You couldn’t kill a man who wasn’t there.
When Lom read the biography of Rizhin, what he saw was nothing. Gaps. Elisions. Lacunae. Imprecision covering emptiness. The testimony of witnesses who were not there. It was a life that had not happened. All the hardness and roaring industrious speed of Mirgorod and the New Vlast were a tissue of words laid across nothing at all.
And two other simple words, one name spoken out loud, a double trochee on a single breath of air–JO-sef KAN-tor–would scatter the whole construction and blow it all away.
Don’t kill him, Maroussia had said. Bring him down. Destroy the idea of him. Ruin him in this world, using the tricks of this world, and ruin this world he has created.
For centuries the Vlast had wiped histories away. The stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen created unpersons out of lives and made ruined former people the unseen, unheard haunters of their own streets.
So there it was.
Turn the weapon on the wielder of it. One name spoken would turn Osip Rizhin into another empty unperson.
JO-sef KAN-tor.
Lom’s heart was beating faster. He shifted in his seat with excitement. He wanted to be moving again. He had seen the way. He could do that, and he would.
What was needed was proof.
6
President-Commander Osip Rizhin had at his disposal the entire security machinery of the New Vlast. Two million police and militia men and women, their agents and informers and surveillance systems. Interrogators, analysts, collectors and sifters of intelligence. Torturers, assassins and spies. Rizhin had all of that, but trusted none of them because he of all people knew what kind of thing they were, and knew they must themselves be watched and kept in fear.
And so Rizhin had created the Parallel Sector. The Black Guard. The Streltski.
The Director of the Parallel Sector was Hunder Rond, and Rond was Rizhin’s man. Narrow-shouldered and diminutive, Rond had the cropped grey hair and brisk featureless competence of a senior bank official. In the brief civil war against Fohn and his crew, Rond–then a colonel of militia–had shown himself assiduously and unflamboyantly effective as an eliminator of the less-than-committed within Rizhin’s own camp. As an interrogator he was imaginatively destructive. He had certain private desires (which he gratified) that Rizhin disliked and documented, but in Rond he overlooked them. He needed someone, and Hunder Rond met the requirement as no one else. When Rond entered a room he brought darkness with him.
‘Keep that doctor locked up for now,’ Rizhin told Rond. ‘I want no blabbing from him.’
(Did Rizhin trust Hunder Rond? He did not. But he was sure Rond had no involvement in yesterday’s sniper attack. Rond had no friends, no allies because Rond hurt everyone–Rizhin made sure of that. Rond had no independent means of support and wouldn’t survive a week with Rizhin gone. Rond would not have tried to cut off the branch he sat on.)
‘Grigor Ekel’s outside,’ said Rond. ‘He’s been sitting there for two hours in a pool of his own piss and sweat. As secretary for security he is most distraught at this failure on the part of others outside his control. He wishes to abase himself and name the negligent.’
‘Have the fucker sent away,’ said Rizhin. ‘Tell him he’s lucky he’s not already under arrest. And tell him he’s got better things to do than lick my arse. Like find the fucker who shot me.’
Rond nodded. If he noticed that Rizhin spoke more slowly and emphatically than normal, through swollen lips that barely moved–if he observed Rizhin’s tunic soaked with blood, Rizhin’s face half-hidden under bandages, the slight tremor in Rizhin’s right hand–then Rond gave no sign. He was reassuring efficiency, only there to serve.
‘And there has been nothing?’ Rizhin was saying. ‘No further moves? No claims of responsibility?’
‘Nothing,’ said Rond. ‘Nobody seems to have been prepared for this. Everybody is watching everybody else and waiting to see what happens. The situation is drifting. Perhaps we should make a public statement? You could make an appearance. Reassert control. Vacuum is the greater risk now. Nerves are shot. We need to worry about the whole continent, not just Mirgorod.’
‘Not yet,’ said Rizhin. ‘Keep it vague a few more hours. And watch. Someone may still make a move.’
Rond made a face.
‘I think the time for that’s gone,’ he said. ‘We’d have seen something by now. The more time passes, the more likely it is that this was a lone wolf.’
Rizhin looked at him sharply.
‘A wolf? You say a wolf?’
‘Someone working alone,’ said Rond. ‘A grudge. A fanatic. A private venture. It was always a possibility. It’s the hardest threat to see coming and protect against.’
‘Nothing comes from nowhere,’ said Rizhin. ‘I want to know who did this, Rond. Find the shooter. Find them all. I want them disembowelled. I want them swinging in the wind and screaming to be let die.’
7
Lom passed the morning in a ProVlastKult reading room among stacks of newspapers six years old. The whole of the story was there if you knew how to read it.
There was the assault on Secetary Dukhonin’s residence in Pir-Anghelsky Park: Dukhonin and all his household butchered by a terrorist gang who then themselves all died at the hands of the militia, including their leader the notorious agitator Josef Kantor. The papers gave a surprisingly full account of Kantor’s history: his involvement with the Birzel plot; his twenty-year confinement in the labour camp at Vig; his death in a hail of bullets as he tried to escape the Pir-Anghelsky charnel house. There was no photograph of Kantor though, not even a prison mug shot. Of course there wasn’t.
And then the very next day after Dukhonin’s death, the Archipelago bombers had come for the first time and Mirgorod began to burn. The government withdrew and it seemed the city would quickly fall. But there was Colonel-General Osip Rizhin, suddenly come from nowhere, an unknown name (there were no prior references in the index, none at all) to lead the city’s defence. To stem the enemy advance and hold the siege. To conjure out of nowhere atomic artillery shells, a whole new way of killing, and turn the tide. Step forward Papa Rizhin, father and begetter of a new and better Vlast. Times are better now, citizens.
What Rizhin stood for was never made clear. If there were principles they were not spoken of. It was all about racing ahead. Dynamism. Taking the future in hand. A fresh beginning. Victory and peace and a bright widening tomorrow. Papa Rizhin works on the people, an editorial read, as a chemist works in his laboratory. He builds with us, as an engineer builds a great bridge.
In the early weeks and months after Rizhin’s first appearance in the world the papers had carried vague and inconsistent accounts of who he was and where he’d come from. Stories came and went, made little sense and did not stick until the publication of the little pamphlet An Account of the Life of Osip Rizhin, Hero of Mirgorod, Father of the New Vlast. Ten million copies of a little book of lies.