by Boris Akunin
‘What of your expedition to the mountains? Did you discover Tamba’s lair?’ Doronin asked, but without seeming particularly interested.
‘Yes.’
Another book went flying on to the heap.
‘And what then?’
The question was left unanswered, and once again the consul did not persist. He finally lowered his weapon.
‘What are you looking for?’
‘It’s just that I put something away and I c-can’t remember where,’ Fandorin said in annoyance. ‘Perhaps in Bulwer-Lytton?’
‘Do you know what an incredible stunt Bukhartsev pulled while you were away?’ the consul asked with a brief laugh. ‘That brute wrote a complaint about you, and he actually sent it to the Third Section. The day before yesterday a coded telegram arrived, with the signature of the chief of gendarmes himself, Adjutant General Mizinov: “Let Fandorin act as he considers necessary”. Bukhartsev is totally annihilated. You’re the cock of the walk now, as far as the ambassador is concerned. The poor baron was so frightened, he even proposed you for a decoration.’
But this joyful news entirely failed to engage the titular counsellor’s interest; in fact he was beginning to demonstrate increasing signs of impatience.
It was a most singular conversation, with the two men hardly even listening to each other: each was preoccupied with his own thoughts.
‘I’m so very glad that you have come back!’ Vsevolod Vitalievich exclaimed. ‘And today of all days! Now that is a genuine sign of destiny!’
At that point the titular counsellor finally tore himself away from his search, looked at the consul a little more closely and realised that he was obviously not his usual self.
‘What has happened t-to you. Your cheeks are flushed.’
‘Flushed? Really?’ exclaimed Doronin, clutching at one cheek in embarrassment. ‘Ah, Fandorin, a miracle has happened. My Obayasi is expecting a child! The doctor told us today – there’s no doubt about it! I resigned myself long ago to the idea of never being a father, and suddenly …’
‘Congratulations,’ said Erast Petrovich, and wondered what else he might say, but couldn’t think of anything and solemnly shook the consul by the hand. ‘And why is my return a sign of d-destiny?’
‘Why, because I’m resigning! I’ve already written my letter. My child can’t be born illegitimate. I’m getting married. But I won’t go back to Russia. People would look askance at a Japanese woman there. Better let them look askance at me instead. I’ll register as a Japanese subject and take my wife’s family name. I can’t have my child called “Dirty Man”. A letter of resignation is all very fine of course, but there was no one for me to hand the job over to. You disappeared, Shirota resigned. I was prepared for a lengthy wait. But here you are! What a happy day! You’re alive, so now I have someone I can pass things on to.’
Happiness is hard of hearing, and it never even occurred to Vsevolod Vitalievich that his final phrase might sound rather insulting to his assistant, but, in any case, Fandorin did not take offence – unhappiness is not distinguished by keenness of hearing either.
‘I remember. Epicurus!’ the vice-consul exclaimed, pulling down a book with gilt on the edges of its pages. ‘Yes! There it is!’
‘What is?’ asked the future father.
But the titular counsellor only muttered: ‘Later, later, no time just now,’ and blundered towards the door.
He never reached the agreed meeting place. On Yatobasi Bridge, beyond which the Bluff proper began, the tricyclist was hailed by a young Japanese man dressed in European style.
Politely raising his straw hat, he said:
‘Mr Fandorin, would you care to take some tea?’ And he pointed to a sign: ‘English and Japanese Tea Parlour’.
Drinking tea had not entered into Erast Petrovich’s plans, but being addressed by name like this produced the right impression on the vice-consul.
After surveying the young Japanese youth’s short but well-proportioned figure and taking especial note of his calm, exceptionally serious gaze – of a kind not very commonly found among young people – Fandorin asked:
‘Are you Dan? The medical student?’
‘At your service.’
The ‘tea parlour’ proved to be one of the hybrid establishments that were quite common in Yokohama: tables and chairs in one section, straw mats and pillows in the other.
At this early hour the English half was almost empty; there was no one but a pastor with his wife and five daughters taking tea with milk at one of the tables.
