Truth and Fear

by Peter Higgins

  ‘Maroussia!’ It was almost a scream.

  And then he heard her voice. Cautious. Hesitant.

  ‘Vissarion?’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Here.’ He heard a thump against one of the doors halfway down the passage. ‘I’m in here. It’s locked. I can’t get out.’

  Lom barged against the door. It was solid. He would break it down eventually, but it would take time. Wasted time. He ran back down the stairs to where the desk clerk lay in a foetal huddle and hauled him over onto his back. Ignoring the look in the dead, staring eyes, he went through his pockets. Found the bunch of keys by their weight.

  The telephone was still ringing, loud and demanding and persistent, as he ran back up the stairs. Then, abruptly, it stopped. It took him three or four goes to find the right key to let Maroussia out. She was fine. She wasn’t hurt.

  ‘What—’ she began. Lom held up his hand to cut her off.

  ‘Don’t talk,’ he said. ‘Move. We need to clear out. Now.’

  They had to step across the body on the stairs. Maroussia looked but said nothing.

  They passed the open door to the office where the corporal’s body lay across the desk. The telephone started to ring. On impulse, Lom went in and picked it up.

  ‘Yes?’ he said.

  ‘Mamontov? Is that Mamontov?’

  It was a woman’s voice.

  Lom recognised it.

  Chazia.

  ‘I must speak to Mamontov,’ she said. ‘Immediately. It is a matter of great urgency.’

  ‘Mamontov is the corporal here?’ said Lom.

  ‘Of course. Who is this? Who am I speaking to?’

  ‘Mamontov can’t come to the phone. He’s dead.’

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘This is Lom.’

  A moment’s silence in the receiver. Then Chazia spoke.

  ‘Safran was supposed to kill you.’

  ‘He fucked up. I’m coming for you.’

  ‘I’m not hard to find.’

  ‘So wait for me.’

  Lom put the phone down.

  Maroussia was waiting outside the office. She’d found two more bodies. She stared at Lom, her face drawn tight and blank.

  ‘Vissarion?’ she said quietly. ‘Did you…? Did you do this?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  She exhaled deeply.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Of course you didn’t. But… what happened here?’

  ‘I don’t know. I was locked in a room. I didn’t hear anything.’

  ‘Then—’

  ‘Think later. Now, immediately now, we have to get far away, completely clear of here. We have to do that very quickly.’

  9

  Lavrentina Chazia hung up the telephone and reached for the intercom.

  ‘Iliodor?’

  ‘Yes, Commander.’

  ‘The Marinsky Square gendarme post. There is a problem there.’

  ‘Marinsky Square? That’s where the Shaumian girl is being held. A patrol is on its way to collect—’

  ‘There is a problem there.

  Lom. Lom is the problem. Lom is there.’ ‘Lom? That’s impossible. Safran was—’

  ‘I have just spoken to him, Iliodor. To Lom himself. On the telephone, from Marinsky Square. He threatened me, Iliodor. He threatened me. The Marinsky Square station is down. I want them found, Iliodor, him and the girl. Found and brought to me. No more gendarmes. No more militia. No more mistakes. I want the SV involved.’

  ‘But this afternoon is the funeral—’

  ‘This is the priority, man! This matters more! Deal with it yourself, Iliodor, and do it now.’

  Chazia switched off the intercom and sat back in her chair, scratching irritably at the itching dark patch on the side of her neck. She didn’t like being threatened. And she needed the Shaumian girl found.

  Taking a deep breath, she pushed her anger and frustration aside. Focus. Focus. She had work to do. Her desk was heaped with files, reports, photographs, telegrams. The walls of her office were hung with maps. Nothing happened in the Vlast that Chazia didn’t know about. Nothing moved and nothing was agreed. All significant intelligence reports passed through her office before anyone else saw them and were only acted on if and when she let them out again. She knew more about criminals, dissidents and revolutionaries than the police. More about the ongoing war against the Archipelago than the military commanders. She knew it was a war the Vlast could not win.

