Archangel

by Robert Harris

  ‘All right.’ It was disconcerting, hearing your own views so crudely parroted; like an Oxford tutorial –

  ‘Economic crash, and that’s coming, don’t you think?’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Isn’t it obvious? Hitler. They haven’t found their Hitler yet. But when they do, it’s watch out, world, I reckon.’ O’Brian put his left forefinger under his nose and raised his right arm in a Nazi salute. Across the bar, a group of Russian businessmen whooped and cheered.

  AFTER that, the evening accelerated. Kelso danced with Anna, O’Brian danced with Nataliya, they had more drinks – the American stuck to beer while Kelso tried the cocktails: B-52s, Kamikazes – they swapped girls, danced some more and then it was after midnight. Nataliya was in a tight red dress that was slippery, like plastic, and her flesh beneath it, despite the heat, felt cold and hard. She had taken something. Her eyes were wide and poorly focused. She asked if he wanted to go somewhere – she liked him a lot, she whispered, she’d do it for five hundred – but he just gave her fifty, for the pleasure of the dance, and went back to the bar.

  Depression stalked him. He wasn’t sure why. He could smell desperation, that was it: desperation stank as strongly as the perfume and the sweat. Desperation to buy. Desperation to sell. Desperation to pretend you were having a good time. A young man in a suit, so drunk he could barely walk, was being led away by his tie by a hard-faced girl with long blonde hair. Kelso decided he would have a smoke at the bar and then go – no, on second thoughts, forget the cigarette – he stuffed it back into the pack – he would go.

  ‘Rapava,’ yelled the barman.

  ‘What?’ Kelso cupped his hand to his ear.

  ‘That’s her. She’s here.’

  ‘What?’

  Kelso looked to where the barman was pointing and saw her at once. Her. He let his gaze travel past her and then come back. She was older than the others: close-cropped black hair, black eyeshadow like bruises, black lipstick, a dead white face at once broad and thin, with cheekbones as sharp as a skull. Asiatic-looking. Mingrelian.

  Papu Rapava: released from the camps in 1969. Married, say 1970, 1971. A son just old enough to fight in Afghanistan. And a daughter?

  ‘My daughter’s a whore …’

  ‘Night night, professor –’ O’Brian swept past with a wink over his shoulder, Nataliya on one arm, Anna on the other. The rest of his words were lost in the noise. Nataliya turned, giggled, blew Kelso a kiss. Kelso smiled vaguely, waved, put down his drink and moved along the bar.

  A black cocktail dress – fabric shiny, knee-length, sleeveless – bare white throat and arms (not even a wrist watch), black stockings, black shoes. And something not quite right about her, some disturbance in the atmosphere around her, so that even at the crowded bar she was in a space, alone. No one was talking to her. She was drinking a bottle of mineral water without a glass and looking at nothing, her dark eyes were blank, and when he said hello she turned to face him, without interest. He asked if she wanted a drink.

  No.

  A dance, then?

  She looked him over, thought about it, shrugged.

  Okay.

  She drained the bottle, set it on the bar, and pushed past him on to the dance floor, turned, waited for him. He followed her.

  She didn’t make much of a pretence and he rather liked her for that. The dance was merely a polite prelude to business, like a broker and a client spending ten seconds inquiring after each other’s health. For about a minute she moved idly, at the edge of the pack, then she leaned over and said, ‘Four hundred?’

  No trace of perfume, just a vague scent of soap.

  Kelso said, ‘Two hundred.’

  ‘Okay.’

  She walked straight off the floor without looking back and he was so surprised by her failure to haggle that for a moment he was left alone. Then he went after her, up the spiral staircase. Her hips were full in the tight black dress, her waist thick, and it occurred to him that she didn’t have long to go at this end of the game, that it was a mistake to invite immediate comparison with women eight, ten, maybe even twelve years her junior.

  They collected their coats in silence. Hers was cheap, thin, too short for the season.

  They went out into the cold. She took his arm. That was when he kissed her. He was slightly drunk and the situation was so surreal that he actually thought for a moment that he might combine business and pleasure. And he was curious, he had to admit it. She responded immediately, and with more passion than he’d expected. Her lips parted. His tongue touched her teeth. She tasted unexpectedly of something sweet and he remembered thinking that maybe her lipstick was flavoured with liquorice: was that possible?

