Rasputin's Bastards (74 page)

They stepped into a large gymnasium. Alexei smiled. He remembered how it was to play floor hockey there — feel the sting of the ball as it touched his fingertips on its way to the goal, the exhilaration of his cheering classmates. The floor was scuffed birch wood, with lines taped and lacquered onto it in red and blue and white. Long banks of fluorescent light hung on chains from a high ceiling. Their footsteps echoed as they crossed the room. Alexei inhaled the scent of sweat and socks. At least it was warmer.

“Was this,” asked Kolyokov, “such a wicked lie? Truly?” He peered at Alexei, and Vladimir, and then nodded sadly. “I suppose that it was. And so the question remains. Why?”

Alexei and Vladimir looked at Kolyokov, waiting.

“It was a sick game that we played with you. With our children.” Kolyokov smiled sadly. “I cannot blame you, Vladimir, for locking me in the room with that detestable Nazi — after the things that we did to you and the others. Those for whom you are truly an able advocate.” Vladimir squirmed in his chair. “Why, then do I do this? Try to bring you here? Well — I had hoped not to die. Not just yet. I had hoped to bring you here — teach you about things that your training might not have prepared you for. Teach you how to make your way in the world of senses — before I passed into death. Make some amends. Is that very foolish?”

Alexei shook his head. “What do you want — a fucking hug?”

Vladimir coughed.

“Kolyokov,” said Vladimir, in a clear, high voice, “you are a big bastard and you deserve to be eaten.”

Kolyokov shook his head. “My child, do not waste your last words to curse a dying man.”

“My last words? I do not think so.”

“Ah but they are. You had a fine vision, boy — but unattainable. You cannot free the sleepers and the dream-walkers alike. They cannot in the end coexist. Babushka has shown you that.”

“Babushka also deserved to be eaten,” said Vladimir. “As she was.”

Kolyokov shook his head sadly. “Ah, my beautiful boy,” he said. “My greatest regret is that I will never be alive to see you, the day that your own mind grows to a portion of the many minds you occupy now. At least,” he said, “you shall have your inheritance.”

And with that, the ceiling rumbled, and cracked — and the exploding consciousness of Stephen Haber ripped through the metaphor of Alexei Kilodovich’s childhood, and tore it to dust.

He was alone — for the first time in his life. Altogether alone.

He had vague recollections of another dream. A dream in which the world of his siblings and fore-parents was unshackled. Where all could pursue their dreams and their lives according to their wishes. That world was now upon them — and the baby wailed, as their dreams and wishes all receded from him.

But that was fine. For he understood as thought faded from his mind that this had been his purpose — that as much as he used these minds, he was their creation — a manifestation of their collective will. Now, that will dissipated. And Vladimir was left on his own. A mere baby.

The baby looked down at the floor. Two men lay on it — both staring with unseeing eyes ahead of them. They had been unshackled — the baby’s face scrunched as understanding came to him and fled again, as the large mind he used dissolved — so badly unshackled that they might never return. The one he could not weep for. The other, Alexei Kilodovich . . .

That was someone worth mourning, from the baby’s perspective.

“There there.” A big smelly man picked him up and held him. “There. Let’s go find your mama,” he said. “I bet she’s not far.”

By the time they got to the bottom of the stairs, the kid had stopped crying. His mother, whom he no longer recognized by name, stood outside the building next to a skinny boy and a pretty blonde lady. He put out his arms and waggled his fingers. The man who carried him was being nice to him, but he still didn’t like the way he smelled so he let his mother take him away.

First, she thought:

I die.

Kolyokov’s pawn has killed me. Me! Snuffed out like a candle!

And thinking these thoughts, she despaired.

But she need not have. For what she was doing was not dying. She was drifting across and through the salinity of the world, like a sea-dense Medusa trailing her rage in poisonous tentacles beneath her in a way that reminded her of the early days — which she remembered more clearly now in the hyper-conductive medium as they called it at City 512, the place where dreamers would drown, where thought would spin away in the call of whale song, in plankton, shrimp — a rage that she dangled across the insensate few who could hear her pleas as she flew the cold night sky, a rage that motivated armies in her stead, a rage that finally drove her to isolation on the shores of the New World.

