The Turkish Gambit

by Boris Akunin

  “Well, why not those old boots of yours,” said McLaughlin, jabbing a finger in the direction of the Frenchman’s ancient calf-leather footgear. “Try writing something about those that will send the reading public of Paris into raptures.”

  Sobolev threw his hands up in the air.

  “Before they shake hands on it, I pass. Old boots are just too outlandish altogether.”

  In the end, a thousand rubles were bet on the Irishman, and the Frenchman was left without any backers. Varya felt sorry for poor Paladin, but neither she nor Petya had any money. She went across to Fandorin, who was still leafing through his pages of Turkish squiggles, and whispered angrily: “Why don’t you do something? You must back him. I’m sure you can afford it. That satrap of yours must have given you a few pieces of silver. I’ll pay you back later.”

  Erast Petrovich frowned and said in a bored voice: “A hundred rubles on M-monsieur Paladin.” And then he went back to his fascinating reading matter.

  “That makes the odds ten to one,” Lukan summed up. “Not large winnings, gentlemen, but a sure thing.”

  At that moment, Varya’s acquaintance Captain Perepyolkin came dashing into the marquee, changed beyond all recognition: a brand-new uniform, bright, shiny boots, an impressive black dressing over his eye (the bruising had clearly not healed yet), and a white bandage around his head.

  “Your excellency, gentlemen, I come directly from Baron Kried-ener!” the captain announced impressively. “I have an important announcement for the press. You may make a note of my name—Captain of General Headquarters Perepyolkin, Operations Section. Pe-re-pyol-kin. Nikopol has been stormed and taken! We have captured two pashas and six thousand soldiers! Our own losses are trifling. Victory, gentlemen!”

  “Damnation! Again without me!” Sobolev groaned, and he dashed out without even saying good-bye.

  The messenger watched the general leave with a rather bemused expression, but then he was besieged from all sides by journalists. Captain Perepyolkin began answering their questions with obvious enjoyment, flaunting his knowledge of French, English, and German.

  Varya was amazed by Erast Petrovich’s reaction.

  He dropped his book on the table, forced his way resolutely through the gaggle of correspondents, and asked in a quiet voice: “P-pardon me, captain, but are you not mistaken? Kriedener was ordered to take P-Plevna. Nikopol is in entirely the opposite d-direction.”

  There was something in his voice that put the captain on his guard and made him forget about the journalists.

  “Most certainly not, my dear sir. I personally received the telegram from the headquarters of the commander in chief. I was present while it was decoded and I delivered it to the baron myself. I remember the text perfectly: ‘To the commander of the Western Division Lieutenant General Baron Kriedener. I order you to occupy Nikopol and secure your position there with a force of at least one division. Nikolai.’ ”

  Fandorin turned pale.

  “Nikopol?” he asked, even more quietly. “But what about Plevna?”

  The captain shrugged.

  “I have no idea.”

  There was a sudden stamping of feet and clanking of guns at the entrance. The flap was thrust open violently and Lieutenant Colonel Kazanzaki—the last person she wanted to see again!—looked into the marquee. The bayonets of an armed escort glinted behind the lieutenant colonel’s back. The gendarme rested his gaze on Fandorin for a moment, looked straight through Varya, and smiled delightedly at Petya.

  “Ah, there he is, the good fellow! Just as I thought. Volunteer Yablokov, you are under arrest. Take him,” he ordered, turning to the men in the escort. Two gendarmes in blue uniforms promptly strode in and seized hold of Petya’s elbows as he stood there, paralyzed with fright.

  “You’re out of your mind!” cried Varya. “Let him go this instant!”

  Kazanzaki did not dignify her outburst with a reply. He snapped his fingers and the prisoner was quickly dragged outside while the lieutenant colonel remained behind, gazing around him with an equivocal smile.

  “Erast Petrovich, what’s happening?” Varya appealed to Fandorin, her voice trembling. “Say something to him!”

  “Your grounds?” Fandorin asked darkly, staring at the gendarme’s collar.

  “In the message encoded by Yablokov, one word was changed. ‘Plevna’ was replaced by ‘Nikopol,’ nothing more. But only three hours ago, Osman Pasha’s vanguard occupied the deserted town of Plevna and now threatens our flank. Those are my grounds, Mr. Observer.”

