‘We trust you.’
‘“We trust you.’” He laughed again. ‘Imperialists! Always sweet words. Sweet words and then they kill you for a kopek. For a kopek! If you were the ones, you would demand proof.’
‘We demand proof.’
‘I have proof,’ he said defiantly. He glanced from one man to the other, then lowered the rifle, turned and began moving quickly back towards the trees.
‘Now what?’ whispered O’Brian.
‘God knows.’
‘Can we get that rifle off him? Two of us, one of him?’
Kelso stared at him in astonishment. ‘Don’t even think it.’
‘Boy, but he’s quick, though, isn’t he? And completely fucking crazy.’ O’Brian gave a nervous giggle. ‘Look at him. Now what’s he doing?’
But he was doing nothing, merely standing impassively at the edge of the trees, waiting.
THERE didn’t seem to be much else for them to do except follow him, which wasn’t easy, given his speed across the ground, the roughness of the forest floor, the handicap of O’Brian’s injured leg. Kelso carried the camera case. Once or twice they seemed to lose him, but never for long. He must have kept stopping to let them catch up.
After a few minutes they came back out on to the track, but further up, roughly midway between the abandoned Toyota and the empty settlement.
He didn’t pause. He led them straight across the snowy track and into the trees on the other side.
This was not good, thought Kelso, as they passed out of the grey light and back into the shadows. Surreptitiously, without slackening pace, he put his hand into his pocket and tore a page out of his yellow notebook, screwed it into a ball and dropped it behind him. He did this every fifty yards or so – hare and hounds: an old school game – only now he was hare and hound.
O’Brian, panting at his back, whispered, ‘Nice work.’
They emerged into a small clearing, with a wooden cabin in the centre. He had built this well – and recently, by the look of it – cannibalising the old encampment for his materials. Why he had done this, Kelso never discovered. Perhaps the other place was too full of ghosts. Or, maybe he wanted a spot even more secluded, and more easily defensible. In the silence, Kelso thought he could hear running water and he guessed they must be near the river.
The cabin was made of the familiar grey timber, with one small window and a door to suit his height, set a yard above the ground and approached by four wooden steps. At the base of these he picked up a branch and prodded deep into the snow. There was a spurt of white powder as something jumped and snapped. He withdrew the branch. Clamped around the end was a large animal trap, the rusty metal teeth stuck deep into the wood.
He laid this carefully to one side, climbed the steps to his door, unfastened the padlock and went inside. After a brief exchange of looks with O’Brian, Kelso followed, ducking his head to pass through the low entrance, emerging into the one small room. It was dark and cold and he could smell the insanity – he inhaled the lonely madness, as sharp and sour as the lingering stink of unwashed flesh. He put his hand to his mouth. Behind him he heard O’Brian suck in his breath.
Their host had lit a kerosene lamp. The whitened skulls of a bear and a wolf shone from the shadows. He put the notebook on the table, next to a half-eaten plate of some dark and bony fish, put a pot of water on the hob and bent to rekindle the old iron stove, keeping his rifle close to hand.
Kelso could imagine him an hour ago: hearing the distant sound of their car on the track, abandoning his meal, grabbing his gun and heading for the forest, his fire doused, his trap set –
There wasn’t a bed, merely a thin mattress, leaking stuffing, rolled and tied with string. Beside it was an ancient Soviet-made transistor radio, the size of a packing case, and next to that a wind-up gramophone with a tarnished brass horn.
The Russian unfastened the satchel and took out the notebook. He opened it at the picture of the girl gymnasts in Red Square and held it up for them: there, you see? They nodded. He set it down on the table. Then he pulled on a length of greasy leather hanging round his neck and kept on pulling until he hauled from somewhere deep in the fetid folds of his clothes a small piece of clear plastic. He offered it to Kelso. It was warm from the heat of his body: the same picture, but folded very small, so that only Anna Safanova’s face was visible.
‘You are the ones,’ he said. ‘I am the one you seek. And now: the proof.’
