Mazurka Read online

  He wiped sweat from his forehead. As he did so, he was aware of Alexei Malik slipping into the pew beside him. Epishev took off his glasses quickly and put them in his pocket.

  “Why did you choose this place?” Malik asked.

  “I have a warped sense of humour.” Epishev, who wanted to get down to business immediately, noticed the briefcase Malik was holding. “I assume that’s Romanenko’s?”

  Malik nodded. “It’s Romanenko’s.” A short pause, then, “But the message is gone.”

  Epishev was silent for a long time, fanning the heavy air with a hand. “Who removed it?”

  Malik’s voice dropped to a whisper, like that of a man whose words are constantly monitored, constantly eavesdropped upon. “I think we can be certain it was done at Scotland Yard, either by the Commissioner or a policeman called Frank Pagan. It’s very likely that the Commissioner delegated the entire matter to Pagan. A man by the name of Danus Oates was also present in Edinburgh. Oates is something of a linguist and if Romanenko’s message had to be translated he’d be the man to do it.”

  Epishev massaged his eyelids. The flight from Moscow to Berlin, then from Germany to London, had tired him. Some kind of spiced-up eggs had been served on board the second plane and he could feel them burning a hole in his stomach. “We must find out what the damned message said. The General wants to be one hundred per cent certain that the plot is not about to be derailed, Alexei.”

  Epishev watched a middle-aged woman kneel quickly before the altar. A priest emerged from shadows and engaged her in conversation, hovering over her like a large black bat.

  “What about the assassin?” Epishev asked. “What do we know about him?”

  Malik stuffed his handkerchief away. What he disliked about Colonel Epishev, with whom he’d worked in the past, was the way the man asked questions. They were always phrased directly, always posed in a tone that made you feel as if you were taking an oral examination, and that every question could be answered in only one acceptable way.

  Malik said, “The assassin somehow managed to take his own life a few hours ago.”

  This item of news surprised Epishev. “In custody?”

  “In custody,” Malik replied.

  “How careless of the custodians,” Epishev said and returned his gaze to the front of the church, noticing for the first time a stained-glass window depicting Christ in his last agony. “What have you learned about him?”

  “Very little,” Malik answered. “His name was Jacob Kiviranna, an American.”

  “With a Baltic name,” Epishev said. “Was he acting alone?”

  Malik said, “We think so. According to the Soviet Mission in Manhattan, the killer didn’t belong to any dissident groups in the United States. And he certainly had no known affiliations here.”

  Malik, whose official function was to serve as assistant to the Ambassador (a liberal recently installed by the new regime in Moscow), had a whole network of informants throughout the United Kingdom, a varied crew of alcoholics, homosexuals, loners, sociopaths, blackmail victims, fellow travellers, exiles, and fantasists numbed by the Welfare State who needed the romance of thinking themselves spies. He’d spent a long time building this network, and much of the intelligence that reached him was reliable. If he said Kiviranna had no allegiance with any organisation inside the UK, he was offering an assessment that was reasonably accurate.

  “These might be useful,” and Malik took a sheet of paper and a photograph from his pocket, passing both items to Epishev. “I was unable to get a photograph of Danus Oates, only an address. However, I did acquire a picture of Frank Pagan. His address is on the back.”

  Epishev stuck the paper inside his wallet, then studied the photograph briefly. The likeness of the man called Pagan was blurry, but what Epishev saw was a lean, determined face. The picture appeared to have been taken without the subject’s knowledge because Pagan was looking off into the distance, away from the camera, and his expression had no self-consciousness about it. It was a hard face in some respects, but there was a slight suggestion of humour around the eyes, as if this man took himself seriously only to a point.

  Epishev put the picture away. He was impatient to be out of this church now. It had begun to affect him adversely. It was a place where people came to share a common belief, and Epishev, who had shared very little with anyone in his life, felt a quiet little ache of unease. He stood up. “Did you bring me the other thing I wanted?”

  Malik said that it was outside in the car. Both men left the church. The early afternoon sky was overcast, the air suffocating. Malik’s car was an unexceptional Subaru, a rental. A car with diplomatic plates might have been more than a little obtrusive parked outside a Catholic Church in a working-class district of Fulham.

  When both men were seated in the Subaru Malik reached across and opened the glove compartment. Epishev took out the gun, which was a brand-new Randall Service Model with a silencer. He held it in his palm, admiring it a moment before placing it in the pocket of his coat.

  He put a hand on Malik’s shoulder. “You’ve been very helpful, Alexei.”

