17

Near Tallinn, Estonia

Somewhere in the hours of darkness the girl called Erma came into the small room Marcus occupied at the top of the house and slid inside his sleeping-bag and put her arms round him, teasing him gently out of a sleep that hadn’t been deep to begin with, a dreamless state, a dark floating. She curled her fingertips beneath his testicles and touched him, feeling him stir. She enjoyed the ease of her own power.

Marcus woke. He’d been expecting the girl to come to him for some time, and so he wasn’t altogether surprised to find her beside him. He touched her breasts, which were soft, weightless, adolescent. He ran the palm of one hand – his skin was rough and this shamed him because he felt the girl flinch very slightly – down her flat hard belly to her groin, where the pubic hair grew light and shapeless. He moved a finger softly back and forth until she’d become very moist. She straddled him, rocking above him, invisible in the complete dark of the room. Blind like this, Marcus was conscious of how his other senses were extended – the slight milky smell of the girl, the unbearable softness of her flesh beneath his fingertips. It had been a long time since Marcus had been with a woman, and the girl could tell. He came quickly and she with him, shuddering, biting her lip to be silent because other people slept in this house, and she felt his sperm explode through the dark spaces of her body, thinking of it as a series of coloured lights popping deep inside her.

Then she rolled off him and lay beside him, holding his hand. She said, “I’m scared, Marcus. If you want the truth, I’m terrified.”

“We’re all scared,” Marcus whispered. “We all pretend we’re not because we have to. But deep down … You’ll find you’re no different from the others.”

“Are we going to die?” she asked.

Marcus was quiet, listening to the dark, the sound of insects, the occasional flutter of a bird in a nearby tree, the light wind that blew from time to time upon the old shutters. He looked at the luminous dial of his watch. It was almost two a.m. This was the day, and he didn’t want it to be, he wanted to stall for another day, perhaps find time to enjoy this girl a little longer. But there was no changing the calendar of events. Here in Estonia, and in Lithuania, in Latvia, in Moscow – this was the day they’d planned and worked for, through years of secrecy and fear, through euphoria and gloom, trust and paranoia. He listened to the tick of his old watch, then turned the dial away so that the sharp green light wouldn’t annoy him. He put his hand around the girl’s shoulder. She trembled.

He gazed at the window and saw a thin moon sailing behind a garland of clouds. Tonight he was more tense than usual. But so were all the others who occupied this old house. Erma, the young man who called himself Anarhist, and the old fellow named Bruno, who occupied the attic and snored deliriously in his sleep and who’d been fighting the Russians one way or another since 1945 – they were all anxious in this damp, silent place.

What made Marcus more uneasy than the others was the fact that he’d gone to Tallinn earlier in the day for some food, and he’d sensed it at once in the streets, a change, a poisoned atmosphere – and then he’d seen the number of KGB cars in the city centre, and the officers who moved through side-streets and alleyways, and it became apparent to him that the KGB was conducting one of its periodic assaults on the city, ferreting out names on one of its notorious lists of ‘hooligans’ and suspected criminals. They moved on this occasion with unusual stealth, Marcus had thought, and he saw nobody handcuffed, nobody harried or pressed unwillingly inside automobiles – almost as if the order had come down from Moscow to do things quietly and with the least possible fuss. But the timing was bad for him. A concentration of KGB officers in the city was the very last thing he needed, and he couldn’t help wondering if their presence had anything to do with the plan.

Fear, Marcus thought. And he listened to the night, to the sounds that grew in the dark.

“I want to fight, but I don’t want to die,” the girl said.

“Nobody wants to die.” He could see her small face by moonlight and thought how beautiful it was in silver and how tragic the world was that this young girl, brutalised by the Russians, was ready to take up arms – when in another reality she might have been falling peacefully in love. An ordinary existence, a husband, children. “Listen to me. You could leave now. Nobody would think badly of you. You’ve got a long life ahead of you.”

“What kind of life, Marcus?”

