Jig

by Campbell Armstrong

  Kiviranna focused on Romanenko as he came through the barrier. Then he stepped closer, squeezing himself between a porter and a group of genteel elderly Scottish women with walking-sticks and umbrellas who were trying to induce the porter to carry their luggage. Kiviranna reached into his pocket and removed the Bersa, concealing it in the palm of his hand. He needed one clear shot, that was all. One clear shot at Romanenko.

  Kiviranna brought the gun up. The sound of loudspeaker announcements detonated inside his head and then dissolved in a series of meaningless echoes, because he was conscious now of nothing save the short distance between his pistol and Romanenko’s face.

  With an expression of horrified disbelief, Romanenko saw the gun and raised his briefcase up in front of his eyes, a futile attempt to protect himself. Kiviranna fired directly into the Russian’s heart, and as Romanenko screamed and collapsed on the ground and his briefcase slithered away from him and panicked pigeons flapped out of their roosting places in the high roof, Kiviranna turned and started to run. But the tall man in the tan-coloured suit, who had hesitated only a second in the aftermath of the gunfire, seized him roughly around the waist in the manner of an American football or rugby player and dragged him to the ground.

  Frank Pagan, struggling with the gunman, disarming him, clamping cuffs on his wrists, was conscious of old ladies yelping and porters hurrying back and forth and the appearance of two uniformed policemen who immediately began to keep curious onlookers away – including a group of soccer fans who had apparently decided that the violence in Waverley Station was more authentic than any they might see on a soccer field. There was chaos, and that was a state of affairs Pagan did not remotely like. There was chaos and gunfire and he hadn’t been able to prevent this awful situation from happening and that galled him as much as anything.

  Pagan left the handcuffed gunman face down beneath the watchful eyes of one of the uniformed policemen, then he turned to look at Romanenko, who lay flat on his back with his eyes open, as if it were not death that had paralysed him but a catatonic trance. There was a dreadful wound in Romanenko’s chest, and Danus Oates kept saying “Oh my God, my God,” as if the killing would mean a demotion for him inside the Foreign Office. John Downey, who at least knew how to behave around a murder scene, was wading into the spectators and cursing as he roughly pushed them back. It was all madness, that special kind of disorganised lunacy which surrounds any scene of blood. It was the way flies were drawn to feed and bloat themselves on a fresh carcass, and in this case the carcass was one Frank Pagan had been supposed to protect. But he’d failed and Romanenko, the ebullient Romanenko, the enthusiast, the new friend, lay dead.

  You weren’t supposed to let this kind of thing happen, Pagan thought. This was going to be an easy job. The kind of work any nanny should have been able to accomplish without breaking sweat. And now suddenly it was a mess and he felt the muscles of his stomach knot. Oates, like a somnambulist, was reaching down to pick up Romanenko’s briefcase, which had fallen alongside Aleksis’s body.

  The man from the Soviet Embassy, who hadn’t uttered a word all the way from London, said, “Please, the case,” and he made a move in Oates’s direction, stretching out his hand to take the briefcase away from the young Englishman.

  Pagan stepped between Oates and the Russian. He seized the case from Oates and held it against his side. “It stays with me,” he said.

  “On the contrary, Mr Pagan,” the Russian said in immaculate English. “It goes back to the Soviet Embassy. It may contain business documents that are the property of the Soviet Union. Private material. Confidential matters.”

  “I don’t care if it contains the Five Year Plan for the whole of bloody Siberia,” Pagan said. “It stays with me. A man has been murdered and the case may contain material evidence of some kind. If it doesn’t, you’ll get it back.”

  Danus Oates muttered something about the possibility of a diplomatic incident, as if there were no words more blasphemous in his entire vocabulary. Pagan gripped the briefcase fiercely.

  The Russian looked at Oates. “Explain to Mr Pagan that the briefcase is Soviet property. Explain international law to him, please.”

  Oates stammered. His tidy little world had collapsed all about him and he appeared unsure of everything – diplomatic protocol, international law, perhaps even his own identity. He had the expression of a man who suddenly discovers, late in life, that he’s adopted. “I’m not sure, it’s outside my province,” was what he finally blurted out. Pagan almost felt sorry for him. Good breeding and all the proper schools hadn’t prepared Danus Oates for violence, other than the kind in which pheasants were despatched by gentlemen with shotguns.

