Jigsaw

by Campbell Armstrong

  ‘Is this your way of saying I’m off the investigation?’ Pagan asked. He raised eyebrows in a form of mock innocence.

  ‘Don’t play silly buggers with me,’ Nimmo said. ‘You know damn well what I mean. I wouldn’t let you direct traffic in Kensington High Street, never mind the investigation of a bomb attack.’

  ‘I’m getting the picture,’ Pagan said. It was strange how he managed to draw strength from Nimmo’s words; the more Nimmo railed at him, the better he felt, the harder his resolve became. ‘Too bad,’ he added. ‘Just as I was making headway.’

  ‘Headway. Is that what you call this?’ Nimmo made a snorting scornful sound and gestured round the room. ‘For the benefit of our French friends here, what exactly are you doing in Lyon?’

  ‘Following a lead.’

  ‘And? And? I’m listening.’

  ‘Obviously somebody didn’t like what I was doing, George.’ For a second he had the mischievous urge to toss out the name of Caan, to throw the Ambassador on to the bonfire of Nimmo’s anger, but he resisted.

  ‘This so-called lead – I dare say it had something to do with your raging paranoia about our American friends?’

  ‘Hardly raging, George. Let’s just say there’s a connection between the death of Bryce Harcourt and my business in Lyon.’

  Nimmo unclenched his hands finally and turned to look at the assembly of French cops. He was putting on quite a little show for them, berating Pagan before their very eyes, dismissing him. Nimmo knew how to play to the gallery.

  ‘And this mysterious connection will lead us to Carlotta, will it?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  Nimmo paced around in circles, hands clenched behind his back. ‘At considerable expense to Special Branch – to say nothing of serious injury to your colleague – you pursue some nebulous lead which, in the final analysis, may or may not have something to do with Carlotta. Pardon me if I don’t see the logic.’

  Nimmo was quiet for a moment, apparently gathering his strength for a renewed assault. But instead he appeared to lose his momentum and stepped back among the clutch of French cops where he held a hushed conversation with a man in a long heavy overcoat, who was seemingly Nimmo’s opposite number in Lyon. Pagan experienced weakness again. What happened now? Did he go back to London handcuffed to George Nimmo? Would he be escorted to the airport, there to await the next flight home? Pensioned off, banished to his flat in Holland Park. The bright side of that fate was the fact he’d have all the time in the world for Brennan Carberry, whose face drifted tantalizingly through his head. Enticing as this was, he thought: No way. Nimmo wasn’t going to cast him aside. He wasn’t about to quit now. Rock and roll, Frank. Keep on trucking.

  Nimmo took a couple of steps toward the bed. ‘Right. We’re agreed.’

  ‘Who’s agreed what, George?’

  ‘You spend the night in the hospital. First thing in the morning, we catch the early flight to London.’ He came even closer to the bed, ‘Think yourself lucky you’re not being locked up, Pagan.’

  ‘I bless my good fortune,’ Pagan said.

  Nimmo shook his head. ‘You won’t be blessing anything when we get back home.’

  ‘What do you intend, George? Public disgrace? Pagan in the pillory? Behaviour of rogue cop humiliates Commissioner? I can see the tabloids.’

  Nimmo ignored this. He went out of the room, followed by the contingent of French police. Alone, Pagan lay motionless. He reached under the sheets, grabbed Streik’s papers, spread them across the bed. Talk to me, Jake, he thought. Tell me more. Take me to a place beyond these scraps of detail. Show me the whole thing. Come back from the grave and speak to me. He looked at the papers in the attitude of a man awaiting news trumpeted from a disembodied voice at a seance.

  Bryce Harcourt and Jake Streik. Carlotta and her Underground bomb. The transfers of vast sums of money. The Undertakers. Caan’s complicity. He had more slippery hoops in the air than he could handle. His brain wasn’t up to it. Whatever they’d pumped into him had a tidal way of coming and going. Moments of clarity and focus were eclipsed by lassitude and confusion.

  He stared at Streik’s handwriting. His head was clapped-out again; sleep murmured in his ears.

