by Boris Akunin
But when Masa bowed and withdrew, the titular counsellor climbed on to the windowsill and jumped down into the garden. In the darkness he banged his knee and swore. How absurd to be harassed like this by his own servant!
The Grand Hotel was only a stone’s throw away.
Erast Petrovich walked along the deserted promenade and glanced into the foyer.
Luckily for him, the receptionist was dozing behind his counter.
A few silent steps and the nocturnal visitor was already on the stairs.
He ran up to the first floor.
Aha, there was room number 16. The key was sticking out of the lock – very thoughtful, he could enter without knocking, which could easily have attracted the unwelcome attention of some sleepless guest.
Fandorin half-opened the door and slipped inside.
There was a figure silhouetted against the window – but not Asagawa’s, it was much slimmer than that.
The figure darted towards the dumbstruck vice-consul, moving like a cat.
Long slim fingers clasped his face.
‘I have to be with you!’ sang that unforgettable, slightly husky voice.
The titular counsellor’s nostrils caught a tantalising whiff of the magical aroma of irises.
Sad thoughts fill the mind,
Pain fills the heart, and then comes
That sweet iris scent
LOVE’S CALL
Don’t give in, don’t give in! his mind signalled desperately to his crazily beating heart. But in defiance of reason, his arms embraced the lithe body of the one who had put the poor vice-consul’s soul through such torment.
O-Yumi tore at his collar – the buttons scattered on to the carpet. Covering his exposed neck with rapid kisses and gasping impatiently in her passion, she tugged Fandorin’s frock coat off his shoulders.
And then something happened that should have been called a genuine triumph of reason over unbridled, elemental passion.
Gathering all his willpower (a quality with which he was well endowed), the titular counsellor took hold of O-Yumi’s wrists and moved them away from him – gently, but uncompromisingly.
There were two reasons for this, both of them weighty.
Erast Petrovich hastily formulated the first of them in this way: What does she take me for, a boy? She disappears when she pleases, whistles for me when she pleases, and I come running? For all its vagueness, this reason was extremely important. In the skirmish between two worlds that is called ‘love’, there is always monarch and subject, victor and vanquished. And that was the crucial question being decided at that very moment.
The second reason lay outside love’s domain. There was a whiff of mystery here, and a very disturbing kind of mystery at that.
‘How did you find out that Asagawa and I had agreed to communicate by notes?’ Erast Petrovich asked sternly, trying to make out the expression on her face in the darkness. ‘And so quickly too. Have you been following us? Eavesdropping on us? Exactly what is your part in this whole business?’
She looked up at him without speaking or moving or trying to free herself, but the touch of her skin scorched the young man’s fingers. He suddenly recalled a definition from the grammar school physics textbook: ‘The electricity contained in a body gives that body a special property, the ability to attract another body …’
Fandorin shook his head and said firmly:
‘Last time you slipped away without explaining anything to me. But today you will have to answer my qu-questions. Speak, will you!’
And O-Yumi did speak.
‘Who is Asagawa?’ she asked, tearing her wrists free of his grasp – the electric circuit was broken. ‘Did you think someone else sent you the note? And you came straight away? All this time I have been thinking of nothing but him, and he … What a fool I am!’
He wanted to hold her back, but he could not. She ducked, slipped under his arm and dashed out into the corridor. The door slammed in Erast Petrovich’s face. He grabbed hold of the handle, but the key had already turned in the lock.
‘Wait!’ the titular counsellor called out in horror. ‘Don’t go!’
Catch her, stop her, apologise.
But no – he heard subdued sobbing in the corridor, and then the sound of light footsteps moving rapidly away.
His reason cringed and shrank, cowering back into the farthest corner of his mind. The only feelings in Fandorin’s heart now were passion, horror and despair. The most powerful of all was the feeling of irreparable loss. And what a loss! As if he had lost everything in the world and had nobody to blame for it but himself.
‘Damn! Damn! Damn!’ the miserable vice-consul exclaimed through clenched teeth, and he slammed his fist into the doorpost.
