“I draw faces,” Max Klein said and blinked his gingery eyelashes. “I put together drawings from witness descriptions.”
Frank Pagan was quiet a moment.
Klein said, “Yeah, I know. I know what you’re thinking. You’re saying to yourself you’ve been fobbed off with a guy whose basic skills aren’t especially useful.”
“Well.” Pagan shrugged.
Max Klein fidgeted with his bow-tie. “If it puts your mind at rest, I do know my way around Brooklyn. I was raised there, went to school there. It’s my territory. So don’t write me off just because I’m not some hot-shot investigator who’s seven feet three inches in his bare feet.”
Pagan smiled. “How much did they tell you?”
“They said a Communist official was killed in Scotland by a guy from Brooklyn. That you were here to check on the assassin’s background, which they said was kind of shadowy.”
Shadowy, Pagan thought. Max Klein said, “I’ve got a Department car outside, if you’re ready.”
Pagan pulled on his jacket, slipped into his shoes. “I’m ready,” he said.
Carl Sundbach clutched his grocery sack to his chest and crossed Third Avenue in the direction of Twenty-Ninth Street, where his apartment was located. He skipped nimbly through traffic, thinking he might evade the man following him. He wasn’t supposed to know he was being tracked, but the guy wasn’t exactly hot-shot at his trade and besides Carl had a nose for such things. His years in the hills and forests of Estonia had honed certain skills he’d never altogether lost, and one of these was an instinct, rather like a small alarm, that told him when he was being watched. He’d turned once, glimpsed the fellow, a medium-sized anonymity in a dark blue suit, then he’d reached the sidewalk and hurried towards Twenty-Ninth Street.
When he unlocked the front door of his building he shut it quickly behind him, peering through glass at the street. But the man was nowhere to be seen. Sundbach climbed the stairs to his apartment, four rooms on the second floor. Out of breath, he let himself in, bolted the door behind him, slumped into a chair in the kitchen and let his groceries – veal, pig’s knuckles, celery stalks, onions, all the ingredients for the dish called sult, jellied meat – roll from the paper bag in his lap to the floor. He tilted his head back, breathed through his open mouth, shut his eyes.
He’d first seen the man only that morning when he’d gone for his newspaper. Then, minutes ago, he’d been conscious of the same face in the aisles of the supermarket. Kurat! The man looked so out of place among the shoppers that Sundbach spotted him at once. He looked like a lurjas, a sneak. He’d pretended an interest in the produce section, fingering leeks and pressing zucchini, but it was an unconvincing performance. Sundbach opened his eyes. Who was having him followed? That was the big question.
He rose, a little shakily, and walked into the large living-room of the apartment. It was furnished in what one might have called emigré chic, stuffed with chairs and sofas Sundbach had bought from Baltic dealers in New York, old sepia prints of Estonia that depicted the University at Tartu, the steeple of the Oleviste Church, and an aquatint of Tallinn done in 1816 by an artist called A. Schuch. There were also shelves of china, some of it family heirlooms Sundbach had managed to salvage from the old country. There were tea kettles and brass plaques and a collection of Estonian books and underground literature smuggled out of the Baltic over the years. On one wall there hung a gallery of American photographs, each of which showed Carl Sundbach in the company of influential Americans – Sundbach shaking hands with Robert Kennedy during that doomed Presidential campaign to which Sundbach had contributed a small fortune (Carl recalled Kennedy saying he’d make room on his agenda for the whole Baltic issue, only a madman’s bullet had put an end to that little dream), Sundbach with then Governor Rockefeller during the groundbreaking for a new Sundbach hotel in Albany, Sundbach with an unhappy-looking Ramsey Clark during the Democratic primary in 1973. There were photographs of Carl in the company of entertainers like Wayne Newton, Liza Minelli, and Robert Goulet, taken at charity luncheons or dedications of hospital wings to which Carl had donated large sums of money. The whole gallery was an immigrant’s dream of making good in America, of making not only large sums of money but also of moving in the company of the blessed. Carl was proud of what he’d achieved in his new homeland. By sheer hard work, and equal measures of guts and cold determination, he’d shaped his own dream.
