“How was God?” she asked.
“Flustered,” Pagan said.
“I thought Gods were unflappable by definition.”
“They get anxious when something’s not quite right in their domain.”
Like Martin Burr, Pagan was also flustered. Like Martin Burr, Pagan had the feeling that something was not quite right in his domain. Part of it was due to this woman’s sudden entry into his life. He looked around the room as if he expected to see changes, small rearrangements she might have made in his absence. But everything was the same as before. What would she move anyway? The bloody furniture? It was a ridiculous notion. She probably hadn’t even risen from the sofa all the time he’d been gone. He was entertaining some silly thoughts, and he wasn’t quite sure why.
“Are you too tired for the rest of my story?” she asked.
“I want you to take a look at this first.” He removed the poem from his pocket and handed it to her. There was a tiny connection of flesh as his hand encountered hers. “Tell me if it means anything to you.”
She read it, looking solemn. “I know it better in the original,” she said, and there was a catch in her voice. “Küll siis Kalev jõuab koju, Oma lastel õnne tooma, Eesti põlve uueks looma. It’s been a long time since I recited anything in Estonian. And it’s been a long time since I read those lines.”
Pagan had never heard Estonian spoken before. What it reminded him of was Finnish, which he’d heard once or twice, finding it a little too arctic to be mellifluous. He looked at Kristina Vaska. She had her eyes shut very tightly and two thin tears slithered down her cheeks. He felt suddenly helpless – what was he supposed to do? Go to her, put his arms round her, comfort her? He wasn’t sure how to behave.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay. I don’t like to cry. I don’t like feeling homesick and I can’t stand being weepy.” She opened her eyes and forced a tense smile. Then she dipped into her purse and took out a paper tissue, which she pressed against her eyelids. Pagan watched in silence. He had a longing to hold her hands.
“Can I get you a drink?” he asked.
“I’m okay.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.” She smiled again, a pale effort, and gazed at the poem. “I haven’t read Kalevipoeg since I was a kid.”
“Can you explain the poem to me?”
“It’s from an old legend. Kalevipoeg was the son of Kalev. Kalev, who founded the kingdom of Estonia, was the son of the god Taara. According to the story, Kalevipoeg impressed the gods with his upright character, so they severed his legs at the knees then they embedded his fist in the stone surrounding the gateway to hell. Which is where he is to this day – preventing the return of the Evil One, the Devil.”
“The gods have a strange way of showing their appreciation,” Pagan said, wondering if a little half-arsed levity was even remotely appropriate. “So Kalevipoeg is some kind of local hero.”
“A symbol of goodness.”
“And he’s expected back when things get really rough?”
Kristina Vaska said, “Yeah, but I doubt if he’s ever going to return. He’s had plenty of opportunities. And if he hasn’t come back by this time, I’d say he’s simply not going to show. Gods are notoriously unreliable.”
“They have their own timetables, that’s all.”
Kristina Vaska scanned the poem again, her hand trembling slightly. “I assume Romanenko had this in his possession, Frank?” she asked. It was the first time she’d used his name and she did so almost coyly, in a way Pagan found appealing – as if she were speaking a very private word.
Pagan nodded. “The question is, why was he carrying it around with him? It was written in something called Livonian and stuck inside a sealed envelope.”
“Maybe I can shed a little light on why Romanenko would have this poem with him.”
“How?”
“By telling you something about the man, which is the reason I’m here anyhow,” she said. “As I recall, I was getting to the end of my tale when I was rudely interrupted. Shall I continue?”
“I’m listening.” Pagan was impatient now.
Kristina Vaska took a deep breath. “Okay. I was up to the part where Romanenko was about to make an appearance. First, a question. Have you ever heard of an organisation called the Brotherhood of the Forest?”
Pagan, sensing an unwelcome detour, shook his head.
