Mazurka

by Campbell Armstrong

  “Pull up a pew, Gary,” Galbraith said. If he had more men like Iverson – reliable, loyal, patriotic, devious – he might eat less and sleep more. A svelte, well-rested Galbraith – it was quite a thought.

  Iverson dragged a wingbacked chair close to the sofa where the fat man lay. He’d come directly from New York, travelling by helicopter to Norfolk and from Norfolk by car. It seemed to Iverson that he spent most of his life in motion, like a pinball in Galbraith’s private machine, banging between Fredericksburg and DC and New Jersey and Manhattan and Norfolk.

  “Ever had one of Charlie’s specials?” Galbraith asked.

  Iverson shook his head.

  “Remind me to give you one for Christmas.” Galbraith rolled over on his back. “He issues gift certificates good for one bath and a rub-down. Highly recommended, Gary. Besides, this is probably the most discreet place I know. Charlie appreciates how much some people treasure privacy.”

  Iverson looked round the room. Yellow wasn’t his colour. He gazed at the square of window where the blind had been released. He was very glad to see greenery brush against the pane. He said, “Early this morning Frank Pagan and his sidekick Max Klein made inquiries concerning certain vacant properties on the boardwalk at Brighton Beach.”

  “Did they now? Whatever for?” Galbraith sat upright. He had the feeling he wasn’t going to like anything he heard from Gary.

  Iverson said, “They went to the boardwalk last night after interviewing Rose Alexander.”

  “Ah, yes, Kiviranna’s unwilling friend. I recall her name from your report. And she sent them scurrying off to Brighton Beach?”

  Iverson nodded. Galbraith closed his eyes a moment. He had times in which he could literally see trouble as one might witness thunderheads gathering on a distant hill. There were connections here that made him very unhappy indeed.

  “Do we know what she told them, Gary?”

  “An inquiry was made, sir.”

  Galbraith frowned. Inquiry was a word that could conceal a multitude of sins. “I trust this inquiry was peaceful?”

  “The woman was cooperative. She had nothing to hide. She told us exactly what she’d told Pagan. Shortly before he left for London, Jake Kiviranna had an appointment with somebody on the boardwalk – in one of the old shops.”

  “Ye gods,” the fat man said. “You don’t suppose there’s coincidence here, do you?” Galbraith asked this question with heavy sarcasm. He thought of coincidence the way an atheist might think of God. Acceptable if you were naive enough to have faith, preposterous if you gave it only a moment’s consideration. He stood up, adjusting his pants, discarding the towel. “You understand where this is leading, don’t you, Gary?”

  Iverson nodded. He had a quick eye for complexity. Galbraith raised a finger in the air and said, “Jake goes to an old shop on the boardwalk. Carl Sundbach just happens to own such an establishment. Carl Sundbach also happens to know that Romanenko is due to arrive in Edinburgh.” Galbraith paused, then paced the room, speaking very slowly. “Sundbach tells Kiviranna … go to Edinburgh … shoot Romanenko …”

  “Why though?”

  “Why indeed? Why participate at considerable expense in the Brotherhood only to make an attempt to scotch the entire goddam operation by using a hired gun? Do you see any sense in that?”

  Both men were silent for a time. Galbraith said, “We know Sundbach wasn’t happy with the plan. Good Christ, he walked out on it. It’s all there on the tape of that last meeting in Glen Cove. But was he so unhappy with it that he decided he’d ruin the goddam thing himself if he could? And then when he realised he couldn’t halt the Kiss express, no matter what, he walked away …”

  “A change of heart,” Iverson said.

  “Fear maybe. An old man’s terror. Old age and terror – there’s a combination made in hell. And utterly unpredictable.” Galbraith looked thoughtful for a while. “What worries me, you see, is this fellow Pagan getting too close to the flame of the candle. I don’t want him singed, Gary, unless it’s essential. And if it’s essential, I don’t want us to be involved. Not even remotely.”

  In an unhappy voice Iverson said, “It may very well be essential, sir.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I’ve heard from London.”

  “And?”

