‘Yes,’ said Lom. ‘You make them nervous.’
Florian tossed the peeled egg into the air, and with an impossibly fast movement seemed to lean forward and snap it out of the air with his jaws. He swallowed the egg whole. It was over in a fraction of a second, almost too fast to see. It was the most inhuman gesture that Lom had ever seen a human make. Only Florian was not human of course.
Florian wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
‘And what about you, Vissarion?’ he said. ‘Do I bother you?’
‘Yes,’ said Lom. ‘Absolutely.’
‘I see,’ said Florian. ‘Well. OK.’ He took a sip of birch liquor, made a sour face and sat back as if he’d made an incontrovertible point.
67
Gretskaya turned up at the bar half an hour later, her sheepskin rain-soaked, her thick curly hair heavy with water.
‘You tracked us down,’ said Florian.
‘Where else would you be? There is nowhere else. Give me some of that.’ She picked up Florian’s balzam glass and emptied it, then slid in alongside Lom on the bench. ‘There’s heavy weather coming in from the north. It reached Garshal this morning, bad enough that they telephoned a warning to the pier head here. That’s not normal. We’ll stay here tonight and let it blow through, and start again in the morning.’
‘We could go east,’ said Lom. ‘Follow the river to Terrimarkh, like you said. Keep south of the weather.’
Gretskaya shook her head.
‘I will not risk the Kotik over that country,’ she said. ‘It is a wilderness. Bad weather in daylight over the ocean is one thing. Bad weather at night over 250,000 square miles of moss and rocks and scrub is something else again. But…’ She paused and frowned and looked across the room. A corporal of gendarmes had ducked in under the low doorway. He was standing at the edge of the room, letting his eyes adjust to the light.
When he saw them he came across. He was young, not more than nineteen or twenty, narrow-shouldered and wide-hipped. A velvet moustache, a full moist lower lip, a roll of softness swelling over his belt. The holster on his hip looked big and awkward on him.
‘You are the aviators?’ he said. ‘That is your seaplane at the jetty? The Beriolev Mark II Kotik?’
‘It is,’ said Gretskaya.
‘And you are the pilot?’
‘Yes.’
‘You are required to register a flight plan with the harbour authorities. This is your responsibility, yet no such plan is registered.’
‘I don’t have a plan. Not yet. We were just discussing that. There is a problem with the weather.’
The boy was staring at Lom and Florian.
‘And these are your passengers?’ he said. ‘Two men?’
‘As you see.’
‘Cargo?’
‘None.’
‘This can be checked. The aircraft will be searched.’
‘There is no cargo. It is a passenger flight.’
‘For what purpose?’
‘I am exploring possibilities in the timber business,’ said Lom. ‘Naturally, we came to Slensk.’
‘But you are not remaining here. You come from Mirgorod, and only the weather detains you. Correct? So your destination is where?’
‘We are going north along the coast,’ said Gretskaya. ‘Garshal. We leave tomorrow, or perhaps the next day. There is no hurry. Not until the storm blows through.’
The gendarme held out his hand.
‘Papers,’ he said.
‘The logs and registration documents are in the plane. If you want to—’ Gretskaya began, but the gendarme cut her off impatiently.
‘My concern is with persons only. Personal identification. Documents of travel.’
Gretskaya handed over her passport. Florian and Lom followed suit. The gendarme looked through them slowly and carefully, page by page. Then he put all three in the back pocket of his trousers.
‘Hey!’ said Gretskaya.
‘I have certain enquiries to make concerning these documents,’ said the gendarme. ‘Confirmations I intend to seek. You may collect them from the gendarmerie tomorrow, in the afternoon, and until then you will remain in Slensk. This will be convenient for you, no doubt,’ he said to Lom. ‘You will have more time to pursue your commercial interests.’
‘That decides it,’ said Florian. ‘We have to leave now, straight away, and not for Garshal but east.’
‘No,’ said Gretskaya. ‘It’s not a flight to try at night, even without bad weather. Not without a navigator. The only sure way is to follow the river. If we lost the river–it’s a wilderness: no features, no landmarks–we’d circle till the fuel ran out, and if we had to go down, no one would come to look for us. No one would know where we went. It would take us weeks to walk out of there.’
‘If it’s a matter of additional payment…’
‘No,’ said Gretskaya. ‘Not that. Anyway, why the hurry? We’ve got till tomorrow afternoon.’
Florian shook his head. ‘He could send a wire tonight,’ he said. ‘He could be on the telephone now.’
‘Who’s he going to call to check out a passport?’ said Lom. ‘The Lodka’s not open for business, not any more. Anyway, he’s not waiting for ID confirmation.’
‘What do you mean?’ said Gretskaya.
‘How many gendarmes are there in a place like Slensk? Two or three at the most. My guess is he’s on his own. And he’s worried about us. He didn’t buy our story and he didn’t like the odds, so he’s calling for help. Reinforcements. Only he knows nobody can get here before tomorrow. Fuck, he’s almost begging us to run.’
‘So what do we do?’ said Gretskaya.
Florian looked at Lom. ‘Let him decide,’ he said.
Lom emptied his balzam glass. The liquid seared his throat and left his mouth dry and rough. He didn’t need to think. Somewhere Chazia’s train was rolling north towards Novaya Zima with Maroussia and the Pollandore. It was a race, and nothing else mattered, and the train was moving, and they were not. At the thought of Chazia, Lom felt a tight surge of anger and purposeful violence. The iron aftertaste of angel stuff mixed with the balzam. There would be a reckoning there.
‘We leave,’ said Lom. ‘We leave now.’
Gretskaya poured another tumbler of Ligas Balzam, drank it down, and tucked the bottle inside her sheepskin jacket.
‘Then let’s go,’ she said.
68
In the war against his own people Colonel-General Rizhin’s weapons were of necessity crude. When Chazia evacuated the Lodka and removed or destroyed the intelligence files it contained, she decapitated, at least so far as Mirgorod was concerned, the system of informers and secret police that had held the Vlast solid for four hundred years. Rizhin took a more direct approach. It suited him better. He declared martial law. A curfew. Looters and stockpilers were to be summarily shot. Citizens were conscripted to worker battalions and assigned their tasks, and shirkers were shot. If there were no shirkers, some people were to be shot anyway, the weakest and least capable. What mattered was that people were shot.
Spies and saboteurs were captured and their confessions led to further arrests. In quarters where dissent was strongest, collective measures were taken. Reprisals. The citizens of Mirgorod, the newspapers reported, were shocked at the extent of the enemy’s penetration of their city and glad that Rizhin was there, relentless and vigilant, to protect them.
Against the enemy without, he ordered concentric circles of defence to be thrown together. Twenty miles out from the centre of the Mirgorod, Rizhin’s labour armies of women and children raised earth-works with their bare hands, excavating trenches and tank ditches, building breastworks and redoubts, laying barbed wire and mines even as the Archipelago air force strafed and bombed them. They carried away their own dead, and buried them when and where they could.