scanned the spines, paying special attention to those little red volumes with gold lettering: the Baedekers. Naturally enough, the majority of travel guides in the basement were dedicated to Russia, but a few were for other countries, having presumably been discarded at the end of an extended tour. Thus, scattered among the abandoned novels, the Count discovered one Baedeker for Italy; one for Finland; one for England; and, finally, two for the city of Paris.
Then on the twenty-first of March, the Count penned the slanted one-sentence insistence under the hotel’s moniker, slipped it on the bell captain’s desk, went on his weekly visit to the barber, and waited for the note to arrive. . . .
Having poked his head into the hallway in order to watch Boris mount the stairs, the Count closed the barbershop door and turned his attention to Yaroslav’s renowned glass cabinet. At the front of the cabinet were two rows of large white bottles bearing the insignia of the Hammer and Sickle Shampoo Company. But behind these soldiers in the fight for universal cleanliness, all but forgotten, was a selection of the brightly colored bottles from the old days. Taking out several of the shampoo bottles, the Count surveyed the tonics, soaps, and oils—but couldn’t find what he was looking for.
It must be here, he thought.
The Count began moving the bottles about like chess pieces—to see what was hiding behind what. And there, tucked in the corner behind two vials of French cologne, covered in dust, was that little black bottle that Yaroslav Yaroslavl had referred to with a wink as the Fountain of Youth.
The Count put the bottle in his pocket, reloaded the cabinet, and closed its doors. Scurrying back into his chair, he smoothed his smock and leaned back his head; but even as he closed his eyes, he was struck by the image of Boris slitting open the envelope with his razor. Leaping again from the chair, the Count snatched one of the spares from the counter, slipped it into his pocket, and resumed his place—just as the barber came through the door grumbling about fools’ errands and wasted time.
Upstairs in his room, the Count put the little black bottle at the back of his drawer then sat at his desk with the Paris Baedeker. Consulting the table of contents, he turned to the fiftieth page, where the section on the 8th arrondissement began. Sure enough, before the descriptions of the Arc de Triomphe and the Grand Palais, of the Madeleine and Maxim’s, was a thin paper foldout with a detailed map of the neighborhood. Taking Boris’s razor from his pocket, the Count used the edge to cut the map cleanly from its guide; then with a red pen he carefully drew a zigzagging line from the Avenue George V to Rue Pierre Charron and down the Champs-Élysées.
When he was done with the map, the Count went to his study and retrieved his father’s copy of Montaigne’s Essays from the bookcase where it had resided in comfort ever since Sofia had liberated it from under the bureau. Taking the book back to the Grand Duke’s desk, the Count began turning through the pages, stopping here and there to read the passages his father had underlined. As he was lingering over a particular section in “Of the Education of Children,” the twice-tolling clock began to signal the hour of noon.
One hundred and seventy-three chimings to go, thought the Count.
Then issuing a sigh, he shook his head, crossed himself twice, and with Boris’s razor began removing the text from two hundred pages of the masterpiece.
Arrivederci
One evening in early May, as the Count sat in the high-back chair between the potted palms, over the top of his newspaper he spied the young Italian couple exiting the elevator. She was a long, dark beauty in a long, dark dress, and he a shorter man in slacks and jacket. The Count wasn’t certain what had brought the couple to Moscow, but they reliably left the hotel every evening at seven o’clock, presumably to avail themselves of the city’s nightlife. Case in point, when they stepped off the elevator at 6:55 they walked straight to the concierge’s desk, where Vasily was ready with two tickets for Boris Godunov and a reservation for a late supper. Then the couple swung by the front desk in order to drop off their key, which Arkady stowed in the twenty-eighth slot of the fourth row.
Laying his newspaper on the table, the Count rose,