On the ceiling of the ballroom were the superimposed heads of Koslova, Papalazarou Senior and Dascalu, to give the impression that the party’s Holy Trinity were looking down proudly upon their successors and their continuing struggle to safeguard Caspian for the True Human Race. With the three large figures looking down on the people below, the photograph echoed (inadvertently, I had no doubt) the political cartoon of the Triumvirate puppeteering the zodiac conspirators.
Lily was inscrutable. It was impossible to guess what she thought of any of this.
“So. This was the big victory party,” she said.
“It was,” I answered.
“Are you anywhere there?” she asked, leaning in and squinting to study the tiny smiling faces.
I chuckled, amused to think that she believed I would have that sort of status. “No. No, I don’t get invited to those sorts of parties.…”
I stopped. Because, while I knew I was not in that photograph, there were two faces there that I did recognize.
In the left of the frame, quite close to the camera, was a table around which sat several members of StaSec.
Leaning on the back of his chair, with a cigar clamped rakishly in his mouth and gray smoke forming a second beard over his impressive brown brush, was Samuel Papalazarou Junior, the current Director of State Security. He had the expression of a pantomime villain, all white teeth and waggling, devious eyebrows. It was strange to think that this was the near corpse clinging to life on the shore of the Caspian Sea. Looking at his grinning face, I despised him. This was, after all, a year after the Morrison Crisis, when StaSec had lost almost a third of its staff to the newly born ParSec, mad and bawling for blood. And Papalazarou, the Director of StaSec, had not only let it happen, he had actively participated in the purge, feeding hundreds of his own agents into the meat grinder to preserve his own status in the party. I hated him for smiling, but what else would he do? His species did not know shame. But it was the woman sitting beside him that caught my eye. For there was Augusta Niemann, noticeably slimmer but still stocky and robust, smiling cheekily at the camera while on her lap sat a thin, blond woman in a silver sequined dress. She was beautiful in a gawky way, and her eyes and mouth were open wide in laughter and shock as Niemann, grinning like a naughty schoolboy, cupped her left breast in her right hand.
“Agent South?” came a quiet voice from the doorway.
The manager had appeared, holding a page of foolscap paper as if it might explode at any moment.
I extended my hand without a word, and she passed it to me, the page trembling like a spiderweb.
“This is all of them?” I asked. Twelve names, along with their positions in the hotel. Bellboys. Maids. The manager herself, of course (and I commended her courage in putting her own name down) and the concierge.
She nodded. She looked like she was about to cry.
“Thank you,” I said. “Please have all these people assemble in the lobby. My colleagues in StaSec will wish to speak with them.”
She nodded, and left without a word.
“Please wait here,” I told her. “I won’t be long.”
She nodded, but was still fascinated by the final photograph of the ballroom.
I left the museum and proceeded down the stairs to the lobby, where my colleagues in StaSec had just arrived.
19
Men have never been so oppressed as in societies which set man at the pinnacle of values and exalt his greatness or make him the measure of all things. For in such societies freedom is detached from its purpose, which is, we affirm, the glory of God.
—Jacques Ellul, The Ethics of Freedom (1973–1974)
Niemann had said she was sending her “best man,” which of course meant Sally Coe.
Coe was the head of Niemann’s personal security detail, the DSD. She was Niemann’s right hand, which led to all kinds of filthy jokes by StaSec agents who lacked the survival instincts and discretion that would ensure long, healthy careers. She was indeed rumored to be Niemann’s lover as well as her will made manifest: rumors that I would have given no credence to had I not seen the photograph in the Room 114 museum. Prior to that, I would have dismissed the idea of Niemann having any kind of sexual desire to be a lunatic fable. Coe was responsible for Niemann’s safety. She slept in Niemann’s town house and she maintained a vast network of spies and informants quite distinct from StaSec’s own. And she was Niemann’s enforcer. When I had been sitting in Niemann’s office, wondering if I would feel hands on my shoulders bundling me into a darkened van, it was Coe’s long, elegant, pianist’s fingers that I imagined pinching my clavicle.
