‘We’re being watched,’ he said. ‘Someone’s following. I think. I want to be sure. No, don’t look back. Not yet.’
‘Is it the police?’
Lom shook his head.
‘Whoever it is has been with us on and off since Marinsky-Voksal. They’re just watching. I wasn’t sure. I thought they’d gone, but they’re back. There’s not many of them, maybe only one. I want to have a look. Make sure. Then decide what to do.’
‘So what do I do?’
‘We walk on together for a while. Then I’ll duck out of sight and you go on alone. Keep visible and don’t try to lose them. Stop and start. Cross the street at random, but stay with the crowds. Always be among people. Make it hard for them, make it so they have to come in close, to keep in touch with you.’
‘What if they don’t follow me? What if they look for you?’
‘Then we’ll know something. After ten or fifteen minutes find somewhere you can go inside and sit down. Somewhere with lots of people. I’ll find you there.’
Maroussia nodded. ‘Now?’ she said.
‘I’ll be watching you the whole time,’ said Lom. ‘I can do this kind of thing. I’m good.’
‘It’s fine. Let’s go.’
They rounded a corner and Lom ducked into an alleyway and stepped quickly back into the shelter of a service door. He waited there for a slow hundred count then stepped back out into the street.
Maroussia was still in sight a block or so ahead. Lom stayed back and matched his pace with hers. He watched the traffic in the road. Most of it was horse-drawn: a few carts and karetas, a shabby droshki waiting outside a shuttered pension. He ignored them. You didn’t run mobile surveillance with a horse. Maroussia was crossing the street between traffic, stopping to look in a window, starting to cross back, seeming to change her mind, then suddenly going anyway.
Don’t overdo it.
She swung up onto the back of a moving tram, rode it fifty yards back towards Lom, then jumped off at the intersection and walked back the way she’d come. And Lom saw him.
A man had started to jog after the tram, then he came up short and turned away, abruptly absorbed in studying a poster. He was obvious. Clumsy. Not professional. And he was on his own. Definitely. If it was a team, he’d have taken the tram and left the others on Maroussia till he could double back.
Lom hung back, just to be sure. But there was no doubt about it. He wondered how the man had managed to stay out of sight for so long if he wasn’t better than this. It was almost as if he wanted to be seen. Lom pushed the thought aside. Later. Do the job now. He started to close in. He wanted a look at the man’s face. From behind he was tall and wide-shouldered, wearing a long dark coat, a red wine-coloured scarf, a pale grey astrakhan hat. He walked with a faint hitch in his right hip. There was something familiar about him.
The follower was starting to slow, looking left and right, letting Maroussia get ahead of him. He knows I’m here.
Lom increased his pace, reeling him in. He’d got within thirty yards when the man spun on his heels and looked behind him. Straight at Lom. It was like he’d been punched in the chest. All the breath gone out of him. A constriction in the throat.
The face looking at Lom was his own face.
They locked gazes. The follower made a curt nod, spun on his heel and walked rapidly away.
The shock cost Lom a second. Then he reacted. He started forward but got tangled up with an old woman with a dog on a leash and a bag of groceries. By the time he got free the astrakhan hat was disappearing into a side street. When Lom reached the turning there was no sign of him.
Halfway down the street was a café with tables outside. Lom pushed the door open and went in. It was a long dark place, full of shadowed nooks and crannies and booths, thick with the smell of coffee and peppery, meaty stew. Lamps and candles spilled pools of yellow light and deep brown shadow. Most of the tables were empty. A radio was playing a big band march, ‘Ours Are the Guns’.
Almost at the back of the room a man was sitting alone with his back to the door. A pale grey astrakhan hat. A wine-coloured woollen scarf. He was writing by the light of a flickering oil lamp. There was nothing else on the table. No cup. No plate. Lom threaded his way between the tables.
‘Hey,’ he said.
The man stood up and turned round. It was a different person, taller and older, with narrower shoulders. A long oval face under the grey astrakhan. A face full of serious openness. Deep dark eyes looked into Lom’s from behind black wire-rimmed spectacles, wise and a little sad. He had a vaguely military bearing, but it wasn’t a soldier’s face. A doctor’s perhaps. Or a poet’s.
‘Yes?’ he said. ‘Can I help you?’
‘Sorry,’ said Lom. ‘I thought you were someone else.’
‘Ah. Then excuse me, please.’
Lom stepped aside to let him pass and scanned the rest of the café but there was no one else. As he was turning to go, he saw the man had left something on the table. A single sheet of paper, folded once. A name was printed on it in a large clear hand. In capitals. Meant to be noticed. ‘VISSARION LOM’.
He picked up the note and read it.
‘Keep her safe. I will watch when I can.’
It was signed ‘Antoninu Florian’.
Lom snapped his head round but the man had gone. Shit. He hustled back out into the street and looked both ways, but there was nothing to see. He refolded the note and tucked it into his pocket.
On Captain Iliodor’s desk the telephone coughed into life. He picked it up first ring.
‘Yes?’
‘Glazkov, Captain. There was an incident an hour and a half ago in Braviknaya Square. A fracas with some young patriots outside a Lezarye bookshop. Four men are in the Bellin Infirmary—’
Iliodor interrupted him impatiently.
‘Why are you telling me this? This is hardly unusual.’
‘It was done by one man, Captain. One man against many. A man competent in violence. And there was a woman with him. The name Shaumian has come up. Shaumian and Lom.’
‘This was an hour and a half ago? And I’m only hearing about it now?’
‘The victims were unable to make an identification. A witness was found, a girl, but her testimony was… reluctant. The interrogation took some time.’
‘An hour and a half?’
‘The subjects are reported to be walking north. Towards Big Side. I’ll get the written report across to you immediately.’
‘You will tell me yourself, Glazkov. Tell me all of it. Now.’
18
The underground chamber deep beneath the Lodka is lit by the bluish flicker of fluorescent tubes. The gantry stands a hundred feet high and drips with decorative ironwork. Life-size figures of pensive women with long braided hair; plump naked children riding dolphins. An obelisk crowns the dome, and the entire construction is painted burgundy and green. Within the outer framework the alloy containment helix winds upwards like a single strip of orange peel.
Inside the gantry the Pollandore hangs, a perfect globe high as a house, revolving slowly, touching nothing. It glows with is own vaporous luminescence but casts no light. It has no weight. No temperature. Frictionless, it turns on its own axis and follows its own orbit, parallel to but no part of this world, not in this universe but its own, tainting the air of the chamber with a faint smell of lake-water and damp forest floor.
The gantry is almost four hundred years old. It was built soon after the Vlast captured the Pollandore from Lezarye. There was a plan to show it in public–a trophy, a holiday wonder, a kopek to climb to the viewing platform and look down into the heart of strangeness–but this never happened. Perhaps it was never meant to. Perhaps one of the madder descendants of the Founder had the gantry made for his own private pleasure. Perhaps he came down to it alone, at night, driven by some urge to reach out and touch the Pollandore, to run his palm along the underside of another world. And his hand would slide across the skin between alternative possibilities, feeling nothing and leaving no impression.