He picked up the telephone that sat on his old roll-top desk. The receiver was an ancient black one, and heavy. He dialled the number of Mikhail Kiss in Glen Cove. Kiss came on the line after the fifth ring.
Carl Sundbach said, “You having me followed, Mikhail?”
“Followed?” Kiss sounded incredulous.
“A man in a blue suit. Everywhere I go, he goes.”
Kiss laughed softly. “Why would I send somebody to watch you, Carl?”
Sundbach opened the middle drawer of his desk. Inside lay an old revolver and a photograph album with an ornate leather cover. He flicked the album open, gazed absently at pictures, many of them old black and white shots that belonged in another lifetime. He said, “You want to keep an eye on me. Make sure I give nothing away. Make sure I don’t speak to the wrong people or go to the wrong places.”
Kiss laughed again. “Take my word for it. I haven’t sent anybody to keep an eye on you, Carl. I’m insulted by the suggestion.”
“Then who is he? Who sent him?”
Kiss was quiet for a time. “I can only think of the Russian Mission.”
“No,” Sundbach answered quickly. “A vanya I’d smell at five miles. He doesn’t dress like a man from the Mission, Carl. He’s not Russian, unless the Soviets are starting to wear better suits. So who is he? Who sent him if it wasn’t you?”
“Perhaps you’re imagining it,” Kiss said.
“Kuradi perse!” Sundbach slipped into an Estonian curse with the ease of a man who has never left his native country, and who thinks all his thoughts in his native tongue. “I’m imagining nothing, Mikhail.”
“Listen to me. You just bought a nice place in Key West, go down there for a few weeks, relax.”
“Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll keep it in mind,” Sundbach said. He hung up and sat for a while with his hand on the receiver. Then he rose, walked to the window, looked down at the street. Across the way a group of teenagers sat on a stoop, passing back and forth a bottle of wine in a brown paper bag. But there was no sign of the man in the blue suit. Florida, for God’s sake! He’d bought the Key West condo for tax reasons, he wasn’t going to fly down there and sit in the bright sunlight with people who’d lived their lives and had nothing better to do than grow fat and brown.
He was about to turn from the window when he saw the man in the blue suit pass the stoop where the kids sat drinking. The man said something to the kids, then turned his face up in the general direction of Sundbach’s apartment. Carl dropped the lace curtain and moved back from the glass, catching his breath in his throat. If Kiss hadn’t sent the man in the blue suit, then who the hell had?
Sundbach sat down, opened the desk drawer, took out the old revolver, weighed it in the palm of his hand. It was a good, secure feeling, the connection of flesh with cold metal. He stuck the gun back, shut the drawer, stood up, looked absently around his living-room.
The thought struck him then, it came out of nowhere like lightning on a calm summery night – the man on the street, the man who was watching him, might have some connection with the murder in Edinburgh. But how could that be?
He pressed his fingertips upon his eyelids and sighed and felt just a little scared. He’d have to sit very still and think it all through, step by step, searching for any small thing he might have overlooked.
Brooklyn
Klein’s car was a late-model Dodge, bruised and dented, a sponge on four wheels. Klein drove like a man afraid for his life, his hands tight on the wheel. He had none of the average New Yorker’s contempt for pedestrian life-forms
and traffic signals, because he slowed at crosswalks and observed the lights cautiously.
It was after six by the time he parked in Brooklyn, and there was a clouded sun hanging in the sky over Sheepshead Bay.
“This is the place, Frank,” Klein said. It was a street of old grey tenements. “This used to be an okay neighbourhood, which is hard to believe now. I grew up a couple blocks from here. I used to think this neighbourhood was for very rich people. I always felt dirt poor when I came down this street.”
Pagan realised he was disoriented, that he had absolutely no idea of his location because he hadn’t been able to follow Klein’s route to this place. He stepped out of the car and stood on the sidewalk, watching the small man ease himself from behind the steering-wheel.
“Number 643, apartment seven,” Klein said. “That’s the joint we want.”
Pagan moved toward the entranceway of a tenement. Klein followed nimbly, with a motion that was close to skipping, as if his sandalled feet never quite made contact with the sidewalk.
