‘Yes?’
‘Glazkov, Captain. There was an incident an hour and a half ago in Braviknaya Square. A fracas with some young patriots outside a Lezarye bookshop. Four men are in the Bellin Infirmary—’
Iliodor interrupted him impatiently.
‘Why are you telling me this? This is hardly unusual.’
‘It was done by one man, Captain. One man against many. A man competent in violence. And there was a woman with him. The name Shaumian has come up. Shaumian and Lom.’
‘This was an hour and a half ago? And I’m only hearing about it now?’
‘The victims were unable to make an identification. A witness was found, a girl, but her testimony was… reluctant. The interrogation took some time.’
‘An hour and a half?’
‘The subjects are reported to be walking north. Towards Big Side. I’ll get the written report across to you immediately.’
‘You will tell me yourself, Glazkov. Tell me all of it. Now.’
18
The underground chamber deep beneath the Lodka is lit by the bluish flicker of fluorescent tubes. The gantry stands a hundred feet high and drips with decorative ironwork. Life-size figures of pensive women with long braided hair; plump naked children riding dolphins. An obelisk crowns the dome, and the entire construction is painted burgundy and green. Within the outer framework the alloy containment helix winds upwards like a single strip of orange peel.
Inside the gantry the Pollandore hangs, a perfect globe high as a house, revolving slowly, touching nothing. It glows with is own vaporous luminescence but casts no light. It has no weight. No temperature. Frictionless, it turns on its own axis and follows its own orbit, parallel to but no part of this world, not in this universe but its own, tainting the air of the chamber with a faint smell of lake-water and damp forest floor.
The gantry is almost four hundred years old. It was built soon after the Vlast captured the Pollandore from Lezarye. There was a plan to show it in public–a trophy, a holiday wonder, a kopek to climb to the viewing platform and look down into the heart of strangeness–but this never happened. Perhaps it was never meant to. Perhaps one of the madder descendants of the Founder had the gantry made for his own private pleasure. Perhaps he came down to it alone, at night, driven by some urge to reach out and touch the Pollandore, to run his palm along the underside of another world. And his hand would slide across the skin between alternative possibilities, feeling nothing and leaving no impression.
Whatever. Soon after the gantry was made, the Pollandore was consigned to the lowest basement of the Lodka, its existence denied and redacted from the files. Through the centuries that followed, the Vlast periodically tried to destroy it. The Pollandore survived fire and furnace, explosives, the assault of war mudjhiks. Subtler methods were attempted: corrosives, vacuums, the agonisingly slow insertion of invisibly fine needle-points. Nothing affected it. Nothing at all.
The only thing they didn’t do was take it out to the deepest trenches of the ocean and sink it. They would not do that. If they could not destroy it, the Vlast preferred to know where it was.
And the Pollandore went on turning on its own axis.
Being other.
Being something else.
But now inside the Pollandore planetary currents are stirring. Masses are shifting.
It watches and waits.
Its time is close.
19
It was almost three in the afternoon when Lom and Maroussia reached the street where Vishnik had his apartment. Where Raku Andreievich, formerly Professor Prince Raku ter-Fallin Mozhno Shirin-Vilichov Vishnik, one-time historian of Mirgorod and city photographer, had lived among his books and paintings. Where he had died, slowly and painfully, under the interrogation of Chazia’s police.
They surveyed the building from the shadow of a shuttered droshki kiosk on the corner. There was no sign of militia surveillance. The dvornik was at his station outside, slumped in his folding wooden chair, chin buried in a dirty brown muffler, nursing a tin mug in gloved hands. The subsiding flood water had left a smashed-up handcart with no wheels lying canted against the canal-side bollards. A couple of boys were kicking at it, trying to break it up for firewood, but they didn’t have the weight to make an impact. After a while they gave up and dragged the whole thing away. The dvornik’s small black eyes watched them resentfully. He looked like he’d been pulled up out of the canal mud himself and left outside collecting snow.
‘He can’t stay there all day,’ said Maroussia. ‘He has to move sometime. Everyone has to piss.’
‘We haven’t got time for this,’ said Lom. ‘Come on.’