Why
, she wondered,
do I not die
?

Green shafts of light passed through her as she spread and sighed in the sea, and for a moment, a kind of peace came over her. The peace that comes of warm bathwater, running through nostrils and filling the lungs, stilling a medicated sensorium. Rage was not all she had, in those days. For rage is not born of itself.

It is born of love.

Ah
, she thought,
love
.

Memories drifted through her gossamer substance like drowned cruise ship passengers. Stupid Vasili; sanctimonious Fyodor; her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, on whom she doted, and who danced for her in death.

And so it was, holding these thoughts near to her — Babushka entered the brine of the sea, and insensate . . .

She began to spread.

Alexei Kilodovich looked up at the face: slim and tired and very sad. He blinked and frowned. “I am sorry,” he said to her. “I failed you.”

Her frown deepened. “Failed me?”

Alexei nodded and coughed. “I left you to the gangsters,” he said. “On that boat. I was stupid. A child hit me on the head.” He rubbed his chin, which was thick with a growth of beard. He felt cold and shaky — he had some new injuries. They were probably from being manhandled after they’d knocked him unconscious. “I thought you might be dead. You may have my resignation.”

“You — ” Mrs. Kontos-Wu sat back. Alexei pushed himself up. He was lying on a rough wooden floor in the middle of a round room, with windows everywhere. “You are resigning?” she said.

“You may have my resignation,” he repeated, and then said, “Where did you get those clothes?”

“On the submarine,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu.

Alexei stared at her. “Submarine?”

“Sure,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu. “Don’t you remember?”

“No,” said Alexei. “I remember nothing.”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu looked at him, peering close as though trying to see something he’d caught in his eye. Then she put her arms around his shoulders, and held him. Alexei thought he must have been very glad to see his employer healthy and alive after all. That was the only way he could explain the tears.

The beach was long and deep and covered with small, round rocks that dug like fork tines between a man’s ribs. Amar Shadak bled onto those rocks from a hundred little cuts, and three or four fairly large ones as sunlight filtered down through an even blanket of cloud. Not that he minded — with the way things had gone the night before, he was amazed he was still alive.

In fact, he was amazed that so many people were still alive. The beach on this northern part of Labrador was crowded as a Baltic resort town in August.

Or the banks of the River Styx.

Shadak lay there, eyes on the sky. He drummed his torn fingers on his chest. He thought about his wounds and wondered idly if his first assumption might have been wrong.
Am I dead after all?
He wondered.
Is this only just an afterlife?

It was a credible position. When he looked around, he saw all sorts of others move by who ought to have been dead: Gepetto Bucci, his shirt torn, his eyes wide, sat with his arms around his knees rocking back and forth, while his funnyboy Capo Jack Devisi crouched in the surf, letting the froth run around his ankles.

A short time later, the waitress Marie limped over to where Shadak lay and looked down at him. She gave him a kick in the ribs. “Fuck you,” she said as he writhed. “I hope you die here.” And she stalked off to join Bill and Andrea and the cop and Martin Lancaster, who huddled in a circle beneath a low shelf of rock. They were all in remarkably good shape for a collection of shipwrecked torture victims.

It was all about right for Shadak’s afterlife theory — the torturer diminished, his victims restored. It was the sort of irony that God would appreciate.

God. Or the other one. The Devil Kilodovich.

Shadak shut his eyes and listened to the pounding of the surf. It was rhythmic — as rhythmic as the dripping in the Black Villa. Could this place be simply another prison, concocted for him by Kilodovich?

It was unlikely. Shadak had spent enough time with his soul asunder to know when he was all in one place. And right now, if nothing else, Amar Shadak was whole: there was no small piece of his conscience held hostage in some distant and imaginary place. If anything, the whole of him was. And that didn’t seem likely.

Shadak felt another poke in his ribs. He opened his eyes, to look up at a face he didn’t recognize — a small pug-face with slicked back hair. Looked to be in his forties somewhere.

“Fuck,” said the man. “You ain’t dead.”

“That remains to be seen,” said Shadak.

