David Nickle - Rasputin's Bastards

“What about the old man?” said Nino.

“The old man’s not here. Maybe he’s dead. But we got two out of three and that ain’t too bad. C’mon.”

Montassini stood up. It had sounded good. Firm. Leaderly.

Almost as though he’d believed it himself.

Jack Devisi motioned with his gun at Mrs. Kontos-Wu.

“She’s some looker,” he said. “Don’t you think?”

Stephen rolled his eyes. “Whatever,” he said.

“I mean to say that she’s got a nice ass,” said Jack. “C’mon kid — I saw you two goin’ at it.”

Stephen wouldn’t even dignify that one with a response.

“All right,” said Jack. “Up to you, kiddo.”

The other two Bucci boys chose that moment to step out of the bathroom. Both of them, Stephen noted, looked a little pale — like they’d stepped in something.

Or seen something.

“Okay,” said the little guy. “Here’s how it’s gonna go. You two are coming with us. You’re going to go down with us in the freight elevator and you’re going to come with us to see a mutual friend.”

“Mutual friend? Who might that be?”

The little guy gave him a look. “I think you know,” he said. “Listen—” he motioned to Mrs. Kontos-Wu. “She okay to walk?”

“She’s a fuckin’ vegetable there, Leo,” said Jack. “She won’t be able to walk.”

“I’m not — a vegetable.”

The four of them looked as one at Mrs. Kontos-Wu. She rolled over.

“You’re taking us to Shadak — right?”

The little guy, Leo, hesitated for a second, as Mrs. Kontos-Wu sat up. She looked him in the eye.

“Come on,” she said. “Right?”

Leo nodded.

“Good. That’s what I thought. Now if you’re bringing us to Shadak, he obviously didn’t want you to shoot us first — right?”

Leo made a show of glaring at her and raised his gun. “That don’t necessarily follow—”

“—Right?”

“Right.”

“Good,” she said. “Then put the guns down — they just make you look foolish. Do you have a conveyance?”

“A what?” said Jack.

“A car?”

“A truck,” said Leo. “Yeah. Should be out back by now.”

Nino leaned over to Leo. “This is bullshit,” he said. “We got a whole fuckin’ hotel this guy could be in. We gotta—”

Leo held up his hand. “Shut the fuck up,” he said. He blinked and rubbed his temple. “He’s not here. We got a plan. Take ’em to the fuckin’ plane.”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu pushed herself out of bed. “Excellent. Then let’s get to it.” She looked at Stephen. “You packed?” she said.

“Packed?” said Stephen.

“I’m assuming that Shadak’s not in town,” she said. “You’ll want one of the passports and an overnight bag, I’m willing to bet.”

Stephen and Jack shared a look. What’s with the broad? Jack mouthed. Stephen gave a little shrug.

“Let me pack some shit,” said Stephen.

Behind him, Leo Montassini swatted Nino’s arm away from his shoulder. He dug a finger into his ear, like he was trying to scratch a very deep itch.

The laundry truck pulled out of the Emissary’s loading bay and rumbled into crosstown traffic — where it sat for a moment waiting for the flow to resume.

Miles regarded the truck from the coffee shop across Broadway. It was white, with a stylized picture of sheets drying on a line. Not from the usual service.

Miles knew he should be on his cell phone right now; taking steps to learn the identity of the mysterious laundry truck. Find out how badly security was breached.

Or just as likely, he’d be seeing those steps taken for him, feeling his eyes flutter and a curious sapping of his will; watching as though on a closed-circuit television, as his arms moved to his cell phone, and listening as his lips made strange words into it.

But this fine New York evening, Miles did neither thing. He watched as the truck crested the small rise in the street, and vanished among the cascade of brake lights and cab signs. A scent of lavender tickled his nose, and he felt a smile creep up his face.

Miles raised his coffee mug to them in a farewell salute.

“ Nazdorovya ,” he said, following as he did the lavender’s course across the street — and from there, inexorably to the north.

Amar Shadak equivocated through the night. He needed, he knew, to strike a delicate balance. There was warmth: the geniality of a good host. And there was terror. He wouldn’t get anywhere, he knew, without a solid weight of terror at hand. He posed in front of a tall mirror in his bedchamber as he thought about it; pulled his lips taut into a thin smile and raised his dark brows in the middle, as though asking a polite question. He slackened his shoulders, rolling them quickly back and forth like a dancer or an athlete, then abruptly stood straight and threw them back. Warmth and terror — terror and warmth. Somewhere, he thought, looking for himself in the reflection of his eyes. Somewhere in spaces between…

In the space between the fountain and the kitchen where blood dripped from the draining goat, where the Devil Kilodovich tore Amar in two…

“Ah,” he said to no one, “this is shit.” And he relaxed his shoulders and flung his arms into the air, and fell back onto the rumpled sheets of his unmade bed. He would just have to play it by ear, when they arrived. Try and piece the mystery of the missing submarine and Alexei Kilodovich together as best he could.

Shadak’s head hurt. He felt, these days, as though a thousand tiny hands were pulling the anatomy of his brain to and fro, scratching at it with nail-point fingertips. It reminded him of that month — the month that the devil Kilodovich had taken him into the caves in Afghanistan — tried to work his sorcery on him, took him to the Black Villa, and left a piece of Shadak’s soul there. When the bastard children had fucked with him, pulling him to bits all over again. Same kind of thing — fingers in his brain, pulling the neurons apart, looking for gold.

Fucking Rapture .

Shadak thought of it more as brain rape.

Ah, what to say — what to say ?

When he’d called Gepetto and asked him to fetch the people from the Emissary, he’d really hoped that he might find Kilodovich there. The widow Kontos-Wu’s presence in the hotel when he called suggested that this might be so, that Kolyokov had engineered a double sting, stolen the children through some third party, and had pulled all his people back to the home base.

If that had happened, then Kilodovich would be on his way here now. The terrible losses he’d suffered — his American organization, a yacht, and the usefulness of his submarine guy… the trouble with the children, their demonic influence… all that would have been balanced by the possession of Kilodovich.

But it was not to be. Kolyokov was gone — dead? Or simply on the move? Somewhere with his treasure, the devil Kilodovich, perhaps? — and there was no one to bring but the useless piece of shit of a boy Kolyokov kept — and Kontos-Wu.

Ah, Kontos-Wu. There was something else. When he’d known her, she’d been a raven-haired beauty in the blossom of her twenties — the bride of old Tom Wu, a Taiwanese banker who ran some ships out of Hong Kong and sometimes did drug business with Shadak. He hadn’t really seen her since those years — but when they spoke on the phone, it was the beauty of those years past that he remembered. He’d held some information back — in particular, that horrible scrabbling of claws inside his head, the Black Villa, and what he thought Kilodovich and the children meant to it — but still, he’d spoken too freely with her; told her far too much about the children and their devilish powers.