Erast Fandorin 04 - The Death of Achilles

by Boris Akunin

  Some Russian gentleman who looked like a factory owner performed a rather strange ritual: He called over a flower girl, took a bouquet of pan-sies out of her basket, wrapped them in a hundred-ruble note, and sent them to Wanda. Without a pause in her singing, she sniffed the bouquet and ordered it to be sent back, together with the hundred-ruble note. The factory owner, who had been acting as proud as a lion, was visibly deflated and gulped down two tall wineglasses of vodka in quick succession. The people around him in the hall kept casting derisive glances in his direction.

  Erast Petrovich did not forget his role again. He played the fool a little, pouring champagne into a teacup, and from there into the saucer. He puffed out his cheeks and sipped at the champagne with a loud slurping noise — but only drank a tiny amount, in order not to get tipsy. He ordered the waiter to bring some more champagne (“And not Lanvin, either — the real stuff, Moet”) and roast a piglet, only it had to be still alive, and first they had to bring it and show it to him: “I know what you krauts are like; you’ll slip me some old carcass from the icehouse.” Fandorin was counting on the fact that it would take a long time to find a live piglet, and in the meantime the situation would be resolved in one way or another.

  The disguised Knabe squinted across at his noisy neighbor in annoyance, but without taking any great interest in him. The secret agent took out his Breguet watch four times; it was obvious that he was nervous. At five minutes to eight Wanda announced that she was singing her last song before the intermission and struck up a sentimental Irish ballad about a girl called Molly, whose true love failed to return from war. Some of the people sitting in the hall were wiping tears from their faces.

  She’ll finish the song in a moment and sit at Knabe’s table, Fandorin assumed, and prepared himself by lowering his forehead onto his elbow, as if he had dozed off, but he tossed back the strand of hair from over his right ear and, applying the science of concentration, shut off all of his senses except for hearing. He became transformed, as it were, into his own right ear. Wanda’s singing now seemed to be coming from far away, but he could hear the slightest movement made by Herr Knabe with great clarity. The German was restless: squeaking his chair, scraping his feet, then suddenly starting to tap his heels. Just in case, Erast Petrovich turned his head and half-opened one eye — and was just in time to see the gentleman with the ginger beard slipping out through the side door.

  The hall broke into thunderous applause.

  “A goddess!” shouted a student, moved almost to tears. The milliners were clapping loudly.

  Herr Knabe’s stealthy departure was not at all to the collegiate assessor’s liking. In combination with the disguise and the false name, it suggested alarming possibilities.

  The young merchant rose abruptly to his feet, knocking over his chair, and declared in a confidential tone to the festive group at the next table: “Got to go relieve myself.” Swaying slightly on his feet, he headed for the side exit.

  “Sir!” shouted a waiter, racing up behind him. “The lavatory is not that way.”

  “Go away,” said the barbarian, shoving the waiter aside without even turning around. “I’ll go wherever I want.”

  The waiter froze on the spot in horror, and the merchant continued on his way in broad, rapid strides. Oh, this was not good. He needed to hurry. Wanda had already flitted off the stage into the wings.

  Just as he reached the door a new obstacle arose for the capricious client in the form of a desperately squealing piglet being carried in his direction.

  “Here, just as you ordered!” said the panting chef, proudly displaying his trophy. “Alive and kicking. Shall we roast it for you?”

  Erast Petrovich looked at the piglet’s little eyes filled with terror and suddenly felt sorry for the poor creature, born into the world only to end up in the belly of some glutton.

  The merchant growled: “Not big enough yet, let him put on a bit of fat!”

  The chef dejectedly clutched the cloven-hoofed beast to his breast as the ignorant boor stumbled against the doorpost and staggered out into the corridor.

  Right, Fandorin thought feverishly. The entrance hall is on the right. That means the offices and Wanda’s dressing room are on the left.

  He set off down the corridor at a run. Around the corner he heard a scream coming from a dimly lit recess. There was some kind of commotion going on there.

  Erast Petrovich dashed toward the sound and saw the man with the ginger beard clutching Wanda from behind, holding one hand over the songstress’s mouth and forcing a narrow steel blade up toward her throat.

