Mazurka

by Campbell Armstrong

  Inside the apartment Frank Pagan poured two shots of scotch and gave one to Kristina. She was silent, listening to the rain upon the window. Pagan watched her sip the drink, then he went to her and rubbed one of her cold hands between his own. She trembled. He walked to the window, looked down at the street, saw nothing below but the woman in the plastic raincoat caressing her spotted dog. There was no sign of the stranger who had so suddenly spooked Kristina and made her claw at his coat-sleeve in such a panicked manner that she’d dragged him across the street and inside the house before he’d even had time to register the existence of the man.

  Kristina moved to the sofa and sat down. She was motionless for a long time.

  “His name’s Epishev,” she said in a quiet voice, almost a whisper. “Some people call him Uncle Viktor, and they don’t use the name fondly.”

  Pagan sat down beside her. He wanted to reach for her hand again, but he didn’t. “How can you be sure it’s the same man?”

  “Because it’s fucking hard to forget the face of the KGB officer who arrested my father in Tallinn.”

  Pagan didn’t doubt her fear. He could read it in her eyes as plainly as bold print. But there was something else here that troubled him, a convergence of more echoes from the past, actors from an old melodrama that might have been revived purely for his personal bewilderment. Uncle Viktor and Norbert Vaska. The KGB and the Brotherhood of the Forest. It was as if a faded photograph had been retouched, making it appear fresh and new. And it had been thrust rudely into his face, forcing him to look directly into it. He had the thought that his life, which had been simpler only recently, was taking strange, complicated detours. The problem with these departures was the feeling that he had no control over any of them.

  He stared for a while at the prints on the walls. “Why would the KGB send somebody here?” he asked. “Why send somebody to spy on me?”

  “Spy? I don’t think Viktor Epishev would have anything as innocent as spying in mind, Frank. That’s not what he does. Let me put it to you this way. If he’s been sent over here because of you, he’s got a more sinister purpose than simply watching you.”

  “He wants me out of the way,” Pagan said rather flatly, more a statement of fact than a question.

  “I’d hazard that guess, Frank.”

  “Hazard another one and tell me why.”

  “I don’t exactly know. Let’s look at what we’ve got. Romanenko carries a message he doesn’t get the chance to deliver. We assume the message was intended for another member or members of the Brotherhood. Let’s say the gist of it is to go ahead with a plan, which we believe is a plan against the Soviets. The message, however, falls into your hands.”

  “And Epishev wants it.”

  “Presumably.”

  “And he wants to silence me into the bargain.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s not adding up for me,” Pagan said. “If the KGB thinks I have knowledge of some anti-Russian business, the logical thing would be for them to ask me directly. Frank, old comrade, what do you know about this Brotherhood stuff? That would be the rational approach. The notion of somebody being sent here to kill me – apart from scaring me quite shitless – seems a little extreme.”

  They were silent for a while. Then Kristina said, “Here’s another possible consideration. Maybe the KGB already know what the Brotherhood’s up to – only they’d prefer it if you didn’t.”

  “Which would imply the KGB is in bed with the Brotherhood, wouldn’t it?”

  Kristina Vaska nodded. “And that’s an impossibility. The likelihood of the Brotherhood fornicating with the KGB is about as remote as finding a civil rights lawyer in Moscow.”

  “Here’s a question for you. How would somebody go about finding out exactly what it is the Brotherhood’s up to?”

  Kristina Vaska shook her head, moved to the window, looked out into the rain. With a fingertip she drew a thin spiral on the glass. Pagan went towards her. He gazed over her shoulder and across the square.

  “I wish I knew more,” she said.

  “When you researched the Brotherhood, what did you find out about them?”

  “I researched their past, Frank, and that was tough enough. Their present’s even more difficult. They don’t advertise for new members. They don’t put ads in newspapers giving the times and locations of their meetings. They’re not in the business of promoting themselves.”

  “If I wanted to find one of the members, where would I start looking?”

