There wasn’t a Russian word in sight.
‘Never thought I’d live to see this, did you?’ Adelman’s voice crackled down the receiver. ‘This is victory we’re looking at, my friend. You realise that? Total victory.’
‘Is it really, Frank? It just looks like a lot of lights to me.’
‘Oh no. It’s more than that, believe me. They ain’t coming back from this.’
‘You’ll be telling me next it’s “the end of history”.’
‘Maybe it is. But not the end of historians, thank God.’ Adelman laughed. ‘Okay, I’ll see you in the lobby. Say twenty minutes?’ He hung up.
The searchlight on the opposite side of the Moskva, next to the White House, shone fiercely into the room. Kelso reached across and opened the wooden frame of the inner window and then of the outer, admitting a particulate breath of yellow mist and the white noise of the distant traffic. A few snowflakes fluttered across the sill and melted.
The end of history, my arse, he thought. This was History’s town. This was History’s bloody country.
He stuck his head into the cold, leaning out to see as much of the city as he could across the river, before it was lost in the murk of the horizon.
If one Russian in six believed that Stalin was their greatest ruler, that meant he had about twenty million supporters. (The sainted Lenin, of course, had many more.) And even if you halved that figure, just to get down to the hard core, that still left ten million. Ten million Stalinists in the Russian Federation, after forty years of denigration?
Mamantov was right. It was an astounding figure. Christ, if one in six Germans had said they thought Hitler was the greatest leader they’d ever had, the New York Times wouldn’t just have wanted an op-ed piece. They’d have put it on the front page.
He closed the window and began gathering together what he would need for the evening: his last two packets of duty free cigarettes, his passport and visa (in case he was picked up), his lighter, his bulging wallet, the book of matches with Robotnik’s address.
It was no use pretending he was happy about this, especially after that business at the embassy, and if it hadn’t been for Mamantov, he might have been tempted to leave matters as they stood – to play it safe, the Adelman way, and to come back to find Rapava in a week or two, perhaps after wangling a commission in New York from some sympathetic publisher (assuming such a mythical creature still existed).
But if Mamantov was on the trail, he couldn’t afford to wait. That was his conclusion. Mamantov had resources at his disposal Kelso couldn’t hope to beat. Mamantov was a collector, a fanatic.
And it was the thought of what Mamantov might do with this notebook, if he found it first, that was also beginning to nag at him. Because the more Kelso turned matters over in his mind, the more obvious it became that whatever Stalin had written was important. It couldn’t be some mere compendium of senile jottings, not if Beria wanted it enough to steal it and then, having stolen it, was willing to risk hiding it, rather than destroying it.
‘He was squealing like a pig … shouting something about Stalin and something about an archangel … Then they put a scarf in his mouth and shot him …’
Kelso took a last look around the bedroom and turned out the light.
IT wasn’t until he got down to the restaurant that he realised how hungry he was. He hadn’t had a proper meal for a day and a half. He ate cabbage soup, then pickled fish, then mutton in a cream cheese sauce, with the Georgian red wine, Mukuzani, and sulphurous Narzan mineral water. The wine was dark and heavy and after a couple of glasses on top of the whisky he could feel himself becoming dangerously relaxed. There were more than a hundred diners at four big tables and the noise of the conversation and the clink and chime of glass and cutlery were soporific. Ukrainian folk music was being played over loudspeakers. He started to dilute his wine.
Someone – a Japanese historian, whose name he didn’t know – leaned across and asked if this was Stalin’s favourite drink and Kelso said no, that Stalin preferred the sweeter Georgian wines, Kindzmarauli and Hvanchkara. Stalin liked sweet wines and syrupy brandies, sugared herbal teas and strong tobacco –
‘And Tarzan movies …’ said someone.
‘And the sound of dogs singing …’
Kelso joined in the laughter. What else could he do? He clinked glasses with the Japanese across the table, bowed and sat back, sipping his watery wine.
‘Who’s paying for all this?’ someone asked.
‘The sponsor who paid for the symposium, I guess.’
‘Who’s that?’
‘American?’
‘Swiss, I heard …’
The conversation resumed around him. After about an hour, when he thought no one was looking, he folded his napkin and pushed back his chair.