  She pulled away from him.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he said.

  ‘What name do you like?’

  He had to smile at that. His luck: to find the first postmodern whore in Moscow. When she saw him smiling, she frowned.

  ‘What’s your wife’s name?’

  ‘I don’t have a wife.’

  ‘Girlfriend?’

  ‘No girlfriend, either.’

  She shivered and thrust her hands deep into her pockets. It had stopped snowing, and now that the metal door had closed behind them the night was silent.

  She said, ‘What’s your hotel?’

  ‘The Ukraina.’

  She rolled her eyes.

  ‘Listen,’ he began, but he had no name to ease the conversation. ‘Listen, I don’t want to sleep with you. Or rather,’ he corrected himself, ‘I do, but that isn’t what I had in mind.’

  Was that clear?

  ‘Ah,’ she said, and looked knowing – looked like a whore for the first time, in fact. ‘Whatever you want, it’s still two hundred.’

  ‘Do you have a car?’

  ‘Yes.’ She paused. ‘Why?’

  ‘The truth is,’ he said, wincing at the lie, ‘I’m a friend of your father’s. I want you to take me to see him –’

  That shocked her. She reeled back, laughing, panicky. ‘You don’t know my father.’

  ‘Rapava. His name’s Papu Rapava.’

  She stared at him, slack mouthed, then slapped his face – hard, the heel of her hand connecting with the edge of his cheekbone – and started walking away, fast, stumbling a little: it couldn’t have been easy in high heels on freezing snow. He let her go. He wiped his mouth with his fingers. They came away black with something. Not blood he realised: lipstick. Oh, but she packed a punch, though: he was hurting. Behind him, the door had opened. He was aware of people watching, and a murmur of disapproval. He could guess what they were thinking: rich westerner gets honest Russian girl outside, tries to renegotiate the terms, or suggests something so disgusting she can only turn and run – bastard. He set off after her.

  She had veered on to the virgin snow of the pitch and had stopped, somewhere near the halfway line, staring into the dark sky. He trod along the path of her small footprints, came up behind her and waited, a couple of yards away.

  After a while, he said, ‘I don’t know who you are. And I don’t want to know who you are. And I won’t tell your father how I found him. I won’t tell anyone. I give you my word. I just want you to take me to where he lives. Take me to where he lives and I’ll give you two hundred dollars.’

  She didn’t turn. He couldn’t see her face.

  ‘Four hundred,’ she said.

  Chapter Nine

  FELIKS SUVORIN, IN a dark blue Crombie overcoat from Saks of Fifth Avenue, had arrived at the Lubyanka in the snow a little after eight that evening, sweeping up the slushy hill in the back of an official Volga.

  His path had been eased by a call from Yuri Arsenyev to his old buddy, Nikolai Oborin – hunting crony, vodka partner and nowadays chief of the Tenth Directorate, or the Special Federal Archive Resource Bureau, or whatever the Squirrels had decided to call themselves that particular week.

  ‘Now listen, Niki, I’ve got a young fellow in the office with me, name of Suv
orin, and we’ve come up with a ploy … That’s him … Now, listen, Niki, I can’t say more than this: there’s a foreign diplomat – western, highly placed – he’s got a racket going, smuggling … No, not icons, this time, wait for it – documents – and we thought we’d lay a trap … That’s it, that’s it, you’re way ahead of me, comrade – something big, something irresistible … Yes, that’s an idea, but what about this: what about that notebook the old NKVDers used to go on about, what was it? … That’s it, “Stalin’s testament” … Well, this is why I’m calling now. We’ve got a problem. He’s meeting the target tomorrow … Tonight? He can do tonight, Niki, I’m certain – I’m looking at him now, he’s nodding – he can do tonight …’

  Suvorin hadn’t even had to repeat the tale, let alone elaborate upon it. Once inside the Lubyanka’s marble hall, his papers checked, he’d followed his instructions and called a man named Blok, who was expecting him. He stood around the empty lobby, watched by the silent, uncurious guards and contemplated the big white bust of Andropov, and presently there were footsteps. Blok – an ageless creature, stooped and dusty, with a bunch of keys on his belt – led him into the depths of the building, then out into a dark, wet courtyard and across it and into what looked like a small fortress. Up the stairs to the second floor: a small room, a desk, a chair, a wood-block floor, barred windows –

  ‘How much do you want to see?’

