Rasputin's Bastards (44 page)

Alexei approached the thing. It sat on a platform three feet off the ground — circled with deep ochre curtain. It wasn’t truly an egg. It was more shaped like a lozenge . . . a fat man’s coffin. Where the stones had not been fixed, it was the colour of robin’s egg.

It reminded Alexei of something that caught in the corner of his mind.

“That was Babushka’s. It was where she slept.”

“Is she sleeping there still?” Alexei had a vision of Lenin’s Tomb — but with a desiccated old woman in the place of the perfectly preserved corpse of Vladimir Lenin.

“Really now.” Alexei circled the strange container, looking for a way in. It didn’t take long. On the opposite side, he saw a round hatch — like a submarine hatch, complete with a small iron wheel in its centre. The wheel had been painted a deep violet. It sparkled with tiny foil stars — the kind teachers used to congratulate a student for work well done.

“What an interesting — museum — you have here,” he said, and gave the wheel a spin. It turned easily, with the tick-tock sound of a clock. As it slowed, it became more like a roulette wheel. When it stopped, the hatch swung open a hair’s breadth.

Darya stood open-mouthed — genuinely alarmed.

“Wha — ” she began.

Alexei looked at her.

“What is that smell?”

What smell
? thought Alexei. He was about to say it. Dismiss little Darya’s observation. But something was changed. He cocked his head — listening.

“I don’t know about the smell,” he said. “But do you hear?”

“Hear what?”

“Nothing. That’s the thing,” said Alexei. “No music. Mr. Rebroff has left us.”

The opening to the Babushka’s vessel yawned at them. Alexei tentatively leaned toward it and sniffed. He looked back at Darya, who was holding her nose now. He sniffed again. The air was cool, and stale as you might expect from a sarcophagus that had apparently been sealed up for a decade or so. But whatever odour had Darya clutching her face was undetectable to Alexei. He squinted to look inside.

“Why — why did you do that?” Darya’s voice had taken a pleading, whining tone.

“I don’t know,” said Alexei shortly. “I don’t know why I do a lot of things.” He stuck his head into the opening, tried to see around in the darkness. “Who is Babushka?” The question echoed, edging the words with iron. “She is the lady of scents, hmm? Now tell me: what was she doing with this — thing? Out with it, Darya.”

“Lena.”

“What?” The vessel was making Darya’s voice sound strange too. It sounded tinny, as though travelling through a cheap radio speaker. At least she’d stopped whining.

“Babushka is Lena.”

“I see. And who is Lena?”

“Dead.”

Alexei reached inside, ran his hand over the interior surface. It wasn’t metal in here. It felt like ceramic. It was cold as a sheet of ice. “That’s not an answer,” he said.

“It will have to do.”

Alexei frowned. The voice really didn’t sound like young Darya’s. It was, he realized, too deep. Not mannishly deep. But old. Very old.

Alexei took a breath, and looked behind him. Darya had stepped away — she was back behind the dressmaker’s dummy, arms crossed, fingers tapping on her elbows — looking anywhere but back at Alexei.

He turned back into the chamber.

“All right,” he said. “You didn’t answer my second question: What’s this thing for?”

“Butterflies.”

“Butterflies.” Alexei frowned. “Caterpillars into butterflies?” he ventured. “A cocoon? Like that?”

“It will have to do.”

Ah
. That was why the voice sounded so strange. He wasn’t hearing it with his ears; it was as when Vladimir spoke to him. He heard it in his head.

“You are no fool, Alexei Kilodovich.”

I don’t know about that
, thought Alexei.

“No, it is true. There is something about you, little man.”

Ha
.

“Your mockery is insincere. Because you know it to be true. You know your true nature is other than it seems. What, I wonder, is it?”

I have been puzzling this for months. So don’t ask me
.

“You have certainly had a difficult day. Someone tried to kill you.”

Are you watching me all the time
?

“No. No. Not yet. But do you wonder — why would anyone want to kill you? What is in you?”

I don’t know
.

“I think you know. Something in you is refusing to accept, hmm?”

If you say
.

“Well. Whatever it is — I am sure old Fyodor buried it there for a reason. Best not pry — hmm?”

Why would Fyodor bury anything
?