  Malik smiled. “We’re on the same side, Viktor. We want the same goal. The kind of things happening in Russia …” Malik paused, searching for the correct expression. “They’re not Russian.”

  Epishev stepped out of the car, feeling the gun’s weight drag at his coat pocket. “You’re right, Alexei. Whatever else they might be, they’re not Russian.”

  He didn’t look back at Malik as he moved away from the car and along the pavement. The same side, Viktor. The same goal. The restoration of the Revolution’s credentials.

  He stopped on a street corner outside a small grocery store. He took Malik’s slip of paper from his wallet, memorised the address written there, then tore the sheet into fragments. He turned Frank Pagan’s photograph over, committed the address on the back to memory, then ripped the picture into four pieces. He placed all this litter, rather fastidiously, in a waste-basket affixed to a lamp-post.

  Moscow

  General Stefan Ivanovich Olsky and his wife lived in a large apartment in the Lenin Hills on the outskirts of Moscow. It was a modern home, filled with Western appliances and decorated in the kind of blond wood surfaces one associates with Scandinavian houses. It was located on a street that was off-limits to most Muscovites, guarded at each end by uniformed militia men.

  Unlike most Russian women married to powerful men, Sabina Olskaya kept herself informed about her husband’s work and discussed it with him. But mainly she listened, because she knew her real strength came from her sympathetic ear. She was also ambitious on her husband’s behalf, imagining a day when he might ascend from the Chairmanship of the KGB to General Secretary of the Party.

  She lay in the bedroom, listening to the sound of her husband running water in the bathroom. It was early evening, and they’d taken a light meal together, and now they were going to make love, which was something they invariably did at this time every Sunday. The General’s demanding schedule meant that their time together was both precious and sacrosanct, and Sabina guarded it jealously. She was a slim woman with long black hair and a wide mouth and front teeth which protruded slightly – a flaw in her appearance Stefan Olsky found very attractive.

  He came out of the bathroom wearing a silk robe. As he approached the bed, Sabina rolled on her side, reaching out to slickly untie the cord, so that his robe fell open. She could tell from the expression on his face that he was preoccupied and she knew from experience that when he was absorbed in something he was as distant from her as a man walking on the surface of the moon.

  She sat with her back against the pillows, her legs crossed. She had wonderful thighs. Before her marriage, she’d been a ballet dancer in the corps of the Kirov, and she still exercised every day. Now Olsky stroked her thigh absent-mindedly, unconscious of the years of training that had gone into creating such fine muscle tone.

  She reached for an apple that lay in a bowl on the bed
side table and bit into it loudly.

  “So,” she said. “You let that old fart Greshko upset you?”

  “Am I upset?”

  “Let’s say you’re distracted, shall we? He’s a sick old man, he lies buried in the countryside, why should he worry the Chairman of the KGB?”

  Stefan Olsky closed his eyes. Inside the bedroom there was a caged bird, a small yellow canary that sang in a tuneful way. The General listened a moment, aware of a warm breeze blowing in through the open window, stirring the long curtains. His beloved wife, the playful breeze, the songbird – all the elements were present for happiness, for contentment. Why then was it so unattainable? He opened his eyes, ran the palm of his hand across his shaved skull. At his side, Sabina practised turn-outs with her feet, then raised her long legs in glorious extensions.

  Stefan Olsky said, “Fact. Greshko removes Romanenko’s file. (Or authorises its removal, the same difference.) Fact. Romanenko is killed by an assassin. Fact. Greshko associates with people known to be unsympathetic to the General Secretary and his programme.”

  Sabina, who knew just the kind of people her husband was referring to – and especially their wives, those shapeless, tight-lipped spouses, those unfashionable old biddies who lived like wraiths in their husbands’ shadows – made an expression of disgust and said, “They’re toothless decrepit shits.”

  “They can still bite with their gums, dear heart.” He had a strong feeling he was missing something, something that kept slipping between his fingers, some gap in a logical sequence, except he wasn’t sure what. He had three separate facts, but they didn’t provide him with a syllogism.

  He thought of how he’d taken over the KGB during this period of enormous social reconstruction, and how the General Secretary made excellent speeches about infusing Soviet society with a new dynamic – but the actuality was difficult, the practical implications complicated. Inside the KGB, for example, the old guard, some of them Greshko loyalists, went to great lengths to make pernickety complaints. It was as if the very word new had the same effect on those thick-skulled old-timers as sunlight on vampires.

