Wolfhound Century

by Peter Higgins

  ‘Why?’ said Lom into the silence. ‘What are you going to do? Rob a bank?’

  Petrov stared at him.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘He’s my friend, Lakoba,’ said Vishnik. ‘He’s from out of town.’

  ‘Anyone can see that,’ said Petrov. He turned to Lom. ‘And do you like this place? It is our laboratory. We are all scientists here. We are studying the coming apocalypse.’

  ‘Sounds to me you’re planning to start it.’

  ‘You shouldn’t laugh at me.’

  ‘As long as you bring us champagne,’ said Briakh, ‘you can laugh as much as you like.’ He reached a heavy paw across to Vishnik’s bottle, took a pull from the neck, emptied it and waved it at the bar. ‘Another!’ he boomed. ‘Two more! Dry men are desperate here! Friend Vishnik’s paying.’

  Petrov stood up.

  ‘Drink till you vomit,’ he said. ‘The crisis is now, but you wouldn’t know it if it bit your arse.’ He went unsteadily towards the exit.

  ‘You’re crazy drunk yourself, man!’ Briakh shouted after him. ‘Crazy drunk on that crazy-man syrup you drink.’

  Lom got up and followed Petrov. He got entangled with a boy in a spangled crinoline and jewelled breast-caps who wanted to dance with him. By the time he got free and caught up with him, Petrov was halfway down the street.

  ‘Can I walk with you a while?’ said Lom.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Curiosity. I agree with what you were saying in there. I wanted to hear more.’

  ‘I don’t believe you understood a word of it.’

  ‘Maybe I don’t know about painting. But I do know about blowing things up.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

  ‘That was fighting talk in there.’ The rain was heavier now, whipped along on a bitter wind. Petrov, wearing only his half-buttoned green shirt, seemed oblivious to it. Lom wished he had brought his cloak out with him. His head was ringing with the noise and heat of the club. ‘Unless it was just bluster,’ he added. ‘Like Briakh.’

  ‘You’re right about Briakh. Ha! Blusterer Briakh.’

  ‘What about you?’

  Petrov’s face was close to his. His eyes were wide and black and shiny. Lom smelled the fumes of sweetness and alcohol on his breath.

  ‘I have an idea,’ said Petrov. ‘I have an intention. I have a purpose.’

  ‘I’d like to hear about it.’

  ‘You will. When it’s done.’

  ‘Why not tell me now? Perhaps I can help you. Let me buy you a drink somewhere out of the rain.’

  ‘Help doesn’t come into it. Help isn’t necessary. And neither is talk. One can either talk or do, but not both, never both. You should tell that to Briakh. Tell all of them back there. They can’t tell talk from do, any of them. That’s their problem.’

  Petrov walked on. Lom followed.

  ‘We should talk though. We have a friend in common, I think.’

  Petrov didn’t stop walking. ‘Who?’ he said.

  ‘Josef Kantor.’

  ‘Kantor?’

  ‘You know him then?’

  ‘You said I did.’

  ‘I guessed.’

  ‘Kantor the Crab. Josef Krebs. Josef Cancer. The smell of the camps is in his skin. He can’t wash it off. I think he made himself a shell when he was there and climbed inside it, and he has sat inside it for so long that now he’s all shell. Nothing but shell, shell, and lidless eyes on little stalks staring out of it, like a crab. But people like him. Do you know that, Vishnik’s friend? They think he has charm. They say those crab eyes of his twinkle like Uncle Novozhd. But they’re idiots. There’s no man left in there at all. He’s all crab. Turtle. Cockroach. And shall I tell you something else about him?’ Petrov stopped and turned to Lom, swaying slightly, oblivious of the rain in his face. He began to speak very slowly and clearly. ‘He has some other purpose which is not apparent.’ He began to tap Lom on the chest with a straight forefinger. ‘And. So. Do. You.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘I don’t like you, Vishnik’s friend. I don’t like you at all. Your hair is too short. You look around too much. You keep too many secrets and you play too many games. Vishnik should choose his friends better. You wear him. Like a coat. No, like a beard.’

