Wolfhound Century

by Peter Higgins

What the fuck am I doing?

  He put the notebook back in his pocket. The Lodka was getting under his skin already, releasing the inner bureaucrat. Doors, wedged open, showed glimpses of desks, bowed concentrating heads, pencils poised over lists. Empty conference tables, waiting. The quiet music of distant telephone bells and typewriter clatter. The smell of polished linoleum and paper dust. Stairs and corridors without end. The Lodka cruised on the surface of the city like an immense ship, and like a ship it had no relationship with the depths over which it sailed, except to trawl for what lived there.

  He let these thoughts drift on, preoccupying the surface layers of his mind, while the Lodka carried him forward, floating him though its labyrinths on a current you could only perceive if you didn’t look for it too hard. This was a technique that always worked for him in office buildings: they were alive and efficient, and knew where you needed to go; if you trusted them and kept an open mind, they took you there.

  On the ground floor he followed his nose, tracing the faint scent of sweetness and corruption down a narrow stairwell to its source. A sign on the swing doors said MORTUARY. And beyond the door, a corridor floored with linoleum, brick-red to hide the stains. The attendant led him to an elevator and closed the metal grille with a crash. They descended.

  ‘You’re in luck. We burn them after a week. You’re just in time. They’ll be a bit ripe though, your friends.’

  The attendant gave him a cigarette. It wasn’t because of the dead — they weren’t so bad — it was the sickly sweetness of the formaldehyde, the sting of disinfectant in your lungs. That was worse. The harshness of the smoke took Lom by surprise: it scoured his throat and clenched his lungs. He coughed.

  ‘You going to puke?’

  ‘Let’s get on with it.’

  The Cold Room was tiled in white and lit to a bright, gleaming harshness. Their breath flowered ghosts on the stark air.

  ‘Anyone else been to see them?’

  The attendant ran his finger down a column in a book on the desk by the door.

  ‘Nope. Wait here.’

  Lom dragged hard on the cigarette. Two, three, four times. It burned too quickly. A precarious length of ash built up, its core still burning. The cardboard was too thick.

  The attendant came back pushing a steel trolley. A mounded shape lay on it, muffled by a thin, stained sheet.

  ‘You’ll have to help me with the giant,’ he said. ‘They’re heavy bastards.’

  Lom let his cigarette drop half-finished on the white-tiled floor, ground it out with his boot, and followed the attendant between heavy rubber curtains into the refrigerator room. Many bodies on trolleys were parked along the walls, but there was no mistaking the bulk of the giant on its flatbed truck. Lom took the head end and pushed.

  ‘You can leave me,’ he said when they were done. ‘I’ll let you know when I’m finished.’

  Sheets pulled back, the two cadavers lay side by side, like father and son. What was he hoping to find? A clue. That’s what detectives did. Dead bodies told you things. But these bodies were simply dead. Very.

  He checked the record sheets. The man had been identified as Akaki Serov. ‘Male. Hair red. Dyed brown. Age app. 30–35.’ The face had matched a photograph on a file somewhere: there was a serial number, a reference to the Gaukh Archive. The face on the trolley was unmarked apart from a few small cuts and puncture wounds, but nobody would recognise it now. The flesh was discoloured and collapsed, the lips withdrawn from the teeth in the speechless grin of death. The torso was swollen tight like a balloon. The blood had drained down to settle in his back and his buttocks. A wound in his neck was lipped with darkened, crusted ooze — a nether mouth, also speechless. There were no legs.

  Lom hesitated. He should take fingerprints. He should prise the jaws open to check for secreted… what?… secrets. In life, he could have worked with him. Serov dyed his hair: he was vain, then. Or trying to change his appearance. Human things. Things Lom could use. Serov might have felt a grudge against someone. Taken a bribe. Feared pain. Something. That was how Lom interrogated people: seducing, cajoling, threatening, building a relationship, coming to a conclusion. But the dead told you nothing. It was their defining characteristic, the only thing that remained to them: being dead.

  He turned to the other corpse.

