Wolfhound Century

by Peter Higgins

  INVESTIGATOR VISSARION LOM MUST MIRGOROD SOONEST STOP ATTEND OFFICE UNDER SECRETARY KROGH STOP 6PM 11 LAPKRIST STOP LODKA STOP MANDATED REPEAT MANDATED ENDS

  Lom read it three times. It wasn’t the kind of thing that happened. A provincial investigator summoned halfway across the continent to the capital. They never did that. Never.

  ‘Maybe they want to give you a medal, Vissarion Yppolitovich,’ Ziller said.

  ‘Or shoot me in the throat and dump me in the Mir.’

  ‘Don’t need to go to Mirgorod for that. There’s plenty here would do it, not only Lasker, after what you did to Laurits.’

  ‘Laurits was a shit,’ said Lom. ‘I saw the room where she was found. I saw what he did.’

  ‘Sure. Only she was a non-citizen and a tart, and Laurits was one of our shits. He had a wife and daughters. That makes people feel bad. You’re not a popular guy any more.’

  ‘It wasn’t a career move.’

  ‘Better if it was,’ said Ziller. ‘They’d understand that.’

  ‘I did it because he was a murdering bastard. That’s what policemen do.’

  ‘You shouldn’t joke about this, Vissarion. Things could get serious. People have been asking questions about you. Turning over files. Looking for dirt. You should be careful.’

  ‘What people?’ said Lom.

  Ziller made a face. ‘You know,’ he said. ‘People.’ He hesitated. ‘Look, Vissarion,’ he said. ‘I like you. You’re my friend. But if they come after me, I won’t stand up for you. I can’t. I’m not that kind of brave. I won’t risk Lena and the children, not for that. It might be a good thing to be away for a week or two. You know, let things settle down.’

  Lom folded the telegram and put it in his pocket. A trip might be good. A change of scene. There was nothing here he would miss. Maybe, just possibly, in Mirgorod they had a job for him. A proper job. He was tired of harassing students and checking residence permits while the vicious stuff went on in this very building, and they fucked you over if you did anything about it. He looked at his watch. There was time: an hour to pack, and he could still catch the overnight boat to Yislovsk.

  ‘You can take the Schama Bezhin file,’ he said to Ziller. ‘Call it temporary promotion.’

  Ziller grinned. ‘And I thought you didn’t appreciate me,’ he said. ‘Don’t rush back.’

  4

  A messenger was standing near the back exit of the Sviatopolk, white-faced, gripping his bicycle. Kantor dragged the machine out of his hands and rode off in pursuit of the dying horse, the money and the giant. He found them in a lane off Broken Moons Prospect. Vaso had begun to unload the satchels of roubles, stacking them neatly in the gutter. The horse was dead. Vaso was inside the back of the car, filling it almost completely. Kantor leaned his bicycle against the wall and peered in.

  Vaso looked back over his shoulder.

  ‘They were waiting for us,’ he said. His huge blue eyes peered into Kantor’s face as if from deep under water. ‘Inside the bank. They knew we were coming.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Kantor looked away a fraction too late. In some odd instant of rapport, some unprotected momentary honesty, there was a flash of communication between the giant and the man which neither had intended. Kantor saw the start of it in the giant’s huge eyes and the changed way he held his massive shoulders.

  ‘You,’ said Vaso. ‘ It was you that told them.’ He began to pull himself backwards out of the strong-car.

  ‘Vaso,’ said Kantor quietly, ‘wait. It’s not how you think.’

  But even as he spoke, Kantor had already taken the grenade from his pocket and shoved it hard into the crevice between the thighs of the giant.

  Three pounds of explosive filler encased in a sphere of brittle iron.

  The release lever of a standard grenade is held in place by a pin. Once the pin is removed, only the grip of the bomber prevents the lever from springing open, firing the primer and igniting the fuse, which detonates the main charge with a ten second delay. But when Kantor thrust the grenade between Vaso’s legs, it was squeezed tight. The lever couldn’t spring open.

