...5...
Moscow was a city of hidden passages and surprising depths. There were pedestrian walkways under all the larger streets, lined with small shops and lit by bioluminescent lichens growing on the undersides of their roofs. Basements opened into underground arcades where illegal businesses were run out of undocumented storage vaults carved from the bedrock when the city was young. Military installations from bygone eras and bunkers built to protect ancient tyrants from their enemies both abroad and at home were embedded deep within a three-dimensional tangle of transit and utility tunnels, some still functional and others containing the ruins of the electrical infrastructure that had been hastily ripped asunder after the revolt of mankind’s electronic slaves. Long corridors connected buildings that no longer existed.
“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 naïve 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.
Seeing their exhaustion, however, Arkady gently kissed both the dear women on their foreheads and, throwing on his embroidered silk dressing gown, went to the window to watch the birth of a new day. The smokes and fogs of Moscow had been transformed by the alchemy of dawn into a diffuse and holy haze that briefly made this thronged and wicked place appear to be a sinless city upon the hill, a second Jerusalem, a fit dwell-ing-place for the living Spirit.
He stood motionless, reveling in the presence of God.
After a time, Baronessa Avdotya stirred faintly and said, “That was… even better than the first time. I would not have thought it possible.”
Beside her Irina murmured, “I am never going to let a man touch me again. It would spoil the memory of this night.”
There were no words Arkady could have more greatly relished hearing. They stroked his vanity so emphatically that he had to fight down the urge to fling himself back onto the bed and show both ladies how much more he had yet to give.
“Why have you left us?” the baronessa mock-complained.He could hear her loving smile in her voice. “What are you looking at so intently?”
“I am watching the sun come up,” he said simply. “It struggles to rise above the horizon, and in doing so it makes the horizon seem to shift and move, like a sleeper’s eyelid when he strives to awaken. Yet though the enterprise looks difficult, it is inevitable; not all the armies in the world could delay it for the slightest fraction of a second.”
“You make it sound so profound.”
“It is! It is!” Arkady cried with all the certainty of a recent convert. “It seems to me that this is exactly like the merciful God trying to force His way into our night-bound, sinful lives—it seems so difficult, impossible even, and yet His will is indomitable and cannot be stopped. Darkness flees from Him. His light arises from within like the sun, and the soul is filled with purity, certainty, and serenity.”
“Oh, Arkady,” Irina sighed. “You are so very, very spiritual. But God does not enter into the lives of ordinary people in such a manner. Only for saints and people in books does He behave that way.”
Now Arkady flung away the robe and returned to the bed. He swept both women into his arms and addressed them by their pet names. “Ah, my beautiful Dunyasha! Sweet Irinushka! Do not despair, for God has found a way to break through the membrane separating Him from the mundane world.”
“Away, insatiable beast!” The baronessa pushed herself out of Arkady’s arms and then, when he did not move to grab her back, snuggled into them again. Irina rolled over weakly and touched her lips in a little pouting kiss to Arkady’s chest, though without any strength.
Now came the most delicate and important part of Arkady’s mission. “I was not always so vigorous, you know, nor so sure of God’s abiding love. Not long ago I was weak and riddled with doubt.” He paused, as if debating within himself whether to share with them a great secret. “My darlings! Do you wish to be as strong as I? To have my sexual stamina? That is nothing. That is the simplest thing imaginable. I can show you how it is done. But more importantly, you will feel the presence of the indwelling God as intimately as you have felt my caresses.”
“It sounds delightful,” Baronessa Avdotya murmured,“though improbable.”
“Invite me to your estate next weekend, when the baron is away, and I will bring what is requisite. We shall all three of us be made closer than lovers and stronger than gods.”
“I will come,” Irina promised. “But I must bring another friend with me—perhaps two—so that I can get some rest between your storms of lovemaking.”
“We’d best make it five,” the baronessa said.
It was that fleeting moment of golden perfection that comes in late September, which the Russians called “grandmother’s summer.” The parks and boulevards of Moscow drew lovers and idlers out from their houses and businesses. There were people boating on the river’s silvery waters. The view from the wooded heights of the Secret Garden was as picturesque as a hand-colored woodcut.
