Rasputin's Bastards (23 page)

“Why shouldn’t they be? They’re alone in the winter, waiting for interrogators that are invisible and can read their very thoughts.” Kolyokov reached inside, and idly entered the mind of the pacing man.

“You see? That one — I can’t make much sense of it, but he’s thinking about a sum of rubles — a sum I’m pretty sure he shouldn’t have on his salary.” Kolyokov smiled thinly. “I’ll make a note of it.”

“Is this what we’ve come to at City 512? Peeping into the minds of our brave Comrades?”

Both Vasili and Kolyokov started. The voice was a woman’s — and Kolyokov thought it was the sweetest thing that he had ever heard. He and Vasili turned to see her.

She stood in a long, hooded robe, lined with mink, that covered all but her mouth, which was pulled now into a mischievous smile. Kolyokov’s hand slipped from the KGB man’s mind.

“Lena,” said Vasili. Almost of their own accord, his wings extended outward and over his head.

The woman — Lena — laughed. “Vasili Borovich? Is that you in the folds of that outrageous metaphor?”

The wings faltered, but Vasili kept his composure. “None other, my dear,” he said, and stepped forward — surely, thought Kolyokov, as though he were expecting an embrace. Kolyokov had to suppress a smirk, as this woman Lena stepped passed him, ducked underneath his extended left wing-tip, and brushed past Kolyokov to peer into the window.

“My name is Lena,” she said.

“Fyodor,” said Kolyokov.

“Well, Fyodor,” she said as she stepped through the glass and wall and into the room, “I’m glad to see
someone
didn’t overdress for the occasion.”

The interrogation took only a few hours — but in those hours, Kolyokov learned more about his gift and its application than he had in his entire lifetime spent studying at City 512. Lena had done this before — and she knew the tricks of a dream-walker’s defences as a locksmith knows the tumblers of a well-made safe.

Their subject turned out to be a formidable lock indeed. As they stepped into the metaphor of his defences, they found themselves standing upon a great plain. The ground was cracked like a dried sea bed — the sky the colour of fire and smoke. Kolyokov was confused — there appeared to be no entry point here at all. Perhaps they should dig? Vasili swore and flapped his angel wings in frustration. Lena held up a hand, and slowly began to turn, her eyes narrowed to observant slits. Finally she pointed.

“That horizon,” she said, “is closer than the others. We go there.”

It took what seemed like an hour to get there, but finally they found what the closer horizon signified: a cliff, dropping treacherously into a deep canyon. It might be scalable — looking down, Kolyokov could see things nested in crooks and ledges; and they would have had to have gotten there somehow. But if this were a defence system, he didn’t think the route would be easy.

“Hell,” said Lena, looking further.

“Don’t despair, my dear,” said Vasili, putting a hand on her shoulder. Lena shrugged it off.

“I’m not despairing,” she said. “Just observing. This place — it’s a Christian Hell. Look.” She pointed into the yellow mist that clung to the floor of the great canyon. Kolyokov peered.

“I see what you mean,” he said. “There are circles — tiers, going down in ever smaller circles. Think there’s an ice field in the middle?”

Lena spared Kolyokov a dazzling smile. “You’ve read your Dante,” she said, and made a scolding noise. “Careful, Fyodor.
The Divine Comedy
cannot be on the approved reading list at City 512.”

Kolyokov shrugged. Had he been there in Physick, she might have seen him blush.

“Well,” she said, “this is no doubt a terrifying metaphor for the weak Christian bourgeoisie in the West. Here, though, we are made of sterner stuff, hey Comrades? There is no Hell for we Soviets, but the chains and wheels of unchecked Capital.”

“You are very wise, my dear,” said Vasili.

“Actually,” she said, “I am very funny. That was a joke, my little Comrade Angel. Now why don’t you flap your wings. Perhaps it will break your fall.” And with no more than the tiniest of nudges, she sent Vasili Borovich cartwheeling over the edge of the abyss.

She laughed sweetly, as he plummeted and rolled and finally, when he was no more than a distant speck — began to spin and glide into the yellow sulfur of Hell’s ground mist.

