Robert Harris - Archangel

He tore Kelso's statement in half, then halved it again, and again - kept on until it couldn't be reduced further. He crumpled the pieces between his hands, cupped them and threw the fragments out across the water. The wind caught them. The seagulls swooped in the hope of food then wheeled away, shrieking with disappointment.

'Nothing is as it was,' he said. 'You ought to know that. The investigation begins again from scratch this morning. This statement was never taken. You were never detained by the militia. The officer who questioned you has been promoted and is being transferred, even as we speak, by military transport plane to Magadan.'

'Magadan?' Magadan was on the eastern rim of Siberia, four thousand miles away.

'Oh, we'll bring him back,' said the Russian, airily, 'when this is sorted out. What we don't want is the Moscow press corps trampling over everything. That really would be embarrassing. Now, I tell you all this, knowing there's nothing we can do to prevent you publishing your version of events abroad. But there will be no official corroboration from here, you understand? Rather the contrary. We reserve the right to make public our record of your day's activity, in which your motives will be made to look quite different. For example: you were arrested for indecent exposure to a couple of children in the Zoopark, the daughters of one of my men. Or you were picked up drunk on the Smolenskaya embankment, urinating into the river, and had to be locked up for violent and abusive behavior.'

'Nobody will believe it,' said Kelso, trying to summon a last vestige of outrage. But, of course, they would. He could make a list now of everyone who would believe it. He said, bitterly, 'So that's it then? Mamantov goes free? Or perhaps you'll try to find Stalin's papers yourselves, so you can bury them somewhere, like you people bury everything else that's "embarrassing"?'

'Oh, but you irritate me,' said the Russian, and now it was his turn to lose his temper. 'People like you. How much more is it you want of us? You've won, but is that enough? No, you have to rub our faces in it - Stalin, Lenin, Beria: I'm sick of hearing their damn names - make us turn out all our filthy closets, wallow in guilt, so you can feel superior -'

Kelso snorted, 'You sound like Mamantov.'

'I despise Mamantov,' said the Russian. 'Do you understand me? For the same reason I despise you. We want to put an end to Comrade Mamantov and his kind - what d'you suppose this is all about? But now you've come along - blundered into something much bigger - something you can't even begin to understand -'

He stopped - goaded, Kelso could tell, into saying more than he intended - and then Kelso realised where he must have seen him before.

'You were there, weren't you?' he said. 'When I went to see him. You were one of the men outside his apartment -But he was talking to himself. The Russian was striding

back to the car.

'Take him to the Ukraina,' he said to the driver, 'then come back here and pick me up. I need some air.

'Who are you?'

'Just go. And be grateful.'

Kelso hesitated but suddenly he was too tired to argue. He climbed, weary and defeated, into the back seat as the engine started. The Russian slammed the door on him, emphatically. He felt numb and shut his eyes again and there was Rapava's corpse swinging in the darkness. Thump. Thump. He opened his eyes and saw that it was the blond-headed man, knocking on the window. Kelso wound it down.

A final thought.' He was making an effort to be polite again. He even smiled. 'We're working on the assumption, obviously, that Mamantov now has this notebook. But have you considered the alternative? Remember, Papu Rapava withstood six months of interrogation back in fifty-three, and then fifteen years in Kolyma. Suppose Mamantov and his friends didn't manage to break him in one evening. It's a possibility: it would explain the . . . ferocity of their behaviour: frustration. In that case, if you were Mamantov, who would you want to question next?' He banged on the roof. 'Sleep well in New York.'

Suvorin watched the big car as it bounced over the rough ground and out of sight. He turned away, towards the river, and walked along the quayside, smoking his pipe, until he came to a big metal post set into the concrete, to which ships had moored in the communist time, before economics had accomplished what Hitler's bombers had never managed, and laid waste the docks. His performance had exhausted him. He wiped the surface with his handkerchief, sat down, and pulled out his photocopy of Kelso's statement. To have written so much - perhaps two thousand words - so quickly and with such clarity, after such an experience . . . Well, it proved his hunch: he was a clever one, this fellow, Fluke. Troublesome. Persistent. Clever. He went through the pages again with a gold propelling pencil and made a list of matters for Netto to check. They needed to visit the house on Vspolnyi Street - Beria's place, well, well. They ought to find this daughter of Rapava's. They should compile a list of every forensic document examiner in the Moscow region to whom Mamantov might take the notebook for authentication. And every handwriting expert. And they should find a couple of tame historians and ask them to make the best guess possible as to what this notebook might contain. And and and. . . He felt as though he was trying to stuff gas back into a cylinder with his hands.

He was still writing when Netto and the driver returned. He rose stiffly. To his dismay he found that the mooring-post had left a rust-coloured mark on the back of his beautiful coat, and he spent much of the journey to Yasenevo picking at it obsessively, trying to make it clean.

KELSO'S HOTEL ROOM was in darkness, the curtains closed. He pulled aside the cheap nylon drapes. There was an odd smell of something - talcum powder? Aftershave? Someone had been in here. Blond-head, was it? Eau Sauvage? He lifted the telephone receiver. The line hummed. He felt breathless. His skin was crawling. He could have done with a whisky but the mini-bar was still empty after his night with Rapava; there was nothing in it apart from soda and orange juice. And he could have done with a bath but there wasn't a plug.

He guessed now who the blond-headed man was. He knew the species - smooth and sharply-dressed, westernised, deracinated - too sharp for the secret police. He had been meeting men like that at embassy receptions for more than twenty years, dodging their discreet invitations for lunch and drinks, listening to their carefully indiscreet jokes about life in Moscow. They used to be called the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. Now they called themselves the SVR. The name had changed but the job had not. Blond-head was a spy. And he was investigating Mamantov. They had set the spies on Mamantov, which was not much of a vote of confidence in the FSB.

At the thought of Mamantov, he stepped quickly over to the door and turned the heavy lock and set the chain. Through the spy-hole he took a fish-eyed squint down the empty corridor.

'But you did kill him... You are the killer.'

He was shaking now with delayed shock. He felt filthy, somehow, defiled. The memory of the night was like grit against his skin.

He went into the little green-tiled bathroom, took off his clothes and turned on the shower, set the water as hot as he could bear, and soaped himself from head to foot. The suds turned grey with the Moscow grime. He stood under the steaming jet and let it scourge him for another ten minutes, thrashing his shoulders and his chest, then he stepped out of the tub, slopping water over the uneven lino. He lit a cigarette and smoked as he shaved, transferring it from one side of his mouth to the other, working his razor around it, standing in a puddle. Then he dried himself off, got into bed and pulled the cover up to his chin. But he didn't sleep.