Robert Harris: Archangel

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. gain 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-fuckingbelieve-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 trains 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. 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.