Boris Akunin - Special Assignments

The plan for the forthcoming campaign, which in his own mind Momos had already dubbed the 'Battle for the Emerald', had taken shape of its own accord.

The turban was always on the Rajah's head. But surely we could assume that he removed it when he went to bed?

Where did the Rajah sleep? In the mansion on the Sparrow Hills. That meant Momos had to go there.

The Governor-General's villa was intended for use by honoured guests. There was a wonderful view of Moscow from that spot on the hills, and there were not so many idle onlookers to annoy the visitors. It was good that the house was rather out of the way. But the villa was guarded by a gendarme post, and that was bad. Clambering over walls in the night and then hightailing it to the shrilling tones of a police whistle was in bad taste, not Momos's style.

Ah, if only the secretary weren't a eunuch, the whole thing could not have been simpler. The Georgian princess, driven to desperation by her passion, would have paid Tarik-bei a secret night-time visit and, once she was in the house, she would have found some way of wandering into the Rajah's bedroom to see whether the emerald might be persuaded to leave that boring turban in search of new adventures. After that it would be a purely technical matter, and Momos knew all about that sort of thing.

But this line of thought, entirely speculative as it was, set a black cat's sharp claws scraping at Momos's heart. For an instant he imagined Mimi in the embraces of a handsome, broad-shouldered young fellow with a luxuriant moustache who was no eunuch but quite the opposite, and he did not like what he saw. It was nonsense, of course, sentimental drivel, but - would you believe it! - he suddenly realised that he would not have gone down this most simple and natural route, even if the secretary's means had been a match for his desires.

Stop! Momos jumped off the desk on which he had been sitting until that moment, dangling his legs (his thoughts moved more nimbly like that) and walked across to the window. Stop-stop-stop ...

The coaches and fours, and the sleighs, and the carriages on their spiked winter wheels were pouring down Tverskaya Street in an unbroken stream. Soon spring would arrive, bringing slush. It was Lent, but today the sun still shone without warming, and the main street of Moscow looked smart and full of life. It was four days since Momos and Mimi had moved out of the Metropole and into the Dresden. Their suite was a little smaller, but it had electric light and a telephone. They couldn't have stayed in the Metropole any longer. Sliunkov had come to see him there several times, and that was dangerous. That little fellow was too unreliable altogether. With a responsible, in fact secret job like that, he still dabbled at cards, and didn't even know his own limits. What if the ingenious Mr Fandorin or some other chief of his were to take hold of him by the lapels and give him a good shaking? No, God looked after those who looked after themselves.

Anyway the Dresden was a very fine hotel, and located exactly opposite the Governor's palace, which was like home to Momos now, after the business with the Englishman. It gave him a warm feeling just to look at it.

The previous day he'd seen Sliunkov in the street and deliberately moved up close to him, even nudged him with his shoulder, but the clerk still hadn't recognised the Marseilles merchant Antoine Bonifatievich Darioux, a long-haired dandy with a waxed moustache, as Momos. Sliunkov had simply muttered, 'Pardon,' and trudged on, hunched over under the powdery falling snow

Stop-stop-stop, Momos told himself again. He had an idea: why couldn't he kill two birds with one stone as he usually did? -or, to be more precise, kill the other man's bird and keep his own away from the stones; or to put it another way, have his cake and eat it. Yes that was exactly the way it would be: innocence preserved and capital acquired.

And why not? - it could very well work! And things were coming together well. Mimi had said that Tarik-bei understood a little French, and 'a little' was exactly the amount that was required.

From that moment on the operation had a new title. It was called 'Platonic Love'.

He knew from the newspapers that after dinner His Indian Highness liked to stroll along the walls of the Novodevichy Convent, where the winter amusements and rides were laid out. There was ice-skating, and wooden slides, and all sorts of sideshows - plenty for the foreign visitor to look at.

As we have already said, it was a genuine Shrovetide day -light and bright with a touch of frost - and so, after strolling round the frozen pond for an hour, Momos and Mimi were chilled through. It wasn't so bad for Mimi. Since she was playing a princess, she was wearing a squirrel-skin coat, with a pine-marten hood and a muff - only her cheeks were ruddy and flushed. But Momos was frozen through to the bone. For the good of the cause he had decked himself out as an elderly oriental chaperone, gluing on thick eyebrows that ran together across the bridge of his nose, deliberately leaving his upper lip unshaved and blackening it and sticking an extension like the bowsprit of a frigate on his nose. His headscarf, with the plaits of false hair streaked with grey dangling from under it, and the short rabbit-fur jacket over his long beaver coat did little to keep him warm; his feet were freezing in their soft felt shoes, and still the damned Rajah did not show up. To amuse Mimi and avoid getting bored himself, from time to time Momos intoned in a soaring contralto with a Georgian accent: 'Sofiko, my darling little chick, your old nurse is absolutely frozen,' or something else of the same kind, and Mimi giggled and stamped her chilly feet in their pretty scarlet boots.

His Highness eventually deigned to arrive. Momos spotted the closed sleigh upholstered in blue velvet from a distance. There was a gendarme in a greatcoat and dress-uniform helmet with a plume sitting on the box beside the coachman.

The prince, wrapped in sables, strolled unhurriedly along beside the skating rink in his tall white turban, casting curious glances at the amusements of these northerners. Trotting along behind His Highness was a low, squat figure in a sheepskin coat that reached down to the ground, a shaggy round cap and a yashmak - presumably the devoted wet nurse Zukhra. The secretary Tarik-bei, in an overcoat of woollen cloth, beneath which his white shalwars could be seen, kept falling behind, gaping eagerly at a gypsy with a bear, or stopping beside a man selling hot spice tea. The pompous gendarme with the grey moustache brought up the rear, in the role of guard of honour. That was helpful: he could take a good look at the ladies who would come visiting that night.

The public showed tremendous interest in the colourful procession. The simpler among them gaped open-mouthed at the infidels, pointing their fingers at the turban and the emerald and the old oriental woman's covered face. The respectable, washed public behaved with greater tact, but also evinced great curiosity. Momos waited until the people of Moscow had had their fill of ogling 'the Indians' and returned to their former amusements, then gave Mimi a gentle nudge in the ribs: it was time.

They set off towards the others. Mimi curtseyed lightly to His Highness and he nodded graciously. She beamed joyfully at the secretary and dropped her muff. The eunuch did what he was supposed to do and rushed to pick it up. Mimi also squatted down and she and the oriental bumped foreheads in a most charming fashion. Following this small, entirely innocent incident, the length of the procession quite naturally increased, with the prince still striding along at the front in regal solitude, followed by his secretary and the princess, and then the two elderly eastern women, with the sniffling, red-nosed gendarme bringing up the rear.