Fandorin in English 1-10

‘Well?’ the inspector asked, pouncing on Fandorin without so much as a ‘hello’ or ‘how are you’. ‘I’ve been waiting for a week already. I can’t bear it any longer. Do you know that yesterday Suga was appointed the intendant of police? The old intendant was dismissed for failing to protect the minister… I am burning up inside. I cannot eat, I cannot sleep. Have you thought of anything?’

Erast Petrovich felt ashamed. He could not eat or sleep either, but for a completely different reason. He had not remembered Asagawa even once during the last few days.

‘No, n-not yet…’

The inspector’s shoulders slumped dejectedly, as if he had been deprived of his last hope.

‘Yes, of course…’ he said morosely. ‘In your European terms there is nothing to be done here. No clues, no evidence, no witnesses.’ He turned even paler and shook his head decisively. ‘Well, so be it. If we cannot do it in the European away, I shall act in the Japanese way.’

‘What is “the Japanese way”?’

‘I shall write a letter to His Majesty the Emperor, expounding all my suspicions concerning Intendant Suga. And I shall kill myself to prove my sincerity.’

‘Kill yourself? Not Suga?’ exclaimed Fandorin, dumbfounded.

‘To kill Suga would not be to punish a criminal, but to commit a new crime. We have an ancient, noble tradition. If you wish to attract the attention of the authorities and the public to some villainy – commit seppuku. A deceitful man will not cut his stomach open.’ Asagawa’s eyes were inflamed and melancholy. ‘But if only you knew, Fandorin-san, how terrible it is to commit seppuku without a second, without someone who will put an end to your suffering with a merciful sword-stroke! Unfortunately, I have no one to turn to with this request, my colleagues will never agree. I am entirely alone…’ Suddenly he started and seized the vice-consul’s arm. ‘Perhaps you? Only one stroke! I have a long neck, it will not be hard to hit it!’

Fandorin recoiled and exclaimed:

‘G-good Lord Almighty! I have never even held a sword!’

‘Only one stroke! I will teach you. If you practise for an hour with a bamboo pole, you will manage it perfectly. I implore you. Do me this invaluable service!’

Seeing the expression on the other man’s face, the inspector broke off and took himself in hand with an effort.

‘All right,’ he said in a dull voice. ‘I am sorry for asking you. It was weakness. I am very ashamed.’

But Erast Petrovich was feeling even more ashamed. There were so many things in the world that were more important than wounded vanity, jealousy or an unhappy love! For instance, the aspiration to truth and justice. Moral integrity. Self-sacrifice in the name of justice.

‘Listen,’ the titular counsellor began agitatedly, squeezing the inspector’s slack arm. ‘You are an intelligent, modern, educated individual. What sort of barbarity is this – slicing your own stomach open! It’s a throwback to the Middle Ages! But the end of the nineteenth century is already in sight! I swear to you that we will think of something!’

But Asagawa would not listen to him.

‘I cannot live like this. As a European, you cannot understand this. Let there be no second! I shall not feel the pain. On the contrary, I shall free the pain that is burning me up inside. This villain has betrayed a great man who trusted him! He has kicked me aside with his boot, like a lump of mud! And now he is revelling in his victory. I cannot stand by and see villainy triumph. The criminal Suga is the head of the police! He is admiring himself in the mirror in his new uniform, he is moving into his new estate at Takarazaka! He is certain that the entire world is at his feet! This is intolerable!’

Erast Petrovich wrinkled up his forehead. Takarazaka? He had heard that name before somewhere.

‘What estate is th-that?’

‘A truly fine estate close to the capital. Suga won it at cards a few days ago. Oh, he is so lucky, his karma is strong!’

And then Fandorin remembered the conversation he had overheard in Bullcox’s study. ‘Well now, Onokoji, that is very Japanese,’ the Englishman had said. ‘To reprimand someone, and then reward him with promotion a week later.’ And the prince had replied: ‘This, my dear Algernon, is not a reward, he is merely occupying a position that has fallen vacant. But he will receive a reward, for doing the job so neatly. He will be given the suburban estate of Takarazaka. Ah, what plum trees there are there! What ponds!’

‘What’s wrong with you?’ the inspector asked, gazing at Fandorin in surprise.

The vice-consul replied slowly:

‘I think I know what to do. You and I have no evidence, but perhaps we will have a witness. Or at least an informer. There is someone who knows the true background to the murder.’

And Fandorin told Asagawa about the wily dandy who traded in others’ secrets. Asagawa listened avidly, like a condemned man listening to the announcement of his own reprieve.

‘Onokoji said that Suga had “done the job neatly”? Then the prince really does know a lot!’

‘More than you and I know, in any case. But the most interesting question is who rewarded the new intendant with such a generous gift. Is it possible to find out who the estate belonged to before?’

‘One of the deposed Shogun’s relatives. But Takarazaka was put up for bidding a long time ago. Anyone at all could have bought it and lost it straight away at cards. We shall find out, it is not difficult.’

‘But what can we do with the prince? It’s stupid to hope that he will testify voluntarily.’

‘Yes, he will,’ the inspector declared confidently. ‘Voluntarily and frankly.’ A bloom had appeared on Asagawa’s cheeks, his voice had become brisk and energetic. It was hard to believe that only ten minutes earlier this man had looked like a living corpse. ‘Onokoji is pampered and weak. And even more importantly, he is addicted to every possible kind of vice, including the forbidden kind. I have not touched him before, assuming that he was a good-for-nothing idler, basically harmless. And in addition, he has numerous protectors in high places. But now I shall arrest him.’

‘For what?’

Asagawa thought for no more than two seconds.

‘He goes down to the “Number Nine” almost every day. It’s the most famous brothel in Yokohama. Do you know it?’

Fandorin shook his head.

‘Ah yes, you haven’t been here for long… They have merchandise to suit all tastes there. For instance, the owner has a so-called “boarding school”, for lovers of little girls. You can find thirteen-year-olds, twelve-year-olds, sometimes even eleven-year-olds. It’s illegal, but since only foreign girls work at the “Number Nine”, we do not interfere, it is outside our jurisdiction. Onokoji is a great lover of “little ones”. I shall order the owner (he is in my debt) to tell me as soon as the prince secludes himself with a young girl. That is when he has to be arrested. I cannot do it myself, unfortunately – the arrest must be carried out by the municipal police.’

‘So we’ll be working with Sergeant Lockston again,’ Erast Petrovich said with a nod. ‘And tell me, are there any Russian subjects among the young prostitutes? That would justify my involvement in the matter.’

‘I think there is one Polish girl,’ Asagawa recalled. ‘I do not know what passport she has, though. Probably none at all, since she is a minor.’

‘The Kingdom of Poland is part of the Russian Empire, so the unfortunate victim of depravity could be a compatriot of mine. In any case, it is the vice-consul’s duty to check. Well now, Inspector, have you changed you mind about slicing open your stomach?’

The titular counsellor smiled, but Asagawa was serious.

‘You are right,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Seppuku is a throwback to the Middle Ages.’

Something round and hard struck Fandorin in the back. He looked round – it was a cricket ball. One of the sportsmen had thrown very wide of the target.

Erast Petrovich picked up the small, taut leather sphere and flung it to the far end of the pitch. When he turned back again, the inspector was gone – there were only white sprays of acacia swaying on the bushes.

Intoxicating,

Astounding the mind, a white

Spray of acacia

A LITTLE PIECE OF HAPPINESS

‘Well now, it’s worth a try,’ said Vsevolod Vitalievich, narrowing his reddish eyes. ‘If you can expose the intendant, that will be a powerful blow struck against the party of war. And your involvement in the investigation will not only free you of all suspicion of Okubo’s murder, it will significantly improve the value of Russia’s stock in Japan.’

Fandorin had found the consul in his dressing room, taking his morning tea. Doronin’s sparse hair was covered with a fine net, and his thin neck with the protruding Adam’s apple was visible in the open collar of his shirt.

Obayasi-san bowed and offered the visitor tea, but Erast Petrovich declined, with the lie that he had already had tea. For some reason he had no desire either to eat or drink. But his apathy had disappeared and the beat of his heart was strong and regular. The hunting instinct is every bit as ancient and powerful as the instinct to make love, thought the titular counsellor, glad that he was recovering the habit of rationalising his own feelings.

‘We shall not inform the ambassador of your new initiative,’ said Doronin, holding out his little finger as he raised his cup to his mouth, but he didn’t drink. ‘If we do, he will instruct Lieutenant Captain Bukhartsev to deal with it, and he will turn the whole business into a grand fiasco.’

Erast Petrovich shrugged.

‘Why bother His Excellency with unimportant trifles? This is very small beer: the vice-consul defending the interests of an underage victim of corruption. That’s all we’re talking about so far.’

And then Vsevolod Vitalievich uttered a most injudicious sentiment.

‘Do you know what true patriotism is?’ he asked, then raised one finger and declared: ‘To act for the good of the Homeland, even if it means going against the will of one’s superiors.’

The titular counsellor considered this adventurous maxim. He nodded in agreement.

‘Thank you for the aphorism, I f-feel it will prove useful to me in life on more than one occasion. And that being the case, I think I shall not tell you anything more. I shall act like a true patriot, that is, without the sanction of my superiors, at my own discretion. If anything goes wrong, I shall answer for everything. For the time being, let us consider that this conversation of ours never took place.’

Doronin flushed, jumped up off his chair and tore the net off his hair.

‘Just what sort of minor role do you think you are assigning to me, my dear sir! Equal shares in the profit, but if the venture makes a loss, please don’t be concerned about that? I’m a Russian diplomat, not a stock market speculator!’

Poor Obayasi, frightened by the sudden shouting, froze on the spot and put her hand over her mouth.

Erast Petrovich also got up off his chair.

‘Precisely,’ he said drily, piqued by that ‘my dear sir’. ‘You are a diplomat, the consul of the Russian Empire, and you must not think of your own role, but the good of the Fatherland.’

The conversation with Lockston was much simpler, with no highbrow introspection.

‘So if His Yellow-Bellied Excellency’s protectors grab us by the ass, I blame you for everything,’ the American summed up. ‘My job’s a cinch: there was a request from the Russian consulate, and I was obliged to comply. All the notes and protests are your department, Rusty.’

‘Precisely so.’

‘Then I’m in.’ The sergeant chuckled. ‘Stick a genuine daimyo in the slammer – I like the idea. That’ll teach them to go defiling our little girls! And if you can take that skunk Suga down a peg or two, I owe you a crate of genuine bourbon, one dollar ninety-nine a bottle. Why that ape, thinking he could give white men the run around! There I was with my men, guarding that swamp, while he was pulling his dirty little tricks. Walter Lockston won’t let anyone get away with that, especially some lousy, slanty-eyed aboriginal!’

The titular counsellor winced at the American manner of scorning other races and repeated the essential points.

‘You wait for the signal. The next time Onokoji shows up at “Number Nine”, the owner will plant the young Polish girl on him. Asagawa lets us know immediately. You hurry to the brothel and make an arrest at the scene of the c-crime. Then you summon the Russian vice-consul and the head of the Japanese police.’

They didn’t have to wait long for ‘the next time’.

That evening a courier arrived at the consulate, bearing an official note from Sergeant Lockston: an underage female, very probably a Russian subject, had been subjected to abuse.

Erast Petrovich responded to the summons immediately, taking the secretary Shirota with him to add greater formality to the proceedings.

The scene that greeted the representatives of Russia in the office of the head of the municipal police was perfectly scandalous. Two people were sitting facing the sergeant, whose visage was set in a predatory smile; Prince Onokoji and a skinny little girl – gaudily made up, but with her hair in plaits, tied with bows. Both arrestees were in a state of complete undress. Lockston had evidently escorted the fornicators to the station in the same condition in which they were caught.

The infuriated daimyo’s apparel consisted of two sheets (one round his loins, the other thrown across his shoulders) and a pair of silk socks with elastic suspenders.

The presumptive Russian subject was wrapped in a sheet, but by no means tightly, and unlike her accomplice, she gave no sign of being particularly agitated – she kept turning her bright little face this way and that, sniffing all the time, and at the sight of the vice-consul she crossed one leg over the other and toyed coquettishly with her sandal. The knee of this victim of molestation was as skinny as a frog’s paw.

‘Who is this?’ Onokoji squealed in English. ‘I demanded the presence of the Japanese authorities! You will answer for this! My cousin is a minister of court!’

‘These are representatives of the injured party’s state,’ Lockston declared solemnly. ‘Here you are, Mr Vice-Consul, I relinquish this unfortunate child into your custody.’

Fandorin cast a glance of disgust at the child molester and spoke compassionately to the young girl in Russian.

‘What is your name?’

She flirted with her heavily painted eyes, stuck the end of one plait into her mouth and drawled:

‘Baska. Baska Zaionchek.’

‘How old are you?’

After a moment’s thought, the unfortunate child replied:

‘Twenty.’

And in an entirely superfluous gesture, she showed him ten outstretched digits twice.

‘She says she is twenty years old?’ asked the prince, brightening up. ‘That is what she told you, right?’

Taking no notice of him, Erast Petrovich said slowly:

‘That is a great pity. If you were a juvenile, that is, underage, the Russian Empire, in my person, would have defended you. And then you could count on substantial c-compensation. Do you know what compensation is?’

Baska clearly did know what compensation was. She wrinkled up her forehead and examined the titular counsellor curiously. She jerked her leg, throwing off the sandal, scratched her foot and replied, swallowing her hard Polish ‘l’:

‘I wied to the gentewman. I’m fourteen.’ She thought for a little longer. ‘I wiw be soon. I’m stiw thirteen.’

This time she put up ten fingers first, then three.

‘She is thirteen,’ the vice-consul translated for Lockston.

The prince groaned.

‘My child, I can only protect your interests if you have Russian citizenship. So tell me, are you a subject of the empire?’

‘Tak,’ Baska said with a nod, crossing herself with three fingers, Orthodox-style, to prove the point – although she did it from left to right, as Catholics did. ‘Pan, the compensation – how much is it?

‘She is a Russian subject, we’ll take care of her,’ Erast Petrovich told the sergeant, and he reassured the girl: ‘You’ll b-be quite satisfied.’

Her presence was no longer required.

‘Why didn’t you let the poor creature get dressed?’ the vice-consul asked Lockston reproachfully. ‘The little child is frozen through. Mr Shirota will take her to her apartment.’

Baska didn’t really look chilly at all. On the contrary, keeping her eyes on the interesting man with the dark hair, she opened the sheet as if by accident and Fandorin blinked: the juvenile Zaionchek’s breasts were developed well beyond her age. Although the devil only knew how old she really was.

So Shirota led the injured party away and Erast Petrovich stayed to attend to the drawing up of the minutes. And soon after that the representative of the Japanese side turned up – Inspector Asagawa, the head of the indigenous police.

The prince threw himself at the inspector, waving his arms in the air and jabbering something in Japanese.

‘Quiet!’ Lockston roared. ‘I demand that all conversations be conducted in a language comprehensible to the injured party.’

The injured party – in this case Erast Petrovich – nodded sombrely.

‘The individual styling himself Prince Onokoji has said he can obtain a promotion for me if I hush this case up,’ Asagawa announced imperturbably.

The arrested man gazed round at all three of them with a hunted look and his eyes glinted, as if the realisation was dawning that he had not ended up in the police station by chance. But even so, he drew the wrong conclusion.

‘All right, all right.’ He chuckled, holding his hands up in a gesture of surrender. ‘I can see I’ve been caught. You arranged it all very neatly. But you are in for a disappointment, gentlemen. Did you think that because I am a prince I have pockets full of money? I am afraid not. I am as poor as a shrine turtle. You won’t make much out of me. I’ll tell you how all this will end. I’ll spend the night in your lock-up and tomorrow someone from the ministry will come and collect me. You’ll wind up with nothing.’

‘What about the disgrace?’ said Asagawa. ‘You, a scion of an ancient and glorious line, are involved in a dirty little scandal. Your patrons may perhaps get you released, but then they will break off all relations with you. Society will shun you, as if you had the plague. No more protection, no more charity from relatives.’

Onokoji narrowed his eyes. This man was clearly far from stupid.

‘What do you want from me? I can see that you’re leading up to something. Tell me straight out. If the price is fair, we’ll strike a deal.’

Asagawa and Fandorin exchanged glances.

‘Suga,’ the inspector said in a quiet voice. ‘We want Suga. Tell us everything you know about his part in the assassination of Minister Okubo, and we will let you go.’

The prince’s face blenched as rapidly as if he had daubed a paintbrush dunked in lead white across his forehead and cheeks.

‘I know nothing about that…’ he babbled.

‘A week ago you told Algernon Bullcox about the reward in store for Suga for doing the job so neatly,’ said Fandorin, joining the game. ‘Don’t deny it, there’s no point.’

The prince gaped at the vice-consul in horror – he evidently had not been expecting an attack from this quarter.

‘How do you…? We were alone in the room, just the two of us!’ Onokoji batted his eyelids in confusion.

Erast Petrovich was certain that this puny playboy would flinch and falter now. But instead it was the titular counsellor who flinched.

‘Ah!’ the prisoner exclaimed. ‘It’s his concubine, isn’t it? She’s spying for the Russians? But of course! There weren’t any servants in the house, only her!’

‘What concubine? Who are you talking about?’ Fandorin asked hastily (perhaps rather too hastily). His heart shrank in horror. The very last thing he wanted was to get O-Yumi into trouble! ‘You shouldn’t chat b-beside open windows where anybody at all might overhear you.’

It was hard to tell whether he had succeeded in diverting Onokoji from his dangerous suspicion with this retort. But the prince refused to speak openly.

‘I won’t say a thing,’ he blurted out sullenly. ‘Disgrace may be unpleasant, but my life means more to me… Your agent got things confused. I don’t know anything of the sort about Intendant Suga.’

And after that he stuck to his guns. Threats of scandal had no effect on him. Onokoji simply kept repeating his demand for the Tokyo police to be informed of the arrest of a member of the higher nobility, a first cousin of four generals and two ministers, a schoolfellow of two Imperial Highnesses, and so on, and so forth.

‘Japan will not allow the Prince Onokoji to be held in a foreign lock-up,’ he declared in conclusion.

Is he right? was the question in Fandorin’s glance at the inspector. Asagawa nodded.

Then what can we do?

‘Tell me, Sergeant, I expect you are probably very busy with correspondence, reports and all sorts of documents?’ Asagawa asked.

‘No, not really,’ answered Lockston, surprised.

‘Oh, come now,’ the inspector insisted. ‘You are responsible for the entire Settlement. Citizens of fifteen different states live here, there are so many ships in the port, and you have only one pair of hands.’

‘That’s true,’ the sergeant admitted, trying to understand what the Japanese was driving at.

‘I know that under the law you are obliged to inform us of the arrest of a Japanese subject within twenty-four hours, but you might not be able to meet that deadline.’

‘Probably not. I’ll need two or three days. Maybe even four,’ said the American, starting to play along.

‘So, I’ll receive official notification from you in about four days. I’m very busy as well. Not enough staff, I’m barely keeping up. It could be another three days before I can report to the department.’

Onokoji listened to this conversation with increasing alarm.

‘But listen, Inspector!’ he exclaimed. ‘You’re already here! You know that I have been arrested by foreigners.’

‘It’s not a matter of what I know. I have to be informed about this officially, according to the prescribed procedure,’ said Asagawa, raising one finger in admonishment.

The titular counsellor had absolutely no idea what this strange manoeuvre signified, but he did notice the prisoner’s face twitch in a strange way.

‘Hey, Orderly!’ the sergeant shouted. ‘Put this one in a cell. And send to the brothel for his clothes.’

‘Where will dragging things out like this get us?’ Fandorin asked in a low voice when the prince had been led away.

Asagawa didn’t answer, he just smiled.

