on the corner of Dzerzhinsky Street where some little gray fellow behind a little gray desk would record whatever they had happened to hear word for word.*
Did this obligation of the hostesses cause the journalists to be more cautious or tight-lipped for fear that some careless remark would be passed along?
On the contrary. The foreign press corps had a standing wager of ten American dollars to any of their number who could get summoned to the Commissariat of Internal Affairs. To that end, they crafted outrageous provocations and wove them into their chatter. One American let slip that in the backyard of a certain dacha a disenchanted engineer was building a balloon from specifications he’d found in Jules Verne. . . . Another relayed that an unnamed biologist was crossing a peep of chickens with a flock of pigeons to breed a bird that could lay an egg in the morning and deliver a message at night. . . . In sum, they would say anything within earshot of the hostesses—that is, anything that might be underscored in a report and land with a thud on a desk in the Kremlin.
As the Count stood at the Shalyapin’s entrance, he could see that tonight there was even more cavorting than usual. The jazz ensemble in the corner, which was charged with setting the tempo, was scrambling to keep up with the eruptions of laughter and the slaps on the back. Working his way through the hubbub, the Count approached the more discreet end of the bar (where an alabaster pillar fell from the ceiling to the floor). A moment later, Audrius was leaning toward the Count with his forearm on the bar.
“Good evening, Count Rostov.”
“Good evening, Audrius. It seems like quite a celebration tonight.”
The bartender gestured with his head toward one of the Americans.
“Mr. Lyons was taken to the office of the OGPU today.”
“The OGPU! How so?”
“It seems that a letter written in his hand was found on the floor of Perlov’s Tea House—a letter that included descriptions of troop movements and artillery placements on the outskirts of Smolensk. But when the letter was laid on the desk and Mr. Lyons was asked to explain himself, he said that he’d simply been transcribing his favorite passage from War and Peace.”
“Ah, yes,” said the Count with a smile. “The Battle of Borodino.”
“For this accomplishment, he collected the kitty and now he’s buying everyone a round. But what can we do for you this evening?”
The Count tapped twice on the bar.
“You wouldn’t happen to have any absinthe, would you?”
Ever so slightly, Audrius raised an eyebrow.
How well this tender of bar knew the Count’s preferences. He knew that before dinner the Count enjoyed a glass of champagne or dry vermouth. He knew that after dinner he enjoyed a snifter of brandy until the average nightly temperature fell below 40˚, at which point he would switch to a glass of whiskey or port. But absinthe? In the decade that they had known each other, the Count had not asked for a single glass. In fact, he rarely indulged in any of the syrupy liqueurs—and certainly not those that were colored green and reported to cause madness.
But ever the professional, Audrius confined his surprise to the movement of his eyebrow.
“I believe I may have one bottle left,” he said. Then opening a seamless door in the wall, he disappeared into the cabinet where he kept his more expensive and esoteric spirits.
On the platform in the opposite corner of the bar, the jazz ensemble was playing a perky little tune. Admittedly, when the Count had first encountered jazz, he hadn’t much of an affinity for it. He had been raised to appreciate music of sentiment and nuance, music that rewarded patience and attention with crescendos and diminuendos, allegros and adagios artfully arranged over four whole movements—not a fistful of notes crammed higgledy-piggledy into thirty measures.
And yet . . .
And yet, the art form had grown on him. Like the American correspondents, jazz seemed a naturally gregarious force—one that was a little unruly and prone to say the first thing that popped into its head, but generally of good humor and friendly intent. In addition, it seemed decidedly unconcerned with where it had been or where it was going—exhibiting somehow simultaneously the confidence of the master and the inexperience of the apprentice. Was there any wonder that such an art had failed to originate in Europe?
The Count’s reverie was broken by the sound of a bottle being placed