‘I agree,’ says Brutskoi. ‘We can do more for Belatinsk in Mirgorod than here. We can speak up for the provinces in the capital. We can protest against the inefficiency of this neglect.’
‘Indeed,’ says Forshin. ‘If Pinocharsky is right, we will have the ear of Rizhin himself.’
‘Colleagues,’ says the miniature, frail Yudifa Yudifovna quietly, ‘I cannot believe you are falling for this transparent shit. Do you not know a trap when you see one?’
‘No, no, Yudifa!’ Forshin protests. ‘This is no trap. What about that speech of Gzowski’s that Pinocharsky enclosed?’ He quotes a part of Gzowski’s speech from memory. ‘We are in danger of destroying the spiritual capital of our people. We risk breeding a new crop of brutal and corrupt bureaucrats and a terrible new generation of cruel and lumpen youth. The New Vlast needs poetry and culture and art fit for our great aspirations. The people themselves call for it. Such words could never have been printed without sanction from the very top. It’s is as if Rizhin himself had spoken directly in public to us. This is no trap. This is enlightenment.’
‘Well I’m too old to fall for that crap again,’ says Yudifovna. ‘I’d rather take my chances here with a temporary shortage of beans than risk ending up in a VKBD cell. I’ve been there already. I’ll wait here and see how you get on.’
‘I think Yudifa is right,’ says Sitzenvaldt. ‘Pinocharsky is overexcited and misled. What he describes will never be permitted. We should stick together. If you leave us here we are too few to defend ourselves, and I for one know nothing of chickens.’
‘But how much longer do you think we can hold out here?’ says Polon. ‘One day the mob from Belatinsk will come for us, and what can people like us do then? We cannot fight.’
‘These shortages are a natural corrective mechanism,’ says Pitrim Brutskoi. ‘There will be a rebalancing before too long, you’ll see. The human soul is basically sound, and economic society is naturally efficient. I’m sure our fellows in Belatinsk will sort themselves out soon enough: all they need is systematic collective organisation.’
anisation.’‘Well I’ve had enough of hiding in the country!’ cries Olga-Marya Rapp. ‘Personal safety is secondary. We must see what is happening and write about it. My duty as an artist requires me to share whatever faces the women of the capital and report on it fearlessly!’
‘Are there no women in Belatinsk?’ mutters Yudifovna. ‘Is what’s happening here not worth writing of?’ But only Kamilova hears her.
And so, to Forshin’s dismay, the League divides. Some are for Mirgorod, and some are for staying at the dacha and waiting out the famine.
‘And what about you, Eligiya Kamilova?’ says Forshin at the end. ‘Will you and the girls come with us to Mirgorod? Surely you will? You’d be safe with us. You’d be travelling under the protection of the League.’
Kamilova hesitates.
‘All we want to do is go home to Mirgorod, Nikolai,’ she says, ‘only we cannot afford the tickets.’
Yudifa Yudifovna leans across and puts a hand on Kamilova’s arm.
‘How much do you need, Eligiya?’ she says.
‘Ninety roubles. But—’
‘I will give you all of that,’ says Yudifovna. ‘I’ll give you a hundred if you will sell me your gun.’
5
Lom spent a broken night between unclean sheets in his room in the Pension Forbat overlooking the Wieland Station and rose late and ill slept to the news that Papa Rizhin had survived the attempt on his life. He stared at the newspaper headline blankly, too stupid-tired and slow to take it in. His mind was still stuck with the noise of night trains shunting. The clank of points and signals. The echo of klaxons. Porters calling. An arc light splashing bone-sharp shadow across his wall. The empty wardrobe with the door that wouldn’t close.
Unshaven and only half awake he went out into the morning and bought black coffee and cigarettes in a railway workers’ café-bar on the corner by the pension. Laid the paper out on the table in front of him. Lit a cigarette with a cardboard match from a match book on the bar marked LOCOMOTIVE STAR. The unaccustomed smoke tasted bad and caught in his throat. His chest clenched. He ground the unfinished cigarette into the ashtray and lit another. Scooped sticky sugar into his coffee and swallowed the whole cup to take the taste away. Got another. That was breakfast.
