Are we close to Edinburgh?” Romanenko asked, gazing out of the window with some excitement. Like a boy on his first trip overseas, Pagan thought. The flushed expression, the voice a little too loud.

Danus Oates said that it would be another ten minutes or so. Romanenko smiled, lit a cigarette, a Player's, and fell silent for perhaps the only time since the train had left London.

Pagan stared out of the window. It was one of those leaden Scottish afternoons – drab skies and a low heaven, beneath which the granite houses, stained by rain, looked squat and depressing.

“Wish we'd had a better day,” Danus Oates remarked. He had an upper-class Englishman's attitude to Scotland. It was an English colony where there were only two things of conversational significance – grouse-shooting and salmon-fishing.

The Russian shrugged. “Rain is not a problem to me, my friend. In Rosha, finding a good umbrella – that's the problem.”

Pagan smiled, closed his eyes, drifted for a time.

Romanenko and Oates were, of all things, discussing roses now, a scarlet clutch of which Romanenko had just noticed in a back yard. Oates didn't know a rose from a rhododendron but he'd been trained in the craft of small talk and he made it with consummate ease. It transpired that Romanenko's hobby was rose-growing and he discussed it with the same enthusiasm he had for everything else, his hands caressing the air around him as if it were a delicate flower. He apparently had quite a garden at his dacha on the shores of the Baltic.

He took a wallet out of his pocket and showed Oates some photographs. Oates went into his head-nodding mode.

Pagan, who needed to stretch his legs and check to see if his hungover circulation was still functioning, excused himself and stepped out into the corridor, where he slid one of the windows open and enjoyed the feel of cold rain on his skin.

The man from Special Branch who stood in the corridor considered Pagan eccentric. To his way of thinking, Pagan didn't belong in the club. His clothes – brown shirt, beige necktie undone, a slightly baggy two-piece tan suit, brown canvas espadrilles – were wrong. His manner was wrong. He didn't have the right attitude. The man from Special Branch, who was called John Downey, resented the idea of Pagan being in charge of the security around Romanenko and so he thought sullen thoughts when it came to Frank.