Kelso, nursing his coffee, moved away from the gasoline fumes and lit a cigarette. In the darkness, in the cold, under the immense Eurasian sky, he felt disconnected from reality, frightened yet strangely exhilarated, his senses sharpened. He heard a rumble far away and a yellow dot appeared far back on the straight highway. He watched it grow slowly, saw the gleam divide and become two big headlights, and for a moment he thought they were coming directly at him, and then a big truck, a sixteen-wheeler, rushed past, the driver merrily sounding his horn. The noise of the engine was still faintly audible in the distance long after the red tail lights had vanished in the dark.
‘Hey, Fluke! Give us a hand here, will you?’
Kelso took a last draw on his cigarette and flicked it away, spinning orange sparks across the road.
O’Brian wanted help lifting down one of his precious pieces of equipment, a white polycarbonate case, about two feet long and eighteen inches wide, with a small pair of black wheels mounted on one end. Once they’d pulled it out of the Toyota, O’Brian trundled it round to the front passenger door.
‘Now what?’ said Kelso.
‘Don’t tell me you’ve never seen one of these before?’
O’Brian opened the lid of the box and removed what looked like four white plastic trays, of the kind that fold out of aircraft seats. He slotted these together, creating a flat square about a yard across, which he then attached to the side of the case. Into the centre of the square he screwed a long, telescopic prong. He ran a cable from the side of the box to the Toyota’s cigarette lighter, came back, flicked a switch and a variety of small lights blinked on.
‘Impressed?’ He produced a compass from his jacket pocket and shone his torch on it. ‘Now where the hell is the Indian Ocean?’
‘What?’
O’Brian glanced back along the M8. ‘Right the way down there, by the look of it. Directly down there. A satellite in stationary orbit twenty thousand miles above the Indian Ocean. Think of that. Oh, but the world’s a small place, is it not, Fluke? I swear I can almost hold it in my hand.’ He grinned and knelt by the box, moving it around by degrees until the antenna was pointing directly south. At once the machine began to emit a whine. ‘There you go. She’s locked on to the bird.’ He pressed a switch and the whining stopped. ‘Now, we plug in the handset – so. We dial zero-four for the ground station at Eik in Norway – so. And now we dial the number. Easy as that.’
He stood and held out the handset and Kelso cautiously put his ear to it. He could hear a number ringing in America, and then a man said, ‘Newsroom.’
KELSO lit another cigarette and walked away from the Toyota. O’Brian was in the front seat with the light on and even with the windows closed his voice carried in the cold silence.
‘Yeah, yeah, we’re on the road … About halfway I guess … Yeah, he’s with me … No, he’s fine.’ The door opened and O’Brian shouted, ‘You’re fine, aren’t you, professor?’
Kelso raised his hand.
‘Yeah,’ resumed O’Brian, ‘he’s fine.’ The door slammed and he must have lowered his voice because Kelso couldn’t catch much after that. ‘Be there about nine … sure … good stuff … looking good …’
Whatever it was, Kelso didn’t like the sound of it. He walked back to the car and flung open the door.
‘Whoops. Gotta go, Joe. Bye.’ O’Brian hung up quickly and winked.
‘What are you telling them exactly?’
‘Nothing.’ The reporter looked like a guilty boy.
‘What d’you mean, nothing?’
‘Come on, I had to give them the bones, Fluke. Give them the gist –’
‘The gist?’ Kelso was shouting now. ‘This was supposed to be confidential –’
‘Well, they’re not going to tell anyone, are they? Come on, I can’t just take off without giving them an idea of what I’m doing.’
‘Christ.’ Kelso slumped against the side of the Toyota and appealed to the sky. ‘What am I doing?’
‘Want to make a call, Fluke?’ O’Brian waved the handset at him. ‘Call a wife? On us?’
‘No. There’s no one I want to call right now. Thank you.’
‘Zinaida?’ said O’Brian craftily. ‘Why don’t you call Zinaida?’ He climbed out of the seat and pressed the telephone into Kelso’s hand. ‘Go ahead. I can tell you’re worried. It’s sweet. Zero-four, then the number. Only don’t take all night about it. A fellow could freeze his balls off out here.’
