Part 10 (1/2)

Lom didn't want to approach him in his office. Better to do it in the evening, at home. Pus.h.i.+ng his winning streak for one last throw, he scouted around for a Mirgorod residential telephone directory. He found it. And Pavel Antimos was in it. Lom memorised the address. It was a tenuous lead but the only one he had.

Pull on a thread. See where it takes me.

Just like the old days.

8.

Maroussia Shaumian feels small beyond insignificance. The trees spread around her in all directions, numberless, featureless and utterly bleak. A still, engulfing, unending tide of blankness. The skin between her and the forest is permeable: she wants to spill out into it, a scent cloud dispersing under the branch-head canopy. The forest tugs and nags at the edges of her. Pieces of her snag on the trees and pull free.

She is walking again. Walking.

When it rains the rain clags the mud and makes the forest hiss and whisper. Mud clumps and drags and weighs on her boots. Every time it rains the rain gets colder and there are fewer leaves on the trees. Winter seems coming too soon, but she has boots and blankets and she will be OK.

Towards the end of the day she finds a dry rise of ground and a heavy oak tree, half fallen, its root ma.s.s torn from the earth. With her axe she hacks off some branches, props them against the fallen tree's side and weaves thinner stem-lengths through to make strong, shallow, sloping walls. When the walls are solid she heaps leaves on top, pile on pile, until it swells, a natural earthy rising of the ground, skinned with leaves an arm's length deep, at one end a low dark mouth. She rests another layer of branches across the outside, for the weight of them, to hold the leaves in place, and crawls inside, dragging more leaves after her, the driest she has found. Spreads them deep across the ground and packs the far end until she has a narrow earth-smelling tunnel scarcely wide enough to lie in. With more leaf-heavy branches she makes a door to pull in place behind her.

She works quickly but the light is failing.

The forest is too dark to see beyond the fire circle but she feels its presence. Trees rolling without end or limit, their roots under the earth all touching and knotting together, root whispering to root as branch brushes against branch. Connected, watchful, they merge and make one thing, the largest animal in the world. Night-waking. Watchful. It knows she is there.

There are stars in the gaps between branches, and a deeper purple-green s.h.i.+ning blackness.

Maroussia crawls into the enclosing darkness of her leaf-and-branch coc.o.o.n. Her hiding, her little burial, her dream time, her forgetting. Deep beneath her in the earth the fine tangled roots sift and slide and touch each other. They whisper.

The shelter has its own quiet whispering too, a barely audible s.h.i.+fting and settling, the outer layer flickering and feathering in the night breeze. She hears the rustle and tick of small thingswoodlice, spiders, miceburrowing in the canopy. The shelter absorbs her, mothering, nurturing. Hiding her away.

The blanket is wrapped tight around her, rough against her face. Knees pulled up tight against her belly, feet pressed against the solid weight of her pack, head pillowed on her arms, she breathes with her mouth, shallow, slow breaths. Breathing the warmth of her own breath. The smell of leaves and earth and moss. Woodsmoke in the blanket and in her clothes and hair.

This isn't right. This isn't what I meant at all.

She is a rim of troubled consciousness encircling immensities without and immensities within. Sustaining it hurts. Her fragility and capacity for fracture terrify her.

A hand of fear in the darkness covers her face so it is hard to breathe. Fear grasps her heart inside her chest and squeezes out breath. Everything inside her is tight. Tight like wires. The trees she cannot see in the night p.r.i.c.kle with the same fear. She wants to dig herself into the ground and be buried.

One break and I could lose myself for ever.

The Pollandore speaks its presence softly all the time, a voice inside her that sounds like it is outside, whispering dangerous promises. It swells and grows. The s.p.a.ces inside her are as measureless as the forest and less human. Maroussia-Pollandore holds the green wall shut: the forest is withdrawn from its borders and does not leak. It holds no traffic with the human world, not any more. She feels the human world grow hard and quick and dying, and she is the engine of that. She is the separation and the holding back. She is the border patrol.

