Archangel (Mass Market Paperback) Read online

  And the flag? The flag of the Tunisian Republic, honourable sir, was a red crescent and a red star in a white orb, all on a red ground.

  there was a red sickle moon and a single red star...

  The blue shaving of cigarette smoke curled and broke against the dusty plaster.

  Oh, he thought, how prettily it all hung together -Rapava's story and Yepishev's story and the convenient emptiness of the Beria mansion and the freshly turned earth and the bar named 'Robotnik'.

  He finished the Scotch and stubbed out his cigarette and lay there for a while, turning the book of matches over and over, anti-clockwise in his fingers.

  STILL unsure of what he should do, Kelso went down to the front desk and changed the last of his travellers' cheques into roubles. He would need to have cash, whatever happened. He would need ready money. His credit card was not entirely reliable these days - witness that unfortunate incident at the hotel shop, when he had tried to use it to buy his Scotch.

  He thought he saw someone he recognised - from the symposiums presumably - and he raised his hand but they had already turned away.

  On the counter of the reception was a sign - Any guest requiring to make an international telephone call must please to leave a cash deposit - and seeing it gave him a second stab of homesickness. So much happening, nobody to tell. On impulse he handed over $50 and made his way back through the crowded lobby towards the elevators.

  Three marriages. He contemplated this extraordinary feat as the elevator shot him skywards. Three divorces in ascending order of bitterness.

  Kate - well, Kate, that hardly counted, they were students, it was doomed from the start. She had even sent him Christmas cards until he moved to New York. And Irma -she at least had got her passport, which was always, he suspected, the main point of the exercise. But Margaret -poor Margaret - she was pregnant when he married her, which was why he married her, and no sooner had one boy arrived than the next was coming, and suddenly they were stuck in four cramped rooms off the Woodstock Road: the history teacher and the history student who between them had no history. It had lasted twelve years - 'as long as the Third Reich,' Fluke, drunk, had told an inquiring gossip columnist on the day that Margaret's petition for divorce had been published. He had never been forgiven.

  Still, she was the mother of his children. Maggie. Margaret. He would call poor Margaret.

  The line sounded strange from the moment the operator got on to the international circuit, and his first reaction was, Russian phones! He shook it hard as the New York number began to ring.

  'Hello.' The familiar voice, sounding unfamiliarly bright.

  'Its me.

  'Oh.' Flat, suddenly; dead. Not even hostile.

  'Sorry to ruin your day.' It was meant to be a joke, but it came out badly, bitter and self-pitying. He tried again. 'I'm calling from Moscow.

  'Why?'

  'Why am I calling or why am I calling from Moscow?'

  'Are you drinking?'

  He glanced at the empty bottle. He had forgotten her capacity to smell breath at four thousand miles. 'How are the boys? Can I talk to them?'

  'It's eleven o'clock on a Tuesday morning. Where do you think they are?'

  'School?'

  'Well done, dad.' She laughed, despite herself.

  'Listen,' he said, 'I'm sorry.

  'For what in particular?'

  'For last month's money.

  'Three months' money.'

  'It was some cock-up at the bank.'

  'Get a job, Fluke.'

  'Like you, you mean?'

  'Fuck you.'

  'All right. Withdrawn.' He tried again. 'I spoke to Adelman this morning. He might have something for me.

  'Because things can't go on like this, you know?'

  'I know. Listen. I may be on to something here -''What's Adelman offering?'

  Adelman? Oh, teaching. But that's not what I mean. I'm on to something here. In Moscow. It could be nothing. It could be huge.'

  'That is it?'

  There was definitely something odd about the line. Kelso could hear his own voice playing back in his ear, too late to be an echo. 'It could be huge, 'he heard himself say.

  'I don't want to talk about it on the phone.'

  'You don't want to talk about it on the phone -''I don't want to talk about it on the phone.'

  - no, sure you don't. You know why? Because it's just more of the same old shit -'

  'Hold on, Maggie. Are you hearing me twice?'

  '- and here's Adelman offering you a proper job, but of course you don't want that, because that means facing up -'

  Are you hearing me twice?'

