My age, my predatory beast–
who will look you in the eye
and with their own blood mend
the centuries’ smashed-up vertebrae?
Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938)
Vasilisk the bodyguard, six foot three and deeply tanned and sleek with sun oil, naked but for sky-blue trunks, runs five springing steps on his toes, takes to the air and executes a long perfect dive. Enters the pool with barely a splash, swims twelve easy lengths, hauls out in a single smooth movement and lies stretched out on a towel–blue towel laid on perfect white poolside tiles–in the warmth of the morning sun.
He lies on his back with eyes half closed, arms spread wide to embrace the sun, the beautiful killer at rest, empty of thought, breathing the scent of almonds. His slicked yellow hair glistens, his firm honey-brown stomach is beaded with water jewels. Through damp eyelashes he watches blue shimmer.
The pool is filled with water and sunlight. The surface glitters.
A warm breeze stirs the fine pale hairs on his chest.
A dragonfly, lapis lazuli, fat as his little finger, flashes out of the rose bushes, disturbed by a quiet footfall in the garden. The chink of glass against glass.
A housemaid with a tray of iced tea.
Vasilisk the bodyguard, blond and beautiful, half asleep, listens without intent to the bees among the mulberries, the shriek and laughter from the tennis court, the pock pock pock of the ball, the sway of trees on the hillside that sounds like the sea.
The sky overhead is a bowl of blue. Brushstroke cloud-wisps. Vasilisk closes his eyes and watches the drift of warm orange light across translucent skin.
Far away down the mountain a car drops a gear, engine racing to attack a steep climb. The sound is tiny with distance.
Lukasz Kistler’s sleek ZorKi Zavod limousine took the corniche along the Karima coast, purring effortlessly, a steady sixty-five, glinting under the southern sun. Two and a half tons of engine power, bulging wheel arches, running boards, mirrors and fins.
The road was a dynamited ledge, hairpins and sudden precarious fallings-away. The mountains of the Silion Massif plunged to the edge of the sea: bare cliffs and steep slopes of black cypress; sun-sharpened jagged ridges and crisp high peaks, snow-capped even in summer. And always to the right and hundreds of feet below, the white strip of sand and the sea itself, discovered by glittering light, a tranquil and brilliant horizonless blue.
This was the favoured country: sun-warmed Karima rich in climate and soil, with its own little private ocean. Karima of the islands and the hidden valleys. Karima of the flowering trees, hibiscus, tea plantations, vineyards and orange groves. Karima of the white-columned sanatoriums in the wooded hills and on the curving quiet of the bays. Rest-cure Karima. Union-funded convalescent homes for the paragons of sacrificial labour in olive and lemon and watermelon country: the bed-ridden propped under rugs in their windows to watch the sea, the ambulatory at backgammon and skat under striped awnings. Secluded private hotels with balcony restaurants (LIST ROUBLES ONLY ACCEPTED). Resort Karima. Twenty-mile coastal ribbons of pastel-blue concrete dormitories for the ten-day family vacations of seven-day-week leading workers. War never touched Karima. The Archipelago never got there, neither bombers nor troops nor cruisers nor submarines. Civil war was fought elsewhere. Karima was never hurt at all.
The municipal authorities of Karima made the most of the annual Dacha Summer of the Central Committee. The road to Rizhin’s Krasnaya Polyana, Dacha Number Nine at Zusovo, was remade fresh each year: the velvet shimmer of asphalt, the gleam of undented steel crash barriers.
The limousine tyres hissed quietly. The driver dropped a gear and slowed into a hairpin switchback, and the turn brought Kistler suddenly face to face with the biggest portrait of Papa Rizhin he’d ever seen: two hundred feet high, surely, and the benevolent smiling countenance outlined with scarlet neon tubes, burning bright against the cliff face even in the noonday light.
ALL KARIMA LOYALLY WELCOMES OUR GENERALISSIMUS!
Lukasz Kistler had his own dacha, a white-gabled lodge in the Koromantine style tucked in among black cypresses a mile or so from Krasnaya Polyana. They all did–Gribov, Yashina and the rest–all except Rond, who travelled with his staff and had rooms in Rizhin’s place. No vacation for the assiduous Colonel Hunder Rond.
Studded timber gates opened at Kistler’s approach. The car entered a rough-walled unlit tunnel cut through solid mountain and ten minutes later emerged into sunlight and the courtyard of Krasnaya Polyana, a sprawling low green mansion on the brink of a sheer cliff.
The sun-roofed verandas of Dacha Number Nine looked out across the sea. Some previous occupant had planted the gardens with mulberry, cherry, almonds and acacia. Tame flightless cranes and ornamental ducks for the boating lake. Rizhin had added tennis courts, skittles, a shooting range. Papa Rizhin holidayed seriously.
Kistler found Rizhin himself in expansive mood, rigged out in gleaming white belted tunic and knee-length soft boots, Karima-fashion, paunch neat and round, hair brushed back thick and lustrous in the sunshine. He seemed taller. Mountain air suited him. The bullet scar on his cheek, still puckered and raw, gave his long pockmarked face a permanent lopsided grin. A show of white ivory teeth.
‘Lukasz! You came!’ Rizhin clapped him on the shoulder. ‘So we haven’t arrested you yet? Still not shot? Good. Come and see Gribov playing tennis in his jacket and boots, it’s the most comical thing–everyone is laughing. But he wins, Lukasz! He plays like a firebrand. What a man this Gribov is.’
They linked arms like brothers and walked around the edge of the lake.
‘Zorgenfrey came up yesterday from Anaklion,’ said Rizhin, ‘and completely fixed my teeth. No pain at all. Why can’t we have such dentists in Mirgorod? The Karima sanatoriums get the best of everything. Yet he tells me he can’t get his daughter into Rudnev-Possochin. He wants her to study medicine but the university puts up no end of obstructions. We must do something there. Talk to them for me, Lukasz. Iron the wrinkles out.’
‘Leave it with me, Osip,’ said Kistler. ‘I’ll take care of it.’
