Archangel

Archangel by Robert Harris.

Prologue

Rapava's story

'Death solves all problems - no man, no problem.'

J.V Stalin, 1918

LATE ONE NIGHT a long time ago - before you were even born, boy - a bodyguard stood on the veranda at the back of a big house in Moscow, smoking a cigarette. It was a cold night, without stars or moon, and he smoked for the warmth of it as much as anything else, his big, farm lad's hands cupped around the burning cardboard tube of a Georgian papirosa.

This bodyguard's name was Papu Rapava. He was twenty-five years old, a Mingrelian, from the north-eastern shoreland of the Black Sea. And as for the house - well, fortress would have been a better word. It was a tsarist mansion, half a block long, in the diplomatic sector, not far from the river. Somewhere in the frosty darkness at the bottom of the walled garden was a cherry orchard, and beyond it a wide street - Sadovaya-Kudrinskaya - and beyond that the grounds of the Moscow Zoo. There was no traffic. Very faintly in the distance, when it was quiet, like now, and the wind was in the right direction, you could hear the howling of caged wolves.

By this time the girl had stopped screaming, which was a mercy, for it had got on Rapava's nerves. She couldn't have been more than fifteen, not much older than his own kid sister, and when he had picked her up and delivered her, she had looked at him - looked at him - well, to be honest, boy, he preferred not to talk of it, even now, nearly fifty years later.

Anyway, the girl had finally shut up and he was enjoying his cigarette when the telephone rang. This must have been about two a.m. He would never forget it. Two o'clock in the morning on the second of March, 1953. In the cold stillness of the night the bell sounded as loud as a fire alarm. Now, normally - you have to understand this - there were four guards on duty during an evening shift: two in the house and two in the street. But when there was a girl, the Boss liked his security kept to a minimum, at least indoors, so on this particular night Rapava was alone. He threw down his cigarette, sprinted through the guard room, past the kitchen and into the hall. The phone was old-fashioned, pre-war, fastened to the wall - Holy Mother, it was making a racket! - and he grabbed the receiver mid-ring. A man said: 'Lavrenty?'

'He's not here, comrade.'

'Get him. It's Malenkov.' The normally ponderous voice was hoarse with panic.

'Comrade -'Get him. Tell him something's happened. Something's happened at Blizhny.'

'KNow what I mean by Blizhny, boy?' asked the old man. There were two of them in the tiny bedroom, on the twenty-third floor of the Ukraina Hotel, slumped in a pair of cheap foam armchairs, so close their knees were almost touching. A bedside lamp threw their dim shadows on to the curtained window - one profile bony, picked bare by time, the other still fleshy, middle-aged.

'Yes,' said the middle-aged man, whose name was Fluke Kelso. 'Yes, I know what Blizhny means.' Of course I bloody know, he felt like saying, I did teach Soviet history at Oxford for ten bloody years- Blizhny is the Russian word for 'near'. 'Near', in the Kremlin of the forties and fifties, was shorthand for the 'Near Dacha and the Near Dacha was at Kuntsevo, just outside Moscow - double-perimeter fence, three hundred NKVD special troops and eight camouflaged 30-millimetre antiaircraft guns, all hidden in the birch forest to protect the dacha's solitary elderly resident. Kelso waited for the old man to carry on, but Rapava was suddenly preoccupied, trying to light a cigarette from a book of matches. He couldn't manage it. His fingers couldn't grasp the flimsy sticks. He had no fingernails.

'So what did you do?' Kelso leaned across and lit Rapava's cigarette for him, hoping to mask the question with the gesture, trying to keep the excitement out of his voice. On the little table between them, hidden among the empty bottles and the dirty glasses and the ashtray and the crumpled packs of Marlboro, was a miniature cassette recorder which Kelso had put there when he thought Rapava wasn't looking. The old man sucked hard on the cigarette and then contemplated the tip with gratitude. He tossed the matches on to the floor.

'You know about Blizhny?' he said at last, settling back in his chair. 'Then you know what I did.'

Thirty seconds after answering the telephone, young Papu Rapava was knocking on Beria's door.

POLITBURO member Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria, draped in a loose red silk kimono through which his belly sloped like a great white sack of sand, called Rapava a cunt in Mingrelian, and gave him a shove in the chest that sent him stumbling backwards into the corridor. Then he pushed past him and padded off towards the stairs, his sweaty white feet leaving prints of moisture on the parquet flooring. Through the open door, Rapava could see into the bedroom - the big wooden bed, a heavy brass lampstand in the form of a dragon, the crimson sheets, the white limbs of the girl, sprawled like a sacrifice. Her eyes were wide open, dark and vacant. She made no effort to cover herself On the bedside table was a jug of water and an array of medicine bottles. A scattering of large white pills had fallen across the pale yellow Aubusson carpet.

He couldn't remember anything else, or exactly how long he had stood there before Beria came panting back up the stairs, all fired up by his conversation with Malenkov, throwing the girl's clothes at her, shouting at her to get out, get out, ordering Rapava to bring round the car. Rapava asked who else he wanted. (He had in mind Nadaraya, the head of the bodyguard, who normally went everywhere with the Boss. And maybe Sarsikov, who at that moment was deep in a vodka stupor, snoring in the guard house at the side of the building.) At this, Beria, who had his back to Rapava and was beginning to shrug off his dressing gown, stopped for a moment, and glanced over his fleshy shoulder - thinking, thinking - you could see his little eyes flickering behind their rimless pince-nez.

'No,' he said at last. 'Just you.

The car was American - a Packard, twelve cylinders, dark green bodywork, running-board a half-metre wide - a beauty. Rapava backed it out of the garage and reversed it down Vspolnyi Street until he was directly outside the front entrance. He left the engine running to try to get the heater going, jumped out and took up the standard NKVD position beside the rear passenger door: left hand on hip, coat and jacket pulled slightly open, shoulder holster exposed, right hand on the butt of his Makarov pistol, checking the street up and down. Beso Dumbadze, another of the Mingrelian boys, came running round the corner to see what was going on, just as the Boss stepped out of the house and on to the pavement.

'What was he wearing?'

'What the hell do I know what he was wearing, boy?' said the old man, irritably.

'What the hell does it matter what he was wearing?'

Actually, now he stopped to think of it, the Boss was wearing grey - grey coat, grey suit, grey pullover, no tie - and what with this, and his pince-nez, and his sloping shoulders, and his big, domed head, he looked like nothing so much as an owl - an old, malevolent grey owl. Rapava opened the door and Beria got in the back, and Dumbadze - who was about ten yards away - made a little what the fuck do I do? Gesture with his hands, to which Rapava gave a shrug - what the fuck did he know? He ran round the car to the driver's seat, slid behind the wheel, jammed the gear stick in to first, and they were off.

He had driven the fifteen miles out to Kuntsevo a dozen times before, always at night and always as part of the General Secretary's convoy - and that was some performance, boy, I can tell you. Fifteen cars with curtained rear windows, half the Politburo - Beria, Malenkov, Molotov, Bulganin, Khrushchev - plus bodyguards: out of the Kremlin, through the Borovitskiy Gate, down the ramp, accelerating to 75 miles an hour, the militia holding back the traffic at every intersection, two thousand plainclothes NKVD men lining the government route. And you never knew which car the GenSec was in until, at the last minute, just as they turned off the highway into the woods, one of the big ZiLs would pull out and accelerate to the front of the cortege, and the rest of them would all slow down to let the Rightful Heir of Lenin go in first.

But there was nothing like that tonight. The wide road was empty and once they were across the river Rapava was able to let the big Yankee car have its head, the speedo flickering up to nearly 90, while Beria sat in the back as still as a rock. After twelve minutes, the city was behind them. After fifteen, at the end of the highway from Poklonnaya Gora, they slowed for the hidden turning. The tall white strips of the silver birches strobed in the headlights.

How quiet the forest was, how dark, how limitless - like a gently rustling sea. Rapava felt that it might stretch all the way to the Ukraine. A half-mile of track took them to the first perimeter fence where a red-and-white pole lay waist-high across the road. Two NKVD specials in capes and caps carrying sub-machine guns strolled out of the sentry box, saw Beria's stone face, saluted smartly and raised the barrier. The road curved for another hundred yards, past the hunched shadows of big shrubs, and then the Packard's powerful lights picked out the second fence, a fifteen foot high wall with gun-slits. Iron gates were swung open from the inside by unseen hands. And then the dacha.

Rapava had been expecting something unusual - he wasn't sure what - cars, men, uniforms, the bustle of a crisis. But the two-storey house was in darkness, save for one yellow lantern above the entrance. In this light, a figure waited - the unmistakable plump and dark-haired form of the Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers, Georgiy Maksimilanovich Malenkov. And here was an odd thing, boy: he had taken off his shiny new shoes and had them wedged under one fat arm. Beria was out of the car almost before it had stopped and

in a flash he had Malenkov by the elbow and was listening to him, nodding, talking quietly, looking this way and that. Rapava heard him say, 'Moved him? Have you moved him?' And then Beria snapped his fingers in Rapava's direction, and Rapava realised he was being summoned to follow them inside.

Always before on his visits to the dacha he had either waited in the car for the Boss to emerge, or had gone to the guardhouse for a drink and a smoke with the other drivers. You have to understand that inside was forbidden territory. Nobody except the GenSec's staff and invited guests ever went inside. Now, moving into the hall, Rapava suddenly felt almost suffocated by panic - physically choked, as if someone had their hands around his windpipe.

Malenkov was walking ahead in his stockinged feet and even the Boss was on tiptoe, so Rapava played follow-my-leader and tried not to make a sound. Nobody else was about. The house seemed empty. The three of them crept down a passage, past an upright piano, and into a dining room with chairs for eight. The light was on. The curtains were drawn. There were some papers on the table, and a rack of Dunhill pipes. A wind-up gramophone was in one corner.

Above the fireplace was a blown up black and white photograph in a cheap wooden frame: the GenSec as a younger man, sitting in a garden somewhere on a sunny day with Comrade Lenin. At the far end of the room was a door. Malenkov turned to them and put a pudgy finger to his lips, then opened it very slowly. The old man closed his eyes and held out his empty glass for a refill. He sighed.

'You know, boy, people criticise Stalin, but you've got to say this for him: he lived like a worker. Not like Beria - he thought he was a prince. But Comrade Stalin's room was a plain man's room. You've got to say that for Stalin. He was always one of us.'

Caught in the draught of the opening door, a red candle flickered in the corner beneath a small icon of Lenin. The only other source of light was a shaded reading lamp on a desk. In the centre of the room was a large sofa that had been made up as a bed. A coarse brown army blanket trailed off it on to a tiger-skin rug. On the rug, on his back, breathing heavily and apparently asleep was a short, fat, elderly, ruddy-faced man in a dirty white vest and long woollen underpants. He had soiled himself. The room was hot and stank of human waste.

Malenkov put his podgy hand to his mouth and stayed close to the door. Beria went quickly over to the rug, unbuttoned his overcoat and fell to his knees. He put his hands on Stalin's forehead and pulled back both eyelids with his thumbs, revealing sightless, bloodshot yolks.

'Josef Vissarionovich,' he said softly, 'it's Lavrenty. Dear comrade, if you can hear me, move your eyes. Comrade?' Then to Malenkov, but all the while looking at Stalin: And you say he could have been like this for twenty hours?'

Behind his palm, Malenkov made a gagging sound. There were tears on his smooth cheeks.

'Dear comrade, move your eyes . . . Your eyes, dear comrade . . . Comrade? Ah, fuck it.' Beria pulled his hands away and stood up, wiping his fingers on his coat. 'It's a stroke right enough. He's meat. Where are Starostin and the boys? And Butusova?'

Malenkov was blubbing by now and Beria had to stand between him and the body - literally had to block his view to get his attention. He grasped Malenkov by the shoulders and began talking very quietly and very fast to him, as one would to a child - told him to forget Stalin, that Stalin was history, Stalin was meat, that the important thing was what they did next, that they had to stand together. Now: where were the boys? Were they still in the guard room? Malenkov nodded and wiped his nose on his sleeve.

'All right,' said Beria. 'This is what you do.'

Malenkov was to put on his shoes and go tell the guards that Comrade Stalin was sleeping, that he was drunk and why the fuck had he and Comrade Beria been dragged out of their beds for nothing? He was to tell them not to touch the telephone, and not to call any doctors. ('You listening, Georgiy?') Especially no doctors, because the GenSec thought all doctors were Jewish poisoners - remember? Now, - what was the time? Three? All right. At eight - no, better, seven-thirty - Malenkov was to start calling the leadership. He was to say that he and Beria wanted a full Politburo meeting here, at Blizhny, at nine. He was to say they were worried about Josef Vissarionovich's health and that a collective decision on treatment was necessary. Beria rubbed his hands.

'That should start them shitting themselves. Now let's get him up on the couch. You,' he said to Rapava. 'Get hold of his legs.'

The old man had been sinking deeper into his chair as he talked, his feet sprawled, his eyes shut, his voice a monotone. Suddenly he let out a long breath and hauled himself upright again. He looked around the hotel bedroom in a panic. 'Need to have a piss, boy. Gotta piss.'

'In there.'

He rose with a drunk's careful dignity. Through the flimsy wall, Kelso heard the sound of his urine drilling into the back of the toilet bowl. Fair enough, he thought. There was a lot to unload. He had been lubricating Rapava's memory for the best part of four hours by now: Baltika beer first, in the Ukraina's lobby bar, then Zubrovka in a cafe across the street, and finally single-malt Scotch in the cramped intimacy of his room. It was like playing a fish: playing a fish through a river of booze. He noticed the book of matches lying on the floor where Rapava had thrown it and he reached down and picked it up. On the back flap was the name of a bar or a nightclub - ROBOTNIK - and an address near the Dinamo Stadium. The lavatory flushed and Kelso quickly slipped the matches into his pocket, then Rapava reappeared, leaning against the door jamb, buttoning his flies.

'What's the time, boy?'

'Nearly one.

'Gotta go. They'll think I'm your fucking boyfriend.' Rapava made an obscene gesture with his hand. Kelso pretended to laugh. Sure, he'd call down for a taxi in a minute. Sure. But let's just finish this bottle first - he reached over for the Scotch and surreptitiously checked that the tape was still running - finish the bottle, comrade, and finish the story The old man scowled and looked at the floor. The story was finished already. There was nothing more to say. They got Stalin up on to the couch - so, what of it? Malenkov went off to talk to the guards. Rapava drove Beria home. Everyone knows the rest. A day or two later, Stalin was dead. And not long after that, Beria was dead. Malenkov - well, Malenkov hung around for years after his disgrace (Rapava saw him once, in the seventies, shuffling through the Arbat) but now even Malenkov was dead. Nadaraya, Sarsikov, Dumbadze, Starostin, Butusova - dead, dead. The Party was dead. The whole fucking country was dead, come to that.

'But there's more to your story, surely,' said Kelso. 'Please sit down Papu Gerasimovich, and let us finish the bottle.'

He spoke politely and hesitantly, for he sensed that the anaesthetic of alcohol and vanity might be wearing off, and that Rapava, on coming round, might suddenly realise he was talking far too much. He felt another spasm of irritation. Christ, they were always so bloody difficult, these old NKVD men - difficult and maybe even still dangerous. Kelso was a historian, in his middle forties, thirty years younger than Papu Rapava. But he was out of condition - to be truthful, he had never really been in condition - and he wouldn't have fancied his chances if the old man turned rough. Rapava, after all, was a survivor of the Arctic Circle camps. He wouldn't have forgotten how to hurt someone - hurt someone very quickly, guessed Kelso, and probably very badly. He filled Rapava's glass, topped up his own, and forced himself to keep on talking.

'I mean, here you are, twenty-five years old, in the General Secretary's bedroom. You couldn't get any closer to the centre than that - that was the inner sanctum, that was sacred So what was Beria up to, taking you in there?'

'You deaf, boy? I said. He needed me to move the body.'

'But why you? Why not one of Stalin's regular guards? It was they who'd found him, after all, and alerted Malenkov in the first place. Or why didn't Beria take one of his more senior boys out to Blizhny? Why did he specifically take you?' Rapava was swaying, staring now at the glass of scotch, and afterwards Kelso decided that the whole night really turned upon this one thing: that Rapava needed another drink, and he needed it at that precise instant, and he needed these two things in combination more than he needed to leave. He came back and sat down heavily, drained the glass in one, then held it out to be filled again.

'Papu Rapava,' continued Kelso, pouring another three fingers of scotch. 'Nephew of Avksenty Rapava, Beria's oldest crony in the Georgian NKVD. Younger than the others on the staff A new boy in the city. Maybe a little more naive than the rest? Am I right? Precisely the sort of eager young fellow the Boss might have looked at and thought: yes, I could use him, I could use Rapava's boy, he would keep a secret.'

The silence lengthened and deepened until it was almost tangible, as if someone had come into the room and joined them. Rapava's head began to rock from side to side, then he leaned forward and clasped the back of his scrawny neck with his hands, staring at the worn carpet. His grey hair was cropped close to his skull. An old, puckered scar ran from his crown almost to his temple. It looked as if it had been stitched up by a blind man using string. And those fingers: blackened yellow tips and not a nail on one of them.

'Turn off your machine, boy,' he said, quietly. He nodded towards the table. 'Turn it off. Now take out the tape - that's it - and leave it where I can see it.

Comrade Stalin was only a short man - five foot four - but he was heavy. Holy Mother, he was heavy! It was as if he wasn't made of fat and bone, but of some denser stuff. They dragged him across the wooden floor, his head lolling and banging on the polished blocks, and then they had to lever him up, legs first. Rapava noticed - couldn't help noticing, as they were almost in his face - that the second and third toes of the GenSec's left foot were webbed - the Devil's mark -and when the others weren't looking, he crossed himself.

'Now, young comrade,' said Beria, when Malenkov had gone 'do you like standing on the ground, or would you prefer to be under it?'

At first, Rapava couldn't believe he had heard properly. That was when he knew his life would never be the same again, and that he'd be lucky to survive this night. He whispered~ 'I like standing on it, Boss.'

'Good lad.' Beria made a pincer of his thumb and forefinger. 'We need to find a key. About so big. Looks like the sort of key you might use to wind a clock. He keeps it on a brass ring with a piece of string attached. Check his clothes.'

