The Mercedes braked gently to a halt. I opened the back door: the owner of the car was sitting beside the driver in that manner that nouveau-riche second-raters have.
“Drive along the embankment for the time being,” I ordered the bodyguard. And before I slammed the door, I shouted to Sasha: “Oh, by the way, you passed the practical exam. You can take tomorrow to recover—in situations like this I usually get drunk, but you can think up something of your own. And the day after tomorrow, report to the operations section. You’re hired.”
On that day Gesar had been in an elated mood since the morning. At the briefing meeting he smiled, told an irrelevant joke that was funny but rather crude, unexpectedly increased the science department’s budget for the next quarter, gave Olga Ignat’s playful little hug when she was simply walking by and approved Ignat’s business trip to Lvov “for an exchange of experience,” although everybody knew perfectly well that Ignat was from Lvov and he simply wanted to visit his relatives and friends.
My account of Alexander’s practical exam was also received favorably. The only question was one that I was expecting.
“And are you sure it wouldn’t have been better for the girl to die than become undead?” the boss asked, toying with his ballpoint pen.
“No, I’m not,” I replied honestly. “But I didn’t have a chance to ask her, and I didn’t want to decide for her. At the end of the day, she has enough time with a relatively healthy psyche before she is totally transformed. If she should choose differently . . . And then, it was extremely useful for Alexander to realize that our actions don’t always produce the desired result. I’m sure he got the point.”
“Convincing,” Gesar said, nodding, and signed the order for Alexander’s enrolment as a full-time member of staff with a flourish.
Basically, it was a day when you could get Gesar to okay anything, or almost anything. And I tried to take advantage of that when I stayed behind after the gathering started to disperse.
“Questions, Anton?”
“Yes, I have one. About Erasmus.”
“Have you guessed how to reveal his prophecy?” Gesar asked.
“Not yet, although I’ve had one inkling of an idea. But everything here’s so interconnected . . . Boris Ignatievich, tell me, that bonsai you sent him—can you tell me what magic is concealed in it?”
“No,” Gesar snapped.
Well, it was worth a try . . .
“I wouldn’t bother my head about the old prophecy,” Gesar continued, without looking at me. “It either went off and was never realized, or it all happened ages ago. But finding out what the boy wanted to tell us, now that really would be interesting.”
“Arina twisted me round her little finger,” I said, repenting for my sins, and not for the first time. “But even I’m not certain that there was anything on that flash stick . . .”
“Remember the unwritten law that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong—there was something there, all right . . .” Gesar sighed and closed his laptop. “Sit down, Anton. Let’s talk. I understand what’s bothering you.”
“Arina’s prophecy,” I admitted. “Or rather, her friend’s . . . What if she’s right and the prophecy does come true?”
Gesar shrugged.
“Maybe she’s right, and the prophecy will come true. Maybe it already did, despite all her cunning tricks—the Germans occupied Little Russia, the Japanese invaded Siberia, they hanged Bolsheviks . . .”
“The war will last nine years?”
“The First World War began in 1914, the Civil War in Russia ended in 1923. Can you do the sum?”
“It ended in 1922,” I protested stubbornly.
“Oh, these historians! In Yakutia, in Kamchatka and Chukotka, it was 1923!” Gesar growled. “Who are you arguing with? Were you there? I fought against Bologov’s Cossacks and their shaman in 1923! And the basmachi carried on their bloody struggle after that . . .”
“That’s not what I’m arguing about,” I said in a conciliatory tone. “If the count includes 1914 and 1922, that makes exactly nine years.”
Gesar raised his hands thoughtfully and started bending down the fingers. Then he looked at me and turned crimson.
“So what are you arguing about? It’s all happened!”
“Not all of it,” I said morosely. “ ‘A third of the people die of starvation . . .’ ”
“Famine in the Volga region, Kazakhstan, Little Russia . . . Not a third, of course, but let’s grant the Prophets the right to pile on the tragedy.”
