Lom pulled the envelope from the back of the bloody couch and ripped it open. It contained a sheaf of glossy monochrome photographic prints. He shuffled through them quickly. He knew what they were. Vishnik’s Pollandore moments, the photographs taken with his beloved Kono on his long wanderings around Mirgorod. Photographs of moments when the world broke open and new things were possible. He’d kept them safe at the cost of his life.
Lom sat back, flooded with disappointment.
‘There’s nothing new here,’ he said. ‘We’ve seen all this before.’
‘Maybe he saw something else in them,’ said Maroussia. ‘Something specific. Something we missed.’
‘It’s possible,’ said Lom. ‘I guess.’
‘So let’s have another look.’
Maroussia spread the photographs out on the floor and they went through them together. Most were gentle, beautiful images, full of an oblique magic: sunlight on a street corner, ripples in a pool of rain, the way light caught the moss on a tree. Some were passionate, dramatic, apocalyptic even: the curtain torn aside, the whole of the city ripping open at the seams. The people in them knew what was happening to them. They looked into Vishnik’s lens, their mouths open as if they were laughing, their faces filled with ecstatic joy.
Sorting through the pictures, Lom felt a sharp pang of loss. He felt the loss of Vishnik, and also of the city as Vishnik had seen it. Vishnik’s Mirgorod was beautiful: these things happened and were perhaps still happening, somewhere in the city, but Lom had never seen them. For him too the city had opened to show him glimpses, possibilities, but he saw blank-faced buildings, a tower half a mile high crowned with an immense brutal statue of Josef Kantor, the Square of the Piteous Angel crowded with grey withdrawn people, their downturned faces, their drab whispering voices. A future crushed under the weight of its own fear, far heavier even than the weight of the Vlast today. Kantor’s future. Chazia’s future. It had to be stopped, and if he could stop it he would. Maroussia’s way, or his way.
Maroussia picked up a handful of photographs from the pile.
‘These are new,’ she said. ‘I haven’t seen these before.’
‘Show me,’ said Lom.
He went through them one by one. A couple walked naked on the surface of a river, the river glowing with an inward radiant light. A giant stood on a harbour side, silhouetted against the sky, his hair rising in a cloud around his head. A parade marched down a street towards the lens, only the street was above the rooftops and wrapped in chimney smoke and the people carried blazing candelabras and some of them were only heads and had no bodies at all. They were exhilarating, uncanny pictures, but they added nothing. No help at all.
‘Maybe if we knew where they were taken?’ said Lom. ‘Vishnik had notes, but without them… It would take us days to find all these places. Weeks.’
Maroussia slipped her hand inside the couch, feeling around towards the top of the backrest.
‘Wait,’ she said. ‘There’s something else in here. Hang on… yes!’
She pulled it out and held it up. A large map, printed on thin paper and folded to make a compact packet, the creases strengthened with strips of glued linen.
‘That’s more like it,’ said Lom.
Lom cleared a space on the floor and they laid it out flat. The map was a standard large-scale street plan of Mirgorod, but Vishnik had made marks all over it. Hundreds of small circles in black pencil. The pattern was instantly discernible: a few outliers in the outer quarters, growing denser towards the centre of the city. The marks clustered most thickly at a point on the River Mir where it made an elbow-bend southwards and the Yekaterina Canal joined it.
‘It’s the Lodka,’ said Maroussia. ‘The Pollandore is in the Lodka.’
The Lodka. The stone heart and cerebral cortex of the Vlast. The immense island building, the thousand-windowed palace of bureaucracy, the labyrinth of linoleum-floored corridors, entranceless courtyards, stairwells without stairs. The offices of uncountable clerks and archivists and diplomats and secret police. The basement cells, the killing rooms, the mortuary. Vishnik had traced the Pollandore to there.
Lom refolded the map, scooped up the photographs, stuffed the whole lot back into the envelope and gave it to Maroussia.
‘Take it,’ he said. ‘We need to get moving. We’ve been here too long.’
She pushed the envelope into her carpet bag and they hurried out of the apartment, Maroussia first, then Lom hustling the dvornik ahead of him. At the bottom of the stairs they turned left into the narrow entrance hall and walked straight into two militia men coming the other way, 9mm Blok 15 parabellums in their hands.