Whatever the cause, the sound was utterly disconcerting.
When a single telephone rings, our immediate instinct is to pick up the receiver and say hello. But when thirty ring at once, our instinct is to take two steps back and stare. The limited crew of the night shift found themselves running from phone to phone without the fortitude to answer a single one. The drunken crowd in the Shalyapin began spilling into the lobby, as guests, who had been awakened on the second floor, came marching down the stairs. And in the midst of this commotion, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov quietly donned the journalist’s hat and coat, shouldered his rucksack, and walked out of the Metropol Hotel.
AFTERWORD
Afterwards . . .
On the twenty-first of June 1954, Viktor Stepanovich Skadovsky left his apartment shortly before midnight in order to keep an appointment.
His wife had urged him not to go. What good could come from an appointment at this hour, she wanted to know. Did he think the police didn’t walk the streets at midnight? The police made a point of walking the streets at midnight. Because since the beginning of time, that’s when fools have kept their appointments!
Viktor responded to his wife that this was nonsense; that she was being melodramatic. But when he left their building, he walked ten blocks to the Garden Ring before boarding a bus, and he took comfort from the indifference with which the others on the bus received him.
Yes, his wife was upset that he had an appointment at midnight. But if she had known the purpose of the appointment, she would have been beside herself. And if, upon learning of his intentions, she had demanded to know why on earth he had agreed to do something so foolhardy, he wouldn’t have been able to answer her. He wasn’t certain himself.
It wasn’t simply because of Sofia. Of course, he felt an almost fatherly pride in her achievement as a pianist. The very notion of helping a young artist discover her talent was a fantasy that Viktor had long since abandoned; and to experience it so unexpectedly was beyond description. What’s more, it was the hours of teaching Sofia that had ultimately led him to pursue another abandoned dream: playing the classical repertoire in a chamber orchestra. But even so, it wasn’t simply because of her.
To a greater degree, it was because of the Count. For, however unaccountably, Viktor felt a profound sense of loyalty to Alexander Ilyich Rostov; a sense of loyalty that was grounded in feelings of respect that Viktor could hardly articulate—and that his wife, for all her virtues, would never have understood.
But perhaps most of all, he had agreed to the Count’s request because it felt right to do so; and that feeling of conviction, in itself, was a pleasure that had become increasingly rare.
With that thought, Viktor stepped off the bus, entered the old St. Petersburg Station, and walked across the central hall toward the brightly lit café where he had been instructed to wait.
Viktor was sitting in a booth in the corner—watching an old accordion player move from table to table—when the Count entered the café. He was wearing an American trench coat and a dark gray fedora. Seeing Viktor, he crossed the café, set down his rucksack, shed the coat and hat, and joined him in the booth. When a moment later the waitress appeared, he ordered a cup of coffee and then waited for the coffee to arrive before sliding a little red book across the table.
“I want to thank you for doing this,” he said.
“You needn’t thank me, Your Excellency.”
“Please, Viktor. Call me Alexander.”
Viktor was about to ask if the Count had received any word from Sofia, but he was interrupted by a scuffle on the other side of the café. Two haggard-looking fruit sellers carrying woven baskets had gotten into a territorial dispute. Given that it was so late, both men were down to a few sorry pieces of produce; and while this may have lent an air of futility to their argument in the eyes of the observers, it in no way diminished the stakes for the principals. To that end, after a brief exchange of insults, one struck the other in the face. With blood on his lip and fruit on the floor, the assaulted man responded in kind.
As the customers in the café stopped their conversations to watch the skirmish with weary, knowing expressions, the café’s manager rounded the bar and dragged the combatants out by their collars. For a moment, the room was silent while everyone stared out the café window to the spot where the two fruit sellers remained sitting on the ground a few feet apart. Then all of a sudden, the old accordion player—who had stopped performing during the scuffle—struck up a friendly tune, presumably in the hopes of restoring some sense of goodwill.
As Viktor took a sip from his coffee, the Count watched the accordion player with interest.
“Have you ever seen Casablanca?” he asked.
Somewhat bewildered, Viktor admitted that he had not.
“Ah. You must see it one day.”
And so the Count told Viktor about his friend Osip and their recent viewing of the movie. In particular, he described the scene in which a small-time crook was dragged away by the police and how the American saloonkeeper, having assured his customers that everything was all right, casually instructed his bandleader to play on.
“My friend was very impressed with this,” explained the Count. “He saw the saloonkeeper’s instruction to the piano player to start playing so soon after the arrest as evidence of his indifference to the fates of other men. But I wonder. . . .”
The following morning at half past eleven, two officers of the KGB arrived at the Metropol Hotel in order to question Headwaiter Alexander Rostov on an undisclosed matter.
Having been escorted by a bellhop to Rostov’s room on the sixth floor, the officers found no sign of him there. Nor was he receiving a trim in the barbershop, lunching at the Piazza, or reading the papers in the lobby. Several of Rostov’s closest associates, including Chef Zhukovsky and Ma?tre d’ Duras, were questioned, but none had seen Rostov since the previous night. (The officers also endeavored to speak with the hotel’s manager, only to find that he had not yet reported to work—a fact that was duly noted in his file!) At one o’clock, two additional KGB men were summoned so that a more thorough search could be made of the hotel. At two, the senior officer conducting the investigation was encouraged to speak with Vasily, the concierge. Finding him at his desk in the lobby (where he was in the midst of securing theater tickets for a guest), the officer did not beat about the bush. He put his question to the concierge unambiguously:
“Do you know the whereabouts of Alexander Rostov?”
To which the concierge replied: “I haven’t the slightest idea.”
Having learned that both Manager Leplevsky and Headwaiter Rostov had gone missing, Chef Zhukovsky and Ma?tre d’ Duras convened at 2:15 for their daily meeting in the chef’s office, where they immediately engaged in close conversation. To be perfectly frank, there was little time spent on consideration of Manager Leplevsky’s absence. But there was a good deal of time spent on Headwaiter Rostov’s. . . .
Initially concerned when they had received word of their friend’s disappearance, the two members of the Triumvirate took comfort from the KGB’s obvious frustration—for it confirmed that the Count was not in their grips. But the question remained: Where could he possibly be?
Then a certain rumor began to spread among the hotel’s staff. For though the officers of the KGB were trained to be inscrutable, gestures, language, and facial expressions have a fundamentally unruly syntax. Thus, over the course of the morning, implications had slipped out and inferences had been made that Sofia had gone missing in Paris.
“Is it possible . . . ?” wondered Andrey aloud, clearly implying to Emile that their friend may also have escaped into the night.