Wolfhound Century

by Peter Higgins

  ‘I’ve got boxfuls of shells. I’m very patient.’

  ‘You’re mad.’

  Lom said nothing. The longer he could hold them here, the more time he would give Maroussia.

  ‘We can rush you, Lom. Any time we want. You can’t shoot us all.’

  ‘Who’s first then?’

  ‘How’s your friend, Lom? How’s Prince Vishnik?’ Lom felt the anger rising inside him. ‘He liked you, Lom. Did you know that? He called your name a lot. When he wasn’t squealing like a pig.’

  ‘You bastard—’ Lom stopped. Safran was goading him. He mustn’t let it distract him. He waited. ‘Safran?’ he called. But there was no answer. The silence stretched. Nothing happened. Lom waited.

  Someone appeared on the landing below. A face. An arm. Throwing something. Lom fired too late.

  The grenade bounced off the wall and skittered towards him. Instinctively he kicked out at it, a panicky jab of his foot that almost missed completely, but the outside edge of his shoe connected. The clumsy kick sliced the grenade against the skirting board. It bounced off and rolled back down the stairs, two or three steps at a time. Lom lurched back, protecting his face with his arm.

  The explosion sucked the air down the stairwell and then burst it back up. The noise was too loud to be heard as sound; it was just a slamming pain inside his head. Lom stumbled dizzily.

  As he leaned against the wall, trying to clear his head, trying not to vomit, it dawned on him that the sawing, hiccupping sounds he was hearing were someone else’s pain.

  He looked up in time to see a uniform looming up the stairs. He fired towards it wildly and the uniform retreated.

  Something — a sound, a glimpse of movement in the corner of his eye — made him turn. Safran was behind him, only a few yards away, his revolver raised.

  Shit. The lift shaft. He climbed it.

  As Lom swung round, he saw the satisfaction in Safran’s pale eyes. There was no time to react. Safran clubbed him viciously on the side of his head. On the temple. And again.

  Lom’s world swam sickeningly, his balance went and he fell.

  Two militia men were holding his arms behind his back. Safran’s pale eyes were looking into his. Lom tried to tense the muscles in his midriff, but when the blow came, hard, he folded and tried to drop to his knees. The men held him up.

  Lom hauled at the air with his mouth but no breath would go in. Safran pulled his head up by the hair to see his face and hit him again. And again. When the men dropped his arms, he went down and curled up on the floor, knees tucked in against his chin, trying to protect himself. At last he was able to suck in some air, noisily. A sticky line of spit trailed from his mouth to the floor.

  ‘You,’ said Safran, ‘are nothing. You are made of shit.’

  61

  The room they left him in was stiflingly hot. It must have been somewhere deep inside the Lodka: there were no windows, just shadowless electric light from a reinforced glass recess in the ceiling. Some sort of interview room. A wooden table in the centre of floor, two chairs facing each other across it, another two along the wall. Green walls, a peeling linoleum floor and, around the edges of the room, solid, heavy iron pipes, bolted strongly to the wall and scalding hot to the touch. Leather straps were wrapped loosely around them, and there were stains and dried stuff stuck on the pipes. There were stains on the floor too. Dark brown. Through the door came the sound of a distant bell, footsteps, muffled yelling and shouting. It was impossible to tell what time it was. Whether it was night or day.

  Every part of him hurt. His left eye was closed. It felt swollen and tender to the touch. His fingers came away sticky with drying blood. His head was throbbing. There was a dull pain and an empty sickness in his midriff. A sharp jabbing in his ribs when he moved. No serious damage had been done. Not yet. He had been lucky or, more likely, Safran had been careful.

  He tried the door. It was locked. He sat at the table, facing the door, and waited, trying to keep the image of Vishnik on the couch — what they had done to him — out of his mind. He would settle with Safran for that.

  He found himself thinking about Maroussia Shaumian. Her face. The darkness under her eyes. She had been holding herself together but the effort was perceptible. There had been a ragged wound across her cheek. He hoped she was far away. He hoped he would see her again.