  Since the death of the Novozhd and subsequent collapse of the peace conference the junior officers had taken to hanging their generals and taking their men across to the enemy. In Herkess and Gorkysk the populace had risen against their land colonels. The aristocrats were coming out of their tenements and moving back to their estates. Eleven oblasts had been lost in the last week alone. The fleet at Remontin had mutinied. The divisions and war fleets of the Archipelago were within striking distance of Mirgorod itself. They could be at the gates of the city in a matter of days. The city’s defensive line looked impregnable on the map but it was brittle. When the enemy came with their armoured and motorised artillery like movable fortresses and the nine-hundred-rounds-a-minute drum magazines of their Whitfield-Roberts automatic rifles, the political commissars would not hold the army together. The hundred-foot war-mudjhiks which still remained viable might delay the advance for a few days but that was all. One sharp blow and the western Vlast would crumble. Dust.

  Good. Let them come. Let them destroy the aging, desiccated Vlast. Let them sweep it aside. Its collapse was both inevitable and necessary, and the Archipelago would do it more quickly from outside. It would make her task all the easier.

  A New Vlast.

  History was on her side. The enemy could not hope to hold what it took. Weakened by the war and by its own internal contradictions and fault lines, its stupid plurality, that loosely bound argumentative club of island nations would soon retreat back beyond the Cetic Ocean. They would have no stomach for the terror to come. And while they were here, she would be building a new and better Vlast in the east, protected from the Archipelago occupation by five thousand miles of rolling continental plain. The New Vlast would be strong. Modern. Purposeful. Cleansed of all the impurities, weaknesses and compromises accumulated under generations of feeble Novozhds. And united under her.

  And yet it was taking too long. She had no illusions. She knew that failure was possible. The others had been cleverer than she had expected. Dukhonin. Khazar. Fohn. Particularly Fohn. Within hours of the Novozhd’s death they had pulled together this Colloquium. They had gathered to themselves the reins of power in the Vlast. The generals and officials of the Inner Council had signed up to it before she even knew what was in the air. Fohn had done that. He had been ready. Polished, metropolitan, underestimated Fohn.

  Fohn had made himself Chairman. Dukhonin was General Secretary. Khazar was… what? She could not remember. Khazar was negligible.

  Chairman Fohn had wanted to keep her out of it altogether–her! Chazia! Excluded from power! But Dukhonin and Khazar had not dared shut her out. So it had become the Colloquium of Four, and they made her Secretary of Security. She had insisted on keeping the police under her direct control and retained the title of Commander. But she hated and despised the whole thing. It was a useless, bastardised, temporary compromise going nowhere. She would bring it all down. Set them one against another, take them down, one by one.

  But it was taking too much time.

  Chazia was not patient. She was hungry and sleepless. She itched and fretted and burned. She sat in her high office and read the reports and scratched at the dark itching patches on her arms and face. The worms and insects moving under her burning skin. She needed more strength. More power. An edge to cut them down. A massive fist to crush them.

  She needed the Pollandore. The Pollandore was power, she was convinced of that. There was no doubt. But she couldn’t use it because she didn’t know how. For that she needed the Shaumian girl.

&
nbsp; There was a quiet sound behind her. Chazia jerked her head round. The hidden door in the panelling of her office opened and Josef Kantor stepped in.

  Chazia hated the way he would just come in like that, with his pockmarked face, dirty red silk shirt and preposterous fedora, presuming access and attention. She regretted ever giving him the key to the bridge gates.

  ‘I wasn’t expecting you, Josef,’ she said.

  ‘Of course not. You sent me no word, Lavrentina. Since the Novozhd died I have heard nothing from you. Nothing at all.’

  ‘Were you expecting to? I am busy. I have many new responsibilities now.’

  ‘Responsibilities? You are a bureaucrat. This Colloquium was not the plan.’

  ‘It is temporary,’ said Chazia. ‘Fohn’s position is stronger than I had anticipated, but this phase will pass. Everything is in hand.’

  Kantor pulled out a chair and sat down in front of her.

  ‘This was not the plan,’ he said again.

  ‘There is no need for you to be concerned, Josef. I keep my promises. Let’s talk about you, since you’re here. You need a change, my friend. You played your part well, but you’ve lived too long among thieves and terrorists. I’ve been thinking about you. I have an offer for you: land colonel of Vassaravia. The current incumbent is insufficiently diligent. You would be a good replacement.’

