Archive of Our Own ^beta

There’s a small bell over the door of the bookshop that tinkles as Napoleon pushes it open. It’s a rare day of respite after a dull mission in the middle of the Welsh countryside, where - as ever - some madman with a plan for world domination had a nuclear bunker buried underneath the Cotswolds, and he’s making the most of it by commandeering a rather lovely powder-blue Jaguar E-type and driving to Britain’s bookshop capital, with the intent of finding a couple of first-edition or at least beautifully bound books for his shelves at home.

The shop is warm, with low-level lighting, and pretty much every available space is covered with books. The counter is piled high, and there’s a blonde head - little of which he can actually see behind the stacked tomes covering the surface - behind it. He clears his throat, hears the shop assistant give a low grunt he assumes passes for ‘hello’ in Britain, and wanders into the back room where the antiques are signposted.

Napoleon is browsing, flicking through an 1881 edition of Pope’s translation of the Iliad, the pages spotted with age and the bindings stiff and creaky in his hands, lounging against a ceiling-high bookshelf. The place seems to go on forever, with rooms upon rooms stuffed with books on every imaginable subject. That said, he’s not seen anything he likes yet, so he makes his way back to the counter and tries to get the assistant’s attention.

‘Hello?’ His voice is too loud in the silence of the shop, too brash, too American.

‘Hello,’ the person says, their - his, from the low, gruff baritone - thick Eastern-European accent immediately recognisable. He doesn’t look up from the brick of a novel in his own lap. What a Russian is doing behind the counter of a quaint little bookstore in the most quintessentially British village Napoleon has ever visited, he would never know. Still, he persists.

‘I need a book recommendation.’

‘What do you like to read?’ the man asks, eyes still on his book. His tone is bored, as though he has to deal with this question a lot (which, now that Napoleon thinks about it, he probably does), as he suggests a couple of options. ‘Classics? Mystery? Detective? Historical?’

‘Not the classics, they’re terribly dull. I got less than twenty pages through War and Peace before I had to give up in despair, with a migraine that could have felled an elephant.’

‘War and Peace is masterpiece of Russian literature,’ the shop assistant growls, and finally looks up, eyes narrowed. They’re a startling shade of blue, even in the dim light of the shop, and Napoleon blinks for a moment before smirking.

‘Forgive me, comrade, but you strike me as perhaps a little biased.’

‘Is no bias to be proud of the country and culture you come from,’ the assistant sniffs. ‘Besides, I recommend Tolstoy to everybody. He is a genius. Start with Anna Karenina.’ He spins around on his chair, pulls a Penguin copy as thick as Napoleon’s arm from the middle of one of the piles on his desk, and shoves it in the American’s direction. ‘Pevear and Volokhonsky. Is good translation.’

Napoleon takes it from him, and, since it only costs a pound, hands over a couple of coins. The shop assistant writes him out a receipt by hand, and shoves it into the book as he passes it back, and glowers Napoleon out of his shop.

On page 210, the receipt is turned over to reveal a note in an untidy hand.

Я должен был сказать Толстой ‘Не мечи́те би́сер пе́ред сви́ньями.’

Although his Russian is a little rusty, Napoleon understands the gist. He grins, folds up the note, and stows it away in the drawer of his bedside table.

Although never a particularly voracious reader, Napoleon manages to get through Anna Karenina in three days. He’s still not convinced that the Russians, like Hardy, know how to write anything that isn’t a moral tale about how miserable it is to be alive, but he actually finishes the book instead of palming it off on Gaby and then asking for the synopsis like he usually does. In fact, he even goes back when he walks into town for lunch.

The shop assistant is no friendlier the second time around. Napoleon’s ‘hello’ is greeted with a grunt much like the first, and the man doesn’t even so much as glance up from whatever enormous tome he’s got open in his lap this time. Napoleon perches on the tiny patch of bare space available on the desk and leans over to get a closer look.

The page is full of Cyrillic, and although his Russian is a little rusty, Napoleon thinks he recognises the passage as belonging to Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot.

‘Is good book for you,’ the assistant says, as he reaches out to shove Napoleon off the desk, and turns the page with his free hand.

‘My handler would no doubt agree,’ Napoleon told him, ‘but I’m back for another recommendation. None of Mr. Tolstoy’s pearls this time -’ the man’s ears go slightly pink with a blush - ‘perhaps something else.’

