But who knew the truth? Hundreds must have known. Thousands. People who would have seen the portraits of Osip Rizhin and recognised Josef Kantor. For a start there would be those who knew him from his childhood among the families of Lezarye. Lom turned cold. He went back to the newspapers from the first days of the siege and read again a passage he had seen there. The whole of the Raion Lezaryet had been cleared and every last person of Lezarye ‘relocated in the east’. There was no reference to Lezarye in the journal index after that. No account of the place or its people ever again. He felt dizzy. Sick.
Of course there would have been others who could identify Kantor as Rizhin. Fellow inmates in the camp at Vig, for a start. But how easy it would be to reach out from Mirgorod and silence them if you had already removed an entire city quarter.
Josef Kantor knew who knew him, and Osip Rizhin could kill them all.
Lom went through the list in his mind. Under-Secretary Krogh (who knew because Lom had told him) was dead: his obituary was there in the paper, a eulogy to a lifetime’s service cut short by heart failure in his office a week before war came to Mirgorod. Raku Vishnik was dead. Lavrentina Chazia was dead (not killed by Kantor because Lom had saved him that trouble). Kantor’s wife, Maroussia’s mother, was dead: Lom had seen her shot down in the street in front of him. They had come to kill Maroussia herself more than once. And they had tried to kill him, Lom, as well.
Who else? Who else? Was there anyone left at all, apart from Maroussia and himself, who had been so comprehensively lost to view that Rizhin could not find them?
Lom racked his brain. There was one more face he remembered, a wild-eyed prophet of the new arts, standing green shirt half unbuttoned in the rain in the alley outside the Crimson Marmot. The painter Lakoba Petrov. He knew Josef Kantor. He was one of Kantor’s gang. Kantor the crab, Petrov had called him. Josef Krebs. Josef Cancer. Nothing but shell, shell, and lidless eyes on little stalks staring out of it, like a crab. Lom remembered Petrov swaying drunk in the red glow of the Marmot’s sign, oblivious of the rain in his face. And shall I tell you something else about him? Petrov had said, speaking very slowly and clearly. He has some other purpose which is not apparent.
Lom went back to the index and searched for Lakoba Petrov, painter.
For the second time he turned cold. Sick and dizzy with disbelief. Following a couple of references to reviews of Petrov’s paintings, there was one last entry: ‘Petrov, Lakoba: assassination of the Novozhd; death of.’ Petrov had blown himself up and taken the Novozhd with him. The papers presented it as some mad kind of anarchist artwork, the ultimate product of a degenerate corrupted mind. But Petrov’s act had paved the way for Chazia, and ultimately Kantor, to seize the Vlast, and Petrov was Kantor’s man.
Lom ripped the page from the newspaper, stuffed it in his pocket and walked out of the library in a daze. Sat on the steps in the early-afternoon sunshine and lit a cigarette. There were still a couple left in the packet.
The story was there in the archive to be read if you knew what to look for, but everyone who could have known even part of it… Papa Rizhin had raked the Vlast with a lice comb and killed them all, every one, as he would kill anyone who came forward with a rumour or began to ask around. There was no proof. And what would proof look like anyway? What were the chances of finding a police file with Josef Kantor’s photograph and fingerprints neatly tagged and docketed?
But there had once been such a file. Lom had held it in his own hands. He’d stolen it from Chazia’s personal archive in the Lodka: the file that contained Chazia’s account of her recruitment of Kantor as an informant and conspirator, and of her contact with the living angel in the forest. That file was proof enough to bring Rizhin down. But it was gone. Lom remembered how he’d left it hidden in the cistern in the bathroom of Vishnik’s apartment, but he knew the militia had searched the building when they killed Vishnik. They looked all over, the dvornik had told him. The halls. The stairwell. The bathroom. They pulled the cistern off the wall.
That surely meant they had found it, and the file was gone. But it had gone somewhere. Where? Back to Chazia presumably. The efficient paper handling of the old regime.
It came back to him now. There had in fact been two files in the folder he hid in the cistern: Chazia’s folder on Josef Kantor, and Lom’s own personnel record, which he’d also lifted from Chazia’s archive and brought away to read. Lom remembered the manuscript note on the second file from Krogh’s traitorous private secretary, who’d extracted it from Krogh’s office and passed it to Chazia.
Lom felt a sudden waking of excitement and hope. The private secretary. He was Chazia’s man, and he’d known something, perhaps a lot. He’d certainly known all about Lom’s mission to track down Kantor. But Kantor almost certainly would not have known about him.
Lom could still see the private secretary’s face.
His name? What was his name?
It was there somewhere, neatly lodged away in his long-unused policeman’s brain.
Find it. Find it.
Pavel!
Pavel. First name only, but it might be enough.
Lom raced back up the steps and into the library again. In the reference section next to the newspaper index he’d seen the long rows of annual volumes of the Administrative Gazette Yearbook, which among much other turgid information listed the ministers and senior officials of the Vlast. Including details of their private offices. Heart pounding, Lom pulled down the volume of the Gazette he needed and flipped through the pages until he found the one he needed. And there it was, in small italic typeface under the name of Krogh himself: ‘Private Secretary: Antimos, Pavel Ilich’.
It was a lot to hope that Pavel Antimos had survived: survived the siege, survived the war, survived Rizhin’s lice comb; survived it all and continued to work for the government of the New Vlast. A lot to hope for but perhaps not too much. Men like Pavel did survive. They even kept their jobs. He might still be there.
The long unbroken run of the Administrative Gazette Yearbook had gold lettering on blue spines fading to grey as the years receded to the left. Tucked in at the right-hand end of the last shelf were five volumes with the same gold lettering, but the spines were green and shining new. Administrative Gazette Yearbook, New Series. Lom took the last one, the most recent volume. Antimos, Pavel Ilich had not only survived but his career had flourished. He was an under-secretary now, in the Office for Progressive Cultural Enlightenment, with a private secretary of his own.
Lom didn’t want to approach him in his office. Better to do it in the evening, at home. Pushing his winning streak for one last throw, he scouted around for a Mirgorod residential telephone directory. He found it. And Pavel Antimos was in it. Lom memorised the address. It was a tenuous lead but the only one he had.
Pull on a thread. See where it takes me.
Just like the old days.
8
Maroussia Shaumian feels small beyond insignificance. The trees spread around her in all directions, numberless, featureless and utterly bleak. A still, engulfing, unending tide of blankness. The skin between her and the forest is permeable: she wants to spill out into it, a scent cloud dispersing under the branch-head canopy. The forest tugs and nags at the edges of her. Pieces of her snag on the trees and pull free.