Rasputin's Bastards

THE IDIOT

The face looming over his own could have belonged to God: an old, tired, and infinitely pissed-off God.

Well, thought Alexei Kilodovich as he gazed up into His heavenly glare, He has every right to be. God must have better places to be than here out in the rain on the deck of a boat in the middle of an Atlantic night, pulling an undeserving wretch like Alexei Kilodovich out of the drink. One small eye squinted as a rivulet of water ran into a tiny pink tear duct from the broad slope of His forehead.

“What the fuck happened to you?” He demanded.

Alexei looked back at the face and considered the question, and the unspoken questions that cascaded from that one.

How did you get that bruise on your own forehead, all yellow and blue and soft? How did you wind up in that little dingy, here in the Atlantic? How could you let Mrs. Kontos-Wu down? Leave her to the Romanians?

How could you be so stupid?

Alexei opened his mouth to answer. But the truth stuck in his throat like a bone.

“I remember nothing,” he lied, and with that lie he settled into a new role: the amnesiac castaway, confused and grateful and frightened — but most of all confused — as much a mystery to himself as he is to his benefactors.

“Ah,” said God, “should have let you drown.” And He pulled away and vanished in the dark.

“Did your boat sink?” It was a new face this time — a long one, with a little van Dyke beard and a head shaved bald. His breath smelled funny — like burning sugar, and something beyond. The smell came and went as a sea breeze.

“I do not—” Alexei paused, to frown and think on the question, or at least give the appearance of honest thought “—I do not remember.”

“What about its name?” asked a young woman who sounded American — possibly from the southern States, maybe Georgia. “Your boat’s name.”

“It was—” Alexei made a show of snapping his fingers, as if the noise alone would summon up the name like a well-trained dog.

“No,” he said. “I am sorry.”

“What are you doing off Maine?” said the bald man. “You sound Russian or something.”

“Maine?” said Alexei. The woman was pulling up the rope ladder from their own boat. This one was at least as large as the Romanians’ big cabin cruiser — from the brief glimpse of it he’d gotten as it approached his raft, he’d guessed it might be even larger, and more opulent. From inside the main cabin, Alexei could hear faint music — although he couldn’t tell what kind, against the noise of the ocean. Yellow light shone warm as a fire through the curtains of a nearby porthole. It all should have conspired to give him comfort… .

Comfort is the torturer’s first tool. Succumb to that, and you’ve failed already. Who had said that? Alexei frowned, and shivered. Maybe the amnesia trick wasn’t such a lie after all.

“You can’t not know where Maine is,” said the woman. She had the hood of her raincoat up, so he couldn’t see much of her. But the skin on her face shone like a seal pelt in the misting rain, and her eyes, small and suspicious, flashed at him. “You can’t,” she repeated.

“It is in the United States,” replied Alexei. He let a sliver of uncertainty creep into the trailing sentence for effect. “Sure.”

“So you haven’t forgotten everything,” said the woman. “What year is it? You know that?”

“1997,” he said, and she said, “See?”

She threw her hood back, damp hair falling to her shoulders in faux-Rasta Medusa-snakes. She was younger than he’d thought — not more than twenty-five, certainly, with an oval face, scorched eyebrows and small dark eyes — and in the act of pulling back the hood, the accusation in her eyes had changed to a kind of triumph.

Alexei let his hand flutter up to the cut on his forehead. “Ah,” he said, and loosened his knees. Take me to a bunk, he willed, as he let his eyes turn up into his skull and relaxed his shoulders before he hit the hard wood slats of the deck. Take me inside, make me warm and well, and save your questions for the morning.

“Take him inside,” shouted the bald man. “Get him warmed up, and lay off the questions — plenty of time for that later. Okay, Heather?”

Alexei had to fight to keep his mouth slack, suppress the smile. His mother would have said he’d had the power. The strength of a Koldun, a lodge wizard, going through him. She had believed in that kind of thing.

Heather grunted something and took hold of an arm. Another crewmember took Alexei’s other arm, and together they hefted him off the deck. Alexei was a big man — no fat on him, but like they used to say back at school, he had lead in his muscles. He let them drag him under the canopy and inside, down some stairs to the warm lower deck where the cabins were. Long before the crew selected a bunk for him, gotten him out of his sodden clothes and wrapped him in thick woolen blankets, Alexei slipped into genuine unconsciousness — a blank, dreamless oblivion that erased Mrs. Kontos-Wu, the Romanians, and the kids. Especially them: the little bastard kids that put him in this predicament to begin with.