Once again it was night. And once again Erast Petrovich was not sleeping. He wasn’t tormented by insomnia, it was as if sleep had ceased to exist, as if the need for it had fallen away. Or perhaps it was all because the titular counsellor was not simply lying in bed – he was listening. He had left the door into the corridor open, and several times he thought he heard the porch creak gently under light footsteps, as if someone was standing there in the darkness, unable to make up their mind to knock. Once, unable to bear it any longer, Fandorin got up, walked through quickly into the hallway and jerked the door open. Naturally, there was nobody on the porch.

When the knock finally did come, it was loud and abrupt. O-Yumi could not possibly knock like that, so Erast Petrovich’s heart did not skip a beat. He lowered his feet off the bed and started pulling on his boots. Masa was already leading his nocturnal visitor along the corridor.

The visitor was a constable from the municipal police: the sergeant requested that Mr Vice-Consul come to the station urgently.

Fandorin walked rapidly along the dark Bund, tapping with his cane. Masa plodded along behind, yawning. It was pointless trying to argue with him.

Fandorin’s servant did not go into the police station. He sat on the steps, hung his short-cropped head and drifted into a doze.

‘The Jap’s got convulsions,’ Lockston told the vice-consul. ‘He’s yelling and banging his head against the wall. Has he got epilepsy, then? I told them to tie him up, to stop him harming himself. I sent for you, Asagawa and Dr Twigs. The doc’s already here, the inspector hasn’t arrived yet.’

Soon Asagawa showed up too. He listened to the sergeant’s story without any sign of surprise.

‘So soon?’ he said, but still didn’t explain anything. The inspector’s strange composure and the meaning of the ‘manoeuvre’ were explained when Dr Twigs entered the room.

‘Good evening, gentlemen,’ he said, greeting the titular counsellor and the inspector. ‘It’s not epilepsy. It’s a perfectly ordinary withdrawal syndrome. Hence the convulsions. This man is an inveterate morphine addict. The veins on his arms are covered in needle marks. And of course, there are the consequences of a hysterical personality and a weak character, but, generally speaking, at that stage a man can’t manage without another dose for more than twelve hours.’

‘Didn’t I tell you, Fandorin-san, that the prince is given to every possible vice that exists,’ Asagawa remarked. ‘He’ll start singing a different tune for us now. Let’s go.’

The cell was a recess in the wall of the corridor, fenced off with thick iron bars.

Onokoji was sitting on a wooden bunk with his hands and his feet tied. He was shaking violently and his teeth were chattering.

‘Doctor, give me a shot!’ he shouted. ‘I’m dying! I feel terrible!’

Twigs glanced enquiringly at the others.

Lockston chewed imperturbably on his cigar. Asagawa surveyed the sick man with a satisfied air. Only the vice-consul was clearly ill at ease.

‘Never mind,’ said the sergeant. ‘You’ll get out in week or so, you can stick yourself then.’

The prince howled and doubled over.

‘This is torture,’ Fandorin said in a low voice. ‘Say what you will, gentlemen, but I do not wish to obtain information by such methods.’

The inspector shrugged.

‘How are we torturing him? He is torturing himself. I don’t know how things are in your countries, but in Japanese jails we don’t give prisoners narcotics. Perhaps the municipal police have different rules? Do you keep morphine to ease the suffering of morphine addicts?’

‘Like hell we do,’ said Lockston, shaking his head in admiration. ‘Well, Go, you old son of a gun. I could learn a thing or two from you.’

On this occasion Goemon Asagawa did not protest about the American’s familiarity, he just smiled at the flattery.

‘This is a genuine discovery!’ the sergeant continued, waxing more and more enthusiastic. ‘Think of the prospects this opens up for police work! What do you do if a criminal clams up and refuses to inform on his accomplices? They used to stretch him on the rack, burn him with red-hot tongs and all the rest of it. But, firstly, that’s uncivilised. And secondly, there are some tough nuts you can’t crack with any torture. But with this – away you go. All very cultured and scientific! Get a stubborn character like that hooked on morphine and then – bang – stop giving him any. He’ll be only too delighted to tell you everything. Listen, Go, I’ll write an article about this for the Police Gazette. Of course, I’ll mention your name. Only the idea is mine, after all. You came across it by chance, but I invented the method. You wouldn’t dispute that, would you, my friend?’ Lockston asked anxiously.

‘I wouldn’t, Walter, I wouldn’t. You don’t even need to mention me at all.’ The inspector walked over to the bars and looked at the sobbing prince. ‘Tell me, Doctor, could you find an ampoule of morphine and a syringe in that bag of yours?’

‘Of course.’

Onokoji straightened up, gazing at Asagawi imploringly.

‘Well, Your Excellency, shall we have a talk?’ the inspector asked him cordially.

The prisoner nodded, licking his purple lips.

Erast Petrovich frowned, but said nothing – the Japanese inspector was in charge now.

‘Thank you, Doctor,’ said Asagawi. ‘Fill the syringe and leave it with me. You can go home to bed.’

Twigs clearly did not wish to leave. He ran a curious eye over the bound man and rummaged slowly in his bag, opened the ampoule without hurrying and took a long time to examine the syringe.

No one was intending to initiate the doctor into their secret game of backstage politics, but it simply happened anyway.

‘Come on, quickly, quickly!’ the prince shouted. ‘For God’s sake! Why are you dawdling like that? One little injection, and I’ll tell you all I know about Suga!’

Twigs pricked up his ears at that.

‘About whom? Suga? The intendant of police? What has he done?’

There was nothing for it – they had to explain. And so the group that had investigated the case of Captain Blagolepov’s strange death was reconstituted. Only now it had a different status. They were not official investigators but, rather, conspirators.

Almost as soon as the prisoner had been untied and injected, he turned pink, started smiling and became jaunty and talkative. He spoke a lot, but told them very little of real substance.

According to Onokoji, the new intendant of police had taken part in the conspiracy against the great reformer because he was nursing a grudge – he felt offended at having been subordinated to a worthless little aristocrat with connections in high places. Being a man of intelligence and cunning, Suga had planned the plot in such a way as to achieve two goals at once: take revenge on the minister, who had failed to appreciate his true worth, and land the responsibility on his immediate superior, in order to take his place. Suga had succeeded wonderfully well. The public, of course, might repeat all sorts of rumours, but once a lion is dead, he ceases to be the king of beasts and becomes plain ordinary carrion, and no one was interested in the late Okubo any more. There were new winds blowing at the highest levels; the dead minister’s favourites were making way for appointees from the opposite party.

‘Is Suga’s involvement in the conspiracy just rumour or authenticated f-fact?’ asked Fandorin, disappointed by this frivolous tittle-tattle.

The prince shrugged.

‘Naturally, there is no proof, but my information is usually reliable. Otherwise I would have starved to death a long time ago. That skinflint Tsurumaki, who owes everything to our family, pays me such a pitiful allowance that it’s barely enough for decent shirts.’

Five thousand yen a month, Fandorin recalled. Twenty vice-consular salaries.

‘And who led the c-conspiracy? From whom did Suga receive the estate of Tarazaka as his reward?’

‘The samurai of Satsuma set up an entire organisation, and all the members swore to kill the traitor Okubo. Those people prepared for a long hunt, they collected a lot of money. It would have been enough for a dozen estates.’

Further questioning produced nothing. Onokoji repeated the same things over and over again, occasionally veering into high-society gossip, and finally wore his interrogators down.

Eventually, having realised that they wouldn’t discover anything else useful, they moved away and tried to work out a plan of further action.

‘Apart from the certainty that Suga is guilty and a few other details unconfirmed by any proof, we have nothing,’ Erast Petrovich said acidly, no longer doubting that it had been a waste of time to stir up this whole mess. The cunning and morally dubious operation had produced very little.

Asagawa was gloomy too, but he remained determined.

‘But even so, we cannot pull back now. Suga must pay for his villainy.’

‘How about this?’ Lockston suggested. ‘The intendant receives an anonymous letter that says: “You think you’re a sly dog and you’ve sold everyone a pup, but you’ve slipped up, hombre. I’ve got something on you. I don’t give a cuss for Okubo, he got what was coming to him, but I’m in desperate need of money. Come to such-and-such a place at such-and-such a time: I’ll give you the evidence, and you give me – let’s say, ten thousand”. And to make it convincing, slip in a few details about his dirty dealings: the stolen reports, the gag and the estate. At the very least Suga will get alarmed, he’ll want to take a look at this blackmailer and see what he’s got. If he doesn’t send a detachment of police to the rendezvous and comes himself, that alone will give him away, hook, line and sinker. How’s that for a plan?’ the sergeant asked, giving his comrades a boastful look. ‘Not bad, eh?’

The titular counsellor disappointed him.

‘Terrible. No good at all. Of course Suga won’t come. He’s no fool.’

Lockston wouldn’t surrender.

‘So he’ll send some police? I don’t think so. He won’t want to take the risk. What if the blackmailer really does have some evidence?’

‘And there won’t be any p-police. More Satsumans will just turn up and slice us to ribbons.’

‘Mm, yes, that is very likely,’ the doctor admitted.

The inspector didn’t say anything, merely frowned even more darkly.

The disputants fell silent.

‘Hey! What are you whispering about over there?’ Onokoji shouted, walking up to the bars. ‘If you don’t know how to get Suga’s back to the wall, I’ll tell you! And in exchange you’ll let me out of here. All right?’

The four of them all turned towards the prisoner together and spontaneously moved towards the cell.

The prince held his open hand out through the bars.

‘One ampoule in reserve. And the syringe. As an advance.’

‘Give them to him,’ Asagawa told the doctor. ‘If he talks nonsense, we’ll take them away again.’

Savouring the moment, the high-society gent kept his audience in suspense for a brief moment while he brushed a speck of dust off his rather crumpled frock coat and adjusted his lapel. He carefully placed the ampoule in his waistcoat pocket, after first kissing it and whispering: ‘Oh, my little piece of happiness!’ He smiled triumphantly.

‘Ah, how little I am appreciated!’ he exclaimed. ‘And how poorly I am paid. But the moment they need something, they come running to me: “Tell us, find out, pick someone’s brains”. Onokoji knows everything about everybody. Mark my words, gentlemen. In the century to come, which it is unlikely that I shall live to see, owing to my physical frailty, the most valuable commodity will be information. More valuable than gold, diamonds or even morphine!’

‘Stop blabbering!’ the sergeant roared. ‘Or I’ll take it back!’

‘See how the red-hairs talk to the scion of an ancient Japanese family,’ the prince complained to Asagawa, but when the inspector grabbed him menacingly by the lapels, he stopped playing the fool.

‘Mr Suga is a great pedant. A genuine poet of the bureaucratic art. Therein lies the secret of his power. During his years in the police department he has collected a secret archive of hundreds of files.’

‘I’ve never heard about that,’ said the inspector, shaking his head.

‘Naturally. Neither had I. Until one fine day Suga called me into his office and showed me something. Ah, I am a man of lively fantasy, I flit through life like a butterfly. It is not hard to catch my delicate wings with crude fingers. You, gentlemen, are not the first to have done so…’ The prince sighed woefully. ‘On that day, in the course of a conversation that was most unpleasant for me, Suga boasted that he had similar picklocks to open up many highly influential individuals. Oh, Mr Intendant understands perfectly well the great future that lies ahead for information!’

‘What did he want from you?’ Fandorin asked.

‘The same as everyone else. Information about a certain person. And he received it. You see, the contents of my file are such that I did not dare to argue.’

The sergeant chuckled.

‘Underage girls?’

‘Ah, if only… But there’s no need for you to know about it. What matters to you is that I gave Suga what he wanted, but I didn’t want to remain a puppet in his hands for ever afterwards. I turned to certain masters of secret arts for help – not in person, naturally, but through an intermediary.’

‘Masters of secret arts?’ Twigs exclaimed. ‘You wouldn’t be talking about shinobi, would you?’

The doctor and the vice-consul exchanged glances. Was this really possible?

‘Precisely,’ Onokoji said, as if that were perfectly normal, and yawned, putting his elegantly manicured hand over his mouth. ‘To the dear, kind ninja.’

‘S-so… So they do exist?’

Lurid images appeared before Erast Petrovich’s eyes – first the gaping jaws of the snake, then the red mask of the man with no face. The vice-consul shuddered.

The doctor shook his head mistrustfully.

‘If the ninja had survived, people would know about it.’

‘Those who need to know, do know,’ the prince said with a shrug. ‘Those who trade in these arts do not print advertisements in the newspapers. Our family has been employing the services of the Momochi clan for three hundred years.’

‘The same clan? The descendants of the great Momochi Tambi, who killed the witch disguised as a moon with his arrow?’ the doctor asked in a trembling voice.

‘Aha. The very same.’

‘So in 1581 on Mount Hijiyama the samurais didn’t kill all of them? Who escaped?’

‘On which mount?’ Onokoji was clearly not well informed about the history of his own country. ‘I’ve no idea. All I know is that the masters of the Momochi clan serve a very narrow circle of clients and charge very dearly for their services. But they know their job well. My intermediary, my late father’s senior samurai, contacted them and gave them the commission. The shinobi discovered where Suga hides his secrets. If you’re interested in the conspiracy against Okubo, you can be certain that all the information you need is kept there. Suga does not destroy documents, they are his investment in the future.’

‘I have no doubt that my missing reports are there too!’ Asagawa said rapidly, turning to Fandorin.

But the vice-consul was more concerned with the masters of secret arts.

‘But how do people contact the ninja?’ he asked.

‘At our court it was the senior samurai who dealt with that. The prince’s most trusted adviser. They always come from the same family and have served our family for almost four hundred years. That is, they used to serve…’ Onokoji sighed. ‘There are no more principalities or devoted vassals now. But our senior samurai, a most magnanimous man, carried out my request for old times’ sake. He even paid Momochi the advance out of his own funds. An old man with a heart of pure gold – to do that he had to mortgage his family estate. The shinobi did a good job and, as I already said, they found the hiding place, But they didn’t enter it, they wanted more money for that – those were the terms of the arrangement. And as bad luck would have it, I was going through a dry spell at the time, and I couldn’t make the payment. The ninja are very sensitive about that sort of thing. If the client breaks the terms, that’s the end of him. They’ll kill him, and in some nightmarish fashion too. Oh, they’re terrible people, truly terrible.’

‘But you seem to be alive, my friend,’ Lockston remarked.

The prince was astonished.

‘What do I have to do with it? The client was our vassal. And he was the one who had to answer to them. The old man fell ill all of a sudden, out of the blue, with a very strange complaint. His tongue swelled up and fell out of his mouth, then his skin turned black and his eyes melted out of their sockets. The poor fellow screamed in agony for two days and then he died. You know, the shinobi are virtuosos at preparing all sorts of unusual potions, both for healing and for killing. They say that the shinobi can…’

‘Oh, damn the shinobi!’ the sergeant interrupted, to Erast Petrovich’s considerable displeasure. ‘Where’s the hiding place? Did the samurai get a chance to tell you?’

‘Yes, the hiding place is always within Suga’s reach. Last year they built a new headquarters for the police department, in the Yaesu district. Suga, who was vice-intendant at the time, supervised the building work in person, and unknown to almost anyone, he had a secret room built adjacent to his office. The work was carried out by an American architect, who later drowned. Do you remember that sad story? All the newspapers wrote about it. In gratitude for their good work, the police department organised a steamboat cruise for the architect and the best workers, but then, didn’t the boat go and capsize… And the best workers included the three who built the secret room.’

‘What villainy!’ the inspector gasped. ‘Now I understand why Suga stayed in his old office when he was put in charge of the department. And everyone in the department admires his modesty!’

‘How does one gain access to the secret room?’ Fandorin asked.

‘I don’t know exactly. There’s a cunning lever somewhere – that’s all the shinobi told my old samurai. I don’t know any more than that, gentlemen, but you must admit that my information is highly valuable to you. I think you ought to let me go immediately.’

Asagawa and Fandorin glanced at each other.

‘We’ll see about that when we get back,’ said the inspector. ‘But you have earned your little bit of happiness.’

Hard though you may try,

You can’t pinch off a little

Piece of happiness

2.18

Two of them went off on ‘the job’ (that was what Fandorin called the operation to himself, in criminal style). The doctor, as the father of a family and a law-abiding member of society, did not express any desire to participate in such a risky undertaking. Lockston did express such a desire, but he was refused. Entirely abandoning his Japanese politeness, Asagawa declared that the American smelled of cigar smoke and beer from a mile away and Japanese did not smell like that. And his light blond hair would stand out too clearly in the darkness. At least the Russian vice-consul had hair that was a normal colour. Left alone with Erast Petrovich, the inspector was even less complimentary about the sergeant: ‘This matter requires brains, and our American bison knows no other way but to go at something bald-headed.’

The day was spent in preparation. Asagawa went to the police department, supposedly on official business, but really with one very simple goal: he filed down the tongue of the bolt on the window of the toilet. The titular counsellor prepared his outfit for the nocturnal adventure – he bought a costume mask and a close-fitting black fencing costume, and smeared his rubber-soled gymnastic shoes with boot polish.

He tried to catch up on his sleep, but he couldn’t.

When it started to get dark, he sent Masa to the Grand Hotel for the evening paper so that he wouldn’t follow him, and hurried to catch the last train.

He and the inspector travelled in the same carriage, but they sat at opposite ends and didn’t look at each other.

Looking out of the window at the lights drifting by in the darkness, Fandorin was surprised at himself. Why had he got mixed up in this wild adventure? What had made him gamble with his own honour and the honour of his country like this? It was terrible to think what the consequences would be if he, the Russian vice-consul, were caught at night in the office of the intendant of police. What made it worth taking such a risk? The chance to expose a scheming local official who was responsible for the death of another local official? Why, damn the lot of them!

The interests of Russia require it, Fandorin tried to convince himself rather uncertainly. By bringing down Suga, I shall strike a blow at a party hostile to the interests of my Homeland.

He was not convinced. After all, he himself had always said that no interests of the Homeland (at least, its geopolitical interests) could be more important than personal honour and dignity. A most honourable activity, this was – to go rifling through other people’s secret hiding places, dressed up like a chimney sweep.

Then he tried to justify things differently, from Asagawa’s point of view. There was such a thing as Justice, and also Truth, which it was the duty of every noble man to defend. One could not allow infamous acts to be committed with impunity. By conniving at them or washing one’s hands of the matter, one became an accomplice, you insulted your own soul and God.

But for all their grandeur, these highly moral considerations somehow failed to touch the titular counsellor very deeply. It was not a matter of defending Justice. After all, in weaving his plot, Suga could have been guided by his own ideas of Truth, which differed from Fandorin’s. In any case, there was no point in Erast Petrovich deceiving himself – he had not embarked on this nocturnal escapade for the sake of words that were written with a capital letter.

He rummaged about inside himself for a bit longer and finally came up with the right reason. Fandorin did not like it, for it was simple, unromantic and even ignominious.

I could not have borne one more sleepless night waiting for a woman who is never going to come again, the titular counsellor told himself honestly. Anything at all, any kind of folly, but not that.

And when the locomotive hooted as it approached the final station of Nihombasi, the vice-consul suddenly thought: I’m poisoned. My brain and my heart have been affected by a slow-acting venom. That is the only possible explanation.

And after thinking that, he calmed down immediately, as if now everything had fallen into place.

While there were still passers-by on the streets, Erast Petrovich maintained his distance from his partner. He walked along with the air of an idle tourist, casually swinging the briefcase that contained his spy’s outfit.

But soon they reached the governmental office district, where there were no people, because office hours had finished ages ago. The titular counsellor cut down the distance until he was almost walking in tandem with the inspector. From time to time Asagawa explained something in a low voice.

‘You see the white building at the far side of the bridge? That is the Tokyo Municipal Court. It’s only a stone’s throw from the department.’

Fandorin saw a white three-storey palace in the European Mauritanian style – rather frivolous for an institution of the judiciary. Behind it he could see a high wooden fence.

‘Over there?’

‘Yes. The estate of the princes Matsudaira used to be there. We won’t go as far as the gates, there’s a sentry.’

A narrow alley ran off to the left. Asagawa looked round, waved his hand, and the accomplices ducked into the dark, crevice-like passage.

