“Oh yes!” His expression brightens considerably. “Yes indeed! A restoration project, I am to understand . . . ?”
“Possibly.” The woman swings her violin case up above the glass counter then gently lowers it. “Our client has asked us to obtain a preliminary valuation, and also to inquire about the cost of certain necessary restoration work for an instrument of similar manufacture that is currently in storage in a degraded condition—it’s too fragile to move.” She reaches into her handbag again and when she takes her hand out, she’s holding an envelope. “Before examining the instrument, I would like you to sign this non-disclosure agreement.” She removes a thin document from the envelope.
Mr. Dower is surprised. “But it’s just a violin! Even if it’s a rarity—” He does a double take. “Isn’t it?”
The woman shakes her head silently, then hands him the papers.
Mr. Dower scans the first page briefly then glances up at her. “This isn’t from Sotheby’s—”
“If anybody asks you who I am and why I’m here, you will tell them I’m Cassie May, from Sotheby’s auction house, inquiring about a valuation.” She doesn’t smile. “You will now read the document and sign it.”
Almost as if he can’t help himself, Mr. Dower’s eyes return to the document. He scans it rapidly, mumbling under his breath as he turns the three pages. Wordlessly, he produces a pen from his inside jacket pocket.
“Not like that.” The woman offers him a disposable sterile needle: “First, you must draw blood. Then sign using this pen.” She waits patiently while he presses a digit against the needle, winces, and rubs the nib of the pen across the ball of his thumb. He makes no complaint about the unusual request, and doesn’t seem to notice the way she produces a small sharps container for the office supplies and carefully folds the document back into its envelope. “Good. By the authority vested in me I bind you to silence, under pain of the penalties specified in this document. Do you understand?”
Mr. Dower stares at the violin case as if stunned. “Yes,” he mutters.
The woman who calls herself Cassie May unclips the lid of the violin case and lays it open before him.
Mr. Dower stares into the case for ten long seconds, barely breathing. Then he shudders. “Excuse me,” he says, hastily covering his mouth. He turns and stumbles through the bead curtain. A few seconds later she hears the sound of retching.
The woman waits patiently until Mr. Dower reappears, looking pale. “You can shut that,” he tells her.
“If you want.” She shrugs. “I take it you’ve seen one before.”
“Yes.” He shudders again, his gaze unfocused. He seems to be staring down inner demons. “What do I have to do to get you to take it away?”
“You give me a written evaluation.” She has another piece of paper, this one containing a short list of bullet points. “As I said, a preliminary estimate of the cost of repairing such a . . . relic. A half-gram sample excised from the corpse of another identical instrument. All necessary materials to be provided by the customer. If you can assess the nature of the bindings that hold it together, my employers would like to be able to replicate them.”
He stares at her. “Who are you from? Who sent you here?”
“I’m from the government department responsible for keeping instruments like this out of your shop. Unfortunately there is a time for business as usual, and then . . . well. Can you do it?”
Mr. Dower stares at the wall behind her. “If I must.”
“Good. If you attach your invoice to the report I will see that it is processed promptly.”
“When do you need the report?” he asks, shaking himself as if awakening from a dream.
“Right now.” She walks over to the door and flips the sign to CLOSED.
“But I—” He swallows.
“I’m required to stay within arm’s reach of the instrument at all times. And to remove it from your premises when you are not working on it.” The woman doesn’t smile; in fact, her expression is faintly nauseated.
“Why? To prevent me stealing it?”
“No, Mr. Dower: to prevent it from killing you.”
I’M BACK IN MY OFFICE AFTER THE BLOODY BARON MEETING. The committee have minuted that I am to try and think myself into Angleton’s shoes (ha bloody ha); the coffee mug is cooling on the mouse mat beside my cranky old HP desktop as I sit here, head in hands, groaning silently and wishing I’d paid more attention in history classes rather than staring at the back of Zoe McCutcheon’s head and thinking about—let’s not go there. (Sixteen-year-old male: fill in the blanks.) All this Russian stuff is confusing the hell out of me—why can’t we go back to worrying about Al Qaida or pedophiles on the internet or whatever it is that intelligence services traditionally obsess about?
