“Why?” she asked, wearing that sly, teasing smile of hers.
“Why what?”
“Against the war.” She waved a hand. “These wars of theirs.”
“Well,” I said, “isn’t it obvious?”
“What?”
“Why.”
She mouthed a smoke ring, peered at me through it. “No,” she said. I scowled at her but was wary of being drawn into anything. War, politics, even our bug life—she always seemed to have some kind of clever-clever answer.
“Come on,” she said, stubbing out her cigarette. “Help me with Vladimir’s lunch.”
Before heading down, I went into the spare room to turn off the computer. I spent most of my days in there, finding out what I could about ‘carriers’ (nothing, just some stuff about haemophilia) and following the “New Chapter in the War on Terror” as it unfolded.
I’d Googled Kobro, who had seven whole pages, either as a joint author or acknowledged in papers like Regression analysis with calibrated exposure: some interesting findings and Molecular Epidemiology and Gene-Environment Interaction: a discussion. From this I’d managed to construct a CV that appeared to match what Magda had told me: an alumnus of Stanford and Columbia universities, articles in a USAID bulletin dating back four years, more recent stuff out of the WHO.
Before I logged off, just for the hell of it I Googled myself. I used to have a couple of pages—some short stories I’d written for the school mag, swimming club results—but now . . . nothing. I typed my name three times with the same result. Tried a couple of other engines.
Fuck. I sat back. Think. I tried to log on to Snapchat, Instagram . . . Facebook— wasn’t half the world on there?—but it was the same story: “I’m sorry, Facebook does not recognise your address”, it said. I tried signing in but my “password or e-mail address are not recognised”.
“What’s up?” asked Magda as I came into the kitchen looking wan. I explained how I’d gone missing. “You’ve not logged in to anything?” she said, her expression suddenly serious.
I shook my head.
“Don’t.” She shook her head, looked out at the back garden, where Akka was bent by a rose bush.
“That’s clever,” she said, “for them to think of. I mean, what else would someone your age do? The natural thing is to go online. It’s not an accident. It’s a signal, maybe even a message.”
“What is?”
“This . . . absence of yours,” she said. “Either they’re up to something, or it’s their way of telling you: we know.”
I gave her a sceptical look.
“You explain it.”
I shrugged. “Maybe it’s just some . . . glitch.”
Now it was her turn to look sceptical. “Yes, baby,” she said. “Some ‘get Vereesh’ glitch, maybe . . . ” Her expression turned unexpectedly tender. “The important thing,” she said, “is not to react. It’s what they want. For you to panic, break cover. They have all the time in the world. Experts paid good money just for you, my baby—to get inside your head, track you down. Track us down. Careers are built on just one of us.” She drew an imaginary line down her chest. “Opening us up, finding out what’s going on inside.”
“But why the secrecy?” I said. “The deception, all the bullshit. What good does it do them? Shouldn’t we be Most Wanted or something?”
Magda looked at me askance. “My darling baby boy.” She stroked my cheek. “You know as well as I do that we’re not normal.” She laughed. “We’re not even nice. Why on earth should they panic the poor plebeians with poison people? Particularly when they don’t really know what they’re dealing with. They don’t really know our uses, our full potential, though they may be beginning to get an idea, my pretty bio-terrorist . . .
“This . . . web thing. It’s just the beginning. You understand that, don’t you?” She took my hands, her black eyes drilling into mine. “Don’t you?” She let go. “Try, baby,” she said. “And in the meantime, you can peel the potatoes.”
Vladimir couldn’t take solids, so his lunch consisted of a handful of vegetables, and sometimes some fish, passed through a blender. As I scraped away at the potatoes, I wondered at the cosy domestic scene: the bubbling pots, Radio 4 in the background, Magda cooking, Akka pottering away in the garden. How ordinary it seemed, yet how utterly weird everything had become.
