Archangel (31 page)

Shortly after eleven o'clock, Suvorin had gone home.

And at one twenty-five he got the call that told him she had been found.

'WHERE was she?'

'Sitting in her car,' said Bunin. 'Outside her father's place. We followed her from the club. Waited to see if she was meeting anyone, but nobody else showed, so we picked her up. She's been in a fight, I reckon.'

'Why?'

'Well, you'll see when you go up. Take a look at her hand.' They were standing, talking quietly, in the downstairs lobby of her apartment block, in the Zayauze district, a drab hinterland of eastern Moscow. She had a place close to the park - privatised, to judge by the neatness of its common parts; respectable. Suvorin wondered what the neighbours would think if they knew the girl on the third floor was a tart.

'Anything else?'

'The apartment's clean, and so's her car,' said Bunin. 'There's a bag of clothes in the back - jeans, T-shirt, pair of boots, knickers. But she's got a lot of money stashed up there. She doesn't know I found it yet.'

'How much?'

'Twenty, maybe thirty thousand dollars. Bound up tight in polythene and hidden in the lavatory cistern.'

'Where is it now?'

‘
I've got it.
’

'Let's have it.'

Bunin hesitated, then handed it over: a thick bundle, all hundreds. He looked at it hungrily. It would take him four or five years to make that much and Suvorin guessed he had probably been on the point of helping himself to a percentage. Maybe he already had. He stuffed it into his pocket. 'What's she like?'

'A hard bitch, major. You won't get a lot out of her.' He tapped the side of his head. 'She's cracked, I reckon.'

'Thank you, lieutenant, for that valuable psychological insight. You can wait down here.'

Suvorin climbed the stairs. On the landing of the second floor, a middle-aged woman with her hair in curlers stuck her head round her door.

'What's going on?'

'Nothing, madam. Routine inquiries. You're perfectly safe.' He carried on climbing. He had to make something of
this, he thought. He must. It was the only lead he had. Outside the girl's apartment he squared his shoulders, knocked politely on the open door and went inside. A militia man got to his feet.

'Thank you,' said Suvorin. 'Why don't you go down and keep the lieutenant company?'

He waited until the door had closed before he took a proper look at her. She had a grey woollen cardigan on over her dress and she was sitting in the only chair, her legs crossed, smoking. In a dish on the little table next to her were the stubbed remains of five cigarettes. The apartment consisted of only this one room but it was neat and nicely done, with plenty of evidence of money spent: a westernmade television with a satellite decoder, a video, a CD-player,
a rack of dresses, all black. A little kitchen was off in one corner. A door led to the bathroom. There was a couch that presumably folded into a bed. Bunin was right about her hand, he noticed. The fingers that held the cigarette had blood crusted under the nails. She saw him looking.

'I fell,' she said, and uncrossed her legs, displaying a scraped knee, torn tights. 'All right?'

'I'll sit down.' She didn't reply, so he sat down anyway, on the edge of the couch, moving a couple of toys out of the way, a soldier and a ballerina. 'You have children?' he asked.

No answer.

'I have children. Two boys.' He searched the room for some other point of contact, some way of opening, but there was no evidence of any personality anywhere: no photographs, no books apart from legal manuals, no ornaments or knick-knacks. There was a row of CDs, all western and all by artists he'd never heard of. It reminded him of one Yasenevo's safe houses - a place to spend a night in and then move on.

She said, Are you a cop? You don't look like a cop.

'No.'

'What are you, then?'

'I'm sorry about your father, Zinaida.'

'Thanks.'

'Tell me about your father.'

'What's to tell?'

'Did you get on with him?'

She looked away.

'Only I'm wondering, you see, why you didn't come forward when his body was discovered. You went to his apartment last night, didn't you, when the militia were there? And then you just drove away.

'I was upset.

'Naturally.' Suvorin smiled at her. 'Where's Fluke Kelso?' 'Who?'

Not bad, he thought: she didn't even flicker. But then she didn't know he had Kelso's statement.

'The man you drove to your father's apartment last night.' 'Kelso? Was that his name?'

'Oh you're a sharp one, Zinaida, aren't you? Sharp as a knife. So where have you been all day?'

'Driving around. Thinking.'

'Thinking about Stalin's notebook?'

'I don't know what you -'

'You've been with Kelso, haven't you?'

'No.'

'Where's Kelso? Where's the notebook?'

'Don't know what you're talking about. What d'you mean, anyway - you're not a cop? You got some papers that tell me who you are?'

'You spent the day with Kelso -'

'You've no right to be in my place without the proper papers. It says so in there.' She pointed to her legal books.

'Studying the law, Zinaida?' She was beginning to irritate him. 'You'll make a good lawyer.'

She seemed to find that funny: perhaps she had heard it before? He pulled out the bundle of dollars and that stopped her laughing. He thought she was going to faint.

'So what's the Federation statute on prostitution, Zinaida Rapava?' Her eyes on the money were like a mother's on her baby. 'You're the lawyer: you tell me. How many men in this little pile? A hundred? A hundred and fifty?' He flicked through the notes. 'Must be a hundred and fifty, surely -you're not getting any younger. But the others are, aren't
they? They're getting younger every day. You know, I think you might never make this much back.'

'Bastard -'

He weighed the dollars from hand to hand. 'Think about
it. A hundred and fifty men in return for telling me where I
can find one? A hundred and fifty for one. That's not such a
bad deal.'

'Bastard,' she said again, but with less conviction this time.

He leaned forward, soft-voiced, coaxing. 'Come on Zinaida: where's Fluke Kelso? It's important.'

And for a moment he thought she was going to tell him. But then her face hardened. 'You,' she said. 'I don't care who you are. There's more honesty in whoring.'