“ ‘The world absorbs the rest of the nation . . .’ ”
“What country hasn’t been absorbed into the world nowadays?” asked Gesar, raising one eyebrow in surprise. “Globalization, Anton! Everybody has dissolved in everybody! I went into a toilet in Paris, and there were graffiti scratched on the wall in fourteen languages!”
“ ‘Moscow consumed by flames . . .’ ”
“Prophecies are always allegorical,” Gesar snapped. “The old Moscow has perished, there’s nothing left of it but the Kremlin—but the Kremlin isn’t Moscow.”
“ ‘With the loss of his heir, the tsar is deranged . . .’ ”
Gesar pondered for a moment. Then he said: “Well, that is the result of Arina’s interference. She treated the heir to the throne’s illness, if she’s not lying, so he didn’t die—as he should have done . . . But one way or another, all the rest has happened. The silly old fool has simply gone gaga. She wants to suffer a bit, don’t you know. She has destroyed Russia! What a laugh! The whole world and its uncle have been trying to destroy Russia for a thousand years, but it’s still there, and it will stay there!”
“Thank you,” I said sincerely, getting up. “I was feeling pretty lousy about it.”
“Anton, I’ve lived in many different places,” Gesar said in a gentle voice. “Tibet . . . China . . . India . . . Flanders . . .”
“Not Holland?” I asked.
“Zeelandic Flanders,” Gesar replied. “Now it’s part of Holland, that’s right. The point, Anton, is that you can get stuck on any country. I love Tibet, and India, and Flanders. And Russia, of course! But with the passing years you come to realize that the most important things are your family, your friends, your work. And as for countries . . . we’re all citizens of humankind, we have emerged from it, but we live and work for its sake. We’re all Others! That’s what is most important. Don’t be afraid of that old Witch’s nonsense. Sleeping for all that time had a bad effect on her. Don’t seek for meaning in Erasmus’s old lump of wood: if even Arina didn’t covet it—and she could have stolen it from you a hundred times—it means there isn’t any meaning in it. But when it comes to Innokentii’s prophecy, of course, that’s where you really blundered! That would be really worth knowing!”
I hung my head repentantly.
“You definitely erased everything from the toy phone?” Gesar asked casually.
“Yes. I gave it to the lab guys.”
“They couldn’t fish anything out of it,” Gesar sighed. “A tiny microchip, completely written over, the old information completely erased . . . And you didn’t keep another flash stick?”
“I don’t have another one. They’ve checked already.”
“That’s bad,” said Gesar, sighing heavily again. “The most valuable piece of information you obtained in Formosa is that the Tiger is not exactly what we thought: he tries to spur the Prophets on to make their prophesies, not eliminate them! But he behaved quite differently here! He himself stated that the prophecy must not be uttered! And that makes the prophecy interesting—but now it’s out of our reach!”
“It’s my fault . . .”
“Drop it,” said Gesar, with a wave of his hand. Yes, he was clearly in an excellent mood. “What’s done is done. No point raking over old coals. I don’t have any assignments for you today, you can take care of your own business. Ah yes . . . you are granted the right to one seventh-level benign intervention!”
“If only I’d had it yes
terday evening!”
“You would have saved the girl, and the vampire would have been given a new license. You know that!”
I shrugged and walked out of the office.
Chapter 2
THE MAIN ADVANTAGE THAT SOMEONE AT the top has, at least in an organization like the Night Watch, is the freedom to plan his own day.
I actually always had more than enough work. Officially I had been made responsible for supervising trainees, monitoring teaching in the school and inspecting patrols. In the tedious bureaucratic language that is self-generated in any organization, whether it’s the accounts office of a pipe-rolling mill or an alliance of anarchistic romantic artists, my job was titled “Deputy Director for the Training and Professional Development of Personnel.”
