The Diamond Chariot (16 page)

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.’