Suvorin groaned, turned, leaned against the wall. This whole business was spinning out of control.
'How long ago?'
About an hour. In defence of Bunin, he has been on duty for eighteen hours.' A pause. 'Major?'
Suvorin had the phone wedged between his chin and shoulder. He was drying his hands, thinking. He didn't blame Bunin, actually. To mount a decent surveillance took at least four watchers; six for safety.
'I'm still here. Stand him down.'
'Do you want me to tell the chief?'
'I think not, don't you? Not twice in one day. He might begin to think we're incompetent.' He licked his lips, tasting dust. 'Why don't you go home yourself, Vissari? We'll meet in my office, eight tomorrow.
'Have you discovered anything?'
'Only that when people go on about "the good old days" they're talking shit.'
' He rinsed his mouth, spat, went back to work.
BERIA was shot, Poskrebyshev released, Viasik got a sentence of ten years, Rapava was sent to Kolyma, Yepishev was taken off the case, the investigation meandered on.
Beria's house was searched from attic to cellar and yielded no further evidence, apart from some pieces of human remains (female) that had been partially dissolved by acid and bricked up. He had his own private network of cells in the basement. The property was sealed. In 1956, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs asked the KGB if it had any suitable premises which might be offered as an embassy to the new Republic of Tunisia, and, after a final brief investigation, Vspolnyi Street was handed over.
Vlasik was interrogated twice more about the notebook, but added nothing new. Poskrebyshev was watched, bugged, encouraged to write his memoirs and, when he had finished, the manuscript was seized 'for permanent retention'. An extract, a single page, had been clipped to the file:
What went through the mind of this incomparable genius in that final year, as he confronted the obvious fact of his own mortality, I do not know. Josef Vissarionovich may have confided his most private thoughts to a notebook, which rarely left his side during his final months of unstinting toil for his people and the cause of progressive humanity. Containing, as it may do, the distillation of his wisdom as the leading theoretician of Marxism-Leninism, it must be hoped that this remarkable document will one day be discovered and published for the benefit...
Suvorin yawned, closed the bundle and put it to one side, grabbed another. This turned out to be the weekly reports of a Gulag stool-pigeon named Abidov, assigned to keep an eye on the prisoner Rapava during his time at the Butugychag uranium mine. There was nothing of interest in the smudged carbons, which ended abruptly with a laconic note from the camp KGB officer, recording Abidov's death from a stab wound, and Rapava's transfer to a forestry labour detail.
More files, more stoolies, more of nothing. Papers authorising Rapava's release at the conclusion of his sentence, reviewed by a special commission of the Second Chief Directorate - passed, stamped, authorised. Appropriate work selected for the returning prisoner at the Leningrad Station engine sheds; KGB informer-in-place: Antipin, foreman. Appropriate housing selected for the returning prisoner at the newly built Victory of the Revolution complex; KGB informer-in-place: Senka, building supervisor. More reports. Nothing. Case reviewed and classified as 'diversion of resources', 1975. Nothing on file until 1983, when Rapava was briefly re-examined at the request of the deputy chief of the Fifth Directorate (Ideology and Dissidents).
Well, well...
Suvorin pulled out his pipe and sucked at it, scratched his forehead with the stem, then went searching back through the files. How old was this fellow? Rapava, Rapava, Rapava -here it was, Papu Gerasimovich Rapava, born 9.9.27.
Old, then - in his seventies. But not that old. Not so old that even in a country where the average male life expectancy was fifty-eight and falling - worse than it had been in Stalin's time - not so old that he need necessarily be dead.
He flipped back to the 1983 report, and scanned it. It told him nothing he didn't know already. Oh, he was a tight one, this Rapava - not a word in thirty years. Only when he reached the bottom, and saw the recommendation to take no further action, and the name of the officer accepting this recommendation did he jolt up in his chair.
He swore and fumbled for his mobile, tapped out the number of the SVR's night duty officer and asked to be patched through to the home of Vissari Netto.
THEY SETTLED ON three hundred, and for that he insisted on two things: first, that she drove him there herself and, secondly, that she waited an hour. An address on its own would be useless at this time of night, and if Rapava's neighbourhood was as rough as the old man had implied it was ('it was a decent block in those days, boy, before the drugs and the crime. . .9 then no foreigner in his right mind would go stumbling around there alone.
Her car was a battered, ancient Lada, sand-coloured, parked in the dark street that led to the stadium, and they walked to it in silence. She opened her door first and then reached across to let him in. There was a pile of books on the passenger seat - legal textbooks, he noticed - and she moved them quickly into the back.
He said, Are you a lawyer? Are you studying the law?'
'Three hundred dollars,' she said, and held out her hand.
'US.'
'Later.
'Now.'
'Half now,' he said, cunningly, 'half later.'
'I can get another fuck, mister. Can you get another ride?'
It was her longest speech of the night.
'Okay, okay.' He pulled out his wallet. 'You'll make a good lawyer.' Jesus. Three hundred to her, after more than a hundred at the club - it just about cleaned him out. He had thought he might try offering the old man some cash, this evening, as a downpayment for the notebook, but that wouldn't be possible now. She re-counted the notes, folded them carefully and put them away in her coat pocket. The little car rattled down to the Leningradskly Prospekt. She made a right into the quiet traffic, then did a U-turn, and now they were heading out of the city, back past the deserted Dinamo stadium, north-west, towards the airport.
She drove fast. He guessed she wanted to be rid of him. Who was she? The Lada's interior offered him no clues. It was fastidiously clean, almost empty. He gave her profile a surreptitious look. Her face was tilted downwards slightly. She was scowling at the road. The black lips, the white cheeks, the small and delicately pointed ears below the lick of short black hair - she had a vampirish look: disturbing, he thought again. Disturbed. He still had the taste of her in his mouth and he couldn't help wondering what the sex would have been like - she was so utterly out of reach now, yet fifteen minutes earlier she would have done whatever he asked.
She glanced up at the mirror and caught him looking at her. 'Cut that out.'
He continued to stare anyway - more frankly now: he was making a point, he had paid for the ride - but then he felt cheap and turned away.
The streets beyond the glass had become much darker. He didn't know where they were. They had passed the Park of Friendship, he knew that, and passed a power station, a railway junction. Thick pipes carrying communal hot water ran beside the road, across the road, along the other side, steam leaking from their joints. Occasionally, in the patches of blackness, he could see the flames of bonfires and people moving around them. After another ten minutes, they turned off left into a street as wide and rough as a field, with scruffy birch trees on either side. They hit a pothole and the chassis cracked, scraped rock. She spun the wheel and they hit another. Orange lights beyond the trees dimly lit the gantries and stairwells of a giant housing complex.
She had slowed the car now almost to walking pace. She stopped beside a broken-down wooden bus shelter.