The Diamond Chariot

by Boris Akunin

No one, absolutely no one! Empty space!

  But someone had been here, and very recently – the smell of Japanese pipe tobacco still lingered in the air.

  Masa looked round the room that had a wooden floor instead of mats. He squatted down and rubbed the smooth wood. Something caught his interest and he stepped inside.

  The vice-consul was about to follow him, but just at that moment he heard a rustling from behind the seventh door, the one closing off the end of the corridor, and he started. Aha! There’s someone there!

  It was a strange sound, something like sleepy breathing, the breath expelled not by a man, but a giant or some kind of huge monster, it was so powerful and deep.

  Let it be a giant or a monster – it was all the same to Erast Petrovich now. Anything but emptiness, anything but deathly silence!

  The titular counsellor waited for an endlessly long out-breath to come to an end, flung the door aside with a crash and dashed forward.

  Fandorin only just managed to grab hold of the railings, right on the very edge of the little wooden bridge suspended above the precipice. He was surrounded on all sides by Nothing – the night, the sky, a yawning gulf.

  He heard the out-breath of the invisible colossus again – it was the boundless ether sighing, stirred by a light breeze.

  There was nothing but blackness below the vice-consul’s feet, stars above his head; all around him were the peaks of mountains illuminated by the moon, and in the distance, between two slopes, the lights of the distant plain.

  Erast Petrovich shuddered and backed into the corridor.

  He slammed the door into Nowhere and called out:

  ‘Masa!’

  No answer.

  He glanced into the room with the wooden floor. His servant was not there.

  ‘Masa!’ Erast Petrovich shouted irritably.

  Had he gone outside? If he was in the house, he would have answered.

  Yes, he had gone out. The entrance door, which the titular counsellor had left open, was now closed.

  Fandorin walked up to it and tugged on the handle. The door didn’t move. What the hell?

  He tugged as hard as he could – the door didn’t budge at all. Was it stuck? That was no great problem. It wasn’t hard to make a hole in a Japanese partition.

  Swinging his fist back, the vice-consul punched the straw surface – and cried out in pain. It felt as if he had slammed his hand into iron.

  Erast Petrovich heard a grating sound behind him. Swinging round, he saw another partition sliding out of the wall to enclose him in a cramped square between two rooms, the doors of which (as he noticed only now) were also closed.

  ‘A trap!’ – the realisation flashed through Fandorin’s mind.

  He jerked at the door on the left, with no result, and the same with the door on the right.

  They had him locked in, like an animal in a cage.

  But this animal had fangs. Fandorin pulled out his seven-round Herstal and started swinging round his own axis, hoping that one of the four doors would open now and there would be an enemy behind it – in a close-fitting black costume with a mask that covered all his face, so that only the eyes could be seen.

  And in fact he did see a black man without a face, but not where he was expecting to see him. As he gazed round on all sides, the titular counsellor raised his head – and froze. Directly above Fandorin, there was a ninja lying (yes, yes, lying, in defiance of all the laws of nature!) on the ceiling, spreadeagled against it like a spider. The two glinting eyes in the slit between the headscarf and the mask were staring straight at the vice-consul.

  Erast Petrovich threw up the hand with the revolver, but the bullet hit the boards of the ceiling – the shinobi grabbed the barrel of the diplomat’s gun with an incredibly fast movement and turned it away. The spider-man had a grip of iron.

  Suddenly the floor under Fandorin’s feet caved in and the titular counsellor went hurtling downwards with his eyes closed. Meanwhile the Herstal remained in the ninja’s hand.

  Erast Petrovich landed softly, on what felt like cushions. He opened his eyes, expecting to find himself in darkness, but there was a lamp burning in the basement.

  The stunned Fandorin was facing a lean little old man sitting with his legs crossed and smoking a pipe with a tiny bowl at the end of a long stem.

  He blew out a cloud of bluish smoke and spoke in English:

  ‘I wait and you come.’

  The narrowed eyes opened wider and glinted with a fierce flame, like two glowing coals.

