Petrov walked on. Lom followed.
‘We should talk though. We have a friend in common, I think.’
Petrov didn’t stop walking. ‘Who?’ he said.
‘Josef Kantor.’
‘Kantor?’
‘You know him then?’
‘You said I did.’
‘I guessed.’
‘Kantor the Crab. Josef Krebs. Josef Cancer. The smell of the camps is in his skin. He can’t wash it off. I think he made himself a shell when he was there and climbed inside it, and he has sat inside it for so long that now he’s all shell. Nothing but shell, shell, and lidless eyes on little stalks staring out of it, like a crab. But people like him. Do you know that, Vishnik’s friend? They think he has charm. They say those crab eyes of his twinkle like Uncle Novozhd. But they’re idiots. There’s no man left in there at all. He’s all crab. Turtle. Cockroach. And shall I tell you something else about him?’ Petrov stopped and turned to Lom, swaying slightly, oblivious of the rain in his face. He began to speak very slowly and clearly. ‘He has some other purpose which is not apparent.’ He began to tap Lom on the chest with a straight forefinger. ‘And. So. Do. You.’
‘Me?’
‘I don’t like you, Vishnik’s friend. I don’t like you at all. Your hair is too short. You look around too much. You keep too many secrets and you play too many games. Vishnik should choose his friends better. You wear him. Like a coat. No, like a beard.’
‘I—’
‘He knows it, and he lets you. That’s a friend. And you’ll kill him because of it. You think I don’t know a policeman when I see one?’
33
It was long after midnight, but not yet morning. Lom lay on the couch in Vishnik’s apartment under a thin blanket, trying to force sleep to come, but it would not. The couch was too small and the stove had gone out long ago. All heat had seeped from the room, along with the illusion of warmth from the Crimson Marmot’s champagne and brandy, leaving him cold and wakeful. Moonlight flooded in through a gap in the curtains: the glare of the two broken moons, wide-eyed and binocular, searchlighting out of a glassy, starless, vapourless sky. The room was drenched in it. The effect was remorseless: every detail was whited, brittle, monochrome. Petrov’s drunken accusation cut at him again and again.
You think I don’t know a policeman when I see one?
One day when he was about fourteen he’d been sent out on some errand, and there was a girl in a green dress in the alleyway by Alter’s. Town boys were gathered around her. Shoving. Tripping. Touching. What’s in your bag? Show us your bag.
Lom could have walked away, but he didn’t.
‘Hey!’ he shouted. ‘Leave her alone!’
They’d beaten him. Badly. The big one kept punching him in the face: a boy with a pelt of cropped hair across his skull. Every time the boy punched him in the face Lom fell over. And every time that happened, he shook his head and stumbled back to his feet. And the big one punched him again. And he fell. And got up. At first Lom had shouted at them. Yelled.
‘Fuck off! Leave me alone! I haven’t done anything to you!’
But that soon passed. He’d fallen silent. Fallen into the rhythm of it. Punch. Fall. Stand up. Punch. Fall. Stand up. There was no room for yelling. No breath for it either.
‘I love this,’ one of the boys was saying. ‘Do it again, Savva. Hit him more. Go on. Yes. I love it.’
There was blood on Lom’s face and he hardly knew what was happening. Everything was weightless and distant. The punches hardly hurt now. Every time he fell, he stood back up. It was mute, pointless resistance. His face was numb. He’d been beaten beyond the capacity for thought. There was nothing left but the automatic determination to get back up on his feet.
Eventually there would have come a time when he could not have got up again, but before he reached it Savva stopped. He was looking at Lom with something like fellowship in his eyes. And then one of the smaller ones, one of Savva’s shoal, stepped in and punched at Lom’s chin himself, but he didn’t have Savva’s power and Lom was numb to anything less. He didn’t stumble or fall this time, but turned to look in the little one’s feral, weasel eye, disinterestedly.
‘Leave him,’ said Savva. ‘That’s enough.’
Lom had felt something like friendship for Savva then, a feeling which had shamed him secretly ever since. That moment of instinctive friendship, he thought afterwards, had taught him something. The victim’s gratitude toward his persecutor. How it felt so much like love.
Savva had taken his money. The Provost’s money. Lom had been made to clean the lavatories every morning for a month. But a letter had come from the girl’s father to thank the unknown boy in the uniform of the Institute who had come to his daughter’s help. The father was Dr Arensberg the magistrate, and the Provost had given him Lom’s name. An invitation arrived, addressed to Vissarion Lom himself. He was asked to the Arensbergs’ house for tea, and the Provost had made him go. After the first time he’d become a regular visitor on weekend afternoons.
The Arensbergs’ house was well known in Podchornok. It was large, steep-gabled, wooden, with clustered chimneys of warm red brick, set in its own orchard. The rooms were full of dogs and flowers, the smell of baking, and the Arensberg children at music practice. The family taught him to play euchre and svoy kozyri: Dr and Mrs Arensberg, the girl, Thea, and her brother Stepan, who was seventeen and going to be an officer in the hussars, sitting together, playing cards in the dusty sunlight. The smell of beeswax and amber tea.
Lom’s visits to the Arensbergs were his first and only encounter with family domesticity. A private life. The warmth and decency that came with secure money. He’d known nothing of such houses before, or the families that lived in them, except what he saw through town-house windows at dusk, when the lights were lit and the curtains not yet drawn.
One day in summer Dr Arensberg called him into his study.
‘What will you do, Vissarion? With your life, I mean? Your career?’
‘Career? I don’t know. I expect I will become a teacher.’
‘Do you want to do that?’
‘I’ve never considered it from that angle. It’s what boys in my position do.’
‘What would you say about joining the police? It’s a good life, solid, a decent salary, a career in which talent can rise. One of the few. You could hope for a good position. In society I mean.’
And so Lom’s future had been settled. He would be a policeman. The private decency of houses like the Arensbergs’ was worth protecting. He was a fighter and he could keep it safe, and one day perhaps he would rise high enough in the service to have such a house himself, like the Deputy’s on Sytin Prospect.
He passed the entrance examination without difficulty. It was in the very same week that he took the oath of commitment to the Vlast that the terrible dark blade fell. The knife went in.
Gendarmes came from Magadlovosk to the Arensbergs’ house and took the doctor away. He was denounced. A profiteer. An enemy of the people. A spy for the Archipelago. They took him down the Yannis and he never returned. The house was seized, declared forfeit to the Vlast and granted to the new Commissar for Timber Yards. Stepan’s commission was revoked. Mrs Arensberg, Stepan and Thea moved into a single room above a stationer’s shop off Ansky Prospect.
Lom couldn’t believe in Arensberg’s guilt. It was a mistake. It would be cleared up. Someone had lied. A magistrate made his share of enemies. Lom would prove Arensberg’s innocence one day, when he’d finished his training. He said as much to Thea when he went to see her, wearing his new cadet uniform, in the room off Ansky Prospect, with its yellow furniture and thin muslin curtains. She had tied a scarf around her hair and she was scrubbing layers of fat and dust off the kitchen shelves when he arrived.