The Death of Achilles

TEN

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

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

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

He had to think over what had happened very carefully.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who sent you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That meant:

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

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

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

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

Answer: Only Monsieur NN and his people.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What needed to be done?

Clean up after his own operation.

Find the briefcase.

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

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

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

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

Deal with the mysterious Little Misha.

He would get Misha to provide his dessert.

Someone among Monsieur NN’s people kept strange company.

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

Point 1 was scheduled for implementation that evening.