There’s a pile of dusty manila folders sitting on my desk. Angleton said they were interesting, right before he went missing, and if that wasn’t a deliberate clue I’ll eat my pants. He’s a slithy old tove and I wouldn’t put it past him to have meant something significant, damn him. But all I’ve got is a list of hastily scrawled file reference numbers, pointers into the shelf positions documents are stored at in the stacks—nothing as simple as filenames, of course, that would be giving valuable information to the enemy. How like Angleton.
I pick up the first folder and open it. It contains a creased, dog-eared, and much folded letter, handwritten on paper that’s a weird size. I peer at the faded scrawl, trying to make head or tail of it. “Jesus, boss, what the hell . . . ?” Luckily I have a scanner with an automatic document feeder. I carefully feed the brittle pages to the computer, one at a time, twitching the software to maximum resolution. On the first page I pick up a reasonable high-contrast scan—there’s some ghosting, what looks like pale scribble showing through, as if the author tried to scrub something out—and zoom in. I puzzle out the date, first: October 11th, 1921. Then I turn the handwriting recognition software loose and sit back. After a while, it’s cooked and ready to read.
CLASSIFIED: S76/45
Dear John,
First of all, greetings from Reval! I sincerely hope this letter finds you experiencing a more clement climate than the Estonian autumn, which has clamped down in earnest this past week. Please give my best regards to Sonia.
I assume you have already received word through the wires about the execution of the Beast of Dauria last month. By all accounts he was given as fair a trial as the Reds could manage, and if even a tenth of the allegations leveled against him are true then I can’t see that they had any alternative but to shoot him. I have been paying special attention to the reports filtering out of Siberia about Semenov’s bandits, and Ungern Sternberg was by far the worst of a bad bunch. It was a beastly affair, and a bad end to a thoroughly bad fellow, and perhaps we should thank the Reds for ridding us of this monster.
However, his death leaves certain questions unanswered. I decided to visit his parents—not his father, but his mother and her husband, Sophie Charlotte and Baron Oskar Von Hoyningen-Huene. They live in Jerwakant, and although the weather is dismal—the snow is already lying four feet thick on the ground—I was able to arrange a weekend visit.
As you probably know, madness stalks the Ungern Sternberg line; the Baron’s father Theodor—once a keen amateur geologist, noted for his interest in unusual fossils—is in a sanatorium to this day. In my estimate Sophie Charlotte suffered considerably by proximity, for he deteriorated while they were still married; it is a difficult topic to raise in conversation, especially in light of the unfortunate fate of her son, and so I did not seek to disturb her, but made my observations indirectly.
The Hoyningen-Huene estate is a stately home that would grace any family of means, in any country. By winter it presents a fairy-tale face to the world, its steeply pitched roofs and turrets peaceful beneath a blanket of snow, an island of tranquility in the middle of the gloomy pine forest. But it is a fairy tale out of the Brothers Grimm, rather than the bloodless and bowdlerized fare that
our parents’ generation sought to raise us on! This is a castle of the German aristocracy, descendants of the Teutonic Knights and servants of the Russian Empire until the late upheaval deprived them of the object of their loyalty. And it is an estate that has been cut down to size, thanks to the decrees of the Riigikogu relating to land reform and the rights of the peasants to the fruits of their labor.
Evgenia and I visited with the Hoyningen-Huenes last weekend, ostensibly to write a tub-thumper for the Guardian about the equitable settlement in Rapla County, which has not seen so much turbulence and persecution of the former rulers as other areas: I put it about that we would also like to see the countryside thereabouts, and talk to some of the local landlords about the recent changes. The Guardian’s status as an English newspaper outweighs its political reputation in the backwoods: I had no shortage of correspondents, mostly of the Indignant of Colchester variety so familiar to us from the letter columns.
