28
Minister of Armaments and General Secretary of the Colloquium Steopan Dukhonin’s car took him home after the Novozhd’s funeral. From a window in the building opposite, Bez Nichevoi watched the long ZorKi Zavod saloon arrive. It rode low, weighed down by two tons of steel plate. Assassination-proof. Bez could make out Dukhonin’s head in the back, a dim featureless shape behind two inches of hardened glass. An underwater profile, bowed forward as if he were absorbed. Reading. The car pulled up at the wide double gates and the driver spoke into the intercom grille. The gates swung open to let the ZorKi edge through and closed behind it. Bez knew the routine. Dukhonin would not leave again before morning.
The house was a squat stone block, blank-windowed, in its own grounds, an enclave carved out of Pir-Anghelksy Park. The driver would ignore the steps up to the front door. He would follow the gravel driveway round to the back and into the courtyard. Walls within walls. One of the indoor guards would be waiting. The driver would see Dukhonin inside, then take the ZorKi across to the garage, lock it in for the night, and go into the house himself. Dukhonin would go to his study and work there until the early hours of the morning. He would have supper brought to him on a tray. Dukhonin worked prodigiously. Secretively. Since becoming one of the Four he had given up his office in the Lodka and worked solely from home.
Apart from the driver and the housekeeper, there were two guards inside the house and two in the grounds. And dogs. Lean, black, heavy-jawed killers left to roam free within the outer wall. Dukhonin also had a private secretary, a new man, Pavel, who arrived at 7.30 every morning and normally remained until 7.30 in the evening, but he was not in the house. He had been at the funeral, and Dukhonin had told him he wouldn’t be required again until the morning. Dukhonin liked to observe such niceties–they were of consequence to him.
That evening’s leave of absence was a propriety Pavel would come to appreciate. It had saved his life.
It took Bez five minutes to walk to the place where he could cross the perimeter wall without being seen from the street. The wall was ten feet high, but he climbed it without difficulty. His body was light as a small child’s. He dropped to the ground inside the compound. There was fifteen yards of clear space before the laurels began, snow-mounded in the gathering darkness. The snow was falling thickly. It blurred his senses a little, muffling sound and muting scent, but he could feel the presence of the dogs nearby, three of them. They had his scent. He felt their alertness, the way they moved a few paces towards him, heads up, but they were hesitating, the strangeness of his smell making them uncertain. No sign of the guards.
Bez stood with his back to the wall and waited. It would be better if the dogs came to him. Neater that way. Simpler. He opened his mouth and let out a long plume of breath. A visible steam-cloud on the snow-thick air. He put into it the taint of carrion. Death. That would bring them, curious and eager but not alarmed. A few moments later the dogs broke through the laurels and saw him, not the dead thing they were expecting but a tall man standing.
When they came for him Bez killed them quickly. He absorbed their small deaths and started towards the house. He was leaving a trail of footprints, but it didn’t matter. It would make no difference.
Because of the snow, the guards were within thirty yards of him before he was aware of them. They were not alert. Just a routine patrol. Bez dropped on them from the low branches of a fir tree, taking the head of one and piercing the eyes of the other, spearing his brain. He allowed himself a moment to digest their deaths and moved on. Entered the house through an upstairs window.
Inside, he took his time, walking through cool shadows, looking into all the empty rooms. Running his hands across tables and along the backs of chairs. Sharing in the quiet of the house, unbroken but for the slow ticking of a clock on a landing and the distant murmur of a radio. He found what must have been the housekeeper’s sitting room. A chintz-backed armchair next to a purring stove. A shelf of china figures. A postcard from Lake Tsyrkhal. Nice things.
Dukhonin was in his study, at his desk, working on papers. He was smoking, a bottle of aquavit open at his elbow, a single glass. The radiogram in its cabinet against the wall playing quiet music. Absorbed, Dukhonin didn’t see Bez Nichevoi watching him from the doorway.
Bez left him there for the moment. The others–the indoor guards, the driver, the housekeeper–were downstairs in the kitchen, gathered at the table, drinking tea. None of them noticed Bez until he was in the room with them, and by then it was too late. For them it had always been too late.
Now it was only him and Dukhonin in the house.
