Archangel (39 page)

'He led me on, Fluke, you know that, don't you? Led me right into his fucking trap. He's probably out there now, watching us.'

He was getting his strength back, his recovery speeded by fear.

He hobbled a few steps. When he tried to put his left leg down properly he winced. But he could move it, that was something. It definitely wasn't broken.

'We gotta go. We gotta get out of here.' He bent awkwardly and closed the catches on the camera case.

Kelso needed no persuading. But they would have to go carefully, he said. They had to think. They had blundered into two of his traps already - one on the track and one here
- and who could guess how many more there might be. In this snow it was so damned hard to see.

'Maybe,' said Kelso, 'if we try to follow my footprints -'But his tracks were already beginning to be lost beneath the ceaseless soft downpour.

'Who is he, Fluke?' whispered O'Brian, as they went back into the trees. 'I mean, what is he? What is he so goddamned scared of?'

He's his father's son, thought Kelso, that's who he is. He's a forty~fiveyearold paranoid psychopath, if such a thing is possible.

'Oh man,' said O'Brian, 'what was that?'

Kelso stopped.

It wasn't another avalanche of snow from the treetops, that was for sure. It went on too long. A heavy, sustained rustling, somewhere in front of them.

'It's him,' said O'Brian. 'He's moving again. He's trying to head us off.' The noise stopped abruptly and they stood, listening. 'Now what's he doing?'

'Watching us, at a guess.

Again, Kelso strained his eyes into the gloom, but it was hopeless. Dense undergrowth, great patches of shadow, occasionally broken by torrents of snow - he couldn't get a fix on anything, it was so unlike any place he had ever seen. He was really sweating now, despite the cold. His skin was prickling.

That was when the howling started - a deafening, inhuman wail. It took Kelso a couple of seconds to realise it was the car alarm.

Then came two loud gunshots in rapid succession, a pause, and then a third.

Then silence.

AFTERWARDS, Kelso was never sure how long they stood there. He remembered only the immobilising sense of terror:

the paralysis of thought and action that came from the realisation there was nothing they could do. He - whoever he was - knew where they were. He had shot up their car. He had booby-trapped the forest. He could come for them whenever he wanted. Or he could leave them where they were. There was no prospect of rescue from the outside world. He was their absolute master. Unseen. All-seeing. Omnipotent. Mad
After a minute or two they risked a whispered conference. The telephone~ said O'Brian, what if he had damaged the Inmarsat telephone? It was their only hope and it was in the back of the Toyota.

Maybe he wouldn't know what a satellite telephone looked like, said Kelso. Maybe if they stayed where they were until dark and then went to retrieve it -Suddenly O'Brian grabbed him hard by the elbow.

A face was looking at them through the trees. Kelso didn't see it at first, it was so perfectly still
–
so
unnaturally, perfectly immobile, it took a moment for his mind to register it, to separate the pieces from the shapes of the forest, to assemble them and declare the composite human:
Dark impassive eyes that didn't blink. Black, arched brows. Coarse black hair hanging loose across a leathery forehead. A beard.

There was also a hood made of some kind of brown animal fur.

The apparition coughed. It grunted.

'Com-rades,' it said. The word was slurred, the voice harsh, like a tape being played at too slow a speed.

Kelso could feel the hair stirring on his scalp. 'Aw, Jesus,' said O'Brian, 'Jesusiesusiesus -'

There was another cough and a great gathering of phlegm. A gobbet of yellow spit was ejected into the undergrowth.

'Com-rades, I am a rude fell-ow. I cannot deny it. And I have been out of the way of hu-man com-pany. But there it is. Well then? D'yer want me to shoot yer? Yes?'

He stepped out in front of them - quickly, sharply: he barely disturbed a twig. He was wearing an old army greatcoat - patched, hacked off above the knees and belted
with a length of rope - and cavalry boots into which his baggy trousers were stuffed. His hands were bare and huge. In one he carried an old rifle. In the other was the satchel with Anna Safanova's notebook and the papers.

Kelso felt O'Brian's grip tighten on his arm.

