Kistler was a shaven-headed barrel of a man, boulder-shouldered, hard not fat, his torso straining at the seams of his shiny jacket. Kistler liked money, drank with workers and didn’t care about spilling his gravy. His shirt cuffs jutted six inches beyond his jacket sleeves. But the intelligence in his small creased eyes was sharp and dangerous as spikes. Kistler was never, ever tired and never, ever got sick and never, ever stopped working. His energy burned like a furnace. He had made huge amounts of money before he was thirty out of iron and oil and coal, anything big and dirty that came out of rock and was hard to get. He was a digger and a burrower and a hammerer. When Rizhin found Kistler he was turning out battle tanks from a factory that had no roof. It had been bombed so often Kistler had stopped rebuilding and left it a ruin in the hope the enemy would piss off and bomb something else. Within half an hour of their first meeting Rizhin put him in charge of producing battle tanks for the whole of the Vlast. Since the war ended, Kistler had expanded into oilfields, gasfields, hydro turbines, petroleum refineries, atomic power. Energy. Energy. Energy. Lukasz ‘Dynamo’ Kistler made Papa Rizhin’s Vlast burn brighter and run louder and faster every day.
And Lukasz Kistler was a clever, subtle, observant and far-sighted man. He saw that Rizhin knew how to spend money and people but had no idea where such resources actually came from. Rizhin didn’t know how to turn dirt into cash or people into workers. Rizhin grabbed and stole to spend, and spent what he could not make, and in the end he would spend the whole of the world until he had nothing left. Kistler suspected that one day he and Papa Rizhin would come to blows.
Kistler was watching Rizhin now. Rizhin was on his feet and prowling behind the seated committee members in his soft leather shoes. He liked to walk behind them. It made them uncomfortable. And today Rizhin was wielding a sword. He gripped it in his swollen fist and made experimental swipes at the air as he prowled. (Rizhin’s hands fascinated Kistler: hard, thickened, stub-fingered hands, butcher’s hands, raw-pink hands that looked like they’d been stung by bees. Long rough work on stone in ice and cold could make such hands. Many years in labour camps. That was something not in Papa Rizhin’s official biography.)
The sword was ridiculous. The Severe Sword. The Southern Congress of Regions had presented it to him that morning as a birthday gift. Its blade was inscribed on one side SLASH THE RIGHT DEVIATION! and on the other SLASH THE LEFT DEVIATION! and on the hilt it said PUMMEL THE CONCILIATOR!
‘They give me a sword?’ Rizhin was saying. ‘And what are we to make of that? I give them jet engines and atomic space vessels and they give me a sword. What am I to do with a sword? What does a sword say? You see how riddled we are with aristocrats and peasants still? Fantasists. Nostalgists. Am I to ride out on a fucking horse like a khan? Do they mean me to butcher my own people? Well, if there is butchery to be done, let us start with the Southern Congress of Regions.’
‘The sword is an emblem, Osip,’ said Yashina. ‘That’s all.’
‘Everything is an emblem,’ said Rizhin. ‘A generator is an emblem. A sky rise is an emblem. Those fuckers need to get better emblems.’
Rizhin laid the sword on the table and sat down, slumping back in his chair. He picked up a pen and began to scrawl doodles on his notepad.
‘The people call me Papa and sing hymns about me,’ he said. ‘“Thank you Papa Rizhin. Glory to our great commander.” It’s laughable. I’m not Papa Rizhin; I’m a simple man. I am Osip, a worker and a soldier just like them.’
He paused and looked around the table, fixing them one by one with his smiling burning eyes.
‘Even you, my friends,’ he said, ‘even you do this to me. You want me to walk out there today on that platform and let you make me Generalissimus. Do I need this? No. Does Osip the simple industrious man need such empty titles? No, he does not. I do not. I will not accept it. I give it back to you. Take it back, I beg you, and make someone else your Generalissimus, not me.’
There was silence in the room. Everyone froze. Everyone looked down. Secretary for Agriculture Vladi Broch stared glassy-eyed at the sword on the table in front of him as if it would leap up and stab him in the neck. Rizhin doodled on his pad and waited.
For one horrifying moment Lukasz Kistler thought the idiots were going to accept. It’s a test! he screamed inwardly. A loyalty test! If someone didn’t speak soon he would have to do it himself, and that would be no good. He wasn’t on trial–everyone knew he was Rizhin’s dynamo–but if he had to step in and repair the situation it would be the end for some of them.
It was Yashina who rescued them in the end. Smooth, calm, cultured Yulia Yashina.
‘We’re nothing without you, Osip,’ she said quietly. ‘No one else could step into your shoes. It is unthinkable.’
They all swung in behind her then. General acclamation, a clattering of fists on the table. Rizhin sighed and straightened himself up in his chair.
‘Very well, then,’ he said. ‘If you insist… I do not like it, you hear me. I protest. Let the record show that. Well… let’s get this over with, and get back to our real work.’
Lukasz Kistler glanced down at Rizhin’s notepad as they filed out of the room. There was a jagged black scribble in the corner of the top sheet: the scrawled angular face of a wolf glaring out at him from a wall of dark trees. The wolf’s jaw was open, showing its teeth.
3
Elena Cornelius climbed the concrete stairwell in near-darkness, counting floors as she went. Five. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty. The light filtering through fluted glass panes in the landing doors was enough to climb by, but too dim to read the floor numbers. It didn’t matter. She could count. She knew how many storeys up she needed to go. The key to the service entrance of the New Mirgorod Hotel was in her pocket. Vesna Mayskova, a floor attendant at the New Mirgorod, had got it for her, and she’d left a bucket of dirty water and a mop in the alley outside, the signal that the area was clear of militia patrols.
On the twenty-second floor of the New Mirgorod Hotel, Elena Cornelius stopped climbing and shoved open the door onto the second-tier roof. The sudden daylight was blinding: the shock of air and sky and the noise of the city after the dim stairwell. Elena held the door open with her foot, swung the canvas bag off her shoulder and rummaged in it for a small sliver of wood. Panic rose for a moment when she couldn’t find it, but there it was. Putting the bag on the ground, she let the door almost close and slipped the wooden sliver between the edge of it and the jamb. From the stairwell it would look shut, but there was just enough edge left proud of the surround to wrench it open again from outside with the tips of clawed fingers.
She turned and looked out across the roof. Taking stock. Considering. Checking. She had been here before–a rehearsal run–but nothing must be taken for granted. Check and check again. That’s what had kept her alive in the siege.
She was trembling from the effort of the long climb, but that was OK: she knew that it would pass and her hand would steady. There was plenty of time. The impersonal oceanic murmur of the crowd in Victory Square twenty-two floors below was oddly restful. It didn’t sound human but like the power of waterfalls or the wind in forest trees.
There was no chance of being seen from below as long as she kept back from the edge. Only the newly built Rizhin Tower on the other side of Victory Square was tall enough to overlook her, and that was still unoccupied. If she were in charge of security, she’d have posted an observer with binoculars in one of the deserted rooms high in the Rizhin Tower. Maybe somebody had, but the architect who designed the three-tiered edifice of the New Mirgorod Hotel had set thirty-foot bronze allegorical figures at the roof corners of every stage. He hadn’t worried that he was giving cover for shooters.