Archangel (Mass Market Paperback)

by Robert Harris

  He stuffed the magazine back into the rack and returned to the window. It was her, all right, standing alone, in jeans and a fleece-lined leather jacket. His breath misted on the cold glass. Wait, he mouthed at her. She stared at him blankly. He pointed at her feet. Stay there.

  To get to her he had to walk away from her, following the line of the glass wall, trying to find an exit. The first set of doors was chained shut. The second opened. He came out into the cold and wet. She was standing about fifty yards 'away. He looked back at the crowded terminal - he couldn't see the others - and then at her, and now she was moving away from him, heading across a pedestrian crossing, heedless of the cars. He hesitated: what to do? A bus momentarily wiped her from view and that made his mind up for him. He hoisted his luggage and set off after her, breaking into a trot. She drew him on, always maintaining the same distance, until they were into the big outdoor car park, and then he lost her.

  Grey light, snow and frozen slush. The stink of fuel much sharper here. Row upon row of boxy cars, some muffled white, others thinly wrapped in a film of mud and grit. He walked on. The air shook. A big old Tupolev jet swept directly over his head, so low he could see the lines of rust where the plates of the fuselage were welded together. Instinctively, he ducked, just as a sandy-coloured Lada emerged slowly from the end of the line and stopped, its engine running.

  SHE didn't make it easy for him, even then. She didn't drive over to where he was; he had to walk to her. She didn't open the door; he had to do it. She didn't speak; it was left to him to break the silence. She didn't even tell him her name - not then, at least, although he discovered it later. She was called Zinaida. Zinaida Rapava.

  She knew what had happened, that was obvious by the strain on her face, and he felt guiltily relieved at that, because at least he wouldn't have to break the news. He had always been a coward when it came to breaking bad news - that was one reason he'd been married three times. He sat in the front passenger seat, his suitcase wedged across his knees. The heater was running. The windscreen wiper flicked intermittently across the dirty glass. He knew he would have to say something soon. Delta to New York was the one event of the symposium he had no intention of missing.

  'Tell me what I can do to help.'

  'Who killed him?'

  A man named Vladimir Mamantov. Ex-KGB. He knew of your father from the old time.

  'The old time,' she said, bitterly.

  Silence - long enough for the wiper to scrape back and forth, back and forth.

  'How did you know where to find me?'

  'Always, all my life: the old time.'

  Another Tupolev rumbled low overhead.

  'Listen,' he said, 'I've got to go in a minute. I've got to catch a plane to New York. When I get there, I'm going to write everything down - are you listening? I'll send you a copy. Tell me where to send it. You need anything, I'll help.'

  It was hard to move with his case on his lap. He unbuttoned his coat and reached awkwardly into his inside pocket for his pen. She wasn't listening to him. She was staring straight ahead, talking almost to herself

  'It'd been years since I saw him. Why would I want to? I hadn't been near that dump in eight years till you asked me to take you.' She turned to him for the first time. She had washed off her makeup. She looked younger, more pretty. Her leather jacket was old, brown, zipped tight to the neck. 'After I left you, I went home. Then I went back to his place again. I had to find out - you know - what was going on. Never saw 50 many cops in my life. You'd been taken away by then. I didn't say who I was. Not to the cops. I had to think things through. I -' She stopped. She seemed baffled, lost.

  'What's your name?' he said. 'Where can I reach you?'

  'Then, this morning, I went to the Ukraina. I rang you. Went up to your room. When they said you'd checked out I came here and waited.'

  'Can't you just tell me your name?' He looked at his watch, hopelessly. 'Only I've got to catch this plane, you see.

  'I don't ask favours,' she said fiercely. 'I never ask favours.' 'Listen, don't worry. I want to help. I feel responsible.' 'Then help me. He said you'd help me 'He?'

  'The thing is, mister, he's left me something.' Her leather jacket creaked as she unzipped it. She felt around inside and brought out a scrap of paper. 'Something worth a lot? In a toolbox? He says that you can tell me what it is.'

