Summerland, Page 2

  ‘Very well.’ The major puffed out his chest. ‘But any monkey business will go into my report.’

  He took out his sapgun, a small shotgun-bore revolver with four rubber bullets. It was the Service’s non-lethal weapon of choice. Rachel had fired one a few times but only in training. It had a terrific kick.

  Rachel pocketed the weapon and narrowed her eyes. ‘Thank you. Naturally, it is your duty to include every detail. But so is mine. My report may mention your failure to stop Mr Kulagin from insulting and assaulting a young man of high station. I would much rather focus on how you arrived too late to stop the incident, and then immediately contacted me. I wonder which set of details Vee-Vee would discover the devil in?’

  Allen rubbed his moustache.

  ‘I bid you both goodnight,’ he said finally.

  His back was ramrod-straight as he left the room. The moment the door closed, Kulagin started laughing.

  * * *

  She cleaned Kulagin’s wound with alcohol, half-kneeling in front of him.

  ‘I may have misjudged you, Mrs Moore,’ Kulagin said in English. ‘You are a spirited woman, ambitious. I see it now. It must be difficult in this country, especially in your Service, being surrounded by all these Etonian boy-children who—how do you say—like each other’s bums?’

  She pressed an alcohol-dampened cotton pad into the wound. Kulagin flinched.

  ‘There is no need to be crude, Yakov Mikhailovich.’

  ‘Ours is a crude profession, all shit and flies and sex, don’t let the bum-boys tell you otherwise! It would have been easier for you in the Soviet Union, Mrs Moore. There we are all comrades together, men and women, in the same shit. But here? Very difficult.’

  ‘I like difficult things. Otherwise why would I be patching up a foul-mouthed Russian who tried to get himself killed?’

  ‘Ha!’ Kulagin raised a hand. ‘I did not try to get killed.’ He ran his fingers along the wound. They came away covered with a thin film of blood. ‘I was trying to feel alive!’

  ‘You will not be alive much longer unless you let me clean it properly,’ Rachel said dourly.

  This time, she poured the alcohol directly onto the wound and Kulagin shuddered from head to toe.

  ‘What a waste,’ he said. ‘We must drink together, you and I. To men and women, and being alive.’

  ‘No, Yakov Mikhailovich, we will not drink together.’

  ‘What?’

  Kulagin’s face turned dark red with fury. He struggled to get up.

  Rachel grabbed his shoulders and pushed. He fell back onto the couch heavily, overcome by surprise and gravity. She doubted she could have moved the Russian’s wrestler-like bulk otherwise.

  ‘We had an agreement,’ Rachel said. ‘In exchange for information deemed to be of value by the Service, we will arrange new papers for you, comfortable accommodation and subsistence, or, if you prefer, a Ticket and a painless transition to Summerland. Was there anything unclear about that?’

  ‘I was bored,’ he growled. ‘The young fool offended me. I acted. Nothing to do with our deal.’

  ‘It had everything to do with our deal. The deal was with us, not with our colleagues on the Other Side. There is a reason why you have not been given a Ticket yet. If you had been shot, you would have been lost like any Ticketless ghost, Faded in a day. Is that what you wanted? Or did you have such confidence in your aim?’

  She got up, poured Kulagin a brandy from the room’s drinks cabinet and handed him the glass. His hand shook so badly he spilled some of the amber liquid in his lap. Then he downed the remainder in one gulp.

  ‘See?’ Rachel said. ‘I cannot imagine how you expected to hit anything.’

  Kulagin let out a bark-like laugh. ‘Hit, miss—no difference! You just need to be the last man standing.’

  Rachel returned to the drinks cabinet and refilled his glass, then took out a needle and a length of catgut thread from the first-aid kit. ‘Well, right now I need you to sit still. This will hurt.’

  She pinched the white folds of his skin together and started stitching the wound. Before joining the Winter Court, she had worked as a volunteer nurse and her fingers remembered the movements. Kulagin twitched and drank more, grimacing.

  ‘You are a cruel woman, Mrs Moore,’ he said between sips.

  ‘If you say so, Yakov Mikhailovich.’ Rachel knotted the last stitch, yanked the thread tight and cut it with the kit’s tiny scissors. Then she put the first-aid supplies to one side and pulled out one of the desk drawers.

