Anyway, the Cooper?
You killed that car.
The zebra skin seats really gave you most favored nation status.
And this is how Radha does gratitude.
INFORMATION!
And you want this.
It’s interesting.
This is about Daddy Bear, Yevgeny Dragomirov.
Two things.
One: I dug around in Soviet military archives, not the kind of thing Americans get invitations to see. But I have inroads and people. Dragomirov fought in Stalingrad and Kursk, really heavy fighting, really nasty, some of the most brutal stuff of the war. Kursk was huge, 5,000 tanks mixing it up, more than two million combatants. Hitler was trying to double down after losing his ass in Stalingrad, but he lost more ass in Kursk.
My point is, this was survival of Mother Russia shit, not the kind of fighting you get leave from, and Yevgeny and his T-34 were tangled up in it from November 1942 until at least August 1943. Mikhail Dragomirov was born in December 1943. You might think you see where this is going, but you don’t.
I don’t think Mama Dragomirov had herself a fling; she was a mousy little thing loyal to her husband and scared of him, too. Busted her ass in a factory that made soldier’s boots, belts and satchels.
No, it wasn’t her.
There’s a twist.
I found record of a soldier, a Gennady Lemenkov, an illiterate farmer from the Urals, who, with the help of a friend who could read and write, sent a letter of complaint to a superior officer about comrade D.
Here’s the letter:
Comrade Junior Lieutenant,
I know the danger to our beloved country and so I would not waste your time with small matters. Please believe me when I say, however, that our comrade Efreitor Dragomirov, Yevgeny, steals away from his post to have relations with a woman. This woman follows the column. She may well be a spy for the fascists. She comes and goes as she pleases, and knows tricks only a spy would know. I saw her bring him wine, which he shared with us, but when she left, there was only one set of tracks in the mud, belonging to a snowshoe hare. I saw her come to him as a beautiful woman where he slept in a stable. When she left the moon was out and I could see that she had become an old babka. A costume trick! I know that comrade Dragomirov has been a loyal soldier. I wish him no ill. But please, for the sake of our lives, come to investigate this matter of the woman. Before she can betray us to our enemies. Which I believe she will. Others believe this, too. One simple Cossack whose name I forget said she is a witch, a very bad witch, and that she pulled dead men from tanks and cooked them as her meat, and that was whose smoke we saw in the trees though the scouts found nothing. Another man agreed that she was a witch, (Baba Yaga herself, can you believe it?) but said that she was against the Germans, that she had brought a hard winter to kill them all and that frost went with her in the form of a starving wolf. I do not believe such childish things. But I know she is bad for morale. And I believe she is pregnant now. And even if she is not a spy and not a witch it is not fair that one man should have the comfort of a woman when the rest of us do not.
There’s no record of follow-up, at least not from the Soviets.
I’m sure they laughed their dicks off at this guy.
But someone wasn’t laughing.
This Lemenkov went chasing a doe a few days later and disappeared. They thought he deserted. But they found him dead, naked, holding a tree. He had been crying; they know this because his tears were frozen on his cheeks.
His eyes were frozen in his head.
The dude who told on Dragomirov froze to death.
In June.
And nobody fucked with Yevgeny Dragomirov again.
Are you following this? He got some spooky witch pregnant at the same time his wife supposedly got knocked up. But his wife took no time off from the factory. Even hardcore soviet chicks take a little maternity leave. Nothing. Nada. Nyitchevo.
You know what I think?
I think that was Baba Yaga, in the woods, with the smoke and rabbit tracks.
I think she walked right up to Dragomirov’s house with an infant in her arms and made Dragomirov’s wife raise the baby.
I think your rusalka killed Baba Yaga’s son.
* * *
Two:
I attached a one-paragraph article about a grave-robbing near Nizhny Novgorod.
A body was taken last week.
It probably would never have made the paper, but it was the body of a heavily decorated hero of the war against the fascists. Even in these days, you don’t fuck with Second World War heroes. You know how protective we are about ours? The Russians are even more hardcore about their WW2 vets, they worship those guys, and for good reason.
I’m getting off topic.
The point is, it was our guy.
Yevgeny Dragomirov got exhumed last week.
* * *
I didn’t advertise a three, but there’s a three.
Three:
Somebody’s trying to hack me.
Hack ME.
Seriously?
I tracked the probable source to the Ukraine, and it shouldn’t be long before I have a name and address.
And then?
I bring the whoop-ass.
I’m thinking maybe a . . .
But I’ll keep that a secret in case he or she intercepts this.
I REALLY don’t think there’s much chance of that.
But.
* * *
If you ARE reading this, cocksucker, you should think about taking a little vacation, and not going near anything with a screen and a plug until Carnaval season. Or until the Mayan apocalypse comes.
Which it won’t.
Except for you if you don’t go low-tech, and I mean now.
Which I hope you don’t.