It was a good question, and Marcus had no answer. A life of repression, a life of careful utterances, of never knowing who was watching you, who was saying things behind your back – he might have mentioned all this but he didn’t. He slid out of the sleeping bag and went to the window and looked down into the courtyard.

“Not much of one,” she said, answering her own question. “If I could keep my big mouth shut, and go about my business and notice nothing – but that would be like death.”

Marcus gazed at the outbuilding where the vehicles were parked. He saw it then, or thought he did, the cold hard disc of a flashlight, something that burned brief and yellow in the dark before vanishing, something alien that shouldn’t have been there. He turned to the girl and said Ssshhh, then he dressed very quickly and told her to do the same thing. After that she should go wake the others immediately and tell them to move around with no noise. Armed, he said. They must be armed.

“What did you see?” she asked.

Marcus picked up his automatic rifle, his Uzi, and made a gesture with his hand, a swift, chopping motion that meant the girl was to hurry. She scampered quietly out of the room and Marcus went back to the window, where he looked out cautiously, seeing once again the glow of a flashlight and hearing the noise of the tarpaulin that covered the vehicles being moved slowly aside. Now there were shapes that came to him in the thin moonlight – three men, maybe four, but he couldn’t see clearly. He heard the attic floor creak, then the noise of Bruno on the narrow staircase, followed by the sharp sound of the boy’s voice as he was awakened from sleep by the girl. What? he asked, but the girl must have silenced him then.

Marcus turned when the old man came in the room. He had a pistol in one hand and a Browning Magnum rifle in the other, and he carried himself with his chest thrust forward, his shoulders back, the stance of an old fighter ready to renew hostilities with an eternal enemy.

“In the yard,” Marcus whispered. “Three, maybe four. I can’t tell.”

Bruno approached the window, peered down. He was licking his lips nervously, dehydrated by the possibility of gunplay. Marcus studied the darkness, seeing a figure emerge from the outbuilding with a flashlight, and immediately behind him two others, both illuminated briefly by the moon, young men, boys, dressed in KGB uniforms.

“Do we fire from here?” Marcus asked. He could smell liniment from the old man, which he habitually rubbed into his muscles every night, believing it kept him young and supple.

“Mida rutem seda parem,” Bruno said. The sooner the better.

The three figures below were coming towards the front door of the house now. They would knock first, Marcus knew, but only once, and then they’d force their way in. They had grounds for forced entry, even though they needed none. Four vehicles concealed under tarpaulin, highly unusual, even suspicious. It was enough.

Erma and the young man came into the bedroom. Anarhist had his M-16 strapped to his shoulder, the barrel slung forward. Erma carried a Uzi pistol, which seemed too large for her to hold. Tucked in the waistband of her pants was her other weapon, the Colt automatic. She looked fierce suddenly, no longer the scared girl who’d made love to Marcus moments before. Anarhist looked down from the window and Marcus could sense it in the young man, the urgency to fire his gun, the desire that drove him.

“Not yet,” Marcus whispered. “There might be others in the vicinity. We need to be sure.”

“Wait? Screw it.” Anarhist raised the barrel of his rifle and Marcus gripped it with his hand. The angle was narrow now, because the men below were clustered around the front door and the boy would need to hang from the window to get a decent aim, and then he’d be exposed.

“Go to the top of the stairs,” Marcus said. “When they come in, fire. You’ll have a better chance.”

The boy went out of the room, followed by Bruno, whose anxiety was as sharp as the young man’s. Marcus stayed at the window, watching, thinking that sounds of gunfire would bring others to the scene – if there were others nearby. And if they came, they’d enter this courtyard, and he could fire down on them. He smiled at the girl, who crossed the room and stood at his side.

“I’m ready,” she said.

Marcus touched the side of her face. It came to this moment, he thought, all the years of longing, the years of hatred, they came to a point in time when they couldn’t be contained any longer. He seemed not to exist, or if he did it was in some form he couldn’t recognise, shapeless, out of his body, an entity floating in the scant light. He held his breath, heard the sound of something hard on the door below, perhaps the barrel of a weapon – and then the door was forced open and the intruders were inside the house.

