Archangel

by Harris, Robert

  ‘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.

  Chapter Twenty

  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 GAI 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. They 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 GAI 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 façades 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?’

  He started to laugh.

  ‘What’s funny?’

  ‘Nothing.’ He glanced at O’Brian and tried to stop himself, but it was no good, there was something about the reporter’s utter dejection that set him off again. His vision was blurred by tears. ‘I’m sorry,’ he gasped. ‘Sorry –’

  ‘Oh, go ahead, enjoy yourself,’ said O’Brian, bitterly. ‘This is my idea of a perfect fucking Friday. Drive eight hundred miles to some dump that looks like Pittsburgh after a nuclear strike to try to find Stalin’s fucking girlfriend –’

  He snorted and started to laugh as well.

  ‘You know what we haven’t done?’ O’Brian managed to say after a while.

  Kelso took a breath and swallowed. ‘What?’

  ‘We haven’t been to the railway station and checked the radiation meter … We’re probably … being … fucking … irradiated!’

  They roared. They cried. The Toyota rocked with it. The snow fell and the husky watched them, its head cocked in surprise.

  O’BRIAN locked the car and they hurried through the snow, across the treacherous expanse of subsiding concrete, into the port authority building.

  Kelso carried the satchel.

  They were both still slightly shaky and the advertised ferry sailings – to Murmansk and the Groaning Islands – briefly set them off again.

  The Groaning Islands?

  ‘Oh come on, man. Stop it. We’ve got to do some work here.’

  The building was bigger than it looked from the outside. On the ground floor there were shops – little kiosks selling clothes and toiletries – plus a café and a ticket booth. Downstairs, beneath banks of fluorescent lights, most of which had blown, was a gloomy underground market – stalls offering seeds, books, pirated cassettes, shoes, shampoo, sausages and some immense, sturdy Russian brassières in black and beige: miracles of cantilevered engineering.

  O’Brian bought a couple of maps, one of the city and the other of the region, then they both went back upstairs to the ticket office where Kelso, in return for offering a dollar bill to a suspicious man in a greasy uniform, was permitted a brief look at the Archangel telephone directory. The book was small, red-bound, with hard covers and it took him less than thirty seconds to establish that no Safanov or Safanova was listed.

  ‘Now what?’ said O’Brian.

  ‘Food,’ said Kelso.

  The café was an old-style stolovaya, a self-service workers’ canteen, its floor wet and filthy with melted snow. There was a warm fug of strong tobacco. At the next door table a couple of German seamen were playing cards. Kelso had a big bowl of shchi – cabbage soup with a dollop of sour cream bobbing in its centre – black bread, a couple of hard-boiled eggs, and the effect of all this on his empty stomach was immediate. He began to feel almost euphoric. This was going to be all right, he thought. They were safe up here. Nobody could find them. And if they played it properly, they could be in and out in a day.

  He tipped half a miniature of cognac into his instant coffee, looked at it, thought, Sod it, why not? and added the rest. He lit a cigarette and glanced around. The people up here appeared shabbier than they did in Moscow. They stared at foreign strangers. But when you attempted to meet their eyes they looked away.

  O’Brian pushed his plate to one side. ‘I’ve been thinking about this college, whatever it was – this “Maxim Gorky Academy”. They’ll have old records, right? And there was this girl she knew – what was her name, the ugly kid?’

  ‘Maria.’

  ‘Maria. Right. Let’s find her class yearbook and find Maria.’

  Class yearbook? thought Kelso. Who did O’Brian think she was? The Maxim Gorky prom queen, 1950? But he was too full of goodwill to pick a fight. ‘Or,’ he said, diplomatically, ‘or we could try the local Party. She was in Komsomol, remember. They might still have the old files.’

  ‘Okay. You’re the expert. How d’we find ’em?’

  ‘Easy. Give me the town plan.’

  O’Brian pulled the map from his inside pocket and scraped his chair round until he was sitting next to Kelso. They spread out the city plan.

  The bulk of Archangel was crammed into a wide headland, about four miles across, with ribbons of development running out along either bank of the Dvina.

  Kelso put his finger on the map. ‘There,’ he said. ‘That’s where they are. Or were. On the ploshchad Lenina, in the biggest building on the square. That’s where the bastards always were.’

  ‘And you think they’ll help?’

  ‘No. Not willingly. But if you can provide a little financial lubrication … It’s worth a try, anyway.’

  On the map it looked like a five-minute walk.

  ‘You’re really getting into this, aren’t you?’ said O’Brian. He gave Kelso’s arm an affectionate pat. ‘We make a good team, you know that? We’ll show ’em.’ He folded away the map and put five roubles under his plate as a tip.

  Kelso finished his coffee. The cognac gave him a warm glow. O’Brian really wasn’t such a bad fellow, he thought. Sooner him than Adelman and the rest of those waxworks, no doubt safely stowed in New York by now.

  History wasn’t made without taking risks, that much he knew. So maybe sometimes you had to take risks to write it, too?

  O’Brian was right.

  He would show them.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  THEY WENT BACK out into the snow, past the Toyota and past the shuttered front of a decaying hospital: the Northern Basin Seamen’s Policlinic. The wind was driving the snow inshore across the water, whining through the steel rigging of the boats on the wooden jetty, bending the stumpy trees that had been planted along the promenade to protect t
he buildings. The two men had to struggle to keep their feet.

  A couple of the boats had sunk, and so had the wooden hut at the end of the jetty. Benches had been heaved by vandals over the railings into the river. There was graffiti on the walls: a Star of David, dripping blood, with a swastika daubed across it; SS flashes; KKK.

  One thing was sure: there wouldn’t be any Italian shoe boutiques up here.

  They turned inland.

  Every Russian town still had its statue of Lenin. Archangel’s portrayed the Leader, fifteen yards high, rising out of a block of granite, his face determined, his overcoat flapping, a roll of papers in his outstretched hand. He looked as if he were trying to hail a taxi. The square that still carried his name was huge, and smooth with snow, and deserted; in one corner, a couple of tethered goats nibbled at a bush. Fronting it were a big museum, the city’s central post office, and a huge office block with the hammer and sickle still attached to the balcony.

  Kelso led the way towards it and they had almost made it when a sandy-coloured jeep with a searchlight mounted on its hood came round the corner: Interior Ministry troops, the MVD. That sobered him up. He could be stopped at any minute, he realised, and forced to show his visa. The pale faces of the soldiers stared at them. He bowed his head and trotted up the steps, O’Brian close behind him, as the jeep completed its cautious circuit of the square and passed out of sight.

  THE communists had not been forced entirely from the building; they had merely moved round to the back. Here they maintained a small reception area presided over by a big, middle-aged woman with a froth of dyed yellow hair. Beside her, along the window sill, was a row of straggling spider plants in old tin cans; opposite her, a big colour poster of Gennady Zyuganov, the Party’s pudding-faced candidate in the last presidential election.

  She studied O’Brian’s business card intently, turning it over, holding it to the light, as if she suspected forgery. Then she picked up the telephone and spoke quietly into the receiver.