He ignored her aggression. She was entitled to it. ‘What was he like, the last time you saw him?’
‘Like?’
‘His mood.’
‘A bastard. Same as always.’ She frowned at the oncoming traffic. ‘He must have been waiting for me all night, outside my place. I got back about six. I’d been at the club, you know, been working. The moment he saw me he started shouting. Saw my clothes. Called me a whore.’ She shook her head at the memory.
‘Then what happened?’
‘He followed me in. Into my place. I said to him, I said: “You hit me, I’ll take your fucking eye out, I’m not your little girl any more.” That calmed him down.’
‘What did he want?’
‘To talk, he said. It was a shock after all that time. I didn’t think he knew where I lived. I didn’t even know he was still alive. Thought I’d got away from him for good. Oh, but he’d known, he said – known where I was for a long time. Said he used to come and watch me sometimes. He said, “You don’t get away from the past that easily.” Why did he come to see me?’ She looked at Kelso for the first time since they’d left the airport. ‘Can you tell me that?’
‘What did he want to talk about?’
‘I don’t know. I wouldn’t listen. I didn’t want him in my place, looking at my things. I didn’t want to hear his stories. He started going on about his time in the camps. I gave him some cigarettes to get rid of him and told him to go. I was tired and I’d got to go to work.’
‘Work?’
‘I work at GUM in the daytime. I learn law at college in the evenings. Some nights, I screw. Why? Is it a problem?’
‘You lead a full life.’
‘I have to.’
He tried to picture her behind the counter at GUM. ‘What do you sell?’
‘What?’
‘At the store. What do you sell?’
‘Nothing.’ She checked the mirror again. ‘I work the switchboard.’
Closer to the city, the road was clogged. They slowed to a crawl. There had been an accident up ahead. A rickety Skoda had run into the back of a big old Zhiguli. Broken glass and bits of metal were scattered across two lanes. The militia were on the scene. It looked as though one of the drivers had punched the other: he had splashes of blood on the front of his shirt. As they passed the policemen, Kelso turned his head away. The road cleared. They picked up speed.
He tried to fit all this together: Papu Rapava’s last two days on earth. Tuesday 27 October: he goes to see his daughter for the first time in a decade, because, he says, he wants to talk. She throws him out, buys him off with a pack of cigarettes and a book of matches labelled ‘Robotnik’. In the afternoon, he turns up, of all places, at the Institute of Marxism–Leninism and listens to Fluke Kelso deliver a paper on Josef Stalin. Then he follows Kelso back to the Ukraina and sits up all night drinking. And talking. He certainly talked. Perhaps he told me what he would have told his daughter if she’d only listened.
And then it’s dawn and he leaves the Ukraina. This is now Wednesday 28 October. And what does he do after he’s slipped away into the morning? Does he go to the deserted house on Vspolnyi Street and dig up the secret of his life? He must have done. And then he hides it, and he leaves a note for his daughter, telling her where to find it (‘remember that place I used to have when Mama was alive?’) and then, late in the afternoon, his killers come for him. And either he had told them everything, or he hadn’t, and if he hadn’t, then it must have been partly out of love, surely? To make certain that the only thing he had in the world that might be worth anything should go not to them but to his daughter.
God, thought Kelso, what an ending. What a way to leave a life – and how in keeping with the rest of it.
‘He must have cared for you,’ said Kelso. He wondered if she knew how the old man had died. If she didn’t, he couldn’t bring himself to tell her. ‘He must have cared for you, to have come to find you.’
‘I don’t think so. He used to hit me. And my mother. And my brother.’ She glared at the oncoming traffic. ‘He used to hit me when I was little. What does a child know?’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so.’
Kelso tried to imagine the four of them in the one-bedroom apartment. Where would her parents have slept? On a mattress in the sitting-room? And Rapava, after a decade and a half in Kolyma – violent, unstable, confined. It didn’t bear contemplating.
‘When did your mother die?’
‘Do you ever stop asking questions, mister?’
They came off the highway and down a slip road. Half of it had never been completed. One lane curved like a water-chute, ending abruptly in a row of dripping metal rods and a ten-yard drop to waste ground.
