Erast Fandorin 04 - The Death of Achilles

by Boris Akunin

  “Nothing! I swear!” She dashed across to a little cupboard and took something out of it. “Here is the bottle that Knabe gave me. See, it’s still full. I don’t play other people’s games.”

  The tears were streaming down her face, but there was no entreaty in the gaze that she turned on him, and certainly no trace of hysteria. She hadn’t folded her cards, even though the situation she was in was truly desperate: caught between the Russian police, German intelligence, and Achimas Welde, who would be worse than any police force and intelligence service combined. But then, she knew nothing about that. He glanced at the tense expression on her face. Or did she?

  Achimas shook the bottle, examined its color, sniffed the cork. Apparently crude cyanide.

  “Mademoiselle, do not try to hide anything from me. How long have you been connected with German intelligence? What instructions did Knabe give you?”

  A rather peculiar change came over Wanda. She stopped trembling, her tears dried up, and a strange expression appeared in her eyes, an expression that Achimas had seen once before — the previous evening, when she had asked him if he regretted giving her away to someone else.

  She moved closer and sat on the arm of his chair, then put her hand on his shoulder. She spoke in a voice that was quiet and tired.

  “Of course, Kolya. I’ll tell you everything. I won’t try to hide anything. Knabe is a German spy. He has been coming to me for three years now. I was a fool when it all started; I wanted to get my money as quickly as possible, and he paid very well. Not for love — for information. All sorts of men come to see me, most of them big shots of one kind or another. Some of them are from the very top. Like your Sobolev. And men like to let loose their tongues in bed.” She ran a finger across his cheek. “Someone like you probably wouldn’t. But there aren’t many like you. Do you really think I earned that fifty thousand in my bed? No, my dear, I’m too choosy. I have to like a man. Sometimes, of course, Knabe would deliberately offer me to someone. The way you did with Sobolev. I tried to resist, but I was locked far too tightly in his vice. At first he sang me a sweet song: What are you doing living here in Russia, fraulein, you’re German, you have a homeland of your own. Germany will not forget the services you have rendered; honor and safety await you there. Here you will always be a courtesan, but in Germany no one will ever find out about your past. The moment you wish it, we will help you to settle down comfortably, with honor. But later he changed his tune and kept telling me how long his reach was, that German citizenship had to be earned. I don’t want their damned citizenship, but there was nothing I could do. He tightened his noose around my throat. He could even kill me. Without the slightest problem. As an example to the others. He has plenty more like me.” Wanda shivered, but then she shook her luxuriant hair almost lightheartedly. “The day before yesterday, when Knabe heard about Sobolev — like a fool I told him myself, I wanted to get into his good books — he almost nagged me to death. He started saying that Sobolev was Germany’s sworn enemy and muttering about a conspiracy in the army. He said that if Sobolev were not eliminated, there would be a great war, and Germany was not yet ready. “I’ve been racking my brain,” he said, “wondering how to stop this Scythian, and now I have this stroke of luck! It’s providential!” He brought me the bottle of poison. He promised me mountains of gold, but I wasn’t interested. Then he started threatening me. He was like a madman. I decided not to argue with him and promised to do it. But I didn’t give Sobolev the poison, honestly. He just died; it was his heart. Believe me, Kolya. I may be a despicable, cynical fallen woman, but I’m not a murderer.”

  There was a hint of entreaty in her green eyes now, but still not a trace of hysterics. A proud woman. But even so, she couldn’t be allowed to live. A pity.

  Achimas sighed and placed his right hand on her exposed neck. His thumb was on her artery, his middle ringer on her fourth vertebra, just below the base of the skull. He only needed to squeeze, and the light in those eyes looking down at him so trustingly would fade and die.

  And then something unexpected happened. Wanda put her arm around Achimas’s neck, pulled him closer, and pressed her hot cheek against his forehead.

  “Is it you?” she whispered. “Is it you I’ve been waiting for all this time?”

