Archangel Read online

  ‘What’s the time, boy?’

  ‘Nearly one.’

  ‘Gotta go. They’ll think I’m your fucking boyfriend.’ Rapava made an obscene gesture with his hand.

  Kelso pretended to laugh. Sure, he’d call down for a taxi in a minute. Sure. But let’s just finish this bottle first – he reached over for the Scotch and surreptitiously checked that the tape was still running – finish the bottle, comrade, and finish the story.

  The old man scowled and looked at the floor. The story was finished already. There was nothing more to say. They got Stalin up on to the couch – so, what of it? Malenkov went off to talk to the guards. Rapava drove Beria home. Everyone knows the rest. A day or two later, Stalin was dead. And not long after that, Beria was dead. Malenkov – well, Malenkov hung around for years after his disgrace (Rapava saw him once, in the seventies, shuffling through the Arbat) but now even Malenkov was dead. Nadaraya, Sarsikov, Dumbadze, Starostin, Butusova – dead, dead. The Party was dead. The whole fucking country was dead, come to that.

  ‘But there’s more to your story, surely,’ said Kelso. ‘Please sit down Papu Gerasimovich, and let us finish the bottle.’

  He spoke politely and hesitantly, for he sensed that the anaesthetic of alcohol and vanity might be wearing off, and that Rapava, on coming round, might suddenly realise he was talking far too much. He felt another spasm of irritation. Christ, they were always so bloody difficult, these old NKVD men – difficult and maybe even still dangerous. Kelso was a historian, in his middle forties, thirty years younger than Papu Rapava. But he was out of condition – to be truthful, he had never really been in condition – and he wouldn’t have fancied his chances if the old man turned rough. Rapava, after all, was a survivor of the Arctic Circle camps. He wouldn’t have forgotten how to hurt someone – hurt someone very quickly, guessed Kelso, and probably very badly.

  He filled Rapava’s glass, topped up his own, and forced himself to keep on talking.

  ‘I mean, here you are, twenty-five years old, in the General Secretary’s bedroom. You couldn’t get any closer to the centre than that – that was the inner sanctum, that was sacred. So what was Beria up to, taking you in there?’

  ‘You deaf, boy? I said. He needed me to move the body.’

  ‘But why you? Why not one of Stalin’s regular guards? It was they who’d found him, after all, and alerted Malenkov in the first place. Or why didn’t Beria take one of his more senior boys out to Blizhny? Why did he specifically take you?’

  Rapava was swaying, staring now at the glass of Scotch, and afterwards Kelso decided that the whole night really turned upon this one thing: that Rapava needed another drink, and he needed it at that precise instant, and he needed these two things in combination more than he needed to leave. He came back and sat down heavily, drained the glass in one, then held it out to be filled again.

  ‘Papu Rapava,’ continued Kelso, pouring another three fingers of scotch. ‘Nephew of Avksenty Rapava, Beria’s oldest crony in the Georgian NKVD. Younger than the others on the staff. A new boy in the city. Maybe a little more naïve than the rest? Am I right? Precisely the sort of eager young fellow the Boss might have looked at and thought: yes, I could use him, I could use Rapava’s boy, he would keep a secret.’

  The silence lengthened and deepened until it was almost tangible, as if someone had come into the room and joined them. Rapava’s head began to rock from side to side, then he leaned forward and clasped the back of his scrawny neck with his hands, staring at the worn carpet. His grey hair was cropped close to his skull. An old, puckered scar ran from his crown almost to his temple. It looked as if it had been stitched up by a blind man using string. And those fingers: blackened yellow tips and not a nail on one of them.

  ‘Turn off your machine, boy,’ he said, quietly. He nodded towards the table. ‘Turn it off. Now take out the tape – that’s it – and leave it where I can see it.’

  COMRADE Stalin was only a short man – five foot four – but he was heavy. Holy Mother, he was heavy! It was as if he wasn’t made of fat and bone, but of some denser stuff. They dragged him across the wooden floor, his head lolling and banging on the polished blocks, and then they had to lever him up, legs first. Rapava noticed – couldn’t help noticing, as they were almost in his face – that the second and third toes of the GenSec’s left foot were webbed – the Devil’s mark – and when the others weren’t looking, he crossed himself.

