by John Altman
Tsoi came on the line, displaying his usual easy bonhomie. ‘Tovarish. Luck?’
‘Not yet. But I’m looking ahead.’ He laid out his request. When he had finished, static fizzed briefly over the line: another pause slightly longer than it should have been.
‘Let me see,’ said Tsoi then, ‘what I can do.’
FINLYANDSKY STATION
She had come full circle: another half-empty train station, another cluster of shivering homeless, another bird-shat statue of Lenin.
She stood before the schedule board, pondering. She might ride the high-speed Karelian train to Helsinki in style. But trying to cross the border without first improving her disguise, in light of the description she’d heard on Masha’s radio, would be unwise. She had traded the Red Army jacket for a pea coat and fur-lined ushanka hat stolen from a vendor’s stall, but the camouflage would not resist any except the most cursory inspection.
That left the drab commuter trains, the elektrichka. One was heading to Vyborg in twenty minutes. Just thirty kilometers south of the border, the town would make a fine staging area for the endgame.
She bought a ticket. On the platform, she circled around the questing gaze of a security camera. The train was drafty, redolent of cabbage and fish. Most of the passengers began dozing the instant they slumped awkwardly into their second-class seats.
She found an empty row behind a woman reading a paperback with a garish four-color cover. Somebody near at hand began working their way through a steaming Thermos of soup. The wafting fragrance – noodles, vegetables, chicken broth – made her think of Mariya’s kitchen. That roused her appetite and a commensurate wave of self-pity. The self-pity brought up in turn the cool gray mist, comfortably numbing.
Politsiya and soldiers walked up and down the platform outside the train: looking at tablets, looking into windows, looking away. A whistle blew. The train began to move. Gaining distance from the station, the carriage fell into a comfortable rattling rhythm. Recessed lights tucked beneath the luggage rack came on. Cassie leaned back in her seat, exhaling.
She felt nothing.
The door at the near end of the train opened. A provodnik came in, dressed all in black like a mourner. ‘Tickets,’ he called.
He moved down the aisle, punching tickets and handing them back. When he had gone, Cassie closed her eyes. She was back in Mariya’s cottage, begging to be allowed to stay. (Pathetic. She regretted it already.) She was climbing again into the Kalina, shoving the dead woman across the parking brake. She was sighting on Quinn’s face as he slowed, scanning the rooftops, seeming to realize what was coming. Fuck you.
She felt nothing.
She was slitting the OMON agent’s throat with a shard of broken glass. She was shaking Owen Holt’s ringless hand in the bar in Sergiev Posad. She was winging in toward the dacha, aiming for the peaked roof beneath stringy clouds. She was watching herself in the mirror on Zimyanin’s bedroom ceiling as he violated her. It’s a beautiful thing between two people, Cass, m’lass. It’s when a man loves a woman and they make a baby together. She was lying in a soft bed in the red-brick colonial, thrusting out her brave, determined little chin. The bad guys killed your father.
The train rolled into a turn, shifting her balance. She was accepting the gun Quinn had casually produced from his waistband. She could have turned it on him right then, ended all this before it began. Could have, would have, should have. She was licking her lips, taking a running jump between rooftops in Alphabet City. She was spending her first ever night in a homeless shelter, forbidding herself to cry – if others sensed weakness, she was done for. She was sitting on a plastic slip-cover in the Gunthers’ fawn-colored suburban living room, debating which made for a stronger transcript: foreign languages or athletics. A normal girl. A regular life. The road not taken.
She was walking with her father, coming upon a snarl of spray-painted red graffiti. She was mixing a glass of chocolate milk while a radio played on the countertop. Mommy and Daddy were both alive, and she felt safe, she felt warm, she felt loved.
The door at the end of the carriage opened again, as if by a ghost’s hand; a blast of cold air and noise swept in from the vestibule.
She looked vacantly through her own wavering reflection in the window, at dark frozen earth rocketing past in a blur. Eventually, the clanking rhythm of wheels across track slowed. Not far ahead, illuminated by a few straggling lights, a train station appeared.
‘Vyborg,’ said the provodnik, coming again through the car. ‘Last stop. Vyborg.’
