by Boris Akunin
Then she leaned down to the master and whispered something in his ear in gaijin language.
And that was all – she went out into the clearing and walked towards the house with a light stride.
They didn’t notice her straight away, but when they spotted the figure in the black, close-fitting ninja costume, they were startled.
Midori-san raised her empty hands and shouted.
‘Mr Tsurumaki knows me! I am Tamba’s daughter! I will show you his secret hiding place!’
The Black Jackets swarmed round her and started searching her. Then the entire crowd moved towards the porch and went into the house. Not a single soul was left outside.
The distance was only about thirty paces, Masa suddenly realised. If there was an explosion, wreckage would come showering down. He had to drag the master farther away.
He put his arms round the motionless body and dragged it across the ground.
But he hadn’t carried him very far, only a few steps, when the earth shook and his ears were deafened.
Masa turned round.
Momochi Tamba’s house collapsed neatly, as if it had gone down on its knees. First the walls caved in, then the roof swayed and came crashing down and broke in half, sending dust flying in all directions. It was suddenly completely light all around and a blast of hot air hit him in the face.
The servant leaned over to protect the body of his master and saw tears flowing out of the wide-open eyes.
The woman had deceived him. The master did not come round in an hour, or even in two.
Masa went to look at the heap of rubble several times. He dug up an arm in a black sleeve, a leg in a black trouser leg, and also a close-cropped head without a lower jaw. He didn’t find a single person alive.
He came back several times and shook the master to make him wake up. The master wasn’t actually unconscious, but he just lay there without moving, looking at the sky. At first the tears kept running down his face, then they stopped.
And not long before dawn Tamba appeared – he simply came through the forest from the direction of the crevice, as if everything was perfectly normal.
He said he had been on the other side and killed the sentries. There were only six of them.
‘But why didn’t you fly here through the sky, sensei?’ Masa asked.
‘I’m not a bird, to go flying through the sky. I flew down off the cliff on wings made of cloth, a man can learn to do that,’ the cunning old man explained, but, of course, Masa didn’t believe him.
‘What happened here?’ asked the sensei, looking at the master lying on the ground and the ruins of the house. ‘Where’s my daughter?’
Masa told him what had happened and where his daughter was.
The jonin knitted his grey eyebrows together but, of course, he didn’t cry – he was a ninja.
He said nothing for a long time, then he said:
‘I’ll get her out myself.’
Masa also said nothing for a while – for as long as was required by consideration for a father’s feelings – and then he expressed concern about his master’s strange condition. He enquired cautiously whether Midori-san could possibly have tried too hard and whether the master would now be paralysed for ever.
‘He can move,’ Tamba replied after taking another look at the man on the ground. ‘He just doesn’t want to. Let him stay like that for a while. Don’t touch him. I’ll go and rake through the rubble. And you cut some firewood and build a funeral pyre. A big one.’
I could sit watching,
Watch it till the break of dawn –
The flame of the fire
1 Hidden village (Japanese)
2 In Japanese neko-chan means ‘little cat’
3 Shinran (1173–1263), the founder of the Jodo sect of the school of the Way of the Pure Land
4 A unit of area (0.033 m3)
5 A unit of length (1.81m)
HE DIDN’T ANSWER
Fandorin lay on the ground and looked at the sky. At first it was almost black, lit up by the moon. Then the highlighting disappeared and the sky turned completely black, but seemingly not for long. Its colour kept changing: it became greyish, acquired a reddish glaze and started turning blue.
While Midori’s final words were still ringing in his ears (‘Farewell, my love. Remember me without sadness’) – and that echo lingered for a long, long time – tears flowed unceasingly from benumbed Erast Petrovich’s eyes. Gradually, however, the echo faded away and the tears dried up. The titular counsellor simply lay on his back, not thinking about anything, observing the behaviour of the sky.
