by Boris Akunin
Vasilii Alexandrovich made a call from a public telephone (a most convenient innovation that had only recently appeared in the old capital). He asked the lady to give him number 34-81.
He spoke the prearranged words:
‘A hundred thousand pardons. May I ask for the honourable Ivan Konstantinovich to come to the phone?’
After a second’s pause, a woman’s voice replied:
‘He’s not here at present, but he will be soon.’
That meant Thrush was in Moscow and prepared to meet.
‘Please be so good as to let Ivan Konstantinovich know that Professor Stepanov wishes to invite him to his seventy-third birthday.’
‘Professor Stepanov?’ the woman asked, bemused. ‘To his seventy-third?’
‘Yes, that is correct.’
The go-between didn’t need to understand the meaning, her job was to pass on precisely what he said. In the figure 73, the first numeral indicated the time, and the second was a position in a list of previously agreed meeting places. Thrush would understand: at seven o’clock, at place number 3.
If anybody had eavesdropped on Rybnikov’s conversation with the man from Krasnoyarsk, he probably would not have understood a thing.
‘More account books?’ asked Tunnel, a sturdy man with a moustache and eyes that were constantly half closed. ‘We should raise the price. Everything’s so expensive nowadays.’
‘No, not books,’ said Vasilii Alexandrovich, standing in the middle of the cheap hotel room and listening carefully to the footsteps in the corridor. ‘A special delivery. Payment too. Fifteen hundred.’
‘How much?’ the other man gasped.
Rybnikov pulled out a bundle of banknotes.
‘There. You’ll receive the same again in Khabarovsk. If you do everything right.’
‘Three thousand?’
The Krasnoyarsk man’s eyebrows twitched and twitched again, but they didn’t rise up on to his forehead. It’s not easy to gape in astonishment with eyes used to watching the world through a peephole.
The man whom Vasilii Alexandrovich had christened Tunnel had no idea about this nickname, or about the real activities of the people who paid for his services so generously. He was convinced that he was assisting illegal gold miners. The ‘Statute on Private Gold-Mining’ required prospecting cooperatives to hand over their entire output to the state in exchange for so-called ‘assignations’ at a price lower than the market level and with all sorts of other deductions into the bargain. And everybody knew that when the law was unjust or irrational, people found ways to get round it.
Tunnel occupied a post that was extremely useful to the Organisation – he escorted the postal wagons along the Trans-Siberian main line. When he carried notebooks filled with columns of figures from the European part of the empire to the Far East and back, he assumed that this was financial correspondence between the miners and the dealers in black-market gold.
But Rybnikov had fished the postman out of his own cunning little notebook for a different purpose.
‘Yes, three thousand,’ he said firmly. ‘And no one pays money like that for nothing, you know that.’
‘What do I have to carry?’ asked Tunnel, licking his lips, which had turned dry with excitement.
Rybnikov snapped:
‘Explosive. Three poods.’
The postman started blinking, thinking it over. Then he nodded.
‘For the diggings? To smash the rocks?’
‘Yes. Wrap the crates in sackcloth, like packages. Do you know tunnel No. Twelve on the Baikal Bypass Line?’
‘The “Half-Tunnel”? Everyone knows that.’
‘Throw the crates off exactly halfway through, at marker 197. Our man will pick them up afterwards.’
‘But … er, won’t it go off bang?’
Rybnikov laughed.
‘It’s obvious you know nothing about using explosives. Haven’t you ever heard of detonators? Go off bang – don’t talk nonsense.’
Satisfied with this reply, Tunnel spat on his fingers, preparing to count the money, and Vasilii Alexandrovich smiled to himself: It won’t go off bang, it will make a boom that sets the Winter Palace shaking. Then just let them try to rake out the smashed rock and drag out the flattened wagons and locomotive.
The Baikal Bypass Tunnel, which had been built at huge expense and opened only recently, ahead of schedule, was the final link in the Trans-Siberian. The military trains used to line up in immense queues at the Lake Baikal ferry crossing, but now the line pulsated three times faster than before. The Half-Tunnel was the longest one on the line; if it was put out of action, the Manchurian army would be back on short rations again.