'This is the book of which it is spok-en? Yes? And the papers prove i!' The figure leaned towards them, rocking his head this way and that, studying them intently. 'You are the ones, then? You are truly the ones?'

He came closer, peering at them with his dark eyes, and Kelso could smell the stench of his body, sour with stale sweat.

'Or are you, perhaps, spiders?'

He took a pace back and swiftly raised the rifle, aiming it from his waist, his finger on the trigger.

'We are the ones,' said Kelso, quickly.

The man cocked an eyebrow in surprise. 'Imperialists?'

'I am an English comrade. The comrade here is American.'

'Well, well! England and America! And Engels was a Jew!' He laughed, showing black teeth, then spat. 'And yet you have not asked me for proof Why so?'

'We trust you.

"'We trust you."' He laughed again. 'Imperialists! Always sweet words. Sweet words and then they kill you for a kopek. For a kopek! If you were the ones, you would demand proof.'

'We demand proof.'

'I have proof' he said defiantly. He glanced from one man to the other, then lowered the rifle, turned and began moving quickly back towards the trees.

'Now what?' whispered O'Brian.

'God knows.'

'Can we get that rifle off him? Two of us, one of him?'

Kelso stared at him in astonishment. 'Don't even think it.

'Boy, but he's quick, though, isn't he? And completely flicking crazy.' O'Brian gave a nervous giggle. 'Look at him. Now what's he doing?'

But he was doing nothing, merely standing impassively at the edge of the trees, waiting.

THERE didn't seem to be much else for them to do except follow him, which wasn't easy, given his speed across the grounds the roughness of the forest floor, the handicap of O'Brian's injured leg. Kelso carried the camera case. Once or twice they seemed to lose him, but never for long. He must have kept stopping to let them catch up.

After a few minutes they came back out on to the track, but further up, roughly midway between the abandoned Toyota and the empty settlement.

He didn't pause. He led them straight across the snowy track and into the trees on the other side.

This was not good, thought Kelso, as they passed out of the grey light and back into the shadows. Surreptitiously, without slackening pace, he put his hand into his pocket and tore a page out of his yellow notebook, screwed it into a ball and dropped it behind him. He did this every fifty yards or so - hare and hounds: an old school game - only now he was hare and hound.

O'Brian, panting at his back, whispered, 'Nice work.'

They emerged into a small clearing, with a wooden cabin in the centre. He had built this well - and recently, by the look of it - cannibalising the old encampment for his materials. Why he had done this, Kelso never discovered. Perhaps the other place was too full of ghosts. Or, maybe he wanted a spot even more secluded, and more easily
defensible. In the silence, Kelso thought he could hear running water and he guessed they must be near the river.

The cabin was made of the familiar grey timber, with one small window and a door to suit his height, set a yard above the ground and approached by four wooden steps. At the base of these he picked up a branch and prodded deep into the snow There was a spurt of white powder as something jumped and snapped. He withdrew the branch. Clamped around the end was a large animal trap, the rusty metal teeth stuck deep into the wood.

He laid this carefully to one side, climbed the steps to his door, unfastened the padlock and went inside. After a brief exchange of looks with O'Brian, Kelso followed, ducking his head to pass through the low entrance, emerging into the one small room. It was dark and cold and he could smell the insanity - he inhaled the lonely madness, as sharp and sour as the lingering stink of unwashed flesh. He put his hand to his mouth. Behind him he heard O'Brian suck in his breath.

Their host had lit a kerosene lamp. The whitened skulls of a bear and a wolf shone from the shadows. He put the notebook on the table, next to a half-eaten plate of some dark and bony fish, put a pot of water on the hob and bent to rekindle the old iron stove, keeping his rifle close to hand.

Kelso could imagine him an hour ago: hearing the distant sound of their car on the track, abandoning his meal, grabbing his gun and heading for the forest, his fire doused, his trap set -There wasn't a bed, merely a thin mattress, leaking stuffing, rolled and tied with string. Beside it was an ancient Soviet-made transistor radio, the size of a packing case, and next to that a wind-up gramophone with a tarnished brass horn.

