by Boris Akunin
‘Yes, that is no. I don’t understand a single—’
I heard the disconnect signal and slammed the receiver down in extreme indignation. How dare he talk to me in that fashion? He had not explained anything; he had not told me anything! How had his meeting with Somov gone? Where was Fandorin now? Why was he not coming back here? And, most importantly, why did I have to take the jewels to such a strange place?
I suddenly recalled the strange expression with which he had looked at me when we parted. What was it he had wanted to tell me as he left, but had not been able to bring himself to say?
He had said: ‘This is where our paths part.’ What if our paths had parted not only in the literal but also the figurative sense? Oh Lord, and I had no one to ask for advice!
I sat there, looking at the silent telephone and thinking intently.
Karnovich? Out of the question.
Lasovsky? I could assume that he had been removed from his post, and even if he had not been removed . . .
Endlung? Of course. He was a fine chap. But he would be no help in a such a puzzling business.
Emilie! She was the one who could help me.
I had to telephone the Hermitage, I realised, and ask for Mademoiselle Declique in a disguised voice, preferably a female one . . . And at that very moment the telephone came to life and began ringing desperately. God be praised! So Fandorin was not quite such an ignorant fellow as I had supposed. We had simply been cut off.
I deliberately spoke first, so that he would not have a chance to shock me with some new trick in his usual manner.
‘Before I do as you demand, be so good as to explain,’ I said hurriedly, ‘what happened with Somov? And why disguise yourself as a monk? Could you not find any other costume? This is sacrilege!’
‘Mon Dieu, what are you saying, Athanas?’ Mademoiselle’s voice said and I choked, but only for a moment.
It was simply wonderful that she had phoned me herself!
‘Who were you talking to?’ Emilie asked, changing into French.
‘Fandorin,’ I mumbled.
‘What monk? What has Somov got to do with anything? I’m ringing from his room, your old room, that is. Somov has gone missing; no one knows where he is. But that is not important. Carr has been killed!’
‘Yes, yes, I know.’
‘You know? How?’ She sounded amazed. ‘All the grand dukes are here, and Colonel Karnovich. He has been interrogating Freyby for several hours. The poor colonel has completely lost his head. He took almost no notice of my arrival – all he said to me was: “You can tell me later; it’s not important just now.” I try to tell him about Lord Banville, but he does not believe me! He tells me I am mentally disturbed because of all the shocks. Can you believe it? He imagines that Freyby is Doctor Lind! I want to ask you and Erast for advice. Perhaps I should try once again? Explain to Karnovich that Freyby is only a minor figure? Or perhaps tell him that you have found the empress’s stolen jewels? Then all these gentlemen will calm down and start listening to me. What should I do?’
‘Emilie, I am in need of advice myself,’ I confessed. ‘Never mind about Mr Freyby. I don’t think he is guilty of anything, but let Karnovich carry on questioning him. At least that will keep him busy. Don’t tell anyone about the jewels. I have a different idea . . .’
I hesitated, because the idea had only just occurred to me and it had not been properly formulated yet. I picked the telephone book up off the table and opened it at the letter ‘p’. Was the Vorobyovsky Park listed?
As I leafed through the pages, I said what I would not have been able to say if Emilie had been standing there in front of me: ‘I am so glad to hear your voice. I was feeling completely lost and alone, but now I feel much better. I hope I am not speaking too boldly?’
‘Good Lord, Athanas, sometimes your formality makes you quite insufferable!’ she exclaimed. ‘Are you never going to say the words that I long to hear? Simply and clearly, with no quibbling or evasion?’
I guessed immediately which words she wanted to hear, and my throat went dry.
‘I don’t entirely understand,’ I croaked, nonplussed by her directness. ‘I think I have already said far more than might be considered acceptable, bearing in mind—’
‘There you go humming and hawing again,’ Mademoiselle interrupted me. ‘All right, damn you. I’ll shake your declaration out of you when we meet. But in the meantime tell me your idea. Only be quick. Someone could come in at any moment.’
I told her about Fandorin’s strange demands.