They got changed quickly. The inspector also put on something black and close fitting, tied a kerchief round his head and muffled the lower half of his face in a rag.

‘This is exactly how the shinobi dress,’ he whispered with a nervous giggle. ‘Right, forward!’

They gained entrance to the site of the department very easily: Asagawa folded his hands into a stirrup, Fandorin set his foot in it and in an instant he was on top of the fence. Then he helped the inspector to scramble up. The police obviously didn’t have enough imagination to believe that miscreants might take it into their heads to break into the holy of holies of law and order voluntarily. In any case, there was no one patrolling the yard – just a figure in a uniform and cap over on the right, striding to and fro at the main entrance.

Asagawa moved quickly and confidently. Hunching over, he ran across to a low building in a pseudo-Japanese style, then along the white wall, past a long series of blank windows. The inspector stopped beside the window at the corner.

‘I think this is the one. Help me up.’

He put his arms round Fandorin’s neck, then stepped on the vice-consul’s half-bent knee with one foot, put the other on his shoulder, and grabbed hold of the window frame. He scraped with something, clicked something, and the small windowpane opened. Asagawa pulled himself up and seemed to be sucked into the black rectangle, so that only the lower half of his body was left outside. Then that disappeared into the window as well, and a few seconds later the large windowpane opened silently.

For form’s sake, before entering the building Erast Petrovich noted the time: seventeen minutes past eleven.

The arrangement of the Japanese toilet looked strange to him: a row of low cubicles that could only conceal a seated man up to the shoulders.

Fandorin discovered Asagawa in one of the wooden cells.

‘I advise you to relieve yourself,’ the black head with the strip of white for the eyes said in a perfectly natural tone of voice. ‘It is helpful before hazardous work. To prevent any trembling of the hara.’

Erast Petrovich thanked him politely, but declined. His hara was not trembling at all, he was simply oppressed by the melancholy presentiment that this business would not end well. Nonsensical thoughts about the next day’s newspaper headlines kept drifting into his mind, as they had done on that other memorable night: ‘RUSSIAN DIPLOMAT A SPY’, ‘OFFICIAL NOTE FROM JAPANESE GOVERNMENT TO RUSSIAN EMPIRE’ and even ‘JAPAN AND RUSSIA BREAK OFF DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS’.

‘Will you be much longer?’ the vice-consul asked impatiently. ‘It’s twenty-three minutes past eleven. The nights are short now.’

From the toilet they crept down a long, dark corridor, Asagawa on his twisted-straw sandals and Fandorin on his rubber soles. The department of police was sleeping peacefully. That’s what a low level of crime does for you, thought the titular counsellor, not without a twinge of envy. Along the way they encountered only a single office with a light burning, where some kind of night work seemed to be going on, and once a duty officer carrying a candle came out from round a corner. He yawned as he walked past, without even noticing the two black figures pressed back against the wall.

‘We’re here,’ Asagawa whispered, stopping in front of a tall double door.

He put a piece of metal into the keyhole (an ordinary picklock, Erast Petrovich noted), turned it and the accomplices found themselves in a spacious room: a row of chairs along the walls, a secretary’s desk, another door in the far corner. It was clearly the reception area. Consul Doronin had told Fandorin that six years earlier there had been a great bureaucratic reform. The functionaries had all been dressed in uniforms instead of kimonos and forced to sit on chairs, not on the floor. The bureaucracy had almost rebelled at first, but had gradually got accustomed to it. What a shame. It must have been very picturesque before. Imagine arriving at a government office, and the heads of department and clerks and secretaries are all dressed in robes and sitting there cross-legged. Fandorin sighed, lamenting the gradual displacement of the variety of life by European order. In a hundred years’ time everything would be the same everywhere, you wouldn’t be able to tell whether you were in Russia or Siam. How boring.

The room located beyond the reception area was also not in any way remarkable. An ordinary office of some important individual. One broad, short desk, and beyond it a long narrow table. Two armchairs on one side, for official conversations with important visitors. Bookshelves with codes of laws. A photographic portrait of the emperor hanging in the most prominent position. The only unusual thing, from the Japanese point of view, was the crucifixion hanging beside the image of the earthly ruler. Ah, yes, Suga was a Christian, he had a cross hanging round his neck too.

A fine follower of Christ, thought Erast Petrovich, shaking his head, but immediately felt ashamed: As if our own lovers of God don’t betray or kill.

Asagawa closed the curtains more tightly, lit an oil lamp and walked up to the titular counsellor. He seemed excited, almost triumphant.

‘I don’t know if we’ll find the hiding place or how all this will end, so I will say now what I must say. I should have come here alone. This is our Japanese business. My business. But I am very grateful to you, Fandorin-san, for volunteering to keep me company. I have more faith in your acumen than I do in my own. Without you, I would almost certainly not find the lever, but you are cunning. Almost as cunning as Intendant Suga.’

Erast Petrovich bowed ceremoniously, but the inspector did not understand the irony. He bowed in reply, only more deeply.

‘Do not think I do not understand how much more exalted your sacrifice is than mine. If we are caught, what is that to me, I shall merely take my life and bring disgrace on the clan of Asagawa, which has served the law honestly for two and a half centuries. But you will disgrace your country and your state. You are a very brave man, Fandorin-san.’

They exchanged bows again, this time without even a hint of playfulness on the vice-consul’s side, and set about their search.

First they sounded out the two side walls, then divided the office into left and right sections. Unlike the energetic inspector, who nimbly tapped all the skirting boards and floorboards in his half, checked all the items on the desk and then set about the books, Erast Petrovich hardly touched anything at all. He strode around unhurriedly, shining his little American torch on things. An excellent little item, the very latest design. It produced a bright, dense ray of light. When it started to fade – about every one and a half minutes – you had to pump a spring with your fingers, and the torch immediately came back to life.

He stood in front of the portrait for a while. His Majesty the Mikado was shown in military uniform, with epaulettes and a sword. Fandorin thought the young face with the sparse moustache bore the imprint of degeneracy (which was hardly surprising, considering the dynasty’s twenty-five centuries of genealogical history), but Emperor Mutsuhito’s gaze was searching and intent. Patient, cautious, secretive, unsure of himself, enquiring, thought the vice-consul, practising his physiognomics. A master of ninso would undoubtedly have seen far more, but even this was enough to tell that the young royal ruler would go far.

‘I’ve finished my half,’ Asagawa declared. ‘There’s nothing.’

‘Would you like to swap? By all means.’

Fandorin walked out into the centre of the room, sat on the conference table and dangled one leg. A quarter past twelve.

An archive was something that you needed often. So the answer was most likely one of two things: either a lever within easy reach that could be operated without getting up from the desk; or, on the contrary, the lever was located right beside the entrance to the secret compartment. Asagawa had examined everything on the desk very thoroughly indeed. So it must be the second option.

There were two walls in which the secret room could be hidden. The wall between the office and reception area could be eliminated, along with the external wall.

Fandorin walked backwards and forwards, scrutinising.

The clock on the wall struck one.

‘Have you moved that?’ the titular counsellor asked, pointing at the clock.

‘Of course,’ said Asagawa, wiping the sweat off his forehead. ‘I divided the room up into squares, I’m trying not to miss anything.’

Yes, the lever couldn’t be in the clock, Fandorin thought. The cleaner might trip it if he started dusting the timepiece. Or the person responsible for winding and adjusting it…

‘I’ve run out of squares,’ the inspector announced in a dejected voice. ‘What can we do? Try again…’

One forty-two. Where could the lever be? It wasn’t behind the wallpaper or the skirting boards. Or in the bookcase. Asagawa had lifted up the pictures too…

Erast Petrovich suddenly froze.

‘Tell me, did you touch the emperor’s portrait?’

‘Of course not. That’s impossible!’ The inspector actually shuddered at such a blasphemous suggestion.

‘But someone dusts it, don’t they?’

‘That sacred responsibility can only be performed by the owner of the office, with all appropriate respect. In my station no one would dare to touch the portrait of His Majesty that hangs over my desk. People wipe the dust from the emperor’s face in the morning, almost as soon as they get to work. With a special silk duster, after first bowing.’

‘I see. Well, now I’ll show you how the s-secret room opens.’

The titular counsellor took a chair, carried it across to the wall, climbed up on it and took hold of the portrait confidently with both hands. Asagawa gasped.

‘Like this,’ Erast Petrovich purred, swaying the frame to the left. Nothing happened. ‘Well then, like this.’

He swayed the frame to the right – again nothing. Fandorin pulled the portrait towards himself. He tugged it up, he tugged it down. Finally he turned it completely upside down. The poor inspector groaned and whimpered.

‘Damn! Could I really be mistaken?’

Erast Petrovich took the emperor down and tapped on the glass. The sound was hollow.

He angrily hung the portrait back up and it swayed to and fro in shock.

The young man felt ashamed. Not for his mistake, but for the lofty condescension with which he had drawled ‘I see’. The beam of his torch slid across the wallpaper, lighting up the horizontal beam of the crucifixion from above.

The titular counsellor caught his breath.

‘Tell me, who cleans the c-cross? Also the owner of the office?’

Fandorin jumped down on to the floor and moved the chair closer to the crucifixion. He scrambled back up again.

‘Of course. The cleaner wouldn’t dare. He knows it is a sacred object for your religion.’

‘Uh-huh. I can see that.’

The intendant obviously regarded the symbol of the Christian faith with less respect than the portrait of Emperor Mutsuhito – a thin layer of dust had accumulated on the black wood.

Erast Petrovich tried to move the crucifixion, but he couldn’t. Shining his torch a bit closer, he saw that the cross was not hung on the wall or nailed to it, but sunk slightly into its surface. Strange! So a special housing had been made for it?

He tried to pull it out. He couldn’t. Then he pressed it.

With a barely audible click, the crucifixion sank deeper into the wallpaper, leaving its edges protruding no more than an inch.

A second later there was a melodic clang, and a section of the wall moved aside rapidly, almost springing into the space behind the bookcase. A dark rectangle opened up, slightly lower than the height of a man.

‘That’s it! The secret hiding place!’ Asagawa cried, and glanced round at the door of the reception area, in case he had shouted too loudly.

Fandorin automatically glanced at his watch: two minutes to two.

‘Ah, what would I have done without you?’ the inspector exclaimed emotionally, almost with tears in his eyes, and dived into the dark hole.

But the vice-consul’s attention was caught by the arrangement of the secret room. In cross-section it was clearly visible: a layer of oak boards under the plaster, and then cork. That was why sounding out the walls hadn’t helped. The lever released powerful steel springs, which was why the partition jumped aside so fast. Fandorin wondered whether it closed in the same impetuous fashion or whether strength had to be applied.

Having satisfied his technical curiosity, Erast Petrovich followed his accomplice inside.

The repository of secrets proved to be a narrow room, but quite long – about ten paces. Its walls were entirely covered with shelving. Standing on the shelves were perfectly ordinary office files of various thicknesses. Asagawa took them down one by one, exclaimed something in Japanese and put them back again. The vice-consul also took one of the thicker ones. There were hieroglyphs drawn on the cover. The first two were easy, Erast Petrovich recognised them: ‘Eastern Capital’, that was ‘Tokyo’, but everything after that was gobbledegook to him.

‘What does it say here?’

‘Tokyo Provincial Government,’ Asagawa said after a swift glance. ‘But that’s nothing! There are ministers and members of the State Council here, even – you won’t believe it – members of the imperial family! Nothing is sacred to this man!’

‘And what does he have there about the empress?’ Fandorin asked curiously, glancing over the inspector’s shoulder.

He couldn’t see anything interesting on the page – just some note in the same old hieroglyphic scrawl – but the inspector nudged him away impolitely with his elbow.

‘I haven’t read it and I won’t allow you to! How infamous!’

He tore up the note and a few other pieces of paper in the file with trembling fingers.

‘Listen, it’s two minutes past two,’ the titular counsellor told him, pointing to his watch. ‘This isn’t what we came here for. Where’s the file with the conspirators?’

Owing to his hieroglyphic illiteracy, Erast Petrovich had nothing to occupy himself with. While Asagawa rummaged through the shelves, the young man shone his torch in all directions. He failed to discover anything of interest. There didn’t seem to be any lever inside the secret room, it could be opened and closed only from the outside. There were gas burners protruding from the ceiling – evidently the lighting could be switched on from the office, but there was no need for that, the torch and the lamp were quite adequate.

‘I have it!’ the inspector gasped. ‘It says “Okubo” on the spine.’ He started leafing feverishly through the pages. ‘Here are my missing reports, all three of them! And this is a report from the head of the police in the city of Kagosima. He says that according to reports from his agents, the sword master Ikemura Hyoske and two of his pupils have set out for Tokyo. Description: forty-five years old, a scar on the left side of his neck and his temple, left arm twisted. His nickname is Kamiyasuri – “Glasspaper”, because he covers the hilt of his sword with glass paper – his right hand is harder than steel. It’s him, the man with the withered arm! Wait, wait, there’s more here…’ Asagawa took out three sheets of paper covered with writing in a strange brown-coloured ink. ‘It’s an oath. Written in blood. “We, the undersigned, do hereby swear on our honour not to begrudge our lives in the name of an exalted goal – to exterminate the base traitor Okubo…” There are three such documents. One of them has six signatures – that is the group that killed the minister. The second document has three signatures, and the first one is Ikemura Hyoske’s. Our Satsumans! The third document has four signatures. So there was another group that remained undiscovered. The names are here, it will not be difficult to find the plotters before they can do anything else dangerous… We have won, Fandorin-san! We have Suga in our hands! With these oaths and the stolen reports we can pin him down!’

‘He was already in our hands anyway,’ Erast Petrovich remarked coolly. ‘This delightful little archive will cost him his head without any c-conspiracies.’

Asagawa shook his head.

‘Surely you do not think that I will allow all these abominations to come pouring out? There is so much filth here, so many family secrets! There would be a wave of suicides, divorces, scandals, resignations in disgrace. No, worse than that! The new minister would take the archive for his own use, he would announce that it has been destroyed, but keep the spiciest items – just in case.’

‘Then what is to be done?’

‘We are going to destroy all this poison. Without reading it.’

‘Very n-noble,’ declared Fandorin, who could not have savoured the Japanese secrets even if he had felt any desire to do so. ‘But what are these signs? They don’t look like hieroglyphs.’

He pointed to a sheet of paper lying at the very bottom of the file. Right at the centre there was a circle with a strange squiggle inside it. Lines ran out from the circle, connecting it with other, smaller circles.

‘No, those are not hieroglyphs,’ the inspector murmured, peering at the paper. ‘At least, not Japanese hieroglyphs. I have never come across any writing like this before.’

‘It looks like a diagram of the conspiracy,’ Fandorin suggested. ‘And in code too. It would be interesting to know who is symbolised by the c-circle at the centre.’

‘It must be Suga.’

‘Unlikely. He wouldn’t have denoted himself with some kind of doodle. He would just have drawn the circle and left it at that.’

They leaned down over the mysterious diagram, with their shoulders pressed against each other. Asagawa must have breathed in a lot of dust, because he sneezed, and the sound echoed loudly under the low vaulted ceiling.

‘You’re crazy!’ Fandorin hissed. ‘Quiet!’

The Japanese waved his hand nonchalantly and answered without lowering his voice.

‘What does it matter? We no longer have to hide. As soon as we’ve destroyed the unnecessary documents, I’ll call the duty officer and explain that…’

But he didn’t finish what he was about to say.

Without the slightest warning, the secret door slammed shut with that familiar metallic clang. The wall trembled slightly and the room was suddenly as silent as the grave.

Erast Petrovich’s first reaction was purely nervous – he glanced at his watch. It showed eighteen minutes past two.

If it is eighteen

Or nineteen minutes past two -

What’s the difference?

THE SCALES FALL FROM HIS EYES

For a few minutes the burglars who had fallen into a trap behaved in a perfectly normal and predictable way – they hammered on the impervious partition with their fists, tried to find a joint in the wall with their fingers and searched for some kind of knob or lever. Then Erast Petrovich left all the fussing about to his partner and sat down on the floor with his legs crossed.

‘It’s p-pointless,’ he said in a steady voice. ‘There isn’t any lever in here.’

‘But the door closed somehow! No one came into the office, we would have heard them – I closed the catch!’

Erast Petrovich explained.

‘A timing mechanism. Set to twenty minutes. I’ve read about doors like this. They use them in large bank safes and armoured repositories – where the loot can’t be carried out very quickly. Only the owner knows how much time he has before the spring is activated, but anyone who breaks in gets caught. Calm down, Asagawa. We’re not going to get out of here.’

The inspector sat down as well, right in the corner.

‘Never mind,’ he said cheerfully. ‘We’ll sit here until the morning, then let them arrest us. We have something to show the authorities.’

‘No one will arrest us. In the morning Suga will come to work and from the disorder in the office, he’ll realise that he’s had uninvited visitors. From the chair under the crucifixion, he’ll realise that there are mice in the trap. And he’ll leave us here to die of thirst. I must admit, I’ve always been afraid of dying that way…’

The words were spoken, however, without any particular feeling. The poisoning of heart and brain had evidently already affected the instinct of self-preservation. So be it, then, thirst it is, Erast Petrovich thought languidly. What difference does it make, in the end?

Fatalism is an infectious thing. Asagawa looked at the waning flame in his lamp and said thoughtfully:

‘Don’t worry. We won’t have time to die of thirst. We’ll suffocate before Suga arrives. There’s only enough air here for four hours.’

For a while they sat there without speaking, each of them alone with his own thoughts. Erast Petrovich, for instance, thought about something rather strange. It suddenly occurred to him that perhaps none of this really existed at all. The events of the last ten days had been too incredible, and he himself had behaved too absurdly – it was all delirious nonsense. Either a lingering dream or the monstrous visions of the afterlife. After all, no one really knew what happened to a person’s soul when it separated from the body. What if there were phantom-like processes that occurred, similar to dreaming? None of it had really happened: not the chase after the faceless assassin, or the pavilion at night beside the pond. In reality, Erast Petrovich’s life had been cut short at the moment when the grey and brown mamusi fixed its beady stare on his face while he was lying helpless. Or even earlier – when he walked into his bedroom and saw the old Japanese man smiling…

Nonsense, the titular counsellor told himself with a shudder.

Asagawa shuddered too – his thoughts had clearly also taken a wrong turning.

‘There’s no point in just sitting here,’ said the inspector, getting up. ‘We still have our duty to perform.’

‘But what can we do?’

‘Tear out Suga’s sting. Destroy the archive.’

Asagawa took several files down off the shelves, carried them into his corner and started tearing the sheets of paper into tiny little scraps.

‘It would be better to burn them, of course, but there isn’t enough oxygen,’ he murmured absentmindedly.

The titular counsellor carried on sitting for a little while, then got up to help. He took a file and handed it to Asagawa, who continued his work of methodical destruction. The paper ripped with a sharp sound and the heap of rubbish in the corner gradually grew higher.

It was getting stuffy. Fine drops of sweat sprang out on the vice-consul’s forehead.

‘I don’t like dying of suffocation,’ he said. ‘Better a bullet through the temple.’

‘Yes?’ Asagawa said thoughtfully. ‘I think I’d rather suffocate. Shooting yourself is not the Japanese way. It’s noisy, and it gives you no chance to feel yourself dying…’

‘That is obviously a fundamental difference between the European and Japanese cultures…’ the titular counsellor began profoundly, but this highly interesting discussion was not fated to continue.

Somewhere above them there was a quiet whistle and bluish tongues of trembling flame sprang out of the gas brackets. The secret room was suddenly brightly lit.

Erast Petrovich looked round, raised his head and saw a tiny opening that had appeared in the wall just below the ceiling. A slanting eye was peering out of it at the titular counsellor.

He heard a muffled laugh, and a familiar voice said in English:

‘Now there’s a surprise. I was expecting anyone at all, but not Mr Russian Diplomat. I knew you were an enterprising and adventurous man, Fandorin-san, but this is really…’

Suga! But how had he found out?

