A Gentleman in Moscow

by Amor Towles

  “I want to thank you for doing this,” he said.

  “You needn’t thank me, Your Excellency.”

  “Please, Viktor. Call me Alexander.”

  Viktor was about to ask if the Count had received any word from Sofia, but he was interrupted by a scuffle on the other side of the café. Two haggard-looking fruit sellers carrying woven baskets had gotten into a territorial dispute. Given that it was so late, both men were down to a few sorry pieces of produce; and while this may have lent an air of futility to their argument in the eyes of the observers, it in no way diminished the stakes for the principals. To that end, after a brief exchange of insults, one struck the other in the face. With blood on his lip and fruit on the floor, the assaulted man responded in kind.

  As the customers in the café stopped their conversations to watch the skirmish with weary, knowing expressions, the café’s manager rounded the bar and dragged the combatants out by their collars. For a moment, the room was silent while everyone stared out the café window to the spot where the two fruit sellers remained sitting on the ground a few feet apart. Then all of a sudden, the old accordion player—who had stopped performing during the scuffle—struck up a friendly tune, presumably in the hopes of restoring some sense of goodwill.

  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.”

  “Not comrade Leplevsky . . .”

  “The very same, sir. It appears that he discovered the plan of the girl’s defection and was on his way to inform the KGB when Rostov overcame him and forced him into the storeroom at gunpoint.”

  “At gunpoint!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Where did Rostov get a firearm?”

  “It appears that he had a pair of antique dueling pistols—and the will to use them. In fact, it has been confirmed that he shot a portrait of Stalin in the manager’s office.”

  “Shot a portrait of Stalin. Well. He does sound like a rather ruthless fellow. . . .”

  “Yes, sir. And, if I may say so, wily. For it appears that two nights ago a Finnish passport and Finnish currency were stolen from one of the hotel’s Finnish guests. Then last night, a raincoat and hat were stolen from an American journalist. This afternoon, investigators were sent to Leningradsky Railway Station, where confirmation was obtained that a man wearing the hat and coat in question was seen boarding the overnight train to Helsinki. The hat and coat were discovered in a washroom at the Russian terminus in Vyborg, along with a travel guide for Finland from which the maps had been removed. Given the tightness of security at the railway crossing into Finland, it is presumed that Rostov disembarked in Vyborg in order to cross the border on foot. Local security has been alerted, but he may already have slipped through their fingers.”

  “I see . . . ,” said the Chief Administrator again, accepting the file from his lieutenant and putting it on his desk. “But tell me, how did we make the connection between Rostov and the Finnish passport in the first place?”

  “Comrade Leplevsky, sir.”

  “How so?”

  “When comrade Leplevsky was led to the basement, he witnessed Rostov taking the Finnish guide from a collection of abandoned books. With that piece of information in hand, the connection was quickly made to the theft of the passport, and officers were dispatched to the station.”

  “Excellent work all around,” said the Chief Administrator.

  “Yes, sir. Though it does make one wonder.”

  “Wonder what?”

  “Why Rostov didn’t shoot Leplevsky when he had the chance.”

  “Obviously,” said the Chief Administrator, “he didn’t shoot Leplevsky, because Leplevsky isn’t an aristocrat.”

  “Sir?”

  “Oh, never mind.”

  As the Chief Administrator tapped the new folder with his fingers, the lieutenant lingered in the doorway.

  “Yes? Is there something else?”

  “No, sir. There is nothing else. But how shall we proceed?”

  The Chief Administrator considered this question for a moment and then, leaning back in his chair with the barest hint of a smile, replied:

  “Round up the usual suspects.”

  It was Viktor Stepanovich, of course, who left the damning evidence in the Vyborg terminal washroom.

  An hour after bidding the Count good-bye, he boarded the Helsinki-bound train wearing the journalist’s hat and coat with the Baedeker in his pocket. When he disembarked in Vyborg, he tore out the maps and left the guide with the other items on a counter in the station’s washroom. Then he traveled back on the next train bound for Moscow empty-handed.

