Wolfhound Century

29


When Lom got back to the apartment, Vishnik was out. Lom turned on the lamp, poured a glass of aquavit and opened the dossier on Kantor. The early stuff was standard: student records, informants’ reports of domestic life, associates and contacts. There was an extracted account of the Birzel Rebellion court proceedings and the Executive Order of Internal Exile. Notes on the subject’s conduct in the camps. Something about a wife. She had followed him to the camp, but once there she had become pregnant by another man, abandoned Kantor and come back to the city.

Lom read the whole file through from cover to cover, but the papers only filled out what Krogh had told him without adding much, until he got to the end. In a separate pouch at the back, attached with a string tag, were some loose pages with manuscript notes on them in a tight, spidery hand. Some of the notes were initialled. LYC.

Lavrentina Chazia.

Lom sat up and began to read more carefully. This was something else. There was an account of Kantor’s repeated escape attempts. Violent attacks on other inmates. He had crushed an informant’s hand in a vice. ‘A resourceful man,’ Chazia had scribbled across it. ‘He dominates the camp. The guards fear him. Commandant reluctant to discuss the case.’

On another page, in a different ink, were the words ‘Spoke to Kantor today. He has agreed.’ Attached to the same report with a paper clip was a single sheet of lined paper torn from a bound notebook. It was covered in Chazia’s scrawl, apparently written in haste, in pencil, and in parts illegible. It took him a long time to puzzle out the words, and some whole passages defeated him. ‘It spoke to me at Vig! It is an angel, a living angel! There can be no doubt of it. We are acknowledged, we are acceptable. The power of it! The power is…’ The next few lines were not readable. ‘… hands trembling. I can’t hold it all…’ Illegible. ‘… write before it fades. Not words – ideas, impressions, understandings – roaring floods of light. Much lost…’ Illegible. ‘… magnificent. This is the day! The new Vlast begins here. It speaks to Kantor also. It does.’

There were a few more notes in Chazia’s scrawl. They seemed to record further meetings with Kantor, but they were undated. Only a few unconnected words and figures. Lom could make nothing of them. Chazia had written across the bottom of one, ‘It speaks to him. Always to him. Never to me.’





30


There was a way to enter the Lodka revealed only to the most secret and trusted servants of the Vlast. It was a small shop, occupying the ground floor of a grimy brick house. The shop window, glazed with small square panes of dirty glass and lit by dim electric bulbs, displayed photographs of naked dancing girls. Books in plain yellow covers. Packets in flimsy paper wrappers marked with prices in spidery brown manuscript. The dried-out carcases of flies and moths.

The proprietor was a fat bearded man in gloves and striped shirtsleeves, known only as Clover. If you spoke certain words to this Clover, he would nod, lift the partition in the counter and show you through a dusty glass door into the back parlour. From there you went through a curtained back exit, across an interior courtyard and down a narrow stairway into a mazy network of tunnels and cellars. It was easy to lose yourself in that subterranean labyrinth, but Josef Kantor knew the way well.

It was an unpleasant route. Kantor disliked it and used it as rarely as he could. The way was damp and dark, and stank of stale river-water. The tunnels and passageways were faced sometimes with stone, more often with rotten planks, and always with slime and streaks of mud. The floor was treacherous with dirty puddles and scattered rubbish. These underground passageways extended under much of inner Mirgorod. They were remnants of the original building work, if not – as some said – remains of some much more ancient settlement that predated the coming of the Founder. Kantor tended to believe the latter. Sometimes he heard things – the shuffle of slow footsteps, mutterings and echoes of shouting – and saw the trails of heavy objects dragged through the mud. Not all the original inhabitants of the marshlands had been driven away by the coming of the city, and some that had left had returned. He wasn’t nervous, threading his way through the maze, but he found it… distasteful.

He came eventually to a locked metal gate that barred the way. He had a key, and let himself through onto an enclosed walkway slung beneath one of the bridges that crossed to the Lodka. Out of sight of the embankment and the windows of the building, it led into the upper basements of the vast stone building. Once inside, Kantor traced a circuitous route that led him gradually upwards, through unused corridors and by way of service elevators and blank stairwells, to the office of Lavrentina Chazia.

