Амор Тоулз - A Gentleman in Moscow

As Viktor took a sip from his coffee, the Count watched the accordion player with interest.

“Have you ever seen Casablanca ?” he asked.

Somewhat bewildered, Viktor admitted that he had not.

“Ah. You must see it one day.”

And so the Count told Viktor about his friend Osip and their recent viewing of the movie. In particular, he described the scene in which a small-time crook was dragged away by the police and how the American saloonkeeper, having assured his customers that everything was all right, casually instructed his bandleader to play on.

“My friend was very impressed with this,” explained the Count. “He saw the saloonkeeper’s instruction to the piano player to start playing so soon after the arrest as evidence of his indifference to the fates of other men. But I wonder. . . .”

The following morning at half past eleven, two officers of the KGB arrived at the Metropol Hotel in order to question Headwaiter Alexander Rostov on an undisclosed matter.

Having been escorted by a bellhop to Rostov’s room on the sixth floor, the officers found no sign of him there. Nor was he receiving a trim in the barbershop, lunching at the Piazza, or reading the papers in the lobby. Several of Rostov’s closest associates, including Chef Zhukovsky and Maître d’ Duras, were questioned, but none had seen Rostov since the previous night. (The officers also endeavored to speak with the hotel’s manager, only to find that he had not yet reported to work—a fact that was duly noted in his file!) At one o’clock, two additional KGB men were summoned so that a more thorough search could be made of the hotel. At two, the senior officer conducting the investigation was encouraged to speak with Vasily, the concierge. Finding him at his desk in the lobby (where he was in the midst of securing theater tickets for a guest), the officer did not beat about the bush. He put his question to the concierge unambiguously:

“Do you know the whereabouts of Alexander Rostov?”

To which the concierge replied: “I haven’t the slightest idea.”

Having learned that both Manager Leplevsky and Headwaiter Rostov had gone missing, Chef Zhukovsky and Maître d’ Duras convened at 2:15 for their daily meeting in the chef’s office, where they immediately engaged in close conversation. To be perfectly frank, there was little time spent on consideration of Manager Leplevsky’s absence. But there was a good deal of time spent on Headwaiter Rostov’s. . . .

Initially concerned when they had received word of their friend’s disappearance, the two members of the Triumvirate took comfort from the KGB’s obvious frustration—for it confirmed that the Count was not in their grips. But the question remained: Where could he possibly be?

Then a certain rumor began to spread among the hotel’s staff. For though the officers of the KGB were trained to be inscrutable, gestures, language, and facial expressions have a fundamentally unruly syntax. Thus, over the course of the morning, implications had slipped out and inferences had been made that Sofia had gone missing in Paris.

“Is it possible . . . ?” wondered Andrey aloud, clearly implying to Emile that their friend may also have escaped into the night.

As it was only 2:25, and Chef Zhukovsky had yet to turn the corner from pessimist to optimist, he curtly replied: “Of course not!”

This led to a debate between the two men on the differences between what was probable, plausible, and possible—a debate that might have gone on for an hour, but for a knock at the door. Responding with an irritated “Yes?” Emile turned, expecting to find Ilya with his wooden spoon, but it was the clerk from the mail room.

The chef and maître d’ were so confounded by his sudden appearance that they simply stared.

“Are you Chef Zhukovsky and Maître d’ Duras?” he asked after a moment.

“Of course we are!” declared the chef. “Who else would we be?”

Without a word, the clerk presented two of the five envelopes that had been dropped in his slot the night before (having already made visits to the seamstress’s office, the bar, and the concierge’s desk). A professional through and through, the clerk showed no curiosity as to the contents of these letters despite their unusual weight; and he certainly didn’t wait around for them to be opened, having plenty of his own work to attend to, thank you very much.

With the mail clerk’s departure, Emile and Andrey looked down at their respective envelopes in wonder. In an instant, they could see that the letters had been addressed in a script that was at once proper, proud, and openhearted. Meeting each other’s gaze, they raised their eyebrows then tore the envelopes open. Inside, they each found a letter of parting that thanked them for their fellowship, assured them that the Night of the Bouillabaisse would never be forgotten, and asked that they accept the enclosed as a small token of undying friendship. The “enclosed” happened to be four gold coins.

The two men, who had opened their letters at the same time, and read them at the same time, now dropped them on the table at the same time.

“It’s true!” gasped Emile.

A man of discretion and civility, Andrey did not for one second consider saying: I told you so. Although with a smile he did observe: “So it seems . . .”

But when Emile had recovered from these happy surprises (four pieces of gold and an old friend purposefully at large!), he shook his head as one forlorn.

“What is it?” asked Andrey in concern.

“With Alexander gone and you afflicted with palsy,” the chef said, “what is to become of me?”

Andrey looked at the chef for a moment then smiled.

“Afflicted with palsy! My friend, my hands are as agile as they have ever been.”

Then to prove his point, Andrey picked up the four gold Catherines and sent them spinning in the air.

At five o’clock that afternoon, in a nicely appointed office of the Kremlin (with a view of the lilacs in the Alexander Gardens, no less), the Chief Administrator of a special branch of the country’s elaborate security apparatus sat behind his desk reviewing a file. Dressed in a dark gray suit, the Chief Administrator might have been described as relatively indistinguishable when compared to any other balding bureaucrat in his early sixties, were it not for the scar above his left ear where, by all appearances, someone had once attempted to cleave his skull.

When there was a knock at his door, the Chief Administrator called, “Come in.”

The knocker was a young man in a shirt and tie bearing a thick brown folder.

“Yes?” said the Chief Administrator to his lieutenant, while not looking up from his work.

“Sir,” the lieutenant replied. “Word was received early this morning that a student on the Moscow Conservatory’s goodwill tour has gone missing in Paris.”

The Chief Administrator looked up.

“A student from the Moscow Conservatory?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Male or female?”

“A young woman.”

. . .

“What is her name?”

The lieutenant consulted the folder in his hands.

“Her given name is Sofia and she resides in the Metropol Hotel, where she has been raised by one Alexander Rostov, a Former Person under house arrest; although there appears to be some question as to her paternity. . . .”

“I see. . . . And has this Rostov been questioned?”

“That is just it, sir. Rostov cannot be found either. An initial search of the hotel’s premises proved fruitless, and no one who has been questioned has admitted to seeing him since last night. However, a second and more thorough search this afternoon resulted in the discovery of the hotel’s manager, locked in a storeroom in the basement.”