Mazurka

by Campbell Armstrong

  “Viktor, I want you to meet a very good friend of ours.”

  The newcomer smiled warmly. “Gunther,” the man said. “Ted Gunther.”

  There was a long silence during which Epishev studied the American’s face. There was a certain kind of face which Epishev didn’t care for. And Gunther had it – a face as obvious as an open sandwich.

  “I think it’s time to clarify things,” Ted Gunther said, and he rubbed his hands in the congenially cautious manner of a diplomat about to do some business in detente. “The last thing we want is misunderstandings, right?”

  Epishev, still staring at the American, said nothing.

  Brighton Beach, Brooklyn

  It was dark and the moon was rising on the ocean when Frank Pagan and Max Klein stepped on to the boardwalk at Brighton Beach. The night, hot and close, filled with smells of sweat and the collected suntan lotion of the day and fried foodstuffs, crowded Pagan like some great damp creature risen up from the water. Both men walked slowly to the end of the boardwalk, drifting through the crowds, the roller-skaters and skateboarders, the cyclists, the old couples moving arm-in-arm, the kids popping beercans and jousting for the attention of girls with hairdos fashioned by stylists from other planetary systems – seething activity, clammy heat, the ocean almost motionless. Pagan, sweating, leaned against the handrail and looked out at the water.

  “Welcome to Brighton Beach,” Klein said, and he waved a hand at the sky, as if the very constellations were a part of Brooklyn.

  Pagan studied the storefronts that lined one side of the boardwalk. Here and there a vendor sold soda and hot-dogs, but what really intrigued Pagan were those places that seemed to serve as social clubs, establishments without signs. You could see through open doorways into cavernous rooms where men, mainly old, played cards or studied chessboards. Slavic music drifted out into the darkness, oddly nostalgic, even sorrowful. Though he couldn’t understand a word of what was being sung, Pagan found the sound touching anyhow.

  Klein said, “These places used to be stores. Some sold tourist trinkets, others greasy foods. But they gradually got taken over by emigrant societies. Mainly the Russians, although you sometimes find Ukrainians or Moldavians or Latvians – you’ve got to be careful with the distinctions, Frank. Come here some Sundays it’s like Babel, guys talking in Russian or Latvian or Georgian. You name it. Odessa Beach, USA.”

  Pagan started to walk. Klein, nimble in his open sandals, kept up with him. Now and then, like a nautical blessing given in a miserly way, a faint breeze would come up from the ocean and blow aside the humidity for a moment, then the swamplike dark would reassemble itself. Pagan paused in the open door of a clubhouse and saw a middle-aged man in a loose-fitting suit dance with a large woman who wore pink-framed glasses and had her yellow hair up in a beehive. The music was big-band stuff that might have been recorded in the early 1950s.

  Klein said, “The people that come to America from the Soviet Union tend to keep to themselves. It’s almost a force of habit with them, Frank. They come from countries where everybody was a snoop. Even your next-door neighbour was a potential informer for the KGB. What I’m saying is you can’t just walk around here asking questions. If some Baits have organised themselves into a fraternity with a sinister purpose, which is what you tell me, they’re not going to be shouting it from the rooftops.”

  Pagan moved out of the doorway. “Rose Alexander mentioned an old shop.”

  “Take your pick,” Klein remarked. He gestured with a hand, indicating three or four stores that hadn’t been occupied in a long time. Some had windows protected by metal grilles, others padlocked doors, one had a faded To Rent sign with a realtor’s name bleached by the sunlight. Pagan had a sense of decline here, of an age that had passed, a world receding. There must have been dignity here once, but it had been reduced to the kind of seediness he associated with decrepit English seaside resorts.

  He walked a little way, trying to imagine Kiviranna coming along these same slats of wood. It would be dark, and Kiviranna’s contact would be waiting for him in the shadows, perhaps inside one of the vacant shops, and Jake would move along the boardwalk in a stealthy manner, taking care that nobody saw him. Pagan conjured up these tiny pictures, almost as if he were forcing himself to see the ghost of Kiviranna appear before him now, leaving a spectral trail for him to follow. He tried to eavesdrop an old conversation. The man’s name is Romanenko. You have to kill him. This is the key to the place where you’ll find the gun.

