Archangel by Robert Harris.
Prologue
Rapava's story
'Death solves all problems - no man, no problem.'
J.V Stalin, 1918
LATE ONE NIGHT a long time ago - before you were even born, boy - a bodyguard stood on the veranda at the back of a big house in Moscow, smoking a cigarette. It was a cold night, without stars or moon, and he smoked for the warmth of it as much as anything else, his big, farm lad's hands cupped around the burning cardboard tube of a Georgian papirosa.
This bodyguard's name was Papu Rapava. He was twenty-five years old, a Mingrelian, from the north-eastern shoreland of the Black Sea. And as for the house - well, fortress would have been a better word. It was a tsarist mansion, half a block long, in the diplomatic sector, not far from the river. Somewhere in the frosty darkness at the bottom of the walled garden was a cherry orchard, and beyond it a wide street - Sadovaya-Kudrinskaya - and beyond that the grounds of the Moscow Zoo. There was no traffic. Very faintly in the distance, when it was quiet, like now, and the wind was in the right direction, you could hear the howling of caged wolves.
By this time the girl had stopped screaming, which was a mercy, for it had got on Rapava's nerves. She couldn't have been more than fifteen, not much older than his own kid sister, and when he had picked her up and delivered her, she had looked at him - looked at him - well, to be honest, boy, he preferred not to talk of it, even now, nearly fifty years later.
Anyway, the girl had finally shut up and he was enjoying his cigarette when the telephone rang. This must have been about two a.m. He would never forget it. Two o'clock in the morning on the second of March, 1953. In the cold stillness of the night the bell sounded as loud as a fire alarm. Now, normally - you have to understand this - there were four guards on duty during an evening shift: two in the house and two in the street. But when there was a girl, the Boss liked his security kept to a minimum, at least indoors, so on this particular night Rapava was alone. He threw down his cigarette, sprinted through the guard room, past the kitchen and into the hall. The phone was old-fashioned, pre-war, fastened to the wall - Holy Mother, it was making a racket! - and he grabbed the receiver mid-ring. A man said: 'Lavrenty?'
'He's not here, comrade.'
'Get him. It's Malenkov.' The normally ponderous voice was hoarse with panic.
'Comrade -'Get him. Tell him something's happened. Something's happened at Blizhny.'
'KNow what I mean by Blizhny, boy?' asked the old man. There were two of them in the tiny bedroom, on the twenty-third floor of the Ukraina Hotel, slumped in a pair of cheap foam armchairs, so close their knees were almost touching. A bedside lamp threw their dim shadows on to the curtained window - one profile bony, picked bare by time, the other still fleshy, middle-aged.
'Yes,' said the middle-aged man, whose name was Fluke Kelso. 'Yes, I know what Blizhny means.' Of course I bloody know, he felt like saying, I did teach Soviet history at Oxford for ten bloody years- Blizhny is the Russian word for 'near'. 'Near', in the Kremlin of the forties and fifties, was shorthand for the 'Near Dacha and the Near Dacha was at Kuntsevo, just outside Moscow - double-perimeter fence, three hundred NKVD special troops and eight camouflaged 30-millimetre antiaircraft guns, all hidden in the birch forest to protect the dacha's solitary elderly resident. Kelso waited for the old man to carry on, but Rapava was suddenly preoccupied, trying to light a cigarette from a book of matches. He couldn't manage it. His fingers couldn't grasp the flimsy sticks. He had no fingernails.
'So what did you do?' Kelso leaned across and lit Rapava's cigarette for him, hoping to mask the question with the gesture, trying to keep the excitement out of his voice. On the little table between them, hidden among the empty bottles and the dirty glasses and the ashtray and the crumpled packs of Marlboro, was a miniature cassette recorder which Kelso had put there when he thought Rapava wasn't looking. The old man sucked hard on the cigarette and then contemplated the tip with gratitude. He tossed the matches on to the floor.
'You know about Blizhny?' he said at last, settling back in his chair. 'Then you know what I did.'
Thirty seconds after answering the telephone, young Papu Rapava was knocking on Beria's door.
