forces working against the Novozhd. But there was other stuff as well. Other voices, other threads, omitted from Krogh’s selective collection.
An inside spread described new plans for massive monumental ossuaries to hold the corpses of the fallen soldiers, sailors and airmen of the Archipelago War: ‘On the rocky coast of the Cetic Ocean there will grow up grandiose structures… Massive towers stretching high in the eastern plains will rise as symbols of the subduing of the chaotic forces of the outcast islands through the disciplined might of the Vlast.’ They were to be called Castles of the Dead. There were artist’s impressions, with tiny, lost-looking stick families wandering in the grounds, inserted for scale.
MOTHER MURDERS LITTLE ONES. A lawyer, Afonka Voscovec, had suffocated her three children with a pillow and hanged herself. She’d left a note. ‘The floors keep opening,’ she’d written. ‘Will no one stop it?’
Lom was about to throw the paper aside when he noticed a small piece in the social columns. A photograph of an officer of the militia shaking hands with the Commissioner of the Mirgorod Bank of Foreign Commerce. ‘Major Artyom Safran, whose brave action defended the bank in Levrovskaya Square against a frontal terrorist assault, receives the congratulations of a grateful Olland Nett. Major Safran is a mudjhik handler.’ Levrovskaya Square was, according to Krogh, Kantor’s most recent atrocity. If this Major Safran had been there, that meant he had seen Kantor or at least his people. It was a connection.
Lom studied the photograph carefully. The legs and belly of the mudjhik could just be made out in shadow behind the Major's head. And in his head, in the middle of his brow, was a seal of angel flesh, the twin of Lom’s own.
He stood up. It was time to go.
He took the lift down to the exit. The dvornik was in his cubbyhole. If the uniform impressed him, he didn’t let it show. There was a cork board behind his head, with notices pinned to it: the address of the local advice bureau, details of winter relief collections, blackout exercises, changes to social insurance, a soap rationing scheme.
‘Yes? What?’
‘I’m going to be staying here for a few days. With Professor Vishnik.’ Lom showed his warrant card. The dvornik glanced at it. Still not impressed. ‘My presence here is authorised. By me. The Professor is under my protection. You are to report nothing. To no one. The fact that I am here – when I come – when I go – that’s up to me. You notice nothing. You say nothing. You remember nothing.’
The dvornik had his tin cup in his hand. He took a sip from it and shrugged. Barely. Perhaps.
‘Understand?’
‘Whatever you say, General.’
15
Lom found the office Krogh’s private secretary had fixed for him at the Lodka. One office among thousands, a windowless box on an upper floor among storerooms, filing rooms, cleaning cupboards, boilers. It took him half an hour wandering corridors and stairways to track it down. There was a freshly typed card in the slot by the door handle: INVESTIGATOR V Y LOM. PODCHORNOK OBLAST. PROVINCIAL LIAISON REVIEW SECRETARIAT.
In the office there was a chair, a coat rack, a desk. Lom went through the drawers: stationery lint; a lidless, dried-up bottle of ink. Somebody had hung a placard on the wall.
Citizens! Let us all march faster
Through what remains of our days!
You might forget the fruitful summers
When the wombs of the mothers swelled
But you’ll never forget the Vlast you hungered and bled for
When enemies gathered and winter came.
He laid out his notepad and sharpened his pencils. He gave the room two more minutes. It felt about a minute and a half too long. Do something. Do anything. Make a start.
Lom left the office behind and set himself adrift in the mazy corridors of the Lodka. There were floor plans posted at intersections, but they were no help: the room numbers and abbreviations in small print, amended in manuscript, bore little relationship to the labels on doors and stairwells. He knew that the place he wanted would be down. Such places were always near the root of things. Tucked away. Like death always was.
He came into a more crowded part of the building: secretaries in groups, carrying folders of letters, talking; porters wheeling trolleys of files and loose papers; policemen, uniformed and not; civil servants arguing quota and precedent, trading the currency of acronyms. The placards on committee room doors were syllables in a mysterious language. Hints and signs.