Exoteric

by Philip Hemplow

  It was still early and, but for one of the Clandestine mercenaries, the others were still asleep. The sun, low in the east, was not yet masked by the mountain’s bulk. Daggers of light came in at the windows to split the shade. Dust motes danced a Brownian gavotte in front of him, becoming frenzied in the wake he left as he limped towards the kitchen.

  He made coffee and put a pan of eggs on to boil, cursing himself for forgetting to give Votyakov a shopping list to take on his trip. Perhaps it was just as well. Parking a private ambulance with a corpse in it outside Magnit so you could nip in for potatoes, tvorog, and marrowbones was hardly the acme of operational decorum. Still, he thought, perhaps when he’d drunk his coffee he would take a walk in the woods, see if there were any winter mushrooms to harvest and roast.

  He heard shuffling footsteps in the restaurant before the kitchen door banged open. Sophia Molchanov shambled into the room wearing a long tee shirt and knee-length woollen socks, her hair wrapped in a towel. She yawned at him by way of greeting, and made a bee-line for the coffee pot.

  “I hate jetlag,” she complained in English, through the tail-end of the yawn. “Tell me this isn’t decaf.”

  “It’s not.”

  “Good.”

  She slopped some into a cup and sipped, wincing as it burned her mouth.

  “There are eggs, if you would like some breakfast,” offered Arkady.

  She shook her head, blowing on the coffee through pouting lips. “I don’t eat breakfast,” she declared, “or eggs, for that matter. I’ll have something later. So, what’s going on here today?”

  “Today? Today we are testing the equipment. The Og—Mr Votyakov is bringing us some test material for Dr Yelagin to practice on, so we can put right any problems before we try the procedure on your father.”

  “Oh. What kind of ‘test materials?’”

  Arkady hesitated. He would have preferred not to go into detail, and for the girl to remain aloof from the grislier details of their work. Still, he reasoned, she was an adult, and she was paying a fortune for them to be there. That had to afford her some rights.

  “A cadaver, donated to medical science. Dr Yelagin will use the surgical robotics to transplant a pig’s heart into it.”

  Sophia pulled an appalled face. “Ugh! That’s gruesome! Surely she already knows how to do heart transplants. I thought she was an expert.”

  “She is! She undoubtedly is,” Arkady hurried to reassure her. “They tell me the rehearsal is needed only because of the difficulties of working with frozen tissue. It will not be the same as operating on a patient at room temperature. There will be no bleeding, but they must work more slowly. It is good to practice.”

  Sophia shrugged. “I suppose so. When are they starting?”

  “Not yet. Mr Votyakov is collecting the body from Novosibirsk. It is a long drive back. They will operate this evening.”

  “Oh. So, what are we going to do all day?”

  “Whatever you like. I am going to look for mushrooms in the wood. You are welcome to come with me.”

  “When? Now?”

  “Yes.”

  She stared straight ahead and sipped her coffee, considering the offer.

  “Yeah, okay. May as well. I’ll get dressed. Will you wait for me?”

  “Of course.”

  He began to regret that promise when half an hour had passed and she still had not returned, but eventually she came bounding down the stairs to find him waiting by the door. The two doctors were up and about by then, Zapad munching hard-boiled eggs and ham in the restaurant, his stepsister outside on the patio, smoking.

  “Ready?” Sophia asked, as if he’d been the one to delay their departure.

  “Will you be warm enough?”

  He cast a doubtful eye over her attire. The roll-neck jumper looked thick enough, but her denim jeans wouldn’t insulate at all if they got wet, and her boots looked positively dainty. Stop worrying, you old goose! Ana’s voice remonstrated with him. You’re not going far; she’ll be fine!

  “Once I’ve got this on,” replied the girl, reaching for the hooded leather coat she’d worn the day before.

  Outside, they paused a moment while their eyes adjusted to the blinding light of the snowbound plateau, and for a few moments more to admire the view of the valley below. The air was cold and dry, each desiccating breath like inhaling needles. Sophia had no gloves. Arkady passed her his, thrusting his own hands deep into his pockets and ignoring her polite protestations.