And that was only half of Rybnikov’s dual ‘project’.
The second half was to be implemented by the man staying at the Kazan Hotel, with whom Vasilii Alexandrovich spoke quite differently – not curtly and abruptly, but soulfully, with compassionate restraint.
He was a man still quite young, with a sallow complexion and protruding Adam’s apple. He made a strange impression: the subtle facial features, nervous gesticulations and spectacles fitted uncomfortably with the worn pea jacket, calico shirt and rough boots.
The man from Samara coughed up blood and was in love, but his feelings were not requited. This made him hate the whole world, especially the world close to him: the people around him, his native city, his own country. There was no need for secrecy with him – Bridge knew who he was working for and he carried out his assignments with lascivious vengefulness.
Six months earlier, on the instructions of the Organisation, he had left university and taken a job as a driver’s mate on the railway. The heat of the firebox was consuming the final remnants of his lungs, but Bridge was not clinging to life, he wanted to die as soon as possible.
‘You told our man that you wish to go out with a bang. I’ll give you the opportunity to do that,’ Rybnikov declared in ringing tones. ‘This bang will be heard right across Russia, right round the world, in fact.’
‘Tell me, tell me,’ the consumptive said eagerly.
‘The Alexander Bridge in Syzran …’ said Rybnikov, and paused for effect. ‘The longest in Europe, seven hundred sazhens. If it is sent crashing into the Volga, the main line will come to a halt. Do you understand what that means?’
The man he called Bridge smiled slowly.
‘Yes, yes. Collapse, defeat, disgrace. Surrender. You Japanese know where to strike! You deserve the victory!’ The former student’s eyes blazed brightly and he spoke faster and faster with every word. ‘It can be done! I can do it! Do you have powerful explosive? I’ll hide it in the tender, under the coal. I take one slab into the cabin. I throw it in the firebox, it explodes, fireworks!’
He burst into laughter.
‘On the seventh span,’ Rybnikov put in gently. ‘That’s very important. Otherwise it might not work. On the seventh, don’t get that wrong.’
‘I won’t! I go on duty the day after tomorrow. A goods train to Chelyabinsk. The driver will get what’s coming to him, the bastard, he’s always sneering at my cough, calls me “Tapeworm”. I feel sorry for the stoker, though, he’s only a young boy. But I’ll get him off. At the last station I’ll catch his hand with the shovel. Tell him never mind, I’ll shovel the coal myself. But what about our deal?’ Bridge exclaimed with a sudden shudder. ‘You haven’t forgotten about our deal?’
‘How could we?’ asked Rybnikov, setting his hand to his heart. ‘We remember. Ten thousand. We’ll hand it over exactly as you instructed.’
‘Not hand it over, drop it off,’ the sick man cried out nervously. ‘And the note: “In memory of what might have been”. I’ll write it myself, you’ll get it wrong.’
And he wrote it there and then, splattering ink about.
‘She’ll understand … And if she doesn’t, so much the better,’ he muttered with a sniff. ‘Here, take it.’
‘But bear in mind that the individual who is so precious to you will only receive the money and th
e note on one condition – if the bridge collapses. Don’t get the count wrong, the seventh span.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said the man from Samara, shaking a tear from his eyelashes. ‘If there’s one thing consumption has taught me, it’s precision – I have to take my pills at the right time. But don’t you trick me. Give me your word of honour as a samurai.’
Vasilii Alexandrovich drew himself up to attention, wrinkled up his forehead and narrowed his eyes. Then he performed a fanciful gesture that he had just invented and solemnly declared:
‘My word of honour as a samurai.’
The most important face-to-face conversation was set for seven o’clock in the evening, in a cab drivers’ inn close to the Kaluga Gates (place number three).
The place had been well chosen: dark, dirty, noisy, but not uproarious. In this place they didn’t drink beverages that heated the brain, but tea, in large amounts, entire samovars of it. The clientele was well mannered and incurious – they’d seen quite enough of the hustle and bustle of the streets, and of their own passengers, during the day. Now all they wanted was to sit in peace and quiet and make staid conversation.
