by Boris Akunin
“Sister Pelagia, a nun.”
The reaction to this seemingly inoffensive introduction was unexpected. The stranger flung Salakh to the ground and grabbed hold of the nun’s neck.
“A nun! A black raven! Was it him, that walking skeleton, who sent you? It was him, him, who else! Tell me, or I’ll rip your throat out!”
Pelagia watched numbly as the blade of a knife glittered in front of her face.
“Who is ‘he’?” the half-strangled woman asked, struggling to understand what was going on.
“Don’t give me that, you snake! I mean him, the one in charge of all you black-robed vermin! You all spy for him, all you weasels work for him.”
The one in charge of the black-robed vermin—the head of the order of clergy?
“You mean Chief Procurator Pobedin?”
“Aha!” the bearded man cried triumphantly. “You confessed! Lie down!” he said, kicking Salakh, who was attempting to sit up. “I saved Manuila from the old vampire once, and I’ll save him again!” His broad mouth spread out into a crooked-toothed smile. “I expect Kistyantin Petrovich hasn’t forgotten the servant of God Trofim Dubenko?”
“Who?” Pelagia asked hoarsely.
“What, didn’t he tell you how he falsely accused the holy man of stealing and clapped him in jail? And he put me there to guard him. All those years I served Kistyantin Petrovich like a dog on a chain! And I’d have died as a dog, if I hadn’t risen to the dignity of a human being! ‘Trofimushka,’ he says to me, ‘keep an eye on this thief and troublemaker, he’s a dangerous man. I don’t trust the police guards. Watch him in the station until tomorrow, don’t let him do any talking to anyone, and in the morning I’ll get a warrant to move him to the Schlisselburg Fortress.”
Pelagia remembered Sergei Sergeevichs story about the gold clock stolen from the Chief Procurator. So this was what really had happened! There never was any theft, and Konstantin Petrovich had not magnanimously released the alleged thief—quite the opposite, in fact. The highly intelligent Chief Procurator had perceived some serious danger for himself in the wandering prophet. He had begun by locking him in a cell in a police station and setting his underling to guard him, and then taken measures to shut him away him more securely—Pobedin’s resources in this regard were well known.
“You didn’t allow Emmanuel to talk to the other guards, but you talked to him yourself, didn’t you?” the holy sister said, more as a statement than a question. “Please let go of me, I’m not your enemy.”
“Yes, I spoke to him. In all my life nobody had ever spoken to me like that. Kistyantin Petrovich is a great master at the tongue-wagging, but everything he says against Manuila is a load of chaff.”
Trofim Dubenko’s fingers were still around the nun’s throat, but they were squeezing less tightly now, and the hand holding the knife had been lowered.
“And you took the prisoner out of the police cell? But how did you manage that?”
“Simple. At night they only had one man in uniform sitting at the door. I gave him a tap on the back of the neck with my fist and that was that. And then I said to Manuila: I’ll go with you to the end of the earth, because you can’t take care of yourself. You’ll get yourself killed on your own, but you have to live for a long time and talk to people. Only he didn’t take me. No need, he said, and I’m not supposed to. I have to go alone. And don’t you be afraid for me, he says—God will take care of me. Well, he didn’t want to take me, so I didn’t try to force him. I didn’t go with him, I went after him. Wherever he goes, I go. God might protect him and He might not, but Trofim Dubenko certainly won’t let him come to any harm. Months and months I’ve been following Manuila. Across Mother Russia, right across the wide ocean, across the Holy Land. He’s one of God’s fools, there’s no suspicion in him. Would you believe I’ve followed him almost halfway around the world, and he doesn’t realize it? Just don’t let him see you, that’s the whole secret of it. Do you know how he walks? He never looks back. Just walks on, waving his stick. Doesn’t even look down at his feet. Just straight ahead or up at the sky. And he likes to turn his head to the sides as well, that’s true. Like I said, a holy fool.” Manuila’s bodyguard spoke in a voice full of tenderness and admiration, and Pelagia suddenly remembered the “miracle of the Lord” that Malke had told her about.
“Tell me, was it you who killed the Bedouin bandit in the Mountains of Judea?”