The paper still said the same thing, which wasn’t much. Some minister for agriculture was dead and Rizhin was not. There was a photograph of Rizhin at his desk and in command, a wad of cotton stuck on where the bullet had grazed his face. Rizhin glared straight into the camera, purposeful, confident. Burning with determination undimmed. No day’s work lost for the man they couldn’t kill. Lom felt that the picture was meant for him personally: the dark energy of Rizhin’s gaze locked eyes with him. It was a challenge. See what I am? See what I can do? Did you think I could be stopped? Then think again. What’s it like to be alone?
Lom got a third coffee.
In the sleepless watches of the night he’d lit the dim bedside lamp and read again the official biography of Osip Rizhin. There was a copy in every guest house, pension and hotel room across the whole of the New Vlast. It went with the head-and-shoulders portrait on the wall. In the night the book had been an obituary, the shadowed Rizhin face above the dresser a funerary mask, but in the morning the man had climbed out of his grave, fresh and ready for the day.
You couldn’t kill a man who wasn’t there.
When Lom read the biography of Rizhin, what he saw was nothing. Gaps. Elisions. Lacunae. Imprecision covering emptiness. The testimony of witnesses who were not there. It was a life that had not happened. All the hardness and roaring industrious speed of Mirgorod and the New Vlast were a tissue of words laid across nothing at all.
And two other simple words, one name spoken out loud, a double trochee on a single breath of air–JO-sef KAN-tor–would scatter the whole construction and blow it all away.
Don’t kill him, Maroussia had said. Bring him down. Destroy the idea of him. Ruin him in this world, using the tricks of this world, and ruin this world he has created.
For centuries the Vlast had wiped histories away. The stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen created unpersons out of lives and made ruined former people the unseen, unheard haunters of their own streets.
So there it was.
Turn the weapon on the wielder of it. One name spoken would turn Osip Rizhin into another empty unperson.
JO-sef KAN-tor.
Lom’s heart was beating faster. He shifted in his seat with excitement. He wanted to be moving again. He had seen the way. He could do that, and he would.
What was needed was proof.
6
President-Commander Osip Rizhin had at his disposal the entire security machinery of the New Vlast. Two million police and militia men and women, their agents and informers and surveillance systems. Interrogators, analysts, collectors and sifters of intelligence. Torturers, assassins and spies. Rizhin had all of that, but trusted none of them because he of all people knew what kind of thing they were, and knew they must themselves be watched and kept in fear.
And so Rizhin had created the Parallel Sector. The Black Guard. The Streltski.
The Director of the Parallel Sector was Hunder Rond, and Rond was Rizhin’s man. Narrow-shouldered and diminutive, Rond had the cropped grey hair and brisk featureless competence of a senior bank official. In the brief civil war against Fohn and his crew, Rond–then a colonel of militia–had shown himself assiduously and unflamboyantly effective as an eliminator of the less-than-committed within Rizhin’s own camp. As an interrogator he was imaginatively destructive. He had certain private desires (which he gratified) that Rizhin disliked and documented, but in Rond he overlooked them. He needed someone, and Hunder Rond met the requirement as no one else. When Rond entered a room he brought darkness with him.
‘Keep that doctor locked up for now,’ Rizhin told Rond. ‘I want no blabbing from him.’
(Did Rizh
in trust Hunder Rond? He did not. But he was sure Rond had no involvement in yesterday’s sniper attack. Rond had no friends, no allies because Rond hurt everyone–Rizhin made sure of that. Rond had no independent means of support and wouldn’t survive a week with Rizhin gone. Rond would not have tried to cut off the branch he sat on.)
‘Grigor Ekel’s outside,’ said Rond. ‘He’s been sitting there for two hours in a pool of his own piss and sweat. As secretary for security he is most distraught at this failure on the part of others outside his control. He wishes to abase himself and name the negligent.’
‘Have the fucker sent away,’ said Rizhin. ‘Tell him he’s lucky he’s not already under arrest. And tell him he’s got better things to do than lick my arse. Like find the fucker who shot me.’
Rond nodded. If he noticed that Rizhin spoke more slowly and emphatically than normal, through swollen lips that barely moved–if he observed Rizhin’s tunic soaked with blood, Rizhin’s face half-hidden under bandages, the slight tremor in Rizhin’s right hand–then Rond gave no sign. He was reassuring efficiency, only there to serve.