  ‘I—’

  ‘He knows it, and he lets you. That’s a friend. And you’ll kill him because of it. You think I don’t know a policeman when I see one?’

  33

  It was long after midnight, but not yet morning. Lom lay on the couch in Vishnik’s apartment under a thin blanket, trying to force sleep to come, but it would not. The couch was too small and the stove had gone out long ago. All heat had seeped from the room, along with the illusion of warmth from the Crimson Marmot’s champagne and brandy, leaving him cold and wakeful. Moonlight flooded in through a gap in the curtains: the glare of the two broken moons, wide-eyed and binocular, searchlighting out of a glassy, starless, vapourless sky. The room was drenched in it. The effect was remorseless: every detail was whited, brittle, monochrome. Petrov’s drunken accusation cut at him again and again.

  You think I don’t know a policeman when I see one?

  One day when he was about fourteen he’d been sent out on some errand, and there was a girl in a green dress in the alleyway by Alter’s. Town boys were gathered around her. Shoving. Tripping. Touching. What’s in your bag? Show us your bag.

  Lom could have walked away, but he didn’t.

  ‘Hey!’ he shouted. ‘Leave her alone!’

  They’d beaten him. Badly. The big one kept punching him in the face: a boy with a pelt of cropped hair across his skull. Every time the boy punched him in the face Lom fell over. And every time that happened, he shook his head and stumbled back to his feet. And the big one punched him again. And he fell. And got up. At first Lom had shouted at them. Yelled.

  ‘Fuck off! Leave me alone! I haven’t done anything to you!’

  But that soon passed. He’d fallen silent. Fallen into the rhythm of it. Punch. Fall. Stand up. Punch. Fall. Stand up. There was no room for yelling. No breath for it either.

  ‘I love this,’ one of the boys was saying. ‘Do it again, Savva. Hit him more. Go on. Yes. I love it.’

  There was blood on Lom’s face and he hardly knew what was happening. Everything was weightless and distant. The punches hardly hurt now. Every time he fell, he stood back up. It was mute, pointless resistance. His face was numb. He’d been beaten beyond the capacity for thought. There was nothing left but the automatic determination to get back up on his feet.

  Eventually there would have come a time when he could not have got up again, but before he reached it Savva stopped. He was looking at Lom with something like fellowship in his eyes. And then one of the smaller ones, one of Savva’s shoal, stepped in and punched at Lom’s chin himself, but he didn’t have Savva’s power and Lom was numb to anything less. He didn’t stumble or fall this time, but turned to look in the little one’s feral, weasel eye, disinterestedly.

  ‘Leave him,’ said Savva. ‘That’s enough.’

  Lom had felt something like friendship for Savva then, a feeling which had shamed him secretly ever since. That moment of instinctive friendship, he thought afterwards, had taught him something. The victim’s gratitude toward his persecutor. How it felt so much like love.

  Savva had taken his money. The Provost’s money. Lom had been made to clean the lavatories every morning for a month. But a letter had come from the girl’s father to thank the unknown boy in the uniform of the Institute who had come to his daughter’s help. The father was Dr Arensberg the magistrate, and the Provost had given him Lom’s name. An invitation arrived, addressed to Vissarion Lom himself. He was asked to the Arensbergs’ house for tea, and the Provost had made him go. After the first time he’d become a regular visitor on weekend afternoons.

  The Arensbergs’ house was well known in Podchornok. It was large, steep-gabled, wooden, with clustered chimneys of warm red brick, se
t in its own orchard. The rooms were full of dogs and flowers, the smell of baking, and the Arensberg children at music practice. The family taught him to play euchre and svoy kozyri: Dr and Mrs Arensberg, the girl, Thea, and her brother Stepan, who was seventeen and going to be an officer in the hussars, sitting together, playing cards in the dusty sunlight. The smell of beeswax and amber tea.

  Lom’s visits to the Arensbergs were his first and only encounter with family domesticity. A private life. The warmth and decency that came with secure money. He’d known nothing of such houses before, or the families that lived in them, except what he saw through town-house windows at dusk, when the lights were lit and the curtains not yet drawn.

  One day in summer Dr Arensberg called him into his study.

  ‘What will you do, Vissarion? With your life, I mean? Your career?’

