In his dreams he moved to kiss her again but she evaded his embrace. She danced jerkily across the snow outside the apartment block while O’Brian paraded up and down pretending to be Hitler. Madame Mamantov raged against her madness. And behind a door somewhere, Papu Rapava went on knocking to be let out. In here, boy! Thump. Thump. Thump.
HE woke to find a cool blue eye regarding him through the spyhole. The metal eyelid drooped and closed, the lock rattled.
Behind the pustulous guard there stood a second man – blond-headed, well-dressed – and Kelso’s first thought was a happy one: The embassy, they’ve come to get me out. But then blond-head said, in Russian, ‘Dr Kelso, put your boots on, please,’ and the guard shook the contents of the envelope out on to the cot.
Kelso bent to thread his laces. The stranger, he noticed, was wearing a smart pair of western brogues. He straightened and strapped on his watch and saw that it was only six-twenty. A mere two hours in the cells, but enough to last him a lifetime. He felt more human with his boots on. A man can face the world with something on his feet. They passed down the corridor, triggering the same desperate hammering and shouting.
He assumed he would be taken back upstairs for more questioning, but instead they came out into a rear courtyard where a car was waiting with two men in the front seats. Blond-head opened the rear passenger door for Kelso – ‘Please,’ he said, with cold politeness – then went round and got in the other side. The interior of the car was hot and fetid, as if at the end of a long journey, sweetened only by blond-head’s delicate aftershave. They pulled away, out of militia headquarters and into the quiet street. Nobody spoke.
It was beginning to get light – light enough, at least, for Kelso to recognise roughly where they were heading. He had already marked this trio down as secret police, which meant the FSB, which meant the Lubyanka. But to his surprise he realised they were travelling east, not west. They came down the Noviy Arbat, past the deserted shops, and the Ukraina came into view. So they were taking him back to the hotel, he thought. But he was wrong again. Instead of crossing the bridge they turned right and followed the course of the Moskva. Dawn was coming on quickly now, like a chemical reaction, darkness dissolving across the river, first to grey and then to a dirty alkali blue. Streaks of smoke and steam from the factory chimneys on the opposite bank – a tannery, a brewery – turned a corrosive pink.
They drove on in silence for a few more minutes and then suddenly swung off the embankment and parked in a derelict patch of reclaimed land that jutted out into the water. A couple of big sea-birds flapped and rose, and span away, crying. Blond-head was out first and then, after a brief hesitation, Kelso followed him. It crossed his mind that they had brought him to the perfect spot for an accident: a simple push, a flurry of news reports, a long investigation for a London colour supplement, suspicions raised and then forgotten. But he put a brave face on it. What else could he do?
Blond-head was reading the statement Kelso had given to the militia. It flapped in the breeze that was coming off the river. Something about him was familiar.
‘Your plane,’ he said, without turning round, ‘leaves Sheremetevo-2 at one-thirty. You will be on board it.’
‘Who are you?’
‘You’ll be taken back to your hotel now, and then you’ll catch the bus to the airport with your colleagues.’
‘Why are you doing this?’
‘You may try to re-enter the Russian Federation in the near future. In fact, I’m sure you will: you’re a persistent fellow, anyone can see that. But I must tell you that your application for a visa will be rejected.’
‘This is a bloody outrage.’ It was stupid, of course, to lose his temper, but he was too tired and shaken-up to help himself. ‘A complete bloody disgrace. Anyone would think that I was the killer.’
‘But you did kill him.’ The Russian turned round. ‘You are the killer.’
‘This is a joke, is it? I didn’t have to come forward. I didn’t have to call the militia. I could have run away.’
And don’t think I didn’t consider it –
‘It’s here in your own words.’ Blond-head slapped the statement. ‘You went to Mamantov yesterday afternoon and told him a “witness from the old time” had approached you with information about Stalin’s papers. That was a death sentence.’
Kelso faltered. ‘I never gave a name. I’ve been over that conversation in my mind a hundred times –’
‘Mamantov didn’t need a name. He already had the name.’
