The Diamond Chariot

The first syllable, which has a certain connection with the East

On the very day when the appalling rout and destruction of the Russian fleet near the island of Tsushima was approaching its end and the first vague and alarming rumours of this bloody Japanese triumph were sweeping across Europe – on that very day, Staff Captain Vasilii Alexandrovich Rybnikov, who lived on a small street with no name in the St Petersburg district of Peski, received the following telegram from Irkutsk: ‘Dispatch sheets immediately watch over patient pay expenses’.

Thereupon Staff Captain Rybnikov informed the landlady of his apartment that business would take him to St Petersburg for a day or two and she should not, therefore, be alarmed by his absence. Then he dressed, left the house and never went back there again.

Initially Vasilii Alexandrovich’s day proceeded entirely as usual – that is, in a bustle of ceaseless activity. After first riding to the centre of the city in a horse cab, he continued his peregrinations exclusively on foot and, despite his limp (the staff captain dragged one foot quite noticeably), he managed to visit an incredible number of places.

He started with the Major General Commandant’s Office, where he sought out a clerk from the transport accounts section and returned with a solemn air one rouble, borrowed from the clerk two days previously. Then he called into the Cossack Forces Directorate on Simeonovskaya Square, to enquire about a petition he had submitted two months ago, which had got bogged down in red tape. From there he moved on to the Military Department of Railways – he had been trying for a long time to obtain a position as an archivist in the drafting office there. On that day his small, fidgety figure was also seen in the Office of the Inspector General of Artillery on Zakharievskaya Street, and the Office of Repairs on Morskaya Street, and even at the Committee for the Wounded on Kirochnaya Street (Rybnikov had been attempting without any success to obtain an official note concerning a concussion suffered at Luoyang).

The agile army man managed to show his face everywhere. Clerks in offices nodded offhandedly to their old acquaintance and quickly turned away, immersing themselves, with an emphatically preoccupied air, in their documents and conversations about work. They knew from experience that once the staff captain latched on to someone, he could worry the life out of them.

Vasilii Alexandrovich turned his short-cropped head this way and that for a while, sniffing with his plum-shaped nose as he selected his victim. Having chosen, he seated himself unceremoniously right there on the victim’s desk and started swaying one foot in a shabby boot, waving his arms around and spouting all sorts of drivel: about the imminent victory over the Japanese macaques, his own heroic war exploits, the high cost of living in the capital. They couldn’t just tell him to go to hell – after all, he was an officer, and he’d been wounded at Mukden. They poured Rybnikov tea, regaled him with papiroses, answered his gormless questions and dispatched him with all possible haste to some other section, where the whole business was repeated all over again.

Between two and three o’clock in the afternoon, the staff captain, who had called into the office of the St Petersburg Arsenal on a procurement matter, suddenly glanced at his wristwatch with the mirror-bright glass (everyone had heard the story of this chronometer at least a thousand times – it had supposedly been presented to him by a captured Japanese marquis) and became terribly agitated. Blinking his yellowish-brown eyes at the two shipping clerks, who by now were completely exhausted by his gabbling, he told them:

‘Well, that was a great chat. I’m sorry, but I have to leave you now. Entre nous, an assignation with a lovely lady. The fever-heat of passion and all that. As the Jappos say, strike while the iron’s hot.’

He gave a brief snort of laughter and took his leave.

‘What a character,’ said the first shipping clerk, a young warrant officer. ‘But even he’s managed to find himself some woman or other.’

‘He’s lying, just talking big,’ the second clerk said reassuringly – he held the same rank, but was much older. ‘Who could ever be seduced by an old Marlborough like that?’

The worldly-wise shipping clerk was right. In the apartment on Nadezhdinskaya Square, to which Rybnikov made his way via a long, roundabout route through connecting courtyards, the staff captain was not met by a lovely lady, but a young man in a speckled jacket.

‘What on earth took you so long?’ the young man exclaimed nervously when he opened the door at the prearranged knock (twice, then three times, then a pause and twice again). ‘You’re Rybnikov, right? I’ve been waiting forty minutes for you!’

‘I had to weave around a bit. Thought I saw something…’ replied Vasilii Alexandrovich, sauntering round the tiny apartment and even looking into the toilet and outside the back door. ‘Did you bring it? Let me have it.’

‘Here, from Paris. You know, I was ordered not to come straight to Petersburg, but go via Moscow, so that…’

‘I know,’ the staff captain interrupted before he could finish, taking the two envelopes – one quite thick, the other very slim.

‘Crossing the border was really easy, incredibly easy, in fact. They didn’t even glance at my suitcase, never mind tap it for secret compartments. But the reception I got in Moscow was strange. That Thrush person wasn’t exactly polite,’ declared the speckled young man, who obviously wanted very much to have a chat. ‘After all, I am risking my own head, and I have a right to expect…’

‘Goodbye,’ Vasilii Alexandrovich interrupted him again after examining both envelopes and even feeling along their seams with his fingers. ‘Don’t leave straight after me. Stay here for at least an hour, then you can go.’

Stepping out of the entrance, the staff captain turned his head left and right, lit up a papirosa and set off along the street with his usual gait – jerky, yet surprisingly brisk. An electric tram went rattling past. Rybnikov suddenly stepped off the pavement into the road, broke into a run and leapt nimbly up on to the platform.

‘Now then, sir,’ the conductor said with a reproachful shake of his head. ‘Only the young shavers do that sort of thing. What if you’d come a cropper there? With that gammy leg of yours.’

‘Never mind,’ Rybnikov replied brightly. ‘What’s that the Russian soldiers say? A chestful of medals or your head in the bushes. And if I get killed, that’s all right. I’m an orphan, there’s no one to cry over me… No thanks, friend, I just hopped on for a minute,’ he continued, waving aside the ticket, and a minute later he jumped down on to the road in the same boyish fashion.

He dodged a horse cab, darted in front of the radiator of an automobile that started bellowing hysterically with its horn, and limped nimbly into a side street.

It was completely deserted there – no carriages, no pedestrians. The staff captain opened both envelopes. He glanced briefly into the thick one, saw the respectful form of address and regular rows of neatly inscribed hieroglyphs and put off reading it all until later – he slipped it into his pocket. But the second letter, written in a hasty cursive hand, engrossed Rybnikov’s attention completely.

The letter said this:

My dear son! I am pleased with you, but now the time has come to strike a decisive blow – this time not at the Russian rear line, and not even at the Russian army, but at Russia itself. Our forces have accomplished all that they can, but they are bled dry and the might of our industry is waning. Alas, Time is not on our side. Your task is to ensure that Time will no longer be an ally of the Russians. The tsar’s throne must be made to totter beneath him. Our friend Colonel A. has completed his preparatory work. Your task is to deliver the shipment, which he has dispatched to Moscow, to the consignee, whom you already know. Tell him to hurry. We cannot hold out for longer than three or four months.

One more thing. We badly need an act of sabotage on the main railway line. Any interruption in supplies to Linevich’s army will help stave off imminent disaster. You wrote that you had been thinking about this and you had some ideas. Put them into action, the time has come.

I know that what I ask of you is almost impossible. But were you not taught: ‘The almost impossible is possible’?

Your mother asked me to tell you she is praying for you.

After he had read the letter, Rybnikov’s high-cheekboned face betrayed no sign of emotion. He struck a match, lit the sheet of paper and the envelope, dropped them on the ground and pulverised the ashes with his heel. He walked on.

The second missive was from Colonel Akashi, a military agent in Europe, and consisted almost entirely of numbers and dates. The staff captain ran his eyes over it and didn’t bother to read it again – Vasilii Alexandrovich had an exceptionally good memory.

He lit another match and, while the paper was burning, glanced at his watch, lifting it almost right up to his nose.

There was an unpleasant surprise waiting for Rybnikov. The mirror-bright glass of the Japanese chronometer reflected the image of a man in a bowler hat with a walking cane. This gentleman was squatting down, inspecting something on the pavement, at the very spot where one minute earlier the staff captain had burned the letter from his father.

The letter didn’t matter at all, it had been completely incinerated. What alarmed Vasilii Alexandrovich was something else. This wasn’t the first time he had glanced into his cunning little piece of glass, and he hadn’t seen anyone behind him before. Where had the man in the bowler hat come from? That was what concerned him.

Rybnikov walked on as if nothing had happened, glancing at his watch more frequently than before. However, once again there was no one behind him. The staff captain’s black eyebrows arched up uneasily. The curious gentleman’s disappearance concerned him even more than his sudden appearance.

Yawning, Rybnikov turned into a gated passage that led him into a deserted stone courtyard. He cast a glance at the windows (they were dead, untenanted) and then suddenly, no longer limping, he ran across to the wall separating this yard from the next one. The barrier was immensely high, but Vasilii Alexandrovich demonstrated quite fantastic springiness – vaulting almost seven feet into the air, he grabbed hold of the edge and pulled himself up. He could have jumped across the wall with no effort, but the staff captain contented himself with glancing over the top.

The next yard was residential. A skinny little girl was hopping over chalk marks scrawled across the asphalt. Another, even smaller, was standing nearby, watching.

Rybnikov did not climb over. He jumped down, ran back to the passage, unbuttoned his fly and started urinating.

He was surprised in this intimate act by the man with the bowler hat and cane, who came jogging into the passage.

The man stopped dead, frozen to the spot.

Vasilii Alexandrovich was embarrassed.

‘Beg your pardon, I was desperate,’ he said, shaking himself off and gesticulating at the same time with his free hand. ‘It’s all our swinish Russian ignorance, not enough public latrines. They say there are toilets on every corner in Japan. That’s why we can’t beat the damn monkeys.’

The expression on the hasty gentleman’s face was wary but, seeing the staff captain smile, he also extended his lips slightly beneath his thick moustache.

‘Take your samurai now, how does he fight?’ said Rybnikov, continuing with his buffoonery, buttoning up his trousers and moving closer. ‘Our soldier boys will fill the trench right up to the top with shit, but your samurai, that slanty-eyed freak, he stuffs himself full of rice, so he’s got natural constipation. That way he can go a week without a crap. But then, when he’s posted back to the rear, he’s stuck on the crapper for two whole days.’

Delighted at his own wittiness, the staff captain broke into shrill laughter and, as if he was inviting the other man to share his merriment, prodded him lightly in the side with one finger.

The man with the moustache didn’t laugh; instead he gave a strange kind of hiccup, clutched the left side of his chest and sat down on the ground.

‘Oh, mother,’ he said in a surprisingly thin little voice. And then again, quietly, ‘Oh, mother…’

‘What’s wrong?’ Rybnikov asked in sudden alarm, looking around. ‘Heart spasm, is it? Oi-oi, that’s really terrible! I’ll be straight back. With a doctor! In just a jiffy!’

He ran out into the side street but, once there, decided not to hurry after all.

The staff captain’s face assumed an intent expression. He swayed to and fro on his heels, thinking something through or trying to reach a decision, and turned back towards Nadezhdinskaya Street.

The second syllable, in which two earthly vales terminate abruptly

Evstratii Pavlovich Mylnikov, head of the surveillance service at the Department of Police, sketched a hammer and sickle inside a roundel, drew a bee on each side of it, a peaked cap above and a Latin motto below, on a ribbon: ‘Zeal and Service’. He tilted his balding head sideways and admired his own handiwork.

He had composed the crest of the House of Mylnikov himself, investing it with profound meaning. As if to say: I’m not trying to sneak into the aristocracy, I’m not ashamed of my common origins: my father was a simple blacksmith (the hammer), my grandfather was a son of the soil (the sickle), but thanks to zeal (the bees) in the sovereign’s service (the cap), I have risen high in accordance with my deserts.

Evstratii Mylnikov had been awarded the rights and privileges of the hereditary nobility the previous year, along with an Order of Vladimir, Third Class, but the College of Arms was still smothering the approval of the crest in red tape, still nitpicking. It had approved the hammer and sickle, and the bees, but baulked at the peaked cap – supposedly it looked too much like the coronet that was reserved for titled individuals.

In recent times Mylnikov had got into the habit, when he was in a thoughtful mood, of drawing this emblem so dear to his heart on a piece of paper. At first he couldn’t get the bees right at all, but in time Evstratii Pavlovich got the hang of it so well that they were a real delight to look at. And now here he was again, diligently shading in the stripes on the toilers’ abdomens, glancing every now and again at the pile of papers lying to the left of his elbow. The document that had plunged the court counsellor into a brown study was titled: ‘Log of the surveillance of honorary citizen Andron Semyonov Komarovsky (alias ‘Twitchy’) in the city of St Petersburg on 15 May 1905’. The individual who called himself Komarovsky (there were compelling reasons to believe that his passport was false) had been handed on from the Moscow Department for the Defence of Public Security and Order (the Moscow Okhrana) ‘with a view to establishing contact and communications’.

And now this.

The mark was taken over from an agent of the Moscow Flying Squad at 7.25 at the railway station. The accompanying agent (Detective Gnatiuk) stated that on the way Twitchy had not spoken with anyone and had only left his compartment to answer calls of nature.

Having taken over the mark, we followed him in two cabs to the Bunting Building on Nadezhdinskaya Street, where Twitchy walked up to the fourth floor, to apartment No. 7, from which he never emerged again. Apartment No. 7 is rented by a certain Zwilling, a resident of Helsingfors, who only appears here very rarely (according to the yard keeper the last time was at the beginning of winter).

At 12.38 the mark summoned the yard keeper with the bell. Agent Maximenko went up to him, disguised as the yard keeper. Twitchy gave him a rouble and told him to buy bread, salami and two bottles of beer. There was apparently no one in the flat apart from him.

When he brought the order, Maximenko was given the change (17 kop.) as a tip. He observed that the mark was extremely nervous. As if he was waiting for someone or something.

At 3.15 an army officer who has been given the code name ‘Kalmyk’ appeared. (A staff captain with the collar tabs of the Supply Department, a limp on his right leg, short, high cheekbones, black hair.)

He went up to apartment No. 7, but came down 4 minutes later and set off in the direction of Basseinaya Street. Agent Maximenko was dispatched to follow him.

Twitchy did not emerge from the entrance of the building. At 3.31 he walked over to the window and stood there, looking into the yard, then walked away.

At this moment Maximenko has still not returned.

I am presently (8 o’clock in the evening) handing over the surveillance detail to Senior Agent Goltz.

Sen. Agent Smurov

Short and clear, apparently.

Short enough, certainly, but damn all about it was clear.

An hour and a half ago Evstratii Pavlovich, having only just received the report cited above, also received a phone call from the police station on Basseinaya Street. He was informed that a man had been found dead in the courtyard of a building on Mitavsky Lane, with documents that identified him as Flying Squad agent Vasilii Maximenko. In less than ten minutes the court counsellor himself had arrived at the scene of the incident and ascertained that it really was Maximenko. There were absolutely no signs of violent death, nor any traces of a struggle or of any disorder in the agent’s clothing. The highly experienced medical expert, Karl Stepanovich, had said immediately that all the signs indicated heart failure.

Well, of course, Mylnikov was upset for a while, he even shed a tear for the old comrade with whom he had served shoulder to shoulder for ten years – the number of scrapes they’d been through together! And, as a matter of fact, Vasilii had even been involved in the winning of the Order of Vladimir that had led to the genesis of a new noble line.

In May the previous year, a secret message had been received from the consul in Hong Kong, saying that four Japanese disguised as businessmen were making their way towards the Suez Canal – that is, to the city of Aden. Only they were not businessmen at all, but naval officers: two minelayers and two divers. They intended to place underwater bombs along the route of cruisers from the Black Sea Squadron that had been dispatched to the Far East.

Evstratii Pavlovich had taken six of his best agents, all of them genuine wolfhounds (including the now-deceased Maximenko), skipped across to Aden and there, in the bazaar, disguised as sailors on a spree, they had started a knife fight: they carved the Jappos to shreds and dumped their luggage in the bay. The cruisers had got through without a single hitch. True, those lousy macaques had smashed them to pieces afterwards anyway but, like they say, that wasn’t down to us, was it?

This was the kind of colleague the state counsellor had lost. And not even in some rollicking adventure, but from a heart attack.

After giving instructions concerning the mortal remains, Mylnikov went back to his office on Fontanka Street and reread the report about Twitchy, and something started bothering him. He dispatched Lenka Zyablikov, a very bright young lad, to Nadezhdinskaya Street, to check Apartment No. 7.

And then what came up? Well, the old wolfhound’s nose hadn’t led him astray.

Zyablikov had phoned just ten minutes ago, talked about this and that, said how he’d dressed up as a plumber, and started ringing and knocking at No. 7 – no answer. Then he opened the door with a picklock.

Twitchy was dangling in a noose, by the window, from the curtain rail. All the signs indicated suicide: no bruises or abrasions, paper and a pencil on a chair, as if the man had been going to write a farewell note, but changed his mind.

Evstratii Pavlovich had listened to the agent’s agitated jabbering and ordered him to wait for the group of experts to arrive, then sat down at the desk and started drawing the crest – to clear his mind and, even more importantly, to calm his nerves.

Just recently the court counsellor’s nerves hadn’t been worth a rotten damn. The medical diagnosis read: ‘General neurasthenia resulting from excessive fatigue; enlargement of the pericardium; congestion of the lungs and partial damage to the spinal cord that might pose the threat of paralysis’. Paralysis! You had to pay for everything in this life, and the price was usually much higher than you expected.

So here he was, a hereditary nobleman, the head of a supremely important section in the Department of Police, with an annual salary of six thousand roubles – and never mind the salary, he had a budget of thirty thousand to use entirely at his own discretion, every functionary’s dream. But without his health, what good was all the gold in the world to him now? Evstratii Pavlovich was tormented by insomnia every night, and if he ever did fall asleep, that was even worse: bad dreams, ghoulish visions, with the devil’s work in them. He woke in a cold sweat, with his teeth chattering wildly. He kept thinking he could see something stirring repulsively in the corners and hear someone chuckling indistinctly, but derisively, or that ‘someone’ might suddenly start howling. In his sixth decade Mylnikov, the scourge of terrorists and foreign spies, had started sleeping with a lighted icon lamp. For the sanctity of it, and to keep away the darkness in the nooks and crannies. All those steep hills had nigh on knackered the old horse…

The previous year he had applied to retire – and why not, he had a bit of money put by, and a little homestead bought, in a fine area for mushrooms, out on the Gulf of Finland. And then this war happened. The head of the Special Section, the director of the Department and the minister himself had implored him: Don’t betray us, Evstratii Pavlovich, don’t abandon us in dangerous times like these. You can’t refuse!

The court counsellor forced himself to focus his thoughts on more pressing matters. He tugged on his long Zaporozhian Cossack moustache, then drew two circles on the paper, a wavy line between them and a question mark up above.

Two little facts, each on its own more or less clear.

So, Maximenko had died, his overworked heart had given out under the stresses and strains of the service. It happened.

Honorary citizen Komarovsky, whoever the hell he was (the Moscow lads had picked up his trail the day before yesterday at a secret Socialist Revolutionary meeting place), had hanged himself. That happened with some neurasthenic revolutionaries too.

But for two existences that were to some degree interconnected, two, so to speak, intersecting earthly vales, both to be broken off abruptly and simultaneously? That was too queer by half. Evstratii Pavlovich had only the vaguest idea of what an earthly vale was, but he liked the sound of the words – he had often imagined himself wandering through life as just such a vale, narrow and tortuous, squeezed in between bleak, rocky cliffs.

Who was this Kalmyk? Why did he go to see Twitchy – on business or, perhaps, by mistake (he was only there for four minutes)? And what took Maximenko into a dead-end courtyard?

Oh, Mylnikov didn’t like this Kalmyk at all. He was more like the Angel of Death than a plain staff captain (the court counsellor crossed himself at the thought); he left one man, and he promptly hanged himself; another man followed the Kalmyk, and he died a dog’s death in a filthy passageway.

Mylnikov tried to draw a slant-eyed Kalmyk face beside the crest, but the likeness turned out poorly – he didn’t have the knack of it.

Ah, Kalmyk-Kalmyk, where are you now?

And Staff Captain Rybnikov, so accurately nicknamed by the agents (his face really was rather Kalmykish), was spending the evening of this troublesome day hurrying and scurrying more intensely than ever.

After the incident on Mitavsky Lane, he dropped into a telegraph office and sent off two messages: one was local, to the Kolpino railway station, the other was long-distance, to Irkutsk, and he quarrelled with the telegraph clerk over the rate – he was outraged that they took ten kopecks a word for telegrams to Irkutsk. The clerk explained that telegraphic communications to the Asiatic part of the empire were charged at a double rate, and he even showed Rybnikov the price list, but the staff captain simply wouldn’t listen.

‘What do you mean, it’s Asia?’ he howled, gazing around plaintively. ‘Gentlemen, did you hear what he said about Irkutsk? Why, it’s a magnificent city, Europe, the genuine article! Oh, yes! You haven’t been there, so don’t you talk, but I served three unforgettable years there! What do you make of this, gents? It’s daylight robbery!’

After raising a ruckus, Vasilii Alexandrovich moved to the queue for the international window and sent a telegram to Paris, at the urgent rate, that is to say, all of thirty kopecks for a word, but he behaved quietly here, without waxing indignant.

After that the irrepressible staff captain hobbled off to the Nicholas station, where he arrived just in time for the departure of the nine o’clock express.

He tried to buy a second-class ticket, but the ticket office didn’t have any.

‘Sorry, it’s not my fault,’ Rybnikov informed the queue with obvious satisfaction. ‘I’ll have to travel in third, even though I am an officer. Government business, I’ve no right not to go. Here’s six roubles. My ticket, please.’

‘There’s no more places in third class,’ the booking clerk replied. ‘There are places in first, for fifteen roubles.’

‘How much?’ Vasilii Alexandrovich gasped. ‘My father’s not called Rothschild, you know! If you’re really interested, I happen to be an orphan!’

They started explaining to him that there weren’t enough places, that the number of passenger trains to Moscow had been reduced because of the military traffic. And even that one ticket in first class had only become free by sheer chance, just two minutes ago. A lady had wanted to travel in a compartment alone, but this was forbidden by decree of the director of the line, and the passenger had been forced to return the extra ticket.

‘Well, are you taking it or not?’ the booking clerk asked impatiently.

Cursing plaintively, the staff captain bought the hugely expensive ticket, but he demanded ‘a paper with a seal’ stating that there hadn’t been any cheaper tickets available. They barely managed to get rid of him by sending him off to the duty station supervisor for a ‘paper’, but the staff captain didn’t go to him, instead he called into the left luggage office.

There he retrieved a cheap-looking suitcase and a long, narrow tube, the kind used for carrying blueprints.

And then it was already time to go to the platform, because they were ringing the first bell.

The third syllable, in which Vasilii Alexandrovich visits the WC

There was a lady passenger sitting in the first-class compartment – presumably the one who had been prevented from travelling in solitude by the rules of the railway.

The staff captain greeted her glumly, evidently still smarting over his fifteen roubles. He hardly even glanced at his travelling companion, although the lady was good-looking – in fact more than merely good-looking, she was quite exceptionally attractive: a delicate watercolour face, huge moist eyes behind a misty veil, an elegant travelling suit in a mother-of-pearl hue.

The lovely stranger took no interest in Rybnikov either. In reply to his ‘hello’ she nodded coldly, cast a single brief glance over her companion’s common features, his baggy uniform tunic and gingerish scuffed boots and turned away towards the window.

The second bell pealed out.

The female passenger’s delicately defined nostrils started fluttering. Her lips whispered:

‘Ah, get a move on, do!’ but the exclamation was clearly not addressed to her companion in the compartment.

Newspaper boys dashed, gabbling, along the corridor – one from the respectable Evening Russia, the other from the sleazy Russian Assembly. They were both howling at the tops of their voices, trying to out-yell each other.

‘Woeful news of the drama in the Sea of Japan!’ called the first one, straining his lungs to bursting point. ‘Russian fleet burned and sunk!’

The second one yelled: ‘Famous “Moscow Daredevils” gang strikes in Petersburg! High society lady undressed!’

‘First lists of the dead. Numerous names dear to all hearts! The whole country will be weeping!’

‘Countess N. put out of a carriage in the costume of Eve! The bandits knew she had jewels hidden under her dress!’

The staff captain bought Evening Russia with its huge black border of mourning and the lady bought Russian Assembly, but before they could start reading, the door burst open, and in charged a huge bouquet of roses that wouldn’t fit through the frame, immediately filling the compartment with unctuous fragrance.

Protruding above the rosebuds was a handsome man’s face with a well-groomed imperial and a curled moustache. A diamond pin glinted and sparkled on his necktie.

‘Anddd who is thissss!’ the new arrival exclaimed, eyeing Rybnikov intently, and his black eyebrows slid upwards menacingly, but after only a second the handsome fellow had had his fill of observing the staff captain’s unprepossessing appearance and lost all interest in him, after which he did not deign to notice him again.

‘Lycia!’ he exclaimed, falling to his knees and throwing the bouquet at the lady’s feet. ‘I love only you, with all my heart and soul! Forgive me, I implore you! You know my temperament! I am a man of sudden enthusiasms, I am an artiste.’

It was easy to see that he was an artiste. The owner of the imperial was not at all embarrassed by his audience – in addition to the staff captain glancing out from behind his Evening Russia, this interesting scene was also being observed by spectators in the corridor, attracted by the mind-numbing scent of the roses and the sonorous lamentations.

Nor did the lovely lady’s nerve fail her in front of an audience.

‘It’s over, Astralov!’ she declared wrathfully, throwing back her veil to reveal her glittering eyes. ‘And don’t you dare show up in Moscow!’ She waved aside the hands extended in supplication. ‘No, no, I won’t even listen!’

Then the penitent did something rather strange: without rising from his knees, he folded his hands together on his chest and started singing in a deep, truly magical baritone:

‘Una furtive lacrima negli occhi suoi spunto…’

The lady turned pale and put her hands over her ears, but the divine voice filled the entire compartment and flowed far beyond – the entire carriage fell silent, listening.

Donizetti’s entrancing melody was cut short by the particularly long and insistent trilling of the third bell.

The conductor glanced in at the door:

‘All those seeing off passengers please alight immediately, we are departing. Sir, it’s time!’ he said, touching the singer’s elbow.

The singer dashed over to Rybnikov:

‘Let me have the ticket! I’ll give you a hundred roubles! This is a drama of a broken heart! Five hundred!’

