The Winter Queen (25 page)

Brilling took an identical Herstal out of his left pocket and dropped the smoking Smith & Wesson on the floor at Fandorin’s feet.

“My gun here is fully loaded, as you will learn soon enough,” Ivan Brilling babbled feverishly, becoming more and more agitated with every word. “I shall place it in the hand of the unfortunate Cunningham here, and it will be obvious that you killed each other in an exchange of fire. You will be guaranteed an honorable funeral with heartfelt speeches of farewell. I know that means a lot to you. And stop looking at me like that, you damned greenhorn!”

Fandorin realized with horror that his chief was absolutely crazy, and in a desperate attempt to awaken Brilling’s suddenly clouded reason he shouted, “Chief, it’s me, Fandorin! Ivan Franzevich Brilling! State counselor!”

“
Full
state counselor,” said Brilling with a crooked smile. “You’re behind the times, Fandorin. The emperor’s decree was promulgated on the seventh of June. For a successful operation to disarm the terrorist organization Azazel. So you may address me as Your Excellency.”

Brilling’s dark silhouette against the window looked as if it had been cut out with scissors and pasted on gray paper. Dehind his back the dead branches of the dry elm radiated in all directions, forming a sinister spiderweb. A line from a childish jingle ran through Fandorin’s head: “ “Will you step into my parlor,” said the spider to the fly.”

Brilling’s face suddenly contorted agonizingly, and Fandorin realized that his chief had hardened his heart sufficiently and now he could fire at any moment. Out of nowhere a thought suddenly came to him, shattering instantly into a string of brief thought particles:
the safety catch had to be off, otherwise you couldn’t fire it, that meant half a second or a quarter of a second, not enough time, not nearly enough
…

Erast Fandorin squeezed his eyes tight shut and with a bloodcurdling howl he flung himself forward, aiming his head at his chief’s chin. They were no more than five paces apart. Fandorin did not hear the click of the safety catch, but the shot thundered past him into the ceiling, as Brilling and Fandorin went flying over the windowsill together and tumbled out the window.

Fandorin’s chest collided with the trunk of the dry elm and he went crashing downward, breaking off branches and scraping his face as he fell. The stunning impact when he struck the ground almost made him lose consciousness, but his keen instinct for survival would not allow it. Erast Fandorin raised himself up on all fours, glaring around like a madman.

His chief was nowhere to be seen, but his small black Herstal was lying beside the wall. Fandorin, still on all fours, pounced like a cat, grabbed the gun, and began turning his head in all directions.

But Brilling had disappeared.

Fandorin only thought to look up when he heard the strained, wheezing sound.

Ivan Franzevich Brilling was dangling in the air in an awkward and unnatural position. His polished gaiters were twitching a little above Fandorin’s head. Protruding from just below his Cross of St. Vladimir, where a crimson stain was creeping across his starched white shirt, was the sharp stump of a broken branch that had pierced the newly created general right through. The most terrible thing of all was that the lucid gaze of his eyes was fixed on Erast Fandorin.

“Horrible,” his chief pronounced distinctly, wincing either in pain or disgust. “Horrible…” And then in a hoarse, unrecognizable voice he gasped out: “A-za-zel.”

An icy tremor ran through Fandorin’s body, but Brilling continued gasping for about half a minute before finally falling silent.

As if this were some agreed-on signal, there was a clattering of hooves and clanging of wheels from around the corner. The gendarmes had arrived in their droshkies.

ADJUTANT GENERAL LAVRENTII ARKADIEVICH MIZINOV, head of the Third Section and chief of the corps of gendarmes, rubbed his eyes, which were red with fatigue. The golden aiguillettes on his dress uniform jingled dully. During the last twenty-four hours he had had no chance to change his clothes, let alone to get any sleep. The previous evening a special messenger had dragged General Mizinov away from the ball in honor of the Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich’s name day. And then it had all begun…

The general cast an unfriendly glance at the boy with the disheveled hair and badly scratched nose who was sitting beside him, poring over some papers. He hadn’t slept for two nights and he was still as fresh as a Yaroslavl cucumber. And he acted as if he had been sitting around in high-level offices all his life. Very well, let him work his sorcery. But this Brilling business! It simply defied comprehension!

“Well, Fandorin, will you be long? Or have you been distracted by yet another of your ‘ideas’?” the general asked strictly, feeling that after a sleepless night and an exhausting day he was unlikely to be having any more ideas himself.