Kantor picked up a chair, placed it in front of her desk and sat down. Chazia ignored him and carried on working. Her face had always reminded Kantor of something reddish and cruel. A vixen. And the dark, smooth blemishes where her skin was turning to stone. They were spreading. It was getting worse. He watched her unconsciously scratching at the angel mark on the back of one hand. She dabbles too much.

‘It was a complete success,’ he said.

‘What?’ She didn’t look up.

‘The march. On the Lodka.’

‘Oh. That. But we must talk about something else, Josef. Your position is compromised. Krogh knows who you are. He has the name. Josef Kantor.’

‘Krogh is old and tired.’

‘Krogh is clever,’ said Chazia. ‘He knows we’re working against him and he knows he can’t trust his own people. He’s taken steps against you. An investigator. From the east. Someone with no connections here. He’s set him to track you down.’

Kantor grunted. ‘One investigator? That can be taken care of. You’ll do that?’

‘Of course.’

‘We can’t afford distractions.’

She looked up from her papers at last.

‘You and I cannot meet again, Josef. Our plans must change. At least in so far as they involve you.’

‘I’m not dispensable, Lavrentina. The angel speaks to me. Not you.’

Kantor saw Chazia’s vixen head lean forward, her eyes widen a fraction. She scratched at the stone-coloured back of her hand again. Delicately wet her lips with the tip of her tongue. How transparent she is. She gives herself away. She doesn’t know she’s doing it. How she wants to be close to power! How she desires it! She longs to feel power’s hot breath on her skin, and open her legs for power. She is jealous of me, because the angel comes inside me, not her. She felt it once and she wants it again. She’s hooked like a fish.

‘What does it say?’ said Chazia. ‘What does the angel say to you?’

He saw how weak she was. Desiring to be near power is not the same as desiring power. It is the opposite.

‘It is impatient,’ he said. ‘It urges haste. It makes promises.’

‘Promises?’

‘To me, Lavrentina. Not to you. To me.’

‘Of course you would say that. To save yourself.’

‘One cannot lie about the angel. One cannot deceive it.’

Chazia showed the tip of her tongue again, pink between pale thin lips.

‘Is it here? Is it with you… now?’

‘Of course not. I couldn’t speak to you if it was.’

‘Why does it choose you, Josef? Why doesn’t it come to me again?’

Kantor said nothing.

‘Do you know why not?’

‘No.’

‘You could ask it.’

‘No.’

Chazia sighed and leaned back in her chair.

‘So. What does it promise you, Josef?’

‘Stars. Galaxies. Universes. The red sun rising.’

‘Meaning? Meaning what?’

Kantor looked at her and said nothing.

‘Meaning nothing,’ said Chazia.

‘It has given me an instruction. The Pollandore must be destroyed.’

‘It knows about that?’

‘It knows everything.’

‘Then it knows we cannot destroy the Pollandore. We have tried and failed.’

‘It must be done’

‘This doesn’t change your position, of course,’ she continued. ‘The logic is inescapable.’

‘I do not see it.’

‘Think, Josef. See it from my perspective. Soon the Iron Guard will step in and put things right. This weak and backsliding regime will fall. The One Righteous War will recommence with renewed vigour.’

‘With me alongside you, Lavrentina. That is the agreement. It must stand.’

‘But consider this, Josef. How would it be if Krogh makes the connection between you and me? If he can prove it? If he takes this to the Novozhd before we are ready? Surely you see the impossibility of this?’

Kantor watched her steadily. He said nothing.

‘What would you do, Josef?’ she said. ‘In my position?’

He shrugged. ‘It is not complex,’ he said. ‘Krogh must be killed.’

Her eye flickered.

You are transparent to me. You garrulous intoxicated mad old fox-bitch.

‘Nothing is easier than death,’ he said. ‘The more deaths there are, the better for our purpose.’

