The Petrovitch Trilogy

by Simon Morden

  The kettle boiled, and she dutifully made instant coffee spooned from a battered tin.

  “What about you?” asked Petrovitch. “You don’t seem, I don’t know, very holy.”

  She plugged the fire back in. “Holiness is a work in progress. In the meantime, I can kick your bony ass through a wall, I can group twelve shots at fifty meters and I can take a bullet meant for my priest. The job description didn’t mention sainthood.”

  “So what did it say?”

  Her fingers tightened around her mug, and she blew steam on her face. “I was fifteen and I was going to end up killing someone. I was full of rage and hate, and I couldn’t control it. Someone offered me a chance; a chance to change what I was going to become. A new start, just like you.”

  “Yeah. Not quite like me.”

  The lights went out.

  In the dying glow of the fire, Petrovitch snatched up his gun and pulled the slide. It was dark, a closed room without windows. He could hear the sister’s clothing rustle softly, then the solid mechanical sound of her own, considerably larger gun being cocked.

  He listened intently. There was the rain, the creaking of timbers, the splash of water in over-full containers. There was traffic noise and the clatter of domestic alarms. He could see where the back door was by the slit of light under it. He took two slow steps and stood beside it, back to the wall, ready.

  The only movement in the room was now hers. The chair relaxed with a sigh as she rose from it. The air stirred as she walked. She made no sound herself. Even her breathing was below a whisper.

  She stopped, and everything was still.

  The vestry door gave a very slight shudder, just enough for whoever it was to tell it wasn’t locked. Petrovitch crouched down and reached out with his free hand for his jacket. He found it, and pulled it slowly toward him. He felt in his pocket for his key-fob torch, which he gripped between his lips: his teeth rested against the on switch. He kept hold of the jacket.

  The door opened a fraction. Something bounced on the carpet, once, twice, and landed close to his feet. He bit down on the torch and spun his jacket over the thick black disc.

  A circle of actinic light flashed out from around the edges of the jacket, together with an almighty clap of thunder. Flames jetted up. He was deaf, but he could still see. He spat the torch out across the room, and suddenly someone was shooting at the tiny point of light as it sailed through the air.

  Petrovitch dived the other way, brought his gun up and held his breath. His white robe reflected every last glimmer of light, but the man shrouded head to foot in black wasn’t looking his way.

  He shot him twice in the back, and the figure jerked each time. Petrovitch watched the man start to turn, then slip heavily to one knee. The strange green-glowing eye of night vision rested on him.

  Their guns came around, and Petrovitch fired first, straight into his face.

  Out of bullets. But there was a mostly full pistol in a dead man’s grip right in front of him. He reached for it, and found himself in the crosshairs of another man in black. He looked up and saw a hint of green-cast skin.

  “Pizdets.” There was no way he was going to get hold of that gun, let alone use it.

  Then the man was enfolded in a shadow that lifted him off his feet and slammed him sideways. Bright flashes of gunfire moved in an arc, away from where Petrovitch lay.

  He took the brief window of opportunity to pry the gun away from its entangling fingers, then immediately jammed the long barrel in the ear of the man who had come up behind the sister.

  “Otsosi, potom prosi,” he hissed, and pressed harder. “Sister?”

  She moved, and the body of the second gunman slid awkwardly to the floor. Petrovitch’s jacket was still on fire. She stamped it out and picked up his torch, shining it right in the remaining man’s night-vision goggles.

  “Get his gun,” she said, with such authority that Petrovitch felt his own nerve falter. “And get that thing off his face.”

  With the man disarmed, Petrovitch felt confident enough to wrench the goggles away. He wasn’t Japanese.

  “Chyort! I was so sure they were from Hijo.”

  The point of light moved from one hand to the other, and she took the man down with a punch to the stomach that made him double over before collapsing. She was on him, even while he was retching and gagging, dragging him up again by the neck and holding him against the wall. “I know who these bastards are. Paradise militia.”