  ‘Vassaravia! A flat empty landscape three thousand miles away. Horse meat and wool.’

  ‘It is in the south, yes. But to be land colonel in such a place is no small thing. A population of two million, and Kirtsbergh is a substantial capital. You would have scope to flourish there, Josef. There is work there for a man of your quality. The Donvass cavalry is wavering. The defences are unprepared. If Vassaravia fell, the whole of the Pienau river basin would be open.’

  ‘The armies of the Archipelago are half a continent from the Donvass and the bulk of their navy is already off the Bight of Gatsk. They wouldn’t waste a single gunboat on Kirtsbergh. They have no need.’ He leaned forward. ‘I won’t be shuffled off to Vassaravia, Lavrentina.’

  ‘Then name your oblast, Josef. What about Stari-Krasnogorsk? Or Munt? Land colonel is a handsome offer. Or would you prefer a less public role? Munitions production in Susaninograd is 60 per cent behind target—’

  ‘I will remain here. In Mirgorod.’

  ‘But distance is necessary, Josef! We’ve talked about this before. You are the great Kantor, king of terrorists! You cannot take a place in public among us. It is impossible. You can’t be—’

  Kantor waved the objection away.

  ‘That is being dealt with,’ he said. ‘Josef Kantor will disappear and the people who know my face will die. Is this not so? Did we not agree?’

  ‘Josef…’

  Kantor paused. Looked at her sharply.

  ‘The girl,’ he said. ‘The Shaumian girl? The bastard daughter of the whore who was my wife? You have done this, Lavrentina? It matters. It is important.’

  ‘Yes.’ Chazia lied with facility. It was a talent of hers. ‘Yes. It is done.’

  ‘You found her? And the Investigator? Lom? They are cleared away? They are killed?’

  ‘Yes. Of course. I have told you.’

  ‘Good. I will take a new name. An alias. A sobriquet. A nom de guerre. I’m thinking of Rizhin. Rizhin the red man. The crimson man. Rizhin. I think the name has a ring to it. Rizhin. What do you think?’

  ‘I think we must go more slowly, Josef.’

  ‘Slowly? Everything with you is always slowly! This is not satisfactory, Lavrentina. Do you know where you are going?’

  Chazia glared at him.

  ‘And do you share your plans with me, Josef?’ she said. ‘No. You do not.’

  Kantor leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head.

  ‘You’re making heavy weather of this, Lavrentina. You seem tired. You grow weak when the moment has come for strength. You delay when the time has come to act.’

  ‘Be careful, Josef. Remember who you are speaking to. I have made you a good offer. A very fair offer. You should take it.’

  Kantor’s gaze locked with hers. His expression didn’t change, but in his dark brown eyes she saw black earth burning.

  ‘I’m beginning to think,’ he said, ‘that you’re not the right person for the angel’s purpose.’

  Chazia felt her face grow hot.

  ‘You wave this angel at me like a shroud!’ she said, slapping her hand hard against the tabletop. ‘Yet it hides itself from me. Why, Josef? Why does it not speak to me? It spoke to me once at Vig but never again.’

  ‘I will remain here in Mirgorod, Lavrentina. As Rizhin. And you, you will arrange it. You will make me a general. You will make me Defence Commissar.’

  ‘City Defence Commissar? I am offering you an oblast of your own!’

  ‘I will remain in Mirgorod. As Defence Commissar.’

  ‘But Mirgorod is lost. It can’t be defended, the Novozhd saw to that. The Archipelago will take it, and soon. Mirgorod is worth nothing now.’

  ‘Then give it to me.’

  Chazia shrugged.

  ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘If you wish. It means nothing to me. I will be leaving the city soon. You are welcome to it.’

  Kantor stood up.

  ‘It is settled then,’ he said.

  10

  Once they were clear of the gendarme station, Maroussia led the way. Lom followed. It was her city. She set a fierce pace, striding in silence. Lom loped along beside her with a steady, comfortable rhythm. The violence of what had happened in the gendarme station was a third presence between them, strange and raw and dark. A gap in the world had opened up and something new had reached through it and touched them: something sourceless and reckless and inexplicable. It set Lom on edge. It was like a thin whining noise in his ear: pitched too high for hearing, it reached into his unsettled belly and clenched there, an uneasy knot, a fist. An unspoken, liminal intimation of blood fear. He could sense that Maroussia felt it too, but they didn’t speak of it. The shadow of a separation walked between them.

