The Witch Who Came in From the Cold - Season One Volume One

by Lindsay Smith

  Across the way, the general stood motionless, phone in hand. After some time he put the phone down and slumped into an easy chair.

  Standing in the cold and darkness, Tanya projected herself into that despairing silhouette. By now, it would be obvious to him that he had been played for a fool. The question was, by whom? By Tanya? But she had very carefully asked for nothing. His old friend Sasha? The bastard was certainly devious enough to have arranged this. But for what reason? Blackmail? So he would go away and leave Sasha in peace? There were no answers to be had and every question would raise a dozen more questions in Bykovsky’s brain. Paranoia would feed upon suspicion, and both would be fed by ignorance.

  Slowly, Bykovsky raised his hands to his head. His entire body shook. The man was weeping.

  Tanya unspliced the telephone with a smile.

  5.

  Tanya slept late the next morning. She had a leisurely breakfast and then picked up a copy of F. V. Gladkov’s Cement, which she had been slogging through for some time, and read the last chapters. Then she considered her options. She could go shopping. Or she could do some cleaning. Certainly the apartment needed it. But in the end, she decided to go to the Hermitage show at the National Gallery. She had been in too sour a mood at the opening to enjoy it, and there were paintings on display that were unlikely to ever again leave the Hermitage.

  It was mid-afternoon before Tanya put in an appearance in the rezidentura vault. Time enough, she judged, for things to have shaken down in her absence. The minute she entered, she could sense that things had returned to normal. The cacophonous mix of clacking typewriters and chattering voices had returned to its familiar rhythm. The undertone of hysteria was gone. Not one of the general’s men was visible anywhere.

  Ekaterina dashed up to clasp Tanya’s hands. “I don’t know how you did it, Comrade, but thank you.” Her eyes shone. Had she been any happier, she would have smiled. Another typist, mousy little Anya, appeared with a cup of tea in her hands and placed it on Tanya’s desk.

  Tanya gaped at the cup in astonishment. Only Sasha himself possessed sufficient clout to demand that the clerical staff make tea for him, and they despised him for it. But there the cup was, with milk in it, too. Then Tanya saw that throughout the vault, the clerical staff had turned their eyes to her. To a woman, they were all silently miming applause.

  She felt a flush of unfamiliar solidarity and reddened. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I did nothing.”

  “Our oppressor suddenly gathers up his hooligans and leaves. The new rules disappear. Work returns to normal. Yet when you walk in, you show not a flicker of surprise. That tells us all we need to know,” Ekaterina said. “Oh, and I should mention that you’re wanted.” She made a little upward jerk of her head. “Up there.”

  Sasha had restored his chessboards and their men to their usual places. They looked contented to be there. His wretched little bonsai was back too. “Sit down,” he said when Tanya entered. Then, gesturing to the board before him, “Give the game a try. Just this once. You can have white.”

  Tanya stared at the board long and hard. Despite the offer (or maybe command), she did not sit. Then, finally, she pushed a pawn to f3.

  Sasha advanced his pawn to e5.

  Without hesitation, she moved another pawn to g4.

  Sasha slid his queen through the opening he’d created, across the board to h4, putting Tanya’s queen in check. Quizzically, he said, “Fool’s mate.”

  “Congratulations. You win. I see you have your office back.”

  “It was the oddest thing,” Sasha said. “When I came in this morning, General Bykovsky was waiting for me. He looked like the very devil. He demanded to see a file on a tall, white-haired master spy known as the Norwegian. Imagine my surprise to discover that such a file existed. Imagine my astonishment to learn that one Magnus Haakensen, a man I never heard of before today, is considered to be the most dangerous terrorist in all Europe; is allied with MI6, the CIA, and Mossad; and is the mastermind behind half the wars of oppression in Africa.”

  Tanya said nothing. The specimen sheet for her typewriter was on file, but she had long ago swapped it for that of a machine in the Polish trade mission. Whatever he suspected, Sasha could not be sure of her hand in it.