Vasilii Alexandrovich arrived ten minutes late and immediately made for the table in the corner, which was occupied by a sturdy man with a beard, an expressionless face and a piercing gaze that was never still for a moment.
Rybnikov had been watching the entrance to the inn for the last hour from the next gateway and had spotted Thrush as he walked up. When he was certain Thrush wasn’t being trailed, he went in.
‘My greetings to Kuzmich,’ he shouted from a distance, holding up one hand with the fingers spread wide. Thrush didn’t know what he looked like, and they had to act out a meeting between old friends.
The revolutionary was not in the least surprised, and he replied in the same tone:
‘Aha, Mustapha. Sit down, you old Tartar dog, we’ll have a spot of tea.’
He squeezed Rybnikov’s hand tightly and slapped him on the shoulder for good measure.
They sat down.
At the next table a large party was sedately consuming tea with hard bread rings. They glanced incuriously at the two friends and turned away again.
‘Are they following you?’ Vasilii Alexandrovich said quietly, asking the most important question first. ‘Are you sure there’s no police agent in your group?’
‘Certainly they’re following me, quite definitely. And we have a stooge. We’re leaving him alone for the time being. Better to know who – they’ll only plant another one, and then try to figure out who it is.’
‘They are following you?’ Rybnikov tautened like a spring and cast a rapid glance in the direction of the counter – there was an exit into a walk-through courtyard behind it.
‘They’re following me, so what?’ the Socialist Revolutionary said with a shrug. ‘Let them follow, when it doesn’t matter. And when it does, I can give them the slip, I’m well used to it. So don’t you get nervous, my bold samurai. I’m clean today.’
It was the second time in one day that Vasilii Alexandrovich had been a called a samurai, but this time the mockery was obvious.
‘You are Japanese, aren’t you?’ the consignee of the Shipment asked, crunching on a lump of sugar and slurping tea noisily from his saucer. ‘I read that some of the samurais are almost indistinguishable from Europeans.’
‘What the hell difference does it make whether I’m a samurai or not?’ Rybnikov asked, out of habit slipping into the tone of the person he was talking to.
‘True enough. Let’s get down to business. Where are the goods?’
‘I took them to a warehouse on the river, as you asked. Why do you need them on the river?’
‘I just do. Where exactly?’
‘I’ll show you later.’
‘Who else knows, apart from you? Unloading, transporting, guarding – that’s quite an operation. Are they reliable people? Know how to keep a still tongue in their heads?’
‘They’ll be as silent as the grave,’ Rybnikov said seriously. ‘I’ll wager my head on that. When will you be ready to collect?’
Thrush scratched his beard.
‘We’re thinking of floating some of the goods, a small part, down the Oka, to Sormovo. A barge will come up from there tomorrow at nightfall. We’ll collect it then.’
‘Sormovo?’ said Vasilii Alexandrovich, narrowing his eyes. ‘That’s good. A good choice. What’s your plan of action?’
‘We’ll start with a strike on the railways. Then a general strike. And when the authorities start getting the jitters, let the Cossacks loose or do a bit of shooting – the combat squads will be out in a flash. Only this time we’ll manage without cobblestones, the weapon of the proletariat.’
‘When are you going to start?’ Rybnikov asked casually. ‘I need it to be within a month.’
The revolutionary’s stony face twisted into an ironic grin.
‘Running out of steam, are you, sons of the Mikado? On your last legs?’
A snigger ran round the room and Vasilii Alexandrovich started in surprise – surely they couldn’t have heard?
He jerked round, and then immediately relaxed.
Two grey-bearded cab drivers had just staggered into the inn, both well oiled. One had missed his footing and fallen, and the other was trying to help him up, muttering:
‘Never mind, Mityukha, a horse has got four legs, and it still stumbles …’
Someone shouted from one of the tables:
‘A horse like that’s ready for the knacker’s yard!’
People cackled with laughter.
