Red Devil (Dangerous Spirits) (13 page)

Chapter 15

Alexei did not dream of Konstantin that night, and he woke Sunday with his sense of accomplishment dominating the lingering unease. He had his date, and he didn’t need the old fox and his “soldier’s passion” now. Maybe the ghost would go away, disgusted, and leave Alexei alone. That would be just fine.

Sol came out while Alexei was eating cereal and got himself a bowl, but didn’t say anything. His flat ears and curled tail would normally prompt Alexei to ask him what was wrong, but the fox had a pretty good idea, so he kept quiet as well.

Then Meg opened her door and stood there, yawning, while Sol poured his milk. “So,” she said, “let’s hear it. How did the night go?”

“Alexei was pretty hardcore,” Sol said. “He showed up Kendall twice on the dance machine.”

“Three times,” Alexei said.

“He went off in a huff and Alexei got to talk to Mike.”

“I asked him on a date,” Alexei said, sitting up and lifting his muzzle proudly.

Meg raised her eyebrows. “And he said…?”

“Yes, of course.” Alexei grinned.

Sol squinted at the fox. “You were getting kind of belligerent at the game, too. And then you had a drink.”

“Just a swallow of Mike’s. It calmed me down,” Alexei said, and then nodded to Meg. “Your Red Devil was better. Too much sweet in theirs.”

“Grenadine? The cherry flavor?” Alexei nodded. Meg yawned again, her piercings glittering in the light, and smiled smugly. “Maybe I should apply to be a bartender.”

Sol crunched down a mouthful of Corn Flakes and swallowed. “Seriously, though, what got into you? You were bitchy at me, too.”

Meg walked up and sat down while Alexei was chewing, composing his answer. “What’cha mean?” She looked back and forth from wolf to fox.

“It is nothing,” Alexei said. “I decided I was tired of putting up with Kendall.”

He avoided Meg’s gaze as Sol went on. “He was being all up in Kendall’s face. Like when they first picked music to dance, he called him a loser right there. I mean, you know Kendall—well, no, you don’t. But he’s all about…” Sol waved his paws. “Kendall’s one of those guys who wants everyone to like him and think he’s awesome. And he’s okay if you don’t like him as long as you still think he’s awesome.”

“He is not awesome,” Alexei said.

“No, but…well, he’s a pretty good goalie,” Sol said. “And he knows a lot of stuff. Hey,” he said, when Alexei glared at him, “I mean, I know he’s obnoxious, but he was really opening up last night. We talked about going on this march to Potomac.”

Meg leaned forward, her rings clinking as she set her muzzle on her paws. “So let me get this straight. Alexei was getting all confident and belligerent.”

To disrupt the conversation, Alexei asked, “What is belligerent?” though he was pretty sure he knew.

Sol and Meg both explained it while he finished his cereal, and then he said, “I was not so belligerent.”

“I never saw you act like that before,” Sol said.

“I decided I wanted a date with Mike,” Alexei said. He still didn’t look at Meg.

“Uh-huh.”

She let the words hang there, but still he kept his muzzle turned away from her, toward Sol. “Shall we go to the park and practice today?”

The wolf’s ears remained partly down. “I guess,” he said. “Weather looks good if we go early. Supposed to be nasty by the end of the day.”

They walked down the street, tossing the soccer ball back and forth until they got to the park, and they did not talk much, both lost in their own thoughts. Three cubs from the block were already there, playing with their own ball, so Sol and Alexei kicked around with them for a while. Only when Alexei took out his phone to check the time did he realize he had never turned it back on after the previous night.

A few moments after he replaced it in his pocket, it chimed. He ignored it until they were done practicing and then took it out as Sol was talking to the cubs. Sol was better at that than Alexei was, because inevitably the cubs asked where they played, and Sol had to talk very delicately about the VLGA. The wolf stayed away from specifics, telling the cubs about “a group of my friends,” as Alexei looked at the number that had called him.

It was an international number, from Siberia, but it wasn’t his parents’ number. His heart raced. He glanced at Sol, held up his phone, and called up the message.

“
Hello, Alexei
,” his sister’s voice said, in Siberian.

He froze. For a moment, the brightness of the day flooded his eyes with white, and he smelled the rotting wood of the bedroom wall he’d talked to his sister through. He said, “Caterina?” before remembering it was just a voicemail.