  The recording equipment was in a false compartment installed by the Service before Kulagin moved in: an old-fashioned magnetophone in a heavy metal case. They had more modern equipment with Zöllner crystals that broadcast directly to the spirit Watchers, but the quartermaster was paranoid about using them on operations the brass did not want the Summer Court to know about.

  Rachel clicked the case open and yanked out the tape. Then she sat in the leather armchair opposite Kulagin, folded her hands on top of one knee and looked at him calmly.

  ‘Now it is just the two of us, Yakov Mikhailovich,’ she said. ‘No notes, no recordings, no ghosts. Just a living man and a woman, bleeding and drinking.’

  Kulagin did not look drunk anymore. His dark eyes burned with a cold fire.

  ‘You have been testing us,’ Rachel said, ‘measuring how badly we want what you have to offer. But you have gone too far. My superiors are going to put you on a boat to America. Is that what you want? We can protect you from your former colleagues better than the Yanks can, you know that. It is why you came to us in the first place. I can help you, Yakov Mikhailovich, but only if you help me.’

  Kulagin leaned forwards, hands on his knees.

  ‘You think I am here because I am afraid, Mrs Moore? Scared that the big, bad NKVD will spank me if they catch me? I think we need to get to know each other better before we can talk. Much better.’

  There it was. Rachel rolled her eyes.

  ‘I am a married woman, Yakov Mikhailovich.’

  ‘Aha! You are thinking of sex! Again, you misunderstand. Sex is a tool. Our Lenin School has a section, in the countryside, where women and men learn to use it. But it does not bring understanding. And I want to understand you, Mrs Moore. This thing we do, telling secrets we trained a lifetime to keep, it takes trust—on both sides.’

  Kulagin got up slowly and poured more brandy, two glasses this time, and held one out to Rachel.

  ‘I said I would not drink with you.’

  ‘It is a small price to pay for my secrets, no? Here is what I propose. We drink. I ask questions. Not about your country, about you. You answer. If I deem your answers to be of value, as you said, I will tell you things in return. What do you say?’

  It was another test. Did Kulagin really think she was a beginner who would open up, give him leverage?

  Cautiously, she accepted the glass.

  ‘Ha! So it is decided,’ Kulagin said.

  They clinked glasses and drank. The brandy was strong and made Rachel cough. It burned in her belly.

  Kulagin sat back down. ‘Tell me, Mrs Moore—what makes you feel alive? What gives your life meaning?’

  She frowned, cupping her glass with both hands.

  ‘Service, I suppose. Serving something greater than myself. Protecting others. Being useful.’

  ‘Being accepted?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘And your husband, does he understand your needs in this regard?’

  Rachel hesitated. ‘He understands duty.’

  ‘And what is a wife’s duty, in this country?’

  Rachel bit the inside of her mouth.

  ‘Play the game, please,’ Kulagin said. ‘A wife’s duty is…?’

  ‘To love her husband. To support him faithfully. To bear children.’

  ‘Do you have children, Mrs Moore?’

  ‘No. I do not.’

  The words slipped out too quickly. As a matter of course, she had sketched a backstory for
her interview alias—a former schoolteacher turned service officer through her husband’s connections. Why hadn’t she given Mrs Moore children, a whole litter of them?

  The Russian regarded her curiously.

  ‘A pity. For many people, it is children who give their lives meaning. The little fallen stars. What did your great thinkers Hinton and Tait call it? The ana dimension, all light, where the souls come from, fall into our crude matter and take root. Some say children retain that light for a while, before it fades and they become us. And then we seek our light elsewhere. Where is your light?’

  ‘I told you. I have no children. My work keeps other people’s children safe.’

  ‘I am not sure I believe you, Mrs Moore.’

  Rachel hesitated. Kulagin was a professional. He could smell a half-baked cover story. A modicum of truth was her only option.

  ‘I had a child, Yakov Mikhailovich,’ she said slowly. ‘It died.’

  ‘I am very sorry to hear that. Do you still talk to the little one, through the ectophone?’

  ‘No. It was never born.’

  ‘Ah. Better that way than going to the afterlife motherless.’

