Archangel

'That's one way of putting it.' 'Poor kid.'

'Poor kid,' he agreed.

'So why did he keep her book?'

'Obsession? Infatuation?' He shrugged. "Who's to say. He was a sick man by then. He only had twenty months to live. Maybe she described what happened to her, then thought better of it, and tore out the pages. Or, more likely, he got hold of her book and ripped them out himself. He didn't like people knowing too much about him.'

'Well, I can tell you one thing: he didn't screw her that night.'

Kelso laughed. And how do you know that?'

'Easy. Look.' She opened the notebook. 'Here on the twelfth of May, she's got "the usual trouble of this time", right? On the tenth of June, on the train, it's "the worst of days to travel". Well, you can work it out for yourself, can't you? There's exactly twenty-eight days between the two. And twenty-eight days after the tenth of June is July the eighth. 'Which is the last entry.

Kelso stood slowly and went over to the desk. He peered over her shoulder at the childish writing.

'What are you talking about?'

'She was a regular girl. A regular little Komsomol girl.'

Kelso absorbed this information, put the gloves back on, took the book from her, flicked between the two pages. Well, now, this was crazy, wasn't it? This was sick. He could barely bring himself to acknowledge the suspicion that was forming in the back of his mind. But why else would Stalin have been so interested in whether or not she had had rubella, of all things? Or whether her family had any history of congenital disorders?

'Tell me,' he said, quietly, 'when would she have been fertile?'

'Fourteen days later. On the twenty-second.'

AND suddenly she couldn't get out of there fast enough.

She pushed her chair back from the desk and stared at the notebook with revulsion.

'Take the damned thing,' she said. 'Take it. Keep it.'

She didn't want to touch it again. She didn't even want to see it.

It was cursed

In a couple of seconds she had her bag over her shoulder and was flinging open the door and Kelso had to scramble to catch up with her as she strode across the office towards the elevators. O'Brian came out of an editing suite to see what was going on. He was in a heavy waterproof jacket with two pairs of binoculars slung around his thick neck. He started to follow them but Kelso waved him back.

'I'll handle this.'

She was standing in the corridor, her back to him.

'Listen Zinaida,' he said. The lift door opened and he stepped in after her. 'Listen. It's not safe for you out there -'

Almost immediately the car stopped and a man got in -heavy-set, middle-aged, black leather coat and a black leather cap. He stood between them, glanced at Zinaida, then at Kelso, sensing the edge to their silence. He looked straight ahead and stuck out his chin, smiling slightly. Kelso could tell what he was thinking: a lovers' tiff well that was fine, they’d get over it.

When they reached the ground floor he stood back politely to let them out first and Zinaida clattered quickly across the marble in her knee-length boots. A security guard pressed a switch to unlock the doors.

'You,' she said, zipping up her jacket, 'should worry about yourself It was just after four. People were beginning to leave from work. In the offices across the road Kelso could see the green glow of computer screens. A woman had shrunk herself into a doorway and was talking into a mobile phone. A motorcyclist went past, slowly.

'Zinaida, listen.' He grabbed her arm, stopping her from walking away. She wouldn’t look at him. He pulled her close to the wall. 'Your father died badly, do you understand what I'm saying? The people who did it - Mamantov and his people - they're after this notebook. They know there's something important about it - don't ask me how. If they realise your father had a daughter - and they're bound to because Mamantov used to have access to his file - well, think about it. They're going to come after you.'

And they killed him for that?'

'They killed him because he wouldn't tell them where it was. And he wouldn't tell them where it was because he wanted you to have it.

'But it wasn't worth dying for. The stupid old fool.' She glared at him. Her eyes were wet for the first time that day. 'Stupid stubborn old fool.'

'Is there someone you can stay with? Family?'

'My family are dead.'

A friend maybe?'

'Friend? I've got this, remember?' She lifted the flap of her bag, showing him her father's pistol.

Kelso said, as calmly as he could, At least give me your address, Zinaida. Your phone number -'

She looked at him suspiciously. 'Why?'

'Because I feel responsible.' He glanced around. This was madness, talking in the street. He felt in his pocket for a pen, couldn't find any paper, tore the side off a pack of cigarettes. 'Come on, write it for me. Quickly.'

He thought she wouldn't do it. She turned to go. But then, abruptly, she swung back and scribbled something down. She had a place near Izmaylovo Park, he saw, where the big flea market was.

She didn't say goodbye. She set off up the street, dodging the pedestrians, walking fast. He watched her, waiting to see if she might look back. But of course she didn't. He knew she wouldn't. She wasn't the looking-back kind.

Parr Two

Archangel

'If you are afraid of wolves, keep out of the woods.' J. V. Stalin, 1936.

BEFORE THEY COULD get out of Moscow they had to take on fuel - because, as O'Brian said, you never knew what kind of rusty; watered-down horse~ piss they might try to sell you once you got out of town. So they stopped at the new Nefto Agip on Prospekt Mira and O'Brian filled the Land Cruiser's tank and four big jerry cans with forty gallons of high-octane, lead-free gasoline. Then he checked the tyres and the oil, and by the time they were back on the road the evening rush was in full and sluggish spate.

It took them the best part of an hour to reach the outer ring, but there, at last, the traffic thinned, the monotonous apartment blocks and factory chimneys fell away, and suddenly they were out and free - into the flat open countryside, with its grey-green fields and giant pylons and a vast sky: a Kansas sky. It was more than ten years since Kelso had ventured north on the M8. Village churches, used as grain stores since the Revolution, were being restored, encased in web-works of wooden scaffolding. Near Dvoriki, a golden dome gathered the weak afternoon light and shone from the horizon like an autumn bonfire.

O'Brian was in his element. 'On the road,' he would say occasionally, 'and out of town - it's great, isn't it? Just great. He drove at a steady sixty-five miles an hour, talking constantly, one hand on the wheel, the other beating time to a tape of thumping rock music.

just great...

The satchel was on the back seat, wrapped in plastic. Heaped around it was an extravagant array of equipment and provisions: a couple of sleeping bags, thermal underwear ('Got any thermals, Fluke? Gotta have those thermals!'), two waterproof and fur-lined jackets, rubber boots and army boots, ordinary binoculars, binoculars with night-imaging, a shovel, a compass, water bottles, water purification tablets, two six-packs of Budweiser, a box of Hershey chocolate bars, two vacuum flasks filled with coffee, pot noodles, a torch, a short-wave transistor radio, spare batteries, a travelling kettle that could be plugged into the car's cigarette lighter - Kelso lost count after that.

In the rear section of the Toyota were the jerrycans and four rigid cases stamped SNS, whose contents O'Brian described with professional relish: a miniaturised, digital camcorder; an Inmarsat satellite telephone; a laptop-sized DVC-PRO video editing machine; and something he called a Toko Video Store and Forward Unit. Total value of these four items: $120,000.

'Ever hear of travelling light?' asked Kelso.

'Light?' O'Brian grinned. 'You can't get any lighter. Give me four suitcases and I can do what it used to take six guys and a truckful of equipment to do. If there's any excess baggage around here, my friend, it's you.'

'It wasn't my idea to come.

But O'Brian wasn't listening. Thanks to these four cases, he said, his beat was the world. African famines. The genocide in Rwanda. The bomb in the village in Northern Ireland that he'd actually filmed go off (he'd won an award for that one). The mass graves in Bosnia. The cruise missiles in Baghdad, trundling down the streets at roof-top level - left, then right, then right again, and which way, please, for the presidential palace? And then of course there was Chechnya. Now, the trouble with Chechnya - You are a bird of ill-omen, thought Kelso. You circle the world and wherever you land there is famine and death and destruction: in an earlier and less credulous age, the local citizens would have gathered at the first sight of you and driven you off with stones - the trouble with Chechnya, O'Brian was saying, was that the sucker had ended just as he arrived, so he had pitched up in Moscow for a while. Now that was a scary town: 'Give me Sarajevo any day.'

'How long are you planning to stay in Moscow?'

'Not long. Till the presidential elections. Should be fun, I reckon.

Fun?

And then where are you going?'

'Who knows? Why d'you ask?'

'I just want to make sure I'm nowhere around, that's all.'

O'Brian laughed and put his foot down. The speedometer flickered up towards seventy.

THEY maintained this pace as the afternoon turned to dusk, O'Brian still prattling on. (Jesus, did the man never shut up?) At Rostov the road ran beside a great lake. Boats, moored and tarpaulined for the winter, lined a jetty, close to a row of shuttered, timbered buildings. Far out on the water Kelso could see a lone sailboat with a light at its stern. He watched it swing about in the wind and tack for the shore and he felt again the familiar depression of nightfall starting to creep over him.

He could sense Stalin's papers behind him now almost as a physical presence, as if the GenSec were in the car with them. He worried about Zinaida. He would have liked a drink, or a cigarette, come to that, but O'Brian had declared the Toyota a smoke-free zone.

'You're jumpy,' said O'Brian, interrupting himself. I can tell.'

'Do you blame me?'

'Why? Because of Mamantov?' The reporter flicked his hand. 'He doesn't scare me.

'You didn't see what he did to the old man.'

'Yeah, well he wouldn't do that to us. Not to a Brit and a Yank. He's not completely nuts.

'Maybe not. But he might do it to Zinaida.'

'I wouldn't worry about Zinaida. Besides, she hasn't got the stuff any more. We have.'

'You're a nice man, you know that? And what if they don't believe her?'

'I'm just saying you should quit bothering about Mamantov, that's all. I've interviewed him a couple of times and I can tell you, he's a busted flash. The man lives in the past. Like you.'

And you? You don't live in the past, I suppose?'

'Me? No way. Can't afford to, in my job.'

'Now let's just analyse that,' said Kelso, pleasantly. In his mind he was opening a drawer, selecting the sharpest knife he could find. 'So all these places- you've been boasting about for the past two hours - Africa, Bosnia, the Middle East, Northern Ireland - the past isn't important there, is that what you're saying? You think they're all living in the present? They all just woke up one morning, saw you were there with your four little suitcases, and decided to have a war? It wasn't happening till you arrived? "Gee, hey, look everyone, I'm R. J. O'Brian and I just discovered the fucking Balkans -'Okay,' muttered O'Brian, 'there's no need to be offensive about it.'

'Oh but there is.' Kelso was warming up. 'This is the great myth, you see, of our age. The great western myth. The arrogance of our time, personified - if you'll excuse me for saying so - in you. That just because a place has a McDonalds and MTV and takes American Express it's exactly the same as everywhere else - it doesn't have a past any more, it's Year Zero. But it's not true.

'You think you're better than me, don't you?' 'No.'

'Smarter then?'

'Not even that. Look. You say Moscow is a scary town. It

is. Why? I'll tell you. Because there's no tradition of private property in Russia. First of all there were workers and peasants who had nothing and the nobility owned the country. Then there were workers and peasants with nothing and the Party owned the country. Now there are still workers and peasants with nothing and the country's owned, as it's always been owned, by whoever has the biggest fists. Unless you understand that, you can't begin to understand Russia. You can't make sense of the present unless a part of you lives in the past.' Kelso sat back in his seat. 'End of lecture.'

And for half an hour, as O'Brian pondered this, there was blessed peace.

THEY reached the big town of Yaroslavl just after nine and crossed the Volga. Kelso poured them each a cup of coffee. It slopped across his lap as they hit a rough patch of road. O'Brian drank as he drove. They ate chocolate. The headlights that had blazed towards them around the city gradually dwindled to the occasional flash.

Kelso said, 'Do you want me to take over?'

O'Brian shook his head. 'I'm fine. Let's change at midnight. You should get some sleep.'

They listened on the radio to the news at ten o'clock. The communists and the nationalists in the lower senate, the Duma, were using their majoriry to block the President's latest measures: another political crisis threatened. The Moscow stock exchange was continuing its plunge. A secret report from the Interior Ministry to the President, warning of a danger of armed rebellion, had been leaked and printed in Aurora.

Of Rapava, Mamantov or Stalin's papers there was no mention.

'Shouldn't you be in Moscow, covering all this?'

O'Brian snorted. 'What? "New Political Crisis in Russia"? Give me a break. R. J. O'Brian won't be on the hour every hour with that.

'But he will with this?'

"'Stalin's Secret Lover, Mystery Girl Revealed"? What do you think?'

O'Brian switched off the radio.

Kelso reached over to the back seat and dragged one of the sleeping bags into the front. He opened it out and wrapped it around him like a blanket, then pressed a button and his seat slowly reclined.

He closed his eyes but he couldn't sleep. Images of Stalin gradually invaded his mind. Stalin as an old man. Stalin as glimpsed by Milovan Djilas after the war, leaning forward in his limousine while he was being driven back to Blizhny, turning on a little light in the panel in front of him to see the time on a pocket watch hanging there - 'and I observed directly in front of me his already hunched back and the bony grey nape of his neck with its wrinkled skin above the stiff marshal's collar. . .' (Djilas thought Stalin was senile that night: cramming his mouth with food, losing the thread of his stories, making jokes about the Jews.) And Stalin, less than six months before he died, delivering his last, rambling speech to the Central Committee, describing how Lenin faced the crises of 1918 and repeating the same word over and over - 'he thundered away in an incredibly difficult situation, he thundered on, fearing nothing, he just thundered away...' - while the delegates sat stunned, transfixed.

And Stalin, alone in his bedroom, at night, tearing pictures of children out of magazines and plastering them around his walls. And then Stalin making Anna Safanova dance for him -It was curious, but whenever Kelso tried to picture Anna Safanova dancing, the face he always gave her was that of Zinaida Rapava.

ZINAIDA RAPAVA WAS sitting in her parked car in Moscow in the darkness with her bag on her lap and her hands in that bag, feeling the outline of her father's Makarov pistol.

She had discovered that she could still strip and load it without looking at it - like riding a bicycle, it seemed: one of those childish accomplishments you never forgot. Release the spring at the bottom of the grip, pull out the magazine, squeeze in the bullets (six, seven, eight of them, smooth and cold to the touch), push the magazine back up, click, slide, then press the safety catch down to fire. There.

