Sister Pelagia and the Red Cockerel (59 page)

Pelagia suddenly realized that she had not introduced herself, and said, “I’m Pelagia, a nun.”

“Ah, a Bwide of Chwist,” Emmanuel laughed. “The son of God has so many bwides! More than the Sultan of Turkey. And not one of them ever asked him if he wanted to mawwy them.”

The blasphemous joke shattered Pelagia’s special, almost mystical mood created by the moonlit atmosphere in the Garden of Gethsemane.

For a while they walked uphill in silence.
It’s time I explained everything to him
, the nun thought, and she began guardedly and drily, the quip about the Brides of Christ still in her mind: “I have bad news for you. You are in mortal danger. You have very powerful enemies who wish to kill you and will stop at nothing. Your enemies will not be stopped because you have left Russia …”

“Enmity is a mutual substance,” the leader of the Foundlings interrupted her flippantly. “And since I’m nobody’s enemy, I can’t have any enemies of my own. That seems weasonable to me. The people you mention are mistaken, they think I can cause them harm. I just need to talk to them, then evewything will be cweared up. I will definitewy talk to them if it doesn’t work again today. And if it does work, I won’t be here anymore, and they’ll cool down.”

“If what works?” asked Pelagia, baffled.

“I could expwain, but you wouldn’t bewieve me anyway.”

“Ah, they won’t talk to you! They want to see you dead. Your enemies simply kill anyone who gets in their way, without the slightest hesitation! That means that eliminating you is very, very important for them.”

At this point the prophet squinted sideways at Pelagia, not in fear, but with a bemused expression, as if he didn’t really understand why she was so very agitated.

“Sh-sh-sh
” he whispered, putting one finger to his lips. “We’re here. And the moon’s exactly at its zenith.”

He pushed open a half-rotten gate, and they went into a yard overgrown with dry grass. Pelagia could just make out a shack with a collapsed roof at the back of it.

“Whose house is that?”

“I don’t know. No one wesides there anymore. I’m afraid some disaster happened here. I can sense these things …”

Emmanuel shuddered and put his arms around his own shoulders.

Pelagia was not at all interested in the abandoned hovel. She was burning up with frustration and annoyance. She had spent so long searching for this man, and he wouldn’t even listen to her! “Perhaps you think that you’re out of danger because you left Russia,” the nun said angrily. “But that’s not so! They’ll find you, even here. I think I know where the threat comes from, though it seems so unlikely … And then, why would he be so furious with you? That is, I have a theory, but it’s not so very …”

Pelagia broke off. As she looked at the ludicrous figure of the leader of the Foundlings standing on one leg and scratching his ankle with the other foot, the holy sister felt quite ready to admit that her “theory” was a monstrous absurdity.

“No, Pobedin is simply insane,” she muttered.

“What you say is incompwehensible,” Emmanuel said. He put down his staff, lifted a wooden board up off the ground, and started scraping away a heap of rubbish, sending branches, potsherds, and lumps of earth flying in all directions. “And you’re not tewwing me the most important thing.”

“What most important thing?” Pelagia asked in astonishment as she watched this strange performance.

He tugged some planks out from under the rubbish, exposing a pit, and in the bottom of the pit there was a black hole.

“Is that an underground passage?”

“No, it’s a buwiaw chamber. A cave. There are people buwied here who wived a long time ago, two thousand years or even much more than that. Do you know what Eneowithic is? And Chalcowithic?” he asked, pronouncing the high-sounding words with great pomp.

Pelagia had read about ancient Jewish burial sites. The Jerusalem hills were riddled with caves that had once been used for burying the dead. It was not really surprising to find one of these chambers in the yard of an abandoned peasant hovel. But what did Emmanuel want with it?

He struck a match and lit a tightly twisted rag soaked in oil.

His bearded face gazed up at Pelagia out of the pit, illuminated by the crimson flame. The night around her instantly seemed blacker.

“It’s time for me to go,” Emmanuel said. “But I can see you want to ask me about something and you don’t dare. Don’t be afwaid, ask. If I know the answer, I’ll tell you the twuth.”

Down there, below me, there’s a cave
, Pelagia thought, transfixed.
A cave!

The nun completely forgot that she had sworn never to venture underground again. “Can I go down there with you? Please!”

He looked up at the moon hanging at the precise center of the sky.

“If you pwomise you’ll come out soon and you won’t wait for me outside.”

Pelagia nodded, and he gave her his hand.

At first the passage was very narrow. She felt stone steps under her feet, crumbling with age in places, but not worn at all. How could they possibly have been worn?

When the stairway ended, Emmanuel lifted up the hand holding the rag torch and it became clear that the burial chamber was quite extensive. There were dark niches in the walls, but the light was too dim for her to make them out clearly.

The prophet turned his face to Pelagia and said, “Have you had a wook? Now ask your question and go.”

Suddenly his eyebrows, which were set very high in any case, lifted even closer to the roots of his hair. Emmanuel was not looking at his companion, he was looking over her head, as if he had suddenly seen something very interesting there.

But Pelagia was not watching where he was looking. Feeling desperately anxious, she took a deep breath, raised one hand to her temple in an involuntary gesture, and asked her question.

No matter how the string twists and turns

WHEN THE HANTUR reached the Jaffa Gate and turned to the right, Yakov Mikhailovich immediately realized that they intended to skirt the wall. In that case, they wouldn’t get far, he could send off a telegram to Peter. It was more than a week since he had been in contact, that wasn’t good. And the twenty-four-hour telegraph was right here—that was what had given him the idea.