  Rachel said nothing. Kulagin sat quietly for a while. Then he nodded to himself, got up, poured them more brandy from the cabinet and sat down again.

  ‘I saw many motherless children in Russia, after the Revolution. Bezprizornii, we called them, wild children. They hunted rats and other small animals for food. Remarkable creatures. So innocent, so cruel. In a way, we were all like them, little boys and girls whose dream of a world without parents had come true. There were no rules except tearing down what was and building something new. Nothing existed except our own wills. It was glorious. Even death was an instrument to make a new Soviet Man.

  ‘One day, I sat in a café in Petrograd, signing death warrants by the dozen, finding different ways to choose the names. Letters in an alphabet. All the first names I could remember from school. Eventually, I just picked sheets at random. Then, a poet—a real poet, not like the young man tonight—came to interrupt me, accused me of tyranny. I took my revolver and shot him.’

  Kulagin flexed his thick fingers. There was a look of dark pleasure on his face. Suddenly, Rachel was grateful for the sapgun in her pocket.

  ‘Later, I regretted it. His poems were actually good. I think that was why I did not shoot young Shaw-Asquith today. Even bad poets touch something we cannot, with our games and lies. But no one dared to stop me in that café. Do you understand? There was no one to judge. No mother. No morality. No God. Until we built Him, in nineteen twenty-five.’

  Rachel felt a chill. In spite of all their efforts, the SIS knew relatively little about the genesis of the Soviet Union’s mighty guiding intellect that ran its economy with machine precision and uncovered every agent they tried to get inside OGPU with ruthless efficiency.

  ‘The God-Builders,’ Rachel said.

  ‘Krasin, Termin, Malevich and Bogdanov, those fools,’ Kulagin continued. ‘Ha! They thought that the Soviet people needed a God, and so they made an electric one. And now we have little Tombs everywhere, his eyes, watching everything. He is a sterner father than the Tsar ever was. And when we die, we become Him.

  ‘That was to be my reward, you see. I have served our radiant Father too well. I was chosen by the Immortalization Commission to return home and to undergo the Termin Procedure, to merge my meagre soul with that of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. An honour beyond measure.’

  Kulagin sighed. ‘What was I to do, Mrs Moore? I preferred to remain a wild child, fatherless, motherless. And so here I am.’

  Rachel stared at Kulagin. She imagined losing her identity, joining the Soviet overmind like a raindrop falling into a dark sea, and shuddered.

  ‘Why the tantrums and the games, then?’ she asked. ‘Why not tell my superiors what you just told me? Why risk dying in a duel without a Ticket?’

  ‘I wanted to see if your Service could protect me. It became clear that they could not. They are a bunch of schoolboys. I decided to let Shaw-Asquith kill me and take my leave. I thought it would be … how do you say? Poetic justice. Oh, do not look so shocked. I know what you people are told about the Ticketless dead. Only a few ever return to speak to family or lovers, and Fade quickly even then. I think you are too quick to believe your Dimensionists. What if your Tickets lead the souls astray? I prefer to see where my death takes me. If there is a land without mothers and fathers, I will find it.’

  ‘Then what are you still doing here?’ Rachel asked. It was best to humour him. The man was obviously mad. She regretted sending Allen away. Slowly, she pushed her hand into the bathrobe’s pocket, feeling for the sapgun.

  ‘You, Mrs Moore, you stepped in front of a bullet for me. It may be that I can trust you with a gift before I leave. But I have to be sure.’

  Kulagin got up, set down his glass and walked over to Rachel, looming in front of her. The black stitches on his side and his pale nipples made his chest and stomach look like an obscene face with a lopsided grin. Rachel fumbled for the sapgun, but the barrel caught in the pocket’s edge.

  Kulagin slapped her. Black dots danced in her eyes. He caught her right wrist and bent her arm back painfully. Her elbow screamed and she had to drop the weapon.

  Kulagin’s hands closed around her neck, crushing her windpipe.

  ‘In Tashkent, I strangled a woman once,’ Kulagin said. ‘She clawed at my arms, fought to the very end. She had a child, you see.’

  Rachel grabbed his wrists, tried to pry his fingers open, but the Russian’s grip was like iron. Her throat was on fire.