He kissed the home-made locket and lowered it back into his clothes. Then, from the belt of his greatcoat, he drew out a short, wide-bladed knife with a leather hilt. He turned it, showing them the sharpness of the edge. He grinned at them. He kicked back the bit of carpet at his feet, dropped to his knees and prised up a crude trapdoor.
He reached down and pulled out a large and shabby suitcase.
HE unpacked his reliquary like a priest, reverently placing each object on the crude wooden table as if it were an altar.
The holy texts came out first: the thirteen volumes of Stalin’s collected works and thoughts, the Sochineniya, published in Moscow after the war. He showed the title page of each book to Kelso and then to O’Brian. All of them were signed in the same way – ‘To the future, J. V. Stalin’ – and all, clearly, had been read and re-read endlessly. On some of the volumes, the spines were badly cracked or hanging off. The pages were swollen by markers and bent corners.
Then came the uniform, each part carefully wrapped in yellowing tissue paper. A pressed grey tunic with red epaulets. A pair of black trousers, also pressed. A greatcoat. A pair of black leather boots, gleaming like polished anthracite. A marshal’s cap. A gold star in a crimson leather case embossed with the hammer and sickle, which Kelso recognised as the Order of Hero of the Soviet Union.
And then came the mementoes. A photograph (in a wooden frame, glazed) of Stalin standing behind a desk: signed, like the books, ‘To the future, J. V. Stalin’. A Dunhill pipe. An envelope containing a lock of coarse grey hair. And finally a stack of gramophone records, old 78s, as thick as dinner plates, each still in its original paper sleeve: ‘Mother, the Fields are Dusty’, ‘I’m Waiting For You’, ‘Nightingale of the Taiga,’ ‘J. V. Stalin: Speech to the First All-Union Congress of Collective Farm Shock Workers, February 19 1933’, ‘J. V. Stalin: Report to the Eighteenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, March 10 1939’ …
Kelso couldn’t move. He couldn’t speak. It was O’Brian who took the first step. He glanced at the Russian, touched himself on his chest, gestured at the table, and received in return a nod of approval. Tentatively, he reached out to pick up the photograph. Kelso could see what he was thinking: the likeness was indeed striking. Not exact, of course – no man ever looks exactly like his father – but there was something there, no doubt about it, even with the younger man’s beard and straggling hair. Something in the cast of the eyes and the bone structure, perhaps, or in the play of the expression: a kind of ponderous agility, a genetic shadow that was beyond the skills of any actor.
The Russian grinned again at O’Brian. He picked up his knife and pointed at the photograph, then mimed hacking at his beard. Yes?
For a moment, Kelso wasn’t sure what he meant, but O’Brian did. O’Brian knew at once.
Yes. He nodded vigorously. Oh, yes. Yes, please.
The Russian promptly scythed away a great swathe of coarse black facial hair and held it out, with childish pleasure, for their inspection. He repeated the stroke, again and again, and there was something shocking about the way he did this, in the casual manipulation of the razor-edged knife – this side, that, and then the throat – in the careless self-mutilation of it. There is nothing, thought Kelso, with a flash of certainty, there is no act of violence this man is not capable of. The Russian reached behind his head and grabbed his hair into a thick ponytail and sliced it off as close to the roots as he could. Then he crossed the cabin in a couple of strides, opened the door of the iron stove, and flung the mass of hair on to
the burning wood where it flared for an instant before shriveling to dust and smoke.
‘Bloody hell,’ whispered Kelso. He watched, disbelieving, as O’Brian began opening the camera case. ‘Oh no. Not that. You can’t be serious.’
‘I can.’
‘But he’s mad.’
‘So are half the people we put on television.’ O’Brian pushed a new cassette into the side of the camera and smiled as it clicked home. ‘Showtime.’
Behind him, the Russian had his head bent over the bowl of hot water steaming on the stove. He had stripped to a dirty yellow vest and had lathered his face with something. The rasp of the knife-blade on his bristle made Kelso’s own flesh ache.
‘Look at him,’ said Kelso. ‘He probably doesn’t even know what television is.’
‘Fine by me.’
‘God.’ Kelso closed his eyes.
