Mazurka by Campbell Armstrong Read Free Book Online Page B

of affairs that would doom the upstart brigade who ruled these days from the Kremlin. What Greshko desired was nothing less than a new Revolution, one that would replace the bastard liberalisation of the Politburo with an older, more reassuring socialism. What Greshko really wanted was yesterday.
    Epishev put a finger inside his mouth and finally located the sliver of apple that had been stuck between his back teeth for the past hour or so. He examined it on the tip of his finger. He had a way of staring at things that suggested the concentration of a coroner inspecting an unusual corpse. He wiped the pellet from his fingertip and sighed, looking out at the moon, which had a curiously hollow appearance, as if it were simply an empty sphere. And he had a sense of uneasiness for a moment, because he felt he’d become exactly the kind of person he’d spent most of his life hunting down and destroying. He had become an enemy of the State.
    But the uneasiness passed as quickly as it had come, and Epishev watched the fog return, spreading like acid across the face of the moon.
    When the nurse had gone Greshko lay alone in the darkened bedroom. On certain nights, his fiery pain was beyond any of the opiates the nurse administered. And then there were other nights – and this was one of them – when he felt free of the burden of his cancer. There was calm and stillness and even the prospect of a future to anticipate.
    He stared at the window. Outside, the night was completely quiet, and the quiet was that of his own death. But he could hold it at bay, he could keep it from entering this bedroom, he was too busy, too curious to die. Besides, his hatred would not allow him to expire. He needed only to live long enough to hear the noises of chaos and destruction. He needed only to live for five short days, if the Baltic scheme ran according to its own timetable. And Viktor would make sure that it did.
    He turned his thoughts to Epishev. A good man, a good Communist, if perhaps a little too ruminative at times. But there was also an element of brutality to Epishev and he’d go to the ends of the world for Vladimir Greshko. What more could you ask for?
    Epishev would probably use a Hungarian or West German passport and leave Eastern Europe through Berlin, perhaps passing himself off as a commercial traveller or, as he’d once done many years ago, as a piano tuner. A piano tuner! Sometimes Epishev could be inventive. And if that wasn’t always a desirable quality, there were times when it was admirable, especially when you combined it with a streak of ruthlessness and complete commitment to the class-struggle of Leninism – something Greshko himself had come long ago to regard with utter cynicism.
    More important than imagination, though, was the fact of Epishev’s bottomless loyalty, which Greshko had bought cheaply years ago with a simple lie about how Joe Stalin wanted to purge Viktor from the KGB and the Party. Stalin hadn’t been remotely interested in Epishev. Indeed, the old vozhd hadn’t even heard of the young man. But Greshko had dreamed up the fiction, thus presenting himself as Epishev’s saviour, as the man who had intervened personally on Epishev’s behalf. From that time on, Viktor had never questioned a single order issued by his deliverer. A lie, but justifiable within a system where power depended on a network of unquestioning loyalties you forged in any way you could.
    Greshko smiled. The idea of setting in motion events that would alter the self-destructive course of this great empire delighted him. He shut his eyes and stuck his hand out to touch the surface of the bedside telephone. He knew he hadn’t been given the privilege of a phone out of charity or kindness. He had a telephone for one reason only – so that his conversations could be eavesdropped, his intentions monitored. But Greshko also knew that only a token attempt was made to record his messages