Archangel (14 page)

Are you hearing me twice?'

'-to your responsibilities -'

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

STALIN, as you know, was dismissive of women.

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

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

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

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

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

'Later she vanished...'

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

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

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

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

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

'Dinner?'

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

'Christ. Do I have a choice?'

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

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

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

'Of course not.

'It's all balls?'

Absolutely. Nothing in it.

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

'I looked up an old friend.'

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

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

There wasn't a Russian word in sight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'And the sound of dogs singing...

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

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

American?'

'Swiss, I heard . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Colleagues,' began Askenov.

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

headed towards the exit.

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

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

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

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

There was more laughter. Kelso strode on.

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

'The way out?' he said.

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

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