“The one with the sword? That was me. Look, I’ve got a carbine. I swapped for it in the city of Jaffa, I had this engraved watch that Kistyantin Petrovich gave me for serving him so well. A curse on that service and on that skeleton and his lousy watch. The bandit was nothing special. Manuila calls down disaster on himself almost every day. If it wasn’t for Trofim Dubenko, bad people would have buried him in the ground a long time ago.” The bearded man suddenly stopped short with his boasting and said: “Ah, you’re a cunning one, you are! Hah, you loosened my tongue. Haven’t spoken our language for a long time, so I couldn’t stop myself. Tell me: Are you from Pobedin or not?” He flourished the knife again.
“No, I’m here on my own account. And I wish Emmanuel… Manuila no harm. On the contrary, I want to warn him.”
Trofim Dubenko looked at her intently. He said: “Come on, then.”
And he ran his massive paws all over her, searching to see if she had a concealed weapon. Pelagia held her hands up and endured it.
“All right,” he said. “Go. Only on your own. Your friend can stay here. But there’s one condition: not a word about me. Or else he’ll send me away, and he can’t be left without someone to look after him.”
“I promise,” the nun said with a nod.
FOR A MINUTE or so the garden again seemed to be empty. Pelagia walked from one end of it to the other, gazing around her without seeing anyone. But when she stopped in bewilderment, she heard a voice from the very center of the garden, asking something in a language she did not know. Then at last she made out the figure sitting in the grass by the old well.
“What?” the nun asked with a shudder.
“Are you Wussian?” the voice asked, with a childlike lisp on the letter r. “I asked what you’re wooking for? Or who?”
“What are you doing there?” she babbled.
The man was sitting absolutely still on the ground, bathed in the white moonlight. It was his stillness that had kept her from noticing him, although she had passed very close to him.
Approaching him hesitantly, Pelagia saw a thin face with wide-open eyes, a clumpy beard (it seemed to be streaked with gray), a protruding Adam’s apple, and a pair of eyebrows that seemed to be permanently raised in readiness for joyful amazement. The prophet’s hair had been cut in the Russian peasant style, but a long time ago, at least six months, so that the hair now hung almost down to his shoulders.
“I’m waiting,” Manuila-Emmanuel replied. “The moon’s not quite in the middle of the sky yet. That’s called ‘at its zenith.’ I have to wait a wit-tle bit.”
“And … what will happen when the moon is at its zenith?”
“I’ll get up and go that way.” He pointed to the far corner of the garden.
“But there’s a fence over there.”
The prophet glanced around, as if someone might overhear them, and whispered conspiratorially: “I made a hole in it. When I was here earwier. One pwank opens, and then you can go up the hill thwough the monastewy.”
“But why don’t you go by the street? It goes up the hill too,” said Pelagia, also lowering her voice.
He sighed. “I know. I twied, it doesn’t work. Pwobably evwything has to be exactly like it was then. But the main thing is the full moon, of course. I compwetewy forgot about it, but now I’ve wemembewed, Passover awways used to be at full moon, onwy now the Jews have got evewything confused.”
“What have they got confused?” Pelagia asked, wrinkling up her forehead as she tried to make sense of his words. “Why do you need the full moon?”
“I can see
you came here to speak to me,” Emmanuel said unexpectedly. “Speak.”
Pelagia started. How did he know?
But the prophet got to his feet, proving to be a whole head taller than the nun, and looked into her face. There were sparks of moonlight glittering in his eyes.
“You want to warn me about something,” he said, screwing up his eyes as if he was reading aloud in the dark and had to strain to see.
“What?”
“You’ve been wooking for me for a wong time because you want to warn me about something bad. It would be intewesting to talk to you. But it’s alweady time for me to go. Come with me, if you wike. We can talk on the way.”
He beckoned to her and set off toward the fence.
One of the planks really was secured only by a single nail at the top. Emmanuel swung it aside and squeezed through the narrow gap. Feeling strangely numb, Pelagia did the same.
Moving uphill, they walked through the dark courtyard of some monastery, then out through a wicket gate into a side street.
