Dancing With Bears - Michael Swanwick [120]
“I think that you are a fellow of hidden resources. A memory such as yours is a gift to be cherished. As for the Diamond Fund itself, you have completely sold me on the idea.”
“Yeah, but if we want to nab any of that stuff, we gotta find a way to get through all those crazies outside. Then we’d have to either climb the Kremlin walls—which I don’t think is gonna happen—or else talk our way past the guards, which maybe you could do but they’d never let me come in with you. Then we’d have to truck all that gold and shit back out the same way we came in. It sounds like a fucking big task.”
“There are no big tasks, Kyril. Only small ambitions. Let’s—” Darger stopped abruptly. “No,” he said. “What am I thinking? There exists an even greater treasure for our seizing, and we would be criminals not to take it up.”
“What are you—?” Kyril began. Then, “Oh, no. You’re talking about those fucking books, aren’t you?”
“I am talking about the treasure of the ages, the greatest and wisest words and thoughts the human mind has ever committed to paper. Or, as it may be, parchment or even papyrus. Kyril, gemstones are but pretty gauds with which we beguile ourselves on our hopefully long road to death. But books—great books, I mean—are why we were born in the first place. Also, there is a very good commercial value to a previously unknown play by Euripides. I know it sounds unlikely, but it’s true.”
Kyril had gone to the door during this speech and stood in its frame, staring out. “Well, I got some bad news for you.” He pointed. “Look at that.”
Flames were pouring out of the entryway to the staircase leading down to the Pushkinskaya docks.
“Good lord!” Darger was alongside Kyril in a trice. He clutched the lad’s shoulder. “This only increases the necessity for us going back to the lost library. We must rescue the books!”
“Yeah, but look at that. Half the fucking undercity must be burning.”
“It does not matter. Great stakes sometimes require great risks. I will not ask you to come along with me, Kyril, for I can see that this is not your cause. But for myself, I can only echo the illustrious if short-tempered German monk, Martin Luther: Ich kann nicht anders. This I must do. I—”
“Okay, okay,” Kyril said testily. “I wasn’t gonna say this. But there’s another way into the library.”
“What?!”
“If you climb up to the top of it, there’s a little door. Behind it, there’s a kind of secret passage. I was poking around and found it. I went through it once, almost got caught, and never tried it again.”
“Where does it come out?”
“In the Secret Tower,” Kyril said, “in the Kremlin.”
The square was empty when they emerged from the bar. Kyril had snatched up a bottle of alcohol as they left, “just in case we need to make friends with somebody,” he explained, and tucked it under one arm. Darger who, as a matter of principle, liked to keep his hands unencumbered by anything other than his walking stick, tidily closed the door behind them out of consideration for the bar’s proprietor.
An unceasing and strangely insistent mumble of noise sounded from Red Square, a mile or so distant. “Listen!” Darger said.
“That’s one fucking creepy sound.”
“On the contrary. It is the sound of opportunity.”
The baronessa’s carriage was an open troika. Thus, when the servile driving it pushed through the crowds to the front of the procession, it was the highest spot in the square. Tsar Lenin, seeing this, stepped lightly up onto the troika. Baronessa Lukoil-Gazproma surrendered her own seat to him and, tapping the servile on the shoulder, said, “Get off. Run alongside the rear wheel.” With the graciousness of old nobility, she climbed into the driver’s seat and took the reins.
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