by John Meaney
‘This is the one.’ It was Leonid from the market, brushing past Dmitri on the way to refill his vodka glass at the counter. ‘Grey coat, coming in now.’
Dmitri slowly lowered his chin, an unobtrusive acknowledgement. Then Leonid was talking to Ivana, and Dmitri’s attention, apparently on his own glass, refocused on the door.
The thin man who entered had a long grey coat, as Leonid had said. It was torn and stained with coal and oil, no surprise for a railway worker. His name was Vadim Sergeiev, and he did not look like a criminal. In fact he looked worn out; but Dmitri had no intention of feeling sympathy.
He watched while Sergeiev drank the one glass of vodka he was here for, before buttoning his coat back up and checking his woollen hat. Then he went back out into the night; and after a few moments, Dmitri followed.
Outside, snow was accumulating. In the morning, young women (for there was no unemployment in the great Soviet state) would use square boards on sticks - looking like placards for the kind of demonstration the downtrodden proletariat occasionally organized in imperialist regimes like England - as snow-shovels, clearing away the deep drifts, for pedestrians and also for the occasional official car that might use one of the broad roads.
Up ahead, at the entrance to the Metro system, Vadim Sergeiev met up with two men - they had been smoking to keep warm - and all three continued walking. Down below, the Metro station was like a palace, its walls marble and spotless, its intricate chandeliers gleaming, a symbol of the immense wealth that future citizens would all enjoy, generations not yet born, after many decades of rational planning, mobilizing the resources of the state.
It was quite a walk to the men’s destination, the above-ground railway station, but perhaps they did not have money to spare for the Metro fare. Neither did Dmitri, but in his case he had ways to ride for free.
None of them appeared security conscious. Perhaps they were too weary to check behind them; perhaps they were too stupid. In any case, Dmitri pressed inward with both arms as he walked, not patting his pockets, but feeling with his inner wrists the hardness inside each coat pocket. The trio up ahead might be amateurs; he was not.
Despite the darkness, the cold and the snow, there were others trekking along the streets. It was only when they neared the station and headed around the back, towards the marshalling yards, that Dmitri had to be careful. Now he moved from shadow to shadow, glad that the snow was fresh and therefore silent as he walked.
Finally, they were standing next to a tarpaulin-covered pile, itself caked in snow. Railway sleepers, waiting to be laid beneath tracks. From what Dmitri had learned, this was where he had expected them to be; the surprise was the fourth man who joined them, bulkier than the others, a departure from the rail-thin norm of Muscovites. Of Russians in general, really.
‘Ten roubles,’ the newcomer said. ‘Is that really the price you think you can get?’
‘Everything’s so scarce.’ This was Vadim Sergeiev. ‘These things are valuable.’
He pointed at the pile of sleepers.
Thank you. That was all I needed.
Dmitri broke cover, reaching inside his coat and pulling out his wallet.
‘Stay exactly where you are, comrades.’
‘No—’
‘Stand still. I’m State Security, and I have reinforcements with me.’
‘But—’
‘Stay exactly as you are, Vadim Sergeiev.’
That caused a whimper in response. When State Security knew your name, there was rarely a pleasant outcome.
‘Oh, Jesus,’ murmured one of the others.
‘I really don’t like Christians,’ said Dmitri. ‘So you keep your bastard prayers to yourself.’
But the big man, the stranger, spoke in a deep, easy voice. ‘Good evening, gospadin Shtemenko. It is nice to meet you at last.’
So. Gospadin instead of tovarisch; mister instead of comrade.
‘Cosmopolitanism,’ said Dmitri, ‘is a crime against the state.’
‘You think I deserve the firing-squad for good manners? For offering politeness?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘I think your mother would not have approved of your attitude to the Church. Perhaps even you, Lieutenant Shtemenko, could learn to accommodate the needs of others.’
My mother!
And then, because the man’s words were intended to invoke uncoordinated rage, Dmitri went cold and emotionless. This would be a professional criminal, with excellent information, therefore highly placed.
Dmitri gestured towards the railway sleepers with his chin.
‘Stealing the people’s property. This hardly accommodates their needs.’
‘And such selfishness’ - the voice was almost gentle - ‘did not exist in your village?’
Dmitri ignored this.
‘As you said, Vadim Sergeiev, the railway property is valuable because of the economic scissors.’
It was often in Pravda and Izvestiya these days, both newspapers - the Truth and the News - reporting the current twin trends of high and increasing prices for manufactured goods and raw materials against low, falling prices for the simple goods that the proletariat were trying to sell. The graphs looked like open scissors, sure enough.
From his left pocket, Dmitri drew a pair of black, heavy, battered scissors.