  ‘Career? I don’t know. I expect I will become a teacher.’

  ‘Do you want to do that?’

  ‘I’ve never considered it from that angle. It’s what boys in my position do.’

  ‘What would you say about joining the police? It’s a good life, solid, a decent salary, a career in which talent can rise. One of the few. You could hope for a good position. In society I mean.’

  And so Lom’s future had been settled. He would be a policeman. The private decency of houses like the Arensbergs’ was worth protecting. He was a fighter and he could keep it safe, and one day perhaps he would rise high enough in the service to have such a house himself, like the Deputy’s on Sytin Prospect.

  He passed the entrance examination without difficulty. It was in the very same week that he took the oath of commitment to the Vlast that the terrible dark blade fell. The knife went in.

  Gendarmes came from Magadlovosk to the Arensbergs’ house and took the doctor away. He was denounced. A profiteer. An enemy of the people. A spy for the Archipelago. They took him down the Yannis and he never returned. The house was seized, declared forfeit to the Vlast and granted to the new Commissar for Timber Yards. Stepan’s commission was revoked. Mrs Arensberg, Stepan and Thea moved into a single room above a stationer’s shop off Ansky Prospect.

  Lom couldn’t believe in Arensberg’s guilt. It was a mistake. It would be cleared up. Someone had lied. A magistrate made his share of enemies. Lom would prove Arensberg’s innocence one day, when he’d finished his training. He said as much to Thea when he went to see her, wearing his new cadet uniform, in the room off Ansky Prospect, with its yellow furniture and thin muslin curtains. She had tied a scarf around her hair and she was scrubbing layers of fat and dust off the kitchen shelves when he arrived.

  Thea had thrown him out.

  ‘Get out of here, policeman,’ she said bitterly.

  ‘Thea — I want to help you — all of you.’

  ‘Don’t you see you’re one of them?’

  ‘But only for you… for him…’

  ‘That uniform makes me sick,’ she said. ‘Don’t come here again.’

  He stayed away for a few days to let her calm down, but when he went back, Mrs Arensberg — distant, polite, formal — told him Thea had left Podchornok. She was going to live in Yagda. She had cousins there, or aunts, or something. She planned to study and become a doctor like her father.

  That same week Lom saw Raku Vishnik off to the University. In one week he’d lost them both, and the Arensbergs’ house was gone for ever.

  Lom had immersed himself in police work. As soon as he could, he called up the magistrate Arensberg’s file. The evidence against him was overwhelming. He’d been sent to Vig, and died there. No cause of death was recorded. There was nothing to be done.

  Fifteen years.

  It hadn’t been difficult. There was always someone to tell you what to do. Someone like Krogh. Krogh wasn’t a bad man. But he wasn’t a good man either. He wasn’t any sort of man.

  Detectives make nothing happen. They do the opposite, repairing the damage done by events: desire, anger, accident and change. Stitching the surface of things back together. But events break the surface open anyway. Inside you. Transforming the way you feel and see things. Taking an axe to the frozen sea inside us. Detectives can’t clear up after that.

  Sleep would not come. Lom lay there and listened to the rumble of the darkened city.

  And then there was something else in the room. There had not been and now there was.

  It was a dark and sour presence, a thing of blood and earth. No door had opened. No curtain had stirred. It had arrived. Somehow.

  It was coming closer. Lom could see it now, at the edge of vision, soaked in the light of the moons. Standing, looking at him, sniffing the air. Lom dared not move his head to see it more clearly, but he knew what it was. He had seen such a thing before, once, laid out dead on the earth under a stand of silver birch. That one had been shaped like a man, or rather a child, short and slender, with a small head and a lean, wiry strength. But this one was different, and not only because it was alive, and stalking him. The body he had seen was naked and entirely white, with the whiteness of a thing that had never felt the light of the sun. This one wore clothes of a kind and the skin of its face and hands was oddly piebald. Large irregular blotches of blackness marked the pallor. It was a killer, an eater of blood.

  Suddenly the thing was not where it had been, ten feet away between the window and the door. It was standing over him, leaning forward, opening its black mouth. Lom had not seen it cover the intervening space. He was certain it had not done so. It had simply… moved.