The Russian turned towards them, wiping himself on his shirt. His face was blotchy, beaded with pinheads of blood, but he had left himself a heavy moustache, as black and oily as a crow’s wings, and the transformation was stunning. Here stood the Stalin of the 1920s: Stalin in his prime, an animal force. What was it Lenin had predicted? ‘This Georgian will serve us a peppery stew.’
He tucked his hair under the marshal’s cap. He slipped on the tunic. A little loose around the front, perhaps, but otherwise a perfect fit. He buttoned it and strutted up and down the room a couple of times, his right hand circling modestly in an imperial wave.
He picked up a volume of the Collected Works, opened it at random, glanced at the page and handed it to Kelso.
Then he smiled, held up a finger, coughed into his hand, cleared his throat and began to speak. And he was good. Kelso could tell that straight away. He was not merely word perfect. He was better than that. He must have studied the recordings, hour after hour, year after year since childhood. He had the familiar, flat, remorseless delivery; the brutal, incantatory beat. He had the expression of heavy sarcasm, the dark humour, the strength, the hate.
‘This Trotsky–Bukharin bunch of spies, murderers and wreckers,’ he began slowly, ‘who kow-towed to the foreign world, who were possessed by a slavish instinct to grovel before every foreign bigwig, and who were ready to enter his employ as a spy –’ his voice began to rise ‘– this handful of people who did not understand that the humblest Soviet citizen, being free from the fetters of capital, stands head and shoulders above any high-placed foreign bigwig whose neck wears the yoke of capitalist slavery –’ and now he was shouting ‘– who needs this miserable band of venal slaves, of what value can they be to the people, and whom can they demoralise?’
He glared around, defying any of them – Kelso with the open book, O’Brian with the camera to his eye, the table, the stove, the skulls – any one of them to dare to answer him back.
He straightened, thrusting out his chin.
‘In 1937 Tukhachevsky, Yakir, Uborevich and other fiends were sentenced to be shot. After that, the elections to the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. were held. In these elections, 98.6 per cent of the total vote was cast for the Soviet power!
‘At the beginning of 1938 Rosengoltz, Rykov, Bukharin and other fiends were sentenced to be shot. After that, the elections to the Supreme Soviets of the Union Republics were held. In these elections 99.4 per cent of the total vote was cast for the Soviet power! Where are the symptoms of demoralisation, we would like to know?’
He placed his fist on his heart.
‘Such was the inglorious end of the opponents of the line of our Party, who finished up as enemies of the people!’
‘Stormy applause,’ read Kelso. ‘All the delegates rise and cheer the speaker. Shouts of “Hurrah for Comrade Stalin!” “Long live Comrade Stalin!” “Hurrah for the Central Committee of our Party!”’
The Russian swayed before the rhythm of the dead crowd. He could hear the roars, the stamping feet, the cheers. He nodded modestly. He smiled. He applauded in return. The imaginary tumult rang around the narrow cabin and rolled out across the snowy clearing to split the silent trees.
Chapter Twenty-seven
FELIKS SUVORIN’S AIRCRAFT dropped through the base of low cloud and banked to starboard, following the line of the White Sea coast.
A stain of rust appeared in the snowy wilderness and spread, and he began to make out details. Drooping cranes, empty submarine pens, derelict construction sheds … Severodvinsk, it must be – Brezhnev’s big nuclear junkyard, just along the coast from Archangel, where they built the subs in the 1970s that were supposed to bring the imperialists to their knees.
He stared down at it as he fastened his seatbelt. Some mafia middlemen had been sniffing around up here, about a year ago, trying to buy a warhead for the Iraqis. He remembered the case. Chechens in the taiga! Unbelievable! And yet they would manage it one day, he thought. There was too much spare hardware, too little supervision, too much money chasing it. The law of supply and demand would mate with the law of averages and they would get something, sometime.
The wingflaps shuddered. There was a whine of cables. They descended further, yawing and pitching through the snowstorm. Severodvinsk slid away. He could see grey discs of freezing water, flat blank swampland, white-capped trees and more trees, running away for ever. What could live down there? Nothing, surely? No one. They were at the edge of the earth.
The old plane trundled on for another ten minutes, barely fifty yards above the forest ceiling, and then ahead Suvorin saw a pattern of lights in the snow.
