Archangel (15 page)
Authors: Robert Harris
He got out down a side-street on to Kutuzovskiy Prospekt and trudged through the wet snow beside the busy highway trying to find a taxi. A dirty, unmarked Volga swerved across two lanes of traffic and the driver tried to persuade him to get in, but Kelso waved him away and kept on walking until he came to the taxi rank at the front of the hotel. He couldn't be bothered to haggle. He climbed into the back of the first yellow cab in the queue and asked to be driven off, quickly.
Chapter Eight
THERE WAS A big football match in progress at the Dinamo stadium - an international, Russia playing someone-or-other, two-all, extra time. The taxi driver was listening to the commentary on the radio and as they came closer to the stadium, the cheers on the cheap plastic loudspeaker were subsumed into the roar of eighty thousand Muscovite throats less than two hundred yards away. The flurries of snow swelled and lifted like sails in the floodlights above the stands.
They had to go up Leningradskiy Prospekt, make a U-turn and come back down the other side to reach the stadium of the Young Pioneers. The taxi, an old Zhiguli that stank of sweat, turned off right, through a pair of iron gates, and bounced down a rutted track and into the sports ground. A few cars were drawn up in the snow in front of the grandstand, and there was a queue of people, mostly girls, outside an iron door with a peep-hole set into it. A sign above the entrance said 'Robotnik'.
Kelso paid the taxi driver a hundred roubles - a ludicrous amount, the price of not haggling before the journey started
- and watched with some dismay as the red lights bucked across the rough surface, turned and disappeared. An immense noise, like a breaking wave, came from the phosphorescent sky above the trees and rolled across the white sweep of the pitch. 'Three-two,' said a man with an Australian accent. 'It's over.' He pulled out a tiny black earpiece and stuffed it into his pocket. Kelso said to the nearest person, a girl, 'What time does it open?' and she
turned to look at him. She was startlingly beautiful: wide dark eyes and wide cheekbones. She must have been about twenty. Snow flecked her black hair.
'Ten,' she said, and slipped her arm through his, pressing her breast against his elbow. 'Can I have a cigarette?'
He gave one to her and took one himself and their heads brushed as they bent to share the flame. He inhaled her perfume with the smoke. They straightened. 'One minute,' he said, smiling, and moved away, and she smiled back, waving the cigarette at him. He walked along the edge of the pitch, smoking, looking at the girls. Were they all hookers? They didn't seem like hookers. What were they, then? Most of the men were foreigners. The Russians looked rich. The cars were big and German, apart from one Bentley and one Rolls. He could see men in the back of them. In the Bentley, a red tip the size of a burning coal glowed and faded as someone smoked an immense cigar.
At five past ten, the door opened - a yellow light, the silhouettes of the girls, the steamy glow of their perfumed breath - a festive sight, thought Kelso, in the snow. And from the cars now came the serious money. You could tell the seriousness not just by the weight of the coats and the jewellery, but by the way their owners carried themselves, straight to the head of the queue, and by the amount of protection they left hanging around at the door. Clearly, the only guns allowed on the premises belonged to the management, which Kelso found reassuring. He went through a metal detector, then his pockets were checked for explosives by a goon with a wand. The admission fee was three hundred roubles - fifty dollars, the average weekly wage, payable in either currency
and in return for this he got an ultra-violet stamp on his wrist and a voucher for one free drink.
A spiral staircase led down to darkness, smoke and laser beams, a wall of techno-music pitched to make the stomach shake. Some of the girls were dancing listlessly together, the men were standing, drinking, watching. The idea of Papu Rapava showing his scowling face in here was a joke, and Kelso would have turned round there and then, but he felt in need of another drink, and fifty dollars was fifty dollars. He gave his voucher to the barman and took a bottle of beer. Almost as an afterthought, he beckoned the bartender towards him.
'Rapava,' he said. The barman frowned and cupped his ear, and Kelso bent closer. 'Rapava,' he shouted.
The barman nodded slowly, and said in English, 'I know.'
'You know?'
