Radiant State Read online

  When Rizhin called on him to speak, he rose and hooked his wire spectacles behind his ears, cleared his throat nervously and began to introduce his report. He was a freshly washed sheep among wolves.

  ‘Everywhere the population shows the demographic impact of war,’ he began. ‘Six hundred men for every thousand women, and worse among those of working age. The rebuilding of our factories proceeds far too slowly. Water, electricity and sewerage everywhere are in an abysmal condition. Above all the prices for agricultural producers are ruinously low, though the prices in shops still rise—’

  Rizhin raised a hand to interrupt. ‘Is it not your own ministry, Varagan, that fixes these prices?’

  ‘Precisely, sir. I have recommendations which I will come to. I am sketching the background first. The rural populace has fled to the cities. They eat dogs and horses and the bark of trees. In many of our towns we see black-marketeering. Gangsterism. Bribery. The rule of this committee in such places is nominal at best.’

  Rizhin sat back in his chair, doodling wolf heads as he listened with half-closed eyes.

  ‘Steady, Varagan,’ said Kistler quietly. ‘Remember where you are.’

  But Rizhin waved Varagan on. ‘Let the man speak,’ he said. ‘Let us hear what he has to say.’

  The committee looked on in silence as Varagan methodically ploughed his furrow.

  ‘Grain is exported to the Archipelago even as our own people starve,’ he said. ‘Our errors are compounded by poor harvests. Famine is widespread and growing. Deaths are to be counted in hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, and—’

  ‘But surely,’ said Rizhin, raising his eyelids and looking round the table, fixing them one by one with a stony gaze, ‘this is not right? Did not our old friend Broch tell us just the other week that this talk of famine was a fairy tale? Am I not right, colleagues? He said so often. And you are telling us now, Varagan, that Vladi Broch’s reports were false?’

  Varagan looked suddenly sick, as if he had been punched in the stomach.

  ‘I…’ he began. ‘I…’

  ‘Who drafted Vladi’s reports for him?’ said Rizhin. ‘Who produced those false statistics?’ He made a show of riffling back through old papers in his folder. ‘Come, Varagan, I want the name.’

  Poor Varagan was shaking visibly now. He was beginning to understand what he had done. The pit he had dug for himself with his own honest shovel. His face was blood-red. His mouth opened and shut soundlessly. Kistler wondered if he might collapse.

  Varagan snatched at a glass of water and drank it down.

  ‘But people are dying,’ he said, struggling to speak. Mouth dry, voice catching. ‘I have ideas for saving them. I have drawn up a programme…’

  ‘And yet,’ said Rizhin, ‘week after week we have had reports to the precise contrary. Tables of figures. I have them here.’ He lifted a file from his pile. ‘Figures from the Secretariat of Food Production. Signed by your own hand, Secretary Varagan. How do you account for this? How do you explain?’

  ‘I…’ said Varagan again, eyes wide in panic, and snapped his mouth shut.

  Rizhin threw the file down on the table.

  ‘There is no famine in the New Vlast,’ he said. ‘It is impossible. What there is, is pilfering and theft. Corrupt individualism! Starvation is the ploy of reactionary and deviationist elements. Our enemies hate our work so much they let their families die. The distended belly of a child is a sign of resistance. It is good news. It confirms we are on the right track that our opponents grow so desperate.’

  ‘Yes,’ whispered Varagan, casting desperately around the table for support, but no one caught his eye. ‘Of course. I see clearly now. I have misinterpreted the data. I have made a mistake. An honest mistake.’

  Rizhin was suddenly trembling with anger.

  ‘Mistake?’ he said. ‘Oh no, I think not. This is a power play, Varagan. Transparent viciousness. You wriggle now, oh yes, you squirm. That is always the way of it with men like you. First you come here and throw accusations at your own dead boss, yes, and at others around this table, honest hard-working fellows, and now you row backwards. I know your type, my friend. You are ambitious! You would rise! You ache for preferment, and you cover your tracks. You are at fault and blame everyone but yourself. Well I see now that there is someone to blame, and it is you.’

  ‘No,’ whispered Varagan. ‘I wished only—’

  Kistler leaned across to him. ‘Leave the room, man,’ he said quietly. ‘This agenda item is closed.’