POLITBURO member Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria, draped in a loose red silk kimono through which his belly sloped like a great white sack of sand, called Rapava a cunt in Mingrelian, and gave him a shove in the chest that sent him stumbling backwards into the corridor. Then he pushed past him and padded off towards the stairs, his sweaty white feet leaving prints of moisture on the parquet flooring. Through the open door, Rapava could see into the bedroom - the big wooden bed, a heavy brass lampstand in the form of a dragon, the crimson sheets, the white limbs of the girl, sprawled like a sacrifice. Her eyes were wide open, dark and vacant. She made no effort to cover herself On the bedside table was a jug of water and an array of medicine bottles. A scattering of large white pills had fallen across the pale yellow Aubusson carpet.
He couldn't remember anything else, or exactly how long he had stood there before Beria came panting back up the stairs, all fired up by his conversation with Malenkov, throwing the girl's clothes at her, shouting at her to get out, get out, ordering Rapava to bring round the car. Rapava asked who else he wanted. (He had in mind Nadaraya, the head of the bodyguard, who normally went everywhere with the Boss. And maybe Sarsikov, who at that moment was deep in a vodka stupor, snoring in the guard house at the side of the building.) At this, Beria, who had his back to Rapava and was beginning to shrug off his dressing gown, stopped for a moment, and glanced over his fleshy shoulder - thinking, thinking - you could see his little eyes flickering behind their rimless pince-nez.
'No,' he said at last. 'Just you.
The car was American - a Packard, twelve cylinders, dark green bodywork, running-board a half-metre wide - a beauty. Rapava backed it out of the garage and reversed it down Vspolnyi Street until he was directly outside the front entrance. He left the engine running to try to get the heater going, jumped out and took up the standard NKVD position beside the rear passenger door: left hand on hip, coat and jacket pulled slightly open, shoulder holster exposed, right hand on the butt of his Makarov pistol, checking the street up and down. Beso Dumbadze, another of the Mingrelian boys, came running round the corner to see what was going on, just as the Boss stepped out of the house and on to the pavement.
'What was he wearing?'
'What the hell do I know what he was wearing, boy?' said the old man, irritably.
'What the hell does it matter what he was wearing?'
Actually, now he stopped to think of it, the Boss was wearing grey - grey coat, grey suit, grey pullover, no tie - and what with this, and his pince-nez, and his sloping shoulders, and his big, domed head, he looked like nothing so much as an owl - an old, malevolent grey owl. Rapava opened the door and Beria got in the back, and Dumbadze - who was about ten yards away - made a little what the fuck do I do? Gesture with his hands, to which Rapava gave a shrug - what the fuck did he know? He ran round the car to the driver's seat, slid behind the wheel, jammed the gear stick in to first, and they were off.
He had driven the fifteen miles out to Kuntsevo a dozen times before, always at night and always as part of the General Secretary's convoy - and that was some performance, boy, I can tell you. Fifteen cars with curtained rear windows, half the Politburo - Beria, Malenkov, Molotov, Bulganin, Khrushchev - plus bodyguards: out of the Kremlin, through the Borovitskiy Gate, down the ramp, accelerating to 75 miles an hour, the militia holding back the traffic at every intersection, two thousand plainclothes NKVD men lining the government route. And you never knew which car the GenSec was in until, at the last minute, jus
t as they turned off the highway into the woods, one of the big ZiLs would pull out and accelerate to the front of the cortege, and the rest of them would all slow down to let the Rightful Heir of Lenin go in first.
But there was nothing like that tonight. The wide road was empty and once they were across the river Rapava was able to let the big Yankee car have its head, the speedo flickering up to nearly 90, while Beria sat in the back as still as a rock. After twelve minutes, the city was behind them. After fifteen, at the end of the highway from Poklonnaya Gora, they slowed for the hidden turning. The tall white strips of the silver birches strobed in the headlights.
How quiet the forest was, how dark, how limitless - like a gently rustling sea. Rapava felt that it might stretch all the way to the Ukraine. A half-mile of track took them to the first perimeter fence where a red-and-white pole lay waist-high across the road. Two NKVD specials in capes and caps carrying sub-machine guns strolled out of the sentry box, saw Beria's stone face, saluted smartly and raised the barrier. The road curved for another hundred yards, past the hunched shadows of big shrubs, and then the Packard's powerful lights picked out the second fence, a fifteen foot high wall with gun-slits. Iron gates were swung open from the inside by unseen hands. And then the dacha.