He wandered away, flapping his arms against the cold, and Kelso, after a second’s hesitation, hunted through his pockets for the scrap of paper with her address on it.
As he waited for the number to connect he tried to visualise her apartment, but he couldn’t do it, he didn’t know enough about her. He stared southwards down the M8 at the shadowy mass of departing clouds, fleeing as if from some calamity, and he imagined the route his call was taking – from the middle of nowhere to a satellite above the Indian Ocean, down to Scandinavia, across the earth to Moscow. O’Brian was right: you could stand in a great wilderness and the world still felt small enough to hold in your hand.
He let the number ring for a long time, alternately willing her to answer it so that he’d know she was safe, and hoping that she wouldn’t, because her apartment was the least safe place of all.
She didn’t answer and after a couple of minutes he hung up.
AND then it was Kelso’s turn to drive while O’Brian slept, and even then the reporter couldn’t be quiet. The sleeping bag was drawn tight up to his chin. His seat was tilted back almost to the horizontal. ‘Yeah,’ he’d mutter, and then, almost immediately, and with greater emphasis, ‘yeah.’ He grunted. He curled up and flopped around like a landed fish. He snorted. He scratched his groin.
Kelso gripped the steering wheel hard. ‘Can you shut up, O’Brian?’ he said into the windscreen. ‘I mean, just for once, could you possibly, as a favour to humanity, and more particularly to me, put a sock in your great fat mouth?’
There was nothing to see except the shifting patch of road in the headlights. Occasionally a car appeared in the opposite carriageway, lights full beam, blinding him. After about an hour he overtook the big truck that had passed them earlier. The driver hooted cheerfully again, and Kelso hooted back.
‘Yeah,’ said O’Brian, turning over at the sound of the horn, ‘oh yeah –’
The drumming of the tyres was hypnotic and Kelso’s thoughts were random, disconnected. He wondered what O’Brian would have been like in a real war, one in which he actually had to fight rather than just take pictures. Then he wondered what he would have been like. Most of the men he knew asked themselves that question, as if never having fought somehow made them incomplete – left a hole in their lives where a war should have been.
Was it possible that this absence of war – marvellous though it was and so forth: that went without saying – was it possible that it had actually trivialised people? Because everything was so bloody trivial now, wasn’t it? This was The Trivial Age. Politics was trivial. What people worried about was trivial – mortgages and pensions and the dangers of passive smoking. Jesus! – he shot a look at O’Brian – is this what we’ve been reduced to, worrying about passive smoking, when our parents and our grandparents had to worry about being shot or bombed?
And then he began to feel guilty, because what was he implying here? That he wanted a war? Or a cold war, come to that? But it was true, he thought: he did miss the cold war. He was glad it was over, of course, in a way – glad the right side had won and all that – but at least while it was on people like him had known where they stood, could point to something and say: well, we may not know what we do believe in, but we don’t believe in that.
The fact was, almost nothing had gone right for him since the cold war ended. Here was a good joke. He and Mamantov: twin career victims of the end of the USSR! Both bemoaning the trivia of the modern world, both preoccupied with the past, and both in search of the mystery of Comrade Stali
n –
He frowned, remembering something Mamantov had said.
‘I’ll tell you this, you’re as obsessed as I am.’
He had laughed it off at the time. But now that he thought of it again, the line struck him as unexpectedly shrewd – unsettling, even, in the quality of its insight – and he found himself returning to it again and again as the temperature dropped and the road uncoiled endlessly from the freezing darkness.
HE drove for more than four hours, until his legs were numb and at one point he actually fell asleep, jerking awake to find the Toyota veering across the centre of the highway, the white lines flashing up at them like spears in the headlights.
A few minutes later they passed a kind of truckers’ lay-by. He braked hard, stopped, and reversed back into it. Beside him, O’Brian struggled blearily into consciousness.
‘Why’re we stopping?’
‘The tank’s empty. And I’ve got to rest.’ Kelso turned off the ignition and massaged the back of his neck. ‘Why don’t we stop here for a bit?’