  Varagan nodded. Wordless and methodical, shaking like a leaf, he collected his papers. Unhooked his wire spectacles from his ears and popped them into the top pocket of his jacket. Rose, turned, pushed back his chair and went out slowly into the lonely cold.

  10

  After sundown in the balmy nights of summer the well dinnered families of the List, Rizhin’s plush elite, take to the paths of the Trezzini Pleasure Gardens in the Pir-Anghelsky Park. Entering the blazing gateway of crystal glass–lit from within by a thousand tiny flickering golden lights–they move among pagodas and boating lakes. Arched bridges, tulips and water lilies. Straight-haired girls walk there with mothers sleekly plump. Awkward boys with arrogant blank eyes wince as father calls to father with penetrating voice. There is music here. Sugared chestnuts and roasting pig and candyfloss. Take a pedalo among enamel-bright and floodlit waterfowl! Visit the Aquarium and the Pantomime Theatre! Ride the Dragon Swing! The Spinner! See the pierrot and the dancing bear!

  The List regarded their pleasures coolly, with the assurance of natural entitlement. They were the experts. The competent ones. You would not know that a handful of years ago none of them was here. No old money in Papa Rizhin country! But the polished faces of the List reflect the coloured lamps strung among wax-leaved dark exotic trees. Their soaps and perfumes mingle with evening-heavy blossom.

  Lom stayed in the darkness under the trees. Pavel had chosen this meeting place to make a point–This is the coming world. Here it is. I’m at home and familiar among these people. I belong here, and you, Lom, you ghost, you do not–but also because the konditorei was on an island in the shallow lake reached by a causeway. Light blazed from the filigreed iron glasshouse and blazed reflections off dark waters. Within, the List at white-linen-covered tables ate pastries from tiered plates and drank chocolate from gleaming china jugs. The gilt-framed mirror behind the central counter showed the backs of master patissiers and konditiers: their crisp white tunics, shaved necks, pomaded hair.

  The narrow causeway was the one way in and the one way out.

  Pavel Ilich Antimos was achingly visible, sitting alone at a table in the window. Lom had watched him for half an hour and he had not moved. He might as well have been under a spotlight. Here I am. See me. Come to me. He stared at the untouched chocolate in front of him, twisting a knotted napkin, his injured right shoulder hunched up against his neck. He never looked up. Never looked around.

  The konditorei was crowded but the tables near Pavel were empty. Perhaps the customers had been warned away; more likely they shunned him through instinct: the unerring sense of the List for avoiding the tainted. The untouchable. The fallen. Even from across the lake Lom could detect the sour grey stink and sadness of the already dead.

  Ten feet from Lom, in the dark of the lakeside trees, a corporal of the VKBD was also observing Pavel Antimos. From time to time he scanned the brightly lit approach to the causeway through binoculars. There were three other VKBD at intervals in the shadow near Lom, and no doubt there were more on the other side of the lake. Probably they had a team in the konditorei as well. Lom couldn’t see them but they would be there.

  Poor Pavel. He wouldn’t have gone to the VKBD with his story –he’d have known that was suicidal–so they must have caught him with his fingers in the drawer. And they’d taken the trouble to keep him alive and use him as bait. So they wanted Lom too. That told Lom something. That was information.

  He could have simply slipped away, back i
n under the rhododendron trees, and left the VKBD to their watching, but the corporal ten feet from him had a pistol on his hip and Lom wanted that. He needed to broaden his options.

  He waited till the brass orchestra in the bandstand reached the finale of ‘We Fine Dragoons’. They made a lot of noise. The corporal didn’t hear him coming.

  11

  An hour later, with no secret Rizhin file from Pavel Antimos but a VKBD pistol in his pocket, Lom re-entered the Lodka by underground ways. He came up past empty cells and interrogation rooms into the tile-floored central atrium. There was no moonlight. He felt the corridors, the stairwells, the doorways, the ramifications of office and conference room as spaciousness and slow currents in the air. Opened up, arboreal and dark-adapted, Lom scented out his way. Forest percipience. He knew the difference between solid dark and airy dark. He felt the invitation of certain thresholds, the threat beyond others; he heard the echo of entranceless passageways on the far side of walls, and the restless shuffling of the basement mortuary dead.

