As the vista broadened, even O'Brian's spirits seemed to fall. He called it a dump. He declared it a hole. He said it was the worst goddamn place he had ever seen. A goods train clanked along the railroad track beside them. At the end of the bridge they turned left, towards what seemed to be the main part of the city. Everything had decayed. The fa~ades of the buildings were pitted and peeling. Parts of the road had subsided. An ancient tram, in a brown and mustard livery, went rattling by, making a sound like a chain being dragged over cobbles. Pedestrians tilted drunkenly into the snow.
O'Brian drove slowly, shaking his head, and Kelso wondered what more he had been expecting. A press centre? A media hotel? They came out into the wide open space of a bus station. On the far side of it, on the waterfront, four giant Red Army men, cast in bronze, stood back to back, facing the four points of the compass, their rifles raised in triumph. At their feet, a pack of wild dogs scavenged among the trash. Nearby was a long, low building of white concrete and plate glass with a big sign: 'Harbour Master of Archangel'. If the city had a centre, this was probably it.
'Let's pull up over there,' suggested Kelso.
They cruised around the edge of the square and parked with their front bumper up close to the bent railings, looking directly out across the water. A husky watched them with detached interest, then brought its hind paw up to its neck and vigorously scratched its fleas. In the distance, through the snow, it was just possible to make out the flat shape of a tanker.
'You do realise,' said Kelso quietly, staring straight ahead across the water, 'that we are at the edge of the world? That at this point we are one hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle and there is nothing between us and the North Pole but sea and ice? You are aware of that?'
He started to laugh.
'What's funny?'
'Nothing.' He glanced at O'Brian and tried to stop himself, but it was no good, there was something about the reporter's utter dejection that set him off again. His vision was blurred by tears. 'I'm sorry,' he gasped. 'Sorry’
'Oh, go ahead, enjoy yourself,' said O'Brian, bitterly. 'This is my idea of a perfect fucking Friday. Drive eight hundred miles to some dump that looks like Pittsburgh after a nuclear strike to try to find Stalin's fucking girlfriend-'
He snorted and started to laugh as well.
'You know what we haven't done?' O'Brian managed to say after a while.
Kelso took a breath and swallowed. 'What?'
'We haven't been to the railway station and checked the radiation meter. . . We're probably. . . being. . . fucking... irradiated"
They roared. They cried. The Toyota rocked with it. The snow fell and the husky watched them, its head cocked in surprise.
O'BRIAN locked the car and they hurried through the snow, across the treacherous expanse of subsiding concrete, into the port authority building.
Kelso carried the satchel.
They were both still slightly shaky and the advertised ferry sailings - to Murmansk and the Groaning Islands - briefly set them off again.
The Groaning Islands?
'Oh come on, man. Stop it. We've got to do some work here.'
The building was bigger than it looked from the outside. On the ground floor there were shops - little kiosks selling clothes and toiletries - plus a cafe and a ticket booth. Downstairs, beneath banks of fluorescent lights, most of which had blown, was a gloomy underground market - stalls offering seeds, books, pirated cassettes, shoes, shampoo, sausages and some immense, sturdy Russian brassi~res in black and beige: miracles of cantilevered engineering.
O'Brian bought a couple of maps, one of the city and the other of the region, then they both went back upstairs to the ticket office where Kelso, in return for offering a dollar bill to a suspicious man in a greasy uniform, was permitted a brief look at the Archangel telephone directory. The book was small, red-bound, with hard covers and it took him less than thirty seconds to establish that no Safanov or Safanova was listed.
'Now what?' said O'Brian.
'Food,' said Kelso.
The caf~ was an old-style stolovaya, a self-service workers' canteen, its floor wet and filthy with melted snow. There was a warm fug of strong tobacco. At the next door table a couple of German seamen were playing cards. Kelso had a big bowl of shchi- cabbage soup with a dollop of sour cream bobbing in its centre - black bread, a couple of hard-boiled eggs, and the effect of all this on his empty stomach was immediate. He began to feel almost euphoric. This was going to be all right, he thought. They were safe up here. Nobody could find them. And if they played it properly, they could be in and out in a day. He tipped half a miniature of cognac into his instant coffee, looked at it, thought, Sod it, why not? and added the rest. He lit a cigarette and glanced around. The people up here appeared shabbier than they did in Moscow. They stared at foreign strangers. But when you attempted to meet their eyes they looked away.
O'Brian pushed his plate to one side. 'I've been thinking about this college, whatever it was - this "Maxim Gorky Academy". They'll have old records, right? And there was this girl she knew - what was her name, the ugly kid?'
'Maria.'
'Maria. Right. Let's find her class yearbook and find Maria.'
Class yearbook? thought Kelso. Who did O'Brian think she was? The Maxim Gorky prom queen, 1950? But he was too full of goodwill to pick a fight. 'Or,' he said, diplomatically, 'or we could try the local Party. She was in KomsomOl, remember. They might still have the old files.'
'Okay. You're the expert. How d'we find 'em?'
'Easy. Give me the town plan.'
O'Brian pulled the map from his inside pocket and scraped his chair round until he was sitting next to Kelso. They spread out the city plan.
The bulk of Archangel was crammed into a wide headland, about four miles across, with ribbons of development running out along either bank of the Dvina.
Kelso put his finger on the map. 'There,' he said. 'That's where they are. Or were. On the ploshchad Lenina, in the biggest building on the square. That's where the bastards always were.
'And you think they'll help?'
'No. Not willingly. But if you can provide a little financial lubrication... It's worth a try, anyway.
On the map it looked like a five-minute walk.
'You're really getting into this, aren't you?' said O'Brian. He gave Kelso's arm an affectionate pat. 'We make a good team, you know that? We'll show 'em.' He folded away the map and put five roubles under his plate as a tip.
Kelso finished his coffee. The cognac gave him a warm glow. O'Brian really wasn't such a bad fellow, he thought. Sooner him than Adelman and the rest of those waxworks, no doubt safely stowed in New York by now. History wasn't made without taking risks, that much he knew. So maybe sometimes you had to take risks to write it, too?
O'Brian was right.
He would show them.
THEY WENT BACK out into the snow, past the Toyota and past the shuttered front of a decaying hospitaclass="underline" the Northern Basin Seamen's Policlinic. The wind was driving the snow inshore across the water, whining through the steel rigging of the boats on the wooden jetty, bending the stumpy trees that had been planted along the promenade to protect the buildings. The two men had to struggle to keep their feet.
A couple of the boats had sunk, and so had the wooden hut at the end of the jetty. Benches had been heaved by vandals over the railings into the river. There was graffiti on the walls: a Star of David, dripping blood, with a swastika daubed across it; SS flashes; KKK.
One thing was sure: there wouldn't be any Italian shoe boutiques up here.
They turned inland.
Every Russian town still had its statue of Lenin. Archangel's portrayed the Leader, fifteen yards high, rising out of a block of granite, his face determined, his overcoat flapping, a roll of papers in his outstretched hand. He looked as if he were trying to hail a taxi. The square that still carried his name was huge, and smooth with snow, and deserted; in one corner, a couple of tethered goats nibbled at a bush. Fronting it were a big museum, the city's central post office, and a huge office block with the hammer and sickle still attached to the balcony.