Archangel

by Harris, Robert

  The worst that could be said about her was that she had, perhaps ‘a slightly dreamy temperament’ (Comrade Oborin) and ‘a certain tendency to subjectivity and bourgeois sentimentalism rather than objectivity in all her personal relations’ (Elena Satsanova). Against a further criticism from the same Comrade Satsanova, that she was ‘naïve,’ a marginal comment had been appended, in red pencil: ‘Good!’ and, later, ‘Who is this old bitch?’ There were numerous other underlinings, exclamation marks, queries and marginalia: ‘Ha ha ha’, ‘And so?’, ‘Acceptable!’

  Kelso had spent enough time in the archives to recognise this hand and style. The jagged scrawl was Stalin’s. There was no question of it.

  After half an hour he put the papers back in their original order and took off his gloves. His hands felt claw-like, raw and sweaty. He was suddenly overcome with self-disgust.

  Zinaida was watching him.

  ‘What do you think happened to her?’

  ‘Nothing good.’

  ‘He brought her down from the north to screw her?’

  ‘That’s one way of putting it.’

  ‘Poor kid.’

  ‘Poor kid,’ he agreed.

  ‘So why did he keep her book?’

  ‘Obsession? Infatuation?’ He shrugged. ‘Who’s to say. He was a sick man by then. He only had twenty months to live. Maybe she described what happened to her, then thought better of it, and tore out the pages. Or, more likely, he got hold of her book and ripped them out himself. He didn’t like people knowing too much about him.’

  ‘Well, I can tell you one thing: he didn’t screw her that night.’

  Kelso laughed. ‘And how do you know that?’

  ‘Easy. Look.’ She opened the notebook. ‘Here on the twelfth of May, she’s got “the usual trouble of this time”, right? On the tenth of June, on the train, it’s “the worst of days to travel”. Well, you can work it out for yourself, can’t you? There’s exactly twenty-eight days between the two. And twenty-eight days after the tenth of June is July the eighth. Which is the last entry.’

  Kelso stood slowly and went over to the desk. He peered over her shoulder at the childish writing.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘She was a regular girl. A regular little Komsomol girl.’

  Kelso absorbed this information, put the gloves back on, took the book from her, flicked between the two pages. Well, now, this was crazy, wasn’t it? This was sick. He could barely bring himself to acknowledge the suspicion that was forming in the back of his mind. But why else would Stalin have been so interested in whether or not she had had rubella, of all things? Or whether her family had any history of congenital disorders?

  ‘Tell me,’ he said, quietly, ‘when would she have been fertile?’

  ‘Fourteen days later. On the twenty-second.’

  AND suddenly she couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

  She pushed her chair back from the desk and stared at the notebook with revulsion.

  ‘Take the damned thing,’ she said. ‘Take it. Keep it.’

  She didn’t want to touch it again. She didn’t even want to see it.

  It was cursed.

  In a couple of seconds she had her bag over her shoulder and was flinging open the door and Kelso had to scramble to catch up with her as she strode across the office towards the elevators. O’Brian came out of an editing suite to see what was going on. He was in a heavy waterproof jacket with two pairs of binoculars slung around his thick neck. He started to follow them but Kelso waved him back.

  ‘I’ll handle this.’

  She was standing in the corridor, her back to him.

  ‘Listen Zinaida,’ he said. The lift door opened and he stepped in after her. ‘Listen. It’s not safe for you out there –’

  Almost immediately the car stopped and a man got in – heavy-set, middle-aged, black leather coat and a black leather cap. He stood between them, glanced at Zinaida, then at Kelso, sensing the edge to their silence. He looked straight ahead and stuck out his chin, smiling slightly. Kelso could tell what he was thinking: a lovers’ tiff – well, that was life, they’d get over it.

  When they reached the ground floor he stood back politely to let them out first and Zinaida clattered quickly across the marble in her knee-length boots. A security guard pressed a switch to unlock the doors.

  ‘You,’ she said, zipping up her jacket, ‘should worry about yourself.’

