Fandorin in English 1-10

Fandorin staggered along the pier with his fingers over his bleeding wound. He wasn’t thinking about the invisible man, because he knew for certain that if the ninja had wanted to kill him, he would have done.

The high-society playboy was lying face down. A glittering steel star had bitten deep into his neck just above the collar. The titular counsellor pulled it out with his finger and thumb, and blood immediately started seeping from the wound. A throwing weapon, the vice-consul guessed, carefully touching the sharpened edges of the small star. And it appeared to be smeared with something.

Once again he was astounded. Why had the invisible man taken the risk of dodging the bullets? All he had to do was fling this thing and it would have been all over.

He leaned down (the sharp movement set everything around him swaying) and turned the dead man over on to his back.

And he saw that Onokoji was still alive.

There was horror dancing in the open eyes and the trembling lips fumbling at the air.

‘Nan jya? Nan jya?,’ the dying man babbled. (‘What happened? What happened?’)

He must not have realised yet what disaster had overtaken him. He had been running for grim death, at full tilt, he couldn’t see anything around him, and suddenly – a blow to the back of his neck…

‘It was a ninja. Bullcox sent him,’ said Fandorin, fighting his dizziness. ‘I’ll take you to a doctor. To Dr Twigs.’

But it was obvious that no doctor could help the prince now, his eyes were already rolling up and back.

Suddenly he wrinkled up his face, gathered all his strength and said, slowly but clearly:

‘Not Bullcox… Don…’

‘What?’

‘Don… Tsurumaki.’

That was all. His jaw shuddered and dropped open. Only the whites of his eyes were visible under his half-open eyelids.

The name throbbed in the titular counsellor’s bruised head, like the rhythm of a tolling bell: Don-Don-Don…

This is how life sounds

Ding-ding, tingaling, cuckoo,

Ending with: dong, dong

A HEADACHE

Fandorin thought he had just lain down on the planking for half an hour to wait for the spell of severe dizziness to pass off, but when he opened his eyes again he discovered that he was in his own bedroom, lying on the bed, completely naked under the blanket, with two heads leaning down over him: both had narrow eyes, but one was round, with hair cut in a short, stiff brush, and the other was long and narrow, with a neat parting. It was Masa and Shirota, both gazing at the titular counsellor with expressions of intense anxiety.

‘What… happened… to me?’ asked Erast Petrovich, struggling to force his dry tongue to pronounce the words.

This simple question provoked an entire discussion in Japanese, after which the two men nodded to each other as if they had come to some arrangement, and the secretary began cautiously:

‘At dawn Miss O-Yumi shook your servant awake and told him: “The master is in trouble, I can feel it, let’s go, quickly”. She ran along the seafront towards the cargo wharfs, with Masahiro following her. He says that as she ran, she kept looking at the moorings. At one of the farthest, already in the native town, she found you lying unconscious, covered in blood.’

Fandorin looked at Masa, who narrowed his eyes conspiratorially. Aha, thought Erast Petrovich, they didn’t tell Shirota there was a dead body lying beside me. That’s good. But how did O-Yumi know that I was in trouble? And how did she guess that she should look for me on the seafront? What an amazing woman. Where is she?

He looked around, but she wasn’t in the room.

‘Miss O-Yumi did something – apparently she pressed on some vein – and the bleeding stopped. Then she tore a strip off her dress and bandaged you up. She ordered your servant to carry you home, but she did not come back here. She said that an in fusion of some mountain plant was needed urgently – Masahiro did not remember the name. She told him that if you did not drink this infusion, the blood in your head would dry up and become a little stone, and after a while his master could die. Your servant carried you as far as the boundary of the Settlement, and there he was fortunate enough to meet an early riksha… And this morning the consul ran into your apartment and saw you lying here unconscious with a bandage on your head. He shouted at your servant, called me and sent for the doctor. I went to Mr Twigs, knowing that he is your friend… And the consul left for Tokyo urgently, to go to the embassy…’

So many things in this story were unclear, but Fandorin was struck most forcibly of all by Vsevolod Vitalievich’s strange behaviour.

‘He came running in?’

The punctilious Doronin bursting into his assistant’s apartment first thing in the morning? Something really extraordinary must have happened for him to do that.

Shirota faltered and did not answer.

‘And what did Dr Twigs say?’

The two Japanese exchanged glances again. And once again there was no answer.

Masa said something in an anxious voice and the secretary translated it.

‘You need to lie down and change your compress every hour and you must not worry. Dr Albertini says you have a very serious concussion.’

‘Why Albertini and n-not Twigs?’

Another animated discussion in Japanese, this time without any translation.

Erast Petrovich’s head really was aching terribly, and he felt nauseous, but all this mystery was beginning to get on his nerves.

Damn the doctors and the consul. There was more important business to deal with.

‘Masa, Asagawa-san koko, hayaku!’ ^[x]

the titular counsellor ordered.

The servant batted his eyelids and gave Shirota a frightened glance. The secretary cleared his throat in warning.

Erast Petrovich’s heart started pounding, beating faster and faster with every second. He jerked upright on the bed and bit his lip to stop himself crying out from the pain.

‘Masa, I must get dressed!’

Fandorin returned to the consulate after two in the morning, shattered by the scale of the catastrophe. He would probably have been even more shaken if not for the constant dizziness and spasms of pain that repeatedly transfixed his cranium from temple to temple, imparting an air of unreality to everything that happened, as if it were some appalling nightmare. The horror of it all made it too far-fetched to believe. Things like that didn’t happen in waking life.

Inspector Asagawa had been killed by hooligans. And, if the Japanese police could be believed, purely by chance, in a pointless, drunken brawl.

Sergeant Lockston had died of a heart attack in his office.

And an autopsy had shown that a blood vessel had burst in Dr Twigs’ brain.

All of this was already highly unlikely, but a coincidence of chance events was possible, in theory – if not for that invisible man, who had killed the witness, and the disappearance of the three clues.

The coded diagram had disappeared from the doctor’s study. No oaths written in blood had been discovered on the sergeant’s body. And the police knew nothing about any file of reports supposedly in the inspector’s possession.

As soon as Fandorin tried to fathom the meaning of this monstrous sequence of events, his dizziness intensified and he was swamped by a wave of nausea. And he simply didn’t have the strength to digest and extrapolate on the ‘Don Tsurumaki’ clue.

But the vice-consul was tormented most of all by O-Yumi’s disappearance. Where was she? Would she come back? What was this damned business about a mountain herb?

Gibberish. Insane, crazy gibberish.

Just as Fandorin was approaching the consulate, a two-seater kuruma drove up from the direction of Main Street, and out got Doronin, with the navy agent Bukhartsev (what the hell was he doing here?). They spotted the vice-consul walking towards them and stared at him dourly.

‘Here he is, the hero,’ the lieutenant captain said loudly to Vsevolod Vitalievich. ‘You told me he was almost at death’s door, but now see how chirpy he looks. If I’d only known, I wouldn’t have come, I’d have ordered him to report to Tokyo.’

This beginning boded nothing good, but then, how could there possibly be anything good in all this?

Doronin looked hard into his assistant’s face, which was as white as if it had been dusted with chalk.

‘How are you feeling? Why did you get up?’

‘Thank you, I am p-perfectly all right.’

Fandorin shook hands with the consul, but merely exchanged hostile glances with Bukhartsev, who demonstratively hid his hands behind his back. Well, at the end of the day, they worked in different departments, and they were both on the ninth level of the table of ranks, so no insubordination was involved.

But rank was one thing, and position was quite another, and the sailor immediately demonstrated who was in charge here.

In the consul’s office, he occupied the incumbent’s place at the desk, without bothering to ask permission. Vsevolod Vitalievich had to take a seat on another chair and Fandorin remained standing – not out of diffidence, but because he was afraid that if he sat down, he would not be able to get up again. He leaned against the wall and crossed his arms.

‘Secretary! Hey, whatever your name is…’ the lieutenant captain yelled through the open door. ‘Stay close, you might be needed!’

‘Yes, sir,’ said a voice in the corridor.

Doronin frowned vaguely but said nothing. And Fandorin realised that Bukhartsev had said that to intensify the menace of the situation, as if some rigorous trial were about to begin here and now, and sentence would be pronounced, and it would need to be dictated.

‘His Excellency and I have not been able to get anything intelligible out of your superior,’ Bukhartsev said in an aggressively assertive tone, fixing Erast Petrovich with a gimlet-eyed stare. ‘Vsevolod Vitalievich merely keeps repeating that he bears responsibility for everything, but he can’t explain anything in a way that makes sense. So I have been instructed to conduct an inquiry. You, Fandorin, are to consider yourself answerable to the ambassador in my person. Indeed, even more than that, answerable to the state of Russia.’

The titular counsellor paused slightly before making a slight bow. So be it, to the state.

‘Well then, the first matter,’ the lieutenant captain continued in the style of a public prosecutor. ‘The Japanese police of Yokohama have discovered the body of Prince Onokoji, a member of the very highest levels of society and relative of many influential individuals, near some warehouses.’

‘Near some warehouses?’ Erast Petrovich thought in surprise, and then recalled his servant’s conspiratorial grimace. So, before he carried his unconscious master away from the pier, he had had the wits to move the body somewhere else. Well done, Masa.

‘On examination of the papers of the head of the foreign police, following his sudden death, it emerged that the aforementioned Prince Onokoji had been kept under arrest in the municipal jail.’ Bukhartsev raised his voice, emphasising every single word now. ‘And he had been confined there at the insistence of the Russian vice-consul! What does this mean, Fandorin? Why this arbitrary arrest, and of such an important individual? The whole truth, with no dissimulation! That is the only thing that can mitigate in any way the punishment that awaits you!’

‘I am not afraid of punishment,’ Erast Petrovich said coolly. ‘I will expound the facts as I know them, by all means. Although I must state in advance that I acted entirely at my own discretion and risk, without informing the c-consul.’

The agent snorted incredulously, but he didn’t interrupt. With all possible brevity, but also without omitting anything of substance, the titular counsellor recited the entire sequence of events, explained the reasons for his actions and concluded with a recital of the terrible outcome to which these actions had led. He did not attempt to justify his own mistakes, he made no excuses. And the only concession he made to his own vanity was to omit the false trail leading from the intendant to Bullcox. Consul Doronin had also not mentioned the Right Honourable, although he was well aware of the ‘British intrigue’ theory.

‘Your servant is smarter than you are,’ the naval agent remarked acidly after listening to the whole story. ‘He realised he had to drag the prince’s body as far away as possible, otherwise, who knows, the Japanese police might have suspected the Russian vice-consul of murder. To hear you talk, Fandorin, anyone might think you were a genuine patriot of your Fatherland, a heroic partisan, a real Denis Davydov. Only why have you omitted to mention the escapade with Bullcox?’

He knows, Fandorin realised. But it makes no difference now.

‘Yes, that was my mistake. I allowed myself to be deceived. You see…’

He was going to tell Bukhartsev about the intendant’s lie just before he died, but the lieutenant captain interrupted him.

‘A “mistake”, “deceived”. You stupid boy! Creating an incident like that! And all because of a skirt – that is, a kimono! A challenge to a duel from Bullcox – a senior governmental adviser! What a nightmare! A diplomatic scandal!’

At this point the titular counsellor stopped understanding absolutely anything at all – he clutched at the stabbing pain in his temple.

‘What ch-challenge? What do you mean?’

‘Mstislav Nikolaevich is referring to the challenge that was delivered from Bullcox at eight o’clock this morning,’ Doronin explained. ‘In view of the fact that you were unconscious, I was obliged to accept it. The document is drawn up in due form, the choice of weapons is yours and there is just one condition: only one of the opponents shall remain alive. No sooner had Bullcox’s second left than some men arrived from the native police – concerning Prince Onokoji… I was obliged to set out immediately for Tokyo, in order to inform His Excellency.’

Fandorin smiled dourly – here was further confirmation that Bullcox was no conspirator, no master villain lurking in the wings who sent assassins to do his bidding, but an English gentleman, willing to respond to an insult by offering up his breast to the bullet or the sword.

‘And still he smiles!’ Bukhartsev exclaimed furiously. ‘He has disgraced the title of a Russian diplomat and he laughs! And for whom? For some flesh-peddling…’

‘Hold your tongue!’ Fandorin shouted at the lieutenant captain. ‘One more word, and you and I will fight a duel to the death!’

‘Why, he shouldn’t be dismissed the service, he should be put in a madhouse, in a straitjacket!’ Mstislav Nikolaevich muttered, but without his former hauteur. He obviously did not wish to fight any duel to the death.

‘Gentlemen, gentlemen,’ the consul intervened. ‘We have common cause here, we need to find a way out of an extremely unpleasant situation. Let us not quarrel! Erast Petrovich, you said that before he died the prince named Don Tsurumaki as the leader of the conspiracy?’

‘Yes. But why would an entrepreneur, philanthropist and advocate of progress kill the minister? It doesn’t make any sense…’

It should, perhaps, be noted that at that particular moment the titular counsellor’s head was incapable of making sense of anything much at all, the pain was kneading and squeezing it so fiercely.

‘Oh, doesn’t it?’ Vsevolod Vitalievich said slowly, rubbing his chin, ‘Why not?… It’s actually quite logical. Tsurumaki is a constitutionalist, an advocate of parliamentarianism, which opens up unlimited opportunities for a man like him. Okubo was a classic devotee of enlightened absolutism. From the point of view of our Mr Cloud, the minister was an obstacle on the road to social and economic progress – since you have already brought up the subject of progress. There was nothing personal about it. It’s just that the “New Japanese” like our mutual friend have got used to solving their problems in the simplest and most effective way. What could possibly be more effective: remove one piece from the board, and the game is won… And Tsurumaki has more than enough technical means. Firstly, he has retained his own force of guards from the civil war – the so-called Black Jackets, who serve him with fierce devotion.’ (Fandorin recalled the invisible servants in the estate at the Bluff.) ‘Secondly, the Don effectively owns the entire shadow economy of Yokohama, with all its low dives and dens of fornication. And that means he has close ties with the criminal world, the Yakuza.’ (Yes, yes: the Rakuen, the hunchback, Erast Petrovich thought.) ‘And finally, ever since that same revolution, the Don has remained in close contact with the Satsuma samurai, who fought with him against the Shogun.’

The consul fell silent, having evidently exhausted his arguments, but under the influence of his words, the titular counsellor’s brain finally began to stir, although only feebly.

Tsurumaki had been well aware of the spying activities and unreliability of his indigent noble house guest. And from his telescope he could observe not only the stars, but also his neighbour’s house, which Onokoji often visited at night. The Don was also acquainted with Suga…

And then the lieutenant captain struck the final blow.

‘Hmm. And are you aware, gentlemen, that a few days ago the late, lamented Suga won a quite superb estate from Tsurumaki at cards? The Austrian ambassador told me about it – the game took place at his villa. Is this information of any assistance to you?’

It was remarkable how the naval agent’s attitude had changed following the mention of a duel. Instead of arrogance, his prevalent tone was now one of statesmanlike concern for the interests of the Fatherland.

Oh yes, the news communicated by Bukhartsev was very significant indeed. Erast Petrovich clutched his head in his hands and groaned.

Asagawa had been going to find out exactly who had ‘lost’ the estate to the intendant, only the self-appointed sleuths had got too carried away with their game of cops and robbers. And yet the puzzle had really been perfectly simple all along.

How many disastrous, unforgivable errors they had made!

Now there was not a scrap of evidence left. All three clues had been destroyed. The only witness who knew a lot and was willing to talk had been killed.

Intendant Suga would be buried with full honours. His party would remain in power.

And the secret room behind the police chief’s office? Its existence would prove nothing. All it contained was a heap of torn scraps of paper. And Asagawa had made sure to tear the compromising documents into such tiny scraps that they could never be glued back together.

‘We have only one trump card left,’ the vice-consul declared. ‘The Don does not know that we know about him.’

‘Not a very strong trump,’ Vsevolod Vitalievich said with a shrug. ‘And how do we play it?’

Erast Petrovich rubbed his temple and said in a low voice:

‘There is one way. It is very risky, of course, but I would try it…’

‘I don’t wish to know anything about it!’ the lieutenant captain interrupted hastily, even pretending to put his hands over his ears. ‘No details. You created this mess – you can sort it out. You really have nothing to lose. All I can do is delay my report for twenty-four hours. But know this, Fandorin: I shall send that document, not to our genial and benign ambassador, but directly to St Petersburg. Well then, messieurs consuls, you have exactly twenty-four hours. Either you present me with a scapegoat on to whom we can shift the blame for everything that has happened or… don’t hold me responsible for the consequences.’ Mstislav Nikolaevich paused significantly and addressed Fandorin directly. ‘Only remember this: no duels with Bullcox!’

‘But how can I refuse? It’s d-dishonourable!’

‘I can’t even tell what would be the greater disaster, with Russo-British relations in their present overheated state: if you kill Bullcox or if he kills you.’ Mstislav Nikolaevich pondered for a moment, but then shrugged. ‘No, it’s out of the question. When what’s at stake is the honour of the entire country, Fandorin, one must be willing to sacrifice one’s personal honour.’

The titular counsellor glowered at the naval agent.

‘Personal honour, Lieutenant Captain, must not be sacrificed for any motives whatever.’

And once again, faced with a rebuff, Bukhartsev softened his tone, abandoning high principle for hearty sincerity.

‘Oh, please, drop that, Erast Petrovich. What are all our petty vanities and ambitions in the face of History? And that is precisely what you and I are dealing with here. We stand in the front line of the whole of European culture. Oh, yes, don’t be so surprised. I have been thinking about this a lot just recently. The other day I argued with you, Vsevolod Vitalievich, and I laughed at the Japanese military threat. But I had a good think about it afterwards, and I admit that you were right, a hundred times right. Only we need to take a broader view. It’s not just a matter of little Japan. Soon a new Genghis Khan will advance against Europe. The giant of China will begin to stir, preparing to awaken. When that yellow wave rises, its crest will reach up to the heavens, drawing all the Koreas and Mongolias after it, and perched high on its foaming peak will be an impudent little island empire with a predatory nobility and an avaricious nouveau riche bourgeoisie!’ Mstislav Nikolaevich’s voice resounded prophetically, his eyes glowed with fire – the lieutenant captain was no doubt already picturing himself pronouncing this speech to the supreme statesmen of the empire. ‘The New Mongolism or the Yellow Peril – that is what I shall call it. Millions upon millions of ferocious, yellow-faced Asians with slanty eyes and bandy legs will flood into the peaceful expanses of the Old World in that unstoppable wave. And once again we, the Slavs, will find ourselves in the path of this Chinese giant with a Japanese head… That is what you should be thinking about, Erast Petrovich, not your lordly personal honour.’

Having delivered this supremely worthy speech in a superlative tone of comradely reproach, the lieutenant captain left without adding anything more, in order not to spoil the effect. He simply got up, nodded in military style, pronounced a single word (‘Gentlemen’) and proceeded to the door.

Doronin stood up but didn’t move from the spot.

‘Shirota will see you out,’ he said quietly.

And a little later, when the agent was already outside the gates, he added with feeling:

‘Why, the scoundrrrel! And he was lying anyway. He won’t wait for any twenty-four hours. He’ll scribble out his telltale tittle-tattle right now, in the train. Then he’ll send it directly to the ministry, with a copy to the Third Section. And to prevent it looking like any ordinary denunciation, he’ll put in all that gibberish about the Yellow Peril that he just rehearsed in front of us. And the most sickening thing of all is that everyone in St Petersburg will be most favourably impressed.’ The consul lowered himself wearily into an armchair. ‘They’ll shove me into retirement, at the very least… Well, to hell with my career, I can live without it. But I won’t go back to Russia. I’ll have myself naturalised and become Japanese, eh? What do you think of that idea?’ And he laughed, as if making it clear that he was, of course, joking.

