Lom wasn’t too worried about the four gendarmes pressed in close around them. Gendarmes, with their uniforms of thick green serge, their shiny peaked caps, polished leather belts and buttoned-down holsters, were street police: efficient enough at traffic and checkpoints and petty crime, but not used to serious trouble. They carried 7.62mm Vagants: heavy service revolvers, the seven-cartridge cylinder unconverted single-action version. Lom had carried a Vagant himself for three years and he’d never liked it: loud and clumsy, with a wild kick, a Vagant made a nasty mess at close range, but it was hopelessly inaccurate over more than ten yards.
These four weren’t the problem. The problem was the other four man patrols at the other five tram halts and the VKBD truck pulled up at the kerb twenty yards away, two men in the cab and an unknown number in the back. Shit. They shouldn’t have stayed on the tram till the end of the line. They should have got off at some suburban stop and walked in. He’d made a mistake. The only thing now was to get out of Marinsky Square as quickly as possible with the minimum number of police in tow. Maroussia had seen that quicker than he had. Second mistake of the day. Wake up. This is serious.
Maroussia was standing silent, upright and fierce, waiting while the gendarmes briefly debated their next move. The one who’d spotted them wanted to take them across to the VKBD truck, but the corporal vetoed it.
‘I’m calling it in myself. We’ll get no thanks from Vryushin if the VKBD gets credit for this. Take them across to the section office. Quickly, no fuss, before anyone notices what’s going on. Move. Now.’
They split into pairs, two walking ahead with Maroussia between them, the corporal and the other one following with Lom. They didn’t wait to search him. Traffic cops.
But the corporal stayed ten feet behind him with his Vagant aimed at the small of Lom’s back. It was efficient enough. Lom might have got away, perhaps, but he couldn’t see a way to take Maroussia with him, so for the moment he rode with it. Things could have been worse. Perhaps.
Something else nagged at him. He couldn’t shake a small insistent pressure at the back of his neck. The familiar feeling that he was being watched.
Two floors above the street on the other side of Marinsky Square, Antoninu Florian crouched on the sill of a bricked-up window, enfolded by scarves of rain-mist drifting down off the roof slates. He licked the living moisture from his upper lip and savoured it on his tongue, sharing with it the city, the engine fumes and sweat and the dark strong silt-green surge of the living River Mir. The mist tasted of fires not yet burning and blood not yet spilled, traces of the passing touch of the living angel in the forest. But there was also the bright sharp resinous hint of something good, scents of earth and green currents stirring: all morning Florian had been following the trail of it, and now with yellow-flecked eyes he watched the woman who mattered walking between policemen. And he watched the man who was with her. He gripped them with the teeth of his gaze, sifting their particular scents out of the city tumult.
The man who was with the woman was spilling bright shining communication, all unawares. Florian could have found him a mile away in a dark forest at night in a thunderstorm, and the man did not even know it. Though he did have some vague sense of Florian’s presence: Florian watched him hesitate and look around. But the man did not look up. Nor did the police look up. They never looked up. Not until they learned. If they ever did.
Experimentally, Florian shifted and adjusted the bone structure of his face. Slid musculature into new places under warm sleeves of flesh. His hair moved like leaves under water. He tested thickness and shade, melatonin and refraction. It was enough. He was confident. When the woman and the man and the four policemen had passed beneath him, Florian leaped down from the second-floor ledge, landing lightly on all fours on rain-skinned cobbles, rose up and followed.
6
Thousands of miles east of Mirgorod, deep in the endless forest, the immense, mountainous body of Archangel rises against the skyline like a storm cloud approaching. His consciousness bleeds into the surrounding country, not life but anti-life, oozing out through the forest like lichen across rock. Like piss in snow. In the lower skirts of his body, dead-alive giants of ice and stone with eroded faces lumber waist-high through crumbling stone trees.
A wonderful thing is happening to Archangel. He is beginning to recover.
