The Diamond Chariot (62 page)

‘Of course,’ said Asagawa, wiping the sweat off his forehead. ‘I divided the room up into squares, I’m trying not to miss anything.’

Yes, the lever couldn’t be in the clock, Fandorin thought. The cleaner might trip it if he started dusting the timepiece. Or the person responsible for winding and adjusting it …

‘I’ve run out of squares,’ the inspector announced in a dejected voice. ‘What can we do? Try again …’

One forty-two. Where could the lever be? It wasn’t behind the wallpaper or the skirting boards. Or in the bookcase. Asagawa had lifted up the pictures too …

Erast Petrovich suddenly froze.

‘Tell me, did you touch the emperor’s portrait?’

‘Of course not. That’s impossible!’ The inspector actually shuddered at such a blasphemous suggestion.

‘But someone dusts it, don’t they?’

‘That sacred responsibility can only be performed by the owner of the office, with all appropriate respect. In my station no one would dare to touch the portrait of His Majesty that hangs over my desk. People wipe the dust from the emperor’s face in the morning, almost as soon as they get to work. With a special silk duster, after first bowing.’

‘I see. Well, now I’ll show you how the s-secret room opens.’

The titular counsellor took a chair, carried it across to the wall, climbed up on it and took hold of the portrait confidently with both hands. Asagawa gasped.

‘Like this,’ Erast Petrovich purred, swaying the frame to the left. Nothing happened. ‘Well then, like this.’

He swayed the frame to the right – again nothing. Fandorin pulled the portrait towards himself. He tugged it up, he tugged it down. Finally he turned it completely upside down. The poor inspector groaned and whimpered.

‘Damn! Could I really be mistaken?’

Erast Petrovich took the emperor down and tapped on the glass. The sound was hollow.

He angrily hung the portrait back up and it swayed to and fro in shock.

The young man felt ashamed. Not for his mistake, but for the lofty condescension with which he had drawled ‘I see’. The beam of his torch slid across the wallpaper, lighting up the horizontal beam of the crucifixion from above.

The titular counsellor caught his breath.

‘Tell me, who cleans the c-cross? Also the owner of the office?’

Fandorin jumped down on to the floor and moved the chair closer to the crucifixion. He scrambled back up again.

‘Of course. The cleaner wouldn’t dare. He knows it is a sacred object for your religion.’

‘Uh-huh. I can see that.’

The intendant obviously regarded the symbol of the Christian faith with less respect than the portrait of Emperor Mutsuhito – a thin layer of dust had accumulated on the black wood.

Erast Petrovich tried to move the crucifixion, but he couldn’t. Shining his torch a bit closer, he saw that the cross was not hung on the wall or nailed to it, but sunk slightly into its surface. Strange! So a special housing had been made for it?

He tried to pull it out. He couldn’t. Then he pressed it.

With a barely audible click, the crucifixion sank deeper into the wallpaper, leaving its edges protruding no more than an inch.

A second later there was a melodic clang, and a section of the wall moved aside rapidly, almost springing into the space behind the bookcase. A dark rectangle opened up, slightly lower than the height of a man.

‘That’s it! The secret hiding place!’ Asagawa cried, and glanced round at the door of the reception area, in case he had shouted too loudly.

Fandorin automatically glanced at his watch: two minutes to two.

‘Ah, what would I have done without you?’ the inspector exclaimed emotionally, almost with tears in his eyes, and dived into the dark hole.

But the vice-consul’s attention was caught by the arrangement of the secret room. In cross-section it was clearly visible: a layer of oak boards under the plaster, and then cork. That was why sounding out the walls hadn’t helped. The lever released powerful steel springs, which was why the partition jumped aside so fast. Fandorin wondered whether it closed in the same impetuous fashion or whether strength had to be applied.

Having satisfied his technical curiosity, Erast Petrovich followed his accomplice inside.

The repository of secrets proved to be a narrow room, but quite long – about ten paces. Its walls were entirely covered with shelving. Standing on the shelves were perfectly ordinary office files of various thicknesses. Asagawa took them down one by one, exclaimed something in Japanese and put them back again. The vice-consul also took one of the thicker ones. There were hieroglyphs drawn on the cover. The first two were easy, Erast Petrovich recognised them: ‘Eastern Capital’, that was ‘Tokyo’, but everything after that was gobbledegook to him.

