‘Now, I didn’t know this was going to happen, Fluke, I swear to you –’
‘What have you done?’
‘Nothing –’
‘What have you done?’
O’Brian flinched and muttered, ‘I filed the story.’
‘You what?’
‘I filed the story,’ he said, sounding more defiant now. ‘Yesterday, from the river bank, while you were talking to him in the hut. I cut the pictures to three minutes forty, laid a commentary, converted them to digital and sent them over the satellite. I nearly told you last night, but I didn’t want to upset you –’
‘Upset me?’
‘Come on, Fluke, for all I knew the story might not have gone through. Battery could’ve failed or something. Gear could’ve been shot up –’
Kelso was struggling to keep pace with all that was happening – the Russian on the train, the excitement, Mamantov. They still hadn’t left Vologda, he noticed.
‘These pictures – what time would they have been seen here?’
‘Maybe nine o’clock last night.’
‘And they would have run – what? Often? “On the hour, every hour”?’
‘I guess so.’
‘For eleven hours? And on other channels, too? Would they have sold them to the Russian networks?’
‘They’d’ve given them to the Russians, as long as they were credited. It’s good advertising, you know? CNN probably took them. Sky. BBC World –’
He couldn’t help looking pleased.
‘And you also used the interview with me, about the notebook?’
The hands came back up, defensively.
‘Now, I don’t know anything about that. I mean, okay, they had it, sure. I cut that and sent it back from Moscow before we left.’
‘You irresponsible bastard,’ said Kelso, slowly. ‘You do know Mamantov’s on the train?’
‘Yeah. I saw him just now.’ He glanced nervously at the window. ‘Wonder what he’s doing here?’
And there was something in the way he said this – a slight falseness of tone: a pretence at being offhand – that made Kelso freeze. After a long pause he said, quietly, ‘Did Mamantov put you up to this?’
O’Brian hesitated and Kelso was conscious of swaying slightly, like a boxer about to go down for the final time, or a drunk.
‘Christ almighty, you’ve set me up –’
‘No,’ said O’Brian, ‘that’s not true. Okay, I admit Mamantov called me up once – I told you we’d met a few times. But all of this – finding the notebook, coming up here – no: that was all us, I swear. You and me. I knew nothing about what we’d find.’
Kelso closed his eyes. It was a nightmare.
‘When did he call?’
‘At the very beginning. It was just a tip. He didn’t mention Stalin or anything else.’
‘The very beginning?’
‘The night before I showed up at the symposium. He said: “Go to the Institute of Marxism-Leninism with your camera, Mr O’Brian” – you know the way he talks – “find Dr Kelso, ask him if there is an announcement he wants to make.” That was all he said. He put the phone down on me. Anyway, his tips are always good, so I went. Jesus –’ he laughed ‘– why else d’you think I was there? To film a bunch of historians talking about the archives? Do me a favour!’
‘You irresponsible, duplicitous bloody bastard –’
Kelso took a step across the compartment and O’Brian backed away. But Kelso ignored him. He’d had a better idea. He dragged down his jacket from the luggage rack.
O’Brian said, ‘What’re you doing?’
‘What I would have done at the beginning, if I’d known the truth. I’m going to destroy that bloody notebook.’
He pulled the satchel out of the inside pocket.
‘But then you’ll ruin the whole thing,’ protested O’Brian. ‘No notebook – no proof – no story. We’ll look like complete assholes.’
‘Good.’
‘I’m not sure I can let you do that –’
‘Just try and bloody stop me –’
It was the shock of the blow as much as the force of it that felled him. The compartment turned upside down and he was lying on his back.
‘Don’t make me hit you again,’ begged O’Brian, looming over him. ‘Please, Fluke. I like you too much for that.’
He held out his hand, but Kelso rolled away. He couldn’t get his breath. His face was in the dust. Beneath his hands he could feel the heavy vibrations of the locomotive. He brought his fingers up to his mouth and touched his lip. It was bleeding slightly. He could taste salt. The big engine revved again, as if the driver was bored of waiting, but still the train didn’t move.
