Sister Pelagia and the Red Cockerel

by Boris Akunin

  Kesha jumped lightly to the ground and stretched like a cat.

  “Whossat?” Foma asked, pointing to Matvei Bentsionovich.

  “With me. A guest. I’ll tell His Excellency. Let Semyon go,” the young man said, addressing the public prosecutor. “The count will give us his carriage for the drive back.”

  When Berdichevsky paid the driver, the man seemed confused, as if there was something he was hesitant to say, and at the last moment he decided not to. He merely grunted, pulled his cap down over his eyes, and drove away.

  The state counselor watched the carriage leave with a wistful gaze. Matvei Bentsionovich did not like the look of Castle Schwartzwinkel, despite the electric light and the mailbox.

  They went inside.

  Berdichevsky did not get a very clear impression of the courtyard and the buildings, because it is hard to make out architectural details in the dark. The setting seemed to be bizarre and fantastic: little towers, gryphons on waterspouts, stone chimeras silhouetted against the starry sky. In the main building there was electric light behind the curtains: dim on the ground floor, and bright on the second.

  The visitors were met in the doorway by another servant, whom Kesha called Filip. He was dressed exactly the same way as Foma, which indicated that this was the livery of the counts servants. Once again the dimensions of the codpiece were impressive. Do they stuff them with cotton wool or something? the public prosecutor wondered, stealing a sly glance. And only then did the naïve man realize that these fine bucks were probably used by His Excellency for more than just running the household.

  With his black leather creaking, Filip led the guests up a marble stairway decorated with statues of knights. When they reached a spacious, tastefully furnished room on the second floor, he bowed and went out, leaving Matvei Bentsionovich and Kesha alone.

  The young man nodded toward a tall door that led into the inner chambers. “I’ll tell the count about you. You wait here in the reception room for a while.”

  The public prosecutor had the impression that Kesha was nervous. The clerk straightened his tie in the mirror, then took out a little porcelain tube and deftly touched up the color of his lips. The surprise of it set Berdichevsky’s eyes blinking.

  No sooner had the young man with blond hair disappeared into the next room than the state counselor leaped up out of his chair and tiptoed across to the door. He pressed his ear against it and listened.

  He could hear Kesha’s rapid tenor patter, but he couldn’t make out the words. An unnaturally taut, springy voice that sounded as if it had been inflated with a pump said: “Oh, really?”

  More unintelligible gabble.

  “What’s that you say? Berg-Dichevsky?”

  Kesha replied: gabble-gabble-gabble.

  “Very well, let’s have a look at him.”

  Matvei Bentsionovich swung around and in three swift, silent bounds he was back at his armchair and fell into it, casually crossing one leg over the other.

  Then suddenly he noticed Filip standing in the doorway that led to the stairs. The servant was watching the guest with a stony expression on his face and his strong arms, naked up to the elbows, crossed on his chest.

  Curses! Not only had he not heard anything useful, he had disgraced himself in front of a servant! The public prosecutor felt his face flooding with color, but there was no time to dwell on his error. The door of the drawing room opened, and the master of the house came out.

  Berdichevsky saw an elegant gentleman with very white skin and very black hair. From a distance the mustache with curled-up ends looked like a line drawn in charcoal, dividing the face into two halves. Ah, the infernal Zizi has been at work here, the state counselor thought, drawing on his own recently acquired expertise in the dyeing of hair.

  Charnokutsky was wearing a Chinese silk cap with a tassel and a black dressing gown with silver dragons, beneath which could be seen a white shirt with a lace collar. The magnate’s absolutely motionless face appeared to be ageless: there was not a single wrinkle on it. Only the faded blue of the eyes made it possible to surmise that their owner was closer to the sunset of his life than to its dawn. However, the gaze of His Excellency’s eyes was not sated and bored with life, but as sharp and inquisitive as a little boy’s. An old child—that was the description that occurred to Matvei Bentsionovich.