‘When I was eighteen, if that makes any difference.’
The ugliness around them was heroic. In Russia it could afford to be – could afford to take its time, stretch out a bit. Minor roads ran as wide as motorways, with flooded potholes the size of ponds. Each concrete stack of apartments, each belching industrial plant had an entire wilderness to itself to pollute. Kelso remembered the night before – the endless run from Block Nine to Block Eight to raise the alarm: it had gone on and on, like a journey in a nightmare.
Rapava’s place in the daylight looked even more derelict than it had seemed in the darkness. Scorch marks shot up the wall from a set of windows on the second floor where an apartment had been torched. There was a crowd outside and Zinaida slowed so they could take a look.
O’Brian was right. The word was out. That much was obvious. A solitary militia man blocked the doorway, holding at bay a dozen cameramen and reporters, who were themselves being watched by a straggling semi-circle of apathetic neighbours. Some kids kicked a ball on the waste ground. Others hung around the media’s fancy western cars.
‘What was he to them?’ Zinaida said suddenly. ‘What was he to any of you? You’re all vultures.’
She gave a grimace of disgust, and for the third time Kelso noticed her adjusting the rear-view mirror.
‘Is someone behind us?’ He turned round sharply.
‘Maybe. A car from the airport. But not any more.’
‘What sort of a car?’ He tried to keep his voice calm.
‘A BMW. Seven series.’
‘You know about cars?’
‘More questions?’ She shot him another look. ‘Cars were my father’s interest. Cars and Comrade Stalin. He was a driver, wasn’t he, for some big shot in the old days? You’ll see.’
She put her foot down.
She knows nothing, thought Kelso. She has no idea of the risks. He began making promises to himself of what he would do: you take a quick look now to see if this toolbox is here (it wouldn’t be) then ask her to take you back to the airport and see if you can talk your way on to the next flight out –
Two minutes from Rapava’s apartment they turned off the main street and on to a muddy track that led through a scrappy copse of birch to a field that had been divided into small-holdings. A pig snuffled in the earth in an enclosure made of old car doors tied together with wire. There were a few scrawny chickens, some frost-blasted vegetables. Children had made a snowman out of yesterday’s fall. It had melted in the light rain and looked grotesque in the dirt, like a lump of white fat.
Facing this rural scene was a row of lock-up garages. On the long flat roof sat the remains of half a dozen small cars – rusted red skeletons picked bare of windows, engines, tyres, upholstery. Zinaida switched off the engine and they climbed out into the mud. An old man leaned on his shovel and watched them. Zinaida stared him down, her hands on her hips. Eventually, he spat on the ground and returned to his digging.
She had a key. Kelso looked back along the deserted track. His hands felt numb. He stuffed them into his coat pockets. She was the calm one. She was wearing a pair of knee-length leather boots and to avoid getting them dirty she stepped carefully across the lumpy ground. He looked around again. He didn’t like it: the encroaching trees, the derelict cars, this bewilderin
g woman with her kaleidoscope of roles – GUM telephonist, would-be lawyer, part-time hooker and now griefless daughter.
He said, ‘Where did you get the key?’
‘It was with the note.’
‘I don’t understand why you didn’t come here on your own straight away. Why do you need me?’
‘Because I don’t know what I’m looking for, do I? Are you coming or not?’ She was fitting the key into a big padlock on the nearest lock-up. ‘What are we looking for, anyway?’
‘A notebook.’
‘What?’ She stopped fiddling with the key and stared at him.
‘A black oilskin notebook that used to belong to Josef Stalin.’ He repeated the familiar phrase. It was becoming his mantra. (It wouldn’t be here, he told himself again. It was the Holy Grail. The quest was all that mattered. It wasn’t supposed to be found.)
‘Stalin’s notebook? And what’s that worth?’
‘Worth?’ He tried to make it sound as if the question had never occurred to him. ‘Worth?’ he repeated. ‘It’s hard to put an exact figure on it. There are some rich collectors. It depends what’s in it.’ He spread his hands. ‘Half a million, maybe.’
