Wolfhound Century

by Peter Higgins

  The Kantor family name earned Josef a place at the Bergh Academy. He was safe then from the fish wharves that ruined his father, but Bergh’s was a dull and vicious place. The masters spied on the students, searched their possessions, encouraged them to inform on each other. They beat him for reading prohibited books and lending them to the other boys. He studied the masters’ methods and hated the unimaginative, unproductive purposes to which they put their dominance. On the day he’d grown strong enough, he went to find the mathematics master alone, gripped him by the hair and cracked his face down onto his desk.

  ‘If I’m beaten again, I will come back and kill you,’ he whispered.

  The teacher wore the bruise for a week. Josef was left alone at Bergh’s after that. He grew tall and lean and hard and full of energy. The first work the Lezarye Committee gave him was distributing leaflets to the railway workers. He was caught and badly beaten, while Anastas Bragin, Director of Railways, looked on, his face flushed rosy pink. Three nights later Josef Kantor climbed into Bragin’s garden with a revolver. It was late spring, and the sun was still in the sky though it was after eleven at night. The air in the garden was heavy with warmth and bees and lime blossom perfume. Bragin was working by lamplight at a desk in a downstairs room with the window open. Kantor trampled fragrant earth to get to the casement. He leaned in.

  ‘Remember me?’

  He waited a moment before he shot Bragin in the head. He was seventeen then.

  The police picked him up after the Birzel Rebellion. They wanted to know where his father was hiding. They broke his hands and burned his feet and kicked his balls until they swelled like lemons, but he didn’t tell them. They gave up in the end, and left him alone, and then he told them where his father was. The police forced him to watch his father’s execution. That was a pleasure. The icing on the cake. He was stronger than them all.

  There was a rapping at the door of the office. Kantor swore under his breath. It would be Vitt. Vitt and the others. Vitt had said they would come, though Kantor had forbidden it. He hated people coming here. It compromised his security and invaded his private space. But they’d insisted. Vitt had insisted.

  The knocking came again, louder. Determined. They were early.

  ‘Come in then, Vitt,’ he called. ‘Come in if you must. This had better be good.’

  They crowded into the room. Kantor surveyed their faces. So many useless, vapid, calf-like faces. He’d told them to lie low, that was the proper way, but after a few days they’d got restless and suspicious. Too frightened of the police, not frightened enough of him. Vitt had dragged them along.

  ‘The banknotes are marked,’ Vitt was saying. ‘They’ve published the serial numbers in the Gazetta.’

  ‘The roubles go to the Government of Exile Within,’ said Kantor. ‘You know that. Their problem, not ours.’

  ‘They were waiting for us,’ said Lidia. ‘They knew we were coming. They knew when and where.’

  ‘And we lost Akaki,’ said Vitt. ‘Akaki was a good comrade.’

  ‘Deaths are inevitable,’ said Kantor. ‘Nothing worth having is got without great price. Be under no illusion, there is worse to come. Storms and torrents of blood will mark the struggle to end oppression. Are you ready for that?’

  They stared at him sourly.

  ‘But—’

  ‘Is this a challenge, Vitt?’

  Vitt stopped dead, his mouth open, the colour draining from his face.

  ‘No. No, Josef. I’m only trying to…’

  Kantor looked around the room, fixing every one of them, one by one, with hard eyes. It was time.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They were waiting for us, and you know what that means, but none of you has the courage to say it. One of us is an informer.’

  ‘Maybe it was—’ Stefania began.

  “Let’s go over it again,’ said Kantor. ‘You, Vitt, threw a bomb that did not explode, and then you, Vitt, ran like a hare.’

  ‘I—’

  ‘I smell you, Vitt. I smell treachery and lies. I smell the policeman’s coin in your pocket.’

  ‘No, Josef! Maybe it was Petrov? Where is he today? Has anyone seen him? It was Petrov!’

  ‘I smell you Vitt, and I’m never wrong. See how you crumble? This is how you crawled and squealed when the police took you. This is the traitor’s courage. This is the disease within.’

  Kantor took the revolver from his pocket and held it out in the palm of his hand.