  Vaso, alarmed but uncertain what had happened, hastily tried to back out. Kantor retreated until he was pressed against the wall of the building behind him, watching the giant reversing into the light. At the last moment, the bomb dropped free, rolled forward into the vehicle, and exploded. The force of it struck Kantor like his father’s fist used to. It cracked his skull backwards against the wall and the world slipped sideways. When it righted itself, the remains of Vaso were on the ground in front of him. The giant’s head, as big as a coal bucket, was smouldering. There was no skin on his face, but his lidless eyes still had life in them. He looked up mutely at Kantor and the big gap of his mouth moved slightly.

  Kantor reached inside his coat for the revolver tucked in his belt. He brought it out, showed it to the giant, and fired two shots into his head.

  5

  The light of the broken moons, circling one another in their slow, wobbling dance, floods the forest. Archangel dominates the empty landscape, a thousand feet high, like a solitary hill. The huge slopes of his body have accumulated a thick covering of snow. When he struggles to move, he dislodges avalanches and rumbling slides of ice, but he cannot shift himself. His body is irredeemably stuck, the lower part of it plunged many more hundreds of feet deep into the heart-rock and permanently fused there by the heat of his fall. The blast of his impact burned the trees flat for miles around, but new trees are growing through the ashes. Fresh snowfall carpets the floor of the shallow crater ten miles wide whose centre is him.

  Call him Archangel, though it’s not his name, he has none. He is what he is. But call him Archangel. It is… appropriate. The duration of his existence unfolds from everlasting to everlasting, measured by the lifespan of all the stars.

  At least, that was how it seemed, until, in one impossible moment, the shadow fell across him. Now he’s as you see him, caught, unable to escape, stuck hard in the planetary crust, at the bottom of the uncertainty well. He cannot adjust his density. He cannot extrude any part of himself by even a few inches. He cannot move at all. Only his perceptions can travel, and even that only within the limits of this one trivial, cramped, poisoned and shadowed planet. He is bound in a straitened prison, scarcely larger than his own self.

  And he’s afraid of dying.

  He examines his fear carefully. Pain and surprise are its flanking attendants, but it is the fear that intrigues him. So this is what fear is like. It could be useful. If he is to live.

  His attentive gaze, vast and cool and inhuman, moves restlessly across the surface of the planet, sifting through the teeming profusion of minds that populates it. So many minds. He opens them up, first one and then another, looking for what he needs. And he draws his plans.

  6

  Lom took the overnight steamer down the Yannis and reached the rail terminus at Yislovsk just after dawn the next day. There was an hour to wait for the Mirgorod train. The waiting room was crammed with fresh conscripts for the southern front, crop-haired and boisterous, so he bought a bag of pirogi and settled on a bench outside, sheltered from the blustering sleet. He shivered inside his heavy black woollen cloak, his feet numb, the pirogi warm in his hands. Stevedores, sacking tied round their shoulders against the rain, were unloading barges. Passengers wandered across the wet quay, picking their way across the rails, squeezing between trucks and wagons. A crane arm swept the sky, the grind of its winch engine competing against the sound of the rain and the wash of the river against the quayside. The first warning bell rang. Fifteen minutes to departure. On a whim, Lom went across to the telegraph office and wired ahead to Raku Vishnik, hoping to save himself the cost of a room in Mirgorod.

  The train was a twelve-foot-gauge monster, the locomotive as high as a house. The Admiral Grebencho, in the purple livery of the Edelfeld Sparre line. Three cylinders, double Chapkyl blastpipe, sleek, rounded, backswept prow, pulling thirty carriages.
The Admiral could make a hundred and fifty versts an hour on the straight, but they travelled with meticulous slowness, stopping at every halt and crossing place, sliding across vast flat country.

  Krasnoyarsk. Novorossiysk. Volynovsk. Elgen. Magaden.

  Lom had spent an entire week’s salary on a first-class compartment. He travelled in solitude, in a slow blur of daylight and darkness. His only company was a framed photograph of the Novozhd and two posters: CITIZEN! WHOM ARE YOU WITH? and COME TO LAKE TSYRKHAL! THE WATER IS WARM!