There were twenty-four at dinner: the Central Committee, Rizhin’s bodyguards Bauker and Vasilisk, uncomfortable and self-conscious (‘Come,’ said Rizhin. ‘We’re all family here.’) and silent, watchful Hunder Rond. They ate roasted lamb in a thick citrus sauce. Sliced tomatoes, cherries and pears. Red wine and grappa. Rizhin kept the glasses filled, and after dinner there was singing and dancing.
Bauker and Vasilisk pushed the table to the side of the room and rolled back the carpet. Rizhin presided over the gramophone, playing arias from light operas and ribald comic songs. He led the singing with his fine tenor voice. The bodyguards circulated, refilling glasses.
‘Dance!’ said Rizhin. ‘Dance!’ He put on ‘Waltz of the Southern Lakes’ three times in a row, loud as the machine would go. The men danced with other men or jigged on the spot alone. Yashina, tall and gaunt, twirled on her spiky heels, arms upraised, face a mask of serious concentration. Gribov went to take her in his arms, and when she ignored him he pulled out a handkerchief and danced with it the country way, stamping and shouting like the peasant he used to be. He lunged at Kistler, breathing grappa fumes. Kistler ducked out of his way.
‘Osip!’ shouted Gribov. ‘Osip! Put on the one with dogs!’
‘What’s this about dogs?’ said Marina Trakl, the new Secretary for Agriculture, red-faced. She was very drunk. ‘Are there dogs? I adore dogs!’
‘These are dogs that sing,’ said Gribov. He started to dance with her.
‘Then let us have singing dogs!’ Marina Trakl grinned, snatching Gribov’s handkerchief and waving it in the air.
‘Of course,’ said Rizhin. ‘Whatever you say.’ He changed the record to Bertil Hofgarten’s ‘Ball of the Six Merry Dogs’. When the dogs came in on the second chorus Rizhin started hopping and yelping himself, face twisted in a lopsided beatific smile. Kistler hadn’t seen Rizhin so full of drink. Normally he left the aquavit and the grappa to the others and watched.
‘Come on, you fellows!’ called Rizhin, dancing. ‘Bark with me! Bark!’
One by one, led by Gribov, the members of the Central Committee pumped their elbows and put back their heads and howled like hounds and bitches at the broken moons.
‘Yip! Yip! Yip! A-ruff ruff ruff! Wah-hoo!’
‘Come on, Rond!’ yelled Rizhin. ‘You too!’
Peller, the Secretary for Nationalities, slipped on spilled food and fell flat on his back, legs stuck out, laughing. He wriggled on his back in the mess.
‘Yap! Yap! Yap!’
When the music stopped Gribov slumped exhausted and sweaty on a couch next to Kistler, undid his jacket, put back his head and began to snore. Kistler jabbed him when Rizhin, face flushed, eyes suddenly on fire, drained his glass and banged the table. It was time for Rizhin’s speech.
‘Look at ourselves, my friends,’ he began. ‘What are we?’
He paused for an answer. Somebody made a muffled joke. A few people laughed.
‘What was that? I didn’t hear,’ said Rizhin, but no one spoke. The atmosphere was suddenly tense.
‘I’ll tell you what we are,’ Rizhin continued. ‘Nothing. We are nothing. Look at this planet of ours: a transitory little speck in a universe filled with millions upon millions of far greater bodies.’ He gestured towards the ceiling. ‘Out there, above us, there are countless suns in countless galaxies, and each sun has its own planets. What is any one of us? What is a man or a woman? We are, in actual and literal truth, nothing. Our bodies are collections of vibrating particles separated by emptiness. The very stuff and substance of our world is nothing but light and energy held in precarious patterns of balance, and mostly it is nothing at all. We are accidental temporary assemblages in the middle of a wider emptiness that is passing through us even now, at this very moment, even as we pass through it. Emptiness passing through emptiness, each utterly unaffected by the other. The energies of the universe pass through us like Kharulin rays, as if we are not here at all. We are our own graves walking. We are handfuls of dust.’
Several faces were staring at Rizhin with open dismay. Gribov leaned over in a fug of grappa to whisper in Kistler’s ear, ‘What the fuck’s the man talking about? What’s all this crazy shit?’
Kistler winced. ‘You’re too loud,’ he hissed. ‘For fuck’s sake, keep it down.’
Every time Kistler glanced at Hunder Rond the man was watching him. Their eyes locked for a second, then Rond turned away.
One day, little prince, thought Kistler. One day I’ll snap your fucking thumbs.
‘But what a gift this nothingness is, my friends!’ Rizhin was saying. ‘It is the gift of immensity! Once we see that this world, this planet, is nothing, we realise what our future truly holds. Not one world, but all the worlds. The universe. The stars like sand on the beach. The stars like water, the oceans we sail. Our present world is trivial: it is merely the first intake of breath at the commencement of the endless sentence of futurity.’
Rizhin poured himself another glass, the clink of bottle against tumbler the only sound in the room. He fixed them with burning eyes. It was Rizhin the poet, Rizhin the artist of history, speaking now.
‘I have seen this future! Red rockets, curvaceous, climbing on parabolas of steam and fire. making the sky seem small and wintry-blue. Because the sky is small. We can take it in our fists! I have seen these rockets of the future rising into space, carrying a new human type to their chosen grounds. Individuals whose moral daring makes them vibrate at a speed that turns motion invisible. There are new forms in the future, my friends, and they need to be filled with blood. We are the first of a new humankind. Where death is temporary a million deaths mean nothing.’
After the dinner and the dancing, Rizhin led the way to his cinema. Blue armchairs in pairs, a table between each pair: mineral water, more grappa, chocolate and cigarettes. Rugs on the grey carpet. They watched an illicit gangster film, imported from the Archipelago: men in baggy suits with wide lapels fought over a stolen treasure and a dancing girl with silver hair. Then came a Mirgorod Studios production, Courageous Battleship! Torpedoed in the Yarmskoye Sea, a hundred shipwrecked sailors line an iceberg to sing a song of sadness, a requiem for their lost ship.
Halfway through the film, Rizhin leaned across and gripped the elbow of Selenacharsky, secretary for culture.
