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.