Marcus heard the gunfire, the terrible roar of it, and he saw through the open bedroom doorway the boy and the old man firing down into the entranceway, and the old man was saying Kaunis! Kaunis!, meaning, beautiful, beautiful. The fire was returned from below in a brief outburst, and Marcus saw the boy hit in the skull and thrown backwards against the wall. And then somebody was running from the house. Marcus, standing in the window, fired into the courtyard and the running figure stumbled, ran a few more paces, fell, crawled, and Marcus fired again.

The silence that flooded the dark was immense, oceanic. Marcus stepped out of the bedroom, glanced at the dead boy, then at the white face of the old man. The girl was making an odd little whimpering noise, her sleeve drawn up to her face like a mask. Below, at the foot of the stairs, lay two KGB men, one atop the other as if in death a strange intimacy had been imposed. Marcus went down the stairs, stepped into the courtyard, walked to where the third KGB man lay. The side of his skull was gone and his face, beneath the glare of Marcus’s flashlight, had about it an unreality, like something left only half-created. He killed the flashlight, listening to the dark, concentrating. There was still only silence. He went out of the courtyard and walked until he came to the rutted track, and there he paused. A car was parked to the side of the track. He approached it cautiously. There was nobody in it, and no sign of any other vehicles. He sat down on the ground, his back to the front tyre of the car. He was shaking. He stuffed his hands in his pockets but the trembling went on, even after he’d risen and walked back to the house and climbed the stairs to look at Anarhist, who lay slumped against the wall.

Marcus reached down to close the boy’s eyelids, conscious of the girl watching him, and of the old man standing nearby, clearing his throat in the manner of somebody about to make a speech. But Bruno thankfully said nothing.

“I don’t know if they came here purely by chance or if somebody tipped them off, but we leave here now,” Marcus said. “We’ll go elsewhere until it’s time.”

Nobody disagreed.

Fredericksburg, Virginia

Galbraith had been furious – and his unleashed fury was like a mad panther loose in a room of fine china – when he learned of the risk Andres Kiss had taken by going to Carl Sundbach’s apartment and unexpectedly killing the old man. The carnival in the street, the water display and the battered cop car, hadn’t exactly delighted him either. It often seemed to him that the Clowns took their in-house name too seriously, and had some adolescent need to perform acrobatics and gravity-defying stunts in cars and the like, which Galbraith found distasteful altogether. True, they’d managed to divert Pagan from Andres Kiss, creating a triumph out of the almost disastrous coincidence of Kiss and Pagan being in the same area at the same time, but still … The whole situation need not have happened. And it had arisen because Gary Iverson had failed to fathom young Kiss’s killing potential. He’d failed to read the man with any accuracy, and Galbraith was annoyed by the fact that his own trusted servant, the loyal Iverson, his right fucking hand, had proved less than perspicacious in an important matter.

Dressed in his robe, Galbraith was lounging in his basement, gazing at his consoles, tapping into the vast data banks of the planet. The grimness of his mood was caused as much by Andres Kiss’s unnecessary risk as by his own apprehension, his tangible sense of anticipation. The clock was running down, and Frank Pagan was out there – and he still had the potential to do damage.

Galbraith studied the consoles, albeit in an absent way, because he was thinking of Epishev. Listening to Gary’s conversation with the Russian in New York a couple of hours ago, Galbraith had been struck by a chill note in Epishev’s voice, and a curious reticence on the man’s part – as if he suspected some kind of trap. Perhaps his long association with Greshko had made Epishev just as paranoid as his superior. It was only because of Greshko’s suspicions that Epishev had become involved in the first place – and since Galbraith hated waste, it occurred to him that Epishev’s talents should be put to the best possible use. It was one of Galbraith’s most important gifts. He knew how to use the talents of other people to perform tasks he’d never undertake himself.

