Dancing with Bears (20 page)

“Lev!” he shouted. “Remember what you promised!”

But instead of throwing the money in the air, Lev clutched it tight.

“Lev!”

Kyril saw his faithless friend disappear into the crowd.

Desperately, then, Kyril snarled over his shoulder, “Get your mitts off me, you ass-fucker. I’m not gonna be your butt-boy, no matter how much you beg me.”

The goat’s ugly face twisted in outrage. He pulled back one fist to give Kyril a hard punch in the face.

But Kyril had a hand free now and that was all he needed. He plunged it into his pocket, pulled out the wad of money and, snapping the thread, flung it into the air.

Pandemonium.

Just as the Englishman had predicted, everyone—even the goat—was snatching at the banknotes fluttering down from above. Bodies slammed into bodies. Grown men crawled after bills lying on the ground. Somebody shoved somebody else, and fights broke out.

Weeping hot tears of anger, Kyril fled to freedom.

“They none of them stood up for me. Not Oleg or Stephan—hell, they was supposed to be keeping a lookout and didn’t. Dmitri wasn’t no use either. And Lev! I shouted for him to throw up the money, but did he? No. I fucking begged him. I got down on my fucking knees. He was gonna let me go to prison, just so he could keep a few lousy rubles!”

“You will remember that I cautioned you that your associates were of unknown mettle,” Darger said gently. He set down the
Telegonia
in order to give the urchin his full attention. “This is a hard lesson to learn at such a tender age, and yet a necessary one as well. Most people are untrustworthy and, as a rule, only in it for themselves. Better you know that now than not at all.”

“Well, it sucks!” Kyril said. “It sucks big fat donkey dicks!”

“Your bitterness is natural. But you must not let it distract you from learning your games.”

“Games! What good are games, if I ain’t got no friends?”

“No friends?” Darger said in a tone of mild astonishment. “Why do you think I’ve been teaching you a trade, if not out of friendship?”

“You’re just doing it so you can keep all these—” Kyril spat out the word as if it were an obscenity—“
books
.”

“Oh, my dear chap! You don’t imagine that I’ll be allowed to keep these books, do you? No, no, no. As soon as it is discovered I have found them, the Duke of Muscovy—or rather his people—will take them away from me. Nor will I be offered any sort of adequate recompense or reward. This is simply the way of the world. The strong take from the weak, and afterward they call it justice.”

“Then what the fucking hell are you doing here?”

“It would take some time to spell out the workings of the operation in which I am engaged. Suffice it to say that I have a trusted associate who will pretend to set a trap for me. The great powers of Muscovy will bait that trap with what I trust will be enormous wealth. And in the natural course of things, there will come a fleeting, magical moment when that bait is solely in my associate’s control. The rest, I trust, you can work out for yourself.”

“You’d better watch out your pal doesn’t grab everything and skip out on you.”

“My associate has proved himself a hundred times over. This is what I was trying to explain to you earlier: Not that friends are unreliable, but that a reliable friend is a pearl beyond price. I would walk through fire for him. As, I truly believe, he would for me.”

“Yeah, well, I ain’t walking through fire for nobody,” Kyril said intensely. “I’m not putting myself out for nobody ever again.”

“Then you’re not half the fellow I believe you to be. Incidentally, did you bring today’s papers with you?”

“Don’t I always? I set ’em down over there.”

“And there’s my proof! Even in your heightened emotional state, you have demonstrated your reliability. Look here. It is true that this is a very bad world. It is true that the strong feed upon the weak, and the weak feed upon each other. But not all the weak are content to remain so. Some few—such as you and I, Kyril, you and I!—employ our wits to better our lot and to regain some fraction of what was stolen from us long before we were born.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“I shall be leaving you soon, and without so much as a word of farewell, as often is necessary in our trade. But before I do, I would like to impart to you a few words of fatherly wisdom. If. . .” Darger stopped, thought, and began again. “To do well in this world, this is what is required of you: First of all confidence, patience, and the ability to keep your head when those around you are mad with hysteria. You must learn to present a bland face in the presence of lies and hatred. Let others underestimate you. Take care not to look too good or to sound too wise. Spin dreams for others, but don’t get caught up in them yourself. Plan for triumph and prepare for disaster. There will be times when you lose all you have; pick yourself up and start over again, and don’t whine about it afterward.