He nodded again. He was a young man, with a wispy blond beard and a gold earring. He began to turn away, to serve another customer so Kelso pulled out his wallet and put a one-hundred thousand rouble note on the bar. That got his attention. 'I want to find Rapava,' he shouted.
The money was carefully folded and tucked into the barman's breast pocket. 'Later,' said the young man. 'Okay? I tell you.
'When?'
But the young man smirked and moved further up the bar.
'Bribing bartenders?' said an American voice at Kelso's elbow. 'That's smart. Never thought of that. Get served first? Impress the ladies? Hello, Dr Kelso. Remember me?'
In the half-light, the handsome face was patched with colour and it took Kelso a couple of seconds to work out who he was. 'Mr O'Brian.' A television reporter. Wonderful. This was all he needed.
They shook hands. The young man's palm was moist and
fleshy. He was wearing his off-duty uniform - pressed blue jeans~ white T-shirt, leather jacket - and Kelso registered broad shoulders, pectorals, thick hair glistening with some aromatic gel.
O'Brian gestured across the dance floor with his bottle. 'The new Russia,' he shouted. 'Whatever you want, you buy, and someone's always selling. Where're you staying?'
'The Ukraina.'
O'Brian made a face. 'Save your bribe for later's my advice. You'll need it. They're strict on the door at the old Ukraina. And those beds. Boy.' O'Brian shook his head and drained his bottle, and Kelso smiled and drank as well.
'Any other advice?' he yelled.
'Plenty, since you ask.' O'Brian beckoned him in close. 'The good ones'll ask for six hundred. Offer two. Settle on three. And we're talking all-night rates, remember, so keep some money back. As an incentive, let's say. And be careful of the real, real babes, 'cause they may be spoken for. If the other fellow's Russian, just walk away. It's safer, and there's plenty more - we're not talking life partners here. Oh, and they don't do triples. As a rule. These are respectable girls.'
'I'm sure.'
O'Brian looked at him. 'You don't get it, do you, professor? This ain't a whorehouse. Anna here -' he curled his arm around the waist of a blonde girl standing next to him and used his beer bottle as a microphone ' - Anna, tell the professor here what you do for a living.'
Anna spoke solemnly into the bottle. 'I lease property to Scandinavian businesses.
O'Brian nuzzled her cheek and licked her ear and released her. 'Galina over there - the skinny one in the blue dress? -she works at the Moscow stock exchange. Who else? Damnit,
they all look alike, after you've been here a time. Nataliya, the one you spoke to outside - oh, yes, I was watchin' you, professor, you sly old dog Anna, darlin', what does Nataliya do?'
'Comstar, R.J.,' said Anna. 'Nataliya works for Comstar, remember?'
'Sure, sure. And what was the name of that cute kid at Moscow U? The psychologist, you know the one -'
'Aiissa.'
'Alissa, right. Alissa - she in tonight?'
'She got shot, R.J.'
'Boy! Did she? Really?'
'Why were you watching me outside?' asked Kelso.
'That's commerce, I guess. You wanna make money, you gotta take risks. Three hundred a night. Let's say three nights a week. Nine hundred dollars. Give three hundred for protection. Still leaves six hundred clear. Twenty thousand dollars a year - that's not hard. What's that - seven times the average annual wage? And no tax? Gotta pay a price for that. Gotta take a risk. Like working on an oil rig. Let me get you a beer, professor. Why shouldn't I watch you? I'm a reporter, goddamnit. Everyone comes here watches everyone else. There's half a billion dollars worth of custom here tonight.
And that's just the Russians’.
'Mafia?'
'No, just business. Same as any place else.'
The dance floor was packed now, the noise louder, the smoke denser. A new kind of lightshow had been switched on - lights that made everything that was white stand out dazzlingly bright. Teeth and eyes and nails and banknotes flashed in the gloom like knives. Kelso felt disorientated and vaguely drunk. But not, he thought, as drunk as O'Brian was
pretending to be. There was something about the reporter that gave him the creeps. How old was he? Thirty? A young
man in a hurry, if ever he'd seen one.
He said to Anna, 'What time does this finish?'
