by Boris Akunin
As he walked up, the engineer heard a trembling, senile voice declaiming:
‘So is it said in prophecy: and iron stars shall rain down from the heavens and strike down the sinners …’
Fandorin spoke sombrely to the policeman:
‘Clear the public away.’
Even though Fandorin was in civilian garb, the policeman realised from his tone of voice that this man had the right to command, and he immediately blew on his whistle.
To menacing shouts of ‘Move aside! Where do you think you’re shoving?’ Fandorin walked round the site of the slaughter.
All four agents were dead. They were lying in identical poses, on their backs. Each had an iron star with sharp, glittering points protruding from his forehead, where it had pierced deep into the bone.
‘Lord Almighty!’ exclaimed Mylnikov, crossing himself as he walked up.
Squatting down with a sob, he was about to pull a metal star out of a dead head.
‘Don’t touch it! The edges are smeared with p-poison!’
Mylnikov jerked his hand away.
‘What devil’s work is this?’
‘That is a shuriken, also known as a syarinken. A throwing weapon of the “Furtive Ones”, a sect of hereditary sp-spies that exists in Japan.’
‘Hereditary?’ The court counsellor started blinking very rapidly. ‘Is that like our Rykalov from the detective section? His great-grandfather served in the Secret Chancellery, back in Catherine the Great’s time.’
‘Something of the kind. So that’s why he jumped on to the kiosk …’
Fandorin’s last remark was addressed to himself, but Mylnikov jerked his head up and asked:
‘Why?’
‘To throw at standing targets. You and your “cat on a fence”. Well, you’ve made a fine mess of things, Mylnikov.’
‘Never mind the mess,’ said Mylnikov, with tears coursing down his cheeks. ‘If I made it, I’ll answer for it, it won’t be the first time. Zyablikov, Raspashnoi, Kasatkin, Möbius …’
A carriage came flying furiously into the square from the direction of Bolshaya Tartarskaya Street and a pale man with no hat tumbled out of it and shouted from a distance:
‘Evstratpalich! Disaster! Thrush has got away! He’s disappeared!’
‘But what about our plant?’
‘They found him with a knife in his side!’
The court counsellor launched into a torrent of obscenity so wild that someone in the crowd remarked respectfully:
‘He’s certainly making himself clear.’
But the engineer set off at a brisk stride towards the station.
‘Where are you going?’ shouted Mylnikov.
‘To the left luggage office. They won’t come for the melinite now.’
But Fandorin was mistaken.
The clerk was standing there, shifting from one foot to the other in front of the open door.
‘Well, did you catch the two boyos?’ he asked when he caught sight of Fandorin.
‘Which b-boyos?’
‘You know! The two who collected the baggage. I pressed on the button, like you told me to. Then I glanced into the gendarme gentlemen’s room. But when I looked, it was empty.’
The engineer groaned as if afflicted with a sudden, sharp pain.
‘How l-long ago?’
‘The first one came exactly at five. The second was seven or eight minutes later.’
Fandorin’s Breguet showed 5.29.
The court counsellor started swearing again, only not menacingly this time, but plaintively, in a minor key.
‘That was while we were creeping round the courtyards and basements,’ he wailed.
Fandorin summed up the situation in a funereal voice:
‘A worse debacle than Tsushima.’
The second syllable, entirely about railways
The interdepartmental conflict took place there and then, in the corridor. In his fury, Fandorin abandoned his usual restraint and told Mylnikov exactly what he thought about the Special Section, which was fine for spawning informers and agents provocateurs, but proved to be absolutely useless when it came to real work and caused nothing but problems.
‘You gendarmes are a fine lot too,’ snarled Mylnikov. ‘Why did your smart alecs abandon the ambush without any order? They let the bombers get away with the melinite. Now where do we look for them?’
Fandorin fell silent, stung either by the justice of the rebuke or that form of address – ‘you gendarmes’.
