Special Assignments (Electronic book text)

Chapter 1 The Jack of Spades oversteps the mark NO ONE IN the whole wide world was more miserable than Anisii Tulipov. Well, perhaps someone somewhere in darkest Africa or Patagonia, but certainly not anywhere nearer than that. Judge for yourself. To begin with, that first name--Anisii. Have you ever seen a nobleman--a gentleman of the bedchamber, say, or at least the head of some official department--called Anisii? It simply reeks of icon lamps and priests' offspring with their hair slicked with nettle oil. And that surname, from the word tulip It was simply a joke. He had inherited the ill-starred family title from his great-grandfather. When Anisii's forebear was studying in the seminary, the father rector had the bright idea of replacing the inharmonious surnames of the future servants of the church with names more pleasing to God. For the sake of simplicity and convenience, one year he named all the seminarians after church holidays, another year after fruits, and great-grandfather found himself in the year of the flowers: someone became Hyacinthov, someone Balzamov, and someone else Buttercupov. Great-grandfather never did graduate from the seminary, but he passed the idiotic surname on to his progeny. Well, at least he had been named after a tulip and not a dandelion. But never mind about the name What about Anisii's appearance First of all, his ears, jutting out on both sides like the handles of a chamber pot. Tuck them in under your cap and they just turned rebellious, springing back so that they jutted out like some kind of props for your cap. They were just too rubbery and gristly. There had been a time when Anisii used to linger in front of the mirror, turning thisway and that way, combing to both sides the long hair that he had grown specially in an attempt to conceal his lop ears--and it did seem to look a bit better, at least for a while. But when the pimples erupted all over his physiognomy--and that was more than two years ago now--Anisii had put the mirror away in the attic, because he simply couldn't bear to look at his own repulsive features anymore. Anisii got up for work before it was even light--in wintertime you could say it was still night. He had a long way to go. The little house he had inherited from his father, a deacon, stood in the vegetable garden of the Pokrovsky Monastery, right beside the Spassky Gates. The route along Pustaya Street, across Taganskaya Square, past the ominous Khitrovka district, to his job in the Department of Gendarmes took Anisii a whole hour at a fast walk. And if, like today, there was a bit of a frost and the road was covered with black ice, it was a real ordeal--your tattered shoes and worn-out overcoat weren't much help to you then. It fair set your teeth clattering, reminding you of better times, your carefree boyhood, and your dear mother, God rest her soul. The year before, when Anisii became a police agent, things had been much better. A salary of eighteen rubles, plus extra pay for overtime, and for night work, and occasionally they might even throw in some travel expenses. Sometimes it all added up to as much as thirty-five rubles a month. But the unfortunate Tulipov hadn't been able to hold on to his fine, lucrative job. Lieutenant Colonel Sverchinsky himself had characterized him as a hopeless agent and in general a ditherer. First he'd been caught leaving his obser