Archangel (18 page)

She had slowed the car now almost to walking pace. She stopped beside a broken-down wooden bus shelter.

'That's his place,' she said. 'Block number nine.'

It was about a hundred yards away, across a snowy strip of waste ground.

'You'll wait here?'

'Entrance D. Fifth floor. Apartment twelve.'

'But you'll wait?'

'If you want.'

'We did agree.

Kelso looked at his watch. It was twenty-five past one. Then he looked again at the apartment block, trying to think what he would say to Rapava, wondering what reception he would get.

'So this is where you grew up?'

She didn't answer. She switched off the engine and turned up her collar, put her hands in her pockets, stared ahead. He sighed and got out of the car, walked around it. The powdery snow creaked as it compacted under his feet. He shivered and began to pick his way over the rough ground.

He was about halfway across when he heard the grating of an ignition and an engine firing up. He swung round to see the Lada moving off slowly, lights doused. She hadn't even bothered to wait until he was out of sight. Bitch. He began running towards her. He shouted - not loudly, and not in anger really: it was more a groan at his own stupidity. The little car was shuddering, stalling, and for a moment he thought he might catch up with it, but then it coughed,
'lurched, the lights came on and it accelerated away from him. He stood and watched it helplessly as it vanished into the labyrinth of concrete.

He was alone. Not a soul in view.
He turned and began quickly retracing his steps,
crunching across the snow towards the building. He felt vulnerable in the open and panic sharpened his senses. Somewhere to his left, he could hear the bark of a dog and a baby's cry, and ahead of him there was music - it was faint, there was scarcely more than a thread of it, but it was coming from Block Nine and it was getting louder with each step. His eyes were making out details now - the ribbed concrete, the shadowed doorways, the stacked balconies crammed with junk: bed frames, bike frames, old tyres, dead plants; three windows were lit, the rest in darkness.

At Entrance D something crunched beneath his foot and he bent to pick it up, then dropped it, fast. A hypodermic syringe.

The stairwell was a sump of piss and vomit, stained newsprint, limp condoms, dead leaves. He covered his nose with the back of his hand. There was an elevator, and it might have been working - a Moscow miracle that would have been - but he didn't propose to try. He climbed the stairs, and by the time he reached the third floor he could hear the music much more clearly. Someone was playing the old Soviet national anthem - the old old anthem, that was -the one they used to sing before Khrushchev had it censored. 'Party of Lenin!' shouted the chorus. 'Party of Stalin!' Kelso took the last two flights more quickly, with a sudden rush of hope. She hadn't entirely tricked him, then, for who else but Papu Rapava would be playing the greatest hits of Josef Stalin at half-past one in the morning?
He came out on to the fifth floor and followed the noise along the dingy passage to number twelve. The block was largely derelict. Most of the doors were boarded over, but not Rapava's. Oh no, boy. Rapava's door wasn't boarded over. Rapava's door was open and outside it, for reasons Kelso couldn't begin to fathom, there were feathers on the floor.
The music stopped.

COME on then, boy. What're you waiting for? What's up? Don't tell me you haven't the balls -For several seconds, Kelso stood on the threshold,
listening.
Suddenly there was a drumroll.

The anthem began again.

Cautiously, he pushed at the door. It was partially open, but it wouldn't go back any further. There was something behind it, blocking it.
He squeezed around the edge. The lights were on.

Dear God -Thought you'd be impressed, boy! Thought you'd be surprised'

I/you're going to get fucked over, you might as well get fucked over by professionals, eh?
At Kelso's feet were more feathers, leaking from a cushion that had been disemboweled. These feathers could not be said to be on the floor, however, because there was no floor. The boards were all prised up and stacked around the edges of the room. Strewn across the rib-cage of the joists were the remains of Rapava's few possessions - books with splayed and shattered spines, punched-through pictures, the skeletons of chairs, an exploded television, a table with its legs in the air, bits of crockery, shards of glass, shredded fabric. The interior walls had been skinned to expose the cavities. The exterior walls were
bruised and dented, apparently by a sledgehammer. Much of the ceiling was hanging down. Plaster dust frosted the room.