The vice-consul did not speak, merely greedily gulping in the air that was seeping into the cramped space through the narrow opening.

‘Who told you about my secret place?’ the intendant of police asked, and went on without waiting for an answer. ‘The only people apart from me who knew of its existence were the architect Schmidt, two stonemasons and one carpenter. But they all drowned… Well, I am positively intrigued!’

The most important thing, Erast Petrovich told himself, is not to glance sideways into the corner where Asagawa is hiding. Suga can’t see him, he’s sure that I’m here alone.

And he also thought what a pity it was that he hadn’t taken a few lessons from Doronin in the art of battojiutsu – drawing a weapon a high speed. He could have grabbed his Herstal with a lightning-fast gesture and put a bullet in the bridge of this villain’s nose. With the little window open they wouldn’t suffocate before the morning, and when the morning came, people would arrive and free the prisoners from the trap.

‘And you? How did you know I was here?’ Fandorin asked to distract the intendant’s attention, while he put his hands behind his back and stretched slightly, as if his shoulders were cramped. His fingers found the flat holster.

Out of the corner of his eye he caught a movement in the corner – apparently the inspector was also taking out his weapon. But what was the point? He couldn’t hit the little window from there, and Suga would hide at the slightest suspicious rustle.

‘The official apartment of the head of police is close by here. The signal went off,’ Suga explained willingly, even proudly. This may be Asia, but we try to keep up with the latest inventions of progress. I’ve satisfied your curiosity, now you satisfy mine.’

‘Gladly,’ the titular counsellor said with a smile and fired.

He fired from the hip, without wasting any time on aiming, but the intendant’s reactions were impeccable – he disappeared from the window and the incredibly lucky shot (it didn’t hit the wall, but passed straight through the opening) went to waste.

Erast Petrovich was deafened by the roar. He slapped the left side of his head, then the right. The ringing became quieter and he heard Suga’s voice:

‘… something of the kind and I was on my guard. If you behave impolitely and don’t answer my questions, I’ll close the hatch now and come back in two days to collect the body.’

Asagawa got up without making a sound and pressed his back against the bookshelves. He was holding his revolver at the ready, but Suga wouldn’t present himself as a target again now, that was quite clear.

‘Yes, come back, do,’ said Erast Petrovich, pressing one finger to his lips. ‘Collect my mortal remains. And don’t forget the glue. It will take you a few years to stick all the thousands of scraps of p-paper from your precious files back together. I’ve only managed to destroy the contents of seven files so far, but there must be at last two hundred in here.’

Silence. Apparently the intendant was thinking that over.

The inspector gestured to say: Lift me up, so that I can reach the little window. Fandorin shrugged, he didn’t really believe in this plan but, when all was said and done, why not try?

He grabbed hold of the shelves and tugged. Files went crashing to the floor and the vice-consul took advantage of the racket to grab Asagawa round the waist, jerk him up to arm’s length above his head and press his stomach against the wall, to make it easier to hold him. The Japanese proved not to be so very heavy, about a hundred and fifty pounds, and every morning Fandorin pressed two one-hundred-pound iron weights forty times.

‘What are you doing in there?’ Suga shouted.

‘I knocked the shelves over. Almost by accident!’ Erast Petrovich called, and then told the inspector in a low voice: ‘Careful! Don’t let him spot you!’

A few seconds later Asagawa slapped his comrade on the shoulder to ask to be put down.

‘It won’t work,’ he whispered as his feet touched the floor. ‘The window’s too small. I can either look or poke the gun out. It’s not possible to do both at once.’

‘Fandorin! These are my terms,’ the intendant announced. He must have been standing right under the window, so he couldn’t have seen Asagawa anyway. ‘You don’t touch any more of the files. You give me the name of the person who told you about the archive. After that I’ll let you go. Naturally after searching you to make sure you haven’t picked up anything as a souvenir. Then you take the first ship out of Japan. Unless, of course, you prefer to move to the foreign cemetery in Yokohama.’

‘He’s lying,’ the inspector whispered. ‘He won’t let you go alive.’

‘Fair terms!’ Fandorin shouted. ‘I’ll tell you the name. But that’s all.’

‘All right! Who told you about the archive?’

‘A ninja from the Momochi clan.’

The sudden silence suggested that Suga was badly shaken. Which meant he believed it.

‘How did you find them?’ the intendant asked after a thirty-second silence.

‘I won’t tell you that. Our agreement was only for the name. Let me out!’

Without looking, he grabbed the first file that came to hand, took out several sheets of paper and started tearing them, holding his hands up close to the opening.

‘All right! We have an agreement. Throw your weapon out here!’

Asagawa nodded and flattened himself against the wall -at the spot where the door would open.

Going up on tiptoe, Fandorin tossed his Herstal into the air vent.

The aperture went dark and the eye appeared again. It examined Fandorin carefully.

He stood there tensely, poised to spring into the blind zone if a gun barrel appeared instead of an eye.

‘Take your clothes off,’ Suga told him. ‘Everything. Completely naked.’

‘What for?’

‘I want to make sure you haven’t got another weapon hidden anywhere.’

Seeing Asagawa cautiously cocking the hammer of his revolver with two fingers, Fandorin replied hastily:

‘Only don’t even think of trying to shoot. I’ll jump out of the way before you’re even ready. And then that’s the end of the agreement.

‘On my word of honour,’ the intendant promised.

He was lying, of course, but Fandorin’s words had not been meant for him – they were for the inspector, who understood and gestured reassuringly: I won’t.

The titular counsellor got undressed slowly, holding up every item of his ensemble for the intendant to see and them dropping it to the floor. Eventually he was left standing there in his birthday suit.

‘Well built,’ Suga said approvingly. ‘Only your belly’s too hollow. A man’s hara should be more substantial than that. Now turn your back to me and raise your hands.’

‘So that you can shoot me in the back of my head? Oh, no.’

‘All right. Put your clothes under your arm. Take your shoes in the other hand. When I open the door, walk out slowly.

The cunning door sprang to one side, leaving the way out open.

‘We want him alive,’ Erast Petrovich mimed with his lips as he walked past Asagawa.

The office was illuminated by a bright light that flickered slightly. Suga was standing on the same chair that the vice-consul had set against the wall so recently. The intendant was holding a large, black revolver (it looked like a Swedish Hagstrцm) and Fandorin’s Herstal was lying on the desk.

‘NAKED VICE-CONSUL SHOT IN POLICE CHIEF’S OFFICE’ – the headline flashed through the junior diplomat’s mind.

Nonsense, he won’t shoot. This isn’t an insulated space, with walls that muffle sound. The duty officers will hear and come running. Why would he want that? But, of course, he’s not going to let me out of here alive.

Without stopping, and giving the intendant only a fleeting glance, Fandorin headed straight for the exit.

‘Where are you going?’ Suga asked in amazement. ‘Are you going to walk through the department naked? Put your clothes on. And anyway, they won’t let you through. I’ll see you out.’

The police chief put his gun away and held up his empty hands: See, I keep my word.

The titular counsellor had never actually had any intention of strolling through the corridors in the altogether. The whole point of the manoeuvre was to distract the intendant’s attention from the secret repository and, above all, make him turn his back to it.

It worked!

Suga watched as the vice-consul donned his Mephistophelean outfit, and meanwhile Asagawa darted silently out of the door and trained his gun on the general.

How is this sly dog planning to kill me? Erast Petrovich wondered as he pulled on one of his gymnastic slippers. After all, he can’t leave any blood on the parquet.

‘You are an interesting man, Mr Fandorin,’ Suga rumbled good-naturedly, laughing into his curled moustache. ‘I actually like you. I think we have a lot in common. We both like to break the rules. Who knows, perhaps some day fate will throw us together again, and not necessarily as opponents. A period of cooling relations between Russian and Japan will probably set in now, but in about fifteen or twenty years, everything will change. We shall become a great power, your state will realise that we cannot be manipulated, we have to be treated as a friend. And then…’

He’s talking to distract me, Fandorin realised, seeing the intendant moving closer, almost as if by chance. With his arms casually bent at the elbows and his hands held forward, as if he were gesticulating.

So that was it. He was going to kill without any blood. Using jujitsu, or some other kind of jitsu.

Gazing calmly into his adversary’s face, the titular counsellor assumed the defensive posture he had been taught by Masa, advancing one half-bent knee and raising his hand in front of himself. Suga’s eyes glinted merrily.

‘It’s a pleasure doing business with you,’ he said, chuckling, no longer concealing his preparations for a fight.

Left hand turned palm upward, right arm bent at the elbow, with the hand held behind the back, one foot raised off the floor – a real dancing Shiva. What sort of jitsu have I run up against this time? the vice-consul thought with a sigh.

‘Now, let’s see what you’re like in unarmed combat,’ the police general purred smugly.

But, thank God, things didn’t go as far as unarmed combat.

Choosing his moment, Asagawa bounded across to the intendant and struck him on the neck with the butt of his gun. The hereditary yoriki’s efficient, virtuoso work was a sheer delight to watch. He didn’t let the limp body fall – he dragged it over to a chair and sat it down. In a single movement he uncoiled the rope that was wound round his waist and quickly tied Suga’s wrists to the armrests of the chair and his ankles to its legs. Then he stuck a gag-bit in his mouth – the hami that was so familiar to Fandorin. In less than twenty seconds the enemy had been bound and gagged in accordance with all the rules of Japanese police craftsmanship.

While the intendant was batting his eyelids as he came round, the victors conferred about what to do next – call the duty officer or wait until the day started and there were plenty of officials in the building. After all, what if the duty officer turned out to be one of Suga’s men?

The discussion was interrupted by low grunting from the chair. The general had come round and was shaking his head: he clearly wished to say something.

‘Well, I won’t take out the hami,’ said Asagawa. ‘Let’s do it this way…’

He tied down the prisoner’s right elbow, but freed the wrist. Then he gave the intendant a sheet of paper and dipped a pen in the inkwell.

‘Write.’

Scattering drops of black ink as he scraped the pen over the paper, Suga wrote downwards from the top of the page.

‘Let me die,’ the inspector translated. ‘Damn you, you ignoble traitor! You’ll swallow you full share of disgrace, and your severed head will hang on a pole for all to see.’

Erast Petrovich’s attitude was more pacific, but only slightly.

‘The diagram,’ he reminded Asagawa. ‘Let him tell us who is signified by the large circle, and then he can die, if that’s what he wants. If he wants to, he’ll kill himself in prison, you won’t be able to stop him. He’ll smash his head open against the wall, like the man with the withered arm, or bite his tongue off at the first interrogation, like the hunchback.’

Asagawa snorted and reluctantly went to get the diagram. When he came back, he stuck the mysterious sheet of paper under the intendant’s nose.

‘If you tell us who led the conspiracy, I’ll let you die. Right here and now. Do you agree?’

After a while – after quite a while – Suga nodded.

‘Is this a diagram of the conspiracy?’

A pause. A nod.

‘Write the names.’

He wrote in English:

‘Just one name.’

And he looked at Fandorin – the agreement was the same, only now they had changed places.

Sensing that if he pressed any harder, the deal could break down, Erast Petrovich said:

‘All right. But the most important one.’

The intendant closed his eyes for a few seconds – evidently gathering himself, either for this betrayal or for his own death. Or most likely for both.

He grasped the pen resolutely, dipped it in the inkwell that was held out to him and started slowly scrawling letter after letter – not in hieroglyphs or the Latin alphabet this time, but in katakana, the syllabic Japanese alphabet that Fandorin could already read.

‘Bu’, he read. Then ‘ru’, ‘ko’, ‘ku’, ‘su’.

Bu-ru-ko-ku-su?

Bullcox!

Why, of course!

Everything immediately fell into place and the scales fell from the titular counsellor’s eyes.

Do you really want

The scales to fall from your eyes

One of these fine days?

A WORD ONCE GIVEN MUST BE KEPT

They went back to Yokohama on the seven o’clock train, the first. They didn’t bother too much about secrecy, sitting next to each other, although they didn’t talk. But then, there was no one else in the carriage apart from the vice-consul and the inspector. The second- and third-class carriages were crammed with clerks and shop assistants on their way to work in Yokohama, but it was too early for first-class passengers.

Asagawa dozed lightly for a while and then – oh, those nerves of steel! – fell into a deep, sweet sleep, even smacking his lips occasionally. Fandorin didn’t feel like sleeping. It was almost as if his body had completely renounced this trivial pastime. But something told the titular counsellor that there would be no more insomnia.

The medicine that would cure the patient of his painful condition was called ‘Bullcox’. Not that Erast Petrovich was thinking about the torment of sleepless nights at this moment, his mind was on something quite different, but at the same time a voice from somewhere in the wings kept whispering to his exhausted body: ‘Soon, you will rest soon’.

The titular counsellor’s reason, which existed independently of any voices, was concerned with a most important matter – Defining a Sequence of Logical Reasoning.

The sequence that emerged could not possibly have been more elegant.

So, at the head of the conspiracy to which the Napoleon of Japan had fallen victim, stood the Right Honourable Algernon Bullcox, agent of the government of Victoria, Empress of India and Queen of Great Britain.

The motivation for the plot was obvious:

To dispose of a ruler who strove to maintain the balance between the two Great Powers that were vying to seize control of the Pacific Ocean -England and Russia. That was one.

To bring to power the party of expansion, which would require a mighty fleet. Who would help in the forthcoming conquest of Korea? Naturally, the ruler of the waves, Britannia. That was two.

Bullcox could count on a great reward. Why, of course he could! As a result of the operation that he had successfully completed Japan would fall into the zone of British influence, followed by the whole of the Far East. That was three.

From the human point of view, it was also clear that Bullcox was capable of such a sordid, cynical undertaking.

He engaged in spying and did not try very hard to conceal the fact. That was one.

According to O-Yumi (and who could know this villain better than she did, thought Fandorin, stabbing himself in the heart), he was capable of any abominable infamy, he could even send assassins to kill a successful rival or take revenge on a woman who left him. That was two.

Of course, it was highly improbable that he had organised the conspiracy against Okubo with the approval of St James’s Palace, but he was an adventurer by nature, an ambitious man who would use any means to secure his own success. That was three.

And now, four. Prince Onokoji had said that the conspirators had a lot of money. But where would poor Satsuman samurai get money? Would they really have been able to reward Suga so generously for the artfulness that he had demonstrated? But the agent of the British crown had access to inexhaustible financial resources. The Right Honourable must have laughed heartily to himself when the high-society gossip-monger told him about the gift of the estate. Bullcox himself must have bought it and then ‘lost’ it to Suga at cards. Or if not himself, then he had acted through intermediaries – what difference did that make!

The course of his deductive reasoning was unwittingly interrupted by Asagawa, who suddenly snored blissfully in his sleep. Resting on his laurels, almost literally, thought Fandorin. Villainy had been punished, justice had triumphed, harmony had been restored. And the inspector’s sleep was not disturbed by any considerations of high politics. Or by the nightmarish events that had taken place two hours earlier in the department of police. The place must be in a fine uproar now. Or it would be very soon.

A cleaner or a zealous secretary, arriving before the start of office hours in order to tidy away a few papers, would glance into the boss’s office and see a sight that would make him feel quite unwell…

When the intendant named Bullcox, the inspector hissed something to the prisoner in Japanese. Flexing his jaw muscles, he explained his indignation to Fandorin:

‘He is an even greater scoundrel than I thought. At least the fanatics from Satsuma believed they were acting in the name of their Homeland, but this one knew they were mere pawns in a game planned by a foreigner!’

Suga bleated.

‘We can take out the hami now,’ said Erast Petrovich, who had still not recovered from his shock – he simply could not understand why this explanation had not occurred to him earlier.

Freed of the gag, the general spat and blurted out hoarsely to Asagawa:

‘And aren’t you a pawn in the hands of a foreigner?’ But then he came to his senses, remembering that he was completely in the inspector’s power, and changed his tone of voice. ‘I have kept my word. Now it is your turn. Give me a dagger.’

‘I don’t have a dagger,’ Asagawa said with a crooked grimace. ‘And if I did, I wouldn’t give it to you. I wouldn’t let you stain the noble steel with your filthy blood! Remember how you forced the hunchback to chew his tongue off? Now it is your turn. You’ve got sharp teeth, go on – if you have the courage. I shall enjoy watching.’

The intendant’s eyes narrowed in hatred and glittered with fire.

The vice-consul tried cautiously to bite the tip of his tongue and shuddered. Asagawa was cruel, and no mistake. He was testing Suga’s strength of character. If the intendant wavered, he would lose face. Then it would be possible to shake all sorts of things out of him.

None of them spoke. Then there was a strange stifled sound – it was Suga gulping.

No one was watching the door that led into the secret room, so when it slammed shut with a clang, they all started. Could twenty minutes really have gone by since the intendant had pressed the lever?

‘You don’t want to eat your own tongue,’ the inspector remarked smugly. ‘Then here is a new proposal. Look here…’ – he took a revolver out of the general’s pocket (Fandorin had not been mistaken, it was a cavalryman’s Hagstrцm) and left one bullet in the cylinder. ‘Tell us who the other circles represent, and you won’t have to gnaw your tongue off.’

The glance that Suga cast at that revolver was beyond description. No Romeo had ever devoured his Juliet with such lust in his eyes, no shipwreck victim had ever gazed so longingly at a speck on the horizon. The titular counsellor was absolutely certain that the general would not be able to resist the temptation. He was certain – and he was mistaken.

On the previous occasion Erast Petrovich had been lucky – he had observed this grisly spectacle from a distance, but this time it all happened just two paces from him.

Suga gave an absolutely feral, inhuman roar, opened his mouth wide, thrust his fleshy, red tongue out as far as it would go and clamped his jaws together. There was a sickening crunch and Fandorin turned away, but even so he had feasted his eyes on the sight long enough for it to remain with him for the rest of his days.

The intendant took longer to die than Semushi. Fandorin realised now that the shock of the pain had been too much for the hunchback. But Suga had a strong heart, and he choked on his own blood. At first he swallowed it convulsively, then it streamed out over his chin and his chest. That probably lasted for a few minutes. And all this time the iron man didn’t groan even once.

After the wheezing ended and the suicide slumped limply in his bonds, Asagawa cut him free. The body slid down on to the floor and a red puddle started spreading out across the parquet.

The epitaph pronounced by the inspector was restrained and respectful.

‘A strong man. A genuine akunin. But the main akunin in this story is not Japanese, he is a foreigner. What a disgrace!’

Fandorin was feeling sick. He wanted to get away from this cursed place as quickly as possible, but they spent quite a lot more time there after that.

First they eliminated all signs of their own presence: they collected up the pieces of rope, straightened the portrait of the Mikado, found the bullet fired from Fandorin’s Herstal and dug it out.

From the European point of view it looked absolutely absurd: for some reason the head of the imperial police had come to his office in the middle of the night, sat down in a chair, bitten off his own tongue and died. Erast Petrovich could only hope that in Japanese terms it might appear less outlandish.

Then, on Asagawa’s insistence, they spent the best part of an hour tearing all the numerous dossiers into tiny scraps of paper. Only then did they finally leave, in the same way as they had entered, that is, via the window of the toilet.

The only part of the archive that they did not destroy was the ‘Okubo’ file. It contained the page with the coded diagram, the stolen reports and the three sheets of paper with the oath written in blood. In combination with the testimony of the witness, Prince Onokoji, who not only knew about Suga’s secret activities, but had connections with Bullcox, this was quite enough. Soon everyone would know why the intendant of police had done away with himself.

But before that the case had to be brought to a conclusion by finding evidence against the Englishman. If that could be managed, Britannia would suffer categorical disgrace, and Russian interests would be completely triumphant. This was a very grave matter – the resident English agent had organised the political assassination of a great man! It would probably lead to the severance of diplomatic relations.

If Bullcox wormed his way out of it and got away scot-free (there was really nothing to snag him with as yet), they would have to be satisfied with having exposed Suga. But that was already quite a lot.

