Or the whole deal was phoney, to distract someone’s attention from the real business. Say, Gesar believed that Zabulon was following me and would now go dashing off to London to see Erasmus too.
I sighed. I could carry on thinking up any number of theories. But somehow I had the feeling that I was missing something very simple and very logical—and therefore missing the most logical explanation.
“I wouldn’t bother my head about it if I were you,” Svetlana said as she packed a little suitcase for me. “Gesar’s being devious, of course. But he needs you, and in general I think he’s very fond of you. He had to send someone to London to see Erasmus for form’s sake—so why not you?”
“But he clearly thinks this business with the Tiger case isn’t over yet,” I said pensively. We were in the bedroom. Nadya was watching TV in the sitting room and we could talk frankly.
“I don’t think it’s over, either . . .” Svetlana froze over the suitcase for a moment, with a pile of clean shorts in her hands. “Anton, is there anything you’re hiding from me?”
“How do you mean?”
“Anything to do with the Tiger and the prophecy?”
“I told you everything I knew,” I said, prevaricating slightly. I really didn’t know what had been dictated into the toy telephone. I wasn’t even sure that anything had been dictated into it at all . . . “Sveta, how many days are you packing my suitcase for?”
“Three . . . five . . . seven. For a week.”
“What for? I’ve got a return ticket after just two days.”
“Obviously for some reason I felt it was right to put in seven sets of underclothes for you,” Svetlana said thoughtfully. “And I’ve put in five shirts . . . and two warm sweaters as well . . .”
“London’s sweltering, just like Moscow,” I remarked.
“I know,” Svetlana sighed. “Unfortunately, I’m an intuitive clairvoyant.”
I nodded. Most Others, even when they feel a need to act in one particular way and not any other, can’t explain the reason why. And Svetlana didn’t know why she was packing me a bag for a week. That boy Innokentii would be able to explain it—when he learned to manage his gift.
“And I’ll put in a raincoat for you,” Svetlana said unexpectedly. “And an umbrella.”
“Will it fit?” I asked doubtfully, looking at the suitcase.
“I’ll stretch it on the inside.”
The funny thing was that the spell which made it possible to pack a whole heap of junk into a small volume had only appeared fairly recently. It had simply never occurred to a single Other that it could be done—until people started describing magical bags and suitcases in books of fantasy and fairy tales. Naturally, the path from concept to realization was not long. But even at that time not every magician was capable of casting the “handbag”—aka “nosebag”—spell.
Svetlana could, of course.
“I’ll expand your suitcase for two weeks,” said Svetlana. “You never know . . . if you really did get delayed, there’d be shorts and shirts spraying out in the middle of the airport.”
“Thanks,” I said. “What can I bring you from London?”
Svetlana brushed that aside.
“Don’t you try choosing any clothes for me . . . London has the oldest toyshop in the world: Hamleys. Drop in there and buy something for Nadya.”
“Clothes?” I asked.
“Toys.”
I harrumphed. I reckoned our daughter was pretty much indifferent to toys already. If I’d had a son, everything would have been simple enough. Buy him some radio-controlled helicopter, or some fancy kind of construction set.
“Barbie?” I asked, straining my imagination.
Svetlana sighed, smiled, and explained. “Look what girls her age are buying and get that.”
“I’ll do that,” I said happily. “Still, what shall I bring you?”
There was a moment’s awkward silence, with just some dialogue in squeaky cartoon voices from the TV in the sitting room: “I want to know what the meaning of life is!”—“Then you need Cuisinart, which gives meaning!”
“We need a food processor for the kitchen,” said Svetlana, laughing at something. “But you don’t have to drag it all the way from Great Britain. Bring what the English do best of all.”
“A global language or an empire?”
“Good whisky.”
“In the first place, whisky is either Scotch or Irish, and not English. And in the second place, when did you start drinking?”
“I’ll try it,” said Svetlana, smiling again. “And you’ll have a drink with your friends. And your conscience will be clear, because you’ve brought me a present.”
