Boris Akunin - The Diamond Chariot

In the cosy salon two pretty girls in grammar school uniform were playing the ‘Dog’s Waltz’ for four hands.

They got up, performed a clumsy curtsy and chorused: ‘ Bonjour, madame .’

Glyceria Romanovna smiled affectionately at their embarrassment. She had once been a shy young thing just like them, she had grown up in the artificial world of the Smolny Institute: childish young dreams, reading Flaubert in secret, virginal confessions in the quiet of the dormitory …

Vasya was standing there, by the piano – with a bashful look on his plain but sweet face.

‘My auntie’s waiting for you. I’ll show you the way,’ he muttered, letting Lidina go on ahead.

Fira Ryabchik (specialisation ‘grammar school girl’) held Rybnikov back for a moment by the hem of his jacket.

‘Vas, is that your ever-loving? An interesting little lady. Don’t get in a funk. It’ll go all right. We’ve locked the others in their rooms.’

Thank God that she and Lionelka didn’t have any make-up on yet because it was still daytime.

And there was Beatrice, already floating out of the doors to meet them like the Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna.

‘Countess Bovada,’ she said, introducing herself with a polite smile. ‘Vasya has told me so much about you!’

‘Countess?’ Lidina gasped.

‘Yes, my late husband was a Spanish grandee,’ Beatrice explained modestly. ‘Please do come into the study.’

Before she followed her hostess, Glyceria Romanovna whispered:

‘So you have Spanish grandees among your kin? Anyone else would certainly have boasted about that. You are definitely unusual.’

In the study things were easier. The countess maintained a confident bearing and held the initiative firmly in her own grip.

She warmly approved of the idea of an escape abroad. She said she would obtain documents for her nephew, entirely reliable ones. Then the two ladies’ conversation took a geographical turn as they considered where to evacuate their adored ‘Vasya’. In the process it emerged that the Spanish grandee’s widow had travelled almost all over the world. She spoke with special affection of Port Said and San Francisco.

Rybnikov took no part in the conversation, merely cracked his knuckles nervously.

Never mind, he thought to himself. It’s the twenty-fifth tomorrow, and after that it won’t matter.

The fourth syllable, in which Fandorin feels afraid

Sombre fury would be the best name to give the mood in which Erast Petrovich found himself. In his long life he had known both the sweetness of victory and the bitterness of defeat, but he could not remember ever feeling so stupid before. This must be the way a whaler felt when, instead of impaling a sperm whale, his harpoon merely scattered a shoal of little fish.

But how could he possibly have doubted that the thrice-cursed dark-haired man was the Japanese agent responsible for the sabotage? The absurd concatenation of circumstances was to blame, but that was poor comfort to the engineer.

Precious time had been wasted, the trail was irredeemably lost.

The mayor of Moscow and the detective police wished to express their heartfelt gratitude to Fandorin for catching the brazen band of crooks, but Erast Petrovich withdrew into the shadows, and all the glory went to Mylnikov and his agents, who had merely delivered the bound bandits to the nearest police station.

There was a clearing of the air between the engineer and the court counsellor, and Mylnikov did not even attempt to be cunning. Gazing at Fandorin with eyes bleached colourless by his disappointment in humankind, Mylnikov admitted without the slightest trace of embarrassment that he had set his agents on the case and come to Moscow himself because he knew from the old days that Fandorin had a uniquely keen nose, and it was a surer way of picking up the trail than wearing out his own shoe leather. He might not have picked up any saboteurs, but he hadn’t come off too badly – the hold-up artists from Warsaw would earn him the gratitude of his superiors and a gratuity.

‘And instead of name-calling, you’d be better off deciding what’s the best way for you and me to rub along,’ Mylnikov concluded amicably. ‘What can you do without me? That railway outfit of yours doesn’t even have the right to conduct an investigation. But I do, and then again, I’ve brought along the finest sleuths in Peter, grand lads, every last one of them. Come on, Fandorin, let’s come to friendly terms, comradely like. The head will be yours, the arms and legs will be ours.’

The proposal made by this rather less than honourable gentleman was certainly not devoid of merit.

‘On a friendly basis, so be it. Only bear in mind, Mylnikov,’ Fandorin warned him, ‘if you take it into your head to be cunning and act behind my b-back, I shan’t beat about the bush. I shan’t write a complaint to your superiors, I’ll simply press the secret bakayaro point on your stomach, and that will be the end of you. And no one will ever guess.’

There was no such thing as a bakayaro point, but Mylnikov, knowing how skilled Fandorin was in all sorts of Japanese tricks, turned pale.

‘Don’t frighten me, my health’s already ruined as it is. Why should I get cunning with you? We’re on the same side. I’m of the opinion that without your Japanese devilry, we’ll never catch the fiend who blew up that bridge. We have to fight fire with fire, sorcery with sorcery.’

Fandorin raised one eyebrow slightly, wondering whether the other man could be playing the fool, but the court counsellor had a very serious air, and little sparks had lit up in his eyes.

‘Do you really think old Mylnikov has no brains and no heart? That I don’t see anything or ponder what’s going on?’ Mylnikov glanced round and lowered his voice. ‘Who is our sovereign, eh? The Lord’s anointed, right? So the Lord should protect him from the godless Japanese, right? But what’s happening? The Christ-loving army’s taking a right battering, left, right and centre. And who’s battering it? A tiny little nation with no strength at all. That’s because Satan stands behind the Japanese, he’s the one who’s giving the yellow bastards their strength. And the Supreme Arbiter of fate has forsaken our sovereign, He doesn’t want to help. Just recently I read a secret report in the Police Department, from the Arkhangelsk province. There’s a holy man prophesying up there, an Old Believer: he says the Romanovs were given three hundred years to rule and no longer, that’s the limit they were set. And those three hundred years are running out. And the whole of Russia is bearing the punishment for that. Doesn’t that sound like the truth?’

The engineer had had enough of listening to this drivel. He frowned and said:

‘Stop all this street sleuth’s drivel. If I want to discuss the fate of the tsarist dynasty, I won’t choose to do it with a member of the Special Section. Are you going to work or just arrange stupid provocations?’

‘Work, work,’ said Mylnikov, dissolving in spasms of wooden laughter, but the sparks were still dancing in his eyes.

Meanwhile the experts had concluded their examination of the site of the disaster and presented a report that completely confirmed Fandorin’s version of events.

The explosion of moderate force that had caused the collapse was produced by a charge of melinite weighing twelve to fourteen pounds – that is, its power was approximately equal to a six-inch artillery shell. Any other bridge on the Nicholas line would probably have survived a shock of that power, but not the decrepit Tezoimenitsky, especially while a heavy train was crossing it. The saboteurs had chosen the spot and the moment with professional competence.