Rasputin's Bastards

THE GRAND INQUISITOR

“I am quartermaster of the Imperial New Pokrovskoye Tea Company,” explained the little man one more time. “Now let me go or there will be trouble.”

Amar Shadak looked over to Gepetto Bucci, who shrugged and twiddled his forefinger around his ear. He looked back at their prisoner. Shadak didn’t even bother making a nice face for this one.

“Where,” said Bucci, leaning forward, “is New Pokrovskoye?”

“Everywhere,” said the prisoner. “It will come upon you soon. Then you will be in trouble. Trust me. Better to let me go. I will put in a good word for you with the Imperial Guard.”

Bucci nodded. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a cigarette lighter, flicked it to life. “I got this from my old man. He used to run an empire up this way too.”

“Is that so?”

“Yeah. That’s so. Not fuckin’ tea, though.”

The Quartermaster looked up at the bluish flame. “Vodka,” he said and nodded.

Bucci shook his head no. “Screech,” he said. “Used to run it down through St. John’s. Newfoundland. Big empire. Roman empire, you could say.” He looked at the quartermaster. “Don’t fuckin’ threaten me,” he said. “Answer questions.”

Their prisoner rattled the handcuffs they’d used to affix him to the chair at the Cloridorme Marina office. Outside, the harbour stood empty, but for the motor launch that Bucci had arranged to meet them there. It was nearly dawn. The prisoner was the only living soul they had seen since pulling into town.

Shadak rolled his shoulders and stepped back from the interrogation. He had suddenly lost his stomach for it, and as he stepped back leaned against the flimsy screen door that led outside. Just like that, he was standing on a cracked cement pad in the pale illumination of a Coke machine, listening to the surf crash rhythmically against the pier. Another sea — of car and truck hoods — gleamed nearer in the pre-dawn light.

He scraped his foot along the cement. It was sandy. The way the sand rasped between the toe of his shoe and the cement made him think about the way the sand flowed like a river through the caves where he had lost himself in the Black Villa which made him think about the townspeople who even if they were in their beds might be in a place far off now. Rapture had come to this place; there was no mistaking it.

Rapture had taken the men in the caves. It had taken his caravansary — and it had assuredly taken everyone in the Emissary Hotel, prior to the arrival of Gepetto Bucci and his crew.

“Everything okay in there?”

Shadak shuddered and turned. Jack Devisi stepped into the pool of light outside the Cloridorme marina. Devisi dropped his spent cigarette and mashed it under his toe.

“Mind your business,” Shadak said.

“Right.” Devisi shrugged, moved his toe off the squashed butt. Smoke curled across the top of his shoe then vanished in the maritime breeze. Devisi reached into his jacket, pulled out a package of cigarettes and offered Shadak one. Shadak made a swatting motion. Devisi shrugged, pulled one out between his lips and lit it.

“I been at the diner here in town,” said Devisi finally. “Supposed to open at six a.m. It’s five-twenty now. You think someone’d be in there — getting’ ready. Fuck, with all the cars in town…” he gestured to the cars — they were double-parked along the road to the edge of town. Volkswagens and Chryslers, Hondas and Toyotas…

There was a muffled cry inside the marina. Devisi looked back over his shoulder. “Workin’ him over, huh?”

Shadak looked out at the ocean. Dawn was creeping up in the east, painting a thin pink line at horizon’s edge. The moon and a couple of stars perched a little higher in the part that was still night.

Devisi laughed nervously. “Surprised you ain’t in there,” he said.

Shadak took his hands from his jacket pocket. He looked at Devisi. “Why would you say that?”

“I only mean, it seems you like that kind of thing.”

Shadak raised his eyebrows. Devisi stepped a little closer.

“You know,” he said. His voice was like gravel in Shadak’s ear. Stale cigarette smoke enveloped Shadak. “Rough shit.”

Shadak turned to look at Devisi, calculating as he did so. He thought about killing him. For no reason better than the exercise, and he was in reach. It would be misplaced, such an act. But, thought Shadak, it would be satisfying.

“Hey!”

Devisi and Shadak both looked back. Bucci was standing in the door, his sleeves rolled up, his cheeks pink with the exertion. He looked at Devisi and jerked his thumb back. “Get inside. We gotta talk.”