  The giant had been found by the empty strong-car. There was no name for this one, no photograph to match his face on a file, not much face left to match. His flesh was hard and waxy white. Bloodless. Between his legs, where his lower belly and genitals and thighs should have been, there was nothing. A gouged-out hollow. Ragged. Burned. Vacant. The front of his body was seared and puckered. Flash burns. And there was a gunshot wound in his face that had exploded the back of his skull.

  The bullet was a puzzle. He must have been dying already — the entire middle part of his body blown to mush — but someone had taken the trouble to shoot him anyway. Why? A kindness? A silencing? A message for others to read? There were too many stories here. Too many possibilities were the same as none. They took you nowhere. The dead, being dead, were of no help.

  Lom put his hands in his pockets, trying to warm them. The cold of the room was beginning to numb his face. He needed to get out of there.

  Do something else. Pull on another thread.

  16

  Maroussia Shaumian climbed the familiar stairs to Lakoba Petrov’s studio and pushed open the door. Grey daylight flooded the sparse, airy room. Gusts of rain clattered against the high north-facing windows. She knew the room well: its wide bleak intensity, its smell of paint and turpentine, uneaten food and stale clothing. She used to come here often.

  Petrov had been working on Maroussia’s portrait, on and off, for months. He was painting her nude, in reds and purples and shadowed blacks of savage energy, her body twisted away from the viewer in a violent torsion that revealed the side of one breast under the angle of her arm. A vase of flowers was falling across a tablecloth behind her, as if she had kicked the table in the violence of the movement that hid her face. Petrov had said it was an important work: he was using it to feel his way out of conventional, scholastic painting of the female form, searching for a way to express directly his dispassionate desire and his indifference to the suffocating conventions of love and beauty. But he had lost interest in painting her since he’d got involved with Kantor. He had changed, becoming distant and distracted. Maroussia had come there less and less, and finally not at all.

  She had met Petrov at the Crimson Marmot Club, where she had started going in the evenings after work. She had gravitated towards the place because she felt obscurely hungry for new things. New ways of looking at the world. But the Marmot’s had been disappointing: a refuge where artists and intellectuals gathered to drink and boast instead of work. Everyone there had tried to get inside her skirts. Everyone except Petrov.

  ‘What do you want from this place?’ he had asked her.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she’d said seriously. ‘Something. Anything. So long as it’s new.’

  “Is anything ever really new?’ Petrov had said. ‘The present only exists by reference to the past.’ That was the kind of thing you said at the Marmot’s.

  Maroussia had frowned. ‘The past is a better place than the present,’ she said. ‘The present is a bad place, and the future will be bad too. Unless we can start again. Unless we can find a new way.’

  Petrov had laughed. ‘You won’t find anything new at the Marmot’s. Look at them. Every one a poser, every one a hypocrite, every one a mountebank. They talk about the revolution of the modern, but all they’re after is fame and money.’

  ‘Are you like that?’

  ‘Not me, no,’ Petrov had said. ‘I mean what I say. One must begin the revolution with oneself. One must remove all barriers and inhibitions within oneself first, before one can do work that is truly new. One must do all the things it is possible to do. Experience the extremes of life. I don’t care what other people think about me: I want t
o shock myself.’

  She had liked him then. She hadn’t seen then the danger of his words, the literal seriousness of his desire to shock and destroy. They had met again at the Marmot’s, several times, talking earnestly. Maroussia had wondered if they might become lovers, but it hadn’t happened.

  And now, he scarcely looked up when she came in. The studio was bitterly cold, but he was working regardless, in fingerless mittens and a woollen cap, the paint-spattered table at his side set out with jars and tubes and brushes. He painted hastily, with bold, rapid strokes, stabbing away at the immense canvas that towered above him.

  ‘Lakoba?’ said Maroussia. ‘I wanted to ask you something.’

  Petrov didn’t look round.

  ‘I will not paint you today,’ he said. ‘That picture is finished. They’re all finished. This is the last.’

  ‘What are you doing?’ she said. ‘Can I look?’