  When he heard the key turn in the lock, he thought about standing up to face them, but didn’t trust his body to straighten, so he stayed where he was. The man in the doorway was wearing a dark fedora and a heavy grey coat, unbuttoned, over a red silk shirt. His face was thin and pockmarked under a few days’ growth of beard.

  Lom had seen him before. In the old photograph on Krogh’s file. In the marching crowd. As a statue half a mile in the sky, looking out across another Mirgorod, a city that didn’t exist, not yet. The whisperers’ Mirgorod. His Mirgorod. This was him.

  The half-mile-high man laid his hat on the table, hung his coat on the back of the other chair and sat down facing Lom. His hair was straight and cut long, thickly piled, a dark of no particular colour, unusually abundant and lustrous, brushed back from his face without a parting. The red silk of his shirt was crumpled and needed washing. Close up, his eyes were dark and brown, with a surprising, direct intensity. It was like looking into street-fires burning. The man let his hands rest, relaxed and palm-down on the table, but all the time he was watching Lom’s face with those deep, dark brown eyes in which the earth was burning.

  ‘Kantor,’ said Lom. ‘Josef Kantor.’

  ‘You’re an interesting fellow, Investigator,’ said Kantor. ‘Stubborn. Clever. Courageous. A policeman who steps outside the rules.’ He paused, but Lom said nothing. Every word was to be wrung from him. Nothing offered for free. He regretted he’d spoken at all. He’d given too much away already. In interrogations, there was as much to learn for the subject as for the interrogator. What did they know? What did they not? What did they need? The silence in the room continued. It became a kind of battle. Eventually, Kantor smiled. ‘You react as I would,’ he said. ‘Observe, learn, give nothing away. That’s good.’

  Lom said nothing. Kantor leaned back in his chair.

  ‘So. Here we are. I wanted some time alone with you before Lavrentina comes. She’ll be here soon, I’m afraid, and after that it won’t be possible for us to speak like this any more. Which for me is genuinely regrettable.’ Kantor looked at his watch. ‘You’ve impressed me. Do you want to know what time it is? Ask me, and I’ll tell you.’

  Lom said nothing.

  ‘Would you like to smoke?’ He laid a packet of cigarettes on the table. ‘Oh please, say something. We both know the game. I’ve been beaten myself, in rooms like this one. You ask yourself, will I be brave? But it doesn’t matter. It makes no difference. Lavrentina will come soon, and that won’t be the kind of roughhouse you and I are used to.’

  The strangest thing about Kantor, thought Lom, was that, despite all he knew about him, he was attractive. He turned interrogation into a teasing game. He made himself charming, fun to be with. You sensed his strength and power and his capacity for cruelty, but somehow that made you want him to look after you. He might kill you, but he might also love you.

  ‘Perhaps you’re still hoping you’ll be able to deliver Lavrentina’s stupid file to Krogh. Perhaps you’re thinking, Krogh is arresting Chazia even as we speak. He will come through the door any moment now and rescue me. But that isn’t going to happen.’ Kantor paused, and looked into Lom’s eyes with warm sympathy. ‘We found the files in the bathroom. And Krogh is dead. She had to do that, didn’t she, after that telephone call?’

  Lom felt his defences crumbling. He was tired and scared and weak and sick.

  ‘You killed him, actually,’ Kantor was saying. ‘Of course you did. You knew you were doing it at the time. At least, you were indifferent whether it happened or not. See why you interest me, Lom? I see something of myself in you, as a matter of fact. And you killed Vishnik too.�
��

  ‘No!’

  ‘What do you want to know, Lom? Go on, ask me something and I will answer, I promise, even if only to repay the pleasure of having finally got you to speak. I have to get something out of you before Chazia does. You have the advantage of me: you’ve seen my file. Tell me about it. What does it say?’

  It was as if he had been reading Lom’s thought processes in his face.

  ‘Chazia thinks she can use you,’ said Lom. ‘But she’s wrong, isn’t she? You’re using her. The question is, what for? What do you want, Kantor?’

  ‘Ha!’ cried Kantor. ‘You wonderful man! You do see to the heart of things, don’t you? You’re right, that is the biggest question. No one, not even the angel, has asked it until now.’

  ‘You owe me an answer.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘So answer.’

  ‘Have you ever wondered where the angels come from?’

