Vishnik was hunting traces: the trail of vanished enterprise, the hint of occupations yet to come, the scent of possibilities haunting the present. Such as this jeweller and watchmaker, whose wooden sign of business (S. LARKOV) was fixed over — but didn’t completely cover — the larger inscription in bottle green on purple tiling RUDOLF GOTMAN — BOOKSELLER — PERIODICALS — FINE BINDINGS. Vishnik noted Gotman’s advertisement on his plan of the Apraksin and took out his camera to photograph the palimpsest vitrine.
‘You. What do you want? What are you doing?’
Oh my fuck. Not again.
A small man — slick black hair, round face polished to a high sheen — had come out of the shop. S. Larkov. He wore gold half-moon glasses on his nose and a gold watch chain across his tight waistcoat. Expandable polished-steel sleeve suspenders gripped his narrow biceps, making the crisp white cotton of his shirtsleeves balloon.
‘I said, what are you doing?’
‘Taking pictures,’ said Vishnik, and offered him a card.
Prof. Raku Andreievich Vishnik
Historian of Mirgorod
City Photographer
231 Pelican Quay, Apt. 4
Vandayanka
Big Side
Mirgorod
The jeweller brushed it aside. ‘This means nothing. Who photographs such places? Who makes maps of them?’
‘I do,’ said Vishnik.
‘I’ll tell you who. Spies. Terrorists. Agents of the Archipelago. Here, give me that!’ He grabbed for the camera. Vishnik snatched it back out of his grip.
‘Listen, you fuck. I’m a historian—’
Larkov’s face was stiff with hatred. His tiny eyes as tight and sharp and cramped as the cogwheels in the watches he picked over at his bench.
‘What if you are? Your sort are disgusting. Parasites. Intelligentsia. Only looking after their own. The Novozhd will—’
People were coming out of the neighbouring shops. Larkov made another snatch at the camera and missed, but caught the strap of Vishnik’s satchel.
‘Stay where you are. I haven’t finished with you. Intellectual!’ The man propelled the word into Vishnik’s face, spattering him with warm spittle.
‘You piss off,’ said Vishnik. ‘Piss away off.’
He jerked the satchel away from Larkov.
‘Gendarme! Gendarme! Stop the bastard!’
Vishnik saw a green uniform coming from the other direction. Time to go.
18
From the mortuary Lom found his way eventually, via many corridors and stairs, to the Central Registry of the Lodka. He had wanted to see this place for years, and when he found it he stopped a moment in the entrance, taking it in.
It was a vast circular hall, floored with flagstones, ringed by tiers of galleries, roofed with a dome of glass and iron. It had the airy stillness of a great library and the smell of wood polish and ageing paper that a library has. Rows of readers’ desks radiated outwards from the hub of the room like the spokes of a wheel. Each desk had a blue-shaded electric lamp of brass, a blue blotter, a chair upholstered in blue leather. Three thousand readers could work there at once, though not more than a tenth of that number was present now, bent in quiet study.
At the centre of the vast hall, rising more than a hundred feet high, almost to the underside of the dome, was the Gaukh Engine. Lom had seen a photograph of it once. It had been beautiful in the picture, but nothing prepared him for the reality. It was immense. An elegant nested construction of interlinked vertical wheels of steel and polished wood carried, like fairground wheels, dozens of heavy gondolas. The whole machine was in constant motion, its wheels turning and stopping and turning. The murmuring of its electric motors gave the hall a quiet, restful air.
A woman — pink arms, a round red face, hair wound in braids about her head, a white sweater under her uniform tunic — was watching him.
‘Yes?’ she said. ‘Can I help?’
‘I’m looking for a file,’ said Lom. ‘Name of Kantor. I haven’t been here before.’
The archivist came around from behind the desk. She was shorter and wider than he had thought. There were crumbs in the lap of her skirt.
‘Follow me,’ she said.
She led him to one of the control desks. There were two arrays of lettered keys, like the keyboards of two typewriters.
‘This one is for surnames, and this is for code names. Enter the first three letters of the name you want, then press the button and the engine will bring the correct gondola. Gondolas contain index cards. When you find the one you’re looking for, copy the reference number in the top right corner and bring it to me. The index is phonetic, not alphabetical — sometimes a name is only overheard, and the spelling is uncertain. Cards are colour coded: yellow for students, green for anarchists, purple for nationalists, and so on. It’s all here.’ She showed him a hand-coloured legend pinned to the desk.
‘How many cards do you have here?’
‘Thirty-five million. Approximately.’
Lom keyed in the letters. K A N. Pressed the button. The wheels turned slowly, until the right car stopped in front of him. He lifted the hinged lid to reveal tray after tray of cards suspended from racks on an axle. He spun through the racks. There was a half-tray of Kantors, generations of them, but only two Josefs with a birth date in the last half-century. One card was white, indicating a minor public official included for completeness, against whom nothing was known. The other was lavender, creased and dog-eared, cross-referenced to at least twenty separate code names. Lom noted the reference on a slip of paper from the pad provided and handed it in.
While the archivist was gone, Lom wandered around the hall. There were card index cabinets, rows of guard-book catalogues. Newspapers, periodicals, journals, directories, maps, atlases, gazetteers, timetables. The publications, proceedings and membership lists of every organisation and society. The records of universities, technical colleges and schools. Galleries rose up to the domed ceiling. Swing doors led to the specialised archives and collections: keys, said a notice, could be collected from the desk by the holder of appropriate authorisation.
The foundation of any security organisation is its archives. That was what Commander Chazia had said in her address to the assembled police and militia of the Podchornok Oblast the previous year. Lom and Ziller had arrived late to find the room over-filled and over-hot. They had to stand at the back, craning to get a decent view between the bullet heads of a pair of gendarmes from Siflosk. Deputy Laurits had made a long and unctuous speech of welcome. The visit of the great Lavrentina Chazia, head of Vlast Secret Police, in all her pomp was a momentous occasion, a moment for the provincial service to feel close to the heart of the great machinery of the Vlast.
Chazia had dominated the room: a small woman but, standing on the simple stage at the front of the hall, a pillar of air and energy, pale and intense, neat and slender and upright, her voice carrying effortlessly to the back of the hall. She had drawn and held the attention of every man there. We are hers, they found themselves thinking. We are her soldiers. We are working for her.
The reports they provided mattered, that was Chazia’s message to them: they were used; they had to be done right. Lom listened intently as she unfolded the process by which raw intelligence from across the Dominions of the Vlast was gathered and sifted. It was a huge undertaking, rigorous, elegant, thorough: beautifully simple in its conception, dizzying in its scale and reach.