‘Our collaboration hasn’t worked out,’ said the man from the Department of Police, sighing. ‘Now you’ll make a complaint to your bosses about me, and I’ll make one to mine about you. Only none of that bumph is going to put things right. A bad peace is better than a good quarrel. Let’s do it this way: you look after your railway and I’ll catch Comrade Thrush. The way we’re supposed to do things according to our official responsibilities. That’ll be safer.’
Hunting for the revolutionaries who had established contact with Japanese intelligence obviously seemed far more promising to Mylnikov than pursuing unknown saboteurs who could be anywhere along an eight-thousand-verst railway line.
But Fandorin was so sick of the court counsellor that he replied contemptuously:
‘Excellent. Only keep well out of my sight.’
‘A good specialist always keeps out of sight,’ Evstratii Pavlovich purred, and he left.
And only then, bitterly repenting that he had wasted several precious minutes on pointless wrangling, did Fandorin set to work.
The first thing he did was question the receiving clerk in detail about the men who had presented the receipts for the baggage.
It turned out that the man who took the eight paper packages was dressed like a workman (grey collarless shirt, long coat, boots), but his face didn’t match his clothes – the clerk said he ‘wasn’t that simple’.
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘He was educated. Glasses, hair down to his shoulders, a big, bushy beard like a church sexton. Since when does a worker or a craftsman look like that? And he’s ill. His face is all white and he kept clearing his throat and wiping his lips with a handkerchief.’
The second recipient, who had shown up a few minutes after the one in glasses, sounded even more interesting to the engineer – he spotted an obvious lead here.
The man who took away the three wooden crates had been dressed in the uniform of a railway postal worker! The clerk could not possibly be mistaken about this – he had been working in the Department of Railways for a good few years.
Moustache, broad cheekbones, middle-aged. The recipient had a holster hanging at his side, which meant that he accompanied the mail carriage, in which, as everybody knew, sums of money and precious packages were transported.
Fandorin could already feel a presentiment of success, but he suppressed that dangerous mood and turned to Lieutenant Colonel Danilov, who had just arrived.
‘In the last twenty minutes, since half past five, have any trains set off?’
‘Yes indeed, the Harbin train. It left ten minutes ago.’
‘Then that’s where they are, our boyos. Both of them,’ the engineer declared confidently.
The lieutenant colonel was doubtful.
‘But maybe they went back into the city? Or they’re waiting for the next train, to Paveletsk? It’s at six twenty-five.’
‘No. It is no accident that they showed up at the same time, with just a few minutes between them. That is one. And note what time that was – dawn. What else of any importance happens at this station between five and six, apart from the departure of the Harbin train? And then, of course, the third point.’ The engineer’s voice hardened. ‘What would saboteurs want with the P-Paveletsk train? What would they blow up on the Paveletsk line? Hay and straw, radishes and carrots? No, our subjects have gone off on the Harbin train.’
‘Shall I send a telegram to stop the train?’
‘Under no circumstances. There is melinit
e on board. Who knows what these people are like? If they suspect something is wrong, they might blow it up. No delays, no unscheduled stops. The bombers are already on their guard, they’re nervous. No, tell me instead where the first stop is according to the timetable.’
‘It’s an express. So it will only stop in Vladimir – let me just take a look … At nine thirty.’
The powerful locomotive commandeered by Danilov overhauled the Harbin express at the border of the province of Moscow and thereafter maintained a distance of one verst, which it only reduced just before Vladimir.
It came flying on to the next line only a minute after the express. Fandorin jumped down on to the platform without waiting for the locomotive to stop. The scheduled train halted at the station for only ten minutes, so every minute was precious.
The engineer was met by Captain Lenz, the head of the Vladimir Railway Gendarmes Division, who had been briefed about everything in detail by telephone. He goggled wildly at Fandorin’s fancy dress (greasy coat, grey moustache and eyebrows, with temples that were also grey, only there had been no need to dye them) and wiped his sweaty bald patch with a handkerchief, but did not ask any questions.