The eyes of a dozen other dvorniks followed them from their chairs and lobbies. Informers every one, watchers and listeners, recording comings and goings in their black notebooks. The dvornik at Vishnik’s building recognised them. His little berry-black eyes widened even more when Lom pulled his hand partly out of his pocket to show him the grip of the Sepora .44.
‘This is pointing right at your belly. We’re coming inside.’
The dvornik threw a panicked glance sideways.
‘Make one sign to them,’ said Lom, ‘and I’ll shoot your bollocks off. Or you can let us in. It’s a fair offer. A trade.’
The dvornik didn’t move. He shook his head.
‘You’ll kill me inside.’
‘Maybe,’ said Lom. ‘Only if you piss me off.’
The man still didn’t move. Pig-stubborn, or too scared to think. Probably both. A couple more seconds and the watchers would know something was wrong.
‘He won’t shoot you,’ said Maroussia. ‘Really he won’t. We’ve come to see inside Professor Vishnik’s apartment, not to kill you. We only need a few minutes. Then we’ll be gone.’
The dvornik’s raisin eyes squinted up at her. He nodded, stood up slowly and went ahead of them up the steps and into the building. Lom followed close behind. When they were inside, Maroussia pushed the heavy outer door shut. Latched it. Pushed the bolts home, top and bottom.
The dvornik turned to face them, blocking the hallway.
‘It wasn’t my fault,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t me. I didn’t—’
Lom shoved him in the shoulder. Hard. He stumbled back.
‘Get the key,’ Lom said. ‘Number 4. Hurry.’
The dvornik went behind the counter into his little office. Lom followed him, the Sepora clear of his coat. The office was in a filthy state: the rug sodden, the linoleum floor still wet from the flood. A greasy leather armchair slumped in the corner, oozing and ruined. The whole place reeked of canal. The dvornik rummaged about in a box under the counter and brought out a labelled key. Held it out to Lom.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘Second floor.’
‘Bring it. Take the stairs, not the lift.’
‘We can’t. The lift’s still out. The flood… the electrics…’
‘I said the stairs, arsehole. You first.’
On the way up Lom saw the gouges in the plaster where he’d fired at Safran and his men when they came for him. The wreckage the grenade had made of the landing. It seemed for ever ago. As the dvornik put the key in the lock, Lom had a premonition that Vishnik’s body would still be there, still tied to the couch, eyes open, wounds crusted and gaping. Left by Chazia’s interrogation team to rot and seep and dry out where he had died.
But the body was gone, though the couch still stood where it had been dragged into the centre of the room. It was covered in dried blood. And other stuff. The leakage of death.
The room had been thoroughly, violently searched. The filing cabinets were open and empty. Desk drawers pulled out, their contents spilled, the desk smashed open. Faded brick-red curtains pulled off the wall along with the rail that held them. Bookshelves emptied and torn from the wall, the books scattered across the floor. All the strange, inconsequential objects that Vishnik had collected in his solitary city walks–the red lacquer tea caddy, the pieces of wood and brick, the discarded tickets and p
rinted notices, the shards of pottery and glass–swept into a heap in the corner. The paintings that had filled every gap on the wall ripped from smashed frames. Vishnik’s lonely absence hung in the air, bereft, accusing and sad.
‘I haven’t had time…’ the dvornik said.
‘What?’
‘The floods… I’ve been too busy. The room has to be re-let, but I can’t—’
‘Sit there,’ said Lom. ‘On the couch. Don’t move and don’t speak. I may just shoot you anyway.’
In a corner of the room there was a small heap of women’s clothes and a threadbare carpet bag. Maroussia pounced on them
‘My things!’
She started to stuff them back into the bag. When she had finished, she knelt among Vishnik’s scattered books, sifting through them, riffling the pages.
‘There’s nothing here,’ said Lom. ‘If there was, they’ve taken it.’
Maroussia shook her head.
‘There must be something. He told me. They didn’t get it. That’s what he said. They didn’t get it. Even they are human and stupid.’
‘But they searched again,’ said Lom. ‘More thoroughly. After he was dead.’