“
I am on a public phone. I stole ten rubles from Papa. I don’t know how long that will let me talk. I wrote you another letter today, but before I could give it to Kisha, the phone rang in our house. Papa answered and it was the fox from Vdansk, asking after me. Papa yelled at him and then locked me in my room.

“
I had stolen the money to go to Vdansk later, but I had to call you, so I jumped out the window. I didn’t hurt myself much. I landed on my ankle badly, but I can walk on it. It’s like the time I fell out of the tree. Lexi, I will not go to Vdansk today because the next time I go, it must be to leave forever. So I will take Papa’s punishment when I come back and I will go fish again, but I needed to ask you this favor first. Please, if you can reach this corsac fox and tell him not to call, but ask him to meet me in the same café in Vdansk. If he tells you when he will be there, I will make sure to go there and meet him, if I have to smash all the windows in our house to go. I know that we are meant to respect our ancestors, but also our ancestors are meant to protect us, and if Mama and Papa will not protect me, then I must leave and protect myself. I think Prababushka would want me to go.

“
The fox’s name is Bogdan Chichikov and I do not have a phone for him. But he is on leave from the civil service and he lives in Moskva. It is an unusual name and I think he should be easy to find so please, please, Lexi, find him for me and I will come join you. Love you so much.
”

The phone clicked and then a smooth mechanical voice said, “End of message.”

“Hey,” Sol said behind him. “Hey, you ready to go?”

Alexei stared down at his phone. Sol stood a short distance from him, arms folded. “Was that Mike?”

“No,” Alexei said. “My sister.”

The wolf took a step closer, his shoulder brushing Alexei’s. “Oh. Is she okay?”

Alexei curled his tail around his leg and lowered his ears. “She twisted her ankle.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad.” Sol squinted ahead at the street. “Come on, the light’s green.”

He tossed Alexei the soccer ball, but Alexei, when he caught it, did not toss it back. “Come on,” Sol said as they hurried across the scorching asphalt through exhaust fumes to the other side of the street. “I’ll buy you a Coke.”

Sol ascribed to the Vidalia custom of using “Coke” to refer to any fizzy Coca-Cola product, and often not even that brand. Alexei was used to Coke being inflexibly associated with red and white, and sweet cold carbonated cola with a distinctive bite, so he had gotten used to specifying to Sol that he wanted an actual Coca-Cola. But he was distracted by his sister’s call, and Sol didn’t ask, so this time Alexei got a Pepsi because that’s what the newsstand had in the cooler.

The over-sweet soda did at least stop him panting quite so much. Sol chatted about the pieces of Niki’s story he was going to write that evening, his tail swishing more freely than it had earlier, but Alexei only half-listened, his thoughts chasing each other around his head. He panted in the muggy heat, the air full of automobile fumes and people and the cool, delicate scent of the trees as they walked beneath them. It felt crowded and alive, and Alexei liked that he could move through it undisturbed when he wanted to, sometimes jostling people talking on cell phones and to each other, and though his ears caught all those conversations, he didn’t parse the words. Midland was larger than Samorodka; Vidalia was larger by at least two orders of magnitude, a city that Alexei had at first been afraid of getting lost in. But he had started from his apartment, added the parks and the VLGA and his workplace and his co-workers, and now he could tune out the noises and smells and flashes of different fur and walk confidently down a street, knowing that he had a home and a job and that he belonged here.

On this walk, he focused on plans to find this Bogdan…Chichikov? Shchichikov? The word blurred in his memory; he would have to listen to the message again. Learning the name did not make him feel more confident in the fox, but it didn’t matter; Chichikov or Shchichikov would not throw bottles at Caterina, would not constantly belittle her and think of her as good for nothing but marrying, and so Alexei was determined to find him.

The beaver who’d processed his exchange program would be a good place to start. But Rozalina wouldn’t be in her office until Monday morning, Moskva time, which would be…Alexei tried to work out the numbers in his head. Something like midnight here. He could stay up and call, if he did some research while Sol was writing.