  Achimas looked at her white, delicate skin. Something strange was happening to him.

  * * *

  TWELVE

  When he left at dawn, Wanda was sleeping soundly with her mouth half-open like a child.

  Achimas stood looking down at her for a moment, feeling a bizarre sensation stirring in the left side of his chest. Then he went out quietly.

  She won’t tell anyone, he thought as he came out onto Petrovka Street. If she hadn’t told Fandorin yesterday, why would she tell today? There was no reason to kill her.

  But in his heart he felt uneasy. It was inexcusable to confuse business with personal matters. He would never have allowed himself to do it before.

  “What about Evgenia?” asked a voice that came from the same spot where he could feel that alarming stirring. The time had obviously come for him to retire.

  What happened the night before would never be repeated. No more contact with Wanda.

  Who could link the merchant Klonov, resident until the previous day at the Metropole, with the singer from the Alpine Rose? No one. Except perhaps the koelner Timofei. It was unlikely, but he had better not take the risk. It would tidy things up and not take up too much of his time.

  The voice whispered: “The koelner will die so that Wanda can live.”

  Never mind; that was all right. Things hadn’t gone so well with Knabe, however. Fandorin was almost certain to have run into the German agent as he was on his way out from Wanda’s suite yesterday evening and, being a meticulous and quick-witted detective, he was bound to have made inquiries about her visitor. It was also only reasonable to assume that the true nature of Herr Knabe ‘s activities was well known to the Russian authorities. A senior intelligence agent was a rather conspicuous individual.

  He discerned the possibility of an excellent maneuver that would divert the investigation into a safe channel.

  “And Wanda will be free of her noose,” the perspicacious voice added pitilessly.

  Achimas set up his observation post in the attic opposite Knabe’s house. It was a convenient position offering a good view of the windows on the third floor, where the German agent lived.

  Fortunately it turned out to be a hot day. Of course, the roof above the attic was scorching hot by eight o’clock and it was stifling up there, but Achimas was never bothered by minor inconveniences and the heat meant that Knabe’s windows were standing wide open.

  He could see quite clearly what was happening in every single room of the German agent’s flat: He saw him shave in front of the mirror, drink his coffee, and leaf through the newspapers, marking some places in them with a pencil. If the cheerful way he moved and the expression on his face were anything to go by (Achimas was conducting his observation through binoculars with a magnification factor of twelve), Mr. Knabe was in an excellent mood.

  Sometime after ten he emerged from the entrance to the building and strode off in the direction of Petrovsky Square. Achimas fell in behind him. From his appearance he could have been taken for an office clerk or a shop assistant: a cap with a cracked lacquer peak, a good-quality long-skirted frock coat, and a little gray goatee.

  Knabe walked on, waving his arm energetically, and in a quarter of an hour he had reached the central post office. Inside the building Achimas reduced the distance between them, and when the German agent walked over to the telegraph window, he stood behind him.

  Knabe said a cheery hello to the counter clerk, who had obviously taken telegrams from him before, and handed him a sheet of paper.

  “As always, to Kerbel und Schmidt in Berlin. Stock quotations. But please,” he added with a smile, “if you would be so kind, Panataleimon Kuzmich, don’t give it to Serdiuk like the last time. He confuse
d two figures and it caused me great unpleasantness with my superiors afterward. Please, as a friend, give it to Semenov; let him send it.”

  “All right, Ivan Egorich,” the counter clerk replied in an equally merry voice. “So be it.”

  “There should be a reply for me soon; I’ll come back,” said Knabe, and with a fleeting glance at Achimas’s face, he set off toward the door.

  The German agent was moving at an unhurried pace now, strolling along. He whistled a frivolous little tune as he walked along the pavement. Just once he checked to see if he was being tailed — no doubt purely out of habit. He didn’t look as if he suspected he was under observation.