Muddled passengers filed out on to a cold platform. Cassie walked with the throng. Inside the terminal she passed shuttered ticket windows, magazine stalls, and a currency exchange. In the parking lot, she kept walking. Centuries-old towers shared a skyline with ribbed construction scaffolding. Rows of small cottages paced a frozen bay. Snow-covered gabled roofs glimmered beneath a smoky yellow moon. The air smelled of saltwater, sawdust, metal, and tar.
Closing the pea coat’s top button, she walked on. Behind lighted windows, Saturday-night revelers drank and laughed. Icy wet wind swept off the bay. Northern lights shimmered behind the moon. She was moving, without having made a conscious decision, uphill, toward a red-and-white lighthouse.
When she reached the tower, she kept going. Houses were increasingly isolated up here, the town rambling behind her. She felt colder, and hungrier, than she’d realized. Fatigue was a crouching beast, ready to pounce. Soon she would need to choose a door, take a chance. Not yet.
She left the road, veering on to a winding path. Hill steeper, breath coming harder. Like a shark. Stop moving and die. Story of her life.
She was heading for a house set apart from any neighbor. Low gate, frozen mossy front walk, shambling woodpile. No driveway, no light inside, no sign of inhabitation.
The gate was unlocked. She walked a quiet circle around the cottage, sniffing the air. Something rank drifted on the night wind. She thought of brimstone and sulfur, of Quinn’s revenant haunting her.
Around back: an old screen door. She touched the latch experimentally. The door creaked open.
Holding her breath she walked forward, into darkness.
PART THREE
THIRTEEN
MOIKA RIVER EMBANKMENT
Exiting the car before Sledkom HQ, Ravensdale paused briefly to look around the city at midnight.
The pallid streets were stunningly quiet. Such quiet, in the center of a city, was somehow unnerving. The traffic that had slowed Fletcher’s limo to a crawl during the bustling morning had left no trace. The only visible vehicles were a single street sweeper, a solitary garbage truck, and an idling Italian Fiat, whose driver had pulled over to argue with a pretty woman in the passenger seat. A tremendous stone statue of Nikolay Przhevalsky, bearing more than a passing resemblance to Joseph Stalin, seemed to look back at Ravensdale challengingly.
Inside the marble lobby, he and Vlasov submitted to the de rigueur search. Six minutes later they stepped into a warren of body odor and close air and wreaths of smoke, of clicking and tapping and artificial light. Ravensdale accepted a cup of coffee, set it aside with a grimace after the first sip. Russians, he thought, would always be a tea-drinking people at heart.
Bordachenko led them to a laptop operated by a young man with wild black hair and three days’ worth of beard. ‘Four hundred and eighty sites, investigated in just shy of six hours – and nothing whatsoever to show for it. A waste, in the end, of time and resources. Thus we’ve given up on veterans and war widows, and redoubled our efforts with drone, security, and civilian footage. Of course, the facial recognition software is imprecise; a human eye is required for verification. Some potential leads on which I’d value your insight …’
As the first images ran – surveillance drone footage, exposing night-vision-green girls stumbling tipsily across bridges, relieving themselves in alleys – Ravensdale’s belly crawled. There is something squalid and rancid, Stephen Fry had said, about being spied on.
Across the laptop’s screen moved dozens of young ladies, many filmed without their knowledge, all possessing the same basic facial structure, or close enough for the computer’s purposes. Surveillance cams revealed belligerent young women filmed during traffic stops, intent young women inspecting shelves during late-night grocery runs, coquettish young women letting men light their cigarettes outside restaurants. Video remotely recovered from unsuspecting civilians’ phones showed a girl wearing a headscarf sitting cross-legged on a floor in a dark room, a naked nice-looking blonde flipping a middle finger at whoever was filming, a brunette trying on lipstick in a bathroom mirror. Moral qualms aside, thought Ravensdale, the technology at hand created an operational challenge. There was just too much data. The mammoth security apparatus at their disposal threatened to sink beneath its own weight.
Drone footage again: a prostitute propositioning a client inside a stopped car, a young woman huddling on a park bench beside a man who had either fallen asleep or passed out. Security cams again: in convenience stores, bank vestibules, parking garages. Private video: girls orchestrating dance routines, girls reading magazines, girls emoting into microphones in nightclubs and karaoke bars, girls conducting video chats in various stages of undress.