  Wanda had grabbed the broad wrist covered in reddish hair with both her hands, but the distance between the blade and her slim neck was closing rapidly.

  “Stop! Police!” Fandorin cried in a voice hoarse with tension. Displaying phenomenally rapid reactions, Herr Knabe pushed the floundering Wanda straight at Erast Petrovich, who involuntarily put his arms around the songstress’s thin shoulders. She clung to her savior with a grip of iron, trembling all over. In two bounds the German was past them and dashing away down the corridor, fumbling under his armpit as he ran. Fandorin saw the running man’s hand emerge, holding something black and heavy, and he barely had time to drag Wanda to the floor and shield her. A second later and the bullet would have pierced both their bodies. For an instant the collegiate assessor was deafened by the thunderous roar that filled the narrow corridor. Wanda squealed in despair and began thrashing about under the young man.

  “It is I, Fandorin!” he panted as he struggled to stand up. “Let go of me.”

  He tried to leap to his feet, but Wanda, still lying on the floor, was clutching him tightly by the ankle and sobbing hysterically: “Why did he do that? Why? Oh, don’t leave me!”

  It was useless trying to pull his foot free — the songstress was clinging on tight and wouldn’t let go. Then Erast Petrovich said in an emphatically calm voice: “You know yourself, why. But, God be praised, you’re safe now.”

  He unclasped her fingers gently but firmly and ran off in pursuit of the secret agent. It was all right; Klyuev was at the entrance, a sound officer, he wouldn’t let him go. At the very least he would delay him.

  However, when Fandorin burst out of the doors of the restaurant onto the embankment, he discovered that things had gone about as badly as possible. Knabe was already sitting in an ‘egoist’ — an English single-seater carriage — and lashing a lean, sleek gelding with his whip. The horse flailed at the air with its front hooves and set off so sharply that the German was thrown back hard against his seat.

  The sound officer Klyuev was sitting on the pavement, holding his head in his hands with blood running out between his fingers.

  “Sorry, let him get away,” he groaned dully. “I told him — “Stop,” and he hit me on the forehead with the butt—”

  “Get up!” Erast Petrovich tugged at the wounded man’s shoulder and forced him to his feet. “He’ll get away!”

  With a great effort of self-control, Klyuev smeared the dark-red sludge across his face and began hobbling sideways toward the droshky.

  “I’m all right, it’s just that everything’s spinning,” he muttered, clambering up onto the coachbox.

  Fandorin leapt up beside him in a single bound, Klyuev cracked the reins, and the chestnut mare set off with its hooves clip-clopping loudly over the cobblestones, gradually picking up speed. But it was slow, too slow. The ‘egoist’ already had a start of a hundred paces!

  “Harder!” Erast Petrovich shouted at the groggy Klyuev. “Drive harder!”

  At breakneck speed, with houses, shop signs, and astounded pedestrians flashing past in a blur, both carriages tore along the short Sofiiskaya Street and out onto the broad Lubyanka, where the chase began in earnest. A policeman on duty opposite Mobius’s photographic studio began whistling in furious indignation and waving his fist at the scofflaws, but that was all. Ah, if only I had a telephone apparatus in the carriage, Fandorin fantasized, I could call Kara
chentsev and have a couple of carriages sent out from the gendarme station to cut him off. A useless, idiotic fantasy — their only hope now was the chestnut mare, and that dear creature was giving her all, desperately flinging out her sturdy legs, shaking her mane, glancing back over her shoulder with one insanely goggling eye — as if she were asking if this was all right, or should she kick even harder. Kick, my darling, kick, Erast Petrovich implored her. Klyuev seemed to have recovered a little and he stood up, cracking his whip and hallooing so wildly that an entire Mongol horde seemed to be hurtling down the quiet evening street.

  The distance to the ‘egoist’ had been reduced a little bit. Knabe looked back in alarm once, then again, and seemed to realize that he wouldn’t get away. When there were about thirty paces remaining between them, the German agent turned around, holding out the revolver in his left hand, and fired. Klyuev ducked.

  “Damn, he’s a good shot! That one whistled right past my ear! That’s a Reichsrevolver he’s blasting away with! Shoot, Your Honor! Aim at the horse! He’s outpacing us!”