“Did they try to kill you? Is that it?”

Alexei blinked awake. There was a bandage wrapped around his head, and from the prickly aching underneath, he thought that someone might have sutured up the gash in his scalp. Although it wasn’t bright, the white fluorescent light in the cabin hurt his eyes and for a moment he couldn’t focus.

“Hey. I’m talking to you.” Alexei felt a hand on his shoulder, saw a blurry shadow intersect the light. It was another American, and his breath stank of garlic or something, and all told he made Alexei want to puke. But he held it down.

“Who are you?” asked Alexei. “I can’t see well right now.”

The hand moved off his shoulder, and the shadow settled back to resolve itself into the shape of a round-shouldered hulk of a man. He could have been the one from the deck — probably he was — but he reminded Alexei more of some of his former colleagues. It was something in the heaviness he projected; a weight that went beyond his wide jaw, his blunted nose, or even the expanding gut that crept an inch too far over his belt-line. Even starvation couldn’t do much about the kind of mass this guy carried, Alexei thought. It was a weight of the soul.

“I’m Holden.” The man leaned back further, so the chair legs creaked and the few remaining shadows from the overhead light vanished. “Got a good look?”

“Thank you,” said Alexei.

“Don’t fucking thank me. Picking you up wasn’t my idea. But you better thank me for not tossing you back when my kids told me what they did. You’d be dead out there, last night. On a raft in the middle of fucking nowhere. This isn’t even a shipping lane. Nobody comes out here, except to fish and you don’t look like a fucking fisherman. Now start talking. Somebody try to kill you? Or what? How’d you get that cut?”

Alexei tried to sit up. Yes, he knew this kind of guy. “I fell — or something. Don’t remember.”

“Bullshit.”

“Maybe…” Alexei felt a nauseating wave of dizziness as he propped the pillow behind him. “Maybe it’s going to come back to me later. What’s this place?”

Holden regarded him levelly. “Mine,” he said. “This place is mine.”

“What do you do here?”

Holden laughed. “Sell Avon,” he said. Then he twisted his larynx into a creepy falsetto: “Ding dong, Avon calling. You remember that commercial?”

“Okay.” Alexei had no idea what he was talking about. “Like that.”

Alexei nodded politely.

“That’s not what you wanted to know, though — is it?”

Alexei didn’t answer, and Holden clearly didn’t expect him to. “Well I’m not hearing what I want to know, either,” said Holden.

“I’m sorry. I don’t remember.”

“You don’t remember.” Holden crossed his arms. “Sometimes,” he said, “I get instincts. About people. About things. About what to do. And you want to know something?”

“Sure,” said Alexei.

“I got an instinct about you.”

“I see.”

“Yeah, see that’s the thing,” said Holden. “I don’t fuckin’ see. I got no idea what that instinct says. It’s just screaming at me. Fuckin’ screaming. So you see—” he leaned forward, making the chair legs creak dangerously “—I gotta know your story.”

“I don’t know it myself,” said Alexei. “I’m trying.”

“Well good for you.” Holden kicked the chair out from behind him and stood. “When you’ve got a story for me, we’ll talk again. Right now—” he opened the door to the cabin and stepped out “—I’ve got a schedule to keep.”

The door swung shut again. It made a rubbery sound as it bounced off the doorframe, and finally settled, closed but unlatched.

Alexei rolled onto his side. His legs drew up toward his chest. He felt himself begin to shake. His eyes closed.

Alexei’s instincts were screaming too: they made a high, wailing sound in his brain like feedback, a microphone held too near a speaker. If he had any piss in him, he’d put it in the bed sheets now.

This was maybe not instinct at all, thought Alexei.

It felt more like terror. A formless, directionless terror — such as he had never felt.

It’s the Romanians, he told himself. The fuck-up on their boat. You are feeling bad about the fuck-up. You are feeling bad about where you are. Worried. This is, after all, hardly a U.S. coastguard rescue. Present circumstances are naturally upsetting.

It has nothing to do with…

…with the snow-covered tarmac outside a low cement block barracks building, beneath a clear sub-arctic sky and the rivers of dust at the base of a cave in Afghanistan and lights that flashed and Czernochov and trigonometry and…

…that game of floor hockey.

The thoughts slipped away as fast as they came, into a storm of memories — and Alexei opened his eyes.

