IGMS Issue 24

by IGMS

  "Pishill tiye," Trevelyan said, his voice a low rumble.

  "Father was a pig," Mikhail spit. "Like you. Poor little Sonja, lying there in the parlor stiff and cold, mother wailing. What kind of man leaves his family at a moment like that? Tell me!"

  "It wasn't like --"

  "He's in the ground, Pyotr, stop making excuses for him. He left because mother was a Jew. He knew she was a Jew when he married her. And when she sat shiva for Sonja -- the one time she acted as a Jew after marrying him -- he left. That's why he's a pig."

  Peter remembered during that time their mother, Sarra, insisted he take Mikhail to church on Sundays. "Look for your father there," she said to them. But as soon as the boys rounded the block, Mikhail would run away.

  Peter would hide in the back of the dark church, praying his father wouldn't discover him.

  "Father came back," said Trevelyan, the ache of an old wound in his voice. He had returned after some months, and no one -- except Mikhail -- spoke again of that time.

  "Alexei never came back," said Mikhail. "Not for me. He was there, in the apartment, but he never came back. I never understood how you could side with him, with his church. How you could forgive his cruelty. Maybe that's why you can side with Teddy, and Hoover, and Tesla. You need cruel masters."

  Mikhail hit a button and the presses whirred back to life, drowning out anything Peter had to say.

  Trevelyan crept to his door with pistol in hand. The pounding came again. He'd been tending his icons, saying evening prayers, and was not expecting visitors.

  "Pyotr!" called a voice he immediately recognized as Katya's. "Open the door!"

  A quick peek though the peephole to ensure she was alone and Trevelyan unlocked the deadbolts and chains. Pulling Katya inside by the arm elicited a squeak of surprise from her and he smelled the acrid reek of old booze as she whirled past him. He glanced down the hall in both directions and thought he saw a door closing.

  At least one nosy neighbor. Dammit.

  "What the hell are you doing here?" he demanded. It was obvious Katya had been crying. "I don't need some drunk woman at my door at midnight screaming in Russian."

  "Pyotr, Pyotr," she sobbed. "You can get him released. Tell them Mischa didn't do it."

  "Tell who? What happened?"

  "Mischa went to the police and told them he killed that girl. The one you were asking about."

  "What?"

  "Then the politsiya -- " She flopped down on the sofa. "They came to the shop," she said, sniffling and trying to get her composure back. "Ransacked it. Smashed up the printing press. They won't let me see him -- you have to help!"

  In a flash, Trevelyan ran everything he knew about the case through his mind. Mikhail killing Alice? It made no sense. What was the motive?

  "He was screwing that blyadischa," Katya said, venomously. "How could he do that to me?"

  Trevelyan felt like he might throw up. In a cascade the facts fell together in his mind, proofs colliding on their way to inescapable conclusion.

  "You killed her," said Trevelyan. It was not a question.

  Katya, tears rolling down her cheeks, sat down at the small kitchen table. Trevelyan joined her.

  "Tell me what happened."

  "I found out they were meeting, in secret. She wasn't one of us," Katya said.

  Wasn't Russian, she meant. He couldn't tell her.

  "I knew there was going to be an attack. So I set up a meeting at the subway station. I wanted her to get caught in the attack, to suffer. But when I saw her . . . It was rage, pure rage. Before I knew it, it was over. I left her there, on the bench. I was so angry, Pyotr."

  Trevelyan could say nothing for a time except "Katya, Katya."

  "After your visit Mikhail realized what I'd done. He turned himself in to protect me. So noble," she scoffed. "Oh God, why do I still love him?" She began sobbing again.

  "I didn't know you and Mikhail were -- not until I walked into the shop."

  She nodded her head. "We only had each other after you left. Please, Pyotr, you have to get him out of there."

  "I can't get him released unless I can give them someone else. The real killer." He stood, pushing the chair away.

  She reached in her coat for a packet of cigarettes and lit one with shaking hands.

  "Maybe we can work out a deal with the district attorney," he said. "You've got contacts among the anarchists. Turn state's evidence."

  "Betray our cause? Mischa was right about you!"