The titular counsellor had no thoughts at all on that count; there were already plenty of other problems for his poor, broken head to puzzle over.

‘So the main akunin in this business is Don Tsurumaki?’ he muttered, as if to himself.

‘What did you say? Akunin?’

‘Why, yes, the villain of the piece. It has been explained to me that Japanese villains are a special kind, unlike any others. That is, of course, they are appalling monsters too, but with p-principles and a certain nobility about them. Or something of that kind.’

Vsevolod Vitalievich chuckled.

‘Japan, a country of noble villains? Perhaps. Tsurumaki at least is a classic akunin.’

‘I’m not so sure… you see, I know the man quite well.’ Fandorin did not go into the details. ‘He… he doesn’t seem like a sly schemer. And then, should we put so much faith in the testimony of a dying man? I made that mistake once already by believing Suga. And now it’s clear that in his final moments of life the only thing on his mind was how to send us off on a false trail.’

‘Onokoji is not Suga. The intendant was a strong, resilient individual who was not afraid of death. But your effete Japanese decadent does not fit into the category of akunin at all.’

They fell silent, this time both thinking about the same thing.

Unable to come up with any ideas, the consul looked at his assistant, who kept clutching at his temple.

‘You said that you saw some risky way of doing something, but what exactly?’

‘Proving Don Tsurumaki’s cunning villainy to ourselves. Or his innocence.’

‘But how do we do that?’

‘I have been challenged to a duel. So I shall require a second, shan’t I?’ Erast Petrovich tried to smile, but instead his face merely contorted in a new spasm of pain.

My most faithful friend,

Back here with me once again,

My own dear headache

A QUIET VOICE

That evening there was another meeting in the same office, with the list of attendees slightly altered. The naval agent was not present, but Vsevolod Vitalievich had invited Shirota instead – no doubt in compensation for his humiliating wait in the corridor.

The Japanese, however, seemed thoughtful, rather than offended, as if his mind was wandering somewhere far, far away. But the remarks that he interpolated from time to time made it clear that he had listened to the vice-consul’s story no less attentively than Doronin.

The vice-consul had returned from Don Tsurumaki’s, still not having resolved his doubts.

‘Since we have no proof of this man’s guilt, I have b-based the operation exclusively on psychological factors,’ the pale green Erast Petrovich explained rather slowly – either because he was not feeling well, or because he wished to analyse his talk with the suspect once again. ‘In brief, I tried to frighten Tsurumaki and at the same time suggest a way for him to avoid the danger.’

Frighten Don Tsurumaki?’ the secretary repeated, shaking his head dubiously, as if Fandorin had said something absurd.

‘Well, rather, make it clear that he is in danger. To that end, I pretended to be in a state of shock at the news of recent sad events (to be quite honest, I didn’t really have to pretend) and spoke to him quite candidly, as a friend.’ The vice-consul laughed bitterly. ‘He and I are f-friends… I told him that all this time I had been leading an independent investigation into the assassination of Okubo. That I regarded Bullcox as the prime suspect, as the representative of the power most interested in having the minister removed. Nor did I forget to mention my helpers and our valuable witness, Prince Onokoji, who is well known to the Don. As you can see, all this is quite close to the truth. But beyond that I permitted myself a certain degree of improvisation. In relating the final moments of the dying witness, I modified his final words. I said that what Onokoji whispered as he gave up the ghost was this: “It wasn’t Bullcox, I deceived you. It was my…” – and he died before he could finish. Then I mused out loud at considerable length about who the poor prince could have meant. I asked the Don’s opinion – after all, he knew the dead man and his circle of acquaintances very well. My who? Brother? Cousin? Uncle? Tsurumaki responded rather uneasily, he told me: “The Prince didn’t have any brothers. But he has any number of cousins once removed and twice removed, and many of them hold important positions. Which one of them did he mean?” He mentioned one, then a second, and a third. And then I launched the following attack. Thinking out loud, I asked: “But what if he didn’t mean a relative? My former servant? My friend?” I thought the Don looked wary at that, but I could be mistaken… I pretended to drop the subject. I said: “But I haven’t come see you just about that.” I told him about the challenge to a duel, and said I needed a second. “This is a serious request, and I can only ask a friend…”’

Erast Petrovich recalled how Tsurumaki had smiled at those words, as if flattered, but the vice-consul’s memory immediately threw up what the millionaire had once said about Bullcox: ‘Surely you know, my dear Fandorin-san, that one of the greatest pleasures is the feeling of secret superiority over someone who thinks he is better than you’.

‘The time had come to show some emotion – nobody really expects that from such a reserved individual as yours truly. Which only makes the impression all the stronger. “I have no one else I can turn to,” I said mournfully. “The consul won’t do, because I have been forbidden to fight a duel by our superiors. And all my friends – Dr Twigs, Sergeant Lockston and Inspector Asagawa – have been treacherously murdered. Yes, yes, murdered, I am absolutely certain of it! It was those accursed ninja who did it! But they are only the agents of the man Onokoji tried to tell me about. I swear I shall find him, no matter what it may cost me! I’ll identify everyone with whom Onokoji had any connections at all! It’s someone very c-close to him, otherwise he would not have referred to that person as ‘my’!” And I carried on ranting about the same subject for another five minutes, to make sure that Tsurumaki was appropriately impressed. After all, it’s so simple – “my benefactor” or “my patron”. I may not have thought of it today, but surely I’m certain to think of it tomorrow. If the Don is guilty, he cannot help but be alarmed by that.’

Erast Petrovich thought back, trying to recall the expression with which the millionaire had listened to his ranting. Tsurumaki’s bearded face had been intent and serious, his thick brows knitted together. Was that circumspection or merely normal sympathy for a friend? The devil only knew.

‘Then I took a grip on myself and started talking more calmly. “You know, my dear friend, if this challenge had arrived yesterday, I would have killed Bullcox with no hesitation – not because of the woman, but for all his supposed atrocities. But now it turns out that I was mistaken and he hasn’t committed any particular atrocities at all. Bullcox is merely a party whom I have offended and, in his own way, he is perfectly right. I burst into his house, started a f-fight, abducted the woman he loves… No, I don’t want to kill him, I have no right to do it. But I don’t want to be killed either. I’m young, I’m blessed with love. Why should I die? So, this is the essence of my request. Be my second and help me set the conditions for the duel so that I shall not have to kill or be killed – naturally, without any damage to my honour. I have tried to think of something myself, but my head is not working very well”. And that was no lie, gentlemen, of that you can be quite certain.’ The titular counsellor pressed his hands against his temples, closed his eyes and allowed himself to pause for a moment. ‘As you can see, my ploy is very simple. If the Don is the individual I am looking for, he is certain to seize such a convenient opportunity to use someone else to rid him of an irksome and dangerous investigator. He thought it over for a long time, I waited patiently…’

‘And what happened?’ Doronin blurted out eagerly. ‘Is he guilty or not?’

‘I think not. But judge for yourselves. Tsurumaki asked: “Are you good with a sword?” I replied: “Middling. As a youth I was enthusiastic and even became the best swordsman in my grammar school, but then I gave it up. I’m a much better shot.” He said: “Firearms are far too deadly, better cold steel. If you know how to hold a sword, that is quite enough. I shall go to Bullcox and tell him that the choice has been made. He can’t reject it and he can’t refuse to fight. But the fact is that quite recently he fell from a horse and broke his wrist. And now that wrist has entirely lost it flexibility”. I told him: “No, not for the world! That is base and ignoble!” And the Don replied: “It would be ignoble if you intended to run Bullcox through. But you will simply knock the sword out of his hand, set your blade to his throat and in that advantageous position you will offer your apologies for invading his home – and only for that. I shall take care that the public finds out about the duel, so there will be quite enough witnesses. After you disarm the Englishman in the presence of an audience and then spare him, he won’t be able to challenge you again”. That is the plan invented by Tsurumaki. It has a certain air of oriental guile about it, but I think it is quite ingenious in its own way. So it would seem that Onokoji lied. The Don is innocent.’

‘He is guilty, as guilty as can be!’ Vsevolod Vitalievich exclaimed vehemently. ‘Bravo, Fandorin, you have succeeded in exposing the Don’s true colours! He has deceived you. Firstly, somehow I don’t recall Bullcox walking around with his arm in a sling at any time recently. And secondly, he is an excellent swordsman, which your “dear friend” omitted to mention, aware that you have not been in Yokohama very long and could not know about that. I remember that last year at the Atlantic Club there was a competition between European and Japanese swordsmen. The Europeans fought with a blunted sword, a rapier or a spadroon, according to their choice, and the Japanese fought with bamboo swords. Our side suffered a crushing defeat. The only one who came up to the mark was Bullcox. In the final bout he held out against the finest of the native swordsmen. And do you know who that was?’

‘Tsurumaki Donjiro,’ Shirota whispered. ‘Yes, I remember. It was a splendid fight!’

‘You have played your part capitally, Erast Petrovich. He believed that you were acting in secret from me, so there was no one from whom you could learn the truth.’

‘Then Onokoji wasn’t lying. Quod erat d-demonstrandum,’ the titular counsellor summed up with satisfaction. ‘That is, the garnering of evidence still lies ahead of us, but we know the correct answer to the problem in advance.’

‘What do you intend to do? Have the time and place for the duel been named?’

‘Yes. Tsurumaki went straight from me to Bullcox and came back half an hour later with the message that the duel will take place tomorrow at eight in the morning on Kitamura Hill, above the Bluff.’

‘And are you going to walk straight into this trap?’

‘Naturally. Don’t worry, Vsevolod Vitalievich, this time I have a reserve plan. Perhaps we won’t need to gather any evidence after all.’

‘But what if he kills you?’

Fandorin twitched one shoulder nonchalantly – as if to say: The plan does not envisage that outcome.

‘It will be a very beautiful death,’ Shirota said suddenly, blushing bright red for some reason.

It looks as if this occasion will be my chance to become a ‘sincere man’, thought Erast Petrovich, noticing the secretary’s eyes blazing with excitement. Perhaps another portrait would soon be added to those of Marshal Saigo and Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin…

‘I’m sorry, gentlemen. I’m feeling a bit tired. I’ll go and lie d-down for a while…’

He walked out, trying not to stagger, but in the corridor he was obliged to lean against the wall, and no sooner had he stepped inside the door of his apartment than he felt the floor turn into something like the deck of a ship. The deck swayed to the right, then heaved to the left, and eventually slipped out from under his feet altogether. Erast Petrovich fell.

He must have lost consciousness for a while, because when he opened his eyes he was lying in bed, and Masa was applying something cold to his forehead. The sensation was inexpressibly pleasant. Fandorin thanked him: ‘Arigato’ – and tumbled into oblivion again.

Asagawa and Dr Twigs came. Sergeant Lockston was peering over their shoulders, wearing a broad-brimmed hat instead of his uniform cap. They gazed at Fandorin lying there and said nothing, just glanced at each other.

And then they were replaced by another vision, a sweet one – O-Yumi. Her face was not as beautiful as in waking life – it was pale, haggard and sad, and her unkempt hair hung down on to her cheeks, but Fandorin was still absolutely delighted.

‘It doesn’t matter that you’re not very beautiful,’ he said. ‘Only, please, don’t disappear.’

She smiled briefly, just for a moment, and turned serious again.

The pillow on which the sick man’s head was resting suddenly rose up all on its own and a cup appeared in front of Fandorin’s lips.

‘Drink, drink,’ a sweet voice murmured and, of course, Erast Petrovich drank.

The potion was bitter and pungent, but he looked at the slim hand holding the cup and that helped.

‘That’s good, and now sleep.’

The pillow sank back down.

‘Where were you?’ asked Fandorin, only now realising that he hadn’t imagined O-Yumi. ‘I wanted to see you so much!’

‘A long way away. On the mountain where the magical herb grows. Sleep. Tomorrow your head will hurt even more. That will be the blood vessels purging themselves. You must bear it. And at midday I’ll give you another infusion, and then the pain will pass off, and the danger will be over. Go to sleep. Have a good, sound sleep. I won’t go away until you wake up…’

Then I must not wake up for as long as possible, he thought. What could be better than lying here, listening to that quiet voice?

Never in the day,

Only at night do I hear

Your sweet, quiet voice

A DRAGONFLY’S RAINBOW WINGS

Fandorin woke up soon after dawn, suffering from an agonising migraine. The day before it had been a dull pain, sweeping over him in waves, but now it was as if someone had inserted a large screw into his temple and they kept turning it, turning it. Even though it was already in right up to its head and could go no farther, some implacable force still kept on tightening that screw, and he felt as if his cranium would give way and crack open at any moment.

But even worse was the fact that O-Yumi had disappeared again. When Erast Petrovich opened his eyes, the only person he saw beside the bed was Masa, holding a small basin of ice and a wet towel at the ready. The mistress went away, he explained as best as he could. Before midnight. She put on her cloak and left. She said she would be back and ordered me to prepare ice.

Where had she gone? Why? And would she come back?

His thoughts were agonising. Thanks to them and the icy compresses, he managed to forget about the screw for a while.

His second arrived at half past seven, dressed as befitted the solemn occasion – in a black frock coat, black trousers and a top hat instead of his customary fez. The top hat did not suit the Don’s plump-cheeked face.

The titular counsellor had been ready for some time. His agonised face was as white as his shirt, but his tie was knotted neatly, the parting in his hair glinted sleekly and the ends of his moustache were the very model of symmetry.

Not being entirely convinced of his valet’s acting ability, Erast Petrovich had not explained to him that Tsurumaki had been identified as the major akunin, so Masa greeted the Don with every possible politeness. And the servant was also not aware, thank God, of the purpose of this morning visit, otherwise he would quite certainly have tagged along after his master. He was told to stay at home and wait for O-Yumi to arrive.

They got into a carriage and set off.

‘Everything has been done as planned,’ the Don informed Fandorin in a conspiratorial voice. ‘The rumour has been circulated. It’s a convenient spot for people to spy on events. There will be witnesses, have no doubt about that.’

It was depressing to look at the villain’s ruddy, smiling face, but the titular counsellor made an effort and forced himself to thank Tsurumaki and talk about the weather, which was simply wonderful for the rainy season: overcast but dry, with a sea breeze.

The carriage drove higher and higher along the main road. The seafront and the prim residences of the Bluff had been left behind now, and on all sides there were hills, bushes and sandy paths for healthy walks.

‘They’re here already,’ said Tsurumaki.

Three black figures were standing off to one side of the road, in a round open space surrounded on three sides by thick undergrowth. One of the men removed his hat to wipe his forehead with a handkerchief – from the red locks, Fandorin recognised Bullcox. The second man was wearing a scarlet uniform with a sword, and holding a long bundle under his arm. The third had a Gladstone bag between his feet. No doubt a doctor.

‘Aha, and there is the public.’ The Japanese chuckled contentedly. ‘We have a full house.’

The spot certainly had been well chosen. Although the bushes might appear to conceal the sparring area from prying eyes, the impression of privacy was deceptive. A cliff rose up right above the open space, its top also overgrown with some kind of vegetation, and protruding from the greenery were top hats and bowler hats, and even a couple of ladies’ white umbrellas. If the sun had peeped out from behind the clouds, no doubt there would also have been the glinting of opera glasses.

The public will be disappointed, thought Fandorin, stepping across the grass, which was wet with dew.

Bullcox’s second nodded curtly and introduced himself – Major Ruskin. He also named the doctor – Dr Stein.

‘I have something important to say to Mr Bullcox,’ the titular counsellor said when the major unrolled the piece of silk wrapped around two swords.

The reserve plan was absolutely elementary. Ask Bullcox whether he had broken his wrist recently. Bullcox would say no, he hadn’t. Then expose Tsurumaki publicly, in front of witnesses. Starting with the base deception unworthy of a second, then immediately moving on to the most important part – the accusation of conspiring against Okubo. There was no proof, but the treachery shown by Tsurumaki would set the witnesses against the Japanese and make them hear the vice-consul out. Bullcox might be beside himself with jealousy, but he was a state official and would understand quite clearly the significance of the vice-consul’s declaration. Tsurumaki had not only organised a political assassination, he had attempted to cast suspicion on Britain and its representative. That which was hidden would be revealed, and Bullcox wouldn’t be interested in a duel any more. The audience was in for a disappointment.

If not for his headache and his anxiety about O-Yumi, the titular counsellor would undoubtedly have contrived something more serviceable. The reserve plan, the frail child of a migraine, proved to be no good for anything and crumbled to dust at the very first contact with reality.

‘The Right Honourable Algernon Bullcox warned me that you were capable of something like this,’ Ruskin replied with a frown. ‘No, no. No apologies. The duel will go ahead in any case.’

‘I do not intend to apologise,’ the vice-consul assured him coldly. ‘This is a m-matter of state importance.’

The major’s face set in an expression of dull-witted intransigence.

‘I have received clear instructions. No negotiations between the two opponents. Would you care to choose a sword?’

‘Hey, Ruskin, why are you dragging things out over there?’ Bullcox shouted irritably.

‘I have been informed that your friend recently suffered a fracture of the right wrist,’ Fandorin told the second hastily, starting to feel anxious. ‘If that is so, a duel with swords cannot take place. That is actually what I intended…’

The Englishman interrupted disdainfully:

‘Rubbish. Algernon has never broken his arm. That trick won’t work. I’d been told there were not many gentlemen among the Russians, but everything has its limits!’

‘After Bullcox, I’ll deal with you,’ the titular counsellor promised. ‘And I’ll hammer those words back into your cast-iron head.’

This shameful outburst by Fandorin can only be explained by his annoyance with himself – Erast Petrovich was already beginning to realise that nothing would come of his plan. He only had to look at Tsurumaki, who was making no attempt to conceal his smirk of triumph. Could he have guessed about the plan? And now, of course, he was quite sure that the Russian had lost.

But there was still one hope left – to tell Bullcox everything when they stood face to face. Without looking, the vice-consul took hold of one of the swords by its leather-covered hilt. He dropped his cloak on the ground, leaving himself in just his shirt.

The major drew his sabre.

‘Assume your positions. Cross swords. Commence at my blow. The conditions state that fighting continues as long as one of the opponents is capable of holding a weapon. Go!’

He rapped his sabre against the crossed swords with a clang and jumped aside.

‘I have something I must tell you.’ Fandorin began rapidly in a low voice, so that the seconds would not overhear and interfere.

‘Hah!’ the Right Honourable gasped instead of answering, and launched a furious barrage of blows at his opponent.

Barely able to defend himself, the vice-consul was obliged to retreat.

There were exclamations above his head, the sound of applause; a woman’s voice shouted, ‘Bravo!’

‘Just wait, will you! We’ll have plenty of time to fight! You and I have been the victims of a political intrigue.’

‘I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you! Only not straight away. First I’ll neuter you, like a ram,’ Bullcox wheezed, then slid his blade along Fandorin’s sword and made a thrust straight for his crotch.

By some miracle Erast Petrovich managed to dodge. He fell, jumped to his feet and assumed a defensive stance again.

‘You idiot!’ he hissed. ‘This concerns the honour of Britain.’

But looking into the Right Honourable’s bloodshot eyes, he realised that the other man simply couldn’t hear him, and just at this moment he couldn’t care less for the honour of Britain, or for any matters of state importance. What did Okubo and devious plots have to do with this? This was an event as old as the world itself, a battle between two males over a female, there was nothing in the world more urgent and remorseless than this battle. The clever Don had understood that from the beginning. He knew there was no power capable of placating the bloodlust that seizes the abandoned lover.

And the titular counsellor felt afraid.