He looked at the consoles. There was a message from the US Embassy in Moscow, destined for the State Department, but picked up by Galbraith’s technology just as it plucked everything out of the sky.

The General Secretary will address the thirty-eight member Presidium of the Supreme Soviet at approximately 1600 hours Moscow time. He is expected to push through a progressive programme on both social and economic matters although there is likely to be strong criticism from certain elements in the Party, who consider his innovations too drastic. It is thought that he has sufficient support, although the outcome will be dose. End end end.

End end end – but of what? The world as he knew it? Galbraith wondered. He checked his wristwatch. It was almost seven. In three hours time Andres Kiss would be catching his plane to Norway. Three hours. Galbraith picked up one of his telephones, the white slimline one which looked incongruous amid the other five receivers, all of them standard US government issue. He punched in eleven digits, and almost immediately heard Gary Iverson’s voice.

“Where are we, Gary?” Galbraith asked.

“On the Long Island Expressway,” Iverson replied. His tone was muted, a little remorseful. He clearly felt he’d failed Galbraith, and Iverson was a man who rarely failed at anything. Except, Galbraith thought, simple human understanding.

“And where’s Pagan?”

“Pagan and Max Klein are about four cars ahead on the outside lane, sir. The girl is not travelling with them.”

“Their destination is Glen Cove?”

“Apparently,” Iverson said across a connection that was remarkably clear. “I imagine Max Klein’s researches at the Corporation Commission provided him with Mikhail Kiss’s name. I guess they tracked down the number of Andres’s Jag, and that got Klein rolling.” A pause. “I’m sorry about that one, sir. I had no idea Andres would do what he did. If I’d known …”

Sorry, Galbraith thought. Being sorry wasn’t going to cut it. Being sorry was a dead-end street. This was where the miscalculations had led. This was what Iverson’s illiteracy in reading the human heart came down to. This panic, this last-minute crap, this needless pursuit and the inevitable slaughter. “Call the Kisses. Tell them to leave for the airport.”

“My information is they’ve already gone, sir.”

“Fine. Where’s Epishev?”

“He’s directly behind me in a van.”

“And the MO?”

“It’s his own idea and I think effective. It dispenses with both men at once.”

Galbraith said, “I don’t want you anywhere near it, Gary. Is that understood?”

“Understood. What about the girl?”

“I’m not interested in her in the meantime. When Pagan’s no longer … well, around, we’ll keep her under surveillance for a while to see what she does. Not that it’s going to matter, because it’s after the fact by then, Gary. Keep me posted. And no fuck-ups. No near misses. No collisions. No calamities. Are you receiving me?”

Galbraith hung up. He chewed on a fingernail. There was at least no caloric intake in this kind of oral activity. He was still nervous, and there were phonecalls to return from Senators Holly and Crowe, that fretful Tweedledum and Tweedledee. He lay down on the sofa, thinking how unfortunate it was that a man like Frank Pagan, whose file he’d pulled from the Scotland Yard interface, whose attributes he admired, was doomed to die because he’d been in the wrong goddam place at the wrong goddam time.

The fat man shut his eyes. He contemplated the design of White Light, the mosaic which, despite the unwillingness of certain pieces to fit, was nevertheless a fairly attractive thing to behold. He was pleased in general with the pattern, and the fact that neither he nor his department was even remotely involved in events which by tomorrow night would have echoed around the world. He even liked the sound of the very name White Light – which had about it a certain shimmering intensity, a mysterious quality, something that raised it above the mundane manner in which clandestine projects were normally christened. He thought of Operation Mongoose, and Operation Overlord, and Project Bluebird, and he decided that White Light was superior to all of them.

He opened his eyes when he heard the sound of somebody knocking on the basement door. He called out Entrez and saw the ugly little woman known rather cruelly around the building as Madame Avoidable.

“The papers you asked for,” she said. She wore a green wool cardigan and matching skirt and her glasses kept slipping to the end of her nose, causing her to make constant adjustments.

Galbraith took the documents and thanked her.

She said, “These are in the system.”