  Nonetheless, he was being observed, and rather skillfully. Achimas himself didn’t spot the tail immediately. But the workman on the opposite side of the street was studying the window displays of the expensive shops, where there was clearly nothing that he could afford, much too intently. And the reason was clear: He was following Knabe through his reflection in the glass. And five to ten paces farther back, there was a cabbie barely even trundling along. Someone hailed him and he turned them down, and then the same thing happened again. An interesting kind of cabbie.

  Mr. Fandorin had apparently not wasted any time the evening before.

  Achimas took precautionary measures to avoid becoming too obvious. He turned into an entryway, tugged off his beard in one swift movement, put on a pair of spectacles with plain lenses, dumped his cap, and turned his frock coat inside out. The frock coat had an unusual lining — a state functionary’s uniform coat with the collar tabs removed. A shop assistant went into the entryway and ten seconds later a retired bureaucrat came out.

  Knabe hadn’t moved on very far yet. He stood in front of the mirrored doors of a French pastry shop for a moment and then went in.

  Achimas went in after him.

  The German agent was eating creme brulee ice cream with great gusto, washing it down with seltzer water. A young man with prying eyes, dressed in a summer suit, appeared out of nowhere at the next table. He hid his face behind a fashionable magazine, but every few moments he glanced quickly over the top of its cover. The cabbie he ‘d noticed previously halted on the pavement outside. The workman, though, had disappeared. They were really giving Herr Knabe the full treatment. But that was all right, in fact it was helpful. Just as long as they didn’t arrest him. But all the signs indicated that they wouldn’t — what point would there be in tailing him, then? They wanted to identify his contacts. But Herr Knabe didn’t have any contacts, or he wouldn’t be communicating with Berlin by telegram.

  The German spy sat in the pastry shop for a long time. After his ice cream, he ate a marzipan cake, drank a hot chocolate, and then ordered a tutti-frutti. His appetite was prodigious. The young sleuth was replaced by another, somewhat older. The first cabbie’s place at the pavement was taken by a different one, who was equally stubborn in refusing to accept any fares.

  Achimas decided that he had exposed himself to the eyes of the police for long enough and he left the pastry shop first. He took up a position in the post office and set in to wait. Along the way he had changed his social status: He got rid of the frock coat, pulled his shirt out of his trousers and put his belt on top of it, removed his spectacles, and pulled a cloth cap onto his head.

  When Knabe turned up, Achimas was standing right beside the telegraph window and moving his lips intently as he traced out words in a telegram blank with a pencil.

  “Tell me, old fellow,” he said to the attendant, “will it definitely get there tomorrow?”

  “I already told you, it’ll get there today,” the attendant replied patronizingly. “And you keep it short; it’s not a letter, you’ll bankrupt yourself. Ivan Egorich, there’s a telegram for you!”

  Achimas pretended to be glaring angrily at the pink-cheeked German as he stole a glance at the piece of paper thrust out from behind the window.

  A brief text and columns of figures — it looked like stock quotations.

  Their working methods in Berlin were obviously rather crude. They underestimated the Russian gendarmes.

  Knabe gave the telegram a cursory glance and thrust it into his pocket. Naturally, it was in code; now he would be bound to go home and decipher it.

  Achimas broke off his surveillance and returned to the observation point in the attic.

  The German agent was already at home — he must have come back in a cab (could it have been the same one?). He was sitting at the table, leafing through the pages of a book and copying something out onto a sheet of paper.

  Then things began to get interesting. Knabe’s movements became more rapid. He wiped his forehead nervously several times. He flung the book to the floor and clutched his head in his hands. He leapt to his feet and began running around the room. He read through what he had written again.

  Apparently the news he had received wasn’t very pleasant.

  Then things became even more interesting. Knabe dashed away somewhere into the back of his apartment and came back holding a revolver.

  He sat down in front of a mirror. He raised the revolver to his temple three times and stuck the barrel into his mouth once.

  Achimas nodded his head. How very timely. A fairy-tale ending. Go on then, shoot yourself.