  “Jesus, I wish I had a specific answer to that one. The truth is, they ended up all over the place. Australia. New Zealand. Scandinavia. There’s probably even a couple of old members right here in London. But mainly they made it to the United States. Chicago. Los Angeles. Mostly they came to New York City, Brooklyn in particular. But since many of them arrived as young men, they presumably married, raised families, and – like all good upwardly mobile Americans – prospered and moved out into the suburbs. Like I said, they don’t advertise their whereabouts.”

  “If you researched them, surely you must know some of their names?”

  There was frustration in Kristina Vaska’s voice. She looked at Pagan as if he’d asked the one question that had bewildered her for years. “They weren’t stupid men, Frank. They didn’t fight under their own names. They used pseudonyms. Noms de guerre to protect their families if they were captured. They left nothing but dead-ends behind them when they dispersed. I spent a long time trying to track old members down when I was doing my research. Elusive’s an understatement when it comes to their identities. I’d keep running into references to men who operated under names like Rebane, the Fox. One man called himself Kotkas, the Eagle. Another was Hunt, the Wolf. I could never pin anything down about the true identities of these characters. Apart from Romanenko, I never learned any real names. And I tried goddam hard, believe me. It’s like I said, Frank. Records – even when they exist – are difficult to obtain and after a while you get so frustrated you can’t do anything else but give up. If the men of the Brotherhood took such pains to conceal their identities, what right did I have to come along and try to force open old doors anyway? So I stopped looking. I quit.”

  Pagan was silent. He stared into the trees. He remembered the way he’d yearned for her down there in the square, that brief flare of longing, as if he might find in her an escape hatch from the lonely condition of his life. He looked at the delicate shadow in the nape of her neck. Now now, he thought. Maybe never. He wondered what it would be like to make love to this woman.

  There was a long silence broken only by the metronome of the rain. She turned from the window and said, “Epishev scares me. He scared me when I was a kid, and he scares me now. I have this memory of the way he patted me on the head and told me everything was going to be all right. I can see him and his goons take my father out of the apartment. I can still see the way the bastard smiled.”

  “Do you think he recognised you?”

  “I hope not.”

  Pagan thought of the pistol, the Bernardelli he kept in a shoebox under his bed. He said, “We’re safe here.”

  “For how long, Frank?”

  Pagan didn’t answer the question. He was thinking of somebody out there in the rain, somebody who’d been sent from the Soviet Union, a man whose purpose only added to a general mystification that Frank Pagan didn’t like. He reached inside the pocket of his jacket and removed the poem, the original version, and he stared at the blue writing on the cracked sheet of paper. Dry old words, dry paper, foreign to him in more ways than mere language.

  Saaremaa Island, the Baltic Sea

  Colonel Yevgenni Uvarov practised the signature, which he’d seen hundreds of times. He wrote slowly, in the manner of an unpractised counterfeiter. Every time he covered a sheet, he studied it then wadded the paper up as tightly as he could. When he had it compressed into a tiny ball, he took it to the bathroom and flushed it. Once, a little tipsy on the Georgian wine he sometimes acquired, he
imagined a secret laboratory where all flushed paper was fished from the sewers and dried out and examined by the KGB, a special department of effluence commissars who were puzzled by the fact that somebody kept signing the name S.F. Tikunov over and over, and then tossed the papers down the toilet.

  His hand became cramped. He capped his pen, rolled the sheet of paper until it was no larger than a walnut, then turned his face away from the lamp beside his bunk. He stood up, put on his jacket, left his quarters. He passed the leisure room, which was a spartan affair containing an old black and white TV and three ancient easy chairs. Once, Uvarov recalled, a technician called Samov had rigged a makeshift antenna for the TV, and for three nights a station from Finland had been visible, tantalisingly so, bringing another world into this drab place. American programmes, Scandinavian ones, even some pornography – these were watched secretly until Samov’s aerial was reported and its inventor sent elsewhere.

