Wolfhound Century

by Peter Higgins

  The paluba’s companion faces opposite, eastwards, back towards the border of the endless forest. And whereas the paluba has a hand-made body, a material caricature of the living human form, the companion is the opposite of this also. For while she is not an artifice but a living creature, she has no body at all. Inside her shrouds of cloth there is nothing but air, only air — collected, coherent, densely-tangible forest air. She is the breath of the forest, walking.

  As the train edges slowly closer to Mirgorod, the paluba’s companion feels the widening distance between herself and the forest as an ever-increasing pain. She wants to go home. She needs to go home. Nothing would be easier for her than to leave, but she cannot. It is only her presence close to the paluba that enables it to continue to hold together and function so far from the forest. If she were to abandon the paluba it would fall apart. It would become inert, nothing more than the heap of rags and stuff of which it is made. Without her, the paluba’s mission would fail, and with it would fail the hope of the forest, the only hope of the world.

  25

  The next morning, Lom took the tram back to the Lodka. He had a lead from Safran — the name of the painter, Petrov, who was one of Kantor’s gang and had betrayed the Levrovskaya raid — not much of a lead, but something. A link to Kantor. Lom tried to keep his focus on Kantor, but his thoughts kept sliding sideways. Chazia was a presence in the background, unsettling him. A dark, angel-stained presence. She had showed herself to him deliberately. Playing a game with him. He was sure of that, though he didn’t understand why. Yet it wasn’t her face he kept seeing in the street on the other side of the tram window, but Maroussia Shaumian’s. She had got under his skin. He hadn’t liked the way she looked at him as she left last night: the mixture of fear and scorn in her face had cut him raw. For the first time, it didn’t feel so good, being a policeman.

  The tram had come to a stop. The engine cut out. A murmuring broke out among the dulled morning passengers.

  ‘We’re going nowhere,’ the driver called. ‘They’ve cut the power. Traffic’s all snarled up. I guess there’s another march somewhere up ahead.’

  Lom sighed and got out to walk. It wasn’t far.

  A few hesitant snowflakes twisted slowly down out of the grey sky and littered the streets. People kept their heads down. As he got nearer the Lodka, Lom noticed the crowds getting slower and thicker. There was a sound of distant music. Hymns. He turned a corner and was brought up short by a mass of people passing slowly down the street.

  They were singing as they came, not marching but walking. There were old men in sheepskin hats and women in quilted coats. Students in threadbare cloaks. Workers from the Telephone and Telegraph Office and the tramcar depot. Schoolchildren and wounded soldiers, bandaged and hobbling. There were giants, shuffling forward, struggling to match the slow pace. Faces in uncountable passing thousands, following a hundred banners, shouting the slogans of a dozen causes. STOP THE WAR! PAY THE SOLDIERS! FREE TRADE UNIONS! LIBERATE THE PEOPLE OF LEZARYE! The finest banners belonged to the unions and free councils. They were made of silk, embroidered in beautiful reds and golds and blacks and hung with tassels. Each took three men to hold the poles and three more to go in front, pulling the tassels down to keep the banner taut and straight against the wind. The banner men wore long coats and bowler hats.

  They were going his way, so Lom stepped into the road and walked along beside them. These people weren’t terrorists or even dissidents. They were ordinary people, most of them, ordinary faces filled now with energy and purpose and an unfamiliar sort of joy. Lom felt the warmth of their fellowship. It was a kind of bravery. He almost wished he was part of it. A few people in the crowd looked at him oddly because of his uniform, but they said nothing. The traffic halted to let them pass. People on the pavement watched, curious or indifferent. Some jeered, but others offered words of encouragement and a few stepped off the kerb to join them. Gendarmes in their plywood street-corner kiosks fingered their batons uncertainly and avoided eye contact. They had no instructions.

  Lom scanned the faces in the crowd automatically, the way he always did. Looking for nothing in particular, waiting for something to grab his attention. There was a man striding with the crowd, not keeping his place but weaving through them, working his way slowly forward towards the front, handing out leaflets as he went. He was wearing a striking grey fedora. His overcoat flapped open and his pink silk shirt was a splash of colour in the crowd. He came within a few feet of Lom, singing the chorus from Nina in a fine tenor voice.

