When the door was opened he removed the key, and – a nice touch this, he remembered thinking – replaced it on the sill.
HE emerged on to a narrow verandah, about two yards wide, with weathered floorboards and a broken handrail. He could hear traffic at the bottom of the garden and the laborious whine of a big jet, dropping towards Sheremetevo Airport. The breeze was cold, scented by the smoke of a bonfire. There was a last pale flush of daylight in the sky.
He guessed the garden must have been abandoned at the same time as the house. Nobody could have worked in it for months. To his left was an ornate greenhouse with an iron chimney, partially overgrown by Russian vines. To his right, a ragged thicket of dark green shrubs. Ahead were trees. He stepped down off the verandah on to the carpet of leaves that covered the lawn. The wind stirred and lofted some of them, sent a detachment cartwheeling towards the house. He kicked through the drifts towards the orchard – a cherry orchard he could see now as he came closer: big old trees, maybe twenty feet high, at least a hundred of them, a Chekhovian scene. Suddenly he stopped. The ground beneath the trees was flat and level except in one place. At the base of one tree, close to a stone bench, was a patch of blackness, darker than the surrounding shadows. He frowned. Was he sure he wasn’t imagining it?
He went over, knelt and slowly sank his hands into the leaves. On the surface they were dry but the lower levels were damp and mulchy. He brushed them back, releasing a rich smell of moist soil – the black and fragrant earth of Mother Russia.
‘Don’t make it so wide. It’s not a grave. You’re making work for yourself …’
He cleared away the leaves from an area about a yard square, and although he couldn’t see much, he could see enough, and he could feel it. The grass had been removed and a hole had been dug. And then it had been filled in again and an attempt had been made to jam the turfs back into their original positions. But some parts had crumbled and others overlapped the lip of the hole and the result was a mess, like a broken, muddy jigsaw. It had been done in a hurry, thought Kelso, and it had been done recently, possibly even today. He stood and brushed the wet leaves from his coat.
‘Do you feel the force of Comrade Stalin, even from the grave …?’
Beyond the high wall he could hear the traffic on the wide highway. Normality seemed close enough to touch. He used the side of his foot to scrape a covering of leaves back across the scarred surface, grabbed his bag and stumbled through the orchard towards the end of the garden, towards the sounds of life. He had to get out now. He didn’t mind admitting it. He was rattled. The cherry trees stretched almost to the wall which rose up blank and sheer before him, like the perimeter of a Victorian gaol. There was no way he could scale it.
A narrow cinder path followed the line of the wall. He headed left. The path turned the corner and took him back in the direction of the house. About halfway along, he could see a darkened oblong – the garden door he had noticed from the street – but even this was overgrown and he had to pull back the trailing branches of a bush to get at it. It was locked, maybe even rusted shut. The big iron ring of the handle wouldn’t turn. He flicked his cigarette lighter and held it close to get a better view. The door was solid but the frame looked weak. He stood back and aimed a kick at it, but nothing happened. He tried again. Hopeless.
He stepped back on to the path. He was now about thirty yards from the house. Its low roof was clearly silhouetted. He could see an aerial and the bulk of a tall chimney with a satellite dish attached to it. It was too big to be an ordinary domestic receiver.
It was while he was staring distractedly at the dish that his eye was caught by a glimmer of light in an upstairs window. It vanished so quickly he thought he might have imagined it and he told himself to keep his nerve, just find a tool, get out of here. But then it flashed again, like the beam of a lighthouse – pale, then bright, then pale again – as someone holding a powerful torch swivelled anti-clockwise towards the window then back towards the blackness of the room.
The suspicious security guard was back.
‘God.’ Kelso’s lips were so tightly drawn he could barely shape his breath into the syllable. ‘God, God, God.’
He ran up the path towards the greenhouse. A rickety door slid back just far enough for him to slip through. The vines made it darker inside than out. Trestle tables, an old trug, empty trays for seedlings, terracotta pots – nothing, nothing. He blundered down a narrow aisle, a frond of something brushed his face and then he collided with an object immense and metal. An old bulbous, cast-iron stove. And next to it, a heap of discarded implements – shovel, scuttle, riddling iron, poker. Poker.
