The White City (3 page)

The coffee came in a silver-colored pot with a rustic mug for decanting into and drinking from. The milk steamed in a jug. Jack lifted coffee in his right hand and milk in the left, pouring both simultaneously into red stoneware. The rich, brown scent, mellowed by dairy sweetness, rose on coils of steam. The first sip floated him on a bubble of well-being. He closed his eyes and sighed, hands caged loosely around his cup.

When he opened them, a girl was looking at him sidelong through the veil of her hair. She had her head ducked down, one fingernail picking at the grout between the blue tiles of the counter. He noticed flecks of crimson and gold under the nail and embedded in her cuticle, freckling the sleeve of her blouse. She wore trousers and a man’s coat and waistcoat, and with her wire-smooth black locks and her eyes like oilstones resting on the ledges of her pale brown cheeks she seemed unbearably exotic to Jack.

She smiled at him and said, “You are the Englishman.”

Jack assembled his expression—blank with shock, by the numb feeling of his face—into something more welcoming. “I’m Jack Priest,” he said, and thrust his hand out to shake hers as if she were a man.

“Irina Stephanova,” she answered, leaving off her last name in favor of a patronymic, an informal fashion he was becoming accustomed to.

She couldn’t have been much older than he—two years or three—but she had the lean wariness of somebody who’s used to looking out for herself. “I hope you’ll tell me what I did to attract such welcome attention, so I can make a habit of it.”

She squinted slightly, head cocked forward, and after a moment shook her head self-deprecatingly. “My English—” she explained, and waved over her shoulder. “You sit with my friends and with me, please?”

Following the gesture of her head, he noticed a group of three other girls about the same age gathered around a samovar on a low table. Each was dressed in similarly Bohemian splendor. Though none of them were in drag, all were uncorseted, wearing blouses, shawls, and sweaters layered loose over long wool skirts. One wore fingerless gloves, a not-unreasonable affectation given the chill in the basement café.

—I’m waiting for my breakfast,— Jack offered. His Russian wasn’t much better than her English, but it was often easier to understand somebody fumbling through your language than zooming past in their own.

—Dmitri will bring it,— she said, with a nod to the counterman. Jack turned in time to see the look Dmitri sent back in his turn, intense, focused, leavened by a slight smile. Possessive, perhaps, but Jack didn’t get a sense that Irina Stephanova was impressed by the possessiveness, if she had even noticed it.

Jack smiled politely as Irina Stephanova swiped his coffeepot and milk jug, leaving him little choice other than to cause a scene or to carry the mug along after her, balancing the half-eaten plate of bread atop it. She led him over to the cluster of worn leather couches centered on a glass-topped coffee table where her friends were sitting, and hip-checked one of her girlfriends over to make room. When Jack settled beside her, all blushes and apologies, he couldn’t edge over far enough to keep from feeling the radiant heat of her body against his thigh.

Dmitri was probably going to spit in his eggs.

Irina Stephanova settled his coffee and milk on the table with a clatter, edging aside used cups and plates dotted with crumbs to do so. Pointing quickly, she introduced the young women surrounding her, and it was all Jack could do to catch the proper names. Patronymics were on their own reconnaissance. Fortunately, nobody else in the café seemed too determined to enforce their use, and for Jack—already feeling transgressive in using the Christian names of people, of
women
, he barely knew—one more revolutionary increment came easy.

The one in the red sweater, mahogany-brown hair piled high, was Svetlana. She had frayed shirt-cuffs splattered with motheaten yellow stains that looked like the residue of some mild acid, and her knuckles were marked with a fine lacework of scratches. He was unsurprised to hear Irina Stephanova identify her as a sculptress.

The heavyset one with medium-brown hair, wearing a sort of embroidered robe that seemed inspired by kimono or caftan over her dress, was Tania. She was drinking black tea from a ruby-tinted glass, heavy costume rings glinting on her fingers.

—Tania works in gouache,— Irina Stephanova said. —And this is Nadia.

The third woman was a redhead, neither flaming carrot nor auburn but a soft gingery color, the locks cropped off at her shoulders and oiled in soft springy curls. She was the one in a goat’s-hair shawl, the open lacework slipping down her shoulders. She smiled widest at Jack as he sipped his coffee and leaned forward to set the mug down.

