Mazurka (30 page)

Andres Kiss said he couldn't think of a thing. He'd never understood how much Iverson knew about the Brotherhood, or how much research he'd done into the nature of the plan. He assumed Iverson wouldn't have made a plane available without doing a deep background check – but how deep was deep? Did he know about Romanenko and the whole Soviet side of the affair? Did he know about the undelivered message? There was guardedness on both sides, and secrecy, and that was only correct. Security sometimes depended on areas of mutual ignorance. But every now and then there was tension because of this need for secrecy. For instance – who did Iverson work for? Kiss knew he'd gone to work at the Pentagon somewhere along the way, but he didn't know if he was still employed there. And why was he so keen to make an F-16 available? There were old loyalties at work, of course, and a shared past in the Air Force, but these were not enough to make somebody give you a present of a very expensive aircraft. Andres Kiss might have pursued these questions if he'd been a different kind of man. Somebody more reflective, somebody more widely focused, might have explored and probed for satisfactory answers. But Kiss didn't have that kind of scope. On the bottom line, Iverson was supplying a plane that Kiss was desperate to fly – did anything else matter?

Kiss recalled now how Iverson had first entered the plan, how a chance encounter with Gary Iverson at an air show in Atlantic City two years ago had revitalised an old friendship, one Iverson pursued with an enthusiasm that surprised Kiss, an ardour that even flattered the younger man. Iverson issued dinner invitations, or asked Kiss to join him for cocktails in midtown hotels, or sometimes even invited him to make up a foursome at which the women were invariably handsome and silent and eager to please. The friendship turned eventually, as friendships do, on an axis of mutual trust. On one inebriated night Kiss had talked openly about Mikhail, about the men of the Brotherhood, of lost causes and resurrections – not in a specific vocabulary but in a general one that caused Iverson to be intrigued. It began like this, in vague ways, and it grew until Iverson's F-16 had become a pivotal piece in the jigsaw, and Iverson himself a mysterious force behind the success of things.

“Let me be straight with you, Andres,” Gary Iverson said. “Some of my people – and I can't name names, you know that – are concerned about one of your personnel.”

“Who?”

Iverson admired Kiss's cool, his smoothness, his way of failing to mention such major incidents as the rupture at yesterday's meeting in Glen Cove and the assassination of Aleksis Romanenko. “It's Sundbach. We worry about him.”

“Sundbach?” Andres Kiss felt a sense of relief. For a moment he imagined Iverson was going to bring up the matter of Romanenko's murder, and say that it was an obstacle, an incident that had made his people unhappy, that support for the mission was beginning to evaporate. But if he hadn't mentioned Romanenko, then it was because he hadn't learned of Aleksis's role in the scheme. Therefore Iverson's knowledge of the plan's groundwork was limited.

“I wasn't aware you'd ever heard of Sundbach, Gary. You've been doing some digging.”

“I didn't leap into this business without doing some research, Andres.”

“If you'd dug a little deeper, you'd have learned that Sundbach's out.”

“Out?”

“As of yesterday.”

“Out? Like how?”

“He quit.”

“Let me get a handle on this. He just walked
away
. Just left the room? So long, it's been good to know you?”

Kiss was silent for a long time before he said, “That's right.”

Iverson examined a slick of oil on the floor. From another hangar came the roar of a plane's engine being pushed through its paces by enthusiastic apprentice mechanics. “I'm a little surprised, Andres. I'm surprised he walked. There's a lot at stake here, friend, and an old guy like Sundbach …” Iverson paused. “Let me be right up front with you, Andres. Point one, Sundbach's a little too fond of his drink. Point two, an old guy who drinks can be indiscreet. Point three, we don't need indiscretion at this stage of the game. Point four, he knows a lot…”

“Mikhail says he isn't a threat.”

“Maybe Mikhail's right. Who knows? Maybe Mikhail knows Sundbach better than anyone else. All I can tell you is some of my people don't like the notion of this old character having so much information, no matter what Mikhail thinks. Some of my people have this affliction called high blood pressure.”

