Mazurka Read online

  But he wasn’t going to yield to memories. In any event he’d heard how the Tallinn of his recollection had changed with Soviet occupation – the Russians had torn historic buildings down, renamed streets, and erected those dreary blocks of high-rise apartments that were so deadeningly characteristic of Communist architecture.

  He checked his wristwatch. It was almost nine. He had been waiting for more than an hour. But what was a mere hour when weighed against the forty-three years that had passed since the Russians had ‘liberated’ his country? Old men learned one thing. They learned how to sing in the soft voices of patience.

  He looked at the young man who stood alongside him. In the young man’s blue eyes the lights of the city were reflected.

  “He’s not coming, Mikhail,” the young man said. He was extraordinarily handsome, at times almost angelic, but he had no self-consciousness about the perfection of his looks because external appearances meant very little to him. When he entered a restaurant, or stepped inside a crowded room, he turned heads and fluttered hearts and caused glands to work overtime – he affected people, mainly women, in ways that rarely interested him. This coldness, this seeming indifference, only enhanced his physical desirability. He wasn’t merely a handsome young man, he was a challenging presence in the landscape, and difficult to conquer.

  Mikhail Kiss looked away from his nephew and made an indeterminate gesture with his enormous hands. He had killed with those hands. He had dug graves with them and buried his dead comrades with them. “If he isn’t coming, then he’s bound to have a damn good reason.”

  “Like what?”

  Mikhail Kiss shrugged. Who could say? Meetings were hard to arrange, and sometimes things went wrong, timetables became confused, time zones were overlooked, planes were delayed, trains ran late, a hundred accidents could happen. Nothing was perfect in this world anyway – except revenge, which he carried protectively in a special place deep inside his heart. He nurtured revenge, and fed it carefully the way someone might tend an exquisite plant. Vengeance was precious to him, and vows that had been taken long ago were not forgotten. He was a man who still breathed the atmosphere of the past.

  He moved closer to the young man, seeing the way a muscle worked tensely in the cheek and how the blond hair, which lay lightly upon the collar of his raincoat, was speckled with drops of very fine rain.

  “Something must have gone wrong, Mikhail.”

  Mikhail Kiss squeezed his nephew’s shoulder. He didn’t say anything. He never allowed himself to think the very worst until there was no alternative. Leaping to conclusions was a sport for the young and tempestuous.

  The young man, whose name was Andres Kiss, leaned upon the stone parapet and looked down through the darkness that rose up around the rock on which the Castle had been built. He restlessly rubbed the rough surface of stone with the palm of one hand. A person with a sense of history might have imagined, even for the briefest time, the touch of the mason who had put the stone in place many centuries ago. He might even have imagined calloused skin, a face, a concentrated expression, and marvelled at how the past created echoes in the present. But Andres Kiss’s sense of history went back a mere forty years, and no further.

  He turned his face away from the sight of the city spread out beneath him, and he looked at his uncle. “I have a bad feeling in my gut,” he said. “I don’t think he’s going to come.”

  A gust of wind blew soft rain at Mikhail Kiss’s eyes, and he blinked. He felt exactly as his nephew did, that something had gone wrong, that down there in the shadowy pools between lamps and neon signs something altogether unexpected had happened to Aleksis Romanenko.

  2

  Zavidovo, the Soviet Union

  The cottage was a simple three-room building located on the edge of Zavidovo, a one hundred and thirty square mile wilderness some ninety miles from Moscow. The house was surrounded by trees and practically invisible until one was within twenty yards of the place. It was reached by means of a mud track, which was severely rutted. Dimitri Volovich had some trouble holding the car steady on the awful surface, especially in the dark. He parked a hundred feet from the cottage, then stepped out and opened the rear door for Colonel V. G. Epishev, who emerged into a blackness penetrated only by the soft light from one of the cottage windows.

