by Bob Mayer
Edith turned to him and grabbed him by the shirt. “Don’t you understand? The art is the beginning of everything. If it all disappears, it’s the end of everything.”
Still Before D-Day and After They Came Back From The Ides Of March
Hunter Army Airfield, Georgia
Scout stood alone in the dark, watching the house’s windows, trying to decide on a course of action in the face of the red rage she could feel pulsing forth from the dwelling.
Time travel, Fireflies from another timeline, assassins sent by the Shadow; those, she could handle. This was different. The shades were drawn on every window, and all she could make out were the silhouettes of those inside occasionally moving about. A man. A woman. Just by the way they held themselves, she could discern the relationship.
The woman was Nada’s ex-wife. The man, her current husband. After arriving back from the Ides mission and getting debriefed, Scout had checked her cell phone and there had been a message from Nada’s daughter Isabella to meet. Scout had played phone tag and left a message for Isabella that she would be here, as requested, this evening.
Beyond the demeanor of the silhouettes, Scout could sense the vibe roiling off the house: anger, confusion, despair, hopelessness; an enmeshment from which Isabella wanted to extract her mother.
Headlights pierced the darkness to the left, a car rolling down the street. It came to a halt short of the house, on this side of the street. A young woman got out. Scout emerged from the shadows of a large oak tree and flashed her penlight.
“Are they in there?” Isabella asked.
“Yes.”
“Let’s go.” Isabella took a step into the street and toward the house.
“Hold on,” Scout said.
Isabella paused, but didn’t come back. “What?”
“He’s angry,” Scout said.
“I know he’s angry,” Isabella said. “That’s why I left you the message. He beat the crap out of my mother last week. You told me to call you if I needed anything. I need something. I called. You agreed to meet here. Now we have to help her.”
“Getting her killed, or us killed, isn’t going to help anyone,” Scout said. “I can feel him. He won’t allow us to just walk in and take your mother out. It’s dangerous. More than you think.”
“You can ‘feel him?’” Isabella turned back to Scout then stepped up, face-to-face. “More than I have? I felt him many times. I felt his fist. His slap. He broke my arm once, and my mother made me tell everyone I’d fallen off my bike. My teachers knew. I could see it in their eyes, but everyone played the game. Because if we weren’t going to do anything about it, how could they?
“I got out of there when I was sixteen. You think my mother would have learned from my dad.” She stepped closer to Scout. “My father might have been a great soldier, but at home, he was a drunk and abusive. Why my mother had to hook up with another one like him—” She left the rest unsaid.
“We repeat patterns.”
Scout and Isabella turned at the low voice coming out of the dark. A tall woman, almost six feet, slender with wide shoulders, was shadowed by a dim streetlight.
“Moms,” Scout said, relieved but not overly surprised at the apparition of her team-leader. “What are you doing here?”
“We take care of our own,” Moms said. Scout’s team leader came up and put her hand out to Isabella. “I’m Moms. You must be Isabella. I served with your dad for years. I know what you remember about him, but trust me, he ultimately did what was best for you. And he helped a lot of people,” she added with a glance at Scout.
Isabella shook Moms’s hand. “What do you mean, we repeat patterns?”
“We go for the known,” Moms said, nodding toward the house. “We all do. We prefer the horrible known over the paralyzing fear of the unknown and different. It’s not surprising your mother would marry a man just like Nada was.”
“‘’Nada’?” Isabella was confused.
Moms smiled sadly. “That’s what we called your dad on our team. It’s hard for me to think of him by any other name. As hard as it is for you to think outside of what he was in your early childhood. But he finally recognized what he was, and he left. Sometimes that’s the best a person can do. Remove themselves. And he did change after he left, but it was too late for him to come back. You need to know that. And remember it. Your mother didn’t leave, and she didn’t kick him out. He made the decision to remove himself from your life. Wasn’t his absence better than his presence?”
