Rasputin's Bastards

EPILOGUE

The beach was long and deep and covered with small, round rocks that dug like fork tines between a man’s ribs. Amar Shadak bled onto those rocks from a hundred little cuts, and three or four fairly large ones as sunlight filtered down through an even blanket of cloud. Not that he minded — with the way things had gone the night before, he was amazed he was still alive.

In fact, he was amazed that so many people were still alive. The beach on this northern part of Labrador was crowded as a Baltic resort town in August.

Or the banks of the River Styx.

Shadak lay there, eyes on the sky. He drummed his torn fingers on his chest. He thought about his wounds and wondered idly if his first assumption might have been wrong. Am I dead after all? He wondered. Is this only just an afterlife?

It was a credible position. When he looked around, he saw all sorts of others move by who ought to have been dead: Gepetto Bucci, his shirt torn, his eyes wide, sat with his arms around his knees rocking back and forth, while his funnyboy Capo Jack Devisi crouched in the surf, letting the froth run around his ankles.

A short time later, the waitress Marie limped over to where Shadak lay and looked down at him. She gave him a kick in the ribs. “Fuck you,” she said as he writhed. “I hope you die here.” And she stalked off to join Bill and Andrea and the cop and Martin Lancaster, who huddled in a circle beneath a low shelf of rock. They were all in remarkably good shape for a collection of shipwrecked torture victims.

It was all about right for Shadak’s afterlife theory — the torturer diminished, his victims restored. It was the sort of irony that God would appreciate.

God. Or the other one. The Devil Kilodovich.

Shadak shut his eyes and listened to the pounding of the surf. It was rhythmic — as rhythmic as the dripping in the Black Villa. Could this place be simply another prison, concocted for him by Kilodovich?

It was unlikely. Shadak had spent enough time with his soul asunder to know when he was all in one place. And right now, if nothing else, Amar Shadak was whole: there was no small piece of his conscience held hostage in some distant and imaginary place. If anything, the whole of him was. And that didn’t seem likely.

Shadak felt another poke in his ribs. He opened his eyes, to look up at a face he didn’t recognize — a small pug-face with slicked back hair. Looked to be in his forties somewhere.

“Fuck,” said the man. “You ain’t dead.”

“That remains to be seen,” said Shadak.

“No,” he said sadly. “You ain’t dead.” The man leaned closer. He put one hand over Shadak’s mouth. With his other hand he pinched Shadak’s nostrils shut. “Look buddy — I’m sorry about this. But Mr. Bucci says that if I want to get back into his good books, I gotta do this thing.”

Shadak felt his lungs burn. He hitched his back and widened his eyes and shook his head desperately — a move intended at once to dislodge the man’s fingers and plead his case: No you do not have to do this thing! the gesture said. Arrangements can be made!

“You must have really pissed Mr. B. off somethin’ good,” he said. “More than me — which, owing that by my crappy judgement, I caused him to have to come to this place and wreck his boat an’ fuck up his St. John’s operation, is something.”

Shadak frowned and looked up. “Leo Montassini?” he tried to say, but only managed “Mm-Mm MmmMmmMmmMmm?”

Leo Montassini didn’t answer. Instead, he started to whistle — a tune that sounded vaguely Russian, like a folk song or an anthem. It reminded Shadak of a song that he’d heard as a kid, by some Russian folk singer. He couldn’t remember its name for the life of him.

The main rescue party from New Pokrovskoye arrived by boat later in the afternoon. They’d been alerted by Leo Montassini, who’d found the castaways, he said, while taking a walk along the beach to clear his head. The fact that the walk had taken him twelve miles each way, half of it in the pre-dawn dark… well, that was just an indication of how badly in need of clearing his head in fact was.

They loaded the castaways onto one of New Pokrovskoye’s few remaining vessels — a motor yacht that had an unusual amount of bunk space hidden away under the foredecks. It was still a tight fit for the thirty-nine survivors that they’d managed to collect — particularly as most of them were injured.

Fortunately, it was a short run up the coast to New Pokrovskoye. The trip was joined mainly in a kind of puzzled silence. The makeshift crew of the motor yacht was not prone to discussion in any case. And the castaways themselves were disoriented enough by the trauma of the previous night’s attack — never mind the bizarre quality of their rescuers, which included hard-faced Romanians, children who shouldn’t have been out of grade school yet, and odd, grey things who hunched and drooled and capered on the decks.