As Bez was going back upstairs, he heard a small sound. A door quietly opening. Dukhonin was on the move. Slowly. Bez sensed something uneasy about him. An edge of tense energy. Fear. He must have heard, or half-heard, what had happened in the kitchen. The housekeeper’s interrupted scream. Bez moved soundlessly into the shadow of a doorway and waited.
Dukhonin was coming down the corridor in carpet slippers, a small pistol in his hand. He walked right past the doorway where Bez was. Bez stepped forward and gripped the wrist of the hand that held the gun. Dukhonin jerked round, lashed out, shouted–some harsh meaningless syllable–then saw what had come for him. Bez felt him collapse inside. Smelled that he had pissed himself. The pistol dropped to the floor.
Dukhonin stood in the corridor, arms dropped to his sides, resigned, hopeless.
‘The guards?’ he said in a flat voice. ‘You killed them.’
‘Yes.’
‘All of them?’
‘Yes.’
‘And Mila?’
‘Housekeeper?’
‘Yes. The housekeeper.’
‘Yes.’
A flicker of something–sadness? grief?–passed across Dukhonin’s face and died.
‘Who sent you?’ he said. ‘Khazar? Chazia? Fohn? Not Fohn? Surely not Fohn?’
‘Chazia.’
Dukhonin nodded.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Well. Go on then. Do it.’
Bez looked at him.
‘Kill me,’ said Dukhonin. ‘Kill me, then. That’s what you’re here for. So. Do it, fuck you. I’m not going to fucking beg.’
Bez turned and started down the corridor.
‘Come,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Your car,’ said Bez Nichevoi. ‘You drive.’
29
The Raion Lezaryet rose out of the surrounding city of Mirgorod on a steep angular hill of raw black rock. When the Lezarye’s long wandering brought them to the shore of the Cetic Ocean in the time of the Founder’s grandson, the hill of the raion had been an island in the marsh miles distant from Mirgorod. It seemed to surge out of the ground, a solid dark thunderhead glowering against the westering evening sky, the weathered root of a larger mountain. Some of the Lezarye families travelled on, taking ship onwards to the Archipelago and never returning, but the rest stayed and settled the black rock hill. Through the centuries that followed, Mirgorod flowed out across the waterland mud in a tide of suburbs and factories, surrounding the raion, pressing up against it and spilling past across the further islands one by one. On the steep black hill people crowded together, more and more of them squeezing into the narrowing streets. Every new Novozhd brought new restrictions, new laws, new arrests, new pogroms. Why are our years always worse? the poet Yourdania asked, because every decade that came hurt more than the last.
Other peoples came to settle in the raion, building their wooden shacks and shanties along the river and against the walls of the old Lezarye houses. Kyrghs and Mazhars, Esterhaziers, Samoys from the ice grass, shadowy relicts of the proto-peoples who had lived in the Mir estuary before the Founder. Refugees from former countries that had been declared unVlast and erased from the maps. The memory of those sunken countries was written in the faces in the streets: men in long black coats and wide-brimmed hats or furs and boots and braided beards; women in embroidered linen shawls and headscarves made from the colour-stained skins
of mice; stark-eyed children with beaded hair and ringlets under caps of felt, carrying little books on straps hung round their necks. No one remembered who had built the wall round the raion, or knew for certain whether it was built to keep Mirgorod out or the Lezarye in. But built it was, with one gate only, which opened through a stone arch onto the Purfas Bridge.
The pony walked slowly, head down and shoulders bunched against the weight of the cart. Maroussia hugged her carpet bag in her lap. Lom shivered and pulled his loden tighter against the cold. An early twilight was closing in and the snow was coming down in a dense steady flow, settling thickly, when they crossed the Purfas by the narrow wooden bridge and entered the raion.
The failing of the day brought the dusk bells ringing, the last circling of rooks, the first evening flicker of bats, lamps and candles in the windows. From narrow passageways came the smell of food: frying fish and spiced meat. Paprika. Onions. Livestock wandered and rooted in the cramped alleyways. There were animals in every tiny courtyard and fenced-in patch of cottage ground. Small stunted orchards, leafless and snow-covered, crouched behind walls. The chill darkening air was rich with woodsmoke and the reek of pigs, chickens and cows.
