by Boris Akunin
‘Mr Engineer,’ the captain of the train’s crew exclaimed plaintively, ‘we’ve been standing here for over four hours.’
‘And you’ll b-be standing here for a long time yet. I have to draw up a complete list of the passengers. We’ll question all of them and check their credentials. We’ll start from the final carriage. And you, Mylnikov, would do better to turn your attention to that telegraph clerk who disappeared. I can manage things here without you.’
‘Of course, right enough, it’s your move,’ said Mylnikov, and he even waved his arms, as if to say: I’m leaving, I’m not claiming any rights here. However, he didn’t leave.
‘Sir, madam,’ the conductor-in-chief said to the officer and lady in a dejected voice. ‘Please be so good as to return to your seats. Did you hear? They’re going to check your documents.’
‘Disaster, Glyceria Romanovna,’ Rybnikov whispered. ‘I’m done for.’
Lidina gasped as she examined a lace cuff stained with blood, but then jerked her head up sharply.
‘Why? What’s happened?’
In those slightly red and yet still beautiful eyes, Vasilii Alexandrovich read an immediate readiness for action and once again, after all the numerous occasions during the night, he marvelled at the unpredictability of this capital-city cutie.
The way Glyceria Romanovna had behaved during the efforts to save the drowning and wounded had been absolutely astounding: she didn’t sob and wail, or throw a fit of hysterics; in fact she didn’t cry at all, simply bit on her bottom lip at the most painful moments, so that by dawn it had swollen up quite badly. Rybnikov shook his head as he watched the frail little lady dragging a wounded soldier out of the water and binding up his bleeding wound with a narrow rag torn off her silk dress.
Once, overcome by the sight, the staff captain had murmured to himself: ‘It’s like Nekrasov, that poem “Russian Women”’. And he glanced around quickly, to see whether anyone had heard this comment that fitted so badly with the image of a grey little runt of an officer.
After Vasilii Alexandrovich had saved her from the dark-complexioned neurasthenic, and especially after several hours of working together, Lidina had started acting quite naturally with the staff captain, as if he were an old friend – she, too, had evidently changed her opinion of her travelling companion.
‘Why, what’s happened? Tell me!’ she exclaimed, gazing at Rybnikov with fright in her eyes.
‘I’m done for all round,’ Vasilii Alexandrovich whispered, taking her by the arm and leading her slowly towards the train. ‘I went to Peter without authorisation, my superiors didn’t know about it. My sister’s unwell. Now they’ll find out – it’s a catastrophe …’
‘The guardhouse, is it?’ Lidina asked, distressed.
‘Never mind the guardhouse, that’s no great disaster. The terrible part is something else altogether … Remember you asked about my tube? Just before the explosion? Well, I really did leave it in the toilet. I’m always so absentminded.’
Glyceria Romanovna put her hand over her lips and asked in a terrible whisper:
‘Secret drawings?’
‘Yes. Very important. Even when I went absent without leave, I didn’t let them out of my sight for a moment.’
‘And where are they? Haven’t you taken a look there, in the toilet?’
‘They’ve disappeared,’ Vasilii Alexandrovich said in a sepulchral voice, and hung his head. ‘Someone took them. That’s not just the guardhouse, it means a trial, under martial law.’
‘How appalling!’ said the lady, round-eyed with horror. ‘What can be done?’
‘I want to ask you something,’ said Rybnikov, stopping as they reached the final carriage. ‘Before anyone’s looking, I’ll duck in under the wheels and afterwards I’ll choose my moment to slip down the embankment and into the bushes. I can’t afford to be checked. Don’t give me away, will you? Tell them you’ve got no idea where I went to. We didn’t talk during the journey. What would you want with a rough type like me? And take my little suitcase that’s on the rack with you, I’ll call round to collect it in Moscow. Ostozhenka Street, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, the Bomze building.’
Lidina glanced round at the big boss from St Petersburg and the gendarmes, who were also moving towards the train.