From the way Bullcox attacked and the assuredness with which he parried the clumsy thrusts of the former provincial grammar-school champion, the outcome of the duel was clearly a foregone conclusion. The Englishman could have killed his opponent many times over, there was only one thing stopping him: he was absolutely determined to carry out his threat and kept directing all his attacks exclusively at Fandorin’s loins. To some degree this simplified the task of his weaker opponent, who only had to concentrate on defending one area of his body, but the resistance could not continue for long. His wrist, unaccustomed to swordplay, turned numb, and parrying blows became harder and harder. Erast Petrovich repeatedly fell, unable to retain his balance, and Bullcox waited for him to get up. Twice he had to beat off a thrust that had pierced his defences with his bare left hand, and once the tip of the blade furrowed his thigh as Fandorin barely managed to wrench himself out of the way.

His shirt was black from dirt and green from grass stains, there were red blotches spreading on his sleeves and blood was flowing down one of his legs.

In his despair the titular counsellor was struck by a comforting idea – since all was lost, why not run over to the Don and slash his fat belly open in farewell?

The vice-consul had long ago abandoned his attempts to bring Bullcox to his senses. He was saving his breath, his eyes fixed on only one point – his opponent’s slashing sword. He didn’t try to counter-attack, there was no question of that. He could only fend off steel with steel and, if that didn’t work, with his arm.

It was becoming clear, however, that the Englishman did not run in circles round the cricket field every morning, or stretch a chest-expander, or raise heavy weights. For all his subtle skill and dexterity, Bullcox was beginning to tire. The sweat was streaming down his crimson face, his fiery curls were glued together, his movements were becoming more economical.

And then he stopped and wiped his sweat away with his sleeve in a most unaristocratic manner. He hissed:

‘All right, damn you. Die as a man.’

This was followed by a furious onslaught that drove Erast Petrovich into a corner of the open area, right up against the bushes. A series of lunges was followed by a mighty, slashing blow. This time too, Fandorin managed to jump back in time, but that was what the attacker was counting on; the vice-consul’s heel struck a projecting root and he fell flat on his back. The audience on high gasped, seeing that this time the Right Honourable was not going to allow his opponent to get up – the performance had reached its climax.

Bullcox had already pressed Fandorin’s right hand down with his foot and raised his sword to pin the Russian to the ground, when he suddenly started pondering, or perhaps even daydreaming; his eyelids closed halfway, while his mouth, on the contrary, fell half open. With this strange expression on his face the Right Honourable swayed to and fro for a second or two, them went limp and collapsed directly on to the panting Erast Petrovich.

A startled dragonfly soared up out of the grass in a flutter of little rainbow wings.

They are just the same

As those of angels and elves -

A dragonfly’s wings

A BLUE STAR

How greatly everything had changed compared with the night before! The world had not ceased to be dangerous. On the contrary, it had become even more unpredictable and predatory. From somewhere out there in the gloom – Fandorin knew this for certain – the keen eyes of a man with cold serpent’s blood were watching him relentlessly. But even so, life was beautiful.

Erast Petrovich sat in the darkness, with the peak of his uniform cap pulled down over his eyes, waiting for the agreed signal. The tip of his cigar glowed brightly in the dark – it must be visible from any of the roofs nearby.

The titular counsellor was in a state of bliss that flooded body, heart and mind.

His body – because the migraine had passed off and his cuts and bruises were not aching or stinging at all. When the bleeding duellist was brought home, the first to run out to meet him had been O-Yumi. She wouldn’t allow Doronin to call a doctor and dealt with the injured man herself. She smeared something smelly on the slashes on his arms and thigh – and the bleeding instantly stopped. Then she gave Erast Petrovich a herbal infusion to drink – and a tight steel band seemed to fall away from round his head. Fandorin shook his head and batted his eyelids and even smacked himself on the temple, but there was no nausea, or pain, or dizziness at all. And what was more, the tiredness had also disappeared. His muscles were supple and taut, rippling with strength, he could have taken up his sword again – and who could tell who would have come off best this time? This magical new-found lightness in all his limbs had not faded during the day; in fact the feeling had grown stronger. And that was very apropos – the night ahead promised to be stormy.

Bliss filled his heart because O-Yumi was sleeping in the next room. And when all was said and done, wasn’t that the most important thing?

Bliss filled his mind because once again Erast Petrovich had a plan, and this time a real one, thoroughly thought through and prepared, unlike that recent bastard mongrel of a plan created by a sick brain, which had almost cost him his life. It was simply miraculous that he had survived!

When the victorious Bullcox collapsed on his vanquished foe, none of the spectators could understand what had happened, let alone Fandorin, who had already prepared himself for death. He pushed off the Englishman’s heavy carcass and wiped down his forehead (which was streaming with cold sweat) with his hand (which was streaming with hot blood). The Right Honourable lay there face down with his hand flung out, still clutching the hilt of his sword.

The doctor and seconds were already running towards the men on the ground.

‘Are you seriously hurt?’ shouted Dr Stein, squatting down on his haunches.

Without waiting for an answer, he hastily ran his hands over the vice-consul, waved his hand dismissively at the cuts (‘That can wait’) and turned to Bullcox.

He took his pulse, raised his eyelid and whistled.

‘Apoplexy. A man can’t do all this jumping and jigging about with blood as congested as that! Mr Tsurumaki, your carriage is the most spacious. Will you take him home? I’ll come with you.’

‘Of course I’ll take him, he’s my neighbour,’ said the Don, making a show of taking the Right Honourable under the arms and avoiding looking at Fandorin.

Erast Petrovich was taken to the consulate by Major Ruskin, who was no less pale than the vice-consul. He was courteous and attentive, and apologised for his rudeness, which had been the consequence of a misunderstanding – he was obviously seriously concerned about the safety of his ‘cast-iron head’. But the major was the last thing on the titular counsellor’s mind. The young man was shaking all over – not in relief and not from overworked nerves. Fandorin was simply overwhelmed by the evident prejudice of fate, which had saved him yet again, come to his assistance in a quite desperate, hopeless situation. He could hardly believe that Bullcox had suffered a stroke at precisely the moment when his vanquished foe had only a second left to live! No doubt the sceptics would find rational explanations for this, say that the vengeful anticipation of the Englishman, who was already panting and short of breath, had sent the blood rushing to his head, and a blood vessel had burst in his brain. But Erast Petrovich himself knew that he had been saved once again by his lucky star, also known as Destiny. But for what purpose? And how long would this go on?

The entire population of the consulate had assembled at the bedside of the bloodied victim: Vsevolod Vitalievich, turned completely yellow in his grief, with Obayasi-san; and Shirota, chewing on his lips; and Sophia Diogenovna, sobbing; and even the servant Natsuko, who actually spent most of the time ogling Masa. It was a touching picture, almost harrowing in fact – an impression facilitated in no small part by the spinster Blagolepova, who appealed to everyone to send for the priest from the frigate Governor, ‘before it’s too late’, but O-Yumi performed her magical manipulations and the man pretending to be at death’s door returned miraculously to life. He sat up on the bed, then got up and walked round the room. And finally he declared that he felt hungry, dammit.

At this point it emerged that no one in the embassy had taken breakfast yet – everyone had known about the duel and been so worried about Erast Petrovich that they couldn’t eat a single bite. A table was hastily laid, right there in Doronin’s office – for a confidential strategic discussion.

They spoke about the duel for a while, and then turned their attention to Don Tsurumaki. The titular counsellor’s reawakened reason was eager for rehabilitation. The plan came together instantly, over roast beef and fried eggs.

‘He is certain that I am lying flat on my back and will not get up any time soon, so he is not expecting a visit from me. That is one,’ said Fandorin, brandishing a fork. ‘He doesn’t have any guards at the villa, he told me many times that he is not afraid of anyone. That is two. I still have a key to the gates, that is three. The conclusion? Tonight I shall pay him a visit аl’anglais, ^[xi]

that is to say, uninvited.’

‘The purpose?’ asked Doronin, narrowing his eyes.

‘We’ll have a little friendly chat. I think the Don and I can find a thing or two to talk about.’

The consul shook his head.

‘Are you thinking of trying to frighten him? You’ve had plenty of opportunity to realise that the Japanese akunin is not afraid of death. And you’re not going to kill him anyway.’

Erast Petrovich wiped his lips with a napkin, sipped his red wine and took a slice of Philippine pineapple. It was a long time, a very long time, since he had eaten with such a good appetite.

‘Why should I want to frighten him? He’s not some nervous young damsel, and I’m not a g-ghost. No, gentlemen, it will not be like that at all. Shirota, may I count on your assistance?’

The secretary nodded, keeping his eyes fixed on the vice-consul.

‘Excellent. Don’t be alarmed, you won’t have to do anything against the law. Masa and I will enter the house. Your job, starting in the evening, is to sit on the hill that overlooks the estate. It is an excellent observation point, and it can also be seen from here. As soon as the lights go out in the house, you will signal. Can you find a coloured lantern?’

‘Yes, there are some left over from the New Year. A green one, a red one and a blue one.’

‘Let it be the blue one. Flash three times, several times in succession. Masa will be watching for the signal on the porch.’

‘Is that all?’ Shirota asked disappointedly. ‘Just give the signal when the lights go out in the house?’

‘That’s all. They put the lights out there when the servants leave. I take responsibility for everything after that.’

Vsevolod Vitalievich was indignant.

‘How you love an air of mystery! Well, all right, you get into the house, and then what?’

Erast Petrovich smiled.

‘The Don has a secret safe. That is one. I know where it is, in the library, behind the bookshelves. That is two. I also know where to find the key to the safe – hanging round the Don’s neck. That is three. I do not intend to frighten Tsurumaki, I shall only borrow his key and take a look at what is in the safe, and in the meantime Masa will keep our hospitable host in his sights.’

‘Do you know what he has in the safe?’ asked Doronin.

‘No, but I can guess. Tsurumaki told me once that he keeps gold bars in it. I’m sure he was lying. No, there is something more valuable than gold in there. For instance, a certain diagram with serpentine symbols. Or there may possibly be even more interesting documents to be found…’

At this point the consul did something very strange: he grabbed his blue spectacles off his nose and started blinking at the bright light. His mouth started twitching and twisting, living a life of its own. He sank his teeth into his thin lip.

‘Even if you do find something important, you won’t be able to read it,’ Vsevolod Vitalievich said in a flat voice. ‘You don’t know Japanese. And your servant won’t be much use to you. I tell you what…’ He faltered, but only for a second, and then went on in a perfectly firm voice. ‘I tell you what, I’ll go with you. In the interests of the cause. I’m tired of being a spectator. It’s a shameful and depressing pastime.’

Erast Petrovich knew that even the slightest show of astonishment would seriously wound the consul’s feelings, so he took his time before answering, as if he was thinking over the advisability of the suggestion.

‘In the interests of the cause, it would be better if you stayed here. If my little excursion ends badly, than what more can they do to me – a young pup, a duellist and adventurer? The lieutenant captain has already written me off. Things stand differently with you – a pillar of Yokohama society and Consul of the Russian Empire.’

Vsevolod Vitalievich’s eyebrows arched up like angry leeches, but at this point Shirota intervened in the conversation.

‘I’ll go,’ he said quickly. ‘Or why should I bother at all? Am I just going to give the signal and then sit on the hill? That’s rather stupid.’

‘If my assistant and my secretary get involved in a scandalous incident, I’m done for anyway!’ Doronin fumed. ‘So I’d better go myself.’

But Shirota disrespectfully interrupted his superior.

‘I do not count. Firstly, I am a hired employee, a native.’ He gave a crooked smile. ‘And secondly, I shall write a resignation note this very minute and put yesterday’s date on it. The letter will say that I no longer wish to serve Russia, because I have become disillusioned with its policy towards Japan, or something of the kind. In that way, if Mr Fandorin and I are involved in a scandalous incident, as you put it, it will be a criminal conspiracy between a young pup and adventurer (I beg your pardon, Erast Petrovich, but that is what you called yourself) and a crazy native who has already been dismissed from his job serving Russia. No more than that.’

This was all said in solemn tones, with restrained dignity, and that was how the discussion ended. They started discussing the details.

When he got back to his apartment, Erast Petrovich found O-Yumi lying in the bed barely alive. Her face was pale and bloodless, her feet were bound in rags.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ he cried in horror. ‘Are you ill?’

She smiled weakly.

‘No, I’m just very, very tired. But it’s all right, it will pass.’

‘But what’s wrong with your feet?’

‘I grazed them.’

He went down on his knees, took hold of her hand and said imploringly:

‘Tell me the truth. Where were you last night? Where did you go today? What is happening to you? The truth, for God’s sake, the truth!’

O-Yumi looked at him affectionately.

‘Very well. I will tell you the truth – as far as I can. And you promise me two things: that you won’t ask any more questions and that you will tell me the truth too.’

‘I promise. But you first. Where were you?’

‘In the mountains. The maso herb only grows in one place, on the southern slope of Mount Tanzawa, and that is fifteen ri from here. I had to make two trips, because the infusion has to be brewed twice, and it must be absolutely fresh. That is all I have to tell. Now you tell me. I can see that you are planning something and I feel alarmed. I have a bad premonition.’

Fifteen ri – that’s almost sixty versts in each direction, Fandorin calculated. No wonder she’s barely alive!

‘To ride thirty ri in one night!’ he exclaimed. ‘You must have driven the horses half to death!’

For some reason O-Yumi found his words amusing, and she broke into quiet laughter.

‘That’s all. No more questions, you promised. Now you tell me.’

And he told her: about the duel, about how Bullcox’s fury burst a blood vessel in his brain, about Don Tsurumaki, and about the forthcoming operation. O-Yumi’s face became more and more uneasy, sadder and sadder.

‘How terrible…’ she whispered when he finished.

‘You mean about your Algie?’ Fandorin asked, immediately jealous. ‘Then go to him and feed him your infusion!’

‘No, I don’t mean him. I feel sorry for Algie, but one or the other of you had to come to grief. What you have planned is terrible. Don’t go anywhere tonight! It will end badly! I can see that from the shadow on your temple!’ she said, reaching out her hand to his head, and when Erast Petrovich smiled, she exclaimed despairingly, ‘You don’t believe in ninso!’

They argued for a long time after that, but Fandorin was adamant, and in the end O-Yumi fell asleep, exhausted. He walked out carefully, afraid of disturbing her sleep with an accidental movement or the creak of a chair.

The remainder of the day passed in preparations. There wasn’t a sound from the bedroom – O-Yumi was sleeping soundly.

But late in the evening, when Masa was already sitting on the porch, gazing in the direction of the dark hills above the Bluff, there was a surprise in store for Erast Petrovich.

As he walked past the bedroom yet again, he put his ear to the door. This time he thought he heard a gentle rustling and he cautiously opened the door slightly.

No, O-Yumi was still sleeping – he could her quiet, regular breathing from the bed.

He tiptoed over to the window in order to close it – there was a cold draught coming in. He glanced at the grey silhouette of the house opposite and suddenly froze.

Something had moved over there, up by the chimney. A cat? Then it was a very big one.

His heart started pounding like a wild thing, but Fandorin gave no sign of being alarmed in any way. On the contrary, he stretched lazily, closed the window, locked it with all the latches and slowly walked away.

Out in the corridor, he broke into a run.

It was the roof of the Club Hotel, Erast Petrovich realised, and he could climb up there from the back, using the fire escape ladder.

Hunched over, he ran along the railings to the next building. A minute later he was already up there. Resting one knee on the tiles, which were wet with rain, he pulled his Herstal out of it holster.

He heard rustling steps close by, on the other pitch of the roof.

No longer trying to hide, Fandorin dashed forward, with just one thought in his head – how to avoid slipping.

He reached the ridge of the roof and glanced over it – just in time to glimpse a black figure in a close-fitting black costume over by the edge of the roof. The invisible man again!

The titular counsellor threw up his hand, but it was too late to fire: the ninja jumped down.

Spreading his feet wide, Erast Petrovich slithered head first down the tiles, grabbed hold of the gutter and leaned out.

Where was the ninja?

Had he been killed by the fall, was he still moving?

But no matter how hard he stared, he couldn’t make out anyone down below. The invisible man had disappeared.

‘Omaeh ikanai. Hitori iku,’ ^[xii]

Fandorin told his servant when he got back to the consulate. ‘O-Yumi-san mamoru. Wakaru?’ ^[xiii]

And Masa understood. He nodded, without taking his eyes off the hill on which sooner or later the little blue light would flash. Erast Petrovich had been lucky with his servant after all.

An hour later, or maybe an hour and a half, the titular counsellor was sitting at the window in a peaked uniform cap, smoking cigars and, as has already been mentioned, his body, heart and mind were flooded with bliss.

So they were following him? Let them. The motto of tonight’s lightning raid was speed and more speed.

During the fourth cigar Masa looked into the room. It was time!

Fandorin left his servant with some simple instructions and walked out on to the porch.

Yes, the signal. Over there above the Bluff (but it looked as if it was at the very edge of the sky) a little blue star flashed on and off several times.

In the bright blue sky

Just you try to make it out -

A small bright blue star

A BRIAR PIPE

He grabbed hold of the tricycle that had been positioned in advance, lowered it off the porch and pushed it along the pathway at a run. Outside the gates he jumped into the saddle and started pressing hard on the pedals. Come on, then, just you try to follow me!

In order to throw any possible spies off the scent, instead of turning to the right, towards the Bluff, he turned left. He hurtled along at top speed, glancing in the mirror every now and then, but he didn’t glimpse a single black figure behind him on the brightly lit promenade. Perhaps his simple attempt at cunning had succeeded. Everyone knew that the simplest tricks were the most reliable.

The trick really was childish in its simplicity. Instead of the vice-consul, Masa was now sitting in the vice-consul’s window – in a peaked cap, with a cigar in his teeth. If they were lucky, the substitution would not be noticed soon.

Just to make certain of things, without reducing his speed, Erast Petrovich circled round the Settlement and rode into the Bluff from the other side, across the Okagawa river.

The rubber tyres swished through the puddles with a miraculous rustling sound and water splashed out from under the wheels, glinting joyously in the light of the street lamps. Fandorin felt like a hawk soaring above the dark streets of the night. He could see his goal, it was close, and nothing could halt or impede his impetuous attack. Watch out, you akunin!

Shirota was waiting at the agreed spot, on the corner of a side street.

‘I was watching through binoculars,’ the secretary reported. ‘The light went out thirty-five minutes ago, everywhere except for one window on the first floor. The servants withdrew to the house that stands at the back of the garden. Fifteen minutes ago the last window also went dark. Then I came down the hill.’

‘Did you look at the terrace? I told you that he l-likes to watch the stars.’

‘What stars are there today? It’s raining.’

Fandorin liked the secretary’s attitude. Calm, businesslike, with no sign of nerves. It could well be that Kanji Shirota’s true calling was not polishing an office desk with his elbows but a trade that required sangfroid and a love of risk.

Just as long as his courage didn’t fail him when it came to the real work.

‘Well, will you join me for dinner? The table’s all set,’ the titular counsellor said jocularly, gesturing towards the gates.

‘After you,’ Shirota replied in the same tone of voice. He really was holding up very well.

The lock and the hinges were well lubricated, they made their way inside without a single creak or squeak. And they had been exceptionally lucky with the weather: cloudy and dark, with the rain muffling any sound.

‘Do you remember the plan?’ Fandorin whispered as he walked up the steps. ‘We go into the house now. You wait downstairs. I’ll go up to…’

‘I remember everything,’ the secretary replied just as quietly. ‘Don’t waste time on that.’

The door into the house was not locked – a special point of pride for the owner that was also very handy for them. Fandorin ran up the carpeted steps to the first floor without making a sound. The bedroom was at the end of the corridor, beside the way out on to the terrace.

Wouldn’t it be fine if he woke up, Erast Petrovich suddenly thought when his left hand touched the door handle (the revolver was grasped in his right hand). Then, regardless of any unworthy desire for revenge, I would be perfectly justified in smacking the villain on the forehead with the butt of my gun.

When Fandorin stole up to the bed he even sighed deliberately, but Don Tsurumaki didn’t wake up. He was sleeping sweetly on a soft feather bed. He had a white nightcap with a vulgar pompom on his head instead of a fez. The silk blanket rose and fell peacefully on the millionaire’s broad chest. His lush lips were parted slightly.

