‘… a black oilskin notebook that used to belong to Josef Stalin …’
They were still bent over the tape when Netto crept back in, his complexion three shades paler than usual, to announce he had bad news.
FELIKS Stepanovich Suvorin, with Netto at his heels, walked back, grim-faced, to his office. It was a long trek from the leadership suites in the west of the building to the operational block in the east, and in the course of it at least a dozen people must have nodded and smiled at him, for in the Finnish-designed, wood and white-tile corridors of Yasenevo, the major was the golden boy, the coming man. He spoke English with an American accent, subscribed to the leading American magazines and had a collection of modern American jazz, which he listened to with his wife, the daughter of one of the President’s most liberal economic advisers. Even Suvorin’s clothes were American – the button-down shirt, the striped tie, the brown sports jacket – each one a legacy of his years as the KGB resident in Washington.
Look at Feliks Stepanovich!, you could see them thinking, as they struggled into their winter coats and hurried past to catch the buses home. Put in as number two to that fat old timer, Arsenyev, primed to take over an entire directorate at the age of thirty-eight. And not just any directorate, either, but RT – one of the most secret of them all! – licensed to conduct foreign intelligence operations on Russian soil. Look at him, the coming man, hurrying back to his office to work, while we go off home for the night …
‘Good evening to you, Feliks Stepanovich!’
‘So long, Feliks! Cheer up!’
‘Working late again, I see, comrade major!’
Suvorin half-smiled, nodded, gestured vaguely with his pipe, preoccupied.
The details, as Netto had relayed them, were sparse but eloquent. Fluke Kelso had left the Mamantovs’ apartment at fifteen-seven. Suvorin had also left the scene a few minutes later. At fifteen-twenty-two, Ludmilla Fedorova Mamantova, in the company of the bodyguard, Viktor Bubka, was also observed to leave the apartment for her customary afternoon stroll to the Bolotnaya Park (given her confused condition, she had always to be accompanied). Since there was only one man on duty, they were not followed.
They did not return.
Shortly after seventeen hundred, a neighbour in the apartment beneath the Mamantovs’ reported hearing prolonged, hysterical screams. The porter had been summoned, the apartment – with difficulty – opened and Madame Mamantov had been discovered alone, in her undergarments, locked inside a cupboard, through the door of which she had nevertheless managed to kick a hole using her bare feet. She had been taken to the Diplomatic Policlinic in a state of extreme distress. Both her ankles were broken.
‘This must be an emergency escape plan,’ said Suvorin, as they reached his office. ‘He’s clearly had this up his sleeve for quite a while, even down to establishing a routine for his wife. The question is: what’s the emergency?’
He pressed the light switch. Neon panels stuttered into life. The leadership’s side of the building had the view of the lake and the trees while Suvorin’s office looked north, towards the Moscow ring road and the squat and crowded tower blocks of a housing estate. Suvorin threw himself into his chair, grabbed his tobacco pouch and swung his feet up on to the window sill. He saw Netto, reflected, coming in and closing the door. Arsenyev had given him a blasting, which wasn’t really fair. If anyone was to blame, it was Suvorin, for sending Bunin after Kelso.
‘How many men do we have at Mamantov’s apartment right now?’
‘Two, major.’
‘Split them. One to the Policlinic to keep an eye on the wife, one to stay in place. Bunin’s to stick with Kelso. What’s his hotel?’
‘The Ukraina.’
‘Right. If he’s heading south down the Garden Ring he’s probably on his way back. Call Gromov at the Sixteenth and tell him we want a full communications intercept on Kelso. He’ll tell you he hasn’t the resources. Refer him to Arsenyev. Have the authorisation papers on my desk within fifteen minutes.’
‘Yes, major.’
‘Leave the Tenth to me.’
‘The Tenth, major?’ The Tenth was the archives branch.
‘According to the colonel, there should be a file on this Stalin notebook.’ Legend of the Lubyanka, indeed! ‘I’ll need to dream up some excuse to see it. Check on this place in Vspolnyi Street: what is it exactly? God, we need more men!’ Suvorin banged his desk in frustration. ‘Where’s Kolosov?’