  Lom felt a lurch of recognition. The man’s face meant something to him, though at first he couldn’t make a connection. Then it came to him. Long and narrow and pockmarked, with those wide brown eyes, it could have been Josef Kantor. This man was older — of course he would be — and his face was filled out compared to the lean features in Krogh’s old photograph. But it could have been Kantor. Lom was almost certain it was.

  Lom’s heart was pounding. He could hardly go up and seize him. Apart from any doubts about the man’s identity, if he — in his uniform, with few other police around — tried to seize someone by force out of this crowd, things would get nasty. He’d be lucky to get out of it with his life. Certainly, he wouldn’t get out of it with Kantor. Lom walked on, watching the man who might have been Kantor make his way expertly through the crowd.

  For a while Lom tried to keep up with him. The man was tall, and in his fedora he was hard to lose sight of. But he was working his way steadily deeper into the crowd. As Lom went after him, his uniform began to attract attention. People jostled him and swore. Twice he was almost tripped. If he fell, he would have been kicked and trampled. He was sure of it.

  A strong hand gripped his arm and squeezed, dragging him roughly round. A fat, creased face was shoved close to his.

  ‘Idiot. Get the fuck out of here. What are you trying to do? Start a fucking riot?’

  The man shoved him towards the edge of the crowd. Lom bumped hard against someone’s back. Something sharp hit him on the back of the head, momentarily dizzying him.

  ‘Hey,’ said another voice behind him. A quiet voice, almost a whisper. ‘Hey. Look at me. Arsehole.’

  Lom turned in time to see the glint of a short blade held low, at waist level, in someone’s hand. He lurched sideways, trying to get out of range. He couldn’t even tell, in the crowd, who had the knife. Most of the walkers were still ignoring him, still walking on, ordinary faces wanting to do a good thing. Kantor, if it had been Kantor, had disappeared from view.

  Shit. He needed to get out of there. Warily, watchfully, trying not to be jostled again, he edged himself sideways until he could step out of the slow tide of people, back onto the pavement. Lom realised he was sweating. He paused for a moment to catch his breath and tried to find his bearings, looking for a side street or alley that would let him get to the Lodka without getting caught up in the march again.

  26

  Unaware of Lom’s abortive pursuit of him, Josef Kantor continued to weave his way through the moving crowd. Kantor wasn’t the leader of the march. Nobody was. A dozen separate organisations had called for the demonstration and claimed it as theirs. There was a vague plan of sorts: to march up Founder’s Prospect to the Lodka and hold a vigil there, with speeches from the steps, then on to the Novozhd’s official residence in the Yekaterinsky Park to present a petition at the gates.

  The chiefs of each marching organisation walked apart from the others, following their own colours, suspicious of spies and provocateurs. Kantor moved from coterie to coterie with a word of encouragement and support. He was everyone’s friend. Some of them wondered who he was. Some thought they knew him, though each one knew him by a different name — Pato, or Lura, or David, or Per, or simply the Singer. Some knew him as the go-between and negotiator who had drafted their petition, a masterpiece of inspiring words and lofty demands that meant different things to different people.

  The size of the crowd grew as it went, exceeding all e
xpectation, even of Kantor himself. Runners moved through it, passing back instructions and bringing forward news of the swelling numbers, until those at the front began to wonder what they had unleashed, and felt nervous. They were beginning to sense that something more momentous than they had intended was preparing to happen.

  The song changed from Nina to the Lemke Hymn. Their breath flickered on the air, but their hearts were warm. They were no longer a hundred thousand separate, accidental people but one large animal moving forward with a strength and purpose of its own. A newly-formed being whose moment had come.

  And then a hesitation began somewhere in the crowd, no one knew where, and spread, a gathering wave of silence and concern. The singing died away but the crowd kept on walking.

  Kantor shoved his way to the front.

