The Winter Queen (22 page)

“I expect it would be best to shoot her after all,” Zurov said thoughtfully in reply to that. “Good-bye, Erasmus. God willing, we’ll meet again.”

AFTER THE SHOCKS and upheavals of the night, for all its intensity Erast Fandorin’s day turned out strangely disjointed, as if it were composed of separate fragments poorly connected with one another. It seemed as if Fandorin was thinking and taking meaningful decisions, even putting them into action, and yet all of this was taking place in isolation, outside the general scenario. The last day of June was preserved in our hero’s memory as a sequence of vivid isolated pictures suspended against an empty void.

MORNING ON THE BANKS of the Thames in the dockland district. The weather is calm and sunny, the air fresh after the thunderstorm. Erast Fandorin sits on the tin roof of a squat warehouse, clad only in his undergarments. Laid out beside him are his wet clothes and his boots. The top of one of the boots is torn. His open passport and banknotes are drying in the sun. The thoughts of the escapee from a watery grave grow confused and wander but always return to the main channel.

They think that I’m dead, but I’m alive—that’s one. They think that nobody else knows about them, but I know—that’s two. The attaché case is lost—that’s three. Nobody will believe me—that’s four. They’ll put me in a madhouse—that’s five
…

No, from the beginning. They don’t know that I am alive—that’s one. They’re no longer looking for me—that’s two. It will take time for them to miss Pyzhov—that’s three. Now I can pay a visit to the embassy and send a coded message to the chief—that’s four
…

No, I can’t go to the embassy. What if Pyzhov is not the only Judas there? Amalia will find out and then everything will start all over again. I must not tell anyone at all about this whole business. Except the chief. And a telegram is no good for that. He’ll think Fandorin’s impressions of Europe have driven him crazy. Shall I send a letter to Moscow? I could do that, but it will get there too late.

What shall I do? What shall I do?

Today is the last day of June by the local calendar. Today Amalia will draw a line under the bookkeeping for June and the envelope will go off to Nicholas Croog in St. Petersburg. The first to die will be the full state counselor, a distinguished man, with children. He is there somewhere in St. Petersburg’, they will find him and dispose of him in a moment. It is rather stupid of them to write from St. Petersburg to London in order to get an answer back to St. Petersburg. One of the penalties of conspiratorial secrecy. Obviously the branches of the secret organisation do not know where the head quarters is located. Or perhaps the headquarters shifts from country to country? Today it is in St. Petersburg, but in a month’s time it will be somewhere else? Or perhaps there is no HQ, just a single individual? Who, Croog? That would be too simple, but Croog has to be arrested with the envelope.

How can I stop that envelope?

I can’t. It’s impossible.

Stop! I can’t stop it, but I can overtake it! How many days does the post take to reach St. Petersburg?

THE NEXT ACT is played out a few hours later, in the office of the East Central postal district of the City of London. The director is feeling flattered—Fandorin has introduced himself as a Russian prince—and he calls his visitor ‘Prince’ and ‘Your Highness,’ enunciating the title with undisguised relish. Erast Fandorin is wearing an elegant morning coat and carrying a cane, an accessory without which any real prince is quite inconceivable.

“I very much regret, Prince, that your wager will be lost,” the postal director explains for the third time to the slow-witted Russian. “Your country is a member of the International Postal Union which was founded the year before last, uniting twenty-two states with a total population of more than three hundred and fifty million. Standard regulations and rates are in effect across this entire area. If the letter was sent from London today, the thirtieth of June, for urgent delivery, then you cannot overtake it—in exactly six days’ time, on the morning of the sixth of July, it will arrive at the post office in St. Petersburg. Well, not on the sixth, of course, but whatever the date would be by your calendar.”

“Why will it be there, but I won’t?” the ‘prince’ asks, failing entirely to grasp the situation.

The director explains with an air of grave seriousness. “You see, Your Highness, packages with an ‘urgent’ stamp are delivered without a single minute of delay. Let us suppose that you board the same train at Waterloo station on which an urgent letter has been dispatched. You board the same ferry at Dover. And you also arrive at the Gare du Nord in Paris at the same time.”