He has wormed and rooted tendrils of himself down through the planetary crust and deep into the hot seething places. He has spread vapours of himself thinly on the upper layers of the atmosphere, sifting solar radiation. And now, at last, slowly, slowly, the clouds of forgetfulness grow thin and dissipate in the growing heat of his renewed interior sun.
Far down inside the painful solid rock of himself, Archangel feels gobbets of mass spark into energy. Tiny bright cold shards of pure elation spark and shatter. Crushed clods of light stretch and breathe. Fragments of dead processes, imploded and squeezed to appalling density by his flight and fall, are unpacking themselves and restarting. Raw spontaneous networks unfurl and new possibilities trickle across them, glittering into self-awareness. Archangel, ancient as all the stars, old and hurt, wrapped in scraps of memory and stunted relics of ambition, is growing young again.
He makes an inventory of his inward terrain. Scraps of brightness in a dark country. He hadn’t realised how much of himself he had lost and forgotten. How far gone dead he’d been. Even now the greater part of him remains useless. Eclipsed. Obscure. Inert. And much that was lost will never return, not while he remains trapped here on this small dark planet.
He cannot escape. He hasn’t the strength for that, not yet. But he can, at last–at last!–begin to move.
With a roar of agony and joy, thunderous and tree-shattering, Archangel grinds and slides forward, forcing extrusions and pseudopodia of himself out across the landscape. He is a rock amoeba, a single-cell life-form mountain-high. It hurts. With painful slowness at first, millimetre by screaming millimetre, a metre by day, a metre by night, onward he goes. The ground for miles around him trembles. The flanks of his momentous body shed fresh avalanches. He is anti-life rock mountain slowly moving, leaving in his wake a slug-trail of seething, crippled waste. As he goes he screams out in his agony and joy and desperate purpose. It is a fear voice. A true power voice. The voice of history.
And in Mirgorod Josef Kantor hears him.
7
Lom was in a cell in the local gendarme station down a side street just off Marinsky Square. It was barely a cell at all, more of a windowless cupboard: brick walls painted a pale sickly green, worn linoleum lifting from a concrete floor; it was hardly big enough for the table and two chairs. The door was plain, unpainted wood, panelled, not solid, with a standard domestic lock. There was a single caged lamp in the ceiling. They still hadn’t searched him; they’d locked him in without a word; they weren’t interested in him. Maroussia had been taken to another room. But somebody would come in the end. Somebody always did.
He climbed on the table, unhooked the lamp cage and smashed the bulb, plunging the room into darkness, then climbed back down, felt his way to the door and took up a position beside it, back against the wall. The darkness inside the room would give him half a second. Whoever came would hesitate. Wonder if they’d come to the wrong cell. Then caution and alarm would kick in, but not immediately. He would have half a second at least, and that would be all he needed.
He waited, but nobody came. The narrow line of brightness seeping under the door was the only light. Somewhere in the distance a door slammed shut.
He’d noticed on the way in that the station was almost deserted. Everyone who could be spared was out on the streets. He thought about that. The whole of the city centre was locked down and under surveillance. It couldn’t possibly be all for him and Maroussia. Something else was happening. Something bigger. He listened for footsteps coming down the corridor but none came. A muffled telephone rang three times and broke off. That and his breathing and the quickened beating of his heart were t
he only sounds he could hear. He focused all his attention on the corridor on the other side of the door. Ready for the sound of the key in the lock. The handle beginning to move.
The air in the room was warm and thick and oppressively close. All interrogation rooms smelled the same: the acrid tang of disinfectant failing to mask the faint stale sweetness of vomit and urine and sweat. Lom had been in cells like this one many times before. For years, when he was an investigator of police in Podchornok, such rooms had been comfortable spaces for him. They were his working environment, a place to do what he did well: uncovering truth, extracting truth, the skilled and delicate practice of peeling back surfaces, evasions, pretences, assertions, lies.
