Epishev went a little closer to Dimitri Volovich. He caught the sickly citric scent of Volovich’s Italian hair oil. It was awful, but anything was better than the odour surrounding Greshko’s bed.
“This is the most patriotic thing you have ever been asked to do,” Greshko said. “If it helps, think of yourself as a loyal officer of a small, elite KGB that operates secretly inside the larger one. Think, too, of how this elite KGB is connected to some of the most powerful figures in the country, men who are just as discontented as ourselves.”
Epishev was already thinking of the drive through darkness back to Moscow and the visit to the Printer. He was thinking of identification papers, a passport, airline tickets.
“Remember this,” Greshko said. “If there are complications and you’re delayed outside the country, I want to be informed. I want news, no matter how trivial it may seem. Don’t call me directly on my telephone. Volovich here will be the liaison. Every day, Viktor. I expect that much. But let’s be optimistic. Let’s hope the business is straightforward and our worries needless.”
There was a sound from the bedroom door. The nurse stepped into the room, carrying a tray which held small medicine bottles. “I need my patient back,” she said, and she smiled cheerfully.
“It’s feeding time at the zoo,” Greshko remarked. He winked at Epishev, who turned away and, without looking back, left the bedroom.
On the road to Moscow a fog rolled out of the fields, clinging to the windshield of the car. Volovich drove very slowly even when he’d turned on the yellow foglamps. Epishev sat hunched in the passenger seat. He blinked at the layers of fog, which parted every now and then in the severe glare of the yellow lights, only to come rushing in again.
“Does it constitute treason, Dimitri?”
Volovich stared straight ahead, looking grimly into the fog. “I never think about words like that.”
“I’m asking you to think about them now.”
Volovich shrugged. “I take my orders directly from you. Always have done. I’m a creature of habit, and I’m not about to change at this stage of my life. If you’re asking whether I’m loyal, the answer is yes. Besides, I never think about politics.”
Epishev leaned back in his seat. He closed his eyes. Politics. This was no mere matter of politics. If Volovich chose to simplify it for himself, that was fine. But it came down to something that was far beyond the ordinary course of Party personalities and rituals. What was going on here was a struggle between the old ways and the new, and Epishev – who loved his country as fiercely as Greshko – knew where his own heart lay. There were flaws in the old ways, but it was a system that worked in its own fashion, one that people had come to accept. And if there were failings, they were temporary, and inevitable, because the road to Communism wasn’t exactly smooth – or even straight. The Revolution had never promised an easy path. Epishev, who had been a Party member for more than thirty years, and before that a dedicated child of the Komsomol, knew what the Revolution had intended. Like an ardent suitor with a faithful passion, he had committed his life to this one mistress. He tolerated all her failings and loved all her glories. And sometimes, when he thought about the Revolution – which he saw as an ongoing process, unlimited, as demanding as it was endless – he experienced an extraordinary sense of iron purpose. He was in the slipstream of history. Everything he did, every task he carried out, no matter how distasteful, had been shaped by the historic forces that had overthrown the Romanovs in 1917.
But to toss all this away! To open windows and throw the old system out! To change the purpose of the Revolution! And to do all this with such indecent haste! Heresy was hardly the word.
Epishev stared into the fog and sighed. He had absolutely no choice but to go along with Greshko. Anything else would have been complete hypocrisy. It didn’t matter if Greshko was motivated by pure patriotism, or the promptings of a dying man’s monumental ego, because Epishev knew his own reasons were good. He was, as Greshko had correctly pointed out, a patriot. He knew no other way to be.
The fog was thinning now. Epishev glanced at Volovich. “When I need to telephone, I’ll contact you at your home. I’ll use the East Berlin link. It’s safer.”
