Rasputin's Bastards

THERE ARE NO GUILTY PEOPLE

Mrs. Kontos-Wu spent her formative years at Bishop’s Hall, a girl’s boarding school in the hills of northern Connecticut carved out of the rambling summer home of Emmanuel Bishop. As she would explain to anyone who asked, Emmanuel Bishop was of the textile Bishops, a clan who during the Second World War became better known as the Parachute Bishops and in the post-war boom of the 1950s and beyond became more infamous as the Cuban, the Costa Rican, and finally the Atlantic City Bishops.

The tuition was steep, but her guardians were willing to pay the price. Bishop’s Hall had a reputation in certain circles. Ask a Bishop’s Hall Girl what she’d learned at Bishop’s, and without even having to even consider the question, she’d answer:

Everything.

Mrs. Kontos-Wu was a Bishop’s Hall Girl now and forever. It seemed as though every morning, she would wake up recalling a new morsel of information or advice gleaned during her years walking those oak-panelled halls — advice that had direct and frequently devastating application in the course of her day. Even the bad days — the worst days, the days such as this one — were improved by the memory of her education.

This morning, for instance, she’d remembered something about the truth.

You are even less a liar than you are a killer, Mr. Bishop had told her, towering over her in the drawing room math class at Bishop’s Hall, as the wind whipped snow across the leaded-glass windows over the bookshelves. Tell the unvarnished truth.

The unvarnished truth.

She recalled this kernel of advice once more in the afternoon, as a very nice couple named Jerri and Elmer Bergensen hauled her out of the ocean and onto their motorboat.

No matter how awkward it might be to do so, she would answer all of their questions with only that — the truth. Unvarnished.

“Are you all right?” asked Jerri.

Mrs. Kontos-Wu said that she was. She had simply felt it necessary to leave the company of the disgusting Romanians on a motor yacht called Ming Lei 3, whom she had joined on the pretext of discussing a business deal. Jerri made a sympathetic noise.

“Should we radio the coast guard?” asked Elmer. “Is this a — a criminal thing?”

“In international waters, maybe,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu. But she didn’t think the coast guard would carry any jurisdictional power there, so she said it didn’t make sense to call them.

“I only want to get home,” she said.

The next roster of questions concerned Mrs. Kontos-Wu’s life raft, which as they watched, Mrs. Kontos-Wu deflated and folded back into a satchel no bigger than a seat cushion. Mrs. Kontos-Wu explained that she’d bought the thing last year at Trekker’s Outfitting Co-Op in Manhattan. This made Jerri instantly curious. Jerri and Elmer were wearing matching TOC windbreakers and drank their tea from a stainless steel thermos with the TOC logo stamped prominently on the side. According to Elmer, Jerri bought her underwear there. TOC’s home page was book marked on both their web browsers. And neither of them recalled seeing a TOC self-inflating life raft that fit in a seat cushion. They would have bought two if they had. What gives? they both asked.

Mrs. Kontos-Wu explained that as she had a special relationship with a founding member of the co-op, she’d been given a lifetime subscription to the Iron Curtain Catalogue, which was delivered quarterly by encrypted email. The catalogue included a whole range of interesting equipment and weaponry decommissioned from the Soviet arsenal that the co-op deemed unsuitable for the Western market. Jerri and Elmer both laughed. They thought Mrs. Kontos-Wu was kidding.

The questions stopped for the moment, and Elmer went to the wheel, to guide the motorboat back to their club in Long Island. Jerri reached into the cooler to offer Mrs. Kontos-Wu a beer. She accepted it gratefully, and leaned back, watching the horizon grow from a blur to a line to the jagged hint of a skyline. Jerri offered her a second beer when she was finished, and when Mrs. Kontos-Wu declined, she shrugged and opened another for herself. Halfway through that beer, Jerri could no longer contain her curiosity. What kind of business, she asked, did Mrs. Kontos-Wu have with a bunch of filthy Romanians on a yacht called Ming Lei 3 anyway?

Mrs. Kontos-Wu leaned over the side of the boat, heaved once or twice and vomited a spray of thin yellow foam into the boat’s frothing wake.

Jerri helped her clean herself up, but wasn’t to be dissuaded, and asked again: What kind of business did Mrs. Kontos-Wu have with the Turks?

So Mrs. Kontos-Wu answered her truthfully.

This led to a lot of activity.

“Holy shit,” said Jerri, “you’re not kidding are you?”

“No,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu.

“You fucking monster,” said Jerri. She started to get up, and opened her mouth to yell. Mrs. Kontos-Wu stopped her by stuffing the neck of her empty beer bottle into Jerri’s mouth. She grabbed her hair for leverage to push the thing down Jerri’s throat. Elmer, at the boat’s controls the whole time, hadn’t even heard their conversation, which itself was far noisier and more animated than Jerri’s death throes. When Mrs. Kontos-Wu joined him at the controls, he asked her how Jerri was doing back there.

More truth. Elmer yelled and jumped out of his seat, and as he did so Mrs. Kontos-Wu took hold of his leg. Elmer sprawled to the deck, right next to Mrs. Kontos-Wu’s TOC rubber-raft seat cushion. Before he could get up, she took hold of the cushion, straddled Elmer with both knees on his arms, and held it over his face until he, too, was dead.

Mrs. Kontos-Wu gave herself a breather then, and squinted over the bow to the skyline and smiled. This was not just any skyline, but a Manhattan skyline in perfect twilight, the windows of its skyscrapers ignited with that come-hither glow that had first mesmerized her three decades ago. She knew them by name — the Chrysler building, the Empire State; Trump’s magnificent golden towers. The World Trade.

And of course, the Emissary. The Home. The Hall. Though its windows were dark, it gleamed with inner light amid its taller siblings.

Mrs. Kontos-Wu was near now. But was she near enough to paddle ashore? She would have to take the chance. She rummaged under the gunwale, where a small oar had been stowed, then rummaged again in the TOC cushion-raft for the spare CO2 cartridge. It only took a minute to hook it up to the raft’s valve. As the raft began to inflate, Mrs. Kontos-Wu felt a pang of guilt. She wasn’t a killer, Mr. Bishop had said.

The half-inflated raft slapped against the waves like the palm of an angry giant’s hand. Maybe, thought Mrs. Kontos-Wu, old Mr. Bishop had been wrong about her not being a killer. The dead Bergensens certainly made for compelling evidence to the contrary. So maybe — maybe there was a part of her that Mr. Bishop had not been able to apprehend so well during her years at Bishop Hall. Maybe that part was a killer.

Maybe the voice that spoke to her now — the one that was congratulating her for her quick and smooth reactions, her ability to make difficult and necessary decisions — maybe that voice was a truer one than Mr. Bishop’s ever was.