Night Watch 05 - The New Watch (18 page)

‘I like tea with honey,’ Semyon said impassively. ‘And an intelligent, loving man like you should think of a present for your wife yourself, and not ask what you should bring. Even a jar of honey would do.’

IT WAS A
bad landing at Heathrow. No, there was nothing wrong with the plane, we were on schedule, we touched down on the runway gently, docked with the bridge quickly . . .

But a flight from somewhere in South-East Asia had arrived at Terminal Four just ahead of us – maybe from Bangladesh, maybe from Indonesia. And a hundred and fifty Russian passengers found themselves queuing up for passport control behind two hundred swarthy Asians.

Each one of them was carrying a whole heap of documents. It looked from the papers as if they were all planning to study at Oxford or Cambridge, invest hundreds of thousands of pounds in the economy or collect a multimillion-pound inheritance. Basically, the Bangladeshi-Indonesians had so many grounds for entering the country, it was immediately obvious that most of them would end up working in the restaurants or on the construction sites and farms of Britain. The officers at passport control – also, for the most part, not native Anglo-Saxons – understood this perfectly well, and they checked the documents with exacting precision. Every now and then a check ended with a passenger being led aside – for further investigation . . .

The stream of passengers from our flight who had British citizenship dribbled rapidly past a separate set of desks. Not such a very thin stream, though – it seemed to me that about twenty per cent of the people who had flown to England with me were ‘servants of two masters’. The others lined up sombrely between the queue guides. Men dreaming of a smoke after the flight fidgeted miserably. Children who had sat still for too long in the aeroplane were acting up. Women dreaming of ‘strolling along Piccadilly’ and storming the shops of Oxford Street sent text messages and rummaged in handbags.

Of course, I could have jumped the queue altogether. One way or another. If it came to that, I could simply enter the Twilight and bypass passport control altogether – a young guy did that before my very eyes, although on the plane I hadn’t even suspected that he was an Other. In fact, if I hadn’t had a visa in my passport, I’d have done the same without the slightest hesitation.

But I felt uncomfortable. A woman patiently joined the back of the queue with two little infants, feeding both of them simultaneously, ‘Macedonian-style’. Admittedly, after a while she was sent to a short queue for those who didn’t have to stand in line with everyone else. There were children and old people standing in front of me too. But there was nothing to be done – we’d arrived at a bad moment, and for Europe the endangered species of Russians is made up of the same kind of suspect ‘third-world’ folk as the denizens of any overpopulated Asian country. Maybe even more suspect – although Russia might have accepted its role as a third-world country, but from time to time it still demonstrates certain ambitions and is reluctant to acknowledge its colonial status openly.

Anyway, positively overflowing with noble feelings, I decided to wait out the queue together with my compatriots. And for the first half-hour I felt genuinely proud of the way I was acting.

I held out for a second half-hour from sheer stubbornness, realising that to pronounce a spell and bypass passport control now would be as good as admitting my own stupidity.

No special questions arose when my turn came. The officer, who was a Sikh to judge from his turban, glanced at the visa, asked how long I had come to Britain for, was told that it was two or three days, nodded and slapped his stamp down on my passport.

I passed through the checkpoint manned by a Dark Other and a Light Other without any delay at all – my Higher Other aura inspired respect.

I felt so worn out after the queue that I didn’t take the express train, even though it went to Paddington, which would have been very convenient for me. I walked out of the airport terminal and turned left, towards the spot where smokers were ruining their health at an appropriate distance from decent people. A little glass isolation cell had been set up outside for the victims of nicotine dependence. But the exhausted passengers and uniformed airport workers still disregarded the rules and smoked in the open air.

I lit up too. Beside me a beautiful young miss with long legs and an expensive aluminium suitcase was slavering over a thin cigarette and swearing on the phone at someone called Peter, who hadn’t arrived in time to meet her. The girl happened to be Russian, but she was speaking English and swearing like a real virtuoso. When she finished talking she shook her head helplessly, then immediately phoned Moscow and started discussing the difference in mentality between Russian and English men with a girlfriend.

