Stalin's Hammer: Paris: A Novel of the Axis of Time

by John Birmingham

  “You can stop trying to cut through the ties, Your Highness,” he said. “You are only hurting yourself, and I can certainly save you the trouble of that.”

  The Russian flicked a short, sharp crescent kick into Harry’s face. The side of his boot smashed Harry’s nose flat, the laces and eyelets cutting open his cheeks. He swore in surprise, but more at the violation and shock than in pain. He had already absorbed a good measure of suffering over the past few hours, and this was but a small side-dish in a considerable feast of hurt.

  Julia called Skarov a son of a bitch, but did nothing else besides tucking her legs up beneath herself, as though worried he might stomp on them. And who was to say that he wouldn’t?

  Harry tried blinking to clear his vision, but it did not help. The ship’s cabin was a red blur through a bloody veil of sweat and tears. He started to shake his head, like a dog emerging from a cold stream, but pain‌—‌real pain, blinding and white‌—‌spiked deep into his head at that. His nose was broken, and maybe a cheekbone too. The shape of Skarov, an indistinct smear of darkness, moved through the dissolving watercolor tableau of the cabin and lowered itself into a seated position‌—‌probably on to the small wooden stool which had been sitting under that hinged tabletop.

  “You present me with an inconvenience, Your Highness,” said the Russian.

  Harry did not disavow his defunct royal title. If Skarov wanted to think of him as a prince of the realm, he saw no downside in allowing the error.

  “You have blundered into my operation and caused me to take somewhat extreme measures to secure my objective.”

  “You mean when you murdered everyone?” Julia snarked.

  “Oh no, no, no, Miss Duffy,” Skarov purred. “I did not murder anybody. I merely had them killed. This is not just a rhetorical difference, as His Highness could explain to you.”

  Harry said nothing, but he did not have to speak up. Skarov was not finished.

  “Prince Harold did not murder the Jew he shot back at the Hilton hotel, did he? And you, Miss Duffy, you did not murder those men whose lives you took a few minutes before that. We are none of us murderers, my dear. We are professionals and as such we are above such squalid and tawdry distinctions. But where are my manners?”

  Skarov’s voice changed direction and timbre as he addressed one of his underlings.

  “Oleg, please, His Highness requires some assistance.”

  Harry sensed movement, then gasped as somebody grabbed a handful of his hair, yanked his head back, and roughly wiped the blood and tears away from his eyes with an oily cloth. His broken nose and cheekbones shrieked a high, keen song of pain and he groaned involuntarily. When the stars cleared from his vision he could see comparatively clearly again. The giant Russian spy, comically perched on a small wooden stool just a few feet away; a shorter, thickset goon standing over Harry with a bloodied, filthy rag in one hand; another anonymous off-the-rack thug looming over Julia. Not a trace of pity in any of their faces, but the outline of a grin on Skarov’s. The amusement of a psychopath with an insect in the killing jar.

  “So, to return to the difficulties you have caused me, Prince Harold… as a great man once said, what is to be done?”

  Harry coughed up a gob of blood as he croaked back.

  “Could I suggest you go fuck yourself?”

  Skarov smiled.

  “But of course, Your Highness. Of course you could.”

  He nodded to the muscle and Harry flinched as he anticipated the blow.

  He did not anticipate it would land on Julia.

  The man standing over her leaned forward and back-fisted her in the face. He did not strike her with his full force, which almost certainly would have knocked her out, possibly even killed her. But he struck with enough speed and focus to snap her head back into the steel frame of the cot.

  Julia cried out, “Fuck!” and Harry launched himself at her attacker, a futile gesture which served to do nothing other than further injure his wrists and painfully wrench a shoulder.

  Skarov spoke as though they were a couple of old friends discussing the weather of the day.

  “Professor Bremmer,” he said by way of explanation. “I am curious about your interest in him, Your Highness.”

  “I’m not interested in him,” Harry said, the words feeling worthless as he stared helplessly at his lover. Her nose was broken and her eyes had watered with the blow. She was looking back at him, but he could not read her expression.

