28 June, 11:00 AM, Czernograd, 44 Rimsky Street
Halszka Saint-Germain-Bukowski leaned back in her chair, closed her eyes and ran her hand through her long blond hair. As always, her fingers encountered a little bump a few centimetres above the ear and started massaging it absentmindedly.
Halszka got her first name from her great-grandmother, the Bukowski second barrel of her surname from her mother, and Saint-Germain from her father’s distant ancestor, Comte de Saint-Germain, the eighteenth century adventurer, alchemist and bon vivant of mysterious origins, the man many have over the centuries believed discovered the secret of immortality and so did not really die. He did, but a few years later than the accepted date of 1784, and not in Europe as it then was, but back in his true birthplace. He was buried in a crypt of St Stephan’s, a Catholic church on the eastern edge of the Old City, and when she was seven, Halszka’s father took her there to show her the dusty white marble sarcophagus of their famous ancestor, the life-size sculpted figure of the Count half-reclining on the lid, as if the eternal rest was just a brief afternoon lay-down for this man who couldn’t stay still when he was alive.
Halszka’s blonde hair was the inheritance from her father, but the two little bumps underneath the curls were definitely from her mother’s side, where the great-grandpa was said to have been a czort, a minor forest devil; poor, mischievous, little creature that always in the end manages to get outsmarted and bested by a wily local farmer. Yet for all that he had still managed to impregnate her mother’s grandmother, thus passing his horns as a family legacy through the Bukowski family. They were getting smaller which each generation, thankfully, shrinking the same way Ruthenia’s other magic legacies have been for some time now. The bumps remained well-hidden under Halszka’s blonde mane, a source of embarrassment to her that was perhaps somewhat overwrought in a country like Ruthenia. Nevertheless she never allowed anyone to massage her scalp.
Anyone but herself that is.
The names might have been passed down the families, as have the little bumps on her head, and even perhaps some of the devil’s cunning that has helped her in her work at some crucial times. But this headache… this headache she got from the tape.
She clicked the mouse again to bring the cursor to the start of the digital recording, and pressed play again, for the tenth, or maybe the twentieth time.
“Is everything in place?”
A deep, gruff voice, speaking Ruthenian with a Russian accent. Vadim Fedorov, the deputy trade attaché at the Zvorsky House, up on the Embankment, the Russian embassy in Czernograd. Late thirties, medium height but solidly built, a martial arts enthusiast, just like Vladimir Putin, shortly cropped hair the colour of the Volga mud, non-descript features, a man you wouldn’t give a second look on a downtown tram. Two years into his posting to Ruthenia and Galicia, previously five years in Warsaw and three years in Prague. Jogs every morning along the river, between his apartment and the embassy. Likes Chinese cuisine. Occasionally attends the Czernograd Opera. Frequent contacts with the local business community. Special interest: the natural resources sector. No family, and no discrete local liaisons, at least not outside of the embassy. The real employer: Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki or SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence service.
“You know it is.”
Fedorov is calling a mobile phone, somewhere in the Royal Palace. They have managed to pick it up, but the quality of the recording left a lot to be desired, even after the computer wizards have had their go at it. They’ve tried hard but so far they haven’t been able to match the second voice to any known individual. Perhaps because of the poor quality they never would.
“It better be,” Fedorov laughs, or at least it sounds like laughter. “After all this time… all this work…”
“You don’t have anything to worry about,” says the voice inside the Palace.
“I always worry,” replies Fedorov. “It’s in my job description. In any case, we do have the insurance. I don’t have to tell you that…”
There is some noise that masks a few words in reply, then: “-I wish you didn’t. You know it’s not necessary.”
“You know the saying we have back home,” says Fedorov, “doveryai, no proveryai, trust but verify. He will have one week to demonstrate through his actions that he intends to deliver what he promised. You understand that, of course?”
“Of course.”
“Otherwise – perezagruzka, my friend. The reset.”
There is a pause at the Palace end of the conversation.
“There won’t be any need.” Tired and slow, like speaking from under a lake of molasses.
“All the same,” says Fedorov. “Just so we are perfectly clear, as soon as we know that the King has only a few days to live… and we will know… we will bring and put our people in place. And they will be ready to do what needs to be done… if it ever needs to be done. And I pray it won’t. As I’m sure you do to, my friend.”
Silence, again.
“Sometimes one needs some extra things to concentrate one’s mind on the task ahead,” the Russian continues. “The more important the thing, the greater the need to concentrate. And the greater the thing that concentrates.” A pause. “Anyway, I better be going. But I thought I would just pass on this small reminder. We will talk more, soon. Good day to you.”
Click.
The end.
Rewind.
“Of course.”
“Otherwise – perezagruzka, my friend. The reset.”
Her finger circling around the base of the bump. She can almost repeat the whole conversation by now from memory; she’s been listening to it for the past week or so, ever since it has been intercepted. But no matter how many times she listens to the now familiar words, they’re still just that: words, and words without a context are just sounds. And there’s no context, just a random conversation they were lucky to pick up, almost by accident, because Fedorov made a mistake of calling on his mobile from an exposed spot, and because he had made an earlier mistake of arousing the curiosity of the Polish counter-intelligence service, which as a courtesy, when Fedorov was transferred to the Russian embassy in Czernograd, passed on the information to their Ruthenian colleagues.
So there was Fedorov, a Russian spook. There was a disembodied voice in the Palace. And then there was some sort of an arrangement, backed by blackmail, backed in turn by a threat... of what? The reset. Harm? Violence? To whom? And how exactly?
Only the timing was more or less certain. Halszka Saint-Germain-Bukowski knew that King John III, the king of Ruthenia and Galicia for the past fifty-three years had only days to live now, his liver and other internal organs consumed beyond saving by cancerous growths. By the sounds of it, the Russians would know it too by now. So, a few days from now, someone will have to do something that the Russians are counting on. Or there will be consequence. And Halszka Saint-Germain-Bukowski, and her colleagues at the five-storey neo-classical edifice at 44 Rimsky Street, have only a week at best to discover what the deal is, and what the reset is. And then stop it.
So far, the only thing that Halszka has discovered today is that rubbing her horns does not make the headache go away.
Photo by Sergiu Nista on Unsplash
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