“So you are the Englishman.” Her accent was meticulous.

“Someone has to be.”

She laughed and quickly translated for the others, who laughed as well. Irina Stephanova looked over her shoulder at him, flipping her long black hair out of the way. “Jack, you are artist?”

He shook his head. “A dilettante.” Coffee was an excuse not to answer the question in too detailed a fashion. “But I prefer the company of artists to that of polite society, and in general I find the feeling is mutual.” He repeated himself, as best as he could, in Russian, for Tania and Svetlana.

His breakfast arrived then, a welcome excuse to drop out of the conversation to listen. “It’s all right,” Irina said to Jack as Dmitri vanished back behind the counter. “He is not artist either, but wishes he was. We put up with him.”

Jack smiled and stuffed his face with bread and eggs. He’d always had a good facility for languages—an indispensable talent for anyone spending time in the company of an itinerant vampire—and he knew before too long if he kept up the exposure he’d be dreaming in Russian. Also, it was somehow restful to sit at the table with the women and listen to them gossip about critics and galleries and fellow artists, veering off occasionally to brush over revolutionary politics. Leaning back into the embrace of the couch, balancing his plate on his knee, he relaxed and ate and concentrated on understanding as much of the talk as he could follow.

By the time he’d finished his breakfast and was making a few more hesitant conversational overtures, the café was packed to overflowing. Despite the fact that Jack had not seen them here on his last visit, Irina Stephanova and her friends were apparently a part of the regular clientele—at least, judging by the number of people who wandered over to greet them as part of the ritual of entering the space. Kobalt was not just the hangout of artists and Republicans, but the usual associated crowd of musicians, anarchists, nihilists, and students.

Jack’s coffee was still hot enough for drinking, so he refilled his cup and settled back in. The women seemed to have accepted his presence—there was something to be said for not monopolizing the conversation—and now he felt he was getting to see their real faces.
That
was something he almost never witnessed when he was with Sebastien, because almost everyone who encountered Sebastien wanted something from him—his help, in his guise as the Great Detective; his attention, as an elder of the blood; his friendship or his patronage or his destruction.

The short afternoon passed pleasantly enough. The winter sun was lowering and Jack thinking of making his excuses when three men about the same age as Irina Stephanova and her friends wandered over with the peculiar insouciant slouch of boys desperately attempting to appear casual before girls. Jack forced himself not to frown over the introductions—not because he minded the competition, but because more names and faces abruptly felt like overload. Still, he managed to sort out that the tall dark-haired one with the charismatic stare was Ilya, and that he was a painter by night and a tailor’s piecer by day. The two medium-tall ones with medium-brown hair and gray eyes (one plump and one thin) were Sacha and Grigor, and they were brothers.

“Be careful what you say to them,” Irina Stephanova whispered. —Ilya said their father is a policeman, and they might be agitators.

Or it might be adolescent rebellion against a figure in authority. But Jack wasn’t going to say so with his out loud voice.

One was a poet and one was a painter, but Jack was damned if he could remember which was which within thirty seconds of the introduction. It bothered him a little, because they seemed at pains to distinguish themselves from one another, and Sebastien would have known—and known a dozen other things about them simply by observation, within the space of that same half a minute.

Jack was practicing that trick of mindfulness, but he did not find it easy.

He watched as the boys—Sacha, the plump one, was plainly the ringleader—eased up on the girls with the idea of going to a labor organizer’s meeting, and tried to use Sebastien’s methods as he did. Sacha had a better job, he thought, because his shoes might be carefully scuffed but they were also sound and just as carefully repaired, and all of the shiny patches on his coat looked cosmetic.

Grigor, the thin one, revealed himself to be the painter after all, through the simple expedient of being unable to stop talking about a gallery showing planned for the following day. They all spoke rapid-fire in Russian, with occasional forays into vestigial English and Czech for Jack’s benefit, while Jack followed as well as he could.

—You will come to the union meeting with us?— Sacha asked Jack, so suddenly it took two seconds’ thought before Jack understood him.

Jack shook his head. —I am meeting a friend for dinner.

