Dancing with Bears (12 page)

Darger looked forward to getting to know the dear thing much better. For the moment, however, it was best to keep things simmering away on the back burner. There would be time for romance soon enough.

He just hoped that it did not break her heart when he inevitably had to move on and leave her in the lurch.

Dark waters lapped against the boat. Pepsicolova poled them deeper into mystery.

It was a Tuesday, so of course there was yet another tea party. Up and down the room, twin table-halves were set against either side of the dividing screen. Knots of men (never women, who understandably found the implicit comparison with the Pearls painful) clustered about the tables, vying for the attention of the beauties across from them, while serviles with madly glittering eyes watched for the least sign that a teacup needed filling. Occasionally, a gentleman succeeded in drawing a Pearl away from his competition, and the two stood apart, talking quietly through the screen.

Because they were indoors and because it was the custom here in Russia, the women did not wear veils. This made the Pearls feel daring, which lent a certain sauciness to even their least consequential remarks.

Zoësophia wafted from table to table, now drawing Russalka away from a young swain’s flattery that she was beginning to take too seriously, now subtly switching a retired general’s attention from Eulogia to Euphrosyne, so that each could later upbraid him for his inconstancy. Where the conversation was too heated, she damped it down, before a Neanderthal could descend upon the offender. Where it was listless, she enlivened it with an easily misinterpreted sisterly kiss upon Nymphodora’s dewy lips. By the time her circuit was done and Olympias rose to take over, the energy in the room had significantly intensified.

“Your baron glowers away anybody who tries to sit at your table,” Olympias said behind her hand.

“I know. It is terribly boorish of him.”

“But also very indicative of the depth of his feelings. As is the way your young artist—the one with the unfortunate mustache—refuses to be glowered away.”

“They are both overwrought. I fear that inevitably one of them will kill the other.”

Olympias assumed an expression of bored indifference. “There will always be more artists; they are interchangeable. Conversely, by all accounts, if the Butcher of Smolensk were the one to fall, it would be universally regarded as a act of high-minded civic spiritedness on your part.”

“You are a wicked, sinful girl,” Zoësophia said before drifting back to her table, “and when someday the vagaries of politics free us from the duke’s harem, you’re going to make some unfortunate man extremely happy.”

“Men,” Olympias called loftily after her. “Many, many, many men.”

If truth be told, Zoësophia found these events tedious. Nevertheless, the Pearls were all in ardent competition to be the next after Aetheria to kill a man—not by suicide, it was agreed, for that had been done, but this time by provoking a duel—and it would be uncongenial of her not to give it her best effort. So she returned to the table where Baron Lukoil-Gazprom and the artist who, quite frankly, she found so boring she couldn’t bring herself to remember his name, impatiently awaited her return.“Nikodim, my sweet,” she said to the baron, and to the poet: “My little rabbit.”

“At last, dear angel, you return!” The artist was lean as a whippet and twice as high-strung. “A thousand times have I died in your absence.”

“It was worse for me,” the baron said dryly. “He at least wasn’t sharing a table with a twit.” He was a handsome man and rich as well, though in such company that went without saying. Also politically powerful, which for Zoësophia was always a plus. But the best thing about him was that he thought himself clever, and such fellows were invariably the most delightfully easy to manipulate. He leaned closer to the screen and in a low, flirtatious voice said, “Tell me,
ma petite minette
… what is the shortest path to your bedroom?”

“Through the wedding chapel,” snapped the artist, who was himself unwed.

Zoësophia allowed herself a hastily stifled snort of laughter.

The baron suppressed a wince. “Sweet lady, it is a dreary journey this… stripling urges upon you. I have made it myself and can recommend neither the experience nor the prospect at the end.”

“It is at least an honorable estate,” the artist said.

“You forget that these ladies are all promised to the Duke of Muscovy.”

“So what you are saying is that in order for you to betray your wife, you require that Zoësophia cuckold the duke?”

It happened as fast as that—too fast for Zoësophia to prevent, even if the rules of the Pearls’ little game had allowed that. The baron sucked in his breath. Then he stood, jarring the table as he did, so that the spoons and teacups rattled.