Should he report to Doronin or wait a while? It was probably too soon. First he had to try to catch Bullcox by the tail, and that would probably require him to use methods that were not exactly diplomatic. And then, there was another circumstance, one that was quite insignificant from the viewpoint of high politics, but extremely important to Fandorin. It was precisely this delicate problem, of an entirely personal nature, that he was thinking through as he gazed out of the window at the paddy fields glinting in the sun.

Asagawa suddenly opened his eyes and said thoughtfully, as if he had never been asleep, but had also been immersed in analytical thinking:

‘You know, that scoundrel Onokoji deliberately sent us into a trap.’

‘Why do you think that?’

‘There was no file on Onokoji in the archive.’

Fandorin frowned.

‘You mean to say that the shinobi carried out their assignment in full? They got into the archive and stole the file of compromising material?’

‘If we were able to find the lever, the ninja must certainly have found it. They are far more experienced in such matters, and more cautious. If there were two of them, we must assume that they did not enter the secret room together, as we did, but one stayed on guard outside.

‘Then why did they not steal the entire archive? It could have been a powerful instrument of influence for them! Those secrets are worth huge amounts of money!’

The inspector looked at Fandorin in amazement.

‘Come now! The Stealthy Ones kill, steal and spy, but they do not engage in blackmail and extortion! That would contradict their traditions and code of honour.’

Yes, Erast Petrovich had forgotten that in Japan everybody, even the villains, always had some kind of code. There was something reassuring about that, somehow.

‘So Onokoji did get his f-file? Well, of course. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have spoken about Suga’s archive so calmly. He got what he wanted, but he didn’t wish to pay the Momochi clan for their work. He knew that the senior samurai would be held answerable, not him. The prince used the samurai and condemned him to death.’

‘There’s no point now in talking about the samurai,’ said Asagawa, waving his fist through the air. ‘Don’t you see? Onokoji knew we would fall into a trap, and he didn’t warn us. He was counting on Suga killing us! I swear I’ll shake the black soul out of that slimy scoundrel!’

The prince’s soul almost took leave of his body without any shaking, just as soon as he heard about the intendant’s death.

Lockston was still jangling the key to the cell, Asagawa was still waving his fist menacingly through the bars of the locked door, but the prince needed to be resuscitated. After the inspector’s first furious shouts (‘Surprised to see us? Did you think Suga would finish us off? It turned out the other way round!’) Onokoji had jumped up off the bunk, turned as white as chalk and collapsed in a dead faint.

‘Well, would you look at that?’ the sergeant said in amazement. ‘Bright and chirpy all night, he was, singing Parisian chansonettes. Boasting that he’d be free in the morning.’

‘Water,’ Asagawa said curtly.

They splashed water from the glass into the prisoner’s face, slapped him on the cheeks, and the scion of feudal lords came round. He started sobbing and his teeth started chattering.

‘Did you… Did you kill him? That’s it, then, I’m done for.’

The prince was trembling so violently that his head wobbled back and forth on his thin neck. And apparently it was not simply because the effect of the morphine had worn off – Onokoji was in a total panic. At first Fandorin thought he was afraid of Asagawa and vengeance for his treachery. But the titular counsellor soon realised that he was mistaken.

First, the prisoner made no attempt to wriggle out of it. Quite the opposite, in fact!

‘I didn’t think it was possible, I swear! They told me the trap was a very cunning device! It’s his own fault,’ the prince babbled, grabbing hold of Erast Petrovich’s hand and apparently apologising for the fact that the trap hadn’t worked. ‘You tell him that, tell him!’

‘Tell who?’ asked Fandorin, leaning forward bodily in his eagerness. ‘We’ll certainly tell him, but who?’

Onokoji slapped his palm against his lips. His eyes turned round in terror.

‘No one,’ he said quickly. Then he groaned pitifully, contradicting himself: ‘That’s it, he’ll kill me now…’

‘Because you were responsible for the intendant’s death?’

The aristocrat nodded.

Well, this is one who won’t bite his tongue off, the vice-consul thought. And he won’t shoot himself either. It looks as if the Englishman won’t be able to wriggle his way out of this after all!

‘Don’t worry, Prince. We’ll be able to protect you against him.’

Onokoji just shook his head.

‘Do you think we don’t know who you are s-so afraid of? We know. Suga told us before he died. It’s Bullcox.’

‘Bullcox?’ said Lockston, wide-eyed in amazement. ‘What has Bullcox got to do with all this?’

‘Algernon Bullcox was at the head of the conspiracy against Okubo,’ Fandorin explained, carefully enunciating every word – more for Onokoji than the sergeant. ‘Suga was acting on the Englishman’s instructions. Right?’

The question was addressed to the prisoner. He nodded without opening his eyes.

‘What kind of nation are these English?’ the sergeant exploded. ‘India’s not enough for them. The seas are not enough! They want to dominate the whole world. And they don’t even go about it honestly! Let me tell you this, gentlemen. Old Dame Britannia is getting above herself. It’s high time she was put in her place. They’ve got no business being here in Japan. There are more decent countries that trade honestly and don’t go interfering in politics.’

The titular counsellor was entirely in agreement with the American on this point, although he suspected that by ‘more decent countries’, he did not actually mean the Russian Empire.

‘I don’t want to be released,’ Onokoji said suddenly, looking at Fandorin. ‘I’ll be killed. Take care of me. I’ll be useful to you.’

‘You tell us everything you know about Bullcox’s secret dealings, and Sergeant Lockston will allow you to live in the municipal prison for as long as necessary.’

‘No! He’ll find me here in no time at all.’

Seeing that the man was beside himself with fear, Erast Petrovich said gently:

‘Very well. I’ll give you refuge in the Russian consulate. But only on condition that you are absolutely frank with me.’

‘I’ll tell you everything. About Bullcox. But not now. I don’t feel well. And it will be worse soon. I need another dose. I’ll go to sleep and then… and then we’ll talk. Only take me away from here! Quickly! He… he must know that I’ve been arrested. He knows about Suga too! And he’ll guess straight away. He’s very clever!’

Lockston snorted.

‘Well, listen to that. That damn lousy Englishman’s really got him running scared.’

Suddenly a voice behind him asked:

‘Who’s that you’re talking about, Sergeant? Could it perhaps be me?’

They all looked round. Twigs was standing in the entrance of the cell, wearing a tie and a tight collar, as usual, with his old, scuffed doctor’s bag under his arm.

‘No, Doc, I wasn’t talking about you, I meant…’ the head of the municipal police began awkwardly, but Asagawa coughed loudly and Lockston finished rather incoherently, ‘I was talking about a completely different Englishman… a different Englishman.’

Erast Petrovich caught Asagawa’s eye and the inspector gave a slight shrug – a gesture that meant: Of course, Twigs-sensei is a most worthy individual, but the state interests and prestige of his homeland are involved here, so we had better keep quiet about Bullcox.

‘Well, how did the nocturnal expedition go?’ the doctor asked eagerly. ‘I must admit, I didn’t sleep a wink all night. I was terribly worried about you. Well, come on, tell me, then!’

They told him. Almost everything – the only part they didn’t mention was the Right Honourable.

‘So, we have evidence against Suga, but we don’t have Suga any more?’ the doctor summed up, mopping his bald head with a handkerchief. ‘But that’s marvellous! Why are you all looking so frustrated?’

There was a further exchange of glances, and the inspector shrugged again, but this time with a different meaning: Do what you think best.

‘In the intendant’s papers we found a diagram with all the inscriptions in strange s-symbols,’ said Erast Petrovich, showing the doctor the sheet of paper. ‘We know that they are the members of the conspiracy, but we can’t read the names…’

‘Let me take a look…’

Twigs moved his spectacles down to the very tip of his nose and peered eagerly at the paper. Then he suddenly turned it upside down.

‘Wait, wait… I’ve seen something like this before…’

‘Remember, Doctor, remember,’ all three of them cried together.

‘The cryptograms that the ninja used, that’s what this is,’ Twigs announced triumphantly. ‘The shinobi had their own system of phonetic writing, for secret correspondence.’

‘Intendant Suga was not a shinobi,’ Asagawa said doubtfully. ‘It’s not possible. He came from a good samurai family.’

‘What does that matter? He could have learned their alphabet, as I tried to do at one time. You know that I’m very interested in the history of the ninja. I can’t just read these signs for you off the top of my head, but if I rummage through my old notes, I might find something and be able to decipher them. I can’t promise, but I’ll try.’

‘We know how to read one of the words,’ said Fandorin, pointing to the central circle. ‘It’s the name of the leader.’

‘Oh, that’s very important. There are letters here that also occur in the other words. So tell me, what does this say?’

The titular counsellor said the name quietly:

‘Bullcox.’

The doctor turned crimson. And when he grasped the full significance of this information, his indignation knew no bounds. He proclaimed a blistering philippic on the subject of rogues and adventurers who besmirch the honour and principles of a great empire, concluding with this:

‘If your information is accurate, then the Right Honourable Bullcox is a criminal. He will be exposed and punished as he deserves!’

Asagawa asked incredulously:

‘And does it not matter to you that your motherland will suffer?’

Squaring his shoulders proudly and raising one finger, Twigs said:

‘The honour of the Motherland, my dear Asagawa, is not maintained by him who conceals her crimes, but by him who is not afraid to purge her of them.’

This rousing maxim was followed by a pause. The others pondered the doctor’s words, wondering whether he was right, and, judging from the fact that the inspector winced, the sergeant nodded and the vice-consul sighed, they all reached rather different conclusions.

Asagawa brought the conversation back round to business.

‘Since we are all in agreement, I suggest we discuss our plan of action. This is not an easy task. It will require time… Where are you going?’

The question was addressed to Fandorin, who had suddenly shaken his head, as if coming to some decision, and set off towards the door.

‘Consult without me for the time being, g-gentlemen. I have urgent business.’

‘Wait! What about me?’ shouted Onokoji, dashing over to the bars of his cell. ‘You promised to give me refuge!’

Fandorin was so entirely preoccupied with his own idea that words cannot possibly express how reluctant he felt to waste his time dealing with this repulsive specimen.

But he had given his word.

From the beginning,

Enduring until the end -

The Word is the Word

AN AUTUMN LEAF

Masa couldn’t sleep all night, he was too anxious.

In the evening, pretending he believed that his master suddenly needed a newspaper, he left the house, but of course he didn’t go to any Grand Hotel, he hid behind a tree instead. He followed his master to the station without being seen, and when he saw that the vice-consul was going to Tokyo, he was on the point of buying a ticket himself. Then, however, Inspector Asagawa showed up. From the way that he walked past the master without even saying hello it was quite clear that they had some joint business to deal with.

Masa hesitated. Inspector Asagawa was a real yoriki, he couldn’t be fooled. He’d spot that he was being followed in an instant. And, moreover, he was a serious man, responsible. The master could be trusted to a man like that.

Anyway, he didn’t go. That was why he was in anguish. From all appearances, this business that his master had set out on was no laughing matter. The bag that he had packed in secret contained a night spy’s outfit. Oh, how hard was the life of a vassal who could not make himself understood in words to the person he served! If only he knew the language of the northern barbarians, Masa would have told his master: ‘You do not have and never will have a more faithful and diligent helper than me. You wound my heart and my honour painfully when you disdain my help. I am obliged to be with you everywhere and always, it is my duty’. Never mind, the master was very clever, every day he knew more and more Japanese words, and the day was not far off when it would be possible to talk to him in proper human language, without making gestures and pulling faces. Then Masa would be able to serve him properly.

But in the meantime he did what he could; first, he didn’t sleep; secondly he didn’t allow Natsuko into his bed, even though she turned sulky, because she really wanted Masa’a karada very badly (never mind, she could wait, the karada had to obey the spirit); thirdly he had recited eight hundred and eighty-eight times a dependable incantation against calamities of the night that he had learned from a certain courtesan. The sovereign of that woman’s heart was a night bandit. Every time he went off to work, she received no clients, but burned incense and prayed to the big-bellied god Hotei, the patron of all whose fate depended on luck. And every time her beloved returned in the morning with a sack full of booty over his shoulder and, most importantly, alive and unhurt – that was how powerful the incantation was. But one day the stupid woman lost count and, just to be on the safe side, she repeated the prayer more times than necessary. And what happened? That very night the unfortunate robber was seized by the guards, and the next day his head was already grinning at passers-by from the bridge across the Sakuragawa. The courtesan, of course, jabbed a hairpin through her neck, and everyone said that was what she deserved, the irresponsible fool.

To make sure he didn’t lose count, Masa gathered rice grains together into little heaps. He recited and added a grain, recited and added a grain. The little heaps of eight grains built up into bigger heaps, consisting of ten little ones. Morning had arrived by the time there were eleven of the big heaps. Masa chanted the prayer unhurriedly another eight times. As he added the final grain to the heap he glanced out of the window and saw a shiny black-lacquered carriage of indescribable beauty drive up to the gates of the consulate, harnessed to a team of four horses. The haughty driver sitting on the box was covered in gold braid and he had feathers in his hat.

The door opened and the master jumped down lightly on to the pavement. He didn’t actually have a sack over his shoulders, but he was alive and unhurt. And then, surely a carriage was as good as any sack! Hail to the magical incantation!

Masa dashed over to meet him.

Even more wonderful was the change that had taken place in the master. After that cursed night when he had left the pavilion earlier than usual and stumbled all the way home, like a blind man, the master’s face had become like the mask of the Ground Spider in the Noh theatre – dark and stiff – and his nose, which was long enough already, had turned so sharp, it was a ghastly sight.

The reason why O-Yumi-san had chosen the red-haired Englishman was clear: he was much richer, he had a big, beautiful house and eight servants, not just one. The master was suffering terribly from jealousy, and just to look at him plunged Masa into despair too. He even started wondering whether he ought to kill the worthless woman. The master would be sad, of course, but that was still better than destroying your liver by imagining your beloved squirming in someone else’s embrace.

But now a miracle had happened, and the evil enchantment had been dispersed. Masa saw that straight away. Thanks to the kind god Hotei, or perhaps for some other reason, the master had been healed. His eyes glowed with confidence and the corners of his mouth were no longer turned down.

‘Masa, big job,’ he said in Japanese, in a strong voice. ‘Very big. Help, all right?’

A man in a crumpled, grimy frock coat climbed out of the carriage, skinny backside foremost, turned round and then swayed so violently that he almost fell.

To judge from his hook-nosed face, pampered skin and elegant little hands, he was an aristocrat.

‘He… live… home,’ the master said, snapping his fingers impatiently because he couldn’t immediately remember the words he wanted.

That means he’s a guest, Masa realised, and he bowed politely to the stranger, who hiccuped and staggered again. He was either ill or drunk – Masa couldn’t tell which.

They went into the building, with the master walking sideways somehow, as if he were shielding his guest from the windows of the Dirty Man.

The master walked along the corridor, thought for a moment and said:

‘There. He live there.’

Masa tried to explain that no one could live there, it was a cupboard. There were suitcases, a sack of rice, jars of pickled radish and ginger root in there, but the master wouldn’t listen to him.

‘Guarudu, guarudu…’ – he spoke the incomprehensible word twice. Then he muttered ‘Dammit’ (Masa knew that word, it meant ‘chikusho!’), brought the dictionary from his study and translated. ‘Guard. You he guard. Understand?’

‘Understand,’ Masa said with a nod.

He should have said so straight away. Masa grabbed the man with the hooked nose and pushed him into the cupboard. The man started whinging pitifully and sat down limply on the floor.

‘Polite,’ the master ordered strictly, using the dictionary again. ‘Guard. Strict. But polite.’

Very well, politely. Masa brought a mattress, pillow and blanket from his own room and said to the prisoner:

‘Please make yourself comfortable.’

The aristocrat tearfully asked the master about something in English. Masa recognised only the familiar word ‘puriidz’.

The master sighed deeply and took a little box out of his pocket. There were tiny bottles of some kind of liquid lying in it, and a syringe, like the ones they used for smallpox inoculations. He gave the little box to the sniveller and locked the door of the cupboard.

‘Watch. Guard. Strict. Polite,’ he repeated, pointing his forefinger up in the air and wagging it about for some reason.

He turned round and almost ran out of the apartment.

He got into the carriage. He drove away.

For the first minute, out of sheer inertia, Erast Petrovich carried on thinking about the witness imprisoned in the cupboard. Masa could be relied on. He wouldn’t leave the door and he wouldn’t let anyone come close. The devil only knew what the servant thought about all this. Unfortunately, the vice-consul couldn’t explain – he didn’t have enough words.

The toll of disasters for which the titular counsellor would have to answer was increasing by the hour. Breaking into the lair of the head of police wasn’t enough for him, now he had added the concealment of an unauthorised individual on the premises of the consulate without his superior’s knowledge. He couldn’t tell anyone about the hidden prince, neither Doronin nor Shirota – at least not for the time being.

However, while this high-handed behaviour could at least be kept secret, the next act of folly that the titular counsellor intended to commit would inevitably lead to a high-profile scandal.

Strangely enough, that did not bother Erast Petrovich at all just at the moment.

As he swayed on the cushions of the light carriage that he had hired, the very best that could be found in the fleet of the firm ‘Archibald Griffin’ (‘Excellent horses and also Most Comfortable Carriages for all occasions at an hourly rate’), Fandorin felt very pleased with himself. The idea that made him abandon his colleagues at the height of a supremely important consultation had captivated the titular counsellor with its simplicity and indubitable practicability.

Take O-Yumi from the scoundrel, and have done with it. Not listen to her, give her no time to collect her wits. Simply put her in the carriage and drive her away.

That would be honest and manly, the Russian way.

This was what he should have done at the very beginning, even before Bullcox had been transformed into an arch-villain. What did political conspiracies have to do with love? Nothing. O-Yumi must have been waiting for her beloved to do precisely this. But he had turned flabby, allowed his willpower to flag, got bogged down in despondency and self-pity.

To really do things right, he ought to have dressed up in ceremonial style – tails, top hat. starched shirt, as the importance of the occasion required – but he hadn’t wanted to waste a single minute.

The carriage hurtled along the cobbled streets of the Bluff and came to a dashing halt at property number 129. The coach driver removed his hat and opened the door, and the vice-consul descended slowly to the ground. He smoothed down his hair, and twisted up the ends of his moustache with a little brush – they were drooping slightly after his nocturnal adventures – and adjusted his tailcoat.

Well, God speed!

Once inside the wicket gate, he recalled Bullcox’s dogs. But the ferocious confrиres of Cerberus were nowhere to be seen. They were probably chained up during the day.

Fandorin crossed the lawn with a firm tread. What about O-Yumi? She was probably still sleeping; after all, she didn’t go to bed until after dawn…

Before he could even touch the bell, the door swung open of its own accord. A haughty footman in livery was standing in the doorway. The titular counsellor handed him a card with a double-headed eagle on it:

Consulat de l’empire de la Russe

Eraste Pйtrovich Fandorine

Vice-consul, Conseiller Titulaire

Yokohama, Bund, 6

Only the day before, Shirota had handed him an entire stack of these cards – freshly printed and still smelling of the press.

‘I require to see the Right Honourable Algernon Bullcox on urgent business.’

He knew perfectly well that Bullcox could not possibly be home. The Englishman must certainly have been informed already of the mysterious ‘suicide’ of his accomplice and, of course, he had gone dashing to Tokyo.

Erast Petrovich had even prepared the following respnse:

‘Ah, he is not here? Then please inform Miss O-Yumi that I am here. She is sleeping? She will have to be woken. This is a most pressing matter.’

But there was a surprise in store for Fandorin. The doorkeeper bowed as if everything was perfectly in order, asked him to come in and disappeared though a door leading out of the hallway to the left – from his previous, unofficial visit the vice-consul knew that was the location of the study.

Before Erast Petrovich had time to consider the possible implications, the Right Honourable in person came out of the study, wearing a smoking jacket and soft slippers and looking most serene altogether.