  The unchanging landscape of birch forest made all movement seem an illusion. Time grew thickened and lazy, measured out in the glasses of tea the provodnik brought from the samovar at the end of the corridor. Lom watched the trees and slept, stretched out on the green leather upholstery. Five days of enforced inactivity… the trundling of iron wheels and the slow passage of trees and earth and sky… rest in motion…

  The birches bored him. They were unimpressive: widely-spaced chalk marks. Nothing like the forest east of Podchornok. That was proper forest. Dark. Mossy. Thick. He’d lived all his life in its shadow. Podchornok was the last town before the forest began: from Durnovo-Burliuk Street you could see the low hills of the tree edge. The measureless forest. No one knew how big it was, or what — if anything — lay beyond it. Normally, Lom tried not to think about the forest too much — it was addictive, it consumed the hours — but now, with nothing else to do, he imagined what it would be like to walk there, smelling the damp earth, digging his fingers into layers of mouldering leaves and rotting, mushroomy fallen wood. Swimming in the white lakes. Great wolves and giant elk moving through splashes of sunlight.

  The Vlast mounted periodic incursions into the trees. Artel followed artel into the woods, only to find themselves caught in impenetrable thickets of thorn, their horses floundering up to their bellies in mud. River expeditions drifted through tangled shadow, feeling themselves shrinking, diminishing, losing significance as the world grew silent and strange. Aircraft flew over an illimitable carpet of trees flecked with the glint of rivers and lakes. The silence of the forest remained undisturbed.

  Karka. Lapotev. Narymsk. Kaunats. Vorkutagorsk.

  Having no money for the restaurant car, Lom carried with him a supply of bread and white crumbly cheese. Bored of this eventually, he got off the train at Chelyagorsk, where they had a two-hour stop, and spent a few kopeks on some mushrooms and dried fish and a newspaper. There was a wooden hut at the end of the platform. A sign said EXHIBITION OF PRESERVED ZOOMORPHS — 5 KOPEKS. A pale girl in a knitted headscarf was sitting on a flimsy chair by the door. She was shivering. Her eyes watery with the cold.

  ‘Is it good?’ he said. ‘The exhibition. Is it worth seeing?’

  The girl shrugged. ‘I guess. It’s five kopeks.’

  ‘Do you get many visitors?’

  ‘No. Do you want to go in? It’s five kopeks.’

  He gave her the money. She put it in her pocket carefully.

  The hut was unheated and dim and filled with dusty stuffed animals: some drab wildfowl, a pair of scrawny wolves, a cringing bear. Feeble specimens compared to the forest beasts of his imagination. And there was a female mammoth, extracted from permafrost to the north. She had been mounted exactly as she was found, sitting back on her haunches, one forefoot set on the ground, as if she had fallen into a bog and was trying to climb out. Her hair was reddish, rough, worn thin in patches, and she squinted at Lom with mean, resentful eyes, small and black and glittering like sloes. Yellowing tusks arched up in supplication towards the pitch ceiling. For the rest of the journey she came to him in his dreams.

  One incident broke the limpid surface of the long, slow journey. In the next compartment to Lom’s an old man — clouded eyes, a thick spade of a beard combed with a central parting — was travelling with his wife and a dark-haired girl of six or so. Lom heard him through the partition, coughing, grumbling, swearing at his wife for letting the cold air in.

  There was a commotion as the train was coming into Tuga. Lom found the wife in the corridor, wailing in dry-eyed distress, surrounded by guards and curious passengers. The girl was watching, silent and wary in the background. It turned out the old man had run from the compartment in his slippers, rushed down the length of the carriage and pushed open the door onto the small ledge at the end, just as the train was slowing. He’d fallen between the cars, and was dead.

  Lom watched them bring a stretcher to carry off his shrunken old body. Blood was leaking from his mouth. The wife and child and all their baggage followed him off the train.

  As Lom turned to go back to his compartment, a gendarme grabbed him by the arm.

  ‘You,’ he said. ‘You.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘What do you know about the man who died?’

  ‘Nothing. Why?’

  ‘You were watching.’

  ‘So was everyone.’

  ‘But not like you. Where are you from?’

  ‘Podchornok. I joined the train at Yislovsk. But—’

  The gendarme was standing too close, looking up into Lom’s face. He thrust his hand forward, almost jabbing it into Lom’s midriff.

  ‘Papers. Your papers.’

  ‘What papers?’

  ‘Papers. Passport. Permission to travel. Certification of funds. Certification of sound health and freedom from infestation. Papers.’

  ‘There was no time,’ said Lom. ‘And I don’t need papers.’