  ‘Who will do what must be done? Must I do it myself?’

  ‘Let me,’ said Lidia. ‘Please, Josef.’

  Kantor gave her the revolver. Vitt upped from his seat and made for the door, but Stefania stuck out her foot. He fell on his face with a sickening slap.

  ‘Oh, no,’ he murmured. ‘No.’

  Lidia put the muzzle to the back of his head.

  ‘Bye, fat boy.’

  She fired.

  ‘I wish,’ said Kantor, wiping a splash of something warm from his face, ‘I wish you’d done that outside.’

  No sooner had Kantor closed the door behind them than he felt the attention of Archangel enter the room. The furniture crackled with fear.

  ‘No,’ said Kantor quietly. ‘No. I don’t want this. Not again.’

  Archangel opened him up and came into him. Ripping his way inside his head. Occupying everything. Taking everything. Leaving nowhere private. His voice was a roaring whisper.

  They fear you, it said. But whom do you fear?

  Kantor lay on his back on the floor, his limbs in rigid spasm, his eyes fixed open, staring at nothing. Archangel’s alien voice in his mind was a voice of shining darkness, absolutely intelligent, absolutely cold, like a midnight polar sky, clean of cloud and shot through with veins of starlight.

  Whom do you fear?

  Archangel allowed him a little room, in which to formulate his response.

  ‘You,’ whispered Kantor. ‘I fear you.’

  You are wasting time. Think like a master, not like a slave. Are you listening to me?

  Kantor tried to speak but the muscles of his face were stuck and his throat was blocked with the inert flesh of his tongue. He tried to drive out the thing that had torn open his mind and come inside. It was like trying to push his face through raw and solid rock.

  There must be fear. There must be war. There must be death. Everything is weak. Everything will shake. I will put this world in your hands. And others. Many many others. And you will do one thing for me. One small thing.

  Destroy the Pollandore.

  8

  The platforms of the Wieland Station, enclosed under a wide, arching canopy of girders and glass, roared. Shrill whistles, shouts, venting steam, the clank of shunting iron. The smell of hot oil, hot metal, stale air, dust. The roof glass, smeared with sooty rain, cast a dull grey light. Train lamps burned yellow. Raucous announcements of arrivals and departures punctuated the ‘Tarsis Overture’ on the tannoy.

  Lom collected his valise from the luggage car himself. It was heavy and awkward, a hefty oblong box of brown leather, three brass-buckled belts and a brass clasp. He’d dressed for the cold, his cap pulled down tight down over his forehead, but the station was hot and close. By the time he’d hauled his baggage down the wide, shallow marble staircase into the concourse, he was hot with sweat and the din was ringing in his ears.

  He let the crowds part around him. Guards and porters shouted destinations. Droshki and kareta drivers called for business. A giant lumbered past, hauling a trolley. Everyone was in uniform, not just the railway workers, drivers, policemen and militia, but students and doorkeepers and concierges and clerks, wet nurses and governesses, messengers and mail carriers. The only ones not in uniform were the wealthy travelling families, the labourers in their greasy jackets and the civil servants in their dark woollen coats. Lom scanned the passing faces for Raku Vishnik. There was no sign of him. Maybe the telegram hadn’t reached him. Maybe, after fourteen — no, fifteen — years, Vishnik had read it and
thrown it away.

  ‘Clear the way there!’

  Lom stepped aside. A ragged column of soldiers was shuffling through the central hall and up the shallow stairs to the platforms. The smell of the front came with them: they stank of herring, tobacco, wet earth, mildew, lice and rust. The wounded came at the rear. The broken-faced, they were called. It was a literal term. Men with pieces of their heads missing. One had lost a chunk out of the side of his skull, taking the ear with it. Another had no jaw: nothing but a raw mess between his upper teeth and his neck.

  At the end of the column two privates were struggling to support a third, walking between them, or not walking but continually falling forward. Trembling violently from head to foot, as if he was doing some kind of mad dance, as if his clothes were infested with foul biting bugs. He had a gentle face, bookish, the face of a librarian or a schoolteacher. Apart from his eyes. He was staring at something. Staring backwards in time to a fixed, permanent event, an endless loop of repetition beyond which he could neither see nor move.