  Would Jake have asked why Romanenko had to be killed? Would he have bothered with a mere detail like that? Suppose he had? What would his contact have answered? He’s carrying something that can’t reach its destination, Jake. That’s all you need to know. And Jake might have nodded his head, absorbed the information. But it probably hadn’t happened that way at all. Jake’s connection would only have to say that the world would be a better place if a treacherous Commie like Romanenko was taken out of it and that would be enough for Kiviranna. Pagan walked to the handrail, leaned there, gazed out over the dark water for a time, seeing the moon that sent a column of shivering silver across the sluggish tide. Then he turned back to the empty stores whose dark windows suggested rich mysteries.

  “I suppose it wouldn’t be difficult to track the owners of these places down,” he said to Klein.

  Klein guessed it would be a matter of public record. It would take maybe a phonecall or two, a little legwork. Pagan wanted to know how quickly this could be accomplished and Klein, wondering at the Englishman’s dedication, his apparent immunity to jet-lag, figured it might be done first thing in the morning when people with regular jobs were at their desks. There was a hint of sarcasm in Klein’s speech, nothing objectionable, enough to make Pagan smile to himself.

  He continued to stare at the windows. Some had faded signs inscribed on glass, old lettering barely legible in the thin light from the lamps that burned along the boardwalk. Roo beers. H t dogs. C t on candy – like half-finished answers in an elaborate crossword puzzle, or words in an alphabet designed to be read only by initiates. Frank Pagan, feeling fatigue creep through him at last, glanced once more at the moon, thought about Kristina Vaska – in whose half of the world this moon would already be fading – then he asked Klein to drive him to his hotel.

  They walked back to the place where Klein had parked the Dodge. Once again, either on account of fatigue or darkness, neither man noticed the car that travelled behind them all the way back to Manhattan. It was not this time the pea-green Buick, which had been replaced by a navy blue 1983 Ford Escort, a car unremarkable in every way, and just as anonymous as its predecessor. The pea-green Buick had gone in another direction, back to the apartment building in which Rose Alexander lived.

  London

  The moon that had taken Frank Pagan’s attention had disappeared completely from the sky when Kristina Vaska woke in her hotel in Kensington. She rose at once, went inside the small bathroom, splashed cold water across her face, brushed her teeth. She dressed, packed her suitcase, then she sat for a time on the edge of the narrow bed. She had three hours until her plane left Heathrow. She checked her ticket to be absolutely sure, then put it back in her wallet. She remained motionless on the bed. A morning newspaper had been shoved under the door of her room, one of the hotel’s little courtesies, but she couldn’t bring herself to pick it up. From where she sat she could read the headline, or at least that half of it which hadn’t been folded.

  TWO POLICEMEN SHOT IN

  That was all she could make out. She turned her face away.

  Those men were dead because Frank Pagan had asked them to protect her. It was a world of blood in which men kept dying.

  She found it an unbearable thought to get around, an obstacle in the dead centre of her brain. She got up, covered her face with her hands in such a way that an observer might have imagined her to be weeping – but she wasn’t, even if she felt like it. She picked up the phone on the bedside table, dialled the hotel operat
or, asked to be connected with Mrs Evi Vaska at a number in upstate New York. While she waited Kristina imagined the antique phone in her mother’s tiny downstairs living-room, the room she called the parlour, she pictured Evi Vaska in her white makeup moving through the small boxlike rooms and down the crooked stairs of the old house, past the shelves of fragile china figures, all the glass reindeer, the crystal ducks, the porcelain gnomes and elves that crowded the little house and that always seemed to be growing in number, as if they bred in the dark. Kristina imagined she heard the lacy gown Evi always wore whispering on the steps as she moved. From her house in the foothills of the Adirondacks, Evi Vaska wrote impassioned letters to Congressmen and Senators and British Members of Parliament concerning Norbert Vaska’s incarceration, conducting a relentless campaign she thought would win her husband’s freedom.

  Relentless, Kristina thought. And doomed.

  “Hello?” Evi Vaska’s voice was distant.