  “There you have it, McLaughlin, that miracle of yours that can save Turkey,” Varya heard Paladin say in Russian that was quite correct, but with a charming Gallic roll to the r’s.

  “No miracle, monsieur correspondent, but perfectly straightforward treason,” the lieutenant colonel said with a smile, looking at Fandorin as he spoke. “I simply cannot imagine, Mr. Volunteer, how you are going to explain yourself to his excellency.”

  “You t-talk too much, Lieutenant Colonel.” Erast Petrovich’s glance slid even lower, to the top button of the gendarme’s uniform jacket. “Personal ambition should not interfere with the p-performance of one’s duty.”

  “What?” Kazanzaki’s swarthy face began twitching. “You dare lecture me? Well, now! I’ve had time to make a few inquiries about you, Mr. Wunderkind. In the line of duty. And the character that emerges isn’t exactly a highly moral one. Too sharp altogether, above and beyond the call of duty. Made a highly advantageous marriage, didn’t you, eh? Doubly advantageous in fact—pocketed a nice fat dowry and still held on to your freedom. Very nice work indeed! My congrat—”

  He never finished. Striking as deftly as a cat, Erast Petrovich swiped the palm of his hand across Kazanzaki’s plump lips. Varya gasped, and several officers grabbed hold of Fandorin’s arm, but immediately released it when he showed no signs of agitation.

  “Pistols,” Erast Petrovich pronounced in a humdrum tone of voice, looking the lieutenant colonel straight in the eye now. “Immediately. This very moment, before the command can interfere.”

  Kazanzaki had turned deep crimson. His eyes, as black as plums, flushed bright red with blood. After a moment’s pause he swallowed and said: “By order of His Imperial Majesty, duels are absolutely forbidden for the duration of the war. As you, Fandorin, are perfectly well aware.”

  The lieutenant colonel went out and the canvas flap swung shut violently behind him. Varya asked: “Erast Petrovich, what are we going to do?”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  In which the arrangement

  of a harem is described

  LA REVUE PARISIENNE (Paris)

  18 (6) July 1877

  Charles Paladin

  OLD BOOTS

  * * *

  A FRONTLINE SKETCH

  Their leather has cracked and turned softer than the skin on a horse’s lips. In such boots one could not possibly appear in respectable company. And, of course, I don’t—the boots are meant to serve a quite different purpose.

  They were sewn for me ten years ago by an old Jew in Sofia. As he fleeced me of ten lire, he said: “Monsieur, long after the burdock is growing thick over my grave, you will still be wearing these boots and remembering old Isaac with a kindly word.”

  Less than a year passed before the heel of the left boot fell off in the excavation site of an Assyrian city in Mesopotamia. I was obliged to return to camp alone. As I hobbled across the burning sand, I cursed that old swindler from Sofia in the vilest possible terms and swore that I would burn those boots on the campfire.

  The British archaeologists I was working with at the site never did get back to the camp. They were attacked by the horsemen of Rifat-bek, who regard all infidels as children of Satan, and every last one of them was butchered. I did not burn the boots; instead I replaced the heel and ordered silver heel plates.

  In 1873, in the month of May, while I was on my way to Khiva, my guide, Asaf, decided to appropriate my watch, my rifle, and my black Akhaltekin s
tallion, Yataghan. At night, while I lay sleeping in my tent, Asaf dropped a carpet viper, whose bite is deadly, into my left boot. But the toe of the boot was gaping wide open, and the viper crawled away into the desert. In the morning Asaf himself told me what had happened, because he saw the hand of Allah in it.

  Six months later the steamship Adrianople ran onto rocks in the Gulf of Therma. I drifted along the shoreline for two and a half leagues. The boots were pulling me down to the bottom, but I did not take them off, for I knew that act would be tantamount to capitulation, and then I would never reach land. Those boots gave me the strength not to give in. And I was the only one who made it ashore; everyone else was drowned.

  Now I find myself in a place where men are being killed. The shadow of death hangs over us every day. But I am calm. I put on my boots, which in ten years have changed in color from black to red, and even under fire I feel as though I am gliding across a gleaming parquet floor in my dancing shoes.

  And I never allow my horse to trample burdock—just in case it might be growing over old Isaac’s grave.

