Mazurka (18 page)

He glanced up and down the boardwalk before inserting the key into the lock. You couldn't be too careful. Brighton Beach, with its enormous immigrant community from Soviet Europe, was a hotbed of gossip. Stooped old women with shopping-bags babbled on street corners, eyes hooded and lips flapping. They were as efficient as any telegraph system. Then there were the scum from the so-called Russian diplomatic mission in Manhattan who infiltrated the neighbourhood so they could collect information on who was saying what, data they shipped back to Russia where it was used to put pressure on families still over there. Andres hated the KGB with a passion so profound it rendered him speechless.

He turned the key, then stepped inside the bleak room beyond, closing the door at his back and smelling the dank scent of the place, a fusion of sawdust and mildew. Sunlight hardly penetrated here. His eyes slowly became attuned to the dimness and he made out the old refrigerator, a prehistoric job which had no door. Then a couple of battered chairs. There was an ancient menu on the wall. Hot dogs were 15 cents. Soda cost a nickel.

“You call this punctual? For this you wear a fancy wristwatch?”

The voice that came out of the gloom was thickly accented. Andres saw Carl Sundbach emerge from behind the refrigerator. In what little sunlight filtered through the grubby window, Sundbach appeared fragile. He wore an antique raccoon coat, the way he always did from the first of September to the last day of March, regardless of the temperature. His face was thin and angular and there were glasses attached for safekeeping to a threadbare string that hung round his scrawny neck. He was one of the richest men in the whole of Brooklyn, probably in all New York State, but he was so frugal he made Scrooge seem like a charitable foundation.

Sundbach came a little nearer. He scanned Andres's face a moment, his little eyes flicking back and forth.

“You don't know time, huh?” And he seized Andres's wrist in his hand, tapping his fingernails on the dial of the Rolex. “Thirty-two years old and still you don't know time. Even when we got a calamity going on.”

Andres took his hand away and said, “I'm ten minutes late. So what?”

“So what? Maybe the world is falling to pieces and you want to know so what?”

“Nothing's falling to pieces, Carl,” Andres said.

“I hear different, sonny. I hear bad news. You get to my age, you trust your instincts. And what they're saying isn't good. You know what I think? It's all over. It's finished. The whole thing's going to be cancelled. Which maybe isn't such a bad idea.”

“It's a goddam stupid idea,” Andres said. “Nothing's going to be cancelled. No way, Carl. Not now.”

“A terrible thing happened in Scotland. A man is dead, for God's sake.”

“I know, Carl. I just got back from Edinburgh. Remember?” Andres was always made impatient by Sundbach. It was tough to practise the composure Mikhail Kiss advocated.
Give him respect, Andres. He's an old man now, but he used to be a real fighter
. Andres forced his mouth into a smile, which brightened his handsomely sullen face. He looked quite angelic right then, the cherubic boy who'd been the joy of the boardwalk as a baby, clucked over by
babushkas
, stroked by teenage girls overwhelmed that anything could be so beautiful, a golden little heartbreaker who always held on tightly to Uncle Mikhail's hand.

“We didn't reckon on
murder
, Andres.” Carl Sundbach, whose raccoon coat reeked of mothballs, peered in the direction of the window where he could make out, barely, the old gilt letters on the glass. Some of the letters were missing now, scratched out by weather and vandals.
Brook yns Best H t Dogs. Roo Beer
. Once, he'd fantasised about reopening his shop when the boardwalk returned to its former glory, but in recent years he'd become disenchanted. It wasn't going to happen. Now now. Not ever. All the good days were gone. What you had now were kids guzzling beer and humping under the boardwalk, leaving their battered cans and discarded condoms, which looked like hollowed-out snails, all over the place.

Nevertheless, he kept this place, and he came here sometimes, usually on Sundays when Andres picked him up, riding by train all the way down from Manhattan, where he had a rent-controlled apartment on the lower East side. He'd sit in the space behind the refrigerator and he'd reminisce about the days when Sundbach's had been a going concern and sometimes he even imagined he heard the ringing of the cash-register.