He was looking at the little bedside table. It was cheap — made out of pressed board covered in dirty white laminate. It looked to have been originally in a child’s room, because the laminate was covered in stickers that someone had tried to scrape off with a pallet knife. The only two that were left was a brilliant green one of a cartoonish frog, next to a bright blue hairy monster with goggly eyes and three thick fingers on each hand, that did not look threatening at all.

Alexei smiled. He liked the blue thing. It reminded him of more innocent times, of childhood.

“Cute monster,” he whispered, and reached out to touch the sticker with his thumb.

Finally, Alexei pulled the blankets from his bare legs and swung his feet onto the deck. The dizziness came again, but it wasn’t as bad this time, so Alexei rode it out. Whoever it was had put him to bed had taken his briefs as well as his pants, and the cold cabin air actually seemed to help. He put his weight onto the balls of his feet, and holding onto the top bunk for support pulled himself upright. And stood there, facing the bunk, leaning forward on both arms like an athlete warming up for a race. A shaky athlete, after a bad night of too much vodka and maybe one too many rounds with an over-energetic whore — but still, Alexei thought, an athlete.

“Not so bad,” he said aloud.

“Depends on where you’re standing.”

Alexei started and turned — hands instinctively leaping down to cover himself.

It was the woman — Heather, he remembered, the one who had hauled him downstairs. He recognized her mainly by the dreadlocks and the eyes. The shapeless raincoat was gone, replaced by a snug-fitting pair of tights and a matched black sweater.

Her eyes flickered down Alexei’s torso. They finally settled on his hands.

“You’re hiding something,” she said, shutting the door behind her.

“I — beg your pardon?” Alexei stumbled a bit, and finally managed to duck his head and sit down — knees together, hands still clasped on his lap. Like a nervous schoolboy, Alexei thought.

Heather smiled, and when she blinked her eyes had left his groin. She met his eye steadily.

“This amnesia game of yours,” she said, “is what I’m talking about.” She lowered her voice, to just above a whisper: “I overheard your talk with Mr. Gibson.”

“Mr. Gibson?”

“Holden.”

“Ah.” Alexei crossed his legs, and reached over with one hand to draw a blanket over his lap.

“Holden can be a prick,” she said, crossing the tiny room so that she stood directly over him. Now her tone went playful. “But you’re used to dealing with pricks, I bet.”

“You meet all kinds,” said Alexei.

“—in your business,” she finished for him.

Now Alexei was quiet. He looked up at Heather with raised eyebrows, and for that instant her face was a mirror, throwing back his whatever-can-you-mean expression with one of her own.

“You can’t remember how you hit your head,” she said finally. “Or so you say. But maybe you remember how you got this.” Her hand fell onto his shoulder, and the long string of scar tissue that went nearly as far as the base of his neck.

“Or the one on your ass,” she said. “Left cheek. Looks like a piece of shrapnel hit you.”

Actually, it had been a knife, and the scar was a lot uglier than the wound that had made it. But Alexei merely sighed, reached up and put his hand on top of hers. “You,” he said, “have been peeking.”

“Not just at your ass,” she said, and reached under her sweater. “I found this in your pants pocket.” She pulled out what looked like an oversized black pen, but Alexei recognized it immediately. He had been in pretty bad shape in the dingy, so he could excuse himself for not noticing — but he was sure they had taken it, along with the Glock and the butterfly knife, before setting him adrift. Alexei grabbed for it, but she stepped away too quickly, and lifted the weapon above her head.

“Give that to me!”

Any chance they give you — take it. Escape is your duty.

He jumped to his feet, the blanket falling away as he did so, and — the old instincts kicking in — he dove at her. She tried to twist out of his way, but he anticipated her action and caught her under an arm. She reached for the door with her free hand, but Alexei spun them both around so that his own body blocked her. In the same move, he reached up with his free hand and twisted Heather’s wrist. She gave a little cry, and the weapon fell to the deck.

“Wow,” she said, gasping for breath. The two of them were locked in a bizarre parody of a tango clinch — he with one arm locked under her arm and around her waist, his other hand holding hers high above their heads.

As they stood panting, Alexei realized with a blush just how close they were.

“What are you?” she murmured. “Russian mafia? KGB?”

“Not these days,” he whispered, before he could think. “No,” he said at volume. “There is no Russian mafia. I’m not KGB.”

She smiled at that. “All right,” she said. “It’s coming back to you.”