‘To what do I owe the pleasure, Mr… Fendorain?’ he asked, with a glance at the card. ‘Ah yes, I believe we are acquainted.’

What on earth was happening here? Midday already, and Suga’s body had not yet been discovered? Impossible!

Or it had been discovered, but Bullcox, a senior governmental adviser, had not been informed? Out of the question!

Or it had been discovered, but he had not been alarmed by the news? Absurd!

But a fact was a fact: Bullcox had preferred to stay at home. But why?

Erast Petrovich squinted through the half-open door of the study and saw a fire blazing in the hearth. So that was it! He was burning compromising documents! That meant he was really and truly alarmed! He really was an intelligent man. And far-sighted. He had caught the scent of danger!

‘Why do you not say anything?’ the Briton asked, frowning in annoyance. ‘What do you want?’

Fandorin moved the Right Honourable aside and walked into the study.

But there were no papers beside the fireplace, only a pile of dry branches.

‘What in damnation is the meaning of this?’ asked Bullcox, following him.

Erast Petrovich impolitely answered a question with a question:

‘Why have you lit a fire? It’s summer now?’

‘I heat the fireplace every morning with tamarisk branches. This is a new house, it’s damp. And I like the smell of smoke… Listen here, sir, you are behaving very strangely. We are hardly even acquainted! Explain to me immediately what is going on! What was your purpose in coming here?’

There was absolutely nothing to lose now, and Fandorin took the plunge, head first into the whirlpool.

‘To take away the lady whom you are holding here by force!’

Bullcox’s jaw dropped and he started batting his eyelashes, as ginger as his curly locks.

But the titular counsellor, who, in the French expression, avait dйjа jetй son bonnet par-dessus le Moulin, that is, effectively, he had thrown caution to the wind, proceeded to attack, which, as everyone knows, is the best form of defence in a poor position.

‘Intimidating a woman is ignoble and unworthy of a gentleman! But then, what kind of gentleman are you? Out of my way, I’m going to her!’

He tried to walk past, but Bullcox blocked his way and grabbed him by the lapels.

‘I’ll kill you like a mad dog,’ hissed the Englishman, whose own eyes had turned quite rabid.

Erast Petrovich replied in an equally predatory hiss:

‘Kill me? Yourself? Oh, hardly. You wouldn’t have the courage. You’re more likely to send the “Stealthy Ones”.’

And he pushed his rival with his uncommonly well-trained arms – so hard that the Right Honourable went flying away and knocked over a chair.

The footman looked in at the crash, and his long English features stretched out even longer.

‘What “Stealthy Ones”?’ the Briton exclaimed, stunned. ‘You’re a raving lunatic! I’ll file a note of complaint with your government!’

‘Go right ahead!’ Fandorin growled in Russian.

He tried to run up the stairs, but Bullcox darted after him. He grabbed the Russian by his coat-tail and pulled him back down.

The vice-consul swung round and saw that the senior governmental adviser had assumed a boxer’s stance.

Well, boxing was not jujitsu, Erast Petrovich had no cause to be shy here.

He readied himself too: left fist forward, right fist covering the chin.

The first skirmish ended in a draw, with all the blows struck being parried.

In the second clash the vice-consul took a strong poke to the body, but replied with a rather good left hook.

Here the fight was interrupted by a female voice that exclaimed:

‘Algie? What’s going on?’

O-Yumi was standing on the landing of the staircase in her nightshirt, with a silk shawl on top. Her loose hair was scattered across her shoulders and the sunlight was shining through it.

Erast Petrovich choked.

‘It’s the Russian!’ Bullcoxs exclaimed excitedly. ‘He’s gone insane! He claims that I’m keeping you here by force. I decided to bring the blockhead to his senses.’

O-Yumi started moving down the steps.

‘What’s wrong with your ear, Algie? It’s all puffy and red. You need to put some ice on it.’

The familial, domestic tone in which these words were spoken, the name ‘Algie’, spoken twice, and – above all – the fact that she hadn’t even looked at him, made Erast Petrovich feel as if he had tumbled impetuously over a precipice.

It was hard to breathe, let alone to speak, but Fandorin turned to O-Yumi and forced out a few hoarse words:

‘Just one word. Only one. Me – or – him?’

Bullcox apparently also wanted to say something, but his voice failed him.

Both boxers stood and watched as the black-haired woman walked down the stairs in her light outfit with the sun shining through it.

She reached the bottom and glanced upwards reproachfully at Erast Petrovich. And said with a sigh:

‘What a question. You, of course… Forgive me, Algie. I was hoping everything would end differently for us, but clearly it was not to be.’

The Briton was absolutely crushed. He started blinking, looking from O-Yumi to Fandorin and back again. The Right Honourable’s lips trembled, but he still couldn’t find any words.

Suddenly Bullcox shouted something inarticulate and went dashing up the steps.

‘Let’s run!’ said O-Yumi, grabbing the titular counsellor by the hand and pulling him after her towards the door.

‘What f-for?’

‘His armoury room is upstairs!’

‘I’m not afraid!’ Erast Petrovich declared, but the slim hand jerked him with such surprising strength that he barely managed to stay on his feet.

‘Let’s run!’

She dragged the titular counsellor along, and he kept looking back, across the lawn. The beautiful woman’s hair fluttered in the wind, the hem of her nightdress flapped and ballooned, the backs of her velvet slippers slapped loudly.

‘Yumi! For God’s sake!’ a voice called from somewhere high up.

Bullcox leaned out of a first-floor window, waving a hunting carbine.

Fandorin tried, as far as he could, to cover the woman running in front of him with his own body. A shot rang out, but the bullet missed by a wide margin, he didn’t hear it whine.

Looking back again, the titular counsellor saw the Englishman settling his eye to the carbine again, but even at this distance he could see the barrel wobbling – the gunman’s hands were shaking wildly.

He didn’t need to shout to the driver to set off. He had already set off, in fact, immediately after the first shot – without bothering to wait for his passengers. He just lashed the horses, pulled his head down into his shoulders and didn’t look back.

Erast Petrovich opened the door on the run, grabbed his companion round the waist and threw her inside. Then he jumped up on to the seat himself.

‘I dropped my shawl and lost one slipper!’ O-Yumi exclaimed. ‘Ah, how interesting!’ Her eyes were wide open and glittering brightly. ‘Where are we going, my darling?’

‘To my place at the consulate!’

She whispered:

‘That means we have an entire ten minutes. Close the blind.’

Fandorin did not notice how they reached the Bund. He was brought round by a knock at the window. Apparently someone had been knocking for a while, but he hadn’t heard them straight away.

‘Sir, sir,’ said a voice outside, ‘we’re here… You might add on a bit, for a fright like that.’

The titular counsellor opened the door slightly and thrust a silver dollar out through the crack.

‘Here you are. And wait.’

He managed more or less to tidy up his suit.

‘Poor Algie,’ O-Yumi said with a sigh. ‘I wanted so much to leave him according to all the rules. You’ve gone and spoilt the whole thing. Now his heart will be filled with bitterness and hate. But never mind. I swear that for us everything will end beautifully, in proper jojutsufashion. You’ll have very, very good memories of me, we’ll separate in the “Autumn Leaf” style.’

The loveliest gift.

A tree gives is its last one -

A gold autumn leaf

INSANE HAPPINESS

‘So, that night you rejected me only because you wanted to separate from “poor Algie” according to all the r-rules?’ asked Erast Petrovich, looking at her mistrustfully. ‘That was the only reason?’

‘Not the only one. I really am afraid of him. Did you notice his left earlobe?’

‘What?’ Fandorin thought he must have misheard.

‘From the shape, length and colour of his earlobe, it’s clear that he is a very dangerous man.’

‘There you go with your ninso again! You’re just laughing at me!’

‘I counted ten dead bodies on his face,’ she said quietly. ‘And those are only the ones he killed with his own hands.’

Fandorin didn’t know whether she was being serious or playing the fool. Or rather, he wasn’t absolutely certain that she was playing the fool. And so he asked with a laugh:

‘Can you see dead bodies on my face?’

‘Of course. Every time one man takes the life of another, it leaves a scar on his soul. And everything that happens in the soul is reflected on the face. You have those traces as well. Do you want me to tell you how many people you have killed?’ She held out her hand and touched his cheekbones with her fingers. ‘One, two, three…’

‘St-stop it!’ he said, pulling away. ‘Better tell me more about Bullcox instead.’

‘He doesn’t know how to forgive. Apart from the ten that he killed himself, I saw other traces, people for whose deaths he was responsible. There are a lot of them. Far more than there are of the first kind.’

The titular counsellor leaned forward despite himself.

‘You mean you can see that too?’

‘Yes, it’s not hard to read a killer’s face, it’s moulded so starkly, with sharp contrasts of colour.’

‘Positively Lombroso,’ murmured Erast Petrovich, touching himself on the cheekbone. ‘No, no, it’s nothing, go on.’

‘The people with the most marks on their faces are front-line generals, artillery officers and, of course, executioners. But the most terrible scars I have ever seen, quite invisible to ordinary people, were on a very peaceable, wonderful man, the doctor in a brothel where I used to work.’

O-Yumi said it as calmly as if she were talking about a perfectly ordinary job – as a seamstress or milliner.

Fandorin felt his insides cringe and he went on hastily, so that she wouldn’t notice anything.

‘A doctor? How strange.’

‘It’s not strange at all. Over the years he had helped thousands of girls get rid of their fetuses. Only the doctor had fine, light marks, like ripples on water, but Algie’s are deep and bloody. How could I not be afraid of him?’

‘He won’t do anything to you,’ the titular counsellor said sombrely but firmly. ‘He won’t have time. Bullcox is finished.’

She looked at him in fearful admiration.

‘You’re going to kill him first, are you?’

‘No,’ replied Erast Petrovich, opening the blind and peering cautiously at Doronin’s windows. ‘Any day now Bullcox will be expelled from Japan. In disgrace. Or perhaps even put in prison.’

In was lunchtime. Shirota, as usual, must have taken his ‘captain’s daughter’ to the table d’hфte at the Grand Hotel, but – dammit! – there was a familiar figure hovering in the window of the consul’s apartment. Vsevolod Vitalievich was standing there with his arms folded, looking straight at the carriage stuck there at the gates.

The very idea of leading O-Yumi across the yard, in a state of undress, and with only one shoe, was quite unthinkable.

‘What are we waiting for?’ she asked. ‘Let’s go! I want to settle into my new home as quickly as possible. Your place is so uncomfortable as it is!’

But they couldn’t sneak in like thieves either. O-Yumi was a proud woman, she would feel insulted. And wouldn’t he cut a fine figure, embarrassed of the woman he loved!

I’m not embarrassed, Erast Petrovich told himself. It’s just that I need to prepare myself. That is one. And she is not dressed. That is two.

‘Wait here for now,’ he told her. ‘I’ll be back in a moment.’

He walked across the yard with a brisk, businesslike stride, but he squinted sideways at Doronin’s window anyway. He saw Vsevolod Vitalievich turn away with a certain deliberate emphasis. What could that mean?

Clearly he must already know about Suga, and he realised that Fandorin had been involved in some way; waiting at the window was a way of reminding the vice-consul about himself and showing how impatient he was to hear a few explanations; his demonstrative indifference made it clear that he did not intend to demand these explanations – the titular counsellor would decide when the time was right.

Very subtle, very noble and most apposite.

Masa was standing outside the cupboard, as motionless as a Chinese stone idol.

‘Well, what has he been like?’ Erast Petrovich asked, gesturing to clarify the meaning of the gesture.

His servant reported with the help of mime and gesture: first he cried, then he sang, then he fell asleep, he had to be given the chamber pot once.

‘Well done,’ the vice-consul said approvingly. ‘Kansisuru. Itte kuru.’

That meant: ‘Guard. I go away.’

He looked into his room for a second and went back quickly to the carriage. He opened the door slightly.

‘You are not dressed and have no shoes,’ he said to the charming passenger, setting down a sack of Mexican silver on the seat beside her. ‘Buy yourself some clothes. And, in general, everything that you think you need. And these are my cards with the address. If you need to have something taken in or whatever, I don’t know, leave one with the shop assistant, they’ll deliver it. When you get back, you can settle in. You are the mistress of the house.’

O-Yumi touched the jingling sack with a smile, but without any great interest, thrust out a little bare foot and stroked Erast Petrovich on the chest with it.

‘Ah, what a dunce I am!’ he exclaimed. ‘You can’t even go into a shop in that state!’

He glanced furtively over his shoulder at the consulate and squeezed her slim ankle.

‘Why would I go inside?’ O-Yumi laughed. ‘They’ll bring everything I need to the carriage.’

The anti-Bullcox coalition, assembled at full strength, held its meeting in the office of the head of the municipal police. Somehow it turned out that the role of chairman had passed to Asagawa, although he had not been appointed by anyone. The Russian vice-consul, previously acknowledged by all as the leader, ceded his primacy quite willingly. First, having abandoned his brothers-in-arms for the sake of a private matter, Erast Petrovich had, as it were, forfeited his moral right to lead them. And secondly, he knew that his mind and heart were preoccupied with a quite different matter just at the moment. And that matter happened to be a most serious one, which could not be dealt with half-heartedly.

In any case, Asagawa conducted the analytical work surpassingly well without any help from Fandorin.

‘So, gentlemen, we have a witness who is prepared to testify. But he is an unreliable individual of dubious character and what he says is of little value without documentary confirmation. We have the Satsuman warriors’ oath, signed in blood, but this evidence incriminates only the late Intendant Suga. We also have the police reports confiscated by Suga, but again, they cannot be used against Bullcox. The only unquestionable piece of evidence is a coded diagram of the conspiracy in which the central figure is the senior foreign counsellor of the British imperial government. But in order for this diagram to become proof, we must first decipher it completely. We cannot hand the document over to the authorities before that – we might be making a fatal mistake for, after all, we do not know which other officials are involved in the conspiracy. Since the intendant of police himself was one…’

‘That’s right,’ said Lockston, who was puffing on his cigar on the windowsill, beside the open window – in order to spare Dr Twigs’ sensitive nose. ‘I basically don’t trust any of the Jappos… Apart from you, of course, my good friend Go. Let the doc try to figure out what the squiggles mean. We’ll identify all the bad guys and then smash them all at once. Right, Rusty?’

Erast Petrovich nodded in reply to the sergeant, but he looked only at the inspector.

‘All this is c-correct, but we don’t have much time. Bullcox is a clever man, and he has powerful allies who will stop at nothing. I have no doubt that Bullcox will pay particular attention to my person [the vice-consul cleared his throat in embarrassment at this point] and to you, since it is known that we were working together on investigating the case of the Satsuma trio.’

At this point Erast Petrovich allowed himself to deviate from the truth somewhat, but only in the details. Even if the Englishman had not had personal reasons to hate him, the members of the conspiracy, frightened by the intendant’s strange death, would certainly have taken an interest in the vice-consul. He and Suga had been actively involved in the investigation of the conspiracy against Okubo – that was one. The blow struck against the intendant was in the interests of the Russian Empire – that was two. And there was also a three: in his recent confrontation with Bullcox, the titular counsellor had been incautious – his actions had intimated his suspicion that the Briton was intending to burn certain compromising documents. In the emotional heat of the moment, the Right Honourable had probably not paid any attention to this, but later, of course, he would call it to mind. And there could certainly be no doubt that at present he was thinking unceasingly of the Russian diplomat, and with quite exceptional intensity.

It was getting stuffy in the office. Asagawa walked over to the window and stood beside the sergeant in order to take a breath of fresh air, but instead he choked on the ferocious tobacco fumes and started coughing. He waved his hand, scattering the cloud of smoke, and turned his back to the window.

‘Perhaps Fandorin-san is right. In any case, extra caution will do no harm. Let’s divide up the evidence, so that it is not all kept in the same place. Twigs-sensei will take the diagram – that is obvious. You are our only hope now, Doctor. For God’s sake, do not leave your house. No visits, no patients. Say that you are unwell.’

Twigs nodded solemnly and stroked his pocket – obviously that was where the crucial clue was.

‘I shall take the police reports, especially since three of them were written by me. That leaves the oaths for you, Sergeant.’

The American took the three sheets of paper covered with brown hieroglyphs and examined them curiously.

‘You can count on me. I’ll keep the papers with me, and I won’t set foot outside the station. I’ll even spend the night here.’

‘Excellent, that’s the best thing to do.’

‘And what will I get?’ asked Erast Petrovich.

‘You have custody of the only witness. That is quite enough.’

That left Fandorin feeling at a loss.

‘Gentlemen… I was about to ask you to take the prince off my hands. My domestic circumstances have changed somewhat, you see. I can’t possibly keep him now… I’ll exchange him for any of the clues. And please, as soon as possible.’

The inspector gave the vice-consul a curious glance, but he didn’t ask any questions.

‘All right, but it can’t be done in daylight – he’ll be seen. I tell you what. I know where we can accommodate the prince, there’s a good place that he won’t escape from. Tonight, just before dawn, bring him to pier number thirty-seven, it’s beside the Fujimi bridge.’

‘Th-thank you. And what if the doctor doesn’t manage to decipher the diagram? What then?’

The Japanese had an answer ready for this eventuality.

‘If the sensei does not decipher the diagram, we shall have to act in an unofficial manner. We shall give everything that we know, together with the material evidence and witnesses’ testimony, to one of the foreign newspapers. Only not a British one, of course. To the editors of L’Echo du Japon, for instance. The French will be absolutely delighted by a sensational story like this. Let Bullcox try to explain everything and demand a retraction. Then all the secrets will come out.’

On the way home Erast Petrovich’s eye was caught by the fashion shop ‘Madame Bкtise’ or, rather, by a huge advertising poster covered with roses and cupids: ‘The novelty of the Paris season! Fine and coarse fishnet stockings in all sizes, with moirй ties!’ The vice-consul blushed as he recalled a certain ankle. He went into the shop.

The Parisian stockings proved to be wonderfully fine, and on the aforementioned lower limb they ought to look absolutely breathtaking.

Fandorin choose half a dozen pairs: black, lilac, red, white, maroon and a colour called ‘Sunrise over the Sea’.

‘Which size would you like?’ the scented salesman asked.

The titular counsellor was on the brink of confusion – he hadn’t thought about the size, but the owner of the shop, Madame Bкtise herself, came to his assistance.

‘Henri, the monsieur requires size one. The very smallest,’ she cooed, examining the customer curiously (or at least, so it seemed to him).

Yes, indeed, the very smallest, Erast Petrovich realised, picturing O-Yumi’s tiny foot. But how did this woman know? Was it some kind of Parisian ninso?

The owner turned her face away slightly, still looking at Fandorin, then suddenly lowered her eyes and turned to look at the shelves of merchandise.

She made eyes at me, the titular counsellor deduced, and, even though he was not attracted to Madame Bкtise in the slightest, he squinted at himself in the mirror. And he found that, despite his rather exhausted appearance and creased suit, he was quite positively good-looking.

‘So glad to see you, do call more often, Monsieur Diplomat,’ a voice called from behind him on his way out.

He was surprised, but only very slightly. Yokahama was a small town. No doubt a tall young man with dark hair and blue eyes and a wonderfully curled moustache, who was always (well, almost always) impeccably dressed, had simply been noticed.

Although there was a fine rain falling (still the same kind, plum rain), Erast Petrovich was in a totally blissful state of mind. People walking towards him seemed to look at him with genuine interest and even, perhaps, gaze after him when he had walked by, the smell of the sea was wonderful and the sight of the ships at the anchorage was worthy of the brush of Mr Aivazovsky. The titular counsellor even tried to sing, something that he would not usually have allowed himself to do. The tune was distinctly bravura, the words entirely frivolous.

Yokohama, little town,

See me strolling up and down;

The town is really very small,

No need to take a cab at all.

But the little town of Yokohama was even smaller than Fandorin had imagined – as he was soon to discover.

No sooner had Erast Petrovich set foot in the yard of the consulate than someone called his name.

Doronin was loitering in the same window as on the recent previous occasion, but this time he did not turn away or show any signs of tact.

