Lom moved from room to room. Everything was neat. Possessions carefully put away. There was a phonogram cabinet in the sitting room, the lid closed. A shelf of recordings arranged in alphabetical order of composer. On a low glass-topped table with splayed tapering legs Pavel had stacked some literary magazines–New Cosmos, The Forward View–and three days’ worth of newspapers, crisply folded. In the bedroom there were books, also carefully arranged, the spines unbroken, on a low shelf under the window. The food in the kitchen was brightly coloured packages and tins–fruit juice, condensed milk, rye bread, caviar–all high quality List Shop brands.
There was something about Pavel’s apartment that was odd. It took Lom a moment to realise what it was. Nothing in the whole place was personaclass="underline" nothing was old or well used or could possibly have had sentimental value. The pressed dark suits, the careful ties, the white shirts folded in drawers, the carpets, the curtains, the coverlet on the bed, the gramophone recordings of new composers singled out for favour by the Academy of Transformational Artistic Production (chairman, Osip Rizhin). Pavel had kept nothing that was made before the inception of the New Vlast. Nothing that deviated from post-war cultural norms. Pavel had accepted Rizhin’s world utterly, immersed himself in it, acquired with the obsessiveness of a connoisseur the top-rank artefacts of its material culture and surrounded himself with them. This was the apartment of an exemplary fellow, New Vlast Man to the core, from whose life all vestiges of the past had been removed with surgical thoroughness. Pavel was a chameleon, a caddis fly. He raised the art of blending in to new pinnacles of ruthless ostentation.
In a drawer of Pavel’s desk Lom found a travel agent’s confirmation of a booking for one–two weeks at the Tyaroga Resort Hotel on the Chernomorskoy Sea, single-berth rail sleeper included. He also found a carton of small-calibre shells and a diminutive pistol. A Deineka 5-shot Personal Defender. It looked like it had never been fired.
Lom loaded the gun, slipped a round into the chamber and put it in his pocket. Then he went into the kitchen, opened a packet of Pavel’s Oksetian Sunrise coffee, filled Pavel’s coffee pot and put it on Pavel’s stove. When the pot hissed and bubbled he poured himself a cup, picked up a book from the kitchen counter and went back into the other room to wait for Pavel to come home. The window was slightly open, letting in a stir of warm early-evening air. The quiet sound of distant traffic. Liquid blackbird song.
The book from Pavel’s kitchen was the Mikoyan Institute’s Home Course of Delicious and Healthy Food. Lom flicked through the pages to pass the time. Monochrome photographic plates displayed smiling family faces and crowded tables: meat loaf canapés filled with piped mayonnaise; bottles of sparkling Vlastskoye Sektwine and shining crystal goblets; a platter of pike in aspic decorated with radish rosettes. There were recipes for crab and cucumber salad; vinaigrette of beetroot, cabbage and red potato; crunchy pork cutlets; mutton aubergine claypot. Papa Rizhin himself had provided a foreword. ‘The special character of our New Vlast,’ it began, ‘is the joyousness of our prosperous and cultured style of life.’ There were no grease spots on the herb-green cloth binding. No spills. No stuck-together pages. Pavel didn’t have any favourite recipes then. Pavel Ilich Antimos would eat them all with equal relish. Anything that Papa Rizhin recommends. Lom looked at his watch. It was well past six o’clock. He hoped Pavel wasn’t working late or dining out.
Lom got another coffee and occupied himself with the pictures on Pavel’s walls. The pictures people put on their walls told you as much about them as their books–more, because they were meant to be seen. This is what I like. This is my mind. This is who you should think I am. Pavel’s visual world was framed prints advertising exhibitions of art promoted by the Office for Progressive Cultural Enlightenment. He’d probably picked them up free at work. There was a jewel-bright painting of a Mirgorod Airways Skyliner over snow-capped mountains. Dancers in a town square. The storm-beset factory ship VV Karamazov riding glass-green churning foam-flecked waters under a purple thunder-riven sky (Recall Our Heroic Sailors of the Merchant Marine!). Pride of place went to a large colourised photograph of the Vlast Universal Vessel Proof of Concept climbing on a column of fire into a cloud-wisped sky.
Three hours later it was getting dark outside when Pavel Antimos let himself into his own apartment with his own key. Lom heard him lock the door behind him, drive the bolts home top and bottom, safe and sound, and hook the chain in place for the night. He let Pavel find him in the sitting room. In his armchair. Reading his books. Drinking his coffee. From his mug.
‘Pavel,’ he said, ‘it’s been too long, old friend. How’re you doing? Working late tonight? You’re looking well. You haven’t changed.’
And Pavel hadn’t changed, hardly at all. Some thickening at the neck and shoulders, maybe. A suggestion of jowl under the chin. A darkening around the eyes, the pallor of long office days.
He blinked. But only once.
‘You,’ he said. ‘You’re Lom.’
‘You remembered.’
‘I’m efficient. What do you want?’
Lom saw his eyes flick to the desk. To the drawer left open where the gun had been. A small loss of hope. You had to know it was there to see it.
‘I want a talk,’ said Lom. ‘About Josef Kantor.’
Pavel’s eyes widened. Not so missable this time.
‘Who?’
‘Please don’t spoil it,’ said Lom, ‘the memory thing. Let’s talk Papa and Joe. The Rizhin–Kantor nexus. Identities.’
‘You’re insane.’
‘He never knew about you, did he?’ said Lom. ‘You were never on his list. You’ve been lucky. It’s been a long time now, and you’re in the clear unless somebody mentions you to him. An anonymous note would be enough; a phone call would be better. He might even remember your name then, and if he didn’t he might check it out, but probably he wouldn’t bother. It wouldn’t make any difference. He’d err on the safe side. That would be bad for you. And I can make that happen, Pavel. Maybe I will.’
Pavel didn’t flinch. No bluster. No threats. No visible emotion of any kind. He absorbed the position and adapted to it. Instantly. It was a masterclass in how to survive.
‘This is wasting time,’ he said. ‘I understand you perfectly. You have information dangerous to me, and you come to my home to threaten me because you want something in return for your silence. I do not like this but I accept the inevitability of it. Well, I am listening. So what do you want?’
‘I want proof,’ said Lom. ‘I know that Rizhin is Kantor, but I want evidence. Photographs. Police files. Intelligence reports. Identification.’
‘Like I said, you’re insane,’ said Pavel. ‘You really are. Fortunately for both of us, what you’re asking for is impossible. The Lodka archive is long gone. Most of it was burned when the Archipelago came, before the siege.’
‘Only most of it?’ said Lom.
‘Some papers were sent to Kholvatogorsk, but Rizhin has been there. He’s been everywhere. You won’t find any files on Josef Kantor; they’re all gone, and everybody who might have dealt with such information is dead or disappeared into a labour camp.’
‘Has he been to Vig too?’ said Lom. ‘The courts? Provincial stations? There must have been a lot of paper on Kantor. A lot of people who would recognise his face.’