  At a glance from Skarov, the enforcer grabbed a handful of Julia’s greasy hair, yanked her head back, and twisted a knuckle into the maxilla nerve bundle of her cheek.

  She screamed until he stopped.

  “Not interested?” Skarov mused. “I find that an extraordinary proposition, Your Highness. London to Cairo is a long way to travel for a man in whom you are not interested.”

  Skarov’s man wrenched Julia’s head around again, allowing him to attack the infra-orbital nerve just below her nose. He didn’t use a knuckle this time. He took something from his pocket‌—‌a set of keys‌—‌and holding her head in a lock, he gouged away at the nerve point as though he intended to dig it out of her face. Her screams this time were incoherent. No words. No cursing.

  Just animal shrieks.

  Harry cried out too, but his howl was merely impotent fury. He thrashed against his binding, desperate to get to her, but his guard squatted down and restrained him with a judo choke‌—‌applied strongly enough to hold him in place, so he could watch, but not so strongly as to black him out.

  Skarov continued in his bizarrely reasonable tone.

  “I don’t know why you are allowing Miss Duffy to suffer in this way, Prince Harold. It seems… ungentlemanly.”

  The torturer switched his attention to Julia’s subclavian nerve, using his hooked fingers this time, extracting a whole new chorus of bellowing moans and cries from his victim.

  “Especially when we could put this unpleasantness behind us with just a few words.”

  Skarov had a way of talking that cut through the loud discordant horror of Julia’s screams. He did not raise his voice. He seemed to pitch his words in a way that slid under her cries and directly into Harry’s ear. Into his mind. His conscience.

  “Just tell me why MI6 sent you to Cairo and I will have Oleg stop what he is doing to your woman.”

  Oleg appeared to redouble his efforts at that, as though he did not want to be denied a rare opportunity to enjoy himself.

  “I work for the Ministry of Trade,” Harry said and the words sounded so weak and shameful that he gagged on them. “We came to Cairo for the trade fair…” He started to say, but his voice trailed off, his conviction lost.

  Skarov sensed his failing will and nodded to Oleg. The man stepped away from Julia, who fell forward in a dead faint. Her face was hidden by a curtain of her thick, dark hair, sodden with sweat and matted with filth.

  “We both know that is a lie, Your Highness. But I can see that your determination to persist with it is not strong. This is good, Harold. You are a rational man. You know that I will have this information from you, so no end is served by your subjecting your woman to this treatment. No? So come now, just tell me what you wanted of the professor. Tell me truthfully. And we shall be done with this. I do not need you or Miss Duffy. I simply need to know what you know. Is that too much to ask?”

  Skarov nodded at Oleg who plucked one of Julia’s hands from where it rested in her lap. He took hold of her little finger, ready to break it.

  Harry cringed. His jaws ground together, as though he were trying to bite down hard enough to stop the truth escaping from his mouth.

  Skarov sighed.

  “Oleg. If you will.”

  “No, don’t!” Harry said quickly.

  Skarov held up a hand to Oleg.

  “MI6 asked me to find Bremmer,” Harry said.

  Julia was crying, but through her sobs he distinctly heard her say, �
��No, Harry, don’t…”

  “Please. Miss Duffy. The men are talking,” said Skarov, not unkindly. “Your Highness? Do go on.”

  “We need him,” said Harry. “London and Washington. They think Bremmer can help them build a ballistic missile shield.”

  “What is this shield? Be precise now, Your Highness. Miss Duffy will suffer if you are not.”

  “We called it Star Wars,” Harry said. “Back up in the 21st. A layered defense against ballistic missile strikes. We need one here to intercept your nukes in space. They think Bremmer could help deliver the shield at least two years earlier.”

  It was a lie, but like the best of lies it contained enough of the truth to be credible.

  Skarov nodded slowly, seeming to contemplate the new information. Before he could speak again they all jumped at a cry of pain.

  Oleg jumped highest of all.

  Julia had jammed his hand, the one holding hers, into her mouth and bitten down hard.