The familiar grey tunic was hanging off the back of a chair. Grey pants were neatly folded over it. Beside them was a pair of high black cavalry boots, their heels built up an inch or so. Rapava's limbs moved jerkily. What kind of dream was this? The Father and Teacher of the Soviet People, the Inspirer and Organiser of the Victory of Communism, the Leader of All Progressive Humanity, with half his iron brain destroyed, lying filthy on the sofa, while the two of them went through his room like a pair of thieves? Nevertheless, he did as he was ordered and started on the tunic while Beria attacked the desk with an old Chekist's skill - pulling out drawers, upending them, scavenging through their contents, sweeping back the detritus and replacing them on their runners. There was nothing in the tunic and nothing in the trousers, either, apart from a soiled handkerchief, brittle with dried phlegm. By now, Rapava's eyes had grown used to the gloom, and he was better able to see his surroundings. On one wall was a large Chinese print of a tiger. On another -and this was the strangest thing of all - Stalin had stuck up photographs of children. Toddlers, mostly. Not proper prints, but pictures roughly torn out of magazines and newspapers. There must have been a couple of dozen of them.

Anything?'

'No, Boss.'

'Try the couch.'

They had put Stalin on his back, with his hands folded on his paunch, and you'd have thought the old fellow was merely asleep. His breathing was heavy. He was almost snoring. Close up, he didn't look much like his pictures. His face was mottled red and fleshy, pitted with shallow cratered scars. His moustache and eyebrows were whitish grey. You could see his scalp through his thin hair. Rapava leaned over him - ah! the smell: it was as if he were already rotting - and slid his hand down into the gap between the cushions and the sofa's back. He worked his fingers all the way down, leaning left towards the GenSec's feet then moving right again, up towards the head until, at last, the tip of his forefinger touched something hard and he had to stretch to retrieve it, his arm pressing gently against Stalin's chest. And the an awful thing: the most horrible, terrible thing. As he withdrew the key and called in a whisper to the Boss, the GenSec gave a grunt and his eyes jerked open - an animal's yellow eyes, full of rage and fear. Even Beria faltered when he saw them. No other part of the body moved, but a kind of straining growl came from the throat. Hesitantly, Beria came closer and peered down at him, then passed his hand in front of Stalin's eyes. That seemed to give him an idea. He took the key from Rapava and let it dangle at the end of its cord a few inches above Stalin's face. The yellow eyes locked on to it at once, and followed it, never left it, through all the points of the compass. Beria, smiling now, let it circle slowly for at least half a minute, then abruptly snatched it away and caught it in his palm. He closed his fingers around it and offered his clenched fist to Stalin. Such a sound, boy! More animal than human! It pursued Rapava out of that room and along the passage and down all the years, from that night to this.

The bottle of Scotch was drained and Kelso was on his knees now before the mini-bar like a priest before his altar. He wondered how his hosts at the historical symposium would feel when they got the bar bill, but that was less important right now than the task of keeping the old man fuelled and talking. He pulled out handfuls of miniatures - vodka, more scotch, gin, brandy, something German made of cherries -and cradled them across the room to the table. As he sat down and released them a couple of bottles rolled on to the floor but Rapava paid them no heed. He wasn't an old man in the Ukraina any more; he was back in fifty-three - a frightened twenty-five-year-old at the wheel of a dark green Packard, the highway to Moscow shining white in the headlights before him, Lavrenty Beria rocklike in the rear.

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.

'And Stalin died,' he said, trying to avoid taking a sip. His words slurred into one another. His jaw was numb.

'And Stalin died.' Rapava shook his head in sorrow He suddenly leaned forward and clinked glasses. 'To Comrade Stalin!'

'To Comrade Stalin!'

They drank.

AND Stalin died. And everyone went mad with grief. Everyone, that is, except Comrade Beria, who delivered his eulogy to the thousands of hysterical mourners in Red Square like he was reading a railway announcement, and had a good laugh about it afterwards with the boys. Word of this got around. Now Beria was a clever man, much cleverer even than you are, boy - he'd have eaten you for breakfast. But clever people all make one mistake. They all think everyone else is stupid. And everyone isn't stupid. They just take a bit more time, that's all. The Boss thought he was going to be in power for twenty years. He lasted three months. It was late one morning in June and Rapava was on duty with the usual team - Nadaraya, Sarsikov, Dumbadze -when word came through that there was a special meeting of the Presidium in Malenkov's office in the Kremlin. And because it was at Malenkov's place, the Boss thought nothing of it. Who was fat Malenkov? Fat Malenkov was nothing. He was just a dumb brown bear. The Boss had Malenkov on the end of a rope.

So when he got in to the car to go to the meeting, he wasn't even wearing a tie, just an open-necked shirt and a worn-out old suit. Why should he wear a tie? It was a hot day and Stalin was dead and Moscow was full of girls and he was going to be in power for twenty years. The cherry orchard at the bottom of the garden had not long finished flowering. They arrived at Malenkov's building and the Boss went upstairs to see him, while the rest of them sat around in the ante-room by the entrance. And one by one the big guys arrived, all the comrades Beria used to laugh about behind their backs - old 'Stone Arse' Molotov and that fat peasant Khrushchev and the ninny Voroshilov, and finally Marshal Zhukov, the puffed-up peacock, with his boards of tin and ribbon. They all went upstairs and Nadaraya rubbed his hands and said to Rapava: 'Now then, Papu Gerasimovich, why don't you go to the canteen and get us some coffee?'

The day passed and from time to time Nadaraya would wander upstairs to see what was happening, and always he came back with the same message: meeting still in progress. And again: so what? It wasn't unusual for the Presidium to sit for hours. But by eight o'clock, the chief of the bodyguard was starting to look worried and, at ten, with the summer darkness gathering, he told them all to follow him upstairs.

They crashed straight past Malenkov's protesting secretaries and into the big room. It was empty. Sarsikov tried the phones and they were dead. One of the chairs had been tipped back and on the floor around it were some folded scraps of paper, on each of which, in red ink, in Beria's writing, was the single word 'Alarm!'

THEY could have made a fight of it, perhaps, but what would have been the point? The whole thing was an ambush, a Red Army operation. Zhukov had even brought up tanks -stationed twenty T34s at the back of the Boss's house (Rapava heard this later). There were armoured cars inside the Kremlin. It was hopeless. They wouldn't have lasted five minutes. The boys were split up there and then. Rapava was taken to a military prison in the northern suburbs where they proceeded to beat ten kinds of shit out of him, accused him of procuring little girls, showed him witness statements and photographs of the victims and finally a list of thirty names that Sarsikov (great big swaggering Sarsikov - some tough guy he turned out to be) had written down for them on the second day. Rapava said nothing. The whole thing made him sick. And then, one night, about ten days after the coup - for a coup was how Rapava would always think of it - he was patched up and given a wash and a clean prison uniform and taken up in handcuffs to the director's office to meet some big shot from the Ministry of State Security. He was a tough-looking, miserable bastard, aged between forty and fifty -said he was a Deputy Minister - and he wanted to talk about Comrade Stalin's private papers. Rapava was handcuffed to the chair. The guards were sent out of the room. The Deputy Minister sat behind the director's desk. There was a picture of Stalin on the wall behind him. It seems, said the Deputy Minister - after looking at Rapava for a while - that Comrade Stalin, in recent years, to assist him in his mighty tasks, had got into the habit of making notes. Sometimes these notes were confided to ordinary sheets of writing paper and sometimes to an exercise book with a black oilskin cover. The existence of these notes was known only to certain members of the Presidium, and to Comrade Poskrebyshev, Comrade Stalin's long-standing secretary, whom the traitor Beria recently had falsely imprisoned on fraudulent charges. All witnesses agree that Comrade Stalin kept these papers in a personal safe in his private office, to which he alone had the key.

The Deputy Minister leaned forwards. His dark eyes searched Rapava's face. Following Comrade Stalin's tragic death, attempts were made to locate this key. It could not be found. It was therefore agreed by the Presidium to have this safe broken into, in the presence of them all, to see if Comrade Stalin had left behind material that might be of historical value, or which might assist the Central Committee in its stupendous responsibility of appointing Comrade Stalin's successor. The safe was duly broken open, under the supervision of the Presidium, and found to be empty, apart from a few minor items, such as Comrade Stalin's party card.

'And now,' said the Deputy Minister, getting slowly to his feet, 'we come to the crux of the matter.

He walked around and sat on the edge of the desk directly in front of Rapava. Oh, he was a big bastard, boy, a fleshy tank.

We know, he said, from Comrade Malenkov that in the early hours of the second of March, you went to the Kuntsevo dacha in the company of the traitor, Beria, and that you were both left alone with Comrade Stalin for several minutes. Was anything removed from the room?

No, comrade.

Nothing at all?

No, comrade.

And where did you go when you left Kuntsevo?

I drove Comrade Beria back to his house, comrade.

Directly back to his house?

Yes, comrade.

You are lying.

No, comrade.

You are lying. We have a witness who saw you both inside the Kremlin shortly before dawn. A sentry who met you in a corridor.

Yes, comrade. I remember now. Comrade Beria said he needed to collect something from his office -Something from Comrade Stalin's office!

No, comrade.

You are lying! You are a traitor! You and the English spy Beria broke into Stalin's office and stole his papers! Where are those papers?

No, comrade -Traitor! Thief! Spy!

Each word accompanied by a punch in the face. And so on.

I'LL tell you something, boy. Nobody knows the full truth of what happened to the Boss, even now - even after Gorbachev and Yeltsin have sold off our whole fucking birthright to the capitalists and let the CIA go picnicking in our files. The papers on the Boss are still closed. They smuggled him out of the Kremlin on the floor of a car, rolled up in a carpet, and some say Zhukov shot him that very night. Others say they shot him the following week. Most say they kept him alive for five months - Jive months! - sweated him in a bunker underneath the Moscow Military District - and shot him after a secret trial. Either way, they shot him. He was dead by Christmas Day. And this is what they did to me.

Rapava held up his mutilated fingers and wiggled them. Then he clumsily unbuttoned his shirt, pulled it from the waistband of his pants, and twisted his scrawny torso to show his back. His vertebrae were criss-crossed with shiny roughened panes of scar-tissue - translucent windows on to the flesh beneath. His stomach and chest were whorls of blue-black tattoos. Kelso didn't speak. Rapava sat back leaving his shirt unbuttoned. His scars and his tattoos were the medals of his lifetime. He was proud to wear them. NOT a word, boy. You listening? They did not get. One. Single. Word.

Throughout it all, he didn't know if the Boss was still alive, or if the Boss was talking. But it didn't matter: Papu Gerasimovich Rapava, at least, would hold his silence.

Why? Was it loyalty? A bit, perhaps - the memory of that reprieving hand. But he wasn't such a young fool that he didn't also realise that silence was his only hope. How long do you think they'd have let him live if he'd led them to that place? It was his own death warrant he'd buried under that tree. So, softly, softly: not a word.

He lay shivering on the floor of his unheated cell as the winter came and dreamed of cherry trees, the leaves dying and falling now, the branches dark against the sky, the howling of the wolves.

And then, around Christmas, like bored children, they suddenly seemed to lose interest in the whole business. The beating went on for a while - by now it was a matter of honour on both sides, you must understand - but the questions stopped, and finally, after one prolonged and imaginative session, the beating stopped as well. The Deputy Minister never came again and Rapava guessed that Beria must be dead. He also guessed that someone had decided that Stalin's papers, if they did exist, were better left unread.

Rapava expected to get his seven grams of lead at any moment. It never occurred to him that he wouldn't, not after Beria had been liquidated. So of his journey, in a snowstorm, to the Red Army building on Kommissariat Street, and of the makeshift courtroom, with its high, barred windows and its troika of judges, he remembered nothing. He blanked his mind with snow. He watched it through the window, advancing in waves up the Moskva and along the embankment, smothering the afternoon lights on the opposite side of the river - high white columns of snow on a death march from the east. Voices droned around him. Later, when it was dark and he was being taken outside, he assumed to be shot, he asked if he could stop for a minute on the steps and bury his hands in the drifts. A guard asked why, and Rapava said: 'To feel snow between my fingers one last time, comrade.'

They laughed a lot at that. But when they found out he was serious they laughed a whole lot more. 'If there's one thing you'll never go hungry for, Georgian,' they told him, as they pushed him into the back of the van, 'it's snow.' That was how he learned he had been sentenced to fifteen years' hard labour in the Kolyma territory.

KHRUSHCHEV amnestied a whole bunch of Gulag prisoners in fifty-six, but nobody amnestied Papu Rapava. Papu Rapava was forgotten. Papu Rapava alternately rotted and froze in the forests of Siberia for the next decade and a half- rotted in the short summer, when each man worked in his own private fever-cloud of mosquitoes, and froze in the long winter when the ice made rock of the swamps.

They say that people who survive the camps all look alike because, once a man's skeleton has been exposed, it doesn't matter how well-padded his flesh subsequently becomes, or how carefully he dresses - the bones will always poke through. Kelso had interviewed enough Gulag survivors in his time to recognise the camp skeleton in Rapava's face even now, as he talked, in the sockets of his eyes and in the crack of his jaw. He could see it in the hinges of his wrists and ankles, and the flat blade of his sternum. He wasn't amnestied, Rapava was saying, because he killed a man, a Chechen, who tried to sodomise him - gutted him with a shank he'd made from a piece of saw. And what happened to your head? said Kelso.

Rapava fingered the scar. He couldn't remember. Sometimes, when it was especially cold, the scar ached and gave him dreams.

What kind of dreams?

Rapava showed the dark glint of his mouth. He wouldn't say.

Fifteen years...

They returned him to Moscow in the summer of sixty-nine, on the day the Yankees put a man on the moon. Rapava left the ex-prisoners' hostel and wandered round the hot and crowded streets and couldn't make sense of anything. Where was Stalin? That was what amazed him. Where were the statues and the pictures? Where was the respect? The boys all looked like girls and the girls all looked like whores. Clearly, the country was already halbway in the shit. But still - you have to say - at least in those days there were jobs for everyone, even for old zeki like him. They sent him to the engine sheds at the Leningrad Station, to work as a labourer. He was only forty-one and as strong as a bear. Everything he had in the world was in a cardboard suitcase.

Did he ever marry?

Rapava shrugged. Sure, he married. That was the way you got an apartment. He married and got himself fixed up with a place.

And what happened? Where was she?

She died. It was a decent block in those days, boy, before the drugs and the crime.

Where was his place?

Fucking criminals...

And children?

A son. He died as well. In Afghanistan. And a daughter.

His daughter was dead?

No. She was a whore.

And Stalin's papers?

Drunk as he was, there was no way Kelso could make that question casual and the old man shot him a crafty look; a peasant's look. Rapava said softly, 'Go on, boy. Yes? And Stalin's papers? What about Stalin's papers?'

Kelso hesitated.

'Only that if they still existed - if there was a chance - a possibility -'You'd want to see them?' 'Of course. Rapava laughed. 'And why should I help you, boy? Fifteen years in Kolyma, and for what? To help you spin more lies? For love?'

'No. Not for love. For history.' 'For history? Do me a favour, boy!' 'All right - for money, then.' 'What?'

'For money. A share in the profits. A lot of money.

The peasant Rapava stroked the side of his nose. 'How much money?'

'A lot. If this is true. If we could find them. Believe me: a lot of money.

THE momentary silence was broken by the sound of voices in the corridor, voices talking in English, and Kelso guessed who this would be: his fellow historians - Adelman, Duberstein and the rest - coming back late from dinner, wondering where he'd got to. It suddenly seemed overwhelmingly important to him that no one else - least of all his colleagues - should know anything at all about Papu Rapava.

Someone tapped softly on the door and he held up a warning hand to the old man. Very quietly he reached over and turned off the bedside lamp.

They sat together and listened to the whispers, magnified by the darkness but still muffled and indistinct. There was another knock, and then a splutter of laughter, hushed by the others. Maybe they had seen the light go out. Perhaps they thought he was with a woman - such was his reputation.

After a few more seconds, the voices faded and the corridor was silent again. Kelso turned on the light. He smiled and patted his heart. The old man's face was a mask, but then he smiled and began to sing - he had a quavering, unexpectedly melodious voice -Kolyma, Kolyma,

What a wonderfiul place!

Twelve months of winter

Summer all the rest...

AFTER his release, he was this and no more: Papu Rapava, railway worker, who had done a spell in the camps, and if anyone wanted to take it further - well? yes? come on, then, comrade! - he was always ready with his fists or an iron spike. Two men watched him from the start. Antipin, who was a foreman in the Lenin No. 1 shed, and a cripple in the downstairs flat called Senka. And they were as pretty a pair of canaries as you could ever hope to meet. You could practically hear them singing to the KGB before you were out of the room. The others came and went - the men on foot, the men in parked cars, the men asking 'routine questions~ comrade' - but Antipin and Senka were the faithful watchers, though they never got a thing, neither of them. Rapava had buried his past in a hole far deeper than the one he'd dug for Beria.

Senka died five years ago. He never knew what became of Antipin. The Lenin No. 1 shed was now the property of a private collective, importing French wine.

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.

'Jesus, Fluke,' called Adelman, cheerfully, 'you look just awfuL'

Kelso raised a fragile hand in acknowledgement. He could see a huddle of taxi drivers in quilted jackets stamping their feet against the cold. Workmen were struggling to lift a roll of tin off the back of a lorry One Korean businessman in a fur hat was photographing a group of twenty others, similarly dressed. But of Papu Rapava: no sign.

'Doctor Kelso, please, we are waiting again.' The umbrella wagged at him in reproof. He transferred the cigarette to the corner of his mouth, hitched his bag up on to his shoulder and moved towards the bus.

'A battered Byron' was how one Sunday newspaper had described him when he had resigned his Oxford lectureship and moved to New York, and the description wasn't a bad one - curly black hair too long and thick for neatness, a moist, expressive mouth, pale cheeks and the glow of a certain reputation - if Byron hadn't died on Missolonghi but had spent the next ten years drinking whisky, smoking, staying indoors and resolutely avoiding all exercise, he, too, might have come to look a little like Fluke Kelso.

He was wearing what he always wore: a faded dark blue shirt of heavy cotton with the top button undone, a loosely knotted and vaguely stained dark tie, a black corduroy suit with a black leather belt over which his stomach bulged slightly, red cotton handkerchief in his breast pocket, scuffed boots of brown suede, an old blue raincoat. This was Kelso's uniform, unvaried for twenty years.

