A Gentleman in Moscow

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 Maître 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 Maître 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.

As it was only 2:25, and Chef Zhukovsky had yet to turn the corner from pessimist to optimist, he curtly replied: “Of course not!”

This led to a debate between the two men on the differences between what was probable, plausible, and possible—a debate that might have gone on for an hour, but for a knock at the door. Responding with an irritated “Yes?” Emile turned, expecting to find Ilya with his wooden spoon, but it was the clerk from the mail room.

The chef and maître d’ were so confounded by his sudden appearance that they simply stared.

“Are you Chef Zhukovsky and Maître d’ Duras?” he asked after a moment.

“Of course we are!” declared the chef. “Who else would we be?”

Without a word, the clerk presented two of the five envelopes that had been dropped in his slot the night before (having already made visits to the seamstress’s office, the bar, and the concierge’s desk). A professional through and through, the clerk showed no curiosity as to the contents of these letters despite their unusual weight; and he certainly didn’t wait around for them to be opened, having plenty of his own work to attend to, thank you very much.

With the mail clerk’s departure, Emile and Andrey looked down at their respective envelopes in wonder. In an instant, they could see that the letters had been addressed in a script that was at once proper, proud, and openhearted. Meeting each other’s gaze, they raised their eyebrows then tore the envelopes open. Inside, they each found a letter of parting that thanked them for their fellowship, assured them that the Night of the Bouillabaisse would never be forgotten, and asked that they accept the enclosed as a small token of undying friendship. The “enclosed” happened to be four gold coins.

The two men, who had opened their letters at the same time, and read them at the same time, now dropped them on the table at the same time.

“It’s true!” gasped Emile.

A man of discretion and civility, Andrey did not for one second consider saying: I told you so. Although with a smile he did observe: “So it seems . . .”

But when Emile had recovered from these happy surprises (four pieces of gold and an old friend purposefully at large!), he shook his head as one forlorn.

“What is it?” asked Andrey in concern.

“With Alexander gone and you afflicted with palsy,” the chef said, “what is to become of me?”

Andrey looked at the chef for a moment then smiled.

“Afflicted with palsy! My friend, my hands are as agile as they have ever been.”

Then to prove his point, Andrey picked up the four gold Catherines and sent them spinning in the air.

At five o’clock that afternoon, in a nicely appointed office of the Kremlin (with a view of the lilacs in the Alexander Gardens, no less), the Chief Administrator of a special branch of the country’s elaborate security apparatus sat behind his desk reviewing a file. Dressed in a dark gray suit, the Chief Administrator might have been described as relatively indistinguishable when compared to any other balding bureaucrat in his early sixties, were it not for the scar above his left ear where, by all appearances, someone had once attempted to cleave his skull.

When there was a knock at his door, the Chief Administrator called, “Come in.”

The knocker was a young man in a shirt and tie bearing a thick brown folder.

“Yes?” said the Chief Administrator to his lieutenant, while not looking up from his work.

“Sir,” the lieutenant replied. “Word was received early this morning that a student on the Moscow Conservatory’s goodwill tour has gone missing in Paris.”

The Chief Administrator looked up.

“A student from the Moscow Conservatory?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Male or female?”

“A young woman.”

. . .

“What is her name?”

The lieutenant consulted the folder in his hands.

“Her given name is Sofia and she resides in the Metropol Hotel, where she has been raised by one Alexander Rostov, a Former Person under house arrest; although there appears to be some question as to her paternity. . . .”

“I see. . . . And has this Rostov been questioned?”

“That is just it, sir. Rostov cannot be found either. An initial search of the hotel’s premises proved fruitless, and no one who has been questioned has admitted to seeing him since last night. However, a second and more thorough search this afternoon resulted in the discovery of the hotel’s manager, locked in a storeroom in the basement.”

“Not comrade Leplevsky . . .”

“The very same, sir. It appears that he discovered the plan of the girl’s defection and was on his way to inform the KGB when Rostov overcame him and forced him into the storeroom at gunpoint.”