‘Will you help me out, save me?’ asked Rybnikov, stepping into the shadow of the carriage.
‘Of course!’ A determined, even reckless expression appeared on Glyceria Romanovna’s little face – just like earlier, when she had made a dash for the emergency brake. ‘I know who stole your drawings! That repulsive specimen who attacked me! That’s why he was in such a great hurry! And I wouldn’t be surprised if he blew up the bridge too!’
‘Blew it up?’ Rybnikov gasped in amazement, struggling to keep up with what she was saying. ‘How do you make that out? How could he blow it up?’
‘How should I know, I’m not a soldier! Perhaps he threw some kind of bomb out of the window! I’ll save you all right! And there’s no need to go crawling under the carriage!’ she shouted, darting off towards the gendarmes so impulsively that the staff captain was too late to hold her back, even though he tried.
‘Who’s in charge here? You?’ Lidina asked, running up to the elegant gentleman with the grey temples. ‘I have important news!’
Screwing his eyes up in alarm, Rybnikov glanced under the carriage, but it was too late to duck in under there now – many eyes were already gazing in his direction. The staff captain gritted his teeth and set off after Lidina.
She was holding the man with grey hair by the sleeve of his summer coat and jabbering away at incredible speed:
‘I know who you want! There was a man here, an obnoxious type with dark hair, vulgarly dressed, with a diamond ring – a huge stone, but not pure water. Terribly suspicious! In a terrible hurry to get to Moscow. Absolutely everybody stayed, and lots of them helped get the men out of the river, but he grabbed his travelling bag and left. When the first wagon arrived from the station for the wounded, he bribed the driver. He gave him money, a lot of money, and drove away. And he didn’t take a wounded man with him!’
‘Why, that’s true,’ the captain of the train put in. ‘A passenger from the second carriage, compartment number six. I saw him give the peasant a hundred-rouble note – for a wagon! And he rode off to the station.’
‘Oh, be quiet, will you, I haven’t finished yet!’ Lidina said, gesturing at him angrily. ‘I heard him ask that peasant: “Is there a shunting engine at the station?” He wanted to hire the engine, to get away as quickly as possible! I tell you, he was terribly suspicious!’
Rybnikov listened anxiously, expecting that now she would tell them about the stolen tube, but clever Glyceria Romanovna kept quiet about that highly suspicious circumstance, astounding the staff captain yet again.
‘A m-most interesting passenger,’ the gentleman with the grey temples said thoughtfully, and gestured briskly to a gendarmes officer. ‘Lieutenant! Send to the other side. My Chinese servant is across there in the inspector’s carriage, you know him. Tell him to come at the d-double. I’ll be at the station.’
And he strode off rapidly along the train.
‘But what about the express, Mr Fandorin?’ the lieutenant shouted after him.
‘Send it on its way!’ the man with the stammer shouted back without stopping.
A dull fellow with a simple sort of face and a dangling moustache who was hanging about nearby snapped his fingers – two nondescript little men came running up to him, and the three of them started whispering to each other.
Glyceria Romanovna returned to Rybnikov victorious.
‘There now, you see, it’s all settled. No need for you to go chasing through the bushes like a hare. And your drawings will turn up.’
But the staff captain wasn’t looking at her, he was looking at the back of the man whom the lieutenant had called ‘Fandorin’. Vasilii Alexandrovich’s yellowish face was like a frozen mask, and t
here were strange glimmers of light flickering in his eyes.
NAKA-NO-KU
The first syllable, in which Vasilii Alexandrovich takes leave
They said goodbye as friends and, of course, not for ever – Rybnikov promised that as soon as he was settled in, he would definitely come to visit.
‘Yes, do, please,’ Lidina said severely, shaking his hand. ‘I’ll be worried about that tube of yours.’
The staff captain assured her that he would wriggle out of it somehow now and parted from the delightful lady with mixed feelings of regret and relief, of which the latter was by far the stronger.
