The Diamond Chariot (71 page)

As he pulled on his trousers and shoes, he jigged and twirled around, jabbering away without a pause – the vice-consul had to tell him to be quiet.

Fandorin led his disorderly companion out of the building by the elbow. To be on the safe side, he kept his other hand in his pocket, on the butt of his Herstal, but he didn’t take the gun out, in order not to frighten the prince.

It was drizzling and there was a smell of fog. As the fresh air started bringing Onokoji to his senses, he glanced round at the empty promenade and asked:

‘Where are you taking me?’

‘To a safer place,’ the titular counsellor explained, and Onokoji immediately calmed down.

‘I heard a woman’s voice in your apartment,’ he said in a sly voice. ‘And that voice sounded very familiar. Ve-ry, ve-ry familiar.’

‘That’s none of your business.’

It was a long walk to the thirty-seventh pier, long enough for the effect of the dope to wear off. The witness stopped jabbering and looked around nervously more and more often, but he didn’t ask any more questions. He must have been feeling cold – his shoulders were trembling slightly. Or perhaps the trembling was the result of the drug?

This looked like the place. Fandorin saw the number ‘37’ daubed in white paint on a low
godaun
. A long pier stretched out from the shore into the sea, its beginning lit up by a street lamp, and its far end lost in darkness. Set along it were the black silhouettes of boats, with their mooring cables creaking.

The wooden boards rumbled hollowly under their feet and water splashed somewhere down below. The darkness was not completely impenetrable, for the sky had already begun turning grey in anticipation of dawn.

Eventually the end of the pier came into sight. There was a mast jutting up from a large boat, and Inspector Asagawa in his police uniform, sitting on a bollard: they could see his cap and broad cloak with a hood.

Relieved, Erast Petrovich let go of his companion’s elbow and waved to the inspector.

Asagawa waved back. They were only about twenty steps away from the boat now.

Strange, the titular counsellor suddenly thought, why didn’t he get up to greet us?

‘Stop,’ Fandorin said to the prince, and he stopped walking himself.

The seated man got up then, and he turned out to be a lot shorter than Asagawa. Has he sent another policeman instead of coming himself? Erast Petrovich wondered, but his hand was already pulling the revolver out of his pocket: God takes care of those who take care of themselves.

What happened next was quite incredible.

The policeman whipped the cap off his head, dropped the cloak – and
he disappeared
. There was no one under the cloak, just blackness!

The prince cried out in a shrill voice, and even Fandorin was seized by mystical horror. But the next moment the darkness stirred and they saw a figure in black, approaching them rapidly.

A ninja!

With a plaintive howl, Onokoji turned and took to his heels, and the vice-consul flung up his Herstal and fired.

The black figure was not running in a straight line, but in zigzags, squatting down or jumping up as it went, and performing all these manoeuvres with unbelievable speed – too fast for Fandorin to follow it with the barrel of his gun.

A second shot, a third, a fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh. Could every shot really have missed the target? The distance was only fifteen, ten, five paces!

When he was at close quarters with Erast Petrovich, the invisible man leapt high into the air and kicked the Herstal (now entirely useless anyway) out of Fandorin’s hand. The revolver rattled across the wooden decking and there, right in front of his face, the vice-consul saw two slanting eyes, like two blazing coals, in the slits of a black mask.

Once seen, those eyes could never be forgotten.

It was him! Him! The snake-charmer, the man with no face! He was alive!

The titular counsellor simply couldn’t understand how this was possible; in fact he couldn’t understand anything at all any more, but he was determined to sell his life dearly.

He assumed a combat pose, just as he had done with Suga and – hoorah! – succeeded in parrying the first kick with his elbow. Now, according to the science of jujitsu, he should build on his success by moving on to the attack. Erast Petrovich lunged (in a way more suited to boxing), but missed his opponent, who ducked under the fist and straightened up again like a spring, and then Fandorin’s feet parted company with the pier. The titular counsellor flew, tumbling over and over in the air, and for as long as this flight lasted, he thought of nothing. And he didn’t think at all after he struck his head against the edge of the pier: he saw a flash, heard an extremely unpleasant crunch, and that was all.

