Nikolai Bragin lit a cigarette from the butt of one he was already smoking. His fingertips were orange and the front of his waistcoat soiled by spilled ash. His darkly-jowled face was constantly vanishing behind smoke clouds. “It’s not enough, Vladimir. If I start asking questions to substantiate your story, people are going to say your personal view of Olsky has caused you to concoct a scheme to discredit the man.”
Greshko shook his head. “I expect that, of course. But it might prove enlightening if you were to ask General Olsky why he came all the way from Moscow to see me the other day.”
“And why did he?”
Greshko took air into lungs that were barely functioning. “He tried to enlist my support in his scheme. Unsuccessfully, I might add. It’s my understanding that he has been secretly trying to muster support from formerly influential people – people, shall we say, that are no longer in power but are ready to rule again if called upon to do so, people whom he thinks might be relied upon to form a new government. Olsky wants to discredit the present regime and replace it with another. With himself, no doubt, in the role of General Secretary. That’s his goal. And in collusion with reactionary forces inside the country as well as outside, that’s just what he intends to do.”
Greshko, who had begun to wheeze, took a handkerchief from his pocket and applied it to his lips.
Bragin said, “General Olsky is held in high esteem within the Politburo. You’re walking through a minefield.”
“I’m used to minefields,” Greshko said.
“The trouble is, Vladimir, I only have your word for all this. Who can prove Olsky belongs in a conspiracy? Is there documentation? Is there evidence? I’m sorry to say your word doesn’t carry weight these days, Vladimir. For me to consider this story, I’d need more to go on. I can’t blunder around asking awkward questions without some foundation.”
Greshko sat back in his chair. His heartbeat was monstrous all at once, a frantic drum locked in his chest. He had trouble swallowing and the surface of his skin was clammy. Was this the moment? Was this death coming in? He closed his eyes. How could he exit without nailing that fucker Olsky to a cross? He trembled, concealed his shaking hand under the table.
“Do you need water, Vladimir?” Bragin asked.
Greshko shook his head. He opened his eyes. Steadying his hands, he gripped the edge of the table. “Let me ask you, Nikolai. Is General Olsky a good Communist? Is he ideologically sound?”
“I would imagine so.”
“My ass,” Greshko said. And he reached for the inside pocket of his greatcoat, which felt heavy and suffocating, removing several photostat sheets. He shoved them disdainfully across the table. “There’s your good Communist, Nikolai. There’s your ideologically sound Olsky.”
Bragin picked up the papers and Greshko smiled. It was a good moment, one of the best he’d had in years. He watched Bragin go through the sheets. Bragin made a humming sound between his closed lips as he read. When he’d finished he didn’t raise his face up from the papers.
Greshko said, “One hundred and sixteen thousand English pounds in a money-fund organised by Coutts Bank in London. Three hundred and thirty thousand American dollars in a trust run by the Wells Fargo Bank of California. Six million Swiss francs deposited with the Credit Suisse in Zurich. Transaction receipts, records of deposit, all of Comrade Olsky’s good Communist activities are right there in front of your very eyes, Nikolai.”
Bragin looked up now from the documents.
Greshko said, “I’ve given you photocopies. If you’re interested in the originals they can be found locked in safety deposit box number 1195 in the vault of the Oxford Street branch of the Westminster Bank in London.”
Bragin said, “You’ve done your homework, Vladimir.”
“I had excellent sources once,” Greshko said.
There was a long silence. Bragin got up. Greshko gathered the sheets together and tapped them on the table.
“This is something of a surprise,” Bragin said.
“I imagined it might be,” Greshko remarked. “I admit this documentation in itself doesn’t connect Olsky to any seditious movement. But it raises some distressing questions about the General. If he can dabble so freely in capitalist enterprises, and indulge himself in a system he professedly hates – well, who can say what he might or might not be capable of? And how did he amass the money in the first place?”