‘No. We need to keep moving. Fix us some coffee, will you? I’ll fill her up.’
They went through the same ritual as before, O’Brian stumbling out into the cold and hoisting a pair of jerrycans from the back of the Toyota, while Kelso wandered away for a cigarette. The wind had a sharper edge to it this far north. He could hear it slicing through trees he couldn’t see. Running water splashed somewhere, softly.
When he got back into the car, O’Brian was in the driver’s seat with the interior light on, running an electric shaver over his big chin, studying the map. It was an unnatural time to be awake, thought Kelso. It meant nothing good. He associated it with emergency, bereavement, conspiracy, flight; the sad skulk away at the end of a one-night affair.
Neither man spoke. O’Brian put away his shaver and stuffed the map into the pocket beside him.
The reclined seat was warm and so was the sleeping bag and within five minutes, despite his anxieties, Kelso was asleep – a dreamless, falling sleep – and when he awoke a few hours later it was as if they had crossed a barrier and entered another world.
Chapter Nineteen
A LITTLE TIME before this, when Kelso was still at the wheel, Major Feliks Suvorin had bent to kiss his wife, Serafima.
She offered him merely her cheek at first but then seemed to think the better of it. A warm, soft arm snaked up from beneath the duvet, a hand cupped the back of his head and drew him down. He kissed her mouth. She was wearing Chanel. Her father had brought it back from the last G8 meeting.
She whispered, ‘You won’t be back tonight.’
‘I will.’
‘You won’t.’
‘I’ll try not to wake you.’
‘Wake me.’
‘Sleep.’
He put his finger to her lips and turned off the bedside lamp. The light from the passage showed him the way out of the bedroom. He could hear the sound of the boys’ breathing. An ormolu clock announced it was one-thirty-five. He had been home two hours. Hell. He sat down on a gilt chair beside the door and put his shoes on, then collected his coat from its carved wooden hanger. The decor was copied from some glossy western magazine and it all cost far more than he earned as a major in the SVR; in fact, on his salary, they could barely afford the magazine. His father-in-law had paid.
On his way out, Suvorin glimpsed himself in the hall mirror, framed against a Jackson Pollock print. The lines and shadows of his exhausted face seemed to merge with those of the picture. He was getting too old for this kind of game, he thought: the golden boy no longer.
THE news that the Delta flight had taken off without Fluke Kelso had reached Yasenevo shortly after two in the afternoon. Colonel Arsenyev had expressed in various colourful colloquialisms – and had no doubt minuted elsewhere, for the record, more discreetly – his amazement that Suvorin had not arranged for the historian to be escorted on to the aircraft. Suvorin had choked back his response, which would have been to inquire, acidly, how he was supposed to locate Mamantov, control the militia, find the notebook and nursemaid an independent-minded western academic through Sheremetevo-2, all with the assistance of four men.
Besides, by then this was of less pressing importance than the discovery that the Interfax news agency was putting out a story on Papu Rapava’s death, quoting unnamed ‘militia sources’ to the effect that the old man had been murdered while trying to sell some secret papers of Josef Stalin to a western author. Three outraged communist deputies had already attempted to raise the matter in the Duma. The Office of the President of the Federation had been on the line to Arsenyev, demanding to know (a direct quote from Boris Nikolaevich, apparently) what the fuck was going on? Ditto the FSB. Half a dozen reporters were camped outside Rapava’s apartment block, more were besieging militia HQ, while the militia’s official position was to hold up their hands and whistle.
For the first time, Suvorin had begun to see the merit of the old ways, when news was what Tass was pleased to announce and everything else was a state secret.
He had made one last attempt to play devil’s advocate. Weren’t they in danger of getting this out of proportion? Weren’t they playing Mamantov’s game? What could Stalin’s notebook possibly contain that would have any modern relevance?
Arsenyev had smiled: always a dangerous sign.
‘When were you born, Feliks?’ he had asked, pleasantly. ‘Fifty-eight? Fifty-nine?’
‘Sixty.’
