Rasputin's Bastards

THE IDIOT

Alexei stood in front of the lighthouse door and wiped his mouth. The sun was low in the sky now, and it etched his shadow on the rough stone of the building. At his feet, poor young James was barely able to move he was so intoxicated. The stink of puke and sweat and alcohol drifted out of his pores like a mist. Alexei allowed himself a cold little smile: let Holden Gibson try and dream-walk this young wretch now. James’ inability to hold his liquor had proven Alexei’s salvation.

“James,” said Alexei. “Can you walk?”

James looked up at him with red, stupid eyes. Alexei nudged him with his toe.

“Up,” he said, and scooped his hand under the boy’s arm. He hauled him to his feet. “We’re going back inside.”

James got up with considerable difficulty, and Alexei walked him back into the lighthouse. He sat him down in a chair, then gathered some rope he’d found in a box underneath the bed, and wrapped it in tight coils first around the boy’s legs, and then his arms. He tied it firmly, but not too tight. He didn’t want to hurt the kid. He pushed a bucket up to James’ feet.

“You need to sick up,” said Alexei, “use that. You need to piss? I’m afraid there’s no easy way.”

James looked at Alexei.

Alexei nodded. “It’s an indignity, I know,” he said. “But nothing really, compared to the things that Holden Gibson has put you through. That Fyodor Kolyokov has put me through.”

“Goo’ poin’,” said James, language returning to him at last.

“Now I’m going to go away,” said Alexei.

“To ki — to kill Hol’en?”

Alexei snorted and waved at him dismissively. He brushed the handle of the gun tucked into his trousers, and stepped back outside.

Was he going to kill Holden Gibson? It was an idea, Alexei admitted. Probably he would have to kill someone before this thing played itself out. But Gibson, necessarily?

Alexei hurried back to the long staircase where the Koldun had left him earlier that day.

Now there was someone who was a candidate for killing. When they first met, the old man Vasili Borovich had seemed like an ally. Alexei was sorely tempted to reassess that, and cast the Koldun in Holden Gibson’s camp. After all, it was the Koldun who sent Alexei alone to the lighthouse. Where Holden Gibson had sent an agent — a puppet, really — to interrogate and kill Alexei.

It was a tempting theory. But truly, if the Koldun and Gibson were working together, and killing Alexei was their shared objective, it would have been simpler to murder Alexei as he slept. No — there was more to this place and the people here than simple murder.

And, he began to think, there was perhaps more to himself than simple murder too. Would the day end in killing at all? In the sobering summer air, Alexei began to wonder about that. Heather had set him up early to murder Holden Gibson. But how many times had he hesitated? Lost his nerve? Rationalized it away?

Alexei fingered the butt of the Glock. Was he really made for these things? If not these — then what? As he climbed down the stairs, Alexei came upon the thought that this place would, in its way, be just as useful in deciphering his present as was his metaphorical idyll into a childhood in assessing his history.

Alexei looked out over the harbour. There were more boats in it than before — which made a certain amount of sense. The sun was going down, casting a long, blue shadow over the breadth of the village. Lights were coming on in the buildings already. The fishing boats would be coming in for the night.

But he began to count. There were more boats there, really, than a prodigal fishing run could account for: more boats than there were moorings.

The stairs bottomed out in a yard, behind a two-storey wooden building that looked as though it might be a store. The back door stood ajar, and as Alexei listened, soft music drifted out. He approached the back of the building through the tall grass of the rear yard. The music was familiar — a Russian singer, bass. Singing to someone called Natascha.

“Rebroff,” said Alexei, as the recognition dawned. “Ivan Rebroff.”

Alexei remembered. Ivan Rebroff was an old Russian singer from the 1970s; a big round-faced Cossack, with an incredible vocal range who lived in a chateau in Austria with a couple of Siberian tigers for pets. Alexei had apparently listened to him quite a lot at one point, because he found himself humming along with the ballsy lament.

Alexei cracked open the door. It was a grocery — the sort of grocery you get in isolated little towns like this: a long room with sparsely filled shelves, with rows of old fluorescent tubes lighting everything a grey that flickered. A young woman sat behind a countertop, staring vacantly out the window. She was slight, long dark hair dangling in braids from the back of her skull. She reminded Alexei of something. Like the song, it was a memory unplaced.