'Boy,' Rapava had called him, and the word was both absurd for a middle-aged man and yet oddly accurate. Boy.

The heater was going full blast. Nobody was saying much. He sat on his own near the back of the bus and rubbed at the Wet glass as they jolted up the slip-road to join the traffic on the bridge. Across the aisle, Saunders made an ostentatious display of batting Kelso's smoke away. Beneath them, in the filthy waters of the Moskva, a dredger with a crane mounted on its aft deck beat sluggishly upstream.

He nearly hadn't come to Russia. That was the joke of it. He knew well enough what it would be like: the bad food, the stale gossip, the sheer bloody tedium of academic life - of more and more being said about less and less - that was one reason why he had chucked in Oxford and gone to live in New York. But somehow the books he was supposed to write had not quite materialised. And besides, he never could resist the lure of Moscow. Even now, sitting on a stale bus in the Wednesday rush-hour, he could feel the charge of history beyond the muddy glass: in the dark and renamed streets, the vast apartment blocks, the toppled statues. It was stronger here than anywhere he knew; stronger even than in Berlin. That was what always drew him back to Moscow - the way history hung in the air between the blackened buildings like sulphur after a lightning-strike.

'You think you know it all about Comrade Stalin, don't you boy? Well, let me tel/you: you don't know fuck.'

Kelso had already delivered his short paper.,,on Stalin and the archives, at the end of the previous day: delivered it in his trademark style - without notes, with one hand in his pocket, extempore, provocative. His Russian hosts had looked gratifyingly shifty. A couple of people had even walked out. So, all in all, a triumph. Afterwards, finding himself predictably alone, he had decided to walk back to the Ukraina. It was a long walk, and it was getting dark, but he needed the air. And at some point - he couldn't remember where: maybe it was in one of the back streets behind the Institute, or maybe it was later, along the Noviy Arbat - but at some point he had realised he was being followed. It was nothing tangible, just a fleeting impression of something seen too often - the flash of a coat, perhaps, or the shape of a head - but Kelso had been in Moscow often enough in the bad old days to know that you were seldom wrong about these things. You always knew if a film was out of synch, however fractionally; you always knew if someone fancied you, however improbably; and you always knew when someone was on your tail.

He had just stepped into his hotel room and was contemplating some primary research in the mini-bar when the front desk had called up to say there was a man in the lobby who wanted to see him. Who? He wouldn't give his name, sir. But he was most insistent and he wouldn't leave. So Kelso had gone down, reluctantly, and found Papu Rapava sitting on one of the Ukraina's imitation leather sofas, staring straight ahead, in his papery blue suit, his wrists and ankles sticking out as thin as broomsticks.

'You think you know it all about Comrade Stalin, don't you, boy... ?'Those had been his opening words.

And that was the moment that Kelso had realised where he had first seen the old man: at the symposium, in the front row of the public seats, listening intently to the simultaneous translation over his headphones, muttering in violent disagreement at any hostile mention of J. V. Stalin.

Who are you? thought Kelso, staring out of the grimy window. Fantasist? Con man? The answer to a prayer?

THE symposium was only scheduled to last one more day -for which relief, in Kelso's view, much thanks. It was being held in the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, an orthodox temple of grey concrete, consecrated in the Brezhnev years, with Marx, Engels and Lenin in gigantic bas-relief above the pillared entrance. The ground floor had been leased to a private bank, since gone bust, which added to the air of dereliction.

On the opposite side of the street, watched by a couple of bored-looking militia men, a small demonstration was in progress - maybe a hundred people, mostly elderly, but with a few youths in black berets and leather jackets. It was the usual mixture of fanatics and grudge-holders - Marxists, nationalists, anti-semites. Crimson flags bearing the hammer and sickle hung beside black flags embroidered with the tsarist eagle. One old lady carried a picture of Stalin; another sold cassettes of SS marching songs. An elderly man with an umbrella held over him was addressing the crowd through a bullhorn, his voice a distorted, metallic rant. Stewards were handing out a free newspaper called Aurora.

'Take no notice,' instructed Olga Komarova, standing up beside the driver. She tapped the side of her head. 'These are crazy people. Red fascists.~

'What's he saying?' demanded Duberstein, who was considered a world authority on Soviet communism even though he had never quite got round to learning Russian.

'He's talking about how the Hoover Institution tried to buy the Party archive for five million bucks,' said Adelman. 'He says we're trying to steal their history.

Duberstein sniggered. 'Who'd want to steal their goddamned history?' He tapped on the window with his signet ring. 'Say, isn't that a TV crew?'

The sight of a camera caused a predictable, wistful stir among the academics.

'I believe so..

'How very flattering...

'What's the name,' said Adelman, 'of the fellow who runs Aurora? Is it still the same one?' He twisted round in his seat and called up the aisle. 'Fluke - you should know. What's his name? Old KGB -,

'Mamantov,' said Kelso. The driver braked hard and he had to swallow to stop himself being sick. 'Vladimir Mamantov.'

'Crazy people,' repeated Olga, bracing herself as they came to a stop. 'I apologise on behalf of Rosarkhiv. They are not representative. Follow me, please. Ignore them.'

They filed off the bus and a television cameraman filmed them as they trudged across the asphalt forecourt, past a couple of drooping, silvery fir trees, pursued by jeers.

Fluke Kelso moved delicately at the rear of the column, nursing his hangover, holding his head at a careful angle, as if he was balancing a pitcher of water. A pimply youth in wire spectacles thrust a copy of Aurora at him and Kelso got a quick glimpse of the front page - a cartoon caricature of Zionist conspirators and a weird cabalistic symbol that was something between a swastika and a red cross - before he rammed it back in the young man's chest. The demonstrators jeered.

A thermometer on the wall outside the entrance read minus one. The old nameplate had been taken down and a new one had been screwed in its place, but it didn't quite fit so you could tell that the building had been renamed. It now proclaimed itself 'The Russian Centre for the Preservation and Study of Documents Relating to Modern History'.

Once again, Kelso lingered behind after the others had gone in, squinting at the hate-filled faces across the street. There were a lot of old men of a similar age, pinched and raw-cheeked in the cold, but Rapava wasn't among them. He turned away and moved inside, into the shadowy lobby, where he gave his coat and bag to the cloakroom attendant, before passing beneath the familiar statue of Lenin towards the lecture hall. Another day began.

There were ninety-one delegates at the symposium and almost all of them seemed to be crowded into the small anteroom where coffee was being served. He collected his cup and lit another cigarette.

'Who's up first?' said a voice behind him. It was Adelman. Askenov, I think. On the microfilm project.'

Adelman groaned. He was a Bostonian, in his seventies, at that twilight stage in his career when most of life seemed to be spent in airplanes or foreign hotels: symposia, conferences, honorary degrees - Duberstein maintained that Adelman had given up pursuing history in favour of collecting air miles. But Kelso didn't begrudge him his honours. He was good. And brave. It had taken courage to write his kind of books, thirty years ago, on the Famine and the Terror, when every other useful idiot in academia was screeching for detente.

'Listen, Frank,' he said, 'I'm sorry about dinner.'

'Forget it. You got a better offer?'

'Kind of.'

The refreshment room was at the back of the Institute and looked out on to an inner courtyard, in the centre of which, dumped on their sides amid the weeds, were a pair of statues, of Marx and Engels - a couple of Victorian gentlemen taking time off from the long march of history for a morning doze.

'They don't mind taking down those two,' said Adelman. 'That's easy. They're foreigners. And one of them's a Jew. It's when they take down Lenin - that's when you'll know the place has really changed.'

Kelso took another sip of coffee. 'A man came to see me last night.'

'A man? I'm disappointed.'

'Could I ask your advice, Frank?'

Adelman shrugged. 'Go ahead.'

'In private?'

Adelman stroked his chin. 'You got his name, this guy?'

'Of course I got his name.

'His real name?'

'How do I know if it's his real name?'

'His address, then? You got his address?'

'No, Frank, I didn't get his address. But he did leave these.' Adelman took off his glasses and peered closely at the book of matches. 'It's a set-up,' he said at last, handing them back. 'I wouldn't touch it. Whoever heard of a bar called "Robotnik", anyhow? "Worker"? Sounds phoney to me.

'But if it was a set-up,' said Kelso, weighing the matchbook in his palm, 'why would he run away.

'Obviously, because he doesn't want it to look like a set-up. He wants you to have to work at it - track him down, persuade him to help you. That's the psychology of a clever fraud - the victims wind up doing so much chasing around, they start wanting to believe it's true. Remember the Hitler diaries. Either that or he's a lunatic.'

'He was very convincing.'

'Lunatics often are. Or it's a practical joke. Someone wants to make you look a fool. Have you thought of that? You're not exactly the most popular kid in the school.'

Kelso glanced up the corridor towards the lecture hall. It wasn't a bad theory. There were plenty in there who didn't like him. He had appeared on too many television programmes~ knocked out too many newspaper columns, reviewed too many of their useless books. Saunders was loitering at the corner, pretending to talk to Moldenhauer, both men obviously straining to overhear what he was saying to Adelman. (Saunders had complained bitterly after Kelso's paper about his 'subjectivity': 'Why was he even invited, that's what one wants to know. One had been given to understand this was a symposium for serious scholars . .

'They don't have the wit,' he said. He gave them a wave and was pleased to see them duck out of sight. 'Or the imagination.

'You sure have a genius for making enemies.

'Ah well. You know what they say: more enemies, more honour.'

Adelman smiled and opened his mouth to say something, but then seemed to think better of it. 'How's Margaret, dare one ask?'

'Who? Oh, you mean poor Margaret? She's fine, thank you. Fine and feisty. According to the lawyers.'

'And the boys?'

'Entering the springtime of their adolescence.'

'And the book? That's been a while. How much of this new book have you actually written?'

'I'm writing it.'

'Two hundred pages? A hundred?'

'What is this, Frank?'

'How many pages?'

'I don't know.' Kelso licked his dry lips. Almost unbelievably, he realised he could do with a drink. 'A hundred maybe.' He had a vision of a blank grey screen, a cursor flashing wealdy, like a pulse on a life-support machine begging to be switched off He hadn't written a word. 'Listen, Frank, there could be something in this, couldn't there? Stalin was a hoarder, don't forget. Didn't Khrushchev find some letter in a secret compartment in the old man's desk after he died?' He rubbed his aching head. 'That letter from Lenin, complaining about Stalin's treatment of his wife? And then there was that list of the Politburo, with crosses against everyone he was planning to purge. And his library -remember his library? He made notes in almost every book.'

'So what are you saying?'

'I'm just saying it's possible, that's all. That Stalin wasn't Hitler. That he wrote things down.'

'Quod volimus credimus libenter,' intoned Adelman. "Which means -'I know what it means -'- which means, my dear Fluke, we always believe what we

want to believe.' Adelman patted Kelso's arm. 'You don't want to hear this, do you? I'm sorry. I'll lie if you prefer it. I'll tell you he's the one guy in a million with a story like this who turns out not to be full of shit. I'll tell you he's going to lead you to Stalin's unpublished memoirs, that you'll rewrite history, millions of dollars will be yours, women will lie at your feet, Duberstein and Saunders will form a choir to sing your praises in the middle of Harvard Yard.

All right, Frank.' Kelso leaned the back of his head against the wall. 'You've made your point. I don't know It's just -Maybe you had to be there with him -, He pressed on, reluctant to admit defeat. 'It's just it rings a bell with me somewhere. Does it ring a bell with you?'

'Oh sure. It rings a bell, okay. An alarm bell.' Adelman pulled out an old pocket watch. 'We ought to be getting back. D'yoLI mind? Olga will be frantic.' He put his arm round Kelso's shoulders and led him down the corridor. 'In any case, there's nothing you can do. We're flying back to New York tomorrow. Let's talk when we get back. See if there's anything for you in the faculty. You were a great teacher.'

'I was a lousy teacher.'

'You were a great teacher, until you were lured from the path of scholarship and rectitude by the cheap sirens of journalism and publicity. Hello, Olga.'

'So here you are! The session is almost starting. Oh, Doctor Kelso - now this is not so good - no smoking, thank you.' She leaned over and removed the cigarette from his lips. She had a shiny face with plucked eyebrows and a very fine moustache, bleached white. She dropped the stub into the dregs of his coffee and took away his cup.

'Olga, Olga, why so bright?' groaned Kelso, putting his hand to his brow. The lecture hail exuded a tungsten glare.

'Television,' said Olga, with pride. 'They are making a programme of us.'

'Local?' Adelman was straightening his bow tie. 'Network?'

'Satellite, professor. International.'

'Say, now, where are our seats?' whispered Adelman, shielding his eyes from the lights.

'Doctor Kelso? Any chance of a word, sir?' An American accent. Kelso turned to find a large young man he vaguely recognised.

'I'm sorry?'

'R. J. O'Brian,' said the young man, holding out his hand. 'Moscow correspondent, Satellite News System. We're making a special report on the controversy -'I don't think so,' said Kelso. 'But Professor Adelman, here

- I'm sure he'd be delighted -'

At the prospect of a television interview, Adelman seemed physically to swell in size, like an inflating doll. 'Well, as long as it's not in any official capacity. .

O'Brian ignored him. 'You sure I can't tempt you?' he said to Kelso. 'Nothing you want to say to the world? I read your book on the fall of communism. When was that? Three years ago.

'Four,' said Kelso.

'Actually, I believe it was five,' said Adelman.

Actually, thought Kelso, it was nearer six: dear God, where were all the years going? 'No,' he said, 'thanks all the same, but I'm keeping off television these days.' He looked at Adelman. 'It's a cheap siren, apparently.'

'Later, please,' hissed Olga. 'Interviews are later. The director is talking. Please.' Kelso felt her umbrella in his back again as she steered him into the hall. 'Please. Please -'

By the time the Russian delegates were added in, plus a few diplomatic observers, the press, and maybe fifty members of the public, the hall was impressively full. Kelso sank heavily into his place in the second row. Up on the platform, Professor Valentin Askenov of the Russian State Archives had launched into a long explanation of the microfilming of the Party records. O'Brian's cameraman walked backwards down the central aisle, filming the audience. The sharp amplification of Askenov's sonorous voice seemed to pierce some painful chamber of Kelso's inner ear. Already, a kind of metallic, neon torpor had descended over the hall. The day stretched ahead. He covered his face with his hands. Twenty-five million sheets... recited Askenov, twenty-five thousand reels ofmicrofilm. . . seven million dollars.

Kelso slid his hands down his cheeks until his fingers converged and covered his mouth. Frauds! he wanted to shout. Liars! Why were they all just sitting here? They knew as well as he did that nine-tenths of the best material was still locked up, and to see most of the rest required a bribe. He'd heard that the going rate for a captured Nazi file was $1,000 and a bottle of Scotch.

He whispered to Adelman, 'I'm getting out of here.'

'You cant.

'Why not?'

'It's discourteous. Just sit there, for pete's sake, and pretend to be interested like everyone else.' Adelman said all this out of the side of his mouth, without taking his eyes off the platform. Kelso stuck it for another half minute.

'Tell them I'm ill.'

'I shall not.

'Let me by, Frank. I'm going to be sick.'

'Jesus...'

Adelman swung his legs to one side and pressed himself back in his seat. Hunched in a vain effort to make himself less conspicuous, Kelso stumbled over the feet of his colleagues, kicking in the process the elegant black shin of Ms Velma Byrd.

'Aw, fuck, Kelso,' said Velma.

Professor Askenov looked up from his notes and paused in mid-drone. Kelso was conscious of an amplified, humming silence, and of a kind of collective movement in the audience, as if some great beast had turned in its field to watch his progress. This seemed to last a long time, for at least as long as it took him to walk to the back of the hall. Not until he had passed beneath the marble gaze of Lenin and into the deserted corridor did the droning begin again.

KELSO sat behind the bolted door of a lavatory cubicle on the ground floor of the former Institute of Marxism-Leninism and opened his canvas bag. Here were the tools of his trade:

a yellow legal pad, pencils, an eraser, a small Swiss army knife, a welcome pack from the organisers of the symposium, a dictionary, a street map of Moscow, his cassette recorder, and a Filofax that was a palimpsest of ancient numbers, lost contacts, old girlfriends, former lives.

There was something about the old man's story that was familiar to him, but he couldn't remember what it was. He picked up the cassette recorder, pressed REWIND, let it spool back for a while, then pressed PLAY He held it to his ear and listened to the tinny ghost of Rapava's voice.

Comrade Stalin’s room was a plain man's room. You've got to say that for Stalin. He was always one ofus...

REWIND. PLAY

and here was an odd thing, boy - he had taken off his shiny new shoes and had them wedged under one fat arm...

REWIND. PLAY

Know what I mean by Blizhny. boy?...'

by Blizhny. boy?...'

byBlizhny...

THE MOSCOW AIR tasted of Asia - of dust and soot and eastern spices, cheap petrol, black tobacco, sweat. Kelso came out of the Institute and turned up the collar of his raincoat. He walked across the rutted concourse, skirting the frozen puddles~ resisting the temptation to wave at the sullen crowd

- that would have been 'a western provocation'.

The street sloped southwards, down towards the centre of the city. Every other building was encased in scaffolding. Beside him, debris hurtled down a metal chute and exploded into a fountain of dust. He passed a shady casino, anonymous except for a sign showing a pair of rolling dice. A fur boutique. A shop selling nothing but Italian shoes. A single pair of handmade loafers would have cost any one of the demonstrators a whole month's wages and he felt a stab of sympathy. He remembered a line of Evelyn Waugh's he had used before about Russia: 'The foundations of Empire are often occasions of woe; their dismemberment, always.'

At the bottom of the hill he turned right, into the wind. The snow had stopped but the cold blast was hard and unyielding. He could see tiny figures bent into it, across the road, beneath the red rock-face of the Kremlin wall, while the golden domes of the churches rose above the parapet like the globes of some vast meteorological machine.

His destination lay straight ahead. Like the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, the Lenin Library had been renamed. It was now the Central Library of the Russian Federation, but everyone still called it the Lenin. He stepped through the familiar triple doors, gave his bag and coat to the babushka behind the cloakroom counter, then showed his old reader's ticket to an armed guard in a glass booth.