On Sunday afternoon, after the obligatory morning visit to the chapel—which was very Lutheran in that manner that is peculiar to the Baltic territories, with gloomy danse macabre and carved skull heraldry above the bare wood pews, and do I need to add, unheated even in winter?—I had a chance to chat with the Baron, and by way of two or three glasses of schnapps the subject of the Prodigal rose to the surface.
“He has always been a disappointment to me, and a tribulation to his mother,” quoth Oskar Hoyningen-Huene. “This latest shame is but the final straw—luckily the final one—on the pyre of his depravity.” He sighed deeply at this point. “I tried to beat sense into him when he was young, you know. But he was always a wild one. Took after his father, and then there was the obsession with Shamanism, like the nonsensical garbage Theodor plagued my wife with before she divorced him.”
“Garbage?” I asked, digging. I intimated, indirectly, that I had been asked to prepare a column about his adoptive son, but had declined to do so out of respect for the recently bereaved.
Oskar snorted. “No son of mine,” he said, with cold deliberation, “would have done what that beast did. He wrote us letters, you know, boasting of it! Executing prisoners by quartering—tying their limbs to springy saplings. Mass hangings, stabbings, shootings. Said he was going to line the road to Moscow with Commissars and Jews, impaled every couple of yards—heaven knows I’ve got no time for yids myself, but he pledged to kill them all, to purify Russia and reinstate serfdom. Can you believe it? And there was other stuff, dark stuff. Absolutely disgusting.”
I asked what he did with the letters.
“I burned them!” he said indignantly. “All but a couple that Sophie refused to let me have. I hadn’t the heart to deprive her of . . . well. Memories.” He subsided into a sulky silence for a few minutes, but bestirred himself with the assistance of a fresh glass. “There were his father’s fossils, you know. I think that’s where the rot set in.”
“Fossils?” I asked.
“Rum things, never seen anything like them. I think Sophie left them in the boy’s room. He used to play with them when he was a tot, you know. I’d find him staring at the things. Thought he was going to grow up to be a geologist like his pa, which would have been no bad thing compared to how he turned out.”
Knowing of your interests, and learning that his mother had actually preserved the Prodigal’s bedroom—untouched! As if she expected her son to return!—I availed myself of an opportunity to look inside, in hope of getting some insight into his character.
(ENCLOSED: 8 faded black and white photographs of irregular pieces of rock, cleaved along fracture planes. Most of the pieces appear to be slate, although it is hard to be certain. The fossils resemble certain other samples referenced by codeword: ANNING BLUE SKULL.)
I think we’ve seen the like of these pieces before, haven’t we? “In those days, giants walked the Earth . . .”
I shall make indirect enquiries to see if it is possible to acquire Roman Von Ungern Sternberg’s boyhood fossil collection for the nation, and (if possible) his mother’s collection of letters. I shall also attempt to arrange a follow-up visit, although it is now unlikely to be practical until the spring thaw. (Chateau Hoyningen-Huene is somewhat isolated, and polite society does not travel much in winter: a premature visit would invite unwelcome scrutiny.) Meanwhile, I shall be wintering in Reval and will make use of my free time to investigate further the matter of the Bloody White Baron and the mystery he discovered in the Bogd Khan’s palace.
Your obedient friend,
Arthur Ransome
THE WOMAN WHO CALLS HERSELF CASSIE MAY WAITS PATIENTLY, sitting on a backless stool behind the antique cash register in George Dower’s shop while keeping an eye on the proprietor, who is busy in the workshop behind the bead curtain (which she has tied back, to afford her a clear view).
The back of the shop is not what she had expected. She’s been in instrument makers’ workshops before, smelled the glue and fresh-planed wood, the wax and varnish. She’s familiar with other musical specialties as well, with signal generators and plugboards, amps and filters, the hum and hot metallic smell of overdriven amplifiers. Dower’s shop is not like any of these. It has some of the characteristics of a jeweler’s workshop, or a watch repairer’s—but it is not entirely like either of those. It’s summer but the air is uncharacteristically chill, and not from air conditioning: it’s stuffy, and there’s a faint charnel-house scent, as if something has died under the floorboards.