  “I keep the case,” Pagan snapped. “And that’s final.”

  The Russian wasn’t easily appeased. He reached towards Pagan and tried to pull the briefcase away. Pagan placed a hand upon the Russian’s shoulder and pushed him back – a moment of unseemly jostling that might quite easily have led to further violence had it not been for the fact that there were policemen everywhere now, plainclothes men from the Edinburgh Criminal Investigation Department, uniformed cops dragged away from soccer duty, sirens whining, ambulances roaring – through the rain. Pagan, clutching the briefcase to his side, was suddenly drained by events – and at the same time angered by what he saw as his own delinquency in performing a task that should have been as simple as sucking air.

  A tall man with white and rather theatrical side-whiskers appeared at Pagan’s side. He introduced himself as Inspector Dalrymple of the Edinburgh CID. He had a melancholy manner and he surveyed the scene with the unhappy expression of a drama critic at an amateur performance. Pagan took out his ID and showed it to the Inspector, who looked suitably impressed.

  “I wish this hadn’t happened in respectable old Edinburgh, Mr Pagan. Gives the place an awfully bad name.” He stared first at the corpse, then at the handcuffed gunman, who lay motionless on the ground. “I’ll give you a hand getting the body out of the way. The least I can do. Keep Edinburgh clean, eh? Don’t frighten the tourists. After all, this isn’t Glasgow,” and Dalrymple chuckled briefly, because Glasgow’s reputation as a rough, criminal city was something Edinburgh people never tired of gloating over.

  The Inspector, stroking his copious whiskers, began to issue orders to various policemen. Ambulance men, those attendants of injury and death, had appeared with a stretcher. Pretty soon there would be nothing left, no traces of the violence that had happened in this place. Pretty soon there would be nothing but dried bloodstains and a memory of murder. Pagan watched the body of Romanenko being raised on to a stretcher with a certain finality. But nothing was final here at all and Frank Pagan knew it.

  John Downey had appeared out of the crowd and stood beside him. Crow, Pagan thought.

  Downey blew his nose loudly, then studied the centre of his handkerchief, grotesquely fascinated by his own effluence. “Well, Pagan,” he said, folding the handkerchief into his pocket. “This is what I’d call a fine kettle of fish.”

  “One thing I always liked about you, John, is your original turn of phrase.”

  Downey smiled, and it was a brutal little twist of his lips. “You’re up shit creek, Frank. Romanenko was your baby and you let him slip down the plughole with the bathwater. The Commissioner’s going to need an extra dose of the old digitalis to cope with this one, chum.”

  Shit creek, Pagan thought. It was a stagnant waterway he knew intimately. He stared at Downey. There was an urge to strike out suddenly, a longing to stifle the man. He resisted the desire even as he realised that it was the first really passionate yearning he’d felt in many months. There was spirit in him yet, he thought – and despite the chaos around him it warmed his blood and it made his nerves tingle and it kicked his sluggish system into some kind of life. All this might be a mess, but it was his own to straighten out. He had become the proprietor of a bad situation, like a man who has unexpectedly inherited a house he later discovers has been con
demned.

  The goon from the Soviet Embassy, who had been lingering close to Pagan as if he might still get a chance to snatch the briefcase away, said, “I promise you, Pagan. Unless you hand over the case, you have not heard the last of this.”

  That promise was the one thing of certainty, Pagan thought, in an uncertain state of affairs. He turned and walked back to the place where the handcuffed gunman lay motionless.

  The big man who stood that same night on the ramparts of Edinburgh Castle wore a charcoal suit especially made for him by an exclusive tailor who operated out of basement premises on East 32nd Street in Manhattan. He also wore a matching fedora, pulled down rather firmly over his head. He had a craggy face dominated by a misshapen nose. It was the kind of face one sometimes saw on former boxers but the eyes were clear and had none of that dullness, that dead-dog quality, that afflicts old fighters. He was sixty years old and still muscular and hard the way he’d always been because condition was important to him. In the past, it was condition that had saved his life. He was still proud of his body.