“Your point is taken,” Bragin said, and there was some hesitation in his voice.
Greshko rose. He was no longer unsteady. “What will you do next, Nikolai?”
“One doesn’t leap into something so sensitive as this, Vladimir.”
“I understood you journalists could come and go as you please these days. I believed you had a mandate to write about dry-rot in the system, Nikolai, no matter where it might be found.”
Bragin ran his thick fingers through his hair. “We have some new freedoms, of course. But we haven’t been given a licence to kick doors down, Vladimir. We don’t destroy reputations in a malicious manner. If Olsky is guilty the matter will come to the surface.”
Greshko stepped towards the door, where he stopped, turned around. “You’re saying you would need Party authorisation before you could investigate my information, is that it?”
“Hardly,” Bragin replied. “However, if I assembled a story with indisputable documentation, the Party would want to examine the evidence before giving its approval to publication – especially in an area such as this one.”
“In other words the Party still tells you what you can print?”
Bragin shook his head from side to side. “Vladimir, I have more freedom now than at any other time in my career. But some sensitive matters need to be cleared in advance, that’s all.”
“Are we talking about censorship?”
“Censorship? I wouldn’t use that word. It’s out of fashion.”
Greshko opened the door. “I’ll leave the papers with you. I have copies of my own, of course. I’ll see myself out.” He paused, turned back. “When you write this story, please be sure you mention the original source of it.”
“I won’t forget, Vladimir.”
Greshko opened the front door. He felt rather jaunty all at once. He paused on the steps, smelling the air. Then he went confidently towards his car, where the Yakut nurse sat behind the wheel. He got in on the passenger side and told the woman to drive him now to the Moskva Hotel on the Karl Marx Prospekt for his second and final appointment of the night. He sang quietly under his breath as the car moved through the dark streets.
He was under no illusion that Bragin could simply write the story as he saw fit. What Greshko had really done was simple. He’d planted a seed to discredit Olsky, certainly. But much more than that. When the Baltic assault took place the very next day, when the extent of the plot became apparent, when those clowns who ran the Politburo were swept away on great tides of discontent and humiliation and public wrath and injured patriotism, Greshko was certain that Nikolai Bragin would remember the man who had forewarned him. Greshko had protected his own reputation. When it came time to analyse his career, when one hundred years from now autopsies were performed on his life and work, he would be remembered as the man who had exposed treachery in the highest echelons of power, who had uncovered corruption in the very heart of State Security. A Soviet saint, canonised by history. And wasn’t that what life was all about when you got down to the bitter end of it? Your reputation? Your place in the scheme of things? Your name?
The car halted in front of the Moskva Hotel, and Greshko stepped out. He told the Yakut woman to wait for him. He glanced at the doorman as he entered the hotel. The doorman, touched by a shiver of recognition from the recent past, didn’t question the old man muffled in the heavy overcoat as he entered the foyer. Greshko went up to the third floor. The room he entered was dull and a little shabby, the woodwork in need of paint, the wallpaper faded.
A young man sat at a card-table in the middle of the flo
or. He wore a plaid shirt open at the neck and blue jeans and the cigarettes he smoked were unfiltered Capstans, empty crumpled packets of which were scattered around the room. Greshko smiled at the young man and thought: My insurance policy.
The man, whose name was Thomas McLaren, stood up. He appeared a little awed in the presence of the former Chairman of the KGB. He was a ciphers clerk at the British Embassy, somebody Greshko had once caught in what is politely called ‘an indiscretion’. A married man, McLaren had been ruthlessly seduced by a female KGB officer called Tamara. A sad affair, really, because McLaren had fallen in love with the woman and she had become fond of him – but permanence was impossible, of course. Photographs were taken of couplings in hotel rooms, meadows, borrowed apartments. McLaren, who understood he’d been manipulated, had been placed on ice for a day when he might be needed. And that day was now.
Greshko sat at the card-table and McLaren fidgeted.