‘Why are the movies of the Archipelago better than ours?’
Selenacharsky turned pale in the semi-darkness and scribbled something in his notebook.
Dawn was coming up when they filed out of the cinema into the scented courtyard. Kistler was going to his car when Rizhin appeared at his elbow.
‘I shoot in the mornings at the pistol range. Join me, eh, Lukasz? We’ll have a chat, just you and me. Man to man.’
Kistler groaned inwardly. His head hurt.
‘Of course, Osip.’
‘Good. Nine thirty sharp.’
Kistler managed a couple of hours’ sleep and returned to Rizhin’s dacha stale and depressed, unbreakfasted, the dregs of the wine and the grappa still in his blood, a sour taste of coffee on his tongue. The dinner of the night before weighed heavy in his stomach. He felt queasy.
He followed the sound of gunfire to Rizhin’s shooting range, a crudely functional concrete block among almond trees. Vasilisk the bodyguard, six foot three, blond and beautiful, was lounging on a chair by the door, white cotton T-shirt tight across his chest. He was wearing white tennis shoes and regarded Kistler with sleepy expressionless sky-blue eyes.
Kistler nodded to him and entered the shooting range.
Vasilisk rose lazily to his feet and padded in behind him. Closed the door, leaned against the wall and folded his arms. Kistler watched the muscles of the bodyguard’s shoulders sliding smoothly. His thickened honey-gold forearms.
Rizhin was alone inside the building, bright and fresh in shirtsleeves, firing at twenty-five-yard targets with a pistol. Three rounds then a pause. You could cover the holes in the target with the palm of your hand.
He paused to reload. The gun was fat and heavy in his swollen fists but his fingers on the magazine were lightning-quick. Nimble. Practised.
‘Do you know firearms, Lukasz?’
‘Not really.’
‘You should. Our existence depends on them. The powerful should study and understand the foundations of their power. This, for instance, is a Sepora .44 magnum. Our VKBD officers carry these. Heavy in the hand, but they shoot very powerful shells. Very destructive. They tend to make a mess of the human body. The removal of limbs. The bursting of skulls. Large holes in the stomach or torso. Butchery at a distance. Not a pretty death.’ He turned and fired seven shots in rapid succession. The noise was deafening. An unmistakable acrid smell.
Rizhin offered the gun to Kistler.
‘Would you like to shoot, Lukasz? It’s important to keep one’s skills up to scratch’
‘No,’ said Kistler. ‘Later perhaps. I drank too much grappa last night.’
Rizhin shrugged.
‘Your hand’s trembling,’ he said.
Kistler couldn’t stop himself looking down at his hands. It was a sign of submission. He cursed himself inwardly.
Careful.
He held his hands out in front of him, palms down.
‘I don’t think so,’ he said.
Rizhin ejected the magazine from the pistol and reloaded, taking a fresh magazine from his pocket.
‘You enjoyed our evening then?’ he said. ‘I hope so.’
‘Of course! It’s good to know one’s colleagues better. The holiday season is valuable. Time well spent.’
‘I thought you were bored. You seemed bored. Gribov can be overpowering.’
‘Not at all. A little tired perhaps. I’d had a long journey.’
Rizhin raised his arm and squeezed off three rapid shots. ‘But you keep a distance–I see you doing it–and that’s sound. I admire it in you. Music and feasting are excellent things, Lukasz; they reduce the bestial element in us. Song and dance, food and wine, good company: they calm the soul and make one amiable towards humanity. But we aren’t ready for softness yet, you and I. Today is not the time to stroke people’s heads. Of course, opposition to all violence is the ultimate ideal for men like us, but you have to build the house before you hang the pictures. Your attitude last night was a criticism of me, which I accept.’
‘No. Not at all, Osip. I only—’
‘But yes, it was, and I accept it. I’ve sent the others home, you know. I’ve packed them all off back to Mirgorod, back to their desks. There is work to be done and they must get to it.’
‘What? All of them?’ said Kistler.
‘I thought you’d be pleased. Our colleagues bore you, Lukasz, isn’t that so? Be honest with me. I’ll tell you frankly, they bore me too. For now I must use people like them, but they’re narrow, they have limited minds. Not like you and me. We see the bigger picture.’
Where is this going?
Vasilisk the bodyguard moved across to a wooden chair. The neat brown leather holster nestled in the small of his back bobbed with the rhythm of his buttocks as he walked. Vasilisk settled into the chair, crossed legs stretched out in front of him, and absorbed himself in studying his fingernails.
Rizhin was turning his pistol over with thick clumsy-looking fingers.
‘What I was trying to say last night,’ he continued, ‘but I was drunk and over-poetical… what I was trying to say is that this–this, all around us, our work and our diplomacy and our cars and our dachas–this is not the point to which history is leading us. This is only the beginning: the first letter of the first word of the first sentence of the first book in the great library of futurity. You see this as well as I do.’
‘There’s a lot more to be done,’ said Kistler cautiously. ‘Of course. Certainly. Our industry…’
Rizhin fished out three more shells from his pocket, ejected the magazine and pressed them into place one by one. Replaced the magazine in the pistol.
‘I’m talking philosophically,’ he said. ‘The moral compass is not absolute, you see. It has changed and we have a new morality now. A new right. A new good. A new true. Our predecessors were scoundrels; the angels were an obfuscation, the things of the forest bedbugs. Leeches. A distortion of the moral gravity. Whatever serves the New Vlast is moral. That’s how it must be, for now. Where all death is temporary then death is nothing. Killing is conscienceless. A million deaths, a billion deaths, are nothing.’
‘But we need people,’ said Kistler. ‘Strong healthy people, educated, burning with energy. We need them to work. And we need steel. We need oil. We need power. We need mathematics and engineering. We need to be clever, Osip, or the Archipelago will—’
Rizhin brushed him off with a gesture. ‘The Archipelago will be ground to powder under the wheels of history, Lukasz,’ he said. ‘You underestimate inevitability.’
He raised the pistol and levelled it at Kistler’s head, the ugly blackness of the barrel mouth pointing directly between his eyes.