Devisi nodded and stepped away. Shadak’s thoughts moved elsewhere.

Bucci ambled up beside Shadak.

“You all right?” he asked.

“Fine,” said Shadak, and Bucci shook his head.

“That fuckin’ guy in there,” he said. “Don’t blame you for getting air. He’s whacked.”

“Does he know?”

Bucci looked out at the sea. “He knows. Fat lot of good it’ll do us. I ask him where New Pokrovskoye is. He won’t say at first. Then he tells me it’s on the — get this — the Iliana Peninsula. Through the Petroska Straits. He gave us directions, but he may as well have told us to follow the fuckin’ Yellow Brick Road.”

“The sea,” said Shadak. “How fast can we get your boat here? You said later this morning.”

“My guy says about eleven, depending.”

Shadak nodded. The crew of them had flown in overnight and driven here in a rental, to get a fast lay of things in Cloridorme. But it didn’t sound like you could fly to New Pokrovskoye that easily — and anyway, Shadak wanted to go in with some firepower. Bucci had a boat he kept in Newfoundland — a big fast boat that Shadak was familiar with. There were guns there too — cached underneath the new Trekkers Outfitting Co-op that was slated to open there in the fall. That was the plan: load up the boat, send it to Cloridorme, and then the crew of them could follow the trail across the water to New Pokrovskoye.

Where, he was sure, he would find Kilodovich.

“How close are we?” he said.

“To leaving?” Bucci smiled. “I told you.”

“No.Youknow.TofindingKilodovich.YouhavebeenaskingtheQuartermaster there about Alexei Kilodovich, haven’t you?”

The smile vanished. Bucci leaned in close to Shadak. He put a hand on Shadak’s shoulder.

“Fucker did a real number on you,” said Bucci softly. “Didn’t he? Well don’t worry, Amar. We’ll make things right.

“You know what this place reminds me of?” said Bucci. “Marcia.”

“It reminds you of Marcia? Who is Marcia?”

“An old girlfriend,” said Bucci. “Great in the sack. But she had one problem.”

“What was that?”

“Thought she had psychic powers. The Sight.”

“Did she? Have the Sight, I mean?”

“Who knows?” said Bucci. “She said a lot of things that were true. But they were also things you could figure out by looking at a guy.” He thought about it. “So could go either way. Probably she wasn’t no psychic. But you couldn’t tell her that. She spent all her money on books and crystals and fuckin’ tapes — most months it was me that paid her fuckin’ rent and not her.”

“It sounds like a waste.”

“It was a waste I guess,” said Bucci. “But I think she used it. To keep out of serious shit. See, one day I finally got sick of her. Told her that was it — she was on her own, no more gifts no more nothing.”

“Hmm. What did she do?”

Bucci laughed. “She told me I had bad energy or some fuckin’ thing. She told me I didn’t know what I was saying and she knew because she could see the energy all around me.” Bucci fanned his fingers around his head and wiggled them. “All jaggly. She said I should fuckin’ meditate and I’d feel better about things.”

“Did you?”

“Fuck no. I left.”

Shadak looked at him sidelong. “She was not psychic,” he said. “If she was—” Bucci looked back. “If she was,” he said, “I still would have left. Wouldn’t have changed a fuckin’ thing.”

Shadak didn’t finish what he was going to say: If she was psychic, you would have been her fucking hand-puppet until she was finished with you, and when you left you would have taken away less than half of yourself. The rest would have stayed in her clutches until you died. Instead, he asked: “Do you think that Cloridorme is pretending to be psychic?”

Bucci leaned back and crossed his arms. “You know,” he said, “with the shit I’ve seen the past couple of days, I don’t think Cloridorme is pretending anything. I sure as shit don’t think New Pokrovskoye is playin’ a game here. I’m goin’ there because I said I would and I owe you from way back and I do what I say and I pay my fuckin’ tab. But you know something? In the end, I don’t think it means shit.”

“You have not met Alexei Kilodovich,” said Shadak.

“No,” said Bucci, “I have not. But we’ll see about meeting him soon. That fucker did a real number on you. I can tell. Soon as the boat comes. We’ll get on that fucker’s ass.”

And with that, Bucci stepped back inside.