Emilie listened without saying a word.
‘I intend to act differently,’ I said. ‘Let us meet and I shall give you the casket and the Orlov. At dawn I shall go to the meeting place and demand an explanation from Fandorin. If his answers satisfy me and I realise that he really does need the stone for this business, I shall telephone you from the office in the Vorobyovsky Park. There is an apparatus there, I have just checked. Be ready. From the Hermitage to the Vorobyovsky Park is a fifteen-minute ride in a cab. Fandorin will not lose much time as a result of these precautions.’
I heard her breathing in the earpiece, and that quiet music warmed my heart.
‘No,’ Emilie said after a long pause. ‘I do not like your idea at all, Athanas. Firstly, I am not sure that I will be able to leave the Hermitage unnoticed today. Secondly, I am afraid that we will cause problems for Erast. I trust him. And you should trust him too. He is a truly noble man. More than that, he is an exceptional man. I have never met anyone else like him in my life. If you want the little prince to be rescued, go to the meeting with Erast and do exactly as he says.’
Her verdict shocked me, and in the most unpleasant way. She had even spoken like Fandorin: ‘Firstly . . . Secondly . . .’ How clever this man was at making people adore him!
I asked in a trembling voice: ‘You trust him that far?’
‘Yes. Implicitly,’ she snapped, and suddenly laughed. ‘Naturally, apart from dresses and corsets.’
What an incredible woman – joking at such a moment! But she was immediately serious again.
‘I implore you, Athanas, do everything that he says.’ She hesitated. ‘And also . . . be careful. For my sake.’
‘For your sake?’ I asked stupidly, which of course I should not have done, because no self-respecting lady could possibly have expressed herself more clearly.
But Mademoiselle repeated: ‘Yes, for my sake. If anything happens to Mr Fandorin, even though he is a genuine hero and an exceptional man, I can survive.’ She hesitated again. ‘But if anything happens to you, I am afraid . . .’
She did not finish the sentence, and there was no need for her to.
Totally and completely unsettled, I babbled in a pathetic voice: ‘Thank you, Mademoiselle Declique. I shall make sure to contact you tomorrow morning.’
‘Thank you, Mademoiselle Declique. I shall make sure to contact you tomorrow morning.’
Then I quickly hung up.
Oh Lord, had I imagined it? And had I understood the meaning of her words correctly?
Need I say that I did not sleep a wink all night long until the dawn?
1 My God, what is it?
2 How horrible! Who do you take me for?
3 A real scarecrow!
20 May
In accordance with my invariable habit, I reached the meeting place earlier than the appointed time.
At twenty minutes to six I arrived in a cab at the main avenue of the Vorobyovsky Park, which was entirely deserted at that early hour. As I walked along a sandy path, I glanced absentmindedly to the left, where the city lay shrouded in blue-grey shadows, and screwed my eyes up against the bright sunlight. The view was very beautiful, and the morning freshness of the air set my head spinning, but my state of mind was not conducive to poetic ecstasy. My heart alternately stood still and pounded furiously. I pressed the casket firmly against myself with my right hand, and beneath my undershirt the two-hundred-carat diamond swayed very slightly aga
inst my chest. A strange thought came to me: how much was I, Afanasii Ziukin, worth just at that moment? To the Romanov dynasty I was worth a great deal, immeasurably more than Ziukin without the casket and the Orlov dangling in a woollen sock on a ribbon. But to myself I was worth exactly as much as I had been a week or a year earlier. And for Emilie too my value had probably not changed a jot because of all these diamonds, rubies and sapphires.
This realisation lent me strength. I no longer felt like a pitiful unworthy vessel chosen by the mere whim of fate as a temporary shrine for priceless treasures, but the defender and saviour of the dynasty.
As I approached the bushes behind which the hanging bridge should be located, I glanced at my watch again. A quarter to six.
A few more steps, and the ravine came into sight, the dew on its steep grassy slopes glinting with a cold metallic gleam. From down below came the murmur of a stream, invisible under the light swirling mist. But my glance only slid over the fissure in passing and immediately turned to the narrow bridge. It turned out that Fandorin had arrived even earlier and was waiting for me.
