Michael Swanwick - Dancing with Bears

“Vodka, miss?”

“Why the hell else would I be in this shit-hole?”

No man knew all of the underground city’s ways. But Anya Pepsicolova knew as many of them as anybody. To its denizens she was the single best guide to its mysteries that money could hire, a young woman of aristocratic birth who had taken to slumming in the criminal underworld and who, because she had no known protector, they could routinely cheat and shortchange. To the secret police, she was a ruthless and useful undercover agent, though one they felt absolutely no loyalty to. To Sergei Chortenko, she was a naive and ingenious girl who had snooped into matters that did not concern her and who had subsequently been broken to his will. To the monsters who fancied themselves the real rulers of the City Below, she was a convenient means of keeping an eye on the City Above while their plans ripened and fermented and the glorious day grew nearer and nearer when everyone in Moscow-herself most emphatically included-died.

It was hard sometimes for her to keep all of her ostensible masters straight-much less decide which of them she hated the most. The only real pleasure she got out of life anymore was when she was hired by somebody powerless enough that she dared to feed him, alive and screaming, to one of her oppressors.

Pepsicolova sat hunched over a plate of bread she’d chopped into small pieces, chain-smoking cigarettes and drinking slowly but steadily, maintaining a small, warm buzz in the back of her skull. After each shot, she splayed a hand over the bread. Then she closed her eyes, flicked Saint Cyrila out of her wrist sheath, and stabbed between her fingers for a bit of bread to clear her palate. It was her way of judging whether she was still sober. She wanted to have a clear head when the foreign adventurer named Aubrey Darger finally put in an appearance.

For the past two days she had observed him. Today they would speak.

At last there came a clatter of feet down the stairs from the street and her prey threw open the door. For the merest instant cool autumn air blew into the Bucket of Nails. Then the door slammed shut, once again restoring the stench of cigarettes and stale beer.

“English!” cried one of the negligible young men-of no interest even to Chortenko’s people-who came here regularly to argue political theory and leave behind small piles of pamphlets. “It’s the Englishman!” shouted another. A young woman who was still half a student but already more than half a whore twisted in her stool and blew him a kiss.

The foreigner could be charming when he wanted to be-that had been the first thing Pepsicolova had written in her report.

“Vodka!” Darger cried, seizing a chair and throwing his cap onto a table. “If you can call it that.” A bottle, a glass, and a plate of bread were provided. He downed a shot and pinched up some bread. Then he leaned over to fill the glasses at the nearest table. “What subversive nonsense are we discussing today, eh?”

The dilettantes laughed and raised their glasses in salute.

Darger gave the impression of great generosity, but if one kept careful track of what he actually spent, it came to very little, perhaps half a bottle of vodka over the course of a long evening. That was the second thing Pepsicolova had written in her report.

Pepsicolova studied Darger through narrowed eyes. He was unlike anyone she had ever met. He was a well-made fellow, if one considered only his body. But his face…well, if you looked away for an instant and he happened to shift position, you would be hard-put to find him again. It was not that he was homely, not exactly, but rather that his features were so perfectly average that they refused to stay in your memory. When he was talking, his face lit up with animation. But as soon as his mouth stopped moving, he faded back into the wallpaper.

Nondescript. That was the word for him. She stood and went to his table.

“You are looking for something,” she told him.

“As are we all.” Darger’s smile was as good as a wink, an implicit invitation to join him in a private conspiracy of two. “In my youth, I worked for a time as a fortune teller. ‘You seek to better yourself,’ I would say. ‘You have unsuspected depths…You’ve suffered great loss and known terrible pain… Those around you fail to appreciate your sensitive nature.’ I said the same words to everyone, and they all ate it up with a spoon. Indeed, my patter was so convincing that the rumor went out that I was consorting with demons and I had to flee from a lynch mob under cover of night.”

He kicked out the chair across from him. “Sit down and tell me about yourself. I can see that you are a remarkable person who deserves far better than the shoddy treatment you have received so far in your life.”

The man was laughing at her! Pepsicolova silently promised herself that he would pay for that. “A guide,” she said. “I was told you were looking for someone wise in the ways of the dark.”

He studied her thoughtfully.

Pepsicolova could easily imagine what he saw. A woman of marriageable age, rather on the slender side, with her dark hair chopped short, dressed in workingman’s clothing: slouch hat, a loose jacket over a plain vest and shirt, and baggy trousers. Her boots were solid enough to snap a rat’s spine with a single stomp. She knew this from experience. Darger would not see Saint Cyrila and Saint Methodia-one slim blade for infighting and the other for throwing-which she kept up her sleeves. But the girls had a brother, Big Ivan, on her belt, which like most males was not so much functional as it was showy and intimidating.

“Your price?” Darger asked.

She told him.

“You’re hired,” he said. “For half your stated fee, of course-I’m not a fool. You may begin by familiarizing me with the general area where I wish to concentrate my search.”

“And that is?” He gestured vaguely. “Oh, east, I think. Beneath the Old City.” “At the foot of the Kremlin, you mean. I know what you’re after.”

“Do you?”

“Don’t think you’re the first who’s ever hired me to help him find the tomb of the lost tsar.”

“Refresh my memory.”

Not bothering to keep the annoyance out of her voice, Pepsicolova said, “During the fall of Utopia, a great many things were dismantled or hidden away to protect them from…certain entities. Among them was the tomb of Tsar Lenin, which once stood in Red Square but now lies buried no one knows where. Like Peter the Great or Ivan the Terrible, his memory is still a potent one for many Russians. Were his body to be found, it would doubtless be put to use by your political dissident friends. Also, there are the usual rumors about associated treasure which are complete nonsense but I am sure you believe in anyway. So don’t think you’re fooling anybody.”

“Yes! Absolutely! You’ve seen right through me.” Darger smiled brightly. “You are an extraordinarily insightful woman, and I see I can hide nothing from you. Can we start right away?”

“If you wish. We’ll go out through the back.”

They passed through the kitchen, and Darger held the door for her. As Pepsicolova passed through, he placed his hand on her backside in an infuriatingly condescending manner. A thrill of dark pleasure ran up her spine.

She was going to enjoy making this one suffer.

The first time that the Baronessa Lukoil-Gazproma spent the night with Arkady, she came alone. The second time, she brought along her best friend Irina to help blunt his appetites. Nevertheless, when the pearly light of dawn suffused itself across the city and seeped through the windows of his apartment, the two ladies sprawled loose-limbed and exhausted upon the raft of his great bed, while Arkady was entirely certain that he could continue for hours to come.