  It was almost a year later when Viktor finally had the opportunity to watch Casablanca. Naturally, when the scene shifted to Rick’s Café and the police began closing in on Ugarte, his interest was piqued, because he remembered his conversation with the Count in the railway station café. So with utmost attention, he watched as Rick disregarded Ugarte’s pleas for help; he saw the saloonkeeper’s expression remain cool and aloof when the police dragged Ugarte from his lapels; but then, as Rick began making his way through the disconcerted crowd toward the piano player, something caught Viktor’s eye. Just the slightest detail, not more than a few frames of film: In the midst of this short journey, as Rick passes a customer’s table, without breaking stride or interrupting his assurances to the crowd, he sets upright a cocktail glass that had been knocked over during the skirmish.

  Yes, thought Viktor, that’s it, exactly.

  For here was Casablanca, a far-flung outpost in a time of war. And here at the heart of the city, right under the sweep of the searchlights, was Rick’s Café Américain, where the beleaguered could assemble for the moment to gamble and drink and listen to music; to conspire, console, and most importantly, hope. And at the center of this oasis was Rick. As the Count’s friend had observed, the saloonkeeper’s cool response to Ugarte’s arrest and his instruction for the band to play on could suggest a certain indifference to the fates of men. But in setting upright the cocktail glass in the aftermath of the commotion, didn’t he also exhibit an essential faith that by the smallest of one’s actions one can restore some sense of order to the world?

  And Anon

  On one of the first afternoons of summer in 1954, a tall man in his sixties stood in the high grass among some ragged apple trees somewhere in the Nizhny Novgorod Province. The beginnings of a beard on his chin, the dirt on his boots, and the rucksack on his back all contributed to the impression that the man had been hiking for several days, though he didn’t look weary from the effort.

  Pausing among the trees, the traveler looked a few paces ahead to where he could just make out the suggestion of a road that had become overgrown long ago. As the man turned onto this old road with a smile at once wistful and serene, a voice came down from the heavens to ask: Where are you going?

  Stopping in his tracks, the man looked up as—with a rustle of branches—a boy of ten dropped to the ground from an apple tree.

  The eyes of the old man widened.

  “You’re as silent as a mouse, young man.”

  With a look of self-assurance, the boy took the man’s remark very much as a compliment.

  “I am too,” said a timid voice from among the leaves.

  The traveler looked up to discover a girl of seven or eight perched on a branch.

  “Indeed, you are! Would you like a hand coming down?”

  “I don’t need one,” said the girl. But she angled herself to drop into the traveler’s arms, just the same.

  Once the girl was on the ground beside the boy, the traveler could see that the two were siblings.

  “We’re pirates,” the boy said matter-of-factly, while looking off toward the horizon.

  “I could tell,” said the man.

  “Are you going to the mansion?” the little girl asked with curiosity.

  “Most no one goes there,” cautioned the boy.

  “Where is it?” the man asked, having seen no sign of it through the trees.

  “We’ll show you.”

  The boy and girl led the man along the old, overgrown road, which turned in a long, lazy arc. After they had walk
ed about ten minutes, the mystery of the mansion’s invisibility was solved: for having been burned to the ground decades before, it consisted now of two tilting chimneys at either end of a clearing still dusted here and there with ash.

  If one has been absent for decades from a place that one once held dear, the wise would generally counsel that one should never return there again.

  History abounds with sobering examples: After decades of wandering the seas and overcoming all manner of deadly hazards, Odysseus finally returned to Ithaca, only to leave it again a few years later. Robinson Crusoe, having made it back to England after years of isolation, shortly thereafter set sail for that very same island from which he had so fervently prayed for deliverance.

  Why after so many years of longing for home did these sojourners abandon it so shortly upon their return? It is hard to say. But perhaps for those returning after a long absence, the combination of heartfelt sentiments and the ruthless influence of time can only spawn disappointments. The landscape is not as beautiful as one remembered it. The local cider is not as sweet. Quaint buildings have been restored beyond recognition, while fine old traditions have lapsed to make way for mystifying new entertainments. And having imagined at one time that one resided at the very center of this little universe, one is barely recognized, if recognized at all. Thus do the wise counsel that one should steer far and wide of the old homestead.

  But no counsel, however well grounded in history, is suitable for all. Like bottles of wine, two men will differ radically from each other for being born a year apart or on neighboring hills. By way of example, as this traveler stood before the ruins of his old home, he was not overcome by shock, indignation, or despair. Rather, he exhibited the same smile, at once wistful and serene, that he had exhibited upon seeing the overgrown road. For as it turns out, one can revisit the past quite pleasantly, as long as one does so expecting nearly every aspect of it to have changed.

  Having wished the young pirates well, our traveler made his way into the local village about five miles away.