The titular counsellor’s guide led him farther on, slid open a paper partition, and Erast Petrovich saw that there were even fewer customers in the Japanese half – only one, in fact: a lean little old man in a faded kimono.
‘Why here? Why not on the hill?’ Erast Petrovich asked as he sat down. ‘The Black Jackets are up there, are they?’
The jonin’s eyes rested inquisitively on the titular counsellor’s stony face.
‘Yes. How did you know?’
‘Not having received a report, the Don realised that his second brigade had also been destroyed. He is expecting vengeance, he has prepared for a siege. And Shirota told him about the hill that has a c-clear view of the whole house. But why don’t you tell me how you guessed that I would ride into the Bluff from this side?’
‘I didn’t. Your servant is waiting on the road that leads from the racecourse. He would have brought you here too.’
‘So there’s no way to g-get into the house.’
‘I sat in a tree for a long time, looking through a gaijin spyglass. It is very bad. Tsurumaki does not come outside. There are sentries right along the fence. Vengeance will have to be postponed. Possibly for a week, or months, or even years. Never mind, vengeance is a dish that will not go stale.’ Tamba lit his little pipe slowly and deliberately. ‘I shall tell you how my great-grandfather, Tamba the Eighth, took his revenge on someone who did him wrong. A certain client, a powerful daimyo, decided not to pay for work that had been carried out and killed the shinobi who came to him to collect the money. It was a great deal of money, and the daimyo was greedy. He decided never to leave the confines of his castle again – indeed he never left his own chambers, nor did he allow anyone else into them. Then Tamba the Eighth ordered his son, a boy of nine, to get a job in the kitchen of the castle. The boy was diligent and he was gradually promoted. First he swept the yard, then the back rooms. Then he became the servants’ scullion. Then an apprentice to the prince’s chef. He spent a long time learning how to grate paste from a shark’s bladder – that requires especial skill. Finally, by the time he was nineteen, he had attained such a degree of perfection that he was allowed to prepare a difficult meal for the prince. That was the last day of the daimyo’s life. Retribution had taken ten years.’
Fandorin listened to this colourful story and thought: Live ten years with cramped lungs? No thank you.
But to be honest, another thought also occurred to him: What if vengeance doesn’t help?
This question went unanswered. Erast Petrovich asked a different one out loud.
‘Did you see Shirota in your spyglass?’
‘Yes, many times. Both outside and in a window of the house.’
‘And a white woman? Tall, with yellow hair woven into a long plait?’
‘There are no women in the house. There are only men.’ The jonin was looking at Fandorin with ever greater interest.
‘Just as I thought. In planning the defence, Shirota sent his fiancée to some s-safe place …’ Erast Petrovich said with a nod of satisfaction. ‘We don’t have to wait for ten years. And a shark’s bladder will not be required either.’
‘And what will we require?’ Tamba asked in a very, very quiet voice, as if afraid of frightening away the prey.
His nephew leaned forward eagerly, with his eyes fixed on the gaijin. But Fandorin turned away and looked out at the street through the open window. His attention seemed to have been caught by a blue box
hanging on a pillar. There were two crossed post horns on it.
His answer consisted of only two words:
‘A postman.’
Uncle and nephew exchanged glances.
‘A man who delivers letters?’ the jonin asked, to make quite certain.
‘Yes, a man who d-delivers letters.’
Letter-bag brimful
Of love and joy and sorrow –
Here comes a postman
THE REAL AKUNIN
The municipal express post, one of the greatest conveniences produced by the nineteenth century, had made its appearance in the Settlement only recently, and therefore the local inhabitants had recourse to its services more frequently than genuine necessity required. The postmen delivered not only official letters addressed, say, from a trading firm on Main Street to the customs office on the Bund, but also invitations to five o’clock tea, advertisement leaflets, intimate missives and even notes from a wife to a husband, informing him that it was time to go to lunch.