There were Arab shanties on both sides, without a single light burning in any of them. Once, at a bend, the nun glanced back and found herself facing the Temple Hill, crowned by the round cap of the Mosque of Omar. In the moonlight, Jerusalem looked as dead as the Jewish cemetery across from it.
Pelagia suddenly realized that she had not introduced herself, and said, “I’m Pelagia, a nun.”
“Ah, a Bwide of Chwist,” Emmanuel laughed. “The son of God has so many bwides! More than the Sultan of Turkey. And not one of them ever asked him if he wanted to mawwy them.”
The blasphemous joke shattered Pelagia’s special, almost mystical mood created by the moonlit atmosphere in the Garden of Gethsemane.
For a while they walked uphill in silence. It’s time I explained everything to him, the nun thought, and she began guardedly and drily, the quip about the Brides of Christ still in her mind: “I have bad news for you. You are in mortal danger. You have very powerful enemies who wish to kill you and will stop at nothing. Your enemies will not be stopped because you have left Russia …”
“Enmity is a mutual substance,” the leader of the Foundlings interrupted her flippantly. “And since I’m nobody’s enemy, I can’t have any enemies of my own. That seems weasonable to me. The people you mention are mistaken, they think I can cause them harm. I just need to talk to them, then evewything will be cweared up. I will definitewy talk to them if it doesn’t work again today. And if it does work, I won’t be here anymore, and they’ll cool down.”
“If what works?” asked Pelagia, baffled.
“I could expwain, but you wouldn’t bewieve me anyway.”
“Ah, they won’t talk to you! They want to see you dead. Your enemies simply kill anyone who gets in their way, without the slightest hesitation! That means that eliminating you is very, very important for them.”
At this point the prophet squinted sideways at Pelagia, not in fear, but with a bemused expression, as if he didn’t really understand why she was so very agitated.
“Sh-sh-sh” he whispered, putting one finger to his lips. “We’re here. And the moon’s exactly at its zenith.”
He pushed open a half-rotten gate, and they went into a yard overgrown with dry grass. Pelagia could just make out a shack with a collapsed roof at the back of it.
“Whose house is that?”
“I don’t know. No one wesides there anymore. I’m afraid some disaster happened here. I can sense these things …”
Emmanuel shuddered and put his arms around his own shoulders.
Pelagia was not at all interested in the abandoned hovel. She was burning up with frustration and annoyance. She had spent so long searching for this man, and he wouldn’t even listen to her! “Perhaps you think that you’re out of danger because you left Russia,” the nun said angrily. “But that’s not so! They’ll find you, even here. I think I know where the threat comes from, though it seems so unlikely … And then, why would he be so furious with you? That is, I have a theory, but it’s not so very …”
Pelagia broke off. As she looked at the ludicrous figure of the leader of the Foundlings standing on one leg and scratching his ankle with the other foot, the holy sister felt quite ready to admit that her “theory” was a monstrous absurdity.
“No, Pobedin is simply insane,” she muttered.
“What you say is incompwehensible,” Emmanuel said. He put down his staff, lifted a wooden board up off the ground, and started scraping away a heap of rubbish, sending branches, potsherds, and lumps of earth flying in all directions. “And you’re not tewwing me the most important thing.”
“What most important thing?” Pelagia asked in astonishment as she watched this strange performance.
He tugged some planks out from under the rubbish, exposing a pit, and in the bottom of the pit there was a black hole.
“Is that an underground passage?”
“No, it’s a buwiaw chamber. A cave. There are people buwied here who wived a long time ago, two thousand years or even much more than that. Do you know what Eneowithic is? And Chalcowithic?” he asked, pronouncing the high-sounding words with great pomp.
Pelagia had read about ancient Jewish burial sites. The Jerusalem hills were riddled with caves that had once been used for burying the dead. It was not really surprising to find one of these chambers in the yard of an abandoned peasant hovel. But what did Emmanuel want with it?
He struck a match and lit a tightly twisted rag soaked in oil.
His bearded face gazed up at Pelagia out of the pit, illuminated by the crimson flame. The night around her instantly seemed blacker.
