Lom pushed the dvornik ahead of him into the kitchen. Vishnik’s darkroom was still set up in a corner. Bottles of chemicals opened and spilled down the sink. The room reeked of metol and hypo. The enlarger head had been unscrewed and opened up. The red safety light smashed. Packets of photographic paper ripped open and ruined. Unexposed films, pulled from their canisters, lay on the floor in curls and spools of grey-black cellulose ribbon. The boxes where Vishnik kept his prints and negative strips were gone.
Lom searched for a while randomly. After a few minutes he went back into the other room. Maroussia was sitting on the floor in the wreckage of Vishnik’s desk. She would have stayed there for days, sifting every last piece. Opening every page of every book. But it was hopeless. They didn’t even know what they were looking for.
‘We have to go,’ said Lom.
She looked up at him, suddenly angry.
‘Where?’ she said. ‘Where else would we look? Do you know? I don’t know. Here. This is the place. Here. There’s something here. You knew him. He was your friend. Work it out.’
‘Please…’ said the dvornik.
‘Sit back down on that couch,’ said Lom, ‘and shut the fuck up.’
‘Does he have to sit there?’ said Maroussia.
Lom looked at the awful object, stained by torture and dying. Vishnik had lain there. Shit.
‘I know where it is,’ he said.
They didn’t get it. Even they are human, and stupid.
The interrogators had searched thoroughly. While Vishnik’s body was still there on the couch. And the one place they didn’t look was the same place he and Maroussia hadn’t looked. Because of what was on it. Because of what had happened there. They blanked it out. Even the Vlast torturers blinded themselves. Avoided seeing the work of their own hands. Forgetting as soon as they had done it.
‘It’s in the couch,’ said Lom.
He pulled the dvornik off it roughly and knelt to look underneath. There was nothing. He felt with his hands all over the bloody and still faintly sticky leather seat and up the back of it, slipping his hands into the crevices. Looking for something. Anything. An opening. A lump in the stuffing. There was nothing.
The couch was a kind of chaise longue with a seat-back rising at one end. Lom went round behind it, down on his knees. The back was covered with a single panel of leather, sewn at the top and pinned tight with a row of black metal studs along the bottom. He ran his finger along the studs. Picked at a couple of them with his fingernail. One came loose. Then another. They weren’t completely tight. As if they had been levered out and pushed loosely back into place. They held, but only just.
Lom took the razor from his pocket and sliced a long, arcing cut across the leather back panel. Stuck his hand inside. Pulled out a large brown envelope stuffed with paper and sealed down tight.
20
The Colloquium of Four sat on the high platform at the north end of the All-Dominions Thousand Year Hall on chairs of plush red velvet. Chazia was in the centre with Chairman Fohn. Dukhonin, the General Secretary, was on Chazia’s left, and Khazar–negligible Khazar, the Minister for Something–sat at Fohn’s right hand. The platform, raised high above the crowd, had room for a hundred, but the Four sat alone, a wide frosty space gaping between each chair. To the crowd we look small, Chazia thought. Unimpressive. Vulnerable. Fohn had planned the Novozhd’s funeral and he had fucked it up. Every part of it.
Fohn would make the speeches. Reading the exequies of the lost leader. Chazia had not objected. Let Fohn lick the dead man’s arse; she wouldn’t wrap herself in his corpse-shroud. They would know her for other reasons soon enough.
Behind the Four on their chairs, Fohn had hung immense waterfalls of red and black fabric and, bathed in a golden spotlight, a portrait of the Novozhd fifty feet tall. Fine words picked out in letters of gold.
Beneath the platform the corpse itself was displayed. It lay on crimson silk in an open casket of black wood polished to a mirror shine. The embalmers had done their work thoroughly: repaired his bomb wounds, given his face a waxy apple flush, blacked and glossed his hair and moustache. A man in the prime of life. The image of his portrait. Only the drab khaki uniform that Fohn had insisted on–We must remember, colleagues, that we are, after all, in a state at war–spoiled the fine effect. The four mudjhiks faced outwards, one at each corner of the catafalque, motionless and watchful, the colour of dried blood.
From the Thousand Year Hall, after the funeral, the body was to be carried in solemn procession to the Khronsk-Gorsk Mausoleum. Factories had been closed for the day so the workers could line the avenues for the cortège. Free meals were being served at the municipal canteens. On the way to the funeral Chazia had seen huge crowds of people in mourning black. Karetas, droshkis and cars, black ribbons and pennants fluttering.
Chazia’s attention was fixed on the crowd in the hall. The first rows of seating were reserved for war veterans. They sat in rigid silence, holding up their crutches, pointing with them towards the leaders on the podium like arms raised in salute. And behind them, row after row, dissolving into shadow, one hundred thousand persons dressed in black with touches of red, standing to attention in perfect rank and file, not one speaking a word. So many feet, so many shoulders, so many lungs breathing. The noise of a hundred thousand silences–the small shuffle for balance, the rub of cloth against cloth, the swallow and stifled cough–roared against the platform like the sea. One hundred thousand faces, one expression. The sombre gravity of grief. It was one body. One mass. It had heaviness. Inertia. An existence all of its own. It was the Vlast.
Chazia pictured how it would be when she stood alone before them, speaking in a fine clear amplified voice. Two hundred thousand shining eyes fixed on her. The roar of their cheering. The rhythmic stamping of two hundred thousand feet. They would chant her name. She would throw her arms wide to embrace their acclamation, and her hair would lift and stir in the wind of their breath.
In the Thousand Year Hall, the waiting dragged on too long. The hundred thousand people waited. On their platform the Colloquium of Four waited. Dead time. Chazia felt the mass dissolving. Atomising. A hundred thousand separate thoughts. Fucking Fohn. He was surely finished after this.
There was a deep loud crash from outside the hall. Another. And another. The distant explosions roared on and on, ceaselessly, merging into a rolling brutal thunder. The veterans were standing to attention, right hands clenched against their chests. Somewhere in the crowd a woman was screaming. The Archipelago! The Archipelago has come! But it was only the five hundred guns of the fleet at the Goll Dockyards doing their bit.
At last the thundering guns subsided into silence and a magnified rustling came over the tannoy. The Combined Services Orchestra in the gallery was getting ready to play. Chazia could see them across the vastness of the auditorium, minute figures in a splash of stark white light for the kinematograph camera. When Colonel of Music Vikhtor Vanyich Forelle raised his baton, all other lights in the hall fell dim. Everything disappeared in shadow, apart from the orchestra and the corpse itself, isolated under a single spotlamp. The effect drew murmurs of appreciation from the mourners. Well done, Fohn. They can’t see us at all now.
The music began. The slow movement from Frobin’s Lake Horseman Suite. The massed voices of the Navy Choir singing the ‘Blood of Angels’ chorus from Winter Tears.