Jigsaw Read online

In his office, Pagan stood at the window and stared down at the square. Daylight, grey and scummy, caused the place to look neglected, like something imported from a dreary East European city. The only thing missing, he reflected, was a dismantled statue of Lenin. He was thinking of Caan, trying to suppress a small admiration for the way the Ambassador had attempted to manipulate him. Yes, we have some dubious characters in the Embassy. No, there’s no such thing as The Undertakers. The first statement was a confidential admission designed to give the imprimatur of validity to the second. A rhetorical trick, and Caan had worked it as well as it could be worked.

  But Pagan wasn’t buying. The strident, panicky tone in Streik’s recorded voice impressed him more than Caan’s silvery manner. Nor did Caan’s weak explanations of Streik’s message convince him.

  He pressed his forehead against the glass: his thoughts drifted away from Caan, back to Brennan Carberry, back to the first meeting on the Embankment, the collision. She had caused more than a dent in his Camaro; she was doing a number on his emotions as well. She was fogging his brain, eroding his concentration, and he felt curiously destabilized. Somebody blows in out of nowhere and snags your heart and suddenly you’re losing the thread of things and you don’t really know why, you don’t know your own mind, you don’t know her, or whether in her scheme of things you’re just some holiday recreation, the old shipboard romance that enhances a long cruise, a diversion …

  He moved back from the window, ran a hand across his face, frowned, picked up the telephone, and even as he began to dial he experienced a feeling of resentment against himself, and a certain sadness, because he’d lost something essential from his life: he’d forgotten how to trust. He stopped dialling, put the phone back down. Don’t do this, Frank, he thought. Leave it alone and see where it goes. But his hand strayed to the receiver again and he picked it up and this time dialled the number without stopping. It rang for a long time before it was answered. Pagan spoke his name.

  He heard Artie Zuboric’s voice, the bearlike growl of a man disturbed from sleep. ‘You any idea what time it is here, Pagan?’

  ‘About five a.m.,’ Pagan said.

  ‘Fuck’s sake,’ Zuboric said. ‘I don’t hear from you in what – five, six years, and you wake me in the middle of the goddam night? This better be good, Pagan.’

  Pagan hesitated. You can still hang up, he thought. Apologize to Zuboric and put down the phone and forget you ever considered this.

  Zuboric, who had no acquaintance with charm at the best of times, snarled. ‘I’m waiting, Pagan.’

  Pagan said, ‘I need a favour.’

  ‘Big or small?’

  ‘Small,’ Pagan replied.

  ‘Let’s hear it.’

  Pagan made his request and Zuboric asked, ‘That’s it?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Fuck you. You wake me for that? I’ll get back to you.’ The line went dead abruptly and Pagan set the receiver down. Dogged by doubt, he wandered back to the window. OK. It was done. Zuboric would get back to him. But he felt bad, sneaky, as if he’d done something underhand. He could call Zuboric again and tell him to forget it.

  He looked down from the window.

  A man in a dark green overcoat stood in the middle of the square, gazing up at the office. There was a moment of eye contact with Pagan and then the man drew from the folds of his overcoat a gun and raised it quickly, arm stretched, aiming at the window. Shocked, Pagan barely heard the two shots. Before he could react he was aware of glass breaking all around him, chips of wood flying from the rotted old frame, fragments of plaster clouding the air about his skull – and then the man was rushing across the square in the direction of Lower James Street.

  Pagan went to the drawer of his desk, took out his Bernardelli and hurried from his office, striding quickly toward the stairs, rushing out into the street and heading in the same direction as the gunman. But there was no sign of him; already the figure in the green overcoat had vanished towards Piccadilly Circus.

  Pagan kept moving anyway, looking this and that way through the crowds trudging up from the Circus, unaware of the startled expressions of those who saw him with the gun in his hand and shrank away, expecting the worst, a madman on the loose, a massacre in the making.

  When he came to Piccadilly Circus, he gave up. Taxicabs, buses, cars, pedestrians, the place was choked. You could never find anyone here. He walked to the corner of Regent Street where a vendor had on display an array of the morning’s newspapers, one of which carried the lurid headline TERROR IN BERLIN, a proclamation that registered only slightly in Pagan’s head – because he was thinking of the man in the green coat, he was remembering the chase through the streets of Mayfair, the gunman who had shot Quarterman.