They climbed the winding streets between ravines of red-tiled roofs and smoking chimneys, jutting windows and arched doorways, weather-blackened wood and stone. Here and there angular outcrops of raw black rock shouldered the crowded buildings aside. Small cottages and wooden shanties jostled in the shadow of tall old houses with peeling louvred shutters at their windows and carved coats of arms on their gable ends: spread-winged eagles, prowling bears, running wolves. The antlers of a great elk were mounted over a courtyard arch. The raion was a place of gaps and crannies, steep angular lanes, small doorways and purposeless openings barred with rusted iron gratings.
Elena Cornelius walked ahead, leading the pony.
‘Elena’s a good woman,’ said Maroussia, breaking a long silence.
‘Yes,’ said Lom.
‘We can’t stay here. We’ll bring her trouble. She doesn’t understand. She has children. I don’t want to get her involved. This is my thing. People have died already.’
‘It’s not your fault,’ said Lom. ‘It happened.’
‘If anything happens to Elena, it will be my fault. I went to her. I shouldn’t have.’
‘It’ll be OK,’ said Lom. ‘It’ll be fine. It’s just for tonight.’
Wooden signs announced places of business–an estaminet, a pension, a tailor, an apothecary, a notary public–all crowded in among the houses and cottages. The names above the shops were names from lost, remembered countries, long ago obliterated under the hegemony of the Vlast. SYLWEST. NIKODEM. TILL. CZESLAW. ONUFRY. KAZIMIERZ. WHITE. The poetry of distance and difference.
Lom had known of the raion since childhood, though it wasn’t mentioned in the books of the library at the Podchornok Institute of Truth. There were students at the Institute who said that Podchornok, within sight of the endless forest, had been one of the Lezarye way forts once, in the great days of their wardership of the border, under the Reasonable Empire long ago. Some even made whispered claims to family connections with the aristocrat families of the raion, though saying so risked denunciation by the Student Council. Lom, knowing nothing of his own family and remembering nothing before the Institute, toyed with the idea that he too was one of them. But Raku Vishnik, his one true friend, had mocked him. The Lezarye, Vissarion, never gave birth to a great blond clumsy bear like you!
Nevertheless, Lom stared about him now and wondered if it felt like coming home. But it didn’t. Not for him.
Elena Cornelius pulled the cart off the road into a small yard.
‘We’ll go in this way,’ said Elena. ‘Our neighbours watch and talk as much as anyone else’s do.’
She unlocked a door in the brick wall of the yard and led them through into a small private garden. In the gathering darkness Lom caught a vague impression of the side of a tall house: walls of mossy brick and crumbling stucco, precarious vine-tangled wrought-iron balconies, steep roofs and high crowded gables. The ground floor was skirted with a glass-roofed pillared loggia. Yellow light spilled through gaps in the curtains. They rounded the corner of the house and descended a narrow flight of basement steps. Elena rattled at a storm door of pierced zinc and wire netting until it jerked open and they squeezed inside, past buckets and mops and a rack of oilskins. A dog appeared at the end of the passageway, a black and yellow coarse-haired thing, standing stiff-legged and growling at the back of its throat. It was some kind of spitz or laitka, Lom didn’t know what and didn’t care. He preferred dogs at a distance.
‘Vesna!’ called Elena gently. ‘It’s OK. They’re friends.’
The dog padded forward and inspected them. Lom offered his hand to be sniffed. The dog ignored it and went out into the garden.
‘This is a big place,’ he said.
‘It’s Sandu Palffy’s house,’ said Elena. ‘Count Palffy. He and Ilinca have an apartment at the back. The rest is let out. But it is Count Palffy’s house. At least, morally it is his, as he is morally a Count.’
There was a warm fug in the kitchen. Black and white tiles on the floor. Curtains drawn. A hefty old stove against the wall, its fire door open, shedding the heat of fast-burning logs. Two girls at the scrubbed deal table–thick black curly mops of hair and bright clever eyes–looked up when they came in. The older was about thirteen, school books spread in front of her amid the remains of their supper. The younger, who must have been ten or eleven, had a piece of reddish wood and a big clasp knife. She was carving something. An animal. A cat maybe. Lom thought it was probably good.
‘Galina, Yeva, this is my friend Maroussia from the city,’ said Elena. ‘And this…’
‘Vissarion,’ said Lom. ‘I’m Vissarion. That’s a good cat.’