  Iverson gathered his thoughts, parading them in an orderly manner in his mind as if they were foot soldiers with a tendency to be unruly. He noticed a pitcher of iced water, rose, poured himself a glass, returned to his chair. “It seems that Frank Pagan has been travelling in some interesting company, sir. The daughter of a former member of the Brotherhood, a man who vanished into Siberia some years ago, has become a companion of Pagan’s. The assumption is that this young lady, Krishna Vaska by name, has provided Pagan with some information about the Brotherhood. We’re not sure what. But Pagan may be able to come to certain conclusions. He knows something about the Brotherhood, he’s about six inches away from Sundbach – it’s a situation fraught with danger.”

  Galbraith loved the fraught. He adored the way Iverson spoke in general, with a kind of polite precision. But he worried now over Frank Pagan who was meant to remain on the safer fringes of things and stay well clear of the centre. It really was too bad. He said, “So Viktor Epishev has been running amok over there in an attempt to silence this potential menace.” He pulled at his lower lip and looked for all the world like a petulant choirboy who has just been told that his voice is about to break and his singing career is kaput.

  “Apparently,” Iverson replied. “His initial objective was to make sure that nothing inhibited the scheme, that Romanenko’s message wasn’t deciphered –”

  “Deciphered?”

  “It seems Greshko told Epishev the message might contain a code of some kind, which in the wrong hands –”

  Galbraith interrupted, his jowls quivering with sudden anger and his eyes popping. He was rarely touched by rage but when it happened it was an awesome sight. Iverson was hypnotised by the fat man’s volcanic display of temper.

  “Classic Greshko! No matter what you tell that old fucker, no matter how goddam hard you try to ram something into his head, he runs it through that paranoid brain of his and comes up with something off the goddam wall. He was told there wasn’t a code. I told him that personally. I told him there was nothing hidden in that message, nothing secretive, nothing that needed to be analysed. It’s a simple bloody message, I said, and it couldn’t mean a damn thing to anyone outside the Brotherhood. But oh no, oh no! – that wasn’t good enough for him. Classic goddam Greshko! Trust nobody, especially your friends, especially your American friends! Always look at the world through the prism of suspicion. Always think the next fellow is trying to put one over on you. He probably thought I was trying to slip a nuclear weapon past him, for Christ’s sake! Or drop some fucking bombs on his beloved railroad tracks! Sweet Jesus!” Galbraith shook his head. “The truth of the matter is he didn’t need to send Epishev to London at all. He didn’t need a man running around over there doing that kind of damage. All he had to do, Gary, was to leave everything alone. And that’s the one thing he’s never been able to do in his entire goddam life. He’s never been able to leave anything alone! And that includes White Light!”

  Both men were quiet for a few moments. Galbraith walked to the corner of the room where an old-fashioned upright piano was located. It had been lacquered in high-gloss yellow and was almost painful to behold. He sat down and thumped out the first few bars of St James Infirmary Blues. He broke off and, feeling a little less tense now, looked at the keys pensively. He was thinking of that summer in Monaco in 1984, the leisurely mornings spent reading on the beach, the splendid dinners at Les Lucioles in Roquebrune or La Couletta in Eze-Village, the magnificent room he had at the Hotel de Paris on the Place du Casino, the white sunlight on a blue ocean. He was remembering evenings in the Grand Casino, walking through the verdant gardens or strolling the gambling rooms, casually playing roulette here, blackjack th
ere, chemin-de-fer – rare moments for Galbraith, who hardly ever left anything to pure chance.

  He dropped his hands from the keyboard, thinking of how Vladimir Greshko, travelling as incognito as incognito can get, hadn’t appeared in Monaco until the third day. Their encounters had all taken place indoors at night – in dark little bars, hotel rooms, secluded restaurants. Their talks at first had been guarded. After all, they had little in common on any superficial level. What could Galbraith, with his Ivy League sophistication and wealthy background, share with the Chairman of the KGB, a rough-edged peasant more cunning than intelligent? The only novel Greshko had ever read, for example, was Crime and Punishment. Galbraith on the other hand was a Henry James aficionado. He loved the convoluted sentences and the cultivated world James described what could he possibly feel for a yarn in which the central event was the sordid murder of a moneylender by a broodingly unsympathetic student? All that Russian gloom, dear Christ!