Kristina Vaska said, “The Brotherhood fought the Soviet occupation until 1952, maybe 1953. Mainly they had nothing but rifles and guts. But what really finished them off were Soviet reprisals against the farmers who supplied the Brotherhood with food and shelter. So they disbanded. Some were executed, others imprisoned. A few fled from the Baltic. My father, who was a member of the Brotherhood when he was sixteen years old, threw his rifle away and managed to slip back into society, which wasn’t easy for him – given his views. I suppose he thought he could continue the struggle by political means. It wasn’t a period of his life he talked about, you understand. He let one or two things slip when he was in an expansive mood or if he’d been drinking, but never anything of substance and only in front of the immediate family.”
Frank Pagan watched her. The darkness of the eyes, the mouth that was a little too large for the face and yet somehow absolutely right, the soft curl of eyelashes – a skilled portrait artist or a poet might have done justice to her idiosyncratic beauty. Pagan, neither artist nor poet, was content to look and appreciate.
“I want to show you something, Frank.”
She opened her purse. She took out a small, cracked photograph, an old black and white affair with a scalloped edge. She handed it to him. Pagan saw two young men, boys – one neatly bisected by the crack in the picture – standing in shirtsleeves under the branches of a tree. They both held rifles. Their faces were misty with that nebulous quality old photographs often have and their expressions weren’t easy to read. There was toughness in them, and grimness, but they were both grinning in a stiff fashion as if the photographer had bullied them into smiling when neither of them felt like it.
“The man on the left is my father,” she said.
Pagan looked at the face of Norbert Vaska, seeing no resemblance between the man and his daughter.
“The man on the right,” she said, then paused.
Pagan raised his face from the picture and waited.
“Don’t you recognise him, Frank?”
Pagan, puzzled by her question, looked at the picture again. How could he possibly recognise a Baltic rebel in a photograph that had to be forty years old, a soldier in a forgotten war fought when Frank Pagan had been barely five years old?
“Look closer,” Kristina Vaska said.
Pagan did so. There was something, the foggy edge of recognition, but then it slipped away from him. “I give up,” he said.
“The man on the right is Aleksis Romanenko.”
“Romanenko?” Pagan stared at the photograph. Time had eroded the resemblance between the man with the rifle and the one who’d been assassinated in Edinburgh. There was some mild similarity, nothing more. “Are you sure?”
Kristina Vaska was emphatic. “Beyond any doubt.”
“I’m having a hard time with this, Kristina,” he said. “You’re telling me that Romanenko, the First Secretary of the Communist Party in Estonia, was once a guerilla who fought against the Soviets? That he was a member of this Brotherhood?”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
Pagan laid the photograph on the rug. Romanenko’s face gazed up at him – and now Pagan thought he saw another quality there, a certain defiance, a challenge from the past. “I need more,” he said quietly.
Kristina Vaska stood up and walked to the window. She parted the curtains and gazed out at the park in the square. “Aleksis Romanenko was one of my father’s best friends. Even when he began his climb in the Party, he was still Norbert Vaska’s friend. Until the e
arly 1970s he would visit our house. The visits stopped after my father’s arrest in 1972.”
Pagan caught something here, a slight stress in her voice. He asked, “How was Romanenko able to rise in the Party?”
She turned from the window. “He obliterated his past, Frank. He recreated his own history by falsifying records. You’ve got to remember how the war scattered people all over the Soviet Union. The deportations alone accounted for millions of people uprooted and shipped elsewhere. Think of the confusion. Wholesale turmoil. Badly kept records, documents destroyed in air-raids, birth-certificates and identity papers burned. An ingenious man like Romanenko could take advantage of the situation.”
She paused, looked distant, even a little forlorn. There was at times, Pagan thought, a certain delicacy to her features. “He must have lived with the constant fear of being found out. Which is the way my father lived. In the end Norbert Vaska couldn’t work within the system any longer. But Romanenko did.”
“Worked within or worked against?” Pagan asked.
“Both. The phrase we want is a double life. Aleksis may have been the Party Secretary, but he believed in the independence of the Baltic countries. And secretly, he did everything he could to support that goal.”