He squeezed back on to the path, holding his prize, and jammed the poker into the gap between the garden door and the frame, just above the lock. He heaved and heard a crack. The poker came loose. He jammed it back and pulled again. Another crack. He worked it downwards. The frame was splintering.
He took a few paces back and ran at the door, rammed it with his shoulder, and some force that seemed to him beyond the physical – some fusion of will and fear and imagination – carried him through the door and out of the garden and into the quiet emptiness of the street.
Chapter Six
AT SIX O’CLOCK that evening, Major Feliks Suvorin, accompanied by his assistant, Lieutenant Vissari Netto, presented an account of the day’s developments to their immediate boss, the chief of the RT Directorate, Colonel Yuri Arsenyev.
The atmosphere was informal, as usual. Arsenyev sprawled sleepily behind his desk, on which had been placed a map of Moscow and a cassette player. Suvorin reclined on the sofa next to the window, smoking his pipe. Netto worked the tape machine.
‘The first voice you’ll hear, colonel,’ Netto was saying to Arsenyev, ‘is that of Madame Mamantov.’
He pressed PLAY.
‘Who is this?’
‘Christopher Kelso. Could I speak with Comrade Mamantov?’
‘Yes? Who is this?’
‘As I said, my name is Kelso. I’m using a public telephone. It’s urgent.’
‘Yes, but who is this?’
Netto pressed PAUSE.
‘Poor Ludmilla Fedorova,’ said Arsenyev, sadly. ‘Did you know her, Feliks? I knew her when she was at the Lubyanka. Oh, she was a piece of work! A body like a pagoda, a mind like a razor and a tongue to match.’
‘Not any more,’ said Suvorin. ‘Not the mind, anyway.’
Netto said, ‘The next voice will be even more familiar, colonel.’
PLAY.
‘All right, this is Mamantov. Who are you?’
‘It’s Kelso. Doctor Kelso? You may remember me?’
‘I remember you. What do you want?’
‘To see you.’
‘Why should I see you after that shit you wrote?’
‘I wanted to ask you some questions.’
‘About?’
‘A black oilskin notebook that used to belong to Josef Stalin.’
‘Shut up.’
‘What?’
‘I said shut up. I’m thinking it over. Where are you?’
‘Near the Intourist building, on Mohavaja Street.’
‘You’re close. You’d better come.’
STOP.
‘Play it again,’ said Arsenyev. ‘Not Ludmilla. The latter part.’
Through the armoured glass at Arsenyev’s back Suvorin could see the ripple of the office lights reflected in Yasenevo’s ornamental lake, and the massive floodlit head of Lenin, and beyond these, almost invisible now, the dark line of the forest, its edge serrated against the evening sky. A pair of headlights winked through the trees and disappeared. A security patrol, thought Suvorin, suppressing a yawn. He was happy to let Netto do the talking. Give the lad a chance.
‘A black oilskin notebook that used to belong to Josef Stalin …’
‘Fuck me,’ said Arsenyev, softly, and his flabby face tautened.
‘The call was initiated this afternoon, at fourteen-fourteen, by this man,’ con
tinued Netto, handing out two flimsy buff-coloured folders. ‘Christopher Richard Andrew Kelso, commonly known as “Fluke”.’
‘Now this is nice,’ said Suvorin, who hadn’t seen the photograph before. It was still glistening from the darkroom, and reeked of sodium thiosulphate. ‘Where are we?’
‘Third floor, inner courtyard, opposite the entrance to Mamantov’s staircase.’
‘So now we can afford an apartment in the House on the Embankment?’ grumbled Arsenyev.
‘It’s empty. Doesn’t cost us a rouble.’
‘How long did he stay?’
‘Arrived at fourteen-thirty-two, colonel. Left at fifteen-seven. One of our operatives, Lieutenant Bunin, was then detailed to follow him. Kelso caught the metro at Borovitskaya, here, changed once, got out at Krasnopresnenskaya, and walked to a house here –’ Netto again put his finger on the map ‘– in Vspolnyi Street. A deserted property. He made an illegal entry and spent approximately forty-five minutes inside. He was last reported here, heading south on foot along the Garden Ring. That was ten minutes ago.’
‘What does that mean exactly? “Fluke”?’
‘“A lucky stroke”, colonel,’ said Netto, smartly. “‘An unexpected success.”’