  He removed a cigarette from a silver case and lit it with a gold Dunhill lighter on which his initials, M.K., had been engraved in a craftsman’s script. He never inhaled smoke. He blew a cloud from his mouth and looked down across rainy Edinburgh, marvelling at the damp nimbi that glowed here and there in the night and the floodlit monuments. The rain, which had been sweeping relentlessly across the city, had slowed now to little more than a drizzle and the night had a quite unexpected beauty, almost a magnificence, that touched the man.

  From the distance he could hear a sound of bagpipes and although it was strange music to him, nevertheless the despair in the notes, the unfulfillable longing, moved him. Scotland was not his own country – but very little separated him from his native land. The North Sea, Scandinavia, the Baltic. It was hardly any distance at all. He felt a painful twinge of homesickness. But then he’d grown accustomed to that sensation over the years and whereas it had troubled him deeply in the past, now he was in control of it. But only up to a point, he thought. Because every so often he was still astonished by the way the sensation could creep up on him and, like some wintry vulture, claw his heart.

  He crushed his cigarette underfoot. Tonight was not the night for those old predatory birds. Tonight was not the time for remembering that he hadn’t seen Estonia since 1949, when he’d been captured by Soviet forces and shipped inside an overcrowded freight car to Siberia, where he’d survived along with other Baltic freedom fighters, along with many thousands of the dispossessed – brave Latvians, valiant Lithuanians, headstrong, determined men who might have lost the battle but would one day win the war, because they had a secret weapon Stalin and all his butchers could never strip away from them. They had hatred.

  He moved along the ramparts, wishing – dear God, how he wished – he was strolling along the cobblestones of Pikk Street, past Mustpeade clubhouse, through the Suur Rannavarav and down to Tallinn Harbour to look at the ships. Or passing the medieval Kiek-in-de-Kök cannon tower and the Linda statue to reach Hirve Park where he had walked hand-in-hand many times with his wife Ingrida on those summer nights in June when it seems the sun will never sink in the sky. It had become a dream to him, a dream of a dead city, a beautiful corpse bathed in pearly light.

  But he wasn’t going to yield to memories. In any event he’d heard how the Tallinn of his recollection had changed with Soviet occupation – the Russians had torn historic buildings down, renamed streets, and erected those dreary blocks of high-rise apartments that were so deadeningly characteristic of Communist architecture.

  He checked his wristwatch. It was almost nine. He had been waiting for more than an hour. But what was a mere hour when weighed against the forty-three years that had passed since the Russians had ‘liberated’ his country? Old men learned one thing. They learned how to sing in the soft voices of patience.

  He looked at the young man who stood alongside him. In the young man’s blue eyes the lights of the city were reflected.

  “He’s not coming, Mikhail,” the young man said. He was extraordinarily handsome, at times almost angelic, but he had no self-consciousness about the perfection of his looks because external appearances meant very little to him. When he entered a restaurant, or stepped inside a crowded room, he turned heads and fluttered hearts and caused glands to work overtime – he affected people, mainly women, in ways that rarely interested him. This coldness, this seeming indifference, only enhanced his physical desirability. He wasn’t merely a handsome young man, he was a challenging presence in the landscape, and difficult to conquer.

  Mikhail Kiss looked away from his nephew and made an indeterminate gesture with his enormous hands. He had killed with those hands. He had dug graves with them and buried his dead comrades with them. “If he isn’t coming, then he’s bound to have a damn good reason.”

  “Like what?”

  Mikhail Kiss shrugged. Who could say? Meetings were hard to arrange, and sometimes things went wrong, timetables became confused, time zones were overlooked, planes were delayed, trains ran late, a hundred accidents could happen. Nothing was perfect in this world anyway – except revenge, which he carried protectively in a special place deep inside his heart. He nurtured revenge, and fed it carefully the way someone might tend an exquisite plant. Vengeance was precious to him, and vows that had been taken long ago were not forgotten. He was a man who still breathed the atmosphere of the past.

