Free Archangel by Robert Harris Page B

position to tell us what he was like...
     
    .MAMANTOV'S NEW PLACE turned out to be just across the river, in the big apartment complex on Serafimovich Street known as the House on the Embankment. This was the building to which Comrade Stalin, with typical generosity, had insisted that leading Party members go to live with their families. There were ten floors with twenty-five different entrances at ground level, at each of which the GenSec had thoughtfully posted an NKVD guard - purely for your security, comrades.
    By the time the purges were finished, six hundred of the building's tenants had been liquidated. Now the flats were privately owned and the good ones, with a view across the Moskva to the Kremlin, sold for upwards of half a million dollars. Kelso wondered how Mamantov could afford it.
    He came down the steps from the bridge and crossed the road. Parked outside the entrance to Mamantov's staircase was a boxy white Lada, its windows open, two men in the front seat, chewing gum. One had a livid scar running almost from the corner of his eye to the edge of his mouth. They watched Kelso with undisguised interest as he walked past them towards the entrance.
    Inside the apartment block, next to the elevator, someone had written, neatly, in English, in capitals and lower case, 'Fuck Off'. A tribute to the Russian education system, thought Kelso. He whistled nervously, a made-up tune. The lift rose smoothly and he got out at the ninth floor to be met by the distant thump of western rock music. Mamantov's apartment had an outer door of steel plate. A red aerosol swastika had been sprayed on to the metal. The paint was old and faded but no attempt had been made to clean it off. Set in the wall abov e it was a small remote TV came ra. There was already plenty about this set-up that Kelso didn't like - the heavy security, the guys in the car downstairs - and for a moment he could almost smell the terror from sixty years ago, as if the sweat had seeped into the brickwork: the clattering footsteps, the heavy knocking, the hurried goodbyes, the sobs, silence. His hand paused over the buzzer. What a place to choose to live. He pressed the button.
    After a long wait, the door was opened by an elderly woman. Madame Mamantov was as he remembered her -tall and broad, not fat, but heavily built. She was draped in a shapeless, flowery smock and looked as though she had just finished crying. Her red eyes rested on him briefly, distractedly, but before he could even open his mouth she had wandered off and suddenly there was Vladimir Mamantov, looming down the dark passage, dressed as if he still had an office to go to - white shirt, blue tie, black suit with a small red star pinned in his lapel.
    He didn't say anything, but he offered his hand. He had a crushing handshake, perfected, it was said, by squeezing balls of vulcanized rubber during KGB meetings. (A lot of things were said about Mamantov: for example - and Kelso had put it in his book - that at the famous meeting in the Lubyanka on the night of 20 August 1991, when the plotters of the coup had realised the game was up, Mamantov had offered to fly down t o Gorbachev's dacha at Foros on the Black Sea and shoot the Soviet President personally; Mamantov had dismissed the story as 'a provocation'.) A young man in a black shirt with a shoulder holster appeared in the gloom behind Mamantov, and Mamantov said, without looking round,
    'It's all right, Viktor. I'm dealing with the situation.' Mamantov had a bureaucrat's face - steel-coloured hair, steel-framed glasses and pouched cheeks, like a suspicious hound's. You could pass it in the street a hundred times and never notice it. But his eyes were bright: a fanatic's eyes, thought Kelso; he could imagine Eichmann or some other Nazi desk-murderer having eyes like these. The old woman had started making a curious howling noise from the other end of the flat, and Mamantov told Viktor to go and sort her out.
    'So you're part of the gathering