Rapava had been expecting something unusual - he wasn't sure what - cars, men, uniforms, the bustle of a crisis. But the two-storey house was in darkness, save for one yellow lantern above the entrance. In this light, a figure waited - the unmistakable plump and dark-haired form of the Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers, Georgiy Maksimilanovich Malenkov. And here was an odd thing, boy: he had taken off his shiny new shoes and had them wedged under one fat arm. Beria was out of the car almost before it had stopped and
in a flash he had Malenkov by the elbow and was listening to him, nodding, talking quietly, looking this way and that. Rapava heard him say, 'Moved him? Have you moved him?' And then Beria snapped his fingers in Rapava's direction, and Rapava realised he was being summoned to follow them inside.
Always before on his visits to the dacha he had either waited in the car for the Boss to emerge, or had gone to the guardhouse for a drink and a smoke with the other drivers. You have to understand that inside was forbidden territory. Nobody except the GenSec's staff and invited guests ever went inside. Now, moving into the hall, Rapava suddenly felt almost suffocated by panic - physically choked, as if someone had their hands around his windpipe.
Malenkov was walking ahead in his stockinged feet and even the Boss was on tiptoe, so Rapava played follow-my-leader and tried not to make a sound. Nobody else was about. The house seemed empty. The three of them crept down a passage, past an upright piano, and into a dining room with chairs for eight. The light was on. The curtains were drawn. There were some papers on the table, and a rack of Dunhill pipes. A wind-up gramophone was in one corner.
Above the fireplace was a blown up black and white photograph in a cheap wooden frame: the GenSec as a younger man, sitting in a garden somewhere on a sunny day with Comrade Lenin. At the far end of the room was a door. Malenkov turned to them and put a pudgy finger to his lips, then opened it very slowly. The old man closed his eyes and held out his empty glass for a refill. He sighed.
'You know, boy, people criticise Stalin, but you've got to say this for him: he lived like a worker. Not like Beria - he thought he was a prince. But Comrade Stalin's room was a plain man's room. You've got to say that for Stalin. He was always one of us.'
Caught in the draught of the opening door, a red candle flickered in the corner beneath a small icon of Lenin. The only other source of light was a shaded reading lamp on a desk. In the centre of the room was a large sofa that had been made up as a bed. A coarse brown army blanket trailed off it on to a tiger-skin rug. On the rug, on his back, breathing heavily and apparently asleep was a short, fat, elderly, ruddy-faced man in a dirty white vest and long woollen underpants. He had soiled himself. The room was hot and stank of human waste.
Malenkov put his podgy hand to his mouth and stayed close to the door. Beria went quickly over to the rug, unbuttoned his overcoat and fell to his knees. He put his hands on Stalin's forehead and pulled back both eyelids with his thumbs, revealing sightless, bloodshot yolks.
'Josef Vissarionovich,' he said softly, 'it's Lavrenty. Dear comrade, if you can hear me, move your eyes. Comrade?' Then to Malenkov, but all the while looking at Stalin: And you say he could have been like this for twenty hours?'
Behind his palm, Malenkov made a gagging sound. There were tears on his smooth cheeks.
'Dear comrade, move your eyes . . . Your eyes, dear comrade . . . Comrade? Ah, fuck it.' Beria pulled his hands away and stood up, wiping his fingers on his coat. 'It's a stroke right enough. He's meat. Where are Starostin and the boys? And Butusova?'
Malenkov was blubbing by now and Beria had to stand between him and the body - literally had to block his view to get his attention. He grasped Malenkov by the shoulders and began talking very quietly and very fast to him, as one would to a child - told him to forget Stalin, that Stalin was history, Stalin was meat, that the important thing was what they did next, that they had to stand together. Now: where were the boys? Were they still in the guard room? Malenkov nodded and wiped his nose on his sleeve.
'All right,' said Beria. 'This is what you do.'
