‘You’ve got shit,’ said Dukhonin. ‘Dangerous shit, but shit. You think you know it all, with your files and your informers and your useless lickspittle secret police? You know nothing, Lavrentina! Nothing of importance. You know nothing and you are no one. Who are you? What are you? You’re meat, you’re disgusting, a diseased, repellent little cow-bitch. Novaya Zima will kill you. Shit. You send that thing to scare me and you kill my housekeeper and you keep me locked up all night in this pathetic stinking toilet. Fohn will kill you slowly and I will piss on your shitty corpse.’ He stood up. ‘I’ve had enough. I’m going home.’
‘The door,’ said Chazia, ‘is not locked.’
Dukhonin stood up, raised himself to his full five foot six, shuffled across in his carpet slippers and pulled the door open. Bez Nichevoi was standing in the corridor, patient and still. A shadow in the shadows. Dukhonin didn’t see him until he moved. Bez dislocated Dukhonin’s left arm at the shoulder and Dukhonin screamed.
Bez did something to Dukhonin’s face, too fast for Chazia to see, and pushed him back into the room. Dukhonin fell forward hard on the floor and lay there, his left arm at a wrong angle, useless, his right hand holding his face.
‘Oh shit,’ he murmured. ‘Shit.’
Bez followed him into the room and looked to Chazia for instructions.
‘Help him back into his chair.’
Dukhonin sat slumped forward, twisted sideways with the pain in his shoulder, blood trickling down his cheek from his ruined left eye. The socket was a jellied, swollen mess.
‘There cannot be four rulers, Steopan,’ said Chazia. ‘There can only be one. Power shared isn’t power at all. This Colloquium you and Fohn and Khazar cooked up is an abortion. It is an arena for battle only–it is a war–but none of you is a soldier and none of you will win. I am going to take it all.’
Dukhonin didn’t look at her. His one good eye was fixed on Bez Nichevoi, motionless and watchful in the corner of the room. Nichevoi seemed to be exuding the shadows that gathered around him despite the flat glare of the overhead lamp. Tall and thin, he wore a neat dark suit made of shadows. Dark hair, a dark inexpressive gaze, a stark face white as chalk. He made the angles of the room around him seem wrong.
‘You’re just like the rest of them, Steopan, when they come in here,’ Chazia said. ‘The ground you walked on was always fragile, and now it has broken and you’ve fallen through. You’re in my world now.’
‘But we can do a deal, Lavrentina,’ said Dukhonin. ‘Listen. We can do a deal. You’re right about Fohn, of course you are. Completely. He’s weak. A bureaucrat. A committee man. A compromiser. But not me, I’m not like that. You and I–we can make an alliance. Don’t let that thing… You don’t need to kill me, Lavrentina. There’s no call for that. I can help you. You want to come in on it? I’ll let you in. Of course I will. It’s a perfect idea. Perfect. I should have thought of it before. We’ll be good together, Lavrentina. We don’t need Khazar and Fohn. You don’t need to kill me. I’ll share.’
‘Share? What have you got that I need, Steopan Vadimovich?’
‘Novaya Zima! Shit. Novaya Zima! You need it. You need me.’
‘So what is Novaya Zima? Tell me what it is.’
‘Not tell you. I’ll show you. You need to see.’
31
When Elena Cornelius had left them alone in the attic, Maroussia went across to one of the mattresses and sat down. She put the carpet bag she’d brought from Vishnik’s on the floor next to her and opened it. Started pulling things out, one by one and setting them out on the quilt. The envelope with Vishnik’s photographs. A dark woollen skirt. A couple of thin cotton blouses, faded and softened from frequent washing. A blue knitted cardigan, neatly mended at the elbow with slightly mismatched thread. A linen nightshirt. A bar of soap, wrapped in a piece of brown waxed paper. A thin book in a grey card cover. The Selo Elegies and Other Poems by Anna Yourdania. The clothes were crumpled. They’d been fingered by Vishnik’s killers and thrown aside until Maroussia had grabbed them off the floor and stuffed them roughly, hastily, back into the bag. Lom watched her set out each one, smooth it down and refold it, neatly.
She felt him watching her and looked up.
‘I don’t want to wear these again,’ she said. ‘Not after where they’ve been. Not after what happened there.’
‘No,’ said Lom. ‘I guess not.’
‘They’re not… they’re not mine, not any more.’
She picked up the packet of soap and went across to the table under the window. There was a large pitcher of water and a wide shallow washbowclass="underline" chipped yellow enamel with a thin black rim. A rough brown towel hung from a hook. Maroussia poured some water into the bowl, rolled up her sleeves, leaned forward and splashed her face with tight cupped hands. Rubbed her dripping hands across her eyes, her mouth, her forehead, her throat, the back of her neck. Ran wet fingers through her hair. Then she straightened up, unwrapped the soap and lathered her hands, her arms up to the elbow. She turned the soap over and over in her fingers, rubbed it again along the length of her arms and let it slip back into the bowl. Scooped a double handful of water and jammed the heels of her palms into her eyes. Not rubbing but pressing, gently pushing. She stood like that, not moving, breathing.
Lom went up behind her. He could smell the soap and the warmth of her skin and hair. Her hands, her face, her neck were flushed from the icy cold of the water. He could smell the scent of her on the thin blouse she’d been wearing the day the boat took them into the White Reaches and was still wearing now. He could still feel the warmth of her long back against his side, where she had lain pressed against him in the bed in the gate keeper’s lodge the night before. Twenty-four hours ago. He picked up the towel and dipped a corner of it in the icy water in the pitcher. Began to wipe the soap from her neck and her arms.
When he took her two hands in one of his and drew them gently away from her face, her eyes were screwed tight shut. He wiped the soap from them, one by one. She turned into his arms, opened her eyes and looked into his. Held his gaze for a long, quiet time. There was a faint sweetness of brandy on her breath.
She was a stranger to him. Again, he felt the otherness of her. A part of her was very far away, behind her eyes, not wanting to be reached.
He moved the rough damp edge of the towel across her mouth, wiping the soap away. She moved her body against him. He felt the patch of damp cold where she had spilled water down her neck. She opened her mouth and put her lips against his.
Hours later, Lom lay wakeful in the dark, listening to the quiet creaks and ticks of the roof beams under the accumulating weight of snow. Maroussia was lying next to him, sleeping, the warmth of her breathing against his cheek. He listened to the rattles and groans in the pipes, the scratch and skitter of small animals. Felt the presence of dark, amorphous, inky, shifty, scuttling night-things that lived in the shadows and ceilings and whispered. Cool, filmy presences. Watchful creatures of fur and dust. The delicate new skin across the hole in the front of his skull fluttered in response with gentle moth-wing beats.
Slowly and carefully so as not to wake her, he slipped out from under the quilt and padded barefoot across to the window. It was bitterly cold in the room. He was instantly shivering. The vapour of his and Maroussia’s breath had crystallised in whorls and ferns of frost across the windowpanes, and through it a faint snow-glimmer filtered into the room. He cleared a patch with the side of his palm and looked out: dense, swirling snowfall still coming down; the tumbled, tightly packed rooftops of the raion falling away down the hill. Lamps burning in a few isolated windows, their light reflecting off the snow.