He signed his name in the register and added the time. It was eleven minutes past ten. They had yet to get around to computerising the Lenin, which meant forty million titles were still on index cards. At the top of a wide flight of stone steps, beneath the vaulted ceiling, was a sea of wooden cabinets, and Kelso moved among them as he had done years ago, sliding open one drawer after another, riffling through the familiar titles. Radzinsky he would need, and the second volume of Volkogonov, and Khrushchev and Alliluyeva. The cards for these last two were marked with the Cyrillic symbol '~' which meant they had been held in the secret index until 1991. How many titles was he allowed? Five, wasn't it? Finally, he decided on Chuyev's series of interviews with the ancient Molotov. Then he took his request slips to the issuing desk and watched as they were fitted into a metal canister and fired down the pneumatic tube into the Lenin's lower depths.

'What's the wait today?'

The assistant shrugged. Who was she to say?

An hour?'

She shrugged again.

He thought: nothing changes.

He wandered back across the landing into Reading Room No. 3, and trod softly down the path of worn green carpet that led to his old seat. And nothing had changed here, either - not the rich brownness of the wood-panelled, galleried hail, nor the dry smell of it, nor its sacrilegious hush. At one end was a statue of Lenin reading a book, at the other an astrological clock. Maybe two hundred people were bent over their desks. Through the window to his left he could see the dome and spire of St Nicholas's. He might never have left; the past eighteen years might have been a dream.

He sat down and laid out his things and in that instant he was a student of twenty-six again, living in a single room in Corpus V of Moscow University; paying 260 roubles a month for a desk, a bed, a chair and a cupboard, taking meals in the basement canteen that was overrun by cockroaches, spending his days in the Lenin and his nights with a girlfriend - with Nadya, or Katya, or Margarita, or Irma. Irma. Now there was a woman. He ran his hand over the scratched surface of the desk and wondered what had become of Irma. Perhaps he should have stuck with her -serious, beautiful Irma, with her samizdat magazines and her basement meetings, making love to the accompaniment of a rattling Gestetner duplicator and afterwards vowing that they would be different, that they would change the world.

Irma. He wondered what she would make of the new Russia. The last he had heard she was a dental assistant in South Wales.

He glanced around the reading room and closed his eyes, trying to keep hold of the past for a minute longer, a fattening and hungover middle-aged historian in a black corduroy suit.

His books arrived at the issuing stack just after eleven, or at any rate four of them did: they had fetched up volume one of Volkogonov rather than volume two and he had to send it back. Still, he had enough. He carried the books back to his desk and gradually he became absorbed in his task, reading, noting and cross-referencing the various eyewitness accounts of Stalin's death. He found, as usual, an aesthetic pleasure in the sheer detective work of research. Secondhand sources and speculation he discarded. He was only interested in those people who had actually been in the same room as the GenSec and had left behind a description he could match against Rapava's.

By his reckoning there were seven: the Politburo members, Khrushchev and Molotov; Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva; two of Stalin's bodyguards, Rybin and Lozgachev; and two of his medical staff: the physician, Myasnikov, and the recuscitator, a woman named Chesnokova. The other eyewitnesses had either killed themselves (like the bodyguard, Khrustalev, who drank himself to death after watching the autopsy), or had died soon afterwards, or had disappeared.

The accounts all differed in detail but were in essence the same. Stalin had suffered a catastrophic haemorrhage in the left cerebral hemisphere some time when he was alone in his room between 4 a.m. and 10 p.m. on Sunday March 1 1953. Academician Vinogradov, who examined the brain after death, found serious hardening of the cerebral arteries which suggested Stalin had probably been half-crazy for a long while, maybe even years. Nobody could tell what time the stroke had hit. His door had stayed closed all day and his staff had been too scared to enter his room. The bodyguard Lozgachev told the writer Radzinsky that he had been the first to pluck up the courage:

I opened the door. . . and there was the Boss lying on the floor holding up his right hand like this. I was petrified. My hands and legs wouldn't obey me. He had probably not yet lost consciousness but he couldn't speak. He had good hearing, he'd obviously heard me coming, and probably raised his hand slightly to call me in to help him. I hurried up to him and said 'Comrade Stalin, what's wrong?' He'd - you know - wet himself while he was lying there, and was trying to straighten something with his left hand. I said, 'Shall I call the doctor, maybe?' He made some incoherent noise – like 'Dz - dz. . . ,'all he could do was keep on 'dz'-ing.

It was immediately after this that the guards had called in Malenkov. Malenkov had called in Beria. And Beria's order, tantamount to murder by negligence, had been that Stalin was drunk and should be left to sleep it off.

Kelso made a careful note of the passage. Nothing here contradicted Rapava. That didn't prove Rapava was telling the truth, of course - he could have got hold of Lozgachev's testimony for himself, and tailored his story to fit. But it didn't suggest he was lying, either, and certainly the details tallied - the time frame, the order not to call for medical help, the way Stalin had wet himself, the way he would regain consciousness but be unable to speak. This happened at least twice over the three days it took Stalin to die. Once, according to Khrushchev, when the doctors at last brought in by the Politburo were spoon-feeding him soup and weak tea, he had raised his hand and pointed at one of the pictures of children on the wall. The second return to consciousness occurred just before the end and was noted by everyone, especially his daughter, Svetlana:

At what seemed like the very last moment he suddenly opened his eyes and cast a glance over everyone in the room. It was a terrible glance, insane or perhaps angry and full of fear of death and the unfamiliar faces of the doctors bent over him. The glance swept over everyone in a second. Then something incomprehensible and terrible happened that to this day I can't forget and don't understand. He suddenly lifted his left hand as though he were pointing to something up above and bringing down a curse on us all. The gesture was incomprehensible and full of menace, and no one could say to whom or what it might be directed. The next moment, after a final effort, the spirit wrenched itself free of the flesh.

That had been written in 1967. After his heart had stopped, the doctors had ordered the resuscitator, Chesnokova - a strong young woman - to pound at Stalin's chest and blow into his mouth, until Khrushchev had heard the old man’s ribs snap and had told her to pack it in. No one could say to whom or what it might be directed. . .' Kelso underlined the words lightly with his pencil. If Rapava was telling the truth, it was fairly obvious whom Stalin must have been cursing: the man who had stolen the key to his private safe -Lavrenty Beria. Why he should have pointed at a picture of a child was less clear.

Kelso tapped the pencil against his teeth. It was all very circumstantial. He could imagine Adelman's reaction if he tried to offer it as any sort of supporting evidence. The thought ofAdelman made him look at his watch. If he set off now he could be back at the symposium comfortably in time for lunch and there was a good chance they wouldn't even have missed him. He gathered up the books and took them back to the issuing desk, where the second volume of Volkogonov had just arrived.

'Well,' said the librarian, her thin lips crimped with irritation, 'do you want it or not?'

'Kelso hesitated, almost said no, then decided he might as well finish what he'd started. He handed over the other books and carried the Volkogonov back into the reading room.

It lay before him on his desk like a dull brown brick. Triyumfi Tragedzjva: politi cheskii portret L V Stalina, Novosti publishers~ Moscow 1989. He had read it when it first came out and hadn't felt the need to look at it since. He regarded it now without enthusiasm, then flicked the cover open with his finger. Volkogonov was a three-star Red Army general with powerful contacts inside the Kremlin, granted special access to the archives under Gorbachev and Yeltsin which he had used to produce a trio of tombstone lives - Stalin, Trotsky, Lenin - each one more revisionist than the last. Kelso picked it up and leafed through it to the index, looked up the relevant entries for Stalin's death - and a moment later there it was, the memory that had been niggling at the back of his mind ever since Papu Rapava disappeared into the Moscow dawn: A. A. Yepishev, who was at one time deputy Minister of State Security, told me that Stalin kept a black oilskin exercise book in which he would make occasional notes, and that for some time Stalin kept letters from Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and even Trotsky. All efforts to discover either the notebook or these letters

have failed, and Yepishev did not reveal his source. Yepishev did not reveal his source but he did, according to Volkogonov, have a theory. He believed that Stalin's private papers had been removed from his Kremlin safe by Lavrenty Beria, while the General Secretary lay paralysed by his stroke.

Beria made a dash for the Kremlin where it is reasonable to assume he cleaned out the safe, removing the Boss's personal papers and with them, one assumes, the black notebook ... Having destroyed Stalin's notebook, if indeed it was there, Beria would have cleared the path to his own ascendancy. Perhaps the truth will never be known, but Yepishev was convinced that Beria cleaned out the safe before the others could get to it. Now calm yourself, and don't get excited, because this proves nothing, you understand? Nothing whatever.

But it does make it a thousand times more likely Back outside the entrance to the reading room, Kelso yanked open the narrow wooden drawer and searched through it quickly until he found the index cards to Yepishev, A. A. (1908-85). The old man had written a score of books, of uniform dullness and hackery: History Teaches: The Lessons of the Twentieth Anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War (1965), Ideological Warfare and Military Problems (1974), We Are True to the Ideas of the Party (1981). Kelso's hangover had gone, to be replaced by that familiar phase of post-alcoholic euphoria - always, in the past, his most productive time of day - a feeling that alone was enough to make getting drunk worthwhile. He ran down the flight of steps and along the wide and gloomy corridor that led to the Lenin's military section. This was a small and self-contained area, neon-lit, with a subterranean feel to it. A young man in a grey pullover was leaning against the counter, reading a 1970s MAD comic.

'What do you have on an army man named Yepishev?' asked Kelso. 'A. A. Yepishev?'

'Who wants to know?'

Kelso handed over his reader's card and the young man examined it with interest.

'Hey, are you the Kelso who wrote that book a few years back on the end of the Party?'

Kelso hesitated - this could go either way - but finally he admitted he was. The young man put down the comic and shook his hand. 'Andrei Efanov. Great book. You really stuffed the bastards. I'll see what we have.'

THERE were two reference books with entries for Yepishev:

the Military Encyclopaedia of the USSR and the Directory of Heroes of the Soviet Union, and both told pretty much the same story, if you knew how to read between the lines, which was that Aleksey Alekseevich Yepishev had been an armour-plated, ocean-going Stalinist of the old school: Komsomol and Party instructor in the twenties and thirties; Red Army Military Academy, 1938; Commissar of the Komintern Factory in Kharkov, 1942; Military Council of the Thirty-Eighth Army of the 1St Ukrainian Front, 1943; Deputy People's Commissar for Medium Machine Building, also 1943 -

'What's a "medium machine",' asked Efanov, who was peering at the books over Kelso's shoulder. Efanov turned out to have done his military service in Lithuania - two years of hell - and to have been refused admittance to Moscow University in the communist time on the grounds he was a Jew. Now he was taking a huge delight in poking over the dust and ashes of Yepishev's career.

'Cover-name for the Soviet atomic bomb programme, said Kelso. 'Beria's pet project.' Beria. He made a note.

- Secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Parry, 1946 -

'That was when they purged the Ukraine of collaborators, after the war,' said Efanov. 'A bloody time.'

- First Secretary of the Odessa Regional Party Committee, 1950; Deputy Minister of State Security, 1951 -Deputy Minister...

Each entry was illustrated with the same official photograph of Yepishev. Kelso looked again at the the square jaw, the thick brow, the grim face set above the boxer's neck.

'Oh, he was a big bastard, boy. A fleshy tank...

'Gotcha,' whispered Kelso to himself.

After Stalin's death, Yepishev's career had taken a dive. First he had been sent back to Odessa, then he had been packed off abroad. Ambassador to Romania, 1955-61. Ambassador to Yugoslavia, 1961-62. And then, at last, the long-awaited summons back to Moscow, as Head of the Central Political Department of the Soviet Armed Forces -its ideological commissar - a position he held for the next twenty-three years. And who had served as his deputy? None other than Dmitri Volkogonov, three-star general and future biographer of Josef Stalin.

To extract these small plums of information it was necessary to dig through a great pudding of cliche and jargon, praising Yepishev for his 'important role in shaping the necessary political attitudes and enforcing Marxist- Leninist orthodoxy in the Armed Forces, in strengthening military discipline and fostering ideological readiness'. He had died aged seventy-seven. Volkogonov, Kelso knew, had died ten years later.

The list ofYepishev's honours ancE medals took up the rest of his entry: Hero of the Soviet Union, winner of the Lenin Prize, holder of four Orders of Lenin, the October Revolution Order, four Orders of the Red Banner, two Orders of the Great Patriotic War (ist class), the Order of the Red Banner, three Orders of the Red Star, the Order of Service to the Motherland...

'It's a wonder he could stand up.'

'And I'll bet you he never shot anyone,' sneered Efanov, 'except on his own side. So what's so interesting about Yepishev~ if you don't mind me asking?'

'What's this?' said Kelso suddenly. He pointed to a line at the foot of the column: 'V. P. Mamantov.'

'He's the author of the entry.

'Yepishev's entry was written by Mamantov? Vladimir Mamantov? The KGB man?'

'That's him. So what? The entries are usually written by friends. Why? D'you know him?'

'I don't know him. I've met him.' He frowned at the name. 'His people were demonstrating - this morning -'Oh, them? They're always demonstrating. When did you meet Mamantov?'

Kelso reached for his notebook and began skimming back through the pages. About five years ago, I suppose. When I was researching my book on the Party.

Vladimir Mamantov. My God, he hadn't thought about Vladimir Mamantov in half a decade, and suddenly here he was, crossing his path twice in a morning. The years fluttered through his fingers - ninety-five, ninety-four. . . Some details of the meeting were starting to come back to him now: a morning in late spring, a dead dog revealed in the thawing snow outside an apartment block in the suburbs, a gorgon of a wife. Mamantov had just finished serving fourteen months in Lefortovo for his part in the attempted coup against Gorbachev, and Kelso had been the first to interview him when he came out of jail. It had taken an age to fix the appointment and then it had proved, as so often in these cases, not worth the effort. Mamantov had refused point-blank to talk about himself, or the coup, and had simply spouted Party slogans straight out of the pages of Pravda. He found Mamanrov's home telephone number from 1991, next to an office address for a lowly Party functionary, Gennady Zyuganov.

'You're going to try to see him?' asked Efanov, anxiously. 'You know he hates all Westerners? Almost as much as he hates the Jews.'

'You're right,' said Kelso, staring at the seven digits.

Mamanrov had been a formidable man even in defeat, his Soviet suit hanging loose off his wide shoulders, the grey pallor of prison still dull on his cheeks; murder in his eyes. Kelso's book had not been flattering about Vladimir Mamantov, to put it mildly. And it had been translated into Russian - Mamantov must have seen it.

'You're right,' he repeated. 'It would be stupid even to try.

FLUKE Kelso walked out of the Lenin Library a little after two that afternoon, pausing briefly at a stall in the lobby to buy a couple of bread rolls and a bottle of warm and salty mineral water. He remembered passing a row of public telephones opposite the Kremlin, close to the Intourist office, and he ate his lunch as he walked - first down into the gloom of the metro station to buy some plastic tokens for the phone, and then back along Mokhavaya Street towards the high red wall and the golden domes.

He was not alone, it seemed to him. His younger self was ambling alongside him now - floppy-haired, chain-smoking, forever in a hurry; forever optimistic, a writer on the rise. ('Dr Kelso brings to the study of contemporary Soviet history the skiiis of a first-rate scholar and the energy of a good reporter' - The New York Times.) This younger Kelso wouldn't have hesitated to call up Vladimir Mamantoy, that was for sure - by God, he would have battered his bloody door down by now if necessary.

Think about it: if Yepishev had told Volkogonov about Stalin's notebook, might he not also have told Mamantov? Might he not have left behind papers? Might he not have a family? It had to be worth a try. He wiped his mouth and fingers on the little paper napkin and as he picked up the receiver and inserted the tokens he felt a familiar tightening of his stomach muscles, a butteriness around his heart. Was this sensible? No. But who cared about that? Adelman - he was sensible. And Saunders - he was very sensible.

Go for it.

He dialled the number.

The first call was an anti-climax. The Mamantovs had moved and the man who now lived at their old address was reluctant to give out their new number. Only after he had held a whispered consultation with someone at his end did he pass it on. Kelso hung up and dialled again. This time the phone rang for a long time before it was answered. The tokens dropped and an old woman with a trembling voice said, 'Who is this?'

He gave his name. 'Could I speak with Comrade Mamantoy?' He was careful to say 'comrade': 'mister' would never do.

'Yes? Who is this?'

Kelso was patient. 'As I said, my name is Kelso. I'm using a public telephone. It's urgent.'

'Yes, but who is this?'

He was about to repeat his name for a third time when he heard what sounded like a scuffle at the other end of the line and a harsh male voice cut in. All right. This is Mamantov. Who are you?'

'It's Kelso.' There was a silence. 'Doctor Kelso? You may remember me?'

'I remember you. What do you want?'

'To see you.

'Why should I see you after that shit you wrote?'

'I wanted to ask you some questions.'

About?'

A black oilskin notebook that used to belong to Josef Stalin.'

'Shut up,' said Mamantov.

'What?' Kelso frowned at the receiver.

'I said shut up. I'm thinking it over. Where are you?'

'Near the Intourist building, on Mokhavaya Street.'

There was another silence. Mamantov said, 'You're close.' And then he said, 'You'd better come. He gave his address. The line went dead.

THE line went dead and Major Feliks Suvorin of the Russian intelligence service, the SVR, sitting in his office in the south-eastern suburb of Yasenevo, carefully slipped off his headphones and wiped his neat pink ears with a clean white handkerchief On the notepad in front of him he had written: A black oilskin notebook that used to belong to Josef Stalin...

'Confronting the Past'

An International Symposium on the

Archives of the Russian Federation

Tuesday 27 October,

final afternoon session

DR KELSO: Ladies and gentlemen, whenever I think offosef Stalin, Ifind myself thinking of one image in particular. I think of Stalin, as an old man, standing beside his gramophone.

He wouldfinish working late, usually at nine or ten, and then he would go to the Kremlin movie theatre to watch afllm. Often, it was one of the Tarzan series -for some reason Stalin loved the idea ofa young man growing up and living among wild animals - then he and his cronies in the Politburo would drive out to his dacha at Kuntsevo for dinner, and, after dinner, he would go over to his gramophone and put on a record. His particular favourite, according to Milovan Djilas, was a song in which howling dogs replaced the sound of human voices. And then Stalin would make the Politburo dance.