  It was just after four. People were beginning to leave from work. In the offices across the road Kelso could see the green glow of computer screens. A woman had shrunk herself into a doorway and was talking into a mobile phone. A motorcyclist went past, slowly.

  ‘Zinaida, listen.’ He grabbed her arm, stopping her from walking away. She wouldn’t look at him. He pulled her close to the wall. ‘Your father died badly, do you understand what I’m saying? The people who did it – Mamantov and his people – they’re after this notebook. They know there’s something important about it – don’t ask me how. If they realise your father had a daughter – and they’re bound to because Mamantov used to have access to his file – well, think about it. They’re going to come after you.’

  ‘And they killed him for that?’

  ‘They killed him because he wouldn’t tell them where it was. And he wouldn’t tell them where it was because he wanted you to have it.’

  ‘But it wasn’t worth dying for. The stupid old fool.’ She glared at him. Her eyes were wet for the first time that day. ‘Stupid stubborn old fool.’

  ‘Is there someone you can stay with? Family?’

  ‘My family are dead.’

  ‘A friend maybe?’

  ‘Friend? I’ve got this, remember?’ She lifted the flap of her bag, showing him her father’s pistol.

  Kelso said, as calmly as he could, ‘At least give me your address, Zinaida. Your phone number –’

  She looked at him suspiciously. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I feel responsible.’ He glanced around. This was madness, talking in the street. He felt in his pocket for a pen, couldn’t find any paper, tore the side off a pack of cigarettes. ‘Come on, write it for me. Quickly.’

  He thought she wouldn’t do it. She turned to go. But then, abruptly, she swung back and scribbled something down. She had a place near Izmaylovo Park, he saw, where the big flea market was.

  She didn’t say goodbye. She set off up the street, dodging the pedestrians, walking fast. He watched her, waiting to see if she might look back. But of course she didn’t. He knew she wouldn’t. She wasn’t the looking-back kind.

  Part Two

  Archangel

  ‘If you are afraid of wolves, keep out of the woods.’

  J. V. Stalin, 1936

  Chapter Sixteen

  BEFORE THEY COULD get out of Moscow they had to take on fuel – because, as O’Brian said, you never knew what kind of rusty, watered-down horse’s piss they might try to sell you once you got out of town. So they stopped at the new Nefto Agip on Prospekt Mira and O’Brian filled the Land Cruiser’s tank and four big jerrycans with forty gallons of high-octane, lead-free gasoline. Then he checked the tyres and the oil, and by the time they were back on the road the evening rush was in full and sluggish spate.

  It took them the best part of an hour to reach the outer ring, but there, at last, the traffic thinned, the monotonous apartment blocks and factory chimneys fell away, and suddenly they were out and free – into the flat open countryside, with its grey-green fields and giant pylons and a vast sky: a Kansas sky. It was more than ten years since Kelso had ventured north on the M8. Village churches, used as grain stores since the Revolution, were being restored, encased in web-works of wooden scaffolding. Near Dvoriki, a golden dome gathered the weak afternoon light and shone from the horizon like an autumn bonfire.

  O’Brian was in his element. ‘On the road,’ he would say occasionally, ‘and out of town – it’s great, isn’t it? Just great.’ He drove at a steady sixty-five miles an
hour, talking constantly, one hand on the wheel, the other beating time to a tape of thumping rock music.

  ‘Just great …’

  The satchel was on the back seat, wrapped in plastic. Heaped around it was an extravagant array of equipment and provisions: a couple of sleeping bags, thermal underwear (‘Got any thermals, Fluke? Gotta have those thermals!’), two waterproof and fur-lined jackets, rubber boots and army boots, ordinary binoculars, binoculars with night-imaging, a shovel, a compass, water bottles, water purification tablets, two six-packs of Budweiser, a box of Hershey chocolate bars, two vacuum flasks filled with coffee, pot noodles, a torch, a short-wave transistor radio, spare batteries, a travelling kettle that could be plugged into the car’s cigarette lighter – Kelso lost count after that.

  In the rear section of the Toyota were the jerrycans and four rigid cases stamped SNS, whose contents O’Brian described with professional relish: a miniaturised, digital camcorder; an Inmarsat satellite telephone; a laptop-sized DVC-PRO video editing machine; and something he called a Toko Video Store and Forward Unit. Total value of these four items: $120,000.