‘History is as inevitable and unstoppable as the path of the bullet from this gun if I pull the trigger. Effects follow causes.’
Kistler made an effort to take his eyes from the pistol. His gaze met Rizhin’s soft-brown gentle look.
‘Osip…’ he began.
Rizhin turned away and fired a shot at the target. The raw explosion echoed off the concrete walls. Kistler realised his hands were damp. The back of his shirt was cold and sticky against his skin.
‘I had hopes for you, Lukasz,’ said Rizhin. ‘I was going to involve you. You’re a man of fine qualities. An outstandingly useful fellow. I was going to take you with us. But I find you are also a sentimentalist. Your belly is soft and white and you aren’t to be trusted. You’ve let me down. Badly.’
‘I don’t understand this,’ said Kistler. ‘What’s happening here, Osip? Where is this going to?’
‘Tell me about Investigator Vissarion Lom.’
‘Feeble. Feeble. Where is the famous Kistler fire in the guts? Where is the energy?’ Rizhin pulled a crumpled typescript from the back pocket of his trousers and pushed it towards him. Kistler read the first few lines.
Kistler Residential–Internal
23.47 Transcription begins
Kistler: Yes?
Unknown caller: I wish to speak with Lukasz Kistler.
Kistler: This is Kistler. Who the fuck are you?
‘I know this is Lom,’ said Rizhin. ‘He’s a man I know. He circles me, Lukasz. He buzzes in my ear. I can’t shake him off.’
‘So shoot me.’
Rizhin shook his head.
‘I want you to extend your vacation, Lukasz. Another week or two maybe. I’ve had enough of this bastard Lom. I want to trace him. I want to tie him down and finish him. And he’s not doing this alone; there are conspiracies here, Lukasz, and you’re deep in the whole nest of shit, and I’m going to know the extent of it. The whole fucking thing. Names. Dates. Connections. Circles of contact. You’ll stay here and spend some time with Rond and his people. We’re going to be seeing a lot more of each other. We’ll have more talks.’
Back in Mirgorod again after the long journey from Vitigorsk, Lom wasted no time. He dialled from a call box at the Wieland Station. The contact number Kistler had given him rang and rang. He hung up and tried again.
Eventually someone answered. A woman’s voice. Cautious.
Yes? Who is this?
‘I want to speak with Lukasz Kistler.’
‘I will speak to Kistler. Only Kistler. He is expecting me.’
Secretary Kistler is unavailable.
‘I’ll call back. Give me a time.’
The Secretary will be unavailable for some considerable time, perhaps days, perhaps longer. You may discuss your business with me. What is your name?
Lom cut the connection.
He took a cab across the city and walked the last few blocks to the war-levelled quarter of the rubble dwellers, to the cellar Elena Cornelius had led him to. His link to the Underground Road. Konnie and Maksim were there. So was Elena, looking strained. Hunted.
‘I can’t reach Kistler,’ said Lom. ‘I’ve got something he can use. Devastating material. Dynamite. In Kistler’s hands it will bring Rizhin down. Definitely. But Kistler is out of contact. His number’s no good. I thought you could—’
‘Kistler has been arrested,’ said Maksim.
Lom felt the warmth drain from his face.
‘No,’ he said. ‘No. When?’
‘He went to Rizhin’s dacha. He’s being held there under interrogation. Rizhin is there with him, and so is Rond. Nobody else.’
‘How do you know this? How can you be sure.’
‘We have somebody there,’ said Konnie. ‘On the dacha staff. There is no doubt.’
‘But Kistler is alive?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Maksim. ‘For now he is alive, though what state he’s in…’
‘Is there anybody else?’ said Lom. ‘Anyone else who could use the material I have, like Kistler could?’
‘In the Presidium? No. Not a chance.’
‘Then I have to get Kistler out of there and back to Mirgorod,’ said Lom.
‘That’s impossible,’ said Maksim. ‘He’s being held by the Parallel Sector in Rizhin’s own fucking dacha.’
‘Nothing’s impossible,’ said Lom. ‘I need Kistler. Tell me about this dacha. Tell me about your contact there.’
‘No,’ said Maksim. ‘It’s out of the question.’
‘This material,’ said Konnie. ‘It’s as big as you say? It’s that dangerous for Rizhin?’
‘Absolutely,’ said Lom. ‘Poisonous. Lethal. In Kistler’s hands it will bring him down.’
‘What is it?’ said Maksim.
‘No,’ said Lom. ‘First you tell me about Rizhin’s dacha.’
‘But what you’ve got is really that good?’
‘Yes. If we can get Kistler back to Mirgorod, free, and arm him with what I have, he can turn the Central Committee against Rizhin and he will fall.’
Konnie glanced at Maksim.
‘We won’t tell you where Rizhin’s dacha is,’ she said. ‘You’ll need help. We’ll take you there. We’ll go with you.’
‘Konnie…’ said Maksim.
Konnie ignored him.
‘You can’t get Kistler out of there all by yourself,’ she said. ‘We have some resources, not much maybe, but better than one man on his own.’
Lom considered. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Yes. That would be good.’
Konnie turned to Elena.
‘You’re welcome to stay here,’ she said. ‘You’ll be safe. You won’t be found. Someone will bring you food. It won’t be more than a week.’
Elena Cornelius bridled. ‘I’m coming. I’m tired of hiding. I’ve got a job to finish and none of you can do what I can do. Get me a rifle and I will come.’
Every day in the first pale pink and violet flush of another new morning Vasilisk the bodyguard runs in the hills above Dacha Number Nine. Ten easy miles on yellow earth tracks before breakfast, taking the slopes through fragrant thorny shrub with cardiovascular efficiency, the early warmth of the sun on his shoulders. He sees the soft mist in the valleys. Sees the black beetles crossing the paths and the boar pushing through thickets. Watches the big hunting birds, high on stiff wings against the pale dusty blue, circling up on the thermals. Miles of rise and fall unrolling smoothly and effortlessly.
No words. No thoughts.