  The wood and the fire,

  The coal, the time, the diamond

  And the chariot

  1 ‘Rope’ (Japanese)

  2 ‘Let’s go!’ (Japanese)

  THE DEATH OF AN ENEMY

  Unlike the rooms that Fandorin had seen upstairs, the basement looked lived in and even cosy after a fashion. There really were cushions scattered across the floor, a cup of tea was steaming on a lacquered table, and behind the frightening old man there was a picture hanging on the wall – a portrait of a warrior in a horned helmet, with a bow in his hands, an arrow in his teeth and his glittering eyes glaring menacingly up at the sky.

  Erast Petrovich recalled the legend of how the great Momochi Tamba shot the false moon, but the titular counsellor was in no mood for ancient fables just at the moment.

  It was pointless to throw himself at his enemy – Fandorin remembered his two previous skirmishes with the jonin only too well, and the humiliating way in which they had ended. When an opponent is a hundred times stronger, an individual of dignity has only one weapon – his presence of mind.

  ‘Why did you abduct O-Yumi?’ Erast Petrovich asked, trying with all his might to impart a dispassionate expression to his face (after the shock he had just suffered this was difficult). He sat down clumsily on the floor and rubbed his bruised fist. The hatch through which Fandorin had tumbled had already slammed shut – now there was a ceiling of yellow planks above his head.

  ‘I did not abduct her,’ the old man replied calmly in his broken but perfectly understandable English.

  ‘You lie!’

  Tamba did not take offence or grow angry – he half-closed his eyelids sleepily.

  ‘Lies are my trade, but now I am telling the truth.’

  Erast Petrovich was unable to maintain his dispassionate expression: driven by a sudden paroxysm of fury, he lunged forward, grabbed the little old man by the neck and shook him, forgetting that the jonin could paralyse him with a single touch of his finger.

  ‘What have you done with Yumi? Where is she?’

  Tamba offered no resistance, and his head bobbed about on his skinny shoulders.

  ‘Here. She is here,’ Fandorin heard, and jerked his hands away.

  ‘Where is “here”?’

  ‘At home. Midori is expecting you.’

  ‘Who the hell is Midori?’ the titular counsellor asked, wrinkling up his forehead. ‘Where’s my Yumi?’

  Behaving as if everything was perfectly normal, the old man glanced into his pipe, saw that the tobacco had been shaken out and packed in a new pinch. He kindled the flame first, puffing out his cheeks, and then spoke.

  ‘Her real name is Midori. She is my daughter. And I did not abduct her. I’d like to see anyone abduct a girl like her …’

  ‘Eh?’ was all that the astounded Fandorin could find to say.

  ‘She makes her own mind up about everything. She has a terribly bad character. And I’m a soft father, she does as she likes with me. The real Tamba would have killed a daughter like that.’

  ‘What do you mean, “the real Tamba”?’ the vice-consul asked, desperately rubbing his forehead as he tried to gather his thoughts. ‘Then who are you?’

  ‘I am his successor in the eleventh generation,’ said the jonin, pointing with his pipe at the portrait of the warrior in the horned helmet. ‘I am an ordinary, weak man, not like my great predecessor.’

  ‘D-damn the genealogy!’ Erast Petrovich exclaimed. ‘Where’s my
Yumi?’

  ‘Midori,’ the eleventh Tamba corrected him again. ‘She was right in what she said about you. You are half-sighted, short-winged, half-blind. Your sight is keen, but it does not penetrate far. Your flight is impetuous, but not always precise. Your mind is sharp, but not deep. However, I see you have a kagebikaru shadow under your left cheekbone, which tells me that you are still at the very beginning of your Path and can change for the better.’

  ‘Where is she?’ Fandorin cried, jumping to his feet: he did not wish to listen to this nonsense. And when he jumped up, he banged his head against wood – the ceiling was too low for his height.

  Bells started chiming in the crown of the vice-consul’s head and circles started spinning in front of his eyes, but the old man who called himself O-Yumi’s father did not stop talking for a moment.

  ‘If I had noticed the inuoka bumps at the sides of your forehead in time, I would not have set the adder on you. Dogs do not bite people like you, snakes leave you alone, wasps do not sting you. Things and animals love you. You are a man of a very rare breed. That is why I assigned my daughter to you.’