Papa would have been proud of her. But then she always had been better at this game than Sergo. Guns made Sergo nervous. Which was a joke, seeing as he was the one who had to do military service.

Thinking of Sergo made her cry again, but she wouldn't let herself give in to it for long. She pulled her hands out of her bag and wiped each eye irritably - so then so - on either sleeve of her jacket, then went back to her task.

Push. Click. Slide. Press...

SHE was scared. So scared, in fact, that when she had walked away from the westerner that afternoon she had wanted to look back at him standing outside the office block - had wanted to go back to him - but if she'd done that he would have known she was afraid, and fear, she had been taught, was something you must never show. Another of her father's lessons.

So she had hurried on to her car and had driven around for a while without thinking until presently she had found herself heading in the direction of Red Square. She had parked in Bolshaya Lubyanka and had walked uphill to the little white Church of the Icon of the Virgin of Vladimir, where a service was in progress.

The place was packed. The churches were always packed now, not like in the old days. The music washed over her. She lit a candle. She wasn't sure why she did this because she had no faith; it was the sort of thing her mother used to do. And what has your god ever done for us?' - her father's sneering voice. She thought of him, and of the girl who wrote the journal, Anna Safanova. Silly bitch, she thought. Poor silly bitch. And she lit a candle for her, too, and much good might it do her, wherever she was.

She wished her memories were better but they weren't and there was nothing to be done. She could remember him drunk, mostly, his eyes like worm holes, his fists flying. Or tired from work at the engine sheds, as rank as an old dog, too weary to rise from his chair to go to bed, sitting on a sheet of Pravda to keep the oil off the cover. Or paranoid, up half the night, staring out of the window, prowling the corridors - who was that looking at him? who was that talking about him? - spreading yet more sheets from Pravda down on the floor and obsessively cleaning his Makarov. (I’ll kill them if I have to...')

But sometimes, when he wasn't drunk or exhausted or mad - in the mellow hour, between mere inebriation and oblivion - he'd talk about life in Kolyma: how you survived, traded favours and scraps of tobacco for food, wangled the easier jobs, learned to smell a stoolie - and then he'd take her on his lap and sing to her, some of the Kolyma songs, in his fine Mingrelian tenor.

That was a better memory.

At fifty he had seemed so old to her. He always had been an old man. His youth had gone when Stalin died. Maybe that was why he went on about him so much? He even had a picture of Stalin on the wall - remember that? - Stalin with his glossy moustaches, like great black slugs? Well, she could never take her friends back there, could she? Never let them see the pig state in which they lived. Two rooms, and her in the only bedroom, sharing first with Sergo and then, when he was too big and too embarrassed to look at her, with mama. And mama a wraith even before the cancer got her, then turning to gossamer and finally melting to nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, yes, I remember.

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

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

Speak up, girl"

She bowed her head meekly.

Never show them you're afraid, papa.

Again!'

'Never show them you're afraid.'

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

You've only got one friend in this world.

And that friend is?'

Yourself.

And what else?'

This.

Show me.'

This, papa. This.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good.

Well: good enough.

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

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

'No way, darling. Sorry.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SHE listened to the ten o'clock news, then switched on the ignition and drove slowly out of Bolshaya Lubyanka, heading north-west across Moscow to the Stadium of the Young Pioneers, where she parked in her usual spot, just off the darkened track.

The night was cold. The wind whipped the thin dress tight around her legs. She held on to her bag as she stumbled towards the lights. She would be safer inside.

Outside Robotnik there was a good crowd for a Thursday night, a nice line of rich western sheep all waiting to be fleeced. Normally her eyes would have flashed as sharp across them as a pair of shears, but not tonight, and she had to force herself forwards.

She went round to the back entrance, as normal, and the barman, Aleksey, let her in. She checked her jacket into the cloakroom and hesitated over her bag but then gave that to the old woman attendant as well: the floor of the Robotnik was not the wisest place in Moscow to be caught carrying a gun.

She could always pretend to be someone else when she came to the club, and apart from the money that was the other good thing about it. ('What~' your name?' they would say, trying to make some human contact. 'What name do you like? 'she would always reply.) She could leave her history at the door of the Robotnik, and hide behind this other Zinaida: sexy, self-possessed, hard. But not tonight. Tonight, as she stood in the ladies' toilet, freshening her make-up, the trick didn't seem to be working, and the face that stared back at her was indisputably her own: raw-eyed, frightened Zinaida Rapava.

SHE sat in one of the shadowy booths for an hour or more, watching. What she needed was someone who would take her for the whole night. Someone decent and respectable, with an apartment of his own. But how could you ever judge what men were really like. It was the young ones with the swaggering walks and the loud mouths who ended up bursting into tears and showing you pictures of their girlfriends. It was the bespectacled bankers and lawyers who liked to knock you around.

Just after half-past eleven, when the place was at its busiest, she made her move.

She circled the dance floor, smoking, holding a bottle of mineral water. Holy Mother, she thought, there were girls in here tonight who barely looked fifteen. She was practically old enough to have given them birth.

She was coming to the end of this life.

A man with dark curly hair poking through the straining buttons of his shirt came over to her but he reminded her of O'Brian and she side-stepped him through a cloud of aftershave, in favour of a big south-east Asian in an Armani suit.

He drained his drink - vodka, neat, no ice, she noticed: noticed it too late - and he got her on the dance floor. He quickly grabbed her backside, a cheek in either hand, and began digging his fingers into her, almost lifting her out of her new shoes. She told him to cut it out but he didn't seem to understand. She tried to press her arms against him, push him back, but he only increased his grip and something gave in her then, or rather joined - a kind of merging of the two Zinaidas -Are you a good Bolshevik, Anna Safanova? Will you prove it? Will you dance for Comrade Stalin?'

- and suddenly she raked the fingers of her right hand down his smooth cheek, so deep she was sure she could feel the glossy flesh clogging beneath her nails.

He released her then all right - roared and doubled over, shaking his head, spraying beads of blood around him in a series of perfect arcs, like a wet dog shaking off water. Someone screamed and people rippled away to give him space.

This was what they had come to see!

Zinaida ran - across the bar, up the spiral staircase, past the metal detectors and out into the cold. Her legs splayed like a cow's and gave way on the ice. She was sure he was coming after her. She dragged herself back up on to her feet and somehow made it to her car.

THE Victory of the Revolution apartment complex. Block Nine. In darkness. The cops had gone. The little crowd had gone. And soon the place itself would be gone - it had been jerry built even by Soviet standards; it was going to be pulled down in a month or two.

She parked across the street, in the spot where she had brought the westerner the night before, and stared at it across the roughened, freezing snow.

Block Nine.

Home.

She was so tired.

She grasped the top of the steering wheel with both hands and laid her forehead on her bare arms. She was done with crying by then. She had a very strong sense of her father's presence, and that stupid song he used to sing.

Kolyma. Kolyma,

What a wonderful place!

Twelve months of winter

Summer all the rest.

And wasn't there another verse? Something about twenty-four hours of work each day and sleeping all the rest? And so on and on? She knocked her head against her arms in time to the imagined beat, then rested her cheek against the wheel, and that was the moment that she remembered that she had left her bag with her gun in it back at the club. She remembered it because a car, a big car, had drawn alongside her, very close, preventing her from pulling out, and a man's face was staring at her - a white blur distorted through two panes of dirty wet glass.

SILENCE WOKE HIM.

"What time is it?'

'Midnight.' O'Brian yawned noisily. 'Your shift.'

They were parked beside the deserted highway with the engine off. Kelso could see nothing, apart from a few faint stars up ahead. After the noise of the journey the stillness was almost physical, a pressure in the ears.

He pulled himself upright. 'Where are we?'

About a hundred, maybe a hundred and twenty miles north of Vologda.' O'Brian snapped on the interior light, making Kelso flinch. 'Should be about here, I figure.'

He leaned over with the map, his big fingernail pressed to a spot that looked entirely blank, a white space split by the red line of the highway, with a few symbols for marshland dotted on either side of it. Further north the map turned green for the forest.

'I need a piss,' said O'Brian. 'You coming?'

It was much colder than in Moscow, the sky even bigger. A great fleet of vast clouds, pale-edged by the moonlight, moved slowly southwards, occasionally unveiling patches of stars. O'Brian had a torch. They scrambled down a short bank and stood urinating, companionably, side by side, for half a minute, steam rising from the ground before them, then O'Brian zipped up his flies and shone his torch around. The powerful beam stretched for a couple of hundred yards into the darkness, then dissipated; it lit nothing. A freezing mist hung low to the ground.

'Can you hear anything?' said O'Brian. His breath flickered in the cold.

'No.'

'Neither can I.'

He switched off the torch and they stood there for a while. 'Oh, daddy,' whispered O'Brian, in a little boy's voice, 'I'm so scared'

He turned the light back on and they climbed the bank to the Toyota. Kelso poured them both more coffee while O'Brian lifted up the rear door and dragged out a couple of the jerrycans. He found a funnel and began filling the tank.

Kelso, nursing his coffee, moved away from the gasoline fumes and lit a cigarette. In the darkness, in the cold, under the immense Eurasian sky, he felt disconnected from reality, frightened yet strangely exhilarated, his senses sharpened. He heard a rumble far away and a yellow dot appeared far back on the straight highway. He watched it grow slowly, saw the gleam divide and become two big headlights, and for a moment he thought they were coming directly at him, and then a big truck, a sixteen-wheeler, rushed past, the driver merrily sounding his horn. The noise of the engine was still faintly audible in the distance long after the red tail lights had vanished in the dark.

'Hey, Fluke! Give us a hand here, will you?'

Kelso took a last draw on his cigarette and flicked it away, spinning orange sparks across the road.

O'Brian wanted help lifting down one of his precious pieces of equipment, a white polycarbonate case, about two feet long and eighteen inches wide, with a small pair of black wheels mounted on one end. Once they'd pulled it out of the Toyota, O'Brian trundled it round to the front passenger door.

'Now what?' said Kelso.

'Don't tell me you've never seen one of these before?'

O'Brian opened the lid of the box and removed what looked like four white plastic trays, of the kind that fold out of aircraft seats. He slotted these together, creating a flat square about a yard across, which he then attached to the side of the case. Into the centre of the square he screwed a long, telescopic prong. He ran a cable from the side of the box to the Toyota's cigarette lighter, came back, flicked a switch and a variety of small lights blinked on.

'Impressed?' He produced a compass from his jacket pocket and shone his torch on it. 'Now where the hell is the Indian Ocean?'

'What?'

O'Brian glanced back along the M8. 'Right the way down there, by the look of it. Directly down there. A satellite in stationary orbit twenty thousand miles above the Indian Ocean. Think of that. Oh, but the world's a small place, is it not, Fluke? I swear I can almost hold it in my hand.' He grinned and knelt by the box, moving it around by degrees until the antenna was pointing directly south. At once the machine began to emit a whine. 'There you go. She's locked on to the bird.' He pressed a switch and the whining stopped. 'Now, we plug in the handset - so. We dial zero-four for the ground station at Eik in Norway - so. And now we dial the number. Easy as that.'

He stood and held out the handset and Kelso cautiously put his ear to it. He could hear a number ringing in America, and then a man said, 'Newsroom.'

Kelso lit another cigarette and walked away from the Toyota. O'Brian was in the front seat with the light on and even with the windows closed his voice carried in the cold silence.

'Yeah, yeah, we're on the road . . . About halfway I guess ... Yeah, he's with me ... No, he's fine.' The door opened and O'Brian shouted, 'You're fine, aren't you, professor?'

Kelso raised his hand.

'Yeah,' resumed O'Brian, 'he's fine.' The door slammed and he must have lowered his voice because Kelso couldn't catch much after that. 'Be there about nine.., sure. . . good stuff. . . looking good...'

Whatever it was, Kelso didn't like the sound of it. He walked back to the car and flung open the door.

'Whoops. Gotta go, Joe. Bye.' O'Brian hung up quickly and winked.

'What are you telling them exactly?'

'Nothing.' The reporter looked like a guilty boy.

'What d'you mean, nothing?'

'Come on, I had to give them the bones, Fluke. Give them the gist -'

'The gist?' Kelso was shouting now. 'This was supposed to be confidential -,

'Well, they're not going to tell anyone, are they? Come on, I can't just take off without giving them an idea of what I'm doing.'

'Christ.' Kelso slumped against the side of the Toyota and appealed to the sky. 'What am I doing?'

'Want to make a call, Fluke?' O'Brian waved the handset at him. 'Call a wife? On us?'

'No. There's no one I want to call right now. Thank you.'

'Zinaida?' said O'Brian craftily. 'Why don't you call Zinaida?' He climbed out of the seat and pressed the telephone into Kelso's hand. 'Go ahead. I can tell you're worried. It's sweet. Zero-four, then the number. Only don't take all night about it. A fellow could freeze his balls off out here.'

He wandered away, flapping his arms against the cold, and Kelso, after a second's hesitation, hunted through his pockets for the scrap of paper with her address on it.

As he waited for the number to connect he tried to visualise her apartment, but he couldn't do it, he didn't know enough about her. He stared southwards down the M8 at the shadowy mass of departing clouds, fleeing as if from some calamity, and he imagined the route his call was taking -from the middle of nowhere to a satellite above the Indian Ocean, down to Scandinavia, across the earth to Moscow. O'Brian was right: you could stand in a great wilderness and the world still felt small enough to hold in your hand.

He let the number ring for a long time, alternately willing her to answer it so that he'd know she was safe, and hoping that she wouldn't, because her apartment was the least safe place of all.

She didn't answer and after a couple of minutes he hung up.

AND then it was Kelso's turn to drive while O'Brian slept, and even then the reporter couldn't be quiet. The sleeping bag was drawn tight up to his chin. His seat was tilted back almost to the horizontal. 'Yeah,' he'd mutter, and then, almost immediately, and with greater emphasis, 'yeah.' He grunted. He curled up and flopped around like a landed fish. He snorted. He scratched his groin.