  “Bykovsky had me stand before him like a schoolboy while he read the file. Then he asked for the ‘other’ photos. I knew my answer would displease him, but having no idea whatsoever what he was talking about, I told him there were none. What else might I have done? What would you have done in my place?” Sasha shook his head heavily, like a weary buffalo. “When I said that, he gave me a look that froze my blood. I fear that Boris Petrovich and I are no longer friends. Then, without saying another word, he swept up all his people and fled. Back to Moscow, I presume.”

  When Tanya still said nothing, Sasha asked, “Do I want to know the details?”

  “No.”

  “Ahh, little Tanya, more and more I am convinced that you would make an excellent chess player, if only you’d apply yourself to it.”

  Tanya locked eyes with her superior. Let the bastard experience a touch of fear himself, for a change. Let him think twice before breaking into her apartment again and stealing what was hers. With cold menace, she said, “I don’t play games.”

  • • •

  The only time Tanya ever wished she could paint was when she stood on the Charles Bridge, savoring the silence of dawn. Every visit was different, and each was beautiful in its own way. Today, silvery mists rose from the frozen river as the sky above the horizon slowly turned palest yellow. The feet of the buildings in the Old Town were as darkly shadowed as the bridge itself, but their upper stories rose into the sunlight to turn eggshell white and the apricot glow of their tiled rooftops made her soul soar. She came here when she could, though it grew increasingly hard to find the time, to clasp hands with something vital to which she could not put a name.

  Midway across the bridge, Tanya became aware of a splash of red on the parapet ahead of her. Blood?

  No.

  It was a rose.

  As she drew closer, Tanya saw that a dark rectangle of duct tape held the rose to the stone so a breeze would not blow it away. Closer still, she saw that someone had leaned a hand on the parapet to melt away the thin skim of ice covering it to give the tape purchase. Pritchard had been here, and not all that long ago. For a moment, she felt an unreasoning outrage at this breach of her privacy. Peeling off her gloves, she ripped away the tape and dropped it onto the Vltava. Almost, she threw the rose after it. Was this supposed to be a gesture of thanks? Or was the American boasting that he was not the incompetent he seemed, but capable of ferreting out her most private and cherished habits? Or could it be a threat, a reminder that he could reach into her life anytime he so desired? Did she need to take precautions against him?

  Finally, Tanya decided that this was nothing more than classic tradecraft. The American was messing with her mind, trying to make her paranoid, doing his best to throw her off her game.

  She scowled down at the red blossom. Again, she felt the urge to fling it as far from herself as she could.

  In the end, however, Tanya decided not to throw the rose into the cold waters. Instead, she lifted it to her nose and inhaled. Even in the cold winter air, its perfume was lush and rich.

  Briefly—though she knew that it was pointless, for tomorrow would necessarily bring new disasters to which she might or might not be equal—Tanya smiled.

  Episode 7: Radio Free Trismegistus

  by Ian Tregillis

  Czechoslovak Socialist Republic

  February 17, 1970

  1.

  It was a ramshackle little place, part stone and part timber, with moss growing between the shingles and bird-bone wind chimes swaying from the eaves. Fifty meters from the nearest road, the cottage hid within a stand of pines in an isolated valley forty kilometers outside of town. The roof had a pronounced sag, like a swaybacked horse. A lonely goat che
wed cud inside a pen that looked unlikely to withstand the next strong breeze. The wind smelled of pine resin and goat shit.

  Finding this place had taken all morning, half a tank of gas, and three stops for directions. Gabriel Pritchard couldn’t afford the time and he couldn’t afford to leave a trail of people who might remember a man with a strong American accent. But nor could he keep living with a disembodied spirit lodged in his soul like a couch stuck in a doorway.

  So here he was. Hoping like hell he hadn’t been played for a fool.

  He’d come on the advice of a KGB officer whom, quite frankly, he had no compelling reason to trust. Jesus, they didn’t even like each other. If he died out here, it might be days or weeks before the CIA found his body—if they ever did. Perhaps he’d die in an ambush today, or be captured. Or perhaps the end would come when the hitchhiker finally burst his skull like an overripe melon.

  Fools rush in, he reminded himself. But he knocked anyway.

  From within he heard quiet voices and the squeak of a chair. Slow footsteps on creaking floorboards.