‘Don’t you dare let him have the ticket!’ the lady shouted.

‘I can’t do it,’ the staff captain replied firmly to the artiste. ‘I would gladly, but it’s urgent government business.’

The conductor dragged Astralov, in floods of tears, out into the corridor.

The train set off. There was a despairing shout from the platform:

‘Lycia! I’ll do away with myself! Forgive me!’

‘Never!’ the flushed lady passenger shouted, and flung the magnificent bouquet out of the window, showering the little table with scarlet petals.

She fell back limply on to the seat, covered her face with her fingers and burst into sobs.

‘You are a noble man,’ she said through her sobbing. ‘You refused his money! I’m so grateful to you! I would have jumped out of the window, I swear I would!’

Rybnikov muttered:

‘Five hundred roubles is huge money. I don’t earn a third of that, not even with mess and travelling allowances. But I’ve got my job to do. The top brass won’t excuse lateness…’

‘Five hundred roubles he offered, the buffoon!’ the lady exclaimed, not listening to him. ‘Preening his feathers for his audience! But he’s really so mean, such an economiser!’ She pronounced the final word with boundless contempt and even stopped sobbing, then added: ‘Refuses to live according to his means.’

Intrigued by the logical introduction inherent in this statement, Vasilii Alexandrovich asked:

‘Begging your pardon, but I don’t quite understand. Is he thrifty or does he lives beyond his means?’

‘His means are huge, but he lives too far within them!’ his travelling companion explained, no longer crying, but anxiously examining her slightly reddened nose in a little mirror. She dabbed at it with a powder puff and adjusted a lock of golden hair beside her forehead. ‘Last year he earned almost a hundred thousand, but he barely spent even half of it. He puts it all away “for a rainy day”!’

At this point she finally calmed down completely, turned her gaze on her companion and introduced herself punctiliously.

‘Glyceria Romanovna Lidina.’

The staff captain told her his name too.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ the lady told him with a smile. ‘I must explain, since you have witnessed this monstrous spectacle. Georges simply adores histrionic scenes, especially in front of an audience!’

‘Is he really an artiste, then?’

Glyceria Romanovna fluttered her almost inch-long eyelashes incredulously.

‘What? You don’t know Astralov? The tenor Astralov. His name is on all the show bills!’

‘I’m not much for theatres,’ Rybnikov replied with an indifferent shrug. ‘I don’t have any time to go strutting about at operas, you know. And it’s beyond my pocket, anyway. My pay’s miserly, they’re delaying the pension, and life in Petersburg is too pricey by half. The cabbies take seventy kopecks for every piddling little ride…’

Lidina was not listening, she wasn’t even looking at him any more.

‘We’ve been married for two years!’ she said, as if she were not addressing her prosaic companion, but a more worthy audience, which was listening to her with sympathetic attention. ‘Ah, I was so in love! But now I realise it was the voice I loved, not him. What a voice he has! He only has to start singing and I melt, he can wrap me round his little finger. And he knows it, the scoundrel! Did you see the way he started singing just now, the cheap manipulator? Thank goodness the bell interrupted him, my head was already starting to spin!’

‘A handsome gentleman,’ the staff captain acknowledged, trying to suppress a yawn. ‘Probably gets his fair share of crumpet. Is that what the drama’s all about?’

‘They told me about him!’ Glyceria Romanovna exclaimed with her eyes flashing. ‘There are always plenty of “well-wishers” in the world of theatre. But I didn’t believe them. And then I saw it with my own eyes! And where? In my own drawing room! And who with? That old floozy Koturnova! I’ll never set foot in that desecrated apartment again! Or in Petersburg either!’

‘So you’re moving to Moscow, then?’ the staff captain summed up. It was clear from his tone of voice that he was impatient to put an end to this trivial conversation and settle into his newspaper.

‘Yes, we have another apartment in Moscow, on Ostozhenka Street. Georges sometimes takes an engagement for the winter at the Bolshoi.’

At this, Rybnikov finally concealed himself behind Evening Russia and the lady was obliged to fall silent. She nervously picked up the Russian Assembly, ran her eyes over the article on the front page and tossed it aside, muttering:

‘My God, how vulgar! Completely undressed, in the road! Could she really have been stripped totally and completely naked? Who is this Countess N.? Vika Olsufieva? Nelly Vorontsova? Ah, it doesn’t matter anyway.’

Outside the windowpane, dachas, copses of trees and dreary vegetable patches drifted by. The staff captain rustled his newspaper, enthralled.

Lidina sighed, then sighed again. She found the silence oppressive.

‘What’s that you find so fascinating to read?’ she eventually asked, unable to restrain herself.

‘Well, you see, it’s the list of officers who gave their lives for the tsar and the fatherland in the sea battle beside the island of Tsushima. It came through the European telegraph agencies, from Japanese sources. The scrolls of mourning, so to speak. They say they’re going to continue it in forthcoming issues. I’m looking to see if any of my comrades-in-arms are there.’ And Vasilii Alexandrovich started reading out loud, with expression, savouring the words. ‘On the battleship Prince Kutuzov-Smolensky: junior flagman, Rear Admiral Leontiev; commander of the vessel, Commodore Endlung; paymaster of the squadron, State Counsellor Ziukin; chief officer, Captain Second Rank von Schwalbe…’

‘Oh, stop!’ said Glyceria Romanovna, fluttering her little hand. ‘I don’t want to hear it! When is this terrible war ever going to end!’

‘Soon. The insidious enemy will be crushed by the Christian host,’ Rybnikov promised, setting the newspaper aside to take out a little book, in which he immersed himself with even greater concentration.

The lady screwed her eyes up short-sightedly, trying to make out the title, but the book was bound in brown paper.

The train’s brakes screeched and it came to a halt.

‘Kolpino?’ Lidina asked in surprise. ‘Strange, the express never stops here.’

Rybnikov stuck his head out of the window and called to the duty supervisor.

‘Why are we waiting?’

‘We have to let a special get past, Officer, it’s got urgent military freight.’

While her companion was distracted, Glyceria Romanovna seized the chance to satisfy her curiosity. She quickly opened the book’s cover, held her pretty lorgnette on a gold chain up to her eyes and puckered up her face. The book that the staff captain had been reading so intently was called TUNNELS AND BRIDGES: A concise guide for railway employees.

A telegraph clerk clutching a paper ribbon in his hand ran up to the station supervisor, who read the message, shrugged and waved his little flag.

‘What is it?’ asked Rybnikov.

‘Don’t know if they’re coming or going. Orders to dispatch you and not wait for the special.’

The train set off.

‘I suppose you must be a military engineer?’ Glyceria Romanovna enquired.

‘What makes you think that?’

Lidina felt embarrassed to admit that she had peeped at the title of the book, but she found a way out – she pointed to the leather tube.

‘That thing. It’s for drawings, isn’t it?’

‘Ah, yes.’ Vasilii Alexandrovich lowered his voice. ‘Secret documents. I’m delivering them to Moscow.’

‘And I thought you were on leave. Visiting your family, or your parents, perhaps.’

‘I’m not married. Where would I get the earnings to set up a family? I’m dog poor. And I haven’t got any parents, I’m an orphan. And in the regiment they used to taunt me for a Tatar because of my squinty eyes.’

After the stop at Kolpino the staff captain brightened up somewhat and became more talkative, and his broad cheekbones even turned slightly pink.

Suddenly he glanced at his watch and stood up.

‘Pardon, I’ll just go out for a smoke.’

‘Smoke here, I’m used to it,’ Glyceria Romanovna told him graciously. ‘Georges smokes cigars. That is, he used to.’

Vasilii Alexandrovich smiled in embarrassment.

‘I’m sorry. When I said a smoke, I was being tactful. I don’t smoke, an unnecessary expense. I’m actually going to the WC, on a call of nature.’

The lady turned away with a dignified air.

The staff captain took the tube with him. Catching his female companion’s indignant glance, he explained in an apologetic voice:

‘I’m not allowed to let it out of my hands.’

Glyceria Romanovna watched him go and murmured:

‘He really is quite unpleasant.’ And she started looking out of the window.

But the staff captain walked quickly through second class and third class to the carriage at the tail of the train and glanced out on to the brake platform.

There was an insistent, lingering blast on a whistle from behind.

The conductor-in-chief and a gendarme sentry were standing on the platform.

‘What the hell!’ said the conductor. ‘That can’t be the special. They telegraphed to say it was cancelled!’

The long train was following them no more than half a verst away, drawn by two locomotives, puffing out black smoke. A long tail of flat wagons cased in tarpaulin stretched out behind it.

The hour was already late, after ten, but the twilight had barely begun to thicken – the season of white nights was approaching.

The gendarme looked round at the staff captain and saluted.

‘Begging your pardon, Your Honour, but please be so good as to close the door. Instructions strictly forbid it.’

‘Quite right, old fellow,’ Rybnikov said approvingly. ‘Vigilance, and all the rest of it. I just wanted to have a smoke, actually. Well, I’ll just do it in the corridor here. Or in the WC.’

And he went into the toilet, which in third class was cramped and not very clean.

After locking himself in, Vasilii Alexandrovich stuck his head out of the window.

The train was just moving on to an antediluvian bridge, built in the old Count Kleinmichel style, which spanned a narrow little river.

Rybnikov stood on the flush lever and a hole opened up in the bottom of the toilet. Through it he could clearly see the sleepers flickering past.

The staff captain pressed some invisible little button on the tube and stuffed the narrow leather case into the hole – the diameter matched precisely, so he had to employ a certain amount of force.

When the tube had disappeared through the hole, Vasilii Alexandrovich quickly moistened his hands under the tap and walked out into the vestibule of the carriage, shaking the water from his fingers.

A minute later, he was already walking back into his own compartment.

Lidina looked at him severely – she still had not forgiven him for that ‘call of nature’ – and was about to turn away, when she suddenly exclaimed:

‘Your secret case! You must have forgotten it in the toilet!’

An expression of annoyance appeared on Rybnikov’s face, but before he could answer Glyceria Romanovna there was a terrifying crash and the carriage lurched and swayed.

The staff captain dashed to the window. There were heads protruding from the other windows too, all of them looking back along the line.

At that point the line curved round in a small arc and they had a clear view of the tracks, the river they had just crossed and the bridge.

Or rather, what was left of it.

The bridge had collapsed at its precise centre, and at the precise moment when the line of heavy military flat wagons was crossing it.

The catastrophe was an appalling sight: a column of water and steam, splashed up into the air as the locomotives crashed down into the water, upended flat wagons with massive steel structures tumbling off them and – most terrible of all – a hail of tiny human figures showering downwards.

Glyceria Romanovna huddled against Rybnikov’s shoulder and started squealing piercingly. Other passengers were screaming too.

The tail-end carriage of the special, probably reserved for officers, teetered on the very edge of the break. Someone seemed to jump out of the window just in time, but then the bridge support buckled and the carriage went plunging downwards too, into the heap of twisted and tangled metal protruding from the water.

‘My God, my God!’ Lidina started screaming hysterically. ‘Why are you just looking? We have to do something!’

She dashed out into the corridor. Vasilii Alexandrovich hesitated for only a second before following her.

‘Stop the train!’ the small lady gabbled hysterically, throwing herself on the conductor-in-chief, who was running towards the leading carriage. ‘There are wounded men there! They’re drowning! We have to save them!’

She grabbed him by the sleeve so tenaciously that the railwayman had no choice but to stop.

‘What do you mean, save them? Save who? In that shambles!’ Pale as death, the captain of the train crew tied to pull himself free. ‘What can we do? We have to get to a station, to report this.’

Glyceria Romanovna refused to listen and pounded him on the chest with her little fist.

‘They’re dying, and we just leave them? Stop! I demand it!’ she squealed. ‘Press that emergency brake of yours, or whatever you call it!’

Hearing her howling, a dark-complexioned man with a little waxed moustache put his head out of the next compartment. Seeing the captain of the train hesitate, he shouted menacingly:

‘Don’t you dare stop! I’ve got urgent business in Moscow!’

Rybnikov took Lidina gently by the elbow and started speaking soothingly:

‘Really and truly, madam. Of course, it’s a terrible disaster, but the only thing we can do to help is telegraph as soon as possible from the next…’

‘Ah, to hell with all of you!’ shouted Glyceria Romanovna.

She darted to the emergency handle and pulled it.

Everyone in the train went tumbling head over heels to the floor. The train gave a hop and started screeching sickeningly along the rails. There were howls and screams on every side – the passengers thought their train had crashed.

The first to recover his senses was the man with the dark complexion, who had not fallen, but only banged his head against the lintel of the door.

With a cry of ‘You rrrotten bitch, I’ll kill you!’ he threw himself on the hysterical woman, who had been stunned by her fall, and grabbed her by the throat.

The small flames that glinted briefly in Vasilii Alexandrovich’s eyes suggested that he might possibly have shared the swarthy gentleman’s bloody intentions to some extent. However, there was more than just fury in the glance that the staff captain cast at Glyceria Romanovna as she was being strangled – there was also something like stupefaction.

Rybnikov sighed, grabbed the intemperate dark-haired man by the collar and tossed him aside.

The fourth syllable, in which a hired gun sets out on the hunt

The phone rang at half past one in the morning. Before he even lifted the receiver to answer, Erast Petrovich Fandorin gestured to his valet to hand him his clothes. A telephone call at this hour of the night could only be from the Department, and it had to be about some emergency or other.

As he listened to the voice rumbling agitatedly in the earpiece, Fandorin knitted his black eyebrows tighter and tighter together. He switched hands, so that Masa could slip his arm into the sleeve of a starched shirt. He shook his head at the shoes – the valet understood and brought his boots.

Erast Petrovich did not ask the person on the phone a single question, he simply said:

‘Very well, Leontii Karlovich, I’ll be there straight away.’

Once he was dressed, he stopped for a moment in front of the mirror. He combed his black hair threaded with grey (the kind they call ‘salt-and-pepper’), ran a special little brush over his entirely white temples and his neat moustache, in which there was still not a single silver hair. He frowned after running his hand across his cheek, but there was no time to shave.

He walked out of the apartment.

The Japanese was already sitting in the automobile, holding a travelling bag in his hand.

The most valuable quality of Fandorin’s valet was not that he did everything quickly and precisely, but that he knew how to manage without unnecessary talk. From the choice of footwear, Masa had guessed there was a long journey in prospect, so he had equipped himself accordingly.

With its mighty twenty-horsepower engine roaring, the twin-cylinder Oldsmobile surged down Sadovaya Street, where Fandorin was lodging, and a minute later it was already gliding across the Chernyshevsky Bridge. A feeble drizzle was trickling down from the grey, unconvincing night sky, and glinting on the road. The remarkable ‘Hercules’ brand non-splash tyres glided over the black asphalt.

Two minutes later the automobile braked to a halt at house number 7 on Kolomenskaya Street, where the offices of the St Petersburg Railway Gendarmerie and Police were located.

Fandorin set off up the steps at a run, with a nod to the sentry, who saluted him. But his valet remained sitting in the Oldsmobile, and even demonstratively turned his back.

From the very beginning of the armed conflict between the two empires, Masa – who was Japanese by birth, but a Russian citizen according to his passport – had declared that he would remain neutral, and he had stuck scrupulously to this rule. He had not delighted in the heroic feats of the defenders of Port Arthur, nor had he rejoiced at the victories of Japanese armies. But most importantly of all, as a matter of principle, he had not stepped across the threshold of any military institutions, which at times had caused both him and his master considerable inconvenience.

The valet’s moral sufferings were exacerbated still further by the fact that, following several arrests on suspicion of espionage, he had been obliged to disguise his nationality. Fandorin had procured a temporary passport for his servant in the name of a Chinese gentleman, so that now, whenever Masa left the house, he was obliged to put on a wig with a long pigtail. According to the document, he bore the impossible name of ‘Lianchan Shankhoevich Chaiunevin’. As a consequence of all these ordeals, the valet had lost his appetite and grown lean, and had even given up breaking the hearts of housemaids and seamstresses, with whom he had enjoyed vertiginous success during the pre-war period.

These were hard times, not only for the false Lianchan Shankhoevich, but also for his master.

When Japanese destroyers attacked the Port Arthur squadron without warning, Fandorin was on the other side of the world, in the Dutch West Indies, where he was conducting absolutely fascinating research in the area of underwater navigation.

At first Erast Fandorin had wanted nothing to do with a war between two countries that were both close to his heart, but as the advantage swung more and more towards Japan, Fandorin gradually lost interest in the durability of aluminium, and even in the search for the galleon San Felipe, which had gone down with its load of gold in the year ad 1708 seven miles south-south-east of the island of Aruba. On the very day when Fandorin’s submarine finally scraped its aluminium belly across the stump of the Spanish mainmast protruding from the sea bottom, news came of the loss of the battleship Petropavlosk, together with Commander-in-Chief Admiral Makarov and the entire crew.

The next morning Fandorin set out for his homeland, leaving his associates to deal with raising the gold bars to the surface.

On arriving in St Petersburg, he contacted an old colleague from his time in the Third Section, who now occupied a highly responsible post, and offered his services: Erast Petrovich knew that Russia had catastrophically few specialists on Japan, and he had spent several years living in the Land of the Rising Sun.

The old acquaintance was quite delighted by Fandorin’s visit. He said, however, that he would like to make use of Erast Petrovich in a different capacity.

‘Of course, there aren’t enough experts on Japan, or on many other subjects,’ said the general, blinking rapidly with eyes red from lack of sleep, ‘but there is a far worse rent in our garments, which leaves us exposed, pardon me for saying so, at the most intimate spot. If you only knew, my dear fellow, what a calamitous state our counter-espionage system is in! Things have more or less come together in the army in the field, but in the rear, the confusion is appalling, monstrous. Japanese agents are everywhere, they act with brazen impudence and resourcefulness, and we don’t know how to catch them. We have no experience. We’re used to civilised spies, the European kind, who do their work under cover of an embassy or foreign companies. But the Orientals break all the rules. I’ll tell you what worries me most,’ said the important man, lowering his voice. ‘Our railways. When the war’s happening tens of thousands of versts away from the factories and the conscription centres, victory and defeat depend on the railways, the primary circulatory system of the organism of the state. The entire empire has just one artery from Peter to Arthur. Atrophied, with a feeble pulse, prone to thrombosis and – worst of all – almost completely unprotected. Erast Petrovich, dear fellow, there are two things that I dread in this situation: Japanese sabotage and Russian slovenliness. You have more than enough experience of intelligence work, thank God. And then, they told me that in America you qualified as an engineer. Why not get back in harness, eh? On any terms you like. If you want, we’ll reinstate you in government service; if you want, you can be a freelance, a hired gun. Help us out, will you, put your shoulder to the wheel.’

And so Fandorin found himself engaged at the capital’s Department of Railway Gendarmerie and Police in the capacity of a ‘hired gun’ – that is, a consultant receiving no salary, but endowed with extremely far-reaching powers. The goal set for the consultant was as follows: to develop a security system for the railways, test it in the zone under his jurisdiction and then pass it on to be used by all the Railway Gendarmerie departments of the empire.

It was hectic work, not very much like Erast Fandorin’s preceding activities, but fascinating in its own way. The Department’s jurisdiction extended to two thousand versts of railway lines, hundreds of stations and terminuses, bridges, railway line reservations, depots and workshops – and all this had to be protected against possible attack by the enemy. While the provincial department of gendarmes had several dozen employees, the railway department had more than a thousand. The scale and the responsibility were beyond all comparison. In addition, the duty regulations for the railways’ gendarmes exempted them from performing the functions of a political police, and for Fandorin that was very important: he was not fond of revolutionaries, but he regarded with even greater revulsion the methods by which the Okhrana and the Special Section of the Department of Police endeavoured to eradicate the nihilist contagion. In this sense, Erast Petrovich regarded working for the Railway Gendarmerie Department as ‘clean work’.

Fandorin did not know much about railways, but he could not be classed as a total dilettante. He was, after all, a qualified engineer in the area of self-propelled machines, and twenty years earlier, while investigating a rather complicated case, he had worked on a railway line for a while in the guise of a trainee.

During the year just past, the ‘hired gun’ had achieved a great deal. Gendarme sentries had been established on all trains, including passenger trains; a special regime had been introduced for guarding bridges, tunnels, crossings and points, flying brigades on handcars had been created, and so on and so forth. The innovations introduced in the St Petersburg department were quickly adapted in the other provinces and so far (fingers firmly crossed) there had not been a single major accident, not a single act of sabotage.

Although Fandorin’s official position was a strange one, they had grown accustomed to Erast Petrovich in the Department and regarded him with great respect, referring to him as ‘Mr Engineer’. His superior, Lieutenant General von Kassel, had grown used to relying on his consultant in all matters and never took any decisions without his advice.

And now Leontii Karlovich Kassel was waiting for his assistant in the doorway of his office.

Catching sight of the engineer’s tall, dashing figure at the end of the corridor, he went rushing towards it.

‘Of all things, the Tezoimenitsky Bridge!’ the general shouted before he was even close. ‘We wrote to the minister and warned him the bridge was dilapidated and unsafe! And now he rebukes me and threatens me: says that if this turns out to be Japanese sabotage – I’ll stand trial for it. How in hell can it be sabotage? The Tezoimenitsky Bridge hasn’t been repaired since 1850! And here’s the result for you: it couldn’t bear the weight of a military transport carrying heavy artillery. The ordnance is ruined. There are large numbers of dead. And worst of all, the line to Moscow has been disrupted!’

‘A good thing it happened here, and not beyond Samara,’ said Erast Petrovich, following von Kassel into the office and closing the door. ‘Here we can send trains by an alternative route along the Novgorod line. But is it certain the bridge collapsed and this is not sabotage?’

Leontii Karlovich frowned.

‘Oh, come, now, how can it be sabotage? You ought to know, you developed the regulations yourself. Sentries on the bridge, the rails checked every half-hour, gendarmes on duty on the brake platforms of all trains – my territory is in perfect order. Tell me instead, if you can, what our unfortunate homeland has done to deserve such disasters. We’re straining ourselves to the very limit as it is. What about Tsushima, eh? Have you read the newspaper reports? A total debacle, and not a single enemy vessel sunk. Where did it come from, this Japan? When I entered the service, no one had even heard of such a country. And now it’s sprung up out of nowhere, in just a few years, like a mushroom overnight. Why, it’s totally unheard of.’

‘Why d-do you say it’s unheard of?’ Fandorin replied with his habitual light stammer. ‘Japan began modernising in 1868, thirty-seven years ago. Less time than that passed from the moment Peter the Great ascended the throne until the battle of Poltava. Before that, there was no such power as Russia, then it suddenly sprang up out of nowhere, also like a m-mushroom, overnight.’

‘Oh, come on, that’s history,’ the general said dismissively, crossing himself with broad sweeps of his hand. ‘I’ll tell you what it is. It’s God punishing us for our sins. Punishing us harshly, as he did the Egyptian pharaoh, with miraculous disasters. So help me…’ – Leontii Karlovich glanced round at the door and dropped his voice to a whisper – ‘… we’ve lost the war.’

‘I d-don’t agree,’ Erast Petrovich snapped. ‘Not on a single point. Nothing miraculous has occurred. That is one. What has happened is only what should have been expected. It’s hardly surprising that Russia has not won a single battle. It would have been an absolute miracle if she had. Our enlisted man is no match for the Japanese soldier – he has less stamina, less learning and less martial spirit. Let us assume that the Russian officer is not bad, but the Japanese officer is simply superb. And then, what can we say about the generals (please don’t take this personally, Your Excellency); ours are fat and lack initiative, the Japanese generals are lean and forceful. If we are still holding out somehow, the only reason is that it is easier to defend than attack. But don’t be alarmed, Leontii Karpovich. We may lose the battles, but we shall win the war. And that is t-two. We are immeasurably stronger than the Japanese in the most important thing of all: we have economic might, human and natural resources. Time is on our side. Commander-in-Chief Linevich is acting entirely correctly, unlike Kuropatkin; he is drawing out the campaign, building up his strength. The longer it goes on, the weaker the Japanese become. Their treasury is on the brink of bankruptcy, their lines of communication are being extended further and further, their reserves are being drained. All we have to do is avoid large-scale battles, and victory is in the b-bag. Nothing could have been more stupid than to drag the Baltic fleet halfway round the world to be devoured by Admiral Togo.’

As the general listened to his assistant, his face grew brighter but, having begun on a bright note, Fandorin concluded his optimistic discourse on a gloomy one.

‘The crash on the Tezoimenitsky Bridge frightens me more than the loss of our navy squadron. Without a fleet, at least we will just about win the war, but if tricks like this start happening on the main railway line supplying the front, Russia is done for. Have them couple the inspector’s carriage to a locomotive. Let’s go and take a look.’

The fifth syllable, which features an interesting passenger

By the time the inspector’s carriage reached the scene of the disaster on the rocky banks of the Lomzha river, night had grown weary of pretending to be dark at all, and the clear morning light was streaming down from the sky in all its glory.

A quite incredible amount of top brass had gathered at the stub end of the Tezoimenitsky Bridge – the Minister of War, and the most august Inspector General of Artillery, and the Minister of Railways, and the Chief of the Gendarmes Corps, and the Director of the Department of Police, and the Head of the Provincial Gendarmes Department. There were as many as half a dozen saloon carriages, each with its own locomotive, drawn up one after another in a queue.

There, above the precipice, gold braid glittered, spurs and adjutant’s aiguillettes jingled, imperious bass voices rumbled peremptorily, and down below, at the water’s edge, chaos and death prevailed. Rising up in the middle of the Lomzha was a shapeless heap of wood and iron, with the broken bones of the bridge drooping down over it; one of the mangled and twisted locomotives had buried its nose in the far bank and was still smoking, while the rectangular black tender of the other protruded from the water like a cliff. The wounded had already been taken away, but there was a long line of dead lying on the sand, covered with tarpaulins.

The latest heavy guns, intended for the Manchurian army, had tumbled off the flat wagons: some had sunk and some had been scattered across the shallows. On the opposite bank a mobile crane was jerking its jib absurdly as it tugged at the mounting of a monster with a twisted barrel, but it was obvious that it could not cope and would never pull it out.

