Rasputin's Bastards (32 page)

The direction of his thoughts made Alexei queasy. Trying to talk it out, he recalled, had led to a metaphorical rock in his metaphorical head from the little bastard Ivan. So rather than seeking some equilibrium in further dialogue, he stood up and asked if he might be excused.

“Bladder too small, Kilodovich?” asked Czernochov mildly.

“I’m not feeling well,” said Alexei. “Think I’m going to sick up.” He put his fingers to his lips and inflated his cheeks like they were filling up with bile.

“Well then. Better go deal with it.” Czernochov sneered as he spoke it. Several of his metaphorical classmates snickered. Alexei got up and made his way to the door. The hallway was still a work in progress — if he squinted, he could see through walls as though they were simple strips of canvas, into washrooms and meeting rooms, and, as he passed it, the great void of the gymnasium. He went straight to the north doors, pushed them open, and stepped outside into the freezing cold of the afternoon.

The sky was perfect blue today. Maybe, thought Alexei bitterly, by tomorrow Kolyokov would have thought to add some attractive cloud. He’d obviously spent his time up to now on the snow and the rock. Alexei trudged across it, his freezing hands jammed into the pockets of his trousers.

When he was far enough away from the building, Alexei shouted, “You are a bastard fuck, Comrade Kolyokov!”

The wind howled in answer. Fyodor Kolyokov did not appear. Alexei found himself suddenly hoping that he might.

Not, of course, the Kolyokov who was probably now playing Party politics with Comrade General Rodionov — trying to secure the survival of his precious City 512. Not him — but the ghost Kolyokov who’d appeared to Alexei what seemed like months ago: a geriatric specter in wind-blown snow; aged and ominous and fleeting. That one, Alexei decided, was the real man — the Fyodor Kolyokov who drew his rage; this one, here in memory, hadn’t yet begun to exact the indignities upon him that had led him into this terrible spiral of memory — this unhinging of truth.

Alexei came to the very back of the exercise yard. Here, the snow was not nearly so distinct — it clotted on his heels like half-frozen cream. The air was cold, but it was more an idea of cold than the thing itself: a Platonic chill.

And so it was with the fence. Eventually, the fence would be eight feet high and capped with razor-wire. Now, it was a flat, vertical plane, etched with just the blurry indication of chain link. Alexei reached out to touch it. It felt like metal, but was yielding like a skin of rubber. Alexei pulled at it until he’d made a space wide enough to step through.

“Bastard fuck,” he said, looking back at the low buildings, the icy fields — all of it, the evil and manipulative lie of his childhood. Then he turned from it, and bending only slightly, stepped through the fence.

The last time Stephen had seen sky was the dawn outside Silifke, just a day ago. It had been something: fluted streamers of cloud pasted against a slate of a sky that ran tones between purple and orange and deep, deep blue. A contrail of some high-flying jet transected it like a filament of gold. There were smells, too — the faintly sweet, faintly corrupt odour of the port, mingled with turpentine-fresh gasoline from the inboard motor of the fishing boat that was taking them out the mouth of the Goksu River to the Mediterranean Sea.

Eyes shut and fists clenched in the tiny midshipman’s cabin they’d given him, Stephen tried to summon that sky. It might just banish the sweating metal pipes and red-painted valves that hovered just three feet over his hard, narrow bunk. But seeing sky through the roof of a submarine was more difficult than discovering Central Park behind Manhattan water towers from the 14th floor of the Emissary. They had been running deep since the fishing boat had unloaded them on the sub’s deck. And the distractions in this place — the thrumming of the engines; the
stink
of the engines; and the clattering of footsteps and hatches and the occasional words of spoken conversation — made Stephen’s carefully studied exercises all but useless.

If, that was, Zhanna hadn’t been right — and those exercises hadn’t been useless from the beginning.

Stephen opened his eyes and rolled off the bunk. There was just enough room for him to stand up. If he turned to the left a little, there was a little table. If he turned to the right a little, there was the hatch to the submarine’s spinal corridor. If he took one step in any direction, he’d bash his head on a valve or a pipe or one of the dozens of little lozenge-shaped light fixtures that buzzed and clicked through the day.

Stephen cleared his throat.

“Shh!”

A red-fingered, bandaged hand shot out from the bottom bunk. Uzimeri glared up at Stephen. He clasped his hands together as in prayer and rested his head on them, and mouthed:
Sleeping
.

