Archangel

by Harris, Robert

  Interrogator: Describe what happened following your departure from J. V. Stalin’s dacha with the traitor Beria.

  Rapava: I have nothing to add to my previous statement.

  Interrogator: Describe what happened following your departure from J. V. Stalin’s dacha with the traitor Beria.

  Rapava: I have nothing to add to my previous statement.

  Interrogation of L. P. Beria

  8 July 1953 [Extract]

  Interrogator: When did you first become aware of the personal notebook belonging to J. V. Stalin?

  Beria: I refuse to answer any questions until I have been allowed to express myself before a full meeting of the Central Committee.

  Interrogator: Both Vlasik and Poskrebyshev have confirmed your interest in this notebook.

  Beria: The Central Committee is the proper forum in which all these matters should be addressed.

  Interrogator: You do not deny your interest in this notebook.

  Beria: The Central Committee is the proper forum.

  Highly Confidential

  30 November 1953

  To USSR Deputy Minister of State Security, A. A. Yepishev

  You are instructed to bring the investigation into the anti-Party criminal and traitor Beria to a rapid conclusion, and to move this matter to trial.

  Central Committee,

  Malenkov

  Khrushchev

  Interrogation of L. P. Beria

  2 December 1953 [Extract]

  Interrogator: We know that you took possession of the notebook of J. V. Stalin, yet you continue to deny this matter. What was your interest in this notebook?

  Beria: End it.

  Interrogator: What was your interest in this notebook?

  Beria: [The accused indicated by gesture his refusal to co-operate]

  Highly confidential

  23 December 1953

  To Central Committee, Comrades Malenkov, Khrushchev

  I beg to report that the sentence of death by shooting imposed on L. P. Beria was carried out today at 01:50.

  T. R. Falin,

  Procurator General

  27 December 1953

  Judgement of the People’s Special Court in the case of

  Lieutenant P. G. Rapava: 15 years’ penal servitude.

  SUVORIN couldn’t bear the filth of his hands any longer. He wandered the empty corridor until he found a toilet with a sink where he could wash himself down. He was still in there, trying to get the last of the dust out from under his fingernails, when his mobile phone rang. In the silence of the Lubyanka it made him jump.

  ‘Suvorin.’

  ‘It’s Netto. We’ve lost him. No. 3.’

  ‘Who? What’re you talking about?’

  ‘No. 3. The historian. He went in to eat with the others. He never came out. It looks as though he left through the kitchens.’

  Suvorin groaned, turned, leaned against the wall. This whole business was spinning out of control.

  ‘How long ago?’

  ‘About an hour. In defence of Bunin, he has been on duty for eighteen hours.’ A pause. ‘Major?’

  Suvorin had the phone wedged between his chin and shoulder. He was drying his hands, thinking. He didn’t blame Bunin, actually. To mount a decent surveillance took at least four watchers; six for safety.

  ‘I’m still here. Stand him down.’

  ‘Do you want me to tell the chief?’

  ‘I think not, don’t you? Not twice in one day. He might begin to think we’re incompetent.’ He licked his lips, tasting dust. ‘Why don’t you go home yourself, Vissari? We’ll meet in my office, eight tomorrow.’

  ‘Have you discovered anything?’

  ‘Only that when people go on about “the good old days” they’re talking shit.’

  He rinsed his mouth, spat, went back to work.

  BERIA was shot, Poskrebyshev released, Vlasik got a sentence of ten years, Rapava was sent to Kolyma, Yepishev was taken off the case, the investigation meandered on.

  Beria’s house was searched from attic to cellar and yielded no further evidence, apart from some pieces of human remains (female) that had been partially dissolved by acid and bricked up. He had his own private network of cells in the basement. The property was sealed. In 1956, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs asked the KGB if it had any suitable premises which might be offered as an embassy to the new Republic of Tunisia, and, after a final brief investigation, Vspolnyi Street was handed over.