  For a second Kristina was tempted to hang up without saying anything. She hesitated. “Mother.”

  “Kristina!” Evi Vaska’s voice became breathlessly excited. “Are you still in England?”

  “Yes,” Kristina said. She pictured the house, the hundreds of miniature figures that rendered the place even more claustrophobic than it was, with its narrow passageways and cramped staircase and low ceilings. Even the garden, a wild green riot, pressed in upon the house as if to isolate it before finally consuming it. Kristina had the thought that the house and its garden were like her mother’s mind, a place of lifeless figures and disarray.

  “Is there news, Kristina?”

  “We’ll talk when I come home, mother. I’ll drive up to see you and we’ll sit down together and we’ll talk.”

  Kristina pictured her mother’s flour-coloured face, the black eye makeup, the deep red lipstick, the dyed yellow hair that lay upon her shoulders like the broken strings of a harpsichord. “In other words there’s nothing, is that what you’re saying, Kristina?”

  “That’s not what I’m saying, mother. Look, I’m flying back today. At the weekend I’ll drive up to you. I’ll come up to the Adirondacks.” She tried to keep impatience and exasperation out of her voice, but she wished she hadn’t called in the first place. She sighed. She didn’t have the heart for this talk. She didn’t have the heart for any of it.

  “You didn’t see Aleksis? Is that what you’re trying to tell me, Kristina? So there’s no news of your father? Is this what you’re keeping from me?”

  Kristina Vaska put the receiver down. She walked to the window, pressed her forehead upon the glass, looked down at the street below. She felt as if she were a victim suddenly, a casualty of history, wounded by forces from the past – forces that had killed some people and driven others, like Evi Vaska who sat in a world of her own creation, totally out of her mind. And her eyes watered, but she didn’t weep, no matter how tight the constriction at the back of her throat or the ache around her heart. She was beyond tears. She needed dignity, which came through retribution rather than grief.

  14

  Virginia Beach

  There were days when Galbraith needed to get out of the house in Fredericksburg, when he suffered from a rarified form of cabin-fever and had to step away from the consoles and the never-ending flow of data. A man might choke to death on so many tiny bones of information. Sometimes he sat in the back of his chauffeured car and was driven to Cape Hatteras or Williamsburg or Richmond. On this early Tuesday morning he chose to go to Virginia Beach, city of soothsayers and palmists, tea-leaf readers and cosmic masseurs, hitch-hiking gurus and astral travellers, faith healers and tarot interpreters and astrologers and other fools. It was a city Galbraith found refreshingly silly, all the more so since it took its ‘metaphysics’ with grave seriousness. On his last visit here Galbraith had had his chart done by a fey astrologer – just for the hell of it – who told him that the heavenly portents were far from pleasing. Galbraith listened to talk about one’s moon being in Venus, and how an absence of earth signs indicated a certain abstract turn of mind, utter nonsense over which he nodded his head grimly. He declined the opportunity to have his past lives revealed for the further paltry sum of twenty bucks. One incarnation, in Galbraith’s mind, was more than enough. Anything more was arguably masochistic.

  He surveyed the ocean from the back of the Daimler, or at least those stretches of it one might spot between high-rise hotels. It was a sunny morning and the sea was calm, and the yachts that floated out towards the Chesapeake Bay did so with slack sails. Galbraith observed the streets, the summer festivities, people strolling through sunshine, men and women in bermuda shorts, kids in funny hats, the kerbs clogged with Winnebagos from faraway states. The great American vacation, he thought. He wouldn’t have minded a vacation himself. He hadn’t taken one in fourteen years, unless one considered a trip four years ago to Monaco but that had really been business. And this quick jaunt to Virginia Beach, which had the superficial appearance of a leisurely drive, was still connected to work. Nothing Galbraith did was ever done without purpose. Aimless was not in his vocabulary.

  The chauffeur, a black man called Lombardy, turned the big car away from the strip and through streets that quickly became dense with trees. Graceful willows hung over narrow inlets of water. There were expensive homes here, many of them refurbished Victorian affairs filled with brass and stained-glass and heavy with a ponderous sense of the past lovingly restored. Galbraith watched the Daimler plunge down a lane and listened to branches scratch the windows. Lombardy parked the car outside a house which was so well-camouflaged by trees that it couldn’t be seen from the road. The black man opened the door and Galbraith slid out of the back seat, puffing as he waddled towards the front of the house.