  Erast Petrovich did not interrupt him any more. O-Yumi had mentioned that her father was an unsurpassed master of ninso! Could what he was saying really be true?

  ‘Midori took a look at you and said yes, you were special. It would be a shame to kill someone like that. Properly employed, you could be very helpful.’

  ‘Where is she?’ Fandorin asked in a dejected voice. ‘I must see her …’

  At that Tamba reached out one hand to the wall, pressed something, and the wall slid sideways.

  O-Yumi was sitting in the next room, wearing a white and red kimono, with her hair in a tall style. Completely motionless, her face absolutely still, she looked like a beautiful doll. Erast Petrovich was no more than five steps away from her.

  He shot forward towards her, but O-Yumi didn’t stir and he didn’t dare to embrace her.

  ‘She’s drugged!’ – the thought flashed through his mind; but her gaze was perfectly clear and calm. This was a strange, incomprehensible O-Yumi sitting in front of him, close enough for him to reach out and touch her, but that distance seemed quite insurmountable. It was not this woman he loved, but another, who, as it turned out, had never existed …

  ‘What? Why? What for?’ poor Fandorin babbled incoherently. ‘Are you a ninja?’

  ‘The very best in the Momochi clan,’ Tamba declared proudly. ‘She can do almost everything that I can do. But in addition, she has mastered arts that are inaccessible to me.’

  ‘I know,’ the titular counsellor said with a bitter laugh. ‘For instance, jojutsu. You sent her to a brothel to study that wisdom.’

  ‘Yes. I sent her to Yokohama to study. Here in the mountains no one would have taught her to be a woman. And Midori had to study the foreign barbarians, because Japan needs them.’

  ‘Did he order you to study me too?’ Erast Petrovich asked the woman of stone.

  Tamba answered again.

  ‘Yes. I will tell you how it happened. I received a commission to protect the samurai who were pursuing Minister Okubo. My men could easily have killed him themselves, but it had to be done by the samurai. Then the killing would have a meaning that was clear to everyone and no one would suspect my client.’

  ‘Don Tsurumaki?’

  ‘Yes. The Momochi clan has been receiving commissions from him for several years. A serious man, he pays promptly. When one of the client’s men told me that an old foreigner was sitting in the Rakuen gambling house and telling everybody about the group led by Ikemura with the withered arm, the tattler’s mouth had to be stopped. The job was done very neatly, but then you turned up, most inappropriately. Ikemura and his men had to hide. And I also found out that you had taken as your servant a man who had seen me and could identify me.’

  ‘How did you find that out?’ Fandorin asked, turning towards the jonin for the first time since the partition had slid aside.

  ‘From the client. And he got his information from police chief Suga.’

  For whom the efficient Asagawa wrote his reports, the titular counsellor added to himself. Events that had seemed mysterious, even inexplicable, began arranging themselves in a logical sequence, and this process was so fascinating that the vice-consul forgot about his broken heart for a while.

  ‘I had to kill your servant. Everything would have fitted nicely – the bite of the mamusi would have rid me of the witness. But then you showed up again. At first I almost made a mistake, I almost killed you. But the snake proved cleverer. It did not wish to bite you. Of course, I could easily have killed you myself, but the mamusi’s strange behaviour forced me to take a closer look at you. I saw that you were an unusual man and it would be a shame to kill someone like that. And in any case, the death of a foreign diplomat would have created too much commotion. You had seen me – that was bad, but you would not be able to find me. That was how I reasoned.’ The old man finished smoking his pipe and shook out the ash. ‘And then I made another mistake, which happens to me very, very rarely. The client informed me that I had left a clue. An unheard-of kind of clue – the print of a finger, and I had done it twice. It turned out that European science can find a man from such a small thing as that. Very interesting. I instructed one of my genins to find out more about fingerprints, it could be useful to us. Another genin broke into the police station and destroyed the clues. He was a good shinobi, one of my cousins. He didn’t manage to escape his pursuers, but he died like a genuine ninja, without leaving his face to his enemies …’

  All this was extraordinarily interesting, but one strange thing was bothering Erast Petrovich. Why was the jonin taking so much trouble to enlighten his prisoner, why did he think it necessary to offer any explanations? This was a riddle!