Kelso gripped the steering wheel hard. 'Can you shut up, O'Brian?' he said into the windscreen. 'I mean, just for once, could you possibly, as a favour to humanity, and more particularly to me, put a sock in your great fat mouth?'

There was nothing to see except the shifting patch of road in the headlights. Occasionally a car appeared in the opposite carriageway, lights full beam, blinding him. After about an hour he overtook the big truck that had passed them earlier. The driver hooted cheerfully again, and Kelso hooted back.

'Yeah,' said O'Brian, turning over at the sound of the horn, 'oh yeah-'

The drumming of the tyres was hypnotic and Kelso's thoughts were random, disconnected. He wondered what O'Brian would have been like in a real war, one in which he actually had to fight rather than just take pictures. Then he wondered what he would have been like. Most of the men he knew asked themselves that question, as if never having fought somehow made them incomplete - left a hole in their lives where a war should have been.

Was it possible that this absence of war - marvellous though it was and so forth: that went without saying - was it possible that it had actually trivialised people? Because everything was so bloody trivial now, wasn't it? This was The Trivial Age. Politics was trivial. What people worried about was trivial - mortgages and pensions and the dangers of passive smoking. Jesus! - he shot a look at O'Brian - is this what we've been reduced to, worrying about passive smoking, when our parents and our grandparents had to worry about being shot or bombed?

And then he began to feel guilty, because what was he implying here? That he wanted a war? Or a cold war, come to that? But it was true, he thought: he did miss the cold war. He was glad it was over, of course, in a way - glad the right side had won and all that - but at least while it was on people like him had known where they stood, could point to something and say: well, we may not know what we do believe in, but we don't believe in that.

The fact was, almost nothing had gone right for him since The cold war ended. Here was a good joke. He and MamantOv twin career victims of the end of the USSR! Both bemoaning the trivia of the modern world, both preoccupied with the past, and both in search of the mystery of Comrade Stalin -He frowned, remembering something Mamantov had said.

'I'll tell you this, you're as obsessed as Jam.'

He had laughed it off at the time. But now that he thought o~ it again, the line struck him as unexpectedly shrewd -unsettling, even, in the quality of its insight - and he found himself returning to it again and again as the temperature dropped and the road uncoiled endlessly from the freezing darkness.

HE drove for more than four hours, until his legs were numb and at one point he actually fell asleep, jerking awake to find the Toyota veering across the centre of the highway, the white lines flashing up at them like spears in the headlights.

A few minutes later they passed a kind of truckers' lay-by. He braked hard, stopped, and reversed back into it. Beside him, O'Brian struggled blearily into consciousness.

'Why're we stopping?'

'The tank's empty. And I've got to rest.' Kelso turned off the ignition and massaged the back of his neck. 'Why don't we stop here for a bit?'

'No. We need to keep moving. Fix us some coffee, will you? I'll fill her up.'

They went through the same ritual as before, O'Brian stumbling out into the cold and hoisting a pair of jerrycans from the back of the Toyota, while Kelso wandered away for a cigarette. The wind had a sharper edge to it this far north.

He could hear it slicing through trees he couldn't see. Running water splashed somewhere, softly.

When he got back into the car, O'Brian was in the driver's seat with the interior light on, running an electric shaver over his big chin, studying the map. It was an unnatural time to be awake, thought Kelso. It meant nothing good. He associated it with emergency bereavement, conspiracy flight; the sad skulk away at the end of a one-night affair.

Neither man spoke. O'Brian put away his shaver and stuffed the map into the pocket beside him.

The reclined seat was warm and so was the sleeping bag and within five minutes, despite his anxieties, Kelso was asleep - a dreamless, falling sleep - and when he awoke a few hours later it was as if they had crossed a barrier and entered another world.

A LITTLE TIME before this, when Kelso was still at the wheel, Major Feliks Suvorin had bent to kiss his wife, Serafima.

She offered him merely her cheek at first but then seemed to think the better of it. A warm, soft arm snaked up from beneath the duvet, a hand cupped the back of his head and drew him down. He kissed her mouth. She was wearing Chanel. Her father had brought it back from the last G8 meeting.

She whispered, 'You won't be back tonight.'

'I will.'

'You wont.

'I'll try not to wake you.'

'Wake me.

'Sleep.'

He put his finger to her lips and turned off the bedside lamp. The light from the passage showed him the way out of the bedroom. He could hear the sound of the boys' breathing. An ormolu clock announced it was one-thirty-five. He had been home two hours. He sat down on a gilt chair beside the door and put his shoes on, then collected his coat from its carved wooden hanger. The decor was copied from some glossy western magazine and it all cost far more than he earned as a major in the SVR; in fact, on his salary, they could barely afford the magazine. His father-in-law had paid.

On his way out, Suvorin glimpsed himself in the hall mirror, framed against a Jackson Pollock print. The lines and shadows of his exhausted face seemed to merge with those of the picture. He was getting too old for this kind of game, he thought: the golden boy no longer.

THE news that the Delta flight had taken off without Fluke Kelso had reached Yasenevo shortly after two in the afternoon. Colonel Arsenyev had expressed in various colourful colloquialisms - and had no doubt minuted elsewhere, for the record, more discreetly - his amazement that Suvorin had not arranged for the historian to be escorted on to the aircraft. Suvorin had choked back his response, which would have been to inquire, acidly, how he was supposed to locate Mamantov, control the militia, find the notebook and nursemaid an independent-minded western academic through Sheremetevo-2, all with the assistance of four men.

Besides, by then this was of less pressing importance than the discovery that the Interfax news agency was putting out a story on Papu Rapava's death, quoting unnamed 'militia sources' to the effect that the old man had been murdered while trying to sell some secret papers of Josef Stalin to a western author. Three outraged communist deputies had already attempted to raise the matter in the Duma. The Office of the President of the Federation had been on the line to Arsenyev, demanding to know (a direct quote from Boris Nikolaevich, apparently) what the flick was going on? Ditto the FSB. Half a dozen reporters were camped outside Rapava's apartment block, more were besieging militia HQ, while the militia's official position was to hold up their hands and whistle.

For the first time, Suvorin had begun to see the merit of the old ways, when news was what Tass was pleased to announce and everything else was a state secret.

He had made one last attempt to play devil's advocate.

Weren't they in danger of getting this out of proportion? Weren't they playing Mamantov's game? What could Stalin's notebook possibly contain that would have any modern relevance~

Arsenyev had smiled: always a dangerous sign.

'When were you born, Feliks?' he had asked, pleasantly. 'Fifty-eight? Fifty-nine?'

'Sixty.'

'Sixty. You see, I was born in thirty-seven. My grandfather he was shot. Two uncles went to the camps ... never came back. My father died in some crazy business at the start of the war, trying to stop a German tank outside Poltava with a bit of rag and a bottle, and all because Comrade Stalin said that any soldier who surrendered would be considered a traitor. So I don't underestimate Comrade Stalin.'

'I'm sorry -But Arsenyev had waved him away. His voice was rising,

his face red. 'If that bastard kept a notebook in his safe, he kept it for a reason, I can tell you that. And if Beria stole it, he had a reason. And if Mamantov is willing to risk torturing an old man to death, then he has a damned good reason for wanting to get his hands on it, too. So find it, Feliks Stepanovich, please, if you would be so good. Find it.'

And Suvorin had done his best. Every forensic document examiner in Moscow had been contacted. Kelso's description had been circulated, discreetly, to all the capital's militia posts, as well as to the traffic cops, the GM. Technically, the SVR was now 'liaising' with the militia's murder inquiry, which meant at least he now had some resources to draw on: he had worked out a common line with the militia which they could spin to the media. He had spoken to a friend of his father-in-law's - the owner of the biggest chain of newspapers in the Federation - to plead for a little restraint. He had sent Netto to poke around Vspolnyi Street. He had arranged for a watch to be put Qn the apartment of Rapava's daughter, Zinaida, who had disappeared, and when she still hadn't turned up by nightfall he had sent Bunin to hang around the club she worked in, Robotnik.

Shortly after eleven o'clock, Suvorin had gone home.

And at one twenty-five he got the call that told him she had been found.

'WHERE was she?'

'Sitting in her car,' said Bunin. 'Outside her father's place. We followed her from the club. Waited to see if she was meeting anyone, but nobody else showed, so we picked her up. She's been in a fight, I reckon.'

'Why?'

'Well, you'll see when you go up. Take a look at her hand.' They were standing, talking quietly, in the downstairs lobby of her apartment block, in the Zayauze district, a drab hinterland of eastern Moscow. She had a place close to the park - privatised, to judge by the neatness of its common parts; respectable. Suvorin wondered what the neighbours would think if they knew the girl on the third floor was a tart.

'Anything else?'

'The apartment's clean, and so's her car,' said Bunin. 'There's a bag of clothes in the back - jeans, T-shirt, pair of boots, knickers. But she's got a lot of money stashed up there. She doesn't know I found it yet.'

'How much?'

'Twenty, maybe thirty thousand dollars. Bound up tight in polythene and hidden in the lavatory cistern.'

'Where is it now?'

‘I've got it.’

'Let's have it.'

Bunin hesitated, then handed it over: a thick bundle, all hundreds. He looked at it hungrily. It would take him four or five years to make that much and Suvorin guessed he had probably been on the point of helping himself to a percentage. Maybe he already had. He stuffed it into his pocket. 'What's she like?'

'A hard bitch, major. You won't get a lot out of her.' He tapped the side of his head. 'She's cracked, I reckon.'

'Thank you, lieutenant, for that valuable psychological insight. You can wait down here.'

Suvorin climbed the stairs. On the landing of the second floor, a middle-aged woman with her hair in curlers stuck her head round her door.

'What's going on?'

'Nothing, madam. Routine inquiries. You're perfectly safe.' He carried on climbing. He had to make something of this, he thought. He must. It was the only lead he had. Outside the girl's apartment he squared his shoulders, knocked politely on the open door and went inside. A militia man got to his feet.

'Thank you,' said Suvorin. 'Why don't you go down and keep the lieutenant company?'

He waited until the door had closed before he took a proper look at her. She had a grey woollen cardigan on over her dress and she was sitting in the only chair, her legs crossed, smoking. In a dish on the little table next to her were the stubbed remains of five cigarettes. The apartment consisted of only this one room but it was neat and nicely done, with plenty of evidence of money spent: a westernmade television with a satellite decoder, a video, a CD-player, a rack of dresses, all black. A little kitchen was off in one corner. A door led to the bathroom. There was a couch that presumably folded into a bed. Bunin was right about her hand, he noticed. The fingers that held the cigarette had blood crusted under the nails. She saw him looking.

'I fell,' she said, and uncrossed her legs, displaying a scraped knee, torn tights. 'All right?'

'I'll sit down.' She didn't reply, so he sat down anyway, on the edge of the couch, moving a couple of toys out of the way, a soldier and a ballerina. 'You have children?' he asked.

No answer.

'I have children. Two boys.' He searched the room for some other point of contact, some way of opening, but there was no evidence of any personality anywhere: no photographs, no books apart from legal manuals, no ornaments or knick-knacks. There was a row of CDs, all western and all by artists he'd never heard of. It reminded him of one Yasenevo's safe houses - a place to spend a night in and then move on.

She said, Are you a cop? You don't look like a cop.

'No.'

'What are you, then?'

'I'm sorry about your father, Zinaida.'

'Thanks.'

'Tell me about your father.'

'What's to tell?'

'Did you get on with him?'

She looked away.

'Only I'm wondering, you see, why you didn't come forward when his body was discovered. You went to his apartment last night, didn't you, when the militia were there? And then you just drove away.

'I was upset.

'Naturally.' Suvorin smiled at her. 'Where's Fluke Kelso?' 'Who?'

Not bad, he thought: she didn't even flicker. But then she didn't know he had Kelso's statement.

'The man you drove to your father's apartment last night.' 'Kelso? Was that his name?'

'Oh you're a sharp one, Zinaida, aren't you? Sharp as a knife. So where have you been all day?'

'Driving around. Thinking.'

'Thinking about Stalin's notebook?'

'I don't know what you -'

'You've been with Kelso, haven't you?'

'No.'

'Where's Kelso? Where's the notebook?'

'Don't know what you're talking about. What d'you mean, anyway - you're not a cop? You got some papers that tell me who you are?'

'You spent the day with Kelso -'

'You've no right to be in my place without the proper papers. It says so in there.' She pointed to her legal books.

'Studying the law, Zinaida?' She was beginning to irritate him. 'You'll make a good lawyer.'

She seemed to find that funny: perhaps she had heard it before? He pulled out the bundle of dollars and that stopped her laughing. He thought she was going to faint.

'So what's the Federation statute on prostitution, Zinaida Rapava?' Her eyes on the money were like a mother's on her baby. 'You're the lawyer: you tell me. How many men in this little pile? A hundred? A hundred and fifty?' He flicked through the notes. 'Must be a hundred and fifty, surely -you're not getting any younger. But the others are, aren't they? They're getting younger every day. You know, I think you might never make this much back.'

'Bastard -'

He weighed the dollars from hand to hand. 'Think about it. A hundred and fifty men in return for telling me where I can find one? A hundred and fifty for one. That's not such a bad deal.'

'Bastard,' she said again, but with less conviction this time.

He leaned forward, soft-voiced, coaxing. 'Come on Zinaida: where's Fluke Kelso? It's important.'

And for a moment he thought she was going to tell him. But then her face hardened. 'You,' she said. 'I don't care who you are. There's more honesty in whoring.'

'Now that may be true,' conceded Suvorin. Suddenly, he threw her the money. It bounced off her lap and on to the floor between her legs. She didn't even bend to pick it up, just looked at him. And he felt a great sadness then: sad for himself, that it should have come to this, sitting on a tart's bed in the Zayauze district, trying to bribe her with her own money. And sad for her, because Bunin was right, she was cracked, and now he would have to break her.