  ‘Now, young comrade,’ said Beria, when Malenkov had gone, ‘do you like standing on the ground, or would you prefer to be under it?’

  At first, Rapava couldn’t believe he had heard properly. That was when he knew his life would never be the same again, and that he’d be lucky to survive this night. He whispered, ‘I like standing on it, Boss.’

  ‘Good lad.’ Beria made a pincer of his thumb and forefinger. ‘We need to find a key. About so big. Looks like the sort of key you might use to wind a clock. He keeps it on a brass ring with a piece of string attached. Check his clothes.’

  The familiar grey tunic was hanging off the back of a chair. Grey pants were neatly folded over it. Beside them was a pair of high black cavalry boots, their heels built up an inch or so. Rapava’s limbs moved jerkily. What kind of dream was this? The Father and Teacher of the Soviet People, the Inspirer and Organiser of the Victory of Communism, the Leader of All Progressive Humanity, with half his iron brain destroyed, lying filthy on the sofa, while the two of them went through his room like a pair of thieves? Nevertheless, he did as he was ordered and started on the tunic while Beria attacked the desk with an old Chekist’s skill – pulling out drawers, upending them, scavenging through their contents, sweeping back the detritus and replacing them on their runners.

  There was nothing in the tunic and nothing in the trousers, either, apart from a soiled handkerchief, brittle with dried phlegm. By now, Rapava’s eyes had grown used to the gloom, and he was better able to see his surroundings. On one wall was a large Chinese print of a tiger. On another – and this was the strangest thing of all – Stalin had stuck up photographs of children. Toddlers, mostly. Not proper prints, but pictures roughly torn out of magazines and newspapers. There must have been a couple of dozen of them.

  ‘Anything?’

  ‘No, Boss.’

  ‘Try the couch.’

  They had put Stalin on his back, with his hands folded on his paunch, and you’d have thought the old fellow was merely asleep. His breathing was heavy. He was almost snoring. Close up, he didn’t look much like his pictures. His face was mottled red and fleshy, pitted with shallow cratered scars. His moustache and eyebrows were whitish grey. You could see his scalp through his thin hair. Rapava leaned over him – ah! the smell: it was as if he were already rotting – and slid his hand down into the gap between the cushions and the sofa’s back. He worked his fingers all the way down, leaning left towards the GenSec’s feet then moving right again, up towards the head until, at last, the tip of his forefinger touched something hard and he had to stretch to retrieve it, his arm pressing gently against Stalin’s chest.

  And then – an awful thing: the most horrible, terrible thing. As he withdrew the key and called in a whisper to the Boss, the GenSec gave a grunt and his eyes jerked open – an animal’s yellow eyes, full of rage and fear. Even Beria faltered when he saw them. No other part of the body moved, but a kind of straining growl came from the throat. Hesitantly, Beria came closer and peered down at him, then passed his hand in front of Stalin’s eyes. That seemed to give him an idea. He took the key from Rapava and let it dangle at the end of its cord a few inches above Stalin’s face. The yellow eyes locked on to it at once, and followed it, never left it, through all the points of the compass. Beria, smiling now, let it circle slowly for at least half a minute, then abruptly snatched it away and caught it in his palm. He closed his fingers around it and offered his clenched fist to Stalin.

  Such a sound, boy! More animal than human! It pursued Rapava out of that room and along the pass
age and down all the years, from that night to this.

  THE bottle of Scotch was drained and Kelso was on his knees now before the mini-bar like a priest before his altar. He wondered how his hosts at the historical symposium would feel when they got the bar bill, but that was less important right now than the task of keeping the old man fuelled and talking. He pulled out handfuls of miniatures – vodka, more Scotch, gin, brandy, something German made of cherries – and cradled them across the room to the table. As he sat down and released them a couple of bottles rolled on to the floor but Rapava paid them no heed. He wasn’t an old man in the Ukraina any more; he was back in fifty-three – a frightened twenty-five-year-old at the wheel of a dark green Packard, the highway to Moscow shining white in the headlights before him, Lavrenty Beria rocklike in the rear.