“And the genuine ones?”

“Expunged as per your request.”

“Mmm mmm mmm, a million kisses of gratitude,” Galbraith said. He flipped through the pages, about six or seven in all. He watched Madame Avoidable leave, then he spread the sheets on his table and gazed at them. They were very good, very convincing. It was Andres Kiss’s military record, and it read like a case-study in schizophrenia. He absorbed such phrases as ‘delusions of grandeur’, ‘failure to accept any authority other than his own’, ‘a sense of a personal mission against the Soviet Union’, and ‘unwillingness to comply with Air Force regulations’. At the bottom of the page was the signature of a military psychiatrist (since deceased) and the stamped legend DISHONORABLY DISCHARGED. It was a nice little piece of fabrication and it would go down well with the gentlemen of the press, when the time came.

Long Island

Max Klein had replaced the battered Dodge with another Department car, a tan Ford of unsurpassed anonymity, the kind of vehicle used by narcotics officers making undercover buys. Pagan noticed scratchmarks across the back seat where handcuffed suspects had presumably scuffled around vigorously. Klein, who hadn’t said much all the way from Manhattan, was curious about the woman in Pagan’s room, but reluctant to ask questions. He had the feeling the Englishman wasn’t exactly a man who opened up for you. Likeable, tough, the kind of guy to have with you in a crisis, Pagan gave the impression of a closed person, difficult to know, hard to reach.

As the Ford passed an exit for Flushing, Klein decided to take a chance. He said, “I thought you came to New York on your own, Frank.”

“I did.”

“Don’t think I’m prying. The woman, I mean.”

“I don’t.” Pagan enjoyed the friendliness he found in Americans, the quick camaraderie, the casual way first-name relationships were formed, all of which made a bright contrast to the taciturn English, whose hearts you had to drill open as if they were safes containing something too precious to touch. The down side of this easy manner was the way certain Americans thought they had the freedom to go rummaging around in your life, which was what Klein was edging towards now. But Pagan was going to be firmly polite.

“I don’t want to go into it, Max. I don’t want to complicate your life.”

“Complicate my life?” Max Klein laughed. “My life’s already complicated. I’m thirty-seven years old and instead of hanging in the Museum of Modern Art I’m driving a goddam cop car on the Long Island Expressway. You think that’s a simple transition?”

Withered ambitions, Pagan thought. He stared at the highway before him and the way the sinking sun glinted from passing cars. Did he want to hear about Klein’s life? Apparently he had no choice because Klein was talking about his paintings, his days in art school, the months he spent dragging a portfolio of his stuff around midtown galleries, only to encounter the severity of rejection. At least it steered the subject away from Kristina, Pagan thought, half-listening to Klein’s good-natured banter about the rebuffs he’d received at the hands of gallery owners and art critics. Max had developed a shell of self-mockery, referring to his paintings as the work of a quick-sketch artist with delusions of mediocrity. Pagan, smiling, looked in the mirror on the passenger side, seeing the flow of traffic behind.

“I used to be in demand with my sketches,” Klein said as he deftly changed lanes. “Give me a witness, a half-assed description, and I’d whip out a picture of a suspect in no time flat. Nowadays, they can use computers or a pre-made ID kit. They don’t need my particular skills. So they push me here and there, one department to another. Fraud last month. Juvenile the month before. Before that it was missing persons. You want an insight into sheer misery, Frank, missing persons is the cream.”

Pagan made a noise of sympathy. He saw the exit for Great Neck. “How much further?” he asked.

“A few miles,” Klein replied.

Pagan glanced once more in the side mirror. A large cement-mixer rattled behind, and then tucked at an angle in the rear of this monster was a dark blue van whose windshield glowed golden in the sun. He looked at the greenery along the edge of the expressway, imagining simple pleasures, walking with Kristina Vaska through a meadow or along a sandy shore or lazing by the bank of some stream. Sweet Jesus, Frank – had it come to this so soon, these little halcyon pictures, these banal images of romance? He was almost embarrassed by the direction of his own mind. You’ve been too lonely too long.