  Chaos, he thought. If peace was bad for business, then chaos was good – if you were in the kind of business where profits were to be made from anarchy. He found himself thinking of William Caan, whose fortune, according to Martin Burr, had come from computerized weapons systems. What was it Burr had said so long ago? Scrap a new missile and a whole industry suffers? And all the sub-industries, all the subcontractors, all the research-and-development boys start to hurt as well. Factories close, weeds grow through concrete, FOR SALE signs mushroom, former high-paid executives sign on for welfare, ruin all the way down the line.

  Because peace is bad for business.

  This train of thought faded out on him. Caan eluded him, drifting away like a wisp of woodsmoke on a dull afternoon. His insight came to an end in a thicket of half-formed notions and tangled deductions. I’ll come back to it, he thought. I’ll rest, then I’ll come back to it.

  He shut his eyes, saw a fierce after-image of Nimmo’s flaccid features, opened his eyes again at once. He didn’t want Nimmo occupying his head. No. He decided that what he really wanted, what he needed, was to speak to Brennan; this was the druggy urge that fluttered through him now. He longed to hear her voice, make a soothing connection with her, envisage her lying across her bed in the room at the Hilton with the telephone pressed to her lips. I don’t want you to worry, he’d say. There’s been a small accident. Maybe he wouldn’t mention it at all. Maybe he’d say what he’d considered saying before, that he loved her – an ambitious statement, one of consequence and commitment, a declaration and a risk.

  He raised his face. There was a telephone on the bedside table. He doubted if it was connected to anywhere beyond the hospital switchboard, but he’d try it anyhow. He fumbled for the receiver and, to his surprise, heard a dial tone. He called the operator, had himself transferred to International Inquiries, and was presently patched through to the Hilton in London, where a receptionist answered. Pagan asked for Brennan’s room number. Dismayed, he heard her line ring unanswered, on and on. He replaced the receiver, dropped his head back against the pillows and wondered where she was at this time of night. The explanation’s simple, he thought. She’d gone to a theatre because that’s what Americans did in London. And now she was sitting in the hotel bar nursing a nightcap and thinking thoughts of him. There: perfectly acceptable. So why didn’t it silence his concern?

  He felt drowsy again, but the drift towards sleep was disturbed by recurring images of Brennan and her empty room. With the lover’s unbounded optimism, he dialled the Hilton again. There was still no answer from her room. He left a message with the operator, settled back, shut his eyes. She wouldn’t go away. She was there. She was in front of him constantly. He tried to remember if he’d been this obsessed over Roxanne, but that whole history was strangely lost to him. He floated into shallow sleep, fought against it, forced himself awake. He needed to think. He needed to be alert. Rhodes, he thought. Who the hell was this Rhodes character who figured in Streik’s death-bed thoughts? It seemed to him a matter of the utmost urgency to find out; Rhodes suddenly dominated his sluggish brain.

  He reached for the telephone and dialled Billy Ewing’s line at Golden Square. The Scotsman was in a spluttering mode. ‘Frank? Where the hell are you? It’s like some bloody palace coup is going on here, for God’s sake. Gladstone and Wright are installed in your office, going through your notes, rummaging through everything they can lay their hands on … They even had me in there for questioning. They’re like the bloody Gestapo. ‘What did Pagan tell you? What secrets are you keeping from us?’ And now we’ve got some tight-arsed bastards from Nimmo’s special staff going through the whole place. Jesus.’

  ‘Call it the end of a very short era, Billy,’ Pagan said. ‘I’ve got a small job for you.’<
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  ‘Frank, I was to let them know the minute you made contact—’

  ‘You wouldn’t do that, would you, Billy?’

  ‘What do you think I am?’

  ‘Run a name for me. Rhodes. Montgomery Rhodes. An American. See if we’ve got anything on him. And then call me back as quick as you can at this number …’ Pagan looked at the phone, read the digits to Ewing. ‘I don’t know the area code for Lyon. Look it up.’

  ‘Listen, Frank, I’ll do what I can, but I’m not sure they’ll even let me within a hundred yards of a computer the way things are. They’ve taken over. Everything. It’s like the invasion of the body snatchers.’

  ‘Stay calm. Do what you can, Billy.’

  ‘Don’t hang up, Frank. There was a message for you. I took it myself. Guy called Zuboric from New York. Grumpy character.’

  Zuboric. Pagan had almost forgotten. He shut his eyes. ‘And?’