Breaking the American’s shield was a complicated business. At the bottom of the cliff, there waited an army of red Imps, carrying pitchforks, breathing flame and uttering unsettling commentaries concerning Vasili’s parentage. Kolyokov was inclined to dive down and help out, but Lena held him back. While Vasili kept the American occupied, she meant to outflank him. If this metaphor was anything like the defensive metaphors that she was familiar with, there was only so much of it the American could control at once.

So they moved along the ridge, until Vasili’s cries and the clanging of pitchforks blended in with the droning laments of the damned. Lena stopped, and looked down at the rock. Sure enough, it was smoother here — the cracks in the clay had a blurred quality to them. When Kolyokov put his hand against the firmament of Hell, it yielded like foam rubber before solidifying under his touch.

Lena knelt beside him — put her hand on his. She smiled at him. He smiled back. And as they touched, the ground shifted and bent, and the edge of the cliff extended. Lena took her hand away, stood, and stepped on the new ground they had made. It was the top landing of a long set of stairs cut into the cliffside, extending step by step down to the next circle of Hell.

“Abandon hope, ye who enter,” said Kolyokov.

“Stop showing off,” said Lena, “or I’ll report you. Now come on. This is our way in.”

There was a great fat demon waiting for them at the bottom — but he remained lethargic and indistinct while the American put his full attention on the defeat of the angelic Vasili. Lena and Kolyokov were able to sneak past him without incident.

Kolyokov was beginning to think the whole thing would be a piece of cake when, in the midst of a stony plaza approaching the blasted out archway of a bone white cathedral, he stepped into a puddle of flaming pitch. The pain was so intense that it was all he could do not to sit up in his tank back at City 512 and shriek like a baby. Lena hauled him back, and told him not to blame himself: the puddle had literally appeared as he stepped into it. They had apparently wandered into a psychic minefield. They both concentrated, and the pain vanished as his metaphorical foot reconstituted itself.

They took greater care as they resumed their march — and for that, still trod on sudden spikes and razors and lengths of barbed wire that popped up unavoidably as they made their way along.

They met Vasili again at the edge of the next circle, and for the next phase of their journey, faced the defences of the American head-on: clouds of flesh-stripping locusts and great black tentacles, sudden gouts of red-hot magma that leapt at them from fresh-cut fissures in the rock.

They battled an immense two-headed serpent and played a riddle game with a hunchback, and cut their way through a great rose bush that grew thorns long as fingers.

Finally, on a basalt mountain in the midst of the ice field that encrusted the firmament of Hell’s centre, they met the American himself: a giant, black-skinned demon with wings pulled from a bat and thick-lidded eyes that glowed like headlamps.

“‘Night on Bald Mountain.’ How unoriginal,” said Lena.

The American Satan let out a terrible roar.

“But what do you expect from Americans?” she continued. “They drop a little LSD on their tongues or chew on the peyote, and think they can control the world. You’re better than most — I’ll give you that. But still — the best you can come up with for your defence is an image you stole from a Walt Disney film.”

Lucifer the American shrieked, swelled his immense chest and spread his wings so they blacked out the sky.

“Oh, that and I suppose your vaunted faith. But really.
Fantasia
? Why don’t you just have the mouse send broomsticks after us? That is every bit as terrifying as this scribble of a demon you’ve made of yourself.”

Kolyokov could see the metaphor beginning to dissolve, as Lena’s words cut through the Yank Beelzebub’s belief. That was always key to defeating these things — destroy the belief in the metaphor, and it begins to crumble. Keep playing by its rules — and it grows stronger.

“Or what,” she continued, “about that funny dog? What is his name — ”

The demon’s wings began to show light through them, like thinning fabric —

“Pluto?”

The creature opened its mouth and closed it again. The light in its eyes began to dim. And so it began: the American’s metaphor of Hell began to fragment and collapse upon itself.

She’d made it look easy. But afterward, Lena told them that she’d only encountered stronger defences in the best of the younger generations — younger even than Kolyokov’s. This one — John Kaye was his true name; they’d managed to extract that from the mewling remains of the American agent — must have been an aberration to have built up such a fortress around his mind, and Lena suggested they keep him alive for his genetic material if nothing else.

“You
are
still breeding at City 512, aren’t you?” she said, looking directly at Kolyokov as she spoke.

“That is the main of our work there,” said Vasili, his wings drooping forlornly by this point.