Chapter Thirty-three
IN MOSCOW, COLONEL Yuri Arsenyev, clumsily juggling technologies, had a telephone receiver wedged between his shoulder and his ear, and a television remote control in his plump hands. He pointed it at the big television screen in the corner of his office and tried hopelessly to raise the volume, boosting first the brightness and then the contrast before he was at last able to hear what Mamantov was saying.
‘… flew up here from Moscow the moment I heard the news. I am therefore boarding this train to offer my protection, and that of the Aurora movement, to this historic figure, and we defy the great fascist usurper in the Kremlin to try to prevent us from reaching together the once and future seat of Soviet power …’
The past twelve hours had already delivered a succession of unpleasant shocks to the chief of the RT Directorate, but this was the greatest. First, at eight o’clock the previous evening, there had been the anxious call reporting that Spetsnaz HQ had lost all communication with Suvorin and his unit in the forest. Then, an hour later, the first television pictures of the lunatic raving in his hut had begun to be broadcast (‘Such is the law of capitalism – to beat the backward and the weak. It is the jungle law of capitalism …’) Reports that the man had been seen on the Moscow sleeper had reached Yasenevo just before dawn and a scratch force of militia units and MVD had been assembled at Vologda to stop the train. And now this!
Well, to take a man off under cover of darkness in some piddling little halt like Konosha or Yertsevo – that was one thing. But to storm a train in daylight, in full view of the media, in a city as big as Vologda, with V. P. Mamantov and his Aurora thugs on hand to put up a fight – that was something else entirely.
Arsenyev had called the Kremlin.
He was therefore hearing Mamantov’s ponderous tones twice – once via the television in his own office and then again, a fraction later, coming down the telephone, filtered through the sound of an ailing man’s laboured breathing. In the background at the other end of the line someone was shouting, there were general sounds of panic and commotion. He heard the clink of a glass and a liquid being poured.
Oh, please, he thought. Not vodka, surely. Please. Not even him. Not this early in the morning –
On the screen, Mamantov had turned and was boarding the train. He waved at the cameras. The band was playing. People were applauding.
Holy mother –
Arsenyev could feel the lurching of his heart, the clenching of his bronchial tubes. Getting air into his lungs was like sucking mud through a straw.
He took a couple of squirts on his inhaler.
‘No,’ grunted the familiar voice in Arsenyev’s ear, and the line went dead.
‘No,’ wheezed Arsenyev, quickly, pointing at Vissari Netto.
‘No,’ said Netto, who was sitting on the sofa, also holding a telephone, patched through on a secure military circuit to the MVD commander in Vologda. ‘I repeat: no move to be made. Stand your men down. Let the train go.’
‘The right decision,’ said Arsenyev, replacing the receiver. ‘There could have been shooting. It wouldn’t have looked good.’
Looking good was all that mattered now.
For a while Arsenyev said nothing as he contemplated, with increasing unease, this final fork in his life�
�s road. One route, it seemed to him, took him to retirement, pension and a dacha; the other to almost certain dismissal, an official inquiry into illegal assassination attempts and, quite possibly, jail.
‘Abandon the whole operation,’ he said.
Netto’s pen began to move across his pad. Deep in their fleshy sockets, like a pair of berries in dough, Arsenyev’s little eyes blinked in alarm.
‘No, no, no, man! Don’t write any of this down! Just do it. Pull the surveillance off Mamantov’s apartment. Remove the protection from the girl. Abort the whole thing.’
‘And Archangel, colonel? We’ve still got a plane waiting up there for Major Suvorin.’
Arsenyev tugged at his thick neck for a few seconds. In his perennially fertile mind, the form of an unattributable briefing for the foreign media was already beginning to take shape: ‘reports of shooting in the Archangel forest … regrettable incident … rogue officer took matters into his own hands … disobeyed strict orders … tragic outcome … profound apologies …’
Poor Feliks, he thought.
