Wolfhound Century

by Peter Higgins

  Maroussia felt the door move behind her. Somebody was trying to push it open. She heard Fasil’s voice.

  ‘Go home, mother!’ It was hard enough without this. ‘Please. Whatever it is, you can tell me later. At home.’

  Maroussia turned and pulled the door open, surprising Fasil. She shoved past him and walked back to her trestle, looking neither right nor left, feeling the eyes of the women watching her. She picked a uniform from the line and began to work.

  It took her two minutes, perhaps five, to realise that her mother would never find her way home by herself. It was a miracle she’d managed to get herself to Vanko’s in the first place.

  Maroussia picked up her coat and walked back down the aisle, out into the Mirgorod morning. There were other jobs. Probably.

  When she got outside she looked up and down the street. There was no sign of her mother.

  40

  Lom came round a corner against soft wet flurries of snow and stopped dead in his tracks. Twenty yards or so ahead of him two militia men were standing in the long alleyway that cut down between warehouses towards Vanko’s. They had their backs to him. One of them was Major Safran.

  The other had laid a hand on Safran’s shoulder and was pointing out an elderly woman coming up the alley towards them, walking slowly, talking to herself. Her hair was a wild wispy mess and she was holding her hands cupped in front of her, carrying something precious. Safran took some papers out of his pocket — photographs — glanced at them and nodded. The militia men moved down the alley to meet the old woman. When she saw them coming she clutched her hands tighter against her chest and turned back.

  ‘Hey!’ shouted Safran. ‘You! Stop there!.

  She ignored him and walked faster, breaking into a kind of scuttling hobble. Safran took his revolver from his holster and levelled it.

  ‘Militia! Halt or I shoot!’

  ‘No!’ shouted Lom, but he was too far away to be heard above the traffic noise.

  Safran fired once.

  The woman’s legs broke under her and she collapsed. She was still struggling to crawl forward when Safran reached her. He hooked the toe of his boot under her ribs and flipped her over onto her back. She lay, her left foot stuck out sideways at a very wrong angle, looking up at him. Her other leg was shifting feebly from side to side. Safran compared her to the photograph in his hand, said something to the other militia man, and shot her in the face. Her head burst against the snowy pavement like an over-ripe fruit, spattering the men’s legs with mess. The one with Safran flinched back in disgust, and dabbed at his trouser-shins with a handkerchief. After a cursory check that she was dead, they continued towards Vanko’s.

  Lom felt sick. Another senseless killing in the name of the Vlast. Another uniformed murder.

  The woman’s body, when he came close to it, was a bundle of rags. Around her broken face the cooling blood had scooped hollows in the snow, scarlet-centred, fringed with soft edges of rose-pink, and in one of the hollows lay the object she had held so tightly: a little bag of some thin, rough material. Hessian? Hemp? Lom picked it up. The side that had lain in the snow was wet with blood. He untied the cord that held the mouth of it pursed shut. Inside was a fragile-looking ball of twigs. He closed the bag and slipped it into his pocket

  ‘Get away from her! Leave her alone!’

  Lom looked round. Maroussia Shaumian was staring at him with wide unseeing eyes.

  ‘She’s my mother,’ she said. ‘I have to take her home.’

  ‘Maroussia,’ said Lom. ‘I couldn’t stop this. I was too late. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I have to take her home,’ she was saying. ‘I can’t leave her here.’

  ‘Maroussia—’

  ‘Perhaps I could get a cart.’

  She was losing focus. He’d seen people like this after a street accident: together enough on the surface, but they weren’t really there, they hadn’t aligned themselves to the new reality. You had to be rough to get through to them.

  ‘Your mother has been shot,’ he said harshly. ‘She is dead. That is her body. The militia killed her deliberately. They were looking for her. Do you understand me?’ Maroussia was staring at him, her dark eyes fierce, small points of red flushing her cheeks. ‘I think they’re looking for you too. When they find you’re not at Vanko’s they’ll come back, and if you’re still here they’ll kill you as well.’

  ‘You,’ she said. ‘I know you. You did this.’

  ‘No. I didn’t. I wanted to stop it. I couldn’t—’

  ‘You’re a policeman.’

