The Parsifal Mosaic (96 page)

“Yes, he told me. He would have been destroyed, his influence finished.… It’s on that basis—your belief in him—that he asked me to come and see you. It’s got to stop, Leon—excuse me—Alexei. He knows why you did what you did, but it’s got to
stop
.”

Kalyazin’s gaze strayed to Jenna. “Where is the hatred in your eyes, young lady? Surely, it must be there.”

“I won’t lie to you, it’s close to my thoughts. I’m trying to understand.”

“It had to be done; there was no other way. Anton had to be rid of the specter of Mikhail. He had to know he was far away from the government, with other interests, other pursuits. He was so afraid his … his son … would learn of his work and come to stop him.” Kalyazin turned to Havelock. “He couldn’t get you out of his mind.”

“He approved of what you did?” asked Michael.

“He looked away, I think, a part of him revolted by himself, another part crying to survive. He was failing rapidly by then, his sanity pleading to be left intact whatever the cost. Miss Karas became the price.”

“He never asked you how you did it? How you reached men in Moscow to provide what you needed?”

“Never. That, too, was part of the price. Remember, the world you and I lived in was very unimportant to him. Then, of course, everything became chaos …”

“Out of control?” suggested Jenna.

“Yes, young lady. The things we heard were so unbelievable, so horrible. A woman killed on a beach …”

“What did you expect?” asked Havelock, controlling himself and not finding it easy.
Two
 … 
three demented old men
.

“Not that. We weren’t killers. Anton had given orders that she was to be sent back to Prague and watched, her contacts observed, and eventually her innocence was to be established.”

“Those orders were intercepted, changed.”

“By then he could do nothing. You had disappeared and he finally went completely, totally mad.”

“Disappeared?
I
disappeared?”

“That’s what he was told. And when they told him he collapsed, his mind went. He thought he’d killed you, too. It was the final pressure he could not withstand.”

“How do you know this?” pressed Michael.

Kalyazin balked, his rheumy eyes blinking. “There was someone else. He had sources, a doctor. He found out.”

“Raymond Alexander,” said Havelock.

“Anton told you, then?”

“Boswell.”

“Yes, our Boswell.”

“You mentioned him when I called you from Europe.”

“I was frightened. I thought you might speak to someone who had seen him at Anton’s house; he was there so often. I wanted to give you a perfectly acceptable reason for his visits, to keep you away from him.”

“Why?”

“Because Alexander the Great has become Alexander the Diseased. You’ve been away, you don’t know. He rarely
writes anymore. He drinks all day and most of the night; he can’t stand the strain. Fortunately, for his public, there’s the death of his wife to blame it on.”

“Matthias told me you had a wife,” said Michael, his ear picking up something in Kalyazin’s voice. “In California. She died and he persuaded you to come here to the Shenandoah.”

“I had a wife, Mikhail. In Moscow. And she was killed by the soldiers of Stalin. A man I helped destroy, a man who came from the Voennaya.”

“I’m sorry.”

A brief rattling somewhere in the small house was louder than the pounding rain outside. Jenna looked at Havelock.

“It’s nothing,” said Kalyazin. “There’s a piece of wood, a wedge, I place in that old door on windy nights. The sight of you made me forget.” The old man leaned back in his chair and brought his thin, veined hands to his chin. “You must be very clear with me, Mikhail, and you must give me time to think. It’s why I did not answer you a few moments ago.”

“About Anton?”

“Yes. Does he really know why I did what I did? Why I took him through those terrible nights? Auto and external suggestion, swelling him up until he performed like the genius he was, debating with men who weren’t there. Does he
really
understand?”

“Yes, he does,” replied Havelock, feeling a thousand pounds on the back of his neck. He was so close, but a wrong response would send this Parsifal back into self-imposed, unbreakable silence. Alexander was right, after all; Kalyazin had a Christ complex. Beneath the old Russian’s mild speech was a commitment forged in steel. He knew he was right. “No single man,” said Michael, “should be given such power and the strains of that power ever again. He begs you, pleads with you on the strength of all the talks vou and he had before his illness, to give me those incredible agreements you both created and whatever copies exist. Let me burn them.”

