by Boris Akunin
Varya turned pale.
“But I haven’t even seen my fiancé . . .”
“You’ll see each other after the war,” snapped Malyuta Skuratov, turning toward the door to summon his thugs, but then Erast Fandorin intervened.
“Lavrenty Arkadievich, I think it would be quite sufficient to ask Miss Suvorova to give her word of honor.”
“I give my word of honor!” Varya cried, encouraged by this unexpected intercession on her behalf.
“I’m sorry, dear chap, we can’t take the risk,” the general snapped, without even looking at her. Then there’s this fiancé of hers. And how can we trust a girl? You know what they say—’the longer the braid, the dafter the maid.’ ”
“I don’t have any braid! And that is a base insult to my intelligence!” Varya’s voice trembled, threatening to break. “What do I want with all your Anwars and Midhats, anyway?”
“On my responsibility, your excellency. I vouch for Varvara Andreevna.”
Mizinov said nothing, frowning in annoyance, and Varya realized that even among secret police agents there were clearly some people who were not entirely beyond salvation. After all, he was a Serbian volunteer.
“It’s stupid,” growled the general. He turned toward Varya and asked gruffly, “Do you know how to do anything? Is your handwriting good?”
“I qualified as a stenographer! I worked as a telegraphist! And a midwife!” said Varya, stretching the truth just a little.
“A stenographer and a telegraphist?” said Mizinov, surprised. “All the better, then. Erast Petrovich, I will allow this woman to remain here on one single condition: She will fulfill the duties of your secretary. You will in any case require some kind of courier or messenger who will not arouse unnecessary suspicion. Only bear in mind that you have vouched for her.”
“Oh, no!” Varya and Fandorin exclaimed in a single voice. Then they continued speaking together, but saying different things.
Erast Petrovich said: “I have no need of a secretary.”
Varya said: “I will not work for the Okhranka.”
“As you wish,” said the general, rising to his feet with a shrug. “Novgorodtsev, the escort!”
“I agree!” shouted Varya.
Fandorin said nothing.
CHAPTER FOUR
In which the enemy
strikes the first blow
THE DAILY POST (London)
15 (3) July 1877
...An advance detachment of the dashing General Gurko’s forces has captured Trnovo, the ancient capital of the kingdom of Bulgaria, and is pressing on apace towards the Shipka Pass, the gateway to the defenceless plains that extend to the walls of Constantinople itself. The military vizier Abdul Kerim Pasha has been removed from all his posts and committed for trial. Only a miracle can save Turkey now.
THEY HALTED BY THE PORCH. Some kind of understanding had to be reached.
Fandorin coughed to clear his throat and began.
“Varvara Andreevna, I very much regret that things have turned out like this. Naturally, you are entirely at liberty and I shall not oblige you to work for me in any way.”
“Thank you,” she replied coldly. “That is very noble of you. I must confess that for a moment I thought you had arranged all this deliberately. You could see perfectly well that I was there, and you must have anticipated how everything would turn out. Well, do you really need a secretary so badly?”
Once again, Erast Fandorin’s eyes glinted briefly in a way that she might have taken for a sign of merriment in any normal man.
“You are most perceptive. But unjust. I was indeed guided by an ulterior motive, but I was acting entirely in your own interests. Lavrenty Arkadievich would quite certainly have banished you as far away as possible from the active forces. And Mr. Kazanzaki would have set a gendarme to guard you. But now you have a p-perfectly legitimate reason for remaining here.”
Varya could hardly raise any objection to that, but she did not wish to thank this despicable spy.
“I see you are a truly subtle practitioner of your despised profession,” she said acidly. “You even managed to outwit the head ogre.”
“By ‘ogre’ you mean Lavrenty Arkadievich?” Fandorin asked in surprise. “He hardly fits the p-part, I think. And then, what is so d-despicable about defending the interests of the state?”
What point was there in talking to someone like that?