Balanced in the centre of this chaos, amid a black and jagged pool of broken records, was a bulky 1970s Telefunken record player, set to automatic replay.

Party of Lenin!

Party of Stalin!

Kelso stepped carefully from rib to rib and lifted the needle.

In the silence: the dripping of a broken tap. The extent of the destruction was so overwhelming, so utterly beyond anything he had ever seen, that once he was satisfied the apartment was empty, it barely occurred to him that he ought to be scared. Not at first. He peered around him, baffled.

So where am I, boy? That's the question. What have they done with poor old Papu? Come on then, come and get me. Chop, chop, comrade - we haven't got all night!

Kelso, wobbling, tightrope-walked along a joist, into the kitchen alcove: slashed packets, upended ice-box, wrenched-down cupboards...

He edged backwards and round the corner into a little passage, scrabbling at the broken wall to stop himself from slipping.

Two doors here, boy - right and left. You take your pick. He swayed, indecisive, then reached out a hand. The first - a bedroom.

Now you're getting warm, boy. By the way: did you want to fuck my daughter?

Slashed mattress. Slashed pillow. Overturned bed. Empty drawers. Small and tatty nylon carpet, rolled and stacked. Clumps of plaster everywhere. Floor up. Ceiling down.
Kelso back in the passage, breathing hard, balanced on a rib, summoning the nerve.

The second door -Very warm now, boy!

- the second door: the bathroom. Cistern lid off, propped against the toilet. Sink dragged away from the wall. A white plastic tub brimming with pinkish water that made Kelso think of diluted Georgian wine. He dipped his finger in and pulled it out sharply, shocked at the coldness, his fingertip sheathed in red.

Floating on the surface: a ring of hair still attached to a small flap of skin.

Let's go, boy.

Rib to rib, plaster dust in his hair, on his hands, all over his coat, his shoes -He stumbled in his panic, lost his footing on the beam, and his left shoe punched a hole into the ceiling of the flat beneath. A piece of debris detached itself. He heard it fall into the darkness of the empty apartment. It took him half a minute and both hands to pull his foot free, and then he was out of there.

He squashed himself around the door and into the corridor and moved quickly back along the passage, past the abandoned apartments, towards the stairs. He heard a thump.

He stopped and listened.

Thump.

Oh,
you're hot, now, boy, you're very, very hot...

It was the elevator. It was someone inside the elevator.

Thump.

THE Lubyanka, the still of night, the long black car with the engine running, two agents in overcoats charging down the steps - was there no escaping the past? thought Suvorin, bitterly, as they accelerated away. He was surprised there were

(no tourists on hand to record this traditional scene of life in Mother Russia. Why not put it in the album, darling, between St Basil's Cathedral and a troika in the snow?

They thumped into a dip at the bottom of the hill near the Metropol Hotel, and his head connected with the cushioned roof. In the front seat, next to the driver, Netto was unfolding a large-scale map of the Moscow streets of a detail that no tourist would ever see because it was still officially secret. Suvorin snapped on the interior light and leaned forward for a better look. The apartment blocks of the Victory of the Revolution complex were scattered like postage stamps across the Tagansko-Krasno metro line, in the north-west outer suburb.

'How long do you reckon? Twenty minutes?'

'Fifteen,' said the driver, showing off. He gunned the engine, shot the lights, swung right, and Suvorin was pitched the other way, against the door. He had a brief impression of the Lenin Library flashing past.

'Relax,' he said, 'for pity's sake. We don't want to get a ticket.'