  THE big car flew along the Kutuzovskiy Prospekt and through the silent sweep of the western suburbs. At three-thirty it crossed the Moskva at the Borodinskiy Bridge and headed at speed towards the Kremlin, entering through the south-western gate on the opposite side to Red Square.

  Once they had been waved inside, Beria leaned forward and gave Rapava directions – left past the Armoury, then sharp right through a narrow entrance into an inner courtyard. There were no windows, just half a dozen small doors. The icy cobbles in the darkness glowed crimson like wet blood. Looking up, Rapava saw they were beneath a giant red neon star.

  Beria was quickly through one of the doors and Rapava had to scramble to follow him. A little flagstoned passage took them to a cage-lift that was older than the Revolution. A rattle of iron and the drone of an engine accompanied their slow ascent through two silent, unlit floors. They jolted to a stop and Beria wrenched back the gate. Then he was off again, down the corridor, walking fast, swinging the key on the end of its length of string.

  Don’t ask me where we went, boy, because I can’t tell you. There was a long, carpeted corridor lined with fancy busts on marble pedestals, then an iron spiral staircase which had to be climbed down, and then a huge ballroom, as vast as an ocean liner, with giant mirrors ten yards high, and fancy gilt chairs set around the walls. Finally, not long after the ballroom, came a wide corridor with lime-green, shiny plaster, a floor that smelt of wood-polish and a big, heavy door that Beria unlocked with a key he kept in a bunch on a chain.

  Rapava followed him in. The door, on an old imperial pneumatic hinge, closed slowly behind them.

  It wasn’t much of an office. Eight yards by six. It might have done for some factory director at the arse-end of Vologda or Magnitogorsk – a desk with a couple of telephones, a bit of carpet on the floor, a table and a few chairs, a heavily-curtained window. On the wall was one of those big, pink, roll-up maps of the USSR – this was back in the days when there was a USSR – and next to the map was another, smaller door, to which Beria immediately headed. Again, he had a key. The door opened into a kind of walk-in cupboard in which there was a blackened samovar, a bottle of Armenian brandy and some stuff for making herbal teas. There was also a wall-safe, with a sturdy brass front on which was a manufacturer’s label – not in Russian Cyrillic but in some western language. The safe wasn’t very big – a foot across, if that. Square. Well fashioned. Straight handle, also brass.

  Beria noticed Rapava staring at it and told him roughly to clear off back outside.

  NEARLY an hour passed.

  Standing in the corridor, Rapava tried to keep himself alert, practising drawing his pistol, imagining every little creak of the great building was a footstep, every moan of wind a voice. He tried to picture the GenSec striding down this wide, polished corridor in his cavalry boots, and then he tried to reconcile that image with the ruined figure lying imprisoned in his own rancid flesh out at Blizhny.

  And you know something, boy? I cried. I might have cried a bit for myself as well – I can’t deny it, I was scared – I was shitless – but really I cried for Comrade Stalin. I cried more over Stalin than I did when my own father died. And that goes for most of the boys I knew.

  A distant bell chimed four.

  At around half-past, Beria at last emerged. He was carrying a small leather satchel stuffed with something – papers, certainly, but there might have been other objects: Rapava couldn’t tell. The contents, presumably, had come from the safe, and the satchel might have come from there, too. Or it might have come from the office. Or it might – Rapava couldn’t swear to this, but it was possible – it might have been in Beria’s hand right from the moment he got out of the car. At any rate, he had what he wanted, and he was smiling.

  Smiling?

  Like I say, boy. Yes – smiling. Not a smile of pleasure, mark you. More a kind of –

  Rueful?

  – That’s it, a rueful kind of smile. A would-you-fucking-believe-it? kind of a smile. Like he’d just been beaten at cards.

  They went back the way they had come, only this time in the bust-lined passage they ran into a guard. He practically dropped to his knees when he saw the Boss. But Beria just dead-eyed the man and kept on walking – the coolest piece of thievery you ever saw. In the car he said, ‘Vspolnyi Street.’