  Surprised, Lom shook his head. ‘The stars, I guess,’ he said. ‘The planets. Outer space. Galaxies.’

  ‘Exactly. And what about that? We hardly consider it, do we? They arrive, and we take them for signs and wonders. Messages about us. Who is justified, who not? What clever machines can we make of their dying flesh? It’s all so narrow and trivial, don’t you think? As if this one damp and cooling world with its broken moons was all there is. The Vlast looks inwards and backwards all the time. But we’re seeing angels the wrong way round. What they tell us is, there are other worlds, other suns, countless millions of them; you only have to look up in the night to see them. And we can go there. We can move among them. Humankind spreading out across the sky, advancing from star to star.’

  ‘Impossible,’ said Lom.

  Kantor slammed his hand on the table. ‘Of course it’s possible. It’s not even a matter of doubt. The engineering is straightforward. Like everything else, it is only a matter of paying the price. A few generations of collective sacrifice is all that’s needed. The fruit of the stars is there to be harvested. That’s our future. I know it. I’ve seen it in the voice of the angel. A thousand thousand glittering vessels rising into the sky and unfolding their sails and crossing the emptiness between stars. All it requires is ingenuity. Effort. Organisation. Purpose. Sacrifice. The deferment of pleasure. Imagine a Vlast of a thousand suns. That would be worth something. Can you see that, Lom? Can you imagine it? Can you share that great ambition?’

  It seemed to be an honest question. It might have been a genuine offer, a door out of the torture room.

  ‘No,’ said Lom. ‘No. I can’t.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Kantor and shrugged. ‘Pity.’

  The door opened and Lavrentina Chazia came in.

  Archangel unfurls his mind like a leaf across the continent.

  The dead dig trenches to bury themselves.

  The dead ride long slow cattle trains eastwards, the streets behind them empty, the walls fallen from their houses, their wallpaper open to the rain, their home-stuff spilled across the streets. The smell of wet, burned buildings enriches the air.

  Grey-haired young men with ears turned to bone.

  A naked corpse lies at the foot of the slope; a lunar brilliance streams across the dead legs stuck apart.

  Conscripts in trenches kiss their bullets in the dark and drink the snow.

  Corpses awaiting collection stiffen like thorn trees.

  Men and women hang by the neck from balconies on long ropes, like sausages in a delicatessen window.

  I becoming We.

  The clock and the calendar reset to zero.

  Everything starts from here.

  Archangel — voice of history, muse of death — reaches out across his world — the is and the will-be-soon — touching its unfolding — tasting its texture with his mind’s tongue — testing it with his mind’s fingers — it is satisfaction — it is joy — it is hope. The stars are coming, and the space between them.

  And yet — and still — nearby but out of reach — the tireless egg of time glimmers diminutively in the massy dark — his future tinctured still with the edge of fear.

  Chazia had brought a carpet bag with her, which she set on the table and began to unpack. Lom watched as she unrolled a chamois containing an array of small tools: blades, pliers, a steel-headed hammer.

  Kantor picked up his hat and cigarettes and withdrew to a chair at the edge of the room. He laid the hat on his lap and folded his arms across it. It seemed like an instinctive act of self-protection. It wasn’t deference. It might have been distaste.

  ‘There is only one subject of interest to us, Investigator,’ said Chazia. ‘The whereabouts of Maroussia Shaumian, the daughter of Josef’s late wife. That is all. There is nothing else. The sooner we have exhausted that topic, the sooner we can leave this unpleasant room.’

  His flimsy constructions of hope and defence crumbled. He said nothing.

  ‘Major Safran saw you talk to her, and now we can’t find her. I think you know where she has gone.’

  ‘He won’t speak,’ said Kantor. ‘He’s playing dumb.’

  Chazia came round to Lom’s side of the table and knelt beside him. She began to bind him with leather straps like the collars of dogs. She fixed his hands to the legs of the chair, so that his arms hung down at his sides, and then she bound his ankles to the chair legs as well. Her face was close to his lap. Her breasts were pressing against the rough material of her uniform blouson. The patches on her skin didn’t look like stone, they were stone. Angel stone.