  Lom felt his stomach tighten. The war was far away. You tried not to think about it.

  The veterans went on and up, absorbed back into the crowd. Lom looked at his watch. It had stopped. He’d forgotten to wind it on the train. The station clock stood on a pillar in the centre of the concourse, its minute hand five feet long and creeping with perceptible jolts around its huge yellowed face. Ten past six. He was late for Krogh.

  9

  It took him an hour to get across the city to the Lodka. When he got there, he leaned on the balustrade of the Yekaterinsky Bridge, looking up at it. The momentous building, a great dark slab, rose and bellied outwards like the prow of a vast stationary ship against the dark purple sky, the swollen, luminous stars, the windblown accumulating rags of cloud. Rain was in the air. Nightfall smelled of the city and sea, obscuring colour and detail, simplifying form. Lom felt the presence of the angel stone embedded in the walls. It called to the seal in his head, and the seal stirred in response.

  The Lodka stood on an island, the Yekatarina Canal passing along one side, the Mir on the other. Six hundred yards long, a hundred and twenty yards high, it enclosed ten million cubic yards of air and a thousand miles of intricately interlocking offices, corridors and stairways, the cerebral cortex of a stone brain. It was said the Lodka had been built so huge and so hastily that when it was finished, many of the rooms could not be reached at all. Passageways ran from nowhere to nowhere. Stairwells without stairs. Exitless labyrinths. From high windows you could look down on entrance-less vacant courtyards, the innermost secrets of the Vlast. Amber lights burned in a thousand windows. Behind each window ministers and civil servants, clerks and archivists and secret policemen were working late. In one of those rooms Under Secretary Krogh of the Ministry of Vlast Security was waiting for him. Lom crossed the bridge and went up the steps to the entrance.

  Krogh’s private secretary was sitting in the outer office. Files were stacked in deep neat piles on his desk, each one tagged with handwritten slips of paper and coloured labels. He looked up without interest when Lom came in.

  ‘You’re late, Investigator. The Under Secretary is a busy man.’

  ‘Then you’d better get me in there straight away.’

  ‘Your appointment was for six.’

  ‘I was sent for. I’ve come.’

  ‘Pavel?’ A voice called from the inner office. ‘Is that Lom? Bring the man in here.’

  Krogh’s office was large and empty. Krogh himself was sitting at the far end, behind a plain wooden table in an eight-sided bay with uncurtained windows on every side. In daylight he would have had an almost circular view across the city, but now the windows were black and only reflected Krogh from eight different angles. The flesh of his face was soft and pouched, but his eyes under heavy half-closed lids were bright with calculation.

  Lom waited while Krogh examined him. His head hurt where the angel seal was set into it. A dull, thudding ache: the tympanation of an inward drum.

  ‘You’re either an idiot or a courageous man, Lom. Which is it?’

  ‘You didn’t bring me all the way to Mirgorod so you could call me an idiot.’

  ‘Yough!’ Krogh made an extraordinary, high-pitched sound. It was laughter. He picked up a folder that lay in front of him on the desk.

  ‘This is the file on you, Lom. I’ve been reading it. You were one of Savinkov’s. One doesn’t meet many. And you have talent. But still only an Investigator. No promotion for, what is it, ten years?’

  ‘Eleven.’

  ‘And three applications for transfer to Mirgorod. All rejected.’

  ‘No reason was given. Not to me.’

  ‘Your superiors in Podchornok refer to attitudinal problems. Is that right?’

  Lom shrugged.

  ‘There’s room for men like you, Investigator. Opportunities. That’s why you’re here. Would you do something for me? A very particular task?’

  ‘I’d need to know what it was.’

  The ache in Lom’s head was stronger now. Shafts of pain at the place where the angel stone was cut in. Patches of brightness and colour disturbed his vision. None of the angles in the room was right.

  ‘You’re cautious,’ said Krogh. ‘Good. Caution is a good quality. In some circumstances. But we have reached an impasse, Investigator. I can’t tell you anything until I know that you’re on my side. And mine only. Only mine, Lom.’ Krogh spread his hands. Slender hands, slender fingers, pale soft dry skin. ‘So. Where do we go from here? How should we proceed?’

