When the Sparrow Falls Read online

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  To Iola, to Donnacha and to Aoife.

  My world.

  prologue

  I shall begin with the hanging of Leon Mendelssohn.

  There. It’s decided.

  My beloved wife is a writer, and she warned me that finding a place to begin is the hardest part of telling any story. In this, as in everything else, she has been proven correct. For a long time I was going to begin with the founding of the Caspian Republic, some ninety-four years ago, or with my own birth in that same misbegotten country three years later. But the first approach risked history (which I have no desire to write) and the second risked autobiography (which I assure you, you have no desire to read). So we will begin with a clear, bright, quite savagely cold day in September when poor old Mendelssohn was brought out into the courtyard before a crowd of party functionaries, union representatives and one journalist, and hanged from his neck while they watched and shuffled their feet against the cold.

  They were not the kind of people who flinched from violence. Every man and woman among them knew that the Caspian Republic was the guardian of something immeasurably precious, the last dying embers of the human race. And to protect its people from the Infernal Machine, the state—like any state—had to be willing to kill. The apparatchiks of the Caspian Republic attended shootings with the same regularity that the leaders of other, more decadent nations attended policy seminars. But a shooting is one thing: a hanging quite another. There hadn’t been a hanging in Caspian for decades, and a new gallows had to be constructed from scratch. It stood there in the courtyard, hideously new and appallingly clean. For some inscrutable reason it had been painted a bright sky blue as if to make sure that no one could look away from it, and it imposed itself on the vision of the onlookers with a horrible, irresistible vividness. There’s a special horror in seeing a brand-new gallows, just beginning its long, ghastly life.

  Mendelssohn was brought out into the cold morning air and his appearance shocked even those of the crowd who were in high places in State Security and its implacable rival, the Bureau of Party Security. These were men who, by the very nature of their work, were used to seeing the human body in states of extremity, and yet even they flinched when they saw the creature that was brought out with a guard supporting one arm and a priest the other.

  Mendelssohn had always been thin, but now those who saw him must have wondered where the muscles were that allowed him to feebly stagger out into the bright harsh sun which seemed to freeze rather than warm. His bright blue eyes now glinted from the depths of two cavernous sockets, and his once thick mane of brown hair was so wispy and brittle that it seemed as if a strong breeze might shave him to the scalp. His beard, too, had gone feral and grown over his lips, and the dried remains of his last meal clung there, a bowl of thin gray soup that he had drunk ravenously at the breaking of dawn. I have no reason to love any of the people who watched Leon Mendelssohn die that morning, but I will still assume that they felt pity for him. He was one of them, after all. Or had been. He had once been one of the leading intellectual lights of the party, one of the few among them who could still make the principles of the revolution feel noble and romantic, who could still sing the old songs in tune. He could write poetry, while the rest of them struggled with prose.

  All in the past now. He had fallen too far, and now there was nothing left to do but fall the last six feet.

  Standing on the gallows, Mendelssohn gave the crowd a sad little smile as the noose was lowered down over a neck scarcely thicker than the rope.

  “Don’t worry friends,” he said softly. “We’ll see each other soon.”

  The priest who had followed him out of his cell nodded approvingly, completely unaware just what Mendelssohn meant by these words and just as unaware of the personal jeopardy he placed himself in by agreeing with them.

  Why did they hang him? Because they loved him, and he had betrayed them.

  To simply shoot him would have been to render him one of the anonymous thousands. But this was Leon Mendelssohn. We kept him by our bedsides and read him to our children. His famous passage on the nature of love from Elijah’s Chariot had been read at half the weddings in Caspian for almost thirty years.

  His contribution to the life of the state was immense. His betrayal, indescribable.

  So the state hanged him, to make the point clear.

  Barbaric though it may seem, hanging can be the most merciful form of execution if performed competently. But the conditions were not favorable. No hanging had been performed in many decades, as I have said, and even if the noose had been expertly tied, Mendelssohn was simply too light. He hung there for perhaps two minutes, transforming before the eyes of the assembled crowd from a dignified, learned man to a panicked, choking animal, and lastly to an object, hanging silently in the wind.

  None of the party faithful said anything. Nobody wished to be a main character in this particular play. All were content to be extras.

  If you look at the pictures that were taken of the hanging, study the faces of those people: gray and lumpy and anonymous as a row of unwashed potatoes. But, standing among them you will see another man. In his late thirties but still with a youthful zeal on his features, bald, sallow skinned and with the eyes of a betrayed lover, burning with hatred and love gone septic.

  This was the journalist Paulo Xirau, and he was the only one of his profession permitted to attend the hanging. Journalists, as a rule, are not trusted in places like the Caspian Republic. Those that are have gone to great lengths to prove their loyalty. Paulo had most assuredly done that. In fact, looking back at my time in the Caspian Republic, I find myself asking: Did anyone believe as much as he did? In the party, in the principles the nation was founded on? Did anyone hate as much, believe as passionately, pledge their life and body and soul to the Caspian Republic as fervently as he did? I doubt it. Which is tragic, when you consider the truth about him.

