Rasputin's Bastards (15 page)

“Shh.”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu rolled her eyes. “I was being quiet, Loi — ”

She stopped. It wasn’t Lois. It was a boy — not the one she’d seen earlier, either. This one was taller, a little older than the other one, with badly clipped brown hair and wide, hungry eyes that she was sure she recognized from somewhere. He wore ill-fitting green trousers and a white T-shirt, and he had a bright red gasoline can in one hand. The other hand was at his mouth, forefinger extended across his lips. “Shh!”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu didn’t know why — a strange boy shows up at Bishop’s Hall with a can of gasoline, a girl should really say something — but she did as she was told. The boy smiled and nodded. He unscrewed the top of the can and began sloshing gasoline in a line around the edge of the room. When he came to a bookshelf, he made sure to slosh the gasoline up the spines of the books, but he didn’t bother splashing too high. Mrs. Kontos-Wu supposed that made sense — the paper would burn well enough by itself, after all.

Wait a minute
. Mrs. Kontos-Wu set the book down and got up again.
Burn
?

“Hey!” she ran across the room to where the boy was working. “What do you think you’re doing! This is a library! You can’t burn down a library!”

The boy turned and glared at her. “Shhh!” he said.

“I will not!” Mrs. Kontos-Wu took a deep breath and let out a scream. It was a good scream — better than the one she’d imagined hearing a few moments ago — all high-pitched spooky-movie shrill. She took a breath and screamed again — louder this time.

“Ah, shit, Kontos-Wu,” said the boy, reaching into his pocket. “Do we have to go through this?” He pulled out a book of matches, and before Mrs. Kontos-Wu could recover herself, lit one and dropped it to the floor.

The flame spread fast as sunlight along the trail of gasoline, only at first it was a line of blue, not gold. The gold came an instant later, in an explosion of flame and smoke that engulfed the boy all at once. Mrs. Kontos-Wu felt the ground fall from beneath her feet as the force of the fire threw her back. Roaring flame and the crackling combustion of wood and paper filled her ears as her back hit the floor and the air heaved from her chest. Mrs. Kontos-Wu gasped a lungful of black, evil-tasting smoke, and coughed it back out again. She felt as though she were suffocating — she couldn’t get a breath past her throat.

She felt a hand on her back, and another on her arm. The hands were large, and their grips firm. She looked up through the thickening smoke, and felt a moment of comforting reassurance.

It was Mr. Bishop! Her schoolmaster! He was wearing one of his familiar tweed jackets, the wire-rimmed glasses perched on the end of his nose. And behind them, his eyes —

Mrs. Kontos-Wu gasped — and took in a little air this time. She blinked the stinging smoke away and looked more closely. She’d been right.

His eyes were the same as the boy’s. Older, stuck into a different face. But they were the same.

“Come on,” said Mr. Bishop. “We must leave this place — before they get back.”

With Mr. Bishop’s help, Mrs. Kontos-Wu got to her feet. The fire was spreading quickly. Flames licked across the shelves at the far side of the library in little blue streaks. The wall by the entrance where the fire had started was consumed in a terrible mix of roiling flame and black smoke. The tall windows had shattered, and now the oxygen-rich night air blew in past the billowing, flaming curtains to feed the conflagration.

Mr. Bishop dragged her toward the flaming wall. Mrs. Kontos-Wu pulled against him. She was not going anywhere near that fire.

“Quickly!” he shouted. “We’ve got to get out of here — before they come back!”

“We’ll die if we go there, Mr. Bishop!” shouted Mrs. Kontos-Wu. She squirmed free of Mr. Bishop’s grip and ran toward the far end of the library.

“We won’t!” shouted Mr. Bishop. He started to run after her — and might have caught her all other things being equal.

But at that moment, an immense gust of wind knocked both of them to the floor. The curtains flew nearly straight out from their rods and the flames blew back an instant before returning, brighter and hotter in the fresh outside air.

Lois stood at the window. Her arms were folded across her chest and she appeared very cross indeed. Strange light flickered behind her — green like the reading lamp, but moving across her shoulders like a thick liquid.

“You,” she said. “You bastard.”

“I’m a — ” Mrs. Kontos-Wu stopped herself. Lois wasn’t calling
her
a big bastard — she was looking straight at Mr. Bishop, who had climbed to his feet. He towered over them both — his head seemed to reach as high as the ceiling.

“We are all bastards,” he said. “Rasputin’s bastards, they used to call us? That is our common bond.”