After Fandorin dropped the envelope with the five-cent ‘lightning’ stamp on it into the slit above the crossed post horns, less than half an hour went by before a fine young fellow in a dandified blue uniform rode up on a pony, checked the contents of the box and went clopping off over the cobblestones up the slope – to deliver the correspondence to the addressee at Number 130, the Bluff.
‘What is in the envelope?’ Tamba asked for the fourth time.
The first three attempts had produced no response. Fandorin’s feverish agitation as he addressed the envelope had given way to apathy. The gaijin didn’t hear any questions that he was asked – he sat there, gazing blankly at the street, every now and then beginning to gulp in air through his mouth and rub his chest, as if his waistcoat was too tight for him.
But old Tamba was patient. He waited and waited – and then asked again. And then again.
Eventually he got an answer.
‘Eh?’ Erast Petrovich asked with a start. ‘In the envelope? A poem. The moment Shirota reads it, he’ll lose control and come running. And he’ll pass along this street, over the b-bridge. Alone.’
Tamba didn’t understand about the poem, but he didn’t ask any questions – it wasn’t important.
‘Alone? Very good. We’ll grab him, it won’t be hard.’
He leaned across to Dan and started speaking rapidly in Japanese. The nephew kept nodding and repeating:
‘Hai, hai, hai …’
‘There’s no need to grab him,’ said Fandorin, interrupting their planning. ‘It will be enough if you simply bring him here. Can you do that?’
Shirota appeared very soon – Tamba had barely finished his preparations.
There was the sound of rapid hoof beats and a horseman in a panama hat and a light, sandy-coloured suit came riding round the bend. The former secretary was unrecognisable, so elegant, indeed dashing, did he look. He had the black brush of a moustache sprouting under his flattish nose, and instead of the little steel-rimmed spectacles, his face was adorned with a brand new gold pince-nez.
The native gentleman’s flushed features and the furious gait of his mount suggested that Shirota was in a terrible hurry, but he was obliged to pull back on the reins just before the bridge, when a hunchbacked beggar in a dusty kimono threw himself across the horseman’s path.
He grabbed hold of the bridle and started begging in a repulsive, plaintively false descant whine.
Restraining his overheated horse, Shirota abused the mendicant furiously and jerked on the reins, but the tramp had clutched them in a grip of iron.
Erast Petrovich observed this little incident from the window of the tea parlour, trying to stay in the shadow. Two or three passers-by, attracted for a brief moment by the shouting, had already turned away from such an uninteresting scene and gone about their business.
For half a minute the horseman tried in vain to free himself. Then, at last, he realised there was a quicker way. Muttering curses, he rummaged in his pocket, fished out a coin and tossed it to the old man.
And it worked – the beggar immediately let go of the reins. In a sudden impulse of gratitude, he seized his benefactor’s hand and pressed his lips against it (he must have seen gaijins doing that somewhere). Then he jumped back, gave a low bow and scurried away.
Amazingly enough, though, Shirota seemed to have forgotten that he was in a hurry; he shook his head, then rubbed his temple, as if he were trying to remember something. Then suddenly he swayed drunkenly and slumped sideways.
He would quite certainly have fallen, and probably bruised himself cruelly on the cobblestones, if a young native man of a most respectable appearance had not been walking by. The youth managed to catch the fainting horseman in his arms and the proprietor of the tea parlour came running out to help, together with the pastor, who had abandoned his numerous family.
‘Drunk?’ shouted the proprietor.
‘Dead?’ shouted the pastor.
The young man felt Shirota’s pulse and said:
‘Fainted. I’m a doctor … That is, I soon will be a doctor.’ He turned to the proprietor. ‘If you would allow us to carry this man into your establishment, I could help him.’
The three of them lugged the insensible body into the tea parlour and, since there was nowhere to put the sick man down in the English half, they carried him through into the Japanese half with its tatami – to the very spot where Erast Petrovich was finishing his tea.
It took a few minutes to get rid of the proprietor, and especially the pastor, who was very keen to comfort the martyr in his final minutes. The medical student explained that it was an ordinary fainting fit, there was no danger and the patient merely needed to lie down for a little while.
