The White City Read Online Free

her head self-deprecatingly. “My English—” she explained, and waved over her shoulder. “You sit with my friends and with me, please?”
    Following the gesture of her head, he noticed a group of three other girls about the same age gathered around a samovar on a low table. Each was dressed in similarly Bohemian splendor. Though none of them were in drag, all were uncorseted, wearing blouses, shawls, and sweaters layered loose over long wool skirts. One wore fingerless gloves, a not-unreasonable affectation given the chill in the basement café.
    —I’m waiting for my breakfast,— Jack offered. His Russian wasn’t much better than her English, but it was often easier to understand somebody fumbling through your language than zooming past in their own.
    —Dmitri will bring it,— she said, with a nod to the counterman. Jack turned in time to see the look Dmitri sent back in his turn, intense, focused, leavened by a slight smile. Possessive, perhaps, but Jack didn’t get a sense that Irina Stephanova was impressed by the possessiveness, if she had even noticed it.
    Jack smiled politely as Irina Stephanova swiped his coffeepot and milk jug, leaving him little choice other than to cause a scene or to carry the mug along after her, balancing the half-eaten plate of bread atop it. She led him over to the cluster of worn leather couches centered on a glass-topped coffee table where her friends were sitting, and hip-checked one of her girlfriends over to make room. When Jack settled beside her, all blushes and apologies, he couldn’t edge over far enough to keep from feeling the radiant heat of her body against his thigh.
    Dmitri was probably going to spit in his eggs.
    Irina Stephanova settled his coffee and milk on the table with a clatter, edging aside used cups and plates dotted with crumbs to do so. Pointing quickly, she introduced the young women surrounding her, and it was all Jack could do to catch the proper names. Patronymics were on their own reconnaissance. Fortunately, nobody else in the café seemed too determined to enforce their use, and for Jack—already feeling transgressive in using the Christian names of people, of women , he barely knew—one more revolutionary increment came easy.
    The one in the red sweater, mahogany-brown hair piled high, was Svetlana. She had frayed shirt-cuffs splattered with motheaten yellow stains that looked like the residue of some mild acid, and her knuckles were marked with a fine lacework of scratches. He was unsurprised to hear Irina Stephanova identify her as a sculptress.
    The heavyset one with medium-brown hair, wearing a sort of embroidered robe that seemed inspired by kimono or caftan over her dress, was Tania. She was drinking black tea from a ruby-tinted glass, heavy costume rings glinting on her fingers.
    —Tania works in gouache,— Irina Stephanova said. —And this is Nadia.
    The third woman was a redhead, neither flaming carrot nor auburn but a soft gingery color, the locks cropped off at her shoulders and oiled in soft springy curls. She was the one in a goat’s-hair shawl, the open lacework slipping down her shoulders. She smiled widest at Jack as he sipped his coffee and leaned forward to set the mug down.
    “So you are the Englishman.” Her accent was meticulous.
    “Someone has to be.”
    She laughed and quickly translated for the others, who laughed as well. Irina Stephanova looked over her shoulder at him, flipping her long black hair out of the way. “Jack, you are artist?”
    He shook his head. “A dilettante.” Coffee was an excuse not to answer the question in too detailed a fashion. “But I prefer the company of artists to that of polite society, and in general I find the feeling is mutual.” He repeated himself, as best as he could, in Russian, for Tania and Svetlana.
    His breakfast arrived then, a welcome excuse to drop out of the conversation to listen. “It’s all right,” Irina said to Jack as Dmitri vanished back behind the