Fandorin in English 1-10

Zurov tossed an exuberant lock of hair back from his forehead. “Ah yes, I forgot. You’re from the train.”

“From where?”

“That’s what I call it. Amalia—she’s a queen, after all—she needs a train, a train of men. The longer the better. Take a piece of well-meant advice: put her out of your head or you’re done for. Forget about her.”

“I can’t,” Erast Fandorin replied honestly.

“You’re still a babe in arms. Amalia’s bound to drag you down into the whirlpool, the way she’s dragged so many down already. Maybe the reason she took a shine to me was because I wouldn’t follow her into the whirlpool. I don’t need to—I have a whirlpool of my own. Not as deep as hers but still quite deep enough for me to drown in.”

“Do you love her?” Fandorin asked bluntly, claiming his privilege as the offended party.

“I’m afraid of her,” said Hippolyte with a dismal laugh, “more afraid than in love. And, anyway, it’s not love at all. Have you ever tried smoking opium?”

Fandorin shook his head.

“Once you’ve tried it, you’ll hanker after it for the rest of your life. That’s what she’s like. She won’t set me free! I can see perfectly well that she despises me and thinks I’m not really worth a damn, but she’s spotted something or other in me. Worse luck for me! You know, I’m glad she’s gone away, honest to God. Sometimes I used to think of killing her, the witch, strangling her with my own hands to stop her tormenting me. And she could tell, all right. Oh yes, brother, she’s clever. She was fond of me because she could play with me like with fire. First she would fan the flames, then she would blow them out, but all the time she knew that the fire might flare up and spread, and then she wouldn’t escape with her life. Otherwise what does she need me for?”

Erast Fandorin thought enviously that there was a great deal that might make a woman love the handsome Hippolyte, this devil-may-care hothead, without any need for flames. A handsome fellow like him was probably plagued by women. How was it that some people had such immoderate good luck? However, these were considerations that had nothing to do with the job at hand. He should be asking about business.

“Who is she, where from?”

“I don’t know. She doesn’t like to talk about herself very much. All I know is that she grew up abroad somewhere. I think it was in Switzerland, in some boarding school or other.”

“And where is she now?” asked Erast Fandorin, without really expecting he would have any luck.

Zurov, moreover, was clearly taking his time to reply, and Fandorin’s heart stood still.

“Why—are you that badly smitten?” the count inquired morosely, and a hostile grimace momentarily distorted his handsome, capricious features.

“Yes!”

“Ye-es, well, it makes no difference, if a moth is drawn to a candle flame it will be burned up anyway…”

Hippolyte rummaged among the decks of cards, unironed handkerchiefs, and shop bills on the table.

“Where is it, dammit? Ah, I remember.” He opened a Japanese lacquered box with a mother-of-pearl butterfly on the lid. “There you are. It arrived by municipal post.”

Erast Fandorin took the narrow envelope with trembling fingers. Written on it in a slanting, impetuous hand was: To His Excellency Count Hippolyte Zurov, Yakovo-Apostolsky Lane, at his own house. According to the postmark, the letter had been sent on the sixteenth of May, the day that Bezhetskaya had disappeared.

Inside, he discovered a short note in French, with no signature.

I am obliged to leave without taking my leave. Write to me at: London, Grey Street, the Winter Queen Hotel, for the attention of Miss Olsen. I am waiting. And do not dare to forget me.

“But I shall dare,” Hippolyte threatened vehemently, but then he immediately wilted. “At least, I shall try…Take it, Erasmus. Do whatever you like with it…Where are you going?”

“I must be off now,” said Fandorin, tucking the envelope into his pocket. “I have to hurry.”

“Well, well.” The count nodded pityingly. “Off you go, fly into the flame. It’s your life, not mine.”

Outside in the yard Erast Fandorin was overtaken by Jean carrying a bundle.

“Here you are, sir. You left this behind.”

“What is it?” Fandorin asked in annoyance, glancing around.

“Are you joking, sir? Your winnings. His Excellency ordered me to be sure to catch up with you and give them to you.”

ERAST FANDORIN had a most peculiar dream.

He was sitting at a desk in a classroom in his provincial gymnasium. He had dreams of this kind—usually alarming and unpleasant—quite frequently, in which he was once again a pupil at the gymnasium and had been called out to the front in a physics or algebra lesson and his mind was blank. However, this dream was not just miserable but genuinely terrifying. Fandorin simply could not comprehend the reason for this fear. He was not up at the blackboard but at his desk, with his classmates sitting around him: Ivan Brilling; Akhtyrtsev; some fine, handsome young fellow with a high, pale forehead and insolent brown eyes (Erast Fandorin knew this must Kokorin); two female pupils in white uniform aprons; and someone else sitting in front of Fandorin with his back turned to him. Fandorin was afraid of the fellow with his back to him and tried not to look his way, but he kept straining his neck to get a look at the girls—one dark haired and one light haired. They were sitting at their desks with their slim hands studiously clasped together in front of them. One turned out to be Amalia and the other Lizanka. The first shot him a searing glance from her huge black eyes and stuck her tongue out, while the second smiled bashfully and lowered her downy eyelashes. Then Fandorin noticed that Lady Astair was standing at the blackboard holding a pointer, and everything suddenly became clear to him: this was the latest English method of education, in which boys and girls were taught together. And very good, too. As though she had heard his thoughts, Lady Astair smiled sadly and said, “This is not simply coeducation—this is my class of orphans. You are all orphans, and I must set you on the path.”

“By your leave, my lady,” Fandorin said, surprised, “I happen to know for certain that Lizanka is not an orphan but the daughter of a full privy counselor.”

“Ah, my sweet boy,” said her ladyship, smiling even more sadly. “She is an innocent victim, and that is the same thing as an orphan.” The terrifying fellow in front of Fandorin slowly turned around and, staring straight at him with whitish, transparent eyes, whispered, “I, Azazel, am also an orphan.” He winked conspiratorially and, finally casting aside all restraint, said in Ivan Brilling’s voice, “And, therefore, my young friend, I shall be obliged to kill you, which I sincerely regret…Hey, Fandorin, don’t just sit there like a dummy. Fandorin!”

“Fandorin!” Someone was shaking him by the shoulder, rousing him from his terrifying nightmare. “Wake up now. It’s morning already.”

He shook himself awake and jumped to his feet, turning his head this way and that. Apparently he had been dozing in his chief’s office, overcome by sleep right there at the desk. The joyful light of morning was pouring in through the window between the open curtains, and Ivan Brilling was standing there beside him, dressed as a petit bourgeois in a cap with a cloth peak, a pleated caftan, and mud-stained, concertina-creased boots.

“Dropped off, did you, couldn’t wait?” Brilling asked merrily. “Pardon my fancy dress. I had to go out in the night on an urgent matter. Go and get a wash, will you—stop gawping like that. Quick march.”

While Fandorin was on his way to get washed, he recalled the events of the previous night, remembering how he had dashed away from Hip-polyte’s house at breakneck speed, how he had leapt into the cab with its somnolent driver and ordered him to drive hard to Miasnitskaya Street. He had been so impatient to tell his chief about his success, but Brilling had not been at his desk. Erast Petrovich had first dealt with a certain urgent matter, then sat down in the office to wait, and he had fallen asleep.

When he got back to the office Ivan Brilling had already changed into a light two-piece suit and was drinking tea with lemon. There was a second steaming glass in a silver holder standing opposite him, and there were bagels and plain rolls lying on a tray.

“Let’s have some breakfast,” Brilling suggested, “and we can talk at the same time. I already know the basic story of your nighttime adventures, but I have a few questions.”

“How can you know?” asked Fandorin, feeling aggrieved. He had been anticipating the pleasure of telling his story and—to be honest—had intended to omit certain details.

“One of my agents was at Zurov’s. I got back about an hour ago, but it would have been a shame to wake you. I sat and read his report. Fascinating reading—I didn’t even find time to get changed.”

He slapped his hand down on several sheets of paper covered with fine handwriting.

“He’s a clever agent, but his prose is terribly flowery. He imagines he has literary talent and writes to the newspapers under the name of Maximus Zorky, dreams of a career as a censor. Listen to this—you’ll find it interesting. Where is it…Ah yes.”

Description of the subject.

Name: Erasmus von Dorn or von Doren (determined by ear).

Age: not more than twenty.

Verbal portrait

Height: two arshins, eight vershoks*;

Build: skinny;

Hair: black and straight;

Beard and mustache: none, and appears unlikely to shave; eyes bright blue, close-set, slightly slanting toward the corners; skin white and clear;

Nose: narrow and straight;

Ears: set close to the head, small, with short lobes.

Distinctive feature: his cheeks are always flushed.

Personal impressions: typical representative of vicious and depraved gilded youth, shows quite exceptional promise as an incorrigible duelist. After the events described above he and the gambler withdrew to the latter’s study. They talked for twenty-two minutes. They spoke quietly, with pauses. Because of the door I could hear almost nothing, but I did clearly make out the word ‘opium’ and also something about fire. I felt it was necessary to shadow von Doren, but he evidently discovered my presence and escaped me most cleverly, leaving in a cab. I suggest…

“Well, the rest is not very interesting.” Brilling looked at Fandorin with curiosity. “So what was it you were discussing about opium? Don’t keep me waiting. I’m burning up with curiosity.”

Fandorin gave a brief account of the conversation with Hippolyte and showed Brilling the letter. Brilling heard him out most attentively, asked for clarification of several points, and then fell silent, gazing out the window. The pause continued for a long time, about a minute. Erast Fandorin sat quietly, afraid of disturbing the thinking process, although he had his own thoughts, too.

“I am very pleased with you, Fandorin,” his chief said, coming back to life. “You have been quite brilliantly effective. In the first place, it is absolutely clear that Zurov is not involved in the murder and does not suspect the nature of your activity. Otherwise, would he have given you Amalia’s address? That gets rid of scenario three for us. In the second place, you have made a lot of progress with the Bezhetskaya scenario. Now we know where to look for that lady. Bravo. I intend to set all of the agents who are now free, including you, on to scenario four, which seems to me to be the basic one.” He jabbed his finger toward the blackboard, where the fourth circle contained the white chalk letters NO.

“How do you mean?” Fandorin asked anxiously. “But, by your leave, chief—”

“Last night I came across a very promising kind of trail that leads to a certain dacha outside Moscow,” Ivan Brilling declared with quite evident satisfaction (that accounted for the mud-spattered boots). “Revolutionaries—extremely dangerous ones—use it as a meeting place. There also appears to be a thread leading to Akhtyrtsev. We shall work on it. I shall need everybody. And it seems to me that the Bezhetskaya scenario is a blind alley. In any case, it is not urgent. We’ll forward a request to the English via diplomatic channels and ask them to detain this Miss Olsen until the matter is clarified, and that will be an end of that.”

“That’s exactly what we must not do under any circumstances!” Fandorin cried out so vehemently that Ivan Brilling was quite taken aback.

“Why not?”

“Surely you can see that it all fits together perfectly!” Erast Fandorin began very quickly, afraid of being interrupted. “I don’t know about the nihilists—it’s entirely possible, and I understand its importance—but this is also a matter of importance, state importance! Look at the picture we have taking shape, Ivan Franzevich. Bezhetskaya has gone into hiding in London—that’s one.” (He did not even notice that he had adopted his chief’s manner of expressing his thoughts.) “Her butler is English and a very suspicious character, the kind that will slit your throat without batting an eyelid—that’s two. The white-eyed man who killed Akhtyrtsev spoke with an accent and also looks like an Englishman—that’s three. Now for number four: Lady Astair is, of course, a most noble creature, but she is also an Englishwoman. And Kokorin’s estate, say what you will, has gone to her. Surely it’s obvious that Bezhetskaya deliberately prompted her admirers to draw up their wills in favor of the Englishwoman!”

“Stop, stop,” said Brilling with a frown. “What exactly are you driving at? Espionage?”

“It’s obvious, surely,” Erast Fandorin said with a flurry of his arms. “English plots. You know yourself the state of relations with England at the moment. I don’t wish to say anything untoward about Lady Astair—she probably doesn’t know a thing—but her organization can be used as a cover, as a Trojan horse for infiltrating Russia.”

“Oh yes,” said his chief with an ironical smile. “Queen Victoria and Mr. Disraeli are not satisfied with the gold of Africa and the diamonds of India—they want Petrusha Kokorin’s fabric mill and Nikolenka Akhtyrtsev’s three thousand desyatins* of land.”

And then Fandorin played his trump card.

“Not the mill and not even the money! Do you remember the inventory of their property? I didn’t pay any attention to it at first either. Among his other companies Kokorin had a shipbuilding yard in Libava, and the armed forces place orders there—I made inquiries.”

“When did you find time for that?”

“While I was waiting for you. I sent an inquiry by telegraph to the Ministry of the Navy. They work a night shift there, too.”

“I see. Well, well. What else?”

“The fact that apart from his land, houses, and capital, Akhtyrtsev also had an oil well in Baku, from his aunt. I read in the newspapers that the English are dreaming of getting their hands on Caspian oil. And here you have it—by perfectly legal means! And see how securely planned it is: either the shipyard in Libava or the oil, in either case the English come out of it with something! You act as you wish, Ivan Franzevich,” said Fandorin, becoming impassioned, “but I won’t leave it at this. I’ll carry out all your assignments, but after work I’ll go digging for clues myself. And I’ll get to the bottom of this.”

Brilling began gazing out the window again, and this time he was silent for even longer than before. Erast Fandorin was a bundle of raw nerves, but his character stood the test.

Finally Brilling sighed and began speaking—slowly, hesitantly, still thinking something through as he went along. “Most likely it’s all nonsense. Edgar Allan Poe, Eugene Sue. Meaningless coincidences. However, you are right about one thing—we won’t contact the English…We can’t act through our agent at the London embassy either. If you are mistaken—and you are most certainly mistaken—we shall make total fools of ourselves. If we are to assume that you are correct, the embassy will not be able to do anything in any case. The English will hide Bezhetskaya or tell us some pack of lies…And the hands of our embassy staff are tied—they’re too exposed…So it’s decided!” Ivan Brilling swung his fist energetically through the air. “Of course, Fandorin, you would have come in useful to me here, but, as the common folk say, love won’t be forced. I’ve read your file. I know you speak not only French but also German and English. Have your own way—go to London to see your femme fatale. I won’t impose any instructions on you—I believe in your intuition. I’ll give you one man in the embassy—Pyzhov is his name. His post is that of a humble clerk, like your own, but he deals with other matters. At the Ministry of Foreign Affairs he is listed as a provincial secretary, but in our line he holds a different rank, a higher one. A gentleman of many and varied talents. When you get there, go straight to him. He is extremely efficient. I remain convinced, however, that your journey will be wasted. But in the final analysis you have earned the right to make a mistake. You’ll get a look at Europe, travel a bit at the state’s expense. Although I believe you now have means of your own?” Brilling squinted at the bundle lying unattended on a chair.

Erast Fandorin started, dumbfounded at these words.

“My apologies, those are my winnings. Nine thousand six hundred rubles—I counted them. I wanted to hand them in at the cashier’s office, but it was closed.”

“Why, dammit?” said Brilling dismissively. “Are you in your right mind? What do you think the cashier would write in the receipts ledger? Revenue from Collegiate Registrar Fandorin’s game of stoss?…Hmm, wait a moment. It’s not really proper for a mere registrar to go on a foreign assignment.”

He sat down at the desk, dipped a pen into the inkwell, and began writing, speaking the words aloud. “Now then. “Urgent telegram. To Prince Mikhail Alexandrovich Korchakov, personally. Copy to Adjutant General Lavrentii; Arkadievich Mizinov. Your Excellency, in the interests of a matter of which you are aware, and also in recognition of exceptional services rendered, I request you to promote Collegiate Registrar Erast Petrovich Fandorin immediately and without taking into account his length of service…” Ah, all right then, straight up to titular. Not such a very big cheese, either, but even so…“to titular counselor. I also request you to list Fandorin temporarily in the department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the post of diplomatic courier, first class.” That’s so that you won’t be delayed at the border,” Brilling explained. “Right. Date. Signature. By the way, you really will deliver diplomatic post along the way—to Berlin, Vienna, and Paris. For the sake of secrecy, in order not to arouse unnecessary suspicion. No objections?” Ivan Brilling’s eyes glinted mischievously.

“None at all,” Erast Fandorin mumbled, his thoughts still lagging behind the pace of events.

“And from Paris, already under a false identity, you will make your way to London. What was the name of that hotel?”

CHAPTER TEN

which a blue attachй case features prominently

ON THE TWENTY-EIGHTH OF JUNE IN THE western style, or the sixteenth of June in the Russian style, a hired carriage pulled up in front of the Winter Queen Hotel on Grey Street. The driver in his top hat and white gloves jumped down from his box, folded out the step, and bowed as he opened the black lacquered door bearing the legend:

DUNSTER & DUNSTER

Since 1848

LONDON REGAL TOURS

The first item to emerge from the door was a morocco traveling boot studded with silver nails, which was followed by a prosperous-looking youthful gentleman sporting a bushy mustache that suited his fresh-faced complexion remarkably badly, a Tyrolean hat with a feather, and a broad Alpine cloak. The young man leapt down to the pavement in sprightly fashion, glanced around him at the quiet, entirely unremark able little street, and fixed his agitated gaze on the hotel, a rather unprepossessing four-story detached structure in the Georgian style that had clearly seen better times.

After hesitating for a moment, the gentleman pronounced in Russian, “Ah, all right then.”

He then followed this enigmatic phrase by walking up the steps and entering the vestibule.

Literally one second later someone in a black cloak emerged from the public house located across the road, pulled a tall cap with a shiny peak down over his eyes, and began striding to and fro in front of the doors of the hotel.

This remarkable circumstance, however, escaped the attention of the new arrival, who was already standing at the counter and surveying a bleary portrait of some medieval lady in a gorgeous jabot—no doubt the ‘Winter Queen’ herself. The porter, who had been dozing behind the counter, greeted the foreigner rather indifferently, but on observing him give the boy, who had done no more than carry in his traveling bag, an entire shilling for his trouble, he welcomed him again far more affably, this time addressing the new arrival not merely as ‘sir,’ but ‘Your Honor.’

The young man inquired whether there were any rooms available and demanded the very best, with hot water and newspapers, before entering himself in the hotel’s register of guests as Erasmus von Dorn from Helsingfors, following which, for doing absolutely nothing at all, the porter received a half sovereign and promptly began addressing this half-witted foreigner as ‘your lordship.’

Meanwhile, ‘Mr. von Dorn’ found himself suffering rather grave doubts. It was hard to believe that the brilliant Amalia Kazimirovna Bezhetskaya could be staying at this third-rate hotel. Something here was clearly not right.

In his bewilderment and dismay, he even asked the zealously attentive porter, now bent almost double, whether there was not another hotel of the same name in London. He received in reply a sworn oath assuring him that indeed there was not, nor ever had been, if one did not take into account the Winter Queen Hotel that had stood on the very same site but had burned to ashes more than a hundred years previously.

Could it really all have been in vain—the twenty-day round-trip through Europe, and the false mustache, and the luxurious carriage hired at Waterloo station instead of an ordinary cab and, finally, the half sovereign expended to no effect?

Well, you’ll just have to earn your baksheesh from me, my dear chap, thought Erast Fandorin—for let us call him so, disregarding his false identity.

“Tell me, my good man, has there not been a guest staying here by the name of Miss Olsen?” he asked with poorly feigned casualness, leaning his elbows on the counter.

Entirely predictable as the reply was, it pierced Erast Fandorin to the heart.

“No, my lord, no lady by that name is staying here, or ever has.”

Discerning the dismay in the guest’s eyes, the porter paused for effect before declaring reticently, “However, the name mentioned by your lordship is not entirely unfamiliar to me.”

Swaying slightly to one side, Erast Fandorin fished another gold coin out of his pocket. “Go on.”

The porter leaned forward in a gust of cheap eau de cologne and whispered, “Post arrives here in the name of that individual. Every evening at ten o’clock a certain Mr. Morbid—apparently a servant or a butler—arrives and collects the letters.”

“Immensely tall, with big, light-colored side-whiskers, looking as if he has never smiled in all his life?” Erast Fandorin asked quickly.

“Yes, my lord, that’s him.”

“And do the letters come often?”

“Yes, my lord, almost every day, and sometimes more than one. Today, for instance”—the porter cast a meaningful glance behind himself in the direction of the pigeonholes on the wall—“there are actually three of them.”

The hint was immediately taken.

“I would quite like to take a glance at the envelopes, merely out of idle curiosity,” Fandorin remarked, tapping on the counter with the next half sovereign.

The porter’s eyes began glittering feverishly. Something quite incredible was happening, something beyond the grasp of reason but extremely pleasant.

“Generally speaking, that is most strictly forbidden, milord, but…if it’s just a matter of glancing at the envelopes…”

Erast Fandorin seized the envelopes avidly, but there was a disappointment in store for him—the envelopes carried no return address. His third piece of gold had apparently been expended in vain. But then his chief had sanctioned all outlays “within reason and in the interests of the case.” What did the postmarks say?

The postmarks gave Fandorin cause for reflection: one letter was from Stuttgart, another from Washington, and the third all the way from Rio de Janeiro. Well now!

“And has Miss Olsen been receiving correspondence here for long?” Erast Fandorin asked, calculating in his head how long it would take letters to cross the ocean. And the address here also had had to be communicated to Brazil! That put a rather strange complexion on the whole business. Bezhetskaya could not possibly have arrived in England more than four weeks previously.

The reply was unexpected.

“For a long time, my lord. When I started working here—and that’s four years ago now—the letters were already arriving.”

“How’s that? Are you not confusing things?”

“I assure you, my lord. Mr. Morbid, it is true, only began working for Miss Olsen recently, from the early summer, I believe. In any case, before him a Mr. Mobius used to come to collect the correspondence, and before that a Mr…mm, I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten what his name was. He was such an inconspicuous gentleman and not very talkative.”

Erast Fandorin desperately wanted to take a look inside the envelopes. He cast a quizzical glance at his informer. He would probably not hold out against a further proposition. At this point, however, our newly fledged titular counselor and diplomatic courier, first class, had a rather better idea.

“You say this Mr. Morbid comes every evening at ten?”

“Like clockwork, my lord.”

Erast Fandorin laid a fourth half sovereign on the counter, then leaned across and whispered something in the lucky porter’s ear.

THE TIME REMAINING until ten o’clock was employed in a most productive fashion.

First of all, Erast Fandorin oiled and loaded his courier’s Colt. Then he retreated to the bathroom and by alternately pressing the hot water and cold water pedals, in fifteen minutes or so he had filled the bath. He luxuriated for half an hour, and by the time the water cooled, his plan of subsequent action was already fully formed.

After gluing his mustache back into place and admiring himself briefly in the mirror, Fandorin attired himself as an inconspicuous Englishman in black bowler hat, black jacket, black trousers, and black necktie. In Moscow he would probably have been taken for an undertaker, but in London he felt certain that he would pass for the invisible man. And it would be just the thing for the night: conceal the shirtfront with the lapels, pull down the cuffs, and dissolve into the embrace of darkness—and that was extremely important for his plan.

There still remained an hour and a half for a stroll to familiarize himself with the neighborhood. Erast Fandorin turned off Grey Street onto a broad thoroughfare entirely filled with carriages and almost immediately found himself in front of the famous Old Vic Theatre, which was described in detail in his guidebook. Walking on a little further he spied—oh, wonder!—the familiar profile of Waterloo Station, from which the carriage had taken a good forty minutes to transport him to the Winter Queen—that scoundrel of a driver had charged him five shillings! And then there hove into view the gray Thames, bleak and uninviting in the evening twilight. Gazing at its dirty waters, Erast Fandorin shivered as he was inexplicably seized by some macabre presentiment. The fact was that he simply did not feel at ease in this strange city. The people he met looked straight past him, and not one of them so much as glanced at his face, which you must admit would have been quite inconceivable in Moscow. And yet Fandorin was haunted by the strange feeling that some hostile gaze was trained on his back. Several times the young man glanced around, and once he even thought he noticed a figure in black dodge back behind a tall, round theater billboard. After that, Erast Fandorin took a firm grip on himself, abused himself for being overanxious, and did not look back over his shoulder again. Confound those nerves of his! He even began wondering whether he ought to delay putting his plan into action until the following evening. Then it would be possible to pay a visit to the embassy in the morning and meet the mysterious clerk Pyzhov who had been mentioned by his chief. But such a cowardly excess of caution was dishonorable, and he did not wish to lose any more time. Almost three weeks had been wasted on trifling matters already.

The journey around Europe had proved less pleasant than Fandorin had anticipated in his first access of elation. Beyond the border post of Verzhbolov he had been depressed by the quite striking dissimilarity of the locality to the unpretentious open spaces of his homeland. As he looked out the window of his train, Erast Fandorin had kept expecting that the neat little villages and toy towns would come to an end and a normal landscape would begin, but the farther the train traveled from the Russian border, the whiter the houses became and the more picturesque the towns. Fandorin’s mood became grimmer and grimmer, but he had refused to allow himself to be reduced to sniveling. In the final analysis, he told himself, all that glisters is not gold, but nonetheless at heart he still felt a little nauseated.

After a while he had grown used to it and it did not seem so bad. It even began to seem as though Moscow was not so very much dirtier than Berlin, and the Kremlin with its gold-domed churches was finer than anything that the Germans had ever dreamed of. It was something else that had really played on his nerves: the military agent at the Russian embassy, to whom Fandorin had transmitted a sealed package, had ordered him to travel no further and await the arrival of secret correspondence for delivery to Vienna. The waiting had stretched into a week, and Erast Fandorin had grown weary of sauntering along the shady Unter den Linden, and weary of admiring the plump swans in the Berlin parks.

The same story was repeated in Vienna, only this time he had been obliged to wait five days for a package destined for the military agent in Paris. Erast Fandorin had fretted nervously, imagining that ‘Miss Olsen,’ not having received any word from her Hippolyte, must have moved out of the hotel and now it would never be possible to find her again. To calm his nerves Fandorin had spent long periods sitting in the cafes, eating large numbers of sweet almond pastries and drinking cream soda by the liter.

When it came to Paris, he had taken matters into his own hands, calling into the Russian legation for just five minutes, handing the documents to the colonel from the embassy, and declaring that he was on a special assignment and could not delay even for an hour. To punish himself for the fruitless waste of so much time he had not even looked around Paris, beyond taking a drive in a fiacre along the boulevards that had been so recently extended by Baron Haussmann, and then going straight to the Gare du Nord. There would be time for all that afterward, on his return journey.

AT A QUARTER TO TEN Erast Fandorin was already seated in the foyer of the Winter Queen Hotel, having concealed himself behind a copy of The Times with a hole pierced in it for purposes of observation. Waiting outside was a cab prudently hired in advance. Following instructions received, the porter demonstratively avoided looking in the direction of the guest who was rather overdressed for summer, even striving to turn his back on him completely.

At three minutes past ten the bell jangled, the door swung open, and a giant of a man clad in gray livery entered. It was him, the butler, John Karlovich! Fandorin pressed his eye up against a page bearing a description of a ball given by the Prince of Wales.

The porter cast a furtive glance at Mr. van Dorn, who had become so engrossed in his reading, and the villain even began raising and lowering his shaggy eyebrows, but fortunately the object of study either failed to notice this or else he regarded it as beneath his dignity to look around.

The waiting cab proved most opportune, for it turned out that the butler had not arrived on foot but in an ‘egotist,’ a single-seater carriage, to which a sturdy little black horse was harnessed. No less opportune was the persistent drizzle, which obliged John Karlovich to raise the carriage’s leather hood, so that now, no matter how hard he might try, he would be unable to detect anyone shadowing him.

Evincing not the slightest sign of surprise at the order to follow the man in gray livery, the cabby cracked his long whip, and phase one of the plan was under way.

It grew dark. The streetlamps were lit, but not knowing London, Erast Fandorin very quickly lost his bearings among the tangle of identical stone buildings in this alien, menacingly silent city. After a certain time the houses became lower and more scattered, and he thought he could see the indistinct outlines of trees drifting through the gloom. After another fifteen minutes there were large detached houses surrounded by gardens. The ‘egotist’ halted at one of these and disgorged a giant silhouette, which opened the tall barred gates. Leaning out of the cab, Fandorin saw the small carriage drive inside, following which the gates were closed again.

The quick-witted cabby stopped his horse, then looked around and asked, “Should I report this journey to the police, sir?”

“Here’s a crown for you, and decide that question for yourself,” replied Erast Fandorin, deciding that he would not ask the driver to wait—he was too smart by half. And Fandorin had no idea when he would be going back. Ahead lay total uncertainty.

Slipping over the fence proved to be quite simple—in his schooldays at the gymnasium he had overcome higher obstacles.

The garden menaced him with its shadows and poked him inhospitably in the face with its branches. Ahead through the trees he could make out the vague white form of a two-story house surmounted by a hipped roof. Attempting to crunch as quietly as possible, Fandorin stole as far as the final bushes (they smelled like lilac—probably it was some English kind of lilac) and surveyed the lay of the land. It was not just a house, rather more like a villa. There was a lantern over the door. The windows on the first floor were brightly lit, but it looked as though the domestic offices were located there. Far more interesting was a lighted window on the second floor (at this point he recalled that for some reason the English referred to it as the ‘first floor’), but how could he get up to it? Fortunately there was a drainpipe running close beside it, and the wall was overgrown with some kind of climbing vegetation that appeared to have taken a solid grip. The skills of his recent childhood might prove useful once again.

Like a black shadow Erast Fandorin dashed across to the wall and gave the drainpipe a shake. It seemed secure and it didn’t rattle. Since it was vitally important not to make any noise, the ascent proceeded more slowly than Erast Fandorin would have wished. Eventually his foot found the projecting ledge that encircled the second floor of the house most conveniently, and taking a cautious grip on the ivy—wild vine, liana, whatever the hell these serpentine stems were called—Fandorin began edging his way in tiny steps toward the cherished goal of the window.

For one instant he was overwhelmed by bitter disappointment—there was no one in the room. A lamp with a pink shade illuminated an elegant writing desk with some papers, and in the corner he thought he could see the white form of a bed. Erast Fandorin waited for about five minutes, but nothing happened except that a fat moth settled on the lamp, its shaggy wings fluttering. Would he really have to climb back down again? Or should he take a risk and clamber inside? He gave the window frame a gentle push and it swung open slightly. Fandorin hesitated, berating himself for his indecision and procrastination, but he had been right to delay, for just then the door opened and a man and a woman entered the room. At the sight of the woman Erast Fandorin very nearly gave a whoop of triumph—it was Bezhetskaya! With her smoothly combed black hair tied back with a red ribbon, in a lacy peignoir over which she had thrown a brightly colored Gypsy shawl, to his eyes she appeared blindingly beautiful. Oh, such a woman could be forgiven any transgressions!

Turning toward the man—his face remained in shadow, but to judge from his stature it was Morbid—Amalia Bezhetskaya spoke in impeccable English (a spy, most indubitably a spy!). “So it was definitely him?”

“Yes, ma’am. Absolutely no doubt about it.”

“How can you be so certain? Did you actually see him?”

“No, ma’am. Franz was keeping watch there today. He informed me that the boy arrived at seven o’clock. The description matched perfectly; even your guess about the mustache was correct.”

Bezhetskaya laughed her clear, musical laugh. “Nevertheless, we must not underestimate him, John. This boy is one of the lucky breed, and I know that kind of person very well—they are unpredictable and very dangerous.”

Erast Fandorin’s heart sank. Surely they could not be talking about him? No, it was impossible.

“Nothing simpler, ma’am. You only have to say the word…Franz and I will go over there and finish him off. Room fifteen, on the second floor.”

They were talking about him! Erast Fandorin was staying in room number fifteen on the third floor (the second floor English style). But how had they found out? From where? Fandorin tore off his ignominious, useless mustache, ignoring the pain.

Amalia Bezhetskaya, or whatever her real name might be, frowned, and a harsh metallic note sounded in her voice. “Don’t you dare! It’s my fault, and I shall correct my own mistake. For once in my life I trusted a man…but I am surprised that we did not get word of his arrival from the embassy.”

Fandorin was all ears now. They had their own people in the Russian embassy! Well, well, well! And Ivan Brilling had been doubtful. Say who, say it!

But Bezhetskaya began talking of other matters. “Are there any letters?”

“Three today, ma’am.” The butler handed over the envelopes with a bow.

“Good. You may go to bed, John. I shall not require you any further today.” She stifled a yawn.

When the door closed behind Mr. Morbid, Amalia Bezhetskaya tossed the letters carelessly on the bureau and walked over to the window. Fandorin shrank back behind the projecting masonry, his heart pounding furiously. Gazing out blankly into the murky drizzle with her huge black eyes, Bezhetskaya (if not for the glass, he could have reached out and touched her) muttered pensively in Russian, “How deadly boring, God help me. Stuck in this miserable place…”

Then she began behaving very strangely. She went up to a frivolous wall lamp in the form of a Cupid and pressed the god of love’s bronze navel. The engraving hanging beside it (it appeared to be a hunting scene of some kind) slid soundlessly to one side, revealing a small copper door with a round handle. Bezhetskaya freed a slim, naked hand from its gauzy sleeve, turned the handle this way and that, and the door opened with a melodic thrumming sound. Erast Fandorin pressed his nose against the windowpane, afraid of missing the most important part of the action.

Amalia Bezhetskaya, looking more than ever like an Egyptian queen, reached gracefully into the safe, took something out of it, and turned around. She was holding a light blue velvet attachй case.

She sat down at the bureau, extracted a large yellow envelope from the attachй case, and from the envelope she extracted a sheet of paper covered in fine writing. She slit open the newly received letters with a knife and copied something from them onto the paper. It all took no longer than two minutes. Then, having replaced the letters and the sheet of paper in the attachй case, Bezhetskaya lit a pakhitoskaand inhaled deeply several times, gazing pensively into space.

The hand with which Erast Fandorin was gripping the vegetation had gone numb, the handle of his Colt was sticking painfully into his side, and his feet had begun to ache from being so unnaturally splayed. He could not continue standing in that position for long.

Eventually Cleopatra extinguished her pakhitoska, stood up, and withdrew into the dimly lit far corner of the room, where a low door opened then closed again, and then there was the sound of running water. Evidently that was where the bathroom was located.

The blue attachй case remained lying enticingly on the writing desk, and women, as everyone knows, spend a long time over their evening toilette…Fandorin pushed against the window frame, set his knee on the windowsill, and in an instant was inside the room. Glancing now and again in the direction of the bathroom, from where he could still hear the sound of running water, he set about relieving the attachй case of its contents.

It proved to contain a large bundle of letters and the envelope he had already seen. Written on the envelope was an address:

MR. NICHOLAS M. CROOG, POSTS RESTANTE

L’HOTEL DES POSTES, S.-PETERSBOURG, RUSSIE

This was already progress. Inside the envelope there were sheets of paper divided into columns and squares containing English writing in the slanting hand now so familiar to Erast Fandorin. The first column contained some kind of number, the second the name of a country, the third a rank or title, the fourth a date, and the fifth another date—different dates in June in ascending numerical order. For instance, the last three entries, which to judge from the ink had only just been made, appeared as follows:

N°1053F

Brazil head of the emperor’s personal bodyguard

sent 30 May

received 28 June 1876

N°825F

United States of America deputy chairman of a Senate committee

sent 10 June

received 28 June 1876

N°354F

Germany chairman of the district court

sent 25 June

received 28 June 1876

Wait! The letters that had arrived at the hotel for Miss Olsen today had been from Rio de Janeiro, Washington, and Stuttgart. Erast Fan-dorin rummaged through the bundle of letters and found the one from Brazil. It contained a sheet of paper with no salutation or signature, nothing but a single line of writing:

30 May, head of the emperor’s personal bodyguard, N°1053F.

So for some reason Bezhetskaya was copying the contents of the letters she received onto sheets of paper that she then sent to a certain Nikolai Croog in St. Petersburg, or rather Mr. Nicholas Croog. To what end? And why to St. Petersburg? What could it all mean?

The questions came thick and fast, jostling each other for space in his mind, but he had no time to deal with them—the water had stopped running in the bathroom. Fandorin hastily stuffed the papers back into the attachй case, but it was too late to retreat to the window. A slim white figure was already standing motionless in the doorway.

Erast Fandorin tugged the revolver out of his belt and commanded in a whisper, “Miss Bezhetskaya, one sound and I’ll shoot you! Come over here and sit down! Quickly now!”

She approached him without speaking, gazing spellbound at him with those unfathomable, gleaming eyes, and sat down beside the writing desk.

“You weren’t expecting me, I suppose?” Erast Fandorin inquired sarcastically. “Took me for a stupid little fool?”

Amalia Bezhetskaya said nothing. Her gaze seemed thoughtful and slightly surprised, as if she were seeing Fandorin for the first time.

“What is the meaning of these lists?” he demanded, brandishing his Colt. “What has Brazil got to do with all this? Who is concealed behind the numbers? Well, answer me!”

“You’ve matured,” Bezhetskaya said unexpectedly in a quiet, pensive voice. “And you seem a bit braver, too.”

She dropped her hand and the peignoir slipped from a rounded shoulder so white that Erast Fandorin swallowed hard.

“Brave, impetuous little fool,” she went on in the same quiet voice, looking him straight in the eyes. “And so very good-looking.”

“If you’re thinking of seducing me, you’re wasting your time,” Erast Fandorin mumbled, blushing. “I am not such a little fool as you imagine.”

Amalia Bezhetskaya said sadly, “You are a poor little boy who doesn’t even understand what he has got mixed up in. A poor, handsome little boy. And now there is nothing I can do to save you…”

“You’d do better to think about saving yourself!” said Erast Fandorin, trying hard not to look at that accursed shoulder, which had become even more exposed. Could skin really be such a glowing, milky white?

Bezhetskaya rose abruptly to her feet, and he started back, holding his gun out in front of him…

“Sit down.”

“Don’t be afraid, silly boy. What rosy cheeks you have. May I touch them?”

She reached out a hand and gently brushed his cheek with her fingers.

“You’re hot…What am I going to do with you?”

She set her other hand gently on his fingers that clutched the revolver. The matte-black, unblinking eyes were so close that Fandorin could see two little pink reflections of the lamp in them. A strange list-lessness came over the young man and he remembered Hippolyte’s warning about the moth, but the memory was strangely abstract—it had nothing to do with him.

Then events moved very rapidly. With her left hand Bezhetskaya pushed the Colt aside. With her right hand she seized Erast Fandorin by the collar and jerked him toward her, simultaneously butting his nose with her forehead. Fandorin was blinded by the sharp pain, but he would not have been able to see anything in any case, because the lamp went crashing to the floor and the room was plunged into darkness. At the next blow—a knee to the groin—he doubled up, his fingers contracted spasmodically, the room was lit by a bright flash, and there was the deafening roar of a shot. Amalia took a convulsive breath, half sobbed and half screamed, and then there was no longer anyone beating Erast Fandorin, no one squeezing his wrist. He heard the sound of a falling body. There was a loud ringing in his ears, twin streams of blood were flowing over his chin, tears were pouring from his eyes, and his lower belly ached so sickeningly that all he wanted to do was curl up in a ball and wait for the agony to pass, groan until the unbearable pain went away. But he had no time for bellowing. He could hear loud voices and the sound of heavy footsteps from downstairs.

Fandorin grabbed the attachй case off the desk and threw it out the window, then climbed over the windowsill, and almost fell, because his hand was still clutching the pistol. Later he was unable to recall how he climbed down the drainpipe, terrified all the while of not being able to find the attachй case in the darkness, but in fact it was clearly visible on the white gravel. Erast Fandorin picked it up and set off at a run, fighting his way through the bushes and mumbling rapidly to himself: “A fine diplomatic courier…killed a woman…My God, what am I going to do, what am I going to do?…It’s her own fault…I didn’t want to do it at all…Now where shall I go?…The police will be looking…or these…Murderers…I can’t go to the embassy…Must flee the country, quickly…Can’t do that either…They’ll be watching all the railway stations and ports…They’ll stop at absolutely nothing to get back their attachй case…Have to go into hiding…My God, Mr. Brilling, what shall I do, what shall I do?”

As he ran, Fandorin glanced around and saw something that made him stumble and almost fall. Standing motionless in the bushes was a black figure in a long cloak. The moonlight traced the features of a strangely familiar white face. Count Zurov!

Totally demented by this final blow, Erast Fandorin squealed and scrambled over the fence, darted to the right, then to the left (which direction had the cab come from?), then finally decided that it made no difference and ran off to the right.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

which tells the story of a very long night

ON THE ISLE OF DOGS, IN THE MAZE OF NARROW streets behind Millwall Docks, night falls rapidly. Before you can so much as glance over your shoulder the twilight has thickened from gray to brown and one in every two or three of the sparse streetlamps is already glowing. It is dirty and dismal, the Thames ladens the air with damp, the rubbish dumps adding the scent of putrid decay. The streets are deserted, with the only life—both disreputable and dangerous—teeming around the shady pubs and cheap furnished lodgings.

The rooms in the Ferry Road guesthouse are home to decommissioned sailors, petty swindlers, and aging port trollops. Pay sixpence a day and a separate room with a bed is yours to do with as you will—no one will stick his nose into your business—but a condition of the agreement is that for damaging the furniture, brawling, or yelling in the night your host, Fat Hugh, will fine you a shilling, and if anyone refuses to pay up, he will throw him out on his ear.

From morning to night Fat Hugh is at his post behind the counter, by the door, strategically positioned so that he can see anyone either arriving or leaving or bringing anything in or, on the contrary, attempting to take anything out. The clientele here is a mixed bunch, and you never know what they might be getting up to.

Take, for instance, that French artist with the shaggy red hair who has just gone scurrying past his landlord and into the corner room. The frog eater has money, all right—he paid for a week in advance with no arguments. He doesn’t drink, just sits there locked in his room, and this is the first time he’s been out at all. So, naturally, Hugh took the opportunity to glance into his room, and what do you think he found? Him an artist, but never a sign of any paints or canvases in the place! Maybe he’s some murderer or other, who knows—otherwise why would he be hiding his eyes behind those dark glasses? And maybe the constable ought to be told—the money’s been paid in advance anyway…

Meanwhile, the redheaded artist, unaware of the dangerous line taken by Fat Hugh’s train of thought, locked his door and began behaving in a manner that was indeed more than simply suspicious. First of all, he pulled the curtains tightly closed. Then he placed his purchases—a loaf of bread, cheese, and a bottle of porter—on the table, pulled a revolver out of his belt, and hid it under his pillow. But the disarming of this peculiar Frenchman was not complete at that. From the top of his boot he extracted a derringer—a small, single-shot pistol such as is usually employed by ladies and political assassins—and set this toylike firearm beside the bottle of porter. From his sleeve the lodger withdrew a short, narrow stiletto that he stuck into the loaf of bread. Only after all this did he light the candle, remove his blue spectacles, and rub his eyes with a weary hand. Finally, after a glance around at the window to make sure that the curtains were not parting, he lifted the red-haired wig off his head and was revealed as none other than Erast Petrovich Fandorin.

The meal was over and done with in five minutes—the titular counselor and fugitive assassin clearly had more important matters to attend to. Brushing the crumbs from the table, Erast Fandorin wiped his hands on his long bohemian blouse, went over to the tattered armchair standing in the corner, fumbled under its upholstery, and took out a small blue attachй case. Fandorin was impatient to continue the work with which he had been occupied all day and which had already led him to an extremely important discovery.

FOLLOWING THE TRAGIC EVENTS of the previous night Erast Fandorin had been obliged in spite of everything to pay a brief visit to his hotel in order to pick up at least his money and his passport. Now let his good friend Hippolyte—that villainous Judas—and his henchmen search the railway stations and seaports in vain for ‘Erasmus von Dorn.’ Who would pay any attention to a poor French artist who had taken up residence in the very foulest sink of the London slums? And though Fandorin may have been obliged to take his life in his hands and run the risk of going out to the post office, there had been a very good reason for that.

But what should he make of Zurov? His part in the story was not entirely clear, but it was certainly unseemly at the very least. His Excellency was not simple, not simple at all. The gallant hussar and open-hearted soul performed the most devious of maneuvers. How cleverly he had passed on that address, how well he had worked it all out! In a word, a true game master! He knew that the stupid gudgeon would take the bait and swallow the hook as well. But no, His Excellency had used some other allegory, something about a moth. The moth had flown into the flame all right, flown in exactly as expected. And it had almost burned its wings. Serve the fool right. After all, it was clear enough that Bezhetskaya and Hippolyte had some interest in common. Only a romantic blockhead such as a certain titular counselor (who had, in fact, been promoted to that rank over the heads of other, more worthy individuals) could have seriously believed in a fatal passion in the Castilian style! And he had even tried to fill Ivan Franzevich Brilling’s head with all that nonsense. For shame! Ha-ha! How beautifully Count Hippolyte Zurov had expressed it: “I love her and I fear her, the witch. I’ll strangle her with my own hands.” No doubt he had enjoyed toying with the babe in arms! And how exquisitely he had pulled it off, every bit as good as the first time, with the duel. His moves had been calculated simply and unerringly: take up a position at the Winter Queen Hotel and wait there calmly until the stupid moth Erasmus came flying to the candle. This was not Moscow—there was no detective police, no gendarmes. Erast Fandorin could be taken with the greatest of ease. And all the clues securely buried. Might not Zurov perhaps be that Franz whom the butler had mentioned? Ugh, these hideous conspirators! But which one of them was the leader—Zurov or Bezhetskaya? It seemed more likely, after all, that she was…Erast Fandorin shivered as he recalled the events of the previous night and the plaintive shriek with which Amalia had collapsed when she was shot. Perhaps she had been wounded and not killed? But the dismal chill that enveloped his heart told him that she was dead, the beautiful queen was dead, and Fandorin would have to live with that terrible burden to the end of his days.

It was, of course, entirely possible that the end was already near. Zurov knew who had killed her: he had seen Fandorin. The hunt must already be on right across London, right across England, even. But why had Zurov let him go last night? Why had he allowed him to escape? Had he been frightened off by the pistol in Fandorin’s hand? It was a riddle…

There was, however, another, even more puzzling riddle—the contents of the attachй case. For a long time Fandorin had been quite unable to make any sense of the mysterious list. His check had revealed that the number of entries on the sheets of paper was exactly the same as the number of letters and all of the information matched, except that in addition to the date indicated in each letter, Bezhetskaya had also entered the date of its receipt.

There were forty-five entries in all. The very earliest of them was dated the first of June, and the three latest had made their appearance even as Erast Fandorin watched. The ordinal numbers in the letters were all different; the lowest was 47F (the Kingdom of Belgium, director of a governmental department, received on the fifteenth of June) and the highest was 2347F (Italy, a lieutenant of dragoons, received on the ninth of June). The letters had been dispatched from a total of nine countries, of which the most frequently occurring were England and France. Russia only appeared once in the sequence. (N°994F, a full state counselor, received on the twenty-sixth of June, with a St. Petersburg stamp from the seventh of June on the envelope. Ooph, he mustn’t confuse the calendars! The seventh of June would be the nineteenth in the European style. That meant it had taken just a week to arrive.) For the most part, the positions and ranks mentioned were high—generals, senior officers, one admiral, one senator, even one Portuguese government minister—but there were also small fry, such as the lieutenant from Italy, a court investigator from France, and a captain of the Austro-Hungarian border guards.

Taking everything together, Bezhetskaya appeared to be some kind of intermediary, a transmission link or living post box whose duties involved registering incoming information and then forwarding it—evidently to Mr. Nicholas Croog in St. Petersburg. It was reasonable to assume that the lists were forwarded once a month. It was also clear that some other individual had played the role of Miss Olsen before Bezhetskaya, a fact the hotel porter had not suspected.

At that point the obvious came to an end and an urgent need arose to apply the deductive method. If only the chief were here, he would have instantly listed all the possible scenarios and everything would have been neatly sorted into its right place. But he was far away, and the unavoidable conclusion was that Brilling had been right, a thousand times right. There obviously existed a widely ramified secret organization with members in many countries—that was one. Queen Victoria and Disraeli had nothing to do with the case (otherwise why send the reports to St. Petersburg?)—that was two. Erast Fandorin had made a fool of himself with his English spies; this affair very definitely smacked of nihilists—that was three. And all the threads led nowhere else but back to Russia, which possessed the most fearsome and ruthless nihilists of all—that was four. And they included that treacherous werewolf Zurov.

His chief may have been right, but even so Fandorin had not squandered his travel expenses in vain. Even in his worst nightmares Ivan Brilling could hardly have imagined the true might of the multiheaded hydra with which he was doing battle. These were no students and hysterical young ladies with little bombs and pistols. This was an entire secret order involving ministers of state, generals, court investigators, and even a full state counselor from St. Petersburg!

That was when Erast Fandorin was struck by a sudden insight (by this time it was already after noon). A full state counselor—and a nihilist? It simply didn’t make sense. The head of the imperial guard in Brazil was not really a problem. Erast Fandorin had never been to Brazil and he had no idea of the local mores—but his imagination absolutely refused to picture a Russian state general holding a bomb in his hand. Fandorin was acquainted quite closely with one full state counselor, Feodor Trifonovich Sevriugin, the director of the provincial gymnasium he had attended for almost seven years. Could he possibly be a terrorist? Nonsense!

Then suddenly Erast Fandorin’s heart was wrung with pity. These were no terrorists; these were all decent and respectable individuals! These were the victims of terror! Nihilists from various countries, each of them concealed behind a coded number, were reporting to central revolutionary HQ about the terrorist acts they had committed!

And yet, he could not actually recall any ministers being killed in Portugal in June—all the newspapers would most certainly have reported it…Which meant that they must be prospective victims—that was it! The ‘numbers’ were requesting permission from HQ to commit acts of terror. And no names were given in order to maintain secrecy.

Now everything fell into place; now everything was clear. Ivan Brilling had said something about a thread connecting Akhtyrtsev to some dacha outside Moscow, but Fandorin, all fired up with his own fantastic ravings about spies, had not bothered to listen.

But stop. What did they want with a lieutenant of dragoons? He really was very small fry. Very simple, was Erast Fandorin’s immediate reply to his own question. The unknown Italian obviously must have got under their feet somehow. In the same way that a youthful collegiate regular istrar from the Moscow detective police had once got under the feet of a certain white-eyed killer.

What should he do? He was simply sitting things out here while the threat of death hung over so many honorable people! Fandorin felt especially sorry for the unknown general in St. Petersburg. No doubt he was a worthy man, already middle-aged and distinguished, with little children…And it appeared that these Carbonari* sent out their villainous communiquйs every month. No wonder there was blood flowing right across Europe every day! And the threads led back nowhere else but to St. Petersburg. Erast Fandorin recalled the words once spoken by his chief: “The very fate of Russia is at stake.” Ah, Ivan Brilling, ah, Mr. State Counselor, not just the fate of Russia—the fate of the entire civilized world!

He could inform the clerk Pyzhov secretly, so that the traitor in the embassy would not sniff anything out. But how? The traitor could be anyone at all, and it was dangerous for Fandorin to show his face near the embassy, even in the guise of a redheaded Frenchman in an artist’s blouse…He would have to take a risk, send a letter by municipal post to provincial secretary Pyzhov and mark it ‘to be delivered personally.’ Nothing superfluous, just his address and greetings from Ivan Franzevich Brilling. He was a clever man; he would understand everything. And they said the municipal post here delivered a letter to its addressee in little more than two hours…

And that was what Fandorin had done, so that when evening came it found him waiting to see if there would be a cautious knock at the door.

There was no knock, however. Everything turned out quite differently.

LATER, WHEN IT WAS ALREADY AFTER MIDNIGHT, Erast Fandorin was sitting in the tattered armchair in which the attachй case was concealed. On the table the candle had almost burned itself out, in the corners of the room a hostile gloom had gathered and thickened, and outside the window an approaching storm occasionally rumbled alarmingly. The very air seemed oppressive and stifling, as if some invisible, corpulent individual had sat down on his chest and would not let him get his breath. Fandorin teetered uncertainly on the ill-defined boundary between wakefulness and sleep. Important thoughts of practical matters would suddenly become bogged down in irrelevant drivel, and then the young man would rouse himself and shake his head in order to avoid being sucked down into the whirlpool of sleep.

During one of these lucid intervals something very peculiar happened. First there was a strange, shrill squeak. Then Erast Fandorin could scarcely believe his own eyes as he saw the key protruding from the keyhole begin to turn of its own accord. The door creaked sickeningly as it swung open into the room, and a bizarre vision appeared in the doorway: a puny little gentleman of indeterminate age with a round, clean-shaven face and narrow eyes nestling in beds of fine, radiating wrinkles.

Fandorin shuddered and grabbed the revolver from the table, but the vision smiled sweetly, nodded contentedly, and cooed in extremely pleasant, honeyed tenor tones, “Well, here I am, my dear lad. Porfirii Pyzhov, son of Martin, servant of God, and provincial secretary, come flying to you the very moment you chose to beckon. Like the wind at the summons of Aeolus.”

“How did you open the door?” Erast Fandorin whispered in fright. “I distinctly remember turning the key twice.”

“With this—a magnetic picklock,” the long-awaited visitor readily explained, displaying some kind of elongated little bar, which, however, immediately disappeared back into his pocket. “An extremely handy little item. I borrowed it from a certain local thief. In my line of business I am obliged to maintain relations with the most dreadful types, denizens of the very darkest depths of society. The most absolute miserables, I assure you. Such types as Monsieur Hugo never even saw in his dreams. But they, too, are human souls and it is possible to find ways to approach them. In fact, I am very fond of the scum and I even collect them a little. As the poet put it: each amuses himself as he may, but all shall be brought low by death alone. Or as the Teut would have it Jedes Tierchen hat sein Plдsierchen—every little beastling has its own plaything.”

It was quite evident that this strange man possessed the ability to rattle off nonsense on any subject whatsoever without the slightest difficulty, but his keen eyes were wasting no time. They had already thoroughly ransacked both Erast Fandorin’s person and the furnishings of his squalid chamber.

“I am Erast Petrovich Fandorin. From Mr. Brilling. On extremely important business,” said the young man, although the first and second facts had been stated in his letter, and Pyzhov himself must undoubtedly have guessed the third. “Only he did not give me any password. Probably he forgot.”

Erast Fandorin looked anxiously at Pyzhov, on whom his salvation now depended, but the little man merely threw up his short-fingered hands.

“There is no need of any password. Sheer nonsense and games for children. Can a Russian fail to know another Russian? It is enough for me to gaze into your bright eyes”—Porfirii Pyzhov moved close up against Fandorin—“and I see everything as clearly as if it were laid out before me. A youth pure hearted and bold, filled with noble aspirations and patriotic devotion to his fatherland. Why, of course—in our department we have no other kind.”

Fandorin frowned. It seemed to him that Provincial Secretary Pyzhov was playing the fool, taking him for some idiot child. And therefore Erast Fandorin related his story briefly and dryly, without any emotions. It transpired that Porfirii Pyzhov was capable of more than mere tongue wagging. He could also be an extremely attentive listener—in fact he had a positive talent for it. Pyzhov sat down on the edge of the bed, folded his hands across his belly, squeezed the narrow slits of his eyes even tighter—and it was as if he had disappeared. That is, he was quite literally all attention. Not once did Pyzhov interrupt, not once did he even stir. However, at times, at the key moments of the narrative, a subtle spark glimmered beneath his hooded eyelids.

Erast Fandorin did not divulge his hypothesis concerning the letters—that he saved for Ivan Brilling—and in conclusion he said, “And so, Mr. Pyzhov, you see before you a fugitive and involuntary homicide. I urgently need to get across to the Continent. I need to get to Moscow, to see Mr. Brilling.”

Pyzhov chewed on his lips and waited to see whether anything else would be said, then he asked in quiet voice, “And what of the attache case? Why not forward it with the diplomatic post? That would be more reliable. One never knows…From what you have told me, these gentlemen are serious individuals. They will be searching for you in Europe as well. Of course I shall get you across the Channel, my sweet angel. That is no great business. Provided you disdain not the fisherman’s frail bark, you shall sail tomorrow, and God speed! Riding the howling gale beneath your billowing sails.”

All of his winds seem to be gales, thought Erast Fandorin, who in all honesty desperately did not wish to part with the attache case which it had cost him so dear to obtain. Porfirii Pyzhov, however, continued as if he had not noticed the young man’s hesitation.

“I do not interfere in other people’s business, for I am an unassuming and incurious individual. However, I can see there are many things you are not telling me. And quite right, my peachy darling; the word is silver, but silence is golden. Ivan Franzevich Brilling is a high-flying bird, a haughty eagle, one might say, among starlings, who would not entrust important business to just anyone. Is that not so?”

“In what sense?”

“Why, regarding the attachй case. I would daub it with sealing wax on every side, give it to one of the more keen-witted couriers—and it would be wafted across to Moscow in an instant, as on a three-horse sleigh with bells a-jingling. And for my part I would dispatch a coded telegram: accept, O ruler of the heavenly realms, this priceless gift.”

God knows, Erast Fandorin did not crave honors. He did not desire decorations or even fame. He would have surrendered the attachй case to Pyzhov for the good of the cause, for, after all, a courier really would be more reliable. But in his imagination he had already rehearsed so many times the triumphant return to his chief, with the spectacular presentation of the precious attachй case and the thrilling account of all the adventures that had befallen him…and now was none of this to be?

Cravenly putting his own interest first, Fandorin said austerely, “The attachй case is concealed in a secure hiding place. And I shall deliver it myself. I answer for it with my life. Please do not take offense, Mr. Pyzhov.”

“Why, of course not, of course not.” Pyzhov made no attempt to insist. “Just as you wish. It will be less trouble for me. The devil take other people’s secrets—I have quite enough of my own. If it is in a secure place, so be it.” He got to his feet and ran his gaze over the bare walls of the tiny room. “You take a rest for the time being, my young friend. Youth needs sleep. I am an old man, and I have insomnia in any case, so in the meanwhile I shall issue instructions concerning the boat. Tomorrow—actually it is already today—I shall be here at very first light. I shall deliver you to the shore of the sea, embrace and kiss you in farewell and make the sign of the cross over you. And I shall remain here, an orphan abandoned in an alien land. Oh, it frets poor Ivan’s heart to be stuck in foreign parts.”

At this point even Porfirii Pyzhov clearly realized that he had poured on the syrup a little too thickly, and he spread his arms in acknowledgment of his guilt.

“I repent—my tongue has run away with me. But, you know, I have missed living Russian speech so badly. I do so yearn for elegant turns of phrase. Our embassy know-it-alls express themselves most of the time in French, and I have no one with whom I can share the inmost stirrings of my soul.”

The thunder rumbled again, this time more seriously, and it appeared to have started raining. Pyzhov was suddenly all business, and he began preparing to depart.

“I must be going. Ai-ai-ai, how passionately the inclement elements do rage.”

In the doorway he turned around to caress Fandorin with a farewell glance and then with a low bow he melted away into the gloom of the corridor.

Erast Fandorin locked and bolted the door and hunched his shoulders in a chill shiver as a peal of thunder reverberated above the very roof.

IT WAS DARK AND EERIE in the wretched little room, with its solitary window that overlooked the naked stone yard without a single blade of grass. Outside, the weather was foul, windy and rainy, but the moon was slewing through the tattered clouds strewn across the black and gray sky. A ray of yellow light falling through the crack between the curtains cut the squalid lodging in half, slashing through it as far as the bed, where Fandorin, beset by nightmares, tossed in a cold sweat. He was fully dressed, including his boots, and he was still armed, except that the revolver was once again under his pillow.

Overburdened by the guilt of the murder, poor Erast Fandorin’s conscience visited upon him a strange vision. Dead Amalia was leaning over his bed. Her eyes were half closed, a drop of blood trickled from beneath her eyelid, and in her bare hand she held a black rose.

“What did I do to you?” The dead woman groaned piteously. “I was young and beautiful. I was unhappy and lonely. They snared me in their web—they deceived and depraved me. The only man I loved betrayed me. You have committed a terrible sin, Erast. You have killed beauty, and beauty is a miracle from God. You have trampled underfoot a miracle from God. And why, what for?”

The drop of blood fell from her cheek straight onto Erast Fandorin’s forehead. He started at the cold sensation and opened his eyes. He saw that Amalia was not there, thank God. It was all a dream, nothing but a dream. But then another icy drop fell on his forehead.

What was it? Erast Fandorin wondered, shuddering in horror and finally waking up completely. He heard the howling of the wind, the drumming of the rain, the hollow rumbling of the thunder. But what were these drops? It was nothing supernatural, however—the ceiling was leaking. Be still, foolish heart, be calm.

Then came the low but distinct whispering from behind the door: “Why, what for?”

And then again: “Why, what for?”

It’s my bad conscience, Fandorin told himself. My bad conscience is giving me hallucinations. But this commonsensical, rational thought failed to dispel the hideous, viscous terror that was oozing in at every pore of his body.

Everything seemed quiet. A flash of lightning lit up the naked gray walls, and then it was dark again.

A minute later he heard a quiet knocking at the window. Tap-tap. Then again: tap-tap-tap.

Steady now! It’s nothing but the wind. A tree. A branch scraping the window. A perfectly ordinary occurrence.

Tap-tap. Tap-tap-tap.

A tree? What tree? Fandorin suddenly jerked upright. There was no tree outside the window! There was nothing but an empty yard. My God, what was it?

The strip of yellow between the curtains faded and turned to gray—the moon must have gone behind a cloud—and an instant later something dark, mysterious, and terrifying loomed into sight.

He could endure anything but lying there, feeling the hairs rising on the nape of his neck. Anything but feeling himself losing his mind.

Erast Fandorin stood up and set off toward the window on legs that scarcely obeyed him, keeping his eyes fixed on that terrible patch of darkness. At the very moment when he jerked back the curtains, the sky was lit up by a flash of lightning and there outside the windowpane, right in front of him, Fandorin saw a deadly pale face with black pits for eyes. A hand glimmering with unearthly light slid slowly across the glass, its fingers extended in bright rays. Erast Fandorin acted stupidly, like a little child—he sobbed convulsively and staggered backward, then dashed back to the bed, collapsed on it facedown, and covered his head with his hands.

He had to wake up! Wake up as soon as possible! Our Father, Who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy—

The tapping at the window stopped. He lifted his face out of the pillow and squinted cautiously in the direction of the window but saw nothing terrible—just the night and the rain and the rapid flashes of lightning. It was his imagination. Definitely his imagination.

Fortunately Erast Fandorin managed to recall the teachings of the Indian Brahmin Chandra Johnson, who taught the science of correct breathing and correct living. The book of wisdom read:

Correct breathing is the basis of correct living. It will support you in the difficult moments of life, and through it you will attain salvation, tranquillity, and enlightenment. Breathing in the vital force of prana, do not hasten to breathe it out again, but hold it a while in your lungs. The longer and more regular your breath is, the more vital force there is within you. That man has achieved enlightenment who, after breathing in prana in the evening, does not breathe it out again until the dawn light.

Well, Erast Fandorin still had a long way to go to reach enlightenment, but thanks to his regular morning exercises he had already learned to hold his breath for up to a hundred seconds, and to this sure remedy he resorted now. He filled his chest with air and became still. He was “transformed into wood, stone, grass.” It worked—the pounding of his heart steadied a little, the terror receded. At the count of a hundred Fandorin released his breath noisily, soothed and reassured by the victory of the enlightened spirit over superstition.

And then he heard a sound that set his teeth chattering loudly. Someone was scratching at the door.

“Let me in,” a voice whispered. “Look at me. I’m cold. Let me in…”

This is just too much, thought Fandorin indignantly, summoning his final remnants of pride. I’m going to open the door and wake up. Or…or I shall see that this is no dream.

In two bounds he was at the door, pulled back the bolt, and heaved the door toward himself.

Amalia was standing in the doorway. She was wearing a white lace peignoir like the last time, but her hair was wet and tangled from the rain and a bloody patch had spread across her breast. The most terrifying thing of all was the unearthly glimmering of her face, with its motionless, lifeless eyes. A white hand trailing sparks of light reached out toward Erast Fandorin’s face and touched his cheek in exactly the same way as the day before, but this time the fingers radiated such an icy chill that the unfortunate Fandorin staggered backward, his mind reeling into madness.

“Where is the attachй case?” the specter asked in a hissing whisper. “Where is my attachй case? I sold my soul for it.”

“I won’t give it to you!” Erast Fandorin cried out through parched lips. He staggered backward to the armchair in the depths of which the purloined attachй case lay concealed, plumped down heavily on the seat, and put his arms around the chair for safety’s sake.

The ghost went over to the table. She struck a match, lit the candle, and suddenly shouted loudly in English, “Your turn now! He’s all yours!”

Two men burst into the room: the tall Morbid with his head almost brushing the ceiling, and someone else small and sprightly.

His mind now totally befogged, Fandorin did not even stir a muscle when the butler set a knife to his throat and the other man frisked him, discovering the derringer in the top of his boot.

“Look for the revolver,” Morbid ordered in English, and the sprightly little fellow made no mistake, instantly discovering the Colt hidden under the pillow.

All this time Amalia was standing by the window, wiping her face and hands with a handkerchief.

“Is that all?” she asked impatiently. “What foul muck this phosphorous is. And the entire masquerade was a total waste of time. He lacked the brains even to hide the case properly. John, look in the armchair.”

She did not look at Fandorin, as if he had suddenly been transformed into an inanimate object.

Morbid easily tugged Fandorin out of the armchair, keeping the blade of the knife pressed to his throat the whole time, and the sprightly fellow thrust his hand into the seat and pulled out the blue attache case.

“Give it here.” Bezhetskaya went over to the table and checked the contents of the case. “It’s all there. He didn’t have time to send anything on. Thank God. Franz, bring my cape. I’m chilled through.”

“So it was all a show?” Fandorin asked in a quavering voice as his courage began to return. “Bravo. You are a magnificent actress. I am glad that my bullet missed you. Such a great talent would have been lost—”

“Don’t forget the gag,” Amalia said to the butler. Tossing the cape brought by Franz across her shoulders, she left the room without so much as a final glance at the disgraced Erast Fandorin.

The sprightly little fellow—so it was him who had been watching the hotel, not Zurov at all—took a ball of fine string out of his pocket and bound the captive’s arms tightly against his sides. Then he grabbed Fandorin’s nose between his forefinger and thumb, and when the young man opened his mouth, he thrust a rubber pear into it.

“All in order,” Franz declared with a slight German accent, pleased with the result of his handiwork. “I’ll bring the sack.”

He darted out into the corridor and quickly returned. The last thing that Erast Fandorin saw before the coarse sack was pulled over his shoulders and right down to his knees was the stony, totally impassive face of John Morbid. But though it was, of course, a pity that it was this face of all faces the world should choose to show Erast Fandorin in farewell, and not the visage that had enchanted him so, nonetheless the dusty darkness of the sack proved even worse.

“Let me tie a bit more string ‘round the outside,” Fandorin heard Franz say. “We don’t have far to go, but it’ll be safer that way.”

“Where’s he going to go?” Morbid’s bass replied. “The moment he twitches I’ll stab him in the belly.”

“We’ll tie him a bit tighter in any case,” Franz sang. He bound the string around the sack so tightly that it became hard for Erast Fandorin to breathe.

“Get moving!” said Morbid, prodding the captive. Fandorin set off like a blind man, not really understanding why they could not simply slit his throat there in the room.

He stumbled twice, and almost fell in the doorway of the guesthouse, but John’s massive ham of a hand caught him by the shoulder in time.

He could smell rain and hear horses snorting gently.

“You two, as soon as you’ve dealt with him, come back here and tidy everything up,” he heard Bezhetskaya say. “We are going back to the house.”

“Don’t you worry, ma’am,” the butler rumbled. “You’ve done your job—now we’ll do ours.”

Oh, how Erast Fandorin longed to say something remarkable to Amalia in parting, something really exceptional, so that she would not remember him as a stupid, frightened little boy but as a valiant warrior who fell in an unequal struggle with a whole army of nihilists. But the accursed rubber pear deprived him of even that final satisfaction.

And then, just when it seemed that fate could torment him no more after what he had already endured, the poor youth was struck yet another shattering blow.

“My darling Amalia Kazimirovna,” said a familiar light tenor voice in Russian. “Will you not permit an old man to take a spin in your carriage with you? We could chat about this and that, and I should be a bit drier. As you can see, I am absolutely drenched. Your servant can take the droshky and drive behind us. You don’t object, do you, my sweetheart?”

“Get in,” Bezhetskaya replied dryly. “But remember, Pyzhov, I am no darling of yours, let alone your sweetheart.”

Erast Fandorin lowed mutely, for with the rubber pear in his mouth it was quite impossible to burst out sobbing. The entire world had taken up arms against the poor youth. Where could he draw the strength required to overcome the odds in this battle with an entire host of villains? He was surrounded by noxious traitors, venomous vipers (pah, now he had been infected by Porfirii Pyzhov’s odious verbiage!). Bezhetskaya and her cutthroats, and Zurov, and even Pyzhov, that fickle fair-weather friend—they were all his enemies. At that moment Erast Fandorin did not even wish to go on living, so overwhelmed was he by disgust and weariness.

But as things stood, no one seemed very keen to persuade him to go on living. In fact, his escorts appeared to have something quite different in mind. Strong hands hoisted the captive up and set him down on a seat. The heavyweight Morbid clambered up and sat on his left, the lightweight Franz sat on his right and cracked his whip, and Erast Fandorin was thrown backward.

“Where to?” asked the butler.

“We were told to go to pier six. It’s deeper there and the current’s stronger, too. What do you think?”

“It makes no difference to me. Number six will do as well as any.”

And so Erast Fandorin’s imminent fate was spelled out for him quite clearly. They would take him to some solitary quayside, tie a rock to him, and dispatch him to the bottom of the Thames, to rot among the rusty anchor chains and bottle shards. Titular Counselor Fandorin would disappear without trace, for it would transpire that after the military agent in Paris, he had not been seen by a single living soul. Ivan Brilling would realize that his protege must have missed his footing somewhere, but he would never learn the truth. And in Moscow and Peter they would still be unaware of the viper that lurked in the bosom of their secret service. If only he could be unmasked.

Well, and perhaps he still could.

Even bound and stuffed into a long, dusty sack, Erast Fandorin was feeling incomparably better than twenty minutes earlier, when the phosphorescent specter was glaring in at his window and his reason was paralyzed by fear.

For in matter of fact there was indeed a chance of salvation for him. Franz was adroit, but he had not guessed to feel Fandorin’s right sleeve. In that sleeve lay the stiletto, and in the stiletto lay hope. If only he could contrive somehow to reach the handle with his fingers…Oh, that’s not so simple when your hand is tied to your hip. How long would it take them to reach this pier six? Would he have time?

“Sit still,” said Morbid, poking his elbow into the side of the captive, who was wriggling about (no doubt from fear).

“Indeed, my friend, twist and turn as you may, it changes nothing,” Franz remarked philosophically.

The man in the sack carried on twitching for about a minute before eventually emitting a brief, muffled hoot and falling quiet, evidently finally reconciled to his fate (before it yielded and slid out, the accursed stiletto had dealt him a painful cut on the wrist).

“Here we are,” John announced and got to his feet, peering about in all directions. “Nobody here.”

“And who would there be, out in the rain, in the middle of the night?” asked Franz with a shrug of his shoulders. “Come on, will you—get a move on. We’ve still got to get back.”

“Take his legs.”

They picked up the bundle bound around with string and carried it to a rough wooden pier for rowboats that thrust over the black water like an arrow.

Erast Fandorin heard the squeak of planks underfoot and the splashing of the river. Deliverance was near. The moment the waters of the Thames closed over his head he would slash the blade across his bonds, slice open the sack, and rise quietly to the surface under the pier. There he would bide his time until these two were gone, and then his nightmare would be over—salvation, life, freedom! It all seemed so plain and easy that an inner voice suddenly whispered to Fandorin: Erast, things never happen like that in real life. Fate is sure to play some dirty trick and upset your entire marvelous plan.

Alas, the inner voice was an omen of the disaster it predicted, for the dirty trick put in an appearance without further delay—and it came not from the direction of the nightmarish Mr. Morbid, but on the initiative of the genial Franz.

“Wait a moment, John,” Franz said when they halted at the edge of the pier and set their burden down on the rough boards. “This won’t do—throwing a living man into the water like some kitten. Would you like to be in his place?”

“No,” replied John.

“Well, then,” said Franz, delighted. “You see what I mean. Choking on that filthy rotten swill—brrrr! I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Let’s do right by him: slit his throat first so he won’t suffer. One quick swipe, and it’s all over, eh?”

Such philanthropic sentimentality made Erast Fandorin feel quite ill, but dear, wonderful Mr. Morbid muttered discontentedly, “Oh, no, I’ll get my knife all bloody. And splatter blood on my sleeve. This young puppy’s caused enough trouble already. Never mind—he’ll croak anyway. If you’re so kindhearted, you strangle him with a piece of string—that’s your speciality—and meanwhile I’ll go and look for a lump of iron or something of the sort.”

His heavy footsteps receded, leaving Fandorin alone with the humanitarian Franz.

“I shouldn’t have tied any string ‘round the outside of the sack,” the latter mused thoughtfully. “I used it all up.”

Erast Fandorin lowed in approval—never mind, don’t worry about it, I’ll manage somehow.

“Eh, poor soul,” sighed Franz. “Listen to him groan. It fair breaks your heart. Okay, my lad, don’t you be frightened. Uncle Franz won’t begrudge you his belt.”

There was the sound of approaching steps.

“There you are, a piece of rail, the very thing,” boomed the butler. “Stick it in under the string. He won’t surface for a month at least.”

“Wait a moment. I’ll just slip this noose ‘round his neck.”

“Ah, to hell with all your mollycoddling! Time’s wasting—it’ll be dawn soon!”

“I’m sorry, son,” Franz said sympathetically. “Obviously that’s the way it’s meant to be. Das host du dir selbst verdanken.*”

They picked Erast Fandorin up again and began swinging him backward and forward.

“Azazel!” Franz cried out in a solemn, formal voice, and a second later the swaddled body plunged with a splash into the putrid water.

Fandorin felt neither the cold nor the oily weight of the water pressing down on him as he hacked through the soaking string with the stiletto. The most awkward part was freeing his right hand, but once it was loose, the job went swimmingly: one stroke and his left hand began assisting his right; another, and the sack was slashed from top to bottom; a third, and the heavy length of rail went plunging into the soft silt.

Now he just had to make certain not to surface too soon. Erast Fandorin pushed off with his legs, thrust his hands out in front of him, and groped about with them in the turbid water. Somewhere here, very close, there ought to be the supports that held up the pier. There—his fingers had come into contact with slippery, weed-covered timber. Quietly now, without hurrying, up along the pillar so there would be no splash, not a sound.

Under the wooden decking of the pier it was pitch-dark. Suddenly a round white blob was thrust up from the black, watery depths. Within this white circle a smaller dark one immediately took shape as Titular Counselor Fandorin greedily gulped in the air above the river. It smelled of decay and kerosene. It had the magical smell of life.

Meanwhile, up above on the pier, a leisurely conversation was in progress. Concealed below, Erast Fandorin could hear every word. He had sometimes reduced himself to sentimental tears by imagining the words with which friends and enemies would remember him, the hero who met an untimely end, by rehearsing the speeches that would be pronounced over the gaping pit of his grave. One might say that his entire youth had been spent in dreams of this kind. Imagine, then, the young man’s indignation when he heard what trivia formed the subject of the prattle between those who believed themselves his murderers! Not a word about the man over whose head the somber waters had only just closed! A man with a mind and a heart, with a noble soul and exalted aspirations!

“Oh,” sighed Franz, “I’ll pay for this little stroll with an attack of rheumatism. Feel how damp the air is. Well, what are we standing here for? Let’s go, eh?”

“It’s too soon.”

“Listen, what with all this running about I didn’t get any supper. What do you think—will they give us something to eat or think up some other job for us to do?”

“That’s not for us to worry our heads about. We’ll do whatever they tell us.”

“If I could just grab a nice piece of cold veal on the way. My stomach’s rumbling…Are we really going to uproot ourselves from the old familiar homestead? I’ve just settled in, got used to the place. What for? Everything worked out all right in the end.”

“She knows what for. If she’s given the order, there’s a reason.”

“That’s true enough. She doesn’t make mistakes. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for her—I’d even shop my own dear old dad. That is, if I had one, of course. No mother would ever have done as much for us as she has.”

“That goes without saying…Right, that’s it. Let’s go.”

Erast Fandorin waited until the footsteps died away in the distance, counted to three hundred just to make sure, and only then began moving toward the shoreline.

When, after falling back several times, he finally hauled himself out with a great struggle onto the low but almost vertical parapet of the waterfront, the darkness was already beginning to melt away before the advancing dawn. The man who had failed to drown shuddered and shivered, his teeth chattered, and then he was seized by the hiccups as well. He must clearly have swallowed a lot of the putrid river water. But it was still wonderful to be alive. Erast Fandorin cast a loving glance across the wide expanse of the river (on the far side there were lights shining sweetly); smiled affectionately at the sheer solidity of a low, squat warehouse; gave his approval to the regular swaying of the tugboats and harbor launches lined up along the quayside. A blissful smile lit up the wet face of this man risen from the dead with a smear of fuel oil on his forehead. He stretched sweetly, and then froze motionless in that absurd pose—a low, agile silhouette had detached itself nimbly from the corner of the warehouse and begun scurrying toward him.

“What vile brutes they are, what villainous knaves,” the silhouette lamented in a thin voice clearly audible from a distance as it came toward him. “They can never be trusted to do anything—you always have to keep an eye on them. Where would you all be without Pyzhov, tell me that! You’d be as helpless as blind little kittens—you’d be done for.”

Fandorin dashed forward, overwhelmed by righteous fury. The traitor appeared to imagine that his Satanic apostasy had remained undiscovered.

However, a glimpse of the malevolent gleam of metal in the provincial secretary’s hand made Erast Fandorin first halt and then begin backing away.

“That’s a wise decision, my sweet strawberry,” Pyzhov said approvingly, and Fandorin saw what a catlike spring there was in his step. “You’re a sensible lad—I saw that straightaway. Do you know what it is I have here?” He waved his weapon in the air, and Fandorin saw a twin-barreled pistol of unusually large caliber. “A terrible thing. In the local criminal argot it is known as a smasher. Here, if you would care to take a look, is where you load the two little explosive bullets—the very ones forbidden by the St. Petersburg Convention of 1868. But criminals are genuine villains, my little Erast. What do they care for some philanthropic convention? And the bullet is explosive. Once it strikes the flesh, it unfolds its petals like a flower. It reduces flesh and bone to a bloody mush. So just you take it easy, my little darling, don’t go getting twitchy. If I’m startled I might just fire, then afterward I wouldn’t be able to live with what I’d done, I’d feel so guilty. It really is excruciatingly painful if it hits you in the belly or anywhere else around that area.”

Still hiccuping—no longer from the cold but from fear—Fandorin yelled out, “Judas Iscariot! You sold your homeland for thirty pieces of silver!” And he backed further away from the menacing muzzle of the gun.

“In the words of the immortal Derzhavin, inconstancy is the lot of mortal kind. And you do me a grave injustice, my little friend. I was not enticed by thirty shekels but by a far more substantial sum, transferred in the most immaculate manner to a Swiss bank—for my old age, to ensure that I do not die in the gutter. And what did you think you were doing, you little fool? Who did you think you were yelping and yapping at? Shooting at stone is merely a waste of arrows. This is a truly mighty structure, the pyramid of Cheops. You cannot butt it down with your forehead.”

In the meantime Erast Fandorin had shuffled back to the edge of the quayside and been obliged to halt on feeling the low curb press against the back of his heels. All appearances indicated that this was exactly what Pyzhov had been trying to achieve.

“That’s very good now—that’s quite splendid,” he intoned melliflu-ously, halting ten paces away from his victim. “It wouldn’t have been easy for me to drag such a well-nourished youth to the water afterward. Don’t you be alarmed, my rubicund little fellow, Pyzhov knows what he’s about. Bang—and it’s all over. No more red little face, just gooey red mush. Even if they fish you out they won’t identify you. And your soul will soar straight up to the angels. It hasn’t had a chance to sin yet, it’s such a young soul.”

With these words he raised his weapon, screwed up his left eye, and smiled in sweet anticipation. He was in no hurry to fire; he was clearly savoring the moment. Fandorin cast a despairing glance at the deserted shoreline illuminated by the bleary light of dawn. There was no one, not a single soul. This time it really was the end. He thought he saw something stirring over by the warehouse, but he had no time to make it out—a shot thundered out, appallingly loud, louder than the loudest of thunder. Erast Fandorin swayed backward, then with a bloodcurdling howl he plunged down into the river out of which he had clambered with such great difficulty only a few minutes earlier.

CHAPTER TWELVE

in which our hero discovers that he has a halo around his head

CONSCIOUSNESS DID NOT, HOWEVER, DESERT the executed man, and, strangely enough, there was absolutely no pain at all. Totally bemused, Erast Fandorin began flailing at the water with his arms. What had happened? Was he alive or dead? If he was dead, then why was everything so wet?

Zurov’s head appeared above the curb at the edge of the quay. Fandorin was not surprised in the least. In the first place, it would have been hard to surprise him with anything just at that moment, and in the second place, in the next world (if that was where he was) far stranger things might occur.

“Erasmus! Are you alive? Did I nick you?” Zurov’s head cried out in an anguished voice. “Give me your hand.”

Erast Fandorin thrust his right hand out of the water, and with one mighty heave he was dragged up onto terra firma. The first thing he saw when he rose to his feet was a small figure lying facedown on the ground with one hand extended forward, clutching a hefty pistol. In among the thinning, skewbald hair on the back of the figure’s head there was a black hole, beneath which a dark puddle was slowly spreading.

“Are you wounded?” Zurov asked anxiously, turning the wet Erast Fandorin around and feeling him all over. “I don’t understand how it could have happened. A perfect rйvolution dans la balls tique* No, it’s quite impossible.”

“Count Zurov, is that you?” Fandorin wheezed, finally grasping the fact that all this was not taking place in the next world but in this one.

“Don’t be so formal. Have you forgotten that we drank to bruder-schaft?”

“But why did you do it?” Erast Fandorin began shaking and shuddering again. “Are you absolutely determined to do away with me? Did that cursed Azazel of yours offer you a reward to do it? Shoot then, shoot, curse you! You make me feel sick, all of you, worse than cold semolina!”

How cold semolina came to be mixed up in the matter was not clear—no doubt it was something from his childhood, long ago forgotten. Erast Fandorin was about to rip open the shirt on his chest—there you are, there’s my breast, shoot!—but Zurov thumped him unceremoniously on the shoulder.

“Stop raving, Fandorin. What Azazel? What semolina? Let me bring you to your senses.” And thereupon he delivered two resounding slaps to the exhausted Erast Fandorin’s face. “It’s me. Hippolyte Zurov. It’s no wonder your brains have turned to jelly after such trying adventures. Prop yourself up against me.” He put his arm around the young man’s shoulders. “Now I’ll take you back to the hotel. I’ve got a horse tethered close by and he”—Zurov prodded Pyzhov’s motionless body with his foot—“has a droshky. We’ll fly back like the wind. You’ll get warmed up, down a dose of grog, and explain to me what kind of circus it is you’re involved in here.”

Fandorin pushed the count away violently. “Oh no, you explain to me! How did you come to be here? Why were you following me? Are you in collusion with them?”

Disconcerted, Zurov twirled his black mustache.

“I can’t tell you all that in a couple of words.”

“Never mind, I’ve got plenty hie—of time. I won’t budge from this spot.”

“Very well then, listen.”

And this is the story that Hippolyte told.

“Do you think I gave you Amalia’s address just like that, without thinking about it? No, brother Fandorin, there was an entire psychology behind it. I took a liking to you, a terribly strong liking. There’s something about you…I don’t know, perhaps you’re marked in some way. I have a nose for people like you. It’s as if I can see a halo above a man’s head, a kind of faint radiance. They’re special people, the ones with that halo. Fate watches over them—it protects them against all dangers. It never occurs to the man to think what fate is preserving him for. You must never fight a duel with a man like that—he’ll kill you. Don’t sit down to play cards with him—you’ll be cleaned out, no matter what fancy tricks you pull out of your sleeve. I spotted your halo when you cleaned me out at stoss and then forced me to draw lots to commit suicide. I don’t meet people like you often. Back in our unit, when we were crossing the desert in Turkestan, there was a lieutenant by the name of Ulich. He went wading straight into the thickest fighting and nothing ever happened to him—he just kept on grinning. Would you believe that near Khiva with my own eyes I saw the khan’s guardsmen fire a volley at him? Not a scratch. And then he drank some kumiss* that had turned sour and it finished him. We buried Ulich in the sand. Then why did the Lord watch over him in battle? It’s a riddle! So, Erasmus, you are one of those people, too—you can take my word for it. I’ve loved you since that moment when you put a pistol to your head without the slightest hesitation and pulled the trigger. But my love, brother Fandorin, is a subtle substance. I can’t love anyone who is inferior to me and I envy those who are superior to me with a deadly envy. I envied you, too. I felt jealous of your halo and your unnatural luck. Look at you—today you’ve come out of the water bone dry. Ha-ha, that is to say, you’ve come out wet, of course, but still alive and without a single scratch. And to look at, you’re a mere boy, a young whelp, nothing to look at at all.”

Until this moment Erast Fandorin had been listening with lively interest, even blushing a gentle pink in his pleasure, and for the time being he had stopped shivering, but at the word ‘whelp’ he scowled and hiccuped twice angrily.

“Don’t go taking offense—I mean it in friendship,” said Zurov, and slapped him on the shoulder. “Anyway, what I thought was: fate has sent him to me. Amalia is bound to go for someone like him. She’ll like the look of what she sees so much that she’ll be hooked. And that will be the end of it—I’ll be free of this satanic compulsion once and for all. She’ll leave me in peace, stop tormenting me and leading me around on a chain like a bear at a fairground. Let her bait the boy with those Egyptian tortures of hers. So I gave you the end of the thread; I knew you wouldn’t renounce your quest…Here, put this cloak over you and take a sip from this flask. You’ll hiccup yourself to death.”

While Fandorin, with his teeth chattering all the while, gulped down the Jamaican rum that splashed around on the bottom of the large flat flask, Hippolyte threw his dandified cloak with the crimson satin lining over Fandorin’s shoulders and then briskly rolled Pyzhov’s corpse to the edge of the quay with his feet, tumbled it over the curb, and shoved it into the water. A single muffled splash, and all that remained of the iniquitous provincial secretary was a dark puddle on a flagstone.

“Lord, have mercy on the soul of Thy servant whoever he was,” Zurov prayed piously.

“Py-pyzhov,” said Erast Fandorin, hiccuping again, although thanks to the rum at least his teeth were no longer chattering. “Porfirii Martynovich Pyzhov.”

“I won’t remember it anyway,” said Hippolyte with a careless shrug of his shoulder. “To hell with him. The half-pint was a rotten lot as far as I can see. Attacking an unarmed man with a pistol—pah! You know, he was going to kill you, Erasmus. As a matter of fact, I saved your life. Do you realize that?”

“I realize, I realize. Carry on with your story.”

“Carry on I will then. I gave you Amalia’s address, and the next day I was plunged into such depression—such a deep depression, as God forbid you should ever know. I drank, and I went to the girls, and I threw away fifty thousand at the card table—and still it wouldn’t let go of me. I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat. I could drink all right, though. I kept seeing you lovey-doveying with Amalia and both of you laughing at me. Or, even worse, forgetting about me completely. I pined like that for ten whole days. I felt like I was losing my mind. You remember Jean, my manservant? He’s in the hospital now. He tried to remonstrate with me, shoved his nose in, and I put his nose out of joint and broke two of his ribs. I was ashamed, brother Fandorin. It was as if I were in a raging fever. On the eleventh day I couldn’t take any more of it. I decided, that’s it, I’ll kill them both and afterward I’ll do away with myself. Nothing could be worse than this. So help me God, I can’t remember how I traveled across Europe. I was drinking like a Kara Kum camel. When we were traveling through Germany I even threw a couple of Prussians out of the carriage. But I can’t actually remember it. Perhaps I imagined it. When I recovered my wits I was in London. The first thing I did was go to the hotel. Not a trace of her or of you. The hotel’s a godforsaken hole. Amalia’s never stayed in places like that in all her life. The sly rogue of a porter doesn’t have a word of French, and the only English I know is ‘bottul viskey’ and ‘moov yoor ass’—a midshipman I used to know taught me that. It means give me a bottle of the strong stuff and look sharp about it. I asked that porter, the English shrimp, about Miss Olsen, and he jabbered something in his own lingo and shook his head and pointed somewhere backward, as if to say she’s gone, but he doesn’t know where. Then I took a stab at you: ‘Fandorin, I say, Fandorin, moov yoor ass.’ And then—mind you don’t take offense, now—he opened his eyes wide in amazement. Your name obviously means something indecent in English. Anyway, the flunky and I failed to reach a mutual understanding. There was nothing else for it, so I moved into that fleapit and stayed there. The schedule was, in the morning I go to the porter and I ask: ‘Fandorin?’ He bows and says ‘Moning, sya’—telling me you haven’t arrived yet. Then I go across the street to the tavern where I have my observation post. What hellish boredom, those miserable mugs all around me. It’s a good thing I at least have my ‘bottul viskey’ and ‘moov yoor ass’ to help me out. At first the tavernkeeper just gawped at me, then he got used to it and started greeting me like a member of the family. His trade was livelier because of me: people gathered to watch me swigging spirits by the glassful. But they were afraid to come close—they watched from a distance…I learned some new words: ‘djin’—that’s juniper vodka, ‘ram’—that’s rum, ‘brendy’—that’s a wretched kind of cognac. Well, anyway, I would have stayed sitting at my observation post until I drank myself into a stupor, but on the fourth day, Allah be praised, you arrived. And you arrived looking like a real dandy, in a big shiny carriage, with a mustache. By the way, it’s a shame you shaved it off, it makes you look more of a sport. Fancy that, I think, you cock of the walk, you’ve spread your fine tail now. Only now instead of ‘Miss Olsen’ you’ll get short shift for your pains! But that hotel twerp sang a different song for you, so I decided I’d lie low and wait until you put me on the scent and then see how the cards lay. I crept ‘round the streets after you like some sleuth from the detective police. Pshaw! I was at my wits’ end. I saw you agree terms with a cabdriver and so I took measures of my own. I took a horse from the stable and wrapped its hooves in towels from the hotel to stop them clattering too loudly. The Chechens do that when they’re preparing for a raid. Not that they use hotel towels, I mean—they use some other kind of rags. You understand me?”

Erast Fandorin remembered the night before last. He had been so afraid of losing sight of Morbid that he had not given a thought to looking behind him, but now it appeared that the shadower had been shadowed.

“When you climbed in through her window, a volcano started bubbling up inside me,” Hippolyte continued. “I bit my hand until it bled. Here, look.” He thrust his strong, well-proportioned hand under Fandorin’s nose, and indeed, there between the thumb and the forefinger was the perfect half-moon mark of a bite. “That’s it, I said to myself, now three souls will go flying off at once—one to heaven (I meant you) and two straight to hell…You dithered a little bit by the window until you summoned up enough impudence to climb in. My last hope then was that she might throw you out. She doesn’t like being taken unawares like that—prefers to order everyone else around herself. I wait, and I’m shaking in my boots. Suddenly the light goes out, there’s a shot, and she screams! Oh, I think, Fandorin’s shot her, the hothead. Landed himself in a fine mess, a fine pickle! And then suddenly, brother Fandorin, I felt so miserable, as if I were completely alone in the whole wide world and there was no point in going on living…I knew she would come to a bad end, I wanted to do away with her myself, but even so…You saw me, didn’t you, when you went running past? But I was frozen, just as if I were paralyzed. I didn’t even call out to you. It was as if I were surrounded by a haze…Then very queer things started happening, every one queerer than the last. First of all, it became clear that Amalia was alive. You must have shot wide in the darkness. She was howling and cursing the servants so loudly that the walls shook. She was giving some orders or other in English. The lackeys were running around in circles, poking about in the garden. I hopped into the bushes and lay low. My head was full of the most terrible muddle. I felt like the dummy in a game of preference. Everybody’s making their bids, and I’m just sitting there with the discards. Oh no, I think, you’ve got the wrong man. Zurov’s never been anybody’s duffer. There’s a little boarded-up hut in the garden, about the size of two dog kennels. I rip the plank off it and hide inside. It’s not the first time I’ve had to do that kind of thing. I observed events, kept a sharp eye out, pricked up my ears. A satyr lying in wait for Psyche. And meanwhile they’re kicking up a real rumpus! Just like at corps HQ before an imperial inspection. The servants come dashing out of the house, then dash back in again. Amalia shouts something every now and then. There are postmen bringing telegrams. I can’t make sense of it all—what kind of rumpus has my Erasmus started in there? He seems such a well-mannered young man, too. What did you do to her, eh? Did you spot a lily on her shoulder, or what? She hasn’t got any lily, not on her shoulder or anywhere else. Well, tell me. Don’t tease.”

Erast Fandorin merely gave an impatient wave of his hand, as if to say, get on with it, I have no time for such nonsense.

“Well, anyway, you stirred up an anthill. Your dead man”—Zurov nodded in the direction of the river where Porfirii Martynovich Pyzhov had found his final resting place—“came calling twice. The second time it was almost evening already.”

“You mean to say you sat there all night and all day?” Fandorin gasped. “With no food or drink?”

“Well, I can go without food for a long time, just as long as there’s drink. And there was.” Zurov slapped his hand against his flask. “Of course, I had to introduce rationing. Two sips an hour. It’s hard, but I put up with worse during the siege of Mahram—I’ll tell you about that later. To stretch my legs I got out and went to check the horse a couple of times. I’d tied her to the fence in a nearby park. I pulled her some grass and spoke to her a bit so she wouldn’t get too lonely, and then went back to the hut. Back at home people would have led off an unguarded filly like that in an instant, but the people here are a bit slow on the uptake. It never occurred to them. In the evening my dun filly came in very handy. When the dead man drove up”—Zurov nodded in the direction of the river again—“for the second time, your enemies began gathering to launch their campaign. Imagine the scene. Amalia at the head in her coach like a genuine Bonaparte, with two sturdy fellows on the box. The dead man following her in a droshky. Then a pair of servants in a carriage. And a little distance behind, concealed in the black of night there am I on my dun filly, like Denis Davidov*—just four towels moving to and fro in the dark.” Hippolyte gave a short laugh and shot a brief glance at the red strip of dawn that already lay along the river. “They drove into some dismal dump, just like the Ligovka slums: lousy little houses, warehouses, and mud. The dead man climbed into Amalia’s coach—obviously in order to hold a council of war. I tethered my filly in a gateway and watched to see what would happen next. The dead man went into a house with some kind of signboard and stayed there about half an hour. Then the climate began to deteriorate, cannonades in the sky, rain lashing down. I’m soaked, but I wait—I’m curious. The dead man appeared again and hopped up into Amalia’s coach. They’re probably holding another consultation. But the water’s pouring down my neck and my flask’s getting empty. I wanted to give them Christ appearing to the multitude, scatter the whole rotten gang of them and demand an explanation from Amalia, but suddenly the door of the coach opened and I saw such an ungodly sight…”

“A ghost?” asked Fandorin. “Glowing?”

“Precisely. Brrr. It made me shiver. I didn’t realize straightaway that it was Amalia. That made me feel curious again. She behaved strangely. First she went into the same door, then she disappeared in the next gateway, then she flitted back in the door again. Her servants followed her. A little while after that they led out a sack walking on legs. It was only later that I realized they’d nabbed you. At the time I was puzzled. After that, their army divided up: Amalia and the dead man got into the coach, the droshky followed them, and the servants with the sack—with you, that is—drove off in the opposite direction. All right, I think, the sack’s no business of mine. I have to save Amalia—she’s got herself mixed up in some dirty business or other. I ride after the carriage and the droshky, my hooves making a gentle clippety-clop, clippety-clop. They hadn’t gone very far before they stopped. I dismounted and held the dun by the muzzle, so she wouldn’t whinny. The dead man climbed out of the coach and said (it was a quiet night, you could hear things from a long way off): “Oh no, my sweetheart, I’d better go and check. I have an uneasy feeling somehow. This youth of ours is a bit too sharp altogether. If you should need me, you know where to find me.” At first I felt indignant: what kind of ‘sweetheart’ is she to you, you dratted old rogue? And then it dawned on me. Could they possibly be talking about Erasmus?” Hippolyte shook his head, clearly proud of his own shrewdness. “Well, after that it’s simple. The driver from the droshky moved across to the box of the coach. I followed the dead man. I was standing way over there behind that corner, trying to understand what you’d done to rile him. But the two of you were talking so quietly I couldn’t hear a damned thing. I hadn’t been thinking of shooting, and it was a bit dark for a good shot, but he would have killed you for sure—I could see that from his back. I have a good eye for such things, brother. What a shot! Now tell me Zurov wastes his time making holes in five-kopeck pieces! From forty paces straight into the back of the head, and you have to take the poor light into account.”

“Let us assume it wasn’t forty,” Erast Fandorin said absentmindedly, thinking of something else.

“How so not forty?” Hippolyte said, growing excited. “You try counting it!” And he actually started pacing out the distance (the paces were perhaps a little on the short side), but Fandorin stopped him.

“Where are you going to go now?”

Zurov was amazed. “How d’you mean, where? I’ll get you back into decent shape, you’ll explain to me properly what all this hullabaloo of yours is about, we’ll have some breakfast, and then I’m going to see Amalia. I’ll shoot the slippery serpent, to hell with her. Or I’ll carry her off somewhere. Just you tell me, are we two allies or rivals?”

“I’ll tell you how things are,” said Erast Fandorin, rubbing his eyes wearily. “There’s no need to help me—that’s one. I’m not going to explain anything to you—that’s two. Shooting Amalia is a good idea, but just make sure they don’t shoot you instead—that’s three. And I am no rival of yours, she turns my stomach—that’s four.”

“I expect it would be best to shoot her after all,” Zurov said thoughtfully in reply to that. “Good-bye, Erasmus. God willing, we’ll meet again.”

AFTER THE SHOCKS and upheavals of the night, for all its intensity Erast Fandorin’s day turned out strangely disjointed, as if it were composed of separate fragments poorly connected with one another. It seemed as if Fandorin was thinking and taking meaningful decisions, even putting them into action, and yet all of this was taking place in isolation, outside the general scenario. The last day of June was preserved in our hero’s memory as a sequence of vivid isolated pictures suspended against an empty void.

MORNING ON THE BANKS of the Thames in the dockland district. The weather is calm and sunny, the air fresh after the thunderstorm. Erast Fandorin sits on the tin roof of a squat warehouse, clad only in his undergarments. Laid out beside him are his wet clothes and his boots. The top of one of the boots is torn. His open passport and banknotes are drying in the sun. The thoughts of the escapee from a watery grave grow confused and wander but always return to the main channel.

They think that I’m dead, but I’m alive—that’s one. They think that nobody else knows about them, but I know—that’s two. The attachй case is lost—that’s three. Nobody will believe me—that’s four. They’ll put me in a madhouse—that’s five…

No, from the beginning. They don’t know that I am alive—that’s one. They’re no longer looking for me—that’s two. It will take time for them to miss Pyzhov—that’s three. Now I can pay a visit to the embassy and send a coded message to the chief—that’s four…

No, I can’t go to the embassy. What if Pyzhov is not the only Judas there? Amalia will find out and then everything will start all over again. I must not tell anyone at all about this whole business. Except the chief. And a telegram is no good for that. He’ll think Fandorin’s impressions of Europe have driven him crazy. Shall I send a letter to Moscow? I could do that, but it will get there too late.

What shall I do? What shall I do?

Today is the last day of June by the local calendar. Today Amalia will draw a line under the bookkeeping for June and the envelope will go off to Nicholas Croog in St. Petersburg. The first to die will be the full state counselor, a distinguished man, with children. He is there somewhere in St. Petersburg’, they will find him and dispose of him in a moment. It is rather stupid of them to write from St. Petersburg to London in order to get an answer back to St. Petersburg. One of the penalties of conspiratorial secrecy. Obviously the branches of the secret organisation do not know where the head quarters is located. Or perhaps the headquarters shifts from country to country? Today it is in St. Petersburg, but in a month’s time it will be somewhere else? Or perhaps there is no HQ, just a single individual? Who, Croog? That would be too simple, but Croog has to be arrested with the envelope.

How can I stop that envelope?

I can’t. It’s impossible.

Stop! I can’t stop it, but I can overtake it! How many days does the post take to reach St. Petersburg?

THE NEXT ACT is played out a few hours later, in the office of the East Central postal district of the City of London. The director is feeling flattered—Fandorin has introduced himself as a Russian prince—and he calls his visitor ‘Prince’ and ‘Your Highness,’ enunciating the title with undisguised relish. Erast Fandorin is wearing an elegant morning coat and carrying a cane, an accessory without which any real prince is quite inconceivable.

“I very much regret, Prince, that your wager will be lost,” the postal director explains for the third time to the slow-witted Russian. “Your country is a member of the International Postal Union which was founded the year before last, uniting twenty-two states with a total population of more than three hundred and fifty million. Standard regulations and rates are in effect across this entire area. If the letter was sent from London today, the thirtieth of June, for urgent delivery, then you cannot overtake it—in exactly six days’ time, on the morning of the sixth of July, it will arrive at the post office in St. Petersburg. Well, not on the sixth, of course, but whatever the date would be by your calendar.”

“Why will it be there, but I won’t?” the ‘prince’ asks, failing entirely to grasp the situation.

The director explains with an air of grave seriousness. “You see, Your Highness, packages with an ‘urgent’ stamp are delivered without a single minute of delay. Let us suppose that you board the same train at Waterloo station on which an urgent letter has been dispatched. You board the same ferry at Dover. And you also arrive at the Gare du Nord in Paris at the same time.”

“Then what is the problem?”

“The problem,” the director says triumphantly, “is that there is nothing faster than the urgent post! You have arrived in Paris, and you have to change to a train going to Berlin. You have to buy a ticket—since, after all, you have not booked one in advance. You have to find a cab and travel all the way across the city center to a different station. You have to wait for the Berlin train, which departs once a day. Now, let us return to our urgent letter. From the Gare du Nord it travels by special postal handcar around the circular railway line and is delivered to the first train traveling in an easterly direction. It may not even be a passenger train but a freight train with a postal wagon.”

“But then I can do the very same!” Erast Fandorin exclaims excitedly.

The reply of the patriot of the postal service is strict. “Perhaps in Russia such a thing might be feasible, but not in Europe. Hmm, let us suppose it is possible to suborn a Frenchman, but at your change of trains in Berlin all your efforts will come to nothing—the postal and railway workers in Germany are famous for their incorruptibility.”

“Can everything really be lost?” the despairing Erast Fandorin exclaims in Russian.

“I beg your pardon?”

“So you believe that I have lost my wager?” the ‘prince’ asks dejectedly, switching back into English.

“At what time was the letter sent? But it really doesn’t matter. Even if you dash straight to the station from here, it is already too late.”

The Englishman’s words produce a quite magical effect on the Russian aristocrat.

“At what time? Why, of course! Today is still June! Morbid will not collect the letters until ten o’clock. While she is copying them out…and encoding them! She can’t send them just like that, in plain Russian! She will definitely encode them—but of course! And that means that the envelope will only go off tomorrow! And it will arrive not on the sixth, but on the seventh! On the twenty-fifth of June by our calendar!”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand a thing, Prince,” says the director, gesturing helplessly with his hands, but Fandorin is no longer in the office. The door has just closed behind him.

A plaintive voice calls after him. “Your Highness, your cane! Oh my, these Russian boyars!”

AND FINALLY, the evening of this arduous day that seems to have been shrouded in fog but has seen such important developments: The waters of the English Channel. The final sunset of June flaunting its outrageous colors above the sea. The ferry The Duke of Gloucesterholding course for Dunkirk, with Fandorin posed at the prow like a true Briton, in a cloth cap, checked suit, and Scottish cape. He gazes fixedly ahead, toward the shore of France that is approaching with such agonizing slowness. Not once does Erast Fandorin glance back toward the white cliffs of Dover.

His lips whisper, “Only let her wait until tomorrow to send it. Only let her wait…”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

which narrates events that transpired on the twenty-fifth of June

THE LUSH SUNSHINE OF SUMMER PAINTED golden squares on the floor of the operations hall of the Central Post Office in St. Petersburg. As evening drew near, one of them, elongated by this time into an irregular oblong, reached the poste restante window and instantly warmed the counter. The atmosphere became stifling and soporific. A fly droned drowsily, and the attendant sitting at the window was overcome by sudden fatigue—thank goodness his stream of customers was gradually drying up at last. Another half hour and the doors of the post office would be closed; then all he would have to do was hand in his register and he could go home. The attendant—but let us give him his own name, he was Kondratii Kondratievich Shtukin, who in seventeen years of service in the postal department had risen from simple postman to the glorious heights of a formal state rank—Kondratii Shtukin handed over a package from Revel to an elderly Finnish woman with the amusing name of Pyrvu and looked to see whether the Englishman was still sitting there.

The Englishman was still sitting there—he had not gone away. There was an obstinate nation for you now. The Englishman had appeared early in the morning, when the post office had barely even opened, and having seated himself beside the partition with his newspaper, had sat there the whole day long, without eating or drinking or even, begging your pardon, leaving his post to do the necessary. As if he were rooted to the spot. Clearly someone must have made an appointment to meet him and failed to keep it. That happens often enough around here, but for a Briton it would be incomprehensible. They’re such a disciplined people, so punctual. Whenever anyone, especially anyone of a foreign appearance, approached the window, the Englishman would draw himself up in eager anticipation and even shift his blue spectacles to the very tip of his nose. But so far none of them had been the one he was expecting. A Russian, now, would have given way to indignation long ago, thrown his hands up in the air, and begun complaining loudly to everyone in earshot; but this fellow just stuck his nose into his Times and carried on sitting there.

Or perhaps the fellow had nowhere to go. Came here straight from the railway station—look at that checked traveling suit he had on, and the traveling bag—thinking he would be met, but he hadn’t been. What else could he do? When he came back from lunch, Kondratii Shtukin had taken pity on the son of Albion and sent the doorman Trifon across to ask whether there was anything he needed, but the gentleman in checks had only shaken his head irritably and handed Trifon twenty kopecks, as much as to say: leave me alone. Well, have it your own way.

A little shrimp of a man who had the look of a cabdriver appeared at the window and pushed across a crumpled passport.

“Take a look, would you, dear chap. See if there’s anything for Nikola Mitrofanich Krug.”

“Where are you expecting it from?” Kondratii Shtukin asked strictly, taking the passport.

The reply was unexpected. “From England, from London.”

The remarkable thing was that a letter from London was found—only not under the Russian letter K, but the Latin letter C. Look at that now, “Mr. Nicholas M. Croog,” if you don’t mind! The things you do see at the poste restante counter!

“But is that definitely you?” Shtukin asked, more out of curiosity than suspicion.

“Not a doubt about it,” the cabdriver replied rather rudely, thrusting his clawlike hand in through the window and snatching up the yellow envelope with the ‘urgent’ stamp.

Kondratii Shtukin handed him the register. “Are you able to sign for it?”

“As well as anyone else.” And the boor entered some kind of scrawl in the ‘received’ column.

Shtukin followed the departure of this unpleasant customer with a wrathful eye, then cast his now customary sideways glance at the Englishman, but he had disappeared. He must have finally despaired of his appointment.

ERAST FANDORIN WAITED OUTSIDE for the cabdriver with a sinking heart. So that was ‘Nicholas Croog’! The further he pursued it, the more confusing this whole business became. But the most important thing was that his six-day tactical forced march across Europe had not been in vain! He had overtaken the letter and intercepted it. Now he would have something of substance to present to his chief. But he must not let this Krug get away from him!

The cabby hired by Fandorin for the entire day was dawdling away the time beside a stone post. He was feeling dazed by the imposed idleness and tormented by the thought that he had asked the strange gentleman for only five rubles—for this kind of excruciating torture he should have demanded six. When his fare finally reappeared, the cabby drew himself up straight and tightened his reins, but Erast Fandorin did not even glance in his direction.

The mark appeared. He walked down the steps, donned a blue peaked cap, and set off toward a carriage standing nearby. Fandorin unhurriedly set off in pursuit. The mark halted by the carriage, doffed his cap, and bowed, then held out the yellow envelope. A man’s hand in a white glove emerged from the window and took the envelope.

Fandorin increased his pace in an attempt to catch a glimpse of the unknown man’s face. He succeeded.

Sitting in the carriage and inspecting the wax seals against the light was a ginger-haired gentleman with piercing green eyes and a pale face with a profuse scattering of freckles. Fandorin recognized him immediately: but of course—Mr. Gerald Cunningham as large as life, the brilliant pedagogue, friend of orphans, and right-hand man of Lady Astair.

The cabby’s sufferings proved to have been all in vain. It would not be difficult to ascertain Mr. Cunningham’s address. In the meantime there was more urgent business that required attention.

Kondratii Shtukin was in for a surprise: the Englishman came back, and now he was in a terrible hurry. He ran over to the telegram reception counter, stuck his head right in through the window, and began dictating something very urgent to Mikhal Nikolaich. And Mikhal Nikolaich began fussing and bustling about and hurrying, which was really not like him at all.

Shtukin was stung by curiosity. He got to his feet—fortunately there were no customers waiting—and as if he were simply taking a stroll, he set out in the direction of the telegraph apparatus at the far side of the hall. Halting beside Mikhal Nikolaich, who was working away intently with his key, he bent over a little and read the hastily scribbled message:

To the Criminal Investigation Division, Moscow Police, State Counselor

Mr. Brilling.

I have returned. Please contact me urgently. I await your reply by the apparatus.

Fandorin

So that was it—now he understood. Shtukin glanced at the ‘Englishman’ with different eyes. A detective, are we? Hunting down bandits? Well, well.

The agent strode agitatedly around the hall for about ten minutes, no longer, before Mikhal Nikolaich, who had remained by the apparatus, gestured to him and held out the ribbon with the return telegram.

Kondratii Kondratievich Shtukin was on the spot in a flash and he read the message on the ribbon.

TO MR FANDORIN STOP

MR BRILLING IS IN SPB STOP

ADDRESS KATENINSKAYA ST STOP

SIVERS HOUSE STOP

DUTY OFFICER LOMEIKO

For some reason this reply delighted the gentleman in checks quite remarkably. He even clapped his hands and inquired of Shtukin, who was observing him with interest, “Where is Kateninskaya Street? Is it far?”

“Not at all,” Kondratii Shtukin replied courteously. “It’s very handy from here. Take the public coach, get out at the corner of Nevsky Prospect and Liteiny Prospect, and then…”

“Never mind, I have a cab,” the agent interrupted, and with a flourish of his traveling bag, he set off for the door at a run.

ERAST FANDORIN LIKED THE LOOK of Kateninskaya Street. It looked, in fact, exactly like the most respectable streets of Berlin or Vienna: asphalt, brand-new electric streetlamps, and substantial houses of several stories. In a word—Europe.

Sivers House with the stone knights on the pediment and the en-tranceway brightly illuminated, even though the evening was still light, was especially fine. But then, where else would a man like Ivan Franzevich Brilling live? It was quite impossible to imagine him residing in some dilapidated old mansion with a dusty yard and an orchard of apple trees.

The obliging doorkeeper reassured Erast Fandorin by informing him that Mr. Brilling was home. “Got in just five minutes ago, sir.”

Today everything was going right for Fandorin; today he could do nothing wrong.

Taking the steps two at a time, he flew up to the second floor and rang the electric bell that was polished to a golden gleam.

Ivan Brilling opened the door himself. He had not yet had time to change and had only removed his frock coat. The bright enamel colors of a brand-new Cross of St. Vladimir glittered where it hung below his starched collar.

“Chief, it’s me,” Fandorin announced gleefully, savoring the effect produced by his words.

The effect certainly did exceed all expectations.

Ivan Franzevich Brilling stood there dumbfounded and waved his hands about as if he were trying to say: Holy Spirit preserve us! Get thee behind me, Satan!

Erast Fandorin laughed.

“Well, weren’t you expecting to see me?”

“Fandorin! Where have you sprung from? I’d given up hope of ever seeing you alive again.”

“But why?” the returned traveler inquired, not without a trace of coquettishness.

“Why naturally! You disappeared without trace. The last time you were seen was in Paris on the twenty-sixth. You never arrived in London. I asked Pyzhov and he told me you had disappeared without trace—the police were looking for you!”

“I sent you a detailed letter from London to the address of the Moscow detective office. All about Pyzhov and everything else. I expect it will arrive today or tomorrow. I didn’t know that you were in St. Petersburg.”

His chief frowned anxiously.

“You look quite awful. Have you fallen ill?”

“To be perfectly honest, I am desperately hungry. I spent the whole day on guard duty at the post office and I haven’t had a single bite.”

“Guard duty at the post office? No, no, don’t tell me about it. I’ll tell you what we’ll do. First of all I will give you some tea and pastries. My Semyon, the scoundrel, has been drinking heavily for the last two days, so I’m keeping house for myself. I mostly live on sweetmeats and fancy cakes from Filippov’s. You do like sweet things, don’t you?”

“Very much,” Erast Fandorin confirmed enthusiastically.

“So do I. It’s a relic of my orphan childhood. You don’t object if we eat in the kitchen, bachelor fashion?”

As they walked down the corridor Fandorin had time to observe that Brilling’s flat, although it was not very large, was furnished in a most practical and precise fashion—everything that was necessary but nothing superfluous. Fandorin’s interest was particularly attracted by a lacquered box with two black metal horns or tubes hanging on the wall.

“That is a genuine miracle of modern science,” Ivan Franzevich explained. “It is called Bell’s apparatus. It has only just arrived from America, from an agent of ours. There is an inventor of genius there, a certain Mr. Bell, thanks to whom it is now possible to conduct a conversation at a considerable distance, even a distance of several versts.* The sound is transmitted along wires like telegraph wires. This is an experimental model—the apparatus is not yet in production. In the whole of Europe there are only two lines: one has been laid from my apartment to the secretariat of the head of the Third Section; the other has been installed in Berlin between the Kaiser’s study and Bismarck’s chancellery. So we are keeping well abreast of progress.”

“Magnificent!” Erast Fandorin exclaimed in admiration. “How is it? Can you hear clearly?”

“Not very, but you can make it out. Sometimes there is a loud crackling in the tube…Would you be happy with orangeade instead of tea? I somehow can’t quite get the hang of the samovar.”

“I should say so,” Erast Fandorin reassured his chief, and like a good sorcerer Brilling set a bottle of orangeade on the table before him, together with a large dish covered with eclairs, cream puffs, light, fluffy marzipans, and flaky almond cones. “Tuck in,” said Ivan Brilling, “and in the meantime I will bring you up to date on our business. Afterward it will be your turn for confession.”

Fandorin nodded, his mouth stuffed full and his chin lightly dusted with fine powdered sugar.

“So,” his chief began, “as far as I recall, you set out for St. Petersburg to collect the dipomatic post on the twenty-seventh of May. Immediately after that, events took an interesting turn here and I regretted having let you go—we needed every last man. I discovered through agents in the field that some time ago a small but extremely active cell of radical revolutionaries, absolute madmen, had been established in Moscow. Whereas ordinary terrorists set themselves the goal of exterminating those who ‘stain their hands with blood,’ meaning the highest officials of the state, these people had decided to attack ‘the exultant crowd of idle boasters.’ ”

“Who?” asked Fandorin, puzzled and himself absorbed in attacking a most delicate eclair.

“You know, the poem by Nekrasov:”

For the exultant crowd of idle boasters,

Who stain their hands with others’ crimson blood,

Lead me into the camp of love’s promoters,

Who perish for the greater cause of good.

“Well then, our ‘perishers for the cause of greater good’ have demarcated their areas of responsibility. The leading organization has been allocated those who ‘stain their hands’—the ministers, governors, and generals. And our Moscow faction has decided to deal with ‘those who exult,’ those same individuals who are also ‘bloated and gorged.’ As we managed to learn through an agent who infiltrated the group, the faction has taken the name Azazel—as a token of their daredevil opposition to the will of God. A whole series of murders was planned among the gilded youth, the ‘parasites’ and the ‘high livers.’ Bezhetskaya was also a member of Azazel; from what we know she must be the emissary of an international anarchist organization. The suicide—effectively the murder—of Pyotr Kokorin, which she organized, was Azazel’s first operation. But I suppose you will be telling me all about Bezhetskaya. The next victim was Akhtyrtsev, who was of even greater interest to the conspirators because he was the grandson of the chancellor Prince Korchakov. You see, my young friend, the terrorists’ plan was insane but at the same time devilishly cunning. They calculated that it is far easier to reach the offspring of important people than those people themselves, but that the blow struck against the hierarchy of the state is no less powerful. Prince Korchakov, by the way, is so crushed by the death of his grandson that he has almost given up working and is seriously contemplating retirement. And he is an extremely distinguished man, who has been responsible in many respects for shaping modern Russia.”

“What dark villainy!” Erast Fandorin cried in outrage, even setting aside an unfinished marzipan.

“But when I discovered that Azazel’s ultimate goal was the assassination of the tsarevich—”

“It can’t be true!”

“I’m afraid it is. Well then, when that was discovered, I was ordered to take decisive action. I was obliged to comply, although I would have preferred to piece together the whole picture first, but you understand, with the life of His Imperial Highness himself at risk…We carried out an operation, but it didn’t go entirely smoothly. On the first of June the terrorists were planning to hold a gathering at the dacha in Kuzminki. You remember, I told you about that? At that time, of course, you were keen to pursue your own ideas. How did it go, by the way? Did you come up with anything?”

Erast Fandorin began lowing with his mouth full and swallowed an unchewed piece of a cream cone, but Brilling relented. “All right, all right, later. Eat. And so, we surrounded the dacha. I could use only my own agents from St. Petersburg, without involving the Moscow gendarmerie and police—at all costs I had to avoid publicity.” Ivan Brilling sighed angrily. “That was my fault. I was overcautious. Basically, because we didn’t have enough men, we failed to spread our net widely enough. There was an exchange of fire. Two agents were wounded and one was killed. I’ll never forgive myself…We didn’t manage to take anyone alive—all we got were four corpses. The description of one of them was rather like your white-eyed fellow. Although he didn’t have any eyes left as such. He blew half his skull away with his last bullet. In the basement we found a laboratory for producing infernal devices and some papers—but, as I said, there is a great deal about the plans and connections of Azazel that remains a mystery. An unsolvable one, I’m afraid…Even so the emperor, the chancellor, and the head of the corps of gendarmes were very pleased with our operation. I told General Mizinov about you. Of course, you weren’t in at the finish, but you helped us a great deal in the course of the investigation. If you have no objection, we can carry on working together in future. I take your fate into my own hands…Are you feeling stronger now? Right, now you tell me everything. What happened over in London? Did you manage to pick up Bezhetskaya’s trail? What’s all this hellish business with Pyzhov? Is he dead? All in the right order, starting at the beginning. Don’t leave anything out.”

The nearer his chief’s story had drawn to its end, the brighter the envy had glowed in Erast Fandorin’s eyes, and his own adventures, which he had been so proud of only recently, seemed to pale and fade in significance. An attempt on the life of the tsarevich! An exchange of fire! An infernal device! Fate had mocked Fandorin cruelly—tempted him with glory and led him off the main highway onto a miserable country track…

However, he gave Ivan Brilling a detailed account of his epic quest—except that he related the circumstances under which he had been deprived of the blue attachй case rather vaguely and even blushed a little, a fact that apparently did not escape the attention of Brilling, who listened to the narrative in gloomy silence. When he reached the denouement, Erast Fandorin took heart again and he brightened up, unable to resist the temptation of dramatic effect.

“And I did see the man!” he exclaimed when he came to the scene outside the St. Petersburg post office. “I know who holds in his hands the contents of the attachй case and all the threads of the organization! Azazel is still alive, Ivan Franzevich, but it is in our hands!”

“Tell me then, devil take it!” his chief exclaimed. “Enough of this puerile posturing! Who is this man? Where is he?”

“Here, in St. Petersburg,” said Fandorin, savoring his revenge. “A certain Gerald Cunningham, senior assistant to Lady Astair, whom I have more than once drawn to your attention.” At this point Erast Fandorin cleared his throat tactfully. “So the business with Kokorin’s will is explained. And now it is clear why Bezhetskaya directed her admirers to the Astair Houses. And note how cunningly that red-haired gentleman chose his lair. What a cover, eh? Orphans, branches all over the world, an altruistic patroness to whom all doors are open. All very clever, you must admit.”

“Cunningham?” Fandorin’s chief queried. “Gerald Cunningham? But I know the gentleman very well. We are members of the same club.” He spread his arms in amazement. “An extremely industrious gentleman, but I find it impossible to imagine him being involved with nihilists and assassinating full state counselors.”

“But he didn’t kill them, he didn’t!” exclaimed Erast Fandorin. “I thought at first that the lists contained the names of victims. I told you that in order to convey my train of thought. When you’re in a rush you can’t work everything out at once. But afterward, while I was jolting all the way across Europe in the train, it suddenly struck me! If it was a list of future victims, then why were the dates entered in it? Dates that were already past! That doesn’t fit! No, Mr. Brilling, we have something else here!”

Fandorin even leapt to his feet, his thoughts agitated him so powerfully.

“Something else? But what?” asked Brilling, screwing up his bright eyes.

“I think it is a list of members of a powerful international organization. And your Moscow terrorists are only a small link, the very tiniest.” At the expression that these words brought to his chief’s face, Erast Fandorin felt himself beginning to gloat—and was immediately ashamed of such an unworthy feeling. “The central figure in the organization, the main purpose of which remains as yet unknown to us, is Gerald Cunningham. You and I have both seen him—he is a most exceptional gentleman. ‘Miss Olsen,’ whose role has been played by Amalia Bezhetskaya since June, is the organization’s registration center, something like the personnel department. It receives information from all over the world concerning changes in the status of members of the society. Regularly, once a month, ‘Miss Olsen’ forwards the new information to Cunningham, who has been based in St. Petersburg since last year. I told you that Bezhetskaya has a secret safe in her bedroom. She probably keeps a full list of the members of this Azazel in it—it does seem as if that actually is the organization’s name. Or else it’s their password, something rather like an incantation. I have heard the word spoken twice, and on both occasions it was when a murder was about to be committed. In general it is rather like a Masonic society, except that it is not clear why the fallen angel is involved. But it seems to be on a bigger scale than the Masons. Just imagine—forty-five letters in one month! And the people involved—a senator, a minister, generals!”

Erast Fandorin’s chief gazed patiently at the young man, for the latter had clearly not yet concluded his narrative. He had wrinkled up his forehead and was thinking intensely about something.

“Mr. Brilling, I was just thinking about Cunningham…He is a British subject, after all, so I suppose we couldn’t simply turn up and search his house?”

“I suppose not,” Fandorin’s chief agreed. “Go on.”

“And before you can obtain sanction, he will hide the envelope so securely that we won’t find anything and won’t be able to prove a thing. We still don’t know what connections he has in high places and who will intercede for him. Special caution would seem to be recommended here. It would be best first to get a grip on his Russian operation and haul in the chain link by link, wouldn’t it?”

“And how can we do that?” Brilling asked with lively interest. “By means of secret surveillance? Logical.”

“We could use surveillance, but I think there is a more certain method.”

Ivan Brilling thought for a moment and then shrugged, as if surrendering.

Flattered, Fandorin dropped a tactful hint. “What about the full state counselor who was created on the seventh of June?”

“Check the emperor’s decrees on new titles?” Brilling slapped a hand against his forehead. “Say, for the first ten days of June? Bravo, Fandorin, bravo!”

“Of course, chief. Not even for the first ten days, just from Monday to Saturday, from the third to the eighth. The new general would hardly be likely to delay the happy announcement any longer than that. Just how many new full state counselors appear in the empire in the course of a week?”

“Two or three perhaps, if there happens to be a bumper crop. I have never actually inquired.”

“Well then, we put all of them under observation, check their statements of service, their circles of acquaintances, and so forth. We’ll winkle out our Azazalean in no time at all.”

“Right, now tell me, has all the information you gathered been forwarded by post to the Moscow Criminal Investigation Division?” Brilling asked, following his usual habit of skipping without warning from one subject to another.

“Yes, chief. The letter will arrive either today or tomorrow. Why—do you suspect someone in the ranks of the Moscow police? In order to emphasize its importance I wrote on the envelope: “To be delivered to His Honor State Counselor Brilling in person, or in his absence to His Excellency the Chief of Police.” So no one will dare to open it. And if he reads it, the chief of police will certainly contact you.”

“That’s logical,” Ivan Brilling said approvingly, and then fell silent for a long while, staring at the wall while his expression became gloomier and gloomier.

Erast Fandorin sat there with bated breath, knowing that his chief was weighing up all that he had heard and would now tell him what he had decided. To judge from his expression it was a difficult decision.

Brilling gave a loud sigh, followed by an oddly bitter laugh. “Very well, Fandorin. I’ll take all the responsibility on myself. There are certain ailments that can only be cured by surgery. That is what we will do. This is a matter of great importance, of state importance, and in such cases I have the right to dispense with the formalities. We will take Cunningham. And immediately, in order to catch him red-handed with the envelope. Do you believe the message is in code?”

“Undoubtedly. The information is too important. And after all it was sent by ordinary post, even though it was for urgent delivery. It could have fallen into the wrong hands or been lost. No, Mr. Brilling, these people do not like to take unnecessary risks.”

“All the more reason, then. That means Cunningham decodes it, reads it, and writes it out again for his card index. He must have a card index! I am afraid that in her accompanying letter Bezhetskaya may have informed him of your adventures, and Cunningham is a clever man. He will realize in an instant that you might have sent a report to Russia. No, he has to be taken now, without delay! And it would be interesting to read that accompanying letter. The business with Pyzhov bothers me. What if he is not the only one they suborned? We will talk things over with the English embassy later. They’ll be thankful to us. You do claim that the list included subjects of Queen Victoria?”

“Yes, almost a dozen of them,” Erast Fandorin said with a nod, gazing at his chief adoringly. “Of course, taking Cunningham now is the very best thing to do, but…what if we get there and we don’t find anything? I would never forgive myself if because of me you had…that is, I am prepared in all instances…”

“Don’t talk nonsense,” said Brilling, twitching his jaw in irritation. “Do you really think that if things turn out badly I would hide behind a boy? I have faith in you, Fandorin. And that is enough.”

“Thank you,” said Erast Fandorin in a quiet voice.

Ivan Brilling bowed sarcastically.

“No need for gratitude. Right then, enough of these idle compliments. Let’s get to work. I know Cunningham’s address. He lives on Aptekarsky Island, in the wing of the St. Petersburg Astair House. Do you have a gun?”

“Yes, in London I bought a Smith and Wesson. It’s in my travel bag.”

“Show me.”

Fandorin quickly brought in from the hallway the heavy revolver that he liked so much for its weight and solidity.

“Rubbish!” his chief said peremptorily, after weighing the gun on his palm. “This is for American cowboys and their drunken shoot-outs in the saloon. It’s no use to a serious agent. I’m taking it away from you, and I’ll give you something better in exchange.”

He left the room for a short while and came back with a small, flat revolver, which fitted almost completely into the palm of his hand.

“There you are, a seven-round Belgian Herstal. It’s a new model, a special order. You wear it behind your back in a little holster under your coat. Quite indispensable in our line of work. It’s light and it doesn’t shoot very far or very accurately, but it’s self-cocking, and that guarantees a rapid shot. After all, we don’t need to hit a squirrel in the eye, do we? And the agent who stays alive is usually the one who fires first and more than once. Instead of a hammer to cock, there is a safety catch—this little button here. It’s rather stiff, to avoid accidental firing. Click it like that and then fire off all seven rounds if you like. Is that clear?”

“Yes,” said Erast Fandorin, gazing in fascination at the handsome toy.

“You can admire it later—there’s no time just now,” said Brilling, pushing him in the direction of the door.

“Are we both going to arrest him together?” Fandorin asked excitedly.

“Don’t talk nonsense.”

Ivan Brilling stopped beside the Bell’s apparatus, took hold of a horn-shaped tube and pressed it to his ear, then cranked some kind of lever. The apparatus grunted and something inside it clanged. Brilling set his ear to the other horn protruding from the lacquered box, and the horn gave out a squeaky sound. Fandorin thought he could just make out a faint, funny little voice pronouncing the words ‘duty adjutant’ and then ‘chancellery.’

“Is that you, Novgorodtsev,” Brilling bellowed into the tube. “Is His Excellency in his office? No? I can’t hear! No, no, don’t worry. Don’t worry, I say!” He drew as much air as he could into his lungs and began shouting even louder. “An urgent detachment for an arrest! Send them immediately to Aptekarsky Island. Ap-te-kar-sky! Yes! The wing of the Astair House! As-tair House! It doesn’t matter what it means—they’ll find it. And have a search group sent out! What? Yes, I will, in person. And hurry, Major, hurry.”

He returned the tube to its resting place and wiped his forehead.

“I hope that Mr. Bell will improve his design, or soon all my neighbors will know everything about the Third Section’s secret operations.”

Erast Fandorin was still entranced by the sorcery that had just been worked before his eyes. “Why, it’s like something from The Thousand and One Nightsl A genuine miracle! And there are still people who condemn progress!”

“We can talk about progress on our way. Unfortunately I have already dismissed my carriage, so we will have to look for a cab. Will you put down that damned travel bag! Come on, quick march!”

THE CONVERSATION ABOUT PROGRESS, however, never took place, for they rode to Aptekarsky Island in total silence. Erast Fandorin was trembling with excitement, and he made several attempts to draw his chief into conversation, but all in vain. Brilling was in a foul mood. He was clearly taking a great risk after all in launching an operation on his own authority.

The pale northern evening glimmered above the watery expanse of the Neva. It occurred to Fandorin that the bright summer night was most opportune. He would not be getting any sleep today in any case. And last night in the train he had not slept a wink either, he had been so worried that he might miss the envelope…The driver urged on his chestnut filly, earning his promised ruble honestly, and they reached their destination quickly.

The St. Petersburg Astair House, a beautiful yellow building that had previously belonged to the army engineers’ corps, was smaller in size than its Moscow equivalent, but it was drowning in greenery. It was a heavenly spot, surrounded by gardens and rich dachas.

“Ah, what will happen to the children?” Fandorin sighed.

“Nothing will happen to them,” Ivan Brilling replied aggressively. “Her ladyship will appoint another director and that will be the end of the matter.”

The wing of the Astair House proved to be an imposing Catherine-style mansion overlooking an agreeable, tree-shaded street. Erast Fandorin saw an elm tree charred black by lightning reaching out its dead branches toward the lighted windows of the tall second story. The house was quiet.

“Splendid, the gendarmes have not yet arrived,” said the chief. “We won’t wait for them—the most important thing for us is not to put Cunningham on his guard. And to be prepared for all sorts of surprises.”

Erast Fandorin thrust his hand under the back flap of his jacket and felt the reassuring chill of his Herstal. He felt his chest tighten, not out of fear—for with Ivan Franzevich Brilling there was nothing to fear—but out of impatience. Now at last everything would finally be settled!

Brilling shook the little brass bell vigorously, producing a melodious trill. A red-haired head glanced out of an open window on the second floor.

“Open up, Cunningham,” Fandorin’s chief said in a loud voice. “I have an urgent matter to discuss with you.”

“Is that you, Brilling?” the Englishman asked in surprise. “What’s the matter?”

“An emergency at the club. I must warn you about it.”

“Just a moment, I’ll come down. It’s my manservant’s day off.” And the head disappeared.

“Aha,” whispered Fandorin. “He got rid of his servant deliberately. He’s probably sitting there with the papers!”

Brilling nervously rapped on the door with his knuckles. Cunningham seemed to be taking his time.

“Will he not make a run for it?” Erast Fandorin asked in panic.

“Through the rear door, eh? Perhaps I should run ‘round the house and stand on that side?”

Just then, however, they heard the sound of steps from inside and the door opened.

Cunningham stood in the doorway in a long dressing gown. His piercing green eyes rested for a moment on Fandorin’s face, and his eyelids trembled almost imperceptibly. He had recognized him!

“What’s happening?” the Englishman asked guardedly in his own language.

“Let’s go into the study,” Brilling answered in Russian. “It’s very important.”

Cunningham hesitated for a second, then gestured for them to follow him.

After climbing an oak staircase, the host and his uninvited guests found themselves in a room that was furnished richly but clearly not for leisure. The walls were covered from end to end with shelves holding books and some kind of files. Over by the window, beside an immense writing desk of Karelian birch, there was a rack holding drawers, each of which was adorned with a gold label.

However, Erast Fandorin’s interest was not drawn to the drawers (Cunningham would not store secret documents in open view), but by the papers lying on the desk, where they had been hastily covered by a fresh copy of the Stock Exchange Gazette.

Ivan Brilling was evidently thinking along the same lines. He crossed the study and positioned himself beside the desk, standing with his back to the open window with the low sill. The evening breeze gently ruffled the lace curtain.

Grasping the significance of his chief’s maneuver, Fandorin remained standing by the door. Now there was nowhere for Cunningham to go.

The Englishman seemed to suspect that something was wrong.

“You are behaving rather oddly, Brilling,” he said in faultless Russian. “And why is this person here? I’ve seen him before—he’s a policeman.”

Ivan Franzevich Brilling glared sullenly at Cunningham, keeping his hands in the pockets of his wide frock coat.

“Yes, he is a policeman. And in a minute or two there will be a lot of policemen here, and so I have no time for explanations.”

The young detective saw his chief’s right hand come darting out of his pocket holding Fandorin’s Smith & Wesson, but he had no time to register surprise. He pulled out his own gun. Things were beginning to move now!

“Don’t!” the Englishman cried out, throwing his hands up in the air, and that very instant there was a thunderous shot.

Cunningham was thrown over backward. Erast Fandorin gazed in amazement at the green eyes staring as if they were still alive and the neat dark hole in the middle of the forehead.

“My God, chief, why?”

He turned toward the window. The black mouth of the barrel was staring straight at him.

“You killed him,” Brilling stated in a strange, unnatural voice. “You’re too good a detective. And, therefore, my young friend, I shall be obliged to kill you, which I sincerely regret.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

in which the narrative takes a sharp change of direction

TOTALLY BEMUSED, POOR ERAST FANDORIN took a few steps forward.

“Stop!” his chief barked out furiously. “And stop waving that gun around—it isn’t loaded. You might at least have taken the trouble to glance into the cylinder! Why must you be so trusting, damn you! You can never trust anyone but yourself!”

Brilling took an identical Herstal out of his left pocket and dropped the smoking Smith & Wesson on the floor at Fandorin’s feet.

“My gun here is fully loaded, as you will learn soon enough,” Ivan Brilling babbled feverishly, becoming more and more agitated with every word. “I shall place it in the hand of the unfortunate Cunningham here, and it will be obvious that you killed each other in an exchange of fire. You will be guaranteed an honorable funeral with heartfelt speeches of farewell. I know that means a lot to you. And stop looking at me like that, you damned greenhorn!”

Fandorin realized with horror that his chief was absolutely crazy, and in a desperate attempt to awaken Brilling’s suddenly clouded reason he shouted, “Chief, it’s me, Fandorin! Ivan Franzevich Brilling! State counselor!”

“Full state counselor,” said Brilling with a crooked smile. “You’re behind the times, Fandorin. The emperor’s decree was promulgated on the seventh of June. For a successful operation to disarm the terrorist organization Azazel. So you may address me as Your Excellency.”

Brilling’s dark silhouette against the window looked as if it had been cut out with scissors and pasted on gray paper. Dehind his back the dead branches of the dry elm radiated in all directions, forming a sinister spiderweb. A line from a childish jingle ran through Fandorin’s head: “ “Will you step into my parlor,” said the spider to the fly.”

Brilling’s face suddenly contorted agonizingly, and Fandorin realized that his chief had hardened his heart sufficiently and now he could fire at any moment. Out of nowhere a thought suddenly came to him, shattering instantly into a string of brief thought particles: the safety catch had to be off, otherwise you couldn’t fire it, that meant half a second or a quarter of a second, not enough time, not nearly enough…

Erast Fandorin squeezed his eyes tight shut and with a bloodcurdling howl he flung himself forward, aiming his head at his chief’s chin. They were no more than five paces apart. Fandorin did not hear the click of the safety catch, but the shot thundered past him into the ceiling, as Brilling and Fandorin went flying over the windowsill together and tumbled out the window.

Fandorin’s chest collided with the trunk of the dry elm and he went crashing downward, breaking off branches and scraping his face as he fell. The stunning impact when he struck the ground almost made him lose consciousness, but his keen instinct for survival would not allow it. Erast Fandorin raised himself up on all fours, glaring around like a madman.

His chief was nowhere to be seen, but his small black Herstal was lying beside the wall. Fandorin, still on all fours, pounced like a cat, grabbed the gun, and began turning his head in all directions.

But Brilling had disappeared.

Fandorin only thought to look up when he heard the strained, wheezing sound.

Ivan Franzevich Brilling was dangling in the air in an awkward and unnatural position. His polished gaiters were twitching a little above Fandorin’s head. Protruding from just below his Cross of St. Vladimir, where a crimson stain was creeping across his starched white shirt, was the sharp stump of a broken branch that had pierced the newly created general right through. The most terrible thing of all was that the lucid gaze of his eyes was fixed on Erast Fandorin.

“Horrible,” his chief pronounced distinctly, wincing either in pain or disgust. “Horrible…” And then in a hoarse, unrecognizable voice he gasped out: “A-za-zel.”

An icy tremor ran through Fandorin’s body, but Brilling continued gasping for about half a minute before finally falling silent.

As if this were some agreed-on signal, there was a clattering of hooves and clanging of wheels from around the corner. The gendarmes had arrived in their droshkies.

ADJUTANT GENERAL LAVRENTII ARKADIEVICH MIZINOV, head of the Third Section and chief of the corps of gendarmes, rubbed his eyes, which were red with fatigue. The golden aiguillettes on his dress uniform jingled dully. During the last twenty-four hours he had had no chance to change his clothes, let alone to get any sleep. The previous evening a special messenger had dragged General Mizinov away from the ball in honor of the Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich’s name day. And then it had all begun…

The general cast an unfriendly glance at the boy with the disheveled hair and badly scratched nose who was sitting beside him, poring over some papers. He hadn’t slept for two nights and he was still as fresh as a Yaroslavl cucumber. And he acted as if he had been sitting around in high-level offices all his life. Very well, let him work his sorcery. But this Brilling business! It simply defied comprehension!

“Well, Fandorin, will you be long? Or have you been distracted by yet another of your ‘ideas’?” the general asked strictly, feeling that after a sleepless night and an exhausting day he was unlikely to be having any more ideas himself.

“Just a moment, Your Excellency, just a moment,” the young whip-persnapper mumbled. “There are just five entries left. I did warn you that the list might be in code. See what a cunning code it is. They haven’t been able to identify half the letters, and I don’t remember everyone who was in it myself…Aha, this is the postmaster from Denmark, that’s who he is. Right, then, what’s this? The first letter’s not decoded. There’s a cross, and a cross for the second one, too, and the third and the fourth—two m’s, then another cross, then an n, then a dwith a question mark, and the last two are missing. That gives us cross cross MM cross ND(?) cross cross.”

“Such gibberish.” General Mizinov sighed. “Brilling would have guessed it in a moment. Are you quite sure it wasn’t just a fit of temporary insanity? It’s impossible even to imagine that…”

“Absolutely sure, Your Excellency,” Erast Fandorin repeated for the umpteenth time. “And I quite distinctly heard him say ‘Azazel.’ Wait! I’ve remembered! Bezhetskaya had some commander or other on her list. We must assume this is him.”

“Commander is a rank in the British and American fleets,” Mizinov explained. “It corresponds to our captain second class.” He strode angrily across the room. “Azazel, Azazel, what is this Azazel that has come to plague us? So far we clearly don’t know a single thing about it! Brilling’s Moscow investigation is totally worthless! We must assume it’s all nonsense, invention, lies—including all those terrorists and that attempt on the tsarevich’s life! He’s bound to have tucked away all the loose ends! Palmed us off with a few corpses. Or did he really hand us some nihilist idiots? That would be just like him—he was a very, very capable man…Curses—where can the results of that search have got to? They’ve been rummaging in there for days now!”

The door opened quietly and a glum, skinny face wearing gold-rimmed spectacles was thrust through the crack.

“Captain Belozerov, Your Excellency.”

“At last! Talk of the devil! Send him in.”

A middle-aged officer of the gendarmes, whom Fandorin had seen the previous day at Cunningham’s house, walked into the office, squinting and screwing up his weary eyes.

“We have it, Your Excellency,” he reported in a low voice. “We divided the entire house and the garden into squares and turned everything upside down and went through it all with a fine-tooth comb—not a thing. Then Agent Ailenson, a detective with an excellent nose for a lead, thought of sounding out the walls in the basement of the Astair House. And what do you think, General? We discovered a hidden compartment containing twenty boxes with about two hundred cards in each. The cipher was strange—some kind of hieroglyphs, quite different from the one in the letter. I gave instructions for the boxes to be brought here. I’ve set the entire cryptography section onto it and they’re about to start work.”

“Well done, Belozerov, well done,” said the general in a more generous mood now. “And that man with the nose, recommend him for a decoration. Well, then, let us pay a visit to the cipher room. Come along, Fandorin—it will be interesting for you, too. You can finish up later—there’s no great hurry now.”

They went up two floors and set off quickly along an endless corridor. As they turned a corner they saw an official running toward them, waving his hands in the air.

“Disaster, Your Excellency, disaster! The ink is fading before our very eyes. We can’t understand it!”

Mizinov set off at a trot, which did not at all suit his corpulent figure: the gold tassels on his epaulets fluttered like the wings of a moth. Belozerov and Fandorin disrespectfully overtook their high-ranking superior and were the first to burst in through the tall white doors.

The large room completely filled with tables was in absolute turmoil. About a dozen officials were dashing about, fussing over stacks of neat white cards set out across the tables. Erast Fandorin snatched one up and caught a brief glimpse of barely discernible figures resembling Chinese hieroglyphs. Before his eyes the hieroglyphs disappeared and the card was left absolutely blank.

“What devil’s work is this?” exclaimed the general, panting heavily. “Some kind of invisible ink?”

“I’m afraid it is far worse than that, Your Excellency,” said a gentleman with the appearance of a professor, examining a card against the light. “Captain, didn’t you say the card file was kept in something like a photographic booth?”

“Precisely so, sir,” Belozerov confirmed.

“And can you recall what kind of lighting it had? Perhaps a red lamp?”

“Absolutely right. It was a red electrical lamp.”

“Just as I thought. Alas, General Mizinov, the card archive has been lost to us and cannot be restored.”

“How’s that?” the general exclaimed furiously. “Not good enough, Mister Collegiate Counselor, you must think of something. You’re a master of your trade, a leading light—”

“But not a magician, Your Excellency. The cards were obviously treated with a special solution and it is only possible to work with them in red light. Now the layer to which the characters were applied has been exposed to daylight. Very clever, you must admit. It’s the first time I’ve come across anything of the sort.”

The general knitted his shaggy eyebrows and began snorting menacingly. The room fell silent, with the silence that comes before a storm. But the peal of thunder never came.

“Let’s go, Fandorin,” Mizinov said in a dejected tone. “You have work to finish.”

THE FINAL TWO ENCODED ENTRIES remained undeciphered. They contained information that had arrived on the final day, the thirtieth of June, and Fandorin was unable to identify them. The time had come to sum up the situation.

Striding to and fro across his office, the weary General Mizinov reasoned out loud. “So, let us draw together the little that we do have. There exists a certain international organization with the provisional name of Azazel. To judge from the number of cards, which we shall now never be able to read, it has three thousand eight hundred and fifty-four members. We know something at least about forty-seven of them, or rather forty-five, since two of the entries remained undeciphered. However, that something amounts to no more than their nationality and the positions that they occupy. No name, no age, no address…What else do we know? The names of two dead Azazelians, Cunningham and Brilling. And, in addition, there is Amalia Bezhetskaya in England—if this Zurov of yours has not killed her, if she is still in England, and if that really is her name…Azazel acts aggressively, killing without hesitation. There is clearly some global purpose involved. But what is it? They are not Masons, because I myself am a member of a Masonic lodge, and no ordinary one either. Hmm…Remember, Fandorin, you didn’t hear that.”

Erast Fandorin lowered his eyes meekly.

“It is not the Socialist International,” Mizinov continued, “because the gentlemen communists don’t have the stomach for this kind of business. And Brilling couldn’t possibly have been a revolutionary. It’s out of the question. Whatever he might have got up to in secret, my dear deputy hunted down nihilists with a will, and very successfully. What then does Azazel want? That, after all, is the most important thing! And we have not a single thing to go on. Cunningham is dead. Brilling is dead. Nikolai Krug is a mere functionary, a pawn. That scoundrel Pyzhov is dead. All the leads have been lopped off…” General Mizinov spread his arms in a gesture of indignation. “No, I don’t understand a single thing! I knew Brilling for more than ten years. I was the one who made his career! I discovered him myself. Judge for yourself, Fandorin. When I was governor-general of Kharkov I used to hold all kinds of competitions for students in order to encourage patriotic feelings and the desire for useful reform in the younger generation. I was introduced to a skinny, awkward youth, a final-year gymnasium pupil who had written a very sensible and passionate composition on the subject ‘The Future of Russia.’ Believe me, he had the spirit and the background of a genuine Lomonosov—an orphan with no family or relatives, who had financed his own studies on coppers and then passed the examinations for the seventh year at the grammar school at the first attempt. A genuine natural diamond! I became his patron, sent him to St. Petersburg University, then I gave him a place in my department—and never had cause to regret it. He was my finest assistant, my trusted deputy! He had made a brilliant career—all roads were open to him! Such a brilliant, paradoxical mind, so resourceful, so assiduous! My God, I was even planning to marry my daughter to him!” said the general, clutching his forehead.

Out of respect for the feelings of his high-ranking superior, Erast Fandorin paused tactfully before clearing his throat. “Your Excellency, I was just thinking…Of course, we don’t have many leads, but still we do have something.”

The general shook his head as if he were dispelling unwelcome memories and sat down at the desk. “I’m listening. Tell me what’s on your mind, Fandorin. No one knows this whole business better than you.”

“Well, what I actually wanted to say was…” Erast Fandorin looked at the list, underlining something with a pencil. “There are forty-four men here. Two we were unable to figure out, and the full state counselor—that is, Ivan Brilling—is no longer in the reckoning. At least eight of them can be identified without too much difficulty. Well, just think about it, Your Excellency. How many heads of the emperor of Brazil’s bodyguard can there be? Or number forty-seven F, the head of a government department in Belgium, sent on the eleventh of June, received on the fifteenth. It will be easy enough to determine who he is. That’s two already. The third is number five forty-nine F, a rear admiral in the French fleet, sent on the fifteenth of June, received on the seventeenth. The fourth is number one oh oh seven F, a newly created English baronet, sent on the ninth of June, received on the tenth. The fifth is number six ninety-four F, a Portuguese government minister, sent on the twenty-ninth of May, received on the seventh of June.”

“That one’s a dud,” said the general, who had been listening with great interest. “The Portuguese government changed in May, so all the ministers in the cabinet are new.”

“Are they?” Erast Fandorin asked in dismay. “Oh, well, that means we’ll have seven instead of eight. Then the fifth is an American, the deputy chairman of a Senate committee, sent on the tenth of June, received on the twenty-eighth, in my own presence. The sixth is number ten forty-two F, Turkey, personal secretary to Prince Abdьlhamid, sent on the first of June, received on the twentieth.”

General Mizinov found this information particularly interesting. “Really? Oh, that is very important. And actually on the first of June? Well, well. On the thirtieth of May in Turkey there was a coup, Sultan Abdьlaziz was overthrown, and the new ruler, Midhat Pasha, set Murad V on the throne. And then the very next day he appointed a new secretary for Abdьlhamid, Murad’s younger brother. What great haste, to be sure. This is extremely important news. Could Midhat Pasha be planning to get rid of Murad and set Abdьlhamid on the throne? Aha…Never mind, Fandorin, that’s all way over your head. We ‘ll have the secretary identified in a couple of shakes. I’ll get on the telegraph today to Nikolai Pavlovich Gnatiev, our ambassador in Constantinople—we’re old friends. Carry on.”

“And the last, the seventh: number fifteen oh eight F, Switzerland, a prefect of cantonal police, sent on the twenty-fifth of May, received on the first of June. Identifying the rest will be a lot harder, and some of them will be impossible. But if we can at least identify these seven and put them under secret surveillance…”

“Give me the list,” said the general, holding out his hand. “I’ll give orders immediately for coded messages to be sent to the embassies concerned. We shall clearly have to collaborate with the special services of these countries. Apart from Turkey, where we have an excellent network of our own…You know, Mr. Fandorin, I was abrupt with you, but don’t take offense. I do value your contribution very highly and so on and so forth…It’s just that it was painful for me…because of Brilling…Well, you understand.”

“I understand, Your Excellency. I myself, in a sense, was no less—”

“Very well, excellent. You’ll be working with me, investigate Azazel. I’ll set up a special group and appoint the most experienced people. We must untangle this whole sorry mess.”

“Your Excellency, I really ought to take a trip to Moscow…”

“What for?”

“I’d like to have a little talk with Lady Astair. She herself, being more a creature of the heavens than the earth”—at this point Fandorin smiled—“was surely not aware of the true nature of Cunningham’s activity, but she did know the gentleman since he was a child and might well be able to tell us something useful. It would be best not to talk to her formally, through the gendarmerie, surely? I am fortunate enough to be slightly acquainted with her ladyship, and I speak English. What if another lead of some kind were to come to light? Perhaps we might pick up something from Cunningham’s past?”

“It sounds to the point. Go. But only for one day, no more. And now go and get some sleep. My adjutant will assign you your quarters. Tomorrow you’ll take the evening train to Moscow. If we’re lucky, by that time the first coded messages from the embassies will have arrived. On the morning of the twenty-eighth you’ll be in Moscow, and in the evening I want you back here, and come immediately to me to report. At any time, is that clear?”

“Yes, Your Excellency.”

IN THE CORRIDOR of the first-class carriage on the St. Petersburg-Moscow express, a very grand elderly gentleman sporting an enviable mustache and whiskers and a diamond pin in his necktie smoked a cigar as he glanced with undisguised curiosity at the locked door of compartment number one.

“Hey there, be so kind,” he said, beckoning with a fat finger to a conductor who had made an opportune appearance.

The conductor dashed over to the stately passenger in a flash and bowed. “What can I do for you, sir?”

The gentleman took hold of the conductor’s collar between his finger and thumb and asked in a deep bass whisper, “The young man traveling in the first compartment—who is he exactly? Do you know? He is quite remarkably young.”

“I was surprised at that too,” the conductor declared in a whisper. “Everyone knows the first compartment is reserved for VIPs. They won’t let just any old general in—only someone on urgent and responsible state business.”

“I know.” The gentleman released a stream of smoke. “Traveled in it myself once, on a secret inspection to Novorossiya. But this person is a mere boy. Perhaps he’s someone’s favorite son? One of our gilded youth?”

“Nothing of the kind, sir. They don’t put favorite sons in number one—they’re very strict about that. Except perhaps for one of the grand dukes. But I felt a bit curious about this one, so I took a quick glance at the train manager’s passenger list.” The attendant lowered his voice still further.

“Well then?” the intrigued gentleman urged him impatiently.

Anticipating a generous tip, the conductor put his finger to his lips. “From the Third Section. Specially important cases investigator.”

“I can understand the ‘specially.’ They wouldn’t put anyone who was merely ‘important’ in the first compartment.” The gentleman paused significantly. “And what is he up to?”

“He locked himself in the compartment and hasn’t been out since, sir. Twice I offered him tea, but he wasn’t interested. Just sits there with his nose stuck in his papers, without even lifting his head. We were detained for twenty-five minutes leaving Petersburg, remember? Due to him, that was, sir. We were waiting for him to arrive.”

“Oho!” gasped the passenger. “But that’s quite unheard-of!”

“It does happen, but only very rarely, sir.”

“And does the passenger list give his name?”

“Indeed no, sir. No name and no rank.”

THE LONGER ERAST FANDORIN CONTINUED his study of the niggardly lines of the dispatches, tousling his hair as he did so, the higher he felt the mystical terror mounting toward his throat.

Just as he was about to set out for the station, Mizinov’s adjutant had turned up at the state apartment where Fandorin had slept like a log for almost twenty-four hours and told him to wait. The first three telegrams had arrived from the embassies; they would be deciphered immediately and brought to him. The wait had lasted for almost an hour, and Erast Fandorin had been afraid he would miss the train, but the adjutant had reassured him on that score.

Fandorin was no sooner inside the immense compartment upholstered in green velvet, with a writing desk, a soft divan, and two walnut chairs with their legs bolted to the floor, than he opened the package and immersed himself in reading.

Three telegrams had arrived: from Washington, Paris, and Constantinople. The heading on all of them was identical:

URGENT. TO HIS EXCELLENCY LAVRENTII ARKADIEVICH MIZINOV IN REPLY TO YOUR REF. NO. 13476-8ZH OF 26 JUNE 1876.

The reports were signed by the ambassadors themselves, but that was as far as the similarity went. The texts were as follows.

9 July (27 June) 1876. 12:15 Washington.

The person in whom you are interested is John Pratt Dodds, who on 9 June this year was elected vice chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. A man very well known in America, a millionaire of the sort who are known here as self-made men. Age 44. His early life, place of birth, and background are unknown. He is assumed to have become rich during the California gold rush. He is regarded as an entrepreneur of genius. During the war between the North and the South he was President Lincoln’s adviser on financial matters. It is believed by some that it was Dodds’s diligence and not the valor of the federal generals that was responsible for the capitalist North’s victory over the conservative South. In 1872 he was elected Senator for the state of Pennsylvania. Well-informed sources tell us that Dodds is tipped to become Secretary of the Treasury.

9 July (27 June) 1876. 16:45. Paris.

Thanks to the agent Coco, who is known to you, it has been possible to ascertain via the Ministry of War that on the 15 of June Rear Admiral Jean Intrepide, who had recently been appointed to command the Siamese Squadron, was promoted to the rank of Vice Admiral. He is one of the French fleet’s most legendary personalities. Twenty years ago a French frigate off the coast of Tortuga came across a boat adrift in the open sea, carrying a boy who had obviously survived a shipwreck. As a result of the shock the boy had completely lost his memory and could not give his own name or even his nationality. Taken on as a cabin boy and named after the frigate that found him, he has made a brilliant career. He has taken part in numerous expeditions and colonial wars. He especially distinguished himself in the Mexican War. Last year Jean Intrepide caused a genuine sensation in Paris when he married the eldest daughter of the due de Rohan. I will forward details of the service record of the individual in whom you are interested in the next report.

27 June 1876. Two o’clock in the afternoon. Constantinople.

Dear Lavrentii,

Your request quite flabbergasted me, the point being that this Anwar Effendi, in whom you have expressed such pressing interest, has for some time now been the object of my own close scrutiny. According to information in my possession this individual, who is an intimate of Midhat Pasha and Abdьlhamid, is one of the central figures in a conspiracy that is coming to a head in the palace. We must soon expect the overthrow of the present sultan and the reign ofAbdьlhamid. Then Anwar Effendi will most certainly become a figure of quite exceptional influence. He is highly intelligent, with a European education, and knows a countless number of Oriental and Western languages. Unfortunately, we do not possess any detailed biographical information on this interesting gentleman. We do know that he is no more than twenty-five years old and was born in either Serbia or Bosnia. His origins are obscure and he has no relatives, which promises to be a great boon for Turkey if Anwar ever should become vizier. Just imagine it—a vizier without a horde of avaricious relatives! Such things simply never happen here. Anwar is by way of being Midhat Pasha’s eminence grise, an active member of the New Osman party. Have I satisfied your curiosity? Now please satisjy mine. What do you want with my Anwar Effendi? What do you know about him? Let me know immediately. It might prove to be important.

Erast Fandorin read the telegrams through once again, and in the first one he underlined the words ‘His early life, place of birth, and background are unknown’; in the second one the words ‘could not give his own name or even his nationality’; and in the third the words ‘His origins are obscure and he has no relatives.’ He was beginning to feel frightened. All three of them seemed to have appeared out of nowhere! At some moment they had simply emerged from the void and immediately set about clambering upward with genuinely superhuman persistence. What were they—members of some secret sect? And what if they were not people at all but aliens from another world, emissaries, say, from the planet Mars? Or worse than that, some kind of infernal demons? Fandorin squirmed as he recalled his nocturnal encounter with ‘Amalia’s ghost.’ Bezhetskaya herself was yet another creature of unknown origin. And then there was that satanic invocation—Azazel. Oh, there was definitely a sulfurous smell about this business…

There was a furtive knock at the door. Erast Fandorin shuddered, reached rapidly behind his back for the secret holster, and fingered the grooved handle of his Herstal.

The conductor’s obsequious face appeared in the crack of the door.

“Your Excellency, we’re coming into a station. Perhaps you’d like to stretch your legs? There’s a buffet there, too.”

At the word ‘Excellency’ Erast Fandorin assumed a dignified air and cast a stealthy sidelong glance at himself in the mirror. Could he really be taken for a general? Well anyway, ‘stretching his legs’ sounded like a good idea, and it was easier to think as he walked. There was some vague idea swirling around in his head, but it kept eluding him. So far he couldn’t quite get a grip on it, but it seemed to be encouraging him: keep digging, keep digging!

“I think I will. How long is our stop?”

“Twenty minutes. But you’ve no need to concern yourself about that. Just take your time.” The conductor tittered. “They won’t leave without you.”

Erast Fandorin leapt down from the step onto a platform flooded with light by the lamps of the station. Here and there the lights were no longer burning in the windows of some compartments—evidently some of the passengers had already retired for the night. Fandorin stretched sweetly, folded his hands behind his back, and prepared himself for a stroll that would stimulate his mental faculties to more effective activity. However, at that very moment there emerged from the same carriage a portly, mustached gentleman wearing a top hat, who cast a glance of intense curiosity in the young man’s direction and proffered an arm to his youthful female companion. At the sight of her charming, fresh face Erast Fandorin froze on the spot, while the young lady beamed and exclaimed in a clear, ringing voice, “Papa, it’s him, that gentleman from the police! I told you about him, remember? You know, the one who interrogated Frдlein Pfьhl and me!”