Rasputin's Bastards (46 page)

“Shit,” continued Montassini. “Everything makes so much fuckin’ sense. We are fuckin’ soulmates, pal. Fuckin’ soul — ”

But he didn’t have opportunity to finish, before Alexei reached around and swung the hatch cover closed on Leo Montassini’s gun hand. The handgun clattered to the floor, and Alexei Kilodovich’s soulmate howled like a dog.

The Rapture was beginning.

New Pokrovskoye had been building to it for weeks — its children flowing to it from the corners of the continent, in buses and trains and cars and finally boats. Welders, bankers, professors at universities; or as often, quiet and solitary men and women who slept in basement apartments and worked their days in strategically placed gas stations or convenience stores. Men who knew how to fix aircraft, or fly them. Women who bore the children of politicians and businessmen and bureaucrats. An astronaut. Three chefs. Dozens, who had fallen on hard times and lived on the streets.

Fifteen were too ill to properly travel. But when the Babushka’s call went out and entered their minds — when it tickled the tiny parts of their brains that registered smells, and pleasure, and comfort — the sick ones climbed out of their beds and made their way to the rendezvous points, along with the rest. They basked in the immediate community of family as they sat in the backs of buses, humming along with the old songs, reintegrating their memories of truth with the lies that their lives had become.

At Cloridorme, they had loaded onto the boats that were gathered for this purpose. They stood at the gunwales, holding the hands of the ones next to them like old lovers, watching as the land receded — the mists of the sea enveloped them. They hummed and sang and sniffed at their memories — at the tantalizing hope of truth, once and for all — until the coastline reappeared, and the anomaly of this place — of New Pokrovskoye — surrounded them with the unfamiliar comfort of its harbour. The sleepers gathered there in rooms and beds — doing good work in the fishery and the greenhouse during the day, humming and thinking and waiting, for the moment they might truly awaken.

It was not only sleepers that came to New Pokrovskoye for the Rapture. The call went out to all of the family, twisting in a great, expanding mist. To the more senior members — the ones who dreamed — there was no need for the crude manipulation of smell. It was a simple shout:
Join in me
.

Join in me
. It did not, precisely, appeal to reason — but perhaps reason’s near cousin. To those who had hidden fearful as witches these many years in the darker corners of the world, alone but for their own small network of sleepers, the call offered a kind of hope that they had never allowed themselves to feel. Though they might not have known the voice of the caller by name, they knew her in their hearts. For she was their Babushka — one of the elders who had made them.

And she was something else too. Something that they all intuited was greater. For waiting as they did in dark places, feeding off the wealth of their networks, these ones all were haunted by the sense that perhaps something greater might come of them; that such abilities as they had could not simply be a mutation, a trick of the brain. The light they saw at seven thousand feet could not just be the sun. It had to be more. It had to be heaven.

Or else their life is meaningless
, said Fyodor Kolyokov.
Who can bear that
?

Heather clutched her torn fingernail in her fist, as though pressing it back down could reunite it with the quick. She stood in the lighthouse’s aerie, looking down at the village of New Pokrovskoye. It was lit up like a carnival tonight; strings of white lights drew along its laneways like a spiderweb after a rainfall, winding and radiating out from the middle of the harbour. That fucking song was back again. But this time, it wasn’t the scratchy old recording — it was a chorus sung by a thousand voices, as they moved through the brightly lit streets to their convergence.

“Meaning is overrated,” she said — subvocalizing like he’d told her to when she spoke.

Her zombie pal laughed.
I
do
like you
, he said, in that freaky in-your-head way he had of talking. Back at the Transcendental Meditation Camp, as they stood over the array of steaming body parts that had been Hippie Pete and watched the world there begin to fade, he had warned her it would be a little strange at first, the two of them sharing one skull. She would hear him as an echo through her bones.

It was a creepy feeling. But creepy as it was, it was not half as bad as losing herself to Holden Gibson or John Kaye or whoever the fuck the old man she’d spent her life with was. She thought it might even be less creepy than taking part in this dance — this Rapture thing — that all these other loser sleepers were falling into now. It was also, she admitted, nice to be able to stay in her body without concentrating on her old Hippie Pete mantra.