Gesar was feeling so benevolent that I didn’t even have to book a taxi—Semyon called round for me at seven.
“There’s your present for Erasmus,” he said, waving one hand towards a tightly packed plastic bag, crudely sealed with sticky tape, that was lying on the boot of the car.
“What’s in it?”
“I don’t know. What kind of presents do people take from Russia? Vodka, caviar . . .”
“A matryoshka doll and a balalaika,” I said in the same tone. I opened the suitcase and stuffed the plastic bag into it. In defiance of all common sense it fitted easily into the tightly packed case.
“Did Sveta put a ‘nosebag’ on it?” Semyon asked.
“Uh-huh. She has the strange idea my trip’s going to last a whole week.”
“I’d trust what Svetlana says,” Semyon said seriously.
“I do.”
Along the way, after we’d made the turn onto Leningrad Chaussee, Semyon unexpectedly asked: “Anton, do you mind if I ask you a personal question?”
“Go ahead.”
“How are things with you and Svetlana?”
“In what sense?”
“The most direct sense possible. How’s the relationship?”
“Just fine,” I said. “Best friends and comrades. Complete mutual understanding.”
“That’s not exactly what’s required in family relationships,” Semyon said didactically. “You and I are the ones who should be best friends and comrades—we fight together. But in bed and at the family table comradeship is inappropriate.”
I said nothing for a moment, then lowered the window on my side of the car, took out a cigarette and lit up. Leningrad Chaussee was already packed with cars, but Semyon was driving easily and quickly.
“What made you suddenly bring this up?” I asked. “You lousy psychotherapist . . .”
“I want to help you,” Semyon explained. “I’ve lived in this world for a long time, after all, and I’ve seen a lot. It was hard to make everything fit together at first, right? You and Sveta are both strong individuals, it’s hard for you to adjust to suit someone else, even if you want to. And then somehow it all came together after all. You had a daughter and everything was really good, right? But afterwards, when she grew up a bit—everything got a bit messy again. Comradely.”
“So?” I asked, taking a greedy drag.
“You need shaking up a bit,” Semyon said imperturbably. “For instance, you need a good row about something, the real thing, with smashed plates, or a fight. Separate for a while, get really miffed with each other. But that’s hard for you, because of your daughter . . . And it would be good if you were unfaithful to her. You’ve never been unfaithful to Svetlana, have you?”
“Listen, you, sod off . . .” I said, starting to get really wound up. “When you were a kid, didn’t your mum tell you not to poke your nose into other people’s family business?”
“No, my mum just loved sticking her nose into other people’s squabbles,” Semyon replied. “Anton, don’t go taking offense, there’s no one else who’ll tell you this. But I love you and Sveta very much. And I really want everything to be fine for you.”
“So you advise us to have a fight or be unfaithful to each other!”
“Well, I’m a simple soul and my methods are simple,” Semyon
chuckled. “You could turn to a therapist for help instead, go to sessions for a year or two, spend a bit of time on the couch, talk about life . . .”
“Screw you,” I said crudely, flicking my cigarette out of the window.
“Anton, there’s something big brewing,” said Semyon. “Trust my intuition on that. Hard times are on the way and it would be good if we can all be in good shape to meet them. With no discord in our hearts or our families . . .”
“You get married then, set up a durable social unit of your own . . .”
“My love was a human being. She died,” Semyon replied simply. “I told you about that. And it seems like I’m the one-woman kind. Like yourself. Okay, don’t go getting upset, don’t make a big thing of it.”
“Oh, sure, first you lay all this on me, then it’s ‘don’t make a big thing of it,’ ” I muttered. “Shall I bring you something from London? Whisky . . .”
“I can buy whisky here,” Semyon said dismissively. “You know what, drop into Fortnum and Mason, that’s on Piccadilly. Buy me a jar of Yorkshire honey, I really love it and you can’t get it here.”
