Mazurka (23 page)

Pagan and the woman were still moving towards the exit. They walked about two feet apart from each other and there was no apparent intimacy now. Epishev put his hand into the pocket of his coat that contained the gun. He rested the other hand on the door handle, looked along the quiet, rainy street.

It kept coming back to nag him, this feeling that somewhere in the distant past there had been an encounter with the woman. He was sure of it now. He gazed across the grass at her face, which was partly hidden by the upturned collar of her outsized raincoat. A lovely face, but tantalising. She made a gesture with her hand, threw her head back, laughed at something Pagan said. Epishev turned the handle of the door.

Pagan and the woman were about a hundred yards from the low stone wall that surrounded the square. Now the woman was staring almost directly at the car and Epishev brought his hand up to his lips and coughed into it, a reflex action, a gesture to conceal himself from her attention.

Who was she? And where had he seen her before?

He had a little memory trick he sometimes used. It was to envisage the environment in which he'd seen a particular face. It was to recall physical details – dress, weather, the colour of wallpaper, the curtains – and then set the remembered face against these recollections.

Tallinn, he thought. He had the feeling it had to be Tallinn. He recalled a flight of stairs, a bicycle propped against the wall on the landing, an open doorway that led inside a large apartment, a well-furnished set of rooms.

He almost had it then. But the memory was like a badly-tuned television station, a picture that fluttered, blemished by static. Damn. Now Pagan and the woman were a mere fifty yards away and they were walking more briskly than before. They wanted to get out of the rain, of course. To dry themselves off. Epishev undid the safety catch on the gun, and ran the tips of his fingers over the surface of the weapon. He'd step out of the car, approach Pagan with the gun, and the rest would be easy, a matter of getting back Romanenko's mysterious verse, which was presumably inside Pagan's apartment or even on his person, and then he'd dispose of both the Englishman and the woman, right here on this street if he had to –

A young girl in braided hair, a yellow print dress, bare feet in sandals, a child sobbing …

Pagan and the woman were approaching the stone wall now, the exit, the pavement. For a second they were lost behind a clutch of dense trees, then they reappeared.

A child sobbing
…

And that was when it came to him, reaching across the years, echoing out of the past, it came to him with sudden clarity. He could see a young girl's face and the way her hair was braided and how she'd cried and scratched viciously at his hands as her father was being led out of the apartment in Tallinn on a cold morning more than fifteen years ago. Fifteen long years ago – how had Frank Pagan come into the orbit of the daughter of Norbert Vaska, the child called Kristina?

She turned her face towards the car then, for some reason. She turned, looking damp and pale, her black hair plastered across her scalp, her mouth a dark circle. Epishev wasn't sure whether it was recognition that crossed her face, whether his appearance provoked memories inside her of that same chill morning so long ago, when she'd been twelve, perhaps thirteen. He saw something in her features change, and then she was reaching for Pagan's arm and pulling it, and hurrying him across the street to the house. Pagan, running alongside her, his overcoat billowing around him, looked puzzled and reluctant as if the woman had drawn him suddenly into a game he couldn't follow.

Epishev, his sense of timing skewed by the sudden movement of the couple, tightened his grip on the gun and was about to step out of the car when he was aware of the enormous black and white dog thumping and pounding along the pavement towards him, a massive spotted creature, perhaps two hundred pounds in weight, pursued by a woman in a plastic raincoat. This monstrous animal had sighted Epishev stepping out of the car and now it charged with crazed canine friendliness toward him, a dumb light in its eyes, paws upraised, tail flailing the air like a whip. Epishev drew the car door shut and watched the creature slobber against the glass before losing interest and padding huffily away. The damned English and their damned pets! But he'd lost the initiative, the element of surprise, even before the appearance of the mutt.

Across the street Pagan and Kristina Vaska had vanished inside the house, and the dark brown door was shut behind them. Epishev cursed, stared up at the windows. Had she recognised him? Of course – how else could one explain the speed with which they'd crossed the street and entered the house? How else to explain that urgency?

