'You can choose who you sleep with on your own time,' the boss barked. 'But when you're working, I make all your decisions for you. Even when you go to the lavatory.'
Ignat shrugged. He glanced at me as if looking for sympathy and growled to himself:
'That's discrimination . . .'
'We're not in the States,' the boss said, his voice becoming dangerously polite. 'Yes, it's discrimination. Making use of the most appropriate available member of staff without taking his personal inclinations into account.'
'Couldn't I take that assignment?' Garik asked quietly.
That released the tension immediately. Garik's incredibly bad luck with women was no secret. Someone laughed.
'Igor and Garik, you carry on looking for the female vampire.' The boss almost seemed to have taken the suggestion seriously. 'She needs blood. She was stopped at the last minute, so she's going insane with hunger and frustration. Expect new victims at any moment. Anton, you and Olga look for the boy.'
That was clear enough.
Again, the most pointless and least significant assignment.
Somewhere in the city there was an Inferno waiting to erupt, somewhere in the city there was a wild, hungry female vampire, and I had to go looking for a kid who might, potentially, possess great magical powers.
'Permission to proceed?' I asked.
'Yes, of course,' said the boss, ignoring my quiet hint of revolt. 'Proceed.'
I swung round and left the Twilight as a sign of protest. The world flickered as it filled with colours and sounds. I was left standing there on my own in the middle of the square. To any outsider watching it would have looked really crazy. And then there were no footprints ... I was standing in a snowdrift, surrounded by a shroud of virgin snow.
That's how myths are born. Out of our carelessness, out of our tattered nerves, out of jokes that go wrong and flashy gestures.
'It's okay,' I said and set off straight for the avenue.
'Thank you ...' a gentle voice whispered affectionately in my ear.
'For what, Olga?'
'For not forgetting about me.'
'It really is that important to you to succeed in this, isn't it?'
'Yes, it is,' the bird answered after a pause.
'Then we'll try really hard.'
I skipped over the snowdrifts and some stones lying around – a glacier must have passed that way, or maybe someone had been playing at Zen gardens – and came out on to the avenue.
'Have you any cognac?' asked Olga.
'Cognac . . . yes. Why?'
'Good cognac?'
'It's never bad. If it's genuine cognac, that is.'
Olga sniffed scornfully.
'Then why don't you offer a lady coffee with cognac?'
I pictured to myself an owl drinking cognac out of a saucer and almost laughed out loud.
'Certainly. Shall we take a taxi?'
'Don't push it, kid!'
Hmm. Just when had she been locked into that bird's body? Or maybe it didn't stop her reading books?
'There's such a thing as television,' the bird whispered.
Dark and Light! I'd been certain my thoughts were safely concealed.
'Experience of life is an excellent substitute for vulgar telepathy . . . a long experience of life,' Olga went on slyly. 'Your thoughts are closed to me, Anton. And anyway, you're my partner.'
'I wasn't really . . .' I gave up. It was stupid to deny the obvious. 'And what about the boy? Are we just dropping the assignment? It's not all that serious . . .'
'It's very serious,' Olga exclaimed indignantly. 'Anton, the boss has admitted that he made a mistake. He's given us a headstart, and we've got to make the most of it. The girl vampire is focused on the boy, don't you see? For her he's like a sandwich she never got to eat, it was just taken right out of her mouth. And he's still on her leash. Now she can lure him into her lair from any side of the city. But that gives us an advantage. Why go looking for a tiger in the jungle, when you can tether a goat out in a clearing?'
'Moscow's just full of goats like that . . .'
'This boy is on her leash. She's an inexperienced vampire. Establishing contact with a new victim is harder than attracting an old one. Trust me.'
I shuddered, trying to shake off a foolish suspicion. I raised my hand to stop a car and said sombrely:
'I trust you. Absolutely and completely.'
CHAPTER 4
THE OWL emerged from the Twilight the moment I stepped inside the door. She launched into the air – for just an instant I felt the light prick of her claws – and headed for the fridge.
'Maybe I ought to make you a perch?' I asked, locking the door.
For the first time I saw how Olga spoke. Her beak twitched and she forced the words out with obvious effort. To be honest, I still don't understand how a bird can talk. Especially in such a human voice.
'Better not, or I'll start laying eggs.'
That was obviously an attempt at a joke.
'Sorry, I didn't mean to offend you,' I replied. 'I was just trying to lighten things up.'
'I understand. It's all right.'