  '-to your responsibilities -'

  Quietly, Kelso replaced the receiver. He looked at it for a moment, and chewed his lip, then lay back on the bed and lit another cigarette.

  STALIN, as you know, was dismissive of women.

  Indeed, he believed the very notion of an intelligent woman was an oxymoron: he called them 'herrings with ideas' Of Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, he once observed to Molotov, 'She may use the same lavatory as Lenin, but that doesn't mean she knows anything about Leninism. 'After Lenin’s death, Krupskaya believed her status as the great man's widow would protect her from Stalin's purges, but Stalin quickly disabused her. 'If you don't shut your mouth, 'he told her, 'we'll get the Party a new Lenin's widow.'

  However, this is not the whole story. And here we come to one of those strange reversals of the accepted wisdom which occasionally make our profession so rewarding. For while the common view of Stalin has always been that he was largely indifferent to sex - the classic case of the politician who channels all his carnal appetites into the pursuit of power - the truth appears to have been the opposite. Stalin was a womaniser.

  The recognition of this facet of his character is recent. It was Molotov, in 1988, who coyly told Chuyev (Sto sorok beseds Molotovym, Moscow) that Stalin had always been attractive to women In 1990, Khrushchev, with the posthumous publication of his last set of interviews (The Glasnost Tapes, Boston) lifted the curtain a little further. And now the archives have added still more valuable detail.

  Who were these women, whose favours Stalin enjoyed both before and after the suicide ofhis second wife? Some we know of There was the wife of A. I. Yegorov, First Deputy People's Commissar of Defence, who was notorious in Party circles for her numerous affairs. And then there was the wife of another military man - Gusev - a lady who was allegedly in bed with Stalin on the night Nadezhda shot herself There was Rosa Kaganovich, whom Stalin, as a widower, seems for a time to have thought of marrying. Most interesting of all, perhaps, there was Zhenya Alliluyeva, the wife of Stalin’s brother-in-law, PaveL Her relationship with Stalin is described in a diary which was kept by his sister-in-law, Maria. It was seized on Maria's arrest and only recently declassified (F45 01 Dl).

  These, of course, are only the women we know something about. Others are mere shadows in history, like the young maidservant, Valechka Istomina, who joined Stalin’s personal staff in 1935 ('whether or not she was Stalin's wifeis nobody else's business, 'Molotov told Chuyev), or the 'beautiful young woman with dark skin' Khrushchev once saw at Stalin's dacha. 'I was told later she was a tutor for Stalin's children, 'he said, 'but she was not there for long. Later she vanished. She was there on Beria's recommendation. Beria knew how to pick tutors.

  'Later she vanished...'

  Once again, the familiar pattern asserts itself it was never very wise to know too much about Comrade Stalin’sprivate lift. One of the men he cuckolded, Yegorov, was shot; another, Pavel Alliluyev, was poisoned. And Zhenya herself his mistress and his sister-in-law by marriage - 'the rose of the Novgorodfields'- was arrested on Stalin’s orders and spent so long in solitary confinement that when eventually she was released, after his death, she could no longer talk - her vocal cords had atrophied...

  HE must have fallen asleep because the next he knew the telephone was ringing.

  The room was still in semi-dark
ness. He switched on the lamp and looked at his watch. Nearly eight.

  He swung his legs off the bed and took a couple of stiff paces across the room to the little desk next to the window. He hesitated, then picked up the receiver.

  But it was only Adelman, wanting to know if he was coming down to dinner.

  'Dinner?'

  'My dear fellow, it's the great symposium farewell supper, not to be missed. Olga's going to come out of a cake.'

  'Christ. Do I have a choice?'

  'Nope. The story, by the way, is that you had a hangover of such epic proportions this morning you had to go back to your room and sleep it off'

  'Oh, that's lovely, Frank. Thank you.'

  Adelman paused. 'So what happened? You find your man?'

  'Of course not.

  'It's all balls?'

  Absolutely. Nothing in it.

  'Only - you know - you were gone all day -'

  'I looked up an old friend.'

