Fenek Solère - Rising

Heaving the corpse aside, Janssen shouldered his way through the door frame, subliminally clocking the chipped woodwork where his protégés had met their end. ‘ Dobre Vechyre ’, he announced to the assembled crowd before easing the Tec-9 into auto and letting off like a threshing machine. Two died instantly. A third, Bogdan, collapsed with a leg wound, whimpering and begging for mercy.

Arkady’s huge body slid across the wooden table, his Stechkin blowing mouse holes in the ceiling. Janssen grinned, inserting a second magazine. He enjoyed killing with impunity. Striding over to where the bald Bloc fanatic lay clutching his shattered knee-cap, he placed the gun barrel to Bogdan’s juddering skull. His opponent’s tears flowed freely, Then he tugged at the trigger triumphantly.

Tom walked alone in the heart of the city. Moonlight played on granite. He was caught up in a world-changing event. His eyes darted wildly from the mosque burning in the distance to the Bakhcha-U parked at the side of the road. It was becoming increasingly obvious that he was a man of letters, not action, his world inhabited by characters like Stavrogin and Verkhovensky, Dostoevsky’s political villains, rather than the muscle-bound reality of Bogdan and Arkady. The vision of Ekaterina lying asleep and the metallic click of the door latch dropping made his conscience itch.

He strode on, not knowing or caring where. He circled the canal bridges, lost in thought, up and down, past the Anichkovsky Palace and the sleek horse statues harnessed by straps of bitter starlight. Strings of white globes stretched away down Nevsky, their light casting neon nets over the muddy water flowing to the sea. Carved gargoyles looked down accusingly. Tom kept asking himself what he should do. Should he stay or should he go? He was sweating despite the cold. The ghoulish grandeur rolled out either side of the river before him. Corruption and glamour were covered by a twinkle of silver. He remembered she had told him that in the Russian language, St Petersburg is male whilst Moscow is female. Little sentences and sayings, the sound of her voice reverberated constantly in his head. He leaned against a parapet, steadying himself against the maelstrom loosed about him.

The city was in a hurry. It was as if the residents were recovering from collective amnesia. Granules of snow flittered through car headlights, ice crunched like baby powder underfoot. He knew he had to get back to the hotel. He was so tired that he began to stagger. His moleskin coat was speckled with flakes, and kiss-curls were stuck to his forehead. The lines from Dugin’s alias Hans Zivers came to mind: ‘In a buttoned coat, buttoned frock coat, solemnly kefir he drinks, and the dogs bark, and move black cancers, in the darkness of Soviet apartments’.

• Her Majesty’s Consulate in St Petersburg advises all British citizens to leave Russia as a consequence of the deteriorating political situation;

• Russian nationalists re-capture the radar base at Gabala and launch sporadic attacks amidst the rusting derricks dotted along the Caspian shore, shelling the Bibi Heyat mosque and the new fortress housing Israel’s Kohanim Council of the East;

• ‘Our new challenge’, states General Hosiah Webb, Commander of the US 4th Army in Afghanistan, ‘is to secure the energy corridor between the Caspian and the Balkans, those like Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan and Nabucco, supplying our allies in Western Europe’;

• Petro Poroshenko demands direct military intervention to save Jews from persecution in Russia;

• Wall Street financial houses redouble their efforts to undermine the rouble by hiking interest rates yet again;

• Firms trading in global equity markets start a frenzy of selling on what they deem to be contaminated funds on the instruction of the Zew Research Group based in Strasbourg, New York, and Tel Aviv;

• Food processing plants in Belarus are sabotaged by NATO special forces.

Tom’s eyes reluctantly welcomed the first rays of dawn light playing like pellucid fingers over the bedsheets. He lay still for a minute, his head on the soft pillow, his penis hard as rock. He had been dreaming of a woman walking through cornfields, tresses flowing from a crown of spring flowers, bearing an apple in open hands.

‘Where am I?’ he said to himself. ‘What have I done?’

He got up to use the toilet and saw the brown suitcase in the hall. Then he remembered everything. The League’s request for him to attend an emergency council. His promise. Her smiling through tears and Arkady’s threat. Could he stay and fight? Could he cut and run?

Tom fell heavily onto the toilet seat. His sweaty face reflected in the mirror between the chrome taps. He could already hear the sound of cracking bones and see his blood smeared on a wall. He was not going to die here like Yesenin. Poets die romantically, but political dissidents like him bleed painfully in shootouts with the police, like that young French duo in Arles. Neither did he care to end his days like that Trotsky acolyte John Reed, author of the book he had just cast into the wastepaper basket, squirming in agony on a hospital bed with spotted typhus.

He swallowed some aspirin and took a long swig from a bottle. His eyes were sore. He could not be sure if it was from the drink or the tears he remembered coming suddenly in the early hours.

His hand reached for the phone. ‘I need a taxi’, he heard himself say, and then in response to the voice on the other end, ‘To the airport.’ He got dressed, brushed his hair, and checked his wallet. Picking up his bags, he walked out the door without looking back. Behind him, the phone began to ring.

Downstairs, the lobby was full of cleaners pushing mops and empty-handed doormen looking for something to do. Life went on. One anaemic youngster with bad skin offered to take his luggage. Tom waved him away, then gestured to the girl at the desk, who in turn pointed to a black-suited driver walking towards him across the foamy floor.

‘Oh, excuse me, sir, but I have a letter for you’, the receptionist remembered, coming out from behind the counter to hand him a sealed envelope. Tom took it, but before he could peel it open, his driver was guiding his arm.

‘Your car, sir!’ Tom pushed the blue envelope into his coat pocket and followed the chauffeur out onto the street. A gypsy woman was passing, carrying a sprig of flowers.

‘Would you like to buy one for your sweetheart?’ she asked in broken English. Tom chose some, paid her, and tossed it onto the back seat. The driver slammed the trunk on his baggage.

‘ Pulkovo, spasibo ’, the Englishman said. The engine started and they pulled off into the square.

He looked up at St Isaacs as they circled, watching a young family walking their brown water spaniel under the sparse trees. Peter Janssen was strolling, bag in hand, towards the Astoria. Alyosha was at his side. A column of armed Vulcari trailed in their wake. They went over the Blue Bridge and up Voznesenkiy Prospect. Glass shop fronts winked with cracked smiles. They stopped only to cut right back across the Fontanka embankment to make Moskovskiy Prospekt, then went onwards past the Technology Institute and the Olympic Gardens. For a moment, his attention was drawn once again to the ubiquitous Lenin statue, this time pointing towards the airport. Iron railings rushed past. He could see the dusty towers of the Baltic railway station in the distance and endless rows of Stalinist housing blocks. Alex Tiuniaev’s heart-rending symphony I Knew Her played on the radio.

30 minutes and 5 checkpoints later, the car pulled up at Pulkovo. ‘Take the flowers to this address.’ He handed the driver a hastily scribbled note. ‘It is very important that you do not say where I am, horosho? ’ Tom turned up his collar and walked across the tarmac between two Chosta self-propelled howitzers which were entering the departure terminal. Passing security, he set off a metal detector and had to empty his pockets, allowing the hands of a stripling security guard to run over his body. Two pin-sharp eyes stared him out. Tom returned the look with interest, regretting his insolence when he was pulled unceremoniously aside.