The General said, “I will be quick and to the point. I am going to give you certain documents. You will make sure these fall into the hands of respectable journalists in your country.” He took documents from his overcoat, copies of the same papers he’d given to Bragin, and he laid them on the card-table. “They refer to the conduct of General Olsky, Chairman of the KGB.”
The young man put a hand out, but Greshko stopped him. “Read them when I leave. There’s no time now.” Greshko paused because new pain fluttered across his chest and up into his throat and he felt dizzy. He was quiet, waiting for the pain to pass. McLaren, who had black hair and eyes intense with fear of blackmail – a fear he’d carried with him day and night ever since Tamara had been revealed to him as KGB – watched the old man warily.
“General Olsky, handpicked by the General Secretary to run the KGB, is deeply involved in a foreign plot to undermine this Government. A good journalist may ask himself, what kind of human insight does the General Secretary lack that made him appoint this treacherous person? And if Olsky is a traitor, are there others in the present Politburo? Has the General Secretary made other … shall we say unfortunate appointments? Is he a man so lacking in insight that he’s easily fooled?”
“What kind of plot do you mean, General?” McLaren asked.
“You’ll know everything very soon. All I ask is you ensure delivery of these documents to reliable sources. And make absolutely sure you mention my part in bringing you the information. You must also point out to your writers that I made every effort to make our present leadership aware of this corruption, but I was ignored. I tried again and again, always with the same results. Newspapers all over the world will publish the story. The new Russia falls to pieces! All the bold new promises go down in flames of betrayal and treason! Wonderful headlines, eh?”
Greshko, tired now, fell silent. He studied McLaren for a moment. “Please. Try to relax. This room isn’t bugged. I still have a little influence, McLaren. I made sure it was safe here before I came.”
McLaren looked relieved. He opened the documents Greshko had given him, glanced at them. General Greshko stood up.
“Do as I ask, and all incriminating photographs, as well as negatives, will be destroyed. You understand me?”
McLaren understood.
Greshko walked to the door. For a moment he lost all his strength and had to grip the door-handle to keep from slipping. Then he stepped out into the corridor and walked towards the lifts, stiff-backed, moving with all the dignity he could find. He went down to the lobby, thinking it had been quite an evening, and that if his story failed ever to see the light of day in the Soviet Union, it would at least be published elsewhere in the world, and whispers and rumours, like quicksilver passages of air, would slip back inside Russia, quiet at first, then growing louder, and more shrill, and finally undeniable. After the success of the Baltic plot, Olsky would be removed, and the Politburo purged of Birthmark Billy and his cronies who had tried to fabricate an obscene new Russia, a hybrid society hacked out of half-understood socialism and an uneasy yearning for the stuff of the capitalist world. A bastard place, a nightmare land of varying political beliefs and separate nationalities, Greshko thought as he walked towards his car. But he’d done everything he could to confer legitimacy upon his precious country once again.
Manhattan
Pagan rose from the bed and looked down at Kristina Vaska. She had one knee uplifted, and the other leg stretched flat, so that the pubic shadows, always gorgeous mysteries, were even more inviting. It was a precious moment, and like everything precious fragile, and Pagan wasn’t sure what he was supposed to say about what had just happened, or if speech would somehow alter the delicacy of things. He walked across the room to the window, pulling his robe around him as he moved. The afternoon sun was still hazy, slanting through the spires of midtown and yet failing to touch the streets below, which were already locked into that premature twilight characteristic of New York City.
He turned. Kristina was watching him. Pagan went back to the bed and sat down, letting his fingertips rest very lightly on the woman’s hand.
“You surprised me, Frank Pagan.”
“I surprised myself.” And he had, he had.
She stretched in a lazy way, closing her eyes. She hadn’t expected to end up in this bed. She hadn’t anticipated that rush of feeling, nor had she imagined the extent of his desire, which touched her, filling her with an awareness of how deep his loneliness must have been. At the same time, her own complicity in his release had amazed her, because he’d activated responses in her that, like someone miserly with her emotions, she didn’t want to feel.
