a desk in a downstairs room with the window open. Kantor trampled fragrant earth to get to the casement. He leaned in.
‘Remember me?’
He waited a moment before he shot Bragin in the head. He was seventeen then.
The police picked him up after the Birzel Rebellion. They wanted to know where his father was hiding. They broke his hands and burned his feet and kicked his balls until they swelled like lemons, but he didn’t tell them. They gave up in the end, and left him alone, and then he told them where his father was. The police forced him to watch his father’s execution. That was a pleasure. The icing on the cake. He was stronger than them all.
There was a rapping at the door of the office. Kantor swore under his breath. It would be Vitt. Vitt and the others. Vitt had said they would come, though Kantor had forbidden it. He hated people coming here. It compromised his security and invaded his private space. But they’d insisted. Vitt had insisted.
The knocking came again, louder. Determined. They were early.
‘Come in then, Vitt,’ he called. ‘Come in if you must. This had better be good.’
They crowded into the room. Kantor surveyed their faces. So many useless, vapid, calf-like faces. He’d told them to lie low, that was the proper way, but after a few days they’d got restless and suspicious. Too frightened of the police, not frightened enough of him. Vitt had dragged them along.
‘The banknotes are marked,’ Vitt was saying. ‘They’ve published the serial numbers in the Gazetta.’
‘The roubles go to the Government of Exile Within,’ said Kantor. ‘You know that. Their problem, not ours.’
‘They were waiting for us,’ said Lidia. ‘They knew we were coming. They knew when and where.’
‘And we lost Akaki,’ said Vitt. ‘Akaki was a good comrade.’
‘Deaths are inevitable,’ said Kantor. ‘Nothing worth having is got without great price. Be under no illusion, there is worse to come. Storms and torrents of blood will mark the struggle to end oppression. Are you ready for that?’
They stared at him sourly.
‘But—’
‘Is this a challenge, Vitt?’
Vitt stopped dead, his mouth open, the colour draining from his face.
‘No. No, Josef. I’m only trying to…’
Kantor looked around the room, fixing every one of them, one by one, with hard eyes. It was time.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They were waiting for us, and you know what that means, but none of you has the courage to say it. One of us is an informer.’
‘Maybe it was—’ Stefania began.
“Let’s go over it again,’ said Kantor. ‘You, Vitt, threw a bomb that did not explode, and then you, Vitt, ran like a hare.’
‘I—’
‘I smell you, Vitt. I smell treachery and lies. I smell the policeman’s coin in your pocket.’
‘No, Josef! Maybe it was Petrov? Where is he today? Has anyone seen him? It was Petrov!’
‘I smell you Vitt, and I’m never wrong. See how you crumble? This is how you crawled and squealed when the police took you. This is the traitor’s courage. This is the disease within.’
Kantor took the revolver from his pocket and held it out in the palm of his hand.
‘Who will do what must be done? Must I do it myself?’
‘Let me,’ said Lidia. ‘Please, Josef.’
Kantor gave her the revolver. Vitt upped from his seat and made for the door, but Stefania stuck out her foot. He fell on his face with a sickening slap.
‘Oh, no,’ he murmured. ‘No.’
Lidia put the muzzle to the back of his head.
‘Bye, fat boy.’
She fired.
‘I wish,’ said Kantor, wiping a splash of something warm from his face, ‘I wish you’d done that outside.’
No sooner had Kantor closed the door behind them than he felt the attention of Archangel enter the room. The furniture crackled with fear.
‘No,’ said Kantor quietly. ‘No. I don’t want this. Not again.’
Archangel opened him up and came into him. Ripping his way inside his head. Occupying everything. Taking everything. Leaving nowhere private. His voice was a roaring whisper.
They fear you, it said. But whom do you fear?
Kantor lay on his back on the floor, his limbs in rigid spasm, his eyes fixed open, staring at nothing. Archangel’s alien voice in his mind was a voice of shining darkness, absolutely intelligent, absolutely cold, like a midnight polar sky, clean of cloud and shot through with veins of starlight.
Whom do you fear?
Archangel allowed him a little room, in which to formulate his response.
‘You,’ whispered Kantor. ‘I fear you.’
You are wasting time. Think like a master, not like a slave. Are you listening