Dancing With Bears - Michael Swanwick [137]
Darger sat down on the gurney, swung up his legs, and then lay flat. “How on earth did you…? No, don’t tell me. You managed to pull yourself partially out of your drowse before I left the bar. Though you were unable to summon the sobriety needed to stop me, you heard me talking with Kyril and so knew where we were headed.”
“Right in one.” Sergeant Wojtek tightened the straps, one by one. “Hey! Shpeaking of your young partner in crime—where ish he?”
“While I was distracting you with conversation, he quite wisely fled.” Darger felt a little sad to reflect that in all likelihood he would never see the young lad again. But at least he could take some consolation in the fact that he had put the boy’s feet on the path to a respectable career.
“Well, no big deal. You, however, have to be kept shomewhere shecure.” Sergeant Wojtek thought for a moment and then grinned toothily. “And I know jusht the playzsch.”
Across the Kremlin grounds he pushed the gurney and through a field of rubble that led to the most extraordinary breach in the side of the Terem Palace. (Fleetingly, Darger regretted that from his prone position, he could not get more than a glimpse of it, and so the nature of the catastrophe that had created it remained to him a mystery.) Then, hoisting the gurney onto his back, Sergeant Wojtek made his way across uneven floors, down into the basement, and through a doorway, where he was finally able to set the gurney down again.
“If you don’t mind telling me…where are we going?”
“This tunnel leads to Chortenko’s manshion. Ish probably the best protected playzsch in the city, now that the Kremlin’s in sush bad shape. I’m going to bring you there and then shtand guard over you until Chortenko pershonally accepts you into hish cusht’dy.”
Darger had been thinking furiously. Now he said, “Is that wise?”
Sergeant Wojtek eyed him suspiciously. “Waddaya shaying?”
“You noticed that the crowds had dispersed? That means the revolution has failed.”
“Well…maybe.”
“Not maybe, but certainly. There is, as the Bard put it, a tide in the affairs of men which taken at the flood leads on to fortune. That tide has turned and left you stranded in the shallows, an easy prey for the warships of the regime you opposed.”
Sergeant Wojtek pushed on in stolid silence for a time. At last he said, “You’re right. I’m in a terrible fiksh.”
“I can tell you how to get out of it.”
The sergeant stopped. “You can?”
“Absolutely. However, in exchange for my advice, you must promise to free me.”
“How about I shimply promish not to kill you?”
“No good. Leaving me for Chortenko to find accomplishes the same thing and in a more painful fashion.”
It took Sergeant Wojtek several minutes to think through his options. Then, placing a paw over his heart, he said, “I shwear on my honor ash a member of the Royal Guard. Are you happy now?”
“I am. Now, what you must do is to quickly obtain a great deal of easily negotiated wealth—gold, jewels, and the like. Then, straightaway go to a hostler—roust him from bed, if you have to—and buy a sturdy coach and six of the best horses he has. He will overcharge you, but what of that? Your life is at stake. Flee immediately, without waiting for morning, for St. Petersburg. There you can easily book passage to Europe, where the remainder of your loot will allow you to live in comfortable anonymity.”
Sergeant Wojtek snorted. “Yeah, but wheresh a guy like me going to come up with that kind of money?”
“I believe you will discover,” Darger said, “that the Diamond Fund is, briefly, unguarded.”
A wondering light dawned in the sergeant’s eyes. “Yesh,” he said. “It would work.”
“Then you may release me, and we shall part as friends.”
“Hah! Let a shlippery bastard like you free? Not a chansh.” Sergeant Wojtek turned away and started back up the tunnel, leaving Darger strapped motionless to the gurney.
“You gave me your word as a member of the Royal Guard!” Darger called after him.
“Chump!” the sergeant said over his shoulder.