Rasputin's Bastards (43 page)

It was a tempting theory. But truly, if the Koldun and Gibson were working together, and killing Alexei was their shared objective, it would have been simpler to murder Alexei as he slept. No — there was more to this place and the people here than simple murder.

And, he began to think, there was perhaps more to himself than simple murder too. Would the day end in killing at all? In the sobering summer air, Alexei began to wonder about that. Heather had set him up early to murder Holden Gibson. But how many times had he hesitated? Lost his nerve? Rationalized it away?

Alexei fingered the butt of the Glock. Was he really made for these things? If not these — then what? As he climbed down the stairs, Alexei came upon the thought that this place would, in its way, be just as useful in deciphering his present as was his metaphorical idyll into a childhood in assessing his history.

Alexei looked out over the harbour. There were more boats in it than before — which made a certain amount of sense. The sun was going down, casting a long, blue shadow over the breadth of the village. Lights were coming on in the buildings already. The fishing boats would be coming in for the night.

But he began to count. There were more boats there, really, than a prodigal fishing run could account for: more boats than there were moorings.

The stairs bottomed out in a yard, behind a two-storey wooden building that looked as though it might be a store. The back door stood ajar, and as Alexei listened, soft music drifted out. He approached the back of the building through the tall grass of the rear yard. The music was familiar — a Russian singer, bass. Singing to someone called Natascha.

“Rebroff,” said Alexei, as the recognition dawned. “Ivan Rebroff.”

Alexei remembered. Ivan Rebroff was an old Russian singer from the 1970s; a big round-faced Cossack, with an incredible vocal range who lived in a chateau in Austria with a couple of Siberian tigers for pets. Alexei had apparently listened to him quite a lot at one point, because he found himself humming along with the ballsy lament.

Alexei cracked open the door. It was a grocery — the sort of grocery you get in isolated little towns like this: a long room with sparsely filled shelves, with rows of old fluorescent tubes lighting everything a grey that flickered. A young woman sat behind a countertop, staring vacantly out the window. She was slight, long dark hair dangling in braids from the back of her skull. She reminded Alexei of something. Like the song, it was a memory unplaced.

“Hello,” he said.

The woman shook her head, dislodging a daydream.

“Oh. Hello. I did not see you come in.”

“Quite all right,” he said. “Sorry for sneaking up on you. Nice music.”

“Yes. It’s good. Can I help you with something?”

Alexei sidled up to the counter. There was a row of chocolate bars. Packages of cigarettes lined the wall behind her.

“I’m afraid I don’t have any cash on me,” he said.

The woman shrugged. “I’m afraid I don’t have a cash register. You want something to eat? You’ve been drinking — I can smell it. Food will take the edge off the headache.”

Alexei reddened. He’d hoped the little binge had been long enough past that no one would notice. The girl had a point, though.

“For free?”

She smiled. “We’re all family here,” she said.

“Maybe some cashews,” he said.

“Help yourself.”

Alexei munched on the cashews and listened to the rest of the song, and looked around. As he did, it became clear that the absence of a cash register was far from the strangest thing in this store.

For one thing, the shelves weren’t stocked with the hair combs and the cans of creamed corn and the salsa dips for the real Mexican tortillas in the salty snack section that you’d expect to see in an outpost grocery. In their place were little tins of Russian caviar and jars of truffle oil that sold in New York for $50 a bottle. A small open refrigerator was stuffed with fresh-looking roasts and exotic fowl wrapped tight in plastic. Through the cereal aisle, Alexei could make out a wine rack. There were no cheap wine boxes in sight, and he suspected he wouldn’t find many screw-top bottles there either.

“We’re family, are we?” he said, lifting a duck and letting it fall back into the ice. In the air, old Rebroff was starting on the Natascha song again, from the beginning.

The girl came around the counter. She was wearing a dark, patterned skirt to her ankles.

“You have just arrived? No. You’ve been here long enough to know better than to ask that.”

Alexei nodded. “Right,” he said. He looked to the ceiling and behind the counter.

“Where is your stereo?” he said as Rebroff sang on.

The girl smiled. “Same place as the cash register,” she said. “We don’t need one.”