  “Welcome, Mr. Berg-Dichevsky,” the host said in that rubbery voice with which the public prosecutor was already familiar. “Please forgive my informal dress. I was not expecting visitors at this late hour. People rarely come here without some advance arrangement. But I know that Innocent”—the word was pronounced in the French manner, with the stress on the final syllable—“would not bring anyone … inappropriate”

  It took Matvei Bentsionovich a moment to realize that the count was referring to Kesha—“Innokentii”—“Innocent.”

  Charnokutsky flared his nostrils slightly, as if he were repressing a yawn. Suddenly it was clear why his voice sounded so unnatural: the count hardly moved his lips at all and employed no facial expressions—that must be in order to avoid wrinkles. Flaring the nostrils was undoubtedly his substitute for a smile.

  When asked if he was related to the deceased Field Marshal Count Berg, the state counselor replied cautiously that he was, but only very very distantly.

  “Better not tell the other Poles about that,” His Excellency said with another twitch of the nostrils. “It’s all the same to me, I’m an absolute cosmopolitan.”

  As a result of this reply, Matvei Bentsionovich, first, recalled who Field Marshal Berg was—the oppressor of the Poles during the reigns of Nikolai Pavlovich and Alexander the Second—and, second, realized that his host had taken the cautious tone of his reply the wrong way. And thank God for that.

  “What is it, Filip?” the count asked, gazing at his servant.

  Filip bowed, walked up to the count, and whispered in his ear.

  He’s told on me, the brute.

  Charnokutsky’s eyebrows lifted very slightly, and a spark of merriment glinted in the eyes turned toward the public prosecutor.

  “So you are a marshal of the nobility? From the province of Zavolzhie?”

  “What do you find so funny about that?” asked Matvei Bentsionovich and knitted his brows darkly, having decided that the best form of defense was attack. “Do you imagine Zavolzhie is such a hopeless backwater that it has no nobility?”

  The count whispered something to Filip and patted him affectionately on his taut thigh, and then the scurvy lackey finally cleared off.

  “No, no, what I found amusing was something quite different,” said the master of the house, examining his guest openly, in fact absolutely frankly. “It is amusing that Bronek Ratsevich’s friend of the heart should be a marshal of the nobility. That joker will always land on his feet. Tell me, how did you come to meet him?”

  Berdichevsky had prepared an explanation to meet this eventuality on his way there.

  “You know Bronek,” he said with a congenial smile. “Always up to mischief. He got himself into a silly spot of bother in our province. He tried to give a certain nun a fright, for a joke, but he tried a little too hard, and found himself in court. As a stranger who had no acquaintances in the town, he appealed to the marshal for help in choosing a lawyer. Naturally, I helped—as one nobleman to another …”

  Matvei Bentsionovich paused eloquently, as if to say: You can guess for yourselves how events developed after that.

  The smile that was like a yawn appeared once again on the count’s face. “Yes, he always did have a certain penchant for servants of the church. Do you remember that nun, Kesha, the one who wandered into the castle looking for charitable contributions? Remember how Bronek dealt with her, eh?”

  The trembling of the nostrils was joined by a suppressed sobbing—this was obviously not simply laughter, but an entire paroxysm of mirth.

  Kesha smiled too, only his smile seemed somehow crooked, even frightened. But the state counselor tensed i
nside at the mention of the nun. He seemed to be getting warm!

  “But why are we standing here—please come through into the drawing room. I’ll show you my collection, which is absolutely unique after its own fashion.” Charnokutsky gestured to invite them in, and they all moved to the next room.

  The walls of the drawing room were lined and draped with red velvet in a wide variety of tones, from light crimson to dark vermilion, which produced a strange, even malevolent impression. The electric lighting emphasized the shimmering transitions of this bloody palette, creating a glowing effect somewhere between a distant conflagration and a blazing sunset.

  The first thing to catch Berdichevsky’s eye in this incredible drawing room was an Egyptian sarcophagus that contained an incredibly well-preserved female mummy.