I had thought all this shit was behind me. Despite what Ma had said, I had thought it was over, all the . . . weirdness. That I could get on with my life. Yet, on the contrary, it seemed that the past had served as a kind of preparation for the present, that far from going on to live a normal life like everyone else, this shit was actually my normal. Could you have known, Ma, as you carried me across countries, continents, road and railway networks? Could you have had any fucking inkling?
“Prodvinltesl, vozmite sto medlenno . . . ”
Magda tilted the spoon further and the mush edged into Vladimir’s mouth. He coughed a little, raised a skeletal hand to his mouth, and I was wondering at the Chinese lettering I glimpsed beneath his pyjama top, the tired purple tattoo like an elongated birthmark against his wrinkled, liver-spotted chest.
“Henan,” said Magda matter-of-factly. Seeing my blank look, she added, “He was a prisoner, in the Second World War.”
I struggled to get my head around it. “Vladimir’s English?”
Magda shook her head. “No, Vlad’s a Rusky, aren’t you, miloshka. He’s Siberian. An Eskimo, almost.” She tidied his snow-white hair.
“I don’t understand.”
“He was captured in Mongolia, during fighting between the Japanese and Russians. In a way you could say he was kind of lucky—they worked most of his fellow prisoners to death. But before that could happen to him, they found out what he was. Some of it, anyway. He was younger even than you, no more than sixteen.” She lifted a glass of water and tilted it against his lips. He swallowed weakly.
“People began to get ill,” she said. “I mean really ill. At that point even the Japs didn’t want everyone to die—they had buildings and roads and railways to build first, right? So they called in the medics, who diagnosed dysentery. A strain of amoebic dysentery.
“Most doctors would have done what they could, cleaned the place up and left it at that. But these weren’t ordinary doctors, they were some kind of specialists from this big laboratory nearby.
“So what they do is, they isolate the prisoners. Do some tests, pull out Vladimir.” She lit a cigarette, drew deep. “Take him back to base.”
It was a huge complex consisting of hundreds of buildings. “Like some kind of concentration camp,” said Magda, “except the whole thing was about medical experiments. Well,” she shrugged, “I say medical. I mean, basically they’re doing to people the kind of things they do to animals, right?”
At first they placed Vladimir in a cell with other POWs, Soviets like himself, though mostly Uzbeks. “Then . . . nothing happens. They more or less leave them alone. But, as people begin to fall ill, there are the medics, with their clipboards.
“Eventually, they remove the Uzbeks—the healthy as well as the sick—and replace them with another batch. This time Chinese.”
It was only now, as they too fell ill, that Vladimir began to intuit his role. But despite this, or maybe because of it, he did nothing. He neither sought to warn his fellow inmates, nor to keep apart. He just continued as before, looking on while one Chinese died after another.
After the Chinese came the Americans. Piloti, they said. They towered above the Japanese. A tight group, they were wary of Vladimir but loyal to each other. Still, they wasted away just the same, poisoned, Vladimir suspected, by the very food the guards instructed him to serve, impregnated, he also suspected, with the blood and stool samples they collected when he was removed from the cell for “interrogation”.
While the Chinese kept their death agonies to themselves, the Americans were more gregarious, even reaching out for Vladimir as they expired in their own mess.
The last able-bodied Americans tried to throttle him one night, convinced that he was the cause of their woes. As their fingers closed around his throat, he fleetingly wanted to let them squeeze, to take him quickly, while they still had a chance. But by the time the guards had arrived, just one of the men was still alive and Vladimir understood: he would clasp on to life with all of his might.
At first the noise was only at night. The lazy drone of the aircraft heading over en masse, their stuttering return towards the dawn.
Sometimes they ditched their bombs on the homeward run and Vladimir would curl up as the pounding, like a giant’s fists upon the walls of his cell, grew louder. So close he could smell the cordite.
One time he heard the low whine of a plane coming down. The whump as it hit the ground, the excited shouting of the guards. Later: the timid report of a pistol, once, twice. A cacophony of returning fire.
Vladimir turned over, went back to sleep.