“Hello,” he said.

The woman shook her head, dislodging a daydream.

“Oh. Hello. I did not see you come in.”

“Quite all right,” he said. “Sorry for sneaking up on you. Nice music.”

“Yes. It’s good. Can I help you with something?”

Alexei sidled up to the counter. There was a row of chocolate bars. Packages of cigarettes lined the wall behind her.

“I’m afraid I don’t have any cash on me,” he said.

The woman shrugged. “I’m afraid I don’t have a cash register. You want something to eat? You’ve been drinking — I can smell it. Food will take the edge off the headache.”

Alexei reddened. He’d hoped the little binge had been long enough past that no one would notice. The girl had a point, though.

“For free?”

She smiled. “We’re all family here,” she said.

“Maybe some cashews,” he said.

“Help yourself.”

Alexei munched on the cashews and listened to the rest of the song, and looked around. As he did, it became clear that the absence of a cash register was far from the strangest thing in this store.

For one thing, the shelves weren’t stocked with the hair combs and the cans of creamed corn and the salsa dips for the real Mexican tortillas in the salty snack section that you’d expect to see in an outpost grocery. In their place were little tins of Russian caviar and jars of truffle oil that sold in New York for $50 a bottle. A small open refrigerator was stuffed with fresh-looking roasts and exotic fowl wrapped tight in plastic. Through the cereal aisle, Alexei could make out a wine rack. There were no cheap wine boxes in sight, and he suspected he wouldn’t find many screw-top bottles there either.

“We’re family, are we?” he said, lifting a duck and letting it fall back into the ice. In the air, old Rebroff was starting on the Natascha song again, from the beginning.

The girl came around the counter. She was wearing a dark, patterned skirt to her ankles.

“You have just arrived? No. You’ve been here long enough to know better than to ask that.”

Alexei nodded. “Right,” he said. He looked to the ceiling and behind the counter.

“Where is your stereo?” he said as Rebroff sang on.

The girl smiled. “Same place as the cash register,” she said. “We don’t need one.”

“Ah.”

“Now let me ask a question,” she said. “Two questions.”

“All right.”

“What is your name, sir?”

Alexei smiled. “Alexei,” he said.

“Hello Alexei. I am Darya.” She extended her hand. He shook it. “And your second question?”

“Were you a killer?”

Alexei let her fingers slip from his. “A—”

“I only say, because you don’t look like a university professor or a lawyer, or much of a politician. Did you kill for them?”

Darya was flushed as she spoke. Alexei looked back at her levelly.

“I have my suspicions,” he said.

She nodded and smiled. “I thought so. It’s good. It’s good. I’m told that I’m getting an eye for this kind of thing. Maybe one day, you think I can become one with the dream-walkers? Babushka used to tell me I’d make a good dream-walker.”

Alexei went to the front door of the shop. He looked out into the street. A small group of tourists walked along the road. “Dream-walkers,” he said. “I don’t know about that.” Then Alexei remembered something the Koldun said earlier: he was going to prepare for the “dance” tonight.

“Are you going to the dance?” he asked.

Darya’s smile widened and she turned her ankle in an awkward flirt. “Is that an invitation?” she asked. “Because you know that it’s not that kind of dance. But—”

Alexei looked at her. She looked back at him with an unmistakable expression.

“—we do have a bit of time before it begins.”

Comfort is the torturer’s first tool, thought Alexei.

“No,” he said.

She was visibly annoyed when he turned down her proposition — but Alexei felt he had no choice. Comfort was indeed the torturer’s first tool. After having spent the afternoon comfortably drinking and eating and kibitzing in the lighthouse, Alexei would have been a fool to fall back into the trap again.

“You are heartless,” she said, eyes narrow. “Makes it easy to kill, I suppose, being so heartless.”

“I am sorry,” he said. “Look — I have to look around this place. Find my bearings. I have to find the children. Gibson. I—” he dropped his gaze to the floor “—I don’t have time for that kind of thing.”

“None of us have more than a little time,” she said. Then her smile returned. “But if you don’t want to play around — I could show you around. Help you get your bearings, like you said.”

Alexei smiled and shook his head. “I’ll be going. Thank you for the nuts.”

“No,” the girl said, following him as he headed towards the front door. “Wait. You want to see things, I can show you things: the fishery. The greenhouse. The museum.”

