by Pavel Kornev
I turned on the water, stuck my fallen-burned fingers under the taught stream and caught my breath with relief. After that, I lowered my arms into the ice bath and spent some time standing in that position, feeling the burning sensation overcome by acute bone pain.
Good!
Rolling my sleeves back down as I walked, I headed for the bedroom, took my police-issue Roth-Steyr from my bedside table, stuck it into its holster and clipped it to my belt. I did not want to carry anything too heavy if I didn't have to, but all rules both written and unwritten indicated that my pistol was to have been returned to the armory the day before yesterday, so the earlier I did it the better.
"I'm going to have a peek at the grocer's," I warned my butler, having come down into the entryway, "if I buy anything, I'll send it by errand boy."
"As you say, Viscount," Theodor nodded.
Simply nodded, taking what he'd heard into account, and that was all.
To be honest, he sometimes made me feel beside myself. Not alive, not dead – how did Theodor occupy his days? Why had he still not yet left this world? What was holding him here? The fact that he gave his word to my parents? Or was it the guilt of feeling indebted? It could even have just been a banal fear of death.
I shook my head, took out my tin and tossed back a mint sugar drop.
At that moment, Elizabeth-Maria came out of the kitchen, noticed the tin of sweets and wondered:
"May I, Leo?"
"Be my guest."
The girl popped a candy into her moth, rolled it around with her tongue and admitted with surprise:
"It's tasty," then melted into a malignant smile: "Do you have any blood flavored ones?"
"Curses!" I exclaimed and jumped out onto the street, slamming the door behind me thunderously. At the gates, I raked a thick plug of correspondence from my post box, primarily bills, split the envelopes between my pockets and walked down through the Italian quarter. I walked into a grocer's stall on the outskirts, left the owner a list of purchases and money, then called on the local baker, and after his cinnamon-scented shop, I headed for a two-story estate with a new banner on the side reading "Colonial Goods."
After pushing the door aside, I stepped across the threshold to the melodic ring of a bell and greeted the lanky black-haired boy on the other side of the counter.
"Good morning, Antonio!"
"Mr. Orso!" the roguish-looking clerk lit up, wiped his palm on a once-white apron and bent down over the counter toward me. "It's been some time since we've seen one another!"
I squeezed his outstretched hand and inquired:
"How's business?"
Antonio could only smile carelessly in reply:
And in fact, the owner of this little shop had no cause to complain about lack of customers: goods from both Indias, the South-African colonies and the New World were in unceasing demand.
"What type of tea do you recommend?" I wondered, pondering over the glass jars of spices, salt, sugar, coffee beans and tea leaves sitting on the shelves.
"Tea again?" Antonio winced disapprovingly and got a bottle of grappa out from under the counter. "Would you take a small glass?"
"No thank you," I refused.
The trader filled a glass, poured the grape liquor down his throat and shook his head. He begrudgingly hid the bottle under the counter and sighed:
"Leopold, I'd think you were a Londoner! Tea, tea and only tea! Try some coffee!"
"Coffee is bad for the heart and it'll make your teeth dark. That's what they say in all the magazines."
"Nonsense!" Antonio objected. "I'd think you were an Italian!"
"Antonio," I sighed, "but you know I'm not Italian."
"Enough bullshitting! Leo, look at yourself! You and I could be brothers!"
A certain similarity between us could in fact be seen, but the fact remained that there were no Italians among my ancestors. It was just that, my grandfather, on being ennobled, had decided that Piotr Orso sounded nicer than Piotr Medved and later, that same Russian officer in the Imperial army took an Irish woman as a bride, and into the world came Boris Orso, my father.
His mother's side of the family had old aristocratic origins, going back to the first days of the rise of Atlantis, which meant that my family genealogy contained more than enough Romans.
"Sure, we may as well be brothers!" I laughed uncontrollably. "I need tea! And don't even offer me any of that fancy stuff from the Celestial Kingdom. Regular black tea will do just fine."