Fuck off
, mouthed Stephen. But he kept quiet. Glancing out into the corridor, he saw that the lights had indeed been turned down. Most of the submarine’s cargo was asleep — and that meant that those who were awake had to keep quiet, because a sudden loud noise to wake one or two of them could spell disaster.

The first time the crew went to sleep, it very nearly did. Uzimeri was in a tiny galley no bigger than a men’s room stall, boiling water for a porridge, and Mrs. Kontos-Wu, Stephen, and two other guests — a thirtyish red-haired woman and a round little man with a thumbprint-sized mole on his cheek — were settled in the cramped mess hall. They’d been in the submarine just a few hours.

Mrs. Kontos-Wu had tried to convince Uzimeri to take it easy — he’d been damn near dead when they’d found him, after all.

“Stephen can cook,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu, taking Uzimeri’s stick-thin arm and guiding him to a seat.

But Uzimeri had refused.

“I am restored,” he said. “I am back amongst my people now. Let me feed you this simple breakfast, yes?”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu gave up after that — and Stephen was less worried about making sure Uzimeri was steady on his feet than he was about Mrs. Kontos-Wu’s own interior stability.

After all — she’d
seemed
fine back in the Emissary, when she’d basically given them up to the mob. She seemed fine now, too. But like a junkie, she could be back into her never-never land of metaphor in a second. Stephen didn’t take his eyes off her as she conversed with the two Russians.

“I am Ilyich,” said the man, in Russian. “This is Tanya.”

“We have been on board since Odessa,” said Tanya. “How was Silifke? Did you happen to visit the Tekir Ambar?”

“The — ?” Mrs. Kontos-Wu frowned, her lips turned up in a question.

“No,” said Tanya. “You would know what that was if you had seen it. It is a great cistern, next to Silifke Castle. There are stairs climbing down the side of it. You can walk to the bottom. It was made by Romans. You can feel their presence in the stones. Ghosts.” Tanya beamed. “Silifke is a wonderful town. The Romans, the Christians — everyone had a hand there. And the people — so friendly!”

“We really didn’t spend much time in the town,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu. Stephen put a hand on Mrs. Kontos-Wu’s arm — he was afraid that she’d start to explain to them how it was hard to take the Silifke walking tour when you were locked up in Amar Shadak’s fucking caravansary and sucking back lungsful of tear gas. How you couldn’t get much of a view of the beautiful Roman architecture when you were hiding under a blanket in the back of a delivery truck while it bombed down a mountain road. And how the guy who ran the fishing boat seemed friendly enough in a dream-walked zombie kind of way, but by and large you didn’t get to spend too much quality time with the happy friendly people of Silifke when you were on the run from a psychotic Turkish gangster like Amar Shadak.

But Mrs. Kontos-Wu was all right. She patted Stephen’s hand and gently pushed it from her arm.

“Tell me all about Odessa,” she said. “That’s one place that I’ve never been.”

Ilyich smiled. “Well then that is one place you must visit. Odessa is every — ”

His smile vanished then, and he tilted his head as though listening for something. Stephen didn’t hear anything. But the little Russian frowned, and put his finger to his lips.

“Shh,” he said.

Both he and Tanya sat straight in their little seats.

And that was it for their little dining car conversation. Tanya and Ilyich sat up with their hands folded. Mrs. Kontos-Wu did the same. Stephen followed their cue.

It all would have gone swimmingly — were it not for Uzimeri, and his porridge. Stephen later kicked himself for not paying more attention to the frail old Turk, who had insisted on boiling a brimming pot-full of water by himself. When Ilyich has said “shh,” Uzimeri had taken it as Word from the lips of Jesus. So standing not six inches from the edge of the tiny cooking range, Uzimeri had simply stood straight, taken a deep breath — and, after less than a minute, fallen into a dead faint.

There was a clattering and a splashing sound — and when Stephen looked, the first thing he saw was the pot of not-quite-boiling water hissing over the stove element and streaming down onto Konstantine Uzimeri’s right side.

Stephen leapt up from his chair and pushed his way into the galley, just as Uzimeri opened his mouth to scream. Slipping in the puddle on the floor as he did so, Stephen pulled Uzimeri away.

Except that the scream didn’t come. Uzimeri had been scalded — not as badly as if the water had been at a complete boil, but badly enough. His mouth stretched open for an instant, and the tiniest squeak came out. Then it closed and a look of peace came over him.