IT NEVER SEEMED to get properly light, even two hours after dawn. It was as if the day had given up on itself before it even started. The sky stayed grey and the long concrete ribbon of road that ran straight ahead of them dwindled into a damp murk. On either side of the highway lay a wrinkled dead land of rust-coloured swamps and sickly, yellowish plains - the sub-Arctic tundra - that turned in the middle distance to dense, dark green forests of pine and fir.

It started to snow.

There was a lot of military traffic on the road. They passed a long column of armoured cars with watery headlights and soon afterwards began to see evidence of human settlement

- shacks, barns, bits of agricultural machinery - even a collective farm with a broken hammer and sickle over the gate, and an old slogan: PRODUCTION IS VITAL FOR THE VICTORY OF SOCIALISM.

After a couple of miles the road crossed a railway line and a row of big chimneys appeared up ahead in the murk, gushing black soot into the snowy sky.

'That must be it,' said Kelso, looking up from the map. 'The M8 ends here, in the southern outskirts.'

'Shit,' said O'Brian.

'What?'

The reporter gestured with his chin. 'Road block.'

A hundred yards ahead a couple of GAl cops with lighted sticks and guns were waving down every vehicle to check the occupants' papers. O'Brian looked quickly in his mirror, but he couldn't reverse - there was too much traffic slowing behind them. And concrete sleepers laid across the centre of the road made it impossible to perform a U-turn and join the southbound carriageway. They were being forced into a single-lane queue.

'What did you call it?' said Kelso. 'My visa? A detail?'

O'Brian tapped his fingers on the top of the steering wheel.

'Is this check permanent, do you think, or just for us?'

Kelso could see a glass booth with a GAl man in it, reading a newspaper.

'I'd say permanent.

'Well, that's something.' O'Brian began rummaging in the glove compartment. 'Pull your hood up,' he said, 'and get that sleeping bag up over your face. Pretend to be asleep. I'll tell 'em you're my cameraman.' He hauled out a crumpled set of papers. 'You're Vukov, okay? Foma Vukov.'

'Foma Vukov? What kind of a name is that?'

'You want to go straight back to Moscow? Well, do you? I'd say you've got two seconds to make up your mind.'

'And how old is this Foma Vukov?'

'Twentysomething.' O'Brian reached behind him and grabbed the leather satchel. 'You got a better idea? Stick this under your seat.

Kelso hesitated, then wedged the satchel behind his legs. He lay back, drew up the sleeping bag and closed his eyes. Travelling without a visa was one crime. Travelling without a visa and using someone else's papers - that, he suspected, was quite another.

The car edged forwards, braked. He heard the engine switch off and then the hum of the driver's window being lowered. A blast of cold air. A gruff male voice said in Russian, 'Get out of the car please.'

The Toyota rocked as O'Brian clambered out.

With his heel, Kelso gently pushed at the satchel, jamming it further out of sight.

There was a second rush of cold as the rear door was lifted.

The sound of boxes being swung out, of catches snapping. Footsteps. A quiet conversation.

The door next to Kelso opened. He could hear the pattering of snowflakes, a man breathing. And then the door was closed - closed softly, with consideration, so as not to wake a sleeping passenger, and Kelso knew that he was safe.

He heard O'Brian load up the back and come round to the driver's seat. The engine started.

'It is surely most amazing,' said O'Brian, 'the effect of a hundred bucks on a cop who ain't been paid for six months.' He pulled the sleeping bag away from Kelso. 'This is your wake-up call, professor. Welcome to Archangel.'

THEY thumped across an iron bridge above the Northern Dvina. The river was wide, stained yellow by the tundra. Swollen currents rolled and flexed like muscles beneath its dirty skin. A couple of big black cargo barges, chained together, steamed north towards the White Sea. On the opposite bank, through the filter of snow and the spars of the bridge, they could see factory chimneys, cranes, apartment blocks, a big television tower with a winking red light.

As the vista broadened, even O'Brian's spirits seemed to fall. He called it a dump. He declared it a hole. He said it was the worst goddamn place he had ever seen. A goods train clanked along the railroad track beside them. At the end of the bridge they turned left, towards what seemed to be the main part of the city. Everything had decayed. The fa~ades of the buildings were pitted and peeling. Parts of the road had subsided. An ancient tram, in a brown and mustard livery, went rattling by, making a sound like a chain being dragged over cobbles. Pedestrians tilted drunkenly into the snow.

O'Brian drove slowly, shaking his head, and Kelso wondered what more he had been expecting. A press centre? A media hotel? They came out into the wide open space of a bus station. On the far side of it, on the waterfront, four giant Red Army men, cast in bronze, stood back to back, facing the four points of the compass, their rifles raised in triumph. At their feet, a pack of wild dogs scavenged among the trash. Nearby was a long, low building of white concrete and plate glass with a big sign: 'Harbour Master of Archangel'. If the city had a centre, this was probably it.

'Let's pull up over there,' suggested Kelso.

They cruised around the edge of the square and parked with their front bumper up close to the bent railings, looking directly out across the water. A husky watched them with detached interest, then brought its hind paw up to its neck and vigorously scratched its fleas. In the distance, through the snow, it was just possible to make out the flat shape of a tanker.

'You do realise,' said Kelso quietly, staring straight ahead across the water, 'that we are at the edge of the world? That at this point we are one hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle and there is nothing between us and the North Pole but sea and ice? You are aware of that?'

He started to laugh.

'What's funny?'

'Nothing.' He glanced at O'Brian and tried to stop himself, but it was no good, there was something about the reporter's utter dejection that set him off again. His vision was blurred by tears. 'I'm sorry,' he gasped. 'Sorry’

'Oh, go ahead, enjoy yourself,' said O'Brian, bitterly. 'This is my idea of a perfect fucking Friday. Drive eight hundred miles to some dump that looks like Pittsburgh after a nuclear strike to try to find Stalin's fucking girlfriend-'

He snorted and started to laugh as well.

'You know what we haven't done?' O'Brian managed to say after a while.

Kelso took a breath and swallowed. 'What?'

'We haven't been to the railway station and checked the radiation meter. . . We're probably. . . being. . . fucking... irradiated"

They roared. They cried. The Toyota rocked with it. The snow fell and the husky watched them, its head cocked in surprise.

O'BRIAN locked the car and they hurried through the snow, across the treacherous expanse of subsiding concrete, into the port authority building.

Kelso carried the satchel.

They were both still slightly shaky and the advertised ferry sailings - to Murmansk and the Groaning Islands - briefly set them off again.

The Groaning Islands?

'Oh come on, man. Stop it. We've got to do some work here.'

The building was bigger than it looked from the outside. On the ground floor there were shops - little kiosks selling clothes and toiletries - plus a cafe and a ticket booth. Downstairs, beneath banks of fluorescent lights, most of which had blown, was a gloomy underground market - stalls offering seeds, books, pirated cassettes, shoes, shampoo, sausages and some immense, sturdy Russian brassi~res in black and beige: miracles of cantilevered engineering.

O'Brian bought a couple of maps, one of the city and the other of the region, then they both went back upstairs to the ticket office where Kelso, in return for offering a dollar bill to a suspicious man in a greasy uniform, was permitted a brief look at the Archangel telephone directory. The book was small, red-bound, with hard covers and it took him less than thirty seconds to establish that no Safanov or Safanova was listed.

'Now what?' said O'Brian.

'Food,' said Kelso.

The caf~ was an old-style stolovaya, a self-service workers' canteen, its floor wet and filthy with melted snow. There was a warm fug of strong tobacco. At the next door table a couple of German seamen were playing cards. Kelso had a big bowl of shchi- cabbage soup with a dollop of sour cream bobbing in its centre - black bread, a couple of hard-boiled eggs, and the effect of all this on his empty stomach was immediate. He began to feel almost euphoric. This was going to be all right, he thought. They were safe up here. Nobody could find them. And if they played it properly, they could be in and out in a day. He tipped half a miniature of cognac into his instant coffee, looked at it, thought, Sod it, why not? and added the rest. He lit a cigarette and glanced around. The people up here appeared shabbier than they did in Moscow. They stared at foreign strangers. But when you attempted to meet their eyes they looked away.

O'Brian pushed his plate to one side. 'I've been thinking about this college, whatever it was - this "Maxim Gorky Academy". They'll have old records, right? And there was this girl she knew - what was her name, the ugly kid?'

'Maria.'

'Maria. Right. Let's find her class yearbook and find Maria.'

Class yearbook? thought Kelso. Who did O'Brian think she was? The Maxim Gorky prom queen, 1950? But he was too full of goodwill to pick a fight. 'Or,' he said, diplomatically, 'or we could try the local Party. She was in KomsomOl, remember. They might still have the old files.'

'Okay. You're the expert. How d'we find 'em?'

'Easy. Give me the town plan.'

O'Brian pulled the map from his inside pocket and scraped his chair round until he was sitting next to Kelso. They spread out the city plan.

The bulk of Archangel was crammed into a wide headland, about four miles across, with ribbons of development running out along either bank of the Dvina.

Kelso put his finger on the map. 'There,' he said. 'That's where they are. Or were. On the ploshchad Lenina, in the biggest building on the square. That's where the bastards always were.

'And you think they'll help?'

'No. Not willingly. But if you can provide a little financial lubrication... It's worth a try, anyway.

On the map it looked like a five-minute walk.

'You're really getting into this, aren't you?' said O'Brian. He gave Kelso's arm an affectionate pat. 'We make a good team, you know that? We'll show 'em.' He folded away the map and put five roubles under his plate as a tip.

Kelso finished his coffee. The cognac gave him a warm glow. O'Brian really wasn't such a bad fellow, he thought. Sooner him than Adelman and the rest of those waxworks, no doubt safely stowed in New York by now. History wasn't made without taking risks, that much he knew. So maybe sometimes you had to take risks to write it, too?

O'Brian was right.

He would show them.

THEY WENT BACK out into the snow, past the Toyota and past the shuttered front of a decaying hospital: the Northern Basin Seamen's Policlinic. The wind was driving the snow inshore across the water, whining through the steel rigging of the boats on the wooden jetty, bending the stumpy trees that had been planted along the promenade to protect the buildings. The two men had to struggle to keep their feet.

A couple of the boats had sunk, and so had the wooden hut at the end of the jetty. Benches had been heaved by vandals over the railings into the river. There was graffiti on the walls: a Star of David, dripping blood, with a swastika daubed across it; SS flashes; KKK.

One thing was sure: there wouldn't be any Italian shoe boutiques up here.

They turned inland.

Every Russian town still had its statue of Lenin. Archangel's portrayed the Leader, fifteen yards high, rising out of a block of granite, his face determined, his overcoat flapping, a roll of papers in his outstretched hand. He looked as if he were trying to hail a taxi. The square that still carried his name was huge, and smooth with snow, and deserted; in one corner, a couple of tethered goats nibbled at a bush. Fronting it were a big museum, the city's central post office, and a huge office block with the hammer and sickle still attached to the balcony.

Kelso led the way towards it and they had almost made it when a sandy-coloured jeep with a searchlight mounted on its hood came round the corner: Interior Ministry troops, the MVD. That sobered him up. He could be stopped at any minute, he realised, and forced to show his visa. The pale~ faces of the soldiers stared at them. He bowed his head and trotted up the steps, 0 Brian close behind him, as the jeep completed its cautious circuit of the square and passed out of sight.

THE communists had not been forced entirely from the building; they had merely moved round to the back. Here I they maintained a small reception area presided over by a big, ~ middle-aged woman with a froth of dyed yellow hair. Beside i her, along the window sill, was a row of straggling spider plants in old tin cans; opposite her, a big colour poster of Gennady Zyuganov, the Parry's pudding-faced candidate in the last presidential election. She studied O'Brian's business card intently, turning it over, holding it to the light, as if she suspected forgery. Then she picked up the telephone and spoke quietly into the receiver.

Outside, through the double glass, the snow was beginning to pile in the courtyard. A clock ticked. Beside the door Kelso noticed a bundle of the latest issue of Aurora, tied up with string, awaiting distribution. The headline was a quote from the Interior Ministry's report to the president:

'VIOLENCE IS INEVITABLE'.

After a couple of minutes, a man appeared. He must have been about sixty - an odd-looking figure. His head was too small for his heavy torso, his features too small for his face. His name was Tsarev, he said, holding out a hand stained black with ink. Professor Tsarev. Deputy First Secretary of the Regional Committee.

Kelso asked if they could have a word.-

Yes. Perhaps. That would be possible.

Now? In private?

Tsarev hesitated, then shrugged. 'Very well.' He led them down a dark corridor and into his office, a

little time warp from the Soviet days, with its pictures of Brezhnev and Andropov. Kelso reckoned he must have visited a score of offices like this over the years. Wood block floorings thick water pipes, a heavy radiator, a desk calendar, a big green Bakelite telephone, like something out of a 1950s science fiction movie, the smell of polish and stale air - every detail was familiar, right down to the model Sputnik and the clock in the shape of Zimbabwe left behind by some visiting Marxist delegation. On the shelf behind Tsarev's head were six copies of Mamantov's memoirs, I Still Believe.

'I see you have Vladimir Mamantov's book.' It was a stupid thing to say but Kelso couldn't help himself

Tsarev turned round, as if noticing them for the first time. 'Yes. Comrade Mamantov came to Archangel and campaigned for us, during the presidential elections. Why? Do you know him?'

'Yes. I know him.'

There was a silence. Kelso was aware of O'Brian looking at him, and of Tsarev waiting for him to speak. Hesitantly, he began his rehearsed speech. First of all, he said, he and Mr O'Brian would like to thank Professor Tsarev for seeing them at such short notice. They were in Archangel for one day only, making a film about the residual strength of the Communist Party. They were visiting various towns in Russia. He was sorry they had not been in contact earlier to make a proper appointment, but they were working quickly -'And Comrade Mamantov sent you?' interrupted Tsarev.

'Comrade Mamantov sent you here?'