  VARYA HAD BEEN WORKING with Fandorin for two days now. She had to try to get Petya released, and, according to Erast Petrovich, there was only one way to do that: Find the true culprit in the case. So Varya herself had implored the titular counselor to take her as his assistant.

  Things looked bad for Petya. They would not allow Varya to see him, but she knew from Fandorin that all the evidence was against the cryptographer. After receiving the commander in chief’s order from Kazanzaki, Yablokov had set about encoding it immediately and then, following standing orders, he had personally delivered the message to the telegraph office. Varya suspected that the absentminded Petya could very well have confused the two towns, especially as everyone knew about the Nikopol fortress, but hardly anyone had ever heard of the little town of Plevna before. Kazanzaki, however, did not believe in absentmindedness, and Petya himself stubbornly insisted that he clearly remembered encoding the name “Plevna,” because it sounded so funny. The worst thing of all was that, according to Erast Petrovich, who had attended one of the interrogation sessions, Yablokov was quite clearly hiding something, and doing it very clumsily indeed. Varya was well aware that Petya simply did not know how to lie. As things stood a court-martial seemed inevitable.

  Fandorin’s way of seeking out the true culprit was rather strange. In the morning he arrayed himself in idiotic striped tights and performed a long sequence of English gymnastics. He lay for days at a time on his camp bed, occasionally visiting the headquarters operations section, and in the evenings he could always be found sitting in the journalists’ club. He smoked cigars, read his book, drank wine without getting drunk, and only entered into conversation reluctantly. He didn’t give her any instructions at all. Before he wished her good-night, all he said was: “I’ll see you in the club tomorrow evening.”

  Varya was driven frantic by the realization of her own helplessness. During the afternoon she walked around the camp, keeping her eyes peeled for anything suspicious that might turn up. But nothing suspicious did turn up, and so, worn out, Varya would go to Erast Petrovich’s tent to shake him up and spur him into action. The titular counselor’s den was a truly appalling mess, a scattered confusion of books, three-verst maps, wickerwork-covered Bulgarian wine bottles, clothes, and cannonballs, which obviously served him as exercise weights. On one occasion Varya sat on a plate of cold pilaf, which for some reason was lying on a chair where she had failed to notice it. She flew into a terrible rage and afterward no matter how she tried she simply could not wash the greasy stain off her one and only decent dress.

  On the evening of the seventh of July Colonel Lukan organized a party in the press club (as the journalists’ marquee had come to be known, in the English fashion) in order to celebrate his birthday. To mark the occasion, three crates of champagne were delivered from Bucharest, for which the hero of the festivities claimed to have paid thirty francs a bottle. The money, however, was wasted, for the birthday boy was very soon forgotten—the true hero of the hour was Paladin.

  In the morning, having armed himself with the Zeiss binoculars he had won from the humbled McLaughlin (note, by the way, that for his miserable hundred rubles Fandorin had won an entire thousand, and all thanks to Varya), the Frenchman had carried out an expedition of great daring: He had ridden unaccompanied to Plevna and, under the protection of his correspondent’s armband, had penetrated to the enemy’s forward lines, even managing to interview the Turkish colonel.