Shadak peeked into his breast pocket — at the photograph there, of himself and Kilodovich — on the back of a jeep, grinning like fools. Shadak’s girlfriend had taken it — Ming Lei, with her long black hair and thighs smooth as silk. She was the kind of girl that a resourceful young hero like Amar Shadak ought to have three of. But Shadak, at just twenty-two still reeling at the responsibility of the shipment of small arms and mortar bombs that the Americans had dropped for him across the Pakistani border, one girl like her was enough.

Closer she’d said. Don’t worry — no one call you faggot, Amar. Cuddle up. And they’d laughed, and Alexei had thrown his arm over Amar Shadak’s shoulder like they were brothers — and she had taken the picture and handed it to him. He sat there, as the convoy started moving, watching the picture turn from creamy nothing into the instant of history, where Alexei Kilodovich embraced Amar Shadak as a brother.

He hoped that Bucci’s boat would do the trick. Shadak had acquired it for Bucci a couple of years ago from a cartel of Filipino pirates. It was one of a fleet of very useful little boats; it could pass muster in an only slightly well-oiled harbour. But given a half-hour’s notice, the deck gun could be up and assembled on the prow and the boat would be ready for combat. It was a good choice. Shadak thought that they might well have need of it.

Particularly, if Kilodovich was in charge of the force of men and women that were awaiting them.

He was sly enough to be. Particularly now that Fyodor Kolyokov was out of the picture.

They had first met in Quetta — during Shadak’s second and last meeting with Jim Saunders, his C.I.A. contact — the man who, at the time, Shadak saw as nothing less than his gatekeeper, to greatness. Kilodovich was lolling under a Banyan tree across from the café, sipping on a frosted bottle of beer and drumming his fingers impatiently on the wood of the bench. He was barely a man — skinny and pale, with close-cropped black hair and that unibrow, a little dusting of beard. He wore acid-washed blue jeans that did not fit him and a wine-coloured shirt with lapels wider than his chest. Shadak was not happy when Saunders had insisted that Kilodovich go along.

“The kid has contacts,” said Saunders.

“I have contacts,” said Shadak. “That’s why you hired me.”

Saunders had smiled that apologetic little half-smile of his. “We move in Soviet Afghanistan, we go with the Russian kid. Otherwise—”

He left it unspoken.

“Fine,” said Shadak. He had not yet worked with the Americans — and in 1985, if you worked with the Americans it was either Central America or Afghanistan. At that point Nicaragua was just a set of possible locations on young Amar’s mental map of the world. But Shadak had been doing heroin deals with certain Afghani parties since long before the Soviets had marched in. At that stage in his career where he could not afford to stand still, he could not afford to leave the American opportunity untapped.

At the time, Amar assumed that Saunders had given Alexei Kilodovich some kind of secret signal. The kid downed his beer and started immediately across the street. He was gawky and thin, but he moved even then with an easy confidence. He stepped around the low fence of the café’s patio and pulled up one of the plastic resin chairs.

He nodded hello at Shadak, who gave him a little smile in return.

“So we are going to be travelling together, da?”

Shadak nodded. “So it seems. You know Afghanistan pretty well, I hear.”

“Not really,” said Alexei.

Shadak laughed. He had no idea, of course, that Alexei was telling pretty much the truth. He had never set foot on the lunar landscape of Afghanistan. He was along for another purpose.

Amar Shadak killed the next couple of hours wandering around the little town. The dawn light flattered it. If you squinted, and thought back to happier times, you might have imagined you were in a little French fishing village in the south — where you could while away the morning with a bottle of wine and some fresh-baked bread, before you climbed back into your Peugeot for the drive back to Paris and a night in the clubs.

Except of course you would never find a parking spot for your Peugeot here. The roads were all lined with cars. The town could probably build a hospital with the money it collected from parking tags this morning… .

Shadak wandered up the gentle slope from the harbour to the main streets. He walked past a gas station — still closed — a grocery store, a dark structure of corrugated steel and cinderblock filled with empty shelves and a couple of old video games. There were houses that crawled back further from the water, simple wooden buildings roofed in tar paper. Everyone in town seemed to have a truck, parked next to sleek, bullet-shaped little vehicles that Shadak understood to be snowmobiles. The houses were all dark, and as he walked he began to wonder whether the town was deserted. He thought back to The Omega Man, which made him think about the caves again, which made him wonder how well he’d do if the town rose up before him now — one terrible mind.