Klein swung the car off the expressway now. Pagan saw the exit sign for Glen Cove and then the greenery that had bordered the expressway became suddenly more dense and leafy, and white houses appeared to float half-hidden in the trees. Klein slid from his pocket the piece of paper with Mikhail Kiss’s address on it, and looked at it as he braked the Ford at a red light. Since he didn’t know where Brentwood Drive was located, he said he’d have to stop at a gas-station and ask.

Pagan turned his head, seeing the same cumbersome cement-mixer and the dark blue van behind him, and suddenly, without quite knowing why, he was uneasy, perhaps because he remembered the van outside Sundbach’s building, which had been the same make as the one behind him now, perhaps it was because the van hadn’t attempted to overtake the slow-moving cement-mixer for the last twenty miles. It’s in the air, Frank, he thought, this general wariness, this low-level fear that you’ll go a step too far and upset somebody to the point of madness – something you might have done already.

He tried to relax, rolling his window down and smelling the perfume of new-mown grass float across the evening. He had a sudden glimpse of water, a narrow inlet that penetrated the land from Long Island Sound, and then the water vanished behind trees. Klein pulled the Ford into a gas-station and Pagan saw both the cement-mixer and the dark blue van go past, and he felt a quick surge of relief because he’d already begun to construct unpleasant possibilities in his mind.

Pagan took the slip of paper from Max Klein. “I’ll get directions,” he said, and he stepped out of the car, glad to stretch his legs. He walked toward the glass booth where the cashier sat. He pushed the paper towards the woman, who was middle-aged and wore her hair in a slick black bun. She had the slightly flamboyant look of a retired flamenco dancer. She started to give directions, then interrupted herself to answer the telephone.

Pagan, staring across the forecourt, past the pumps, past Max Klein in the tan Ford, folded his arms. He could hear the distant drone of a lawn-mower, a summery sound, lulling and comforting, as if the very essence of the suburb was encapsulated in that single familiar noise. There was nothing alien here, nothing extraordinary, just this unchanging placidity.

He shut his eyes a moment, caught unaware by a sudden tiredness, then he shook himself, opened his eyes, saw the dark blue van come back along the road, moving slowly, the windshield still burnished by sunlight. It came to a halt on the side of the street opposite the station. Pagan felt curiously tense as he watched the vehicle.

The van moved again, but slowly still, making an arc in the direction of the gas-station. Pagan put his hand behind him, reaching for his gun in the holster, but not yet withdrawing the weapon because this might be nothing, an absolutely innocent situation, a van driver deciding he needed gasoline and turning back to get it, nothing more than that. Frank Pagan fingered the butt of the Bernardelli, watched the van cruise toward the pumps, and he realised how jumpy he’d become. He saw Klein behind the wheel of the Ford, his head tilted against the back of his seat in a weary manner.

The van kept rolling forward. It was about twenty feet from the station now. It stopped again, hidden somewhat from Pagan’s view by the thicket of gas-pumps. The cashier hung up the telephone and said, “Now where was I? Oh, yeah, you take a left at the second light,” but Pagan wasn’t really listening. He saw a hand emerge from the blue van and something dark flew through the air, crossing the bright disc of the evening sun a moment, flying, spinning, falling, and it was a second before Pagan realised what it was, a second before he opened his mouth and shouted Max!

