Sister Pelagia and the Red Cockerel A Novel

by Akunin, Boris; Bromfield, Andrew

• ISBN13: 9780812975154
• ISBN10: 0812975154
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-08-11
• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks

Summary

The third installment of the Sister Pelagia series: "whodunits that, because of their literary overtones, can be guiltlessly consumed as entertainment" (Los Angeles Times) Murder aboard the Sturgeon! Manuila, the leader of a mystical Jewish sect who claims to be the Messiah, is viciously murdered aboard a steamer bound for Jerusalem. But the badly beaten body is a decoy; the real Manuila is on his way to the promised land. And with a trail of enemiesand Sister Pelagiastalking behind him, he is not alone. Pelagia's search for Manuila and the murderer draws her into a series of mysterious caves in both the Russian forests and in Jerusalem. As she visits some of Christianity's most important sites, Pelagia learns the symbolism and value of a red rooster, knowledge that might reveal the true nature of Jesus himself. With more than twenty-two million books sold worldwide, Boris Akunin enjoys near legendary popularity as one of the most "fluent, inventive, fun-loving, and confident" authors of our time (Daily Telegraph,UK). His layered and complex mysteries have earned him comparisons to Russian literary greats like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, and his gripping page-turners have critics and fans asking for more. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Author Biography

BORIS AKUNIN is the pen name of Grigory Chkhartishvili, a philologist, critic, essayist, and translator born in the republic of Georgia. He has become one of the most widely read authors in Russia.

Excerpts

Chapter One


On the Sturgeon
About Muffin

Muffin rolled onboard the steamer Sturgeon as roundly and gently as the little loaf he was named after. He had waited for a thick scrap of fog to creep across onto the quayside, then shrank and shriveled and made himself just like a little gray cloud too. A sudden dart to the very edge, then a hop and a skip up onto the cast-iron bollard. He tripped lightly along the mooring line stretched as taut as a bowstring (this was no great trick for Muffin—he once danced a jig on a cable for a bet). Nobody spotted a thing, and there you are now: welcome the new passenger onboard!

Of course, it wouldn’t have broken him to buy a deck ticket. Only thirty-five kopecks as far as the next mooring, the town of Ust- Sviyazhsk. But for a razin, buying a ticket would be an insult to his profession. Buying tickets was for the geese and the carp.

Muffin had got his nickname because he was small and nimble and he walked with short, springy steps, as if he were rolling along. And he had a round head, cropped close, with ears that stuck out at the sides like little shovels, but were remarkably keen of hearing.

What is known about the razins? A small group of river folk, inconspicuous, but without them the River would not be the River, like a swamp without mosquitoes. There are experts at cleaning out other people’s pockets onshore as well—“pinchers,” they’re called—but those folk are petty, ragged riffraff and for the most part homeless strays, so they aren’t paid much respect, but the razins are, because they’ve been around since time out of mind. As for the question of where the name came from, some claim that it must have come from the word “razor,” since the razins are so very sharp, but the razins themselves claim it comes from Ataman Stenka Razin, the river bandit, who also plucked fat geese on the great Mother River. The philistines, of course, claim that this is mere wishful thinking.

It was good work, and Muffin liked it exceptionally well. Get on the steamer without anyone noticing you, rub shoulders with the passengers until the next mooring, and then get off. What you’ve taken is yours, what you couldn’t take can go sailing on.

So what are the trump cards in this game?

Sailing airily down the river is good for the health. That’s the first thing. And then you see all different kinds of people, and sometimes they’ll start telling you something so amusing you clean forget about the job. That’s the second thing. But the most important thing of all is—you won’t do any time in jail or hard labor. Muffin had been working on the River for twenty years, and he had no idea what a prison even looked like, he’d never laid eyes on one. Just you try catching him with the swag. The slightest hitch, and it’s gone: “The rope ends are underwater.” And by the way, that old Russian saying was invented about the razins, only other folk never bother to think about it. “Ends” is what whey call their booty. And as for the water, there it is, splashing just over the side. Get spotted, and you just chuck the ends in the water, and there’s no way they can prove a thing. The Mother River will hide it all. Well, they’ll give you a thrashing, of course, that’s just the way of things. Only they won’t beat you really hard, because the public that sails on steamers is mostly cultured and delicate, not like in the villages by the river, where the peasants are so wild and ignorant they can easily flog a thief to death.

The razins call themselves “pike” as well, and they call the passengers “geese” and “carp.” As well as “the rope ends are underwater,” there’s another saying that everyone repeats all the time, but they don’t und

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Excerpted from Sister Pelagia and the Red Cockerel: A Novel by Boris Akunin, Andrew Bromfield
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