  Peter stalked to his desk and from a drawer he pulled the photos from the subway attack, tossing them on the coffee table. Katya looked away.

  "That's what your politics cost, Katya! Innocent people, on their way home from work. Dead. Think of their last moments. Think of their agony as the gas choked them. As they were crushed to death. Tell me they don't deserve justice."

  "That's not why you want me to turn them in, Petya. You know it."

  "If you love him, you won't leave him in there for what you did." Trevelyan took a cigarette from her pack and lit it with shaking hands.

  "They so rarely allow me to leave Wardenclyffe, and then never to a park to feed the pigeons."

  Tesla sat on the same bench where Trevelyan had left him two days before. At the inventor's feet were dozens of pigeons cooing and pecking the ground as he hunched over and delicately spread seed for them. "I used to spend wonderful hours in Bryant Park feeding my pigeons."

  "In the southwest corner," said Trevelyan.

  Tesla turned, a look of delighted surprise on his face.

  "It's the same corner you sent Alice Bester to, once a month, to feed your birds." Trevelyan held up the small ID photo from the missing persons report. "Several of the vendors remember seeing this girl there with some frequency over the last two years."

  Tesla's smile faded and he turned back to the birds. "I understand Miss Bester's killer has turned herself in. A matter of simple jealousy, I'm told."

  "Jealousy, yes," said Trevelyan taking a seat on the bench. "But simple? There are a few things that don't add up. You and Alice were close. You both loved birds. She would bring you birdseed from Capar's Dry Goods on Houston."

  "I am impressed, Mr. Trevelyan."

  "There was a bag of seed in her pocket when we found her. I noticed the same purple stamp on your bag when I was here last. I understand from the proprietor that a young woman placed an order every other week for a very special blend of birdseed. He mixes it only for her, and she pays a premium for the service. Quite a bill on a secretary's salary."

  Tesla smiled weakly. "I gave her the ratios for the mix myself, and arranged payment through Miss Bester. It is what my birds like best, you understand."

  "But you ordered Alice to the city at least twice a month, according to Mrs. Wilson. Witnesses only put Alice in Bryant Park once a month. Why the second trip? Was the flower-print dress her signal that her contact wanted to meet?"

  "I've no idea what you mean. It's well known --"

  "That you hate flower-print dresses, yes. Strange, though, that a social secretary you claimed was the best you'd ever worked with and whom you forbade Mrs. Wilson to fire seemed incapable of remembering such a simple thing. She had dozens of dresses, yet she wore her only flower-print dress twice a month? Tell me, Mr. Tesla, did she also routinely wear pearls, or brush her hair in your face?"

  Tesla cringed visibly at the thought.

  "I didn't think so," said Trevelyan, leaning close. "How long did it take you to deduce that Miss Bester was Miss Bestemianova and take her into your confidence?"

  Tesla paused his feeding, considering the last handful of seed carefully. "You seem to have figured out a great deal, Mr. Trevelyan," said Tesla. "Very well," he said before sprinkling the feed delicately before the cooing, flapping mass of birds. "Let us speak frankly with one another. I knew almost immediately that she was Russian. Her accent. She had been here since she was a child and to anyone born here I'm sure her English was flawless. But I have an ear for such
things. A certain lilt when she vocalized certain sounds, and the way she pronounced 'Tesla.'"

  "You were in love with her."

  "Dear me, no!" Tesla laughed. "I love only my work and my birds. Anything else is a distraction I cannot afford. No, Miss Bester was assisting me in my great work."

  "Providing the Russians with plans for your peace beam."

  Tesla glowered at Trevelyan. "No doubt you believe the tsar is paying me vast sums for this knowledge? Do you think me so coldly mercenary as that?" Tesla stood and stalked away.

  "The thought had occurred to me," said Trevelyan, following.

  Tesla rounded on him. "You should call it my death ray, Special Agent. Everyone else does, and they are right. I was terribly naive to think my beam could stop war. It can only make it more terrible, and more random.

  "The incident in Siberia was an accident, and not intended whatsoever. I had aimed my teleforce beam for the skies above the Arctic, to a spot I had calculated was west of the Peary expedition. He was then making his second attempt to reach the North Pole and I had asked him to report back to me anything unusual that he might witness on the open tundra.