'I can truthfully say we would not be. here without Vladimir Mamantov.'

Tsarev began nodding. Well, this was a most excellent subject. This was a subject wilfully ignored in the west. How many people in the west knew, for example, that in the Duma elections, the communists had taken thirty per cent of the votes, and then, in 1996, in the presidential elections, forty per cent? Yes, they would be in power again soon. Sharing power to begin with, perhaps, but afterwards - who could say?

He became more animated.

Take the situation here in Archangel. They had millionaires, of course. Wonderful! Unfortunately, they also had organised crime, unemployment, AIDS, prostitution, drug addiction. Were his visitors aware that life expectancy and child-mortality in Russia had now reached African levels? Such progress! Such freedoms! Tsarev had been a professor of Marxist theory in Archangel for twenty years -the post was now abolished, naturally - so he had taught Marxism in a Marxist state, but it was only now, as they were literally tearing down Marx's statues, that he had come to appreciate the genius of the man's insight: that money robs the whole world, both the human world and nature, of their own proper value -'Ask him about the girl,' whispered O'Brian. 'We haven't

got time for all this bullshit. Ask him about Anna.'

Tsarev had halted in mid-speech and was looking from one man to the other.

'Professor Tsarev,' said Kelso, 'to illustrate our film we need to look at particular human stories -'

That was good. Yes. He understood. The human element.

There were many such stories in Archangel.

'Yes, I'm sure. But we have in mind one in particular. A girl. Now a woman in her sixties. She would be about the same age as you. Her unmarried name was Safanova. Anna Mikhailovna Safanova. She was in the Komsomol.'

Tsarev stroked the end of his squat nose. The name, he said, after a moment's thought, was not familiar. This would have been some time ago, presumably?

Almost fifty years.'

Fifty years? It was not possible! Please! He would find them other persons -'But you must have records?'

- he would show them females who fought the fascists in the Great Patriotic War, Heroes of Socialist Labour, Holders of the Order of the Red Banner. Magnificent people -'Ask him how much he wants,' said O'Brian, not even bothering to whisper now. He was pulling out his wallet. 'To look in his files. What's his price?'

'Your colleague,' said Tsarev, 'is not happy?'

'My colleague was wondering,' said Kelso, delicately, 'if it would be possible for you to undertake some research work for us. For which we would be happy to pay you - to pay the Party, that is-a fee...'

IT would not be easy, said Tsarev.

Kelso said he was sure it would not be. The membership of the Communist Party in the last years of the Soviet Union comprised seven per cent of the adult population. Apply those figures to Archangel and what did you get? Maybe 20,000 members in the city alone, and perhaps the same number again in the oblast. And to those figures you had to add the membership of Komsomol and of all the other Party outfits. And then, if you included all the people who had been members over the past eighty years -the people who had died or dropped out, been shot, imprisoned, exiled, purged - you had to be looking at a really large number. A huge number. Still -Two hundred dollars was the sum they agreed on. Tsarev insisted on providing a receipt. He locked the money into a battered cash box which he then locked in a drawer, and Kelso realised, with a curious sense of admiration, that Tsarev probably did intend to give the money to Party funds. He wouldn't keep it for himself: he was a true believer.

The Russian conducted them back along the passage and into reception. The woman with the dyed blonde hair was watering her tinned plants. Aurora still proclaimed that violence was inevitable. Zyuganov's fat smile remained in place. Tsarev collected a key from a metal cupboard and they followed him down two flights of stairs into the basement. A big, blast-proof iron door, studded with bolts, thickly painted a battleship grey, swung open to show a cellar, lined with wooden shelving, piled with files.

Tsarev put on a pair of heavy-framed spectacles and began pulling down dusty folders of documents while Kelso looked around with wonder. This was not a storeroom, he thought. This was a catacomb, a necropolis. Busts of Lenin, and of Marx and Engels, crowded the shelves like perfect clones. There were boxes of photographs of forgotten Party apparatchiks and stacked canvases of socialist realism, depicting bosomy peasant girls and worker-heroes with granite muscles. There were sacks of decorations, diplomas, membership cards, leaflets, pamphlets, books. And then there were the flags - little red flags for children to wave, and swirling crimson banners for the likes of Anna Safanova to parade with.

It was as if a great world religion had been suddenly obliged to strip its temples and hide everything underground - to preserve its texts and icons out of sight, in the hope of better times, the Second Coming -The KomsomOl lists for 1950 and 1951 were missing.

'What?'

Kelso wheeled round to find Tsarev frowning over a pair of folders, one in either hand.

It was most curious, Tsarev was saying. This would need to be investigated further. They could see for themselves - he held out the files for their inspection - the lists were here for 1949 and here, also, for 1952. But in neither of those years was there an Anna Safanova listed.

'She was too young in forty-nine,' said Kelso, 'she wouldn't have qualified.' And by 1952 God alone knew what might have happened to her. 'When were they removed?'

April, fifty-two,' said Tsarev, frowning. 'There's a note. "To be transferred to the archives of the Central Committee, Moscow."'

'Is there a signature?'

Tsarev showed it him: "'A. N. Poskrebyshev."'

O'Brian said, 'Who's Poskrebyshev?'

Kelso knew. And so, he could see, did Tsarev.

'General Poskrebyshev,' said Kelso, 'was Stalin's private secretary.'

'So,' said Tsarev, a little too quickly, 'a mystery.' He began putting the files back up on the shelf. Even after fifty years and all that had happened the signature of Stalin's secretary was still enough to unsettle a man of the right age. His hands shook. One of the folders slipped through his fingers and flopped to the floor. Pages spilled. 'Leave it, please. I'll attend to it.' But Kelso was already on his knees, gathering the loose sheets.

'There is one other thing you could do for us,' he said.

'I don't think so -'

'We believe that Anna Safanova's parents were probably both Party members.'

It was impossible, said Tsarev. He couldn't let them look. Those records were confidential.

'But you could look for us -'

No. He didn't think so.

He held out his inky hand for the missing pages and suddenly O'Brian was beside him, bending, and pressing into his outstretched palm another two hundred dollars.

'It really would help us very much,' said Kelso, desperately waving O'Brian away and nodding to emphasise eac~h word, ~help us very much with our film, if you could look them up.

But Tsarev ignored him. He was staring at the two one-hundred dollar bills, and the face of Benjamin Franklin, shrewd and appraising, gazed back up at him.

'There isn't anything, is there,' he said slowly, 'that you people don't think you can buy with money?'

'No insult was intended,' said Kelso. He gave O'Brian a murderous look.

'Yeah,' muttered O'Brian, 'no offence.'

'You buy our industries. You buy our missiles. You try to buy our archives -His fingers contracted around the notes, screwing them tight, then he let the money fall.

'Keep your money. To hell with you and your money. He turned and bent his head, busied himself with putting all the records in the proper order. There was silence save for the rustling of dried paper.

Well done, mouthed Kelso at O'Brian. Congratulations -A minute passed.

And then, unexpectedly, Tsarev spoke. 'What did you say their names were?' he said, without looking round. 'The parents?'

'Mikhail,' said Kelso quickly, 'and -' And, hell, what was

the mother called? He tried to remember the NKVD report.

Vera? Varushka? No, Vavara, that was it. 'Mikhail and Vavara

Safanova.'

Tsarev hesitated. He turned to look at them, an expression on his narrow face that mingled dignity with contempt. 'Wait here,' he said. 'Don't touch anything.'

He disappeared to another part of the storeroom. They could hear him moving around.

O'Brian said, 'What's going on?'

'I think,' said Kelso, 'I think it's called making a point. He's gone to see if there are any records on Anna's parents. And no bloody thanks to you. Didn't I tell you: leave the talking to me?'

'Well, it worked didn't it?' O'Brian stooped and picked up the crumpled dollars, smoothed them out and replaced them in his wallet. 'Jesus, what a boneyard.' He picked up a nearby head of Lenin. 'Alas, poor Yorick ...' He stopped. He couldn't remember the rest of the quotation. 'Here you go, professor. Have a souvenir.' He tossed the bust to Kelso, who caught it and quickly set it down.

'Don't,' he said. His good mood had gone. He was sick of O'Brian, but it wasn't only that. There was something else -something about the atmosphere down here. He couldn't define it exactly.

O'Brian sneered. 'What's up with you?'

'I don't know. "God is not mocked."'

'And neither is Comrade Lenin? Is that it? Poor old Fluke. You know what? I think you're beginning to lose it.

Kelso would have told him to go to hell, but Tsarev was on his way back, carrying another file and now he was looking triumphant.

Here was a subject who would be suitable for their filming. Here was a woman who had never been bought - he glared at O'Brian - a person who was a lesson to them all. Vavara Safanova had joined the Communist Party in 1935 and had stayed with it, through good times and bad. She had a list of citations bestowed by the Archangel Central Committee that took up half a page. Oh yes: here was the indomitable spirit of socialism that could never be conquered!

Kelso smiled at him. 'When did she die?'

Ah! That was the thing. She hadn't died.

'Vavara Safanova?' repeated Kelso. He couldn't believe it. He exchanged a look with O'Brian. 'Anna Safanova's mother? Still alive?'

Still alive last month, said Tsarev. Still alive at eighty-five! It was written here. They could take a look. More than sixty years a faithful member - she had just paid her Party dues.

IT WAS MORNING in Moscow.

Suvorin was in the back of the car with Zinaida Rapava. Militia liaison was sitting up front with the driver. The doors were locked. The Volga was wedged in the stream of sluggish traffic on the road heading south towards Lytkarino.

The militia man was complaining. They should have come in a different car - to force their way through this lot needed revolving lights and sound effects. And who do you think you are? thought Suvorin. The President?

Zinaida's eyes looked bruised and puffy from lack of sleep. She wore a raincoat over her dress and her knees were turned towards the door, putting as much seat leather as she could between herself and Suvorin. He wondered if she knew where they were going. He doubted it. She seemed to have gone off somewhere into the heart of herself and barely to be aware of what was happening.

Where was Kelso? What was in the notebook? The same two questions, over and over, first at her place, then upstairs in the front office that the SVR maintained in downtown Moscow - the place where visiting western journalists were entertained by the Service's smiling, Americanized public relations officer. (See, gentlemen, how democratic we are! Now what can we do to help?) No coffee for her and no cigarettes, either, once she had smoked the last of her own. Write a statement, Zinaida, then we tear it up and we write it again, and again, as the clock drags on till nine, which is when Suvorin can play his ace.

She was as stubborn as her father.

In the old days, in the Lubyanka, they had operated a system called The Conveyer Belt: the suspect was passed between three investigators working eight-hour shifts in rotation. And after thirty-six hours without sleep most people would sign anything, incriminate anyone. But Suvorin didn't have back-up and he didn't have thirty-six hours. He yawned. His eyes seemed full of grit. He guessed he was as tired as she was.

His mobile telephone rang.

'Go ahead.'

It was Netto.

'Good morning, Vissari. What do you have?'

A couple of things, said Netto. One: the house in Vspolnyi Street. He had established that it belonged to a medium-sized property company called Moskprop, who were trying to let it for $15,000 a month. No takers so far.

'At that price? I'm not surprised.'

Two: it looked as though something had been dug up in the garden in the past couple of days. There was loose soil in one spot to a depth of five feet, and forensics reported traces of ferrous oxide in the earth. Something had been rusting away down there for years.

'Anything else?'

'No. Nothing on Mamantov. He's evaporated. And the colonel's agitated. He's been asking for you.'

'Did you tell him where I was?'

'No, lieutenant.'

'Good man.' Suvorin rang off. Zinaida was watching him.

'You know what I think?' said Suvorin, 'I think your old papa went and dug up that toolbox just before he died. And then I think he gave it to you. And then I reckon you gave it to Kelso.'

It was only a theory, but he thought he saw something flicker in her eyes before she turned away.

'You see,' he said, 'we will get there in the end. And we'll get there without you, if necessary. It's just going to take us more time, that's all.'

He settled back in his seat.

Wherever Kelso was, he thought, the notebook would be. And wherever the notebook was, Vladimir Mamantov would be as well - if not now, then very soon. So the answer to one question - where was Kelso? - would provide the solution to all three problems.

He glanced at Zinaida. Her eyes were closed. And she knew it, he was sure of it.

It was so infuriatingly simple.

He wondered if Kelso had any idea how physically close Mamantov might be to him at that moment, and how much danger he was in. But of course he wouldn't, would he? He was a westerner. He would think he was immune.

The journey dragged on.

THAT’S it,' said the militia man, pointing a thick forefinger.

'Up there, on the right.'

It looked a grim place in the rain, a warehouse of dull red brick, with small windows set behind the usual cobweb of iron bars. There was no nameplate beside the dingy entrance.

'Let's drive round the back,' suggested Suvorin. 'See if you can park.'

They swung right and right again, through open wooden gates, into an asphalt courtyard glistening in the wet. There was an old green ambulance with its windows painted out parked in one corner, next to a large black van. Big drums of corrugated metal were piled with white plastic sacks, tied with tape and stamped SURGICAL WASTE in red letters., Some had toppled off and split open, or been torn open by dogs, more like. Sodden, bloodied linen soaked up the rain.

The girl was sitting erect now, staring about her, beginning to guess where she was. The militia man levered his big frame out of the front seat and came round to open her door. She didn't move. It was Suvorin who had to take her gently by her arm and coax her out of the car.

'They've had to convert this place. And there's another warehouse out in Elektrostal, apparently. But there you are. That's the crime-wave for you. Even the dead are obliged to sleep rough. Come on, Zinaida. It's a formality. It has to be done. Besides, I'm told it often helps. We must always look our terrors in the eye.'

She shook her arm free of him and gathered her coat around herself and he realised that actually he was more nervous than she was. He had never seen a corpse before. Imagine it: a major of the former First Chief Directorate of the KGB and he had never seen a dead man. This whole case was proving an education.