  Epishev ran a finger inside his mouth, probing for an annoyingly stubborn particle of the apple he’d eaten on the way from Moscow. He had a pleasant round face, the kind you might associate with a favourite uncle. It wasn’t memorable, which suited him very nicely. In the West he could have passed for a stockbroker or a certified public accountant. His manner, which he’d cultivated over years of service in one or other Directorate of the KGB, was indeed avuncular, sometimes kindly in a way that disarmed even people who were his sworn enemies. And he was known among these enemies – a diverse group that included political dissidents he’d imprisoned or practising Christians he’d dissected or errant Jews he’d shipped in the opposite direction from Israel and into a colder climate than they desired – as Uncle Viktor, although no affection was implied by the term.

  He turned towards the lighted window, hearing Greshko’s music issuing from the house. An incongruous sound in the Russian night. He wondered what it was that the old man found so absorbing in American country songs. It was a weird taste Greshko had acquired in the late 1940s, when he’d spent six months as rezident in Washington at the Soviet Embassy.

  Epishev, followed by Lieutenant Volovich, entered the cottage. Neither man was at ease in this place. As officers of the KGB, they had no compelling, official reason to visit Greshko, who had been removed a year ago from his position as Chairman of State Security. He was therefore non-existent, persona non grata inside ruling circles – even if there were those who feared him still and who awaited news of his death with considerable impatience.

  The nurse appeared in the doorway of the bedroom. She was a small black-haired girl from the Yakut, and her oriental features had a plump-cheeked innocence. Epishev was never sure about her. She went about her business briskly, and her Russian was very poor, and she seemed to think it perfectly natural that Greshko would have visitors – but you could never tell. The Colonel, who had lived much of his life promoting a sense of paranoia in others, didn’t care to experience the feeling for himself.

  “He’s awake,” the nurse said. Her uniform was unnaturally white, almost phosphorescent in the thin light of the room.

  Epishev and Volovich went towards the bedroom door. The music filled the air, a flutter of fiddles, a scratching Epishev found slightly painful. The bedroom was lit only by a pale lamp on the bedside table and the red and green glow of lights from Greshko’s sophisticated stereophonic equipment, which the old man had had imported from Denmark.

  Greshko’s face emerged from the shadows. Once, it had been large and round, reminding Epishev of an angry sun. Now, changed by terminal illness, the skin was transparent and the eyes, still brightly piercing, were the only things that suggested any of Greshko’s former fire. Angular and terrible, the features appeared to draw definition from the shallow pools of light in the small room. When he spoke, Greshko’s voice was no longer the harsh commanding thing it had been before, a dictatorial instrument, imperious and thrilling. The cancer had spread to his throat and when he said anything he did so laboriously, barely able to raise his voice above a rasping whisper. A length of plastic tubing ran from Greshko’s body to a point under the bed. It was transparent and would fill now and then with brown liquid, the wastes of Greshko’s stomach. Or what was left of it.

  Epishev moved nearer the bed. He tried to ignore the smell of death that hung around the old man. He concentrated on the dreadful music, as if that might help. A man with a nasal condition was singing.

  As I walk along beside her up the golden stair,

  I know they’ll never take her love from me.

  “Poor Viktor,” Greshko said. “You never liked my music, did you? You made passable attempts at tr
ying, didn’t you?”

  Epishev was held by Greshko’s eyes, as he’d been trapped so many times in the old days. If Epishev had ever had a true friend in a life that was almost entirely solitary, it had to be Vladimir Greshko. Only Greshko’s patronage and protection had spared Epishev the whimsical wrath of Stalin, at a time when Stalin was launched on still another crazed purge of Soviet society and Epishev had been a young man of twenty-two, barely at the start of his career. His youthful ambition, so far as he’d ever been able to comprehend, had been his only ‘crime’. And Greshko’s intervention with The Great Leader had saved Epishev the long one-way trip to Siberia. Epishev remembered this with a gratitude that would never diminish. He had repaid the debt with years of unquestioning loyalty to Greshko.