He knows the routes of the security patrols and the places they watch from and he does not go there; he prefers to drink the mountain solitude in, like cool sweet water. The watcher doesn’t like to be watched. Doesn’t like the feel of a long lens on his back. Ten miles of nobody in the morning sets him up for the day.
Two hundred push-ups, breathing steady and slow, two sets of fifty per arm, and a downhill sprint between pine trees–jumping tussocks and stony glittering streams–and Vasilisk the bodyguard steps out onto the road, corn-yellow hair slick with sweat. Sweat patches darkening his singlet.
The guards at the gatehouse phone him in through the gate, as they do every morning. He glances at them lazily, indifferent small blue eyes blank and pale behind pale-straw eyelashes. He goes to his room, picks up a towel and heads for the pool.
The streets of Anaklion on the Karima coast were wide and shaded by trees. Many of the houses were modern, every fifth building a guest house or hotel. Women at the roadside and in the squares sold figs and watermelons and clouded-purple grapes. Warm air off the sea disturbed the palms and casuarina trees.
Konnie, Lom and Elena took the funicular up to the Park of Culture and Rest. Gravel paths between long plots of enamel-bright flowers. Statues of dogs and soldiers. Wrought-iron benches for the weary and the convalescent. At the Tea-Garden-Restaurant Palmovye Derevya they took a table some way from the other customers, at the edge of the cliff, shaded by waxy dark green leaves against the low morning sun. A hundred feet sheer below them youths swam in the river, and across the gorge balconied houses recuperated: quiet lawns, striped awnings.
A waiter materialised at their table. Tight high-waisted trousers, a pouch at his hip for coin.
‘Tea,’ said Konnie. ‘With lemon. For four. And some pastries.’ Her long fine hair was burnished copper in the flickering splashes of sunlight between leaves. Her eyes flashed green at the waiter. A hint of a conspiratorial smile. ‘You decide which ones.’ A beautiful young woman with friends, on vacation. A husband or boyfriend would join them soon.
They’d arrived the night before. Lom used the last of Kistler’s roubles for rooms at the guest house Black Cypress. Maksim hadn’t appeared at breakfast.
‘He went up the mountain before dawn,’ said Konnie. ‘He wanted to have a look for himself.’
Lom said nothing. Since they had left Mirgorod, Maksim had changed subtly. His face cleared. No longer pent-up and clouded with frustration, he was self-contained, competent and direct. Back in the military again, he was a man at his best with a mission. A simple purpose. Lom liked him. He’d started to trust him too.
‘We can do this,’ said Maksim when he arrived. ‘It is possible. There is a way. But it’s all about timing. Everything has to work precisely right. Absolute discipline.’
‘OK,’ said Lom. ‘Go on.’
Maksim glanced at him. The two men had never quite resolved the unspoken question of who was in charge.
‘The dacha is a fortress,’ Maksim began. ‘A compound surrounded by steep hills. The only way in is a tunnel through the mountain. There’s a gate at the entrance from the road: wooden but three inches thick and reinforced with iron. There’s a gatehouse–always two guards, with binoculars and a view for miles down the mountain. They’d see any vehicle coming ten minutes before it reached them. The gate is kept closed and barred from within. It’s opened at a signal from the gatehouse, when they’re expecting company. But nobody comes and nobody goes, except the domestics make a shopping trip once a week. A couple of guards go with them.’
‘And inside?’ said Lom.
‘VKBD security. Plus Rond is there, and he’s got Parallel Sector personnel with him. And Rizhin has his own personal security. Two bodyguards. Part of the family. Very dangerous. Say, twenty in all.’
‘Not so much,’ said Lom.
‘There’s a militia company in the town, an armoured train five miles away, a cruiser in the bay. They think they’re safe enough.’
‘No information,’ said Maksim. ‘But assume so. Yes.’
‘So what’s the plan?’ said Lom.
‘We must have the gate open at eleven tomorrow morning. Eleven o’clock exactly, to the second. No sooner and no later. Kistler will be coming out in a car.’
‘A car?’ said Konnie.
‘Rizhin’s personal limousine. It’s the most powerful and heavily armoured they have. Bullet-proof glass in the windows. Thick steel panels underneath too. Hell, even the tyres are bullet-proof.’
‘And all we have to do,’ said Lom, ‘is open the gate tomorrow?’
‘Yes.’
‘How?’ said Konnie.
Maksim’s face clouded. ‘It can’t be unbarred from outside, so we’ll need explosives.’
Konnie looked around at the Park of Culture and Rest, at the teenage boys and girls in the river and stretched out on flat slabs of rock, lazy under the sun.
‘Where do you get explosives in a place like this?’ she said.
‘Every construction project here has to start with blasting rock,’ said Maksim. ‘There’s got to be a supply somewhere. A builder’s merchant. An engineering yard.’
‘That won’t be necessary,’ said Lom. ‘You can leave the gate to me. I’ll take care of it. And the guards in the gatehouse too.’
Maksim looked at him doubtfully.
‘How?’ he said.
Lom hesitated. Maksim’s expression was soldierly. Sceptical. He couldn’t begin to explain. Explaining would make it worse.
‘It’ll be fine,’ said Lom. ‘Please. I know what I’m doing. Leave it to me. If you can get Kistler to the gate at eleven, it’ll be open.’
Maksim bridled.
‘I must know what you intend,’ he said. ‘I will not lead my people blind. Lives depend on me.’
Lom shrugged. ‘Stay here then. I’m grateful for what you’ve done, and from here I will go on alone.’
‘Maksim,’ said Elena Cornelius quietly, ‘I think we should trust Vissarion. He has brought us this far. Without him we would be nowhere. We owe the chance we have to him.’
‘Chance!’ Maksim began, but thought better of it. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘But I’ll be at the gatehouse with you.’
‘Good,’ said Lom. ‘Thank you.’
He took a long draught of hot sweet tea and considered the plan. It was terrible. A really shit plan. But it would be fine.
Just keep blundering on. Plough through the obstacles as they come. Way too late to back off now.
Weary after weeks of frustrating travel–delays over paperwork, failed and diverted trains, fuel shortages, their carriage attacked by a hungry mob–the Philosophy League arrived at the Wieland Station. Penniless–all their money spent on unexpected expenses along the way–but back in Mirgorod at last.
