Wolfhound Century

by Peter Higgins

  ‘You piss off,’ said Vishnik. ‘Piss away off.’

  He jerked the satchel away from Larkov.

  ‘Gendarme! Gendarme! Stop the bastard!’

  Vishnik saw a green uniform coming from the other direction. Time to go.

  18

  From the mortuary Lom found his way eventually, via many corridors and stairs, to the Central Registry of the Lodka. He had wanted to see this place for years, and when he found it he stopped a moment in the entrance, taking it in.

  It was a vast circular hall, floored with flagstones, ringed by tiers of galleries, roofed with a dome of glass and iron. It had the airy stillness of a great library and the smell of wood polish and ageing paper that a library has. Rows of readers’ desks radiated outwards from the hub of the room like the spokes of a wheel. Each desk had a blue-shaded electric lamp of brass, a blue blotter, a chair upholstered in blue leather. Three thousand readers could work there at once, though not more than a tenth of that number was present now, bent in quiet study.

  At the centre of the vast hall, rising more than a hundred feet high, almost to the underside of the dome, was the Gaukh Engine. Lom had seen a photograph of it once. It had been beautiful in the picture, but nothing prepared him for the reality. It was immense. An elegant nested construction of interlinked vertical wheels of steel and polished wood carried, like fairground wheels, dozens of heavy gondolas. The whole machine was in constant motion, its wheels turning and stopping and turning. The murmuring of its electric motors gave the hall a quiet, restful air.

  A woman — pink arms, a round red face, hair wound in braids about her head, a white sweater under her uniform tunic — was watching him.

  ‘Yes?’ she said. ‘Can I help?’

  ‘I’m looking for a file,’ said Lom. ‘Name of Kantor. I haven’t been here before.’

  The archivist came around from behind the desk. She was shorter and wider than he had thought. There were crumbs in the lap of her skirt.

  ‘Follow me,’ she said.

  She led him to one of the control desks. There were two arrays of lettered keys, like the keyboards of two typewriters.

  ‘This one is for surnames, and this is for code names. Enter the first three letters of the name you want, then press the button and the engine will bring the correct gondola. Gondolas contain index cards. When you find the one you’re looking for, copy the reference number in the top right corner and bring it to me. The index is phonetic, not alphabetical — sometimes a name is only overheard, and the spelling is uncertain. Cards are colour coded: yellow for students, green for anarchists, purple for nationalists, and so on. It’s all here.’ She showed him a hand-coloured legend pinned to the desk.

  ‘How many cards do you have here?’

  ‘Thirty-five million. Approximately.’

  Lom keyed in the letters. K A N. Pressed the button. The wheels turned slowly, until the right car stopped in front of him. He lifted the hinged lid to reveal tray after tray of cards suspended from racks on an axle. He spun through the racks. There was a half-tray of Kantors, generations of them, but only two Josefs with a birth date in the last half-century. One card was white, indicating a minor public official included for completeness, against whom nothing was known. The other was lavender, creased and dog-eared, cross-referenced to at least twenty separate code names. Lom noted the reference on a slip of paper from the pad provided and handed it in.

  While the archivist was gone, Lom wandered around the hall. There were card index cabinets, rows of guard-book catalogues. Newspapers, periodicals, journals, directories, maps, atlases, gazetteers, timetables. The publications, proceedings and membership lists of every organisation and society. The records of universities, technical colleges and schools. Galleries rose up to the domed ceiling. Swing doors led to the specialised archives and collections: keys, said a notice, could be collected from the desk by the holder of appropriate authorisation.

  The foundation of any security organisation is its archives. That was what Commander Chazia had said in her address to the assembled police and militia of the Podchornok Oblast the previous year. Lom and Ziller had arrived late to find the room over-filled and over-hot. They had to stand at the back, craning to get a decent view between the bullet heads of a pair of gendarmes from Siflosk. Deputy Laurits had made a long and unctuous speech of welcome. The visit of the great Lavrentina Chazia, head of Vlast Secret Police, in all her pomp was a momentous occasion, a moment for the provincial service to feel close to the heart of the great machinery of the Vlast.

