'Anton, I sensed something. Something bad. Did you agree? Are you going to work?'
'Why not? I've got nothing else to do.'
Svetlana was silent. Then she said reluctantly:
'You know, I felt a sort of pricking in my heart. Do you believe I can sense trouble?'
I laughed:
'Yes, Great One.'
'Anton, be serious, will you!' Svetlana was instantly uptight, the way she always got when I called her Great One. 'Listen to me . . . if Gesar asks you to do something, say no.'
'Sveta, if Gesar called me in, it means he wants to ask me to do something. It means he needs help. He says everyone's on holiday . . .'
'He needs more cannon fodder,' Svetlana snapped. 'Anton . . . never mind, you won't listen to me anyway. Just be careful.'
'Sveta, you don't seriously think that Gesar's going to put me in any danger, do you?' I said cautiously. 'I understand the way you feel about him . . .'
'Be careful,' said Svetlana. 'For our sake. All right?'
'All right,' I promised. 'I'm always very careful.'
'I'll call if I sense anything else,' said Svetlana. She seemed to have calmed down a bit. 'And you call, all right? If anything at all unusual happens, call. Okay?'
'Okay, I'll call.'
Svetlana paused for a few seconds, then before she hung up, she said:
'You ought to leave the Watch, third-grade Light Magician . . .'
It all ended on a suspiciously cheerful note, with a cheap jibe . . . Although we had agreed a long time ago not to discuss that subject – three years earlier, when Svetlana left the Night Watch. And we hadn't broken our promise once. Of course. I used to tell my wife about my work . . . at least, about the jobs that I wanted to remember. And she always listened with interest. But now she had come right out with it.
Could she really have sensed something bad?
Anyway, I got ready to go slowly and reluctantly. I put on a suit, then changed into jeans and a checked shirt, then thought 'to hell with it!' and got into my shorts and a black T-shirt with an inscription that said: 'My friend was clinically dead, but all he brought me from the next world was this T-shirt!' I might look like a German tourist, but at least I would retain the semblance of a holiday mood in front of Gesar.
Eventually I left the building with just twenty minutes to spare. I had to flag down a car and feel out the probability lines – and then tell the driver which streets to take so we wouldn't hit any traffic jams.
The driver accepted my instructions hesitantly, he obviously had serious doubts.
But we got there on time.
The lifts weren't working – there were guys in blue overalls loading them with paper sacks of cement. I set off up the stairs on foot, and discovered that the second floor of our office was being refurbished. There were workmen lining the walls with sheets of plasterboard, and plasterers bustling about beside them, filling in the seams. At the same time they were installing a false ceiling, which already covered the air-conditioning pipes.
So our office manager Vitaly Markovich had got his own way after all. He'd managed to get the boss to shell out for a full-scale refurbishment, and even worked out where to get the money from.
I stopped for a moment to look at the workmen through the Twilight. Ordinary people, not Others. Just as I ought to have expected. There was just one plasterer, not much to look at, whose aura seemed suspicious. But after a second I realised he was simply in love. With his own wife! Well, would you believe it, there were still a few good people left in the world.
The third and fourth floors had already been refurbished and that really put me in a good mood. At long last it would be cool in the IT department too. Not that I was in there every day now, but even so . . . As I dashed past I greeted the security guards who had clearly been posted here for the duration of the refurbishment. Just as I got to Gesar's office, I ran into Semyon. He was impressing something on Yulia in a serious, didactic voice.
How time flew . . . Three years earlier Yulia had been just a little girl. Now she was a beautiful young woman. And a very promising enchantress – she had already been invited to join the European Office of the Night Watch. They like to skim off the young talent – to a multilingual chorus of protests about the great common cause.
But this time they hadn't got away with it. Gesar had held on to Yulia, and into the bargain let them know that he could recruit young European talent if he felt like it.
I wondered what Yulia herself had wanted to happen.
'Been called back in?' Semyon enquired sympathetically, breaking off his conversation the moment he spotted me. 'Or is your time up already?'
'My time's up, and I've been called in,' I said. 'Has something happened? Hi, Yulia.'
For some reason Semyon and I never bothered to say hello. As if we'd only just seen each other. And anyway, he always looked exactly the same – simply dressed, carelessly shaved, with the crumpled face of a peasant who's moved to the big city.
That day, in fact, Semyon was looking more homely than ever.
'Hi, Anton,' Yulia replied. Her expression was glum. It looked as though Semyon had been lecturing her again – he was always doing that sort of thing.