  Harry heard the wet and terrible crunch as she took off the tip of Oleg’s middle finger.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The stranglehold was choking the life from Pavel Ivanov and for once he was happy.

  Life held few pleasures these days, but he did enjoy this. As his opponent’s forearm bit deeply into his neck, he relaxed and took stock of his situation. He was blacking out. He had no stable base from which to execute a counter technique. His arms and legs were expertly tied up. He had maybe two or three inches of movement in the fingertips of his left hand, but they were not well positioned to dig and gouge for nerve centers.

  He tapped out.

  Shihan Moribeda loosened his hold immediately. The two men disentangled themselves, tidied up their sweat-soaked, disheveled training uniforms, and faced each other on their knees, bowing formally.

  Around them, in the small, noisy dojo, Moribeda’s students struggled on in a dozen or more individual bouts. Some were ugly, disorganized grappling matches between beginners. In other contests, senior students and instructors battled each other with minimal movements. A second dan sensei and his third dan opponent had taken grips but not moved again. Ivanov watched them as he climbed to his feet, expecting the contest to explode into action at any moment. It did, eventually, but such action as there was ended quickly, with the third dan pinning the second under a crushing side forequarter hold.

  “Very well done,” Moribeda said in English, dipping his head to Ivanov. “Your ground work improves.”

  The judoka master clapped his hands and barked out an instruction across the dojo for all to cease fighting. Another black belt, who had been supervising the class, making sure the fighters did not roll into each other or off the edge of the tatami onto the concrete floor, repeated the order. Within a second or two all of the individual struggles had ceased. Men and women, but mostly men, straightened themselves up and bowed to each other, as Ivanov and his master had just done.

  “Line up please,” said the third dan, in French this time, raising his voice only slightly to be heard across the dojo. The students and their instructors organized themselves into their belt ranks. The youngest tended to move quickly. Older hands, feeling the weight of their years, were slower to find their places, but eventually everyone was where they were meant to be.

  Ivanov stood halfway along the line of seven black belts, next to the second dan who had also lost to a superior judoka.

  Shihan Moribeda thanked the students for their effort, and the sensei for their time and patience. He spoke slowly in French, heavily accented by his Brazilian origins. The senpai, or senior student, a young French woman with a well-worn brown belt, led them through the formal ceremony to end the lesson, calling the class to seiza and saying in a loud, declarative voice, “Kiotsuke sensei-ni, rei!”

  The class bowed as a whole.

  As Ivanov came up from his bow, he tried to hold onto the peace of mind he had enjoyed the last two hours, but in trying to grasp at serenity he only forced it away.

  The Russian enjoyed training. Whether judo, jujitsu, krav maga or even aikido there was a letting go of things when he bowed to the spirits of the dojo and stepped onto the mat. A lessening of the great weight he normally carried through each day.

  Ivanov did not have the troubles of an average man at his time of life. He was supremely fit and very healthy, at least physically. He had no debts, no money problems of any kind and none in prospect. He had not married and he was not burdened with children. He had no such commitments to anyone, and did not feel their absence in his life. But he was not happy. Being Russian, he accepted this as the human condition, but accepting one’s misery did not lift the burden of it. What solace he had, he had from two sources: taking action to right a world which had gone terribly wrong, and preparing himself to take that action.

  His judo session, every Monday night when he was in Paris, every Thursday night should he be working from his London apartment, was part of that preparation. Judo was a sport, not a combat art, but he appreciated its benefits anyway. To practice judo well was to master balance above all else. Without balance, there was no strength, no technique. All was lost. So too with aikido, and the mastery of energy flow. He sought these things in his life outside the dojo, but he only ever reliably found them in here.

  As he came off the mat with the other students, changing out of their heavy, woven training gi, discussing the class, their plans, their normal lives, he knew that, within an hour or so, the pleasant sensation of being in balance with his existence would vanish and he would be left with the memories of the dead. They were what he had instead of friends and family.

  “Pavel.”

