to check for secreted… what?… secrets. In life, he could have worked with him. Serov dyed his hair: he was vain, then. Or trying to change his appearance. Human things. Things Lom could use. Serov might have felt a grudge against someone. Taken a bribe. Feared pain. Something. That was how Lom interrogated people: seducing, cajoling, threatening, building a relationship, coming to a conclusion. But the dead told you nothing. It was their defining characteristic, the only thing that remained to them: being dead.
He turned to the other corpse.
The giant had been found by the empty strong-car. There was no name for this one, no photograph to match his face on a file, not much face left to match. His flesh was hard and waxy white. Bloodless. Between his legs, where his lower belly and genitals and thighs should have been, there was nothing. A gouged-out hollow. Ragged. Burned. Vacant. The front of his body was seared and puckered. Flash burns. And there was a gunshot wound in his face that had exploded the back of his skull.
The bullet was a puzzle. He must have been dying already – the entire middle part of his body blown to mush – but someone had taken the trouble to shoot him anyway. Why? A kindness? A silencing? A message for others to read? There were too many stories here. Too many possibilities were the same as none. They took you nowhere. The dead, being dead, were of no help.
Lom put his hands in his pockets, trying to warm them. The cold of the room was beginning to numb his face. He needed to get out of there.
Do something else. Pull on another thread.
16
Maroussia Shaumian climbed the familiar stairs to Lakoba Petrov’s studio and pushed open the door. Grey daylight flooded the sparse, airy room. Gusts of rain clattered against the high north-facing windows. She knew the room well: its wide bleak intensity, its smell of paint and turpentine, uneaten food and stale clothing. She used to come here often.
Petrov had been working on Maroussia’s portrait, on and off, for months. He was painting her nude, in reds and purples and shadowed blacks of savage energy, her body twisted away from the viewer in a violent torsion that revealed the side of one breast under the angle of her arm. A vase of flowers was falling across a tablecloth behind her, as if she had kicked the table in the violence of the movement that hid her face. Petrov had said it was an important work: he was using it to feel his way out of conventional, scholastic painting of the female form, searching for a way to express directly his dispassionate desire and his indifference to the suffocating conventions of love and beauty. But he had lost interest in painting her since he’d got involved with Kantor. He had changed, becoming distant and distracted. Maroussia had come there less and less, and finally not at all.
She had met Petrov at the Crimson Marmot Club, where she had started going in the evenings after work. She had gravitated towards the place because she felt obscurely hungry for new things. New ways of looking at the world. But the Marmot’s had been disappointing: a refuge where artists and intellectuals gathered to drink and boast instead of work. Everyone there had tried to get inside her skirts. Everyone except Petrov.
‘What do you want from this place?’ he had asked her.
‘I don’t know,’ she’d said seriously. ‘Something. Anything. So long as it’s new.’
“Is anything ever really new?’ Petrov had said. ‘The present only exists by reference to the past.’ That was the kind of thing you said at the Marmot's.
Maroussia had frowned. ‘The past is a better place than the present,’ she said. ‘The present is a bad place, and the future will be bad too. Unless we can start again. Unless we can find a new way.’
Petrov had laughed. ‘You won’t find anything new at the Marmot's. Look at them. Every one a poser, every one a hypocrite, every one a mountebank. They talk about the revolution of the modern, but all they’re after is fame and money.’
‘Are you like that?’
‘Not me, no,’ Petrov had said. ‘I mean what I say. One must begin the revolution with oneself. One must remove all barriers and inhibitions within oneself first, before one can do work that is truly new. One must do all the things it is possible to do. Experience the extremes of life. I don’t