The Diamond Chariot

by Boris Akunin

  There was no such thing as a bakayaro point, but Mylnikov, knowing how skilled Fandorin was in all sorts of Japanese tricks, turned pale.

  ‘Don’t frighten me, my health’s already ruined as it is. Why should I get cunning with you? We’re on the same side. I’m of the opinion that without your Japanese devilry, we’ll never catch the fiend who blew up that bridge. We have to fight fire with fire, sorcery with sorcery.’

  Fandorin raised one eyebrow slightly, wondering whether the other man could be playing the fool, but the court counsellor had a very serious air, and little sparks had lit up in his eyes.

  ‘Do you really think old Mylnikov has no brains and no heart? That I don’t see anything or ponder what’s going on?’ Mylnikov glanced round and lowered his voice. ‘Who is our sovereign, eh? The Lord’s anointed, right? So the Lord should protect him from the godless Japanese, right? But what’s happening? The Christ-loving army’s taking a right battering, left, right and centre. And who’s battering it? A tiny little nation with no strength at all. That’s because Satan stands behind the Japanese, he’s the one who’s giving the yellow bastards their strength. And the Supreme Arbiter of fate has forsaken our sovereign, He doesn’t want to help. Just recently I read a secret report in the Police Department, from the Arkhangelsk province. There’s a holy man prophesying up there, an Old Believer: he says the Romanovs were given three hundred years to rule and no longer, that’s the limit they were set. And those three hundred years are running out. And the whole of Russia is bearing the punishment for that. Doesn’t that sound like the truth?’

  The engineer had had enough of listening to this drivel. He frowned and said:

  ‘Stop all this street sleuth’s drivel. If I want to discuss the fate of the tsarist dynasty, I won’t choose to do it with a member of the Special Section. Are you going to work or just arrange stupid provocations?’

  ‘Work, work,’ said Mylnikov, dissolving in spasms of wooden laughter, but the sparks were still dancing in his eyes.

  Meanwhile the experts had concluded their examination of the site of the disaster and presented a report that completely confirmed Fandorin’s version of events.

  The explosion of moderate force that had caused the collapse was produced by a charge of melinite weighing twelve to fourteen pounds – that is, its power was approximately equal to a six-inch artillery shell. Any other bridge on the Nicholas line would probably have survived a shock of that power, but not the decrepit Tezoimenitsky, especially while a heavy train was crossing it. The saboteurs had chosen the spot and the moment with professional competence.

  An answer had also been found to the riddle of how the perpetrators had managed to place a mine on a tightly guarded target and explode it right under the wheels of the military train. At the point of the fracture, the experts had discovered scraps of leather from some unknown source and microscopic particles of dense laboratory glass. After racking their brains for a while, they offered their conclusion: a long, cylindrical leather case and a narrow spiral glass tube.

  That was enough for Erast Petrovich to reconstruct a picture of what had happened.

  The melinite charge had been placed in a leather package, something like a case for a clarinet or other narrow-bodied wind instrument. There had not been any hard casing at all – it would only have made the mine heavier and weakened the blast. The explosive used was chemical, with a retardant – the engineer had read about those. A glass tube holding fulminate of mercury is pierced by a needle, but the fulminate does not flow out immediately, it takes thirty seconds or a minute, depending on the length and shape of the tube.

  No doubt remained: the bomb had been dropped from the express travelling directly in front of the special.

  The situation by which the two trains were in dangerously close proximity to each other had been arranged by artifice, using the false telegram that was passed on by the telegraph clerk at Kolpino (who, naturally, had disappeared without a trace).

  Fandorin racked his brains for a while over the question of exactly how the mine had been dropped. Through the window of a compartment? Hardly. The risk was too great that when the case hit the covering of the bridge, it would go flying off into the river. Then he guessed – through the flush aperture in the toilet. That was what the narrow case was for. Ah, if only that witness hadn’t interfered, with her comments about the suspicious dark-haired man! He should have acted as he had planned to do from the start: make a list of the passengers, and question them too. Even if he’d had to let them all go, he could have interrogated them again now – they would definitely have remembered a travelling musician, and it was quite probable that he wasn’t alone, but in a group …

  Once the mystery of the disaster had been solved, Erast Petrovich had no time for wounded pride, for more compelling concerns came to light.