  The snow was powdery and deep-frozen, crunching like sugar with every step. It was not deep: perhaps six inches, more where it had drifted against the buildings and the base of the cliff. Still, Arkady walked slowly, conscious of the pain in his leg, and wary of obstacles or declivities that could be hidden beneath the glinting, crystal blanket.

  Nearer the trees, footprints began to appear: high-stepping tracks left by gloomy Siberian foxes; the broken-cross imprints of birds’ feet. It occurred to Arkady that there could well be wolves on the plateau, hungry and potentially dangerous. In his pocket, his fingers closed around the stubby kitchen knife he’d brought for cutting mushroom stems, and he wondered if he should have picked up a gun as well.

  Sophia tramped along beside him. The thin air made it challenging to walk, talk, and breathe at the same time, and after some idle chatter about the scenery and weather, she lapsed into silence. Arkady could smell her shampoo: coconut and mango, an incongruous note of summer above the swelling scent of pine. Watching her saunter beside him, cheeks flushed pink, the snowfield sparking catch-lights in her eyes, he realised the rest of her was incongruous too. She didn’t belong in his desaturated world, with the old, and the compromised, and the stray. She was an innocent—or what passed for one in that day and age.

  “Did you go mushroom-picking before, with your family, when you lived in Russia?” he asked as they crossed the treeline. He was being solicitous, aiming for a sense of normality, but wondered if it made him sound old. Maybe children didn’t go mushrooming anymore, now the supermarket shelves groaned with food. Maybe the very idea of it was preposterous to them.

  “Not that I remember,” replied Sophia, scooping up snow with the toe of her boot and flicking it into the air. “I’m not sure my father would have had the patience for it. I don’t think he really liked to relax.”

  “Ah. That is a shame. When I was young, every Russian child knew how to find mushrooms and avoid the poisonous ones, even in Moscow. Sometimes they made the difference between going to bed hungry and going to bed happy.”

  “Was your father a good man?”

  Arkady considered the question and wondered where it was leading. “Good? Yes, I suppose he was. He wasn’t a bad man.”

  “Do you think I’m doing the right thing? Here, I mean.”

  “Do you?”

  She kicked more snow. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m being selfish. Spoilt little rich girl, used to getting her own way, buying back her dad…it feels wrong—like cheating, or breaking the rules. What do you think? I know you have your own agenda here; I’m not stupid. I’m sure you think you’re doing the right thing—but am I?”

  She stopped walking and looked at him with wide, expectant eyes. He could read the hope and fear in them. She didn’t want a debate, didn’t necessarily want the truth even. She just wanted to be reassured.

  He coughed, playing for time, and fixed his eyes on the horizon.

  “That’s a question only you can answer,” he began. “But, if it helps…your father was a clever man, but also a foolish one. I do not think he was a bad person, but he started playing a bad game, and he lost. It would have been better had he kept his humility, taken his fortune, and raised his daughter in peace. Now though, if the doctors are right and their clever techniques work, and none of a thousand little things go wrong, maybe he will have the chance to do that, and to help us, too. The men who killed him have not been idle, and we cannot stop them without him. So, perhaps you don’t do this for yourself, or
for him—you do it for a greater good.”

  He questioned his own sincerity even as he was saying the words, and was surprised to find he believed himself. Sophia, though, looked less convinced. She started walking again without prompting, looking back over her shoulder to make sure he was following.

  “That sounds nice. But it’s hard to believe that men like you and Mr Votyakov are on the side of the angels.”

  “There are no angels,” Arkady shot back. “But there are devils. Your father trafficked with them, and they killed him. I need to stop them before many more people are dancing to their tune. We must be determined, willing to risk our livelihoods, our reputations, our freedom. And, yes, perhaps you must risk a little something too.”

  “I think I’d feel better if I knew I was risking something. What must I risk?”

  Arkady met her gaze. “A clear conscience,” he replied. “A small portion of your soul.”

  “Ah. So, you do believe in souls.”

  That caught him off-guard. He hesitated.