  By now it was nearly five, still dark, but the trams had started running and there were people on the streets – babushkas, mostly, who had cleaned the government offices under the Tsar and under Lenin, and who, after tomorrow, would be cleaning them under somebody else. Outside the Lenin Library a vast poster of Stalin, in red, white and black, gazed down upon a line of workers queuing outside the metro station. Beria had the satchel open on his lap. His head was bent. The interior light was on. He was reading something, tapping his fingers with anxiety.

  ‘Is there a shovel in the back?’ he asked, suddenly.

  Rapava said there was. For snowdrifts.

  ‘And a toolbox?’

  ‘Yes, Boss.’ A big one: car jack, wheel wrench, wheel nuts, spare starting handle, spark plugs …

  Beria grunted and returned his attention to his reading.

  *

  BACK at the house, the surface of the ground was diamond-hard, set with glittering points of ice, much too hard for the shovel, and Rapava had to hunt around the outbuildings at the bottom of the garden for a pick-axe. He took off his coat and wielded the axe like he used to when he worked his father’s patch of Georgian dirt, bringing it down in a great smooth arc over his head, letting the weight and the velocity of the tool do the job, the edge of the blade burying itself in the frozen earth almost to the shaft. He wrestled it back and forth and pulled it free, adjusted his stance, then brought it down again.

  He worked in the little cherry orchard by the light of a hurricane lamp suspended from a nearby branch, and he worked at a frantic pace, conscious that in the darkness behind him, invisible on the far side of the light, Beria was sitting on a stone bench watching him. Soon he was sweating so heavily that despite the March cold he had to stop and take off his jacket and roll up his sleeves. A large patch of his shirt was stuck to his back and he had an involuntary memory of other men doing this while he nursed his rifle and watched – other men on a much hotter day, hacking away at the ground in a forest, then lying obediently on their faces in the freshly dug earth. He remembered the smell of moist soil and the hot drowsy silence of the wood and he wondered how cold it would be if Beria made him lie down now.

  A voice came out of the darkness. ‘Don’t make it so wide. It’s not a grave. You’re making work for yourself.’

  After a while, he began alternating between the axe and the shovel, hacking off chunks of earth and jumping into the hole to clear the debris. At first the ground came up to his knees, and then it lapped his waist, and finally it was at his chest – at which point Beria’s moon face appeared above him and told him to stop, that he had done well, it was enough. The Boss was actually smiling and held out his hand to pull Rapava from the hole, and Rapava at that moment, as he grasped that soft palm, was filled with such love – such a surge of gratitude and devotion: he would never feel anything like it again.

&nbs
p; It was as comrades, in Rapava’s memory, that they each took hold of one end of the long metal toolbox and lowered it into the ground. They kicked the earth in after it, stamped it tight, and then Rapava hammered the mound flat with the back of the shovel and scattered dead leaves over the site. By the time they turned to walk across the lawn to the house, the faintest gleams of grey were beginning to infiltrate the eastern sky.

  BETWEEN them, Kelso and Rapava had drained the miniatures and had moved on to a kind of home-made pepper vodka, which the old man had produced from a battered tin flask. God alone knew what he had made it from. It could have been shampoo. He sniffed it, sneezed, then winked and poured a brimming, oily glass for Kelso. It was the colour of a pigeon’s breast and Kelso felt his stomach lurch.

  ‘And Stalin died,’ he said, trying to avoid taking a sip. His words slurred into one another. His jaw was numb.

  ‘And Stalin died.’ Rapava shook his head in sorrow. He suddenly leaned forward and clinked glasses. ‘To Comrade Stalin!’

  ‘To Comrade Stalin!’

  They drank.

  AND Stalin died. And everyone went mad with grief. Everyone, that is, except Comrade Beria, who delivered his eulogy to the thousands of hysterical mourners in Red Square like he was reading a railway announcement, and had a good laugh about it afterwards with the boys.

  Word of this got around.

  Now Beria was a clever man, much cleverer even than you are, boy – he’d have eaten you for breakfast. But clever people all make one mistake. They all think everyone else is stupid. And everyone isn’t stupid. They just take a bit more time, that’s all.