Jigsaw (53 page)

The girl glanced at him. ‘I want you to know how I got involved with Barron.'

Pagan said nothing. He made an indifferent gesture with his hands. He didn't care.

She didn't speak again for a few miles and then it was as if she were addressing herself. ‘It seems sometimes that I've known him for ever. He used to come regularly to our house in upstate New York. He'd lock himself away with my father for hours. I was just a kid, what did I know? Two grown-ups discussing business, that's all. When business was over he was … playful, I guess is the word. He liked games. Croquet. Checkers. He taught me chess moves. Whenever he came to visit, he brought presents.'

‘Good old Uncle Tobias,' said Pagan wearily.

Undeterred by his tone, the girl continued. ‘I went away to boarding-school for a while. During summer vacations, I'd go visit him in Coral Gables. He always had time for me. He'd drive me round in this big convertible he had. Take me to restaurants. I was maybe thirteen, fourteen, and he treated me like an adult. He was never anything but kind to me …'

Pagan didn't want to hear any more recollections of Uncle Tobias. ‘Very nice,' he said. ‘I'm happy for you. I'm delighted you've got all these lovely memories to sift. Long sunshine days in Florida. Teaching you chess. Open-air restaurants. Very nice.'

She glanced at him and he looked away. He said, ‘And the sweet little girl grows up to be a potential killer. Uncle Tobias was a terrific influence. A real role model.'

‘I made my own decisions, Pagan. He didn't force me into anything.'

‘He approached you with a proposition. Get me the dirt on Pagan and don't worry if you have to sleep with him to do so – it's all part of the ongoing struggle for justice. He pimped for you and you cruised along with it. Then there's another proposition. Something new. Something different.
Katherine, my dear, I'm afraid you're going to have to kill Pagan. You don't mind, do you, Katherine?
Or did he call you Kate?'

‘I'm trying to explain,' she said.

‘And I'm wondering why you feel this burning need. I don't give a shit—'

‘I don't believe what you said about Barron, Pagan. That's why. What you tell me doesn't square with what I know about him.'

‘You're trying to defend a man who orders you to shoot me? You're trying to tell me he's basically good, is that it? Sorry if I'm not buying, love.'

There was anger in the girl's voice. ‘Look. He was kind to me, goddamit. After my father died … shit, I couldn't begin to tell you. You wouldn't listen anyway.'

‘You've got that right,' he said.

She tightened her hands on the wheel, accelerated, overtook a convoy of cumbersome trucks in a reckless way. Then she braked slightly as if her anger had dissipated. ‘Your perspective is just so goddam narrow, Pagan. You've been chasing terrorists for so long it's warped your judgement. You see things that aren't there. You impute motives to people who don't deserve to be maligned. This Carlotta, this bomb on the Underground, you've got that all wrong when you blame Barron. OK, he wanted
you
out of the way, but he'd have a sound reason, because he wouldn't order death unless it was necessary, and even then he'd be unhappy about it, it would make him miserable—'

‘Mr Conscience,' Pagan remarked. ‘Even as he tells you to off me, he's wringing his hands and blowing his nose into a hanky and his eyes are watering.'

‘You're a shit,' she said.

‘When it comes to people like you and Barron, I'm more than a shit. I'm a monster.'

‘You could never understand the part he played in my life.' The girl stared at him a second before returning her eyes to the road. ‘I was fifteen when I understood that Barron was helping the Cause. I knew about my father's involvement before that – how could I not have known? It was all around me. You were right about that much at least. When he died, I went to live in Barron's house in Florida for a time. When I was seventeen, and pretty damn bitter about the way both my father and brother had been killed, Barron asked me to run an errand for him. A simple thing, really. I was to deliver an envelope from Belfast to New York. I jumped at the chance. I didn't know what it contained, I didn't care. I assumed it was money, a cheque maybe, I don't know. All I knew was I was making a contribution … And it excited me, Pagan. I was doing something
real.
'

Pagan said, ‘And one simple errand leads to another. Then another. By which time you're ready for your first big assignment – namely, Frank Pagan.'