‘Sixty. You see, I was born in thirty-seven. My grandfather … he was shot. Two uncles went to the camps … never came back. My father died in some crazy business at the start of the war, trying to stop a German tank outside Poltava with a bit of rag and a bottle, and all because Comrade Stalin said that any soldier who surrendered would be considered a traitor. So I don’t underestimate Comrade Stalin.’
‘I’m sorry –’
But Arsenyev had waved him away. His voice was rising, his face red. ‘If that bastard kept a notebook in his safe, he kept it for a reason, I can tell you that. And if Beria stole it, he had a reason. And if Mamantov is willing to risk torturing an old man to death, then he has a damned good reason for wanting to get his hands on it, too. So find it, Feliks Stepanovich, please, if you would be so good. Find it.’
And Suvorin had done his best. Every forensic document examiner in Moscow had been contacted. Kelso’s description had been circulated, discreetly, to all the capital’s militia posts, as well as to the traffic cops, the GAI. Technically, the SVR was now ‘liaising’ with the militia’s murder inquiry, which meant at least he now had some resources to draw on: he had worked out a common line with the militia which they could spin to the media. He had spoken to a friend of his father-in-law’s – the owner of the biggest chain of newspapers in the Federation – to plead for a little restraint. He had sent Netto to poke around Vspolnyi Street. He had arranged for a watch to be put on the apartment of Rapava’s daughter, Zinaida, who had disappeared, and when she still hadn’t turned up by nightfall he had sent Bunin to hang around the club she worked in, Robotnik.
Shortly after eleven o’clock, Suvorin had gone home.
And at one twenty-five he got the call that told him she had been found.
‘WHERE was she?’
‘Sitting in her car,’ said Bunin. ‘Outside her father’s place. We followed her from the club. Waited to see if she was meeting anyone, but nobody else showed, so we picked her up. She’s been in a fight, I reckon.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, you’ll see when you go up. Take a look at her hand.’
They were standing, talking quietly, in the downstairs lobby of her apartment block, in the Zayauze district, a drab hinterland of eastern Moscow. She had a place close to the park – privatised, to judge by the neatness of its common parts; respectable. Suvorin wondered what the neighbours would think if they knew the girl on the third floor was a tart.
‘Anything else?’
‘The apartment’s clean, and so??
?s her car,’ said Bunin. ‘There’s a bag of clothes in the back – jeans, T-shirt, pair of boots, knickers. But she’s got a lot of money stashed up there. She doesn’t know I found it yet.’
‘How much?’
‘Twenty, maybe thirty thousand dollars. Bound up tight in polythene and hidden in the lavatory cistern.’
‘Where is it now?’
‘I’ve got it.’
‘Let’s have it.’
Bunin hesitated, then handed it over: a thick bundle, all hundreds. He looked at it hungrily. It would take him four or five years to make that much and Suvorin guessed he had probably been on the point of helping himself to a percentage. Maybe he already had. He stuffed it into his pocket. ‘What’s she like?’
‘A hard bitch, major. You won’t get a lot out of her.’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘She’s cracked, I reckon.’
‘Thank you, lieutenant, for that valuable psychological insight. You can wait down here.’
Suvorin climbed the stairs. On the landing of the second floor, a middle-aged woman with her hair in curlers stuck her head round her door.
‘What’s going on?’
‘Nothing, madam. Routine inquiries. You’re perfectly safe.’
He carried on climbing. He had to make something of this, he thought. He must. It was the only lead he had. Outside the girl’s apartment he squared his shoulders, knocked politely on the open door and went inside. A militia man got to his feet.
‘Thank you,’ said Suvorin. ‘Why don’t you go down and keep the lieutenant company?’
He waited until the door had closed before he took a proper look at her. She had a grey woollen cardigan on over her dress and she was sitting in the only chair, her legs crossed, smoking. In a dish on the little table next to her were the stubbed remains of five cigarettes. The apartment consisted of only this one room but it was neat and nicely done, with plenty of evidence of money spent: a western-made television with a satellite decoder, a video, a CD-player, a rack of dresses, all black. A little kitchen was off in one corner. A door led to the bathroom. There was a couch that presumably folded into a bed. Bunin was right about her hand, he noticed. The fingers that held the cigarette had blood crusted under the nails. She saw him looking.