Special Assignments

by Boris Akunin

  'It's not done. In oriental etiquette that is too dandified for a secretary' said Fandorin. He turned Anisii's head to the left, then to the right and declared: 'There's nothing else for it; we'll have to make a eunuch of you.' He mixed up a little yellow grease and started rubbing it into Anisii's cheeks and under his chin -'to loosen the skin a bit and gather it into a fold'. He inspected the result and was satisfied: A genuine eunuch. Just what we need.'

  But that was not the end of Tulipov's torments. 'Since you're a Moslem now, the hair has to go' - the Court Counsellor passed sentence implacably.

  Already crushed by his transformation into a eunuch, Anisii bore the shaving of his head without a murmur. The shaving was carried out deftly by Masa, with an extremely sharp Japanese dagger. Erast Petrovich rubbed the smelly brown infusion into Anisii's naked cranium and told him: 'It shines like a cannon ball.' He took a little brush, tinkered with Anisii's eyebrows a little and approved his eyes: brown, with a slight slant, just right.

  He made Anisii put on the broad silk trousers and some sort of short, patterned woman's jacket, then the robe, and finally jammed a turban on his bald pate and unfortunate ears.

  Anisii walked across to the mirror with slow, reluctant steps, expecting to see some hideous monstrosity - and instead was pleasantly astonished: staring out at him from the bronze frame was a picturesque Moor - no sign at all of pimples or protruding ears. What a pity it was he couldn't stroll around Moscow like that all the time!

  'You're done,' said Fandorin. 'Just rub some make-up into your hands and neck. And don't forget your feet and ankles -you'll be wearing loose slippers ..."

  The gilded morocco sandals, which Erast Petrovich referred to so unromantically as slippers, caused Anisii problems, because he wasn't used to them. They were the reason why Anisii stood absolutely stock-still at the ball. He was afraid that if he moved from the spot one of them was bound to fall off - it had already happened on the staircase. When the lovely Georgian lady asked in French if Tarik-bei would care to dance a waltz with her, Anisii became flustered and, instead of following instructions and replying silently with an oriental bow, he whispered quietly: 'Non, merci, je ne danse pas.'

  Thank God, the other girls didn't seem to have caught what he muttered, or the situation would have become complicated. Tarik-bei was not supposed to understand a single white man's language.

  Anisii turned anxiously to his chief, who had been talking for several minutes to a dangerous guest, the British Indologist Sir Andrew Marvell, an exceedingly boring gentleman wearing spectacles with thick lenses. A little earlier, when Ahmad-Khan had been exchanging bows with the Governor-General on the upper landing of the staircase, Dolgorukoi had whispered excitedly (Anisii had heard snatches of the exchange): 'Why the devil did he have to turn up? ... And he would have to be an Indologist!... I can't turn him out, he's a baronet... What if he sees through your disguise?'

  However, to judge from the calm way in which the prince and the baronet were conversing, Fandorin was in no danger of being seen through. Anisii did not know English, but he heard he often-repeated words 'Gladstone' and 'Her Britannic Majesty'.

  When the Indologist blew his nose loudly into a handkerchief and walked away the prince summoned his secretary to him with a brief, imperious gesture of a swarthy, ring-bedecked hand and hissed to him: Wake up, Tulipov. And be more affectionate with her; don't look so surly. Only don't overdo it.'

  'More affectionate? Who with?' Anisii asked in an astonished whisper.

  'Why with that Georgian. Can't you see that it's her? The window-jumper.'

  Tulipov looked round and was struck dumb. It was her! Why hadn't he realised it straight away! Yes, the white-skinned young lady from the lottery now had swarthy skin, the hair that had been golden was black and woven into two plaits, her eyebrows had been painted out as far as her temples, and a delightful mole had somehow appeared on her cheek. But it was her, definitely her! And the sparkle in her eyes was exactly the same as that other time, just before her reckless leap from the window ledge.

  The bait had been taken! The grouse was circling round the decoy hen.

  Gently, now, Anisii, you mustn't go frightening him off. He pressed his hand to his forehead, then to his heart, and bowed to the starry-eyed charmer with true oriental gravity.