The gold chain glinted in the opening of his nightshirt.

Now he’s sure to wake up, Erast Petrovich thought as he lined up the pliers, and he raised the hand holding the revolver. His heart was beating out a deafening drum-roll of triumph.

There was a metallic click, and the chain slid down the sleeping man’s neck. He lowed blissfully and turned over on to his side. The prickly golden rose was lying on Fandorin’s palm.

The soundest sleepers are not those who have a clear conscience, but those who never had one to begin with, the vice-consul told himself philosophically.

He walked downstairs, gestured for Shirota to go in the direction of the study-library, where he had once taken Prince Onokoji – may the Japanese God rest his sinful soul – by surprise at the scene of his crime.

He ran the beam of his little torch over the closed curtains, the tall cupboards with the solid doors, the bookshelves. There, that was the one.

‘You hold the light.’

He handed the little torch to the secretary, then spent two minutes feeling the spines of the books and the wooden uprights. Finally, when he pressed on a weighty tome of Sacred Writings (third from the left on the last shelf but one), something clicked. He pulled the shelves towards himself and they swung open like a door. Behind them in the wall was a small steel door.

‘On the keyhole, the keyhole,’ said Erast Petrovich, pointing impatiently.

The thorny rose wiggled and jiggled and slipped into the opening like a hand into a glove. Before turning the key, the titular counsellor carefully examined the wall, the floor and the skirting board for any electric alarm wires – and sure enough, he discovered a thick, hard string under the wallpaper. To get caught in the same trap twice would be unseemly, to say the least.

The pliers were called on again. One snip and the alarm was disconnected.

‘Open, sesame,’ Erast Petrovich whispered, in order to encourage Shirota. The beam of the torch had started wavering a bit – it looked as if the clerical worker’s nerves were beginning to find the tension too much.

‘What?’ the Japanese asked in surprise. ‘What did you say?’

Apparently he had never read the Arabian Nights.

There was a quiet ringing sound and the little door opened. Fandorin first squeezed his eyes shut, then swore under his breath.

Lying there in the steel box, glittering brilliantly in the electric light, were gold ingots. There were a lot of them; they looked like bricks in a wall.

Erast Petrovich’s disappointment knew no bounds. The Don had not lied. He really did keep gold in his safe. What a stupid, nouveau riche thing to do! Had this entire operation really been undertaken in vain?

Still unable to believe in such a crushing fiasco, he pulled out one ingot and glanced into the gap, but there was yellow metal glinting in the second row as well.

‘At the scene of the crime,’ a loud, mocking voice declared behind him.

The titular counsellor swung round sharply and saw a burly, stocky figure in the doorway. The next moment the chandelier on the ceiling blazed into life and the silhouette acquired colour, volume and texture.

It was the master of the house, still in that idiotic nightcap, with a dressing gown over his nightshirt, but the style of the trousers showing under the dressing gown was anything but pyjama-like.

‘Does Mr Diplomat like gold?’ Tsurumaki asked with a smile, nodding at the ingot in Fandorin’s hand.

The millionaire’s face was not sleepy at all. And another remarkable detail was that he was not wearing household slippers on his feet, but shoes, laced up in an extremely neat manner.

A trap, thought Erast Petrovich, turning cold. He was lying in bed dressed, even with his shoes on. He was waiting, he knew!

The Don clapped his hands, and men emerged from everywhere – from behind the curtains, out of doors, even out of the cupboards in the walls, and they were all dressed in identical black jackets and black cotton trousers. The servants – but Shirota had said they had all gone away!

There were at least a dozen servants. Fandorin had seen one of them before – a sinewy, bandy-legged fellow with long arms like a monkey. The vice-consul thought he worked as something like a butler or major-domo.

‘What a disgrace for the Russian Empire,’ said Tsurumaki, clicking his tongue. ‘The vice-consul stealing gold from other people’s safes. Kamata, ju-o toreh.’

The last phrase, spoken in Japanese, was addressed to the man with long arms. Ju was ‘weapon’, toro meant ‘take’, Kamata was his name.

The titular counsellor recovered from his stupor. He flung up his hand and aimed the Herstal at the forehead of the master of the house.

Kamata immediately froze on the spot, as did the other Black Jackets.

‘I have nothing to lose,’ Fandorin warned Tsurumaki. ‘Tell your men to go out. Immediately, otherwise…’

The Don wasn’t smiling any longer, he was looking at the titular counsellor curiously, as if trying to guess whether he was bluffing or might really fire.

‘I’ll fire, have no doubt about that,’ Fandorin assured him. ‘Better death than dishonour. And if I’m going to die anyway, it will be more fun with you. You’re such an interesting specimen. Shirota, stand on my left, you’re blocking my view of Mr Tsurumaki.’

The secretary obeyed but, evidently out of agitation, he stood on the vice-consul’s right instead of the left.

‘You know perfectly well that I didn’t come here for the gold.’

The Don moved and Erast Petrovich clicked the safety catch. ‘Stand still! And get all these men out of here!’

But then something strange happened. Something quite incredible, in fact.

The titular counsellor’s faithful comrade-in-arms, the secretary Shirota, flung himself on Fandorin’s arm with a guttural cry. A shot rang out and the bullet clipped a long splinter off the oak parquet.

‘What are you doing?’ Erast Petrovich shouted, trying to shake off the insane Japanese, but Kamata bounded across to the vice-consul and twisted his arm behind his back, and others came darting after him.

A second later Fandorin, disarmed and helpless, was standing flattened against the wall: they were holding him by the arms, the legs and the neck.

But Erast Petrovich was not looking at the black-clad servants, only at the traitor, who picked the revolver up off the floor and handed it to the Don with a bow.

‘You Judas!’ the titular counsellor shouted hoarsely. ‘You coward! You scoundrel!’

Shirota asked the master of the house something in Japanese – apparently he was requesting permission to reply. Tsurumaki nodded.

Then the turncoat turned towards Fandorin: his face was a pale, frozen mask, but his voice was firm and steady.

‘I am not a coward or a scoundrel, and even less a traitor. Quite the contrary, I am faithful to my country. I used to think it was possible to serve two countries without any loss of honour. But Mr Lieutenant Captain Bukhartsev opened my eyes. Now I know how Russia regards Japan and what we can expect from the Russians.’

Fandorin couldn’t bear it – he turned his eyes away. He remembered how Bukhartsev had pontificated about the ‘Yellow Peril’ without even thinking it necessary to lower his voice, and Shirota had been standing in the corridor all the time…

‘That’s politics,’ Erast Petrovich interrupted. ‘It can change. But betraying those who trust you is wrong! You are a member of the Russian consular staff!’

‘Not any longer. As you are aware, I handed in my resignation and even wrote exactly why I no longer wish to serve Russia.’

And that was true too!

‘Is it really more honourable to serve this murderer?’ Fandorin asked, nodding at the Don to emphasise this, his final argument.

‘Mr Tsurumaki is a sincere man. He is acting for the good of my Motherland. And he is also a strong man. If the supreme authority and the law damage the interests of our native land, he changes the authority and corrects the laws. I have decided that I shall help him. I never sat on any hill, I went straight to Mr Tsurumaki and told him about your plan. You could have harmed Japan, and I have stopped you.’

The longer Shirota talked, the more confident his voice became and the more brightly his eyes flashed. The modest, unassuming secretary had wound the smart Fandorin round his little finger; he even dared to be proud of the fact. Erast Petrovich, soundly drubbed on all counts, including even the moral issue, was seized by a spiteful desire to spoil the triumph of this champion of ‘sincerity’ in at least some small way.

‘I thought you loved Sophia Diogenovna. But you have betrayed her. You will never see her again.’

The moment he said it, he repented. It really was rather unworthy.

But Shirota was not perturbed.

‘On the contrary. Today I proposed to Sophie and I was accepted. I warned her that if she married me, she would have to become Japanese. She replied: “With you I would live in the jungle.”’ The hateful face of the Russian Empire’s new enemy dissolved into a smile of happiness. ‘It is bitter for me to part from you like this. I have profound respect for you. But nothing bad will happen to you, Mr Tsurumaki has promised me that. The safe was specially filled with gold instead of documents that contain state secrets. Thanks to this, you will not be charged with spying. And Mr Tsurumaki will not sue you for attempted robbery. You will remain alive, you will not go to jail. You will simply be expelled from Japan. You cannot be left here, you are far too dynamic, and you are also embittered because of your friends who have been killed.’

He turned to the Don and bowed to indicate that the conversation in Russian was over.

Tsurumaki added in English:

‘Shirota-san is a genuine Japanese patriot. A man of honour who knows that duty to the Motherland comes above all other things. Go, my friend. You should not be here when the police arrive.’

With a low bow to his new master and a brief nod to Fandorin, Shirota left the room.

The titular counsellor was still being held as tightly as ever, and that could mean only one thing.

‘The police, of course, will arrive t-too late,’ Erast said to the master of the house. ‘The thief will be killed while attempting to escape or resisting capture. That is why you have sent the idealistic Shirota away. I am such a dynamic individual – not only can I not be left in Japan, I cannot even be left alive, right?’

The smile with which Tsurumaki listened to these words was full of jovial surprise, as if the millionaire had not expected to hear such a subtle and witty comment from his prisoner.

The Don turned the Herstal over in his hand and asked:

‘Self-winding? Hammerless?’

‘Yes. Simply press the trigger and all seven bullets will be fired, one after another. That is, six, one round has already been spent,’ replied Fandorin, inwardly feeling proud of his own cool composure.

Tsurumaki weighed the small revolver in his hand and the titular counsellor readied himself: now it would be very painful, then the pain would become duller, and then it would pass off altogether…

But the Herstal was sent flying to the floor. Erast Petrovich was surprised only for a moment. Then he noticed that the Don’s pocket was bulging. Of course: it would be strange if the robber were to be shot with his own revolver.

As if to confirm this guess, the master of the house lowered his hand into that pocket. Events were clearly approaching their conclusion.

Suddenly Kamata, who had been keeping his eyes fixed on the titular counsellor, turned his bony face covered with coarse wrinkles towards the door.

There were shouts and crashing sounds coming from somewhere outside.

Had the police arrived? But then why the noise?

Another Black Jacket came running into the room. He bowed to the master and Kamata and jabbered something.

‘Tsurete koi,’ ^[xiv]

Tsurumaki ordered, without taking his hand out of his pocket.

The servant ran out, and half a minute later Masa, looking much the worse for wear, was led in by the arms.

When he saw Fandorin, he shouted something in a desperate voice.

Only one word was comprehensible: ‘O-Yumi-san’.

‘What’s he saying? What’s he saying?’ the vice-consul asked, jerking in the arms of his guards.

To judge from the master’s face, he was astounded by the news. He asked Masa something, received an answer and suddenly started thinking very intently. He took no notice of Fandorin’s repeated questions and merely scratched at his black beard furiously. Masa kept on trying to bow to Erast Petrovich (which was not easy to do with his arms twisted behind his back) and repeating: ‘Moosiwake arimasen! Moosiwake arimasen!’

‘What is that he’s muttering?’ the titular counsellor exclaimed in helpless fury. ‘What does it mean?’

‘It means: “There can be no forgiveness for me!”,’ said Tsurumaki, suddenly looking at him keenly. ‘Your servant is saying some very interesting things. He says he was sitting at the window and smoking a cigar. That he felt stuffy and he opened one windowpane. That there was a whistling sound, something stung him in the neck, and after that he remembers nothing. He woke up on the floor. There was something like a thorn sticking out of his neck. He dashed into the next room and saw that O-Yumi had disappeared. The bed was empty.’

Erast Petrovich groaned, and the master of the house asked Masa another question. When he received an answer he jerked his chin, and Fandorin’s servant was immediately released. Masa reached inside the front of his jacket and took out what looked like a wooden needle.

‘What’s that?’ asked Fandorin.

The Don examined the ‘thorn’ gloomily.

‘A fukibari. They smear this piece of rubbish with poison or some other kind of potion – to paralyse someone temporarily, for instance, or put them to sleep – and fire it out of a blowpipe. The ninja’s favourite weapon. I’m afraid, Fandorin, that your girlfriend has been abducted by the “Stealthy Ones”.’

At that very moment Erast Petrovich, who had fully prepared himself to die, suddenly felt that he wanted terribly not to. Why, one might think, should he care about anything in the world? If there are only a few seconds of life left, do unsolved puzzles, or even the abduction of the woman you love, really have any importance? But he wanted so much to live that when the Don’s hand moved in that ominous pocket, Fandorin gritted his teeth tightly – in order not to beg for a respite. They wouldn’t grant him a respite in any case, and even if they did, he couldn’t possibly ask a murderer for anything.

The vice-consul forced himself to look at the hand as it slowly pulled a black, gleaming object out of the pocket until it emerged completely.

It was a briar pipe.

After I read it -

The Latin word for ‘briar’ -

I took up a pipe

TWO HANDS TIGHTLY CLASPED

‘I like your Shirota,’ the Don said thoughtfully, striking a match and puffing out a cloud of smoke. ‘A genuine Japanese. All of a piece, intelligent, reliable. I’ve wanted an assistant like that for a long time already. All these’ – he waved his pipe round at his black army – ‘are good for fighting and other simple jobs that require no foresight. But Shirota belongs to a different breed, a far more valuable one. And what’s more, he has made an excellent study of foreigners, especially Russians. That’s very important for my plans.’

The very last thing Fandorin had been expecting was a panegyric on the virtues of the former secretary of the consulate, so he listened cautiously, not sure what Tsurumaki was driving at.

But the millionaire puffed on his pipe and carried on in the same style, as if he were thinking out loud,

‘Shirota defined you very precisely: brave, unpredictable and very lucky. That is an extremely dangerous combination, which is why this performance was required.’ He nodded at the safe with the magical radiance streaming out of it. ‘But now everything is changing. I need you. And I need you here, in Japan. There won’t be any police.’

The Don gave an order in Japanese, and suddenly no one was holding Erast Petrovich any longer. The Black Jackets released him, bowed to their master and left the room one by one.

‘Shall we have a talk?’ asked Tsurumaki, gesturing towards two armchairs by the window. ‘Tell your man not to worry. Nothing bad will happen to you.’

Fandorin waved his hand to let Masa know that everything was all right and his servant reluctantly left the room, with a suspicious glance at the master of the house.

‘You need me? Why?’ asked Fandorin, in no hurry to sit down.

‘Because you are brave, unpredictable and very lucky. But you need me even more. You want to save your woman, don’t you? Then sit down and listen.’

The vice-consul sat down at that; he didn’t need to be asked twice.

‘How do I do that?’ he asked quickly. ‘What do you know?’

The Don scratched his beard and sighed.

‘This is going to be a long story. I wasn’t intending to make any excuses to you, to deny all the nonsense that you have imagined about me. But since we shall be fighting a common cause, I shall have to. Let’s try to restore our former friendship.’

‘That won’t be easy,’ Fandorin remarked ironically, unable to resist.

‘I know. But you are an intelligent man and you will realise I am telling the truth… to begin with, let’s clear up the business with Okubo, since that’s where everything began.’ Tsurumaki looked into the other man’s eyes calmly and seriously, as if he had decided to set aside his everyday mask of a jolly bon vivant. ‘Yes, I had the minister removed, but that is our own internal Japanese affair, which shouldn’t be of any interest to you. I don’t know what your view of life is, Fandorin, but for me life is an eternal struggle between Order and Chaos. Order strives to pigeonhole everything, nail it down, render it safe and emasculate it. Chaos demolishes all this neat symmetry, turns society upside down, recognises no laws or rules. In this eternal struggle I am on the side of Chaos, because Chaos is Life, and Order is Death. I know perfectly well that, like all mortals, I am doomed: sooner or later Order will get the better of me, I shall stop floundering about and be transformed into a piece of dead matter. But for as long as I am alive, I wish to live as intensely as I can, so that the earth trembles around me and the symmetry is disrupted. Pardon the philosophy, but I want you to understand correctly how I am made and what I am striving for. Okubo was the absolute incarnation of Order. Nothing but arithmetic and precise accounting. If I had not stopped him, he would have transformed Japan into a second-rate, pseudo-European country, doomed eternally to drag along in the wake of the great powers. Arithmetic is a dead science, because it only takes material things into account. But my Homeland’s great strength is in its spirit, which cannot be quantified. It is non-material, it belongs entirely to Chaos. Dictatorship and absolute monarchy are symmetrical and dead. Parliamentarianism is anarchic and full of life. The downfall of Okubo is a small victory for Chaos, a victory for Life over Death. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?’

‘No,’ replied Fandorin, who was listening intently. ‘But do carry on. Only please, m-move from the philosophy to the facts.’

‘Very well, let it be the facts. I don’t think I need to go into the details of the operation – you already have a good grasp of that. I employed the help of the Satsuman fanatics and several highly placed officials who see the future of Japan in the same way as I do. I feel sorry for Suga. He was an outstanding man and would have gone far. But I bear no grudge against you – you have given me Shirota instead. For the Russians he was a lowly native clerk, but from this seed I shall grow a remarkable sunflower, just you wait and see. And perhaps you and he will make peace with each other yet. Three friends like you, me and him are a great force.’

‘Three friends?’ Erast Petrovich repeated, clutching the armrests of his chair with his fingers. ‘I had three friends. You killed them all.’

The Don was disconcerted by that and his face fell.

‘Yes, that was most unfortunate… I didn’t order them to be killed. I only wanted to take back what should not have fallen into the wrong hands. It is my fault, of course. But only in the sense that I didn’t forbid them to be killed, and as far as the Stealthy Ones are concerned, the less bother, the better. I forbade them to touch you, because you are my friend. That’s why they killed the little prince, but not you.’

The titular counsellor shuddered. That sounded like the truth. Tsurumaki had not wanted him dead? But if that was the case, the entire pattern he had figured out was shot to hell!

Erast Petrovich wrinkled up his forehead and immediately restored the sequence of logic:

‘Right. You decided to get rid of me later, when I told you what Onokoji said before he died.’

‘Nothing of the kind!’ Tsurumaki exclaimed resentfully. ‘I arranged everything in the best possible manner. I made Bullcox give me his word, and he kept his promise, because he is a gentleman. He satisfied his vanity, cut a dash, humiliated you in public, but he didn’t maim you or kill you.’

‘But surely… surely the stroke was not staged?’

‘Why, did you think he was struck down by lightning from heaven? Bullcox is an ambitious man. What would he want with the scandal of a killing? But this way he saved his honour and did no damage to his career.’

The pattern had collapsed anyway. No one had intended to kill Erast Petrovich, and his lucky star apparently had nothing to do with anything!

This news made a profound impression on the titular counsellor, but even so he did not allow himself to be put off his stride.

‘But how did you find out that my friends and I had evidence that was dangerous for you?’

‘Tamba told me.’

‘Who t-told you?’

‘Tamba,’ Tsurumaki explained matter-of-factly. ‘The head of the Momochi clan.’

Fandorin was totally bemused now.

‘Are you talking about the ninja? But as far as I’m aware, Momochi Tamba lived hundreds of years ago!’

‘The present Tamba is his successor. Tamba the Eleventh. Only don’t ask me how he knew about your plan – I have no idea. Tamba never reveals his secrets.’

‘What does this man look like?’ Erast Petrovich asked, unable to control a nervous tremor.

‘It’s hard to describe him, he changes his appearance. But basically Tamba is short, less than five feet tall, but he can make himself taller, they have some kind of cunning devices for that. Old, skinny… What else? Ah, yes, the eyes. He has absolutely special eyes that are impossible to hide. When he looks at you, they seem to burn right through you. It’s best not to look into them – he’ll put a spell on you.’

‘Yes, that’s him!’ Fandorin exclaimed. ‘I knew it! Tell me more! Have you been dealing with the ninja for a long time?’