Kiss studied the other man's face carefully, wondering if he were meant to read something into the absence of expression, something that couldn't be uttered aloud but was to be understood, between friends, in silence. Was he being tested? Was this mention of Sundbach meant to be some kind of examination of his feelings, the way the simulator had been a test of his knowledge? More than feelings, though. Was he being asked to demonstrate some initiative, to carry out a task Iverson didn't want to spell out directly? It was subtle, and quiet, and the nuances of the situation troubled Kiss. He felt like a man looking into a fogged mirror.

“People who outlive their usefulness can be damned tricky,” Iverson remarked. “Sometimes, though, they just don't do diddley. They potter in their gardens and grow things they can't eat. Is Sundbach like that?”

Kiss said, “He doesn't have a garden.”

“Doesn't have a garden,” Iverson said, more a private little echo than anything meaningful. He moved towards the hangar doors and pushed them open, looking out across the concrete expanse of old runways, cracked now and weeded. “Well, maybe he'll find something else to pass the time.”

“Maybe,” Andres Kiss said, and some of the fog began to clear from the face of the mirror.

Manhattan

It was one o'clock in the afternoon when Frank Pagan arrived at John F. Kennedy Airport. He had expected to be met by somebody from the New York City Police Department, because Martin Burr had arranged a liaison, but nobody turned up. It was an insufferably humid afternoon. As he rode in a cab towards Manhattan, Pagan sat with his eyes shut and the window open, feeling a feeble little breeze blow upon his sweating face. You could drown in this kind of weather, he thought. Even the prospect of Manhattan, a city he adored, a city whose electricity sent people scurrying around like galvanised particles, didn't take the edge off his sense of brooding isolation – a condition exaggerated by four scotches on the plane and the absence of Kristina Vaska who, stuck with a ticket she hadn't been able to exchange, wasn't scheduled to arrive in New York until tomorrow.

Kristina Vaska. He could still see that uneasy juxtaposition of images, wet-haired Kristina in the old paisley robe and the two dead cops in the street below, and he was caught between the erotic and the dismal, a place that had all the appeal of an occupied mousetrap. He' opened his eyes, stared out at suburban streets beyond the highway, neat boxed dwellings surrounded by neat boxed shrubs. And he remembered the horror he'd felt when he'd looked inside the squad car, when he'd put his face to the window and was about to ask something simple like
Anything happening?
and he'd realised that both occupants were dead, one with his face on the other's chest, the driver with his mouth wide open and blood around his lips.

The two dead cops had caused Martin Burr an apoplectic depression. Pagan couldn't remember ever having seen the Commissioner look so grim, all colour drained from his face and all mischief gone from his one good eye. The cops were hurriedly removed, the car towed, but not before the scandalmongers of Fleet Street, alerted by neighbours, had come upon the scene. Martin Burr had been obliged to hold an impromptu press-conference in the course of which his voice had quivered once and he'd gone silent, holding his emotions in check. No, he told the reporters, he had no idea of the identity of the killer. And no, he had no idea why they were parked opposite Frank Pagan's apartment nor what their nightly routine might be – lies, of course, lies that wouldn't slake the scribblers' voracious appetites for too long.

Later, in the privacy of his office, Burr had said
Don't feel bad about it, Frank. Don't blame yourself for those two coppers
. It was a struggle, and Pagan didn't think he'd win it, because obviously the two young men would still be alive if it hadn't been for the fact that he'd called the local police station for a couple of watchdogs. They'd still be alive, and married, and raising their kids. He stared from the window of the cab, feeling as grim now as Martin Burr had looked in London only a few hours ago. Resentful too, because he was being pitched out of the centre of the action, expelled like some truant schoolboy.

I want you on the first available plane, Frank. I want you out of here and far away from this lunatic. Leave him to MI6. Get what you can on Kiviranna and come home again
.

Pagan had been unable to resist saying that he was being shuttled off to do something any responsible cop in New York could do. It would've been simpler to use some local cop and have him talk to the woman who'd scorned Jake Kiviranna – a lady, according to information supplied at the last minute by the ever helpful Ted Gunther, called Rose Alexander who lived in Brooklyn. Simpler and cheaper. Telexes, Commissioner, don't cost much. Burr had chosen to ignore him.