It was a military airfield, secluded in the trees, with a snow plough parked at the edge of the apron. The runway had just been cleared but already a thin white skin was beginning to form again. They came in low to take a look then lifted once more, the engine straining, and turned to make a final approach. As they did so, Suvorin had a tilting glimpse of Archangel – of distant, shadowy tower blocks and filthy chimneys – and then in they came, bouncing off the runway, once, twice, before settling, turning, the propellers conjuring miniature blizzards from the snow.
When the pilot switched off the engine there was a quality of silence that Suvorin had never experienced before. Always in Moscow there was something to hear, even in the so-called still of night – a bit of traffic, maybe, a neighbour’s quarrel. But not here. Here the quiet was absolute, and he loathed it. He found himself talking just to fill it.
‘Good work,’ he called up to the pilot. ‘We made it.’
‘You’re welcome. By the way, there’s a message for you from Moscow. You’re to call the colonel before you go. Make any sense?’
‘Before I go?’
‘That’s it.’
Before I go where?
There wasn’t enough room to stand upright. Suvorin had to crouch. Drawn up beside a big hangar he could see a line of bi-planes painted in arctic camouflage.
The door at the back of the plane swung open. The temperature dropped about five degrees. Snowflakes billowed up the fuselage. Suvorin grabbed his attaché case and jumped down to the concrete. A technician in a fur hat pointed him towards the hangar. Its heavy sliding door was pulled a quarter open. Waiting in the shadows, next to a couple of jeeps, sheltering from the snow, was a reception committee: three men in MVD uniforms with AK-74 assault rifles, a guy from the militia and, most bizarrely, an elderly lady in thick male clothing, hunched like a vulture, leaning on a stick.
SOMETHING had happened, Suvorin could tell that right away, and whatever it was, it was not good. He knew it when he offered his hand to the senior Interior Ministry soldier – a surly-lipped, bull-necked young man named Major Kretov – and received in reply a salute of just sufficient idleness to imply an insult. And as for Kretov’s two men, they never even bothered to acknowledge his arrival. They were too busy unloading a small armoury from the back of one of the jeeps – extra magazines for their AK-74s, pistols, flares and a big old RP46 machine gun with cannisters of belt-fed ammunition and a metal bipod.
‘So, what are we expecting here, major???
? Suvorin said, in an effort to be friendly. ‘A small war?’
‘We can discuss it on the way.’
‘I’d prefer to discuss it now.’
Kretov hesitated. Clearly he would have liked to tell Suvorin to go to hell, but they had the same rank, and besides he hadn’t quite got the measure yet of this civilian-soldier in his expensive western clothes. ‘Well, quickly then.’ He clicked his fingers irritably in the direction of the gangly young militia man. ‘Tell him what’s happened.’
‘And you are?’ said Suvorin.
The militia man came to attention. ‘Lieutenant Korf, major.’
‘So, Korf?’
The lieutenant delivered his report quickly, nervously.
Shortly after midday, the Archangel militia had been notified by Moscow central headquarters that two foreigners were believed to be in the vicinity of the city, possibly seeking to make contact with a person or persons named Safanov or Safanova. He had undertaken the inquiry himself. Only one such citizen had been located: the witness Vavara Safanova – he indicated the old woman – who had been picked up within ninety minutes of receipt of the telex from Moscow. She had confirmed that two foreigners had been to see her and had left her barely an hour earlier.
Suvorin smiled in a kindly way at Vavara Safanova. ‘And what were you able to tell them, Comrade Safanova?’
She looked at the ground.
‘She told them her daughter was dead,’ cut in Kretov, impatiently. ‘Died in childbirth, forty-five years ago, having a kid. A boy. Now: can we go? I’ve got all this out of her already.’
A boy, thought Suvorin. It had to be. A girl wouldn’t have mattered. But a boy. An heir –
‘And the boy lives?’
‘Reared in the forest, she says. Like a wolf.’
Suvorin turned reluctantly from the silent old woman to the major. ‘And Kelso and O’Brian have gone into the forest to find this “wolf”, presumably?’