Leontii Karlovich set off towards the topmost brass, but Fandorin skirted round the islet of gold epaulettes and walked up to the very edge of the cliff. He stood there for a while, looking, then suddenly started climbing down the inclined surface. Down by the water, he leapt agilely on to the roof of a submerged carriage, and from there clambered on to the next support of the bridge, from which the crooked rails were dangling. The engineer scrambled up the sleepers as if they were the rungs of a ladder, and was soon on the far side of the river.

There were fewer people here. Standing some distance away, about fifty paces, was an express train – the one that had managed to slip across the bridge just before the collapse. The passengers were gathered in little knots beside the carriages.

On the surviving section of the bridge and beside the water, men in civilian clothes, all dressed differently but all, nonetheless, as alike as brothers, were swarming about with a businesslike air. Among them Fandorin recognised Evstratii Pavlovich Mylnikov, with whom he had once worked in Moscow.

A gendarme corporal in a wet, torn uniform was standing rigidly to attention in front of Mylnikov – it looked as if his report was already in full spate. But the court counsellor was not looking at the corporal, he was looking at Fandorin.

‘Bah,’ he said, throwing his arms wide, as if he was about to embrace the engineer. ‘Fandorin! What are you doing here? Ah, yes, you’re in the RGD now, they told me. Sorry for invading your territory, but it’s an order from the very top: investigate as a matter of emergency, involve all the contiguous departments. Got us up out of our feather bed. Go get ’em, they said, pick up that trail, you old bloodhound. Well, the part about the feather bed’s not true.’ Mylnikov bared his yellow teeth in what should have been a smile, but his eyes remained cold and narrowed. ‘When would humble sleuths like us ever see our feather beds these days? I envy you railway sybarites. I spent the night on the chairs in the office, as I usually do. But then again, as you can see, I got here first. Look, I’m interrogating your lads, to see if it was a Japanese mine.’

‘Mr Engineer,’ the corporal said excitedly, turning to Fandorin, ‘tell His Honour, will you? Do you remember me? I’m Loskutov, I use to work in Farforovaya, on the crossing. You inspected us in winter and you were well pleased. You gave orders for me to be promoted. I did everything all right and proper, just like we’re supposed to! I climbed over the whole lot myself, ten minutes before the express. It was all clear! And how could the enemy have crept through on to the bridge? I’ve got sentries at both ends!’

‘So it was completely clear?’ Fandorin asked to make certain. ‘Did you look carefully?’

‘Why, I… Just look at that…’ The corporal choked and tugged his peaked cap off his head. ‘By Christ the Lord! Seven years… You ask anyone you like how Loskutov does his duty.’

The engineer turned to Mylnikov:

‘What have you managed to find out?’

‘The picture’s clear,’ Mylnikov said with a shrug. ‘The usual old Rooshian nonsense. The express train was travelling in front. It stopped at Kolpino and was supposed to let the special with the field guns go past. Then this telegraph clerk passes on a telegram: Carry on, the special’s delayed. Someone messed things up somewhere. As soon as the express has cleared the bridge, the army train catches up with it from behind. A heavy brute, as you can see for yourself. Should have shot across at full speed, as required, then nothing would have happened. But it must have started to brake, and the supports caved in. The railway top brass will be in for it now.’

‘Who sent the telegram about the special b-being delayed?’ asked Fandorin, leaning forward eagerly.

‘Well, that’s just it. No one sent any such telegram.’

‘And where’s the telegraph clerk who supposedly received it?’

‘We’re searching. Haven’t found him yet – his shift was already over.’

The corner of the engineer’s mouth twitched.

‘You’re not searching hard enough. Get a verbal portrait, a photo if you can, and put him on the all-Russian wanted list, urgently.’

‘The telegraph clerk? On the all-Russian list?’

Fandorin beckoned the court counsellor with his finger, took him aside and said in a quiet voice:

‘This is sabotage. The bridge was blown up.’

‘How do you make that out?’

Fandorin led the sleuths’ boss across to the break and started climbing down the dangling rails. Mylnikov clambered after him, gasping and crossing himself.

‘L-look.’

The hand in the grey glove pointed to a charred and splintered sleeper and a rail twisted like a paper streamer.

‘Our experts will arrive any minute now. They are certain to discover particles of explosive…’

Mylnikov whistled and pushed his bowler hat on to the back of his head.

The detectives hung there above the black water, swaying slightly on the improvised ladder.

‘So the gendarme’s lying when he says he inspected everything? Or even worse, he’s in on it? Shall we arrest him?’

‘Loskutov – a Japanese agent? Rubbish. Then he would have run for it, like the Kolpino t-telegraph clerk. No, no, there wasn’t any mine on the line.’

‘Then how’d it happen? There wasn’t any mine, but there was an explosion?’

‘That’s the way it is, though.’

The court counsellor frowned thoughtfully and set off up the sleepers.

‘Go and report this to the top brass… Now won’t there be a real song and dance.’

He waved to the agents and shouted:

‘Hey, get me a boat!’

However, he didn’t get into the boat, he changed his mind.

He watched Fandorin walking away towards the express train, scratched the back of his head and went dashing after him.

The engineer glanced round at the sound of tramping feet and nodded towards the motionless train.

‘Was there really such a small distance between the trains?’

‘No, the express halted farther along, on the emergency brake. Then the driver reversed. The conductors and some of the passengers helped to get the wounded out of the water. It’s not so far to a station this side as on the other. They drove a farm cart over and took them off to hospital…’

Fandorin summoned the conductor-in-chief with an imperious gesture and asked:

‘How many passengers on the train?’

‘All the seats were sold, Mr Engineer. That makes three hundred and twelve. I’m sorry, but when can we get moving again?’

Two of the passengers were standing quite close by: an army staff captain and an attractive-looking lady. Both covered from head to foot in mud and green slime. The officer was pouring water on to his companion’s handkerchief from a kettle, and she was energetically scrubbing her mud-smeared face. Both of them were listening to the conversation curiously.

A platoon of railway gendarmes approached at a trot from the bridge. The commanding officer ran up first and saluted.

‘Mr Engineer, we’re here at your disposal. There are two platoons on the other bank. The experts have started work. What will our orders be?’

‘Cordon off both sides of the bridge and the banks. Let no one near the break, not even if they hold the rank of general. Otherwise we renounce all responsibility for the investigation – tell them that. Tell Sigismund Lvovich to look for traces of explosive… But no, don’t bother, he’ll see that for himself. Give me a clerk and four of your brightest soldiers. Yes, and one more thing: put a cordon round the express train as well. Let none of the passengers or train staff through without my permission.’

‘Mr Engineer,’ the captain of the train’s crew exclaimed plaintively, ‘we’ve been standing here for over four hours.’

‘And you’ll b-be standing here for a long time yet. I have to draw up a complete list of the passengers. We’ll question all of them and check their credentials. We’ll start from the final carriage. And you, Mylnikov, would do better to turn your attention to that telegraph clerk who disappeared. I can manage things here without you.’

‘Of course, right enough, it’s your move,’ said Mylnikov, and he even waved his arms, as if to say: I’m leaving, I’m not claiming any rights here. However, he didn’t leave.

‘Sir, madam,’ the conductor-in-chief said to the officer and lady in a dejected voice. ‘Please be so good as to return to your seats. Did you hear? They’re going to check your documents.’

‘Disaster, Glyceria Romanovna,’ Rybnikov whispered. ‘I’m done for.’

Lidina gasped as she examined a lace cuff stained with blood, but then jerked her head up sharply.

‘Why? What’s happened?’

In those slightly red and yet still beautiful eyes, Vasilii Alexandrovich read an immediate readiness for action and once again, after all the numerous occasions during the night, he marvelled at the unpredictability of this capital-city cutie.

The way Glyceria Romanovna had behaved during the efforts to save the drowning and wounded had been absolutely astounding: she didn’t sob and wail, or throw a fit of hysterics; in fact she didn’t cry at all, simply bit on her bottom lip at the most painful moments, so that by dawn it had swollen up quite badly. Rybnikov shook his head as he watched the frail little lady dragging a wounded soldier out of the water and binding up his bleeding wound with a narrow rag torn off her silk dress.

Once, overcome by the sight, the staff captain had murmured to himself: ‘It’s like Nekrasov, that poem “Russian Women”’. And he glanced around quickly, to see whether anyone had heard this comment that fitted so badly with the image of a grey little runt of an officer.

After Vasilii Alexandrovich had saved her from the dark-complexioned neurasthenic, and especially after several hours of working together, Lidina had started acting quite naturally with the staff captain, as if he were an old friend – she, too, had evidently changed her opinion of her travelling companion.

‘Why, what’s happened? Tell me!’ she exclaimed, gazing at Rybnikov with fright in her eyes.

‘I’m done for all round,’ Vasilii Alexandrovich whispered, taking her by the arm and leading her slowly towards the train. ‘I went to Peter without authorisation, my superiors didn’t know about it. My sister’s unwell. Now they’ll find out – it’s a catastrophe…’

‘The guardhouse, is it?’ Lidina asked, distressed.

‘Never mind the guardhouse, that’s no great disaster. The terrible part is something else altogether… Remember you asked about my tube? Just before the explosion? Well, I really did leave it in the toilet. I’m always so absentminded.’

Glyceria Romanovna put her hand over her lips and asked in a terrible whisper:

‘Secret drawings?’

‘Yes. Very important. Even when I went absent without leave, I didn’t let them out of my sight for a moment.’

‘And where are they? Haven’t you taken a look there, in the toilet?’

‘They’ve disappeared,’ Vasilii Alexandrovich said in a sepulchral voice, and hung his head. ‘Someone took them. That’s not just the guardhouse, it means a trial, under martial law.’

‘How appalling!’ said the lady, round-eyed with horror. ‘What can be done?’

‘I want to ask you something,’ said Rybnikov, stopping as they reached the final carriage. ‘Before anyone’s looking, I’ll duck in under the wheels and afterwards I’ll choose my moment to slip down the embankment and into the bushes. I can’t afford to be checked. Don’t give me away, will you? Tell them you’ve got no idea where I went to. We didn’t talk during the journey. What would you want with a rough type like me? And take my little suitcase that’s on the rack with you, I’ll call round to collect it in Moscow. Ostozhenka Street, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes, the Bomze building.’

Lidina glanced round at the big boss from St Petersburg and the gendarmes, who were also moving towards the train.

‘Will you help me out, save me?’ asked Rybnikov, stepping into the shadow of the carriage.

‘Of course!’ A determined, even reckless expression appeared on Glyceria Romanovna’s little face – just like earlier, when she had made a dash for the emergency brake. ‘I know who stole your drawings! That repulsive specimen who attacked me! That’s why he was in such a great hurry! And I wouldn’t be surprised if he blew up the bridge too!’

‘Blew it up?’ Rybnikov gasped in amazement, struggling to keep up with what she was saying. ‘How do you make that out? How could he blow it up?’

‘How should I know, I’m not a soldier! Perhaps he threw some kind of bomb out of the window! I’ll save you all right! And there’s no need to go crawling under the carriage!’ she shouted, darting off towards the gendarmes so impulsively that the staff captain was too late to hold her back, even though he tried.

‘Who’s in charge here? You?’ Lidina asked, running up to the elegant gentleman with the grey temples. ‘I have important news!’

Screwing his eyes up in alarm, Rybnikov glanced under the carriage, but it was too late to duck in under there now – many eyes were already gazing in his direction. The staff captain gritted his teeth and set off after Lidina.

She was holding the man with grey hair by the sleeve of his summer coat and jabbering away at incredible speed:

‘I know who you want! There was a man here, an obnoxious type with dark hair, vulgarly dressed, with a diamond ring – a huge stone, but not pure water. Terribly suspicious! In a terrible hurry to get to Moscow. Absolutely everybody stayed, and lots of them helped get the men out of the river, but he grabbed his travelling bag and left. When the first wagon arrived from the station for the wounded, he bribed the driver. He gave him money, a lot of money, and drove away. And he didn’t take a wounded man with him!’

‘Why, that’s true,’ the captain of the train put in. ‘A passenger from the second carriage, compartment number six. I saw him give the peasant a hundred-rouble note – for a wagon! And he rode off to the station.’

‘Oh, be quiet, will you, I haven’t finished yet!’ Lidina said, gesturing at him angrily. ‘I heard him ask that peasant: “Is there a shunting engine at the station?” He wanted to hire the engine, to get away as quickly as possible! I tell you, he was terribly suspicious!’

Rybnikov listened anxiously, expecting that now she would tell them about the stolen tube, but clever Glyceria Romanovna kept quiet about that highly suspicious circumstance, astounding the staff captain yet again.

‘A m-most interesting passenger,’ the gentleman with the grey temples said thoughtfully, and gestured briskly to a gendarmes officer. ‘Lieutenant! Send to the other side. My Chinese servant is across there in the inspector’s carriage, you know him. Tell him to come at the d-double. I’ll be at the station.’

And he strode off rapidly along the train.

‘But what about the express, Mr Fandorin?’ the lieutenant shouted after him.

‘Send it on its way!’ the man with the stammer shouted back without stopping.

A dull fellow with a simple sort of face and a dangling moustache who was hanging about nearby snapped his fingers – two nondescript little men came running up to him, and the three of them started whispering to each other.

Glyceria Romanovna returned to Rybnikov victorious.

‘There now, you see, it’s all settled. No need for you to go chasing through the bushes like a hare. And your drawings will turn up.’

But the staff captain wasn’t looking at her, he was looking at the back of the man whom the lieutenant had called ‘Fandorin’. Vasilii Alexandrovich’s yellowish face was like a frozen mask, and there were strange glimmers of light flickering in his eyes.

The first syllable, in which Vasilii Alexandrovich takes leave

They said goodbye as friends and, of course, not for ever – Rybnikov promised that as soon as he was settled in, he would definitely come to visit.

‘Yes, do, please,’ Lidina said severely, shaking his hand. ‘I’ll be worried about that tube of yours.’

The staff captain assured her that he would wriggle out of it somehow now and parted from the delightful lady with mixed feelings of regret and relief, of which the latter was by far the stronger.

After shaking his head to drive away inappropriate thoughts, the first thing he did was pay a visit to the telegraph office at the station. A telegram was waiting there for him to collect: ‘Management congratulates brilliant success objections withdrawn may commence project receive goods information follows’.

Apparently this acknowledgement of his achievements, plus the withdrawal of certain objections, was very important to Rybnikov. His face brightened up and he even started singing a song about a toreador.

Something in the staff captain’s manner changed. His uniform still sat on him baggily (after the adventures of the night, it had become even shabbier), but Vasilii Alexandrovich’s shoulders had straightened up, the expression in his eyes was more lively, and he wasn’t dragging his leg any more.

Running up the stairs to the second floor, where the offices were located, he seated himself on a broad windowsill offering a clear view of the entire wide, empty corridor and took out a notebook with pages full of aphorisms for every occasion in life. These included the old byword: ‘A bullet’s a fool, a bayonet’s a fine fellow’ and ‘The Russian harnesses up slowly, but he rides fast’ and ‘Anyone who’s drunk and clever has two landholdings in him’, and the last of the maxims that had caught Vasilii Alexandrovich’s interest was: ‘You may be Ivanov the Seventh, but you’re a fool. A. P. Chekhov’.

Chekhov was followed by blank pages, but the staff captain took out a flat little bottle of colourless liquid, shook a drop on to the paper and rubbed it with his finger, and strange symbols that looked like intertwined snakes appeared on the page. He did the same thing with the next few pages – and the outlandish squiggles came wriggling out of nowhere on to them as well. Rybnikov studied them closely for some time. Then he thought for a while, moving his lips and memorising something. And after another minute or two the serpentine scribbles disappeared all by themselves.

He went back to the telegraph office and sent off two urgent telegrams – to Samara and Krasnoyarsk. The content of both was identical: a request to come to Moscow ‘on agreed business’ on 25 May and a statement that a room had been booked in ‘the same hotel’. The staff captain signed himself with the name ‘Ivan Goncharov’.

And with that, urgent business was apparently concluded. Vasilii Alexandrovich went downstairs to the restaurant and dined with a good appetite, without counting the kopecks – he even allowed himself cognac. He also gave the waiter a tip that was not extravagant, but quite respectable.

And that was only the start of this army scarecrow’s miraculous transformation.

From the station, the staff captain went to a clothing shop on Kuznetsky Most. He told the salesman that he had been discharged ‘for good’ when he was wounded, and wished to acquire a decent wardrobe.

He bought two good summer suits, several pairs of trousers, shoes with spats and American ankle boots, an English cap, a straw boater and half a dozen shirts. He changed there, put the tattered uniform away in his suitcase and told them to wrap his sword in paper.

And then there was this: Rybnikov arrived at the shop in a plain, ordinary cab, but he drove off in a lacquered four-wheeler, the kind that charge you fifty kopecks just for getting in.

The dapper passenger got out at Vuchtel’s typographical emporium and told the driver not to wait for him. He had to pick up an order – a hundred cartes de visite in the name of a correspondent from the Reuters telegraph agency, and, moreover, the first name and patronymic on the cards were his, Rybnikov’s – Vasilii Alexandrovich – but the surname was quite different: Sten.

And the freshly minted Mr Sten (but no, in order to avoid confusion, let him remain Rybnikov) made his departure from there on a regular five-rouble rocket, telling the driver to deliver him to the Saint-Saëns boarding house, but first to call in somewhere for a bunch of white lilies. The driver, a real sport, nodded respectfully: ‘Understood, sir.’

The railings of the absolutely charming empire-style villa ran along the actual boulevard. If the garland of small coloured lanterns decorating the gates was anything to go by, the boarding house must have looked especially festive during the evening hours. But just at the moment the courtyard and the stand for carriages were empty and the tall windows were filled with the blank white of lowered curtains.

Rybnikov asked whether this was Countess Bovada’s house and handed the doorman his card. Less than a minute later a rather portly lady emerged from the depths of the house, which proved to be far more spacious on the inside than it appeared to be from the outside. No longer young, but not yet old, she was very well groomed and made up so skilfully that it would have taken an experienced eye to spot any traces of cosmetic subterfuge.

At the sight of Rybnikov, the countess’s slightly predatory features seemed to tighten and shrink for a brief moment, but then they immediately beamed in a gracious smile.

‘My dear friend! My highly esteemed…’ – she squinted sideways at the calling card. ‘My highly esteemed Vasilii Alexandrovich! I am absolutely delighted to see you! And you haven’t forgotten that I love white lilies! How sweet!’

‘I never forget anything, Madam Beatrice,’ said the former staff captain, pressing his lips to the hand that glittered with rings.

At these words his hostess involuntarily touched her magnificent ash-blonde hair, arranged in a tall style, and glanced in concern at the back of the gallant visitor’s lowered head. But when Rybnikov straightened up, the charming smile was beaming once again on the countess’s plump lips.

In the decor of the salon and the corridors, pastel tones were prevalent, with the gilt frames of copies of Watteau and Fragonard gleaming on the walls. This rendered even more impressive the contrast with the study to which Her Excellency led her visitor: no frivolity or affectation here – a writing desk with account books, a bureau, a rack for papers. It was obvious that the countess was a thoroughly businesslike individual, and not in the habit of wasting time idly.

‘Don’t be alarmed,’ said Vasilii Alexandrovich, taking a seat in an armchair and crossing his legs. ‘Everything is in order. They are pleased with you, you are as useful here as you were previously in Port Arthur and Vladivostok. I have not come to you on business. You know, I’m tired. I decided to take a period of leave, live quietly for a while.’ He smiled cheerfully. ‘I know from experience that the wilder things are around me, the calmer I feel.’

Countess Beauvade took offence.

‘This is not some wild place, this is the best-run establishment in the city! After only a year of work my guest house has acquired an excellent reputation! Very respectable people come to us, people who value decorum and calm.’

‘I know, I know,’ Rybnikov interrupted her, still with the same smile. ‘That is precisely why I came straight here from the train, dear Beatrice. Decorum and calm are exactly what I need. I won’t be in the way, will I?’

His hostess replied very seriously.

‘You shouldn’t talk like that. I’m entirely at your disposal.’ She hesitated for a moment and asked delicately, ‘Perhaps you would like to relax with one of the young ladies? We have some capital ones. I promise you’ll forget your tiredness.’

‘I’d better not,’ said the telegraph correspondent, declining politely. ‘I may have to stay with you for two or three weeks. If I enter into a special relationship with one of your… boarders, it could lead to jealousy and squabbling. We don’t want that.’

Beatrice nodded to acknowledge the reasonableness of his argument.

‘I’ll put you in a three-room apartment with a separate entrance. It’s a section for clients who are prepared to pay for total privacy. That will be the most convenient place for you.’

‘Excellent. Naturally, your losses will be reimbursed.’

‘Thank you. In addition to being secluded from the main part of the house, where it is sometimes quite noisy at night, the apartment has other conveniences. The rooms are connected by secret doors, which might prove apposite.’

Rybnikov chuckled.

‘I bet it also has false mirrors, conveniently positioned for taking photographs in secret. Like in Arthur, remember?’

The countess smiled and said nothing.

Rybnikov was pleased with his apartment. He spent a few hours arranging it, but not at all in the usual meaning of that word. His domestic bustle had nothing to do with the cosy comforts of home.

Vasilii Alexandrovich went to bed after midnight and took a right royal rest, the kind he had not had in a long time – he slept for an entire four hours, twice as long as usual.

The second syllable, in which Masa violates his neutrality

The passenger from compartment number six did not disappoint Erast Petrovich. On the contrary, the theory appeared ever more promising as time went on.

At the station Fandorin found the driver of the wagon that had transported the passenger who was in such a great hurry away from the banks of the Lomzha. The pretty lady’s testimony was confirmed when the peasant said that the German had indeed forked out a hundred roubles.

‘Why do you say he is German?’ the engineer asked.

The driver was surprised.

‘Well, why would any Russian shell out a hundred note when the price is fifteen kopecks at the outside?’ Then he thought and added, ‘And he had a queer way of speaking too.’

‘Exactly how was it “queer”?’ Erast Petrovich enquired eagerly, but the local couldn’t explain that.

It was much harder to establish where the dark-haired man had gone on to from there. The stationmaster claimed ignorance, the duty supervisor bleated and avoided Fandorin’s eyes, the local gendarme stood to attention and pretended to be a total imbecile. Then, recalling what his invaluable witness had said, the engineer asked point blank where the shunting engine was.

The gendarme instantly came out in large beads of sweat, the duty supervisor turned pale and the stationmaster turned red.

It turned out that the engine, in contravention of all the rules and regulations, had borne the dark-haired man off, full steam ahead, in pursuit of the passenger train that had passed through an hour ahead of the express. The berserk passenger (concerning his nationality, the opinions of the witnesses differed: the stationmaster thought he was a Frenchman, the duty supervisor thought he was a Pole, and the gendarme thought he was a ‘Yid boy’) had thrown so much money about in all directions that it was impossible to resist.

No doubts remained: this was the man Fandorin wanted.

The train that the interesting passenger had set out to chase arrived in Moscow at a quarter to ten, so there was just barely enough time left.

The engineer sent a telegram to the Moscow representative of the Department and an identical one to the head of the Volokolamsk section, Lieutenant Colonel Danilov, telling them to meet the suspect (there follow a detailed description) at the station but not to detain him under any circumstances, simply assign the smartest plainclothes agents they had to shadow him; and to do nothing more until Erast Petrovich arrived.

Because of the wreck, all traffic on the Nicholas line had come to a halt. A long queue of passenger and goods trains had formed in the St Petersburg direction, but in the Moscow direction the line was clear. Fandorin requisitioned the very latest five-axle ‘compound engine’ locomotive and, accompanied by his faithful valet, set off to the east at a speed of eighty versts an hour.

Erast Petrovich had last been in his native city five years earlier – in secret, under an assumed name. The higher authorities of Moscow were not fond of the retired state counsellor; indeed, they disliked him so greatly that even the briefest of stays in Russia’s second capital city could end very unpleasantly for him.

After Fandorin returned to government service without any of the normal formalities being observed, an extremely strange situation had arisen: although he enjoyed the confidence of the government and was invested with extremely wide-ranging powers, the engineer continued to be regarded as persona non grata in the province of Moscow and endeavoured not to extend his journeys beyond the station of Bologoe.

But shortly after the New Year an incident had occurred that put an end to these years of exile, and if Erast Petrovich had not yet got around to visiting his native parts, it was only because of his extraordinarily excessive workload.

Standing beside the driver and gazing absentmindedly into the hot blaze of the firebox, Fandorin thought about the imminent encounter with the city of his youth and the event that had made this encounter possible.

It was an event that shook Moscow, in the literal sense as well as the figurative one. The governor-general of Moscow, Fandorin’s bitter enemy, had been blown to pieces by a Social Revolutionary bomb right in the middle of the Kremlin.

For all his dislike of the deceased, a man of little worth, who had caused only harm to the city, Erast Petrovich was shocked by what had happened.

Russia was seriously ill, running a high fever, shivering hot and cold by turns, with bloody sweat oozing from her pores, and it was not just a matter of the war with Japan. The war had merely brought to light what was already clear in any case to any thinking individual: the empire had become an anachronism, a dinosaur with a body that was huge and a head that was too small, a creature that had outlived its time on earth. Or rather, the actual dimensions of the head were huge, it was swollen up with a multitude of ministries and committees, but hidden at the centre of this head was a tiny little brain, uncomplicated by any convolutions. Any decision that was even slightly complex, any movement of the unwieldy carcass, was impossible without a decision of will by a single individual whose wisdom, unfortunately, fell far short of Solomon’s. But even if he had been an intellectual titan, how was it possible, in the age of electricity, radio and X-rays, to govern a country single-handed, during the breaks between lawn tennis and hunting?

So the poor Russian dinosaur was reeling, tripping over its own mighty feet, dragging its thousand-verst tail aimlessly across the earth. An agile predator of the new generation sprang at it repeatedly, tearing out lumps of flesh, and deep in the entrails of the behemoth, a deadly tumour was burgeoning. Fandorin did not know how to heal the ailing giant, but in any case bombs were not the answer – the jarring concussion would totally confuse the immense saurian’s tiny little brain, the gigantic body would start twitching convulsively in panic, and Russia would die.

As usual, it was the wisdom of the East that helped purge his gloomy and barren thoughts. The engineer fished out of his memory an aphorism that suited the case: ‘The superior man knows that the world is imperfect, but does not lose heart’.

The factor that had disrupted the harmony of Erast Petrovich’s soul should be arriving at the Nicholas station in Moscow any minute now.