Volovich switched off the foglamps. The car began to gather speed. Between thin pine trees, a half-moon had appeared, suspended in a way that struck Epishev as forlorn. He was thinking now of Romanenko, the First Secretary of the Communist Party in the Estonian Soviet Republic, and trying to imagine a shadowy gunman in a railway station. When he’d first heard Greshko speak of the organisation that called itself the Brotherhood of the Forest and how this old association of Baltic freedom fighters had been the driving-force behind Romanenko’s plan, when Greshko had patiently explained the merits of the conspiracy and how it might be used against Birthmark Billy and his cronies, Epishev’s first instinct had been to distrust the entire undertaking. Romanenko was an Estonian, a Bait, and Epishev trusted absolutely nothing that originated in any of the Baltic countries.
More than fifteen years ago he had spent nine months in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, where he’d been sent from Moscow to purge the city of Estonian nationals with suspect sympathies. The Baits were a clannish crew, annoyingly supercilious at times, and they tended to protect one another from the common enemy, which they saw as Russia. He remembered Viru Street now, and Tsentralnaya Square, and the 5th October Park. A handsome city, a little too Western perhaps and its native population too irreverent, but there was a pleasant atmosphere, at times almost a buoyancy, in the cafés – places like the Gnome and the Pegasus – that one found nowhere else in the Soviet Union.
More than buoyancy, though. There was defiance throughout the Baltic. One encountered it in Latvia and Lithuania as well. There were strikes, and well-organised protests, and various groups babbling publicly about their rights and singing forbidden national anthems. It was as if all three Baltic nations still believed themselves to be independent of Russia. So many Baltic nationals even now resisted – and loathed – the absorption of their so-called ‘republics’ into the Soviet Union. And they were encouraged in their dreams by émigré communities overseas, mainly America. He thought of the social clubs in Los Angeles and Chicago and New York where old men played cards or shuffled dominoes and wrote angry letters to their Congressmen about ‘prisoners of conscience’ behind the Iron Curtain. All that was harmless enough. All that was empty noise and the fury of frustration. Dominoes and cards and folk-festivals and national costumes amounted to nothing. Conscience, after all, was cheap.
But now it had gone beyond simple conscience. The Baits had engineered a plot which had been in the planning a long time and, if Greshko had his way, stood every chance of success. And if it did succeed, it would release all kinds of turmoil, all manner of ancient frustrations and ethnic demands for sovereignty and self-determination throughout the Baltic. What Greshko hoped for was an apocalypse – a popular uprising inspired by the success of the plot and unified by its symbolism, mobs in the streets, tanks and soldiers of the Red Army fighting the local populations of Tallinn and Riga and Vilnius, the disintegration of Soviet influence in satellite republics, a decomposition that might spread beyond the Soviet Union itself and into Poland and East Germany and Czechoslovakia, an anarchic state of affairs that would doom the upstart brigade who ruled these days from the Kremlin. What Greshko desired was nothing less than a new Revolution, one that would replace the bastard liberalisation of the Politburo with an older, more reassuring socialism. What Greshko really wanted was yesterday.
Epishev put a finger inside his mouth and finally located the sliver of apple that had been stuck between his back teeth for the past hour or so. He examined it on the tip of his finger. He had a way of staring at things that suggested the concentration of a coroner inspecting an unusual corpse. He wiped the pellet from his fingertip and sighed, looking out at the moon, which had a curiously hollow appearance, as if it were simply an empty sphere. And he had a sense of uneasines
s for a moment, because he felt he’d become exactly the kind of person he’d spent most of his life hunting down and destroying. He had become an enemy of the State.
But the uneasiness passed as quickly as it had come, and Epishev watched the fog return, spreading like acid across the face of the moon.
When the nurse had gone Greshko lay alone in the darkened bedroom. On certain nights, his fiery pain was beyond any of the opiates the nurse administered. And then there were other nights – and this was one of them – when he felt free of the burden of his cancer. There was calm and stillness and even the prospect of a future to anticipate.
He stared at the window. Outside, the night was completely quiet, and the quiet was that of his own death. But he could hold it at bay, he could keep it from entering this bedroom, he was too busy, too curious to die. Besides, his hatred would not allow him to expire. He needed only to live long enough to hear the noises of chaos and destruction. He needed only to live for five short days, if the Baltic scheme ran according to its own timetable. And Viktor would make sure that it did.