‘He left for Switzerland yesterday.’
‘Anybody else around? Barsukov?’
‘Barsukov’s in Ivanovo with his Germans.’
Suvorin groaned. This operation was running on paraffin and thin air, that was the trouble with it. It didn’t have a name, a budget. Technically, it wasn’t even legal.
Netto was writing rapidly. ‘What do you want to do with Kelso?’
‘Just continue to keep an eye on him.’
‘Not pick him up?’
‘For what exactly? And where do we take him? We have no cells. We have no legal basis to make arrests. How long’s Mamantov been loose?’
‘Three hours, major. I’m sorry, I –’ Netto looked close to tears.
‘Forget it, Vissi. It’s not your fault.’ He smiled at the young man’s reflection. ‘Mamantov was pulling stunts like that while we were in the womb. We’ll find him,’ he added, with a confidence he did not feel, ‘sooner or later. Now off you go. I’ve got to call my wife.’
After Netto had gone, Suvorin removed the photograph of Kelso from its folder and pinned it to the noticeboard beside his desk. Here he was, with so much else to do, on issues which really mattered – economic intelligence, biotechnology, fibre optics – reduced to worrying about whether and why Vladimir Mamantov was after Stalin’s notebook. It was absurd. It was worse than absurd. It was shaming. What kind of a country was this? Slowly, he tamped the tobacco in his pipe and lit it. And then he stood there for a full minute, his hands clasped behind his back, his pipe between his teeth, regarding the historian with an expression of pure loathing.
Chapter Seven
FLUKE KELSO LAY on his back, on his bed, in his room on the twenty-third floor of the Ukraina Hotel, smoking a cigarette and staring at the ceiling, the fingers of his left hand curled around the comforting and familiar shape of a quarter-bottle of Scotch.
He hadn’t bothered to take off his coat, nor had he turned on the bedside lamp. Not that he needed to. The brilliant white floodlights that lit the Stalinist–Gothic skyscraper shone into his room and provided a feverish illumination. Through the closed window he could hear the sound of the early evening traffic on the wet road far below.
A melancholy hour this, he always thought, for a stranger in a foreign city – nightfall, the brittle lights, the temperature dropping, the office workers hurrying home, the businessmen trying to look cheerful in the hotel bars.
He took another swig of Scotch, then reached over for the ashtray and balanced it on his chest, tapping the end of his cigarette into it. The bowl hadn’t been cleaned properly. Still stuck to its dusty bottom, like a small green egg, nested a gobbet of Papu Rapava’s phlegm.
It had taken Kelso only a few minutes – the length of one short visit to the Ukraina’s business centre and the time it took to flick through an old Moscow telephone directory – to establish that the house on Vspolnyi Street had indeed once been an African embassy. It was listed under the Republic of Tunisia.
And it had taken him only slightly longer to extract the rest of the information he needed – sitting on the edge of his hard and narrow bed, talking earnestly on the telephone to the press attaché at the new Tunisian Embassy, pretending an intense interest in the booming Moscow property market and the precise design of the Tunisian flag.
According to the press attaché, the Tunisians had been offered the mansion on Vspolnyi Street by the Soviet government in 1956, on a short-term lease, renewable every seven years. In January, the ambassador had been notified that the lease would
not be extended when it came up for renegotiation, and in August they had moved out. And in truth, sir, they had not been too sorry to go, no indeed, not after that unfortunate business in 1993 when workmen had dug up twelve human skeletons, victims of the Stalinist repression, buried beneath the pavement outside. No explanation for the eviction had been offered, but, as everyone knew, great swathes of state property were now being privatised in central Moscow and sold on to foreign investors; fortunes were being made.
And the flag? The flag of the Tunisian Republic, honourable sir, was a red crescent and a red star in a white orb, all on a red ground.
‘… there was a red sickle moon and a single red star …’
The blue shaving of cigarette smoke curled and broke against the dusty plaster.
Oh, he thought, how prettily it all hung together – Rapava’s story and Yepishev’s story and the convenient emptiness of the Beria mansion and the freshly turned earth and the bar named ‘Robotnik’.
