Archangel (27 page)

K
ELSO
borrowed her tweezers to peel away the outer layer of paper. It came off like dead skin, flaking here and there, but cleanly enough for him to make out some of the words on the page underneath. It was a typed document, a surveillance report of some kind by the look of it, dated 24 May 1951, signed by Major I. T. Mekhlis of the NKVD.

... summary of finding to the 23rd instant ... Anna Mikhailovna Safanova, born 27
.
2.32 ... Maxim Gorky Academy... reputation (see attached). Health: good... diptheria, a
ged 8yrs. 3 mths.. . Rubella, l0yrs. 1 mth. . . No famil
y history of genetic disorder Party work: outstanding... Pioneers . . Komsomol .

Kelso peeled back more layers. Sometimes they came away
singly, sometimes fused in twos or threes. It was painstaking work. Through the glass partition he caught occasional glimpses of O'Brian, lugging suitcases across the outer office to the elevator doors, but he was too absorbed to pay much attention. What he was reading was as full a record of a nineteen-year-old girl's life as it was possible for a secret police force to compile. There was something almost pornographic about it. Here was an account of every childhood ailment, details of her blood group (0), the state of her teeth (excellent), her height and weight and hair-colour (light auburn), her physical aptitude ('in gymnastics she displays a particularly high aptitude . . .'), mental abilities ('overall, in the 90th percentile . . . '), ideological correctness ('the firmest grasp of Marxist theory . . .

interviews with her doctor, coach, teachers, Komsomol group leader, school
friends.

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 'na:ive,' a marginal comment had been appended, in red pencil: 'Good!' and, later, 'Who is this old bitch?' There were numerous other
underlining’s
, 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 fine
, 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
.

Parr Two

Archangel

'If you are afraid of wolves, keep out of the woods
.' J.
V
.
Stalin, 1936
.

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~ 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 jerry
cans 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 sto
nes
- 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 elec
tions. 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.