  'Oh, I get you,' said Adelman, with heavy emphasis. 'Same old Fluke. Say, are you looking at this view?'

  A glittering nightscape spread out at Kelso's feet, neon banners hoisted across the city like the standards of an invading army. Philips, Marlboro, Sony, Mercedes-Benz... There was a time when Moscow after sunset was as gloomy as any capital in Africa. Not any more.

  There wasn't a Russian word in sight.

  'Never thought I'd live to see this, did you?' Adelman's voice crackled down the receiver. 'This is victory we're looking at, my friend. You realise that? Total victory.'

  'Is it really, Frank? It just looks like a lot of lights to me.

  'Oh no. It's more than that, believe me. They ain't coming back from this.'

  'You'll be telling me next it's "the end of history".'

  'Maybe it is. But not the end of historians, thank God.' Adelman laughed. 'Okay, I'll see you in the lobby. Say twenty minutes?' He hung up.

  The searchlight on the opposite side of the Moskva, next to the White House, shone fiercely into the room. Kelso reached across and opened the wooden frame of the inner window and then of the outer, admitting a particulate breath of yellow mist and the white noise of the distant traffic. A few snowflakes fluttered across the sill and melted.

  The end of history, my arse, he thought. This was history's town. This was History's bloody country.

  He stuck his head into the cold, leaning out to see as much of the city as he could across the river, before it was lost in the murk of the horizon.

  If one Russian in six believed that Stalin was their greatest ruler, that meant he had about twenty million supporters. (The sainted Lenin, of course, had many more.) And even if you halved that figure, just to get down to the hard core, that still left ten million. Ten million Stalinists in the Russian Federation, after forty years of denigration?

  Mamantov was right. It was an astounding figure. Christ, if one in six Germans had said they thought Hitler was the greatest leader they'd ever had, the New York Times wouldn't just have wanted an op-ed piece. They'd have put it on the front page.

  He closed the window and began gathering together what he would need for the evening: his last two packets of duty free cigarettes, his passport and visa (in case he was picked up), his lighter, his bulging wallet, the book of matches with Robotnik's address.

  It was no use pretending he was happy about this, especially after that business at the embassy, and if it hadn't been for Mamantov, he might have been tempted to leave matters as they stood - to play it safe, the Adelman way, and to come back to find Rapava in a week or two, perhaps after wangling a commission in New York from some sympathetic publisher (assuming such a mythical creature still existed).

  But if Mamantov was on the trail, he couldn't afford to wait. That was his conclusion. Mamantov had resources at his disposal Kelso couldn't hope to beat. Mamantov was a collector, a fanatic.

  And it was the thought of what Mamantov might do with this notebook, if he found it first, that was also beginning to nag at him. Because the more Kelso turned matters over in his mind, the more obvious it became that whatever Stalin had written was important. It couldn't be some mere compendium of senile jottings, not if Beria wanted it enough to steal it and then, having stolen it, was willing to risk hiding it, rather than destroying it. 'He was squealing like a pig... shouting something about Stalin and something about an archangel... Then they put a scarf in his mouth and shot him...'

  Kelso took a last look around the bedroom and turned out the light.

  IT wasn't until he got down to the restaurant that he realised how hungry he was. He hadn't had a proper meal for a day and a half. He ate cabbage soup, then pickled fish, then mutton in a cream cheese sauce, with the Georgian red wine, Mukuzani, and sulphurous Narzan mineral water. The wine was dark and heavy and after a couple of glasses on top of the whisky he could feel himself becoming dangerously relaxed. There were more than a hundred diners at four big tables and the noise of the conversation and the clink and chime of glass and cutlery were soporific. Ukrainian folk music was being played over loudspeakers. He started to dilute his wine.

  Someone - a Japanese historian, whose name he didn't know - leaned across and asked if this was Stalin's favourite drink and Kelso said no, that Stalin preferred the sweeter Georgian wines, Kindzmarauli and Hvanchkara. Stalin liked sweet wines and syrupy brandies, sugared herbal teas and strong tobacco -And Tarzan movies. . .' said someone.

  'And the sound of dogs singing...