Varya demonstratively turned away and ran her eyes over the camp: little white-walled houses, neat rows of tents, brand-new telegraph posts. She saw a soldier running along the street, waving his long, awkward arms in a very familiar-looking fashion.
“Varya, Varenka!” the soldier called out from a distance, pulling his long-peaked cap off his head and waving it in the air. “So you really did come!”
“Petya!” she gasped and, instantly forgetting Fandorin, she dashed toward the man for whose sake she had made the long journey of one and a half thousand versts.
They embraced and kissed, entirely naturally, with no awkwardness, in a way they never had before. It was a joy to see Petya’s dear, plain face so radiant with happiness. He had lost weight and acquired a tan and he stooped more than he used to. The black uniform jacket with the red shoulder straps hung on him like a loose sack, but his smile was the same as ever, wide and beaming in adoration.
“So you accept, then?” he asked.
“Yes,” Varya replied simply, even though she had been planning not to accept his proposal immediately, but only after a long and serious discussion; only after she had laid down certain conditions of principle.
Petya gave a childish squeal of joy and tried to hug her again, but Varya had already come to her senses.
“But we still have to discuss everything in detail. In the first place—”
“Of course we’ll discuss everything, of course we will. Only not now, this evening. Why don’t we meet in the journalists’ tent? They have a kind of club there. You’ve met the Frenchman, haven’t you? I mean Paladin. A splendid fellow. He’s the one who told me you had arrived. I’m terribly busy right now; I just dashed away for a moment. If they notice, I’ll really be for it. Till this evening, this evening!”
He ran off back the way he came, kicking up the dust with his heavy boots and glancing back at every second.
HOWEVER, THEY WERE NOT ABLE to meet that evening. An orderly brought a note from the staff building: “On duty all night. Tomorrow. Love. P.”
There was nothing to be done, he was in the army now, so Varya began settling in. The nurses had taken her in to live with them. They were wonderful, caring women, but they were quite elderly—all about thirty-five—and rather dull. They collected together everything necessary to replace the things in her baggage appropriated by the enterprising Mitko—clothes, shoes, a bottle of eau-de-cologne (instead of her wonderful Parisian perfume!), stockings, underwear, a comb, hairpins, scented soap, powder, salve to protect against the sun, cold cream, emollient lotion to counteract the effect of wind, essence of chamomile for washing her hair, and other essential items. Of course, the dresses were quite awful, with the possible exception of only one, which was light blue with a little white-lace collar. After Varya had removed the old-fashioned cuffs, it actually turned out rather nice.
But, first thing in the morning, she already found herself at loose ends. The nurses had gone to the field hospital to tend two wounded men brought in from near Lovcha. Varya drank her coffee alone, then went to send a telegram to her parents: first so that they wouldn’t go insane with worry; second to ask them to send some money (purely as a loan—let them not start thinking she had voluntarily returned to her cage). She went for a stroll around the camp, on her way gazing in fascination at a bizarre train with no tracks—a military transport drawn by traction engines that had arrived from the opposite bank of the river. The iron locomobiles with the huge wheels puffed heavily and panted out steam as they tugged along the heavy field guns and wagons of ammunition. It was an impressi
ve spectacle—a genuine triumph of progress.
After that, for want of anything better to do, she called in on Fandorin, who had been assigned his own tent in the staff sector. Erast Petrovich was also idling the time away, lying on his camp bed and copying out words from a book in Turkish.
“Protecting the interests of the state, Mr. Policeman?” Varya asked. She had decided that it would be most appropriate to address the secret agent in a casually sarcastic tone of voice.
Fandorin stood up and threw on a military tunic with no shoulder straps (he had obviously had himself kitted out somewhere, too). Varya caught a glimpse of a thin silver chain in the opening of his unbuttoned collar. A cross? No, it looked more like a medallion. It would be interesting to take a glance at what it was exactly. Could our sleuth possibly be of a romantic disposition?
The titular counselor buttoned up his collar and replied seriously: “If you live in a state, you should either ch-cherish it or leave it—anything else is either parasitism or mere lackeys’ gossip.”
