The dead weight of the past lay across him like a toppled statue.
It took an effort, pressing hard on the smooth stone, to push himself up on to his feet.
'Come on,' he said. He offered her his hand.
'Archangel.'
'What?' He looked down at her. She was watching him from the floor. There was a frightening calmness about her. He moved closer to her. 'What was that?'
She said it again.
'Archangel.'
HE held on to the tails of his overcoat and carefully lowered himself back to the floor and sat close to her. They both had their backs propped up against the wall, like a couple of survivors after an accident.
She was staring straight ahead and was talking in an odd monotone. He had his notebook open and his pen was working fast, tearing across the page, filling one sheet then flicking it over to start another. Because she might stop, he thought, stop talking as suddenly as she'd started -He had gone to Archangel, she said. Driving. Gone up north, him and the reporter from the television.
Fine, Zinaida, take your time. And when was this? Yesterday afternoon.
When exactly?
Four, maybe. Five. She couldn't remember. Did it matter?
What reporter?
O'Brian. An American. He was on the television. She didn't trust him.
And the notebook?
Gone. Gone with them. It was hers but she didn't want it. She wouldn't touch it. Not after she had worked out what it was about. It was cursed. The thing was cursed. It killed everyone who touched it.
She paused, staring at the spot where her father's body had been. She covered her eyes.
Suvorin waited, then said, Why Archangel?
Because that was where the girl had lived.
Girl? Suvorin stopped writing. What was she talking about? What girl?
'LISTEN,' he said, a few minutes later, when he had put his notebook away, 'you're going to be all right. I'm going to see to that, personally, do you understand me? The Russian government guarantees it.'
(What was he talking about? The Russian government couldn't guarantee a damned thing. The Russian government couldn't guarantee its president wouldn't drop his pants at a diplomatic reception and try to set light to one of his farts) 'Now what I'm going to do is this. Here's my office number: it's a direct line. I'm going to get one of my men to take you back to your apartment, okay? And you can get some sleep. And I'll make sure there's a guard outside on the landing and one in the street. So no one's going to be able to get at you and harm you in any way. Right?'
He rushed on, making more promises he couldn't keep. I should go into politics, he thought. I'm a natural.
'We're going to make sure Kelso is safe. And we're going to find the people - the man - who did this terrible thing to your father, and we're - going to lock him up. Are you listening, Zinaida?'
He was on his feet again, surreptitiously looking at his watch.
'I've got to set things moving now. I've got to go. All right? I'm going to call Lieutenant Bunin - you remember Bunin, from last night? -and I'll get him to take you home.
Halfway out the door he looked back at her.
'My name is Suvorin, by the way. Feliks Suvorin.'
THE militia man and the morgue assistant were waiting in the corridor. 'Leave her alone,' he said. 'She'll be fine.' They were looking at him strangely. Was it contempt, he wondered, or a wary respect? He wasn't sure which he deserved and he didn't have time to decide. He turned his back on them and called Arsenyev's number at Yasenevo.
'Sergo? I need to speak to the colonel... Yes, it's urgent. And I need you to fix some transport for me... Yes - are you ready? - I need you to fix me a plane.'
ACCORDING TO HER Party record, Vavara Safanova had lived at the same address for more than sixty years, a place in the old part of Archangel, about ten minutes' drive from the waterfront, in a neighbourhood built of wood. Wooden houses were reached by wooden steps from wooden pavements - ancient timber, weathered grey, that must have been floated down the Dvina from the forests upstream long before the Revolution. It looked picturesque in the winter weather, if you could close your eyes to the cQncrete apartment blocks towering in the background. There were stacks of cordwood beside some of the houses and here and there a curl of smoke rose to lick the falling snow.
The roads were broad and empty, guarded on either side by sentinels of silver birch, and the surface in the snow was deceptively smooth. But the roads weren't made. The Toyota plunged into potholes as deep as a man's shin, jarring and bouncing down the wide track, until Kelso suggested they pull over and continue the search on foot.
He stood shivering on the duckboards as O'Brian rummaged around in the back. Across the street were a dozen railroad freight cars. Suddenly a homemade door in the side of one of them opened and a young woman climbed out, followed by two small children so thickly bundled against the cold they were almost spherical. She set off across the snowy field, the children dawdling behind her and staring at Kelso with solemn curiosity, until she turned and shouted sharply for them to follow her.
O'Brian locked the car. He was carrying one of the aluminium cases. Kelso still had the satchel.
'Did you see that?' said Kelso. 'There are people actually living over there in those freight cars. Did you see that?'
O'Brian grunted and, pulled up his hood.
They trudged down the side of the road, past a row of patched and tumbledown houses, each tilted at its own mad angle to the ground. Every summer the land must thaw, thought Kelso, and shift, and the houses with it. And then fresh boards would have to be nailed over the new cracks, so that some of the walls had skins of repairs that must date back to the Tsars. He had a sense of time frozen. It wasn't hard to imagine Anna Safanova, fifty years ago, walking where they walked, with a pair of ice skates slung around her shoulders.
It took them another ten minutes to find the old woman's street - an alley, really, no more, running off the main road, behind a clump of birch trees, and leading to the back of the house. In the yard were some animal coops: chickens, a pig, a couple of goats. And looming over it all, ghostly in the snow, a slab-sided fourteen-storey tower block, with a few yellow lights visible on the lower floors.
O'Brian unlocked his case, took out his video camera and started filming. Kelso watched him, unhappily.
'Shouldn't we check she's in first? Shouldn't you get her permission?'
'You ask her. Go ahead.'
Kelso glanced at the sky. The flakes seemed to be getting bigger - thick and soft as a baby's hand. He could feel a knot of tension in his stomach the size of his fist. He picked his way across the yard, past the hot stink of the goats, and started to climb the half-dozen loose wooden steps that led to the back porch. On the third step he paused. The door was partially open and in the narrow gap he could see an old woman, bent forwards, two hands resting on a stick, watching him.
He said, 'Vavara Safanova?'
She didn't say anything for a moment. Then she muttered, 'Who wants her?'
He took this as an invitation to climb the remaining steps. He wasn't a tall man but when he reached the rickety porch he soared above her. She had osteoporosis, he could see now. The tops of her shoulders were on a level with her ears and it gave her a watchful look.
He tugged down his hood and for the second time that morning he launched into his carefully prepared lie - they were in town to make a film about the communists. they were looking for people with interesting memories; they had been given her name and address by the local Party - and all the time he was appraising her, trying to reconcile this hunched figure with the matriarch who featured briefly in the girl's journal.
Mama is strong, as ever.. . Mama brings me to the station, I kiss her dear cheeks.. .'
She had opened the door a crack wider to get a better look at him, and he could see more of her. Apart from her shawl the clothes she wore were masculine - old clothes: her dead husband's clothes, perhaps - with a man's thick socks and boots. Her face was still handsome. She might have been stunning once - the evidence was there, in the sharpness of her jaw and cheekbones, in the keenness of her one good blue-green eye; the other was milky with a cataract. It didn't take much effort to imagine her as a young communist in the 1 930s, pioneer builder of a new civilisation, a socialist heroine to warm the hearts of Shaw or Wells. He bet she would have worshipped Stalin.