With a wave of his hand he moved quickly towards me, striding confidently along the gently swaying ribbon of wood. Neither the baggy monk’s habit nor the black hood with the mantle falling to his shoulders could conceal the grace of his erect figure. We were separated by a distance of no more than twenty paces. The sun was shining from behind his back, and this suddenly made it look as if the black silhouette with its glowing halo was descending towards me directly from the heavens along a slim ray of gold.
Shielding my eyes with one hand, I took hold of the cable that served as a handrail with the other and stepped onto the bridge, which swayed elastically beneath my feet.
After that everything happened very quickly. So quickly that I did not even have the time to take another step.
On the opposite side of the ravine a slim black figure dashed towards the bridge. I saw that one of its hands was longer than the other and glinted brightly in the sun. The barrel of a revolver!
‘Look out!’ I shouted, and Fandorin swung round with lightning speed, poking a hand clutching a small revolver out of the sleeve of his habit.
Erast Petrovich swayed, evidently blinded by the rays of the sun, but fired at the same moment. Following an interval so very brief that it was almost impossible to hear, Lind’s weapon also roared.
They both hit the target.
The slim figure on the far side of the ravine tumbled over onto its back, but Fandorin was also thrown back and to one side. He clutched the cable with one hand and for a brief moment stayed on his feet – I caught a glimpse of a white face bisected by a thin strip of moustache before it disappeared behind the crêpe curtain of the mantle. Then Erast Petrovich swayed, tumbled over the cable and plunged down.
The bridge jerked to the left and the right as if it was drunk, and I was obliged to clutch the cable with both hands. The casket slipped out from under my elbow, struck a plank, then a rock and split apart, and Her Majesty’s jewels fell into the grass, shooting out a glimmering spray of coloured light.
The double echo of the shots rumbled along the ravine and then dissolved. It became very quiet again. There were birds singing and somewhere in the distance a factory whistle hooted to announce the start of a shift. Then I heard a rapid regular knocking, like the rattling of a tea glass in its metal holder on a train as it hurtles along at top speed.
It took me some time to realise that it was my teeth chattering.
The body on the far side of the ravine lay motionless.
The other, its form widened by the spreadeagled black habit, lay below me, at the very edge of the stream. The mist that had lined the bottom of the ravine only a minute earlier was thinner now, and I could see that one of the body’s hands was dangling lifelessly into the water. There could be no hope that Fandorin was alive after such a fall – the crunch of the impact with the ground had been far too fearsome.
I had not liked this man. Perhaps I had even hated him. At least I had wanted him to disappear from our lives once and for all. But I had not wished his death.
His trade was risk – he constantly toyed with danger – but somehow I had not thought that he could be killed. He had seemed immortal to me.
I do know how long I stood there, clutching the cable and looking down. Perhaps for a moment, perhaps for an hour.
I was brought back to my senses by a spot of sunlight that leapt out of the grass straight into my eye. I started, gazed in incomprehension at the source of the light and saw the yellow star-shaped diamonds of the tiara. I stepped off the bridge onto the ground in order to gather up the scattered treasures but then did not do it. They were safe enough where they were.
Whatever he may have been like, Fandorin had not deserved this, to be left lying like carrion on the wet gravel. I crossed myself and began making my way down. I slipped twice but did not fall.
I stood over the dead man not knowing what to do. Suddenly, making up my mind, I leaned down, took hold of his shoulders and began to turn him over onto his back. I do not know why. It was simply unbearable to see how he, always so elegant and so full of life, lay there with his broken body arched grotesquely while the rapid water stirred his lifeless hand.
Fandorin proved a lot lighter than I had expected and I turned him over with no great difficulty. I hesitated briefly, then threw the bundled-up mantle back off the face and . . .