  THEY DROVE OUT of the airport perimeter onto the St Petersburg highway and turned south towards the city. A big truck overtook them, its wheels as high as their roof, rocking them in its wake, soaking them in a filthy spray.

  Kelso had promised himself he wouldn't look back, but of course he did - looked back and saw the terminal building, like a great grey ocean liner, sink out of sight behind a line of birch trees until only a few watery lights were visible, and then they disappeared.

  He winced and nearly asked the girl to take him back. He gave her a sideways glance. In her scuffed flying jacket she looked intrepid: an aviatrix at the controls of her battered plane.

  He said, 'Who's Sergo?'

  'My brother.' She glanced in the rear-view mirror. 'He's dead.'

  He turned the note over and read it again. Rough paper. Pencil scrawl. Written quickly. Stuffed under the door of her apartment, or so she said: she had found it when she got back after dropping Kelso outside her father's block.

  My little one, Greetings!

  I have been a bad one, you're right. All you said was right. So don't think I don't know it! But here is a chance to do some good. You wouldn't let me tell you yesterday, so listen now. Remember that place I used to have, when Mama was alive? It’s still there! And there's a toolbox with a present for you that’s worth a lot.

  Are you listening, Zinaida?

  Nothing will happen to me, but if it does - take the box and hide it safe. But it could be dangerous, so mind yourself You'll see what I mean.

  Destroy this note. I kiss my little one, Papa.

  - There's a Britisher called Kelso, get him through the Ukraina, he knows the story. Remember your papa!

  I kiss you again, Zinaida. Remember Sergo!!

  'So he came to see you - when was it? The day before yesterday?'

  She nodded, without looking round at him, concentrating on the road. 'It was the first time I'd seen him in nearly ten years.

  'You didn't get on, then?'

  'Oh, you're a smart one.' Her laugh was brief, sarcastic: a short expulsion of breath. 'No, we didn't get on.'

  He ignored her aggression. She was entitled to it. 'What was he like, the last time you saw him?'

  'Like?'

  'His mood.'

  A bastard. Same as always.' She frowned at the oncoming traffic. 'He must have been waiting for me all night, outside my place. I got back about six. I'd been at the club, you know, been working. The moment he saw me he started shouting. Saw my clothes. Called me a whore.' She shook her head at the memory.

  'Then what happened?'

  'He followed me in. Into my place. I said to him, I said:

  "You hit me, I'll take your fucking eye out, I'm not your little girl any more." That calmed him down.'

  'What did he want?'

  'To talk, he said. It was a shock after all that time. I didn't think he knew where I lived. I didn't even know he was still alive. Thought I'd got away from him for good. Oh, but he'd known, he said - known where I was for a long time. Said he used to come and watch me sometimes. He said, "You don't get away from the past that easily." Why did he come to see me?' She looked at Kelso for the first time since they'd left the airport. 'Can you tell me that?'

  'What did he want to talk about?'

  'I don't know. I wouldn't listen. I didn't want him in my place, looking at my things. I didn't want to hear his stories. He started going on about his time in the camps. I gave him some cigarettes to get rid of him and told him to go. I was tired and I'd got to go to work.'

  'Work?'

  'I work at GUM in the daytime. I learn law at college in the evenings. Some night
s, I screw. Why? Is it a problem?'

  'You lead a full life.'

  'I have to.

  He tried to picture her behind the counter at GUM. 'What do you sell?'

  'What?'

  At the store. What do you sell?'

  'Nothing.' She checked the mirror again. 'I work the switchboard.'

  Closer to the city, the road was clogged. They slowed to a crawl. There had been an accident up ahead. A rickety Skoda had run into the back of a big old Zhiguli. Broken glass and bits of metal were scattered across two lanes. The militia were on the scene. It looked as though one of the drivers had punched the other: he had splashes of blood on the front of his shirt. As they passed the policemen, Kelso turned his head away. The road cleared. They picked up speed.