When grey clouds crept across it, crowding out the blue, Tamba’s face leaned down over the man on the ground. Perhaps the old jonin had appeared earlier, Fandorin wasn’t entirely sure about that. But in any case, until this moment Tamba had not attempted to shut out the sky.
‘That’s enough,’ he said. ‘Now get up.’
Erast Petrovich got up. Why not?
‘Let’s go.’
He went.
He didn’t ask the old man any questions – he couldn’t care less about anything. But Tamba starting talking anyway. He said he had sent Masa to Tokyo. Masa had been very reluctant to leave his master, but it was necessary to summon Tamba’s nephew, a student in the faculty of medicine. Dan was the only one left, if you didn’t count the two who were studying abroad. They would come too, although not soon, of course. The Momochi clan had suffered grievous losses, it would have to be restored. And before that Tamba had to settle accounts with Don Tsurumaki.
The titular counsellor listened indifferently. None of this interested him.
In the clearing beside the ruined house a huge stack of firewood had been piled up, with another, smaller stack beside it. On the first stack there were bodies wrapped in black rags packed close together in three rows. Something white and narrow was lying on the second one.
Fandorin didn’t really look very closely. When you’re standing up it’s awkward to tilt your head back to look at the sky, so now he was mostly just examining the grass at his feet.
‘Your servant spent several hours chopping and stacking the wood,’ said Tamba. ‘And we carried the dead together. They are all here. Most of them have no heads, but that is not important.’
He walked up to the first stack of wood, bent over in a low bow and did not straighten up for a long, long time. Then he lit a torch and touched it to the wood, which flared up immediately – it must have been sprayed with some kind of combustible liquid.
Watching the fire was better than watching the grass. It kept changing its colour all the time, like the sky, and it moved, but still stayed in the same place. Fandorin looked at the flames until the bodies started moving. One dead man squirmed as if he had decided to try sitting up. That was unpleasant. And there was a smell of scorched flesh.
The titular counsellor first turned away, then walked off to the side.
The fire hissed and crackled. But Erast Petrovich stood with his back to it and didn’t turn round.
After some time Tamba came over to him.
‘Don’t keep silent,’ he said. ‘Say something. Otherwise the ki will find no exit and a lump will form in your heart. You could die like that.’
Fandorin didn’t know what ki was and he wasn’t afraid of dying, but he did as the old man asked – why not? He said:
‘It’s hot. When the wind blows this way, it’s hot.’
The jonin nodded approvingly.
‘Good. Now your heart won’t burst. But it is encrusted with ice, and that is also dangerous. I know a very good way to melt ice that shackles the heart. It is vengeance. You and I have the same enemy. You know who.’
Don Tsurumaki, the titular counsellor said in his head, and listened to his own voice – nothing inside him stirred.
‘That won’t change anything,’ he said out loud.
Tamba nodded again.
Neither of them spoke for a while.
‘You know, I found her,’
the old man said quietly a minute later, or perhaps it was an hour. ‘I had to rake through the beams and the planks, but I found her. She’s there, look.’
And he pointed to the second pyre.
That was when Erast Petrovich realised what it was lying there, covered with white material. He started shaking. It was impossible to stop the shuddering, it got stronger and stronger with every second.
‘She’s my daughter. I decided to bury her separately. Come, you can say goodbye.’
But the titular counsellor didn’t move from the spot – he just shook his head desperately.
‘Don’t be afraid. Her body is shattered, but I have covered it. And half of her face survived. Only don’t go close.’
Tamba didn’t wait, but set off towards the pyre first. He threw back the corner of the cover and Fandorin saw Midori’s profile. White, slim, calm – and as beautiful as in life.
Erast Petrovich dashed towards her, but the jonin blocked his way.
‘No closer!’
Why not? Why not?
The titular counsellor tossed Tamba aside like a dry twig, but the old man grabbed him at a slant round the waist.
‘Don’t! She wouldn’t have wanted it!’