“There is a third possibility,” Varya parried, stung by the phrase “lackeys’ gossip.” “An unjust state can be demolished and a new one built in its place.”
“Unfortunately, Varvara Andreevna, a state is not a house, it is more like a tree. It is not built, it grows of its own accord, following the laws of nature, and it is a long business. It is not a stonemason who is required, but a gardener.”
Completely forgetting about her appropriate tone of voice, Varya exclaimed passionately: “But the times we live in are so oppressive and hard! Honest people are oppressed—they are crushed under the burden of tyrannical arrogance and stupidity. But you reason like an old man, with your talk about gardeners!”
Erast Petrovich shrugged.
“My dear Varvara Andreevna, I am tired of listening to whining about ‘these difficult times’ of ours. In Tsar Nicholas’s times, which were far more oppressive than these, your ‘honest people’ marched in tight order and constantly sang the praises of their happy life. If it is now possible to complain about arrogance and tyranny, it means that times have begun getting better, not worse.”
“Why, you’re nothing but . . . nothing but . . . a lackey of the throne!” Varya hissed out this worst of all possible insults through her teeth, and when Fandorin did not even flinch, she explained it in words that he could understand. “A servile, loyal subject with no mind or conscience of his own!”
As soon as she had blurted it out, she took fright at her own rudeness, but Erast Petrovich was not angry in the least. He merely sighed and said: “You are unsure of how to behave with me. That is one. You do not wish to feel grateful, and therefore you get angry. That is two. If you will simply forget about your damnable gratitude, we shall g-get along very well. That is three.”
Such blatant condescension only made Varya even more furious, especially since the cold-blooded secret agent was absolutely right.
“I noticed yesterday that you talk like a dancing teacher: one-two-three, one-two-three. Where did you pick up such a stupid mannerism?”
“I had my teachers,” Fandorin replied vaguely, and impolitely stuck his nose back into his Turkish book.
THE MARQUEE WHERE THE JOURNALISTS accredited to central headquarters gathered was visible from a distance. The entrance was festooned with the flags of various countries hanging on a long string, the pennants of magazines and newspapers, and even a pair of red suspenders decorated with white stars.
“I expect they were celebrating the success at Lovcha yesterday,” volunteered Petya. “Someone must have celebrated so hard that he lost his suspenders.”
He pulled aside the canvas flap and Varya glanced inside.
The club was untidy but quite cozy in its own way: wooden tables, canvas chairs, a bar counter with rows of bottles. It smelled of tobacco smoke, candle wax, and men’s eau-de-cologne. There were heaps of Russian and foreign newspapers lying on a long table at one side. The newspapers looked rather unusual, because they were glued together out of telegraph tapes. On taking a closer look at the London Daily Post, Varya was surprised to see that it was that morning’s issue. Evidently the newspaper offices forwarded them everything by telegraph. How wonderful!
Varya was particularly gratified to note that there were only two women present, both wearing pince-nez and no longer in the first flush of youth. But there were lots and lots of men, and she spied her acquaintances among them.
First of all there was Fandorin, still with his book. That was rather silly—he could have read it in his tent.
In the opposite corner a session of simultaneous chess was in progress. McLaughlin was striding up and down on one side of the table, smoking his cigar with a condescendingly good-natured expression, while seated along the other side, all concentrating intensely, were Sobolev, Paladin, and two other men.
“Bah, it’s our little Bulgarian!” exclaimed General Michel, getting up from the chessboard with relief. “Why, how you have changed! All right, Seamus, we’ll call it a draw.”
Paladin smiled affably at the new arrivals and his gazed lingered on Varya (which was very pleasant), but then he continued with his game. However, a dark-complexioned officer in a positively dazzling uniform came dashing up to Sobolev, set a finger to one point of his over-exuberant waxed mustache, and exclaimed in French: “General, I implore you, introduce me to your enchanting acquaintance! Extinguish the candles, gentlemen! They are needed no longer, for the sun has risen!”