  Vlasik was interrogated twice more about the notebook, but added nothing new. Poskrebyshev was watched, bugged, encouraged to write his memoirs and, when he had finished, the manuscript was seized ‘for permanent retention’. An extract, a single page, had been clipped to the file:

  What went through the mind of this incomparable genius in that final year, as he confronted the obvious fact of his own mortality, I do not know. Josef Vissarionovich may have confided his most private thoughts to a notebook, which rarely left his side during his final months of unstinting toil for his people and the cause of progressive humanity. Containing, as it may do, the distillation of his wisdom as the leading theoretician of Marxism–Leninism, it must be hoped that this remarkable document will one day be discovered and published for the benefit …

  Suvorin yawned, closed the bundle and put it to one side, grabbed another. This turned out to be the weekly reports of a Gulag stool-pigeon named Abidov, assigned to keep an eye on the prisoner Rapava during his time at the Butugychag uranium mine. There was nothing of interest in the smudged carbons, which ended abruptly with a laconic note from the camp KGB officer, recording Abidov’s death from a stab wound, and Rapava’s transfer to a forestry labour detail.

  More files, more stoolies, more of nothing. Papers authorising Rapava’s release at the conclusion of his sentence, reviewed by a special commission of the Second Chief Directorate – passed, stamped, authorised. Appropriate work selected for the returning prisoner at the Leningrad Station engine sheds; KGB informer-in-place: Antipin, foreman. Appropriate housing selected for the returning prisoner at the newly built Victory of the Revolution complex; KGB informer-in-place: Senka, building supervisor. More reports. Nothing. Case reviewed and classified as ‘diversion of resources’, 1975. Nothing on file until 1983, when Rapava was briefly re-examined at the request of the deputy chief of the Fifth Directorate (Ideology and Dissidents).

  Well, well …

  Suvorin pulled out his pipe and sucked at it, scratched his forehead with the stem, then went searching back through the files. How old was this fellow? Rapava, Rapava, Rapava – here it was, Papu Gerasimovich Rapava, born 9.9.27.

  Old, then – in his seventies. But not that old. Not so old that even in a country where the average male life expectancy was fifty-eight and falling – worse than it had been in Stalin’s time – not so old that he need necessarily be dead.

  He flipped back to the 1983 report, and scanned it. It told him nothing he didn’t know already. Oh, he was a tight one, this Rapava – not a word in thirty years. Only when he reached the bottom, and saw the recommendation to take no further action, and the name of the officer accepting this recommendation did he jolt up in his chair.

  He swore and fumbled for his mobile, tapped out the number of the SVR’s night duty officer and asked to be patched through to the home of Vissari Netto.

  Chapter Ten

  THEY SETTLED ON three hundred, and for that he insisted on two things: first, that she drove him there herself and, secondly, that she waited an hour. An address on its own would be useless at this time of night, and if Rapava’s neighbourhood was as rough as the old man had implied it was (‘it was a decent block in those days, boy, before the drugs and the crime …’) then no foreigner in his right mind would go stumbling around there alone.

  Her car was a battered, ancient Lada, sand-coloured, parked in the dark street that led to the stadium, and they walked to it in silence. She opened her door first and then reached across to let him in. There was a pile of books on
the passenger seat – legal textbooks, he noticed – and she moved them quickly into the back.

  He said, ‘Are you a lawyer? Are you studying the law?’

  ‘Three hundred dollars,’ she said, and held out her hand. ‘US.’

  ‘Later.’

  ‘Now.’

  ‘Half now,’ he said, cunningly, ‘half later.’

  ‘I can get another fuck, mister. Can you get another ride?’

  It was her longest speech of the night.

  ‘Okay, okay.’ He pulled out his wallet. ‘You’ll make a good lawyer.’ Jesus. Three hundred to her, after more than a hundred at the club – it just about cleaned him out. He had thought he might try offering the old man some cash, this evening, as a downpayment for the notebook, but that wouldn’t be possible now.

  She re-counted the notes, folded them carefully and put them away in her coat pocket. The little car rattled down to the Leningradskiy Prospekt. She made a right into the quiet traffic, then did a U-turn, and now they were heading out of the city, back past the deserted Dinamo stadium, north-west, towards the airport.