Epishev drove the Ford along the street, passing the dalmatian, which had its leg cocked against a wall. He glanced once more at Pagan's house, and then he was turning out of the narrow street, wondering what had brought Kristina Vaska into the policeman's world, and what it would mean if indeed she'd recognised him.

Inside the apartment Frank Pagan poured two shots of scotch and gave one to Kristina. She was silent, listening to the rain upon the window. Pagan watched her sip the drink, then he went to her and rubbed one of her cold hands between his own. She trembled. He walked to the window, looked down at the street, saw nothing below but the woman in the plastic raincoat caressing her spotted dog. There was no sign of the stranger who had so suddenly spooked Kristina and made her claw at his coat-sleeve in such a panicked manner that she'd dragged him across the street and inside the house before he'd even had time to register the existence of the man.

Kristina moved to the sofa and sat down. She was motionless for a long time.

“His name's Epishev,” she said in a quiet voice, almost a whisper. “Some people call him Uncle Viktor, and they don't use the name fondly.”

Pagan sat down beside her. He wanted to reach for her hand again, but he didn't. “How can you be sure it's the same man?”

“Because it's fucking hard to forget the face of the KGB officer who arrested my father in Tallinn.”

Pagan didn't doubt her fear. He could read it in her eyes as plainly as bold print. But there was something else here that troubled him, a convergence of more echoes from the past, actors from an old melodrama that might have been revived purely for his personal bewilderment. Uncle Viktor and Norbert Vaska. The KGB and the Brotherhood of the Forest. It was as if a faded photograph had been retouched, making it appear fresh and new. And it had been thrust rudely into his face, forcing him to look directly into it. He had the thought that his life, which had been simpler only recently, was taking strange, complicated detours. The problem with these departures was the feeling that he had no control over any of them.

He stared for a while at the prints on the walls. “Why would the KGB send somebody here?” he asked. “Why send somebody to spy on me?”

“Spy? I don't think Viktor Epishev would have anything as innocent as
spying
in mind, Frank. That's not what he does. Let me put it to you this way. If he's been sent over here because of you, he's got a more sinister purpose than simply
watching
you.”

“He wants me out of the way,” Pagan said rather flatly, more a statement of fact than a question.

“I'd hazard that guess, Frank.”

“Hazard another one and tell me why.”

“I don't exactly know. Let's look at what we've got. Romanenko carries a message he doesn't get the chance to deliver. We assume the message was intended for another member or members of the Brotherhood. Let's say the gist of it is to go ahead with a plan, which we believe is a plan against the Soviets. The message, however, falls into your hands.”

“And Epishev wants it.”

“Presumably.”

“And he wants to silence me into the bargain.”

“Yes.”

“It's not adding up for me,” Pagan said. “If the KGB thinks I have knowledge of some anti-Russian business, the logical thing would be for them to ask me directly.
Frank, old comrade, what do you know about this Brotherhood stuff?
That would be the rational approach. The notion of somebody being sent here to kill me – apart from scaring me quite shitless – seems a little extreme.”

They were silent for a while. Then Kristina said, “Here's another possible consideration. Maybe the KGB
already know
what the Brotherhood's up to – only they'd prefer it if
you
didn't.”

“Which would imply the KGB is in bed with the Brotherhood, wouldn't it?”

Kristina Vaska nodded. “And that's an impossibility. The likelihood of the Brotherhood fornicating with the KGB is about as remote as finding a civil rights lawyer in Moscow.”

“Here's a question for you. How would somebody go about finding out exactly what it is the Brotherhood's up to?”

Kristina Vaska shook her head, moved to the window, looked out into the rain. With a fingertip she drew a thin spiral on the glass. Pagan went towards her. He gazed over her shoulder and across the square.

“I wish I knew more,” she said.

“When you researched the Brotherhood, what did you find out about them?”

“I researched their
past
, Frank, and that was tough enough. Their present's even more difficult. They don't advertise for new members. They don't put ads in newspapers giving the times and locations of their meetings. They're not in the business of promoting themselves.”