“Vladimir wanted to destroy you outright,” said Lois. The flames behind her diminished as she spoke — out and out vanishing in spots. And where they vanished, the wallpaper and bookshelves and hangings reappeared unblemished. The liquid green light grew brighter. “Maybe he was right.”

“Vladimir is merciful, then. I presume it wasn’t he who devised my reunion with old Krieghoff.”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu gaped. As Mr. Bishop spoke, the flames started up again — consuming the fresh wallpaper and bookshelves and hanging as fast as they’d been made.
Becky Barker and the Adventure of the Scarlet Arrow
was forgotten in the face of this new mystery.

“That was me,” said Lois. “You had it coming.”

“I see. I have been very wicked — of course. And who are you, little girl, who judges an old man so harshly for a lifetime of sin?”

There was a series of loud pops then, as a row of lights on the far side of the library blew out. New flames climbed up the rails of the staircase to the library’s second level in brilliant lines of blue and yellow.

And as that happened, another thing occurred, which gave Mrs. Kontos-Wu even more pause. Mr. Bishop — a tall, fit man of about fifty-five, with sandy grey hair and a tweed single-breasted sports jacket — began to melt and change. He grew shorter and his hair receded; his sports jacket melded and extended down to near his ankles, and transformed into a thick, terrycloth bathrobe that had once been a deep, luxurious purple but had faded with washings to a threadbare pink. His belly swelled and his feet grew, and his chin darkened with late morning stubble.

“Fyodor Kolyokov,” she said, nodding. This wasn’t Mr. Bishop. She was not a schoolgirl at Bishop’s Hall. She was Mrs. Kontos-Wu, who worked for Wolfe-Jordan, where she managed offshore mutual funds. Except that there really was no Wolfe-Jordan — Wolfe-Jordan was a cover, a money laundering front, and her real master was Fyodor Kolyokov, who ran his own kind of financial empire out of a hotel at Broadway and 95th, which was called . . .

“The Emissary,” she said aloud, looking down at her hands. The fingers, which had been small and pink and a little pudgy, narrowed and lengthened and dried out into what seemed by comparison a mummy’s claw but in fact was only the more weather-worn hand of a thirty-six-year-old woman who had not been at Bishop’s Hall for a quarter century.

She looked at Kolyokov, and he nodded to her:
Good
, he mouthed — and then he spoke some other words to her — not with his mouth, but in her head. They flashed across her mind like quicksilver. And then he mouthed again:
Now
.

Lois screamed at her to stop, but it was too late. Mrs. Kontos-Wu flung herself into the flames — felt them lick and tear at her clothes and her flesh — felt the illusion of the metaphor burn and bubble away like the skin on her arms and face and thighs — felt the pain of burning nerves and searing flesh — and then felt its absence, as death came to her sure and final, in the crumbling metaphor that was Bishop’s Hall.

It was dark enough, but that was it as far as sensory deprivation went in Fyodor Kolyokov’s tank. In spite of the buckets of cleaning products that had been flushed through the thing over the past several hours, the air inside was filled with old man stink. If anything, the antiseptic made it worse: it made it smell like a geriatric ward. And it wasn’t completely silent, either. Stephen heard the scream from the living room with both hatches closed.

“Piece of shit Soviet junk.”

Stephen muttered it under his breath, but in the tomb of Fyodor Kolyokov’s isolation tank it echoed like the voice of God. He sighed — which sounded to his sense-starved ears like a hurricane hitting a Florida beach — and opened the two hatches. The scream had come three more times before he was out.

“Shut the fuck up!” he yelled. “I’m fucking trying to fucking concentrate!” He kicked his feet into his slippers. “Fuckwad!”

“Ste-Stephen? That you?”

Stephen shrugged on a bathrobe and opened the bathroom door. Mrs. Kontos-Wu looked at him from the bed. Her eyes were wide and wet with tears. Terrified. Which was interesting: it was the first spark of humanity in her that Stephen had detected since she’d returned. And the accent was gone.

Maybe
, he thought,
the dream-walker’s gone too.

Or it could be a trick — like those scenes
in The Exorcist
where Linda Blair seems okay for a second, to trick the priests to come in close enough so the devil can let loose another green puke whammy and knock them out the window to their deaths.

“It’s me,” he said carefully. “Yeah.”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu glanced down at the straps. “What’s with these things?” she said. “Can you undo them?”

“I don’t think so,” said Stephen —
Can you undo them
? being one of the first things a tricky dream-walker would ask once he’d gotten the knack of humanizing his host.

