Peter Higgins - Truth and Fear

Until Chazia herself had left him waiting in an interrogation cell. Lavrentina Chazia, who–when she’d come at last–had used that angel worm glove thing to slither around inside his mind, rummaging about, turning him inside out, pulling out half-known intimate private things. Lom flinched at the memory of having her inside his mind. It had been… disgusting. And she had dug into his skull with a blade, prising the lozenge of angel flesh from his forehead while Josef Kantor stood behind her. Kantor had leaned in for a closer look. Is that the brain in there? Kantor had said, probing the bleeding, kopek-sized hole with his finger. Firmer than I’d have thought.

Lom was surprised to find that he felt almost no antagonism towards Josef Kantor. Kantor was cruel and murderous and charming, and no doubt in the end a more lethal enemy than Chazia was, but in some way that troubled Lom even as it half-seduced him, Kantor was–Lom struggled with the word, but it was true–Kantor, at least as Lom had seen him, was honest . Kantor had become completely what he had chosen to be. He was all of something, like an animal was all of what it was. Lom felt in some odd way a bond with Josef Kantor. Kantor was his adversary, still. For some reason that he couldn’t explain to himself, Lom felt he had not laid down the task of hunting him. But he didn’t hate him.

Chazia, though, Chazia was unwholesome. She was one thing on the surface and another thing inside. Lom had looked up the public details of her record once, and found nothing there except ordinariness: the ordinary successes and advancements of an assiduous career. She had risen smoothly from comfortable family beginnings to the top of her profession. The sickness and poison that Lom had smelled on her breath in that interrogation room and seen breaking out in dark patches on her skin, that came from nowhere, that was all her own. She was unfeedable hunger, unsatisfiable desire. She would draw and draw on power and pain and never be full. It was Chazia who was responsible for what he had been in Podchornok, Chazia who had wormed his mind, Chazia who had sent men for Maroussia and for him, Chazia who had sent the men who killed his friends… With Chazia, Lom felt a different sort of bond. Unfinished business of a different kind.

Don’t think about this. Not now.

Outside in the street Antoninu Florian took off his astrakhan hat and combed the thin fine blond hair on his head. His overcoat was too large on the slight frame of the body shape he was using. He undid the buttons to let it hang loose so it wouldn’t show. When he was ready, he strode up the steps and into the gendarme office. Closing the outer doors carefully behind him. Slipping the bolt quietly into place.

The desk clerk looked up in surprise. Recognised him. Registered a reflex of alarm. Stood straighter and tugged at his necktie.

‘Captain Iliodor!’ he said. ‘We weren’t expecting you. We weren’t told—’

‘No,’ said Florian quietly. ‘Not Iliodor. I am so sorry.’

Lom waited in the darkness. The muffled telephone rang and stopped and rang again. Time passed. Once, he thought he heard a voice in the distance, a man’s half-shout of anger or surprise, cut off by silence. How long had he been standing there, behind the door? Five minutes at least. More.

The telephone was ringing again. Incessantly now. Urgently. It jangled his nerves. For fuck’s sake somebody answer it. He tried to measure out the time by counting the rings of the telephone but lost patience after thirty.

Nobody was coming for him. It was Maroussia they were interested in. The corporal would have made his glory phone call by now, reporting the successful capture of the fugitive. Somebody would come for her. They might take her away and leave him here. He had to get out. Now.

Lining himself up by feel, he kicked at the door, aiming for underneath the handle. It shook in its frame but didn’t give. The noise was shockingly loud in the dark. Surely it would bring someone. He kicked again. And again. No progress. The geometry of the attack was all wrong: kicking the door just made him stagger back, off balance. He put down his shoulder and crashed all his weight against the wooden panel and heard something split. It sounded like it was inside the door near the hinge, but when he tested it, it was as solid as before. The pulse in the wound in his head was pounding now. The darkness surrounding him was a sour, suffocating stillness. Impending panic. He had to get out . Desperate, attentive senses felt the air pressing in around him like a tangible, mouldable, moveable substance. He reached out with his mind and gathered the dark air up like a fist and shoved it, threw it, forward. It was like a fierce silent shout. The door burst open, tearing its hinges out of the frame and crashing to the ground.

Lom stepped back behind the gaping doorway, leaning against the wall, recovering his breath, letting his eyes adjust to the light. Now someone would come. The noise would bring them. He had to be ready. Surprise lay in not rushing out into the corridor. He counted off a whole minute. Still no one came. Halfway through the count, he realised the telephone had stopped ringing. When the minute was up he went out into the corridor and checked the other cupboard-cells one by one. None was locked. All were empty. Maroussia wasn’t there.

He went up the passage into the office area. At first he thought there was nobody there, that they’d all just gone away, leaving chairs pushed back, filing drawers pulled out, lights burning, doors open, empty. Then he saw the gendarme lying on his back on the floor between two desks. It was probably the one who’d first spotted them on the tram, but it was hard to be sure, because there was a pocket of bloody mess where the man’s throat used to be, and the lower half of his face was gone. Dark blood pooled on the linoleum under his head: a neat pool, almost perfectly circular, except where a chair leg had interrupted the flow. The spilling blood had separated to pass round it and come together on the other side. The obstruction had caused a notch, an irregularity in the circumference of the shiny crimson dish. Not a big dish. No heart had pumped it out. The man been dead when he went down.

A murmur of traffic noise drifted in through the open front doors. The cry of distant gulls. Lom found the desk clerk curled behind the counter. His neck was broken.

Maroussia!

He ran back across the open area, dodging between the desks. In the first office he tried, he found the corporal propped in the chair, his body slumped across the desk. Lom lurched backwards out of the office and shouted.

‘Maroussia!’

He waited a second and called again.

‘Maroussia!’

There was no answer.

All the other ground-floor offices were empty. On a desk in the middle of the big room a telephone began to ring again. For the love of fuck, shut up. A swing door opened onto a hallway and a staircase climbing up. Lom raced up, heart pounding, taking the stairs two at a time. There was a uniformed body slumped on the first landing. He jumped it without slowing.

‘Maroussia!’

At the top of the stairs was another passageway. Doors, some standing open, some locked.

‘Maroussia!’ It was almost a scream.

And then he heard her voice. Cautious. Hesitant.

‘Vissarion?’

‘Where are you?’

‘Here.’ He heard a thump against one of the doors halfway down the passage. ‘I’m in here. It’s locked. I can’t get out.’

Lom barged against the door. It was solid. He would break it down eventually, but it would take time. Wasted time. He ran back down the stairs to where the desk clerk lay in a foetal huddle and hauled him over onto his back. Ignoring the look in the dead, staring eyes, he went through his pockets. Found the bunch of keys by their weight.