I wanted the opposite of this. I chose to open the world not close it. This is not me. My name is Maroussia Shaumian. When the angel in the forest is gone, then I can go home.

All she has to do is keep on walking. Keep it clear and simple, that is all she has to do. Be hard and strong and clever, and somehow she will keep the darkness from her. Somehow she will do that.

Trees in the forest walk, but slowly, year by year. Inching.

She will outrun them yet.

9.

Lom had never heard birdsong in Mirgorod before. Never smelled new-cut lawn.

The lindens on the street where Pavel Ilich Antimos lived must have been planted fully grown. The fragrant asphalt, the raked gravel, the clipped laurels, they were all fresh out of the box, but those late-afternoon-sun-kindled shade-breathing linden trees would have taken fifty years to reach the height they were. They cast a kind of quiet privacy over Voronetsin Heights that made you feel like an intruder, just being in the road.

Atom House, the residence of Pavel Ilich Antimos, was a low-rise apartment building in walled grounds. A pleasant low-key fortress. The gate in the wall was wrought iron, painted to a gleam like broken coal. Lom watched the block for fifteen minutes. He saw domestic staff and deliveries checking in and out; wives coming back from shopping; children being driven home from school. The gate opened for them and closed behind them, and no way was the woman in the kiosk going to open that gate, not unless she knew you or you had an appointment and you were in her book.

Thus lived the Listthe managers, the lawyers, the officials, the financiers and architects and engineers of Rizhin Landspending different currency in different stores.

Lom went round the corner out of sight of the kiosk, jumped to hook his fingers on the coping ridge, hauled himself up till he could scrabble over the wall and dropped on the other side. The soft earth of a rose bed. A quiet formal garden in the slanting sun.

Pavel's apartment was at the end of a short corridor, top floor back. It felt like an afterthought in the building. Single occupancy, one of the less expensive units, not a family home. Lom hoped so. He didn't want to find Pavel's wife at home. Or children. That would complicate things. The only other door in the pa.s.sage was a cleaner's storeroom. Lom checked it. Empty. Smelling of bleach and musty mops.

He knocked on Pavel's door, brisk and businesslike. The door felt solid. His knocking sounded dull and didn't carry. There was no bell push.

He knocked again.

'Hi!' he called. 'Residence Antimos! Is someone at home? Open please!'

n.o.body came. No matter how long he stared at it, the door stayed shut. It had a solid Levitan deadbolt lock, heavier than was normal for domestic use and fitted upside down to make it more awkward to pick.

Lom had spent his time productively since leaving the ProVlastKult library that morning. From a dusty shop by the Wieland Station (broken clocks and watches on velvet pads in the window) he'd bought a basic lock-picking kit: a C-rake, a tension wrench and short hook, all wrapped in a convenient canvas roll. He'd also acquired a neat small black rubber cosh in a silk sheath, with a plaited cord lanyard. The cosh was expensive but the proprietor sewed an extra pocket for him in his jacket sleeve. No extra cost. You had to know how to ask.

He popped the Levitan deadbolt without too much trouble. The door was solid hardwood a couple of inches thick. It took weight to open it.

'Hi,' he called again quietly. 'Pavel, old friend? Are you there?'

The place was cool and dim and still and obviously empty. Lom stepped inside, pulled the door shut behind him and relocked it. On the inside it was fitted with two heavy bolts and a chain. Lom looked around. It was a single man's apartment: kitchen, bathroom, sitting room with one armchair and a desk, a bedroom with a single bed. Pavel didn't get many visitors obviously. Didn't seem to spend much time at home at all.

Lom moved from room to room. Everything was neat. Possessions carefully put away. There was a phonogram cabinet in the sitting room, the lid closed. A shelf of recordings arranged in alphabetical order of composer. On a low gla.s.s-topped table with splayed tapering legs Pavel had stacked some literary magazinesNew Cosmos, The Forward Viewand three days' worth of newspapers, crisply folded. In the bedroom there were books, also carefully arranged, the spines unbroken, on a low shelf under the window. The food in the kitchen was brightly coloured packages and tinsfruit juice, condensed milk, rye bread, caviarall high quality List Shop brands.