  He took her arm and tried to turn her away from her dead mother.

  ‘I want to help you,’ he said.

  ‘Fuck you.’

  ‘I’ll take you somewhere. We can talk.’

  She jerked her arm away. She was surprisingly strong. Her muscles were hard.

  ‘I said fuck you.’

  Safran had appeared at the far end of the alley.

  ‘Maroussia, I want to help you,’ said Lom. ‘But you have to get away from here. Now. Or they’ll do that to you.’

  ‘Why would you help me? You’re one of them.’

  ‘No,’ said Lom. ‘I’m not.’

  Safran was coming.

  Maroussia looked at her mother, lying raw and dead under the high walls of the alley and the sky.

  ‘I can’t just leave her,’ she said. ‘The rats… the gulls…’

  ‘Listen,’ said Lom. ‘You have to go now. I’ll make time for you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Go now. Do you hear me? Don’t go home. Go to Vishnik’s and wait for me there.’

  But she was glaring at him. Her face was hard and closed.

  ‘You don’t want to help me. You’re a liar. Leave me alone. Leave my mother alone.’

  Hey!’ Safran had begun to jog, drawing his revolver as he came. ‘Hey, you!’

  Lom stepped into the middle of the alley and held up his hand, hoping that behind him Maroussia was walking away. Hoping that his own face wasn’t on one of Safran’s photographs.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here, Lom?’

  Safran’s face was tight with anger.

  ‘No mudjhik?’ said Lom. ‘Doing your own killing today?’

  ‘Who was that woman? Teslev, stop her.’

  ‘Wait,’ said Lom. ‘I want to talk to you. Both of you.’

  Teslev ignored him and hurried after Maroussia, who had reached the end of the alley, walking fast. Her back looked long and thin and straight in her threadbare coat. The nape of her neck, bare and pale between collar and short black hair, was the most vulnerable and nakedly human thing Lom had ever seen. He felt as if a fist had reached inside his ribs and taken a grip on his heart, squeezing it tight.

  41

  Maroussia’s legs were shaking so much it was hard to walk. Her spine was trickling hot ice, waiting for the impact of the militia man’s bullet.

  Keep going, she told herself. Don’t look back. Get out of sight. Think!

  Her world was compressed into the next few seconds. She imagined the bullets smashing into her spine. Her legs. Breaking.

  Think! Do something! Now!

  There were no limits. No rules. Just do something.

  An alleyway opened up to her left, narrow between tall buildings. No one had been down it since the snow started. She knew where the alley went. Nowhere. A dead end. She cut into it. At least for a few moments she was out of their sight.

  One side of the alley was a blank brick face, the other a wall of rough stone blocks stained with grime. Dark windows looked out over it, but high overhead, out of reach. No doors. The building was, she thought, an old warehouse. If she could get inside it… inside was better… she could run… weave… find a way out again… into the crowded streets… lose herself in the crowd…

  She took a few steps into the middle of the alley, turned, ran at the wall, jumped… Her fingers stretched for the window ledge…

  Her weight crashed hard against the wall. He
r knee, her elbow, smashed against it. Her fingers scrabbled at the rough face of the stone, well below the window, and she fell.

  She pulled off her shoes and forced the bare toes of one foot hard into the crevice between two blocks of stone, drove her fingers into the gap at shoulder level, and pulled herself up. It worked. She was off the ground, barely, her body flattened, her cheek pressed against the cold wall, her fingers trembling. She tried to dig them further into the stone, tried to gouge out holds by sheer effort of will. She raised her good leg, gasping as her weight pressed on her injured knee, lifted one hand, pulled herself a little higher. It worked. And again. She was almost half her own height above the snow and crawling slowly up the vertical face of the wall. She stretched upwards and got the fingertips of one hand onto the stone ledge of the window. With a desperate lunge she got the other hand next to it. Her feet slipped but she scrabbled with her toes and got purchase again, half pulling and half walking upwards until her backside was sticking out, her knees tucked under. There was a groove in the window ledge she could hook her fingers into. If she could just get one knee up there—

  ‘Are you going to come down, or do I shoot you up the arse?’

