Sister Pelagia and the Red Cockerel

Sister Pelagia and the Red Cockerel

Boris Akunin

Random House Publishing Group (2009)

Tags: Mystery & Detective, General, Historical, Fiction

Mystery & Detectivettt Generalttt Historicalttt Fictionttt

The ship carrying the devout to Jerusalem has run into rough waters. Onboard is Manuila, controversial leader of the “Foundlings,” a sect that worships him as the Messiah. But soon the polarizing leader is no longer a passenger or a prophet but a corpse, beaten to death by someone almost supernaturally strong. But not everything is as it seems, and someone else sailing has become enmeshed in the mystery: the seemingly slow but actually astute sleuth Sister Pelagia. Her investigation of the crime will take her deep into the most dangerous areas of the Middle East and Russia, running from one-eyed criminals and after such unlikely animals as a red cockerel that may be more than a red herring. To her shock, she will emerge with not just the culprit in a murder case but a clue to the earth’s greatest secret.Sister Pelagia and the Red Cockerel features its beloved heroine’s most exciting and explosive inquiry yet, one that just might shake the foundations of her faith.From the Trade Paperback edition.

ALSO BY BORIS AKUNIN

Sister Pelagia and the White Bulldog
Sister Pelagia and the Black Monk

THE ERAST FANDORIN MYSTERIES

The Winter Queen
The Turkish Gambit
Murder on the Leviathan
The Death of Achilles
Special Assignments

“The true realist, if he is a non-believer, will always
discover within himself the strength and ability
not to believe even in a miracle.”

—F. M. DOSTOEVSKY,
The Brothers Karamazov

About Muffin

MUFFIN ROLLED ONBOARD the steamer
Sturgeon
as roundly and gently as the little loaf he was named after. He had waited for a thick scrap of fog to creep across onto the quayside, then shrank and shriveled and made himself just like a little gray cloud too. A sudden dart to the very edge, then a hop and a skip up onto the cast-iron bollard. He tripped lightly along the mooring line stretched as taut as a bowstring (this was no great trick for Muffin—he once danced a jig on a cable for a bet). Nobody spotted a thing, and there you are now: welcome the new passenger onboard!

Of course, it wouldn’t have broken him to buy a deck ticket. Only thirty-five kopecks as far as the next mooring, the town of Ust-Sviyazhsk. But for a
razin
, buying a ticket would be an insult to his profession. Buying tickets was for the geese and the carp.

Muffin had got his nickname because he was small and nimble and he walked with short, springy steps, as if he were rolling along. And he had a round head, cropped close, with ears that stuck out at the sides like little shovels, but were remarkably keen of hearing.

What is known about the
razins?
A small group of river folk, inconspicuous, but without them the River would not be the River, like a swamp without mosquitoes. There are experts at cleaning out other people’s pockets onshore as well—“pinchers,” they’re called—but those folk are petty, ragged riffraff and for the most part homeless strays, so they aren’t paid much respect, but the
razins
are, because they’ve been around since time out of mind. As for the question of where the name came from, some claim that it must have come from the word “razor,” since the
razins
are so very sharp, but the
razins
themselves claim it comes from Ataman Stenka Razin, the river bandit, who also plucked fat geese on the great Mother River. The philistines, of course, claim that this is mere wishful thinking.

It was good work, and Muffin liked it exceptionally well. Get on the steamer without anyone noticing you, rub shoulders with the passengers until the next mooring, and then get off. What you’ve taken is yours, what you couldn’t take can go sailing on.

So what are the trump cards in this game?