“Then what is the problem?”

“The problem,” the director says triumphantly, “is that there is nothing faster than the urgent post! You have arrived in Paris, and you have to change to a train going to Berlin. You have to buy a ticket—since, after all, you have not booked one in advance. You have to find a cab and travel all the way across the city center to a different station. You have to wait for the Berlin train, which departs once a day. Now, let us return to our urgent letter. From the Gare du Nord it travels by special postal handcar around the circular railway line and is delivered to the first train traveling in an easterly direction. It may not even be a passenger train but a freight train with a postal wagon.”

“But then I can do the very same!” Erast Fandorin exclaims excitedly.

The reply of the patriot of the postal service is strict. “Perhaps in Russia such a thing might be feasible, but not in Europe. Hmm, let us suppose it is possible to suborn a Frenchman, but at your change of trains in Berlin all your efforts will come to nothing—the postal and railway workers in Germany are famous for their incorruptibility.”

“Can everything really be lost?” the despairing Erast Fandorin exclaims in Russian.

“I beg your pardon?”

“So you believe that I have lost my wager?” the ‘prince’ asks dejectedly, switching back into English.

“At what time was the letter sent? But it really doesn’t matter. Even if you dash straight to the station from here, it is already too late.”

The Englishman’s words produce a quite magical effect on the Russian aristocrat.

“At what time? Why, of course! Today is still June! Morbid will not collect the letters until ten o’clock. While she is copying them out…and encoding them! She can’t send them just like that, in plain Russian! She will definitely encode them—but of course! And that means that the envelope will only go off tomorrow! And it will arrive not on the sixth, but on the seventh! On the twenty-fifth of June by our calendar!”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand a thing, Prince,” says the director, gesturing helplessly with his hands, but Fandorin is no longer in the office. The door has just closed behind him.

A plaintive voice calls after him. “Your Highness, your cane! Oh my, these Russian boyars!”

AND FINALLY, the evening of this arduous day that seems to have been shrouded in fog but has seen such important developments: The waters of the English Channel. The final sunset of June flaunting its outrageous colors above the sea. The ferry
The Duke of Gloucester
holding course for Dunkirk, with Fandorin posed at the prow like a true Briton, in a cloth cap, checked suit, and Scottish cape. He gazes fixedly ahead, toward the shore of France that is approaching with such agonizing slowness. Not once does Erast Fandorin glance back toward the white cliffs of Dover.

His lips whisper, “Only let her wait until tomorrow to send it. Only let her wait…”

which narrates events that transpired on the twenty-fifth of June

THE LUSH SUNSHINE OF SUMMER PAINTED golden squares on the floor of the operations hall of the Central Post Office in St. Petersburg. As evening drew near, one of them, elongated by this time into an irregular oblong, reached the poste restante window and instantly warmed the counter. The atmosphere became stifling and soporific. A fly droned drowsily, and the attendant sitting at the window was overcome by sudden fatigue—thank goodness his stream of customers was gradually drying up at last. Another half hour and the doors of the post office would be closed; then all he would have to do was hand in his register and he could go home. The attendant—but let us give him his own name, he was Kondratii Kondratievich Shtukin, who in seventeen years of service in the postal department had risen from simple postman to the glorious heights of a formal state rank—Kondratii Shtukin handed over a package from Revel to an elderly Finnish woman with the amusing name of Pyrvu and looked to see whether the Englishman was still sitting there.

The Englishman was still sitting there—he had not gone away. There was an obstinate nation for you now. The Englishman had appeared early in the morning, when the post office had barely even opened, and having seated himself beside the partition with his newspaper, had sat there the whole day long, without eating or drinking or even, begging your pardon, leaving his post to do the necessary. As if he were rooted to the spot. Clearly someone must have made an appointment to meet him and failed to keep it. That happens often enough around here, but for a Briton it would be incomprehensible. They’re such a disciplined people, so punctual. Whenever anyone, especially anyone of a foreign appearance, approached the window, the Englishman would draw himself up in eager anticipation and even shift his blue spectacles to the very tip of his nose. But so far none of them had been the one
he
was expecting. A Russian, now, would have given way to indignation long ago, thrown his hands up in the air, and begun complaining loudly to everyone in earshot; but this fellow just stuck his nose into his
Times
and carried on sitting there.