  This forest-opened world was not like seeing; it was knowing and feeling. Everything–absolutely everything–was alive, and Lom shared the life of it. Raw participation. The boundaries of himself were uncertain and permeable. Shifting frontier crossings. He felt history, watchfulness, weight and presence.

  And there was something else. Another spectrum altogether. Liminal angel senses came into play, the residuum of the coin-size lozenge of angel flesh fitted into his skull in childhood and gouged out by Chazia; the residuum also of Chazia’s angel suit, its substance seared into him and joined with his by Uncle Vanya’s atomic starburst at Novaya Zima. Angel particles and angel energies had soaked through him to the blood-warm matter at the heart of bone. Synapses sparkled with alien angel speed and grace. By the faint afterglow of the Lodka’s radiating warmth, Lom saw with a crisp and prickling non-human clarity that needed no more light.

  Always at some level he was these two things: the heart of the forest and the heartless gaze of the spaciousness inside atoms, the spaciousness separating stars. He saw further and better in the dark. Darkness simplified.

  In the Lodka’s cool central atrium (a huge airy space lined by abandoned reception desks, a plaza of echoing linoleum, a node for wide staircases heavily balustered and swing-door exits, surfaces dust-skinned and speckled with the faeces of small animals) Moth was waiting for him. She had sensed his perfumed brightness coming, and he knew she was there: from several floors below he had felt her agitation.

  ‘Men are here!’ she hissed. ‘They have lamps and guns. We know the black uniforms they wear, my sisters and I. They are Streltski!’ She spat the word. Anger and hatred. ‘They have your friend. Some threaten her; others look for papers.’

  Lom had brought Elena Cornelius to the Lodka before he went to look for Pavel in Pir-Anghelsky Park. She is my friend, he’d said to Moth. She’s here under my protection. He’d thought she would be safer here than at her apartment.

  ‘It’s bad the black Streltski are here,’ Moth was saying. ‘We remember them from long ago, but Josef Kantor who is Papa Rizhin brought them back. Streltski burn us! If they find us they burn! Two of us they roasted in the Apraksin. My sisters blame you for bringing them here and for bringing this woman here, and they blame me for this because of you. There will be a bad end of things now.’

  ‘How many men and where?’ said Lom.

  ‘Two with the woman in the reading room under the wheel and two in the locked corridor nearby where they look for Lavrentina’s private archive. I heard them say that.’ She grinned, a wide dark gaping slash of mouth. ‘But they will not find what they want it is not where they look.’

  ‘Lavrentina’s archive?’ said Lom. ‘I want that too. I need that very much.’

  Was it possible the papers he needed were still in the Lodka? That Chazia hadn’t moved them before she left for Novaya Zima with the Pollandore? In the chaos of the withdrawal and burning of that day, it could have happened.

  ‘My sisters are right,’ said Moth. ‘It’s because of you the Streltski are come here where we were forgotten and safe.’

  ‘Moth?’ said Lom ‘Do you know where Lavrentina’s papers are?’

  Her wide nocturnal eyes flashed in the darkness.

  ‘The black uniforms will not find them,’ she said. ‘However long they search. We took them to be safe. Lavrentina will want them when she comes back.’

  ‘Lavrentina isn’t coming back,’ said Lom. ‘She’s dead. It’s Rizhin who wants her archive now. He must know I’m looking for it, and that’s a danger to him. He wants to find it first. ’ Poor Pavel. And Chazia’s papers here all the time. ‘That’s why he sent the Parallel Sector here–I mean the Streltski.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Moth. ‘Lavrentina is dead?’ She reacted to that with the incurious indifference of the non-human who measure their lives in centuries. Then he felt her gaze in the darkness harden and grow colder. Dangerous. ‘And now you want to take Lavrentina’s papers away from us? You didn’t say.’

  ‘One file, Moth. Only one file. Lavrentina had papers about Josef Kantor that I need to find. I didn’t tell you before because I didn’t think the papers were still here.’

  ‘Kantor papers? Papers that endanger Kantor? Kantor whose Streltski drive us out and burn us ’

  ‘Yes.’

