Mazurka

by Campbell Armstrong

  Max had made inquiries just as soon as Sundbach’s body was discovered, only to learn that the Jag belonged to an auto-leasing company on Long Island that had leased the car to an entity called Rikkad Inc, with corporate offices in Merrick. It was not apparently leased to any particular individual, but rather to the corporation as a whole, and when Klein had tried to telephone the number of Rikkad Inc he’d received a recorded message saying that Rikkad, a division of something called Piper Industries, was closed for the day and thank you for calling. Piper Industries, with offices in New Platz, had no information to give about Rikkad and suggested Klein try the Merrick number again in the morning.

  Pagan turned from the window, suspecting that Klein, if he discovered anything, was going to find himself ensnared in one of those corporate mazes, an auditor’s nightmare, where the structure of ownership is complicated and one corporate entity is laid upon another – the point being to obscure responsibility and evade direct culpability in the event of law-suits or tax claims. Klein had decided to look at records in the offices of the Corporation Commission and Pagan, needing some quiet time alone, had walked back to the Warwick.

  He wondered what he was left with after the death of Carl Sundbach. Certain facts, certain connections, but they suggested empty railway cars connected to a locomotive going nowhere. He’d hoped that Sundbach was going to be the entryway to the Brotherhood – but that particular little light had been blown out and the entryway was a cul-de-sac in darkness now. And if he was no closer to the Brotherhood, then he was also no nearer to an understanding of their scheme, nor why certain Russians apparently stood in the shadows behind it.

  He turned from the window, picked up the envelope on the bedside table, sat on the edge of the mattress. He stood up when he heard the sound of somebody knock lightly. When he opened the door and saw Kristina Vaska there, a small charge of electricity coursed suddenly through him, a voltage almost adolescent in its intensity.

  “Frank Pagan?” she asked, smiling.

  “The very same.”

  She stepped inside, closing the door behind her. She sat on the bed. “I wanted to get here sooner, but I went to my apartment to drop off my luggage.”

  Pagan, filled with the desire to touch her and yet postponing the moment, had ignored the essentials of the woman’s life. She lived in this city, therefore she had to have an apartment. Somehow the information surprised him, as if he’d stumbled into a concealed corner of her world. You go in this direction, he thought, and before long you’re asking all the old, half-scared questions – is there a boyfriend somewhere? is there somebody else? a rival? even more than one?

  “I don’t even know where you live,” he said.

  “Eighty-sixth and Amsterdam.”

  “How was the flight?” he asked, dismayed by his own question. How was the flight? Was it raining in England? Did you have the plastic stroganoff for lunch on the plane? He was staggered by his sudden knack for the inane.

  There was a long silence in the room, an abyss into which all sounds were abruptly sucked, as if this narrow hotel bedroom were an island of sheer soundproofed quiet afloat on the turbulence of Manhattan. Pagan stepped towards the bed.

  Kristina said, “Oh fuck the flight, Frank. I don’t want to talk about airplanes and luggage. That’s just stuff. Sit down beside me. I want to forget stuff.”

  He sat down. He reached for her hand and held it. She twined her fingers through his and he couldn’t recollect any gesture more intimate in years.

  “Look at me, Frank. I’m trembling, for Christ’s sake.”

  How unlike Roxanne she was, he thought. Roxanne, with a certain coyness, had been passionate in less direct ways. She would have gone at her desire indirectly, using touches, gestures, as if she couldn’t quite trust speech to convey her needs. Kristina, less subtle perhaps, was no less exciting. She lay back, curling her legs under her body. There was a lull, a quietness, one of those intolerably enjoyable moments of anticipation. He remembered when he’d walked with her in the park. He remembered the dampness of laurels and laburnum, moisture on old wood, raindrops on a coat. The effusiveness of recollected perfumes. The swift touch of passion he’d felt, the urge to invade this woman’s world.

  She held one hand out in front of her face and laughed. “I’m shaking like a schoolgirl. I feel idiotic.”