  ‘What is it?’ he said. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘Dragoons are gathering at the Lodka. They have mudjhiks, and orders to fire.’

  ‘Rumours. There are always rumours.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Kantor moved on to another group. The Union of Dockers and Tracklayers was always up for a fight. He grabbed their Steward, Lopukhin, by his sleeve.

  ‘It’s only a rumour,’ said Kantor. ‘Keep them going. Get them singing again.’

  ‘Who cares if the dragoons are waiting for us?’ said Lopukhin. ‘They won’t attack us. We are fellow citizens. What a moment for us! Imagine. The dragoons refusing a direct order!’

  But Lopukhin’s was only one voice among the leaders. Others were for turning aside and making straight for the Park. The argument continued all the way up Founder’s Prospect, and they were still arguing when they found themselves at the edge of the Square of the Piteous Angel.

  The square was empty. On the far side, the huge prow of the Lodka rose against the sky. And between the marchers and the Lodka were two lines of mounted dragoons. A mudjhik stood at each end and another in the middle.

  Those at the head of the march tried to halt and turn back, but the great mass of the crowd had a momentum of its own, and those behind, unaware of what was happening, kept on coming. The shoving and jostling started. Kantor found Lopukhin again and seized him by the shoulder.

  ‘Come on!’ he shouted. ‘This is your moment! Lead them, Lopukhin! Face the soldiers down!’

  ‘Damn, yes!’ cried Lopukhin. His face was flushed, his eyes bright and unfocused. ‘I will!’

  Lopukhin shoved his lieutenants in the back, making them stumble forward into the empty square. He grabbed the colours of the Union and jogged forward, yelling and waving it over his head.

  ‘Come on, lads! Come on! They won’t shoot us!’

  Some of the men followed Lopukhin willingly and others were pushed forward by pressure from behind. Kantor slipped away to the edge of the crowd and took up a position in the doorway of a boot shop. At first nothing happened. The dragoons didn’t respond, and the demonstrators grew confident. More and more spilled into the square. Then Kantor heard what he had been waiting for. From the back of the crowd a swelling noise rolled forward. At first it sounded like they were cheering. Then the screams grew clearer, and the crack of shots.

  All was as it should be. The troops that had been waiting out of sight in the side streets, letting the crowd pass by, were attacking the flank and rear. The killing had begun.

  27

  Threading through back streets and alleys, Lom made his way round to a side entrance of the Lodka and back into the great Archive. He called up the file on Lakoba Petrov without difficulty — unlike the Kantor file, it was there, and there was no sign that it had been tampered with. He sat reading it at one of the long tables under the dome while the Gaukh Engine rumbled and turned quietly behind him. He’d switched on the desk lamp. It pooled buttery yellow light on the blue leather desktop. But he found it hard to concentrate on the file. His head was hurting, as it had done in Krogh’s office. Patches of faint flickering colour disturbed his vision.

  Lom rubbed at his forehead, feeling the seal of angel skin smooth and cool under his fingers, tracing the slight puckering of the skin around it. He was keyed up and unsettled after his dangerous encounter with the marching crowd. The glimpse of Kantor — it was him, he was sure of it — haunted him: the sureness with which he had moved through the jostling people, the easy confidence on his face. He hadn’t looked like a hunted man.

  But there was something else that troubled Lom, something deeper: watching the crowd marching, he had been drawn towards them. He had launched himself unthinkingly among them to follow Kantor. He had, he now realised, wanted to be one of them. He was, at some instinctive level, on their side. And yet… the hostility, the contempt, even the hatred they had turned on him when they noticed him. Not him, the uniform. For the second time, it didn’t feel so good, being a policeman.