They’d hoped for more of a reception. Forshin had wired ahead to Pinocharsky to warn him of their arrival. They’d expected journalists and prepared the lines they would take: Forshin had the text of a speech in his pocket, and Brutskoi had written an article for the Lamp, a manifesto of sorts, a call to intellectual arms. But there was no one to meet them. The League stood together in a disgruntled huddle on the platform, surrounded by their suitcases and chests of books, their luggage much battered and repaired. They all looked to Forshin for answers.
‘Well?’ said Yudifa Yudifovna. ‘So what are we to do?’
Eligiya Kamilova stood somewhat apart from the rest with Yeva and Galina Cornelius. The girls were restless and unhappy.
‘Do we have to stay with these people any more?’ said Yeva. ‘Can’t we go home now?’
Home? thought Kamilova. What is home?
‘Ha!’ said Forshin, visibly relieved. ‘Here’s Pinocharsky at last.’ He waved. ‘Pinocharsky! I say, Pinocharsky! Here!’
Pinocharsky came towards them, arms open in a mime of embrace. He was wreathed in smiles but looked harassed, his wiry red hair wisping.
‘Well then!’ he said. ‘Here you are; you have come at last! But you’re late. I was expecting you two hours ago. You have to hurry. Your train is waiting on the next platform.’ He gestured for porters. ‘What a lot of luggage you have. But no matter, there’s no doubt plenty of room.’
The members of the League were looking at one another in dismay. Forshin took Pinocharsky by the arm.
‘Train?’ he said. ‘What train? We’ve only just arrived, man. We need a hotel. We need a meeting. Editors. Publishers. We need a plan. We have much to say to the people.’
‘Ah,’ said Pinocharsky. ‘Well, no, not exactly. Not yet. There’s been a change of plan. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to contact you.’ He was looking shifty.
‘A change of plan?’
Yes. The House of Enlightened Arts… Rizhin decided Mirgorod wasn’t the place for it after all. He has a new plan, a better plan. You’ll see the advantages when you understand.’
‘What?’ said Forshin. ‘No. This is unacceptable.’
‘I’m to take you there directly,’ said Pinocharsky. ‘The train’s waiting—’
‘This is outrageous,’ said Forshin. ‘I protest. On behalf of the League. There must be consultation.’
‘These are the instructions of Rizhin himself,’ said Pinocharsky stonily.
‘At least let us have some time to rest and recover from the journey. The ladies—’
‘I’m sorry, that won’t be possible.’
‘Then tell us where we are going, man,’ said Olga-Marya Rapp. ‘At least tell us that.’
‘A new town in the east,’ said Pinocharsky. ‘A pioneering place. Leading edge. A city of the future. A place called Vitigorsk. There’s a great project under way there. I don’t know much about it yet myself.’
The League muttered and grumbled and cursed under their breath but there was no rebellion. They were too weary, too inured to disappointment; they knew in their hearts the limits of their true worth. Porters picked up their baggage and moved along the platform, and they followed in a subdued huddle.
Eligiya Kamilova caught up with Forshin.
Forshin looked at her, puzzled. She and the girls had slipped his mind in all the fuss.
‘Oh, Eligiya, of course…’
‘I wanted to thank you, Nikolai. You’ve been very kind to the girls and me. You’ve done more than we had any right to hope for.’
‘Oh. You’re not coming with us? No, of course not. But do. Come with us to this Vitigorsk place, Eligiya. See where all this excitement leads. The future is opening for us, I feel sure of it.’
‘I can’t, Nikolai. I must take Galina and Yeva to look for their mother.’
‘Of course you must do that.’ He held out his hand and she took it. ‘Well, goodbye then.’
‘Thank you, Nikolai. And good luck.’
Eligiya Kamilova watched Forshin walk away purposefully, hurrying to catch up with Pinocharsky. She never saw or heard of him, nor any other member of the Philosophy League, ever again.
‘Eligiya,’ said Yeva, ‘can we go now, please? We have to go and find our mother.’
Two hours later they were standing in the street where their aunt’s apartment building had stood, the place where the Archipelago bomb had fallen: six years before in Mirgorod time, but for them it was a matter of months.
Everything was different. Everything was changed.
Of their mother Elena Cornelius there was of course no sign at all. They waited a while, pointlessly. It was futile. They were simply causing themselves pain.
Eligiya Kamilova wondered what to do. It was only now she was here that she realised she had no plan for what came next, no plan at all.
‘We’ll come back again tomorrow,’ said Galina to Yeva. ‘We’ll come every day.’
The next morning, early, Lom went up into the mountains with Maksim, Konnie and Elena. Konnie had rented a boxy grey Narodni with a dented near-side wheel arch. The interior smelled strongly of tobacco smoke. There was a heaped ashtray in the driver’s door. The streets climbed steeply out of Anaklion into scrub and scree and dark dense trees. No sun yet reached the lower slopes.
They drove in silence. Lom, squeezed onto the scuffed leather bench-seat in the back next to Elena, watched out of the window. The Narodni struggled on the steep inclines and Konnie swore, fishing for the second gear that wasn’t there. The back of Maksim’s head sank lower and lower between his shoulders.
After forty-five minutes Konnie pulled off the road onto a rough stony track. Out of sight among boulders and black cypress she killed the engine.
‘This is it,’ she said. ‘You walk from here.’
Maksim, Lom and Elena left her with the car and started up a steep narrow hunting trail. Elena carried a rifle slung across her back. When they crested a ridge and clear stony ground fell away to their right, she broke away on her own. Two minutes later Lom couldn’t see her at all.
It took him and Maksim another hour to work their way around to the thick woodland above and behind the gatehouse of Dacha Number Nine. Maksim picked his route carefully, stopping to look at his watch. He seemed to know what he was doing. Once he had them crawl on their bellies in under thick green spiky vegetation.
‘Patrol,’ he hissed.
The sun was higher now, kindling scent from crushed leaves and crumbling earth. Slow pulses of purple and blue rippled across the cloudless sky. A liminal solar breathing.