Shadak was saved from his own thoughts by the OPEN sign in the town’s little restaurant. He stuck his head inside, and saw a thickset woman behind the counter. A coffee machine was sputtering in the corner. The woman looked up at him and said bonjour, and Shadak said bonjour back, but when he tried to order a light breakfast it developed that there was no cook; he had left with the others. Shadak could have coffee and some cereal, but there was no bread for toast. “Les pilgrims” had cleaned them out. On a hunch, Shadak asked her where they’d gone and the woman shrugged. “Away, thank God,” she said. Shadak thought about working her over — but truly, if he’d been in a frame of mind for working people over there was honest work for him in the marina. She poured him a cup of weak, strange-tasting coffee and he sat there at the counter in silence and thought about Afghanistan.

They were almost equals at first. In the two weeks it took for Shadak’s and Saunders’ people to coordinate the shipment of munitions and guards for it at the border rendezvous, Amar and Alexei got to know one another very well. They spent time in clubs — partied with the Mujahedeen staffers at Captain Musa’s villa outside Quetta. After only a little hesitation, Amar introduced Alexei to his girlfriend. Her name was Ming Lei. She was twenty-one years old and Shadak had met her at a club in Hong Kong, where she had been working as a dancer. She had implied several times that she was trying to gather enough money to smuggle her family out of the People’s Republic and this was the best way of earning it quickly. He trusted her, the way only a twenty-two year old can trust a beautiful woman who doesn’t answer questions directly.

“I want to bring her with us,” said Shadak at their favourite club, while Ming was off for a pee.

“To Kandahar?” Alexei appeared to consider it. Amar had expected him to do the sensible thing and tell him to fuck off. But then Alexei surprised him.

“Why not? She is good luck, yes?”

Amar blinked. “She is good luck.”

“Can she handle a gun?”

Amar laughed and stubbed out his cigarette in the little bronze ashtray at their table. “She doesn’t know about guns,” he said.

“That’s good,” said Alexei. “It never pays to love a woman who knows about guns.”

And they’d laughed. And Ming had come back, straightening her short skirt, and looked at them both. “What you laughing about? Crazy bastard?” She punched Amar hard in the arm. “What?”

Alexei propped his own cigarette in the crook of his smiling lips, and extended a hand across the table to Ming. She took it. “Congratulations, darling,” he shouted over the club’s booming techno-pop soundtrack. “Amar and I have voted on it.”

“What?”

“We’ve decided,” shouted Alexei.

Amar slid his arm around Ming’s ass.

“You’re coming to Kandahar!” he hollered. “With us!”

Ming laughed and nodded, and rubbed her hip deliciously against Amar’s shoulder. She seemed pleased enough at the time. Although later, Amar would learn that was because she hadn’t understood a word either of them had said over the din of the nightclub.

“You crazy?” she demanded later that night as they lay in bed. “Take a Chinese woman to Afghanistan? With luck I would be raped by Russian soldiers. No luck, and we meet Mujahideen? Who knows what would happen?”

“If you don’t — want to go, you don’t have to,” Amar stammered.

“Who is that kid you working with, anyway? This his idea?”

“No. It was mine.”

Ming faced him, hands on both his shoulders. She pretended to study his face. “You look all hurt. Aw. Don’t look hurt. Stupid idea, that’s all.”

They hadn’t spoken about it the rest of the night. But the next morning, when they met Alexei, Ming just nodded when he went over their travel itinerary. When Alexei left them, Amar asked her about it.

“So you’ve changed your mind? Do you want to come?”

Ming grinned and nodded. “Sure,” she said, infiltrating his fingers with her own and squeezing hard. “Big desert trip. Sound like fun.”

And that was all she would say about it, until they were at the border and pulling the tarps off the Red Cross trucks that his Calcutta contacts had moved in for him.

“Well well,” said a voice from the back of the restaurant, “another tourist. I thought we were done with them, eh, Marie?”

Shadak looked up. The man who’d come in was skinny as a rail, with cropped hair and a face rouged with exploded capillaries. As he worked his way closer to the counter, Shadak could smell liquor coming off him. Liquor and bile. He went past Shadak and set himself down at the end of the counter. The waitress, Marie, poured coffee into a cup and saucer and brought it to him.

“Good morning, Bill,” she said.