But the noise of battle began to seep into the day. At first it was distant, like thunder. The sound of artillery—wasn’t Vlad once a gunner?—100 pounders, he guessed. Howitzers. He listened out for the sound of Katyusha, the screaming sisters. No, not Soviets then, but the noise was drawing nearer, the howitzers, field guns, giving way to mortars.
Distant, but increasingly insistent, he began to hear small arms fire.
The first explosion covered him in concrete dust. He coughed it out, splashed water over his face, cleared his eyes, his ears still ringing. There again—he retreated to the furthest corner of the cell, squatted down, held his hands over his head.
He didn’t hear them come in—it coincided with another bone-shuddering bang—but there they were, three guards, armed to the teeth. They slammed him onto his belly, fastened his hands behind his back. Pulled him up, almost off his feet as they screamed at him, at each other. They hurried him out through a haze of dust and smoke.
The installation was in chaos. Equipment was being smashed, files, photographs burned or piled into crates. Vladimir was pulled outside. Another huge blast and they bent down, but staggered on. He realised that the buildings were being dynamited.
Up ahead—the trench. Against the scorched horizon the long line of Chinese, and Caucasians like himself, were waiting, watching. Then a screamed order: a first batch herded forward.
Machine-gunned, they dropped into the earth.
But not Vladimir; he was swept away from this, towards the staff car. Bundled into the back.
They drove out through the gates and across the poisoned, flat land. Passed burned-out, windowless smallholdings. A donkey dead in a ditch, its four legs turned rigidly upwards. Corpses piled like heaps of rags by the roadside.
The further they got into the city, the harder it became to continue by car. Refugees were crowding the streets, fights breaking out between looters, troops. Gunfire. Confusion. The guards were arguing, a pistol was drawn. The driver pulled over. They piled out of the car, pushed through the crowd. The Chinese were too slow. The guards began waving their guns, yelling to make way. A rifle discharged into an elderly woman. The crowd closed over her. Gone.
The group ducked down a back street, up a rickety flight of stairs. Banged on a door, let inside.
Vladimir was thrown to the floor. He lay on his side, looking on as the transaction took place.
The man they were dealing with was in a well-cut dark suit. He looked Chinese but was speaking Japanese. Behind him were two other Chinese in workmen’s clothes. Both had tommy guns slung across their chests.
The guards and the Chinaman stopped talking and turned to look at Vladimir. Casting a wary eye at his armed companions, the Chinaman went over to him and crouched down. He pulled on a rubber glove and turned Vladimir’s face towards the light, compared it with a black-and-white photo in his ungloved hand. He got up.
The Chinaman nodded and one of the workmen went over to the guards, handed each a small bag. One of them opened his—it contained gold coins. The deal concluded, the guards backed out of the room.
Alone, the Chinaman addressed the others not in Japanese, or Chinese, but American. He gestured towards Vladimir. They hoisted him up. The Chinaman said something to him he didn’t understand and they hauled him to a bathroom. There, still handcuffed and under the barrel of a tommy gun, he received his first bath in four years.
He was dried, led naked to a bedroom, blinds drawn. Outside, the explosive crump, the rifle crack. But inside felt safe and clean. They laid him on his side. He sensed the Chinaman, the leader, enter the room. His rose-water cologne. There was a sharp scratch against his buttock.
And he was out.
A hazy journey. Driven through deserted streets at dawn, two cars—his own and one up ahead. Weaving around abandoned carts, burned-out cars, dead horses; the bump as they rolled over a corpse. Negotiations—with Japanese, Kuomintang. More tiny bags distributed.
Bouncing up a gangplank, onto a white ship. Pushed onto a bed, trousers pulled down. Injected.
He came to. The boat was rolling. The churn, the chug of machinery.
His hands were no longer cuffed. His wrists were sore, blistered. He tried to get up. Made it, opened the porthole. Drew down the sea air.
Sat back on the bed. Began to think, to reason, for the first time since he had been taken from his cell.
Free from the Japanese—captive of another people. These . . . Americans. Handed over, like a parcel, a package. Valuable though. A lot of effort had gone into this.