  Kelso joined in the laughter. What else could he do? He clinked glasses with the Japanese across the table, bowed and sat back, sipping his watery wine.

  'Who's paying for all this?' someone asked. 'The sponsor who paid for the symposium, I guess. "~Vho's that?'

  American?'

  'Swiss, I heard . .

  The conversation resumed around him. After about an hour, when he thought no one was looking, he folded his napkin and pushed back his chair.

  Adelman looked up and said, 'Not again? You can't run out on them again?'

  A call of nature,' said Kelso, and then, as he passed behind Adelman, he bent down and whispered, 'What's the plan for tomorrow?'

  'The bus leaves for the airport after breakfast,' said Adelman. 'Check-in at Sheremetevo at eleven-fifteen.' He grabbed Kelso's arm. 'I thought you said this was all balls?'

  'I did. I just want to find out what kind of balls.' Adelman shook his head. 'This just isn't history, Fluke -'

  Kelso gestured across the room. And this is?' Suddenly there was the sound of a knife being rapped against a glass, and Askenov pushed himself heavily to his feet. Hands banged the table in approval.

  'Colleagues,' began Askenov.

  'I'd sooner take my chances, Frank. I'll see you. He detached himself gently from Adelman's grip and

  headed towards the exit.

  The cloakroom was by the toilets, next door to the dining room. He handed over his token, put down a tip and collected his coat, and he was just shrugging it on when he saw, at the end of the passage leading to the hotel lobby, a man. The man wasn't looking in his direction. He was pacing backwards and forwards across the corridor, talking into a mobile phone. If Kelso had seen him full-face he probably wouldn't have recognised him, and then everything would have turned out differently. But in profile the scar on the side of his face was unmistakable. He was one of the men who had been parked outside Mamantov's apartment.

  Through the closed door behind him, Kelso could hear laughter and applause. He backed towards it, until he could feel the doorhandle - all this time keeping his eyes on the man - then he turned and quickly re-entered the restaurant.

  Askenov was still on his feet and talking. He stopped when he saw Kelso. 'Doctor Kelso,' he said, 'seems to have a deep aversion to the sound of my voice.'

  Saunders called out, 'He has an aversion to the sound of everyone's voice, except his own.'

  There was more laughter. Kelso strode on.

  Through the swing doors the kitchen was in pandemonium. He had
an overpowering impression of heat and steam and of noise and the hot stink of cabbage and boiled fish. Waiters were lining up with trays of cups and coffee pots, being screamed at by a red-faced man in a stained tuxedo. Nobody paid Kelso any attention. He walked quickly across the huge room to the far end, where a woman in a green apron was unloading trays of dirty crockery off a trolley.

  'The way out?' he said.

  'Tam,' she said, gesturing with her chin. 'Tam.' Over there.

  The door had been wedged open to let in some cold air. He went down a dark flight of concrete steps and then he was outside, in the slushy snow, moving through a yard of overflowing trash bins and burst plastic sacks. A rat went scrabbling for safety in the shadows. It took him a minute or so to find his way out, and then he was in the big, enclosed courtyard at the rear of the hotel. Dark walls studded with lit windows rose on three sides of him. The low clouds above his head seemed to boil a yellowish-grey where they were struck by the beam of the searchlight.

  He got out down a side-street on to Kutuzovskiy Prospekt and trudged through the wet snow beside the busy highway trying to find a taxi. A dirty, unmarked Volga swerved across two lanes of traffic and the driver tried to persuade him to get in, but Kelso waved him away and kept on walking until he came to the taxi rank at the front of the hotel. He couldn't be bothered to haggle. He climbed into the back of the first yellow cab in the queue and asked to be driven off, quickly.

  Chapter Eight

  THERE WAS A big football match in progress at the Dinamo stadium - an international, Russia playing someone-or-other, two-all, extra time. The taxi driver was listening to the commentary on the radio and as they came closer to the stadium, the cheers on the cheap plastic loudspeaker were subsumed into the roar of eighty thousand Muscovite throats less than two hundred yards away. The flurries of snow swelled and lifted like sails in the floodlights above the stands.