“I was not informed,” the officer replied with a shrug. “It weighs about four pounds. I believe you are celebrating a happy event today? Could it perhaps be in that connection? In any case, please accept my personal congratulations. There is a letter here that will probably make everything clear.”
He drew a small envelope without any address on it out of his cuff. “Permission to leave?”
Erast Fandorin examined the seal on the envelope, then nodded.
The special messenger saluted, turned smartly on his heels, and left the room.
The drawn shades made the room rather dark and Fandorin walked over to the window that looked directly out onto Malaya Nikitskaya Street, opening the envelope as he went.
Lizanka put her arms around her husband’s shoulders and breathed in his ear. “Well, what is it? Congratulations?” she asked impatiently and then, catching sight of the glossy piece of card with two golden rings, she exclaimed, “Why, so it is! Oh, how lovely!”
That very second Fandorin’s attention was caught by a rapid movement outside the window, and he glanced up to see the courier behaving in a rather strange fashion. He went racing down the steps, launched himself at a run into a waiting cab, and shouted to the coachman, “Go! Nine! Eight! Seven!”
As the coachman swung his whip he glanced around for an instant. Just an ordinary coachman: a hat with a tall crown, a graying beard, nothing unusual about him but the color of his eyes—extremely light, almost white.
“Stop!” Erast Fandorin shouted furiously, and without thinking what he was doing he leapt over the windowsill out into the street.
The coachman cracked his whip and his pair of blacks set off at a trot.
“Stop or I’ll shoot!” Fandorin roared as he ran in pursuit, although he had nothing to shoot with—in honor of the wedding his trusty Herstal had been left at the hotel.
“Erast! Where are you going?”
Fandorin glanced back as he raced along. Lizanka was leaning out of the window with an expression of total bewilderment on her face. The next moment flames and smoke came bursting out of the window and Fandorin was hurled roughly to the ground.
For a while everything was quiet, dark, and peaceful, then, from the bright daylight that stung his eyes and the dull roaring in his ears, he realized he was alive. He could see the cobblestones of the roadway, but he could not understand why they were right there in front of his eyes. The sight of the gray stone was disgusting and he tried to turn away, but that only made things worse. He saw a pellet of horse dung lying beside something disagreeably white, with two small gold circles glittering on it. Erast Fandorin sat up with a jerk and read the line written in a large, old–fashioned hand, with curlicues and intricate flourishes:
My Sweet Boy, This is a Truly Glorious Day!
The meaning of the words failed to penetrate the fog in the concussed youth’s mind, and in any case his attention was distracted by another object that was sparkling cheerfully where it lay in the middle of the road.
Erast Fandorin did not realize what it was for a moment. The only thought that came to him was that the ground was definitely no place for that. Then he recognized it: a gold ring glittering on the third finger of a slim girl’s arm severed at the elbow.
THE FOPPISHLY DRESSED but terribly slovenly young man stumbled along Tverskoi Boulevard with rapid, erratic steps, paying no attention to anyone—expensive crumpled frock coat, dirty white tie, dusty white carnation in his buttonhole. The promenading public stepped aside to make way for this strange individual and gazed after him curiously. It was not at all a question of the dandy’s deathly pallor—after all, there was no shortage of consumptives in Moscow—nor even that he was undoubtedly drunk as a lord (he was staggering uncertainly from side to side). There was nothing new in that. No, the attention of those he encountered, especially the ladies, was attracted by one particularly intriguing feature of his appearance: despite his obvious youth the bon vivant’s temples were a stark white, as if they were thickly coated with hoarfrost.
Turkish Gambit
BORIS AKUNIN
Translated by Andrew Bromfield
Chapter One
IN WHICH A PROGRESSIVE WOMAN FINDS HERSELF IN A QUITE DESPERATE SITUATION
La Revue Parisienne
14 (2) July 1877
Our correspondent, now already in his second week with the Russian Army of the Danube, informs us that in his order of the day for yesterday, 1st July (13th July in the European style), the Emperor Alexander thanks his victorious troops, who have succeeded in forcing a crossing of the Danube and breaching the borders of the Ottoman state. His Imperial Majesty's order affirms that the enemy has been utterly crushed and in no more than two weeks' time at the very most the Orthodox cross will be raised over Saint Sophia in Constantinople. The advancing army is encountering almost no resistance, unless one takes into account the mosquito bites inflicted on the Russian lines of communication by flying detachments of the so-called Bashi-Bazouks ('mad-heads'), a species of half-bandit and half-partisan, famed for their savage disposition and bloodthirsty ferocity.
According to Saint Augustine, woman is a frail and fickle creature, and the great obscurantist and misogynist was right a thousand times over - at least with regard to a certain individual by the name of Varvara Suvorova.
It had all started out as such a jolly adventure, but now it had come to this. She only had her own stupid self to blame - Mama had told Varya time and time again that sooner or later she would land herself in a jam, and now she had. In the course of one of their many tempestuous altercations her father, a man of great wisdom endowed with the patience of a saint, had divided his daughter's life into three periods: the imp in a skirt; the perishing nuisance; the loony nihilist. To this very day Varya still prided herself on this characterisation, declaring that she had no intention of resting on her laurels as yet; but this time her self-confidence had played her a really mean trick.
Why, oh why had she agreed to make a halt at the tavern - this korchma, or whatever it was they called the abominable dive? Her driver, that dastardly thief Mitko, had started his whining with those funny Bulgarian endings: 'Let's water the hossesta, let's water the hossesta.' So they had stopped to water the horses. O God, what was she going to do now?
Varya was sitting in the corner of a dingy and utterly filthy shed at a table of rough-hewn planks, feeling frightened to death. Only once before had she ever experienced such grim, hopeless terror, when at the age of six she broke her grandmother's favourite teacup and hid under the divan to await the inevitable retribution.
If she could only pray - but progressive women didn't pray. And meanwhile the situation looked absolutely desperate.
Well then . . . The St Petersburg-Bucharest leg of her route had been traversed rapidly enough, even comfortably: the express train (two passenger coaches and ten flatcars with artillery pieces) had rushed Varya to the capital of the principality of Roumania in three days. The brown eyes of the lady with the bobbed hair, who smoked papyrosas and refused on principle to allow her hand to be kissed, had very nearly set the army officers and staff functionaries bound for the theatre of military operations at each others' throats. At every halt Varya was presented with bouquets of flowers and punnets of strawberries. She threw the bouquets out of the window, because they were vulgar, and soon she was obliged to forswear the strawberries as well, because they brought her out in a red rash. It had turned out to be a rather jolly and pleasant journey, although from an intellectual and ideological perspective, of course, all of her suitors were absolute maggots. There was, to be sure, one cornet who was reading Lamartine and had even heard of Schopenhauer, and he had been more subtle in paying court than the others; but Varya had explained to him - as one comrade to another - that she was travelling to join her fiance, after which the cornet's behaviour had been quite irreproachable. He had not been at all bad-looking, either, rather like Lermontov. Oh, bother the cornet, anyway.