  The man, the feared killer, resolved into just another street kid; a foot soldier for a gang who, like all the others, thought they could control part of the Metrozone. He clawed at Sister Madeleine’s hand with his scabbed fingers and slowly turned blue.

  “You’re strangling him,” noted Petrovitch.

  “No. I’m suffocating him,” she said.

  “He can’t tell you anything if he’s dead too.”

  “I don’t need him to tell me anything.”

  “Fair enough.” Petrovitch closed the vestry door, and felt to see if there were bolts he could use. “Don’t you lose your nunhood or something if you kill a man in cold blood, cursed to wander the earth forever?”

  She let go.

  “Also, don’t you think we should be getting the huy out of here?” He stumbled across the body on the floor and put his hand down in a pool of dark, sticky liquid.

  She stood there, staring at the weak, mewling form at her feet.

  “We could still die here.” Petrovitch wiped the gore off on his gown and crawled over to his boots. “We could still die and I’m wearing a yobanaya dress.”

  She moved, holding the torch high, and strode to the wardrobe full of vestments. “Put this on, and this cape.” She threw them, complete with plastic hangers, at Petrovitch.

  “Where’s your gun?” It was hard to put his wet boots on. He jammed his foot down and tore some skin off.

  “I dropped it.” She was in the desk drawers, rattling their contents around.

  “Not smart.”

  “Listen to me,” she roared. “What do you know about fighting? What do you know about close-quarter combat? What do you know about knowing you’re going to be lucky to see the other side of twenty?”

  “You just summed up my life, Sister. Now stop screwing around and get your gun. You’re going to need it.”

  “I don’t need a gun to shut you up.”

  “Yeah?” Petrovitch grunted with the effort of getting the other boot on.

  “I could just break your stringy neck with my bare hands, like that guy in the corner.” She rattled an iron hoop loaded with keys. “Get that back door open.”

  “I’m busy here.”

  “I’m trying to save you. Get a move on!” The keys landed beside him.

  “And a moment ago you were contemplating your navel. For some stupid reason it’s me saving you.” He pulled on the black cassock, arms up, and shrugged it down.

  “I don’t need saving.”

  “Yeah. Martyr yourself on someone else’s time.”

  There should have been five guns in the room. Petrovitch could account for three of them, and a set of night-vision goggles proved too tempting not to take.

  “What are you doing?” The desk fell over, making him jump.

  “Scavenging. What are you doing?”

  “Looking for my gun.”

  “You mean it doesn’t come when you whistle?”

  She heaved another piece of furniture aside. “Got it.”

  Petrovitch piled the guns and the goggles on the cape, then scraped his wet clothes on top, even his ruined jacket. He picked up the keys. “Any idea which one?”

  “Oh, give them here. You are impossible.”

  He gathered the corners of the cape and tied them to form a bundle. “You don’t get out much, do you?”

  The lock turned on the third try. “Ready?” she asked.

  “Yeah. I still look like a kon’v pal’to, though.”

  “You’re fussing about my gun: where
’s yours?”

  “I’ll be running. You’re the one who can shoot straight.”

  She turned the torch off and gripped the latch.

  “I know this is probably not the time to ask,” he said, “but how old are you?”

  “Nineteen,” she said. She twisted her wrist and the sickly daylight flooded in.

  18

  At the bottom end of Edgware Road, she was still jogging effortlessly, while he was gagging with the effort of keeping up.

  “Stop.” Petrovitch squatted and put his head down between his knees. Rain dripped from his nose.

  She stood over him, hands on her hips. “I don’t think we’re being followed,” she said, scanning the crowded pavements. Umbrellas formed an uneven multicolored sea that flowed in every direction at once.

  “Don’t… think?” he gasped, and breathed through his mouth. He was aware that his heart was struggling, but there were more pressing pains like the burning in his lungs and the stitch that was threatening to split him open from groin to neck.

