The Fuller Memorandum

“I’m required to stay within arm’s reach of the instrument at all times. And to remove it from your premises when you are not working on it.” The woman doesn’t smile; in fact, her expression is faintly nauseated.

“Why? To prevent me stealing it?”

“No, Mr. Dower: to prevent it from killing you.”

I’M BACK IN MY OFFICE AFTER THE BLOODY BARON MEETING. The committee have minuted that I am to try and think myself into Angleton’s shoes (ha bloody ha); the coffee mug is cooling on the mouse mat beside my cranky old HP desktop as I sit here, head in hands, groaning silently and wishing I’d paid more attention in history classes rather than staring at the back of Zoe McCutcheon’s head and thinking about—let’s not go there. (Sixteen- year-old male: fill in the blanks.) All this Russian stuff is confusing the hell out of me—why can’t we go back to worrying about Al Qaida or pedophiles on the internet or whatever it is that intelligence services traditionally obsess about?

There’s a pile of dusty manila folders sitting on my desk. Angleton said they were interesting, right before he went missing, and if that wasn’t a deliberate clue I’ll eat my pants. He’s a slithy old tove and I wouldn’t put it past him to have meant something significant, damn him. But all I’ve got is a list of hastily scrawled file reference numbers, pointers into the shelf positions documents are stored at in the stacks—nothing as simple as filenames, of course, that would be giving valuable information to the enemy. How like Angleton.

I pick up the first folder and open it. It contains a creased, dog-eared, and much folded letter, handwritten on paper that’s a weird size. I peer at the faded scrawl, trying to make head or tail of it. “Jesus, boss, what the hell . . . ?” Luckily I have a scanner with an automatic document feeder. I carefully feed the brittle pages to the computer, one at a time, twitching the software to maximum resolution. On the first page I pick up a reasonable high-contrast scan—there’s some ghosting, what looks like pale scribble showing through, as if the author tried to scrub something out—and zoom in. I puzzle out the date, first: October 11th, 1921. Then I turn the handwriting recognition software loose and sit back. After a while, it’s cooked and ready to read.

CLASSIFIED: S76/45

Dear John,

First of all, greetings from Reval! I sincerely hope this letter finds you experiencing a more clement climate than the Estonian autumn, which has clamped down in earnest this past week. Please give my best regards to Sonia.

I assume you have already received word through the wires about the execution of the Beast of Dauria last month. By all accounts he was given as fair a trial as the Reds could manage, and if even a tenth of the allegations leveled against him are true then I can’t see that they had any alternative but to shoot him. I have been paying special attention to the reports filtering out of Siberia about Semenov’s bandits, and Ungern Sternberg was by far the worst of a bad bunch. It was a beastly affair, and a bad end to a thoroughly bad fellow, and perhaps we should thank the Reds for ridding us of this monster.

However, his death leaves certain questions unanswered. I decided to visit his parents—not his father, but his mother and her husband, Sophie Charlotte and Baron Oskar Von Hoyningen-Huene. They live in Jerwakant, and although the weather is dismal—the snow is already lying four feet thick on the ground—I was able to arrange a weekend visit.

As you probably know, madness stalks the Ungern Sternberg line; the Baron’s father Theodor—once a keen amateur geologist, noted for his interest in unusual fossils—is in a sanatorium to this day. In my estimate Sophie Charlotte suffered considerably by proximity, for he deteriorated while they were still married; it is a difficult topic to raise in conversation, especially in light of the unfortunate fate of her son, and so I did not seek to disturb her, but made my observations indirectly.

The Hoyningen-Huene estate is a stately home that would grace any family of means, in any country. By winter it presents a fairy-tale face to the world, its steeply pitched roofs and turrets peaceful beneath a blanket of snow, an island of tranquility in the middle of the gloomy pine forest. But it is a fairy tale out of the Brothers Grimm, rather than the bloodless and bowdlerized fare that our parents’ generation sought to raise us on! This is a castle of the German aristocracy, descendants of the Teutonic Knights and servants of the Russian Empire until the late upheaval deprived them of the object of their loyalty. And it is an estate that has been cut down to size, thanks to the decrees of the Riigikogu relating to land reform and the rights of the peasants to the fruits of their labor.