“He understands, then, but is it enough? Do the others? Have
they
learned?”

“Who?”

“The men who allocate such power, who permit the canonization of would-be saints only to find that their heroes
are only mortals, broken by swollen egos, and by the demands made on them.”

“They’re terrified. What more do you want?”

“
I want them to know what they’ve done, how this world can be set on fire by a single brilliant mind caught in the vortex of unbearable pressures. The madness is contagious; it does not stop with a broken saint.”

“They understand. Above all, the one man most people consider the most powerful on earth, he understands. He told me they had created an emperor, a god, and they had no right to do either. They took him up too high; he was blinded.”

“And Icarus fell to the sea,” said Kalyazin. “Berquist is a decent man, hard but decent. He’s also in an impossible job, but he handles it better than most.”

“There’s no one I’d rather see there now.”

“I’m inclined to agree.”

“You’re killing him,” said Havelock. “Let him go. Free him. The lesson’s been taught, and it won’t be forgotten. Let him get back to that impossible job and do the best he can.”

Kalyazin looked at the glowing embers of the fire. “Twenty-seven pages, each document, each agreement. I typed them myself, using the form employed by Bismarck in the treaties of Schleswig-Holstein. It
so
appealed to Anton.… I was never interested in the money, they know that, don’t they?”

“They know that. He knows it.”

“Only the lesson.”

“Yes.”

The old man turned back to Michael. “There are no copies except the one I sent to President Berquist in an envelope from the State Department, from Matthias’s office, with the word
Restricted
stamped across the front. It was marked, of course, for his eyes only.”

Havelock tensed, recalling so clearly Raymond Alexander’s statement that Kalyazin had “caged” him, that if a telephone call was not made, the documents would be sent to Moscow and Peking. The numbers added up to four, not two. “No other copies at all, Alexei?”

“None.”

“I would think,” remarked Jenna unexpectedly, taking hesitant steps toward the frail old Russian, “that Raymond
Alexander, your Boswell, would have insisted on one. It’s the core of his writing.”

“It’s the core of his fear, young lady. I control him by telling him that if he divulges anything to anyone, copies will be sent to your enemies. That was never my intention-on the contrary, the furthest thought from my mind. It would bring about the very cataclysm I pray will be avoided.”

“Pray, Alexei?”

“Not to any god you know, Mikhail. Only to a collective conscience. Not to a Holy Church with a biased Almighty.”

“May I have the documents?”

Kalyazin nodded. “Yes,” he said, drawing out the word. “But not in the sense of possession. We will burn them together.”

“Why?”

“You know the reason; we were both in the same profession. The men who allow the Matthiases of this world to soar so high they’re blinded by the sun, those men will never know. Did an old man lie? I deceived them before. Am I deceiving them again?
Are
there copies?”

“Are there?”

“No, but they won’t know that.” Kalyazin struggled out of the chair; he stood up and breathed deeply, planting his feet firmly on the floor. “Come with me, Mikhail. They’re buried in the woods along the path to the Notch. I pass them every afternoon, seventy-three steps to a dogwood tree, the only one in Seneca’s burial ground. I often wonder how it got there.… Come, let’s get it over with. We will dig in the rain and get terribly wet and return with the weapons of Armageddon. Perhaps Miss Karas might make us some tea. Also, glasses of vodka … with buffalo grass, always buffalo grass. Then we shall burn the evidence and rekindle the fire.”

The door to the kitchen crashed open like a sudden explosion of thunder, and a tall man with a fringe of gray around his bald head stood there, a gun in his hand.

“They lie to you, Alexei. They
always
lie and you never know it.
Don’t move
, Havelock!” Arthur Pierce reached out, gripped Jenna’s elbow and yanked her to him, lashing his left arm around her neck, the automatic pressed against her head. “I’m going to count to five,” he said to Michael. “By which time you will have removed your weapon with two
fingers and thrown it on the floor, or you will see this woman’s skull blown into the wall
One, two, three—”

Havelock unbuttoned his coat, spreading it open, and, using two fingers as pincers, took out the Llama from its bolster. He dropped it on the floor.

“Kick it over!” yelled the traveler.

Michael did so. “I don’t know how you got here, but you can’t get out,” he said quietly.