“Just a moment, Your Excellency, just a moment,” the young whip-persnapper mumbled. “There are just five entries left. I did warn you that the list might be in code. See what a cunning code it is. They haven’t been able to identify half the letters, and I don’t remember everyone who was in it myself…Aha, this is the postmaster from Denmark, that’s who he is. Right, then, what’s this? The first letter’s not decoded. There’s a cross, and a cross for the second one, too, and the third and the fourth—two
m’s
, then another cross, then an
n
, then a
d
with a question mark, and the last two are missing. That gives us cross cross MM cross ND(?) cross cross.”

“Such gibberish.” General Mizinov sighed. “Brilling would have guessed it in a moment. Are you quite sure it wasn’t just a fit of temporary insanity? It’s impossible even to imagine that…”

“Absolutely sure, Your Excellency,” Erast Fandorin repeated for the umpteenth time. “And I quite distinctly heard him say ‘Azazel.’ Wait! I’ve remembered! Bezhetskaya had some
commander
or other on her list. We must assume this is him.”

“Commander is a rank in the British and American fleets,” Mizinov explained. “It corresponds to our captain second class.” He strode angrily across the room. “Azazel, Azazel, what is this Azazel that has come to plague us? So far we clearly don’t know a single thing about it! Brilling’s Moscow investigation is totally worthless! We must assume it’s all nonsense, invention, lies—including all those terrorists and that attempt on the tsarevich’s life! He’s bound to have tucked away all the loose ends! Palmed us off with a few corpses. Or did he really hand us some nihilist idiots? That would be just like him—he was a very, very capable man…Curses—where can the results of that search have got to? They’ve been rummaging in there for days now!”

The door opened quietly and a glum, skinny face wearing gold-rimmed spectacles was thrust through the crack.

“Captain Belozerov, Your Excellency.”

“At last! Talk of the devil! Send him in.”

A middle-aged officer of the gendarmes, whom Fandorin had seen the previous day at Cunningham’s house, walked into the office, squinting and screwing up his weary eyes.

“We have it, Your Excellency,” he reported in a low voice. “We divided the entire house and the garden into squares and turned everything upside down and went through it all with a fine-tooth comb—not a thing. Then Agent Ailenson, a detective with an excellent nose for a lead, thought of sounding out the walls in the basement of the Astair House. And what do you think, General? We discovered a hidden compartment containing twenty boxes with about two hundred cards in each. The cipher was strange—some kind of hieroglyphs, quite different from the one in the letter. I gave instructions for the boxes to be brought here. I’ve set the entire cryptography section onto it and they’re about to start work.”

“Well done, Belozerov, well done,” said the general in a more generous mood now. “And that man with the nose, recommend him for a decoration. Well, then, let us pay a visit to the cipher room. Come along, Fandorin—it will be interesting for you, too. You can finish up later—there’s no great hurry now.”

They went up two floors and set off quickly along an endless corridor. As they turned a corner they saw an official running toward them, waving his hands in the air.

“Disaster, Your Excellency, disaster! The ink is fading before our very eyes. We can’t understand it!”

Mizinov set off at a trot, which did not at all suit his corpulent figure: the gold tassels on his epaulets fluttered like the wings of a moth. Belozerov and Fandorin disrespectfully overtook their high-ranking superior and were the first to burst in through the tall white doors.

The large room completely filled with tables was in absolute turmoil. About a dozen officials were dashing about, fussing over stacks of neat white cards set out across the tables. Erast Fandorin snatched one up and caught a brief glimpse of barely discernible figures resembling Chinese hieroglyphs. Before his eyes the hieroglyphs disappeared and the card was left absolutely blank.

“What devil’s work is this?” exclaimed the general, panting heavily. “Some kind of invisible ink?”

“I’m afraid it is far worse than that, Your Excellency,” said a gentleman with the appearance of a professor, examining a card against the light. “Captain, didn’t you say the card file was kept in something like a photographic booth?”

“Precisely so, sir,” Belozerov confirmed.

“And can you recall what kind of lighting it had? Perhaps a red lamp?”

“Absolutely right. It was a red electrical lamp.”

“Just as I thought. Alas, General Mizinov, the card archive has been lost to us and cannot be restored.”

