Амор Тоулз - A Gentleman in Moscow

The Count listened to the Bishop with genuine interest and a touch of surprise. His sort? The Lord’s blessing that he could do as he pleased? While dancing with his illusions? The Count had no idea what the Bishop was talking about. After all, he had now lived under house arrest in the Metropol Hotel for over half his life. He almost smiled, on the verge of making some quip about the large imaginations of small men—but his expression instead grew sober, as he considered the Bishop’s smug assurance that all would “come to light.”

His gaze shifted to the filing cabinets, of which there were now five.

With the barrel of the pistol still trained on the Bishop, the Count crossed to the filing cabinets and pulled at the left uppermost drawer. It was locked.

“Where is the key?”

“You have no business opening those cabinets. They contain my personal files.”

The Count went around to the back of the desk and opened the drawers. They were surprisingly empty.

Where would a man like the Bishop keep the key to his personal files? Why, on his person. Of course.

The Count came around the desk and stood over the Bishop.

“You can give me that key,” he said, “or I can take it from you. But there is no third way.”

When the Bishop looked up with an expression of mild indignation, he saw that the Count had raised the old pistol in the air with the clear intention of bringing it down across his face. The Bishop took a small ring of keys from a pocket and threw it on the desk.

Even as they landed in a jangle, the Count could see that the Bishop had undergone something of a transformation. He had suddenly lost his sense of superiority, as if all along it had been secured by his possession of these keys. Picking up the ring, the Count sorted through them until he found the smallest, then he unlocked all of the Bishop’s filing cabinets one by one.

In the first three cabinets, there was an orderly collection of reports on the hotel’s operations: revenues; occupancy rates; staffing; maintenance expenditures; inventories; and yes, discrepancies. But in the remainder of the cabinets, the files were dedicated to individuals. In addition to files on various guests who had stayed in the hotel over the years, in alphabetical arrangement were files on members of the staff. On Arkady, Vasily, Andrey, and Emile. Even Marina. The Count needed no more than a glance at them to know their purpose. They were a careful accounting of human flaws, noting specific instances of tardiness, impertinence, disaffection, drunkenness, sloth, desire. One could not exactly call the contents of these files spurious or inaccurate. No doubt, all of the aforementioned had been guilty of these human frailties at one point or another; but for any one of them the Count could have compiled a file fifty times larger that cataloged their virtues. Having pulled the files of his friends and dumped them on the desk, the Count returned to the cabinets and double-checked among the Rs. When he found his own file, he was pleased to discover that it was among the thickest.

The Count looked at his watch (or rather the Bishop’s). It was 2:30 in the morning: the hour of ghosts. The Count reloaded the first pistol, tucked it through his belt, and then pointed the other at the Bishop.

“It’s time to go,” he said, then he waved at the files on the desk with the pistol. “They’re your property, you carry them.”

The Bishop gathered them up without protest.

“Where are we going?”

“You’ll see soon enough.”

The Count led the Bishop through the empty offices, into an enclosed stairwell, and down two flights below street level.

For all his persnickety command of the hotel’s minutiae, the Bishop had obviously never been in the basement. Coming through the door at the bottom of the stairs, he looked around with a mixture of fear and disgust.

“First stop,” the Count said, pulling open the heavy steel door that led into the boiler room. The Bishop hesitated, so the Count poked him with the barrel of the gun. “Over there.” Taking a handkerchief from his pocket, the Count opened the small door in the furnace. “In they go,” he said.

Without a word, the Bishop fed the flames with his files. Perhaps it was his proximity to the furnace, or the exertion of carrying the stack of dossiers down two flights of stairs, but the Bishop had begun to sweat in a manner that was distinctly out of character.

“Come on,” said the Count. “Next stop.”

Once outside the boiler room, the Count prodded the Bishop down the hall to the cabinet of curiosities.

“There. On the lower shelf. Get that small red book.”

The Bishop did as he was told and handed the Count the Baedeker for Finland.

The Count nodded his head to indicate they were headed farther into the basement. The Bishop now looked quite pale, and after a few steps it seemed his knees might buckle beneath him.

“Just a little farther,” coaxed the Count. And a moment later they were at the bright blue door.

Taking Nina’s key from his pocket, the Count opened it. “In you go,” he said.

The Bishop stepped in and turned. “What are you going to do with me?”

“I’m not going to do anything with you.”

“Then when are you coming back?”

“I am never coming back.”

“You can’t leave me here,” said the Bishop. “It could be weeks before someone finds me!”

“You attend the daily meeting of the Boyarsky, comrade Leplevsky. If you were listening at the last one, you’d recall that there is a banquet on Tuesday night in the ballroom. I have no doubt that someone will find you then.”

At which point, the Count closed the door and locked the Bishop into that room where pomp bides its time.

They should get along just famously, thought the Count.

It was three in the morning when the Count entered the belfry on the lobby floor. As he climbed, he felt the relief of the narrow escape. Reaching in his pocket, he removed the stolen passport and the Finnish marks and tucked them in the Baedeker. But when he turned the corner on the fourth floor, a shiver ran down his spine. For on the landing just above him was the ghost of the one-eyed cat. From his elevated position, the cat looked down upon this Former Person—who was standing there in his stocking feet with pistols in his belt and stolen goods in his hand.

It has been said that Admiral Lord Nelson, having been blinded in one eye during the Battle of the Nile in 1798, three years later during the Battle of Copenhagen held his telescope to his dead eye when his commander raised the signal for retreat—thus continuing his attack until the Danish navy was willing to negotiate a truce.

Though this story was a favorite of the Grand Duke’s and often retold to the young Count as an example of courageous perseverance in the face of impossible odds, the Count had always suspected it was a little apocryphal. After all, in the midst of armed conflicts, facts are bound to be just as susceptible to injury as ships and men, if not more so. But at the onset of the summer solstice of 1954, the one-eyed cat of the Metropol turned his blind eye upon the Count’s ill-gotten gains, and without the slightest expression of disappointment, disappeared down the stairs.

Apotheoses

Despite having gone to bed at four in the morning, on the twenty-first of June the Count rose at his usual hour. He did five squats, five stretches, and took five deep breaths. He breakfasted on coffee, a biscuit, and his daily fruit (today an assortment of berries), after which he went downstairs to read the papers and chat with Vasily. He lunched in the Piazza. In the afternoon, he paid a visit to Marina in the stitching room. As it was his day off, at seven o’clock he had an aperitif at the Shalyapin, where he marveled at the arrival of summer with the ever-attentive Audrius. And at eight, he dined at table ten in the Boyarsky. Which is to say, he treated the day much as he treated any other. Except that when he left the restaurant at ten, having told Nadja that the manager wished to see her, he slipped inside the empty coatroom in order to borrow the raincoat and fedora of the American journalist, Salisbury.