They sped on. Once they were clear of the centre, Netto unlocked the glove compartment and handed Suvorin a welloiled Makarov and a clip of ammunition. Suvorin took it reluctantly, felt the unfamiliar weight in his hand, checked the mechanism and sighted briefly at a passing birch tree. He hadn't joined the service because he enjoyed this kind of thing. He had joined because his father was a diplomat who had taught him early on that the best thing to do if you lived
in the Soviet Union was to get a posting abroad. Guns? Suvorin hadn't set foot on the Yasenevo range inside a year. He gave the weapon back to Netto who shrugged and stuffed it in his own pocket.

A blue dot grew noisily in the road behind them, swelled and flashed past like an angry fly - a patrol car of the Moscow militia. It dwindled into the distance.

'Asshole,' said their driver.

A few minutes later they turned off the main road and headed into the wilderness of concrete and wasteland that was the Victory of the Revolution. Fifteen years in Kolyma, thought Suvorin, then welcome home to this. And the joke was, it must have seemed like paradise.

Netto said, According to the map, Block Nine should be just round this corner.

'Slow down,' ordered Suvorin, suddenly, putting his hand on the driver's shoulder. 'Can you hear something?'

He wound down his window. Another siren, off to the left. It faded for a moment, muffled by a building, then became very loud, and colours burst ahead - a blue and yellow light-show, rather pretty, moving fast. For a couple of seconds the patrol car seemed to be coming straight at them but then it swung off the road and bounced over the rough ground, and a moment later they were level with it and could see the entrance to the block themselves, lit up like a fairyland -three cars, an ambulance, people moving, shadowed tracks in the snow

They cruised round the building a couple of times, a trio of ghouls, unnoticed, as the stretcher men brought out the body and then Kelso was driven away.

IMONOV TELLS THE following story.

At meetings of the Council of People's Commissars, it was Comrade Stalin's habit to rise from his place at the head of the long table and to pace behind the backs of the participants. Nobody dared to look round at him: they could establish where he was only by the soft squeak of his leather boots or by the passing fragrance of his Dunhill pipe. On this particular occasion, the conversation concerned the large number of recent plane crashes. The head of the air force, Rychagov, was drunk. 'There will continue to be a high level of accidents, ' he blurted out, 'as long as we're compelled by you to go up in flying coffins.' There was a long silence, at the end of which Stalin murmured. 'You really shouldn't have sa
id that. 'A fe
w days later, Rychagov was shot.

One could quote any number of such stories. His favourite technique, according to Khrushchev, was suddenly to look at a man and say: 'Why is your face so shifty today? Why can't you look Comrade Stalin directly in the eyes?' That was the moment when one's l~fr hung in the balance.

Stalin's use of terror seems to have been partly instinctive (he was naturally physically violent: he sometimes struck his subordinates in the face) and partly calculated 'The people. 'he told Maria Svanidze, 'need a tsar. 'And the tsar upon whom he modelled himself was Ivan the Terrible. We have written confirmation of that here in this archive, in
Stalin’s
personal library, which contains a copy of
A. M Tolstoy's 1942 play. Ivan Grozny (F558 03 D350). Not only has Stalin corrected the speeches of Ivan to make them sound more laconic -
to sound more like himself in fact - but he has also scrawled repeated
ly over the title page 'Teacher-

Indeed, he had only one criticism of his role model: that he was too weak. As he told the director, Sergei Eisenstein: 'Ivan the Terrible would execute someone and then spend a long time repenting and praying God got in his way in this matter. He ought to have been still more decisive!' (Moskovskie novosti, no. 32, 1988).

Stalin was nothing lf
not decisive.

Professor L A. Kuganov estimates that some sixty-six million people were killed in the USSR between 1917 and 1953 - shot, tortured, starved mostly, frozen or worked to death. Others say the true figure is a mere forty-five million. Who knows?

Neither estimate, by the way, includes the thirty million now known to have been killed in the Second World War.

To put this loss in context: the Russian Federation today has a population of roughly 150 million. Assuming the ravages inflicted by communism had never occurred, and assuming normal demographic trends, the actual population should be about 300 million.