Fandorin in English 1-10

At this point, however, the baptized Jew said something unexpected: “So please tell your respected uncle, may God grant him health and prosperity in his business affairs, that he need not trouble himself anymore. I am a new man in the Caucasus, but I know about those people who I need to know about. Convey my humble greetings to Chasan Mu-radovich and my gratitude for his taking an interest in me. But that idea about the water is a good one. Was it yours?” He slapped the young man on the shoulder patronizingly and asked him to pay another visit — on Thursdays the cream of Semigorsk society gathered at the house.

The fact that the baptized Jew had proved to be clever and well-informed was not in itself a difficulty. The difficulty arose on Thursday, when Achimas, having accepted the invitation, arrived at the house at the top of the cliff in order to study the disposition of the rooms.

So far the plan had been conceived as follows: Overpower the guards at night, hold a knife to the householder’s throat, and see which he loved more — the iron room or his own life. It was a simple plan, but Achimas didn’t really like it. First, it could not be managed without additional helpers. And second, there were people who loved their money more than their lives, and the young man’s intuition told him that Lazar Medvedev was one of them.

At that Thursday’s gathering there was a large number of guests, and Achimas was hoping that later, when they took their seats at table and drank their fill, he would be able to slip away unnoticed and look around the house. But matters never reached that point, because the aforementioned difficulty manifested itself at the very beginning of the evening.

When the host introduced his guest to his wife, Achimas merely noted that old Abylgazi had not lied when he said she was young and attractive: ash-blond hair with a golden tinge and beautifully shaped eyes. She was called Evgenia Alexeevna. But Madame Medvedev’s charms had no connection with his business and therefore, having pressed his lips to the slim white hand, Achimas walked through into the drawing room and took up a position in the farthest corner, by the door curtain, from where he had a good view of the entire company and the door that led into the inner rooms.

It was there that the hostess sought him out. She walked up to him and asked quietly: “Is that you, Lia?” Then she answered herself. “It is you. No one else has eyes like that.”

Achimas said nothing, overcome by a strange stupefaction that he had never experienced before, and Evgenia Alexeevna continued in a rapid, fitful half whisper: “What are you doing here? My husband says you are a bandit and a murderer, that you wish to rob him. Is it true? Don’t answer, it is all the same to me. How I waited for you. And now, when I have stopped waiting and married, you suddenly turn up here. Will you take me away from here? You don’t mind that I didn’t wait until you came, do you, you’re not angry? You remember me, don’t you? I’m little Evgenia from the orphanage at Skyrovsk.”

Suddenly Achimas had a vivid recollection of a scene that he had not remembered even once in all those years: Chasan carrying him away from the orphanage, and a thin little girl running silently after the horse. He thought that at the end he had heard her shout: “Lia, I’ll wait for you!”

This difficulty could not be resolved by the usual means. Achimas did not know how to explain the strange behavior of Medvedev’s wife. Perhaps this really was the love that they wrote about in novels? But he did not believe in novels and had not touched a single one since grammar school. This was alarming and uncomfortable.

Achimas left the soiree without giving Evgenia Alexeevna any answer. He mounted his horse and rode back to Solenovodsk. He told his uncle about the iron room and the difficulty that had arisen. Chasan thought for a moment and said: “For a wife to betray her husband is a bad thing. But it is not for us to untangle the artful designs of fate, we should simply follow its wishes. And it is fate’s wish for us to enter the iron room with the help of Medvedev’s wife — this much is clear.”

FOUR

Chasan and Achimas walked up the hill to Medvedev’s house in order to avoid alerting the sentries with the clattering of hooves. They left their horses in a copse at the bottom of the cliff. Down below in the valley, there were only scattered points of light — Semigorsk was already sleeping. Transparent clouds skidded across the greenish black sky, and the night constantly changed from bright to dark and back again.

The plan had been drawn up by Achimas. Evgenia would open the small garden gate at the special knock they had agreed on. They would creep through the garden into the yard, stun both sentries, and go down into the basement. Evgenia would open the armored door, because her husband had shown her how to do it, and he wrote down the number of the combination on a piece of paper that he hid behind the icon in the bedroom. He was afraid of forgetting the combination, which would mean that he would have to take up the stonework of the floor — there would be no other way of getting into the iron room. They would not take everything — only as much as they could carry away. Achimas would take Evgenia with him.

While they were making their arrangements, she had suddenly looked into his eyes and asked: “Lia, you won’t deceive me, will you?”

He didn’t know what to do with her. His uncle gave him no advice. “When the moment comes to decide, your heart will tell you what to do,” said Chasan. But they took only three horses. One for Chasan, one for Achimas, and one for the spoils. The nephew watched silently as his uncle led the chestnut, the black, and the bay out of the stable, but he said nothing.

As he walked along the white wall without making a sound, Achimas wondered what those words meant: “your heart will tell you.” As yet his heart was silent.

The garden gate opened immediately on oiled hinges that did not squeak. Evgenia was standing in the opening, wearing a tall fur hat and a felt cloak. She had prepared for a journey.

“Walk behind us, woman,” Chasan whispered, and she moved aside to let them through.

Medvedev had six retired soldiers. They stood guard in pairs, changing every four hours.

Achimas pressed himself up against an apple tree and watched what was happening in the yard. One sentry was sitting on a bollard beside the gates, dozing with his arms around his rifle. The other was striding at an even pace from the gates to the house and back: thirty steps to the house, thirty steps back.

Of course, the sentries would have to be killed — when Achimas had agreed in his conversation with Evgenia that he would only stun them and tie them up, he had known that the promise could not be kept.

Achimas waited until the wakeful sentry halted to light his pipe, then silently ran up behind him in his soft leather shoes and struck him just above the ear with his brass knuckles. Brass knuckles were a quite invaluable item when someone had to be killed very quickly. Better than a knife, because a knife had to be withdrawn from the wound, and that cost an extra second.

The soldier did not cry out, and Achimas caught the limp body in his arms, but the second sentry was sleeping lightly and he stirred and turned his head at the sound of crunching bone.

Achimas pushed the dead body away and in three massive bounds he was already at the gates. The soldier opened his dark mouth, but he had no time to cry out. The blow to his temple flung his head backward and it smashed against the oak boards with a dull thud.

Achimas dragged one dead man into the shadows and positioned the other one as he had been sitting before.

He waved his hand, and Chasan and Evgenia came out into the moonlit yard. The woman glanced at the seated corpse without speaking and wrapped her arms around her shoulders. Her teeth were chattering rapidly. Now, by the light of the moon, Achimas could see that under her cloak she was wearing a Circassian coat with cartridge belts and she had a dagger at her waist.

“Go, woman, open the iron room,” Chasan prompted her.

They walked down the steps into the basement — Evgenia opened the door with a key. Down below, one wall of the square chamber was made of steel. Evgenia lit a lamp. She took hold of the wheel on the armored door and began turning it to the right and the left, glancing at a piece of paper. Chasan looked on curiously, shaking his head. Something clicked in the door and Evgenia tried to pull the massive slab outward, but the steel was too heavy for her.

Chasan moved the woman aside, grunted with effort, and the door began swinging out, reluctantly at first, but then more and more freely.

Achimas took the lamp and went inside. The room was smaller than he had imagined: about six paces wide and fifteen paces long. It contained trunks, bags, and files of papers.

Chasan opened one trunk and immediately slammed it shut again — it was full of silver ingots. You couldn’t take many of those; they were too heavy. But the bags were filled with jangling gold coins, and the uncle smacked his lips in approval. He began stuffing bags inside his coat and then heaping them up on his cloak.

Achimas was more interested in the files, which turned out to contain share certificates and bonds. He began selecting the ones that came from mass issues and had the highest face value. Shares in Rothschild, Krupp, and the Khludov factories were worth more than gold, but Chasan was a man of the old breed and he would never have believed that.

Grunting again, he loaded his heavy bundle onto his back and glanced around regretfully — there were still so many bags left — then sighed and started toward the door. Achimas had a thick wad of securities inside his coat. Evgenia had not taken anything.

When Chasan began climbing up the shallow steps to the yard, there was a sudden volley of shots. Chasan tumbled backward and slid down the steps headfirst. His face was the face of a man overtaken by sudden death. His cloak came untied and the gold scattered downward, glittering and jingling.

Achimas went down on all fours, scrambled up the steps, and peered out cautiously. He was holding a long-barrel American Colt revolver, loaded with six bullets.

The yard was empty. His enemies had taken up a position on the veranda of the house and could not be seen from below. But it was also unlikely that they could see Achimas, because the steps of the staircase were shrouded in intense darkness.

“One of you is dead!” Lazar Medvedev’s voice called out. “Who is it, Chasan or Achimas?”

Achimas took aim at the voice, but did not fire — he did not like to miss.

“Chasan, it was Chasan,” the baptized Jew shouted triumphantly. “Your figure, Mr. Welde, is slimmer. Come out, young man. You have nowhere to go. Do you know what electricity is? When the door of the repository opens, an alarm bell sounds in my bedroom. There are four of us here — me and three of my soldiers; I’ve sent the fourth one for the superintendent. Come out, let’s stop wasting time! The hour is getting late!”

They fired another volley — evidently trying to frighten him. The hail of bullets rattled against the stone walls.

Evgenia whispered from behind him: “I’ll go out. It’s dark, I’m wearing a cloak, they won’t understand. They’ll think it’s you. They’ll break cover and you can shoot them all.”

Achimas pondered her suggestion. He could take Evgenia with him, now that there was a free horse. It was just a pity that they would never reach the copse. “No,” he said, “they are too afraid of me, they will start shooting immediately.”

“They won’t,” Evgenia replied. “I’ll raise my hands high in the air.” She stepped lightly over Achimas’s recumbent form and walked out into the yard, her hands thrown out to the sides, as if she were afraid of losing her balance. When she had taken five steps a ragged volley of shots rang out.

Evgenia was thrown backward. Four shadows cautiously climbed down from the dark veranda and approached the motionless body. I was right, thought Achimas, they did fire. And he killed all four of them.

In the years that followed he rarely remembered Evgenia. Only if some chance occurrence happened to remind him of her. Or in his dreams.

MAITRE LICOLLE

ONE

At the age of thirty Achimas Welde was fond of playing roulette. It was not a matter of money. He earned money, plenty of it — far more than he was able to spend — by other means. He enjoyed defeating blind chance and exercising control over the elemental force of numbers. It seemed to him that the spinning roulette wheel, with its pleasant clicking sound and bright gleam of metal and polished mahogany, followed laws of its own that no one else knew, and yet precise calculation, restraint, and control of the emotions were just as effective here as they were in every other situation with which Achimas was familiar, and therefore the basic law must be the same one that he had known since his childhood. The underlying unity of life through its infinite variety of forms — this was what interested Achimas above all else. Each new confirmation of this basic truth made the regular rhythm of his heart beat just a little faster.

His life included occasional prolonged periods of idleness, when he had to find something to occupy his time. The English had come up with an excellent invention when they devised the so-called ‘hobby,’ and Achimas had two of them: roulette and women. He preferred the very finest of women, the most genuine kind — professional women. They were undemanding and predictable; they understood that there were rules that had to be observed. Women were also infinitely varied, while still remaining the one, eternally unchanging Woman. Achimas ordered the most expensive from an agency in Paris — usually for a month at a time. If he happened to find a very good one, he would extend the contract for a second term, but never for longer than that — that was his rule.

For the last two years he had been living in the German resort of Ruletenburg, because here, in the liveliest town in Europe, both his hobbies could be pursued without any difficulty. Ruletenburg was like Solen-ovodsk — it also had mineral springs, and a leisured, idle throng of people. No one knew anyone or took any interest in anyone else. All that was missing were the mountains, but the overall impression of imperma-nence, of artificiality, was precisely the same. Achimas thought of the resort as a neat and accurate model of life made to a scale of 1:500 or 1:1000. A man lived five hundred months on this earth, or, if he were lucky, a thousand, but people came to Ruletenburg for one month. That is, the average lifetime of a resort resident had a length of thirty days and that was the precise rate at which the generations succeeded each other here. Everything was accommodated within this period — the joy of arrival, the process of habituation, the first signs of boredom, the sadness at the thought of returning to that other, bigger world. At the resort there were brief romances and tempestuous but short- lived passions, ephemeral local celebrities, and transient sensations. But Achimas was a constant spectator at this puppet theater, for unlike all the other residents he himself had determined the length of his own lifetime here.

He lived in one of the finest suites in the hotel Kaiser, the preferred accommodation of Indian nabobs, Americans who owned gold mines, and Russian grand dukes traveling incognito. His intermediaries knew where to find him. When Achimas accepted a commission, his suite was kept for him and sometimes it would stand empty for weeks, or even months, depending on the complexity of the matter he had to deal with.

Life was pleasant. Periods of exertion alternated with periods of recreation, when his eyes were gladdened by the dense green of baize and his ears by the regular clicking of the roulette wheel. All around him passions raged, heightened and intensified by their condensed timescale: respectable gentlemen blanching and blushing by turns, ladies swooning, someone shaking the final gold coin out of his wallet with trembling hands. Achimas never wearied of observing this fascinating spectacle. He himself never lost, because he had a System.

The System was so simple and obvious that it was amazing that no one else used it. They quite simply lacked patience, restraint, and the ability to control their emotions — all the things that Achimas possessed in abundance. All that was needed was to bet on one and the same sector, constantly doubling up the stake. If you had a lot of money, sooner or later you would get back all that you had lost and win something into the bargain. That was the entire secret. But you had to place your bet on a large sector, not a single number. Achimas usually preferred a third of the wheel.

He walked over to the table where they played without any limits on stakes, waited until the ball had failed to land in one or another of the thirds six times in a row, and then began to play. For his first bet he staked a single gold coin. If his third did not come up, he staked two gold coins on it the next time, then four, and then eight, and so on until the ball eventually landed where it should. Achimas could raise his stake to absolutely any level — he had more than enough money. On one occasion, shortly before the previous Christmas, the third on which he was staking his money had failed to come up for twenty-two spins in a row — the six preliminary spins and sixteen on which he had placed bets. But Achimas had never doubted his eventual success, for each failure improved his chances.

As he tossed chips with ever-longer strings of zeros onto the table, he recalled an incident from his American period.

It was 1866, and he had received a substantial commission from Louisiana. He had to eliminate the commissioner of the federal government, who was interfering with the sharing-out of various concessions by the carpetbaggers — enterprising adventurers from the North who came to the conquered South with nothing but an empty travel bag and left in their own personal Pullman cars.

Those were troubled times in Louisiana and human life was cheap. But the money offered for eliminating the commissioner was good, because it was very difficult to get close to him. The commissioner knew that he was being hunted down, and he behaved wisely, never leaving his residence at all. He slept, ate, and signed all his documents within the same four walls. His residence was guarded day and night by soldiers in blue uniforms.

Achimas put up at a hotel located three hundred paces from the commissioner’s residence — he was unable to secure anything closer. From his room he could see the window of the commissioner’s study. Every morning at precisely half past seven his target opened the curtains. This action took three seconds — not enough time to get a decent aim at such a great distance. The window was divided into two parts by the broad upright of the frame. An additional difficulty was caused by the fact that when the commissioner drew back the curtains, he stood either slightly to the right or slightly to the left of the upright. There would be only one chance to get off a shot — if Achimas missed, then he could forget about the job, because he wouldn’t get a second opportunity. Absolute certainty was imperative.

There were only two possibilities: The target would be either on the right or on the left. Then let it be the right, Achimas decided. What difference did it make? The long-barreled rifle with its stock gripped tight in a vice was trained on a spot six inches to the right of the upright, at exactly the height of a man’s chest. The most certain way would have been to set up two rifles, aiming to the right and the left, but that would have required an assistant, and in those years (and still even now, except in cases of extreme need) Achimas preferred to manage without help from anyone else.

The bullet was a special one that exploded on impact, unfolding its petals to release the essence of ptomaine within. It was enough for even the tiniest particle to enter the blood to render the very slightest of wounds fatal.

Everything was ready. On the first morning the commissioner approached the window from the left. Likewise on the second. Achimas did not try to hurry things. He knew that tomorrow or the next day the curtains would be pulled back from the right, and then he would press the trigger.

It was as if someone had cast a spell on the commissioner. From the very day that the sights were set, for six days running he parted the curtains from the left, not once from the right.

Achimas decided that his target must have established a routine, and he shifted his sights to a spot six inches left of center. Then on the seventh day the commissioner made his approach from the right! And again on the eighth day, and the ninth.

That was when Achimas realized that in a game played against blind chance the most important thing was not to get flustered. He waited patiently. On the eleventh morning the commissioner made his approach from the required direction, and the job was done.

Likewise last Christmas, at the seventeenth spin of the wheel, when his stake had risen to sixty-five thousand, the ball had finally landed where it should, and the house had paid out almost two hundred thousand to Achimas. His winnings had covered all the stakes that he had lost and left him slightly ahead of the game.

TWO

That September morning in 1872 had begun as usual. Achimas and Azalea had breakfasted alone together. She was a slim, loose-limbed Chinese girl with a remarkable voice like a small crystal bell. Her real name was something different, but in Chinese it meant ‘Azalea’ — or so the agency had informed him. She had been sent to Achimas on approval, as a sample of the oriental goods that had only recently begun to appear on the European market. The price asked was only half of the usual, and if Monsieur Welde wished to return the girl early, his money would be refunded. In exchange for such preferential conditions the agency had requested him, as a connoisseur and regular client, to give his authoritative opinion both on Azalea’s abilities and the prospects for yellow goods in general.

Achimas was inclined to award her the highest possible rating. In the mornings, when Azalea sang quietly to herself as she sat in front of the Venetian mirror, Achimas felt a strange tightness in his chest, and he did not like the feeling. The Chinese girl was simply too good. What if he were to grow accustomed to her and not wish to let her go? He had already decided that he would send her back ahead of time. But he would not demand a refund and he would give the girl excellent references, in order not to spoil her career.

Following his invariable custom, that afternoon Achimas entered the gaming hall at two-fifteen precisely. He was wearing a jacket the color of cocoa with milk, checked trousers, and yellow gloves. Attendants came dashing up to take the regular client’s cane and top hat. Herr Welde was a very familiar figure in the gambling houses of Ruletenburg. At first his manner of gambling had been accepted begrudgingly as an inevitable evil, but then they had noticed that the constant doubling-up of the stake practiced by the taciturn blond with the cold, pale eyes inflamed the passions of his neighbors at the table. Achimas had then become a most welcome guest.

He drank his usual coffee with liqueur and looked through the newspapers. England and Russia could not reach an agreement over customs duties. France was delaying the payment of reparations and in response Bismarck had sent a threatening diplomatic note to Paris. In Belgium the trial of the Pied Piper of Brussels was just about to begin.

After he had smoked a cigar, Achimas went over to table 12, where they were playing for high stakes.

There were three players and a gray-haired gentleman simply sitting there, nervously clicking the lid of his gold watch. Catching sight of Achimas, he fastened his eyes on him like limpets. Experience and intuition told Achimas that he was a client. His presence here was not accidental; he was waiting. But Achimas gave the gentleman no sign — let him make the first approach.