  Chazia had dominated the room: a small woman but, standing on the simple stage at the front of the hall, a pillar of air and energy, pale and intense, neat and slender and upright, her voice carrying effortlessly to the back of the hall. She had drawn and held the attention of every man there. We are hers, they found themselves thinking. We are her soldiers. We are working for her.

  The reports they provided mattered, that was Chazia’s message to them: they were used; they had to be done right. Lom listened intently as she unfolded the process by which raw intelligence from across the Dominions of the Vlast was gathered and sifted. It was a huge undertaking, rigorous, elegant, thorough: beautifully simple in its conception, dizzying in its scale and reach.

  The Vlast’s information machine was in fact three machines, or rather it was a machine in three parts: that was how Chazia expounded it. First, there was the soft machine, the flesh machine, the machine of many humans. They were the Outer Agents: uniformed policemen, plain-clothes detectives, infiltrators and provocateurs — tens if not hundreds of thousands of them — watching and listening, collecting information about the political activities, opinions and social connections of the population. The Outer Agents used direct observation, and they also employed their own informants — dvorniks, tram drivers, schoolteachers, children. Their primary targets were the shifting and fissile groups of dissidents, separatists, anarchists, nationalists, democrats, nihilists, terrorists, insurgents and countless other dangerous sects and cults that sought to undermine the Vlast. Naturally they also collected an enormous amount of collateral intelligence on the families, neighbours and associates of such people, and on public servants and prominent citizens generally, for the purposes of cross-reference, elimination and potential future usefulness.

  The soft machine fed the second machine, the paper machine: tons and tons of paper; miles of paper; paper stored in the dark cavernous stacks that ramified through the basements and inner recesses of the Lodka. Nothing was thrown away: nothing had ever been thrown away in the history of the centuries-long surveillance. The technicians of the paper machine were the archivists and code breakers and, at the pinnacle of the hierarchy, the analysts. It was they who, working from summary observation sheets, prepared the semi-magical Circles of Contact. Finding cadres, plots and secret cells in the teeming mass of the population was harder than finding needles in haystacks. Circles of Contact was how you did it. You began by writing a name — the Subject — at the centre of a large sheet of paper and drawing a circle around it. Then you drew spokes radiating from the circle, and at the end of each spoke you put the name of one of the Subject’s contacts or associates. The more frequent or closer the contact, the thicker the connecting spoke. Each associated name then became the centre of its own circle, a new node in its own right, and the process was repeated. The idea was to find the patterns — connections — linked loops — that would crystallise out of seemingly inchoate lists of names and dates and demonstrate the presence of a tightly knit but secretive connection. Lom found it exhilarating. It was like focusing a microscope lens and seeing some tiny malignant creature swimming in a bath of fluid. This was why he had become a policeman. To understand the pattern, to find the alien cruelty at its heart, to cut it out.

  And the third machine, Chazia had said, the heart and brain of the operation, was the machine of steel and electricity: the famous Gaukh Engine, right at the heart of the Lodka. And now Lom was standing in its shadow. />
  The archivist came back.

  ‘The material you ordered is unavailable,’ she said.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means you can’t have it. You don’t have the appropriate authorisation.’

  ‘Where do I get authorisation? I mean urgently. I mean now.’

  ‘This material is stored in Commander Chazia’s personal archive. They are her personal papers, and her personal permission is required. In writing. I’m sorry, Investigator. There’s nothing I can do.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you. I’m grateful for your help.’

  Shit.

  I’m running out of threads.

  Pull another one.

  19

  The tattered pelmet of an awning fluttered in the wind. It was the colour of leather. Florid script crawled across it. Bakery. Galina Tropina. Confections. Coff –.

  Vishnik went in.

  The woman behind the counter frowned at him. She had arms the colour and texture of uncooked pastry, and her hair was artificially curled, sticky-looking, dyed a brash, desiccated copper. There were a couple of empty tables at the back.

  ‘I would like coffee,’ said Vishnik. ‘Strong, please. And aquavit. A small glass of that. Plum. Thank you.’