  In my better moments, I pity him. I once met a theologian who described Hell as “a small room and enough time to think about how much you hate yourself.” Paulo Xirau entered that room a long time ago, and barred the door.

  Everyone there knew Xirau and Mendelssohn. They knew why Xirau was trusted and Mendelssohn had been killed. But even they, I hope, were shocked when he broke the line of anonymous party hacks to stand in front of the still-swinging body of Mendelssohn and fire a thick, yellow glob of sputum onto his chest. Then, as if he had exorcised himself of some malign spirit, he calmly strode out of the courtyard, stopping only to exchange a polite, wordless smile with some high-ranking party member or other.

  Nobody said anything. But that night, four members of the
Senior Administrative Council of the State Security Agency met in the parlor of Augusta Niemann, the StaSec Deputy Director. And there, with tongues loosened by Niemann’s still-impressive-if-dwindling stock of pre-embargo brandy, they bravely declared in whispered tones that, whatever about politics, just forgetting politics for one second, Xirau had crossed a line. Everyone agreed, each more vigorously than the last, that Mendelssohn had to die. But spitting on his corpse? Completely uncalled for.

  “Have you ever felt…,” Niemann began, and everyone in the room readied themselves to feel whatever it was that Niemann was about to ask them to feel, “… that there was something off about Paulo Xirau?”

  It is a rare gift, in a nation like the Caspian Republic, to be able to speak the truth. And Niemann’s guests received with even more gratitude than they had received her brandy the opportunity to plainly say at last that:

  Yes.

  God.

  There was something unquestionably, undeniably off about Paulo Xirau.

  1

  Contran

  kɒn/Tran/

  NOUN

  1. A procedure whereby a consciousness is transferred from an organic body to an artificial server, or vice versa, using the Sontang process.

  “Following her accident, a contran was carried out and she was safely uploaded.”

  VERB

  2. The act of digitally transferring one’s consciousness from the physical realm to a virtual environment or vice versa.

  “If I had the money, I’d contran myself to the Ah! Sea.”

  —Oxford English Dictionary, 5th Edition

  It was a month after they’d hanged old Mendelssohn that two bodies were found in a small, grimy bedroom in Old Baku. The neighborhood then, as now, was mostly Russian-speaking, which was why I was sent to investigate along with my superior, Special Agent Alphonse Grier. I had some (admittedly rusty) Russian which I had inherited from my mother, as well as nearsightedness and a long nose. Caspian was a nation of immigrants and Grier’s family were originally German, but he spoke only a particularly clipped and irritated dialect of English. For this reason, I was useful in investigations in Old Baku, and for that reason only. At least, according to Grier.

  Grier rapped on the door, which was opened by an old Russian man with a magnificent white beard and sad, rheumy eyes. He froze. He had called us, but he still froze at the sight of us. StaSec had that effect on people. ParSec had quite a different one. People did not freeze when they saw ParSec coming. They ran.

  “Jakub Smolna?” Grier barked.

  Smolna nodded nervously.

  “I am Special Agent Alphonse Grier with State Security, this is my colleague Agent South. Where are the bodies please?”

  Smolna looked at us both, his eyes darting from one to the other in silent panic.

  Grier gave an exasperated sigh and elbowed me in the ribs. With a jolt, I realized what was being asked of me and searched for the necessary Russian.

  “Tela,” was the best I could muster.

  Smolna nodded, and gestured for us to step inside.

  Grier did not like me, and was entirely within his rights. I had been a security agent in StaSec for twenty-nine years by then. I had only ever been promoted once, which Grier took to mean that I was considered politically unpopular, and I attended party meetings only the absolute minimum number of times that a person of my grade was required to, which Grier took to mean I was disloyal. For that reason, from the hour I had been assigned to him as his partner, he had regarded me like an old grenade found under his floorboards that could go off at any moment. I’ve found myself mellowing to Grier over the years. He had a family: a wife and two sons. That colors things. It’s easy to be kind, when ParSec aren’t perched on everyone’s shoulder. Everyone in Caspian had an invisible rope, tying them to someone else. If I had been pulled down for disloyalty, quite possibly he and his entire family would have been yanked along with me.

  I’ve just realized that I’ve been talking about Grier as if he’s dead. But he could still be alive. Stranger things have happened, after all. All kinds of people are still alive.

  The Paria twins, Yasmin and Sheena, had done their best with the room. Over the discolored patches of mold on the wall they had hung pictures of the two of them embracing and smiling big, honest, generous grins. To mask the damp scent of Smolna’s old carpet there were vases of flowers, and in the light of the many candles strewn about the mantelpiece and tables, I could imagine that the room might even have looked cozy and homelike.