“That is an insult I will not endure,” he exclaimed loudly. “Sir, I give you your choice of weapons.”

Somehow the artist was on his feet as well. He was such a negligible fellow that Zoësophia had not seen him rise. “Then I choose paint and canvas,” he said. “We shall each paint a satirical portrait of the other in oils.” In his anger, he looked like a terrier defying a bull. Of course, that mustache did not help. “The winner to be selected by vote of all those present—”

“Bah! Paint is no weapon. A duel is not a duel unless there is the chance of grievous injury.”

“Please. Allow me to finish. The winning portrait will be placed on public display for a month at the expense of the loser.”

The baron turned white. Then he sat down. “That is no fit challenge for a gentleman,” he grumbled, “and I refuse to accept it.”

During the exchange, all the room had fallen silent. Now a light smattering of applause arose from those present. The artist colored with pleasure.

“That was wittily done, my little carrot,” Zoësophia said, “and so you must have a reward. You there!” She snapped her fingers at the servile waiting on the table across from her. “Observe me carefully. Then assume my stance.”

The servile stared at her with hard, reptilian eyes. Then, with an ease possible only to one who had no true sense of self, she took on Zoësophia’s mien and posture.

“Now do precisely as I do.”

Zoësophia delicately raised a hand, and the servile moved as if her shadow. Her fingers brushed the artist’s cheek. She stepped forward, into his arms. Her chin tilted upward and her lips met his. Zoësophia’s tongue briefly, lightly probed the air.

Separated by several feet of space, she and the artist kissed.

A long moment later, Zoësophia stepped back, gracefully extricating her proxy from the artist’s embrace. A gesture of dismissal, and the servile resumed her former stance.

The baron watched it all with mingled wonder, lust, anger, and humiliation. Then he turned his back on them all and stormed out of the embassy’s ballroom. Zoësophia did not doubt for a second that at next Tuesday’s tea party she would be short one suitor or the other.

So, really, it turned out to be quite an amusing little gathering after all.

Chortenko climbed the stairs from his basement with a calm and easy heart. Waiting for him on the ground floor was a servile with a hot towel, which he used to clean any spatters of blood that might be on his face and hands. Then he went into the library and sat down to discover Pepsicolova’s latest report waiting for him on a side table. He read it through with care. It fit in interestingly with his observations of the ambassador’s behavior.

When he was done, he touched a nearby bell.

His butler materialized at a respectful distance. “Brandy, sir?”

“Just a small glass.”

“Very good, sir.”

Chortenko swirled the brandy in the glass, staring down at its fluid motion, enjoying its aroma. Sir de Plus Precieux was assuredly intent upon deceiving him. Which probably meant that ultimately the ambassador would have to be rigorously interrogated. But before Chortenko took such an irreversible step, he would need the duke’s assurance that it was the right thing to do.

The Duke of Muscovy, after all, was the ultimate arbiter in such matters. It would not do to act contrary to his judgment.

He thought back to his last conversation with the ambassador.“I would wield the whip myself,” he had said. Chortenko could not help being amused. The fellow had so little idea of what modern torture—applied by knowledgeable professionals—entailed. But he would learn. He would learn.

Chortenko took the merest sip of brandy and rang his butler again. When the man appeared in the doorway, he said, “Two of the dogs have died. Please have their corpses removed and buried somewhere immediately.”

“As you will, sir.”

Chortenko leaned back in his chair with a satisfied little smile. He was a methodical man, and despised untidiness.

...6...

I
t had been years since Anya Pepsicolova last saw daylight. The basement bar where she daily met Darger was as close as she ever came to the surface anymore. Unless one counted Chortenko’s mansion, as she did not; to her that bleak house felt as though it were sunk deeper into the earth than even the most stygian of her other haunts. Nor did she think she would ever know the surface world again. She was trapped in this labyrinth of tunnels and darkness, tied to a slim and unbreakable thread of fate that was somewhere being rewound, drawing her inexorably inward, toward the underworld’s dark center, where only madness and death awaited her.