  ‘Everything.’

  ‘That’s your decision,’ said Blok, and left.

  Suvorin had always preferred to look ahead rather than to live in the past: something else he admired about the Americans. What was the alternative for a modern Russian? Paralysis! The end of history struck him as an excellent idea. History couldn’t end soon enough, as far as Feliks Suvorin was concerned.

  But even he could not escape the ghosts in this place. After a minute he got to his feet and prowled around. Craning his head at the high window he found he could see up to the narrow strip of night sky, and then down to the tiny windows, level with the earth, that marked the old Lubyanka cells. He thought of Isaak Babel, down there somewhere, tortured into betraying his friends, then frantically retracting, and of Bukharin, and his final letter to Stalin (‘I feel, toward you, toward the Party, toward the cause as a whole nothing but great and boundless love: I embrace you in my thoughts, farewell forever …’) and of Zinoviev, disbelieving, being dragged away by his guard to be shot (‘Please comrade, please, for God’s sake call Josef Vissarionovich …’)

  He pulled out his mobile phone, tapped in the familiar number and spoke to his wife.

  ‘Hi, you’ll never guess where I am … Who’s to say?’ He felt better immediately for hearing her voice. ‘I’m sorry about tonight. Hey, kiss the babies for me, will you …? And one for you, too, Serafima Suvorina …’

  The secret police was beyond the reach of time and history. It was protean. That was its secret. The Cheka had become the GPU, and then the OGPU, and then the NKVD, and then the NKGB, and then the MGB, and then the MVD, and finally the KGB: the highest stage of evolution. And then, lo and behold!, the mighty KGB itself had been obliged by the failed coup to mutate into two entirely new sets of initials: the SVR – the spies – stationed out at Yasenevo, and the FSB – internal security – still here, in the Lubyanka, amid the bones.

  And the view in the Kremlin’s highest reaches was that the FSB, at least, was really nothing more than the latest in the long tradition of rearranged letters – that, in the immortal words of Boris Nikolaevich himself, delivered to Arsenyev in the course of a steam bath at the Presidential dacha, ‘those motherfuckers in the Lubyanka are still the same old motherfuckers they always were’. Which was why, when the President decreed that Vladimir Mamantov had to be investigated, the task could not be entrusted to the FSB, but had to be farmed out to the SVR – and never mind if they hadn’t the resources.

  Suvorin had four men to cover the city. He called Vissari Netto for an update. The situation hadn’t changed: the primary target – No. 1 – had still not returned to his apartment, the target’s wife – No. 2 – was still under sedation, the historian – No. 3 – was still at his hotel and now having dinner.

  ‘Lucky for some,’ muttered Suvorin. There was a clatter in the corridor. ‘Keep me informed,’ he added firmly, and pressed END. He thought it sounded like the right kind of thing to say.

  He had been expecting one file, maybe two. Instead, Blok threw open the door and wheeled in a steel trolley stacked with folders – twenty or thirty of them – some so old that when he lost control of the heavy contraption and collided with the wall, they sent up protesting clouds of dust.

  ‘That’s your decision,’ he repeated.

  ‘Is this the lot?’

  ‘This goes up to sixty-one. You want the rest?’

  ‘Of course.’

  HE couldn’t read them all. It would have taken him a month. He confined himself to untying the ribbon from each bundle, riffling through the torn and brittle pages to see if they contained anything of interest, then tying them up again. It was filthy work. His hands turned black. The spores invaded the membrane of his nose and made his head ache.

  Highly confidential

  28 June 1953

  To Central Committee, Comrade Malenkov

  I hereby enclose the deposition of the cross-examination of prisoner A. N. Poskrebyshev, former assistant to J. V. Stalin, concerning his work as an anti-Soviet spy.

  The investigation is continuing.