He turned his thoughts to Epishev. A good man, a good Communist, if perhaps a little too ruminative at times. But there was also an element of brutality to Epishev and he’d go to the ends of the world for Vladimir Greshko. What more could you ask for?
Epishev would probably use a Hungarian or West German passport and leave Eastern Europe through Berlin, perhaps passing himself off as a commercial traveller or, as he’d once done many years ago, as a piano tuner. A piano tuner! Sometimes Epishev could be inventive. And if that wasn’t always a desirable quality, there were times when it was admirable, especially when you combined it with a streak of ruthlessness and complete commitment to the class-struggle of Leninism – something Greshko himself had come long ago to regard with utter cynicism.
More important than imagination, though, was the fact of Epishev’s bottomless loyalty, which Greshko had bought cheaply years ago with a simple lie about how Joe Stalin wanted to purge Viktor from the KGB and the Party. Stalin hadn’t been remotely interested in Epishev. Indeed, the old vozhd hadn’t even heard of the young man. But Greshko had dreamed up the fiction, thus presenting himself as Epishev’s saviour, as the man who had intervened personally on Epishev’s behalf. From that time on, Viktor had never questioned a single order issued by his deliverer. A lie, but justifiable within a system where power depended on a network of unquestioning loyalties you forged in any way you could.
Greshko smiled. The idea of setting in motion events that would alter the self-destructive course of this great empire delighted him. He shut his eyes and stuck his hand out to touch the surface of the bedside telephone. He knew he hadn’t been given the privilege of a phone out of charity or kindness. He had a telephone for one reason only – so that his conversations could be eavesdropped, his intentions monitored. But Greshko also knew that only a token attempt was made to record his messages because he had called in an old debt from a certain I. F. Martynov, Chief of the Internal Security Directorate, who also happened to be a closet homosexual with a dangerous liking for those lean and lovely teenage boys of the Bolshoi School of Ballet. There were choice tidbits about Martynov’s life in Greshko’s possession, unsavoury items that Martynov, a married man with overwhelming political ambitions, could not afford to have made public. A little mutual backscratching, a couple of unspecified threats, and Martynoy had agreed that only a small proportion of Greshko’s conversations would be monitored strictly for appearance’s sake, and that even these would be sanitised by Martynov himself.
So Greshko used the telephone freely, though not without some caution. He might have a lock on Martynov, but such locks could stand only so much pressure. His callers, on the other hand, who knew nothing of Martynov’s editorial wizardry, were always wary. A retired admiral in Minsk, a former UN ambassador in Kharkov, a Party boss ingloriously ousted in Perm, a retired Minister of Foreign Affairs who called from his dacha in Stavropol, a former Deputy of the Supreme Soviet from Moldavia, and many others – Greshko’s callers were men who had previously been in power and who were now living reclusive lives filled with bitterness and a desperate yearning for what they had lost. But there were other supporters too, the kind who wished to remain anonymous because they were men who still had prominent positions they wanted to keep. A Deputy Chairman on the Council of Ministers, a dozen or so members of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets, a Vice President of the Supreme Soviet, several KGB rezidents overseas, and a variety of personnel in five different Directorates who owed their promotions to Greshko’s patronage in the past.
These men did not risk telephone calls. They smuggled notes to Greshko, messages brought by visitors, terse words of support, commitments, promises for the future, loosely-worded statements that, read carefully, left no doubt about their feelings concerning Birthmark Billy and his gang. It was a subterranean network, an amorphous one in need of strong organisation, but nevertheless huge, and what gave it strength was its resistance to change, its longing for the way things had been before. It was growing daily, drawing recruits from the ranks of the dissatisfied, or from those whose power-bases had been eroded or whose privileges had been removed. It was growing quietly and in secret, pulling in politicans, army officers, bureaucrats, ordinary workers, and it would continue to do so, just as long as things continued their decline inside Russia.
Greshko suddenly perceived the vastness of the Soviet Union, the great plains, the mountain ranges, the lakes and rivers, the taiga, in a flash of illumination and love. What was that line the Americans used in one of their songs? From sea to shining sea …
They were such apt songwriters, the Americans.