The Russian unfastened the satchel and took out the notebook. He opened it at the picture of the girl gymnasts in Red Square and held it up for them: there, you see? They nodded. He set it down on the table. Then he pulled on a length of greasy leather hanging round his neck and kept on pulling until he hauled from somewhere deep in the fetid fluids of his clothes a small piece of clear plastic. He offered it to Kelso. It was warm from the heat of his body: the same picrure~ but folded very small, so that only Anna Safanova's face was visible.

'You are the ones,' he said. 'I am the one you seek. And now: the proof.'

He kissed the home-made locket and lowered it back into his clothes. Then, from the belt of his greatcoat, he drew out a short, wide-bladed knife with a leather hilt. He turned it, showing them the sharpness of the edge. He grinned at them. He kicked back the bit of carpet at his feet, dropped to his knees and prised up a crude trapdoor.

He reached down and pulled out a large and shabby suitcase.

HE unpacked his reliquary like a priest, reverently placing each object on the crude wooden table as if it were an altar.

The holy texts came out first: the thirteen volumes of
Stalin’s
collected works and thoughts, the Sochineniya, published in Moscow after the war. He showed the title page of each book to Kelso and then to O'Brian. All of them were signed in the same way - 'To the future, J. V. Stalin' - and all, clearly, had been read and re-read endlessly. On some of the volumes, the spines were badly cracked or hanging off. The pages were swollen by markers and bent corners.

Then came the uniform, each part carefully wrapped in
yellowing tissue paper. A pressed grey tunic with red epaulets. A pair of black trousers, also pressed. A greatcoat. A pair of black leather boots, gleaming like polished anthracite. A marshal's cap. A gold star in a crimson leather case embossed with the hammer and sickle, which Kelso recognised as the Order of Hero of the Soviet Union.

And then came the mementoes. A photograph (in a wooden frame, glazed) of Stalin standing behind a desk:

signed, like the books, 'To the future, J. V. Stalin'. A Dunhill pipe. An envelope containing a lock of coarse grey hair. And finally a stack of gramophone records, old 78s, as thick as dinner plates, each still in its original paper sleeve: 'Mother, the Fields are Dusty', 'I'm Waiting For You', 'Nightingale ~f the Taiga,' 'J. V. Stalin: Speech to the First All-Union Congress of Collective Farm Shock Workers, February 19 1933', 'J. V. Stalin: Report to the Eighteenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, March 10 1939'...

Kelso couldn't move. He couldn't speak. It was O'Brian who took the first step. He glanced at the Russian, touched himself on his chest, gestured at the table, and received in return a nod of approval. Tentatively, he reached out to pick up the photograph. Kelso could see what he was thinking:

the likeness was indeed striking. Not exact, of course - no man ever looks exactly like his father - but there was something there, no doubt about it, even with the younger man's beard and straggling hair. Something in the cast of the eyes and the bone structure, perhaps, or in the play of the expression: a kind of ponderous agility, a genetic shadow that was beyond the skills of any actor.

The Russian grinned again at O'Brian. He picked up his knife and pointed at the photograph, then mimed hacking at his beard. Yes?

For a moment, Kelso wasn't sure what he meant, but O'Brian did. O'Brian knew at once.

Yes. He nodded vigorously. Oh, yes. Yes, please. The Russian promptly scythed away a great swathe of coarse black facial hair and held it out, with childish pleasure, for their inspection. He repeated the stroke, again and again, and there was something shocking about the way he did this, in the casual manipulation of the razor-edged knife - this side, that, and then the throat - in the careless self-mutilation of it. There is nothing, thought Kelso, with a flash of certainty, there is no act of violence this man is not capable of The Russian reached behind his head and grabbed his hair into a thick ponytail and sliced it off as close to the roots as he could. Then he crossed the cabin in a couple of strides, opened the door of the iron stove, and flung the mass of hair on to the burning wood where it flared for an instant before shriveling to dust and smoke.