Robert Harris - Archangel

She'd died in eighty-nine when Zinaida was eighteen. And six months later they were back at the Troekurovo cemetery putting Sergo in the earth beside her. Zinaida closed her eyes and remembered papa, drunk, at the funeral, in the rain, and a couple of Sergo's army comrades, and a nervous young lieutenant, just a kid himself, who had been Sergo's commanding officer, talking about how Sergo had died for the motherland whilst rendering fraternal assistance to the progressive forces of the People's Republic of-

- oh, fuck it, what did it matter? The lieutenant had cleared off as soon as he decently could, after about ten minutes, and Zinaida had moved her things out of the ghost-filled apartment that night. He had tried to stop her, hitting her, sweating vodka through his open pores, stinking even more like an old dog from his soaking in the rain, and she had never seen him again. Never seen him again until last Tuesday morning when he had turned up on her doorstep and called her a whore. And she had thrown him out like a beggar, sent him away with a couple of packs of cigarettes, and now he was dead and she really would never see him again.

She bent her head, lips moving, and anyone watching might have thought she was praying, but actually she was reading his note and talking to herself.

'I have been a bad one, you're right. All you said was right. So don't think I don't know it-'

Oh, papa, you were, you know that? You really were. 'But here is a chance to do some good-' Good? Is that what you call it? Good? That's a joke. They killed you for it and now they're going to kill me.

'Remember that place I used to have, when mama was alive?'

Yes, yes, I remember.

And remember what I used to tell you? Are you listening to me, girl? Rule number one? What's rule number one?'

She folded away the note and glanced around. This was stupid.

Speak up, girl"

She bowed her head meekly.

Never show them you're afraid, papa.

Again!'

'Never show them you're afraid.'

And rule number two? What's rule number two?'

You've only got one friend in this world.

And that friend is?'

Yourself.

And what else?'

This.

Show me.'

This, papa. This.

In the concealed darkness of the bag her fingers began to work her rosary, clumsily at first but with increasing dexterity -Push. Click. Slide. Press -

SHE had left the church when the service ended and hurried down into Red Square, knowing what she had to do, much calmer now.

The westerner was right. She didn't dare risk her apartment. There wasn't a friend she knew well enough to ask if she could stay. And in a hotel she would have to register, and if Mamantov had friends in the FSB -That only left one option.

It was nearly six and the shadows were beginning to collect and deepen around the base of Lenin's tomb. But across the cobbles the lights of the GUM department store blazed brighter by the minute - a line of yellow beacons, it seemed to her, in the gloom of the late October afternoon.

She made her purchases quickly, starting with a knee-length black cocktail dress of raw silk. She also bought herself sheer black tights, short black gloves, a black purse, a pair of black high-heeled shoes and make-up.

She paid for it all in cash, in dollars. She never went out with less than $1,000 in cash. She refused to use a credit card: they left too many traces. And she didn't trust the banks, either: thieving alchemists, the lot of them, who would take your precious dollars and conjure them into roubles, turn gold into base metal.

At the cosmetic counter one of the salesgirls recognised her - Hi, Zina! - and she had to turn and flee.

She went back into the boutique and took off her jeans and shirt and tugged herself into her new dress. It was hard to fasten the zip - she had to twist her left arm halfway up her back and push her right hand down between her shoulder blades until her fingers touched, but it fastened eventually, pinching her flesh, and she stepped back a pace to look at herself- her hand on her hip, her chin tilted, her profile turned to the mirror.

Good.

Well: good enough.

The make-up took another ten minutes. She stuffed her old warm clothes into the GUM carrier bag, slipped on her leather jackets and headed back into Red Square, tottering on her high heels over the big stones.

She was careful not to look at the Lenin mausoleum, nor at the Kremlin wall behind it, where her father used to take her when she was a girl to file past Stalin's tomb. Instead she walked quickly through the gate in the northern edge of the square, turned right and headed towards the Metropol. She wanted to have a drink at the hotel bar but the security men wouldn't let her through.

'No way, darling. Sorry.'

She could hear them laughing as she walked away. 'Starting early tonight?' one of them called after her. It was dark by the time she reached her car.

WHICH was where she now sat. Strange, she thought, looking back, the deaths of mama and Sergo - these two little deaths. Strange. They were like two small pebbles at the start of an avalanche. Because not long after they went, everything went - all the old, familiar world slid after them into the wet ground.

Not that Zinaida took much notice of the politics of it all. The first couple of years after leaving papa were a haze in her memory. She lived in a squat out in the Krasnogorsk district. Got pregnant twice. Had two abortions. (And not many days had gone by since when she hadn't wondered what they might have been like, those two - the/d be nearly nine and seven now - and whether they could have been any more clamorous than the spaces they'd left behind.)

Still: if she didn't notice the politics, she did notice the money that was now beginning to appear around the rich hotels - the Metropol, the Kempinski and the rest. And the money noticed her, like it noticed all the Moscow girls. Zinaida wasn't one of the most beautiful, maybe, but she was good enougk~ sufficiently Mingrelian to have an almost Oriental sharpness to her face, sufficiently Russian to have a padding of voluptuousness despite her skinny frame.

And as no girl in Moscow could earn in a month what a western businessman might spend in a night on a bottle of wine, you didn't have to be a genius at economics - you didn't have to be one of the hard-faced management consultants drinking at the bar - to see there was a market in the making here. Which was why one night in December 1992, at the age of twenty-one, in the hotel suite of a German engineer from Ludwigshafen am Rhein, Zinaida Rapava became a whore, tottering down the corridor after ninety sweaty minutes with $125 hidden in her bra, which was more money than she had ever even seen.

And shall I tell you something else, papa, now that we're talking at last? It was fine. I was fine. Because what was I doing, really, that ten million other girls don't do every night, only they don't have the sense to get paid for it? That was decadent. This was business - kapitalism - and it was fine, and it was like you said, I only had one friend: myself.

After a time, the trade moved out of the hotels and into the clubs, and that was easier. The clubs paid protection to the mafia, collecting a percentage from the girls, and in return the mafia kept the pimps out of it, so it all looked nice and respectable and everyone could pretend it was pleasure, not business.

Tonight~ almost six years after that first encounter, hidden in her apartment - which was bought and paid for, by the way - Zinaida Rapava had nearly $30,000 in cash. And she had plans. She was studying law. She was going to be a lawyer. She was going to give up Robotnik, and Moscow with it, and move to St Petersburg and become a proper legal whore - a lawyer.

She was going to do all this until, on Tuesday morning, Papu Rapava had turned up out of nowhere, wanting to talk, calling her filthy names, bringing with him from the street the familiar, stinking dog's breath stench of the past.