‘But—’

‘The solution is clear,’ Kantor continued. ‘Krogh must be killed. Of course…’ He looked her in the eye. Held her gaze. ‘If you don’t have the stomach for that, I will do it myself. It doesn’t matter so long as it is done.’

Chazia glared at him.

‘It will be done,’ she said. ‘It’s not a problem.’

‘Thank you,’ said Kantor. ‘Good. Of course, that isn’t why I came to see you.’

‘So why did you come?’

‘I have a couple of requests.’ He smiled. ‘No doubt these also will be no problem.’

Chazia bridled.

‘Be careful, Josef. Don’t go to far. You are not… safe.’

‘No one is safe, Lavrentina. Such is the world. But there are some favours you could do for me.’

‘What?’

‘My former wife, the slut Feiga-Ita.’

Chazia looked at him in surprise. ‘What about her?’

‘Kill her. Kill that bastard daughter of hers too.’

‘I see,’ said Chazia. ‘But… surely you could do this yourself? You have people.’

‘They would want to know why. That would not be helpful.’ Chazia sat back and considered.

‘I see no objection,’ she said eventually. ‘But you will owe me, Josef. The service is not your personal execution squad. Is that all?’

‘No. I want you to take me to the Pollandore. I want to see it.’





31


In Vishnik’s apartment, Lom poured another glass and reached for the file with his own name on it. It was a standard personnel file, tied with ribbon. The registry slip on the front showed it had been referred to Commander Chazia only the day before. The day he had arrived in Mirgorod and seen Krogh. The referring signature was Krogh’s own private secretary.

The file itself contained all the paperwork of an unexceptional career. Good but not brilliant academic achievement. Stalled promotions and rejected applications. The criticisms, complaints and accusations. And one other thing. The earliest document. A letter. Lom read it over and over again until he had it by heart. It was addressed to the Provost of the Podchornok Institute of Truth.


Righteous and Excellent Provost Savinkov

I bow to you deeply from the white of my face to the damp earth, and I commit to your care this boy, gathered in by my artel when, in pursuance of the Forest Extirpation Order, we removed the village and nemeton of Salakhard. The boy does not speak to us, but is believed to be a child of uncouth persons, and consequently now parentless. He is apparently not above six years old, and in all conscience we hesitate to end the life of one so young. But his remaining with us is not by any means practicable. Our orders take us further eastwards, under the trees. Perhaps he may be closed up, in the way you know how, and enfolded in the One Truth? He is yet young.

Your servant,

S V Labin, Captain


Lom leaned back on Vishnik’s couch. Deeply buried memories: first memories, beginnings. He was lying under a tree, a thickened old beech that thrust torsos of root deep into the earth and rose high over his head, spreading its leafhead, casting a pool of blue shade on the spring-green grass. The sun hung above the tree, a moored fiery vessel, and small things moved in the thickets. The air was filled with strong, sour, earthy smells, and he could feel the ground beneath his back. He heard the leaves of trees and bushes moving as if in a wind. He was looking upwards, tracing the boughs of the tree where the trunk bifurcated and reached high into the mass of foliage, the million leaves, fresh and thick, bright with the green liquid fire of sunlight that was pouring through them. The tree was eating light and breathing clouds of perfume.

The perfumed tree-breath was its voice, its chemical tongue. It was speaking to the insect population in its bark and branches, warning and soothing them. It was speaking to its neighbour trees, who answered: tree spoke to tree, out across the endless forest. And it was speaking to him. Psychoactive pheromones drifted through the alveolar forests of his human lungs and the whorled synaptical pathways of his cerebral cortex.

At the institute at Podchornok they’d given the silent boy a name, Vissarion Lom, and all this they had taken from him.

Memory left him. For a while Lom simply sat, tired and empty, thinking of nothing, listening to the evening call of the gulls in the seacoloured sky. Surfacing. It was almost dark when he finally moved. Lom gathered up the files and his notes, put them in the waterproof bag, weighted it with the quayside cobblestone and slipped it into the cistern in the bathroom. He settled down to wait for Vishnik to return. That night they would go to the Crimson Marmot Club. To see Lakoba Petrov.