  ‘I’ve had a long journey, Under Secretary. I’ve been on a train for the last six days. I’m tired and my head hurts. Unless you brought me all this way just so you could not tell me anything, you’d better say what this is all about.’

  Krogh exhaled. A faint subsiding sigh.

  ‘I’m beginning to see why your people find you difficult. Nevertheless, you have a point. Does the name Josef Kantor mean anything to you?’

  ‘No.’

  Krogh sank back, his head resting against the red leather chair-back.

  ‘Josef Kantor,’ he began, ‘was nineteen at the time of the Birzel Rebellion. His father was a ringleader: he was executed by firing squad. Here at the Lodka. Josef Kantor himself was also involved. He spoke at the siege of the Armoury, and drafted the so-called Birzel Declaration. Do you know the Declaration, Lom?’

  ‘I’ve heard of it.’

  ‘It’s fine work. Very fine. You should know it by heart. One should know one’s adversary.’

  Krogh leaned forward in his chair.

  ‘We believe,’ he began in a louder, clearer voice. ‘We believe that the Vlast of One Truth has no right in Lezarye, never had any right in Lezarye, and never can have any right in Lezarye. The rule of the Vlast is for ever condemned as a usurpation of the justified government of the people of Lezarye, and a crime against human progress of the Other Rational Peoples. We stand ready to die in the affirmation of this truth. We hereby proclaim the Nation of Lezarye as a sovereign independent people, and we pledge our lives and the lives of our comrades-in-arms to the cause of its freedom, its continued development, and its proper exaltation among the free nations of the continent.’

  Krogh paused. Lom said nothing.

  ‘Fine words, Lom. Fine words. Kantor was arrested, of course, but — and I cannot explain this, the file is obscure — his sentence was limited to three years’ internal exile. To your province, Investigator. And there he might have sat out his sentence in relative comfort and returned to the city, but he did not. He made persistent attempts to escape. He killed a guard. So. For this he got twenty years at the penal colony of Vig. Such a sentence is rarely completed, but Kantor survived. And then, a year ago, for reasons again obscure, he was simply released. He came back to Mirgorod and disappeared from our view. And also about a year ago,’ Krogh continued, ‘we began to notice a new kind of terror in Mirgorod. Of course we have our share of anarchists. Nihilists. Nationalists. There is a
lways a certain irreducible level of outrage. But this was a new sense of purpose. Daring. Destructiveness. Cruelty. There was a new leader, that was obvious. There were names, many names: eventually we discovered they all led to one person.’

  ‘Kantor.’

  ‘Indeed. This month alone he has been responsible for the assassination of Commissioner Halonen, a mutiny at the Goll Dockyard and only last week an attack on the Bank of Foreign Commerce. They got thirty million roubles. Can you imagine what a man like Kantor is capable of, with thirty million roubles?’

  ‘I read about the bank raid in the papers,’ said Lom. ‘But why are you telling me this?’

  Krogh waved the question away.

  ‘I’ve been after Kantor for a year,’ he continued. ‘A year, Lom! But I never get anywhere near him. Why?’

  ‘I guess he has friends,’ said Lom.

  Krogh looked at him narrowly. A glint of appreciation.

  ‘Exactly. Yes. You are sharp. Good. I cannot get near Kantor because he is protected. By people in the Vlast — people here, in the Lodka itself.’

  ‘OK,’ said Lom. ‘But why? Why would they do that?’

  ‘I guess,’ said Krogh, ‘that some understanding of the international situation percolates even as far as Podchornok? You realise, for instance, that we are losing the war with the Archipelago?’

  ‘I only know what’s in the newspapers. Seva was retaken last week.’

  ‘And lost again the next day. The Vlast cannot sustain this war for another year. Our financial position is weak. The troops are refusing to fight. The Archipelago has proposed terms for a negotiated peace, and…’ Krogh broke off. ‘This is confidential, Lom, you understand that?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘The Novozhd is preparing to open negotiations. Peace with honour, Lom. An end to the war.’