  ‘Ever hear of travelling light?’ asked Kelso.

  ‘Light?’ O’Brian grinned. ‘You can’t get any lighter. Give me four suitcases and I can do what it used to take six guys and a truckful of equipment to do. If there’s any excess baggage around here, my friend, it’s you.’

  ‘It wasn’t my idea to come.’

  But O’Brian wasn’t listening. Thanks to these four cases, he said, his beat was the world. African famines. The genocide in Rwanda. The bomb in the village in Northern Ireland that he’d actually filmed go off (he’d won an award for that one). The mass graves in Bosnia. The cruise missiles in Baghdad, trundling down the streets at roof-top level – left, then right, then right again, and which way, please, for the presidential palace? And then of course there was Chechnya. Now, the trouble with Chechnya –

  (You are a bird of ill-omen, thought Kelso. You circle the world and wherever you land there is famine and death and destruction: in an earlier and less credulous age, the local citizens would have gathered at the first sight of you and driven you off with stones –)

  – the trouble with Chechnya, O’Brian was saying, was that the sucker had ended just as he arrived, so he had pitched up in Moscow for a while. Now that was a scary town: ‘Give me Sarajevo any day.’

  ‘How long are you planning to stay in Moscow?’

  ‘Not long. Till the presidential elections. Should be fun, I reckon.’

  Fun?

  ‘And then where are you going?’

  ‘Who knows? Why d’you ask?’

  ‘I just want to make sure I’m nowhere around, that’s all.’

  O’Brian laughed and put his foot down. The speedometer flickered up towards seventy.

  THEY maintained this pace as the afternoon turned to dusk, O’Brian still prattling on. (Jesus, did the man never shut up?) At Rostov the road ran beside a great lake. Boats, moored and tarpaulined for the winter, lined a jetty, close to a row of shuttered, timbered buildings. Far out on the water Kelso could see a lone sailboat with a light at its stern. He watched it swing about in the wind and tack for the shore and he felt again the familiar depression of nightfall starting to creep over him.

  He could sense Stalin’s papers behind him now almost as a physical presence, as if the GenSec were in the car with them. He worried about Zinaida. He would have liked a drink, or a cigarette, come to that, but O’Brian had declared the Toyota a smoke-free zone.

  ‘You’re jumpy,’ said O’Brian, interrupting himself. ‘I can tell.’

  ‘Do you blame me?’

  ‘Why? Because of Mamantov?’ The reporter flicked his hand. ‘He doesn’t scare me.’

  ‘You didn’t see what he did to the old man.’

  ‘Yeah, well he wouldn’t do that to us. Not to a Brit and a Yank. He’s not completely nuts.’

  ‘Maybe not. But he might do it to Zinaida.’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry about Zinaida. Besides, she hasn’t got the stuff any more. We have.’

  ‘You’re a nice man, you know that? And what if they don’t believe her?’

  ‘I’m just saying you should quit bothering about Mamantov, that’s all. I’ve interviewed him a couple of times and I can tell you, he’s a busted flash. The man lives in the past. Like you.’

  ‘And you? You don’t live in the past, I suppose?’

  ‘Me? No way. Can’t afford to, in my job.’

  ‘Now let’s just analyse that,’ said Kelso, pleasantly. In his mind he was opening a drawer, selecting the sharpest knife he could find. ‘So all these places you’ve been boasting about for the past two hours – Africa, Bosnia, the Middle East, Northern Ireland – the past isn’t important there, is that what you’re saying? You think they’re all living in the present? They all just woke up one morning, saw you were there with your four little suitcases, and decided to have a war? It wasn’t happening till you arrived? “Gee, hey, look everyone, I’m R. J. O’Brian and I just discovered the fucking Balkans –”’

  ‘Okay,’ muttered O’Brian, ‘there’s no need to be offensive about it.’