  "When I first energized my tower --" Tesla turned to stare up at the giant mushroom-like transmitter, "it was hard to tell whether it was even working. Then an owl tried to perch on the tower and was disintegrated instantaneously. We powered down at once. That was the extent of the test. Forty seconds, perhaps a minute. But the destruction it caused . . .

  "The beam did not behave as my calculations suggested it would. Instead of discharging into the sky, the energy traveled through the crust of the earth itself, erupting in the Tunguska valley. I have still been unable to deduce how or why this happened.

  "My death ray is not like an arrow or artillery shell. It follows no predictable path or parabola. It is as random and capricious as lightning. It might strike halfway around the world, or ten feet from you. It is useless as a weapon and a hazard to any nation that would deploy it."

  Trevelyan was for a moment too stunned to speak. The whole world thrown into chaos for a weapon no one could use safely?

  "Then why give the ray to the Russians?"

  Tesla's brow furrowed and he straightened to his full height. "I would destroy the death ray, if I could," he said, voice quavering. "I am thankful beyond measure that the explosion at Tunguska killed no one. But lesser souls will pervert the device for destructive ends. I was a fool not to see this before. I understand now something of what poor Nobel must have felt. I gave the world alternating current, harnessed the power of Niagara Falls, but all I shall be remembered for is my death ray. No, I would never share that technology. It's too terrible to contemplate.

  "What I gave Miss Bester were plans and schematics for my defensive shield. The act with the flower-print dress was, as you surmise, to get her to the city when necessary. She said only that she had contacts in the Russian community that could pass the information to the tsar's agents."

  Trevelyan staggered back and sat hard on the bench. "Mikhail was her contact?" Katya, what have you done? They weren't lovers.

  "I wish she did not have to become involved. But Miss Bester was considered such a low security risk that she was allowed off base with greater ease and frequency than would be other members of the staff. And since she was leaving at my eccentric request . . ."

  Trevelyan understood. No one would suspect Tesla of collaborating with the Entente that had tried to kill him.

  "Getting the shield to the Russians is the only way to ensure, nay, enforce global peace," said Tesla. "If the Entente can shield their cities as we can, it renders not only conventional warfare obsolete, but also my death ray.

  "There are elements, within our military and our government, who wish to use the death ray even knowing its flaws. Edison -- that fool! -- has convinced them that the accuracy of the weapon can be refined and a targeting system devised."

  Trevelyan lifted his head from his hands. "Is this possible?"

  "Possible," said Tesla slowly. "But only at terrible cost. Edison's plan for calibration might take as many as several hundred firings of the weapon. Several hundred Tunguskas.

  "This is what Miss Bester -- let us call her by her proper name at last, Miss Bestemianova -- was working to prevent. But with her dead the Russians will never build the shield towers, now. They are still missing key components of the plans. Everything I have worked for -- that she worked for -- has come to naught. I have unleashed a terror upon the world."

  Tesla staggered to the bench and began to weep.

  Trevelyan had spent a long night in prayer before his icon of St. Mark of the Caves, asking help and guidance from a saint known for his gift of discernment. And as he descended the creaking stairs to Mikhail's basement it struck him how cave-like the space was. Carved from the bedrock of Manhattan, the walls were dark and slick with moisture.

  Given the contents of the briefcase Trevelyan carried he thought it appropriate, too, that St. Mark was also known as the Gravedigger.

  In the harsh light of the single Edison bulb, Trevelyan saw that the basement and the printing press had been worked over. Paper was everywhere, both printed issues and sheaves of blank stock: shredded, wrinkled, stepped on and torn. The presses were battered and bent, like someone -- or several someones -- had taken a sledgehammer to them.

  In the damp chill, Mikhail stood with his back to the stairs, leaning over his smashed press and trying to repair the dented rollers with nothing more than a wrench.

  Mikhail mumbled something that Trevelyan couldn't make out, and as his brother turned toward him Trevelyan got his first look at Mikhail's battered face. Deep purple bruises, a split through the left eyebrow, a swollen lip.

  "Bozhe moy . . ." whispered Trevelyan.

