DID KELSO FALL asleep? He afterwards wondered if he might have done, for he had no real recollection of that long afternoon until he heard footsteps in the corridor and the sound of someone knocking softly on the door. And by then they were into the northern fringes of Moscow and the flat October light was already falling on the endless iron and concrete of the city.
Viktor idly swung his foot off the banquette and stood, hitching up his trousers. He removed his knife from<the mechanism of the lock and slid back the door a fraction, then pulled it all the way, coming stiffly to attention, and suddenly Vladimir Mamantov was across the threshold and into the compartment, bringing with him that same odd odour of camphor and carbolic that Kelso remembered from his apartment. The same clump of dark bristles still nestled in the cleft of his chin.
He was all false smiles and apologies: so sorry if Kelso had been inconvenienced in any way, such a pity they had not been able to meet much earlier in the journey, but he had had other, more pressing matters to attend to. He was sure that Kelso understood.
His overcoat was unbuttoned. His face was sheened with sweat. He tossed his hat on to the banquette opposite Kelso and sat down next to it, grabbing the satchel, removing the documents, gesturing to Viktor to take the seat next to Kelso, calling to the second bodyguard he had left in the corridor to close the door and not to let anyone in.
This was not the Mamantov Kelso had met seven years ago on his release from prison. This was not even the Mamantov from earlier in the week. This was Mamantov in his prime again. Mamantov rejuvenated. Mamantov redux.
Kelso watched him as his thick fingers checked through the notebook and the NKVD reports.
'Good,' he said, briskly, 'excellent. Everything is here, I think. Tell me: were you really were planning to destroy all this?'
'Yes.'
All of it?'
'Yes.'
He looked at Kelso in wonderment and shook his head.
'And yet you are the one who is always bleating about the need to open every historical document for inspection!'
'Even so, I'd still have destroyed it. In the interests of stopping you.
Kelso felt the increasing pressure of Viktor's elbow in his ribs, and he knew that the young man was longing for an opportunity to hurt him.
Ah! So history is only to be permitted where it suits the subjective interests of those who hold the records?' Mamantov smiled again. 'Has the myth of so-called western "objectivity" ever been more completely exposed? I can see I shall have to take these documents back into my possession for safe-keeping.'
'Take them back?' said Kelso. He couldn't keep the incredulity out of his voi~e-'You mean you had them before?'
Mamantov inclined his head graciously. Indeed.
MAMANTOV had replaced the papers in the satchel and had fastened the straps. But he couldn't quite bring himself to leave. Not yet. After all, he had waited so long for this moment. He wanted Kelso know. It was fifteen years since Yepishev had first told him about this 'black oilskin notebook' and he had never lost faith that one day he would find it. And then, like a miracle, in the very darkest hours of the cause, who should turn up on the membership lists of Aurora but the very same Papu Rapava whose name had cropped up so often in the KG B's files? Mamantov had summoned him. And at long last - hesitantly, reluctantly at first, but eventually out of loyalty to his new chief - Rapava had told him the story of the night of Stalin's stroke.
Mamantov had been the first to hear it.
That had been a year ago. It had taken him a whole nine months to get into the garden of Beria's mansion on Vspolnyi Street. And do you know what he had had to do? No? He had had to set up a property company - Moskprop - and buy the goddamn place off its owners, the former KGB, although that hadn't been too hard because Mamantov had plenty of friends at the Lubyanka who, in return for a percentage, were happy to sell state assets for a fraction of their true value. Some might call it corruption, or even robbery. He preferred the western term: privatisation.
The Tunisians had been kicked out, finally, under the terms of their lease, in August, and Rapava had led him to the exact spot in the garden. The toolbox had been retrieved. Mamantov had read the notebook, had flown to Archangel, had followed exactly the same trail as Kelso and O'Brian into the heart of the forest. And he had seen the potential at once. But he also had the sense - the genius, he would almost call it, but he would leave that judgement to others - the wit, let's say, to recognise what Kelso had just so aptly proved: that history, in the end, is a matter of subjectivity not objectivity.
'Suppose I had returned to Moscow with our mutual friend, convened a press conference and announced he was Stalin's son. What would have happened? I'll tell you. Nothing. I would have been ignored. Derided. Accused of forgery. And why?' He jabbed his finger at Kelso. 'Because the media is in the grip of cosmopolitan forces that loathe Vladimir Mamantov and all he stands for. Oh, but if Dr Kelso, the darling of the cosmopolitans - ah, yes, if Kelso says to the world, "Behold, I give you Stalin's son," then that is a different matter.
So the son had been prevailed upon to wait a few weeks longer, until some other strangers would appear bearing the notebook.
(And that explained a lot, thought Kelso: the odd sense he had experienced in Archangel that people had been somehow waiting for them - the communist official, Vavara Safanova, the man himself. 'You are the ones, you are truly the ones; and lam the one you seek.. .')
'And why me?' he asked.
'Because I remembered you. Remembered you wheedling your way in to see me when I was fresh from Lefortovo after the coup - your fucking arrogance, your certainty that you and your kind had won and I was finished. The shit you wrote about me. . . What was it Stalin said? "To choose one's victims, to prepare one's plans minutely, to stake an implacable vengeance, 'good than to go to bed ... there is nothing sweeter in the world." Sweet. That's it. Nothing sweeter in the world.'
ZINAIDA Rapava arrived at Moscow's Yaroslavl Station a few minutes after four o'clock. (What exactly she had been doing in the three hours since leaving Robotnik the authorities were never able to determine, although there were unconfirmed reports of a woman matching her description being seen at the Troekurovo cemetery, where her mother and brother were buried.)
At any rate, at five past four, she approached an employee of the Russian railway network. Afterwards he couldn't say why she stuck in his mind when so many others were milling around that day: perhaps it was the dark glasses she was wearing, despite the perpetual sunken gloom beneath the hooded arches of the railway terminus.
Like the rest, she wanted to know which platform the Archangel train would be arriving at.
The crowds were already beginning to build, and Aurora stewards were doing their best to keep them in order. A gangway had been roped off A platform had been erected for the cameras. Flags were being distributed - the Tsarist eagle, the hammer and sickle, the Aurora emblem. Zinaida took a little red flag, and maybe it was that, or maybe it was the leather jacket that made her look like a typical Aurora activist, but whatever it was she secured a prime position, at the edge of the rope, and nobody bothered her.
She can be glimpsed, occasionally, on some of the videotape of the crowd, taken before the train arrived - cool, solitary, waiting.
THE train was trundling past the suburban stations. Curious Saturday afternoon shoppers looked to see what all the fuss was about. A man held up a child to wave but Mamantov was too busy talking to notice.
He was describing the way he had lured Kelso to Russia -and that, he said, was the touch he was proudest of: that was a ruse worthy of Josef Vissarionovich himself.