David Nickle - Rasputin's Bastards

Now, Lois stood in the shadows beneath the window, visible only by the faint ember of the cigarette she was smoking. The smoke curled over her head and joined the dust motes in the sunlight. Don’t let them catch me , she said. Whatever you do .

“Don’t worry,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu. Shh , said Lois, so Mrs. Kontos-Wu repeated: Don’t worry .

The footsteps were still coming up the stairs, but more slowly. Over the banister, Mrs. Kontos-Wu could see the pink curve of a bald man’s scalp — she could hear his own laboured breathing as he climbed.

In the shadows, Lois lit another cigarette. Lois took a brief puff, and gestured impatiently to Mrs. Kontos-Wu.

Well ?

The bald man’s eyes were well over the top of the banister by then, but he didn’t get a chance to see Lois or anything else before Mrs. Kontos-Wu was upon him.

“Jesus,” said Stephen a minute and a half later, “you look like hell.”

Most of the time, Stephen would have found something more diplomatic to say — but looking at Mrs. Kontos-Wu standing in the hallway, Stephen thought that if anything he’d understated the case. More than anything, she resembled a street person. The kind of street person who’d gone off their medication a month ago, been rolled for their coat and last bathed in an East River garbage scow’s wake. It was a long way from the sleek, predatory Wall Street maven she was programmed to play. Her long black hair was tangled like dry branches — her face was smudged with dirt and maybe blood — and the walking shorts and tank top she was wearing were grey and torn.

Her eyes were the deadest thing about her — they stared blankly at him and through him, hooded as they were beneath slightly swollen lids.

“Well, get inside,” said Stephen. He stood aside and beckoned. Mrs. Kontos-Wu nodded and stepped across the threshold. He shut the door behind her as she continued across the floor toward the suite’s modified bathroom.

“Hey!” said Stephen, following after her. “What’re you doing?”

“ I have to pee .”

“What?” Stephen frowned. She’d said it in Russian — idiomatic Russian, which so far as Stephen understood, Mrs. Kontos-Wu was not programmed to speak. And she was heading to the bathroom.

Where Kolyokov’s tank was set up.

Evil premonition lanced through Stephen.

Someone was dream-walking in Mrs. Kontos-Wu, and it wasn’t Kolyokov. Stephen had seen the master at work in Mrs. Kontos-Wu, and this dream-walker was an amateur by comparison.

It wasn’t Kolyokov. But she was going to see Kolyokov. And when she saw him, Stephen was sure, she was going to kill him.

Stephen launched himself across the room. He connected with Mrs. Kontos-Wu in the small of her back, and his momentum carried both of them into one of the armchairs flanking the bathroom entrance. Stephen locked his arms around her waist.

Mrs. Kontos-Wu shrieked. She twisted and bucked in his grip, but Stephen held tight. She managed to get hold of his left ear and twisted hard. The pain was incredible, but Stephen didn’t let go. He had, after all, been through this before. He’d been through worse than this, in fact — with his parents, no less, when he was eleven.

They were hosting a dinner party in Wisconsin when the call came. Stephen didn’t have any idea who it was at the time — although later, with Kolyokov’s help, he would learn that it was from a New York-based embassy official named Gregor Ivchyn. When Stephen caught up with him much later, the old ex-Commie had stutteringly explained he was doing the KGB equivalent of cleaning up his office on the way out.

Like shredding documents, da ?

At the time, all Stephen had known was that a shadow had drawn across his mother’s eyes as she handed the phone to his father, and when he took it he nodded and that same look fell upon him. What is it ? said Mrs. Stewart from the dining room. Is everything all right ? Dad strode across the room like a marching soldier and strangled her before she could say anything else. Mr. Stewart tried to stop him, but Mom brained him with the cast iron frying pan and he collapsed into the mashed potatoes. Their son, Ted — an athletic 13-year-old whom Stephen had developed something of a thing for — was upstairs in the bathroom at the time. The fact that he wasn’t in the room — and that Stephen had such an overpowering thing for him — was probably what saved Stephen’s life. Before his Dad had even released Mrs. Stewart’s neck, and his Mom had recovered her balance from the second fry-pan swing, Stephen was on the staircase. He burst into the bathroom, found Ted was just buckling his trousers, and somehow managed to convince him to follow him to the back bedroom where there was a window that opened and a small porch roof. Ted was halfway out the window when Stephen’s Mom appeared in the door, framed against the hall light. She held the pan like the weapon it had become.

But she dropped it as she saw Ted making his escape, and lunged across the room. Stephen’s Mom grabbed his foot with both hands and yanked hard. Stephen can still remember the cry that Ted let loose — a surprisingly girlish sob as his middle hit against the windowsill. Stephen’s Mom braced her foot against the wall beneath the window and prepared to yank again. But Stephen didn’t let her. He jumped on her back, pulling at the long, greying hair around her temples like reins on a horse, and digging his knees hard into her side. She shrieked and let go of Ted, who scrambled outside.

Mom! Stop it ! Stephen screamed, but Mom wouldn’t. She threw herself backwards so hard he could hear plaster sprinkling loose from the ceiling below them. Stephen let go, the wind knocked out of him, and as he lay there gasping his Mom rolled over and got to her knees. She straddled him, and placed her left hand over his mouth. Without so much as blinking — so much as blinking! — she pinched his nose shut with her right hand. Stephen could feel his lungs closing off and his breathing diminish almost immediately.

He would have died but for Ted, who shouted through tears: Hey! Stop it, Mrs. Haber! Where’s my Mom! MOM ! Stephen’s Mom let her only son go to finish the job on his best friend — and Stephen took the only chance he had. He grabbed the frying pan from where it had fallen and swung it the same way he’d seen his Mom swing it at Mr. Stewart. He wasn’t tall enough to have the same devastating effect — he just managed to reach the middle of her back — but it sent her to the floor twitching if not dead. Stephen yelled at Ted to run and call the police before heading out the window — followed by the pounding footsteps of his father running up the stairs.

When the police got there, they found four corpses. Which, as Ivchyn explained later, had all been according to their programming. A catastrophic termination was how he put it. Like the paper shredder, da? Ivchyn had smiled — still not understanding the depths of his predicament so far as Stephen was concerned. I am glad they did not finish you too, boy. You are a treasure of the state — a true treasure . And then his eyes had widened, and taken a quite sinister cast. He leaned forward, and spoke the words:

Baba Yaga. Manka. Vasilissa.

The old man had thought those words would shut Stephen’s own programming down — make him docile, knock any thoughts of murder from his mind; and then make him pliant to whatever new programming Ivchyn wanted to install. Baba Yaga. Manka. Vasilissa. That’s what the words were for: every sleeper in the Komitet could be switched off, their programming accessed with the little mnemonic. Had Stephen known the words the night of his parents’ death, everyone would have been spared a lot of grief. Of course, at the time they would have had a similar effect on him — his parents had been programming him since he was old enough to see straight.