‘You can’t be certain –’
‘Papu Rapava,’ said the Russian, with exaggerated patience, ‘was re-investigated by the KGB in nineteen eighty-three. The investigation was at the request of the deputy chief of the Fifth Directorate – Vladimir Pavlovich Mamantov. Do you see?’
Kelso closed his eyes.
‘Mamantov knew precisely who you were talking about. There is no other “witness from the old time”. Everyone else is dead. So: fifteen minutes after you left Mamantov’s apartment, Mamantov also left. He even knew where the old man lived, from his file. He had seven, possibly eight hours to question Rapava. With the assistance of his friends. Believe me, a professional like Mamantov can do a lot of damage to a person in eight hours. Would you like me to give you some of the medical details? No? Then go back to New York, Dr Kelso, and play your games of history in somebody else’s country, because this isn’t England or America, the past isn’t safely dead here. In Russia, the past carries razors and a pair of handcuffs. Ask Papu Rapava.’
A gust of wind swept the surface of the river, raised waves, set a nearby buoy clanking against its rusting chains.
‘I can testify,’ said Kelso after a while. ‘To arrest Mamantov, you’ll need my evidence.’
For the first time, the Russian smiled. ‘How well do you know Mamantov?’
‘Hardly at all.’
‘You know him hardly at all. That is your good fortune. Some of us have come to know him well. And I can assure you that Comrade V. P. Mamantov will have no fewer than six witnesses – none of them below the rank of full colonel – who will swear that he spent the whole of last evening with them, discussing charity work, one hundred miles from Papu Rapava’s apartment. So much for the value of your testimony.’
He tore Kelso’s statement in half, then halved it again, and again – kept on until it couldn’t be reduced further. He crumpled the pieces between his hands, cupped them and threw the fragments out across the water. The wind caught them. The seagulls swooped in the hope of food then wheeled away, shrieking with disappointment.
‘Nothing is as it was,’ he said. ‘You ought to know that. The investigation begins again from scratch this morning. This statement was never taken. You were never detained by the militia. The officer who questioned you has been promoted and is being transferred, even as we speak, by military transport plane to Magadan.’
‘Magadan?’ Magadan was on the eastern rim of Siberia, four thousand miles away.
‘Oh, we’ll bring him back,’ said the Russian, airily, ‘when this is sorted out. What we don’t want is the Moscow press corps trampling over everything. That really would be embarrassing. Now, I tell you all this, knowing there’s nothing we can do to prevent you publishing your version of events abroad. But there will be no official corroboration from here, you understand? Rather the contrary. We reserve the right to make public our record of your day’s activity, in which your motives will be made to look quite different. For example: you were arrested for indecent exposure to a couple of children in the Zoopark, the daughters of one of my men. Or you were picked up drunk on the Smolenskaya embankment, urinating into the river, and had to be locked up for violent and abusive behavior.’
‘Nobody will believe it,’ said Kelso, trying to summon a last vestige of outrage. But, of course, they would. He could make a list now of everyone who would believe it. He said, bitterly, ‘So that’s it then? Mamantov goes free? Or perhaps you’ll try to find Stalin’s papers yourse
lves, so you can bury them somewhere, like you people bury everything else that’s “embarrassing”?’
‘Oh, but you irritate me,’ said the Russian, and now it was his turn to lose his temper. ‘People like you. How much more is it you want of us? You’ve won, but is that enough? No, you have to rub our faces in it – Stalin, Lenin, Beria: I’m sick of hearing their damn names – make us turn out all our filthy closets, wallow in guilt, so you can feel superior –’
Kelso snorted, ‘You sound like Mamantov.’
‘I despise Mamantov,’ said the Russian. ‘Do you understand me? For the same reason I despise you. We want to put an end to Comrade Mamantov and his kind – what d’you suppose this is all about? But now you’ve come along – blundered into something much bigger – something you can’t even begin to understand –’
He stopped – goaded, Kelso could tell, into saying more than he intended – and then Kelso realised where he must have seen him before.
‘You were there, weren’t you?’ he said. ‘When I went to see him. You were one of the men outside his apartment –’
But he was talking to himself. The Russian was striding back to the car.
