Lom sat back, flooded with disappointment.
‘There’s nothing new here,’ he said. ‘We’ve seen all this before.’
‘Maybe he saw something else in them,’ said Maroussia. ‘Something specific. Something we missed.’
‘It’s possible,’ said Lom. ‘I guess.’
‘So let’s have another look.’
Maroussia spread the photographs out on the floor and they went through them together. Most were gentle, beautiful images, full of an oblique magic: sunlight on a street corner, ripples in a pool of rain, the way light caught the moss on a tree. Some were passionate, dramatic, apocalyptic even: the curtain torn aside, the whole of the city ripping open at the seams. The people in them knew what was happening to them. They looked into Vishnik’s lens, their mouths open as if they were laughing, their faces filled with ecstatic joy.
Sorting through the pictures, Lom felt a sharp pang of loss. He felt the loss of Vishnik, and also of the city as Vishnik had seen it. Vishnik’s Mirgorod was beautiful: these things happened and were perhaps still happening, somewhere in the city, but Lom had never seen them. For him too the city had opened to show him glimpses, possibilities, but he saw blank-faced buildings, a tower half a mile high crowned with an immense brutal statue of Josef Kantor, the Square of the Piteous Angel crowded with grey withdrawn people, their downturned faces, their drab whispering voices. A future crushed under the weight of its own fear, far heavier even than the weight of the Vlast today. Kantor’s future. Chazia’s future. It had to be stopped, and if he could stop it he would. Maroussia’s way, or his way.
Maroussia picked up a handful of photographs from the pile.
‘These are new,’ she said. ‘I haven’t seen these before.’
‘Show me,’ said Lom.
He went through them one by one. A couple walked naked on the surface of a river, the river glowing with an inward radiant light. A giant stood on a harbour side, silhouetted against the sky, his hair rising in a cloud around his head. A parade marched down a street towards the lens, only the street was above the rooftops and wrapped in chimney smoke and the people carried blazing candelabras and some of them were only heads and had no bodies at all. They were exhilarating, uncanny pictures, but they added nothing. No help at all.
‘Maybe if we knew where they were taken?’ said Lom. ‘Vishnik had notes, but without them… It would take us days to find all these places. Weeks.’
Maroussia slipped her hand inside the couch, feeling around towards the top of the backrest.
‘Wait,’ she said. ‘There’s something else in here. Hang on… yes!’
She pulled it out and held it up. A large map, printed on thin paper and folded to make a compact packet, the creases strengthened with strips of glued linen.
‘That’s more like it,’ said Lom.
Lom cleared a space on the floor and they laid it out flat. The map was a standard large-scale street plan of Mirgorod, but Vishnik had made marks all over it. Hundreds of small circles in black pencil. The pattern was instantly discernible: a few outliers in the outer quarters, growing denser towards the centre of the city. The marks clustered most thickly at a point on the River Mir where it made an elbow-bend southwards and the Yekaterina Canal joined it.
‘It’s the Lodka,’ said Maroussia. ‘The Pollandore is in the Lodka.’
The Lodka. The stone heart and cerebral cortex of the Vlast. The immense island building, the thousand-windowed palace of bureaucracy, the labyrinth of linoleum-floored corridors, entranceless courtyards, stairwells without stairs. The offices of uncountable clerks and archivists and diplomats and secret police. The basement cells, the killing rooms, the mortuary. Vishnik had traced the Pollandore to there.
Lom refolded the map, scooped up the photographs, stuffed the whole lot back into the envelope and gave it to Maroussia.
‘Take it,’ he said. ‘We need to get moving. We’ve been here too long.’
She pushed the envelope into her carpet bag and they hurried out of the apartment, Maroussia first, then Lom hustling the dvornik ahead of him. At the bottom of the stairs they turned left into the narrow entrance hall and walked straight into two militia men coming the other way, 9mm Blok 15 parabellums in their hands.
22
The men confronting Lom and Maroussia were officers, a captain and a lieutenant. Crisply turned out uniforms, neat haircuts under their caps, pale steady eyes. Their cap badges said SV. Spetsyalnaya Voyska. Political Police operating within the armed forces. The militia picked the best from the army and the gendarmes, and then the SV picked the best of the militia. The SV were supremely competent, tough and absolutely ideologically loyal.
