And, by the way, what is it exactly?”
The cheerful person started to smile soothingly and lifted his hands, showing that all the answers would be given in their time. Then he took out a hard rectangular business card and tapped the table with it.
“I’m… hmm… a little of everything. Broker? Antique dealer? Bibliophile? Now and then the most interesting people die. Writers, artists, academicians. The heirs remain. Quite often not particularly competent.”
“I find this hard to believe,” Guy remarked absent-mindedly. “They cannot but know what their ancestor killed his whole life for.”
Chubby began to nod hurriedly. “Goes without saying! It’s well known to them that there’s quite a lot in grandpa’s and father’s library. But that’s all they know! Almost no one suspects that 95 percent of collected works in luxurious bindings have very little value, but some tiny unpretentious little book is priceless. The first limited edition Akhmatova8 collection with her autograph, or a well-preserved bundle of Satyricon,9 or something similar. I politely buy dozens of beautiful books, paying three times their value for them, and out of courtesy I take the tiny booklet in an overall pile of all sorts of unnecessary things.”
“In other words, your task is to find this five percent and get it for nothing, after leaving the rest to the fool of an heir?” Till, wheezing, spelt it out. The round face of his collocutor strayed somewhere between the sun and a pancake.
“Each business has its special quirks. Can’t teach them. Can only learn them. In the spring, a decrepit old lady on Ostozhenka passed away, the widow of an artist of battle scenes. Her niece couldn’t wait to get rid of the junk. She was simply happy when I bought from her two trunks of all sorts of old stuff.”
“Soiled palettes? Drying tubes of paint?” Guy asked.
The cheerful person started to laugh with exaggerated energy. He had a habit of overstating the worth of mediocre jokes like that of book collections. “Not quite. The artist drew historical paintings, and for that, reliable historical things were necessary. Weapons, cloth, goblets. The entire second trunk turned out to be crammed with ancient horse harness. Bridles, belts, stirrups, adornment.”
“Do you want a bridle?” Guy asked Till.
Till shook his head and started to crumble bread with his thick fingers. “I now rarely sit behind the wheel. Gotten old, clumsy,” he complained.
These jokes did not fool the cheerful person. Once such people have heard you out up to this point, they will listen some more. Then they will pay, there is no getting away from it.
“The lid of the trunk interested me most of all. It was suspiciously heavy. I tapped it and found a secret compartment, which even the owners themselves clearly didn’t know about. An hourglass in a copper case lay there.” After mentioning the hourglass, the antique dealer stopped talking and quickly looked at Guy. “A very interesting hourglass. That and something else belonged to some first-hdiver Mityai Zheltoglazyi,” he sweetly added.
Guy stopped cleaning his nails with a corner of the business card and looked attentively for the first time at his collocutor. “What do you know about hdivers, Sergey Ilich?” he asked sharply.
Pancake-face grinned and stroked the napkin lying in front of him as if stroking a dead rabbit. “A little. You see, the hourglass was wrapped with a scrap of skin. On the skin was text. Very brief, but I examined it… For example, I understood that hdivers would hardly pay me. But you here are a different story.”
“What, me personally?” Guy doubted.
Sergey Ilich lowered his eyes so shyly that one wanted to give him some money. “No, of course not. I spent three months in order to come to you. Several times the thought flickered in me that there exist neither hdivers nor warlocks. So many centuries have gone by. I despaired, and here’s a piece of luck! I discovered on the Net the description of a strange anomaly – an enormous column of water on the Moscow River. Someone shot it with his cell phone. Immense! Such could only be done by a hdiver marker, the description of which was on the reverse side of the skin. And you yourself know only who could drop it… hee-hee… So I came to Gomorrah. The rest is a technical matter.”
“Not bad!” Guy showed approval. “I see you’ve done some good work. Can I have a look at the hourglass and the skin?”
The antique dealer looked cautiously at Till. Till was calmly chewing a piece of dill, which was hanging from the right corner of his mouth as from a horse’s mouth. “They’re at my place. No, no, it goes without saying, not with me! First we agree on a price!”
“What will the price be?” asked Guy.
“High. Transactions of this grade happen once in a lifetime,” the antique dealer said firmly. “I’ll ask three things, quite normal.”
“What are these three things?”
“Money. Health. And I want to know always what threatens me!”
Guy drew a circle with a wet finger on the polishing. “Why the last one? With money and health?” he asked.
The cheerful person looked tritely downcast. “I don’t like to move blindly! You can see that my work is also tricky. I’m always meeting people I don’t know. All or nothing. That’s my motto.”
“Great,” Guy approved. “Are you sure that I’m capable of supplying you all this?”
“Sure, I could demand even more. Three wishes is quite modest, taking into account that the sand in the hourglass has almost trickled through.”
Guy stopped examining the chin of his collocutor and looked him in the eyes for the first time. “Sand? Do you mean to say it has been flowing all this time? All these decades?”
“Yes,” touching the napkin, Sergey Ilyich confirmed. “It’s a strange hourglass. The sand runs only in one direction. And very slowly. One grain of sand a day at dawn. Must admit, I tried to cheat. Turned the hourglass over. And then the grain of sand – I swear! – fell from the bottom to the top!” Sergey Ilyich looked sharply at Guy, checking what impression his words would make.
“You’re observant. Difficult to notice one grain of sand a day. You probably have a lot of free time,” Guy acknowledged.
“I used a web cam and examined slowly at high magnification.”
Guy stretched, getting up. Overtaking the waiter, Nekalaev dashed to move aside the chair. The antique dealer also jumped. “Well, fine, my dear!” said Guy after a long pause. “We’ll fulfil your wishes if the hourglass actually belongs to… what did you call him?”
“Mityai Zheltoglazyi,” smiling with understanding, the antique dealer prompted. “When will you be ready?”
“I’m always ready,” said Guy, listening to something going on inside him. “At least health and the knowledge of the future I’m ready to give you now. As for the money… possibly we’ll have to make a couple of calls!” He looked at Till.
Looking sombrely, Till promised that he would find the money even without Dolbushin. From his small personal reserve. “And we still haven’t settled our misunderstanding with Albert,” he acknowledged.
“Soon?”
“Yes,
Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966), pen name of Anna Andreevna Gorenko, one of the most acclaimed modernist poets of the Silver Age.