The Don paused, gazing at the other man quizzically.

‘Not very long. I was put in contact with them by an old samurai, now deceased. He used to serve the princes Onokoji… The Momochi clan is a very valuable ally, they are capable of working genuine miracles. But they are dangerous to deal with. You never know what is on their mind and what to expect from them. Tamba is the only man in the world I’m afraid of. Did you see how many guards I have in the house? But before, if you recall, I was perfectly happy to spend the night here alone.’

‘What happened between you? Did you not have enough money to pay him?’ Fandorin laughed mistrustfully, glancing at the safe packed with gold ingots.

‘That’s funny,’ Tsurumaki conceded dourly. ‘No, I always paid on time. I don’t understand what happened, and that’s what alarms me most of all. Tamba has started some game of his own, with goals that are not clear to me. And in some strange way that game is connected with you.’

‘With me? In what way?’

‘I don’t know in what way!’ the Don cried irritably. ‘They want something from you! Otherwise why would they have abducted your lover? That’s why I’m not handing you over to the police. You are the key to this plot. I just don’t know yet which way to turn you so that the box of secrets will open. And you don’t know either, do you?’

The expression on the titular counsellor’s face was more eloquent than any reply, and the disciple of Chaos nodded.

‘I can see that you don’t. Here is my hand, Fandorin. It is the custom for you Europeans to seal a bargain with a handshake, is it not?’

The millionaire’s short-fingered hand hung motionless in midair.

‘What b-bargain?’

‘An alliance. You and I against Tamba. The ninja abducted O-Yumi and killed your friends. I didn’t kill them – they did. We shall strike a pre-emptive blow against them. The best form of defence is attack. Come on, give me your hand! We have to trust each other!’

But the vice-consul still did not reach out in response.

‘What trust can there be if you are armed and I am not?’

‘Oh Lord! Take your little toy, I don’t want it.’

Once he had picked his Herstal up off the floor, Erast Petrovich finally believed that all this was not some subtle trap intended to worm something out of him.

‘What is this pre-emptive strike?’ he asked cautiously.

‘Tamba thinks that I don’t know where to look for him, but he is mistaken. My men, of course, are not shinobi, but they know a thing or two. I have managed to find out where the Momochi clan’s lair is located.’

Fandorin jerked up out of his chair.

‘Then why are we wasting time? Let’s get going straight away.’

‘It’s not that simple. The lair is hidden in the mountains. My spies know exactly where, but it is hard to reach it…’

‘Is it far from Yokohama?’

‘Not very. On the border of the Sagami and Kai provinces, close to Mount Oyama. Two days’ march from here – if you travel with baggage.’

‘What do we need baggage for? We can travel light and be there tomorrow!’

But Tsurumaki shook his head.

‘No, the baggage is essential, and quite heavy baggage too. The place is a genuine fortress.’

‘A f-fortress? The ninja have built a fortress close to the capital and no one knows about it?’

‘That is what our country is like. Densely populated plains along the sea, but move away from the coast, even slightly, and there are remote, uninhabited mountains. And Tamba’s fortress is not one that the chance traveller will notice…’

Erast Petrovich was sick to death of all these riddles.

‘You have many loyal men, these “Black Jackets” of yours. If you order them to, they will storm the place, even at the cost of their own lives, I have no doubt about that. So what do you need me for? Tell me the truth, or there will be no alliance.’

‘Yes, I will send Kamata there with a brigade of my best fighting men. They are all my comrades-in-arms from the civil war, I can rely on every one of them. But I myself cannot go with them – I have elections in three prefectures, that’s the most important thing for me at the moment. Kamata is an experienced commander, an excellent soldier, but he only knows how to act according to the rules. He’s not much use in an unconventional situation. And, let me repeat once again, it is very difficult to get into Tamba’s secret village. Impossible in fact. There is no entrance.’

‘How can there be no entrance?’

‘There simply isn’t. That is what my spies have reported to me, and they are not given to fantasising. I need your brains, Fandorin. And your luck. You can be quite sure that is where O-Yumi has been taken, to the mountain fortress. On your own, without me, there is nothing you can do. You need me. But you will be useful to me too. Well then, do I have to hold my hand out in the air for much longer?’

After a second’s hesitation, the titular counsellor finally shook the outstretched hand. Two strong hands came together and squeezed each other so tight that the fingers turned white.

Stupid ritual

That refuses to die out:

Two hands tightly clasped

A DEAD TREE

Europe came to an end half an hour after they set out on their way. The spires and towers of the anglicised Bluff first gave way to the factory chimneys and cargo cranes of the river port, then to iron roofs, then to a sea of tiles, then to the thatched straw roofs of peasant huts, and after another mile or so, the buildings disappeared completely, leaving just the road stretching out between the rice fields, and bamboo groves, and the wall of low mountains that closed in the valley on both sides.

The expedition set off before dawn, in order not to attract unwanted attention. Strictly speaking, there was nothing suspicious about the caravan. It looked like a perfectly ordinary construction brigade, like the ones that built bridges and laid roads throughout the Mikado’s empire, which was striving eagerly to make the transition from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century.

The caravan was commanded by a sturdily built man with a coarse, wrinkled face. He stared around with the tenacious gaze of a bandit, which actually differs very little from the gaze of a construction foreman or master builder. His outfit – straw hat, black jacket, narrow trousers – was exactly the same as the workers wore, it was just that the commander rode and his thirty-two subordinates travelled on foot. Many of them were leading mules, loaded with heavy crates of equipment, by the bridle. Even the fact that the brigade was accompanied by a foreigner with his Japanese servant was unlikely to seem strange to anyone – there were many European and American engineers working on the immense building site that the Land of the Rising Sun had now become. If travellers coming the other way and peasants scrabbling in the meagre dirt watched the foreigner as he rode by, it was only because of the outlandish self-propelled kuruma on which he was riding.

Fandorin already regretted that he had not listened to the consul, who had advised him to hire a mule – the animals were slow and rather unattractive, but far more reliable than Japanese horses. However, Erast Petrovich had not wished to appear unattractive as he set out to save the woman he loved. He had taken a mule, but not to ride, only for his baggage, and had entrusted it to Masa’s care.

His servant tramped along behind him, leading the solid-hoofed creature on a rein and every now and then shouting at it: ‘Get arong’. The mule was walking along on its own in any case, but Masa had specially asked his master for the Russian words for urging on animals, in order to show off to the Black Jackets.

In everything apart from his choice of a means of transport, the titular counsellor had taken the advice of the experienced Vsevolod Vitalievich. His baggage consisted of a mosquito net (the mosquitoes in the Japanese mountains were genuine vampires); a rubber bath (skin diseases were widespread among the local inhabitants, so washing in the hotel bathrooms was a no-no); an inflatable pillow (the Japanese used wooden ones); baskets of food and lots of other essential items for a journey.

Communication with the commander of the brigade, Kamata, was established with some difficulty. He knew quite a lot of English words, but he had no concept of grammar, so without the habit of deductive reasoning, Fandorin probably would not have been able to understand him.

For instance, Kamata would say:

‘Hia furomu ibuningu tsu gou, naito hoteru supendo. Tsumorou mauntin entah.’

To start with, bearing in mind the peculiarities of the Japanese accent, Erast Petrovich restored the fragments of this gibberish to their original state. This gave him: ‘Here from evening to go, night hotel spend, tomorrow mountain enter’. After that, the meaning became clear: ‘We move on from here until the evening, spend the night in a hotel and tomorrow we enter the mountains’.

To reply he had to perform the reverse procedure: dismember the English sentence into its separate words and distort them in the Japanese style.

‘Mauntin, hau fah?’ the vice-consul asked. ‘Ninja bireju, hau fah?’

And Kamata understood perfectly. He thought for a moment and scratched his chin.

‘Smuuzu irebun ri. Mauntin faibu ri?’

It was eleven ri across the plain (about forty versts), and five ri through the mountains, Fandorin understood. So generally, although it wasn’t easy, they managed to make themselves understood to each other, and by midday the two of them had achieved such a close fit that they could even talk about complicated matters. For instance, about parliamentary democracy, of which Kamata was terribly fond. The empire had only just adopted a law on local government; elections for prefecture assemblies, mayors and village elders were taking place everywhere; and the Black Jackets were playing a very lively part in all this activity: they defended some candidates and also, as this advocate of parliamentarianism put it, ‘smorru furaiten’ others, that is, they frightened them a little. For Japan, all this was new, even revolutionary. And Don Tsurumaki seemed to be the first influential politician who had realised the full importance of the little provincial governments, which were regarded ironically in the capital as a useless decoration.

‘Ten eas, Tokyo nasingu,’ Kamata prophesied, swaying in the saddle. ‘Provinsu rearu pawa. Tsurumaki-dono rearu pawa. Nippon nou Tokyo, Nippon probinsu.’ ^[xv]

But Fandorin thought: The provinces are all very well, but by that time the Don will probably have control of the capital as well. And that will be the triumph of democracy.

The commander of the Black Jackets turned out to be quite a considerable chatterbox. As they moved along the valley, squeezed in tighter and tighter by the hills on both sides, he talked about the glorious days when he and the Don crushed the competition in the fight for lucrative contracts, and then came even jollier times – it was a period of revolt, and they fought and feasted ‘furu beri’, that is, with a full belly.

It was clear that the old bandit was in seventh heaven. Fighting was far better than working as a major-domo, he avowed. And a little later he added that it was even better than building a democratic Japan.

He really was a fine commander too. Every half-hour he rode round the caravan, checking to see whether the mules had gone lame or the baggage had come loose, joking with the fighting men, and the column immediately started moving more cheerfully and energetically.

To Fandorin’s surprise, they pressed on without a halt. He pushed his pedals economically, matching his speed to the men on foot, but after twenty versts he was starting to tire, while the Black Jackets were not showing any signs of fatigue.

Lunch lasted a quarter of an hour. Everyone, including Kamata, swallowed two rice balls, drank some water and then got back in formation. Erast Petrovich barely even had time to lay out the sandwiches prepared by the thoughtful Obayasi-san, and was obliged to chew them on the move, as he caught up with the brigade. Masa muttered as he dragged his Rosinante along behind.

Between four and five in the afternoon, having covered about thirty versts, they turned off the main road on to a narrow track. This was a completely wild area; at least, no European had ever set foot here before. Fandorin’s eye could not discern any signs of Western civilisation in the small, squalid villages. Little children and adults with their mouths hanging open stared, not only at the tricycle, but also at the round-eyed man in outlandish clothes who was riding it. And this was only a few hours’ journey away from Yokohama! Only now did the titular counsellor start to realise how thin was the lacquer of civilisation with which the rulers had hastily coated the faзade of the ancient empire.

Several times they came across cows – wearing colourful aprons with pictures of dragons on them and straw shoes over their hoofs. The villagers used these imposingly attired cud-chewers as pack and draught animals. The titular counsellor asked Kamata about this, and he confirmed his suspicion that the stupid peasants did not eat meat or drink milk, because they were still completely savage here, but never mind, democracy would come to them soon.

They stopped for the night in a rather large village at the very end of the valley, just before the mountains began. The village elder accommodated the ‘construction brigade’ in the communal house – ‘workers’ in the yard, ‘masters’ and ‘engineers’ inside. A straw-mat floor, no furniture, paper walls with holes in them. So this was the ‘hoteru’ Kamatu had mentioned that morning. The only other guest was an itinerant monk with a staff and a shoulder bag for alms, but he remained apart from their group and kept turning away – he didn’t want to defile his gaze with the sight of the ‘hairy barbarian’.

Fandorin got the idea of taking a stroll round the village, but the villagers behaved no better than the bonze – the children shouted and ran away, the women squealed, the dogs barked hysterically – and so he had to go back. The embarrassed elder came, bowed many times in apology and asked the gaijin-san not to go anywhere.

‘Furu pazanto nevah see uait man,’ Kamata translated. ‘Yu sakasu manki, sinku.’

He dangled his long arms and swayed as he hobbled round the room, laughing at the top of his voice. It took Erast Petrovich some time to understand what was wrong. It turned out that they had never seen any white people in the village before, but one of the locals had been in the city many years ago and seen an ugly trained monkey that was also dressed in a curious manner. Fandorin’s eyes were so big and blue that the ignoramuses had taken fright.

Kamata took pleasure in telling Fandorin at length what fools the peasants were. The Japanese had a saying: ‘A family never remains rich or poor for longer than three generations’, and it was true that in the city life was arranged so that in three generations rich men declined into poverty and poor men fought their way up – such was the law of God’s justice. But the boneheads living in the villages had not been able to break out of their poverty for a thousand years. When parents got decrepit and were unable to work, their own children took the old folk into the mountains and left them there to die – in order not to waste food on them. The peasants didn’t wish to learn anything new, they didn’t want to serve in the army. He couldn’t understand how it was possible to build a great Japan with this rabble, but if Tsurumaki-dono took the contract, they’d build it, they’d have to.

Eventually, weary of deciphering his companion’s chatter, the titular counsellor went off to sleep. He cleaned his teeth with ‘Brilliant’ powder and washed himself in his travelling bath, which was most convenient, except that the water smelled strongly of rubber. Meanwhile Masa set out his camp bed, hung the green net over it and inflated the pillow, working furiously with his cheeks.

‘Tomorrow,’ Fandorin said to himself and fell asleep.

The last five ri were a match for the previous day’s eleven. The road immediately started rising steeply and looping between the hills, which reached up higher and higher towards the sky. Fandorin had to dismount from his tricycle and push it by the handlebars, and the young man regretted not having left it in the village.

Well after midday Kamata pointed to a mountain with a snowy peak.

‘Oyama. Now right-right.’

Four thousand feet, thought Fandorin, throwing his head back and gauging it by eye. Not Kazbek, of course, and not Mont Blanc, but a serious elevation, no doubt about it.

The place we are going to is a little off to one side, explained the commander, who was thoughtful and taciturn today. We stretch the line out into single file and keep quiet.

They walked on for about another two hours. Before they entered a narrow but short ravine, Kamata dismounted and divided the brigade into two parts. He ordered the larger group to cover their heads with leaves and crawl through the bottleneck on their stomachs. About ten men remained behind with the pack animals and baggage.

‘Tower. Look,’ he explained curtly to Erast Petrovich, jabbing one finger upwards.

Obviously the enemy had an observation point somewhere close by.

The titular counsellor travelled the two hundred sazhens of the ravine in the same manner as the others. His outfit did not suffer at all, though: specially designed for outings in the mountains, it was equipped with magnificent knee-pads and elbow-pads of black leather. Masa panted along behind him, having refused point blank to stay behind with the mule and the tricycle.

Having passed this dangerous place they moved on, standing erect now, but sticking to the undergrowth and avoiding open areas. Kamata clearly knew the road – either he had been given precise instructions, or he had been here before.

They scrambled up the wooded slope and along a stony stream for at least an hour.

At the top the commander waved his hand and the Black Jackets slumped to the ground, worn out. Kamata gestured for Fandor in to come over to him.

The two of them moved away about a hundred paces to a naked boulder overgrown with moss, from which there was a panoramic view of the mountain peaks around them and the valley stretching out below.

‘The village of the shinobi is there,’ said Kamata, pointing to the next mountain.

It was about the same height, and also overgrown with forest, but it had one intriguing and distinctive feature. A section of the summit had split away from the massif (probably as a result of an earthquake) and twisted down, separated from the rest of the mountain by a deep crack. On the side facing them, the separated block ended in a precipice, where the slope had crumbled away, unable to retain the layer of earth on its inclined surface. It was a quite fantastic site: a crooked slice of mountain suspended over an abyss.

Erast Petrovich pressed his binoculars to his eyes. He could not make out any signs of human habitation at first, only the pine trees crowding close together and flocks of birds flying in zigzags. The only structure was clinging to the very edge of the precipice. Adjusting the focus with the little wheel, Fandorin saw a wooden house that was certainly of considerable size. It had something like a little bridge or jetty protruding from the wall that ran down into nowhere. But who could moor at that berth, at a height of two hundred sazhens?

‘Momochi Tamba,’ said Kamata in his distinctive English. ‘His house. The other houses can’t be seen from below.’

The titular counsellor felt his heart leap. O-Yumi was near! But how could he reach her?

He ran the binoculars over the entire mountain again, slowly.

‘I don’t understand how they g-get up there…’

‘That’s the wrong question,’ said the commander of the Black Jackets, looking at Erast Petrovich, not the mountain. His gaze was at once searching and mistrustful. ‘The right question is how do we get up there? I don’t know. Tsurumaki-dono said the gaijin will think of something. Think. I’ll wait.’

‘We have to move closer,’ said Fandorin.

They moved closer. To do that they had to climb to the peak of the split mountain – and then the separated block was very close. They didn’t walk, but crawled to the fissure that separated it off, trying not to show themselves above the grass, although on that side they couldn’t see a living soul.

The titular counsellor estimated the size of the crack. Deep, with a sheer verticalwall – impossible to scramble up. But not very wide. At the narrowest spot, where a dead, charred tree stuck up on the other side, it was hardly more than ten sazhens. The shinobi probably used a flying bridge or something of the sort to get across.

‘Well then?’ Kamata asked impatiently. ‘Can we get across there?’

‘No.’

The commander swore in a Japanese whisper, but the sense of his exclamation was clear enough: I knew a damned gaijin wouldn’t be any use to us.

‘We can’t get across there,’ Fandorin repeated, crawling away from the cliff edge. ‘But we can do something to make them come out.’

‘What?’

The vice-consul expounded his plan on the way back.

‘Secretly position men on the mountain, beside the crack. Wait for the wind to blow in that direction. We need a strong wind. But that’s not unusual in the mountains. Set fire to the forest. When the shinobi see that the flames could spread to their island, they’ll throw a bridge across and come to this side to put them out. First we’ll kill the ones who come running to put out the fire, then we’ll make our way into their village across their bridge.’

With numerous repetitions, checks and gesticulations, the explanation of the plan occupied the entire journey back to the camp.

It was already dark and the paths could not be seen, but Kamata walked confidently and didn’t go astray once.

When he had finally clarified the essential points of the proposed action, he pondered them for a long time.

He said:

‘A good plan. But not for shinobi. Shinobi are cunning. If the forest simply catches fire all of a sudden, they’ll suspect that something’s not right.’

‘Why just all of a sudden?’ asked Fandorin, pointing up at the sky, completely covered with black clouds. ‘The season of the plum rain. There are frequent thunderstorms. A lightning strike – a tree catches fire, the wind spreads the flames. Very simple.’

‘There will be a storm,’ the commander agreed. ‘But who knows when? How long will we wait? One day, two, a week?’

‘One day, two, a week,’ the titular counsellor said, and shrugged, thinking: And the longer the better. You and I, my friend, have different interests. I want to save O-Yumi, you want to kill the Stealthy Ones, and if she dies together with them, there’s no sorrow in that for you. I need time to prepare.

‘A good plan,’ Kamata repeated. ‘But no good for me. I won’t wait a week. I won’t even wait two days. I also have a plan. Better than the gaijin’s.’

‘I wonder what it is.’ The titular counsellor chuckled, certain that the old war-dog was bragging.

They heard muffled braying and the jingling of harness. It was the caravan moving up, after passing through the ravine under cover of darkness.

The Black Jackets quickly unloaded the bundles and crates off the mules. Wooden boards cracked and the barrels of Winchester rifles, still glossy with the factory grease, glinted in the light of dark lanterns.

‘About the forest fire – that’s good, that’s right,’ Kamata said in a satisfied voice as he watched four large crates being unloaded.

Their contents proved to be a Krupps mountain gun, two-and-a-half-inch calibre, the latest model – Erast Petrovich had seen guns like that among the trophies seized by the Turks during the recent war.

‘Shoot from the cannon. The pines will catch fire. The shinobi will run. Where to? I’ll put marksmen on the bottom of the crack. On the other side, where the precipice is, too. Let them climb down on ropes – we’ll shoot all of them.’