  "This is what they think of us," Mikhail mumbled. Only then did Trevelyan realize his brother's jaw was wired shut.

  "I'm so sorry, Mischa."

  Mikhail sucked back spittle leaking through the wiring. "Save your pity for Katya. I wasn't sleeping with Alice. I never told Katya what we were doing so I could protect her if it went bad. Instead . . . this. She told me you wanted her to make a deal, turn in her contacts. She won't do it. She'd never betray the movement. Just like I didn't tell the police your precious secret. You have no radical brother to embarrass you."

  "Mischa, if I could have protected her --"

  "Don't," he said, turning back to his ruined press. After a moment: "I was only ever worried that Katya loved you. I had no idea that she would --" He began to silently shake.

  After a long pause Trevelyan said, "Alice was getting the plans directly from Tesla." At that, Mikhail turned around. "Told me so himself. We both misjudged him. He wants his death ray stopped as badly as anyone." Trevelyan held up the briefcase. "These are the last blueprints they need to build shield generators of their own."

  "Is this a trick? A trap?"

  Trevelyan shook his head. Mikhail managed a "Why?" after a moment of stunned silence.

  "I know you have contacts with the tsarists," Trevelyan said. "I know you've been passing Tesla's plans to them. I need you to finish the job."

  "There's no money in this. No glory," said Mikhail, defensive. "We are doing only what needs doing."

  "I never thought you were being paid, Mischa," said Trevelyan, handing him the briefcase.

  Mikhail quickly examined the papers inside before closing the case. "They will shoot us for this, you know," he said. "If we are caught. This is treason."

  Peter never imagined doing anything like this. Everything was upside down. He simply nodded and said, "Then let us hope it's a noble treason."

  What Happened at Blessing Creek

  by Naomi Kritzer

  Artwork by Nicole Cardiff

  * * *

  We circled our wagons at night so Reverend Dawson's magic could protect us. The Reverend said it was the power of prayer, but Papa scoffed at that.

  "He's a magician, and a good one," Papa said. "Or
we wouldn't've brought him along in the first place."

  My sister Adeline liked to pretend Papa had said something shocking, but I knew he was right. I could smell the magic on the Reverend. I could hear it humming when he said the last words of the nightly blessing that kept out trouble -- dragons, wolves, fevers, Indians.

  Adeline and I were twins, but not the sort who looked alike. She was the pretty one, with plump pink cheeks and hair the color of summer butter. My mother said I was the clever one, but she didn't really believe it. I wasn't pretty, though, so I suppose she thought it would be a consolation if people thought me clever.

  "Papa's right, you know," I told Adeline one night. "I can smell the magic even now." It smelled like burnt bread, and I could hear it crackle into place beyond our wagons.

  "Don't talk about your second sight, Hattie," Adeline said. "It's not ladylike. You know what Mother says."

  Mother said that every man wished he'd had a witch for a mother, but no one wanted one as a wife. Witches were useful to have in the family. Sometimes they could keep a child from dying of a fever, or banish mice from your grain store. But that didn't mean anyone wanted to marry one.

  "So why would you want a witch as a husband?" I muttered, half to myself.

  "He's not a witch. He is a minister of the gospel."

  "Hush, girls," Mother said. We were supposed to be going to sleep, even though the grownups would be talking by the fire for hours yet. We fell silent for a few minutes.

  "Anyway, that was back east they said no one wanted to marry a witch," I said. "We're going west. Things could be different. There are dangers here."

  "Not so long as we stay close to the Reverend," Adeline said.

  "Do you think everyone who comes west wants to live in a town? Maybe I'll meet a man who wants to strike out on his own."

  "No man wants to be protected by his wife. Anyway, do you think you could really make a good blessing? Just because you can smell the magic doesn't mean you can do it."

  "Girls. I don't want to tell you again."

  This time I kept my peace, and after a few minutes I heard Adeline's breathing turn quiet and steady. I stared up at the stars, still wide awake. Out in the distance, somewhere in the darkness of the prairie, I heard a long, high-pitched cry, and then an answering cry, further away. I sat up and looked; my mother was by the fire. "You're perfectly safe, Hattie," she said.