So in the afternoon, he told Meg he would help her with dinner, and then spent an hour looking up Bogdan Chichikov online, with no success. He looked through forums to find various branches of the civil service in Moskva, but there were a dozen agencies that might qualify, and a thousand jobs, and though there were three Chichikovs, none of them even had the first initial B. Siberia had not yet reached a point where everything was copied online, and it was entirely possible that this Chichikov, who had to be moderately well-placed to have a son in the exchange program, was just low enough to be ignored online.

There would be nothing more he could do without calling, and nobody in Moskva would be around on what was their Sunday night. So Alexei helped Meg prepare some kind of fish she had gotten from the market. “You actually left the apartment?” he said.

She slapped him. “I go out plenty.”

“You are always here. Where do you go?”

“The market.” She waved at the window. “Couple shops out that way.”

“Riverwalk?” He knew of no other shops in easy walking distance.

“Somewhere with fish and lemons.” She pulled three bright yellow fruits from her bag and set them on the counter, their knobbly forms wobbling across the formica.

Alexei unwrapped the fish and drew a claw across the bluish-grey skin that glistened under the kitchen lights. The sight was both familiar and unfamiliar; the fish he’d caught for years in Samorodka were longer and thinner, their fins differently placed and shaped. And none of them, in the fifteen years he’d fished, had had skin this healthy. “I can clean this fish. I have practice.”

“Really? I hate cleaning fish.”

Alexei did, too, but not when he was offering to do it and it made him feel like part of a family. He brought the fish to the dining room table and allowed his paws to do the automatic work while he thought again about Cat and what else he could do.

He could call his parents. He could make them let Cat go—but no, they would never listen to him. He reviewed the names of his school friends, anyone he could talk into helping Cat, but the names had faded after a year, and he could only think of one, a hare, who might still remember him well enough to be willing to help.

“Wow,” Meg said. “You did that fast.”

Alexei had hardly realized that he’d finished. “I told you,” he said. “Practice.” He scooped the skin, bones, and organs into the garbage.

The fish was delicious, fresher than most Meg had brought home, but it disappeared quickly, and for Alexei, dinner passed in a blur of thoughts of Mike and Cat and Konstantin. Sol had to ask him twice what his plans for Monday night were. Tuesday, of course, was their regular practice, and Wednesday was the game, the one where the Peaches would be watching him.

“I don’t know,” Alexei said. “I have to look at some things for my sister.”

“For her ankle?”

He shook his head impatiently. “She is trying to escape Samorodka—Siberia.”

“Oh.” Sol leaned forward over his empty plate. “I thought she couldn’t call you any more.”

“She cannot. She stole money to make a public phone—to use a public phone.”

“Good Christ,” Meg said. “Don’t cubs in Siberia have cell phones?”

“No.” Alexei wiped his paws on his napkin and set it back on the table. “No, not in Samorodka. Moskva, yes, perhaps. We heard stories from the people there. Some probably were not true. But no, my sister and I used one phone, in our parents’ house.”

“How did you survive? Did your parents—” Meg started.

Alexei pushed his chair back and got up. “I am sorry,” he said. “Thank you for dinner. I need to look on the Internet for Cat.”

Meg offered to wash up, so he left his plate and silverware in the soapy water in the sink and retreated into his room.

Though he couldn’t think of anywhere else to look online, he returned to the Moskva civil service sites, sitting at the desk until Sol came back in, then ceding the desk to the wolf and sitting cross-legged on his bed with his back to the wall and his tail beneath the laptop on his knees. When he’d gone through all the civil service sites, he looked at information on the exchange program. Then, because he kept looking over at the space on the wall where Niki’s picture had hung, he looked up the tsars and their guards. He couldn’t remember the name the fox had spoken in his dream, but when he called up images of the Semenovsky guards, he recognized the uniforms, the navy blue coats, red collars, and gold sashes.

The image of Konstantin in the video game came back to him. He found it difficult to look away from the pictures even as he read the descriptions of the elite non-tiger regiment assigned to protect the noble families and keep order in Petrograd, and later Moskva. None of the few names mentioned in the articles Alexei found matched Konstantin, or an adopted fox, and he had no idea what Konstantin’s last name might be. There was one picture of a guard, a stern-looking red fox, and every time Alexei’s eyes traveled away from the picture, he expected it to move. He had to copy the page’s text into another window and close the page before he could read it properly.