Rasputin's Bastards

THE GRAND INQUISITOR

Amar Shadak equivocated through the night. He needed, he knew, to strike a delicate balance. There was warmth: the geniality of a good host. And there was terror. He wouldn’t get anywhere, he knew, without a solid weight of terror at hand. He posed in front of a tall mirror in his bedchamber as he thought about it; pulled his lips taut into a thin smile and raised his dark brows in the middle, as though asking a polite question. He slackened his shoulders, rolling them quickly back and forth like a dancer or an athlete, then abruptly stood straight and threw them back. Warmth and terror — terror and warmth. Somewhere, he thought, looking for himself in the reflection of his eyes. Somewhere in spaces between…

In the space between the fountain and the kitchen where blood dripped from the draining goat, where the Devil Kilodovich tore Amar in two…

“Ah,” he said to no one, “this is shit.” And he relaxed his shoulders and flung his arms into the air, and fell back onto the rumpled sheets of his unmade bed. He would just have to play it by ear, when they arrived. Try and piece the mystery of the missing submarine and Alexei Kilodovich together as best he could.

Shadak’s head hurt. He felt, these days, as though a thousand tiny hands were pulling the anatomy of his brain to and fro, scratching at it with nail-point fingertips. It reminded him of that month — the month that the devil Kilodovich had taken him into the caves in Afghanistan — tried to work his sorcery on him, took him to the Black Villa, and left a piece of Shadak’s soul there. When the bastard children had fucked with him, pulling him to bits all over again. Same kind of thing — fingers in his brain, pulling the neurons apart, looking for gold.

Fucking Rapture.

Shadak thought of it more as brain rape.

Ah, what to say — what to say?

When he’d called Gepetto and asked him to fetch the people from the Emissary, he’d really hoped that he might find Kilodovich there. The widow Kontos-Wu’s presence in the hotel when he called suggested that this might be so, that Kolyokov had engineered a double sting, stolen the children through some third party, and had pulled all his people back to the home base.

If that had happened, then Kilodovich would be on his way here now. The terrible losses he’d suffered — his American organization, a yacht, and the usefulness of his submarine guy… the trouble with the children, their demonic influence… all that would have been balanced by the possession of Kilodovich.

But it was not to be. Kolyokov was gone — dead? Or simply on the move? Somewhere with his treasure, the devil Kilodovich, perhaps? — and there was no one to bring but the useless piece of shit of a boy Kolyokov kept — and Kontos-Wu.

Ah, Kontos-Wu. There was something else. When he’d known her, she’d been a raven-haired beauty in the blossom of her twenties — the bride of old Tom Wu, a Taiwanese banker who ran some ships out of Hong Kong and sometimes did drug business with Shadak. He hadn’t really seen her since those years — but when they spoke on the phone, it was the beauty of those years past that he remembered. He’d held some information back — in particular, that horrible scrabbling of claws inside his head, the Black Villa, and what he thought Kilodovich and the children meant to it — but still, he’d spoken too freely with her; told her far too much about the children and their devilish powers.

In the morning, they would have another conversation face to face. Shadak hoped that she’d gotten fat — or stringy — or developed a skin condition. Anything to give him the edge in their interview.

“Pah,” he said aloud, forcing himself to sit up in his bed, “you are a shallow creature, Amar. Moved by lust and sentiment before sense.”

Shadak stood again — threw back his shoulders and tightened his smile — and strode across the room, through a curtain and into the hallway. To his left, tall leaded-glass windows cut into the stonework admitted silvered moonlight, painting themselves across the stonework of the narrow corridor. A man with an Uzi dangling from a strap on his shoulder nodded deferentially as Shadak strode past. Shadak barely acknowledged him.

Lust and sentiment. Jean Kontos-Wu had played to those two vulnerabilities well in the early years: an agonizingly beautiful girl, trapped by a wicked husband. He might have killed him for her — he would have, if congestive heart failure hadn’t taken the old man first.

He stepped around a corner and out onto a low balcony, facing west. He regarded the darkened, jagged horizon. Far beyond it, over the ocean, the two of them — Jean Kontos-Wu and Stephen — flew toward him. They would talk in the morning. Settle things. Find answers together, in a pit beneath the caravansary’s mosque. Shadak regarded the night a moment longer, then turned back to his bedchamber.

In the morning, Jean Kontos-Wu would open up to him. Amar Shadak would, he vowed, be the one in control — not her. Not this time.