“You have had a lot of tourists?” asked Shadak.

Bill shook his head and belched. “Oh, a few,” he said.

“Where did they go?”

Bill looked at him wearily. “Jeez-us,” he said. “Not so loud. They went away in boats.”

Shadak looked at him. He smiled pleasantly. “You,” he said mildly, “know more than that.”

Bill sipped his coffee noisily, like soup. “I don’t know anythin’ anymore,” he said.

Shadak stood up and took the stool next to Bill.

“Took my boat, what they did,” he said. “No gratitude, isn’t that right, Marie?”

Marie smiled and shook her head. “They paid you,” she said.

“Where,” said Shadak, “did they take your boat?”

“No idea.”

Shadak picked up his coffee and sipped at it. He smacked his lips and turned to the waitress.

“What’s that I’m tasting?” he asked in French.

“Salt,” she said.

“You are joking.”

“It is a family secret. Takes away the bitterness.”

Shadak might have asked another question — but there was a jangling at the front door. Jack Devisi stepped in. “Fuck,” he said, “there you are. We been lookin’ all over for you. Fuckin’ harbourmaster lost—” Devisi stopped himself, seeing the two others in the diner “—lost his train of thought,” he finished.

Shadak nodded. He looked at the drunk. Studied his bleary eyes.

The drunk blinked and stared at him, suddenly alert. His eyes had a hungry glitter to them.

“You aren’t a grandchild,” he said. In Russian. “You are close. But you are missing.”

“What the fuck,” gasped Devisi.

Shadak stepped back from the counter. Marie stepped back into the kitchen.

“Oh merde,” she said.

Shadak smiled. Russian. This wasn’t old Bill talking. This was — who?

“Babushka?” said Shadak.

Bill’s face broke into a grin.

“Where,” said Shadak carefully in Russian, “is Alexei Kilodovich?”

“I was hoping,” said Bill, “you could tell me.”

Then he faltered and grabbed the back of his chair. He settled himself into it.

“Wow,” Bill said, shaking his head.

“What the fuck?” said Devisi. “A Russian?”

Shadak looked around him. Devisi bent over the guy and slapped him. “Hey!” he said. “Fuckwit! What the fuck do you mean you could tell me? Where the fuck do we go! Answer me!”

Shadak was about to grab Devisi’s shoulder to make him stop when Marie appeared at the door to the kitchen.

“We both want the same thing,” she said in Russian.

“Ah, shit,” whispered Shadak. Then to Devisi: “Leave the old man alone. He has nothing to say to us.”

Bill was sobbing now. Marie, the waitress, touched her forehead and stumbled against the counter. She gasped. “I’m — sorry,” she said. “I didn’t say anything, did I?”

Rapture. Shadak swore. It was the same as at the caravansary — the whole world might turn against him. The same as — as the caves.

Except this time, he was unarmed.

Shadak turned to Devisi. “Give me your gun,” he said.

Devisi’s eyes widened and he made shushing motions with his hands. “Fuck,” he whispered, “don’t talk—”

He didn’t get a chance to finish. Bill was on top of him like a bouncer at a Belarus nightclub. “Fuck!” said Devisi, as Bill pushed him from the stool and onto the floor. Shadak slid back off his chair and tried to grab Bill, but the old man was quick, and rolled away. Shadak turned around and picked up a stool, as Bill fumbled in Devisi’s coat while Devisi hung onto the old man’s throat. Shadak held the stool over his head, when he heard the unmistakable click! of a firearm cocking.

“Put down the stool,” said Marie in Russian.

She was holding a double-barrelled shotgun levelled at Shadak’s chest.

Fuck, he thought. He put down the stool, as Bill pulled Devisi’s gun from underneath his jacket.

Bill got up, coughed, and motioned for Devisi to do the same.

“In the back,” said Marie, motioning with the gun.

After listening to Leo Montassini talk about his travels, locating this place, Shadak had made his way to the 14th floor where old Fyodor Kolyokov had kept that tank of his. More than anywhere in the hotel, this place seemed haunted. It smelled like salt and rot, making Shadak wonder if that sea that Montassini described wasn’t just beyond the closed bathroom door. He felt, almost, as though he were walking into another world as he crossed that threshold.

