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  The Deputy Minister leaned forwards. His dark eyes searched Rapava's face. Following Comrade Stalin's tragic death, attempts were made to locate this key. It could not be found. It was therefore agreed by the Presidium to have this safe broken into, in the presence of them all, to see if Comrade Stalin had left behind material that might be of historical value, or which might assist the Central Committee in its stupendous responsibility of appointing Comrade Stalin's successor. The safe was duly broken open, under the supervision of the Presidium, and found to be empty, apart from a few minor items, such as Comrade Stalin's party card.

  'And now,' said the Deputy Minister, getting slowly to his feet, 'we come to the crux of the matter.

  He walked around and sat on the edge of the desk directly in front of Rapava. Oh, he was a big bastard, boy, a fleshy tank.

  We know, he said, from Comrade Malenkov that in the early hours of the second of March, you went to the Kuntsevo dacha in the company of the traitor, Beria, and that you were both left alone with Comrade Stalin for several minutes. Was anything removed from the room?

  No, comrade.

  Nothing at all?

  No, comrade.

  And where did you go when you left Kuntsevo?

  I drove Comrade Beria back to his house, comrade.

  Directly back to his house?

  Yes, comrade.

  You are lying.

  No, comrade.

  You are lying. We have a witness who saw you both inside the Kremlin shortly before dawn. A sentry who met you in a corridor.

  Yes, comrade. I remember now. Comrade Beria said he needed to collect something from his office -Something from Comrade Stalin's office!

  No, comrade.

  You are lying! You are a traitor! You and the English spy Beria broke into Stalin's office and stole his papers! Where are those papers?

  No, comrade -Traitor! Thief! Spy!

  Each word accompanied by a punch in the face. And so on.

  I'LL tell you something, boy. Nobody knows the full truth of what happened to the Boss, even now - even after Gorbachev and Yeltsin have sold off our whole fucking birthright to the capitalists and let the CIA go picnicking in our files. The papers on the Boss are still closed. They smuggled him out of the Kremlin on the floor of a car, rolled up in a carpet, and some say Zhukov shot him that very night. Others say they shot him the following week. Most say they kept him alive for five months - Jive months! - sweated him in a bunker underneath the Moscow Military District - and shot him after a secret trial. Either way, they shot him. He was dead by Christmas Day. And this is what they did to me.

  Rapava held up his mutilated fingers and wiggled them. Then he clumsily unbuttoned his shirt, pulled it from the waistband of his pants, and twisted his scrawny torso to show his back. His vertebrae were criss-crossed with shiny roughened panes of scar-tissue - translucent windows on to the flesh beneath. His stomach and chest were whorls of blue-black tattoos. Kelso didn't speak. Rapava sat back leaving his shirt unbuttoned. His scars and his tattoos were the medals of his lifetime. He was proud to wear them. NOT a word, boy. You listening? They did not get. One. Single. Word.

  Throughout it all, he didn't know if the Boss was still alive, or if the Boss was talking. But it didn't matter: Papu Gerasimovich Rapava, at least, would hold his silence.

  Why? Was it loyalty? A bit, perhaps - the memory of that reprieving hand. But he wasn't such a young fool that he didn't also realise that silence was his only hope. How long do you think they'd have let him live if he'd led them to that place? It was his own death warrant he'd buried under that tree. So, softly, softly: not a word.

  He lay shivering on the floor of his unheated cell as the winter came and dreamed of cherry trees, the leaves dying and falling now, the branches dark against the sky, the howling of the wolves.

  And then, around Christmas, like bored children, they suddenly seemed to lose interest in the whole business. The beating went on for a while - by now it was a matter of honour on both sides, you must understand - but the questions stopped, and finally, after one prolonged and imaginative session, the beating stopped as well. The Deputy Minister never came again and Rapava guessed that Beria must be dead. He also guessed that someone had decided that Stalin's papers, if they did exist, were better left unread.