  He gazed toward the statue of Eros, which seemed to fade into the threadbare morning light.

  TWENTY-SIX

  LONDON

  ‘ARE YOU SURE IT WAS THE SAME MAN?’ FOXWORTH ASKED.

  ‘I didn’t see him from the front when Quarterman was shot. So I can’t be one hundred per cent. But I’m reasonably sure.’

  Pagan and Foxworth sat in a pub on Beak Street. It was jammed with midday trade. The air smelled of sausages, beer, damp umbrellas, the sulphuric stench of struck matches. The lunch had been Pagan’s suggestion. He put down a half-eaten tuna salad sandwich. The acrid taste of grey fish and mayonnaise clung to his tongue like a fur.

  ‘It’s an interesting coincidence, don’t you think?’ Pagan asked. ‘An hour or so after I talk with William Caan, somebody takes a couple of pot-shots at me.’

  Foxie sipped his half-pint of lager. ‘Caan doesn’t like the direction of the investigation—’

  ‘So he wants to … interrupt it,’ Pagan remarked. His voice was calm but the gunshots had shaken him. The marksman had come just a little too close.

  ‘And you think he sent down an instruction.’

  ‘It’s a reasonable assumption.’

  ‘To The Undertakers.’

  ‘Another reasonable assumption.’

  Foxie pondered this. On the circuitously careful walk to lunch, Pagan had brought him up to date on business: the talk with Burr, the interview with Caan, the putative existence of The Undertakers. Foxie had been overwhelmed by a sense of wheels spinning inside wheels, a carousel endlessly revolving.

  Pagan was quiet for a time, listening to the roar of voices around him, the click of cutlery on plates, somebody telling a bawdy joke whose punchline hinged on some weak play on the word beaver. ‘It might be that the gunman’s instruction was only to scare me. A warning to back off. Ease up a little. I don’t know.’

  He picked up his scotch, tasted it, found it watery. He heard the shots again as you might hear faraway echoes. ‘I’ve been giving some thought to the idea that Caan might be a candidate for Carlotta’s paymaster,’ he said.

  ‘Except he’d be too cautious, too careful. Direct involvement would be out of the question for him, Frank.’

  ‘I’m not saying he’d meet Carlotta or pick up the phone and call her. He wouldn’t go near her in a hundred years. He wouldn’t make a silly move like that. I don’t trust the guy, but I don’t think for a moment he’s the one immediately behind Carlotta. There’s got to be somebody else. A go-between. Look. Imagine Caan wants to be rid of Harcourt. Maybe he doesn’t want to involve The Undertakers in killing one of their own. Maybe he doesn’t want it to be an in-house job. He prefers secrecy, a hired assassin, somebody without connections to The Undertakers. So he contacts a third party who brings in Carlotta … Possibly without Caan’s knowledge or permission.’

  It was all very vague, Pagan knew. Straws, some short, some long, blew around in his head. ‘Even if it didn’t happen like that, what it boils down to is the fact that we have to keep as much information away from Caan as possible. If I feed everything to George, George sees it as his duty to spoon it out to Caan. And Caan, not content with the privilege of an inside track, wants to cover all his bases – which includes finishin
g me off along the way.’

  ‘If you’re a target …’ said Foxie, leaving his sentence unfinished.

  ‘Then so are you.’

  ‘A shining thought,’ said Foxie. ‘A bright prospect.’

  ‘And I don’t doubt for a moment they’ll try again if we keep worrying them. You may be sure they’re watching us.’

  Pagan shoved aside his sandwich and sighed. He gazed round the crowded bar. You couldn’t tell from superficial appearances if anyone in the pub was a potential killer. The plump man jammed in the corner balancing a pork pie, the long-haired kid in a leather jacket deftly rolling a cigarette, the laughing girl near the doorway. You just couldn’t tell.

  He took from his pocket the scrap of paper Foxie had delivered from the drunken McLaren and looked at it. ‘As to the business of Streik – this Audrey Roczak in Lyon. McLaren said she worked with Streik.’

  ‘He suggested they might have been closer than mere workmates, actually. They ran errands in the Cold War days. They were postmen.’

  ‘McLaren’s info is reliable?’

  ‘I’d say so.’

  ‘At least Lyon narrows our inquiries down geographically.’

  ‘Except Audrey Roczak’s not answering her phone,’ Foxie said. ‘I’ve been trying.’