“The world’s gone crazy,” I said. “I asked Sveta, she told me to bring whisky. And a healthy drinking man like you wants a jar of English honey!”
“I like tea with honey,” Semyon said impassively. “And an intelligent, loving man like you should think of a present for your wife yourself, and not ask what you should bring. Even a jar of honey would do.”
Chapter 2
IT WAS A BAD LANDING AT HEATHROW. NO, THERE WAS NOTHING wrong with the plane, we were on schedule, we touched down on the runway gently, docked with the bridge quickly . . .
But a flight from somewhere in Southeast Asia had arrived at Terminal Four just ahead of us—maybe from Bangladesh, maybe from Indonesia. And a hundred and fifty Russian passengers found themselves queuing up for passport control behind two hundred swarthy Asians.
Each one of them was carrying a whole heap of documents. It looked from the papers as if they were all planning to study at Oxford or Cambridge, invest hundreds of thousands of pounds in the economy, or collect a multimillion-pound inheritance. Basically, the Bangladeshi-Indonesians had so many grounds for entering the country, it was immediately obvious that most of them would end up working in the restaurants or on the construction sites and farms of Britain. The officers at passport control—also, for the most part, not native Anglo-Saxons—understood this perfectly well, and they checked the documents with exacting precision. Every now and then a check ended with a passenger being led aside—for further investigation . . .
The stream of passengers from our flight who had British citizenship dribbled rapidly past a separate set of desks. Not such a very thin stream, though—it seemed to me that about twenty percent of the people who had flown to England with me were “servants of two masters.” The others lined up somberly between the queue guides. Men dreaming of a smoke after the flight fidgeted miserably. Children who had sat still for too long in the airplane were acting up. Women dreaming of “strolling along Piccadilly” and storming the shops of Oxford Street sent text messages and rummaged in handbags.
Of course, I could have jumped the queue altogether. One way or another. If it came to that, I could simply enter the Twilight and bypass passport control altogether—a young guy did that before my very eyes, although on the plane I hadn’t even suspected that he was an Other. In fact, if I hadn’t had a visa in my passport, I’d have done the same without the slightest hesitation.
But I felt uncomfortable. A woman patiently joined the back of the queue with two little infants, feeding both of them simultaneously, “Macedonian-style.” Admittedly, after a while she was sent to a short queue for those who didn’t have to stand in line with everyone else. There were children and old people standing in front of me too. But there was nothing to be done—we’d arrived at a bad moment, and for Europe the endangered species of Russians is made up of the same kind of suspect “third-world” folk as the denizens of any overpopulated Asian country. Maybe even more suspect—although Russia might have accepted its role as a third-world country, but from time to time it still demonstrates certain ambitions and is reluctant to acknowledge its colonial status openly.
Anyway, positively overflowing with noble feelings, I decided to wait out the queue together with my compatriots. And for the first half-hour I felt genuinely proud of the way I was acting.
I held out for a second half-hour from sheer stubbornness, realizing that to pronounce a spell and bypass passport control now would be as good as admitting my own stupidity.
No special questions arose when my turn came. The officer, who was a Sikh to judge from his turban, glanced at the visa, asked how long I had come to Britain for, was told that it was two or three days, nodded, and slapped his stamp down on my passport.
I passed through the checkpoint manned by a Dark Other and a Light Other without any delay at all—my Higher Other aura inspired respect.
I felt so worn out after the queue that I didn’t take the express train, even though it went to Paddington, which would have been very convenient for me. I walked out of the airport terminal and turned left, towards the spot where smokers were ruining their health at an appropriate distance from decent people. A little glass isolation cell had been set up outside for the victims of nicotine dependence. But the exhausted passengers and uniformed airport workers still disregarded the rules and smoked in the open air.