  Rapava expected to get his seven grams of lead at any moment. It never occurred to him that he wouldn't, not after Beria had been liquidated. So of his journey, in a snowstorm, to the Red Army building on Kommissariat Street, and of the makeshift courtroom, with its high, barred windows and its troika of judges, he remembered nothing. He blanked his mind with snow. He watched it through the window, advancing in waves up the Moskva and along the embankment, smothering the afternoon lights on the opposite side of the river - high white columns of snow on a death march from the east. Voices droned around him. Later, when it was dark and he was being taken outside, he assumed to be shot, he asked if he could stop for a minute on the steps and bury his hands in the drifts. A guard asked why, and Rapava said: 'To feel snow between my fingers one last time, comrade.'

  They laughed a lot at that. But when they found out he was serious they laughed a whole lot more. 'If there's one thing you'll never go hungry for, Georgian,' they told him, as they pushed him into the back of the van, 'it's snow.' That was how he learned he had been sentenced to fifteen years' hard labour in the Kolyma territory.

  KHRUSHCHEV amnestied a whole bunch of Gulag prisoners in fifty-six, but nobody amnestied Papu Rapava. Papu Rapava was forgotten. Papu Rapava alternately rotted and froze in the forests of Siberia for the next decade and a half- rotted in the short summer, when each man worked in his own private fever-cloud of mosquitoes, and froze in the long winter when the ice made rock of the swamps.

  They say that people who survive the camps all look alike because, once a man's skeleton has been exposed, it doesn't matter how well-padded his flesh subsequently becomes, or how carefully he dresses - the bones will always poke through. Kelso had interviewed enough Gulag survivors in his time to recognise the camp skeleton in Rapava's face even now, as he talked, in the sockets of his eyes and in the crack of his jaw. He could see it in the hinges of his wrists and ankles, and the flat blade of his sternum. He wasn't amnestied, Rapava was saying, because he killed a man, a Chechen, who tried to sodomise him - gutted him with a shank he'd made from a piece of saw. And what happened to your head? said Kelso.

  Rapava fingered the scar. He couldn't remember. Sometimes, when it was especially cold, the scar ached and gave him dreams.

  What kind of dreams?

  Rapava showed the dark glint of his mouth. He wouldn't say.

  Fifteen years...

  They returned him to Moscow in the summer of sixty-nine, on the day the Yankees put a man on the moon. Rapava left the ex-prisoners' hostel and wandered round the hot and crowded streets and couldn't make sense of anything. Where was Stalin? That was what amazed him. Where were the statues and the pictures? Where was the respect? The boys all looked like girls and the girls all looked like whores. Clearly, the country was already halbway in the shit. But still - you have to say - at least in those days there were jobs for everyone, even for old zeki like him. They sent him to the engine sheds at the Leningrad Station, to work as a labourer. He was only forty-one and as strong as a bear. Everything he had in the world was in a cardboard suitcase.

  Did he ever marry?

  Rapava shrugged. Sure, he married. That was the way you got an apartment. He married and got himself fixed up with a place.

  And what happened? Where was she?

  She died. It was a decent block in those days, boy, before the drugs and the crime.

  Where was his place?

  Fucking criminals...

  And children?

  A son. He died as well. In Afghanistan. And a daughter.

  His daughter was dead?

  No. She was a whore.

  And Stalin's papers?

  Drunk as he was, there was no way Kel
so could make that question casual and the old man shot him a crafty look; a peasant's look. Rapava said softly, 'Go on, boy. Yes? And Stalin's papers? What about Stalin's papers?'

  Kelso hesitated.

  'Only that if they still existed - if there was a chance - a possibility -'You'd want to see them?' 'Of course. Rapava laughed. 'And why should I help you, boy? Fifteen years in Kolyma, and for what? To help you spin more lies? For love?'

  'No. Not for love. For history.' 'For history? Do me a favour, boy!' 'All right - for money, then.' 'What?'

  'For money. A share in the profits. A lot of money.

  The peasant Rapava stroked the side of his nose. 'How much money?'

  'A lot. If this is true. If we could find them. Believe me: a lot of money.

  THE momentary silence was broken by the sound of voices in the corridor, voices talking in English, and Kelso guessed who this would be: his fellow historians - Adelman, Duberstein and the rest - coming back late from dinner, wondering where he'd got to. It suddenly seemed overwhelmingly important to him that no one else - least of all his colleagues - should know anything at all about Papu Rapava.

