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Zusatztext “Addictively dazzling.” —Entertainment Weekly “Splendidly smart and funny! this is half pastiche! half reinvention and wholly entertaining.” —Evening Standard ! UK “It [pleases] lovers of mysteries! as well as fans of classic Russian literature.” —USA Today “Akunin has delivered a virtuoso performance! a mélange of mystery and horror.”— Courier-Mail! Australia Informationen zum Autor 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. Klappentext The third installment of the Sister Pelagia series pleases lovers of mysteries! as well as fans of classic Russian literature ("USA Today"). 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 wa...