  A woman old enough to be Gabe’s grandmother opened the door. Behind her, bundles of dried flowers and herbs, dozens of them, hung from the rafters. A very large man, bald and meaty, ate black bread at the kitchen table. Too young for a husband or brother. Her son? Grandson?

  Tanya had given Gabe an address, referring to a woman who might be able to help. He knew immediately what this place was and whom he’d come to meet.

  He didn’t know the Czech term. But in Latin America they’d call her a curandera.

  The old woman was a hedgewitch. A cut-wife.

  This was the ragged fringe of the USSR, where local superstitions hadn’t been bulldozed by socialist realism. Here the cut-wife solved human problems beyond the purview of Marxism-Leninism. She lived on the outskirts of town because people feared her, maybe even reviled her at times, but they always stopped short of driving her away. Where else would they buy good-luck charms and love potions, have their fortunes divined or their most delicate problems solved with discretion?

  For her part, she’d likely been expecting to find a girl on the doorstep. Somebody from one of the surrounding farms. Gabe could picture it now in his mind’s eye: a freckled milkmaid—he gave her Pippi Longstocking braids, because why not?—who’d naively spent some unchaperoned time in a hayloft with a charming boy and now found herself in just a little bit of trouble. Such was a cut-wife’s clientele.

  Certainly she had not expected to find a man in his mid-thirties on the doorstep. And an American, at that.

  They stared at each other for a long, awkward beat. To her credit, she didn’t slam the door. She looked him up and down, as if assessing a horse or cow for purchase. He wondered if she’d want to check his teeth, too. Then she narrowed her eyes and, just for a split second, the hitchhiker stirred.

  Damn. She was good.

  That’s when she made to slam the door. Gabe was faster. He caught the door with his toe. She yelped in protest. The large fellow set down his bread, tugged at the napkin in his collar, and dabbed the buttery crumbs from his lips. Then he pushed his chair away from the kitchen table and stood. He tilted his head far to the left, set his hands on his jaw and scalp, and gave a little tug, cracking the joints in his neck. Then he tilted his head the other way and did it again. It was quite a show. All very deliberate, probably to give unwise visitors time to rethink just how badly they needed to overstay their welcome. Performance completed, he approached the door. His hands curled into fists, undoubtedly anticipating a short, intense conversation with Gabe’s face. Gin blossoms pinked the man’s nose and cheeks.

  She’s not aligned with either the Ice or the Flame and she’s got a drinking problem, Tanya had said, so she’s always in need of money.

  Gabe carried a rucksack slung over one shoulder, and he hefted this now. Glass clinked. The old woman cocked an eyebrow.

  “Slivovice,” Gabe said. She licked her lips. He pulled open the rucksack, just enough to show her the bottles.

  Cocking her head ever so slightly, she said over her shoulder, “All is well.”

  Baby Huey shrugged, turned, and lumbered back to the kitchen table. With the same deliberation with which he had prepared to show Gabe the error of his ways, he sat down, tucked the napkin back in his collar, and spread another spoonful of butter across his bread.

  The woman reached for the sack. Gabe handed it over. The witch retreated a few steps, opening the door more widely. He entered. The hitchhiker stirred again; it tweaked his senses. The cottage smelled of freshly baked bread, garlic, thyme, incense, sweat, lavender, and half a dozen additional wildflowers and herbs he couldn’t parse. The air within tasted of ash and tickled his tongue with the metallic tang of blood—she’d butchered a chicken sometime in the past few days. His host pointed to a chair beside the hearth. Gabe took a seat while she stowed the booze in a cabinet.

  He could imagine the expense report now. Ninety korunas: plum brandy (six bottles, top-shelf), for bribing the local hedgewitch.

  Baby Huey finished his meal and went outside. Soon the noises of wood chopping filtered into the cottage. The old woman stoked the fire, washed her hands in an aluminum basin, then dragged the only other chair before Gabe. She sat facing him.

  “You have a ghost in you,” she said. Přízrak: Ghost. Phantom. Wraith. Specter.

  “Yes.”

  She took his hands, spat in his palms, slapped them together, and stared unblinking into his eyes. “How long?”

  “A year and a half.”

  “That long? But you’re not dead.”