But today she was still alive, and that, she reminded herself, was good. And she was still the third most dangerous entity—after Chortenko and the underlords—in all the City Below. Which was, if not actually good, at least a consolation.

As she poled down the Neglinnaya canal, the lantern at the bow of her skiff feebly lighting the walls ahead, Pepsicolova said, “We’ve been doing this for a week. You draw your maps. Sometimes you hire men to break through a bricked-over doorway. What exactly are you looking for?”

“I told you. The tomb of Tsar Ivan.”

“Lenin.”

“Yes, precisely.”

Pepsicolova tied up the skiff at the Ploshchad Revolutsii docks. Here, dim streaks of lichen provided some feeble light. As she always did, she paused at the bronze statue of a young man and his dog to touch a snout already rubbed shiny. “For luck,” she explained and, to her surprise, Darger did the same. “Why did you do that? This is my superstition, not yours.”

“A man in my profession by necessity courts Lady Luck. Nor do I sneer at any superstition, lest there be some practical reason behind it, as in the well-observed fact that a man walking under a ladder is far more likely to have a hammer dropped upon his head than one walking cautiously around it, or that breaking a mirror necessarily entails the bad luck of enraging its owner.”

“Exactly what is your profession?”

“Right now, I am searching for Tsar Ivan.”

“Lenin.”

“Of course.” Darger unfolded a map of Moscow. “We are now directly below—here? A brief walk from the Resurrection Gates?”

“That is correct.”

Darger got out his book, flipped to a page midway through it, and nodded with satisfaction. Then, repocketing the tome, he said, “We shall extend our search into the underground passages below the south wall of the Kremlin and above the river.”

“The south wall? Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“You should be aware that most people think that the tomb is buried somewhere under Red Square.”

“Which is precisely why nobody has found it yet,” Darger said with an infuriatingly superior smile. “Shall we go on?”

They were coming into Dregs territory. Pepsicolova closed her lantern so that only the merest slit of light shone out. More than that would have identified them as rank outsiders, and thus enemies. Moving in total darkness, as the Dregs themselves did, would have identified them as strangers who knew their way around, and thus both enemies and spies. The territory between the two identities was extremely narrow, and there were times when she suspected it existed only in her mind.

She pushed through a rusty metal door which squealed as it opened and slammed shut noisily behind them. They boomed down a short flight of iron stairs. The air here felt stale and yet she could sense a great openness before her. The light from her lantern did not reach to the far wall.

They walked forward, dead cockroaches crunching underfoot.

“This is the largest space we’ve been in so far.” Darger’s voice echoed hollowly. “What is it?”

“Before it was built over, it was something called a
motorway
—a road the ancients built for their slave machines to carry them along. Now hush. We’ve made more than enough noise already.”

There were whole tribes of people living in the darkness under Moscow. These were the broken and the homeless, the mentally ill and those suffering from the gross reshapings of viruses left over from long-forgotten wars. The more competent among them went aboveground periodically to scrounge through garbage bins, shoplift, or beg on the streets. Others sold drugs or their bodies to people who would, as likely as not, soon end up living down here themselves. As for the rest, no one knew how they managed to stay alive, save that often enough they didn’t.

The Dregs were reputed to be the oldest and maddest of the tribes in the City Below. They lived in abject fear, and this made them dangerous.

From the darkness ahead came the sound of one metal pipe being steadily and rhythmically struck by another.

“Shit,” Pepsicolova said. “The Dregs have spotted us.”

“They have? What does that mean?”

She put down her lantern on the ground and closed its shutters completely. The darkness wrapped itself around them like a thick black blanket. “It means that we wait. Then we negotiate.”

They waited. After a time, there was the scruff of feet on pavement and then a wavering quality to the darkness before them. Out of nowhere someone said, “Who are you, and what are you doing where you don’t belong?”

“My name is Anya Pepsicolova. Either you know me or you’ve heard of me.”

There was a quiet murmur of voices. Then silence again.

“My companion and I are searching for something that was lost long ago, before any of us was born. We have no reason to disturb you, and we promise to stay away from your squat.”