The door to the suite opened then, and Miles stepped in. He was carrying a Glock at chest height. He gave Stephen a pissed-off look; Stephen had sent him from the suite an hour ago, on the theory that security man’s aura was what was fucking up his dream-walking. Miles had argued — he didn’t trust the straps where Mrs. Kontos-Wu was concerned, and thought Stephen was taking a foolish risk leaving her unguarded while he “sloshed around in Mr. Kolyokov’s tank.”

Stephen had a hard time looking Miles in the eye now. He’d responded by pointing out that he was the dream-walker, Miles was the goon, and while Miles might have nothing better to do in a tank than “slosh around,” Stephen had the capacity to use the tank to its full advantage.

Except that it hadn’t exactly turned out that way. Stephen had spent the last three hours using every trick in the book, several on tape and even a couple he’d picked up off the Internet. And try as he might, he hadn’t been able to invoke even a hint of the dream-walking state that Kolyokov entered so effortlessly in the tank.

“Is everything under control, sir?” said Miles, in a tone that made Stephen want to hit him.

“The straps are holding,” said Stephen. “If that’s what you mean.”

Miles lowered his handgun. He regarded Mrs. Kontos-Wu, and she frowned back at him.

“Miles — Shute. Right?”

Miles nodded warily. Her eyes tracked him as he stepped around the bed, and settled on the bandage on his scalp. “What happened to your head?” she asked.

“Is this for real?” said Miles to Stephen.

“Not sure. She’s doing a good impression of herself. But who knows?”

“Why,” said Miles, “don’t you just get back in the tank and check for yourself? Dream-walk into her. That’s your knack — right, Stephen?”

Stephen looked away, out the window. It was late afternoon in New York City. Central Park was a long vertical sliver of gold-hazed greenery. Stephen couldn’t imagine what the park was like to either side of the sliver. All he saw now was two ugly old water towers, and below that, deep red brick, drawn curtains and the black cross-hatch of fire escapes. It was a shitty view, and there wasn’t anything he could do to change that.

“Who knows?” said Stephen.

“How is Mr. Kolyokov?” asked Mrs. Kontos-Wu. “He said he might be injured — maybe in a coma?”

Miles raised both eyebrows and scrunched his lips. Stephen looked over to Mrs. Kontos-Wu. “‘He said’? You’ve been talking with Fyodor?”

“Look — Stephen. Cut the shit. Undo the straps.” Mrs. Kontos-Wu threw him a full-teeth smile. “What am I going to do? Kill ya with my hands?”

“Wouldn’t put it past you,” said Miles. “Don’t untie her.”

“You don’t have to tell me that,” Stephen answered. He turned back to Mrs. Kontos-Wu. “If our positions were reversed, you wouldn’t untie me either. Don’t ask again.”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu’s eyes narrowed. “Something happened,” she said. “I pulled some stuff, didn’t I? What did I do?”

Stephen kept his mouth shut, and motioned to Miles to do the same. There was no point in giving Mrs. Kontos-Wu, if that’s who she was, any more information than she already had.

But she was working it out for herself. “I did that to you — didn’t I, Miles? Your head?” Miles stared at her, stone-faced. “Shit, I’m sorry if that’s what happened. Did I — ” Mrs. Kontos-Wu’s eyelids fluttered, which Stephen knew to be one of the few signs of real distress that his comrade would show “ — did I kill anyone?”

“Save the questions,” said Stephen. “Right now, it’s important
you
tell
me
— what did Fyodor — Mr. Kolyokov — say to you?”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu considered the question. “All right. I guess holding out won’t go far in convincing you I’m of sound mind and body. Here goes.” She shut her eyes and licked her lips. When she spoke again, it wasn’t her voice — it was Fyodor Kolyokov, speaking as it were, from beyond the grave.

“Stephen my love. If you get this message (said Kolyokov through Mrs. Kontos-Wu) then my ruse has worked and I have succeeded in returning our operative to herself. You may have encountered her in her previous state — she was inhabited by a powerful dream-walker, up to no good — but if that happened, I doubt both of you would be alive — and therefore I doubt you would be hearing this.

“Assuming the best, then, I also assume you have encountered certain truths already. You will — I hope — have found me by now, in a coma or unconscious, in my tank. You will have taken the appropriate steps — yes? — and had me moved to the infirmary on the fifth floor. If you have not done so yet, in hopes that I may return to my corporeal self — abandon that hope for the moment, and put my body in a doctor’s care immediately. I will wait here until you’re finished.”