Black Knight in Red Square

Начало книги

Warren Harding Aubrey thought he was feeling the effects of a trio of double vodkas on the rocks. Actually, he was dying.

His once hard belly ached slightly as he got on the elevator of the Metropole Hotel and told the young woman he wanted vosem. When she pressed the button marked eight, he knew his minimal Russian had not failed him this time.

The girl on the stool was named Maria Nevanskaya. She had been riding up and down for almost fourteen hours a day five days a week for three of her twenty-five years. Normally it would take the appearance of a babbling ax murderer or of the general secretary himself to draw her attention. But this was not a normal week. It was the first week of the Moscow Film Festival, and the hotel was filled with foreigners. The lobby elevator dispatcher, Verochek, had abused Maria about her lack of courtesy to the guests. She guessed, quite correctly, that Verochek had himself been abused by Karlenko, the Metropole’s Communist Party supervisor. So as the elevator slowly rose to the sound of the weary restaurant orchestra playing “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” Maria turned to her drunken passenger and asked, in what she thought was French, if he was ill.

Читать дальше →