‘Roubles?’
‘Dollars.’
‘Dollars? Shit. Shit.’ She resumed her efforts to undo the padlock, clumsy now with her eagerness.
And suddenly, watching her, he caught her mood and then of course he knew why he had come. Because it was everything, really, wasn’t it? It was much more than mere money. It was vindication. Vindication for twenty years of freezing his arse off in basement archives, and dragging himself to lectures in the winter dark – first to listen, then to give them – twenty years of teaching and faculty politics and trying to write books that mostly didn’t sell and all the while hoping that one day he would produce something worthwhile – something true and big and definitive – a piece of history that would explain why things had happened as they did.
‘Here,’ he said, almost pushing her out of the way, ‘let me try.’
He jiggled the key in the lock. At last it turned and the arm sprang open. He pulled the chain through the heavy eye-bolts.
COLD, oily darkness. No window. No electricity. An ancient paraffin lamp hanging on a nail by the door.
He took down the lamp and shook it – it was full – and she said she knew how to light it. She knelt on the earth floor and struck a match, applied it to the wick. A blue flame, then yellow. She held it up while he dragged the door shut behind them.
The garage was a bone-yard of old spare parts, stacked around the walls. At the far end in the shadows was a row of car seats arranged to form a bed, with a sleeping bag and a blanket, neatly folded. Suspended from a beam in the roof was a block and tackle, a chain, a hook. Beneath the hook were floorboards forming a rectangle a yard and a half wide by two yards long.
She said, ‘He’s had this place for as long as I’ve been alive. He used to sleep here, when things were bad.’
‘How bad did they get?’
‘Bad.’
He took the lamp and walked around, shining it into the corners. There was nothing like a toolbox that he could see. On a work bench was a tin tray with a metal brush, some rods, a cylinder, a small coil of copper wire: what was all that? Fluke Kelso’s ignorance of mechanics was deep and carefully maintained.
‘Did he have a car of his own?’
‘I don’t know. He fixed them up for people. People gave him things.’
He stopped next to the makeshift bed. Something glinted above it. He called to her, ‘Look at this,’ and raised the light to the wall. Stalin’s sombre face gazed down at them from an old poster. There were a dozen more pictures of the General Secretary, torn from magazines. Stalin looking thoughtful behind a desk. Stalin in a fur hat. Stalin shaking hands with a general. Stalin, dead, lying in state.
‘And who’s this? This is you?’
It was a photograph of Zinaida, aged about twelve, in school uniform. She stepped closer to it, surprised.
‘Who’d have thought it?’ She laughed uneasily. ‘Me up there with Stalin.’
She stared at it a while longer.
‘Let’s find this thing,’ she said, turning away. ‘I want to get out of here.’
Kelso was prodding one of the floorboards with his foot. It rested loosely on a wooden frame set into the earth. This was it, he thought. This had to be the place.
They worked together, watched by Stalin, stacking the short planks against the wall, uncovering a mechanic’s pit. It was deep. In the weak light it looked like a grave. He held the lamp over it. The floor was sand, stamped smooth and hard, stained black with oil. The sides were shored up with old timber, into which Rapava had let alcoves for tools. He gave her the lamp and wiped his palms on his coat. Why was he so damned nervous? He sat on the edge for a moment, legs dangling, before cautiously lowering himself. He knelt on the floor of the pit, his bones cracking, and felt around in the damp gloom. His hands touched sacking.
He called up to her, ‘Shine the light here.’
The rough cloth pulled away easily. Next came something solid, wrapped in newspaper. He passed it up to Zinaida. She set down the lamp and unwrapped a gun. She was surprisingly deft with it, he noticed, sliding out the clip of ammunition, checking it – eight rounds loaded – sliding it back again, pushing the safety catch down then up.
‘You know how it works?’
‘Of course. It’s his. A Makarov. When we were little, he taught us how to strip it, clean it, fire it. He always kept it by him. He said he’d kill if he had to.’
‘That’s a nice memory.’ He thought he heard a sound outside. ‘Did you hear that?’
