Robert Harris - Archangel

He tried to fit all this together: Papu Rapava's last two days on earth. Tuesday 27 October: he goes to see his daughter for the first time in a decade, because, he says, he wants to talk. She throws him out, buys him off with a pack of cigarettes and a book of matches labelled 'Robotnik'. In the afternoon, he turns up, of all places, at the Institute of Marxism- Leninism and listens to Fluke Kelso deliver a paper on Josef Stalin. Then he follows Kelso back to the Ukraina and sits up all night drinking. And talking. He certainly talked. Perhaps he told me what he would have told his daughter if she'd only listened.

And then it's dawn and he leaves the Ukraina. This is now Wednesday 28 October. And what does he do after he's slipped away into the morning? Does he go to the deserted house on Vspolnyi Street and dig up the secret of his life? He must have done. And then he hides it, and he leaves a note for his daughter, telling her where to find it ('remember that place I used to have when Mama was alive?') and then, late in the afternoon, his killers come for him. And either he had told them everything, or he hadn't, and if he hadn't, then it must have been partly out of love, surely? To make certain that the only thing he had in the world that might be worth anything should go not to them but to his daughter.

God, thought Kelso, what an ending. What a way to leave a life - and how in keeping with the rest of it.

'He must have cared for you,' said Kelso. He wondered if she knew how the old man had died. If she didn't, he couldn't bring himself to tell her. 'He must have cared for you, to have come to find you.'

'I don't think so. He used to hit me. And my mother. And my brother.' She glared at the oncoming traffic. 'He used to hit me when I was little. What does a child know?' She shook her head. 'I don't think so.'

Kelso tried to imagine the four of them in the one-bedroom apartment. Where would her parents have slept? On a mattress in the sitting-room? And Rapava, after a decade and a half in Kolyma - violent, unstable, confined. It didn't bear contemplating.

'When did your mother die?'

'Do you ever stop asking questions, mister?'

They came off the highway and down a slip road. Half of it had never been completed. One lane curved like a water-chute, ending abruptly in a row of dripping metal rods and a ten-yard drop to waste ground.

'When I was eighteen, if that makes any difference.'

The ugliness around them was heroic. In Russia it could afford to be - could afford to take its time, stretch out a bit. Minor roads ran as wide as motorways, with flooded potholes the size of ponds. Each concrete stack of apartments, each belching industrial plant had an entire wilderness to itself to pollute. Kelso remembered the night before - the endless run from Block Nine to Block Eight to raise the alarm: it had gone on and on, like a journey in a nightmare.

Rapava's place in the daylight looked even more derelict than it had seemed in the darkness. Scorch marks shot up the wall from a set of windows on the second floor where an apartment had been torched. There was a crowd outside and Zinaida slowed so they could take a look.

O'Brian was right. The word was out. That much was obvious. A solitary militia man blocked the doorway, holding at bay a dozen cameramen and reporters, who were themselves being watched by a straggling semi-circle of apathetic neighbours. Some kids kicked a ball on the waste ground. Others hung around the media's fancy western cars.

'What was he to them?' Zinaida said suddenly. 'What was he to any of you? You're all vultures.'

She gave a grimace of disgust, and for the third time Kelso noticed her adjusting the rear-view mirror.

'Is someone behind us?' He turned round sharply. 'Maybe. A car from the airport. But not any more. "'What sort of a car?' He tried to keep his voice calm. A BMW. Seven series.

'You know about cars?'

'More questions?' She shot him another look. 'Cars were my father's interest. Cars and Comrade Stalin. He was a driver, wasn't he, for some big shot in the old days? You'll see.'

She put her foot down.

She knows nothing, thought Kelso. She has no idea of the risks. He began making promises to himself of what he would do: you take a quick look now to see if this toolbox is here (it wouldn't be) then ask her to take you back to the airport and see if you can talk your way on to the next flight out -Two minutes from Rapava's apartment they turned off the main street and on to a muddy track that led through a scrappy copse of birch to a field that had been divided into small-holdings. A pig snuffled in the earth in an enclosure made of old car doors tied together with wire. There were a few scrawny chickens, some frost-blasted vegetables. Children had made a snowman out of yesterday's fall. It had melted in the light rain and looked grotesque in the dirt, like a lump of white fat.

Facing this rural scene was a row of lock-up garages. On the long flat roof sat the remains of half a dozen small cars -rusted red skeletons picked bare of windows, engines, tyres, upholstery. Zinaida switched off the engine and they climbed out into the mud. An old man leaned on his shovel and watched them. Zinaida stared him down, her hands on her hips. Eventually, he spat on the ground and returned to his digging.

She had a key. Kelso looked back along the deserted track. His hands felt numb. He stuffed them into his coat pockets. She was the calm one. She was wearing a pair of knee-length leather boots and to avoid getting them dirty she stepped carefully across the lumpy ground. He looked around again. He didn't like it: the encroaching trees, the derelict cars, this bewildering woman with her kaleidoscope of roles - GUM telephonist, would-be lawyer, part-time hooker and now griefless daughter.

He said, 'Where did you get the key?'

'It was with the note.'

'I don't understand why you didn't come here on your own straight away. Why do you need me?'

'Because I don't know what I'm looking for, do I? Are you coming or not?' She was fitting the key into a big padlock on the nearest lock-up. 'What are we looking for, anyway?'

'A notebook.'

'What?' She stopped fiddling with the key and stared at him.

A black oilskin notebook that used to belong to Josef Stalin.' He repeated the familiar phrase. It was becoming his mantra. (It wouldn't be here, he told himself again. It was the Holy Grail. The quest was all that mattered. It wasn't supposed to be found.)

" 'Stalin's notebook? And what's that worth?'

'Worth?' He tried to make it sound as if the question had never occurred to him. 'Worth?' he repeated. 'It's hard to put an exact figure on it. There are some rich collectors. It depends what's in it.' He spread his hands. 'Half a million, maybe.'

'Roubles?'

'Dollars.'

'Dollars? Shit. Shit.' She resumed her efforts to undo the padlocks clumsy now with her eagerness.

And suddenly, watching her, he caught her mood and then of course he knew why he had come. Because it was everything, really, wasn't it? It was much more than mere money. It was vindication. Vindication for twenty years of freezing his arse off in basement archives, and dragging himself to lectures in the winter dark - first to listen, then to give them - twenty years of teaching and faculty politics and trying to write books that mostly didn't sell and all the while hoping that one day he would produce something worthwhile - something true and big and definitive - a piece of history that would explain why things had happened as they did

'Here,' he said, almost pushing her out of the way, 'let me try.

He jiggled the key in the lock. At last it turned and the arm sprang open. He pulled the chain through the heavy eyebolts.

COLD, oily darkness. No window. No electricity. An ancient paraffin lamp hanging on a nail by the door.