My grandfather had given me my love of tea; my father preferred vodka.
"Black tea?" Antonio sighed, scratching the back of his curly-haired head in deepest thought. "What about some high-mountain Ceylon? Or some Kenyan? The Kenyan is even better – it might even be – the last harvest."
"Egypt?" I guessed.
"Sure, but if the war starts, there will be no one around to harvest it," Antonio sighed, placing two jars in front of me and removing their fast-tightened tops to allow me to take a whiff.
"Ceylon," I decided a little while later. "As usual."
The trader placed some heavy weights in one of the scale's baskets, put a little paper bag on the other and set about filling it with the heavy tea.
"Four and a half francs," Antonio announced the price, setting the measuring spoon aside.
"That's for how much?" I clarified.
"One pound."
"One pound? Antonio, what time-period do you live in? Ounces, inches, pints! That's all last century! Believe me, Imperial Measurement Units are much more convenient."
"Oh, that garbage!" the trader waved it off. "I don't want to fill my head up with difficult calculations! My grandfather weighed in pounds, my father weighed in pounds, and I, Antonio..."
"Hold on! But isn't the price on the jar shown per kilogram?" I interrupted the man. "Ten and a half francs per kilogram of tea, isn't that right?"
"Drop it, Leo! It's too hard for me!"
"What are you talking about, Antonio?! It's actually quite simple. The length of the equator is forty thousand kilometers; thus one meter is..."
"And why forty thousand exactly?"
"Why not? The important thing is having a standard."
"Leopold," Antonio sighed hopelessly, "enough of the brain-busting! Tell me straight: what do you want?"
One pound of tea wasn't four and a half francs, just four francs twenty centimes, but it wouldn't have been polite for me to nickel and dime the man, so I didn't point out the inaccuracy in his calculations, just asked:
"Would you please weigh me out a half kilo."
The trader rolled his eyes, muttered an indecipherable curse under his breath, changed out one weight for another, and filled the bag up with his tea-measuring spoon.
"Are you satisfied?" he asked, lining up the arrows.
"So I pay four seventy-five, right?"
"Yes!"
With a smile, I threw a ten-franc note on the counter, and when Antonio began taking my change from the cash register, I asked quietly:
"You don't have anything else to offer me?"
The trader shot his attentive gaze over me, and just as quietly asked:
"How much?"
"One."
Then Antonio laid a bar before him in a plain paper wrapper and quickly covered it with a five-franc coin. I carelessly swept the change into my pocket and warned him:
"Give the tea to Mario. He will send an errand-boy."
"Deal. Good luck, Leopold!"
"Have a nice day, Antonio."
Exiting onto the street, I slid the loop of my dark glasses down to the very tip of my nose and took a careful look around. I didn't notice anything suspicious, so I freed the brown bar from its wrapper and popped it into my mouth.
Bliss! A pure, not at all cloudy bliss!
Curses, how little a person needs to be happy!
Just a couple grams of chocolate! Yes, chocolate. The contraband delicacy, the trafficking of which, until recently threatened a huge fine and, for some,
a prison sentence.
Chocolate itself didn't contain anything illegal, but by some quirk of fate, the cacao tree was found exclusively in territory under Aztec control, and any trade with these blood-thirsty savages was intercepted immediately after combat measures started in Texas again. In the Old World, chocolate trees were cultivated in sub-equatorial Africa, but candy and tobacco products made in Great Egypt had been forbidden for two decades already.
I stood still for some time, enjoying the taste of the treat, then I cast off the stupor and stepped off toward the nearest steam-trolley station. It was a money-saving move, but if I went everywhere on foot, I'd have been sewing patches into my soles and fixing my heels until I was frail. Footwear was not issued by the police, after all.