Beside him, Irina Stephanova seemed to have grown bored with the conversation. Jack watched as she filled her glass with concentrated tea, diluted it with hot water from the samovar, and glanced over her shoulder before producing a flask that Jack had already learned contained brandy.

“They speak of my showing. You will come to that?” she said, leaning sideways to speak into his ear without disturbing the main flow of discussion. “You get in without paying.”

He held out his empty coffee cup, and she splashed brandy into the bottom. He touched his lips to it, the fumes stinging his eyes to watering. A fashionable gallery show was quite an accomplishment for an artist not yet twenty. And a woman artist at that.

—I will come. Tell me please, what time,— he answered in Russian, so she would laugh at his accent.

Arrangements were made, and he accepted the free pass she handed him, her fingertips brushing his palm.

He made sure to wave at Dmitri on the way out, just to watch him glower.

Moscow

Bely Gorod

May 1903

—I have in my pocket a letter from the woman who lives here requesting my attendance,— Sebastien said. He spread his arms and raised his hands. For a moment, he thought of giving the pseudonym he had traveled under—
Doctor John Nast
—but the note tucked into his coat was addressed to
My dear Don Sebastien
, and explanations could become so complicated.

The slender-shouldered figure that had stepped forward now withdrew between the other two in the doorway, opening a gap that a man could pass through.

—Come out slowly, please.— he said. The same voice as before, by which Sebastien inferred he must be in charge.

Sebastien obeyed, hands still raised. Upon returning to the hallway and the dull gaslight therein, he could quite clearly make out the details of all three Imperial Police. The one he’d identified as the leader was fiftyish and clad in wrinkled mufti, a rumpled brown coat and ill-tied tie so cliché that the wampyr badly hoped it was an affectation. His hair was almost the same dull shade as the coat, or if anything a little mousier, and he wore small square spectacles that caught the light.

His subordinates were a mismatched team, despite their uniforms. One was tall and slender; the other of medium height and muscular build, gray-eyed where the first was dark. Though they were armed, Sebastien did not expect to find them much of a threat. He still remained at pains to prevent them from discovering his disregard. Truly, it would be better for everyone if this could be resolved—cooperatively.

—I am called Don Sebastien de Ulloa, and the woman on the floor is not our hostess.

The detective’s eyes narrowed, his pulse accelerating—and it had already been quite speedy, considering his recent run up the stairs and confrontation with an unknown murder suspect. Sebastien had no doubt he recognized the name. Notoriety had its price.

—You are the so-called Great Detective?

Sebastien nodded.

—I am Gospadin Dyachenko, Imperial Inspector. Do you have some proof of your identity?

—A passport,— Sebastien answered.

—Give the passport and the letter you mentioned to Sergeant Asimov.

Dyachenko nodded to the taller and thinner of the uniformed officers, and Sebastien provided the paperwork with, he thought, a good show of cheerful cooperation and no mention of the three hundred-ruble banknotes tucked carelessly inside the folds of paper. He could have afforded more, but he judged that an inappropriately large gratuity would only encourage suspicion.

The sergeant withdrew, riffling papers under the hallway light. Sebastien saw his hand go to his pocket before he handed the papers to his sturdier companion, who still had a pistol trained on Sebastien. He too checked them over, and then provided the lot to Dyachenko, who stuffed them in his inside pocket unexamined.

—Of course, You will accompany us, Don Sebastien.

—Of course. It’s no more than I expected,— Sebastien said. —Only I wonder could you have someone deliver a message to my lady friend? Apparently, I’m about to stand her up for the ballet.

Moscow

Bely Gorod

January 1897

The next day brought Jack out into another particularly fine, particularly wintry afternoon, the clear sky above brilliant as blue spinel, the sun splinter-sharp off the white walls of Moscow’s ancient fortress heart. The gallery—his destination—nestled against the inner wall of the Bely Gorod. The palm Irina Stephanova—Belotserkovskaya, her last name was on the invitation—had touched tingled inside his glove as he handed his card to the gray-coated gentleman at the door and was allowed inside. As Jack strode past incomprehensible posters in the entry, he was not surprised by the lack of a milling crowd. Anyone sensible would be inside already, where there might be vodka and nibbles. And how many people could you expect at an unknown artist’s opening, after all?