‘What does it say here?’

‘Tokyo Provincial Government,’ Asagawa said after a swift glance. ‘But that’s nothing! There are ministers and members of the State Council here, even – you won’t believe it – members of the imperial family! Nothing is sacred to this man!’

‘And what does he have there about the empress?’ Fandorin asked curiously, glancing over the inspector’s shoulder.

He couldn’t see anything interesting on the page – just some note in the same old hieroglyphic scrawl – but the inspector nudged him away impolitely with his elbow.

‘I haven’t read it and I won’t allow you to! How infamous!’

He tore up the note and a few other pieces of paper in the file with trembling fingers.

‘Listen, it’s two minutes past two,’ the titular counsellor told him, pointing to his watch. ‘This isn’t what we came here for. Where’s the file with the conspirators?’

Owing to his hieroglyphic illiteracy, Erast Petrovich had nothing to occupy himself with. While Asagawa rummaged through the shelves, the young man shone his torch in all directions. He failed to discover anything of interest. There didn’t seem to be any lever inside the secret room, it could be opened and closed only from the outside. There were gas burners protruding from the ceiling – evidently the lighting could be switched on from the office, but there was no need for that, the torch and the lamp were quite adequate.

‘I have it!’ the inspector gasped. ‘It says “Okubo” on the spine.’ He started leafing feverishly through the pages. ‘Here are my missing reports, all three of them! And this is a report from the head of the police in the city of Kagosima. He says that according to reports from his agents, the sword master Ikemura Hyoske and two of his pupils have set out for Tokyo. Description: forty-five years old, a scar on the left side of his neck and his temple, left arm twisted. His nickname is Kamiyasuri – “Glasspaper”, because he covers the hilt of his sword with glass paper – his right hand is harder than steel. It’s him, the man with the withered arm! Wait, wait, there’s more here …’ Asagawa took out three sheets of paper covered with writing in a strange brown-coloured ink. ‘It’s an oath. Written in blood. “We, the undersigned, do hereby swear on our honour not to begrudge our lives in the name of an exalted goal – to exterminate the base traitor Okubo …” There are three such documents. One of them has six signatures – that is the group that killed the minister. The second document has three signatures, and the first one is Ikemura Hyoske’s. Our Satsumans! The third document has four signatures. So there was another group that remained undiscovered. The names are here, it will not be difficult to find the plotters before they can do anything else dangerous … We have won, Fandorin-san! We have Suga in our hands! With these oaths and the stolen reports we can pin him down!’

‘He was already in our hands anyway,’ Erast Petrovich remarked coolly. ‘This delightful little archive will cost him his head without any c-conspiracies.’

Asagawa shook his head.

‘Surely you do not think that I will allow all these abominations to come pouring out? There is so much filth here, so many family secrets! There would be a wave of suicides, divorces, scandals, resignations in disgrace. No, worse than that! The new minister would take the archive for his own use, he would announce that it has been destroyed, but keep the spiciest items – just in case.’

‘Then what is to be done?’

‘We are going to destroy all this poison. Without reading it.’

‘Very n-noble,’ declared Fandorin, who could not have savoured the Japanese secrets even if he had felt any desire to do so. ‘But what are these signs? They don’t look like hieroglyphs.’

He pointed to a sheet of paper lying at the very bottom of the file. Right at the centre there was a circle with a strange squiggle inside it. Lines ran out from the circle, connecting it with other, smaller circles.

‘No, those are not hieroglyphs,’ the inspector murmured, peering at the paper. ‘At least, not Japanese hieroglyphs. I have never come across any writing like this before.’

‘It looks like a diagram of the conspiracy,’ Fandorin suggested. ‘And in code too. It would be interesting to know who is symbolised by the c-circle at the centre.’

‘It must be Suga.’

‘Unlikely. He wouldn’t have denoted himself with some kind of doodle. He would just have drawn the circle and left it at that.’

They leaned down over the mysterious diagram, with their shoulders pressed against each other. Asagawa must have breathed in a lot of dust, because he sneezed, and the sound echoed loudly under the low vaulted ceiling.

‘You’re crazy!’ Fandorin hissed. ‘Quiet!’

