A Gentleman in Moscow

by Amor Towles

  Turning on his heels, the Count went to the head of the belfry and listened until the Bishop had descended the first two flights of stairs. Still in his stocking feet, the Count began to follow in the Bishop’s footsteps; but when he got to the fifth floor, he exited the belfry, sped down the hallway, and ran down the main staircase, just as Sofia had at the age of thirteen.

  As if he were still enshrouded in a mist, when the Count alit from the stairs, he ran down the hall and entered the executive offices without being seen by a soul; but upon reaching the Bishop’s door, he discovered it was locked. Even as he was taking the Lord’s name in vain, the Count slapped his hands against his vest with relief. For he still had Nina’s passkey in his pocket. Letting himself in, the Count relocked the door and crossed to the wall where the filing cabinets had taken the place of Mr. Halecki’s chaise. Counting from the portrait of Karl Marx, the Count placed his hand in the center of the second panel to the right, gave a push, and popped it open. Taking the inlaid box from its chamber, the Count set it on the desk and opened the lid.

  “Simply marvelous,” he said.

  Then sitting in the manager’s chair, the Count removed the two pistols, loaded them, and waited. He guessed that he had only a matter of seconds before the door would open, but he used them as best he could to moderate his breathing, lower his heart rate, and calm his nerves; such that by the time the Bishop’s key turned in the lock, he was as cold as a killer.

  So unanticipated was the Count’s presence behind the desk that the Bishop had swung the door closed before even noticing that he was there. But if every man has his strengths, one of the Bishop’s was that he was never more than a step away from petty protocol and an inherent sense of superiority.

  “Headwaiter Rostov,” he said almost peevishly, “you have no business being in this office. I insist that you leave immediately.”

  The Count raised one of the pistols.

  “Sit down.”

  “How dare you!”

  “Sit down,” the Count repeated more slowly.

  The Bishop would be the first to admit that he had no experience with firearms. In fact, he could barely distinguish between a revolver and a semiautomatic. But any fool could see that what the Count was holding was an antique. A museum piece. A curiosity.

  “You leave me no choice but to alert the authorities,” he said. Then stepping forward, he took up the receiver from one of his two telephones.

  The Count shifted his aim from the Bishop to the portrait of Stalin and shot the former Premier between the eyes.

  Shocked by either the sound or the sacrilege, the Bishop jumped back, dropping the receiver with a clatter.

  The Count raised the second pistol and leveled it at the Bishop’s chest.

  “Sit down,” he said again.

  This time, the Bishop obliged.

  With the second gun still trained on the Bishop’s chest, the Count now stood. He replaced the telephone receiver in its cradle. He backed around the Bishop’s chair and locked the office door. Then he returned to his seat behind the desk.

  The two men were quiet as the Bishop restored his sense of superiority.

  “Well, Headwaiter Rostov, it seems that by threat of violence, you have succeeded in keeping me against my will. What do you intend to do now?”

  “We’re going to wait.”

  “Wait for what?”

  The Count didn’t answer.

  After a few moments, one of the telephones began to ring. Instinctively, the Bishop reached for it, but the Count shook his head. It rang eleven times before it went silent.

  “How long do you expect to hold me here?” insisted the Bishop. “An hour? Two? Until morning?”

  It was a good question. The Count looked around the walls of the room for a clock, but couldn’t find one.

  “Give me your watch,” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me.”

  The Bishop removed the watch from his wrist and tossed it on the desk. Generally speaking, the Count was not in favor of relieving men of their possessions at gunpoint, but having prided himself on ignoring the second hand for so many years, the time had come for the Count to attend to it.

  According to the Bishop’s watch (which was probably set five minutes fast to ensure that he was never late for work), it was almost 1:00 A.M. There would still be a few of the hotel’s guests returning from late suppers, a few stragglers in the bar, the clearing and setting up of the Piazza, the vacuuming of the lobby. But by 2:30, the hotel would be quiet in every corner.