  She worked with methodical care, her breathing shallow and rapid. The fear was a dry, silent roaring in Lom’s head. He wanted to speak now, to tell her everything, but his mouth had no moisture in it and he could not.

  ‘You were a promising policeman, Investigator,’ she was saying as she worked. ‘Krogh thought he’d been clever, spotting you, but it was my doing, actually. Didn’t you guess? I keep track of all Savinkov’s experiments. You’d never have been able to get at Laurits if I hadn’t let you. We fed you the evidence, of course. Laurits was lazy, and brazen with it. I thought it would be a good idea to let you take him down, if you could. Keep the others on their toes. I had it in mind to bring you to Mirgorod myself, if you succeeded. A career open to talent, that’s what the Vlast should be. But Krogh got you first, and it has come to this. A pity.’

  Lom tried to focus on her, but his vision was blurry. What was she saying? He wasn’t sure. His gaze was drawn back to the line of implements ready on the desk.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Chazia. ‘It won’t be like that. Excruciation has many uses, but collecting information quickly isn’t one of them. Torture is good for encouraging demoralisation and fear — for every one person put to pain, a thousand fear it — and it binds the torturers closer to us. But none of that is relevant in your case. Such methods were ineffective on your friend Vishnik, and I doubt they would be more so with you. On this occasion I require the truth quickly, and there is a better way. You may find the method professionally interesting.’

  She took a piece of some dark stuff from her bag and pulled it onto her right hand. It was a long, loose-fitting glove made of a heavy substance something like rubber, but it wasn’t rubber. She held it out for him to see. It had a slightly reddish lustrous sleekness like wet seal fur.

  ‘Angel skin,’ she said, though he knew that already. He had read of such things. This was a Worm. Chazia took a flask out of her bag and held it up to Lom’s face. He jerked his head aside.

  ‘It’s only water,’ she said. ‘Drink a little if you like.’

  He nodded, and she unscrewed the cap and held the flask to his dry lips, tipping it up to let him take a sip. He sluiced the water around carefully in his mouth and let it trickle down his throat as slowly as he could. Without warning, she tipped the rest of it over his head. It was ice-cold. Lom shouted at the shock of it.

  ‘It helps,’ said Chazia. ‘I don’t know why.’

  She brought her chair round from the other side of the desk and sat beside him, plac
ing her angel-gloved hand on his face. He flinched. His skin crawled.

  ‘Ask him, Josef,’ she said quietly, with suppressed excitement. ‘Ask him.’

  Kantor came and stood by him. His eyes were hard and dispassionately curious. The smouldering earth flickered deep inside them.

  ‘Where is my wife’s bastard daughter, Vissarion? Maroussia Shaumian? Where is she now?’

  Lom felt something disgusting slithering about on the surface of his mind, and pushed it instinctively away. He closed his thoughts against it and concentrated on Kantor’s face. He imagined himself drawing it, like a draughtsman, meticulously. He examined its lines, contours and shadows.

  See it as an object. See the surface only.

  Chazia grunted in surprise, and Lom felt her push the Worm harder against the defences he had built. Her hand inside the obscene glove tightened, gripping his face where before she had only touched. He shut his mind more firmly against her. Kantor asked the question again.

  Fall back to the second line of defence. Tell them something they already know. Let them believe they are making progress.

  He ignored Chazia and looked into Kantor’s eyes.

  I can do this.

  ‘I saw Miss Shaumian this morning, for the first and last time. Or perhaps it was yesterday, I’ve lost track of time. I saw her on the occasion of the summary execution in the street of her mother, Feiga-Ita Shaumian, wife of Josef Kantor, by Major Safran of the Mirgorod Militia. Miss Shaumian also observed this execution, and afterwards she walked away. I do not know where she went. I have not seen her since.’

  Kantor returned his gaze impassively. If the words meant anything to him he did not show it. Lom felt Chazia remove her hand from his face.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said to Kantor. ‘Hold his head please.’

  Kantor walked around the desk to stand behind him and put his arm across Lom’s throat, under his chin, pulling him backwards until he was choking, and all he could see was the recessed light in the ceiling. Kantor’s other hand gripped his hair so that his head was held firmly.