‘They looked all over,’ said the dvornik. ‘The halls. The stairwell. The bathroom. They pulled the cistern off the wall.’
‘You shut up,’ said Lom.
‘He just wants us out of here quickly,’ said Maroussia. ‘We need to search. We don’t have another option.’
Lom pushed the dvornik ahead of him into the kitchen. Vishnik’s darkroom was still set up in a corner. Bottles of chemicals opened and spilled down the sink. The room reeked of metol and hypo. The enlarger head had been unscrewed and opened up. The red safety light smashed. Packets of photographic paper ripped open and ruined. Unexposed films, pulled from their canisters, lay on the floor in curls and spools of grey-black cellulose ribbon. The boxes where Vishnik kept his prints and negative strips were gone.
Lom searched for a while randomly. After a few minutes he went back into the other room. Maroussia was sitting on the floor in the wreckage of Vishnik’s desk. She would have stayed there for days, sifting every last piece. Opening every page of every book. But it was hopeless. They didn’t even know what they were looking for.
‘We have to go,’ said Lom.
She looked up at him, suddenly angry.
‘Where?’ she said. ‘Where else would we look? Do you know? I don’t know. Here. This is the place. Here. There’s something here. You knew him. He was your friend. Work it out.’
‘Please…’ said the dvornik.
‘Sit back down on that couch,’ said Lom, ‘and shut the fuck up.’
‘Does he have to sit there?’ said Maroussia.
Lom looked at the awful object, stained by torture and dying. Vishnik had lain there. Shit.
‘I know where it is,’ he said.
They didn’t get it. Even they are human, and stupid.
The interrogators had searched thoroughly. While Vishnik’s body was still there on the couch. And the one place they didn’t look was the same place he and Maroussia hadn’t looked. Because of what was on it. Because of what had happened there. They blanked it out. Even the Vlast torturers blinded themselves. Avoided seeing the work of their own hands. Forgetting as soon as they had done it.
‘It’s in the couch,’ said Lom.
He pulled the dvornik off it roughly and knelt to look underneath. There was nothing. He felt with his hands all over the bloody and still faintly sticky leather seat and up the back of it, slipping his hands into the crevices. Looking for something. Anything. An opening. A lump in the stuffing. There was nothing.
The couch was a kind of chaise longue with a seat-back rising at one end. Lom went round behind it, down on his knees. The back was covered with a single panel of leather, sewn at the top and pinned tight with a row of black metal studs along the bottom. He ran his finger along the studs. Picked at a couple of them with his fingernail. One came loose. Then another. They weren’t completely tight. As if they had been levered out and pushed loosely back into place. They held, but only just.
Lom took the razor from his pocket and sliced a long, arcing cut across the leather back panel. Stuck his hand inside. Pulled out a large brown envelope stuffed with paper and sealed down tight.
20
The Colloquium of Four sat on the high platform at the north end of the All-Dominions Thousand Year Hall on chairs of plush red velvet. Chazia was in the centre with Chairman Fohn. Dukhonin, the General Secretary, was on Chazia’s left, and Khazar–negligible Khazar, the Minister for Something–sat at Fohn’s right hand. The platform, raised high above the crowd, had room for a hundred, but the Four sat alone, a wide frosty space gaping between each chair. To the crowd we look small, Chazia thought. Unimpressive. Vulnerable. Fohn had planned the Novozhd’s funeral and he had fucked it up. Every part of it.
Fohn would make the speeches. Reading the exequies of the lost leader. Chazia had not objected. Let Fohn lick the dead man’s arse; she wouldn’t wrap herself in his corpse-shroud. They would know her for other reasons soon enough.
Behind the Four on their chairs, Fohn had hung immense waterfalls of red and black fabric and, bathed in a golden spotlight, a portrait of the Novozhd fifty feet tall. Fine words picked out in letters of gold.
WE WILL REMEMBER HIM, AND IN REMEMBERING, VICTORY!
STAND TOGETHER, CITIZENS, AGAINST ENEMIES WITHIN AND WITHOUT!