  42

  Lom turned his back on Safran and walked over to the old woman’s broken body. She had been so fragile. He could have picked her up and tucked her under his arm. It was taking all his effort not to look behind him, back up the alley, to see if Teslev was coming back.

  ‘Who gave you the photographs, Safran? The pictures of the Shaumian women? Who turned you loose on them?’

  Safran stared at him. ‘This has nothing to do with you.’

  ‘I mean,’ Lom continued. ‘You’d hardly come after them on your own initiative, would you? You probably don’t even know who they are. I mean, who they really are.’

  ‘What are you getting at?’

  ‘I hope for your sake the order came directly from Chazia herself.’

  ‘And who are you working for, Lom?’

  Lom shrugged. He kicked at a stone. Keep him off balance. Don’t let him have time to think.

  ‘So did you find the object Chazia wanted?’

  This time Safran looked genuinely puzzled.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Never mind. Don’t worry about it.’

  The crack of a pistol shot echoed off the high walls. It sounded a few streets away.

  Safran smiled. ‘Teslev found her.’

  Another shot. And then another.

  ‘Ah,’ said Safran. ‘The coup de grâce.’

  43

  Maroussia, clinging to the window ledge, looked down under her arm and stared into the face of the militia man. He was standing below her, his pistol in his hand. He’d obviously been there a while, watching her trying to climb. He thought it was funny. It was in his face. She pushed herself away from the wall and crashed down onto him. He collapsed under her weight. The pistol fired. Something slapped, hard and burning, against her calf and her whole leg went numb.

  ‘You. Stupid. Bitch.’

  She was lying on her back on top of him. His breath was hot against her ear, his voice close, almost a whisper. She whipped her head forward and sharply back, smashing it into his face, and felt his nose burst. The militia man swore viciously and smashed his gun against the side of her head. And did it again. And again. She felt something jagged open a rip in her cheek. Then his other hand was scrabbling around in front of her, trying to pull at her, trying to roll her off him.

  ‘I’m going to kill you,’ he whispered. ‘Bitch.’

  He was strong. She couldn’t fight him. In another second he would be able to get his gun against her back or her ribs and fire without risk of hitting himself. She dug her hand back and under herself, pushing it down between their struggling bodies, scrabbling for his testicles, and when she found them she squeezed and twisted as viciously as she could. The militia man yelled and arched his back, trying to throw her off, trying to club at her hand with the pistol. She jerked her head backwards again and again, smashing it recklessly into his face. She felt it strike a sweet spot on his chin, smashing his skull back against the pavement. She felt him go slack.

  Maroussia rolled away from him and raised herself up on her hands and knees. The militia man was lying on his back, trying to raise his head, his eyes struggling to focus.

  ‘Bitch,’ he mumbled. ‘Bitch.’ He raised his pistol towards her. It seemed heavy in his hand.

  She grabbed at the pistol with both hands, twisting and wrenching it. It fired a shot but she barely noticed. She felt the man’s finger snap and the gun came away in her grasp. ‘Oh no,’ he said quietly. ‘No.’

  She pressed the muzzle against his thigh and pulled the trigger.

  44

  In the mid-morning quiet of his apartment Raku Vishnik cleared his desk and spread across it a large new street plan of Mirgorod. The city — crisp black lines on fresh white paper — looked geometrical and rectilinear, a network of canals and prospects laid out like electrical cabling, connecting islands to squares and squares to islands; a civic circuit diagram for the orderly channelling of work and movement. It was nothing, or almost nothing, but wishful aspiration. A flimsy overlay of civilisation, the merest stencil grid over marsh and mist and dreams.

  Next to the map Vishnik set out his neat pile of filled notebooks, a box file of newspaper cuttings, a sheaf of other maps and plans. The maps all showed the city or parts of it, and all of them were creased, much re-folded, and covered with faint pencil marks: lines and symbols and Vishnik’s own cramped and scarcely legible annotations, from single words to entire paragraphs. The hatbox of photographs was on the floor beside his chair. On the other side of the window the city breathed and rumbled. Snow flurries smudged the distance, yellow and grey and brown.

  He was looking for shape and pattern.