“So was Holden Gibson — John Kaye — whoever. Was he coming
here
for meaning?”

As for him
, said the zombie Kolyokov,
I don’t know. The last time I saw him was more than forty years ago. At City 512 — at the place where we used to work. I wouldn’t have thought there was enough left of him to walk a straight line. We did quite a job
.

“You sound proud of yourself.”

Not proud
. She felt the zombie move behind her eyes, a restless foetus.
Merely puzzled. We have to find out more about John Kaye. Maybe when we find Alexei, he will be able to help. Hey. What is that music?

“What?” Heather listened. She made a face. “Fuck if I know. Something about Natascha?”

I recognize it. Hum
.

Heather leaned against the thick glass of the aerie. She squinted, at what she was sure was an optical illusion. The lights below seemed to be swirling — rising, as though they were attached to a great net that something high and huge was pulling out of water.

“I don’t know what help
Alexei’s
going to be,” said Heather, subvocalizing through gritted teeth. “Stupid bastard couldn’t even manage a clean killing.”

Ivan Rebroff
.

“What?”

Ivan Rebroff. The guy singing. Hah. Trite folk songs. She
would
be a fan of his
.

“Who would be?”

Kolyokov didn’t answer. So Heather stood there with her quiet zombie — watching the lights of the village rise up past her, and illuminate the belly of a great, dark cloud that she could have sworn had not been there a moment ago.

“What the fuck is that thing?” she said. Little flashes of lightning illuminated the cloud’s broad underside. Thunder rumbled like laughter.

It is a metaphor
, said Fyodor,
of Her
.

When the hatch opened again, and his eyes adjusted to the bright light, Leo Montassini found he was looking down the barrel of a Glock semiautomatic handgun. It was accompanied by an open hand, fingers wiggling impatiently.

“You have another weapon?”

Montassini reached into his boot and pulled out a knife. The hand took it, and flung it away. It clattered on the floorboards somewhere near the samovars.

“You may come out.” The gun backed away. Montassini blinked and let his eyes focus on the man who held them:

Alex Kilodovich. Well fuck me blue
.

He was a big guy — bigger than Montassini had been led to expect. And fuck but he looked like he could take care of himself. He had that kind of hardness about him that all guys in the profession had at one time. And he had the stare. The one that said he’d taken stock of all of the goodness and mercy in his soul — everything that was right — and locked it up somewhere safe. Leo wasn’t exactly afraid of him — but he was wise enough to respect him, and respect the fact that he had a gun pointed at Leo’s chest. Leo kept eye contact and started to crawl out of the hatch. He winced.

“Your hand okay?” said Kilodovich.

“Nothing broken,” said Montassini. “Little sore though.”

“Sorry.”

“Hey — I was pointin’ a gun at you then I let my guard down. I’d have done the same thing in your shoes.”

“You are a forgiving soul.” Kilodovich reached into his waistband and pulled Montassini’s gun out. He pointed it at Montassini’s chest too.

“Yeah, whatever.” Montassini stretched in front of the UFO. He felt his joints cracking. Kilodovich backed away, holding both guns up.

He frowned. “Mr. Bucci . . . You said he was the man who sent you?”

“Yeah.”

“Bucci. Hah. Where have I heard that name before? Wait.
Gepetto
Bucci?”

“Yeah,” said Montassini, “
that
Bucci.”

Kilodovich raised his eyebrows and tilted his head. “Hmm.” He backed up, and motioned Montassini over to the steps. “Why would the Italian Mafia be looking for me, now?”

Montassini shrugged. “A favour,” he said.

Kilodovich put Montassini’s gun into his waistband and scratched his stomach with his free hand. His own gun he kept trained on Montassini’s stomach. “A favour for who?”

“Some fuckin’ Turk he does business with. Amar he calls him.”

Now Kilodovich lowered the second gun. If Montassini had wanted to, he probably could have jumped him — grabbed the gun back — and had him face down on the floor. Kilodovich’s mouth opened and closed, and he stared at the floor. That look in his eye dissolved, and for a moment his face held the innocence of a child. Montassini knew he could have taken him now — but fuck. They were soulmates, he and Alexei Kilodovich. You don’t fuck with your soulmate.

