The Diamond Chariot (21 page)

‘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.’