Simply being in the Kremlin, Surplus felt lifted above the day-to-day concerns of the groundlings in the city beneath him. It explained everything about those who governed from this high place: He felt himself not only physically but morally superior, occupying a higher, more spiritually elevated space, ethereal where the Muscovites were flesh-bound and sweaty, pure where they reeked of sausage and kvass. He shook his head in amusement at the whimsicality of these thoughts, but found he could not dismiss them. “Those poor fellows!” he thought pityingly, meaning everybody who had the misfortune to be ruled from this extraordinary spot.
It was also, he had to admit, good to get away from the Pearls for a change. Beauteous and charming as they might be, the Pearls were also— there was no denying it—intense. Indeed, they were growing more intense with each passing day on which they were not taken, with enormous pomp and ceremony, to the Terem Palace to stand at last, blushing and shy, before their new bridegroom. After which, he presumed, these seven virgins with their excess of book learning and lack of any prior outlets for their physical desires, would teach the duke precisely how terrifying such young ladies could be.
So it was with a bit of an edge in his voice that Surplus turned to the rotund and pompous bureaucrat—the eighteenth most powerful man in Moscow, the gentleman had boasted—with whom he slowly strolled among the ash trees of the Secret Garden and said, “We have been in Moscow over a month and still you cannot make this simplest of things happen?”
“I have given it my honest best. But what is there to be done? A meeting with the Duke of Muscovy is not something that happens every day.”
“All I wish to do,” Surplus said, “is to give the man a present of seven uniquely beautiful concubines, all of them graceful, intelligent, and desperately eager to please. Nor are they merely decorative and companionable. They can also cook, tat lace, arrange flowers, cheat at cards, and play the pianoforte. Not only are they pleasant to the eye and ear and—presumably—nose and hand and tongue, but they have been thoroughly educated in literature, psychology, and political philosophy. As advisors, they will be unfailingly frank yet subtle as only a Byzantine can be. Further, they are trained in all the social graces and the erotic arts as well. Never was such a gift more churlishly refused!”
“The duke is a great man, with many demands on his time.”
“I warn you that when he finally experiences the thousand delights of the Pearls of Byzantium, he will not reward you for having kept them from him so long.”
“You have your duty and I have mine. Good-bye.” Wrapping his dignity about himself like a greatcoat, the bureaucrat, whom Surplus now thought of as the single most useless man in Moscow, departed.
Dispirited, Surplus sank down on a park bench.
The Secret Garden’s portentous name was more suggestive than it perhaps merited, for it lay above and was named for the Secret Tower, one of the Kremlin’s two dozen towers, most of which antedated the Utopian era. As for why the tower was so named, there were many explanations. One was that it was the terminus of a secret tunnel into the city. Another said that it contained a secret well. The most plausible was that it was named after a long-demolished Cathedral of the Secret that once stood nearby. But which was the truth no man could say for there were no facts in Russia—only conflicting conspiracy theories.
Surplus came out of his reverie to discover, sitting on the bench beside him, a stocky and unprepossessing man in blue glass goggles.
“You seem unhappy, Ambassador,” Chortenko said. “May I ask why?”
His mood being foul, and seeing no reason to pretend otherwise, Surplus said, “Surely you, who are reputed to know everything else that goes on in this city, must be aware of what I have made no effort whatsoever to hide.”
“Yes, yes, these ‘Pearls’ of yours, of course. I was only making small talk. But you, I see, are far too direct for that. So I shall be blunt as well. It is impossible for you to see the Duke of Muscovy. No foreigner has ever been allowed into his presence. But if you will answer a few questions openly and honestly for me, I will arrange the impossible for you. And then…well, you will have as much of the great man’s attention as he deigns to give you.”
There was something about the quiet amusement with which the man spoke that made the small hairs on the back of Surplus’s neck bristle with sudden fear. But he said only, “What do you wish to know?”
“This book that was stolen from you—for there was a book and it was stolen—exactly what is it?”