  He tried to fit all this together: Papu Rapava's last two days on earth. Tuesday 27 October: he goes to see his daughter for the first time in a decade, because, he says, he wants to talk. She throws him out, buys him off with a pack of cigarettes and a book of matches labelled 'Robotnik'. In the afternoon, he turns up, of all places, at the Institute of Marxism- Leninism and listens to Fluke Kelso deliver a paper on Josef Stalin. Then he follows Kelso back to the Ukraina and sits up all night drinking. And talking. He certainly talked. Perhaps he told me what he would have told his daughter if she'd only listened.

  And then it's dawn and he leaves the Ukraina. This is now Wednesday 28 October. And what does he do after he's slipped away into the morning? Does he go to the deserted house on Vspolnyi Street and dig up the secret of his life? He must have done. And then he hides it, and he leaves a note for his daughter, telling her where to find it ('remember that place I used to have when Mama was alive?') and then, late in the afternoon, his killers come for him. And either he had told them everything, or he hadn't, and if he hadn't, then it must have been partly out of love, surely? To make certain that the only thing he had in the world that might be worth anything should go not to them but to his daughter.

  God, thought Kelso, what an ending. What a way to leave a life - and how in keeping with the rest of it.

  'He must have cared for you,' said Kelso. He wondered if she knew how the old man had died. If she didn't, he couldn't bring himself to tell her. 'He must have cared for you, to have come to find you.'

  'I don't think so. He used to hit me. And my mother. And my brother.' She glared at the oncoming traffic. 'He used to hit me when I was little. What does a child know?' She shook her head. 'I don't think so.'

  Kelso tried to imagine the four of them in the one-bedroom apartment. Where would her parents have slept? On a mattress in the sitting-room? And Rapava, after a decade and a half in Kolyma - violent, unstable, confined. It didn't bear contemplating.

  'When did your mother die?'

  'Do you ever stop asking questions, mister?'

  They came off the highway and down a slip road. Half of it had never been completed. One lane curved like a water-chute, ending abruptly in a row of dripping metal rods and a ten-yard drop to waste ground.

  'When I was eighteen, if that makes any difference.'

  The ugliness around them was heroic. In Russia it could afford to be - could afford to take its time, stretch out a bit. Minor roads ran as wide as motorways, with flooded potholes the size of ponds. Each concrete stack of apartments, each belching industrial plant had an entire wilderness to itself to pollute. Kelso remembered the night before - the endless run from Block Nine to Block Eight to raise the alarm: it had gone on and on, like a journey in a nightmare.

  Rapava's place in the daylight looked even more derelict than it had seemed in the darkness. Scorch marks shot up the wall from a set of windows on the second floor where an apartment had been torched. There was a crowd outside and Zinaida slowed so they could take a look.

  O'Brian was right. The word was out. That much was obvious. A solitary militia man blocked the doorway, holding at bay a dozen cameramen and reporters, who were themselves being watched by a straggling semi-circle of apathetic neighbours. Some kids kicked a ball on the waste ground. Others hung around the media's fancy western cars.

  'What was he to them?' Zinaida said suddenly. 'What was he to any of you? You're all vultures.'

  She gave a grimace of disgust, and for the third time Kelso noticed her adjusting the rear-view mirror.

  'Is someone behind us?' He turned round sharply. 'Maybe. A car from the airport. But not any more. "'What sort of a car?' He tried to keep his voice calm. A BMW. Seven series.

  'You know about cars?'

  'More questions?' She shot him another look. 'Cars were my father's interest. Cars and Comrade Stalin. He was a driver, wasn't he, for some big shot in the old days? You'll see.'

  She put her foot down.

  She knows nothing, thought Kelso. She has no idea of the risks. He began making promises to himself of what he would do: you take a quick look now to see if this toolbox is here (it wouldn't be) then ask her to take you back to the airport and see if you can talk your way on to the next flight out -Two minutes from Rapava's apartment they turned off the main street and on to a muddy track that led through a scrappy copse of birch to a field that had been divided into small-holdings. A pig snuffled in the earth in an enclosure made of old car doors tied together with wire. There were a few scrawny chickens, some frost-blasted vegetables. Children had made a snowman out of yesterday's fall. It had melted in the light rain and looked grotesque in the dirt, like a lump of white fat.