32


The music got louder with each step down the alleyway. Letters in electric red flickered on and off above a door shut tight against the blowing rain and cold. The Crimson Marmot. Lom pushed the door open. A blast of thick, heated air, tobacco smoke and noise hit his face. Inside was a hot, boiling cauldron of red. Red, the colour of the Vlast, the colour of propaganda, the colour of blood, but also the colour of intimacy and desire. Loud voices shouting into excited faces.

Vishnik led the way through the crowd to a table. A young man was dancing nearby, an absorbed, solitary dance with unseeing eyes. His face was powdered chalky white. As his face caught the light Lom saw a ragged wound scar down his cheek. At the next table a snaggle-bearded man was smoking with his eyes closed. The woman with him looked bored. Her jacket shimmered as if it was silk. She was naked from the waist down. She laughed and drained her glass and got up to dance with the young man with the powdered face, swaying her hips and moving her hands in complicated knots. The young man didn’t notice her. On a bench in the corner a couple were making love.

Lom leaned across to shout in Vishnik’s ear: ‘Who are these people?’

Vishnik shrugged.

‘That doesn’t matter here. They come to leave all that behind. Outside, in the daytime, they are clerks. Waiters. Former persons who used to be lawyers or the wives of generals. But this is the night side, a place without history. They come here for the now of it. Keep raising the level. Another notch. Another glass. Another powder. Here you make the most of your body and anyone else’s you can. Does that shock you?’

‘No,’ said Lom. ‘No. It doesn’t.’ He’d been to places in Podchornok where fat rich men went to get drunk and touch young bodies, but this was different. There was a version of himself that could be comfortable here. He looked around again. Searching the faces. ‘Can you see Petrov? Is he here yet?’

‘No, but it’s still early.’

A waiter brought a bottle of champagne and two glasses. Lom watched him uncork and pour.

‘Relax,’ said Vishnik. ‘Enjoy the evening.’

Lom’s eyes were adjusting to the rich, dim redness of the Marmot’s. The walls were crimson plush and hung with vast gilded mirrors that made the room seem larger than it was. Tables crowded one another in a horseshoe around a central space where dancers moved between people standing in noisy, excitable groups. At the back of the room was a small stage, its heavy curtains closed, and in one corner, musicians played instruments of the new music. Lom recognised some of them: a heckelphone, a lupophone, a bandonion, a glasschord. Others he couldn’t identify. He sipped at the champagne and winced. It was thick, with a metallic perfume.

He’d expected something different of the Crimson Marmot: an art gallery, perhaps, with intense talk and samovars. There was art here, though. Wild, angular sketches on the walls. A larger-than-life humanesque manikin hanging from the ceiling, dressed as a soldier with the head of a bear. A figure, crouched high in the corner, with eight limbs and six pairs of woman’s breasts. Lom realised it was meant to be an angel. It was made out of animal bones, old shoes, leather straps and rubbish. Candles burned in its eyes and a scrawled placard hung from its neck. Motherland. Beneath it, someone had pinned a notice to the wall.

ART IS DEBT! LONG LIFE TO THE MEAT MACHINE ART OF THE FORBAT!

With a crash of drums, the musicians fell silent and the curtain was drawn aside to reveal the small stage. A red banner unfurled. The Neo-emotional Cabaret. An ironic cheer went around the room, and a smattering of applause. Vishnik leaned across to Lom.

‘You’ll like this. This is different. This is new. This is f*cking good.’

On the stage a man was crouching inside a large wooden crate, shouting nonsense words into a tube connected to a megaphone on top of the crate. ‘Zaum! Zaum! Baba-zaum!’ he chanted. The musicians hacked away with atonal enthusiasm. Lom caught some longer phrases of almost-coherent verse.


Wake up, you scoundrel self-abusers!

Materialists! Bread eaters! Mirgorod is a cliff –

bare snow in banked-up drifts – daybreak.

Winter’s late dawn – worn out – shivering –

descends the river like smallpox.