“No,” he said sadly. “You ain’t dead.” The man leaned closer. He put one hand over Shadak’s mouth. With his other hand he pinched Shadak’s nostrils shut. “Look buddy — I’m sorry about this. But Mr. Bucci says that if I want to get back into his good books, I gotta do this thing.”

Shadak felt his lungs burn. He hitched his back and widened his eyes and shook his head desperately — a move intended at once to dislodge the man’s fingers and plead his case:
No you do not have to do this thing!
the gesture said.
Arrangements can be made!

“You must have really pissed Mr. B. off somethin’ good,” he said. “More than me — which, owing that by my crappy judgement, I caused him to have to come to this place and wreck his boat an’ fuck up his St. John’s operation, is something.”

Shadak frowned and looked up. “Leo Montassini?” he tried to say, but only managed “Mm-Mm MmmMmmMmmMmm?”

Leo Montassini didn’t answer. Instead, he started to whistle — a tune that sounded vaguely Russian, like a folk song or an anthem. It reminded Shadak of a song that he’d heard as a kid, by some Russian folk singer. He couldn’t remember its name for the life of him.

The main rescue party from New Pokrovskoye arrived by boat later in the afternoon. They’d been alerted by Leo Montassini, who’d found the castaways, he said, while taking a walk along the beach to clear his head. The fact that the walk had taken him twelve miles each way, half of it in the pre-dawn dark . . . well, that was just an indication of how badly in need of clearing his head in fact was.

They loaded the castaways onto one of New Pokrovskoye’s few remaining vessels — a motor yacht that had an unusual amount of bunk space hidden away under the foredecks. It was still a tight fit for the thirty-nine survivors that they’d managed to collect — particularly as most of them were injured.

Fortunately, it was a short run up the coast to New Pokrovskoye. The trip was joined mainly in a kind of puzzled silence. The makeshift crew of the motor yacht was not prone to discussion in any case. And the castaways themselves were disoriented enough by the trauma of the previous night’s attack — never mind the bizarre quality of their rescuers, which included hard-faced Romanians, children who shouldn’t have been out of grade school yet, and odd, grey things who hunched and drooled and capered on the decks.

The boat slid into the protected haven of New Pokrovskoye’s harbour just past four in the afternoon. It moved into the slip next to the submarine, where Konstantine Uzimeri was busy drawing up a duty roster and a course back to Turkey. Jean Kontos-Wu watched it from the window of the town’s café. She sipped at her tea. It was jasmine, her favourite — which she hadn’t expected to find at a distant outpost like this one. She turned back to her table mates. Stephen Haber was poking at the baby Vladimir sitting in Zhanna’s lap next to him. Heather — the woman who’d obligingly carried Fyodor Kolyokov’s soul the past few days — was still scribbling madly on a napkin.

“There,” Heather finally said, and slid the napkin into the centre of the table, “that’s all of them.”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu turned the napkin around so that she could read them: a list of four ten-digit numbers, topped by the address and telephone number of a bank in Geneva.

“Is he saying anything else?” asked Mrs. Kontos-Wu.

“Well,” said Heather, “he’s pretty sorry.”

“He has cause to be,” said Zhanna, “the old bastard.”

“Shh,” said Heather. Her eyes fluttered closed. “He’s dying.”

“Dying.” Mrs. Kontos-Wu shook her head. “How does that work?”

“We have a metaphor. A living room.” Heather let her eyes flutter shut. “Fyodor Kolyokov is lying on the sofa in front of the television.”

“What’s he watching?”

“The television — doesn’t exactly work any more.”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu patted Heather’s hand, as Heather said, “Oh.”

“The old bastard is dead,” said Zhanna. “Good.”

“He wasn’t so bad,” said Heather.

Vladimir rolled his eyes in what was an innocuously adult expression of disbelief, and Zhanna snorted. “He was so bad. He tried to purchase us from Amar Shadak — with the life of poor Alexei Kilodovich — to turn us into mind-slaves to further build his wealth. Is that not so, Jean?”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu shrugged. That had been her understanding too.

Stephen reached across to the middle of the table and picked up a salt shaker. He idly sprinkled some on the red-and-white checked tablecloth and blew on it.

“Well,” said Heather, her lips pulled tight, “at least he didn’t want to take over the world.”