Sashenka Read Online Free PDF Page B

liking.
    “Cognac? Your tastes are becoming rather expensive, Ivanov.” Sagan tinkled a silver bell.
    A waiter, as long and thin as a flute, glided drunkenly through the door, as if on skis.
    “Two cognacs and make it quick,” Sagan ordered, savoring the aroma of cigars, cologne and shoe polish, the essence of officers’ messes and gentlemen’s clubs across the Empire.
    When the glasses arrived, the two men stood up, toasted the Tsar, downed their brandies and hurried into the lobby.
    They pulled on their uniform greatcoats and shapkas and stepped out into a numbing cold.
    Disorderly, shapeless snowflakes danced around them. It was already midnight but a full moon made the fresh snow glow an eerie blue. Cocaine, Sagan decided, was the secret policeman’s ideal tonic in that it intensified his scrutiny, sharpening his vision. There stood his phaeton, a taxicarriage with one horse snorting geysers of breath, its driver a snoring bundle of clothing. Ivanov gave him a shove and the driver’s bald head appeared out of his sheepskin, pink, shiny and blearyeyed, like a grotesque baby born blind drunk.
    Sagan, heart still palpitating, scanned the street. To the left, the golden dome of St. Isaac’s Cathedral loomed ominously over the houses as if about to crush them. Down to the right, he could see the doorway of the Zeitlin residence. He checked his surveillance team. Yes, a mustachioed figure in a green coat and bowler hat lurked near the corner: that was Batko, ex–NCO Cossack, smoking a cigarette in the doorway of the apartments opposite. (Cossacks and ex–NCOs made the best “external agents,” those who worked on surveillance.) And there was a sleeping droshky driver a little farther down the street: Sagan hoped he was not really asleep.
    A RollsRoyce, with chains on its wheels and a Romanov crest on its doors, skidded past.
    Sagan knew that it belonged to Grand Duke Sergei, who would be going home with the ballerina mistress he shared with his cousin Grand Duke Andrei.
    From the Blue Bridge over the Moika came the echo of shouts, the thud of punches and the crunch of boots and bodies on compacted snow. Some sailors from the Kronstadt base were fighting soldiers—dark blue versus khaki.
    Then, just as Sagan had one foot on the phaeton’s step, a Benz limousine rumbled up. Its uniformed driver leaped out and opened the leatherlined door. Out of it stepped an overripe, ruddycheeked figure in a fur coat. ManuilovManesevich, spy, war profiteer, friend of Rasputin, born a Jew, converted to Orthodoxy, pushed past Sagan and hurried into the Imperial Yacht Club. Inside the limousine, Sagan glimpsed crushed scarlet satin and mink on a pale throat. A waft of sweat and cigar smoke disgusted him. He got into the carriage.
    “This is what the Empire has come to,” he told Ivanov. “Yid spies and influence peddlers.
    A scandal every day!”
    “Yaaaa!” the driver yelled, cracking his whip a little too close to Sagan’s nose. The phaeton lurched forward.
    Sagan leaned back and let the lights of Peter the Great’s city flow past him. The brandy was a bullet of molten gold scouring his belly. Here was his life, in the capital of the world’s greatest empire, ruled by its stupidest people in the midst of the most terrible war the world had ever known. Sagan told himself that the Emperor was lucky that he and his colleagues still believed in him and his right to rule; lucky they were so vigilant; lucky that they would stop at nothing to save this fool Tsar and his hysterical wife, whoever her friends were…
    “Y’wanna know what I think, barin ?” said the driver, sitting sideways to his passengers, his warthog nose illuminated by the phaeton’s swinging lantern. “Oats is going up again!
    One more price hike and we won’t be able to feed our horses. There was a time, I remember it well, when oats was only…”
    Oats, oats, oats, that was all Sagan heard from the damn drivers of carriages and sleighs.
    He breathed