Mazurka by Campbell Armstrong

bed.”
    â€œWhich will make you popular,” Pagan remarked.
    â€œI’m more interested in answers than winning any popularity contest, Frank,” and Gunther smiled again, the very essence of Anglo-American friendship.
    Pagan walked down the steps away from the Embassy, crossed Grosvenor Square, searched the traffic for a taxi. When he reached the other side of the Square he looked back at the darkened Embassy and saw Theodore Gunther go inside the building, the glass doors swinging shut behind him.
    Moments later, just as Pagan successfully hailed a cab and was about to step into it, a light went on in a second-floor window. Pagan glanced up and saw Gunther’s silhouette pass briefly in front of the glass.
    Panicked, Jacob Kiviranna woke in the dark holding-cell, his body drenched in sweat, yet he was cold and his teeth rattled together and he couldn’t keep his hands still. He sat on the edge of his bunk, his blanket wrapped round his body. He was afraid, more afraid than he could remember having been in his life before. Was it this sense of terror that made him so fucking cold? He wished he had more downers because the first one had worn off and now he was frazzled and disoriented and it was only with a great effort that he could remember where he was.
    He shut his eyes and rocked his body back and forth and remembered the face of the old guy who’d given him the key to the luggage locker and the airline ticket and an envelope that contained five hundred dollars for expenses. He remembered the tiny glasses the guy wore, and the way they were perched on the end of his long nose, and how frayed the cuffs of his jacket were – but that was all he could bring to mind. And when the cop called Pagan came back in the morning to ask for the old guy’s name, he wasn’t going to believe it when Kiviranna told him once again that he didn’t know it, that he’d never known it, never asked. He could point out the places where he’d met the old guy, he could take him to the boardwalk or show him the apartment building in Manhattan where the guy lived or where they’d walked at Coney Island, or even his own coldwater apartment in the Village where the old guy had come one time. But when it came to a name, forget it. There were some situations when you just didn’t want to know names, when secrecy was everything.
    And Pagan wasn’t going to believe that.
    Without batting a fucking eyelid, Pagan would turn him over to the Russians. And the Russians would stick him on board an Aeroflot flight to Moscow, and that would be the end of it. Kiviranna opened his eyes and looked around the dark little cell, vaguely making out the door, the unlit lightbulb overhead. There was no way he was going to Russia. Under no circumstances. Never. What they’d do to him over there – they’d interrogate him and beat him and then finally prop him up against a stone wall and shoot him. His perceptions of the Soviets had been shaped by stories he’d heard from older relatives in the USA, men and women who’d survived Stalin’s various holocausts and who remembered wholesale executions and famine and even rumours of cannibalism during the 1930s and who told horror stories about how, to this very day, immigrants sometimes disappeared from their homes in New York City and were smuggled back to Russia by the KGB. And they were never heard from again.
    He got to his feet and, still draped in the blanket, wandered up and down the cell. In the corner of the room was a porcelain washbasin and a paper-towel holder. Kiviranna ran the hot water faucet until it scalded his palms. That was one kind of pain, and he could just about stand it, but he knew the Soviets had ways of inflicting unthinkable agonies. No, he wasn’t going to Russia to be executed for the murder of Romanenko – which wasn’t murder at all, but a justifiable act, a moral act. That’s what the old guy