  Facing this rural scene was a row of lock-up garages. On the long flat roof sat the remains of half a dozen small cars -rusted red skeletons picked bare of windows, engines, tyres, upholstery. Zinaida switched off the engine and they climbed out into the mud. An old man leaned on his shovel and watched them. Zinaida stared him down, her hands on her hips. Eventually, he spat on the ground and returned to his digging.

  She had a key. Kelso looked back along the deserted track. His hands felt numb. He stuffed them into his coat pockets. She was the calm one. She was wearing a pair of knee-length leather boots and to avoid getting them dirty she stepped carefully across the lumpy ground. He looked around again. He didn't like it: the encroaching trees, the derelict cars, this bewildering woman with her kaleidoscope of roles - GUM telephonist, would-be lawyer, part-time hooker and now griefless daughter.

  He said, 'Where did you get the key?'

  'It was with the note.'

  'I don't understand why you didn't come here on your own straight away. Why do you need me?'

  'Because I don't know what I'm looking for, do I? Are you coming or not?' She was fitting the key into a big padlock on the nearest lock-up. 'What are we looking for, anyway?'

  'A notebook.'

  'What?' She stopped fiddling with the key and stared at him.

  A black oilskin notebook that used to belong to Josef Stalin.' He repeated the familiar phrase. It was becoming his mantra. (It wouldn't be here, he told himself again. It was the Holy Grail. The quest was all that mattered. It wasn't supposed to be found.)

  " 'Stalin's notebook? And what's that worth?'

  'Worth?' He tried to make it sound as if the question had never occurred to him. 'Worth?' he repeated. 'It's hard to put an exact figure on it. There are some rich collectors. It depends what's in it.' He spread his hands. 'Half a million, maybe.'

  'Roubles?'

  'Dollars.'

  'Dollars? Shit. Shit.' She resumed her efforts to undo the padlocks clumsy now with her eagerness.

  And suddenly, watching her, he caught her mood and then of course he knew why he had come. Because it was everything, really, wasn't it? It was much more than mere money. It was vindication. Vindication for twenty years of freezing his arse off in basement archives, and dragging himself to lectures in the winter dark - first to listen, then to give them - twenty years of teaching and faculty politics and trying to write books that mostly didn't sell and all the while hoping that one day he would produce something worthwhile - something true and big and definitive - a piece of history
that would explain why things had happened as they did

  'Here,' he said, almost pushing her out of the way, 'let me try.

  He jiggled the key in the lock. At last it turned and the arm sprang open. He pulled the chain through the heavy eyebolts.

  COLD, oily darkness. No window. No electricity. An ancient paraffin lamp hanging on a nail by the door.

  He took down the lamp and shook it - it was full - and she said she knew how to light it. She knelt on the earth floor and struck a match, applied itto the wick. A blue flame, then yellow. She held it up while he dragged the door shut behind them.

  The garage was a bone-yard of old spare parts, stacked around the walls. At the far end in the shadows was a row of car seats arranged to form a bed, with a sleeping bag and a blanket, neatly folded. Suspended from a beam in the roof was a block and tackle, a chain, a hook. Beneath the hook were floorboards forming a rectangle a yard and a half wide by two yards long.

  She said, 'He's had this place for as long as I've been alive. He used to sleep here, when things were bad.'

  'How bad did they get?'

  'Bad.'

  He took the lamp and walked around, shining it into the corners. There was nothing like a toolbox that he could see. On a work bench was a tin tray with a metal brush, some rods, a cylinder, a small coil of copper wire: what was all that? Fluke Kelso's ignorance of mechanics was deep and carefully maintained.

  'Did he have a car of his own?'

  'I don't know. He fixed them up for people. People gave him things.'

  He stopped next to the makeshift bed. Something glinted above it. He called to her, 'Look at this,' and raised the light to the wall. Stalin's sombre face gazed down at them from an old poster. There were a dozen more pictures of the General Secretary, torn from magazines. Stalin looking thoughtful behind a desk. Stalin in a fur hat. Stalin shaking hands with a general. Stalin, dead, lying in state.