Alexei stopped.

“Museum?” He turned to look at her. “What kind of a museum does a town like this have?”

The girl grinned. “The New Pokrovskoye Museum of Family History,” she said. “It tells our whole story. It is very complete. You should go there before the dance, certainly. It helps — well it helps. All the new people must go there — or however will they learn to dance?”

Alexei thought about that. He was, after all, trying to tell his own story. He’d spent what had seemed like months in a metaphor looking for clues. And clues he found — but only enough to confound him more.

He could try to find the children — blunder in — maybe run in to more of Holden Gibson’s people. Maybe run into the mysterious Koldun again. That would be how Alexei the KGB agent would handle things.

But there was more to him than that. Simply stumbling in, pounding against a locker — fighting Czernochov in a math class — or killing Holden Gibson — that wouldn’t do it. He needed to find out more about himself — about this place — about what he was up against.

The skills he learned decoding his memory — perhaps, thought Alexei, he needed to apply them in the present as well.

He made up his mind.

“All right,” he said and held out his hand. “Take me to the museum.”

“So it will be like a date?”

“Sure,” he’d replied. “A big date.”

She followed him outside, turned the CLOSED sign into place and pulled the door closed.

“Come on,” she said. “It’s not far.”

They were perched on top of a rocky slope, that rode down to make a bowl around the harbour. Red and green-painted houses clung to the slope, like Day-Glo barnacles. A single road wound between them. The only noise that Alexei heard was the crying of gulls, the sputtering of boat engines in the harbour. And Ivan Rebroff, selling the chorus of “Ach, Natascha” one more time.

“Nothing’s far here, is it?” he said.

“True enough,” she said. “That is the beauty of New Pokrovskoye. Everything at hand. Now do you want to go to the museum? We’ve got a marvellous collection of Fabergé eggs. The best in the world, Papa says.”

The Imperial New Pokrovskoye Museum of Family History was a rambling thing of wood and iron and shingle — a long A-frame that suggested an ancient longhouse, more of a shelter for Norwegians and their livestock than a repository of Russian antiquities. It huddled in the crook of an elbow of rock at the southern edge of the village, at the end of a short gravel road. It had been painted bright red a couple of seasons ago. Now the paint was beginning to peel. The sign was in Cyrillic, hand-painted above a small door, which was marked CLOSED, just like Darya’s grocery. She pushed the door open. A smell like cloves wafted out. Darya inhaled deeply.

“Are there speakers everywhere in town?” asked Alexei.

Darya looked at him.

“That song,” said Alexei. “I hear it everywhere I go.”

“It’s a song,” said Darya, as though that answered everything. Then she took him by the hand. “Inside!” she said.

In the guise of adjusting his belt, Alexei fingered the handle of the Glock in his waistband. Darya leaned to one side of the door, and there was the sound of a light-switch flipping — and Alexei gasped. His hand fell away from the gun. And he stared.

The inside of the museum was huge — a vast chamber held up by thick tree trunks in the middle that had not even been squared. Lights hung on cords from the ceiling in conical shades, casting round pools onto tables and cases filled with objects that glittered with gold and precious stones. Further back, the pools illuminated other things: machinery that might have been military; a case with a great skeleton mounted from a contraption that looked like a gallows; and something else — a thing that Alexei couldn’t quite place — that looked like a great, jewel-encrusted egg.

They had to walk down a short flight of stairs — the floor had been cut deep into the rock, so the first six feet of wall was carved stone before the barn board took over. The sight abruptly reminded Alexei of something he had seen once before — in a strange cavern, in Afghanistan, before he had — had —

No good. He lost the thread of it.

Alexei smiled around the lump in his throat. This place, he thought, might just be as useful as that school days metaphor, in helping him sort the puzzle of his life. He squeezed Darya’s hand. “Let’s have a look,” he said. And together they descended, humming along with the chorus as they went.

“My Papa was a killer,” said Darya as they paused over a display case of Imperial Russian china.

“Really,” said Alexei. “A killer.”

Darya slapped him on the shoulder. “Don’t make fun! He was!”

“All right. Papa was a killer. You must be very proud. Who did he kill? How many?”