  She drove fast. He guessed she wanted to be rid of him. Who was she? The Lada’s interior offered him no clues. It was fastidiously clean, almost empty. He gave her profile a surreptitious look. Her face was tilted downwards slightly. She was scowling at the road. The black lips, the white cheeks, the small and delicately pointed ears below the lick of short black hair – she had a vampirish look: disturbing, he thought again. Disturbed. He still had the taste of her in his mouth and he couldn’t help wondering what the sex would have been like – she was so utterly out of reach now, yet fifteen minutes earlier she would have done whatever he asked.

  She glanced up at the mirror and caught him looking at her. ‘Cut that out.’

  He continued to stare anyway – more frankly now: he was making a point, he had paid for the ride – but then he felt cheap and turned away.

  The streets beyond the glass had become much darker. He didn’t know where they were. They had passed the Park of Friendship, he knew that, and passed a power station, a railway junction. Thick pipes carrying communal hot water ran beside the road, across the road, along the other side, steam leaking from their joints. Occasionally, in the patches of blackness, he could see the flames of bonfires and people moving around them. After another ten minutes, they turned off left into a street as wide and rough as a field, with scruffy birch trees on either side. They hit a pothole and the chassis cracked, scraped rock. She spun the wheel and they hit another. Orange lights beyond the trees dimly lit the gantries and stairwells of a giant housing complex.

  She had slowed the car now almost to walking pace. She stopped beside a broken-down wooden bus shelter.

  ‘That’s his place,’ she said. ‘Block number nine.’

  It was about a hundred yards away, across a snowy strip of waste ground.

  ‘You’ll wait here?’

  ‘Entrance D. Fifth floor. Apartment twelve.’

  ‘But you’ll wait?’

  ‘If you want.’

  ‘We did agree.’

  Kelso looked at his watch. It was twenty-five past one. Then he looked again at the apartment block, trying to think what he would say to Rapava, wondering what reception he would get.

  ‘So this is where you grew up?’

  She didn’t answer. She switched off the engine and turned up her collar, put her hands in her pockets, stared ahead. He sighed and got out of the car, walked around it. The powdery snow creaked as it compacted under his feet. He shivered and began to pick his way over the rough ground.

  He was about halfway across when he heard the grating of an ignition and an engine firing up. He swung round to see the Lada moving off slowly, lights doused. She hadn’t even bothered to wait until he was out of sight. Bitch. He began running towards her. He shouted – not loudly, and not in anger really: it was more a groan at his own stupidity. The little car was shuddering, stalling, and for a moment he thought he might catch up with it, but then it coughed, lurched, the lights came on and it accelerated away from him. He stood and watched it helplessly as it vanished into the labyrinth of concrete.

  He was alone. Not a soul in view.

  He turned and began quickly retracing his steps, crunching across the snow towards the building. He felt vulnerable in the open and panic sharpened his senses. Somewhere to his left, he could hear the bark of a dog and a baby’s cry, and ahead of him there was music – it was faint, there was scarcely more than a thread of it, but it was coming from Block Nine and it was getting louder with each step. His eyes were making out details now – the ribbed concrete, the shadowed doorways, the stacked balconies crammed with junk: bed frames, bike frames, old tyres, dead plants; three windows were lit, the rest in darkness.

  At Entrance D something crunched beneath his foot and he bent to pick it up, then dropped it, fast. A hypodermic syringe.

  The stairwell was a sump of piss and vomit, stained newsprint, limp condoms, dead leaves. He covered his nose with the back of his hand. There was an elevator, and it might have been working – a Moscow miracle that would have been – but he didn’t propose to try. He climbed the stairs, and by the time he reached the third floor he could hear the music much more clearly. Someone was playing the old Soviet national anthem – the old old anthem, that was – the one they used to sing before Khrushchev had it censored. ‘Party of Lenin!’ shouted the chorus. ‘Party of Stalin!’ Kelso took the last two flights more quickly, with a sudden rush of hope. She hadn’t entirely tricked him, then, for who else but Papu Rapava would be playing the greatest hits of Josef Stalin at half-past one in the morning?