  ‘You ever been in Lyon, Foxie?’

  Foxie shook his head. ‘It’s always had this weirdly inexplicable attraction for me, though.’

  ‘I hear it’s a pleasant sort of town.’

  ‘I hear the same.’ Foxie watched a sly smile on Pagan’s face.

  ‘Billy Ewing can run the show from Golden Square in our absence,’ Pagan said.

  ‘Nimmo wouldn’t like that.’

  ‘By the time Nimmo finds out, it’s going to be too late to complain.’ Pagan stood up, colliding with a pipe-smoking man in a wet tweed coat, who immediately said he was sorry in an exasperated manner. Pagan scanned the faces as he moved to the door. He thought a subdued air of desperation hung over everything; people had the expressions of mourners awaiting the entry of a corpse with whom they’d barely been acquainted.

  He looked up at a small TV that played without volume above the bar. A plane wheeled along a tarmac, stopped, a door opened, a crowd of men in dark overcoats emerged, surveying the tarmac with the stiff neck movements of security guards the world over. And then Vladimir Gurenko appeared and began to descend, flanked by his protectors. He waved a hand, smiled for the camera, a breeze shuffled his already unruly hair. At the foot of the steps he was greeted by the Prime Minister, an overweight man whose customary expression was one of moral rectitude. He gave the impression of a mirthless life. Pagan, who had no great fondness for the PM – a former lawyer, a party hack – felt a small admiration for the Russian. It was given grudgingly; Gurenko was a politician, after all, and ipso facto flawed. But Pagan had always considered Gurenko something more than a product of decrepit Russian politics. He was a man of some courage and vision; he had stature – he had, Pagan thought, soul – in contrast to the pinheads running most of the governments of the world. Pagan remembered a famous photograph of Gurenko, taken in Red Square after a failed coup attempt by an assortment of superannuated generals and elephant-brained hardliners, depicting Gurenko with a bloodied bandage round his skull and a revolver in his hand and a wild look on his face. Pagan considered it unlikely that Gurenko had actually used the pistol in the course of events; but he’d enjoyed the symbolism of the Russian’s stance. The photograph had come to represent Gurenko’s determination for the future direction of his country. Pagan couldn’t imagine, under any circumstances, the PM with a pistol in his hand.

  A man with a pipe stuck between his lips said to nobody in particular, ‘Once a Commie, always a Commie. Mark my words.’ He looked purposefully at Pagan, as if he longed for one of those interminable pub arguments that resolve nothing. ‘His people don’t have enough food, they can’t keep themselves warm in winter, and here he is traipsing round Europe like some bloody monarch. What’s he playing at? Eh? Eh? Who does he think he is?’

  Pagan wasn’t about to be drawn into a dreary debate. He looked away from the TV, stepped out of the pub. He turned up the collar of his coat on the wet street. ‘Get us on the earliest flight, Foxie. I just need enough time to pack an overnight bag in case we have to stay in Lyon. Pick me up at my place when you’re ready. And tell Billy Ewing he’s minding the store.’

  ‘You’re sure about this, Frank? It’s a long shot.’

  ‘Without Jake Streik, what have we got?’

  ‘A lot of nothing,’ said Foxworth.

  ‘Precisely.’ He added, ‘And be careful.’

  ‘I always am.’ Briskly, Foxie moved off down Beak Street while Pagan went to the car park where he’d left his Camaro earlier. He strolled round the car, got down on his knees and examined the underside, ran his fingers over the insides of the wheels. He neither felt nor saw any sign of interference, no hidden attachments, no devastating devices. He unlocked the door and, after a second of hesitation, turned the key in the ignition.

  The car started at once.

  He drove to Holland Park, went inside the house, headed down the corridor to the stairs. He passed the closed doors of Miss Gabler’s flat, hearing choral music issue from the old dear’s antique record-player. He took the stairs rapidly, climbing to the landing, where he let himself into his own flat and shut the door behind him.

  He found a leather bag in his bedroom closet, tossed in two shirts, underwear, socks. From the bathroom he removed toothbrush, toothpaste, comb. Inside the living-room he walked to the window, drew back the curtain, looked out in a guarded manner. Nobody moved in the colourless street. Nobody was obvious. Of course somebody could be sitting in one of the parked cars or watching from the small winter-dead park across the way. It was impossible to tell. He picked up the telephone, dialled the number of the Hilton and was put through to Brennan’s room. She picked up on the second ring, sounding breathless.

