A Gentleman in Moscow: Book 5, Antagonists at Arms (And an Absolution) Summary & Analysis

On June 20, the Count is in the Boyarsky, serving a Finnish couple. As they order, he asks for their room number. When the Count formulated his plan, he quickly determined that he would need to steal a passport from a Scandinavian guest, without the person noticing. Here is an unmissable opportunity, he thinks, and he knows he must visit their suite that night. When he asks if they want dessert, the Count is pleased to hear that they plan to go right to bed.

Shortly after midnight, the Count goes to suite 322, setting his shoes by the door so as not to make any noise. He slips easily in and out of the room with the passport and 150 Finnish marks in hand. He discovers, however, that while he was inside the night service had picked up his shoes for shining. Taking comfort in the fact that everything else has gone to plan, he climbs back up to his suite.

When the Count arrives in his room, the Bishop is sitting at his desk with the Count’s first map of Paris, with Sofia’s escape path drawn through it in red pen. The Bishop says coolly that the Count is a man of many interests. The Count lies and says that he has been reading Proust lately, and thus wanted to reacquaint himself with the layout of the city. The Bishop gets up and walks past the Count, descending the stairs to the ground floor, presumably to inform the authorities. When he arrives there, he is shocked to find the Count already sitting behind his desk with a pistol in hand.

The narrator flashes back: when the Bishop left the Count, the Count was struck by fury, fear, and frustration. Then, he had quickly sprung into action, running down the main staircase while the Bishop took the belfry staircase. He used Nina’s passkey to open the door to the manager’s office and found the panel behind which lay the old dueling pistols.

Seeing the Count, the Bishop insists that he leave. The Count tells him to sit. When the Bishop starts to dial the police, the Count takes the pistol and fires it at a portrait of Stalin on the wall. The Bishop sits, and the Count asks for his watch, which tells him that it is almost 1:00 A.M.

As the Count waits in the office with the Bishop, the Bishop sneers that the nobility have always been convinced of their supremacy, and have thought that their wealth was a confirmation of the rightness of their actions. But, he goes on, what the Count says and does now will come to light, and he will be held accountable for it.

The Count looks over the Bishop’s filing cabinets and asks for the key to them. The Bishop hands over his keyring, losing his sense of superiority in the process. The cabinets reveal files on members of the hotel staff, which contain notes about things such as flaws in the staff members’ work or personal shortcomings. The Count pulls the files of his friends.

At 2:30 in the morning, the Count leads the Bishop to the boiler room, forcing him to dump the files into the furnace. Then the Count finds another travel guidebook in the basement—this time, for Finland. The last stop on the tour through the basement is the room in which the silver service is stored. He locks the Bishop in the room, knowing that there is a banquet on Tuesday and someone will find him then.

At three in the morning, the Count heads back to his room when he encounters the one-eyed cat, who sees him with the stolen passport, money, the travel guide, stockings on his feet, and two pistols in his belt. The one-eyed cat turns his blind eye upon the Count and disappears down the stairs.