to stop him and ask him what he was doing there, so he prepared a line about the urgent need to improve liaison with the Eastern Provinciates. He found he had a lot to say on the subject: it was an issue that actually did need attention. He began to think of improvements that could be made to the committee structure and lines of command. Perhaps he should write a memo for Krogh? He started to take out his notebook to write some thoughts down.
What the fuck am I doing?
He put the notebook back in his pocket. The Lodka was getting under his skin already, releasing the inner bureaucrat. Doors, wedged open, showed glimpses of desks, bowed concentrating heads, pencils poised over lists. Empty conference tables, waiting. The quiet music of distant telephone bells and typewriter clatter. The smell of polished linoleum and paper dust. Stairs and corridors without end. The Lodka cruised on the surface of the city like an immense ship, and like a ship it had no relationship with the depths over which it sailed, except to trawl for what lived there.
He let these thoughts drift on, preoccupying the surface layers of his mind, while the Lodka carried him forward, floating him though its labyrinths on a current you could only perceive if you didn’t look for it too hard. This was a technique that always worked for him in office buildings: they were alive and efficient, and knew where you needed to go; if you trusted them and kept an open mind, they took you there.
On the ground floor he followed his nose, tracing the faint scent of sweetness and corruption down a narrow stairwell to its source. A sign on the swing doors said MORTUARY. And beyond the door, a corridor floored with linoleum, brick-red to hide the stains. The attendant led him to an elevator and closed the metal grille with a crash. They descended.
‘You’re in luck. We burn them after a week. You’re just in time. They’ll be a bit ripe though, your friends.’
The attendant gave him a cigarette. It wasn’t because of the dead – they weren’t so bad – it was the sickly sweetness of the formaldehyde, the sting of disinfectant in your lungs. That was worse. The harshness of the smoke took Lom by surprise: it scoured his throat and clenched his lungs. He coughed.
‘You going to puke?’
‘Let’s get on with it.’
The Cold Room was tiled in white and lit to a bright, gleaming harshness. Their breath flowered ghosts on the stark air.
‘Anyone else been to see them?’
The attendant ran his finger down a column in a book on the desk by the door.
‘Nope. Wait here.’
Lom dragged hard on the cigarette. Two, three, four times. It burned too quickly. A precarious length of ash built up, its core still burning. The cardboard was too thick.
The attendant came back pushing a steel trolley. A mounded shape lay on it, muffled by a thin, stained sheet.
‘You’ll have to help me with the giant,’ he said. ‘They’re heavy bastards.’
Lom let his cigarette drop half-finished on the white-tiled floor, ground it out with his boot, and followed the attendant between heavy rubber curtains into the refrigerator room. Many bodies on trolleys were parked along the walls, but there was no mistaking the bulk of the giant on its flatbed truck. Lom took the head end and pushed.
‘You can leave me,’ he said when they were done. ‘I’ll let you know when I’m finished.’
Sheets pulled back, the two cadavers lay side by side, like father and son. What was he hoping to find? A clue. That’s what detectives did. Dead bodies told you things. But these bodies were simply dead. Very.
He checked the record sheets. The man had been identified as Akaki Serov. ‘Male. Hair red. Dyed brown. Age app. 30–35.’ The face had matched a photograph on a file somewhere: there was a serial number, a reference to the Gaukh Archive. The face on the trolley was unmarked apart from a few small cuts and puncture wounds, but nobody would recognise it now. The flesh was discoloured and collapsed, the lips withdrawn from the teeth in the speechless grin of death. The torso was swollen tight like a balloon. The blood had drained down to settle in his back and his buttocks. A wound in his neck was lipped with darkened, crusted ooze – a nether mouth, also speechless. There were no legs.
Lom hesitated. He should take fingerprints. He should prise the jaws open