‘Everything’s ready. This way, please.’
He reported about everything else on the run, as he tried to keep up with Erast Petrovich.
‘The trolley’s waiting. The team has been assembled. They’re keeping their heads down, as ordered …’
The station postal worker, who had been informed of the basic situation, was loitering beside a trolley piled high with correspondence. To judge from the chalky hue of his features, he was in a dead funk. The room was packed with light-blue uniforms – all the gendarmes were squatting down, and their heads were bent down low too. That was so that no one would see them from the platform, through the window, Fandorin realised.
He smiled at the postal worker.
‘Calm down, calm down, nothing unusual is going to happen.’
He took hold of the handles and pushed the trolley out on to the platform.
‘Seven minutes,’ the gendarmes captain whispered after him.
A man in a blue jacket stuck his head out of the mail carriage, which was coupled immediately behind the locomotive.
‘Asleep, are you, Vladimir?’ he shouted angrily. ‘What’s taking you so long?’
Long moustache, middle-aged. Broad cheekbones? I suppose so, Erast Petrovich thought to himself, and whispered to his partner again:
‘Stop shaking, will you? And yawn, you almost overslept.’
‘There you go … Couldn’t keep my eyes open. My second straight day on duty,’ the Vladimir man babbled, yawning and stretching.
Meanwhile the disguised engineer was quickly tossing the mail in through the open door and weighing things up, wondering whether he should grab the man with the long moustache round the waist and fling him on to the platform. Nothing could be easier.
He decided to wait first and check whether there were three wooden crates measuring 15 × 10 × 15 inches in there.
He was right to wait.
He climbed up into the carriage and began dividing the Vladimir post into three piles: letters, parcels and packages.
The inside of the carriage was a veritable labyrinth of heaps of sacks, boxes and crates.
Erast walked along one row, then along another, but he didn’t see the familiar items.
‘What are you doing wandering about?’ someone barked at him out of a dark passage. ‘Get a move on, look lively! Sacks over this way, square items over there. Are you new, or something?’
This was a surprise: another postman, also about forty years old, with broad cheekbones and a moustache. Which one was it? A pity he didn’t have the clerk from the left luggage office with him.
‘Yes, I’m new,’ Fandorin droned in a deep voice, as if he had a cold.
‘And old too, from the look of you.’
The second postal worker came over to the first one and stood beside him. They both had holsters with Nagant revolvers hanging on their belts.
‘Why are your hands shaking –on a spree yesterday, were you?’ the second one asked the Vladimir man.
‘Just a bit …’
‘But didn’t you say this was your second day on duty?’ the first one, with the long moustache, asked in surprise.
The second one stuck his head out of the door and looked at the station building.
Which one of them? Fandorin tried to guess, slipping rapidly along the stacks. Or is it neither? Where are the crates of melinite?
Suddenly there was a deafening clang as the second postman slammed the door shut and pushed home the bolt.
‘What’s up with you, Matvei?’ the one with the long moustache asked, surprised again.
Matvei bared his yellow teeth and cocked the hammer of his revolver with a click.
‘I know what I’m doing! Three blue caps in the window, and all of them staring this way! I’ve got a nose for these things!’
Incredible relief was what Erast Petrovich felt at that moment – so he hadn’t wasted his time smearing lead white on his eyebrows and moustache and it had been worthwhile breathing locomotive soot for three hours.
‘Matvei, have you gone crazy?’ the one with the long moustache asked in bewilderment, gazing into the glittering gun barrel.
The Vladimir postal worker got the idea straight away and pressed himself back against the wall.
‘Easy, Lukich. Don’t stick your nose in. And you, you louse, tell me, is this loader of yours a nark? I’ll kill you!’ The subject grabbed the local man by the collar.
‘They made me do it … Have pity … I’ve only one year to go to my pension …’ said the local man, capitulating immediately.