  There was a full moon outside, and the radar antennae were superimposed strangely against it, as if they were odd cracks that had developed on the moon’s surface. Uvarov walked to the shoreline, took the paper out of his pocket, threw it into the tide. He gazed for some time across the silvery water, thinking of his wife and children. He saw a Kirov guided missile cruiser, a floating palace of lights, about a half mile from the shore.

  He walked back in the direction of the control centre that housed the radar screens and the computers. Two of the computers were inoperative, and had been for days, despite the arrival of a maintenance crew from Moscow, argumentative men who’d tinkered without success, squabbling among themselves, blaming one another for the failure. At any given time two of the four computers failed to function because of flaws in their basic designs – they were bad copies of Japanese originals. They were scheduled to be phased out, and replaced, but the programme was already five weeks late.

  Uvarov entered the centre smelling the dead, stale air of the place, absorbing the green screens, the uniformed men who sat before them. Nothing was happening on the waters of the Baltic. He spoke to a couple of the technicians, pleasantries, little else. In recent months he’d tended to remain aloof. He saw no future in forming friendships.

  He walked to his metal desk, sat down. He pretended to work, to study papers, but in reality he was examining a computer manual which had been circulated by the Defence Ministry. It had been printed in a limited edition, and access was restricted to men above the rank of Colonel. The manual detailed the interfacing between the computers at this installation and those located at other Air Defence posts in the Baltic sector of the Soviet Union and in Moscow itself. He read for a while, then closed the manual, placing it for safekeeping in the drawer with his family’s photograph.

  The timing had to be unerring. He rose from his desk, walked along the banks of consoles, hands clasped behind his back. He paused when he reached the wall. Where a window might have been located, there hung a large portrait of Lenin. Uvarov felt an odd sense of constriction, of being caged in an airless space. The surface of his skin was hot, and there was a dull ache behind his eyes.

  Nerves. Nothing more than nerves. He was living so very close to the edge these days that physical reactions were not entirely surprising. He glanced at the face of Lenin, then walked back the way he’d come. The radar screens were lifeless. Everything here was lifeless. Uvarov suddenly longed to hear his children laughing, or the sound of his wife playing her piano.

  He reached his desk, leaned against it, folded his arms over his chest. On the wall some yards away was the Orders Board. He turned toward it, gazing at a variety of instructions, orders, revised orders, revisions to those revisions, procedures. They came in batches every day from Moscow, and they were all signed by the same man – the Commander in Chief of Soviet Air Defences, Deputy Minister S. F. Tikunov.

  Uvarov breathed very deeply, tried to relax. The sheer magnitude of what he was involved in made his heart pound and his pulses go berserk. A week ago he’d asked the physician for something to help him sleep, but the doctor had been unwilling to prescribe drugs and Uvarov didn’t press the matter. Why have insomniac on your record? It would be perceived eventually by somebody in records as a weakness and then it might result in a whole battery of those psychiatric tests everybody had become so fond of lately. And Uvarov had neither the time nor the inclination to be the subject of any kind of inquiry.

  The telephone rang on his desk and he was startled for a second by the intensity of the sound. It pierced him. He reached for the receiver and held it to his ear. From the amount of static on the line he knew the call was long distance.

  A man’s voice said, “Colonel Uvarov?”

  Uvarov said, “Speaking.”

  The voice responded, “Aleksis told me to contact you.”

  10

  Moscow

  After Lieutenant Dimitri Volovich parked and locked his car and removed the windshield-wipers as a precaution against theft, he looked the length of the quiet street, which was located between the Riga Railway Terminal and the Sadovoye Ring. It was a pleasant street and Volovich’s apartment building was new, built from brown brick and flanked by spindles of newly-planted trees. The sixty apartments were allotted to people with blat, the influence necessary to live a life of comfort within the Soviet Union.