Kamata lovingly stroked the barrel of the gun.

Fandorin felt a chilly tremor run down his spine. Exactly what he was afraid of! It wouldn’t be a carefully planned operation to rescue a prisoner, but a bloodbath, in which there would be no survivors.

It was pointless trying to argue with the old bandit – he wouldn’t listen.

‘Perhaps your plan really is simpler,’ said the vice-consul, pretending to stifle a yawn. ‘When do we begin?’

‘An hour after dawn.’

‘Then we need to get a good night’s sleep. My servant and I will bed down by the stream. It’s a bit cooler there.’

Kamata mumbled something without turning round. He seemed to have lost all interest in the gaijin.

‘The dead tree, the dead tree’ – the words hammered away inside the titular counsellor’s head.

To be beautiful

After death is a great skill

That only trees have

THE GLOWING COALS

It was not difficult to get to the next mountain in the dark – Fandorin had memorised the way.

They clambered up to the top by guesswork – just keep going up and when there’s nowhere higher left to go, that’s the summit.

But determining the direction in which the split-away section of the mountain lay proved to be quite difficult.

Erast Petrovich and his servant tried going right and left, and once they almost fell over the edge of a cliff, and the cliff turned out not to be the one they needed – there was a river murmuring down at its bottom, but there was no river at the bottom of the crack.

Who can tell how much more time they would have wasted on the search, but fortunately the sky was gradually growing lighter: the dark clouds crept away to the east, the stars shone ever more brightly, and soon the moon came out. After the pitch darkness, it was as if a thousand-candle chandelier had lit up above the world – you could have read a book.

Kamata would have had to wait a long time for a thunderstorm, Erast Petrovich thought as he led Masa towards the fissure. Somewhere not far away an eagle owl hooted: not ‘wuhu, wuhu’ as in Russia, but ‘wufu, wufu’. That is its native accent, because there is no syllable ‘hu’ in the Japanese alphabet, thought Erast Petrovich.

There it was, the same place, with the charred pine on the far side, the one that the titular counsellor had noticed earlier. The dead tree was his only hope now.

‘Nawa,’ ^[xvi]

the vice-consul whispered to his servant.

Masa unwound the long rope from his waist and handed it to him.

The art of lasso-throwing, a souvenir of his time in Turkish captivity, would come in handy yet again. Fandorin tied a wide noose and weighted it with a travelling kettle of stainless steel. He stood at the edge of the black abyss and started swinging the noose in wide, whistling circles above his head. The kettle struck the tree with a mournful clang and clattered across the stones. Missed!

He had to pull back the lasso, coil it up and throw again.

The loop caught on the trunk only at the fourth attempt.

The vice-consul wound the other end of the rope round a tree stump and checked to make sure it held. He set off towards the fissure, but Masa decisively shoved his master aside and went first.

He lay on his back, wrapped his short legs round the rope and set off, placing one hand in front of the other and crawling very quickly. The lasso swayed, the stump creaked, but the fearless Japanese didn’t stop for an instant. In five minutes he was already on the other side. He grabbed hold of the rope and pulled on it – so that Erast Petrovich would not sway as much. So the titular counsellor completed his journey through the blackness with every possible comfort, except that he skinned one hand slightly.

That was the first half of the job done. His watch showed three minutes after eleven.

‘Well, God speed,’ Fandorin said quietly, taking the Herstal out of its holster.

Masa pulled a short sword out from under his belt and checked to make sure that the blade slipped easily out of the scabbard.

Erast Petrovich had estimated that the hanging island was approximately a hundred sazhens across, from the fissure to the precipice. At a stroll, that was two minutes. But they walked slowly, so that no branch would crack and the fallen pines needles wouldn’t rustle. Occasionally they froze and listened. Nothing – no voices, no knocking, only the usual sounds of a forest at night.

The house loomed up out of the darkness unexpectedly. Erast Petrovich almost blundered into the planks of the wall, which were pressed right up against two pine trees. To look at, it was an ordinary peasant hut, like many that they had seen during their journey across the plain. Wooden lattices instead of windows, a thatched straw roof, a sliding door. Only one thing was strange – the area around the hut had not been cleared, the trees ran right up to it on all sides, and their branches met above its roof.

The house was absolutely still and silent, and Fandorin signalled to his servant – let’s move on.

After about fifty paces they came across a second house, also concealed in a thicket – one of the pine trees protruded straight out of the middle of the roof; probably it was used as a column. Not a sound or a glimmer of light here either.

Bewilderment and anxiety forced the titular counsellor to be doubly cautious. Before approaching Tamba’s house – the one hovering at the edge of the precipice – he had to know for certain what he was leaving behind him. So before they reached the precipice, they turned back.

They covered the entire island in zigzags. They found another house exactly like the first two. Nothing else.

And so the entire ‘fortress’ consisted of four wooden structures, and there was no garrison to be seen at all.

What if the shinobi had left their lair and O-Yumi wasn’t here? The idea made Fandorin feel genuinely afraid for the first time.

‘Iko!’ ^[xvii]

he said to Masa, and set off, no longer weaving about, straight towards the grey emptiness that could be seen through the pines.

The house of Tamba the Eleventh was the only one surrounded by clear grassy space on three sides. On the fourth side, as Fandorin already knew, there was a gaping precipice.

He could still hope that the inhabitants of this sinister village had gathered for a meeting at the house of their leader (Twigs had said he was called the jonin).

Pressing himself against a rough tree trunk, Erast Petrovich surveyed the building, which differed from the others only in its dimensions. There was nothing noteworthy about the residence of the leader of the Stealthy Ones. Fandorin felt something rather like disappointment. But the worst thing of all was that this house also seemed to be empty.

Had it really all been in vain?

The vice-consul darted across the open space and up the steps on to the narrow veranda that ran along the walls. Masa was right behind him every step of way.

Seeing his servant remove his footwear, Erast Petrovich followed his example – not out of Japanese politeness, but in order to make less noise.

The door was open slightly and Fandorin shone his little torch inside. He saw a long, unlit corridor covered with rice straw mats.

Masa wasted no time. He poured a few drops of oil from a little jug into the groove and the door slid back without creaking.

Yes, a corridor. Quite long. Seven sliding doors just like the first one: three on the left, three on the right and one at the end.

Removing the safety catch of his revolver, Erast Petrovich opened the first door on the right slowly and smoothly. Empty. No household items, just mats on the floor.

He opened the opposite door slightly more quickly. Again nothing. A bare room, with a transverse beam running across the far wall.

‘Damn!’ the titular counsellor muttered.

He moved on quickly, without any more precautions. He jerked open a door on the right and glanced in. A niche in the wall, some kind of scroll in it.

The second door on the left: a floor made of polished wooden boards, not covered with straw, otherwise nothing remarkable.

The third on the right: apparently a chapel for prayer – a Buddhist altar in the corner, statuettes of some kind, an unlit candle.

The third on the left: nothing, bare walls.

No one, absolutely no one! Empty space!

But someone had been here, and very recently – the smell of Japanese pipe tobacco still lingered in the air.

Masa looked round the room that had a wooden floor instead of mats. He squatted down and rubbed the smooth wood. Something caught his interest and he stepped inside.

The vice-consul was about to follow him, but just at that moment he heard a rustling from behind the seventh door, the one closing off the end of the corridor, and he started. Aha! There’s someone there!

It was a strange sound, something like sleepy breathing, the breath expelled not by a man, but a giant or some kind of huge monster, it was so powerful and deep.

Let it be a giant or a monster – it was all the same to Erast Petrovich now. Anything but emptiness, anything but deathly silence!

The titular counsellor waited for an endlessly long out-breath to come to an end, flung the door aside with a crash and dashed forward.

Fandorin only just managed to grab hold of the railings, right on the very edge of the little wooden bridge suspended above the precipice. He was surrounded on all sides by Nothing – the night, the sky, a yawning gulf.

He heard the out-breath of the invisible colossus again – it was the boundless ether sighing, stirred by a light breeze.

There was nothing but blackness below the vice-consul’s feet, stars above his head; all around him were the peaks of mountains illuminated by the moon, and in the distance, between two slopes, the lights of the distant plain.

Erast Petrovich shuddered and backed into the corridor.

He slammed the door into Nowhere and called out:

‘Masa!’

No answer.

He glanced into the room with the wooden floor. His servant was not there.

‘Masa!’ Erast Petrovich shouted irritably.

Had he gone outside? If he was in the house, he would have answered.

Yes, he had gone out. The entrance door, which the titular counsellor had left open, was now closed.

Fandorin walked up to it and tugged on the handle. The door didn’t move. What the hell?

He tugged as hard as he could – the door didn’t budge at all. Was it stuck? That was no great problem. It wasn’t hard to make a hole in a Japanese partition.

Swinging his fist back, the vice-consul punched the straw surface – and cried out in pain. It felt as if he had slammed his hand into iron.

Erast Petrovich heard a grating sound behind him. Swinging round, he saw another partition sliding out of the wall to enclose him in a cramped square between two rooms, the doors of which (as he noticed only now) were also closed.

‘A trap!’ – the realisation flashed through Fandorin’s mind.

He jerked at the door on the left, with no result, and the same with the door on the right.

They had him locked in, like an animal in a cage.

But this animal had fangs. Fandorin pulled out his seven-round Herstal and started swinging round his own axis, hoping that one of the four doors would open now and there would be an enemy behind it – in a close-fitting black costume with a mask that covered all his face, so that only the eyes could be seen.

And in fact he did see a black man without a face, but not where he was expecting to see him. As he gazed round on all sides, the titular counsellor raised his head – and froze. Directly above Fandorin, there was a ninja lying (yes, yes, lying, in defiance of all the laws of nature!) on the ceiling, spreadeagled against it like a spider. The two glinting eyes in the slit between the headscarf and the mask were staring straight at the vice-consul.

Erast Petrovich threw up the hand with the revolver, but the bullet hit the boards of the ceiling – the shinobi grabbed the barrel of the diplomat’s gun with an incredibly fast movement and turned it away. The spider-man had a grip of iron.

Suddenly the floor under Fandorin’s feet caved in and the titular counsellor went hurtling downwards with his eyes closed. Meanwhile the Herstal remained in the ninja’s hand.

Erast Petrovich landed softly, on what felt like cushions. He opened his eyes, expecting to find himself in darkness, but there was a lamp burning in the basement.

The stunned Fandorin was facing a lean little old man sitting with his legs crossed and smoking a pipe with a tiny bowl at the end of a long stem.

He blew out a cloud of bluish smoke and spoke in English:

‘I wait and you come.’

The narrowed eyes opened wider and glinted with a fierce flame, like two glowing coals.

The wood and the fire,

The coal, the time, the diamond

And the chariot

THE DEATH OF AN ENEMY

Unlike the rooms that Fandorin had seen upstairs, the basement looked lived in and even cosy after a fashion. There really were cushions scattered across the floor, a cup of tea was steaming on a lacquered table, and behind the frightening old man there was a picture hanging on the wall – a portrait of a warrior in a horned helmet, with a bow in his hands, an arrow in his teeth and his glittering eyes glaring menacingly up at the sky.

Erast Petrovich recalled the legend of how the great Momochi Tamba shot the false moon, but the titular counsellor was in no mood for ancient fables just at the moment.

It was pointless to throw himself at his enemy – Fandorin remembered his two previous skirmishes with the jonin only too well, and the humiliating way in which they had ended. When an opponent is a hundred times stronger, an individual of dignity has only one weapon – his presence of mind.

‘Why did you abduct O-Yumi?’ Erast Petrovich asked, trying with all his might to impart a dispassionate expression to his face (after the shock he had just suffered this was difficult). He sat down clumsily on the floor and rubbed his bruised fist. The hatch through which Fandorin had tumbled had already slammed shut – now there was a ceiling of yellow planks above his head.

‘I did not abduct her,’ the old man replied calmly in his broken but perfectly understandable English.

‘You lie!’

Tamba did not take offence or grow angry – he half-closed his eyelids sleepily.

‘Lies are my trade, but now I am telling the truth.’

Erast Petrovich was unable to maintain his dispassionate expression: driven by a sudden paroxysm of fury, he lunged forward, grabbed the little old man by the neck and shook him, forgetting that the jonin could paralyse him with a single touch of his finger.

‘What have you done with Yumi? Where is she?’

Tamba offered no resistance, and his head bobbed about on his skinny shoulders.

‘Here. She is here,’ Fandorin heard, and jerked his hands away.

‘Where is “here”?’

‘At home. Midori is expecting you.’

‘Who the hell is Midori?’ the titular counsellor asked, wrinkling up his forehead. ‘Where’s my Yumi?’

Behaving as if everything was perfectly normal, the old man glanced into his pipe, saw that the tobacco had been shaken out and packed in a new pinch. He kindled the flame first, puffing out his cheeks, and then spoke.

‘Her real name is Midori. She is my daughter. And I did not abduct her. I’d like to see anyone abduct a girl like her…’

‘Eh?’ was all that the astounded Fandorin could find to say.

‘She makes her own mind up about everything. She has a terribly bad character. And I’m a soft father, she does as she likes with me. The real Tamba would have killed a daughter like that.’

‘What do you mean, “the real Tamba”?’ the vice-consul asked, desperately rubbing his forehead as he tried to gather his thoughts. ‘Then who are you?’

‘I am his successor in the eleventh generation,’ said the jonin, pointing with his pipe at the portrait of the warrior in the horned helmet. ‘I am an ordinary, weak man, not like my great predecessor.’

‘D-damn the genealogy!’ Erast Petrovich exclaimed. ‘Where’s my Yumi?’

‘Midori,’ the eleventh Tamba corrected him again. ‘She was right in what she said about you. You are half-sighted, short-winged, half-blind. Your sight is keen, but it does not penetrate far. Your flight is impetuous, but not always precise. Your mind is sharp, but not deep. However, I see you have a kagebikaru shadow under your left cheekbone, which tells me that you are still at the very beginning of your Path and can change for the better.’

‘Where is she?’ Fandorin cried, jumping to his feet: he did not wish to listen to this nonsense. And when he jumped up, he banged his head against wood – the ceiling was too low for his height.

Bells started chiming in the crown of the vice-consul’s head and circles started spinning in front of his eyes, but the old man who called himself O-Yumi’s father did not stop talking for a moment.

‘If I had noticed the inuoka bumps at the sides of your forehead in time, I would not have set the adder on you. Dogs do not bite people like you, snakes leave you alone, wasps do not sting you. Things and animals love you. You are a man of a very rare breed. That is why I assigned my daughter to you.’

Erast Petrovich did not interrupt him any more. O-Yumi had mentioned that her father was an unsurpassed master of ninso! Could what he was saying really be true?

‘Midori took a look at you and said yes, you were special. It would be a shame to kill someone like that. Properly employed, you could be very helpful.’

‘Where is she?’ Fandorin asked in a dejected voice. ‘I must see her…’

At that Tamba reached out one hand to the wall, pressed something, and the wall slid sideways.

O-Yumi was sitting in the next room, wearing a white and red kimono, with her hair in a tall style. Completely motionless, her face absolutely still, she looked like a beautiful doll. Erast Petrovich was no more than five steps away from her.

He shot forward towards her, but O-Yumi didn’t stir and he didn’t dare to embrace her.

‘She’s drugged!’ – the thought flashed through his mind; but her gaze was perfectly clear and calm. This was a strange, incomprehensible O-Yumi sitting in front of him, close enough for him to reach out and touch her, but that distance seemed quite insurmountable. It was not this woman he loved, but another, who, as it turned out, had never existed…

‘What? Why? What for?’ poor Fandorin babbled incoherently. ‘Are you a ninja?’

‘The very best in the Momochi clan,’ Tamba declared proudly. ‘She can do almost everything that I can do. But in addition, she has mastered arts that are inaccessible to me.’

‘I know,’ the titular counsellor said with a bitter laugh. ‘For instance, jojutsu. You sent her to a brothel to study that wisdom.’

‘Yes. I sent her to Yokohama to study. Here in the mountains no one would have taught her to be a woman. And Midori had to study the foreign barbarians, because Japan needs them.’

‘Did he order you to study me too?’ Erast Petrovich asked the woman of stone.

Tamba answered again.

‘Yes. I will tell you how it happened. I received a commission to protect the samurai who were pursuing Minister Okubo. My men could easily have killed him themselves, but it had to be done by the samurai. Then the killing would have a meaning that was clear to everyone and no one would suspect my client.’

‘Don Tsurumaki?’

‘Yes. The Momochi clan has been receiving commissions from him for several years. A serious man, he pays promptly. When one of the client’s men told me that an old foreigner was sitting in the Rakuen gambling house and telling everybody about the group led by Ikemura with the withered arm, the tattler’s mouth had to be stopped. The job was done very neatly, but then you turned up, most inappropriately. Ikemura and his men had to hide. And I also found out that you had taken as your servant a man who had seen me and could identify me.’

‘How did you find that out?’ Fandorin asked, turning towards the jonin for the first time since the partition had slid aside.

‘From the client. And he got his information from police chief Suga.’

For whom the efficient Asagawa wrote his reports, the titular counsellor added to himself. Events that had seemed mysterious, even inexplicable, began arranging themselves in a logical sequence, and this process was so fascinating that the vice-consul forgot about his broken heart for a while.

‘I had to kill your servant. Everything would have fitted nicely – the bite of the mamusi would have rid me of the witness. But then you showed up again. At first I almost made a mistake, I almost killed you. But the snake proved cleverer. It did not wish to bite you. Of course, I could easily have killed you myself, but the mamusi’s strange behaviour forced me to take a closer look at you. I saw that you were an unusual man and it would be a shame to kill someone like that. And in any case, the death of a foreign diplomat would have created too much commotion. You had seen me – that was bad, but you would not be able to find me. That was how I reasoned.’ The old man finished smoking his pipe and shook out the ash. ‘And then I made another mistake, which happens to me very, very rarely. The client informed me that I had left a clue. An unheard-of kind of clue – the print of a finger, and I had done it twice. It turned out that European science can find a man from such a small thing as that. Very interesting. I instructed one of my genins to find out more about fingerprints, it could be useful to us. Another genin broke into the police station and destroyed the clues. He was a good shinobi, one of my cousins. He didn’t manage to escape his pursuers, but he died like a genuine ninja, without leaving his face to his enemies…’

All this was extraordinarily interesting, but one strange thing was bothering Erast Petrovich. Why was the jonin taking so much trouble to enlighten his prisoner, why did he think it necessary to offer any explanations? This was a riddle!

‘By that time Midori had already started working with you,’ Tamba went on. ‘I found you more and more interesting. How artfully you tracked down Ikemura’s group! If not for Suga, who corrected the situation, my client could have had serious problems. But Suga was not cautious enough, and you exposed him. You acquired new clues, even more dangerous than the previous ones. The client ordered me to finish you off, once and for all. To kill Prince Onokoji, who had caused him too much trouble, to kill you all: the head of the foreign police, Asagawa, the bald doctor. And you.’

‘Me too?’ Fandorin asked with a start. ‘You say the Don ordered me to be killed too?’

‘Especially you.’

‘Why didn’t you do it? There on the pier?’

The old man heaved a sigh and shifted his gaze to his daughter.

‘Why, why… And why am I wasting time on you, instead of wringing your neck?’

The titular counsellor, who was very much concerned about this question, held his breath.

‘I have already told you. I am a poor, weak jonin. My daughter does as she likes with me. She forbade me to kill you, and I deceived the client. How shameful…’

Tamba lowered his head on to his chest and sighed even more bitterly. Fandorin turned round towards O-Yumi, who was really called something else.

‘B-but why?’ he asked with just his lips.

‘The shinobi are degenerating,’ Tamba said mournfully. ‘In former times a ninja girl, the daughter of a jonin, would never have fallen in love with an outsider, and a barbarian.’