Doesn’t actually sound too exhausting, right? But I had practically no free time left. Unless I took an arbitrary decision to rake all the papers to one corner of the desk, switch off my work mobile, and do something that was strictly optional. Then it miraculously turned out that the Watch was capable of existing without one of its deputy directors for as long as you could wish. But the moment I turned back to work, I was swamped by a tsunami of applications, requests, complaints, instructions, and schedules.
As a child I didn’t like school, as a young man I didn’t like college—and I went through all that to end up supervising the training program in a magical police force! I wonder whether, if I had remained a programmer, or taken up architecture—that was what my parents wanted, we had some well-known architect or other in our family—educational work would have caught up with me anyway?
Probably it would. Anybody, even an Other, can only change the form of his life, not its content. In one old computer game a wicked witch had the habit of asking people she met: “What can change human nature?”—and afterwards she took great pleasure in killing them. Because no one could find the right answer . . .
But although Nature cannot be changed, she can always be deceived. For a while.
And so I sat at the desk in my office for a few minutes, looking through the papers and smoking a cigarette. About a year earlier Igor, in a burst of fanatical enthusiasm for the healthy lifestyle, had launched a campaign to prohibit smoking in the Watch’s office premises. In general terms everybody, including the smokers, agreed with his arguments. But when it came down to the specifics, opinions differed widely. Naturally, in areas where nonsmokers worked, no one smoked anyway. In communal areas it was permitted, but only if no one objected. Everyone took their dose of poison either in the smoking rooms or in their own offices—and when all was said and done, it didn’t take that much magic to rid rooms of the smell of tobacco. But Igor insisted on having everything his way, railing about the stench of tobacco, holding up the example of civilized Europe, pressing home the point that it was embarrassing when colleagues visited us from there. (Although I hadn’t noticed the European Others suffering much when they drank vodka at receptions, smoked in their rooms, or, for instance, bought hundreds of suspiciously cheap “licensed” movie DVDs and music CDs in the shops.)
The campaign came to a sudden end when Gesar, after listening benevolently to Igor speaking on his proposal, remarked: “That’s right, everyone should smoke pipes or hookahs, not stinking cigarettes . . .” Igor should have stopped short there and then, but in the heat of the moment he blurted out that hookahs, pipes, and cigars were even worse than cigarettes: “The stench is really horrible!” Gesar’s face darkened and he asked whether from now on, when he wanted to focus on thinking through important problems, he would have to run out into the street with his hookah. And then he asked if there was no difference between the climate in Europe, where you could go outside in your shirtsleeves in December, and the climate in Russia, where even in Moscow minus twenty Celsius was a common occurrence.
After that the subject somehow just folded of its own accord. For a while Igor walked around looking offended and ostentatiously withdrew from any areas where anyone was smoking. But then his enthusiastic endorsement of the healthy lifestyle was replaced by the struggle against the discrimination suffered by Others with low levels of magical Power.
Since I wasn’t expecting a visit from Igor, I smoked unashamedly as I looked through the accumulation of papers.
A schedule of classes for novice Others. That could wait.
A plan for the advanced training of Fourth- and Fifth-Level Others in order to identify the more powerful magicians among them. That was a bit more interesting. Peering attentively at the sheet of paper, I read this remarkable phrase: “The goal of holding this advanced training program is advanced training for the purposes of determining . . .” After that I suddenly started feeling bored, signed the papers, and dropped them into the “Approved” file. The sheets faded and disappeared, teleported off to their authors.
So, what next?
A schedule of classes for patrol members on the subject of “Certain aspects of interaction with members of the Day Watch in situations where ‘wild’ Others have been discovered and apprehended.” I glanced through the lesson summaries with great interest. Olga was intending to teach the classes, which was already interesting in itself. And the subject was a burning issue of perennial interest—by no means all Others were found and initiated by members of the Watches, quite often people discovered their own magical powers independently . . . and then things could get really messy, regardless of whether they were Dark Ones or Light Ones.