But the cold water in which the body of the vanquished vice-consul landed with a loud splash brought him round again. And his first thought (even before he surfaced) was: Why didn’t he kill me? Bullcox must have ordered me to be killed!

Blood was streaming down his face, and there was a ringing sound in his ears, but Erast Petrovich was determined not to lose consciousness. He grabbed hold of a slippery beam, clutched at a transverse pile, hauled himself up and managed to scramble on to the pier.

A second thought forced its way through the noise and the fiery circles in front of his eyes. What about the prince? Had he managed to escape? He had had enough time. And if he had escaped, where could the titular counsellor search for him now?

But there was no need to search for the prince. Erast Petrovich realised that when he saw a dark heap lying under the only street lamp in the distance – as if someone had dumped a pile of old rags there.

Fandorin staggered along the pier with his fingers over his bleeding wound. He wasn’t thinking about the invisible man, because he knew for certain that if the ninja had wanted to kill him, he would have done.

The high-society playboy was lying face down. A glittering steel star had bitten deep into his neck just above the collar. The titular counsellor pulled it out with his finger and thumb, and blood immediately started seeping from the wound. A throwing weapon, the vice-consul guessed, carefully touching the sharpened edges of the small star. And it appeared to be smeared with something.

Once again he was astounded. Why had the invisible man taken the risk of dodging the bullets? All he had to do was fling this thing and it would have been all over.

He leaned down (the sharp movement set everything around him swaying) and turned the dead man over on to his back.

And he saw that Onokoji was still alive.

There was horror dancing in the open eyes and the trembling lips fumbling at the air.

‘
Nan jya? Nan jya?
,’ the dying man babbled. (‘What happened? What happened?’)

He must not have realised yet what disaster had overtaken him. He had been running for grim death, at full tilt, he couldn’t see anything around him, and suddenly – a blow to the back of his neck …

‘It was a ninja. Bullcox sent him,’ said Fandorin, fighting his dizziness. ‘I’ll take you to a doctor. To Dr Twigs.’

But it was obvious that no doctor could help the prince now, his eyes were already rolling up and back.

Suddenly he wrinkled up his face, gathered all his strength and said, slowly but clearly:

‘Not Bullcox … Don …’

‘What?’

‘Don … Tsurumaki.’

That was all. His jaw shuddered and dropped open. Only the whites of his eyes were visible under his half-open eyelids.

The name throbbed in the titular counsellor’s bruised head, like the rhythm of a tolling bell: Don-Don-Don …

This is how life sounds
Ding-ding, tingaling, cuckoo,
Ending with: dong, dong

A HEADACHE

Fandorin thought he had just lain down on the planking for half an hour to wait for the spell of severe dizziness to pass off, but when he opened his eyes again he discovered that he was in his own bedroom, lying on the bed, completely naked under the blanket, with two heads leaning down over him: both had narrow eyes, but one was round, with hair cut in a short, stiff brush, and the other was long and narrow, with a neat parting. It was Masa and Shirota, both gazing at the titular counsellor with expressions of intense anxiety.

‘What … happened … to me?’ asked Erast Petrovich, struggling to force his dry tongue to pronounce the words.

This simple question provoked an entire discussion in Japanese, after which the two men nodded to each other as if they had come to some arrangement, and the secretary began cautiously:

‘At dawn Miss O-Yumi shook your servant awake and told him: “The master is in trouble, I can feel it, let’s go, quickly”. She ran along the seafront towards the cargo wharfs, with Masahiro following her. He says that as she ran, she kept looking at the moorings. At one of the farthest, already in the native town, she found you lying unconscious, covered in blood.’

Fandorin looked at Masa, who narrowed his eyes conspiratorially. Aha, thought Erast Petrovich, they didn’t tell Shirota there was a dead body lying beside me. That’s good. But how did O-Yumi know that I was in trouble? And how did she guess that she should look for me on the seafront? What an amazing woman. Where is she?

He looked around, but she wasn’t in the room.

