Boris Akunin - He Lover of Death

Out of sheer animal terror – it had nothing to do with courage –Senka swung the rods clutched in his right hand up behind him. He hit something, then he struck at it again with all his might. And then he struck it once more. Something up there gave a grunt, deep and hollow like a bear’s. The massive hand clutching Senka’s hair let go, and the boot shifted off his back.

Senka rolled over sideways, spinning like a top, got up on all fours, then on to his feet and dashed off, howling, into the darkness. When he ran into a wall, he recoiled and ran in the opposite direction.

He darted down the steps into the dark night street and ran as far as Lubyanka Square. Beside the low wall round the pool he dropped to his knees, and plunged his face into the water, and it wasn’t until after he’d cooled off a bit that he noticed he’d dropped the rods.

To hell with them. He was alive, that was what mattered.

‘Where did you g-get to, Spidorov?’ Mr Nameless asked as he opened the door of the apartment. Then he grabbed Senka by the arm and led him over to a lamp. ‘Who d-did this to you? What happened?’

He’d noticed the bump on Senka’s forehead and the swollen nose he’d smashed against the stone floor.

‘The Prince tried to kill me,’ Senka replied morosely. ‘Almost broke my neck.’

And he told Erast Petrovich what had happened. Of course, he didn’t say exactly where he’d been, or that he was carrying silver rods. He just said he’d looked into Yeroshenko’s basement, on some business or other, and that was where the terrible precedent happened.

‘Incident,’ Erast Petrovich corrected him without thinking, and a long crease appeared across his forehead. ‘Did you g-get a good look at the Prince?’

‘What do I need a good look for?’ Senka asked, mournfully studying his face in a mirror. What a nose – a real baked potato. ‘Who else wants to do me in? The Yerokha riff-raff won’t attack just anyone, they take a look first to see who it is. But this lug hit me without any warning, and real hard too. It was either the Prince or someone from his deck. Only not Deadeye – he wouldn’t have messed about, he’d have stuck his foil or his little knife straight in my eye. But where’s Masa-sensei?’

‘He has a prior engagement.’ Mr Nameless took hold of Senka’s chin and turned it this way and that – inspecting his face. ‘You need a c-compress. And mercurochrome here. Does that hurt?’

‘Yes!’ Senka yelled, because Erast Petrovich had taken a firm grip on his nose with his finger and thumb.

‘Never m-mind, it will heal soon enough. It’s not b-broken.’

Mr Nameless was wearing a long silk dressing gown and had a fine net over his hair – to hold his coiffure in place. Senka had one like that too, it was called a ‘garde-façon’.

I wonder how it went with Death, Senka thought, glancing at the engineer’s smooth face out of the corner of his eye. Well, it was obvious enough. A fancy trotter like that wouldn’t let his chance slip.

‘Well then, Herr Schopenhauer, l-listen to me,’ Erast Petrovich declared when he had finished smearing smelly gunk on Senka’s face. ‘From n-now on you stick with Masa and me. Is that c-clear?’

‘Why wouldn’t it be?’

‘Excellent. Then g-go to bed, and straight into the sweet embrace of Morpheus.’

Senka went to bed all right, but it took him some time to cuddle up to Morpheus. Either his teeth started chattering, or he started shivering and just couldn’t get warm. It was only natural. Doom had flitted by awfully close and brushed his soul with its icy wing.

He remembered that he hadn’t gone to see Tashka. She’d said she wanted to tell him something, to warn him. He ought to go and visit her, but the very thought of going back to Khitrovka gave him the shakes, even worse than before.

If he slept on it, maybe in the morning everything wouldn’t seem so terrible. He fell asleep with that thought.

But the next day he still felt really afraid. And the day after, and the day after that too. He was afraid for a long time, a whole week. In the morning or the afternoon, if it wasn’t that bad, he’d think: today’s the day, I’ll go as soon as it gets dark. But by the time evening came he had that anxious feeling again, and his legs refused to carry him to Khitrovka.

It wasn’t as if all Senka did on those days was sit around and feel afraid. There were lots of things to be done, and the kind of things that could make you forget everything else in the world.

It all started when Erast Petrovich made a suggestion. ‘How would you like to t-take a look at my “Flying C-Carpet”?’

This was just after they’d had a conversation in which Senka begged him in the name of Christ the Lord to stop calling him ‘Spidorov’, because that offended him.

‘It offends you?’ Mr Nameless asked in surprise. ‘The fact that I address you f-formally? But I think you consider yourself an adult, d-don’t you? Between adults, less formal modes of address require s-some kind of reciprocal feeling, and I am not yet ready to address you in a m-more intimate manner.’

‘But you talk to Masa over there like a close friend, don’t you? It’s like I’m not even a human being for you.’

‘You see, Spidorov . . . I beg your pardon, I m-mean Mr Spidorov,’ the engineer said, beginning to get really annoyed with Senka, ‘I address Masa informally and he addresses me formally, because in J-Japan that is the only way in which master and s-servant can converse. In Japanese etiquette the n-nuances of speech are regulated very strictly. There are a dozen or so d-different levels of formality or informality for all kinds of relationships, whenever you address s-someone else. To address a servant in an inappropriate m-manner is quite grotesque, it is actually a g-grammatical mistake.

‘But here in Russia it’s only the intelligensia that talks to simple people politely, so they can show how much they despise them. That’s why the people don’t like them.’

Senka barely managed to persuade him. And even then, Erast Petrovich still wouldn’t call him ‘Senka’, like a mate. Instead of ‘Spidorov’, he began calling him ‘Senya’, as if he was some little gent’s son in short pants. Senka had to grin and bear it.

When Senka started batting his peepers at the words ‘Flying Carpet’ (he was prepared to expect all sorts of marvels from this gent, even magic), Erast Petrovich smiled.

‘It’s not magical, of c-course. It’s the name I’ve given to my three-wheeler m-motor car, a self-propelled carriage of my own d-design. Come on, you can take a l-look at it.’

Standing in the coach shed out in the yard was a carriage like a cab with sprung wheels, only it narrowed towards the front, and instead of four wheels, it only had three: the front one was low, with rounded sides, and the two at the back were big. Where the front board would be on a cab, there was a wooden board with numbers on it, and a little wheel sticking out on an iron stick, and some little levers and other fiddly bits and pieces. The seat was box calf leather and it could take three people. The engineer pointed all these things out.

‘On the right, where the wheel is, that’s the d-driver’s seat. On the left is the assistant’s seat. The driver is like a c-coachman, only instead of horses, he drives the m-motor. Sometimes you need two people –to t-turn the wheel or hold a lever in place, or just to wave a f-flag so that people will get out of the way.’

Senka didn’t twig straight off that this lump of metal would go all on its own, without a horse. According to what Erast Petrovich said (which was probably horse shit anyway), the iron box under the seat contained the strength of ten horses, so this three-wheeler could dash along the road faster than any wild cabby.