‘Sergo? Where’s that damned coffee?’ Arsenyev, immensely fat, had a habit of falling asleep if he didn’t have caffeine every hour.
‘It’s coming, Yuri Semonovich,’ said a voice from the intercom.
‘Kelso’s parents were both in their forties, sir, when he was born.’
Arsenyev turned a tiny and astonished eye towards Vissari Netto. ‘Why do we care about his parents?’
‘Well –’ The young man wilted, stalled, appealed to Suvorin.
‘Kelso was a fluke,’ said Suvorin. ‘The joke. It’s a joke.’
‘And that is funny?’
They were spared by the arrival of the coffee, borne in by Arsenyev’s male assistant. The blue mug said ‘I LOVE NEW YORK’ and Arsenyev raised it towards them, as if drinking their health. ‘So tell me,’ he said, blinking through the steam over the rim, ‘about Mister Fluke.’
‘Born Wimbledon, England, nineteen fifty-four,’ said Netto, reading from the file (he had done well, thought Suvorin, to get all this together in the space of an afternoon – the lad was keen, you couldn’t fault him on ambition). ‘Father, a typical petit-bourgeois, a clerk in legal chambers; three sisters, all older; standard education; nineteen seventy-three, scholarship to study history at the college of St John, Cambridge; starred first class honours degree, nineteen seventy-six –’
Suvorin had already skimmed through all of this – the personal file dredged up from the Registry, a few newspaper cuttings, the entry in Who’s Who – and now he tried to reconcile the biography with this snatched picture of a figure in a raincoat leaving an apartment. The graininess of the picture had a pleasing, fifties feel: the man, glancing across the street, a cigarette in his mouth, had the appearance of a slightly seedy French actor playing a dodgy cop. Fluke. Does a name stick because it suits a man or does the man, unconsciously, evolve into his name? Fluke, the spoiled and lazy teenager, doted on by all these family women, who astonishes his teachers by winning a scholarship to Cambridge – the first in the history of his minor grammar school. Fluke, the carousing student who, after three years of no apparent effort, walks away with the best history degree of his year. Fluke, who just happens to turn up on the doorstep of one of the most dangerous men in Moscow – although, naturally, as a foreigner he would have felt invulnerable. Yes, one would have to be wary of this Fluke –
‘– scholarship to Harvard, nineteen seventy-eight; admitted to Moscow University, under the “Students for Peace” scheme, nineteen eighty; dissident contacts – see annex “A” – led to recategorisation from “bourgeois-liberal” to “conservative and reactionary”; doctoral thesis published eighty-four, Power in the Land: The Peasantry of the Volga Region, 1917–22; lecturer in modern history, Oxford University, eighty-three to ninety-four; now resident in New York City; author of the Oxford History of Eastern Europe, 1945–87; Vortex: The Collapse of the Soviet Empire, published ninety-three; numerous articles –’
‘All right, Netto,’ said Arsenyev, holding up a hand. ‘It’s getting late. Did we ever make a pass at him?’ This question was addressed to Suvorin.
‘Twice,’ said Suvorin. ‘Once at the University, obviously, in nineteen eighty. Again in Moscow in ninety-one, when we tried to sell him on democracy and the New Russia.’
‘And?’
‘And? Looking at the reports? I should say he laughed in our faces.’
‘He’s a western asset, do we think?’
‘Unlikely. He wrote an article in the New Yorker – it’s in the file – describing how the Agency and SIS both tried to sign him. Rather a funny piece, in fact.’
Arsenyev frowned. He disapproved of publicity, on either side. ‘Wife? Kids?’
Netto jumped in again: ‘Married three times.’ He glanced at Suvorin, and Suvorin made a little ‘go ahead’ gesture with his hand: he was happy to take a back seat. ‘First, as a student, Katherine Jane Owen, marriage dissolved, seventy-nine. Second, Irina Mikhailovna Pugacheva, married eighty-one –’
‘He married a Russian?’
‘Ukrainian. Almost certainly a marriage of convenience. She was expelled from the University for anti-state activity. This is the beginning of Kelso’s dissident contact. She was granted a visa in eighty-four.’
‘So we blocked her entry into Britain for three years?’