In Podchornok Lom had considered himself a subtle, accomplished interrogator. He’d admired himself for his delicacy of touch. He didn’t use the crude and brutal techniques that many of his colleagues used. He’d never done that. Well, hardly ever, and only when urgently necessary. He used to think that his tools were persistence, empathy, imagination, patience and preparation. He had a nose for the hidden core of fact and an instinct for the detours and false constructions people used to obscure it. Everybody left traces. Lom used to think he was clever. Perceptive. He’d never realised, it had simply never dawned on him, not in Podchornok, that the tool he used–the only effective tool in his box–was fear. When prisoners looked up as he stepped into the interrogation room, they never saw Lom the sympathetic, imaginative man, the disinterested investigator nosing for facts. All they saw–all there was to see, because that’s all he was–was an avatar of fear. A black serge uniform, belt and boots and antler buttons polished, a sliver of angel flesh in his forehead; the cropped fair hair and frank blue eyes of a man who could, if he chose, at his own inclination, break their bodies and break their families, break their careers and break their lives. They’d sweated and felt sick while they waited for him to come, and when he did come they all wanted to piss themselves and some of them did. And he had done that to them, not by what he said or what he did–not often–but simply by being what he was: not a man with a job to do, but an expression of the Vlast in human form.
You couldn’t be a man who happened to be a policeman. Not in the Vlast. You could cling, in the stories you told yourself about yourself, to the evasions, the illusions, the fictions of somebody drawing interior lines, keeping it clean: that could be how you saw yourself, but it wasn’t what you were. What a prisoner saw when you walked into the interrogation cell, that and only that, that was what you were. All those dead and wasted years in Podchornok that’s what he had been, Vissarion Yppolitovich Lom the unselfconscious torturer, excavating truth with fear. Vissarion Lom, one of Chazia’s men.
Until Chazia herself had left him waiting in an interrogation cell. Lavrentina Chazia, who–when she’d come at last–had used that angel worm glove thing to slither around inside his mind, rummaging about, turning him inside out, pulling out half-known intimate private things. Lom flinched at the memory of having her inside his mind. It had been… disgusting. And she had dug into his skull with a blade, prising the lozenge of angel flesh from his forehead while Josef Kantor stood behind her. Kantor had leaned in for a closer look. Is that the brain in there? Kantor had said, probing the bleeding, kopek-sized hole with his finger. Firmer than I’d have thought.
Lom was surprised to find that he felt almost no antagonism towards Josef Kantor. Kantor was cruel and murderous and charming, and no doubt in the end a more lethal enemy than Chazia was, but in some way that troubled Lom even as it half-seduced him, Kantor was–Lom struggled with the word, but it was true–Kantor, at least as Lom had seen him, was honest. Kantor had become completely what he had chosen to be. He was all of something, like an animal was all of what it was. Lom felt in some odd way a bond with Josef Kantor. Kantor was his adversary, still. For some reason that he couldn’t explain to himself, Lom felt he had not laid down the task of hunting him. But he didn’t hate him.
Chazia, though, Chazia was unwholesome. She was one thing on the surface and another thing inside. Lom had looked up the public details of her record once, and found nothing there except ordinariness: the ordinary successes and advancements of an assiduous career. She had risen smoothly from comfortable family beginnings to the top of her profession. The sickness and poison that Lom had smelled on her breath in that interrogation room and seen breaking out in dark patches on her skin, that came from nowhere, that was all her own. She was unfeedable hunger, unsatisfiable desire. She would draw and draw on power and pain and never be full. It was Chazia who was responsible for what he had been in Podchornok, Chazia who had wormed his mind, Chazia who had sent men for Maroussia and for him, Chazia who had sent the men who killed his friends… With Chazia, Lom felt a different sort of bond. Unfinished business of a different kind.
Don’t think about this. Not now.
Outside in the street Antoninu Florian took off his astrakhan hat and combed the thin fine blond hair on his head. His overcoat was too large on the slight frame of the body shape he was using. He undid the buttons to let it hang loose so it wouldn’t show. When he was ready, he strode up the steps and into the gendarme office. Closing the outer doors carefully behind him. Slipping the bolt quietly into place.