  His legs were trembling. He was getting sensitive: things were getting to him more than they should. I’ve been spending too much time on my own. He used to like being alone, when he was young. But that was a different kind of loneliness: the solitude of the only child who knows that he is free and safe and loved. That was the rich, enchanted solitude of Before. Before the purge of the last aristocrats, when the militia had come winkling them out of the obscure burrows they had made for themselves in their distant country estates.

  That was a different world. The storms smashed it long ago. All I am now is fucking memories. I move through life facing backwards.

  He checked the camera. It was a precise, purposeful thing. A Kono. When he was growing up in Vyra, a camera was a hefty contraption of wood and brass and leather bellows, which required a solid and man-high mahogany tripod to hold it steady. But the Kono was matte black metal, about the size of his notebook, and sat comfortably in the palm of his hand, satisfyingly solid and weighty. Vishnik had built a darkroom in the kitchen of his apartment, where he developed his own films and made his own prints, which he kept in boxes. Many, many boxes.

  A girl came into the bakery and put a basket of provisions on the counter. Her black dress fell loosely from her narrow, bony shoulders. Her fine strengthless hair had parted at the back to show the pale nape of her neck. She wore thick grey stockings and scuffed, awkward shoes. The woman behind the counter smiled at her. The smile was a sunburst of love, extraordinary, generous and good, and in the moment of that smile it happened: the surface of the world split open, spilling potential, spilling possibility, spilling the hidden truth of things.

  The sheen of the zinc counter top separated itself and slid upwards and sideways, a detached plane of reflective colour, splashed with the vivid blues and greens of the tourist posters on the opposite wall. The hot-water urn opened its eyes and grinned. The floorboards turned red– gold and began to curl and writhe. The woman’s arms were flat, biscuity, her hands floated free, dancing with poppy-seed rolls to the tune of the gusting rain, and the girl in the black dress was floating in the air, face downwards, bumping against the ceiling, singing ‘The Sailor’s Sorrow’ in a thin, clear voice.

  O Mirgorod, O Mirgorod,

  Sweet city of rain and dreams.

  Wait for me, wait for me,

  And I’ll come back.

  Cautiously, slowly, so as not to disturb the limpid surface of the moment, Vishnik raised his camera to his eye and released the shutter. He wound the film on slowly — cautiously — with his thumb and took another. And another. Then he opened his notebook and began to write, spilling words quickly and fluently across the page.

  The Pollandore, buried beneath a great and populous upper catacomb of stone in the heart of the city, waits, revolving.

  In darkness, but having its own light, it turns on its axis slowly. Swelling and subsiding. Gently.

  Like a heart.

  Like a lung.

  Like respiration.

  Every so often — more frequently now, perhaps, but who could measure that? — somewhere inside it — deep within its diminutive immensity — a miniscule split fissures slightly wider — a cracking — barely audible, had there been anyone to hear it (there wasn’t) — the faintest spill of light and earthy perfume.

  Almost nothing, really.

  The egg of time, ripening.

  20

  Lom stopped in front of the Armoury and looked up. Narrow and needle-sharp, the One Column on Spilled Blood speared a thousand feet high out of the roof. The militia was headquartered at the Armoury, not the Lodka, a distinction they carefully maintained. Being both soldiers and police, yet not exactly either, the militia considered themselves an elite within the security service, the Novozhd’s killers of choice.

  He climbed the splay of shallow steps and pushed his way through heavy brass-furnished doors into a place of high ceilings; black and white tiled floors; cool, shadowed air; the echoes of footsteps; the smell of polish, sweat, uniforms and old paper. There were texts on the walls, not the exhortations and propaganda that encrusted the city, but the core tenets of the committed Vlast.

  ALL THAT IS COMING IS HERE ALREADY.

  HISTORY IS THE UNFOLDING OF THE CLOTH, BUT THE CLOTH HAS ALREADY BEEN CUT AND EVERY STITCH SEWN.

  A clerk behind a high counter was watching him.

