Archangel Read Free

the door jamb, buttoning his flies.
    'What's the time, boy?'
    'Nearly one.
    'Gotta go. They'll think I'm your fucking boyfriend.' Rapava made an obscene gesture with his hand. Kelso pretended to laugh. Sure, he'd call down for a taxi in a minute. Sure. But let's just finish this bottle first - he reached over for the Scotch and surreptitiously checked that the tape was still running - finish the bottle, comrade, and finish the story The old man scowled and looked at the floor. The story was finished already. There was nothing more to say. They got Stalin up on to the couch - so, what of it? Malenkov went off to talk to the guards. Rapava drove Beria home. Everyone knows the rest. A day or two later, Stalin was dead. And not long after that, Beria was dead. Malenkov - well, Malenkov hung around for years after his disgrace (Rapava saw him once, in the seventies, shuffling through the Arbat) but now even Malenkov was dead. Nadaraya, Sarsikov, Dumbadze, Starostin, Butusova - dead, dead. The Party was dead. The whole fucking country was dead, come to that.
    'But there's more to your story, surely,' said Kelso. 'Please sit down Papu Gerasimovich, and let us finish the bottle.'
    He spoke politely and hesitantly, for he sensed that the anaesthetic of alcohol and vanity might be wearing off, and that Rapava, on coming round, might suddenly realise he was talking far too much. He felt another spasm of irritation. Christ, they were always so bloody difficult, these old NKVD men - difficult and maybe even still dangerous. Kelso was a historian, in his middle forties, thirty years younger than Papu Rapava. But he was out of condition - to be truthful, he had never really been in condition - and he wouldn't have fancied his chances if the old man turned rough. Rapava, after all, was a survivor of the Arctic Circle camps. He wouldn't have forgotten how to hurt someone - hurt someone very quickly, guessed Kelso, and probably very badly. He filled Rapava's glass, topped up his own, and forced himself to keep on talking.
    'I mean, here you are, twenty-five years old, in the General Secretary's bedroom. You couldn't get any closer to the centre than that - that was the inner sanctum, that was sacred So what was Beria up to, taking you in there?'
    'You deaf, boy? I said. He needed me to move the body.'
    'But why you? Why not one of Stalin's regular guards? It was they who'd found him, after all, and alerted Malenkov in the first place. Or why didn't Beria take one of his more senior boys out to Blizhny? Why did he specifically take you?' Rapava was swayin g, staring now at the glass of s cotch, and afterwards Kelso decided that the whole night really turned upon this one thing: that Rapava needed another drink, and he needed it at that precise instant, and he needed these two things in combination more than he needed to leave. He came back and sat down heavily, drained the glass in one, then held it out to be filled again.
    'Papu Rapava,' continued Kelso, pouring another three fingers of scotch. 'Nephew of Avksenty Rapava, Beria's oldest crony in the Georgian NKVD. Younger than the others on the staff A new boy in the city. Maybe a little more naive than the rest? Am I right? Precisely the sort of eager young fellow the Boss might have looked at and thought: yes, I could use him, I could use Rapava's boy, he would keep a secret.'
    The silence lengthened and deepened until it was almost tangible, as if someone had come into the room and joined them. Rapava's head began to rock from side to side, then he leaned forward and clasped the back of his scrawny neck with his hands, staring at the worn carpet. His grey hair was cropped close to his skull. An old, puckered scar ran from his crown almost to his temple. It looked as if it had been stitched up by a blind man using string. And those fingers: blackened yellow tips and not a nail on one of them.
    'Turn off your machine, boy,' he said, quietly. He nodded towards the table. 'Turn it off. Now take