  And then Lom realised what the separation was. There was something else that he was feeling: not fear, but something deeper than fear; the nameless, surprising visceral exhilaration of violence, and a taste in his mouth that reminded him of mudjhiks: the aliveness of angel flesh.

  They walked on through the city, keeping to side streets and quiet backwaters because away from the main thoroughfares and intersections there would be fewer gendarme patrols. The temperature was still dropping fast. A front of freezing air was rolling straight in off the Cetic Ocean. The freezing wall of atmosphere came on slowly, rolling through the streets, pouring into alleyways, folding round buildings and spilling in through open doors and windows. Meeting the residual warmth of the city, it condensed in tongues and low thin drifting pillars of fog. A crisp delicate edging of frost formed on lamp posts and railings and wet sandbags stacked in doorways.

  Mirgorod felt different. Something had changed. Where before the carapace of the city, its chitinous exoskeleton, had been hard and shiny and black, subject to sudden fractures, now everything was softer, more elastic. Fluid shifting changes of grey. Currents of possibility and change rippled and collided and slid across one another. There were tiny openings everywhere. Nothing was fixed. Apparent reality felt like a thin skin easily torn. Lom felt the watchfulness of the tenuous drifting fog. Wakeful, attentive presences inhabited it. Ice-cold fingers brushed his cheek and investigated the opening in his forehead. Sifting river voices whispered in his ear. The speech of strange tongues.

  And he felt something else, something not of the cold air and the soft rain and the city. A hot animal pressure. An urgent attentive hunter’s gaze drilling into the small of his back, dangerous, intelligent and wild.

  Lom spun round suddenly but there was nothing to be seen, only warehouses and alleyways and solitary pedestrians hunched and muffled against the frosting cold.

  ‘What is it
?’ said Maroussia. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Lom. ‘Nothing. Probably nothing.’

  They walked on in silence.

  ‘We still need to eat,’ said Lom after a while.

  Maroussia shook her head.

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘Nor am I,’ said Lom. ‘All the same, we should eat when we can. Is there somewhere we could go? Somewhere quiet.’

  Maroussia frowned. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘OK.’

  She led them to a place in a basement, down a narrow flight of steps next to the stage door of the Mogen-Balterghen Music Theatre. There was no sign outside: if you didn’t know it was there, you’d walk right past. A shabby door opened into a kind of one-room café-bar. Maroussia had been there once, a year or so before, she said. The place was known as Billroth’s among the painters and theatricals and yellow-press journalists who spent their after-show evenings there. She hadn’t liked it much–a stale, noisy jostle, everyone shouting-drunk on cheap sweet wine–and she’d never gone back there again.

  But at this time of the morning Billroth’s was just opening and almost empty: only a couple of plump-armed women in floral print blouses sharing a plate of cakes and a bottle of raspberry brandy, and a sallow ageing man with ink-black hair behind the bar, counting up the till. There was a coal fire in the grate and the smell of frying onions mixed with the reek of stale tobacco from the thick carpet and the dirty plush upholstery.

  Lom found a table in the shadows away from the fire while Maroussia went across to the counter. He took off his coat and laid it beside him on the soft, sagging banquette. The brown velvet of the seat was rubbed smooth and dark. Sticky. There was thick flocked wallpaper everywhere, not on the walls only but also on the back of the doors and even the panels of the upright piano in the corner: florid blooms and intricate curlicues of dark blue against gold. It looked sticky too, with a thick patina of smoke and grease. Purple-shaded brass lamps flickered on the tables. Lom liked the place. It was cosy. To pass the time till Maroussia came back he read the yellowing show posters on the walls–THE GREEN-GOLD HYACINTH REVUE, MAIDENS ALL!, THE SCUTTLE-BUG, THE HERRING HARVEST–and studied the clutter of framed and autographed photographs among them. Studio-lit faces of actors, singers, dancers in greasepaint and costume or crisp evening wear.