  “I think there’s a part of yourself it’s important to keep clean,” he said at last. “Something you see when you look in the mirror. Not a soul, but something better than the rest of you.”

  “Something pure,” suggested Sophia.

  “Exactly.”

  “And you have that, do you?”

  It was an uncomfortable question. He tried to brush it away, but found himself answering anyway.

  “I don’t know. I used to.” She died. “I don’t really think about such things. Aha!” He pointed at a tree trunk in front of them, relieved to have a reason to change the subject. “Chaga!”

  “What?”

  “Chaga! There, on that birch—very valuable!”

  It didn’t look valuable. Nor did it look like a mushroom, or anything someone might want to eat: just a black, twisted, tumourous scab, growing from the bark of a tree.

  “What do you expect to do with that?” asked Sophia dubiously.

  “Grate it,” replied Arkady, circling the tree. There were two more smaller patches of chaga on the other side of the trunk. “Make it into tea. It’s good for the immune system—fights off cancer, even. Fights off pretty much everything, if you believe the old folk remedies.”

  “Does it make you trip?”

  He scowled at her, disappointed by her cynicism and lack of enthusiasm. “No, child, it doesn’t make you ‘trip’. A conk that size has been growing here for six, seven years or more. Here, hold the bag. I’m going to collect some.”

  She made a great show of holding the bag at arm’s length and turning her face away. It wasn’t genuine distaste, he knew, just a way to playfully mock him, casting him in the role of an eccentric, tree-scratching old man. He could live with that. In fact, it was oddly gratifying.

  He shaved as much of the sooty clump into his bag as he could, more of it than he would use, then turned and smiled at the girl.

  “There. A wonderful find to start the day! You see what you miss by not living here in Russia?”

  Sophia wrinkled her nose. “Are you sure that stuff doesn’t get you high? This is the happiest I’ve seen you since we met.”

  It was true, Arkady realised. For a few minutes, the stress, grief, and sense of dislocation had quite slipped away. As soon as he tried to cling on to the feeling, it began ebbing away, like sand running through his fingers.

  “Yes, well, that’s the joy of mushrooming. If you get nothing else from this…” He waved an arm in the direction of the clinic, groping for an appropriate noun. “All this,” he concluded lamely, “you will at least be able to tell people you walked in the woods and found chaga.”

  “They’ll be blown away,” said Sophia with a wry smile.

  “Come on. Let’s see what else is out here.”

  They spent another half hour walking in the woods, until Sophia began complaining about the cold. On the way, Arkady stopped to cull a small colony of silvery oyster mushrooms, prying their dense, rubbery flesh from the bark of another tree. When they re-crossed the plateau, the sun had passed behind the mountain, casting the resort and everything around it into shadow. Arkady felt his good mood start to evaporate. By the time they reached the door, it was all but gone.

  “I think you’d have liked my father, Colonel,” said Sophia as he held the door for her. “Well, maybe. I think he’d have liked you, at least.”

  “Thank you,” replied Arkady, wondering what made her think that. He followed her inside and let the door swing shut behind them. “I look forward to meeting him.”

  *

  “What the fuck?”

  Galina Yelagin’s words seemed to adequately express the feelings of everyone standing round the table. When nobody ventured a contrary opinion, she repeated them.

  “What the fuck? Where did you find this poor bastard? In a ditch? I can’t work on that! I mean, look at the state of him!”

  They were standing round the immaculate, unused operating table in the clinic’s calorimeter: Arkady, Yelagin, Zapad, and Votyakov. The Ogre had returned from Novosibirsk while they were eating dinner. Arkady could feel the last few mouthfuls sliding around in his stomach as he looked at the specimen in front of them and fought the urge to puke.

  Votyakov scowled at the surgeon, furious to hear his work criticised by a civilian.

  “What? Why are you complaining? This is the guy I was told to collect.”

  Galina snorted, walking around the table to examine the carnage from new angles. “Are you sure you didn’t reverse the ambulance over him?”

  “He’s the donor that was arranged. If you have a problem with it, talk to Mr Zolin.”

