Red Equinox

Chapter Six

"I trust that the behavior of my manservant has not inconvenienced you unduly."

The man shook his head and whistled through his teeth. It made damnably little sense to him. He kept his thumb on the page and slowly read the phrase out again.

"I trust that the behavior of my manservant has not inconvenienced you unduly."

He closed the book and laid it on the scarred top of his desk. The cover was torn, but the title could still be read: The English Tongue for the Benefit of the Russian Gentleman Abroad.

It would have been nice if he could have found a phrase book that had been published a little nearer to the time that was called, in his country, "the long grayness." In the frontispiece was the date 1911. That was almost two hundred years ago, but it was still better than nothing.

He heard someone walking along the corridor outside his office and he quickly slid the frail book into the center drawer of his desk and locked it. Though he could probably have formulated a defense for possessing it, he preferred to keep his arcane knowledge as secret as possible.

The feet paused and there was a cautious knock on the door.

"Enter."

The blond, cropped head of Clerk Second Class Alicia Andreyinichna appeared around the wood-painted frame.

"Forgive me, Major-Commissar Zimyanin, for interrupting you."

"Come in, Alicia Andreyinichna. What is it?"

The secretary wore a plain skirt that fell just below the knee, in the dull maroon material that was the uniform color for Internal Security, Moscow.

"A message from your wife, Anya, Major-Commissar."

"Yes?"

The girl coughed nervously. It was common knowledge that all wasn't wonderfully well between Gregori Zimyanin and his tall, heavy-hipped wife. There were often angry calls on the telephone, generally ending with the receiver being slammed down and some colorful cursing from the senior officer.

"She wished to know what time you would be returning home tonight, sir."

"By the anvil and the hammer! She knows I'm going to be late. I told her this morning over first food. I told her!"

He remembered telling Anya, remembered her expression, remembered that she had mentioned something about an invitation they had for last food to an apartment in the adjoining block on Begovaya Ulitsa. He couldn't even recall the names. Some woman who worked in the offices of Pensions and Domestic Debts with Anya who had a buck-toothed, stammering husband with a secret taste for decadent music. Zimyanin had arranged to have them investigated. You couldn't be too careful who you knew.

"Can't be too careful," he said.

"What, sir?"

He smiled. "I didn't mean to speak out loud, Alicia Andreyinichna. My apologies. Tell her, as softly as you can, that it will be after eleven." An afterthought struck him. "And offer my deepest regrets that I must miss our last-food date."

"Yes, Major-Commissar."

He managed a smile, though his wife's constant harrying was becoming increasingly tedious. The girl smiled back and withdrew, closing the door carefully behind her.

Zimyanin leaned back, putting his high boots of tanned hide on his desktop. He had been married to Anya for only six weeks. It had only been ten weeks since his promotion from plain major and his arrival at the center of the government, the spiritual and historical home of Mother Russia.

"Anya," he murmured to himself. Perhaps an accidental fall from the high balcony of their apartment? Perhaps a sudden seizure while she was in the bath. His strong fingers flexed at the thought, imagining how it would feel to close them around her soft, fleshy neck, pressing her with an inexorable power under the scummy water. Eyes open. Mouth open. Tongue protruding, purpling, blackening.

He drew out the phrase book and flicked through, looking for the page he wanted. There it was.

"I regret deeply that my lady wife will not be able to attend your soiree on account of her sudden indisposition."

The officer straightened then buried himself in a pile of reports and documents. The spring thaw would soon begin to release the city from the clawed grip of General Winter. There would be much to do, work parties to enlist and press into reluctant action.

A thick red folder on a shelf across from the desk was marked with the single word "Subbotnik." In the old days, Zimyanin knew from his researches, the citizens of Moscow would have to give up their free time to work for the city. This was Subbotnik, the Saturday when you "volunteered" to help with manual labor. Things had changed.

During the cleansing days of the megacull, great swathes of Moscow had been laid into perpetual dust by the nuking missiles of the hated Americans. Little of the center had been rebuilt, but the suburbs survived — after a fashion. But there was so much to do. A century later and there was always so much to be done.

Subbotniks now tended to refer to people snatched by armed patrols of sec men and forced to perform the menial, essential tasks.

And the time of the spring thaw was the worst for that. The thought of the melting ice brought back a memory to the officer.

Another phrase from his well-learned book. "I am delighted to have made your acquaintance." He paused, his totally bald brow wrinkling with the effort of concentration. "But I do not believe we have been formally introduced."

They hadn't.

But he could still see the face of the mysterious American across the frozen sea that nestled against the Kamchatka Peninsula and touched the land of the Americans in the region they called Alaska. It had been there, not far from a hamlet called Ozhbarchik, following the brutish killing band known as the Narodniki.

"Hozhdenie v narod," Zimyanin said to himself. It meant to be going to the people.

The leader had been called?.. "Uchitel," whispered the officer, nodding his head. The Teacher. That had been the name of the psychopathic slaughterer.

It came back.

The defeat of the Narodniki had been a triumph for Major Zimyanin, his passport away from the icy wasteland beyond the tumbled ruins of Yakutsk. He returned to Moscow with a promotion and thanks from the grateful Party.

"Americans," he said, half smiling.

He had never been sure how many there had been. Even with his precious Zeiss binoculars he hadn't been able to make out their numbers, but he had seen the missile they had ready. That had all been reported to the central offices, an indication that the remnants of the United States weren't yet ready to fall into the hands of Russia.

He'd met four of them face-to-face: a tall black man; a short, fat man with the cold eyes of a born slayer; a woman, handsome with the reddest, most fiery hair that Zimyanin had ever seen.

And their leader...

"I am desolated to see that you have been incapacitated by an accident, sir," he recited.

His gaze moved to the far wall of the small office, near the window, jammed with brown paper to stop it rattling in the winter gales. A rifle hung there on two rusting nails, his own weapon, an old SVD Dragunov sniper's blaster with a PSO-1 scope sight. It had been given to him by the marksman in his unit out east, Corporal Solomentsov, when Zimyanin had received his promotion.

He ran a finger down the furrows of his pockmarked cheeks, thinking about that adventure and the blood that had flowed.

There was a cautious knock on the door again and his clerk stuck her head into his office.

"I am sorry, Major-Commissar Zimyanin, but I'm afraid that..."

"My wife has called again and she wishes to speak with me," he guessed.

"Yes," she replied, surprised at the accuracy of his guess. "She said to tell you..." She stopped as the officer held up a weary hand.

"Don't, sister-comrade. I'm sure I can imagine what my dear..." He gestured for her to leave, watching as she turned in the doorway. The material of her skirt stretched tight across the firm buttocks; her muscular thighs slid down toward her polished boots. Zimyanin sat for a moment after the door had closed, allowing his sensual imagination to run on for a while, imagining himself locked in a sexual embrace on a soft feather mattress with Clerk Second Class Alicia Andreyinichna.

But the vision faded with the certainty of how shrill his wife's voice would sound when he called.

Gregori Zimyanin reached for the Bakelite phone, part of his mind still recalling the leader of the American guerrilla group — the man with the scarred face and a patch over his left eye. A face he would never forget.