Sailing airily down the river is good for the health. That’s the first thing. And then you see all different kinds of people, and sometimes they’ll start telling you something so amusing you clean forget about the job. That’s the second thing. But the most important thing of all is—you won’t do any time in jail or hard labor. Muffin had been working on the River for twenty years, and he had no idea what a prison even looked like, he’d never laid eyes on one. Just you try catching him with the swag. The slightest hitch, and it’s gone: “The rope ends are underwater.” And by the way, that old Russian saying was invented about the
razins
, only other folk never bother to think about it. “Ends” is what whey call their booty. And as for the water, there it is, splashing just over the side. Get spotted, and you just chuck the ends in the water, and there’s no way they can prove a thing. The Mother River will hide it all. Well, they’ll give you a thrashing, of course, that’s just the way of things. Only they won’t beat you really hard, because the public that sails on steamers is mostly cultured and delicate, not like in the villages by the river, where the peasants are so wild and ignorant they can easily flog a thief to death.

The
razins
call themselves “pike” as well, and they call the passengers “geese” and “carp.” As well as “the rope ends are underwater,” there’s another saying that everyone repeats all the time, but they don’t understand the real meaning: “The pike’s in the river to stop the carp dozing.”

The most important festival of all for a
razin
is the first steamer of spring, better than any saint’s day. During the winter you can turn as dull as lead for lack of work, and sometimes you can find yourself hungry too. Just sitting there doing nothing, cursing tedious old winter and waiting for the spring, your young bride. Sometimes your dear heart will play hard to get for a long time and there’ll be no steamers sailing until almost June, but this year spring had come calling on Muffin while she was still a pretty young thing and not been obstinate at all. So passionate and affectionate was she, the way she’d clung to him—he’d never known the like. Would you believe it, only the first of April and all the ice was gone already, and the shipping season had begun.

The River’s floodwaters spread out so far and wide you could scarcely even see the banks, but the
Sturgeon
was sticking strictly to the fairway moving at her slowest speed. Because of the fog, the captain was being extremely cautious, and every two or three minutes he gave a hoarse blast on the whistle: “
Oooh-dooo!
Get out of the way—I’m coming!”

The fog was a nuisance to the captain, but it was Muffin’s trustiest comrade. If he could have cut a deal, he would have given it half the loot, just as long as it kept rolling in thick and heavy.

He certainly had nothing to complain about today—the fog had made a really first-rate effort, spreading itself thickest just above the river so that the lower deck, where the cabins were, was as good as smothered. The boat deck, where the lifeboats lay and the folks with sacks and bundles sat along the edge, was sometimes released from the fog’s grip and sometimes covered over: it was like in a fairy tale—the people were there, then suddenly they all disappeared and there was nothing left but white murk. Only the tall black funnel and the bridge were above the fog. Up there, the captain probably felt like he wasn’t a captain sailing on the
Sturgeon
at all, but more like the Lord God Sabaoth himself, floating on the clouds.

All the vessels in the river fleet of the Nord shipping line were named after some kind of fish, it was one of the owner’s whims. From the flagship, the triple-decked
Great Sturgeon
, with first-class cabins that cost ten rubles each, to the last little panting, puffing tug—the
Gudgeon
or the
Blay
.

The
Sturgeon
was not one of the biggest steamers in the line, but it was a good one, lucrative. It sailed from Moscow to Tsaritsyn. The passengers were mostly long-distance travelers, on their way to the Holy Land, some even going all the way to America. Many of them were traveling on special concessionary tickets from the Palestine Society. Muffin himself had never sailed the seas, because there was no point to it, but he knew the whole business backward and forward.

On the Nord Line’s tickets they traveled as follows: from Moscow along the Oka to Nizhni, and after that along the River to Tsaritsyn, then by train to Taganrog, and from there by steamer again, only this time it was a seagoing vessel, and they went on to wherever it was they wanted to go. Sailing third class to the Holy Land cost only 46 rubles and 50 kopecks. Of course, if you went to America, then it was more expensive.

MUFFIN HADN’T FLEECED anyone yet, he was keeping his hands in his pockets, only his eyes and his ears were at work. And his feet too, that goes without saying. The moment the fog thickened a bit, he shuffled along on his soft felt soles from one group to another, keeping his eyes peeled and his ears pricked. What kind of people are you? How good a watch are you keeping?