The desk clerk looked up in surprise. Recognised him. Registered a reflex of alarm. Stood straighter and tugged at his necktie.
‘Captain Iliodor!’ he said. ‘We weren’t expecting you. We weren’t told—’
‘No,’ said Florian quietly. ‘Not Iliodor. I am so sorry.’
8
Lom waited in the darkness. The muffled telephone rang and stopped and rang again. Time passed. Once, he thought he heard a voice in the distance, a man’s half-shout of anger or surprise, cut off by silence. How long had he been standing there, behind the door? Five minutes at least. More.
The telephone was ringing again. Incessantly now. Urgently. It jangled his nerves. For fuck’s sake somebody answer it. He tried to measure out the time by counting the rings of the telephone but lost patience after thirty.
Nobody was coming for him. It was Maroussia they were interested in. The corporal would have made his glory phone call by now, reporting the successful capture of the fugitive. Somebody would come for her. They might take her away and leave him here. He had to get out. Now.
Lining himself up by feel, he kicked at the door, aiming for underneath the handle. It shook in its frame but didn’t give. The noise was shockingly loud in the dark. Surely it would bring someone. He kicked again. And again. No progress. The geometry of the attack was all wrong: kicking the door just made him stagger back, off balance. He put down his shoulder and crashed all his weight against the wooden panel and heard something split. It sounded like it was inside the door near the hinge, but when he tested it, it was as solid as before. The pulse in the wound in his head was pounding now. The darkness surrounding him was a sour, suffocating stillness. Impending panic. He had to get out. Desperate, attentive senses felt the air pressing in around him like a tangible, mouldable, moveable substance. He reached out with his mind and gathered the dark air up like a fist and shoved it, threw it, forward. It was like a fierce silent shout. The door burst open, tearing its hinges out of the frame and crashing to the ground.
Lom stepped back behind the gaping doorway, leaning against the wall, recovering his breath, letting his eyes adjust to the light. Now someone would come. The noise would bring them. He had to be ready. Surprise lay in not rushing out into the corridor. He counted off a whole minute. Still no one came. Halfway through the count, he realised the telephone had stopped ringing. When the minute was up he went out into the corridor and checked the other cupboard-cells one by one. None was locked. All were empty. Maroussia wasn’t there.
He went up the passage into the office area. At first he thought there was nobody there, that they’d all just gone away, leaving chairs pushed back, filing drawers pulled out, lights burning, doors open, empty. Then he saw the gendarme lying on his back on
the floor between two desks. It was probably the one who’d first spotted them on the tram, but it was hard to be sure, because there was a pocket of bloody mess where the man’s throat used to be, and the lower half of his face was gone. Dark blood pooled on the linoleum under his head: a neat pool, almost perfectly circular, except where a chair leg had interrupted the flow. The spilling blood had separated to pass round it and come together on the other side. The obstruction had caused a notch, an irregularity in the circumference of the shiny crimson dish. Not a big dish. No heart had pumped it out. The man been dead when he went down.
A murmur of traffic noise drifted in through the open front doors. The cry of distant gulls. Lom found the desk clerk curled behind the counter. His neck was broken.
Maroussia!
He ran back across the open area, dodging between the desks. In the first office he tried, he found the corporal propped in the chair, his body slumped across the desk. Lom lurched backwards out of the office and shouted.
‘Maroussia!’
He waited a second and called again.
‘Maroussia!’
There was no answer.
All the other ground-floor offices were empty. On a desk in the middle of the big room a telephone began to ring again. For the love of fuck, shut up. A swing door opened onto a hallway and a staircase climbing up. Lom raced up, heart pounding, taking the stairs two at a time. There was a uniformed body slumped on the first landing. He jumped it without slowing.
‘Maroussia!’
At the top of the stairs was another passageway. Doors, some standing open, some locked.
Truth and Fear Page 3