She Lover of Death: The Further Adventures of Erast Fandorin Read Online Free PDF

Harlequin and left the house in good time, in order to make her first gala promenade through the streets of Moscow without hurrying and give the city a chance to admire its new inhabitant.
    The two of them – Moscow and Columbine – made a great impression on each other. On this overcast August evening the former was jaded, bored and blasé; the latter was wary and nervous, ready for any surprises.
    For the Moscow premiere Columbine had chosen an outfit the like of which no one here could possibly have seen before. She didn’t put on a hat, because that was a bourgeois prejudice; she let down her thick hair and tied it with a broad black ribbon, gathering it together at the side, below her right ear, with a magnificent bow. She put on a crimson waistcoat with silver stars over her lemon-yellow silk blouse with Spanish sleeves and a frilly jabot; her immense skirt of opalescent blue with countless pleats swayed like the waves of the ocean. An important detail of this daring costume was an orange sash with a wooden buckle. All in all, there was plenty for the Muscovites to look at. And certain individuals who looked really closely were in for yet another shock: on closer inspection, the black glittering ribbon on the neck of this breathtakingly spectacular stroller proved to be a live snake, which would occasionally turn its narrow head this way and that.
    Accompanied by gasps and squeals, Columbine strode haughtily across Red Square and across the Moskvoretsky Bridge, and turned on to the Sofiiskaya Embankment, where the respectable public was out strolling. And here, in addition to showing herself off, she gazed around wide-eyed, gathering new impressions.
    For the most part the Moscow ladies were dressed rather boringly: a straight skirt and white blouse with a necktie, or silk dresses in dreary dark tones. She was impressed by the size of the hats, which this season seemed especially luxuriant. She encountered hardly any extravagant ladies of any age, except for one, with a gauze scarf fluttering over her shoulder. And there was a horsewoman with pearly ash-grey hair under a veil, who rode past, holding a long amber cigarette holder with a papirosa . Stylish, Columbine thought, as she watched the woman ride away.
    There proved to be no small number of young men in Moscow with smocks and berets and long hair, and a large bow on their chests: she even called out to one after mistaking him for Petya.
    She deliberately arrived at the rendezvous twenty minutes late, for which she had to walk back and forth along the entire length of the embankment twice. Harlequin was waiting beside a fountain where the cabdrivers watered their horses and he looked exactly the same as in Irkutsk, but here among the granite embankments and closely crowded houses, Columbine felt that this was not enough. Why had he not changed in all these months? Why had he not become something bigger, or something new, or something else?
    And somehow the way Petya behaved wasn’t quite right either. He blushed and faltered. He was about to kiss her, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it – instead he held his hand out in an absolutely fatuous manner. Columbine stared at his hand in jaunty incomprehension, as if she had never seen anything funnier in her life. Then he became even more embarrassed and thrust a bunch of violets at her.
    ‘Why would I want these corpses of flowers?’ she asked with a capricious shrug of her shoulders. She walked over to a cabby’s horse and held the little bouquet out to her. The roan mare indifferently extended her large flabby lip over the violets and chewed them up in an instant.
    ‘Quick, we’re late,’ said Petya. ‘They don’t like that in our set. The horse-tram stops over there, just before the bridge. Let’s go!’
    He glanced nervously at his companion and whispered.
    ‘Everybody’s looking at you. In Irkutsk you dressed differently.’
    ‘Do I alarm you?’ Columbine asked provocatively.
    ‘What do you