Boris Akunin: The Winter Queen

Xavier Grushin yawned comfortably and glanced over the top of his tortoiseshell pince-nez at Erast Petrovich Fandorin, clerk and civil servant fourteenth class, * BORIS AKUNIN Translated by Andrew Bromfield THE WINTER QUEEN who was writing out the weekly report to His Excellency the chief of police for the third time. Never mind , thought Grushin. Let him get into neat habits early; he'll be grateful for it later. The very idea of it — scraping away with a steel nib on a report for the top brass. Oh, no, my friend, you just take your time and do it the good old-fashioned way with a goose quill, with all the curlicues and flourishes. His Excellency was raised in Emperor Nicholas I's day; he knows all about good order and respect for superiors.

Xavier Grushin genuinely wished the boy well and felt a fatherly concern for him, for there was no denying life had dealt hard with the novice clerk, leaving him an orphan at the tender age of nineteen years. He had known no mother since he was a young child, and his hothead of a father had squandered his entire estate on worthless projects and then given up the ghost. First he'd built up a fortune during the railway boom, and then he'd ruined himself in the banking boom. As soon as the commercial banks began going under the previous year, plenty of respectable people had found themselves out in the cold. The most reliable interest-bearing bonds were suddenly reduced to worthless trash, to nothing, and the retired Lieutenant Fandorin, who promptly departed this life under the blow, had left his only son nothing but a bundle of promissory notes. The boy should have finished his studies at the gymnasium and gone on to the university, but instead it was out of the parental halls and off into the streets with you to earn a crust of bread. Xavier Grushin snorted in commiseration. The orphan had passed the examination for collegiate registrar all right (that was no problem for such a well-brought-up lad), but what on earth could have made him want to join the police? He should have a post in the Office of Statistics or perhaps in the Department of Justice. His head was full of romantic nonsense and dreams of catching mysterious Caududals. But we don't have any Caududals here, my dear chap. Xavier Grushin shook his head disapprovingly. We spend most of our time around here polishing the seats of our pants and writing reports about the petty bourgeois Potbelly dispatching his lawful spouse and three little ones with an ax in a drunken fit.

The youthful Mr. Fandorin was only serving his third week in the Criminal Investigation Division, but as an experienced sleuth and a real old hand, Xavier Grushin could tell for certain that the boy would never make a go of it. He was too soft, too delicately raised. Once, during the first week, Grushin had taken him along to the scene of a crime (when the merchant's wife Krupnova had her throat cut). Fandorin had taken one look at the dead woman, turned bright green, and gone creeping back all the way along the wall out into the yard. True enough, the merchant's wife had not been a very appetizing sight — with her throat ripped open from ear to ear, her tongue lolling out of her mouth, and her eyes bulging out of her head — and then, of course, there was that pool of blood she was swimming in. Anyway, Xavier Grushin had been obliged to conduct the preliminary investigation and write the report himself. In all honesty, the case had proved simple enough. The caretaker Kuzykin's eyes had been darting about so crazily in his head that Xavier Grushin had immediately ordered the constable to take him by the collar and stick him in the lockup. Kuzykin had been in there for two weeks now and he was still denying everything, but that was all right. He'd confess — there was no one else who could have slit the woman's throat. In the thirty years he'd been working here, Grushin had developed the nose of a bloodhound. And Fandorin would come in handy for _the paperwork. He was conscientious; he wrote good Russian and knew foreign languages; he was quick on the uptake and pleasant company, unlike that wretched drunk Trofimov who'd been demoted last month from clerk to junior assistant police officer over at the Khitrovka slums — let him do his drinking and talk back to his superiors down there.

Grushin drummed his fingers in annoyance on the dreary standard-issue baize covering of his desk, took his watch out of his waistcoat pocket — oh, there was still a fair old spell to lunch! — and decisively pulled across the latest Moscow Gazette .

"Well now, what surprises have they got for us today?" he asked aloud, and the young clerk eagerly set aside his hateful goose-quill pen, knowing that the boss would start reading out the headlines and other bits and pieces and commenting on what he read. It was a little habit that Xavier Feofilaktovich Grushin had.

"Take a look at that now, young Mr. Fandorin, right up there on the front page, where you can't possibly miss it!

THE LATEST AMERICAN CORSET

LORD BYRON

constructed from the most durable of whalebone for a truly manly figure

AN INCH-THIN WAIST AND YARD-WIDE SHOULDERS!

"And yard-high letters to suit. And way down here in tiny little print we have:

THE EMPEROR DEPARTS FOR EMS

"But of course, how could the person of the emperor possibly rival the importance of 'Lord Byron'!"

Xavier Grushin's entirely good-natured grousing produced a quite remarkable effect on the young clerk. He became inexplicably embarrassed; his cheeks flushed bright red, and his long, girlish eyelashes fluttered guiltily. While we are on the subject of eyelashes, it would seem appropriate at this point to describe Erast Fandorin's appearance in somewhat greater detail, since he is destined to play a pivotal role in the astounding and terrible events that will shortly unfold. He was a most comely youth with black hair (in which he took a secret pride) and blue eyes (ah, if only they had also been black!), rather tall, with a pale complexion and a confounded, ineradicable ruddy bloom on his cheeks. We can also reveal the reason for the young collegiate registrar's sudden discomfiture. Only two days previously he had expended a third of his first monthly salary on the very corset described in such vivid and glowing terms and was actually wearing his Lord Byron for the second day, enduring exquisite suffering in the name of beauty. Now he suspected — entirely without justification — that the perspicacious Xavier Grushin had divined the origin of his subordinate's Herculean bearing and wished to make him an object of fun.

Grushin, however, was already continuing with his reading.

TURKISH BASHI-BAZOUK ATROCITIES IN BULGARIA

"Well, that's not for reading just before lunch…

EXPLOSION IN LIGOVKA

Our St.Petersburg correspondent informs us that yesterday at six-thirty in the morning a thunderous explosion occurred at the rental apartment house of Commercial Counselor Vartanov on Znamenskaya Street, completely devastating the apartment on the fourth floor. Upon arrival at the scene the police discovered the remains of a young man, mutilated beyond recognition. The apartment was rented by a certain Mr. P., a private lecturer at the university, and it was apparently his body that was discovered. To judge from the appearance of the lodgings, something in the nature of a secret chemical laboratory had been installed there. The officer in charge of the investigation, Counselor of State Brilling, conjectures that the apartment was being used to manufacture infernal devices for an organization of nihilist terrorists. The investigation is continuing.

"Well now, thanks be to God our Moscow's not Peter!" Judging from the gleam in his eyes, the youthful Mr. Fandorin would have begged to differ on that score. Indeed, every aspect of his appearance was eloquently expressive of the idea that in the real capital people have serious work to do, tracking down terrorist bombers, not writing out ten times over papers which, if truth were told, contain nothing of the slightest interest in any case.