Some of them were quite good dancers. Mikoyan, for example:

he was a lovely dancer. And Bulganin wasn't bad; he could follow a beat. Khrushchev, though, was a lousy dancer - 'like a cow on ice' - and so was Malenkov and so was Kaganovich, for that matter.

Anyway, one evening - drawn, we might speculate, by the peculiar noise ofgrown men dancing to the baying of hounds -Stalin's daughter, Svetlana, put her head round the door, and Stalin made her start dancing, too. Well, after a time, she grew tired, and her fret were hardly moving, and this made Stalin angry He shouted at her, 'Dance!'And she said, 'But I've already danced, papa, I'm tired 'At which Stalin - and here I quote Khrushchev's description - grabbed her like this, by the hair, a whole fistful, I mean by her forelock, as it were, and pulled, you understand, very hard. . . pulled, jerked and jerked'

Now keep that image in your mind for a moment, and let us consider the fate of Stalin family His first wife died, His oldest son, Yakov, tried to shoot himself when he was twenty-one, but only succeeded in inflicting severe wounds. (When Stalin saw him, according to Svetlana, he laughed Ha!' he said Missed' Couldn't even shoot straight!) Yakov was captured by the Germans during the war and, after Stalin refused a prisoner exchange, he tried suicide again - successfully this time, by hurling himself at the electrified fence of his prison camp.

Stalin had one other child, a son, Vasily, an alcoholic, who died aged forty-one.

Stalin’s second wife, Nadezhda, refused to bear her husband any more children - according to Svetlana, she had a couple of abortions - and late one night, aged thirty-one, she shot herself through the heart. (Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that someone shot her: no suicide note has ever been found) Nadezhda was one of four children. Her older brother, Pavel, was murdered by Stalin during the purges; the death certficate recorded a heart attack. Her younger brother, Fyodor, was driven insane when a friend of Stalin's, an Armenian bank robber named Kamo, handed him a gouged-out human heart. Her sister, Anna, was arrested on Stalin’s orders and sentenced to ten years in solitary confinement. By the time she came out she was no longer capable of recognising her own children. So that was one set of Stalin's relatives.

And what of the other set? Well, there was Aleksandr Svanidze, the brother of Stalin’s first wife - he was arrested in thirty-seven and shot in forty-one. And there was Svanidze's wife?, Maria, who was also arrested; she was shot in forty-two. Their surviving child, Ivan – Stalin’s nephew - was sent into exile, to a ghastly state orphanage for the children of 'enemies of the state’, and when he emerged, nearly twenty years later, he was profoundly psychologically damaged And finally there was Stalin's sister-in-law, Maria - she was also arrested in thirty-seven and died mysteriously in prison.

Now let us go back to that image of Svetlana. Her mother is dead Her half-brother is dead Her other brother is an alcoholic. Two uncles are dead and one is insane. Two aunts are dead and one is in prison. She is being dragged around by her hair, by her father, in front of a roomful of the most powerful men in Russia, all of whom are being forced to dance, maybe to the sound of howling dogs.

Colleagues, whenever I sit in an archive or, more rarely these days, attend a symposium like this one, I always try to remember that scene, because it reminds me to be wary of imposing a rational structure on the past. There is nothing in the archives here to show us that the Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or the Commissar for Foreign Affairs, when they made their decisions, were shattered by exhaustion, and very probably terrified - that they had been up until three and dancing for their lives, and knew they might well be dancing again that evening. Not that I am saying that Stalin was crazy. On the contrary One could argue that the man who worked the gramophone was the sanest person in the room. When Svetlana asked him why her Aunt Anna was being held in solitary confinement, he answered, 'Because she talks too much.' With Stalin, there was usually a logic to his actions. He didn't need a sixteenth-century English philosopher to tell him that 'knowledge is power’ That realisation is the absolute essence of Stalinism. Among other things, it explains why Stalin murdered so many of his own family and close colleagues - he wanted to destroy anyone who had any first-hand knowledge of him.

And this policy, we must concede, was remarkably successful. Here we are, gathered in Moscow, forty-five years after Stalin's death, to discuss the newly-opened archives of the Soviet era. Above our heads, in fire-proofed strong-rooms, maintained at a constant temperature of eighteen degrees celsius and sixty per cent humidity, are one and a half million files - the entire archive of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Yet how much does this archive really tell us about Stalin? What can we see today that we couldn't see when the communists were in power? Stalin’s letters to Molotov - we can see those - and they are not without interest. But clearly they have been heavily censored and not just that: they end in thirty-six, at precisely the point when the real killing started. We can also see the death lists that Stalin signed And we have his appointments book. So we know that on the eighth of December, nineteen thirty-eight, Stalin signed thirty death lists containing five thousand names, many of them of his so-called friends. And we also know, thanks to his appointments book, that on that very same evening he went to the Kremlin movie theatre and watched, not Tarzan this time, but a comedy called Happy Guys. But between these two events, between the killing and the laughter, there lies - what? Who? We do not know. And why? Because Stalin made it his business to murder almost everyone who might have been in a position to tell us what he was like...

.MAMANTOV'S NEW PLACE turned out to be just across the river, in the big apartment complex on Serafimovich Street known as the House on the Embankment. This was the building to which Comrade Stalin, with typical generosity, had insisted that leading Party members go to live with their families. There were ten floors with twenty-five different entrances at ground level, at each of which the GenSec had thoughtfully posted an NKVD guard - purely for your security, comrades.

By the time the purges were finished, six hundred of the building's tenants had been liquidated. Now the flats were privately owned and the good ones, with a view across the Moskva to the Kremlin, sold for upwards of half a million dollars. Kelso wondered how Mamantov could afford it.

He came down the steps from the bridge and crossed the road. Parked outside the entrance to Mamantov's staircase was a boxy white Lada, its windows open, two men in the front seat, chewing gum. One had a livid scar running almost from the corner of his eye to the edge of his mouth. They watched Kelso with undisguised interest as he walked past them towards the entrance.

Inside the apartment block, next to the elevator, someone had written, neatly, in English, in capitals and lower case, 'Fuck Off'. A tribute to the Russian education system, thought Kelso. He whistled nervously, a made-up tune. The lift rose smoothly and he got out at the ninth floor to be met by the distant thump of western rock music. Mamantov's apartment had an outer door of steel plate. A red aerosol swastika had been sprayed on to the metal. The paint was old and faded but no attempt had been made to clean it off. Set in the wall above it was a small remote TV camera. There was already plenty about this set-up that Kelso didn't like - the heavy security, the guys in the car downstairs - and for a moment he could almost smell the terror from sixty years ago, as if the sweat had seeped into the brickwork: the clattering footsteps, the heavy knocking, the hurried goodbyes, the sobs, silence. His hand paused over the buzzer. What a place to choose to live. He pressed the button.

After a long wait, the door was opened by an elderly woman. Madame Mamantov was as he remembered her -tall and broad, not fat, but heavily built. She was draped in a shapeless, flowery smock and looked as though she had just finished crying. Her red eyes rested on him briefly, distractedly, but before he could even open his mouth she had wandered off and suddenly there was Vladimir Mamantov, looming down the dark passage, dressed as if he still had an office to go to - white shirt, blue tie, black suit with a small red star pinned in his lapel.

He didn't say anything, but he offered his hand. He had a crushing handshake, perfected, it was said, by squeezing balls of vulcanized rubber during KGB meetings. (A lot of things were said about Mamantov: for example - and Kelso had put it in his book - that at the famous meeting in the Lubyanka on the night of 20 August 1991, when the plotters of the coup had realised the game was up, Mamantov had offered to fly down to Gorbachev's dacha at Foros on the Black Sea and shoot the Soviet President personally; Mamantov had dismissed the story as 'a provocation'.) A young man in a black shirt with a shoulder holster appeared in the gloom behind Mamantov, and Mamantov said, without looking round,

'It's all right, Viktor. I'm dealing with the situation.' Mamantov had a bureaucrat's face - steel-coloured hair, steel-framed glasses and pouched cheeks, like a suspicious hound's. You could pass it in the street a hundred times and never notice it. But his eyes were bright: a fanatic's eyes, thought Kelso; he could imagine Eichmann or some other Nazi desk-murderer having eyes like these. The old woman had started making a curious howling noise from the other end of the flat, and Mamantov told Viktor to go and sort her out.

'So you're part of the gathering of thieves,' he said to Kelso.

"What?'

'The symposium. Pravda published a list of the foreign historians they invited to speak. Your name was on it.

'Historians are hardly thieves, Comrade Mamantov. Even foreign historians.

'No? Nothing is more important to a nation than its history. It is the earth upon which any society stands. Ours has been stolen from us - gouged and blackened by the libels of our enemies until the people have become lost.'

Kelso smiled. Mamantov hadn't changed at all. 'You can't seriously believe that.'

'You're not Russian. Imagine if your country offered to sell its national archive to a foreign power for a miserable few million dollars.'

'You're not selling your archive. The plan is to microfilm the records and make them available to scholars.'

'To scholars in California,' said Mamantov, as if this settled the argument. 'But this is tedious. I have an urgent appointment.' He looked at his watch. 'I can only give you five minutes, so get to the point. What's all this about Stalin's notebook?'

'It comes into some research I'm doing.' 'Research? Research into what?' Kelso hesitated. 'The events surrounding Stalin's death.' 'Go on.

'If I could just ask you a couple of questions, then perhaps I could explain the relevance -'No,' said Mamantov. 'Let us do this the other way round.

You tell me about this notebook and then I might answer your questions.'

'You mzkht answer my questions?'

Mamantov consulted his watch again. 'Four minutes.'

All right,' said Kelso, quickly. 'You remember the official biography of Stalin, by Dmitri Volkogonov?'

'The traitor Volkogonov? You're wasting my time. That book is a piece of shit.'

'You've read it?'

'Of course not. There's enough filth in this world without my volunteering to go jump in it.'

'Volkogonov claimed that Stalin kept certain papers -private papers, including a black oilskin exercise book - in his safe at the Kremlin, and that these papers were stolen by Beria. His source for this story was a man you're familiar with, I think. Aleksey Alekseevich Yepishev.'

There was a slight movement - a flicker, no more - in Mamantov's hard grey eyes. He's heard of it, thought Kelso, he knows about the notebook -'And?'

And I wondered if you'd come across this story while you were writing your entry on Yepishev for the biographical guide. He was a friend of yours, I assume?'

"What's it to you?' Mamantov glanced at Kelso's bag. 'Have you found the notebook?'

'No.'

'But you know someone who may know where it is?'

'Someone came to see me,' began Kelso, then stopped. The apartment was very quiet now. The old woman had finished wailing, but the bodyguard hadn't reappeared. On the hall table was a copy of Aurora.

Nobody in Moscow knew where he was, he realised. He had dropped off the map.

'I'm wasting your time,' he said. 'Perhaps I might come back when I've -

'That's unnecessary,' said Mamantov, softening his tone. His sharp eyes were checking Kelso up and down - flickering across his face, his hands, gauging the potential strength of his arms and chest, darting up to his face again. His conversational technique was pure Leninism, thought Kelso:

'Push out a bayonet. If it strikes fat, push deeper. If it strikes iron, pull back for another day.'

'I'll tell you what, Doctor Kelso,' said Mamantov. 'I'll show you something. It will interest you. And then I'll tell you something. And then you'll tell me something.' He waved his fingers back and forth between them. 'We'll trade. Is it a deal?'

AFTERWARDS, Kelso tried to make a list of it all, but there was too much of it for him to remember: the immense oil painting, by Gerasimov, of Stalin on the ramparts of the Kremlin, and the neon-lit glass cabinet with its miniatures of Stalin - its Stalin dishes and its Stalin boxes, its Stalin stamps and Stalin medals - and the case of books by Stalin, and the books about Stalin, and the photographs of Stalin – signed and unsigned - and the scrap of Stalin's handwriting - blue pencil, lined paper, quarto-sized and framed - that hung above the bust of Stalin by Vuchetich ('... don't spare individuals, no matter what position they occupy, spare only the cause, the interests of the cause. .

He moved among the collection while Mamantov watched him closely.

The handwriting sample, said Kelso - that. . . that was a note for a speech, was it not? Correct, said Mamantov:

October 1920, address to the Worker-Peasant Inspection. And the Gerasimov? Wasn't it similar to the artist's 1938 study of Stalin and Voroshilov on the Kremlin Wall? Mamantov nodded again, apparently pleased to share these moments with a fellow connoisseur: yes, the GenSec had ordered Gerasimov to paint a second version, leaving out Voroshilov - it was Stalin's way of reminding Voroshilov that life (how to put it?) could always be rearranged to imitate art. A collector in Maryland and another in Dusseldorf had each offered Mamantov $100,000 for the picture but he would never permit it to leave Russian soil. Never. One day, he hoped to exhibit it in Moscow, along with the rest of his collection - 'when the political situation is more favourable'.

And you think one day the situation will be favourable?'

'Oh yes. Objectively, history will record that Stalin was right. That is how it is with Stalin. From the subjective perspective, he may seem cruel, even wicked. But the glory of the man is to be found in the objective perspective. There he is a towering figure. It is my unshakeable belief that when the proper perspective is restored, statues will be raised again to Stalin.'

'Goering said the same of Hitler during the Nuremberg trial. I don't see any statues -

'Hitler lost.'

'But surely Stalin lost? In the end? From the "objective perspective"?'

'Stalin inherited a nation with wooden ploughs and bequeathed us an empire armed with atomic weapons. How can you say he lost? The men who came after him - they lost. Not Stalin. Stalin foresaw what would happen, of course. Khrushchev, Molotov, Beria, Malenkov - they thought they were hard, but he saw through them. "After I've gone, the capitalists will drown you like blind kittens." His analysis was correct, as always.'

'So you think that if Stalin had lived -'

'We would still be a superpower? Absolutely. But men of Stalin's genius are only given to a country perhaps once in a century. And even Stalin could not devise a strategy to defeat death. Tell me, did you see the survey of opinion to mark the forty-fifth anniversary of his passing?'

'I did.'

And what did you think of the results?'

'I thought they were -, Kelso tried to find a neutral word '- remarkable.'

(Remarkable? Christ. They were horrifying. One third of Russians said they thought Stalin was a great war leader. One in six thought he was the greatest ruler the country had ever had. Stalin was seven times more popular than Boris Yeltsin, while poor old Gorbachev hadn't even scored enough votes to register. This was in March. Kelso had been so appalled he had tried to sell an op-ed piece to the New York Times but they weren't interested.)

'Remarkable,' agreed Mamantov. 'I should even say astounding, considering his vilification by so-called historians.

There was an awkward silence.

'Such a collection,' said Kelso, 'it must have taken years to assemble.' And cost a fortune, he almost added.

'I have a few business interests,' said Mamantov, dismissively. 'And a considerable amount of spare time, since my retirement.' He put out his hand to touch the bust, but then hesitated and drew it back. 'The difficulty, of course, for any collector, is that he left so little behind in the way of personal possessions. He had no interest in private property, not like these corrupt swine we have in the Kremlin nowadays. A few sticks of government-issue furniture was all he had. That and the clothes he stood up in. And his private notebook, of course.' He gave Kelso a crafty look. 'Now that would be something. Something - what is the American phrase? - to die for?'

'So you have heard of it?'

Mamantov smiled - an unheard-of occurrence - a narrow, thin, rapid smile, like a sudden crack in ice. 'You're interested in Yepishev?'

'Anything you can tell me.'

Mamantov crossed the room to the bookshelf and pulled down a large, leather-bound album. On a higher shelf Kelso could see the two volumes of Volkogonov - of course Mamantov had read them.

'I first met Aleksey Alekseevich,' he said, 'in fifty-seven, when he was ambassador in Bucharest. I was on my way back from Hungary, after we'd sorted things out there. Nine months work, without a break. I needed a rest, I can tell you. We went shooting together in the Azuga region.'

He carefully peeled back a layer of tissue paper and offered the heavy album to Kelso. It was open at a small photograph, taken by an amateur camera, and Kelso had to stare at it closely to make out what was happening. In the background, a forest. In the foreground, two men in leather hunting caps with fleece-lined jackets, smiling, holding rifles, dead birds piled at their booted feet. Yepishev was on the left, Mamantov next to him - still hard-faced but leaner then, a cold war caricature of a KGB man.

And somewhere there's another.' Mamantov leaned over Kelso's shoulder and turned a couple of pages. Close up, he smelled elderly, of mothballs and carbolic, and he had shaved badly, as old men do, leaving grey stubble in the shadow of his nose and in the cleft of his broad chin. 'There.'

This was a much bigger, professional picture, showing maybe two hundred men, arranged in four ranks, as if at a graduation. Some were in uniform, some in civilian suits. A caption underneath said 'Sverdlovsk, 1980'.

'This was an ideological collegium, organised by the Central Committee Secretariat. On the final day, Comrade Suslov himself addressed us. This is me.' He pointed to a grim face in the third row, then moved his finger to the front, to a relaxed, uniformed figure sitting cross-legged on the ground. And this - would you believe? - is Volkogonov. And here again is Aleksey Alekseevich.'

It was like looking at a picture of Imperial officers in the tsarist time, thought Kelso - such confidence, such order, such masculine arrogance! Yet within ten years, their world had been atomised: Yepishev was dead, Volkogonov had renounced the Party, Mamantov was in jail.

Yepishev had died in 1985, said Mamantov. He had passed on just as Gorbachev came to power. And that was a good time for a decent communist to die, in Mamantov's opinion: Aleksey Alekseevich had been spared Here was a man whose whole life had been devoted to Marxism-Leninism, who had helped plan the fraternal assistance to Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. What a mercy he hadn't lived to see the whole lot thrown away. Writing Yepishev's entry for the Book of Heroes had been a privilege, and if nobody ever read it nowadays - well, that was what he meant. The country had been robbed of its history.

And did Yepishev tell you the same story about Stalin's papers as he told Volkogonov?'

'He did. He talked more freely towards the end. He was often ill. I visited him in the leadership clinic. Brezhnev and he were treated together by the parapsychic healer, Davitashvili.'

'I don't suppose he left any papers.

'Papers? Men like Yepishev didn't keep papers.

'Any relatives?'