The Japanese waved his hand nonchalantly and answered without lowering his voice.

‘What does it matter? We no longer have to hide. As soon as we’ve destroyed the unnecessary documents, I’ll call the duty officer and explain that …’

But he didn’t finish what he was about to say.

Without the slightest warning, the secret door slammed shut with that familiar metallic clang. The wall trembled slightly and the room was suddenly as silent as the grave.

Erast Petrovich’s first reaction was purely nervous – he glanced at his watch. It showed eighteen minutes past two.

If it is eighteen
Or nineteen minutes past two –
What’s the difference?

THE SCALES FALL FROM HIS EYES

For a few minutes the burglars who had fallen into a trap behaved in a perfectly normal and predictable way – they hammered on the impervious partition with their fists, tried to find a joint in the wall with their fingers and searched for some kind of knob or lever. Then Erast Petrovich left all the fussing about to his partner and sat down on the floor with his legs crossed.

‘It’s p-pointless,’ he said in a steady voice. ‘There isn’t any lever in here.’

‘But the door closed somehow! No one came into the office, we would have heard them – I closed the catch!’

Erast Petrovich explained.

‘A timing mechanism. Set to twenty minutes. I’ve read about doors like this. They use them in large bank safes and armoured repositories – where the loot can’t be carried out very quickly. Only the owner knows how much time he has before the spring is activated, but anyone who breaks in gets caught. Calm down, Asagawa. We’re not going to get out of here.’

The inspector sat down as well, right in the corner.

‘Never mind,’ he said cheerfully. ‘We’ll sit here until the morning, then let them arrest us. We have something to show the authorities.’

‘No one will arrest us. In the morning Suga will come to work and from the disorder in the office, he’ll realise that he’s had uninvited visitors. From the chair under the crucifixion, he’ll realise that there are mice in the trap. And he’ll leave us here to die of thirst. I must admit, I’ve always been afraid of dying that way …’

The words were spoken, however, without any particular feeling. The poisoning of heart and brain had evidently already affected the instinct of self-preservation. So be it, then, thirst it is, Erast Petrovich thought languidly. What difference does it make, in the end?

Fatalism is an infectious thing. Asagawa looked at the waning flame in his lamp and said thoughtfully:

‘Don’t worry. We won’t have time to die of thirst. We’ll suffocate before Suga arrives. There’s only enough air here for four hours.’

For a while they sat there without speaking, each of them alone with his own thoughts. Erast Petrovich, for instance, thought about something rather strange. It suddenly occurred to him that perhaps none of this really existed at all. The events of the last ten days had been too incredible, and he himself had behaved too absurdly – it was all delirious nonsense. Either a lingering dream or the monstrous visions of the afterlife. After all, no one really knew what happened to a person’s soul when it separated from the body. What if there were phantom-like processes that occurred, similar to dreaming? None of it had really happened: not the chase after the faceless assassin, or the pavilion at night beside the pond. In reality, Erast Petrovich’s life had been cut short at the moment when the grey and brown
mamusi
fixed its beady stare on his face while he was lying helpless. Or even earlier – when he walked into his bedroom and saw the old Japanese man smiling …

Nonsense, the titular counsellor told himself with a shudder.

Asagawa shuddered too – his thoughts had clearly also taken a wrong turning.

‘There’s no point in just sitting here,’ said the inspector, getting up. ‘We still have our duty to perform.’

‘But what can we do?’

‘Tear out Suga’s sting. Destroy the archive.’

Asagawa took several files down off the shelves, carried them into his corner and started tearing the sheets of paper into tiny little scraps.

‘It would be better to burn them, of course, but there isn’t enough oxygen,’ he murmured absentmindedly.

The titular counsellor carried on sitting for a little while, then got up to help. He took a file and handed it to Asagawa, who continued his work of methodical destruction. The paper ripped with a sharp sound and the heap of rubbish in the corner gradually grew higher.

It was getting stuffy. Fine drops of sweat sprang out on the vice-consul’s forehead.

‘I don’t like dying of suffocation,’ he said. ‘Better a bullet through the temple.’

‘Yes?’ Asagawa said thoughtfully. ‘I think I’d rather suffocate. Shooting yourself is not the Japanese way. It’s noisy, and it gives you no chance to feel yourself dying …’