‘What!’ Erast Petrovich gasped, and suddenly saw a blush appear on Midori’s doll-like cheeks.

‘I did not kill you, I gave part of the money back to the Don and said you had been saved by a miracle. But my shame was not enough for her, she decided to destroy me. When you fought the Englishman with swords, Midori concealed herself in the bushes. She fired a sleeping dart into the redheaded man from a fukubari. It was a terribly stupid thing to do. When Tsurumaki was taking the Englishman home, he discovered the dart sticking out of his throat and realised that this was the work of shinobi. The Don imagined that I was playing a double game. He took precautions, crammed his house full of guards – he was afraid that I would come to kill him. And you, not knowing anything, walked straight into the den of the tiger…’

‘And you didn’t say anything to me?’ Fandorin said to Midori.

She moved for the first time – lowering her eyes.

‘Would you want her to betray her father? To tell an outsider about the Momochi clan?’ Tamba asked menacingly. ‘No, she chose to act differently. My daughter is a lovesick fool, but she is a very cunning fool. She thought of a way to save you. Midori knew that Tsurumaki was afraid of me, not you. He does not understand why I started obstructing him and so he is very worried. If the Don learned that the ninja had stolen your lover, he would not kill you. Midori put your servant to sleep – not for long, only a few minutes, and hurried here to me. She said Tsurumaki would definitely bring you, since he had to work out what the connection was between you and the jonin of the Momochi clan…’ The old man smiled dourly. ‘If he only knew the truth, he would lose all respect for me… Tamba the First had no weaknesses. He did not hesitate to abandon his sons to die in the besieged temple at Hijiyama. But I am weak. My weakness is my daughter. And my daughter’s weakness is you. That is why you are still alive and why I am talking to you.’

Erast Petrovich said nothing, dumbstruck. The isolated facts had come together to form a single picture, the unsolvable riddles had been solved. But even so he asked – not the jonin, but his daughter:

‘Is this true?’

Without raising her head, she nodded. She mouthed some short phrase soundlessly.

‘I love you,’ Fandorin read from her lips, and felt a hot pulse pound in his temples. Never before, not even in the most tender of moments, had she spoken those words. Or was this the accursed jojutsu again?

‘I am not your enemy,’ said Tamba, interrupting the lengthy pause. ‘I cannot be the enemy of the man my daughter loves.’

But the titular counsellor, stung by the very thought of jojutsu, exclaimed intransigently:

‘No, you are my enemy! You killed my friends! What have you done with Masa?’

‘He is alive and well,’ the old man said with a gentle smile. ‘He simply walked into a room with a revolving floor and landed in a pit. My nephew Jingoro squeezed your servant’s neck, to make him fall asleep. You will wake him yourself soon.’

But the vice-consul had a long account to settle with the Momochi clan.

‘You killed my friends! Asagawa, Lockston, Twigs! Did you really think I would forget about them?’

Tamba shrugged at that and said sadly:

‘I hoped you would understand. My genins were doing their job. They did not kill your friends out of hate, but because it was their duty. Each one of them was killed quickly, respectfully and without suffering. But if you wish to take revenge for them, that is your right. Tamba does nothing by halves.’

He thrust his hand under the low table, pressed something, and a dark square opened up in the ceiling above Fandorin’s head.

The jonin gave a brief order and the vice-consul’s Herstal dropped on to the rice mats in front of him with a dull thud.

‘Take your revenge on me,’ said the shinobi. ‘But do not hold any grievance against Midori. She is not guilty of offending you in any way.’

Erast Petrovich slowly picked up the weapon and flicked open the cylinder. He saw one spent cartridge and six fresh ones. Could the old man really be serious?

He raised the revolver and aimed it at Tamba’s forehead. The old man didn’t look away, he merely closed his eyelids. ‘He could probably mesmerise me, or hypnotise me, or whatever they call it, but he doesn’t want to,’ Fandorin realised.

Midori looked at him briefly, and he thought he saw entreaty in her eyes. Or did he imagine it? A woman like that wouldn’t plead with anyone for anything, not even to save her father.

As if in confirmation of this thought, she lowered her head again.

The titular counsellor forced himself to remember the faces of his dead friends; Lockston, as true and dependable as steel; Asagawa, the knight of justice; Dr Twigs, the father of two girls with a heart defect.

It is impossible to shoot at a man who is not trying to protect himself, but the pain that had welled up in Fandorin’s soul demanded an outlet – he had cramp in his finger from the irresistible desire to press the trigger

There are things that cannot be forgiven, or the balance of the world will be shattered, Erast Petrovich told himself.

He jerked his wrist slightly to one side and fired.

The thunderous crash deafened him.

Midori threw her hands up to her temples, but she didn’t raise her face.

Tamba himself didn’t move a single muscle. There was a crimson stripe burned across his temple.

‘There now,’ he said peaceably. ‘Your enemy Tamba is dead. Only your friend Tamba is left.’

Today we rejoice,

Our enemies are destroyed.

Such great loneliness!

THE LOVE OF TWO MOLES

There was a dull rumbling sound from somewhere above them.

Erast Petrovich raised his head. A thunderstorm?

Another peal, but this time the rumbling was accompanied by a crackling sound.

‘What is it?’ asked Fandorin, jumping to his feet.

‘It is Kamata starting to fire his cannon,’ said Tamba, also getting up, but without hurrying. ‘He didn’t wait until dawn. He must have realised that you and your servant are here with us.’

So the jonin knew all about Kamata’s plan!

‘You know everything? How?’

‘These are my mountains. Every tree has ears and every blade of grass has eyes. Let us go, before these stupid people hit one of the houses by accident.’

Tamba stood under the hatch, squatted down on his haunches and then sprang up into the air – so high that he landed sitting on the edge of the opening. There was a flash of white socks and the old man was already upstairs.

Fandorin looked round for Midori and started – the next room was empty. When had she managed to disappear?

Tamba leaned down out of the opening in the ceiling.

‘Give me your hand!’

But the titular counsellor didn’t give him his hand – it would have been humiliating. He pulled himself up clumsily, banging his elbow against a plank in the process. The jonin was wearing black trousers and a loose black shirt. Darting out on to the veranda, he put on black leather stockings, pulled a mask over his face, and became almost invisible. In the darkness a pillar of fire soared up into the air and stones and clods of earth went flying in all directions.

Tamba was no longer anywhere close, he had dissolved into the darkness. A black shadow jumped down from somewhere (was it off the roof?), touched the ground silently with its feet, performed a forward roll, tumbled aside, got up weightlessly and a second later disappeared. The titular counsellor noticed the air trembling in several other places as well and caught a few brief glimpses of dark silhouettes.

Shells were exploding as often as if an entire artillery battery was bombarding the forest. The rapid-firing Krupps gun had a rate of three shots a minute, recalled Fandorin, a veteran of the Turkish War. Judging from the sound, the Black Jackets must have taken up a position on the summit of the mountain. Watching the intervals closely, the vice-consul understood Kamata’s tactics. His gunner was laying down the shells in a chessboard pattern, at intervals of two or three sazhens. He obviously intended to plough up the entire forest island. Sooner or later he would hit the houses too. And one of the pines had already caught fire – a bright crimson flower blossomed in the darkness.

What should he do, where should he run?

One of the shadows stopped beside the titular counsellor, grabbed his hand and dragged him after it.

They had already run to the middle of the wood when a shell struck a tree close by. The trunk gave a crack, splinters went flying and they both fell to the ground. Following the pattern, the next explosion tore up the ground ten steps away, and the eyes in the ninja’s black face flared up – long and moist, full of light.

It was her!

Midori half-rose and took Erast Petrovich’s hand again, in order to run on, but he didn’t yield – he pulled her back to him.

The next explosion roared on the other side of them and Fandorin saw her eyes again, very close – so beautiful and full of life.

‘Do you really love me?’ he asked.

A thunderous rush drowned out his words.

‘Do you love me?’ Erast Petrovich roared.

Instead of answering, she pulled off her mask, took his face between her hands and kissed him.

And he forgot about the rapid-firing cannon, about death’s whistling and rumbling, about everything in the world.

The pine tree blazed brighter and brighter, red shadows flickered across the trunks of trees and the ground. Panting, the titular counsellor tore the clothes from his beloved’s shoulders and her body changed from black to white.

Midori made no attempt at all to stop him. Her breathing was as fast as his, her hands were tearing off his shirt.

Around them the flames blazed, the earth split open, the trees groaned and Fandorin felt as if Night itself, wild and hot, were making love to him.

Pine needles pricked his back and his elbows by turns – the grappling lovers were rolling across the ground. Once a piece of shrapnel buried itself in the earth where their bodies had been just a second earlier, but neither of them noticed it.

It all ended suddenly. Midori pushed her beloved off with a jerk and darted in the opposite direction.

‘What are you doing?’ he exclaimed indignantly – and saw a burning branch falling between them, showering out sparks.

Only then did Erast Petrovich come to his senses.

There was no more artillery fire, just blazing trees crackling in two or three places.

‘What is this called in your jojutsu?’ he asked hoarsely, gesturing round at the forest.

Midori was tying her tangled hair in a knot.

‘There’s never been anything like this in jojutsu. But there will be now. I’ll call it “Fire and Thunder”.’

She was already pulling on her black costume, turning from white to black.

‘Where is everybody?’ asked Fandorin, hastily putting his own clothing in order. ‘Why is it quiet?’

‘Let’s go!’ she called, and ran on in front.

Half a minute later they were at the fissure – in the very spot where the vice-consul and his servant had thrown the lasso across. The dead tree was still there, but Erast Petrovich couldn’t see any sign of the rope.

‘Where to now?’ he shouted

She pointed across to the other side, then went down on all fours and suddenly disappeared over the edge of the cliff. Fandorin dashed after her and saw a cable woven from dry plant stems hanging down. It was thick and strong enough to hold any weight, so the young man followed Midori without hesitation.

She moved on a long way ahead of him, slithering down easily and confidently. But he found the descent difficult.

‘Quickly, quickly, we’ll be late!’ Midori urged him on from down below.

Erast Petrovich tried his very best, but she still had to wait for quite a long time.

The moment he jumped down on to the grass-covered ground, his guide dragged him on into dense, prickly undergrowth.

There, between two boulders, he saw a black crevice in the sheer wall. The titular counsellor squeezed into it with great difficulty, but after that the passage widened out.

‘Please, please, quickly!’ he heard Midori’s voice pleading out of the darkness.

He dashed towards her – and almost fell when he stumbled over a root or a rock. There was a strong draught blowing from somewhere above him.

‘I can’t see a thing!’

A glowing thread appeared in the darkness, emittting a weak, trembling glow.

‘What’s that?’ asked Fandorin, enchanted.

‘A yoshitsune,’ Midori replied impatiently. ‘A falcon’s feather, it has mercury in it. It doesn’t go out in the rain and wind. Come on! I’ll die of shame if I’m late!’

Now, with the light, it became clear that the underground passage had been equipped very thoroughly: the ceiling and walls were reinforced with bamboo, and there were wooden steps underfoot.

Struggling to keep up with Midori, Erast Petrovich barely looked around at all, but he did notice that every now and then there were branches running off the passage in both directions. It was an entire labyrinth. His guide ran on, turning several corners without slowing down for a moment. The titular counsellor was starting to feel exhausted from the long, steep uphill climb, but the slim figure ahead of him seemed incapable of tiring.

Eventually the steps came to an end and the passage narrowed again. The light went out, something creaked in the darkness and a grey rectangle opened up ahead, admitting the damp, fresh breath of the dawn.

Midori jumped down on to the ground. Following her example, Erast Petrovich discovered that he was clambering out of the trunk of an old, gnarled oak tree.

The secret door closed, and the vice-consul saw that it was absolutely impossible to make out its edges on the rough, moss-covered bark.

‘I’m too late!’ Midori exclaimed despairingly. ‘It’s all your fault!’

She darted forward into an open meadow where black silhouettes were moving about slowly. There was a smell of gunpowder and blood. Something long glinted in the morning twilight.

The barrel of the gun, Fandorin realised, looking more closely and then turning his head in all directions.

The underground passage led to the summit of the mountain. The ideal spot for a bombardment – Kamata must have chosen it in advance.

The skirmish was already over. And from the looks of things, it hadn’t lasted long. Pouring out of the passage, the shinobi had taken the Black Jackets by surprise, from behind.

Tamba was sitting on a stump in the middle of the clearing, smoking his pipe. The other ninja were bringing the dead to him. It was an eerie sight, like something out of the afterlife: silent shadows gliding in pairs above the mist that was creeping across the ground, lifting up the dead men (also black, but with white faces) by their arms and legs and laying them out in rows in front of their leader.

The titular counsellor counted: four rows with eight bodies in each, and another body started moving, this time a little one – no doubt the old bandit Kamata. Not one had escaped. Don Tsurumaki would never know what had happened to his brigade…

Shaken by this grim picture, Fandorin didn’t notice that Midori had come back to him. Her husky voice whispered right in his ear.

‘I was late anyway, and we hadn’t finished.’

A lithe arm slipped round his waist and pulled him back towards the entrance of the underground passage.

‘I shall go down in the history of jojutsu as a great pioneer,’ Midori whispered, pushing the titular counsellor into the hollow of the tree. ‘I’ve just had an idea for a very interesting composition. I shall call it “The Love of Two Moles”.’

Even lovelier

Than two flamingos’ loving -

The love of two moles.

THE NOCTURNAL MELDING OF THE WORLD

Tamba said:

‘I know a lot about you, you know little about me. From this there arises mistrust, mistrust produces misunderstanding, misunderstanding leads to mistakes. Ask me everything you wish to know, and I will answer.’

The two of them were sitting in the open clearing in front of the house and watching the sun rising from behind the plain, filling the world with a rosy glow. Tamba was smoking his little pipe, every now and then stuffing it with a new pinch of tobacco. Fandorin would gladly have smoked a cigar with him, but the box of excellent manilas had been left behind with the baggage, on the side of the crevice that divided the shinobi village from the rest of the world.

‘How many of you are there?’ the titular counsellor asked. ‘Only eleven?’

He had seen eleven people at the site of the massacre. When the earth-stained lovers crawled out of their underground burrow, the shinobi had already concluded their sombre task. The dead had been counted, tipped into a pit and covered over with rocks. Tamba’s people took off their masks and Fandorin saw ordinary Japanese faces – seven male and four female.

‘There are four children too. And Satoko, Gohei’s wife. She wasn’t in the battle, because she is due to give birth soon. And three young people, out in the big wide world.’

‘Spying for someone?’ asked Erast Petrovich. If the jonin wanted a straight-talking conversation, then to hell with ceremony.

‘Studying. One in Tokyo University, studying to be a doctor. One in America, studying to be a mechanical engineer. One in London, studying to be an electrical engineer. We can’t get by without European science nowadays. The great Tamba said: “Be ahead of everyone else, know more than everyone else”. We have been following that precept for three hundred years. And he also said: “The ninja of the Land of Iga are dead, now they are immortal”.’

‘But surely Tamba the First was killed together with the others? I was told that their enemies wiped them out to the l-last man.’

‘No, Tamba got away, and he took his best pupils with him. He had sons, but he didn’t take them, and they were killed, because Tamba was truly great, his heart was as hard as diamond. The final jonin of the land of Iga chose the worthiest, so that they could revive the Momochi clan.’

‘How did they manage to escape from the besieged temple?’

‘When the shrine of the goddess Kannon was already burning, the last of the ninja wanted to take their own lives, but Tamba ordered them to hold out until dawn. The day before, one of his eyes had been put out by an arrow and all his men were also covered in wounds, but such is the power of the jonin that the shinobi did not dare to disobey. At dawn Tamba released three black ravens into the sky and left through an underground passage with his two chosen companions. But the others took their own lives, cutting off their faces at the last moment.’

‘If there was an underground passage, then why didn’t they all leave?’

‘Because then Nobunaga’s warriors would have pursued them.’

‘And why was it absolutely necessary to wait until dawn?’

‘So that the enemy would see the three ravens.’

Erast Petrovich shook his head, totally bamboozled by this exotic oriental reasoning.

‘What have the three ravens got to do with it? What were they n-needed for?’

‘Their enemies knew how many warriors were ensconced in the temple – seventy-eight men. Afterwards they would be certain to count the corpses. If three were missing, Nobunaga would have guessed that Tamba had got away and ordered a search for him throughout the empire. But this way the samurai decided that Tamba and two of his deputies had turned into ravens. The besieging forces were prepared for every kind of magic, they brought with them dogs, trained to kill rodents, lizards and snakes. They had hunting falcons with them as well. The falcons pecked the ravens to death. One raven had a wound instead of its right eye and so the ninjas’ enemies, knowing of Tamba’s wound, stopped worrying. The dead raven was displayed at a point where eight roads met and a sign was nailed up: “The Wizard Momochi Tamba, defeated by the Ruler of the West and the East, Protector of the Imperial Throne, Prince Nobunaga”. Less than a year later, Nobunaga was killed, but no one ever discovered that it was Tamba who did it. The Momochi clan was transformed into a ghost, that is, it became invisible. For three hundred years we have preserved and developed the art of ninjutsu. Tamba the First would be pleased with us.’

‘And none of the three lines has been interrupted?’

‘No, because the head of the family is obliged to select a successor in good time.’

‘What does “select” mean?’

‘Choose. And not necessarily his own son. The boy must have the necessary abilities.’

‘Wait,’ Fandorin exclaimed in disappointment. ‘So you are not a direct descendant of Tamba the First?’

The old man was surprised.

‘By blood? Of course not. What difference does that make? Here in Japan, kinship and succession are based on the spirit. A man’s son is the one into whom his soul has migrated. I, for instance, have no sons, only a daughter. I do have nephews, though, and cousins, once removed and twice removed. But the spirit of the great Tamba does not dwell in them, it dwells in eight-year-old Yaichi. I chose him five years ago, in a village of untouchables. In his grubby little face I saw signs that I thought looked promising. And it seems that I was not mistaken. If Yaichi continues to make the same kind of progress, after me he will become Tamba the Twelfth.’

Erast Petrovich decided to wait a little with the other questions – his head was already spinning as it was.

Their second conversation took place in the evening, at the same spot, only this time the two of them sat facing the opposite direction. Watching the sun slipping down on to the summit of the next mountain.

Tamba sucked on his eternal pipe, but now Fandorin was also smoking a cigar. The selfless Masa, who was suffering morally because he had slept right through the night battle, had spent half the day supplying all of his master’s needs by bringing his baggage from the ravaged camp through the underground passage, as well as using a cable hoist (it turned out that there was one of those too). The only thing left on the other side was the untransportable Royal Crescent Tricycle, and there was nowhere to ride that in the village in any case. The mule, set free, wandered through the meadows, dazed and delighted by the luscious mountain grass.

‘I have a request for you,’ said Erast Petrovich. ‘Teach me your art. I will be a zealous student.’

He had spent most of the day observing the shinobi training and had seen things that left his face frozen in an expression of dumb bewilderment entirely alien to him in normal life.

First Fandorin had watched the children playing. A little six-year-old had demonstrated quite incredible patience in training a mouse – teaching it to run to a saucer and come back again. Every time the mouse coped with its mission successfully, he moved the saucer a bit farther away.

‘In a few months’ time the mouse will learn to cover distances of four hundred or even five hundred yards. Then it can be used for delivering secret notes,’ explained the ninja called Rakuda, who had been attached to the vice-consul.

‘Rakuda’ meant ‘camel’, but the ninja was nothing at all like a camel. He was a middle-aged man with a plump, extremely good-natured face, the kind of man that people say ‘wouldn’t hurt a fly’. He spoke excellent English – which was why he had been assigned to accompany Erast Petrovich. He suggested that the titular counsellor call him ‘Jonathan’, but Fandorin liked the resounding ‘Rakuda’ better.