Pagan remembered the way Romanenko had held his briefcase against his chest in the railroad station, the way his face had looked when the gun was fired. Contorted, horrified, a man stepping suddenly into a nightmare and seeing all his fears, which he has nurtured for thirty years or more, suddenly rear up at him in the form of an assassin’s gun. A double life, he thought. So that was Aleksis’s secret world, his hidden depths. The idea that Aleksis had worked against the Soviet system gave Pagan a small glow of pleasure.
“Then we can assume the KGB found out about Romanenko and killed him.” But as soon as he’d said this Pagan thought how trite it was. How pat. Simplicity had a certain elegance, but in his experience simple things often turned out to be deceptive, layers yielding to other layers, each revealing a fresh complexity.
There was Jacob Kiviranna, for example, an American who had travelled three thousand miles to shoot Romanenko, and there was the mysterious associate who’d arranged for the gun to be made available in London. Could Kiviranna and his accomplice be a part of some devious Soviet solution to the problem of what to do with the two-faced Romanenko? A hired gunman fetched from overseas to kill Romanenko in Edinburgh, which at least had the merit of complying with the old axiom that you never shit on your own doorstep?
Pagan dismissed this and not simply on the grounds of its simplicity. The idea of Jake Kiviranna being recruited by the KGB didn’t ring any bells for him. Jake hadn’t impressed him as the type on whom any clandestine organisation would take a chance. It was possible that Jake might have been used unwittingly by the KGB, but that raised another question Pagan found puzzling.
He looked at the woman and said, “The problem I have when I blame the KGB for Romanenko’s death is this – why was he allowed to leave the Soviet Union in the first place? If the KGB intended to kill him, it would have been less messy to do it quietly at home. A lonely road, a car accident, something out of the public eye. Why go to all the trouble of shooting him in a railway station in Edinburgh? But then if it wasn’t the KGB who organised his murder, who did?”
Kristina didn’t answer. She stared at the window and saw dawn, the colour of a cloudy pearl, in the London sky. Pagan watched the same quiet light, enjoying the silence in the room for a while before turning back to her.
He said, “Maybe Romanenko had changed his views over the years. Maybe he’d become tired of the deception involved and settled down as a loyal servant of the Party. In which case, he might have been killed by some people he’d let down badly.” It was a frail little kite, but Pagan, mired in possibilities and speculation, flew it anyhow.
Kristina Vaska said, “I doubt Romanenko would have changed his loyalty. You have to keep in mind the fact that Aleksis belonged to the Brotherhood. And the bonds of the Brotherhood just don’t go away. These are men who simply won’t forgive the Soviets for murdering their nation. They kept in touch with each other over the years, Frank.”
The Brotherhood, Pagan thought. If it existed now, what else could it possibly be but a band of ageing men thriving on dreams? How could it be anything other than a harmless kind of social club, games of bridge or gin-rummy interspersed with patriotic songs and some bilious grumbling and toasts of loyalty made with wizened hands?
“Okay. Even if this outfit is alive and kicking, what makes you so damned sure Romanenko still had anything to do with it?”
Kristina Vaska said, “Because of the poem.”
“Ah, our old mate Kalev.”
“Exactly.”
“Enlighten me, Kristina. Make it as clear as you can.”
She smiled. “It’s very simple. The poem had very special meaning for my father’s cell of the Brotherhood. Aside from its obvious patriotic content, the poem was used when they wanted to send a message secretly. Anybody reading it would understand its meaning immediately. Anybody who received these lines always knew what they stood for. They’re a green light, Frank. They mean go. They mean everything is in place and it’s okay to go ahead.”
“Go ahead with what?”
“With whatever the plan happens to be.”
“What plan?”
“I don’t know in this case. The only assumption I can make is that it’s something directed against the Soviets. Given the background of the Brotherhood, knowing how they feel about the Russiasn, what else could it possibly be?”