The damned old man was tenacious and Erast Petrovich couldn’t move another step farther forward. He went up on tiptoe to see more than just the profile.
And he saw.
The other half of her face was black and charred, like some terrible African mask.
Fandorin recoiled in horror and Tamba shouted angrily:
‘Why do you shrink away? Dead ninjas have no faces, but she still has half of one. Because Midori had become only a half-ninja – and that’s because of you!’ The jonin’s voice shook. He lit another torch. ‘But never mind. Fire purges everything. Watch. Her body will bend and unbend in the tongues of purifying flame and then crumble into ash.’
But Erast Petrovich didn’t want to watch her poor body writhing. He strode off towards the forest, gulping in air with his mouth.
Something had happened to his lungs. The air didn’t fill his chest. The small, convulsive breaths were excruciating.
Why, oh why had he not listened to Tamba! Why had he gone up close to the pyre? She had wanted to part beautifully, following all the rules, so that her tender face and her words of farewell would remain in her beloved’s memory. But now – and he knew this for certain – everything would be overshadowed by a black-and-white mask: one half indescribably beautiful, the other half the very incarnation of horror and death.
But what was this that had happened to his lungs? His breaths had become short and jerky. And it wasn’t that he couldn’t breathe in – on the contrary, he couldn’t breathe out. The poisoned air of this accursed morning had stuck in his chest and absolutely refused to come back out.
‘Your skin is blue,’ said Tamba, coming up to him.
The old man’s face was calm, even sleepy somehow.
‘I can’t breathe,’ Fandorin explained abruptly.
The jonin looked into his eyes and shook his head.
‘And you won’t be able to. You need to let the bad energy out. Otherwise it will suffocate you. You have to shatter the ice that has gripped your heart so tightly.’
He’s talking about the Don again, Erast Petrovich realised.
‘All right. I’ll go with you. It’s not very likely to warm my heart, but perhaps I’ll be able to breathe again.’
Behind the titular counsellor’s back the flames raged and roared, but he didn’t look round.
‘I have no weaknesses any more,’ said the jonin. ‘Now I shall become a genuine Tamba. You will also become stronger. You are young. There are very many good women in the world, far more than there are good men. Women will love you, and you will love them.’
Erast Petrovich explained to him:
‘I mustn’t love anybody. My love brings disaster. I cannot love. I cannot love.’
Tamba didn’t answer.
Nothing is worse than
When someone knows everything
But will not answer
A POSTMAN
They set out for Yokohama at night, Fandorin on his tricycle, Tamba running. The tricyclist turned his pedals smoothly and powerfully, but soon fell behind – the ninja moved faster, and he didn’t have to stop to tauten a chain or negotiate a stony patch. They hadn’t actually arranged to travel together, merely agreed a meeting place: in the Bluff, on the hill that overlooked Don Tsurumaki’s house.
Erast Petrovich immersed himself completely in the rhythm of travelling, thinking of nothing but breathing correctly. Breathing was still as difficult as ever for him, but otherwise the titular counsellor felt a lot better than he had during the day. The movement helped. It was as if he had been transformed from a man into a chain-transmission and ball-bearing mechanism. His soul was filled, not so much with peace, as with a certain blessed emptiness, without any thoughts or feelings. If he could have had his way, he would have carried on like this through the sleeping valley until the end of his life, never feeling tired.
There really was no tiredness. Before setting out, Tamba had made Fandorin swallow kikatsu-maru, an ancient food that ninjas took with them as rations for long journeys. It was a small, almost tasteless ball moulded out of powder: grated carrot, buckwheat flour, yam and some cunning root or other. The mixture was supposed to be aged for three years, until all the moisture evaporated. According to Tamba, two or three of these little balls were enough to prevent a grown man feeling any hunger or fatigue all day long. And instead of a bottle of water, Erast Petrovich had been given a supply of suikatsu-maru – three tiny pellets of sugar, malt and the flesh of marinated plums.