  The only true bond between them was a world view, a global vision which, although different in some respects, nevertheless consisted of many common elements – a well-defined balance of power between the two super-nations, an intermittent detente characterised by periods of warm progress and years of arctic chill, a status quo that, precisely because it achieved nothing real other than to promote national anxieties and keep the arms manufacturers of the world on cheerful terms with their shareholders and bankers, was more acceptable than any of the proposed changes both men knew were coming, and both loathed. And their hatred of change, of disruption, of any erosion in their spheres of influence, glued them together with a fastness unusual between men of such different backgrounds.

  It wasn’t exactly an easy camaraderie. It had its origins in a meeting concerning international terrorism that took place in Geneva in the fall of 1983, when it had seemed to Galbraith that Vladimir Greshko was sending invisible signals across the conference room. An enigmatic note was slipped under a hotel door, a couple of terse phonecalls were made in the ensuing months, and the eventual outcome was the secret meeting in Monte Carlo.

  Greshko had said I am on the way out, Galbraith. Now we will have a world where our much-admired new General Secretary will alter the fabric of things. He wants to create a Russia that neither you nor I will recognise. One we will not understand at all. A dangerous place for me, and for you, Galbraith … because you will not know where America stands when Russia changes. And I will not know. And all the people you have become so used to dealing with over the years will be sent to the glue factories like tired old horses. You replace old horses with hardworking young ones, Galbraith. With colts and stallions who have new feeding habits. Think about it…

  And Galbraith did think about it, and he cared very little for any of his thoughts. Under the sun of Monte Carlo, both men discussed what might be done to preserve a world both had become accustomed to, a world they considered safe and manageable. Endless talk, demanding and exhausting, two days without sleep, periods of high excitement followed by dismay, too much coffee, too much vodka. What they needed was a plan, something they could remain aloof from and yet somehow take part in, what they needed was a scheme they hadn’t themselves designed but one they’d inherited, and could shape to their own ends. Something which, if it happened to go wrong, couldn’t possibly be laid on their respective doorsteps. It was two more years before such a situation presented itself in the form of an old friendship between Gary Iverson and Andres Kiss.

  And still there existed a mutual lack of trust between Galbraith and Greshko, a situation that would diminish with the years but never entirely dissolve because Vladimir Greshko was programmed never to trust a fat capitalist. Galbraith brought his fingers down on the keys, creating a melancholic minor chord that echoed for a while through the room. With just a little more trust, Greshko might never have sent his man Epishev to London. The old fart must have imagined something was being kept from him, that the devious Americans were up to their usual nefarious nonsense, that the message contained coded details which were to be denied him, and that in the end the Americans wanted to throw a little sand in an old man’s eyes. And nobody – nobody! – was allowed to make a fool of General Vladimir Greshko.

  Galbraith ran off a few more chords, then he played the chorus of Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out. He turned to Iverson. “Epishev is still in London?”

  “Yes,” Iverson replied.

  Galbraith looked contemplative. “I’m thinking aloud, you understand. But he might be useful.”

  “Useful, sir?”

  “He wants Pagan, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Pagan’s here, about to make a nuisance of himself…”

  Gary Iverson nodded his head slowly.

  “And Epishev’s in London,” the fat man said quietly. “Not any great distance as the crow flies.”

  Glen Cove, Long Island

  Mikhail Kiss lay on a deckchair in his sunlit garden. He wore dark glasses and a cotton shirt and khaki shorts that revealed the thick silvery hair covering his muscular legs. He glanced at his watch. It was just after eleven a.m. In eleven hours from now, Andres was going to step on board a Scandinavian Airlines flight from Kennedy. Eleven short hours. Kiss felt nervous suddenly.

  He sat upright, looked back at the house, saw the shape of young Andres inside the glass-walled room – he was so damned cool, so cold, you might think the trip that night was no more than a casual tourist affair.

  For his own part, Mikhail Kiss couldn’t silence his nerves. Maybe it had something to do with the dream, the awful dream that had come to him in the darkness and filled him with dread. In this dream he’d been sitting in a restaurant with Carl Sundbach and Aleksis Romanenko, a very strange place with neither menu nor cutlery, a still room where no waiter ever came to serve. The three men had sat in a silence broken only by a thin music coming from a distance, the unrecognisable music that existed only in dreams, neither melodic nor familiar but shatteringly atonal. And then, from nowhere, a shadow had fallen across the table – but Mikhail Kiss hadn’t raised his head to look at the newcomer, at least not immediately.