Two little girls were playing at funerals. They dug a little pit, one of them lay down in it and the other covered her with earth.

‘Won’t she suffocate?’ Fandorin asked in alarm.

Rakuda laughed and pointed to a reed protruding from the ‘grave’.

‘No, she’s learning to breathe with a quarter of her chest, it’s very useful.’

But of course, the young man was interested most of all in eight-year-old Yaichi, whom Tamba had designated as his successor.

The skinny little boy – nothing exceptional to look at – was clambering up the wall of a house. He fell off, scraping himself so that he bled, and climbed back on the wall again.

It was incredible! The wall was made of wooden planks, there was absolutely nothing to cling to, but Yaichi dug his nails into the wood and pulled himself up, and in the end he climbed on to the roof. He sat there, dangled his legs and stuck his tongue out at Fandorin.

‘It’s some kind of witchcraft!’ the vice-consul exclaimed.

‘No, it’s not witchcraft. It’s kakeume,’ said Rakuda, beckoning to the boy, who simply jumped straight down from a height of two sazhens. He showed them his hands and Erast Petrovich saw iron thimbles with curved talons on his fingers. He himself tried using them to climb a wall, but he couldn’t. What strength the fingertips must have to support the weight of the body!

‘Come on, come on,’ Rakuda called to him. ‘Etsuko is going to kill the daijin.’

‘Who is the daijin?’ asked Fandorin, following his guide into one of the houses.

There were four people there in a large empty room: two men, a girl with broad cheekbones and someone wearing a tunic and cap, sitting over by the wall at one side. When he looked more closely, Fandorin saw it was a life-sized doll with a painted face and luxurious moustache.

‘“Daijin” means “big man”,’ Rakuda explained in a whisper. ‘Etsuko has to kill him, and Gohei and Tanshin are his bodyguards. It’s a kind of test that she has to pass before she can move on to the next level of training. Etsuko has already tried twice and failed.’

‘A sort of exam, right?’ the titular counsellor asked curiously as he observed what was happening.

Pock-faced Gohei and sullen, red-faced Tanshin searched the girl thoroughly – she was obviously playing the part of a petitioner who had come for an audience with the ‘big man’.

The search was so scrupulous that Erast Petrovich blushed furiously. Not only was the ‘petitioner’ stripped naked, all the cavities of her body were explored. Young Etsuko played her part diligently – bowing abjectly, giggling timidly, turning this way and that. The ‘bodyguards’ felt the clothing she had taken off, her sandals, her wide belt. They extracted a tobacco pipe from a sleeve and confiscated it. In her belt they found a small cloth bag with hashi – wooden sticks for eating – and a jade charm. They gave back the sticks, but turned the charm this way and that and then kept it, just in case. They made the girl let down her hair and took out two sharp hairpins. Only then did they allow her to get dressed and go through to the daijin. But they wouldn’t let her get really close – they stood between her and the doll: one on the right, one on the left.

Etsuko bowed low to the seated doll, folding her hands together on her stomach. And when she straightened up there was a wooden hashi in her hand. The ‘petitioner’ made a lightning-swift movement and the stick sank straight into the daijin’s painted eye.

‘Ah, well done,’ Rakuda said approvingly. ‘She carved the hashi out of hard wood, sharpened the end and smeared it with poison. She has passed the test.’

‘But they wouldn’t have allowed her to get away! The bodyguards would have killed her on the spot!’

‘What difference does that make? The commission has been carried out.’

Then Erast Petrovich saw training in unarmed combat, and this, perhaps, made the strongest impression of all on him. He had never imagined that the human body was capable of such things.

By this time Masa had finished carrying things about and he joined his master. He observed the acrobatic tricks of the Stealthy Ones with a sour face and seemed thoroughly envious.

The training was supervised by Tamba himself. There were three students. One of them, the youngest, was not very interesting to watch: he kept getting up and falling, getting up and falling – backwards, face down, sideways, somersaulting over his head. The second one – the pock-faced Gohei, who was one of the gaijin’s ‘bodyguards’ – hacked at the jonin with a sword. He attacked with extremely subtle and cunning thrusts, swung from above and below, and at the legs, but the blade always sliced through the empty air. And Tamba didn’t make a simple superfluous movement, he just leaned slightly to the side, squatted down or jumped up. This entertainment was frightening to watch. The third student, a fidgety fellow of about thirty (Rakuda said his name was Okami), fought with his eyes blindfolded. Tamba held a bamboo board in front of him, changing its position all the time, and Okami struck it with unerringly accurate blows from his hands and feet.

‘He has intuition,’ Rakuda said respectfully. ‘Like a bat.’

In the end Masa could no longer bear the expressions of admiration that Fandorin uttered from time to time. With a determined sniff, he walked over to the jonin, bowed abruptly and made a request of some kind.

‘He wishes to fight with one of the pupils,’ Erast Petrovich’s guide translated.

Tamba cast a sceptical eye over the former Yakuza’s sturdy figure and shouted:

‘Neko-chan!’

A wizened little old woman emerged from the hut near by, wiping flour off her hands with her apron. The jonin pointed at Masa and gave a brief order. The old woman smiled broadly, opening a mouth that had only one yellow tooth, and took off her apron.

It was clear from Masa’s face just how terribly insulted he felt. However, Fandorin’s faithful vassal demonstrated his self-control by walking up politely to the matron and asking her about something. Instead of answering, she slapped him on the forehead with her hand – it looked like a joke, but Masa squealed in pain. His flour-dusted forehead turned white and his face turned red. Fandorin’s servant tried to grab the insolent hag by the scruff of her neck, but she took hold of his wrist, twisted it slightly – and the master of jujitsu and connoisseur of the Okinawa style of combat went tumbling head over heels to the ground. The amazing old woman didn’t give him time to get up. She skipped towards the defeated man, pressed him down against the ground with her knee and squeezed his throat with her bony hand – he gave a strangulated wheeze and slapped his palm on the ground in a sign of surrender.

Neko-chan immediately opened her fingers. She bowed to the jonin, picked up her apron and went back to her duties in the kitchen.

And that was the moment, as Fandorin looked at the dejected Masa, who didn’t dare raise his own eyes to look at his master, that the titular counsellor decided he had to learn the secrets of ninjutsu.

When Tamba heard the request, he was not surprised, but he said:

‘It is hard to gain insight into the secrets of ninjutsu, a man must devote his entire life to it, from the day he is born. But you are too old, you will not achieve complete mastery. To master a few skills is all that you can hope for.’

‘Let it be a f-few skills. I accept that.’

The jonin cast a quizzical glance at the stubborn jut of the titular counsellor’s jaw and shrugged.

‘All right, let’s try.’

Erast Petrovich beamed joyfully, immediately stubbed out his cigar and jumped to his feet.

‘Shall I take my jacket off?’

Tamba breathed out a thin stream of smoke.

‘No. First you will sit, listen and try to understand.’

‘All right.’

Fandorin obediently sat down, took a notebook out of his pocket and prepared to take notes.

‘Ninjutsu consists of three main arts: monjutsu, the art of secrecy, taijutsu, the art of controlling the body, and bujutsu, the art of controlling a weapon…’

The pencil started scraping nimbly across the paper, but Tamba laughed, making it clear that he was imitating the manner of a typical lecturer only in fun.

‘But we shall not get to all that for a long, long time. For now, you must make yourself like a newborn child who is discovering the world and studying the abilities of his own body. You must learn to breathe, drink, eat, control the functioning of your inner organs, move your arms and legs, crawl, stand, walk, fall. We teach our children from the cradle. We stretch their joints and muscles. We rock the cradle roughly and rapidly, so that the little child quickly learns to shift its centre of gravity. We encourage what ordinary children are punished for: imitating the calls of animals and birds, throwing stones, climbing trees. You will never be like someone raised in a shinobi family. But do not let that frighten you. Flexible limbs and stamina are not the most important things.’

‘Then what is most important, sensei?’ asked Erast Petrovich, using the most respectful Japanese form of address.

‘You must know how to formulate a question correctly. That is half of the task. And the second half is being able to hear the answer.’

‘I d-don’t understand…’

‘A man consists of questions, and life and the world around him consist of answers to these questions. Determine the sequence of the questions that concern you, starting with the most important. Then attune yourself to receive the answers. They are everywhere, in every event, in every object.’

‘Really in every one?’

‘Yes. For every object is a particle of the Divine Body of the Buddha. Take this stone here…’ Tamba picked up a piece of basalt from the ground and showed it to his pupil. ‘Take it. Look at it very carefully, forgetting about everything except your question. See what an interesting surface the stone has; all these hollows and bumps, the pieces of dirt adhering to it, the flecks of other substances in it. Imagine that your entire life depends on the structure and appearance of this stone. Study this object for a very long time, until you feel that you know everything about it. And then ask it your question.’

‘Which one, for instance?’ asked Erast Petrovich, examining the piece of basalt curiously.

‘Any. If you should do something or not. If you are living your life correctly. If you should be or not be.’

‘To be or not to be?’ the titular counsellor repeated, not entirely sure whether the jonin had quoted Shakespeare or whether it was merely a coincidence. ‘But how can a stone answer?’

‘The answer will definitely be there, in its contours and patterns, in the forms that they make up. The man who is attuned to understanding will see it or hear it. It might not be a stone, but any uneven surface, or something that occurs purely by chance: a cloud of smoke, the pattern of tea leaves in the bottom of a cup, or even the remains of the coffee that you gaijins are so fond of drinking.’

‘Mmm, I see,’ the titular counsellor drawled. ‘I’ve heard about that in Russia. It’s called “reading the coffee grounds”.’

At night he and she were together. In Tamba’s house, where the upper rooms existed only to deceive and real life was concentrated in the basement, they were given a room with no windows.

Following lingering delights that were not like either ‘Fire and Thunder’ or ‘The Love of Two Moles’, as he looked at her motionless face and lowered eyelashes, he said:

‘I never know what you’re feeling, what you’re thinking about. Even now.’

She said nothing, and he thought there was not going to be any answer.

But then sparks glinted under those eyelashes and those scarlet lips stirred:

‘I can’t tell you what I’m thinking about. But if you want, I’ll show you what I’m feeling.’

‘Yes, I do want, very much!’

She lowered her eyelashes again.

‘Go upstairs, into the corridor. It’s dark there, but close your eyes as well, so you can’t even see the shadows. Touch the wall on the right. Walk forward until you find yourself in front of a door. Open it and take three big steps forward. Then open your eyes.’

That was all she said.

He got up and was about to put on his shirt.

‘No, you must not have any clothes on.’

He walked up the stairway attached to the wall. He didn’t open his eyes.

He walked slowly along the corridor and bumped into a door.

He opened it – and the cold of the night scalded his skin.

It’s the door with the precipice behind it, he realised.

Three big steps? How big? How long was the little bridge? About a sazhen, no longer.

He took one step, and then another, trying not to keep them short. He hesitated before the third. What if the third step took his foot into the void?

The precipice was here, right beside him, he could feel its fathomless breathing.

With an effort of will he took a step – exactly as long as the first ones. His toes felt a ribbed edge. Just one more inch and…

He opened his eyes – and he saw nothing.

No moon, no stars, no lights down below.

The world had melded into a single whole, in which there was no heaven and no earth, no top and no bottom, There was only a point around which creation was arranged.

The point was located in Fandorin’s chest and it was sending out a signal full of life and mystery: lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub.

Sunlight parts all things,

Darkness unites everything.

The night world is one

SPILLED SAKE

Tamba said:

‘You must fall as a pine needle falls to the ground – smoothly and silently. But you topple like a felled tree. Mo ikkai.’ ^[xviii]

Erast Petrovich pictured a pine tree, its branches covered with needles, then one of them broke away and went swirling downwards, settling gently on the grass. He jumped up, flipped over in the air and thudded flat out into the ground.

‘Mo ikkai.’

The pine needles fluttered down one at a time, the imaginary branch was entirely bare now and he had to start on the next one, but after every fall he heard the same thing:

‘Mo ikkai.’

Erast Petrovich obediently pounded himself black and blue, but what he wanted most of all was to learn how to fight – if not like Tamba, then at least like the unforgettable Neko-chan. But the jonin was in no hurry to get to that stage; so far he had limited himself to the theory. He had said that first it was necessary to study each of the three principles of combat separately: nagare – fluidity, henkan – mutability, and the most complex of all, rinki-ohen – the ability to improvise according to the opponent’s manner.

In the titular counsellor’s opinion, the most useful part was the information about blows to vitally important points. In this area, it was quite possible to make do with the skills of English boxing and French savate while one was still struggling to grasp the unpronounceable and inexplicable principles of ninjutsu.

The pages of his cherished notebook were filled with sketches of parts of the human body with arrows of various thicknesses, according to the strength of the blow, and mysterious comments such as: ‘Soda (sxth. vert.) – temp. parls.; not hard! – or inst. Death’. Or: ‘Wanshun(tric.) – temp. parls arm; not hard! – or fracture’.

Surprisingly, the hardest thing proved to be the breathing exercises. Tamba bound his pupil’s waist tightly with a belt and Fandorin had to inhale two thousand times in a row, deeply enough to inflate the lower section of his abdomen. This apparently simple exercise made his muscles ache so badly that on the first evening Fandorin crawled back to his room hunched over and very much afraid that he couldn’t make love to Midori.

But he could.

She rubbed his bruises and grazes with a healing ointment and then showed him how to banish the pain and fatigue with ketsuin – the magical coupling of the fingers. Under guidance Erast Petrovich spent a quarter of an hour twisting his fingers out of joint to form them into incredibly complicated shapes, after which the absolute exhaustion disappeared as if by magic and his body felt strong and filled with energy.

The lovers did not see each other during the day – Fandorin strove to comprehend the mysteries of falling and correct breathing and Midori was occupied with some business of her own, but the nights belonged entirely to them.

The titular counsellor learned to manage with two hours of rest. It turned out that if one mastered the art of correct sleeping, that was quite sufficient to restore one’s strength.

In accordance with the wise science of jojutsu, each new night was unlike the one before and had its own name: ‘The cry of the heron’, ‘The little gold chain’, ‘The fox and the badger’ – Midori said that sameness was fatal for passion.

Erast Petrovich’s previous life had been coloured primarily in white, the colour of the day. But now that his sleeping time had been reduced so drastically, his existence was dichromatic – white and black. Night was transformed from a mere backdrop to the stage of life into an integral part of it, and the universe as a whole benefited greatly as a result.

The space extending from sunset to dawn included a great many things: rest, passion, quiet conversation and even rowdy horseplay – after all, they were both so young.

For instance, once they argued over who was faster: Midori running or Fandorin on his tricycle.

They didn’t think twice about crossing to the other side of the crevice, where the Royal Crescent was waiting for its master, then going down to the foot of the mountain and holding a cross-country race along the path.

At first Erast Petrovich shot out in front, but after half an hour, tired from turning the pedals, he starting moving more slowly, and Midori started gaining on him. She ran lightly and steadily, without increasing her rate of breathing at all. After almost ten versts she overtook the tricyclist and her lead gradually increased.

That was when Fandorin realised how Midori had managed to deliver the healing maso herb from the southern slope of Mount Tanzawa in a single night. She had simply run fifteen ri in one direction and then the same distance back again! So that was why she laughed when he pitied the overworked horse…

Once he tried to strike up a conversation about the future, but the answer he received was:

‘In the Japanese language there is no future tense, only the past and the present.’

‘But something will happen to us, to you and me,’ Erast Petrovich insisted stubbornly.

‘Yes,’ she replied seriously, ‘but I haven’t decided exactly what yet: “The autumn leaf” or “The sweet tear”. Both endings have their advantages.’

He went numb. They didn’t talk about the future any more.

On the evening of the fourth day Midori said:

‘We won’t touch each other today. We’re going to drink wine and talk about the Beautiful.’

‘How do you mean, not touch each other?’ Erast Petrovich asked in alarm. ‘You promised me “The silver cobweb”!’

‘“The silver cobweb” is a night spent in exquisite, sensitive conversation that binds two souls together with invisible threads. The stronger this cobweb is, the longer it will hold the moth of love.’

Fandorin tried to rebel.

‘I don’t want this “cobweb”, the moth isn’t going anywhere in any case! Let’s do “The fox and the badger” again, like yesterday!’

‘Passion does not tolerate repetition and it requires a breathing space,’ Midori said in a didactic tone.

‘Mine doesn’t require one!’

She stamped her foot.

‘Which of us is the teacher of jojutsu – you or me?’

‘Nothing but teachers everywhere. No life of my own at all,’ muttered Erast Patrovich, capitulating. ‘Well, all right, then, exactly what is “the Beautiful” that we are going to talk about all night long?’

‘Poetry, for instance. What work of poetry is your favourite?’

While the vice-consul pondered, Midori set a little jug of sake on the table and sat down cross-legged.

‘Well, I don’t know…’ he said slowly. ‘I like “Eugene Onegin”. A work by the Russian poet P-Pushkin.’

‘Recite it to me! And translate it.’

She rested her elbows on her knees and prepared to listen.

‘But I don’t remember it off by heart. It’s thousands of lines long.’

‘How can you love a poem that has thousands of lines? And why so many? When a poet writes a lot, it means he has nothing to say.’

Offended for the great genius of Russian poetry, Fandorin asked ironically:

‘And how many lines are there in your favourite poem?’

‘Three,’ she replied seriously. ‘I like haiku, three-line poems, best of all. They say so little and at the same time so much. Every word in its place, and not a single superfluous one. I’m sure bodhisattvas talk to each other only in haiku.’

‘Recite it,’ said Erast Petrovich, intrigued. ‘Please, recite it.’

Half-closing her eyes, she half-declaimed, half-chanted:

‘Dragonfly-catcher,

Oh, how far ahead of me

Your feet ran today…’

‘It’s beautiful,’ Fandorin admitted. ‘Only I didn’t understand anything. What dragonfly-catcher? Where has he run off to? And what for?’

Midori opened her eyes and she repeated wistfully in Japanese:

‘Doko madeh itta yara… How lovely! To understand a haiku completely, you must have a special sensitivity or secret knowledge. If you knew that the great poetess Chiyo wrote this verse on the death of her little son, you would not look at me so condescendingly, would you?’

He said nothing, astounded by the profundity and power of feeling suddenly revealed in those three simple, mundane lines.

‘A haiku is like the casing of flesh in which the invisible, elusive soul is confined. The secret is concealed in the narrow space between the five syllables of the first line (it is called kami-no-ku) and the seven syllables of the second line (it is called naka-no-ku), and then between the seven syllables of the naka-no-ku and the five syllables of the third and final line (it is called shimo-no-ku). How can I explain so that you will understand?’ Midori’s face lit up in a crafty smile. ‘Let me try this. A good haiku is like the silhouette of a beautiful woman or an artfully exposed part of her body. The outline and the single detail are far more exciting than the whole thing.’

‘But I prefer the whole thing,’ Fandorin declared, putting his hand on her knee.

‘That’s because you are a little urchin and a barbarian.’ Her fan smacked him painfully across the fingers. ‘It is enough for a sophisticated individual merely to glimpse the edge of Beauty, and in an instant his imagination will fill in all the rest, and even improve it many times over.’

‘That, by the way, is from Pushkin,’ the titular counsellor growled, blowing on his bruised fingers. ‘And your favourite poem may be beautiful, but it is very sad.’

‘Genuine beauty is always sad.’

Erast Petrovich was astonished.

‘Surely not!’

‘There are two kinds of beauty: the beauty of joy and the beauty of sadness. You people of the West prefer the former, we prefer the latter. Because the beauty of joy is as short-lived as the flight of a butterfly. But the beauty of sadness is stronger than stone. Who recalls the millions of happy people in love who have quietly lived their lives, grown old and died? But plays are written about tragic love, and they live for centuries. Let’s drink, and then we shall talk about the Beautiful.’

But they were not fated to discuss the Beautiful.