  ‘Oh but there is.’ Kelso was warming up. ‘This is the great myth, you see, of our age. The great western myth. The arrogance of our time, personified – if you’ll excuse me for saying so – in you. That just because a place has a McDonalds and MTV and takes American Express it’s exactly the same as everywhere else – it doesn’t have a past any more, it’s Year Zero. But it’s not true.’

  ‘You think you’re better than me, don’t you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Smarter then?’

  ‘Not even that. Look. You say Moscow is a scary town. It is. Why? I’ll tell you. Because there’s no tradition of private property in Russia. First of all there were workers and peasants who had nothing and the nobility owned the country. Then there were workers and peasants with nothing and the Party owned the country. Now there are still workers and peasants with nothing and the country’s owned, as it’s always been owned, by whoever has the biggest fists. Unless you understand that, you can’t begin to understand Russia. You can’t make sense of the present unless a part of you lives in the past.’ Kelso sat back in his seat. ‘End of lecture.’

  And for half an hour, as O’Brian pondered this, there was blessed peace.

  THEY reached the big town of Yaroslavl just after nine and crossed the Volga. Kelso poured them each a cup of coffee. It slopped across his lap as they hit a rough patch of road. O’Brian drank as he drove. They ate chocolate. The headlights that had blazed towards them around the city gradually dwindled to the occasional flash.

  Kelso said, ‘Do you want me to take over?’

  O’Brian shook his head. ‘I’m fine. Let’s change at midnight. You should get some sleep.’

  They listened on the radio to the news at ten o’clock. The communists and the nationalists in the lower senate, the Duma, were using their majority to block the President’s latest measures: another political crisis threatened. The Moscow stock exchange was continuing its plunge. A secret report from the Interior Ministry to the President, warning of a danger of armed rebellion, had been leaked and printed in Aurora.

  Of Rapava, Mamantov or Stalin’s papers there was no mention.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be in Moscow, covering all this?’

  O’Brian snorted. ‘What? “New Political Crisis in Russia”? Give me a break. R. J. O’Brian won’t be on the hour every hour with that.’

  ‘But he will with this?’

  ‘“Stalin’s Secret Lover, Mystery Girl Revealed”? What do you think?’

  O’Brian switched off the radio.

  Kelso reached over to the back seat and dragged one of the sleeping bags into the front. He opened it out and wrapped it around him like a blanket, then pressed a button and his seat slowly reclined.

  He closed his eyes but he couldn’t sleep. Images of Stalin gradually invaded his mind. Stalin as an
old man. Stalin as glimpsed by Milovan Djilas after the war, leaning forward in his limousine while he was being driven back to Blizhny, turning on a little light in the panel in front of him to see the time on a pocket watch hanging there – ‘and I observed directly in front of me his already hunched back and the bony grey nape of his neck with its wrinkled skin above the stiff marshal’s collar …’ (Djilas thought Stalin was senile that night: cramming his mouth with food, losing the thread of his stories, making jokes about the Jews.)

  And Stalin, less than six months before he died, delivering his last, rambling speech to the Central Committee, describing how Lenin faced the crises of 1918 and repeating the same word over and over – ‘he thundered away in an incredibly difficult situation, he thundered on, fearing nothing, he just thundered away …’ – while the delegates sat stunned, transfixed.

  And Stalin, alone in his bedroom, at night, tearing pictures of children out of magazines and plastering them around his walls. And then Stalin making Anna Safanova dance for him –

  It was curious, but whenever Kelso tried to picture Anna Safanova dancing, the face he always gave her was that of Zinaida Rapava.

  Chapter Seventeen

  ZINAIDA RAPAVA WAS sitting in her parked car in Moscow in the darkness with her bag on her lap and her hands in that bag, feeling the outline of her father’s Makarov pistol.

  She had discovered that she could still strip and load it without looking at it – like riding a bicycle, it seemed: one of those childish accomplishments you never forgot. Release the spring at the bottom of the grip, pull out the magazine, squeeze in the bullets (six, seven, eight of them, smooth and cold to the touch), push the magazine back up, click, slide, then press the safety catch down to fire. There.

  Papa would have been proud of her. But then she always had been better at this game than Sergo. Guns made Sergo nervous. Which was a joke, seeing as he was the one who had to do military service.