'None that I knew of. We never discussed families.' Mamantov pronounced the word as if it was absurd. 'Did you know that one of the things Aleksey had to do was interrogate Beria? Night after night. Can you imagine what that must have been like? But Beria never cracked, not once in nearly half a year, until right at the very end, after his trial, when they were strapping him to the board to shoot him. He hadn't believed they'd dare to kill him.'

'How do you mean, he cracked?'

'He was squealing like a pig - that's what Yepishev said. Shouting something about Stalin and something about an archangel. Can you imagine that? Beria, of all people, getting religious! But then they put a scarf in his mouth and shot him. I don't know any more.' Mamantov closed the albums tenderly and placed them back on the shelf. 'So,' he said, turning to face Kelso with a look of menacing innocence, someone came to see you. When was this?'

Kelso was on his guard at once. 'I'd prefer not to say. 'And he told you about Stalin's papers? He was a man, I assume? An eyewitness, from that time?'

Kelso hesitated.

'Named?'

Kelso smiled and shook his head. Mamantov seemed to think he was back in the Lubyanka.

'His profession then?'

'I can't tell you that, either.'

'Does he know where these papers are?'

'Perhaps.

'He offered to show you?'

'No.'

'But you asked him to show you?'

'No.'

'You're a very disappointing historian, Dr Kelso. I thought you were famous for your diligence –

''If you must know, he disappeared before I had the chance.'

He regretted the words the instant they were out of his mouth.

'What do you mean, he "disappeared"?'

'We were drinking,' muttered Kelso. 'I left him alone for a minute. When I came back he'd run away.

It sounded implausible, even to his own ears.

'Run away?' Mamantov's eyes were as grey as winter. 'I don't believe you.

'Vladimir Pavlovich,' said Kelso, meeting his gaze and holding it, 'I can assure you this is the truth.'

'You're lying. Why? Why?' Mamantov rubbed his chin. 'I think it must be because you have the notebook.'

'If I had the notebook, ask yourself: Would I be here?

Wouldn't I be on the first flight back to New York? Isn't that what thieves are supposed to do?'

Mamantov continued to stare at him for a few more seconds, then looked away. 'Clearly we need to find this man.

We...

'I don't think he wants to be found.'

'He will contact you again.'

'I doubt it.' Kelso badly wanted to get out of here now. He felt compromised, somehow; complicit. 'Besides, I'm flying back to America tomorrow. Which, now I come to think of it, really means I ought -'

He made a move towards the door but Mamantov barred it. Are you excited, Dr Kelso? Do you feel the force of Comrade Stalin, even from the grave?'

Kelso laughed unhappily. 'I don't think I quite share your ... obsession.'

'Go fuck your mother! I've read your work. Does that surprise you? I'll pass no comment on its quality. But I'll tell you this: you're as obsessed as I am.'

'Perhaps. But in a different way.'

'Power,' said Mamantov, savouring the word in his mouth like wine, 'the absolute mastery and understanding of power. No man ever matched him for it. Do this, do that. Think this, think that. Now I say you live, and now I say you die, and all you say is, "Thank you for your kindness, Comrade Stalin." That's the obsession.~

'Yes, but then there's the difference, if you'll permit me, which is you want him back.'

'And you just like to watch, is that it? I like fucking and you like pornography?' Mamantov jerked his thumb at the room. 'You should have seen yourself just now. "Isn't this a note for a speech?" "Isn't that a copy of an earlier painting?" Eyes wide, tongue out - the western liberal, getting his safe thrill. Of course, he understood that, too. And now you tell me you're going to give up trying to find his private notebook and just run away back to America?'

'May I get by?'

Kelso stepped to his left but Mamantov moved smartly to block him.

'This could be one of the greatest historical discoveries of the age. And you want to run away? It must be found. We must find it together. And then you must present it to the world. I want no credit - I promise you: I prefer the shadows -the honour will be yours alone.

'So, what's all this then, Comrade Mamantov?' said Kelso, with forced cheerfulness. 'Am I a prisoner?'

Between him and the outside world there were, he calculated, one fit and obviously crazy ex-KGB man, one armed bodyguard, and two doors, one of them armour-plated. And for a moment, he thought that Mamantov might indeed be intending to keep him: that he had everything else connected with Stalin, so why not a Stalin historian, pickled in formaldehyde and laid out in a glass case, like V. I. Lenin? But then Madame Mamantov shouted from the passage -'What's going on in there?' - and the spell was broken.

'Nothing,' called Mamantov. 'Stop listening. Go back to your room. Viktor!'

'But who is everyone?' wailed the woman. 'That's what I want to know. And why is it always so dark?' She started to cry. They heard the shuffle of her feet and the sound of a door closing.

'I'm sorry,' said Kelso.

'Keep your pity,' said Mamantov. He stood aside. 'Go on, then. Get out of here. Go.' But when Kelso was halfway down the passage he shouted after him: 'We'll talk again about this matter. One way or another.'

THERE were three men now in the car downstairs, although Kelso was too preoccupied to pay them much attention. He paused in the gloomy portal of the House on the Embankment, to hoist his canvas bag more firmly on to his shoulder, then set off in the direction of the Bolshoy Kamenniy bridge.

'That's him, major,' said the man with the scar, and Feliks Suvorin leaned forward in his seat to get a better look. Suvorin was young to be a full major in the SVR - he was only in his thirties - a dapper figure, with blond hair and cornflower blue eyes. And he wore a western aftershave, that was the other thing that was very noticeable at this moment: the little car was fragrant with the smell of Eau Sauvage.

'He had that bag with him when he went in?'

'Yes, major.'

Suvorin glanced up at the Mamantovs' ninth-floor apartment. What was needed here was better coverage. The SVR had managed to get a bug into the flat at the start of the operation, but it had lasted just three hours before Mamantov's people had found it and ripped it out.

Kelso had begun climbing the flight of stairs that led up to the bridge.

'Off you go, Bunin,' said Suvorin, tapping the man in front of him lightly on the shoulder. 'Nothing too obvious, mind you. Just try to keep him in view. We don't want a diplomatic protest.

Grumbling under his breath, Bunin levered himself out of the car. Kelso was moving rapidly now, had almost reached road-level, and the Russian had to jog across to the bottom of the steps to make up part of the distance. Well, well, thought Suvorin, he's certainly in a hurry to get somewhere. Or is it just that he wants to get away from here?

He watched the blurred pink faces of the two men above the stone parapet as they headed north across the river into the grey afternoon and then were lost from view.

KELSO PAID HIS two-rouble fare at the Borovitskaya metro station, collected his plastic token, and descended gratefully into the Moscow earth. At the entrance to the northbound platform something made him glance back up the moving staircase to see if Mamantov was following, but there was no sign of him among the tiers of exhausted faces.

It was a stupid thought - he tried to smile at himself for his paranoia - and he turned away, towards the welcoming dimness and the warm gusts of oil and electricity. Almost at once, a yellow headlight danced around a bend in the track and the rush of the train sucked him forwards. Kelso let the crowd jostle him into a carriage. There was an odd comfort in this dowdy, silent multitude. He hung on to the metal handrail and pitched and swayed with the rest as they plunged back into the tunnel.

They hadn't gone far when the train suddenly slowed and stopped - a bomb scare, it turned out, at the next station: the militia had to check it out - and so they sat there in the semidarkness, nobody speaking, just the occasional cough, the tension rising by imperceptible degrees.

Kelso stared at his reflection in the dark glass. He was jumpy, he had to admit it. He couldn't help feeling he had just put himself into some kind of danger, that telling Mamantov about the notebook had been a reckless mistake. What had the Russian called it? Something to die for? It was a relief to his nerves when the lights eventually flickered back on and the train jolted forwards. The soothing rhythm of normality resumed. By the time Kelso emerged above ground it was after four. Low in the western sky, barely clearing the tops of the dark trees that fringed the Zoopark, was a lemony crack in the clouds. A winter sunset was little more than an hour away. He would have to hurry. He folded the map into a small square and twisted it so that the metro station was to his right. Across the road was the entrance to the zoo - red rocks, a waterfall, a fairy tower - and, a little further along, a beer garden, closed for the season, its plastic tables stacked, its striped umbrellas down and flapping. He could hear the roar of the traffic on the Garden Ring road, about two hundred yards straight ahead. Across that, sharp left, then right, and there it ought to be. He stuffed the map into his pocket, picked up his bag and climbed the cobbled slope that led to the big intersection.

Ten lanes of traffic formed an immense, slow-moving river of light and steel. He crossed it in a dog-leg and suddenly he was into diplomatic Moscow: wide streets, grand houses, old birch trees weeping dead leaves on to sleek black cars. There wasn't much life. He passed a silvery-headed man walking a poodle and a woman in green rubber boots that poked incongruously from beneath her Muslim robe. Behind the thick gauze of the curtained windows, he could see the occasional yellow constellation of a chandelier. He stopped at the corner of Vspolnyi Street and peered along it. A militia car drove towards him very slowly and passed away to his right. The road was deserted.

He located the house at once, but he wanted to get his bearings and to check if anyone was about, so he made himself walk past it, right to the end of the street before returning along the opposite side. 'There was a red sickle moon, and a single red star. And the place was guarded by devils with blackened faces... 'Suddenly he saw what the old man must have meant. A red sickle moon and a single red star -that would be a flag: a Muslim flag. And black faces~ The place must have been an embassy - it was too big for anything else - an embassy of a Muslim country, perhaps in North Africa. He was certain he was right. It was a big building, that was for sure, forbidding and ugly, built of sandy-coloured stone which made it look like a bunker. It ran for at least forty yards along the western side of the road. He counted thirteen sets of windows. Above the massive entrance was an iron balcony with double doors leading on to it. There was no nameplate and no flag. If it had been an embassy it was abandoned now; it was lifeless.

He crossed the street and went up close to it, patting the coarse stone with his palm. He stood on tiptoe and tried to see through the windows. But they were set too high and besides were blanked off by the ubiquitous grey netting. He gave up and followed the facade around the corner. The house went on down this street, too. Thirteen windows again, no door, thirty or forty yards of heavy masonry -immense, impregnable. Where this elevation of the house eventually ended there was a wall made of the same stone, about eight feet high, with a locked, iron-studded wooden door set into it. The wall ran on - down this street, along the side of the ring-road, and finally back up the narrow alley which formed the fourth side of the property. Walking round it, Kelso could see why Beria had chosen it, and why his rivals had decided the only place to capture him was inside the Kremlin. Holed up in this fortress he could have withstood a siege.

In the neighbouring houses, the lights were becoming sharper as the afternoon faded into dusk. But Beria's place remained a square of darkness. It seemed to be gathering the shadows into itself He heard a car door slam and he walked back up to the corner of Vspolnyi Street. While he had been at the back of the property, a small van had arrived at the front. He hesitated, then began to move towards it.

The van was a Russian model - white, unmarked, unoccupied. Its engine had just been switched off and it was making a slight ticking noise as it cooled. As he came level with it, he glanced towards the door of the house and saw that it was slightly open. Again he hesitated, looking up and down the quiet street. He went over and put his head into the gap and shouted a greeting.

His words echoed in the empty hall. The light inside was weak and bluish, but even without taking another step he could see that the floor was of black and white tiles. To his left was the start of a wide staircase. The house smelled strongly of sour dust and old carpets, and there was an immense stillness to it, as though it had been shut up for months. He pushed the door wide open and took a step inside.

He called out again.

He two options now. He could stay by the door, or he could go further inside. He went further inside and immediately, like a laboratory rat in a maze, he found his options multiplied. He could stay where he was, or he could take the door to his left, or the stairs, or the passage that led off into the darkness beyond the stairs, or one of the three doors to his right. For a moment, the weight of choice paralysed him. But the stairs were straight ahead and seemed the obvious course - and perhaps, subconsciously, he also wanted to get the advantage of height, to get above whoever might be on the ground floor, or at least to get on equal terms with them if they were already above.

The stairs were stone. He was wearing brown suede boots with leather soles he'd bought in Oxford years ago and no matter how quietly he tried to walk his steps seemed to ring like gunshots. But that was good. He wasn't a thief, and to emphasise the point he called out again. Pree-vyet! Kto tam? Hello? Is anybody there? The stairs curled round to his right and he had a good, high view now, looking down into the dark blue well of the hall, pierced by the softer shaft of blue that shone from the open door. He reached the top of the stairs and came out into a wide corridor that stretched to right and left, vanishing at either end into Rembrandt gloom. Ahead of him was a door. He tried to take his bearings. That must lead to the room above the front entrance, the one with the iron balcony. What was it? A ballroom? The master bedroom? The corridor floor was parquet and he remembered Rapava's description of Beria's damp footprints on the polished wood as he hurried off to take the call from Malenkov.

Kelso opened the heavy door and the stale air hit him like a wall. He had to clamp a hand to his mouth and nose to keep from gagging. The smell that pervaded the whole house seemed to have its source in here. It was a big room, bare, lit from the opposite wall by three tall, net-curtained windows, high oblongs of translucent grey. He moved towards them. The floor seemed to be strewn with pools of tiny black husks. His idea was that if he pulled back the curtain, he could throw light on the room, and see what he was treading on. But as his hand touched the rough nylon net, the material seemed to split and ripple downwards and a shower of black granules went pattering across his hand and brushed the back of his neck. He twitched the curtain again and the shower became a cascade, a waterfall of dead, winged insects. Millions of them must have hatched and died in here over the summer, trapped in the airless room. They had a papery, acid smell. They were in his hair. He could feel them rustling under his feet. He stepped backwards, furiously brushing at himself and shaking his head.

Down in the lobby, a man shouted. Kto idyot?Is somebody up there?

Kelso knew he should have shouted back. What greater proof could he have offered of his blameless intentions - of his innocence - than to have stepped at once out on to the landing, identified himself and apologised? He was very sorry. The door was open. This was an interesting old house. He was a historian. Curiosity had got the better of him. And obviously, there was nothing here to steal. Really, he was truly sorry -That was Kelso's alternative history. He didn't take it. He didn't choose not to take it. He merely did nothing, which was a form of choice. He stood there, in Lavrenty Beria's old bedroom, frozen, half bent, as if the creaking of his bones might give him away, and listened. With each second that passed, his chances of talking his way out of the building dwindled. The man began to climb the staircase. He came up seven steps - Kelso counted them - then stopped and stayed very still for perhaps a minute.

Then he walked down again and crossed the lobby and the front door closed.

Kelso moved now. He went to the window. Without touching the curtain he found it was possible, by pressing his cheek to the wall, to peer around the edge of the dusty nylon mesh, down into the street. From this oblique angle, he could see a man in a black uniform, standing on the pavement next to the van, holding a flashlight. The man stepped off the kerb and into the gutter and squinted up at the house. He was squat and simian. His arms seemed too long for his thick trunk. Suddenly, he was looking directly at Kelso - a brutal, stupid face - and Kelso drew back. When he next dared to risk a look, the man was bending to open the door on the driver's side. He threw in the flashlight and climbed in after it. The engine started. The van drove off Kelso gave him thirty seconds then hurried downstairs. He was locked in. He couldn't believe it. The absurdity of his predicament almost made him smile. He was locked inside Beria’s house! The front door was huge, with a big iron ball for a handle and a lock the size of a telephone directory. He tried it hopelessly, then looked around. What if there was an intruder alarm? In the gloom, he couldn't see anything attached to the walls, but maybe it was an old-fashioned system - that would be more likely, wouldn't it? - something triggered by pressure-pads rather than beams? The idea froze him.

What set him moving again was the gathering darkness and the realisation that if he didn't find an escape route now he might be trapped by his blindness all night. There was a light switch by the door but he didn't dare try it - the guard was obviously suspicious: he might drive by for a second look. In any case, something about the silence of the place, its utter deadness, made him sure all forms of life-support had been disconnected, that the house had been left to rot. He tried to recall Rapava's description of the lay-out when he came in to answer Malenkov's call. Something about coming in off a verandah, through a duty room, past a kitchen and into the hall.

He headed into the blackness of the passage beyond the stairs, feeling his way along the left-hand wall. The plaster was cool and smooth. The first door he encountered was locked. The second wasn't - he felt a draught of cold air, but sensed a drop, into a cellar, presumably - and closed it quickly. The third opened on to the dull blue gleam of metal surfaces and a faint smell of old food. The fourth was at the end, facing him, and revealed the room where he guessed that Beria's guards must once have sat.

Unlike the rest of the house, which seemed to have been stripped bare, there was furniture here - a plain wooden table and a chair, and an old sideboard - and some signs of life. A copy of Pravda - he could just make out the familiar masthead - a kitchen knife, an ashtray. He touched the table and felt crumbs. Pale light leaked through a pair of small windows. Between them was a door. It was locked. There was no key. He looked again at the windows. Too narrow for him to squeeze through. He took a breath. Some habits, surely, are international? He ran his hand along the sill to the right of the door and it was there and it turned easily in the lock. When the door was opened he removed the key, and - a nice touch this, he remembered thinking - replaced it on the sill.

HE emerged on to a narrow veranda, about two yards wide, with weathered floorboards and a broken handrail. He could hear traffic at the bottom of the garden and the laborious whine of a big jet, dropping towards Sheremetevo Airport. The breeze was cold, scented by the smoke of a bonfire. There was a last pale flush of daylight in the sky. He guessed the garden must have been abandoned at the same time as the house. Nobody could have worked in it for months. To his left was an ornate greenhouse with an iron chimney, partially overgrown by Russian vines. To his right, a ragged thicket of dark green 'shrubs. Ahead were trees. He stepped down off the veranda on to the carpet of leaves that covered the lawn. The wind stirred and lofted some of them, sent a detachment cart wheeling towards the house. He kicked through the drifts towards the orchard - a cherry orchard he could see now as he came closer: big old trees, maybe twenty feet high, at least a hundred of them, a Chekhovian scene. Suddenly he stopped. The ground beneath the trees was flat and level except in one place. At the base of one tree, close to a stone bench, was a patch of blackness, darker than the surrounding shadows. He frowned. Was he sure he wasn't imagining it?

He went over, knelt and slowly sank his hands into the leaves. On the surface they were dry but the lower levels were damp and mulchy. He brushed them back, releasing a rich smell of moist soil - the black and fragrant earth of Mother Russia.

'Don't make so wide. It's not a grave. You're making work for yourself. .

