Nobody in Moscow knew where he was, he realised. He had dropped off the map.
'I'm wasting your time,' he said. 'Perhaps I might come back when I've -
'That's unnecessary,' said Mamantov, softening his tone. His sharp eyes were checking Kelso up and down - flickering across his face, his hands, gauging the potential strength of his arms and chest, darting up to his face again. His conversational technique was pure Leninism, thought Kelso:
'Push out a bayonet. If it strikes fat, push deeper. If it strikes iron, pull back for another day.'
'I'll tell you what, Doctor Kelso,' said Mamantov. 'I'll show you something. It will interest you. And then I'll tell you something. And then you'll tell me something.' He waved his fingers back and forth between them. 'We'll trade. Is it a deal?'
AFTERWARDS, Kelso tried to make a list of it all, but there was too much of it for him to remember: the immense oil painting, by Gerasimov, of Stalin on the ramparts of the Kremlin, and the neon-lit glass cabinet with its miniatures of Stalin - its Stalin dishes and its Stalin boxes, its Stalin stamps and Stalin medals - and the case of books by Stalin, and the books about Stalin, and the photographs of Stalin – signed and unsigned - and the scrap of Stalin's handwriting - blue pencil, lined paper, quarto-sized and framed - that hung above the bust of Stalin by Vuchetich ('... don't spare individuals, no matter what position they occupy, spare only the cause, the interests of the cause. .
He moved among the collection while Mamantov watched him closely.
The handwriting sample, said Kelso - that. . . that was a note for a speech, was it not? Correct, said Mamantov:
October 1920, address to the Worker-Peasant Inspection. And the Gerasimov? Wasn't it similar to the artist's 1938 study of Stalin and Voroshilov on the Kremlin Wall? Mamantov nodded again, apparently pleased to share these moments with a fellow connoisseur: yes, the GenSec had ordered Gerasimov to paint a second version, leaving out Voroshilov - it was Stalin's way of reminding Voroshilov that life (how to put it?) could always be rearranged to imitate art. A collector in Maryland and another in Dusseldorf had each offered Mamantov $100,000 for the picture but he would never permit it to leave Russian soil. Never. One day, he hoped to exhibit it in Moscow, along with the rest of his collection - 'when the political situation is more favourable'.
And you think one day the situation will be favourable?'
'Oh yes. Objectively, history will record that Stalin was right. That is how it is with Stalin. From the subjective perspective, he may seem cruel, even wicked. But the glory of the man is to be found in the objective perspective. There he is a towering figure. It is my unshakeable belief that when the proper perspective is restored, statues will be raised again to Stalin.'
'Goering said the same of Hitler during the Nuremberg trial. I don't see any statues -
'Hitler lost.'
'But surely Stalin lost? In the end? From the "objective perspective"?'
'Stalin inherited a nation with wooden ploughs and bequeathed us an empire armed with atomic weapons. How can you say he lost? The men who came after him - they lost. Not Stalin. Stalin foresaw what would happen, of course. Khrushchev, Molotov, Beria, Malenkov - they thought they were hard, but he saw through them. "After I've gone, the capitalists will drown you like blind kittens." His analysis was correct, as always.'
'So you think that if Stalin had lived -'
'We would still be a superpower? Absolutely. But men of Stalin's genius are only given to a country perhaps once in a century. And even Stalin could not devise a strategy to defeat death. Tell me, did you see the survey of opinion to mark the forty-fifth anniversary of his passing?'
'I did.'
And what did you think of the results?'
'I thought they were -, Kelso tried to find a neutral word '- remarkable.'
(Remarkable? Christ. They were horrifying. One third of Russians said they thought Stalin was a great war leader. One in six thought he was the greatest ruler the country had ever had. Stalin was seven times more popular than Boris Yeltsin, while poor old Gorbachev hadn't even scored enough votes to register. This was in March. Kelso had been so appalled he had tried to sell an op-ed piece to the New York Times but they weren't interested.)
'Remarkable,' agreed Mamantov. 'I should even say astounding, considering his vilification by so-called historians.
There was an awkward silence.
'Such a collection,' said Kelso, 'it must have taken years to assemble.' And cost a fortune, he almost added.
'I have a few business interests,' said Mamantov, dismissively. 'And a considerable amount of spare time, since my retirement.' He put out his hand to touch the bust, but then hesitated and drew it back. 'The difficulty, of course, for any collector, is that he left so little behind in the way of personal possessions. He had no interest in private property, not like these corrupt swine we have in the Kremlin nowadays. A few sticks of government-issue furniture was all he had. That and the clothes he stood up in. And his private notebook, of course.' He gave Kelso a crafty look. 'Now that would be something. Something - what is the American phrase? - to die for?'
'So you have heard of it?'
Mamantov smiled - an unheard-of occurrence - a narrow, thin, rapid smile, like a sudden crack in ice. 'You're interested in Yepishev?'
'Anything you can tell me.'
Mamantov crossed the room to the bookshelf and pulled down a large, leather-bound album. On a higher shelf Kelso could see the two volumes of Volkogonov - of course Mamantov had read them.
'I first met Aleksey Alekseevich,' he said, 'in fifty-seven, when he was ambassador in Bucharest. I was on my way back from Hungary, after we'd sorted things out there. Nine months work, without a break. I needed a rest, I can tell you. We went shooting together in the Azuga region.'
He carefully peeled back a layer of tissue paper and offered the heavy album to Kelso. It was open at a small photograph, taken by an amateur camera, and Kelso had to stare at it closely to make out what was happening. In the background, a forest. In the foreground, two men in leather hunting caps with fleece-lined jackets, smiling, holding rifles, dead birds piled at their booted feet. Yepishev was on the left, Mamantov next to him - still hard-faced but leaner then, a cold war caricature of a KGB man.
And somewhere there's another.' Mamantov leaned over Kelso's shoulder and turned a couple of pages. Close up, he smelled elderly, of mothballs and carbolic, and he had shaved badly, as old men do, leaving grey stubble in the shadow of his nose and in the cleft of his broad chin. 'There.'
This was a much bigger, professional picture, showing maybe two hundred men, arranged in four ranks, as if at a graduation. Some were in uniform, some in civilian suits. A caption underneath said 'Sverdlovsk, 1980'.
'This was an ideological collegium, organised by the Central Committee Secretariat. On the final day, Comrade Suslov himself addressed us. This is me.' He pointed to a grim face in the third row, then moved his finger to the front, to a relaxed, uniformed figure sitting cross-legged on the ground. And this - would you believe? - is Volkogonov. And here again is Aleksey Alekseevich.'
It was like looking at a picture of Imperial officers in the tsarist time, thought Kelso - such confidence, such order, such masculine arrogance! Yet within ten years, their world had been atomised: Yepishev was dead, Volkogonov had renounced the Party, Mamantov was in jail.
Yepishev had died in 1985, said Mamantov. He had passed on just as Gorbachev came to power. And that was a good time for a decent communist to die, in Mamantov's opinion: Aleksey Alekseevich had been spared Here was a man whose whole life had been devoted to Marxism-Leninism, who had helped plan the fraternal assistance to Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. What a mercy he hadn't lived to see the whole lot thrown away. Writing Yepishev's entry for the Book of Heroes had been a privilege, and if nobody ever read it nowadays - well, that was what he meant. The country had been robbed of its history.