They picked their way through the refuse, past a goods lift, and into the back of the warehouse - the militia man in the lead, then Zinaida, then Suvorin. It had been a cold store originally, for fish trucked north from the Black Sea, and there was still a slight tang of brine to the air, despite the smell of chemicals.

The policeman knew the drill. He put his head into a glassed-in office and shared a brief joke with whoever was inside, then another man appeared, shrugging on a white coat. He held back a high curtain of thick black rubber strips and they passed into a long corridor, wide enough to take a fork-lift truck, with heavy refrigerated doors off to either side.

In America - Suvorin had seen this on a video of a cops and robbers programme Serafina liked to watch - the bereaved could view their loved ones on a monitor, comfortably screened from the physical reality of death. In Russia, no such delicacy attended the extinct. But, there again~ in fairness to the authorities, it had to be said that they had done their best with limited resources. The viewing room - if approached from the street entrance - was out of sight of the refrigerators. Also, a couple of bowls of plastic flowers had been placed on a covered table, on either side of a brass cross. The trolley was in front of these, the outline of the body clear beneath the white sheet. Small~ thought Suvorin. He had expected a larger man.

He made sure he stood next to Zinaida. The militia man was beside his friend, the morgue technician. Suvorin nodded and the technician folded back the top part of the sheet.

Papu Rapavis mottled face, his thin grey hair combed back and neatly parted, stared through blackened eyelids at the peeling roof.

The militia man intoned the formal words in a bored voice, 'Witness, is this Papu Gerasimovich Rapava?'

Zinaida, her hand to her mouth, nodded.

'Speak please.'

'It is.' They could hardly hear her. And then, more loudly:

'Yes. It is.'

She glanced sideways at Suvorin, defiantly.

The technician began to replace the sheet.

'Wait,' said Suvorin.

He reached out for the edge of the sheet that was closest to him and pulled, hard. The thin nylon whisked away, billowed clear of the body and settled on the floor.

A silence, and then her scream split the room.

'And is this Papu Gerasimovich Rapava? Take a look, Zinaida.' He didn't look himself - he had only a vague impression, thankfully - his eyes were fixed on her. 'Take a look at what they did to him. This is what they'll do to you. And to your friend Kelso, if they catch him.'

The technician was shouting something. Zinaida, yelling, reeled away, towards the corner of the room, and Suvorin went aftef her - this was his moment, his only moment: he had to strike. 'Now, tell me where he is. I'm sorry, but you've got to tell me. Tell me where he is. I'm sorry. Now.'

She turned and her arm flailed out at him, but the militia man had her by her coat and was pulling her backwards. 'Eh, eh,' he said, 'enough of that,' and he spun her round and on to her knees.

Suvorin got on to his knees as well and shuffled after her. He cupped her face between his hands. 'I'm so sorry,' he said. Her face seemed to be dissolving beneath his fingers, her eyes were liquid, blackness was trickling down her cheeks, her mouth a black smear. 'It's all right. I'm sorry.'

She went still. He thought she might have fainted but her eyes were still open.

She wouldn't break. He knew it at that moment. She was her father's daughter.

After maybe haIfa minute, he released her and sat back on his heels, head bowed, breathing hard. Behind him, he heard the noise of the trolley being wheeled away.

'You're a madman,' said the technician, incredulously. 'You're fucking mad, you are.

Suvorin raised his arm in weary acknowledgement. The door slammed shut. He rested his palms on the cold stone floor. He hated this case, he realised, not simply because it was so damned impossible and freighted with risk, but because it made him realise just how much he hated his own country: hated all those old-timers turning out on Sunday mornings with their pictures of Marx and Lenin, and the hard-faced fanatics like Mamantov who just wouldn't give up, who just didn't get it, couldn't see that the world had changed.

The dead weight of the past lay across him like a toppled statue.

It took an effort, pressing hard on the smooth stone, to push himself up on to his feet.

'Come on,' he said. He offered her his hand.

'Archangel.'

'What?' He looked down at her. She was watching him from the floor. There was a frightening calmness about her. He moved closer to her. 'What was that?'

She said it again.

'Archangel.'

HE held on to the tails of his overcoat and carefully lowered himself back to the floor and sat close to her. They both had their backs propped up against the wall, like a couple of survivors after an accident.

She was staring straight ahead and was talking in an odd monotone. He had his notebook open and his pen was working fast, tearing across the page, filling one sheet then flicking it over to start another. Because she might stop, he thought, stop talking as suddenly as she'd started -He had gone to Archangel, she said. Driving. Gone up north, him and the reporter from the television.

Fine, Zinaida, take your time. And when was this? Yesterday afternoon.

When exactly?

Four, maybe. Five. She couldn't remember. Did it matter?

What reporter?

O'Brian. An American. He was on the television. She didn't trust him.

And the notebook?

Gone. Gone with them. It was hers but she didn't want it. She wouldn't touch it. Not after she had worked out what it was about. It was cursed. The thing was cursed. It killed everyone who touched it.

She paused, staring at the spot where her father's body had been. She covered her eyes.

Suvorin waited, then said, Why Archangel?

Because that was where the girl had lived.

Girl? Suvorin stopped writing. What was she talking about? What girl?

'LISTEN,' he said, a few minutes later, when he had put his notebook away, 'you're going to be all right. I'm going to see to that, personally, do you understand me? The Russian government guarantees it.'

(What was he talking about? The Russian government couldn't guarantee a damned thing. The Russian government couldn't guarantee its president wouldn't drop his pants at a diplomatic reception and try to set light to one of his farts) 'Now what I'm going to do is this. Here's my office number: it's a direct line. I'm going to get one of my men to take you back to your apartment, okay? And you can get some sleep. And I'll make sure there's a guard outside on the landing and one in the street. So no one's going to be able to get at you and harm you in any way. Right?'

He rushed on, making more promises he couldn't keep. I should go into politics, he thought. I'm a natural.

'We're going to make sure Kelso is safe. And we're going to find the people - the man - who did this terrible thing to your father, and we're - going to lock him up. Are you listening, Zinaida?'

He was on his feet again, surreptitiously looking at his watch.

'I've got to set things moving now. I've got to go. All right? I'm going to call Lieutenant Bunin - you remember Bunin, from last night? -and I'll get him to take you home.

Halfway out the door he looked back at her.

'My name is Suvorin, by the way. Feliks Suvorin.'

THE militia man and the morgue assistant were waiting in the corridor. 'Leave her alone,' he said. 'She'll be fine.' They were looking at him strangely. Was it contempt, he wondered, or a wary respect? He wasn't sure which he deserved and he didn't have time to decide. He turned his back on them and called Arsenyev's number at Yasenevo.

'Sergo? I need to speak to the colonel... Yes, it's urgent. And I need you to fix some transport for me... Yes - are you ready? - I need you to fix me a plane.'

ACCORDING TO HER Party record, Vavara Safanova had lived at the same address for more than sixty years, a place in the old part of Archangel, about ten minutes' drive from the waterfront, in a neighbourhood built of wood. Wooden houses were reached by wooden steps from wooden pavements - ancient timber, weathered grey, that must have been floated down the Dvina from the forests upstream long before the Revolution. It looked picturesque in the winter weather, if you could close your eyes to the cQncrete apartment blocks towering in the background. There were stacks of cordwood beside some of the houses and here and there a curl of smoke rose to lick the falling snow.

The roads were broad and empty, guarded on either side by sentinels of silver birch, and the surface in the snow was deceptively smooth. But the roads weren't made. The Toyota plunged into potholes as deep as a man's shin, jarring and bouncing down the wide track, until Kelso suggested they pull over and continue the search on foot.

He stood shivering on the duckboards as O'Brian rummaged around in the back. Across the street were a dozen railroad freight cars. Suddenly a homemade door in the side of one of them opened and a young woman climbed out, followed by two small children so thickly bundled against the cold they were almost spherical. She set off across the snowy field, the children dawdling behind her and staring at Kelso with solemn curiosity, until she turned and shouted sharply for them to follow her.

O'Brian locked the car. He was carrying one of the aluminium cases. Kelso still had the satchel.

'Did you see that?' said Kelso. 'There are people actually living over there in those freight cars. Did you see that?'

O'Brian grunted and, pulled up his hood.

They trudged down the side of the road, past a row of patched and tumbledown houses, each tilted at its own mad angle to the ground. Every summer the land must thaw, thought Kelso, and shift, and the houses with it. And then fresh boards would have to be nailed over the new cracks, so that some of the walls had skins of repairs that must date back to the Tsars. He had a sense of time frozen. It wasn't hard to imagine Anna Safanova, fifty years ago, walking where they walked, with a pair of ice skates slung around her shoulders.

It took them another ten minutes to find the old woman's street - an alley, really, no more, running off the main road, behind a clump of birch trees, and leading to the back of the house. In the yard were some animal coops: chickens, a pig, a couple of goats. And looming over it all, ghostly in the snow, a slab-sided fourteen-storey tower block, with a few yellow lights visible on the lower floors.

O'Brian unlocked his case, took out his video camera and started filming. Kelso watched him, unhappily.

'Shouldn't we check she's in first? Shouldn't you get her permission?'

'You ask her. Go ahead.'

Kelso glanced at the sky. The flakes seemed to be getting bigger - thick and soft as a baby's hand. He could feel a knot of tension in his stomach the size of his fist. He picked his way across the yard, past the hot stink of the goats, and started to climb the half-dozen loose wooden steps that led to the back porch. On the third step he paused. The door was partially open and in the narrow gap he could see an old woman, bent forwards, two hands resting on a stick, watching him.

He said, 'Vavara Safanova?'

She didn't say anything for a moment. Then she muttered, 'Who wants her?'

He took this as an invitation to climb the remaining steps. He wasn't a tall man but when he reached the rickety porch he soared above her. She had osteoporosis, he could see now. The tops of her shoulders were on a level with her ears and it gave her a watchful look.

He tugged down his hood and for the second time that morning he launched into his carefully prepared lie - they were in town to make a film about the communists. they were looking for people with interesting memories; they had been given her name and address by the local Party - and all the time he was appraising her, trying to reconcile this hunched figure with the matriarch who featured briefly in the girl's journal.

Mama is strong, as ever.. . Mama brings me to the station, I kiss her dear cheeks.. .'

She had opened the door a crack wider to get a better look at him, and he could see more of her. Apart from her shawl the clothes she wore were masculine - old clothes: her dead husband's clothes, perhaps - with a man's thick socks and boots. Her face was still handsome. She might have been stunning once - the evidence was there, in the sharpness of her jaw and cheekbones, in the keenness of her one good blue-green eye; the other was milky with a cataract. It didn't take much effort to imagine her as a young communist in the 1 930s, pioneer builder of a new civilisation, a socialist heroine to warm the hearts of Shaw or Wells. He bet she would have worshipped Stalin.

And Mama, yes, it is a modest house! Two storeys only. Your good Bolshevik heart would rejoice at its simplicity...

'- so if it would be possible,' he concluded, 'for us to take up some of your time, we would be very grateful.'

He transferred the satchel uneasily, from hand to hand. He was conscious of the snow settling in a cold clump on his back, of water trickling from his scalp, and of O'Brian at the foot of the steps, filming them.

Oh God, throw us out, he thought suddenly. Tell us to go to hell, and take our lies with us: I would if I were you. You must know why we're here.

But all she did was turn and shuffle back into the room, leaving the door wide open behind her.

KELSO went in first, and then O'Brian, who had to duck to get through the low entrance. It was dark. The solitary window was thickly glazed with snow.

If they wanted tea, she said, setting herself down heavily in a hard-backed wooden chair, then they would have to make it themselves.

'Tea?' said Kelso softly to O'Brian. 'She's offering to let us make her tea. I think yes, don't you?'

'Sure. I'll do it.'

She issued a stream of irritated instructions. Her voice, emanating from her buckled frame, was unexpectedly deep and masculine.

'Well, get the water from the pail, then - no, not that jug:

that one, the black one - use the ladle, that's it - no, no no -she banged her stick on the floor ' - not that much, that much. Now put it on the stove. And you can put some wood on the fire, too, while you're about it.' Another two bangs of the stick. 'Wood? Fire?'

O'Brian appealed helplessly to Kelso for a translation.

'She wants you to put some wood on the fire.'

'Tea in that jar. No, no. Yes. That jar. Yes. There.'

Kelso couldn't get a handle on any of this - on the town, on her, on this place, on the speed with which everything seemed to be happening. It was like a dream. He thought he ought to start taking some notes, so he pulled out his yellow pad and began making a discreet inventory of the room. On the floor: a large square of grey linoleum. On the linoleum:

one table, one chair and a bed covered with a woollen blanket. On the table: a pair of spectacles, a collection of pill-bottles and a copy of the northern edition of Pravda, open at the third page. On the walls: nothing, except in one c&rner, where a flickering red candle on a small sideboard punctuated the gloom, lighting a wood-framed photograph of V. I. Lenin. Hanging next to it were two medals for Socialist Labour and a certificate commemorating her fiftieth anniversary in the Party in 1984; by the time of her sixtieth, presumably, they couldn't run to such extravagance. The bones of communism and of Vavara Safanova had crumbled together.

The two men sat awkwardly on the bed. They drank their tea. It had a peculiar, herbal flavour, not unpleasant -cloudberries in it somewhere: a taste of the forest. She seemed to find nothing surprising in the fact of two foreigners arriving in her yard with a Japanese video camera, claiming to be making a film about the history of the Archangel Communist Party. It was as if she had been expecting them. Kelso guessed she would find no surprise in anything any more. She had the resigned indifference of extreme old age. Buildings and empires rose and fell. It snowed. It stopped snowing. People came and went. One day death would come for her, and she would not find that

surprising either, and she would not care - not so long as He trod in the proper places: 'No, not there. There...'

WELL, yes, she remembered the past, she said, settling back. Nobody in Archangel remembered the past better than she did. She remembered everything She could remember the Reds in 1917 coming out on to the street, and her uncle wheeling her up in the air, and kissing her and telling her the Tsar had gone and Paradise was on the way. She could remember her uncle and her father running away into the forest to hide when the British came to stop the Revolution in 1918 - a great grey battleship moored in the Dvina and runty little English soldiers swarming ashore. She played to the sound of gunfire. And then she remembered early one morning walking down to the harbour and the ship had gone. And that afternoon her uncle came back - but not her father: her father had been taken by the Whites and he never came back.