‘Order it back to Moscow.’
IT was as if the train had been held in check too long, so that when the brakes were finally released it lunged forwards and then stopped abruptly, and O’Brian, like the clapper of a bell, was slammed into the front and back of the compartment. The satchel flew out of his hands.
Very slowly, creaking and protesting, and with the same infinitesimal speed as when they left Archangel, the locomotive began to haul them out of Vologda.
Kelso was still on the floor.
‘No notebook – no proof – no story –’
He dived for the satchel and scooped it in one hand, got the fingertips of his other up on to the door handle, and was attempting to rise when he felt O’Brian grab his legs and try to drag him back. The handle tipped, the door slid open and he flopped out on to the carpeted corridor, kicking backwards frantically with his heels at O’Brian’s head. He felt a satisfying contact of hard rubber on flesh and bone. There was a howl of pain. The boot came off and he left it behind like a lizard losing the tip of its tail. He limped away down the corridor on his stockinged foot.
The narrow passage was clogged with anxious ‘soft’ class passengers – ‘Did you hear?’ ‘Is it true?’ – and it was impossible to make quick progress. O’Brian was coming after him. He could hear his shouts. At the end of the carriage the window of the door was open and he briefly considered hurling the satchel out on to the tracks. But the train hadn’t cleared Vologda, was travelling much too slowly – the notebook was bound to land intact, he thought: was certain to be found –
‘Fluke!’
He ran into the next carriage and realised too late that he was heading back towards ‘hard’ again, which was a mistake because ‘hard’ was where Mamantov and his thugs had boarded – and here, indeed was one of Mamantov’s men, hastening down the corridor towards him, pushing people out of his way.
Kelso grabbed the door handle nearest him. It was locked. But the second handle turned and he almost fell into the empty compartment, locking the door after him. Inside it was shaded, the curtains closed, the berths unmade, a stale smell of cold, male sweat – whoever had occupied it must have got off at Vologda. He tried to open the window but it was stuck. The Aurora man was battering at the door, shouting at him to open up. The handle rattled furiously. Kelso unfastened the satchel and tipped out the contents and had his lighter in his hand as the lock gave way.
THE blinds of Zinaida Rapava’s apartment were drawn. The lights were off. The television screen flickered in the corner of her tiny flat like a cold blue hearth.
There had been a plainclothes guard outside on the landing all night – Bunin to start with, and then a different man – and a militia car parked ostentatiously opposite the entrance to the apartment block. It was Bunin who had told her to keep the blinds closed and not to go out. She didn’t like Bunin and she could tell he didn’t like her. When she asked him how long she would have to stay like this, he had shrugged. Was she a prisoner, then? He had shrugged again.
She had lain in a foetal curl on her bed for the best part of twenty hours, listening to her neighbours coming home from work, then some of them going out for the evening. Later, she heard them preparing for bed. And she had discovered, lying in the darkness, that as long as something occupied her eye, she could prevent herself seeing her father: she could block out the image of the broken figure on the trolley. So she had watched television all night. And at one point, hopping between a game show and a black-and-white American movie, she had lighted on the pictures from the forest.
‘… freedom alone is not enough, by far … It is very difficult, comrades, to live on freedom alone …’
She had watched, hypnotised, as the night went on, how the story had spread like a stain across the networks, until she could recite it by heart. There was her father’s lock-up, and the notebook, and Kelso turning the pages (‘it’s genuine – I’d stake my life on it’). There was the old woman pointing at a map. There was the strange man walking across the forest clearing and staring into the camera as he spoke. He ranted part of a hate-filled speech and that had nagged at her memory for a while in the early hours, until she remembered that her father had sometimes played a record of it when she was a child.
(‘You should listen to this, girl – you might learn something.’)