“What — ”

“Shh,” said Uzimeri, then whispered, in a thick Russian accent that Stephen had last heard from Mrs. Kontos-Wu: “Konstantine will be fine. He is in a safe place. Sit here quietly now, Stephen. Until we are all in a safer place. Past Cyprus.”

Later, the young woman to whom the voice belonged would come and meet Stephen and Mrs. Kontos-Wu. Stephen didn’t swing that way, but he could see how this Zhanna girl had managed to charm Uzimeri and the other men guarding Shadak’s warehouse museum. And how they might have thought that it was lust that drove them at first to worship at the feet of the slim-figured, black-haired Russian girl. She was still blinking the sleep-sand out of her eye and had a bad case of bed-head. But with her wide, dark eyes and delicate, half-smiling lips — she could have been a film star.

“Everything is all right now,” she said. “There are a lot of people on Cyprus who have an interest in watching the comings and goings of submarines. But we fooled them.”

“Fooled them? How?” Stephen was intensely curious. Zhanna — and, he supposed, the boy who shushed them — the two of them were the first of Kolyokov’s children that he’d met face to face. When they’d come to the submarine, it was just the small crew of scowling Romanian men who greeted them. And Ilyich and Tanya after that. Zhanna and her family had remained hidden elsewhere on the submarine until Cyprus.

“There is not just one way,” said Zhanna. She spoke quickly, not meeting Stephen’s eye. “Some ways are very old. There is a way of placing a field around a submarine, like a great cloud. It obscures the eye of dream-walkers, and sends the eyes of others looking elsewhere when it passes before them. That works for the people who look on the feeds from spy satellites, and on radar operators if there are not too many of them. If there are too many of them — in places like the base on Cyprus — and they are watching too attentively . . . we must plan ahead. It is good to have a sleeper on the site. Lucky us — we have three still at Cyprus. So — first we distract — then, sabotage of records. Lots of work for everyone. That is why it is so important to be quiet. None of us can afford to be awakened.”

“Sorry,” said Stephen.

“No harm done.” She smiled shyly. “We got to you through Konstantine, and now we are safe.”

“Lucky for us,” said Stephen. Then he frowned, as he thought of something. “But tell me: Why didn’t you just dream-walk inside of me — shut me up that way?”

“I might have.” She looked at Stephen hard. “But you are very special boy.”

Stephen felt his heart racing at those words. He was special — even if Kolyokov hadn’t recognized it; hadn’t let him develop his special talents. Screw him. Stephen had the dream-walker moves — Zhanna said so.

“Really?” Stephen put his fingers into his belt-loop and leaned back. “Special — in what way?”

“You,” she said, “are a complete cipher to us. So far as we can tell, you have no senses beyond the Physick whatsoever. You alone, Stephen, are entirely safe from we dream-walkers.”

Stephen stood quietly in his quarters for nearly an hour before the alert was over.

“We were passing through the Strait of Gibraltar,” said Uzimeri as he sat up in his bunk. “Very tricky. The British guard that passage jealously. And it is shallow. It is only by the grace of the Most Holy Children that we have been able to pass through it as often as we have.”

Stephen slumped against the bulkhead and glared at Uzimeri. “Stop talking about them like they’re fucking Jesus,” he said.

Uzimeri raised his eyebrows. “This,” he said, “coming from a man who is deaf to the words of the Divine. I think I shall keep my own counsel.”

I’m not deaf to anything
! Stephen clenched a fist behind his back and pressed his lips together. What the fuck did Zhanna know anyway? Stephen wasn’t deaf — he was just having a bad patch. Stephen remembered Kolyokov coming to him — in dream, using Discourse. Hadn’t he? Fyodor Kolyokov wouldn’t have taken him on in the first place, if he was completely untalented — would he?

Ah, he could drive himself in circles thinking about this. He turned himself to the matter at hand.

“We’re passing Gibraltar,” he said. “So what — are they taking us home?”

Uzimeri shrugged. “That would depend,” he said, “on what you regard home.”

“Well aren’t you a cryptic man today.” Looking down at Uzimeri, all hunched around his scalded arm and staring back like some crazed zealot, Stephen found himself missing old Richard. At least Richard had the good sense to be fucked up by all the messing that went on with his head. Uzimeri had turned his servitude to advantage. And Stephen — Stephen just didn’t know what to make of it.