“I cannot tell you specifically, for that is information which the Caliph’s political surgeons have locked my brain against divulging.” Surplus froze every muscle in his face and stared blankly into the distance. Then, with a sudden, spasmodic toss of his head, he said, “However, I am at liberty to say that it was intended as a present for the duke.”
“Then we are allies in this matter. Tell me, is this book very valuable?”
“Far more so than the Pearls of Byzantium. Indeed, it was the chief gift, and they only an afterthought.”
Chortenko pursed his lips and then tapped them thoughtfully with one stubby forefinger. “Perhaps my people can aid in its recovery by finding the man who stole it from you. He is a foreigner, after all, and hence extremely noticeable.”
“His name is Aubrey Darger, and he was my secretary. But I must tell you that the book itself is useless without…” Surplus’s face twitched and contorted as if he were struggling to find a phrasing allowed by the thought-surgery. “Without certain information that he alone possesses.”
“Curious. But I imagine that information would come out easily enough under torture.”
“If only that were so! I would wield the whip myself, after what that dastard has done. But for much the same reason that I cannot be more open with you about…certain aspects of the matter…it would be a pointless endeavor.” Surplus sighed. “I wish I could be of more help. I don’t imagine the little I’ve told you suffices to warrant a meeting with the duke.”
“Not at all, not at all.” Chortenko consulted a small datebook and then made a notation. “Come to my house a week from Tuesday, and I’ll take you to him.”
Darger followed his guide into the undercity.
Anya Pepsicolova was, of course, an agent of the secret police. But Darger did not hold that against her. Indeed, that was the entire point of this charade—to get the attention of the powers who actually ran Muscovy and, ultimately, convince them that he had something they desired.
Something they would be willing to pay dearly for.
Rulers were notoriously stingy with those who did them favors, of course. So in order to receive an appropriate reward, a silent partner would be required. Somebody highly placed in the administration. It was Surplus’s job to find that individual, just as it was his to ostentatiously display the bait.
The Bucket of Nails’ kitchen opened on a long corridor. Through some of the doors lining that corridor could be glimpsed butchers, dishwashers, mushroom cultivators, gene splicers, and the like. These were the lowest levels of the working class, people who were grimly holding on to the very edge of subsistence, terrified lest they lose their grips and fall into the abyss of joblessness and penury.
They rattled down a metal staircase which seemed ready to collapse from age into a lower level where the lichens and bioluminescent fungi dwindled almost to nothing. Where two corridors intersected, a legless army veteran with a patch of tentacles growing out of one cheek sold oil lanterns from a blanket. Pepsicolova threw down a few rubles, and the man lit two lanterns with a sputtering sulfur match. Their flames leapt high and then sank down as he trimmed the wicks. Pepsicolova handed one to Darger.
The metal parts of the lantern seemed flimsy and its thin panes of glass ready to break at the tap of a fingernail. “Aren’t these a fire hazard?” Darger asked.
“If Moscow burns, it burns,” Pepsicolova said with a fatalistic shrug.
She led him down a second steep and endlessly long metal stairway to a vast and shadowy marble-walled station room. There, long concrete piers lined an underground river whose waters were as black as the Styx. “This is the Neglinnaya River,” Pepsicolova said with a touch of melancholy. “The poor thing has been trapped underground since forever.” A handful of gondoliers ditched their cigarettes into the water at their approach and waved lanterns urging the newcomers toward their crafts. But Pepsicolova ignored them. To one end of the pier was a small skiff. She climbed in, and Darger after her.
An odd incident happened as they were preparing to cast off. A wraith-thin and albino-white individual emerged from the gloom and held out three packs of cigarettes, which Pepsicolova accepted wordlessly. The creature’s face was expressionless, his movements listless. He turned away and faded again into darkness.
“Who was that?” Darger asked.
With an irritated gesture, Pepsicolova lit up a cigarette. “Somebody. A messenger. Nobody anybody cares about.”
“You’d be healthier if you didn’t smoke so much.”
“Tell me something I don’t already know.”