“We are not certain. He definitely killed an American. Name was Timothy Elkhorn. In Honduras. He used a shovel. And some Italians. Seven of those. That happened just after I was born. He used a machinegun and a boat. And there were the Africans…”

“He did this under orders?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

Alexei moved past the china, to a display of silver cutlery. “Tell me,” he said, “how did these wonderful objects manage to find their way to New Pokrovskoye?”

“The Koldun,” she said.

“Vasili Borovich, you mean?”

“The Koldun,” she repeated, more firmly. “He brought them with him in a dozen boats, when he came to New Pokrovskoye to rejoin Babushka.”

Alexei looked around. A case of three scimitars, their hilts forged of gold and silver, rested next to a fine chain mail hauberk draped over a dressmaker’s dummy, bosom jutting absurdly through the woven steel. Alexei counted a dozen gleaming samovars on a long oak shelf behind them. The Fabergé eggs were a little farther off, in a tall-glassed in shelf. Alexei counted a dozen of them. Other than the unlikeliness of their context — here in a barn of a museum in a little coastal fishing village in Canada — Alexei had no reason to doubt their authenticity.

“All of this?”

“Not on the same trip — but yes,” she said. “It was a gift. When we made this village, the Koldun was simply a traveller. An old friend of Babushka’s.”

“Vasili,” said Alexei, “Borovich.”

Darya nodded. “That was his name. Then. The gift allowed him to change, by grace of Babushka. To become the Koldun.”

“Well — Vasili or Koldun, by whatever name he is very generous.” Alexei stepped away from the case. He pointed to the giant egg-thing towards the far end of the room.

“That would have required a second trip all by itself, I’d think,” he said.

Darya smiled. “Oh. That one, I don’t think the Koldun brought.”

Alexei approached the thing. It sat on a platform three feet off the ground — circled with deep ochre curtain. It wasn’t truly an egg. It was more shaped like a lozenge… a fat man’s coffin. Where the stones had not been fixed, it was the colour of robin’s egg.

It reminded Alexei of something that caught in the corner of his mind.

“That was Babushka’s. It was where she slept.”

“Is she sleeping there still?” Alexei had a vision of Lenin’s Tomb — but with a desiccated old woman in the place of the perfectly preserved corpse of Vladimir Lenin.

“Really now.” Alexei circled the strange container, looking for a way in. It didn’t take long. On the opposite side, he saw a round hatch — like a submarine hatch, complete with a small iron wheel in its centre. The wheel had been painted a deep violet. It sparkled with tiny foil stars — the kind teachers used to congratulate a student for work well done.

“What an interesting — museum — you have here,” he said, and gave the wheel a spin. It turned easily, with the tick-tock sound of a clock. As it slowed, it became more like a roulette wheel. When it stopped, the hatch swung open a hair’s breadth.

Darya stood open-mouthed — genuinely alarmed.

“Wha—” she began.

Alexei looked at her.

“What is that smell?”

What smell? thought Alexei. He was about to say it. Dismiss little Darya’s observation. But something was changed. He cocked his head — listening.

“I don’t know about the smell,” he said. “But do you hear?”

“Hear what?”

“Nothing. That’s the thing,” said Alexei. “No music. Mr. Rebroff has left us.”

The opening to the Babushka’s vessel yawned at them. Alexei tentatively leaned toward it and sniffed. He looked back at Darya, who was holding her nose now. He sniffed again. The air was cool, and stale as you might expect from a sarcophagus that had apparently been sealed up for a decade or so. But whatever odour had Darya clutching her face was undetectable to Alexei. He squinted to look inside.

“Why — why did you do that?” Darya’s voice had taken a pleading, whining tone.

“I don’t know,” said Alexei shortly. “I don’t know why I do a lot of things.” He stuck his head into the opening, tried to see around in the darkness. “Who is Babushka?” The question echoed, edging the words with iron. “She is the lady of scents, hmm? Now tell me: what was she doing with this — thing? Out with it, Darya.”

“Lena.”

“What?” The vessel was making Darya’s voice sound strange too. It sounded tinny, as though travelling through a cheap radio speaker. At least she’d stopped whining.

“Babushka is Lena.”

“I see. And who is Lena?”

“Dead.”

Alexei reached inside, ran his hand over the interior surface. It wasn’t metal in here. It felt like ceramic. It was cold as a sheet of ice. “That’s not an answer,” he said.