“It’s time for me to go,” Emmanuel said. “But I can see you want to ask me about something and you don’t dare. Don’t be afwaid, ask. If I know the answer, I’ll tell you the twuth.”
Down there, below me, there’s a cave, Pelagia thought, transfixed. A cave!
The nun completely forgot that she had sworn never to venture underground again. “Can I go down there with you? Please!”
He looked up at the moon hanging at the precise center of the sky.
“If you pwomise you’ll come out soon and you won’t wait for me outside.”
Pelagia nodded, and he gave her his hand.
At first the passage was very narrow. She felt stone steps under her feet, crumbling with age in places, but not worn at all. How could they possibly have been worn?
When the stairway ended, Emmanuel lifted up the hand holding the rag torch and it became clear that the burial chamber was quite extensive. There were dark niches in the walls, but the light was too dim for her to make them out clearly.
The prophet turned his face to Pelagia and said, “Have you had a wook? Now ask your question and go.”
Suddenly his eyebrows, which were set very high in any case, lifted even closer to the roots of his hair. Emmanuel was not looking at his companion, he was looking over her head, as if he had suddenly seen something very interesting there.
But Pelagia was not watching where he was looking. Feeling desperately anxious, she took a deep breath, raised one hand to her temple in an involuntary gesture, and asked her question.
No matter how the string twists and turns
WHEN THE HANTUR reached the Jaffa Gate and turned to the right, Yakov Mikhailovich immediately realized that they intended to skirt the wall. In that case, they wouldn’t get far, he could send off a telegram to Peter. It was more than a week since he had been in contact, that wasn’t good. And the twenty-four-hour telegraph was right here—that was what had given him the idea.
He worked a veritable miracle of efficiency: it took him only two minutes to thrust the telegram, written in advance, in through the little window and pay.
The telegram read: “Will take delivery of both loads today. Nifontov.” That was the code name he was to use until the assignment was completed. When it was completed he could write anything he liked in the telegram, but the signature had to be “Ksenofontov.” Those f
or whom it was meant would understand.
Yakov Mikhailovich (still acting under the name of Nifontov) had managed everything excellently: sent off the message, and caught up with the hantur—not far from the gorge that was called Gehenna, that same fiery ravine where, as the holy apostle wrote, “the worm did not die and the fire did not die down.” The inhabitants of ancient Jerusalem used to throw the bodies of people who had been executed into the ravine and cover them over with excrement, and to prevent the plague from creeping out of the cursed pit, fires burned there day and night.
There you have it, the whole of human life, Yakov Mikhailovich sighed as he lashed his horse on. We live in a privy shitting on everyone else, and when you croak, they’ll pile shit on top of you and set you on fire so you don’t stink. Such were the somber philosophical thoughts that came to his mind.
It was simply splendid that the moon was full and there weren’t many clouds. An exceptional stroke of luck. And he had to admit that throughout this entire mission, so long and troublesome, he seemed to have enjoyed a certain Supreme patronage and protection. He could have lost the thread in Jerusalem, and beside Mount Megiddo, and again in Sodom, but every time, diligence and luck had seen him through. Yakov Mikhailovich himself had not set a foot wrong, and God had not forgotten about him, either.
And now there was almost nothing left to do. If Ginger had figured right (and she was a smart woman), then we ought to get everything settled up today, and then we’ll change our name from the fumbling Nifontov to the triumphant Ksenofontov.
What might the reward be for such a tough assignment? he wondered.
He didn’t usually allow himself to dwell on such pleasant matters until the job was done, but the moonlit evening had put him in a pensive mood. And the end was very close now—Yakov Mikhailovich could sense that in his gut.
That certain “little business” would be completely forgotten, and all the relevant documentation held by the investigator would be destroyed—that had been promised unconditionally. He had served his time, wiped the slate clean. He wouldn’t have that sword of Damocles hanging over his head any longer. Today dost Thou release, O Lord. But he could probably ask for something over and above that, a little something for himself in the form of a few crisp pieces of paper that rustled pleasantly in the fingers. His intuition told him that they were certain to pay him a bonus. His bosses had really been infuriated with this Manuila. He must have done something special to get them so fired up. God knows what, but it’s none of our business.