In Levrovskaya Square the gendarmes drew their revolvers and moved towards Lom and Maroussia. Lom considered the position. All the angles. Staying calm, staying relaxed. Assess and evaluate. Think and plan. Like he’d been trained to do. It took him a second. Maybe a second and a half.
The misting rain softened edges and blurred distances. He felt in his face and across his shoulders the weight of massive slabs of high cold air sliding in off the sea. The temperature was dropping. Freezing cold snagged at the back of his throat and in his nose. His visible breath flickered. Tiny vanishing ghosts. Stone slabs slick and slippery underfoot. The Marinsky-Voksal Terminus was a double row of tram stops, low raised platforms under wrought-iron canopies. Tramcars were pulled up at three of them, including the one they’d arrived at, and waiting passengers crowded at the other three. Beyond the terminus, Marinsky Square was a grumbling tangle of traffic, street sellers and pedestrians.
Lom wasn’t too worried about the four gendarmes pressed in close around them. Gendarmes, with their uniforms of thick green serge, their shiny peaked caps, polished leather belts and buttoned-down holsters, were street police: efficient enough at traffic and checkpoints and petty crime, but not used to serious trouble. They carried 7.62mm Vagants: heavy service revolvers, the seven-cartridge cylinder unconverted single-action version. Lom had carried a Vagant himself for three years and he’d never liked it: loud and clumsy, with a wild kick, a Vagant made a nasty mess at close range, but it was hopelessly inaccurate over more than ten yards.
These four weren’t the problem. The problem was the other fourman patrols at the other five tram halts and the VKBD truck pulled up at the kerb twenty yards away, two men in the cab and an unknown number in the back. Shit. They shouldn’t have stayed on the tram till the end of the line. They should have got off at some suburban stop and walked in. He’d made a mistake. The only thing now was to get out of Marinsky Square as quickly as possible with the minimum number of police in tow. Maroussia had seen that quicker than he had. Second mistake of the day. Wake up. This is serious.
Maroussia was standing silent, upright and fierce, waiting while the gendarmes briefly debated their next move. The one who’d spotted them wanted to take them across to the VKBD truck, but the corporal vetoed it.
‘I’m calling it in myself. We’ll get no thanks from Vryushin if the VKBD gets credit for this. Take them across to the section office. Quickly, no fuss, before anyone notices what’s going on. Move. Now.’
They split into pairs, two walking ahead with Maroussia between them, the corporal and the other one following with Lom. They didn’t wait to search him. Traffic cops.
But the corporal stayed ten feet behind him with his Vagant aimed at the small of Lom’s back. It was efficient enough. Lom might have got away, perhaps, but he couldn’t see a way to take Maroussia with him, so for the moment he rode with it. Things could have been worse. Perhaps.
Something else nagged at him. He couldn’t shake a small insistent pressure at the back of his neck. The familiar feeling that he was being watched.
Two floors above the street on the other side of Marinsky Square, Antoninu Florian crouched on the sill of a bricked-up window, enfolded by scarves of rain-mist drifting down off the roof slates. He licked the living moisture from his upper lip and savoured it on his tongue, sharing with it the city, the engine fumes and sweat and the dark strong silt-green surge of the living River Mir. The mist tasted of fires not yet burning and blood not yet spilled, traces of the passing touch of the living angel in the forest. But there was also the bright sharp resinous hint of something good, scents of earth and green currents stirring: all morning Florian had been following the trail of it, and now with yellow-flecked eyes he watched the woman who mattered walking between policemen. And he watched the man who was with her. He gripped them with the teeth of his gaze, sifting their particular scents out of the city tumult.
The man who was with the woman was spilling bright shining communication, all unawares. Florian could have found him a mile away in a dark forest at night in a thunderstorm, and the man did not even know it. Though he did have some vague sense of Florian’s presence: Florian watched him hesitate and look around. But the man did not look up. Nor did the police look up. They never looked up. Not until they learned. If they ever did.
Experimentally, Florian shifted and adjusted the bone structure of his face. Slid musculature into new places under warm sleeves of flesh. His hair moved like leaves under water. He tested thickness and shade, melatonin and refraction. It was enough. He was confident. When the woman and the man and the four policemen had passed beneath him, Florian leaped down from the second-floor ledge, landing lightly on all fours on rain-skinned cobbles, rose up and followed.