He could only hope that Lieutenant Colonel Danilov would not blunder…

Danilov did not blunder. He met his visitor from St Petersburg in person, right beside the reserve line at which the ‘compound’ arrived. The lieutenant colonel’s round face was glowing with excitement. As soon as they had shaken hands he started his report.

He didn’t have a single good agent – they had all been lured into the Okhrana’s Flying Squad, where the pay and the gratuities were better, and there was more freedom. And therefore, knowing that the engineer would not have alarmed him over something trivial, Danilov had decided to reprise the good old days, taken his deputy, Staff Captain Lisitsky, a very capable officer, to help him and followed the mark himself.

Now the engineer understood the reason for bold Nikolai Vasilievich’s agitation. The lieutenant colonel had had enough of sitting in his office, he was weary of having no real work to do, that was why he had gone dashing off so eagerly to play cops and robbers. ‘I’ll have to tell them to transfer him to work in the field,’ Fandorin noted to himself as he listened to the adventurous tale of how Danilov and his deputy had dressed up as petty merchants and how deftly they had arranged the surveillance in two cabs.

‘In Petrovsko-Razumovskoe?’ he asked in surprise. ‘In that d-dump?’

‘Ah, Erast Petrovich, it’s easy to see you haven’t been around for quite a while. Petrovsko-Razumovskoe’s a fashionable dacha district now. For instance, the dacha to which we trailed the dark-haired man is rented by a certain Alfred Radzikovski for a thousand roubles a month.’

‘A thousand?’ Fandorin echoed in astonishment. ‘What kind of Fontainebleau is that?’

‘A Fontainebleau is exactly what it is. A huge great garden with its own stables, even a garage. I left the staff captain to continue the surveillance, he has two corporals with him, in civvies, naturally. Reliable men but, of course, not professional sleuths.’

‘Let’s go,’ the engineer said briskly.

Lisitsky – a handsome fellow with a rakishly curled moustache – proved to be a very capable fellow. He hadn’t wasted his time sitting in the bushes, he had found out a great deal.

‘They live on a grand scale,’ he reported, occasionally slipping into a Polish accent. ‘Electricity, telephone, even their own telegraph apparatus. A bathroom with a shower! Two carriages with thoroughbred trotters! An automobile in the garage! A gym with exercise bicycles! Servants in lace pinafores! Parrots this size in the winter garden!’

‘How do you know about the parrots?’ Fandorin asked incredulously.

‘Why, I was there,’ Staff Captain Lisitsky replied with a cunning air. ‘I tried to get a job as a gardener. They didn’t take me – said they already had one. But they let me take a peep into the conservatory – one of them is a great lover of plants.’

‘One?’ the engineer asked quickly. ‘How many are there?’

‘I don’t know, but it’s a fair-sized group. I heard about half a dozen voices. And, by the way, between themselves they talk Polish.’

‘But what about?’ the lieutenant colonel exclaimed. ‘You know the language!’

The young officer shrugged.

‘They didn’t say anything significant with me there. They praised the dark-haired bloke for something, called him a “real daredevil”. By the way, his name’s Yuzek.’

‘They’re Polish nationalists from the Socialist Party, I’m sure of it!’ Danilov exclaimed. ‘I read about them in a secret circular. They’ve got mixed up with the Japanese, who promised to make independence for Poland a condition if they win. Their leader went to Tokyo recently. What’s his name again…’

‘Pilsudski,’ said Erast Petrovich, examining the dacha through a pair of binoculars.

‘That’s it, Pilsudski. He must have got money in Japan, and instructions.’

‘It l-looks like it…’

Something was stirring at the dacha. A blond man standing by the window in a collarless shirt with wide braces shouted something into a telephone. A door slammed loudly once, twice. Horses started neighing.

‘It looks like they’re getting ready for something,’ Lisitsky whispered in the engineer’s ear. ‘They started moving about half an hour ago now.’

‘The Japs’ spies don’t seem any too bothered about us,’ the lieutenant colonel boomed in his other ear. ‘Of course, our counter-espionage is pretty lousy, right enough, but this is just plain cheeky: setting themselves up in comfort like this, five minutes away from the Nicholas railway station. Wouldn’t I just love to nab the little darlings right now. A pity it’s out of our jurisdiction. The Okhrana boys and the provincial gendarmes will eat us alive. If they were on the railway right of way, now that would be a different matter.’

‘I tell you what we can do,’ Lisitsky suggested. ‘We’ll call our platoon and put the dacha under siege, but we won’t take it, we’ll inform the police. Then they won’t make any fuss about it.’

Fandorin didn’t join in the discussion – he was turning his head this way and that, trying to spot something. He fixed his gaze on a freshly trimmed wooden pole sticking up out of the ground beside the road.

‘A telephone pole… We could listen to what they’re saying…’

‘How?’ the lieutenant colonel asked in surprise.

‘Tap the line, from the pole.’

‘Sorry, Erast Petrovich, I don’t have a clue about technical matters. What does “tap the line” mean?

Fandorin, however, didn’t bother to explain anything – he had already made his decision.

‘One of the platforms on our Nicholas line is c-close by here…’

‘That’s right, the Petrovsko-Razumovskoe way station.’

‘There must be a telephone apparatus there. Send a gendarme. But be quick, don’t waste a second. He runs in, cuts the wire right at the wall, takes the telephone and comes straight back. No wasting time on explanations, he just shows his identification document, that’s all. At the double, now!’

A few moments later they heard the tramping of rapidly receding boots as the corporal rushed off to carry out his mission. About ten minutes after that he came dashing back with the severed telephone and wire.

‘Lucky it’s so long,’ the engineer said happily, and astounded the gendarmes by taking off his elegant coat, clutching a folding penknife in his teeth and shinning up the pole.

After fiddling with the wires for a bit, he came back down, holding the earpiece in his hands, with its wire leading up into the air.

‘Take it,’ he said to the staff captain. ‘Since you know Polish, you can do the listening.’

Lisitsky was filled with admiration.

‘What a brilliant idea, Mr Engineer! How incredible that no one ever thought of it before! Why, you could set up a special office at the telephone exchange! Listen to what suspicious individuals are saying! What tremendous benefit for the fatherland! And so very civilised, in the spirit of technological progr…’ The officer broke off in mid-word, raised a warning finger and informed them in a terrible whisper, ‘They’re calling! The central exchange!’

The lieutenant colonel and the engineer leaned forward eagerly.

‘A man… asking for number 398…’ Lisitsky whispered jerkily. ‘Another man… Speaking Polish… The first one’s arranging to meet… No, it’s a gathering… On Novo-Basmannaya Street… In the Varvarin Company building… An operation! He said “operation”! That’s it, he cut the connection.’

‘What kind of operation?’ asked Danilov, grabbing his deputy by the shoulder.

‘He didn’t say. Just “the operation”, that’s all. At midnight, and it’s almost half past nine already. No wonder they’re bustling about like that.’

‘On Basmannaya? The Varvarin Company Building?’ Erast Petrovich repeated, also whispering without even realising it. ‘What’s there, do you know?’

The officers exchanged glances and shrugged.

‘We need an address b-book.’

They sent the same corporal running back to the way station – to dart into the office, grab the All Moscow guidebook off the desk and leg it back as quickly as possible.

‘The men at the way station will think the railway gendarme service is full of head cases,’ the lieutenant colonel lamented, but mostly for form’s sake. ‘Never mind, we’ll return it all afterwards – the telephone and the book.’

The next ten minutes passed in tense anticipation, with them almost tearing the binoculars out of each other’s hands. They couldn’t see all that well because it was starting to get dark, but all the lights were on in the dacha and hasty shadows flitted across the curtains.

The three of them went dashing to meet the panting corporal. Erast Petrovich, as the senior in rank, grabbed the tattered volume. First he checked what telephone number 398 was. It proved to be the Great Moscow Hotel. He moved on to the Listing of Buildings section, opened it at Novo-Basmannaya Street, and the blood started pounding in his temples.

The building that belonged to the Varvarin Company contained the administrative offices of the District Artillery Depot.

The lieutenant colonel glanced over the engineer’s shoulder and gasped.

‘Why, of course! Why didn’t I realise straight away… Novo-Basmannaya Street. That’s where they have the warehouses for the shells and dynamite that they send to the army in the field! They always have at least a week’s supply of ammunition! But, gentlemen, that’s… Why, it’s unheard of! Monstrous! If they’re planning to blow it up – almost half of Moscow will be blown to pieces! Why, those lousy Poles! Begging your pardon, Boleslav Stefanovich, I didn’t mean…’

‘What can you expect from socialists,’ said Staff Captain Lisitsky, interceding for his nation. ‘Pawns in the hands of the Japanese, that’s all. But what about those Orientals! Genuine new Huns! Absolutely no concept of civilised warfare!’

‘Gentlemen, gentlemen,’ Danilov interrupted, with his eyes blazing. ‘There’s a silver lining to this cloud! The artillery stores adjoin the workshops of the Kazan railway, and that’s…’

‘… that’s our territory!’ Lisitsky concluded for him. ‘Bravo, Nikolai Vasilievich! We’ll get by without the provincials!’

‘And without the Okhrana!’ his boss said with a predatory smile.

The lieutenant colonel and the staff captain worked a genuine miracle of efficiency: in two hours they set up a sound, thoroughly planned ambush. They didn’t trail the saboteurs from Petrovsko-Razumovskoe – that was too risky. At night the lanes in the dacha village were empty and, as luck would have it, the moon was shining with all its might. It was more rational to concentrate all their efforts at a single spot, where the plotters had arranged their gathering.

Danilov brought out all the current members of the section for the operation, apart from those who were standing duty – sixty-seven men altogether.

Most of the gendarmes were set around the inside of the depot’s perimeter wall, with orders to ‘lie there quietly and not stick their heads up’. Lisitsky was the man in command on the spot. The lieutenant colonel himself took ten of his best men and hid in the management building.

To obtain permission for the railway gendarmes to run their own show on the territory of the artillery administration, they had to get the Director of Depositories, an old general who had fought against Shamil some fifty years previously, out of his bed. He got so agitated that it never even entered his head to nitpick about the finer points of jurisdiction – he just agreed to everything immediately and kept swallowing heart drops all the time.

Seeing that Danilov was managing perfectly well without him, the engineer distanced himself from the supervision of the ambush. He and Masa stationed themselves in an entrance opposite the gates of the depot. Fandorin chose the spot quite deliberately. If the gendarmes, who were not used to this kind of operation, let any of the saboteurs get away, then Erast Petrovich would block their path, and they would not get away from him! However, Danilov, elated by the preparations, understood the engineer’s decision in his own way, and a note of slight condescension appeared in the lieutenant colonel’s tone of voice, as if to say: Well, of course, I’m not criticising, you’re a civilian, you’re not obliged to put yourself in the way of a bullet.

Just as soon as everyone had taken up their positions and the nervous general had followed instructions by putting out the light in his office before pressing his face up against the windowpane, they heard the chiming of the clock in the tower on Kalanchovskaya Square, and a minute later three open carriages came rolling into the street from two directions – two from the Ryazan Passage and one from the Yelokhovsky Passage. The carriages met in front of the administration building and men got out of them (Fandorin counted five, and another three who stayed on the coach boxes). They started whispering to each other about something.

The engineer took out of his pocket a beautiful small, flat pistol, manufactured to order at the Browning factory in Belgium, and tugged on the breech. His valet demonstratively turned away.

Well then, come on, Erast Petrovich thought to himself, trying to hurry the Poles along, and sighed – there was not much hope that Danilov’s fine eagles would take anyone alive. But never mind, at least one of the villains had to stay with the horses. The lucky man would escape a gendarme’s bullet and fall into Fandorin’s hands.

The discussions ended. But instead of moving towards the doors of the administration building or straight to the gates, the saboteurs got back into their carriages, cracked their whips and all three carriages dashed away from the depot, picking up speed, in the direction of Dobraya Sloboda.

Had they noticed something? Had they changed their plan?

Erast Petrovich ran out of the gateway.

The carriages had already disappeared round the corner.

The engineer pulled his splendid coat off his shoulders and set off at a run in the same direction.

His servant picked up the abandoned coat and jogged after him, puffing and panting.

When Lieutenant Colonel Danilov and his gendarmes darted out on to the porch, Novo-Basmannaya Street was already empty. The sound of hoofbeats had faded into the distance, and the moon was shining placidly in the sky.

It turned out that Erast Petrovich Fandorin, a responsible member of a highly serious government agency, a man no longer in the prime of youth, could not only shin up telephone poles, but could also run at a quite fantastic speed, while making no sound and remaining virtually invisible – he ran close to the walls, where the shadows of night were thickest of all, skirting round the patches of moonlight or vaulting over them with a prodigious leap. More than anything else, the engineer resembled a phantom, careering along the dark street on some otherworldly business of his own. It was a good thing he didn’t run into anybody out walking late – the poor devil would have been in for a serious shock.

Fandorin caught up with the carriages quite soon. After that he started running more gently, in order to keep his distance.

The pursuit, however, did not continue for long.

The carriages halted behind the Von-Dervizov Grammar School for Girls. They were parked wheel to wheel, and one of the drivers gathered all the reins into a bundle, while the other seven men set off towards a two-storey building with a glass display window.

One of them fiddled with the door for a moment, then waved his hand, and the whole group disappeared inside.

Erast Petrovich stuck his head out from round the corner, trying to work out how to creep up on the driver, who was standing on his box, gazing around vigilantly in all directions. All the approaches were brightly lit by the moon.

At this point Masa came panting up. Realising from Fandorin’s expression that his master was about to take decisive action, he threw his false pigtail over his shoulder and whispered angrily in Japanese:

‘I shall only intervene if the supporters of His Majesty are going to kill you. But if you start killing the supporters of His Majesty the Mikado, then do not count on my help.’

‘Oh, drop it,’ Erast Petrovich replied in Russian. ‘Don’t get in my way.’

There was a muffled scream from the house. No further delay was possible.

The engineer ran soundlessly to the nearest lamp-post and hid behind it. He was now only ten paces away from the driver.

Taking a monogrammed cigar case out of his pocket, Fandorin tossed it away from him.

The driver started at the jingling sound and turned his back to the lamppost.

That was exactly what was required. Fandorin covered the distance between them in three bounds, jumped up on to the footboard and pressed the driver’s neck. The driver went limp, and the engineer carefully laid him out on the cobblestones, beside the inflated tyres.

From here he could make out the sign hanging above the door.

‘IOSIF BARANOV. DIAMOND, GOLD AND SILVER ITEMS,’ the engineer read, and muttered:

‘I don’t understand a thing.’

He ran up to the window and glanced in – he could make out the glow of several electric torches in the shop, but it was still dark inside, with only agile shadows darting about. Suddenly the interior was illuminated by an unbearably bright glow, a rain of fiery sparks scattered in all directions, and Fandorin could make out glass counters with men scurrying along them and the door of a safe, with a man leaning over it, holding a blowtorch – the very latest model. Erast Petrovich had seen one like it in a picture in a French magazine.

A man who looked like the nightwatchman had been tied up and was sitting on the floor with his back against the wall: his mouth was covered with sticking plaster, blood was flowing from a wound where he had been hit over the head, and his frantic eyes were glaring wildly at the satanic flame.

‘What has the Japanese secret service c-come to?’ exclaimed Fandorin, turning to his valet, who had just walked up. ‘Can Japan really be so short of money?’

‘The servants of His Majesty the Mikado do not stear,’ replied Masa, surveying the picturesque scene. ‘These are bandits. “Moscow Daredevirs” – I read about them in the newspaper; they make raids in automobiles or fast carriages – they very fond of progress.’ The Japanese servant’s face lit up in a smile. ‘That’s good! Master, I can herp you!’

Erast Petrovich himself had already realised that he was the victim of a misunderstanding – he had mistaken ordinary Warsaw bandits on tour in Moscow for saboteurs. All that time had been wasted for nothing!

But what about the dark-haired man, the passenger from compartment number six, who had fled the scene of the catastrophe in such a suspicious manner?

That’s very simple, the engineer replied to his own question. A daring robbery was committed two days ago in St Petersburg, all the newspapers wrote about it in purple prose. An unidentified individual in a mask stopped the carriage of Countess Vorontsova, robbed Her Excellency, quite literally, of her last thread of clothing and left her there in the road, naked apart from her hat. The spicy part was that the countess had quarrelled with her husband that very evening, and she was moving to her parents’ house, secretly taking all her jewels with her. No wonder Lisitsky said that the inhabitants of the dacha called the dark-haired man ‘a real daredevil’ – he had pulled off the job in St Petersburg and got back here in time for the Moscow operation.

If not for his bitter disappointment and annoyance with himself, Erast Petrovich would probably not have interfered in a mere criminal case, but his fury demanded an outlet – and he felt sorry for the nightwatchman – what if they slit his throat?

‘Take them when they start coming out,’ he whispered to his servant. ‘One for you, one for me.’

Masa nodded and licked his lips.

But fate decreed otherwise.

‘Nix it, gents!’ someone shouted desperately – he must have seen the two shadows outside the window.

In an instant the acetylene glow went out and instead of it a crimson-red gunshot came crashing out of the pitch darkness.

Fandorin and his Japanese valet jumped in opposite directions with perfect synchronisation. The shop window shattered with a deafening jangle.

They carried on firing from the shop, but it was already completely pointless.

‘Whoever jumps out is yours,’ the engineer jabbered rapidly.

He crouched down, rolled agilely over the windowsill covered with shards of glass and dissolved into the dark entrails of the shop.

From inside came the sounds of men yelling and cursing in Russian and Polish, and short, sharp blows. Every so often the room was lit up by the flashes of shots.

A man in a check cap came flying out of the door with his head pulled down into his shoulders. Masa caught the fugitive with an uppercut and laid him out with a blow to the nape of the neck. He rapidly tied him up and dragged him over to the carriages, where the driver Fandorin had half throttled was lying.

Soon another one jumped out through the window and took to his heels without looking back. The Japanese easily overtook him, grabbed him by the wrist and twisted it gently. The bandit squealed and hunched over in pain.

‘Easy, easy,’ Masa coaxed his prisoner as he quickly tied his wrists to his ankles with his belt.

He carried him over to the other two and went back to his original position.

There was no more noise from inside the shop. Masa heard Fandorin’s voice.

‘One, two, three, four… where’s number five? Ah, there he is – five. Masa, how many have you got?’

‘Three.’

‘That tallies.’

Erast Petrovich thrust his head out through the rectangle rimmed with barbs of glass.

‘Run to the depot and bring the gendarmes. And quick about it, or this lot will come round and we’ll be off again.’

The servant ran off in the direction of Novo-Basmannaya Street.

Fandorin untied the watchman and gave him a few slaps on the cheeks to bring him to his senses. But the watchman didn’t want to come to his senses – he muttered and screwed up his eyes, quivered and hiccupped. In medical terms it was called ‘shock’.

While Erast Petrovich was rubbing his temples and feeling for a nerve point just below his collarbone, the stunned bandits began to stir.

One muscly hulk, who had taken an impeccable blow to the chin from a shoe only five minutes earlier, sat up on the floor and started shaking his head. Fandorin had to leave the hiccupping watchman in order to give the reanimated bandit a second helping.

No sooner had that one dived nose first into the floor than another one came round, got up on all fours and started crawling nimbly towards the door. Erast Petrovich dashed after him and stunned him.

A third one was already stirring in the corner, and things were also getting confused out on the street, where Masa had arranged his bandit ikebana: by the light of the street lamp Fandorin could see the driver trying to unfasten the knot on one of his partner’s elbows with his teeth. It occurred to Fandorin that now he was like a clown in a circus who has thrown several balls up in the air and doesn’t know how he’s going to deal with them all. While he’s picking one up off the floor, the others come showering down.

He dashed to the corner. A dark-haired bandit (could it be Yuzek himself?) had not only come round, he had already managed to take out a knife. A quick blow, and another one to make sure. The bandit lay down.

Then a rapid dash to the carriages – before those three could crawl away.

Damn it, where had Masa got to?

But Fandorin’s valet had not managed to reach Lieutenant Colonel Danilov, who was hanging about cluelessly with his men at the Varvarin Company building.

At the very first corner an agile fellow flung himself under Masa’s feet and another two fell on him from above, twisting his arms behind his back.

Masa growled and even tried to bite, but they had his arms twisted tightly, in true professional style.

‘Evstratii Pavlovich! We’ve got one! A Chink! Tell us, Chinky, where’s the shooting?’

They pulled Masa’s pigtail and the wig flew off his head.

‘He’s in disguise!’ the same voice shouted triumphantly. ‘But he’s a slanty-eyed git all right, a Jap! A spy, Evstratii Pavlovich!’

Another man, wearing a bowler hat, walked up and praised his men.

‘Good lads.’

He leaned down to Masa.

‘Good evening to you, Your Japanese Honour. I’m Court Counsellor Mylnikov, Special Section, Department of Police. What’s your name and rank?’

The prisoner tried to give the court counsellor a vicious kick on the shin, but he missed. Then he started hissing and cursing in some foreign tongue.

‘No point in swearing,’ Evstratii Pavlovich rebuked him. ‘You’re caught now, so you can stop chirping. You must be an officer of the Japanese general staff, a nobleman? I’m a nobleman too. So let’s deal honestly with each other. What were you up to here? What’s all this shooting and running about? Give me a light here, Kasatkin.’

The yellow circle of electric light picked out a narrow-eyed face contorted in fury and a head of short-cropped, shiny black hair.

Mylnikov started babbling in confusion:

‘Why, it’s… How do you do, Mr Masa…’

‘Rong time, no see,’ hissed Fandorin’s valet.

The third syllable, in which Rybnikov gets into a jam

In recent months Vasilii Alexandrovich Rybnikov (now Sten) had lived a feverish, nervous life, dealing with hundreds of different matters every day and getting no more than two hours’ sleep a night (which, however, was quite enough for him – he always woke as fresh as a daisy). But the telegram of congratulations he had received the morning after the crash at the Tezoimenitsky Bridge had relieved the former staff captain of routine work, allowing him to concentrate completely on his two main missions or, as he thought of them, ‘projects’.

The brand-new Reuters correspondent did everything that needed to be done at the preliminary stage in the first two days.

In preparation for the main ‘project’ (this involved the onward delivery of a large consignment of certain goods), it was sufficient to send the consignee with the frivolous name of Thrush a letter by the municipal post, telling him to expect delivery in one or two weeks, everything else as formerly agreed.

The second ‘project’, which was of secondary importance, but even so very significant indeed, also required very little fuss or bother. In addition to the aforementioned telegrams to Samara and Krasnoyarsk, Vasilii Alexandrovich ordered from a glass-blowing workshop two slim spirals to match a drawing that he supplied, whispering confidentially to the receiving clerk that they were parts of an alcohol purification device for home use.

By inertia or as a pendant, so to speak, to his hectic life in Peter, Rybnikov spent another day or two running round the military institutions of Moscow, where a correspondent’s calling card ensured him access to all sorts of well-informed individuals – everyone knows how we love the foreign press. The self-styled reporter discovered a great deal of curious and even semi-confidential information, which, when properly assembled and analysed, became completely confidential. After that, however, Rybnikov thought better of it and put an end to all his interviewing. In comparison with the projects that he had been charged to carry out, this was petty business, and there was no point in taking any risks for it.

With an effort of will, Vasilii Alexandrovich suppressed the itch for action that had been developed by long habit and forced himself to spend more time at home. Patience and the need to remain in a state of quiescence are a severe trial for a man who is not used to sitting still for a single minute, but even here Rybnikov proved up to the challenge.

He transformed himself in an instant from an energetic, active individual into a sybarite who sat in his armchair at the window for hours at a stretch and strolled around his apartment in a dressing gown. The new rhythm of his life coincided perfectly with the regimen of the carefree inhabitants of ‘Saint-Saëns’, who woke up at about midday and strolled round the house in curlers and carpet slippers until seven in the evening.

Vasilii Alexandrovich established a wonderful relationship with the girls in no time at all. On the first day the young ladies were still uncertain of the new boarder, and so they made eyes at him, but very soon the rumour spread that he was Beatrice’s sweetheart, and the tentative romantic approaches ceased immediately. On the second day ‘Vasenka’ had already become a general favourite. He treated the girls to sweets and listened to their tittle-tattle with interest and, in addition to that, he tinkled on the piano, crooning sentimental romances in a pleasant, slightly mawkish tenor.

Rybnikov really was interested in spending time with the girls at the boarding house. He had discovered that their tittle-tattle, if correctly directed, could be every bit as useful as dashing from one fake interview to another. Countess Bovada’s boarding house was a substantial establishment, men of position visited it. Sometimes they discussed work matters with each other in the salon and later on, in a separate room, when they were in a tender and affectionate mood, they might let slip something absolutely intriguing. They must have assumed that the empty-headed young ladies would not understand anything anyway. And indeed, the girls were certainly no match for Sophia Kovalevskaya when it came to intellect, but they had retentive memories and they were terribly fond of gossiping.

And so, tea parties at the piano not only helped Vasilii Alexandrovich to kill the time, they also provided a mass of useful information.

Unfortunately, during the initial period of the staff captain’s voluntary life as a hermit, the young ladies’ imagination was totally engrossed by the sensation that had set the entire old capital buzzing. The police had finally caught the famous gang of ‘daredevils’. Everyone in Moscow was writing and talking more about this than about Tsushima. They knew that a special squad of the very finest sleuths had been sent from St Petersburg to capture the audacious bandits – and Muscovites found that flattering.

A redheaded Manon Lescaut who went by the nickname of ‘Wafer’ was known to have been frequented by one of the ‘daredevils’, a handsome Pole and genuine fancy morsel, so now Wafer was wearing black and acting mysteriously. The other girls envied her.

During these days Vasilii Alexandrovich several times caught himself thinking about his companion in the compartment in the train – possibly because Lidina was the total opposite of the sentimental but coarse-spirited inhabitants of the ‘Saint-Saëns’. Rybnikov recalled Glyceria as she made a dash for the emergency brake handle, or with her pale face and bitten lip, binding up a torn artery in a wounded man’s leg with a scrap of her dress.

Surprised at himself, the hermit drove these pictures away; they had nothing to do with his life and his present interests.

For his constitutional he went for a walk along the boulevards, as far as the Cathedral of the Saviour and back again. Vasilii Alexandrovich did not know Moscow very well, and therefore he was terribly surprised when he looked at a sign with the name of a street that led up and away at an angle from the Orthodox cathedral.