He cleared away the leaves from an area about a yard square, and although he couldn't see much, he could see enough, and he could feel it. The grass had been removed and a hole had been dug. And then it had been filled in again and an attempt had been made to jam the turfs back into their original positions. But some parts had crumbled and others overlapped the lip of the hole and the result was a mess, like a broken, muddy jigsaw it had been done in a hurry, thought Kelso, and it had been done recently, possibly even today. He stood and brushed the wet leaves from his coat.

Beyond the high wall he could hear the traffic on the wide highway. Normality seemed close enough to touch. He used the side of his foot to scrape a covering of leaves back across the scarred surface, grabbed his bag and stumbled through the orchard towards the end of the garden, towards the sounds of life. He had to get out now. He didn't mind admitting it. He was rattled. The cherry trees stretched almost to the wall which rose up blank and sheer before him, like the perimeter of a Victorian gaol. There was no way he could scale it.

A narrow cinder path followed the line of the wall. He headed left. The path turned the corner and took him back in the direction of the house. About halfway along, he could see a darkened oblong - the garden door he had noticed from the street - but even this was overgrown and he had to pull back the trailing branches of a bush to get at it. It was locked, maybe even rusted shut. The big iron ring of the handle wouldn't turn. He flicked his cigarette lighter and held it close to get a better view. The door was solid but the frame looked weak. He stood back and aimed a kick at it, but nothing happened. He tried again. Hopeless.

He stepped back on to the path. He was now about thirty yards from the house. Its low roof was clearly silhouetted. He could see an aerial and the bulk of a tall chimney with a satellite dish attached to it. It was too big to be an ordinary domestic receiver.

It was while he was staring distractedly at the dish that his eye was caught by a glimmer of light in an upstairs window. It vanished so quickly he thought he might have imagined it and he told himself to keep his nerve, just find a tool, get out of here. But then it flashed again, like the beam of a lighthouse - pale, then bright, then pale again - as someone holding a powerful torch swivelled anti-clockwise towards the window then back towards the blackness of the room.

The suspicious security guard was back.

'God.' Kelso's lips were so tightly drawn he could barely shape his breath into the syllable. 'God, God, God.'

He ran up the path towards the greenhouse. A rickety door slid back just far enough for him to slip through. The vines made it darker inside than out. Trestle tables, an old trug, empty trays for seedlings, terracotta pots - nothing, nothing. He blundered down a narrow aisle, a frond of something brushed his face and then he collided with an object immense and metal. An old bulbous, cast-iron stove. And next to it, a heap of discarded implements - shovel, scuttle, riddling iron, poker. Poker.

He squeezed back on to the path, holding his prize, and jammed the poker into the gap between the garden door and the frame, just above the lock. He heaved and heard a crack. The poker came loose. He jammed it back and pulled again. Another crack. He worked it downwards. The frame was splintering.

He took a few paces back and ran at the door, rammed it with his shoulder, and some force that seemed to him beyond the physical - some fusion of will and fear and imagination - carried him through the door and out of the garden and into the quiet emptiness of the street.

AT SIX O'CLOCK that evening, Major Feliks Suvorin, accompanied by his assistant, Lieutenant Vissari Netto, presented an account of the day's developments to their immediate boss, the chief of the RT Directorate, Colonel Yuri Arsenyev.

The atmosphere was informal, as usual. Arsenyev sprawled sleepily behind his desk, on which had been placed a map of Moscow and a cassette player. Suvorin reclined on the sofa next to the window, smoking his pipe. Netto worked the tape machine.

'The first voice you'll hear, colonel,' Netto was saying to Arsenyev, 'is that of Madame Mamantov.'

He pressed PLAY

'Who is this?'

'Christopher Kelso. Could I speak with Comrade Mamantov?'

'Yes? Who is this?'

As I said, my name is Kelso. I'm using a public telephone. It's urgent.

'Yes, but who is this?'

Netto pressed PAUSE.

'Poor Ludmilla Fedorova,' said Arsenyev, sadly. 'Did you know her, Feliks? I knew her when she was at the Lubyanka. Oh, she was a piece of work! A body like a pagoda, a mind like a razor and a tongue to match.'

'Not any more,' said Suvorin. 'Not the mind, anyway.'

Netto said, 'The next voice will be even more familiar, colonel.'

PLAY

All right, this is Mamantov. Who are you?'

'It's Kelso. Doctor Kelso? You may remember me?' 'I remember you. What do you want?'

'To see you.

'Why should I see you after that shit you wrote?' 'I wanted to ask you some questions.'

About?'

A black oilskin notebook that used to belong to Josef Stalin.'

'Shut up.

'What?'

'I said shut up. I'm thinking it over. Where are you?'

'Near the Intourist building, on Mohavaja Street.'

'You're close. You'd better come.

STOP

'Play it again,' said Arsenyev. 'Not Ludmilla. The latter part.

Through the armoured glass at Arsenyev's back Suvorin could see the ripple of the office lights reflected in Yasenevo's ornamental lake, and the massive floodlit head of Lenin, and beyond these, almost invisible now, the dark line of the forest, its edge serrated against the evening sky. A pair of headlights winked through the trees and disappeared. A security patrol, thought Suvorin, suppressing a yawn. He was happy to let Netto do the talking. Give the lad a chance.

A black oilskin notebook that used to belong to JosefStalin...'

'Fuck me,' said Arsenyev, softly, and his flabby face tautened.

'The call was initiated this afternoon, at fourteenfourteen, by this man,' continued Netto, handing out two flimsy buff-coloured folders. 'Christopher Richard Andrew Kelso, commonly known as "Fluke".'

Archangel

'Now this is nice,' said Suvorin, who hadn't seen the photograph before. It was still glistening from the darkroom, and reeked of sodium thiosulphate. 'Where are we?'

'Third floor, inner courtyard, opposite the entrance to Mamantov's staircase.'

'So now we can afford an apartment in the House on the Embankment?' grumbled Arsenyev.

'It's empty. Doesn't cost us a rouble.'

'How long did he stay?'

'Arrived at fourteen-thirty-two, colonel. Left at fifteen-seven. One of our operatives, Lieutenant Bunin, was then detailed to follow him. Kelso caught the metro at Borovitskaya, here, changed once, got out at Krasnopresnenskaya, and walked to a house here -' Netto again put his finger on the map '- in Vspolnyi Street. A deserted property. He made an illegal entry and spent approximately forty-five minutes inside. He was last reported here, heading south on foot along the Garden Ring. That was ten minutes ago.

'What does that mean exactly? "Fluke"?'

"A lucky stroke", colonel,' said Netto, smartly. "'An unexpected success."'

'Sergo? Where's that damned coffee?' Arsenyev, immensely fat, had a habit of falling asleep if he didn't have caffeine every hour.

'It's coming, Yuri Semonovich,' said a voice from the intercom.

'Kelso's parents were both in their forties, sir, when he was born.'

Arsenyev turned a tiny and astonished eye towards Vissari Netto. 'Why do we care about his parents?'

'Well -' The young man wilted, stalled, appealed to Suvorin.

'Kelso was a fluke,' said Suvorin. 'The joke. It's a joke.'

'And that is funny?'

They were spared by the arrival of the coffee, borne in by Arsenyev's male assistant. The blue mug said 'I LOVE NEW YORK' and Arsenyev raised it towards them, as if drinking their health. 'So tell me,' he said, blinking through the steam over the rim, 'about Mister Fluke.'

'Born Wimbledon, England, nineteen fifty-four,' said Netto, reading from the file (he had done well, thought Suvorin, to get all this together in the space of an afternoon the lad was keen, you couldn't fault him on ambition). 'Father, a typical petit-bourgeois, a clerk in legal chambers; three sisters, all older; standard education; nineteen seventy-three, scholarship to study history at the college of St John, Cambridge; starred first class honours degree, nineteen seventy-six -Suvorin had already skimmed through all of this – the personal file dredged up from the Registry, a few newspaper cuttings, the entry in Who~- Who - and now he tried to reconcile the biography with this snatched picture of a figure in a raincoat leaving an apartment. The graininess of the picture had a pleasing, fifties feel: the man, glancing across the street, a cigarette in his mouth, had the appearance of a slightly seedy French actor playing a dodgy cop. Fluke. Does a name stick because it suits a man or does the man, unconsciously, evolve into his name? Fluke, the spoiled and lazy teenager, doted on by all these family women, who astonishes his teachers by winning a scholarship to Cambridge - the first in the history of his minor grammar school. Fluke, the carousing student who, after three years of no apparent effort, walks away with the best history degree of his year. Fluke, who just happens to turn up on the doorstep of one of the most dangerous men in Moscow -although, naturally, as a foreigner he would have felt

invulnerable. Yes, one would have to be wary of this Fluke scholarship to Harvard, nineteen seventy-eight; admitted to Moscow University, under the "Students for Peace" scheme, nineteen eighty; dissident contacts - see annex 'A" - led to re-categorisation from "bourgeois-liberal" to "conservative and reactionary"; doctoral thesis published eighty-four, Power in the Land: The Peasantry of the Volga Region~ 191 7-22; lecturer in modern history, Oxford University, eighty-three to ninety-four; now resident in New York City; author of the Oxfbrd History of Eastern Europe, 1945-87; Vortex: The Collapse of the Soviet Empire, published ninety-three; numerous articles -'

'All right, Netto,' said Arsenyev, holding up a hand. 'It's getting late. Did we ever make a pass at him?' This question was addressed to Suvorin.

'Twice,' said Suvorin. 'Once at the University, obviously, in nineteen eighty. Again in Moscow in ninety-one, when we tried to sell him on democracy and the New Russia.-

'And?'

'And? Looking at the reports? I should say he laughed in our faces.'

'He's a western asset, do we think?'

'Unlikely. He wrote an article in the New Yorker - it's in the file - describing how the Agency and SIS both tried to sign him. Rather a funny piece, in fact.'

Arsenyev frowned. He disapproved of publicity, on either side. 'Wife? Kids?'

Netto jumped in again: 'Married three times.' He glanced at Suvorin, and Suvorin made a little 'go ahead' gesture with his hand: he was happy to take a back seat. 'First, as a student, Katherine Jane Owen, marriage dissolved, seventy-nine. Second, Irma Mik1~ailovna Pugacheva, married eighty-one -'He married a Russian?'

'Ukrainian. Almost certainly a marriage of convenience. She was expelled from the University for anti-state activity. This is the beginning of Kelso's dissident contact. She was granted a visa in eighty-four.

'So we blocked her entry into Britain for three years?'

'No, colonel, the British did. By the time they let her in, Kelso was living with one of his students, an American, a Rhodes Scholar. Marriage to Pugacheva dissolved in eighty-five. She is now married to an orthodontist in Glamorgan.

There is a file but I'm afraid I haven t -'Forget it,' said Arsenyev. 'We'll drown in paper. And the third marriage?' He winked at Suvorin. A real romeo!' 'Margaret Madeline Lodge, an American student -''This is the Rhodes Scholar?'

'No, this is a different Rhodes Scholar. He married this one in eighty-six. The marriage was dissolved last year.'

'Kids?'

'Two sons. Resident with their mother in New York City.'

'One cannot help but admire this fellow,' said Arsenyev, who, despite his bulk, had a mistress of his own in Technical Support. He contemplated the photograph, the corners of his mouth turned down in admiration. 'What's he doing in Moscow?'

'Rosarkhiv are holding a conference,' said Netto, 'for foreign scholars.'

'Feliks?'

Major Suvorin had his right ankle swung up on to his left knee, his elbows resting casually on the sofa back, his sports jacket unbuttoned - easy, confident, Americanized: his style. He took a pull on his pipe before he spoke.

'The words used on the telephone are ambiguous, obviously. The implication could be that Mamantov has this notebook, and the historian wishes to see it. Or the historian himself has the notebook, or has heard of it, and wishes to check some detail with Mamantov. Whichever is the case, Mamantov is clearly aware of our surveillance, which is why he cuts the conversation short. When is Kelso due to leave the Federation, Vissari, do we know yet?'

'Tomorrow lunchtime,' said Netto. 'Delta flight to JFK, leaves Sheremetevo-2 at thirteen-thirty. Seat booked and confirmed.'

'I recommend we arrange for Kelso to be stopped and searched,' said Suvorin. 'Strip-searched, it had better be -delay the flight if necessary - on suspicion of exporting material of historical or cultural interest. If he's taken anything from this house in Vspolnyi Street, we can get it off him. In the meantime, we maintain our coverage of Mamantov.'

A buzzer sounded on Arsenyev's desk; Sergo's voice.

'There's a call for Vissari Petrovich.'

'All right, Netto,' said Arsenyev. 'Take it in the outer office.' When the door was closed, he scowled at Suvorin, 'Efficient little bastard, isn't he?'

'He's harmless enough, Yuri. He's just keen.

Arsenyev grunted, took two long squirts from his inhaler, unhitched his belt a notch, let his flesh sag towards his desk. The colonel's fat was a kind of camouflage: a blubbery, dimpled netting thrown over an acute mind, so that while other, sleeker men had fallen, Arsenyev had safely waddled on - through the cold war (KGB chief resident in Canberra and Ottawa), through glasnost and the failed coup and the break-up of the service, on and on, beneath the armoured soft protective shell of his flesh, until now, at last, he was into the final stretch: retirement in one year, dacha, mistress, pension, and the rest of the world could go fuck its collective mother. Suvorin rather liked him.

'All right, Feliks. What do you think?'

'The purpose of the Mamantov operation,' said Suvorin, carefully, 'is to discover how five hundred million roubles were siphoned out of KGB funds, where Mamantov hid them, and how this money is being used to fund the anti-democratic opposition. We already know he bankrolls that red fascist mucksheet -'

'Aurora -'- Aurora - if it now turns out he's spending it on guns as well, I'm interested. If he's buying Stalin memorabilia, or selling it, for that matter - well, it's sick, but -'

'This isn't just memorabilia, Feliks. This - this is famous -there was a file on this notebook - it was one of "the legends of Lubyanka".'

Suvorin's first reaction was to laugh. The old man couldn't be serious, surely? Stalin's notebook? But then he saw the expression on Arsenyev's face and hastily turned his laughter into a cough. 'I'm sorry, Yuri Semonovich - forgive me - if you take it seriously, then, of course, I take it seriously.'

'Run the tape again, Feliks, would you be so good? I never could work these damned machines.'

He slid it across the desk with a hairy, pudgy forefinger. Suvorin came over from the sofa and they listened to it together, Arsenyev breathing heavily, tugging at the thick flesh of his fat neck, which was what he always did when he scented trouble.

'... a black oilskin notebook that used to belong to Josef Stalin...'

They were still bent over the tape when Netto crept back in, his complexion three shades paler than usual, to announce he had bad news.

FELIKS Stepanovich Suvorin, with Netto at his heels, walked back, grim-faced~ to his office. It was a long trek from the leadership suites in the west of the building to the operational block in the east, and in the course of it at least a dozen people must have nodded and smiled at him, for in the Finnish-designed, wood and white-tile corridors of Yasenevo, the major was the golden boy, the coming man. He spoke English with an American accent, subscribed to the leading American magazines and had a collection of modern American jazz, which he listened to with his wife, the daughter of one of the President's most liberal economic advisers. Even Suvorin's clothes were American - the button-down shirt, the striped tie, the brown sports jacket - each one a legacy of his years as the KGB resident in Washington.

Look at Feliks Stepanovich!, you could see them thinking, as they struggled into their winter coats and hurried past to catch the buses home. Put in as number two to that fat old timer, Arsenyev, primed to take over an entire directorate at the age of thirty-eight. And not just any directorate, either, but RT - one of the most secret of them all! - licensed to conduct foreign intelligence operations on Russian soil. Look at him, the coming man, hurrying back to his office to work, while we go off home for the night...

'Good evening to you, Feliks Stepanovich!'

'So long, Feliks! Cheer up!'

'Working late again, I see, comrade major!'

Suvorin half-smiled, nodded, gestured vaguely with his pipe, preoccupied.

The details, as Netto had relayed them, were sparse but eloquent. Fluke Kelso had left the Mamantovs' apartment at fifteen-seven. Suvorin had also left the scene a few minutes later. At fifteen-twenty-two, Ludmilla Fedorova Mamantova, in the company of the bodyguard, Viktor Bubka, was also observed to leave the apartment for her customary afternoon stroll to the Bolotnaya Park (given her confused condition, she had always to be accompanied). Since there was only one man on duty, they were not followed.

They did not return.

Shortly after seventeen hundred, a neighbour in the apartment beneath the Mamantovs' reported hearing prolonged, hysterical screams. The porter had been summoned, the apartment - with difficulty - opened and Madame Mamantov had been discovered alone, in her undergarments, locked inside a cupboard, through the door of which she had nevertheless managed to kick a hole using her bare feet. She had been taken to the Diplomatic Policlinic in a state of extreme distress. Both her ankles were broken.

'This must be an emergency escape plan,' said Suvorin, as they reached his office. 'He's clearly had this up his sleeve for quite a while, even down to establishing a routine for his wife. The question is: what's the emergency?'

He pressed the light switch. Neon panels stuttered into life. The leadership's side of the building had the view of the lake and the trees while Suvorin's office looked north, towards the Moscow ring road and the squat and crowded tower blocks of a housing estate. Suvorin threw himself into his chair, grabbed his tobacco pouch and swung his feet up on to the window sill. He saw Netto, reflected, coming in

and closing the door. Arsenyev had given him a blasting, which wasn't really fair. If anyone was to blame, it was Suvorin, for sending Bunin after Kelso.

'How many men do we have at Mamantov's apartment right now?'

'Two, major.'

'Split them. One to the Policlinic to keep an eye on the wife, one to stay in place. Bunin's to stick with Kelso. What's his hotel?'

'The Ukraina.'

'Right. If he's heading south down the Garden Ring he's probably on his way back. Call Gromov at the Sixteenth and tell him we want a full communications intercept on Kelso. He'll tell you he hasn't the resources. Refer him to Arsenyev. Have the authorisation papers on my desk within fifteen minutes.

'Yes, major.'

'Leave the Tenth to me.

'The Tenth, major?' The Tenth was the archives branch.

According to the colonel, there should be a file on this Stalin notebook.' Legend of the Lubyanka, indeed! 'I'll need to dream up some excuse to see it. Check on this place in Vspolnyi Street: what is it exactly? God, we need more men!'