‘Um.’ The big man looked surprised. Then his face tensed. ‘You don’t have reinforcements. That’s why I’m willing to talk. I’m Alexei Krymov and I—’
Dmitri pulled his revolver from his right-hand pocket.
‘Reinforcements,’ he said.
The name of Krymov was familiar. He was big-time, and an arrest would be spectacular. On the other hand, any bribe he might offer would be substantial.
‘Put that weapon away, Lieutenant.’
‘You should not have mentioned her.’ Dmitri meant his mother. ‘You are a bad person, tovarisch Krymov.’
The revolver bucked, simultaneously with the crash of sound. Krymov dropped like a stack of dead sticks.
‘Please, sir—’ Vadim Sergeiev was on his knees in the snow, tears on his face. ‘My son wrote an essay on Darwinism at school, that’s why he’s in trouble and I need the money to, to ease his way . . .’
‘To bribe a teacher?’
Contradicting Lysenkoism meant turning against a doctrine beloved of Josef Stalin, the genetic basis for the agricultural plans designed to bring food to an ever-hungrier people.
‘Technically, but my son’s ideas could produce actual crops that—’
Again, the crash and the recoil came together.
‘It’s only a few years,’ said Dmitri to the two cowering survivors, ‘since we were a feudal society that was almost fully illiterate. Within a decade, fifty per cent of the proletariat will be able to read and write.’
‘Yes, comrade.’
‘We agree,’ said the other. ‘We didn’t mean to go up against the state. It was just that we were hungry and—’
Two more bangs, one bullet each. Two more corpses splayed and tangled on the snow.
‘Freedom of the people,’ said Dmitri, ‘is inevitable.’
Then he pocketed his revolver, and transferred the heavy scissors to his right hand.
‘Scissor economics,’ he added.
Only dead things were here, piles of bone and cooling meat, no longer bearing minds to appreciate his humour.
He took the little finger of each left hand, leaning down to force the blades through bone, then put all four trophies in his pocket along with the scissors. From their wallets he took the dead men’s money - pitifully little, apart from Krymov - not from greed but because whoever found the bodies would rob them anyway, so why should he not benefit?
After all, he was the one who had just carried out his part in purifying the proletariat, was he not?
That’s right.
His internal voice mocked him, while far off in the distance he could hear a nine-note sequence that sometimes haunted him, particularly when
he remembered the village and his fifteenth birthday; and if that bastard Krymov weren’t already dead, Dmitri would shoot him now, because no one should mention his mother, no one should even know.
He fired again, and the Krymov-thing’s coat leaped; the dead meat inside did not.
Wasting bullets.
And causing noise. Moving back into shadow, he made his away across the tracks, away from the station proper. He would take a roundabout route home, checking behind him all the way - he was a professional, unlike those idiots - and check that no one was inside his rooms before putting his four treasures in the secret part of his pantry, along with the others.
Not that he was intending to eat them, though they were stored so close to food.
Mother.
That was a thought to push away, to force from his mind.
No.
But sometimes - like now, when the dark shadows twisted in their diabolic ways, off beyond the edge of his vision - the other voices came back too, the voices of traumatized innocence remembering the before-times.
Mother, and the taste like bacon.
Whimpering, he pushed on. Snow was falling heavily now, hiding his tracks, cold on his face, because he could not be crying. That had been leached from him four years before, when hell descended on a starving world.
Most of the village had perished, and there had been no food, no other food; and those who survived shared the secret they could never talk about, not among themselves and never to strangers.
He had never eaten her fingers. It seemed important to remember that.
I’m sorry.
All around in the night, snow caked Moscow’s grand old buildings, creating beauty.
At the same time in Zürich, Gavriela was trying to insert her front-door key into the lock. It took several iterations of zeroing in by feel, and then she had success - except that, as she pushed the door, it rattled but did not open. Solid bolts were in place.
Frau Pflügers has locked me out.
Thanks to the Glühwein, Gavriela wasn’t thinking clearly. That was clear. Or maybe it wasn’t, maybe the world had grown fuzzy while she wasn’t looking, because you never knew what happened out of your—
‘My dear girl.’ Frau Pflügers, old-fashioned oil lamp in hand, was standing there. ‘I thought you were in bed, or I’d never have locked up.’
‘I met some people.’
‘Come in, come in. So, were there young gentlemen present?’
‘Oh, no.’
‘Did it sound as if I was criticizing?’ Frau Pflügers slid the bolts home. ‘Never mind. Were you making new friends?’
‘Actually, I think I was.’
Inge, Elke and Petra. They were excellent company; but they lived life in a way Gavriela could not afford to keep up with.
