Moskau

by G. Zotov

  Now was exactly such a case.

  Pavel walked up the orchid-entwined steps to the top of a hill. A carved ivory throne awaited him there, surrounded by four red drums. Pavel hit the drums one by one and began rocking in place, imbibing their hum.

  As soon as the last echo died away, he took his place on the throne. Immediately the vines entwined his bare feet; the sky overhead opened up, awash with lightning.

  Pavel stared hard in front of himself. Now. It was coming.

  He saw a penciled face. A delicate nose. Long hair. The black dots of pupils. Olga Sélina, a Viking TV presenter. She’d died two months ago. Who would have thought: a celebrity, a University graduate, a TV star with her own fan club — a guerrilla fighter? A leader of a Schwarzkopf terrorist cell?

  Her group had attacked the cortege of Moskau’s Oberkommandant von Travinsky by ambushing it on Aryan Street. The terrorist attack of the year. Armed with grenade launchers, the terrorists had set the front and rear cars on fire while their snipers opened up on them from the roofs of the München Shopping Center.

  The Oberkommandant had been the first to be killed, followed by fifteen security staff and all eight of the attackers, eliminated by the arriving Vogel helicopters. Four of the terrorists’ bodies had never been found: they’d been simply torn to shreds. They’d had to be identified using the DNA tests provided by Gestapo researchers.

  According to Jean-Pierre, all the top brass, the Triumvirate included, had been in shock when they’d discovered that one of the terrorists was a Viking TV star. Street cameras had registered the beginning of the attack: Olga, in black leather, a Schmeisser slung over her shoulder, snapping commands to the terrorists.

  None of which was mentioned in the media, of course. Celebrities suspected of having been in contact with guerrillas were sentenced to a very special punishment: oblivion. The names of the actors, TV presenters or singers who’d had the imprudence to commend the Forest Brotherhood on the Shogunet network were forever expelled from the media.

  This was death. No interviews, no talk show appearances, nothing. Already a week later, the ostracized celebrity was willing to star in the cheapest of porn simply to draw attention back to him or herself.

  It didn’t help. The punishment erased their names, dooming them to oblivion — and no one was brave enough to challenge it.

  Normally, such an ostracized actor or singer committed suicide within three months. Some proved to be of sturdier stock, but none lasted more than six months. Which was why Olga’s disappearance hadn’t really surprised anyone — neither the audience nor her ex co-workers. She must have done something, as simple as that.

  The questioning of Kolychev — Olga’s co-anchor — hadn’t turned anything up. He seemed to have been Olga’s only friend and clubmate. Apart from him, nothing: she had no family nor friends. They checked Kolychev’s phone but found no calls from her made after the attack.

  The creepers had entwined Pavel’s entire body and closed in over his head. In places the vines had split, spewing out acid-red petals.

  The body of the TV presenter had never been found. She, as well as three other terrorists, had been at the very epicenter of the explosion. A bunch of bone fragments, tissue and some blood had been the only material evidence available for DNA analysis.

  But the unfortunate experiment that had resulted in the mental incapacitation of the three Gestapo researchers had only been conducted very recently. And at least one of the lunatics had recognized Olga as a fiery angel — the fact that had cost him his sanity.

  That could mean at least two things. Either the afterworld indeed existed, revealing a winged fire-enveloped Olga to the Gestapo researchers. Alternatively, she was the “trigger agent” that the Triumvirate had ordered Pavel to locate. Olga Sélina was the spitting image of the fiery angel on the picture. He was almost sure of that.

  But how was he supposed to find her if she was dead?

  The sky crumbled, turning into knots of squirming snakes. Geysers spat out jets of blood. The air thickened. Unseeing, Pavel could sense panthers circling him, growling and swishing their tails.

  She hadn’t died. He could feel her heart beat.

  The body hadn’t been found. Olga would rather everybody considered her dead. Fingernails, bits of skin and the scraps of bloodied clothing that had served as DNA material weren’t really proof of death.

  But how had she managed to escape the city center cordoned off by the SS? Camera footage had been thoroughly studied but you couldn’t really see that much: Aryan Street had been engulfed by smoke and stone dust. The special forces had searched everything within a two-mile diameter with a fine-tooth comb but found no one, either dead or wounded.