Malenkov was to put on his shoes and go tell the guards that Comrade Stalin was sleeping, that he was drunk and why the fuck had he and Comrade Beria been dragged out of their beds for nothing? He was to tell them not to touch the telephone, and not to call any doctors. ('You listening, Georgiy?') Especially no doctors, because the GenSec thought all doctors were Jewish poisoners - remember? Now, - what was the time? Three? All right. At eight - no, better, seven-thirty - Malenkov was to start calling the leadership. He was to say that he and Beria wanted a full Politburo meeting here, at Blizhny, at nine. He was to say they were worried about Josef Vissarionovich's health and that a collective decision on treatment was necessary. Beria rubbed his hands.
'That should start them shitting themselves. Now let's get him up on the couch. You,' he said to Rapava. 'Get hold of his legs.'
The old man had been sinking deeper into his chair as he talked, his feet sprawled, his eyes shut, his voice a monotone. Suddenly he let out a long breath and hauled himself upright again. He looked around the hotel bedroom in a panic. 'Need to have a piss, boy. Gotta piss.'
'In there.'
He rose with a drunk's careful dignity. Through the flimsy wall, Kelso heard the sound of his urine drilling into the back of the toilet bowl. Fair enough, he thought. There was a lot to unload. He had been lubricating Rapava's memory for the best part of four hours by now: Baltika beer first, in the Ukraina's lobby bar, then Zubrovka in a cafe across the street, and finally single-malt Scotch in the cramped intimacy of his room. It was like playing a fish: playing a fish through a river of booze. He noticed the book of matches lying on the floor where Rapava had thrown it and he reached down and picked it up. On the back flap was the name of a bar or a nightclub - ROBOTNIK - and an address near the Dinamo Stadium. The lavatory flushed and Kelso quickly slipped the matches into his pocket, then Rapava reappeared, leaning against the door jamb, buttoning his flies.
'What's the time, boy?'
'Nearly one.
'Gotta go. They'll think I'm your fucking boyfriend.' Rapava made an obscene gesture with his hand. Kelso pretended to laugh. Sure, he'd call down for a taxi in a minute. Sure. But let's just finish this bottle first - he reached over for the Scotch and surreptitiously checked that the tape was still running - finish the bottle, comrade, and finish the story The old man scowled and looked at the floor. The story was finished already. There was nothing more to say. They got Stalin up on to the couch - so, what of it? Malenkov went off to talk to the guards. Rapava drove Beria home. Everyone knows the rest. A day or two later, Stalin was dead. And not long after that, Beria was dead. Malenkov - well, Malenkov hung around for years after his disgrace (Rapava
saw him once, in the seventies, shuffling through the Arbat) but now even Malenkov was dead. Nadaraya, Sarsikov, Dumbadze, Starostin, Butusova - dead, dead. The Party was dead. The whole fucking country was dead, come to that.
'But there's more to your story, surely,' said Kelso. 'Please sit down Papu Gerasimovich, and let us finish the bottle.'
He spoke politely and hesitantly, for he sensed that the anaesthetic of alcohol and vanity might be wearing off, and that Rapava, on coming round, might suddenly realise he was talking far too much. He felt another spasm of irritation. Christ, they were always so bloody difficult, these old NKVD men - difficult and maybe even still dangerous. Kelso was a historian, in his middle forties, thirty years younger than Papu Rapava. But he was out of condition - to be truthful, he had never really been in condition - and he wouldn't have fancied his chances if the old man turned rough. Rapava, after all, was a survivor of the Arctic Circle camps. He wouldn't have forgotten how to hurt someone - hurt someone very quickly, guessed Kelso, and probably very badly. He filled Rapava's glass, topped up his own, and forced himself to keep on talking.
'I mean, here you are, twenty-five years old, in the General Secretary's bedroom. You couldn't get any closer to the centre than that - that was the inner sanctum, that was sacred So what was Beria up to, taking you in there?'
'You deaf, boy? I said. He needed me to move the body.'
'But why you? Why not one of Stalin's regular guards? It was they who'd found him, after all, and alerted Malenkov in the first place. Or why didn't Beria take one of his more senior boys out to Blizhny? Why did he specifically take you?' Rapava was swaying, staring now at the glass of scotch, and afterwards Kelso decided that the whole night really turned upon this one thing: that Rapava needed another drink, and he needed it at that precise instant, and he needed these two things in combination more than he needed to leave. He came back and sat down heavily, drained the glass in one, then held it out to be filled again.
Archangel (Mass Market Paperback) Page 1