  Such creatures cannot bear to be looked at. They hate the touch of the human gaze. When it saw that Lom was awake and staring into its eyes it flinched and staggered a step backwards. It recovered almost immediately, but it had given Lom the moment he needed to screw up all his fear and revulsion into a ball and cast it at the thing. In the same instant he threw off the blanket, leapt to his feet and lunged forward. But the thing was no longer where it had been. It was to his left, at his side, jumping up and gripping his shoulder, scrabbling at his neck. He felt the heat of its breath on his face. Smelled the cold wet smell of earth. In desperation Lom threw at his attacker all the air in the room. The creature staggered back and fell. Photographs scattered and a chair fell loudly sideways. A lamp crashed to the floor.

  It was the surprise as much as the force of the attack that was effective. The piebald thing fell awkwardly. As it struggled to its feet, the back of its head was exposed. Wisps of thin hair across its surprisingly slender, conical skull. Lom stepped forward, the cosh from his sleeve gripped firmly. He wouldn’t get another chance.

  But it was not there. It was gone. Lom whipped round, braced for an attack from behind that he was unlikely to survive, but the moonlit room was empty.

  The door from the bedroom opened.

  ‘Vissarion? What the fuck are you doing?’

  Vishnik lit the lamp. The study was in chaos. Heaps of books scattered everywhere. A picture fallen from the wall, its glass shattered.

  ‘What happened? What have you done?’ He saw the rips in Lom’s shirt, the smears of blood from deep scratches on his face and neck, the delicate nastiness of the small cosh in his fist.

  ‘It was a vyrdalak,’ said Lom. ‘A strange one.’ He sat down heavily on the couch. Now that it was over, his legs were trembling and he felt emptily sick. He knew what the bite of such a creature could do. ‘I guess the Commander wants her files back.’

  34

  Lakoba Petrov didn’t go home after leaving the Marmot’s. He no longer needed a place of his own. He hadn’t eaten for so long, he no longer felt hungry. He threw away what remained of his money and walked through the night, drinking sweet water copiously wherever he could find it. The clear coldness of it made his soul also clear and cold. His Mirgorod burned. It was awash with cool, glorious rain and the rain washed him clean.

  Again and again the night city detonated for him, bursting into roses of truth. He was walking through paintings, truer and better than any he had painted. He could
have painted them if had chosen to do it. But why should he? There was no need. He had a better idea. As he walked the streets in a pyrotechnical excitement of fizzing synapses, he developed in words his new principle of art. An art that would leave painting behind altogether and become something new and pure and clean. The art of the coming destruction.

  He did carry one tube of paint with him, though, in his pocket. A beautiful lilac–turquoise. In the lamplight, looking at his reflection in the mirror in a barber’s shop window, he squeezed the paint onto his finger and wrote on his forehead. ‘I, Petrov.’ It wasn’t easy, mirror writing. He had to concentrate.

  When he grew tired he lay down to sleep, and in the dawn when he woke his clothes crackled with the snapping of ice.

  35

  Maroussia Shaumian got out of bed in the chill grey of dawn. She lived in a one-room apartment with her mother out near the Oyster Bridge. There wasn’t much: a bed to share, some yellow furniture, a thin and faded rug on bare boards. Her mother was sitting upright on a chair in the centre of the carpet, wearing only her dressing gown. Her thin hair, unbrushed, stood up round her head in a scrappy, pathetic halo. It was icy cold in the room, though the windows were closed tight. Her small breaths and Maroussia’s own were tiny visible ghosts in the chill air.

  ‘Come on,’ said Maroussia, holding out her hand. ‘I’ll get the stove lit. Come and get dressed.’

  Her mother flapped at her to be silent. Her hands were as soft and pale and strengthless as the empty eggshells of a small bird.

  ‘What is it?’ said Maroussia. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Come away from the window. They’ll see you. They’re watching.’

  ‘There’s nobody there. Just people in the street.’

  ‘They’re there, only you can’t see them.’

  ‘Where then? Show me.’

  Her mother shook her head. Stubbornness was the only strong thing left in her. ‘I’m not coming over there.’