  Methodically he sifted through his notes, looking for anomalous events. Times and places when the city slipped and shifted. Like it had in the Bakery Galina Tropina. Like it had in his photographs. Like it had when he went back to a familiar place and found it different. Others had seen such things in the city. He picked them up in newspapers usually, but also in conversations overheard on trams and buses, in shops, in the street. He’d kept a record of every one. They were in his notebooks. Date, place, time.

  Ever since Maroussia Shaumian had come to him the other night a new idea had been taking shape in his mind. A new possibility. Maroussia had pushed him across a threshold. Until then it had never occurred to him that he could do more than accumulate notes and records. He had been an archivist of glimpses only. The thought had never struck him that what he was seeing had a cause. A source. That he could act.

  But now, slowly, carefully, thoroughly, he went through the notebooks, one by one, and for each event he made a pencil mark on the map. All morning he worked, attuning his breathing to the slow pulse of the rain and the city.

  The pattern began to emerge. It started to resolve itself under his gaze like a photograph in a developing dish, a sketchy outline first, then the richer finer details. But he resisted it. He didn’t want to jump to conclusions. He didn’t want to mislead himself. He kept calm. He stuck to his method.

  I should have done this long ago. This has always been here for the finding and I never thought to look.

  By mid-afternoon he’d finished. He pinned the map to the wall and stood back. There was no doubting it. There could be no mistake. The spattering of pencil marks looked like a black sunburst, a carbon flower blooming, a splash — as if a ball of black flakes had been thrown at the city and splattered on impact. The rays of the sun-splash pattern thinned out in all directions towards the edges of the city, but at the centre they were clustered, overlapping, intense. They were concentrated around one place. It looked like an impact point, a moon crater, the focal point of an explosive scattering. It was the source. There was something there. Causing the surface life of the city to shift and tremble. And the effect was
growing stronger. He had found it.

  Vishnik went to the bookshelf by the stove and took out the old book with the sun-faded, water-stained cover. The spine was detaching itself, the gilt lettering rubbing away, the thin translucent pages grubby and bruised. It was a forbidden work now, under the interdiction of the Vlast for more than a century, ever since its existence had been noticed. He’d found this copy tucked behind a heating pipe in the library of the Institute of Truth at Podchornok more than twenty years ago. He’d shown it to no one, and he’d never found another copy since. No reference to it in any library. So far as he knew, his was the only one in existence. A Child’s Book of Wonders, Legends and Tales of Long Ago.

  Once more he opened it at the familiar page. Once more, sitting on the floor by his bookshelf in the dimming light of late afternoon, he began to read.

  ‘How They Made The Pollandore.’

  45

  Lom left Safran and the body of the executed woman, and walked. Anywhere. Nowhere. He hated the city. He hated the way you could just walk out of an alley and into the flow of crowds and traffic. Faces in the street. Faces behind windows. Faces that knew nothing about the dead body of an old woman a few yards away. That was in another city, not theirs. He needed to breathe. Needed to think.

  He bought a ticket and got on a tram at random. The circle line, orbiting the city centre. The car was almost empty. Two thin men with clean-shaven angular faces were talking about horses. Round-brimmed hats, heeled ankle boots, woollen suits with trouser cuffs. Signs shouted at him: CITIZENS! BEWARE BOMBS! REPORT SUSPICIOUS PACKAGES! LEAVE NO LUGGAGE UNATTENDED!

  A young man in the rear corner seat was staring at him. Frowning. A long thin nose. High cheekbones. Greasy hair in thick strands across his forehead. He had a book open but he wasn’t reading. When his gaze met Lom’s he de-focused his eyes and pretended he was looking past him, out of the window. Lom shrugged inwardly. Just a student. He wondered what book he was carrying. It was heavy and thick and looked old. Not mathematics or engineering, not with hair like that. He considered going across to find out what it was. Shake the tree. See what fell out. Once, not long ago, he would have. But not now. Leave him be. Leave him to his thoughts. Lom realised he was staring, and the young man was suffering under it: he’d buried himself in his book, pretending to be absorbed in it, but his neck and the edges of his cheekbones were flushed. When the tram stopped he would get up and leave, carefully, avoiding eye contact.