‘I’ll tell you who. Spies. Terrorists. Agents of the Archipelago. Here, give me that!’ He grabbed for the camera. Vishnik snatched it back out of his grip.
‘Listen, you fuck. I’m a historian—’
Larkov’s face was stiff with hatred. His tiny eyes as tight and sharp and cramped as the cogwheels in the watches he picked over at his bench.
‘What if you are? Your sort are disgusting. Parasites. Intelligentsia. Only looking after their own. The Novozhd will—’
People were coming out of the neighbouring shops. Larkov made another snatch at the camera and missed, but caught the strap of Vishnik’s satchel.
‘Stay where you are. I haven’t finished with you. Intellectual!’ The man propelled the word into Vishnik’s face, spattering him with warm spittle.
‘You piss off,’ said Vishnik. ‘Piss away off.’
He jerked the satchel away from Larkov.
‘Gendarme! Gendarme! Stop the bastard!’
Vishnik saw a green uniform coming from the other direction. Time to go.
18
From the mortuary Lom found his way eventually, via many corridors and stairs, to the Central Registry of the Lodka. He had wanted to see this place for years, and when he found it he stopped a moment in the entrance, taking it in.
It was a vast circular hall, floored with flagstones, ringed by tiers of galleries, roofed with a dome of glass and iron. It had the airy stillness of a great library and the smell of wood polish and ageing paper that a library has. Rows of readers’ desks radiated outwards from the hub of the room like the spokes of a wheel. Each desk had a blue-shaded electric lamp of brass, a blue blotter, a chair upholstered in blue leather. Three thousand readers could work there at once, though not more than a tenth of that number was present now, bent in quiet study.
At the centre of the vast hall, rising more than a hundred feet high, almost to the underside of the dome, was the Gaukh Engine. Lom had seen a photograph of it once. It had been beautiful in the picture, but nothing prepared him for the reality. It was immense. An elegant nested construction of interlinked vertical wheels of steel and polished wood carried, like fairground wheels, dozens of heavy gondolas. The whole machine was in constant motion, its wheels turning and stopping and turning. The murmuring of its electric motors gave the hall a quiet, restful air.
A woman – pink arms, a round red face, hair wound in braids about her head, a white sweater under her uniform tunic – was watching him.
‘Yes?’ she said. ‘Can I help?’
‘I’m looking for a file,’ said Lom. ‘Name of Kantor. I haven’t been here before.’
The archivist came around from behind the desk. She was shorter and wider than he had thought. There were crumbs in the lap of her skirt.
‘Follow me,’ she said.
She led him to one of the control desks. There were two arrays of lettered keys, like the keyboards of two typewriters.
‘This one is for surnames, and this is for code names. Enter the first three letters of the name you want, then press the button and the engine will bring the correct gondola. Gondolas contain index cards. When you find the one you’re looking for, copy the reference number in the top right corner and bring it to me. The index is phonetic, not alphabetical – sometimes a name is only overheard, and the spelling is uncertain. Cards are colour coded: yellow for students, green for anarchists, purple for nationalists, and so on. It’s all here.’ She showed him a hand-coloured legend pinned to the desk.
‘How many cards do you have here?’
‘Thirty-five million. Approximately.’
Lom keyed in the letters. K A N. Pressed the button. The wheels turned slowly, until the right car stopped in front of him. He lifted the hinged lid to reveal tray after tray of cards suspended from racks on an axle. He spun through the racks. There was a half-tray of Kantors, generations of them, but only two Josefs with a birth date in the last half-century. One card was white, indicating a minor public official included for completeness, against whom nothing was known. The other was lavender, creased and dog-eared, cross-referenced to at least twenty separate code names. Lom noted the reference on a slip of paper from the pad provided and handed it in.
While the archivist was gone, Lom wandered around the hall. There were card index cabinets, rows of guard-book catalogues. Newspapers, periodicals, journals, directories, maps, atlases, gazetteers, timetables. The publications, proceedings and membership lists of every organisation