I chuckled and set off towards the taxi stand. A long line of tall cabs, including some antiques and some ultra-modern specimens, was waiting patiently for customers.

The hotel Gesar had sent me to was a perfectly ordinary little London hotel, located in Bayswater – a district famous for hotels like that. Or perhaps it was the opposite – infamous for its abundance of cheap tourist accommodation. The hotel didn’t have any signs that were visible only in the Twilight, like the ‘yin-yang’ symbol which traditionally means ‘Others welcome’. I was beginning to suspect that although Gesar had given me a business-class flight, he had economised on the accommodation.

Or was there actually some point in staying in the three-star Darling Hotel that occupied two houses in an old Victorian terrace (white walls, columns at the entrance, single-glazed windows with wooden frames)?

My room was typical for that kind of hotel – that is, small, with narrow doors, a low ceiling and a tiny bathroom. But the bathroom fittings were new, in the European style, and there was a flat-screen TV with a hundred satellite channels, including a couple of Russian channels squeezed in between the Arab and Chinese ones, and a minibar, and an airconditioner. The bed was also surprisingly large and comfortable.

It would do. I hadn’t come here to loiter in my room.

Exactly what I did now was entirely up to me. I could take a stroll round the shops, buy souvenirs and sit over a pint of beer in a pub, putting business off until tomorrow. I could go to visit Erasmus – unceremoniously, without an invitation. I could ride or walk through Hyde Park to Belgravia, where the office of the London Night Watch was located, and ask for their cooperation.

Or I could just phone Erasmus.

I took out my phone. Disdaining all subtlety and cunning, Mr Erasmus Darwin now styled himself in the French manner – as Monsieur Erasme de Arvin. And, when I heard his voice in the handset, I even realised why: he spoke with a slight accent, which any modern person would have identified as French.

In actual fact it was an echo of times gone by. An eighteenth-century accent.

The speech of old Others usually doesn’t differ much from modern speech. A language changes gradually, the new words enter the Others’ vocabulary, they pick up new intonations and only a few individual old-fashioned words or expressions are left. The more an Other associates with people, the more active he is in the Watch, the harder it is to tell his age by listening to him.

But if an Other has kept his association with his fellows and with humans to the minimum . . .

There was the accent. And the old-fashioned turns of phrase. And particular words . . . If I had studied English the way normal people do, and not absorbed it magically, I would hardly have understood a thing . . .

‘Erasme on the line, I heed you.’

‘This is Anton here. I’ve come from Moscow and I really need to see you, Mr Darwin. I’d like to have a word with you . . . about tigers . . .’

There was a brief pause. Then Erasmus said: ‘Long have I awaited your call, Antoine. I thought not that you would come from Muscovy, as a Gaul I saw you . . .’

‘You saw?’ I asked, confused.

‘It is known to you that I am a Prophet,’ Erasmus told me. ‘Come you to me – I shall not seek to thwart fate, but shall receive you.’

‘Thank you very much,’ I said, rather taken aback by such frank benevolence.

‘Nonsense is it to thank me, Antoine. The address is known to you. Take a cab and come without delay.’

Monsieur Erasme de Arvin, retired Prophet of the Day Watch and connoisseur of the intimate life of plants, lived beside a park. Properly speaking, the hotel where I was staying was also located beside a park, but there’s a big difference between Hyde Park and Regent’s Park. They may both belong to the Queen, but the former is noisier and simpler, more popular – as in ‘of the people’. You can find absolutely anything close by – from hugely expensive mansions and luxurious shops (that’s on the Thames side) to cheap hotels and ethnic neighbourhoods inhabited by Chinese, Albanians and Russians (that’s on the railway-station side, where that most likeable of English immigrants, Paddington Bear, once arrived).

Regent’s Park, however, is surrounded by expensive houses standing on land that also belongs to the Queen – and they can’t be bought, only rented, even though it may be for a hundred or two hundred years, so none of the residents in these luxurious mansions and apartments that cost millions can truly say ‘my home is my castle’. But that didn’t seem to bother anyone very much – at any rate, as I walked along the side of the park I spotted a parked Bentley with a number plate that read ARMANI and a couple of people with faces that I’d seen in films, or on the front pages of the newspapers.

