of the Royal Guard, looking like gray round-backed snowbanks whenever they bent low over the wreckage.
“Here!” somebody shouted. There was the sound of an armful of planking being thrown to the side. “We’ve found him!”
The baronessa scrambled over the debris to join the circle crouching about a small, still form.
“Pick up the tsar,” Chortenko told two of his underlings. “Perhaps he can be repaired.” Which seemed to the baronessa an extremely odd choice of words under the circumstances. Then, when a nondescript barouche had been brought around, Chortenko said, “What is this thing? I sent you to fetch my own coach. Why isn’t it here?”
The man he addressed looked startled. “You lent it to the Byzantine ambassador, sir. So we requisitioned a coach from one of your neighbors.”
“Lend my coach? I never did any such thing. Who told you that?”
“The servants back at your mansion. Ambassador de Plus Precieux told them you’d given him its use, and so of course they… Well, who would dare claim such a thing if it weren’t true?”
Chortenko looked grim. “I will deal with this when there is time. Right now, lift Lenin into the coach. Baronessa, you will ride with us. The rest of you, stay here and do what you can to establish order.”
In the barouche, Tsar Lenin was laid across the forward-facing seat with his head in the baronessa’s lap. The noble head was surprisingly heavy. The baronessa took one of his hands in her own and stroked it. The skin was unpleasantly waxy, and as cold as a corpse. “Oh, my beloved tsar,” she said, and began to weep.
“Stop that,”Chortenko snapped. “He’s not dead yet. Paralyzed, yes. But look at his eyes.”
The baronessa did. The eyes were slightly open and there was a faint light to them, though it was dimming. Lenin’s lips moved, almost imperceptibly. “Half a hundred of us started out from Baikonur,” he said in a faint voice. “Now but I remain. And soon there will be none.” His eyes moved slowly to focus on Baronessa Lukoil-Gazproma. “You…”
Deeply moved, the baronessa leaned close to hear the tsar’s last words.
“You should…” Lenin whispered.
“Yes?”
“Eat shit and die.”
By the time Darger and Kyril had made a complete circuit of the Kremlin, the Alexander Garden was nearly empty and they were able to simply stroll up the Trinity Gate causeway. Darger led, feeling infinitely self-assured, and Kyril followed, muttering resentfully. “This is as crazy as drinking piss,” Kyril said. “We’re walking into what’s gotta be the most dangerous place in all Russia for people like us, in order to grab some books? I mean, if it were, I dunno, diamonds or some shit like that, I’d understand. But books?”
“Don’t hunch your shoulders like that,” Darger said imperturbably. “I know you’re feeling exposed, but it makes you look suspicious. We go this way.”
“I mean, you’re smart and all, I get that. But you’re bugfuck crazy. I gotta wonder if you’ve let your brains go to your head.”
“Kyril, rescuing even one of those books would give my life a meaning I never expected it to have. Plus, the right collector would pay a fortune for it-and I hope to leave with an armful.”
“Listen, there’s still time to turn back.”
“Here’s the Secret Garden. The tower should be visible just around this bend.”
The path twisted under their feet and they turned the corner just in time to see the Secret Tower go up in flames.
“Dear Lord!” Darger cried. “The library!”
He started to run toward the tower.
Darger had not gone more than three or four strides, however, when his feet were snatched out from under him and he crashed painfully to the ground. For an instant, all went black. Then, when he tried to stand, he could not. A pair of bony knees dug into his back and Kyril spoke urgently into one ear: “Get ahold of yourself. Those books are gone and tough shit about that.”
But they-” Darger felt tears of frustration well up in his eyes. “You have no idea what has just been lost. No idea at all.”
“No, I’m pretty sure I don’t. But you ain’t gonna rescue one fucking page of them by running into a goddamned fire, okay? Those books are dead and gone. There’s not enough left of ’em by now to wipe your ass with.”
Darger felt something die within him. “You’re…you’re right, of course.” With an act of sheer will, he pulled himself together and said,“Pax. Uncle. ’Nuff. You can get off me now.”
Kyril helped him up.
“So what do we do now?” the young bandit asked.
A furry paw clamped down on Darger’s shoulder. “Caught up t’you at lasht!”
“Oh, dear.” Darger had not thought this evening could possibly get any worse. Yet now it had. “Sergeant Wojtek.”
“You don’ know musch about the Royal Guard,” the bear-man said, “if you think a mere dozen drinks or sho can put one of ush out for the night.” His speech was slurred, but he looked to be as strong as ever.
“Indeed, you are a most remarkable fellow, Sergeant,” Darger said. “I will confess that if I absolutely had to be recaptured, there’s less shame in it for me to be recaptured by you than by some ordinary soldier.”
“You can shtop with the flattery. Nobodysh buying a word of it.” Sergeant Wojtek carried the folded gurney under one arm. Without releasing Darger, he shook it open. “Now I’m going to shtrap you in again. If you coop’rate and don’t try to get away, I promish I won’t bite off your face. But if you mishbehave all bets are off. You won’t get any fairer deal than that, now will you?”
Darger sat down on the gurney, swung up his legs, and then lay flat. “How on earth did you…? No, don’t tell me. You managed to pull yourself partially out of your drowse before I left the bar. Though you were unable to summon the sobriety needed to stop me, you heard me talking with Kyril and so knew where we were headed.”
“Right in one.” Sergeant Wojtek tightened the straps, one by one. “Hey! Shpeaking of your young partner in crime-where ish he?”
“While I was distracting you with conversation, he quite wisely fled.” Darger felt a little sad to reflect that in all likelihood he would never see the young lad again. But at least he could take some consolation in the fact that he had put the boy’s feet on the path to a respectable career.
“Well, no big deal. You, however, have to be kept shomewhere shecure.” Sergeant Wojtek thought for a moment and then grinned toothily. “And I know jusht the playzsch.”
Across the Kremlin grounds he pushed the gurney and through a field of rubble that led to the most extraordinary breach in the side of the Terem Palace. (Fleetingly, Darger regretted that from his prone position, he could not get more than a glimpse of it, and so the nature of the catastrophe that had created it remained to him a mystery.) Then, hoisting the gurney onto his back, Sergeant Wojtek made his way across uneven floors, down into the basement, and through a doorway, where he was finally able to set the gurney down again.
“If you don’t mind telling me…where are we going?”
“This tunnel leads to Chortenko’s manshion. Ish probably the best protected playzsch in the city, now that the Kremlin’s in sush bad shape. I’m going to bring you there and then shtand guard over you until Chortenko pershonally accepts you into hish cusht’dy.”
Darger had been thinking furiously. Now he said, “Is that wise?”
Sergeant Wojtek eyed him suspiciously. “Waddaya shaying?”
“You noticed that the crowds had dispersed? That means the revolution has failed.”
“Well…maybe.”
“Not maybe, but certainly. There is, as the Bard put it, a tide in the affairs of men which taken at the flood leads on to fortune. That tide has turned and left you stranded in the shallows, an easy prey for the warships of the regime you opposed.”
Sergeant Wojtek pushed on in stolid silence for a time. At last he said, “You’re right. I’m in a terrible fiksh.”
“I can tell you how to get out of it.”
The sergeant stopped. “You can?”