“You tell me. Or maybe — maybe Fyodor could tell me himself. Are you in there, my love?”

The Babushka’s tone was making Alexei uncomfortable. It was time to change the subject.

Why do they call you Babushka
?

“Because I am an ugly old woman. I am the elder. I am sorry — I
was
the elder. The one who made this place. But Babushka is gone now too. I am just I.”

The elder? Elder what
?

Alexei waited.

“The elder what?” he repeated, aloud. “What?”

“What?” Alexei turned around.

Darya was back. She looked at him strangely. “You should take your head out of there,” she said. “It’s Babushka’s.”

“My head?”

Darya laughed. “The tank,” she said. “But also your head — soon enough.”

Alexei turned and leaned against the tank. “What do you mean by that?”

“At the dance,” said Darya. “We’ll all lose our heads to Babushka.”

“I think,” said Alexei slowly, “I may have just been speaking with her.”

“How fortunate for you.” Darya gave him a sceptical look. “Maybe you will lose your head to her sooner. That is why I thought you might like to — ”

Alexei raised his hand. “Right. I am flattered, Darya. But no thank you. It would be a distraction.”

“You’re the sort of fellow who never does anything, aren’t you? You never take any risks — and you
hate
distractions.” She looked at him, and Alexei shrugged. “I’m right about that. Like Papa says — I’m getting the sight. Well, Mr. Killer — that kind of thinking can’t get you very far in your line of work — now can it?”

Alexei opened his mouth. He didn’t know what to say to that, and was rescued by the sound of the door opening. He closed his mouth and put his hand on the butt of his gun.

“Oh shit,” breathed Darya as a tall, balding man in an overcoat stepped in. He looked around with small, hard eyes. Three others — a man, and two women — jostled in behind him. By the sounds of things, more were waiting to come through outside. “Papa.”

“Papa?” said Alexei.

“Hide!” she hissed. “We’re not supposed to be here. He’ll kill us!”

“Pilgrims!” shouted Darya’s killer father, when the crowd of them had come in. “Welcome to the New Pokrovskoye Museum of Family History! This place has been here as long as we have — and yet like our family here, it grows month by month.” He repeated himself in French, and once more in Russian.

The crowd nodded at various times. By the time they were all inside, Alexei counted at least thirty. They shuffled down the steps and gawked at the treasure like retirees on a bus tour. But it wasn’t just retirees. Old men and women tottered alongside athletes who couldn’t have been older than twenty. A fat man with greased-back blond hair and a sweaty blue T-shirt was pointing out the intricacies of a glass-domed clock to a young red-haired beauty in a dark blue denim jacket. Two angular black-haired men, so similar to one another they might have been twins, wandered toward the eggs. One of them wore the black and white collar of a clergyman. His brother just wore shorts and a T-shirt, and a dumb, happy grin. Of them all, just one — a short, swarthy man who lingered near the door, glancing over his shoulder like he was expecting someone to check for his ticket — didn’t appear to be having the time of his life.

Alexei pulled back behind the curtain, and whispered to Darya: “We can’t stay here. We’ll turn up.”

“Papa will kill us!”

“Really? Like — ” Alexei drew his finger across his throat and raised his eyebrows in a question. Darya shrugged.

“That’s what he used to do,” she said matter-of-factly.

Alexei looked back — this time paying closer attention to Darya’s dad. He had to admit, it was possible. The old man moved in and around the displays with the ease of a jungle cat, his tiny cool eyes unblinking. He wasn’t a young man — what was left of his hair was bone white, and his face was a map of wrinkles — but Alexei didn’t think there was anything but bone and muscle underneath that coat. He appended the thought: bone, muscle, and a small arsenal of assassin’s tools.

Alexei shook his head. That was silly. He was just an old guy who owned a general store, and was right now explaining about the significance of the samovars — which nobleman had made his tea in which of the little tanks, at around about what time period.

“I look at you and I can see — now you wonder,” said Darya’s father, “how this is Family history and not merely a store of antiquities? Tell us, Orlovsky. Are we all descended from the Czars? The cousins of little Anastasia, who fled the Bolsheviks’ bullets? Is this our heritage?”