You don’t mind if we wait outside, Bucci had said, and Shadak had said he didn’t. He stepped into the bathroom, flicked on the light, and beheld the “fucking UFO thing.”

It was a marvel, he supposed. But it was a marvel in the manner that seeing a mysterious thing you’ve only ever imagined is marvellous: it brings the fancy of imagination down to earth. Shadak had once imagined this sort of thing as a great gleaming pod — mirrored surface distorting the world around it like the eye of a huge fish; powered by crackling Van de Graaff generators and operated by monsters with strange appendages and wicked intent. Seeing this thing — a dark lozenge with rust streaks around the welds where pipes and hoses emerged; a simple steel-wrapped conduit providing it with power from a converted wall socket, Cyrillic notations stamped into its skin — made him wonder at its simple reality. Shadak had opened up the hatch — stuck his head inside and sniffed around for the ocean that Leo Montassini had fantasized. He’d chuckled. The tank smelled as much like an ocean as a toilet did, which was to say quite a bit — but Amar Shadak would never confuse the two.

Now, he, Devisi and their two captors marched through the door into the kitchen, and then down stairs to a rough-hewn cellar that had been cut into bedrock some time ago. It also, Shadak noted with a chill, contained four more tanks.

“What the fuck?” said Devisi.

Bill jabbed Devisi in the small of the back. “Open the hatch,” he commanded. Devisi did as he was told. “Inside,” said Bill. Devisi gave Shadak a horrified look — but looked back at the gun, and climbed in.

“D-don’ fuckin’ close—”

But that was all he could say. Bill swung the hatch shut and twirled the handle.

“What are you doing?” demanded Shadak. “Don’t think I’m getting into that fucking thing.”

Marie shook her head. “No,” she said. “There is no point. I could not reach you through there. You are broken.”

“Him, though,” said Bill. “He will open his soul to me. In a week, he will become one of us.”

Shadak sneered. “In a tank? Those are not for sleepers. Those are dream-walkers’.”

“These are not dream-walker tanks. It is an improvisation of mine. There are drugs and gas and media in there. He will break down in a matter of days. It is practically automated. Listen.” Marie motioned to the tank with her shotgun. Shadak went over, and pressed his ear against it. Faintly, he could hear the sound of music — some Russian folk song — something about a girl called Natascha — overlaid with shouting and pounding.

“But not for me,” said Shadak.

“No,” she said. “You do not know where Alexei Kilodovich truly is. You are a dangerous mistake. You must be—”

She held the gun. Shadak stared at her. She did not fire.

“Where is he!” she shouted at him. “Let me into the Villa to see!”

Shadak looked at her levelly. “If I knew how to get into the Black Villa,” he said, a smile creeping into his voice, “don’t you think I would have gone there myself by now?”

“I—” said Marie, and Bill finished for her: “I am tired of this. I have a battle to fight elsewhere.”

And with that, Marie let the shotgun fall to her side — and Devisi’s nine millimetre fell to the cut-stone floor from Bill’s limp hands. The two looked at each other in confusion as Shadak let his breath out and prepared himself for beating the living crap out of both of them.

Gepetto Bucci was not happy when Devisi told him what had happened in the café. Shadak could hear him from outside. He swore and paced and hit things in the little marina office. Shadak couldn’t really blame him. Shadak felt his face flush with the stupidity of the act. They needed to make a clean exit from this place. Who knew how far it would be to New Pokrovskoye? Who knew?

Shadak sat against the cinderblock wall of the marina and rubbed his face in his hands. The knuckles of his right hand were bloody where they’d come into contact with Bill’s belt-buckle.

He should never, he knew, have engaged in this chase. When Fyodor Kolyokov had told him he could provide him with Alexei Kilodovich — Shadak should simply have left. Kilodovich was not good for him. The last time he had seen him…

The last time, he had been in a place like this. He ran his hand over the rough cement of the wall. Did it remind him of the caves? The concrete wall here was not of a piece with the fantastic natural chimneys that twisted and curved to admit dusty light from a distant sky, the layered sediment that measured height and years in the walls like rings on a tree. The poured cement pad here had nothing in common with the fine sand that flowed in solid rivers through the base of the caves.

And yet — the mind draws connections.

He could lose this thing — lose what little of himself that he had retained since Afghanistan. Kilodovich could see to that, if Shadak weren’t clever.