Curses on his police training! A woman of reckless passion, who lived by her heart – the most precious woman in the whole world – had thrown herself into his embraces. She must have taken great risks to do it, perhaps she could even have risked her life. And he had interrogated her: ‘Have you been following?’ – ‘Have you been eavesdropping?’ – ‘What’s your part in all this?’
Oh, God, how horrible, how shameful!
A groan burst from the titular counsellor’s chest. He staggered across to the bed (the very same bed on which heavenly bliss could have been his!) and collapsed on it face down.
For a while Erast Petrovich lay there without moving, but trembling all over. If he could have sobbed, then he certainly would have, but Fandorin had been denied that kind of emotional release for ever.
It had been a long time, a very long time, since he had felt such intense agitation – and it seemed so completely out of proportion with what had happened. As if his soul, fettered for so long by a shell of ice, had suddenly started aching as it revived, oozing thawing blood.
‘What is this? What is happening to me?’ he kept repeating at first – but his thoughts were about her, not himself.
When his numbed brain started recovering slightly, the next question, far more urgent, arose of its own accord.
‘What do I do now?’
Erast Petrovich jerked upright on the bed. The trembling had passed off, his heart was beating rapidly, but steadily.
What should he do? Find her. Immediately. Come what may.
Anything else would mean brain fever, heart failure, the death of his very soul.
The titular counsellor dashed to the locked door, ran his hands over it rapidly and forced his shoulder against it.
Although the door was solid, it could probably be broken out. But then there would be a crash and the hotel staff would come running. He pictured the headline in bold type in the next day’s Japan Gazette: RUSSIAN VICE-CONSUL FOUND DEBAUCHING IN GRAND HOTEL.
Erast Petrovich glanced out of the window. The first floor was high up, and in the darkness he couldn’t see where he was jumping. What if there was a heap of stones, or a rake forgotten by some gardener?
These misgivings, however, did not deter the crazed titular counsellor. Deciding that it was obviously his fate for the day to climb over windowsills and jump out into the night, he dangled by his hands from the window and then opened his fingers.
His was lucky with his landing – he came down on a lawn. He brushed off his soiled knees and looked around.
It was an enclosed garden, surrounded on all sides by a high fence. But a little thing like that did not bother Fandorin. He took a run up, grabbed hold of the top of the fence, pulled himself up nimbly and sat there.
He tried to jump down into the side street, but couldn’t. His coat-tail had snagged on a nail. He tugged and tugged, but it was no good. It was fine, strong fabric – the coat had been made in Paris.
‘RUSSIAN VICE-CONSUL STUCK ON TOP OF FENCE,’ Erast Petrovich muttered to himself. He tugged harder, and the frock coat tore with a sharp crack.
Oops-a-daisy!
In ten paces Fandorin was on the Bund, which was brightly lit by street lamps, even though it was deserted.
He had to call b
ack home.
In order to find Bullcox’s address – that was one. And to collect his means of transport – that was two. It would take too long to walk there, and even if he compromised his principles, there was no way he could take a kuruma – he didn’t want any witnesses to this business.
Thank God, he managed to avoid the most serious obstacle, by the name of ‘Masa’: there was no light in the window of the small room where the meddlesome valet had his lodgings. He was asleep, the bandit.
The vice-consul tiptoed into the hallway and listened.
No, Masa wasn’t asleep. There were strange sounds coming from his room – either sobs or muffled groans.
Alarmed, Fandorin crept over to the Japanese-style sliding door. Masa did not care for European comfort and he had arranged his dwelling to suit his own taste: he had covered the floor with straw mats, removed the bed and bedside locker and hung bright-coloured pictures of ferocious bandits and elephantine sumo wrestlers on the walls.
On closer investigation, the sounds coming through the open door proved to be entirely unambiguous, and in addition, the titular counsellor discovered two pairs of sandals on the floor: one larger pair and one smaller pair.