“His absence was an absence,” Isabella said bitterly. “A father is supposed to be a father.” She looked at the house. “And a mother a mother.”
“If only it were that easy,” Moms said. “My own mother wasn’t much different, even though she ended up alone. She was broken young. It killed her, but she took a long time dying. At least you’re not broken.”
“You don’t know me,” Isabella said.
“Scout does,” Moms said. “She’s here. If she’s here, it’s because she believes in you.” She shifted her attention to the house. “He’s in the Ranger Battalion, Scout.”
“I know,” Scout said. “I’ve been trying to figure the best way to approach this. I can feel his rage. He’s on a hair trigger. We should wait until he deploys to get Isabella’s mother out. The Rangers are always deploying, right?”
Isabella disagreed. “She could be dead by then. And if she isn’t, he’ll go after her when he gets back. We tried leaving once while he was gone. When I was little. He found us. His buddies helped him. Tracked us down and brought us back as if he owned us. Like we were dogs that had strayed.”
“His buddies won’t help him anymore,” Moms said.
“You said it yourself,” Isabella said. “He’s in the Rangers. Those guys cover for each other. What are the three of us going to be able to do against him?”
“Follow my lead,” Moms said as she led the way toward the house, Scout on her right, Isabella to her left.
When they reached the front door, Moms rapped on it with her knuckles.
Nothing.
Moms knocked again, louder.
The door creaked open an inch, and someone peered out. “Yes?” The woman’s voice was barely a whisper. Just below the eye, a chain was visible.
“Time to leave,” Moms said.
The eye blinked. “What?”
In the background, a man yelled, “Who the hell is it?”
The eye disappeared. “Nobody.” The door began to close, but Moms jammed the toe of her boot into the gap. The door opened as far as the chain would allow, two inches. Isabella’s mother was shaking her head, looking past Moms at her daughter. “Please leave, Izzy. I’m fine. Really.”
Moms withdrew her boot.
“Damn it!” A large figure was behind the woman. “Who the hell are you?” He partly shut the door to unhook the chain, then swung it wide open. “Brought some of your dyke friends this time?” he demanded of Isabella. He was a large man, Isabella’s mother a slight presence in front of him. The odor of alcohol wafted out of the house. He wore camouflage pants and a brown T-shirt that had seen better days.
“You need to listen very carefully,” Moms said.
“Screw you, bitch. Get off my porch, or I’ll wipe it up with your blood and brains.” He lifted a large pistol and pointed it at Moms’s head.
“Listen carefully,” Moms repeated. “If you shoot me, you die. The Cellar doesn’t usually give warnings. You’re getting one right now. Back up. Let us take her. Then you never try to see her again.”
The man blinked. “What?”
“The Cellar,” Moms said. “You’ve heard whispers of it. It exists.”
Scout focused, looking into his bloodshot eyes, seeing through them, into him. His thoughts were confused, jumbled. Too many breaching charges going off near his head in training and on missions, each one causing a mini-concussion, over and over again. Too many nighttime raids into villages, where innocents were killed as well as the bad guys. Too muc
h alcohol when not deployed. Too many meds prescribed by Army doctors trying to put a Band-Aid on a wound that was far too big and deep, and started long ago, before all those other things. People were attracted to elite units for many different reasons, and some of them were dark ones.
He owned a legacy of pain from generations of pain.
“We can get you help,” Scout said, putting all the calmness she could muster into her voice.
It was a lot.
The muzzle dropped only slightly. “The Cellar?” He shook his head. “I’ve done nothing for the Cellar to get involved in.”
“I’m here,” Moms said, “to give you a message from the Cellar.”
“The Cellar don’t send messages.” He looked from Moms, to his wife, to his stepdaughter, and then he focused on Scout. “What the hell are you doing? Why are you in my head?”
But Scout was confused, shifting her focus from the man to the mother.
“Get out of my head!” the man screamed as he lifted the gun.