Alexei blinked. He heard a noise in his ears, like tinnitus. Like a radio, swooping up a blank stretch on the AM dial.

Some of them will try sex. It is the next thing after comfort, but it is much more difficult to combat.

Ah ha! It was Kolyokov! Alexei remembered now. Old Fyodor Kolyokov, talking in the upper lecture hall while the autumn wind whipped up a new snow from the shipyards. “I will tell you about sex now,” said Kolyokov, who had dimmed the classroom lights and switched on the overhead projector. “There will be a time when you are on your own, in a weakened state — perhaps a prisoner, perhaps simply drunk. Old Kolyokov will not be there to advise you. So you must understand about sex.”

“Hey! I’m talking to you.”

Heather pulled herself away just enough to get her free hand in the space between them, and took him into her sweat-slick palm. Alexei shut his eyes, let her draw a low, grateful moan from him as she worked him harder still. He let her other hand go, and wrapped both his arms around her middle, so that his hands moved up and underneath her sweater, then crept again beneath the elastic of the tights. She didn’t seem to mind — she gave a pleased-sounding little moan — but she squirmed anyway, so that before Alexei knew it, his hands were back outside, and empty. He opened his eyes, to find himself looking directly into hers, and when he moved forward to kiss her, she pulled back too quickly. In the same motion, she released him.

“Lie down,” she commanded.

“All right.” Alexei returned to his bunk — first scooping up the weapon, which he tucked against his wrist. Heather came over and sat on the bunk beside him.

“I’m not going to fuck you,” she said matter-of-factly.

“All right,” said Alexei. “What are you going to do? Torture me?”

“Depends.”

“On what?”

“On how forthcoming you are. What’s your name?”

Alexei shrugged. “I can’t remember.”

“Bullshit.”

Alexei looked at her levelly. “Are you having instincts too?” he asked.

“Funny guy,” she sneered. “And you say you’re not KGB anymore.”

“I don’t work for the KGB,” said Alexei. “I’m pretty sure about that.”

“That wasn’t what I asked,” she said, and motioned to the weapon in his hand. “What’s that thing?”

Alexei smiled at her. No harm there.

“Would you like me to demonstrate?”

“If you need to.”

“It is called an asp.” With a flick of his wrist, Alexei extended the asp to its full eighteen inches. The black steel ball at the end of it gleamed in the light, and made an ethereal line of reflection as Alexei flicked it back and forth on its steel-spring shaft. “You can buy it at the shopping mall,” he said. “Legal in your country, and pretty dangerous in the hands of someone who knows how to use it.”

Heather nodded, apparently satisfied. “Good. Now we’ll try again — if you don’t work for the KGB, who do you work for?”

Alexei sighed.

“I am,” he said finally, “between employers.”

“Recently so, I take it.”

“Yes.”

“Bullshit,” she said. “You’re here for Holden. From Time-Warner, right?”

“Think what you like.” Alexei could feel himself starting to get pissed off. “What the hell do you mean, Time-Warner? The television people?”

“The magazine people.” Heather nodded as she spoke, raised her eyebrows and lowered her voice — as though she were revealing some sinister truth. It only pissed Alexei off more.

“Whatever you say,” he mumbled.

“He’s a real prick, you know.” Heather’s voice dropped, and she leaned toward him as she spoke. Her hand fell casually on his hip, and her forefinger inscribed an arc on the flesh there. “If you’re not here for him — you should be. You should see what he does to people. To little kids.”

“Little kids,” repeated Alexei, and thought about that.

“And — he’s getting worse,” said Heather. The nail dug in — not quite painfully.

“I’m not in the mood,” he said, and lifted her hand away.

She stood up, face blank.

“Understandable,” she said, before she turned to the door, “I guess. I guess I’m not in the mood either, then.”

When she left, closing the door firmly, Alexei put a hand behind his head and regarded the asp, which she’d thoughtfully left him. Why did he still have it? The Romanians should have found it on him — they were professionals in every other respect, and a professional didn’t leave his enemy with a weapon in his pocket. Even an innocuous little weapon such as this.

He took hold of the ball at the asp’s tip, and pushed it back into the shaft, so it became like a pen again. He bounced it once in his palm, and tucked it under his pillow.

It scarcely mattered now, of course; there were other, more immediate things to worry about.

But he still couldn’t stop asking himself: What the hell was their angle? Crazy damn Romanians. They had to have an angle.