‘And there has been nothing?’ Rizhin was saying. ‘No further moves? No claims of responsibility?’
‘Nothing,’ said Rond. ‘Nobody seems to have been prepared for this. Everybody is watching everybody else and waiting to see what happens. The situation is drifting. Perhaps we should make a public statement? You could make an appearance. Reassert control. Vacuum is the greater risk now. Nerves are shot. We need to worry about the whole continent, not just Mirgorod.’
‘Not yet,’ said Rizhin. ‘Keep it vague a few more hours. And watch. Someone may still make a move.’
Rond made a face.
‘I think the time for that’s gone,’ he said. ‘We’d have seen something by now. The more time passes, the more likely it is that this was a lone wolf.’
Rizhin looked at him sharply.
‘A wolf? You say a wolf?’
‘Someone working alone,’ said Rond. ‘A grudge. A fanatic. A private venture. It was always a possibility. It’s the hardest threat to see coming and protect against.’
‘Nothing comes from nowhere,’ said Rizhin. ‘I want to know who did this, Rond. Find the shooter. Find them all. I want them disembowelled. I want them swinging in the wind and screaming to be let die.’
7
Lom passed the morning in a ProVlastKult reading room among stacks of newspapers six years old. The whole of the story was there if you knew how to read it.
There was the assault on Secetary Dukhonin’s residence in Pir-Anghelsky Park: Dukhonin and all his household butchered by a terrorist gang who then themselves all died at the hands of the militia, including their leader the notorious agitator Josef Kantor. The papers gave a surprisingly full account of Kantor’s history: his involvement with the Birzel plot; his twenty-year confinement in the labour camp at Vig; his death in a hail of bullets as he tried to escape the Pir-Anghelsky charnel house. There was no photograph of Kantor though, not even a prison mug shot. Of course there wasn’t.
And then the very next day after Dukhonin’s death, the Archipelago bombers had come for the first time and Mirgorod began to burn. The government withdrew and it seemed the city would quickly fall. But there was Colonel-General Osip Rizhin, suddenly come from nowhere, an unknown name (there were no prior references in the index, none at all) to lead the city’s defence. To stem the enemy advance and hold the siege. To conjure out of nowhere atomic artillery shells, a whole new way of killing, and turn the tide. Step forward Papa Rizhin, father and begetter of a new and better Vlast. Times are better now, citizens.
What Rizhin stood for was never made clear. If there were principles they were not spoken of. It was all about racing ahead. Dynamism. Taking the future in hand. A fresh beginning. Victory and peace and a bright widening tomorrow. Papa Rizhin works on the people, an editorial read, as a chemist works in his laboratory. He builds with us, as an engineer builds a great bridge.
In the early weeks and months after Rizhin’s first appearance in the world the papers had carried vague and inconsistent accounts of who he was and where he’d come from. Stories came and went, made little sense and did not stick until the publication of the little pamphlet An Account of the Life of Osip Rizhin, Hero of Mirgorod, Father of the New Vlast. Ten million copies of a little book of lies.
But who knew the truth? Hundreds must have known. Thousands. People who would have seen the portraits of Osip Rizhin and recognised Josef Kantor. For a start there would be those who knew him from his childhood among the families of Lezarye. Lom turned cold. He went back to the newspapers from the first days of the siege and read again a passage he had seen there. The whole of the Raion Lezaryet had been cleared and every last person of Lezarye ‘relocated in the east’. There was no reference to Lezarye in the journal index after that. No account of the place or its people ever again. He felt dizzy. Sick.
Of course there would have been others who could identify Kantor as Rizhin. Fellow inmates in the camp at Vig, for a start. But how easy it would be to reach out from Mirgorod and silence them if you had already removed an entire city quarter.
Josef Kantor knew who knew him, and Osip Rizhin could kill them all.