  “Twentieth dynasty, one of the daughters of Ramses the Fourth. I bought it from grave robbers in Alexandria for three thousand pounds sterling. She could be alive! Just take a look.” The count raised the muslin, and Matvei Bentsionovich saw a slim body, absolutely naked. “You see—this is the mark of the embalmer’s knife.” A slim finger with a polished nail followed a line stretching across the yellow, wrinkled stomach until it reached the mons pubis, when it was fastidiously withdrawn.

  Turning his eyes away, the state counselor almost screamed out loud: there was a little negro girl gazing out at him from a glass cupboard, her eyes glinting as if she were alive.

  “What’s that?”

  “She’s stuffed. I brought her from Senegambia. For the sake of the tattoos. A genuine work of art!”

  The count switched on a lamp below a shelf and Matvei Bentsionovich saw purple designs in the form of intertwined snakes on the dark brown skin.

  “There is a tribe there in which the women are decorated with delightful tattoos. One little girl had just died. Well, I bought the body from the chief—for a Winchester rifle and a box of ammunition. Apparently the natives there thought I was a consumer of human flesh.” The counts nostrils twitched again. “But in fact one of my servants at the time was an outstanding taxidermist. Impressive work, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Berdichevsky replied with a gulp.

  They moved on to the next exhibit. This proved to be less frightening: an ordinary human skull, and hanging above it a portrait of a powdered lady with a plunging décolleté and a capriciously pouting lower lip.

  “And what’s this?” Matvei Bentsionovich asked with a feeling of relief.

  “Do you not recognize Marie Antoinette? This is her head,” said the count, stroking the skull’s gleaming crown lovingly.

  “How did you get hold of it?” Berdichevsky gasped.

  “I acquired it from a certain Irish lord who happened to be in straitened circumstances at the time. One of his ancestors was in Paris during the Revolution and was quick-witted enough to bribe the executioner.”

  The state counselor shifted his gaze from the portrait to the skull and back again, trying to discover at least some similarity between the human face in life and after death. He failed. The face existed in its own right, and so did the skull. What a swine that Parisian executioner was, Matvei Bentsionovich thought.

  Next there was a glass cube containing a doll’s head with curly hair—as small and wrinkled as a newborn baby’s.

  “That is from the island of New Guinea,” the count explained. “A smoked head. Not really a great rarity—there are plenty like it in European collections—but this one is remarkable because I was, so to speak, personally acquainted with this lady.”

  “How’s that?”

  “She had committed an offense, broken some taboo or other, and for that she had to be killed. I was a witness to the killing and also to the subsequent smoking process—in fact it was shorter than usual, because according to the rules the process ought to take several months, but I could not afford to wait so long. I was warned quite honestly that my souvenir might spoil after a few years. But so far all is well, it is surviving.”

  “And you did nothing to try to save this unfortunate woman?”

  “Who am I to interfere with the administration of justice, even aboriginal justice?”

  They walked up to a large display case in which little bags of various sizes with leather drawstrings were displayed on the shelves.

  “What are these?” asked Matvei Bentsionovich, failing to find anything interesting in the exhibits. “They look like tobacco pouches.”

  “They are pouches. Made by the Indians of the American Wild West. Do you not notice anything special? Take a closer look.”

  The magnate opened the door, took out one of the pouches, and handed it to his guest, who turned the object in his hands, marveling at how thin and soft the leather was. There was nothing else remarkable about it—no pattern, no embossed work. Except that at the center there was something like a little button. He looked at it closely, and then tossed the pouch back onto the shelf in horror.

  “Yes, yes,” His Excellency clucked. “It is a nipple. The warriors of certain Indian tribes have the delightful custom of bringing back men’s scalps and women’s breasts from a raid. But there are even more startling trophies.”

  He took something that looked like a bunch of dried mushrooms off a shelf: a series of dark rings, some of them with little hairs, threaded on a string.

  “This is from the jungles of Brazil. I visited a certain forest people who were at war with those brutish, bloodthirsty female warriors, the Amazons, whom, thank goodness, they later exterminated completely. I bought this garland from their most valiant hero, who had personally killed eleven Amazons. See, there are exactly eleven rings here.”

