Lom was in a cell in the local gendarme station down a side street just off Marinsky Square. It was barely a cell at all, more of a windowless cupboard: brick walls painted a pale sickly green, worn linoleum lifting from a concrete floor; it was hardly big enough for the table and two chairs. The door was plain, unpainted wood, panelled, not solid, with a standard domestic lock. There was a single caged lamp in the ceiling. They still hadn’t searched him; they’d locked him in without a word; they weren’t interested in him. Maroussia had been taken to another room. But somebody would come in the end. Somebody always did.
He climbed on the table, unhooked the lamp cage and smashed the bulb, plunging the room into darkness, then climbed back down, felt his way to the door and took up a position beside it, back against the wall. The darkness inside the room would give him half a second. Whoever came would hesitate. Wonder if they’d come to the wrong cell. Then caution and alarm would kick in, but not immediately. He would have half a second at least, and that would be all he needed.
He waited, but nobody came. The narrow line of brightness seeping under the door was the only light. Somewhere in the distance a door slammed shut.
He’d noticed on the way in that the station was almost deserted. Everyone who could be spared was out on the streets. He thought about that. The whole of the city centre was locked down and under surveillance. It couldn’t possibly be all for him and Maroussia. Something else was happening. Something bigger. He listened for footsteps coming down the corridor but none came. A muffled telephone rang three times and broke off. That and his breathing and the quickened beating of his heart were the only sounds he could hear. He focused all his attention on the corridor on the other side of the door. Ready for the sound of the key in the lock. The handle beginning to move.
The air in the room was warm and thick and oppressively close. All interrogation rooms smelled the same: the acrid tang of disinfectant failing to mask the faint stale sweetness of vomit and urine and sweat. Lom had been in cells like this one many times before. For years, when he was an investigator of police in Podchornok, such rooms had been comfortable spaces for him. They were his working environment, a place to do what he did well: uncovering truth, extracting truth, the skilled and delicate practice of peeling back surfaces, evasions, pretences, assertions, lies.
In Podchornok Lom had considered himself a subtle, accomplished interrogator. He’d admired himself for his delicacy of touch. He didn’t use the crude and brutal techniques that many of his colleagues used. He’d never done that. Well, hardly ever, and only when urgently necessary. He used to think that his tools were persistence, empathy, imagination, patience and preparation. He had a nose for the hidden core of fact and an instinct for the detours and false constructions people used to obscure it. Everybody left traces. Lom used to think he was clever. Perceptive. He’d never realised, it had simply never dawned on him, not in Podchornok, that the tool he used–the only effective tool in his box–was fear. When prisoners looked up as he stepped into the interrogation room, they never saw Lom the sympathetic, imaginative man, the disinterested investigator nosing for facts. All they saw–all there was to see, because that’s all he was–was an avatar of fear. A black serge uniform, belt and boots and antler buttons polished, a sliver of angel flesh in his forehead; the cropped fair hair and frank blue eyes of a man who could, if he chose, at his own inclination, break their bodies and break their families, break their careers and break their lives. They’d sweated and felt sick while they waited for him to come, and when he did come they all wanted to piss themselves and some of them did. And he had done that to them, not by what he said or what he did–not often–but simply by being what he was: not a man with a job to do, but an expression of the Vlast in human form.
You couldn’t be a man who happened to be a policeman. Not in the Vlast. You could cling, in the stories you told yourself about yourself, to the evasions, the illusions, the fictions of somebody drawing interior lines, keeping it clean: that could be how you saw yourself, but it wasn’t what you were. What a prisoner saw when you walked into the interrogation cell, that and only that, that was what you were. All those dead and wasted years in Podchornok that’s what he had been, Vissarion Yppolitovich Lom the unselfconscious torturer, excavating truth with fear. Vissarion Lom, one of Chazia’s men.
Until Chazia herself had left him waiting in an interrogation cell. Lavrentina Chazia, who–when she’d come at last–had used that angel worm glove thing to slither around inside his mind, rummaging about, turning him inside out, pulling out half-known intimate private things. Lom flinched at the memory of having her inside his mind. It had been… disgusting. And she had dug into his skull with a blade, prising the lozenge of angel flesh from his forehead while Josef Kantor stood behind her. Kantor had leaned in for a closer look. Is that the brain in there? Kantor had said, probing the bleeding, kopek-sized hole with his finger. Firmer than I’d have thought.
Lom was surprised to find that he felt almost no antagonism towards Josef Kantor. Kantor was cruel and murderous and charming, and no doubt in the end a more lethal enemy than Chazia was, but in some way that troubled Lom even as it half-seduced him, Kantor was–Lom struggled with the word, but it was true–Kantor, at least as Lom had seen him, was honest. Kantor had become completely what he had chosen to be. He was all of something, like an animal was all of what it was. Lom felt in some odd way a bond with Josef Kantor. Kantor was his adversary, still. For some reason that he couldn’t explain to himself, Lom felt he had not laid down the task of hunting him. But he didn’t hate him.
Chazia, though, Chazia was unwholesome. She was one thing on the surface and another thing inside. Lom had looked up the public details of her record once, and found nothing there except ordinariness: the ordinary successes and advancements of an assiduous career. She had risen smoothly from comfortable family beginnings to the top of her profession. The sickness and poison that Lom had smelled on her breath in that interrogation room and seen breaking out in dark patches on her skin, that came from nowhere, that was all her own. She was unfeedable hunger, unsatisfiable desire. She would draw and draw on power and pain and never be full. It was Chazia who was responsible for what he had been in Podchornok, Chazia who had wormed his mind, Chazia who had sent men for Maroussia and for him, Chazia who had sent the men who killed his friends… With Chazia, Lom felt a different sort of bond. Unfinished business of a different kind.
Don’t think about this. Not now.
Outside in the street Antoninu Florian took off his astrakhan hat and combed the thin fine blond hair on his head. His overcoat was too large on the slight frame of the body shape he was using. He undid the buttons to let it hang loose so it wouldn’t show. When he was ready, he strode up the steps and into the gendarme office. Closing the outer doors carefully behind him. Slipping the bolt quietly into place.
The desk clerk looked up in surprise. Recognised him. Registered a reflex of alarm. Stood straighter and tugged at his necktie.
‘Captain Iliodor!’ he said. ‘We weren’t expecting you. We weren’t told—’
‘No,’ said Florian quietly. ‘Not Iliodor. I am so sorry.’