  The engineer’s work in the Railway Gendarmerie (or, as Mylnikov called it, the ‘Randarmerie’) had already been going on for an entire year already, directed to a single goal: to protect the most vulnerable section in the anatomy of the ailing Russian dinosaur – its one major artery. The enterprising Japanese predator that had been attacking the wounded giant from all sides must realise sooner or later that he did not need to knock his opponent off its feet, it was enough simply to gnaw through the single major vessel of its blood supply – the Trans-Siberian main line. Left without ammunition, provisions and reinforcements, the Manchurian army would be doomed.

  The Tezoimenitsky Bridge was no more than a test run. Traffic over it would be completely restored in two weeks, and meanwhile trains were making a detour via the Pskov-Starorusskoe branch, losing only a few hours. But if a similar blow were to be struck at any point beyond Samara, from where the main line extended as a single thread for eight thousand versts, it would bring traffic to a halt for at least a month. Linevich’s army would be left in a catastrophic position. And apart from that, what was to stop the Japanese from arranging one act of sabotage after another?

  Of course, the Trans-Siberian was a new line, built using modern technology. And the last year had not been wasted – a decent system of security was up and running, and the Siberian bridges could in no way be compared with the Tezoimenitsky – you wouldn’t blow them up with ten pounds of melinite dumped through the outlet of a water closet. But the Japanese were shrewd, they would come up with something else. The worst thing had already happened – they had already launched their war on the railways. Just wait and see what would come next.

  This thought (which was, unfortunately, quite incontrovertible) made Erast Petrovich feel afraid. But the engineer belonged to that breed of people in whom the response to fear is not paralysis or panic-stricken commotion, but the mobilisation of all their mental resources.

  ‘Melinite, melinite,’ Fandorin repeated thoughtfully as he strode around the office that he had taken on temporary loan from Danilov. He snapped the fingers of the hand he was holding behind his back, puffed on his cigar and stood at the window for a long time, screwing his eyes up against the bright May sky.

  There could be no doubt that the Japanese would also use melinite for subsequent acts of sabotage. They had tested the explosive on the Tezoimenitsky Bridge and the results had been satisfactory.

  Melinite was not produced in Russia, the explosive was deployed only in the arsenals of France and Japan, and the Japanese called it simose or, as distorted by the Russian newspapers, ‘shimoza’. It was simose that was given most of the credit for the victory of the Japanese fleet at Tsushima: shells packed with melinite had demonstrated far greater penetrative and explosive power than the Russian powder shells.

  Melinite, or picric acid, was ideally suited for sabotage work: powerful, easy to combine with detonators of various kinds and also compact. But even so, to sabotage a large modern bridge would require a charge weighing several poods. Where would the saboteurs get such a large amount of explosive and how would they convey it?

  This was the key point – Erast Petrovich realised tha
t straight away – but before he advanced along his primary line of search, he put certain precautions in place on his secondary one.

  In case the melinite theory was mistaken and the enemy was intending to use ordinary dynamite or gun cotton, Fandorin gave instructions for a secret circular to be sent to all the military depots and arsenals, warning them of the danger. Of course, this piece of paper would not make the guards any more vigilant, but thieving quartermasters would be more afraid of selling explosive on the side, and that was precisely the way that such lethal materials usually found their way into the hands of Russia’s terrorist bombers.

  Having taken this safety measure, Erast Petrovich concentrated on the routes for transporting melinite.

  They would deliver it from abroad, and most likely from France (they couldn’t bring it all the way from Japan!).

  You can’t ship a load of at least several poods in a suitcase, thought Fandorin, twirling in his fingers a test tube of light yellow powder that he had acquired from an artillery laboratory. He raised it to his face and absentmindedly drew the sharp smell in through his nose – the same ‘fatal aroma of shimoza’ that the Russian war correspondents were so fond of mentioning.