  Votyakov spat the words. Even as they left his mouth, he flinched, recognising his blunder. His eyes darted to Arkady, to see if he’d noticed, then back to the surgeon to see if she had.

  She had.

  “Who’s Zolin?” she demanded to know, leaning forwards, fists on the table.

  Arkady intervened to bury the question.

  “Look, he may not be pristine—and I’m no doctor—but his torso looks intact. That’s all you need for this, I believe. Is there any reason the test can’t take place?”

  There was silence. The four of them regarded the body with assorted expressions of distaste.

  Galina was right; it wasn’t in good condition. A young man, no older than Sophia Molchanov, his body had been ravaged. Masses of flesh had been debrided, seemingly at random, all the way down to the bone, which had a blackened, charred appearance. His left arm had been amputated below the elbow, his right leg at the knee. An arc of jaw, studded with decaying teeth, grinned at them where the meat had been surgically flayed from one side of his mouth and throat. Elsewhere, his remaining skin was ulcerated and leathery, crusted with scabs. Arkady could only imagine he had stumbled off some battlefield in the Middle East and been sent home to die. Now he was to be butchered again, to pave the way for Molchanov’s return.

  Zapad was flicking through the fat file of photocopied medical notes which accompanied the remains.

  “He was a drug user,” he observed. “Krokodil. It is a homemade heroin substitute—very dangerous. The acid in it has killed the tissue around his injection sites, forcing the surgeons to remove it. Apparently he died of sepsis following the last intervention.”

  He closed the file and looked up at them.

  “Krokodil?” spat his stepsister. “What was it, agents, the last corpse in the shop? A bargain, price reduced because so much of him is missing? Poor bastard! What was his name?”

  “It has been blacked out. The notes are anonymised.”

  “What about his HIV status?”

  “Negative, it says. He was lucky.”

  “If this is what lucky looks like, God help the ill-fated!”

  Votyakov reinserted himself into the conversation. “Well, Doctors, are we just going to lament him, or are you going to do some work? I have done my part. I have brought you a body, also a pig’s heart. Now, do we get to se
e all this expensive equipment in operation? Will you get your hands dirty?”

  Galina ignored him. “What is the status of the live donor?” she asked, turning to Arkady. “How much time do we have?”

  Arkady shrugged. “I have no new information. So far as I know, he remains on life support. He cannot come here. You will need to go to him, to perform the extraction as soon as he passes. Then you will be flown back here directly, by helicopter, bringing the heart with you. We must be ready to receive it, no matter when that is.”

  “And is he a drug addict also? Or an Egyptian mummy, perhaps, all wrapped up in bandages? Are we to make borscht without beets there, too?”

  “The heart donor is fine—healthy,” Arkady assured her, privately aware he had avoided finding out exactly how Zolin had arranged to procure the vital organ. “I suggest we proceed with the rehearsal, using the body that Mr Votyakov has gone a long way to fetch for us, and not worry about the next stage until that is done. I also suggest, Dr Zapad, that we turn on your refrigeration equipment as soon as possible. I think this unfortunate wretch is beginning to smell.”

  They all inhaled discreetly, tasting the air for any trace of corruption. It was there, a faint, carrion perfume, essence of ulcers and corpse liquor. The realisation brought the debate to an end.

  “Yes,” agreed Zapad. “Please, let us vacate the room and chill it. In two hours it will be cold enough for the practice operation to begin.”

  Arkady checked his watch. In two hours it would be half past nine. The operation would not be finished until after midnight. That was okay. They might have to carry out the real surgery in the middle of the night, too. There was no sense in delaying.

  In fact, it took more than three hours for the chugging halocarbon freezer unit to lower the calorimeter’s temperature to forty degrees below zero. Webs of frost began to form on the thick, insulated windows, despite the best efforts of the dehumidifier Zapad had installed. The doctor wrung his hands and fretted about the state of the video camera lenses. “We must go in and clear them. She cannot operate blind!” Arkady just nodded and stared through the glass at the cryostat on the far side of the room.