  CHAPTER 6

  Platonic Love

  But was he a charlatan? - that was the first thing that had to be checked. The last thing he needed was to bump into some professional colleague on tour, come to pluck the plump Moscow geese. An Indian rajah, the Shakh-Sultan emerald -there was more than a whiff of the operetta about all these oriental delights.

  He had checked. And the very last person His Bengali Highness resembled was a crook. Firstly from close up it was immediately obvious that he came from a genuine royal blood line: from his bearing, his manners, from the benevolent languor of his gaze. Secondly Ahmad-Khan had struck up such a highly intellectual conversation with 'Sir Andrew Marvell', the well-known Indologist who had happened so opportunely to be in Moscow - all about the internal politics and religious confessions of the Indian Empire - that Momos had been afraid he might give himself away. The prince's polite question about his opinion of the practice of suttee and whether it reflected the true spirit of Hinduism had obliged him to change the subject to the health of Her Majesty Queen Victoria, feign a sudden attack of sneezing and beat a hasty retreat.

  But the most important thing was that the emerald shone with such seductive conviction that not a trace of doubt remained. How he longed to detach that glorious green cobblestone from the noble Ahmad-Khan's turban, saw it up into eight substantial gemstones and sell off each one for something like twenty-five thousand. Now that would be just the job!

  Meanwhile Mimi had been working on the secretary. She said that although Tarik-bei was a eunuch, that didn't stop him shooting keen glances into a lady's decollete, and he was clearly not indifferent to the female sex in general. Mimi could be trusted in such matters; there was no way to fool her. Who could say how eunuchs felt about such things? Perhaps the natural desires never went away even when the means of satisfaction had been lost?

  The plan for the forthcoming campaign, which in his own mind Momos had already dubbed the 'Battle for the Emerald', had taken shape of its own accord.

  The turban was always on the Rajah's head. But surely we could assume that he removed it when he went to bed?

  Where did the Rajah sleep? In the mansion on the Sparrow Hills. That meant Momos had to go there.

  The Governor-General's villa was intended for use by honoured guests. There was a wonderful view of Moscow from that spot on the hills, and there were not so many idle onlookers to annoy the visitors. It was good that the house was rather out of the way. But the villa was guarded by a gendarme post, and that was bad. Clambering over walls in the night and then hightailing it to the shrilling tones of a police whistle was in bad taste, not Momos's style.

  Ah, if only the secretary weren't a eunuch, the whole thing could not have been simpler. The Georgian princess, driven to desperation by her passion, would have paid Tarik-bei a secret night-time visit and, once she was in the house, she would have found some way of wandering into the Rajah's bedroom to see whether the emerald might be persuaded to leave that boring turban in search of new adventures. After that it would be a purely technical matter, and Momos knew all about that sort of thing.

  But this line of thought, entirely speculative as it was, set a black cat's sharp claws scraping at Momos's heart. For an instant he imagined Mimi in the embraces of a handsome, broad-shouldered young fellow with a luxuriant moustache who was no eunuch but quite the opposite, and he did not like what he saw. It was nonsense, of course, sentimental drivel, but - would you believe it! - he suddenly realised that he would not have gone down this most simple and natural route, even if the secretary's means had been a match for his desires.

  Stop! Momos jumped off the desk on which he had been sitting until that moment, dan
gling his legs (his thoughts moved more nimbly like that) and walked across to the window. Stop-stop-stop ...

  The coaches and fours, and the sleighs, and the carriages on their spiked winter wheels were pouring down Tverskaya Street in an unbroken stream. Soon spring would arrive, bringing slush. It was Lent, but today the sun still shone without warming, and the main street of Moscow looked smart and full of life. It was four days since Momos and Mimi had moved out of the Metropole and into the Dresden. Their suite was a little smaller, but it had electric light and a telephone. They couldn't have stayed in the Metropole any longer. Sliunkov had come to see him there several times, and that was dangerous. That little fellow was too unreliable altogether. With a responsible, in fact secret job like that, he still dabbled at cards, and didn't even know his own limits. What if the ingenious Mr Fandorin or some other chief of his were to take hold of him by the lapels and give him a good shaking? No, God looked after those who looked after themselves.

