The Sin Collector

INNOKENTY

Innokenty sat looking idly at Masha’s map and the series of crosses she had marked. Thank God Masha was tactful enough not to tell him all the details, over lunch, of what had happened at each of those places. As it was, his appetite hadn’t suffered, but his curiosity—the most treacherous of sins, and the driving force of any historian—had definitely been aroused. Innokenty remembered seeing a map with crosses like these once before. Given the sort of things he worked on, the map must have been an old one. Sixteenth or seventeenth century, probably.

He dutifully reached for an atlas. Where was it? Ah, there it was. Innokenty looked thoughtfully at the book’s cover. For him, old maps, just like old sepia photos—and the Dutch masters, really—held an extraordinary charm. The tiny horses racing far off in the background in a Bruegel, a slice of a street scene in a De Hooch, the costumes and facial expressions of a merchant family on a late-nineteenth-century postcard, and the Streletsky Settlement gardens here on the page he turned to first—they all had a particular quality in common, which was that their greatness was in the details.

And these details were powerful enough to make them real. If you followed those details, like Ariadne’s string, through the dark labyrinth of time, they might lead you to a different reality. Wasn’t that, in the end, why Innokenty had become a historian? Because it was a way of dipping into other worlds? Of distancing himself from this one, the world where fate had dropped him? He couldn’t resist running his eyes over the commentary accompanying Herberstein’s map of Moscow one more time. Full of small mistakes, it reflected an outsider’s view. Innokenty smiled ironically. Who were modern Muscovites, if not outsiders observing the sixteenth-century city? They didn’t even know that Moscow, which now ranked somewhere between Delhi and Seoul worldwide, used to be the fourth biggest city in Europe, after Constantinople, Paris, and Lisbon.

And where was that Constantinople? Kenty wondered abstractedly. Where was that Lisbon, all weighed down by New World gold? Where was old Paris, robbed by revolutions? In the Middle Ages, it took a man on horseback three full hours to ride all the way around the walled fortress here—the same amount of time his modern-day descendent spends in traffic every day.

Innokenty licked his lips over the text he already knew almost by heart. Cathedrals in the city are sometimes constructed of brick, though most are wooden, and all the houses are made of wood. None are permitted to build from stone or rock save certain members of the nobility, and the most successful merchants may build vaults on their property, small and narrow, where they secret away their most valuable possessions in times of fire. The English and the Dutch, and the Hanseatic merchants, primarily store their wares here, selling fabrics, silks, and perfumes…

He smiled again when he read the next sentence. The local merchants are quite adept and inclined to make deals, and while they are extremely untrustworthy, they are markedly more pleasant and civilized than other residents of this land.