“Ah.”

“Now let me ask a question,” she said. “Two questions.”

“All right.”

“What is your name, sir?”

Alexei smiled. “Alexei,” he said.

“Hello Alexei. I am Darya.” She extended her hand. He shook it. “And your second question?”

“Were you a killer?”

Alexei let her fingers slip from his. “A — ”

“I only say, because you don’t look like a university professor or a lawyer, or much of a politician. Did you kill for them?”

Darya was flushed as she spoke. Alexei looked back at her levelly.

“I have my suspicions,” he said.

She nodded and smiled. “I thought so. It’s good. It’s good. I’m told that I’m getting an eye for this kind of thing. Maybe one day, you think I can become one with the dream-walkers? Babushka used to tell me I’d make a good dream-walker.”

Alexei went to the front door of the shop. He looked out into the street. A small group of tourists walked along the road. “Dream-walkers,” he said. “I don’t know about that.” Then Alexei remembered something the Koldun said earlier: he was going to prepare for the “dance” tonight.

“Are you going to the dance?” he asked.

Darya’s smile widened and she turned her ankle in an awkward flirt. “Is that an invitation?” she asked. “Because you know that it’s not that kind of dance. But — ”

Alexei looked at her. She looked back at him with an unmistakable expression.

“ — we do have a bit of time before it begins.”

Comfort is the torturer’s first tool
, thought Alexei.

“No,” he said.

She was visibly annoyed when he turned down her proposition — but Alexei felt he had no choice. Comfort was indeed the torturer’s first tool. After having spent the afternoon comfortably drinking and eating and kibitzing in the lighthouse, Alexei would have been a fool to fall back into the trap again.

“You are heartless,” she said, eyes narrow. “Makes it easy to kill, I suppose, being so heartless.”

“I am sorry,” he said. “Look — I have to look around this place. Find my bearings. I have to find the children. Gibson. I — ” he dropped his gaze to the floor “ — I don’t have time for that kind of thing.”

“None of us have more than a little time,” she said. Then her smile returned. “But if you don’t want to play around — I could show you around. Help you get your bearings, like you said.”

Alexei smiled and shook his head. “I’ll be going. Thank you for the nuts.”

“No,” the girl said, following him as he headed towards the front door. “Wait. You want to see things, I can show you things: the fishery. The greenhouse. The museum.”

Alexei stopped.

“Museum?” He turned to look at her. “What kind of a museum does a town like this have?”

The girl grinned. “The New Pokrovskoye Museum of Family History,” she said. “It tells our whole story. It is very complete. You should go there before the dance, certainly. It helps — well it helps. All the new people must go there — or however will they learn to dance?”

Alexei thought about that. He was, after all, trying to tell his own story. He’d spent what had seemed like months in a metaphor looking for clues. And clues he found — but only enough to confound him more.

He could try to find the children — blunder in — maybe run in to more of Holden Gibson’s people. Maybe run into the mysterious Koldun again. That would be how Alexei the KGB agent would handle things.

But there was more to him than that. Simply stumbling in, pounding against a locker — fighting Czernochov in a math class — or killing Holden Gibson — that wouldn’t do it. He needed to find out more about himself — about this place — about what he was up against.

The skills he learned decoding his memory — perhaps, thought Alexei, he needed to apply them in the present as well.

He made up his mind.

“All right,” he said and held out his hand. “Take me to the museum.”

“So it will be like a date?”

“Sure,” he’d replied. “A big date.”

She followed him outside, turned the CLOSED sign into place and pulled the door closed.

“Come on,” she said. “It’s not far.”

They were perched on top of a rocky slope, that rode down to make a bowl around the harbour. Red and green-painted houses clung to the slope, like Day-Glo barnacles. A single road wound between them. The only noise that Alexei heard was the crying of gulls, the sputtering of boat engines in the harbour. And Ivan Rebroff, selling the chorus of “Ach, Natascha” one more time.

“Nothing’s far here, is it?” he said.

“True enough,” she said. “That is the beauty of New Pokrovskoye. Everything at hand. Now do you want to go to the museum? We’ve got a marvellous collection of Fabergé eggs. The best in the world, Papa says.”