“Most of all, live life with all your heart and nerve and sinew. If you can talk with the common bloke without putting on airs and walk with the nobs without letting them relieve you of your watch and wallet… If you can enter a strange city dead broke and leave with your pockets stuffed with cash…Why, then, old son, you’ll be a confidence man, and all the Earth and everything in it will be yours.”

Face screwed up with disgust, Kyril turned and left without saying a word.

“Well,” Darger murmured. “I thought I understood young boys. But clearly I do not.” His hand hesitated over the
Telegonia
, but instead moved on to the papers. Kyril had brought both major dailies, the
Moscow Conquest
, and the
New Russian Empire
. Darger carefully read through the social notes in each. There had been time enough for the Muscovy officials to approach Surplus with plans to catch his errant secretary and claim the library for themselves. As soon as they did, Surplus was supposed to announce a masked ball.

But there was still no news.

Chortenko came out to greet the carriage personally. “Gospozha Zoësophia! What a delightful surprise.” He took her gloved hand and kissed the air above it. Then he offered Surplus a hearty, democratic handshake. “I have informed the duke you are coming, and he looks forward to the meeting with his usual attentiveness.”

“He does not seem to get out of the Kremlin much,” Surplus observed, retrieving his walking stick from the carriage.

Chortenko’s mouth quirked upward, as if he were secretly amused. “The great man’s work is his life.”

At that moment, a door opened and closed somewhere in the mansion so that briefly the yelping of hounds could be heard. “You have dogs!” Zoësophia cried. “Might we see them?”

“Yes, of course you shall. Only not just now. I have arranged for the Moscow City Troop to escort us to the Kremlin, and they are forming up on the other side of the building at this very moment. Shall we take my carriage or yours?”

“I am always keen for new experiences,” Zoësophia said, “whether they be large or small.”

But every hair on Surplus’s body was standing on end. His hearing was acute, as was his sensitivity to the emotions of his dumb cousins. Those dogs were not barking out of ordinary canine exuberance, but from pain and terror and misery. Surplus’s ears pricked up and his nostrils flared. He could smell from their pheromones that they had been extremely badly treated indeed.

Chortenko’s spectacles were twin obsidian circles. “You look alarmed, my dear fellow. Has something startled you?”

“I? Not at all.” Surplus turned to his coachman and with a dismissive wave of his paw sent their equipage back to the embassy.“Only, sometimes I am struck by sudden dark memories. As a man of the world and a sometime adventurer, I have seen more than my share of human cruelty.”

“We must trade stories someday,” Chortenko said amiably.“Those who appreciate such matters say that if you have not seen Russian cruelty, then you do not know cruelty at all.”

Chortenko’s carriage was painted blue-and-white, like his mansion, so that it resembled nothing so much as a Delftware teapot. When it was brought around, Zoësophia and Surplus were given the back seats, while Chortenko and his dwarf savants sat facing them.

Bracketed by horsemen, they started for the Kremlin.

“Tell me, Max,” Chortenko said, turning to the dwarf on his left. “What do we know about the tsar’s lost library?”

“In 1472, the Grand Duke of Moscow Ivan the Third married Princess Sofia Paleologina, a niece of the last Byzantine emperor, Andreas, more rightly known as the Despot of Morea. Despotism is a form of government where all power is embodied in a single individual. The individual self does not exist. As her dowry, Sofia brought to Moscow a wagon train of books and scrolls. Moscow was founded by Prince Yuri Dolgurki in 1147. Soddy podzolic soil is typical of Moscow Oblast. It is apocryphal that the books were the last remnants of the Great Library of Alexandria.”

“Of course, anything labeled apocryphal may also be true,” Chortenko mused.

“The Italian architect Aristotle Fioravanti was commissioned to build a secret library under the Kremlin. Fioravanti also served as a military engineer in the campaigns against Novgorod, Kazan, and Tver. Kazan is the capital of Tartarstan. Tartar sauce is made from mayonnaise and finely chopped pickled cucumber, capers, onions, and parsley, and was invented by the French to go with steak tartare. The last documented attempt to find the library was made by Tsar Nikita Khrushchev.”