Pagan looked up into the cloudy sky. He was thinking of Brooklyn, a place he'd visited before and had no real desire to see again. Martin Burr had wanted him to rent a hotel room there, but Pagan had firmly drawn a line of his own when it came to his place of residence. The Commissioner might be the great architect, he might be the one who sent men hurtling across oceans in accordance with his own designs, but there was no way he was going to impose a Brooklyn hotel on Frank Pagan. Pagan had booked a room in the Warwick, which wasn't exactly top-notch, but his per diem covered it. Barely.
Very well, Frank. I don't care where you stay, so long as it's out of trouble
.

He thought of Kristina. Before leaving London he'd booked her into a room in a quiet hotel in Kensington, far from his apartment. He'd driven her to the place by a circuitous route, then made certain she went to her room, which was chintzy in a very English way, cosy, guaranteed to soothe.
Look at those curtains
, he'd said.
How could anything bad happen in a room with curtains that look like they'd been designed by Pollyanna?
She'd laughed, but there was a tension in her, and she was just as depressed as Pagan by the deaths of the policemen. She'd be safe in the Stafford Arms Hotel in Kensington for one night, Pagan thought now. Tomorrow she'd be back in New York. He was missing her already – a new sensation in his life. Previously, he'd missed only the dead. Missing the living was filled with all kinds of possibilities.

He escaped from the cab outside the Warwick on West 54th Street, plunging into the air-conditioned lobby, where he checked in smoothly and went up to his room on the sixth floor. He stood for a time at the window, watching the sky above Manhattan. He went over the puzzles again, seeking connections, trying to pull together various conjectures.

He sat on the edge of the bed and scribbled words on a notepad.
Kiviranna. Epishev. The Brotherhood of the Forest. Romanenko
. Then he drew a series of connecting arrows, linking each name with the other, until the sheet was covered in a maze of lines resembling a complex spiderweb. Faction was the word he came back to, the idea that within the KGB there was some kind of support for Aleksis's Brotherhood, that a group of individuals – large, small, he couldn't possibly know – was actively encouraging the Brotherhood's scheme. The death in Edinburgh and the failure of Aleksis to play the role of postman, these things had created sudden detours for the supporters of the Brotherhood and their plan … whatever it was. A rush went through Pagan, the familiar feeling he got when he had a flash, an insight, when he saw hitherto unmapped terrain from a point above. All right, he thought, there's a power struggle inside the KGB, even within the Politburo itself – but so what? If it were true, it provided only a context for those events that touched him personally. Political realities within the Soviet Union were as distant as Mars and had nothing to do with him. It was as if somebody had shaken the tree of the Kremlin and a couple of strangely-marked leaves had fallen in Pagan's lap, that was all. He could examine the leaves, and dissect them, but he could never see the larger picture, the architecture of the tree.

He sighed, pulled the sheet from the pad, tossed it inside the wastebasket. Which was when he heard a sharp knock and he rose, opening the door. The man who appeared in the doorway was about five feet seven inches tall and wore a polka-dot bow-tie that drooped from his collar. He had on a light tweed jacket, the elbows of which were patched in leather. He resembled a scholar, Pagan thought, the kind of gnome you saw behind a stack of books in a library, eyes glazed over with that shellshocked look of too much knowledge. He had uncontrollable feathery red hair which seemed to rise, like puffs of thin, gingery smoke, from his skull.

“Frank Pagan? I'm Klein,” the man said. “Max Klein. NYPD.”

Pagan closed the door after Max Klein had entered the room. The bow-tie was all wrong, Pagan thought. What kind of NYPD cop wore such a thing for God's sake? And the green leather patches didn't complement the brown material of the jacket. Pagan noticed the leather sandals in which Klein's bony feet were bare. The word
eccentric
floated into Frank Pagan's head. How did this character, with his odd appearance and scholarly face, fit into the macho scheme of things in the NYPD? Did Klein belong to some special department? The Office of Misfits? Pagan had an image of a large room in which sat cops like Max Klein, men who didn't look and feel like policemen, outcasts and dwarves and innocents, errors of recruitment, who had somehow lost their way in the political labyrinth of the police department.