I’VE GOT SUCH A COOL SURPRISE FOR YOU!
74
Vermont.
Anneke squats froglike, fingering the leaves of the maple sapling she just petrified.
“I want to rest,” she says.
Her head hurts and she’s nauseated; the living tree fought with all its sap and chlorophyll and nonverbal stored-up common sense against the unnatural thing she was doing to it. It felt like having an argument in which you knew you were wrong but won because you were better at arguing and eventually, unjustly, wore your opponent down. She wrung the juicy and vibrant parts of it out with an ugly, strong hand she never knew she had, and now it stands before her white and bleached and dead; still beautiful, but beautiful because it is impossible; no sculptor could carve or shape such thin and perfect leaves from granite. Even as she thinks this, a leaf falls from its branch.
It’s exquisite, she thinks.
This would sell for twenty grand.
Michael just looks at her, sitting in his camp chair, drinking his coffee. The lesson takes place in a patch of woods between the farmhouse and the quarry.
This old bastard’s not going to let me rest.
He sees her looking at him and just nods at the tree.
“I don’t feel good,” she says.
“You’re not supposed to. You just broke the laws of nature. Now make it right.”
She bites her tongue.
Broken laws of nature surround them; Michael Rudnick appears to live in a quaint New England farmhouse neighboring an old quarry, but really he lives in the quarry. A perfect overhang of granite hung with vines shields a vintage Airstream trailer. Doric columns modeled after those supporting the Athenian temple of Hephaestus seem to prop the ledge, and brick walls of varying heights partition the space, keyholed with nooks and alcoves wherein unquenchable oil lamps glimmer by night. Stone benches and chairs surround an impressive fire pit topped by a chimney in the shape of a human mouth open to breathe in smoke. How the trailer got into or
is supposed to get out of the neoclassic wonderland is not apparent. Rock stairs lead down to the opening beneath the ledge, and another set leads to water.
The trapezoidal lake that has collected at the quarry’s bottom half submerges an outsized sculpture and cypress garden: a granite elephant jets water from its upraised trunk, cyclopic giants, Atlas-like, hunch beneath gardens erupting from stone troughs, a mischievous-looking cherub crouches on a pedestal above the waterline, holding a stone to its chest in the posture of a pitcher, a pile of other such stones at its feet. It seems to be eyeing the steps. The stones are the size of volleyballs. Woe betide anyone approaching Michael’s cave with fell intent.
She looks at the stone tree.
Feels the echo of its vanished life, how surprised it was to find itself so violated, cut off from water, numb to sunlight. Dead. When she touches its trunk she feels its absence.
“Put life back into it.”
She tries.
“See it happening.”
She pictures the breeze blowing through supple leaves.
Nothing happens.
“It’s not like moving rocks,” she says.
“No. It’s intimate.”
She tries.
Her head throbs.
“Why are there no schools?” she says. “Harry Potter and all that.”
He just looks at her.
“Are there?”
“You’re in one.”
“But a big one. Like a university.”
He shakes his head.
“Magic is artisanal. You apprentice. One at a time. You’ll teach somebody, too, one day. I’ll make you promise before you leave here.”
“Somebody must have a school.”
“Workshops go on in some actual universities. Grafted to them, working veiled. Antioch College in Yellow Springs is a fine example. They had three users in the faculty at one point. They made students they wanted to teach magic get accepted in other fields, fields they taught in the system.”
She remembers her embarrassing introduction to that town, how she hurled herself into a bathtub, off the wagon, and at a toilet.
“Andrew went there?”
Michael nods.
“Studied Russian. And more.”
“I still don’t get it.”
“There’s talk every few years. But everyone’s scared. Three’s the most users it’s wise to gather at one place for very long.”
“Why?”
“Something changes.”
“So nobody ever tried to found a big, dedicated university?”
“Schools were founded. Couple of times.”
“What happened?” she says, absently touching the leaves of the dead tree.
“Different things.”
“Bad?”
“You could say that.”
“Tell me.”
“Most successful one was in England, started in the 1580s. Hid in plain sight. In Deptford, just down the river from London. Did some big things. You know how Spain could never seem to land an armada? It wasn’t just once. They tried three times, got swamped by storms three times. That was no accident.”
“And?”
“They kept killing each other. The survivors determined that too many users together makes it turn dark. They agreed to separate.”
Now she just looks at him. There’s more, and she wants to hear it.
“Last big one was France, outside Paris. Between the wars. Like a dozen users, thirty or so students. They exchanged oaths of fraternity, made loyalty and friendship more important than the magic, drummed out anybody who seemed greedy. Called themselves The Order of the Duck. I saw pictures. Real cute with the short pants and tall socks, even berets and sacks of baguettes, like the stereotype.”
“And then?”
“Something came and killed them.”
“A demon?”
“Sort of. Hitler.”
She furrows her brow.