  USSR Deputy Minister of State Security,

  A. A. Yepishev

  This had been the start of it – a couple of pages, in the middle of Poskrebyshev’s interrogation, underscored in red ink almost half a century ago, by an agitated hand:

  Interrogator: Describe the demeanour of the General Secretary in the four years, 1949–53.

  Poskrebyshev: The General Secretary became increasingly withdrawn and secretive. After 1951, he never left the Moscow district. His health deteriorated sharply, I should say from his 70th birthday. On several occasions I witnessed cerebral disturbances leading to blackouts, from which he quickly recovered. I told him: “Let me call the doctors, Comrade Stalin. You need a doctor.” The General Secretary refused, stating that the 4th Main Administration of the Ministry of Health was under the control of Beria, and that while he would trust Beria to shoot a man, he would not trust him to cure one. Instead I prepared for the General Secretary herbal infusions.

  Interrogator: Describe the effect of these health problems upon the General Secretary’s conduct of his duties.

  Poskrebyshev: Before the blackouts commenced, the General Secretary would sustain a workload of approximately two hundred documents each day. Afterwards, this number declined sharply and he ceased to see many of his colleagues. He made numerous writings of his own, to which I was not permitted access.

  Interrogator: Describe the form of these private writings.

  Poskreybshev: These private writings took various forms. In his final year, for example, he acquired a notebook.

  Interrogator: Describe this notebook.

  Poskrebyshev: This notebook was of an ordinary sort, which might be bought in any stationers, with a black oilskin cover.

  Interrogator: Which other persons knew of the existence of this notebook?

  Poskrebyshev: The chief of his bodyguard, General Vlasik, knew of it. Beria also knew of it and asked me on several occasions to obtain a copy of it. This was not possible, even for me, as the General Secretary confined it to an office safe to which he alone possessed the key.

  Interrogator: Speculate as to the contents of this notebook.

  Poskrebyshev: I cannot speculate. I do not know.

  Highly Confidential

  30 June 1953

  To USSR Deputy Minister of State Security, A. A. Yepishev

  You are instructed to investigate the whereabouts of the personal writings of J. V. Stalin referred to by A. N.

  Poskrebyshev as a matter of supreme urgency and usi
ng all appropriate measures.

  Central Committee,

  Malenkov

  Cross-examination of prisoner Lieutenant-General N.

  S. Vlasik

  1 July 1953 [Extract]

  Interrogator: Describe the black notebook belonging to J. V. Stalin.

  Vlasik: I do not remember such a notebook.

  Interrogator: Describe the black notebook belonging to J. V. Stalin.

  Vlasik: I remember now. I first became aware of this in December 1952. One day I saw this notebook on Comrade Stalin’s desk. I asked Poskrebyshev what it contained, but Poskrebyshev could not tell me. Comrade Stalin saw me looking at it and asked me what I was doing. I replied that I was doing nothing, that my eye had merely fallen upon this notebook, but that I had not touched it. Comrade Stalin said: “You as well, Vlasik, after more than thirty years?” I was arrested the following morning and brought to the Lubyanka.

  Interrogator: Describe the circumstances of your arrest.

  Vlasik: I was arrested by Beria, and subjected to numberless cruelties at his hands. Beria questioned me repeatedly about the notebook of Comrade Stalin. I was unable to tell him details. I know nothing further of this matter.

  Statement of Lieutenant A. P. Titov, Kremlin Guard

  6 July 1953 [Extract]

  I was on duty in the leadership area of the Kremlin from 22:00 on 1 March 1953 until 06:00 the following day.

  At approximately 04:40, I encountered in the Passage of Heroes Comrade L. P. Beria and a second comrade whose identity is not known to me. Comrade Beria was carrying a small case or bag.

  Interrogation of Lieutenant P. G. Rapava, NKVD

  7 July 1953 [Extract]

  Interrogator: Describe what happened following your departure from J. V. Stalin’s dacha with the traitor Beria.

  Rapava: I drove Comrade Beria to his home.

  Interrogator: Describe what happened following your departure from J. V. Stalin’s dacha with the traitor Beria.

  Rapava: I remember now. I drove Comrade Beria to the Kremlin to enable him to collect material from his office.