  She pulled his hands apart and studied the pattern of spittle. Again, the hitchhiker stirred. She shook her head and dropped his hands as though they were hot coals. He wiped them on his trousers.

  “It is in you too deep. I cannot help.”

  He sagged in his chair. Damn. Coming out here had been a move of desperation. Thanks to Alestair and Jordan, he now understood the magical nature of his affliction. He’d even learned to mitigate it, to a limited extent. But détente wasn’t enough. He wanted a cure. He wanted his old life back. His old self.

  Time for plan B, if his Czech was up to the task. Jordan had speculated that the hitchhiker was an errant elemental spirit. If that was true, then it had to have an affinity for a particular alchemical element. If Gabe could at least identify that, he’d have a strong lever for prying the damn thing out of himself once and for all.

  “If you can’t remove it,” he said, “can you at least tell me its name?” Název: Name. Title. Her blank expression sent him rummaging his mental filing cabinet for any useful scrap of vocabulary. “Its . . .” Nature. Temperament. “. . . povaha.”

  “You seek the druh?”

  He didn’t know that word. She answered his shrug in English: “Species.”

  Gabe nodded. She narrowed her eyes. He got the sense he’d lifted her opinion of him just the tiniest bit. Enough to help?

  “That is very difficult,” she said.

  He pointed to the cabinet. “Too difficult for six bottles?”

  This time he couldn’t read her expression. But she did open a different cabinet, from which she retrieved a yellowed sheaf of papers. An herbal pharmacopoeia, he realized. Such lore was the lens through which she saw the magical undercurrents of the world. Undercurrents that were fundamentally elemental in nature, according to Alestair, for values of “element” more Mendeleevian than Aristotelian. When she flipped through the pages, he glimpsed astrological and alchemical symbols mingled with artful sketches of what he assumed to be local flora. He knew from his own research that certain plants bioaccumulated particular metals or minerals from the environment. It made a certain kind of sense, then, that a hedgewitch or MI6 sorcerer might make use of their ashes.

  She used a mortar and pestle to hold the sheaf open to a long table of symbols: a list of elements and elementals written in several different hands in a hodgepodge of languages. Mostly Czech, of course, but
he recognized bits and pieces of Latin, and even some English, as in the phrase “star regulus of antimony,” whatever that meant.

  They could dispense with three of the classic elements—earth, air, water—right away. He walked on the earth and breathed air literally all day and night, and his body was mostly water. If the hitchhiker were ravenous for any of these things, it would have torn him inside out long ago.

  Of the big four, that left fire. The witch nicked his thumb with a knife, smeared the blood on the long stem of a dried nettle, and wrapped this around a candle. She lit the wick and pointed.

  Gabe stuck his hand in the flame. And yelped. But the hitchhiker didn’t stir. Gabe licked a fresh blister while she crossed off “oheň.”

  The processes became more involved as the elements became more obscure. Though Alestair’s exercises had proven useless at evicting the hitchhiker, Gabe had to give the old spy credit. Without the benefit of the Brit’s tutelage, Gabe would have been utterly incapable of following what she was doing.

  Sometimes she’d roll back his shirt cuff, then jab his arm with a long needle. A songbird beak clamped around a fossilized worm dangled from the eye on an almost invisible thread. Then, before the bleeding stopped, she’d press something to the tiny pinprick. It occurred to Gabe that he was undergoing something akin to magical allergy testing. And so it went all afternoon.

  Until they got to mercury. For this, she opened the window and slipped a thermometer from its bracket.

  Did he feel a little twitch just then? As though the hitchhiker had just rolled over in its sleep? If so, it was subtle, something he wouldn’t have noticed prior to working with Alestair. Encouraging, though.

  She took a chipped saucer from the cupboard. After working the thermometer free of its frame, she used the blooded knife to etch the glass. Then she snapped the thermometer in two and poured the contents into the dish. The bead of hydrargyrum, water silver, was smaller than the nail on his pinky finger.

  He waved his hand over the dish. Nothing happened. The hedgewitch darted forward with the knife. He sighed but, knowing the drill by now, he let her take more blood. Chanting, she flicked a crimson drop into the dish and then swirled it around until the liquids mingled. Then she gestured at him. He waved his hand over the dish again.