So I actually marked the first class in my diary, in order to attend it myself. Not as an inspector, simply as one of the students. It was always useful to learn something new.
And what was this?
Olga again?
Amusing. She must have been bitten by the teaching bug. A lecture for Watch members on the subject of “The Watches’ response in cases of technological and social catastrophe. Specific aspects of interaction with the human agencies of law enforcement.” And two remarks. The first was “attendance desirable”—so it was only nominally an open lecture with optional attendance: in fact, everyone was recommended to attend. The second was “invited guest—a non-Other.”
That was really interesting!
And the lecture had begun half an hour ago . . . I wondered why neither Olga nor Gesar had said a word to me about it.
I decided that my desk work was over for the day and stood up. I could consider this as attendance at a recommended lecture and an inspection at the same time. That note—“attendance desirable”—had freed my hands. Simply turning up at Olga’s lecture would have been awkward, it would have looked like an official visit. But this way it was all fine and dandy—I’d just come to learn something.
The lecture hall was absolutely crammed and I felt like a total idiot. Everybody must have been there, apart from Gesar (he had nothing to learn, even from Olga) and the guys in the duty office.
As I walked in, the crowd burst into laughter. I even hesitated in the doorway. But fortunately they weren’t laughing at me. It was quite dark by the door and no one had even noticed me.
Olga was standing on a small dais beside a lectern, looking out into the hall with a smile on her face. When the laughter died away, she said: “And then I said: ‘Franz, why have you got both gloves on the right hand?’ He looked at Willem, blushed and shouted: ‘Well, damn me, so that was your hand!’ ”
The audience laughed until it groaned. It guffawed, chuckled, grunted, and squealed. It had obviously been a very funny story—but I’d only caught the very end.
There’s nothing more pathetic than a man who has heard the end of a joke and starts asking plaintively: “What was that about, what was it? What happened at the beginning?”
“And what did Willem say?” someone shouted out from the hall.
Olga was apparently expecting this question and she had the answer ready.
“Willem lowered his eyes sheepishly and replied: ‘Yes, Herr Franz, but it wasn’t my hand.’ ”
The audience collapsed in paroxysms of
laughter, even louder than before. I sighed, slumped against the wall, and waited.
It took a couple of minutes for order to be restored. After that Olga, evidently considering that she had the audience eating out of the palm of her hand, announced: “And now meet our guest, Senior Police Sergeant Dmitry Pastukhov!”
This was getting more and more interesting! Mentally congratulating myself on taking up the strategically correct position by the door, I squatted down on my haunches. And when Olga stepped down off the dais, clapping her hands, my old, if rather superficial, acquaintance Dmitry Pastukhov mounted it with an embarrassed expression on his face.
“Hello,” Dmitry said, with a smile that was awkward but basically friendly and sincere. “I am very pleased, I really am, to have been invited here.”
The audience suddenly burst into applause.
“Of course, I’m not Franz, and I’m not Willem,” Pastukhov continued, encouraged by this approval. “But a job’s a job, in any country at any time. Right? So ask what you like, and I’ll answer—only don’t forget, I’m a senior sergeant, not some high-up . . .”
“Why have you been stuck as a sergeant for so long?” a young girl from the research department piped up from the audience.
“If I’d known you were going to invite me to speak, I’d have become a general!” said Pastukhov, laughing the question off. He didn’t seem very keen to discuss the leisurely progress of his career.
But the audience was in a friendly mood. Alisher was the first to get up and ask a question.
“Dima—may I call you Dima?”
“Of course!”
“Let’s discuss the following situation. There’s some kind of disturbance taking place in a city. The police are trying to restore order. They haven’t got enough men. The crowd is setting fire to cars, looting shops, beating up peaceful passersby. And then two men approach you, an ordinary sergeant on patrol duty. One says he can pacify the crowd, the people will feel ashamed and all go home. The other says he can frighten the crowd, make the people feel pain, and they will go running home. Whose help would you accept?”