  He got up from the deckchair and he thought Dreams mean nothing. Dreams are not the harbingers of future happenings. He walked towards the house, stepped inside the glass-walled room, saw Andres skim through the pages of a news magazine. Mikhail Kiss filled a glass with water and drank quickly. Then he sat down, taking off his dark glasses.

  “How are you?” he asked.

  “How should I be?”

  The older man shrugged. “A big night ahead of you, I thought…”

  “It’s just another night.” Andres kept flicking pages.

  Just another night. Mikhail Kiss thought how difficult his nephew had been ever since Carl had walked out on Sunday, how distant and aloof, locked inside his own head. It’s not just another night for me, Andres. I’ve lived a long time with this idea. I’ve breathed it. I’ve slept with it and nursed it. I’ve travelled thousands of miles to make it real. Even when it looked impossible, I still kept going. He wanted to say these things to Andres, but he couldn’t form the words in any way that would give them the hard conviction he felt in his heart.

  Andres Kiss smiled, seeing the odd expression on his uncle’s face and thinking how old men could be like little kids. He patted the back of Mikhail’s hand. “There’s nothing to worry about, Mikhail,” he said. “Everything will go according to plan.” And he thought: Especially now. Now that he had the idea.

  Mikhail Kiss wondered about the certainty in his nephew’s voice. The confidence. Andres had always had that supreme self-assurance that almost seemed at times to be indifference, as if he thought of himself as specially blessed, a magical being, a beautiful young man protected by the gods. Experience hadn’t caused him any suffering. What he knew of pain and sorrow he’d learned second hand. Kiss searched the smooth face, the eyes, the perfect mouth, for some sign of uncertainty, some little touch of concern, a feeling, anything
– fruitless. Andres Kiss gave nothing away. Mikhail Kiss realised that his nephew scared him sometimes.

  Andres closed the magazine and laid it down. The idea had come to him during the conversation with Iverson in Trenton. It had begun like a vapour drifting slowly at the back of his brain, and then it had taken shape and become hard as it floated into the light, and then he’d known with certainty what he had to do with Carl Sundbach. Besides, hadn’t Iverson practically instructed him to do the thing? Hadn’t Gary Iverson done everything but spell the goddam business out? To protect himself, to protect his own position, to cover his ass, Iverson obviously couldn’t come right out and say Do it, Andres. But he’d left Kiss in absolutely no doubt. Sundbach’s a menace, therefore …

  Therefore. It was obvious. The young man stood up and looked at his uncle a moment before he said, “I have to go out for a while.”

  Mikhail Kiss heard something in the young man’s voice, only he wasn’t sure what. A false note, a distortion. “Out? Now?”

  Andres Kiss nodded. “I’ll be back in plenty of time for you to take me to JFK. Don’t worry.”

  Mikhail stood up. “You shouldn’t go anywhere. Not today. You should stay here. You should be relaxing.”

  Andres turned away, and Mikhail went after him, following him out of the sun-room and into the hallway. “I don’t see what’s so important you have to go out.”

  Andres didn’t reply. He walked towards the front door.

  “What is so damned important you have to go anywhere, especially today, for God’s sake?”

  Andres opened the door, turned to look at his uncle. “I’ll be back, Mikhail.”

  Mikhail Kiss watched the door close, then heard Andres’s car in the driveway. For a long time after the sound of the automobile faded, Kiss stood motionless in the hallway. Then he went back to the sun-room, sat down, lit a cigarette, closed his eyes. He felt a strange little nerve, a cord, flutter in his throat.

  And there was the dream again. There was the shadow on white linen, the eerie music. He saw himself raise his head up, saw himself look into the eyes of the fourth man, the one who approached the table, the one who stood over the other three and said nothing. Distanced by the dream, Kiss rose and extended his arm, his hand held out to shake that of the fourth man – who had said nothing and done nothing, except to offer a small, spectral smile.