The Imperial New Pokrovskoye Museum of Family History was a rambling thing of wood and iron and shingle — a long A-frame that suggested an ancient longhouse, more of a shelter for Norwegians and their livestock than a repository of Russian antiquities. It huddled in the crook of an elbow of rock at the southern edge of the village, at the end of a short gravel road. It had been painted bright red a couple of seasons ago. Now the paint was beginning to peel. The sign was in Cyrillic, hand-painted above a small door, which was marked CLOSED, just like Darya’s grocery. She pushed the door open. A smell like cloves wafted out. Darya inhaled deeply.

“Are there speakers everywhere in town?” asked Alexei.

Darya looked at him.

“That song,” said Alexei. “I hear it everywhere I go.”

“It’s a song,” said Darya, as though that answered everything. Then she took him by the hand. “Inside!” she said.

In the guise of adjusting his belt, Alexei fingered the handle of the Glock in his waistband. Darya leaned to one side of the door, and there was the sound of a light-switch flipping — and Alexei gasped. His hand fell away from the gun. And he stared.

The inside of the museum was huge — a vast chamber held up by thick tree trunks in the middle that had not even been squared. Lights hung on cords from the ceiling in conical shades, casting round pools onto tables and cases filled with objects that glittered with gold and precious stones. Further back, the pools illuminated other things: machinery that might have been military; a case with a great skeleton mounted from a contraption that looked like a gallows; and something else — a thing that Alexei couldn’t quite place — that looked like a great, jewel-encrusted egg.

They had to walk down a short flight of stairs — the floor had been cut deep into the rock, so the first six feet of wall was carved stone before the barn board took over. The sight abruptly reminded Alexei of something he had seen once before — in a strange cavern, in Afghanistan, before he had — had —

No good. He lost the thread of it.

Alexei smiled around the lump in his throat. This place, he thought, might just be as useful as that school days metaphor, in helping him sort the puzzle of his life. He squeezed Darya’s hand. “Let’s have a look,” he said. And together they descended, humming along with the chorus as they went.

“My Papa was a killer,” said Darya as they paused over a display case of Imperial Russian china.

“Really,” said Alexei. “A killer.”

Darya slapped him on the shoulder. “Don’t make fun! He was!”

“All right. Papa was a killer. You must be very proud. Who did he kill? How many?”

“We are not certain. He definitely killed an American. Name was Timothy Elkhorn. In Honduras. He used a shovel. And some Italians. Seven of those. That happened just after I was born. He used a machinegun and a boat. And there were the Africans . . .”

“He did this under orders?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

Alexei moved past the china, to a display of silver cutlery. “Tell me,” he said, “how did these wonderful objects manage to find their way to New Pokrovskoye?”

“The Koldun,” she said.

“Vasili Borovich, you mean?”

“The Koldun,” she repeated, more firmly. “He brought them with him in a dozen boats, when he came to New Pokrovskoye to rejoin Babushka.”

Alexei looked around. A case of three scimitars, their hilts forged of gold and silver, rested next to a fine chain mail hauberk draped over a dressmaker’s dummy, bosom jutting absurdly through the woven steel. Alexei counted a dozen gleaming samovars on a long oak shelf behind them. The Fabergé eggs were a little farther off, in a tall-glassed in shelf. Alexei counted a dozen of them. Other than the unlikeliness of their context — here in a barn of a museum in a little coastal fishing village in Canada — Alexei had no reason to doubt their authenticity.

“All of this?”

“Not on the same trip — but yes,” she said. “It was a gift. When we made this village, the Koldun was simply a traveller. An old friend of Babushka’s.”

“Vasili,” said Alexei, “Borovich.”

Darya nodded. “That was his name. Then. The gift allowed him to change, by grace of Babushka. To become the Koldun.”

“Well — Vasili or Koldun, by whatever name he is very generous.” Alexei stepped away from the case. He pointed to the giant egg-thing towards the far end of the room.

“That would have required a second trip all by itself, I’d think,” he said.

Darya smiled. “Oh. That one, I don’t think the Koldun brought.”