Rasputin's Bastards (55 page)

Amar Shadak looked over to Gepetto Bucci, who shrugged and twiddled his forefinger around his ear. He looked back at their prisoner. Shadak didn’t even bother making a nice face for this one.

“Where,” said Bucci, leaning forward, “is New Pokrovskoye?”

“Everywhere,” said the prisoner. “It will come upon you soon. Then you will be in trouble. Trust me. Better to let me go. I will put in a good word for you with the Imperial Guard.”

Bucci nodded. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a cigarette lighter, flicked it to life. “I got this from my old man. He used to run an empire up this way too.”

“Is that so?”

“Yeah. That’s so. Not fuckin’ tea, though.”

The Quartermaster looked up at the bluish flame. “Vodka,” he said and nodded.

Bucci shook his head no. “Screech,” he said. “Used to run it down through St. John’s. Newfoundland. Big empire.
Roman
empire, you could say.” He looked at the quartermaster. “Don’t fuckin’ threaten me,” he said. “Answer questions.”

Their prisoner rattled the handcuffs they’d used to affix him to the chair at the Cloridorme Marina office. Outside, the harbour stood empty, but for the motor launch that Bucci had arranged to meet them there. It was nearly dawn. The prisoner was the only living soul they had seen since pulling into town.

Shadak rolled his shoulders and stepped back from the interrogation. He had suddenly lost his stomach for it, and as he stepped back leaned against the flimsy screen door that led outside. Just like that, he was standing on a cracked cement pad in the pale illumination of a Coke machine, listening to the surf crash rhythmically against the pier. Another sea — of car and truck hoods — gleamed nearer in the pre-dawn light.

He scraped his foot along the cement. It was sandy. The way the sand rasped between the toe of his shoe and the cement made him think about the way the sand flowed like a river through the caves where he had lost himself in the Black Villa which made him think about the townspeople who even if they were in their beds might be in a place far off now. Rapture had come to this place; there was no mistaking it.

Rapture had taken the men in the caves. It had taken his caravansary — and it had assuredly taken everyone in the Emissary Hotel, prior to the arrival of Gepetto Bucci and his crew.

“Everything okay in there?”

Shadak shuddered and turned. Jack Devisi stepped into the pool of light outside the Cloridorme marina. Devisi dropped his spent cigarette and mashed it under his toe.

“Mind your business,” Shadak said.

“Right.” Devisi shrugged, moved his toe off the squashed butt. Smoke curled across the top of his shoe then vanished in the maritime breeze. Devisi reached into his jacket, pulled out a package of cigarettes and offered Shadak one. Shadak made a swatting motion. Devisi shrugged, pulled one out between his lips and lit it.

“I been at the diner here in town,” said Devisi finally. “Supposed to open at six a.m. It’s five-twenty now. You think someone’d be in there — getting’ ready. Fuck, with all the cars in town . . .” he gestured to the cars — they were double-parked along the road to the edge of town. Volkswagens and Chryslers, Hondas and Toyotas . . .

There was a muffled cry inside the marina. Devisi looked back over his shoulder. “Workin’ him over, huh?”

Shadak looked out at the ocean. Dawn was creeping up in the east, painting a thin pink line at horizon’s edge. The moon and a couple of stars perched a little higher in the part that was still night.

Devisi laughed nervously. “Surprised you ain’t in there,” he said.

Shadak took his hands from his jacket pocket. He looked at Devisi. “Why would you say that?”

“I only mean, it seems you like that kind of thing.”

Shadak raised his eyebrows. Devisi stepped a little closer.

“You know,” he said. His voice was like gravel in Shadak’s ear. Stale cigarette smoke enveloped Shadak. “Rough shit.”

Shadak turned to look at Devisi, calculating as he did so. He thought about killing him. For no reason better than the exercise, and he was in reach. It would be misplaced, such an act.
But
, thought Shadak
, it would be satisfying.

“Hey!”

Devisi and Shadak both looked back. Bucci was standing in the door, his sleeves rolled up, his cheeks pink with the exertion. He looked at Devisi and jerked his thumb back. “Get inside. We gotta talk.”

Devisi nodded and stepped away. Shadak’s thoughts moved elsewhere.

Bucci ambled up beside Shadak.

“You all right?” he asked.

“Fine,” said Shadak, and Bucci shook his head.

“That fuckin’ guy in there,” he said. “Don’t blame you for getting air. He’s whacked.”

“Does he know?”