  ‘I want to know what you are really fighting for, Mrs Moore.’

  Rachel struggled to get the words out, mouthed them. Her fingers brushed Kulagin’s side. The thread and the stitches were rough.

  ‘What is it? Tell me.’

  He loosened his grip, just enough to let her pull in one ragged breath.

  ‘For freedom, you bastard,’ Rachel said.

  He squeezed harder again. Black dots filled her vision.

  ‘Whose freedom?’

  Her fingers found the knotted end of the stitches.

  ‘Mine.’

  As the word escaped her lips, she pulled as hard as she could. The catgut bit into her fingers and tore a flap of skin from Kulagin’s side. Droplets of blood stung her face like fat from a burst sausage.

  Kulagin roared with pain. She pushed herself up, ramming her shoulder into Kulagin’s belly. He stumbled against the coffee table and crashed to the floor. Rachel reached for the duelling pistol on the table but a black tunnel swallowed her vision. When it cleared, the weapon was in Kulagin’s hand, pointed at her.

  ‘Very well done,’ Kulagin said. He was laughing, half-sitting, half-lying on the floor. He pressed his left hand against the torn wound in his side. Blood flowed freely between his fingers. ‘Oh, but that hurts. Very well done indeed!’

  His laugh was interrupted by a coughing fit. His aim wavered, but before Rachel could move, he regained his composure.

  ‘I apologise for any discomfort I caused you, but I had to be sure. I recognise truth when I hear it. And so I am going to give you a gift, Mrs Moore, a double-edged gift. For the last two years, I have been running an agent called FELIX—a Section head in your Summer Court. He is a good lad, a little naive, a believer in the cause—more so than I, bless his soul.’

  Rachel struggled to speak but her throat seized up.

  ‘I see you don’t believe me. Well, more detail may convince you. FELIX is called Peter Bloom.’

  ‘Bloom,’ Rachel said, her voice hoarse. She had served with him for a time, before he passed over. One of the Young Turks, although less dashing than the others: short, pudgy, with intense eyes and a sensual mouth. Quiet, polite, a little aloof. Promoted past her, of course, in spite of the fact that she had a decade of experience on him.

  Kulagin coughed again. He lay in a spreading pool of dark crimson now.

  ‘My darling Peter was t
he golden goose I was going to be rewarded for. He belongs to you now.’

  Rachel’s head spun. It was as if all the reason in the world was leaking out together with Kulagin’s blood.

  ‘Even if I believed you,’ she whispered, ‘what do you expect me to do?’

  ‘You weren’t listening,’ Kulagin said. ‘There is no one telling you what to do. Goodbye, Mrs Moore.’

  In one smooth movement, as if downing a drink, he pushed the barrel of the pistol into his mouth and pulled the trigger.

  The shot felt like a slap, blinding and deafening. When her vision cleared, Rachel could not bear to look at Kulagin’s ruined face.

  She fled the room and slammed the door shut behind her.

  ‘We need a—we need a doctor here!’ she shouted at the top of her lungs, tearing the words from her battered throat. ‘Someone get a doctor!’

  Then she sank to the floor. The name pulsed in her mind, crimson and vile and impossible like Kulagin’s blood on the carpet.

  Peter Bloom.

  3

  SMALL WARS, 8TH NOVEMBER 1938

  Peter Bloom found himself haunting an ammunition truck while Madrid burned.

  He could not see the flames. To a ghost, the material world was invisible, except for electricity and the soul-sparks of the living. Buildings and streets were skeletons of luminescent wiring. Human brains glowed like paper lanterns. Everything else was a pale grey mist. He would have been hopelessly lost if not for the beacon in his agent Inez Giral’s ectophone that had guided him here from Summerland for their meeting.

  Now he hung on to the bright coils of the phone’s circuitry like a small boy gripping the hem of his mother’s dress, and listened to Inez describe the world of the living.

  ‘The Gran Vía rooftops are on fire,’ she said. ‘And the bombs, they fall like black pears. Big ones first, to knock buildings down. Incendiaries to light them. Shrapnel to keep the firemen away. Same thing every night. Soon there will be nothing left to burn.’

  For a woman driving a truck loaded with high explosives through a city being firebombed at night, her voice was remarkably calm.