  Pagan kissed her and the warmth of the kiss, the confident way she returned it, shook him. He undid the buttons of her shirt and slid his hand over a breast and saw how she raised her face back and upwards, her mouth open and her throat in shadow, and it was one of those sublime perceptions he knew would return years later even after this passion had gone, one of those pictures that are immediately luminescent in the memory and against which other encounters are inevitably judged. He was hungry, emptier than he’d ever imagined, driven by an excitement and urgency that surprised him.

  Naked, she was perfect. He ran his hand between her breasts and down over the surface of her stomach to her thighs, astonished by the sweet geometry of her body and by his own need to enter her. Now, she said. Do it to me now, Frank. And her voice was hushed and hoarse, like that of a tantalising stranger. She was a verbal lover, whispering over and over, sometimes his name, sometimes words that might have been vulgar in other situations but now seemed magical to him, sometimes simply making sounds in his ear that drove him to utter distraction. He buried himself in the act of love. He buried himself in a place beyond all the mysteries, beyond Romanenko, beyond the Brotherhood and their secret poetry and old wars, beyond Epishev and gunfire in a railway station. It was a place where all the clamour and the mysteries dissolved and the only truth was this woman and the intimacy he shared with her.

  They made love slowly, each trying to be more generous than the other, as if they were exploring each other’s limitations only to find none, discovering instead a lovers’ world of infinite possibility which Pagan, grown stale in his years of loneliness, had long ago forgotten. When it was over, he propped himself up on an elbow and looked down at her. He realised, with something of a surprise, that he wanted her again. Immediately too, as if he’d discovered untouched realms of stamina and impatient desire in himself.

  Moscow

  Vladimir Greshko felt death in the back of the car as though it were an invisible passenger. He sometimes studied the darkened landscape, staring across flat fields and through trees and seeing the occasional light of a farmhouse, but mostly he kept his eyes shut and listened to what sounded like death’s persistent song – a distant music, a couple of fragmented notes that might have been blown on a wind instrument, seductive and enchanting. He squeezed the small rubber ball he carried in a pocket of his overcoat. The solace of solid things, he thought.

  The Yakut nurse drove with great caution, easing the car over ruts as gently as she could. Now and again she would make a remark about the folly of this journey, but the General had long ago ceased to listen. Wrapped in a heavy greatcoat which the nurse had demanded he wear, he saw fields give way to construction, to scaffolding and great piles of bricks that littered the landscape. New Soviet housing was going up, those hideous blocks of flats that reminded Greshko of tombstones marking the burial-grounds of a race of giants. There was a thought here he might have pursued at some other time, a symbolism that might have amused him with its irony, something to do with the death of giants – but not now, not tonight.

  And then the new construction yielded to finished apartment blocks, drab and lifeless, and the Yakut nurse announced the outskirts of the capital. Greshko felt the rush of energy that Moscow, in her great generosity, always gave him. This was his city. This was where he’d risen to power. He knew the streets, the neighbourhoods, he knew the criminals and informants and spies, he knew where the black-marketeers met to sell currency or buy weapons or dispose of stolen cars. He knew its pimps and whores, ambassadors and bureaucrats, politicians and gangsters. There was nothing he couldn’t acquire in Moscow, nothing – American dollars, rare works of
art, imported cars, automatic rifles, you name it. If you knew where to look, Moscow had everything a man could possibly need or want. From his office on Dzerzhinsky Square he’d once controlled this amazing city, understanding it the way no other man could – especially not a man like General Olsky, who didn’t have the rhythms of Moscow in his blood.

  But it wasn’t his Moscow to which he was returning now. It had been taken from him, seized by usurpers, and purged of all his old cronies, who had been shipped to country cottages or seaside villas to rot away the last years of their lives and to dream of how they might regain the power they’d lost. He stared at the buildings, which were old friends. The Central Revolutionary Museum on Gorky Street, the Hotel Minsk, the Yermolova Theatre.

  He made the Yakut stop the car a moment. He rolled the window down and sniffed the air, so unlike the countrified stuff he was forced to breathe these days, then he told the woman to drive on. He gave her the address where he wanted to go and settled back in his seat again, restless, animated by his return, which may have begun quietly and was completely unannounced – but which would end differently, if he had his way.

