Archangel (12 page)

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

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

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

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

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

He pressed PLAY

'Who is this?'

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

'Yes? Who is this?'

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

'Yes, but who is this?'

Netto pressed PAUSE.

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

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

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

PLAY

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

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

'To see you.

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

About?'

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

'Shut up.

'What?'

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

'Near the Into
urist building, on Mohavaja Street.'

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

STOP

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

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

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

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

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

Archangel

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

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

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

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

'How long did he stay?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'And that is funny?'

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

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

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

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

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

'And?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Kids?'

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

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

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

'Feliks?'

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

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

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

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

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

'There's a call for Vissari Petrovich.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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