  Lom turned his attention to the papers on Petrov. It was a thin file. Petrov was a painter, one of the modern type, not approved by the Vlast. Petrov wasn’t popular, it appeared, not even among his fellow artists. He was a marginal figure: there was only a file on him at all because he came into contact with bigger figures. Artists. Composers. Writers. Intelligentsia. They gathered at a place called the Crimson Marmot Club, where Petrov seemed to be a fixture. He had a temper: the file contained accounts of arguments at the Crimson Marmot, scuffles he was involved in. And there had been a dispute with a picture framer. Petrov claimed he’d left a dozen of his works to be framed, the man denied all knowledge of them, and Petrov accused him of having stolen and sold them. He’d made a formal complaint. The framer said Petrov owed him for previous work, and there were no documents on either side. The investigating officer could resolve nothing. He’d filed a report, though. Must have been a quiet day.

  Petrov appeared to have few friends of any kind, the report noted, apart from one woman, a life model who worked in a uniform factory near the Wieland Station. Her name was noted for thoroughness, though there was no address and no file reference. The name was Shaumian. Maroussia Shaumian.

  Lom sat back in his chair and drew a deep breath. Circles of Contact.

  He tried to imagine Petrov. The registry file gave only a vague outline, a man seen only through the lens of surveillance. He wondered what Petrov’s pictures were like. There was one scrap of newsprint pinned inside the cover, clipped, said a manuscript note, from The Mirgorod Honey Bee, dated early that spring: a review of an exhibition at the Crimson Marmot Club. He’d ignored it before, but he looked at it now.

  ‘It would be remiss,’ the reviewer said,

  to overlook the work of Lakoba Petrov, though most do. This young painter is developing a fine individualism. His prickly personality, which is perhaps better known than his canvases in the city’s advanced artistic circles, manifests itself in the three likenesses shown here as a reckless energy. He is impatient with the niceties of style — surely a trait to be admired — and he is not a tactful portraitist, but his use of colour is original and his brush strokes have a fierce movement. He captures through his sitters something of the essence of the modern Mirgorod man. A troubled anxiety lurks in the eyes of his subjects, and their surroundings seem jagged, uncertain, about to fall away. A young man’s work, certainly, but there is bravery and promise here. The Honey Bee hopes for good things from Lakoba Petrov in the future.

  The review was by-lined Raku Vishnik.

  Circles of Contact.

  There was a high-pitched frightened shout from somewhere above him.

  ‘Soldiers! There are soldiers in the square!’ All across the immense reading room, readers looked up from their work. Lom searched for the cause of the commotion.

  ‘They’re charging!’ the voice called again. And then Lom saw where it was coming from: somebody was leaning over the balustrade of the upper gallery, where the high arched windows were. He was waving frantically. ‘The dragoons are charging!’ he was shouting. ‘They’re going to kill them all!’

  Lom ran up the gallery stairs. The upper windows of the
Archive, under the dome, were crowded with people watching the demonstration. He squeezed in among them and looked out across the rooftops, through grey air filled with scrappy lumps of snow.

  A line of dragoons was moving out across the square, the mudjhiks loping forward, drawing ahead of the riders. Some of the demonstrators broke away from the crowd and started to run for the side streets but stopped in confusion, seeing more troops emerging from there. The dragoons had them bottled up tight. A strange collective tremor passed through the demonstrators as the horsemen picked up speed and raised their blades and whips. Then the heads of riders and horses were moving among the crowd, arms high and slashing downwards. The mudjhiks, moving with surprising speed, waded into the thick of it, striking with their fists and stamping on the fallen.

  The dragoons withdrew, circled around and attacked again. And again. Lom saw a group of men grab hold of one of the riders and pull him down until his horse was forced to stumble. Once they had him on the ground, they kicked him and stamped on him and hacked at him with his own sword.

  And something else was happening, though nobody but Lom seemed to see it. There were too many people in the square. Among the demonstrators and the dragoons, Lom could see others walking there: a sifting crowd, soft-edged, translucent, tired and unaware of the killing all around them. They were not old, but their hair was already turning grey. Their shoulders were frail, their faces drawn unnaturally thin and their skin was as dry and lifeless as newsprint. If they spoke at all, they spoke only when necessary; their voices had no strength, and didn’t carry more than a few paces. Whisperers. The dragoons rode through them as if they weren’t there at all. Because they weren’t.