“Couldn’t they fight, or hide?”
“Can’t fight an army. And it’s hard to hide from other users.”
“Hitler had users?”
He looks at her.
She remembers a picture she saw of Adolf Hitler, surrounded by wide-eyed adorers, all of them half mad. Hitler calm in the middle of the storm of madness. They were looking at him like they were starving for something, something in his words and eyes, something only he could give them. They were addicted to him.
“Oh my God,” she says. “He was one.”
Michael nods.
“Only the very luminous can make it out, but those tapes of him ranting in German? I’ve listened to them. It’s not German. It’s not a human language at all. Something taught him those words. Something he conjured. And you can only hear it for a moment. Because it starts to work on you, starts to sound like German. And if you speak German, it starts to sound like the truth.”
She goes pale.
Wonders what she’s gotten herself into.
Wonders if she wants to know these things.
Thinks it’s too late.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “It’s not all rotten. Now fix the tree.”
• • •
She looks at one stone leaf.
She plucks the leaf. Holds it by the stem, holds it up to the sun. So thin opaque light filters through it, lights up its veins and capillaries. You could almost shave with its edges.
She’ll need a word.
Ancient Greek is best for stone.
“Pneuma,” she says.
“Ezasa,” she says.
It liked pneuma better.
It tingled.
She concentrates on the part that glows with the sun behind it, sees the glow turning maple-green.
“Pneuma,” she says again, and breathes on it, as if kindling fire.
Green glows where her breath touched the leaf, starts to creep out toward the edges as fire would creep on paper.
“Ah! Ah!”
The leaf is almost a leaf again.
“Hurry,” he says.
She understands.
She touches the leaf to the rest of the tree, watches the green catch, spread. She blows on it as one would blow kindling, watches it move from leaf to leaf, revivifying the sapling until at last it trembles in the breeze again, at last the sapling winks back into life. Exists again. It wasn’t there, and then it was. As her father had been there, and then gone, in the length of a breath.
75
The beautiful girl furrows her brow, looking at her phone. The handsome man sitting across from her at the hip Lincoln Square sushi restaurant says, “Everything okay?” She nods, still looking into her palm, but the furrow remains. She pockets the phone.
“Sorry. I know that’s rude,” she says, still not looking at him, but she’s said it before, and still keeps checking her phone. When she does this, he doesn’t know where to rest his own eyes. Sometimes on her cleavage, sometimes on the restaurant’s expensive-looking water feature. He knew she would be high maintenance; she looked high maintenance strolling down Clark Street with a bag full of shoe boxes and mustard-yellow pumps, but he took a sheet from his sketch pad, drew a flower on it, wrote down his information, and left it under her windshield wiper anyway because she also looked smart. Girls who aren’t that smart can be fun, but they’re not impressive. This might be the most impressive girl he’s ever brought to Fugu Sushi.
He’s brought seventeen girls to Fugu Sushi.
He calls ahead to get the window seat. Figures everybody wins because he gets a nice view, the restaurant looks hip because he looks hip, and the server always gets twenty-five percent. Twenty percent makes a server happy, twenty-five gets you remembered. The staff remembers him.
Not the way he thinks, though.
They call him
manwhore, as in “I’m cut for the night, you’ve got manwhore.”
Always a two-top.
Always by the window.
Staff sympathies turned decidedly against him when, on companion number eight, he left his website and e-mail address for the waitress, along with a pen-and-ink sketch of an octopus (he had dined on tako that night), which he had prepared in advance. He managed to do it while helping that evening’s date put her coat on, did it with the skill of a cardsharp.
The waitress showed everyone the octopus, and now an octopus-like wave of the fingers means manwhore. Thus, pointing at oneself and waving the fingers, with a gently repulsed lip curl, means “I’ll take manwhore.” The bartender’s in on it, too. Finger wave followed by cup-to-lips uptilt gesture means, “What are manwhore and the young lady drinking?”
The exotic-looking number seventeen, sipping Bride of the Fox sake, would have already figured out manwhore’s deal except that she has been too distracted by computer problems to vet him pre-date, and, tonight, so distracted by her phone that she’s not plumbing his charmingly self-deprecating monologues for sincerity or spontaneity.
“If there’s a problem and you need to call it an early night, I understand,” he says. He knows that’s what he’s supposed to say, but he doesn’t want an early night—he wants to get her back to his loft, put on Portishead and send a finger up under that orange suede skirt to test his theory that small-boned women are tighter and full-lipped women are wetter.
The phone hasn’t been in her pocket a minute when it buzzes again.
She decides to let him in on the problem.
“Somebody’s sending me odd texts.”
“Why don’t you turn it off?”
“Good idea,” she says, and starts to, then doesn’t. “Only I’m intrigued.”
“By what?”
She considers him; he only just clears her threshold for minor confidences.
The Necromancer's House Page 24