And there was one other present, which was obviously supposed to inflame the thirst for vengeance in Fandorin’s indifferent breast: a formal photograph of Midori. The photo seemed to have been taken at the time when she was working in a brothel. Looking out at the titular counsellor from the clumsily coloured portrait was a china doll in a kimono, with a tall hairstyle. He stared at this image for a long time, but didn’t recognise Midori in it. And her beauty had disappeared somehow as well. Erast Petrovich thought abstractedly that genuine beauty was impossible to capture with the camera lens: it was too vital, too anomalous and mercurial. Or perhaps the problem was that genuine beauty was not perceived with the eyes, but in some other way.
The journey from Yokohama to the mountains had taken two days. But Erast Petrovich trundled back in five hours. He didn’t take a single break, but he wasn’t tired at all – no doubt owing to the magical maru.
To get into the Bluff, Fandorin needed to go straight on towards the racecourse, but instead of that he steered his vehicle to the left, towards the river, beyond which lay the crowded roofs of the trading quarter, wreathed in the morning mist.
The titular counsellor raced across the Nisinobasi bridge into the straight streets of the Settlement, and found himself, not on the hill where Tamba was no doubt already tired of waiting for him, but on the promenade, in front of a building with the Russian tricolour flying over it.
Erast Petrovich had not changed his route out of any absentmindedness resulting from the shock that he had suffered. There was no absentmindedness at all. On the contrary, the consequence of the frozen state of his feelings and the hours of mechanical movements was that the titular counsellor’s brain had started to function with the direct, linear precision of an adding machine. Wheels whirled, levers clicked and out popped the answer. In his normal condition Fandorin might possibly have over-intellectualised and produced some fancy construction with bells on, but now, while the non-participation of his emotions was absolute, his plan came out amazingly simple and clear.
Erast Petrovich had called round to the consulate or, rather, to his own apartment, on a matter relating directly to his arithmetically precise plan.
As he walked past the bedroom, he averted his gaze (the instinct of self-preservation prompted him to do that), turned on the light
in the study and started rummaging through the books. Methodically picking up a volume, leafing through it and dropping it on the floor.
While doing this he muttered unintelligibly under his breath:
‘Edgar Allan Poe? Nerval? Schopenhauer?’
He was so absorbed by this mysterious activity that he didn’t hear the quiet footsteps behind him.
Suddenly a strident, nervous voice shouted:
‘Don’t move or I’ll shoot!’
Consul Doronin was standing in the doorway of the study, wearing a Japanese dressing gown and holding a revolver in his hand.
‘It is I, Fandorin,’ the titular counsellor said calmly, glancing round for no more than a second before continuing to rustle the pages. ‘Hello, Vsevolod Vitalievich.’
‘You!’ gasped the consul, without lowering his weapon (owing to surprise, one must assume). ‘I saw a light in your windows and the door standing wide open. I thought it was thieves, or something worse … Oh Lord, you’re alive! Where on earth did you get to? You’ve been gone for a whole week! I already … But where’s your Japanese servant?’
‘In Tokyo,’ Fandorin replied briefly, dropping a work by Proudhon and taking up a novel by Disraeli.
‘And. … and Miss O-Yumi?’
The titular counsellor froze with the book in his hands, totally overwhelmed by this simple question.
Yes indeed, where was she now? After all, it was impossible for her not to be anywhere at all. Had she migrated to other flesh, in accordance with the Buddhist teachings? Or gone to heaven, where there was a place waiting for all that was truly beautiful? Or gone to hell, which was the right place for sinners?
‘… I don’t know,’ he replied after a long pause, at a loss.
The tone of voice in which this was said was enough to prevent Vsevolod Vitalievich from asking his assistant any more about his lover. If Erast Petrovich had been in his normal condition, he would have noticed that the consul himself looked rather strange: he didn’t have his habitual spectacles, his eyes were blazing excitedly and his hair was dishevelled.