  ‘I’ll read it for you word for word.’

  Ewing read in an intoning, ministerial way. No, Pagan thought. Zuboric’s got it wrong. It doesn’t make sense. A confusion of names, a blip in the system, a hiccup. No. No. He asked Ewing to repeat it, but before Billy could respond the line – whether severed by the hospital, or more likely by an eavesdropper in Golden Square – had gone dead. Pagan slumped back against the pillow. He shut his eyes again. Sometimes computers went mad, gremlins made mischief of the system, viruses played havoc with the links – and what came out was skewed, false. Sometimes data was inaccurately stored by the operator, a keyboard struck wrongly, a letter out of place. You heard such things all the time. You heard of mistakes, bank statements sent to the wrong person, electricity bills that amounted to impossible sums of money, you heard all kinds of computer horror stories—

  And Zuboric’s message—

  Zuboric’s message had to be one of them. Misinformation. Yes. That was the word.

  But somehow he knew otherwise. And somehow he’d known all along. He kept his eyes shut. He didn’t want to open them. Didn’t want to think.

  ‘Frank …’

  He shifted his head, licked his dry lips. He had one of those moments when the border crossing from reality to fiction shifts, when you find you have a visa valid for neither the dream world nor the waking one. But the touch of her fingers on the back of his hand was real enough, and so was the sound of her whispered voice, and the way lamplight created flared shadows in her hair, which she’d rearranged, pulled from her face so that no careless strands fell upon brow. She was sitting on the edge of his bed. She wore a black leather jacket, black T-shirt, faded blue jeans. She looked, he thought, both beautiful and austere, and despite the devastating message he’d received from Artie Zuboric he was filled with a yearning to touch her.

  ‘Frank …’

  He was about to speak her name but then he realized that his world had changed in a matter of seconds, that he didn’t know her name. ‘You were killed in a skiing accident in Vermont in 1988. Your neck was broken when they carried you off the slopes. DOA. Brennan Carberry doesn’t exist.’

  THIRTY-ONE

  VENICE

  THE PLANE FROM LONDON LANDED AT MARCO POLO AIRPORT AT EIGHT minutes before three a.m. Swarmed by security personnel, Gurenko disembarked and was escorted down the gangway to a car that carried him a couple of hundred yards to the dock. Everything was done with all the frenzied haste of a polka. He was hustled, Budenny at his elbow, pressured along by a variety of underlings, their ears plugged to listening devices, their lapels wired. They created a large human pool around him. The photographers and journalists awaiting his arrival had no opportunity to get near him. He was swept on to the launch, which was encompassed by a dozen craft, each manned by a contingent of guards, some Russian, others Italian.

  When he was seated in the lounge of the launch, he lit a cigarette and attempted to move the curtain from the window in preparation for his first sight of Venice – but Budenny, forever paranoid, forever alert, advised him against it on the grounds that such an act might expose him.

  ‘Expose me to what?’ Gurenko asked.

  ‘You never know,’ Budenny said.

  Gurenko puffed away at his cigarette with a show of resentment. All his life he’d wanted to see the lights of the city along the Grand Canal, and now he was to be denied the pleasure. The Palazzo Loredan, the Farsetti, the Grassi, the Ca’ Foscari – and he wasn’t allowed to draw back the curtain and look. He was a lover denied the sight of his mistress’s face.

  He walked up and down the narrow curtained lounge. He had the sensation of travelling inside a sealed box. All this security was overkill. He crushed out his cigarette. ‘I feel caged,’ he said. ‘And very, very frustrated.’

  Budenny smiled. ‘It’s exactly how you’re supposed to feel.’

  ‘I’ve dreamed of this city for years, Budenny. When I was a student, Venice was where I wanted to be. Not London, not Paris, always Venice … During all the years when foreign travel was difficult for us, I would read histories of the place, look at photographs, study books of paintings. Magnetism, Budenny. And now you won’t let me look out of the damned window.’

  Budenny said, ‘I have responsibilities. Besides, you’ll get the chance to see what you want to see. Sit down. Be patient.’ Budenny opened a folder, studied a typed schedule. ‘Luncheon with the Italian Prime Minister and his cabinet members. A private meeting with the Prime Minister after luncheon – who, incidentally, would have preferred to meet you in Rome, but he seems, good fellow that he is, to understand your artistic interests. After the meeting, a quick tour of Venice before you head for Berlin in the evening.’