He saw Klein’s face turn towards him even as the van hurried away and the driver was briefly visible. Then the Ford exploded and a streak of flame burst upwards, blue and yellow and red fusing into one indescribable tint, and he heard the sound of glass shattering into something less than fragments, something as fine as powder, then a second explosion which caused Klein’s burning car to rock to one side. For a moment all light seemed to have been sucked out of the sky, as if the sun had dimmed. Pagan wasn’t sure, but he thought he heard Max Klein scream from behind the flames that seared through the car, the burning upholstery, the black smoke that billowed from under the wrecked hood. He rushed forward, thinking he might have a chance to haul Max out, but the intensity of heat and the choking smoke drove him back, scorching his face and hair, blackening his lips. He saw Klein through flame, burning like a straw man, one fiery hand feebly uplifted, as if he might still find his way out of this furnace – and then the flames engulfed him. Pagan, drawing a hand over his face, was forced to step back. The air was unbreathable and the smoke that rose furiously out of the car stung his eyes and blinded him. A mechanic rushed out with an extinguisher but he couldn’t get close to the car because of the heat. Besides, it was far too late to help Max Klein. Inside the glass booth the cashier was calling the fire department, also far too late for Max Klein.

Pagan moved back from the sight of the burning car and sat down against the wall of the gas-station, paralysed by utter dismay. He hadn’t acted quickly enough, hadn’t drawn his gun when the van had first aroused his interest, hadn’t done a goddam thing to alert Klein. He listened to the sound of the car flaring and he turned his face to the side because he could still feel the awful blast. The cashier came out of the glass booth and touched him on the shoulder and asked if he was hurt. Pagan shook his head. He hadn’t even suffered a superficial burn. The woman pressed a wet cloth into his hand and he covered his face with it. Poor fucking Max Klein, the department handyman. Whoever had tossed the grenade hadn’t meant it to be for Klein alone, he was sure of that.

Whoever. He rose, threw the damp doth away, drew his sleeve across his forehead. For an instant, just before the blast, before the rich, deathly smoke had covered everything, he’d seen the face of the van driver with striking clarity, and he remembered the last time he’d seen that face on a London street. Viktor Epishev, impassive behind the wheel of the van, his expression one of complete concentration, like that of a man who loved control. Pagan wondered bitterly if Uncle Viktor had ever done anything in a spontaneous way. Had he ever seduced a girl? Fallen hopelessly in love? Yielded to a casual whim like rolling up the cuffs of his pants to walk the edge of a tide or gone out and bought a brightly-coloured shirt just for the sheer hell of it?

Control and violence.

Pagan, shocked by the suddenness of things, numbed by his last image of Max Klein behind the screen of fire, wandered inside the men’s room and filled the wash-basin with cold water and plunged his head into it, holding it there until he thought his lungs might explode. Gasping, he raised his face up from the water, and grabbed a handful of paper towels, then he walked back out to where the Ford was burning like some awful pyre whose colours kept changing. He shook his head from side to side, wondering if Epishev had mistakenly thought both Pagan and Klein had been in the Ford. Perhaps, blinded by sunlight, he hadn’t seen clearly. Perhaps even now Epishev imagined that Pagan was dead in the ruined car. Whatever, it was painfully clear that Pagan was to be prevented at any cost from visiting the house of Mikhail Kiss – whose address he held, scribbled on a piece of creased paper by Max Klein, a name and a number surrounded by half-sketched faces and interlocking circles and three-dimensional squares, the work of the failed artist.

Throat parched, Pagan watched as a bright red fire-engine drew into the gas-station, a flurry of sirens and dark hoses unrolling and men who worked at a speed that suggested the whole gasoline station was going to blow up at any moment. In silence Pagan watched them blast the blazing car with their high-pressure sprays, but then he walked away because he didn’t want to be anywhere nearby when they doused the flames sufficiently to pull the remains of Max Klein from the crematorium.

Kennedy Airport, New York

Mikhail Kiss found the bright lights of the terminal painful to his eyes, and he blinked a great deal, although sometimes he wasn’t sure if it was the harsh light or the prospect of tears he was struggling against. He watched Andres at the Scandinavian Airlines desk, the check-in procedure, the way the female clerks fawned around him. He didn’t have a suitcase, only an overnight bag. There was no luggage to go on board. Andres returned to the place where Mikhail sat and took the seat next to him, saying nothing, just tapping his fingertips on his knees or every so often checking his boarding-pass.