After shaking his head to drive away inappropriate thoughts, the first thing he did was pay a visit to the telegraph office at the station. A telegram was waiting there for him to collect: ‘Management congratulates brilliant success objections withdrawn may commence project receive goods information follows’.
Apparently this acknowledgement of his achievements, plus the withdrawal of certain objections, was very important to Rybnikov. His face brightened up and he even started singing a song about a toreador.
Something in the staff captain’s manner changed. His uniform still sat on him baggily (after the adventures of the night, it had become even shabbier), but Vasilii Alexandrovich’s shoulders had straightened up, the expression in his eyes was more lively, and he wasn’t dragging his leg any more.
Running up the stairs to the second floor, where the offices were located, he seated himself on a broad windowsill offering a clear view of the entire wide, empty corridor and took out a notebook with pages full of aphorisms for every occasion in life. These included the old byword: ‘A bullet’s a fool, a bayonet’s a fine fellow’ and ‘The Russian harnesses up slowly, but he rides fast’ and ‘Anyone who’s drunk and clever has two landholdings in him’, and the last of the maxims that had caught Vasilii Alexandrovich’s interest was: ‘You may be Ivanov the Seventh, but you’re a fool. A. P. Chekhov’.
Chekhov was followed by blank pages, but the staff captain took out a flat little bottle of colourless liquid, shook a drop on to the paper and rubbed it with his finger, and strange symbols that looked like intertwined snakes appeared on the page. He did the same thing with the next few pages – and the outlandish squiggles came wriggling out of nowhere on to them as well. Rybnikov studied them closely for some time. Then he thought for a while, moving his lips and memorising something. And after another minute or two the serpentine scribbles disappeared all by themselves.
He went back to the telegraph office and sent off two urgent telegrams – to Samara and Krasnoyarsk. The content of both was identical: a request to come to Moscow ‘on agreed business’ on 25 May and a statement that a room had been booked in ‘the same hotel’. The staff captain signed himself with the name ‘Ivan Goncharov’.
And with that, urgent business was apparently concluded. Vasilii Alexandrovich went downstairs to the restaurant and dined with a good appetite, without counting the kopecks – he even allowed himself cognac. He also gave the waiter a tip that was not extravagant, but quite respectable.
And that was only the start of this army scarecrow’s miraculous transformation.
From the station, the staff captain went to a clothing shop on Kuznetsky Most. He told the salesman that he had been discharged ‘for good’ when he was wounded, and wished to acquire a decent wardrobe.
He bought two good summer suits, several pairs of trousers, shoes with spats and American ankle boots, an English cap, a straw boater and half a dozen shirts. He changed there, put the tattered uniform away in his suitcase and told them to wrap his sword in paper.
And then there was this: Rybnikov arrived at the shop in a plain, ordinary cab, but he drove off in a lacquered four-wheeler, the kind that charge you fifty kopecks just for getting in.
The dapper passenger got out at Vuchtel’s typographical emporium and told the driver not to wait for him. He had to pick up an order – a hundred cartes de visite in the name of a correspondent from the Reuters telegraph agency, and, moreover, the first name and patronymic on the cards were his, Rybnikov’s – Vasilii Alexandrovich – but the surname was quite different: Sten.
And the freshly minted Mr Sten (but no, in order to avoid confusion, let him remain Rybnikov) made his departure from there on a regular five-rouble rocket, telling the driver to deliver him to the Saint-Saëns boarding house, but first to call in somewhere for a bunch of white lilies. The driver, a real sport, nodded respectfully: ‘Understood, sir.’
The railings of the absolutely charming empire-style villa ran along the actual boulevard. If the garland of small coloured lanterns decorating the gates was anything to go by, the boarding house must have looked especially festive during the evening hours. But just at the moment the courtyard and the stand for carriages were empty and the tall windows were filled with the blank white of lowered curtains.
Rybnikov asked whether this was Countess Bovada’s house and handed the doorman his card. Less than a minute later a rather portly lady emerged from the depths of the house, which proved to be far more spacious on the inside than it appeared to be from the outside. No longer young, but not yet old, she was very well groomed and made up so skilfully that it would have taken an experienced eye to spot any traces of cosmetic subterfuge.