I rummaged in the fridge and discovered a few odd bits and pieces. Cheese, salami, pickles ... I wondered how forty-year-old cognac would go with a lightly salted cucumber. They'd probably find each other's company a bit awkward. The way Olga and I did.
I took out the cheese and the salami.
'I don't have any lemons, sorry.' I realised just how absurd all these preparations were, but still. . . 'At least it's a decent cognac.'
The owl didn't say anything.
I took the bottle of Kutuzov out of the drawer in the table that I used as a bar.
'Ever tried this?'
'Our reply to Napoleon?' the owl asked with a laugh. 'No, I haven't.'
The situation just kept getting more and more ridiculous. I rinsed out two cognac glasses and put them on the table, glancing doubtfully at the bundle of white feathers. At the short, crooked beak.
'You can't drink from a glass. Maybe I should get you a saucer.'
'Look the other way.'
I did as she said. There was a rustling of feathers behind my back. Then a faint, unpleasant hissing sound that reminded me of a snake that's just been woken up, or gas escaping from a cylinder.
'Olga, I'm sorry, but. . .' I said as I turned round.
The owl wasn't there any more.
Sure, I'd been expecting something like this. I'd been hoping she was allowed to assume human form sometimes at least. And in my mind I'd drawn this portrait of Olga, a woman imprisoned in the body of a bird, a woman who remembers the Decembrist uprising. I'd had this picture of Princess Lopukhina running away from the ball. Only a bit older and more serious, with a wise look in her eyes, a bit thinner . . .
But the woman sitting on the stool was young, in fact she was really young. About twenty-five. Hair cut short like a man's, dirt on her cheeks, as if she'd just escaped from a fire. Beautiful, with finely moulded, aristocratic features. But that dirty soot . . . that crude, ugly haircut . . .
The final shock was the way she was dressed.
Stained army trousers 1940s style, a padded jacket, unbuttoned, over a dirty-grey soldier's shirt. Bare feet.
'Am I beautiful?' the woman asked.
'Yes, as a matter of fact, you are,' I replied. 'Light and Dark . . . why do you look that way?'
'The last time I assumed human form was fifty-five years ago.'
I nodded.
'I get it. They used you in the war.'
'They use me in every war,' Olga said with a sweet smile. 'In every serious war. At any other time I'm forbidden to assume human form.'
'There's no war on now.'
'Then there's going to be one.'
She didn't smile that time. I restrained my oath and just made the sign to ward off misfortune.
'Do you want to have a shower?'
'I'd love to.'
'I don't have any woman's clothes . . . will jeans and a shirt do?'
She nodded. She got up – moving awkwardly, waving her arms bizarrely and looking down in surprise at her own bare feet. But she managed to walk to the bathroom as if it wasn't the first time she'd taken a shower at my place.
I made a dash for the bedroom. She probably didn't have much time.
A pair of old jeans one size smaller than I wear now. They'll still be too big for her ... A shirt? No, better a thin sweater. Underwear . . .
'Anton!'
I raked the clothes into a heap, grabbed a clean towel and dashed back out. The bathroom door was open.
'What kind of tap is this?'
'It's foreign, a ball mechanism . . . just a moment.'
I went in. Olga was standing naked in the bath with her back to me, turning the lever of the tap left and right.
'Up,' I said. 'You lift it up for pressure. Left for cold, right for hot.'
'Okay. Thanks.'
She wasn't even slightly embarrassed. Not surprising, considering her age and rank . . . even if she no longer held one.
But I felt embarrassed. So I tried to act casual.
'Here are the clothes. Maybe you can pick something out. That is, if you need anything.'
'Thank you, Anton ...' Olga looked at me. 'Take no notice. I've spent eighty years in a bird's body. Hibernating most of the time, but I've still had more than enough.'
Her eyes were deep, fascinating. Dangerous eyes.
'I don't think of myself as a human, or an Other, or a woman any longer. Or as an owl, either, come to that. Just ... a bitter, sexless old fool who can sometimes talk.'
The water spurted from the shower. Olga slowly raised her arms and turned round, revelling in the sensation of the firm jets.
'Washing off this soot is more important to me than . . . the embarrassment of an attractive young man.'
I swallowed the 'young man' without argument and left the bathroom. I shook my head, picked up the cognac and opened the bottle.
One thing at least was clear: she was no werewolf. A werewolf wouldn't have kept the clothes on its body. Olga was a magician. A female magician about two hundred years old who'd been punished eighty years ago by being deprived of her body, but still hoped for a chance to redeem herself. She was a specialist in conflicts involving physical force and the last time she'd been used for a job had been about fifty years earlier . . .