The street was called ‘Ostozhenka’.

‘The Bomze building on Ostozhenka Street,’ Vasilii Alexandrovich heard a soft voice say, clipping its consonants in the Petersburg style as clearly as if she were there.

He strolled for a while along the street with its asphalt roadway and lines of beautiful buildings, but soon came to his senses and turned back.

Nonetheless, after that time he got into the habit of making a loop to take in Ostozhenka Street when he reached the end of his horseshoe route on the boulevards. Rybnikov also walked past the Bomze apartment building – a smart four-storey structure. Vasilii Alexandrovich’s indolence had put him in a strange mood, and as he glanced at the narrow Viennese windows, he even allowed himself to daydream a little about what could never possibly happen in a million years.

And then his dreams caught him out.

On the fifth day of his walks, as the false reporter, tapping his cane, was walking down along Ostozhenka Street to Lesnoi Passage, someone called him from a carriage.

‘Vasilii Alexandrovich! Is that you?’

The resounding voice sounded happy.

Rybnikov froze on the spot, mentally cursing his own thoughtlessness. He turned round slowly, putting on a surprised expression.

‘Where did you get to?’ Lidina chirped excitedly. ‘Shame on you, you promised! Why are you in civilian clothes? An excellent jacket, you look much better in it than in that terrible uniform! What about the drawings?’

She asked the last question in a whisper, after she had already jumped down on to the pavement.

Vasilii Alexandrovich warily shook the slim hand in the silk glove. He was nonplussed, which only happened to him very rarely – you might even say that it never happened at all

‘A bad business,’ he mumbled eventually. ‘I am obliged to lie low. That’s why I’m in civvies. And that’s why I didn’t come, too… You know, it’s best to keep well away from me just now.’ To make this more convincing, Rybnikov glanced round over his shoulder and lowered his voice. ‘You go on your way, and I’ll walk on. We shouldn’t attract attention.’

Glyceria Romanovna’s face looked frightened, but she didn’t move from the spot.

She glanced round too, and then spoke right into his ear.

‘A court martial, right? What is it – hard labour? Or… or worse?’

‘Worse,’ he said, moving away slightly. ‘There’s nothing to be done. It’s my own fault. I’m to blame for everything. Really, Glyceria Romanovna, my dear lady, I’ll be going.’

‘Not for anything in the world! How can I abandon you in misfortune? You probably need money, don’t you? I have some. Accommodation? I’ll think of something. Good Lord, what terrible bad luck!’ Tears glinted in the lady’s eyes.

‘No, thank you. I’m living with… with my aunt, my late mother’s sister. I don’t want for anything. See what a dandy I am… really, people are looking at us.’

Lidina took hold of his elbow. ‘You’re right. Get into the carriage, we’ll put the top up.’

And she didn’t wait for him to answer, she put him in – he already knew he could never match the stubbornness of this woman. Remarkably enough, although Vasilii Alexandrovich’s iron will did not exactly weaken at that moment, it was, so to speak, distracted, and his foot stepped up on to the running board of its own accord.

They took a drive round Moscow, talking about all sorts of things. The raised hood of the carriage lent even the most innocent subject an intimacy that Rybnikov found alarming. He decided several times to get out at the next corner, but somehow he didn’t get around to it. Lidina was concerned about one thing above all – how to help this poor fugitive who had the merciless sword of martial law dangling over his head.

When Vasilii Alexandrovich finally took his leave, he had to promise that he would come to Prechistensky Boulevard the next day. Lidina would be riding in her carriage, catch sight of him as though by chance, call him and he would get in again. Nothing suspicious, a perfectly normal street scene.

As he gave his promise, Rybnikov was certain that he would not keep it, but the next day the will of this man of iron was affected once again by the inexplicable phenomenon already mentioned above. At precisely five o’clock the correspondent’s feet brought him to the appointed place and the ride was repeated.

The same thing happened the next day, and the day after that.

There was not even a hint of flirting in their relationship – Rybnikov kept a very strict watch on that. No hints, glances or – God forbid! – sighs. For the most part their conversations were serious, and the tone was not at all the one in which men usually talk to beautiful ladies.

‘I like being with you,’ Lidina confessed one day. ‘You’re not like all the others. You don’t show off, you don’t pay compliments. I can tell that for you I’m not a creature of the female sex, but a person, an individual. I never thought that I could be friends with a man and it could be so enjoyable!’

Something must have changed in the expression on his face, because Glyceria Romanovna blushed and exclaimed guiltily:

‘Ah, what an egotist I am! I’m only thinking about myself! But you’re on the edge of a precipice!’

‘Yes, I am on the edge of a precipice…’ Vasilii Alexandrovich murmured desolately, and the way he said it was so convincing that tears sprang to Lidina’s eyes.

Glyceria Romanovna thought about poor Vasya (that was what she always called him to herself) all the time now – before their meetings and afterwards too. How could she help him? How could she save him? He was disoriented, defenceless, not suited to military service. How stupid to put an officer’s uniform on someone like that! It was enough just to remember what he looked like in that get-up! The war would end soon, and no one would ever remember about those papers, but a good man’s life would be ruined for ever.

Every time she appeared at their meeting elated, with a new plan to save him. She suggested hiring a skilled draughtsman who would make another drawing exactly the same. She thought of appealing for help to a high-ranking general of gendarmes, a good friend of hers, who wouldn’t dare refuse.

Every time, however, Rybnikov turned the conversation on to abstract subjects. He was reluctant and niggardly in speaking about himself. Lidina wanted very much to know where and how he had spent his childhood, but all that Vasilii Alexandrovich told her was that as a little boy he loved to catch dragonflies and let them go later from the top of a high cliff, to watch them darting about in zigzags above the void. He also loved imitating the voices of the birds – and he actually mimicked a cuckoo, a magpie and a blue tit so well that Glyceria Romanovna clapped her hands in delight.

On the fifth day of their drives Rybnikov returned to his apartment in a particularly thoughtful mood. First, because there were fewer than twenty-four hours remaining until both ‘projects’ moved into a crucial stage. And secondly, because he knew he had seen Lidina for the last time that day.

Glyceria Romanovna had been especially endearing today. She had come up with two plans to save Rybnikov: one we have already mentioned, about the general of gendarmes, and a second, which she particularly liked, to arrange for him to escape abroad. She described the advantages of this idea enthusiastically, coming back to it again and again, although he said straight away that it wouldn’t work – they would arrest him at the border post.

The fugitive staff captain strode along the boulevard with his jaw thrust out determinedly, so deep in thought that he didn’t glance at his mirror-bright watch at all.

Once he had reached the boarding house, though, and was inside his separate apartment, his habitual caution prompted him to peep out from behind the curtains.

He gritted his teeth: standing at the opposite pavement was a horse cab with its hood up, despite the bright weather. The driver was staring hard at the windows of the ‘Saint-Saëns’; the passenger could not be seen.

Scraps of thoughts started flitting rapidly through Rybnikov’s head.

How?

Why?

Countess Bovada?

Impossible.

But no one else knows.

The old contacts had been broken off, new ones had not yet been struck up.

There could only be one explanation: that damned Reuters Agency. One of the generals he had interviewed had decided to correct something or add something, phoned the Reuters Moscow office and discovered there was no Sten assigned there. He had taken fright, informed the Okhrana… But even if that was it – how had they found him?

And here again there was only one probable answer: by chance.

Some particularly lucky agent had recognised him in the street from a verbal description (ah, he should at least have changed his wardrobe!), and now was trailing him.

But if it was a chance occurrence, things could be set right, Vasilii told himself, and immediately felt calmer.

He estimated the distance to the carriage: sixteen – no, seventeen – steps.

His thoughts grew even shorter, even more rapid.

Start with the passenger, he’s a professional… A heart attack… I live here, help me carry him in, old mate… Beatrice would be annoyed. Never mind, she was in this up to her neck. What about the cab? In the evening, that could be done in the evening.

He finished thinking it all out on the move. He walked unhurriedly out on to the steps, yawned and stretched. His hand casually flourished a long cigarette holder – empty, with no papirosa in it. Rybnikov also extracted a small, flat pillbox from his pocket and took out of it something that he put in his mouth.

As he walked past the cabby, he noticed the man squinting sideways at him.

Vasilii Alexandrovich paid no attention to the driver. He gripped the cigarette holder in his teeth, quickly jerked back the flap of the cab – and froze.

Lidina was sitting in the carriage.

Suddenly deathly pale, Rybnikov jerked the cigarette holder out of his mouth, coughed and spat into his handkerchief.

Not looking even slightly embarrassed, she said with a cunning smile:

‘So this is where you live, Mr Conspirator! Your auntie has a lovely house.’

‘You followed me?’ said Vasilii Alexandrovich, forcing out the words with a struggle, thinking: One more second, a split second, and…

‘Cunning, isn’t it?’ Glyceria Romanovna laughed. ‘I switched cabs, ordered the driver to drive at walking pace, at a distance. I said you were my husband and I suspected you of being unfaithful.’

‘But… what for?’

She turned serious.

‘You gave me such a look when I said “until tomorrow”… I suddenly felt that you wouldn’t come tomorrow. And you wouldn’t come again at all. And I don’t even know where to look for you… I can see that our meetings are a burden on your conscience. You think you’re putting me in danger. Do you know what I’ve thought of?’ Lidina exclaimed brightly. ‘Introduce me to your aunt. She’s your relative, I’m your friend. You have no idea of the power of two women who join forces!’

‘No!’ said Rybnikov, staggering back. ‘Absolutely not!’

‘Then I shall go in myself,’ Lidina declared, and her face took on the same expression it had worn in the corridor of the train.

‘All right, if you want to so badly… But I have to warn my aunt. She has a bad heart, and she’s not very fond of surprises in general,’ said Vasilii Alexandrovich, spouting nonsense in his panic. ‘My aunt runs a boarding house for girls from noble families. It has certain rules. Let’s do it tomorrow… Yes, yes, tomorrow. In the early eve-’

‘Ten minutes,’ she snapped. ‘I’ll wait ten minutes, then I’ll go in myself.’

And she emphatically raised the small diamond watch hanging round her neck.

Countess Bovada was an exceptionally resourceful individual, Rybnikov already knew that. She understood his meaning from a mere hint, didn’t waste a single second on questions and went into action immediately.

Probably no other woman would have been capable of transforming a bordello into a boarding house for daughters of the nobility in ten minutes.

After exactly ten minutes (Rybnikov was watching from behind the curtains) Glyceria Romanovna paid her cabby and got out of the carriage with a determined air.

The door was opened for her by the respectable-looking porter, who bowed and led her along the corridor towards the sound of a pianoforte.

Lidina was pleasantly surprised by the rich decor of the boarding house. She thought it rather strange that there were nails protruding from the walls in places – as if pictures had been hanging there, but they had been taken down. They must have been taken away to be dusted, she thought absentmindedly, feeling rather flustered before her important conversation.

In the cosy salon two pretty girls in grammar school uniform were playing the ‘Dog’s Waltz’ for four hands.

They got up, performed a clumsy curtsy and chorused: ‘Bonjour, madame.’

Glyceria Romanovna smiled affectionately at their embarrassment. She had once been a shy young thing just like them, she had grown up in the artificial world of the Smolny Institute: childish young dreams, reading Flaubert in secret, virginal confessions in the quiet of the dormitory…

Vasya was standing there, by the piano – with a bashful look on his plain but sweet face.

‘My auntie’s waiting for you. I’ll show you the way,’ he muttered, letting Lidina go on ahead.

Fira Ryabchik (specialisation ‘grammar school girl’) held Rybnikov back for a moment by the hem of his jacket.

‘Vas, is that your ever-loving? An interesting little lady. Don’t get in a funk. It’ll go all right. We’ve locked the others in their rooms.’

Thank God that she and Lionelka didn’t have any make-up on yet because it was still daytime.

And there was Beatrice, already floating out of the doors to meet them like the Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna.

‘Countess Bovada,’ she said, introducing herself with a polite smile. ‘Vasya has told me so much about you!’

‘Countess?’ Lidina gasped.

‘Yes, my late husband was a Spanish grandee,’ Beatrice explained modestly. ‘Please do come into the study.’

Before she followed her hostess, Glyceria Romanovna whispered:

‘So you have Spanish grandees among your kin? Anyone else would certainly have boasted about that. You are definitely unusual.’

In the study things were easier. The countess maintained a confident bearing and held the initiative firmly in her own grip.

She warmly approved of the idea of an escape abroad. She said she would obtain documents for her nephew, entirely reliable ones. Then the two ladies’ conversation took a geographical turn as they considered where to evacuate their adored ‘Vasya’. In the process it emerged that the Spanish grandee’s widow had travelled almost all over the world. She spoke with special affection of Port Said and San Francisco.

Rybnikov took no part in the conversation, merely cracked his knuckles nervously.

Never mind, he thought to himself. It’s the twenty-fifth tomorrow, and after that it won’t matter.

The fourth syllable, in which Fandorin feels afraid

Sombre fury would be the best name to give the mood in which Erast Petrovich found himself. In his long life he had known both the sweetness of victory and the bitterness of defeat, but he could not remember ever feeling so stupid before. This must be the way a whaler felt when, instead of impaling a sperm whale, his harpoon merely scattered a shoal of little fish.

But how could he possibly have doubted that the thrice-cursed dark-haired man was the Japanese agent responsible for the sabotage? The absurd concatenation of circumstances was to blame, but that was poor comfort to the engineer.

Precious time had been wasted, the trail was irredeemably lost.

The mayor of Moscow and the detective police wished to express their heartfelt gratitude to Fandorin for catching the brazen band of crooks, but Erast Petrovich withdrew into the shadows, and all the glory went to Mylnikov and his agents, who had merely delivered the bound bandits to the nearest police station.

There was a clearing of the air between the engineer and the court counsellor, and Mylnikov did not even attempt to be cunning. Gazing at Fandorin with eyes bleached colourless by his disappointment in humankind, Mylnikov admitted without the slightest trace of embarrassment that he had set his agents on the case and come to Moscow himself because he knew from the old days that Fandorin had a uniquely keen nose, and it was a surer way of picking up the trail than wearing out his own shoe leather. He might not have picked up any saboteurs, but he hadn’t come off too badly – the hold-up artists from Warsaw would earn him the gratitude of his superiors and a gratuity.

‘And instead of name-calling, you’d be better off deciding what’s the best way for you and me to rub along,’ Mylnikov concluded amicably. ‘What can you do without me? That railway outfit of yours doesn’t even have the right to conduct an investigation. But I do, and then again, I’ve brought along the finest sleuths in Peter, grand lads, every last one of them. Come on, Fandorin, let’s come to friendly terms, comradely like. The head will be yours, the arms and legs will be ours.’

The proposal made by this rather less than honourable gentleman was certainly not devoid of merit.

‘On a friendly basis, so be it. Only bear in mind, Mylnikov,’ Fandorin warned him, ‘if you take it into your head to be cunning and act behind my b-back, I shan’t beat about the bush. I shan’t write a complaint to your superiors, I’ll simply press the secret bakayaro point on your stomach, and that will be the end of you. And no one will ever guess.’

There was no such thing as a bakayaro point, but Mylnikov, knowing how skilled Fandorin was in all sorts of Japanese tricks, turned pale.

‘Don’t frighten me, my health’s already ruined as it is. Why should I get cunning with you? We’re on the same side. I’m of the opinion that without your Japanese devilry, we’ll never catch the fiend who blew up that bridge. We have to fight fire with fire, sorcery with sorcery.’

Fandorin raised one eyebrow slightly, wondering whether the other man could be playing the fool, but the court counsellor had a very serious air, and little sparks had lit up in his eyes.

‘Do you really think old Mylnikov has no brains and no heart? That I don’t see anything or ponder what’s going on?’ Mylnikov glanced round and lowered his voice. ‘Who is our sovereign, eh? The Lord’s anointed, right? So the Lord should protect him from the godless Japanese, right? But what’s happening? The Christ-loving army’s taking a right battering, left, right and centre. And who’s battering it? A tiny little nation with no strength at all. That’s because Satan stands behind the Japanese, he’s the one who’s giving the yellow bastards their strength. And the Supreme Arbiter of fate has forsaken our sovereign, He doesn’t want to help. Just recently I read a secret report in the Police Department, from the Arkhangelsk province. There’s a holy man prophesying up there, an Old Believer: he says the Romanovs were given three hundred years to rule and no longer, that’s the limit they were set. And those three hundred years are running out. And the whole of Russia is bearing the punishment for that. Doesn’t that sound like the truth?’

The engineer had had enough of listening to this drivel. He frowned and said:

‘Stop all this street sleuth’s drivel. If I want to discuss the fate of the tsarist dynasty, I won’t choose to do it with a member of the Special Section. Are you going to work or just arrange stupid provocations?’

‘Work, work,’ said Mylnikov, dissolving in spasms of wooden laughter, but the sparks were still dancing in his eyes.

Meanwhile the experts had concluded their examination of the site of the disaster and presented a report that completely confirmed Fandorin’s version of events.

The explosion of moderate force that had caused the collapse was produced by a charge of melinite weighing twelve to fourteen pounds – that is, its power was approximately equal to a six-inch artillery shell. Any other bridge on the Nicholas line would probably have survived a shock of that power, but not the decrepit Tezoimenitsky, especially while a heavy train was crossing it. The saboteurs had chosen the spot and the moment with professional competence.

An answer had also been found to the riddle of how the perpetrators had managed to place a mine on a tightly guarded target and explode it right under the wheels of the military train. At the point of the fracture, the experts had discovered scraps of leather from some unknown source and microscopic particles of dense laboratory glass. After racking their brains for a while, they offered their conclusion: a long, cylindrical leather case and a narrow spiral glass tube.

That was enough for Erast Petrovich to reconstruct a picture of what had happened.

The melinite charge had been placed in a leather package, something like a case for a clarinet or other narrow-bodied wind instrument. There had not been any hard casing at all – it would only have made the mine heavier and weakened the blast. The explosive used was chemical, with a retardant – the engineer had read about those. A glass tube holding fulminate of mercury is pierced by a needle, but the fulminate does not flow out immediately, it takes thirty seconds or a minute, depending on the length and shape of the tube.

No doubt remained: the bomb had been dropped from the express travelling directly in front of the special.

The situation by which the two trains were in dangerously close proximity to each other had been arranged by artifice, using the false telegram that was passed on by the telegraph clerk at Kolpino (who, naturally, had disappeared without a trace).

Fandorin racked his brains for a while over the question of exactly how the mine had been dropped. Through the window of a compartment? Hardly. The risk was too great that when the case hit the covering of the bridge, it would go flying off into the river. Then he guessed – through the flush aperture in the toilet. That was what the narrow case was for. Ah, if only that witness hadn’t interfered, with her comments about the suspicious dark-haired man! He should have acted as he had planned to do from the start: make a list of the passengers, and question them too. Even if he’d had to let them all go, he could have interrogated them again now – they would definitely have remembered a travelling musician, and it was quite probable that he wasn’t alone, but in a group…

Once the mystery of the disaster had been solved, Erast Petrovich had no time for wounded pride, for more compelling concerns came to light.

The engineer’s work in the Railway Gendarmerie (or, as Mylnikov called it, the ‘Randarmerie’) had already been going on for an entire year already, directed to a single goal: to protect the most vulnerable section in the anatomy of the ailing Russian dinosaur – its one major artery. The enterprising Japanese predator that had been attacking the wounded giant from all sides must realise sooner or later that he did not need to knock his opponent off its feet, it was enough simply to gnaw through the single major vessel of its blood supply – the Trans-Siberian main line. Left without ammunition, provisions and reinforcements, the Manchurian army would be doomed.

The Tezoimenitsky Bridge was no more than a test run. Traffic over it would be completely restored in two weeks, and meanwhile trains were making a detour via the Pskov-Starorusskoe branch, losing only a few hours. But if a similar blow were to be struck at any point beyond Samara, from where the main line extended as a single thread for eight thousand versts, it would bring traffic to a halt for at least a month. Linevich’s army would be left in a catastrophic position. And apart from that, what was to stop the Japanese from arranging one act of sabotage after another?

Of course, the Trans-Siberian was a new line, built using modern technology. And the last year had not been wasted – a decent system of security was up and running, and the Siberian bridges could in no way be compared with the Tezoimenitsky – you wouldn’t blow them up with ten pounds of melinite dumped through the outlet of a water closet. But the Japanese were shrewd, they would come up with something else. The worst thing had already happened – they had already launched their war on the railways. Just wait and see what would come next.

This thought (which was, unfortunately, quite incontrovertible) made Erast Petrovich feel afraid. But the engineer belonged to that breed of people in whom the response to fear is not paralysis or panic-stricken commotion, but the mobilisation of all their mental resources.

‘Melinite, melinite,’ Fandorin repeated thoughtfully as he strode around the office that he had taken on temporary loan from Danilov. He snapped the fingers of the hand he was holding behind his back, puffed on his cigar and stood at the window for a long time, screwing his eyes up against the bright May sky.

There could be no doubt that the Japanese would also use melinite for subsequent acts of sabotage. They had tested the explosive on the Tezoimenitsky Bridge and the results had been satisfactory.

Melinite was not produced in Russia, the explosive was deployed only in the arsenals of France and Japan, and the Japanese called it simose or, as distorted by the Russian newspapers, ‘shimoza’. It was simose that was given most of the credit for the victory of the Japanese fleet at Tsushima: shells packed with melinite had demonstrated far greater penetrative and explosive power than the Russian powder shells.

Melinite, or picric acid, was ideally suited for sabotage work: powerful, easy to combine with detonators of various kinds and also compact. But even so, to sabotage a large modern bridge would require a charge weighing several poods. Where would the saboteurs get such a large amount of explosive and how would they convey it?

This was the key point – Erast Petrovich realised that straight away – but before he advanced along his primary line of search, he put certain precautions in place on his secondary one.

In case the melinite theory was mistaken and the enemy was intending to use ordinary dynamite or gun cotton, Fandorin gave instructions for a secret circular to be sent to all the military depots and arsenals, warning them of the danger. Of course, this piece of paper would not make the guards any more vigilant, but thieving quartermasters would be more afraid of selling explosive on the side, and that was precisely the way that such lethal materials usually found their way into the hands of Russia’s terrorist bombers.

Having taken this safety measure, Erast Petrovich concentrated on the routes for transporting melinite.

They would deliver it from abroad, and most likely from France (they couldn’t bring it all the way from Japan!).

You can’t ship a load of at least several poods in a suitcase, thought Fandorin, twirling in his fingers a test tube of light yellow powder that he had acquired from an artillery laboratory. He raised it to his face and absentmindedly drew the sharp smell in through his nose – the same ‘fatal aroma of shimoza’ that the Russian war correspondents were so fond of mentioning.

‘Well now, p-perhaps,’ Erast Petrovich murmured.

He quickly got up, ordered his carriage to be brought round, and a quarter of an hour later he was already on Maly Gnezdnikovsky Lane, at the Police Telegraph Office. There he dictated a telegram that set the operator, who had seen all sorts of things in his time, blinking rapidly.

The fifth syllable, consisting almost completely of face-to-face conversations

On the morning of 25 May, Countess Bovada’s boarder received news of the arrival of the Delivery and the Shipment on the same day, as had been planned. The organisation was working with the precision of a chronometer.

The Delivery consisted of four one-and-a-half-pood sacks of maize flour, sent from Lyons for the Moscow bakery ‘Werner and Pfleiderer’. The consignment was awaiting the consignee at the Moscow Freight Station depot on the Brest line. It was all very simple: turn up, show the receipt and sign. The sacks were extremely durable – jute, waterproof. If an overly meticulous gendarme or railway thief poked a hole in one to try it, the yellow, coarse-grained powder that poured out would pass very well for maize flour in wheat-and-rye-eating Russia.

Things were a little more complicated with the Shipment. The sealed wagon was due to arrive by way of a roundabout route from Naples to Batumi, and from there by railway via Rostov to the Rogozhsk shunting yard. According to the documents, it belonged to the Office of Security Escorts and was accompanied by a guard consisting of a corporal and two privates. The guard was genuine, the documents were fake. That is, the crates really did contain, as the transport documents stated, 8,500 Italian ‘Vetterli’ rifles, 1,500 Belgian ‘Francotte’ revolvers, a million cartridges and blasting cartridges. However, this entire arsenal was not intended for the needs of the Escorts Office, but for a man who went by the alias of Thrush. According to the plan developed by Vasilii Alexandrovich’s father, large-scale disturbances were supposed to break out in Moscow, putting a rapid end to the Russian tsar’s enthusiasm for the Manchurian steppes and Korean concessions.

The wise author of the plan had taken everything into account: the fact that the Guards were in St Petersburg, while the old capital had only a scrappy ragbag garrison made up of second-class reservists, and that Moscow was the transport heart of the country, and that the city had 200,000 hungry workers embittered by privation. Ten thousand reckless madcaps could surely be found among them, if only there were weapons. A single spark, and the workers’ quarters would be bristling with barricades.

Rybnikov began as he had been taught in his childhood – that is, with the hardest thing.

The staff captain arrived at the shunting yard. He introduced himself and was given an escort of a minor bureaucrat from the goods arrival section, and they set off to line number three to meet the Rostov special. The clerk felt timid in the company of the gloomy officer, who tapped impatiently on the planking with the scabbard of his sabre. Fortunately, they did not have to wait long – the train arrived exactly on the dot.

The commander of the guard, a corporal who was well past the prime of youth, moved his lips as he read the document presented to him by the staff captain, while the draymen whom Rybnikov had hired drove up to the platform one by one.

But then there was a hitch – there was absolutely no sign of the half-platoon that was supposed to guard the convoy.

Cursing the Russian muddle, the staff captain ran to the telephone. He came back white-faced with fury and let loose a string of such intricately obscene curses that the clerk shrank in embarrassment and the sentries wagged their heads respectfully. There obviously wasn’t going to be any half-platoon for the staff captain.

Having raged for the appropriate length of time, Rybnikov took hold of the corporal by the sleeve.

‘Look, mate, what’s your name… Yekimov, as you can see, this is one almighty cock-up. Help me out here, will you? I know you’ve done your duty and you’re not obliged, but I can’t send it off without a guard, and I can’t leave it here either. I’ll see you all right: three roubles for you and one each for your fine lads here.’