‘No, colonel, the British did. By the time they let her in, Kelso was living with one of his students, an American, a Rhodes Scholar. Marriage to Pugacheva dissolved in eighty-five. She is now married to an orthodontist in Glamorgan. There is a file but I’m afraid I haven’t –’
‘Forget it,’ said Arsenyev. ‘We’ll drown in paper. And the third marriage?’ He winked at Suvorin. ‘A real romeo!’
‘Margaret Madeline Lodge, an American student –’
‘This is the Rhodes Scholar?’
‘No, this is a different Rhodes Scholar. He married this one in eighty-six. The marriage was dissolved last year.’
‘Kids?’
‘Two sons. Resident with their mother in New York City.’
‘One cannot help but admire this fellow,’ said Arsenyev, who, despite his bulk, had a mistress of his own in Technical Support. He contemplated the photograph, the corners of his mouth turned down in admiration. ‘What’s he doing in Moscow?’
‘Rosarkhiv are holding a conference,’ said Netto, ‘for foreign scholars.’
‘Feliks?’
Major Suvorin had his right ankle swung up on to his left knee, his elbows resting casually on the sofa back, his sports jacket unbuttoned – easy, confident, Americanized: his style. He took a pull on his pipe before he spoke.
‘The words used on the telephone are ambiguous, obviously. The implication could be that Mamantov has this notebook, and the historian wishes to see it. Or the historian himself has the notebook, or has heard of it, and wishes to check some detail with Mamantov. Whichever is the case, Mamantov is clearly aware of our surveillance, which is why he cuts the conversation short. When is Kelso due to leave the Federation, Vissari, do we know yet?’
‘Tomorrow lunchtime,’ said Netto. ‘Delta flight to JFK, leaves Sheremetevo-2 at thirteen-thirty. Seat booked and confirmed.’
‘I recommend we arrange for Kelso to be stopped and searched,’ said Suvorin. ‘Strip-searched, it had better be – delay the flight if necessary – on suspicion of exporting material of historical or cultural interest. If he’s taken anything from this house in Vspolnyi Street, we can get it off him. In the meantime, we maintain our coverage of Mamantov.’
A buzzer sounded on Arsenyev’s desk; Sergo’s voice.
‘There’s a call for Vissari Petrovich.’
‘All right, Netto,’ said Arsenyev. ‘Take it in the outer office.’ When the door was closed, he scowled at Suvor
in, ‘Efficient little bastard, isn’t he?’
‘He’s harmless enough, Yuri. He’s just keen.
Arsenyev grunted, took two long squirts from his inhaler, unhitched his belt a notch, let his flesh sag towards his desk. The colonel’s fat was a kind of camouflage: a blubbery, dimpled netting thrown over an acute mind, so that while other, sleeker men had fallen, Arsenyev had safely waddled on – through the cold war (KGB chief resident in Canberra and Ottawa), through glasnost and the failed coup and the break-up of the service, on and on, beneath the armoured soft protective shell of his flesh, until now, at last, he was into the final stretch: retirement in one year, dacha, mistress, pension, and the rest of the world could go fuck its collective mother. Suvorin rather liked him.
‘All right, Feliks. What do you think?’
‘The purpose of the Mamantov operation,’ said Suvorin, carefully, ‘is to discover how five hundred million roubles were siphoned out of KGB funds, where Mamantov hid them, and how this money is being used to fund the anti-democratic opposition. We already know he bankrolls that red fascist mucksheet –’
‘Aurora –’
‘– Aurora – if it now turns out he’s spending it on guns as well, I’m interested. If he’s buying Stalin memorabilia, or selling it, for that matter – well, it’s sick, but –’
‘This isn’t just memorabilia, Feliks. This – this is famous – there was a file on this notebook – it was one of “the legends of Lubyanka”.’
Suvorin’s first reaction was to laugh. The old man couldn’t be serious, surely? Stalin’s notebook? But then he saw the expression on Arsenyev’s face and hastily turned his laughter into a cough. ‘I’m sorry, Yuri Semonovich – forgive me – if you take it seriously, then, of course, I take it seriously.’
‘Run the tape again, Feliks, would you be so good? I never could work these damned machines.’
He slid it across the desk with a hairy, pudgy forefinger. Suvorin came over from the sofa and they listened to it together, Arsenyev breathing heavily, tugging at the thick flesh of his fat neck, which was what he always did when he scented trouble.