Scout and Moms moved at the same time, but with different targets. Moms knocked the gun aside, gripping the hand, twisting, causing him to drop it. She pressed the attack, surprising the Ranger, hitting him with several short punches before landing a solid snap kick to the groin. He was a Ranger, but he was still a man. He went down.
As Moms launched her attack, the mother was reaching into a deep pocket on the front of her dress. Scout was ready, snatching the small pistol out of her hand as the woman brought it to bear on Moms. Scout shoved her back, next to her husband, twirling the gun around and pointing it at the two of them.
Moms glanced at Scout, at the pistol, then at the woman, processing it. “How’d you know?” she asked Scout.
“I felt it,” Scout said. “There are two people here. No prisoner. Partners.”
Moms was silent for a few seconds, then she nodded. “You’re right.”
Isabella tried to move forward, to get her mother, but Moms put an arm out, blocking her.
The woman was kneeling next to her husband, trying to comfort him. “Are you all right? Do you want me to call the cops on them?” She had an arm around his shoulder. “You’ll be okay, baby. You’ll be okay.”
“Mom?” Isabella said.
Her mother looked at her, eyes filled with anger. “Get out! Get out, and never come back. How dare you bring these strangers into my house? Bring them to attack my husband?”
“But Mom...” Isabella looked at Scout in confusion.
“Come on.” Moms gently put a hand on Isabella’s arm, leading her toward the door. Scout followed, keeping the gun on the couple, closing the door behind as they exited.
“I don’t understand,” Isabella said. “I don’t understand.”
They crossed the street. Moms turned to Isabella. “It’s the way it is, Isabella. You can’t make someone do what they don’t want to do. You have your life. It’s time for you to move on completely. Leave this behind.”
“But we can’t leave her with him. He’ll kill her someday.”
“He might,” Moms agreed. “But it’s her choice. We all have to make our own choices. It’s also possible she might kill him. I’d make the odds pretty even.”
“It’s fate,” Scout said, and both women turned to her. “There are things we can’t change, Isabella. You father knew that. He accepted his fate. And in doing so, he did a very, very good thing. There’s another young girl out there who has an older brother who is alive and taking care of her because of your father’s sacrifice.” Scout pointed at the small house. “That’s your mother’s fate. But you control your future.”
Then Moms’s and Scout’s satphones rang: Send Lawyers, Guns and Money.
St. Petersburg, Russia
“We live in a Kafka world,” the Curator said.
“Excuse me?” Doc was startled out of his reverie in front of the tomb of Tsar Nicholas II, the Tsarina and their five children (and the remains of sundry help who were killed with them). It was a marble crypt, roughly four feet high by four wide and two deep, inside Peter and Paul Cathedral, located within Peter and Paul Fortress, an island made by the Neva River.
“All of this. This show.” The Curator waved his hand. He tapped the crypt. “I tell you a secret, since you paid to see it alone. This is not marble. It is fake. They could not afford marble when they decided to put on a show and finally inter the remains after DNA confirmed it was the Royals. So funny that the last Tsar of the Russian Empire, murdered in the name of the Soviet Union, is now buried so poorly in the name of the new Russia, is it not?”
Doc wanted to tell the Curator that paying to be left alone meant being left alone, but the Curator had warned him that there were security cameras, and his boss would wonder if someone were completely alone in here at night. He could explain away the visit as a request from an American academic, but only if he accompanied Doc into the chapel.
What Doc really wanted to say to the Curator was that he was being Kafkaesque by saying it was a Kafka world, but that was a wormhole he wanted to go down as much as he wanted to time travel again, which meant, not at all.
“The Cathedral was plundered during the Revolution,” the Curator said. “The Germans bombed it in World War II. We have restored maybe half, but it will never be the original, even if we manage to make it appear original. There just isn’t the money that a monarch like Peter the Great could spend to build such a thing.”
“You mean that an empire could spend,” Doc said.