Pepsicolova stood and poled. Darger lounged back, watching her by the light of his lantern. When she leaned into the pole, he could not help noticing that she had quite a nice little bottom. All those months in the company of exquisite and untouchable women had made him acutely appreciative of the charms of their imperfect but (potentially) touchable sisters.
He had patted her on the fanny earlier chiefly in order to establish himself as the shallow and insignificant sort of man he was pretending to be. And she had arched her back! She had all but purred! Darger flattered himself that women rather liked him, but this Anya Pepsicolova had responded in such an extraordinary manner as to suggest deeper feelings on her part toward him.
Darger looked forward to getting to know the dear thing much better. For the moment, however, it was best to keep things simmering away on the back burner. There would be time for romance soon enough.
He just hoped that it did not break her heart when he inevitably had to move on and leave her in the lurch.
Dark waters lapped against the boat. Pepsicolova poled them deeper into mystery.
It was a Tuesday, so of course there was yet another tea party. Up and down the room, twin table-halves were set against either side of the dividing screen. Knots of men (never women, who understandably found the implicit comparison with the Pearls painful) clustered about the tables, vying for the attention of the beauties across from them, while serviles with madly glittering eyes watched for the least sign that a teacup needed filling. Occasionally, a gentleman succeeded in drawing a Pearl away from his competition, and the two stood apart, talking quietly through the screen.
Because they were indoors and because it was the custom here in Russia, the women did not wear veils. This made the Pearls feel daring, which lent a certain sauciness to even their least consequential remarks.
Zoësophia wafted from table to table, now drawing Russalka away from a young swain’s flattery that she was beginning to take too seriously, now subtly switching a retired general’s attention from Eulogia to Euphrosyne, so that each could later upbraid him for his inconstancy. Where the conversation was too heated, she damped it down, before a Neanderthal could descend upon the offender. Where it was listless, she enlivened it with an easily misinterpreted sisterly kiss upon Nymphodora’s dewy lips. By the time her circuit was done and Olympias rose to take over, the energy in the room had significantly intensified.
“Your baron glowers away anybody who tries to sit at your table,” Olympias said behind her hand.
“I know. It is terribly boorish of him.”
“But also very indicative of the depth of his feelings. As is the way your young artist—the one with the unfortunate mustache—refuses to be glowered away.”
“They are both overwrought. I fear that inevitably one of them will kill the other.”
Olympias assumed an expression of bored indifference. “There will always be more artists; they are interchangeable. Conversely, by all accounts, if the Butcher of Smolensk were the one to fall, it would be universally regarded as a act of high-minded civic spiritedness on your part.”
“You are a wicked, sinful girl,” Zoësophia said before drifting back to her table, “and when someday the vagaries of politics free us from the duke’s harem, you’re going to make some unfortunate man extremely happy.”
“Men,” Olympias called loftily after her. “Many, many, many men.”
If truth be told, Zoësophia found these events tedious. Nevertheless, the Pearls were all in ardent competition to be the next after Aetheria to kill a man—not by suicide, it was agreed, for that had been done, but this time by provoking a duel—and it would be uncongenial of her not to give it her best effort. So she returned to the table where Baron Lukoil-Gazprom and the artist who, quite frankly, she found so boring she couldn’t bring herself to remember his name, impatiently awaited her return.“Nikodim, my sweet,” she said to the baron, and to the poet: “My little rabbit.”
“At last, dear angel, you return!” The artist was lean as a whippet and twice as high-strung. “A thousand times have I died in your absence.”
“It was worse for me,” the baron said dryly. “He at least wasn’t sharing a table with a twit.” He was a handsome man and rich as well, though in such company that went without saying. Also politically powerful, which for Zoësophia was always a plus. But the best thing about him was that he thought himself clever, and such fellows were invariably the most delightfully easy to manipulate. He leaned closer to the screen and in a low, flirtatious voice said, “Tell me, ma petite minette… what is the shortest path to your bedroom?”
“Through the wedding chapel,” snapped the artist, who was himself unwed.
Zoësophia allowed herself a hastily stifled snort of laughter.