  “Monsieur Perepyolkin was kind enough to explain to me the best way of approaching the town without attracting a bullet,” Paladin explained to the rapt listeners surrounding him. “And it was really not difficult at all—the Turks had not even bothered to arrange proper patrols, and I only met my first asker on the outskirts of the town. ‘What are you gawking at?’ I yelled at him. ‘Take me to your senior commander immediately.’ In the East, gentlemen, the most important thing is to act like a padishah. If you shout and swear, then perhaps you may actually have a right to do it. They brought me to the colonel. His name is Ali-bei—a red fez, a big black beard, and a St. Cyr badge on his chest. Excellent, I thought, la belle France will come to my rescue. I put my situation to him. From the Parisian press. Abandoned by the malevolent fates in the Russian camp, where the boredom is absolutely intolerable and there are no exotic distractions at all, nothing but drunkenness. Would the honorable Ali-bei not agree to give an interview for the public of Paris? He would. So we sit there, drinking cold sherbet. My friend Ali-bei asks me: ‘Is that wonderful café on the corner of the Boulevard Raspaille and the Rue de Sèvres still there?’ To be quite honest, I don’t have a clue whether it is or it isn’t, it is such a long time since I was last in Paris, but I say: ‘Why of course, and more prosperous than ever.’ We speak about the boulevards, the can-can, the cocottes. The colonel becomes quite sentimental, his beard even becomes quite straggly—and it is a most distinguished beard, quite the Maréchal de Rey—and he sighs: ‘Yes, the moment this cursed war is over, I shall go to Paris, to Paris.’ ‘Will it be over soon then, effendi?’ ‘Soon,’ says Ali-bei, ’very soon. Once the Russians dislodge me and my wretched three tabors from Plevna, you can write your conclusion. The road will be left open all the way to Sofia.’ ‘Aye-aye-aye,’ I lament. ‘You are a very brave man, Ali-bei, to face the entire Russian army with only three battalions! I shall certainly write to my newspaper about this. But where is the glorious Osman Nuri Pasha and his army corps?’ The colonel took off his fez and waved one hand in the air: ‘He promised to be here tomorrow, but he will not be in time—the roads are too bad. The evening of the next day, no sooner.’ All in all, we had a splendid little chat. We talked about Constantinople and Alexandria. It cost me quite a struggle to get away—the colonel had already ordered a ram to be slaughtered. On Monsieur Perepyolkin’s advice I have acquainted the grand duke’s staff with the contents of my interview. They found my conversation with Ali-bei quite interesting,” the correspondent concluded modestly. “I believe that tomorrow the Turkish colonel is due for a little surprise.”

  “Oh, Paladin, you old hothead you!” cried Sobolev, advancing on the Frenchman to clutch him in a general’s embrace. “A true Gaul! Let me kiss you!”

  Paladin’s face disappeared behind the general’s immense beard and McLaughlin, who was playing chess with Perepyolkin (the captain had already removed his black bandage and was contemplating the board with both eyes screwed up in concentration), remarked dryly: “The captain ought not to have used you as a scout. I am not really certain, my dear Charles, that your escapade is entirely beyond reproach from the viewpoint of journalistic ethics. A correspondent from a neutral country has no right to take either side in a conflict, and especially to take on the role of a spy, insofar—”

  But at this everyone, including Varya, fell upon the tiresome Celt in such a concerted attack that he was forced into silence.

  “Oho, here’s real revelry!” a confid
ent, ringing voice declared.

  Varya swung round to see a handsome officer of the hussars with black hair, a jaunty mustache, slightly slanting eyes with a devil-may-care glint to them, and a shiny new Order of St. George on his pelisse. This new arrival was not in the least embarrassed by the universal attention that he had attracted—on the contrary, he seemed to accept it as something entirely natural and undeserving of comment.

  “Captain of the Grodno Hussars Regiment Count Zurov,” the officer introduced himself with a salute to Sobolev. “Do you not remember me, your excellency? We marched on Kokand together and I served on Konstantin Petrovich’s staff.”

  “Of course I remember you,” said the general with a nod. “As I recall, you were tried for gambling while on the march and fighting a duel with some quartermaster.”

  “By God’s mercy, nothing came of it,” the hussar replied flippantly. “They told me my old friend Erasmus Fandorin is sometimes to be found in here. I hope they were not lying?”

  Varya glanced quickly at Erast Petrovich, seated in the far corner. He stood up, gave an agonized sigh, and said in a faint voice: “Hippolyte? How do you c-come to be here?”

  “There he is, damn me if he isn’t!” The hussar dashed at Fandorin and began shaking him by the shoulders so enthusiastically that he set Erast Petrovich’s head wobbling backward and forward.

  “And they told me the Turks had set you on a stake in Serbia! Ah, but you’ve lost your looks, brother, I hardly knew you. Touch up the temples to make yourself a bit more impressive, is that it?”

  My, but this titular counselor certainly did have a curious circle of acquaintances: the Vidin Pasha, the chief of gendarmes, and now this picture-postcard dandy with the swashbuckling manners. Varya crept a little closer, as if by chance, in order not to miss a single word.

  “Life has certainly put us through the mill a bit, that it has.” Zurov stopped shaking his old friend and began slapping him on the back instead. “But I’ll tell you about my adventures some other time, tête-à-tête; they’re not for a lady’s ears.” He gave Varya a mischievous sideways glance. “But anyway, they had the usual ending: I was left without a kopeck to my name, all on my lonely ownsome, with my heart shattered to tiny little pieces.” (Another glance in Varya’s direction.)