was closed. It felt swollen and tender to the touch. His fingers came away sticky with drying blood. His head was throbbing. There was a dull pain and an empty sickness in his midriff. A sharp jabbing in his ribs when he moved. No serious damage had been done. Not yet. He had been lucky or, more likely, Safran had been careful.
He tried the door. It was locked. He sat at the table, facing the door, and waited, trying to keep the image of Vishnik on the couch – what they had done to him – out of his mind. He would settle with Safran for that.
He found himself thinking about Maroussia Shaumian. Her face. The darkness under her eyes. She had been holding herself together but the effort was perceptible. There had been a ragged wound across her cheek. He hoped she was far away. He hoped he would see her again.
When he heard the key turn in the lock, he thought about standing up to face them, but didn’t trust his body to straighten, so he stayed where he was. The man in the doorway was wearing a dark fedora and a heavy grey coat, unbuttoned, over a red silk shirt. His face was thin and pockmarked under a few days’ growth of beard.
Lom had seen him before. In the old photograph on Krogh’s file. In the marching crowd. As a statue half a mile in the sky, looking out across another Mirgorod, a city that didn’t exist, not yet. The whisperers’ Mirgorod. His Mirgorod. This was him.
The half-mile-high man laid his hat on the table, hung his coat on the back of the other chair and sat down facing Lom. His hair was straight and cut long, thickly piled, a dark of no particular colour, unusually abundant and lustrous, brushed back from his face without a parting. The red silk of his shirt was crumpled and needed washing. Close up, his eyes were dark and brown, with a surprising, direct intensity. It was like looking into street-fires burning. The man let his hands rest, relaxed and palm-down on the table, but all the time he was watching Lom’s face with those deep, dark brown eyes in which the earth was burning.
‘Kantor,’ said Lom. ‘Josef Kantor.’
‘You’re an interesting fellow, Investigator,’ said Kantor. ‘Stubborn. Clever. Courageous. A policeman who steps outside the rules.’ He paused, but Lom said nothing. Every word was to be wrung from him. Nothing offered for free. He regretted he’d spoken at all. He’d given too much away already. In interrogations, there was as much to learn for the subject as for the interrogator. What did they know? What did they not? What did they need? The silence in the room continued. It became a kind of battle. Eventually, Kantor smiled. ‘You react as I would,’ he said. ‘Observe, learn, give nothing away. That’s good.’
Lom said nothing. Kantor leaned back in his chair.
‘So. Here we are. I wanted some time alone with you before Lavrentina comes. She’ll be here soon, I’m afraid, and after that it won’t be possible for us to speak like this any more. Which for me is genuinely regrettable.’ Kantor looked at his watch. ‘You’ve impressed me. Do you want to know what time it is? Ask me, and I’ll tell you.’
Lom said nothing.
‘Would you like to smoke?’ He laid a packet of cigarettes on the table. ‘Oh please, say something. We both know the game. I’ve been beaten myself, in rooms like this one. You ask yourself, will I be brave? But it doesn’t matter. It makes no difference. Lavrentina will come soon, and that won’t be the kind of roughhouse you and I are used to.’
The strangest thing about Kantor, thought Lom, was that, despite all he knew about him, he was attractive. He turned interrogation into a teasing game. He made himself charming, fun to be with. You sensed his strength and power and his capacity for cruelty, but somehow that made you want him to look after you. He might kill you, but he might also love you.
‘Perhaps you’re still hoping you’ll be able to deliver Lavrentina’s stupid file to Krogh. Perhaps you’re thinking, Krogh is arresting Chazia even as we speak. He will come through the door any moment now and rescue me. But that isn’t going to happen.’ Kantor paused, and looked into Lom’s eyes with warm sympathy. ‘We found the files in the bathroom. And Krogh is dead. She had to do that, didn’t