  ‘Well now, p-perhaps,’ Erast Petrovich murmured.

  He quickly got up, ordered his carriage to be brought round, and a quarter of an hour later he was already on Maly Gnezdnikovsky Lane, at the Police Telegraph Office. There he dictated a telegram that set the operator, who had seen all sorts of things in his time, blinking rapidly.

  The fifth syllable, consisting almost completely of face-to-face conversations

  On the morning of 25 May, Countess Bovada’s boarder received news of the arrival of the Delivery and the Shipment on the same day, as had been planned. The organisation was working with the precision of a chronometer.

  The Delivery consisted of four one-and-a-half-pood sacks of maize flour, sent from Lyons for the Moscow bakery ‘Werner and Pfleiderer’. The consignment was awaiting the consignee at the Moscow Freight Station depot on the Brest line. It was all very simple: turn up, show the receipt and sign. The sacks were extremely durable – jute, waterproof. If an overly meticulous gendarme or railway thief poked a hole in one to try it, the yellow, coarse-grained powder that poured out would pass very well for maize flour in wheat-and-rye-eating Russia.

  Things were a little more complicated with the Shipment. The sealed wagon was due to arrive by way of a roundabout route from Naples to Batumi, and from there by railway via Rostov to the Rogozhsk shunting yard. According to the documents, it belonged to the Office of Security Escorts and was accompanied by a guard consisting of a corporal and two privates. The guard was genuine, the documents were fake. That is, the crates really did contain, as the transport documents stated, 8,500 Italian ‘Vetterli’ rifles, 1,500 Belgian ‘Francotte’ revolvers, a million cartridges and blasting cartridges. However, this entire arsenal was not intended for the needs of the Escorts Office, but for a man who went by the alias of Thrush. According to the plan developed by Vasilii Alexandrovich’s father, large-scale disturbances were supposed to break out in Moscow, putting a rapid end to the Russian tsar’s enthusiasm for the Manchurian steppes and Korean concessions.

  The wise author of the plan had taken everything into account: the fact that the Guards were in St Petersburg, while the old capital had only a scrappy ragbag garrison made up of second-class reservists, and that Moscow was the transport heart of the country, and that the city had 200,000 hungry workers embittered by privation. Ten thousand reckless madcaps could surely be found among them, if only there were weapons. A single spark, and the workers’ quarters would be bristling with barricades.

  Rybnikov began as he had been taught in his childhood – that is, with the hardest thing.

  The staff captain arrived at the shunting yard. He introduced himself and was given an escort of a minor bureaucrat from the goods arrival section, and they set off to line number three to meet the Rostov special. The clerk felt timid in the company of the gloomy officer, who tapped impatiently on the planking with the scabbard of his sabre. Fortunately, they did not have to wait long – the train arrived exactly on the dot.

  The commander of the guard, a corporal who was well past the prime of youth, moved his lips as he read the document presented to him by the staff captain, while the draymen whom Rybnikov had hired drove up to the platform one by one.

  But then there was a hitch – there was absolutely no sign of the half-platoon that was supposed to guard the convoy.

  Cursing the Russian muddle, the staff captain ran to the telephone. He came back white-faced with fury and let loose a string of such intricately obscene curses that the clerk shrank in embarrassment and the sentries wagged their heads respectfully. There obviously wasn’t going to be any half-platoon for the staff captain.

  Having raged for the appropriate length of time, Rybnikov took hold of the corporal by the sleeve.

  ‘Look, mate, what’s your name … Yekimov, as you can see, this is one almighty cock-up. Help me out here, will you? I know you’ve done your duty and you’re not obliged, but I can’t send it off without a guard, and I can’t leave it here either. I’ll see you all right: three roubles for you and one each for your fine lads here.’

  The corporal went to have a word with the privates, who were as long in the tooth and battered by life as he was.