He understood, perfectly. They wanted him for his bug, his germ, his . . . uses. They wanted him, but what did he want?
Vladimir played along. What else was there to do? They would enter his cabin as it grew dark, give him some food—his only meal of the day, but what a meal!
There was potato, meat, pulses. Fit for a king! At first his body protested, he shat it right through, suffered the most terrible cramps, but soon he was taking it down. Growing heavier, stronger, thinking faster.
He turned over, felt the scratch, the pump of their poison.
It had been days, weeks, but as dusk approached he began to make out the distant line of light, growing brighter by the moment.
As ever, the door was opened cautiously. Then the command he understood to mean go, sit at the far end of the bed where he could be seen. This he did.
The first one was inside now, his pistol drawn. He surveyed the tiny cabin, but could see nothing out of order. He knocked twice on the door with the back of his hand, yelled for the other to come in.
Here was the second, with the steaming meal.
Vladimir wolfed it down. The more he ate, the hungrier he seemed to have become over the long, empty hours between meals. His guards seemed relaxed, talking between themselves. They had the air of men at the end of their mission, demob happy. It was strange, he thought as he ran his spoon along the edge of the bowl. Hearing them chat like this, it made them seem almost human.
He finished up, dabbed his mouth with the napkin. He placed it on the plate. He reclined on the bed, pulled down his trousers to expose his buttocks. One of the men made a remark, the other laughed. Vladimir waited. Listened to the man remove the syringe from its case, the hiss as the needle pierced the ampule that contained the drug. The press of the man’s knee onto the bed as he steadied himself to pierce Vladimir’s buttock, the proximity of the needle.
Even before the second man had closed his fingers around the wooden handle of his Smith & Wesson, Vladimir had twisted in, it seemed, one single movement, and had a hold of the needle bearer’s wrist, was turning it back upon itself. The man cried with shock as much as pain as the needle neared his face, his whole body propelling it back upon him.
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br /> It pierced his eyeball, drove clean through the socket and into the brain.
A scalding splash-back of blood across Vladimir’s knuckles as the first man slackened . . . then dropped. The second man was drawing his gun now, had his finger on the trigger, but Vladimir’s palm slammed his head back against the riveted cabin wall and he was looking up at the ceiling as a bare heel came down hard on his throat once, twice and
SNAP—it was all over.
Vladimir had to move quickly. He washed the blood off his hands. Took the second man’s tunic, rolled up the too-short sleeves. Tucked their guns into his waistband like a kid. Buttoned up.
He turned off the light, unlocked the door. Stepped outside.
The ship was quiet. He realised it was not some great liner, cruise ship or military vessel. More like a tramp steamer; a few cabins like his own on this deck, but no more than a couple of hundred feet long. The white paint was peeling. The lifeboats were mouldy, rotten. Cigarette stubs littered the gangway.
Their boss was standing at the prow, turned towards the coast. He sensed movement behind him.
He reached for his weapon, but it was too late. Vladimir had already pulled a revolver. He edged towards him and plucked his gun from his waistband, pitched it into the sea.
The boss was talking. Chinese, Japanese, American. Insistent whispers that said in tone alone—you can trust me, I’m on your side. This was for your own good. You’ll be safe with us. Haven’t we treated you well already?
But all Vladimir heard was a continuity of suffering. He would steer the man back to the cabin, finish him there. Take the money. Get away from here somehow, get away from them all.
The boss sensed this as soon as they turned the corner, realised where they were headed. Knew he wouldn’t be coming back.
He made a break for it, running along the gangway, heading for some stairs. Vladimir caught his ankle on the third stair. A hard heel from the man’s free foot came down on the bridge of Vladimir’s nose and he lost his grip, was left holding only a shoe. He clawed his way up the stairs after the man.
They were on the top deck. At the centre was the wheelhouse, backed by a funnel churning black smoke into the ocean-blue night. Vladimir padded towards it, ready to open fire. He ducked his head in, was met by a blank look from the drowsy Indonesian pilot.
The Poison People Page 8