  Someone tapped softly on the door and he held up a warning hand to the old man. Very quietly he reached over and turned off the bedside lamp.

  They sat together and listened to the whispers, magnified by the darkness but still muffled and indistinct. There was another knock, and then a splutter of laughter, hushed by the others. Maybe they had seen the light go out. Perhaps they thought he was with a woman - such was his reputation.

  After a few more seconds, the voices faded and the corridor was silent again. Kelso turned on the light. He smiled and patted his heart. The old man's face was a mask, but then he smiled and began to sing - he had a quavering, unexpectedly melodious voice -Kolyma, Kolyma,

  What a wonderfiul place!

  Twelve months of winter

  Summer all the rest...

  AFTER his release, he was this and no more: Papu Rapava, railway worker, who had done a spell in the camps, and if anyone wanted to take it further - well? yes? come on, then, comrade! - he was always ready with his fists or an iron spike. Two men watched him from the start. Antipin, who was a foreman in the Lenin No. 1 shed, and a cripple in the downstairs flat called Senka. And they were as pretty a pair of canaries as you could ever hope to meet. You could practically hear them singing to the KGB before you were out of the room. The others came and went - the men on foot, the men in parked cars, the men asking 'routine questions~ comrade' - but Antipin and Senka were the faithful watchers, though they never got a thing, neither of them. Rapava had buried his past in a hole far deeper than the one he'd dug for Beria.

  Senka died five years ago. He never knew what became of Antipin. The Lenin No. 1 shed was now the property of a private collective, importing French wine.

  Stalin's papers, boy? Who gives a shit? He wasn't afraid of anything any more.

  A lot of money, you say? Well, well -He leaned over and spat into the ashtray, then seemed to

  fall asleep. After a while, he muttered, My lad died. Did I tell you that?

  Yes.

  He died in a night ambush on the road to Mazar-i-Sharif. One of the last to be sent. Killed by stone-age devils with blackened faces and Yankee missiles. Could anyone imagine Stalin letting the country be humiliated by such savages? Think of it! He'd have crushed them into dust and scattered the powder in Siberia! After the lad was gone, Rapava took to walking. Great long hikes that could last a day and a night. He criss-crossed the city, from Perovo to the lakes, from Bittsevskiy Park to the Television Tower. And on one of these walks - it must have been six or seven years ago, around the time of the coup - he found himself walking into one of his own dreams. Couldn't figure it out at first. Then he realised he was on Vspolnyi Street. He got out of there fast. His lad was a radio man in a tank unit. Liked fiddling with radios. No fighter.

  And the house? said Kelso. Was the house still standing. He was nineteen. And the house? What had happened to the house?

  Rapava's head drooped.

  The house, comrade -There was a red sickle moon, and a single red star. And the place was guarded by devils with blackened faces -KELSO could get no more sense out of him after that. The old man's eyelids fluttered and closed. His mouth slackened. Yellow saliva leaked across his cheek.

  Kelso watched him for a minute or two, feeling the pressure build in his stomach, then rose suddenly from his chair and moved as quickly as he could to the lavatory, where he was violently and copiously sick. He rested his hot forehead against the cold enamel bowl and licked his lips. His tongue felt huge to him, and bitter, like a swollen piece of black fruit. There was something stuck in his throat. He tried to clear it by coughing but that didn't work so he tried swallowing and was promptly sick again. When he pulled his head back, the bathroom fixtures seemed to have detached themselves from their moorings and to be revolving around him in a slow tribal dance. A line of silver mucus extended in a shimmering arc from his nose to the toilet seat. Endure, he told himself. This, too, will pass.

  He clutched again at the cool white bowl, a drowning man, as the horizon tilted and the room darkened, slid -A RUSTLE in the blackness of his dreams. A pair of yellow eyes.

  'Who are you,' said Stalin, 'to steal my private papers?' He sprang from his couch like a wolf.

  KELSO jerked awake and cracked his head on the protruding lip of the bath. He groaned and rolled on to his back, dabbing at his skull for signs of blood. He was sure he felt some tacky liquid, but when he brought his fingers up close to his eyes and squinted at them they were clean.