Both the elderly ladies cast glances of extreme disapproval in Varya’s direction, and in fact even she was rather taken aback by such a headlong assault.
“This is Colonel Lukan, the personal representative of our invaluable ally, His Highness Prince Karl of Romania,” said Sobolev with a smile. “I must warn you, Varvara Andreevna, that, when it comes to ladies’ hearts, the colonel is more deadly than any upas tree.”
It was clear from his tone of voice that it would be best not to lead the Romanian on, and Varya replied coolly, leaning demonstratively on Petya’s arm: “Pleased to meet you. My fiancé, volunteer Pyotr Yablokov.”
Lukan took Varya’s wrist gallantly between his finger and thumb (a ring studded with a very substantial diamond glittered on his hand), but when he attempted to kiss her fingers, he was instead duly rebuffed.
“In St. Petersburg, one does not kiss modern women’s hands.”
But nonetheless, the company here was certainly intriguing, and Varya took a liking to the correspondents’ club. The only annoying thing was that Paladin was still playing his infernal game of chess. But the end was obviously close now: All of McLaughlin’s other opponents had already capitulated, and the Frenchman’s position was clearly hopeless. Even so, he did not seem downhearted, and he kept glancing in Varya’s direction, smiling lightheartedly and whistling a fashionable little chansonette.
Sobolev stood beside him, looked at the board, and absentmindedly took up the refrain:
“Folichon-folichonet . . . give in, Paladin, this is your Waterloo.”
“The Guards die before they surrender,” said the Frenchman, tugging on his narrow, pointed beard, and finally decided on a move that made the Irishman frown and heave a sigh.
Varya went outside for moment to admire the sunset and enjoy the cool of the evening, and when she went back into the marquee, the chessboards had been cleared away and the conversation had moved on to the exalted topic of man’s relations with God.
“Any kind of mutual respect is entirely out of the question,” McLaughlin was saying passionately, evidently in response to some remark made by Paladin. “Man’s relations with the Almighty are founded on the conscious acknowledgment of inequality. After all, children would never think of claiming equality with their parents! The child unconditionally accepts the supremacy of the parent and its dependence on him, it feels reverence for him and therefore obeys him—for its own good.”
“Permit me, in replying, to employ your own metaphor,” said the Frenchman, smiling as he
drew on a Turkish chibouk. “All this is only correct with regard to little children. But when a child grows somewhat older, it inevitable begins to query the authority of its parent, even though the latter is still incomparably more wise and powerful. This is natural and healthy, for without it man would remain a little infant forever. This is the very stage to which mankind has progressed at the present time. Later, when mankind becomes even more mature, it will most certainly establish new and different relations with God, based on equality and mutual respect. And at some stage, the child will grow sufficiently mature not to have any further need of a parent at all.”
“Bravo, Paladin, you speak as elegantly as you write!” Petya exclaimed. “But the whole point is surely that God does not exist, while matter and the elementary principles of decent behavior do. I advise you to use your concept for a feuilleton in the Revue Parisienne; it would make an excellent topic.”
“One does not need a topic in order to write a good feuilleton,” the Frenchman declared. “One simply needs to know how to write well.”
“Now that’s going a bit too far,” McLaughlin objected. “Without a topic, even a verbal acrobat such as yourself cannot produce anything worthwhile.”
“Name any object you like, even the most trivial, and I will write you an article about it that my paper will be delighted to print,” said Paladin, holding out his hand. “Shall we have a wager? My Spanish saddle for your Zeiss binoculars.”
Everybody livened up remarkably at that.
“Two hundred rubles on Paladin,” declared Sobolev.
“Any subject?” the Irishman said slowly. “Absolutely any subject at all?”
“Absolutely. Even that fly over there sitting on Colonel Lukan’s mustache.”
The Romanian hastily shook his moustache and said: “I bet three hundred on Monsieur McLaughlin. But what will the subject be?”