Coe was only a few years younger than I was, but had the grace and snap of a male ballet dancer in his twenties. She walked through the Morrison’s main entrance with a retinue of DSD gullivers, some a good foot and a half taller than she was and smaller in every other way. She wore a pristine white shirt and a black tie as thin as a ribbon. Whereas StaSec agents typically wore gray trilbies, the DSD wore black ones as befitted their purpose. Coe’s sat snugly on her head between two small, elfin ears, covering a head of very short, iron gray hair in a military cut. Niemann’s best man. There were, I mused, very few women in StaSec of that generation. One could, in fact, map the changing fortunes of her sex in Caspian by using StaSec as a case study. In its earliest days, StaSec had actually been majority female, if only just. Koslova was still prime minister, and the last egalitarian embers of the Founding still gave some heat. And Dascalu, whatever his other faults, cared about results, not chromosomes. But as the years went on, Caspian had stopped trying to forestall the future, and had actually begun to retreat into the past. The number of women who had foregone full-time work to tend hearth and home had slowly crept up, encouraged by the party with methods both subtle and overt. Women were still recruited in StaSec of course, but the floors definitely became hairier as time went on, with a tang of aftershave and old sweat strengthening year on year. After Dascalu finally shuffled off, Papalazarou (an utterly unrepentant misogynist) sped up the process considerably. Now, after eight years of Niemann’s rule, there were once again plenty of young female agents, but almost no old ones. Coe and Niemann were survivors. More than that. Conquerors. I approached her.
“Nicky South!” she said heartily. “How the hell are you, old man?”
I was taken aback. I knew Coe only by reputation. She, judging from her demeanor, knew me from a long and storied friendship going back many a year. But then again, the head of DSD must know everyone intimately. She had probably memorized more about me than I had forgotten.
“I am very well, thank you, Senior Special Agent Coe,” I responded humbly. A good rule of thumb in StaSec: the more informal a superior is with you, the more formal you should be with them.
“You’ve had a little trouble, I hear?” she said.
“Yes. My client, Mrs. Lily Xirau…”
“The code?”
“Yes. A man attempted to abduct her from her hotel room. They knew where she was staying, which leads me to believe that one of the staff here at the Morrison supplied them with the room number. I’ve compiled a list of those staff who would have known that information.”
I handed her the page of foolscap that the manager had supplied me with, knowing full well that it might be the death warrant of twelve people.
“Oh good work, South,” said Coe, pleasantly surprised. “Nicely done, nicely done.”
She put the page in her pocket without so much as glancing at it and pointed to one of the bellboys who was watching us from the stairs.
“Him,” she said to the gullivers.
Two of the gullivers stamped up the stairs, and the bellboy gave a yelp and tried to run down by barging through them. Unfortunately for him, the gullivers were evidently made of some kind of cement and he simply bounced off them and landed on the stairs. They picked him up, each taking an arm and a leg, and dragged him through the main doors to a van waiting outside.
I looked at Coe in shock.
“Yousef Prachti. He’s ParSec’s man in the Morrison,” she said. “You needn’t have gone to the trouble, but I do appreciate the effort. I’ll be sure to tell Gussie.”
“What’ll happen to him?” I asked. Prachti’s screams were still audible, even through the thick wooden doors of the Morrison. In a way, I didn’t care. Even if they tortured and killed Prachti, better one than twelve, surely?
“Oh, he’ll be in for work tomorrow, I shouldn’t wonder,” said Coe, absently. “You can’t really rough him up too badly for talking to ParSec. That’s what good brothers and sisters do, isn’t it? We’ll just shake a few names out of him and let him go. Now. Care to introduce me to Mrs. Xirau? I am positively fascinated to meet her.”