She nodded her head. ‘I was happy to be asked. Do you understand that? It meant I'd grown up, I was to be trusted, Barron needed me for something important. I knew your name, of course. I knew about you and Patrick. I wanted the job, Pagan. And when it came down to killing you, I wanted that as well.'

Pagan stretched his legs, felt his neck throb, tried to adjust his position in such a way that the friction of collar against burn would be alleviated. He stared from the window, seeing apartment buildings and an industrial estate. Somewhere a bonfire was burning and ragged red cinders rose into the sky. Beyond, over the Golfe du Lion, the sun was cloudy, a forlorn old biddy of the sky.

‘Now you're trying to convince me Barron's a liar,' she said. ‘And I'm not ready to accept that. Not on your word alone, Pagan. No way. What are you running on anyway except some wild stories, some flight of goddam fancy?'

Pagan glanced at her profile and felt a slight sadness. She was lost to him – or at least his ideal of her was lost. An evaporation had taken place, a vanishing. But it was unproductive to think about that; the road led nowhere. She came into your life, she went out of it again, and amen. Sadness was irrelevant. He had to put himself in a place beyond feeling. Cold storage.

At Marseille Airport, she parked the car. Pagan stuck her gun with the silencer in the glove compartment. They went inside the terminal building, walked to the Air France desk. When he stated his destination the putty-faced woman behind the console looked at him in a surprised way. ‘I'm afraid there's no direct connection, sir,' she said. ‘You need to go through Rome.'

‘What about another airline then? What about Alitalia?' he asked.

The woman patiently punched her keyboard. ‘Alitalia has no direct flight either. You would have to fly through Milan on that airline. Sorry.'

Sorry
. Pagan realized he'd fallen into a trap of assumptions. He'd come to Marseille because he'd assumed, wrongly, that a direct flight to Venice would be instantly available, he'd buy a ticket, flash a passport – presto, a window seat, coffee, a quick flight.

‘What's the earliest connection we could make?' he asked.

‘For Rome, nine twenty-five. You'd arrive there at ten forty-five. That would get you to Venice at fourteen twenty-five.' The woman tugged at her eyelashes, one of which came off on the tip of her finger like the leg of a spider.

‘OK,' Pagan said. ‘We'll go through Rome.'

He watched as she tapped her keyboard. The printer, whirring into life, issued two tickets. He paid with his credit card, stuck the tickets in his pocket, then, followed by the girl, wandered round the terminal. It was eight-thirty according to the departure screens. A brief time to kill. He got some coffee from a machine, thought about smoking, changed his mind.

He looked in the window of a shop selling souvenirs of France, jars of Dijon mustard, baguettes, wines. He perceived his own reflection in glass. He looked pallid, worn down. In the same window the girl seemed like a ghostly shadow standing just behind him. It was, he thought, an appropriate little cameo – a faded snapshot, a creased item you carried in the back of your wallet.

He sat down, finished his coffee. The girl sat alongside him. Pagan crushed his cardboard cup, dropped it in a waste bin. He gazed at the information screens, pondered faraway destinations.

‘When we get to Venice, what then?' she asked.

‘We go to Barron's.'

‘Together?'

‘You step inside – I'll be right behind you, armed and ready. He's expecting you. I'll be the surprise.'

‘Just like that?'

‘Yes.'

‘I don't like it.'

‘Why? Do you feel you're betraying Barron? Is that what you feel?'

‘Maybe.'

‘My heart aches,' he said.

She pressed her hands between her knees and looked at the floor and was silent a long time. When she spoke her voice was quiet. ‘In a strange kind of way I'm sorry we—'

‘I don't want to hear it,' Pagan said. ‘You have any regrets, keep them to yourself. Spare me.'

She raised her face, looked into his eyes. She said nothing. Restless, he got up, moved around the terminal. The girl followed him a few yards behind. His attention drifted to the doorway of a news-stand, where there was a rack of the morning's papers. The headlines concerned the devastation that had taken place in Prague, the assassination of Svobodin and several of his ministers inside the Castle. A picture showed smoke rising from the building.