  ‘By that time Midori had already started working with you,’ Tamba went on. ‘I found you more and more interesting. How artfully you tracked down Ikemura’s group! If not for Suga, who corrected the situation, my client could have had serious problems. But Suga was not cautious enough, and you exposed him. You acquired new clues, even more dangerous than the previous ones. The client ordered me to finish you off, once and for all. To kill Prince Onokoji, who had caused him too much trouble, to kill you all: the head of the foreign police, Asagawa, the bald doctor. And you.’

  ‘Me too?’ Fandorin asked with a start. ‘You say the Don ordered me to be killed too?’

  ‘Especially you.’

  ‘Why didn’t you do it? There on the pier?’

  The old man heaved a sigh and shifted his gaze to his daughter.

  ‘Why, why … And why am I wasting time on you, instead of wringing your neck?’

  The titular counsellor, who was very much concerned about this question, held his breath.

  ‘I have already told you. I am a poor, weak jonin. My daughter does as she likes with me. She forbade me to kill you, and I deceived the client. How shameful …’

  Tamba lowered his head on to his chest and sighed even more bitterly. Fandorin turned round towards O-Yumi, who was really called something else.

  ‘B-but why?’ he asked with just his lips.

  ‘The shinobi are degenerating,’ Tamba said mournfully. ‘In former times a ninja girl, the daughter of a jonin, would never have fallen in love with an outsider, and a barbarian.’

  ‘What!’ Erast Petrovich gasped, and suddenly saw a blush appear on Midori’s doll-like cheeks.

  ‘I did not kill you, I gave part of the money back to the Don and said you had been saved by a miracle. But my shame was not enough for her, she decided to destroy me. When you fought the Englishman with swords, Midori concealed herself in the bushes. She fired a sleeping dart into the redheaded man from a fukubari. It was a terribly stupid thing to do. When Tsurumaki was taking the Englishman home, he discovered the dart sticking out of his throat and realised that this was the work of shinobi. The Don imagined that I was playing a double game. He took precautions, crammed his ho
use full of guards – he was afraid that I would come to kill him. And you, not knowing anything, walked straight into the den of the tiger …’

  ‘And you didn’t say anything to me?’ Fandorin said to Midori.

  She moved for the first time – lowering her eyes.

  ‘Would you want her to betray her father? To tell an outsider about the Momochi clan?’ Tamba asked menacingly. ‘No, she chose to act differently. My daughter is a lovesick fool, but she is a very cunning fool. She thought of a way to save you. Midori knew that Tsurumaki was afraid of me, not you. He does not understand why I started obstructing him and so he is very worried. If the Don learned that the ninja had stolen your lover, he would not kill you. Midori put your servant to sleep – not for long, only a few minutes, and hurried here to me. She said Tsurumaki would definitely bring you, since he had to work out what the connection was between you and the jonin of the Momochi clan …’ The old man smiled dourly. ‘If he only knew the truth, he would lose all respect for me … Tamba the First had no weaknesses. He did not hesitate to abandon his sons to die in the besieged temple at Hijiyama. But I am weak. My weakness is my daughter. And my daughter’s weakness is you. That is why you are still alive and why I am talking to you.’

  Erast Petrovich said nothing, dumbstruck. The isolated facts had come together to form a single picture, the unsolvable riddles had been solved. But even so he asked – not the jonin, but his daughter:

  ‘Is this true?’

  Without raising her head, she nodded. She mouthed some short phrase soundlessly.

  ‘I love you,’ Fandorin read from her lips, and felt a hot pulse pound in his temples. Never before, not even in the most tender of moments, had she spoken those words. Or was this the accursed jojutsu again?

  ‘I am not your enemy,’ said Tamba, interrupting the lengthy pause. ‘I cannot be the enemy of the man my daughter loves.’

  But the titular counsellor, stung by the very thought of jojutsu, exclaimed intransigently:

  ‘No, you are my enemy! You killed my friends! What have you done with Masa?’

  ‘He is alive and well,’ the old man said with a gentle smile. ‘He simply walked into a room with a revolving floor and landed in a pit. My nephew Jingoro squeezed your servant’s neck, to make him fall asleep. You will wake him yourself soon.’