Adelman looked up and said, ‘Not again? You can’t run out on them again?’
‘A call of nature,’ said Kelso, and then, as he passed behind Adelman, he bent down and whispered, ‘What’s the plan for tomorrow?’
‘The bus leaves for the airport after breakfast,’ said Adelman. ‘Check-in at Sheremetevo at eleven-fifteen.’ He grabbed Kelso’s arm. ‘I thought you said this was all balls?’
‘I did. I just want to find out what kind of balls.’
Adelman shook his head. ‘This just isn’t history, Fluke –’
Kelso gestured across the room. ‘And this is?’ Suddenly there was the sound of a knife being rapped against a glass, and Askenov pushed himself heavily to his feet. Hands banged the table in approval.
‘Colleagues,’ began Askenov.
‘I’d sooner take my chances, Frank. I’ll see you.’
He detached himself gently from Adelman’s grip and headed towards the exit.
The cloakroom was by the toilets, next door to the dining room. He handed over his token, put down a tip and collected his coat, and he was just shrugging it on when he saw, at the end of the passage leading to the hotel lobby, a man. The man wasn’t looking in his direction. He was pacing backwards and forwards across the corridor, talking into a mobile phone. If Kelso had seen him full-face he probably wouldn’t have recognised him, and then everything would have turned out differently. But in profile the scar on the side of his face was unmistakable. He was one of the men who had been parked outside Mamantov’s apartment.
Through the closed door behind him, Kelso could hear laughter and applause. He backed towards it, until he could feel the doorhandle – all this time keeping his eyes on the man – then he turned and quickly re-entered the restaurant.
Askenov was still on his feet and talking. He stopped when he saw Kelso. ‘Doctor Kelso,’ he said, ‘seems to have a deep aversion to the sound of my voice.’
Saunders called out, ‘He has an aversion to the sound of everyone’s voice, except his own.’
There was more laughter. Kelso strode on.
Through the swing doors the kitchen was in pandemonium. He had an overpowering impression of heat and steam and of noise and the hot stink of cabbage and boiled fish. Waiters were lining up with trays of cups and coffee pots, being screamed at by a red-faced man in a stained tuxedo. Nobody paid Kelso any attention. He walked quickly across the huge room to the far end, where a woman in a green apron was unloading trays of dirty crockery off a trolley.
‘The way out?’ he said.
‘Tam,’ she said, gesturing with her chin. ‘Tam.’ Over there.
The door had been wedged open to let in some cold air. He went down a dark flight of concrete steps and then he was outside, in the slushy snow, moving through a yard of overflowing trash bins and burst plastic sacks. A rat went scrabbling for safety in the shadows. It took him a minute or so to find his way out, and then he was in the big, enclosed courtyard at the rear of the hotel. Dark walls studded with lit windows rose on three sides of him. The low clouds above his head seemed to boil a yellowish-grey where they were struck by the beam of the searchlight.
He got out down a side-street on to Ku
tuzovskiy Prospekt and trudged through the wet snow beside the busy highway trying to find a taxi. A dirty, unmarked Volga swerved across two lanes of traffic and the driver tried to persuade him to get in, but Kelso waved him away and kept on walking until he came to the taxi rank at the front of the hotel. He couldn’t be bothered to haggle. He climbed into the back of the first yellow cab in the queue and asked to be driven off, quickly.
Chapter Eight
THERE WAS A big football match in progress at the Dinamo stadium – an international, Russia playing someone-or-other, two-all, extra time. The taxi driver was listening to the commentary on the radio and as they came closer to the stadium, the cheers on the cheap plastic loudspeaker were subsumed into the roar of eighty thousand Muscovite throats less than two hundred yards away. The flurries of snow swelled and lifted like sails in the floodlights above the stands.
They had to go up Leningradskiy Prospekt, make a U-turn and come back down the other side to reach the stadium of the Young Pioneers. The taxi, an old Zhiguli that stank of sweat, turned off right, through a pair of iron gates, and bounced down a rutted track and into the sports ground. A few cars were drawn up in the snow in front of the grandstand, and there was a queue of people, mostly girls, outside an iron door with a peep-hole set into it. A sign above the entrance said ‘Robotnik’.