Something directed against the Soviets. Pagan stared into his empty glass. Bafflement was a tiring business. Even as she explained some things, Kristina Vaska made others even more obscure. Was it part of this mysterious plan for Aleksis to pass the envelope to a contact in Edinburgh, as Pagan had thought before? Was the connection to be made at the Castle? Was that why Aleksis had expressed such an interest in visiting the place – because somebody had been waiting for him up there in the dark fortress? And would this man, this spectre, read the lines, inspiring lines resonant with nostalgic echoes of an old guerilla war, and know precisely what he was supposed to do?
Pagan had the feeling he was being moved further and further away from the core of things. Like some object on a fretful tide, he was being sucked back from the safety of the shoreline. Deep waters, he thought. And growing darker as he trod them.
He asked, “If the poem’s a message, and Aleksis was the messenger, who was the intended recipient?”
Kristina Vaska had no answer to this question. Pagan rubbed his eyes. What he needed was the light of a fresh morning, a new day, a brain that didn’t feel like a leaden mass locked in his skull. He looked towards the half-open bedroom door and wondered if he could find sleep.
He shrugged. “Maybe we can talk again at breakfast.” Breakfast. He wasn’t sure if he had anything more to offer than some stale Rice Krispies floating in milk of a dubious vintage.
“Is that an invitation to stay?” Kristina Vaska asked.
“If you don’t mind the sofa.”
“The sofa’s fine, Frank,” and she seemed to linger over his name, as if she were inviting Pagan to read something into her tone of voice.
“I’ll get you some blankets.” He stepped into the bedroom, foraged inside a closet, then carried a couple of blankets back to the living-room, where the woman had already taken off her shoes and was lightly massaging her toes. He set the blankets down, watching how she smoothed her flesh with long, supple fingers.
She raised her face to him and smiled. “I appreciate your hospitality. Really.”
Pagan went back into his bedroom and closed the door. He could hear her move around. He wondered if she slept naked, a disturbing speculation.
He stared at the ceiling. Sometimes he could sleep on a problem and then, as if he were visited in the dark by his muse, he’d wake with some kind of answer. He didn’t feel optimistic this time,
though. He suspected that his muse, normally fond of cryptic problems, had vacated the premises with the haste of an unhappy tenant.
He reached out, killed the light. But he couldn’t put the idea of the woman out of his mind. The more he contemplated her, the more irksome questions and doubts arose. It would have been comforting to accept Kristina Vaska at face value, to be certain that she was no more than she claimed to be – the angry daughter of a man imprisoned and destroyed by a brutal system, somebody who had simply entered Pagan’s life because she wanted to help.
But Pagan took very little at face value, no matter that the face in question happened to be bewitching, and lovely, the kind that might plunder and pirate your heart and simply sail away with it.
He kicked off his shoes, and shut his brain down – although it continued to murmur still, like some busy river he could hear in the distance.
It was twenty-five minutes past noon when V. G. Epishev stepped inside the Roman Catholic church in the Fulham district of London. The humid air in the church had the texture of flannel. He sat down at the rear and looked absently at the altar. A dolorous clay Virgin peered off into the middle distance. Behind her, concealed in shadow, a large crucifix hung on the back wall. Rows of candles in glass jars created small flickering islands of light. Here and there, supplicants kneeled in front of the jars and crossed themselves, or else genuflected as they passed the altar.
The whole effect, Epishev decided, was tawdry and sentimental. The mystery of Christianity distilled in cheap candles and icons – was this all there was to it? Did people actually find hope and sustenance here? He wondered if the appeal lay in the fundamental simplicity of it all, the easy cycle of sin and redemption.
He sat back in the pew. His forehead was sticky. Even the slight draught that cavorted through the candles was thick and warm. He wasn’t altogether uneasy in this place, rather more puzzled. Years of interrogating believers, years of exploring their hearts, hadn’t brought him any closer to an understanding of their faith. He knew that faith, which transcended the limits of reason, was a great leap they all claimed to have made. And, like the curator of a museum in possession of an interesting artifact he cannot identify, Epishev was mystified, and fascinated, by the nature of this commitment.
Mazurka Page 12