  Quick, Gurenko thought. Like a tourist. He wanted the impossible, probably: the time in which to embrace the whole place. Even in London, when he’d spent five hours with the dour British Prime Minister, and then two hours with Caan, the US Ambassador – a glossy character altogether, a smooth New World product who reassured him that democratic reform in Russia had priority on the US agenda of foreign affairs – he’d been thinking of Venice. Then in Paris, where he’d eaten a late dinner with the President and talked of Russia’s future with a confidence he wasn’t sure he felt, he’d caught himself drifting. When the Frenchman was interrogating him on the subject of popular support for the new Russian constitution, his mind had now and then wandered.

  He regarded Budenny a second. In his well-tailored grey suit, white shirt and bright flowery tie – a blinding length of silk – he was so different from the old Vassily. If you looked at a photograph of Budenny taken ten years ago, you’d be staring at a quite different man, a colourless Party functionary dressed in the kind of shapeless baggy clothes that resembled rejects from a zoot-suit factory. Now he subscribed to fashion magazines published in London and New York; he made shopping trips to foreign cities – Amsterdam, Milan, Paris – and always returned with boxes of shirts and suits and shoes. In recent years, Gurenko thought, he’d become something of a dandy. He’d also acquired implanted teeth to go with the clothes and the blow-dried hair. Budenny could never understand the attraction of Venice. You could explain until there was a heatwave in Siberia, and he’d still never grasp it. His life was all schedules and anxiety. He lived like a man whose eyes are forever looking sideways.

  The launch was slowing now. The motor was silenced; the hull knocked against a quay. Gurenko, again surrounded, squashed by his human shields, was assisted out of the launch to the jetty, then escorted under a barrage of umbrellas to the lobby of the hotel. He had an impression of marble, chandeliers, a thick red carpet underfoot. Otherwise, his view was strictly limited. He suddenly thought of a phrase from a poem he’d read at university, something from Max Eastman, written in the 1920s. Fear is the only danger. Old Max, a Bolshevik New Yorker who’d written in Russian as well as English, was correct. Budenny and his security buffoons should have read that poem.

  And now he was jammed inside a lift rising to the upper floor of the hotel, where every room and suite had been reserved for
the Russian party. There he’d be trapped until it was time to be ushered back into the world.

  Inside the lift, squeezed between Budenny and his guards, he had a moment of stifling dizziness. The doors slid open, the hotel manager stood in the hallway, obsequiously stooped, a fake smile of welcome on his face. We’re so proud to have you stay with us, et cetera, et cetera, and Gurenko nodded, returned the smile after a fashion, and then was whisked down the corridor to his own suite of rooms, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a sitting-room filled with flowers and baskets of fruit, and wine chilling in a silver container.

  Under Budenny’s scrutiny, the security guards checked the rooms, as they’d done so many times before Gurenko’s arrival. They swept the place with electronic devices, examined the telephones, sampled the fruits, sipped the wines, explored the bunches of flowers – what did they expect to find? transmitters concealed in petals? tiny explosives stuffed in stems? – then departed, seemingly satisfied, or as close to satisfaction as they were likely to get. Gurenko, overwhelmed by their zeal, by their mute dedication, was left with Budenny. Exhausted, he slumped on the sofa and put his legs up.

  He remembered another phrase from Eastman’s poem. But they are feeble and their watch is brief. He was about to quote it for Budenny’s sake – but poetry was pointless in Budenny’s world, a luxury for the very few, an artsy-fartsy pastime for weirdos.

  Budenny pressed the remote control for the TV. There was a dazzling chorus of dancers, bright-faced young men in bullfighting suits and leggy girls in abbreviated skirts – a garish spectacle, just the kind of thing Budenny would enjoy. Gurenko felt the frustration rise in him again. Stuck here in front of a stupid TV – when all around him in the city lay great works of art, creations of genius. Lost opportunities: what a life.

  ‘Nice, very nice,’ said Budenny, eyeing the dancing girls.

  Gurenko picked up the remote control and pressed the off button. ‘But not to my liking,’ he said.