2
THE STEAM-TRAM LINE that went nearest the Italian quarter traced the outlines of the factory outskirts; in the windless weather, the smoke climbed along the earth in an impenetrable canopy, forcing me from time to time to hack and cough in an attempt to clear my raw throat and clean my watering eyes. And today, the street was covered by a stretched-out gray haze; the factory buildings got lost in it, as if in a cloud, and only their heightened smoke-stacks could be seen, looming somewhere above me like ships that had sunk in shallow water. Along the rails, there stretched-out warehouses and storage facilities, and only when we turned out to the river to the sound of steel wheels were they replaced with residential houses.
Right after Brown Bridge, the steam tram sharply decreased its pace, from then on crawling at the speed of an unhurried snail.
And that was no wonder – any large city is defined by its orderless, if not to say chaotic street traffic, and New Babylon was no exception in that regard. Carriages with arrogant drivers and clueless pedestrians, unhurried carts and racing self-propelled carriages, people on horseback and bicyclists filled the streets, scurrying from side to side and stepping on one another's toes, creating small jams where there was nothing to warn of their appearance.
And right now, when a wagon driver was thrown off by an unforeseen delay, he pulled on the handle under the ceiling, making a rolling hum sound. The horse next to him got startled by the steam-trolley and hit its cart on the carriage next to it. The driver of the impacted carriage gave a spirited flick of his switch to the nag. Its owner couldn't bear someone treating his horse that way and replied with whip strike on the man.
A squabble ensued. A pair of horse-riding constables set off for the small disturbance.
I looked with sadness at the plugged up transport artery "clot" and hopped over to the bridge, having made up my mind to go the rest of the way on foot. I passed the steam trap, walked in front of a pair of horses tied to a carriage and walked along the sidewalk, elbowing my way through the crowd of onlookers. I spotted a public thoroughfare, weaved under the ropes hanging low from the weight of the wet laundry, and soon came out onto a side ally that looked deserted and calm.
However, on the ground, it became apparent that it was nothing of the sort!
"Hey mister, wanna buy a watch?" shouted out a boy, rummaging through a trash heap.
I walked by in silence.
"I'll sell it cheap!" The little beggar scurried after me, waving a belt of wristwatches.
"Not interested," I tossed out curtly, not reducing my pace.
Watch theft, which thieves had begun to live on immediately after the invention of the pocket watch, had received a second birth as soon as the fashion for wristwatches came around. And counting on catching someone with such a primitive trap was something only a jackass urchin would do.
"They're silver!" said the grubby boy, not even considering backing down, holding a rather large cap on his head, which was slipping around as he ran, sometimes over his eyes, and sometimes over the back of his head.
"Stop it!" I ordered, and two shadows immediately stepped out of a back alley to meet me.
"You're being rude, mister!" a meaty, broad-shouldered boy of imposing dimensions reproached me in a cracking voice.
"That's not nice," agreed a different boy who, while not as strong, was clearly somewhat more imaginative, in that he reinforced his words with a wag of his weighty finger. "And he's wearing glasses..."
My hand outstretched, I caught the boy who had been flittering around my legs by the collar, gave him a kick in the butt and sent him back to his partners in crime. He didn't even have time to squeal in surprise. He simply threw up his hands and sprawled out in the dirt.
"What a creep!" the husky one shouted, but in an instant bit his tongue as soon as my service whistle appeared in my hand. "Well well..."
A sharp whistling shot through the alley and the under-aged robbers blew away like wind.
I didn't dally on the dead little street either; the locals here weren't fond of police, and some do-gooder could easily toss a basin of soapy water out the window at me, or dump out a trash can on my head. And I really didn't need to go tempting fate again. Some underage little animals might stick you in the back with a knife with the same ease their dads displayed sucking down a beer over lunch.
New Babylon was a harsh city.
I knew that not only from the rumors.
NOT FORGETTING TO WATCH my back and sides, I walked a few blocks and, as soon as I was able, turned onto a lively boulevard. From there I went down an imperceptible passageway between buildings with walls burning out in the sun. The winding narrow little street was snaking constantly, sometimes curving around high-fenced yards, sometimes bending in arcs, and occasionally becoming a downright foot-path, dirt and all, but in the end it led me to a neighborhood populated by natives of Greece and the Southern Balkans.