  He heard his name over the chatter of the students and looked up, instantly on guard. There was a pistol in his sports bag. His fingers closed over the grip as he searched for whoever had called out his name. Here, in the dojo, everybody called him Ivan.

  “Hey man, long time.”

  A thickset American man waved to him. A Latino in casual slacks and a short blue rain slicker, beaded with water.

  He relaxed then. He had not recognized the voice, but he did recognize the man.

  Rogas.

  An American, from Ivanov’s own time, back up in the 21st.

  Victor? Vincent?

  No, Vincente. Vincente Rogas. The man looked older, but didn’t they all? The last time Ivanov recalled seeing him had been way back in ‘42. Not long after they had emerged from Pope’s wormhole. Rogas was a Navy SEAL, one of the first into a prison camp they had liberated in the Philippines, outside Cabanatuan. Ivanov smiled at the memory and at Rogas now. That crazy Marine Corps doctor, a woman, had executed a bunch of Japanese officers for using the prisoners as prostitutes. Comfort women, the Japs called them. Major Ivanov, as he had been in those days, very much approved of her bedside manner.

  “Vincente?” he said. “US Navy, right?”

  The American smiled and put out his hand as he walked over. The other judoka mostly ignored them. It was after nine in the evening, and they had homes and families to be getting back to. A few of them checked out the visitor, probably noting his build, which was still powerful, and the grace with which he moved. Ivanov let go of the pistol grip and returned the proffered handshake.

  “I was navy a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, man.” Rogas grinned. “I left after the war. Got an honest job working for Jim Davidson.”

  Ivanov snorted with real delight at the ridiculous statement.

  “He pays well.” Rogas grinned again.

  “And promptly,” Ivanov conceded. “I have worked for him myself.”

  More than half of the students had left by now. Ivanov said goodnight to a couple of them, and to Shihan Moribeda as he passed by on his way to the showers.

  “Are you working for him now?” Ivanov asked. It seemed unlikely the American had stumbled upon him by accident in the backstreets of Paris.

  “I am,” said Rogas. “He has some work for you,
too. He’ll pay promptly for your time, just to hear him out.”

  Rogas handed him a fat envelope. Ivanov did not have to look inside to know it was full of money.

  “Travel expenses,” the American said.

  “Where is he?”

  “At the Hotel Dupleix.”

  “That is just across the city. There is no travel.”

  “But it is such an expensive city,” said Rogas.

  Ivanov tucked the envelope away in his sports bag. He had not worked since returning from Rome and debriefing in London. That was not unusual. He had spent a week recuperating from the physical exertions and damage of the mission‌—‌including a nasty, infected scalp wound. It did not help his recovery that Rome had been a failure in his eyes, although his paymasters did not characterize it as such. The full debriefing had taken another week. First with the British, then with the Americans, and finally with representatives of both intelligence agencies: MI6 and the Office of Strategic Services.

  They had not blamed him for the mess in Italy. He had not even been aware of the shit show on the other side of the Wall, in Free Rome. He had been dispatched to contact Valentin Sobeskaia’s girlfriend. No blame accrued to him for the way in which that had gone wrong. That was Sobeskaia’s fault, with a malign contribution from that zhopoliz Skarov. It had even seemed for a little while that Ivanov might have his revenge on Stalin’s asslicker-in-chief. Six had briefed him into a mission in Cairo, where they knew Stalin’s personal serial killer to have traveled after Rome. But before Ivanov could board a flight to Egypt, his mission was scrubbed.

  He was too compromised for this one, they said.

  Softly, softly, they cautioned. That was the way to catch Skarov.

  He did not disagree. There was no denying he carried half of his body weight around in scar tissue from having stupidly charged into one fight after another with that bastard. And he understood that his personal animus for Skarov and their long history of bloody contention was a liability. But it did not cool his boiling frustration. The delicate feeling of balance, of his soul being at rest for just a moment, which he had enjoyed after the hard session of training, was gone. He felt the old darkness, murmuring with the voices of his dead, come creeping up for him again.