‘All of it,’ said Pavel. ‘He’s been everywhere, you can be sure of that. He’s a thorough man.’
‘Even Chazia’s personal archive?’ said Lom.
Pavel missed a beat. ‘What?’
‘Chazia had her own private papers,’ said Lom. ‘She kept them in a room in the Central Registry. I saw them. And they wouldn’t have been burned or shipped off to Kholvatogorsk. No way. Chazia would have made arrangements to keep them separate and safe.’
‘I know nothing about this,’ said Pavel.
‘Don’t you?’ said Lom. ‘Well you should. Chazia had papers there with your name on, Pavel. Papers that you passed to her from Krogh’s office, including papers about me and how Krogh wanted me to find Kantor. I saw them, Pavel, and you don’t want Rizhin finding them, do you?’
Pavel sat down. He looked suddenly diminished.
‘What do you want from me?’ he said.
‘I want the same thing you want for yourself. I want you to retrieve those papers.’
‘For fuck’s sake!’
‘I’ll tell you what you’re going to do, Pavel. You’re going to find out what happened to Chazia’s archive, then you’re going to find it and you’re going to get the file on Kantor from it and bring it to me. It’s there. I’ve read it. What you do with the rest is up to you.’
‘What if I can’t do this?’ said Pavel. ‘The archive could have been lost or destroyed by now. And even if it still exists, who will know where it is? I can hardly ask.’
Lom shrugged.
‘I don’t care how you do it. These are your problems, not mine. They’re administrative problems, the kind you’re good at solving. If you bring me the Kantor file, you won’t hear from me again. If not, well… I don’t like you, Pavel. I don’t like the kind of person you are, and I remember how you pissed me about when I was working for Krogh. I’m not your friend.’
‘Look,’ said Pavel, ‘OK. I’ll try to find it, but it may not—’
‘I’m not interested in intentions,’ said Lom. ‘Only outcomes. I’ll come back for it this time tomorrow. Have it ready.’
‘No,’ said Pavel. ‘One day isn’t enough. And you are not to come to my home again. Not ever again.’
‘Two days then,’ said Lom. ‘But no more.’
Pavel nodded. He looked sick.
‘There’s a konditorei on the lake in Kerensky Gardens,’ he said. ‘If I can get what you want, I’ll be there. I will arrive at 10 p.m. and I will wait till eleven.’
10
Night in the city, and Mirgorod celebrates the survival of Papa Rizhin the unkillable man. Lamps project the immense face of Rizhin all ruby-red against the underbelly of broken scudding cloud. Moon-gapped, star-gapped, streaming, he fills a quarter of the sky and floods the city with dim reflected redness.
In the rebuilt Dreksler-Kino, Ziabin’s greatest work, The Glorification of Time Racing, makes its triumphant premiere before an audience of twenty thousand. Oh, the ambition of Ziabin! Two thousand performers fusing music, dance and oratory! He will unify the arts! He will raise humankind to the radiant level! New instruments constructed for the occasion emit perfumes and effusions of vaporous colour in accordance with Ziabin’s score, and the auditorium reverberates to wonderful sounds previously unheard. Towers and mountains rise from the floor and cosmonauts descend thunderous from the sky, waving and smiling as they join the chorus in polyphonic harmony. Across the enormous cinema screen roll images of Rizhin country against a backdrop of galaxies. And all in glorious colour! The roars of wonder of twenty thousand watchers echo across the city, new gasps of rapture in perfect time with the long under-rhythms of Ziabin’s scheme. A synchronised crescendo every seventh wave.
Rizhin himself is there at the Dreksler-Kino, seated in a raised box. The wound on his face is agony but his chair is gilt, the walls of his box padded and buttoned velvet. Like a brooch in a jeweller’s box, he says to Ziabin. It is not a remark intended to put the great artist at his ease. Haven’t we shot you yet?
11
The Vlast Universal Vessel Proof of Concept tumbles slowly, describing twenty-thousand-mile-per-hour corkscrew ellipses of orbiting perpetual fall. The cosmonauts ride in silence, having nothing to do. Sweeps of shadow and light. Cabin windows crossing the sun. Nightside passages of broken moon. The internal lighting has failed.
The frost of their breath furs the ceiling thickly.
Hourly they flick the radio switch.
‘Chaiganur? Hello, Chaiganur? Here is Proof of Concept calling.’
Universes of silence stare back from the loudspeaker grille.
In Mirgorod the twenty-foot likenesses of cosmonauts in bronze relief carry their space helms at the hip. In bright mosaic above the Wieland Station concourse they look skyward with chiselled confidence, grinning into star-swept purple. Our Starfaring Heroes. Mankind Advances Towards the Radiant Sun.
On the giant screen in the Dreksler-Kino wobbling smoky rockets descend among rocks and oceans out of strange skies. Bubble-cabin tractors till the extraplanetary soil, building barracks for pioneers. The audience roars and stamps its forty thousand feet. All children know their names from the illustrated magazines.
Our Future Among the Galaxies.
The Vlast Universal Vessel Proof of Concept, two-thousand-ton extraplanetary submarine, makes a shining white mote against the nightly backdrop of the stars. It slides on smooth invisible rails across the sky. You can set your clock by it. It is clean and beautiful and very sad.
Silent the cosmonauts, eyes wide and dark-adapted, having nothing to do.
The turning of the cabin windows pans slowly across vectors of the lost planet, blue-rimmed, beclouded, oceanic. Shadow-side campfire towns and cities glitter. Ant jewels. The shrouded green-river-veined darkness of forest. Lakes are yellow. Lakes are brown. The continent is a midriff between ice and ice. Glimpses of the offshore archipelago.
Complex geometries of turn bring the snub nose of the Proof of Concept round to face the world. It’s a matter of timing. Her fingers stiff with cold and lack of use, Cosmonaut-Commodore Vera Mornova engages console mechanisms. The distant tinny echo of whirr and clunk. The magazine selects a charge.
Her companions observe unspeaking with heavy-lidded eyes and do not move.
‘I’m going home now,’ she says and pushes her thumb into the rubber of the detonation button.
The response is a distant bolt sliding home.
A half-second delay.
The tiny silent star-explosion of angel plasma smashes them in the small of the back. They do not blink.
Vera Mornova jabs her finger into the rubber button again and again.
Her aim is true. Proof of Concept surges forward into burning fall. The world in the window judders and bellies and swells.
The melting frost of their breath on the ceiling begins to fall on them like rain.
12
After leaving Pavel’s apartment, Lom took a night walk on the Mir Embankment. The Mir still rolled on through the city, carrying silt and air and the remembering of lakes and trees, but it was silent now and just a river. Everything was hot and open under the Rizhin-stained sky. He didn’t want to go home, not if home was a room in the Pension Forbat.