David Nickle - Rasputin's Bastards

Richard glanced up sheepishly, saw Stephen staring and looked away again as quickly. He started to fiddle with something before the countertop.

What a fucking write-off , thought Stephen.

As he thought it, an image came into his mind: of Richard fiddling below the countertop for a moment longer, looking back at him, and raising a small automatic pistol with a silencer on the end. He aims it carefully, one eye shut while the other sights along the barrel, and pulls the trigger three times. The bullets hit Stephen in a small triangle over his heart, and Stephen slumps over dead — before he’s been able to even process the fact that poor stupid Richard knows how to put a silencer on a gun, never mind shoot him with it.

In such a scenario, Stephen’s contempt for Richard would work against him. Richard could take him out in a second, and Stephen, in his utter confidence that Richard couldn’t even wipe his own ass without help, would be defenceless.

In the same way that Amar Shadak would be without defence, if Stephen ever took the right kind of initiative.

“Si-ir?”

Stephen set down his cigarette and looked back at Richard.

“Mi-issus Kontos-Wu is ready for you,” Richard said.

Stephen smiled. “Thank you, Richard.” Stephen stood up and stretched so his back cracked. “You’ve been a big help today.”

“Here goes,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu when Stephen returned from his smoke break.

“Shadak first heard about the children through a lawyer friend of his named Tanya Pitovovich in St. Petersburg. She specializes in seeing through foreign adoptions — which in St. Petersburg makes her a bribery and blackmail specialist as much as a lawyer. According to Shadak, the baby trade is huge in St. Petersburg. There are more than 600,000 orphaned and abandoned kids in Russia — and they all live in these orphanages, where, if you know the right people, you can pluck ’em like fruit.

“Anyway — that’s what Pitovovich does, and when the market was right, Shadak would sometimes act as a middleman for families in America and elsewhere who wanted a kid.”

“Do you know where Pitovovich is now?”

“Yes. I got an email address, a mailing address, and a cell phone number. We’ll want to talk to her eventually, I’m sure. But shut up and let me finish.”

“Sorry.”

“About six months ago, Pitovovich contacted Shadak to tip him off to a possibly lucrative shipment. An associate of hers — Shadak thinks they were fucking, but we’ll call him an associate — named Ilyich Chenko had recently taken possession of an old dormitory facility near Odessa. He let slip that he was gathering a number of very ‘special’ children there, for his own orphanage. Pitovovich thought this strange — Chenko’s G.R.U., and dabbles in the same business as she; and there was no percentage in keeping children yourself. So she took a plane there for a visit. And that was where she saw… the shipment.”

“Do we have an address for that warehouse?”

“Yes, yes! I have all the addresses and names and other shit written down. Do you want to know what he said or don’t you?”

Stephen said nothing.

“Fine. When she got there, she saw that the ‘dormitory’ was in fact an old apartment block, and a nice one. There were maybe two dozen children there, all living like kings and queens. And they seemed like siblings; they all had the same black hair. There was something about their eyes. They seemed… aristocratic, she said.

“She asked Chenko a price for them — and he explained they were not for sale. They were too valuable here. But before she left, one of the children — a young girl — came to her and quietly whispered: ‘We do not like it here. See us to America.’

“‘How can I do that?’ asked Pitovovich.

“‘Through Amar Shadak,’ replied the girl.

Stephen threw up his hands. “And how the fuck did she know about Shadak? He’s bullshitting you.”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. I’m just telling you what he told me.”

“Fine. Go on.”

“So that’s when she contacts Shadak — lets him know about this opportunity for these children that Chenko finds so valuable he won’t even talk about selling them. Shadak is intrigued, but not convinced. If Chenko’s not willing to sell then it might be more trouble than it’s worth if he’s got to snatch them.

“But Pitovovich goes on describing the kids, Shadak remembers a conversation he had with Kolyokov — about this bunch of kids that he’d pay top dollar for. Black hair and funny eyes were two of the characteristics he pointed to — but there were other things too. So Shadak said, ‘Okay, I’m intrigued. Let’s go have a look.’

“And that’s when he gets convinced. Because a day later, he takes a trip over to Odessa, meets up with Pitovovich and together they go to the apartment block to meet with Chenko. And it’s like night and day. Chenko sits Shadak down, gives him a drink, and tells Shadak that he’s heard a lot about him and thinks he’ll be a perfect guardian for these beautiful children. Chenko has gone so far as to arrange the papers for their passage across the border into Romania and then to Turkey. Shadak’s kind of amused at first; but when he asks what the price is going to be and Chenko says ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he starts to get suspicious.

“But then — then he meets the kids, and it’s a completely different story. They charm him, in a way that none of his own children have over the years. They say to him, ‘Mister Shadak, take us to Turkey! Take us away!’ And he says: ‘Okay kids.’”

“Doesn’t sound like the Amar Shadak I know.”

“It doesn’t sound like the Amar Shadak that Amar Shadak knows either,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu. “Shadak wondered if he mightn’t have been drugged. Because two days later, Shadak’s got the first shipment of five kids at his house in Belgrade, and Pitovovich has made arrangements for him to transfer them to Hzekul and his people in the United States, which he then does, without giving it so much as a thought — until, that is, they’re gone. By the time the next batch of kids has showed up in Belgrade, Shadak has come to his senses. He’s contacted Kolyokov, told him what’s happened — and that’s where we all came in. Kolyokov agreed to a pretty steep purchase price — Shadak let that much slip — and made arrangements for the shipment, once all the kids were present and accounted for in Belgrade.

“Shadak never saw the next bunch of kids, though — that was when the earthquake hit in Turkey. So he left the details to iron out with his people in the U.S. and Belgrade while he went to Ankara. He seemed a little fuzzy on what happened after that: he told me he was ‘studying the fuckup’ on the delivery now. But he’d get back to me once he’d nailed down the details.”

“Good of him.”

“No,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu. “Not really.”

“What do you mean, ‘not really’?”

“Nailing down details means a direct conversation with Fyodor Kolyokov.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Same as you told him: that Fyodor’s not available right now. But he didn’t seem satisfied.”

Stephen snorted. “He wouldn’t be… I wouldn’t be, frankly. So how did it leave off?”

“Shadak said he wanted to hear from Kolyokov by the end of the day, said that he meant it, and hung up the phone.”

“Well,” said Stephen, smiling, “Mr. Shadak’s going to be disappointed. In the meantime, it sounds like we’ve got enough information to get a start on tracking this thing down. Nice work.”

“Thank—”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu sat down on the bed. Her hands flopped on the bedclothes at her side, and her gaze fell to her lap. For an instant, she looked as though she were a marionette, whose strings had been cut.