Osip led the Count down the hall and into the back staircase. They descended a flight together without speaking and then Osip stopped on the landing.
“This is where we part. Remember: down another flight and out the black metal door. Naturally, it would be best if you never mentioned to anyone that either of us were here.”
“Osip, I don’t know how to repay you.”
“Alexander,” he said with a smile, “you have been at my service for over fifteen years. It is a pleasure for once to be at yours.” Then he was gone.
The Count descended the last flight and went through the black metal door. It was nearly dawn and, despite finding himself in an alley, the Count could sense the gentleness of spring in the air. Across the alley, there was a white van with the words Red Star Baking Collective painted in large letters on its side. An ill-shaven young man was leaning against the passenger door smoking. When he saw the Count, he tossed his cigarette and thumped the door behind him. Without asking the Count who he was, he went behind the van and opened the rear door.
“Thank you,” said the Count as he climbed inside, receiving no reply.
It was only when the door closed and the Count found himself bent over at the waist in the back of the van that he became aware of an extraordinary sensation: the smell of freshly baked bread. When he had seen the insignia of the baking collective, he had assumed it was a ruse. But on the shelves that ran along one side of the van were over two hundred loaves in orderly arrangement. Gently, almost in disbelief, the Count reached out to lay a hand on one and found it to be soft and warm. It couldn’t have been more than an hour from the oven.
Outside, the passenger door slammed shut and the van’s engine started. The Count quickly sat on the metal bench that faced the shelves and they were underway.
In the silence, the Count listened to the gears of the van shifting. Having sped up and slowed down as it came into and out of various turns, the van’s engine now accelerated to the speed of an open road.
Shuffling to the rear of the van with his back hunched, the Count looked out the little square window in the door. As he watched the buildings and canopies and shop signs flying past, for a moment he couldn’t tell where he was. Then suddenly he saw the old English Club and realized that they must be on Tverskaya—the ancient road that radiated from the Kremlin in the direction of St. Petersburg, and that he had strolled a thousand times before.
In the late 1930s, Tverskaya Street had been widened to accommodate the official parades that ended in Red Square. While at the time, some of the finer buildings had been lifted and set back, most had been razed and replaced with towers, in accordance with a new ordinance that buildings on first-rate streets stand at least ten stories tall. As a result, the Count would have had to strain to pick out other familiar landmarks as the van moved along. But he had stopped looking for what was familiar, and instead was watching the blur of facades and street lamps receding rapidly from his view, as if they were being pulled into the distance.
Back in the attic of the Metropol, the Count found his door still open and Montaigne on the floor. Picking up his father’s book, the Count sat down on Sofia’s bed. Then for the first time that night, he let himself weep, his chest heaving lightly with the release. But if tears fell freely down his face, they were not tears of grief. They were the tears of the luckiest man in all of Russia.
After a few minutes, the Count breathed deeply and felt a sense of peace. Realizing that his father’s book was still in his hand, he rose from Sofia’s bed to set it down—and that’s when he saw the black leather case that had been left on the Grand Duke’s desk. It was about a foot square and six inches high with a handle in leather and clasps of chrome. Taped on top was a note addressed to him in an unfamiliar script. Pulling the note free, the Count unfolded it and read:
Alexander,
What a pleasure meeting you tonight. As I mentioned, I am headed home for a spell. In the meantime,