The corporal went to have a word with the privates, who were as long in the tooth and battered by life as he was.

The deal they struck was this: in addition to the money, His Honour would give them a paper saying the squad could spend two days on the town in Moscow. Rybnikov promised.

They loaded up and drove off. The staff captain at the front in a cab, then the drays with the crates, the sentries on foot, one on the left, one on the right, the corporal bringing up the rear of the procession. Pleased with the remuneration and leave pass they had been promised, the privates strode along cheerfully, holding their Mosin rifles at the ready. Rybnikov had warned them to keep their eyes skinned – the slanty-eyed enemy never slept.

Rybnikov had booked a warehouse on the River Moscow in advance. The draymen carried the Shipment in, took their money and left.

The staff captain carefully put the receipt from a member of the workmen’s co-operative away in his pocket as he walked over to the sentries from Rostov.

‘Thanks for the help, lads. I’ll settle up now, a bargain’s a bargain.’

The riverside wharf in front of the warehouse was deserted, and the river water, iridescent from patches of oil, splashed under the planking.

‘But Your Honour, where are the guards?’ Yekimov asked, gazing around. ‘It’s kind of odd. An arms depot with no guards.’

Instead of answering, Rybnikov jabbed him in the throat with a finger of steel, then turned towards the privates. One of them was just about to lend the other some tobacco – and he froze like that, with his mouth hanging open, so the crude shag missed the paper and went showering past. Vasilii Alexandrovich hit the first one with his right hand and the second with his left. It all happened very quickly: the corporal’s body was still falling, and his two subordinates were already dead.

Rybnikov dropped the bodies under the wharf, after first tying a heavy rock to each one of them.

He took off his cap and wiped the sweat off his forehead.

Right, then, it was only half past ten and the most troublesome part of the job was already over.

It only took ten minutes to collect the Delivery. Vasilii Alexandrovich arrived at the Moscow Freight Station in tarred boots, a long coat and a cloth cap – a regular shop counterman. He carried the sacks out himself, wouldn’t even let the cabby help, in case he might ask for an extra ten kopecks. Then he transported the ‘maize flour’ from the Brest line to the Ryazan-Uralsk line, because the Delivery’s onward route led towards the east. On the way across to the other side of the city, he repacked the goods and at the station he checked it in as two lots, with different receipts.

And that put an end to his scurrying about from one railway station to another. Rybnikov wasn’t in the least bit tired; on the contrary, he was filled with a fierce, vigorous energy – he had grown weary of idleness and, of course, he was inspired by the importance of his actions.

Expertly dispatched, received on time, competently delivered, he thought. That was the way invincibility was shaped. When everyone acted in his own place as if the outcome of the entire war depended on him alone.

He was slightly concerned about the ‘dummies’ summoned from Samara and Krasnoyarsk. What if they were late? But it was no accident that Rybnikov had chosen those precise two out of the notebook filled with snaky squiggles. The Krasnoyarsk man (Vasilii Alexandrovich thought of him as ‘Tunnel’) was greedy, and his greed made him dependable, and the Samara man (his code name was ‘Bridge’) might not be outstandingly dependable, but he had compelling reasons not to be late – he was a man with not much time left.

And his calculations had proved correct; neither of the ‘dummies’ had let him down. Rybnikov was already aware of this when he left the station for the agreed hotels – the ‘Kazan’ and the ‘Railway’. The hotels were located close to each other, but not actually adjacent. The last thing he needed was for the two dummies to get to know each other through some grotesque coincidence.

At the Railway Hotel, Vasilii Alexandrovich left a note: ‘At three. Goncharov’. The note at the Kazan Hotel read: ‘At four: Goncharov’.

Now it was time to deal with the man with the alias of Thrush, the consignee of the Shipment.

In this matter Rybnikov employed particular caution, for he knew that the Social Revolutionaries were kept under close surveillance by the Okhrana, and the revolutionary riff-raff had plenty of traitors among their own ranks. He could only hope that Thrush realised this as well as he, Rybnikov, did.

Vasilii Alexandrovich made a call from a public telephone (a most convenient innovation that had only recently appeared in the old capital). He asked the lady to give him number 34-81.

He spoke the prearranged words:

‘A hundred thousand pardons. May I ask for the honourable Ivan Konstantinovich to come to the phone?’

After a second’s pause, a woman’s voice replied:

‘He’s not here at present, but he will be soon.’

That meant Thrush was in Moscow and prepared to meet.

‘Please be so good as to let Ivan Konstantinovich know that Professor Stepanov wishes to invite him to his seventy-third birthday.’

‘Professor Stepanov?’ the woman asked, bemused. ‘To his seventy-third?’

‘Yes, that is correct.’

The go-between didn’t need to understand the meaning, her job was to pass on precisely what he said. In the figure 73, the first numeral indicated the time, and the second was a position in a list of previously agreed meeting places. Thrush would understand: at seven o’clock, at place number 3.

If anybody had eavesdropped on Rybnikov’s conversation with the man from Krasnoyarsk, he probably would not have understood a thing.

‘More account books?’ asked Tunnel, a sturdy man with a moustache and eyes that were constantly half closed. ‘We should raise the price. Everything’s so expensive nowadays.’

‘No, not books,’ said Vasilii Alexandrovich, standing in the middle of the cheap hotel room and listening carefully to the footsteps in the corridor. ‘A special delivery. Payment too. Fifteen hundred.’

‘How much?’ the other man gasped.

Rybnikov pulled out a bundle of banknotes.

‘There. You’ll receive the same again in Khabarovsk. If you do everything right.’

‘Three thousand?’

The Krasnoyarsk man’s eyebrows twitched and twitched again, but they didn’t rise up on to his forehead. It’s not easy to gape in astonishment with eyes used to watching the world through a peephole.

The man whom Vasilii Alexandrovich had christened Tunnel had no idea about this nickname, or about the real activities of the people who paid for his services so generously. He was convinced that he was assisting illegal gold miners. The ‘Statute on Private Gold-Mining’ required prospecting cooperatives to hand over their entire output to the state in exchange for so-called ‘assignations’ at a price lower than the market level and with all sorts of other deductions into the bargain. And everybody knew that when the law was unjust or irrational, people found ways to get round it.

Tunnel occupied a post that was extremely useful to the Organisation – he escorted the postal wagons along the Trans-Siberian main line. When he carried notebooks filled with columns of figures from the European part of the empire to the Far East and back, he assumed that this was financial correspondence between the miners and the dealers in black-market gold.

But Rybnikov had fished the postman out of his own cunning little notebook for a different purpose.

‘Yes, three thousand,’ he said firmly. ‘And no one pays money like that for nothing, you know that.’

‘What do I have to carry?’ asked Tunnel, licking his lips, which had turned dry with excitement.

Rybnikov snapped:

‘Explosive. Three poods.’

The postman started blinking, thinking it over. Then he nodded.

‘For the diggings? To smash the rocks?’

‘Yes. Wrap the crates in sackcloth, like packages. Do you know tunnel No. Twelve on the Baikal Bypass Line?’

‘The “Half-Tunnel”? Everyone knows that.’

‘Throw the crates off exactly halfway through, at marker 197. Our man will pick them up afterwards.’

‘But… er, won’t it go off bang?’

Rybnikov laughed.

‘It’s obvious you know nothing about using explosives. Haven’t you ever heard of detonators? Go off bang – don’t talk nonsense.’

Satisfied with this reply, Tunnel spat on his fingers, preparing to count the money, and Vasilii Alexandrovich smiled to himself: It won’t go off bang, it will make a boom that sets the Winter Palace shaking. Then just let them try to rake out the smashed rock and drag out the flattened wagons and locomotive.

The Baikal Bypass Tunnel, which had been built at huge expense and opened only recently, ahead of schedule, was the final link in the Trans-Siberian. The military trains used to line up in immense queues at the Lake Baikal ferry crossing, but now the line pulsated three times faster than before. The Half-Tunnel was the longest one on the line; if it was put out of action, the Manchurian army would be back on short rations again.

And that was only half of Rybnikov’s dual ‘project’.

The second half was to be implemented by the man staying at the Kazan Hotel, with whom Vasilii Alexandrovich spoke quite differently – not curtly and abruptly, but soulfully, with compassionate restraint.

He was a man still quite young, with a sallow complexion and protruding Adam’s apple. He made a strange impression: the subtle facial features, nervous gesticulations and spectacles fitted uncomfortably with the worn pea jacket, calico shirt and rough boots.

The man from Samara coughed up blood and was in love, but his feelings were not requited. This made him hate the whole world, especially the world close to him: the people around him, his native city, his own country. There was no need for secrecy with him – Bridge knew who he was working for and he carried out his assignments with lascivious vengefulness.

Six months earlier, on the instructions of the Organisation, he had left university and taken a job as a driver’s mate on the railway. The heat of the firebox was consuming the final remnants of his lungs, but Bridge was not clinging to life, he wanted to die as soon as possible.

‘You told our man that you wish to go out with a bang. I’ll give you the opportunity to do that,’ Rybnikov declared in ringing tones. ‘This bang will be heard right across Russia, right round the world, in fact.’

‘Tell me, tell me,’ the consumptive said eagerly.

‘The Alexander Bridge in Syzran…’ said Rybnikov, and paused for effect. ‘The longest in Europe, seven hundred sazhens. If it is sent crashing into the Volga, the main line will come to a halt. Do you understand what that means?’

The man he called Bridge smiled slowly.

‘Yes, yes. Collapse, defeat, disgrace. Surrender. You Japanese know where to strike! You deserve the victory!’ The former student’s eyes blazed brightly and he spoke faster and faster with every word. ‘It can be done! I can do it! Do you have powerful explosive? I’ll hide it in the tender, under the coal. I take one slab into the cabin. I throw it in the firebox, it explodes, fireworks!’

He burst into laughter.

‘On the seventh span,’ Rybnikov put in gently. ‘That’s very important. Otherwise it might not work. On the seventh, don’t get that wrong.’

‘I won’t! I go on duty the day after tomorrow. A goods train to Chelyabinsk. The driver will get what’s coming to him, the bastard, he’s always sneering at my cough, calls me “Tapeworm”. I feel sorry for the stoker, though, he’s only a young boy. But I’ll get him off. At the last station I’ll catch his hand with the shovel. Tell him never mind, I’ll shovel the coal myself. But what about our deal?’ Bridge exclaimed with a sudden shudder. ‘You haven’t forgotten about our deal?’

‘How could we?’ asked Rybnikov, setting his hand to his heart. ‘We remember. Ten thousand. We’ll hand it over exactly as you instructed.’

‘Not hand it over, drop it off,’ the sick man cried out nervously. ‘And the note: “In memory of what might have been”. I’ll write it myself, you’ll get it wrong.’

And he wrote it there and then, splattering ink about.

‘She’ll understand… And if she doesn’t, so much the better,’ he muttered with a sniff. ‘Here, take it.’

‘But bear in mind that the individual who is so precious to you will only receive the money and the note on one condition – if the bridge collapses. Don’t get the count wrong, the seventh span.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said the man from Samara, shaking a tear from his eyelashes. ‘If there’s one thing consumption has taught me, it’s precision – I have to take my pills at the right time. But don’t you trick me. Give me your word of honour as a samurai.’

Vasilii Alexandrovich drew himself up to attention, wrinkled up his forehead and narrowed his eyes. Then he performed a fanciful gesture that he had just invented and solemnly declared:

‘My word of honour as a samurai.’

The most important face-to-face conversation was set for seven o’clock in the evening, in a cab drivers’ inn close to the Kaluga Gates (place number three).

The place had been well chosen: dark, dirty, noisy, but not uproarious. In this place they didn’t drink beverages that heated the brain, but tea, in large amounts, entire samovars of it. The clientele was well mannered and incurious – they’d seen quite enough of the hustle and bustle of the streets, and of their own passengers, during the day. Now all they wanted was to sit in peace and quiet and make staid conversation.

Vasilii Alexandrovich arrived ten minutes late and immediately made for the table in the corner, which was occupied by a sturdy man with a beard, an expressionless face and a piercing gaze that was never still for a moment.

Rybnikov had been watching the entrance to the inn for the last hour from the next gateway and had spotted Thrush as he walked up. When he was certain Thrush wasn’t being trailed, he went in.

‘My greetings to Kuzmich,’ he shouted from a distance, holding up one hand with the fingers spread wide. Thrush didn’t know what he looked like, and they had to act out a meeting between old friends.

The revolutionary was not in the least surprised, and he replied in the same tone:

‘Aha, Mustapha. Sit down, you old Tartar dog, we’ll have a spot of tea.’

He squeezed Rybnikov’s hand tightly and slapped him on the shoulder for good measure.

They sat down.

At the next table a large party was sedately consuming tea with hard bread rings. They glanced incuriously at the two friends and turned away again.

‘Are they following you?’ Vasilii Alexandrovich said quietly, asking the most important question first. ‘Are you sure there’s no police agent in your group?’

‘Certainly they’re following me, quite definitely. And we have a stooge. We’re leaving him alone for the time being. Better to know who – they’ll only plant another one, and then try to figure out who it is.’

‘They are following you?’ Rybnikov tautened like a spring and cast a rapid glance in the direction of the counter – there was an exit into a walk-through courtyard behind it.

‘They’re following me, so what?’ the Socialist Revolutionary said with a shrug. ‘Let them follow, when it doesn’t matter. And when it does, I can give them the slip, I’m well used to it. So don’t you get nervous, my bold samurai. I’m clean today.’

It was the second time in one day that Vasilii Alexandrovich had been a called a samurai, but this time the mockery was obvious.

‘You are Japanese, aren’t you?’ the consignee of the Shipment asked, crunching on a lump of sugar and slurping tea noisily from his saucer. ‘I read that some of the samurais are almost indistinguishable from Europeans.’

‘What the hell difference does it make whether I’m a samurai or not?’ Rybnikov asked, out of habit slipping into the tone of the person he was talking to.

‘True enough. Let’s get down to business. Where are the goods?’

‘I took them to a warehouse on the river, as you asked. Why do you need them on the river?’

‘I just do. Where exactly?’

‘I’ll show you later.’

‘Who else knows, apart from you? Unloading, transporting, guarding – that’s quite an operation. Are they reliable people? Know how to keep a still tongue in their heads?’

‘They’ll be as silent as the grave,’ Rybnikov said seriously. ‘I’ll wager my head on that. When will you be ready to collect?’

Thrush scratched his beard.

‘We’re thinking of floating some of the goods, a small part, down the Oka, to Sormovo. A barge will come up from there tomorrow at nightfall. We’ll collect it then.’

‘Sormovo?’ said Vasilii Alexandrovich, narrowing his eyes. ‘That’s good. A good choice. What’s your plan of action?’

‘We’ll start with a strike on the railways. Then a general strike. And when the authorities start getting the jitters, let the Cossacks loose or do a bit of shooting – the combat squads will be out in a flash. Only this time we’ll manage without cobblestones, the weapon of the proletariat.’

‘When are you going to start?’ Rybnikov asked casually. ‘I need it to be within a month.’

The revolutionary’s stony face twisted into an ironic grin.

‘Running out of steam, are you, sons of the Mikado? On your last legs?’

A snigger ran round the room and Vasilii Alexandrovich started in surprise – surely they couldn’t have heard?

He jerked round, and then immediately relaxed.

Two grey-bearded cab drivers had just staggered into the inn, both well oiled. One had missed his footing and fallen, and the other was trying to help him up, muttering:

‘Never mind, Mityukha, a horse has got four legs, and it still stumbles…’

Someone shouted from one of the tables:

‘A horse like that’s ready for the knacker’s yard!’

People cackled with laughter.

Mityukha was about to curse his mockers roundly, but the waiters swooped on him and in half a jiffy they had shoved the two drunken cabbies out: There, don’t you go bringing shame on our establishment.

‘Ah, old Mother Russia,’ Thrush chuckled with another crooked grin. ‘Never mind, soon we’ll give her such a jolt, she’ll jump right out of her pants.’

‘And set off at a run with a bare backside, into the bright future?’

The revolutionary looked intently into the cold eyes of the other man.

I shouldn’t have mocked him, Rybnikov realised immediately. That was going too far.

He held that glance for a few seconds, then pretended that he couldn’t hold out and lowered his eyes.

‘You and we have only one thing in common,’ the SR said contemptuously. ‘A lack of bourgeois sentiment. Only we revolutionaries no longer have any, while you young predators don’t yet have any – you haven’t reached that age yet. You use us, we use you, but you, Mr Samurai, are not my equal. You’re no more than a cog in a machine, and I’m the architect of tomorrow, savvy?’

He is like a cat, Vasilii Alexandrovich decided. Lets you feed him, but he won’t lick your hand – the most he’ll do is purr, and even that’s not very likely.

He had to reply in the same style, but without aggravating the confrontation.

‘All right, Mr Architect, to hell with the fancy words. Let’s discuss the details.’

Thrush even left like a cat, without saying goodbye.

When he had clarified everything he needed to know, he simply got up and darted out through the door behind the counter, leaving Vasilii Alexandrovich to exit via the street.

In front of the inn cabbies were dozing on their coach boxes, waiting for passengers. The first two were the drunks who had been ejected from the inn. The first one was completely out of it, snoring away with his nose down against his knees. The second was more or less holding up, though – he even shook his reins when he caught sight of Rybnikov.

But Vasilii Alexandrovich didn’t take a cab at the inn – that would contravene the rules of conspiracy. He walked quite a long way before he stopped one that happened to be driving past.

At the corner of Krivokolenny Street, at a poorly lit and deserted spot, Rybnikov put a rouble note on the seat, jumped down on to the road – gently, without even making the carriage sway – and ducked into a gateway.

As they say, God takes care of those who take care of themselves.

The sixth syllable, in which a tail and ears play an important part

Special No. 369-B was expected at precisely midnight, and there was no reason to doubt that the train would arrive on the dot – Fandorin was being kept informed of its progress by telegraph from every station. The train was travelling ‘on a green light’, with priority over all others. Freight trains, passenger trains and even expresses had to give way to it. When the locomotive with only a single compartment carriage went hurtling past an ordinary train that had inexplicably come to a halt at the station in Bologoe or Tver, the worldly-wise passengers said to each other: ‘Higher-ups in a hurry. Must be some kind of hitch in Moscow’.

The windows of the mysterious train were not only closed, but completely curtained over. During the entire journey from the present capital to the old one, 369-B stopped only once, to take on coal, and then for no more than fifteen minutes.

They were waiting to meet the mysterious train outside Moscow, at a small way station surrounded by a double cordon of railway gendarmes. A fine, repulsive drizzle was falling, and the lamps were swaying in a gusting wind, sending sinister shadows scuttling furtively across the platform.

Erast Petrovich arrived ten minutes before the appointed time, listened to Lieutenant Colonel Danilov’s report on the precautions that had been taken and nodded.

Court Counsellor Mylnikov, who had been informed of the imminent event only an hour earlier (the engineer had called for him without any forewarning), couldn’t keep still: he ran round the platform several times, always coming back to Fandorin and asking: ‘Who is it we’re waiting for?’

‘You’ll see,’ Fandorin replied briefly, glancing every now and then at his gold Breguet.

At one minute to twelve they heard a long hoot, then the bright lights of the locomotive emerged from the darkness.

The rain started coming down harder, and the valet opened an umbrella over the engineer’s head, deliberately standing so that the drops ran off on to Mylnikov’s hat. However, Mylnikov was so worked up that he didn’t notice – he merely shuddered when a cold rivulet ran in under his collar.

‘The head of your division, is it?’ he asked when he made out the compartment carriage. ‘The chief of the Corps?’ And finally, lowering his voice to a whisper: ‘Not the minister himself, surely?’

‘Exclude all unauthorised individuals!’ Fandorin shouted when he spotted a linesman at the end of the platform.

Gendarmes went dashing off with a loud tramping of boots, to carry out the order.

The 369-B came to a halt. Evstratii Pavlovich Mylnikov thrust out his chest and whipped off his bowler, but when the clanging of iron and screeching of brakes stopped, his ears were assaulted by a strange sound very similar to the diabolical ululations that tormented his ailing nerves at night. Mylnikov gave his head a shake to drive away the dark spell, but the howling only grew louder, and then he quite clearly heard barking.

An officer in a leather pea jacket skipped smartly down the steps, saluted Fandorin and handed him a package bearing a mysterious inscription in black: RSEUDPWUHPHHDAPO.

‘What’s that?’ Mylnikov asked in a faltering voice, suspecting that he was dreaming all this – the engineer’s appearance in the middle of the night, the drive through the rain, the dogs’ barking and the unpronounceable word on the envelope,

Fandorin decoded the abbreviation:

‘The Russian Society for the Encouragement of the Use of Dogs in Police Work under the Honorary Presidency of His Highness Duke Alexander Petrovich of Oldenburg. Very well, L-Lieutenant, you can bring them out. The horseboxes are waiting.’

Police officers started emerging from the carriage one after another, each leading a dog on a leash. There were German shepherds and giant schnauzers and spaniels, and even mongrels.

‘What is all this?’ Mylnikov repeated perplexedly. ‘What’s it for?’

‘This is Operation Fifth Sense.’

‘Fifth? Which one’s the fifth?’

‘Smell.’

Operation Fifth Sense had been planned and prepared with the utmost dispatch in a little over two days.

In the urgent telegram of 18 May that had so greatly astonished the experienced police telegraph clerk, Fandorin had written to his chief: ‘REQUEST URGENTLY GATHER DUKE’S DOGS DETAILS FOLLOW’.

Erast Petrovich was an enthusiastic supporter and even, to some extent, inspirer of the initiative undertaken by the Duke of Oldenburg, whose idea was to establish in Russia a genuine, scientifically organised police dog service on the European model. This was a new area, little studied as yet, but it had immediately been given massive backing.

Coaching a good dog to track down a specific smell required only a few hours. The amount of simose needed was allocated from the Artillery Department and work began: fifty-four police instructors thrust the noses of their shaggy helpers into the yellow powder, the air was filled with reproachful and approving exclamations, peals of barking and the cheerful sound of sugar crunching between dog’s teeth.

Melinite had an acrid smell and the tracker dogs recognised it easily, even among sacks of common chemical products. Following a brief training course, His Highness’s protégés set off on their work assignments: twenty-eight dogs went to the western border – two to each of the fourteen crossing points – and the rest went on the special train to Moscow, to receive further instructions from the engineer Fandorin.

Working by day and night in two shifts, the handlers led the dogs through the carriages and depots of all the railway lines of the old capital. Mylnikov did not believe in Fandorin’s plan, but he didn’t try to interfere, just looked on. In any case, the court counsellor had no ideas of his own on how to catch the Japanese agents.

On the fifth day, Erast Petrovich finally received the long-awaited telephone call in the office where he was studying the most vulnerable points of the Trans-Siberian Railway, all marked on a map with little red flags.

‘We’ve got it!’ an excited voice shouted into the receiver over the sound of deafening barking. ‘Mr Engineer, I think we’ve got it! This is trainer Churikov calling from the Moscow Freight Station on the Brest line! We haven’t touched a thing, just as you ordered!’

Erast Petrovich telephoned Mylnikov immediately.

They dashed to the station from different directions, arriving almost simultaneously.

Trainer Churikov introduced his bosses to the heroine of the hour, a Belgian sheepdog of the Grunendal breed:

‘Mignonette.’

Mignonette sniffed at Fandorin’s shoes and wagged her tail. She bared her fangs at Mylnikov.

‘Don’t take offence, she’s in pup,’ the handler said hastily. ‘But it makes the nose keener.’

‘Well, what is it you’ve found?’ the court counsellor demanded impatiently.

Churikov tugged on the dog’s lead and she plodded reluctantly towards the depot, glancing back at the engineer. At the entrance she braced her paws against the ground and even lay down, making it very clear that she was in no hurry to go anywhere. She squinted up at the men to see whether they would scold her.

‘She’s acting up,’ the trainer said, sighing. He squatted down, scratched the bitch’s belly and whispered something in her ear.

Mignonette graciously got up and set off towards the stacks of crates and sacks.

‘There now, there, watch,’ said Churikov, throwing up one hand.

‘Watch what?’

‘The ears and the tail!’

Mignonette’s ears and tail were lowered. She walked slowly along one row, and then another. Halfway along the third, her ears suddenly jerked erect and her tail shot up and then sank back down and stayed there, pressed between her legs. The tracker dog sat down and barked at four neat, medium-sized jute sacks.

The consignment had arrived from France and was intended for the Werner and Pfleiderer Bakery. It had been delivered on the morning train from Novgorod. The contents were a yellow powder that left a distinctive oily sheen on the fingers – no doubt about it, it was melinite.

‘It crossed the border before the dogs got there,’ Fandorin said after checking the accompanying documentation. ‘Right then, Mylnikov, we have work to do.’

They decided to do the work themselves and not trust it to the detectives. Erast Petrovich dressed up as a railwayman and Mylnikov as a loader. They installed themselves in the next goods shed, which gave them an excellent view of the depot and the approaches to it.

The consignee arrived for his delivery at 11.55.

The rather short man, who looked like a shop hand, presented a piece of paper, signed the office book and carried the sacks to a closed wagon himself.

The observers were glued to their binoculars.

‘Japanese, I think,’ Erast Petrovich murmured.

‘Oh, come on!’ Mylnikov exclaimed doubtfully, fiddling with the little focusing wheel. ‘As Russian as they come, with just a touch of the Tatar, the way it ought to be.’

‘Japanese,’ the engineer repeated confidently. ‘Perhaps with an admixture of European blood, but the form of the eyes and the nose… I’ve seen him before somewhere. But where, and when? Perhaps he simply looks like one of my Japanese acquaintances… Japanese faces are not noted for their variety – anthropology distinguishes only twelve basic types. That’s because of their insular isolation. There was no influx of b-blood from other races.’

‘He’s leaving!’ Evstratii Pavlovich exclaimed, interrupting the lecture on anthropology. ‘Quick!’

But there was no need to hurry. A whole fleet of cabs and carriages of various kinds had been assembled to carry out surveillance around the city, and an agent was sitting in every one, so the mark couldn’t get away.

The engineer and the court counsellor lowered themselves on to the springy seat of the carriage bringing up the rear of this cavalcade, which was giving a convincing imitation of a busy stream of traffic, and set off slowly through the streets.