Sundbach shivered. He was perpetually cold, even in sunlight. Andres went to the door and opened it, glad of the sea air. He clutched the old man's spindly elbow as they moved along the boardwalk. Every now and then Carl would nod his head at an acquaintance or he'd tip his ancient hat at a passing female who caught his eye. He still fancied himself something of a lady's man, a
seelikukütt
, a hunter of skirts.

They walked slowly to the side-street where Andres had parked his Jaguar. He opened the passenger door for Carl Sundbach and watched him climb in.

“You ought to drive an American car,” the old man said when Andres had the Jaguar going along Brighton Beach Avenue, past the Russian delicatessens and the pharmacies and under the shadow of the El. “The English don't know how to make cars no more.”

It was always this way. Always the complaints, always something to whine about. Andres glanced at the front of the Black Sea Bookstore where a couple of guys leaned against their bicycles and argued. Politics, Andres thought. What else would they argue around here? He was of the opinion that such arguments were finally pointless. Talk achieved nothing. What you really needed was another kind of vocabulary – one of action.

Andres rolled his window down. The stench of camphor was clogging his nostrils.

Sundbach said, “I had a British car, a Rover, in Tallinn. Before the Russians came into the Baltic. After the
tiblad
arrived, you couldn't get parts. You couldn't get gasoline. The English knew how to build cars in those days. I must have driven that Rover thousands of miles. Kahula to Narva. Tartu.
Mu jumal
, Tartu was beautiful then.” Sundbach sighed. “I used to have this feeling I'd see the old country again one day. Now,” and he made a small fluttering gesture with his hand, “I know better.”

Carl Sundbach could go on and on, rambling, reminiscing. Pretty soon he'd be remembering the time he ate the rancid
heeringas hapukoorega
– herring with sour cream – at a roadside restaurant in Jogeva and came down with food-poisoning bad enough to kill a dozen weaker men, or the day the Brotherhood blew up a Soviet munitions dump outside Haapsalu in 1949. He had one of those memories that resurrect every small detail of the past, every trifle, the kind of clouds that were in the sky on such and such a day or the colour of a guy's eyes. When he told a story, Carl Sundbach digressed encyclopaedically, feasting on a sumptuous banquet of recollections.

What the hell, Andres Kiss thought, when you'd hauled yourself up from being a poor Baltic immigrant to one of the wealthiest men in the state, when you owned a chain of motels and fast-food restaurants, when you had property all over Brighton Beach, maybe you deserved the luxury of indulgent nostalgia. Andres had often heard the story of Carl's financial success, the sheer toughness involved, the ambition, the way business enemies had been bulldozed. There was still this suggestion of flint to the old man.

Andres said, “You'll see it again, Carl.”

Sundbach shook his head. “I'm trying to be a realist, boy.”

“You sound more like a defeatist.”

“There's a difference?” Sundbach asked.

The younger man never tried to answer Carl's rhetorical questions. He took the Jaguar on to the Interborough Parkway, heading out to the Island. He stared through the window at a sign for the Harry S. Truman Expressway. Overhead, in a cloudless, sunny sky, a small silvery twin-engined Piper flashed. Andres Kiss, filled with a longing to be up there at the controls of the craft, watched it until it went out of sight.

He took a pair of dark shades from the visor, where they'd been clipped in place. He put them on. He liked the way the sun was dulled now. Too much unfiltered brightness could damage your eyes. When he'd been in the Air Force he'd known men who were grounded because of poor eyesight. Andres wasn't going to run the risk of hurting his vision because there wasn't a thing in the world like soaring up there – not sex, not drugs, nothing. It was undiluted freedom when you were twenty or thirty thousand feet high and rolling through cloudbanks. What thrilled him was the idea of defying gravity, of being suspended in a frail craft that could, if the engine stalled, come crashing down through space. And sometimes, as if he were locked in a delicious place between life and death, Andres imagined that fall and was fascinated by the prospect. To smack the earth at eight hundred miles per hour seemed to him an appropriate way to check out, the flyer's way.

In Glen Cove he travelled leafy back roads until he reached the house, which occupied several acres of prime Long Island real estate. Grey and huge, with turrets and cupolas, and a lawn so immaculate it might have been groomed by a hairdresser, it was situated at the end of a gravel driveway. He parked the Jaguar alongside a black Mercedes. Then he opened the door of his car and looked up at the front of the house. A lime-green awning hung over the porch. Sundbach, who'd dozed for much of the journey the way he usually did, opened his eyes.