I lit up too. Beside me a beautiful young miss with long legs and an expensive aluminium suitcase was slavering over a thin cigarette and swearing on the phone at someone called Peter, who hadn’t arrived in time to meet her. The girl happened to be Russian, but she was speaking English and swearing like a real virtuoso. When she finished talking she shook her head helplessly, then immediately phoned Moscow and started discussing the difference in mentality between Russian and English men with a girlfriend.
I chuckled and set off towards the taxi stand. A long line of tall cabs, including some antiques and some ultra-modern specimens, was waiting patiently for customers.
The hotel Gesar had sent me to was a perfectly ordinary little London hotel, located in Bayswater—a district famous for hotels like that. Or perhaps it was the opposite—infamous for its abundance of cheap tourist accommodation. The hotel didn’t have any signs that were visible only in the Twilight, like the “yin-yang” symbol which traditionally means “Others welcome.” I was beginning to suspect that although Gesar had given me a business-class flight, he had economized on the accommodation.
Or was there actually some point in staying in the three-star Darling Hotel that occupied two houses in an old Victorian terrace (white walls, columns at the entrance, single-glazed windows with wooden frames)?
My room was typical for that kind of hotel—that is, small, with narrow doors, a low ceiling, and a tiny bathroom. But the bathroom fittings were new, in the European style, and there was a flat-screen TV with a hundred satellite channels, including a couple of Russian channels squeezed in between the Arab and Chinese ones, and a minibar, and an air conditioner. The bed was also surprisingly large and comfortable.
It would do. I hadn’t come here to loiter in my room.
Exactly what I did now was entirely up to me. I could take a stroll round the shops, buy souvenirs and sit over a pint of beer in a pub, putting business off until tomorrow. I could go to visit Erasmus—unceremoniously, without an invitation. I could ride or walk through Hyde Park to Belgravia, where the office of the London Night Watch was located, and ask for their cooperation.
Or I could just phone Erasmus.
I took out my phone. Disdaining all subtlety and cunning, Mr. Erasmus Darwin now styled himself in the French manner—as Monsieur Erasme de Arvin. And, when I heard his voice in the handset, I even realized why: he spoke with a slight accent, which any modern person would have identified as French.
In actual fact it was an echo of times gone by. An eighteenth-century acc
ent.
The speech of old Others usually doesn’t differ much from modern speech. A language changes gradually, the new words enter the Others’ vocabulary, they pick up new intonations and only a few individual old-fashioned words or expressions are left. The more an Other associates with people, the more active he is in the Watch, the harder it is to tell his age by listening to him.
But if an Other has kept his association with his fellows and with humans to the minimum . . .
There was the accent. And the old-fashioned turns of phrase. And particular words . . . If I had studied English the way normal people do, and not absorbed it magically, I would hardly have understood a thing . . .
“Erasme on the line, I heed you.”
“This is Anton here. I’ve come from Moscow and I really need to see you, Mr. Darwin. I’d like to have a word with you . . . about tigers . . .”
There was a brief pause. Then Erasmus said: “Long have I awaited your call, Antoine. I thought not that you would come from Muscovy, as a Gaul I saw you . . .”
“You saw?” I asked, confused.
“It is known to you that I am a Prophet,” Erasmus told me. “Come you to me—I shall not seek to thwart fate, but shall receive you.”
“Thank you very much,” I said, rather taken aback by such frank benevolence.
“Nonsense is it to thank me, Antoine. The address is known to you. Take a cab and come without delay.”
Monsieur Erasme de Arvin, retired Prophet of the Day Watch and connoisseur of the intimate life of plants, lived beside a park. Properly speaking, the hotel where I was staying was also located beside a park, but there’s a big difference between Hyde Park and Regent’s Park. They may both belong to the Queen, but the former is noisier and simpler, more popular—as in “of the people.” You can find absolutely anything close by—from hugely expensive mansions and luxurious shops (that’s on the Thames side) to cheap hotels and ethnic neighborhoods inhabited by Chinese, Albanians, and Russians (that’s on the railway-station side, where that most likeable of English immigrants, Paddington Bear, once arrived).