Evgenia and I visited with the Hoyningen-Huenes last weekend, ostensibly to write a tub-thumper for the Guardian about the equitable settlement in Rapla County, which has not seen so much turbulence and persecution of the former rulers as other areas: I put it about that we would also like to see the countryside thereabouts, and talk to some of the local landlords about the recent changes. The Guardian’s status as an English newspaper outweighs its political reputation in the backwoods: I had no shortage of correspondents, mostly of the Indignant of Colchester variety so familiar to us from the letter columns.

On Sunday afternoon, after the obligatory morning visit to the chapel—which was very Lutheran in that manner that is peculiar to the Baltic territories, with gloomy danse macabre and carved skull heraldry above the bare wood pews, and do I need to add, unheated even in winter?—I had a chance to chat with the Baron, and by way of two or three glasses of schnapps the subject of the Prodigal rose to the surface.

“He has always been a disappointment to me, and a tribulation to his mother,” quoth Oskar Hoyningen- Huene. “This latest shame is but the final straw—luckily the final one—on the pyre of his depravity.” He sighed deeply at this point. “I tried to beat sense into him when he was young, you know. But he was always a wild one. Took after his father, and then there was the obsession with Shamanism, like the nonsensical garbage Theodor plagued my wife with before she divorced him.”

“Garbage?” I asked, digging. I intimated, indirectly, that I had been asked to prepare a column about his adoptive son, but had declined to do so out of respect for the recently bereaved.

Oskar snorted. “No son of mine,” he said, with cold deliberation, “would have done what that beast did. He wrote us letters, you know, boasting of it! Executing prisoners by quartering—tying their limbs to springy saplings. Mass hangings, stabbings, shootings. Said he was going to line the road to Moscow with Commissars and Jews, impaled every couple of yards—heaven knows I’ve got no time for yids myself, but he pledged to kill them all, to purify Russia and reinstate serfdom. Can you believe it? And there was other stuff, dark stuff. Absolutely disgusting.”

I asked what he did with the letters.

“I burned them!” he said indignantly. “All but a couple that Sophie refused to let me have. I hadn’t the heart to deprive her of . . . well. Memories.” He subsided into a sulky silence for a few minutes, but bestirred himself with the assistance of a fresh glass. “There were his father’s fossils, you know. I think that’s where the rot set in.”

“Fossils?” I asked.

“Rum things, never seen anything like them. I think Sophie left them in the boy’s room. He used to play with them when he was a tot, you know. I’d find him staring at the things. Thought he was going to grow up to be a geologist like his pa, which would have been no bad thing compared to how he turned out.”

Knowing of your interests, and learning that his mother had actually preserved the Prodigal’s bedroom— untouched! As if she expected her son to return!—I availed myself of an opportunity to look inside, in hope of getting some insight into his character.

(ENCLOSED: 8 faded black and white photographs of irregular pieces of rock, cleaved along fracture planes. Most of the pieces appear to be slate, although it is hard to be certain. The fossils resemble certain other samples referenced by codeword: ANNING BLUE SKULL.)

I think we’ve seen the like of these pieces before, haven’t we? “In those days, giants walked the Earth . . .”

I shall make indirect enquiries to see if it is possible to acquire Roman Von Ungern Sternberg’s boyhood fossil collection for the nation, and (if possible) his mother’s collection of letters. I shall also attempt to arrange a follow-up visit, although it is now unlikely to be practical until the spring thaw. (Chateau Hoyningen-Huene is somewhat isolated, and polite society does not travel much in winter: a premature visit would invite unwelcome