Mazurka by Campbell Armstrong Read Free Book Online Page A

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