  Galbraith pushed a screen-door, entered a yellow entrance room which led along a yellow hallway to rooms the colour of daffodils. He felt like a man plummeted without warning into a strange monochromatic world, a place of yellow sofas and chairs, yellow lampshades, yellow rugs, a house in which even the mirrors had a faint yellow tint. The effect, he decided, was to make one feel rather jaundiced.

  “I liked it better when it was red,” Galbraith said.

  The small man who appeared at the foot of the stairs wore a saffron kimono. “Red is rage,” he said. His black hair, heavily greased, had been flattened on either side of the centre parting.

  “And yellow’s mellow, I dare say,” Galbraith remarked.

  “Yellow is springtime and rebirth, Galbraith. Yellow is the colour of pure thought.”

  “Also yellowjack fever and cowardice.”

  The man inclined his head. He had some slight oriental lineage that showed in the high cheekbones and the facial colouring. He had exceptionally long fingers.

  “Colour and harmony, Galbraith. In your hurried world, you don’t take the time to plan your environment. You eat fast and hump fast and read fast and think fast. What an ungodly way to live. The gospel according to Ronald MacDonald.”

  “When I want to hear about taking time to sniff the goddam flowers, Charlie, I’ll read Thoreau. Meantime, I’ve got other things on my mind.” Galbraith wandered to the window and released a blind, which sprung up quickly, altering the monotonous light in the room. “Do you mind?”

  “What if I did, Galbraith?”

  “I’d ignore you anyhow.” Galbraith wandered to a sofa and lay down on his face, closing his eyes. “It hurts here and here,” and he pointed to a couple of places at the base of his spine. Charlie tugged Galbraith’s shirt out of his pants and probed the spots. Charlie, who had built an expensive clientele among the richly gullible, and employed a hodge-podge of massage techniques together with some oriental mumbo-jumbo, always managed to fix Galbraith for a couple of months or so.

  “You’re too fat,” Charlie said. “No wonder you hurt.”

  “I didn’t drive down here to be abused, Charlie. Mend me. Spare me bullshit about the Seventh Temple of Pleasure and the Six Points of the Dragon and the J
ade Doorway to Joy and all that other piffle you fool people with, just fix me.”

  Charlie pressed his fingertips into the base of Galbraith’s spine and the fat man moaned. “You’re carrying around an extra person, Galbraith. For that you need two hearts. Do you have two hearts, fat man?”

  Galbraith closed his eyes and felt little waves of relaxation spread upward the length of his spine and then ripple through his buttocks as Charlie went to work with his sorcerer’s fingers. For a while Galbraith was able to forget his usual worries, drifting into a kind of hypnotic state. There were times in his life when he needed a retreat from the vast panorama of detail that was his to oversee, an escape from the insidious pressures of his world, the network of responsibilities that each year seemed to grow more and more elaborate. Power, he realised, was an ornate construction, delicate membranes imposed one upon another, creating strata that sometimes perplexed him, sometimes made him nervous. He’d realised in recent years that he couldn’t carry the weight of his job alone. He had to rely on other people. There was no escape from this fact. The best you could do was make sure you didn’t delegate important matters to total idiots. If Galbraith had one dominant fear it was the idea that a dark deed would be traced back to his own outfit, even to his own office, and that some form of public exposure would follow. Sweet Jesus – there were freshfaced youngsters in Congress who fancied themselves investigative officers of the people, ombudsmen for the commonfolk, and they were like hounds out of hell if they had the smell of any illicit expenditure of the taxpayer’s money, the more so if it were used in a covert manner.

  He came suddenly alert when Charlie said, “Your associate is here, Galbraith. I’ll leave you now.”

  Charlie draped an ochre towel across the exposed lower part of Galbraith’s body before he left the room. Galbraith twisted his face to see Gary Iverson looking uncomfortable in the middle of the floor. Galbraith had almost managed to forget that he’d arranged to meet Iverson here.