At the sight of Rybnikov, the countess’s slightly predatory features seemed to tighten and shrink for a brief moment, but then they immediately beamed in a gracious smile.
‘My dear friend! My highly esteemed …’ – she squinted sideways at the calling card. ‘My highly esteemed Vasilii Alexandrovich! I am absolutely delighted to see you! And you haven’t forgotten that I love white lilies! How sweet!’
‘I never forget anything, Madam Beatrice,’ said the former staff captain, pressing his lips to the hand that glittered with rings.
At these words his hostess involuntarily touched her magnificent ash-blonde hair, arranged in a tall style, and glanced in concern at the back of the gallant visitor’s lowered head. But when Rybnikov straightened up, the charming smile was beaming once again on the countess’s plump lips.
In the decor of the salon and the corridors, pastel tones were prevalent, with the gilt frames of copies of Watteau and Fragonard gleaming on the walls. This rendered even more impressive the contrast with the study to which Her Excellency led her visitor: no frivolity or affectation here – a writing desk with account books, a bureau, a rack for papers. It was obvious that the countess was a thoroughly businesslike individual, and not in the habit of wasting time idly.
‘Don’t be alarmed,’ said Vasilii Alexandrovich, taking a seat in an armchair and crossing his legs. ‘Everything is in order. They are pleased with you, you are as useful here as you were previously in Port Arthur and Vladivostok. I have not come to you on business. You know, I’m tired. I decided to take a period of leave, live quietly for a while.’ He smiled cheerfully. ‘I know from experience that the wilder things are around me, the calmer I feel.’
Countess Beauvade took offence.
‘This is not some wild place, this is the best-run establishment in the city! After only a year of work my guest house has acquired an excellent reputation! Very respectable people come to us, people who value decorum and calm.’
‘I know, I know,’ Rybnikov interrupted her, still with the same smile. ‘That is precisely why I came straight here from the train, dear Beatrice. Decorum and calm are exactly what I need. I won’t be in the way, will I?’
His hostess replied very seriously.
‘You shouldn’t talk like that. I’m entirely at your disposal.’ She hesitated for a moment and asked delicately, ‘Perhaps you would like to relax with one of the young ladies? We have some capital ones. I promise you’ll forget your tiredness.’
‘I’d better not,’ said the telegraph correspondent, declining politely. ‘I may have to stay with you for two or three weeks. If I enter into a special relationship with one of your … boarders, it could lead to jealousy and
squabbling. We don’t want that.’
Beatrice nodded to acknowledge the reasonableness of his argument.
‘I’ll put you in a three-room apartment with a separate entrance. It’s a section for clients who are prepared to pay for total privacy. That will be the most convenient place for you.’
‘Excellent. Naturally, your losses will be reimbursed.’
‘Thank you. In addition to being secluded from the main part of the house, where it is sometimes quite noisy at night, the apartment has other conveniences. The rooms are connected by secret doors, which might prove apposite.’
Rybnikov chuckled.
‘I bet it also has false mirrors, conveniently positioned for taking photographs in secret. Like in Arthur, remember?’
The countess smiled and said nothing.
Rybnikov was pleased with his apartment. He spent a few hours arranging it, but not at all in the usual meaning of that word. His domestic bustle had nothing to do with the cosy comforts of home.
Vasilii Alexandrovich went to bed after midnight and took a right royal rest, the kind he had not had in a long time – he slept for an entire four hours, twice as long as usual.
The second syllable, in which Masa violates his neutrality
The passenger from compartment number six did not disappoint Erast Petrovich. On the contrary, the theory appeared ever more promising as time went on.
At the station Fandorin found the driver of the wagon that had transported the passenger who was in such a great hurry away from the banks of the Lomzha. The pretty lady’s testimony was confirmed when the peasant said that the German had indeed forked out a hundred roubles.