  He shrugged indifferently and turned away to busy himself at the table. Maroussia stared up at the picture he had made. It was colossal, like nothing he had made before. At the centre of it was a giant, laid out on a black road, apparently dead, his head and feet bare, surrounded by six lighted candles, each set in a golden candlestick and burning with a circle of orange light. A woman in a white skirt — suffering humanity — threw up her arms in grief. Dark, crooked buildings, roofed with blood, loomed around them. Behind the roofs and taller than all the buildings a man walked past, playing a violin. He seemed to be dancing. The lurid yellow-green sky streamed with black clouds.

  ‘This is good,’ she said. ‘Really good. It’s different. Has it got a title?’

  ‘It’s Vaso,’ he said. ‘The Death of the Giant Vaso, Killed in a Bank Raid.’ But he didn’t look round. Her presence seemed to irritate him.

  ‘Lakoba?’ she said. ‘I want to ask you something. It’s important. I want to find Raku Vishnik.’

  Petrov didn’t reply.

  ‘Raku Vishnik,’ she said again. ‘I need to see him. He didn’t come to the Marmot’s last night.’ She paused, but he didn’t answer. ‘Lakoba?’

  ‘What?’ he said at last. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Raku Vishnik. I need to find him. Quickly. I need his address.’

  ‘Vishnik?’ said Petrov vaguely. ‘You won’t find him during the daytime. He wanders. He always wanders. He’s on the streets somewhere. He walks.’

  ‘Where then? He wasn’t at the Marmot’s.’

  ‘No. I haven’t seen him there. Not for weeks.’

  ‘Where then?’

  ‘You must go to his apartment. At night. Late at night. Very late.’

  ‘What’s his address?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Vishnik’s address? Where does he live?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Petrov vaguely. ‘He’s on Pelican Quay. I don’t know the house. Ask the dvorniks.’

  For the first time he turned to look at her. Maroussia was shocked by how different he looked. He had changed so much in the weeks that had passed. His hair was wild and matted, but his face was illuminated with a strange intense distracted clarity. His pupils were dilated, wide and dark. He was staring avidly at the world, and at her, but he wasn’t seeing what was there: he was looking through her, beyond her, towards some future only he could see. And he stank. Now that he was close to her, she was aware that his breath was bad, his clothes smelled of sourness and sweat.

  ‘Something’s wrong, Lakoba,’ she said. ‘What is it?’

  Petrov opened his mouth to speak again but did not. He looked as if his brain was fizzing with images… ideas… words… purpose — what he must do — But he could say nothing. He tried, but he could not.

  ‘Lakoba?’ Maroussia said again. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Go,’ he said at last. ‘You have to go now.’

  ‘Why? What’s happened?’

  ‘You have to go.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I want you to go. I won’t need you again. Don’t come here again. Not any more.’

  ‘What are you talking about? What have I done?’

  ‘Everything is finished now. I am leaving it behind.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘There is no more to say. No more words. Words are finished now. Personal things don’t matter any more: my personal life is dead, and soon my body will also die.’

  ‘Lakoba—’

  ‘Go. Just go.’

  Maroussia left Petrov to his empty room and the immense dead giant. Once again, for the second time in as many days, she walked away from a door that had closed against her. She didn’t want to go to work, and she didn’t want to go home — not home to her mother, trapped in quiet shadow, waiting silently, too terrified to leave the room, too terrified to look out of the window, too terrified to open the cupboards, too terrified to move at all — she didn’t want to go anywhere. But it was still early, not even afternoon: she would have to wait till night to go to Raku Vishnik’s. Vishnik might tell her about the Pollandore. He was the historian. He might know

  17

  That morning, after Lom left, Raku Vishnik went to the Apraksin Bazaar. He liked the Apraksin, with its garish din and aromatic confusion, its large arcades and sagging balconies of shopfronts and stalls, the central atrium of market sellers and coffee kiosks. Areas of the Apraksin were reserved for different trades: silver, spices, rugs, clothes, shoes, umbrellas, papers and inks, rope and cordage, parts for motors and appliances, tools, chairs, tobacco, marble slabs. Poppy. One distant corner for stolen goods. And at the very top, under a canopy of glass, was an indoor garden littered with unwanted broken statuary: a dog, a child on a bench, a stained sleeping polar bear. Katya’s Alley.