The hallway smelled of fried food. Two bicycles were elaborately chained to a radiator. Pagan stepped around them, pausing at the foot of the stairs which stretched up through gloom to the next floor. Then he started to climb, and Max Klein followed.
Apartment seven was on the second floor. Pagan waited for Klein to reach the landing, then he knocked on the door. The woman who opened it was about forty, rather appealing, dressed in blue jeans and a peasant blouse. There was a slightly spaced-out expression on her face, as if she’d been interrupted in the lonely act of contemplating her inner landscape. She wore her long brown hair parted in the centre and a metal charm bracelet dangled from her wrist. Pagan had an impression of zodiac signs, Celtic crosses, peace symbols, a whole series of miniatures that shivered as she moved her hand.
Klein flashed his badge and asked, “Rose Alexander?”
The woman nodded, pushing a strand of hair out of her face. “Last time I looked,” she said.
“This man” – and here Klein nodded at Pagan – “this man has some questions to ask you.”
The woman turned her face to Pagan. “Who are you?”
Pagan told her. He showed her his ID, which she stared at for a long time. She touched the laminated surface of the card and Pagan had the distinct impression she was either stoned or else had done so much dope in her time she’d failed to return from one of her trips. She was caressing Pagan’s ID as if it were a lover’s poem. Pagan thought there was something anachronistic about a doper caught in middle-age. Rose Alexander was a prisoner of a time-warp, a fugitive from the late ’sixties, the peasant blouse, the blue jeans that he saw now had been patched with little squares of rainbow-coloured material, the peace-symbols hanging from her wrist.
“Scotland Yard,” she said. “You’ve come a long way.”
“Mind if we come inside?” Klein asked.
“Be my guest.” She held the door open for them.
There were posters on the wall that belonged to the purple age of psychedelia – Jimmi Hendrix in neon three-D, Bob Dylan in an art-nouveau rendering, The Beatles in their Sergeant Pepper finery. Pagan, remembering these times, was plunged back into a world of Nehru jackets, incandescent gurus, scented hand-made candles, and blissed-out songs by Donovan.
On a table in front of an electric fire the inevitable stick of incense smoked in its own little Nepalese brass container, throwing the sickening scent of patchouli into the room. Rose Alexander sat down cross-legged on the floor. She struck a match, lit a cigarette, held the smoke in her lungs a long time in a doper’s manner, her small mouth tense.
“Lemme guess,” she said. “Since I haven’t broken any laws I’m aware of, you must be here to talk about Jake Kiviranna.”
Pagan wondered if events in Waverley Station had made it into the newspapers over here. Even if they had, it was doubtful that Rose, ensconced in her own little universe, kept abreast of world affairs. Rose, it appeared, had been expecting news of Kiviranna to surface at some time or other in her life – the bad penny that keeps turning up, as brightly abrasive as ever, no matter how many times you toss it away.
“He shot a man in Scotland,” Pagan said.
“It figures.”
“You don’t seem surprised.” Remarkable calm, Pagan thought.
Rose Alexander stared at Pagan coolly. He caught a glimpse of her as she might once have been, young and carefree, even beautiful, strutting the crowded streets of the Haight in San Francisco or getting high at Woodstock, her long hair hanging over her shoulders and her jeans flared above bare feet and zodiac signs painted on her cheeks and forehead.
She said, “If I don’t seem surprised it’s because I’m not. Do you know Jake?”
“I met him briefly …” And here Pagan hesitated. He had half of a sentence still to complete and he was reluctant to do it. “I don’t know if you’re aware of the fact he committed suicide.”
Perhaps a vague flicker crossed her face, Pagan wasn’t sure. But she still looked unperturbed. “Don’t get the impression I’m a cold bitch. But nothing you’ve told me so far surprises me at all. I’m not amazed he killed somebody and I’m not exactly blown away by news of his suicide either.”
Pagan glanced at Klein, who was fiddling with one of those lamps with a transparent base filled with expanding liquid. Great pink bubbles rose up hypnotically. Rose Alexander lit another cigarette. Pagan sat down in a beanbag chair, which immediately reassembled itself around him like a loose fist.