3
London
Martin Burr, the Commissioner of Scotland Yard, had spent several years of his life in the Royal Navy and had lost his right eye during a vicious skirmish with a Nazi U-boat at Scapa Flow in 1943. He wore a black eyepatch which gave him a jaunty, seasoned appearance. The one good eye, green and bloodshot, surveyed the world with weary intelligence.
Pagan respected the Commissioner. At least he wasn’t a politician. He was first and foremost a policeman and loyal to those he commanded. And if sometimes he was imperiously paternal, then that was almost forgivable in view of his enormous responsibility, which was to keep the peace among the thousands of men – some of them highly-strung – whose careers and destinies he controlled.
Now, as he hobbled around his large office with his walnut cane supporting his bulk, he kept glancing sideways at Pagan, and there was just a hint of explosiveness in the good eye. Pagan, who had returned from Edinburgh by plane only a few short hours ago, still wore the suit that had been made grubby during his scuffle with Romanenko’s killer.
“There will be some form of protest,” said the Commissioner. “No doubt there’s some damned First Secretary from the Russian Embassy already brow-beating the Foreign Minister. They’ll bitch every chance they get, Frank. Bloody Bolsheviks.”
Bolsheviks, Pagan thought. That was a quaint one. He noticed that the Commissioner’s office was without windows. The light in this room was always artificial, issuing from recessed tubes of fluorescence that made objects seem ghostly.
The Commissioner sat down and looked gloomy. He rapped the carpet with his cane and for a second he reminded Frank Pagan of an English country squire. It was deceptive. There was nothing sleepily bucolic in Martin Burr’s character. And his public-school speech patterns concealed a sharp brain and a streak of ruthless determination. “Let’s see what we’ve got here, Frank, before I come up with some bland yarn to feed to the wolfhounds of Fleet Street.”
Pagan longed for a window, a view, a sight of the city. This office oppressed him, despite the collection of sailing ships in wine-bottles and the small models of British destroyers that littered a shelf, the only items of a personal nature in the whole place.
“Romanenko gets himself shot. And I’m not blaming you because a man can’t have eyes in the back of
his head, after all. But a lot of people, and I include the press as well as the Russians, are going to think us incompetent idiots. Be warned, laddie – some people are going to say you might have been more vigilant.” The Commissioner looked at Pagan and shrugged. “Some people are already saying it, Frank. When the Yard isn’t solving crimes, it’s doing the thing it does best. I’m talking about gossip. I’m telling you I sit atop a pyramid of bitchery like some bloody pharaoh who’s got nothing better to do than listen to the whining of his courtiers and the moaning of his soothsayers.”
The Commissioner smiled and Pagan wondered if there was some sympathy to be detected in the expression. Sometimes, when he didn’t want you to observe his true expression, the Commissioner had the habit of turning his face to one side so that only the inscrutable eyepatch was visible, which gave him the crafty demeanour of a pirate who possesses one half of the map to the secret place where the doubloons are buried.
“Now the briefcase, Frank. According to the wallahs along Whitehall, it’s theoretically the property of the Soviet Union because Romanenko was a representative of that country. Therefore it has to be returned. However, I’m not in any great hurry to oblige. One doesn’t want to be scurrying around doing the Russians favours, does one?”
Pagan stared at the briefcase, which was propped against the wall. Alongside the case, there lay the contents of Jacob Kiviranna’s backpack and the weapon, the Bersa, that had been used to kill Romanenko. It was a sorry little collection of items and Pagan had some difficulty in associating these things with the violence that had happened only a few short hours ago in Edinburgh. There was a harsh dreamlike quality to the experience now, and yet he could still hear the sound of the gun being fired as if it were trapped inside the echo-chamber of his skull.
“But first,” the Commissioner said, “before you talk to this fellow Kiviranna, let’s examine his cargo.” He hobbled toward the backpack, staring at a couple of shirts, a pair of jeans, socks, underwear, a guidebook to Edinburgh, a rail ticket, two hundred and seven dollars, a prescription bottle that contained several capsules of Seconal, and Kiviranna’s American passport.
Jig Page 61