Soon Tamba came back. It was impossible to recognise this respectable-looking, clean old man as the repulsive beggar from the bridge. The jonin waited for the outsiders to go, then he leaned over Shirota, squeezed his temples with his fingers and sat down to one side.
The renegade came round immediately.
He batted his eyelids, studying the ceiling quizzically. He raised his head – and met the titular counsellor’s cold, blue-eyed gaze. He jerked upright and noticed the two Japanese near by. He barely glanced at young Dan, but stared at the quiet little old man as if he had never seen a more terrifying sight.
Shirota turned terribly pale and drops of sweat stood out on his forehead.
‘Is that Tamba?’ he asked Fandorin. ‘Yes, I recognised him from the description … This is what I was afraid of! That they had kidnapped Sophie. How can you, a civilised man, be in league with those ghouls?’
But when he glanced once again at his former colleague’s stony face, his features drooped and he murmured:
‘Yes, yes, of course … You had no choice … I understand. But I know you are a noble man. You will not allow the shinobi to do her any harm! Erast Petrovich, Mr Fandorin, you also love, you will understand me!’
‘No, I will not,’ the vice-consul replied indifferently. ‘The woman I loved is dead. Thanks to your efforts. Tamba said that you drew up the plan of the operation. Well then, the Don is fortunate in his choice of d-deputy.’
Shirota looked at Erast Petrovich in terror, frightened less by the meaning of the words than the lifeless tone in which they were spoken.
He whispered fervently:
‘I … I’ll do whatever they want, only let her go! She doesn’t know anything, she doesn’t understand anything about my business. She must not be held as a hostage! She is an angel!’
‘It never even entered my head to t-take Sophia Diogenovna hostage,’ Fandorin replied in the same dull, strangled voice. ‘What scurrilous nonsense you talk.’
‘That’s not true! I have received a note from her. This is Sophie’s hand!’ Shirota extracted the small sheet of pink paper from the torn envelope and read out: ‘“My poor heart can bear this no more. Oh come quickly to help me now! And if you do not come, you know I shall lose my life for you”. Tamba guessed where
I had hidden Sophie and kidnapped her!’
The fiancé of the ‘captain’s daughter’ was a pitiful sight: lips trembling, pince-nez dangling on its lace, fingers intertwined imploringly.
But Erast Petrovich was not moved by this selfless love. The vice-consul rubbed his chest (those cursed lungs!) and simply said:
‘It’s not a note. It’s a poem.’
‘A poem?’ Shirota exclaimed in amazement. ‘Oh, come now! I know what Russian poems are like. There’s no rhyme here: “more” and “know” is not a rhyme. You can have no rhymes in blank verse, but that has rhythm. For instance, Pushkin: “I visited once more that corner of the earth where I spent two forgotten years in exile”. But this has no rhythm.’
‘But even so, it is a poem.’
‘Ah, perhaps it is a poem in prose,’ Shirota exclaimed with a flash of insight. ‘Like Turgenev! “I fancied then that I was somewhere in the Russian backwoods, in a simple village house”.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Erast Petrovich, who did not wish to argue. ‘But in any case, Sophia Diogenovna is not in any danger, I have n-no idea where you have hidden her.’
‘So you … You simply wanted to lure me out!’ Shirota flushed bright red. ‘Well then, you have succeeded. But I won’t tell you anything! Not even if your shinobi torture me.’ At those words he turned pale again. ‘I’d rather bite my tongue off.’
Erast Petrovich winced slightly.
‘No one is intending to torture you. You will get up in a moment and leave. I have met you here to ask you one single question. And you do not even have to answer it.’
Totally confused now, Shirota muttered:
‘You will let me go? Even if I don’t answer?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t somehow … Oh, very well, very well, ask.’
Looking him in the eye, Fandorin said slowly:
‘I remember you used to call me a friend. And you said that you were in my debt for ever. Then you betrayed me, although I trusted you. Tell me, sincere man and admirer of Pushkin, does serving the Fatherland really justify absolutely any kind of villainy?’
