The Great War of the Quartet (The Imperial Timeline Book 1) (24 page)

The small shop had been transformed over the past two years
, and in particular the last ten or twelve months. It was still in the same handsome location in downtown Sofia, not far from King Frants’s Square and the Royal Palace located there in the middle of the Old City. However, the shelves in the shop had deteriorated; or rather, their contents had dwindled from the lack of fresh, regular restocking. Boris had been very proud of his family’s varied offerings that had made it a go-to place for high-quality drinks and condiments. He had been very well acquainted with the wide variety of goods he had sold over the years, despite not consuming them himself. British liquor, South American coffee, chocolate from the Netherlands, and other products that had been widely-available for the well-off citizenry of this part of the city had been the family’s expert area of business. He liked to think that he had been as worried about the war’s impact on the business from day one as he was now, and he ignored his wife when she insisted that he had been quite excited by the news that the Serbs were finally going to be punished for their impudence.

He was leaning down
on the counter, annoyed that the shop had almost as few customers as it had goods, and even the most decadent of his good old customers had stopped coming by in person or sending someone after they had realized that hardly any new goods seemed to come in and the stiff competition from the black market made it hard to win them back even if he would have had the money. If this war continued much longer the family would be out in the street. His father’s savings had become virtually worthless thanks to inept policies and fantastical inflation, and Boris had entered into the first period of his life when he feared for the future in a way he never had in the past. He could almost imagine his dear wife standing with their children in line at a soup kitchen—well, that was actually not so much a matter of imagination as a disturbing fact of life. She might sneak about it, but he knew that she was feeding the children through the Red Cross, and there was no point in talking about it. Suicide had never before seemed so rational as it had begun to appear these days when they could hope to sell little other than moonshine and ersatz tobacco and coffee. Well, the tobacco wasn’t not tobacco, it was just filled with fillers, like the coffee. God, he had become such a common shopkeeper, yet he still hoped to maintain the family’s good name with people of refined, expensive tastes rather than common street boors.

His
bored misery was broken when the door opened, and he instinctively raised himself off the counter, his face shining up the way he did when a member of the clientele entered the premises. He wouldn’t ever let a customer see him defeated, and he mustered his usual, smarmy merchant self.

“Good afternoon, sir,” he said, recognizing
the bank manager Ivan Georgiev Dimitrov.

The old man had been a faithful customer, a connoisseur of Scotch
and Swedish cigars. However, the short supply of Scotch had left Boris with no choice but to simply stop stocking up on it since it was prohibitively expensive even on the wholesale side, and the only cigars he could offer were ordinary domestic ones. Pitiful! The quality of some of the cigars was good, but not as good as some of the expensive ones from the West Indies.

Like many of the customers, Mr. Dimitrov was a part of the class beyond Boris’s own. The shop catered to the wealthy, but no man could become wealthy from the kind of business they were conducting
—the closest thing Boris had to a maid was his wife and mother, and even back in the good days it would have been too great a waste of money to hire someone for banal chores. Before the war, Boris had counted on living a nice and comfortable enough life until the next generation would take over, but never had he expected a life of luxury. He wouldn’t know why Mr. Dimitrov liked Scotch—Boris was much too thrifty to taste it himself since he could sell it for a good profit. If he wanted a drink, good old vodka was cheap and to the point enough for him. Expensive liquor and luxury products were simply not worth it. Except to his customers, and he did his best to oblige them in their waste as long as they were throwing their money away in his direction.

“Afternoon, Boris Petrov,” the man said absentmindedly
as he came over to the counter. “Do you have any new goods? Drinks,” he said with faint hope on his face.

Mr. Dimitrov wasn’t a fool, and he knew as much as anybody that certain things were in very short supply. However, there was always the off chance that something new had come in, and the shop was not far from his bank.

“I’m afraid that there is little in stock right now,” Boris said, worried that Ivan Dimitrov would stop coming when he realized that things were still bleak.

“Damn submarines, eh?” Ivan sighed.

Ivan couldn’t blame Boris Petrov Todorov; it was the fault of the damned French. Apparently the Mediterranean was littered with their submarines, or at least it was simple to blame enemy submarines rather than domestic incompetency. However real the threat from submarines, the vastly more significant factor in the destruction of so much of the civilian economy was the mishandling of the currency that had resulted in runaway inflation which a banker like Ivan knew a lot more about than most other people who might place the blame for the nation’s woes on the French rather than on inbred bloody idiots who had hoped to print money like crazy, get the war over with and then bother picking up the pieces and putting it all together again. The destruction of the Bulgarian lev had left even basic foreign goods prohibitively expensive, but Ivan still hoped in vain for a nice good Scotch on the legal market—or at least not directly from the black market.

“However, sir, I have been told by several customers that the p
omace liquor we acquired back in January is quite good under the circumstances. There are still some bottles left…”

The old man had refused the same drink before
when Boris had tried to flog the common stuff. However, it was one of the products that they could still offer with some frequency since there was no end to cheap liquor distilled by poor peasants. Wine and drinks made locally were available even with the ruination of the sea trade from the financial collapse, and the recent arrangements Boris had made for deliveries of domestic liquor supplies might keep the store from going bankrupt since liquor had always been the premier source of revenue. There was always a market for it, even if he couldn’t charge enough to stay comfortably afloat with his clientele. Besides, there was no telling when today’s money would be eaten up by the inflation demon and become useless paper.