  “I need to call Father John and warn him,” said Sister Madeleine. She pulled out her phone from inside her robes and speed-dialed her priest. “Get some police round to the church.”

  “Do whatever you want.” Petrovitch straightened up, clutching his sides. “I’m going to… yobany stos.” He felt a fresh wave of nausea well up and drag him down. He coughed bile into the gutter.

  “Where am I? Marble Arch. Yes, I know I can’t go back. Our Lady of the Assumption? Warwick Street? Yes, I know it. Look, I’m going to have to call back. What? No, Petrovitch is throwing his guts up.” She paused. “Yes, that Petrovitch. Long story. No, Father.”

  She saw Petrovitch trying to rise again, and she reached down her hand. Petrovitch clung to her arm and she pulled him to his feet.

  “No, Father,” she said, her voice becoming tight. “No. It wasn’t his fault. Because it wasn’t. It was Paradise. Yes. Can we save the questions for later: he’s dying, and I’m drowning. What do you mean, is it raining? Of course it is.”

  Petrovitch hung on tight as his vision grayed. “Chyort.”

  “No. I’m not doing that. Father, he… will you shut up and listen? His heart’s packing in again and standing around on a street corner in plain sight of anyone who might want to kill us is not helping either. So I’m not asking your permission to get him somewhere safe; I’m telling you that’s what I’m doing and I’ll call you again when I’ve done it.” Her thumb stabbed down and the phone was thrust away again inside its secret pocket. “Where are we going?”

  “Imperial college. But not by Park Lane. Goes too close to Green Park.”

  “Bad?”

  “Very. We’ll have to go through Hyde Park.”

  She didn’t look certain. “I ought to just call an ambulance.”

  “If they’re monitoring admissions, I’ll be dead in minutes.” He forced his legs to carry his weight. “You don’t have to come with me. It’s probably better that you don’t.”

  “Shut up, Sam.”

  There was nothing more to say. She marched him over the road. They passed the glistening shaven-headed man at Speakers Corner proclaiming a new machine jihad to the empty pavement, and slipped through the gates set in the wire fence that half-heartedly enclosed the park. Before them lay the warren of tents and shacks and shanties.

  “Keep your eye on the Albert Hall. Too far left and you’ll end up in the Serpentine.”

  She nodded grimly and looked up, fixing the dome against the buildings behind it. The rain had extinguished the open fires and damped down the miasma that hung over the refugee camp. It had even driven most of the inhabitants inside to seek whatever shelter they could scavenge.

  It was loud, the drumming of the droplets on corrugated iron and stiff plastic; a roar that was deafening and disorientating.

  “We could go round the long way,” she said.

  “I won’t last the long way. Besides,” said Petrovitch, “neither the Oshicoras nor Paradise will follow us in. A priest and a nun should get a free pass.”

  It was as if she was looking at him for the first time. “But you’re not a priest.”

  “I won’t tell anyone if you don’t.” He plunged on into the narrow, twisting alleys, ready with a smile and a wave and a benediction, but determined never to stop. Hyde Park was where people went when they burned out of domik life. People went there to die. Petrovitch wasn’t going to be one of them.

  Sister Madeleine followed, and he was glad for her at his back. If it hadn’t been for her, he would have tried the perimeter road. He hated Hyde Park: he could only look at so many hopeless faces before he felt rage overtake him. But who would he choose to grab and shout at? Too many, too many.

  The house in the middle of the park had vanished, every part of it long ago scavenged for building materials: the rough paths still converged at that point though, nothing more than a memory.

  They hurried on. They were deep in the park, surrounded on all sides. Petrovitch’s face was set in a rictus grin, but the sister was in tears as they vaulted over yet another half-rotted corpse. He took hold of her wrist.

  “Come on, babochka. You can’t afford to care.”

  “But…”

  “They chose this.” He turned left and headed for the Black Bridge, dragging her behind him. “There are no guards to this prison. And if you’re at all sensitive, don’t look over the sides of the bridge. Straight down the middle, eyes front.”