The boat slid into the protected haven of New Pokrovskoye’s harbour just past four in the afternoon. It moved into the slip next to the submarine, where Konstantine Uzimeri was busy drawing up a duty roster and a course back to Turkey. Jean Kontos-Wu watched it from the window of the town’s café. She sipped at her tea. It was jasmine, her favourite — which she hadn’t expected to find at a distant outpost like this one. She turned back to her table mates. Stephen Haber was poking at the baby Vladimir sitting in Zhanna’s lap next to him. Heather — the woman who’d obligingly carried Fyodor Kolyokov’s soul the past few days — was still scribbling madly on a napkin.

“There,” Heather finally said, and slid the napkin into the centre of the table, “that’s all of them.”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu turned the napkin around so that she could read them: a list of four ten-digit numbers, topped by the address and telephone number of a bank in Geneva.

“Is he saying anything else?” asked Mrs. Kontos-Wu.

“Well,” said Heather, “he’s pretty sorry.”

“He has cause to be,” said Zhanna, “the old bastard.”

“Shh,” said Heather. Her eyes fluttered closed. “He’s dying.”

“Dying.” Mrs. Kontos-Wu shook her head. “How does that work?”

“We have a metaphor. A living room.” Heather let her eyes flutter shut. “Fyodor Kolyokov is lying on the sofa in front of the television.”

“What’s he watching?”

“The television — doesn’t exactly work any more.”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu patted Heather’s hand, as Heather said, “Oh.”

“The old bastard is dead,” said Zhanna. “Good.”

“He wasn’t so bad,” said Heather.

Vladimir rolled his eyes in what was an innocuously adult expression of disbelief, and Zhanna snorted. “He was so bad. He tried to purchase us from Amar Shadak — with the life of poor Alexei Kilodovich — to turn us into mind-slaves to further build his wealth. Is that not so, Jean?”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu shrugged. That had been her understanding too.

Stephen reached across to the middle of the table and picked up a salt shaker. He idly sprinkled some on the red-and-white checked tablecloth and blew on it.

“Well,” said Heather, her lips pulled tight, “at least he didn’t want to take over the world.”

“Do not be so sure,” said Zhanna. “Who knows what he might have done had things not gone better for him?”

“Things went as they went,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu. “The important thing is that now we all have our wits — and,” she tapped the napkin with a fingernail, “this.”

The five of them looked at the napkin. If Heather was to be believed, those numbers allowed access to bank accounts containing on the order of a half billion U.S. dollars. It was, she claimed Kolyokov had told her, an inheritance.

Divide this evenly between the sleepers and dream-walkers, who have been so ill-used, he had told her. This is truly theirs. I should never have taken it to begin with.

Zhanna snorted. “Deathbed repentance.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” said Stephen, and all looked to him. Those three words were the most he had spoken since he had detonated the psyche bomb and wiped Discourse from their minds the previous night.

Zhanna put her hand on his arm. “Stephen?” she asked. “Are you well?”

Stephen looked at her and looked away, out the window. He squinted at a point on the rocks, across the harbour. There was a figure there. He got up, pushed his chair away, and stepped outside.

Mrs. Kontos-Wu, Heather and Zhanna followed as Stephen tromped down the narrow roadway to the docks. They followed him as he clomped across the wooden boards, back up some cement steps, and onto another dock that jutted just a few feet from the rocks where the old man danced.

“Hey,” said Heather. “I know that guy.”

“From where?” said Zhanna.

“From here,” said Heather, and Mrs. Kontos-Wu blinked, recognition dawning on her.

“Here?”

Stephen smiled. He stepped closer onto the rocks, and put his hand out. “Richard,” he said. “Well fuck me.”

Richard spared Stephen a sidelong glance and a wink before returning to his reel. He danced and sang on the ridge, his arms raised up and fingers snapping over his head. His voice trembled, and occasionally he stumbled over the lyric, and he could not hold anything approaching a melody.

Mrs. Kontos-Wu found herself smiling as Stephen climbed onto the rocks to stand a little closer to Richard. Discordance, she thought, has never sounded so good.