  Anyway the Dresden was a very fine hotel, and located exactly opposite the Governor's palace, which was like home to Momos now, after the business with the Englishman. It gave him a warm feeling just to look at it.

  The previous day he'd seen Sliunkov in the street and deliberately moved up close to him, even nudged him with his shoulder, but the clerk still hadn't recognised the Marseilles merchant Antoine Bonifatievich Darioux, a long-haired dandy with a waxed moustache, as Momos. Sliunkov had simply muttered, 'Pardon,' and trudged on, hunched over under the powdery falling snow

  Stop-stop-stop, Momos told himself again. He had an idea: why couldn't he kill two birds with one stone as he usually did? -or, to be more precise, kill the other man's bird and keep his own away from the stones; or to put it another way, have his cake and eat it. Yes that was exactly the way it would be: innocence preserved and capital acquired.

  And why not? - it could very well work! And things were coming together well. Mimi had said that Tarik-bei understood a little French, and 'a little' was exactly the amount that was required.

  From that moment on the operation had a new title. It was called 'Platonic Love'.

  He knew from the newspapers that after dinner His Indian Highness liked to stroll along the walls of the Novodevichy Convent, where the winter amusements and rides were laid out. There was ice-skating, and wooden slides, and all sorts of sideshows - plenty for the foreign visitor to look at.

  As we have already said, it was a genuine Shrovetide day -light and bright with a touch of frost - and so, after strolling round the frozen pond for an hour, Momos and Mimi were chilled through. It wasn't so bad for Mimi. Since she was playing a princess, she was wearing a squirrel-skin coat, with a pine-marten hood and a muff - only her cheeks were ruddy and flushed. But Momos was frozen through to the bone. For the good of the cause he had decked himself out as an elderly oriental chaperone, gluing on thick eyebrows that ran together across the bridge of his nose, deliberately leaving his upper lip unshaved and blackening it and sticking an extension like the bowsprit of a frigate on his nose. His headscarf, with the plaits of false hair streaked with grey dangling from under it, and the short rabbit-fur jacket over his long beaver coat did little to keep him warm; his feet were freezing in their soft felt shoes, and still the damned Rajah did not show up. To amuse Mimi and avoid getting bored himself, from time to time Momos intoned in a soaring contralto with a Georgian accent: 'Sofiko, my darling little chick, your old nurse is absolutely frozen,' or something else of the same kind, and Mimi giggled and stamped her chilly feet in their pretty scarlet boots.

  His Highness eventually deigned to arrive. Momos spotted the closed sleigh upholstered in blue velvet from a distance. There was a gendarme in a greatcoat and dress-uniform helmet with a plume sitting on the box beside the coachman.

  The prince, wrapped in sables, strolled unhurriedly along beside the skating rink in his tall white turban, casting curious glances at the amusements of these northerners. Trotting along behind His Highness was a low, squat figure in a sheepskin coat that reached down to the ground, a shaggy round cap and a yashmak - presumably the devoted wet nurse Zukhra. The secretary Tarik-bei, in an overcoat of woollen cloth, beneath which his white shalwars could be seen, kept falling behind, gaping eagerly at a gypsy with a bear, or stopping beside a man selling hot spice tea. The pompous gendarme with the grey moustache brought up the rear, in the role of guard of honour. That was helpful: he could take a good look at the ladies who would come visiting that night.

  The public showed tremendous interest in the colourful procession. The simpler among them gaped open-mouthed at the infidels, pointing their fingers at the turban and the emerald and the old oriental woman's covered face. The respectable, washed public behaved with greater tact, but also evinced great curiosity. Momos waited until the people of Moscow had had their fill of ogling 'the Indians' and returned to their former amusements, then gave Mimi a gentle nudge in the ribs: it was time.

  They set off towards the others. Mimi curtseyed lightly to His Highness and he nodded graciously. She beamed joyfully at the secretary and dropped her muff. The eunuch did what he was supposed to do and rushed to pick it up. Mimi also squatted down and she and the oriental bumped foreheads in a most charming fashion. Following this small, entirely innocent incident, the length of the procession quite naturally increased, with the prince still striding along at the front in regal solitude, followed by his secretary and the princess, and then the two elderly eastern women, with the sniffling, red-nosed gendarme bringing up the rear.