  What could have been in that message from Berlin? The answer seemed fairly obvious. The initiative taken by their Moscow agent had not met with approval. To put it mildly. The career of the would-be killer of General Sobolev lay in hopeless ruins.

  No, he didn’t shoot himself. He lowered the hand holding the revolver and began running around the room again. He put the revolver in his pocket. A pity.

  Achimas did not see what happened in the apartment after that, because Knabe closed the windows, and for about three hours all he could do was admire the bright spots of sunlight glittering on the window-panes. Glancing down every now and then at the sleuth loitering in the street, he imagined to himself how his castle would look when it sprang up on the tallest cliff of the island of Santa Croce sometime in the near future. The castle would be reminiscent of the kind of towers that guarded the peace of mountain villages in the Caucasus, but on the flat roof there had to be a garden. The palm trees would have to be planted in tubs, of course, but turf could be laid in, and shrubs.

  Achimas was trying to solve the problem of providing water for his hanging garden when Knabe emerged from the entrance to the building. First the sleuth in the street started fidgeting, then he skipped away from the door and hid around a corner, and a second later the German agent appeared in person. He halted outside the entrance, waiting for something. It soon became clear what it was.

  A single-seater carriage harnessed to a dun horse rolled out of an en-tryway. The groom jumped down from the box and handed the reins to Knabe, who leapt nimbly into the carriage, and the dun set off at a brisk trot.

  This was all quite unexpected. Knabe was escaping surveillance and there was absolutely no possibility of following him. Achimas peered hard through his binoculars just in time to see the spy put on a ginger beard. What idea had he come up with now?

  The sleuth, however, reacted quite calmly. He watched the carriage drive off, jotted something down in his notebook, and walked away. He apparently knew where Knabe had gone and what for.

  Well, since the German agent had taken nothing with him, he was certain to come back again. It was time for Achimas to prepare his operation.

  Five minutes later, Achimas was in the apartment. He took a leisurely look around and found two hiding places. The first contained a small chemical laboratory: invisible ink, poisons, an entire bottle of nitroglycerine (was he planning to blow up the Kremlin, then?). In the other there were several revolvers, some money — about thirty thousand rubles, at a glance — and a book of logarithmic tables, which had to be the key to the code.

  Achimas didn’t touch the contents of the hiding places. The gendarmes could have them. Unfortunately Knabe had burned the decoded telegram — there were
traces of ash in the kitchen sink.

  It was bad that the apartment had no rear entrance. A window in the corridor overlooked the roof of an extension. Achimas climbed out, walked around for a while on the rumbling iron sheeting, and confirmed that the roof was a dead end. The drainpipe was rusted through; you couldn’t climb down it. All right.

  He sat down by the window and prepared himself for a long wait.

  Sometime after nine, when the light of the long summer day had begun to fade, the familiar single-seater carriage came hurtling out from behind a corner. The dun was pushing as hard as it could, scattering thick flakes of lather behind it. Knabe was standing in the carriage and brandishing his whip frantically.

  A chase?

  Apparently not; Achimas couldn’t hear anything.

  Knabe dropped the reins and vanished into the entrance of the building.

  It was time.

  Achimas took up the position he had scouted out in advance, behind the coat stand in the hallway. He was holding a sharp knife taken from the kitchen.

  The apartment was already prepared — everything turned upside down, the contents of the cupboards scattered about, even the eiderdown had been slit open. A crude imitation of a burglary. Mr. Fandorin ought to conclude that Herr Knabe had been eliminated by his own people, who had made a clumsy attempt to fake an ordinary, everyday crime.

  The act itself took only a moment.

  The key scraped in the lock, and Knabe had only run a few steps along the dark corridor before he died without realizing what was happening.

  Achimas looked around carefully to make sure everything was in place and went out to the staircase.

  A door slammed downstairs and he heard voices talking loudly. Someone was running up the stairs. That was bad.

  He backed into the apartment and slammed the door perhaps a bit louder than was necessary.