  The twins themselves lay on the bed, facing each other. In Russian, I asked Smolna to identify the bodies, and he pointed to Yasmin, left, and Sheena, right. He didn’t seem entirely certain, however, and I couldn’t blame him.

  Yasmin’s eyes were closed, and Sheena’s were open, but other than that they were mirror images of each other. Yasmin’s face looked blissful and at peace. Sheena stared unblinkingly at a discolored patch of plaster in the wall. She had a tiny, perfectly round mole under her right eye, which I mentally filed away to distinguish her from her sister. The arrangement of their bodies suggested exactly what I imagine it was supposed to suggest, two sisters having a nap together after a long, hard day. Everything, from the way Sheena’s ankles were crossed to the way Yasmin had used her right hand as a pillow under her cheek, made it look like they were simply resting. They were both quite dead. Ascertaining the cause of death was why Grier and I were there: to see if this was murder, or something worse.

  Smolna was clearly uncomfortable being in the same room as the bodies, so I took him into the corridor and asked him some questions while Grier stood motionless in the center of the room, as if attempting to absorb the room’s mysteries via osmosis. Smolna knew little, or was pretending to know little, and I did not have the energy to badger him. I told him to wait in the kitchen and returned to the bedroom, and Grier and I got to work.

  Despite our mutual animosity we worked well together, in our way. Neither of us were young men, but my eyesight was better (at close range at least), so it was my job to examine the bodies while Grier rummaged through the personal effects of the sisters and tried to assemble a picture of their lives.

  Grier had a deep, booming voice and in another life might have made a good actor. He had presence and a love of being the center of attention. As I examined the bodies, Grier recited a monologue of his own composition: “Sheena and Yasmin Paria. Twenty-eight. Non-party. Born in Nakchivan. Twins. Traitors to their country and all mankind question mark.”

  “No signs of violence,” I murmured. “Pills perhaps? Suicide?”

  “Wouldn’t that be nice?” Grier answered. “For once? How did they afford it, South? If you had the money to do it, why would you live here?”

  “Perhaps they had the money because they lived here?” I offered. “Benefits of frugal living?”

  “Did Smolna say where they worked?” he asked.

  I shook my head as I examined Yasmin’s body, and the motion caused her limp hand to slip off her shoulder and gently land on that of her sister. Jakub Smolna was a landlord who respected the privacy of his tenants, and did not care how they made rent as long as they did.

  “Hostesses?” Grier asked, using the usual euphemism. I shook my head again. Smolna had said that the Parias did very occasionally have male visitors, but nothing to suggest there was anything entrepreneurial going on. It would not have been enough to live on. Sex was appallingly cheap these days, I reminded Grier.

  “You forget, South,” said Grier, in a distant sort of voice. “Twins. Well, enough of their bodies, where are their souls?”

  I stopped. On the back of Yasmin’s neck was a small, neatly applied patch of makeup, less than a centimeter squared. Whoever had applied it had clearly done so with great care but the makeup they had chosen was ever so slightly too light for Yasmin’s skin tone, drawing attention to that which they wished to conceal. With my thumb I smeared the makeup away, revealing a small, jagged puncture wound. It had been made by a d
evice, illegal even in its country of origin. This wound, I knew, was a well. Tiny in width, but so deep that it extended through her skull and right into the gray matter of her brain. And I knew that if I were to check Sheena’s neck I would find an identical wound.

  Grier had asked where their souls were.

  I turned to look at him and simply gave him a nod. Grier sighed, genuinely disappointed. “So,” he said. “Sheena and Yasmin Paria. Twenty-eight. Twins. Traitors to their country and all mankind. Period.”

  Without another word, he wearily trod out of the room, and I heard the stairs creak under his heavy frame as he headed out to the car to radio StaSec HQ.

  I turned to look at the two bodies on the bed.

  “Why did you do it?” I murmured to myself.

  I felt betrayed by what the Paria twins had done. This was not the first contran I had borne witness to, not the tenth or the hundredth or the five hundredth, but this one felt like a point of inflection. We were the last true human beings and our numbers were dwindling. I looked around the room and studied the pictures of the Parias as they were in life: young, vital and beautiful. In Sheena’s and Yasmin’s eyes I saw intelligence and joy and a love of life. I saw all the things that the nation could not afford to lose. When I turned to look at the bodies on the bed, I saw two steps further down the road to extinction.

  I had long, long ago given up on the idea that the Caspian Republic would ever live up to its ideals, to be a place where human beings could live in freedom and happiness. But I had not given up on the ideals themselves, and the Parias had. They had turned their backs on humanity, and surrendered to the Machine. I felt anger at their betrayal, but also pity. Could I really blame them for thinking that a better life was waiting for them in the Machine world? What life was there here for them, really?

  “Why did you do it?” I had asked their lifeless bodies. But, as I looked out the window at the gray, sulking streets of Ellulgrad, buzzing like a hive with hunger, poverty and violence, a treasonous question arose unbidden to my lips: