When the Sparrow Falls

by Neil Sharpson

  “She’s pricey,” I was told. “But when it’s over you’ll feel undercharged, trust me.”

  This sounded encouraging, so I scrimped and saved and then, one damp autumn night, I walked briskly to the address I had been given with my money in my pocket, my throat dry, and my stomach full of weasels.

  Maria Koslova herself sat in bronze at the end of the square as I made the turn, a massive black imposing weight. She was, I knew, glaring into the distance at the Machine on the horizon, but it seemed very much like she was glaring at me. The mother of the revolution, the great Matriarch of the New Humanists, would most likely not have approved of my mission that night.

  Shivering against the cold (I told myself), I approached the house. The door was painted black and the paint was flaking. I knocked politely and waited in the doorway. There was no answer, and the house seemed deserted. The curtains were drawn on all the windows (which, I supposed, was only natural), but there was a definite stillness about the place. I knocked again, louder this time, and my nervousness that she might answer was giving way to fear that she might not, and that I had spent a day and night worrying myself into an early ulcer for nothing. No answer. Bitterly disappointed (relieved, too, if I’m honest) I descended the steps and turned right to head back to Koslova Square. Or at least, I meant to, but I suddenly felt a soft but surprisingly strong bare arm interlock with my own. Then I heard the words “Darling! There you are!” and felt a peck on the cheek, a brush of silky soft skin against my face with a faint waft of perfume, and before I knew where I was, I was being marched down the street away from Koslova Square by a tall girl with long brown hair wearing a fantastic sequined dress and a large, but slightly manic grin. She was a little older than I, maybe two years, and had the kind of beauty that is, to a certain type of shy young man, frankly terrifying. I was so confused that it took me a few minutes to realize that we were not alone. The brown-haired girl had her left arm interlocked with mine, but her right was wrapped around the shoulder of a very petite Arab girl of around seventeen. She, too, was dressed for a night out, but her eyes, beautifully made up with green mascara, were closed and I quickly realized that she was so drunk her companion was literally dragging her along and keeping her upright.

  I opened my mouth to say something and the brown-haired girl leaned in and whispered anxiously in my ear.

  “Please just keep walking,” Olesya said. “There’s a group of gullivers behind us, they’ve been following us for miles. Don’t look.”

  I had never heard the expression before. “Gulliver” was StaSec slang, and it would be another four years before I joined the agency. Olesya’s father, Vassily, was a senior department head in StaSec and his daughter had picked up the word from him. It came from the Russian “golovorez,” meaning a thug, and found a happy home among English speakers for whom it suggested a very large man who’s going to step on you.

  I glanced over my shoulder and Olesya, rather patiently (under the circumstances), reminded me that she had told me not to do that very thing. I did however catch a glimpse of a group of around three or four men following us from a distance. It was too dark to see faces, but they looked large.

  “Why are they following you?” I asked, and she gave me a look of pitying contempt.

  “Why do you think?” she muttered, nodding to her inebriated cargo.

  “It’s fine,” she said, as if this was all in a day’s work. “They won’t try anything now that we’re with you.”

  I could not imagine acting as any kind of deterrent but she seemed confident.

  “You don’t mind walking us home, do you? I promise it’s not far. I just felt certain they were going to rush us when we got off the square, and then you just appeared, and you had a kind face, so I borrowed it.”

  As we walked she regaled me with the lamentable tragedy of Olesya’s Night Out. Olesya was studying at the Ellulgrad Academy of Fine Art and had been invited to attend an exhibition by an artist named Zoe Malpas, an alumnus of the Academy whom Olesya was passionately in love with both for her artwork and the way her lips parted when she pronounced the letter “O.” However, her father had insisted that her sister, Zahara, go with her to ensure that she behaved herself.

  “Half sister, technically. From Alia’s first marriage,” Olesya clarified, referring to her stepmother. Her parents had a bizarre and completely unfounded notion that Zahara was the dependable daughter who could be relied upon to keep her boisterous and wild older sister in check.

  “They can’t understand that just because she’s all quiet and meek around them, doesn’t mean she’s always like that. She’s not better, she’s just sneakier.”

  This was said with absolutely no rancor, and quite a good deal of sisterly pride.

  In any event, far from acting as a moderating influence, Zahara had taken full advantage of the freely available wine and quickly became a danger to herself and the surrounding artwork, which required Olesya to be pulled away from an absolutely wonderful conversation she had been having with Ms. Malpas, who was one of those people who slips your name into every sentence she addresses to you. In Olesya’s case, that meant a lot of “O’s,” and she had been not a little put out when she had to pull Zahara off one of the more promising young male artists of his generation and drag her home. Her annoyance quickly turned to dread, however, when the gullivers had started following her once she and Zahara had left the exhibit.

  By now we were close to Olesya’s home, which was in a leafy, opulent residential area named Azadlig. It was an area for high-ranking party members, StaSec heads like Olesya’s father and the occasional general. Quite a few of the doors had a security guard standing outside, and it did not take long at all for the gullivers to vanish, no doubt realizing that this was not their kind of neighborhood and that if Olesya and her sister lived here then they were not worth the risk. They were gullivers, after all, and Gulliver was only big at the start of the book. He found out later that there is always someone bigger who can step on you.

  We finally reached her front gate and she relinquished her hold on me. She gently guided Zahara to the front door.

  “Looks like we’re in luck,” Olesya said. “I don’t think my parents are home yet. Zahara gets to keep her secret identity safe for another night. Thank you…”

  “Nikolai.”

  “Thank you, Nikolai. I’d invite you in for a coffee but I need to put this one to bed. Say good night and thank you to Nikolai, Zahara,” she said, as if addressing a five-year-old.

  “G’nightentanksNikly…,” Zahara mumbled.

  “Good night, Zahara…,” I said politely, and she suddenly snapped awake like she’d been jabbed with a cattle prod.

  “No!” she said, waving one hand with a finger extended and waving it in front of my face like a conductor “No! It’s not ZaHARa, it’s ZAhara. Say it.”

  “Zahara,” I said, unable to repress a smile.

  “Good,” she said primly. “And again.”

  She made me repeat the correct pronunciation of her name five times. Then, satisfied, she patted me on the cheek, smiled sleepily, turned to Olesya and said, “He’s nice,” and stumbled through the open door.

  I could hear her moving around in the darkened hallway, like a bowling ball slowly brushing against pins.

  Olesya regarded me studiously.

  “Are you in university?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “U-El?” she asked.

  I nodded, and she “tsked” disapprovingly, as if finding that the maid had been sweeping around the sofa, but not under it. To Olesya’s mind, I would soon learn, the University of Ellulgrad was less a place of higher learning, and more a battery farm from which the civil service replenished its larder.

  “I’m going to a party in AFA next week before we break for term,” she said, taking a notepad from her handbag and writing the date and an address on it. “You should come.”

  “I don’t know…,” I said. Parties were a special kind of
hell for me.

  “Please come,” she said and I felt a rising panic and blurted out: “I’d love to.”

  “Good,” she said. “A friend of mine is throwing it and I promised her I’d get as many people to come as possible. You need a crowd, don’t you?”

  I had never needed anything less in my life, but it was too late to back out now.

  * * *

  My thoughts were pulled back to the present with a sickening lurch as the room was suddenly thrown into complete darkness except for the fire, which now cast witches’ shadows across the walls and ceiling. I could hear the hotel staff cursing and yelling in alarm and people tripping and knocking over tables. Somewhere, glass shattered. In three seconds I moved from confusion, to calm, to total panic in three discrete stages:

  1) What’s going on?

  2) A blackout. Nothing to be worried about.

  3) LILY.

  I leapt out of my chair and felt my way toward the door and ran out into the lobby. The lobby was pitch-black except for a fairy’s party of small white lights behind the reception desk where the manager was distributing flashlights to the hotel staff. Without so much as an apology I grabbed a flashlight off one of the bellboys and sprinted up the stairs to our room. Just as I reached the top of the stairs, a shadow came at me from my right and I felt two knuckles and a thumb hammer into my rib cage and a hard, square-edged shoulder collide with my jaw. I collapsed to the ground, wheezing and blinded with pain, and my assailant fled down the stairs, stopping only to tread on my ankle in his haste. In the darkness I recovered my flashlight and shone it up and down the hallway. All the doors were closed, except one. I limped to the doorway of our room and threw the flashlight around inside.

  The room was empty. I shone the flashlight around to be sure but there was no sign of her. Lily’s bedsheets were thrown about like the remains of a carcass, wildly tossed and empty.

  They had taken her.

  17

  Too often I read that people in Caspian are “afraid” to speak out against ParSec. That is untrue. To the average Caspian, it must feel as if people do nothing but speak out against ParSec. The walls of Parliament regularly ring with spirited denunciations of the Bureau’s latest spree. The Caspian Truth’s letters page is full of long, eloquent manifestos beginning with “Brother, I am a loyal party member of 20 years good standing, and I cannot believe that Madame Koslova ever intended for her beloved party to become home to a bunch of jackbooted thugs like Party Security.…”

  That friendly, avuncular, StaSec agent who just wants a few names might lay his hand on your shoulder, give you a wink and whisper, “Hey. Chin up. Least we’re not The Bastards, eh?”

  All this reassures the average Caspian that his government is full of good, decent people who want to protect him from the fear and terror of ParSec, and hopefully distract him from the fact that the fear, the terror and ParSec itself will continue unabated.

  —Sebastien Bellov, We Shall Not Be Silent; Dissident Writings on the Caspian Republic (2207)

  A chair had been knocked over and one of its legs had been smashed. I noticed a glow coming from under my bed. I got down on my hands and knees and shone my flashlight underneath it and was surprised to find … another flashlight. Large, switched on, and with the wide reflector end wedged tight between the bedsprings and the carpet.

  They arranged the blackout, I thought. He brought a flashlight because he knew he’d have to take her out in the dark. But why leave the flashlight here? I tried to pull it out but it was in too far and wedged too tightly. I felt something wet on my fingertips.

  Suddenly, the overhead lights came on. Evidently, one of the hotel staff had reset the breakers. I switched off the flashlight and wheeled around the room looking for any sign of where Lily had been taken. I saw something that made my heart shrink in my chest. On the doorframe were three finger marks, left in blood. There was also some blood on the bedsheets and, while the carpet was a red-and-brown pattern, I could make out some drops there, too. The lock of the door lay on the floor in a shroud of splinters and sawdust. He was in a hurry, and must have made a noise entering.

  A picture started to form and I tried to work out the order of events.

  1) My assailant, The Man on the Stairs, breaks into our hotel room.

  2) Lily is startled awake by the noise. Most likely she calls for help.

  3) The MOTS must silence her. There’s some blood, but not enough to suggest a stabbing (or a shooting, which I almost certainly would have heard, even with the commotion caused by the blackout). Most likely this is a nosebleed. He hit her in the face.

  I broke my chain of thought to look at my fingers. There was a light red stain from where they had touched the flashlight. I had my weapon. I resumed.

  4) He hit her with the flashlight but she fought back. The flashlight was wedged tightly under the bed and must have rolled there at some speed. She knocked the flashlight out of his hand and it went skidding under the bed.

  I crossed the room and examined the fingerprints left in blood on the doorframe. They were far too slender to belong to whatever large mammal had collided with me on the stairs. No. Lily left these.

  Now we reach a point of crucial divergence.

  5a) With the flashlight gone, it’s pitch-black. He tries to grab her but she’s too fast and makes for the door. She’s covering her face to stop the bleeding but she leans against the doorframe for support, leaving the fingerprints behind. And he … and he …

  He realizes that he’s completely botched the whole thing and can’t find her without a light and in any case he’s waited too long, so he runs for the door and down the stairs, knocking into me. Which means she’s still somewhere in the hotel.

  Or …

  5b) The fingerprints on the door were left by Lily as she was dragged out of the room by the Man On The Stairs. He takes her down the stairs, beats me down, drags her out the front door presumably to a waiting car where she is now on her way to be tortured or killed or …

  I stopped before I continued any further down this line of reasoning.

  The figure on the stairs had punched me square in the rib cage and raced down the stairs in darkness. Could he have done that with one hand while restraining a struggling woman with the other and somehow keeping her perfectly silent?

  It didn’t seem possible.

  Time to make your choice, South. And it is critical. Where is Lily Xirau?

  I chose hope.

  I sprinted into the hall and checked the carpet for traces of blood and almost whooped when I found a trail of blotches and smears leading down the corridor.

  Farther down, a handprint on the wall. She was reeling, woozy. Probably panicking. What a place to be. Bleeding and beaten in a darkened maze, in a country where anyone might kill you if they knew what you really were. Oh Lily.

  I came to the last door in the corridor. It was locked and there was no blood to be seen anywhere on the door. Where had she gone?

  There was a noise behind me and I turned to see one of the hotel staff, a young man in his twenties, ascending the stairs. I called him over.

  “Who is staying here?” I asked him, pointing to the door.

  “There?” he said, confused. “That’s Room 114. No one stays there.”

  “I require the key,” I said.

  “It’s never locked,” he said. “We keep it…”

  He tried to open the door but it remained shut.

  “That’s strange…,” he murmured.

  I took the handle and carefully pulled. It gave way for a few inches before meeting resistance.

  “Is there any large, heavy furniture in that room?” I asked.

  He looked like a man trying to think of a tactful way to answer a very stupid question asked by someone who could have him summarily arrested.

  “Well, there’s … there’s the bed, the dresser, the wardrobe…”

  “Do you have a fire axe?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Why?
”

  “Because she’s braced something against the door and I’m going to have to break in.”

  * * *

  As it turned out, a mallet did the job just as well. I broke through the door and climbed over the furniture that had been pushed against the door to prevent entry.

  Sweating and wheezing with the exertion, I shone a flashlight around the darkened hotel room, motes of wood dust dancing in the beam.

  “Lily?” I whispered. “It’s South.”

  I heard something rustle in the darkness, and a figure emerged from under the bed. She carefully got to her feet and stood before me, holding a hand to her face.

  I shone the light on her, and I felt a surge of revulsion and pity. The lower half of her face was a mask of blood.

  “Am I going to die?” she asked. “It … it … won’t stop.”

  I ran to the bathroom and grabbed a fist of toilet paper and held it gently to her face to staunch the bleeding.

  “Sir?” said a voice outside. “Do you need help?”

  “Here’s what I need you to do,” I called to him, never taking my eyes off Lily. “Go and find two people to clear the doorway here. You get the hotel doctor. And you get the manager.”

  The next ten minutes were a whirring blur of people coming into the room and leaving, questions being shouted (most of them by me), and through it all, Lily sat on the bed while I pressed the toilet paper to her face until the bleeding had been staunched. I didn’t know if it was shock, of if she was made of iron, but once I had assured her that her life was in no danger, she had become almost eerily calm.

  The doctor and the manager arrived together (another guest had apparently fallen during the blackout and sprained her ankle and they had both been attending her). While the doctor, a slim German with a waxy, skeletal face and a brown moustache, attended Lily, I motioned to the manager to step outside.