  “What has that poor horse done wrong?” growled Fandorin, remembering the piglet. In fact, of course, the interests of the fatherland would have outweighed his compassion for the dun gelding, but the problem was that his Herstal-Agent wasn’t designed for accurate shooting at such a distance. God forbid, he might hit Herr Knabe instead of the horse, and the entire operation would be ruined.

  At the corner of Sretensky Boulevard the German turned around once again, taking a little longer to aim before his barrel belched smoke and flame. Klyuev instantly collapsed backward, on top of Erast Petrovich. One eye gaped in fright into the collegiate assessor’s face; the place of the other had been taken by a red hole.

  “Your Excel —” his lips began to say, but they did not finish.

  The carriage swung to one side and Fandorin was obliged to shove the fallen man aside unceremoniously. He grabbed the reins, and just in time, or the carriage would have been smashed to smithereens against the cast-iron railings of the boulevard. The excited chestnut mare was still trying to run on, but the left front wheel had jammed against a stone post.

  Erast Petrovich leaned down over the police agent and saw that his one remaining eye was no longer frightened, but staring fixedly upward, as though Klyuev were looking at something very interesting, far more interesting than the sky or the clouds.

  Fandorin mechanically reached up to remove his hat, but he had none, for his remarkable topper had been left behind in the cloakroom at the Alpine Rose.

  This was a fine result: an officer killed and Knabe allowed to escape!

  But where exactly could he have escaped to? Apart from the house on Karyetny Ryad, the German had nowhere else to go. He had to call in there, if only for five minutes — to pick up his emergency documents and money, and destroy any compromising materials.

  There was no time to indulge in mourning. Erast Petrovich took the dead man under the arms and dragged him out of the droshky. He sat him with his back against the railings.

  “You sit here for a while, Klyuev,” the collegiate assessor muttered and, paying no attention to the passersby who had frozen in poses of horrified curiosity, he climbed back up onto the coachbox.

  The ‘egoist’ was standing at the entrance of the beautiful apartment house on the third floor of which the Moscow representative of the banking firm Kerbel und Schmidt resided. The dun gelding, covered in thick lather, was nervously shifting its hooves and shaking its wet head. Fan-dorin dashed into the hallway.

  “Stop! Where are you going?” yelled the fat-faced doorman, grabbing hold of his arm, but he was immediately sent flying by a punch delivered to his jaw without any superfluous explanations.

  Upstairs a door slammed. It sounded like the third floor! Erast Petro-vich bounded up two steps at a time, holding the Herstal at the ready. He would have to shoot him twice, in the right arm and the left. The German had tried to slit Wanda’s throat with his right hand, and he had fired with his left, which meant he was ambidextrous.

  Here at last was a door with a brass plaque: HANS-GEORG KNABE. Fandorin tugged hard on the bronze handle — it wasn’t locked. After that he moved quickly, but took precautionary measures. He held the revolver out in front of him and flicked the safety catch off.

  The long corridor was dimly lit, the only light entering from an open window at its far end. That was why Erast Petrovich, anticipating danger from ahead and from the side, but not from below, failed to notice the elongated object lying under his feet and stumbled over it, almost sprawling full length. He turned swiftly and prepared to fire, but there was no need.

  Lying facedown on the floor, with one hand flung forward, was a familiar figure in a checked jacket with its back flaps parted. Witchcraft, was the first thought that came into Erast Petrovich’s mind. He turned the man over onto his back and immediately saw the wooden handle of a butcher’s knife protruding from his right side. Witchcraft apparently had nothing to do with the case. The secret agent was dead, and to judge from the blood pulsing from the wound, he had only just been killed.

  Fandorin ran through all the rooms, peering intently through half-closed eyes. There was chaos all around, with everything turned upside down and books scattered across floors. In the bedroom, white fluff from a slashed eiderdown was swirling in the air like snow in a blizzard. And there was not a soul there.

  Erast Petrovich glanced out the window that was intended to illuminate the corridor and saw the roof of an extension directly below him. So that was it!