He was frightening, this man, comic and sinister – like Zhirinovsky, or Hitler – and when it was reported that he had been seen on the Moscow train, heading south, she felt almost as if he were coming for her. She could imagine him stamping down the halls of the big hotels, his boots hammering on the marble, his coat flying behind him, smashing the windows of the expensive boutiques, hurling the foreigners out on to the pavements, looking for her. She could see him in Robotnik, overturning the bar, calling the girls whores and shouting at them to cover themselves. He would paint out the western signs, shatter the neon, empty the streets, shut down the airport –
She knew they should have burned that notebook.
It was later, when she was in the bathroom, naked from the waist up, splashing cold water into her red eyes, that she heard from the television the name of Mamantov. And her first thought was, naïvely, that he had been arrested. After all, that was what Suvorin had promised her, wasn’t it?
‘We’re going to find the man who did this terrible thing to your father, and we’re going to lock him up.’
She grabbed a towel and darted back to the screen, hastily drying her face, and scrutinised him, and, oh yes, she knew it was him right enough, she could believe it of him – he looked a pitiless, cold bastard, with his wire-framed glasses and his thin, hard lips, and his Soviet-style hat and coat. He looked capable of anything.
He was saying something about ‘the fascist usurper in the Kremlin’ and it took her a minute to realise that actually he wasn’t being arrested. On the contrary: he was being treated with respect. He was moving towards the train. He was boarding it. Nobody was stopping him. She could even see a couple of militia men, watching him. He turned on the step to the carriage and raised his hand. Lights flickered. He flashed his hangman’s smile and disappeared inside.
Zinaida stared at the screen.
She searched through the pockets of her jacket until she found the telephone number Suvorin had given her.
It rang, unanswered.
She replaced the receiver calmly enough, wrapped the towel around her torso and unlocked her door.
Nobody was on the landing.
She went back into the flat and lifted the blind.
No sign of any militia car. Just the normal Saturday morning traffic beginning to build for the Izmaylovo market.
Afterwards, several witnesses came forward who claimed to have heard the sound of her cry, even above the noises of the busy street.
KELSO was overpowered with humiliating ease. He was pushed back on to the banquette, the satchel and the papers were taken from him, the doo
r was wedged shut, and the young man in the black leather jacket took the seat opposite him, stretching one leg across the narrow aisle to prevent his prisoner from moving.
He unzipped the jacket just far enough to show Kelso a shoulder holster, and Kelso recognised him then: Mamantov’s personal bodyguard from the Moscow apartment. He was a big, baby-faced lad, with a drooping left eyelid and a blubbery lower lip, and there was something about the way he let his boot rest against Kelso’s thigh, cramming him against the window, that suggested hurting people might be his pleasure in life: that he needed violence as a swimmer requires water.
Kelso remembered Papu Rapava’s slowly twisting body and began to sweat.
‘It’s Viktor, isn’t it?’
No reply.
‘How long am I supposed to stay here, Viktor?’
Again, no answer, and after a couple more half-hearted attempts to demand his release, Kelso gave up. He could hear the sound of boots in the corridor and he had the impression that the whole of the train was being secured.
After that, not much happened for several hours.
At 10.20 they stopped as scheduled at Danilov and more of Mamantov’s people poured aboard.
Kelso asked if he could at least go to the lavatory.
No answer.
Later, outside the city of Yaroslavl, they passed a derelict factory with a rusting Order of Lenin pinned to its windowless side. On its roof, a line of youths was silhouetted, their arms raised high in a fascist salute.
Viktor looked at Kelso and smiled, and Kelso looked away.
IN Moscow, Zinaida Rapava’s apartment was empty.
The Klims who lived in the flat beneath afterwards swore they had heard her go out soon after eleven. But old man Amosov, who was fixing his car in the street directly across from the block, insisted it was some time after that: more like noon, he thought. She went straight by him without uttering a word, which wasn’t unusual for her – she had her head down, he said, and was wearing dark glasses, a leather jacket, jeans and boots – and she was heading in the direction of the Semyonovskaya metro station.
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