He finished the Scotch and stubbed out his cigarette and lay there for a while, turning the book of matches over and over, anti-clockwise in his fingers.
*
STILL unsure of what he should do, Kelso went down to the front desk and changed the last of his travellers’ cheques into roubles. He would need to have cash, whatever happened. He would need ready money. His credit card was not entirely reliable these days – witness that unfortunate incident at the hotel shop, when he had tried to use it to buy his Scotch.
He thought he saw someone he recognised – from the symposium, presumably – and he raised his hand but they had already turned away.
On the counter of the reception was a sign – Any guest requiring to make an international telephone call must please to leave a cash deposit – and seeing it gave him a second stab of homesickness. So much happening, nobody to tell. On impulse he handed over $50 and made his way back through the crowded lobby towards the elevators.
Three marriages. He contemplated this extraordinary feat as the elevator shot him skywards. Three divorces in ascending order of bitterness.
Kate – well, Kate, that hardly counted, they were students, it was doomed from the start. She had even sent him Christmas cards until he moved to New York. And Irina – she at least had got her passport, which was always, he suspected, the main point of the exercise. But Margaret – poor Margaret – she was pregnant when he married her, which was why he married her, and no sooner had one boy arrived than the next was coming, and suddenly they were stuck in four cramped rooms off the Woodstock Road: the history teacher and the history student who between them had no history. It had lasted twelve years – ‘as long as the Third Reich,’ Fluke, drunk, had told an inquiring gossip columnist on the day that Margaret’s petition for divorce had been published. He had never been forgiven.
Still, she was the mother of his children. Maggie. Margaret. He would call poor Margaret.
The line sounded strange from the moment the operator got on to the international circuit, and his first reaction was, Russian phones! He shook it hard as the New York number began to ring.
‘Hello.’ The familiar voice, sounding unfamiliarly bright.
‘It’s me.’
‘Oh.’ Flat, suddenly; dead. Not even hostile.
‘Sorry to ruin your day.’ It was meant to be a joke, but it came out badly, bitter and self-pitying. He tried again. ‘I’m calling from Moscow.’
‘Why?’
‘Why am I calling or why am I calling from Moscow?’
‘Are you drinking?’
He glanced at the empty bottle. He had forgotten her capacity to smell breath at four thousand miles. ‘How are the boys? Can I talk to them?’
‘It’s eleven o’clock on a Tuesday morning. Where do you think they are?’
‘School?’
‘Well done, dad.’ She laughed, despite herself.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘For what in particular?’
‘For last month’s money.’
‘Three months’ money.’
‘It was some cock-up at the bank.’
‘Get a job, Fluke.’
‘Like you, you mean?’
‘Fuck you.’
‘All right. Withdrawn.’ He tried again. ‘I spoke to Adelman this morning. He might have something for me.’
‘Because things can’t go on like this, you know?’
‘I know. Listen. I may be on to something here –’
‘What’s Adelman offering?’
‘Adelman? Oh, teaching. But that’s not what I mean. I’m on to something here. In Moscow. It could be nothing. It could be huge.’
‘What is it?’
There was definitely something odd about the line. Kelso could hear his own voice playing back in his ear, too late to be an echo. ‘It could be huge,’ he heard himself say.
‘I don’t want to talk about it on the phone.’
‘You don’t want to talk about it on the phone –’
‘I don’t want to talk about it on the phone.’
‘– no, sure you don’t. You know why? Because it’s just more of the same old shit –’
‘Hold on, Maggie. Are you hearing me twice?’
‘– and here’s Adelman offering you a proper job, but of course you don’t want that, because that means facing up –’
‘Are you hearing me twice?’
‘– to your responsibilities –’
Quietly, Kelso replaced the receiver. He looked at it for a moment, and chewed his lip, then lay back on the bed and lit another cigarette.
STALIN, as you know, was dismissive of women.