“If I wanted to find one of the members, where would I start looking?”

“Jesus, I wish I had a specific answer to that one. The truth is, they ended up all over the place. Australia. New Zealand. Scandinavia. There's probably even a couple of old members right here in London. But mainly they made it to the United States. Chicago. Los Angeles. Mostly they came to New York City, Brooklyn in particular. But since many of them arrived as young men, they presumably married, raised families, and – like all good upwardly mobile Americans – prospered and moved out into the suburbs. Like I said, they don't advertise their whereabouts.”

“If you researched them, surely you must know some of their names?”

There was frustration in Kristina Vaska's voice. She looked at Pagan as if he'd asked the one question that had bewildered her for years. “They weren't stupid men, Frank. They didn't fight under their own names. They used pseudonyms.
Noms de guerre
to protect their families if they were captured. They left nothing but dead-ends behind them when they dispersed. I spent a long time trying to track old members down when I was doing my research. Elusive's an understatement when it comes to their identities. I'd keep running into references to men who operated under names like
Rebane
, the Fox. One man called himself
Kotkas
, the Eagle. Another was
Hunt
, the Wolf. I could never pin anything down about the true identities of these characters. Apart from Romanenko, I never learned any real names. And I tried goddam hard, believe me. It's like I said, Frank. Records – even when they exist – are difficult to obtain and after a while you get so frustrated you can't do anything else but give up. If the men of the Brotherhood took such pains to conceal their identities, what right did I have to come along and try to force open old doors anyway? So I stopped looking. I quit.”

Pagan was silent. He stared into the trees. He remembered the way he'd yearned for her down there in the square, that brief flare of longing, as if he might find in her an escape hatch from the lonely condition of his life. He looked at the delicate shadow in the nape of her neck. Now now, he thought. Maybe never. He wondered what it would be like to make love to this woman.

There was a long silence broken only by the metronome of the rain. She turned from the window and said, “Epishev scares me. He scared me when I was a kid, and he scares me now. I have this memory of the way he patted me on the head and told me everything was going to be all right. I can see him and his goons take my father out of the apartment. I can still see the way the bastard smiled.”

“Do you think he recognised you?”

“I hope not.”

Pagan thought of the pistol, the Bernardelli he kept in a shoebox under his bed. He said, “We're safe here.”

“For how long, Frank?”

Pagan didn't answer the question. He was thinking of somebody out there in the rain, somebody who'd been sent from the Soviet Union, a man whose purpose only added to a general mystification that Frank Pagan didn't like. He reached inside the pocket of his jacket and removed the poem, the original version, and he stared at the blue writing on the cracked sheet of paper. Dry old words, dry paper, foreign to him in more ways than mere language.

Saaremaa Island, the Baltic Sea

Colonel Yevgenni Uvarov practised the signature, which he'd seen hundreds of times. He wrote slowly, in the manner of an unpractised counterfeiter. Every time he covered a sheet, he studied it then wadded the paper up as tightly as he could. When he had it compressed into a tiny ball, he took it to the bathroom and flushed it. Once, a little tipsy on the Georgian wine he sometimes acquired, he imagined a secret laboratory where all flushed paper was fished from the sewers and dried out and examined by the KGB, a special department of effluence commissars who were puzzled by the fact that somebody kept signing the name
S.F. Tikunov
over and over, and then tossed the papers down the toilet.

His hand became cramped. He capped his pen, rolled the sheet of paper until it was no larger than a walnut, then turned his face away from the lamp beside his bunk. He stood up, put on his jacket, left his quarters. He passed the leisure room, which was a spartan affair containing an old black and white TV and three ancient easy chairs. Once, Uvarov recalled, a technician called Samov had rigged a makeshift antenna for the TV, and for three nights a station from Finland had been visible, tantalisingly so, bringing another world into this drab place. American programmes, Scandinavian ones, even some pornography – these were watched secretly until Samov's aerial was reported and its inventor sent elsewhere.