She remembered all these things.

And the kulaks?

Yes, she remembered the kulaks. She was seventeen. They arrived at the railway station, thousands of them, in their strange national dress. Ukrainians: you never saw so many people - covered in sores and carrying their bundles - they were locked in the churches and the townspeople were forbidden to approach them. Not that they wished to. The kulaks carried contamination, they all knew that.

Their sores were contagious? No. The kulaks were contagious. Their souls were contagious. They carried the spores of counter-revolution. Bloodsuckers, spiders and vampires: that was what Lenin called them. And so what happened to the kulaks?

It was like the English battleship. You went to bed at night and they were there, and you got up in the morning and they were gone. The churches were all closed after that. But now the churches were open again - she had seen it with her own eyes. The kulaks had come back. They were everywhere. It was a tragedy.

And the Great Patriotic War, she remembered that - the Allied ships moored out beyond the mouth of the river, and the docks working all day and all night, under the heroic direction of the Parry, and the fascist planes dropping fire-bombs over the old wooden town and burning it, burning so much of it down. Those were the hardest times - her husband away fighting at the front, herself working as an auxiliary nurse at the Seamen's Policlinic, no food in the town and not much fuel, the blackout, the bombs and a daughter to bring up on her own...

ALL of this, of course, took much longer to extract than the printed record would suggest. There was a lot of banging of her stick and doubling-back and repitition and meandering, and Kelso was acutely aware of O'Brian fidgeting beside him and of the snow piling up and muffling the sounds outside. But he let her talk. Indeed, he kicked O'Brian twice on the ankle to warn him to be patient. He wanted to let her come to things in her own time. Fluke Kelso was an expert at this. This was how the whole business had started, after all.

He sipped his cold tea.

So you had a daughter, Comrade Safanova? That's interesting. Tell us about your daughter.

Vavara prodded the linoleum with her stick. Her mouth turned down.

That was of no consequence to the history of the Archangel Regional Party.

'But it was of consequence to you?'

Well, naturally it was of consequence to her. She was the child's mother. But what was a child when set against the forces of history? It was a matter of subjectivity and objectivity. Of who and whom. And of various other slogans of the Party she could no longer fully remember, but which she knew to be true and which had been a comfort to her at the time.

She sat back, hunched in her chair.

Kelso reached for the satchel.

Actually, I know something of what happened to your daughter,' he began. 'We have found a book, a journal, that Anna kept. That was her name, wasn't it? Anna? I wonder -can I show it you?'

Her eyes followed the movement of his hands, warily, as he began to unfasten the straps.

HER fingers were spotted with age, like the book itself, but they didn't tremble as she opened the cover. When she saw the picture of Anna, she touched it hesitantly, then her knuckle went to her mouth. She sucked on it. Slowly she brought the page up level with her face and held it close.

'I ought to be getting this on camera,' whispered O'Brian. 'Don't you dare even move,' hissed Kelso.

He couldn't see her expression, but he could hear her laboured breathing and again he had the odd sensation that she had been waiting for them - for years, maybe.

Eventually, she said, 'Where did you get this?'

'It was dug up. In a garden in Moscow. It was with some papers belonging to Stalin.'

When she lowered the book, her eyes were dry. She closed it and held it out to him.

'No. Read it,' he said. 'Please. It's hers.'

But she shook her head. She didn't want to.

'But that is her writing?'

'Yes, it's hers. Take it away.

She waved the book at him and wouldn't rest until it was safely put back in the satchel. Then she sat back, leaning to her right, one hand covering her good eye, stabbing at the floor with her stick.

ANNA, she said, after a time.

Well. Anna.

Where to begin?

Truth to tell, she had been pregnant with Anna when she married. But people didn't care about such things in those times - the Party had done away with priests, thank God.

She was eighteen. Mikhail Safanov was five years older - a metallurgist in the shipyards and a member of the Party's factory committee.

A good-looking man. Their daughter took after him. Oh yes, Anna was a pretty thing. That was her tragedy.

'Tragedy?'

Clever, too. And growing up a good young communist. She was following her parents into the Party. She had served her time as a Pioneer. She was in the Komsomol: she looked like something out of a poster in her uniform. So much so that she had been picked for the Archangel Komsomol delegation to pass through Red Square - oh, a great honour, this - picked to pass beneath the eyes of the Vozhd himself, on May Day 1951.

Anna's picture had been in Ogonyok afterwards andquestions had been asked. That had been the start of it. Nothing had been the same after that.

Some comrades had come up from the Central Committee in Moscow the following week and had started asking around about her. And about the Safanovs.

And once word of this got out, some of their neighbours had started to avoid them. After all, though the arch-fiend Trotsky was dead at last, his spies and saboteurs might not be. Perhaps the Safanovs were wreckers or deviationists?

But of course nothing could have been further from the truth.

Mikhail had come home early from the shipyard one afternoon in the company of a comrade from Moscow -Comrade Mekhlis: she would never forget his name - and it was this comrade who had given them the good news. The Safanovs had been thoroughly checked and found to be loyal communists. Their daughter was a particular credit to them. So much so that she had been selected for special Party work in Moscow, attending to the needs of the senior leadership. Domestic service, but still: the work required intelligence and discretion, and afterwards the girl could resume her studies with good words on her file.

Anna - well, once Anna got to hear of it - there was no stopping her. And Vavara was in favour of it, too. Only Mikhail had been opposed. Something had happened to Mikhail. It pained her to say it. Something during the war. He had never spoken of it, except once, when Anna was talking, full of wonder, about the genius of Comrade Stalin. Mikhail said he had seen a lot of comrades die at the front:

could she tell him, then, if Comrade Stalin was such a genius, why so many millions had had to die?

Vavara had made him rise from this very table - she struck it with her hand - and go outside into the yard for his foolishness. No. He was not the man he had been before the war. He wouldn't even go to the railway station to see his daughter off.

She fell silent.

Kelso said quietly, And you never saw her again?'

Oh yes, said Vavara, surprised at the question. They saw her again.

She made a curving motion with her hands, outwards from her belly.

They saw her again when she came home to have the baby.

SILENCE.

O'Brian coughed and bent forwards, head down, his hands clasped tight in front of him, his elbows on his knees. 'Did she just say what I thought she said?'

Kelso ignored him. With great effort, he managed to keep his voice neutral.

'And when was this?'

Vavara thought for a while, tapping her stick against her boot.

The spring of 1952, she said eventually. That was it. She got through on the train in March 1952, when it was starting to thaw a bit. They had had no warning, she had just turned up, with no explanation. Not that she needed to explain anything. You only had to look at her. She was seven months gone by then.

'And the father.. . ? Did she say...

No.

A vigorous shake of the head.

But you guessed, didn~you? thought Kelso.

No, she didn't say anything about the father, or about what had happened in Moscow, and after a while they gave up asking. She just sat in the corner and waited for her term to come. She was very silent, this new girl, not like their old Anna. She wouldn't see her friends, or step outside. The truth was, she was scared.

'Scared? What was she scared of?'

Of giving birth, of course. And why not? Men! she said -and some of her old fire returned - what did men know of life? Naturally she was scared. Anyone with eyes in their head and a mind to think would be scared And that baby didn't give her an easy time, either, the little devil. It sucked the goodness out of her. Oh, a proper little devil - what a kick it had! They would sit here in the evening and watch her belly heave.

Mekhlis came by sometimes to keep an eye on her. Most weeks there was a car at the bottom of the street with a couple of his men it.

No, they didn't ask who the father was.

She started to bleed at the beginning of April. They took her to the clinic. And that was the last time they saw her. She had a haemorrhage in the delivery room. The doctor told them everything about it afterwards. There was nothing to be done. She died on the operating table two days later. She was twenty.

'And the baby?'

The baby lived. A boy.

THE arrangements were all made by Comrade Mekhlis.

It was the least he could do, he told them. He felt responsible.

It was Mekhlis who provided the doctor - an academician, no less, the country's leading expert, flown up specially from Moscow - and Mekhlis who arranged the adoption. The Safanovs would have reared the child themselves, willingly -they asked to do so: they begged - but Mekhlis had a paper, signed by Anna, in which she said that if anything happened to her, she wanted the baby to be adopted. She named some relatives of the father, a couple named Chizhikov.

'Chizhikov?' said Kelso. 'You're sure of that name?'

Certain.

They never even saw the baby. They weren't allowed inside the hospital.

Now she was willing to accept all this, because Vavara Safanova believed in the discipline of the Party. She still did. She would believe in it until the day she died. The Party was her god, and sometimes, like a god, the Party moved in a mysterious way.

But Mikhail Safanov no longer accepted the doctrine of infallibility. He was set on finding these Chizhikovs, whatever Mekhlis said, and he still had enough friends in the regional Party to help him do it. And that was how he discovered that the Chizhikovs were not fancy Moscow folk at all - which was what he had expected - but were northerners, like them, and had gone to live in a village in the forest outside Archangel. The whisper in the town was that Chizhikov was not their real name. That they were NKVD.

By this time it was winter and there was nothing Mikhail could do. And then one morning in early spring, while he was still looking out each day for the first signs of a thaw, they woke to solemn music on the radio and the news that Comrade Stalin was dead.

She had wept, and he had, too. Did that surprise him? Oh, they had howled and clutched at one another! They had cried in a way they never had before, not even for Anna. The whole of Archangel was in grief. She could still remember the day of the funeral. The long silence, broken by a thirty-gun salute. The echo of the gunfire had rolled across the Dvina like a distant storm in the forest.

Two months later, in May, when the ice had gone, Mikhail had filled a backpack and had set off to find his grandson.

She had known nothing good could come of it.

One day passed, then two, then three. He was a fit man, strong and healthy - he was only forty-five.

On the fifth day some fishermen had found his body, about thirty versts upstream, rushing along in the yellow meltwater that was pouring out of the forest, not far from Novodvinsk.

Kelso unfolded O'Brian's map and laid it out on the table. She put on her spectacles and hunted up and down the blue line of the Dvina, her good eye held very close.

There, she said, after a while, and pointed. That was the place where her husband's body had been found. A wild spot! There were wolves here in the forest, and lynx and bear. In some places the trees were too dense for a man to move. In others, there were swamps that could eat you in a minute. And here and there the grey weathered bones of the old kulak settlements. Almost all of the kulaks had perished, of course. There was not much of a living to be scratched in such a place.

Mikhail knew the forest as well as any man. He had been roaming the taiga since he was a child.

It had been a heart attack, according to the militia. That was what they said. Maybe he had been trying to fill his water bottle? He had fallen into the cold yellow water and the shock had stopped his heart.

She had buried him in the Kuznecheskoye Cemetery, next to Anna.

'And what,' said Kelso, conscious again of O'Brian Just' behind them, filming them now with his wretched miniature camera, 'what was the name of the village where your husband said the Chizhikovs lived?'

Ah! This was crazy! How could she be expected to remember that? It was so long ago - nearly fifty years.

She brought her face down close to the map again.

Here somewhere - she placed a wavering finger on a spot just north of the river - somewhere around here: a place too small to be worth recording. Too small to have a name, even.

She had never tried to find it herself?

Oh no.

She looked at Kelso in horror.

Nothing good could come of it. Not then. And not now.

THE BIG CAR braked hard and swerved off the south Moscow highway into the Zhukovsky military airbase shortly before noon, Feliks Suvorin hanging grimly to the strap in the rear. Beyond the checkpoint, a jeep waited. It pulled away as the barrier rose, its tail lights flashing, and they followed it around the side of the terminal building, through a wire fence and on to the concrete apron.

A small grey aircraft, as requested - six-seater, prop-driven - was being fuelled by a tanker. Beyond the plane was a line of dark green army helicopters with drooping rotors; parked next to it, a big ZiL limousine.

Well, well, thought Suvorin. Some things still work round here.

He stuffed his notes into his briefcase and darted through the wind and rain towards the limousine where Arsenyev's driver was already opening the rear door.

'And?' said Arsenyev from the warmth of the interior.

'And,' said Suvorin, sliding along the seat to join him, 'it's not what we thought it was. And thank you for fixing the plane.'

'Wait in the other car,' said Arsenyev to his chauffeur.

'Yes, colonel.'

'What's not as who thought it was?' said Arsenyev, when the door was shut. 'Good morning, by the way.

'Good morning, Yuri Semonovich. The notebook. Everybody's always believed it was Stalin's. Actually it turns out to have been a journal kept by a girl servant of Stalin's, Anna Mikhailovna Safanova. He had her brought down from Archangel to work for him in the summer of'51, about eighteen months before he died.'

Arsenyev blinked at him.

'And that's it? That's what Beria stole?'

'That's it. That and some papers about her, apparently.' ' Arsenyev stared at Suvorin for a second or two, then started laughing. He shook his head with relief. 'Go flick your mother! The old bastard was screwing his maid? Is that what he was up to?'

Apparently.'

'That is priceless. That is brilliant!' Arsenyev punched the seat in front of him. 'Oh, let me be there! Let me be there to ~ see Mamantov's face when he finds out his great Stalin testament is nothing more than a maid's account of getting screwed by the mighty Vozhd" He glanced at Suvorin, his fat cheeks flushed with mirth, diamonds glistening in his eyes.

'What's the matter, Feliks? Don't tell me you can't see the funny side?' He stopped laughing. 'What's the matter? You are sure this is true, aren't you?'

'Pretty well sure, colonel, yes. This is all according to the woman we picked up last night, Zinaida Rapava. She read the notebook yesterday afternoon - her father left it hidden for her. I can't think that she would invent such a story. It defies imagination.-

'Right, right. So cheer up, eh? And where's this notebook now?'