Rose Alexander said, “I had to get a court order restraining Jake from coming near me. Not once, but twice. He forced his attentions on me when I didn’t need them and I didn’t ask for them. Jake became a nightmare for me.”
Pagan, who wasn’t interested in Jake’s obsession with this woman, wanted to steer the conversation in the direction of anything Rose might know about Kiviranna’s trip to the United Kingdom and the identity of the man who sent him on that fatal voyage. But Rose had other ideas and she wanted to talk about Kiviranna no matter what Frank Pagan desired.
“When I met him first I felt sorry for him,” she said. “It was in some bar on Brighton Beach Avenue. He had a lost look. And I’ve got a thing for lost creatures. I got drunk and Jake got infatuated. For most people, this would be no big deal. Like a slight cold. You sweat it out, it goes away. Not to Jake Kiviranna. Jake’s thing for me was colossal. Flowers. Cards. Gifts. Poems. I couldn’t turn around without finding Jake in my shadow. It’s nice at the beginning. But it gets old real fast, man. I tried to point this out to Jake, I tried to let him down gently, I was kind – but there are some people you can’t get through to and Jake Kiviranna was one of them. They hear only what they want to hear. Nothing else makes a dent.”
Pagan glanced at Klein, who was going through Rose’s collection of record albums. Familiar old names flicked past. The Grateful Dead. Jefferson Airplane. Big Brother and the Holding Company. Names out of a history that seemed more distant than a mere twenty years.
“Jake wouldn’t go away. I figured if I couldn’t let him down gently, I’d try some reality therapy, so I dated a couple of guys, and I hoped Jake would get the message, but the only message he ever got was the desire to beat me up. Which he did. Two, maybe three times. A couple of broken ribs. Three teeth. A split lip. It might have been worse. He’d beat me, then he’d shower me with flowers. That gets pretty fucking stale. I had to go to court to get a restraining order. The next thing, Jake slashes his wrists. He was a sick sonofabitch. He sent me a poem written in his own blood. Think about that one. Slits his wrists and still finds the time to write verse. Bad verse.”
Pagan was quiet for a time, wondering if Rose Alexander had run her course. She stubbed her cigarette out and looked at the rings adorning her fingers, then she tipped back her head and looked at the ceiling and said, “I never wanted to hurt him, you understand.”
“I believe you,” Pagan said. He struggled up out of the beanbag chair, which made a rasping sound as h
e rose. “When did you last see Jake?”
“Couple of months ago.”
“In what circumstances?”
“He was waiting for me in the street one night. Standard stuff for Jake. He liked to spy on me. He liked to find me with other guys.”
“Did he say anything about how he was going away? Did he mention anything about leaving the country?”
Rose Alexander smiled. “One of the problems with Jake was how you could never tell when he was talking bullshit or when he was being on the level. Sometimes he’d talk in this real wild way, sometimes he’d be calm. But you couldn’t tell from his manner if he was into fantasy or reality. I don’t think I listened, Mr Pagan. I didn’t want him around. Even after I got the restraining order, he’d still call me or try to see me. The bottom line is, Jake scared me.”
Pagan was quiet for a time. He had a mental image of the way he’d seen Kiviranna in the cell in London. The scorchmarks, the elaborate electrocution carried out with a madman’s patience, a death that was both simple and ugly. “What did he talk about the last time you saw him?”
“He was completely out of it,” she answered. “He said he was going to make some kind of statement against international Communism – he had this thing about how the Russians had murdered his parents and grandparents in one of those stupid little countries that don’t exist any more and how he had to do something about it. I wasn’t exactly happy to see him, Mr Pagan. Forgive me if I’m forgetting anything – I wasn’t a captive audience. He was talking crazy. I just wanted to get the hell away from him.”
“Did he say anything else? Did he talk about friends?”
The woman laughed. “Friends? Jake didn’t have any, Mr Pagan. Friendships were off limits to him. How could anybody befriend a guy who was sweet one day, then out of his tree the next? Would you want Charlie Manson for a friend?”
Pagan was frustrated. If this proved to be a dead-end, if Rose Alexander knew nothing about any accomplice, he might as well fold his tent and go home. He said, “Think. Anything at all might be useful.”
Mazurka Page 24
