Rasputin's Bastards (24 page)

“She is a sleeper?” Fyodor bent over and studied the woman’s face. In waking, the aristocratic lines to her jaw and nose might seem harsher — but now, in the early morning light, Mrs. Dunn’s face held an innocence. She might have been a child.

“Yes,” said Lena. “We’re not making too much use of her these days, unfortunately — we’d hoped that things might have progressed differently when the French handed over power to the locals. But it’s always good to have friends in warm places, hmm?”

Mrs. Dunn’s eyes blinked open.

“Well hello there,” she said — looking straight at Kolyokov.

“Shit!” Kolyokov leapt back. “She can see me! Lena! Get out of here!”

But Lena didn’t answer: and as Kolyokov looked around the room for her, he quickly realized that she was gone.

“Shh, shh,” said Mrs. Dunn as she sat up in bed. She was wearing a light, gauzy nightdress suitable to the tropical climate. In the morning light, it left little to the imagination. But her eyes — her eyes had a perfection, a clarity to them, that was unmistakable.

“Lena?”

Mrs. Dunn cocked her head and smiled. “One and the same,” she said.

“What — what are you doing?”

“The same thing,” she said, “as you have done so many times with your

Leningrad sleepers. I’m dream-walking her.”

Mrs. Dunn ran her hands down her sides, lifted one well-formed leg in front of her. She looked at it appraisingly, turning it slightly to admire the ligature of the calf. “She is still looking after herself, I see.”

“I don’t think,” said Kolyokov as Mrs. Dunn’s hand then crept up under her nightgown and towards her middle, “that you are doing the same things with your sleepers, that I do with mine.”

At that, Mrs. Dunn threw her head back and laughed. “Oh Fyodor,” she said, “you
have
been missing out — haven’t you? Come on — ” Mrs. Dunn extended a hand “ — let me introduce you to some of my other friends. This is going to be a wonderful holiday!”

Lena made her sleeper bathe and dress and eat — so it was mid-morning before she ordered a car to take them to Dan Knowling’s apartment in
La Goulette
.

Knowling was a stringer for the Toronto Telegram, who Lena had placed here at the same time as she had Mrs. Dunn. He was meant to be Mrs. Dunn’s backup, said Lena, in the event that dream-walking proved impossible. “Old fashioned mnemonic programming,” said Lena, “should never be discounted. We can only be so many places at once.”

Lena made Mrs. Dunn knock twice on the door to Knowling’s apartment. Mid-morning was evidently still early for a journalist in Tunisia; Mr. Knowling answered the door in a pair of grimy pajama bottoms, with bleary eyes and a dusting of blond stubble on his chin.

“Um . . . hello,” he said. “Can I help you, ma’am?”

Lena gave Kolyokov a fast sidelong glance.

“Quickly,” she said. “
Inside
.”

“Um, pardon me?” said Knowles.

“What?” said Kolyokov.

“Walk him!” said Lena. “Before he sees too much!”

“Before — ?”

“Before — ?”

“Now!”

At first, controlling Dan Knowling was a bit of trick — like driving an unfamiliar automobile. Kolyokov was used to stout little bureaucrats and underfed military personnel: Knowling was tall and athletic, with an assassin’s reflexes and 20/20 vision. It was the difference between driving a broken-down delivery van and an American sports car.

“You took too long, my sweet,” said Lena as she made Mrs. Dunn step into the apartment and shut the door. “He saw.”

“I’m — sorry,” said Kolyokov, through Mr. Knowling. “You should have warned me.”

“Well, then — consider yourself warned.”

As she spoke, Mrs. Dunn’s hand reached to the drawstrings of Mr. Knowling’s pajama bottoms and pulled them undone. With the other hand, she reached down and took hold of Mr. Knowling. Kolyokov gasped.

“Exquisite, isn’t it?” she said, pulling close so that Mrs. Dunn’s breasts pressed against hard against Mr. Knowling. “All the sensations are there for you to enjoy — but they do not possess you, as they might in ordinary lovemaking. You remain your own, Fyodor.”

Kolyokov didn’t know about that: in both ordinary lovemaking, and this game that Lena had devised with the sleepers, he was a complete virgin until this moment.