Suvorin banged his desk in frustration. 'Where's Kolosov?'

'He left for Switzerland yesterday.'

'Anybody else around? Barsukov?'

'Barsukov's in Ivanovo with his Germans.'

Suvorin groaned. This operation was running on paraffin and thin air, that was the trouble with it. It didn't have a name, a budget. Technically, it wasn't even legal.

Netto was writing rapidly. 'What do you want to do with Kelso?'

'Just continue to keep an eye on him.'

'Not pick him up?'

'For what exactly? And where do we take him? We have no cells. We have no legal basis to make arrests. How long's Mamantov been loose?'

'Three hours, major. I'm sorry, I -' Netto looked close to tears.

'Forget it, Vissi. It's not your fault.' He smiled at the young man's reflection. 'Mamantov was pulling stunts like that while we were in the womb. We'll find him,' he added, with a confidence he did not feel, 'sooner or later. Now off you go. I've got to call my wife.'

After Netto had gone, Suvorin removed the photograph of Kelso from its folder and pinned it to the noticeboard beside his desk. Here he was, with so much else to do, on issues which really mattered - economic intelligence, biotechnology, fibre optics - reduced to worrying about whether and why Vladimir Mamantov was after Stalin's notebook. It was absurd. It was worse than absurd. It was shaming. What kind of a country was this? Slowly, he tamped the tobacco in his pipe and lit it. And then he stood there for a full minute, his hands clasped behind his back, his pipe between his teeth, regarding the historian with an expression of pure loathing.

ELIJKEKELSO LAY on his back, on his bed, in his room on the twenty-third floor of the Ukraina Hotel, smoking a cigarette and staring at the ceiling, the fingers of his left hand curled around the comforting and familiar shape of a quarter-bottle of Scotch.

He hadn't bothered to take off his coat, nor had he turned on the bedside lamp. Not that he needed to. The brilliant white floodlights that lit the Stalinist-Gothic skyscraper shone into his room and provided a feverish illumination. Through the closed window he could hear the sound of the early evening traffic on the wet road far below. A melancholy hour this, he always thought, for a stranger in a foreign city - nightfall, the brittle lights, the temperature dropping, the office workers hurrying home, the businessmen trying to look cheerful in the hotel bars.

He took another swig of Scotch, then reached over for the ashtray and balanced it on his chest, tapping the end of his cigarette into it. The bowl hadn't been cleaned properly. Still stuck to its dusty bottom, like a small green egg, nested a gobbet of Papu Rapava's phlegm.

It had taken Kelso only a few minutes - the length of one short visit to the Ukraina's business centre and the time it took to flick through an old Moscow telephone directory -to establish that the house on Vspolnyi Street had indeed once been an Mrican embassy. It was listed under the Republic of Tunisia.

And it had taken him only slightly longer to extract the rest of the information he needed - sitting on the edge of his hard and narrow bed, talking earnestly on the telephone to the press attache at the new Tunisian Embassy, pretending an intense interest in the booming Moscow property market and the precise design of the Tunisian flag.

According to the press attache, the Tunisians had been offered the mansion on Vspolnyi Street by the Soviet government in 1956, on a short-term lease, renewable every seven years. In January, the ambassador had been notified that the lease would not be extended when it came up for renegotiation, and in August they had moved out. And in truth, sir, they had not been too sorry to go, no indeed, not after that unfortunate business in 1993 when workmen had dug up twelve human skeletons, victims of the Stalinist repression, buried beneath the pavement outside. No explanation for the eviction had been offered, but, as everyone knew, great swathes of state property were now being privatised in central Moscow and sold on to foreign investors; fortunes were being made.

And the flag? The flag of the Tunisian Republic, honourable sir, was a red crescent and a red star in a white orb, all on a red ground.

there was a red sickle moon and a single red star...

The blue shaving of cigarette smoke curled and broke against the dusty plaster.

Oh, he thought, how prettily it all hung together -Rapava's story and Yepishev's story and the convenient emptiness of the Beria mansion and the freshly turned earth and the bar named 'Robotnik'.

He finished the Scotch and stubbed out his cigarette and lay there for a while, turning the book of matches over and over, anti-clockwise in his fingers.

STILL unsure of what he should do, Kelso went down to the front desk and changed the last of his travellers' cheques into roubles. He would need to have cash, whatever happened. He would need ready money. His credit card was not entirely reliable these days - witness that unfortunate incident at the hotel shop, when he had tried to use it to buy his Scotch.

He thought he saw someone he recognised - from the symposiums presumably - and he raised his hand but they had already turned away.

On the counter of the reception was a sign - Any guest requiring to make an international telephone call must please to leave a cash deposit - and seeing it gave him a second stab of homesickness. So much happening, nobody to tell. On impulse he handed over $50 and made his way back through the crowded lobby towards the elevators.

Three marriages. He contemplated this extraordinary feat as the elevator shot him skywards. Three divorces in ascending order of bitterness.

Kate - well, Kate, that hardly counted, they were students, it was doomed from the start. She had even sent him Christmas cards until he moved to New York. And Irma -she at least had got her passport, which was always, he suspected, the main point of the exercise. But Margaret -poor Margaret - she was pregnant when he married her, which was why he married her, and no sooner had one boy arrived than the next was coming, and suddenly they were stuck in four cramped rooms off the Woodstock Road: the history teacher and the history student who between them had no history. It had lasted twelve years - 'as long as the Third Reich,' Fluke, drunk, had told an inquiring gossip columnist on the day that Margaret's petition for divorce had been published. He had never been forgiven.

Still, she was the mother of his children. Maggie. Margaret. He would call poor Margaret.

The line sounded strange from the moment the operator got on to the international circuit, and his first reaction was, Russian phones! He shook it hard as the New York number began to ring.

'Hello.' The familiar voice, sounding unfamiliarly bright.

'Its me.

'Oh.' Flat, suddenly; dead. Not even hostile.

'Sorry to ruin your day.' It was meant to be a joke, but it came out badly, bitter and self-pitying. He tried again. 'I'm calling from Moscow.

'Why?'

'Why am I calling or why am I calling from Moscow?'

'Are you drinking?'

He glanced at the empty bottle. He had forgotten her capacity to smell breath at four thousand miles. 'How are the boys? Can I talk to them?'

'It's eleven o'clock on a Tuesday morning. Where do you think they are?'

'School?'

'Well done, dad.' She laughed, despite herself.

'Listen,' he said, 'I'm sorry.

'For what in particular?'

'For last month's money.

'Three months' money.'

'It was some cock-up at the bank.'

'Get a job, Fluke.'

'Like you, you mean?'

'Fuck you.'

'All right. Withdrawn.' He tried again. 'I spoke to Adelman this morning. He might have something for me.

'Because things can't go on like this, you know?'

'I know. Listen. I may be on to something here -''What's Adelman offering?'

Adelman? Oh, teaching. But that's not what I mean. I'm on to something here. In Moscow. It could be nothing. It could be huge.'

'That is it?'

There was definitely something odd about the line. Kelso could hear his own voice playing back in his ear, too late to be an echo. 'It could be huge, 'he heard himself say.

'I don't want to talk about it on the phone.'

'You don't want to talk about it on the phone -''I don't want to talk about it on the phone.'

- no, sure you don't. You know why? Because it's just more of the same old shit -'

'Hold on, Maggie. Are you hearing me twice?'

'- and here's Adelman offering you a proper job, but of course you don't want that, because that means facing up -'

Are you hearing me twice?'

'-to your responsibilities -'

Quietly, Kelso replaced the receiver. He looked at it for a moment, and chewed his lip, then lay back on the bed and lit another cigarette.

STALIN, as you know, was dismissive of women.

Indeed, he believed the very notion of an intelligent woman was an oxymoron: he called them 'herrings with ideas' Of Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, he once observed to Molotov, 'She may use the same lavatory as Lenin, but that doesn't mean she knows anything about Leninism. 'After Lenin’s death, Krupskaya believed her status as the great man's widow would protect her from Stalin's purges, but Stalin quickly disabused her. 'If you don't shut your mouth, 'he told her, 'we'll get the Party a new Lenin's widow.'

However, this is not the whole story. And here we come to one of those strange reversals of the accepted wisdom which occasionally make our profession so rewarding. For while the common view of Stalin has always been that he was largely indifferent to sex - the classic case of the politician who channels all his carnal appetites into the pursuit of power - the truth appears to have been the opposite. Stalin was a womaniser.

The recognition of this facet of his character is recent. It was Molotov, in 1988, who coyly told Chuyev (Sto sorok beseds Molotovym, Moscow) that Stalin had always been attractive to women In 1990, Khrushchev, with the posthumous publication of his last set of interviews (The Glasnost Tapes, Boston) lifted the curtain a little further. And now the archives have added still more valuable detail.

Who were these women, whose favours Stalin enjoyed both before and after the suicide ofhis second wife? Some we know of There was the wife of A. I. Yegorov, First Deputy People's Commissar of Defence, who was notorious in Party circles for her numerous affairs. And then there was the wife of another military man - Gusev - a lady who was allegedly in bed with Stalin on the night Nadezhda shot herself There was Rosa Kaganovich, whom Stalin, as a widower, seems for a time to have thought of marrying. Most interesting of all, perhaps, there was Zhenya Alliluyeva, the wife of Stalin’s brother-in-law, PaveL Her relationship with Stalin is described in a diary which was kept by his sister-in-law, Maria. It was seized on Maria's arrest and only recently declassified (F45 01 Dl).

These, of course, are only the women we know something about. Others are mere shadows in history, like the young maidservant, Valechka Istomina, who joined Stalin’s personal staff in 1935 ('whether or not she was Stalin's wifeis nobody else's business, 'Molotov told Chuyev), or the 'beautiful young woman with dark skin' Khrushchev once saw at Stalin's dacha. 'I was told later she was a tutor for Stalin's children, 'he said, 'but she was not there for long. Later she vanished. She was there on Beria's recommendation. Beria knew how to pick tutors.

'Later she vanished...'

Once again, the familiar pattern asserts itself it was never very wise to know too much about Comrade Stalin’sprivate lift. One of the men he cuckolded, Yegorov, was shot; another, Pavel Alliluyev, was poisoned. And Zhenya herself his mistress and his sister-in-law by marriage - 'the rose of the Novgorodfields'- was arrested on Stalin’s orders and spent so long in solitary confinement that when eventually she was released, after his death, she could no longer talk - her vocal cords had atrophied...

HE must have fallen asleep because the next he knew the telephone was ringing.

The room was still in semi-darkness. He switched on the lamp and looked at his watch. Nearly eight.

He swung his legs off the bed and took a couple of stiff paces across the room to the little desk next to the window. He hesitated, then picked up the receiver.

But it was only Adelman, wanting to know if he was coming down to dinner.

'Dinner?'

'My dear fellow, it's the great symposium farewell supper, not to be missed. Olga's going to come out of a cake.'

'Christ. Do I have a choice?'

'Nope. The story, by the way, is that you had a hangover of such epic proportions this morning you had to go back to your room and sleep it off'

'Oh, that's lovely, Frank. Thank you.'

Adelman paused. 'So what happened? You find your man?'

'Of course not.

'It's all balls?'

Absolutely. Nothing in it.

'Only - you know - you were gone all day -'

'I looked up an old friend.'

'Oh, I get you,' said Adelman, with heavy emphasis. 'Same old Fluke. Say, are you looking at this view?'

A glittering nightscape spread out at Kelso's feet, neon banners hoisted across the city like the standards of an invading army. Philips, Marlboro, Sony, Mercedes-Benz... There was a time when Moscow after sunset was as gloomy as any capital in Africa. Not any more.

There wasn't a Russian word in sight.

'Never thought I'd live to see this, did you?' Adelman's voice crackled down the receiver. 'This is victory we're looking at, my friend. You realise that? Total victory.'

'Is it really, Frank? It just looks like a lot of lights to me.

'Oh no. It's more than that, believe me. They ain't coming back from this.'

'You'll be telling me next it's "the end of history".'

'Maybe it is. But not the end of historians, thank God.' Adelman laughed. 'Okay, I'll see you in the lobby. Say twenty minutes?' He hung up.

The searchlight on the opposite side of the Moskva, next to the White House, shone fiercely into the room. Kelso reached across and opened the wooden frame of the inner window and then of the outer, admitting a particulate breath of yellow mist and the white noise of the distant traffic. A few snowflakes fluttered across the sill and melted.

The end of history, my arse, he thought. This was history's town. This was History's bloody country.

He stuck his head into the cold, leaning out to see as much of the city as he could across the river, before it was lost in the murk of the horizon.

If one Russian in six believed that Stalin was their greatest ruler, that meant he had about twenty million supporters. (The sainted Lenin, of course, had many more.) And even if you halved that figure, just to get down to the hard core, that still left ten million. Ten million Stalinists in the Russian Federation, after forty years of denigration?

Mamantov was right. It was an astounding figure. Christ, if one in six Germans had said they thought Hitler was the greatest leader they'd ever had, the New York Times wouldn't just have wanted an op-ed piece. They'd have put it on the front page.

He closed the window and began gathering together what he would need for the evening: his last two packets of duty free cigarettes, his passport and visa (in case he was picked up), his lighter, his bulging wallet, the book of matches with Robotnik's address.

It was no use pretending he was happy about this, especially after that business at the embassy, and if it hadn't been for Mamantov, he might have been tempted to leave matters as they stood - to play it safe, the Adelman way, and to come back to find Rapava in a week or two, perhaps after wangling a commission in New York from some sympathetic publisher (assuming such a mythical creature still existed).

But if Mamantov was on the trail, he couldn't afford to wait. That was his conclusion. Mamantov had resources at his disposal Kelso couldn't hope to beat. Mamantov was a collector, a fanatic.

And it was the thought of what Mamantov might do with this notebook, if he found it first, that was also beginning to nag at him. Because the more Kelso turned matters over in his mind, the more obvious it became that whatever Stalin had written was important. It couldn't be some mere compendium of senile jottings, not if Beria wanted it enough to steal it and then, having stolen it, was willing to risk hiding it, rather than destroying it. 'He was squealing like a pig... shouting something about Stalin and something about an archangel... Then they put a scarf in his mouth and shot him...'

Kelso took a last look around the bedroom and turned out the light.

IT wasn't until he got down to the restaurant that he realised how hungry he was. He hadn't had a proper meal for a day and a half. He ate cabbage soup, then pickled fish, then mutton in a cream cheese sauce, with the Georgian red wine, Mukuzani, and sulphurous Narzan mineral water. The wine was dark and heavy and after a couple of glasses on top of the whisky he could feel himself becoming dangerously relaxed. There were more than a hundred diners at four big tables and the noise of the conversation and the clink and chime of glass and cutlery were soporific. Ukrainian folk music was being played over loudspeakers. He started to dilute his wine.

Someone - a Japanese historian, whose name he didn't know - leaned across and asked if this was Stalin's favourite drink and Kelso said no, that Stalin preferred the sweeter Georgian wines, Kindzmarauli and Hvanchkara. Stalin liked sweet wines and syrupy brandies, sugared herbal teas and strong tobacco -And Tarzan movies. . .' said someone.

'And the sound of dogs singing...

Kelso joined in the laughter. What else could he do? He clinked glasses with the Japanese across the table, bowed and sat back, sipping his watery wine.

'Who's paying for all this?' someone asked. 'The sponsor who paid for the symposium, I guess. "~Vho's that?'

American?'

'Swiss, I heard . .

The conversation resumed around him. After about an hour, when he thought no one was looking, he folded his napkin and pushed back his chair.

Adelman looked up and said, 'Not again? You can't run out on them again?'

A call of nature,' said Kelso, and then, as he passed behind Adelman, he bent down and whispered, 'What's the plan for tomorrow?'

'The bus leaves for the airport after breakfast,' said Adelman. 'Check-in at Sheremetevo at eleven-fifteen.' He grabbed Kelso's arm. 'I thought you said this was all balls?'

'I did. I just want to find out what kind of balls.' Adelman shook his head. 'This just isn't history, Fluke -'

Kelso gestured across the room. And this is?' Suddenly there was the sound of a knife being rapped against a glass, and Askenov pushed himself heavily to his feet. Hands banged the table in approval.

'Colleagues,' began Askenov.

'I'd sooner take my chances, Frank. I'll see you. He detached himself gently from Adelman's grip and

headed towards the exit.

The cloakroom was by the toilets, next door to the dining room. He handed over his token, put down a tip and collected his coat, and he was just shrugging it on when he saw, at the end of the passage leading to the hotel lobby, a man. The man wasn't looking in his direction. He was pacing backwards and forwards across the corridor, talking into a mobile phone. If Kelso had seen him full-face he probably wouldn't have recognised him, and then everything would have turned out differently. But in profile the scar on the side of his face was unmistakable. He was one of the men who had been parked outside Mamantov's apartment.

Through the closed door behind him, Kelso could hear laughter and applause. He backed towards it, until he could feel the doorhandle - all this time keeping his eyes on the man - then he turned and quickly re-entered the restaurant.

Askenov was still on his feet and talking. He stopped when he saw Kelso. 'Doctor Kelso,' he said, 'seems to have a deep aversion to the sound of my voice.'

Saunders called out, 'He has an aversion to the sound of everyone's voice, except his own.'

There was more laughter. Kelso strode on.

Through the swing doors the kitchen was in pandemonium. He had an overpowering impression of heat and steam and of noise and the hot stink of cabbage and boiled fish. Waiters were lining up with trays of cups and coffee pots, being screamed at by a red-faced man in a stained tuxedo. Nobody paid Kelso any attention. He walked quickly across the huge room to the far end, where a woman in a green apron was unloading trays of dirty crockery off a trolley.

'The way out?' he said.

'Tam,' she said, gesturing with her chin. 'Tam.' Over there.

The door had been wedged open to let in some cold air. He went down a dark flight of concrete steps and then he was outside, in the slushy snow, moving through a yard of overflowing trash bins and burst plastic sacks. A rat went scrabbling for safety in the shadows. It took him a minute or so to find his way out, and then he was in the big, enclosed courtyard at the rear of the hotel. Dark walls studded with lit windows rose on three sides of him. The low clouds above his head seemed to boil a yellowish-grey where they were struck by the beam of the searchlight.

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.