“Hey.”

Shadak looked up. Bucci stood, his hands jammed into his coat pocket, looking down at him.

“You cryin’ now, Amar?”

Shadak wiped his eye and looked at his fingertip. Sure enough: tears.

Bucci knelt down beside Shadak. “You know,” he said, “you once upon a time were a pretty formidable fuckin’ guy.”

“I am,” said Shadak, pushing himself to his feet, “still a pretty formidable fucking guy.”

“Well I hope so,” said Bucci. “I owe you a lot. And I’m pretty fuckin’ curious about all this shit. But fuck.”

Shadak nodded. He thought briefly about taking on Bucci — about slamming his fingers into the soft space underneath his ribcage, pushing up through the muscle and flesh and crushing the breath out of his bare lungs. But he didn’t think he could do that now. So he looked at Bucci and just nodded.

“Now we got a plan,” said Bucci. “We managed to wake up the fuckin’ harbour master, and he’s given us a map.”

“To New Pokrovskoye?”

“Yeah. It’s a chart that he had under his desk. All of a sudden, the fucker broke. He just blinked and started beggin’ — like he’d lost his nerve all at once. So we asked him again and he spilled. Said the maps were there. Map of the eastern fuckin’ seaboard, but the names are all different. They’re written in Russian, so we can’t read them. He showed me where New Pokrovskoye is. It’s in fuckin’ Labrador. Way fuckin’ north. It’s gonna take some time to get there, but we can do it.”

“Good.”

“Now I don’t think he’s lying — but he’s not all there either you know what I mean?”

“I do.”

“So we’re going to take him with us. I’m thinkin’.”

Shadak thought about that. The sea voyage, on a boat filled with guns — in a convoy filled with guns. To New Pokrovskoye. The Black Villa. Where he slept. Where even Babushka could not enter.

“Hey!”

Shadak looked up.

“Fuck, Amar, pay attention.”

Shadak blinked. “The caves,” he said. “The Black Villa.”

“What?”

Shadak shook his head. He didn’t know what. He leaned back against the wall and lowered his hands into his face.

“He’s not the only one we should take,” said Shadak.

“That so? Who else?”

“New friends,” said Shadak. “We should wrap their eyes in bandages and plug up their ears — and if Babushka comes back… she can fucking well talk to me.”

“Ah fuck.” Bucci gave Shadak a despairing look. “I’ll go back inside — I’ve got to—”

Bucci’s voice trailed off. There was the sound of a car engine coming up the road. Shadak looked up.

A Ford minivan with California plates on it, its sides covered in mud, jostled along the road and pulled to a stop. It seemed to shimmer with the heat from its engine. Shapes moved inside, seat-lights flashed on and off, beyond the grime of the tinted windows.

Bucci sniffed. “Fuck,” he said, “What’s that smell?”

Shadak sniffed. It smelled like the Black Villa — inviting, comfortable…

And poison.

The side door slid open, and a young man stepped out. He looked like a surfer — all suntan and streaked blond hair. Behind him, Shadak could see others: a young woman who might have been the surfer’s girlfriend; an older guy with swept-back hair and tinted glasses that might have been the surfer’s girlfriend’s father.

“Hey,” said the surfer. “Are we too late to go to New Pokrovskoye? Man, we been driving through the night and then some.”

“We’d hate to miss out,” said the girl.

Shadak smiled his warmest come-hither smile.

“You have been talking with Babushka?”

“Whoa,” said the surfer. “How’d you know that?”

Shadak smiled again.

“I’ve been talking with her too,” he said. “I would like to talk with her again.”

The older man stepped down. “Well good luck,” he said. “We haven’t been in touch for hours.”

“She said we would see her again in New Pokrovskoye.”

“But we think we’ve missed the boat,” said the older man.

“Yeah,” said the surfer. “We’re bummed.”

“Bummed.” Shadak made a sympathetic face. “Well not to worry. It so happens that the last boat to New Pokrovskoye is due to arrive—” he looked at his watch “—in an hour or so.”

“And there’s room?” said the girl.

“Plenty,” said Shadak — and he didn’t add that if there wasn’t, well they’d make some room in the harbour. He wasn’t going to leave anybody behind in this place. And if he had his way, he wasn’t going to leave anyone in New Pokrovskoye either.