That made the vice-consul feel even more bitter. He heaved a sigh and consoled himself: Well, let him. At least he won’t latch on to me.
Lying on the small table in the drawing room was a useful brochure entitled ‘Alphabetical List of Yokohama Residents for the Year 1878’. By the light of a match, it took Erast Petrovich only a moment to locate the address of ‘His Right Honourable A.-F.-C. Bullcox, Senior Adviser to the Imperial Government’ – 129, The Bluff. And there was a plan of the Settlement on the table too. House number 129 was located at the very edge of the fashionable district, at the foot of Hara Hill. Erast Petrovich lit another match and ran a pencil along the route from the consulate to his destination. He whispered, committing it to memory:
‘Across Yatobashi Bridge, past the customs post, past Yatozaka Street on the right, through the Hatacho Qu-quarter, then take the second turn to the left …’
He put on the broad-brimmed hat he had worn for taking turns around the deck during the evenings of his long voyage. And he swathed himself in a black cloak.
His carried his means of transport – the tricycle – out on to the porch very carefully, but even so, at the very last moment he caught the large wheel on the door handle. The doorbell trilled treacherously, but there was no catching Fandorin now.
He pulled the hat down over his eyes, leapt up on to the saddle at a run and started pressing hard on the pedals.
The moon was shining brightly in the sky – as round and buttery as the lucky lover Masa’s face.
On the promenade the titular counsellor encountered only two living souls: a French sailor wrapped in the arms of a Japanese tart. The sailor opened his mouth and pushed his beret with a pom-pom to the back of his head: the Japanese girl squealed.
And with good reason. Someone black, in a flapping cloak, came hurtling at the couple out of the darkness, then went rustling by on rubber tyres and instantly dissolved into the gloom.
At night the Bluff, with its Gothic bell towers, dignified villas and neatly manicured lawns, seemed unreal, like some enchanted little town that had been spirited away from Old Mother Europe at the behest of some capricious wizard and dumped somewhere at the very end of the world.
Here there were no tipsy sailors or women of easy virtue, everything was sleeping, and the only sound was the gentle pealing of the chimes in the clock tower.
The titular counsellor burst into this Victorian paradise in a monstrously indecent fashion. His ‘Royal Crescent’ tricycle startled a pack of homeless dogs sleeping peacefully on the bridge. In the first second or so they scattered, squealing, but, emboldened by seeing the monster of the night fleeing from them, they set off in pursuit, barking loudly.
And there was nothing that could be done about it.
Erast Petrovich waved his arm at them and even kicked one of them with the toe of his low boot, but the dratted curs simply wouldn’t leave him alone – they chased after the vice-consul, sticking to his heels and barking even more loudly.
He pressed harder on the pedals, which was not easy, because the street ran uphill, but Fandorin had muscles of steel and, after another couple of minutes in pursuit, the dogs started falling behind.
The young man arrived at house number 129 soaked in sweat. However, he was not feeling tired at all – he cared nothing for any trials or tribulations now.
The right honourable patron of the most precious woman in all the world resided in a two-storey mansion of red brick, constructed in accordance with the canons of the glorious Georgian style. Despite the late hour, the house was not sleeping – the windows were bright both downstairs and upstairs.
As he studied the local terrain, Erast Petrovich was surprised to realise that he had been here before. Nearby he could see tall railings with fancy lacework gates and, beyond them, a familiar white palazzo with columns – Don Tsurumaki’s estate, where Erast Petrovich had seen O-Yumi for the first time.
Bullcox’s domain was both smaller and less grandiose than his neighbour’s – and that was very opportune: to scale the ten-foot-high railings of the nouveau-riche Japanese magnate’s estate would have required a ladder, while hopping over the Englishman’s wooden fence was no problem at all.
Without pausing long for thought, Erast Petrovich hopped over. But he had barely even taken a few steps before he saw three swift shadows hurtling towards him across the lawn – they were huge, silent mastiffs, with eyes that glinted an ominous phosphorus-green in the moonlight.