  He squeezed his eyes shut. Blood seeped from under his eyelids. The jungle came to life, each leaf wailing, a tornado swirling the water into an enormous splattering twister. Words began typing in his head, letter by Gothic letter imprinted on the typewriter ribbon,

  The Ministry of Public Education

  München Shopping Center

  Oberkommandant’s Office

  The Burgermeister’s Residence

  That seemed to be it. On top of that, the Shopping Center had been closed for renovation already a month. What else?

  Oh yes, of course: the Temple of Odin. Neo Scandinavian style: a fake cave, a copy of the Islandic Viking temple. Well, well, well.

  According to Jean-Pierre’s report, immediately after the terrorist attack the SS Sonderkommando Kalinka had searched all the adjacent buildings. They were all listed on a separate sheet of paper, including their street numbers — those Gestapo bureaucrats wouldn’t have had it any other way.

  There was only one building missing from the list. The Temple of Odin. That’s right. Who would come to a holy place with a search warrant? That would defy reason. The priests of the cult of Asgard were the cornerstones of the existing regime, just like television was. They had enormous wages, houses, medals, SS ranks, the lot.

  Which meant that no one had checked the Temple.

  And it was only fifty feet or so from the scene of the attack. The smoke cover could possibly have allowed someone to rescue the wounded girl and hide her on the Temple premises. The congregation’s noticing the bloody trail wasn’t even a problem: sacrifices were frequent in Viking temples, priests slaughtering rather large animals like sheep and goats. And even if the search group had paid the Temple a visit, what then? “Guten tag, Herr Priest, is everything all right?” — “Oh yes, sons of Odin, all is well.”

  He had to go there, now. He needed to know whether she’d been there.

  The wailing in his ears stopped. The orange birds exploded like toy balloons. The palm trees shrank, crumbling into flakes of wheat cream. The throne melted into thin air.

  Pavel opened his eyes.

  He sprang to his feet, easing the masseuse girl aside. The towel slid to the floor.

  “Wake up,” he shook Jean-Pierre. “We need to get to the city center. Aryan Street.”

  They were walking through the door when Pavel saw the Japanese man. He recognized him straight away: this was the same wrinkly old boy who’d sat next to him on the flight in. He stood not far away, next to the guard who, according to Jean-Pierre, was Pavel’s lookalike.

  The realization pierced Pavel’s brain. He knew.

  He’s here for a reason. He’s come to get me.

  Pavel stopped. He whipped out a Browning from his pocket but failed to get a round off in time.

  The thunder of an explosion ripped through the air. Yellow flames seared Pavel’s face.

  Reichskommissariat Archives #1

  File ZL8. Politicians

  “… ON OCTOBER 20 1941 Wehrmacht troops entered Moskau. After two more months of fierce street fighting they took control of the capital, including the Kremlin. The search for Joseph Stalin garnered no results. According to the Main Security Office report, he was behind the terrorist attack Vengeance ‘42 at the Nibelung square that had wiped out the enti
re Reich elite.

  According to Abwehr’s intel, later Stalin used to hide in an underground bunker in Kuybyshev (now Führerburg) from where he coordinated the Resistance’s actions. After the taking of Führerburg, he disappeared off the radar. The Ural and Siberian guerrilla groups still consider Stalin their spiritual leader.

  Daniil, the patriarch of the Forest Church (the sect that had united those of the Orthodox clergy who hadn’t recognized Russland’s yielding to the battleaxes of the gods of Asgard) worked hard to support the legend. According to it, Stalin had become a hermit living in the thick of the Siberian taiga praying for victory. Between themselves, guerrilla fighters call Stalin “the holy man” — he’s a bit of a religious icon for them.

  His military commander Klim Voroshilov escaped to Iran and went into hiding in Kurd-controlled areas as “invited by Masoud Barzani”. In 1948, he was apprehended during a razzia by SS paratroopers but blew himself up with a grenade during his arrest.

  Russia’s ex-Head of State Mikhail Kalinin publicly denounced his old masters. He produced paperwork proving his Aryan descent and got himself a job in the Reichskommissariat Moskau. Later he worked for the Ministry of Finances under Walter Funk.

