Boris Akunin - The Coronation

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!

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 against 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 émotionelle 1 – 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.