“We're here?” he asked hoarsely.

“We're here,” Andres Kiss replied.

In the sun-room at the back of the house, where glass walls overlooked prolific rose gardens that blazed with colour, Mikhail Kiss poured tea from a silver pot into dainty china cups. His big hands made the china seem like something plundered out of a doll's house but he poured almost tenderly, a man engrossed in a ritual he respects.

He looked up when Carl Sundbach and Andres came into the room. He thought of the contrast between the young man and the old warrior, the present and the past, strength and frailty. It was important to remember how closely linked past and present were, how much they owed to each other. Without that sense of history, everything they were involved in, everything they'd planned, would be no more than an act of vandalism, a mindless terrorism of the kind that so appalled him.

Carl Sundbach reached for a tea-cup, poured a shot of cognac into it, and sniffed the steam. Andres, declining the offer of tea, stared out into the garden. Through the open doorway a faint gust of wind blew the seductive scent of roses into the room.

Mikhail Kiss, who believed in coming straight to the point, asked, “This tragic event in Edinburgh – is it going to influence us?”

Carl Sundbach made a windy little noise of surprise. “You have a habit of asking questions in the wrong order. What you're asking now isn't what I'd ask myself first. The most important question is obvious. Why was Romanenko killed? Then comes the next question. Who shot him?”

Mikhail Kiss, weary after the long sleepless flight back from Britain, regarded Sundbach's questions as irrelevant. But Carl had poured thousands of dollars into this whole affair and felt he'd purchased the right to ask any questions he wanted.

“Your priorities are wrong, Carl,” he said.

“
My
priorities are wrong?” Sundbach asked. “Tell me, tell me how you figure that.”

“Carl, does it make any difference who killed Aleksis, or why? It was probably some dangerous oddball with a crazy notion and a gun. What would you have me do? Stop everything? Send out messages saying everything has to be halted? Have you any idea how complicated that would be?”

“I hate complicated,” Carl Sundbach said. “Give me simple every time.”

“Nothing's simple,” Mikhail Kiss said. “All this has taken a very long time to stitch together, and I can't undo the whole embroidery now, even if I wanted to.”

Sundbach took off his raccoon coat. His concave chest gave the impression of a man in the throes of malnutrition. He was sweating slightly. “Suppose this killer knew what Aleksis was up to. Let's say this killer knew
everything
there is to know. Imagine that. Just try. Tell me you don't see the consequences.”

Mikhail Kiss said, “Only a scared man worries about consequences he can't possibly predict, Carl.”

“One thing I hate is a man sounds like he just read a fortune-cookie,” Sundbach replied. “This is my point – if Aleksis was killed, then it was because
somebody knew what he was involved in
. Which makes it likely the whole damn scheme's blown. Forgive me, but that's too risky for me. This was supposed to be a big secret – but I told you all along it was too complicated to keep quiet. I kept saying. Make it simple. Short and simple. No, you knew better, didn't you? You had to have grand plans.”

Mikhail Kiss stood up and looked out into the garden, turning his back to the room. The way sunlight struck roses always touched him. He remembered how Aleksis Romanenko had been proud of his flower garden around his house on the bank of the Pirita River.
My peasant instincts
, Aleksis used to say.
If I don't grow things I betray my heart and I die a little
– the theatrical kind of thing Aleksis was given to saying.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s both Kiss and Romanenko had been active in the armed struggle against the Russians in the Baltic. There had been some of the predictable differences between two strong-willed men locked in a useless struggle, but they had common bonds – a passion for the land, and a profound attachment to the Brotherhood of the Forest.

Kiss remembered how, during the cold spring of 1951, Aleksis had planted marigold seeds on a wooded hillside north of Kuusiku. Grubby, lice-ridden, undernourished, facing the prospect of annihilation at the hands of Soviet patrols, Aleksis had planted his precious seeds with all the poignant care of a man who expects eventually to see the flowers grow. He also remembered Carl Sundbach, at that time a gaunt man in his late thirties, saying that if seeds could grow to be rifles, he'd be sowing them himself day and night. But since war was not a horticultural event, why bother?