Pagan inclined his head, let his lips touch the back of her hand, thinking how strange it was to be drawn after all these years into romance, and how much simpler life might have been if he’d relegated this encounter to the bargain basement of uncluttered sex, a one-shot thing, a brief fling, and then silence and amnesia. But it was undeniable – Kristina Vaska, whom he barely knew, had touched him inwardly, in places that hadn’t been touched for God knows how long.
He raised his face. “I’m thirsty. Do you want me to call room service?”
“I was under the impression,” she said, “that we’d just had room service.”
Pagan smiled, reached for the telephone, ordered coffee and sandwiches. He replaced the receiver, remembering the brown envelope that had slipped to the floor during the recent amazing excesses on the bed. He didn’t want to touch it, didn’t want to be reminded of Carl Sundbach and a world that existed beyond the walls of this room. But he picked it up, even though he didn’t open it at once. He held it as a man might hold something contaminated, reluctantly and with great distaste. He was suddenly nervous at the idea of asking Kristina to look at the photographs and wished he didn’t have to. He kissed her, laid a hand flat against the side of her face, and thought how sweetly fragile she seemed right then.
“I want you to look at something,” he said quietly.
“Suddenly you’ve got a grim tone in your voice, Frank. I’ve heard it before and I don’t think I like it. What are you asking me to do?”
“I’ve got some old photos here,” and he opened the flap of the envelope, tipping the contents on to the sheets. “Before you look at these, does the name Sundbach mean anything to you?”
She thought a moment, then shook her head.
Pagan said, “One other thing. Before you pick up these pictures, I want you to be prepared for the fact that your father’s in a couple of them.”
“My father?”
Pagan nodded. “I found the pictures in the apartment of a man called Carl Sundbach who was just murdered.”
She reached for the photographs. There were three in all. Pagan looked over her shoulder as she gazed at them. They were all similar, as if they’d been taken within minutes of each other. Similar and very familiar.
The first depicted three men in shapeless jackets, photographed against a backdrop of wintry trees. The men had rifles, which they held loosely against their sides. One of the
men had a bandoleer strapped over his jacket. In the second photograph, there were also three armed men, but one of them was different from the first picture, as if the person he’d replaced had gone behind the camera. In the last photograph there was still another permutation of three men. In each picture the same stark trees formed the background. Taken quickly, Pagan thought. Hasty souvenirs of war snapped by cameramen in rotation. Guns and four tired, grubby men. Guns and weariness. And a sense of camaraderie, as if the men in the photographs were prepared to die together in a common cause.
In two of the photographs Norbert Vaska and Aleksis Romanenko stood side by side, looking exactly the way they had in the snapshot Kristina had shown Pagan days ago. In the third picture Vaska was missing, and Romanenko, who looked impossibly youthful, had been photographed between the other two men. It was this picture that Pagan picked up now.
He said, “The man on the left is Carl Sundbach. The one in the centre is Romanenko. Have you ever seen the big man, the one on the right?”
She shook her head. “Never.”
Pity, he thought. There had been a chance that if she’d been able to identify the stranger, she might have presented Pagan with a clue to the Brotherhood, a step closer to the elusive core of things. Since Sundbach and Romanenko were dead, and Norbert Vaska in Siberia, that left only the big man with the broken nose and the high forehead. Was he still alive? If he wasn’t, then the Brotherhood would remain what it had always been – a locked room.
“I’ve never seen Sundbach either,” Kristina said. “Who was he?”
Pagan went inside the bathroom, ran a glass of cold water, returned to the bedroom and sat down again. He said, “He was associated with the Brotherhood – but he was also seemingly instrumental in bringing about Romanenko’s murder. Presumably this treachery was frowned upon, and it got old Carl eliminated.”
Mazurka Page 33