Kelso paid the taxi driver a hundred roubles – a ludicrous amount, the price of not haggling before the journey started – and watched with some dismay as the red lights bucked across the rough surface, turned and disappeared. An immense noise, like a breaking wave, came from the phosphorescent sky above the trees and rolled across the white sweep of the pitch. ‘Three–two,’ said a man with an Australian accent. ‘It’s over.’ He pulled out a tiny black earpiece and stuffed it into his pocket. Kelso said to the nearest person, a girl, ‘What time does it open?’ and she turned to look at him. She was startlingly beautiful: wide dark eyes and wide cheekbones. She must have been about twenty. Snow flecked her black hair.
‘Ten,’ she said, and slipped her arm through his, pressing her breast against his elbow. ‘Can I have a cigarette?’
He gave one to her and took one himself and their heads brushed as they bent to share the flame. He inhaled her perfume with the smoke. They straightened. ‘One minute,’ he said, smiling, and moved away, and she smiled back, waving the cigarette at him. He walked along the edge of the pitch, smoking, looking at the girls. Were they all hookers? They didn’t seem like hookers. What were they, then? Most of the men were foreigners. The Russians looked rich. The cars were big and German, apart from one Bentley and one Rolls. He could see men in the back of them. In the Bentley, a red tip the size of a burning coal glowed and faded as someone smoked an immense cigar.
At five past ten, the door opened – a yellow light, the silhouettes of the girls, the steamy glow of their perfumed breath – a festive sight, thought Kelso, in the snow. And from the cars now came the serious money. You could tell the seriousness not just by the weight of the coats and the jewellery, but by the way their owners carried themselves, straight to the head of the queue, and by the amount of protection they left hanging around at the door. Clearly, the only guns allowed on the premises belonged to the management, which Kelso found reassuring. He went through a metal detector, then his pockets were checked for explosives by a goon with a wand. The admission fee was three hundred roubles – fifty dollars, the average weekly wage, payable in either currency – and in return for this he got an ultra-violet stamp on his wrist and a voucher for one free drink.
A spiral staircase led down to darkness, smoke and laser beams, a wall of techno-music pitched to make the stomach shake. Some of the girls were dancing listlessly together, the men were standing, drinking, watching. The idea of Papu Rapava showing his scowling face in here was a joke, and Kelso would have turned round there and then, but he felt in need of another drink, and fifty dollars was fifty dollars. He gave his voucher to the barman and took a bottle of beer. Almost as an afterthought, he beckoned the bartender towards him.
‘Rapava,’ he said. The barman frowned and cupped his ear, and Kelso bent closer. ‘Rapava,’ he shouted.
The barman nodded slowly, and said in English, ‘I know.’
‘You know?’
He nodded again. He was a young man, with a wispy blond beard and a gold earring. He began to turn away, to serve another customer so Kelso pulled out his wallet and put a one-hundred rouble note on the bar. That got his attention. ‘I want to find Rapava,’ he shouted.
The money was carefully folded and tucked into the barman’s breast pocket. ‘Later,’ said the young man. ‘Okay? I tell you.’
‘When?’
But the young man smirked and moved further up the bar.
‘Bribing bartenders?’ said an American voice at Kelso’s elbow. ‘That’s smart. Never thought of that. Get served first? Impress the ladies? Hello, Dr Kelso. Remember me?’
In the half-light, the handsome face was patched with colour and it took Kelso a couple of seconds to work out who he was. ‘Mr O’Brian.’ A television reporter. Wonderful. This was all he needed.
They shook hands. The young man’s palm was moist and fleshy. He was wearing his off-duty uniform – pressed blue jeans, white T-shirt, leather jacket – and Kelso registered broad shoulders, pectorals, thick hair glistening with some aromatic gel.
O’Brian gestured across the dance floor with his bottle. ‘The new Russia,’ he shouted. ‘Whatever you want, you buy, and someone’s always selling. Where’re you staying?’
‘The Ukraina.’
O’Brian made a face. ‘Save your bribe for later’s my advice. You’ll need it. They’re strict on the door at the old Ukraina. And those beds. Boy.’ O’Brian shook his head and drained his bottle, and Kelso smiled and drank as well.