  “How… how do you know these things?”

  “Yeah. Doesn’t show me in a good light, does it?”

  They arrived at the bridge. He didn’t follow his own advice: there were things in the dark water, little bloated islands that not even the seagulls dared touch. The wind had accumulated a small drift of them on the far bank, beached and slick where the rain beat down on them and cleaned the filth of the lake away.

  When the Neva thawed in spring, there were always bodies washing under the St. Petersburg bridges along with the gray lumps of ice. But there was an effort to collect them, identify them, cut holes in the frozen ground and bury them.

  That this—this squalor—was permitted, burned in his soul.

  Not far now. The bridge carried a road, and the spaces between the rude dwellings roughly followed the remains of the tarmacked surface.

  Someone had died, that night or that morning. They lay face down, features obscured by long graying hair. Their bones stuck out against their pale skin, each knuckle-joint a knot. They would have weighed no more than a child.

  The rain beat at the body lying across their path, trying to dissolve it away.

  She lost it. She shook him off hard enough to hurt him and crouched down beside the cold, stiff figure. She wept uncontrollably.

  Petrovitch looked on, gazed at the short distance they had left to go. He could see the start of Exhibition Road on the other side of the gate.

  “Whoever it is, is beyond help. Unless you can raise the dead.”

  The way she moved her shoulders showed him his opinion wasn’t at all welcome. She reached forward, hesitated, then turned the body over so that the sightless eyes were filling with rain.

  It had been a woman, her age impossible to guess, her cause of death likewise. There were so many things she could have died of. A broken heart for one. Sister Madeleine pushed the eyelids down, first one, then the other. She sat hunched on her heels, dejected, defeated.

  “We have to go, babochka.” He dared to put his hand on her curved back, and she let it rest there for a while, before shrugging him off and rising to her full height.

  “I… I just needed to know,” she said. She glanced down, stifled a sob, and walked deliberately around the body.

  And for once, Petrovitch knew better than to ask. He cast a glance behind them. Hyde Park was perfectly still. No one but them was moving.

  As soon as they were outside of the gate, the real world struck them with full force. There were people on the pavements and traffic on t
he roads, and the stench of death was replaced by the familiar tang of sweat and oil.

  Petrovitch looked up and saw a strange fear in the nun’s eyes. “Stay with me, Sister. Only half a block more, I promise.” He took her hand again—properly her hand this time, not her wrist—and joined the queue to cross the road.

  The light went green for them, and they got swept along Exhibition Road. Horns sounded behind them, and Petrovitch twisted round to see the reason: the lights all showed red and the junction had seized.

  “What? What is it?”

  “I’ll tell you later. Unless you want to see some really weird shit, we need to get off the street right now.” He pushed her in front of him and through the automatic doors to the university.

  The first thought he had was that his pass card had probably been destroyed when his jacket had caught fire. His second thought was that untying the bundle in his hand and seeing if it was true or not wasn’t going to be a good idea, since he’d have to sort through three different handguns and some night-vision goggles as well.

  And there was the small matter that he was dressed like a Roman Catholic priest.

  “Pizdets,” he said. “Wait here. I’m going to try and get a temporary card.”

  He gathered up his bluster and took it to the reception desk, where he had his retina rescanned and his photograph taken, and a pass issued in his name.

  He called Sister Madeleine over and explained for the third time that no, he really wasn’t a priest, but yes, she really was a nun, and that she was his guest. The receptionist made her sign in, and clearly didn’t believe a word of it.

  As they walked away toward the lifts, a man with a mop and bucket appeared to clear the floor of the lake they’d brought in with them.

  He had to show his card twice more: once to get into his building, the next as they got off the lift on the fourth floor.

  “At least Pif took me seriously.”

  “Who?”

  “Pif. Doctor Epiphany Ekanobi to most. She’s very smart, but she doesn’t tend to believe half of what I tell her.”