Safran took some papers out of his pocket – photographs – glanced at them and nodded. The militia men moved down the alley to meet the old woman. When she saw them coming she clutched her hands tighter against her chest and turned back.
‘Hey!’ shouted Safran. ‘You! Stop there!.
She ignored him and walked faster, breaking into a kind of scuttling hobble. Safran took his revolver from his holster and levelled it.
‘Militia! Halt or I shoot!’
‘No!’ shouted Lom, but he was too far away to be heard above the traffic noise.
Safran fired once.
The woman’s legs broke under her and she collapsed. She was still struggling to crawl forward when Safran reached her. He hooked the toe of his boot under her ribs and flipped her over onto her back. She lay, her left foot stuck out sideways at a very wrong angle, looking up at him. Her other leg was shifting feebly from side to side. Safran compared her to the photograph in his hand, said something to the other militia man, and shot her in the face. Her head burst against the snowy pavement like an over-ripe fruit, spattering the men’s legs with mess. The one with Safran flinched back in disgust, and dabbed at his trouser-shins with a handkerchief. After a cursory check that she was dead, they continued towards Vanko’s.
Lom felt sick. Another senseless killing in the name of the Vlast. Another uniformed murder.
The woman’s body, when he came close to it, was a bundle of rags. Around her broken face the cooling blood had scooped hollows in the snow, scarlet-centred, fringed with soft edges of rose-pink, and in one of the hollows lay the object she had held so tightly: a little bag of some thin, rough material. Hessian? Hemp? Lom picked it up. The side that had lain in the snow was wet with blood. He untied the cord that held the mouth of it pursed shut. Inside was a fragile-looking ball of twigs. He closed the bag and slipped it into his pocket
‘Get away from her! Leave her alone!’
Lom looked round. Maroussia Shaumian was staring at him with wide unseeing eyes.
‘She’s my mother,’ she said. ‘I have to take her home.’
‘Maroussia,’ said Lom. ‘I couldn’t stop this. I was too late. I’m sorry.’
‘I have to take her home,’ she was saying. ‘I can’t leave her here.’
‘Maroussia—’
‘Perhaps I could get a cart.’
She was losing focus. He’d seen people like this after a street accident: together enough on the surface, but they weren’t really there, they hadn’t aligned themselves to the new reality. You had to be rough to get through to them.
‘Your mother has been shot,’ he said harshly. ‘She is dead. That is her body. The militia killed her deliberately. They were looking for her. Do you understand me?’ Maroussia was staring at him, her dark eyes fierce, small points of red flushing her cheeks. ‘I think they’re looking for you too. When they find you’re not at Vanko’s they’ll come back, and if you’re still here they’ll kill you as well.’
‘You,’ she said. ‘I know you. You did this.’
‘No. I didn’t. I wanted to stop it. I couldn’t—’
‘You’re a policeman.’
He took her arm and tried to turn her away from her dead mother.
‘I want to help you,’ he said.
‘Fuck you.’
‘I’ll take you somewhere. We can talk.’
She jerked her arm away. She was surprisingly strong. Her muscles were hard.
‘I said fuck you.’
Safran had appeared at the far end of the alley.
‘Maroussia, I want to help you,’ said Lom. ‘But you have to get away from here. Now. Or they’ll do that to you.’
‘Why would you help me? You’re one of them.’
‘No,’ said Lom. ‘I’m not.’
Safran was coming.
Maroussia looked at her mother, lying raw and dead under the high walls of the alley and the sky.
‘I can’t just leave her,’ she said. ‘The rats… the gulls…’
‘Listen,’ said Lom. ‘You have to go now. I’ll make time for you.’
‘What?’
‘Go now. Do you hear me? Don’t go home. Go to Vishnik’s and wait for me there.’
But she was glaring at him. Her face was hard and closed.
‘You don’t want to help me. You’re a liar. Leave me alone. Leave my mother alone.’
Hey!’ Safran had begun to jog, drawing his revolver as he came. ‘Hey, you!’
Lom stepped into the middle of the alley and held up his hand, hoping that behind him Maroussia was walking away. Hoping that his own face wasn’t on one of Safran’s photographs.