The buildings and lamp-posts were decorated with flags and garlands. Moscow was celebrating the birthday of the Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna far more sumptuously than in previous years. There was a special reason for that: the sovereign’s wife had recently presented Russia with an heir to the throne, after four little girls – or ‘blank shots’, as Mylnikov expressed it disrespectfully.

‘But they say the little lad’s sickly, there’s a hex on him,’ Evstratii Pavlovich said, and sighed. ‘The Lord’s punishing the Romanovs.’

This time the engineer didn’t bother to reply and merely frowned at this provocative gibberish.

Meanwhile the mark demonstrated that he was a conjuror. At the freight station he had loaded four sacks into his closed wagon, but at the left luggage office of the Ryazan-Uralsk line he took out three wooden crates and eight small bundles wrapped in shiny black paper. He let the wagon go. Of course, the agents stopped the wagon round the very first bend, but all they found in it were four empty jute sacks. For some reason the melinite had been extracted from them and repacked.

The clerk at the left luggage office stated that the crates and the bundles had been left as two separate items, with different receipts.

But Fandorin received all this information only later. Since the putative Japanese proceeded on his way from the station as a pedestrian, the engineer and the court counsellor took the surveillance into their own hands once again.

They followed the mark at the greatest possible distance and dispatched the sleuths into the reserve. The most important thing now was not to frighten off the live bait that might attract some other fish.

The shop hand called into two hotels close to the station – the ‘Kazan’ and the ‘Railway’. They prudently decided not to go barging in, and they wouldn’t have had time in any case – the mark spent no more than a minute inside each building.

Erast Fandorin was scowling darkly – his worst fears had been confirmed: the Ryazan-Uralsk line was part of the great transcontinental line on which the engineer’s red pencil had marked at least a hundred vulnerable sectors. For which one of them were the items handed in at the left luggage office intended?

From the station square the mark set off into the centre and circled around in the city for quite a long time. On several occasions he suddenly stopped his cabby right there in the middle of a street and let him go, but he failed to shake off the superbly organised surveillance.

Shortly after seven o’clock in the evening, he entered a cab drivers’ inn close to Kaluga Square. Since he had spent the previous hour hiding in the gateway of the next building, he had to have an appointment here, and this was an opportunity that must not be missed.

As soon as the mark entered the inn (that happened at nine minutes past seven), Mylnikov summoned the Flying Brigade’s special carriage with his whistle. This carriage was a highly convenient innovation in modern detective work: it contained a selection of costumes and items of disguise to suit every possible occasion.

The engineer and the court counsellor dressed up as cabbies and staggered unsteadily into the tavern.

After casting an eye round the dark room, Evstratii Pavlovich pretended that he couldn’t stay on his feet and collapsed on the floor. When Fandorin leaned down over him he whispered:

‘That’s Lagin with him. Codename Thrush. An SR. Extremely dangerous. How about that…’

The important point had been established, so rather than loiter in the tavern in open view, they allowed themselves to be thrown out in the street.

After stationing four agents at the back entrance, they hurriedly discussed their alarming discovery.

‘Our agents abroad inform us that Colonel Akashi, the senior Japanese foreign agent, is meeting with political émigrés and buying large deliveries of weapons,’ Mylnikov whispered, leaning down from the coach box of his government carriage. ‘But that’s a long way off, in places liked Paris and London, and this is old mother Moscow. We couldn’t have slipped up there, surely? Give the local loudmouths Japanese rifles, and we’ll have real trouble…’

Erast Petrovich listened with his teeth gritted. Provoking a revolution in the enemy’s rear – a démarche unheard of in the practice of war in Europe – was a hundred times more dangerous than any bombs on railway lines. It threatened not just the outcome of the military campaign, but the fate of the Russian state as a whole. The warriors of the Land of Yamato knew what real war was: there were no means that were impermissible, there was only defeat or victory. How the Japanese had changed in a quarter of a century!

‘The **** Asian ***s!’ Mylnikov cursed obscenely, as if he had overheard Fandorin’s thoughts. ‘There’s nothing holy! How do you fight bastards like that?’

But was this not what Andrei Bolkonsky was talking about before the Battle of Borodino, the engineer objected – not out loud to Mylnikov, naturally, but to himself. Chivalry and war practised by the rules are stupid nonsense, according to the most attractive character in the whole of Russian literature. Kill prisoners, do not negotiate. No indulging noble sentiments. War is not amusement.

But even so, the side that indulges noble sentiments is the one that will win, Fandorin suddenly thought, but before he could follow this paradoxical idea through to its conclusion, the agent stationed by the door gave the signal, and he had to clamber up on to his coach box at the double.

The shop hand came out alone. He looked at the line of cabs (every last one belonging to the Okhrana), but didn’t take one. He walked away some distance and stopped a passing cabby – another false one, naturally.

But in the end all of Mylnikov’s cunning was wasted. In some incomprehensible manner, the mark disappeared from the carriage. The detective impersonating the driver did not notice when and how this happened: first there was a passenger, and then there wasn’t – just a crumpled rouble note lying on the seat in mockery.

This was annoying, but not fatal.

First, there was still the SR Lagin, alias Thrush – they had a man in his inner circle. And secondly, near the left luggage office, an ambush was set up, for which Fandorin had especially high hopes, since the arrangements were made through the Railway Gendarmerie, without Mylnikov involved.

The clerk was given a thoroughly detailed briefing by the engineer. As soon as the ‘shop hand’ appeared, or anyone else came to present the familiar receipts, he was to press a button that had been installed specially. A lamp would go on in the next room, where a squad was waiting, and the officer in charge would immediately telephone Fandorin, and then, depending on his orders, either make an arrest or continue secret surveillance (through an eyehole) until plainclothes agents arrived. And. of course, the clerk would make sure the luggage was not given out too quickly.

‘Now we’ve got the slanty-eyed macaque like this,’ Mylnikov gloated, grabbing a tight fistful of air in his strong fingers.

The seventh syllable, in which it emerges that not all Russians love Pushkin

A few days before the long-awaited 25 May, the Moscow life of Vasilii Alexandrovich Rybnikov was punctuated by an episode that may appear insignificant in comparison with subsequent events, but not to mention it at all would amount to dishonesty.

It happened during the period when the fugitive staff captain was languishing in the tormenting embrace of idleness, which, as already mentioned above, even led him to commit certain acts rather uncharacteristic of him.

In one of his idle moments, he visited the Address Bureau located on Gnezdnikovsky Lane and started making enquiries about a certain person in whom he was interested.

Rybnikov did not even think of buying a two-kopeck request form; instead he demonstrated his knowledge of psychology by engaging the clerk in soulful conversation, explaining that he was trying to find an old army comrade of his deceased father. He had lost sight of this man a long time ago and understood perfectly well what a difficult task it was, so he was willing to pay for the all the work involved at a special rate.

‘Without a receipt?’ the clerk enquired, raising himself slightly above the counter to make sure that there were no other customers in the premises.

‘Why, naturally. What use would it be to me?’ The expression in the staff captain’s yellowish-brown eyes was imploring and his fingers casually twirled a rather thick-looking wallet. ‘Only it’s not likely that this man is living in Moscow at present.’

‘That’s all right, sir. Since it will be a special rate, it’s quite all right. If your acquaintance is still in government service, I have lists of all the departments. If he is retired, then, of course, it will be difficult…’

‘He’s still in service, he is!’ Rybnikov assured the clerk. ‘And with a high rank. Perhaps even the equivalent of a general. He and my late father were in the Diplomatic Corps, but I heard that before that he was with the Police Department or, perhaps, the Gendarmes Corps. Perhaps he could have gone back to his old job?’ He delicately placed two paper roubles on the counter.

The clerk took the money and declared cheerfully:

‘It often happens that diplomats are transferred to the gendarmes and then back again. That’s government service for you. In what name does he rejoice? What is his age?’

‘Erast Fandorin. Fan-dor-in. He must be about forty-eight or forty-nine now. I was informed that he resides in St Petersburg, but that is not definite.’

The address wizard rummaged through his plump, tattered books for a long time. Every now and then he declared:

‘No one by that name listed with the ministry of foreign affairs… Not with Gendarmes Corps HQ… Not with the Railway Gendarmerie… At the ministry of internal affairs they have a Ferendiukin, Fedul Kharitonovich, director of the Detective Police Material Evidence Depot. Not him?’

Rybnikov shook his head.

‘Maybe you could look in Moscow? I recall that Mr Fandorin was a native Muscovite and resided here for a long period.’

He proffered another rouble, but the clerk shook his head with dignity.

‘A Moscow enquiry is two kopecks. My direct responsibility. I won’t take anything. Anyway, it only takes a moment.’ And indeed, he very soon declared: ‘No one by that name, either living or working here. Of course, I could look through previous years, but that would be by way of an exception…’

‘Fifty kopecks a year,’ replied the perspicacious client: it was a pleasure doing business with a man like him. At this point the enquiries started dragging on a bit. The clerk took out the annual directories volume by volume and moved from the twentieth century back into the nineteenth, burrowing deeper and deeper into the strata of the past.

Vasilii Alexandrovich had already reconciled himself to failure when the clerk suddenly exclaimed:

‘I have it! Here, in the book for 1891! That will be… er… seven roubles!’ And he read it out: ‘“E. P. Fandorin, state counsellor, deputy for special assignments to governor-general of Moscow. Malaya Nikitskaya Street, annexe to the house of Baron Evert-Kolokoltsev”. Well, if your acquaintance held a position like that fourteen years ago, he definitely must be an Excellency by now. Strange that I couldn’t find him in the ministry listings.’

‘It is strange,’ admitted Rybnikov, absentmindedly counting through the reddish notes protruding from his wallet.

‘You say the Department of Police or the gendarmes?’ the clerk asked, narrowing his eyes cunningly. ‘You know the way things are there: a man may seem to exist, and even hold an immensely high rank, but for the general public, it’s as if he didn’t exist at all.’

The customer batted his eyelids for a moment and then livened up a little.

‘Why, yes. My father said that Erast Petrovich worked on secret matters at the embassy!’

‘There, you see. And you know what… My godfather works just close by here, on Maly Gnezdnikovsky Lane. At the police telegraph office. Twenty years he’s been there, he knows everyone who’s anyone…’

There followed an eloquent pause.

‘A rouble for you, and one for your godfather.’

‘Where do you think you’re going?’ the clerk shouted at a peasant who had stuck his nose in at the door. ‘Can’t you see it’s half past one? It’s my lunch hour. Come back in an hour! And you, sir’ – this was to Vasilii Alexandrovich, in a whisper – ‘wait here. I’ll be back in a flash.’

Of course, Rybnikov did not wait in the office. He waited outside, taking up a position in a gateway. You could never tell. This petty bureaucrat might not be as simple as he seemed.

However, the precaution proved unnecessary.

The bureaucrat came back a quarter of an hour later, alone and looking very pleased.

‘A quite eminent individual! As they say, widely known in very narrow circles,’ he announced when Rybnikov popped up beside him. ‘Pantelei Ilich told me so much about your Fandorin! It turns out that he was a very important man. In the old days, under Dolgorukov.’

As he listened to the story of the former greatness of the governor’s special deputy, Vasilii Alexandrovich gasped and threw his hands up in the air, but the greatest surprise was waiting for him at the very end.

‘And you’re lucky,’ said the bureaucrat, flinging his arms wide dramatically, like a circus conjuror. ‘This Mr Fandorin of yours is in Moscow, he arrived from Peter. Pantelei Ilich sees him every day.’

‘In Moscow?’ Rybnikov exclaimed. ‘Really! Well, that is a stroke of luck. Do you know if he’ll be here long?’

‘No way of telling. It’s something highly important, government business. But Pantelei didn’t say what it was, and I didn’t ask. That’s not for the likes of us to know.’

‘Certainly, that’s right…’ There was a peculiar expression in Rybnikov’s slightly narrowed eyes as their glance slid over the other man’s face. ‘Did you tell your godfather that one of Erast Petrovich’s acquaintances was looking for him?’

‘No, I asked as if I was the one who was interested.’

He’s not lying, Vasilii Alexandrovich decided. He decided to keep both roubles for himself. His eyes widened again to assume their normal expression. And the clerk never knew that his little life had just been hanging on the very slimmest of threads.

‘It’s very good that you didn’t. I’ll arrange a surprise for him – in memory of my late dad. Won’t Erast Petrovich be delighted!’ Rybnikov said with a radiant smile.

But when he walked out, his face started twitching nervously.

That was the same day that Glyceria Romanovna came to their meeting with a new idea for saving Rybnikov: to appeal for help to her good friend, the head of the Moscow Gendarmes Office, General Charme. Lidina assured him that Konstantin Fyodorovich Charme was a dear old man whose name suited him perfectly, and he would not refuse her anything.

‘But what good will that do?’ asked Rybnikov, trying to fight her off. ‘My dear, I am a state criminal: I lost secret documents and I went on the run. How can your general of gendarmes help with that?’

But Glyceria Romanovna exclaimed heatedly:

‘You’re wrong! Konstantin Fyodorovich himself explained to me how much depends on the official who is assigned to handle a case. He can make things go badly or make them go well. Ah, if we could find out who is dealing with you!’

And then, giving way to the impulse of the moment, Vasilii Alexandrovich suddenly blurted out:

‘I do know. You’ve seen him. Do you remember, beside the bridge – that tall gentleman with the grey temples?’

‘The elegant one, in the light-coloured English coat? I remember, a very impressive man.’

‘His name is Fandorin, Erast Petrovich Fandorin. He has come to Moscow from St Petersburg especially to catch me. For God’s sake, don’t ask anyone to intercede – you’ll only make them suspect that you are harbouring a deserter. But if you could find out cautiously, in passing, what kind of man he is, what kind of life he leads, what his character is like, that might help me. Every little detail is important here. But you must act delicately!’

‘You men have nothing to teach us about delicacy,’ Lidina remarked condescendingly, already figuring out how she would go about this business. ‘We’ll set this misfortune right, just let me sleep on it.’

Rybnikov didn’t thank her, but the way he looked at her gave her a warm feeling in her chest. His yellow eyes no longer seemed like a cat’s, as they had during the first minutes of their acquaintance – she thought of them now as ‘bright coffee-coloured’ and found them very expressive.

‘You’re like the Swan Queen,’ he said with a smile. ‘“Dearest Prince, do not pine so, for this wonder I do know. In friendship’s name, do not be sad, I shall help you and be glad.”’

Glyceria Romanovna frowned.

‘Pushkin! I can’t stand him!’

‘What? But surely all Russians adore Pushkin, don’t they?’

Rybnikov suddenly realised that in his astonishment he had expressed himself rather awkwardly, but Lidina attached no importance to his strange words.

‘How could he write: ‘“Your end, your children’s death, with cruel joy I do behold”? What kind of poet is it that rejoices at the death of children? So much for “a star of captivating happiness”!’

And the conversation turned from a serious subject to Russian poetry, which Rybnikov knew quite well. He said that his father, a passionate admirer of Pushkin’s lyre, had cultivated the taste in him as a child.

And then 25 May had come, and Vasilii Alexandrovich had entirely forgotten the inconsequential conversation – there was more important business afoot.

The ‘dummies’ had been instructed to collect the packages from the left luggage office at dawn, just before they set off. The postman would cover the three crates with sackcloth, daub them with sealing wax and conceal them among his parcels – the best possible hiding place. Bridge’s job was even easier, because Vasilii Alexandrovich had done half the work for him: while riding in the closed wagon, he had tipped the melinite into eight cardboard boxes and wrapped each one in anthracite-black paper.

They were both going on the same eastbound express, only Bridge was travelling on his railway worker’s pass, in third class, and Tunnel was in the mail coach. Then their paths would part. The former would change to the locomotive of a freight train at Syzran, and in the middle of the Volga he would throw the boxes into the firebox. The latter would ride on as far as Lake Baikal.

For the sake of good order, Rybnikov decided to make certain that the agents collected the baggage by observing in person – naturally, without letting them see him.

As night was drawing to an end, he left the boarding house dressed in the style of a ‘little man’, with a crooked peaked cap and a collarless shirt under a jacket.

Casting a brief glance at the edge of the sky, which was just turning pink, he slipped into his role and jogged off along Chistoprudny Lane like a stray mongrel.

The first syllable, in which iron stars rain down from the sky

The putative Japanese had now been lost, and the Moscow Okhrana was tailing Thrush, so the efforts of the Petersburgians were concentrated entirely on the left luggage office. The items had been deposited there for twenty-four hours, which indicated that they would be called for no later than midday.

Fandorin and Mylnikov took up position in a secret observation post the evening before. As has already been mentioned, railway gendarmes were concealed in close proximity to the left luggage office, and Mylnikov’s agents were also taking turns to stroll around the square in front of the station, so the two bosses installed themselves comfortably in the premises of Lyapunov’s Funeral Services, which were located opposite the station, offering a superlative panoramic view. The American glass of the shop window was also very handy for their purpose, being funereal black and only allowing light through in one direction.

The two partners did not switch on the light – they had no real need for it anyway, since there was a street lamp burning nearby. The night hours dragged by slowly.

Every now and then the telephone rang – it was their subordinates reporting that the net had been cast, all the men were in position and vigilance was not slackening.

Fandorin and Mylnikov had already discussed everything to do with the job, but the conversation simply would not gel when it came to more abstract subjects – the ranges of the two partners’ interests were simply too different.

The engineer was not concerned, the silence did not bother him, but it drove the court counsellor wild.

‘Did you ever happen to meet Count Loris-Melikov?’ he asked.

‘Certainly,’ replied Fandorin, ‘but no more than that.’

‘They say the man had a great mind, even though he was Armenian.’

Silence.

‘Well, what I’m getting at is this. I’ve been told that before he retired His Excellency had a long tête-à-tête with Alexander III, and he made all sorts of predictions and gave him lots of advice: about a constitution, about concessions to foreigners, about foreign politics. Everyone knows the late tsar wasn’t exactly bright. Afterwards he used to laugh and say: “Loris tried to frighten me with Japan – just imagine it! He wanted me to be afraid of Japan”. That was in 1881, when no one even thought Japan was a proper country! Have you heard that story?’

‘I have had occasion to.’

‘See what kind of ministers Alexander II, the old Liberator, had. But Sandy number three had no time for them. And as for his son, our Nicky, well, what can you say… The old saying’s true: If He wants to punish someone, He’ll take away their reason. Will you at least say something! I’m talking sincerely here, straight from the heart. My soul’s aching for Russia.’

‘S-so I see,’ Fandorin remarked drily.

Not even taking a meal together brought them any closer, especially since each of them ate his own food. An agent delivered a little carafe of rowanberry vodka, fatty bacon and salted cucumbers for Mylnikov. The engineer’s Japanese servant treated him to pieces of raw herring and marinaded radish. Polite invitations from both parties to sample their fare were both declined with equal politeness. At the end of the meal, Fandorin lit up a Dutch cigar and Mylnikov sucked on a eucalyptus pastille for his nerves.

Eventually, at the time determined by nature, morning arrived.

The street lamps went out in the square, rays of sunlight slanted through the steam swirling above the damp surface of the road and sparrows started hopping about on the pavement under the window of the undertaker’s office.

‘There he is!’ Fandorin said in a low voice: for the last half-hour he had been glued to his binoculars.

‘Who?’

‘Our man. I’ll c-call the gendarmes.’

Mylnikov followed the direction of the engineer’s binoculars and put his own up to his eyes.

A man with a battered cap pulled right down to his ears was ambling across the broad, almost deserted square.

‘That’s him all right!’ the court counsellor said in a bloodthirsty whisper, and immediately pulled a stunt that was not envisaged in the plan: he stuck his head out through a small open windowpane and gave a deafening blast on his whistle.

Fandorin froze with the telephone receiver in his hand.

‘Have you taken leave of your senses?’

Mylnikov grinned triumphantly and tossed his reply back over his shoulder:

‘Well, what did you expect? Didn’t think Mylnikov would let the railway gendarmes have all the glory, did you? You can sod that! The Jap’s mine, he’s mine!’

From different sides of the square, agents dashed towards the little man, four of them in all. They trilled on their whistles and yelled menacingly.

‘Stop!’

The spy listened and stopped. He turned his head in all directions. He saw there was nowhere to run, but he ran anyway – chasing after an empty early tram that was clattering towards Zatsepa Street.

The agent running to cut him off thought he had guessed his enemy’s intentions – he darted forward to meet the tramcar and leapt nimbly up on to the front platform.

Just at that moment the Japanese overtook the tram, but he didn’t jump inside; running at full speed, he leapt up and grabbed hold of a rung of the dangling ladder with both hands, and in the twinkling of an eye, he was up on the roof.

The agent who had ended up inside the tram started dashing about between the benches – he couldn’t work out where the fugitive had disappeared to. The other three shouted and waved their arms, but he didn’t understand their gesticulations, and the distance between them and the tram was gradually increasing.

Spectators at the station – departing passengers, people seeing them off, cab drivers – gaped at this outlandish performance.

Then Mylnikov clambered out of the open window almost as far as his waist and howled in a voice that could have brought down the walls of Jericho:

‘Put the brake on, you idiot!’

Either the agent heard his boss’s howling, or he twigged for himself, but he went dashing to the driver, and immediately the brakes squealed, the tram slowed down and the other agents started closing in on it rapidly.

‘No chance, he won’t get away!’ Mylnikov boasted confidently. ‘Not from my aces he won’t. Every one of them’s worth ten of your railway boneheads.’

The tram had not yet stopped, it was still screeching along the rails, but the little figure in the jacket ran along its roof, pushed off with one foot, performed an unbelievable somersault and landed neatly on a newspaper kiosk standing at the corner of the square.

‘An acrobat!’ Mylnikov gasped.

But Fandorin muttered some short word that obviously wasn’t Russian and raised his binoculars to his eyes.

Panting for breath, the agents surrounded the wooden kiosk. They raised their heads, waved their arms, shouted something – the only sounds that reached the undertaker’s premises were ‘f***! – f***! – f***!’

Mylnikov chortled feverishly.

‘Like a cat on a fence! Got him!’

Suddenly the engineer exclaimed:

‘Shuriken!’

He flung aside his binoculars, darted out into the street and shouted loudly:

‘Look out!’

But too late.

The circus performer on the roof of the kiosk spun round his own axis, waving his hand through the air rapidly – as if he were thanking the agents on all four sides. One by one, Mylnikov’s ‘aces’ tumbled on to the paved surface.

A second later the spy leapt down, as softly as a cat, and dashed along the street towards the gaping mouth of a nearby gateway.

The engineer ran after him. The court counsellor, shocked and stunned for a moment, darted after him.

‘What happened? What happened?’ he shouted.

‘He’ll get away!’ Fandorin groaned.

‘Not if I have anything to do with it!’

Mylnikov pulled a revolver out from under his armpit and opened fire on the fugitive like a real master, on the run. He had good reason to pride himself on his accuracy, he usually felled a moving figure at fifty paces with the first bullet, but this time he emptied the entire cylinder and failed to hit the target. The damned Japanese was running oddly, with sidelong jumps and zigzags – how can you pop a target like that?

‘The bastard!’ gasped Mylnikov, clicking the hammer of his revolver against an empty cartridge case. ‘Why aren’t you firing?’

‘There’s no p-point.’

The shooting brought the gendarmes tearing out of the station after breaking their cover for the ambush. The public started to panic, there was shouting and jostling, and waving of umbrellas. Local police constables’ whistles could be heard trilling from various directions. But meanwhile the fugitive had already disappeared into the gateway.

‘Along the side street, the side street!’ Fandorin told the gendarmes, pointing. ‘To the left!’

The light-blue uniforms rushed off round the building. Mylnikov swore furiously as he clambered up the fire escape ladder, but Erast Petrovich stopped and shook his head hopelessly.

He took no further part in the search after that. He looked at the gendarmes and police agents bustling about, listened to Mylnikov’s howls from up above his head and set off back towards the square.

A crowd of curious gawkers was jostling around the kiosk, and he caught glimpses of a policeman’s white peaked cap.

As he walked up, the engineer heard a trembling, senile voice declaiming:

‘So is it said in prophecy: and iron stars shall rain down from the heavens and strike down the sinners…’

Fandorin spoke sombrely to the policeman:

‘Clear the public away.’

Even though Fandorin was in civilian garb, the policeman realised from his tone of voice that this man had the right to command, and he immediately blew on his whistle.

To menacing shouts of ‘Move aside! Where do you think you’re shoving?’ Fandorin walked round the site of the slaughter.

All four agents were dead. They were lying in identical poses, on their backs. Each had an iron star with sharp, glittering points protruding from his forehead, where it had pierced deep into the bone.

‘Lord Almighty!’ exclaimed Mylnikov, crossing himself as he walked up.

Squatting down with a sob, he was about to pull a metal star out of a dead head.

‘Don’t touch it! The edges are smeared with p-poison!’

Mylnikov jerked his hand away.

‘What devil’s work is this?’

‘That is a shuriken, also known as a syarinken. A throwing weapon of the “Furtive Ones”, a sect of hereditary sp-spies that exists in Japan.’

‘Hereditary?’ The court counsellor started blinking very rapidly. ‘Is that like our Rykalov from the detective section? His great-grandfather served in the Secret Chancellery, back in Catherine the Great’s time.’

‘Something of the kind. So that’s why he jumped on to the kiosk…’

Fandorin’s last remark was addressed to himself, but Mylnikov jerked his head up and asked:

‘Why?’

‘To throw at standing targets. You and your “cat on a fence”. Well, you’ve made a fine mess of things, Mylnikov.’

‘Never mind the mess,’ said Mylnikov, with tears coursing down his cheeks. ‘If I made it, I’ll answer for it, it won’t be the first time. Zyablikov, Raspashnoi, Kasatkin, Möbius…’

A carriage came flying furiously into the square from the direction of Bolshaya Tartarskaya Street and a pale man with no hat tumbled out of it and shouted from a distance:

‘Evstratpalich! Disaster! Thrush has got away! He’s disappeared!’

‘But what about our plant?’

‘They found him with a knife in his side!’

The court counsellor launched into a torrent of obscenity so wild that someone in the crowd remarked respectfully:

‘He’s certainly making himself clear.’

But the engineer set off at a brisk stride towards the station.

‘Where are you going?’ shouted Mylnikov.

‘To the left luggage office. They won’t come for the melinite now.’

But Fandorin was mistaken.

The clerk was standing there, shifting from one foot to the other in front of the open door.