Bucci looked out at the sea. “He knows. Fat lot of good it’ll do us. I ask him where New Pokrovskoye is. He won’t say at first. Then he tells me it’s on the — get this — the Iliana Peninsula. Through the Petroska Straits. He gave us directions, but he may as well have told us to follow the fuckin’ Yellow Brick Road.”

“The sea,” said Shadak. “How fast can we get your boat here? You said later this morning.”

“My guy says about eleven, depending.”

Shadak nodded. The crew of them had flown in overnight and driven here in a rental, to get a fast lay of things in Cloridorme. But it didn’t sound like you could fly to New Pokrovskoye that easily — and anyway, Shadak wanted to go in with some firepower. Bucci had a boat he kept in Newfoundland — a big fast boat that Shadak was familiar with. There were guns there too — cached underneath the new Trekkers Outfitting Co-op that was slated to open there in the fall. That was the plan: load up the boat, send it to Cloridorme, and then the crew of them could follow the trail across the water to New Pokrovskoye.

Where, he was sure, he would find Kilodovich.

“How close are we?” he said.

“To leaving?” Bucci smiled. “I told you.”

“No.Youknow.TofindingKilodovich.YouhavebeenaskingtheQuartermaster there about Alexei Kilodovich, haven’t you?”

The smile vanished. Bucci leaned in close to Shadak. He put a hand on Shadak’s shoulder.

“Fucker did a real number on you,” said Bucci softly. “Didn’t he? Well don’t worry, Amar. We’ll make things right.

“You know what this place reminds me of?” said Bucci. “Marcia.”

“It reminds you of Marcia? Who is Marcia?”

“An old girlfriend,” said Bucci. “Great in the sack. But she had one problem.”

“What was that?”

“Thought she had psychic powers.
The Sight
.”

“Did she? Have the Sight, I mean?”

“Who knows?” said Bucci. “She said a lot of things that were true. But they were also things you could figure out by looking at a guy.” He thought about it. “So could go either way. Probably she wasn’t no psychic. But you couldn’t tell her that. She spent all her money on books and crystals and fuckin’ tapes — most months it was me that paid her fuckin’ rent and not her.”

“It sounds like a waste.”

“It was a waste I guess,” said Bucci. “But I think she used it. To keep out of serious shit. See, one day I finally got sick of her. Told her that was it — she was on her own, no more gifts no more nothing.”

“Hmm. What did she do?”

Bucci laughed. “She told me I had bad energy or some fuckin’ thing. She told me I didn’t know what I was saying and she knew because she could see the energy all around me.” Bucci fanned his fingers around his head and wiggled them. “All jaggly. She said I should fuckin’ meditate and I’d feel better about things.”

“Did you?”

“Fuck no. I left.”

Shadak looked at him sidelong. “She was not psychic,” he said. “If she was — ” Bucci looked back. “If she was,” he said, “I still would have left. Wouldn’t have changed a fuckin’ thing.”

Shadak didn’t finish what he was going to say:
If she was psychic, you would have been her fucking hand-puppet until she was finished with you, and when you left you would have taken away less than half of yourself. The rest would have stayed in her clutches until you died
. Instead, he asked: “Do you think that Cloridorme is pretending to be psychic?”

Bucci leaned back and crossed his arms. “You know,” he said, “with the shit I’ve seen the past couple of days, I don’t think Cloridorme is pretending anything. I sure as shit don’t think New Pokrovskoye is playin’ a game here. I’m goin’ there because I said I would and I owe you from way back and I do what I say and I pay my fuckin’ tab. But you know something? In the end, I don’t think it means shit.”

“You have not met Alexei Kilodovich,” said Shadak.

“No,” said Bucci, “I have not. But we’ll see about meeting him soon. That fucker did a real number on you. I can tell. Soon as the boat comes. We’ll get on that fucker’s ass.”

And with that, Bucci stepped back inside.

Shadak peeked into his breast pocket — at the photograph there, of himself and Kilodovich — on the back of a jeep, grinning like fools. Shadak’s girlfriend had taken it — Ming Lei, with her long black hair and thighs smooth as silk. She was the kind of girl that a resourceful young hero like Amar Shadak ought to have three of. But Shadak, at just twenty-two still reeling at the responsibility of the shipment of small arms and mortar bombs that the Americans had dropped for him across the Pakistani border, one girl like her was enough.

Closer
she’d said.
Don’t worry — no one call you faggot, Amar. Cuddle up
. And they’d laughed, and Alexei had thrown his arm over Amar Shadak’s shoulder like they were brothers — and she had taken the picture and handed it to him. He sat there, as the convoy started moving, watching the picture turn from creamy nothing into the instant of history, where Alexei Kilodovich embraced Amar Shadak as a brother.