An empire which accrued total power among the ruling elite, he thought, eventually used it.
In the Central Avtobus station on Gorokhovaya, a young woman boarded a green-and-white avtobus. On a platform at Moscovsky Station, a girl boarded a red-and-gray train. On a platform at Finlyandsky, a woman moved around the very outer edge of the frame, face averted. Dark pea coat, fur-lined ushanka, small but determined chin …
Ravensdale leaned forward, tapping the screen. ‘What train was this?’
The figure froze. The young tech scowled. ‘The … ten thirty-eight to Vyborg.’
‘Has it arrived yet?’
The image minimized. From a checkerboard of icons, the tech made another selection. Moments later they were looking at another railroad platform, this one deserted. Moments after that, an elektrichka pulled in. The timecode pegged the event at just over an hour before. Passengers filed off, half-staggering with fatigue. In the midst of the throng walked the young woman in pea coat and ushanka, head lowered.
For an instant she looked up, almost directly into the lens of the security camera.
The tech froze the image, then magnified it.
The unlit cigarette in Ravensdale’s hand snapped in two.
VYBORG
A bar of eerie moonlight slanted through a doorway.
She approached obliquely, still holding her breath. Even without inhaling, she registered disturbing smells on the air: charnel sewers and constipation, swampland rotting beneath plump dragonflies, a decomposing mouse stuck in the gullet of a snake.
She reached the doorway. As she regarded the living room, brackets appeared on either side of her mouth. After a moment of cognitive dissonance, her brain caught up to her eyes with a thud. She was looking at stuffed animals, arrayed in a line near a darkened fireplace before a dormant television, beady eyes gleaming as they soaked in the blank screen.
A dead woman lay nearby, swollen tongue lolling purple from one corner of the mouth.
A sound came from deeper in the house: a low hissing, a stealthy clicking, like bones or dice.
Several long moments later, Cassie moved again.
The darkened kitchen reeked of gas. She honed in on the burners. Strays pieces of food, cereal and raw pasta, crunched underfoot as she crossed the linoleum floor. She twisted a knob and the hissing-clicking bones fell quiet.
She opened a window, letting in cold air. After refilling her lungs and taking a moment to shove back the dark shadows collecting inside herself, she searched the rest of the house.
She found two small bedrooms. One was decorated with stuffed animals, a glow-in-the-dark Sputnik, board books, coloring books, crayons, action figures, wind-up robots. Painted rocket ships marched in cheery colors around the wainscoting. A wooden plaque hanging on the door declared that ‘THIS ROOM BELONGS TO NIKOLAI’. The little boy in question, perhaps four years old, sprawled across his bed, tangled in a blanket. He had tousled greasy hair, rumpled clothes, and delicate eyelashes lying against creamy cheeks. He was still breathing, lightly but steadily.
The other bedroom featured quilts and pillows, bottles of perfume, paintings reminiscent of Georgia O’Keeffe. A bookshelf was lined not with books but with small china and glass figurines: cats and horses and rabbits and lambs, scale-model Eiffel Towers, Christs-on-crosses. A low-ceilinged closet was filled with casual inexpensive women’s clothing. A small chest on the closet floor contained not jewelry, as Cassie expected, but an impressive selection of sex toys: vibrators and plugs, lubricants, a laced leather bustier, a short riding crop, a coarse blonde wig.
There was a single bathroom, stocked with feminine and juvenile toiletries, body wash and bubble bath. Inside the medicine cabinet Cassie found a man’s deodorant, shaving cream, and safety razor. Her mouth quirked.
She went back to the kitchen. A pot on the stove contained uncooked pasta. An empty salt shaker sat on the counter beside a decaying stick of butter. With the gas stench dissipating, other odors of spoilage and death grew ever stronger.
Returning to the living room, she picked her way around the dead woman, opened another window, and let fresh air blow through. Then she stood appraising the scene, constructing a chain of events to explain what she was seeing.
The elements near the dead woman – a bottle on the floor, a stain of spilled liquid soaked into the carpet, a fleck of blackened tin foil – were key. The only thing missing was the junk itself. In the next instant she found it: a baggie on a coffee table near the fireplace. So. The lady had probably started with a few belts from the bottle – something home-brewed, judging from the lack of label, and likely very strong. Then she had chased the dragon. Had she been alone, or had the owner of the men’s personal effects in the medicine cabinet joined her? The question could prove crucial. The former, and Cassie might expect company when the mystery man came home. The latter, and she could conclude that the man, in the time-honored tradition of men everywhere, had hastily decamped when something had gone wrong.
The baggie contained black tar. The blackened foil suggested that, indeed, the woman had been smoking. But where was the lighter? Cassie looked beneath the couch, around the fireplace, and then, after bracing herself, beneath the dead woman. She found a rolled tube of foil, a scorched cigarette butt. But no lighter.
The man had taken his lighter with him.
He had probably also, then, taken another baggie. No needle tracks on the woman, so she must have been snorting. Overdose from smoking alone was nearly impossible; one passed out before ingesting a fatal dose. So the mystery man had cleaned up. Why had he left behind the black tar?
Because it had been lost. Beneath the couch, or under the woman. And the man had, understandably, been in a rush. And then the little boy had found it, moved it on to the table. She thought of the hissing gas range, the spilled food, the pot of pasta, the empty salt shaker. With Daddy gone and Mommy dead, the little boy had been left to fend for himself. He had filled a pot with pasta, turned on the gas range, and passed out.
The brackets around her mouth deepened.
She went back to his room. Crouching, she put her face very near to his. From slightly-parted lips puffed a soft breath.
She straightened again, cultivating a clinical sense of detachment. She had left Mariya alive … and look how that had worked out. The boy slept the sleep of the innocent. He would feel no pain. With Mommy dead and Daddy gone, he would actually be better off. She could vouch for that personally.
She opened her hands, closed them again.
It would not be easy. Not with those angelic eyelashes, that cupid’s bow mouth.
She stood considering, looking down at him, opening and clos
ing her hands.
ULITSA VARVARKA
Watching Sofiya eat, Yuri Antsiferov had discovered within himself a previously-unsuspected vein of poetry.
He reflected on how the most potent phenomena in nature were personified as women: full moons and seas and death, and even Rodina herself. He realized how much the gentler sex shared with a clear spring day, a babbling fresh brook, a fall of autumn dusk. How much the prisoner’s eyes resembled emerald and turquoise, jade and bloodstone, and her skin alabaster, ivory, pure mother’s milk—
When his gaze moved to her Tatar cheekbones, he caught himself. All at once he remembered an aphorism he’d heard as a child, about the first Roman army to enter Tartary. A legionary captured a Tatar and announced as much to his legatus but, upon being told to deliver the prisoner, was forced to admit: ‘The Tatar won’t let me.’
Sofiya scraped the inside of the bowl with the spoon. She licked her lips – her tongue a small pink blossom against the blistered gray – and then, looking up at him, stood.
She handed back the bowl with a supplicating half-curtsy. He paused, waiting for the inevitable request for a bath or clean clothes.
But she said nothing.
Instead, she drifted closer, so subtly that he couldn’t have said which part of her moved. All he knew was that suddenly they were nearer each other than they had been a moment before. He caught her smell: unclean and overripe, vaguely disgusting and yet strangely arousing. He became aware of the position of the others in the apartment: Yakov grabbing some sleep on the threadbare couch in the front room, Viktor cleaning up in the kitchen. Something could happen between Yuri and the prisoner, right now, and neither of the others would ever know.
And she came closer again, in that way she had, where he couldn’t even say how she had done it, so natural and inviolable was her grace, her femininity. The color high in her cheeks. Her breath came short and fast. And would it be hot on his cheek, that breath? It would. All he need do was reach out and draw her to him, and he could discover just how hot. And why shouldn’t he? Was he not still the Dragon? Did he not have absolute power over her? And did not women respond to powerful men? And if something happened between the two of them, right now, in this room, what would be the harm? It would be the most natural thing in the world, for something to happen between a beautiful woman and a powerful man alone together in a room. It would mean nothing, and nobody need ever know. When it was done he might feel ashamed by his own decadence. But in the moment he would feel strong again, young and powerful, and now she was drifting still closer, into his arms, and without thinking he turned to set down the bowl by the goose-necked lamp, and that was when he heard the sound, whhhssk, soft and sibilant as a butterfly’s wings, and then something feathery touched his neck, closed around it, and drew tight.