Unlike last time, Ivan Georgiev actually looked like he was considering the proposition. Boris would hate to see such a frequent customer be unsatisfied, and in this time of national discord he hoped that he would share some of his wealth with Boris and his family.
Even if British whisky barons wouldn’t accept payment in levs, internally money was still money—at least until the government printed even more. One of the big liberal evening papers had made a mocking bet with the prime minister, suggesting that the editor was confident that when it would be time for a victory cigar it would surely not cost more than one, at the most two billion lev. It was not that bad, but Boris was formally a millionaire these days. Most people probably were.

“I migh
t try a bottle,” the bank manager sighed.

“You will not be disappointed, sir,” Boris said as he went to get a bottle from one of the shelves behind the counter. “Have you heard about the cigars from the Plovdiv Tobacco Company? They are good, very enjoyable without any weeds.”

“How much would you want for them?” the banker said, obviously a little hesitant about the domestic cigars.

“The listed price is 2,340 for six, but since you are a good man, I could not ask for more than 2,000. The margins on good cigars are terrible.”

The banker finally decided to go along and bought eighteen cigars together with his bottle of moonshine. The cigars were gray, but the moonshine was as legitimate as anything, except that Boris cheated on his accounts to classify it as wine rather than spirits to get away from the excessive taxes. It was quite offensive that the government still tried to tax people after making the money so useless. The damn sons-of-bitches!

Boris was happy to receive the large bills. The government had printed special money, and the large bills were noticeably bigger, particularly with the long lines of zero
es. These days, amounts like 27,000 lev did not make for an outrageous fortune; the family had become millionaires, yet only three years ago 1,000 lev would have been a small fortune while now it was hardly even spare change—the coins had been pulled out of circulation more than a year ago and these days there were only the big paper bills. Boris relied on Stoyanka to keep an eye out for the rises so that he could follow the general trend and not lose out on a sudden price jump.

If his youngest brother
Stanislav had not been called up he would have much preferred him to help out with the business, and he was reluctant to use Stoyanka as his assistant since he would have preferred her to be more ignorant of the problems. His younger brother Stanislav was the usual workhorse, but with him gone into the army, Boris had little choice but to look to Stoyanka to wander out and see if the greengrocer and the dry goods store had raised their prices—he used groceries as the baseline for estimating the actual value of the money. Besides, even if she was rather uneducated, she had a talent for keeping tabs on the prices and how they kept changing like a natural little accountant. Perhaps if the war ended she could return to bothering exclusively with the children and not pay attention to prices when she wasn’t shopping. He had been quite proud to not have to ask her to work for a living even in the store, but desperate times…

After the bank manager left with his liquor, Boris sank down back on the counter, glancing over at the ashtray as he pondered having a cigarette. He didn’t smoke much, but when he had nothing to do he quite often had the urge for a few puffs. Back in the good old days he had hardly had time to stop for a smoke during business hours, but what was he supposed to do these days?

He once again shot up erect behind the counter when the door opened, but it was just Stoyanka, accompanied by little Boris coming home, so he sank back down again.

His wife
was not a terribly beautiful woman, but she was not terribly ugly either. She was plain in the sense that she would probably blend out among other women her age. Still not thirty, she had been his wife for nine years now, and little Boris had grown to be eight.

“Any customers?” she asked
in that disinterested tone after she had closed the door.

He shrugged his shoulders
. Did three even count? Just a year ago he would have told her to not use the shop door when she came with the boy and scold her for being so unprofessional. Rather than taking the shop door he would have told her to take him in through the side door that lead directly to the living quarters above the shop. However, the reduced traffic kept him somewhat apathetic about propriety. It wasn’t like she was disturbing any customers with her presence in the shop.

“We made just short of 140,000,” he mumbled
after Stoyanka sent little Boris to run upstairs.

“It could be worse,” she said, shrugging her
shoulders.

Her husband looked impeccable as always, but she knew that he was not
a happy man. She wasn’t very happy either, but there wasn’t much to be done, and being angry or upset didn’t solve anything. All they could do was to hope and pray, and maybe God would stop this endless madness. What could they do about anything? Neither of them had any power to change a single thing that would steer the fate of society or the world in any direction. They had to just ride out the storm, and maybe when the French submarines were all gone, things could return to normal again and she could even sneak herself a little chocolate treat. Oh, how she missed chocolate! Good, wonderful Swiss, Dutch, German, or Swedish chocolate…

“Any good news?”
he asked.

Stoyanka looked like she was deciding on what to say, like she was unsure of the nature of whatever she had picked up. After a moment of indecisive mental measuring, she spoke.

“Blaguna Todorova said that the Chinese are moving around in the Orient,” she said, her voice careful since she had little idea of the significance.

It was still a mystery to her why Bulgaria was at war with Russia
at all. Wasn’t Russia the old benefactor who had helped free Bulgaria from the filthy Turks who had continuously brutalized them for centuries? And yet, her youngest child had been born and was beginning to speak in a world where Bulgaria was locked in deadly war with its national sister nation while allied with Germans, Austrians, and the Chinese—hardly the kind of bedfellows she would have picked out if a schoolteacher would have quizzed her on the unknown future when she had been a child. Then, the safe bet would have been that Bulgaria would be on the same side as Russia and against whoever Russia was fighting. How odd the world could be sometimes… Maybe she was just stupid, but it all seemed very mysterious and wrong.

“That is surely good news,” Boris said, although he knew nothing but what he occasionally read in the paper.

He knew that Asia was a distant and exotic place, and even when the big Asian empire had come to Bulgaria’s side almost two years ago, he still thought it a distant and exotic place. Germany and Austria were at least countries that he could understand. King Petar’s father—the late King Frants—had been a German prince by birth, and Germans were obviously far less alien than orientals. Anyway, if it would mean victory he didn’t care if the most uncivilized savages of Africa would be on Bulgaria’s side.