‘Well, did you catch the two boyos?’ he asked when he caught sight of Fandorin.

‘Which b-boyos?’

‘You know! The two who collected the baggage. I pressed on the button, like you told me to. Then I glanced into the gendarme gentlemen’s room. But when I looked, it was empty.’

The engineer groaned as if afflicted with a sudden, sharp pain.

‘How l-long ago?’

‘The first one came exactly at five. The second was seven or eight minutes later.’

Fandorin’s Breguet showed 5.29.

The court counsellor started swearing again, only not menacingly this time, but plaintively, in a minor key.

‘That was while we were creeping round the courtyards and basements,’ he wailed.

Fandorin summed up the situation in a funereal voice:

‘A worse debacle than Tsushima.’

The second syllable, entirely about railways

The interdepartmental conflict took place there and then, in the corridor. In his fury, Fandorin abandoned his usual restraint and told Mylnikov exactly what he thought about the Special Section, which was fine for spawning informers and agents provocateurs, but proved to be absolutely useless when it came to real work and caused nothing but problems.

‘You gendarmes are a fine lot too,’ snarled Mylnikov. ‘Why did your smart alecs abandon the ambush without any order? They let the bombers get away with the melinite. Now where do we look for them?’

Fandorin fell silent, stung either by the justice of the rebuke or that form of address – ‘you gendarmes’.

‘Our collaboration hasn’t worked out,’ said the man from the Department of Police, sighing. ‘Now you’ll make a complaint to your bosses about me, and I’ll make one to mine about you. Only none of that bumph is going to put things right. A bad peace is better than a good quarrel. Let’s do it this way: you look after your railway and I’ll catch Comrade Thrush. The way we’re supposed to do things according to our official responsibilities. That’ll be safer.’

Hunting for the revolutionaries who had established contact with Japanese intelligence obviously seemed far more promising to Mylnikov than pursuing unknown saboteurs who could be anywhere along an eight-thousand-verst railway line.

But Fandorin was so sick of the court counsellor that he replied contemptuously:

‘Excellent. Only keep well out of my sight.’

‘A good specialist always keeps out of sight,’ Evstratii Pavlovich purred, and he left.

And only then, bitterly repenting that he had wasted several precious minutes on pointless wrangling, did Fandorin set to work.

The first thing he did was question the receiving clerk in detail about the men who had presented the receipts for the baggage.

It turned out that the man who took the eight paper packages was dressed like a workman (grey collarless shirt, long coat, boots), but his face didn’t match his clothes – the clerk said he ‘wasn’t that simple’.

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘He was educated. Glasses, hair down to his shoulders, a big, bushy beard like a church sexton. Since when does a worker or a craftsman look like that? And he’s ill. His face is all white and he kept clearing his throat and wiping his lips with a handkerchief.’

The second recipient, who had shown up a few minutes after the one in glasses, sounded even more interesting to the engineer – he spotted an obvious lead here.

The man who took away the three wooden crates had been dressed in the uniform of a railway postal worker! The clerk could not possibly be mistaken about this – he had been working in the Department of Railways for a good few years.

Moustache, broad cheekbones, middle-aged. The recipient had a holster hanging at his side, which meant that he accompanied the mail carriage, in which, as everybody knew, sums of money and precious packages were transported.

Fandorin could already feel a presentiment of success, but he suppressed that dangerous mood and turned to Lieutenant Colonel Danilov, who had just arrived.

‘In the last twenty minutes, since half past five, have any trains set off?’

‘Yes indeed, the Harbin train. It left ten minutes ago.’

‘Then that’s where they are, our boyos. Both of them,’ the engineer declared confidently.

The lieutenant colonel was doubtful.

‘But maybe they went back into the city? Or they’re waiting for the next train, to Paveletsk? It’s at six twenty-five.’

‘No. It is no accident that they showed up at the same time, with just a few minutes between them. That is one. And note what time that was – dawn. What else of any importance happens at this station between five and six, apart from the departure of the Harbin train? And then, of course, the third point.’ The engineer’s voice hardened. ‘What would saboteurs want with the P-Paveletsk train? What would they blow up on the Paveletsk line? Hay and straw, radishes and carrots? No, our subjects have gone off on the Harbin train.’

‘Shall I send a telegram to stop the train?’

‘Under no circumstances. There is melinite on board. Who knows what these people are like? If they suspect something is wrong, they might blow it up. No delays, no unscheduled stops. The bombers are already on their guard, they’re nervous. No, tell me instead where the first stop is according to the timetable.’

‘It’s an express. So it will only stop in Vladimir – let me just take a look… At nine thirty.’

The powerful locomotive commandeered by Danilov overhauled the Harbin express at the border of the province of Moscow and thereafter maintained a distance of one verst, which it only reduced just before Vladimir.

It came flying on to the next line only a minute after the express. Fandorin jumped down on to the platform without waiting for the locomotive to stop. The scheduled train halted at the station for only ten minutes, so every minute was precious.

The engineer was met by Captain Lenz, the head of the Vladimir Railway Gendarmes Division, who had been briefed about everything in detail by telephone. He goggled wildly at Fandorin’s fancy dress (greasy coat, grey moustache and eyebrows, with temples that were also grey, only there had been no need to dye them) and wiped his sweaty bald patch with a handkerchief, but did not ask any questions.

‘Everything’s ready. This way, please.’

He reported about everything else on the run, as he tried to keep up with Erast Petrovich.

‘The trolley’s waiting. The team has been assembled. They’re keeping their heads down, as ordered…’

The station postal worker, who had been informed of the basic situation, was loitering beside a trolley piled high with correspondence. To judge from the chalky hue of his features, he was in a dead funk. The room was packed with light-blue uniforms – all the gendarmes were squatting down, and their heads were bent down low too. That was so that no one would see them from the platform, through the window, Fandorin realised.

He smiled at the postal worker.

‘Calm down, calm down, nothing unusual is going to happen.’

He took hold of the handles and pushed the trolley out on to the platform.

‘Seven minutes,’ the gendarmes captain whispered after him.

A man in a blue jacket stuck his head out of the mail carriage, which was coupled immediately behind the locomotive.

‘Asleep, are you, Vladimir?’ he shouted angrily. ‘What’s taking you so long?’

Long moustache, middle-aged. Broad cheekbones? I suppose so, Erast Petrovich thought to himself, and whispered to his partner again:

‘Stop shaking, will you? And yawn, you almost overslept.’

‘There you go… Couldn’t keep my eyes open. My second straight day on duty,’ the Vladimir man babbled, yawning and stretching.

Meanwhile the disguised engineer was quickly tossing the mail in through the open door and weighing things up, wondering whether he should grab the man with the long moustache round the waist and fling him on to the platform. Nothing could be easier.

He decided to wait first and check whether there were three wooden crates measuring 15 × 10 × 15 inches in there.

He was right to wait.

He climbed up into the carriage and began dividing the Vladimir post into three piles: letters, parcels and packages.

The inside of the carriage was a veritable labyrinth of heaps of sacks, boxes and crates.

Erast walked along one row, then along another, but he didn’t see the familiar items.

‘What are you doing wandering about?’ someone barked at him out of a dark passage. ‘Get a move on, look lively! Sacks over this way, square items over there. Are you new, or something?’

This was a surprise: another postman, also about forty years old, with broad cheekbones and a moustache. Which one was it? A pity he didn’t have the clerk from the left luggage office with him.

‘Yes, I’m new,’ Fandorin droned in a deep voice, as if he had a cold.

‘And old too, from the look of you.’

The second postal worker came over to the first one and stood beside him. They both had holsters with Nagant revolvers hanging on their belts.

‘Why are your hands shaking -on a spree yesterday, were you?’ the second one asked the Vladimir man.

‘Just a bit…’

‘But didn’t you say this was your second day on duty?’ the first one, with the long moustache, asked in surprise.

The second one stuck his head out of the door and looked at the station building.

Which one of them? Fandorin tried to guess, slipping rapidly along the stacks. Or is it neither? Where are the crates of melinite?

Suddenly there was a deafening clang as the second postman slammed the door shut and pushed home the bolt.

‘What’s up with you, Matvei?’ the one with the long moustache asked, surprised again.

Matvei bared his yellow teeth and cocked the hammer of his revolver with a click.

‘I know what I’m doing! Three blue caps in the window, and all of them staring this way! I’ve got a nose for these things!’

Incredible relief was what Erast Petrovich felt at that moment – so he hadn’t wasted his time smearing lead white on his eyebrows and moustache and it had been worthwhile breathing locomotive soot for three hours.

‘Matvei, have you gone crazy?’ the one with the long moustache asked in bewilderment, gazing into the glittering gun barrel.

The Vladimir postal worker got the idea straight away and pressed himself back against the wall.

‘Easy, Lukich. Don’t stick your nose in. And you, you louse, tell me, is this loader of yours a nark? I’ll kill you!’ The subject grabbed the local man by the collar.

‘They made me do it… Have pity… I’ve only one year to go to my pension…’ said the local man, capitulating immediately.

‘Hey, my good man, don’t be stupid!’ shouted Fandorin, sticking his head out from behind the crates. ‘There’s nowhere you can go anyway. Drop the wea…’

He hadn’t expected that – the subject fired without even bothering to hear him out.

The engineer barely managed to squat down in time, and the bullet whistled by just above his head.

‘Ah, you stinking rat!’ Fandorin heard the man that the saboteur had called Lukich cry indignantly.

There was another crash, then two voices mingling together – one groaning, the other whining.

Erast Petrovich crept to the edge of the stack and glanced out.

Things had taken a really nasty turn.

Matvei was ensconced in the corner, holding the revolver out in front of him. Lukich was lying on the floor, fumbling at his chest with bloody fingers. The Vladimir postal worker was squealing with his hands up over his face.

Bluish-grey powder smoke swayed gently in the ghastly light of the electric lamp.

From the position that Fandorin had occupied, nothing could have been easier than to shoot the villain, but he was needed alive and preferably not too badly damaged. So Erast Petrovich stuck out the hand holding his Browning and planted two bullets in the wall to the subject’s right.

Exactly as required, the subject retreated from the corner behind a stack of cardboard boxes.

Shooting continuously (three, four, five, six, seven), the engineer jumped out, ran and threw himself bodily at the boxes – they collapsed, burying the man hiding behind them.

After that it took only a couple of seconds.

Erast Petrovich grabbed a protruding leg in a cowhide boot, tugged the saboteur out into the light of day (of the electric lamp, that is) and struck him with the edge of his hand slightly above the collarbone.

He had one.

Now he had to catch the other one, in glasses, who had collected the paper parcels.

Only how was he to find him? And was he even on the train at all?

But he didn’t have to search for the man in glasses – he announced his own presence.

When Erast Petrovich drew back the bolt and pushed open the heavy door of the mail carriage, the first thing he saw was people running along the platform. And he heard frightened screams and women squealing.

Captain Lenz was standing beside the carriage, looking pale and behaving strangely: instead of looking at the engineer, who had just escaped deadly danger, the gendarme was squinting off to one side.

‘Take him,’ said Fandorin, dragging the saboteur, who had still not come round, to the carraige door. ‘And get a stretcher here, a man’s been wounded.’ He nodded at the stampeding public. ‘Were they alarmed by the shots?’

‘No, not that. It’s a real disaster, Mr Engineer. As soon as we heard the shots, my men and I rushed out on to the platform, thinking we could help you… Then suddenly there was a wild, crazy howl from that carriage there…’ Lenz pointed off to one side. ‘“I won’t surrender alive!” That’s when it started…’

Two gendarmes lugged away Matvei, under arrest, and Erast Petrovich jumped down on to the platform and looked in the direction indicated.

He saw a green third-class carriage with not a single soul anywhere near it – but he glimpsed white faces with wide-open mouths behind the windows.

‘He has a revolver. And a bomb,’ Lenz reported hastily. ‘He must have thought we came dashing out to arrest him. He took the conductor’s keys and locked the carriage at both ends. There are about forty people in there. He keeps shouting: “Just try getting in, I’ll blow them all up!”’

And at that moment there was a blood-curdling shriek from the carriage.

‘Get back! If anybody moves, I’ll blow them all to kingdom come!’

However, he hasn’t blown them up yet, the engineer mused. Although he has had the opportunity. ‘I tell you what, Captain. Carry all the crates out of the mail carriage quickly. We’ll work out later which ones are ours. And observe every possible precaution as you carry them. If the melinite detonates, you’ll be building a new station afterwards. That is, not you, of course, b-but somebody else. Don’t come after me. I’ll do this alone.’

Erast Petrovich hunched over and ran along the line of carriages. He stopped at the window from which the threats to ‘blow everyone to kingdom come’ had been made. It was the only one that was half open.

The engineer tapped delicately on the side of the carriage: tap-tap-tap.

‘Who’s there?’ asked a surprised voice.

‘Engineer Fandorin. Will you allow me to come in?’

‘What for?’

‘I’d like to t-talk to you.’

‘But I’m going to blow everything in here to pieces,’ said the voice, puzzled. ‘Didn’t you hear that? And then, how will you get in? I won’t open the door for anything.’

‘That’s all right, don’t worry. I’ll climb in through the window, just don’t shoot.’

Erast Petrovich nimbly hauled himself up and in through the window as far as his shoulders, then waited for a moment, so that the bomber could get a good look at his venerable grey hair, before creeping into the carriage slowly, very slowly.

Things looked bad: the young man in spectacles had thrust his revolver into his belt, and he was holding one of the black packages. In fact, he had already thrust his fingers inside it – Fandorin assumed he was clutching the glass detonator. One slight squeeze and the bomb would detonate, setting off the other seven. There they were, on the upper bunk, covered with sackcloth.

‘You don’t look like an engineer,’ said the youth, as pale as death, examining the dusty clothing of the false loader.

‘And you don’t look like a p-proletarian,’ Erast Petrovich parried.

The carriage had no compartments; it consisted of a long corridor with wooden benches on both sides. Unlike the people clamouring on the platform, the hostages were sitting quietly – they could sense the nearness of death. There was just a woman’s voice tearfully murmuring a prayer somewhere.

‘Quiet, you idiot, I’ll blow the whole place up!’ the youth shouted in a terrible deep voice, and the praying broke off.

He’s dangerous, extremely dangerous, Fandorin realised as he looked into the terrorist’s wide, staring eyes. He’s not playing for effect, not throwing a fit of hysterics – he really will blow us up.

‘Why the delay?’ asked Erast Petrovich.

‘Eh?’

‘I can see that you are not afraid of death. So why are you putting it off? Why don’t you crush the detonator? There is something stopping you. What?’

‘You’re strange,’ said the young man in glasses. ‘But you’re right… This is all wrong. It isn’t how it should all happen… I’m selling myself cheap. It’s frustrating. And she won’t get her ten thousand…’

‘Who, your mother? Who will she not get the money from, the Japanese?’

‘What mother!’ the youth cried, gesturing angrily. ‘Ah, what a wonderful plan it was! She would have racked her brains, wondered who did it, where it was from. Then she would have guessed and blessed my memory. Russia would have cursed me, but she would have blessed me!’

‘The one you love?’ Fandorin said with a nod, starting to understand. ‘She is unhappy, trapped, this money would save her, allow her to start a new life?’

‘Yes! You can’t imagine what a hideous abomination Samara is! And her parents and brothers! Brutes, absolute brutes! Never mind that she doesn’t love me, that’s all right! Who could love a living corpse, coughing up his own lungs? But I’ll reach out to her even from the next world, I’ll pull her out of the quagmire… That is, I would have done…’

The young man groaned and started shaking so violently that the black paper rustled in his hands.

‘She won’t get the money because you failed to blow up the bridge? Or the tunnel?’ Erast Petrovich asked quickly, keeping his eyes fixed on that deadly package.

‘A bridge, the Alexander Bridge. How do you know that? But what difference does it make? Yes, the samurai won’t pay. I shall die in vain.’

‘So you are doing all this because of her, for the ten thousand?’

The youth in glasses shook his head.

‘Not only that. I want to take revenge on Russia. It’s a vile, abominable country!’

Fandorin sat down on the bench, crossed his legs and shrugged.

‘You can’t do Russia any great harm now. Well, you’ll blow up the carriage. Kill and maim forty poor third-class passengers, and the lady of your heart will be left to languish in Samara.’ He paused to give the young man a chance to reflect on that, then said forcefully: ‘I have a better idea. You give me the explosive, and then the girl you love will get her ten thousand. And you can leave Russia to her fate.’

‘You’ll deceive me,’ the consumptive whispered.

‘No. I give you my word of honour,’ said Erast Petrovich, and he said it in a voice that made it impossible not to believe.

Patches of ruddy colour bloomed on the bomber’s cheeks.

‘I don’t want to die in a prison hospital. Better here, now.’

‘Just as you wish,’ Fandorin said quietly.

‘Very well. I’ll write her a note…’

The youth pulled a notebook out of his pocket and scribbled in it feverishly with a pencil. The parcel with the bomb was lying on the bench and now Fandorin could easily have grabbed it. But the engineer didn’t budge.

‘Only, please, be brief,’ he said. ‘I feel sorry for the passengers. After all, every second is torment for them. God forbid, someone might have a stroke.’

‘Yes, yes, just a moment…’

He finished writing, folded the page neatly and handed it over.

‘It has the name and address on it…’

Only then did Fandorin take the bomb and hand it out through the window, after first calling the gendarmes. The other seven followed it: the youth in glasses took hold of them carefully and handed them to Erast Petrovich, who lowered them out through the window.

‘And now go out, please,’ said the doomed man, cocking the hammer of his revolver. ‘And remember: you gave your word of honour.’

Looking into the youth’s bright-blue eyes, Erast Petrovich realised that it was pointless to try to change his mind, and walked towards the door.

The shot rang out behind his back almost immediately.

The engineer arrived back at home, feeling weary and sad, as the day was ending. At the station in Moscow he was handed a telegram from Petersburg: ‘All’s well that ends well but we need the Japanese I hope the ten thousand is a joke’.

That meant he would have to pay the Belle Dame sans merci of Samara out of his own pocket, but that was not why he was feeling sad – he simply could not stop thinking about the young suicide, with all his love and hate. And Erast Petrovich’s thoughts also kept coming back again and again to the man who had thought of a way to make practical use of someone else’s misery.

They hadn’t learned much about this resourceful individual from the arrested postman. Nothing new at all, really. They still had no idea where to look for the man. And it was even more difficult to predict at which point he would strike his next blow.

Fandorin was met in the doorway of his government apartment by his valet. Observing neutrality had been particularly difficult for Masa today. All the time his master was away, the Japanese had muttered sutras and he had even tried to pray in front of an icon, but now he was the very image of dispassion. He ran a quick glance over Erast Petrovich to see whether he was unhurt. Seeing that he was, Masa screwed his eyes up in relief and immediately said indifferently in Japanese:

‘Another letter from the head of the municipal gendarmes.’

The engineer frowned as he unfolded the note, in which Lieutenant General Charme insistently invited him to come to dinner today at half past seven. The note ended with the words: ‘Otherwise, I really shall take offence’.

Yesterday there had been an identical invitation, left without a reply for lack of time.

It was awkward. An old, distinguished general. And in an adjacent government department – he couldn’t offend him.

‘Wash, shave, dinner jacket, white tie, top hat,’ the engineer told his servant in a sour voice.

The third syllable, in which Rybnikov gives free rein to his passion

On 25 May, Glyceria Romanovna drove along the boulevard in vain – Vasya did not come. This upset her, but not too badly. First, she knew where to find him now, and secondly, she had something to do.

Lidina drove straight from the boulevard to see Konstantin Fyodorovich Charme at his place of work. The old man was absolutely delighted. He threw some officers or other with documents out of his office, ordered hot chocolate to be served and was generally very sweet with his old-fashioned gallantry.

It was not at all difficult to turn the conversation to Fandorin. After idle chat about their common acquaintances in St Petersburg, Glyceria Romanovna told him how she had nearly been caught up in the appalling crash on the bridge, with graphic descriptions of what she had seen and what she had been through. She dwelt in detail on the mysterious gentleman with grey temples who was in charge of the investigation.

Just as Lidina had calculated, this emphatic epithet had its effect.

‘He may be mysterious to you, but not to me,’ the general said with a condescending smile. ‘That’s Fandorin from the Petersburg Railway Gendarmerie. Highly intelligent man, cosmopolitan, a great original. He’s handling a very important case in Moscow at present. I have been warned that my collaboration might be required at any moment.’

Glyceria Romanovna’s heart sank: ‘an important case’. Poor Vasya!

But she gave no sign of her dismay. Instead, she pretended to be curious:

‘Cosmopolitan? A great original? Ah, dear Konstantin Fyodorovich, introduce me to him! I know nothing is impossible for you!’

‘No, no, don’t even ask. Erast Petrovich has a reputation as a heartbreaker. Could it be that even you have not remained indifferent to his marble features? Take care, I shall become jealous and have you put under secret surveillance,’ the general threatened her jokingly.

But, of course, his stubbornness did not last long – he promised to invite the Petersburgian to dinner that very evening.

Glyceria Romanovna put on her silvery dress, the one which, in her own mind, she called ‘fatale’, scented herself with sensuous perfume and even made up her eyes a little, something that she usually did not do. She looked so fine that for five minutes she simply couldn’t go out on to the stairs – she carried on admiring herself in the mirror.

But the odious Fandorin did not come. Lidina sat there all evening, listening to the flowery compliments of her host and the conversations of his boring guests.

As they were saying goodnight, Konstantin Fyodorovich spread his hands and shrugged.

‘Your mystery man didn’t come. He didn’t even condescend to answer my note.’

She tried to persuade the general not to be angry – perhaps Fandorin was on an important investigation. And she said:

‘You have such a lovely home! And your guests are all so wonderful. I tell you what, arrange another dinner tomorrow, with the same set. And write a bit more determinedly to Fandorin, so that he will definitely come. Do you promise?’

‘For the pleasure of seeing you in my home again, I would do anything. But why are you so interested in Fandorin?’

‘It’s not a matter of him,’ said Lidina, lowering her voice confidentially. ‘It’s just idle curiosity. A caprice, if you like. It’s simply that I’m very solitary now, I need to be out in society more. I didn’t tell you. I’m leaving Georges.’

The general appreciated being taken into her confidence. Glancing round at his tedious wife, he immediately suggested lunch out of town the next day, but Glyceria Romanovna quickly scotched that. And in point of fact, the general was quite content with a little moderate flirtation with the attractive young woman; he had brought up the subject of lunch at the Yar restaurant only out of habit, like an old, retired hussar steed champing at the bit when he hears the distant sound of the bugle.

The next day Fandorin did come, although he was late. And in effect, nothing more was required of him – Lidina had no doubts about how charming she was. Today she looked every bit as fine as yesterday. Even finer, because she’d had the idea of putting on an embroidered Mauritanian cap and lowering a transparent, absolutely ethereal veil from it across her face.

The strategy she chose was the simplest, but it was certain.

At first she did not look at him at all, but she was amiable with the most handsome of the guests – a horse guardsman who was the governor-general’s adjutant.

Later she reluctantly acceded to her host’s repeated requests to perform Mr Poigin’s audacious romance ‘Do not go, stay a while with me’, accompanying herself on the piano. Glyceria Romanovna’s voice was not very strong, but it had a very pleasant timbre and its effect on men was infallible. As she sang the passionate promise to ‘quench languorous love with caresses of fire’, she looked by turn at all the men, apart from Fandorin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was time!

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

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

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

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

Glyceria Romanovna gestured carelessly.

‘He’s a friend of mine.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘So I n-noticed.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Why not, let’s go.’

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

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

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

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

At the entrance Fandorin behaved even more surprisingly.

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

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

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

But it was too late to back out now.

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

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

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

The insane investigator asked:

‘Well, where is he?’

‘Who?’

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

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

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

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

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

‘For what?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A second passed, then another, and another.

But no kiss came.

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

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

He swung round and walked out of the apartment.

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

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

She went back in and telephoned.

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

‘I need to talk to Vasilii Alexandrovich urgently!’

‘He’s not here.’

‘Will he be back soon?’

‘He doesn’t report to us.’

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

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

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

‘Who do you want?’ he asked suspiciously.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tired of waiting, Lidina shouted:

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

And the door opened immediately, that very second.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lidina could never remember running out into the street.

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

Then there was a quiet knock at the door.

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

The countess was standing on the porch.

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

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

‘Why are you looking at me like that?’

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

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

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

She followed him, smiling mistrustfully.

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

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

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

Rybnikov barely managed to bundle her out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sen. agent Smurov

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

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

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

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

‘All right, tell me what’s happened.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Well?’ Sapliukin asked with just his lips

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

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

Not a soul, empty!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Sapliukin! Lepinsh!’

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

Only there was no one there any longer.

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

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

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

The final syllable, the longest one of all

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

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

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

Now everything had fallen into place.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Masa paused and asked:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The man became flustered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fandorin read it: ‘Windrose Restaurant’.

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

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

‘Right away, sir.’

A long silence, lasting several minutes.

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

‘Is that you?’

‘As we agreed. Are you ready?’

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

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

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

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

‘How will you move it? By water?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The gendarme spread his hands helplessly.

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

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

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

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

Masa was waiting for him by the railings.

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

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

His valet replied philosophically:

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

So they started watching.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mylnikov howled and tried to break free of their grip.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They went back to the carriage and drove on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Smurov, who was better read, explained.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Arigato.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He put it back down on the ground.

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

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

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

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

Meanwhile Rybnikov had taken a decision.

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

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

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

At that moment the silence ended.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘No, they were all on loading.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amazingly enough, the argument advanced by Fandorin worked.

The police agent raised his head a little.

‘And Napoleon’s waiting too?’

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

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

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

Smurov didn’t answer.

The engineer glanced at him quickly and swore.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was no way of stopping that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The gendarmes came running down the incline towards him.

‘Who’s in c-command?’

‘Lieutenant Bryantsev!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then one of them straightened up to his full height.

It was him!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The officer got up, looking abashed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Right th-then, row over there!’

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

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

‘Aha, that’s where you are, my boyo.’

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

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

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

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

One minute went by, then another.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then Fandorin leaned down and uttered a strange word:

‘Tamba.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The engineer grimaced in revulsion and remarked:

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

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

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

Rybnikov was in a good mood.

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

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

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

That seemed to be all.

Except…

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

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

He fell asleep.

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

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

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

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

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

Then he undressed to the waist.

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

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