Mikhail Kiss lit a cigarette and for the first time in many years inhaled the smoke deeply into his lungs. He took his eyes from Andres and looked across the terminal floor, seeing two security cops move side by side with vacant looks on their faces. They passed through the glass doors and out into the failing light. Mikhail Kiss examined the departures board. Soon they’d begin boarding the plane that would take Andres to Norway. Mikhail stubbed out the cigarette and sighed. Why was there nothing to say? Why, at the very point he’d worked so long and hard to reach, were words so reluctant to form in his mouth? He laid his hand on his nephew’s sleeve, a gentle gesture, perhaps more meaningful than any words could be. But it was a small thing, and it didn’t go very far to dispel the feeling of estrangement from the young man that Mikhail Kiss experienced.

Something was wrong, and he couldn’t define it. It was more than the goddam dream that kept coming back at him like a bad taste. The face of Norbert Vaska. The music in that white restaurant. They don’t go away, he thought. They come back to haunt you, no matter what you do. What did he feel? he wondered. Was it sorrow? Or resentment at the tenacity of ghosts? But it was more than just the persistent image of Norbert Vaska that troubled him, and he searched his mind fruitlessly.

A bad feeling. Like the one he’d had that night in Edinburgh. That was close to the sensation.

Andres Kiss smiled. For a second Mikhail thought he detected a slight tension in the expression, and he was caught in a memory of when Andres had been a young boy, ten, maybe eleven, stepping into a boxing-ring for the first time, his face hidden behind a protective headpiece too large for him, his hands dwarfed by enormous gloves. He remembered how Andres had turned to him at the last moment and how frightened he’d looked and Mikhail, touched by this vulnerability, had felt needed then – but the moment passed and Andres went inside the ring and demolished his opponent with fierce speed and Mikhail realised that night he’d never really be needed in this young man’s life, that Andres could achieve everything he wanted on his own, without help. And so it was now.

There was an announcement that the flight to Oslo had begun to board. Mikhail looked at his watch. 9:30. Andres examined his ticket and boarding-pass again, saying, “Round-trip. I appreciate your optimism, Mikhail.”

Was this meant to be a small joke? “I wouldn’t send you anywhere one-way, Andres,” and he reached out to embrace the young man, whose body was stiff and unyielding, as if human contact distressed him. It was then Mikhail noticed a scratch on his nephew’s forehead, which had apparently been covered by some kind of makeup, a powder of the kind women use, and he was going to ask about it. But now there wasn’t time. And he didn’t want to know anyhow.

Andres Kiss stood up. “I guess this is it,” he said.

Mikhail Kiss felt moisture forming behind his eyes, but he blinked it away. It was a time for strength, not for useless sentimentality. He wished Carl Sundbach could have been here, because there was a sense of incompleteness, of somebody missing from the circle. Maybe he’d call Carl later, tell him that Andres was on his way to Norway, keep him informed. And maybe by this time Carl would be over his weird paranoia that somebody was following him through the streets and watching his apartment. Old age, Kiss thought, feeling the phantom of it move through him. It rendered men absurd, magnified their fears, expanded their anxieties.

Andres said, “The day after tomorrow, Mikhail. Until then.”

“Until then,” Mikhail Kiss said quietly. He watched Andres walk to the gate, then pass through without looking back. Mikhail had an attack of sudden panic and was filled with the urge to go after his nephew and call him back and tell him that everything was cancelled, there was no need to fly. Even if he’d done so, it would have been a futile gesture because the scheme had a life of its own now, a force that couldn’t be halted, not even by the man who’d first set the whole thing in motion. It had grown, and matured, like a child over whom you no longer have dominion.

His work was finished. He walked out of the terminal. He stepped under lamps and signs and moved between taxis and buses. He felt his age again, a decay, a sense of internal slippage. And his memory was surely going. He’d forgotten to say to Andres at the last moment the words Vabadus Eestile – freedom for Estonia. But it was too late now even if the unspoken words seemed very important to him. He walked into the parking garage and took the stairs up to the second level, where he’d parked his Mercedes.

It was time to go home and wait.