He thought she wouldn't do it. She turned to go. But then, abruptly, she swung back and scribbled something down. She had a place near Izmaylovo Park, he saw, where the big flea market was.
She didn't say goodbye. She set off up the street, dodging the pedestrians, walking fast. He watched her, waiting to see if she might look back. But of course she didn't. He knew she wouldn't. She wasn't the looking-back kind.
Parr Two
Archangel
'If you are afraid of wolves, keep out of the woods.' J. V. Stalin, 1936.
BEFORE THEY COULD get out of Moscow they had to take on fuel - because, as O'Brian said, you never knew what kind of rusty; watered-down horse~ piss they might try to sell you once you got out of town. So they stopped at the new Nefto Agip on Prospekt Mira and O'Brian filled the Land Cruiser's tank and four big jerry cans with forty gallons of high-octane, lead-free gasoline. Then he checked the tyres and the oil, and by the time they were back on the road the evening rush was in full and sluggish spate.
It took them the best part of an hour to reach the outer ring, but there, at last, the traffic thinned, the monotonous apartment blocks and factory chimneys fell away, and suddenly they were out and free - into the flat open countryside, with its grey-green fields and giant pylons and a vast sky: a Kansas sky. It was more than ten years since Kelso had ventured north on the M8. Village churches, used as grain stores since the Revolution, were being restored, encased in web-works of wooden scaffolding. Near Dvoriki, a golden dome gathered the weak afternoon light and shone from the horizon like an autumn bonfire.
O'Brian was in his element. 'On the road,' he would say occasionally, 'and out of town - it's great, isn't it? Just great. He drove at a steady sixty-five miles an hour, talking constantly, one hand on the wheel, the other beating time to a tape of thumping rock music.
just great...
The satchel was on the back seat, wrapped in plastic. Heaped around it was an extravagant array of equipment and provisions: a couple of sleeping bags, thermal underwear ('Got any thermals, Fluke? Gotta have those thermals!'), two waterproof and fur-lined jackets, rubber boots and army boots, ordinary binoculars, binoculars with night-imaging, a shovel, a compass, water bottles, water purification tablets, two six-packs of Budweiser, a box of Hershey chocolate bars, two vacuum flasks filled with coffee, pot noodles, a torch, a short-wave transistor radio, spare batteries, a travelling kettle that could be plugged into the car's cigarette lighter - Kelso lost count after that.
In the rear section of the Toyota were the jerrycans and four rigid cases stamped SNS, whose contents O'Brian described with professional relish: a miniaturised, digital camcorder; an Inmarsat satellite telephone; a laptop-sized DVC-PRO video editing machine; and something he called a Toko Video Store and Forward Unit. Total value of these four items: $120,000.
'Ever hear of travelling light?' asked Kelso.
'Light?' O'Brian grinned. 'You can't get any lighter. Give me four suitcases and I can do what it used to take six guys and a truckful of equipment to do. If there's any excess baggage around here, my friend, it's you.'
'It wasn't my idea to come.
But O'Brian wasn't listening. Thanks to these four cases, he said, his beat was the world. African famines. The genocide in Rwanda. The bomb in the village in Northern Ireland that he'd actually filmed go off (he'd won an award for that one). The mass graves in Bosnia. The cruise missiles in Baghdad, trundling down the streets at roof-top level - left, then right, then right again, and which way, please, for the presidential palace? And then of course there was Chechnya. Now, the trouble with Chechnya - You are a bird of ill-omen, thought Kelso. You circle the world and wherever you land there is famine and death and destruction: in an earlier and less credulous age, the local citizens would have gathered at the first sight of you and driven you off with stones - the trouble with Chechnya, O'Brian was saying, was that the sucker had ended just as he arrived, so he had pitched up in Moscow for a while. Now that was a scary town: 'Give me Sarajevo any day.'
'How long are you planning to stay in Moscow?'
'Not long. Till the presidential elections. Should be fun, I reckon.
Fun?
And then where are you going?'
'Who knows? Why d'you ask?'
'I just want to make sure I'm nowhere around, that's all.'
O'Brian laughed and put his foot down. The speedometer flickered up towards seventy.
THEY maintained this pace as the afternoon turned to dusk, O'Brian still prattling on. (Jesus, did the man never shut up?) At Rostov the road ran beside a great lake. Boats, moored and tarpaulined for the winter, lined a jetty, close to a row of shuttered, timbered buildings. Far out on the water Kelso could see a lone sailboat with a light at its stern. He watched it swing about in the wind and tack for the shore and he felt again the familiar depression of nightfall starting to creep over him.
He could sense Stalin's papers behind him now almost as a physical presence, as if the GenSec were in the car with them. He worried about Zinaida. He would have liked a drink, or a cigarette, come to that, but O'Brian had declared the Toyota a smoke-free zone.
'You're jumpy,' said O'Brian, interrupting himself. I can tell.'
'Do you blame me?'
'Why? Because of Mamantov?' The reporter flicked his hand. 'He doesn't scare me.
'You didn't see what he did to the old man.'
'Yeah, well he wouldn't do that to us. Not to a Brit and a Yank. He's not completely nuts.
'Maybe not. But he might do it to Zinaida.'
'I wouldn't worry about Zinaida. Besides, she hasn't got the stuff any more. We have.'
'You're a nice man, you know that? And what if they don't believe her?'
'I'm just saying you should quit bothering about Mamantov, that's all. I've interviewed him a couple of times and I can tell you, he's a busted flash. The man lives in the past. Like you.'
And you? You don't live in the past, I suppose?'
'Me? No way. Can't afford to, in my job.'
'Now let's just analyse that,' said Kelso, pleasantly. In his mind he was opening a drawer, selecting the sharpest knife he could find. 'So all these places- you've been boasting about for the past two hours - Africa, Bosnia, the Middle East, Northern Ireland - the past isn't important there, is that what you're saying? You think they're all living in the present? They all just woke up one morning, saw you were there with your four little suitcases, and decided to have a war? It wasn't happening till you arrived? "Gee, hey, look everyone, I'm R. J. O'Brian and I just discovered the fucking Balkans -'Okay,' muttered O'Brian, 'there's no need to be offensive about it.'
'Oh but there is.' Kelso was warming up. 'This is the great myth, you see, of our age. The great western myth. The arrogance of our time, personified - if you'll excuse me for saying so - in you. That just because a place has a McDonalds and MTV and takes American Express it's exactly the same as everywhere else - it doesn't have a past any more, it's Year Zero. But it's not true.
'You think you're better than me, don't you?' 'No.'
'Smarter then?'
'Not even that. Look. You say Moscow is a scary town. It
is. Why? I'll tell you. Because there's no tradition of private property in Russia. First of all there were workers and peasants who had nothing and the nobility owned the country. Then there were workers and peasants with nothing and the Party owned the country. Now there are still workers and peasants with nothing and the country's owned, as it's always been owned, by whoever has the biggest fists. Unless you understand that, you can't begin to understand Russia. You can't make sense of the present unless a part of you lives in the past.' Kelso sat back in his seat. 'End of lecture.'