Next to the little shops and tavernas on the first floors, there were dried out stools right in the road. In places, they had barrels and folding tables pushed up to them. Rarely, I would see housewives walking the opposite direction, usually weighed down by a bunch of young children. Hiding here and there in the shadows from the midday heat, there were gray-haired old geezers.
The rest of the neighborhood seemed to have died out. Empty tables were collecting dust under faded storefront banners. Chairs placed against the walls were anticipating the coming of evening, and windows were darkened with pulled-down blinds. Most establishments here opened their doors only with the coming of evening and worked all night straight through to the last client. Most, but not all.
The Charming Bacchante cabaret was hidden on the narrow little embankment of an unnamed canal. Under its awning, there were a few bohemian-looking gentleman sitting and enjoying themselves. Some, with deliberately bored looks on their faces, were smoking cigarettes and drinking strong black coffee; others, despite the fairly early hour, had chosen absinthe instead.
Art people, what good are they?! Bohemians!
But the lank Chinese man sitting on his haunches near the next building over had absolutely nothing to do with the creative workshop. The tools of his trade were not a brush and paints, but gloves and bludgeons.
I knew him. He worked as an enforcer for Mr. Chan the moneylender.
When I showed up, the man stood to his feet and, probing his fabric cap as he walked, stomped out to meet me without particular hurry. After taking a few steps, he slapped a shabby hat on his head and, without the slightest accent, said:
"Mr. Chan wants his money."
"He'll get it," I assured the enforcer.
"Time's up."
"I've had problems. Mr. Chan will get everything to the last centime soon."
"Mr. Chan's patience isn't unlimited," the cutthroat warned, giving a mockingly flippant bow and walking off down the embankment.
I followed him with my gaze and shook my head.
Getting into debt with a Chinese moneylender was first-order idiocy, but how was I to know that this sweet old man would start clambering for my part of the family fortune with such desperate tenacity?
I shrugged my shoulders in annoyance, walked between the tables and flung open the cabaret door. A floor-cleaner turn
ed and opened her eyes in amazement; I placed my pointer finger to my lips and told her:
"Not a sound."
The lady of indeterminate age, wearing a recently-washed robe, nodded obediently and turned back to her former occupation; a security guard took a hesitant peek out of his room, but, thinking correctly, decided not to interfere in the quarrels of the illustrious and ducked back inside.
I went calmly up the wide stairway with carved bannisters to the second floor, walked to the end of the corridor and, without knocking, flung open the door of the rented apartment.
In the room, a thick dimness reigned, and wisps of aromatic smoke were lingering. All the windows were drawn with thick curtains, and only the edge of one window had been left slightly uncovered just so the dim light would fall on the book in the hands of an imposing gentleman of thirty years with a sand-colored mustache and a carefully-groomed beard. The dressers and desk in the far corner got lost in the shadows.
The person whose apartment this was tore himself from the pipe of the hookah sitting on the floor when I appeared, took a breath and said in a well-delivered baritone:
"Leopold, my friend, I wholeheartedly share your annoyance, but allow..."
I was in no mood to allow him anything.
"You'd better shut up!" I demanded, cutting off his explanation mid-way through.
"That is extremely rude on your part!" Albert Brandt feigned indignation. The man was a talented poet, a good friend and a lousy scum-bag. "Leopold, your actions..."
I cast the pillow that happened to be under my hand at him and repeated:
"That's enough!" Then I lied down on the ottoman and stared at the ceiling. "When you talk like that, I want to pop my own ear drums."
The poet gave a rollicking laugh, cleared his throat and said, back in his normal voice, gruffly and with a slight strain:
"I always forget you've lost your hearing." His eyes went dim, losing their luster in the semi-darkness of the apartment like two swamp fires.
Albert was talented not only as a composer of poems; when he began to recite his verses, the impressionable ladies fell into ecstasy from just the sound of his captivating voice. That was how his natural talent was revealed, his illustrious talent.