But she shook her head, preoccupied with the gun.
He sank back down to his knees.
And here, jammed into the aperture, was the square end of a metal box, flaking with rust and dried mud. If you didn’t know what you were looking for, you would never have bothered with it. Rapava had hidden well. He put his hands on either side of it and tugged.
Well, something was heavy. Either the box or what was in it. The handles had rusted flat. It was hard to get a grip. He dragged it into the centre of the pit and hoisted it up to the edge. His cheek was close to it. He could taste the smell of rusted steel, like blood in his mouth. Zinaida bent to help. And this was peculiar: for an instant he thought that the box was exuding an unearthly, blue-grey light. There was a rush of cold air. But then he saw that the garage door was open and that framed in it was the silhouette of a man, watching them.
AFTERWARDS, Kelso was to recognise this as the decisive moment: as the point at which he lost control of events. If he didn’t see it at the time it was because his main concern was simply to stop her blowing a hole in R. J. O’Brian’s chest.
The reporter stood against the garage wall, his hands above his head. Kelso could tell he didn’t quite believe she would shoot. But a gun was a gun. They could go off accidentally. And this one was old.
‘Professor, do me a favour, would you, and tell her to put that thing down?’
But Zinaida jabbed it again towards his chest and O’Brian, groaning, raised his hands still further.
Okay, okay, he said. He was sorry. He had followed them from the airport. It hadn’t been hard, for Christ’s sake. He was only doing his job. Sorry.
His eyes flickered to the toolbox. ‘Is that it?’
Kelso’s immediate reaction on seeing the American had been relief: thank God it was only O’Brian who had followed them from Sheremetevo and not Mamantov. But Zinaida had grabbed the gun and had backed him against the wall.
She said, ‘Shut up.’
‘Look, professor, I’ve seen these suckers go off. And I have to tell you: they really make a mess.’
Kelso said to her, in Russian, ‘Put it away, Zinaida.’ It was the first time he had used her name. ‘Put it away and let’s sort this out.’
‘I don’t trust him.’
‘Neither do I. But what can w
e do? Put it away.’
‘Zinaida? Who is she? Don’t I know her from someplace?’
‘She goes to the Robotnik.’ Kelso spoke through his teeth. ‘Will you let me handle this?’
‘Does she, by God?’ O’Brian passed his tongue across his thick lips. In the yellow lamplight his broad and well-fed face looked like a Hallowe’en pumpkin. ‘That’s right. Of course she does. She’s the babe you were with last night. I thought I knew her.’
‘Shut up,’ she said again.
O’Brian grinned. ‘Listen, Zinaida, we don’t have to be in competition. We can share, can’t we? Split this three ways? I just want a story. Tell her, Fluke. Tell her I can keep her name out of it. She knows me. She’ll understand. She’s a business-minded kind of a girl, aren’t you, darlin’?’
‘What’s he saying?’
He told her.
‘Nyet,’ she said. And then, in English, to O’Brian, ‘No way.’
‘You two,’ said O’Brian. ‘You make me laugh. The historian and the whore. Okay, tell her this. Tell her she can either deal with me or we can stand around like this for an hour or two and you’ll have half the Moscow press pack on your back. And the militia. And maybe the guys who killed the old man. Tell her that.’
But Kelso didn’t need to translate. She understood.
She stood there for another quarter of a minute, frowning, then clicked on the safety catch and slowly lowered the gun. O’Brian let out a breath.
‘What’s she doing in all this anyway?’
‘She’s Papu Rapava’s daughter.’
‘Ah.’ O’Brian nodded. Now he got the picture.
THE toolbox lay on the earth floor. O’Brian wouldn’t let them open it, not right away. He wanted to capture the great moment, he said – ‘for posterity and the evening news’. He went off to get his camera.
Once he’d gone, Kelso shook a cigarette out of his half-empty pack and offered it to Zinaida. She took it and leaned towards him, looking at him steadily as he lit it for her, the flame reflected in her dark eyes. He thought: less than twelve hours ago you were going to go to bed with me for $200 – who the hell are you?
She said, ‘What’s on your mind?’