  “Make yourself comfortable,” said the Count. Then to pass the time, he began to whistle a bit of Mozart from Così fan tutte. Somewhere in the second movement, he became conscious of the fact that the Bishop was smiling dismissively.

  “Is there something on your mind?” asked the Count.

  The left upper corner of the Bishop’s mouth twitched.

  “Your sort,” he sneered. “How convinced you have always been of the rightness of your actions. As if God Himself was so impressed with your precious manners and delightful way of putting things that He blessed you to do as you pleased. What vanity.”

  The Bishop let out what must have passed in his household for a laugh.

  “Well, you have had your time,” he continued. “You have had your chance to dance with your illusions and act with impunity. But your little orchestra has stopped playing. Whatever you say or do now, whatever you think, even if it is at two or three in the morning behind a locked door, will come to light. And when it does, you will be held to account.”

  The Count listened to the Bishop with genuine interest and a touch of surprise. His sort? The Lord’s blessing that he could do as he pleased? While dancing with his illusions? The Count had no idea what the Bishop was talking about. After all, he had now lived under house arrest in the Metropol Hotel for over half his life. He almost smiled, on the verge of making some quip about the large imaginations of small men—but his expression instead grew sober, as he considered the Bishop’s smug assurance that all would “come to light.”

  His gaze shifted to the filing cabinets, of which there were now five.

  With the barrel of the pistol still trained on the Bishop, the Count crossed to the filing cabinets and pulled at the left uppermost drawer. It was locked.

  “Where is the key?”

  “You have no business opening those cabinets. They contain my personal files.”

  The Count went around to the back of the desk and opened the drawers. They were surprisingly empty.

  Where would a man like the Bishop keep the key to his personal files? Why, on his person. Of course.

  The Count came around the desk and stood over the Bishop.

  “You can give me that key,” he said, “or I can take it from you. But there is no third way.”

  When the Bishop looked up with an expression of mild indignation, he saw that the Count had raised the old pistol in the air with the clear intention of bringing it down across his face. The Bishop took a small ring of keys from a pocket and threw it on the desk.

  Even as they landed in a jangle, the Count could see that the Bishop had undergone something of a transformation. He had suddenly lost his sense of superiority, as if all along it had been secured by his possession of these keys. Picking up the ring, the Count sorted through them until he found the smallest, then he unlocked all of the Bishop’s filing cabinets one by one.

  In the first three cabinets, there was an orderly collection of reports on the hotel’s operations: revenues; occupancy rates; staffing; maintenance expenditures; inventories; and yes, discrepancies. But in the remainder of the cabinets, the files were dedicated to individuals. In addition to files on various guests who had stayed in the hotel over the years, in alphabetical arrangement were files on members of the staff. On Arkady, Vasily, Andrey, and Emil
e. Even Marina. The Count needed no more than a glance at them to know their purpose. They were a careful accounting of human flaws, noting specific instances of tardiness, impertinence, disaffection, drunkenness, sloth, desire. One could not exactly call the contents of these files spurious or inaccurate. No doubt, all of the aforementioned had been guilty of these human frailties at one point or another; but for any one of them the Count could have compiled a file fifty times larger that cataloged their virtues. Having pulled the files of his friends and dumped them on the desk, the Count returned to the cabinets and double-checked among the Rs. When he found his own file, he was pleased to discover that it was among the thickest.

  The Count looked at his watch (or rather the Bishop’s). It was 2:30 in the morning: the hour of ghosts. The Count reloaded the first pistol, tucked it through his belt, and then pointed the other at the Bishop.

  “It’s time to go,” he said, then he waved at the files on the desk with the pistol. “They’re your property, you carry them.”

  The Bishop gathered them up without protest.

  “Where are we going?”

  “You’ll see soon enough.”

  The Count led the Bishop through the empty offices, into an enclosed stairwell, and down two flights below street level.