‘Take him to the Ukraina,’ he said to the driver, ‘then come back here and pick me up. I need some air.’
‘Who are you?’
‘Just go. And be grateful.’
Kelso hesitated but suddenly he was too tired to argue. He climbed, weary and defeated, into the back seat as the engine started. The Russian slammed the door on him, emphatically. He felt numb and shut his eyes again and there was Rapava’s corpse swinging in the darkness. Thump. Thump. He opened his eyes and saw that it was the blond-headed man, knocking on the window. Kelso wound it down.
‘A final thought.’ He was making an effort to be polite again. He even smiled. ‘We’re working on the assumption, obviously, that Mamantov now has this notebook. But have you considered the alternative? Remember, Papu Rapava withstood six months of interrogation back in fifty-three, and then fifteen years in Kolyma. Suppose Mamantov and his friends didn’t manage to break him in one evening. It’s a possibility: it would explain the … ferocity of their behaviour: frustration. In that case, if you were Mamantov, who would you want to question next?’ He banged on the roof. ‘Sleep well in New York.’
SUVORIN watched the big car as it bounced over the rough ground and out of sight. He turned away, towards the river, and walked along the quayside, smoking his pipe, until he came to a big metal post set into the concrete, to which ships had moored in the communist time, before economics had accomplished what Hitler’s bombers had never managed, and laid waste the docks. His performance had exhausted him. He wiped the surface with his handkerchief, sat down, and pulled out his photocopy of Kelso’s statement. To have written so much – perhaps two thousand words – so quickly and with such clarity, after such an experience … Well, it proved his hunch: he was a clever one, this fellow, Fluke.
Troublesome. Persistent. Clever.
He went through the pages again with a gold propelling pencil and made a list of matters for Netto to check. They needed to visit the house on Vspolnyi Street – Beria’s place, well, well. They ought to find this daughter of Rapava’s. They should compile a list of every forensic document examiner in the Moscow region to whom Mamantov might take the notebook for authentication. And every handwriting expert. And they should find a couple of tame historians and ask them to make the best guess possible as to what this notebook might contain. And and and … He felt as though he was trying to stuff gas back into a cylinder with his hands.
He was still writing when Netto and the driver returned. He rose stiffly. To his dismay he found that the mooring-post had left a rust-coloured mark on the back of his beautiful coat, and he spent much of the journey to Yasenevo picking at it obsessively, trying to make it clean.
Chapter Twelve
KELSO’S HOTEL ROOM was in darkness, the curtains closed. He pulled aside the cheap nylon drapes. There was an odd smell of something – talcum powder? Aftershave? Someone had been in here. Blond-head, was it? Eau Sauvage? He lifted the telephone receiver. The line hummed. He felt breathless. His skin was crawling. He could have done with a whisky but the mini-bar was still empty after his night with Rapava; there was nothing in it apart from soda and orange juice. And he could have done with a bath but there wasn’t a plug.
He guessed now who the blond-headed man was. He knew the species – smooth and sharply-dressed, westernised, deracinated – too sharp for the secret police. He had been meeting men like that at embassy receptions for more than twenty years, dodging their discreet invitations for lunch and drinks, listening to their carefully indiscreet jokes about life in Moscow. They used to be called the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. Now they called themselves the SVR. The name had changed but the job had not. Blond-head was a spy. And he was investigating Mamantov. They had set the spies on Mamantov, which was not much of a vote of confidence in the FSB.
At the thought of Mamantov, he stepped quickly over to the door and turned the heavy lock and set the chain. Through the spy-hole he took a fish-eyed squint down the empty corridor.
‘But you did kill him … You are the killer.’
He was shaking now with delayed shock. He felt filthy, somehow, defiled. The memory of the night was like grit against his skin.
He went into the little green-tiled bathroom, took off his clothes and turned on the shower, set the water as hot as he could bear, and soaped himself from head to foot. The suds turned grey with the Moscow grime. He stood under the steaming jet and let it scourge him for another ten minutes, thrashing his shoulders and his chest, then he stepped out of the tub, slopping water over the uneven lino. He lit a cigarette and smoked as he shaved, transferring it from one side of his mouth to the other, working his razor around it, standing in a puddle. Then he dried himself off, got into bed and pulled the cover up to his chin. But he didn’t sleep.