‘It’s a lynx,’ said Yeva. ‘Not a cat.’
‘Oh yes. Of course. Sorry.’
‘There’s rassolnik on the stove,’ said the older girl. Galina. ‘We got pigeons from Milla’s. It was four kopeks for two, and Ilinca gave us a loaf of black bread. And kvass. There’s plenty left.’ She looked doubtfully at Lom and Maroussia. ‘I think.’
‘It’ll be fine,’ said Maroussia. ‘Thanks.’
‘You girls need to go and see to the pony,’ said Elena. ‘Then go upstairs. Both of you. Go and sit with Ilinca. You could get her to put the phonogram on.’
Yeva made a sour face.
‘Oh, but we haven’t—’
‘Upstairs,’ said Elena. ‘Now. I need to talk to Maroussia in private. Tell Sandu there’ll be people in the attic tonight. Don’t forget that.’
Elena brought a big iron pot from the oven. On the table she set out plates, a loaf of bread and a small blue jug of soured cream, and spooned out the thin rassolnik. Onions and cucumber. A few scraps of grey meat.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Maroussia. ‘We should never have come. We’ll go tomorrow.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Elena. ‘It makes no difference.’
‘You’re not safe while we’re here. The girls—’
‘Safe?’ said Elena. ‘Nobody is safe. Not anywhere. One day they come for you, and that’s it. That’s all. Every day the girls go to school and I never know if they’ll come back. Last week they shot thirty people at the Red Cliff. They lined them up in the rain and shot them. Buried the bodies in the ditch. A reprisal. Reprisal for what? Who knows? They didn’t care who they took. Old men. Women. Children. They took their clothes first and then they shot them. They made them stand naked. Then they burned the houses.’
‘Who?’ said Lom. ‘Who did that?’
‘What difference does it make?’ said Elena. ‘Police. Militia. Gendarmes. Army. What’s the difference? Uniforms did it. And it’ll be worse now. Much worse.’
‘Why?’
She stood up and went across to the sideboard, took a piece of paper from a drawer and shoved them across the table towards him.
‘Se
e this? Look at this.’
‘Colloquium Communiqué No. 3’. Its corners were torn as if it had been ripped off a notice board or a telegraph pole.
Men and women of the Vlast!
Again the counter-revolution has raised its criminal head. Revanchists are mobilising their forces to crush us. The bloodstained pogrom-mongers, having slaughtered our beloved Novozhd, intend to cause more killing and terror in the streets of Mirgorod! They have deluded the minds of certain weaker elements within our army and navy and betrayed the heroic sons and daughters to the Archipelago. Staunch resistance is needed. Now is the time for action and clear-eyed sacrifice.
Justified by angels, the Colloquium for the Protection of Citizens and the Vlast agrees to take upon itself the defence of Perpetual Revolution. The Administrative Government of the CPCV is hereby declared.
People of the Lezarye cannot be citizens of the Vlast. They have no rights in law.
It was signed with four names. Dukhonin. Khazar. Chazia. Fohn.
‘See?’ said Elena Cornelius. ‘They’re blaming us for the death of the Novozhd. They’ll come for us all. No rights in law. You know what that means? It means anyone can do anything to us. Put us out of our houses. Loot our shops. Kill us, kill our children. Any time they want to, any time at all, and no police to protect us. The police are for citizens.
‘And that is not all. Look at what happened to the men at the Saltworks Foundry. They took them all, hundreds of men, and their families. All of them.’
‘Took them?’ said Lom. ‘Took them where?’
‘Who knows? The Saltworks Foundry was the first. They come for more every day–whole factories and whole streets every time. They put them on trains and we never see them again. One day they will come here. It is only a matter of time. You should run, Maroussia. Get away from the city while you can. Don’t tell me what trouble you’re in, it doesn’t matter. If the Vlast wants to kill you, then they will kill you. You have to get far, far away from here.’ She looked at Lom. ‘Take her away,’ she said. ‘If you are her friend, get her out of Mirgorod. Go to the exclave. Go to the ice. Go to the forest. Find a ship to the Archipelago. Go anywhere. There’s nothing to keep you here. You should run.’
Truth and Fear Page 11