  ‘I was running a bath,’ she said. ‘I knew you’d call. When can I see you?’ The eagerness in her voice was touching.

  He was quiet a second. He looked round the living-room. He had a sense of something out of place, wasn’t sure what. He surveyed the bookshelf – mainly paperbacks and the skinny volumes of poetry Roxanne had collected. These books always emitted a damp earthy scent whenever he opened one, which wasn’t very often these days.

  Carrying the phone, he walked to the kitchen door, nudged it open, glanced inside. The light above the sink was lit, throwing a yellowy bloom into the room. He couldn’t remember whether he’d left it on or not. He looked at the dishes arranged in the slats of the drying-rack. For some reason their stillness, so utterly predictable, so ordinary, spooked him.

  ‘Frank? Hello? You fall asleep?’

  ‘Sorry, sorry. I was thinking about something.’

  ‘You OK?’

  ‘I’m fine.’ A lie. And it wasn’t just because of the gunman he’d lied. He was thinking of the phone call to Artie Zuboric and chastising himself for his own dark doubts.

  ‘So. When do we two meet again?’

  ‘I’m going out of town for a day or so,’ he answered. ‘It isn’t something I want to do.’

  ‘It’s work. I understand.’

  ‘Do you know what I’d rather do? You want me to tell you?’ He shut his eyes.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I want to come to your room. Lock the door. Take your clothes off. Slowly. Very very slowly. As slowly as possible. So softly you can hardly feel me doing it …’

  ‘I’m approaching meltdown,’ she said.

  ‘Then lay you down on the bed and fuck you until my heart gives out.’

  ‘The wires are burning, Frank.’

  ‘More than the wires.’ He had an erection. He supposed this was connected to the regression he was undergoing. The way he’d spoken to her, the words that had come tumbling out of him, the visual images that flowered in his head – this wasn’t his regular kind
of behaviour, he didn’t usually speak like some psycho phone-freak in a scruffy call-box.

  ‘I’m touching myself, Frank,’ she said.

  He pictured her, perhaps naked, perhaps wrapped in a bathrobe, hair piled up and held carelessly in place with pins, a few blond lanks hanging against her face.

  ‘You have an amazing effect on me,’ she said.

  ‘Hold the thought.’

  ‘I’m holding more than a thought, Frank. That’s the problem.’

  He stared out into the street, looked at the tiny area of park, the empty flower-beds awaiting spring, a couple of tired willows. Life should altogether be an easier proposition, he thought. The pieces should be made to fit. Doubts should be dispelled, shadows dispersed. Sense should prevail. But it didn’t work that way.

  ‘I’ll be back from France as quick as I possibly can.’

  ‘France? I’m envious.’

  ‘Don’t be. I promise I’ll take you to Paris one day.’

  ‘And hold my hand on the boulevards,’ she said.

  ‘The whole thing. I promise.’

  ‘Frank,’ she said, and was silent a second. ‘Tell me you’re not playing games. Tell me this isn’t some abrupt little affair.’

  ‘This isn’t some abrupt little affair,’ he said. Call Zuboric back, he thought. Tell him to forget it. It isn’t too late, is it?

  She said, ‘I couldn’t take disappointment. I don’t handle it well. I’m not built for heartbreak.’

  ‘No disappointment. No heartbreak. I promise you.’

  When he’d put the receiver down he was beset by the need to call her again at once and try to clarify his feelings – an elusive task – but instead he wandered the rooms of his flat, feeling a weird emptiness. He found himself in the kitchen, brooding beside the big humming refrigerator.

  The kitchen is wrong, he thought. Something is altered here. He opened the drawers of the dresser, saw knives and forks where they were supposed to be, spoons in their allotted slots, everything the way he’d left it. And yet. He couldn’t finger it. He couldn’t place it. Maybe it was just the fact the light was burning over the sink: had he forgotten to switch it off when he’d hurried out the previous night? And now – was this just his imagination whispering that somebody had been here in his absence, somebody with an expert touch had turned the place over, looking for God knows what? He shivered. Had Bryce Harcourt felt like this when he’d told Victoria Canningsby he was being watched and followed – jumpy, hounded by seemingly irrational thoughts?