  Vishnik wandered from stall to stall, floor to floor, making lists, drawing sketches, taking photographs, picking up discarded bits of stuff — a tram ticket, a discarded theatre programme. He recorded it all.

  Mirgorod, graveyard of dreams.

  He had roamed back and forth like this across the city every day for more than a year, a satchel slung over his shoulder with a fat oilskin notebook, a mechanical pencil, a collection of maps and a camera. The official historian of Mirgorod. He took his duties seriously, even if no one else did. He was systematically mining the alleyways, the streets, the prospects. Blue–green verdigrised domes. Cupolas. Pinnacles. Towers. Statues of horsemen and angels. The Opera. The Sea Station. The Chesma. The Obovodniy Bridge. It all went into his notebooks and onto his maps. He noted the smell of linden trees in the spring and the smell of damp moss under the bridges in the autumn. He photographed chalk scrawlings on the walls, torn advertisements, drinking fountains, the patterns made by telephone wires against the sky. A wrought iron clock tower with four faces under a dome.

  What he found was strangeness. Vishnik had come to see that the whole city was like a work of fiction: a book of secrets, hints and signs. A city in a mirror. Every detail was a message, written in mirror writing.

  A wrong turning has been taken. Everything is fucked.

  As he worked through the city week by week and month by month, he found it shifting. Slippery. He would map an area, but when he returned to it, it would be different: doorways that had been bricked up were open now; shops and alleyways that he’d noted were no longer there, and others were in their place, with all the appearance of having been there for years. It was as if there was another city, present but mostly invisible, a city that showed itself and then hid. He was being teased — stalked — by the visible city’s wilder, playful twin, which set him puzzles, clues and acrostics: manifestations which hinted at the meaning they obscured.

  Tying myself in knots, that’s what I’m doing. There must be cause and pattern somewhere. I’m a historian: finding cause and pattern is what I do. And it’s here, but I can’t see it. I just can’t fucking see it.

  Vishnik was hunting traces: the trail of vanished enterprise, the hint of occupations yet to come, the scent of possibilities haunting the present. Such as this jeweller and watchm
aker, whose wooden sign of business (S. LARKOV) was fixed over — but didn’t completely cover — the larger inscription in bottle green on purple tiling RUDOLF GOTMAN — BOOKSELLER — PERIODICALS — FINE BINDINGS. Vishnik noted Gotman’s advertisement on his plan of the Apraksin and took out his camera to photograph the palimpsest vitrine.

  ‘You. What do you want? What are you doing?’

  Oh my fuck. Not again.

  A small man — slick black hair, round face polished to a high sheen — had come out of the shop. S. Larkov. He wore gold half-moon glasses on his nose and a gold watch chain across his tight waistcoat. Expandable polished-steel sleeve suspenders gripped his narrow biceps, making the crisp white cotton of his shirtsleeves balloon.

  ‘I said, what are you doing?’

  ‘Taking pictures,’ said Vishnik, and offered him a card.

  Prof. Raku Andreievich Vishnik

  Historian of Mirgorod

  City Photographer

  231 Pelican Quay, Apt. 4

  Vandayanka

  Big Side

  Mirgorod

  The jeweller brushed it aside. ‘This means nothing. Who photographs such places? Who makes maps of them?’

  ‘I do,’ said Vishnik.

  ‘I’ll tell you who. Spies. Terrorists. Agents of the Archipelago. Here, give me that!’ He grabbed for the camera. Vishnik snatched it back out of his grip.

  ‘Listen, you fuck. I’m a historian—’

  Larkov’s face was stiff with hatred. His tiny eyes as tight and sharp and cramped as the cogwheels in the watches he picked over at his bench.

  ‘What if you are? Your sort are disgusting. Parasites. Intelligentsia. Only looking after their own. The Novozhd will—’

  People were coming out of the neighbouring shops. Larkov made another snatch at the camera and missed, but caught the strap of Vishnik’s satchel.

  ‘Stay where you are. I haven’t finished with you. Intellectual!’ The man propelled the word into Vishnik’s face, spattering him with warm spittle.