“Really?” Pierce released Jenna, shoving her toward the astonished old Russian. “Then I should tell you that your Abraham was cut down by an ungrateful Ishmael.
You
can’t get out.”

“Others know where we are.”

“I doubt that There’d be a hidden army out there on that road if they did. Oh, no, you went in solo—”

“You?”
cried Kalyazin, shaking, then nodding his trembling head. “It
is
you!”

“Glad you’re with us, Alexei. You’re slowing down in your old age. You don’t hear lies when you’re told them.”

“What lies? How did you
find
me?”

“By following a persistent man. Let’s talk about the lies.”

“What
lies?
”

“Matthias recovering. That’s the biggest lie of all. There’s a metal case in my car the contents of which will make remarkable reading all over the world. It shows Anthony Matthias for what he is. A screaming, hollow shell, a maniac, violent and paranoid, who has no working concept of reality. He builds delusions out of images, fantasies out of abstractions—he can be programmed like a deranged robot, reenacting his crimes and offenses. He’s insane and getting worse.”

“That can’t be true!” Kalyazin looked at Michael. “The things he told me … only Anton would know them, recall them.”

“Another lie. Your convincing friend failed to mention that he’s just driven down from the village of Fox Hollow, the residence and dateline of a well-known commentator. One Raymond Alexander—What did Miss Karas just call him? YourBoswell, I think. I’ll visit him. He can add to our collection.”

“
Mikhail
? Why? Why did you say these things? Why did you lie to me?”

“I had to. I was afraid you wouldn’t listen to me. And because
I believe that the Anton we both knew once would have wanted me to.”

“Still another lie,” said Pierce, lowering himself cautiously, his gun extended as he picked up the Llama from the floor and shoved it into his belt. “All they want are those papers so business can go on as usual. So their nuclear committees can go on designing new ways to blow the godless out of existence. That’s what they call us, Alexei. Godless. Perhaps they’ll make Commander Decker the next Secretary of State. His type is very much in vogue; ambitious zealots are the order of the day.”

“That couldn’t happen and you know it, Traveler.”

Pierce looked at Havelock, studying him. “Yes, a traveler. How did you do it? How did you find me?”

“You’ll never know that. Or how deeply we’ve penetrated the
paminyatchik
operation. That’s right. Penetrated.”

The traveler stared at Michael. “I don’t believe you.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“It won’t make any difference. We’ll have the documents. All the options will be ours, nothing left to you.
Nothing
. Except burning cities if you make a wrong turn, a wrong judgment. The world won’t tolerate you any longer.” Pierce stabbed the air with his gun. ‘Let’s go, all of you. You’re going to dig them up for me, Havelock. “Seventy-three steps to a dogwood tree.’ ”

“There are a dozen paths up to the Notch,” said Michael quickly. “You don’t know which one.”

“Alexei will show me. When it comes down to it, he chooses us, not you. Never you. Not business as usual, conducted by liars. He’ll tell me.”

“Don’t do it, Kalyazin.”

“You lied to me, Mikhail. If there must be ultimate weapons-even on paper—they can’t be yours.”

“I told you why I lied, but there’s a final reason.
Him
. You came over to us not because you believed in us but because you couldn’t believe in
them
. They’ve come back. He was the man at the Costa Brava—he killed at the Costa Brava.”

“I carried out what you only pretended! You had the stomach only for pretense. It had to be
done
, not faked!”

“No, it didn’t. But where there’s a choice, you kill. You killed the man who set up the operation, an operation where
no
one’s death was called for.”

“
I did exactly what you would have done but with far more finesse and inventiveness. His death had to be credible, aocepted for what it appeared to be. MacKenzie was the only one who could retrace the events that night, who knew his personnel.”

“Also killed!”

“Inevitable.”

“And Bradford? Inevitable, too?”

“Of course. He’d found me.”

“You see the pattern, Alexei?” shouted Havelock, his eyes on Pierce. “Kill, kill,
kill
! … Do you remember Rostov, Alexei?”

“Yes, I remember him.”

“He was my enemy, but he was a decent man. They killed him, too. Only hours ago. They’ve come back and they’re marching.”