  Change was struggle, an uphill struggle. Sometimes it couldn’t be forced, it couldn’t be pressured, it had to be coaxed along. Sometimes it only happened through attrition – and you needed patience while the old guard died or retired. Patience, persistence, these were the qualities in himself that Stefan Olsky most admired.

  He clasped his wife’s hand and held it to his lips. He nuzzled her knuckles, but he was still behaving absent-mindedly.

  Sabina Olskaya watched her husband’s face. She was very much in love with him and proud of the role he was playing in re-training this cumbersome elephant that was Russia to her. During her career with the Kirov she’d travelled to the West a score of times, and she’d adored it for more than the great stores and the elegant restaurants and the fashionable people walking on the splendid boulevards. What she’d become enamoured of was a certain spirit – she could think of no other word – that existed in the West. It was something she discovered in newspapers and books, in cinemas and theatres, in late-night conversations she had with friends in those countries – an exhilarating freedom, a giddiness which at times left her breathless, a world of choices, a world seemingly without limits. The Soviet Union she always came back to depressed her, a lumbering beast in drab colours. But now it was being turned around, a dash of colour added here, a touch of spice there, and Stefan – her husband – was one of the men helping to make the alterations. She kissed his forehead just then, more from gratitude than lust. She wanted to live in a new Russia, not the one typified by those old dodos who made Stefan’s life so difficult at times with their underhand ways, and their outmoded dogma.

  The telephone was ringing on the bedside table. Olsky picked it up. He heard the voice of his personal assistant, Colonel Chebrikov, a stuffy young man whose principal attributes were unqualified loyalty and an ambition that was not markedly acute.

  “A man known as Yevenko was arrested a couple of hours ago, General,” the Colonel said. “He was in possession of counterfeit currency.”

  “Yevenko?” Olsky asked. “Should the name mean anything to me?”

  “Perhaps not, sir. He’s been involved in various currency scandals in the past. In more recent years, his speciality has been forged documents. Sometimes he’s known as the Printer.”

  “And?” Olsky watched his wife rise from the bed and walk to the window, where she stood balanced on one leg. The gown she wore caught the breeze and blew away from her thighs.

  “Well, sir, he has information.”

  “What kind of information, Colonel?”

  “He’ll only tell it to you. And then only on the condition that you … that you are lenient with him. The information concerns a man you asked me to make a report on recently with a view to retirement or reassignment. One of Greshko’s people. Colonel Viktor Epishev.”

  Olsky said, “I’ll meet you in twenty minutes, Colonel.” He hung up the receiver quickly. He got up from the bed and crossed the floor, catching Sabina by the shoulders, kissing her on the mouth. Then he stepped back from her.

  She asked, “Will I stay awake for you?”

  Even though Stefan Olsky said yes, yes she should stay awake for him, he wondered how many hours of his time would be absorbed by his other wife, the one infinitely more demanding and more complex than Sabina, the one called Mother Russia.

  8

  Brooklyn, New York

  Andres Kiss, his blond hair moved by the breeze, hurried along the boardwalk at Brighton Beach. Even in his haste he walked with grace. People who noticed him, and many did, were impressed by his poise. There was nothing clumsy, nothing angular, in the way he hurried. If he suggested a blur, it was a streamlined one. He wore a three-piece suit of dark brown silk. His white shirt was open at the collar because he hated the restriction of neck-ties. He paused once, scanning the Sunday afternoon crowds that had come out to promenade and sniff the ozone.

  Old Russians, many of them Jews, sat in the doorways of shops and jabbered or played cards. There was loud music coming from various sources, a clash of sounds – balalaikas on somebody’s tape-deck, rock and roll from a ghetto-blaster hoisted on the shoulder of a passing skateboarder, the drone of some 1950s Soviet crooner limping out of battered speakers that had been set up on a vendor’s table where you could buy tapes bootlegged from the original Russian records. Here and there people were huddled in earnest political discussions about the direction of Soviet society or in serious debate about the inadequacies of Blue Cross and Blue Shield. Old ladies walked dogs through the salted air and sometimes paused to let their pets poop.

  Andres Kiss knew this scene so well he didn’t analyse it, didn’t think about the mix of cultures or the way foreign languages and dialects filled the air around him. He walked until he reached the closed door of what had once been a hot-dog shop during the golden age of the boardwalk, that halcyon time when nearby Coney Island, now a haven for druggers and muggers, had been a safe place for family outings.

  The window of the shop was filthy and the faded lettering on the glass barely legible. Andres Kiss reached deftly into the pocket of his pants and removed the key the old man had reluctantly consented to give him only a few weeks ago.

  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 beyon
d, 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.”