  As always, even now, even as he lay sprawled on the floor of a Moscow bathroom, there was a part of him that remained mercilessly sober, like the wounded captain on the bridge of a stricken ship, calling calmly through the smoke of battle for damage assessments. This was the part of him which concluded that, bad as he felt, he had - amazingly -sometimes felt worse. And this was the part of him that also heard, beyond the dusty thump of his pulse, the creak of a footstep and the click of a door being quietly closed.

  Kelso set his jaw and rose, by force of will, through all the stages of human evolution - from the slime of the floor, to his hands and knees, to a kind of shuffling, simian crouch -and propelled himself into the empty bedroom. Grey light seeped through thin orange curtains and lit the detritus of the night. The sour reek of spilled booze and stale smoke made his stomach coil. Still - and there was heroism as well as desperation in the effort - he headed for the door.

  'Papu Gerasimovich! Wait!'

  The corridor was dim and deserted. From the end of it, around the corner, came the ping of an arriving elevator. Wincing, Kelso loped towards it, arriving just in time to see the doors close. He tried to prise them open with his fingers, shouting into the crevice for Rapava to come back. He punched the call button with the heel of his hand a few times, but nothing happened so he took the stairs. He got as far as the twenty-first floor before he acknowledged he was beaten. He stopped on the landing and summoned the express elevator, and stood there waiting for it, leaning against the wall, breathless, nauseous, with a knife behind his eyes. The car was a long time coming and when, at last, it did arrive, it promptly took him back up the two floors he had just run down. The doors slid open mockingly on to the empty passage.

  By the time Kelso reached ground level, his ears popping from the speed of his descent, Rapava was gone. In the marble vault of the Ukraina's reception there was nobody about except for a babushka, hoovering ash from the red carpet, and a platinum-blonde hooker with a fake sable curled over her shoulders, arguing with a security man. As he made for the entrance he was aware that all three had stopped what they were doing and were staring at him. He put his hand to his forehead. He was dripping with sweat.

  It was cold outside and barely light. A sharp October morning. A damp chill rising off the river. Yet already the rush-hour traffic was beginning to build along the Kutuzovskiy Prospekt, backing up from
the Kalininskiy Bridge. He walked on for a while until he came to the main road, and there he stood for a minute or two, shivering in his shirtsleeves. There was no sign of Rapava. Along the sidewalk to his right, an old grey dog, big and half-starved, went slouching past the heavy buildings, heading east, towards the waking city.

  Part One

  Moscow

  'To choose one's victims, to prepare one's plans minutely, to slake an implacable vengeance, and then to go to bed...there is nothing sweeter in the world.'

  J.V. Stalin

  in conversation with Kamenev and Dzerzhinsky

  Chapter One

  OLGA KOMAROVA OF the Russian Archive Service, Rosarkhiv, wielding a collapsible pink umbrella, prodded and shooed her distinguished charges across the Ukraina's lobby towards the revolving door. It was an old door, of heavy wood and glass, too narrow to cope wit'I~ more than one body at a time, so the scholars formed a line in the dim light, like parachutists over a target zone, and as they passed her, Olga touched each one lightly on the shoulder with her umbrella, counting them off one by one as they were propelled into the freezing Moscow air.

  Franklin Adelman of Yale went first, as befitted his age and status, then Moldenhauer of the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz, with his absurd double-doctorate - Doctor Doctor Karlbloody-Moldenhauer - then the neo-Marxists, Enrico Banfi of Milan and Eric Chambers of the LSE, then the great cold warrior, Phil Duberstein of NYU, then Ivo Godelier of the Ecole Normale Superieure, followed by glum Dave Richards of St Antony's, Oxford - another Sovietologist whose world was rubble - then Velma Byrd of the US National Archive, then Alastair Findlay of Edinburgh's Department of War Studies, who still thought the sun shone out of Comrade Stalin's arse, then Arthur Saunders of Stanford, and finally -the man whose lateness had kept them waiting in the lobby for an extra five minutes - Dr C. R. A. Kelso, commonly known as Fluke.