‘They’ll kill you,’ said Maroussia.
‘They won’t,’ said Lom. ‘Not straight away. They need to know what I’ve done. They need to be sure.’
Maroussia shook her head. ‘Come with me,’ she said.
‘No,’ said Lom.
Maroussia hesitated. There was another crash from downstairs. A shout.
‘Shit,’ said Lom. ‘Just go. You need to go. Please.’
There was nothing else to say. She turned away from him and went out of the door.
60
When Maroussia had gone, Lom went to the lift cage and pressed the button to summon the car. The mechanism juddered loudly into life. The lift was on one of the upper floors, and it took agonising moments to descend. When it reached him, he pulled open the cage and stepped inside, pressed the button for the basement and stepped back out again. There was a splash when it hit the water below. It wouldn’t be coming back, not with the weight of water inside it. That left only the stairwell.
He went to the top of the stairs. He would see down one flight and the landing below. He checked the gun. Checked it again.
A quiet voice. The sound of boots. A face peering up from the landing below.
Lom fired high. The shot struck the wall above the man’s head, and he ducked out of sight.
‘Lom?’ It was Safran’s voice. ‘Lom? Is that you? What are you hoping to achieve?’
Lom fired another shot down the stairwell.
‘Don’t try to come up,’ he called. ‘I’ll shoot anyone I see. I won’t fire high again.’
‘There are six of us, Lom. You haven’t got a chance.’
‘I’ve got boxfuls of shells. I’m very patient.’
‘You’re mad.’
Lom said nothing. The longer he could hold them here, the more time he would give Maroussia.
‘We can rush you, Lom. Any time we want. You can’t shoot us all.’
‘Who’s first then?’
‘How’s your friend, Lom? How’s Prince Vishnik?’ Lom felt the anger rising inside him. ‘He liked you, Lom. Did you know that? He called your name a lot. When he wasn’t squealing like a pig.’
‘You bastard—’ Lom stopped. Safran was goading him. He mustn’t let it distract him. He waited. ‘Safran?’ he called. But there was no answer. The silence stretched. Nothing happened. Lom waited.
Someone appeared on the landing below. A face. An arm. Throwing something. Lom fired too late.
The grenade bounced off the wall and skittered towards him. Instinctively he kicked out at it, a panicky jab of his foot that almost missed completely, but the outside edge of his shoe connected. The clumsy kick sliced the grenade against the skirting board. It bounced off and rolled back down the stairs, two or three steps at a time. Lom lurched back, protecting his face with his arm.
The explosion sucked the air down the stairwell and then burst it back up. The noise was too loud to be heard as sound; it was just a slamming pain inside his head. Lom stumbled dizzily.
As he leaned against the wall, trying to clear his head, trying not to vomit, it dawned on him that the sawing, hiccupping sounds he was hearing were someone else’s pain.
He looked up in time to see a uniform looming up the stairs. He fired towards it wildly and the uniform retreated.
Something — a sound, a glimpse of movement in the corner of his eye — made him turn. Safran was behind him, only a few yards away, his revolver raised.
Shit. The lift shaft. He climbed it.
As Lom swung round, he saw the satisfaction in Safran’s pale eyes. There was no time to react. Safran clubbed him viciously on the side of his head. On the temple. And again.
Lom’s world swam sickeningly, his balance went and he fell.
Two militia men were holding his arms behind his back. Safran’s pale eyes were looking into his. Lom tried to tense the muscles in his midriff, but when the blow came, hard, he folded and tried to drop to his knees. The men held him up.
Lom hauled at the air with his mouth but no breath would go in. Safran pulled his head up by the hair to see his face and hit him again. And again. When the men dropped his arms, he went down and curled up on the floor, knees tucked in against his chin, trying to protect himself. At last he was able to suck in some air, noisily. A sticky line of spit trailed from his mouth to the floor.
‘You,’ said Safran, ‘are nothing. You are made of shit.’
61
The room they left him in was stiflingly hot. It must have been somewhere deep inside the Lodka: there were no windows, just shadowless electric light from a reinforced glass recess in the ceiling. Some sort of interview room. A wooden table in the centre of floor, two chairs facing each other across it, another two along the wall. Green walls, a peeling linoleum floor and, around the edges of the room, solid, heavy iron pipes, bolted strongly to the wall and scalding hot to the touch. Leather straps were wrapped loosely around them, and there were stains and dried stuff stuck on the pipes. There were stains on the floor too. Dark brown. Through the door came the sound of a distant bell, footsteps, muffled yelling and shouting. It was impossible to tell what time it was. Whether it was night or day.
Every part of him hurt. His left eye was closed. It felt swollen and tender to the touch. His fingers came away sticky with drying blood. His head was throbbing. There was a dull pain and an empty sickness in his midriff. A sharp jabbing in his ribs when he moved. No serious damage had been done. Not yet. He had been lucky or, more likely, Safran had been careful.
He tried the door. It was locked. He sat at the table, facing the door, and waited, trying to keep the image of Vishnik on the couch — what they had done to him — out of his mind. He would settle with Safran for that.
He found himself thinking about Maroussia Shaumian. Her face. The darkness under her eyes. She had been holding herself together but the effort was perceptible. There had been a ragged wound across her cheek. He hoped she was far away. He hoped he would see her again.
When he heard the key turn in the lock, he thought about standing up to face them, but didn’t trust his body to straighten, so he stayed where he was. The man in the doorway was wearing a dark fedora and a heavy grey coat, unbuttoned, over a red silk shirt. His face was thin and pockmarked under a few days’ growth of beard.
Lom had seen him before. In the old photograph on Krogh’s file. In the marching crowd. As a statue half a mile in the sky, looking out across another Mirgorod, a city that didn’t exist, not yet. The whisperers’ Mirgorod. His Mirgorod. This was him.
The half-mile-high man laid his hat on the table, hung his coat on the back of the other chair and sat down facing Lom. His hair was straight and cut long, thickly piled, a dark of no particular colour, unusually abundant and lustrous, brushed back from his face without a parting. The red silk of his shirt was crumpled and needed washing. Close up, his eyes were dark and brown, with a surprising, direct intensity. It was like looking into street-fires burning. The man let his hands rest, relaxed and palm-down on the table, but all the time he was watching Lom’s face with those deep, dark brown eyes in which the earth was burning.
‘Kantor,’ said Lom. ‘Josef Kantor.’
‘You’re an interesting fellow, Investigator,’ said Kantor. ‘Stubborn. Clever. Courageous. A policeman who steps outside the rules.’ He paused, but Lom said nothing. Every word was to be wrung from him. Nothing offered for free. He regretted he’d spoken at all. He’d given too much away already. In interrogations, there was as much to learn for the subject as for the interrogator. What did they know? What did they not? What did they need? The silence in the room continued. It became a kind of battle. Eventually, Kantor smiled. ‘You react as I would,’ he said. ‘Observe, learn, give nothing away. That’s good.’