Mityukha was about to curse his mockers roundly, but the waiters swooped on him and in half a jiffy they had shoved the two drunken cabbies out: There, don’t you go bringing shame on our establishment.
‘Ah, old Mother Russia,’ Thrush chuckled with another crooked grin. ‘Never mind, soon we’ll give her such a jolt, she’ll jump right out of her pants.’
‘And set off at a run with a bare backside, into the bright future?’
The revolutionary looked intently into the cold eyes of the other man.
I shouldn’t have mocked him, Rybnikov realised immediately. That was going too far.
He held that glance for a few seconds, then pretended that he couldn’t hold out and lowered his eyes.
‘You and we have only one thing in common,’ the SR said contemptuously. ‘A lack of bourgeois sentiment. Only we revolutionaries no longer have any, while you young predators don’t yet have any – you haven’t reached that age yet. You use us, we use you, but you, Mr Samurai, are not my equal. You’re no more than a cog in a machine, and I’m the architect of tomorrow, savvy?’
He is like a cat, Vasilii Alexandrovich decided. Lets you feed him, but he won’t lick your hand – the most he’ll do is purr, and even that’s not very likely.
He had to reply in the same style, but without aggravating the confrontation.
‘All right, Mr Architect, to hell with the fancy words. Let’s discuss the details.’
Thrush even left like a cat, without saying goodbye.
When he had clarified everything he needed to know, he simply got up and darted out through the door behind the counter, leaving Vasilii Alexandrovich to exit via the street.
In front of the inn cabbies were dozing on their coach boxes, waiting for passengers. The first two were the drunks who had been ejected from the inn. The first one was completely out of it, snoring away with his nose down against his knees. The second was more or less holding up, though – he even shook his reins when he caught sight of Rybnikov.
But Vasilii Alexandrovich didn’t take a cab at the inn – that would contravene the rules of conspiracy. He walked quite a long way before he stopped one that happened to be driving past.
At the corner of Krivokolenny Street, at a poorly lit and deserted spot, Rybnikov put a rouble note on the seat, jumped down on to the road – gently, without even making the carriage sway – and ducked into a gatewa
y.
As they say, God takes care of those who take care of themselves.
The sixth syllable, in which a tail and ears play an important part
Special No. 369-B was expected at precisely midnight, and there was no reason to doubt that the train would arrive on the dot – Fandorin was being kept informed of its progress by telegraph from every station. The train was travelling ‘on a green light’, with priority over all others. Freight trains, passenger trains and even expresses had to give way to it. When the locomotive with only a single compartment carriage went hurtling past an ordinary train that had inexplicably come to a halt at the station in Bologoe or Tver, the worldly-wise passengers said to each other: ‘Higher-ups in a hurry. Must be some kind of hitch in Moscow’.
The windows of the mysterious train were not only closed, but completely curtained over. During the entire journey from the present capital to the old one, 369-B stopped only once, to take on coal, and then for no more than fifteen minutes.
They were waiting to meet the mysterious train outside Moscow, at a small way station surrounded by a double cordon of railway gendarmes. A fine, repulsive drizzle was falling, and the lamps were swaying in a gusting wind, sending sinister shadows scuttling furtively across the platform.
Erast Petrovich arrived ten minutes before the appointed time, listened to Lieutenant Colonel Danilov’s report on the precautions that had been taken and nodded.
Court Counsellor Mylnikov, who had been informed of the imminent event only an hour earlier (the engineer had called for him without any forewarning), couldn’t keep still: he ran round the platform several times, always coming back to Fandorin and asking: ‘Who is it we’re waiting for?’
‘You’ll see,’ Fandorin replied briefly, glancing every now and then at his gold Breguet.
At one minute to twelve they heard a long hoot, then the bright lights of the locomotive emerged from the darkness.
The rain started coming down harder, and the valet opened an umbrella over the engineer’s head, deliberately standing so that the drops ran off on to Mylnikov’s hat. However, Mylnikov was so worked up that he didn’t notice – he merely shuddered when a cold rivulet ran in under his collar.