“Yes, well, we seem to have gotten off the subject.” To Surplus, Chortenko said, “Have you heard the rumors? They say that the library has been found.”

“Really? That would make a splendid present for the Duke of Muscovy, then. One worthy of a Caliph.”

“That is true. Yet one cannot help wondering what would happen were the secret of the library’s location in private hands. Surely that lucky person—whoever he might be—would find himself in a position to claim an enormous reward, eh?”

“Unless he was a government official. Then, of course, his reward would be the simple knowledge that he had done his duty.”

“Indeed. Yet a private citizen would not be in a position to know whether the reward he was being offered was worthy of his heroic discovery. Perhaps the best possible arrangement would be a partnership involving somebody highly positioned within the government and somebody who was not even a citizen of Muscovy. A foreigner, possibly even an ambassador. What do you think?”

“I think we understand each other perfectly.” Surplus settled back into the cushions, warmed by the abrupt conviction that all was right with the world. “I think also that it is about time that the embassy had a masked ball. I shall advertise the event in the newspapers just as soon as I get back.”

The troops clattered up the great causeway to the Kremlin, driving before them businessmen, mendicants, office-seekers, and assorted riffraff unfortunate enough to have chosen that day to petition favors from the government. At the Trinity Tower gate, they were halted and then, their jurisdiction extending so far and not an inch farther, turned back. After an examination of credentials, the carriage was allowed to pass within, accompanied by an escort of Trinity Tower Regulars. At Cathedral Square they alit and, after their papers were presented again, the Inner Kremlin Militia escorted the party to the entrance of the Great Kremlin Palace. There, the Great Palace Guards assumed responsibility for the party, led them up a marble staircase, and directed them onward.

“It seems odd we must go through one palace to get to another,” Surplus remarked.

“Nothing is straightforward in this land,” Chortenko replied.

They passed under twin rows of crystal chandeliers in Georgievsky Hall, an open, light-flooded room of white pillars and parquet floors in twenty types of hardwood, then through its great mirrored doors to the octagonal Vladimirsky Hall with its steep domed ceiling and gilt stucco molding. From whence it was but a short walk to the entrance of the most splendid of the Kremlin’s secular buildings, Terem Palace.

Two eight-foot-tall guards, whose genome was obviously almost entirely derived from
Ursus arctos
, the Russian brown bear, loomed to either side of the entrance. The blades of their halberds were ornamented with ormolu swirls, and yet were obviously deadly. They bared sharp teeth in silent growls, but when Chortenko presented his papers (for the fourth time since entering the Kremlin), they waved the party within.

Surplus took one step forward and then froze.

The walls were painted in reds and golds that were reflected in the polished honey-colored floor, leaving Surplus feeling as if he were afloat in liquid amber. Every surface was so ornately decorated that the eye darted from beauty to beauty, like a butterfly unable to alight on a single flower. Somewhere, frankincense burned. From one of the nearby churches he heard chanting. Then, small and far away, a church bell began to ring. It was joined by more and closer bells, climaxing when all the Kremlin’s many churches joined in, so that his skull reverberated with the sound.

“This is quite grand,” Surplus heard his own voice saying, in the aftermath. It was all a bit overdone for his plain, American tastes and yet, somehow, he wanted to live here forever.

“I completely approve,” Zoësophia said warmly—though by the shrewd look in her eyes, Surplus judged that she was taking mental notes for changes she would make once she came to power.

A messenger hurried by. From his unblinking gaze and rapid stride, it was clear that he was a servile. Another passed, going the other way. “Come,” Chortenko said. His bland, round face showed no expression at all.

They followed.

The Duke of Muscovy’s chambers took up the top floor of the palace.

The room was dominated by a nude statue of a sleeping giant. It stretched from one end of the building to the other. The giant lay gracefully sprawled upon a tremendous couch with mahogany legs as thick as tree trunks, and red velvet upholstery tacked down with nails whose gilded heads were forged in the shape of double-headed eagles. He was magnificently muscled, and his face was that of a god—Apollo, Surplus speculated, or possibly Adonis. One could gaze upon him for an hour.