“Amar . . .” Alexei snapped his fingers. “Amar Shadak!”

“Yeah — that sounds right. Amar Shadak. Turkish guy. Part owner of a camping store that the boss bought off two old Russians back in — ”

But Kilodovich wasn’t listening. He was getting that faraway look that had become very familiar to Montassini, since he’d come back to the Emissary Hotel, met that killer maid and started on this insane road trip to hell. Kilodovich was in — what was the word the tour guide had used?

He was in —

Rope?

Rupture?

Montassini snapped his fingers. Oh yeah. That was it.

“Rapture.”

Montassini took Alexei by the arm and led him to the door. “It’s going to be all right, pal,” he said, and reached for the gun in Alexei’s hand. “Just give me that.”

Alexei looked at him for a moment — and for just a moment, it seemed as though Montassini could see eternity in Alexei’s eyes. Like he’d opened up that safe place he put himself, and something older — bigger — had come up.

And then the look passed, and Alexei blinked — and grinned for an instant like a newborn.

“Give me that,” said Montassini.

Slowly, as though in a dream, Alexei shook his head. “I keep the gun,” he whispered in another voice, one still not his own. “And Alexei is all right now. No Rapture for him.”

Montassini cracked open the door and peered outside. The tour group was long gone — but he could hear them. He could hear a thousand of them, humming some song down by the harbour.

“So all right,” said Montassini, “what do we do now?”

“Rescue me.”

Darya Orlovsky spun and reeled in the perfect winter’s light, long braids of dark hair trailing over her shoulders like lariats. Her eyes were fixed on a place in her dreams: the City of New Pokrovskoye, the greatest port in the Empire. Snow fell like flakes of gold in a winter afternoon. Godly white horses that pranced in front of a sledge bearing lovers snuggled in thick grey furs. The girl laughed, and spun, and thought to herself with desperate joy:

Bullshit. Bullshit metaphor
.

She whirled then, prancing down a long flight of stone steps to the Square. Her father was there — playing an accordion festooned with jewels, in the midst of a circle of girls who danced as though with one mind. His teeth flashed beneath his thick moustache. His eye twinkled. “Darya!” He called. “My little petrushka! Join the dance!”

“Papa,” she called happily. But that is not what she thought.

She thought:
Killer
.

A cold, soul-dead killer who came north with a baby daughter and wife in tow; who took hands that had stabbed and strangled and squeezed triggers and brought them to a fishing village — washed them clean in brine of ocean and blood of cod. And now whose hands played over the
keyboard
of the accordion, making it sing a song that no one could resist.

Darya lifted her skirts and spun back the way she’d come, up the stairs and away from the square. As she turned, she looked over the rooftops of this place. They were high-peaked, shingled in fine slate pulled from quarries at the Empire’s southern mountains. They overhung houses and apartments and in the distance, a long low palace surrounded by gardens where the
Tsarina
, the Babushka held court in the summertime but now —

Now is summertime
, she thought.

And then she thought:
How did I know this
?

And then she whirled again along a broad platform on the edge of the cliffs that surrounded New Pokrovskoye — and she beheld the fountains and the Parliament House and the port, and the great curtain wall where in direr ages there patrolled the Tsar’s guard. Now, the people of New Pokrovskoye danced along it, moving in a great human wave in the afternoon light — praising —

— praising —

Darya spun and turned and felt her knees buckle. And for a moment, she stopped dancing.

The world grew dimmer then and the snow faded, and for a moment she blinked, for the light had vanished. And she thought about the man who’d taken her in the Museum of Family History. She remembered the touch of his hand on her bare thigh and the feeling of his lips as they brushed her mouth, the scraping of his tongue against her teeth, and as she did she blinked again.

She was standing in a crowd, in the darkness of the true New Pokrovskoye, near the pier where her father tied up his boat. The crowd was swaying back and forth and humming, and she felt a touch at her shoulder and she turned — in time to see two figures, the only two who did not seem to be keeping a rhythm. Darya took a breath. For one of them —