Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034

‘We’ll break through,’ Leonid told him with a smile. ‘I shouldn’t say this to you, but honest bureaucrats don’t exist, and the harsher the regime, the lower the price. You just have to know who to pay it to.’

‘I think the magic word will be enough for you,’ the officer chuckled.

‘It doesn’t work on everyone yet,’ said Leonid, touching his cheekbone again. ‘As they say, I’m not a magician yet, I’m still studying.’

‘It will be a pleasure to do business with you… When you complete your studies.’ Albert Mikhailovich bowed his head, swung round and strode away.

The last soldier opened a small gate through the thick bars of a grille that blocked off the tunnel from top to bottom. The stretch of line that began beyond it was brightly lit, and its walls were scorched in some places and chipped in others, as if from long fire-fights: at the far end of it they could see new bands of fortifications and the broad swathes of banners stretched between the floor and the ceiling. The sight of them was enough to set Sasha’s heart pounding.

‘Whose frontier post is this?’ she asked, coming to a sharp halt.

‘What do you mean, whose?’ the musician asked, looking at her in amazement. ‘The Red Line’s, of course.’

Ah, how long Homer had dreamed of being back here again, how long it was since he’d been in these wonderful places…

At Borovitskaya Station, that residence of the intelligentsia, with its sweet smell of creosote and cosy little apartments, built right there in the arches, and its reading-room for Brahmin monks in the middle of the hall – long wooden tables piled high with books, low-hanging lamps with fabric shades – and its astoundingly precise reproduction of the spirit of the ‘debating-hall kitchens’ of the crisis period and pre-war years…

At regal Arbat Station, decked out in white and bronze, almost like the chambers of the Kremlin, with its austere manners and brisk military men, who still puffed out their cheeks, as if they weren’t involved at all in the Apocalypse…

At the old, indeed ancient, Lenin Library Station, which they’d never got round to renaming while it still made any kind of sense to rename it, which was already as old as the world when Kolya first arrived in the Metro as a little kid, the Library, with its connecting passage in the form of a romantic captain’s bridge, right in the middle of the platform, with its painstakingly and skilfully restored moulding work on the leaky ceiling…

And at Alexander Gardens, with its perpetually dim lighting, long-limbed and angular, in a way that reminded Homer of some weak-sighted gouty pensioner, constantly reminiscing about his young days in the Komsomol.

Homer had always wondered if the stations were like their creators. Could they be thought of as their designers’ self-portraits? Had they absorbed particles of the people who built them? One thing he knew for certain: each station left its own imprint on the people who lived in it, sharing its character with them and infecting them with its own moods and ailments. But Homer, with his peculiar cast of mind, his eternal pondering, and his incurable nostalgia, belonged, of course, not to stern Sebastopol, but to Polis, as bright as the past itself.

Only life had dictated otherwise.

And even now, when he had finally got here, he didn’t have even a few spare minutes to stroll through these halls, to admire the plaster mouldings and bronze castings, to indulge his fantasies.

He had to run. With a struggle, Hunter had managed to muzzle someone inside himself, to cage that terrible creature that he fed from time to time with human flesh. But once it bent apart the bars of that inner cage, a moment later there would be nothing left of the feeble bars on the outside. Homer had to hurry.

Hunter had asked him to find Miller. Was that a real name or a nickname? Or maybe a password? Spoken aloud, it had produced a startling effect on the sentries: talk of a court martial for the arrested brigadier had dried up, and the handcuffs that were about to be clicked onto Homer’s wrists were put back in the desk drawer. The pot-bellied head of the watch had volunteered to show the old man the way in person.

Homer and his guide walked up a flight of steps and along the connecting passage to Arbat. They stopped at a door guarded by two men in civilian clothes, with faces that stated very clearly that they were professional killers. Behind them he could see a vista of office rooms. The pot-bellied man asked Homer to wait for a moment and tramped off along the corridor. Less than three minutes later, he came back out, looked the old man over in amazement and invited him to go in.

The cramped corridor led them to a surprisingly spacious room with all its walls hung with maps and diagrams or overgrown with notes and coded messages, photographs and sketches. A bony, elderly man with shoulders as wide as if he was wearing a Caucasian felt cloak was enthroned at a broad oak desk. Only his left arm protruded from the tunic thrown across his shoulders, and when Homer looked closely, he realised why: the man’s right arm was almost completely missing. The owner of the office was immensely tall – his eyes were almost on the same level as the eyes of the old man standing facing him.

‘Thank you,’ he said, dismissing the pot-bellied officer, who closed the door from the other side with obvious regret. ‘Who are you?’

‘Nikolai Ivanovich Nikolaev,’ the old man said, disconcerted.

‘Drop the clowning. If you come to me, saying that you’re with my very closest comrade, whom I laid to rest a year ago, you must have a reason for it. Who are you?’

‘No one…’ said Homer, with perfect sincerity. ‘But this isn’t about me. It’s true, he’s alive. You just have to come with me, and quickly.’

‘So now I’m wondering if this is a trap, an idiotic hoax or simply a mistake.’ Miller lit a papyrosa and blew smoke into the old man’s face. ‘If you know his name and you’ve chosen to come to me with this, you must know his story. You must know that we searched for him every day for more than a year. That we lost several men in the process. You must know, damn you, how much he meant to us. Perhaps even that he was my right hand.’ He gave a crooked smile.

‘No, none of that. He doesn’t tell me anything,’ said the old man, pulling his head down into his shoulders. ‘Please, let’s just go to Borovitskaya. There’s not much time.’

‘No, I won’t go running off anywhere. And I have a good reason for that.’

Miller put his hand under the table, made a strange movement with it and moved back in some incredible fashion, without getting up. It took Homer a few seconds to realise that he was sitting in a wheelchair.

‘So let’s talk calmly. I want to understand the meaning of your appearance here.’

‘Lord,’ said the old man, despairing of ever getting through to this blockhead. ‘Please, just believe me. He’s alive. And he’s sitting in the holding cell at Borovitskaya. At least, I hope he’s still there…’

‘I’d like to believe you,’ Miller said and paused to take a deep pull on his papyrosa – the old man heard the cigarette paper crackling as it curled up and caught fire. ‘Only miracles don’t happen. All right. I have my own theories about whose hoax this is. But they’ll be tested by specially trained men.’ He reached for the phone.

‘Why is he so afraid of black men?’ Homer asked unexpectedly, surprising even himself.

Miller cautiously put down the receiver without saying a word into it. He dragged the rest of the papyrosa into his lungs, right down to the end, and spat out the short cardboard butt into an ashtray.

‘Damn you, I’ll take a ride to Borovitskaya,’ he said.