'Now that may be true,' conceded Suvorin. Suddenly, he threw her the money. It bounced off her lap and on to the floor between her legs. She didn't even bend to pick it up, just looked at him. And he felt a great sadness then: sad for himself, that it should have come to this, sitting on a tart's bed in the Zayauze district, trying to bribe her with her own money. And sad for her, because Bunin was right, she was cracked, and now he would have to break her.

IT NEVER SEEMED to
get properly light, even two hours after dawn. It was as if the day had given up on itself before it even started. The sky stayed grey and the long concrete ribbon of road that ran straight ahead of them dwindled into a damp murk. On either side of the highway lay a wrinkled dead land of rust-coloured swamps and sickly, yellowish plains - the sub-Arctic tundra - that turned in the middle distance to dense, dark green forests of pine and fir.

It started to snow.

There was a lot of military traffic on the road. They passed a long column of armoured cars with watery headlights and soon afterwards began to see evidence of human settlement

- shacks, barns, bits of agricultural machinery - even a collective farm with a broken hammer and sickle over the gate, and an old slogan: PRODUCTION IS VITAL FOR THE VICTORY OF SOCIALISM.

After a couple of miles the road crossed a railway line and a row of big chimneys appeared up ahead in the murk, gushing black soot into the snowy sky.

'That must be it,' said Kelso, looking up from the map. 'The M8 ends here, in the southern outskirts.'

'Shit,' said O'Brian.

'What?'

The reporter gestured with his chin. 'Road block.'

A hundred yards ahead a couple of GAl cops with lighted sticks and guns were waving down every vehicle to check the occupants' papers. O'Brian looked quickly in his mirror, but he couldn't reverse - there was too much traffic slowing
behind them. And concrete sleepers laid across the centre of the road made it impossible to perform a U-turn and join
the southbound carriageway. The
y were being forced into a single-lane queue.

'What did you call it?
' said Kelso. 'My visa? A detail
?'

O'Brian tapped his fingers on the top of the steering wheel.

'Is this check permanent, do you think, or just for us?'

Kelso could see a glass booth with a GAl man in it, reading a newspaper.

'I'd say permanent.

'Well, that's something.' O'Brian began rummaging in the glove compartment. 'Pull your hood up,' he said, 'and get that sleeping bag up over your face. Pretend to be asleep. I'll tell 'em you're my cameraman.' He hauled out a crumpled set of papers. 'You're Vukov, okay? Foma Vukov.'

'Foma Vukov? What kind of a name is that?'

'You want to go straight back to Moscow? Well, do you? I'd say you've got two seconds to make up your mind.'

'And how old is this Foma Vukov?'

'Twentysomething.' O'Brian reached behind him and grabbed the leather satchel. 'You got a better idea? Stick this under your seat.

Kelso hesitated, then wedged the satchel behind his legs. He lay back, drew up the sleeping bag and closed his eyes. Travelling without a visa was one crime. Travelling without a visa and using someone else's papers - that, he suspected, was quite another.

The car edged forwards, braked. He heard the engine switch off and then the hum of the driver's window being lowered. A blast of cold air. A gruff male voice said in Russian, 'Get out of the car please.'

The Toyota rocked as O'Brian clambered out.

With his heel, Kelso gently pushed at the satchel, jamming it further out of sight.

There was a second rush of cold as the rear door was lifted.

The sound of boxes being swung out, of catches snapping. Footsteps. A quiet conversation.

The door next to Kelso opened. He could hear the pattering of snowflakes, a man breathing. And then the door was closed - closed softly, with consideration, so as not to wake a sleeping passenger, and Kelso knew that he was safe.

He heard O'Brian load up the back and come round to the driver's seat. The engine started.

'It is surely most amazing,' said O'Brian, 'the effect of a hundred bucks on a cop who ain't been paid for six months.' He pulled the sleeping bag away from Kelso. 'This is your wake-up call, professor. Welcome to Archangel.'

THEY thumped across an iron bridge above the Northern Dvina. The river was wide, stained yellow by the tundra. Swollen currents rolled and flexed like muscles beneath its dirty skin. A couple of big black cargo barges, chained together, steamed north towards the White Sea. On the opposite bank, through the filter of snow and the spars of the bridge, they could see factory chimneys, cranes, apartment blocks, a big television tower with a winking red light.

As the vista broadened, even O'Brian's spirits seemed to fall. He called it a dump. He declared it a hole. He said it was the worst goddamn place he had ever seen.
A goods train clanked along the railroad track beside them. At the end of the bridge they turned left, towards what seemed to be the main part of the city. Everything had decayed. The fa~ades of the buildings were pitted and
peeling. Parts of the road had subsided. An ancient tram, in a brown and mustard livery, went rattling by, making a sound like a chain being dragged over cobbles. Pedestrians tilted drunkenly into the snow.

O'Brian drove slowly, shaking his head, and Kelso wondered what more he had been expecting. A press centre? A media hotel? They came out into the wide open space of a bus station. On the far side of it, on the waterfront, four giant Red Army men, cast in bronze, stood back to back, facing the four points of the compass, their rifles raised in triumph. At their feet, a pack of wild dogs scavenged among the trash. Nearby was a long, low building of white concrete and plate glass with a big sign: 'Harbour Master of Archangel'. If the city had a centre, this was probably it.

'Let's pull up over there,' suggested Kelso.

They cruised around the edge of the square and parked with their front bumper up close to the bent railings, looking directly out across the water. A husky watched them with detached interest, then brought its hind paw up to its neck and vigorously scratched its fleas. In the distance, through the snow, it was just possible to make out the flat shape of a tanker.

'You do realise,' said Kelso quietly, staring straight ahead across the water, 'that we are at the edge of the world? That at this point we are one hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle and there is nothing between us and the North Pole but sea and ice? You are aware of that?'