A little after nine o’clock the telephone began to ring. The bell was shrill. It rang for a long while, stopped, then started again. This time, though, whoever it was hung up quickly.
A few minutes later, someone knocked softly on his bedroom door.
Kelso felt vulnerable now, naked. He waited ten minutes, threw off the sheet, dressed, packed – that didn’t take long – then sat in one of the foam rubber chairs facing the door. The cover of the other chair was rucked, he noticed, the seat still slightly depressed from the imprint of poor Papu Rapava.
AT ten-fifteen, carrying his suitcase in one hand and with his raincoat over his arm, Kelso unlocked and unchained his door, checked the corridor and descended via the express elevator into the hubub of the ground floor.
He handed in his key at the reception desk and was in the act of turning away, towards the main entrance, when a man shouted ‘Professor!’
It was O’Brian, hurrying over from the news-stand. He was still wearing his clothes from the night before – jeans a little less pressed, T-shirt no longer as white – and he had a couple of newspapers tucked under his arm. He hadn’t shaved. He seemed even bigger in the daylight. ‘Morning, professor. So. What’s new?’
Kelso made a groaning noise in the back of his throat but managed to hoist up a smile. ‘Leaving, I’m afraid.’ He displayed his suitcase, bag and coat.
‘Now I’m sorry to hear that. Let me help you with those.’
‘I’m fine.’ He began to move around O’Brian. ‘Really.’
‘Aw, come on.’ The reporter’s arm flashed out, grabbing the handle, squeezing Kelso’s fingers out of the way. In a second he had the suitcase. He quickly transferred it to his other hand, out of Kelso’s reach. ‘Where to, sir? Outside?’
‘What the fuck are you playing at?’ Kelso strode after him. People sitting in reception turned to watch. ‘Give me back my case –’
‘That was some night, though, wasn’t it? That place? Those girls?’ O’Brian shook his head and grinned as they walked. ‘And then you go and fi
nd that body and all – must’ve been one hell of a shock. Look out, professor, here we go.’
He plunged through the revolving door and Kelso, after a hesitation, followed him. He came out the other side to find O’Brian looking serious.
‘All right,’ said O’Brian, ‘don’t let’s embarrass one another. I know what’s going on.’
‘I will take my case now, thank you.’
‘I decided to hang around outside Robotnik last night. Forgo the pleasures of the flesh.’
‘My case –’
‘Let’s say I had a hunch. Saw you leave with the girl. Saw you kiss her. Saw her hit you – what was that all about, by the way? Saw you get in her car. Saw you go into the apartment block. Saw you run out ten minutes later like all the hounds of hell were after you. And then I saw the cops arrive. Oh, professor, you are a character, you are a man of surprises.’
‘And you’re a creep.’ Kelso began pulling on his raincoat, making an effort to seem unconcerned. ‘What were you doing at Robotnik anyway? Don’t tell me: it was a coincidence.’
‘I go to Robotnik, sure,’ said O’Brian. ‘That’s how I like my relationships: on a business footing. Why get a girl for free when you can pay for one, that’s my philosophy.’
‘God.’ Kelso held out his hand. ‘Just give me my case.’
‘Okay, okay.’ O’Brian glanced over his shoulder. The bus was in its usual place, waiting to ferry the historians to the airport. Moldenhauer was taking a picture of Saunders with the hotel in the background, Olga was watching them, fondly. ‘If you want to know the truth, it was Adelman.’
Kelso drew his head back slowly. ‘Adelman?’
‘Yeah, at the symposium yesterday, during the morning break, I asked Adelman where you were and he told me you were after some Stalin papers.’
‘Adelman said that?’
‘Oh, come on, don’t tell me you trusted Adelman?’ O’Brian grinned. ‘One sniff of a scoop and you guys make the paparazzi look like choirboys. Adelman proposed a deal. Fifty-fifty. He said I should try to find the papers, see if there was anything in it, and if there was then he’d authenticate them. He told me everything you’d told him.’