‘Hey, my good man, don’t be stupid!’ shouted Fandorin, sticking his head out from behind the crates. ‘There’s nowhere you can go anyway. Drop the wea …’
He hadn’t expected that – the subject fired without even bothering to hear him out.
The engineer barely managed to squat down in time, and the bullet whistled by just above his head.
‘Ah, you stinking rat!’ Fandorin heard the man that the saboteur had called Lukich cry indignantly.
There was another crash, then two voices mingling together – one groaning, the other whining.
Erast Petrovich crept to the edge of the stack and glanced out.
Things had taken a really nasty turn.
Matvei was ensconced in the corner, holding the revolver out in front of him. Lukich was lying on the floor, fumbling at his chest with bloody fingers. The Vladimir postal worker was squealing with his hands up over his face.
Bluish-grey powder smoke swayed gently in the ghastly light of the electric lamp.
From the position that Fandorin had occupied, nothing could have been easier than to shoot the villain, but he was needed alive and preferably not too badly damaged. So Erast Petrovich stuck out the hand holding his Browning and planted two bullets in the wall to the subject’s right.
Exactly as required, the subject retreated from the corner behind a stack of cardboard boxes.
Shooting continuously (three, four, five, six, seven), the engineer jumped out, ran and threw himself bodily at the boxes – they collapsed, burying the man hiding behind them.
After that it took only a couple of seconds.
Erast Petrovich grabbed a protruding leg in a cowhide boot, tugged the saboteur out into the light of day (of the electric lamp, that is) and struck him with the edge of his hand slightly above the collarbone.
He had one.
Now he had to catch the other one, in glasses, who had collected the paper parcels.
Only how was he to find him? And was he even on the train at all?
But he didn’t have to search for the man in glasses – he announced his own presence.
When Erast Petrovich drew back the bolt and pushed open the heavy door of the mail carriage, the first thing he saw was people running along the platform. And h
e heard frightened screams and women squealing.
Captain Lenz was standing beside the carriage, looking pale and behaving strangely: instead of looking at the engineer, who had just escaped deadly danger, the gendarme was squinting off to one side.
‘Take him,’ said Fandorin, dragging the saboteur, who had still not come round, to the carraige door. ‘And get a stretcher here, a man’s been wounded.’ He nodded at the stampeding public. ‘Were they alarmed by the shots?’
‘No, not that. It’s a real disaster, Mr Engineer. As soon as we heard the shots, my men and I rushed out on to the platform, thinking we could help you … Then suddenly there was a wild, crazy howl from that carriage there …’ Lenz pointed off to one side. ‘“I won’t surrender alive!” That’s when it started …’
Two gendarmes lugged away Matvei, under arrest, and Erast Petrovich jumped down on to the platform and looked in the direction indicated.
He saw a green third-class carriage with not a single soul anywhere near it – but he glimpsed white faces with wide-open mouths behind the windows.
‘He has a revolver. And a bomb,’ Lenz reported hastily. ‘He must have thought we came dashing out to arrest him. He took the conductor’s keys and locked the carriage at both ends. There are about forty people in there. He keeps shouting: “Just try getting in, I’ll blow them all up!”’
And at that moment there was a blood-curdling shriek from the carriage.
‘Get back! If anybody moves, I’ll blow them all to kingdom come!’
However, he hasn’t blown them up yet, the engineer mused. Although he has had the opportunity. ‘I tell you what, Captain. Carry all the crates out of the mail carriage quickly. We’ll work out later which ones are ours. And observe every possible precaution as you carry them. If the melinite detonates, you’ll be building a new station afterwards. That is, not you, of course, b-but somebody else. Don’t come after me. I’ll do this alone.’
Erast Petrovich hunched over and ran along the line of carriages. He stopped at the window from which the threats to ‘blow everyone to kingdom come’ had been made. It was the only one that was half open.
The engineer tapped delicately on the side of the carriage: tap-tap-tap.