Eight and a half minutes later the required third of the wheel had been selected — the last one, from 24 to 36. Achimas staked a Friedrichs-dor. He won three. The gray-haired man kept on watching. His face was pale. Achimas waited for another eleven minutes before the next sector was determined. He staked a gold coin on the first third, from 1 to 12. Number 13 came up. The second time he staked two gold coins. Zero came up. He staked four gold coins. Number 8 came up. He had won twelve Friedrichsdors and was now five gold coins to the good. Everything was proceeding as usual, with no surprises. At this point the gray- haired man finally stood up. He came over and inquired in a low voice: “Mr. Welde?” Achimas nodded, continuing to follow the spinning of the wheel. “I have come to you on the recommendation of the Baron de —.” The gray-haired man named Achimas’s intermediary in Brussels. He was becoming more and more agitated and lowered his voice to a whisper as he explained. “I have a very important matter to discuss with you.”

“Would you perhaps care to take a stroll?” Achimas interrupted, slipping the gold coins into his purse.

The gray-haired gentleman proved to be Leon Fechtel, the owner of a banking house famous throughout Europe — Fechtel and Fechtel. The banker had a serious problem. “Have you read about the Pied Piper of Brussels?” he asked when they were seated on a bench in the park.

All the newspapers were full of the story: The maniac who had been kidnapping little girls had been captured at last. The Petit Parisiensaid that the police had arrested ‘Mr. F.,’ the owner of a suburban villa outside Brussels. The gardener reported that he had heard the muffled groans of children coming from the basement at night. When the police entered the house in secret, in the course of their search they had discovered a concealed door in the basement, and behind it things so horrible that the newspaper claimed ‘paper could never bear the description of this monstrous scene’. The scene was, however, described in lurid detail in the very next paragraph. In several oak barrels the police had discovered pickled parts of the bodies of seven of the little girls who had disappeared in Brussels and its environs during the previous two years. One body was still quite fresh and it bore the traces of indescribable tortures. In recent years fourteen girls ages six to thirteen had disappeared without a trace. On several occasions people had seen a respectably dressed gentleman with thick black sideburns offering a seat in his carriage to little flower girls or cigarette girls. On one occasion a witness had actually heard the man with sideburns urging the eleven-year-old flower girl Lucille Lanoux to bring her entire basket of flowers to his house and promising that if she did, he would show her a mechanical piano that played wonderful melodies all on its own. This was the occasion that had prompted the newspapers to stop calling the monster ‘Blue Beard’ and christen him ‘the Pied Piper of Brussels,’ by analogy with the fairy-tale Pied Piper who had lured the children of Hamlin away with the music of his magical flute.

Concerning the prisoner, Mr. R, it was reported that he was a member of the gilded youth from the very highest social circles, that he did indeed possess thick black sideburns, and that he had a mechanical piano at his villa. The motive for the crimes was clear, wrote the Evening Standard — it was perverted sensual gratification in the manner of the Marquis de Sade. The date and location of the court hearing had already been determined: the twenty-fourth of September in the little town of Merlain, only half an hour’s journey from the Belgian capital.

“I have read about the Pied Piper of Brussels,” said Achimas, with an impatient glance at the banker, who had said nothing for a long time. Wringing his plump hands spangled with rings, Fechtel exclaimed: “Mr. F. is my only son, Pierre Fechtel! He is destined for the gallows! Save him!”

“You have been misinformed about the nature of my activities. I do not save life, I take it away,” said Achimas, smiling with his thin lips. The banker whispered fervently: “They told me that you work miracles. If you will not take this job, then there is no hope. I implore you. I will pay. I am a very rich man, Mr. Welde, very rich.”

After a pause Achimas asked: “Are you certain that you even want such a son?” Fechtel senior replied without hesitation; it was clear that he had already asked himself that question. “I have no other son and never shall have. He was always rather wild as a boy, but he has a kind heart. If I can only extricate him from this business, he will learn a lesson that will last for the rest of his life. I have been to see him in prison. He is so frightened!”

Then Achimas asked the banker to tell him about the forthcoming trial.

The ‘rather wild’ heir was to be defended by two extremely expensive lawyers. The line of defense was based on proving that the accused was insane. However, according to the banker, the chances of a favorable verdict from the medical experts were slim — they were so obdurately set against the boy that they would not even agree to an unprecedentedly high fee. This latter circumstance had apparently astounded Fechtel senior more than any other.

On the first day of the trial the lawyers had to announce whether their client admitted his guilt. If he did, sentence would be pronounced by a judge; if he did not, the verdict would be delivered by a jury. If the conclusion of the psychiatric examination was that Pierre Fechtel was responsible for his own actions, the defense lawyers had recommended choosing the first route.

The inconsolable father explained angrily that the hangmen in the Ministry of Justice had deliberately chosen Merlain for the trial — three of the girls who had disappeared had lived in the little town. “There can be no fair trial in Merlain,” the banker complained. The population of the small town was in a state of high fever. At night they lit bonfires around the court building. The day before yesterday a crowd had tried to break into the prison and tear the suspect to pieces — they had had to treble the guard.

Mr. Fechtel had conducted secret negotiations with the judge, and he had proved to be a reasonable man. If the decision were to depend on him, the boy would receive a life sentence. But that would not really mean much. The general prejudice against the Pied Piper of Brussels was so great that the public prosecutor would be sure to appeal against such a verdict and a second court hearing would be scheduled.

“You are my only hope, Mr. Welde,” the banker concluded. “I have always regarded myself as a man for whom nothing is impossible. But in this instance I am powerless, and it is a matter of my own son’s life.”

Achimas looked curiously at the millionaire’s crimson face. It was clear that here was a man unused to displaying emotions. For instance now, at a moment of the most powerful agitation, his thick lips were extended in an absurd smile and there was a tear dribbling from one of his eyes. It was interesting: A face unused to molding itself for the expression of feeling was unable to portray a mask of grief. “How much?” asked Achimas. Fechtel swallowed convulsively. “If the boy remains alive, half a million francs. French francs, not Belgian,” he added hastily when his companion gave no reply.

Achimas nodded and an insane glow lit up the banker’s eyes. It was exactly the same glow that lit up the eyes of the madmen who staked all their money on zero at the roulette wheel. This glow had a name: It was called ‘just maybe’. The only difference was that this was clearly not all the money that Mr. Fechtel possessed. “And if you succeed…” The banker’s voice trembled. “If somehow you should succeed not only in saving Pierre’s life but also giving him back his freedom, you will receive a million.”

Achimas had never been offered such a huge fee. Following his usual habit, he translated the sum into pounds sterling (almost thirty thousand), American dollars (seventy-five thousand), and rubles (more than three hundred thousand). It was a very large amount indeed.

Narrowing his eyes slightly, Achimas said slowly and clearly: “Your son must refuse the psychiatric examination, declare himself not guilty, and demand trial by jury. And you must dismiss your expensive lawyers. I shall find a new lawyer.”

THREE

Etienne Licolle ‘s only regret was that his mother had not lived to see this day. How she had dreamed of the time when her boy would qualify as an advocate and array himself in the black robe with the rectangular white tie! But paying for his studies at the university had consumed all of her widow’s pension and skimping on doctors and medicine had shortened her life — she had died the previous spring. Etienne had gritted his teeth and refused to be defeated. Dashing from one lesson to another in the afternoon and poring over his textbooks at night, he had completed his studies after all — and the coveted diploma with the royal seal had been duly awarded. His mother could be proud of her son.

His fellow graduates and newly fledged advocates had invited him to go to a restaurant in the country — to ‘christen the gown’ — but Etienne had refused. He had no money for revels, but more important than that, on a day like this he wanted to be alone. He walked slowly down the broad marble staircase of the Palais de Justice, where the solemn ceremony had taken place. The entire city, with its spires, towers, and statues on rooftops, lay spread out below him, at the foot of the hill. Etienne stopped and admired the view, which seemed to be offering him a hospitable welcome. As if Brussels had opened its arms wide to embrace the new Maitre Licolle, enticing him with the prospect of every possible kind of surprise — for the most part, of course, pleasant ones.

Of course, who could dispute the fact that a diploma was only the beginning? Without useful connections and acquaintances he would not be able to find good clients. And in any case he lacked the means required to establish his own firm. He would have to work as an assistant to Maitre Wiener or Maitre Van Gelen. But that was not so bad — at least they would pay him some kind of salary.

Etienne Licolle pressed the folder containing the diploma with the red seal against his chest, turned his face toward the warm September sunshine, and squeezed his eyes tightly shut in an excess of emotion.

He was surprised in this absurd position by Achimas Welde.

Achimas had picked the young lad out while the hall was echoing to the boring, pompous speeches of the award ceremony. The youth’s appearance was ideally suited to requirements: pleasant-looking, but no Adonis. Slim, with narrow shoulders. Wide, honest eyes. When he stepped up to pronounce the words of the oath, his voice had proved ideally suited, too — clear, boyish, trembling with excitement. But best of all, it was immediately obvious that he was no rich gentleman’s son, but genuine plebeian stock and a hard worker.

While the interminable ceremony continued, Achimas had been able to make inquiries. His final doubts had been laid to rest; this was indeed ideal material. The rest could not have been simpler.

He walked up to the thin youth without making a sound and then cleared his throat.

Etienne started, opened his eyes, and turned around to find himself facing a gentleman in a traveling coat with a walking cane who had appeared out of nowhere. The stranger’s eyes were regarding him with keen seriousness. They were a rather unusual color, too, very pale. “Maitre Licolle?” the man inquired with a slight accent. It was the first time Etienne had been addressed as ‘Maitre’ and he liked the feeling.

As was only to be expected, the boy was at first exultant to learn that he was being offered a case, but when the client’s name was mentioned he was horrified. Achimas remained silent while he indignantly objected, gesticulating wildly and declaring that he would never defend that villain, that monster, for anything. He only spoke after Licolle, having exhausted his reserves of indignation, muttered: “Anyway, I couldn’t cope with a case like that. You see, monsieur, I am still very inexperienced. I have only just received my diploma.”

Now it was Achimas’s turn. He said: “Do you wish to work for a pittance for twenty or even thirty years, earning money and glory for other lawyers? Yes, sometime about 1900 you may manage to scrape together enough centimes to set up in practice for yourself, but by that time you will be a bald, toothless failure with a sick liver and life will already have squeezed you dry. Your vital juices will have oozed out through your fingers drop by drop, maitre, in exchange for those hard-earned centimes. But I am offering you far more than that right here and now. Now, while you are still twenty-three, you can earn good money and make a big name for yourself — even if you should happen to lose the case. In your profession, a name is even more important than money. Certainly your reputation will be tinged with scandal, but that is better than wasting your entire life as someone else’s errand boy. You will receive enough money to open your own firm. Many people will hate you, but there will be others who will appreciate the courage of a young lawyer who was not afraid to stand up against the whole of society.”

Achimas waited for a minute, to give the lad time to grasp what he had said. Then he moved on to the second stage of his argument, which, as he understood matters, ought to prove more decisive.

“Or could it be that you are simply afraid? Have I not just heard you swear ‘to uphold justice and a man’s right to legal representation regardless of all obstacles and pressures’? Do you know why I chose you out of all the graduates? Because you are the only one who pronounced those words with genuine feeling. Or at least, so it seemed to me.”

Etienne said nothing, horrified as he felt himself being swept away by a raging torrent that was quite impossible to resist. “And most important of all,” said the stranger, lowering his voice suggestively, “Pierre Fechtel is innocent. He is no Pied Piper; he is the victim of a confluence of circumstances and the zealous determination of the police. If you do not intervene, an innocent man will go to the scaffold. Yes, it will be very difficult for you. You will be overwhelmed with insults; no one will want to testify in defense of a monster. But you will not be alone. I shall be helping you. I shall remain in the shadows, your eyes and ears. I am already in possession of certain items of evidence which, while they do not entirely confirm Pierre Fechtel’s innocence, do at least cast doubt on the prosecution’s case. And I shall obtain more.”

“What items of evidence?” Etienne asked in a weak voice.

At least three hundred people were crammed into the little hall of the Merlain Municipal Court, which was designed to hold only a hundred, and there were even more people thronging the corridor, standing under the windows, and waiting on the square outside.

The appearance of public prosecutor Renan was greeted with a thunderous ovation. But when they brought in the felon, a pale, thin-lipped man with close- set black eyes and sideburns that had once been well-groomed but had now grown ragged and uneven, a deadly silence fell in the hall, followed by such a thunderous uproar that the judge, Maitre Viksen, broke his bell trying to call the assembly to order.

The judge called out the counsel for the defense and for the first time everyone noticed the puny young man whose advocate’s robes were clearly too large for him. First turning pale, then bright red, Maitre Li-colle babbled a few barely audible words and then, in reply to the judge’s impatient question as to whether the accused admitted his guilt, he suddenly squeaked quite clearly: “No, Your Honor!” The hall erupted indignantly once again. “And such a decent-looking young man, too,” shouted one of the women.

The trial went on for three days.

On the first day the witnesses for the prosecution testified. First came the policemen who had found the terrible room and then interrogated the accused. According to the commissioner of police, Pierre Fechtel had trembled and given contradictory answers to questions, been quite unable to explain anything, and offered the police huge sums of money if they would leave him alone.

The gardener who had reported suspicious screams to the police did not appear in court, but his presence was not necessary. The public prosecutor summoned witnesses who provided vivid descriptions of Fechtel’s debauchery and depravity and his constant demands for the youngest and slenderest girls in brothels. The madam of one of these bawdy houses told the court how the accused had tortured her ‘little daughters’ with red-hot curling tongs, but the poor darlings had put up with it because the villain paid them a gold coin for every burn.

The hall burst into applause when a man who had seen the flower girl Lucille Lanoux ride away in the carriage (her head was later found in a barrel with the eyes gouged out and the nose cut off) identified Fechtel as the very same man who had described the miraculous abilities of his mechanical piano in such glowing terms.

The jurors were presented with items of evidence: implements of torture, a photographic camera and photographic plates discovered in the concealed room. There was also testimony from Monsieur Briihl, who had taught Pierre Fechtel the art of taking photographs three years previously.

In conclusion the jurors were shown an album of photographic cards found in the ghastly basement. These photographs were not shown to the public and the journalists, but one of the jurors fainted and another vomited.

The advocate Licolle sat there with his head bowed like a student at a lecture, assiduously taking down all the testimony in a notebook. When he was shown the photographs he turned as white as chalk and swayed on his feet. “That’s right, take a good look, you puny weakling!” someone shouted from the hall.

That evening there was an unpleasant incident at the end of the session: As Licolle was leaving the hall, the mother of one of the murdered girls came up to him and spat in his face.

On the second day the witnesses were questioned by the counsel for the defense. He asked the police if they had shouted at the accused. “No, we gave him a hug and a kiss,” the commissioner replied sarcastically to approving laughter from the hall.

The advocate asked the witness to the abduction of Lucille Lanoux if he had seen the full face of the man with whom the flower girl had driven away. No, he had not, the witness replied, but he did remember the sideburns very clearly.

After that Maitre Licolle wanted to know what kind of photographs Pierre Fechtel had taken in the course of his amateur studies. It turned out that he used to take photographs of still lifes, landscapes, and newborn kittens. (This announcement was greeted with whistling and jeering, after which the judge ordered half of the spectators to be removed from the courtroom.) In conclusion the counsel for the defense demanded that the main witness, the gardener, must be brought into court and the session was adjourned for an hour.

During the break in proceedings the local cure approached Licolle and asked if he believed in our Lord Jesus Christ. Licolle replied that he did, and that Jesus had taught charity to sinners.

When the proceedings continued, an inspector declared that the gardener could not be found and no one had seen him for the last three days. The counsel thanked him politely and said that he had no more questions for the witnesses.

Then came the public prosecutor’s opportunity to shine. He conducted his interrogation of the accused brilliantly and Pierre Fechtel was unable to give a satisfactory answer to a single question. When he was shown the photographic cards he stared at them for a long time, swallowing hard. Then he said that he had never seen them before. When he was asked if the Weber and Sons camera belonged to him, after whispered consultation with his counsel, he said, yes, it did, but he had lost interest in photography a year ago, put the camera away in the attic, and not laid eyes on it since then. When the question was asked whether the accused could look the parents of the little girls in the eye, it evoked thunderous applause, but it was withdrawn on the insistence of the defense.

When Etienne got back to his hotel that evening, he saw that his things had been thrown out into the street and were lying in the mud. Blushing painfully, he crawled around on all fours, gathering up his long drawers with darned patches and soiled shirtfronts with paper collars.

A large crowd gathered to enjoy this spectacle and shower the ‘mercenary swine’ with abuse. When Etienne had finally packed his things into his new travel bag, purchased especially for this trip, the local tavern-keeper came up to him, slapped him resoundingly across both cheeks, and declared in a voice of thunder: “You can add that to your fee!”

Since none of the other hotels in Merlain would take Licolle in, the mayor’s office provided him with lodgings in a little house used by the guard at the railway station. The old guard had retired a month before and had not yet been replaced.

In the morning there were several words scrawled in charcoal on the white painted wall of the little house: “You will die like a dog!”

On the third day public prosecutor Renan surpassed himself. He delivered a magnificent denunciatory speech that lasted from ten in the morning until three in the afternoon. People in the hall sobbed and cursed freely. The members of the jury, all of them respectable men who paid at least five hundred francs in taxes each year, sat with their faces set in sullen scowls.

The counsel for the defense was pale and they noticed in the hall that several times he seemed to glance inquiringly at his client, but the latter was sitting with his shoulders hunched up, his head lowered, and his face in his hands. When the public prosecutor demanded a death sentence, the public sprang to its feet as one man and began chanting ‘String him up, string him up!’ Fechtel’s shoulders began twitching spasmodically and he had to be given smelling salts.

The defense was given the floor after the break, at four o’clock in the afternoon.

For a long time Licolle was not even allowed to speak — people deliberately scraped their feet, creaked their chairs, and blew their noses loudly. The lawyer waited, bright crimson in his trepidation, clutching a crumpled sheet of paper covered with the neat handwriting of a star pupil.

But once he began speaking, Etienne didn’t glance at the sheet of paper even once. This is his speech, word for word, as it was printed in the evening editions of the newspapers with the most disparaging of commentaries:

“Your Honor, gentlemen of the jury. My client is a weak, spoiled, and even depraved man. But that is not what you are judging him for. One thing is clear: In the home of my client, or rather in a secret room in the basement, the existence of which might or might not have been known to Pierre Fechtel, a terrible crime was committed. A whole series of crimes. The question is: Who committed them? (A loud voice: “Yes, that’s a real riddle.” Laughter in the hall.) The defense has its own explanation of events. I surmise that the murders were committed by the gardener Jean Voiture, who reported the mysterious screams to the police. This man hated his master because he had reduced his salary for drunkenness. There are witnesses who can be called if necessary — they will confirm this fact. The gardener has an awkward, quarrelsome character. Five years ago his wife left him, taking the children with her. It is well known that people of the same type as Voiture often become morbidly sensitive and develop aggressive tendencies. He knew the layout of the house intimately and could easily have installed a secret room without his master’s knowledge. He could also have taken the camera with which Monsieur Fechtel had become bored down from the attic and learned how to use it. He could have taken his master’s clothes during his frequent absences. He could have glued on false sideburns, providing easy identification. You must surely agree that if Pierre Fechtel had committed these heinous crimes, he would long ago have rid himself of such a distinctive feature. Please understand me correctly, gentlemen of the jury. I am not stating that the gardener did all of this — only that he could have done it all. But the main question is — why has the gardener, who set the entire investigation in motion, disappeared so suddenly? There can be only one explanation — he was scared that in court his true involvement in the affair would be revealed, and then he would suffer the punishment that he deserves.” Up to this point Maitre Licolle had spoken smoothly and rather impressively, but now he suddenly began stammering out his words. “And what I would like to say to you is this. There is a great deal that is unclear about this story. To be quite honest, I myself do not know if my client is guilty. But while there remains even the shadow of a doubt — and, as I have just demonstrated to you, there are indeed many doubts concerning this whole business — it is absolutely impermissible to send a man for execution. In the faculty of law I was taught that it is better to acquit a guilty man than to condemn an innocent one. That is all that I wished to say, gentlemen.”

The speech was over at ten minutes past six. The lawyer resumed his seat, wiping the sweat from his brow.

There were jeers here and there in the hall, but all in all the speech received a mixed reception. The correspondent from Le Soir heard (as he later reported in his newspaper) the famous advocate Jan Van Brevern say to his neighbor, also a lawyer: “In essence the boy is right. From the higher perspective of fundamental jurisprudence. But in this particular case that changes nothing.”

The judge rang his bell and shook his head reproachfully, with a glance at the lamentable counsel for the defense: “I had assumed that Maitre Licolle’s address would continue until the end of today’s session and then all of tomorrow morning. But now I find myself in some difficulty. I therefore declare today’s session at an end. I shall sum up for the jury tomorrow morning, following which you, gentlemen, will withdraw to consider your verdict.”

But the next morning there was no session of the court.

During the night there was a fire. The railway guard’s hut was torched and Maitre Licolle was burned alive, because the door had been locked from the outside. The inscription ‘You will die like a dog’ was left on the smoked- blackened wall — no one took the trouble to remove it. No witnesses to this act of arson were found.

The trial was interrupted for several days. Certain intangible but quite definite shifts in public opinion took place. The newspapers reprinted Maitre Licolle’s final address to the court, this time without any scoffing remarks, accompanied by sympathetic commentaries from respected lawyers. Touching reports appeared concerning the short and difficult life of a young man from a poor family, who had studied at university for five years in order to be an advocate for just over a week. His portrait gazed out at readers from the front pages: a boyish face with large, honest eyes.

The lawyers’ guild published a declaration in defense of free and objective jurisprudence, which should not be held to ransom by an emotionally imbalanced public baying for vengeance.

The concluding session was held on the day after the funeral.

To begin with, at the judge’s suggestion everyone present honored the memory of Etienne Licolle with a minute’s silence. They all stood, even the parents of the dead girls. In his summing-up, Judge Viksen recommended the jurors not to bow to external pressure and reminded them that in capital cases a majority of two thirds of the jurors was required for a guilty verdict to be carried.

The gentlemen of the jury consulted for four and a half hours. Seven of the twelve said ‘not guilty’ and demanded that the judge release Pierre Fechtel for lack of evidence.

A difficult task had been carried off very neatly. The gardener’s body was lying in a pit of quicklime, and as for the boy lawyer, he had died without any suffering or fear — Achimas had killed him in his sleep before he set fire to the watchman’s hut.

’THE TRINITY’

ONE

In the year of his fortieth birthday, Achimas Welde began wondering whether it was time for him to retire.

No, he had not become blase about his work — it still gave him the same satisfaction as ever and set his impassive heart beating slightly faster. Nor had he lost his touch — on the contrary, he was now at the very peak of his maturity and prowess.

The reason lay elsewhere — there was no longer any point to his work.

In itself, the process of killing had never given Achimas any pleasure, apart from those very rare occasions when personal scores were involved.

The situation with the killings was simple. Achimas existed alone in the universe, surrounded on all sides by the most varied forms of alien life — plants, animals, and people. This life was in constant motion: It came into existence, changed, and was broken off. It was interesting to observe its metamorphoses, and even more interesting to influence this process through his own actions. But trample down life in one sector of the universe, and it changed the overall picture very little — life filled in the breach that had been formed with quite wonderful tenacity. Sometimes life seemed to Achimas like a tangled, overgrown lawn through which he was trimming the line of his fate. Precision and careful deliberation were required in order not to leave any blades of grass sticking up in the wrong place, while not touching any more blades than were necessary in order to maintain the smoothness and evenness of the line. Glancing back at the path he had traveled, what Achimas saw was not trimmed grass, but the ideal trajectory of his own movement.

Until now there had been two stimuli for his work: finding solutions and earning money.

However, Achimas no longer found the first of these as fascinating as he once had — for him there remained few truly difficult problems that were genuinely interesting to solve.

The second stimulus had also begun to make less and less sense.

A numbered account in a Zurich bank contained very nearly seven million Swiss francs. A safe in Barings bank in London held securities and gold ingots worth seventy-five thousand pounds sterling.

How much money did a man need, if he didn’t collect works of art or diamonds, if he wasn’t building a financial empire or consumed by political ambition?

Achimas’s outlays had stabilized: two or three hundred thousand francs a year went on ordinary expenses and the upkeep of his villa cost another hundred thousand. The price of the villa had been paid in full the year before last, all two and half million francs of it. It was expensive, of course, but a man who was almost forty had to have a house of his own. A man of a certain psychological constitution might not require a family, but he had to have a house.

Achimas was satisfied with his residence, a house that suited the character of its owner perfectly. The small villa of white marble stood on the very edge of a narrow outcrop of rock overlooking Lake Geneva. On one side there was free, open space, and on the other cypress trees. Beyond the cypress trees there was a high stone wall, and beyond that a sheer descent into a valley.

Achimas could sit for hours on his veranda overhanging the smooth surface of the water, looking at the lake and the distant mountains. The lake and the mountains were also forms of life, but without the constant agitation intrinsic to fauna and flora. It was hard to affect this form of life in any way; Achimas had no control over it and therefore it commanded his respect.

In the garden, among the cypresses, stood a secluded retreat, a white house with small round towers at its corners, in which the Circassian woman Leila lived. Achimas had brought her here from Constantinople the previous autumn. He had long ago abandoned the Parisian agencies and the monthly rotation of professional women — the moment had arrived when they no longer seemed so very different to Achimas. He had developed his own taste.

This taste required that a woman should possess a beauty and natural grace that were not cloying and not be too talkative. She should be passionate without being forward, not too inquisitive, and, above all, she should possess a female instinct that made her unerringly sensitive to a man’s mood and desires.

Leila was almost ideal. She could spend the whole day from morning till evening combing her long black hair, singing, and playing herself at backgammon. She was never sulky, never demanded attention. In addition to her native tongue she knew only Turkish and Chechen, which meant that Achimas was the only one who could talk to her and she communicated with the servants by means of gestures. If he wanted to be entertained, she knew numerous amusing stories from the life of Constantinople — Leila had formerly lived in the harem of the grand vizier.

Recently Achimas had accepted work only rarely, two or three times a year: either for very big money or for some special reward. For instance, in March he had received a secret commission from the Italian government to seek out and eliminate the anarchist Gino Zappa, known as the Jackal, who was planning to kill King Umberto. The terrorist was regarded as extremely dangerous and quite impossible to catch.

In itself the job had proved to be rather simple (the Jackal had been traced by Achimas’s assistants, and he had only needed to take a trip to Lugano and press the trigger once), but the fee he had been promised was quite outstanding. First, Achimas received an Italian diplomatic passport in the name of the Cavaliere Welde, and second, he was granted the option of buying the island of Santa Croce in the Tyrrhenian Sea. If Achimas should decide to exercise this option and buy the small scrap of land, in addition to the title of the Count of Santa Croce he would also be granted the right of extraterritoriality, which was particularly attractive. He could be his own sovereign, his own police, his own court? Hmm.

Out of curiosity Achimas took the trip to inspect the island and was captivated. There was nothing remarkable about it — it was nothing but rocks, a couple of olive groves, and a bay. It was possible to walk around the entire shoreline of the island in an hour. For the last four hundred years no one had lived here and the only visitors had been occasional fishermen seeking to replenish their supplies of fresh water.

The title of count held little attraction for Achimas, although in traveling around Europe a fine-sounding title could sometimes have its uses. But an island of his own?

There he could be alone with the sea and the sky. There he could create his own world, belonging to nobody but him. It was tempting.

To withdraw into peaceful retirement. To spend his time sailing and hunting mountain goats, to feel time stand still and fuse with eternity.

No more adventures; he was not a boy anymore.

Perhaps he could even start a family?

But the idea of a family was not really serious — it was more of a mental exercise. Achimas knew he would never have a family. He was afraid that once deprived of his solitude, he would begin to fear death. As other people feared it.

As he was he had no fear of death at all. It was the foundation underpinning the sturdy edifice that went by the name of Achimas Welde. If a pistol should happen to misfire, or a victim prove too cunning and lucky, then Achimas would die. That was all there was to it. It simply meant that nothing would exist any longer. One of the ancient philosophers — he thought it was Epicurus — had said all there was to say on that score: While I exist, death does not exist, and when it comes, I shall not exist.

Achimas Welde had lived long enough and seen enough of the world. One thing he had never known was love, but that was because of his profession. Attachment made you weak and love made you completely defenseless. As he was, Achimas was invulnerable. What leverage is there against a man who fears nothing and holds nothing and nobody dear?

But an island of his own — that was worth thinking about.

There was only one difficulty with the idea — finance. The redemption of his option would cost a lot of money; it would consume all of his funds in the banks in Zurich and London. How would he pay for the equipping and appointment of his count’s fiefdom? He could sell his villa, but that would probably not be enough. Somewhat more substantial capital would be required.

Perhaps he should simply put these idle fantasies out of his head?

And yet an island was more than your own cliff, and the sea was more than a lake. How was it possible to rest content with a little if you were offered more?

These were the reflections with which Achimas was occupied when he received a visit from a man in a mask.

TWO

First his butler, Archibald, brought him a calling card — a piece of white cardboard with a gold coronet and a name in ornamental Gothic script: Baron Eugenius von Steinitz. A brief note in German was attached to the card:

Baron von Steinit requests Mr. Welde to receive him today at ten o ‘clock in the evening on a confidential matter.

Achimas noted that the top edge of the sheet of paper had been torn off. Apparently the prospective visitor did not wish Achimas to see his monogram, which meant that he might perhaps be a genuine ‘von,’ but he was certainly not Steinitz.

The visitor arrived at precisely ten o’clock, not a single minute earlier or later. With such punctuality, it could safely be presumed that he was indeed German. The baron’s face was concealed by a velvet half mask, for which he apologized politely, citing the extremely delicate nature of his business. Achimas noted nothing special about von Steinitz’s appearance — light hair, neat sideburns, blue eyes w ith a troubled expression. The baron was dressed in a cloak, top hat, starched shirt, white tie, and black tails.

They sat on the veranda with the lake glittering below them in the moonlight. Von Steinitz didn’t even glance at the peaceful view; instead he scrutinized Achimas continually through the openings in his operetta mask, seeming in no hurry to begin the conversation. He crossed his legs and lit a cigar.

Achimas had seen all of this many times before and he waited calmly for his visitor to make his mind up to begin.

“I am applying to you on the recommendation of Monsieur du Vallet,” the baron eventually began. “He asked me to give you his most humble greetings and to wish you the utmost… no, it was the most complete prosperity.”

Achimas acknowledged the name of his Paris intermediary and his password with a silent nod.

“I have come on a matter of immense importance and absolute confidentiality,” von Steinitz declared, lowering his voice.

“Precisely the kind of matter that is usually brought to me,” Achimas remarked impassively.

Until this point the conversation had been conducted in German, but now the visitor suddenly switched to Russian, which he spoke perfectly and correctly, with only a slight burring of his r’s.

“The work has to be cawwied out in Wussia, in Moscow. The job has to be done by a foweigner who knows the Wussian language and is fa-miwiar with Wussian customs. You are ideally suited. We have made in-quiwies about you.”

Made inquiries? And who might ‘we’ be? Achimas didn’t like the sound of that. He was on the point of breaking off the conversation immediately, but then his lisping visitor said: “For performing this difficult and delicate task, you will weceive a million Fwench fwancs in advance, and on the completion of our… mm… contwact, a million wubles.”

That changed matters. A sum like that would be a worthy consummation of a brilliant professional career. Achimas recalled the whimsical outline of Santa Croce when the island first hove into view on the horizon — exactly like a bowler hat lying on green velvet.

“You, sir, are an intermediary,” he said coolly, speaking in German. “And it is my principle only to deal directly with the client. My terms are as follows. You immediately transfer the advance payment to my account in Zurich. After that I meet with the client at a place of his choosing and he recounts all the ins and outs of this matter to me. If for some reason I do not find the terms acceptable, I shall return half of the advance.”

‘Baron Eugenius von Steinitz’ indignantly fluttered a pampered hand (an old sapphire glinted on the middle finger), but Achimas had already risen to his feet.

“I will speak only with the principal. If I cannot, you must find another man for the job.”

THREE

The meeting with the client took place in St. Petersburg, on a quiet little street to which Achimas was delivered in a closed phaeton. The carriage wound through the streets this way and that for a long time, with its blinds completely obscuring the windows. This precaution made Achimas smile.

He made no attempt to remember the route, although he knew the geography of Russia’s capital intimately — in times past he had fulfilled several serious contracts here. In any case, Achimas had no need to peep stealthily through the crack beside the blind and count the turns in the road. He had taken steps to ensure his own safety: first by arming himself in an appropriate fashion, and second by bringing four assistants with him.

They had traveled to Russia in the next carriage of his train and now they were following the phaeton in two droshkys. His assistants were professionals, and Achimas knew that they would not fall behind or give themselves away.

The phaeton halted. The taciturn driver, who had met Achimas at the station and — to judge from his military bearing — was no driver at all, opened the door and gestured for Achimas to follow him.

Not a soul on the street. A single-story detached mansion. Modest, but neat and tidy. Only one unusual feature: Although it was summer, all the windows were closed and curtained. One of the curtains quivered slightly and once again Achimas’s thin lips extended in a momentary smile. He was beginning to find these dilettante attempts at cunning amusing. It was all quite clear: aristocrats playing at conspiracy.

His guide led him toward their destination through a series of dark connecting rooms. When they reached the last one, he stopped to let Achimas go on ahead. Once Achimas stepped inside, the double door closed behind his back and he heard the sound of a key turning in a lock.

Achimas glanced around curiously. An intriguing room — not a single window. The only furniture was a small round table with two high-backed armchairs beside it. It was hard, however, to get a clear impression of the interior, since it was only lit by a single candle that did not cast its feeble light as far as the gloom in the corners.

Achimas waited for his eyes to grow accustomed to the darkness before he examined the walls with a practiced glance. He failed to discern anything suspicious — no secret spy-holes from which a gun could be trained on him, no additional doors. But there proved to be another chair standing in the far corner.

Achimas sat down in an armchair. Five minutes later the doors swung open and a tall man entered. He did not take the second armchair, but walked across the room and sat on the chair in the corner without greeting Achimas in any way.

So the client was not so stupid after all. An excellent arrangement: Achimas sitting in full view, illuminated by the candle, and his partner in conversation enveloped in dense shadow. And his full face was not visible — only the silhouette.

Unlike ‘Baron von Steinitz,’ this individual wasted no time in getting straight to the point.

“You wished to meet the principal party in this matter,” the man in the corner said in Russian. “I have consented. Be certain not to disappoint me, Mr. Welde. I shall not introduce myself; to you I am Monsieur NN.”

To judge from his pronunciation, he was a man from the very highest levels of society. He sounded about forty years old, but might be younger — his was a voice accustomed to command, and they always sounded older. His grand manner suggested that he was a man to be taken seriously.

The conclusion? If this was a high-society conspiracy, it was certainly no laughing matter.

“Please explain the gist of the proposal,” said Achimas.

“You speak Russian well,” said the shadow with a nod. “I was informed that at one time you were a Russian subject. That is most convenient. There will be no need for superfluous explanations. And it will certainly not be necessary to impress upon you the importance of the individual who has to be killed.”

Achimas noted the remarkable directness of expression — no equivocations, nothing about ‘eliminating’, ‘removing’ or ‘neutralizing’.

Meanwhile Monsieur NN continued in the same even tone, without the slightest pause: “It is Mikhail Sobolev.”

“The one they call the White General?” Achimas inquired. “The hero of recent wars and the most popular general in the Russian army?”

“Yes, Adjutant General Sobolev, commander of the Fourth Army Corps,” the silhouette confirmed dispassionately.

“I beg your pardon, but I must refuse your request,” Achimas declared politely and crossed his arms on his chest.

The science of gestures defined the meaning of this pose as calm composure and adamant determination. In addition, it happened to set the fingers of his right hand against the handle of the little revolver lying in a special pocket in his waistcoat. The revolver was called a ‘velodog,’ and it had been invented for cyclists who were pestered by stray canines. Four little round-headed twenty-two-caliber bullets. A mere trinket, of course, but in situations like today’s it could prove very useful.

A refusal to accept a commission after the target had already been named was an extremely dangerous move. If complications arose, Achimas intended to act as follows: put a bullet in the client’s brain and jump back into the darkest corner. It would be no easy job to subdue Achimas there.

There had been no search at the entrance, so his entire arsenal was still intact: the Colt manufactured to his personal order, the throwing knife, and the Spanish knife with the sprung blade. And therefore Achimas was tense but calm.

“Surely you are not also one of Sobolev’s devotees?” the client inquired with irritation.

“I have no interest in Sobolev; I am a devotee of common sense. And common sense requires me not to involve myself in matters that entail the subsequent elimination of the agent employed, that is, in the present case, myself. No witnesses are ever left alive after an act of such immense importance. My advice is to find yourself another agent, some novice. An ordinary political assassination is not such a very tricky job.”

Achimas stood up and began backing cautiously toward the door, ready to fire at any second.

“Sit down.” The man in the corner pointed imperiously to the armchair. “What I need is not some beginner, but the very finest master of your trade, because this is a very tricky job indeed. As you will see for yourself. But first allow me to apprise you of certain circumstances that will allay your suspicions.”

Achimas could tell that Monsieur NN was not used to providing explanations and was restraining the urge to fly into a fury.

“This is neither a political assassination nor a conspiracy. On the contrary, the conspirator and offender against the state is Sobolev, who dreams of rivaling the glory of Napoleon. Our hero is planning a military coup, no more and no less. The conspiracy includes officers from his army corps and also the general’s former comrades in arms, many of whom serve in the Guards. But the most dangerous thing of all is that Sobolev’s popularity extends beyond the army to every class of society, while we at court and in the government are regarded by some with resentment and by others with open hatred. The prestige of the ruling house has fallen very low following the shameful hounding and murder of the previous emperor. They ran down the Lord’s anointed as if they were running down a hare with dogs.”

The speaker’s voice was suddenly suffused with a menacing power, and the door behind Achimas immediately gave a creak. The individual for whom the court and the government were included in the concept of ‘we’ impatiently waved a white-gloved hand and the door closed again. The mysterious gentleman continued, speaking more calmly now, without anger.

“We are aware of the conspirators’ plans. At the present moment Sobolev is conducting maneuvers that are in actual fact a rehearsal for the coup. He will then set out for Moscow, accompanied by his retinue, in order to meet with certain Guards officers far away from St. Petersburg, assure himself of their support, and work out his final disposition of forces. The blow will be struck at the beginning of July, during a parade at Tsarskoe Selo. Sobolev intends to take the members of the royal family into ‘temporary custody’ — for their own good and in the name of the salvation of the fatherland.” His intonation became intensely sarcastic. “The fatherland itself will be declared in such grave danger that a military dictatorship will have to be established. There are serious grounds to suppose that this insane project will be supported by a significant portion of the army, the gentry, the merchantry, and even the peasantry. The White General is ideally suited to the role of savior of the fatherland!”

Monsieur NN got to his feet and strode angrily along the wall, cracking his knuckles. Nonetheless, he remained in the shadows as before and did not show his face. Achimas could only make out an aristocratic nose and lush sideburns.

“So you should be aware, Mr. Welde, that in this case you will not be committing any crime, because Sobolev has been condemned to death by a court that included the most senior dignitaries in the empire. Of the twenty judges appointed by His Imperial Majesty, seventeen voted for the death penalty. And the emperor has already confirmed the verdict. It was a secret court, but no less legitimate for that. The gentleman whom you took for an intermediary was one of the judges and was acting in the interests of security and peace in Europe. As you are probably aware, Sobolev is the leader of the militant Slavist party, and his accession to power would inevitably lead to war with Germany and Austria- Hungary.”

The man of state stopped speaking and looked at his imperturbable listener.

“Therefore you have no reason to fear for your life. You are not dealing with criminals, but with the supreme authority of a great empire. You are being asked to play the role of an executioner, not a murderer. Do you find my explanation satisfactory?”

“Let us assume so,” said Achimas, placing his hands on the table. There was apparently no prospect of any shooting. “But what exactly is it that makes the job so difficult? Why can the general not simply be poisoned, or even shot, if it comes to that?”

“Aha — you would appear to have accepted our proposal.” Monsieur NN nodded in satisfaction and lowered himself onto the chair. “Now I shall explain why we need such an authoritative specialist. Let us start with the fact that it is very difficult to get close to Sobolev. He is surrounded day and night by adjutants and orderlies who are fanatically devoted to him. And he cannot simply be killed — that would set the whole of Russia up in arms. He must die naturally, without any ambiguities or suspicions. But even that is not enough. We ourselves could eliminate the criminal by using poison, but the conspiracy has already gone too far. Even the death of their leader cannot stop the conspirators. They will carry their cause through to the end, believing that they are acting on Sobolev’s behest. It is most probable that without their leader they will achieve nothing, but Russia will be plunged into bloody chaos and the supreme authority will be utterly compromised. By comparison with Sobolev’s gentlemen, the Decembrists will come to seem like naughty children. And now allow me to lay the task before you in all its baffling complexity.”

He summed up briskly, slashing at the darkness with a white-gloved hand.

“Sobolev must be eliminated in such a way that his death will appear natural to the general public and not provoke its indignation. We shall organize a sumptuous funeral, set up a monument to him, and even name some ship or other in his honor. Russia cannot be deprived of her only national hero. At the same time, however, Sobolev must die in such a way that his coconspirators will be demoralized and unable to rally around his banner. While remaining a hero in the eyes of the common crowd, he must be stripped of his halo for the conspirators. And so you can see for yourself that such a task is far beyond any novice. Tell me, is it really possible at all?”

For the first time the speaker’s voice betrayed a note of something akin to uncertainty.

Achimas asked: “How and when shall I receive the remainder of the money?”

Monsieur NN sighed in relief.

“When Sobolev leaves for Moscow, he will be carrying all the funds for the conspiracy with him — about a million rubles. Preparations for a coup require substantial expenditures. After killing Sobolev, you will take the money for yourself. I trust that you can manage that task with no difficulty?”

“Today is the twenty-first of June by the Russian calendar. You say that the coup has been set for the beginning of July. When is Sobolev leaving for Moscow?”

“Tomorrow. Or the day after at the very latest. And he will be there until the twenty-seventh. Then he will pay a visit to his estate in Ryazan and go directly from there to St. Petersburg. We know that he has arranged meetings with his generals for the twenty-fifth, twenty-sixth, and twenty-seventh, for which they will make a special journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow. But I will not name any unnecessary names. Without Sobolev, these people are not dangerous. In time we shall retire them quietly, with no publicity. But it would be better if Sobolev had no chance to meet with them. We do not wish distinguished generals to besmirch their reputations with state treason.”

“In your circumstances, you cannot afford to be so considerate,” said Achimas with sudden abruptness. The task was difficult enough without the time allowed being shortened unnecessarily. “You wish me to complete the task before the twenty-fifth of June, that is, you are giving me only three days. It is rather short notice. I shall do my best, but I can promise nothing.”

That same day Achimas paid his assistants what was due to them and dismissed them — he had no more need of their services.

He himself boarded the night train to Moscow.

FOUR

According to a system of classification that Achimas had developed earlier in his life, the current task belonged to the fourth and highest category of difficulty: the disguised murder of a celebrity with an extremely tight deadline and the complication of additional conditions.

There were three difficulties.

First, the target’s strong and devoted bodyguard.

Second, the need to imitate a natural death.

Third, the fact that in the eyes of the general public the death had to appear respectable, but a narrow circle of initiates must regard it as shameful.

Interesting.

In anticipation of fruitful mental endeavor, Achimas settled himself comfortably on the small velvet divan in the first-class carriage. Ten hours of traveling ought to suffice. He didn’t need to sleep — when necessary, he could go without sleep for three or even four days. He had his training with Uncle Chasan to thank for that.

Also, der Reihe nach.* He took out the information that the client had provided at his request. This was a complete dossier on Sobolev that had clearly taken several years to compile; a detailed biography including his service record, interests, and connections. Achimas failed to discover in it a single useful eccentricity that might offer some leverage — Sobolev was not a gambler, or an opium addict, or a dipsomaniac. His character reference was dominated by the word ‘excellent’: an excellent horseman, excellent marksman, excellent billiards player. Very well.

Achimas moved on to the ‘interests’ section. Drinks in moderation, prefers Chateau d’Yquem, smokes Brazilian cigars, likes romantic Russian ballads, especially ‘The Rowan Tree’ (composer Mr. I. Surikov). Yes, yes.

“Intimate habits.” Alas, disappointment awaited Achimas here as well. Not a homosexual, not a disciple of the Marquis de Sade, not a pedophile. Formerly, it seemed, he was a well-known womanizer, but for the last two years he had remained faithful to his mistress, Ekaterina Golovina, a teacher at the Minsk girls’ grammar school. There was information to the effect that a month ago he had offered to legitimize their relationship, but for some unknown reason Golovina had refused him, and the relationship was broken off. Right, there was something in this.

* And so, everything in order. (German) Achimas looked pensively out of the window. He picked up the next document, which detailed the names and character references of officers in Sobolev’s retinue. For the most part they were men of the world who had seen military action. When he traveled, the general was always accompanied by at least seven or eight men. Sobolev never went anywhere alone. That was bad. Even worse was the fact that the food the general ate was checked, not just by one taster, but by two: his senior orderly, the Cossack captain Gukmasov, and his personal valet.

However, the only possible way to imitate a natural death without arousing suspicion was to use poison. An accident would not suit — they always left a lingering odor of suspicion.

How could he bypass the tasters and give his mark the poison? Who was closer to Sobolev than his orderly and valet?

Apparently no one was. There was his old flame in Minsk; no doubt he had eaten from her hands without having the food checked. But the relationship had been broken off.

Stop! That thought clearly pointed in the right direction. A woman could get closer to a man than anyone else, even if he had only made her acquaintance recently. Always assuming, naturally, that they entered into intimate relations. In that case the adjutants and the valets would have to wait outside the door.

So, when had Sobolev broken things off with his mistress? A month ago. He must be famished by now — he would have had no time for love affairs on maneuvers, and they would have been reported in the file. He was a hot-blooded man, in the very prime of life. And in addition he was plotting an enterprise so risky that he could not possibly know how it would turn out for him.

Achimas half-closed his eyes.

Sitting opposite him were a lady and her son, a junior cadet. She was talking to him in a low voice, trying to persuade him to behave himself and stop wriggling.

“You see, Sergei, that gentleman is trying to work and you’re being naughty,” the lady said in French.

The boy looked at the neat, blond-haired man in the fine-quality gray jacket. The German had spread out some boring papers on his knees and was moving his lips without speaking.

The German glanced at the cadet from under his eyebrows and suddenly winked with a pale eye.

Sergei scowled.

The renowned Achilles did have a vulnerable heel, and one that was not particularly original, Achimas concluded. There was no point in trying to be too clever and reinvent the bicycle. The simpler the method, the surer.

The logic of the operation defined itself:

A woman was the most appropriate bait for a strong, healthy male of Sobolev’s character who was weary of abstinence.

The easiest way of all to give the mark poison was by using a woman.

In Russia debauchery was regarded as shameful and certainly unworthy of a national hero. If a hero gave up the ghost, not on the field of battle, or even in a hospital bed, but in a bed of vice with his mistress, or even better, with some slut, according to the Russian way of thinking, that would be (a) indecent, (b) comical, (c) simply stupid. Heroes were not forgiven for such behavior.

The retinue would take care of everything else. The adjutants would go to any lengths to conceal the unseemly circumstances of the White General’s death from the public. However, word would spread in a flash among those close to him, among the conspirators. It is hard to oppose an emperor without a leader, especially if the place of the knightly banner fluttering above one’s head has been taken by a stained bedsheet. The White General would no longer appear so very white to his own devotees.

Well, then, the general method had been determined. Now for the specifics.

Among the various useful things he carried in his trunk Achimas had a generous selection of chemical compounds. The one ideally suited to the present case was an extract of the juice of an Amazonian fern. Give two drops of this colorless and almost tasteless liquid to a healthy man and a slight increase in the rate of his heartbeat would induce respiratory paralysis and heart failure. The death, moreover, appeared perfectly natural and it would never enter anyone’s head to suspect poisoning. In any case, after two or three hours it was quite impossible to detect any trace of the poison.

It was a reliable method, proved repeatedly in practice. Achimas had used it most recently the year before last, in carrying out a commission for a certain idle parasite in London who wished to get rid of his millionaire uncle. The operation was completed simply and elegantly. The loving nephew arranged a dinner in honor of his dear uncle. Achimas was among the guests. First he had drunk poisoned champagne with the old man, and then whispered to the millionaire that his nephew wished to do away with him. The uncle had turned scarlet, clutched at his heart, and collapsed as if his legs had been scythed from beneath him. The death had occurred in the presence of a dozen witnesses. Achimas had walked back to his hotel at a slow, measured pace — in order to allow the poison to disperse and become ineffective.

The target had been an elderly man in poor health. Experience had shown that the substance took effect in a strong, young man when his pulse reached a rate of eighty to eighty-five beats a minute.

The question, therefore, was whether the general’s heart would accelerate to eighty-five beats a minute at the climax of his passion.

The answer was that it was certain to do so, for that was the very nature of passion. Especially if its object were sufficiently sultry.

Only one trifling matter remained — to locate a suitable demi-mondaine.

FIVE

In Moscow, following his instructions, Achimas put up at the fashionable new hotel Metropole under the name of Nikolai Nikolaevich Klonov, a merchant from Ryazan.

Using the number provided by Monsieur NN, he telephoned his client’s representative in Moscow, whom he had been told to address as ‘Mr. Nemo’. Achimas no longer found these absurd aliases laughable — it was clear that these people were deadly serious.

“Hello,” said a crackling voice in the earpiece.

“This is Klonov,” Achimas said into the mouthpiece. “I would like to speak to Mr. Nemo.”

“Speaking,” said the voice.

“Please tell them to send me a verbal portrait of Ekaterina Golovina urgently.”

Achimas repeated the name of Sobolev’s mistress one more time and disconnected the telephone.

The defenders of the throne were evidently not very good conspirators. Achimas took the telephone directory from the koelner and looked to see which subscriber was registered under the number 211. Court Counselor Pyotr Parmyonovich Khurtinsky, head of the governor-general’s secret chancelry. Not bad.

Two hours later a courier delivered a sealed envelope to the hotel. The telegram was brief: “Blond, blue-gray eyes, slightly aquiline nose, thin, well-proportioned, height two arshins and four vershoks, small bust, slim waist, mole on right cheek, scar on left knee from a fall from a horse. NN.”

The information concerning the left knee and the mole was superfluous. The important thing was that the type was clearly denned: a short, slim blonde.

“Tell me, my dear fellow, what’s your name?”

Number 19 was regarding the koelner uncertainly, as if he were embarrassed. The koelner, a man of some experience, was well acquainted with that tone of voice and that expression. He wiped the smile off his face, in order not to embarrass the guest with his excessive perspicacity, and replied: “Timofei, Your Honor. Can I be of any service to you?”

Number 19 (according to the register, a merchant of the first guild from Ryazan) led Timofei away from the counter to the window and handed him a ruble.

“I’m feeling bored, brother. Lonely. I could do with a bit of… entertaining company.”

The merchant fluttered his white eyelashes and blushed a pale pink. How pleasant it was to deal with such a sensitive individual.

The koelner shrugged and raised his hands.

“Why, nothing could be simpler, sir. We have plenty of friendly young ladies here in Moscow. Would you like me to give you an address?”

“No, no address. What I’d like is someone special, who can think a bit. I don’t like the cheap ones,” said the merchant from Ryazan, taking heart.

“We have some like that, too.” Timofei began bending down his fingers as he counted. “Varya Serebryanaya sings at the Yar — a very preventable girl; she won’t go with just anyone. Then there’s Mam’selle Carmencita, a very modern individual; she makes her arrangements on the telephone. Mam’selle Wanda sings at the Alpine Rose, a young lady of very discriminating taste. There are two dancers at the French Operetta, Lisette and Anisette, they’re very popular, sir. And as for the actresses…”

“That’s it, I’d like an actress,” said number 19, brightening even further. “Only to suit my taste. I have no time for over-fleshy women, Timofei. What I like is a slim woman with a thin waist, not too tall, and she has to be blond.”

The koelner thought for a moment and said: “Then that means Wanda from the Rose. Blond and skinny. But very popular. Most of the others are on the fleshy side. Can’t be helped, sir, it’s the fashion.”

“Tell me what this Wanda’s like.”

“She’s a German. With the manners of an aristocrat. Thinks very highly of herself. Lives in grand style in a suite at the Anglia, with a separate entrance. She can afford it, sir, she takes five hundred for her services. And she’s choosy; she’ll only go with someone she likes.”

“Five hundred rubles? My goodness!” The merchant seemed to be interested. “And where could I take a look at this Wanda, Timofei? What is this place the Alpine Rose like?”

The koelner pointed out of the window.

“It’s just here, on Sofiiskaya Street. She sings there most evenings. The restaurant’s nothing special, doesn’t compare with ours or the Slavyansky Bazaar. It’s mostly Germans, begging your pardon, who go there. Our Russian men only go to gawk at Wanda. And engage her services, if their intentions are serious.”

“And how are her services engaged?”

“You have to go about it the right way,” said Timofei, amused, and he set about describing it. “First of all you have to invite her to your table. But if you just call her over, she won’t sit with you. The very first thing you do is send her a bunch of violets, and it has to be wrapped in a hundred-ruble note. The mam’selle will take a look at you from a distance. If she takes a dislike to you straightaway, she’ll send the hundred rubles back. But if she doesn’t, it means she’ll come and sit with you. But that’s only the half of it, sir. She might sit down and chat about this and that and still refuse you afterward. And she won’t give the hundred rubles back because she’s spent time on you. They say she earns more from the hundred-ruble rejects than the five-hundred-ruble fees. That’s the way this Miss Wanda’s set herself up.”

That evening achimas sat in the Alpine Rose, sipping a decent Rhine wine and studying the songstress. The young German woman really was attractive. She looked like a bacchante. Her face wasn’t German at all — it had a bold, reckless look to it, and there was a glint of molten silver in her green eyes. Achimas knew that special tint very well as the exclusive trait of the most precious members of the female species. It was not plump lips or a finely molded little nose that caught men’s fancy, it was that silver sheen that blinded them with its deceptive glimmer and drove them out of their minds. And what a voice! As an experienced connoisseur of female beauty, Achimas knew that half the enchantment lay in the voice. When it had that chesty resonance and that slight hint of hoarseness, as if it had been seared by frost or, on the contrary, scorched by fire, it was dangerous. The best thing you could do was follow Odysseus’s lead and tie yourself to the mast, otherwise you would drown. The bold general would never be able to resist this siren, not for the world.

However, Achimas still had a certain amount of time in hand. Today was only Tuesday and Sobolev would arrive on Thursday, so he had an opportunity to take Mademoiselle Wanda’s measure more precisely.

During the evening she was sent a bouquet of violets twice. One, from a fat merchant in a scarlet waistcoat; Wanda returned it immediately, without even touching it. The merchant left immediately, stamping his heels and cursing.

The second bouquet was sent by a colonel of the Guards with a scar across his cheek. The songstress raised the bouquet to her face and tucked the banknote into her lacy sleeve, but it was some time before she took a seat beside the colonel, and she didn’t stay with him for long. Achimas couldn’t hear what they were talking about, but the conversation ended with Wanda throwing her head back with a laugh, smacking the colonel across the hand with her fan, and walking away. The colonel shrugged his gold-trimmed shoulders philosophically and after a while sent another bouquet, but Wanda returned it immediately.

And yet when a certain red-cheeked, blond-haired gentleman, whose appearance was clearly far less impressive than the officer’s, casually beckoned the proud woman to him with his finger, she took a seat at his table immediately, without making him wait. The blond man spoke to her indolently, drumming on the tablecloth with his short fingers covered in ginger hairs, and she listened without speaking or smiling, nodding twice. Surely not her pimp, Achimas thought in surprise. He didn’t look the part.

However, when Wanda emerged from the side entrance at midnight (Achimas was keeping watch outside), it was the red-cheeked man who was waiting for her in a carriage and she drove away with him. Achimas followed them in a single- seater carriage, prudently hired in advance at the Metropole. They drove across the Kuznetsky Bridge and turned onto Petrovka Street. Outside a large building on the corner with a glowing electric sign that said ‘Anglia,’ Wanda and her companion got out of their carriage and dismissed the driver. The hour was late and the unattractive escort was clearly going to stay the night. Who was he, a lover? But Wanda didn’t look particularly happy.

He would have to ask ‘Mr. Nemo’ about this.

SIX

In order to avoid any risk of simply wasting his time, Achimas did not wrap his violets in a hundred-ruble note, but threaded them instead through an emerald ring bought that afternoon at Kuznetsky Most. A woman might refuse money, but she would never reject an expensive bauble.

Naturally, the ploy was successful. Wanda inspected the present curiously and then looked around, seeking out the giver with equal interest. Achimas bowed slightly. Today he was wearing an English dinner jacket and a white tie with a diamond pin, which lent him an appearance somewhere between an English lord and a modern entrepreneur — the new cosmopolitan breed that was just beginning to set the tone in Europe and Russia.

Yesterday’s peremptory blond gentleman, concerning whom Achimas had received exhaustive (and extremely interesting) information, was not in the restaurant.

When she finished her song, Wanda sat down across from Achimas, glanced into his face, and suddenly said: “What transparent eyes. Like a mountain stream.”

For some reason Achimas’s heart fluttered momentarily at that phrase. It had triggered one of those vague, elusive memories that the French call dejd-vu. He frowned slightly. What nonsense; Achimas Welde was not one to be hooked by cunning feminine wiles.

He introduced himself: “Merchant of the First Guild Nikolai Niko-laevich Klonov, chairman of the Ryazan Commercial Association.”

“A merchant?” the green-eyed woman asked in surprise. “You don’t look like one. More like a sailor. Or a bandit.”

She laughed gruffly and for the second time Achimas was caught off guard. No one had ever told him that he looked like a bandit before. He had to appear normal and respectable — it was a necessary condition of his profession.

The songstress continued to surprise him.

“And you don’t have a Ryazan accent,” she remarked with casual mockery. “You wouldn’t happen to be a foreigner, would you?”

Apparently Achimas’s speech was marked by an extremely slight, almost indistinguishable accent — a certain non-Russian metallic quality retained from his childhood, but to detect it required an extraordinarily subtle ear. Which made it all the more surprising to hear such a comment from a German.

“I lived in Zurich for a long time,” he said. “Our company has an office there. Russian linen and calico.”

“Well, and what do you want from me, Swiss-Ryazan businessman?” the woman continued, as if it were a perfectly ordinary question. “To strike some lucrative deal with me, perhaps? Have I guessed right?”

Achimas was relieved — the songstress was merely flirting.

“Precisely,” he said seriously and confidently, in the manner he always used when speaking to women of this type. “I have a confidential business proposition to put to you.”

She burst into laughter, exposing her small, even teeth.

“Confidential? How elegantly you express it, Monsieur Klonov. Generally speaking, the propositions put to me are extremely confidential.”

Then Achimas remembered that he had said the same thing in almost the same words to ‘Baron von Steinitz’ a week before. He smiled despite himself, but immediately continued in a serious voice: “It is not what you think, mademoiselle. The Ryazan Commercial Association, of which I have the honor to be the chairman, has instructed me to give an expensive and unusual present to a worthy and famous individual who hails from our district. I may choose the present at my own discretion, but our compatriot must be pleased with it. This person is greatly loved and esteemed in Ryazan. We wish to present our gift tactfully and unobtrusively. Even anonymously. He will never even know that the money was collected by subscription from the merchants of his hometown of Ryazan. I thought for a long time about what to give the fortunate man. Then when I saw you I realized that the very finest gift is a woman like yourself.”

It was amazing, but she blushed.

“How dare you!” Her eyes flashed in fury. “I am not a thing, to be given as a gift!”

“Not you, mademoiselle, only your time and your professional skills,” Achimas declared sternly. “Or have I been misled, and you do not trade in your time and your art?”

She looked at him with hatred in her eyes.

“Do you realize, Merchant of the First Guild, that one word from me would be enough to have you thrown out into the street?”

He smiled, but only with his lips.

“No one has ever thrown me out into the street, mademoiselle. I assure you that it is quite out of the question.”

Leaning forward and looking straight into those eyes glittering with fury, he said: “It is not possible to be only half a courtesan, mademoiselle. Honest business relations are best: work in exchange for money. Or do you ply your trade for the pleasure of it?”

The sparks in her eyes faded and the wide, sensuous mouth twisted into a bitter smile.

“What pleasure? Order me some champagne. It’s the only thing I drink. Otherwise in my ‘trade’ you’d never stop drinking. I’m not going to sing any more today.” Wanda made a sign to a waiter, who evidently knew her habits, for he brought a bottle of Clicquot. “You are quite right, Mr. Philosopher. It is only deceiving oneself to be half for sale.”

She drained her glass to the last drop, but would not allow him to fill it again. Everything was going well and the only thing that was causing Achimas any concern was the way everyone around them was staring at him, Wanda’s favored client. But never mind, he would leave the restaurant alone; they would think him just another loser and immediately forget him.

“People don’t often speak to me like that.” The champagne had not lent her gaze sparkle — on the contrary, it had rendered it sad. “They mostly cringe and fawn. At first. And then they start talking to me in a familiar fashion, trying to persuade me to be their kept woman. Do you know what I want?”

“Yes. Money. The freedom that it brings,” Achimas remarked casually as he thought out the details of his subsequent actions.

She gaped at him, astounded.

“How did you know?”

“I am exactly the same,” he replied curtly. “So how much money do you need in order finally to feel that you are free?”

Wanda sighed.

“A hundred thousand. I worked that out a long time ago, when I was still a stupid fool eking out a living from giving music lessons. I’m not going to talk about that. It’s not interesting. I lived in poverty for a long time; I was almost destitute. Until I was twenty years old. And then I decided, that’s enough, no more. I’m going to be rich and free. And that was three years ago.”

“Well, and are you rich and free?”

“In another three years I shall be.”

“Then that means you already have fifty thousand?” Achimas laughed. He liked this songstress very much.

“Yes,” she laughed, this time without bitterness or defiance, but fervently, the way she sang her Parisian chansonettes. He liked that, too — the fact that she didn’t wallow in self-pity.

“I can shorten your term of hard labor by at least six months,” he said, spearing an oyster with a little silver fork. “The association collected ten thousand for our gift.”

Recognizing from the expression on Wanda’s face that she was in no mood to think things over coolly and was on the point of telling him to go to hell and take his ten thousand with him, Achimas added hurriedly: “Don’t refuse, or you will regret it. And, in any case, you don’t yet know what I have in mind. Oh, Mademoiselle Wanda, he is a great man. Many women, even from the very best society, would gladly pay handsomely to spend the night with him.”

He stopped, knowing that now she wouldn’t walk away. The woman had not yet been born whose pride was stronger than her curiosity.

Wanda glared angrily at him. Then she gave way and snorted: “Well, tell me then, don’t torment me like this, you serpent from Ryazan.”

“It is none other than General Sobolev, the incomparable Achilles and Ryazan landowner,” Achimas declared with a solemn air. “That is who I am offering you, not some rough merchant with a belly down to his knees. Later, when you are free, you can write about it in your memoirs. Ten thousand rubles and Achilles into the bargain — that sounds like a good arrangement to me.”

He could see from the young woman’s face that she was of two minds.

“And there’s something else I can offer you,” Achimas added in a very quiet voice, almost a whisper. “I can rid you forever of the society of Herr Knabe. If you would like that, of course.”

Wanda shuddered and asked in a frightened voice: “Who are you, Nikolai Klonov? You’re no merchant, are you?”

“I am a merchant.” He clicked his fingers to get them to bring the bill. “Linen, calico, duck. Don’t be surprised at how well-informed I am. The association has entrusted me with a very important job, and I like to be thorough in my work.”

“That’s why you were staring so hard yesterday, when I was sitting with Knabe,” she said suddenly.

Observant, thought Achimas, not yet sure if that was good or bad. And that intimate tone that had appeared in her voice required some kind of response, too. Which would be more convenient, closeness or distance?

“But how can you rid me of him?” Wanda asked avidly. “You don’t even know who he is.” Then, suddenly seeming to remember something, she interrupted herself. “Anyway, what gives you the idea that I want to get rid of him?”

“It is up to you, mademoiselle,” Achimas said with a shrug, deciding that in the present case distance would be more effective. “Well, then, do you accept the proposal?”

“I do.” She sighed. “Something tells me I won’t be able to shake you off anyway.”

Achimas nodded.

“You are a very intelligent woman. Don’t come here tomorrow. But be at home at about five in the evening. I shall call for you at the Anglia and we will finalize everything. And do try to be alone.”

“I shall be.” She looked at him rather strangely — he didn’t understand the meaning of that look.

“Kolya, you won’t deceive me, will you?”

Not only the words themselves, but the very intonation with which they were spoken, suddenly sounded so familiar that Achimas’s heart skipped a beat.

He remembered. It really was dejd-vu. This had happened before.

Evgenia had said the same thing once, twenty years earlier, before they robbed the iron room. And the words about his transparent eyes, they were hers, too, spoken when she was still a little girl in the Skyrovsk orphanage.

Achimas unfastened his starched collar — he had suddenly found it hard to breathe.

He said in a steady voice, “On my honor as a merchant. Well, then, mademoiselle, until tomorrow.”

SEVEN

At the hotel there was a courier waiting for Achimas with a telegram from St. Petersburg:

“He has taken a month’s leave and left for Moscow by train. He will arrive tomorrow at five in the afternoon and stay at the hotel Dusseaux, Theater Lane, suite 47. He is accompanied by seven officers and a valet. Your fee is in a brown briefcase. His first meeting is set for 10 a.m. on Friday with the commander of the Petersburg district Ganetsky. I remind you that this meeting is undesirable. NN.”

From early in the morning on Thursday 24 June Achimas, wearing a striped blazer and straw boater and with his hair neatly parted and bril-liantined, was hard at work in the vestibule of the Dusseaux. He managed to establish sound business relations with the porter, the doorman, and the janitor who serviced the wing destined for the honored guest. Two important factors had greatly facilitated the establishment of these relations: the first was a correspondent’s identity card from the Moscow Gazette, thoughtfully provided by Mr. Nemo, and the second was his generous greasing of palms (the porter had received a twenty- five-ruble note, the doorman a tenner, and the janitor three rubles). The three rubles proved to be the most profitable investment, for the janitor sneaked the reporter into suite 47.

Achimas gasped and sighed at the luxurious appointments, noted which way the windows faced (out into the yard, in the direction of Rozhdestvenka Street, very good), and also took note of the safe built into the wall of the bedroom. That was helpful, too — he wouldn’t need to turn everything upside down searching for the money. The briefcase would naturally be lying in the safe, and the lock was a perfectly ordinary Van Lippen, five minutes’ fiddling at the most. In gratitude for services rendered, the correspondent of the Moscow Gazette handed the janitor another fifty kopecks, but so clumsily that the coin fell out of his hand and rolled under the divan. While the janitor was crawling around on all fours, Achimas adjusted the latch on the frame of one half of the window, positioning it so that it was just barely held in place and the window would open at the slightest push from the outside.

At half past five Achimas was standing in the crowd of correspondents and idlers at the entrance of the hotel, waiting with a reporter’s notebook in his hand to observe the great man’s arrival. When Sobolev emerged from his carriage in his white uniform, some people in the crowd made an attempt to shout ‘hurrah,’ but the hero gave the waiting Muscovites such an angry glance and his adjutants began gesturing so frantically that the cheering petered out before it had really begun.

Achimas’s first thought was that the White General bore a remarkable resemblance to a catfish: protruding forehead, slightly bulging eyes, drooping mustache, and flaring sideburns so broad that they reminded him of gills. But no, a catfish was lazy and good-natured, whereas the general looked around him with such a steely gaze that Achimas immediately reclassified him among the large marine predators. A hammerhead shark at the very least.

Swimming along ahead of him was his pilot fish, a bold Cossack captain, cleaving ferociously through the crowd with broad sweeps of his white gloves. Three officers walked on either side of the general. Bringing up the rear was a valet, who walked as far as the door and then turned back to the carriage and began supervising the unloading of the luggage.

Achimas noticed that Sobolev was carrying a large and apparently rather heavy calfskin briefcase. A comical touch: The mark had brought along the fee for his own elimination.

The correspondents dashed into the lobby after the hero, hoping for at least some small pickings — the chance to ask a quick question or spot some telling detail. But Achimas behaved differently. He slowly approached the valet and cleared his throat respectfully to draw attention to his presence. Then he waited to be noticed before bothering the man with any questions.

The valet, a bloated old man with bushy, cross-looking gray eyebrows (Achimas knew his entire life story, with all his habits and weaknesses, including a fatal predisposition for taking an early-morning hair of the dog for his hangover) squinted in annoyance at the fop in the straw hat, but, appreciating his tact, graciously condescended to turn halfway around toward him.

“I’m a correspondent with the Moscow Gazette” Achimas said quickly, eager to exploit his opportunity. “I wouldn’t dare to bother His Excellency with tiresome questions, but on behalf of the people of Moscow I would like to inquire as to the White General’s intentions concerning his visit to the old capital. And who should know that if not yourself, Anton Lukich?”

“We know right enough, only we don’t tell just anyone,” the valet replied pedantically, but it was clear that he felt flattered.

Achimas opened his notebook and assumed the pose of someone ready to jot down every precious word. Lukich drew himself erect and began speaking pompously: “The schedule for today is relaxation. His Excellency is tired after the maneuvers and his railway journey. No visits, no formal banquets, and instructions are: God forbid that any of your colleagues should get anywhere near him. And no speeches or deputations, either, oh, no. Instructions are to book dinner in the hotel restaurant for half past eight. If you want to gawk at him, book a table before it’s too late. But you have to keep your distance and not bother him with any questions.”

Achimas pressed his hand to his heart prayerfully and inquired in a sugary voice: “And what plans does His Excellency have for the evening? ”

The valet frowned.

“That’s none of my business and even less of yours.”

Excellent, thought Achimas. The target’s business meetings start tomorrow, but it seems that this evening is indeed reserved for relaxation. On that point our interests coincide.

Now he had to make sure that Wanda was ready.

Just as she had promised, the young woman was waiting for him in her suite — and she was alone. She glanced at Achimas rather strangely, as if she were expecting something from him, but when her guest began talking about business, Wanda’s eyes glazed over with boredom.

“We agreed on everything, didn’t we?” she remarked carelessly. “What’s the point in wading through all the details? I know my trade, Kolya.”

Achimas glanced around the room that served simultaneously as salon and boudoir. Everything was just as it should be: flowers, candles, fruit. The songstress had laid in some champagne for herself, but she had not forgotten the bottle of Chateau d’Yquem that she been told to get the day before.

In her claret-colored dress with its plunging neckline, tight-fitting waist, and provocative bustle, Wanda looked stunningly seductive. That was all very well, but would the fish bite?

In Achimas’s estimation, he was bound to:

No normal, healthy man could resist Wanda’s advances.

If his information was correct — and Monsieur NN had not disappointed him so far — -Sobolev was not merely a normal man, but a man who had endured a forced fast for at least a month.

Mademoiselle Wanda was precisely the same physical type as the general’s amour in Minsk, the old flame to whom he had proposed, only to be rejected and later abandoned.

All said, the powder keg was ready and waiting. But to make detonation certain, a spark would be required.

“Why are you wrinkling up your forehead like that, Kolya? Afraid your compatriot won’t like the look of me?” Wanda asked defiantly, but Achimas caught a hint of suppressed anxiety in her intonation. Every great beauty and incorrigible heartbreaker needed constant reassurance that she was absolutely irresistible. Nestled in the heart of every femme fatale was a little worm that whispered: “But what if the magic doesn’t work this time?”

Depending on her particular character, a woman needed either to be given assurances that she was the fairest in the land, more radiantly lovely than all the rest, or, on the contrary, to have her competitive spirit aroused. Achimas was certain that Wanda belonged to the second type.

“I saw him today,” he said with a sigh and a doubtful glance at the songstress. “I am afraid I might have chosen the wrong present. In Ryazan Mikhail Dmitrievich has the reputation of a great breaker of hearts, but he looks so very serious. What if it doesn’t work? What if the general isn’t interested in our little gift?”

“Well, that’s for me to worry about, not you,” said Wanda, flashing her eyes at him. “All you have to do is pay the money. Did you bring it?”

He put the wad of notes on the table without a word.

Wanda took the money and made great play of pretending to count it.

“All ten thousand? All right, then.” She tapped Achimas lightly on the nose with her finger. “Don’t you be concerned, Kolya. You men are a simpleminded bunch. Your great hero won’t escape my clutches. Tell me, does he like songs? As I recall, there’s a baby grand in the Dusseaux.”

That’s it, thought Achimas. The spark to detonate the powder keg.

“Yes, he does. His favorite romantic ballad is ‘The Rowan Tree’. Do you know it?”

Wanda thought for a moment and shook her head.

“No, I don’t sing many Russian songs, mostly European ones. But that’s not a problem; I can find it in a moment.”

She picked up a songbook off the piano and leafed through it until she found the song.

“This one, you mean?”

She ran her fingers over the keys, hummed the tune without any words, then began singing in a low voice:

In vain the rustling rowan Reaches to the oak tree. Forever a poor orphan, I tremble, sad and lonely.

“What pathetic nonsense! Heroes are such sentimental souls.” She glanced rapidly at Achimas. “You go now. Your Ryazan general will snatch at his present; he’ll grab it with both hands.”

Achimas didn’t go.

“A lady is not supposed to arrive at a restaurant unaccompanied. What can we do about that?”

Wanda rolled her eyes up in mock mortification.

“Kolya, I don’t interfere in your dealings in calico, so don’t you meddle in my professional arrangements.”

He stood there for a moment, listening to that low, passionate voice pouring out the torment of its longing to throw itself into the embrace of the oak tree. Then he quietly turned and walked to the door.

The melody broke off. Behind his back Wanda asked: “Don’t you regret it, Kolya? Giving me away to someone else?”

Achimas turned around.

“All right, go,” she said with a wave of her hand. “Business is business.”

EIGHT

In the restaurant at the hotel Dusseaux all the tables were taken, but Achimas’s domesticated porter had kept his word and saved the most convenient one for his newspaperman — in the corner, with a view of the entire hall. At twenty minutes to nine, three officers entered with a jangling of spurs, followed by the general himself and then another four officers. The other diners, who had been strictly cautioned by the maitre d’hotel not to pester the general with any unwanted expressions of esteem, behaved with appropriate tact and pretended they had simply come to the restaurant for dinner, not to gawk at the great man.

Sobolev took the wine list, failed to discover Chateau d’Yquem on it, and ordered some to be brought from Levet’s shop. His retinue elected to drink champagne and cognac.

The military gentlemen talked among themselves in low voices, with several outbursts of general merriment, in which the general’s lilting baritone could be clearly distinguished. The overall impression was that the conspirators were in excellent spirits, which suited Achimas very well.

At five minutes past nine, when the Chateau d’Yquem had been delivered and duly uncorked, the doors of the restaurant swung inward as though wafted open by some gust of magical wind and Wanda appeared on the threshold, poised picturesquely, her entire lithe figure leaning forward. Her face was flushed and her huge eyes glowed like midnight stars. The entire hall turned around at the sound and froze, entranced by the miraculous spectacle. The glorious general seemed to have turned to stone, the pickled mushroom on his fork suspended halfway to his mouth.

Wanda paused for just a moment — long enough for her audience to admire the effect, but too brief for them to stick their faces back in their plates.

“There he is, our hero!” the miraculous vision declared resoundingly.

And with a loud clattering of heels, she rushed impetuously into the hall.

The claret silk rustled and the ostrich feather on her wide-brimmed hat swayed. The maitre d’hotel fluttered his hands in horror, recalling the prohibition on any public displays of feeling, but he need not have been alarmed: Sobolev was not in the least bit indignant. He wiped his glistening lips with a napkin and rose gallantly to his feet.

“Why do you remain seated, gentlemen, and not pay tribute to the glory of the Russian land?” the ecstatic patriot cried, appealing to the hall, determined not to allow the initiative to slip from her grasp even for a moment. “Hurrah for Mikhail Dmitrievich Sobolev!”

It was as if this was what the diners had all been waiting for. They jumped up from their chairs and began applauding, and the thunderous enthusiasm of their ‘hurrah’ set the crystal chandelier swaying beneath the ceiling.

Reddening most fetchingly, the general bowed to all sides. Despite being famous throughout the whole of Europe and loved throughout all Russia, he still seemed unaccustomed to public displays of enthusiastic admiration.

The vision of beauty dashed up to the hero and flung her slim arms open wide.

“Permit me to embrace you on behalf of all the women of Moscow!”

She cried and, clasping him firmly around the neck, she kissed him three times in the old Moscow manner — full on the lips.

Sobolev turned an even deeper shade of crimson.

“Gukmasov, move over,” he said, tapping the Cossack captain on the shoulder and pointing to an empty chair. “Please do me the honor, madam.”

“No, no, what are you saying?” the delightful blonde exclaimed in fright. “How could I possibly? But if you will permit me, I would be glad to sing my favorite song for you.”

And with the same impetuous abandon, she launched herself toward the small grand piano standing in the middle of the hall.

In Achimas’s view, Wanda’s approach was too direct, even a little coarse, but he could see that she was quite sure of herself and knew perfectly well what she was doing. It was a pleasure to work with a true professional. He was finally persuaded when the first notes of that deep, slightly hoarse voice set every heart in the hall quivering:

Why do you stand so weary, My slender rowanberry, With murmurs sad and dreary Bowing down your head?

Achimas stood up and walked out quietly. Nobody took any notice of him — they were all listening to the song.

Now he could sneak into Wanda’s suite and switch the bottles of Chateau d’Yquem.

NINE

The operation went so smoothly that it was almost boring. All that was required of him was a little patience.

At a quarter past twelve three droshkys pulled up outside the Anglia: Wanda and the mark were in the first and all seven officers were in the other two.

Achimas (wearing a false beard and spectacles, quite unmistakably a university lecturer) had earlier taken a two-room suite at the hotel with windows facing in both directions — onto the street and into the courtyard with the annex. He turned the light off so that his silhouette wouldn’t give him away.

The general was well guarded. When Sobolev and his female companion disappeared behind the door of Wanda’s suite, the officers prepared to stand watch over their leader’s recreation: One remained in the street, at the entrance to the hotel, another began patrolling the inner courtyard, while a third quietly slipped inside the annex and evidently took up a position in the hallway. The other four set off to the buffet. They were evidently going to keep watch by turns.

At twenty-three minutes to one the electric light in the windows of the suite was extinguished and the curtains were illuminated with a dull red glow from within. Achimas nodded approvingly — the chanteuse was playing her part with true Parisian virtuosity.

The officer strolling about in the courtyard glanced around stealthily, walked over to a red window, and stood on tiptoe, but then recoiled as if he were ashamed and resumed his striding back and forth again, whistling with emphatic cheerfulness.

Achimas gazed intently at the minute hand of his watch. What if the White General, so famous for his coolness in battle, never lost his head and his pulse never raced, not even from passion? That was unlikely, for it contradicted the laws of physiology. In the restaurant he had blushed violently at Wanda’s kisses and more than mere kisses would be involved now.

A more likely possibility was that he would not touch the Chateau d’Yquem. But the laws of psychology said that he should. If lovers don’t throw themselves into each other’s arms in the first instant — and a good twenty minutes had passed before the lamp in the boudoir was extinguished — they had to amuse themselves with something. The best thing of all would be for him to drink a glass of his favorite wine, which happened quite fortuitously to be close at hand. And if he didn’t drink it today, then he would drink it tomorrow. Or the next day. Sobolev would be in Moscow until the twenty-seventh and there could be little doubt that from now on he would prefer to spend the night here instead of in suite 47 at the Dusseaux. The Ryazan Commercial Association would be only too glad to pay the cost of a season ticket for their compatriot — Monsieur NN had provided more than enough money for expenses.

At five minutes past one Achimas heard a muffled woman’s scream, then another, louder and more prolonged, but he couldn’t make out any words. The officer in the courtyard started and set off toward the annex at a run. A moment later bright light flooded the windows and shadows began flitting about on the curtains.

That was all.

Achimas walked unhurriedly in the direction of Theater Lane, swinging his cane as he went. There was plenty of time. It took seven minutes to reach the Dusseaux at a leisurely pace — that afternoon he had walked the shortest route twice, timing himself with his watch. The fuss and panic, the attempts to bring the general around, the arguments about whether or not to call a doctor to the hotel or first take Sobolev to the Dusseaux for the sake of appearances — these would take at least an hour.

His problem lay elsewhere: What was he to do with Wanda now? The elementary rules of hygiene required him to clean up after the job was done, to leave no loose ends behind. Of course, there wouldn’t be any inquiry — the officers and gentlemen would make certain of that — and Monsieur NN wouldn’t allow it in any case. And Wanda was extremely unlikely to have noticed that the bottle had been switched. However, if the subject of the bearer of gifts from Ryazan should come up, if it should be discovered that the real Nikolai Nikolaevich Klonov had never set foot outside his own fabric warehouse, there would be unnecessary complications. And in the words of the old saying: God helps those who help themselves.

Achimas frowned. Unfortunately, his line of work did have its unpleasant moments.

It was with these gloomy but unavoidable thoughts in mind that he turned off Sofiiskaya Street into the opening of an entryway that led most conveniently to the rear courtyard of the Dusseaux, directly beneath the windows of Sobolev’s suite.

With a quick glance at the dark windows (all the hotel’s guests had been asleep for a long time already), Achimas set a crate that he had spotted earlier against the wall. The bedroom window opened at his gentle push with only a quiet jingling of its latch. Five seconds later Achimas was inside.

He clicked the spring of his pocket flashlight and it sprang to life, slicing through the darkness with a narrow, faint beam that was still quite strong enough for him to make out the safe.

Achimas pushed a pick into the keyhole and began methodically twisting it to the left and the right in a regular rhythm. He regarded himself as an amateur in the art of safecracking, but in the course of a long career you learn many different things. After three minutes there was a click as the first of the lock’s three tumblers yielded. The remaining two required less time — only about two minutes.

The iron door squeaked open. Achimas put his hand inside and felt some papers or other. He shone the light in: lists of names and diagrams. Monsieur NN would probably have been very glad to get his hands on these papers, but the terms of Achimas’s contract didn’t specify the theft of any documents.

In any case, just at that moment Achimas wasn’t interested in documents.

He was pondering a surprise: The briefcase was not in the safe.

TEN

Achimas spent all Friday lying on his bed, thinking hard. He knew from experience that when you find yourself in a difficult spot, rather than giving way to your first impulse, it is best to stop moving, to freeze the way a cobra does just before its deadly, lightning-fast strike. Provided, of course, that circumstances permit a pause in the action. In this particular case they did, since the basic precautions had already been taken. Last night Achimas had checked out of the Metropole and moved to the Trinity, a collection of cheap apartments in the Trinity Inn. The crooked, dirty alleyways around Pokrovsky Boulevard were only a stone’s throw away from Khitrovka, and that was where he would have to search for the briefcase.

When he left the Metropole, Achimas had not taken a cab. In the hours before dawn he had circled through the streets for a long time, checking to see if he was being tailed, and he had signed into the Trinity under another false name.

His room was dirty and dark, but it was conveniently located, with a separate entrance and a good view of the courtyard.

He had to think over what had happened very carefully.

The previous night he had searched Sobolev’s suite thoroughly and still failed to find the briefcase. But he had found a small pellet of mud on the sill of the end window, which was tightly closed. When he raised his head, he had noticed that the small upper window was open. Someone had climbed out through it not long before.

Achimas stared intently at the small window as he thought for a moment and drew his conclusions.

He brushed the dirt off the windowsill and closed the window through which he had climbed in.

He then left the suite via the door, which he locked from the outside with a skeleton key.

It was quiet and dark in the hotel foyer, with only a single candle guttering on the night doorman’s counter. The doorman himself was half-asleep and failed to notice the dark figure as it slipped out of the corridor. When the little bell on the door jangled, he leapt to his feet, but the stealthy visitor was already outside. I’ll never get any sleep, God help me, the doorman thought. He yawned and made the sign of the cross over his mouth, then went across to close the latch.

Achimas walked briskly in the direction of the Metropole, trying to work out what to do next. The sky was beginning to turn gray — at the end of June the nights are short.

A droshky appeared from around a corner. Achimas recognized the silhouette of Sobolev’s Cossack captain, sitting with his arms wrapped around a figure in white. The figure was supported from the other side by another officer. Its head swayed loosely to the clattering rhythm of hoof-beats. There were two other carriages following behind.

Interesting, Achimas thought absentmindedly, how will they carry him past the doorman? But they’re military men, they’re bound to think of something.

The shortest route to the Metropole lay through an open courtyard, a route that Achimas had followed more than once during the last few days.

As he was walking through the yard’s long, dark archway with his footsteps echoing hollowly on the flagstones, Achimas was suddenly aware of someone else’s presence. It wasn’t his vision or even his hearing that detected this presence, but some other, inexplicable, peripheral sense that had saved his life several times in the past. It was as if the skin on the back of his neck sensed a movement behind him, some extremely faint stirring of the air. It might have been a cat darting by or a rat making a dash for a heap of rotten garbage, but in such situations Achimas wasn’t afraid of making himself look foolish — without pausing to think, he threw himself to one side.

He felt a sudden downward draft of air sweep past his cheek. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught the dull glint of steel slicing through the air close beside his ear. With a rapid, practiced movement, he pulled out his velodog and fired without taking aim.

There was a muffled shriek and a dark shadow went darting away from him.

Achimas overtook the runner in two swift leaps and swung his cane down hard from above.

He shone his light on the fallen man. A coarse, bestial face. Dark blood oozing from beneath his greasy, matted hair. The stubby fingers clutching at the man’s side were also wet with blood.

The attacker was dressed in the Russian style: collarless shirt, wool-cloth waistcoat, velveteen trousers, blacked boots. Lying on the ground beside him was an axe with an unusually short handle.

Achimas leaned lower, pointing the finger of light straight into the man’s face. It glinted on two round eyes with unnaturally dilated pupils.

There was the sound of a whistle from the direction of Neglinnaya Street, then another from the Theater Lane side. He didn’t have much time.

He squatted down, set his finger and thumb just below the fallen man’s cheekbones, and squeezed. He tossed the axe aside.

“Who sent you?”

“It’s poverty that’s to blame, Your Honor,” the wounded man croaked. “We beg forgiveness.”

Achimas pressed his finger hard into the facial nerve, allowed the man on the ground to squirm in agony for a while, and repeated his question: “Who?”

“Let go… let go, you gull,” wheezed the wounded man, hammering his feet against the flagstones. “I’m dying.”

“Who?” Achimas asked for the third time, and pressed hard on an eyeball.

Blood flooded out of the dying man’s mouth, almost drowning his low groan.

“Misha,” the faint voice gurgled. “Little Misha… Let go! It hurts!”

“Who is this Misha?” asked Achimas, pressing down more heavily.

But that was a mistake. The would-be murderer was already at his last gasp. His groan became a wheeze and a torrent of blood gushed out onto his beard. He was obviously not going to say anything more. Achimas straightened up. A police constable’s whistle trilled somewhere very close by.

By midday he had reviewed all the possible courses of action and formulated his decision.

He started from the facts: First, someone had robbed Achimas and then someone had attempted to kill him. Were these two events connected with each other? Undoubtedly. The man who had been lying in wait for Achimas in the dark archway had known what route he would take and when.

That meant:

(1) He had been followed the previous day, when he was checking the route, and followed very cleverly — he had not spotted his tail.

(2) Someone was well aware of what Achimas had been doing last night.

(3) The briefcase had been taken by someone who was certain that Sobolev wouldn’t be coming back to his suite — otherwise why would he have bothered to lock the safe after himself so carefully and climb out through the small window? The general would have discovered the loss in any case.

Question: Who knew about the operation and about the briefcase?

Answer: Only Monsieur NN and his people.

If they had simply tried to eliminate Achimas, that would have been annoying, but understandable.

Annoying, because in that case he, a topflight professional, would have misread the situation, miscalculated the risk, and allowed himself to be deceived.

Understandable, because in a major undertaking like this, fraught with a multitude of possible complications, the agent should, of course, be eliminated. That was precisely what Achimas would have done in the client’s place. The secret imperial court was a fiction, of course. But it was a clever invention, and even the worldly-wise Mr. Welde had been taken in by it.

Taking everything together, it could all have been explained, if not for the disappearance of the briefcase.

Monsieur NN and crude housebreaking? Absurd. Take the million rubles, but leave the documents for the conspirators? Improbable. And the idea that the killer with the bestial face from the archway had any connection at all with NN or ‘Baron von Steinitz’ was absolutely unbelievable.

The wielder of the axe had addressed Achimas as a ‘gull’. In Russian criminal slang, this was a term of abuse that expressed the most extreme level of contempt — not a thief, not a bandit, but an ordinary, law-abiding citizen.

So the attacker was a professional criminal? Perhaps a character from the notorious Khitrovka district?

His behavior and manner of speech certainly suggested it. What was his connection with NN, a man whose lowly coach driver had the bearing of a military officer? Something here didn’t add up.

Since he had insufficient information for genuine logical analysis, Achimas tried approaching the problem from a different angle. If the initial data were inadequate, it was more convenient to start by denning your objectives.

What needed to be done?

Clean up after his own operation.

Find the briefcase.

Settle accounts with the person or persons who had tried to cheat Achimas Welde.

And in that precise order. First protect himself, then get back what belonged to him, and then exact vengeance, for dessert. But there must be a dessert. It was a matter of principle and professional ethics.

At the practical level, the three stages of the plan were as follows:

Eliminate Wanda. A pity, of course, but it was necessary.

Deal with the mysterious Little Misha.

He would get Misha to provide his dessert.

Someone among Monsieur NN’s people kept strange company.

Once he had worked out his program of action, Achimas turned over onto his side and instantly fell asleep.

Point 1 was scheduled for implementation that evening.

ELEVEN

He managed to sneak into Wanda’s suite without being noticed. As he had anticipated, the songstress hadn’t yet returned from the Alpine Rose. Between the boudoir and the hallway there was a cloakroom, crammed with dresses on hangers and stacks of shoeboxes and hatboxes. The room was ideally positioned, with one door leading into the boudoir and another into the hallway.

If Wanda came back alone, it would all be over quickly, without any complications. She would open the door in order to get a change of clothes and die that very second, before she had any time to feel afraid.

Achimas very much didn’t want her to suffer any fear or pain before she died.

He pondered the question of what would be more appropriate — an accident or suicide — and settled on suicide. There were surely many reasons why a woman of the demimonde might decide to take her own life.

The task was simplified by the fact that Wanda didn’t employ a maid. If you had been used to looking after yourself all your life, then it was more convenient to manage without servants — he knew that from his own experience. On the island of Santa Croce the servants would live apart; he would build a house for them at a good distance from the count’s residence. They could always be summoned if they were needed.

But what if Wanda didn’t come back alone?

Well, in that case it would be a double suicide. That was quite fashionable nowadays.

He heard the sound of a door opening and light footsteps.

She was alone.

Achimas grimaced as he recalled her voice asking him: “You won’t deceive me, will you, Kolya?” At that very instant the door from the boudoir into the dressing room half-opened and a slim, naked arm reached in and pulled a Chinese dressing gown decorated with dragons off its hanger.

The moment had been missed. Achimas looked through the chink of the door. Wanda was standing in front of the mirror, still in her dress, holding the dressing gown in her hand.

Three quick, silent steps and the job would be done. She would hardly even have time to catch a glimpse of the figure behind her in the mirror.

Achimas opened the door slightly and then pulled back at the sound of a brief trill from the electric doorbell.

Wanda went out into the hallway, exchanged a few brief words with someone, and came back into the drawing room, examining a small piece of cardboard. A calling card?

She was standing with her profile toward Achimas now and he saw her face quiver.

Almost immediately there was another ring at the door.

Again he was unable to hear what was said in the hallway — the door on that side of the little room was firmly shut. But Wanda and her late-night visitor came straight through into the drawing room, and then he could hear and even see everything.

Fate had an unexpected surprise in store for him. When the visitor — a well- proportioned young man in a fashionable frock coat — entered the circle of light cast by the lamp shade, Achimas recognized his face immediately. In the years that had passed it had changed greatly, matured and shed the soft contours of youth, but it was definitely the same man. Achimas never forgot what his targets looked like; he remembered every last little detail of every one, and especially of this one.

It was an old story from a long time ago, from the interesting period when Achimas had been contracted to work for an organization that called itself ‘Azazel’. They were very serious people who paid the top rate, but they were romantics. That was clear enough from the absolute requirement to utter the word ‘Azazel’ before every strike. Sentimental nonsense. But Achimas had observed this ludicrous condition — a contract is a contract.

He found it disagreeable to look at the handsome young man with black hair. Above all because he was still walking about and breathing. In his entire professional career Achimas had only failed in his task three times, and now he saw before him the living proof of one of those occasions. He ought surely to have been content with such a low failure rate after twenty years of work, but his mood, which had been bad enough already, was now completely spoiled.

What was the name of this young neophyte? Something beginning with ‘F’.

“Mr. Fandorin, on your card it says ‘I know everything’. What is ‘everything’? And who are you, as a matter of fact?” Wanda asked in a hostile tone of voice.

Yes, yes, Fandorin. That was his name. Erast Petrovich Fandorin. So now he was the governor-general’s deputy for special assignments, was he?

Achimas listened carefully to the conversation taking place in the next room, trying to understand the significance of this unexpected encounter. He knew that extraordinary coincidences like this were never accidental; they represented some kind of sign from the fates. Was this a good sign or a bad one? The habit of tidiness prompted him to kill the black-haired young man, although the term of the contract had expired long ago, and the clients themselves had disappeared without a trace. It was sloppy to leave a job unfinished. But, on the other hand, it would be unprofessional to give way to his emotions. Mr. Fandorin could continue on his way. After all, even six years ago Achimas hadn’t had anything personal against him.

But when the young functionary brought up a highly dangerous subject — the Chateau d’Yquem — Achimas was ready to reverse his decision: Mr. Fandorin couldn’t be allowed to leave this place alive. And then Wanda surprised him by not saying a single word about the merchant from Ryazan and how incredibly well-informed he had been concerning the habits of the deceased hero. She led the conversation off in a completely different direction. What could that mean?

Shortly after that the young man took his leave.

Wanda sat at the table with her face in her hands. Nothing could be easier than to kill her now, but Achimas still hesitated.

Why kill her? She had withstood questioning without giving anything away. If the authorities had shown themselves perceptive enough to see through the officers’ primitive conspiracy and find Mademoiselle Wanda, it would be better not to touch her for the time being. The sudden suicide of a witness would appear suspicious.

Achimas shook his head angrily. He must not deceive himself; it was a violation of his code. These reasons were merely excuses for letting her live. At this precise moment the suicide of a chance witness to a national tragedy would seem perfectly understandable: remorse, a nervous breakdown, fear of possible consequences. He had wasted enough time. It was time to get the job done.

There was another ring at the door.

Wanda was in great demand this evening.

Once again the visitor proved to be a familiar face. Not an old acquaintance like Fandorin, but a recent one — the German agent Hans-Georg Knabe.

The spy’s very first words put Achimas on his guard.

“You serve me badly, Fraulein Tolle.”

A fine turn of events this was! Achimas could hardly believe his ears. What ‘substance’ was this? Wanda had been instructed to poison Sobolev? God preserved Germany? It was raving lunacy! Or perhaps some incredible series of coincidences that he could exploit to his own advantage?

As soon as the door closed behind the German, Achimas emerged from his hiding place. When Wanda came back into the room, she didn’t notice at first that there was someone standing in the corner, and when she did she clutched at her heart and uttered a thin shriek.

“Are you a German agent?” Achimas asked curiously, ready to put his hand over her mouth if she tried to make any noise. “Have you been making a fool of me?”

“Kolya…,” she blurted out, raising her hand to her mouth. “Were you listening? Who are you? Who?”

He shook his head impatiently, as though shaking off a bothersome fly.

“Where is the substance?”

“How did you get in here? What for?” Wanda muttered, as if she hadn’t heard his questions.

Achimas took her by the shoulders and sat her down. She gazed at him through wide, black pupils. He could see two miniature reflections of the lamp shade in them.

“This is a strange conversation we are having, mademoiselle,” he said, sitting down facing her. “All questions and no answers. Someone has to begin and it might as well be me. You have asked me three questions: Who am I, how did I get in here, and what for. Here are my answers. I am Nikolai Nikolaevich Klonov. I got in here through the door. And as for why — I think you already know that. I engaged your services to provide a pleasurable surprise for our famous compatriot, Mikhail Dmitrievich Sobolev, and not only did he receive very little pleasure, he lost his life. Surely I am obliged to make inquiries? It would be irresponsible not to, a violation of the merchant’s code. What shall I report to the association? After all, money has been spent.”

“I’ll give you back your money,” said Wanda, ready to rush away and get it.

“It’s not a question of the money,” said Achimas, stopping her. “After standing in there for a while, listening to your conversations with your visitors, I realized I had no idea of what had been going on. Apparently you and Herr Knabe were playing your own little game. I should like to know, mademoiselle, what you did to our national hero.”

“Nothing! I swear!” She dashed across to a little cupboard and took something out of it. “Here is the bottle that Knabe gave me. See, it’s still full. I don’t play other people’s games.”

The tears were streaming down her face, but there was no entreaty in the gaze that she turned on him, and certainly no trace of hysteria. She hadn’t folded her cards, even though the situation she was in was truly desperate: caught between the Russian police, German intelligence, and Achimas Welde, who would be worse than any police force and intelligence service combined. But then, she knew nothing about that. He glanced at the tense expression on her face. Or did she?

Achimas shook the bottle, examined its color, sniffed the cork. Apparently crude cyanide.

“Mademoiselle, do not try to hide anything from me. How long have you been connected with German intelligence? What instructions did Knabe give you?”

A rather peculiar change came over Wanda. She stopped trembling, her tears dried up, and a strange expression appeared in her eyes, an expression that Achimas had seen once before — the previous evening, when she had asked him if he regretted giving her away to someone else.

She moved closer and sat on the arm of his chair, then put her hand on his shoulder. She spoke in a voice that was quiet and tired.

“Of course, Kolya. I’ll tell you everything. I won’t try to hide anything. Knabe is a German spy. He has been coming to me for three years now. I was a fool when it all started; I wanted to get my money as quickly as possible, and he paid very well. Not for love — for information. All sorts of men come to see me, most of them big shots of one kind or another. Some of them are from the very top. Like your Sobolev. And men like to let loose their tongues in bed.” She ran a finger across his cheek. “Someone like you probably wouldn’t. But there aren’t many like you. Do you really think I earned that fifty thousand in my bed? No, my dear, I’m too choosy. I have to like a man. Sometimes, of course, Knabe would deliberately offer me to someone. The way you did with Sobolev. I tried to resist, but I was locked far too tightly in his vice. At first he sang me a sweet song: What are you doing living here in Russia, fraulein, you’re German, you have a homeland of your own. Germany will not forget the services you have rendered; honor and safety await you there. Here you will always be a courtesan, but in Germany no one will ever find out about your past. The moment you wish it, we will help you to settle down comfortably, with honor. But later he changed his tune and kept telling me how long his reach was, that German citizenship had to be earned. I don’t want their damned citizenship, but there was nothing I could do. He tightened his noose around my throat. He could even kill me. Without the slightest problem. As an example to the others. He has plenty more like me.” Wanda shivered, but then she shook her luxuriant hair almost lightheartedly. “The day before yesterday, when Knabe heard about Sobolev — like a fool I told him myself, I wanted to get into his good books — he almost nagged me to death. He started saying that Sobolev was Germany’s sworn enemy and muttering about a conspiracy in the army. He said that if Sobolev were not eliminated, there would be a great war, and Germany was not yet ready. “I’ve been racking my brain,” he said, “wondering how to stop this Scythian, and now I have this stroke of luck! It’s providential!” He brought me the bottle of poison. He promised me mountains of gold, but I wasn’t interested. Then he started threatening me. He was like a madman. I decided not to argue with him and promised to do it. But I didn’t give Sobolev the poison, honestly. He just died; it was his heart. Believe me, Kolya. I may be a despicable, cynical fallen woman, but I’m not a murderer.”

There was a hint of entreaty in her green eyes now, but still not a trace of hysterics. A proud woman. But even so, she couldn’t be allowed to live. A pity.

Achimas sighed and placed his right hand on her exposed neck. His thumb was on her artery, his middle ringer on her fourth vertebra, just below the base of the skull. He only needed to squeeze, and the light in those eyes looking down at him so trustingly would fade and die.

And then something unexpected happened. Wanda put her arm around Achimas’s neck, pulled him closer, and pressed her hot cheek against his forehead.

“Is it you?” she whispered. “Is it you I’ve been waiting for all this time?”

Achimas looked at her white, delicate skin. Something strange was happening to him.

TWELVE

When he left at dawn, Wanda was sleeping soundly with her mouth half-open like a child.

Achimas stood looking down at her for a moment, feeling a bizarre sensation stirring in the left side of his chest. Then he went out quietly.

She won’t tell anyone, he thought as he came out onto Petrovka Street. If she hadn’t told Fandorin yesterday, why would she tell today? There was no reason to kill her.

But in his heart he felt uneasy. It was inexcusable to confuse business with personal matters. He would never have allowed himself to do it before.

“What about Evgenia?” asked a voice that came from the same spot where he could feel that alarming stirring. The time had obviously come for him to retire.

What happened the night before would never be repeated. No more contact with Wanda.

Who could link the merchant Klonov, resident until the previous day at the Metropole, with the singer from the Alpine Rose? No one. Except perhaps the koelner Timofei. It was unlikely, but he had better not take the risk. It would tidy things up and not take up too much of his time.

The voice whispered: “The koelner will die so that Wanda can live.”

Never mind; that was all right. Things hadn’t gone so well with Knabe, however. Fandorin was almost certain to have run into the German agent as he was on his way out from Wanda’s suite yesterday evening and, being a meticulous and quick-witted detective, he was bound to have made inquiries about her visitor. It was also only reasonable to assume that the true nature of Herr Knabe ‘s activities was well known to the Russian authorities. A senior intelligence agent was a rather conspicuous individual.

He discerned the possibility of an excellent maneuver that would divert the investigation into a safe channel.

“And Wanda will be free of her noose,” the perspicacious voice added pitilessly.

Achimas set up his observation post in the attic opposite Knabe’s house. It was a convenient position offering a good view of the windows on the third floor, where the German agent lived.

Fortunately it turned out to be a hot day. Of course, the roof above the attic was scorching hot by eight o’clock and it was stifling up there, but Achimas was never bothered by minor inconveniences and the heat meant that Knabe’s windows were standing wide open.

He could see quite clearly what was happening in every single room of the German agent’s flat: He saw him shave in front of the mirror, drink his coffee, and leaf through the newspapers, marking some places in them with a pencil. If the cheerful way he moved and the expression on his face were anything to go by (Achimas was conducting his observation through binoculars with a magnification factor of twelve), Mr. Knabe was in an excellent mood.

Sometime after ten he emerged from the entrance to the building and strode off in the direction of Petrovsky Square. Achimas fell in behind him. From his appearance he could have been taken for an office clerk or a shop assistant: a cap with a cracked lacquer peak, a good-quality long-skirted frock coat, and a little gray goatee.

Knabe walked on, waving his arm energetically, and in a quarter of an hour he had reached the central post office. Inside the building Achimas reduced the distance between them, and when the German agent walked over to the telegraph window, he stood behind him.

Knabe said a cheery hello to the counter clerk, who had obviously taken telegrams from him before, and handed him a sheet of paper.

“As always, to Kerbel und Schmidt in Berlin. Stock quotations. But please,” he added with a smile, “if you would be so kind, Panataleimon Kuzmich, don’t give it to Serdiuk like the last time. He confused two figures and it caused me great unpleasantness with my superiors afterward. Please, as a friend, give it to Semenov; let him send it.”

“All right, Ivan Egorich,” the counter clerk replied in an equally merry voice. “So be it.”

“There should be a reply for me soon; I’ll come back,” said Knabe, and with a fleeting glance at Achimas’s face, he set off toward the door.

The German agent was moving at an unhurried pace now, strolling along. He whistled a frivolous little tune as he walked along the pavement. Just once he checked to see if he was being tailed — no doubt purely out of habit. He didn’t look as if he suspected he was under observation.

Nonetheless, he was being observed, and rather skillfully. Achimas himself didn’t spot the tail immediately. But the workman on the opposite side of the street was studying the window displays of the expensive shops, where there was clearly nothing that he could afford, much too intently. And the reason was clear: He was following Knabe through his reflection in the glass. And five to ten paces farther back, there was a cabbie barely even trundling along. Someone hailed him and he turned them down, and then the same thing happened again. An interesting kind of cabbie.

Mr. Fandorin had apparently not wasted any time the evening before.

Achimas took precautionary measures to avoid becoming too obvious. He turned into an entryway, tugged off his beard in one swift movement, put on a pair of spectacles with plain lenses, dumped his cap, and turned his frock coat inside out. The frock coat had an unusual lining — a state functionary’s uniform coat with the collar tabs removed. A shop assistant went into the entryway and ten seconds later a retired bureaucrat came out.

Knabe hadn’t moved on very far yet. He stood in front of the mirrored doors of a French pastry shop for a moment and then went in.

Achimas went in after him.

The German agent was eating creme brulee ice cream with great gusto, washing it down with seltzer water. A young man with prying eyes, dressed in a summer suit, appeared out of nowhere at the next table. He hid his face behind a fashionable magazine, but every few moments he glanced quickly over the top of its cover. The cabbie he ‘d noticed previously halted on the pavement outside. The workman, though, had disappeared. They were really giving Herr Knabe the full treatment. But that was all right, in fact it was helpful. Just as long as they didn’t arrest him. But all the signs indicated that they wouldn’t — what point would there be in tailing him, then? They wanted to identify his contacts. But Herr Knabe didn’t have any contacts, or he wouldn’t be communicating with Berlin by telegram.

The German spy sat in the pastry shop for a long time. After his ice cream, he ate a marzipan cake, drank a hot chocolate, and then ordered a tutti-frutti. His appetite was prodigious. The young sleuth was replaced by another, somewhat older. The first cabbie’s place at the pavement was taken by a different one, who was equally stubborn in refusing to accept any fares.

Achimas decided that he had exposed himself to the eyes of the police for long enough and he left the pastry shop first. He took up a position in the post office and set in to wait. Along the way he had changed his social status: He got rid of the frock coat, pulled his shirt out of his trousers and put his belt on top of it, removed his spectacles, and pulled a cloth cap onto his head.

When Knabe turned up, Achimas was standing right beside the telegraph window and moving his lips intently as he traced out words in a telegram blank with a pencil.

“Tell me, old fellow,” he said to the attendant, “will it definitely get there tomorrow?”

“I already told you, it’ll get there today,” the attendant replied patronizingly. “And you keep it short; it’s not a letter, you’ll bankrupt yourself. Ivan Egorich, there’s a telegram for you!”

Achimas pretended to be glaring angrily at the pink-cheeked German as he stole a glance at the piece of paper thrust out from behind the window.

A brief text and columns of figures — it looked like stock quotations.

Their working methods in Berlin were obviously rather crude. They underestimated the Russian gendarmes.

Knabe gave the telegram a cursory glance and thrust it into his pocket. Naturally, it was in code; now he would be bound to go home and decipher it.

Achimas broke off his surveillance and returned to the observation point in the attic.

The German agent was already at home — he must have come back in a cab (could it have been the same one?). He was sitting at the table, leafing through the pages of a book and copying something out onto a sheet of paper.

Then things began to get interesting. Knabe’s movements became more rapid. He wiped his forehead nervously several times. He flung the book to the floor and clutched his head in his hands. He leapt to his feet and began running around the room. He read through what he had written again.

Apparently the news he had received wasn’t very pleasant.

Then things became even more interesting. Knabe dashed away somewhere into the back of his apartment and came back holding a revolver.

He sat down in front of a mirror. He raised the revolver to his temple three times and stuck the barrel into his mouth once.

Achimas nodded his head. How very timely. A fairy-tale ending. Go on then, shoot yourself.

What could have been in that message from Berlin? The answer seemed fairly obvious. The initiative taken by their Moscow agent had not met with approval. To put it mildly. The career of the would-be killer of General Sobolev lay in hopeless ruins.

No, he didn’t shoot himself. He lowered the hand holding the revolver and began running around the room again. He put the revolver in his pocket. A pity.

Achimas did not see what happened in the apartment after that, because Knabe closed the windows, and for about three hours all he could do was admire the bright spots of sunlight glittering on the window-panes. Glancing down every now and then at the sleuth loitering in the street, he imagined to himself how his castle would look when it sprang up on the tallest cliff of the island of Santa Croce sometime in the near future. The castle would be reminiscent of the kind of towers that guarded the peace of mountain villages in the Caucasus, but on the flat roof there had to be a garden. The palm trees would have to be planted in tubs, of course, but turf could be laid in, and shrubs.

Achimas was trying to solve the problem of providing water for his hanging garden when Knabe emerged from the entrance to the building. First the sleuth in the street started fidgeting, then he skipped away from the door and hid around a corner, and a second later the German agent appeared in person. He halted outside the entrance, waiting for something. It soon became clear what it was.

A single-seater carriage harnessed to a dun horse rolled out of an en-tryway. The groom jumped down from the box and handed the reins to Knabe, who leapt nimbly into the carriage, and the dun set off at a brisk trot.

This was all quite unexpected. Knabe was escaping surveillance and there was absolutely no possibility of following him. Achimas peered hard through his binoculars just in time to see the spy put on a ginger beard. What idea had he come up with now?

The sleuth, however, reacted quite calmly. He watched the carriage drive off, jotted something down in his notebook, and walked away. He apparently knew where Knabe had gone and what for.

Well, since the German agent had taken nothing with him, he was certain to come back again. It was time for Achimas to prepare his operation.

Five minutes later, Achimas was in the apartment. He took a leisurely look around and found two hiding places. The first contained a small chemical laboratory: invisible ink, poisons, an entire bottle of nitroglycerine (was he planning to blow up the Kremlin, then?). In the other there were several revolvers, some money — about thirty thousand rubles, at a glance — and a book of logarithmic tables, which had to be the key to the code.

Achimas didn’t touch the contents of the hiding places. The gendarmes could have them. Unfortunately Knabe had burned the decoded telegram — there were traces of ash in the kitchen sink.

It was bad that the apartment had no rear entrance. A window in the corridor overlooked the roof of an extension. Achimas climbed out, walked around for a while on the rumbling iron sheeting, and confirmed that the roof was a dead end. The drainpipe was rusted through; you couldn’t climb down it. All right.

He sat down by the window and prepared himself for a long wait.

Sometime after nine, when the light of the long summer day had begun to fade, the familiar single-seater carriage came hurtling out from behind a corner. The dun was pushing as hard as it could, scattering thick flakes of lather behind it. Knabe was standing in the carriage and brandishing his whip frantically.

A chase?

Apparently not; Achimas couldn’t hear anything.

Knabe dropped the reins and vanished into the entrance of the building.

It was time.

Achimas took up the position he had scouted out in advance, behind the coat stand in the hallway. He was holding a sharp knife taken from the kitchen.

The apartment was already prepared — everything turned upside down, the contents of the cupboards scattered about, even the eiderdown had been slit open. A crude imitation of a burglary. Mr. Fandorin ought to conclude that Herr Knabe had been eliminated by his own people, who had made a clumsy attempt to fake an ordinary, everyday crime.

The act itself took only a moment.

The key scraped in the lock, and Knabe had only run a few steps along the dark corridor before he died without realizing what was happening.

Achimas looked around carefully to make sure everything was in place and went out to the staircase.

A door slammed downstairs and he heard voices talking loudly. Someone was running up the stairs. That was bad.

He backed into the apartment and slammed the door perhaps a bit louder than was necessary.

He had fifteen seconds at most.

He opened the window at the end of the corridor and hid behind the coat stand again. Literally the very next instant a man burst into the apartment. He looked like a merchant.

The merchant was holding a revolver, a Herstal-Agent. A fine little gun; at one time Achimas had used one himself. The merchant froze over the motionless body for a moment, then did what he was supposed to, dashing around the rooms and finally vaulting through the window onto the roof.

There wasn’t a sound on the staircase. Achimas slipped silently out of the apartment. Now he only had to take care of the koelner at the Metro-pole and he could consider the first point of his plan completed.

THIRTEEN

Before he could proceed to the second point of his plan, a little brain-work was required. That night Achimas lay in his room in the Trinity, staring up at the ceiling and thinking.

The tidying-up had been completed.

The koelner had been dealt with. There was no need to worry about the police. The German line of inquiry would keep them busy for a long time yet.

Now for the matter of his stolen fee.

Question: How could he find the bandit called Little Misha?

What did he know about him?

He was the leader of a gang — otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to track Achimas down and then send someone to kill him. So far that seemed to be all.

Now for the safecracker who had stolen the briefcase. What could be said about him? No normal-sized man could have squeezed through the small window opening. So it was a juvenile? No, it was unlikely that a juvenile could have opened the safe so skillfully; that required experience. On the whole it had been a rather neat job: no broken glass, no signs of breaking and entering. The thief had even locked the safe when he was finished. So it was a small man, not a juvenile. And the gang leader was called Little Misha. Which made it reasonable to assume that he and the safecracker were one and the same person. So this Misha must have the briefcase.

To sum up, he had a slim, agile little man known as ‘Little Misha’ who knew how to crack safes and was the leader of a serious gang.

That was really quite a lot.

He could be quite sure that a conspicuous specialist like that would be well known in Khitrovka.

But that was precisely why he would be far from easy to find. Pretending to be a criminal would be pointless — you had to know their customs, their slang, their rules of etiquette. It would make more sense to play the part of a ‘gull’ who required the services of a good safecracker. Say, a shop assistant who dreamed in secret of getting his hands into his master’s safe.

Early on Sunday, before heset out for Khitrovka, Achimas was unable to resist the temptation to turn into Myasnitskaya Street and watch the funeral procession.

It was an impressive spectacle. None of the many operations he had carried out in the course of a long career had produced such an impressive result.

Standing in the crowd of people weeping and crossing themselves, Achimas felt as if he were the central character in this grandiose theatrical production, its invisible center. It was an unfamiliar, intoxicating feeling.

Riding behind the hearse on a black horse was a pompous-looking general. Arrogant and pretentious. Certain that in this spectacle he was the only star of the first magnitude.

But, like all the others, he was no more than a puppet. The puppet master was standing modestly on the pavement, lost to view among the sea of faces. Nobody knew him, nobody looked at him, but the awareness of his unique importance set his head spinning faster than any wine.

“That’s Kirill Alexandrovich, the tsar’s brother,” someone said, referring to the mounted general. “A fine figure of a man.”

Suddenly a woman in a black shawl pushed aside one of the gendarmes in the cordon and dashed out of the crowd to the hearse.

“Whose care have you left us to, our dear father?” she keened in a shrill whine, pressing her face down against the crimson velvet.

The Grand Duke’s Arabian steed flared its nostrils in fright at this heart-rending wail and reared up on its hind legs.

One of the adjutants made to seize the panicking horse’s bridle, but Kirill Alexandrovich checked him with his powerful resonant voice: “Back, Neplyuev. Don’t interfere! I’ll handle it!”

Retaining his seat without any difficulty, he brought his mount to its senses in an instant. Snorting nervously, it began ambling sideways in small steps, then straightened up again. The hysterical female mourner was taken by the arms and led back into the crowd, and the minor incident was over.

But Achimas’s mood had changed. He no longer felt like the master pulling the strings in the puppet theater.

The voice that had ordered the adjutant not to interfere had been only too familiar. Once heard, a voice like that could never be confused with any other.

What a surprise to meet you like this, my dear Monsieur NN.

Achimas cast an eye over the portly figure in the Cavalry Guards uniform. This was the true puppet master, the one who pulled all the strings, and the Cavaliere Welde, otherwise the future Count of Santa Croce, was a mere stage prop. So be it.

He spent the whole day in Khitrovka. The funeral chimes of Moscow’s forty times forty churches reached even here, but the denizens of Khitrovka had no interest in the respectable city’s mourning over some general or other. This was a microcosm teeming with its own secret life, like a drop of dirty water under a microscope.

Achimas, dressed as a shop assistant, had suffered two attempts to rob him and three to pick his pocket, one of which had been successful:

Someone had slit his long-waisted cloth coat open with something very sharp and pulled out his purse. There was hardly any money in it, but the skill was most impressive.

For a long time his attempts to find the safecracker produced no results. Most of the local inhabitants wouldn’t enter into conversation at all, and those who would suggested people he didn’t want — someone called Kiriukha, or Shtukar, or Kolsha the Gymnast. It was after four in the afternoon when he first heard Little Misha’s name mentioned.

It happened while Achimas was sitting in the Siberia tavern, where secondhand dealers and the more prosperous professional beggars gathered. He was chatting with a promising ragamuffin whose eyes shifted their focus with that particular alacrity found only among thieves and dealers in stolen goods.

Achimas treated his neighbor to some bad vodka and made himself out to be a cunning but none-too-bright assistant from a haberdashery shop on Tverskaya Street. When he mentioned that his master kept an enormous fortune in cash in the safe, and if only some knowledgeable person would teach him how to open the lock, it would be no problem to take two or three hundred out of it once or twice a week — nobody would miss it — the ragamuffin’s eyes glittered: The foolish prey had delivered itself straight into his hands.

“Misha’s the one you need,” the local expert said confidently. “He’ll do a nice neat job.”

Achimas put on a doubtful expression and asked: “Is he a man with brains? Not some cheap beggar?”

“Who, Little Misha?” said the ragamuffin, giving Achimas a disdainful look. “You look into the Hard Labor this evening; Misha’s lads are in there drinking every night. I’ll call around and drop them a word about you. They’ll give you a grand reception.”

The ragamuffin’s eyes glittered — he evidently had high hopes that Little Misha would pay him a commission for such a nice fat lead.

Achimas was ensconced in the Hard Labor from early in the evening. But he hadn’t arrived dressed as a shop assistant; now he was a blind beggar, dressed in rags and bast sandals, and he had slipped small transparent sheets of calf’s bladder under his eyelids. He could see through them as if he were looking through fog, but they gave a convincing impression of his eyes being obscured by cataracts. Achimas knew from experience that blind men aroused no suspicion and nobody paid any attention to them. If a blind man sat quietly, the people around him stopped noticing him altogether.

He sat quietly. Not so much watching as listening. A company of tipsy men who were clearly bandits had gathered at a table a short distance away. They could be from Misha’s gang, but the agile little weasel wasn’t among them.

Events started moving when darkness had already fallen outside the dim glass of the basement windows.

Achimas took no notice of the new arrivals when they first came in. There were two of them: a junk dealer and a bandy-legged Kirghiz in a greasy kaftan. A minute later another one arrived — a hunchback doubled right over to the ground. It would never have occurred to him that they might be detectives. You had to give the Moscow police their due; they certainly knew their job. And yet somehow the disguised undercover agents were spotted.

It was all over in a moment. Everything was peaceful and quiet and then two of them — the junk dealer and the Kirghiz — were stretched out, probably dead, the hunchback was lying stunned on the floor, and one of the bandits was rolling about and screaming that it ‘hurt something awful’ in a repulsive voice that sounded fake.

The one Achimas had been waiting for appeared on the scene soon after that. A nervous, agile little dandy wearing European clothes, but with his trousers tucked into a pair of box-calf boots polished to a high gleam. Achimas was familiar with this particular criminal type, which he classified according to his own system as ‘weasels” — minor, but dangerous, predators. It was strange that Little Misha had risen to a position of such prominence in Moscow’s criminal underworld. “Weasels’ usually became stool pigeons or double agents.

Never mind; it would be clear soon enough what kind of character he really was.

They dragged the dead police agents behind a partition and carried the stunned one away somewhere else.

Misha and his cutthroats sat down at their table and began eating and drinking. The one who had been lying on the floor, groaning, soon fell silent, but the event passed unnoticed. It was half an hour later before the bandits suddenly remembered and drank ‘to the repose of the soul of Senya Lomot,’ and Little Misha, with his thin voice, delivered a heartfelt speech, half of which consisted of odd words that Achimas didn’t understand. The speaker respectfully described the dead man as a ‘smooth operator,’ and all the others nodded in agreement. The wake didn’t last for long. They dragged Lomot away by the legs to the same place where they’d taken the two dead police agents, and the feasting continued as if nothing special had happened.

Achimas tried not to miss a single word of the bandits’ conversation. The longer it continued, the more convinced he became that they knew nothing about the million rubles. Perhaps Misha had pulled the job on his own, without any help from his comrades in crime.

In any case, he couldn’t get away now. Achimas only had to wait for the right moment to have a little confidential talk with him.

When it was almost morning and the inn had emptied, Misha stood up and said loudly, “That’s enough talk. I don’t know about you, but I’m going to cuddle up close with Fiska. But first let’s have our little chat with the police spy.”

Laughing and guffawing, the entire gang went behind the bar and disappeared into the depths of the basement.

Achimas looked around. The innkeeper had been snoring away behind the planking partition for a long time already, and the only two customers left were a man and a woman who had drunk themselves unconscious. This was the right time.

Behind the counter was a dark corridor. Achimas could see a dimly lit rectangle ahead of him and hear muted voices coming from it. A cellar?

Achimas removed the membrane from one eye and cautiously glanced down. All five of the bandits were there. He would have to wait for them to finish off the fake hunchback and take them down quietly one by one when they started climbing back up.

But things didn’t turn out that way.

The police agent turned out to be nobody’s patsy. Achimas had never seen skill like it before. The ‘hunchback’ dealt with the entire gang in a matter of seconds. Without even getting up, he jerked one hand and then the other and two of the bandits grabbed frantically at their throats. Were those knives he had thrown at them? The police agent broke the skulls of another two bandits with a most curious device — a stick of wood on a chain. It was incredible — so simple and yet so effective.

But Achimas was even more impressed by the deftness with which the hunchback carried out his interrogation of Misha. Now he knew everything that he needed to know. He hid in the shadows and followed the detective and his prisoner through the dark labyrinth without making a sound.

They went in through some door and a moment later he heard the sound of shots. Who had come out on top? Achimas was sure that it wouldn’t be Misha. And if he were right, it made no sense to go barging in and getting himself shot by such an adroit police agent. Better ambush him in the corridor. No, it was too dark. He might miss and not kill him with the first shot.

Achimas went back to the inn and lay down on a bench.

The dexterous detective appeared almost immediately and — what a pleasant surprise! — he had the briefcase. Should Achimas shoot or wait? The hunchback was holding his revolver at the ready, his reactions were lightning-fast, and he would start shooting at the slightest movement. Achimas squinted with the eye that had no membrane in it. Was that the familiar Herstal? Could this be the same ‘merchant’ who had been at Knabe ‘s apartment?

Events unfolded with dizzying speed as the detective arrested the innkeeper and found his men, one of whom, the Kirghiz, was still alive.

An interesting detail: When the hunchback was bandaging his friend’s head with a towel, they spoke to each other in Japanese. Miracles would never cease — a Japanese in Khitrovka! Achimas was familiar with the fluent rolling sounds of that exotic tongue from a job of three years before, when he had carried out a commission in Hong Kong. The police agent called the Japanese ‘Masa’.

Now that the disguised detective was no longer feigning an old man’s trembling voice, Achimas thought that he sounded familiar. He listened more closely — was that really Mr. Fandorin? A truly resourceful young man, there was no denying it. You didn’t meet many of his kind.

And Achimas decided that it definitely wasn’t worth taking any risks. You had to be doubly careful with an individual like that, especially since the detective was not letting his guard down — he kept darting glances in all directions and his Herstal was always close at hand.

The three of them — Fandorin, the Japanese, and the innkeeper with his hands tied — went outside. Achimas watched them through the dusty window. The detective, still clutching the briefcase, went off to look for a cab; the Japanese stayed behind to guard the prisoner. The innkeeper tried to kick out, but the short oriental hissed angrily and knocked the strapping Tartar off his feet with a single swift movement.

I’ll have to keep chasing the briefcase, thought Achimas. Sooner or later Mr. Fandorin will calm down and lower his guard. Meanwhile, I should check to see if my debtor Little Misha is dead or alive.

Achimas walked quickly through the dark corridors and pulled at the half-open door. The little room behind it was dimly lit. There didn’t seem to be anyone there.

He went across and felt the crumpled bed — it was still warm.

Then Achimas heard a low groan from the corner. Swinging around sharply, he saw a huddled figure. It was Little Misha, sitting on the floor, clutching his stomach with both hands. He raised his moist, gleaming eyes and his mouth twisted pathetically as he uttered a thin, plaintive whine.

“Brother, it’s me, Misha… I’ve been shot. Help me… Who are you, brother?”

Achimas clicked open the blade of his clasp knife, leaned down, and slit the sitting man’s throat. There would be less bother that way. And it was a debt repaid.

He ran back to the inn and lay down on the bench.

Outside, hooves clattered and wheels squeaked. Fandorin came running in, this time without the briefcase, and disappeared into the corridor. He had gone to get Little Misha. But where was the briefcase? Had he left it with the Japanese?

Achimas swung his legs down off the bench.

No, there was no time.

He lay down again, beginning to feel angry. But he mustn’t allow his exasperation to affect him — that was the source of all errors.

Fandorin emerged from the bowels of the underground labyrinth with his face a contorted mask, swinging the Herstal in all directions. He glanced briefly at the blind man and dashed out of the inn.

Outside a voice shouted: “Let’s go! Drive hard to Malaya Nikitskaya Street, to the Department of Gendarmes!”

Achimas pulled out his cataracts. He had to hurry.

FOURTEEN

He drove up to the Department of Gendarmes in a fast cab, jumped out as it was still moving, and asked the sentry impatiently: “Two of our men just brought in a prisoner. Where are they?”

The gendarme wasn’t at all surprised by the peremptory tone of the determined man who was dressed in rags, but had a gleam of authority in his eyes.

“They went straight through to see His Excellency. Less than two minutes ago. And the prisoner’s being booked. He’s in the duty office.”

“Damn the blasted prisoner!” the disguised officer exclaimed with an irritable gesture. “I need Fandorin. You say he went to see His Excellency?”

“Yes, sir. Up the stairs and along the corridor on the left.”

“I know the way well enough!”

Achimas ran up the stairs from the vestibule to the second floor. He looked to the right. From behind the white door at the far end of the corridor he could hear the clash of metal on metal. It must be the gymnastics hall. Nothing dangerous there.

He turned to the left. The broad corridor was empty, with only occasional bustling messengers in uniforms or civilian clothes emerging from one office door, only to disappear immediately into another.

Achimas froze where he stood: After a long sequence of absurd misfortunes and reverses, Fortune had finally exchanged her wrath for favor. The Japanese was sitting outside a door bearing a plaque that read reception, holding the briefcase in his hands.

Fandorin must be reporting to the chief of police about the events of the night. Why had he gone in without the briefcase? He wanted to flaunt his success; he was playing for effect. The night had been full of events, and the detective would have a long story to tell, so Achimas had a few minutes to spare.

Walk up without hurrying. Stab him under the collarbone. Take the briefcase. Leave the same way he had come. All over in a moment.

Achimas considered the Japanese more closely. Gazing straight ahead, holding the briefcase with both hands, he looked like a taut spring. In Hong Kong, Achimas had been able to observe the Japanese mastery of unarmed combat. The masters of English boxing or French wrestling couldn’t possibly compare with it. This short fellow had thrown the massive Tartar innkeeper to the ground in a single movement. All over in a moment?

He couldn’t take the risk. If there was a hitch, the slightest commotion would bring people running from every direction.

He had to think — time was slipping away!

Achimas swung around and walked quickly toward the sound of clashing rapiers. When he opened the door marked officers’ gymnastics hall, he saw a dozen or so figures in masks and white fencing costumes. All playing at musketeers.

Aha, there was the door to the changing room.

He took off his rags and bast sandals, put on the first uniform jacket that came to hand, and chose a pair of boots that were his size — that was important. Hurry, hurry.

As he trotted back briskly in the opposite direction, his eye was caught by a plaque bearing the word mailroom.

The petty functionary behind the counter was sorting envelopes.

“Is there any correspondence for Captain Pevtsov?” asked Achimas, giving the first name that came to mind.

“No, sir.”

“Well, just take a look, will you?”

The functionary shrugged, stuck his nose into the ledger, and began rustling through the pages.

Unseen, Achimas snatched an official envelope with seals off the counter and slipped it up his cuff.

“All right, don’t bother. I’ll come back later.”

He strode smartly up to the Japanese and saluted.

“Mr. Masa.”

The oriental jumped to his feet and greeted the officer with a low bow.

“I have come to you on the instructions of Mr. Fandorin. Do you understand?”

The Japanese bowed even lower. Excellent; he didn’t have a word of Russian.

“Here are my written instructions to collect the briefcase from you.”

Achimas held out the envelope, pointing at the briefcase with it.

The Japanese hesitated. Achimas waited, counting off the passing seconds. The hand hidden behind his back was clutching a knife. Another five seconds and he would have to strike. He couldn’t wait any longer.

Five, four, three, two…

The Japanese bowed once again, gave him the briefcase, took the envelope with both hands, and pressed it to his forehead. Apparently his time to die had not yet come.

Achimas saluted, turned around, and walked into the reception area. He couldn’t possibly leave by the corridor — the Japanese would have found that strange.

A spacious room. Straight ahead, the police chief’s office. Fandorin must be in there. On the left a window. On the right a plaque with the words SECRET SECTION.

The adjutant was hovering outside his boss’s door, which was most opportune. Achimas gestured reassuringly to him and disappeared through the door on the right. His luck held again — Fortune was growing kinder with every moment. It was not an office, where he would have had to improvise, but a short corridor with windows overlooking a courtyard.

Farewell, officers and gentlemen.

Achimas Welde moved on to the third and final point in his plan of action.

The dashing captain of gendarmes walked up to the office floor of the governor- general’s house and asked the attendant in a curt voice where Court Counselor Khurtinsky’s office was, then strode off in the direction indicated, swinging his heavy briefcase.

Khurtinsky greeted the ‘urgent courier from St. Petersburg’ with a smile of phony amiability. Achimas also smiled, but sincerely, without a trace of pretense — he had been looking forward to this meeting for a long time.

“Hello, you scoundrel,” he said, gazing into the dull gray eyes of Mr. Nemo, Monsieur NN’s crafty helot. “I am Klonov. This is Sobolev’s briefcase. And this is your death.” He clicked open his clasp knife.

The court counselor’s face turned an intense white and his eyes an intense black, because the expanding pupils completely consumed the surrounding irises.

“I can explain everything,” the head of the secret chancelry mouthed almost soundlessly. “Only don’t kill me!”

“If I wanted to kill you, you would already be lying on the ground with your throat slit open. What I want from you is something else,” said Achimas, raising his voice in imitation of icy fury.

“Anything at all! Only for God’s sake keep your voice down!”

Khurtinsky stuck his head out into the reception area and told his secretary not to let anyone through.

“Listen, I can explain everything,” he whispered when he came back.

“You can explain to the Grand Duke, you Judas,” Achimas interrupted. “Sit down and write! Write!” He waved his knife in the air and Khurtinsky staggered backward in horror.

“All right, all right. But what shall I write?”

“The truth.”

Achimas stood behind the trembling functionary.

The court counselor glanced around in fright, but his eyes were already gray again, not black. No doubt the cunning Mr. Nemo was already pondering how he was going to wriggle out of this situation.

“Write:”

Pyotr Khurtinsky, am guilty of having committed a crime against my duty out of avarice and of having betrayed him whom I should have served faithfully and assisted in every way possible in his onerous obligations. God is my judge. I beg to inform Your Imperial Highness that…

As soon as Khurtinsky had written the word ‘judge,’ Achimas smashed his cervical vertebrae with a blow of his hand.

He hung the corpse up on the cord from the transom and regarded the look of surprise on the dead man’s face with satisfaction. It was not profitable to play the fool with Achimas Welde.

That was all. His business in Moscow was concluded.

Still wearing his gendarme uniform, Achimas sent a telegram from the post office to Monsieur NN at his secret address. He knew from the newspapers that Grand Duke Kirill Alexandrovich had left for St. Petersburg the previous day.

The text of the telegram was as follows:

Payment has been received. Mr. Nemo proved to be an untrustworthy partner. Difficulties have arisen with Mr. Fandorin of the Moscow branch of the company. Your good offices are required. Klonov.

After a moment’s hesitation, he gave his address at the Trinity. It involved a certain degree of risk, of course, but only within the bounds of what he considered acceptable. Now that he knew who NN was, the likelihood of a double cross seemed insignificant. NN was too important a figure to bother with such trivia.

And he really did need the Grand Duke’s help. The operation had been concluded, but the last thing he wanted was a police investigation following his trail back to Europe. That wouldn’t suit the future Count of Santa Croce at all. Mr. Fandorin was too perspicacious and quickwitted. Let them restrain him a little.

After that he dropped into the Bryansk Station and bought a ticket for the Paris train. Tomorrow, at eight o’clock in the morning, Achimas Welde would leave the city in which he had carried out his final commission. A brilliant professional career had been concluded with appropriate verve.