He hoped that Bucci’s boat would do the trick. Shadak had acquired it for Bucci a couple of years ago from a cartel of Filipino pirates. It was one of a fleet of very useful little boats; it could pass muster in an only slightly well-oiled harbour. But given a half-hour’s notice, the deck gun could be up and assembled on the prow and the boat would be ready for combat. It was a good choice. Shadak thought that they might well have need of it.

Particularly, if Kilodovich was in charge of the force of men and women that were awaiting them.

He was sly enough to be. Particularly now that Fyodor Kolyokov was out of the picture.

They had first met in Quetta — during Shadak’s second and last meeting with Jim Saunders, his C.I.A. contact — the man who, at the time, Shadak saw as nothing less than his gatekeeper, to greatness. Kilodovich was lolling under a Banyan tree across from the café, sipping on a frosted bottle of beer and drumming his fingers impatiently on the wood of the bench. He was barely a man — skinny and pale, with close-cropped black hair and that unibrow, a little dusting of beard. He wore acid-washed blue jeans that did not fit him and a wine-coloured shirt with lapels wider than his chest. Shadak was not happy when Saunders had insisted that Kilodovich go along.

“The kid has contacts,” said Saunders.

“I have contacts,” said Shadak. “That’s why you hired me.”

Saunders had smiled that apologetic little half-smile of his. “We move in Soviet Afghanistan, we go with the Russian kid. Otherwise — ”

He left it unspoken.

“Fine,” said Shadak. He had not yet worked with the Americans — and in 1985, if you worked with the Americans it was either Central America or Afghanistan. At that point Nicaragua was just a set of possible locations on young Amar’s mental map of the world. But Shadak had been doing heroin deals with certain Afghani parties since long before the Soviets had marched in. At that stage in his career where he could not afford to stand still, he could not afford to leave the American opportunity untapped.

At the time, Amar assumed that Saunders had given Alexei Kilodovich some kind of secret signal. The kid downed his beer and started immediately across the street. He was gawky and thin, but he moved even then with an easy confidence. He stepped around the low fence of the café’s patio and pulled up one of the plastic resin chairs.

He nodded hello at Shadak, who gave him a little smile in return.

“So we are going to be travelling together,
da
?”

Shadak nodded. “So it seems. You know Afghanistan pretty well, I hear.”

“Not really,” said Alexei.

Shadak laughed. He had no idea, of course, that Alexei was telling pretty much the truth. He had never set foot on the lunar landscape of Afghanistan. He was along for another purpose.

Amar Shadak killed the next couple of hours wandering around the little town. The dawn light flattered it. If you squinted, and thought back to happier times, you might have imagined you were in a little French fishing village in the south — where you could while away the morning with a bottle of wine and some fresh-baked bread, before you climbed back into your Peugeot for the drive back to Paris and a night in the clubs.

Except of course you would never find a parking spot for your Peugeot here. The roads were all lined with cars. The town could probably build a hospital with the money it collected from parking tags this morning. . . .

Shadak wandered up the gentle slope from the harbour to the main streets. He walked past a gas station — still closed — a grocery store, a dark structure of corrugated steel and cinderblock filled with empty shelves and a couple of old video games. There were houses that crawled back further from the water, simple wooden buildings roofed in tar paper. Everyone in town seemed to have a truck, parked next to sleek, bullet-shaped little vehicles that Shadak understood to be snowmobiles. The houses were all dark, and as he walked he began to wonder whether the town was deserted. He thought back to
The Omega Man
, which made him think about the caves again, which made him wonder how well he’d do if the town rose up before him now — one terrible mind.

Shadak was saved from his own thoughts by the OPEN sign in the town’s little restaurant. He stuck his head inside, and saw a thickset woman behind the counter. A coffee machine was sputtering in the corner. The woman looked up at him and said
bonjour
, and Shadak said
bonjour
back, but when he tried to order a light breakfast it developed that there was no cook; he had left with the others. Shadak could have coffee and some cereal, but there was no bread for toast. “Les pilgrims” had cleaned them out. On a hunch, Shadak asked her where they’d gone and the woman shrugged. “Away, thank God,” she said. Shadak thought about working her over — but truly, if he’d been in a frame of mind for working people over there was honest work for him in the marina. She poured him a cup of weak, strange-tasting coffee and he sat there at the counter in silence and thought about Afghanistan.