  “But what are the rings?” the slow-witted Berdichevsky asked, then suddenly felt sick as he realized the answer.

  A gong boomed quietly somewhere in the depths of the house. “The hors d’oeuvres are ready,” the count declared, breaking off the terrifying excursion. “Shall we?”

  After what he had just seen, the public prosecutor was not really in the mood for hors d’oeuvres, but he replied hastily, “Thank you, with pleasure.”

  Anything at all to get out of this room.

  The wolf driven into the pit

  IN THE HALL next door, the dining room (a perfectly normal one, thank God, with no smoked heads or dried genitals), Matvei Bentsionovich drained two glasses of wine one after the other before he could rid himself of the repulsive trembling in his fingers. He ate a grape. His stomach convulsed, but it was all right, it withstood the test.

  Kesha bolted down stuffed quails as if nothing unusual had happened. The count himself did not touch the food, he merely took a sip of cognac and immediately lit up a cigar.

  “Well, then, so there is society in Zavolzhsk?” he asked, pronouncing the word in a way that made it quite clear exactly what kind of society was intended.

  “Not very numerous, but there is,” Berdichevsky replied, preparing to lie.

  Charnokutsky asked several more questions with lively interest, some of which the Zavolzhian did not understand at all. What could “Do you have a spring chick farm?” mean? Or “Do you organize a carousel?” The devil only knew what sort of carousel was meant. Some kind of filthy pederasts’ perversion.

  In order to avoid being exposed, the public prosecutor decided to seize the initiative. “I was very impressed by your collection,” he said, changing the subject. “Tell me, why do you only collect… er … er … the remains of the fair half of the human race?”

  “Woman is not the fair half of the human race, she is not even a half at all,” the count snapped. “She is a cheap caricature of a human being. I tell you this as a medical man. An ugly, absurd creature! Mammary glands like jellyfish, cushions of fat in the pelvis, an absurd skeletal structure, a squeaky voice …”

  Charnokutsky shuddered in disgust.

  Aha, thought Matvei Bentsionovich, you might be a medical man, but there’s a hospital ward just crying out for you. The kind that is locked from the outside.

  “I beg
your pardon, but it is not possible to manage entirely without women,” he protested mildly. “If only from the point of view of continuing the human race.”

  The count was not floored by his argument. “A special strain should be bred from the most fertile of them, the way they do with cows and farrowing sows. Kept in a barn. And fertilized, of course, by using a syringe, and in no other way.” A tremor of revulsion ran across the misogynist’s face.

  Is he mocking me? thought Berdichevsky, suddenly doubtful. Is he playing the fool? Never mind—damn this psychopath’s idiotic theories. It’s time to get down to business.

  “How marvelous it would be to live in an exclusively male society, associating only with others like oneself,” the state counselor mused. “Have you heard that some American millionaire is restoring the biblical Sodom?”

  “Yes. An amusing fruit of American didacticism. From the point of view of philanthropy, of course, those millions should have been spent on bread for the poor, but you won’t amaze the world that way. And what good would it do? The poor will eat the free bread and then demand more tomorrow, you can never have enough. But this is a lesson to humanity. Mr. Sairus is a respectable family man and he can’t stand ‘perverts,’ but he wants to show his contemporaries an example of tolerance and compassion for pariahs. Oh, the Americans will teach everyone to be moral, given enough time.”

  “No doubt the Sodom project has plenty of enemies?” asked Matvei Bentsionovich, venturing onto his main subject. “Among the prudes and religious fanatics. So many sects have appeared recently, calling for Old Testament–style intolerance.”

  From there he was intending to go on to Manuila—to feel out His Excellency’s attitude toward the prophet whom one-eyed Bronek had tried to kill. However, the conversation was interrupted. Filip entered the dining room with a crunch of gleaming leather, bowed, and handed his master a long paper ribbon.