“How’s that?” the general exclaimed furiously. “Not good enough, Mister Collegiate Counselor, you must think of something. You’re a master of your trade, a leading light—”

“But not a magician, Your Excellency. The cards were obviously treated with a special solution and it is only possible to work with them in red light. Now the layer to which the characters were applied has been exposed to daylight. Very clever, you must admit. It’s the first time I’ve come across anything of the sort.”

The general knitted his shaggy eyebrows and began snorting menacingly. The room fell silent, with the silence that comes before a storm. But the peal of thunder never came.

“Let’s go, Fandorin,” Mizinov said in a dejected tone. “You have work to finish.”

THE FINAL TWO ENCODED ENTRIES remained undeciphered. They contained information that had arrived on the final day, the thirtieth of June, and Fandorin was unable to identify them. The time had come to sum up the situation.

Striding to and fro across his office, the weary General Mizinov reasoned out loud. “So, let us draw together the little that we do have. There exists a certain international organization with the provisional name of Azazel. To judge from the number of cards, which we shall now never be able to read, it has three thousand eight hundred and fifty-four members. We know something at least about forty-seven of them, or rather forty-five, since two of the entries remained undeciphered. However, that something amounts to no more than their nationality and the positions that they occupy. No name, no age, no address…What else do we know? The names of two dead Azazelians, Cunningham and Brilling. And, in addition, there is Amalia Bezhetskaya in England—if this Zurov of yours has not killed her, if she is still in England, and if that really is her name…Azazel acts aggressively, killing without hesitation. There is clearly some global purpose involved. But what is it? They are not Masons, because I myself am a member of a Masonic lodge, and no ordinary one either. Hmm…Remember, Fandorin, you didn’t hear that.”

Erast Fandorin lowered his eyes meekly.

“It is not the Socialist International,” Mizinov continued, “because the gentlemen communists don’t have the stomach for this kind of business. And Brilling couldn’t possibly have been a revolutionary. It’s out of the question. Whatever he might have got up to in secret, my dear deputy hunted down nihilists with a will, and very successfully. What then does Azazel want? That, after all, is the most important thing! And we have not a single thing to go on. Cunningham is dead. Brilling is dead. Nikolai Krug is a mere functionary, a pawn. That scoundrel Pyzhov is dead. All the leads have been lopped off…” General Mizinov spread his arms in a gesture of indignation. “No, I don’t understand a single thing! I knew Brilling for more than ten years. I was the one who made his career! I discovered him myself. Judge for yourself, Fandorin. When I was governor-general of Kharkov I used to hold all kinds of competitions for students in order to encourage patriotic feelings and the desire for useful reform in the younger generation. I was introduced to a skinny, awkward youth, a final-year gymnasium pupil who had written a very sensible and passionate composition on the subject ‘The Future of Russia.’ Believe me, he had the spirit and the background of a genuine Lomonosov—an orphan with no family or relatives, who had financed his own studies on coppers and then passed the examinations for the seventh year at the grammar school at the first attempt. A genuine natural diamond! I became his patron, sent him to St. Petersburg University, then I gave him a place in my department—and never had cause to regret it. He was my finest assistant, my trusted deputy! He had made a brilliant career—all roads were open to him! Such a brilliant, paradoxical mind, so resourceful, so assiduous! My God, I was even planning to marry my daughter to him!” said the general, clutching his forehead.

Out of respect for the feelings of his high-ranking superior, Erast Fandorin paused tactfully before clearing his throat. “Your Excellency, I was just thinking…Of course, we don’t have many leads, but still we do have something.”

The general shook his head as if he were dispelling unwelcome memories and sat down at the desk. “I’m listening. Tell me what’s on your mind, Fandorin. No one knows this whole business better than you.”

“Well, what I actually wanted to say was…” Erast Fandorin looked at the list, underlining something with a pencil. “There are forty-four men here. Two we were unable to figure out, and the full state counselor—that is, Ivan Brilling—is no longer in the reckoning. At least eight of them can be identified without too much difficulty. Well, just think about it, Your Excellency. How many heads of the emperor of Brazil’s bodyguard can there be? Or number forty-seven F, the head of a government department in Belgium, sent on the eleventh of June, received on the fifteenth. It will be easy enough to determine who he is. That’s two already. The third is number five forty-nine F, a rear admiral in the French fleet, sent on the fifteenth of June, received on the seventeenth. The fourth is number one oh oh seven F, a newly created English baronet, sent on the ninth of June, received on the tenth. The fifth is number six ninety-four F, a Portuguese government minister, sent on the twenty-ninth of May, received on the seventh of June.”