  He came out on to the fifth floor and followed the noise along the dingy passage to number twelve. The block was largely derelict. Most of the doors were boarded over, but not Rapava’s. Oh no, boy. Rapava’s door wasn’t boarded over. Rapava’s door was open and outside it, for reasons Kelso couldn’t begin to fathom, there were feathers on the floor.

  The music stopped.

  COME on then, boy. What’re you waiting for? What’s up? Don’t tell me you haven’t the balls –

  For several seconds, Kelso stood on the threshold, listening.

  Suddenly there was a drumroll.

  The anthem began again.

  Cautiously, he pushed at the door. It was partially open, but it wouldn’t go back any further. There was something behind it, blocking it.

  He squeezed around the edge. The lights were on.

  Dear God –

  Thought you’d be impressed, boy! Thought you’d be surprised! If you’re going to get fucked over, you might as well get fucked over by professionals, eh?

  At Kelso’s feet were more feathers, leaking from a cushion that had been disemboweled. These feathers could not be said to be on the floor, however, because there was no floor. The boards were all prised up and stacked around the edges of the room. Strewn across the rib-cage of the joists were the remains of Rapava’s few possessions – books with splayed and shattered spines, punched-through pictures, the skeletons of chairs, an exploded television, a table with its legs in the air, bits of crockery, shards of glass, shredded fabric. The interior walls had been skinned to expose the cavities. The exterior walls were bruised and dented, apparently by a sledgehammer. Much of the ceiling was hanging down. Plaster dust frosted the room.

  Balanced in the centre of this chaos, amid a black and jagged pool of broken records, was a bulky 1970s Telefunken record player, set to automatic replay.

  Party of Lenin!

  Party of Stalin!

  Kelso stepped carefully from rib to rib and lifted the needle.

  In the silence: the dripping of a broken tap.

  The extent of the destruction was so overwhelming, so utterly beyond anything he had ever seen, that once he was satisfied the apartment was empty, it barely occurred to him that he ought to be scared. Not at first. He peered around him, baffled.

  So where am I, boy? That’s the question. What
have they done with poor old Papu? Come on then, come and get me. Chop, chop, comrade – we haven’t got all night!

  Kelso, wobbling, tightrope-walked along a joist, into the kitchen alcove: slashed packets, upended ice-box, wrenched-down cupboards …

  He edged backwards and round the corner into a little passage, scrabbling at the broken wall to stop himself from slipping.

  Two doors here, boy – right and left. You take your pick.

  He swayed, indecisive, then reached out a hand.

  The first – a bedroom.

  Now you’re getting warm, boy. By the way: did you want to fuck my daughter?

  Slashed mattress. Slashed pillow. Overturned bed. Empty drawers. Small and tatty nylon carpet, rolled and stacked. Clumps of plaster everywhere. Floor up. Ceiling down.

  Kelso back in the passage, breathing hard, balanced on a rib, summoning the nerve.

  The second door –

  Very warm now, boy!

  – the second door: the bathroom. Cistern lid off, propped against the toilet. Sink dragged away from the wall. A white plastic tub brimming with pinkish water that made Kelso think of diluted Georgian wine. He dipped his finger in and pulled it out sharply, shocked at the coldness, his fingertip sheathed in red.

  Floating on the surface: a ring of hair still attached to a small flap of skin.

  Let’s go, boy.

  Rib to rib, plaster dust in his hair, on his hands, all over his coat, his shoes –

  He stumbled in his panic, lost his footing on the beam, and his left shoe punched a hole into the ceiling of the flat beneath. A piece of debris detached itself. He heard it fall into the darkness of the empty apartment. It took him half a minute and both hands to pull his foot free, and then he was out of there.

  He squashed himself around the door and into the corridor and moved quickly back along the passage, past the abandoned apartments, towards the stairs. He heard a thump.

  He stopped and listened.

  Thump.

  Oh, you’re hot, now, boy, you’re very, very hot …

  It was the elevator. It was someone inside the elevator.

  Thump.

  *