Lom’s every move and step was a startling noise in the thin motionless air.
They crouched in the shadow of a pine trunk. The roof of the gatehouse was fifty feet below them, and beyond it the closed gate itself. Maksim checked his watch again and put his face close to Lom’s ear.
‘Now we wait,’ he whispered. ‘I will tell you when.’
Lukasz Kistler was lying on a low cot bed in his cell. Every part of him was in pain. He followed the passing of days and nights by the rectangle of sky in the high window, but he didn’t count them. Not any more. He divided time between when he was alone and safe and when he was not, that was all.
When the key turned in the lock and the door opened he wanted to open his mouth and scream but he did not. He knotted his fingers tight in his grey blanket and pulled the fabric taut: a little wall of wool, a shield across his chest. A protection that protected nothing at all.
Vasilisk the bodyguard stepped inside and padded across to the bed. Looked down on Kistler impassively with sleepy half-closed eyes.
‘Please,’ said Kistler. His mouth was dry. ‘Not any more. There is no more. It’s finished now.’
‘You’ve got friends outside the dacha,’ said Vasilisk. ‘They’re coming to take you away.’
Kistler tried to focus on what he was hearing. He couldn’t get past the fact it was the first time he had heard Vasilisk speak. His voice was pitched oddly high.
‘They’re going to try to blow up the gate,’ he said. ‘Stand up. You have to come with me.’
‘I refuse,’ said Kistler. He pressed himself deeper into the thin mattress. The springs dug into his back.
‘You refuse?’ Vasilisk looked at him with faint surprise, like there was something unexpected on his plate at dinner.
‘I refuse,’ said Kistler again. ‘Absolutely I refuse. No more. I will not come again. Not any more. I’m finishing it. Now.’
Vasilisk bent in and hooked a hand under Kistler’s shoulder, iron fingers digging deep into his armpit, hauling him up. Kistler resisted. Pulled away and tried to fall back onto the mattress.
Vasilisk leaned forward and jabbed him in the solar plexus.
Kistler screamed and retched and tried to bring his knees up, curling himself into a protective ball, but the last of his strength had gone. Rizhin’s bodyguard yanked him to his feet and held him upright, though his legs failed him and he could not stand.
Kistler heard a strange sound and realised it was himself sobbing.
‘Shut up,’ said Vasilisk and jabbed him again.
On the slope above the guardhouse Maksim nudged Lom in the ribs and gestured with his chin.
Go! Go!
Vasilisk the bodyguard half-carried, half-dragged the unresisting semi-conscious Kistler through the rose garden and past the swimming pool. There was no one there. From half past ten to half past twelve there was tennis.
Iced tea at half past eleven.
Rizhin’s car was parked in the courtyard and Vasilisk had the keys in his pocket. He checked the time on his watch: 10.51.
He opened the rear door and bundled Kistler inside. Pushed him down into the footwell. Kistler groaned and retched again, spilling sour vomit down the front of his shirt.
Vasilisk took his place in the driver’s seat and settled down to wait.
Lom eased open the door of the gatehouse. Maksim entered first, pistol in his hand. The guards swung round in surprise: one reached for his holster, the other made a grab for the telephone receiver.
Maksim fired twice. Neat and precise.
Lom ripped the phone cable from the wall.
At 10.55 Rizhin himself came round the corner of the veranda into the courtyard. Vasilisk followed him in the rear-view mirror. Saw him glance across at the car and see his bodyguard in the driver’s seat. Puzzled, Rizhin started to come over.
Vasilisk turned the key in the ignition and the engine purred into life. He slipped the car into gear and headed for the tunnel entrance. A cool dark mouth in the rock. In his mirror he saw Rizhin standing in the middle of the courtyard watching him go.
Vasilisk increased the weight of his foot on the accelerator pedal.
The car roared forward. The barrier was down but the car weighed nearly three tons.
As the barrier splintered it occurred to Vasilisk in an abstract way that he was probably beginning the final two minutes of his life.
Lom walked up to the massive gate across the tunnel and pressed the flat of his hand against it, feeling the dry solid wood. Its grain and fine flaws. The bars of iron within it. The blackened studs. The wide sunlit air. The scent of cypress and resinous southern pine. Feeling and remembering.
In the dark time, after Maroussia went, Vissarion Lom moved fast across ice fields and raced through the snow-dark birch trees. Part man, part angel, part something else, body and brain saturated with starlight and burn, all the dark months of winter he ran the ridges of high mountains.
He pushed his fists deep into solid rock just to feel it hurt.
Ten days and more he had stood without moving on the thick frozen surface of a benighted lake. Cold dark fishes slid through darkness far below him and bitter black wind scoured his face with particles of ice.
Lom-in-burning-angel counted the needles on pine trees and ignited them one by one with an idle thought. Little bright-flaring match flames.
He had forgotten who he was and he didn’t care.
But slowly he had been moving south, and slowly the star-fire faded from the angel skin casing Lavrentina Chazia had made. In the early sunlight of that first spring five years ago Vissarion Lom shed his angel carcass and pushed it off a rock into the river.
He squirrelled the recollection of that dark inhuman time deep in the secret fastnesses of the heart where bitterness festers, and guilt. Kept it there, locked under many locks, along with the memory of all the winter slaughtering Lom-in-burning-angel did, or could have done and thought he might have. The iron smell of blood on ice.
After that long inhuman winter in the north without the sun, Vissarion Lom wanted to be nothing more than simply human again, but secretly he knew he never could be quite that. Possibly he never entirely had been: the earliest roots of himself were buried in oblivion and inexhaustible forest. As everyone’s are.
‘Turn your back and cover your face,’ Lom said to Maksim. ‘Splinters.’
Lom focused. Tried to drive all other thoughts and memories from his mind. Tried to calm the rising anxiousness and the beating of his heart.
There was only him and the gate.
He probed. Pushed. Nothing happened.
Changing direction, he gathered all the urgency, the growing white panic inside him, squeezed it all into a tight ball and forced it out from him. Hurled it into the timbers, deep into the corpse limbs of forest trees.