‘Then we’ll celebrate with some nice hot chocolate in the kitchen, before you go to bed.’
‘I couldn’t ask you to—’
‘The range is still hot, and I’d appreciate the company.’
‘In that case, thank you.’
Out back, Gavriela stood and watched as Frau Pflügers heated a saucepan of milk. Gavriela found herself fascinated with the looping currents inside the liquid, the columns of steam that rose then broke apart: a gentle form of turbulence. Then she realized Frau Pflügers was watching her, smiling.
‘You look fascinated, Fräulein Wolf, like a two-year old. Oh, I’m saying it badly, because that sounds like an insult, but’ - Frau Pflügers paused to stir the milk with a wooden spoon - ‘it’s a grown-up innocence, if that makes sense.’
‘It does to me. There’s so much to see everywhere, if people only look.’
‘Hmm. You know, there were women students when I was a girl; but I didn’t know it then.’
‘Oh. Would you have liked to go to the ETH, Frau Pflügers?’
‘It was the Polytechnik in those days.’
‘People still call it the Poly. If you’d gone, what would you have studied?’
‘I don’t know, dear.’ Frau Pflügers stared up to her right. ‘I can’t see myself as a scientist, more an arts type.’
‘Paintings or books?’
‘Do you have to choose between them?’
‘I don’t see why.’
The milk was coming to the boil. From a saucer, Frau Pflügers scraped dark flakes of chocolate into the saucepan, and stirred.
‘We all do the best we can,’ she said. ‘I’d like to believe that. Even Faust, in the end . . . Do you read Goethe?’
‘Of course, Frau Pflügers. And he was quite the scientist, too. Not a sufficient mathematician, or he would not have opposed Newton’s optics’ - Gavriela saw Frau Pflügers’ gaze shift, and realized she was assuming specialist knowledge - ‘but he foreshadowed Darwin’s work. He studied everything.’
‘Wouldn’t that be wonderful?’ Frau Pflügers poured two cups, then handed one over. ‘You know what Napoleon said about Goethe, after they met at Erfurt?’
‘Oh, yes.’
The two women clinked their cups of hot chocolate together.
‘Voilà un homme,’ they said in time.
Gavriela lay back on the clean-smelling pillow, staring at grey shadows, while the room seemed over and over to rotate by degrees, reset to normal, then rotate once more. She felt pleasantly dizzy lying there, supported by a soft, enveloping mattress.
But when she closed her eyes, she tumbled back to a memory of earlier that evening, before her meeting with Inge and Elke and Petra, back to the confusing, awful fight she had seen in the Altstadt, two groups of young men brawling, and the twisting of blackness-within-darkness, accompanied by grating discordant music unheard at the time: da, da-dum, da-da-da-dum, da-da.
Youths scrapping at night meant little; but something lay behind their actions, something awful.
The enemy.
It seemed a weird thought to generate.
The Darkness.
She slid away from horror, into sleep.
When she awoke it was inside a dream, but the contradiction seemed natural. Looking down, she saw her body formed of crystal - intricately organic and pliable, a bluish transparency - draped in a transparent garment, and felt no panic.
She was standing in a high hall, before a long glass table around which nine empty throne-like chairs were placed. Was anybody here?
—Hello?
How strange to speak without expelling air. Not needing to breathe, she attempted inhalation anyway, feeling her diaphragm move with no inrush of any atmosphere.
Perhaps the strangest thing of all was her acceptance.
Shields hung on the wall, some ancient-looking, others new. Carved into the leather were dull angular runes. They caught her attention oddly, then seemed to slip away.
Another crystalline woman entered.
She was tall and slender, haughtiness and wisdom combined; or perhaps that was an illusion caused by her transparency. Her clear eyes, like finest glass, focused on Gavriela.
—I bid you warm welcome, Gavriela Wolf.
So the regal woman knew her name. It seemed all of a piece with this place, so exotic and yet so natural. Here was the strangest dislocation in Gavriela’s life; yet it also felt like coming home.
—How did I get here?
—Truly, you are not here. Not yet.
The explanation was inconsistent; still she embraced it as reasonable.
—Then why am I here, or seem to be?
—To prepare. We all need to prepare.
She looked around the glass-and-sapphire hall. It was archaic, modern and futuristic, all at once.
—So there are others?
—I am Kenna.
The regal stare was intense, glistening and filled with power.
—And you’re the leader.
She realized that she hadn’t asked a question, but stated it as fact.
—Yes, Gavriela.
—And the others?
The woman, Kenna, raised her transparent hand, inside which cl
ear sinews and blood vessels (carrying transparent blood) were visible.
—You’re the first.