‘Miss O-Yumi did something – apparently she pressed on some vein – and the bleeding stopped. Then she tore a strip off her dress and bandaged you up. She ordered your servant to carry you home, but she did not come back here. She said that an in fusion of some mountain plant was needed urgently – Masahiro did not remember the name. She told him that if you did not drink this infusion, the blood in your head would dry up and become a little stone, and after a while his master could die. Your servant carried you as far as the boundary of the Settlement, and there he was fortunate enough to meet an early riksha … And this morning the consul ran into your apartment and saw you lying here unconscious with a bandage on your head. He shouted at your servant, called me and sent for the doctor. I went to Mr Twigs, knowing that he is your friend … And the consul left for Tokyo urgently, to go to the embassy …’

So many things in this story were unclear, but Fandorin was struck most forcibly of all by Vsevolod Vitalievich’s strange behaviour.

‘He came running in?’

The punctilious Doronin bursting into his assistant’s apartment first thing in the morning? Something really extraordinary must have happened for him to do that.

Shirota faltered and did not answer.

‘And what did Dr Twigs say?’

The two Japanese exchanged glances again. And once again there was no answer.

Masa said something in an anxious voice and the secretary translated it.

‘You need to lie down and change your compress every hour and you must not worry. Dr Albertini says you have a very serious concussion.’

‘Why Albertini and n-not Twigs?’

Another animated discussion in Japanese, this time without any translation.

Erast Petrovich’s head really was aching terribly, and he felt nauseous, but all this mystery was beginning to get on his nerves.

Damn the doctors and the consul. There was more important business to deal with.

‘
Masa, Asagawa-san koko, hayaku!
’
¹
the titular counsellor ordered.

The servant batted his eyelids and gave Shirota a frightened glance. The secretary cleared his throat in warning.

Erast Petrovich’s heart started pounding, beating faster and faster with every second. He jerked upright on the bed and bit his lip to stop himself crying out from the pain.

‘Masa, I must get dressed!’

Fandorin returned to the consulate after two in the morning, shattered by the scale of the catastrophe. He would probably have been even more shaken if not for the constant dizziness and spasms of pain that repeatedly transfixed his cranium from temple to temple, imparting an air of unreality to everything that happened, as if it were some appalling nightmare. The horror of it all made it too far-fetched to believe. Things like that didn’t happen in waking life.

Inspector Asagawa had been killed by hooligans. And, if the Japanese police could be believed, purely by chance, in a pointless, drunken brawl.

Sergeant Lockston had died of a heart attack in his office.

And an autopsy had shown that a blood vessel had burst in Dr Twigs’ brain.

All of this was already highly unlikely, but a coincidence of chance events was possible, in theory – if not for that invisible man, who had killed the witness, and the disappearance of the three clues.

The coded diagram had disappeared from the doctor’s study. No oaths written in blood had been discovered on the sergeant’s body. And the police knew nothing about any file of reports supposedly in the inspector’s possession.

As soon as Fandorin tried to fathom the meaning of this monstrous sequence of events, his dizziness intensified and he was swamped by a wave of nausea. And he simply didn’t have the strength to digest and extrapolate on the ‘Don Tsurumaki’ clue.

But the vice-consul was tormented most of all by O-Yumi’s disappearance. Where was she? Would she come back? What was this damned business about a mountain herb?

Gibberish. Insane, crazy gibberish.

Just as Fandorin was approaching the consulate, a two-seater
kuruma
drove up from the direction of Main Street, and out got Doronin, with the navy agent Bukhartsev (what the hell was he doing here?). They spotted the vice-consul walking towards them and stared at him dourly.

‘Here he is, the hero,’ the lieutenant captain said loudly to Vsevolod Vitalievich. ‘You told me he was almost at death’s door, but now see how chirpy he looks. If I’d only known, I wouldn’t have come, I’d have ordered him to report to Tokyo.’

This beginning boded nothing good, but then, how could there possibly be anything good in all this?

Doronin looked hard into his assistant’s face, which was as white as if it had been dusted with chalk.

‘How are you feeling? Why did you get up?’