Well, anyway, if you’ve lived in this world for three hundred years and have still not accumulated enough money to settle anywhere you fancy – then you’re a total idiot. Of course, there are people like that to be found even among Prophets, but Erasmus was clearly not one of them. So of course he could afford a little mansion close to Regent’s Park.

However, the reality exceeded all my expectations.

Rather than using schematic tourist maps or the more detailed police variety, I relied on my phone with its built-in GPS system. I didn’t want to gape at the little screen like some crazy gadget-fanatic, so I simply clipped on the earphone and walked along, following the commands dictated by the pleasant female voice. As everyone knows, apart from the standard voices you can find hundreds of patches for GPS systems on the Internet: if you prefer, you can have your route indicated to you by a grandiloquent Gorbachev or a punch-drunk Yeltsin or a fussy Medvedev, and for the true connoisseur there is even Lenin – ‘You are on the right road, comrades!’ and Stalin – ‘Deviate to the right!’ My soundtrack imitated some old film: ‘To the left, milord,’ ‘To the right, milord,’ and I liked that – somehow it seemed to fit well with Erasmus.

Well, first I walked along Albany Street, glancing curiously at the expensive mansions and old buildings, either of red brick with little towers and bay windows, or with white walls and columns. It was a very touristy district, so I also came across the famous red telephone booths (strangely enough, in this age of digital mobile phones, people were still using them) and the impressive cylindrical forms of the Royal Mail’s postboxes (and people dropped letters into them in front of my very eyes). All this retro that the tourists go dewy-eyed for really did look quite natural, not at all affected, and yet again I was stung by sad thoughts of Moscow. What could my city have been like if it had not been demolished, reconstructed and torn to pieces in order to squeeze profit out of every single clod of earth? Completely different from this, of course, but also alive and interesting – not the present soulless agglomeration of bleak new developments and dilapidated Stalin-era blocks with only rare, usually completely reconstructed old buildings.

The GPS whispered: ‘To the left, milord.’ Obediently walking in through one of the entrances to Regent’s Park, I found myself in a kingdom of mighty trees, fragrant flowers and people strolling along paths. Probably less than a third of them were actual Londoners – most were tourists with cameras.

I wondered where Erasmus actually lived. In a little shack surrounded by his beloved plants?

I suppressed an urge to glance at the screen. It was more interesting to follow the commands. The system’s memory included even the narrowest little paths, and I followed them deeper and deeper into the park. There wasn’t any real wilderness here, of course, there couldn’t possibly be, but I encountered fewer and fewer tourists.

Then I saw a huge building that seemed to me to stand in the park itself, or right on its very edge. In actual fact, there was an avenue running along the boundary of the park, and a house had been built on it. It reminded me most of all of the finest examples of architecture from the Stalinist period – there were even statues on the cornice under the roof, only I couldn’t make out who exactly they represented: mythological characters, maybe, or important British cultural or political figures, or representatives of the various peoples of Britain. To judge from the cars parked by the building it was inhabited by people with millions in their bank accounts.

But the GPS led me further along the avenue.

So did he really live in a little shack, then?

‘Straight ahead, milord,’ said the GPS. ‘We’re arriving now, milord.’

I halted in bewilderment. There in front of me was an old church. Well, maybe not a church, but something ecclesiastical – an abbey, or a monastic building, constructed in a strange architectural style, with two wings, like a country-estate house but quite clearly some kind of religious edifice.

‘To the right, milord.’

The right wing of the building looked rather different. Well, there were the same moss-covered walls, stained-glass windows and tall, carved wooden doors. But it was a dwelling house. Or, rather, the residential section of the abbey or church.

Well, and why not, if I thought about it? Especially in England. If there’d been a church here it would have had a house for a priest – or, rather, a vicar. Let God have the church and the people have the house. No services would have been held here for a long, long time, and the vicar’s descendants – stop, could he have had any descendants? Probably he could, vicars weren’t celibate like Catholic priests – they had chosen a different path. And, sooner or later, someone had sold the house to Erasmus. Or perhaps the house had belonged to the Darwin family and he had inherited it.