Or perhaps the fellow had nowhere to go. Came here straight from the railway station—look at that checked traveling suit he had on, and the traveling bag—thinking he would be met, but he hadn’t been. What else could he do? When he came back from lunch, Kondratii Shtukin had taken pity on the son of Albion and sent the doorman Trifon across to ask whether there was anything he needed, but the gentleman in checks had only shaken his head irritably and handed Trifon twenty kopecks, as much as to say: leave me alone. Well, have it your own way.

A little shrimp of a man who had the look of a cabdriver appeared at the window and pushed across a crumpled passport.

“Take a look, would you, dear chap. See if there’s anything for Nikola Mitrofanich Krug.”

“Where are you expecting it from?” Kondratii Shtukin asked strictly, taking the passport.

The reply was unexpected. “From England, from London.”

The remarkable thing was that a letter from London was found—only not under the Russian letter
K
, but the Latin letter
C
. Look at that now, “Mr. Nicholas M. Croog,” if you don’t mind! The things you do see at the poste restante counter!

“But is that definitely you?” Shtukin asked, more out of curiosity than suspicion.

“Not a doubt about it,” the cabdriver replied rather rudely, thrusting his clawlike hand in through the window and snatching up the yellow envelope with the ‘urgent’ stamp.

Kondratii Shtukin handed him the register. “Are you able to sign for it?”

“As well as anyone else.” And the boor entered some kind of scrawl in the ‘received’ column.

Shtukin followed the departure of this unpleasant customer with a wrathful eye, then cast his now customary sideways glance at the Englishman, but he had disappeared. He must have finally despaired of his appointment.

ERAST FANDORIN WAITED OUTSIDE for the cabdriver with a sinking heart. So that was ‘Nicholas Croog’! The further he pursued it, the more confusing this whole business became. But the most important thing was that his six-day tactical forced march across Europe had not been in vain! He had overtaken the letter and intercepted it. Now he would have something of substance to present to his chief. But he must not let this Krug get away from him!

The cabby hired by Fandorin for the entire day was dawdling away the time beside a stone post. He was feeling dazed by the imposed idleness and tormented by the thought that he had asked the strange gentleman for only five rubles—for this kind of excruciating torture he should have demanded six. When his fare finally reappeared, the cabby drew himself up straight and tightened his reins, but Erast Fandorin did not even glance in his direction.

The mark appeared. He walked down the steps, donned a blue peaked cap, and set off toward a carriage standing nearby. Fandorin unhurriedly set off in pursuit. The mark halted by the carriage, doffed his cap, and bowed, then held out the yellow envelope. A man’s hand in a white glove emerged from the window and took the envelope.

Fandorin increased his pace in an attempt to catch a glimpse of the unknown man’s face. He succeeded.

Sitting in the carriage and inspecting the wax seals against the light was a ginger-haired gentleman with piercing green eyes and a pale face with a profuse scattering of freckles. Fandorin recognized him immediately: but of course—Mr. Gerald Cunningham as large as life, the brilliant pedagogue, friend of orphans, and right-hand man of Lady Astair.

The cabby’s sufferings proved to have been all in vain. It would not be difficult to ascertain Mr. Cunningham’s address. In the meantime there was more urgent business that required attention.

Kondratii Shtukin was in for a surprise: the Englishman came back, and now he was in a terrible hurry. He ran over to the telegram reception counter, stuck his head right in through the window, and began dictating something very urgent to Mikhal Nikolaich. And Mikhal Nikolaich began fussing and bustling about and hurrying, which was really not like him at all.

Shtukin was stung by curiosity. He got to his feet—fortunately there were no customers waiting—and as if he were simply taking a stroll, he set out in the direction of the telegraph apparatus at the far side of the hall. Halting beside Mikhal Nikolaich, who was working away intently with his key, he bent over a little and read the hastily scribbled message: