Fandorin in English 1-10

When she calculated that the subject should be in the required state of readiness – that is, he should by now be sufficiently intrigued and piqued – Lidina gathered herself to strike the final blow and even set off towards the causeuse on which Fandorin was sitting, but their host spoiled her plan.

He walked over to the guest and struck up an idiotic conversation about work, praising some railway gendarmes captain called Lisitsky, who had come to him recently with a very interesting proposal – to set up a permanent station at the municipal telephone exchange.

‘An excellent idea your subordinate had,’ the general rumbled. ‘That’s the gendarme spirit for you. It wasn’t the civilians in the Department who came up with it, but one of our own! I’ve already given instructions to allocate the apparatus required and a special room. Lisitsky said that the idea of eavesdropping on conversations was yours.’

‘Not “eavesdropping”, but “listening in”. And the staff captain is also being too modest. I had nothing to do with it.’

‘Perhaps you could lend him to me to get things started? A competent officer.’

Lidina sighed, realising that the assault would have to be postponed to a more convenient moment.

That moment arrived when the gentlemen followed the new-fangled custom of withdrawing to the smoking room before the meal. By that time Glyceria Romanovna had conclusively established herself as the queen of the evening, and the subject, of course, was not in the slightest doubt that he was the least attractive of all the squires in the present company. The fact that Fandorin kept glancing stealthily at his watch suggested that he was no longer anticipating any pleasure from the soirйe, but was calculating when it would be acceptable for him to beat a retreat.

It was time!

She walked briskly (there was no point in delaying any further) up to the man with the greying dark hair, who was puffing on a small, aromatic cigar, and declared:

‘I remember! I remember where I’ve seen you before! At the bridge that was blown up. It’s not easy to forget such an unusual face.’

The investigator (or whatever it was he was called in his own department) started and fixed Lidina with the gaze of his slightly narrowed blue eyes – she had to confess that they went very well with his silver-shot hair. Anybody would have started at a compliment like that, especially when it was entirely unexpected.

‘Yes indeed,’ he said slowly, getting to his feet. ‘I recall that t-too. I think you were not alone, but with some army man…’

Glyceria Romanovna gestured carelessly.

‘He’s a friend of mine.’

It was too soon to start talking about Vasya. Not that she had any plan of action worked out in advance – she followed only her inspiration – but you should never, under any circumstances, let a man see that you wanted something from him. He should remain convinced that he was the one who wanted something and it lay in your will to give that precious something or not give it. You first had to arouse the hope, then take it away, then titillate his nostrils once again with that magical fragrance.

A clever woman who wished to bind a man to her could always sense to which type he belonged: those who sooner or later will have to be fed, or those who should remain eternally hungry – so that they will be more tractable.

On examining Fandorin more closely, Lidina immediately realised that he was not the Platonic admirer type. If he was led a dance for too long, he would simply shrug his shoulders and walk away.

Which meant that the problem shifted automatically from the tactical phase to the moral or, in unequivocal terms (and Lidina always tried to be supremely honest with herself), it could be formulated thus: could she carry her flirtation with this man all the way through – in order to save Vasya?

Yes, she was prepared for this sacrifice. Having realised that, Glyceria Romanovna experienced a strangely tender feeling and immediately set about justifying such a step.

First, it would not be debauchery, but the very purest self-sacrifice – and not even out of passionate infatuation, but out of selfless, sublimely exalted friendship.

Secondly, it would serve Astralov right – he deserved it.

Of course, if Fandorin had been fat, with warts and bad breath, there could have been no question of any such sacrifice, but although the anglicised investigator was no longer young, he was perfectly good-looking. In fact, more than merely good-looking…

This entire maelstrom of thoughts swept through Lidina’s mind in a single second, so there was no perceptible pause in the conversation.

‘I noticed that you haven’t taken your eyes off me all evening,’ she said in a low, vibrant voice, and touched his arm.

Of course he hadn’t! She had done everything to make sure that the guests could not forget her for a single moment.

The dark-haired man did not protest, but inclined his head honestly.

‘But I didn’t look at you. Not at all.’

‘So I n-noticed.’

‘Because I was afraid… I had the feeling that you didn’t turn up here purely by chance. That fate had brought us together. And that made me feel afraid.’

‘F-fate?’ he asked, with that barely perceptible stammer of his.

He had the right expression in his eyes – attentive and also, she thought, bewildered.

Lidina decided not to waste any time on pointless talk. There was no avoiding what had to be. And she plunged recklessly, head first, into the whirlpool.

‘You know what? Let’s leave. Damn the dinner. Let them talk, I don’t care.’

If Fandorin hesitated, then it was only for an instant. His eyes flashed with a metallic glint and his voice sounded stifled.

‘Why not, let’s go.’

On the way to Ostozhenka Street he behaved very oddly. He didn’t squeeze her arm or try to kiss her or even make conversation.

Glyceria Romanovna remained silent too, trying to work out the best way to behave with this strange man.

And why was he so tense? With his lips clenched firmly together and his eyes fixed on the driver.

Oh, these still waters must definitely run deep! She felt a sweet swooning sensation somewhere inside and rebuked herself angrily: Don’t be such a woman, this is not a romantic adventure, you have to save Vasya!

At the entrance Fandorin behaved even more surprisingly.

He let the lady go ahead, but didn’t walk in straight away himself; he paused, and then entered very rapidly, almost leaping in.

He ran up the stairway first, keeping his hand in his coat pocket all the time.

‘Maybe he’s gaga,’ Lidina suddenly thought in fright. ‘Cock-a-doodle in the head, as they say nowadays.’

But it was too late to back out now.

Fandorin moved her aside and bounded forward. He swung round and pressed his back against the wall of the hallway. He rapidly turned his gaze left, right, upwards.

A little black pistol had appeared in his hand out of nowhere.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ Glyceria Romanovna exclaimed, seriously frightened.

The insane investigator asked:

‘Well, where is he?’

‘Who?’

‘Your lover. Or superior. I really don’t know yet what your relationship with him is.’

‘Who are you talking about?’ Lidina babbled in a panic. ‘I don’t under-’

‘The one who set you this assignment,’ Fandorin interrupted impatiently, listening very carefully. ‘The staff captain, your travelling companion. It was him who ordered you to entice me here, wasn’t it? But he’s not in the apartment, I would sense it. Where is he?’

She threw her hands up to her chest. He knew, he knew everything! But how?’

‘Vasya’s not my lover,’ she gabbled, realising through intuition rather than reason that now was the time to tell the truth. ‘He’s my friend, and I really want to help him. Don’t ask me where he is, I won’t tell you. Erast Petrovich, dear man, I want to ask you for clemency.’

‘For what?’

‘For clemency! A man committed a foolish error. From your military point of view it might be considered a crime, but it’s nothing more than absentmindedness! Surely absentmindedness ought not to be punished so severely!’

The man with dark hair wrinkled up his forehead and put the pistol away in his pocket.

‘I don’t q-quite understand… Who are you talking about?’

‘Why about him, about him! Vasya Rybnikov! Yes, I know, he lost that drawing of yours, but now do you have to destroy a good man? Why, it’s monstrous! The war will be over in a month, or maybe six, and he has to serve hard labour? Or even worse? It’s not human, it’s not Christian, you must agree!’ And this all flooded out so sincerely and soulfully that the tears sprang to her own eyes.

Even this cold fish Fandorin was touched – he gazed at her in surprise bordering on utter amazement.

‘How could you think I was trying to save my lover!’ Glyceria Romanovna declared bitterly, following up quickly on her advantage. ‘If I loved one man, how could I entice another? Yes, at first I intended to enchant you, in order to help Vasya, but… but you really have turned my head. I confess, I even forgot why I wanted to lead you on… You know, I felt a kind of twinge here…’ She set her hand slightly below her bodice in order to emphasise the line of her bust, which was quite lovely enough already.

Glyceria Romanovna uttered several more phrases in the same vain in a voice muffled with passion, without worrying too much about their plausibility – everyone knew how gullible and susceptible men were to that kind of talk, especially when the prey was so close and so accessible.

‘I’m not asking you for anything. And I won’t ask. Let’s forget about everything…’

She threw her head back and turned it slightly to one side. First, this was her best angle. And secondly, the position made it very convenient to kiss her.

A second passed, then another, and another.

But no kiss came.

Opening her eyes and squinting sideways, Lidina saw that Fandorin was not looking at her, but off to one side. But there was nothing of any interest there, just the telephone apparatus hanging on the wall.

‘He lost a drawing? Is that what Rybnikov told you?’ the investigator said thoughtfully. ‘He lied to you, madam. That man is a Japanese spy. If you don’t want to tell me where he is, you do not have to. I shall find out today in any case. G-goodbye.’

He swung round and walked out of the apartment.

Glyceria Romanovna’s legs almost buckled under her. A spy? What monstrous suspicion! She had to warn him immediately. It turned out that the danger was even more serious than he thought! And then, Fandorin had said that he would find out today where Vasya was hiding!

She grabbed the telephone earpiece, but suddenly felt afraid that the investigator might be listening from the stairway. She opened the door – no one there, nothing but rapid footsteps on the stairs.

She went back in and telephoned.

‘Saint-Saлns Boarding House,’ a woman’s voice cooed in the earpiece. She could hear the sounds of a piano playing a jolly polka.

‘I need to talk to Vasilii Alexandrovich urgently!’

‘He’s not here.’

‘Will he be back soon?’

‘He doesn’t report to us.’

What an ill-mannered maid! Lidina stamped her foot in frustration.

There was only one answer: she must go there and wait for him.

The doorman gaped at the visitor as if it was some devil with horns on his head who had arrived, not an elegantly dressed, highly respectable lady, and he blocked the entrance with his chest.

‘Who do you want?’ he asked suspiciously.

The same sounds of rollicking music she had heard on the telephone came out through the doorway. In a respectable boarding house, after ten o’clock in the evening?

Ah yes, today was 26 May, wasn’t it, the end of the school year, Glyceria Romanovna recalled. There must be a graduation party in the boarding house, that was why there were so many carriages in the courtyard – the parents had come. It was hardly surprising that the doorman did not wish to admit an outsider.

‘I’m not here for the party,’ Lidina explained to him. ‘I need to wait for Vasilii Alexandrovich. He will probably arrive soon.’

‘He’s already come back. Only this isn’t the way to his rooms, you need to go in over there,’ said the doorman, pointing to the small wing.

‘Ah, how stupid of me! Naturally, Vasya can’t live with the girl boarders!’

She ran up the steps with a rustle of silk. She rang the bell hastily and then started knocking as well.

The windows of the apartment were dark. Not a shadow stirring, not a sound.

Tired of waiting, Lidina shouted:

‘Vasilii Alexandrovich! It’s me! I have something urgent and terribly important to tell you!’

And the door opened immediately, that very second.

Rybnikov stood in the doorway, staring silently at his unexpected visitor.

‘Why is it dark in your rooms?’ she asked – in a whisper for some reason.

‘I think the electrical transformer has burnt out. What’s happened?’

‘But you have candles, don’t you?’ she asked, walking in, and immediately, still on the threshold, stumbling over the words in her agitation, she started telling him the bad news: how she had met the official dealing with his case by chance, at someone’s home, and this man thought Vasilii Alexandrovich was a spy.

‘We have to explain to him that the drawing was stolen from you! I’ll be a witness, I’ll tell them about that nasty specimen on the train. You can’t imagine the kind of man Fandorin is. A very serious gentleman, eyes like ice! He should be looking for that swarthy character, not you! Let me explain everything to him myself!’

Rybnikov listened to her incoherent story without speaking as he lit the candles in the candelabra one after another. In the trembling light Glyceria Romanovna thought his face seemed so tired, unhappy and haunted that she choked on her pity.

‘I’ll do anything for you! I won’t leave you!’ Lidina exclaimed, clutching impetuously at his hands.

He gave a sudden jerk and strange sparks lit up in his eyes, completely transforming his ordinary appearance. His face no longer seemed pitiful to Glyceria Romanovna – oh no! Black and red shadows ran across his face; he looked like Vrubel’s Demon now.

‘Oh God, my darling, my darling, I love you…’ Lidina babbled, stunned by the realisation. ‘How could I… You are the dearest thing that I have!’

She reached out to him with her arms, her face, her entire body, trembling in anticipation of his movement in response.

But the former staff captain made a sound like a snarl and shrank back.

‘Leave,’ he said in a hoarse voice. ‘Leave immediately.’

Lidina could never remember running out into the street.

Rybnikov stood there for a while in the entrance hall, absolutely motionless, gazing at the little flames of the candles with his face set in a stiff, lifeless mask.

Then there was a quiet knock at the door.

He leapt across in a single bound and wrenched the door open.

The countess was standing on the porch.

‘I’m sorry for bothering you,’ she said, peering into the semi-darkness. ‘It’s noisy in the house tonight, so I came to ask whether our guests are bothering you. I could tell them that a string has broken in the piano and set up the gramophone in the small drawing room. That would be quieter…’

Sensing something strange in her lodger’s behaviour, Countess Bovada stopped in mid-phrase.

‘Why are you looking at me like that?’

Without speaking, Vasilii Alexandrovich took hold of her hand and pulled her towards him.

The countess was a hard-headed woman and extremely experienced, but she was bewildered by the suddenness of this.

‘Come on,’ said the transformed Rybnikov, jerking her in after him.

She followed him, smiling mistrustfully.

But when Vasilii Alexandrovich forced his lips against hers with a dull moan and clasped her in his strong arms, the smile on the plump, beautiful face of the Spanish grandee’s widow changed first to an expression of amazement and, later, to a grimace of passion.

Half an hour later Beatrice was unrecognisable, weeping on her lover’s shoulder and whispering words that she had not spoken for many years, since her early girlhood.

‘If you only knew, if you only knew,’ she kept repeating as she wiped away the tears, but what exactly he ought to know, she was unable to explain.

Rybnikov barely managed to bundle her out.

When he was finally left alone, he sat down on the floor in an awkward, complicated pose. He stayed like that for exactly eight minutes. Then he got up, shook himself like a dog and made a telephone call – exactly half an hour before midnight, as arranged.

And at the same time, at the far side of the boulevard ring, Lidina, who had not yet removed her evening wrap and her hat, was standing in front of the mirror in her hallway, weeping bitterly.

‘It’s finished… My life is finished,’ she whispered. ‘Nobody, nobody needs me…’

She swayed, caught her foot on something that rustled and cried out. The entire floor of the hallway was covered with a living carpet of scarlet roses. If poor Glyceria Romanovna’s nose had not been blocked by her sobbing, she would have caught the intoxicating scent on the stairway.

From out of the dark depths of the apartment came entrancing sounds, creeping stealthily at first, then flowing in a burgeoning flood. The magical voice sang Count Almaviva’s serenade.

‘Ecco, ridente in cielo spunta la bella aurora…’

The tears gushed out of Glyceria Romanovna’s lovely eyes faster than ever.

The fourth syllable, in which the name of the Japanese God is taken in vain

The very moment that Evstratii Pavlovich finished reading the urgent message from the senior member of the squad that had arrived from St Petersburg to replace the agents slain by the metal stars, he jumped up from his desk and dashed to the door – he even forgot about his bowler hat.

The duty carriages were standing ready at the entrance to the Okhrana building, and the drive from Gnezdnikovsky Lane to Chistoprudnaya Street was about ten minutes, if you drove like the wind.

‘Heigh-ho, heigh-ho,’ the court counsellor kept repeating to himself, trying to read the note once again – it was not easy: the carriage was bouncing over the cobbled street, there was not enough light from the street lamps, and Smurov had scrawled the note like a chicken scribbling with its foot. It was quite obvious that the highly experienced agent who had been charged with following Fandorin’s movements was seriously agitated – the letters jumped and skipped, the lines were lopsided.

I took over the watch at 8 from sen. agent Zhuchenko, at the house of General Charme. Silver Fox emerged from the entranceway at three minutes to 9, accompanied by a little lady who has been given the code name Bimbo. They took a cab to Ostozhenka Street, the Bomze House. Silver Fox emerged at 9.37 and five minutes later Bimbo came running out. I sent two men to follow Silver Fox, Kroshkin and I followed Bimbo – I was quite impressed by how agitated she seemed. She drove to Chistoprudny Boulevard and let her carriage go at the Saint-Saлns Boarding House. She walked up on to the porch of the wing. She knocked and rang the bell, but the door was not opened for a long time. From the position I had taken up, I observed a man peep out of the window, look at her and hide. There is a bright lantern outside the building just there and I got a good look at his face. It seemed familiar to me. After a while I remembered where I had seen it: in Peter, on Nadezhdinskaya Street (code name Kalmyk). And then I realised that his description fitted the Acrobat, as described in the briefing circular. It’s him, Evstratii Pavlovich, I swear it’s him!

Sen. agent Smurov

The way the report was written violated the regulations, and the manner of its conclusion was entirely impermissible, but the court counsellor was not annoyed with Smurov about that.

‘Well, what’s he up to? Still there?’ Mylnikov snapped at the senior agent as soon as he jumped down from the carriage.

Smurov was sitting in the bushes, behind the fence of the small park in the square, from where there was an excellent view of the yard of the Saint-Saлns, flooded with the bright light of coloured lanterns.

‘Yes, sir. Have no doubt, Evstratii Pavlovich, I’ve got Kroshkin watching round the other side. If the Kalmyk had climbed out of the window, Kroshkin would have whistled.’

‘All right, tell me what’s happened.’

‘Right, then,’ said Smurov, raising his notebook to his eyes. ‘Bimbo didn’t stay long with Kalmyk, only five minutes. She ran out at 10.38, wiping away her tears with a handkerchief. At 10.42 a woman emerged from the main entrance, we called her Peahen. She walked up on to the porch and went inside. Peahen stayed until 11.20. She emerged sobbing and slightly unsteady on her feet. That’s all there is.’

‘What does this slit-eyed fiend get up to, to upset all the women like that?’ asked Mylnikov, astonished. ‘Well, never mind, now we’ll upset him a little bit too. So, Smurov, I’ve brought six men along with me. I’ll leave one with you. You three are on the windows. And I’ll take the others and get the Jap. He’s tricky all right, but we weren’t exactly born yesterday either. And then, it’s dark in there. He must have gone to bed. Worn out from all those women.’

They doubled over and ran across the yard. Before walking up on to the porch, they took off their boots – they didn’t want any clattering now.

The court counsellor’s men were hand picked. Pure gold, not men. He didn’t have to explain anything to them, gestures were enough.

He snapped his fingers at Sapliukin, and Sapliukin immediately leaned down over the lock. He fiddled about a bit with his picklock, putting in a drop of oil where it was needed. In less than a minute, the door was opened soundlessly.

Mylnikov entered the dark hallway first, holding at the ready a most convenient little doodad – a rubber club with a lead core. The Jappo had to be taken alive, so Fandorin wouldn’t cut up nasty afterwards.

After he clicked a little button on his secret torch, Evstratii Pavlovich picked out three white doors with the beam: one straight ahead, one on the left, one on the right.

He pointed with his finger: you go straight on, you go this way, you go that way, only shshhhh.

He stayed in the hallway with Lepinsh and Sapliukin, ready to dash through the door from behind which they heard the agreed signal: the squeaking of a mouse.

They stood there, huddled up in their tension, waiting.

A minute went by, then two, and three, and five.

Vague nocturnal rustlings came from the apartment; somewhere behind the wall a gramophone was wailing. A clock started striking midnight – so loudly and suddenly that Mylnikov’s heart almost jumped out of his chest.

What were they mucking about at in there? It only took a moment, just glance in and turn your head this way and that. Had they just disappeared into thin air, or what?

The court counsellor suddenly realised that he wasn’t feeling the thrill of the hunt any longer. And his passionate eagerness had evaporated without a trace – in fact, he felt repulsive, chilly shudders running down his spine. ‘Those damn nerves. I’ll just nab this Jappo, and then I’ll go on the mineral water treatment,’ Evstratii Pavlovich promised himself.

He gestured to his agents to stay put and cautiously stuck his nose inside the door on the left.

It was absolutely quiet in there. And empty, as Mylnikov soon convinced himself by shining his torch about. So there had to be a way through into the next room.

Stepping soundlessly across the parquet, he walked out into the middle of the floor.

What the devil! A table, chairs. A window. A mirror on the wall facing the window. There wasn’t any other door. And agent Mandrykin wasn’t there.

He tried to cross himself, but the club grasped in his hand got in the way.

Feeling the cold sweat breaking out on his forehead, Evstratii Pavlovich went back to the hallway.

‘Well?’ Sapliukin asked with just his lips

The court counsellor just gestured irritably at him. He glanced into the room on the right.

It was exactly like the one on the left – the furniture, the mirror and the window.

Not a soul, empty!

Mylnikov went down on his hands and knees and shone his torch under the table, although it was impossible to imagine that an agent could have decided to play hide-and-seek.

Evstratii Pavlovich tumbled back into the hallway, muttering: ‘Oh, our Lord, and the Blessed Virgin.’

He pushed the agents aside and rushed through the door leading straight ahead – clutching his revolver this time, not his club.

It was the bedroom. A washbasin in the corner, with a bath, a toilet bowl and some other white porcelain contraption screwed to the floor behind a curtain.

No one! The chipped moon squinted in derisively at Mylnikov through the window.

He menaced it with his revolver and started flinging open the cupboard doors with a crash. He glanced under the bed, even under the bath.

The Japanese had disappeared. And he had taken with him three of Mylnikov’s best agents.

Evstratii Pavlovich felt afraid that he might have lost his reason. He shouted hysterically:

‘Sapliukin! Lepinsh!’

When the agents failed to reply, he dashed back to the hallway.

Only there was no one there any longer.

‘Oh, Lord Jesus!’ the court counsellor wailed beseechingly, dropping his revolver and crossing himself with broad gestures. ‘Dispel the sorcery of the Japanese devil!’

When the thrice-repeated sign of the cross failed to help, Evstratii Pavlovich finally realised that the Japanese God was stronger than the Russian one and fell to his knees before His Squintyness.

He rested his forehead on the floor and crawled towards the door, howling loudly: ‘Banzai, banzai, banzai.’

The final syllable, the longest one of all

How could he have failed to recognise her straight away? Well, yes, certainly, he was tired, he was tormented by boredom, waiting impatiently for when he could leave. And, of course, she looked quite different: that first time, at dawn near the sabotaged bridge, she was pale and exhausted, in a dress that was muddy and soaking wet, and this time she glowed with a delicate, well-groomed beauty, and the veil had blurred the features of her face. But even so, some sleuth he was!

Then, when she approached him herself and mentioned the bridge, it was like being struck by lightning. Erast Petrovich had recognised her and remembered her testimony, which had led to his fatal, shameful error, and – most importantly – he had remembered her companion.

At the Moscow Freight Station, when he looked through his binoculars and saw the man who had received the melinite, Fandorin realised immediately that he had seen him somewhere before but, confused by those Japanese facial features, he had taken a wrong turning, imagining that the spy resembled one of his old acquaintances from his time in Japan. But it was all much simpler than that! He had seen this man, dressed in a staff captain’s uniform, at the site of the catastrophe.

Now everything had fallen into place.

The special had been blown up by the Acrobat, as Mylnikov had so aptly christened him. The Japanese saboteur was travelling in the express train, accompanied by his female accomplice -this Lidina woman. How cunningly she had sent the gendarmes off on a false trail!

And now the enemy had decided to strike a blow at the person who was hunting him. One of the favourite tricks of the sect of stealthy ones, it was called ‘The rabbit eats the tiger’. Well, not to worry, there was also a Russian saying: ‘The mouse hunts the cat’.

Glyceria Romanovna’s invitation to go to her apartment had not taken the engineer by surprise – he was prepared for something of the sort. But even so, he tensed up inside when he asked himself whether he could cope with such a dangerous opponent on his own.

‘If I don’t cope, that’s my karma, let them fight on without me,’ Erast Petrovich thought philosophically – and he went.

But at the house on Ostozhenka Street he behaved with extreme caution. Karma was all very well, but he had no intention of playing giveaway chess.

That only made the disappointment all the greater when he realised that the Acrobat was not in the apartment. Fandorin didn’t beat about the bush after that. The dubious lady’s part in everything had to be clarified there and then, without delay.

She was not an agent, he realised that straight away. If she was an accomplice, she was an unwitting one and had not been initiated into any secrets. True, she knew where to find the Acrobat, but she would never tell Fandorin, because she was head over heels in love. He couldn’t subject her to torture, could he?

At this point Erast Petrovich’s eye fell on the telephone apparatus, and the whole idea came to him in an instant. A spy of this calibre had to have a telephone number for emergency contacts.

After frightening Lidina as badly as he could, Fandorin ran down the stairs, out into the street, took a cab and ordered the driver to race as fast as he could to the Central Telephone Exchange.

Lisitsky had set himself up very comfortably in his new place of work. The young ladies on the switchboards had already given him lots of embroidered doilies and he had a bowl of home-made biscuits, jam and a small teapot standing on the desk. The dashing staff captain seemed to be popular here.

On seeing Fandorin, he jumped up, pulled off his earphones and exclaimed enthusiastically:

‘Erast Petrovich, you are a true genius! This is the second day I’ve been sitting here and I never weary of repeating it! Your name should be incised in gold letters on the tablets of police history. You cannot imagine how many curious and savoury facts I have learned in these two days!’

‘I c-cannot,’ Fandorin interrupted him. ‘Apartment three, the Bomze House, Ostozhenka Street – what’s the number there?’

‘Just a moment,’ said Lisitsky, glancing into the directory. ‘37-82.’

‘Check what calls have been made from 37-82 in the last quarter of an hour. Q-quickly!’

The staff captain shot out of the room like a bullet and came back three minutes later.

‘A call to number 114-22. That’s the Saint-Saлns Boarding House, on Chistoprudny Boulevard, I’ve already checked it. It was a brief conversation, only thirty seconds.’

‘That means she didn’t find him in…’ Fandorin murmured. ‘What boarding house is that? There wasn’t one by that name in my time. Is it educational?’

‘After a fashion.’ Lisitsky chuckled. ‘They teach the science of the tender passion. It’s a well-known establishment, belongs to a certain Countess Bovada. A highly colourful individual, she figured in one of our cases. And they know her well in the Okhrana too. Her real name is Anfisa Minkina. Her life story is a genuine Boussenard novel. She has travelled right round the world. A shady character, but she is tolerated because from time to time she provides services to the relevant government departments. Of an intimate, but not necessarily sexual, nature,’ the jolly staff captain said, and laughed again. ‘I told them to connect me to the boarding house. There are two numbers registered there, so I’ve connected to both. Was I right?’

‘Yes, well done. Sit here and listen. And meanwhile I’ll make a call.’

Fandorin telephoned his apartment and told his valet to make his way to Chistoprudny Boulevard and observe a certain house.

Masa paused and asked:

‘Master, will this be interfering in the course of the war?’

‘No,’ Erast Petrovich reassured him, prevaricating somewhat, but he had no other choice at the moment. Mylnikov was not there, and the railway gendarmes would not be able to provide competent surveillance. ‘You will simply watch the Saint-Saлns Boarding House and tell me if you see anything interesting. The Orlando electric theatre is close by, it has a public telephone. I shall be at number…’

‘20-93,’ Lisitsky prompted him, with an earphone pressed to each ear.

‘A call, on the left line!’ he exclaimed a minute later.

Erast Petrovich grabbed an extension earpiece and heard a blasй man’s voice:

‘… Beatrice, my little sweetheart, I’m aflame, I just can’t wait any longer. I’ll come straight to your place. Get my room ready, do. And Zuleika, it must be her.’

‘Zuleika is with an admirer,’ a woman’s voice, very gentle and pleasant, replied at the other end of the line.

The man became flustered.

‘What’s that you say, with an admirer? With whom? If it’s Von Weilem, I’ll never forgive you!’

‘I’ll prepare Madam Frieda for you,’ the woman cooed. ‘Remember her, the large lady with the wonderful figure. She’s a true whiplash virtuoso, every bit as good as Zuleika. Your Excellency will like her.’

The staff captain started shaking with soundless, suppressed laughter. Fandorin dropped his earpiece in annoyance.

During the next hour there were many calls, some of an even more spicy nature, but all of them in Lisitsky’s left ear – that is, on number 114-22. Nothing on the other line.

It came to life at half past eleven, with a call from the boarding house. A man requested number 42-13.

‘42-13 – who’s that?’ the engineer asked in a whisper, while the young lady was putting through the connection.

The gendarme was already rustling the pages. He found the number and ran his thumbnail under the line of print.

Fandorin read it: ‘Windrose Restaurant’.

‘Windrose Restaurant,’ said a voice in the earpiece. ‘Can I help you?’

‘My dear fellow, could you please call Mr Miroshnichenko to the telephone? He’s sitting at the table by the window, on his own,’ the Saint-Saлns said in a man’s voice.

‘Right away, sir.’

A long silence, lasting several minutes.

And then a calm baritone voice at the restaurant end asked:

‘Is that you?’

‘As we agreed. Are you ready?’

‘Yes. We’ll be there at one in the morning.’

‘There’s a lot of it. Almost a thousand crates,’ the boarding house warned the restaurant.

Fandorin gripped his earpiece so tightly that his fingers turned white. Weapons! A shipment of Japanese weapons, it had to be!

‘We have enough men,’ the restaurant replied confidently.

‘How will you move it? By water?’

‘Naturally. Otherwise, why would I need a warehouse on the river?’

Just at that moment little lamps started blinking on the telephone apparatus on the desk in front of Lisitsky.

‘That’s the special line,’ the officer whispered, grabbing the receiver and twirling a handle. ‘For you, Erast Petrovich. I think it’s your servant.’

‘You listen!’ Fandorin said with a nod at the earpiece, and took the receiver. ‘Yes?’

‘Master, you told me to tell you if anything interesting happened,’ Masa said in Japanese. ‘It’s very interesting here, come.’

He didn’t try to explain anything – evidently there were a lot of people in the electric theatre.

In the meantime the conversation between Windrose and Saint-Saлns had ended.

‘Well, d-did he tell him the place?’ the engineer asked, turning to Lisitsky impatiently.

The gendarme spread his hands helplessly.

‘It must have been during the two seconds when you put the receiver down and I hadn’t picked it up yet… All I heard was the one at the restaurant saying: “Yes, yes, I know”. What are your instructions? Shall I send squads to the Windrose and Saint-Saлns?’

‘No need. You won’t find anyone at the restaurant now. And I’ll deal with the guest house myself.’

As he flew along the dark boulevards in the carriage, Fandorin thought about the terrible danger hanging over the ancient city – no, over the thousand-year-old state. Black crowds, armed with rifles from Japan (or wherever), would choke the throats of the streets with the nooses of barricades. A formless, bloody stain would creep in from the outskirts to the centre and a ferocious, protracted bloodbath would begin, in which there would be no victors, only dead and defeated.

The great enemy of Erast Petrovich’s life – senseless and savage Chaos – stared out at the engineer through the blank wall eyes of dark windows, grinned at him with the rotten mouths of ravenous gateways. Rational, civilised life shrank to a frail strand of lamps, glimmering defencelessly along the pavement.

Masa was waiting for him by the railings.

‘I don’t know what’s going on,’ he said quickly, leading Fandorin along the edge of the pond. ‘That bad man Myrnikov and five of his men crept into the house, through that porch over there. That was… twerve minutes ago,’ he said, glancing with delight at the gold watch that Erast Petrovich had given him for the Mikado’s fiftieth birthday. ‘I terephoned you straight away.’

‘Ah, how appalling!’ the engineer exclaimed miserably. ‘That jackal picked up the scent and he’s ruined everything again!’

His valet replied philosophically:

‘There’s nothing you can do about it now, anyway. Ret’s watch what happens next.’

So they started watching.

There were single windows on the left and right of the door. They had no light in them.

‘Strange,’ whispered Erast Petrovich. ‘What are they doing there in the dark? No shots, no shouts…’

And that very second there was a shout – not very loud, but filled with such utter animal terror that Fandorin and his servant both leapt up without a word, breaking their cover, and went running towards the house.

A man crawled out on to the porch, working his elbows and knees rapidly.

‘Banzai! Banzai!’ he howled over and over again.

‘Let’s go!’ said the engineer, looking round at Masa, who had stopped. ‘What’s wrong with you?’

His servant stood there with his arms crossed, the mute embodiment of affronted feelings.

‘You deceived me, Master. That man is Japanese.’

There was no point in trying to persuade him. And anyway, Fandorin felt ashamed.

‘He is not Japanese,’ said Fandorin. ‘But you’re right: you’d better go. If neutrality is not to be compromised.’

The engineer sighed and moved on. The valet sighed and plodded away.

Three shadows came flying out, one after another, from round the corner of the boarding house – three men in identical coats and bowler hats.

‘Evstratii Pavlovich!’ they clamoured, taking hold of the crawling man and setting him on his feet. ‘What’s wrong?’

Mylnikov howled and tried to break free of their grip.

‘I am Fandorin,’ said Erast Petrovich, moving closer.

The agents exchanged glances, but they didn’t say anything – obviously no further introductions were required.

‘He’s cracked up,’ one of them, a little older than the others, said with a sigh. ‘Evstratii Pavlovich hasn’t been himself for quite a while now, our lads have noticed. But this time he’s really flipped his lid.’

‘The Japanese God… Banzai… Get thee behind me…’ the afflicted man repeated, twitching and jerking.

So that he would not get in the way, Fandorin pressed on his artery, and the court counsellor quietened down. He hung his head, gave a snore and slumped in the grip of his deputies.

‘Let him lie down for a while, nothing will happen to him. Right now, follow me!’ the engineer ordered.

He walked quickly round the rooms, switching on the electric light everywhere.

The apartment was empty, lifeless. The only movement was a curtain fluttering at an open window.

Fandorin dashed over to the windowsill. Outside was the courtyard, and after that a vacant lot and the gloomy silhouettes of buildings.

‘He got away! Why was no one posted under the window? That’s not like Mylnikov!’

‘Well, I was standing there,’ one of the agents started explaining. ‘Only when I heard Evstratpalich shout, I ran. I thought he needed a hand…’

‘Where are our lads?’ the older one asked, looking around in amazement. ‘Mandrykin, Lepinsh, Sapliukin, Kutko and that other one, what’s his name, with the big ears. Did they go after him, through the window? They should have whistled…’

Erast Petrovich set about examining the apartment more closely. In the room to the left of the entrance hall, he discovered a few drops of blood on the carpet. He touched it – it was fresh.

He glanced around, set off confidently towards the sideboard and pulled open the door, which was slightly ajar. There, protruding slightly from the inner space, was a small crossbow, gripped in a carpenter’s vice. It had been fired.

‘Well, well, familiar tricks,’ the engineer murmured, and started feeling the floor at the spot where he found the blood. ‘Aha, and here’s the spring. He hid it under the parquet… But where’s the body?’

He turned his head to the right and the left. Then walked towards the mirror hanging on the wall facing the window. He fingered the frame, but couldn’t find a switch, and simply smashed his fist into the brilliant surface.

The agents, who were blankly following ‘Silver Fox’s’ actions, gasped – the mirror jangled and collapsed into a black niche.

‘So that’s where it is,’ the engineer purred in satisfaction, clicking a switch. A small door opened up in the wallpaper.

There was a tiny boxroom behind the false mirror. At the far end of it was a window that gave an excellent view of the next space, the bedroom. Half of the secret hiding place was taken up by a camera on a tripod, but that was not what interested Fandorin.

‘With big ears, you say?’ the engineer asked, bending down and examining something on the floor. ‘Is this him?’

He dragged out a dead body, holding it under the armpits. There was a short, thick arrow protruding from its chest.

The agents clustered round their dead comrade, but the engineer was already hurrying into the opposite room.

‘The same trick,’ he announced to the senior agent, who had followed him in. ‘A secret spring under the parquet. A crossbow concealed in the cupboard. Instantaneous death – the point is smeared with poison. And the body is over there’ – he pointed to the mirror. ‘You can check for yourself.’

But in this secret space, which was exactly like the previous one, there were three bodies.

‘Lepinsh,’ the agent said with a sigh, dragging out the top one. ‘Sapliukin. And Kutko’s underneath…’

The fifth body was found in the bedroom, in the gap behind the wardrobe.

‘I don’t know how he managed to deal with them on his own… It probably happened like this,’ said Fandorin, recreating the scene. ‘The ones who went into the side rooms were killed first, by the arrows, and they were spirited away – “through the l-looking glass”. This one, in the bedroom, was killed with a bare hand – at least, there are no visible signs of injury. Sapliukin and this one, what’s his name, Lepinsh, have had their cervical vertebrae smashed. Lepinsh’s open mouth suggests that he caught a glimpse of his killer, but no more than that. The Acrobat killed these two in the hallway, dragged them into the room on the right and threw them on top of Kutko. The one thing I don’t understand is how Mylnikov survived. He must have amused the Japanese with his cries of “Banzai”. But that’s enough idle speculation. Our most important job is still ahead of us. You,’ he said, prodding one of the agents with his finger, ‘collect your deranged superior and take him to the Kanatchikovo mental clinic. And you two come with me.’

‘Where to, Mr Fandorin?’ asked the one who was a little older.

‘To the River Moscow. Damnation, half past twelve already, and we still have to look for a needle in a haystack!’

Not an easy trick, finding a warehouse on the River Moscow when you don’t know which one it is. The old capital didn’t have a cargo port, and the goods wharves began at the Krasnokholmsky Bridge and stretched downstream for several versts, with breaks, all the way to Kozhukhovo.

They started looking from Taganka, at the wharf of the Volga Basin Steamship Line and Trading Company. Then came the landing stage of the Kamensky Brothers Trading House, the warehouses of Madam Kashina’s Nizhny Novgorod Steamship Company, the freight sheds of the Moscow River Partnership, and so on, and so forth.

They searched like this: they rode along the waterfront in a cab, gazing into the darkness and listening for any noise there might be. Who else would work at this desolate hour of the night, apart from men who had something to hide?

Occasionally they went down to the river and listened to the water – most of the moorings were on the left bank, but once in a while there were some on the right bank too.

They went back to the carriage and drove on.

Erast Petrovich became gloomier and gloomier with every minute that passed.

The search was dragging on – the Breguet in his pocket jangled twice. As though in reply, the clock on the tower of the Novospassky Monastery struck two, and the engineer’s thoughts turned to matters divine.

The survival of the autocratic monarchy depends on the people’s belief in its mystical, supernatural origin, Fandorin thought sombrely. If that faith is undermined, Russia will suffer the same fate as Mylnikov. The people are observing the course of this wretched war and every day they are convinced that the Japanese God is stronger than the Russian one, or that he loves his anointed one more than ours loves the Tsar Nicholas. A constitution is the only possible salvation, mused the engineer – despite his mature age, he had not yet outgrown his tendency to idealism. The monarchy must shift the fulcrum of its authority from religiosity to rationality. The people must comply with the will of the authorities because they are in agreement with that will, not out of the fear of God. But if armed revolt breaks out now, it is the end of everything. And it no longer matters whether the monarchy is able to drown the rebellion in blood or not. The genie will escape from the bottle, and the throne will come crashing down anyway – if not now, then in a few years’ time, during the next convulsion…

Large, paunchy iron tanks glinted in the darkness – the oil storage facilities of the Nobel Company. At this point the river made a bend.

Erast Petrovich touched the driver on the shoulder to make him stop. He listened, and from somewhere on the water in the distance he could hear the clear sound of regular mechanical grunting.

‘Follow me,’ said the engineer, beckoning to the agents.

They jogged through a clump of trees. The breeze carried the smell of crude oil to their nostrils – the Postyloe Lake was somewhere close by, behind the trees.

‘That’s it!’ gasped the senior agent (his name was Smurov). ‘Looks like them, all right!’

Down below, at the bottom of a low slope, was the dark form of a long wharf, with several barges moored at it, and one of them, the smallest, was coupled to a steep-sided little tugboat under steam. It was its panting that Fandorin’s sharp hearing had detected.

Two loaders carrying a crate ran out of a warehouse abutting the wharf and disappeared into the hold of the little barge. After them another one appeared, with something square on his shoulders, and ran down the same gangplank.

‘Yes, that’s them,’ Fandorin said with a smile, instantly forgetting his apocalyptic visions. ‘The s-sansculottes are in a hurry.’

‘The who?’ asked agent Kroshkin, intrigued by the unfamiliar word.

Smurov, who was better read, explained.

‘They were armed militants, same as the SRs are. Haven’t you ever heard of the French Revolution? No? What about Napoleon? Well, that’s something at least.’

Another loader ran out of the warehouse, then three at once, lugging along something very heavy. The flame of a match flared up in the corner of the berth and a second or two later shrank to a red dot. There were two more men standing there.

The smile on the engineer’s face was replaced by a thoughtful expression.

‘There are quite a lot of them…’ Erast Petrovich looked around. ‘What’s that dark form over there? A bridge?’

‘Yes, sir. A railway bridge. For the ring road under construction.’

‘Excellent! Kroshkin, over in that direction, beyond Postyloe Lake, is the Kozhukhovo Station. Take the cab and get there as quick as you can. There must be a telephone at the station. Call Lieutenant Colonel Danilov at number 77-235. If the lieutenant colonel is not there, speak to the duty officer. Describe the s-situation. Tell him to put the watch and the duty detail, everyone they can find, on hand trolleys. And send them here. That’s all, run now. Only give me your revolver. And a supply of shells, if you have them. They’re no good to you, but we might find a g-good use for them.’

The agent dashed off back to the carriage at full tilt.

‘Right then, Smurov, let’s creep a bit closer. There’s an excellent stack of rails over there.’

While Thrush was lighting his pipe, Rybnikov glanced at his watch.

‘A quarter to three. It will be dawn soon.’

‘It’s all right, we’ll get it done. The bulk of it’s already been loaded.’ The SR nodded at a big barge. ‘There’s just the stuff for Sormovo left. That’s nothing, only a fifth of the load. Look lively now, comrades, look lively!’

They may be your comrades, but you’re not lugging any crates, Vasilii Alexandrovich thought in passing as he tried to calculate when would be best to bring up the most important subject – the timing of the uprising.

Thrush set off unhurriedly towards the warehouse. Rybnikov followed him.

‘When’s the Moscow load going?’ he asked, meaning the big barge.

‘The rivermen will move it to Fili tomorrow. Then on to somewhere else from there. We’ll keep moving it from place to place, so it won’t attract unwanted attention. And the small one here will go straight to Sormovo now, down the Moscow river, then the Oka.’

Almost no crates were left in the warehouse now, there were just flat boxes of wires and remote control devices.

‘How do you say “merci” in your language?’ Thrush asked with a grin.

‘Arigato.’

‘So, it’s a big proletarian arigato to you, Mr Samurai. You’ve done your job, we’ll manage without you now.’

Rybnikov broached the most important subject, speaking in a grave voice.

‘Well, then. The strike has to start within the next three weeks. And the uprising within six weeks…’

‘Don’t give me orders, Marshal Oyama. We’ll figure all that out for ourselves,’ the SR interrupted. ‘We’re not going to dance to your tune. I think we’ll hit them in the autumn.’ He grinned. ‘Until then you can keep plucking away at Tsar Nick’s feathers and fluff. Let the people see him stripped naked. That’s when we’ll lamp him hard.’

Vasilii Alexandrovich smiled back at him. Thrush never even guessed that at that second his life and the lives of his eight comrades hung by a thread.

‘But that’s really not right. We agreed,’ said Rybnikov, raising his hands reproachfully.

Sparks of mischief glinted in the revolutionary leader’s eyes.

‘To keep a promise made to a representative of an imperialist power is a bourgeois prejudice,’ he declared, and puffed on his pipe. ‘And what would “see you around” be in your language?’

A workman nearby hoisted the final box on to his back and said in surprise:

‘This is far too light. Not empty, is it?’

He put it back down on the ground.

‘No,’ explained Vasilii Alexandrovich, opening the lid. ‘It’s a selection of leads and wires for various purposes. This one is a fuse, this is a camouflage lead and this one, with the rubber covering, is for underwater mines.’

Thrush was interested in that. He took out the bright-red coil and examined it. He caught the metal core between his finger and thumb – it slipped out of the waterproof covering easily.

‘A smart idea. Laying mines underwater? Maybe we could knock off the royal yacht? I have this man in my team, a real desperate character… I’ll have to think about it.’

The loader picked up the box and ran out on to the wharf.

Meanwhile Rybnikov had taken a decision.

‘All right, then, autumn it is. Better late than never,’ he said. ‘But the strike in three weeks. We’re counting on you.’

‘What else can you do?’ Thrush answered casually over his shoulder. ‘That’s all, samurai, this is the parting of the ways. Hop it back to your ever-loving Japanese mother.’

‘I’m an orphan,’ said Vasilii Alexandrovich, smiling with just his lips, and he thought once again how good it would be to break this man’s neck – in order to watch his eyes bulge and turn glassy just before he died.

At that moment the silence ended.

‘Mr Engineer, it looks like that’s all. They’ve finished,’ Smurov whispered.

Fandorin could see for himself that the loading had been completed. The barge had settled almost right down to the waterline. It might look small, but apparently it was capacious – it took a lot of space to accommodate a thousand crates of weapons.

There was the last man clambering up the gangway – from the way he was walking, his load was not heavy at all, and then seven, no eight, hand-rolled cigarettes were lit on the barge, one after another.

‘They’ve done a bit of moonlighting. Now they’ll have a smoke and sail away,’ the agent breathed in his ear.

Kroshkin ran off to get help at a quarter to three, the engineer calculated. Let’s assume he got to a phone at three. It would take him five minutes, maybe ten, to get Danilov or the duty officer to understand what was going on. Agh, I should have sent Smurov, he’s better with words. So we’ll assume they get the watch out at ten minutes, no, a quarter, past three. They won’t set out before half past three. And it takes at least half an hour to get from Kalanchovka Street to the Kozhukhovo Bridge on a handcar. No point in expecting the gendarmes any earlier than four. And it’s three twenty-five…

‘Get your gun out,’ Fandorin ordered, taking his Browning in his left hand and Kroshkin’s Nagant in his right. ‘On the count of four, fire in the direction of the barge.’

‘What for?’ asked Smurov, startled. ‘Look how many of them there are! And how can they get off the river anyway? When help arrives, we’ll overtake them on the bank!’

‘How do you know they won’t sail the barge out of the city, where there are no people, or transfer the weapons to carts before it gets light? No, they have to b-be arrested. How many cartridges do you have?’

‘Seven in the cylinder and seven spares, that’s all. We’re secret policemen, not some kind of Bashibazouks…’

‘Kroshkin had fourteen as well. I have only seven, I don’t carry a spare clip. Unfortunately, I’m no janissary either. Thirty-five shots – that’s not many for half an hour. But there’s nothing to be done about it. This is what we do. You loose off the first cylinder without a pause, to produce an impression. But after that use the bullets sparingly, make every one count.’

‘It’s a bit far,’ said Smurov, judging the distance. ‘They’re half hidden by the side of the barge. It’s hard enough to hit a half-length figure from this far away, even during the day.’

‘Don’t aim at the men – they are your own compatriots, after all. Fire to prevent anyone getting across from the barge on to the tug. Ready, three, four!’

Erast Petrovich pointed his pistol up into the air (with its short barrel, it was almost useless at that distance, anyway) and pressed the trigger seven times.

‘Well, how about that,’ drawled Thrush when he heard the rapid firing.

He stuck his head out of the door cautiously. So did Rybnikov.

The flashes of shots glinted above a heap of rails dumped about fifty paces from the wharf.

The response from the barge was erratic shooting from eight barrels.

‘Narks. They’ve tracked us down,’ Thrush said coolly, summing up the situation. ‘But there are only a few of them. Three or four at the most. It’s a snag, but we’ll soon fix it. I’ll shout and tell the lads to outflank them from both sides…’

‘Wait!’ said Vasilii Alexandrovich, grabbing him by the shoulder and speaking very rapidly. ‘You mustn’t get drawn into a battle. That’s what they want you to do. There aren’t many of them, but they must have sent for support. It’s not hard to intercept a barge on the river. Tell me, is there anyone on the tug?’

‘No, they were all on loading.’

‘The police only got here recently,’ Rybnikov said confidently. ‘Otherwise there’d be an entire company of gendarmes here already. That means they didn’t see the loading of the main barge; we’ve spent almost an hour loading the one for Sormovo. Listen here, Thrush. The Sormovo load can be sacrificed. Save the big barge. Leave, and you can come back again tomorrow. Go, go. I’ll lead the police away.’

He took the coil of red cable from the SR, stuffed it into his pocket and ran out into the open, zigzagging from side to side.

The black silhouettes on the barge disappeared as if by magic, along with the scarlet sparks of light. But a second later the white flashes of shots glinted above the side of the vessel.

Another figure dashed from the warehouse to the barge, weaving and dodging – the engineer watched its movement with especial interest.

At first the bullets whistled high over their heads, but then the revolutionaries found their range and the little lumps of lead ricocheted off the rails, with a nauseating whine and a scattering of sparks.

‘Oh Lord, death’s come for me!’ gasped Smurov, ducking right down behind the stack every now and then.

Fandorin kept his eyes fixed on the barge, ready to fire as soon as anyone tried to slip across to the tug.

‘Then don’t be shy,’ said the engineer. ‘Why be afraid? All those people waiting for you and me in the next world. They’ll greet you like a long-lost friend. And such people, too. Not the kind we have nowadays.’

Amazingly enough, the argument advanced by Fandorin worked.

The police agent raised his head a little.

‘And Napoleon’s waiting too?’

‘Napoleon too. Do you like Napoleon?’ the engineer murmured absentmindedly, screwing up his left eye. One of the revolutionaries, more quick-witted than the others, had decided to clamber from the barge on to the tug.

Erast Petrovich planted a bullet in the cladding, right in front of the bright spark’s nose. The man ducked back down into shelter behind the barge’s side.

‘Keep your eyes open and your wits about you,’ Fandorin told his partner. ‘Now they’ve realised it’s time for them to leave, they’ll creep across one at a time. Don’t let them, fire across their path.’

Smurov didn’t answer.

The engineer glanced at him quickly and swore.

The police agent was slumped with his cheek against the rails, the hair on the back of his head was soaked in blood, and one open eye was staring, mesmerised, off to the side. He was dead…

I wonder if he’ll meet Napoleon? Fandorin thought fleetingly. Just at that moment he could not afford to indulge in sentimentality.

‘Comrade helmsman, into the wheelhouse!’ a voice yelled out loud and clear on the barge. ‘Quickly now!’

The figure that had hidden at the bow of the barge started climbing into the tug again. Fandorin heaved a sigh and fired to kill. The body fell into the water with a splash.

Almost immediately another man tried, but he was clearly visible against the white deck housing and Erast Petrovich was able to hit him in the leg. In any case, the shot man started roaring, so he must still be alive.

The cartridges Erast Petrovich got from Kroshkin had run out. Fandorin took the dead man’s revolver, but there were only three bullets in the cylinder. And there were still an entire eighteen minutes left until four o’clock.

‘Boldly now, comrades!’ the same voice shouted. ‘They’re almost out of bullets. Cut the mooring lines.’

The stern of the barge started creeping away from the wharf; the gangplanks creaked and plunged into the water.

‘Forward, on to the tug! All together, comrades!’

There was no way of stopping that.

When the whole gang of men went rushing to the bow of the barge, Fandorin did not even bother to fire – what was the point?

The tug spewed a shower of sparks out of its funnel, and started flapping at the water with its paddle wheels. The cables stretched taut with a twang.

They set off at 3.46 – the engineer checked his watch.

He had managed to delay them for twenty-one minutes. At the cost of two human lives.

He set off along the bank, moving parallel to the barge.

At first keeping up was not hard, but then he had to break into a run – the tug was gradually picking up speed.

As Erast Petrovich was passing the railway bridge he heard the rumble of steel wheels from up above, on top of the embankment. A large handcar crowded with men came hurtling out of the darkness at top speed.

‘This way! This way!’ shouted Fandorin, waving his hand, and fired into the air.

The gendarmes came running down the incline towards him.

‘Who’s in c-command?’

‘Lieutenant Bryantsev!’

‘There they are,’ said Erast Petrovich, pointing to the receding barge. ‘Get half the men across the bridge to the other side. Follow on both sides. When we overtake the barge, fire at the wheelhouse of the tug. Until they surrender. At the double!’

The strange pursuit of a barge sailing down a river by gendarmes on foot did not last for long.

The return fire from the tug rapidly fell off as the revolutionaries became more and more reluctant to show themselves above the iron sides. The glass in the wheelhouse windows had been smashed by bullets and the helmsman was steering the vessel without sticking his head up, by guesswork. The result was that half a verst from the bridge the tug ran on to a shoal and stopped. The current started slowly swinging the barge round sideways.

‘Cease fire,’ ordered Fandorin. ‘Call on them to surrender.’

‘Lay down your arms, you blockheads!’ the lieutenant shouted from the riverbank. ‘Where can you go? Surrender!’

There really was nowhere for the SRs to go. The sparse, pre-dawn mist swirled above the water, the darkness was dissolving before their very eyes, and gendarmes were lying in ambush on both sides of the river, so they couldn’t even get away one at a time, by swimming.

The survivors huddled together beside the wheelhouse – it looked as if they were conferring.

Then one of them straightened up to his full height.

It was him!

Even at that distance it was impossible not to recognise Staff Captain Rybnikov, alias the Acrobat.

The men on the tug started singing tunelessly, and the Japanese spy took a run-up and vaulted across on to the barge.

‘What’s he up to? What’s he doing?’ the lieutenant asked nervously.

‘Our proud “Varangian” surrenders to no foe, for mercy no one is pleading!’ they sang on the tug.

‘Shoot, shoot!’ Fandorin exclaimed when he saw a small flame flare up like Bengal fire in the Acrobat’s hands. ‘That’s a stick of dynamite!’

But it was too late. The stick went flying into the hold of the barge and the false staff captain grabbed a lifebelt from the side of the tug and leapt into the river.

A second later the barge reared up, snapped in two by several powerful explosions. The front half surged up and covered the tug. Chunks of wood and metal flew into the air and blazing fuel spread across the water.

‘Get down!’ the lieutenant roared desperately, but even without his command the gendarmes were already dropping to the ground, covering their heads with their arms.

The bent barrel of a rifle embedded itself in the ground beside Fandorin. Bryantsev gazed in horror at a hand grenade that had thudded down beside him. It was spinning furiously, with its factory grease glittering.

‘Don’t worry, it won’t go off,’ the engineer told him. ‘It’s got no detonator.’

The officer got up, looking abashed.

‘Is everyone all right?’ he bellowed briskly. ‘Line up for a roll-call. Hey, Sergeant Major!’ he shouted, folding his hands to form a megaphone. ‘How are your men?’

‘One got caught, Yeronner!’ a voice replied from the other bank.

On this side two men had been hurt by pieces of debris, but not seriously.

While the wounded were being bandaged up, the engineer went back to the bridge, where he had spotted a buoy-keeper’s hut earlier.

He rode back to the site of the explosion in a boat. The buoy-keeper was rowing, with Fandorin standing in the bow, watching the chips of wood and blotches of oil that covered the entire surface of the river.

‘May I join you?’ Bryantsev had asked. A minute later, already in the boat, he asked, ‘What are you watching for? The revolutionary gentlemen are on the bottom, that’s clear enough. The divers will come and raise the bodies later. And the cargo – what they can find of it.’

‘Is it deep here?’ the engineer asked, turning to the oarsman.

‘Round here it would be about two sazhens. Maybe three in some spots. In summer, when the sun gets hot, it’ll be shallower, but it’s deep as yet.’

The boat floated slowly downstream. Erast Petrovich gazed fixedly at the water.

‘That one who threw the dynamite was a really desperate fellow. The lifebelt didn’t save him. Look, it’s floating over there.’

Yes, there was the red-and-white ring of cork, swaying on the waves.

‘Right th-then, row over there!’

‘What do you want that for?’ asked the lieutenant, watching as Fandorin reached for the lifebelt.

Once again Erast Petrovich did not condescend to answer the garrulous officer. Instead he murmured:

‘Aha, that’s where you are, my boyo.’

He pulled the ring out of the water, exposing to view a red rubber tube attached to its inside surface.

‘A familiar trick,’ the engineer said with a condescending smile. ‘Only in ancient times they used bamboo, not a rubber cable with the core pulled out.’

‘What’s that enema tube for? And what trick do you mean?’

‘Bottom walking. But now I’ll show you an even more interesting trick. Let’s note the time.’ And Fandorin pinched the tube shut.

One minute went by, then another.

The lieutenant looked at the engineer in increasing bewilderment, but the engineer kept glancing from the water to the second hand of his watch and back.

‘Phenomenal,’ he said with a shake of his head. ‘Even for them…’

Halfway through the third minute a head suddenly appeared out of the water about fifteen sazhens from the boat.

‘Row!’ Fandorin shouted at the boatman. ‘Now we’ll take him! He didn’t stay on the bottom, so we’ll take him!’

And, of course, they did take him – there was nowhere for the cunning Acrobat to escape to. But then, he didn’t try to resist. While the gendarmes bound his arms, he sat there with a detached expression on his face and his eyes closed, dirty water streaming out of his hair and green slime clinging to his shirt.

‘You are a strong player, but you have lost,’ Erast Fandorin told him in Japanese.

The prisoner opened his eyes and studied the engineer for a long time. But it still was not clear if he had understood or not.

Then Fandorin leaned down and uttered a strange word:

‘Tamba.’

‘When your number’s up, it’s up,’ the Acrobat remarked indifferently, and that was the only thing he said.

He maintained his silence in the Krutitsk garrison jail, where he was taken from the place of arrest.

All the top brass came to conduct the interrogation – from the gendarmes, and the military courts, and the Okhrana – but neither by threats nor promises were they able to get a single word out of Rybnikov. After being thoroughly searched and dressed in a coarse prisoner’s jacket and trousers, he sat there motionless. He didn’t look at the generals, only occasionally glanced at Erast Petrovich Fandorin, who took no part in the interrogation and generally stood a little distance away.

After labouring in vain over the stubborn prisoner all day long until the evening, the top brass ordered him to be taken away to a cell.

The cell was a special one, for especially dangerous miscreants. For Rybnikov they had taken additional security measures: the bed and stool had been replaced with a palliasse, the table had been taken out and the kerosene lamp removed.

‘We know these Japanese, we’ve read about them,’ the commandant told Fandorin. ‘He smashes his head open against a sharp corner, and we have to answer for it. Or he’ll pour burning kerosene over himself. He can just sit there with a candle instead.’

‘If a man like that wishes to die, it is not possible to prevent him.’

‘Ah, but it’s very possible. A month ago I had an anarchist, a terrible hard case, he spent two weeks lying swaddled, like a newborn infant. He growled, and rolled around on the floor, and tried to smash his head open against the wall – he didn’t want to die on the gallows. But I still delivered the fellow to the executioner in good order.’

The engineer grimaced in revulsion and remarked:

‘This is no anarchist.’ And he left, with a strangely heavy feeling in his heart.

The engineer was haunted and unsettled by the strange behaviour of a prisoner who had ostensibly surrendered, but at the same time clearly had no intention of providing any evidence.

Once he found himself in a cell, Vasilii Alexandrovich spent some time in an activity typical of prisoners – he stood under the small barred window, gazing at a patch of evening sky.

Rybnikov was in a good mood.

The two goals for which he had surfaced from the waters of the River Moscow, instead of remaining on its silty bottom, had both been achieved.

First, he had confirmed that the main barge, loaded with eight hundred crates, had remained undiscovered.

Secondly, he had looked into the eyes of the man he had heard so much about and had thought about for so long.

That seemed to be all.

Except…

He sat down on the floor, picked up the short pencil left for the prisoner in case he might wish to provide written testimony, and wrote a letter in Japanese cursive script that began with the invocation ‘Father!’

Then he yawned, stretched and lay down at full length on the palliasse.

He fell asleep.

Vasilii Alexandrovich had a glorious dream. He was dashing along in an open carriage that shimmered with all the colours of the rainbow. There was pitch darkness all around him, but far away, right on the very horizon, a bright, even light was glowing. He was not riding alone in the miraculous chariot, but he could not see the faces of his companions, because his gaze was constantly directed forward, towards the source of that rapidly approaching radiance.

The prisoner slept for no more than a quarter of an hour.

He opened his eyes. He smiled, still under the influence of his magical dream.

Vasilii Alexandrovich’s fatigue had evaporated completely. His entire being was filled with lucid strength and diamond-hard resolution.

He reread the letter to his father and burned it in the candle flame without a moment’s hesitation.

Then he undressed to the waist.

The prisoner had a flesh-coloured plaster attached to the skin just below his left armpit. It was camouflaged so artfully that the prison warders had failed to notice it when they searched him.

Rybnikov tore the plaster off, revealing a narrow razor blade. He seated himself comfortably and, with a rapid circular movement, made a single cut all the way round the edge of his face. He caught the edge of the skin with his fingernails and pulled it all off, from the forehead to the chin, and then, without making a single sound, he slashed the blade across his own throat.

BOOK 2

BETWEEN THE LINES

Japan, 1878

A BUTTERFLY’S FLIGHT

The omurasaki butterfly gathered itself for the flight from one flower to another. It cautiously spread its small, white-flecked, azure wings and rose a mere hair’s breadth into the air, but just at that moment, from out of nowhere, a violent gust of wind swooped down on the weightless creature, tossed it way up high into the sky and held it there, carrying it in a mere few minutes all the way from the hills to the plain, with its sprawling city; the wind swirled its captive round above the tiled roofs of the native quarters, drove it in zigzags over the regular geometry of the Settlement, flung it in the direction of the sea and then faded away, its impetus exhausted.

With its freedom restored, the omurasaki flew almost right down on to the green surface that looked like a meadow, but spotted the deception just in time and soared back up before the transparent spray could reach it. It fluttered around for a while above the bay, where the beautiful sailing ships and ugly steamships were standing at anchor, but failed to find anything interesting in this sight and turned back towards the pier.

There the butterfly’s attention was attracted by a crowd of people waiting to meet passengers – seen from above, the brightly coloured spots of women’s caps, hats and bouquets of flowers made it look like a flowery meadow. The omurasaki circled for a minute or so, choosing the most attractive-looking target, made its choice and settled on a carnation in the buttonhole of a gaunt gentleman who gazed out at the world through a pair of blue spectacles.

The carnation was a lush scarlet colour, cut only very recently, and the bespectacled gentleman’s thoughts were a smooth stream of aquamarine, so the omurasaki started settling in thoroughly, folding its wings together, opening them and folding them back together again.

… I just hope he’ll be a competent worker, and not some featherbrain, the owner of the carnation thought, not noticing that his buttonhole had become even more imposing than before. This dandy had a long, shimmering name: Vsevolod Vitalievich Doronin. He held the post of Consul of the Russian Empire in the port city of Yokohama, and he wore dark glasses, not out of any love of mystery (he already had more than enough of that in his job), but because of chronic conjunctivitis.

Vsevolod Vitalievich had come to the pier on business – to meet a new diplomatic colleague (name: Erast Petrovich Fandorin; title: Titular Counsellor). Doronin, however, did not entertain any real hope that the man would prove to be an efficient functionary. Reading a copy of Fandorin’s service record had left him distinctly dissatisfied on all counts: this boy of twenty-two was already a ninth-grade civil servant (so he was someone’s protйgй), he had begun his government service in the police (phooh!), and afterwards he had been commandeered to the Third Section (what could he have done to deserve that?), and he had tumbled directly from the pinnacle of the San Stefano negotiations all the way down to a posting in a third-rate embassy (he must have come badly unstuck somewhere).

Doronin had been left without an assistant for more than seven months now, because his brilliant bosses in Petersburg had sent Vice-Consul Weber off to Hankow – supposedly temporarily, but it looked as if it would be for a very long time indeed. Vsevolod Vitalievich now handled all current business himself: he met Russian ships and saw them off, oversaw the interests of sailors discharged to shore, buried the ones who died and investigated the seamen’s brawls. And all this even though he – a man of strategic intellect and a long-term resident of Japan – had certainly not been appointed to Yokohama for that kind of petty tomfoolery. The question currently being decided was where Japan and, with it, the entire Far East would come to rest – under the wing of the double-headed eagle or the sharp claws of the British lion.

In the pocket of his frock coat the consul had a rolled-up copy of the Japan Gazette, containing a telegram from the Reuters agency, printed in bold type: ‘The tsar’s ambassador Count Shuvalov has left London. War between Great Britain and Russia is now more likely than ever’. An obnoxious business. We just barely managed to get the better of the wretched Turks, how can we possibly fight the British? A matter of ‘God grant our little calf will gore the wolf’. We’ll raise a racket, of course, rattle the sabres a bit, but then our ardour will cool… The sly sons of Albion wish to subjugate the entire world. Oh, we’ll hand them the Far East on a plate, the way we’ve already handed them the Middle East, along with Persia and Afghanistan.

The omurasaki twitched its little wings in alarm, sensing the ominous purple hue flooding Vsevolod Vitalievich’s thoughts, but just at that moment the consul raised himself up on tiptoe and fixed his gaze on a passenger in a brilliant-white tropical suit and blinding pith helmet. Fandorin or not Fandorin? Come on, white swan, fly lower, let’s take a look at you.

From considerations of state the consul’s thoughts turned back to everyday concerns, and the butterfly immediately settled down.

How much time and ink had been wasted on something so absolutely obvious, thought Vsevolod Vitalievich. Surely it was quite clear that without an assistant he could not possibly engage in any strategic work – he had no time for it. The nerve centre of Far Eastern politics was not located in Tokyo, where His Excellency, Mr Ambassador, was stationed, but here. Yokohama was the most important port in the Far East. This was the place where all the cunning British manoeuvres were concocted, the control centre for all that underhand plotting. Why, it was as clear as day, but how long they had dragged things out!

Well, all right, better late than never. This Fandorin here, initially appointed as second secretary at the embassy, had now been transferred to the Yokohama consulate, in order to release Vsevolod Vitalievich from routine work. Mr Ambassador had probably taken this veritably Solomonic decision himself, after checking the titular counsellor’s service record. He had not wished to keep such a recondite individual about his own person. So there you are, dearest Vsevolod Vitalievich, take what is of no use to us.

The snow-white colonialist stepped on to the quayside and no more doubt remained. Definitely Fandorin, every point of the description fitted. Dark hair, blue eyes and the most significant distinguishing feature – prematurely grey temples. But oh, he was dolled up as if he were going on an elephant hunt!

The initial impression was not reassuring. The consul sighed and moved forward to meet him. The omurasaki butterfly flitted its wings in response to this upheaval, but remained on the flower, still unnoticed by Doronin.

Oh, deary me, look at his finger – a diamond ring, Vsevolod Vitalievich noted as he bowed in greeting to the new arrival. And a moustache curled into little loops, if you please! Not a single hair out of place on those temples! And that languorous, blasй expression in the eyes! Griboedov’s Chatsky, to an absolute T. Pushkin’s Onegin: ‘And, like everything in the world, travelling palled on him’.

Immediately after they had introduced themselves, he asked, with an ingenuous air:

‘Do tell me at once, Erast Petrovich, did you see Fuji? Did she hide from your eyes or reveal herself to you?’ And then he explained confidentially: ‘It’s a kind of omen I have. If a person has seen Mount Fuji as he approaches the shore, it means that Japan will open her soul to him. But if capricious Fuji has shut herself off behind the clouds – then, alas. Though you may live here for ten years, you will neither see, nor understand, the most important things of all.’

Actually, Doronin knew perfectly well that Fuji could not possibly have been visible from the sea today, owing to the low clouds, but he needed to take this Childe Harold from the Third Section down a peg.

However, the titular counsellor was neither flustered, nor upset.

He merely remarked, with a slight stammer:

‘I don’t b-believe in omens.’

Well naturally. A materialist. All right, let’s give him a nip from the other side.

‘I am acquainted with your service record,’ said Vsevolod Vitalievich, raising his eyebrows admiringly. ‘What a career you have made, you have even been decorated! Abandon a brilliant stage like that for our modest backwater? There can only be one reason for it: you must have a great love for Japan! Am I right?’

‘No,’ the latter-day Onegin said with a shrug, squinting at the flower in the consul’s buttonhole. ‘How can one love what one does not know?’

‘Why, most certainly one can!’ Doronin assured him. ‘And with far greater ease than objects that are only too familiar to us… Hmm, is that your luggage?’

This von-baron had so many things that almost a dozen porters were required to carry them: suitcases, boxes, bundles of books, a huge three-wheeled velocipede and even a sazhen-long clock made in the image of London’s Big Ben.

‘A beautiful item. And useful. I confess, I prefer a pocket watch myself,’ said the consul, unable to resist a sardonic comment, but he promptly took himself in hand, put on a radiantly polite smile and extended one arm in the direction of the shoreline. ‘Welcome to Yokohama. A splendid city, you will like it!’

This final phrase was uttered entirely without irony. In three years Doronin had developed a genuine affection for this city that grew larger and lovelier by the day.

Just twenty years ago there had been a tiny fishing village here, but now, thanks to the meeting of two civilisations, a truly magnificent modern port had sprung up, with a population of fifty thousand, of whom almost one fifth were foreigners. A little piece of Europe at the very end of the world. Vsevolod Vitalievich was especially fond of the Bund – a seaside esplanade with beautiful stone buildings, gas street lamps and an elegant public.

But Onegin, having cast an eye over this magnificent sight, pulled a sour face, which only served to confirm Doronin’s decision not to like his new work fellow. He passed his verdict: a pompous, preening peacock and supercilious snob. ‘And I’m a fine fellow too, putting on a carnation for his sake,’ thought the consul, gesturing irritably for Fandorin to follow him. He pulled the flower out of his buttonhole and flung it away.

The butterfly soared into the air, fluttered its wings above the heads of the Russian diplomats and, mesmerised by the whiteness of it, settled on Fandorin’s helmet.

Why did I have to dress up in this clown’s outfit? the owner of the miraculous headgear thought in purple anguish. The moment he stepped on the gangway and surveyed the public on the quayside, Erast Petrovich had made a highly unpleasant discovery for anyone who attaches importance to correct dress. When one is dressed correctly, people around you look you straight in the face; they do not gape open-mouthed at your attire. It is the portrait that should attract attention, not the frame. But exactly the opposite was happening here. The outfit purchased in Calcutta, which had appeared perfectly appropriate in India, looked absurd in Yokohama. From the appearance of the crowd, it was clear that in this city people did not dress in the colonial fashion, but in a perfectly normal manner, European-style. Fandorin pretended not to notice the inquisitive glances (which he thought seemed derisive) and strove with all his might to maintain an air of equanimity. There was only one thought in his mind – that he must change as soon as possible.

Even Doronin seemed staggered by Erast Petrovich’s gaffe – Fandorin could sense it from the consul’s barbed glance, which not even the dark glasses could conceal.

Observing Doronin more closely, Erast Petrovich followed his customary habit and employed deductive analysis to construct a cognitive image. Age – forty-seven or forty-eight. Married, with no children. Disposition – intelligent, choleric, inclined to caustic irony. An excellent professional. What else? He had bad habits. The circles under his eyes and a sallow complexion indicated an unhealthy liver.

But the young functionary’s first impression of Yokohama was not at all favourable. He had been hoping to see a picture from a lacquered casket: multi-tiered pagodas, little teahouses, junks with webbed-membrane sails skimming across the water – but this was an ordinary European seafront. Not Japan, more like Yalta. Was it really worth travelling halfway round the globe for this?

The first thing Fandorin did was to get rid of the idiotic helmet – in the simplest way possible. First he took it off as if he was suddenly feeling hot. And then, as they walked up the stairway to the esplanade, he surreptitiously set the colonialist contrivance down on a step and left it there – if anybody wanted it, they were welcome.

The omurasaki did not wish to be parted from the titular counsellor. Forsaking the helmet, it fluttered its wings just above the young man’s broad shoulder, but did not actually alight – it had spotted a more interesting landing place: a colourful tattoo, glistening with little drops of sweat, on a rickshaw man’s shoulder: a dragon in blue, red and green.

The butterfly’s legs brushed against the taut bicep and the fleet-winged traveller caught the local man’s guileless, brownish-bronze thought (‘Kayui!’) ^[i]

, after which its brief life came to an end. Without even looking, the rickshaw man slapped his open hand against his shoulder, and all that was left of the exquisite creature was a little blob of greyish blue.

Careless of beauty

And ever fearless of death:

A butterfly’s flight.

THE OLD KURUMA

‘Mr Titular Counsellor, I was expecting you on the SS Volga a week ago, on the first of May,’ said the consul, halting beside a red-lacquered gig that had clearly seen better days. ‘For what reason were you pleased to be delayed?’

The question, despite being posed in a strict tone of voice, was essentially simple and natural, but for some reason it embarrassed Erast Petrovich.

The young man coughed and his face fell.

‘I’m sorry. When I was changing ships, I c-caught a cold…’

‘In Calcutta? In a temperature of more than a hundred degrees?’

‘That is, I mean, I overslept… In general, I missed the boat and was obliged to wait for the next steamer.’

Fandorin suddenly blushed, turning almost the same colour as the gig.

Tut-tut-tut! thought Doronin, gazing at Fandorin in delighted amazement and shifting his spectacles to the end of his nose. So much for Onegin! We don’t know how to lie. How splendid.

Vsevolod Vitalievich’s bilious features softened and sparks glinted in those lacklustre eyes with the reddish veins.

‘So it’s not a clerical error in the service record, we really are only twenty-two, it’s just that we make ourselves out to be a romantic hero,’ the consul purred, by which he only embarrassed the other man even more. Cutting loose entirely, he winked and said:

‘I bet it was some young Indian beauty. Am I right?’

Fandorin frowned and snapped: ‘No,’ but he did not add another word, and so it remained unclear whether there was no young beauty at all, or there was, but she was not Indian.

The consul did not pursue the immodest interrogation. Not a trace was left of his earlier hostility. He took the young man by the elbow and pulled him towards the gig.

‘Get in, get in. This is the most common form of transport in Japan. It is called a kuruma.’

Erast Petrovich was surprised to see that there was no horse harnessed to the carriage. For a moment a quite fantastic image was conjured up in his mind: a magic carriage, dashing along the street on its own, its shafts held out ahead of it like crimson antennae.

The kuruma accepted the young man with obvious pleasure, rocking him on its threadbare but soft seat. But it greeted Doronin inhospitably, jabbing a broken spring into his scraggy buttock. The consul squirmed, arranging himself more comfortably, and muttered:

‘This chariot has a vile soul.’

‘What?’

‘In Japan every creature, and even every object, has its own soul. At least, so the Japanese believe. The scholarly term for it is “animism”… Aha, and here are our little horses.’

Three locals, whose entire wardrobe consisted of tight-fitting drawers and twisted towels coiled tightly round their heads, grasped the bridle in unison, shouted ‘hey-hey-tya!’ and set off with their wooden sandals clattering along the road.

‘See the troika dashing along snowy Mother Volga,’ Vsevolod Vitalievich sang in a pleasant light tenor, and laughed.

But Fandorin half-rose off the seat, holding on to the side of the gig, and exclaimed:

‘Mr Consul! How can one use human beings like animals! It’s… it’s barbaric!’

He lost his balance and fell back on to the cushion.

‘Accustom yourself to it,’ Doronin said, laughing, ‘otherwise you’ll have to move around on foot. There are hardly any cab drivers at all here. And these fine fellows are called dzinrikisya, or “rikshas”, as the Europeans pronounce it.’

‘But why not use horses to pull carriages?’

‘There are not many horses in Japan, and they are expensive, but there are a lot of people, and they are cheap. A riksha is a new profession – ten years or so ago, no one had ever heard of it. Wheeled transport is regarded as a European novelty here. One of these poor fellows here runs about sixty versts a day. But then, by local standards, the pay is very good. If he is lucky, he can earn half a yen, which is a rouble in our money. Although rikshas don’t live long – they overstrain themselves. Three or four years, and they go to pay their respects to the Buddha.’

‘But that is monstrous!’ Fandorin exploded, swearing to himself that he would never use this shameful form of transport again. ‘To set such a low price on one’s own life!’

‘You will have to get used to that too. In Japan life is worth no more than a kopeck – whether it’s someone else’s or your own. And why should the heathens settle for half-measures? After all, there is no Last Judgement in store for them, merely a long cycle of reincarnations. Today – that is, in this life – you drag the carriage along, but if you drag it honestly, then tomorrow someone else will be pulling you along in the kuruma.’

The consul laughed, but somehow ambiguously; the young functionary thought he heard a note of something like envy in that laugh, rather than ridicule of the local beliefs.

‘Please observe that the city of Yokohama consists of three parts,’ Doronin explained, pointing with his stick. ‘Over that way, where the roofs are clumped close together, is the Native Town. Here, in the middle, is the actual Settlement: banks, shops, institutions. And on the left, beyond the river, is the Bluff. That’s something like a little piece of Good Old England. Everyone who is even slightly better off makes his home there, well away from the port. Generally speaking, it’s possible to live a quite civilised life here, in the European fashion. There are a few clubs: rowing, cricket, tennis, horse riding, even gastronomic. I think they will be glad to welcome you there.’

As he said that, he glanced back. Their red ‘troika’ was being followed by an entire caravan of vehicles carrying Fandorin’s luggage, all drawn by the same kind of yellow-skinned horsemen, some by a pair, some by just one. Bringing up the rear of the cavalcade was a cart loaded with athletic equipment: there were cast-iron weights, and a boxer’s punchball, and gleaming on top of it all was the polished steel of the aforementioned velocipede – the patented American ‘Royal Crescent Tricycle’.

‘All foreigners except the embassy employees try to live here, not in the capital,’ the long-time Yokohama resident boasted. ‘Especially since it’s only an hour’s journey to the centre of Tokyo by railway.’

‘There is a railway here too?’ Erast Petrovich asked dismally, feeling his final hopes for oriental exoticism evaporating.

‘And a most excellent one!’ Doronin exclaimed with enthusiasm. ‘This is how the modern Yokohamian lives nowadays: he orders tickets for the theatre by telegraph, gets into the train, and a hour and a quarter later he is already watching a kabuki performance!’

‘I’m glad that it is at least kabuki, and not operetta…’ the newly minted vice-consul remarked, surveying the seafront glumly. ‘But listen, where are all the Japanese women in kimonos, with fans and umbrellas? I can’t see a single one.’

‘With fans?’ Vsevolod Vitalievich chuckled. ‘They’re all in the teahouses.’

‘Are those like the local cafйs? Where they drink Japanese tea?’

‘One can take a drink of tea, of course. Additionally. But people visit those places to satisfy a different need.’ Doronin manipulated his fingers in a cynical gesture that might have been expected from a spotty grammar-school boy, but certainly not from the Consul of the Russian Empire – Erast Petrovich even blinked in surprise. ‘Would you like to pay a visit? Personally, I abstain from tea parties of that kind, but I can recommend the best of the establishments – it is called “Number Nine”. The sailor gentlemen are highly satisfied with it.’

‘N-no,’ Fandorin declared. ‘I am opposed on principle to venal love, and I consider brothels an affront to both the female and the male sexes.’

Vsevolod Vitalievich smiled as he squinted sideways at his companion, who had blushed for the second time, but he refrained from any comment.

Erast Petrovich rapidly changed the subject.

‘And the samurai with two swords? Where are they? I have read so much about them!’

‘We are riding through the territory of the Settlement. The only Japanese who are allowed to live here are shop workers and servants. But you will not see samurai with two swords anywhere now. Since the year before last the carrying of cold steel has been forbidden by imperial decree.’

‘What a shame!’

‘Oh yes,’ said Doronin with a grin. ‘You’ve really lost a lot there. It was a quite unforgettable sensation – squinting timidly at every son of a bitch with two swords stuck in his belt. Wondering if he’d just walk past, or swing round and take a wild slash at you. I’m still in the habit, when I walk through the Japanese quarters, of glancing behind me all the time. You know, I came to Japan at a time when it was considered patriotic to kill gaijins.’

‘Who is that?’

‘You and I. Gaijin means “foreigner”. They also call us akahige – “red-haired”, ketojin, meaning “hairy”, and saru, namely “monkeys”. And if you go for a stroll in the Native Town, the little children will tease you by doing this…’ The consul removed his spectacles and pulled his eyelids apart with his fingers. ‘That means “round-eyed”, and it is considered very offensive. But never mind, at least they don’t just carve you open for no reason at all. Thanks to the Mikado for disarming his cut-throats.’

‘But I read that a samurai’s sword is an object of reverent obeisance, l-like a European nobleman’s sword,’ said Erast Petrovich, sighing – disappointments were raining down one after another. ‘Did the Japanese knights really abandon their ancient tradition as easily as that?’

‘There was nothing at all easy about it. They were in revolt all last year, it went as far as a civil war, but Mr Okubo is not a man to be trifled with. He wiped out the most turbulent and the rest changed their tune.’

‘Okubo is the minister of internal affairs,’ Fandorin said with a nod, demonstrating a certain knowledge of local politics. ‘The French newspapers call him the First Consul, the Japanese Bonaparte.’

‘There is a similarity. Ten years ago there was a coup d’йtat in Japan…’

‘I know. The restoration of the Meiji, the re-establishment of the power of the emperor,’ the titular counsellor put in hastily, not wishing his superior to think him a total ignoramus. ‘The samurai of the southern principalities overthrew the power of the shoguns and declared the Mikado the ruler. I read about it.’

‘The southern principalities – Satsuma and Choshu – are like Corsica in France. And Corsican corporals were even found – three of them: Okubo, Saigo and Kido. They presented His Imperial Majesty with the respect and adoration of his subjects, and quite properly reserved the power for themselves. But triumvirates are an unstable sort of arrangement, especially when they contain three Bonapartes. Kido died a year ago, Saido quarrelled with the government and raised a rebellion, but he was routed and, in accordance with Japanese tradition, committed hara-kiri. Which left Minister Okubo as the only cock in the local henhouse… You’re quite right to note this down,’ the consul remarked approvingly, seeing Fandorin scribbling away with a pencil in a leather-covered notebook. ‘The sooner you fathom all the subtle points of our local politics, the better. By the way, you’ll have a chance to take a look at the great Okubo this very day. At four o’clock there will be a ceremonial opening of a House for the Re-education of Fallen Women. It is an entirely new idea for Japan. It had never occurred to anyone here before to re-educate the courtesans. And the funds for this sacred undertaking have not been provided by some missionary club, but a Japanese philanthropist, a certain Don Tsurumaki. The crиme de la crиme of the Yokohama beau monde will be there. And the Corsican himself is expected. He is hardly likely to show up for the formal ceremony, but he will almost certainly come to the Bachelors’ Ball in the evening. It is an entirely unofficial function and has nothing to do with the re-education of loose women – quite the opposite in fact. You will not find it boring. “He returned and went, like Chatsky, from the ship straight to the ball”.’

Doronin winked again as he had done recently, but the titular counsellor did not feel attracted to these bachelor delights.

‘I will take a look at Mr Okubo some other time… I’m rather exhausted after the journey and would prefer to rest. So if you will permit…’

‘I will not permit,’ the consul interrupted with affected severity. ‘The ball is de rigueur. Regard it as your first official assignment. You will see many influential people there. And our maritime agent Bukhartsev will be there, the second man in the embassy. Or, perhaps, even the first,’ Vsevolod Vitalievich added with a suggestive air. ‘You will meet him, and tomorrow I shall take you to introduce yourself to His Excellency… Ah, but here is the consulate. Tomare!’ ^[ii]

he shouted to the rickshas. ‘Remember the address, my good fellow, Number Six, the Bund Esplanade.’

Erast Petrovich saw a stone building with a yard flanked by two wings running towards the street.

‘My apartment is in the left wing, yours is in the right wing, and the office is there, in the middle,’ said Doronin, pointing beyond the railings – the formal wing at the back of the courtyard was topped off by a Russian flag. ‘Where we serve is where we live.’

As the diplomats got down on to the pavement, the kuruma gently rocked Erast Petrovich lovingly in farewell, but peevishly snagged the consul’s trousers with the end of a spring.

Whinging and cursing

Vicious potholes in the road:

My old

kuruma

.

A HERO’S EYES

In the reception area a very serious young Japanese man, wearing a tie and steel-rimmed spectacles, rose to his feet to greet the new arrivals. Standing on the desk among the files and heaps of papers were two little flags – Russian and Japanese.

‘Allow me to introduce you,’ said Doronin. ‘Shirota. He has been working with me for more than seven years now. Translator, secretary and invaluable assistant. My guardian angel and clerk, so to speak. I trust you will get on well together.’

Taking the name ‘Shirota’ for the Russian word meaning ‘orphan’, Fandorin was rather surprised that the consul thought it necessary to inform him of his colleague’s unfortunate family situation at the moment of introduction. No doubt the sad event must have taken place only recently, although there was no sign of mourning in the clerk’s manner of dress, with the possible exception of his black satin oversleeves. Erast Petrovich bowed in sympathy, expecting a continuation, but Doronin did not say anything.

‘Vsevolod Vitalievich, you have forgotten to tell me his name,’ the titular counsellor reminded his superior in a low voice.

‘Shirota is his name. When I had just arrived here, I felt terribly homesick for Russia. All the Japanese looked the same to me and their names sounded like gibberish. I was stuck here all on my lonesome, there wasn’t even a consulate then. Not a single Russian sound or Russian face. So I tried to surround myself with locals whose names sounded at least a little bit more familiar. My valet was Mikita, just like the Russian name. That’s written with three hieroglyphs, and means “Field with three trees”. Shirota was my translator, the name means “White field” in Japanese. And I also have the extremely charming – as in the Russian word ‘obayanie’ – Obayasi-san, to whom I shall introduce you later.’

‘So the Japanese language is not so very alien to the Russian ear?’ Erast Petrovich asked hopefully. ‘I should very much like to learn it as soon as possible.’

‘It is both alien and difficult,’ said Vsevolod Vitalievich, dashing his hopes. ‘The discoverer of Japan, St Franciscus Xaverius, said: “This speech was invented by a concourse of devils in order to torment the devotees of the faith”. And such coincidences can sometimes play mean tricks. For instance, my surname, which in Russian is perfectly euphonious, causes me no end of bother in Japan.’

‘Why?’

‘Because “doro” means “dirt” and “nin” means “man”. “Dirty man” – what sort of name is that for the consul of a great power?’

‘And what is the meaning of “Russia” in Japanese?’ asked the titular counsellor, alarmed for the reputation of his homeland.

‘Nothing good. It is written with two hieroglyphs: Ro-koku, “Stupid country”. Our embassy has been waging a complicated diplomatic struggle for years now, to have a different hieroglyph for “ro” used in the documents, one that signifies “dew”. So far, unfortunately, with no success.’

The clerk Shirota took no part in the linguistic discussion, but simply stood there with a polite smile on his face.

‘Is everything ready for the vice-consul to be accommodated?’ Doronin asked him.

‘Yes, sir. The official apartment has been prepared. Tomorrow morning the candidates for the position of valet will come. They all have very good references, I have checked them. Where would you like to take your meals, Mr Fandorin? If you prefer to dine in your rooms, I will find a cook for you.’

The Japanese spoke Russian correctly, with almost no accent, except that he occasionally confused ‘r’ and ‘l’ in some words.

‘That is really all the same to me. I follow a very simple d-diet, so there is no need for a cook,’ the titular counsellor explained. ‘Putting on the samovar and going to the shop for provisions are tasks that a servant can deal with.’

‘Very well, sir,’ Shirota said with a bow. ‘And are we anticipating the arrival of a Mrs Vice-Consul?’

The question was formulated rather affectedly, and Erast Petrovich did not instantly grasp its meaning.

‘No, no. I am not married.’

The clerk nodded, as if he had been prepared for this answer.

‘In that case, I can offer you two candidates to choose from in order to fill the position of a wife. One for three hundred yen a month, fifteen years old, never previously married, knows one hundred English words. The second is older, twenty-one, and has been married twice. She has excellent references from the previous husbands, knows a thousand English words and is less expensive – two hundred and fifty yen. Here are the photographs.’

Erast Petrovich blinked his long eyelashes and looked at the consul in consternation.

‘Vsevolod Vitalievich, there’s something I don’t quite…’

‘Shirota is offering you a choice of concubines,’ Doronin explained, examining the photos with the air of a connoisseur. They showed doll-like young ladies with tall, complicated hairstyles. ‘A wife by contract.’

The titular counsellor wrinkled up his brow, but still did not understand.

‘Everyone does it. It is most convenient for officials, seamen and traders who are far from home. Not many bring their family here. Almost all the officers of our Pacific fleet have Japanese concubines, here or in Nagasaki. The contract is concluded for a year or two years, with the option to extend it. For a small sum of money you obtain domestic comfort, care and attention and the pleasures of the flesh into the bargain. If I understand correctly, you are no lover of brothels? Hmm, these are fine girls. Shirota is a good judge in this matter,’ said Doronin, and tapped his finger on one of the photos. ‘My advice to you is: take this one, who is slightly older. She has already been married to foreigners twice, you won’t have to re-educate her. Before me, my Obayasi lived with a French sea captain and an American speculator in silver. And on the subject of silver…’ Vsevolod Vitalievich turned to Shirota. ‘I asked for the vice-consul’s salary for the first month and relocation allowance for settling in to be made ready – six hundred Mexican dollars in all.’

The clerk inclined his head respectfully and started opening the safe.

‘Why Mexican?’ Fandorin asked as he signed the account book.

‘The most tradable currency in the Far East. Not too convenient, certainly,’ the consul remarked, watching Shirota drag a jangling sack out of the safe. ‘Don’t rupture yourself. There must be about a pood of silver here.’

But Erast Petrovich lifted the load with no effort, using just his finger and thumb – evidently he made good use of those cast-iron weights that he carried about in his luggage. He was about to put the bag on a chair, but he became distracted and started studying the portraits hanging above Shirota’s desk.

There were two of them. Gazing out at Fandorin on the left was Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin, and on the right was a plump-cheeked Oriental with his thick eyebrows knitted in a menacing lour. The titular counsellor was already very familiar with the engraving from the portrait by Kiprensky, and it held no great interest for him, but he was intrigued by the second portrait. It was a garishly coloured wood-block print that could not have been expensive, but it had been done so expertly that the irascible fat man seemed to be glaring straight into the vice-consul’s eyes. A fat neck with naturalistic folds of flesh could be seen under the open, gold-embroidered collar, and the forehead of the Japanese was tightly bound in a white bandana with a scarlet circle at its centre.

‘Is he some kind of poet?’ Fandorin enquired.

‘Not at all. That is the great hero Field Marshal Saigo Takamori,’ Shirota replied reverently.

‘The one who rebelled against the government and committed suicide?’ Erast Petrovich asked in surprise. ‘Surely he is regarded as a traitor to the state?’

‘He is. But he is still a great hero. Field Marshal Saigo was a sincere man. And he died a beautiful death.’ A wistful note appeared in the clerk’s voice. ‘He ensconced himself on a mountain with samurai from his native Satsuma. The government soldiers surrounded him on all sides and started shouting: “Surrender, Your Excellency! We will deliver you to the capital with honour!” But the field marshal did not capitulate. He fought until he was hit in the stomach by a bullet, and then told his adjutant: “Chop my head from my shoulders”.’

Fandorin gazed at the heroic field marshal without speaking. How expressive those eyes were! The rendition of the portrait was truly masterful.

‘But why do you have Pushkin here?’

‘A great Russian poet,’ Shirota explained, then thought for a moment and added, ‘Also a sincere man. He died a beautiful death.’

‘There is nothing the Japanese like better than someone who died a beautiful death,’ Vsevolod Vitalievich said with a smile. ‘But it’s too soon for us to die, gentlemen, there is a slew of work to be done. What’s our most urgent business?’

‘The corvette Horseman has ordered a hundred poods of salt beef and a hundred and fifty poods of rice,’ said Shirota, taking several sheets of paper out of a file as he started his report. ‘The first mate of the Cossack has requested a repair dock to be arranged in Yokosuka as soon as possible.’

‘These are matters that fall within the competence of the brokers,’ the consul explained to Fandorin. ‘The brokers are local traders who act as intermediaries and answer to me for the quality of deliveries and work performed. Carry on, Shirota.’

‘A note from the municipal police, asking if they should release the assistant engineer from the Boyan.’

‘Reply telling them to keep him until tomorrow. And first let him pay for the broken shop window. What else?’

‘A letter from the spinster Blagolepova,’ said the clerk, holding out an opened envelope to the consul. ‘She informs us that her father has died and asks us to issue a death certificate. She also petitions for the payment of a gratuity.’

Doronin frowned and took the letter.

‘“Passed away suddenly”… “completely alone now”… “do not leave me without support”… “at least something for the funeral”… Hmm, yes. There you are, Erast Petrovich. The routine but nonetheless sad side of a consul’s work. We care not only for the living, but also the dead subjects of the Russian Empire.’

He glanced at Fandorin with an expression that combined enquiry with guilt.

‘I realise perfectly well that this is infamous on my part… You have barely even arrived yet. But you know, it would be a great help to me if you could visit this Blagolepova. I still have to write a speech for the ceremony today, and it is dangerous to put off the inconsolable spinster until tomorrow. She could turn up here at any moment and give us a performance of the lamentations of Andromache… Would you go, eh? Shirota will show you the way. He can draw up everything that’s required and take any necessary action, you’ll only have to sign the death certificate.’

Fandorin, who was still contemplating the portrait of the hero who had been beheaded, was about to say: ‘Why, certainly’, but just at that moment the young man thought he saw the field marshal’s black-ink eyes glint as if they were alive – and not aimlessly, but to convey some kind of warning. Astonished, Erast Petrovich took a step forward and even leaned towards the picture. The miraculous effect instantly disappeared, leaving nothing but mere painted paper.

‘Why, certainly,’ said the titular counsellor, turning towards his superior. ‘This very moment. Only, with your permission, I shall change my outfit. It is entirely unsuitable for such a doleful mission. But who is this young lady?’

‘The daughter of Captain Blagolepov, who would appear to have departed this life.’ Vsevolod Vitalievich crossed himself, but rather perfunctorily, without any particular air of devoutness. ‘May heaven open its gates to him, as they say, although the recently deceased’s chances of gaining entry there are none too great. He was a pitiful individual, totally degenerate.’

‘He took to drinking?’

‘Worse. He took to smoking.’ Seeing his assistant’s bewilderment, the consul explained. ‘An opium addict. A rather common infirmity in the East. In actual fact, there is nothing so very terrible about smoking opium, any more than there is about drinking wine – it’s a matter of knowing where to draw the line. I myself like to smoke a pipe or two sometimes. I’ll teach you – if I see that you are a level-headed individual, unlike Blagolepov. But you know, I can remember him as a quite different man. He came here five years ago, on a contract with the Postal Steamship Company. Served as captain on a large packet boat, going backwards and forwards between here and Osaka. He bought a good house and sent for his wife and daughter from Vladivostok. Only his wife died soon afterwards, and in his grief, the captain took to the noxious weed. Little by little the habit consumed everything: his savings, his job, his house. He moved to the Native Town, and for foreigners that is regarded as the ultimate downfall. The captain’s daughter was really worn out, she was almost starving.’

‘If he lost his position, why do you still call him “captain”?’

‘By force of habit. Recently Blagolepov had been sailing a little steam launch, taking people on cruises round the bay. He didn’t sail any farther than Tokyo. He was his own captain, and able seaman, and stoker. One in three persons. At first the launch was his property, then he sold it. He worked for a salary, and for the tips. The Japanese were happy to hire him, it was a double curiosity for them: to go sailing in a miraculous boat with a chimney, and to have a gaijin dancing attendance on them. Blagolepov squandered everything he earned in the opium den. He was a hopeless case, and now he’s given up the ghost…’

Vsevolod Vitalievich took a few coins out of the safe.

‘Five dollars for her for the funeral, as prescribed by the regulations.’ He sighed a little and took another two silver discs out of his pocket. ‘And give her these, without a receipt. A ship’s chaplain will read the burial service, I’ll arrange for that. And tell Blagolepova that she should go back to Russia as soon as she’s buried him, this is no place for her. God forbid she could end up in a brothel. We’ll give her a third-class ticket to Vladivostok. Well, go on, then. My congratulations on starting your new job at the consulate.’

Before he left the room, Erast Petrovich could not resist glancing round at the portrait of Field Marshal Saigo once again. And once again he thought he glimpsed some kind of message in the hero’s gaze – either a warning or a threat.

Three ancient secrets:

Rising sun and dying moon,

And a hero’s eyes.

THE BLUE DIE DOES NOT LIKE BADGER

Semushi scratched his hump with a rustling sound and raise his hand to indicate that bets were no longer being taken. The players – there were seven of them – swayed back on their heels, all of them trying to appear impassive.

Three for ‘evens’ and four for ‘odds’, Tanuki noticed, and although he had not staked anything himself, he clenched his fists in agitation.

Semushi’s fleshy hand covered the little black cup, the dice clacked against its bamboo walls (that magical sound!) and the two little cubes, red and blue, came flying out on to the table.

The red one halted almost immediately with the 4 upwards, but the blue one clattered on to the very edge of the rice-straw mats.

‘Evens!’ thought Tanuki, and the next moment the dice stopped with the 2 upwards. Just as he thought! But if he’d placed a bet, the detestable little cube would have landed on 1 or 3. It had taken a dislike to Tanuki – that had been proved time and time again.

Three players received their winnings and four reached into their pockets to get out new coins. Not a single word, not a single exclamation. The rules of the ancient noble game prescribed absolute silence.

The hunchbacked host gestured to the waitress to pour sake for the players. The girl squatted down beside each one of them and filled their beakers. She squinted quickly at Semushi, saw that he was not looking, and quickly crawled across on her knees to Tanuki and poured some for him, although she was not supposed to.

Naturally, he did not thank her, and even deliberately turned his back. You had to be strict with women, unapproachable, that roused their spirit. If only the rolling dice could be managed that easily!

At the age of eighteen, Tanuki already knew that not many women could refuse him. That is, of course, you had to be able to sense whether a woman could be yours or not. Tanuki could sense this very clearly, it was a gift he had. If there was no chance, he didn’t even look at a woman. Why waste the time? But if – from a glance or the very slightest movement, or a smell – he could tell that there was a chance, Tanuki acted confidently and without any unnecessary fuss. The main thing was that he knew he was a good-looking man, he was handsome and knew how to inspire love.

Then what could he want, one might wonder, with this skinny servant girl? After all, he wasn’t hanging about here for his own amusement, he was on an important job. A matter of life and death, you might say, but still he hadn’t been able to refrain. The moment he saw the girl, he realised straight away that she was his kind, and without even pausing to think, he had applied all his skill in the way he acted with her: he put on a haughty face with a sultry expression in his eyes. When she came closer, he turned away; when she was at a distance, he kept his eyes fixed on her. Women notice that straight away. She had already tried to talk to him several times, but Tanuki maintained his mysterious silence. On no account must he open his own mouth too early.

It wasn’t so much that he was amused by the game with the servant girl – it was more that it helped to relieve the boredom of waiting. And then again, free sake was no bad thing either.

He had been hanging about in Semushi’s dive since yesterday morning. He had already blown almost all the money he had been given by Gonza, even though he only placed a bet every one and a half hours at the most. The accursed blue die had gobbled up all his coins, and now he only had two left: a small gold one and a large silver one, with a dragon.

Since yesterday morning he had neither eaten nor slept, only drunk sake. His belly ached. But his hara could endure it. Far worse was the fact that his head had started to spin – either from the cold or the sweetish smoke that came drifting from the corner where the opium smokers were lying and sitting: three Chinese, a red-haired sailor with his eyes closed and his mouth blissfully open, two rikshas.

Foreigners – akuma take them, let them all croak, but he felt sorry for the rikshas. They were both former samurai, that was obvious straight away. Their kind found it hardest of all to adapt to a new life. These were changed times, the samurai weren’t paid pensions any more – let them work, like everyone else. Only what if you didn’t know how to do anything except wave a sword about? But they’d even taken away the poor devils’ swords…

Tanuki guessed again – this time it would be ‘odds’, and it was! Two and 5!

But the moment he put up the silver yen, the dice betrayed him again. As usual, the red one settled first, on a 5. How he implored the blue one: give me odds, give me odds! And of course, it rolled over into a 3. His last coin but one had gone for nothing.

Snuffling in his fury, Tanuki put down his beaker, so that the servant could splash some sake into it, but this time the mischievous girl poured some for everyone except him – she was probably offended because he wasn’t looking at her.

It was stuffy in the room, the players were sitting there naked to the waist, wafting themselves with fans. If only he had a snake tattoo on his shoulder. Maybe not with three rings, like Obake’s, and not five, like Gonza’s – just one would do. Then the rotten girl would look at him differently. But never mind, if he carried out his assignment diligently, Gonza had promised him not only a fiery-red snake on his right shoulder, but even a chrysanthemum on each knee!

The very reason that Tanuki had been entrusted with this important mission was that he did not have a single decoration on his skin. He had not had any chance to earn them. But the hunchback would not have let in anyone with tattoos. That was why Fudo and Gundari had been put on the door, to prevent any Yakuza from other clans getting in. Fudo and Gundari told customers to roll up their sleeves and inspected their backs and chests. If they saw decorated skin, they threw the man out straight away.

Semushi was cautious, it was not easy to reach him. His ‘Rakuen’ gambling den had a double door: they let you in one at a time, then the first door was locked with some cunning kind of mechanism; on guard behind the inner door were Fudo and Gundari, two guards named in honour of the redoubtable buddhas who guarded the Gates of Heaven. The heavenly buddhas were truly terrible – with goggling eyes and tongues of flame instead of hair, but this pair were even worse. They were Okinawans, skilled in the art of killing with their bare hands.

There were another four guards in the hall as well, but there was no point in even thinking about them. Tanuki’s assignment was clear, he just had to let his own people in, and after that they would manage without him.

Bold Gonza had been given his nickname in honour of Gonza the Spear-Bearer from the famous puppet play – he was a really great fighter with a bamboo stick. Dankichi certainly deserved his nickname of Kusari, or ‘Chain’, too. He could knock the neck off a glass bottle with his chain, and the bottle wouldn’t even wobble. Then there was Obake the Phantom, a master of the nunchaku, and Ryu the Dragon, a former sumotori who weighed fifty kamme ^[iii]

– he didn’t need any weapon at all.

Tanuki didn’t have anything with him either. First, they wouldn’t have let him in with a weapon. And secondly, he could do a lot with his hands and feet. He only looked inoffensive – short and round like a little badger (hence his nickname). ^[iv]

And anyway, since the age of eight, he had practised the glorious art of jujitsu, to which, in time, he had added the Okinawan skill of fighting with the feet and legs. He could beat anyone – except, of course, for Ryu; not even a gaijin’s steam kuruma could shift him from the spot.

The plan thought up by the cunning Gonza had seemed quite simple at first.

Walk into the gambling den as if he wanted to play a bit. Wait until Fudo or Gundari, it didn’t matter which, left his post to answer a call of nature or for some other reason. Then go flying at the one who was still at the door, catch him with a good blow, open the bolt, give the prearranged shout and avoid getting killed in the few seconds before Gonza and the others came bursting in.

It was a rare thing for a novice to be given a first assignment that was so complicated and so responsible. In the normal way of things, Badger should have remained a novice for at least another three or four years, he was much too young for a fully fledged warrior. But the way things were nowadays, sticking to the old customs had become impossible. Fortune had turned her face away from the Chobei-gumi, the oldest and most glorious of all the Japanese gangs.

Who had not heard of the founder of the gang, the great Chobei, leader of the bandits of Edo, who defended the citizens against the depredations of the samurai? The life and death of the noble Yakuza were described in kabuki plays and depicted in Ukio-e engravings. The perfidious samurai Mizuno lured the hero, unarmed and alone, into his house by deception. But the Yakuza made short work of the entire band of his enemies with his bare hands, leaving only the base Mizuno alive. And he told him: ‘If I escaped alive from your trap, people would think that Chobei was too afraid for his own life. Kill me, here is my chest’. And with a hand trembling in fear Mizuno impaled Chobei on his spear. How could you possibly imagine a more exalted death?

Tanuki’s grandfather and his father had belonged to the Chobei-gumi. Since his early childhood, he had dreamed of growing up, joining the gang and making a great and respected career in it. First he would be a novice, then a warrior, then he would be promoted to the wakashu, the junior commanders, then to the wakagashira, the senior commanders, and at the age of about forty, if he survived, he would become the oyabun himself, a lord with the power of life and death over fifty valiant men, and they would start writing plays about his great feats for the kabuki theatre and the Bunraku puppet theatre.

But over the last year the clan had almost been wiped out. The enmity between two branches of the Yakuza lasts for centuries. The Tekiya, to which the Chobei-gumi belonged, were patrons of petty trade: they protected the street vendors and peddlers against the authorities, for which they received the gratitude prescribed by tradition. But the Bakuto made their living from games of chance. Those treacherous bloodsuckers never stayed anywhere for long, they flitted from place to place, leaving ruined families, tears and blood in their wake.

How well the Chobei-gumi had established themselves in the new city of Yokohama, which was positively seething with trade. But the predatory Bakuto had turned up, bent on seizing another clan’s territory. And how crafty they turned out to be! The hunchbacked owner of the ‘Rakuen’ didn’t act openly, with the two clans meeting in an honest fight and slashing away with their swords until victory is won. Semushi had proved to be a master at setting underhand traps. He informed against the oyabun to the authorities, then challenged the warriors to a battle, and there was a police ambush waiting there. The survivors had been picked off one by one, with ingenious patience. In a few short months the gang had lost nine-tenths of it membership. It was said that the hunchback had patrons in high places, that the top command of the police was actually in his pay – an entirely unprecedented disgrace!

And that was how it happened that at the age of eighteen, long before the normal time, Tanuki had moved up from the novices to become a fully fledged member of the Chobei-gumi. True, at the present time there were only five warriors left in the clan: the new oyabunGonza, Dankichi with his chain, Obake with his nunchaku, the man-mountain Ryu and himself, Tanuki.

That wasn’t enough to keep watch over all the street trade in the city. But it was enough to get even with the hunchback.

So here was Badger, exhausted by the fatigue and the strain of it all, waiting for the second day for the moment to arrive when there would be only one guard left on the door. He couldn’t deal with two, he knew that very well. And he could only deal with one if he ran at him from behind.

Fudo and Gundari had gone away – to sleep, to eat, to rest – but the one who left was always immediately replaced by one of the men on duty in the gambling hall. Tanuki had sat there for an hour, ten hours, twenty, thirty – but all in vain.

Yesterday evening he had gone out for a short while and walked round the corner to where the others were hiding in an old shed. He had explained the reason for the delay.

Gonza told him: Go and wait. Sooner or later one man will be left on the door. And he gave Tanuki ten yen – to lose.

In the morning Tanuki had gone out again. His comrades were already tired, of course, but their determination to avenge themselves had not weakened. Gonza gave him another five coins and said: That’s all there is.

Now it was getting on for evening again, the entrance to the ‘Rakuen’ was still guarded as vigilantly as ever, and on top of everything else, Badger had only one final yen left.

Surely he wouldn’t have to leave without completing his assignment? Such disgrace! It would be better to die! To throw himself at both terrifying monsters and take his chances!

Semushi scratched his sweaty chest that was like a round-bellied barrel and jabbed a finger in Tanuki’s direction.

‘Hey, kid, have you moved in here to stay? You just keep on sitting there, but you don’t play much. Either play or get lost. Have you got any money?’

Badger nodded and took out his gold coin.

‘Then stake it!’

Tanuki gulped and put his yen down on the left of the line, where money was staked on ‘odds’. He changed his mind and moved it to ‘evens’. Then he changed his mind again and wanted to move it back, but it was too late. Semushi had raised his hand.

The dice rattled in the little cup. The red one landed on 2. The blue one rolled round in a semicircle on the straw mats and landed on 3.

Tanuki bit his lip to stop himself howling in despair. His life was ending, destroyed by a vicious little six-sided cube. Ending in vain, pointlessly.

Of course, he would try to overpower the guards. Drift quietly towards the door, hanging his head low. He would strike the long-armed Fudo first. If he could hit the mineh point on the chin and put his jaw out of joint, Fudo would lose all interest in fighting. But then he wouldn’t take Gundari by surprise, and that meant that Tanuki’s life would simply be thrown away. He wouldn’t be able to able to open the door, or let Gonza in…

Badger looked enviously at the smokers. They just carried on sleeping, and nothing mattered a damn to them. If he could just lie there like that, gazing up at the ceiling with a senseless smile, with a thread of saliva dangling out of his mouth and his fingers lazily kneading the fragrant little white ball…

He sighed and got to his feet decisively.

Suddenly Gundari opened the little window cut into the door. He glanced out and asked: ‘Who is it?’

Three people came into the room one after another. The first was a Japanese with a foreign haircut and clothes. He grimaced fastidiously while the guards searched him and didn’t look around. Then a white woman came in, or maybe a girl – you could never tell how old they were, twenty or forty. Terribly ugly: huge big arms and legs, hair a repulsive yellow colour and a nose like a raven’s beak. Tanuki had already seen her here yesterday.

Gundari searched the yellow-haired woman, while Fudo searched the third of the newcomers, an astoundingly tall, elderly gaijin. He looked round the den curiously: he looked at the players, the smokers, the low counter with the beakers and jugs. If not for his height, the gaijin would have looked like a human being: normal hair – black with venerable grey at the temples.

But when the longshanks came closer, Tanuki saw that he was a monster too. The gaijin’s eyes were an unnatural colour, the same colour as the abominable die that had ruined unfortunate Badger.

You do not toss it,

You are the one who is tossed

By the die of chance.

THE BLUE DIE LOVES THE GAIJIN

Things were not good at the house of Captain Blagolepov. And it was not even a matter of the departed lying on the table in his old patched tunic with the copper five-kopeck pieces over his eye-sockets (had he brought them with him from Russia, especially for this occasion?). Everything in this decrepit dwelling was permeated with the smell of poverty and chronic, mildewed misery.

Erast Petrovich looked round the dark room with a pained air: tattered straw mats on the floor, the only furniture the aforementioned unvarnished table, two rickety chairs, a crooked cupboard and a set of shelves with just one book or, perhaps, an album of some kind. Under the icon in the corner a slim little candle was burning, the kind that were sold in Russia at five for half a kopeck. The most distressing elements were the pitiful attempts to lend this kennel at least some semblance of home comfort: the embroidered doily on the bookcase, the wretched curtains, the lampshade of thick yellow card.

The spinster Sophia Diogenovna Blagolepova was well matched to her dwelling. She spoke in a quiet little voice, almost a whisper, sniffing with her red nose; she was swathed in a faded, colourless shawl and seemed to be on the point of breaking into protracted floods of tears.

In order to avoid provoking this outpouring of grief, Fandorin comported himself sadly but sternly, as became a vice-consul in the performance of his official responsibilities. The titular counsellor felt terribly sorry for the spinster, but he was afraid of women’s tears and disliked them. Owing to inexperience, his condolences did not turn out very well.

‘P-please allow me for my part, that is, on behalf of the state of Russia, which I represent here… That is, of course, not I, but the c-consul…’ Erast Petrovich babbled unintelligibly, stammering more than usual in his agitation.

When Sophia Diogenovna heard the state mentioned, she gaped at him in fright with her faded blue eyes and bit the edge of her handkerchief. Fandorin lost the thread of his thought and fell silent.

Fortunately Shirota helped him out. It seemed that this kind of mission was nothing new to the clerk.

‘Vsevolod Vitalievich Doronin has asked us to convey to you his profound condolences,’ the clerk said with a ceremonial bow. ‘Mr Vice-Consul will sign the necessary documents and also present you with a financial subsidy.’

Recollecting himself, Fandorin handed the spinster the five coins from the state and the two from Doronin, to which, blushing slightly, he added another handful of his own.

This was the correct manoeuvre. Sophia Diogenovna ceased her sobbing, gathered the Mexican silver together in her palm, counted it quickly and also gave a low bow, displaying the plait arranged in a loop on the back of her head.

‘Thank you for not leaving a poor orphan without support.’

Her thick hair was a beautiful golden-wheat colour. Blagolepova could probably have been rather good-looking, if not for her chalky complexion and the expression of stupid fright in her eyes.

Shirota was making signs to the functionary: he had pinched his finger and thumb together and was running them through the air. Ah, he meant the receipt.

Erast Petrovich shrugged, as if to say: It’s too awkward, later. But the Japanese himself presented the lady with the paper, and she signed with a pencil in a curly flourish.

Shirota sat down at the table, took out a sheet of paper and a travelling inkwell and prepared to write out the death certificate.

‘What were the cause and the circumstances of the demise?’ he asked briskly.

Sophia Diogenovna’s face instantly melted into a tearful grimace.

‘Papa came home in the morning at about seven o’clock. He said, I feel bad, Sophia. I’ve got this aching in my chest…’

‘In the morning?’ Fandorin asked. ‘Was he working at night, then?’

He was sorry he had asked. The tears poured down in torrents from Blagolepova’s eyes.

‘No-o,’ she howled. ‘He’d been in the “Rakuen” all night long. It’s a place like a tavern. Only in our taverns they drink vodka, and in theirs they smoke a noxious weed. I went there at midnight and implored him: “Father, let’s go home. You’ll spend everything on smoking again, and our apartment isn’t paid for, and the oil for the lamp has run out…” He wouldn’t come, he drove me away. He almost beat me… And when he dragged himself home in the morning, there was nothing in his pockets, they were empty… I gave him tea. He drank a glass. Then he suddenly looked at me and said: “That’s that. Sophia, I’m dying. Forgive me, my daughter”. And he put his head on the table. I started shaking him, but he was dead. He was staring sideways, with his mouth open…’

At that point the sad narrative broke off, drowned in sobbing.

‘The circumstances are clear,’ Shirota declared solemnly. ‘Shall we write: “Sudden death from natural causes”?’

Fandorin nodded and shifted his gaze from the sobbing spinster to the deceased. What a strange fate! To die at the end of the world from the heady Chinese poison…

The clerk scraped his pen over the paper, Sophia Diogenovna cried, the vice-consul gazed morosely at the ceiling. The ceiling was unusual, faced with planks. So were the walls. As if they were inside a crate. Or a barrel.

For lack of anything else to do, Erast Petrovich walked over and touched the rough surface with his hand.

‘Papa put that up with his own hands,’ Blagolepova said in an adenoidal voice. ‘So it would be like in a mess room. When he was a cabin boy, the ships were still all wood. One day he looked at the wall and suddenly waved his hand and shouted out: “A name is a mortal’s fate, and there’s no getting away from it! The name you’re given decides the way you live your whole life. Haven’t I flapped about all over the place? I ran away to sea from the seminary, I’ve sailed the seven seas, but even so I’m ending my life as Diogenes – in a barrel”.’

And. moved by her reminiscences, she started gushing even more profusely. The titular counsellor, wincing in sympathy, handed Sophia Diogenovna his handkerchief – her own needed to be wrung out.

‘Thank you, kind man,’ she sobbed, blowing her nose into the fine cambric. ‘And I should be even more grateful, grateful for ever, if you could only liberate my property.’

‘What property?’

‘The Japanese man Papa sold the launch to didn’t pay him all the money. He didn’t give him it all at once, he said: “You’ll smoke yourself to death”. He paid it out in parts, and he still owed seventy-five yen. That’s a lot of money! There was no paper contract between them, that’s not the Japanese custom, so I’m afraid that the hunchback won’t give me it, he’ll deceive a poor orphan.’

‘Why hunchb-back?’

‘Why, he has a hump. He’s got one at the front and another one at the back. A genuine monster and a bandit. I’m afraid of him. Couldn’t you go with me, Mr Vice-Consul, since you’re a diplomat from our great homeland, eh? I’d pray to God for you with all my strength!’

‘The consulate does not engage in the collection of debts,’ Shirota said quickly. ‘It is not appropriate.’

‘I could go in a private capacity,’ the soft-hearted vice-consul suggested. ‘Where can I find this man?’

‘It’s not far, just across the river,’ said the spinster, immediately stopping her crying and gazing hopefully at Fandorin. ‘“Rakuen”, it’s called, that means “Heavenly Garden” in their language. Papa worked for the boss there. He’s called Semushi, it means Hunchback. Papa gave everything he earned at sea to that bloodsucker, for the drug.’

Shirota frowned.

‘The “Rakuen”? I know it. An absolutely infamous establishment. The Bakuto (they are very bad men) play dice there, and they sell Chinese opium. It is shameful, of course,’ he added in an apologetic tone of voice, ‘but Japan is not to blame. Yokohama is an open port, it has its own customs. However, a diplomat cannot appear in the “Rakuen” under any circumstances. There could be an Incident.’

The final word was pronounced with special emphasis and the clerk even raised one finger. Erast Petrovich did not wish to be involved in an Incident, especially not on his first day of work as a diplomat, but how could he abandon a defenceless young woman in distress? And then again, it would be interesting to take a look at an opium den.

‘The regulations of the consular service enjoin us to render assistance to our compatriots who find themselves in extremity,’ Fandorin said sternly.

The clerk did not dare to argue with the regulations. He sighed and resigned himself to the inevitable.

They set out for the den on foot. Erast Petrovich had refused in principle to take a riksha from the consulate, and he did not yield now.

The young man found everything in the native quarter curious: the hovels nailed together haphazardly out of planks, and the paper lanterns on poles, and the unfamiliar smells. The Japanese people seemed exceptionally ugly to the young functionary. Short and puny, with coarse faces, they walked in a fussy manner with their heads pulled down into their shoulders. The women were especially disappointing. Instead of the wonderful, bright-coloured kimonos that Fandorin had seen in pictures, the Japanese women were dressed in washed-out, formless rags. They walked in tiny little steps on their monstrously bandy legs, and their teeth were absolutely black! Erast Petrovich made this appalling discovery when he saw two busybodies gossiping on a corner. They bowed to each other every second and smiled broadly, looking like two black-toothed witches.

But even so, the titular counsellor liked it much better here than on the decorous Bund. This was it, the real Japan! It might be plain and dowdy, but even this place had its merits, thought Erast Petrovich, drawing his first conclusions. Despite the poverty, it was clean everywhere. That was one. The simple people were extremely polite and he could not sense any air of abjection about them. That was two. Fandorin could not think of a third argument in favour of Japan quite yet, and he postponed any further conclusions until later.

‘The shameful quarter starts at the other side of the Ivy Bridge,’ said Shirota, pointing to a arched wooden bridge. ‘Teahouses, beer parlours for the sailors. And the “Rakuen” is there too. There, you see it? Over there by the pole with a head on it.’

As he stepped on to the bridge, Erast Petrovich looked in the direction indicated and froze. A woman’s head with an intricate hairstyle was hanging on a tall pole. The young man wanted to turn away immediately, but he held his glance still for a moment, and after that he could not turn away. The dead face was frighteningly, magically lovely.

‘That is a woman by the name of O-Kiku,’ the clerk explained. ‘She was the finest courtesan in the “Chrysanthemum” establishment – the one over there, with the red lantern at the entrance. O-Kiku fell in love with one of her clients, a kabuki actor. But he grew cold towards her, and then she poisoned him with rat poison. She poisoned herself too, but she vomited, and the poison did not take effect. They washed out her stomach and then cut off her head. Before the execution, she composed a beautiful haiku, a verse of three lines…’

Shirota closed his eyes, concentrated and declaimed in a singsong voice:

‘

A tempest at night,

But dawn brings complete silence -

A flower’s dream ends

.’

And he explained:

‘The flower is herself because “kiku” means “chrysanthemum”. The hurricane is her passion, the silence is her forthcoming execution, and the dream is human life… The judge ordered her head to be kept outside the door of the tearoom for a week – as a lesson to the other courtesans and to punish the proprietress. Not many clients will favour a shop sign like that.’

Fandorin was impressed by the story he had been told, and by Japanese justice, and most of all by the wonderful poem. But Sophia Diogenovna remained unmoved. She crossed herself at the sight of the severed head without any excessive fright – in all the years she had lived in Japan, she must have become accustomed to the peculiarities of the Japanese system of justice. Blagolepova was far more interested in the ‘Rakuen’ – the young lady gazed at the stout oak door with eyes wide in terror.

‘There is nothing for you to be afraid of, madam,’ Erast Petrovich reassured her, and was about to enter, but Shirota slipped ahead of him.

‘No, no,’ he declared with a most decisive air. ‘This is my responsibility.’

He knocked and stepped into a small dark passage that reminded Fandorin of the antechamber of a bathhouse. The door immediately slammed shut, evidently impelled by a concealed spring.

‘That’s a procedure they have here. They let people in one at a time,’ Blagolepova explained.

The door opened again, as if of its own accord, and Fandorin let the lady go ahead.

Sophia Diogenovna babbled ‘Merci’ and disappeared into the antechamber.

Finally, it was the titular counsellor’s turn.

For five seconds he stood in total darkness, then another door opened in front of him, admitting a smell of sweat and tobacco and another unfamiliar, sweetish aroma. ‘Opium’, Erast Petrovich guessed, sniffing the air.

A short, thickset, strong-looking fellow (predatory facial features, wearing a bandana with squiggles on it round his forehead) started slapping the functionary on the sides and feeling under his armpits. A second fellow, who looked exactly the same, brusquely searched Sophia Diogenovna at the same time.

Fandorin flushed, prepared to put an end to this intolerable impudence there and then, but Blagolepova said rapidly:

‘It’s all right, I’m used to it. They have to do this, they get far too many wild characters coming here.’ And she added something in Japanese, in a tone that sounded soothing.

Shirota had already been let through – he was standing a little to one side, with a perfectly clear air of disapproval.

But the vice-consul found it all very interesting.

At first glance the Japanese den of iniquity reminded him very strongly of a Khitrovka tavern of the very worst kind. Only in Khitrovka it was very much dirtier and the floor was covered with gobs of spittle, but here, before stepping on to the straw mats covering the floor, he had to take off his shoes.

Sophia Diogenovna became terribly embarrassed, and Fandorin could not immediately understand why. Then he noticed that the poor spinster had no stockings, and he delicately averted his eyes.

‘Now, which man here is the one who owes you money?’ he asked brightly, gazing around.

His eyes quickly accustomed themselves to the dim lighting. There were motionless figures lying and sitting on straw mattresses in the far corner. No, one of them moved: a gaunt Chinese with a long plait blew on the wick of an outlandish-looking lamp that was standing beside him; he used a needle to turn a little white ball that was heating over the flame, then stuffed the ball into the opening of a long pipe and took a long draw. He shook his head for a few moments, then flopped back on to a bolster and took another draw.

In the middle of the room about half a dozen or so gamblers were sitting at a table with tiny little legs. Several other men were not playing, but watching – all exactly the same as in some Daredevil Inn or Half-Bottle Tavern.

Fandorin identified the owner without any prompting. The half-naked man with an unnaturally bloated upper body shook some kind of small cup, then tossed two little cubes on to the table. That was clear enough – they were playing dice. But it was astonishing that the result of the game didn’t arouse any emotions at all in the men sitting round the table. In Russia the winners would have burst into a string of joyful obscenities and the loser would have sworn obscenely too, but viciously. However, these men silently sorted out the money, most of which went to the hunchback, and then started sipping some kind of murky liquid from little cups.

Taking advantage of the break, Sophia Diogenovna walked up to the owner, bowed obsequiously and started asking him about something. The hunchback listened sullenly and drawled: ‘Heh-eh-eh’ once, as if he was surprised at something. (Erast Petrovich guessed that this was his reaction to the news of the captain’s death.) He heard the woman out, shook his head sharply and muttered: ‘Nani-o itterunda!’ – and then several brief, rumbling phrases.

Blagolepova started crying quietly.

‘What? Does he refuse?’ Fandorin asked, touching the lady’s sleeve.

She nodded.

‘This man says he has paid the captain in full. The captain has spent the entire launch from the funnel to the anchor on opium,’ Shirota translated.

‘He’s lying!’ Sophia Diogenovna exclaimed. ‘Papa couldn’t have smoked enough for all the money! He told me himself that there were still seventy-five yen left!’

The owner gestured with one hand and spoke to Fandorin in appalling English:

‘Want play? Want puh-puh? No want play, no want puh-puh – go-go.’

Shirota whispered, looking round anxiously at the well-muscled young fellows with the white bandanas on their foreheads, who were slowly approaching the table from different sides of the room:

‘There’s nothing we can do. There’s no receipt – we can’t prove anything. We must leave, or else there could be an Incident.’

Sophia Diogenovna was weeping quietly, inconsolably. Fandorin’s cambric handkerchief was already soaked through, and she took out her own, which had dried off slightly.

‘What kind of game is this?’ Erast Petrovich asked curiously. ‘Is it d-difficult?’

‘No, it is absolutely simple. It is called “Choka-hanka” – that is, “Odds and evens”. If you place money to the left of that line there, it means you are betting on evens. If you place it on the right, you are betting on odds.’ The clerk spoke in nervous haste, all the while tugging the vice-consul towards the door with his finger and thumb. ‘Do let us go. This is absolutely not a good place.’

‘Well then, I’ll try it too. I believe at the current rate the yen is worth two roubles?’

Erast Petrovich squatted down awkwardly, took out his wallet and counted out fifteen red ten-rouble notes. That made exactly seventy-five yen. The embassy functionary put his stake to the left of the line.

The owner of the den was not at all surprised by the sight of banknotes with a portrait of the bearded Mikhail Fyodorovich Romanov; Russians had evidently been rather frequent visitors to the ‘Rakuen’. But the hunchback was surprised by the size of the stake, for none of the other players had put more than five yen on the table.

Everything went very quiet. The idle onlookers moved closer, with the guards in white bandanas who had given poor Shirota such a bad fright towering over them. A stocky, round-faced Japanese with a little waxed ponytail on the shaven back of his head had been about to move towards the door, but his attention was caught too. He changed his mind about leaving and froze on the spot.

The little cup swayed in the hunchback’s strong hand and the dice rattled against its thin walls – a sweep of the arm, and the two little dice went tumbling across the low table. The red one rolled over a few times and stopped, showing five dots on its upper surface. The blue one skipped as far as the very edge and stopped right in front of Erast Petrovich, displaying three dots.

A sigh ran round the table.

‘Did I win?’ Erast Petrovich asked Shirota.

‘Yes!’ the clerk said in a whisper. His eyes were blazing in elation.

‘Well then, tell him that he owes me seventy-five yen. He can give the money to Miss Blagolepova.’

Erast Petrovich started getting up, but the owner grabbed his arm.

‘No! Must play three! Rule!’

‘He says that under the rules of the establishment, you have to play at least three times,’ said Shirota, pale-faced, although Fandorin had already understood the meaning of what was said.

The clerk apparently tried to argue, but the owner, who had just tipped a heap of yen on to the table, started shifting them back towards him. It was clear that he would not let the money go without repeating the game.

‘Leave it,’ Erast Petrovich said with a shrug. ‘If he wants to play, we’ll play. It will be worse for him.’

Once again the dice rattled in the little cup. Now everyone on the room had gathered round the table, apart from the apathetic smokers and the two guards at the door, but even they stood up on tiptoe, trying to get at least a glimpse of something over the bowed backs.

The only person who was bored was the titular counsellor. He knew that by a mysterious whim of fate he always won in any game of chance, even in games of which he did not know the rules. So why should he be concerned about a stupid game of ‘Odds and evens’? In his place another man would have become a millionaire ages ago, or else gone insane, like Pushkin’s Herman in The Queen of Spades, who was unable to endure the mystical whimsicality of Fortune. But Fandorin had made it a rule always to trust in miracles and not attempt to squeeze them into the pigeonholes of human logic. If miracles happened, then Thank You, Lord – looking a gift horse in the mouth was bad form.

Erast Petrovich barely even glanced at the table when the dice were cast for the second time. Once again the blue die was slower to settle than the red one.

The spectators shed their reserve and the air rang with exclamations.

‘They are saying: “The blue die has fallen in love with the gaijin!” Shirota, red-faced now, shouted in the titular counsellor’s ear and started raking the heap of white and yellow coins towards him.

‘Madam, there is your father’s money,’ said Fandorin, setting aside the heap of money lost by the owner in the previous game.

‘Damare!’ the hunchback roared at the spectators.

He looked terrifying. His eyes were bloodshot, his Adam’s apple was trembling, his humped chest was heaving.

The servant girl dragged a jangling sack across the floor. The owner untied the laces with trembling hands and began quickly setting out little columns on the table, each column containing ten coins.

He’s going to try to win it all back, Erast Petrovich realised, and suppressed a yawn.

One of the bruisers guarding the door finally succumbed and set off towards the table, which was almost completely covered with little silver columns that gleamed dully.

This time the hunchback shook the little cup for at least a minute before he could bring himself to throw. Everyone watched his hands, mesmerised. Only Fandorin, firmly convinced of the immutability of his gambler’s luck, was gazing around curiously.

And that was why he saw the chubby-faced Japanese edging slyly towards the door. Why was he being so furtive? Had he not settled his bill? Or had he filched something?

The dice struck against the wood and everyone leaned down over the table, shouldering each other aside, but Fandorin was observing the young moon-faced youth.

His behaviour was quite astonishing. Once he had backed away as far as the guard, who was totally absorbed in the game, even though he had remained at the door, Moon-face struck the guard on the neck with his open hand in a fantastically rapid movement. The big brute collapsed on to the floor without a sound and the sneak thief (if he was a thief) was away and gone: he slid the bolt open soundlessly and slipped outside.

Erast Petrovich merely shook his head, impressed by such adroitness, and turned back to the table. What had he staked his money on? Evens, wasn’t it?

The little red cube had stopped on 2, the blue one was still rolling. A second later a dozen throats let out a roar so loud that the titular counsellor was deafened.

Shirota hammered his superior on the back, shouting something inarticulate. Sophia Diogenovna gazed at Fandorin through eyes radiant with happiness.

The blue die was lying there, displaying six large black dots.

Oh why does it love

Only the indifferent,

The fleet tumbling die?

THE FLAG OF A GREAT POWER

Pushing his way through the others, Shirota started scooping the silver back into the sack. The room was filled with a melancholy jingling sound, but the music did not continue for long.

A loud, furious bellow issued simultaneously from several throats and a rabble of most daunting-looking natives came bursting into the room.

The first to run in was a moustachioed, hook-nosed fellow with his teeth bared in a ferocious grin and a long bamboo pole in his hands. Another two flew in behind him, bumping their shoulders together in the doorway – one slicing an iron chain through the air with a whistle, the other holding an odd-looking contrivance: a short wooden rod attached to a cord with an identical wooden rod at the other end. Tumbling in after them came a hulk of such immense height and stature that in Moscow he would have been shown at a fairground – Erast Petrovich had not even suspected that there were specimens like this to be found among the puny Japanese nation. Rolling in last of all came the titch who had recently gone out, so his strange behaviour was finally explained.

Two gangs arguing with each other over something, Erast Petrovich realised. Exactly the same as at home. Only our cut-throats don’t take off their shoes.

This final observation was occasioned by the fact that, before the attackers stepped on to the rice-straw mats, they kicked off their wooden sandals. And then there was a kind of brawl that Fandorin had never seen before, although, despite his young age, the titular counsellor had already been involved in several bloody altercations.

In this unpleasant situation, Erast Petrovich acted rationally and coolly: he caught Sophia Diogenovna as she swooned in horror, dragged her into the farthest corner and shielded her with his body. Shirota was there beside him in an instant, repeating an unfamiliar word in a panicky voice: ‘Yakuza, Yakuza!’

‘What’s that you’re saying?’ Fandorin asked him as he watched the battle develop.

‘Bandits! I warned you! There’s going to be an Incident! Ah, this is an Incident!’

And the clerk was quite right about that – a most serious incident was shaping up.

The gamblers and idle onlookers scattered in all directions. First they pressed themselves back against the wall and then, taking advantage of the absence of any guards on the door, they ran for it. Fandorin could not follow their sensible example – he could not abandon the young lady, and the disciplined Shirota clearly had no intention of abandoning his superior. The clerk even attempted, in turn, to shield the diplomat with his own body, but Erast Petrovich moved the Japanese aside – he was blocking his view.

The young man was rapidly seized by the excitement that seizes any individual of the male sex at the sight of an affray, even if it has nothing to do with him and he is an altogether peaceable individual. The breathing quickens, the blood flows twice as fast, the hands fold themselves into fists and, in defiance of reason, in defiance of the instinct of self-preservation, the desire arises to dash headlong into the free-for-all, doling out blind, fervent blows to left and right.

In this fight, however, almost no blind blows were struck. Perhaps even none at all. The fighters did not bawl out profanities, they only grunted and screeched furiously.

The attackers’ leader seemed to be the man with the moustache. He was the first to throw himself into the fray and smack the surviving doorman very deftly across the ear with the end of his pole – apparently only lightly, but the man fell flat on his back and did not get up again. The pair who had followed the man with the moustache started lashing out, one with his chain and the other with his piece of wood, and they laid out the three guards in white bandanas.

But that was not the end of the battle – far from it.

Unlike the frenetic fellow with the moustache, the hunchback did not go looking for trouble. He stayed behind his men, shouting out instructions. New warriors came dashing out from back rooms somewhere, and the attackers also started taking punishment.

The hunchback’s fighters were armed with long daggers (or perhaps short swords; Erast Petrovich would have found it hard to give a precise definition of those blades fifteen to twenty inches long) and they handled their weapons rather deftly. One might have expected a bamboo pole and a short wooden rod, or the bare hands with which the giant and the titch fought, to be useless against steel, but nonetheless, the scales were clearly not tipping in the ‘Rakuen’s’ favour.

Chubby Face struck out with his feet as well as his hands, managing to hit one man on the forehead and another on the chin. His elephantine comrade acted more majestically and simply: with a nimbleness that was quite incredible for such vast dimensions, he grabbed an opponent by the wrist of the hand clutching a dagger and jerked, flinging him first to the floor and then against the wall. His massive ham-like hands, completely covered with red tattoos, possessed a truly superhuman strength.

The only persons present to remain indifferent to the battle were the spinster Blagolepova, still in a swoon, and the opium addicts in their state of bliss, even though every now and then the blood from some severed artery splashed as far as the mattresses. Once the latest victim of the mountainous man-thrower crashed down on to a dozing Chinaman, but the temporary resident of paradisiacal pastures merely smiled dreamily.

The white bandanas backed towards the counter, losing warriors on the way: some lay with their heads split open, some groaned as they clutched a broken arm. But the raiders suffered losses too: the virtuoso master of the wooden rod impaled his chest on a sharp blade; the chain-bearer fell, skewered from both sides. The chubby-faced prancer was still alive, but he had taken a heavy blow to the temple from a sword-hilt and was sitting on the floor, doltishly wagging his half-shaved head.

But now the hunchback was squeezed into a corner and his two most dangerous enemies – the tattooed giant and the man with the moustache under a hook-nose – were advancing on him.

The owner pressed his hump against the counter, flipped over with amazing agility and ended up on the other side. But that was hardly likely to save him.

The raiders’ leader stepped forward and started twirling his weapon through the air in a whistling figure of eight, just barely touching it with his fingertips.

The hunchback raised his hand. And a six-chamber revolver glinted in it.

‘And about time too,’ Erast Petrovich remarked to his assistant. ‘He c-could have thought of that a bit sooner.’

The face of the bandit with the moustache was suddenly a mask of amazement, as if he had never even seen a firearm before. The hand holding the pole whirled upwards, but the shot rang out too quickly. The bullet struck the bandit on the bridge of the nose and knocked him off his feet. Blood oozed out of the black hole slowly and reluctantly. The dead man’s face was still frozen in an expression of bewilderment.

The last remaining raider was also dumbfounded. His plump lower lip drooped and his narrow eyes started blinking rapidly in their cushions of fat.

The hunchback shouted out some kind of order. One of the guards got up off the floor, swaying on his feet. Then a second, and a third, and a fourth.

They took a firm grip of the giant’s arms, but he gave a light, almost casual shrug, and the white bandanas went flying off and away. Then the owner of the dive calmly discharged the other five cartridges into the hulk’s chest. The huge man only jerked as the bullets ripped into his massive body. He swayed for a moment or two, wreathed in powder smoke, and sat down on the straw mats.

‘At least half a dozen c-corpses,’ said Erast Petrovich, summing up the outcome of the fight. ‘We have to call the police.’

‘We have to get away as quickly as possible!’ protested Shirota. ‘What a terrible Incident! The Russian vice-consul at the scene of a bandit massacre. Ah, what a blackguard that man Semushi is.’

‘Why?’ Fandorin asked in amazement. ‘After all, he was defending his own life and his establishment. They would have killed him otherwise.’

‘You do not understand. Genuine Yakuza will have nothing to do with gunpowder! They kill only with cold steel or their bare hands! What a disgrace! What is Japan coming to! Let’s go!’

Roused by the shots, Sophia Diogenovna sat up and pulled in her feet. The clerk helped her to get up and pulled her towards the exit.

The consular functionary followed but he kept looking around. He saw the guards dragging the dead behind the counter, carrying and leading away the wounded. They pinned the stunned titch’s arms behind his back and emptied a jar of water over him.

‘What are you doing?’ Shirota called from the doorway. ‘Hurry!’

‘Wait for me outside. I’ll just c-collect my winnings.’

But the titular counsellor did not move towards the table where the silver was lying in a blood-spattered heap, he moved towards the counter – the owner was standing there and the Yakuza who had been seized had been dragged across to him.

The hunchback asked him something. Instead of replying, the titch tried to kick him in the crotch, but the blow was feeble and poorly directed – the prisoner had obviously not yet recovered his wits fully. The owner hissed viciously and started kicking the short, sturdy youth – in the stomach, on the knees, on the ankles.

The titch didn’t make a sound.

Wiping the sweat off his forehead, the hunchback asked another question.

‘He wants to know if there is anyone else left in the Chobei-gumi,’ a voice whispered in Erast Petrovich’s ear.

It was Shirota. He had led Sophia Diogenovna outside and come back – he took his responsibilities very seriously.

‘Left where?’

‘In the gang. But the Yakuza won’t tell him, of course. They’ll kill him now. Let us leave this place. The police will be here soon, they must have been informed already.’

Three men in white bandanas grunted as they dragged the dead man-mountain across the floor. The mighty arms flopped about helplessly. The tips of both little fingers were missing.

The servant girl busily sprinkled white powder on the straw mats and immediately wiped them with a rag, and the red blotches disappeared as if by magic. Meanwhile the owner put a thin cord round the prisoner’s neck and pulled the noose tight. He tugged and tugged, and when the Yakuza’s face was suffused with blood, he asked the same question again.

The titch lashed out despairingly at his tormentor with his foot once again, but once again to no avail.

Then the hunchback evidently decided that there was no point in wasting any more time. His flat face spread into a grim smile and his right hand started slowly winding the cord on to his left wrist. The captive started wheezing, his lips started clutching vainly at the air, his eyes bulged out of their sockets.

‘Right then, translate!’ Fandorin ordered the clerk. ‘I am a representative of the consular authority of the city of Yokohama, which is under the jurisdiction of the great powers. I demand that you put an end to this summary execution immediately.’

Shirota translated, but what came out was much longer than what Fandorin had said, and at the end he performed a weird trick: he took out of his pocket two little flags, Russian and Japanese (the same ones that Erast Petrovich had recently seen on his desk), and performed a strange manipulation with them – he raised the red, white and blue tricolour high in the air and leaned the red and white flag over sideways.

‘What was that you showed them?’ the puzzled vice-consul asked.

‘I translated what you said and added on my own behalf that if he kills the bandit, he will have to kill you as well, and then our emperor will have to apologise to the Russian emperor, and that will bring terrible shame on Japan.’

Erast Petrovich was astounded that such an argument could have any effect on the owner of a bandit den. Japanese cut-throats were clearly different from Russian ones after all.

‘But the flags? Do you always carry them with you?’

Shirota nodded solemnly.

‘I always have to remember that I serve Russia, but at the same time remain a Japanese subject. And then, they are so beautiful!’

He bowed respectfully, first to the Russian flag, then to the Japanese one.

After a moment’s thought, Erast Petrovich did the same, only he began with the flag of the Land of the Rising Sun.

Meanwhile there was strange, bustling activity taking place in the room. They took the noose off the captive Yakuza’s neck, but for some reason laid him out on the floor, and four guards sat on his arms and legs. From the evil grin on the hunchback’s face, it was clear that he had thought up some new infamy.

Two male servants came running into the room – one was holding a bizarre-looking piece of metal, and the other a small chalice of black ink.

The half-pint started squirming with every part of his body, he shuddered and howled in misery. Erast Petrovich was astounded – after all, this man had just demonstrated absolute fearlessness in the face of imminent death!

‘What’s happening? What are they about to do to him? Tell them I won’t allow them to torture him!’

‘They are not going to torture him,’ the clerk said sombrely. ‘The owner of the establishment intends to tattoo the hieroglyph ura on his forehead. It means “traitor”. It is the mark used by Yakuza to brand renegades who have committed the worst of all crimes – betraying their own. For this they deserve death. A man cannot possibly live with this brand, and he cannot commit suicide either, because his body will be buried in the slaughterhouse quarter. What appalling villainy! No, Japan is not what she used to be. The honest bandits of former times would never have done anything so vile.’

‘Then we must stop this!’ Fandorin exclaimed.

‘Semushi will not back down, or he will lose face in front of his men. And we cannot force him. This is an internal Japanese matter, it lies beyond consular jurisdiction.’

The owner seated himself on the prostrate man’s chest, set his head in a wooden vice and dipped the piece of metal into the inkwell – and it became clear that the face of the elaborate contrivance was covered with little needles.

‘Villainy always falls within jurisdiction,’ Erast Petrovich said with a shrug, stepping forward and seizing the owner by the shoulder.

He nodded at the heap of silver, pointed at the prisoner and said in English:

‘All this against him. Stake?’

The hunchback visibly wavered. Shirota also took a step forward, stood shoulder to shoulder with Fandorin and lifted up the Russian flag, making it clear that the entire might of a great empire stood behind the vice-consul’s suggestion.

‘OK. Stake,’ the owner agreed in a hoarse voice, getting up.

He snapped his fingers, and the bamboo cup and dice were handed to him with a bow.

Would that you always

inspired only true respect,

my own country’s flag!

A COBBLED STREET RUNNING DOWN A HILL

They did not linger in the vicinity of the ‘Rakuen’. Without a word being spoken, they immediately turned the corner and strode off at a smart pace. Certainly, Shirota tried to assure Fandorin that the hunchback would not dare to pursue them, because taking back someone’s winnings was not the Bakuto custom, but he himself did not appear entirely convinced of the inviolability of bandit traditions and kept looking round. The clerk was lugging the sack of silver. Erast Petrovich was leading the young lady along by the elbow and the Yakuza who had been beaten at dice was plodding along behind, still seeming not quite to have recovered from all his ordeals and so many twists of fate.

They stopped to catch their breath only when they were already out of the ‘quarter of shame’. Rikshas ran along the street, the decorous public strolled along the lines of shop windows and the cobbled road leading down to the river was brightly illuminated by gas lamps – twilight had descended on the city.

And here the titular counsellor was beset by a triple ordeal.

The example was set by the spinster Blagolepova. She embraced him passionately round the neck (in so doing, striking him a painful blow on the back with the bundle containing the captain’s legacy) and watered his cheek with tears of gratitude. The young man was called ‘a saviour’, ‘a hero’, ‘an angel’ and even ‘a darling’.

And that was only the beginning.

While Fandorin, dumbstruck by that ‘darling’, comforted the lady by cautiously stroking her heaving shoulders, Shirota waited patiently. But the moment Erast Petrovich freed himself from the maiden’s embraces, the clerk bowed to him, almost right down to the ground, and froze in that position.

‘Good Lord, Shirota, now what are you doing?’

‘I am ashamed that there are people like Semushi in Japan,’ the clerk said in a flat voice. ‘And this on the day of your arrival! What must you think of us!’

Fandorin was about to explain to this patriot that there were very many bad people in Russia too, and he knew very well that a people should be judged by its best representatives, not its worst, but then the vice-consul was struck by another blow.

The plump-faced bandit stopped glancing round repeatedly at the bridge, panted, dropped at Erast Petrovich’s feet and suddenly started banging his firm forehead against the road!

‘He is thanking you for saving his honour and his life,’ Shirota translated.

‘Please tell him that his gratitude is accepted and to get up quickly,’ the titular counsellor said nervously, glancing round at the people in the street.

The bandit got up and bowed from the waist.

‘He says that he is a soldier of the honourable Chobei-gumi gang, which no longer exists.’

Fandorin found the term ‘honourable gang’ so intriguing that he said:

‘Ask him to tell me about himself.’

‘Hai, kashikomarimashita,’ ^[v]

said the ‘soldier’, bowing once again, and then, with his arms pressed to his sides, he began reporting in true military style, his eyes staring fixedly at the superior officer whose role Erast Petrovich was playing.

‘He comes from a family of hereditary machi-yakko and is very proud of it. (These are also noble Yakuza, who defend little people against the tyranny of the authorities. Well, and they also collect tribute from them, of course),’ said Shirota, mingling translation with comment. ‘His father had only two fingers on his hand. (That is a Yakuza custom: if a bandit has committed some offence and wishes to apologise to the gang, he cuts off a section of a finger.) He himself, of course, does not remember his father – he has heard about him from other people. His mother also came from a respected family, her entire body was covered in tattoos, right down to the knees. When he was three years old, his father escaped from jail, hid in a lighthouse and sent word to his wife – she worked in a teahouse. His mother tied the child to her back and hurried to join her husband at the lighthouse, but she was followed and the warders of the jail were informed. They surrounded the lighthouse. His father did not wish to return to jail. He stabbed his wife in the heart and himself in the throat. He wanted to kill his little son too, but could not do it, and simply threw him into the sea. However, karma did not allow the child to drown – he was fished out and taken to an orphanage.’

‘Why, what a b-brute his dear papa was!’ Erast Petrovich exclaimed, dumbfounded.

Shirota was surprised.

‘Why a brute?’

‘Well, he killed his own wife and threw his own s-son off a cliff!’

‘I assure you that he would not have killed his own wife for anything, unless she had asked him to do it. They did not wish to be parted, their love was stronger than death. This is very beautiful.’

‘But what has this to do with the infant?’

‘Here in Japan we take a different view of this matter, I beg your pardon,’ the clerk replied severely. ‘The Japanese are conscientious people. Parents are responsible for their child, especially if he is very young. The world is so cruel! How is it possible to cast a defenceless creature to the whim of fate? It is simply inhuman! A family should hold together and not be separated. The most touching thing about this story is that the father could not bring himself to stab his little son with a knife…’

While this dialogue was taking place between the vice-consul and his assistant, the titch engaged Sophia Diogenovna in conversation and asked some question that made the spinster sob and burst into bitter tears.

‘What’s wrong?’ Fandorin exclaimed without hearing Shirota out. ‘Has this bandit offended you? What did he say to you?’

‘No-o,’ Blagolepova sniffed. ‘He asked… he asked how my esteemed father was ge-ge-getting on.’

Once again moisture gushed from the young lady’s eyes – apparently her tear glands produced it in genuinely unlimited amounts.

‘Did he really know your father?’ Erast Petrovich asked in surprise.

Sophia Diogenovna blew her nose into the wet handkerchief and was unable to reply, so Shirota readdressed the question to the Yakuza.

‘No, he did not have the honour of being acquainted with the yellow-haired lady’s father, but last night he saw her come to the “Rakuen” for her parent. He was a very sociable man. Opium makes some people fall asleep but others, on the contrary, become merry and talkative. The old captain was never quiet for a moment, he was always talking, talking.’

‘What did he talk about?’ Fandorin asked absentmindedly, taking out his watch.

A quarter to eight. If he had to go to this notorious Bachelors’ Ball with the consul, it would be a good idea to take a bath and tidy himself up first.

‘About how he took three passengers to Tokyo, to the Susaki mooring. How he waited for them there and then brought them back. They spoke the Satsuma dialect. They thought the gaijin would not understand, but the captain had been sailing Japanese waters for a long time and had learned to understand all the dialects. The Satsuma men had long bundles with them, and there were swords in the bundles, he made out one of the hilts. Very odd, covered with kamiyasuri…’ – at this point Shirota hesitated, unsure of how to translate this difficult word. ‘Kamiyasuri is a kind of paper, covered all over in particles of glass. It is used to make the surface of wood smooth…’

‘Glasspaper?’

‘Yes, yes indeed! Glasspaper,’ said Shirota, repeating the word so that he would not forget it again.

‘But how can a sword hilt be covered with glasspaper? It would lacerate your palm.’

‘Of course, it is not possible,’ the Japanese agreed, ‘but I am merely translating.’

He told the Yakuza to continue.

‘Those men said very bad things about Minister Okubo, they called him Inu-Okubo, that is “the Dog Okubo”. One of them, a man with a withered arm who was their leader, said: “Never mind, he will not get away from us tomorrow”. And when the captain brought them back to Yokohama, they told him to be at the same place tomorrow an hour before dawn and paid him a good advance. The captain told everyone who was nearby about this. And he said he would sit there for a little longer and then go to the police and they would give him a big reward for saving the minister from the plotters.’

As he translated the bandit’s story Shirota frowned more and more darkly.

‘This is very alarming information,’ he explained. ‘Former samurai from the principality of Satsuma hate their fellow Satsuman. They regard him as a traitor.’

They started asking the titch about this, but he laughed and waved his hand disdainfully.

‘He says this is all nonsense. The captain was totally sizzled with opium, he was tripping over his own tongue. He must have imagined it. Where would Satsuma samurai get the money to pay for a steam launch? They are all ragged tramps. If they wanted to kill the minister, they would walk to Tokyo. And then, who has ever heard of covering the hilt of a sword with glasspaper? The old gaijin simply wanted people to listen to him, so he spun a tall story.’

Erast Petrovich and Shirota exchanged glances.

‘Right, get him to tell us all the d-details. What else did the captain say? Did anything happen to him?’

The Yakuza was surprised that his story had aroused such great interest, but he was diligent in his reply.

‘He didn’t say anything else. Only about the reward. He kept going to sleep, then waking up and talking about the same thing. He probably really did carry some passengers, but as for the swords, they were an opium dream, everybody said so. And nothing unusual happened to the captain. He sat there until dawn, then suddenly got up and left.’

‘Suddenly? Exactly how d-did it happen?’ enquired Fandorin, who did not like this story about the mysterious samurai at all – especially in the light of Blagolepov’s sudden demise.

‘He simply got up and left.’

‘For no reason at all?’

The Yakuza started thinking hard.

‘The captain was sitting there, dozing. With his back to the room. I think someone walked past behind him and woke him. Yes, yes! Some old man, totally doped. He staggered and swung his arm and caught the captain on the neck. The captain woke up and swore at the old man. Then he said: “Boss, I’m not feeling too well, I’ll be going”. And he left.’

When he finished translating, Shirota added on his own behalf:

‘No, Mr Titular Counsellor, there’s nothing suspicious in that. The captain must have felt a pain in his heart. He got as far as his home and then died there.’

Erast Petrovich did not respond to this piece of deduction, but a slight narrowing of his eyes suggested that he was not entirely satisfied with it.

‘His hand caught his neck?’ he murmured thoughtfully.

‘What?’ asked Shirota, who had not heard.

‘What is this bandit going to do now? His gang has been massacred, after all,’ Fandorin asked, but without any great interest: he simply did not wish to let the clerk know what he was thinking for the time being.

The bandit replied briefly and vigorously.

‘He says he is going to thank you.’

The determined tone in which these words were spoken put the titular counsellor on his guard.

‘What does he mean by that?’

Shirota explained with obvious approval:

‘Now you are his onjin for the rest of his life. Unfortunately, there is no such word in the Russian language.’ He thought for moment. ‘Benefactor to the grave. Can one say that?’

‘To the g-grave?’ Fandorin said with a shudder.

‘Yes, to the very grave. And he is your debtor to the grave. For not only did you save him from death, you also spared him indelible disgrace. For that, it is our custom to pay with supreme gratitude, even with our very life itself.’

‘What would I want with his life? Tell him “don’t mention it”, or whatever it is you say, and let him go on his way.’

‘When people say those words with such sincerity, they do not go on their own way,’ Shirota said reproachfully. ‘He says that from now on, you are his master. Wherever you go, he goes.’

The titch gave a low bow and stuck his little finger up in the air, which seemed rather impolite to Erast Petrovich.

‘Well, what does he say? Why does he not leave?’ asked the young Russian.

‘He will not leave. His oyabun has been killed, and so he has decided to devote his life to serving you. In proof of his sincerity, he offers to cut off his little finger.’

‘Oh, let him go to the d-devil!’ Fandorin exclaimed indignantly. ‘Tell him to hop it.’

The clerk did not dare argue with the annoyed vice-consul and started translating, but then stopped short.

‘In Japanese it is not possible to say simply “hop”, you have to explain where to.’

If not for the presence of a lady, Fandorin would gladly have provided the precise address, since his patience was running out – his first day in Japan had proved exhausting in the extreme.

‘Hop down the hill, like a grasshopper,’ said Fandorin, gesturing towards the waterfront with one hand.

A look of puzzlement flashed across the titch’s face, but immediately disappeared.

‘Kashikomarimashita,’ he said, and nodded.

He gathered himself, raised one foot off the ground and hopped off down the slope.

Erast Petrovich frowned. The blockhead could slip and break his leg on those cobbles. But damn him anyway, the vice-consul had more important business.

‘Tell me, Shirota, can you recommend a reliable doctor, capable of performing an autopsy?’

‘Reliable? Yes, I know a very reliable doctor. His name is Mr Lancelot Twigs. He is a sincere man.’

A rather strange recommendation for a medical man, thought the vice-consul.

From down below came a regular thudding, gradually growing more rapid – it was Fandorin’s debtor to the grave hopping down the cobbled street like a grasshopper.

Bruises will they bring,

the roadway’s rough cobblestones.

Honour’s path is hard.

A PERFECTLY HEALTHY CORPSE

‘I don’t understand a thing,’ said Dr Lancelot Twigs, peeling off the gloves covered in brownish-red spots and pulling the sheet up over the lacerated body. ‘The heart, liver and lungs are in perfect order. There’s no sign of any haemorrhaging in the brain – there was no need for me to saw open the brainpan. God grant every man such excellent health after the age of fifty.’

Fandorin glanced round at the door behind which Sophia Diogenovna had remained in Shirota’s care. The doctor had a loud voice, and the anatomical details he had mentioned might induce another outburst of hysterical sobbing. But then, how would this simple young woman know English?

The autopsy had taken place in the bedroom. They had simply removed the skinny mattress from the wooden bed, spread out oiled paper on the planks, and the doctor had set about his joyless task. Erast Petrovich had played the role of his assistant, holding a lantern and turning it this way and that, following the doctor’s instructions. At the same time, he himself tried to look away, so that he would not – God forbid! – collapse in a faint at the appalling sight. That is, when the doctor said: ‘Just take a look at that magnificent stomach!’ or ‘What a bladder! I wish I had one like that! Just look at it, will you!’, Fandorin turned round, he even nodded and grunted in agreement, but sensibly kept his eyes tightly shut. The smell alone was quite sufficient for the titular counsellor. It seemed as if this torture would never end.

The doctor was elderly and staid, but at the same time exceptionally talkative. His faded blue eyes had a genial glow to them. He had carried out his job conscientiously, from time to time running one hand over a bald spot surrounded by a faint halo of gingerish hair. But when it emerged that the cause of Captain Blagolepov’s death simply refused to be clarified, Twigs became excited, and the sweat started flowing freely across his bald cranium.

After one hour, two minutes and forty-five seconds (the exhausted Erast Petrovich had been timing things with his watch) Twigs finally capitulated.

‘I am obliged to state that this is a perfectly healthy corpse. This was a heroically robust organism, especially when one considers the protracted use by the deceased of the dried lacteal juice of the seed cases of Papaver somniferum. Nothing, apart perhaps from traces of tobacco resins ingrained in the throat and a slight darkening of the lungs – here, see?’ (Without even looking, Erast Petrovich said: ‘Oh, yes’.) ‘He has the heart of an ox. And it suddenly goes and stops, for no reason at all. I’ve never seen anything like it. You should have seen my poor Jenny’s heart.’ Twigs sighed. ‘The muscles were like threadbare rags. When I opened up the thoracic cavity, I simple wept for pity. The poor soul had a really bad heart, the second birth wore it out completely.’

Erast Petrovich already knew that Jenny was the doctor’s deceased wife and that he had decided to perform her autopsy in person, because both of his daughters also had weak hearts, like their mother, and he needed to take a look to see what the problem was – ailments of that kind were often inherited. It turned out to be a moderately severe prolapse of the bicuspid valve and, possessing that important piece of information, the doctor had been able to arrange the proper treatment for his adored little ones. Fandorin listened to this amazing story, not knowing whether he should feel admiration or horror.

‘Did you check the cervical vertebrae carefully?’ Erast Petrovich asked, not for the first time. ‘As I said, he might have been struck on the neck, from behind.’

‘There’s no trauma. Not even a bruise. Only a little red spot just below the base of the skull, as if from a slight burn. But it’s quite out of the question for a trifle like that to have any serious consequences. Perhaps there was no blow?’

‘I don’t know,’ said the young man, already regretting that he had started this rigmarole of the autopsy. Who knew what might stop the heart of an inveterate opium addict?

The dead man’s clothing was hanging on a chair. Erast Petrovich looked thoughtfully at the badly worn back of the tunic, the patched shirt with the buttoned collar – the very cheapest kind, celluloid. And suddenly he leaned down.

‘There was no blow as such, but there was a touch!’ he exclaimed. ‘Look, right here, the imprint left by a f-finger. Although it could have been Blagolepov’s own hand,’ the vice-consul added disappointedly. ‘He was fastening his collar, and he took a grip…’

‘Well, that’s not hard to clear up.’ The doctor took out a large magnifying glass and squatted down beside the chair. ‘Aha. The thumb of the right hand.’

‘You can tell that from a glance?’ asked Fandorin, astounded.

‘Yes, I’ve taken a bit of an interest. You see, my friend Henry Folds, who works in a hospital in Tokyo, made a curious discovery. While studying the prints left by fingers on old Japanese ceramics, he discovered that the pattern on the pads of the fingers is never repeated…’ Twigs walked over to the bed, took the dead man’s right hand and examined the thumb through the magnifying glass. ‘No, this is a quite different thumb. No doubt at all about it… And so Mr Folds proposed a curious hypothesis, according to which…’

‘I have read about fingerprints,’ Erast Petrovich interrupted impatiently, ‘but the European authorities do not see any practical application for the idea. Why don’t you check if it matches the spot with the mark that you spoke about?’

The doctor unceremoniously raised the dead head with its top sawn off and doubled right over.