  Jumping down, the detective set off across the rumbling iron sheeting of the roof. The view from up there was quite remarkable: a scarlet sunset above the belfries and towers of Moscow, and a black flight of crows rippling across the scarlet. But the collegiate assessor, normally so sensitive to beauty, did not even glance at this wonderful panorama.

  It was a strange business. The killer had disappeared, and yet there was absolutely nowhere he could have gone from that roof. He couldn’t have simply flown away, could he?

  Two hours later, the apartment on Karyetny Ryad was unrecognizable. There were detectives darting around the crowded rooms, men from the code section numbering all the papers that had been found and assembling them in cardboard files, a gendarme photographer taking pictures of the body from various angles. The top brass — the chief of police, the head of the secret section of the governor’s chancellery, and the deputy for special assignments — occupied the kitchen, which had already been searched.

  “And what ideas do the gentlemen detectives have?” asked Khurtin-sky, dispatching a pinch of tobacco into his nostril.

  “The general picture is clear,” said Karachentsev with a shrug. “A mock robbery, staged for idiots. They wrecked everything, but didn’t take anything of value. And the secret hiding places haven’t been touched: the weapons, the codebook, the tools — they’re all still there. Evidently they were hoping we wouldn’t dig too deep.”

  “Atish-oo!” the court counselor sneezed deafeningly, but no one blessed him.

  The general turned away from him and continued, addressing Fandorin.

  “One particularly ‘convincing’ detail is the murder weapon. The knife was taken from over there.” He pointed to a set of hooks on which knives of various sizes were hanging. One hook was empty. “Intended to suggest that the thief grabbed the first thing that came to hand. Typically German, rough-hewn cunning. The blow to the liver was delivered with supreme professionalism. Someone was waiting for our Herr Knabe in the dark corridor.”

  “But who?” asked Pyotr Parmyonovich, carefully charging snuff into his other nostril.

  The chief of police did not condescend to explain, and so Erast Petrovich had to do it.

  “Probably someone from his own side. There doesn’t appear to be anyone else it could be.”

  “The krauts panicked; they’re afraid of a diplomatic conflict,” Evgeny Osipovich said with a nod. “The robbery is a fiction, of course. Why bother to ri
p open the eiderdown? No, they were just trying to muddy the waters. It’s not good, meine Herren, not Christian, to do in your own agent like a pig in a slaughterhouse. But I understand the reason for the panic. In this case exposure could mean more than a mere scandal — it could mean war. The General Staff captain overplayed his hand a bit. Excessive zeal is a dangerous thing, and the careerist got what he deserved. In any case, gentlemen, our work is done. The events surrounding General Sobolev’s death have been clarified. From here on the people at the top make the decisions. What’s to be done with Wanda?”

  “She has nothing to do with Sobolev’s death,” said Fandorin. “And she has been punished enough for her contacts with the German agent. She almost lost her life.”

  “Leave the chanteuse alone,” Khurtinsky seconded him, “otherwise a lot of things will surface that we’d rather didn’t.”

  “Well, then,” the chief of police summed up, evidently considering how he would compose his report to the ‘people at the top’.

  “In two days the investigation has reconstituted the entire chain of events. The German agent Herr Knabe, wishing to distinguish himself in the eyes of his superiors, took it into his head, at his own risk, to eliminate our finest Russian general, well known for his militant anti-Germanism, and the acknowledged leader of the Russian nationalist party. Having learned of Sobolev’s forthcoming arrival in Moscow, Knabe arranged for the general to meet a demimondaine, to whom he gave a small bottle of a certain powerful poison. The female agent either chose not to use it or had no time to do so. The sealed bottle has been confiscated from her and is now in the Moscow Governor’s Department of the Gendarmes. The general’s death was the result of natural causes; however, Knabe did not know this and hurried to report his action to Berlin, anticipating a reward. His superiors in Berlin were horrified and, foreseeing the possible consequences of such a political murder, immediately decided to rid themselves of their overzealous agent, which they did. It is not envisaged that there will be any reason to take diplomatic action against the German government, especially since no attempt was actually made on the general’s life.” Evgeny Osipovich concluded his summary in his normal, unofficial tone of voice. “Our clever captain was destroyed by a fatal confluence of circumstances. Which was no more than the scoundrel deserved.”