“It will have to do.”

Alexei frowned. The voice really didn’t sound like young Darya’s. It was, he realized, too deep. Not mannishly deep. But old. Very old.

Alexei took a breath, and looked behind him. Darya had stepped away — she was back behind the dressmaker’s dummy, arms crossed, fingers tapping on her elbows — looking anywhere but back at Alexei.

He turned back into the chamber.

“All right,” he said. “You didn’t answer my second question: What’s this thing for?”

“Butterflies.”

“Butterflies.” Alexei frowned. “Caterpillars into butterflies?” he ventured. “A cocoon? Like that?”

“It will have to do.”

Ah. That was why the voice sounded so strange. He wasn’t hearing it with his ears; it was as when Vladimir spoke to him. He heard it in his head.

“You are no fool, Alexei Kilodovich.”

I don’t know about that, thought Alexei.

“No, it is true. There is something about you, little man.”

Ha.

“Your mockery is insincere. Because you know it to be true. You know your true nature is other than it seems. What, I wonder, is it?”

I have been puzzling this for months. So don’t ask me.

“You have certainly had a difficult day. Someone tried to kill you.”

Are you watching me all the time?

“No. No. Not yet. But do you wonder — why would anyone want to kill you? What is in you?”

I don’t know.

“I think you know. Something in you is refusing to accept, hmm?”

If you say.

“Well. Whatever it is — I am sure old Fyodor buried it there for a reason. Best not pry — hmm?”

Why would Fyodor bury anything?

“You tell me. Or maybe — maybe Fyodor could tell me himself. Are you in there, my love?”

The Babushka’s tone was making Alexei uncomfortable. It was time to change the subject.

Why do they call you Babushka?

“Because I am an ugly old woman. I am the elder. I am sorry — I was the elder. The one who made this place. But Babushka is gone now too. I am just I.”

The elder? Elder what?

Alexei waited.

“The elder what?” he repeated, aloud. “What?”

“What?” Alexei turned around.

Darya was back. She looked at him strangely. “You should take your head out of there,” she said. “It’s Babushka’s.”

“My head?”

Darya laughed. “The tank,” she said. “But also your head — soon enough.”

Alexei turned and leaned against the tank. “What do you mean by that?”

“At the dance,” said Darya. “We’ll all lose our heads to Babushka.”

“I think,” said Alexei slowly, “I may have just been speaking with her.”

“How fortunate for you.” Darya gave him a sceptical look. “Maybe you will lose your head to her sooner. That is why I thought you might like to—”

Alexei raised his hand. “Right. I am flattered, Darya. But no thank you. It would be a distraction.”

“You’re the sort of fellow who never does anything, aren’t you? You never take any risks — and you hate distractions.” She looked at him, and Alexei shrugged. “I’m right about that. Like Papa says — I’m getting the sight. Well, Mr. Killer — that kind of thinking can’t get you very far in your line of work — now can it?”

Alexei opened his mouth. He didn’t know what to say to that, and was rescued by the sound of the door opening. He closed his mouth and put his hand on the butt of his gun.

“Oh shit,” breathed Darya as a tall, balding man in an overcoat stepped in. He looked around with small, hard eyes. Three others — a man, and two women — jostled in behind him. By the sounds of things, more were waiting to come through outside. “Papa.”

“Papa?” said Alexei.

“Hide!” she hissed. “We’re not supposed to be here. He’ll kill us!”

“Pilgrims!” shouted Darya’s killer father, when the crowd of them had come in. “Welcome to the New Pokrovskoye Museum of Family History! This place has been here as long as we have — and yet like our family here, it grows month by month.” He repeated himself in French, and once more in Russian.

The crowd nodded at various times. By the time they were all inside, Alexei counted at least thirty. They shuffled down the steps and gawked at the treasure like retirees on a bus tour. But it wasn’t just retirees. Old men and women tottered alongside athletes who couldn’t have been older than twenty. A fat man with greased-back blond hair and a sweaty blue T-shirt was pointing out the intricacies of a glass-domed clock to a young red-haired beauty in a dark blue denim jacket. Two angular black-haired men, so similar to one another they might have been twins, wandered toward the eggs. One of them wore the black and white collar of a clergyman. His brother just wore shorts and a T-shirt, and a dumb, happy grin. Of them all, just one — a short, swarthy man who lingered near the door, glancing over his shoulder like he was expecting someone to check for his ticket — didn’t appear to be having the time of his life.