No, here I must break off. Because I do not know how to describe my feelings at that moment, when I saw the black moustache pasted onto the face and the trickle of scarlet blood flowing from the dead Mademoiselle Declique’s mouth. Probably I did not feel anything at all. Obviously I must have suffered a kind of paralysie émotionelle1 – I do not know how to say it in Russian. I did not feel anything, I did not understand anything; for some reason I simply kept trying to wipe the blood off Emilie’s pale lips, but the blood kept flowing and it was impossible to stop.
‘Is she dead?’ someone shouted down to me.
Not surprised at all, I slowly raised my head.
Fandorin was making his way down the opposite slope of the ravine, clutching his shoulder.
His face seemed unnaturally white to me, and there were drops of red seeping between his fingers.
Fandorin spoke and I listened. I was feeling rather unsteady, and because of that for most of the time I looked down at the ground, to make sure that it did not completely disappear from under my feet.
‘I guessed yesterday morning, as we were seeing her off to the Hermitage. Do you remember that she joked about knights with a yard keeper’s crowbar? That was careless. How could a prisoner who was chained in the cellar see you and me breaking in the door with the yard keeper’s crowbar? She was unlikely even to have heard the noise. Only someone who was peeping from behind a curtain could have observed what we were doing.’
Erast Petrovich grimaced as he bathed his wounded shoulder with water from the stream.
‘Can’t tell if the bone was hit . . . I don’t think so. At least it was small calibre. But such accuracy! Against the sun, without aiming! An incredible woman . . . And so, after her strange words about the crowbar, the scales fell from my eyes, so to speak. I wondered exactly why the bandits had kept Emilie in her negligee? After all, sexual harassment by this band of misogynists was out of the question; indeed, from what she said they must have found the very sight of the female body repulsive. And now recall the items of men’s clothing scattered about in the house. It’s all very simple, Afanasii Stepanovich. You and I caught Lind by surprise and, instead of running, he (if you don’t mind, I shall speak about the doctor as a male, as I am accustomed to doing) made a bold move. He threw off his male clothing, hastily pulled on a woman’s shift from Mademoiselle Declique’s wardrobe, went down into the cellar and chained himself to the wall. Lind had very little time. He was not even able to hide the casket.’
Slowly and cautiously, an inch at a time, I transferred my glance to the recumbent
body. I wanted to take another look at the lifeless face, but I did not get that far – my eye was caught by a dark bruise showing from under the open collar of the habit. It was an old bruise, one I had seen in the apartment on Arkhangelsky Lane. And then the dense shroud of fog enveloping my brain suddenly quivered and thinned.
‘But what about the bruises and contusions?’ I shouted. ‘She didn’t beat herself! No. Everything you say is lies! There has been a terrible mistake!’
Fandorin grabbed my elbow with a vice-like hand and shook me.
‘Calm down. The bruises and contusions were from Khodynsk Field. He was seriously battered there as well. After all, he was caught in just as bad a crush as we were.’
Yes. Yes. Fandorin was right. The shroud of fog enveloped me once again in its protective mantle, and I was able to carry on listening.
‘I have had enough time to reconstruct the entire plan of Lind’s Moscow operation.’ Erast Petrovich ripped a handkerchief apart with his teeth, bound up his wound crudely and wiped large beads of sweat off his forehead. ‘The doctor made his preparations unhurriedly, well in advance. After all, everyone already knew when the coronation would be last year. The idea was brilliant – to blackmail the entire imperial house. Lind calculated that fear of a worldwide scandal would drive the Romanovs to make any sacrifice. The doctor chose an excellent position for managing his operation – inside the very family against whom he intended to strike. Who would ever suspect the excellent governess of such an outrage? With his extensive connections, it was not hard for Lind to forge references. He gathered together an entire t-team. In addition to his usual helpers, he engaged the Warsaw bandits and they put him in touch with the Khitrovka gang. Oh, this man was a truly remarkable strategist!’
Fandorin looked thoughtfully at the woman lying at his feet. ‘It is strange that I cannot say “she” and “she was” about Lind . . .’
I finally managed to force myself to look at Emilie’s dead face. It was calm and mysterious, and a bloated black fly had settled on the tip of her snub nose. I squatted down and drove the vile insect away.
