Babayaga

footsteps from above, and Vidot looked up to see two large men descending the stairs. Both were almost grotesquely oversized and muscular, looking like mutant stevedores or errant strongmen from some rustic circus. “Put him in the chair there. Be careful. We’ll use him for the next test,” said Bendix. They lifted their victim up and dragged him to a wooden chair by the wall, lashing him tightly to it by his arms and legs. Bendix stood to their side, smoking and watching. He seemed to be thinking through his next steps.
    “You can leave us alone now, I won’t be needing your help,” he said, going to fill a tall glass at the water cooler in the corner. The two large men nodded and went upstairs. Looking down at his victim, Bendix took a sip from the glass and then threw the rest of the water into Will’s face, thoroughly dousing Vidot. Will woke up with a shock, and the little man smiled a devilish grin. “My apologies, but you must understand, it is important to set the right tone,” he said, leaning over his prisoner. “Now, where should we begin? How about we start with you telling me all you know about Mademoiselle Polyakov?”
    Will shook his head. “I don’t know her.”
    The little man nodded and took a drag of his cigarette. “Lies never bother me. In my profession, lies are like a wave hello, or a child jumping joyfully to greet his papa as he comes home from work, they are simply another way to begin a happy conversation.” He picked up a chair and placed it directly across from Will, sitting so close they were only millimeters apart, though Will was a full head taller. “You know how strange it is?” asked Bendix. “I have spent so much of my lifetime searching for Zoya and Elga, such a very long time, so long that I had even given up. And now, when I am working on a completely different project, I find her, without even looking. It is enough to give me goose bumps, look. See?”
    He held out his arm. It was true, Vidot noticed, the man did have goose bumps. Will did not say anything. “I wonder, have you ever asked your friend Zoya her age?” Bendix asked, then smiled. “No, I suppose a true gentleman would never do such a thing. But I can tell you one thing, she is older than she looks. In fact, would you believe me if I told you she is older than me?”
    Will stayed silent.
    “I see.” Bendix got up and went over to the closet. “First you lie and now you don’t talk. That is fine. I don’t mind. So, how about I tell you all I know about this friend of yours while we get set up here.” From the depths of the closet he rolled out a large, odd-looking device. It was a tall, black, metal tripod composed of a padded arm that rested above a series of rubber hoses that were, in turn, wrapped in a serpentine fashion around a skeleton of steel pipes.
    “This was a long time ago,” said Bendix, “when I was working as a fresh-faced research assistant in Basel. Now, when I say a long time, it was almost fifty years ago, well before you were born. Like me at the time, my industry was budding young then too, molting free of its cultish alchemical past and burgeoning by leaps and bounds toward a bright and promising future. It was an electric, exciting time of discovery. My colleagues and I sensed opportunity everywhere. Most of my work was laboratory-based; this has always been my natural milieu. But my direct superior at the time, a brilliant man named Claude Huss, believed the next great leap forward could only be made by journeying beyond the antiseptic confines of the lab, out into the field, where we could delve into the myriad mysteries of the organic world. His plan—an ambitious one—was to catalog and distill the world’s most ancient remedies.” The little man paused to correct himself. “Not distill them literally, of course, but rather to identify, classify, and then methodically strip every remedy down to its most basic chemical components. Then we would rebuild each one scientifically, dispensing with the unnecessary elements and improving upon them wherever possible. As I said, it was an ambitious goal, but what ambition.”
    Bendix kept talking as he rolled the awkward, rattling contraption over to Will’s chair. “You see, Huss was an anthropological pioneer, really, and to him this field of research was of the utmost importance. My job was to accompany him on this safari, uncovering any and every source of ethnobotanical knowledge we could find. Huss and I