‘We’ll do this step by step,’ the captain said. He pointed at Lom. ‘You. Four steps back and face the wall. Put your hands against it, high, and shuffle your feet back.’
Lom did as he said.
‘You–’ the captain pointed to the dvornik ‘–come past me on the left, go into the office and stay there. Keep back from the door. Don’t come out.’
The dvornik looked back at Lom. A leer of triumph. Arsehole.
Maroussia was still standing in the centre of the corridor.
‘Now you,’ the captain said to her. ‘On the floor.’
Maroussia didn’t move. Lom couldn’t see her face.
‘Maroussia,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘You need to do what he says.’
She put her bag on the floor and lay face down, hands on her head. The captain stepped forward and took the envelope out of her hand. The lieutenant came up behind Lom and patted him down, keeping the muzzle of the Blok 15 pressed hard against the base of his spine. He patted down Lom’s pockets. Took out the empty gun and the razor.
‘OK,’ the captain said. ‘Now let’s get out into the street.’
A covered truck waited outside, an unmarked GPV in generic military olive, the tailgate open. The driver saw them coming and started the engine. Lom and Maroussia got in the back and sat side by side on the bench. The lieutenant sat opposite. Covered them with his gun. The captain came last, carrying Maroussia’s bag. He closed the tailgate and sat at the far end of the truck, away from them. Nobody spoke. It was all measured, practised, competent. The lieutenant slapped the back of the cab and the truck moved away.
‘Where are we going?’ said Lom. He had to speak loudly above the noise of the engine. The SV men ignored him. Maroussia sat ramrod straight. Expressionless.
‘OK,’ said Lom. ‘If that’s how you want it.’
He leaned back and stretched his legs in front of him. Closed his eyes and let his mind open, focusing on nothing.
Listen. Feel. Breathe. There is plenty of time.
He felt the faint, steady pulsing in the skin-covered gap in his skull. Focused all his attention on it.
Lom used to imagine his unconscious mind as a dark, irrational place, an airless primeval cave where monsters moved. But the opposite was true. The unconscious mind was immense. Bright, airy, perfumed, luminous, borderless, beautiful. The outside world poured into it constantly, without ever filling it up. Everything was felt, everything was noticed.
And all you had to do was pay attention.
Now, at this very moment, there was the street noise outside, the faint calling of seagulls, the rumble of the truck’s wheels on the road, the working of the engine, the whisper of cloth against cloth, four people breathing. The smell of leather and sweat, hot steel and engine oil. The lieutenant’s shaving soap. Maroussia’s hair. Her skin. And there was the rub of his cuff against his own wrist, the sock rucked under his foot, the pressure of the hard bench seat against his back and thighs. In the subliminal mind’s timeless empire nothing was diminished. Nothing wore thin by tedium and habit. Nothing was ignored, nothing judged trivial. Nothing was forgotten. The luminous inner world contained everything he was and everything undiscovered that he might still become. His forest birthright. His strength and his power.
Lom opened his eyes and looked across at Ma
roussia. She was still sitting straight-backed and staring ahead. How long did they have? Fifteen minutes? Twenty? Then they would reach the Lodka, or the Armoury, or wherever they were going. Then all chance would be gone.
Listen. Feel. Breathe. There is plenty of time.
The GPV came to a halt. An intersection, or a traffic hold-up. Lom reached out into the air around him. Carefully he began to assemble it, to gather it together. He’d never tried to work with such precision before. Always, previously, he’d done what he’d learned to do in haste. In desperation. Recklessly. This time the task needed subtlety: blow out the back of the truck, take down the SV men. But not hurt Maroussia. And try not to draw the attention of everyone in the street. He wasn’t sure if he could do it but it was time to try. He was as ready as he would ever be.
But Lom never made the move. Something else happened. The sudden crash of breaking glass from the cab of the truck. A shout. A scream.
Open to the world as he was, Lom felt the driver die.
23
Lavrentina Chazia had another place in the Lodka, a place few knew of, deeper than the deepest of the interrogation cells, reached by steep iron stairs and locked corridors to which she had the only key. It was not a room but a high, narrow tunnel, running under the immense building and out beyond it. Sometimes, when she was working alone, Chazia heard faint sounds and echoes from the dark tunnel mouths. The skitter of footfalls. Mutterings and distant shrieks. Heavy objects being dragged across stone and mud. She took no notice. Mice and rats in the city’s loft.
The section of tunnel where she worked was filled with cool grey morning light, spilling downwards from smeared light wells in the roof. Parallel steel rails set into the flagstone floor disappeared in both directions into shadow. The air smelled of damp stone and river water and machine oil and the faint iron-and-ozone scent of angel flesh. The tunnel hummed and prickled with the muted almost-life of the angel stuff. It was a low vibration at the threshold of perception. Chazia had collected blocks of it, in slabs and rolls and drums: offcuts from the Armoury workshops where they maintained the mudjhiks. For years she had been working here, at her bench, at night, under the bleak illumination of fluorescent tubing. She worked with lathes and belt saws and finer, subtler tools. It had taken her years to acquire the skills and equipment. Years of trial and error. Years of developing techniques. Years moving towards ever greater power.
The substance dug from the bodies of the immense dead angels varied in consistency. Some of it was as dense as lead and as hard as rock, but it could be soft and fibrous, like meat, or a viscous semi-liquid, or a fine and weightless lustrous diaphane. It ranged in colour from heavy blood-purples, almost blacks, through reds to alabaster orange-pinks. The theoreticians of the Vlast had no idea how the angels’ living bodies might have functioned: there were no apparent internal organs, and no two carcases had the same shape or inner structure.
Unlike the Armoury engineers, Chazia didn’t wear protective clothing. She didn’t work from behind thick glass, her hands in clumsy rubber mittens. She didn’t mask her face with gauze. Unafraid, she immersed herself in angel stuff and breathed its dust. She tasted it. She let it stain and merge with her flesh. Absorbing and being absorbed. It was strength, it was vigour, it was a heady prospect of joy. There had been failures, of course, false starts and disappointments and near-disasters. No one had ever attempted anything so ambitious as this work of hers. No one had dared imagine it or face the risks. But she had driven herself onward relentlessly. And in the end she had succeeded.
She had made herself a suit of angel flesh to wear.
And now, in the grey subaqueous wash of light, she pulled the oilcloth shroud from it.
The thing she had made looked like a mudjhik, but smaller and slighter. A matte reddish-purple carapace of interlocking pieces. And a mudjhik would have had the brain and spinal cord of an animal embedded in it, to give it cerebration, whereas this had none: it required none. She had made an angel headpiece to encase her own head, and angel gauntlets for her hands.
She stared at it, trembling with excitement. Its crude face stared into hers. The sense of power and life in it prickled across her skin, raising the hairs on the back of her neck. She felt the tightening in her throat. The stirring in her belly and between her legs. For weeks she had come down here daily to look at it. To be with it. To stand before it. She had not yet dared to put it on. Fear, or the delicious prolongation of desire, had held her at the brink. The tipping point.
She knew the risks. The science of angel flesh was a thin crust of bluster over vertiginous ignorance. Many had ruined their minds and died. She was not reckless. She would proceed cautiously and step by step. But she had already delayed too long.
No more delay. She must begin.
24
In the first second and a half of the attack on the truck the SV men reacted slowly. They needed time to readjust. Lom was faster. He slid forward on the bench and kicked at the lieutenant’s right hand. The Blok 15 went spinning from his grip and clattered to the floor. Lom punched him in the face. Hard. He went down.
The captain hesitated, caught between the unknown threat outside and what was happening inside the truck. Then he was swinging his gun towards Lom, and Lom was scrabbling towards him, knowing he had no time, knowing he had failed and it was over, when Maroussia grabbed the captain’s wrist and forced it down. The revolver went off, firing into the floor of the truck. The shot was deafening in the enclosed space. The smell of burned powder. Lom clubbed the captain with his fist in the side of the head and he fell sideways.
The tailgate crashed open. A face looked in. A long, oval, serious face under an astrakhan hat. Round wire-rimmed glasses. A doctor’s face. A poet’s.
‘You!’ said Lom.
‘Come with me, please,’ said Antoninu Florian. ‘There is little time to lose. A gunshot will attract attention.’
Maroussia stared at him.
‘Who—’ she began.
‘Please,’ said Florian. ‘Please hurry.’
Maroussia looked at Lom. He nodded. Get through the next two minutes. Maroussia grabbed her carpet bag and climbed down from the back of the truck, clutching it tight in her hand. Lom picked up the lieutenant’s gun from the floor at this feet. Checked the magazine. It was full. He followed Maroussia out of the truck and into the street.
It was snowing hard. Lom spun round, checking on all sides. No visible immediate threat. People on the pavement were looking. One man in particular, bareheaded, open shirt, was staring hard. Considering getting involved but hadn’t made his mind up yet. Florian was already pushing his way through the gathering crowd, moving fast.
‘Go!’ Lom hissed in Maroussia’s ear. ‘Go!’
They followed Florian until he ducked through an arched brick entrance leading into shadow. At the corner by the entrance was a bakery. A torn awning. Curlicues of white script. BAKERY. GALINA TROPINA. PASTRY. COFF--. The archway opened into a long gully between high buildings. It was at least two hundred yards long, and deserted. There was no sign of Florian.
‘Do you know this place?’ he said to Maroussia. ‘Do you know where it goes?’
‘It leads to the back entrance to the Apraksin,’ said Maroussia. ‘The indoor market. There’ll be crowds.’
‘OK,’ said Lom. ‘Let’s go.’
They were about fifty yards into the gully when Lom felt the un-mistakeable zip of a bullet passing close to his ear. There was a sharp crack behind them. The echo followed. Lom swung round, pulling the Blok 15 from his pocket. The SV captain was silhouetted just inside the entrance, lining up for a better shot.
‘Hey! You! Captain!’
The shout came from somewhere up above them.
Antoninu Florian jumped from the high window ledge and landed with a heavy skid between them and the SV captain, crouching like an animal. He rose and charged with astonishing, loping speed. But there was too much ground to cover and not enough time.
The captain shot
him in the belly.
Florian spun round with the force of the bullet hitting him. His knees went first. He staggered and collapsed almost at their feet in a hunched foetal curl, his hand at his stomach. Dark blood spilling out between his fingers and pooling on the ground.
‘Oh,’ said Maroussia quietly. ‘Oh.’
The SV captain raised his gun again, straight-armed for a careful aim. They had no cover. Nowhere to go. Lom shot him. The captain’s skull burst open in a spray of blood and fragments of bone. His lifeless body smashed back against the wall and toppled sideways to the ground.
There was a moment of stillness. Silence. Lom didn’t move. Nor did Maroussia. They were watching Florian. He was getting unsteadily to his feet. Maroussia ran forward. Lom followed. By the time they reached Florian he was standing, swaying, head bowed and holding his hands cupped together at waist level as if he was inspecting the sticky mess on the front of his coat. The thick spill of blood. Then he looked up at them, his eyes unfocused. Glassy surprise.
‘Shot, then,’ he said, almost to himself. ‘Shot again.’
His legs gave under him and he would have fallen if Maroussia hadn’t caught him. He managed to get himself upright again.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Sorry. Blood. On your coat now.’
‘Can you walk?’ said Maroussia.
‘Honestly don’t know. Let’s give it a try.’
Lom put his shoulder under Florian’s arm and lifted him, getting the weight off his feet, drag-carrying him along. His face against Lom’s cheek felt cold and damp. His lungs were dragging at short, fast, shallow breaths.
‘We have to get out of here,’ said Lom.
Stumbling awkwardly, they retreated down the long alley towards the Apraksin, the injured man a sagging, limping weight on Lom’s shoulder. As they got near the far end, Florian tried to pull away from Lom. He seemed to have recovered some strength, enough to stand unaided, though blood was dripping down the front of his coat and splashing the ground at his feet.
Truth and Fear Page 9