There was something about Pavel's apartment that was odd. It took Lom a moment to realise what it was. Nothing in the whole place was personal: nothing was old or well used or could possibly have had sentimental value. The pressed dark suits, the careful ties, the white s.h.i.+rts folded in drawers, the carpets, the curtains, the coverlet on the bed, the gramophone recordings of new composers singled out for favour by the Academy of Transformational Artistic Production (chairman, Osip Rizhin). Pavel had kept nothing that was made before the inception of the New Vlast. Nothing that deviated from post-war cultural norms. Pavel had accepted Rizhin's world utterly, immersed himself in it, acquired with the obsessiveness of a connoisseur the top-rank artefacts of its material culture and surrounded himself with them. This was the apartment of an exemplary fellow, New Vlast Man to the core, from whose life all vestiges of the past had been removed with surgical thoroughness. Pavel was a chameleon, a caddis fly. He raised the art of blending in to new pinnacles of ruthless ostentation.

In a drawer of Pavel's desk Lom found a travel agent's confirmation of a booking for onetwo weeks at the Tyaroga Resort Hotel on the Chernomorskoy Sea, single-berth rail sleeper included. He also found a carton of small-calibre sh.e.l.ls and a diminutive pistol. A Deineka 5-shot Personal Defender. It looked like it had never been fired.

Lom loaded the gun, slipped a round into the chamber and put it in his pocket. Then he went into the kitchen, opened a packet of Pavel's Oksetian Sunrise coffee, filled Pavel's coffee pot and put it on Pavel's stove. When the pot hissed and bubbled he poured himself a cup, picked up a book from the kitchen counter and went back into the other room to wait for Pavel to come home. The window was slightly open, letting in a stir of warm early-evening air. The quiet sound of distant traffic. Liquid blackbird song.

The book from Pavel's kitchen was the Mikoyan Inst.i.tute's Home Course of Delicious and Healthy Food. Lom flicked through the pages to pa.s.s the time. Monochrome photographic plates displayed smiling family faces and crowded tables: meat loaf canapes filled with piped mayonnaise; bottles of sparkling Vlastskoye Sektwine and s.h.i.+ning crystal goblets; a platter of pike in aspic decorated with radish rosettes. There were recipes for crab and cuc.u.mber salad; vinaigrette of beetroot, cabbage and red potato; crunchy pork cutlets; mutton aubergine claypot. Papa Rizhin himself had provided a foreword. 'The special character of our New Vlast,' it began, 'is the joyousness of our prosperous and cultured style of life.' There were no grease spots on the herb-green cloth binding. No spills. No stuck-together pages. Pavel didn't have any favourite recipes then. Pavel Ilich Antimos would eat them all with equal relish. Anything that Papa Rizhin recommends. Lom looked at his watch. It was well past six o'clock. He hoped Pavel wasn't working late or dining out.

Lom got another coffee and occupied himself with the pictures on Pavel's walls. The pictures people put on their walls told you as much about them as their booksmore, because they were meant to be seen. This is what I like. This is my mind. This is who you should think I am. Pavel's visual world was framed prints advertising exhibitions of art promoted by the Office for Progressive Cultural Enlightenment. He'd probably picked them up free at work. There was a jewel-bright painting of a Mirgorod Airways Skyliner over snow-capped mountains. Dancers in a town square. The storm-beset factory s.h.i.+p VV Karamazov riding gla.s.s-green churning foam-flecked waters under a purple thunder-riven sky (Recall Our Heroic Sailors of the Merchant Marine!). Pride of place went to a large colourised photograph of the Vlast Universal Vessel Proof of Concept climbing on a column of fire into a cloud-wisped sky.