  For all his persnickety command of the hotel’s minutiae, the Bishop had obviously never been in the basement. Coming through the door at the bottom of the stairs, he looked around with a mixture of fear and disgust.

  “First stop,” the Count said, pulling open the heavy steel door that led into the boiler room. The Bishop hesitated, so the Count poked him with the barrel of the gun. “Over there.” Taking a handkerchief from his pocket, the Count opened the small door in the furnace. “In they go,” he said.

  Without a word, the Bishop fed the flames with his files. Perhaps it was his proximity to the furnace, or the exertion of carrying the stack of dossiers down two flights of stairs, but the Bishop had begun to sweat in a manner that was distinctly out of character.

  “Come on,” said the Count. “Next stop.”

  Once outside the boiler room, the Count prodded the Bishop down the hall to the cabinet of curiosities.

  “There. On the lower shelf. Get that small red book.”

  The Bishop did as he was told and handed the Count the Baedeker for Finland.

  The Count nodded his head to indicate they were headed farther into the basement. The Bishop now looked quite pale, and after a few steps it seemed his knees might buckle beneath him.

  “Just a little farther,” coaxed the Count. And a moment later they were at the bright blue door.

  Taking Nina’s key from his pocket, the Count opened it. “In you go,” he said.

  The Bishop stepped in and turned. “What are you going to do with me?”

  “I’m not going to do anything with you.”

  “Then when are you coming back?”

  “I am never coming back.”

  “You can’t leave me here,” said the Bishop. “It could be weeks before someone finds me!”

  “You attend the daily meeting of the Boyarsky, comrade Leplevsky. If you were listening at the last one, you’d recall that there is a banquet on Tuesday night in the ballroom. I have no doubt that someone will find you then.”

  At which point, the Count closed the door and locked the Bishop into that room where pomp bides its time.

  They should get along just famously, thought the Count.

  It was three in the morning when the Count entered the belfry on the lobby floor. As he climbed, he felt the relief of the narrow escape. Reaching in his pocket, he removed the stolen passport and the Finnish marks and tucked them in the Baedeker. But when he turned the corner on the fourth floor, a shiver ran down his spine. For on the landing just above him was the ghost of the one-eyed cat. From his elevated position, the cat looked down upon this Former Person—who was standing there in his stocking feet with pistols in his belt and stolen goods in his hand.

  It has been said that Admiral Lord Nelson, having been blinded in one eye during the Battle of the Nile in 1798, three years later during the Battle of Copenhagen held his telescope to his dead eye when his commander raised the signal for retreat—thus continuing his attack until the Danish navy was willing to negotiate a truce.

  Though this story was a favorite of the Grand Duke’s and often retold to the young Count as an example of courageous perseverance in the face of impossible odds, the Count had always suspected it was a little apocryphal. After all, in the midst of armed conflicts, facts are bound to be just as susceptible to injury as ships and men, if not more so. But at the onset of the summer solstice of 1954, the one-eyed cat of the Metropol turned his blind eye upon the Count’s ill-gotten gains, and without the slightest expression of disappointment, disappeared down the stairs.

  Apotheoses

  Despite having gone to bed at four in the morning, on the twenty-first of June the Count rose at his usual hour. He did five squats, five stretches, and took five deep breaths. He breakfasted on coffee, a biscuit, and his daily fruit (today an assortment of berries), after which he went downstairs to read the papers and chat with Vasily. He lunched in the Piazza. In the afternoon, he paid a visit to Marina in the stitching room. As it was his day off, at seven o’clock he had an aperitif at the Shalyapin, where he marveled at the arrival of summer with the ever-attentive Audrius. And at eight, he dined at table ten in the Boyarsky. Which is to say, he treated the day much as he treated any other. Except that when he left the restaurant at ten, having told Nadja that the manager wished to see her, he slipped inside the empty coatroom in order to borrow the raincoat and fedora of the American journalist, Salisbury.