  Greshko made a small gesture with one thin white hand. “Come closer.”

  Epishev sat on the edge of the bed. This close to Greshko, he thought he could see death, as though it were a shadow that fell across Greshko’s face. “Listen a moment,” the old man said. And his hand, a claw of bone, dropped over Epishev’s wrist. “Listen to the music.”

  Epishev shut his eyes and pretended to concentrate.

  If tonight the sun should set

  On all my hopes and cares

  Greshko said, “Do you hear it, Viktor?”

  Epishev looked into the old man’s eyes. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to hear.

  “Ach,” Greshko said impatiently. “You’re too young. Too young.”

  It was an odd thing how Epishev at the age of fifty-five always felt young and inexperienced in Greshko’s presence, always the neophyte in the presence of the old master. Nobody knew Greshko’s real age, which was somewhere between eighty and eighty-five.

  “You never knew what it was like to build the railways in the 1920s, how could you? The great spaces. The sky, Viktor. That endless sky.”

  Epishev couldn’t see the connections here, couldn’t tell which way the old man was going. Since his sickness and removal from office, Greshko had increasingly rambled in directions that were hard to follow at times. Epishev had heard how, as a young man caught up in that first dizzying outbreak of Bolshevik success, Greshko had gone into the wilderness beyond Sverdlosk to lay railway tracks. It was a period of his life the old man reminisced about frequently.

  “That’s the sound of it all,” Greshko said. “In that music, there’s the sound of the endless sky. And the wind across the plains, Viktor. That’s what I always hear. I don’t understand all the words, but the feelings – always the feelings. Why does it take an American to capture something so plaintive?”

  Epishev glanced at Volovich, thin and motionless and uncomfortable in the doorway. To Volovich’s right was a stack of record albums, perhaps a hundred or so in some disarray. Epishev, who had an excellent command of English, could read the names of certain singers. Hank Williams. Johnny Cash. Bill Monroe. Smiling men in cowboy hats. He wondered how they could smile so, when they produced such miserable sounds.

  The music came to an end and there was a silence in the bedroom, broken only by the sucking noise created by the plastic tube.

  “What has Birthmark Billy been doing recently, Viktor?” Birthmark Billy was the derogatory way Greshko referred to the new General Secretary of the Party, a man he loathed so much he could never bring himself to use the proper name. “Tell me the latest news. Has he been tearing things apart again?”

  “He had the Director of the KGB in Krasnoyarsk arrested on a charge of corruption.”

  “Krasnoyarsk? That would be Belenko. Belenko was one of my own.”

  “Yes,” Epishev said.

  Greshko was suddenly restless. His hands fluttered in the air. “Soon there won’t be a single institution, a single law, a single custom he hasn’t attacked and changed. This whole society will have been altered beyond recognition. Don’t doubt this, Viktor, but one day in the very near future these changes are going to affect you as well. You’ll go into your office as usual and you’ll find the furniture has been moved around and a total stranger is sitting where you used to sit. And they’ll send you to Gorki where, if you’re lucky, you’ll find yourself directing traffic. And if you’re unlucky, Colonel Epishev …” Greshko’s hands dropped to his side and something – some spark of life – seemed to subside inside him. He lay very still.

  Epishev had heard this speech before in one form or another, and now he waited for the fire to build in Greshko again, as he knew it would. He was also puzzled why he and Volovich had been ordered to come to this place at such an hour, but he couldn’t hurry Greshko, who never volunteered information until he was ready to do so. The old man sighed and turned his face toward the lamp and Epishev could see the scar on his throat where the surgeon had gone in with a knife.

  “God damn him,” Greshko said quietly. “God damn him and his cronies.” The old man stared at Volovich. “Close the door, Dimitri.”

  Volovich did so. With the door closed, the air in the room was charged with the electricity of conspiracy.

  Greshko said, “The Russian people need the whip of authority. They don’t need some quack who comes along and drops tantalising hints about how there are going to be some new freedoms. Elections! A free press! More consumer goods in stores! You don’t find the Russian spirit in democracy and better nylon stockings and finer toothbrushes and imported French wines! The people don’t understand these things. They don’t want them because they don’t know how to use them. And even if they deceive themselves into thinking they do want these things, they’re not ready for them.” Greshko paused. His breathing was becoming harsh and laboured.

  The strange voice was subdued now, almost inaudible. “What the new crowd fails to understand is that the Russian people need a little fear in their lives. They need emotional austerity. Stalin understood it. Brezhnev, who was a lazy bastard in many ways, also understood it. And I understood it when I ran the KGB. But this new gang! This new gang thinks they have a magic wand and they can wave it and everything will change overnight. They fail to realise this isn’t the West. Democracy isn’t our historic destiny. Adversity is the glue that has always held Russia together.”

  Greshko raised himself up once more with an amazing effort of will and looked towards Volovich.

  “Put something on the turntable, Dimitri,” he said.

  Volovich found an album and played it. It was a man singing about his life in a place called Folsom Prison and it was very maudlin. Epishev wanted to get up from the place where he sat and put a little distance between himself and the wretched plastic tube, but he didn’t move. Even as he lay dying, there was a magnetism about Greshko, perhaps less well-defined these days but still a force Epishev knew he couldn’t resist.

  Greshko licked his dark lips, stared up at the ceiling, seemed to be listening less to the sounds from the speakers than to some inner melody of his own. He moved his face slowly back to Epishev and said, “Romanenko is dead.”

  So that was the reason for this midnight summons! For a moment Epishev didn’t speak. Greshko’s sentence, so baldly stated, floated through his mind.

  “Dead? How?”

  “Shot by a gunman in a railway station in Edinburgh about six hours ago.”

  “A gunman? Who?”

  “I have no more information,” Greshko said. “I only learned about the assassination less than two hours ago,” and he twisted his neck to peer at the bedside telephone, as if he expected it to ring immediately with more news. So far as Greshko was concerned the phone was both a blessing and a threat. His various contacts and sympathisers around the country could always keep in touch with him, but at the same time they always had to be circumspect when they called, because they were afraid of tapped lines and tape-recorders, and so a curious kind of code had evolved, a sub-language of unfinished sentences, half-phrases, substitutions, a terminology whose caution Greshko disliked. He had always preferred forthright speech and down-to-earth images and now it seemed to him that more than his exalted po
sition had been stripped from him – they’d taken his language away from him too.

  Epishev asked, “How does this affect us?”

  Greshko smiled, a weird little expression, lopsided, like that of a man recovering from a severe stroke. And then suddenly he looked bright, more like the Greshko of old, the one who had regarded the delegation of authority as a fatal weakness. This was Greshko the ringmaster, the man who guarded the computer access codes of the State Security organs with all the jealousy of an alchemist protecting his recipe for gold, a man as cold as the tundra and whose only love – and it was love – was for his precious KGB, which was slowly having the life sucked out of it by the new vampires of the Kremlin. Epishev imagined he could hear the brain working now, whirring and ticking, then taking flight.

  Greshko said, “Our main concern is whether Romanenko’s message has fallen into the wrong hands or whether it reached its intended goal. If it was intercepted, then by whom? And what did the message mean to the interceptor? The problem we have is that we were never able fully to ascertain the content of the message. The only way we might have done that would have aroused Romanenko’s suspicions, and that wasn’t worth the risk …” Greshko drew the cuff of his pyjama sleeve across his mouth and went on, “We know Romanenko had planned to pass it along in Edinburgh to his collaborators, we also know the message was an indication that all the elements of the scheme were successfully in place – but we don’t know the extent of the information it contained. Was it some vaguely-worded thing? Or was it more specific? Could a total stranger read it and understand exactly what events are planned inside the Soviet Union a few days from now? Was it written in some kind of code? You see the threat, of course, Viktor. In the wrong hands, this information could be disastrous for all of us.”