  The deal they struck was this: in addition to the money, His Honour would give them a paper saying the squad could spend two days on the town in Moscow. Rybnikov promised.

  They loaded up and drove off. The staff captain at the front in a cab, then the drays with the crates, the sentries on foot, one on the left, one on the right, the corporal bringing up the rear of the procession. Pleased with the remuneration and leave pass they had been promised, the privates strode along cheerfully, holding their Mosin rifles at the ready. Rybnikov had warned them to keep their eyes skinned – the slanty-eyed enemy never slept.

  Rybnikov had booked a warehouse on the River Moscow in advance. The draymen carried the Shipment in, took their money and left.

  The staff captain carefully put the receipt from a member of the workmen’s co-operative away in his pocket as he walked over to the sentries from Rostov.

  ‘Thanks for the help, lads. I’ll settle up now, a bargain’s a bargain.’

  The riverside wharf in front of the warehouse was deserted, and the river water, iridescent from patches of oil, splashed under the planking.

  ‘But Your Honour, where are the guards?’ Yekimov asked, gazing around. ‘It’s kind of odd. An arms depot with no guards.’

  Instead of answering, Rybnikov jabbed him in the throat with a finger of steel, then turned towards the privates. One of them was just about to lend the other some tobacco – and he froze like that, with his mouth hanging open, so the crude shag missed the paper and went showering past. Vasilii Alexandrovich hit the first one with his right hand and the second with his left. It all happened very quickly: the corporal’s body was still falling, and his two subordinates were already dead.

  Rybnikov dropped the bodies under the wharf, after first tying a heavy rock to each one of them.

  He took off his cap and wiped the sweat off his forehead.

  Right, then, it was only half past ten and the most troublesome part of the job was already over.

  It only took ten minutes to collect the Delivery. Vasilii Alexandrovich arrived at the Moscow Freight Station in tarred boots, a long coat and a cloth cap – a regular shop counterman. He carried the sacks out himself, wouldn’t even let the cabby help, in case he might ask for an extra ten kopecks. Then he transported the ‘maize flour’ from the Brest line to the Ryazan–Uralsk line, because the Delivery’s onward route led towards the east. On the way across to the other side of the city, he repacked the goods and at the station he checked it in as two lots, with different receipts.

  And that put an end to his scurrying about from one railway station to another. Rybnikov wasn�
�t in the least bit tired; on the contrary, he was filled with a fierce, vigorous energy – he had grown weary of idleness and, of course, he was inspired by the importance of his actions.

  Expertly dispatched, received on time, competently delivered, he thought. That was the way invincibility was shaped. When everyone acted in his own place as if the outcome of the entire war depended on him alone.

  He was slightly concerned about the ‘dummies’ summoned from Samara and Krasnoyarsk. What if they were late? But it was no accident that Rybnikov had chosen those precise two out of the notebook filled with snaky squiggles. The Krasnoyarsk man (Vasilii Alexandrovich thought of him as ‘Tunnel’) was greedy, and his greed made him dependable, and the Samara man (his code name was ‘Bridge’) might not be outstandingly dependable, but he had compelling reasons not to be late – he was a man with not much time left.

  And his calculations had proved correct; neither of the ‘dummies’ had let him down. Rybnikov was already aware of this when he left the station for the agreed hotels – the ‘Kazan’ and the ‘Railway’. The hotels were located close to each other, but not actually adjacent. The last thing he needed was for the two dummies to get to know each other through some grotesque coincidence.

  At the Railway Hotel, Vasilii Alexandrovich left a note: ‘At three. Goncharov’. The note at the Kazan Hotel read: ‘At four: Goncharov’.

  Now it was time to deal with the man with the alias of Thrush, the consignee of the Shipment.

  In this matter Rybnikov employed particular caution, for he knew that the Social Revolutionaries were kept under close surveillance by the Okhrana, and the revolutionary riff-raff had plenty of traitors among their own ranks. He could only hope that Thrush realised this as well as he, Rybnikov, did.