Darya’s father smiled sadly. He shook his head. “No,” he said. “We are ordinary folk in this room. Our grandparents were more likely to be peasants than kings. They did not, in all likelihood, even know one another in their times. And yet — this is your heritage. It will become your heritage.”

As he spoke, Darya’s father walked over to the case of eggs. Alexei pulled back from the curtain, crawled around to the other side of the space there, and peered out through another crack.

“Your treasure,” he said. “For there are others, who dream us. These ones — these ones are the true Family. Descended from the Holy Man Grigor Rasputin, yes?” Darya’s father’s laugh was a cold razor in his throat. “He who healed the Romanovs and foretold the future — who dreamed and saw the world through God’s eye. And yes — He who spread his seed through the country, to make the Family.

“Rasputin’s bastards, they called them! They have dwelt in our dreams and guided our lives. They are as angels to us. And tonight — ”

His grin was wide as he spread his arms.

“ — tonight, they give you this!”

Alexei scanned across the faces of the old man’s audience. There was not a hint of skepticism in the room; not even rolling eyes at the rich, carnival barker’s hyperbole that Darya’s father was spewing. They just watched him, nodding, and followed the sweep of his hands as he guided them to look upon the scimitars and the clocks and the china, that according to Darya the Koldun Vasili Borovich had brought here on ships many years ago.

“It will begin very soon,” said Darya’s father quietly. “You will hear the song, and then there are the smells, and in a joyful exodus, you will visit Paradise.”

Members of the group looked at one another with broad grins, nodding in agreement. The uncomfortable little man by the door joined in — nodding and grinning even more forcefully than the rest as he moved down the steps, and around a display case outside Alexei’s field of view.

“Soon,” said Darya’s father. “For now — marvel at the treasures of the New Pokrovskoye Museum of Family History. Marvel, children. And savour. For you will remember them, yes? And with them — construct your paradise together. Savour.”

Alexei felt a hand on his thigh. Darya leaned close and whispered in his ear: “Savour me.”

Alexei looked at her, and glanced above — where the Babushka’s great egg loomed, like a terrible cloud. He thought he could hear a clicking sound — a bonging, as if a great thing shifted in there.

“I don’t think — ” he whispered, but she interrupted him:

“Savour me, or I’ll scream.”

Alexei looked at her.

“You won’t scream. Your Papa would kill us both.”

She sighed. “I thought we had a date,” she whispered.

“Pretty exciting date already.”

“Alexei.” Darya shifted so her flank pressed against his. He felt her hip against him. “Please. Just hold me if you don’t want me. I want to feel a touch. Before — ”

Alexei put his hand on her shoulder. It was clammy with fear sweat. “Before what? Rapture?” he whispered.

“
Rapture
.” She uttered it as a curse. “Yes. Before
that
particular wonder.” She looked at him pleadingly. “I am young, Alexei. I don’t want to vanish like the others.”

Alexei nodded. “All right,” he said, stroking her hair. “All right.”

The lighthouse’s aerie was day’s last refuge in New Pokrovskoye. Golden sunlight would catch there before nightfall — and thus trapped, would flit like a moth about the complicated rigging of reflectors and lamps to send phantoms of illumination cascading down to the dark pit of the lighthouse’s base. To the eyes of Holden Gibson, it made the great round room look a bit like a disco.

There were all of ten eyes of his inside the lighthouse. Eight of them were able to focus well enough to be of use. The remaining two were blurry and bloodshot and sore, set into a skull still hammering from the effects of a half a bottle of mid-priced vodka, poured down the attached throat and absorbed through the walls of the acid-drenched stomach a foot and a half below.

The other eight eyes were in much better shape. They were able to assess the situation of eyes nine and ten promptly — drunk, crusted in puke and wallowing in piss, and tied rather too efficiently to a wooden chair in the middle of the room.

Holden Gibson had ten eyes, and those ten eyes had ten hands. Eight of them were useful. He set hands one and two to work undoing the knots around the ankles — then made sure hands three and four held the chair in place. Five and six he set to work on the wrist restraints. And with all the other work taken care of, hands seven and eight he sent to the door, to keep watch — just in case that Russian secret agent fucker Alexei had not in fact run off with Holden Gibson’s gun, but was waiting in the shadows, for Holden Gibson to drop his guard again.