'Nothing's happened,' Semyon said, shaking his head. 'Everything's perfectly calm. Last week we only picked up two witches, and that was for petty offences.'
'Well, that's great,' I said, trying not to notice Yulia's imploring glance. 'I'll go and see the boss.'
Semyon nodded and turned back towards the girl. As I walked into the boss's reception room, I heard him saying:
'So listen, Yulia, I've been doing the same job for sixty years now, but this kind of irresponsible behaviour . . .'
He's strict all right. But he never gives anyone a hard time without good reason, so I wasn't about to rescue Yulia from the conversation.
In the reception area the new air conditioner was humming away quietly and the ceiling was dotted with tiny halogen bulbs for accent lighting. Larissa was sitting there – evidently Gesar's secretary, Galochka, was on holiday, and our field work coordinators really didn't have much work of their own to do.
'Hello, Anton,' Larissa said. 'You're looking good.'
'Two weeks on the beach,' I replied proudly.
Larissa squinted at the clock:
'I was told to show you straight through. But the boss still has visitors. Will you go in?'
'Yes,' I decided. 'Seems like I needn't have bothered hurrying.'
'Gorodetsky's here to see you, Boris Ignatievich,' Larissa said into the intercom. She nodded to me: 'Go on in . . . oh, it's hot in there . . .'
It really was hot in Gesar's office. There were two middle-aged men I didn't know languishing in the armchairs in front of his desk – I mentally christened them Thin Man and Fat Man, after Chekhov's short story. But both of them were sweating.
'And what do we observe?' Gesar asked them reproachfully. He cast a sideways glance at me. 'Come in, Anton. Sit down, I'll be finished in a moment . . .'
Thin Man and Fat Man perked up a bit at that.
'Some mediocre housewife . . . distorting all the facts . . . vulgarising and simplifying everything . . . running rings round you! On a global scale!'
'She can do that precisely because she vulgarises and simplifies,' Fat Man retorted morosely.
'You told us to tell everything like it is,' Thin Man said in support. 'And this is the result, Most Lucent Gesar.'
I took a look at Gesar's visitors through the Twilight. Well, well! More human beings! And yet they knew the boss's name and title. And they even pronounced them with candid sarcasm. Of course, there are always special circumstances, but for Gesar to reveal himself to ordinary people . . .
'All right,' Gesar said with a nod. 'I'll let you have one more try. This time work separately.'
Thin Man and Fat Man exchanged glances.
'We'll do our best,' Fat Man said with a good-natured smile. 'You understand, though – we've already had a
certain degree of success . . .'
Gesar snorted. As if they'd been given some invisible signal that the conversation was over, the visitors rose, shook the boss's hand in farewell and walked out. In the reception area Thin Man made some flirtatious remark to Larissa, and she laughed.
'Ordinary people?' I asked cautiously.
Gesar nodded, gazing at the door with a hostile expression. He sighed:
'People, people . . . All right, Gorodetsky. Sit down.'
I sat down, but Gesar still didn't say anything. He fiddled with his papers and fingered some bright-coloured, smoothly polished glass beads heaped up in a coarse earthenware bowl. I really wanted to look closer and see if they were amulets or just glass beads, but I couldn't risk taking any liberties in front of Gesar.
'How was your holiday?' Gesar asked, as if he'd exhausted all his excuses for delaying the conversation.
'Good,' I answered. 'I missed Sveta, of course. But I couldn't drag little Nadya out into that scorching Spanish sun. That's no good . . .'
'No,' Gesar agreed, 'it isn't.' I didn't know if the Great Magician had any children – even close associates weren't trusted with information like that. He probably did. He was almost certainly capable of experiencing something like paternal feelings. 'Anton, did you phone Svetlana?'
'No,' I said and shook my head. 'Has she contacted you?'
Gesar nodded. Then suddenly he couldn't contain himself any longer – he slammed his fist down on the desk and burst out:
'Just what did she think she was doing? First she deserts from the Watch . . .'
'Gesar, every one of us has the right to resign,' I objected. But Gesar had no intention of apologising.
'Deserts! An enchantress of her level doesn't belong to herself! She has no right to belong to herself! If, that is, she calls herself a Light One . . . And then – she's raising her daughter as a human being!'
'Nadya is a human being,' I said, feeling myself starting to get angry. 'Whether or not she becomes an Other is for her to decide . . . Most Lucent Gesar.'
Gesar realised that I was all set to blow too. And he changed his tone.