Pagan, tired of bombs and destruction, weary of hatreds, allowed his eye to wander across the front pages of various newspapers – Italian, French, English. There were photographs of Vladimir Gurenko, looking small and startled, perhaps even vaguely deranged, by the flashbulbs of cameras. Three separate photographs – Gurenko shaking hands with the British Prime Minister, Gurenko in the presence of the French President.

And the third – Gurenko being greeted by Ambassador William Caan on the steps of the US Embassy in London. Caan looked positively beatific, glowing in the Russian's presence. Gurenko wore a stressed-out laboured smile, that of a man obliged to carry on his back the burden of a nation splintered by factions.

Pagan stared at the Ambassador's handsome face, then lowered his eyes and glanced at the text accompanying the pictures. The words he read caused a darkness to stir at the back of his brain. He'd been too preoccupied with the tunnel, and with Brennan Carberry, and Streik, and Carlotta, to pay anything but the most superficial attention to what was going on in the wider world around him. He'd been drawn so far down into his own depths that the movement of politicians was remote from him, like an ancient clock he heard from time to time ticking asthmatically in a distant room.

Caan greets Gurenko.

Gurenko, according to the text, is on his way to meet the Italian Prime Minister in Venice.
A lover of art, the President will also visit the Scuola Grande di San Rocco …

Venice. Wintry Venice.

Where Tobias Barron resides …

Where Carlotta may be …

He seized a newspaper from the rack and gazed at the photographs and he had the curious sense he was in some way seeing
beyond
them, he was looking into another dimension, as if what he held in his hand was not a record of the recent past but an insight – slim and tenuous – into the future.

The girl stood behind him, looking over his shoulder. ‘What's wrong?' she asked.

He wondered what his expression revealed. He stuffed the newspaper back in the rack. ‘I hope it's me,' he replied.

THIRTY-FIVE

VENICE

S
HE WALKED QUICKLY THROUGH THE NARROW STREETS
. H
ERE AND
there flags fluttered. Festive Venice: the city was welcoming the President of Russia. The wind in the shiny plastic bunting made whiplike sounds as if the air were filled with birds of prey. Sunlight in the squares, fat women strutting in fur coats, kids running back and forth. Happily ever after was what Barron had said. What did he see in the future for them? Some Caribbean island where they'd grow ancient together? Walks along glistening beaches? Meals eaten on stuccoed terraces?

That wasn't happiness, not for her. That was boredom. Barron's little world.

She was happy right now, happy
doing what she was doing
, she was vibrant with the idea of death. Her blood rushed. She was electric, on fire, it seemed to her that anyone looking at her would see around her an aura of flame, a burning in the depths of her eyes. Barron could never begin to understand her, Barron was weak when you got right down to the place where he lived. What could he offer her in the future?

She crossed a small bridge, heard the click of her own urgent footsteps. When she reached the Rialto she barely noticed the shoppers perusing the silk scarves and T-shirts and costume jewellery on display. These things belonged in another world, one that didn't have anything to do with Alyssia Baranova from Smolensk. She was a tourist in this place, a stranger, she was merely passing through. She turned her face up, looked at the sun, blinked.

On the other bank of the Grand Canal she found herself moving in the shade of an alley, passing cafés, conscious of voices raised in small talk. Alyssia Baranova wouldn't understand Italian. She wouldn't know how to go inside a café and order a drink except by pointing to a menu and nodding her head in the silly apologetic way tourists had. She might be thinking of her father, the engineer, and wondering how he was surviving the ravages of winter in Russia. Or her mother, her careworn mother with the grooved forehead and the intricate network of wrinkles round her lips and the hands that were chapped and cracked by the cruelty of the season. Alyssia Baranova might stop and pick out a picture postcard and pay for it in the clumsy manner of foreigners who don't understand currency. Yes, these were the things Alyssia would do.

She emerged from the alley into the direct white flash of sunlight falling on a small square. The Scuola wasn't far away. She looked up, saw banners being shifted by the wind. She was aware of policemen now, scores of them, and soldiers standing idly round in groups with their automatic rifles held lazily against their bodies. Certain alleyways had been cordoned off. Venice, vigilant host, protector of the man called Gurenko. She smelled all around her the inherent decay of the city, the odour of canals, the creeping damp of old stone lapped for centuries by water.