Alexei pulled back behind the curtain, and whispered to Darya: “We can’t stay here. We’ll turn up.”

“Papa will kill us!”

“Really? Like—” Alexei drew his finger across his throat and raised his eyebrows in a question. Darya shrugged.

“That’s what he used to do,” she said matter-of-factly.

Alexei looked back — this time paying closer attention to Darya’s dad. He had to admit, it was possible. The old man moved in and around the displays with the ease of a jungle cat, his tiny cool eyes unblinking. He wasn’t a young man — what was left of his hair was bone white, and his face was a map of wrinkles — but Alexei didn’t think there was anything but bone and muscle underneath that coat. He appended the thought: bone, muscle, and a small arsenal of assassin’s tools.

Alexei shook his head. That was silly. He was just an old guy who owned a general store, and was right now explaining about the significance of the samovars — which nobleman had made his tea in which of the little tanks, at around about what time period.

“I look at you and I can see — now you wonder,” said Darya’s father, “how this is Family history and not merely a store of antiquities? Tell us, Orlovsky. Are we all descended from the Czars? The cousins of little Anastasia, who fled the Bolsheviks’ bullets? Is this our heritage?”

Darya’s father smiled sadly. He shook his head. “No,” he said. “We are ordinary folk in this room. Our grandparents were more likely to be peasants than kings. They did not, in all likelihood, even know one another in their times. And yet — this is your heritage. It will become your heritage.”

As he spoke, Darya’s father walked over to the case of eggs. Alexei pulled back from the curtain, crawled around to the other side of the space there, and peered out through another crack.

“Your treasure,” he said. “For there are others, who dream us. These ones — these ones are the true Family. Descended from the Holy Man Grigor Rasputin, yes?” Darya’s father’s laugh was a cold razor in his throat. “He who healed the Romanovs and foretold the future — who dreamed and saw the world through God’s eye. And yes — He who spread his seed through the country, to make the Family.

“Rasputin’s bastards, they called them! They have dwelt in our dreams and guided our lives. They are as angels to us. And tonight—”

His grin was wide as he spread his arms.

“—tonight, they give you this!”

Alexei scanned across the faces of the old man’s audience. There was not a hint of skepticism in the room; not even rolling eyes at the rich, carnival barker’s hyperbole that Darya’s father was spewing. They just watched him, nodding, and followed the sweep of his hands as he guided them to look upon the scimitars and the clocks and the china, that according to Darya the Koldun Vasili Borovich had brought here on ships many years ago.

“It will begin very soon,” said Darya’s father quietly. “You will hear the song, and then there are the smells, and in a joyful exodus, you will visit Paradise.”

Members of the group looked at one another with broad grins, nodding in agreement. The uncomfortable little man by the door joined in — nodding and grinning even more forcefully than the rest as he moved down the steps, and around a display case outside Alexei’s field of view.

“Soon,” said Darya’s father. “For now — marvel at the treasures of the New Pokrovskoye Museum of Family History. Marvel, children. And savour. For you will remember them, yes? And with them — construct your paradise together. Savour.”

Alexei felt a hand on his thigh. Darya leaned close and whispered in his ear: “Savour me.”

Alexei looked at her, and glanced above — where the Babushka’s great egg loomed, like a terrible cloud. He thought he could hear a clicking sound — a bonging, as if a great thing shifted in there.

“I don’t think—” he whispered, but she interrupted him:

“Savour me, or I’ll scream.”

Alexei looked at her.

“You won’t scream. Your Papa would kill us both.”

She sighed. “I thought we had a date,” she whispered.

“Pretty exciting date already.”

“Alexei.” Darya shifted so her flank pressed against his. He felt her hip against him. “Please. Just hold me if you don’t want me. I want to feel a touch. Before—”

Alexei put his hand on her shoulder. It was clammy with fear sweat. “Before what? Rapture?” he whispered.

“Rapture.” She uttered it as a curse. “Yes. Before that particular wonder.” She looked at him pleadingly. “I am young, Alexei. I don’t want to vanish like the others.”

Alexei nodded. “All right,” he said, stroking her hair. “All right.”