'Well, that's the first complication.' Suvorin spoke hesitantly. It seemed such a shame to spoil the old fellow's mood. 'That's why I needed to talk to you. It seems she showed it to the historian, Kelso. According to her, he's taken it with him.'

'With him?'

'To Archangel. He's trying to find the woman who wrote it, this Anna Safanova.'

Arsenyev tugged nervously at his thick neck. 'When did he leave?'

'Yesterday afternoon. Four or five. She can't remember exactly.

'How?'

'Driving.'

'Driving? That's all right. You'll catch him easily. By the time you land, you'll only be a few hours behind him. He's a rat in a trap up there.'

'Unfortunately, it's not just him. He's got a journalist with him. O'Brian. You know him? That correspondent with the satellite television station.

'Ah.' Arsenyev stuck out his lower lip and pulled at his neck some more. After a while he said, 'But even so, the chances of this woman still being alive are small. And if she is - well, so, so, it's no disaster. Let them write their books and make their fucking news reports. I can't see Stalin entrusting his maid with a message for future generations. Can you?'

'Well, this is my worry -'His maid? Come on, Feliks! He was a Georgian, after all, and an old one at that. Women were good for only three things, as far as Comrade Stalin was concerned. Cooking, cleaning and having kids. He -' Arsenyev stopped. 'No -,

'It's insane,' said Suvorin, holding up his hand. 'I know that. I've been telling myself all the way over that it's crazy. But then, he was crazy. And he was a Georgian. Think about it. Why would he go to so much trouble to check out one girl? He had her medical records, apparently. And he wanted her checked for congenital abnormalities. Also, why would he keep her diary in his safe? And then there's more, you see -'More?' Arsenyev was no longer punching the front seat.

He was clutching it for support.

'According to Zinaida, there are references in the girl's journal to Trofim Lysenko. You know: "the inheritability of acquired characteristics" and all that rubbish. And apparently he also goes on about how useless his own children are, and how "the soul of Russia is in the north".'

'Stop it, Feliks. This is too much.'

'And then there's Mamantov. I've never understood why Mamantov should have taken such an insane risk - to murder Rapava, and in such a way. Why? This is what I tried to say to you yesterday: what could Stalin possibly have written that could have any effect upon Russia nearly fifty years later? But if Mamantov knew - had heard some rumour years ago, maybe, from some of the old timers at the Lubyanka - that Stalin might deliberately have left behind an heir -,

'An heir?'

- well, that would explain everything, wouldn't it? He'd take the risk for that. Let's face it, Yuri, Mamantoy's just about sick enough to - oh, I don't know -' he tried to think of something utterly absurd ' - to run Stalin's son for the Presidency or something. He does have haifa billion roubles, after all. .

'Wait a minute,' said Arsenyev. 'Let me think about this.' He looked across the airfield to the line of helicopters. Suvorin could see a muscle like a fish hook twitching deep in his fleshy jaw. 'And we still have no idea where Mamantov is?'

'He could be anywhere.'

'Archangel?'

'It's a possibility. It must be. If Zinaida Rapava had the brains to find Kelso at the airport, why not Mamantov? He could have been tailing them for twenty-four hours. They're not professionals; he is. I'm worried, Yuri. They'd never know a thing until he made his hit.'

Arsenyev groaned.

'You got a phone?'

'Sure.' Suvorin dug in his pocket and produced it.

'Secure?'

'Supposedly.'

'Call my office for me, will you?'

Suvorin began punching in the number. Arsenyev said, 'Where's the Rapava girl?'

'I got Bunin to take her back home. I've fixed up a guard, for her own protection. She's not in a good state.'

'You saw this, I suppose?' Arsenyev pulled a copy of the latest Aurora out of the seat pocket. Suvorin saw the headline:

'VIOLENCE IS INEVITABLE'.

'I heard it on the news.

'Well, you can imagine how pleasantly that~ gone down -''Here,' said Suvorin, giving him the phone. 'It's ringing.'

'Sergo?' said Arsenyev. 'It's me. Listen. Can you patch me through to the President's office . . . ? That's it. Use the second number.' He put his hand over the mouthpiece. 'You'd better go. No. Wait. Tell me what you need.'

Suvorin spread his hands. He barely knew where to begin. 'I could do with the militia or someone up in Archangel to check out every Safanov or Safanova and have the job finished by the time I arrive. That would be a start. I'll need a couple of men to meet me at the airfield. Transport I'll need. And some place to stay.

'It's done. Go carefully, Feliks. I hope -, But Suvorin never did discover what the colonel hoped, because Arsenyev suddenly held up a warning finger. 'Yes . . . Yes, I'm ready.' He took a breath and forced a smile; if he could have stood up and saluted, he would have done so. 'And good day to you, Boris Nikolaevich -'

Suvorin climbed quietly out of the car.

The tanker had been unhooked from the little aircraft and the hose was being wound up. There were rainbows of oil in the puddles beneath the wings. Close up, the dented, rust-streaked Tupolev looked even older than he expected. Forty, at least. Older than he was, in fact. Holy Mother, what a bucket!

A couple of ground crew watched him without curiosity.

'Where's the pilot?'

One of the men gestured with his head to the plane. Suvorin pulled himself up the steps and into the fuselage. It was cold inside and smelled like an old bus that hadn't been driven for years. The door to the cockpit was open. He could see the pilot idly pressing switches on and off He ducked his head and went forward and tapped him on the shoulder. The airman had a pouchy face, with the sandy, dull-eyed, bloodshot look of a heavy drinker. Great, thought Suvorin. They shook hands.

'What's the weather like in Archangel?'

The pilot laughed. Suvorin could smell the booze: it was not only on his breath - he was sweating it. 'I'll risk it if you will.'

'Shouldn't you have a navigator or someone?'

'There's nobody about.'

'Great. Terrific.'

Suvorin went aft and took his seat. One engine coughed and started with a spurt of black smoke, and then the other.

Arsenyev's limousine had already gone, he noticed. The Tupolev turned and taxied across the deserted apron, out towards the runway. They turned again, the sawing whine of the propellers falling then rising, rising, rising. The wind whipped the rain like dirty laundry, in horizontal sheets across the concrete. He could see the narrow trunks of silver birches on the airfield perimeter, grown close together like a white palisade. He closed his eyes - it was stupid to be scared of flying, but there it was: he always had been - and they were off, scuttling and swaying down the runway, the pressure pushing him back in his seat, and then there was a lurch and they were airborne.

He opened his eyes. The plane rose beyond the edge of the airfield and banked across the city. Objects seemed to rush into his field of vision, only to dwindle and tilt away - yellow headlights reflecting on the wet streets, flat grey roofs and the dark green patches of trees. So many trees! It always surprised him. He thought of all the people he knew down there -Serafima at home in the apartment they couldn't quite afford and the boys at school and Arsenyev trembling after his call to the President and Zinaida Rapava and her silence when he left her in the morgue -They hit the sudden underside of the low cloud and he was permitted one, two, three last glimpses through the shreds of thickening gauze before Moscow was blanked from view.

R. J. O'BRIEN stood on the street corner at the end of the alleyway leading to Vavara Safanova's yard, his metal case on the ground between his legs, his head bent over the map.

'How long d'you figure it'll take us to get there? A couple of hours?'

Kelso looked back at the tiny wooden house. The old woman was still standing at her open door, leaning on her stick, watching them. He raised his hand to wave goodbye and the door slowly closed.

'Get where?'

'The Chizhikov place,' said O'Brian. 'How long d'you figure?'

'In this?' Kelso raised his eyes to the heavy sky. 'You want to try to find it now?'

'There's only one road. See for yourself. She said it was a village, right? If it's a village, it'll be on the road.' He brushed a dusting of snowflakes off the map and gave it to Kelso. 'I'd say two hours.'

'That's not a road,' said Kelso. 'That's a dotted line. That's a track.' It wandered eastwards through the forest, parallel with the Dvina for perhaps fifty miles, then struck north and ended nowhere - just stopped in the middle of the taiga after about two hundred miles. 'Take a look around you, man. They haven't even made most of the roads in the city. What d'you think they'll be like out there?'

He thrust the map back at O'Brian and began walking in the direction of the Toyota. O'Brian came after him. 'We got four-wheel drive, Fluke. We got snow chains.'

'And what if we break down?'

'We got food. We got fuel for a fire and a whole damn forest to burn. We can always drink the snow. We've got the satellite phone.' He clapped Kelso on the shoulder. 'Tell you what, how about this: you get scared, you can call your mommy. How's that?'

'My mommy's dead.'

'Zinaida then. You can call Zinaida.'

'Tell me, did you screw her, O'Brian? As a matter of interest?'

'What's that got to do with anything?'

'I just want to know why she doesn't trust you. Whether she's right. Is it sex or is it something personal?'

'Oh-ho. Is that what all this is about?' O'Brian smirked. 'Come on, Fluke. You know the rules. A gentleman never talks.'

Kelso huddled further into his jacket and increased his pace.

'It's not a question of being scared.'

'Oh really?'

They were within sight of the car now. Kelso stopped and turned to face him. 'All right, I admit it. I am scared. And you know what scares me most? The fact you're not scared. That rea//y scares me.

'Bullshit. A bit of snow -'

'Forget the snow. I'm not bothered about the snow.' Kelso glanced around at the tumbling houses. The scene was entirely brown and white and grey. And silent, like an old movie. 'You just don't get it, do you?' he said. 'You don't understand. You've no history, that's your problem. It's like this name "Chizhikov". What's that to you?'

'Nothing. It's just a name.

'But it's not, you see. "Chizhikov" was one of Stalin's aliases before the Revolution. Stalin was issued with a passport in the name of P. A. Chizhikov in 1911 .'

(Are you excited, Dr Kelso? Do you feel the force of Comrade Stalin, even from the grave?'And he did. He did feel it. He felt as if a hand had reached out from the snow and touched his shoulder.) O'Brian was quiet for a few seconds, but then he gave a dismissive sweep of his metal case. 'Well, you can stand here and commune with history if you want. I'm going to go and find it.' He set off across the street, turning as he walked. 'You coming or not? The train to Moscow leaves at ten past eight tonight. Or you can come with me. Make your choice'

Kelso hesitated. He looked up again at the tumbling sky. It wasn't like any snowfall he had ever known in England or the States. It was as if something was disintegrating up there

- flaking to pieces and crashing around them.

Choice? he thought. For a man with no visa and no money, no job, no book? For a man who had come this far? And what choice would that be, exactly?

Slowly, reluctantly, he began to walk towards the car.

THEY headed back out of the city, along a minor road, and northwards, so at least there was no GAl checkpoint to negotiate.

By now it must have been about one o'clock.

The road ran alongside an overgrown railroad track lined with ancient freight cars, and to start with it wasn't too bad. It could almost have been romantic, in the right company.

They overtook a gaily painted cart being pulled by a pony, its head down into the wind, and soon there were more wooden houses, also bright with paint - blue, green, red leaning in a picturesque way out in the marshland at the end of wooden jettys. In the snow it wasn't possible to tell where the solid ground ended and water began. Boats, cars, sheds, chicken coops and tethered goats were jumbled together. Even the big wood pulp mill across the wide Dvina, on the southern headland, had a kind of epic beauty, its cranes and smoking chimneys silhouetted against the concrete sky.

But then, abruptly, the houses disappeared and so did their view of the river. At the same time the hard surface gave way beneath their wheels and they began jolting along a rutted track. Birch and pine trees closed around them. In less than fifteen minutes they might have been a thousand miles from Archangel rather than a mere ten. The road wound on through the muffled forest. Sometimes the trees grew high and fine. But occasionally the woodland would thin and they would find themselves in a wilderness of blackened, blighted stumps, like a battlefield after heavy shelling. Or - and this was oddly more disconcerting - they would suddenly come across a small plantation of tall radio antennae.

Listening posts, O'Brian said, eavesdropping on Northern NATO.

He started to sing. Walking in a Winter Wonderland Kelso stood it for a couple of verses. 'Do you have to?' O'Brian stopped.

'Gloomy sonofabitch,' he muttered under his breath.

The snow was still falling steadily. Occasional gunshots cracked and echoed in the distance - hunters in the woods -sending panicky birds flapping and crying across the track.

They went through several small villages, each smaller and more dilapidated than the last - a barracks in one with graffiti on its walls, and a satellite dish: a little chunk of Archangel dropped in the middle of nowhere. There was no one to be seen except a couple of gawping children and an old woman dressed entirely in black who (stood at the roadside and tried to wave them down. When O'Brian didn't slow she shook her fist and cursed them.

'Hag.' O'Brian looked back at her in the mirror. 'What's eating her? Where are all the men, anyway? Drunk?' He meant it as a joke.

'Probably.'

'No? What? All of them?'

'Most of them, I should think. Home-made vodka. What else is there to do?'

'Jesus, what a country.

After a while O'Brian began to sing again, but un4er his breath now and less confidently than before.

'We're walking in a winter wonderland...'

ONE hour passed, then another.

A couple of times the river came back briefly into view, and that, as O'Brian said, was a sight and a half- the swampy land, the wide and sluggish mass of water and, far beyond it, the flat, dark mass of trees picking up again, only to dissolve into the waves of snow. It was a primordial landscape. Kelso could imagine a dinosaur moving slowly across it.

From the map it was hard to tell exactly where they were. No habitations were recorded, no landmarks. He suggested they stop at the next village and try to regain their bearings.

'Whatever you want.

But the next village was a long time coming, it never came, and Kelso noticed that the snow on the track was virgin: there hadn't been any traffic this far out for hours. They hit a drift for the first time - a pothole disguised by snow - and the Toyota slewed, its rear tyres flailing, until they bit on something solid. The car lurched. O'Brian spun the wheel and brought them back on course. He laughed - 'Whoa, that was fun!' - but Kelso could tell that even he was starting to feel unsettled now. The reporter slowed the engine, switched on the headlights and shifted forwards in his seat, peering into the swirling flakes.

'Fuel's low. I'd say we've got about fifteen minutes.' 'Then what?'