‘No,’ whispered Varagan. ‘I wished only—’
Kistler leaned across to him. ‘Leave the room, man,’ he said quietly. ‘This agenda item is closed.’
Varagan nodded. Wordless and methodical, shaking like a leaf, he collected his papers. Unhooked his wire spectacles from his ears and popped them into the top pocket of his jacket. Rose, turned, pushed back his chair and went out slowly into the lonely cold.
10
After sundown in the balmy nights of summer the well dinnered families of the List, Rizhin’s plush elite, take to the paths of the Trezzini Pleasure Gardens in the Pir-Anghelsky Park. Entering the blazing gateway of crystal glass–lit from within by a thousand tiny flickering golden lights–they move among pagodas and boating lakes. Arched bridges, tulips and water lilies. Straight-haired girls walk there with mothers sleekly plump. Awkward boys with arrogant blank eyes wince as father calls to father with penetrating voice. There is music here. Sugared chestnuts and roasting pig and candyfloss. Take a pedalo among enamel-bright and floodlit waterfowl! Visit the Aquarium and the Pantomime Theatre! Ride the Dragon Swing! The Spinner! See the pierrot and the dancing bear!
The List regarded their pleasures coolly, with the assurance of natural entitlement. They were the experts. The competent ones. You would not know that a handful of years ago none of them was here. No old money in Papa Rizhin country! But the polished faces of the List reflect the coloured lamps strung among wax-leaved dark exotic trees. Their soaps and perfumes mingle with evening-heavy blossom.
Lom stayed in the darkness under the trees. Pavel had chosen this meeting place to make a point–This is the coming world. Here it is. I’m at home and familiar among these people. I belong here, and you, Lom, you ghost, you do not–but also because the konditorei was on an island in the shallow lake reached by a causeway. Light blazed from the filigreed iron glasshouse and blazed reflections off dark waters. Within, the List at white-linen-covered tables ate pastries from tiered plates and drank chocolate from gleaming china jugs. The gilt-framed mirror behind the central counter showed the backs of master patissiers and konditiers: their crisp white tunics, shaved necks, pomaded hair.
The narrow causeway was the one way in and the one way out.
Pavel Ilich Antimos was achingly visible, sitting alone at a table in the window. Lom had watched him for half an hour and he had not moved. He might as well have been under a spotlight. Here I am. See me. Come to me. He stared at the untouched chocolate in front of him, twisting a knotted napkin, his injured right shoulder hunched up against his neck. He never looked up. Never looked around.
The konditorei was crowded but the tables near Pavel were empty. Perhaps the customers had been warned away; more likely they shunned him through instinct: the unerring sense of the List for avoiding the tainted. The untouchable. The fallen. Even from across the lake Lom could detect the sour grey stink and sadness of the already dead.
Ten feet from Lom, in the dark of the lakeside trees, a corporal of the VKBD was also observing Pavel Antimos. From time to time he scanned the brightly lit approach to the causeway through binoculars. There were three other VKBD at intervals in the shadow near Lom, and no doubt there were more on the other side of the lake. Probably they had a team in the konditorei as well. Lom couldn’t see them but they would be there.
Poor Pavel. He wouldn’t have gone to the VKBD with his story –he’d have known that was suicidal–so they must have caught him with his fingers in the drawer. And they’d taken the trouble to keep him alive and use him as bait. So they wanted Lom too. That told Lom something. That was information.
He could have simply slipped away, back in under the rhododendron trees, and left the VKBD to their watching, but the corporal ten feet from him had a pistol on his hip and Lom wanted that. He needed to broaden his options.
He waited till the brass orchestra in the bandstand reached the finale of ‘We Fine Dragoons’. They made a lot of noise. The corporal didn’t hear him coming.
11
An hour later, with no secret Rizhin file from Pavel Antimos but a VKBD pistol in his pocket, Lom re-entered the Lodka by underground ways. He came up past empty cells and interrogation rooms into the tile-floored central atrium. There was no moonlight. He felt the corridors, the stairwells, the doorways, the ramifications of office and conference room as spaciousness and slow currents in the air. Opened up, arboreal and dark-adapted, Lom scented out his way. Forest percipience. He knew the difference between solid dark and airy dark. He felt the invitation of certain thresholds, the threat beyond others; he heard the echo of entranceless passageways on the far side of walls, and the restless shuffling of the basement mortuary dead.
This forest-opened world was not like seeing; it was knowing and feeling. Everything–absolutely everything–was alive, and Lom shared the life of it. Raw participation. The boundaries of himself were uncertain and permeable. Shifting frontier crossings. He felt history, watchfulness, weight and presence.
And there was something else. Another spectrum altogether. Liminal angel senses came into play, the residuum of the coin-size lozenge of angel flesh fitted into his skull in childhood and gouged out by Chazia; the residuum also of Chazia’s angel suit, its substance seared into him and joined with his by Uncle Vanya’s atomic starburst at Novaya Zima. Angel particles and angel energies had soaked through him to the blood-warm matter at the heart of bone. Synapses sparkled with alien angel speed and grace. By the faint afterglow of the Lodka’s radiating warmth, Lom saw with a crisp and prickling non-human clarity that needed no more light.
Always at some level he was these two things: the heart of the forest and the heartless gaze of the spaciousness inside atoms, the spaciousness separating stars. He saw further and better in the dark. Darkness simplified.
In the Lodka’s cool central atrium (a huge airy space lined by abandoned reception desks, a plaza of echoing linoleum, a node for wide staircases heavily balustered and swing-door exits, surfaces dust-skinned and speckled with the faeces of small animals) Moth was waiting for him. She had sensed his perfumed brightness coming, and he knew she was there: from several floors below he had felt her agitation.
‘Men are here!’ she hissed. ‘They have lamps and guns. We know the black uniforms they wear, my sisters and I. They are Streltski!’ She spat the word. Anger and hatred. ‘They have your friend. Some threaten her; others look for papers.’
Lom had brought Elena Cornelius to the Lodka before he went to look for Pavel in Pir-Anghelsky Park. She is my friend, he’d said to Moth. She’s here under my protection. He’d thought she would be safer here than at her apartment.
‘It’s bad the black Streltski are here,’ Moth was saying. ‘We remember them from long ago, but Josef Kantor who is Papa Rizhin brought them back. Streltski burn us! If they find us they burn! Two of us they roasted in the Apraksin. My sisters blame you for bringing them here and for bringing this woman here, and they blame me for this because of you. There will be a bad end of things now.’