As I sat on the very bed where, almost twenty years ago, a trove of documents had been found that had plunged the nation into civil war, Sally Coe held Lily’s chin delicately in her hand and studied her bruised face. She tutted and clicked her tongue disapprovingly, like a woman seeing a particularly vulgar act of vandalism.
“Animals,” she said. “Mrs. Xirau, I have been instructed by the Deputy Director of State Security herself to offer our most heartfelt apologies on behalf of the Caspian Republic for this assault on your person.”
“That’s quite all right,” said Lily. Sally was looking at her with an intensity that was rather off-putting.
“The Deputy Director of State Security has also asked me to inform you that she fully intends to find the man who did this to you and have his balls in a fruit bowl on her desk by tomorrow morning. Now. Tell me everything.”
I sat in silence as Sally Coe questioned Lily (one does not pass up the opportunity to watch a master at work) and was instantly struck by how different she was in style from any other StaSec agent I had seen. Grier, an excellent interrogator in his own right, was tenacious, dogged and unrelenting. He would wear down a suspect through sheer attrition. Sally played an entirely different instrument, and in an entirely different style. She was charming, warm and an outrageous flirt. And, as it turned out, entirely ineffective against Lily.
Lily, there was no other way to describe it, was stonewalling.
Could she describe the man? She could not.
Was he tall or short? It was too dark to tell.
Did he say anything? Nothing she could recall.
It became so blatant that even Sally, smitten though she was, became quite irritated.
“Mrs. Xirau,” she said. “I’m starting to think you don’t want us to catch this man.”
“I just don’t think it’s necessary,” said Lily. “I don’t intend to press charges.”
Sally rolled her eyes and turned away, staring at the exhibits on the wall.
“Lily,” I said, leaning forward. “Regardless of your personal feelings, what happened tonight was a very serious matter. A criminal matter. And a security matter. It must be dealt with appropriately.”
Lily shrugged. Oh, hello Olesya.
“I won’t help you,” she said simply.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because I don’t want anyone to be killed,” she said.
Sally turned and looked at me. She placed her hand on her heart and made a mock face of adoration, as if Lily were a small child who had said something unspeakably precious.
“Besides, I don’t know what you expect me to say,” said Lily. “It was dark, I couldn’t see anything. He hit me, I hit him, I ran out of the room and hid here. That’s it.”
Sally nodded. “Fair enough. Right. Here’s how it’s going to go. Nicky here will continue to be your escort, that is if neither of you object?”
“No,” she said.
I shook my head.
“Lovely,” Sally continued. “The DSD will have five men at the Morrison at all times outside your door. They’ll be answering to you, South.”
“Me?” I said, stunned.
No, the fucking lamp, South, I heard Niemann bark in my mind.
“Problem?” Coe asked.
“No,” I said quietly.
I felt a nugget of dread forming in my stomach. Those large, grim-faced gullivers who had escorted Sally Coe into the Morrison’s lobby were StaSec’s finest agents. The DSD took only the best. They would not take kindly to having to answer to a lowly agent who hadn’t been promoted in twenty-six years.
“They’ll also be driving you to and from StaSec HQ,” said Sally.
Lily nodded. “Thank you,” she said.
There was a quiet, extremely tentative knock on the door.
I opened it, and the manager stood outside. She whispered to me that the staff had been waiting for me in the lobby for twenty minutes but that one of them was missing, a man named …
“Yousef Prachti, yes, I’m sorry, I should have told you,” I said. “You can tell them all to go back to work, it’s fine.”
Her eyes shone with relief. “No one’s going to be taken?” she asked, as if she could scarcely believe her good fortune.
“No. Well, no one except Prachti,” I said, carelessly.
“You took Prachti?” she exclaimed in distress and began to cry.
I looked at her in shocked silence.
“I’m sorry…,” she said. “He was my nephew.”
“Oh. He’s not dead,” I said. “At least…”
I turned to look at Sally, who shrugged and shook her head in a way that said No, probably not.
“No, he should be fine,” I told her.
“Oh, thank you, Agent South, thank you so much.”
“Is our room ready?”
