Boris Akunin - The Coronation

There were two figures that I could only vaguely make out in the twilight, one standing on my left and one on my right. Right in front of my eyes an icy spark glinted on a strip of steel, and I felt the strange sensation of my knees turning soft, as if they might suddenly bend in the wrong direction, in defiance of all the laws of anatomy.

‘Lookee ’ere,’ hissed a different voice, a bit older and hoarser. ‘A wallet.’

The pocket in which my porte-monnaie was lying suddenly felt suspiciously light, but I realised it would be best not to protest. In any case, the noise might bring Fandorin, and my surveillance of him would be exposed.

‘Take it quickly and leave me in peace,’ I declared quite firmly, but then gagged on my words because a fist came hurtling out of the gloom and struck me on the base of the nose, so that I was immediately blinded, and something hot ran down my chin.

‘Well, isn’t he the feisty one?’ I heard someone say as if he was speaking through a pane of glass. ‘And the skins, look at the skins, with gold trimmints.’

Someone’s hands grabbed hold roughly of my shirt and pulled it out from under my belt.

‘You did wrong to bloody his snout, Seka. That shirt of his is pure cambric, and now look, the whole front’s spattered something rotten. And his pants are good too.’

It was only then I realised that these criminals intended to strip me naked.

‘Them’s women’s pants, but the cloth’s right enough,’ the other voice said and someone tugged at the edge of my culottes. ‘They’ll do Manka for pantaloons. Get ’em off, Mister, get ’em off.’

My eyes had grown accustomed to the dull light, and now I could make out my robbers better.

It would have been better if I hadn’t – the sight was nightmarish. Half the face of one of them was swollen up and covered by a bruise of monstrous proportions, the other was wheezing through a damp, sticky collapsed nose.

‘Take the livery, but I won’t give you the breeches and the shoes,’ I said, for the very idea that I, the butler of the Green Court, might go wandering around Moscow in the nude, was inconceivable.

‘If you don’t get ’em off, we’ll pull ’em off yer corpse,’ the hoarse one threatened and pulled a razor out from behind his back – a perfectly ordinary razor, the same kind that I shave with, except that this one was covered in rust and badly notched.

I began unbuttoning my shirt with trembling fingers, cursing my own folly. How could I have got into such a loathsome mess? I had let Fandorin get away, but that was the least of my worries now – I would be lucky to get out of there alive.

Another shadow appeared behind the backs of the Khitrovka savages and I heard a lazy, sing-song voice say: ‘And what’s this little comedy we ’ave ’ere, then? Right, shrimp, scarper, and quick.’

Erast Petrovich! Butwhere had he come from? He hadwalked away!

‘You what? You what?’ the young robber shrieked, but his voice sounded nervous to me. ‘This here’s our sheep, mine and Tura’s. You live your life, toff, and let honest dogs live too. There’s no law says you can take a sheep off us dogs.’

‘I’ll give you a law,’ Fandorin hissed, and put his hand inside his jacket.

The robbers instantly pushed me away and took to their heels. But they took with them the livery and my wallet – with forty-five roubles and small change inside it.

I did not know if I could consider myself saved or, on the contrary, I had simply fallen out of the frying pan into the fire, as they say. That wolfish grin distorting Fandorin’s smooth features could hardly bode me any good, and I watched in horror as his hand drew something out of his inside pocket.

‘Here, take that.’

It was not a knife or a pistol, merely a handkerchief.

‘What am I going to do with you, Ziukin?’ Erast Petrovich asked in his normal voice and the appalling grimacewas replaced by a crooked smile which, to my mind, was equally repulsive. ‘Of course, I spotted you back at Neskuchny Park, but I didn’t expect you to stay in Khitrovka – I thought you would take fright and retreat. However, I see you are not a man who frightens easily.’

I did not know what to say to that, so I said nothing.

‘I ought to leave you here wandering around naked. It would be a lesson to you. Explain to me, Ziukin, what on earth made you come traipsing after us?’

The fact that he was no longer speaking like a bandit but in his usual gentleman’s voice made me feel a bit calmer.

‘What you told me about the boy was not convincing,’ I replied. I took out my own handkerchief, threw my head back and squeezed my bloodied nose. ‘I decided to check on you.’

Fandorin grinned.

‘Bravo, Ziukin, b-bravo. I had not expected such perspicacity from you. You are quite right. Senka Kovalchuk told me everything he knew, and he’s an observant boy – it’s part of his p-profession. And he’s bright – he realised that I wouldn’t let him go otherwise.’

‘And he told you how to find the “bold face” who hired him?’

‘Not exactly, for that of course is something that our young acquaintance does not know, but he gave an exhaustive description of his employer. Judge for yourself: a bold face, slit eyes, clean-shaven, thick lips, a “general’s” cap with a lacquer peak, a red silk shirt, boots with a loud squeak and lacquer galoshes . . .’

I looked at Fandorin’s own attire and exclaimed: ‘That’s amazing, you’re dressed in exactly the sameway. There are plenty of young fellows like that around in Moscow.’

‘By no means,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘You certainly won’t see them around Moscow very often, but in Khitrovka you can meet them, although not in such v-very large numbers. It’s not just a matter of clothes, this is the supreme Khitrovka chic – the red silk and the lacquer galoshes. Only the toffs, that is bandits at the very top of the hierarchy, can presume to wear this outfit. To make it easier for you to understand, Ziukin, to them it is something like a gentleman-in-waiting’s uniform. Did you see the way those d-dogs scarpered at the sight of me?’

‘Scarpered’, ‘dogs’ – what sort of way is that to talk? I could see that there was very little of the state counsellor left in Fandorin. This man rather reminded me of cheap gilded tableware from which the upper layer has peeled away, exposing the vulgar tin.

‘What “dogs” do you mean?’ I asked, to make it clear that I would not agree to converse in criminal argot.

‘“Dogs”, Ziukin, are petty thieves and ruffians. For them, toffs like me are b-big bosses. But you interrupted me before I could tell you the bold face’s most important characteristic.’ He paused and then, with a pompous air, as if he were saying something very important, he said: ‘All the time he was talking to Senka – and he spoke to him for at least half an hour – this individual never took his right hand out of his pocket and kept jingling his small change.’

‘You believe that this habit is enough for you to find him?’

‘No,’ Fandorin sighed. ‘I believe something quite different. But anyway it will soon become clear whether my assumption is correct or not. Masa has to establish that. And if I am right, we intend to look for Mr Bold Face while Doctor Lind is playing cat and mouse with the police.’

‘And where is Mr Masa?’

Erast Petrovich waved his hand vaguely.

‘Not far from here, in a basement, a secret Chinese opium den. It moved from Sukharevka to Khitrovka after a police raid the year before last. Those people know all sorts of things.’

‘You mean that Mr Masa can speak Chinese?’

‘A little. There are many Chinese in his home town of Yokahama.’