‘Any other advice?’ he yelled.
‘Plenty, since you ask.’ O’Brian beckoned him in close. ‘The good ones’ll ask for six hundred. Offer two. Settle on three. And we’re talking all-night rates, remember, so keep some money back. As an incentive, let’s say. And be careful of the real, real babes, ’cause they may be spoken for. If the other fellow’s Russian, just walk away. It’s safer, and there’s plenty more – we’re not talking life partners here. Oh, and they don’t do triples. As a rule. These are respectable girls.’
‘I’m sure.’
O’Brian looked at him. ‘You don’t get it, do you, professor? This ain’t a whorehouse. Anna here –’ he curled his arm around the waist of a blonde girl standing next to him and used his beer bottle as a microphone ‘– Anna, tell the professor here what you do for a living.’
Anna spoke solemnly into the bottle. ‘I lease property to Scandinavian businesses.’
O’Brian nuzzled her cheek and licked her ear and released her. ‘Galina over there – the skinny one in the blue dress? – she works at the Moscow stock exchange. Who else? Damnit, they all look alike, after you’ve been here a time. Nataliya, the one you spoke to outside – oh, yes, I was watchin’ you, professor, you sly old dog – Anna, darlin’, what does Nataliya do?’
‘Comstar, R.J.,’ said Anna. ‘Nataliya works for Comstar, remember?’
‘Sure, sure. And what was the name of that cute kid at Moscow U? The psychologist, you know the one –’
‘Alissa.’
‘Alissa, right. Alissa – she in tonight?’
‘She got shot, R.J.’
‘Boy! Did she? Really?’
‘Why were you watching me outside?’ asked Kelso.
‘That’s commerce, I guess. You wanna make money, you gotta take risks. Three hundred a night. Let’s say three nights a week. Nine hundred dollars. Give three hundred for protection. Still leaves six hundred clear. Twenty thousand dollars a year – that’s not hard. What’s that – seven times the average annual wage? And no tax? Gotta pay a price for that. Gotta take a risk. Like working on an oil rig. Let me get you a beer, professor. Why shouldn’t I watch you? I’m a reporter, goddamnit
. Everyone comes here watches everyone else. There’s half a billion dollars worth of custom here tonight. And that’s just the Russians.’
‘Mafia?’
‘No, just business. Same as any place else.’
The dance floor was packed now, the noise louder, the smoke denser. A new kind of lightshow had been switched on – lights that made everything that was white stand out dazzlingly bright. Teeth and eyes and nails and banknotes flashed in the gloom like knives. Kelso felt disorientated and vaguely drunk. But not, he thought, as drunk as O’Brian was pretending to be. There was something about the reporter that gave him the creeps. How old was he? Thirty? A young man in a hurry, if ever he’d seen one.
He said to Anna, ‘What time does this finish?’
She held up five fingers. ‘You want to dance, Mister Professor?’
‘Later,’ said Kelso. ‘Maybe.’
‘It’s the Weimar Republic,’ said O’Brian, coming back with two bottles of beer and a can of Diet Coke for Anna. ‘Isn’t that what you wrote? Look at it. Christ. All we need is Marlene Dietrich in a tuxedo and we might as well be in Berlin. I liked your book, professor, by the way. Did I say that already?’
‘You did. Thanks. Cheers.’
‘Cheers.’ O’Brian raised his bottle and took a swig, then he leaned over and shouted in Kelso’s ear. ‘Weimar Republic, that’s how I see it. Like you see it. Six things the same, okay? One: you have a big country, proud country, lost its empire, really lost a war, but can’t figure out how – figures it must’ve been stabbed in the back, so there’s a lot of resentment, right? Two: democracy in a country with no tradition of democracy – Russia doesn’t know democracy from a fuckin’ hole in the ground, frankly – people don’t like it, sick of all the arguing, they want a strong line, any line. Three: border trouble – lots of your own ethnic nationals suddenly stuck in other countries, saying they’re getting picked on. Four: anti-semitism – you can buy SS marchin’ songs on the street corners, for Christ’s sake. That leaves two.’
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