  As a middle-ranking officer of the KGB, one with many years of faithful if unenterprising service, Volovich was entitled to a few perquisites. The two-roomed flat, with its 13.2 square metres of living space – a little more than the average decreed by the State – was one of them. His automobile, a black Zhiguli, was another. In Soviet terms, he was a man of some means. He was also a person with no particular ambitions beyond loyalty to the organs of State Security, which from a practical point of view meant loyalty to his immediate superior, Viktor Epishev. But it was this allegiance that troubled him as he moved towards the entrance to the building. And it troubled him less in terms of any conspiracy against the State, but more at the level of his own survival. His life, he had to admit, wasn’t such a bad one. And he wanted to keep it.

  As he was about to step inside the building, he was aware of a long dark car approaching the kerb. It was a Zil with tinted windows and imported whitewall tyres. Volovich stared at the whitewalls. He knew whose car this was. The rear door opened and he moved towards it even as he fought panic down, like something hard in his throat.

  “Come in,” a voice said from the back of the car.

  Volovich stumbled into the dark interior. He couldn’t make out any details in the dimness of the big car save for the shadowy outline of somebody who sat tucked in the corner. He knew who it was in any case, and he was overwhelmed.

  “Close the door, Dimitri.”

  Volovich did so. The car, whose driver was invisible beyond a panel of smoked glass, drove away immediately.

  “In all Moscow, what is your favourite drive, Dimitri?”

  Volovich licked his lips. He couldn’t think. He stared at the shadowy figure and said, “I’ve always enjoyed the ride to Arkhangelskoye Park, sir.”

  I’m not guilty of anything, he thought. Keep telling yourself that. He breathed deeply and quietly, conscious of the way General Olsky was observing him. The General reached forward to flip a switch set into a panel in the door.

  “Driver,” he said. “Take us to Arkhangelskoye Park. Go by way of Petrovo-Dalniye.”

  Volovich gazed out through the tinted windows. He saw the Sovietskaya Hotel and the Dynamo Stadium, almost as if he were viewing them through eyes that weren’t his own. He was trying hard not to display any kind of uneasiness or fear, but it was difficult. He was conscious of the Aeroflot Hotel, then the Metro station at Alabyan Street, but these impressions belonged in another world. Volovich’s world, which had dwindled abruptly, was confined to this car and the man who sat on the seat next to him.

  General Olsky said, “It’s an ugly building. I always think so.”

  Volovich stared at the Gidroproekt skyscraper, which was
lit even though nightfall wasn’t complete. He had no opinion one way or the other, but he agreed with Olsky in any case. The Zil was travelling along an underpass, beyond which was the road to Arkhangelskoye.

  “It’s good to have an opportunity to talk to you, Dimitri,” he said. “Sometimes a man in my position loses touch with the rank and file, you understand.”

  Volovich craved a drink. Water, vodka, anything. The surface of his tongue was like the skin of a peach.

  “How long have you worked with Colonel Epishev?” the General asked.

  Volovich was filled with sudden dread. Olsky wouldn’t have mentioned Viktor’s name unless he was leading towards something disastrous.

  “Twenty years, more or less.”

  “You’re very close to him, I assume.”

  Volovich sat very still. He wondered how he looked to Olsky, whether his panic was visible somehow, whether he’d given himself away – a line of sweat on his upper lip, a nervous tic somewhere. He wasn’t sure. “We work together,” he managed to say.

  “I have a question,” the General said.

  There was a long pause. Volovich looked through the window. He understood the car was in the vicinity of the Khimki Reservoir, but suddenly he’d lost his bearings.

  “Where is Epishev?” the General asked.

  It was the question Volovich had expected and feared. He said, “Unfortunately, General, he doesn’t always keep me informed of his whereabouts.”

  “Nobody seems to know where he’s gone. It’s very odd. I know my predecessor gave Epishev certain freedoms, and I understand they were close … a little like teacher and pupil. But the fact remains, I have no way of accounting for Epishev’s absence. He’s not in his office, he’s not at his home, he left no information with his secretary.”

  Volovich remembered stories he’d heard about the General’s wife, rumours of her sexual prowess when she’d been a ballerina. He’d seen the woman once, waiting for her husband inside a parked limousine. A woman of stunning beauty. “I wish I could help, General,” he said.