‘Mr Vice-Consul!’ he shouted in a menacing voice. ‘Please be so kind as to call into my office. Immediately, without going round to your apartment!’

And he disappeared, no doubt on his way to the office area.

Fandorin had never seen the highly cultured and restrained Vsevolod Vitalievich in such a fury.

‘I didn’t ask you about anything! I didn’t oblige you to attend the office! I put my trust in you!’ the consul seethed rather than shouted, goggling over his blue lenses with his inflamed eyes. ‘I assumed that you were occupied with state business, but it appears that you… you were engaged in amorous adventures! You burst into the house of the official representative of the British Empire! You abducted his mistress! You provoked an affray! Why are you so surprised? Yokohama is a small town. News, especially the spicy kind, spreads instantaneously here!’

The driver, thought Erast Petrovich. He blabbed to his comrades from ‘Archibald Griffin’ and they spread it round the town in no time at all. And Bullcox’s own servants, too. The kitchen telegraph was the fastest medium of communication.

‘Are you at least aware that Intendant Suga has committed suicide? How could you be! And I thought that… Ah, you heroic lover!’ The consul waved his hand despairingly. ‘All sorts of rumours are circulating. Suga didn’t shoot himself, he didn’t even commit hara-kiri. He chose an ancient, monstrously savage way of leaving this life, one that samurai used if they were captured or suffering severe guilt. Everyone is convinced that the intendant could not forgive himself for Okubo’s death, and his undeserved promotion was the final blow. He did not dare to disobey his monarch’s will, but felt that he had to expiate his guilt by accepting a martyr’s death… Well, why don’t you say something, Fandorin? Explain yourself, damn you! Say something!’

‘I shall speak tomorrow. But for now, please permit me to remind you of the promise that you made me, not to interfere in anything and not to ask any questions. If I fail, I shall answer for everything at once. I have no time to explain now.’

It was well said, with restraint and dignity, but it failed to produce the desired effect.

‘That is quite obvious,’ the consul hissed, looking not into the other man’s eyes, but down and to one side. He waved his hand, this time in disgust, and walked out.

Erast Petrovich also looked down. And there, dangling from the pink paper bag decorated with a ribbon, which he had been handed in the shop, he saw a ‘Sunrise over the Sea’ fishnet stocking.

The vice-consul returned to his quarters feeling dismal. He opened the door and froze on the spot, barely able to recognise his own hallway.

Hanging on the wall was a large mirror in a lacquered and painted mother-of-pearl frame. There were white and purple irises standing in a vase on a flirtatious little chest and perfuming the air with their scent. The coat stand on which Masa used to keep his master’s hats and outer garments was gone – standing in its place was a closed cupboard with doors of woven straw. Above it a large kerosene lamp in a paper shade radiated a soft pink light.

Astounded, Fandorin glanced into the drawing room. There were even more changes there – it was quite impossible to make out all the details, he just got a general impression of something bright, colourful and festive.

In the dining room the titular counsellor saw a table laid in a way that immediately made him feel terribly hungry (something that had not happened to Erast Petrovich at all in the last few days). There were fruits, cheeses, rice balls with red and white fish, pies and cakes, sweets, champagne in an ice bucket.

The vice-consul discovered the fairy who had cast such a miraculous spell on the official government residence in the bedroom. But no, this room could no longer be referred to in such a prosaic, everyday fashion. The broad but simple bed that had been quite adequate for Erast Petrovich was now decorated with a muslin canopy, curtains had appeared at the windows and there was a bright-coloured, fluffy rug on the floor. O-Yumi herself, clad only in her nightshirt (the same one in which she had fled from Bullcox’s lair), was standing on a chair, fastening a long scroll with some kind of hieroglyphic inscription to the wall.

‘Darling, are you back?’ she said, tossing a lock of hair off her forehead. ‘I’m so tired! You have a very strange servant. He refused to help me. I had to do everything myself. It’s a good thing I learned so much at the tea house. In that place, until you win respect, you do everything yourself – wash, iron, mend… But he really is strange! He stands in the corridor all the time and he wouldn’t let me look into the cupboard. What have you got in there? I heard some very odd sounds.’

‘That’s a secret room. Nothing very interesting, just all sorts of boring diplomatic d-documents,’ Fandorin lied. ‘I’ll order them to be removed tomorrow. But why didn’t you buy yourself any clothes?’

She jumped down off the chair without a sound.

‘I did. I just took them off so I wouldn’t get them dirty. Look, this will be enough for a start.’

She opened the door of the wardrobe, and Erast Petrovich saw that his frock coats and trousers had been squeezed right into the very corner, and four-fifths of the space was occupied by brightly coloured silk, velvet and satin. There were hatboxes on the upper shelf and shoeboxes down below.

‘What’s that you’ve got there?’ asked O-Yumi, reaching for the pink bag. ‘From Madame Bкtise? For me?’

She took out the stockings, turned them over in her hands and wrinkled up her nose.

‘Shumiwarui.’

‘What?’

‘How vulgar! You haven’t got a clue about ladies’ outfits. I’ll probably keep the black ones. But I’ll give the others to Sophie. She’s certain to like them.’

‘T-to whom?’ asked poor Erast Petrovich, unable to keep up with the news.

‘The yellow-haired fool who taps on that big iron machine.’

‘Have you already m-made her acquaintance?’

‘Yes, I made friends with her. I gave her a hat, and she gave me a shawl with big red flowers. And I got to know Obayasi-san, your boss’s mistress, even better. A sweet woman. I made friends with her too.’

‘What else have you managed to do in the three hours since we last saw each other?’

‘Nothing else. I bought a few things, started putting the apartment in order and met the neighbours.’

It could not be said that Fandorin was particularly good at counting money, but it seemed to him that there were an awful lot of purchases.

‘How did you stretch the money to all this?’ he asked admiringly when he spotted a little suede box with a delightful pearl brooch on a small table.

‘The money? I spent that in the first two shops.’

‘And… and how did you pay after that?’

O-Yumi shrugged one bare shoulder.

‘The same way as before, when I lived with Algie. I left your cards everywhere.’

‘And they gave you c-credit?’

‘Of course. By the time I reached the third shop, everybody knew that I was living with you now. Madame Bкtise (I was in her shop too, only I didn’t buy these terrible stockings) congratulated me, she said you were very handsome, far more handsome than Bullcox. He’s richer, of course, but that’s not very important if a man’s as handsome as you. I rode back with the blinds open. How everyone stared at me!’

And at me too, thought Erast Petrovich, recalling how people on the street had looked round at him.

Lord, oh Lord…

Late in the evening the two of them sat together, drinking tea. Erast Petrovich was teaching her to drink like a Russian cab driver: from the saucer, through a lump of sugar clutched in the teeth, blowing and puffing noisily. O-Yumi, wearing the Russian shawl, with her face glowing red, puffed out her cheeks, gnawed at the sugar with her white teeth and laughed. There was nothing exotic or Japanese about her at that moment, and it seemed to Fandorin that they had lived together in perfect harmony for many years; God grant that they would be together for as many again.

‘What is your jojutsu good for?’ he asked. ‘Why did you take it into your head to study that filth that turns something living, passionate and natural into m-mathematics?’

‘But isn’t that the essence of any art? To break down the natural into its component parts and reassemble them in a new way? I have studied the art of love since I was fourteen.’

‘Since you were f-fourteen? Surely that wasn’t your own decision?’

‘No. My father ordered me to study jojutsu. He said: “If you were my son, I would send you to develop your ability to think, your strength and cunning, because these are a man’s greatest weapons. But you are a woman, and your greatest weapon is love. If you can completely master this difficult art, the most intelligent, strongest and most cunning men will be like putty in your hands.” My father knew what he was talking about. He is the cleverest, strongest and most cunning man I know. I was fourteen years old, I was stupid and I really didn’t want to go to study with a mistress of jojutsu, but I loved my father, so I obeyed him. And of course, as always, he was right.’

Erast Petrovich frowned, thinking that in any civilised country a loving father who sold his juvenile daughter into a brothel would be packed off to serve hard labour.

‘Where is he now, your father? Do you see each other often?’

O-Yumi’s face suddenly darkened and her lips clamped firmly together, as if from suppressed pain.

He’s dead, the titular counsellor guessed, and, regretting that he had made his beloved suffer, he hastened to make amends for his blunder by gently stroking the hollow at the base of her neck (he had been wanting to do that for a long time anyway).

Much later, lying in bed and staring up at the ceiling, O-Yumi said with a sigh:

‘Jojutsu is a wonderful science. It is the only thing capable of making a woman stronger than a man. But only until the woman loses her head. I’m afraid that is exactly what is happening to me. How shameful!’

Fandorin closed his eyes tight, feeling himself brimming over with an unbearable, insane happiness.

A stupid question,

This ‘to be or not to be’,

Once you’ve been happy

TICKLISH

It was by no means the first time Walter Lockston had spent the night in the office. Under the terms of his contract with the city of Yokohama, the head of the municipal police was provided with an official house, and even furniture, but the sergeant had never got used to those palatial halls. The sofas and chairs stood in their dust covers, the large glass chandelier was never lit up even once, the family bed gathered dust for lack of use – the former inhabitant of the prairies felt more at home on a canvas campbed. It was dreary and depressing to be all alone in a two-storey house, the walls and the ceiling oppressed him. The office was a better place. The familiar cramped space there was all his own, every inch of it: the desk, the safe, the gun shelf. It didn’t smell of the emptiness that filled the house. And he slept better here. Walter was always glad to spend the night in the office, and today’s excuse couldn’t possibly have been more legitimate.

He let the duty constable go home – he was a family man. It was so quiet and peaceful in the station. The lock-up was empty – no sailors on a spree, no drunk clients from ‘Number Nine’. Bliss!

He hummed a song about the glorious year of sixty-five as he washed out his shirt. He sniffed his socks and put them back on – he could wear them for one more day. He brewed some strong coffee and smoked a cigar, and then it was time to settle down for the night.

He made himself comfortable on the armchair, took his boots off and put his feet up on a chair. There was a blanket in the office, worn into holes here and there, but it was his favourite blanket, he always had splendid dreams under it.

The sergeant yawned and looked round the room, just to make sure everything was right. Of course, it was hard to imagine English spies or slanty-eyed Jappos trying to creep in and poke around in a police station, but it never hurt to be careful.

The door of the office was locked. So were the window frame and the bars on the window. Only the small windowpane was slightly open, otherwise you could suffocate in here. The distance between the bars was so narrow, a cat could barely get through it.

The rain that had been falling since midday stopped and the moon started shining in the sky, so bright that he had to pull the peak of his cap down over his eyes.

Walter squirmed about, settling down. The sheets of paper with the oaths written in blood crackled inside his shirt. All the weird freaks who live in this world, he thought with a shake of his head.

Lockston always fell asleep quickly, but first (and this was the part he always liked best), coloured pictures of the past flickered through his head, or maybe pictures of things that had never really happened at all. They swirled around, jostling each other for a place in the queue and gradually merged into his first dream, which was the sweetest.

All of this happened now. He saw a horse’s head with its pointed ears quivering, dashing hell-for-leather towards a stretch of land overgrown with brownish grass; then a great, high sky with white clouds, the kind you only get over huge open spaces; then a woman who had loved him (or maybe she was pretending) in Lucyville back in sixty-nine; then from somewhere or other a dwarf in a bright-coloured body stocking, whirling around and jumping through a hoop. And this, the final vision to surface out of the depths of his totally forgotten past, maybe even out of his childhood, merged imperceptibly into a dream.

The sergeant murmured wordlessly as he marvelled at the little circus artist, who turned out to be able to fly and blow tongues of flame out of his mouth.

Then a less pleasant dream began, about a house fire – that was because the sleeping man felt hot under the blanket. He started squirming about, the blanket slipped off on to the floor and once again all was well in the realm of dreams.

Walter woke up long after midnight. Not of his own volition, though – he heard a ringing sound somewhere in the distance. Still groggy with sleep, he didn’t realise straight away that it was the doorbell, the one that had been hung at the entrance to be used during the night.

The agreement with Asagawa and the Russian vice-consul was this: no matter what happened, the sergeant was not to leave the station. To hell with it if there was a fight, or a knifing, or a murder. It could wait until morning.

And so Lockston turned over on to his side and tried to carry on sleeping, but the jangling continued as loud as ever.

Should he go and take a look? Without going outside, of course – who knew what was out there? It could be a trap. Maybe the bad men had come to get their pieces of paper?

He picked up his revolver and walked silently out into the corridor.

There was a cunning little window made of dark glass in the front door. You could see out of it, but you couldn’t see in.

Lockston glanced out and saw a Japanese whore on the porch, wearing a striped kimono, the kind that the staff in the International Hotel had.

The native woman reached up to the bell pull and jerked it with all her might. And then at last she started screeching too.

‘Poriceman-san! Me Kumiko, Hoter Intanasyanaru! Troubur! Sairor kirred! Kirred entirery! Birriard room! Fight stick! Howr in head!’

Clear enough. Some sailors had had a fight with the cues in the billiard room and someone had got his skull stove in. The usual stuff.

‘Tomorrow morning!’ Lockston shouted. ‘Tell the boss I’ll send a constable in the morning!’

‘Impossibur morning! Need now! Sairor die!’

‘What am I supposed to do, glue his head back together? Get away, girl, get away. I told you, tomorrow.’

She started ringing again, but the sergeant, reassured, was already walking back along the corridor. No way was the head of police dashing out in the middle of the night for some stupid nonsense like that. Even without the important papers tucked under his shirt, he still wouldn’t have gone.

When the bell finally stopped sounding, it was really quiet. Walter couldn’t even hear his own footsteps – in the socks his feet moved across the wooden floor without making the slightest sound. If it wasn’t for that absolute silence, the sergeant would never have heard the faintest of faint rustling sounds behind the door of the office.

Someone was in there!

Lockston froze and his heart set off at a gallop. He put his ear to the crack of the door – sure thing! Someone was going through the desk, pulling out the drawers.

Why, the sons of bitches, coming up with something like that! Deliberately luring him out of the room, and then… But how had they got in? When he went out into the corridor, he locked the door behind him!

Now you’ll get yours, you low snakes!

Holding the revolver in his left hand, he slipped the key into the keyhole without making a sound, then turned it, jerked the handle towards him and burst into the room.

‘Don’t move! I’ll kill you!’

And the sergeant would have blasted away, too, but there was a surprise waiting for him, in the form of a tiny figure, about three feet tall, standing by the desk. Just for a moment Walter imagined he was still asleep and dreaming about the dwarf.

But when he clicked the lamp switch and the gas flared up, it wasn’t a dwarf at all, but a little Japanese boy, entirely naked.

‘Who are you?’ Lockston blurted out. ‘Where are you from? How did you get in?’

The little imp darted nimbly towards the window, jumped up like a monkey, squeezed sideways through the bars, squirmed into the opening of the small windowpane and would surely have got clean away, but the sergeant was up to the challenge – he dashed across the room just in time to grab him by the foot and drag him back inside.

At least now he had the answer to his third question. The naked urchin had climbed in through the window. Even for him it was a tight fit, as the bruises on his thighs testified. And that was why he was naked – he couldn’t have squeezed through in clothes.

Well, how about that! He’d been expecting absolutely anyone – spies, assassins, wily ninja – but instead this little runt had shown up.

‘Right, now answer me.’ He took hold of the kid’s skinny little shoulders and shook him. ‘Kataru! Dareh da? Dareh okutta?’ ^[viii]

The little rat gazed unblinkingly at the huge red-faced American. The little upward-turned face – narrow, with a pointed nose – was impassive, inscrutable. A ferret, a genuine ferret, the sergeant thought.

‘So, going to keep mum, are you?’ he asked menacingly. ‘I’ll loosen your tongue for you. Mita ka?’ ^[ix]

He unbuckled his belt and pulled it out of his trousers.

The little lad (he was only about eight, he couldn’t possibly have been any older) carried on looking at Lockston with the same indifferent, even weary air, like a little old man.

‘Well?’ the sergeant roared at him in a terrible voice.

But the strange child wasn’t frightened, in fact he seemed to brighten up a bit. In any case, his lips crept out to the sides, as if he was unable to restrain a smile. A little black tube stuck out of his mouth. There was a whistling sound, and the sergeant thought he had been stung on the chest by a wasp.

He looked down in surprise. There was something that glittered sticking out of his shirt, where his heart was. Was that really a needle? But where had it come from?

He wanted to pull it out, but somehow he couldn’t raise his hands.

Then suddenly his ears were filled with a low droning and rumbling, and Walter discovered that he was lying on the floor. And now the little boy he had just been looking down on was towering over him – a huge figure, blocking out the entire ceiling.

A massive hand of unbelievable size reached downwards, getting closer and closer. Then everything went dark and all the sounds disappeared. Light fingers ferreted about on his chest, and it felt ticklish.

Vision is the first.

The last sense of all to die

Is the sense of touch.

OFF WITH HIS HEAD

In the twilight at the end of a long day Asagawa paid a visit to Pier 37, a special police mooring for arrested boats. The Kappa-maru, a large fishing schooner arrested on suspicion of smuggling, had been standing there for more than two weeks already – in recent times, junks from Hong Kong and Aomin had taken to roaming the bay. They cruised in neutral waters, waiting for a moonless night, when fast boats could put out from the shore to collect crates of wine, sacks of coffee, bundles of tobacco and woven baskets of opium. The Sakai brothers, who owned the schooner, had been caught and were now in jail, but the inspector had thought of a good use for their little ship.

He examined the hold. Dry and roomy. It was immediately obvious that no fish had been carried in it for a long time. A bit cramped as living space, of course, but never mind, it wasn’t for royalty. Ah, but in fact it was – it was for a prince, thought Asagawa, and couldn’t help smiling.

The idea he had come up with was this. Take the important witness from the vice-consul, put him in the hold of the Kappa-maru, move the boat a long way offshore and drop anchor. Take the rubber and the sail away with him and lock the capstan – so that the prince wouldn’t take it into his head to weigh anchor in a morphine haze. Let him bob about on the waves for a day or two: he wouldn’t escape, and no one could touch him. But the inspector would have to post a sentry at the mooring – to keep an eye on all the confiscated craft, of course.

It was not late yet, and there were still people about near the mooring, but just before dawn there would be no one here. Everything should go quite smoothly. Once he had made sure that the fishing schooner was in good condition, the inspector went home.

The previous night and the day that followed it had been very eventful. In every man’s life there is one moment that is the highest point of his existence. Very often we do not realise this and only understand it retrospectively, when we look back: There, that’s it, the reason why I was born. But it’s already too late, we can’t go back to it and we can’t put anything right.

Asagawa, however, was aware that he was living through the supreme moment of his life right now, and he was firmly determined not to disappoint his karma. Who could ever have thought that the son and grandson of ordinary yoriki would find himself at the centre of high political drama? Surely it now depended on him which way Japan would turn, which force would rule the country?

It was not in the inspector’s character to brag, but today really was a special day, the kind of day that a man could be proud of. And so he allowed himself to feel just a little pride, although he didn’t say anything out loud, of course.

The head of the seaboard precinct of the Yokohama police lived on Nogeh Hill, where he rented a room in the Momoya Hotel, a modest establishment, but very neat and clean. The rent was an insignificant sum and the food was beyond all praise (there was an excellent noodle soup shop on the ground floor), and there was also one other circumstance of some importance for a bachelor.

This circumstance (which was female and went by the name of Emiko) was the owner of the Momoya, who immediately brought his supper to his room in person.

Asagawa, having swapped his tight European clothes for a thin yukata, sat on a cushion, watching blissfully as Emiko fussed over the meal, sprinkling dried seaweed powder on the hot noodles and pouring the warmed sake from the little jug. The calico-bound file holding the documents had been concealed under the mattress laid out on the floor.

