‘And so?’ prompted Virginsky.
‘And so,’ said Porfiry, his voice weary as he hauled himself out of the drozhki, ‘we must proceed with caution.’
At that moment a closed black wagon marked Politsiya drew up beside them. Porfiry raised a questioning eyebrow at Salytov who nodded grimly.
‘Very well,’ said Porfiry, mirroring Salytov’s nod. ‘The wagon is here. Let us talk to Rostanev.’
Echoes of murmured conversations filled the high, marbled lobby. Both urgent and muted, they rose from the shuffling men who crossed the polished floor, to drift like dust into the niches of the walls, before settling on the blank-eyed, stone-deaf busts. The air was stifling, clogged with spinning particles. A desiccated heat drew the breath from Porfiry. Even so, he felt the longing for a cigarette. A large double-headed eagle, emblem of the imperial house, was moulded on to the wall that faced them, picked out in gold leaf. The strange beast looked with inevitably divided attention, left and right, into the corridors that led off from the hall. The new civil flag, that is to say the flag that had been adopted a decade earlier, but which Porfiry still could not bring himself to regard as Russian, hung limply from a staff above the heraldic form, its bands of black, gold and white crumpled into each other. Porfiry saw Salytov’s snarl at the sight of it: ‘Germans!’
The word reverberated clearly above the hubbub, like a hard ball of sound tossed carelessly against the walls. Heads turned in outrage.
‘Be careful, Ilya Petrovich,’ said Porfiry, smiling mischievously. ‘Such an outburst might be construed as treasonable.’
‘Nonsense.’ Salytov glared. ‘I am a loyal subject of the Tsar.’
‘Even when he listens to German counsel, and foists on us an alien flag?’ goaded Virginsky.
‘It was the Germans who made him do it.’
‘But he took up their suggestion readily enough, did he not? That was one reform he was not slow to implement in full — to put the Romanov family colours on the Russian nation’s flag. It shows quite clearly how he regards the country. As his personal fiefdom.’
‘I thought you liberals liked this Tsar,’ said Salytov. ‘He can hardly be described as lacking in reformist zeal.’
‘That is enough,’ interrupted Porfiry, regretting the attention that the hissed debate was drawing.
‘What makes you think I am a liberal?’ Virginsky had to get in.
‘Enough!’ Porfiry’s cry provoked a bubbling of shocked reaction around them. ‘May I remind you gentlemen that we are here on official business? Furthermore, this is hardly the place to engage in such discussions.’
Porfiry frowned distractedly as he looked about. Two staircases led up from the lobby. Numerous unmarked doors were visible in the corridors that fed into the hall. ‘Which way do you suppose it is to the Department of Public Health? In a building this size one would expect there to be signposts.’
‘Now it is you who are criticising the way our Tsar has ordered things.’
Ignoring Virginsky’s observation, Porfiry accosted one of the clerks hurrying head-down towards the door, a youngish man with a splenetic face. ‘Excuse me, sir.’ The clerk did not seem to have heard him. Just as the man was about to collide with him, Porfiry stepped sharply to one side. ‘Sir!’ he shouted. The clerk stopped in his steps and drew himself up. He glanced sharply towards Porfiry, his face crimped in displeasure.
‘Do you mind? I have a very important commission to dispatch.’
‘If you could only tell us where to find the Department of Public Health.’
The man’s eyes bulged. ‘There is a saying in the ministry that if you don’t know where an office is you really have no business going there.’ He brushed past Porfiry and was gone.
‘Really!’ said Porfiry, gazing in astonishment at the fellow’s wake. ‘These people.’
Now another one of the bottle-green-uniformed men was coming towards him from the other direction. A stooped, grey-whiskered relic, whose coat was nonetheless immaculately brushed, his buttons gleaming. He had the order of St Vladimir hanging from a ribbon around his neck. The old man looked straight through Porfiry, and though he moved with slow, small steps, it seemed that he too was bent on collision.
‘Sir!’ cried Porfiry. ‘If you please!’
The other man tottered to a halt as if he had been hurtling towards Porfiry at breakneck speed. His eyebrows bristled menacingly, with sinister abundance. He glared at Porfiry as if he believed him to be a dangerous lunatic.
‘What is it?’ His voice was edged with a panicked impatience.
‘Could you direct us to the Department of Public Health?’
‘The Department of Public Health?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll take you there.’ The old man began his tortuously slow step again, a gait in which neither foot ever once completely extended beyond the other. They waited for him to get ahead of them before following, at a funereal pace.
‘It really is not necessary,’ said Porfiry. ‘If you could simply give us the directions. .’
‘It’s no trouble.’ The old man began to wheeze heavily.
‘We are in rather a hurry.’
‘Yes,’ said the old man. ‘This way is quicker.’
Porfiry sighed. The old man had led them to the first flight of stairs; he paused for a moment at the bottom before ascending to the first step. Not before he had both feet planted on it did he attempt to scale the second.
He led them down a corridor, lined on both sides with mountains of files. These seemed to have grown out like crystal formations from the rooms along the corridor. Moving at their guide’s pace, Porfiry had ample opportunity to peer into some of these rooms, at least before the occupants, noticing his attention, closed a door in his face. The rooms were all of different sizes, some as dark and cramped as a cupboard, others extending beyond the reach of his gaze into shadowed edges. Sometimes he glimpsed rows of men sitting on high stools at ledger desks. In other rooms he saw no one clearly, but had the sense of a presence in there: perhaps he saw a vague shape move or heard the fall of a footstep, the riffle of paper or something scuttling out of sight; the door would inevitably be closed by an unseen hand.
The old man led them at last to a pair of closed double doors. He pointed with a crooked finger at the words ‘Department of Public Health’ etched on a small brass plaque, then continued on his way without a word, almost without pausing. Porfiry widened his eyes as he put a hand on the door handle.
The doors opened on to a large room, which even so felt cramped and stuffy. Piles of papers laid out in rows acted as screens, dividing it into smaller cells. In these, men — either individually or in groups of two, three or four — sat stooped over desks. Porfiry, Virginsky and Salytov were presented with a sea of rounded backs, which seemed to be bent under the oppressive menace of the room’s disproportionately low ceiling. There was a soft sound, a susurration mixed with an amplified scratching, the accumulated mouthings and pen pushings of this army of copyists and clerks. A hundred quills swished the air at once in a hypnotic dance that quivered with promised meaning. One man was moving between the desks. He looked across the room towards them as they came in and after a moment’s frowning hesitation approached them with an armful of files.