Archive. He called up the file on Lakoba Petrov without difficulty – unlike the Kantor file, it was there, and there was no sign that it had been tampered with. He sat reading it at one of the long tables under the dome while the Gaukh Engine rumbled and turned quietly behind him. He’d switched on the desk lamp. It pooled buttery yellow light on the blue leather desktop. But he found it hard to concentrate on the file. His head was hurting, as it had done in Krogh’s office. Patches of faint flickering colour disturbed his vision.
Lom rubbed at his forehead, feeling the seal of angel skin smooth and cool under his fingers, tracing the slight puckering of the skin around it. He was keyed up and unsettled after his dangerous encounter with the marching crowd. The glimpse of Kantor – it was him, he was sure of it – haunted him: the sureness with which he had moved through the jostling people, the easy confidence on his face. He hadn’t looked like a hunted man.
But there was something else that troubled Lom, something deeper: watching the crowd marching, he had been drawn towards them. He had launched himself unthinkingly among them to follow Kantor. He had, he now realised, wanted to be one of them. He was, at some instinctive level, on their side. And yet… the hostility, the contempt, even the hatred they had turned on him when they noticed him. Not him, the uniform. For the second time, it didn’t feel so good, being a policeman.
Lom turned his attention to the papers on Petrov. It was a thin file. Petrov was a painter, one of the modern type, not approved by the Vlast. Petrov wasn’t popular, it appeared, not even among his fellow artists. He was a marginal figure: there was only a file on him at all because he came into contact with bigger figures. Artists. Composers. Writers. Intelligentsia. They gathered at a place called the Crimson Marmot Club, where Petrov seemed to be a fixture. He had a temper: the file contained accounts of arguments at the Crimson Marmot, scuffles he was involved in. And there had been a dispute with a picture framer. Petrov claimed he’d left a dozen of his works to be framed, the man denied all knowledge of them, and Petrov accused him of having stolen and sold them. He’d made a formal complaint. The framer said Petrov owed him for previous work, and there were no documents on either side. The investigating officer could resolve nothing. He’d filed a report, though. Must have been a quiet day.
Petrov appeared to have few friends of any kind, the report noted, apart from one woman, a life model who worked in a uniform factory near the Wieland Station. Her name was noted for thoroughness, though there was no address and no file reference. The name was Shaumian. Maroussia Shaumian.
Lom sat back in his chair and drew a deep breath. Circles of Contact.
He tried to imagine Petrov. The registry file gave only a vague outline, a man seen only through the lens of surveillance. He wondered what Petrov’s pictures were like. There was one scrap of newsprint pinned inside the cover, clipped, said a manuscript note, from The Mirgorod Honey Bee, dated early that spring: a review of an exhibition at the Crimson Marmot Club. He’d ignored it before, but he looked at it now.
‘It would be remiss,’ the reviewer said,
to overlook the work of Lakoba Petrov, though most do. This young painter is developing a fine individualism. His prickly personality, which is perhaps better known than his canvases in the city’s advanced artistic circles, manifests itself in the three likenesses shown here as a reckless energy. He is impatient with the niceties of style – surely a trait to be admired – and he is not a tactful portraitist, but his use of colour is original and his brush strokes have a fierce movement. He captures through his sitters something of the essence of the modern Mirgorod man. A troubled anxiety lurks in the eyes of his subjects, and their surroundings seem jagged, uncertain, about to fall away. A young man’s work, certainly, but there is bravery and promise here. The Honey Bee hopes for good things from Lakoba Petrov in the future.
The review was by-lined Raku Vishnik.
Circles of Contact.
There was a high-pitched frightened shout from somewhere above him.
‘Soldiers! There are soldiers in the square!’ All across the immense reading room, readers