“Ah, yes,” said Kolyokov. “Mostly that is what we do there now.” At their feet, Kaye had mostly finished twitching, and the KGB men had come back into the room. Lena got up from the creaky old rocking chair just as one of the agents moved to sit down on it.

At this point, she’d shed her robe to reveal a pair of dark slacks and a baggy grey turtleneck sweater. It would have been a complete contrast to Vasili’s outlandish seraphim getup but for her face; her eyes in particular, which she had crafted into a sum of what was to Kolyokov at any rate, womanly perfection. He couldn’t stop staring at her — even, he found, when she stared levelly back, as she was doing now.

“Well,” she said, “I think we are finished here. Vasili, my dear?”

“Yes!” Vasili’s wings perked and spread, and his face flushed red. “I mean — yes . . . my dear?”

“Why don’t you use those magnificent wings to fly back to City 512 with our report?”

“But — ” poor Vasili’s face took on a puzzled mask “ — I thought I’d send Comrade Kolyokov back. So we might — ”

Lena raised a finger. “We might not,” she said. “Comrade Kolyokov can wait here a minute. I’ve some questions for him before he departs.”

“But — ”

Lena’s finger pointed to the window. “Go,” she commanded.

Although he clearly was not pleased about it, Vasili had no choice but to obey. No one did, Kolyokov would later reflect bitterly, when Lena commanded.

The farmstead soon emptied after Vasili returned to his tank, and City 512 sent back a radio message that the interrogation was finished. The agents all but bolted from what to them must have been a haunted building. Kolyokov wondered if it was their laughter that drove the agents so quickly. Lena wiped a crystalline tear from a perfect eye and settled back into the rocking chair.

“So tell me now honestly,” she said. “Did you enjoy your first time outside City 512?”

Fyodor sat on the edge of the bed, and shrugged in what he hoped was a worldly way. “It was not my first time,” he said. “I have performed many successful operations in Leningrad and Moscow.”

“Yes,” she said. “Playing the sleepers, isn’t that right? Making them check up on their traitorous neighbours, rounding up the dissidents. That’s good — but it’s not the same thing as dream-walking here, is it?”

Now Fyodor felt himself blushing. “No,” he said. “Not really.”

“Well, I’ve enjoyed my trip here to Germany too,” said Lena. “I’ll tell you — there’s one place in the world that’s worse than City 512: Toronto. In January.”

Fyodor laughed at that, and looked up. “Toronto. That’s right. Vasili said you were the Canadian.”

Lena shook her head. “Not Canadian,” she said. “Russian. In Canada, true, but Russian.”

“Are there many of you there?” Fyodor tried to imagine an operation the size of City 512 in hostile territory.

“No,” she said. “Just me for now. But — ” she smiled in a way that gave Fyodor a chill “ — that won’t be for long. I’m making friends.”

Lena leaned back in the chair and crossed her legs. Her smile broadened as she regarded Fyodor.

“You said — you said you wanted to ask me some questions?”

“Do you make friends?” she asked.

“Not many,” he said. “There are only so many people at City 512, and — ”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“What did you mean?”

Lena stood and reached into a shadow for her cloak. “Better,” she said, throwing it over her shoulders and pulling the clasp tight around her neck, “that I show you.”

Lena took Fyodor to the sky first — and then, from a height where the world curved at the edge — pointed at a line of coast that Fyodor took a moment to recognize:

“Africa,” he said.

“Tunisia,” she replied. “Some of my friends are there now.”

Fyodor followed Lena back down again into the thickening air. They travelled quickly, but the sun was quicker, and its rise had hit the low, ancient buildings of Tunis by the time they’d arrived, making it a golden desert world out of a boy’s adventure novel. Lena led him overtop telephone wires and antennae; past a railway station; over a tall iron fence; and into the diplomatic residence of the Canadian Embassy. They finally stopped in a bedchamber — where a striking dark-haired woman who appeared to be in her early thirties slept alone, beneath a slowly whirling fan.

Lena leaned over and stroked her cheek.

“Fyodor,” she said, “I would like you to meet my dear friend, Mrs. Elizabeth Dunn.”

“Pleased to make your acquaintance,” said Kolyokov.

“Wife,” continued Lena, “to Montgomery Dunn — the Canadian Ambassador to the Republic of Tunisia. She and he have been stationed here for three years now — since the French pulled out, and the ancient lands of Tunisia have become once more ripe for the picking.”