  Back on the sixth floor, the Count dug to the bottom of his old trunk in order to retrieve the rucksack that he had used in 1918 on his trek from Paris to Idlehour. As on that journey, this time he would travel only with the bare necessities. That is, three changes of clothing, a toothbrush and toothpaste, Anna Karenina, Mishka’s project, and, finally, the bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape that he intended to drink on the fourteenth of June 1963—ten years to the day after his old friend’s death.

  Gathering up his things, the Count paid one last visit to his study. So many years before, he had bid adieu to a whole household. Then a few years later he had bid adieu to a suite. Now, he was to bid adieu to a room that was one hundred feet square. It was, without question, the smallest room that he had occupied in his life; yet somehow, within those four walls the world had come and gone. With that thought, the Count tipped his hat to Helena’s portrait and switched out the light.

  At the same time that the Count was descending to the lobby, Sofia was concluding her performance on the stage of the Salle Pleyel in Paris. Rising from the piano, she turned to the audience almost in a state of wonder—for whenever Sofia performed, she so fully immersed herself in her playing, that she tended to forget there was anyone listening. But having been brought back to her senses by the sound of applause, she did not forget to gesture graciously toward the orchestra and her conductor before taking one final bow.

  Immediately offstage, Sofia received a formal congratulations from the cultural attaché and a heartfelt embrace from Director Vavilov. It was her finest performance yet, he said. But then the two men turned their attention back to the stage, where the violin prodigy was taking his place before the conductor. The hall grew so quiet that all assembled could hear the tap of the conductor’s baton. Then after that universal moment of suspension, the musicians began to play and Sofia made her way to the dressing room.

  The Conservatory’s orchestra performed Dvorak’s concerto in just over thirty minutes. Sofia would allow herself fifteen to reach the exit.

  Taking up her knapsack, she went straight to one of the bathrooms reserved for the musicians. Locking the door behind her, she kicked off her shoes and shed the beautiful blue dress that Marin
a had made. She took off the necklace that Anna had given her and dropped it on the dress. She donned the slacks and oxford shirt that her father had purloined from the Italian gentleman. Then looking into the small mirror above the sink, she took out the scissors that her father had given her and began to cut her hair.

  This little implement in the shape of an egret, which had been so prized by her father’s sister, had clearly been designed for snipping, not shearing. The rings cut into the knuckles of Sofia’s thumb and forefinger as she tried and failed to cut through lengths of her hair. Beginning to shed tears of frustration, Sofia closed her eyes and took a breath. There is no time for that, she told herself. Wiping the tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand, she began again—cutting smaller amounts of hair, working systematically around her head.

  When she was finished, she swept up the hair with her hands and flushed it down the toilet, just as her father had instructed. Then from a side pocket in the knapsack she took the little black bottle that the barber of the Metropol had once used to dye those first gray hairs that appeared in his customers’ beards. The cap of the bottle had a small brush attached to it. Taking in hand the strip of white hair that had virtually defined her appearance since the age of thirteen, Sofia leaned over the sink and carefully brushed it with the dye until it was as black as the rest of her hair.

  When she was done, she returned the bottle and the scissors to her pack. She took out the Italian’s cap and set it on the sink. Then she shifted her attention to the pile of clothes on the floor—and that is when she realized they had never considered her shoes. All she had was the elegant pair of high-heeled pumps that Anna had helped pick out for the Conservatory competition the year before. With little choice, she dumped them in the trash.

  She scooped up the dress and necklace to dispose of them as well. Yes, Marina had made the dress and Anna had given her the necklace, but she couldn’t take them with her—of that, her father had left no doubt. If for any reason she was stopped and her bag was searched, these glamorous feminine items would give her away. Sofia hesitated for a moment, then she stuffed the dress into the trash with the shoes; but the necklace, she slipped into her pocket.