Dower has donned a pair of white cotton conservator’s gloves and hung a dictaphone around his neck. He keeps the bone-white violin at arm’s length, as if he doesn’t want to hold it too close, muttering into his microphone: “C-rib thickness varies between 3.2 and 5.5 millimeters; as with the right lower curve, this material appears to be ductile and rigid, although examination at 6X magnification reveals the characteristic spongiform structure of endochondral ossification . . .” He swallows, as if nauseous—as well he might be. (The instrument is indeed made of bone, preserved and treated to give it a rigidity and resonance similar to mountain maple. The treatments that modify the material in this way are applied while its donor is still alive, and in excruciating pain.) Peering into a fiber-optic probe, the end of which is inserted through one of the violin’s f-holes: “The upper block appears to be carved from the body and lesser cornu of os hyoideum; the greater cornu is avulsed in a manner usually indicative of death by strangulation . . .”
Dower may suspect, but the woman knows, that the materials used to construct this instrument were harvested from the bodies of no less than twelve innocents, whose premature deaths were believed to be an essential part of the process. Before he became a highly specialized instrument maker, Dower trained as a surgeon. He’s a sensitive, trained to see what lies before his eyes: most people wouldn’t recognize the true horror of the instrument, seeing merely a white violin. Which is why the woman came here, after checking the files for a list of suitable examiners.
After almost three hours, Dower is flagging, but his work is nearly done. The woman is checking her watch now, with increasing concern. Eventually, finally, he replaces the bow in its recess and folds the lid of the case shut, snapping the latches closed. He steps back and fastidiously peels off his gloves, then drops them in a rubbish bin, being careful not to touch their contaminated outer surface with his bare skin. Finally he clicks off the dictaphone. “I’m done,” he says flatly.
The woman stands, smooths the wrinkles out of her skirt, and nods. “Your written report,” she says.
“I’ll write it up after I’ve had some lunch. You can collect it after four, this afternoon . . .”
She shakes her head. “I won’t be back.” Reaching into her bag she pulls out another envelope. “Print out one copy of your report—and no more—and place it in this envelope. Then seal it and post it.” There is no address on the envelope. “After you have done that, you should destroy your records. Erase your word processor files, burn the tapes, whatever it takes. You will be held responsible if y
our report leaks.”
“But there’s no—” He takes the envelope. “You’re sure?”
“If you post that envelope I will have the contents on my desk by morning,” she tells him, staring at him with pale green eyes as unquiet as a storm surge.
“I don’t want to see that thing ever again,” he tells her.
“You won’t.”
“But you want to know how to make more—”
“No.” Her face is as smooth as plaster, as if any hint of human emotion might crack the surface of her glaze: “I want to prove to my superiors that the cost is too high.”
“Isn’t that obvious?”
“Not given the magnitude of the threat we face. Desperate measures are called for; I merely believe this one to be too desperate. Good-bye, Mr. Dower. I trust we shall never meet again.”
BACK IN THE OFFICE:Photograph One:
A large slate, resting on a table beside a wooden measuring rod. According to the rod it is twenty inches high and (inferred using a ruler) eighteen inches wide. Cleaved along a plane, it reveals a well-preserved fossil of what appears to be a starfish of class Asteroidea.
On closer inspection, there is something wrong with the fossil. Although it possesses the characteristic five-fold symmetry, each tentacle tip appears to be blunt, as if truncated. Moreover, the body doesn’t show signs of radial segmentation—it’s an integral whole, giving an effect more like a cross section through an okra fruiting body, or perhaps an oversized echinoderm—a sea cucumber.
Photograph Two:
Is another large slab of broken rock, this time revealing the partially dissected and fossilized arm of a juvenile BLUE HADES . . .
The Fuller Memorandum Page 11