  He shut his eyes, reflected on Epishev a moment. Viktor hadn’t yet made contact with Volovich, whom Greshko had telephoned only a few hours ago, a nervous Volvovich, terse, talking like a man whose teeth have been welded shut. The conversation had been brief, elliptical. Volovich, undeniably loyal to Viktor, was a rabbit nevertheless, and even if he’d never been told the entire extent of the Brotherhood’s undertaking, just the same he knew enough to create problems if he came under pressure.

  Viktor’s failure to make contact troubled Greshko. Either he had no information to impart (a fact he might have relayed by telephone, as a simple courtesy at the least), or else something had happened to him. Whatever, his absence had come under the scrutiny of Olsky. And that was undesirable.

  He opened his eyes, peered through the window. The car was travelling along the Komsomolsky Prospekt towards the Lenin Hills.

  “Take a right turn here,” he said to the nurse.

  She did so, swinging the car into a narrow street that was dense with foliage under bright street lamps. The houses here were large, constructed within the last forty years. They had copper roofs and elegant gardens and although they’d been converted to apartments during the past twenty years, they were considered among some of the finest residences in the city. You didn’t live in a place like this if you were nobody.

  “Here,” Greshko said, and he indicated one of the houses that was almost completely concealed by trees.

  The nurse turned the car into a driveway, parked it.

  Greshko buttoned his greatcoat and stepped out of the vehicle. The Yakut woman came out to assist him, but he brushed her aside. He had to enter this house unassisted, and pain and frailty and the hole in his stomach be damned. There was dignity in him still, and fire in his blood, and he wasn’t going to give anyone the satisfaction of seeing him hobble with the help of a nurse. But he hurt like hell.

  “Get back in the car,” he told the nurse. “And stay there.”

  Alone, he went shakily up the steps to the door of the house. He rang a bell, waited. There wasn’t an answer. He didn’t ring a second time. He opened the unlocked door and found himself in a long, broad hallway with a high ceiling. A staircase led up into darkness.

  Nikolai Bragin appeared at the end of the hallway. He wore a baggy three-piece suit and his hair, wild and unruly, sprung from his high skull in uneven tufts. It was the hairstyle of a man who habitually ran his fingers across his scalp. He wore glasses that pinched the end of his nose and he chain-smoked.

  “My dear Vladimir,” Bragin said. There was a brief embrace. “It’s been – what? – two years?”

  “It feels like a lifetime,” Greshko said.

  “Can’t stay away from Moscow, eh?”

  “I need to get laid,” Greshko said, and winked. “One last time.”

  Bragin laughed. “And you think this is where all the whores are, eh?”

  “Indisputably,” Greshko said.

  Bragin led him into a large drawing-room, which might have been a stage-set for some pre-Revolutionary drama. Both men sat at a sofa by an unlit fire. The fireplace was ornately carved with the figures of eagles alighting on prey. Presumably the piece had been removed from an aristocratic mansion. Greshko thought the place smelled of prosperity, much of it plundered from Russia’s history – icons on the walls, old books stacked on the shelves, an ancient silver samovar seated on a gilt-leafed table.

  “Tea?” Bragin asked.

  “I’m at that stage of my life when only vodka does me any good, Nikolai.”

  “You shall have some.” Bragin rose, took a bottle from a cupboard, and poured two small glasses that Greshko thought were niggardly. Greshko tossed his back immediately, then helped himself to a second, which he also disposed of quickly. It was first-rate stuff and it roared in his blood.

  “Now, Vladimir. What brings you all the way to Moscow? You were enigmatic on the telephone.”

  Greshko poured himself a third vodka and swallowed it in one gulp. Three vodkas and he could hear those American songs in his head! He leaned across the table. Sweet Christ, how he hurt. He held the liquid in his mouth before swallowing it. It did what it was meant to – it numbed his nervous system, making the pain seem distant and just tolerable.