Beneath the platform the corpse itself was displayed. It lay on crimson silk in an open casket of black wood polished to a mirror shine. The embalmers had done their work thoroughly: repaired his bomb wounds, given his face a waxy apple flush, blacked and glossed his hair and moustache. A man in the prime of life. The image of his portrait. Only the drab khaki uniform that Fohn had insisted on–We must remember, colleagues, that we are, after all, in a state at war–spoiled the fine effect. The four mudjhiks faced outwards, one at each corner of the catafalque, motionless and watchful, the colour of dried blood.
From the Thousand Year Hall, after the funeral, the body was to be carried in solemn procession to the Khronsk-Gorsk Mausoleum. Factories had been closed for the day so the workers could line the avenues for the cortège. Free meals were being served at the municipal canteens. On the way to the funeral Chazia had seen huge crowds of people in mourning black. Karetas, droshkis and cars, black ribbons and pennants fluttering.
Chazia’s attention was fixed on the crowd in the hall. The first rows of seating were reserved for war veterans. They sat in rigid silence, holding up their crutches, pointing with them towards the leaders on the podium like arms raised in salute. And behind them, row after row, dissolving into shadow, one hundred thousand persons dressed in black with touches of red, standing to attention in perfect rank and file, not one speaking a word. So many feet, so many shoulders, so many lungs breathing. The noise of a hundred thousand silences–the small shuffle for balance, the rub of cloth against cloth, the swallow and stifled cough–roared against the platform like the sea. One hundred thousand faces, one expression. The sombre gravity of grief. It was one body. One mass. It had heaviness. Inertia. An existence all of its own. It was the Vlast.
Chazia pictured how it would be when she stood alone before them, speaking in a fine clear amplified voice. Two hundred thousand shining eyes fixed on her. The roar of their cheering. The rhythmic stamping of two hundred thousand feet. They would chant her name. She would throw her arms wide to embrace their acclamation, and her hair would lift and stir in the wind of their breath.
In the Thousand Year Hall, the waiting dragged on too long. The hundred thousand people waited. On their platform the Colloquium of Four waited. Dead time. Chazia felt the mass dissolving. Atomising. A hundred thousand separate thoughts. Fucking Fohn. He was surely finished after this.
There was a deep loud crash from outside the hall. Another. And another. The distant explosions roared on and on, ceaselessly, merging into a rolling brutal thunder. Th
e veterans were standing to attention, right hands clenched against their chests. Somewhere in the crowd a woman was screaming. The Archipelago! The Archipelago has come! But it was only the five hundred guns of the fleet at the Goll Dockyards doing their bit.
At last the thundering guns subsided into silence and a magnified rustling came over the tannoy. The Combined Services Orchestra in the gallery was getting ready to play. Chazia could see them across the vastness of the auditorium, minute figures in a splash of stark white light for the kinematograph camera. When Colonel of Music Vikhtor Vanyich Forelle raised his baton, all other lights in the hall fell dim. Everything disappeared in shadow, apart from the orchestra and the corpse itself, isolated under a single spotlamp. The effect drew murmurs of appreciation from the mourners. Well done, Fohn. They can’t see us at all now.
The music began. The slow movement from Frobin’s Lake Horseman Suite. The massed voices of the Navy Choir singing the ‘Blood of Angels’ chorus from Winter Tears.
Vlast! Vlast! Freedom land!
My heart a flag in winter–
The drum of my blood
In storms of rain.
Music was of no interest to Chazia. She waited for it to end.
Someone edged across the platform towards her, taking advantage of the dimness that hid them from the hall. It was Iliodor. Ignoring Fohn’s ostentatious disapproval, he crouched behind Chazia and whispered in her ear.
She smiled.
‘Good,’ she said when he had finished. ‘Good. When you have her, bring her to me.’
21
Lom pulled the envelope from the back of the bloody couch and ripped it open. It contained a sheaf of glossy monochrome photographic prints. He shuffled through them quickly. He knew what they were. Vishnik’s Pollandore moments, the photographs taken with his beloved Kono on his long wanderings around Mirgorod. Photographs of moments when the world broke open and new things were possible. He’d kept them safe at the cost of his life.
Truth and Fear Page 8