He was obliged to beat a rapid retreat to the fence, and he only just made it in time.
Perched on the narrow top with his feet pulled up, gazing at those gaping jaws, the titular counsellor instantly conceived the appropriate headline for this scene: HAPLESS LOVER CHASED BY MASTIFFS.
What a disgrace, what puerile tomfoolery, the vice-consul told himself, but he didn’t come to his senses, he merely bit his lip – he was so furious at his own helplessness.
O-Yumi was so very close, behind one of those windows, but what could he do about these damned dogs?
The titular counsellor was fond of dogs, he respected them, but right now he could have shot these accursed English brutes with his trusty Herstal, without the slightest compunction. Ah, why had progress not yet invented silent gunpowder?
The mastiffs didn’t budge from the spot. They gazed upwards, scraping their clawed feet on the wooden boards. They didn’t actually bark – these aristocratic canines had been well trained – but they growled.
Erast Petrovich suddenly heard rollicking plebeian barking from the end of the street. Looking round, he saw his recent acquaintances – the homeless dogs from the Yatobashi Bridge. Surely they couldn’t have followed my scent, he thought to himself, but then he saw that the mongrels were chasing after a running man.
The man was waving his arm about – there was a pitiful yelp. He swung his arm in the other direction – another yelp, and the pack dropped back.
Masa, it was Fandorin’s faithful vassal, Masa! He had a wooden club in his hand, with another, identical, one attached to it by a chain. Fandorin already knew that this unprepossessing but effective weapon was called a nunchaku, and Masa could handle it very well.
The valet ran up and bowed to his master sitting on the fence.
‘How did you find me?’ Erast Petrovich asked, and tried to say the same thing in Japanese: Do-o … vatasi … sagasu?
His Japanese lessons had not been a waste of time – Masa understood! He took a sheet of paper, folded into four, out of his pocket, and opened it out.
Ah yes, the plan of the Settlement, with a pencil line leading from the consulate to house number 129.
‘This is not work. Sigoto iie. Go, go,’ said the titular counsellor, waving his hand at Masa. ‘There’s no danger, do you understand? Kiken – iie. Wakaru?’
&n
bsp; ‘Wakarimas,’ the servant said with a bow. ‘Mochiron wakarimas. O-Yumisan.’
Erast Petrovich was so surprised that he swayed and almost went crashing down off the fence – on the wrong side. Somehow he recovered his balance. Oh, servants, servants! It was an old truism that they knew more far more about their masters than the masters suspected. But how? Where from?
‘How d-do you know? Do-o wakaru?’
The Japanese folded his short-fingered hands together and pressed them to his cheek – as if he were sleeping. He murmured:
‘O-Yumi, O-Yumi … Darring …’
Darring?
Had he really been repeating her name in his sleep?
The titular counsellor lowered his head, sorely oppressed by a feeling of humiliation. But Masa jumped up and glanced over the fence. Having ascertained the reason for the vice-consul’s strange position, he started turning his head left and right.
‘Hai,’ he said. ‘Shosho o-machi kudasai.’
He ran over to the pack of dogs that was barking feebly at the fence of the next house. He picked up one canine, turned it over, sniffed it and tossed it away. He did the same with another. But he kept hold of the third one, tucked it under his arm and walked back to his master. The mongrels bore this high-handed treatment in silence – they clearly respected strength: only the captive whined pitifully.
‘What do you want the dog for?’
Masa somehow managed to climb up on to the fence – about ten paces away from Fandorin – without releasing his live booty.
He swung his legs over, jumped down and dashed for the gate as fast as his legs would carry him. The mastiffs darted after the little titch, ready to tear him to pieces. But the nimble-footed valet opened the latch and flung the mongrel on the ground. It bolted out into the street with a squeal, and then a genuine miracle took place – instead of mauling the stranger, the guard dogs bolted after the mongrel.
It shot away from them, working its little legs furiously. The mastiffs ran after it in a pack, with their heads in line.