Burst open by the pressure of tiny air pockets–the desiccated fibrous capillaries suddenly and violently expanding–the heavy wooden planks of the gate exploded loudly from within, split open and shattered.
The rock tunnel behind the broken gate was dark and silent. It smelled like the mouth of a well.
‘What the fuck?’ said Maksim. ‘What the fuck did you do?’
‘Later,’ said Lom.
Where the hell was Kistler’s car?
They stood side by side for thirty long slow seconds.
‘Where is he?’ said Lom. ‘He’s not coming.’
Engine roar echoed, and the sound of gunfire.
The long black limousine was racing towards them. Lom glimpsed a face behind the thick windscreen as he scrambled aside. A tanned impassive handsome face. Cropped yellow hair.
The limousine slowed to a crawl. Maksim pulled open the front passenger seat.
‘Get in the back!’ he yelled at Lom.
Lom slid in alongside the collapsed form of Kistler, who was crouched on the floor. Dirty shirt and soiled trousers. Unshaven face grey. He looked up at Lom with glassy eyes. No recognition. There was a smell of urine and vomit in the car.
The driver didn’t look round but gunned the engine and raced off down the mountain.
The heat of the sun, now high in the sky, beat against the side of Elena Cornelius’ face. She could feel her skin burning. Insects buzzed and clattered in the grass, crawled across the back of her neck, sunk tiny probes into her arms and her ankles. She fought back the urge to scratch. All movement was dangerous.
She was still. She was nothing but eyes watching. She was part of the rock.
From five hundred yards she saw the gate shatter and the limousine emerge, slow to pick up Maksim and Lom, and hurtle away down the hill, jumping culverts, taking the hairpin too fast, scraping its side along the crash barrier.
The racing of the engine and the squeal of tortured metal echoed off cliffs and scree.
Elena Cornelius waited. Less than a minute later two vehicles came charging out of the tunnel mouth: a black Parallel Sector saloon and an open VKBD jeep with three men cradling sub-machine guns on their knees.
Elena moved the rifle slowly, sliding the graticule smoothly along the road, catching up with the windscreen of the leading pursuit car. The driver’s head was a shadow. She moved the scope with the saloon for a moment, matching speed for speed, then shifted her aim three car lengths ahead and lifted it half an inch.
Squeezed the trigger gently.
Half a second after she fired, the glass in the windscreen shattered. From where she was it seemed to collapse and dissolve. The Parallel Sector saloon swung wildly to the left, crashed against the rock face and spun twice.
The jeep, following close behind, had nowhere to go and no time to stop. It crunched sickeningly into the side of the saloon. The men in the back of the jeep were thrown out. They landed badly.
Elena shifted the scope back to the driver. He was folded into the jeep’s steering wheel, his head pushed through broken glass in a mess of blood.
She watched a man stagger from the back of the saloon. Limping. He pulled at the driver’s door. It wouldn’t open. None of the men from the jeep was moving at all. The two crashed vehicles together completely blocked the road.
She shouldered her gun and slid backwards away from the ridge, stood up and began to move, half running, half sliding down through the trees. This route would cut off a mile of road. In seven minutes she would be back at the track where Konnie would be waiting with the boxy grey Narodni.
Archangel hurls himself across the continent, Rizhin world. He is a fisted pocket of certainty crashing from mind to mind–land and pause and look and leap again–leaving a crumb trail of sickness and fall. Hunting the only angel trace still left in Rizhin’s New Vlast.
Brother, I am racing to you! Brother, call again and I will come!
He has scarcely the strength for it. Mile by mile the connecting cord back to his rock-lump-grinding-carcass in the forest lengthens and thins. The thread grows weak and spider-fine.
In the deep concrete cistern under the Mirgorod Sea Gate, Safran-in-mudjhik pummels the imprisoning wall with shapeless fists. His mind is dark with anger at his fall.
Lom pushed him in there.
He cannot get out.
Six years.
The endless surging weight of water, the whole force of the River Mir, pins him on his back. The noise of it fills his head and deafens him. The lost mind of Safran huddles in a silent corner, curled and foetal, wanting only the sound and the shouting and the hopelessness to cease.
Hairline fractures are opening in the concrete.
Two thousand days ago an aircraft of the Archipelago returning from a raid emptied its bomb bay, dumping its unspent load across the White Marshes. Two bombs fell against the dam. No visible damage done, but in the secret places, in the dark interior of immense solid walls, weakened bonds began to shear and slip.
Predator-Archangel plummets from height, daggering into the mind of Safran-in-mudjhik and taking possession with a shriek of triumph. Instantly he expands to fill the space. Scoops the remnants of the weaker mudjhik mind from their runnels and crannies with a spoon and eats them all.
Sorry, brother.
Archangel glows with satisfaction and joy. He has a worthy body now in Rizhin world. He flexes. He samples. He trials his goods.
In a dark corner he finds Safran cowering and hauls him out wriggling and retching by the ear.
What use are you? he wonders briefly, rummaging with clumsy fingers through the maddened Safran mind before crushing it for ever out of existence.
Deep in the endless forest the Seer Witch of Bones is the first to discern the gap in the wall. She shrieks in dismay, ‘Close it! Close it! The angel is through!’
Maroussia Shaumian walking under the trees, preoccupied with the child in her belly and Vissarion Lom, reluctantly turns her attention to the call. She traces the fine connecting threadway. It is weak and she is strong, invested with the Pollandore. It costs her no more than a tussle with the weakened and attenuated angel mind. She pinches her fingers and the cord is cut.
The forest is secure.
But the archangel fragment in the mudjhik, isolated from the depleted mother hill, clings on to life and purpose. In the mudjhik carcass he is strength and fire and brilliance like nothing has been in a donkey workhorse mudjhik ever before.
Slowly Archangel-mudjhik rises to his feet against the power of the crushing river and puts his shoulder to the wall. Shoves and batters and kicks against the weakening concrete.
Brute force does it. Boulders come tumbling down, the river is unleashed and Archangel-mudjhik is swept out, twisting and floundering in a torrent of broken concrete and white water, out into the deeper colder darkness of the bay.