'Okay. That's your right. Pull out of the fight, ruin the little girl's life . . . Anything you like! But where does this hate come from?'
'What did Sveta say?' I asked.
Gesar sighed:
'Your wife phoned me. On a number that she has no right to know . . .'
'Then she doesn't know it,' I put in.
'And she told me I intended to have you killed! That I was hatching a highly complicated plot for your physical elimination!'
I looked into Gesar's eyes for a second. Then I laughed.
'You think it's funny?' Gesar asked in a pained voice. 'You really think so?'
'Gesar . . .' I said, struggling to suppress my laughter. 'I'm sorry. May I speak frankly?'
'By all means . . .'
'You are the greatest schemer I know. Worse than Zabulon. Compared to you, Machiavelli was a mere pup . . .'
'Don't be so quick to underestimate Machiavelli,' Gesar growled. 'I get the idea, I'm a schemer. And?'
'And I'm sure you have no intention of having me killed. In a crisis, perhaps, you might sacrifice me. In order to save a commensurately greater number of people or Light Others. But not that way . . . by planning . . . and intriguing . . . I don't believe it.'
'Thanks, I'm glad to hear it,' Gesar said with a nod. I couldn't tell if I'd nettled him or not. 'Then what on earth has Svetlana got into her head? I'm sorry, Anton . . .' Gesar suddenly hesitated and even looked away. But he finished what he was saying: 'Are you expecting a child? Another one?'
I choked and shook my head:
'No . . . at least, I don't think so . . . no, she would have told me!'
'Women sometimes go a bit crazy when they're expecting a child,' Gesar growled and started fingering his glass beads again. 'They start seeing danger everywhere – for the child, for their husband, for themselves . . . Or maybe now she has . . .' But then the Great Magician got really embarrassed and stopped himself short 'That's rubbish . . . forget it. Why don't you pay your wife a visit in the country, play with your daughter, drink some milk fresh from the cow . . .'
'My holiday ends tomorrow,' I reminded him. There was something not right here. 'And I thought the idea was that I was going to work today.'
Gesar stared hard at me:
'Anton, forget about work. Svetlana shouted at me for fifteen minutes. If she was a Dark One, there'd be an Inferno vortex hanging over my head right now! That's it, work's cancelled. I'm extending your holiday for a week – go to the country to see your wife.'
In the Moscow department of the Watch we have a saying: 'There are three things a Light Other can't do: organise his own personal life, achieve worldwide peace and happiness, and get time off from Gesar'.
To be honest, I was quite happy with my personal life, and now I'd been given an extra week of holiday.
So maybe worldwide peace and happiness were only just around the corner?
'Aren't you pleased?' Gesar asked.
'Yes,' I admitted. No, I wasn't inspired by the prospect of weeding the vegetable beds under the watchful eye of my mother-in-law. But Sveta and Nadya would be there. Nadya, Nadyenka, Nadiushka. My little two-year-old miracle. A lovely little human being . . . Potentially an Other of immense power. An enchantress so very Great that Gesar himself couldn't hold a candle to her. I imagined the Great Light Magician Gesar standing there holding a candle, so that little Nadya could play with her toys, and grinned.
'Call into the accounts office, they'll issue you a bonus . . .' Gesar continued, not suspecting the humiliation I was subjecting him to in my mind. 'Think up the citation for yourself. Something like . . . for many years of conscientious service . . .'
'Gesar, what kind of job was it?' I asked.
He stopped talking and tried to drill right through me with his gaze. When he got nowhere, he said:
'When I tell you everything, you will phone Svetlana. From here. And you'll ask her if you should agree or not. Okay? And you tell her about the extra holiday too.'
'What's happened?'
Instead of replying, Gesar pulled open the drawer of his desk, took out a black leather folder and held it out to me. The folder had a distinct aura of magic – powerful, dangerous battle magic.
'Don't worry, open it, you've been granted access,' Gesar murmured.
I opened the folder – at that point any unauthorised Other or human being would have been reduced to a handful of ash. Inside the folder was a letter. Just one single envelope.
The address of our office was written in newsprint, carefully cut out and stuck onto the envelope.
And naturally there was no return address.
'The letters have been cut out of three newspapers,' said Gesar. 'Pravda, Kommersant and Arguments and Facts.'
'Ingenious,' I remarked. 'Can I open it?'
'Yes, do. The forensic experts have already done everything they can with the envelope – there aren't any fingerprints. The glue was made in China and it's on sale in every newspaper kiosk.'