David Nickle - Rasputin's Bastards

“We are sorry, Mr. Shadak,” said one.

“We do not know how this came to be,” said the second. “We found you like this. And—”

“You see, we cannot find the key,” said the first.

Shadak swallowed, and felt the key slide another few inches down his gullet. Christ — it was going to cut his insides to ribbons if he didn’t get to a doctor soon.

“That is because,” said Shadak, “I have swallowed the key.”

“One of the devils has made you do that,” said the first. “Just as one made me shoot poor Tomas, and caused Pyotr here try to shoot you although you were not looking.”

The second — Pyotr — gave Tomas a look.

“Where—” Shadak winced, as the key tore past a sphincter. “Where are the prisoners?” he finished.

“Escaped, sir,” said Tomas. “In a truck. Viktor tried to pursue on a motorcycle, but I am afraid that I threw a chain into his spokes before he could get going.”

“He is all right,” said Pyotr.

Shadak couldn’t have cared less whether Viktor was all right or not. But he didn’t want to antagonize his men at this point. It was a small blessing they were still apologizing and not just leaving him to die.

“That is fine,” said Shadak. He forced himself to ignore the pain. He modulated the tone of his voice to the familiar, pleasant lilting. He forced his mouth from a grimace, to pleasant repose. He looked first Victor and then Pyotr in the eye. “We will catch up to them later. For now, I want you to get to work on these chains. And contact our surgeon in Silifke. I believe that I will have need of him presently.”

“Of course, sir,” said Viktor, moving off to the tool shed to fetch metal-cutters. “I will find the phone,” said Pyotr, stepping around the corner of the main house.

And so Amar Shadak sat alone for a space beneath the brightening sky. He leaned back, and stared into it — the still deep blue, marred here and there by a light pasting of sun-painted cloud.

Men could lose themselves in such a vista. Too many men strove to do so. And that, thought Shadak as the key cut sharply into his innards, was the thing.

That was the thing.

“I’ll—” Shadak coughed, and felt the hated key hitch higher in his chest. He tasted salt in a mouthful of phlegm.

“I’ll skin her,” he said, and lowered his head against his shoulder, as the old love for her sunk like a spill of acid through the little cuts the key made down the middle of his chest. Alone beneath the lightening sky, Amar Shadak began to weep.

“You are a KGB agent. Elite. You know all sorts of tricks for killing a fellow. You can make yourself unseen should you need to. You have other tricks to get people to tell you things they’d rather not, and more tricks still to make sure that they can’t get that kind of information out of you. Where do you think you learned these tricks? On the street?”

Alexei shook his head. The lights were flashing more rapidly — in a way that caused his testicles to pull close to his abdomen and his fingers to grip painfully into the plastic arm rests.

“Of course not on the street. You learned them in this place. Outside Murmansk. In the cold. It is a terrible place. But also a safe place. A place where you return when your eyes are shut — yes?”

Alexei shut his eyes. He did this every day at City 512. He sat in the chair, arcane cocktails of narcotics coursing through his veins, and shut his eyes when the flashing became too much, and retreated — retreated to the windswept field behind the low buildings of the Murmansk spy school, where eventually he would play cards with Ilyich Chenko; or to the classroom, where he would learn Trigonometry from psychotic old Czernochov, who’d beat him senseless at the slightest sign of inattention.

The spy school was a metaphor — a metaphor that his new master Fyodor Kolyokov used to train him in the ways of his cover. Alexei was barely twelve years old when this happened. Alexei could think of nothing more depressing than to relive it now. He was not sure that the baby Vladimir was doing him any favour by revealing the truth to him.

Still — truth is truth and there’s not much to be gained in its denial.

And he had to admit — it was fascinating to see the construction of his delusions in such vivid detail. Kolyokov and his team were only beginning to implant the details of his metaphor. So when Alexei, in his new metaphor, walked the field behind the school, it was more a sheet of white cloth over a soft mattress than thin snow over permafrost. Czernochov looked like the Western film actor Vincent Price. The washrooms were still in black and white. The door to the gymnasium opened onto a deep, whistling void. Dormitory B, where Alexei’s friend Chenko ostensibly slept, was simply dark — a gateway to the Id, where things chittered and floorboards creaked and cold drafts tickled the neck — but no light ever shone.

Alexei shut his eyes.

“Good,” said the voice over the speaker system. “Now. Describe to me what you see.”

“I’m on the ocean,” said Alexei. “There’s Cuba over there. Spies are everywhere.”

“Don’t joke,” said the voice. “You are not helping. Describe what you see.”

Alexei looked. He was standing at the front of the building. There was a long landing strip. The sky was a crown of brilliant blue, combed over with the thinnest wisps of cloud. Alexei squinted.

“An aircraft,” he said. “An Antonov. One of the new ones. An AN-72, it looks like. It is approaching from the west. It is filled with important men. One of them is a General with the KGB. He has business with you. One of them is a writer. A dissident, I think. Both the General and the writer are unhappy. Not for the same reasons. Their names are — are—”

“Enough!” said the voice. “Stop joking, Kilodovich! There is no aircraft. No general. You are in school. Yes? Your teacher Fyodor Kolyokov has something to tell you.”

“Of course,” said Alexei. He turned away from the approaching Antonov. He turned back to the building, peering vainly into windows and doorways for his spy teacher Fyodor Kolyokov.

No sign of him. Alexei sighed and ran up to the school’s front doorstep. He’d have to be somewhere inside.

Of course, Alexei found the old man quickly enough. Fyodor Kolyokov was the most believable thing in the metaphor — because, at this early point, he was the only thing here based in reality. So if Alexei was in one of his bare, unformed classrooms, sitting amongst classmates that looked to have been made by an air brush, he could tell Fyodor Kolyokov instantly, by the pockmarks on his left cheek and the web of lines at the corner of his eyes; the colour of his eyes. Kolyokov drew attention here by his anomalous solidity.

It gave his proclamations more solidity too. When Kolyokov told Alexei that he was a KGB agent — a skilled assassin — that he was able to do this, and this, and that with his hands — why, when Alexei awoke and they led him from the little room, he was able to repeat the tasks as though he had trained since a boy. Once, Kolyokov had told him to put out a lit match with the tip of his tongue — to not cry out from the pain, or even flinch — and he’d done it, just like that.

Today, Kolyokov was alone in the classroom. He was wearing a blue turtleneck sweater and khaki trousers and big, black military boots that laced up to his calves. He smoked a cigarette that he’d rolled himself. He sucked deep on it, expelling the smoke through his nostrils, as he regarded Alexei.

“You,” he said, “are a KGB agent. Isn’t that right?”

“That’s right, sir,” said Alexei.

“You,” he continued, “don’t fool around with that other stuff — that dream-walking. You never did. Did you?”