  He moved closer to the young man, seeing the way a muscle worked tensely in the cheek and how the blond hair, which lay lightly upon the collar of his raincoat, was speckled with drops of very fine rain.

  “Something must have gone wrong, Mikhail.”

  Mikhail Kiss squeezed his nephew’s shoulder. He didn’t say anything. He never allowed himself to think the very worst until there was no alternative. Leaping to conclusions was a sport for the young and tempestuous.

  The young man, whose name was Andres Kiss, leaned upon the stone parapet and looked down through the darkness that rose up around the rock on which the Castle had been built. He restlessly rubbed the rough surface of stone with the palm of one hand. A person with a sense of history might have imagined, even for the briefest time, the touch of the mason who had put the stone in place many centuries ago. He might even have imagined calloused skin, a face, a concentrated expression, and marvelled at how the past created echoes in the present. But Andres Kiss’s sense of history went back a mere forty years, and no further.

  He turned his face away from the sight of the city spread out beneath him, and he looked at his uncle. “I have a bad feeling in my gut,” he said. “I don’t think he’s going to come.”

  A gust of wind blew soft rain at Mikhail Kiss’s eyes, and he blinked. He felt exactly as his nephew did, that something had gone wrong, that down there in the shadowy pools between lamps and neon signs something altogether unexpected had happened to Aleksis Romanenko.

  2

  Zavidovo, the Soviet Union

  The cottage was a simple three-room building located on the edge of Zavidovo, a one hundred and thirty square mile wilderness some ninety miles from Moscow. The house was surrounded by trees and practically invisible until one was within twenty yards of the place. It was reached by means of a mud track, which was severely rutted. Dimitri Volovich had some trouble holding the car steady on the awful surface, especially in the dark. He parked a hundred feet from the cottage, then stepped out and opened the rear door for Colonel V. G. Epishev, who emerged into a blackness penetrated only by the soft light from one of the cottage windows.

  Epishev ran a finger inside his mouth, probing for an annoyingly stubborn particle of the apple he’d eaten on the way from Moscow. He had a pleasant round face, the kind you might associate with a favourite uncle. It wasn’t memorable, which suited him very nicely. In the West he could have passed for a stockbroker or a certified public accountant. His manner, which he’d cultivated over years of service in one or other Direct
orate of the KGB, was indeed avuncular, sometimes kindly in a way that disarmed even people who were his sworn enemies. And he was known among these enemies – a diverse group that included political dissidents he’d imprisoned or practising Christians he’d dissected or errant Jews he’d shipped in the opposite direction from Israel and into a colder climate than they desired – as Uncle Viktor, although no affection was implied by the term.

  He turned towards the lighted window, hearing Greshko’s music issuing from the house. An incongruous sound in the Russian night. He wondered what it was that the old man found so absorbing in American country songs. It was a weird taste Greshko had acquired in the late 1940s, when he’d spent six months as rezident in Washington at the Soviet Embassy.

  Epishev, followed by Lieutenant Volovich, entered the cottage. Neither man was at ease in this place. As officers of the KGB, they had no compelling, official reason to visit Greshko, who had been removed a year ago from his position as Chairman of State Security. He was therefore non-existent, persona non grata inside ruling circles – even if there were those who feared him still and who awaited news of his death with considerable impatience.

  The nurse appeared in the doorway of the bedroom. She was a small black-haired girl from the Yakut, and her oriental features had a plump-cheeked innocence. Epishev was never sure about her. She went about her business briskly, and her Russian was very poor, and she seemed to think it perfectly natural that Greshko would have visitors – but you could never tell. The Colonel, who had lived much of his life promoting a sense of paranoia in others, didn’t care to experience the feeling for himself.

  “He’s awake,” the nurse said. Her uniform was unnaturally white, almost phosphorescent in the thin light of the room.

  Epishev and Volovich went towards the bedroom door. The music filled the air, a flutter of fiddles, a scratching Epishev found slightly painful. The bedroom was lit only by a pale lamp on the bedside table and the red and green glow of lights from Greshko’s sophisticated stereophonic equipment, which the old man had had imported from Denmark.