She held up five fingers. 'You want to dance, Mister professor?'
'Later,' said Kelso. 'Maybe.'
'It's the Weimar Republic,' said O'Brian, coming back with two bottles of beer and a can of Diet Coke for Anna. 'Isn't that what you wrote? Look at it. Christ. All we need is Marlene Dietrich in a tuxedo and we might as well be in Berlin. I liked your book, professor, by the way. Did I say that already?'
'You did. Thanks. Cheers.'
'Cheers.' O'Brian raised his bottle and took a swig, then he leaned over and shouted in Kelso's ear. 'Weimar Republic, that's how I see it. Like you see it. Six things the same, okay? One: you have a big country, proud country, lost its empire, really lost a war, but can't figure out how - figures it must've been stabbed in the back, so there's a lot of resentment, right? Two: democracy in a country with no tradition of democracy
- Russia doesn't know democracy from a fuckin' hole in the ground, frankly - people don't like it, sick of all the arguing, they want a strong line, any line. Three: border trouble - lots of your own ethnic nationals suddenly stuck in other countries, saying they're getting picked on. Four: anti-semitism - you can buy SS marchin' songs on the street corners, for Christ's sake. That leaves two.
'All right.' It was disconcerting, hearing your own views so crudely parroted; like an Oxford tutorial -'Economic crash, and that's coming, don't you think?'
'And?'
'Isn't it obvious? Hitler. They haven't found their Hitler yet. But when they do, it's watch out, world, I reckon.' O'Brian put his left forefinger under his nose and raised his right arm in a Nazi salute. Across the bar, a group of Russian businessmen whooped and cheered.
AFTER that, the evening accelerated. Kelso danced with Anna, O'Brian danced with Nataliya, they had more drinks
the American stuck to beer while Kelso tried the cocktails:
B-52s, Kamikazes - they swapped girls, danced some more and then it was after midnight. Nataliya was in a tight red dress that was slippery, like plastic, and her flesh beneath it, despite the heat, felt cold and hard. She had taken something. Her eyes were wide and poorly focused. She asked if he wanted to go somewhere - she liked him a lot, she whispered, she'd do it for five hundred - but he just gave her fifty, for the pleasure of the dance, and went back to the bar.
Depression stalked him. He wasn't sure why. He could smell desperation, that was it: desperation stank as strongly as the perfume and the sweat. Desperation to buy. Desperation to sell. Desperation to pretend you were having a good time. A young man in a suit, so drunk he could barely walk, was being led away by his tie by a hard-faced girl with long blonde hair. Kelso decided he would have a smoke at the bar and then go - no, on second thoughts, forget the cigarette - he stuffed it back into the pack - he would go.
'Rapava,' yelled the barman.
'What?' Kelso cupped his hand to his ear.
'That's her. She's here.'
'What?'
Kelso looked to where the barman was pointing and saw
her at once. Her. He let his gaze travel past her and then come
back. She was older than the others: close-cropped black hair, black eyeshadow like bruises, black lipstick, a dead white face
at once broad and thin, with cheekbones as sharp as a skull. Asiatic-looking. Mingrelian.
Papu Rapava: released from the camps in 1969. Married, say 1970, 1971. A son just old enough to fight in Afghanistan. And a daughter?
My daughter's a whore...
'Night night, professor -' O'Brian swept past with a wink over his shoulder, Nataliya on one arm, Anna on the other. The rest of his words were lost in the noise. Nataliya turned, giggled~ blew Kelso a kiss. Kelso smiled vaguely, waved, put down his drink and moved along the bar.
A black cocktail dress - fabric shiny, knee-length, sleeveless - bare white throat and arms (not even a wrist watch), black stockings, black shoes. And something not quite right about her, some disturbance in the atmosphere around her, so that even at the crowded bar she was in a space, alone. No one was talking to her. She was drinking a bottle of mineral water without a glass and looking at nothing, her dark eyes were blank, and when he said hello she turned to face him, without interest. He asked if she wanted a drink.
No.
A dance, then?
She looked him over, thought about it, shrugged.