Robert Harris: Archangel

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.

The door banged hard against his heels. Outside the weather had worsened. It was trying to snow. Tiny flakes, as hard as grit, came whipping across the wide grey concourse and spattered his face and hair. At the bottom of the flight of steps, shuddering in a cloud of its own white fumes, was a dilapidated bus, waiting to take them to the symposium. Kelso stopped to light a cigarette.