Lom went through the list in his mind. Under-Secretary Krogh (who knew because Lom had told him) was dead: his obituary was there in the paper, a eulogy to a lifetime’s service cut short by heart failure in his office a week before war came to Mirgorod. Raku Vishnik was dead. Lavrentina Chazia was dead (not killed by Kantor because Lom had saved him that trouble). Kantor’s wife, Maroussia’s mother, was dead: Lom had seen her shot down in the street in front of him. They had come to kill Maroussia herself more than once. And they had tried to kill him, Lom, as well.
Who else? Who else? Was there anyone left at all, apart from Maroussia and himself, who had been so comprehensively lost to view that Rizhin could not find them?
Lom racked his brain. There was one more face he remembered, a wild-eyed prophet of the new arts, standing green shirt half unbuttoned in the rain in the alley outside the Crimson Marmot. The painter Lakoba Petrov. He knew Josef Kantor. He was one of Kantor’s gang. Kantor the crab, Petrov had called him. Josef Krebs. Josef Cancer. Nothing but shell, shell, and lidless eyes on little stalks staring out of it, like a crab. Lom remembered Petrov swaying drunk in the red glow of the Marmot’s sign, oblivious of the rain in his face. And shall I tell you something else about him? Petrov had said, speaking very slowly and clearly. He has some other purpose which is not apparent.
Lom went back to the index and searched for Lakoba Petrov, painter.
For the second time he turned cold. Sick and dizzy with disbelief. Following a couple of references to reviews of Petrov’s paintings, there was one last entry: ‘Petrov, Lakoba: assassination of the Novozhd; death of.’ Petrov had blown himself up and taken the Novozhd with him. The papers presented it as some mad kind of anarchist artwork, the ultimate product of a degenerate corrupted mind. But Petrov’s act had paved the way for Chazia, and ultimately Kantor, to seize the Vlast, and Petrov was Kantor’s man.
Lom ripped the page from the newspaper, stuffed it in his pocket and walked out of the library in a daze. Sat on the steps in the early-afternoon sunshine and lit a cigarette. There were still a couple left in the packet.
The story was there in the archive to be read if you knew what to look for, but everyone who could have known even part of it… Papa Rizhin had raked the Vlast with a lice comb and killed them all, every one, as he would kill anyone who came forward with a rumour or began to ask around. There was no proof. And what would proof look like anyway? What were the chances of finding a police file with Josef Kantor’s photograph and fingerprints neatly tagged and docketed?
But there had once been such a file. Lom had held it in his own hands. He’d stolen it from Chazia’s personal archive in the Lodka: the file that contained Chazia’s account of her recruitment of Kantor as an informant and conspirator, and of her c
ontact with the living angel in the forest. That file was proof enough to bring Rizhin down. But it was gone. Lom remembered how he’d left it hidden in the cistern in the bathroom of Vishnik’s apartment, but he knew the militia had searched the building when they killed Vishnik. They looked all over, the dvornik had told him. The halls. The stairwell. The bathroom. They pulled the cistern off the wall.
That surely meant they had found it, and the file was gone. But it had gone somewhere. Where? Back to Chazia presumably. The efficient paper handling of the old regime.
It came back to him now. There had in fact been two files in the folder he hid in the cistern: Chazia’s folder on Josef Kantor, and Lom’s own personnel record, which he’d also lifted from Chazia’s archive and brought away to read. Lom remembered the manuscript note on the second file from Krogh’s traitorous private secretary, who’d extracted it from Krogh’s office and passed it to Chazia.
Lom felt a sudden waking of excitement and hope. The private secretary. He was Chazia’s man, and he’d known something, perhaps a lot. He’d certainly known all about Lom’s mission to track down Kantor. But Kantor almost certainly would not have known about him.
Lom could still see the private secretary’s face.
His name? What was his name?
It was there somewhere, neatly lodged away in his long-unused policeman’s brain.
Find it. Find it.
Pavel!
Pavel. First name only, but it might be enough.
Lom raced back up the steps and into the library again. In the reference section next to the newspaper index he’d seen the long rows of annual volumes of the Administrative Gazette Yearbook, which among much other turgid information listed the ministers and senior officials of the Vlast. Including details of their private offices. Heart pounding, Lom pulled down the volume of the Gazette he needed and flipped through the pages until he found the one he needed. And there it was, in small italic typeface under the name of Krogh himself: ‘Private Secretary: Antimos, Pavel Ilich’.
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