“Well, no, the staff have been…”
“Waiting in the lobby. Yes. Can you please see to it at once? Mrs. Xirau is very tired and could use some sleep.”
20
It was at Meghri that one of the most remarkable episodes of the entire war occurred. Surrounded by far superior Caspian forces on either side, the Armenian defenders within the town dug in and prepared for an all-out assault. General Manukov, alone and unarmed, entered Meghri under flag of truce and explained to the young soldiers that their position was impossible. He begged them, tearfully (on his hands and knees in some accounts), to think of their families and to not throw their lives away. The Armenians, so impressed by his sincerity and compassion, agreed to surrender, and Meghri was taken without further bloodshed.
—Ignatius Kasamarin, A History of the Caspian Republic
Mrs. Xirau was not the only one who needed sleep. I was bone tired, and wanted nothing more than to slip under soft warm sheets and drift off, but the night was not yet done with South. After the manager returned to inform us that the new room was finally ready, two of the DSD gullivers escorted Lily away and Coe and I were left alone in the museum.
Coe lit a cigarette and drew deeply.
“God, what a perfect doll,” she said. “The thoughts that code is putting in my head are downright treasonous.”
One of the luxuries of her position, I mused, being able to say things that would get lesser mortals killed.
“So Nicky,” she continued. “What are your thoughts?”
I couldn’t figure Coe out. I was used to being treated by my fellow StaSec agents as a nonentity, a fool or a political menace. Coe was one of the highest-ranked, respected and feared agents in StaSec and yet she treated me not simply as an equal, but as an old friend. Was it simply affectation? What was she doing?
“I think it was ParSec,” I said.
Coe frowned.
“We must be careful of prejudice,” she said. “What happened tonight was stupid and brutal, so of course we would suspect The Bastards. But I’m not sure.”
“Then who else?” I asked, but as I said it I remembered Grier and his long pilgrimage after the discovery of the Parias. Caspian might be poor in food, but it was rich in intelligence and military agencies, any one of which might have taken serious issue with Lily Xirau’s presence. Coe was right. I was letting my hatred of ParSec blind me to other suspects.
“Her
e’s what I don’t like,” said Coe. “There weren’t enough men, and that’s not something I usually find myself saying. But there it is. If ParSec want to snatch someone from a room, they can snatch someone from a room. We must at least give them that, yes? Whoever this outfit was, they were undermanned. Severely so. Which means we need to start thinking smaller. Maybe this was some local hoods looking to ransom a high-value hostage. Ajays, Armenians, one of the Persian cartels? Or maybe it was ParSec, but not all of ParSec, do you follow?”
“A rogue element?”
“Exactly. Knowledge of Mrs. Xirau’s presence is spreading like a virus and about as welcome. No one is worse at keeping secrets than the secret services, you know that. Maybe some hard-liners just couldn’t bear the idea of Lily Xirau’s perfect little arse resting on Caspian soil. Hell, if you accept that this is just a small group of malcontents it could be anyone at all. Rogue ParSec. Rogue army. Hell, rogue us?”
“You mean … it might have been someone in StaSec?” I said.
Coe shrugged. “I’ll be very interested to hear what Prachti has to say. Speaking of, I’d better get down there and make sure things don’t go too far. It might make your stay here awkward if anything were to happen to the manager’s nephew. Here’s my number, South.”
She passed me a card with a phone number and absolutely nothing else.
“Call me if you have any problems.”
She turned to leave and, as she did, her eyes fell on the picture of the victory party, which hung on the far wall. She approached it and stared at it, mesmerized.
“Oh look at her,” she said at last, cooing at the image of the young Niemann. “Wasn’t she a stud, Nicky?”
A sudden, mad thought flashed across my mind. Was it possible that the blond woman sitting on Niemann’s lap was Coe?
“Lily wondered who that was,” I lied, pointing to the blonde. “I was naming all the people there, but I didn’t know her.”
When the Sparrow Falls Page 14