Indeed, he believed the very notion of an intelligent woman was an oxymoron: he called them ‘herrings with ideas’. Of Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, he once observed to Molotov: ‘She may use the same lavatory as Lenin, but that doesn’t mean she knows anything about Leninism.’ After Lenin’s death, Krupskaya believed her status as the great man’s widow would protect her from Stalin’s purges, but Stalin quickly disabused her. ‘If you don’t shut your mouth,’ he told her, ‘we’ll get the Party a new Lenin’s widow.’
However, this is not the whole story. And here we come to one of those strange reversals of the accepted wisdom which occasionally make our profession so rewarding. For while the common view of Stalin has always been that he was largely indifferent to sex – the classic case of the politician who channels all his carnal appetites into the pursuit of power – the truth appears to have been the opposite. Stalin was a womaniser.
The recognition of this facet of his character is recent. It was Molotov, in 1988, who coyly told Chuyev (Sto sorok besed s Molotovym, Moscow) that Stalin had ‘always been attractive to women’. In 1990, Khrushchev, with the posthumous publication of his last set of interviews (The Glasnost Tapes, Boston) lifted the curtain a little further. And now the archives have added still more valuable detail.
Who were these women, whose favours Stalin enjoyed both before and after the suicide of his second wife? Some we know of. There was the wife of A. I. Yegorov, First Deputy People’s Commissar of Defence, who was notorious in Party circles for her numerous affairs. And then there was the wife of another military man – Gusev – a lady who was allegedly in bed with Stalin on the night Nadezhda shot herself. There was Rosa Kaganovich, whom Stalin, as a widower, seems for a time to have thought of marrying. Most interesting of all, perhaps, there was Zhenya Alliluyeva, the wife of Stalin’s brother-in-law, Pavel. Her relationship with Stalin is described in a diary which was kept by his sister-in-law, Maria. It was seized on Maria’s arrest and only recently declassified (F45 O1 D1).
These, of course, are only the women we know something about. Others are mere shadows in history, like the young maidservant, Valechka Istomina, who joined Stalin’s personal staff in 1935 (‘whether or not she was Stalin’s wife is nobody else’s business,’ Molotov told Chuyev), or the ‘beautiful young woman with dark skin’ Khrushchev once saw at Stalin’s
dacha. ‘I was told later she was a tutor for Stalin’s children,’ he said, ‘but she was not there for long. Later she vanished. She was there on Beria’s recommendation. Beria knew how to pick tutors …’
‘Later she vanished …’
Once again, the familiar pattern asserts itself: it was never very wise to know too much about Comrade Stalin’s private life. One of the men he cuckolded, Yegorov, was shot; another, Pavel Alliluyev, was poisoned. And Zhenya herself, his mistress and his sister-in-law by marriage – ‘the rose of the Novgorod fields’ – was arrested on Stalin’s orders and spent so long in solitary confinement that when eventually she was released, after his death, she could no longer talk – her vocal cords had atrophied …
HE must have fallen asleep because the next he knew the telephone was ringing.
The room was still in semi-darkness. He switched on the lamp and looked at his watch. Nearly eight.
He swung his legs off the bed and took a couple of stiff paces across the room to the little desk next to the window.
He hesitated, then picked up the receiver.
But it was only Adelman, wanting to know if he was coming down to dinner.
‘Dinner?’
‘My dear fellow, it’s the great symposium farewell supper, not to be missed. Olga’s going to come out of a cake.’
‘Christ. Do I have a choice?’
‘Nope. The story, by the way, is that you had a hangover of such epic proportions this morning you had to go back to your room and sleep it off.’
‘Oh, that’s lovely, Frank. Thank you.’
Adelman paused. ‘So what happened? You find your man?’
‘Of course not.’
‘It’s all balls?’
‘Absolutely. Nothing in it.’
‘Only – you know – you were gone all day –’
‘I looked up an old friend.’
‘Oh, I get you,’ said Adelman, with heavy emphasis. ‘Same old Fluke. Say, are you looking at this view?’
A glittering nightscape spread out at Kelso’s feet, neon banners hoisted across the city like the standards of an invading army. Philips, Marlboro, Sony, Mercedes-Benz … There was a time when Moscow after sunset was as gloomy as any capital in Africa. Not any more.