The baron suppressed a wince. “Sweet lady, it is a dreary journey this… stripling urges upon you. I have made it myself and can recommend neither the experience nor the prospect at the end.”
“It is at least an honorable estate,” the artist said.
“You forget that these ladies are all promised to the Duke of Muscovy.”
“So what you are saying is that in order for you to betray your wife, you require that Zoësophia cuckold the duke?”
It happened as fast as that—too fast for Zoësophia to prevent, even if the rules of the Pearls’ little game had allowed that. The baron sucked in his breath. Then he stood, jarring the table as he did, so that the spoons and teacups rattled.
“That is an insult I will not endure,” he exclaimed loudly. “Sir, I give you your choice of weapons.”
Somehow the artist was on his feet as well. He was such a negligible fellow that Zoësophia had not seen him rise. “Then I choose paint and canvas,” he said. “We shall each paint a satirical portrait of the other in oils.” In his anger, he looked like a terrier defying a bull. Of course, that mustache did not help. “The winner to be selected by vote of all those present—”
“Bah! Paint is no weapon. A duel is not a duel unless there is the chance of grievous injury.”
“Please. Allow me to finish. The winning portrait will be placed on public display for a month at the expense of the loser.”
The baron turned white. Then he sat down. “That is no fit challenge for a gentleman,” he grumbled, “and I refuse to accept it.”
During the exchange, all the room had fallen silent. Now a light smattering of applause arose from those present. The artist colored with pleasure.
“That was wittily done, my little carrot,” Zoësophia said, “and so you must have a reward. You there!” She snapped her fingers at the servile waiting on the table across from her. “Observe me carefully. Then assume my stance.”
The servile stared at her with hard, reptilian eyes. Then, with an ease possible only to one who had no true sense of self, she took on Zoësophia’s mien and posture.
“Now do precisely as I do.”
Zoësophia delicately raised a hand, and the servile moved as if her shadow. Her fingers brushed the artist’s cheek. She stepped forward, into his arms. Her chin tilted upward and her lips met his. Zoësophia’s tongue briefly, lightly probed the air.
Separated by several feet of space, she and the artist kissed.
A long moment later, Zoësophia stepped back, gracefully extricating her proxy from the artist’s embrace. A gesture of dismissal, and the servile resumed her former stance.
The baron watched it all with mingled wonder, lust, anger, and humiliation. Then he turned his back on them all and stormed out of the embassy’s ballroom. Zoësophia did not doubt for a second that at next Tuesday’s tea party she would be short one suitor or the other.
So, really, it turned out to be quite an amusing little gathering after all.
Chortenko climbed the stairs from his basement with a calm and easy heart. Waiting for him on the ground floor was a servile with a hot towel, which he used to clean any spatters of blood that might be on his face and hands. Then he went into the library and sat down to discover Pepsicolova’s latest report waiting for him on a side table. He read it through with care. It fit in interestingly with his observations of the ambassador’s behavior.
When he was done, he touched a nearby bell.
His butler materialized at a respectful distance. “Brandy, sir?”
“Just a small glass.”
“Very good, sir.”
Chortenko swirled the brandy in the glass, staring down at its fluid motion, enjoying its aroma. Sir de Plus Precieux was assuredly intent upon deceiving him. Which probably meant that ultimately the ambassador would have to be rigorously interrogated. But before Chortenko took such an irreversible step, he would need the duke’s assurance that it was the right thing to do.
The Duke of Muscovy, after all, was the ultimate arbiter in such matters. It would not do to act contrary to his judgment.
He thought back to his last conversation with the ambassador.“I would wield the whip myself,” he had said. Chortenko could not help being amused. The fellow had so little idea of what modern torture—applied by knowledgeable professionals—entailed. But he would learn. He would learn.
Chortenko took the merest sip of brandy and rang his butler again. When the man appeared in the doorway, he said, “Two of the dogs have died. Please have their corpses removed and buried somewhere immediately.”
“As you will, sir.”
Chortenko leaned back in his chair with a satisfied little smile. He was a methodical man, and despised untidiness.