  The princess twittered away in lively French and kept losing her footing all the time, providing a pretext for clutching at the secretary's arm as often as possible. Momos tried to make friends with venerable Zukhra, attempting to express his sympathy to her in gestures and exclamations. Zukhra, however, proved to be a genuine virago. The bitch refused to get to know him and merely cackled from under her chaddar and waved her stubby-fingered hand about, as if to say: Go away, I keep to myself. A genuine savage, in fact.

  Mimi and the eunuch, on the other hand, were getting along like a house on fire. Momos waited until the oriental finally mellowed and offered the young lady permanent support in the form of his crooked arm and decided that was enough for the first time. He caught up with his young ward and intoned sternly: 'Sofiko-o, my little dove, it's time to go home for tea and bread-cakes.'

  The following day 'Sofiko' was already teaching Tarik-bei how to skate (for which the secretary demonstrated quite outstanding ability). In general, the eunuch proved quite compliant: when Mimi lured him behind a fir tree and seemingly by accident set her plump lips right in front of his brown nose, he didn't shy away, but obediently kissed them. Afterwards she told Momos: 'You know, Momochka, I feel so sorry for him. I put my arms round his neck, and he was trembling all over, the poor thing. It's really atrocious to mutilate people like that.'

  'The Lord gave the cussed cow no horns,' the callous Momos replied flippantly. The operation was set to take place the following night.

  During the day everything went as smooth as butter: driven insane by passion, the princess completely lost her head and promised her platonic admirer that she would pay him a visit during the night. In promising, she emphasised the exalted nature of her feelings and the union of two loving hearts in the highest sense, with no crude vulgarity. She could not tell how much of this the oriental understood, but he was clearly overjoyed at the prospect of the visit and explained in broken French that he would open the garden gate at precisely midnight. 'But I shall come with my nanny' Mimi warned him. 'I know what you men are like.'

  At that Tarik-bei hung his head and sighed bitterly. Mimi felt so sorry for him she almost cried.

  That Saturday night there was a moon and stars, perfect for platonic love. After letting his coachman go outside the gates of the Governor's suburban villa, Momos took a look around. Ahead of him, beyond the mansion, was the steep drop to the River Moscow; behind him stood the fir trees of the Sparrow Park; to his right and h
is left he could see the dark silhouettes of expensive dachas. They would have to leave on foot afterwards: through the Acclimatic Garden to the Knacker's Quarter. There they could hire a troika at the inn on the Kaluga road at any time of day or night. And then a sleigh ride with bells jingling along the Kaluga highroad! Never mind the biting frost - the emerald would be warm against his heart.

  They gave the secret knock at the gate and the little door opened immediately. The impatient secretary was obviously already standing there, waiting. He gave a low bow and beckoned for them to follow. They walked through the snow-covered garden to the entrance of the house. The three gendarmes on duty in the vestibule were drinking tea with hard, dry bread rings. They gave the secretary and his nocturnal visitors a curious glance; the sergeant-major with the grey moustache grunted and shook his head, but he didn't say anything. What business was it of his?

  In the dark corridor Tarik-bei pressed a finger to his lips and pointed somewhere upstairs, then folded his hands together, put them against his cheek and closed his eyes. Aha, that meant His Highness was already sleeping - excellent.

  The drawing room was lit by a candle and smelled of some kind of oriental incense. The secretary seated the chaperone in an armchair, set a bowl of sweetmeats and fruits in front of her and muttered something incomprehensible, but it was not hard to guess the significance of his request.

  Ah, children, children,' Momos purred placidly, and wagged a finger in warning. 'But no nonsense, mind.'

  The enamoured couple took each other by the hand and went out through the door and into the secretary's room to devote themselves to their exalted, platonic passion. He'll slobber all over her, the Indian gelding, Momos thought with a frown. He sat and waited for a while, to give the eunuch time to get carried away. He ate a juicy pear and tried some halva. Right, that should be long enough.