The shop assistant shrugs, clambers to his feet, and heads into one of the back rooms.

Napoleon has to watch him go, because it’s truly amazing how such a behemoth manages to fold himself under the door frames of this low-slung building. The man has to be six foot five, if not taller, and Napoleon himself, no stripling at six-two, has to duck a little to get through some of the doors. The shop assistant is also built like a brick outhouse, with the broadest shoulders - wrapped in the snuggest turtleneck - Napoleon has ever seen. Coupled with the menacing accent and the general aura of barely-restrained borderline hostility boiling away beneath the surface, he’s not someone Napoleon would want to come across on a mission. Or in a dark alley.

He returns a moment later with a copy of The Accidental Billionaires. This he hands to Napoleon without a word, before extending his palm with a gruff ‘Two fifty.’

Napoleon pays him and pockets the book.

This time, the note reads, 

Через два дня или меньше.

The Accidental Billionaires takes him two and a half days; he finishes the last page as he’s sat at his table in Shepherd’s, americano halfway to his lips. He’s never been particularly interested in biographies before, but he slogs through it more as a stubborn ‘fuck-you’ to the shop assistant, who was obviously deliberately giving him the most boring, difficult books possible just to mess with him. Nevertheless, he returns to the shop victorious, and slams the book down on the counter.

‘Two days,’ the shop assistant says, in an almost impressed tone, a smile pulling at the corners of his mouth, and Napoleon grins.

‘I was issued a challenge, and I never fail to rise to a challenge.’

The Russian simply raises an eyebrow before heaving his large body out from behind the minuscule desk and fetching another book, this time a thoroughly beaten-up copy of The Confessions of Nat Turner.

‘You’re trying to kill me, Peril. Death by literature.’

‘Peril?’ the assistant glowers. ‘What is this?’

‘Russia,’ Napoleon tells him with a smirk, ‘the Red Peril. Or would you, in honour of the English’s ridiculous nickname for their recent snowstorms, prefer ‘The Beast From The East’?’

The assistant growls, his eyes narrowing to slits of flinty blue, and looks like he’s about to start cracking his knuckles ready to cave Napoleon’s skull in. Eventually he settles for stretching his fingers out, popping each joint one by one, before grumbling, ‘Peril I will tolerate.’

‘Ta-ta,’ Napoleon says with a sardonic wave, and carries his book out of the shop.

Written on a random scrap of paper that looks like a receipt from the local mini-market:

Это не значит, что мы друзья.

The Confessions of Nat Turner, although a slim book, had been heavy reading, and alongside the fact that Napoleon has been fielding multiple calls from Gaby and Waverly about the next mission they have queued up for him in Kuwait, he’s not had much time for reading. It’s been a week since Napoleon last stepped foot in the Russian’s bookstore, but the place looks the same as ever, even down to the assistant with his nose buried in yet another Russian classic.

‘You wound me, Peril,’ Napoleon says in a hurt tone, one hand pressed over his heart and the other brandishing the note, as the bell dings above him. ‘I had thought we were all but bosom buddies as of late. And to think, I’ve been wooed by all of this highbrow literature, and all for naught! How will my poor, tender heart take it?’

The shop assistant regards him with a bored expression, one eyebrow slightly raised. Napoleon thinks he should be used to at least most of the antics he pulls by now, but apparently Russians must undergo a humourectomy at birth or something, because he’s yet to see the other man crack even the tiniest of smiles.

However, the assistant has a new book already held out in one hand, clearly having been put aside for him. It’s old, even older and more battered than the last, and when he opens it he can see that it’s a pulp novel first published in 1936. The front cover shows a man in a white Stetson and an old-fashioned eyemask, firing his gun into the air from the back of a rearing white stallion.

‘The Lone Ranger.’ He reads the title aloud.

‘A ridiculous American book for a ridiculous American man,’ the assistant says, and buries himself back in The Master and Margarita.

The note is three words.

Для тебя, Ковбой.

The Lone Ranger was, as promised, ridiculous, and so much of a riot that Napoleon read it three times in two days. Full of gunfights, saloons, ‘Hi ho, Silver!’s and sarcastic asides from the Native American which remind him of the bookstore clerk’s dry sense of humour, he has to admit that this has been his favourite of the books Peril has recommended to him, and he fully intends to track down the rest of the series if he can.

Napoleon meanders along the footpath, past Shepherd’s and the pharmacist to Peril’s tucked-away little corner of the town, and pushes open the door, the tinkling of the bell barely even registering with him any more due to the frequency of his visits. Peril is waiting for him, an amused smirk on his lips, arms folded and feet propped up on the bare - for once - desk.

‘So. You enjoyed your adventures in Wild West?’

‘Absolutely. But if you’re planning to stage a reenactment, I have to call shotgun on the Ranger.’

‘‘He who sneaks’’, Peril says with a mock-thoughtful expression. ‘Not in my shop. In my shop you galumph like herd of elephants.’

Napoleon, who refuses to dignify that with a response, retorts, ‘And yet you are silent as the grave. As quiet as a mouse.’

‘It is a gift I wish I could share,’ Peril says drily, and snorts a laugh.

Napoleon comes into the shop regularly after that, almost every day, and sits beside Peril for hours in companionable silence, the shopkeeper devouring his ‘highbrow literature’ (Napoleon’s words) and the American thoroughly enjoying his ‘American trash’ (Peril’s) as he follows the adventures of John Reid and Tonto through the Wild West. Every so often he reads a passage aloud, whenever things get particularly far-fetched, and is rewarded with snorts of laughter from Peril that he hoards close to his heart like small jewels.

He learns, after a while, that Peril’s real name is Illya, and that he’s been living in Britain for three years since leaving Russia. He has a cat, Глупый (Glupyy), so named because it refuses to drink water from its bowl - preferring running water from the tap - and because it continually runs into the door instead of through the cat flap Illya installed in the back door of his house.

‘Is very stupid cat,’ Illya says, exasperated, and Napoleon shares the story of a pet fish when he was seven who, in a fit of suicidal pique, jumped out of its bowl to flap around on the kitchen floor where his mother promptly (and, she swore, accidentally) stood on it.

‘Very stupid fish,’ Napoleon says, and Illya nods.

‘You never gave me a new recommendation,’ Napoleon says after several minutes of silence, during which Illya finishes Gogol’s The Overcoat and immediately picks up Terry Pratchett’s Guards! Guards!.

‘I’ve never seen you read anything not in Russian, either.’ He taps the cover of Illya’s book curiously, and Illya twitches one hand to glance at the front before going back to reading.

‘Pratchett is a genius.’

‘I’ve never read any of his.’

Illya puts the book down to fix him with a long, hard stare, before heading to the back room and coming back carrying an enormous armful of books, more than Napoleon was aware even Illya could hold at once.

‘Start at once,’ Illya says, in his strictest tone, and Napoleon obeys.

On the inside cover of Carpe Jugulum, he’s written, 

У меня есть сюрприз в следующий раз.

The entire works of Terry Pratchett take weeks, so long, in fact, that Napoleon has to jet off to Kuwait for that mission from Waverly before he has time to finish them all. He reads Thud! on the plane back to London and Wintersmith on the train up to Hereford. He arrives back in Hay-on-Wye two months after he last saw Illya, and - naturally - immediately heads to the bookstore.

Well, after a little sprucing up.

Illya is sat at his desk as per usual, looking thoroughly morose, when Napoleon walks through the door. The Russian doesn’t even glance up from where he’s been staring moodily at a knot in the wood of the desk, not until he hears Napoleon’s voice asking ‘Missed me?’

‘Like a hole in head,’ Illya retorts, but the brilliant smile that breaks over his face at the sight of the American back in his shop belies his words, and Napoleon grins.

‘I’ve finished your Pratchetts,’ he says. ‘I’m ready for that surprise.’

Illya suddenly blushes to the root of his hair, and excuses himself for a moment, bustling away to the back room (which Napoleon is, by now, absolutely certain must be the size of the British Library to stock all of the books Illya seems to magic up out of nowhere for him) before returning with a punnet of fruit and a remarkably new-looking book.

He hands the book to Napoleon and offers him a peach. There’s still a fiery blush on his cheeks, but mischief is sparkling in the depths of his blue eyes, and Napoleon has to wonder what on earth he’s letting himself in for.

Something wonderful, probably.

fin.