While attending a conference in Moscow, historian Christopher "Fluke" Kelso is met by an old man named Papu Rapava, who claims to have been present at the death of Joseph Stalin. Immediately after Stalin's death, Lavrenty Beria supposedly took measures to secure a black notebook, believed to be Stalin's secret diary. Rapava spent years in Kolyma after the authorities tried to extract the book's location from him, but he never revealed it—and still has not, though he knows that shadowy agents are still watching him in case he should go near the mysterious thing.