A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

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Despite having gone to bed at four in the morning, on the twenty-first of June the Count rose at his usual hour. He did five squats, five stretches, and took five deep breaths. He breakfasted on coffee, a biscuit, and his daily fruit (today an assortment of berries), after which he went downstairs to read the papers and chat with Vasily. He lunched in the Piazza. In the afternoon, he paid a visit to Marina in the stitching room. As it was his day off, at seven o'clock he had an aperitif at the Shalyapin, where he marveled at the arrival of summer with the ever-attentive Audrius. And at eight, he dined at table ten in the Boyarsky. Which is to say, he treated the day much as he treated any other. Except that when he left the restaurant at ten, having told Nadja that the manager wished to see her, he slipped inside the empty coatroom in order to borrow the raincoat and fedora of the American journalist, Salisbury.

Back on the sixth floor, the Count dug to the bottom of his old trunk in order to retrieve the rucksack that he had used in 1918 on his trek from Paris to Idlehour. As on that journey, this time he would travel only with the bare necessities. That is, three changes of clothing, a toothbrush and toothpaste, Anna Karenina, Mishka's project, and, finally, the bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape that he intended to drink on the fourteenth of June 1963-ten years to the day after his old friend's death.

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