“At gunpoint!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where did Rostov get a firearm?”

“It appears that he had a pair of antique dueling pistols—and the will to use them. In fact, it has been confirmed that he shot a portrait of Stalin in the manager’s office.”

“Shot a portrait of Stalin. Well. He does sound like a rather ruthless fellow. . . .”

“Yes, sir. And, if I may say so, wily. For it appears that two nights ago a Finnish passport and Finnish currency were stolen from one of the hotel’s Finnish guests. Then last night, a raincoat and hat were stolen from an American journalist. This afternoon, investigators were sent to Leningradsky Railway Station, where confirmation was obtained that a man wearing the hat and coat in question was seen boarding the overnight train to Helsinki. The hat and coat were discovered in a washroom at the Russian terminus in Vyborg, along with a travel guide for Finland from which the maps had been removed. Given the tightness of security at the railway crossing into Finland, it is presumed that Rostov disembarked in Vyborg in order to cross the border on foot. Local security has been alerted, but he may already have slipped through their fingers.”

“I see . . . ,” said the Chief Administrator again, accepting the file from his lieutenant and putting it on his desk. “But tell me, how did we make the connection between Rostov and the Finnish passport in the first place?”

“Comrade Leplevsky, sir.”

“How so?”

“When comrade Leplevsky was led to the basement, he witnessed Rostov taking the Finnish guide from a collection of abandoned books. With that piece of information in hand, the connection was quickly made to the theft of the passport, and officers were dispatched to the station.”

“Excellent work all around,” said the Chief Administrator.

“Yes, sir. Though it does make one wonder.”

“Wonder what?”

“Why Rostov didn’t shoot Leplevsky when he had the chance.”

“Obviously,” said the Chief Administrator, “he didn’t shoot Leplevsky, because Leplevsky isn’t an aristocrat.”

“Sir?”

“Oh, never mind.”

As the Chief Administrator tapped the new folder with his fingers, the lieutenant lingered in the doorway.

“Yes? Is there something else?”

“No, sir. There is nothing else. But how shall we proceed?”

The Chief Administrator considered this question for a moment and then, leaning back in his chair with the barest hint of a smile, replied:

“Round up the usual suspects.”

It was Viktor Stepanovich, of course, who left the damning evidence in the Vyborg terminal washroom.

An hour after bidding the Count good-bye, he boarded the Helsinki-bound train wearing the journalist’s hat and coat with the Baedeker in his pocket. When he disembarked in Vyborg, he tore out the maps and left the guide with the other items on a counter in the station’s washroom. Then he traveled back on the next train bound for Moscow empty-handed.

It was almost a year later when Viktor finally had the opportunity to watch Casablanca. Naturally, when the scene shifted to Rick’s Café and the police began closing in on Ugarte, his interest was piqued, because he remembered his conversation with the Count in the railway station café. So with utmost attention, he watched as Rick disregarded Ugarte’s pleas for help; he saw the saloonkeeper’s expression remain cool and aloof when the police dragged Ugarte from his lapels; but then, as Rick began making his way through the disconcerted crowd toward the piano player, something caught Viktor’s eye. Just the slightest detail, not more than a few frames of film: In the midst of this short journey, as Rick passes a customer’s table, without breaking stride or interrupting his assurances to the crowd, he sets upright a cocktail glass that had been knocked over during the skirmish.

Yes, thought Viktor, that’s it, exactly.

For here was Casablanca, a far-flung outpost in a time of war. And here at the heart of the city, right under the sweep of the searchlights, was Rick’s Café Américain, where the beleaguered could assemble for the moment to gamble and drink and listen to music; to conspire, console, and most importantly, hope. And at the center of this oasis was Rick. As the Count’s friend had observed, the saloonkeeper’s cool response to Ugarte’s arrest and his instruction for the band to play on could suggest a certain indifference to the fates of men. But in setting upright the cocktail glass in the aftermath of the commotion, didn’t he also exhibit an essential faith that by the smallest of one’s actions one can restore some sense of order to the world?