  Having retreated from Moskau, the Generals Georgy Zhukov and Konstantin Rokossovsky formed the “forest brigades” near Murmansk whose secret underground factories produced everything they needed, including tanks and howitzers.

  The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Winston Churchill was captured during the taking of London and imprisoned in the Tower in the same cell as Rudolf Hess had been. Churchill committed suicide in 1949 by cutting his veins.

  King George VI had managed to escape to Canada on a submarine; from there, his trail was lost. General Charles de Gaulle became the leader of the French resistance in Africa and died in 1955 in the Madagascan jungle during a Luftwaffe air raid.

  The Emperor Hirohito, as tradition required, didn’t leave his country during the entirety of his rule; he even refused to visit the first Japanese nuclear test in 1948 on one of the Indonesian islands. Hirohito refused to grant Japanese citizenship to the residents of the occupied territories. Which is why, unlike the Japanese themselves with their white-bound passports, the Australians and Alaskans have to make do with a temporary yellow ID card.

  Mixed marriages between Japanese and Europeans are forbidden. A similar “racial purity” law had been introduced in the Reich in 1935. Now the Nippon koku is ruled by Akihito who is indifferent to politics and spends his spare time writing hokku.

  Both President Harry S. Truman and the US Commander in Chief Dwight Eisenhower were tried by a Neuer York Tribunal and publicly hanged at the Zeit Platz on December 11 1958. Both the Democratic and the Republican parties had been banned as “loathsome samples of plutocracy in politics”. The remains of President Roosevelt had been exhumed and thrown into the Hudson River to drum rolls.

  Tens of thousands of Americans died during pogroms (the so-called ‘D.C. massacre’) started by Japanese released from relocation centers[viii]. The Mikado’s army didn’t interfere, announcing the slaughter to be their ‘rightful revenge’. The pogromists burned down the Capitol and the White House, causing many congressmen to choke to death in the fire.

  Chinese communists have never stopped fighting the Nippon koku, their guerrilla units still going strong in most of the country’s provinces. Their leader Mao Tse-Tung made it his goal to leave as many successors as he could, calling his project The Hydra of a Billion Heads. By the time of his death from cancer in 1982 in the rainforests of Yunnan Province, he’d fathered three hundred children from a hundred young female guerrilla fighters. Other field commanders had adopted the same system, supplying Chinese communists with plenty of new cadre.

  Stalin’s deputy Nikita Khrushchev was arrested in Moskau in 1980. All that time, he’d been hiding in his own apartment but no one had thought of looking for him there.

  Permitted for public release

  Signed: Deputy Reichskommissar Paul von Breuwitz

  Chapter Nine

  Uradziosutoku

  Mikado’s Joy Street. Nagasaki Café.

  BLOOD IS THROBBING in my temples. I feel even worse now than after I had fainted back in the Temple. I can’t think straight. It’s as if my head has been cut off — and still I can feel the rest of my body. A bit like sensing your own feet after they’ve been amputated. Phantom pain, it’s called. My skin, my nails, my bones — everything seems to have peeled off. Actually, that’s quite possible. To have survived this without losing any of your body just wouldn’t be possible.

  I can see myself as if from above. My priest’s robes are gone. I’m wearing black boots, a black business suit and a bowler hat to match. Standard workday attire here in Uradziosutoku.

  A paper parasol protects my face from the scorching sun. A waitress in traditional geisha costume clutters her geta sandals across the floor, then bends in a deep bow.

  “Would you like something else, Sir?”

  “Danke schön,” I say with a frail wave of my hand. “Only… this…”

  She nods subserviently. “The yakitori is coming. It’s just as it should be, soy sauce and all. We’re heating your sake slowly: we’re doing our best. Irasshai… sorry for the wait. I have something else to offer you.”

  The geisha leans toward my ear, enveloping me in a fresh aroma of morning chrysanthemums. “We have our own moonshine,” she whispers stealthily. “Clear as a crystal.”

  “Good,” I agree, mimicking her. “Got some pickled cabbages to go with it?”