Not that he was about to let on about that: he guided Mr. Knowling’s hand to the back of Mrs. Dunn’s thigh, hiking up her skirt and sliding his fingertips down the tops of her panties with what he hoped was the assurance of an experienced lover. Mrs. Dunn let out an appreciative growl as his hand slid further down. Meanwhile, her fingers had wrapped tighter around Mr. Knowling’s member, and she pulled it free of his pants. With flattened palm, she pressed it against the trembling flesh of her stomach.

“The bed,” said Mrs. Dunn.

“Yes,” said Mr. Knowling.

And together, in a slow dance of marionettes, they crossed the tiny flat to the old iron bed, and fell there in a tangle of limbs.

They stayed in bed the day — putting the two sleepers through what must have been an exhausting array of gymnastics for their mutual pleasure. Lena was the more experienced of the two — but Kolyokov made up for his inexperience with enthusiasm, and Lena voiced no complaints.

By late in the afternoon, however, Lena announced that they were finished.

It produced a premonitory pang in Kolyokov: he remembered suddenly how she’d dismissed Vasili so easily, and was filled with an unreasoning fear that she should do the same to him now that she’d taken her pleasure.

“Don’t worry,” said Lena, “we shall meet again. Not here perhaps — but I am not finished with you, young Fyodor. And you — you still have much to learn at my knee.”

“I am glad,” said Fyodor. He nestled Mr. Knowling’s face into the crook of Mrs. Dunn’s shoulder.

Mrs. Dunn patted Mr. Knowling on the cheek. “Good. Now it’s time for you to leave Mr. Knowling,” she said.

“Now? While you — I mean, while Mrs. Dunn is still here? Won’t that compromise security?”

Mrs. Dunn smiled for Lena. “Oh my dear — we are well past that. Now step out.”

Not quite knowing what to expect, Kolyokov did as he was told. As he watched, Mr. Knowling blinked twice, and looked up at Mrs. Dunn, eyes wide in confusion.

“You — but . . .”

Lena made Mrs. Dunn smile down at him — and Kolyokov’s heart fell as he finally understood what was to happen. “Sorry, Danny,” she said, wrapping her fingers around his throat as she straddled him one last time. “Fyodor was a second too slow — and you saw too much.”

Although Kolyokov did not end the affair at that precise moment, it was that moment — its reverberations and implications; what it said about him, about Lena, and most important, about the two of them together — that finally caused him to quit.

He might have been better off to end it sooner. Things were never the same between himself and Vasili afterward. Vasili stopped inviting Kolyokov for tea and vodka, and after a while would not even acknowledge his presence when the two found themselves alone in a room. Within a year, Vasili had had himself moved out of City 512 to do fieldwork in the European theatre — and after that, he and Kolyokov never had cause to speak again.

Kolyokov, meanwhile, turned away from the foreign work with which he had once busied himself, and spent his days working with the next generation of City 512 students. During those years, he did much commendable work — developing among other things the internal metaphors for new sleeper agents and the three-word mnemonic that could break a program like a stretch of magnetic tape; and, like so many of his colleagues there, building his own network of sleepers that spanned the globe.

Kolyokov and Lena met as often as they could, given the demands of their work. Through the course of their affair, they made love in Rome and London; New York and Nairobi; Gdansk, and Berlin; and Hong Kong, where Kolyokov finally ended it.

“We are craven together,” he said as Lena dressed Wei Yu, a little Taiwanese prostitute who normally did this sort of thing for a clientele of bankers, government and military officials. “Like a couple of unclean puppeteers.”

Wei Yu shrugged for Lena. “So? I do not see why this is a revelation. You just don’t like your body today.”

Kolyokov patted his host’s ample gut. He was in another newspaper man — they seemed to use a lot of journalists for sleepers — but this one was no Dan Knowling. At fifty-three years old, Archibald Lonsdale was a glutton and a drunk and probably wouldn’t survive to see his fifty-fourth birthday the shape he kept himself in.

“That’s not it,” said Kolyokov. “It’s just — look at this fellow. He’s had a life, with a wife and children. And here we take him away from that to fuck a little hooker young enough to be his granddaughter.”

“It’s only flesh, Fyodor.”

Kolyokov shook Mr. Lonsdale’s head. “I make these sleepers, you know.”

“So do I.”

“Granted. But I watch them come up, some of them, from little children. From the cradle. And I can’t help wondering — are we going to take possession of these children someday, to slake our lusts?”

“We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,” said Wei Yu.

“And what about our superiors? We’re squandering the sleepers, Lena! Don’t you imagine there will be an accounting?”