  Lom felt Moth smile. A malevolent smile. A playful smile with rows of pin-sharp blade-edge venomous teeth.

  ‘I could take you there,’ she said. ‘My sisters, though…’

  ‘Elena first,’ said Lom. ‘The men with the guns.’

  12

  Hunder Rond swept his torch across empty shelves.

  ‘Well?’ he said.

  ‘This is the correct room,’ said Lieutenant Vrebel. ‘There’s no mistake.’

  ‘So where are the fucking papers?’

  ‘According to the register they should still be here. Permission to remove them was issued to a Captain Iliodor but the completion slip was never matched. He did not come for them. They were never released.’

  ‘This Iliodor,’ said Rond. ‘Who is he?’

  ‘He was Commander Chazia’s aide,’ said Vrebel. ‘He went missing the first day of the withdrawal, and he was presumed killed in the first bombing raids though no body was found. The paperwork is clear. Chazia commissioned him to remove her archive to some other place but he never did. That’s what Pavel Antimos was on to when we took him.’

  Rond played his torch over the emptied shelving again. ‘So where are Chazia’s files now?’

  ‘I cannot say, Director Rond. I do not know.’

  ‘Do you understand,’ said Rond, ‘how dangerous those papers could be? Who knows what poison that woman stored away for her own use and protection. If such an archive falls in the hands of antisocial elements, or rivals for the Presidium… This archive must be found, Vrebel. It has to be destroyed. Our lives depend on this now. Rizhin knows of its existence, and if we can’t bring it home—’

  He broke off suddenly and spun round, his torch skipping wildly. ‘What the fuck!’

  From somewhere down the corridor behind them came the sound of gunshots. A man screaming and screaming in terror. Pain. Screams without hope.

  Lieutenant Vrebel pulled out his gun and ran.

  ‘Vrebel! Wait!’ called Rond.

  Too late. Vrebel was disappearing down the corridor towards the reading room.

  ‘Idiot,’ said Rond quietly. Hunder Rond was no kind of coward but he understood caution. Circumspection. Explore and comprehend your position, test your enemy, discover your advantage, then exploit it with surprise and overwhelming deadly force. Survival is the first criterion of victory, and in the end the only one. He switched off his torch, drew his pistol and began to follow Vrebel’s jerky flashing beam.

  Lom watched the attack of the vyrdalaks on the Parallel Sector men from an upper gallery of the Lodka reading room.

  Moth had led him there. Together they had crept out onto a balcony from w
here, by the starlight spilling through the broken panes of the dome, he could look down on the rows of reader’s desks that radiated out from the insectile bulk of the motionless great wheel. He’d seen Elena Cornelius sitting at one of the desks, upright and fierce. Men in black uniforms were sitting on desks either side of her, swinging their legs. Relaxed. Waiting for the others to return.

  ‘Let me take them,’ he had whispered to Moth. ‘I’ll do it quietly. No fuss.’

  ‘Too late,’ she’d hissed. ‘See! My sisters are vengeful. Blood for the burnings at the Apraksin!’

  Two dark uncertain shapes were swarming head-first at silent impossible speed down the gantry of the great wheel. White mouths in the moonlight. Lom felt the fluttering shadow-memory of vestigial papery wings brush against his face. Liminal whisperings. He remembered Count Palffy’s collection in the raion. The glass cases mounted on the wall, the pinned-out specimens, some drab, some gaudy. My specialism is winter moths. Ice moths. Strategies for surviving the deep winter cold.

  The Parallel Sector men had also felt movement above them and looked up, swinging their torch beams. They saw what was coming.

  ‘Elena!’ Lom had yelled. ‘Run! They don’t want you. Get clear! Run!’

  He’d started to run himself then, racing for the iron spiral stairway down to the reading room. But before he reached the head of the stairs there were shots and then the screaming began.

  When the vyrdalak sisters attacked her guards, Elena Cornelius had backed away, retreating to the edge of the room. Lom made his way across to her between the desks.

  ‘Keep back out of the way,’ he said. ‘This isn’t for us.’

  There was a flash of light in the frosted pane of the doorway behind her. Lom sensed someone was coming fast. Another one of the Streltski. He felt the man’s fear. He was coming for a fight.