He worked a veritable miracle of efficiency: it took him only two minutes to thrust the telegram, written in advance, in through the little window and pay.

The telegram read: “Will take delivery of both loads today. Nifontov.” That was the code name he was to use until the assignment was completed. When it was completed he could write anything he liked in the telegram, but the signature had to be “Ksenofontov.” Those for whom it was meant would understand.

Yakov Mikhailovich (still acting under the name of Nifontov) had managed everything excellently: sent off the message, and caught up with the hantur—not far from the gorge that was called Gehenna, that same fiery ravine where, as the holy apostle wrote, “the worm did not die and the fire did not die down.” The inhabitants of ancient Jerusalem used to throw the bodies of people who had been executed into the ravine and cover them over with excrement, and to prevent the plague from creeping out of the cursed pit, fires burned there day and night.

There you have it, the whole of human life
, Yakov Mikhailovich sighed as he lashed his horse on.
We live in a privy shitting on everyone else, and when you croak, they’ll pile shit on top of you and set you on fire so you don’t stink
. Such were the somber philosophical thoughts that came to his mind.

It was simply splendid that the moon was full and there weren’t many clouds. An exceptional stroke of luck. And he had to admit that throughout this entire mission, so long and troublesome, he seemed to have enjoyed a certain Supreme patronage and protection. He could have lost the thread in Jerusalem, and beside Mount Megiddo, and again in Sodom, but every time, diligence and luck had seen him through. Yakov Mikhailovich himself had not set a foot wrong, and God had not forgotten about him, either.

And now there was almost nothing left to do. If Ginger had figured right (and she was a smart woman), then we ought to get everything settled up today, and then we’ll change our name from the fumbling Nifontov to the triumphant Ksenofontov.

What might the reward be for such a tough assignment?
he wondered.

He didn’t usually allow himself to dwell on such pleasant matters until the job was done, but the moonlit evening had put him in a pensive mood. And the end was very close now—Yakov Mikhailovich could sense that in his gut.

That certain “little business” would be completely forgotten, and all the relevant documentation held by the investigator would be destroyed—that had been promised unconditionally. He had served his time, wiped the slate clean. He wouldn’t have that sword of Damocles hanging over his head any longer.
Today dost Thou release, O Lord
. But he could probably ask for something over and above that, a little something for himself in the form of a few crisp pieces of paper that rustled pleasantly in the fingers. His intuition told him that they were certain to pay him a bonus. His bosses had really been infuriated with this Manuila. He must have done something special to get them so fired up. God knows what, but it’s none of our business.

He tried to figure out how much money they might give him and what he ought to do with it. Buy himself a little house somewhere on the Okhta? Or should he invest it in interest-bearing bonds? And it was too early to retire. Now that the “little business” would be completely forgotten, he could work for the pleasure of it—meaning for proper compensation. If they got stingy, then he could always show them the door. A high-class specialist in delicate matters would never be short of clients. For instance, if he had charged for his efforts in Palestine at the full rate, including all that sailing across the sea, roaming around in the desert, and other adventures—how much could he have taken them for then?

The zeros began crowding into Yakov Mikhailovich’s brain, but before they could arrange themselves into a single long row, the nun’s hantur turned off the wide road, crossed a bridge, and disappeared into a narrow side street.

He had to get a bit closer.

And once again Yakov Mikhailovich didn’t put a foot wrong—he didn’t go barging into the side street, but drove on a bit farther along the road. He guessed that this was the end of the horse-drawn excursion and all further movements would be on foot.

He jumped down onto the ground and slapped the mare from Bet-Kebir on the crupper:
Off you go now, lady, wherever your fancy takes you. Thanks for your help, you’re no longer needed
.

He took a cautious peep around the corner. The Arab was standing with the horses; the nun wasn’t there. But a minute or two later she appeared, too, coming out of a small gate and heading toward that Salakh of hers. They exchanged a few words about something and then went down the slope and put the hantur in a shadow where it was almost invisible.

Aha
, Yakov Mikhailovich twigged.
Now this looks like an ambush!

Come on now, come on now
.

His hand was itching—he really needed to crack his joints, but he couldn’t afford to make a sound right now.

He spotted the wayfarer before the other two did. The tall, gaunt man was walking along the moonlit roadway, tapping with his staff.

It’s him
, Yakov Mikhailovich realized, and that very moment he was transformed from Nifontov into Ksenofontov. Now everything that still had to happen was a purely technical matter, in other words no problem at all.

He pressed back against the fence, waiting for Manuila to turn into the side street. But then another circumstance emerged, one that could really only be categorized as an unpleasant surprise. Someone was stealthily pursuing the main mark, at a distance of about fifty paces. Unfortunately the moon hid behind a cloud, so he couldn’t get a good look at this second individual straightaway. All he could see was that he was a real bear of a man and he walked like a bear too, waddling along without a sound.

So what kind of news was this? A competitor?

Yakov Mikhailovich could creep along just as quietly as the Bear. He fell in behind him and inched along close to the wall.

He couldn’t hear what Ginger and the Bear were talking about, but it was a heated conversation. The Arab and the nun both came in for rough treatment. But then they all seemed to come to some understanding. Ginger slipped away through a small gate, while the hulk stayed with the driver and the two of them talked about something or other.

Yakov Mikhailovich crept a bit closer.

They were speaking Russian! Would you believe it?

“He’d be done for without someone to protect him,” said a muffled voice. “He’s just like a little child! How can you let someone like that wander around on his own?”

“I guard, too,” the Arab replied grandly. “I take care of her. Woman! Without me she done for a hundred times.”

“That’s for sure. A woman’s a woman,” the Bear agreed.