Alex Auswaks - Sherlock Holmes in Russia

I followed Bakhtadian to the station. Without letting him out of my sight, I squatted down on the ground by the fence.

A lanky fellow came up. He looked as if a barber had upended a bowl on his head and cut his black hair from below it. His hands, face and clothes were so stained with coal you could hardly make out his short, black, bristly moustache. He squatted down beside me, ‘How long before the next train to Manchuria, man?’ he asked.

‘The devil alone knows,’ I answered.

‘So—’ he gave a melancholy drawl.

He sat beside me for a while, then turned towards me, and clapping me on the shoulder in a friendly way said, ‘Not too perceptive are you, my dear Watson!’

Now I recognized the familiar voice. I glanced at him, and his filthy appearance caused me to break out laughing.

‘Shhh,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t let’s bring attention to ourselves.’

At this time the depot manager went up to Bakhtadian, pacing up and down the platform, took him aside and very gravely and very carefully began to explain something to him. A third man, who looked like a foreman, joined them. While they spoke, a goods train came into the station.

The depot manager walked away slowly from them towards the stationmaster who came out of his office on the platform. The two of them together walked alongside the train, stopping at the fifth carriage from the rear. I saw the stationmaster give a nearly imperceptible nod at this carriage.

It was at this moment that Bakhtadian and his companion, both of whom had been watching the other two from a distance, jumped on the platform at the end of a carriage.

‘Let’s follow where they are going, Watson,’ said Holmes. ‘They are being very circumspect. I am sure it is the fifth carriage from the rear that the stationmaster indicated to Bakhtadian. We’ll have to make sure nobody sees us. First, the other side of the train and then let’s get on one of the empty platforms at the rear end of a carriage.’

We did so. We went around the train and, on the other side, began to walk beside it.

Now the third departure signal rang at last. The train began to get under way. We picked an empty platform at the end of a carriage and jumped on it as the train moved.

As soon as the train began to slow down before the next station, we jumped off and hid under the carriage of a train standing on the adjoining track. No sooner had we concealed ourselves when we saw the figure of Bakhtadian and his travelling companion. They marched quickly past us, stopped just before the fifth carriage from the back and, like us, hid on the track underneath the train. But the moment the third signal for departure sounded and the train began to move, both jumped on the platform of the fifth carriage. We, too, jumped up to take our former place on the platform. There were four carriages between us.

The train had moved little more than half a mile and the steep cliffs reappeared to our right, when the darkness descended, so that we couldn’t even see the telegraph poles along the route. We went through tunnel after tunnel. Going through them, the din was so deafening that we couldn’t hear anyone or anything no matter how we strained our ears.

But now the train began to climb uphill. The train slowed down and at the next tunnel was climbing at a crawl. But even here, despite the slow progress, the din was so great that it was impossible to hear any extraneous sounds.

As soon as we emerged from the tunnel, Holmes said to me, ‘Listen, my dear Watson, at the very first stop, get off and try to get home as soon as possible. You should be able to get back by three o’clock to accept the delivery. When Bakhtadian arrives with the goods, tell him that, because of a lucrative deal, I’m away for a day or two. Tell him you can’t unwrap and evaluate the goods and if he doesn’t trust you, he can take the chests away till I return.’

‘What about you, Holmes?’ I asked.

‘I’ll be back in approximately a day, perhaps even earlier or later, depending on the circumstances,’ he said. ‘In any case, watch carefully everything going on around you.’

He gave me certain instructions and, when the train entered the station, he got off. I got off, too, but did not see him. I was lucky! The return train was standing at the station. Since it was night, nobody intercepted me and I was able to find myself a platform on a freight train. At a quarter past two I was already home.

At about half past three there was a knock on the door. It was Bakhtadian with two others, bringing four chests of goods. He expressed great surprise that Holmes, whom he knew as Vedrin, wasn’t home. Obviously, he wanted to get rid of the goods as soon as possible, collect his money and then he could consider himself on the sidelines. But there was nothing to be done. He didn’t feel like taking the goods back, so he said that he’d be back in two days.

I spent all the next day alone, selling one or two trifles to an occasional customer. Holmes appeared at about nine o’clock in the evening. He threw off his working-man’s clothes, washed the make-up off his face and threw himself hungrily at food. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t take a few sandwiches along with me. I had to work on an empty stomach all day,’ he complained.

The fixed, preoccupied stare probably meant the day’s trek had not been in vain. He cast a passing glance at the newly delivered chests saying, ‘Bakhtadian was here! He came at about half-past three in the night accompanied by two labourers. There was a white stain on his right shoulder.’

I remembered that Bakhtadian did, in fact, have such a stain and it was, indeed, on his right shoulder. ‘You saw him?’ I asked.

‘Yes, but much earlier.’

‘And most likely you have found out something of great importance,’ I prompted.

‘Yes, I can certainly boast of that,’ Holmes said cheerfully. He lit a cigar, stretched out his legs and began to speak, ‘Of course, Watson, you remember the moment when we parted. As soon as the train stopped, I ran to the fifth carriage from the rear, but neither Bakhtadian nor his companion was there. I looked everywhere, inside every nook and cranny, but it was a waste of time. There was no doubt in my mind they’d jumped off while the train was in motion. But when? It had to be when the train slowed down and that could only be when it was going uphill. There was only one steep climb before that station when the train really slowed down.’

‘That was just before we got to the long tunnel,’ I interrupted. ‘I think the whole tunnel was on a steep incline.’

‘Quite right, my dear Watson. You are to be commended for your powers of observation,’ said Holmes. ‘And so I had to assume that they’d both jumped off either before we got to the tunnel or inside it. If so, the question arises, why? And then another question, why did they move from the first carriage to the platform of the fifth, the very one on which the stationmaster and depot manager focused their attention. My first instinct was to throw myself headlong into the tunnel but, instead, I rode as far as the next railway shunting. To examine the carriage while the train was standing at the station was both inconvenient and dangerous. As soon as the train moved, I jumped on the platform which Bakhtadian and his companion had occupied. The train moved out of the station and, as soon as we were beyond the last station semaphore, I began to examine the sides of the carriage with the aid of a pocket torch. The first thing I noticed was that there were chinks in the panelling and these chinks were not filled with paint. It was as if the panelling wasn’t painted after it had been installed, but boards had first been painted and then used for panelling. In one of those panels I found a little hollow. It was as if someone had hammered in a thick nail but, before hammering it all the way through, it had been pulled out.