She did not leave even after the inspector had thanked her and started noisily sucking in the scalding hot soba, occasionally picking pieces of his favourite pickled radish out of a separate little bowl with his chopsticks. It was clear from the bloom on Emiko’s cheeks and her lowered eyes that she was yearning for his amorous attentions. And even though Asagawa was deadly tired and ought to get at least a little sleep before dawn, to offend a woman was impolite. So, having rounded off his meal with a cup of excellent barley tea, he spoke the words that had a special meaning for the two of them:

‘How beautiful you are today.’

Emiko blushed and put her broad hands over her face. She murmured:

‘Ah, why do you say such things…’

But even as she spoke, she was unfastening the cord with which the belt of her kimono was tied.

‘Come here,’ said the inspector, reaching out his arms.

‘I shouldn’t. There are customers waiting,’ she babbled in a voice hoarse with passion, and pulled the pins out of her hair one after another.

In her impatience, she didn’t even unwind her belt completely. She freed one shoulder and pulled the kimono abruptly over her head in a most ungraceful fashion. He liked her best of all like this. It was a shame that today he was in no state to relax and enjoy love.

‘I waited all last night…’ she whispered, crawling on to the bed on hands and knees.

Asagawa glanced to make sure that the file was not sticking out from under the rather thin futon, and lay down first.

When Emiko lowered herself on to him with a moan, the sharp corner dug into his back quite uncomfortably, but there was nothing to be done, he had to bear it.

After his debt of politeness had been paid and Emiko had flitted on her way, Asagawa grunted as he rubbed the bruise on his back and blew out the lamp. Following a habit unchanged since his childhood, he lay on his side, put his hand under his cheek and fell asleep immediately.

All sorts of different sounds came through the paper partitions: the clamour of customers in the noodle shop, the servant girls slipping up and down the stairs, his neighbour – a rice trader – snoring in the next room. All this noise was quite usual and it did not prevent the inspector from falling asleep, even though he was a light sleeper. When a cockroach fell off the ceiling on to the straw mats, Asagawa opened his eyes immediately, and his hand automatically slid in under the wooden pillow, where he kept his revolver. The inspector was woken a second time by the tinkling lid of the china teapot that he always put beside the head of the bed. An earthquake, but only a very small one, Asagawa realised, and went back to sleep.

But after he was woken for the third time, he was not allowed to go to sleep again.

Something extraordinary was happening in the noodle shop. He heard someone yelling in a blood-curdling voice, furniture smashing and then the owner shrieking:

‘Asagawa-san!’

That meant he had to go down – Emiko wouldn’t disturb him over anything trivial. It must be the foreign sailors getting rowdy again, like the last time. Just recently they had taken to wandering around the native districts – the drink was cheaper there.

The inspector sighed, got up and pulled on his yukata. He didn’t take his revolver, there was no need. Instead of a firearm, he grabbed his jitte – an iron spike with two curved hooks on its sides. In the old days a jitte was used to ward off a blow from a sword, but it was also useful for parrying a knife-thrust, or simply hitting someone over the head. Asagawa was a past master in the use of this weapon.

He didn’t leave the file in the room, but stuck it in the back of his belt.

To the inspector’s relief, it was not foreigners who were getting unruly, but two Japanese. They looked like ordinary chimpira – petty thugs of the lowest kind. Not Yakuza, just loudmouths, but very drunk and aggressively boisterous. The table had been turned over and a few bowls had been broken. The old basket weaver Yoichi, who often stayed until late, had a bloody nose. There weren’t any other customers, they must all have run off – all except for a fisherman with a face tanned copper-brown by the wind, sitting in the corner. He wasn’t bothered at all, just kept picking up noodles with his little sticks without even looking around.

‘This is Asagawa-san, a big police boss! Now you’ll answer for all this!’ shouted Emiko, who seemed to have suffered too – her hairstyle had slipped over to one side and her sleeve was torn.

It worked.

One chimpira, wearing a red headband, backed away towards the door.

‘Don’t come near us! We’re not from round here! We’ll go and you’ll never see us again.’

And he pulled out a knife, to stop the policeman from interfering.

‘What do you mean, you’ll go?’ Emiko squealed. ‘Who’s going to pay? Look at all the crockery you’ve broken! And the table’s cracked right across!’

She threw herself at the bullies with her fists up, absolutely fearless.

But the second brawler, with deep pockmarks on his face, swung his fist wildly and struck her on the ear, and the poor woman collapsed on the floor, unconscious. Old Yoichi pulled his head down and went dashing headlong out of the eatery.

Asagawa would not have let the scoundrels get away in any case but, for Emiko’s sake, he decided to teach them a serious lesson.

First of all he ran to the door and blocked the way out, so that they couldn’t get away.

The two men glanced at each other. The one with the red headband raised his knife to shoulder level and the pockmarked one pulled out a more serious weapon – a short wakizashi sword.

‘Right, together!’ he shouted, and they both threw themselves at Asagawa at once.

But how could they compete with a master of the jitte! He easily knocked the knife-thrust aside with his elbow, grabbed the blade of the sword with his hook, tugged, and the wakizashi went flying off into the far corner.

Without wasting so much as an instant, Asagawa smacked the man with the red headband across the wrist, so that he dropped the knife. The pockmarked man retreated to the counter and stood with his back to it. The other chimpira cowered against him. They weren’t kicking up a racket now, or waving their arms about; both their faces were ashen with fear.

Asagawa walked unhurriedly towards them, brandishing his weapon.

‘Before you go off to the station, I’ll teach you a lesson in how to behave in decent establishments,’ he said, furious at the thought that he had been denied his sleep.

Meanwhile the copper-faced fisherman drank the remains of the broth from his bowl and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. He leaned down, picked up the wakizashi, weighed it on his palm and suddenly flung it, without any swing at all.

The blade entered the inspector’s back slightly above the calico-bound file.

Asagawa looked round with an angry and bewildered look on his face. He swayed, barely able to stay on his feet.

Then, with the speed of lightning, the chimpira in the read headband pulled a short, straight sword out from under his clothes and jerked it from right to left, as easily as if he were batting away a fly: the inspector’s head leapt off his shoulders and went rolling merrily across the floor.

For a few seconds,

Already off the shoulders,

The head still lives on

THE PHOTOGRAPH OF HIS WIFE

If you wrote the word ‘Bullcox’ in the syllabic alphabet, you got five letters: bu-ru-ko-ku-su. But in the circle at the centre of the mysterious diagram, there were only two. That, however, did not mean a thing: the Japanese loved to shorten foreign words and names that were too long, leaving just the first two letters. So the letters in the circle should be ‘bu-ru’.

The doctor put the notebook that he had taken out the day before on the desk. It contained his five-year-old notes on the history of the Japanese ninja, including the secret alphabet of this clan of professional assassins, carefully copied out from a certain ancient treatise.

The green lamp shone with a peaceful light and the cosy shadows lay thick in the corners of the study. The house was sleeping. Both his daughters, Beth and Kate, had already said their prayers and gone to bed. Following a long-established custom very dear to Twigs’ heart, their father had gone to kiss them before they fell asleep – Beth on the right cheek and Kate on the left.

His elder daughter had turned out a genuine beauty, the very image of his dear departed Jenny, thought Twigs (this same thought visited him every evening when he wished his daughters good night). Kate was still an ugly duckling, and if her big, wide mouth and long nose were anything to go by, she was never going to be a good-looker, but he was less worried about her than her elder sister. Beth was the silent type, all she ever wanted to do was read novels, but Kate was bright and lively, the kind of girl that young men liked. The same thing had happened several times already: Beth acquired some new beau and then, before you could blink, he switched his attentions to the younger sister – she was jollier and easier to be with.

In order to keep their correspondence secret, the medieval ninja did not use the standard hieroglyphs, but a special alphabet, the so-called ‘shindai letters’, a very ancient form of writing reminiscent of the marks left by a snake crawling across wet sand.

Right, then, let’s take a look at how the symbol for ‘bu’ is written in these squiggles. There it is.

And now ‘ru’. It looks like this.

But what do we have in the circle? Quite different symbols. The first one looks like three snakes.

And the second one is like a whole knot of snakes.

But wait a moment, good sir! Both of these squiggles are also in the alphabet. The first is the syllable ‘to’, the second is the syllable ‘nu’, or simply ‘n’.

Hmm. Twigs scratched the bridge of his nose, bemused. What on earth is tonu? What has tonu got to do with anything? It doesn’t add up.

Evidently the writing in the diagram was not simply in the secret alphabet of the ninja, it had been additionally enciphered – each letter signified another one. Well now, that was even more interesting.

The doctor drummed his fingers on the table in keen anticipation of a long and fascinating job.

Forward, sir!

Of all the pleasures granted to man, the very greatest is to exercise his brains.

All right, all right.

We know that Suga uses the letter ‘to’ to represent ‘bu’, and the letter ‘nu’ to represent ‘ru’. These letters also occur in other circles: the former three times and the latter once.

So, let us proceed.

He picked up a magnifying glass and inspected the circle more closely. What are these tiny little lines above the three snakes? Dirt? No, they’re written in ink. They look like a nigori, the sign for voicing, which changes the syllable ‘ka’ to ‘ga’, ‘ta’ to ‘da’, ‘sa’ to ‘za’. That fits: ‘bu’ is a voiced syllable, there ought to be a nigori.

Twigs thoughtfully copied out the circle and the two symbols inside it.

Without any encipherment, it would read as a voiced ‘to’ (in other words ‘do’), plus ‘nu’ or ‘n’.

Hang on now, hang on…

The doctor rubbed his bald patch in agitation and half-rose out of his chair. But then, just at the crucial moment, the night bell attached to the wall above his desk started growling quietly. It was Lancelot Twigs’ own personal invention – he had had electric wires run from the doorbell to his study and bedroom, so that any late-night patients wouldn’t wake the girls.

Feeling highly annoyed, he set off towards the door, but stopped in the corridor before he got there. He mustn’t! Mr Asagawa had warned him very strictly: no night visitors, no opening the door for anyone.

‘Doctor! Is that you?’ a voice said outside. ‘Dr Twigs? I saw the plate on your door. Help me, for God’s sake!’

It was an agitated, almost tearful male voice with a Japanese accent.

‘I’m Jonathan Yamada, senior sales clerk at Simon, Evers and Company. In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, open up!’

‘Why, what’s happened?’ asked Twigs, without the slightest intention of opening up.

‘My wife’s gone into labour!’

‘But I’m not an obstetrician. You need Dr Buckle, he lives on…’

‘I know, I was taking my wife to Dr Buckle! But the carriage overturned! Just round the corner here! Doctor, I beg you! She’s hurt her head, there’s blood! She’ll die, Doctor!’

Twigs heard low, muffled sobbing.

If it had been anything else, Lancelot Twigs would probably not have opened the door, for he was a man of his word. But he remembered his poor Jenny and his own helplessness and hopeless despair.

‘Just a moment… just a moment.’

And he opened the door slightly, without taking it off the chain.

He saw a plump Japanese man in a bowler hat and frock coat, with his trembling face streaming with tears. The man immediately went down on his knees and held his hands up to the doctor.

‘I beg you! Come quickly!’

There was no one else in the street.

‘You know, I’m not well,’ Twigs muttered in embarrassment. ‘Dr Albertini, an excellent surgeon, lives on Hommura-dori Street. It’s only ten minutes away from here…’

‘While I run there, my wife will bleed to death! Save her!’

‘Ah, what is to be done with you!’

Of course, a man should keep his word, but there was also the Hippocratic oath…

He sighed and took the door off the chain.

The senior sales clerk Jonathan Yamada sobbed.

‘Thank you! Thank you! Allow me to kiss your hand.’

‘Nonsense! Come in. I’ll just change my shoes and get my instruments. Wait in the hallway, I’ll only be a moment.’

The doctor set off quickly towards his study – to get his bag and conceal the secret diagram. Or would it be best to take it with him? No, that probably wasn’t a good idea.

Either the sales clerk didn’t hear that he was supposed to wait in the hallway, or he was too agitated to think clearly, but he tagged along after the doctor, babbling all the time about kissing his hand.

‘At least allow me to shake your noble hand!’

‘Oh, be my guest,’ said Twigs, holding out his open right hand and taking hold of the door with his left. ‘I have to leave you for just a second…’

In his emotional fervour Jonathan Yamada squeezed the doctor’s hand with all his might.

‘Ow!’ Twigs exclaimed. ‘That hurts!’

He raised his hand to his eyes. A small drop of blood oozed out of the base of his middle finger.

The sales clerk started fussing again.

‘For God’s sake, forgive me! I have a ring, an old one, a family heirloom. Sometimes it turns round, it’s a bit too big. Did I scratch you? Did I scratch you? Oh, oh! I’m so sorry! Let me bandage it, I have a handkerchief, it’s clean!’

‘Don’t bother, it’s nothing,’ Twigs said with a frown, licking the wound with his tongue. ‘I’ll only be a moment. Wait.’

He closed the door behind him, walked across to the desk and staggered – everything had suddenly gone dark. He grabbed the top of the desk with both hands.

The sales clerk had apparently not stayed in the corridor after all, he had come into the study too, and now he was coolly rummaging through the doctor’s papers.

Twigs, however, was no longer concerned about Jonathan Yamada’s strange behaviour, he was feeling very unwell indeed.

He looked at the photograph of Jenny in a silver frame, standing on the small chest of drawers, and couldn’t tear his eyes away.

Lancelot’s retouched wife gazed back at him with a trusting, affectionate smile.

Everything changes,

Except for the same old face

In an old photo

DONG, DONG

Erast Petrovich did not sleep for very long, he kept glancing at his watch, and at half-past three he quietly got up. O-Yumi was asleep and he looked at her for half a minute, with an exceptionally powerful feeling that he would have found hard to express in words: never before had the world seemed so fragile and at the same time so durable; it could shatter into glassy fragments at the slightest breath of wind, or it could withstand the onslaught of the most violent hurricane.

The titular counsellor put his boots on in the corridor. Masa was sitting on the floor in front of the cupboard, with his head lowered on to his chest. Fandorin touched him on the shoulder and he jumped to his feet.

‘Go and sleep,’ Fandorin said in a whisper. ‘Neru. I’ll keep watch for a while.’

‘Hai,’ Masa said with a yawn, and set off towards his own room.

Erast Petrovich waited until he heard the sound of peaceful snuffling and smacking lips (he did not have to wait for more than a minute), and paid a visit to the prince.

Onokoji seemed to have made himself rather comfortable in his refuge. The shelves holding Masa’s supplies and small household items had been concealed by a blanket, there was a lamp, now extinguished, standing on the floor, and the remains of supper were lying on an empty crate. The prince himself was sleeping serenely, with his thin lips set in a subtle smile – His Excellency was apparently reposing in the delightful embrace of sweet dreams. After O-Yumi, to watch anyone else sleeping, especially an individual as distasteful as this one, seemed blasphemous to Erast Petrovich. Moreover, the source of the wondrous nocturnal visions was not in any doubt – there was an empty syringe glinting beside the pillow.

‘Get up,’ said Fandorin, shaking the witness by the shoulder. ‘Sh-sh-sh-sh. It is I, do not be afraid.’

But the idea of being afraid never entered Onokoji’s head. He opened his bleary eyes and smiled even more widely, still under the influence of the narcotic.

‘Get up. Get dressed. We’re going out.’

‘For a walk?’ The prince giggled. ‘With you, my dear friend – to the ends of the earth.’

As he pulled on his trousers and shoes, he jigged and twirled around, jabbering away without a pause – the vice-consul had to tell him to be quiet.

Fandorin led his disorderly companion out of the building by the elbow. To be on the safe side, he kept his other hand in his pocket, on the butt of his Herstal, but he didn’t take the gun out, in order not to frighten the prince.

It was drizzling and there was a smell of fog. As the fresh air started bringing Onokoji to his senses, he glanced round at the empty promenade and asked:

‘Where are you taking me?’

‘To a safer place,’ the titular counsellor explained, and Onokoji immediately calmed down.

‘I heard a woman’s voice in your apartment,’ he said in a sly voice. ‘And that voice sounded very familiar. Ve-ry, ve-ry familiar.’

‘That’s none of your business.’

It was a long walk to the thirty-seventh pier, long enough for the effect of the dope to wear off. The witness stopped jabbering and looked around nervously more and more often, but he didn’t ask any more questions. He must have been feeling cold – his shoulders were trembling slightly. Or perhaps the trembling was the result of the drug?

This looked like the place. Fandorin saw the number ‘37’ daubed in white paint on a low godaun. A long pier stretched out from the shore into the sea, its beginning lit up by a street lamp, and its far end lost in darkness. Set along it were the black silhouettes of boats, with their mooring cables creaking.

The wooden boards rumbled hollowly under their feet and water splashed somewhere down below. The darkness was not completely impenetrable, for the sky had already begun turning grey in anticipation of dawn.

Eventually the end of the pier came into sight. There was a mast jutting up from a large boat, and Inspector Asagawa in his police uniform, sitting on a bollard: they could see his cap and broad cloak with a hood.

Relieved, Erast Petrovich let go of his companion’s elbow and waved to the inspector.

Asagawa waved back. They were only about twenty steps away from the boat now.

Strange, the titular counsellor suddenly thought, why didn’t he get up to greet us?

‘Stop,’ Fandorin said to the prince, and he stopped walking himself.

The seated man got up then, and he turned out to be a lot shorter than Asagawa. Has he sent another policeman instead of coming himself? Erast Petrovich wondered, but his hand was already pulling the revolver out of his pocket: God takes care of those who take care of themselves.

What happened next was quite incredible.

The policeman whipped the cap off his head, dropped the cloak – and he disappeared. There was no one under the cloak, just blackness!

The prince cried out in a shrill voice, and even Fandorin was seized by mystical horror. But the next moment the darkness stirred and they saw a figure in black, approaching them rapidly.

A ninja!

With a plaintive howl, Onokoji turned and took to his heels, and the vice-consul flung up his Herstal and fired.

The black figure was not running in a straight line, but in zigzags, squatting down or jumping up as it went, and performing all these manoeuvres with unbelievable speed – too fast for Fandorin to follow it with the barrel of his gun.

A second shot, a third, a fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh. Could every shot really have missed the target? The distance was only fifteen, ten, five paces!

When he was at close quarters with Erast Petrovich, the invisible man leapt high into the air and kicked the Herstal (now entirely useless anyway) out of Fandorin’s hand. The revolver rattled across the wooden decking and there, right in front of his face, the vice-consul saw two slanting eyes, like two blazing coals, in the slits of a black mask.

Once seen, those eyes could never be forgotten.

It was him! Him! The snake-charmer, the man with no face! He was alive!

The titular counsellor simply couldn’t understand how this was possible; in fact he couldn’t understand anything at all any more, but he was determined to sell his life dearly.

He assumed a combat pose, just as he had done with Suga and – hoorah! – succeeded in parrying the first kick with his elbow. Now, according to the science of jujitsu, he should build on his success by moving on to the attack. Erast Petrovich lunged (in a way more suited to boxing), but missed his opponent, who ducked under the fist and straightened up again like a spring, and then Fandorin’s feet parted company with the pier. The titular counsellor flew, tumbling over and over in the air, and for as long as this flight lasted, he thought of nothing. And he didn’t think at all after he struck his head against the edge of the pier: he saw a flash, heard an extremely unpleasant crunch, and that was all.

But the cold water in which the body of the vanquished vice-consul landed with a loud splash brought him round again. And his first thought (even before he surfaced) was: Why didn’t he kill me? Bullcox must have ordered me to be killed!

Blood was streaming down his face, and there was a ringing sound in his ears, but Erast Petrovich was determined not to lose consciousness. He grabbed hold of a slippery beam, clutched at a transverse pile, hauled himself up and managed to scramble on to the pier.

A second thought forced its way through the noise and the fiery circles in front of his eyes. What about the prince? Had he managed to escape? He had had enough time. And if he had escaped, where could the titular counsellor search for him now?

But there was no need to search for the prince. Erast Petrovich realised that when he saw a dark heap lying under the only street lamp in the distance – as if someone had dumped a pile of old rags there.