Peter Higgins - Truth and Fear

‘This is pointing right at your belly. We’re coming inside.’

The dvornik threw a panicked glance sideways.

‘Make one sign to them,’ said Lom, ‘and I’ll shoot your bollocks off. Or you can let us in. It’s a fair offer. A trade.’

The dvornik didn’t move. He shook his head.

‘You’ll kill me inside.’

‘Maybe,’ said Lom. ‘Only if you piss me off.’

The man still didn’t move. Pig-stubborn, or too scared to think. Probably both. A couple more seconds and the watchers would know something was wrong.

‘He won’t shoot you,’ said Maroussia. ‘Really he won’t. We’ve come to see inside Professor Vishnik’s apartment, not to kill you. We only need a few minutes. Then we’ll be gone.’

The dvornik’s raisin eyes squinted up at her. He nodded, stood up slowly and went ahead of them up the steps and into the building. Lom followed close behind. When they were inside, Maroussia pushed the heavy outer door shut. Latched it. Pushed the bolts home, top and bottom.

The dvornik turned to face them, blocking the hallway.

‘It wasn’t my fault,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t me. I didn’t—’

Lom shoved him in the shoulder. Hard. He stumbled back.

‘Get the key,’ Lom said. ‘Number 4. Hurry.’

The dvornik went behind the counter into his little office. Lom followed him, the Sepora clear of his coat. The office was in a filthy state: the rug sodden, the linoleum floor still wet from the flood. A greasy leather armchair slumped in the corner, oozing and ruined. The whole place reeked of canal. The dvornik rummaged about in a box under the counter and brought out a labelled key. Held it out to Lom.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘Second floor.’

‘Bring it. Take the stairs, not the lift.’

‘We can’t. The lift’s still out. The flood… the electrics…’

‘I said the stairs, arsehole. You first.’

On the way up Lom saw the gouges in the plaster where he’d fired at Safran and his men when they came for him. The wreckage the grenade had made of the landing. It seemed for ever ago. As the dvornik put the key in the lock, Lom had a premonition that Vishnik’s body would still be there, still tied to the couch, eyes open, wounds crusted and gaping. Left by Chazia’s interrogation team to rot and seep and dry out where he had died.

But the body was gone, though the couch still stood where it had been dragged into the centre of the room. It was covered in dried blood. And other stuff. The leakage of death.

The room had been thoroughly, violently searched. The filing cabinets were open and empty. Desk drawers pulled out, their contents spilled, the desk smashed open. Faded brick-red curtains pulled off the wall along with the rail that held them. Bookshelves emptied and torn from the wall, the books scattered across the floor. All the strange, inconsequential objects that Vishnik had collected in his solitary city walks–the red lacquer tea caddy, the pieces of wood and brick, the discarded tickets and printed notices, the shards of pottery and glass–swept into a heap in the corner. The paintings that had filled every gap on the wall ripped from smashed frames. Vishnik’s lonely absence hung in the air, bereft, accusing and sad.

‘I haven’t had time…’ the dvornik said.

‘What?’

‘The floods… I’ve been too busy. The room has to be re-let, but I can’t—’

‘Sit there,’ said Lom. ‘On the couch. Don’t move and don’t speak. I may just shoot you anyway.’

In a corner of the room there was a small heap of women’s clothes and a threadbare carpet bag. Maroussia pounced on them

‘My things!’

She started to stuff them back into the bag. When she had finished, she knelt among Vishnik’s scattered books, sifting through them, riffling the pages.

‘There’s nothing here,’ said Lom. ‘If there was, they’ve taken it.’

Maroussia shook her head.

‘There must be something. He told me. They didn’t get it . That’s what he said. They didn’t get it. Even they are human and stupid .’

‘But they searched again,’ said Lom. ‘More thoroughly. After he was dead.’

‘They looked all over,’ said the dvornik. ‘The halls. The stairwell. The bathroom. They pulled the cistern off the wall.’

‘You shut up,’ said Lom.

‘He just wants us out of here quickly,’ said Maroussia. ‘We need to search. We don’t have another option.’

Lom pushed the dvornik ahead of him into the kitchen. Vishnik’s darkroom was still set up in a corner. Bottles of chemicals opened and spilled down the sink. The room reeked of metol and hypo. The enlarger head had been unscrewed and opened up. The red safety light smashed. Packets of photographic paper ripped open and ruined. Unexposed films, pulled from their canisters, lay on the floor in curls and spools of grey-black cellulose ribbon. The boxes where Vishnik kept his prints and negative strips were gone.

Lom searched for a while randomly. After a few minutes he went back into the other room. Maroussia was sitting on the floor in the wreckage of Vishnik’s desk. She would have stayed there for days, sifting every last piece. Opening every page of every book. But it was hopeless. They didn’t even know what they were looking for.

‘We have to go,’ said Lom.

She looked up at him, suddenly angry.

‘Where?’ she said. ‘Where else would we look? Do you know? I don’t know. Here. This is the place. Here. There’s something here. You knew him. He was your friend. Work it out.’

‘Please…’ said the dvornik.

‘Sit back down on that couch,’ said Lom, ‘and shut the fuck up.’

‘Does he have to sit there?’ said Maroussia.

Lom looked at the awful object, stained by torture and dying. Vishnik had lain there. Shit.

‘I know where it is,’ he said.

They didn’t get it. Even they are human, and stupid.

The interrogators had searched thoroughly. While Vishnik’s body was still there on the couch. And the one place they didn’t look was the same place he and Maroussia hadn’t looked. Because of what was on it. Because of what had happened there. They blanked it out. Even the Vlast torturers blinded themselves. Avoided seeing the work of their own hands. Forgetting as soon as they had done it.

‘It’s in the couch,’ said Lom.

He pulled the dvornik off it roughly and knelt to look underneath. There was nothing. He felt with his hands all over the bloody and still faintly sticky leather seat and up the back of it, slipping his hands into the crevices. Looking for something. Anything. An opening. A lump in the stuffing. There was nothing.

The couch was a kind of chaise longue with a seat-back rising at one end. Lom went round behind it, down on his knees. The back was covered with a single panel of leather, sewn at the top and pinned tight with a row of black metal studs along the bottom. He ran his finger along the studs. Picked at a couple of them with his fingernail. One came loose. Then another. They weren’t completely tight. As if they had been levered out and pushed loosely back into place. They held, but only just.

Lom took the razor from his pocket and sliced a long, arcing cut across the leather back panel. Stuck his hand inside. Pulled out a large brown envelope stuffed with paper and sealed down tight.

The Colloquium of Four sat on the high platform at the north end of the All-Dominions Thousand Year Hall on chairs of plush red velvet. Chazia was in the centre with Chairman Fohn. Dukhonin, the General Secretary, was on Chazia’s left, and Khazar–negligible Khazar, the Minister for Something–sat at Fohn’s right hand. The platform, raised high above the crowd, had room for a hundred, but the Four sat alone, a wide frosty space gaping between each chair. To the crowd we look small, Chazia thought. Unimpressive. Vulnerable. Fohn had planned the Novozhd’s funeral and he had fucked it up. Every part of it.