“That is the Kafka thing,” the Curator said. “Was Tsar Nicholas a monarch we should venerate, or a tyrant whom our country rebelled against? Those in power in the Soviet Union, the insiders, knew where the bodies were for a long time. But it was best to let it be, since responsibility for the murders had always been denied by the regime. But then the new Russia rose out of the Soviet Union, and what was to be done with the knowledge of where the bodies of the last leaders of the Old Russia were buried? The word would get out sooner or later. It is better to act instead of react.”
Doc didn’t really want to discuss this.
“I wonder what the Tsar would think of all this,” the Curator said.
Nicholas II was a weak man with a wife who’d turned to a shaman in her time of need, Doc thought. He remembered his first and last sight of Nicholas II, asking God to look over Russia, just before Doc was taken out and paraded in front of a firing squad.
Doc shivered although it was warm in the Cathedral.
“But in death, there is equality.” The Curator tapped the crypt. “The servants who died with them, valet, cook, lady-in-waiting, along with the family physician, their remains are in here, too. But on the bottom.” He laughed. “So, even in death, the Tsar is on top.”
I could have saved the Tsarina and the Duchesses, Doc thought. Could have? No. He couldn’t have. He’d accepted that since he’d returned. Not completely, but enough. The Tsar had been doomed along with his family. Doc wondered what a timeline where the Tsar hadn’t died was like. He assumed there had to be one. After all, there were an infinite number of possible timelines. And in one of them at least, Anastasia found her dream. Doc held onto that hope.
“May I have a moment alone?” Doc finally asked. “I’ve paid enough for that.”
The Curator frowned. “I will be right outside the door. Three minutes is all I can allow.” He left in a huff, and silence finally reigned.
Doc reached into his pocket then retrieved the pages he’d carefully ripped out of Anastasia’s diary before tossing it into the furnace in the bowels of Alexander Palace. He unfolded them then read the young girl’s thin script:
I know that I’m a princess, but I don’t want a prince. How funny that I’m the only girl who doesn’t want a prince, but rather desires an ordinary boy who loves me, and not the shoe which I leave behind. I want no pumpkins which turn into carriages, and certainly no wicked stepsisters, as my sisters are enough for any lifetime. I want a true friend in a boy who will always care for me lik
e Papa cares for Mama, and combs my hair and laughs at my little stories and tells me over and over that I’m the prettiest when I know I’m not.
I don’t want a prince at all, and I’m so lucky because I’m the youngest and will be able to have a real marriage for love, and not for country or position or treaty. I know those are needed, but Mama said no to the first who was presented to her by her grandmother. To defy the Great-Grandma Victoria! Even her own son would not do so. But Mama did, and Great-Grandma granted her wish to be with Papa.
And if she had not? I would not be here. I would not be writing this. So strange.
But once Mama met Papa, he was all she had room for in her heart.
Still, Papa was a prince. If only he’d been a farmer. I’d still be here, Mama would still have a full heart, and all these troubles would not lie on our heads.
If only.
If only.
If only HE had not come into ’Mama’s life because of my little brother. HE is not real. HE is not of us. I know it, but I cannot tell anyone. They would think me crazy, even though they should see that HE is the crazy one. All the country can see it, but not Mama. Even Papa knows it, but he gives way.
The first time he read it, Doc had had no doubt about the identity of the HE Anastasia was referring to: Rasputin.
During debrief after the mission, Dane, the Time Patrol Administrator, had dismissed Rasputin when Doc claimed he’d been influenced by a Valkyrie from the Shadow to give the Tsarina his visions and to help heal young Alexei.
It raised a troubling question: Rasputin was recorded in history. His prophecies, his effect on the Tsarina and thus the Tsar, were all there, laid out as fact in the many tomes written about that time.
That was a paradox. It meant that if a Valkyrie had influenced Rasputin, and history had recorded what he did as a result of that, then the Shadow had already changed our history. And that change was part of the present. Did that mean that the Russian Revolution had been inevitable with or without Rasputin? Or that Rasputin would essentially have been the same without the Shadow’s influence? Or that—