  ‘Everyone needs papers. If you’ve got no papers, you’re coming with me. Unless –’ The gendarme pushed his face up closer to Lom’s. ‘Unless you’ve got a big fat purse.’

  ‘Fuck you,’ said Lom quietly, and turned away.

  The gendarme grabbed his shoulder and spun him round. ‘You’re coming with me. Now. Bastard.’

  ‘You’re talking to a senior investigator in the third department of the political police. You don’t call me bastard. You call me sir.’

  For a moment the gendarme hesitated; but only for a moment.

  ‘I don’t care if you’re the fucking Novozhd himself. If you’ve got no papers, you’re mine.’

  ‘Like I said, I don’t need papers.’ Lom took off his cap to let the man see the irremovable seal, the small dark coin of angel flesh embedded in the bone of his forehead like a blank third eye. ‘I have this. This is better.’

  On the fifth day the birch trees thinned out, separated now by long tracts of flat and treeless waste, black mud under dirty melting snow, and on the sixth morning the train emerged abruptly into a flat watery landscape. Lakes. Rivers. Marshland. Low, misty cloud. And sometimes a glint of harder grey on the skyline that was the sea. Stops became more frequent, though the towns were still small. Rain trickled down the windowpane in small droplets. A large, stumpy, dark red mass appeared on the horizon. It looked like an enormous rock. The Ouspenskaya Torso.

  Then, suddenly, without warning, the train was high above the landscape and he was looking down on houses: ramshackle wooden structures with pig yards and cabbage rows; yellow tenements; streets and traffic; the pewter glint of canals and basins. They were on the Bivorg Viaduct, hopping from island to island, closing on the Litenskaya. The rain gave everything a vivid, polished sheen of wetness. Lom felt a nameless stirring of excitement. Arrival. New things coming. The capital. Mirgorod.

  7

  Josef Kantor had a tiny office on the Ring Wharf, an unmarked doorway at the top of an iron staircase among mazy yards and warehouses, tucked away behind bales, vats, crates, barrels and carboys. It reeked of coal and tar and the spice and citrus smells of imported foodstuffs. There was room for a desk, a shelf for books and a small grate for a fire. Kantor had a portable printing press hidden under a blanket, and here he produced the leaflets he distributed along the wharves.

  Every day, he walked among the steam-cranes and the rail trucks, the hammering, the waves of heat and showers of sparks, the supervising engineers with their oilskin notebooks, the collective industry of men. He w
atched them work on the naked, propped bodies of ships in dry dock and the towering frames of new ships rising. Day by day, immense steel vessels took shape out of chaos, bigger and stronger and more numerous than any before them. Speed. Power. Control. This is a new thing, thought Kantor, and wrote it in his leaflets. This is the future. It requires new ways of thinking: new philosophy, new morality, a new kind of person. All that is old and useless must be destroyed to make way.

  Kantor slept on his desk, and on cold nights he built a wall of books around himself to keep out draughts. He’d learned the books trick at Vig, in a moss-caulked hut he shared with three families and the psychopath Vereschak. On winter nights in Vig, your breath iced on your beard while you slept. Vig had taught Kantor the luxury of being alone. He had learned the prisoner’s way of withdrawing inside himself and entering a private inner space the persecutors couldn’t reach.

  Kantor’s life had been shaped by the dialectic of fear and killing: if you feared something, you studied it, learned all you could from it, and then you killed it. And when you encountered a stronger thing to fear, you did it again. And again. And so you grew stronger, until the fear you caused was greater than the fear you felt. It was his secret satisfaction that he had begun to learn this great lesson even before he was born. He was an aphex twin: a shrivelled, dead little brother had flushed out after him with the placenta and spilled across his mother’s childbed sheet. Before he even saw the light of day, he had killed and consumed his rival.

  His father, the great Avril, hero of the Birzel Rebellion, had made his living packing herrings in ice. Avril Kantor loathed his work and himself for doing it. He came home stinking of brandy and fish. Josef heard the crude voice and saw his mother kicked across the floor. Felt the ice-hardened fist in his own face. He didn’t hate his father. He admired his power to hurt and the fear he caused. Only later, when he understood more, did he come to despise him for hurting only weakness, and sacrificing his own life in a grand futile gesture of revolt.