  ‘I’m looking for Major Safran,’ said Lom

  ‘Just missed him. He left about ten minutes ago.’

  ‘How do I find him?’

  ‘Try the stables. He’ll be with the mudjhik. Never goes home without saying goodbye.’

  The stables, when he found them, were a separate block on the far side of the parade ground. The doors, fifteen feet high and made of solid heavy planks, stood open. Lom stepped inside and found himself in a high-ceilinged hall of stone: slit windows near the roof; unwarmed shadows and dustmotes in the air. It didn’t smell like stables. No straw. No leather. No horse shit. The mudjhik was standing motionless at the far end of the hall, in shadow. A militia man was sitting at its feet, his back against the wall.

  ‘I’m looking for Major Safran.’

  ‘That’s me.’

  Lom took a step forward. The mudjhik stirred.

  ‘Come on,’ said Safran. ‘He’ll be still.’

  The mudjhik was a dull red in the dim light, the colour of bricks and old meat. Taller than any giant Lom had seen, and solider, squarer: a statue of rust-coloured angel stone, except it wasn’t a statue. Lom felt the dark energy of its presence. Its watchfulness. The mudjhik’s intense, disinterested, eyeless gaze passed across him and the sliver of angel stuff in Lom’s forehead tingled in response. It was like putting the tip of his tongue on the nub of a battery cell: the same unsettled sourness, the same metallic prickling. The same false implication of being alive.

  Safran waited for Lom to come to him. He was about thirty years old, perhaps, smooth shaven, his hair clipped short and so fair it was almost colourless. His uniform was crisp and neat. A small, tight knot tied his necktie. Without the uniform he could have been anything: a teacher, a civil servant, an interrogator: the joylessly nutritious, right-thinking staple of the Vlast. And yet there was something else. Safran seemed… awakened. The life-desire of the mudjhik glimmered in his wash-pale eyes. His slender hands moved restlessly at his side, and the mudjhik’s own hands echoed the movement faintly. And there was the angel seal, the third blank eye, in the front of his head.

  ‘Well? I’ve got five minutes.’

  Lom took off his cap. Letting Safran see his own seal set in his brow.

  Safran grunted. ‘You can feel him then.’

  ‘It’s watching me?’

  ‘Of course.’

 
Lom looked up into the mudjhik’s face. Except it had no face, only a rough and eyeless approximation of one. It wasn’t looking anywhere in particular, not with its head sockets, but it was looking at him.

  ‘They call them dead,’ Safran was saying, ‘and they use them like pieces of meat and rock, but that’s not right, is it? You’d know what I mean.’

  ‘Would I?’

  ‘We know, people like you and me. The angel stuff is in us. We know they’re not dead.’

  Lom stepped up to the mudjhik and placed his hand on its heavy thigh. It was smooth to the touch, and warm.

  ‘Is it true,’ he said, ‘that it contains the brain and spinal cord of a dead animal?’

  ‘You shouldn’t touch him. He has his own mind. He acts quickly.’

  ‘With a dead cat for a brain?’

  Lom didn’t remove his hand. He was probing the mudjhik, as it was probing him. He encountered the distant pulse of awareness. Like colours, but not.

  ‘Not cat,’ said Safran. ‘Dog. It’s in there somewhere, but it’s not important. You really should step away.’

  It was like being nudged by a shunting engine. Lom didn’t see it move, but suddenly he was lying on his back, breath rasping, mouth gaping, hot shards of pain in his ribs. Safran was standing over him, looking down.

  Lom rolled over and rose to his knees, head down, retching sour spittle onto the floor. No blood. That was something. He felt the mudjhik pushing fingers of awareness into his nose, his throat, his chest.

  Stop!

  Lom repelled the intrusion, slamming back at it hard. He wasn’t sure how he knew what to do, but he did. He felt the mudjhik’s surprise. And Safran’s.

  Lom hauled himself unsteadily to his feet, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

  ‘You’re a crazy man,’ said Safran.

  Lom was becoming aware of the link between Safran and the mudjhik. There was a flow between them, a cord of shared awareness.