“Fyodor,” said Wei Li in a quiet, reasonable tone. “Which superiors are you referring to? I’m not aware of anyone superior to you or I, in the whole world.”

Kolyokov set Mr. Lonsdale’s lips in a thin, hard line.

“We have to end it,” he said.

Wei Yu put a small hand on Lonsdale’s thick, hairy forearm.

“Don’t leave me, Fyodor,” she said for Lena. “You don’t know how alone I am.”

On Kolyokov’s behalf, Lonsdale took hold of Wei Yu’s hand and kissed it delicately. Wei Yu’s face was a mask — Lena had pulled back from it already, and would soon depart altogether.

“Goodbye,” said Lonsdale.

“Fuck off,” said Wei Yu, and as her eyes changed and Lena receded altogether, Kolyokov cursed.

The little prostitute was back in herself now. Lena — in a fit of spite — had pulled out before they could separate the sleepers. Which meant that Wei Yu had seen Lonsdale. And if Kolyokov were to play by the rules, she would have to die.

She had certainly gotten a good look at Lonsdale by now — her eyes were locked on him as she snatched her hand back.

Kolyokov looked down at Lonsdale’s thick-fingered hands. It would be easy — and it would be according to procedure.

But he didn’t. Instead, he moved the hands to his wallet and pulled out a ten-pound note. He had no idea if that was the going rate — and Lonsdale was no help. He liked his fine food and liquor, but it turned out the old boy drew the line when it came to paying for sex.

“I’m sorry,” he said in his rudimentary Mandarin. “Here.” And Lonsdale put the money down on the bed between them. “Good?”

Wei Yu calmed down at the sight of the money, and looked between him and the cash. Kolyokov didn’t need to read her mind to see what she was doing: piecing together her lost afternoon from the best evidence — that she’d at some point met up with this fat old man, come to this room here, and blacked out, somehow managing to forget the whole exchange.

She nodded. “Good,” she said.

“Goodbye then,” said Lonsdale again.

And at Kolyokov’s direction, he pushed himself to his feet, gathered his jacket and stepped out the door. He wobbled down the stairs to the muggy heat of the Hong Kong afternoon and started back to the press club. Kolyokov stayed with him for several blocks — then left the poor man where he stood, confused and disoriented, ten pounds poorer but none the wiser — and still, blessedly, alive.

Now, his own life slipping away, Kolyokov spun through the vortex and did his best to deafen himself to her increasingly hysterical entreaties.

Fyodor!
cried the cloud.
You’re dying! If you don’t join me now, you’ll vanish
.

Fyodor snorted. “Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows what lies beyond the lay of our lives?”

Nothing! Nothing but dark and quiet.

“You speak as though you know. Are you alive or are you dead, Lena?”

What are you — a Goddamn philosopher
? The cloud roared around him, tossing him higher and higher until he breached its top and saw stars spread above him.
Look — the only life after death is in the Discourse!

“In the Discourse,” said Kolyokov, spinning around so he faced the vortex once more. “Interesting: you
do
know. Because you’ve died in body too. And the Discourse — is that where you live now? In the lines of chatter between the sleepers and their masters?”

You’ll die without me
.

“Let me tell you something. I’ve been living in the Discourse, quite comfortably, for quite a while now. How do I know I’ll die?”

Trust your senses
.

He laughed. “My senses are the one thing I know that I cannot trust here. One minute I’m in a metaphor of an old spy school I made — then I’m in the desert talking to Yahweh — the next I’m here in the sky, tossed about like a rag doll. And now — and now — ” he squinted down “ — there you are.”

Join with me, Fyodor
.

The voice came from beneath him — she had coalesced now into her old metaphor; the beautiful Lena, draped in a hooded cloak. Her face uncovered, she was an ice-queen — as beautiful as the face of a glacier. She rose to meet him.

“If I join with you,” he said, “I’ll have surrendered to you. You’re too powerful in this place. And my Children — my beautiful Children — will finally be lost to me. They’ll become your playthings.”

Ours
, said Lena.

“
Our
playthings, then? See? You admit it. But that is not why I risked so much to bring them to me.”

Fyodor
, she said, her eyes ablaze with cold blue fire,
you risked too much for a thing you may never have
.

A rumbling came over the world then, and he realised with a horrible twist in his gut that here in the clouds, he’d misjudged the scale of things. He’d thought Lena was no more than a dozen metres off as she spoke with him. But no — she was much farther than that. She
was
a mountain face; a continent.