Dancing With Bears - Michael Swanwick [78]
She was on her own at last. She would need a place to stay, money, contacts, and access to the highest levels of government, of course. Which meant that she had to find the right patron. Somebody powerful and ambitious—and it would not hurt if he were already half in love with her. Zoësophia was just starting to sort through her eidetic files when she noticed a man several blocks ahead, making his way unhurriedly through the pedestrian traffic. He turned onto Tverskaya and disappeared. She might not have noted him at all were he not inhumanly tall and lean, a caricature of lankiness, a very scribble of a man. It was Wettig, whom she had overheard Chortenko command to murder Baron Lukoil-Gazprom.
The baron. Of course. Zoësophia mentally closed her files.
She didn’t bother following Wettig but went the long way around, because she already knew where he was going. The baron was staying at the English Club these days, as the result of a marital break between himself and the baronessa. Zoësophia didn’t know the exact details, but she had heard enough gossip to make an educated guess. Baron Lukoil-Gazprom was an uncomfortable hybrid of the romantic and the sadist, and unable to reconcile the twin impulses within himself. Thus, he could never find sexual satisfaction with a woman he respected, nor respect any woman who gave him that satisfaction. Which was no recipe for success in a marriage.
Timing her arrival at the club so that Wettig would reach the baron’s suite without glimpsing her, Zoësophia paused to take stock of her appearance. She was expensively dressed, in the Russian manner, with a fortune in Byzantine jewelry. She must pass for a noblewoman, then, and a foreigner to boot. She wrapped one of her scarves about her head in a manner that suggested she was trying to conceal her identity.
Then she walked quickly to the door, opened it halfway and slipped within.
“May I help you?” the doorman said politely, positioning himself so that she could not get by.
All in a rush and with a strong St. Petersburg accent, Zoësophia said, “Please, I am here to meet a man, it is extremely important, you must let me go to his room.” Then, as the doorman did not move aside, she lowered her voice, as if embarrassed. “This is nothing I would normally do. But I have no choice.”
The doorman pursed his lips and shook his head. “If you’ll give me the resident’s name, I can have him sent for. Or else you may wait for him in the lobby.”
“Oh, no! That is far too public. My God, the scandal if my…no, I must wait in his room. There really is no alternative.” Zoësophia wrung her hands in an excellent approximation of agony. There were many rings on her fingers. She twisted off one of the smaller ones, and let the diamonds catch the light. Then she seized the doorman’s hands. “I am in such a terrible fix, you see. I am not the sort of woman who would ever do this, had I the choice, you must believe me.”
When she released the man’s hands, the ring stayed behind.
“I am extremely sorry,” the doorman said in a voice that brooked no argument. “But unescorted ladies are never allowed into the club under any circumstances.”
Then he turned his back on her, so that she could slip inside.
In a cabinet made of ice in Zoësophia’s memory palace was the baron’s dossier. From it she extracted the information that he roomed in Suite
24. But she went instead to a vacant smoking room on the second floor, from which she could look down on the street. Standing motionless by the window, she waited until she saw a tall and yet so broadly built as to be stocky figure with the proud bearing of a former general coming up Tverskaya. She counted to twenty and then went to the baron’s suite and hammered on the door.
“Gospodin Wettig!” she shouted, loudly enough for everybody on the floor to hear. “Open up! Chortenko has changed his mind—you must not kill the baron until tomorrow!”
The door flew open. “Are you mad? Stop that—” Wettig began. Then he recognized