  “We’ll find some, darling… we could dress it up as funchoza, I suppose… these Japanese heathens will never know.”

  Her cheeks burning, the waitress walks back to a door marked in Japanese and disappears in the kitchen.

  The mind boggles. The Japanese took Uradziosutoku on September 10 1941 — as soon as the Nippon koku had officially entered the war. Seventy years later, there’s very little left of this old Siberian megalopolis which used to be equal doses of Bolshevik and the Tsar. The first thing the Japs did, they restored the Amur Republic[ix] and even summoned the Merkulov brothers, its one-time White Guard émigré ex-rulers. Still, it didn’t last: in less than a year Japan must have realized it simply had to have a prime morsel like this all for itself.

  Now Uradziosutoku was a typically Japanese city sliced into neat squares just like Karafuto Island and built with identical gray and white cottages, their curved roofs inviting swallows to nest inside, its streets drowning in cherry blossom — made of plastic, of course, because real wild cherries aren’t that mad to blossom at this time of year in Siberia. Street shops flash their fancy Japanese neons, their owners laying squid tentacles out to dry. You can hear the screams of fishmongers at the pier market.

  Disgusted, I stare at the wasabi on my plate. Where’s my moonshine?

  These cherry blossoms

  Mess with my head;

  I think I need some booze.

  The hokku comes naturally. The Nagasaki café occupies several cozy Buddhist-style verandahs atop a hill. They offer an excellent view of the bay busy with adorable little boats strung with red paper sails. They’re called junks in China.

  I vaguely remember us going up Calm Dragon Street the other day. Kimonoed shop assistants looked out of their shops and smiled to us, bowing and saying “Okaeri nasai!” — “Welcome!”

  The Japanese culture has taken over the city — although not entirely. The locals have preserved a few more exotic bits, like the Lutheran church, the Polish Cathedral of The Most Holy Mother of God and the Arch of Tsesarevich Nicholas. Hokkaido tourists love taking pictures with them. Uradziosutoku means Salt Bay in Japanese but Russlanders still use the city’s old name, Vladivostok.

  Closer to the Harbor of the Morning Calm (called so in honor of the neighboring Korean Province) towers the Amaterasu Arch dedicated to the goddess of the sun. Newlyweds hurry there after their shintoist wedding ceremonies to pay their respects and drin
k tea in the shade of the goddess’ true wisdom.

  The white and blue mansion of the Manchukuo consulate is only a ten-minute drive away: formerly the seat of the city council, it’s surrounded by a colorful array of Chinese restaurants. From what I’ve gleaned from Viking News, recently the city was in a state of mourning. Geishas stopped receiving visitors as a sign of their grief. Apparently, the city’s ex-Shichō — a Mayor — had performed a seppuku, leaving behind the following inscription on silk,

  My Emperor!

  I am forced to disembowel myself, unable to govern this territory where they smash their sake glasses on the ground every time they finish their drinks. I am sorry to have saddened your heart. I just cannot take it any longer.

  True, Japanese nationals don’t have it easy here. They’re run off their feet trying to Japonize the Russian Far East — but to no avail. Things don’t change. Shigemitsu Ivanovich still beats the holy crap out of Dzimmei Petrovich over the former’s wife — the well-respected tea mistress Kumiko Sergeevna — who has been wearing a rather revealing kimono lately so that the latter just couldn’t help himself and dipped a stealthy hand under the provocative silk. No bowing, no apologies, no poems describing the remorse eating through the black heart of the bastard Dzimmei.

  The rising sun has set.

  The three drunk samurai

  Bow to their sake barrel.

  This was the hokku that the Shichō wrote with his own blood after he’d sliced his belly with a katana.

  The Germanization of European Russia has been much more successful. Everyone there seemed to be pleased with becoming a “blond beast” whose Aryan ancestors had arrived from Mount Kailash, the one with the swastika on its slope. It’s true that in Moskau proper the Japanese culture is popular purely due to the distance separating it from exotic Tokyo. But here, the locals can’t stand the sight of it. No matter how many times the police have raided underground samovar[x] tea parties, they mushroom by the day.

  “This is your sake, Master. I beg of you, in the name of Amaterasu, do pay attention.”