  He said, “I come here a dying man. Therefore, what I am about to tell you should be seen in the light of detachment, the lack of self-interest common to dying men. I have no personal axe to grind, you understand.”

  Bragin looked a little embarrassed. Greshko, who wondered if he appeared drunk to the other man, pushed his empty glass away. Too much vodka too quickly was a prescription for disaster. And on an empty stomach that wasn’t really a stomach at all these days – merely half of one, or a quarter, he was never very sure what the surgeons had left him of his digestive tract.

  “There’s a plot,” Greshko said quietly. “It involves national security.”

  “A plot?”

  Greshko nodded. “Before I go any further, I want you to know in advance that I can’t identify my own sources.”

  “Of course,” Bragin said.

  “I know editors and journalists like yourself hear that phrase all the time,” Greshko remarked. He paused, looked down inside his vodka glass. Nikolai Bragin, an editor of the daily Izvestia, had been a journalist since the mid-1950s and now, at the age of fifty-five, was one of the most prominent newspapermen in the Soviet Union and enjoyed unprecedented access to the highest chambers in the land. For years, Bragin had dutifully toed the Party line. His reputation had been built on dull acquiescence rather than daring. His prose was said to be more effective than any Soviet tranquilliser – of which the Russian pharmaceutical industry had produced few in any event. He printed what the Party wanted him to print. The word ‘investigative’ was not, in his vocabulary, an adjective used to describe a certain kind of reporting. He had pursued the bland and the inoffensive with a very blunt pencil. And then, in the last two years, lo and behold! a transformation, a small miracle had taken place. Bragin had published a long piece critical of the Government’s handling of the pollution of Lake Baikal, and followed it with a three-part series on judicial corruption. Like a lifetime teetotaller introduced regrettably late to the beauties of wine and determined to compensate for the dry years of self-denial, Bragin had been reborn in the journalistic freedoms generously permitted by the Kremlin, trading his blunt pencil for a rapier, and shaking off the blinkers that had restricted his vision for almost thirty years. Nikolai Bragin saw himself as a hero of the press, a protector of the rights of small people against the elephantine clumsiness of central government. He was therefore a natural choice for Greshko. If there was to be some holy new form of openness in Soviet society and in the press, Greshko had asked himself, why not try to make some use of it? Why not test it? Turn it against its adherents? Set it upon itself? Why not give it som
e ammunition and see if it self-destructs? Everything free, Greshko thought, had also the freedom to destroy itself.

  “Certain parties within the organs of State Security are involved in a plan directed against our country, Nikolai.”

  “Be more specific, please.”

  “It’s my understanding that General Olsky, Chairman of the KGB – a trusted servant of the state, a man with grave responsibilities – is involved in a scheme with certain dissident factions overseas to perpetrate an outrage against our country.”

  Bragin was quiet for a second. “And what is the nature of this outrage, Vladimir?”

  “That is unknown to me, unfortunately.”

  “You’re being very vague.”

  The old man reached across the table, laying one hand on Bragin’s wrist. “Listen to me, Nikolai. General Olsky, acting against the interests of the State, has sent his emissary Colonel Viktor Epishev out of the country to liaise with a Baltic movement whose primary goal is to achieve independence from the Soviet Union. These forces, as you well know, have existed inside Russia for most of this century. Blackguards and malcontents. Scoundrels. Baltic scum.”

  Bragin took a pen from his pocket and wrote something down in a tiny notepad. Then he looked at Greshko. “You’re making a very serious accusation about the Chairman of the KGB. Can you substantiate any of this?”

  “Certain KGB files are missing. These files, which are damning to Olsky because they link him with outlaw elements in the Baltic states, have obviously been destroyed by him in an effort to cover his crimes. Viktor Epishev is also missing. If you were to ask Olsky about Epishev’s whereabouts, he’d deny knowledge of them. And that would be incriminating enough. Since when does the Chairman of the KGB not know the whereabouts of one of his own Colonels, for God’s sake? When I ran the organs, I always knew where all my officers were. Night and day, it didn’t matter, I always knew.”