Lom was relieved when it finished. The curtain closed and the band struck up again. Pink spotlights lit the dance floor. Lom hadn’t noticed the dancer enter, but she was there. Her breasts were bare and she wore a long flickering skirt, divided to give her legs room for movement. The dancer’s body was thin and muscular, her breasts small and narrow, her black hair cut short, and she danced fast and thoughtlessly, shouting and jerking to the music, advancing towards the audience and then retreating with a shrug. Pleasing herself. Not trying. Just doing.

And then, to cheers and applause, she was gone. Most of the band stood up and went to the bar, leaving the glasschord player alone to unwind some kind of drifting, song-like melody.

Vishnik took him by the arm and whispered in his ear, ‘Petrov’s come. At the table by the bar. The green shirt.’

Lom looked across to where a group of men were listening to a large bearded fellow talking loudly, his wet red mouth working, banging the table with his fist to punctuate his periods. Petrov was a silent bundle of energy in a corner seat, staring with obvious resentment at the talker. Lom studied him carefully. He was all wild, dark curly hair, a long sharp nose and dark eyes, wide and round, full of passionate need and intelligence and a crazed, intent sort of anger. His lips, pressed tight together, were full and almost bruised-looking. He looked as if someone had punched him and he was trying not to cry. When he leaned back in his chair, as if he was trying to get further away from the bearded shouter, his loose green shirt gaped open halfway to his waist, revealing the white, almost skeletal bone structure of his upper chest.

‘Take me over, can you?’ said Lom. ‘I want to talk to him.’

Vishnik picked up the half-empty champagne bottle and the glasses and went across. Lom followed. Some of the men at the table nodded. The beard ignored them. So did Petrov.

‘The city as a whole,’ Beard was saying in a deep, resonant voice, ‘is instinct with energising power. It inspires me. The more marches and strikes and riots – the more confrontation – the better it is for art. The agitation in the squares and factories is like the revving of the engines of the vehicles in the street. It provides heart. It is marvellous. Wonderful. I must have it, at all times, in order to work. It’s the fuel my motor burns.’

Beard paused to take a drink.

‘Did you hear?’ said the young man with the powdered face ‘The Novozhd has said that from now on all his rallies will be held after dark. Isn’t that perfect? It is already evening across the Vlast. Midnight! The Novozhd is an artist himself, though he won’t admit it.’

Beard spluttered.

‘The Novozhd! Do you know what he said about my picture of Lake Tsyrkhal?’ He stared around the table, daring them to speak. ‘I made the water yellow and black, and this is what the Novozhd said: As a hunter, I know that Lake Tsyrkhal is not like that. So now he forbids us to use colours which are different from those perceived by the normal eye. What is the point, I ask you, of a painter with a normal eye? Any idiot can see what’s normal. But do I fear this Novozhd? No!’

‘Does he fear you, Briakh?’ said Petrov fiercely, uncoiling from the tense crouch he’d wound himself into. He was nursing a small glass of something thick and dark. ‘Does the Novozhd fear you? Isn’t that the question? I think he does not.’

Briakh glared at him.

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning your paintings are nothing. All our paintings are nothing. This club is nothing. It’s not even so much shit on his boots, so far as the Novozhd cares. We’re only still here because he hasn’t noticed us yet.’

‘He put three of my pictures in his Exhibition of Degenerate Art. Three.’

‘They get people to laugh at us, that’s all. It’s a distraction. Do you think the Novozhd lies awake at night because you made Lake Tsyrkhal black and yellow?’

Powdered Face giggled. ‘The most perfect shape,’ he quoted, ‘the sublimest image that has ever been created didn’t come out of any artist’s studio: it is the infantryman’s steel helmet. The artists ought to be tied up next to their pictures so every citizen can spit in their faces.’

Briakh ignored him. He was staring at Petrov.

‘And you, Petrov?’ he said. ‘Is the Novozhd scared of you? How many of your pictures does he have in his exhibition?’

‘Painting’s finished,’ said Petrov quietly. ‘I told you. There will be a new art. And he will know my name soon enough. He will know Petrov by his works. You all will. Yes, he should fear me.’

‘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.

‘F*ck 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, set 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 f*ck 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.’