by Boris Akunin
One day, after a long, serious conversation, Green made his young ward a promise: when Bullfinch grew up, Green would let him work with him, no matter what he might happen to be doing at the time. The Combat Group had not even been thought of then, or Green would never have promised such a thing.
Then he had come back home to Russia and set to work. He often remembered the boy, but of course he completely forgot about his promise. And then, just two months ago, in Peter, they had brought Bullfinch to him in a clandestine apartment. Here, comrade Green, meet our young reinforcements from the emigration. Bullfinch had gazed at him with adoration in his eyes and started talking about the promise almost from the very first moment. There was nothing Green could do about it - he didn't know how to go back on his word.
He had taken care of the boy and kept him away from the action, but things couldn't go on like that for ever. And after all, Bullfinch was grown up now - eighteen years old. The same age Green had been on that railway bridge.
Not just yet, he had told himself the previous night, as he prepared for the operation. Next time. And he had ordered Bullfinch to leave for Moscow - supposedly to check on their contacts.
Bullfinch was a delicate peach colour. What kind of warrior would he make? Though it did sometimes happen that people like that turned out to be genuine heroes. He ought to arrange a baptism of fire for the boy, but the execution of a traitor was not the right place to start.
'Nobody's going anywhere,' Green said with authority. 'Everybody sleep. I'll take first watch. Rahmet's on in two hours. I'll wake him.'
'E-eh,' said the former cornet with a smile. 'You're a fine man in every way, Green, only boring. Terror's not the right business for you. You ought to be a bookkeeper in a bank.' But he didn't argue, he knew there was no point.
They drew lots. Rahmet got the bed to sleep on, Emelya got the divan and Bullfinch got the folded blanket.
For fifteen minutes he heard talking and laughter from behind the door, and then everything was quiet. After that their host looked out of the study, his gold pince-nez glinting in the semi-darkness, and muttered uncertainly: 'Good evening.'
Green nodded, but the private lecturer didn't go away.
Green felt that he had to show some consideration. After all, this was inconvenient for the man, and risky. They gave you penal servitude for harbouring terrorists. He said politely: 'I know we've incommoded you, Semyon Lvovich. Be patient -we'll leave tomorrow.'
Aronson hesitated, as if there were something he was afraid to ask, and Green guessed that he wanted to talk. After all, he was a cultured man, a member of the intelligentsia. Once he got started, he wouldn't stop until morning.
Oh no. Firstly, it was not a good idea to strike up a speculative conversation with an unproven individual, and secondly, he had something serious to think over.
'I'm in your way here,' he said, getting up decisively. 'I'll sit in the kitchen for a while.'
He sat down on a hard chair beside a curtained entrance (he had already checked it: it was the servant girl's box room). He started thinking about 'TG'. For perhaps the thousandth time in the last few months.
It had all started in September, a few days after Sable blew himself up - he had thrown a bomb at Khrapov as the General was coming out of a church, but the device had struck the kerb of the pavement and all the shrapnel had been thrown back at the bomber.
That was when the first letter had come.
No, it hadn't come; it had been found - on the dining table in the apartment where the Combat Group was quartered at the time, a place to which only very few people had access.
It wasn't really a group - that was just a name, because after Sable's death Green was the only active warrior left. The helpers and the couriers didn't count.
The Combat Group had been formed after Green returned to Russia illegally. He had spent a long time assessing where he could be most useful, where he should apply the match so that the blaze would flare up as fiercely as possible. He had transported leaflets, helped to set up an underground printing works, guarded the party congress. All this was necessary, but he had not forged himself into a man of steel in order to do work that anyone could manage.
His goal had gradually taken clear shape. It was the same as before: terror. After the destruction of the People's Will party the level of militant revolutionary activity had dwindled away to almost nothing. The police was no longer what it had been in the seventies. There were spies and agent provocateurs everywhere. In the whole of the last decade there had only been a couple of successful terrorist operations and a dozen failures. What good was that?
If there was no struggle against tyranny, revolutions did not happen - that was axiomatic. Tsarism would not be overthrown by leaflets and educational groups. Terror was as necessary as air, as a mouthful of water in the desert.
After carefully thinking everything through, Green had begun to act. He had a word with Melnikov, a member of the Central Committee whom he trusted completely, and was granted qualified approval. He would cany out the first operation entirely at his own risk. If it was successful, the party would announce the establishment of a Combat Group and provide financial and organisational support. If it failed, he had been acting alone.
That was logical. In any case acting alone was safer - you certainly wouldn't betray yourself to the Okhranka. Green also set one condition: Melnikov was to be the only member of the Central Committee who knew about him; all contacts had to go through him. If Green required helpers, he would choose them himself.
The first mission he was given was to carry out the sentence that had been pronounced a long time ago on Privy Counsellor Yakimovich. Yakimovich was a murderer and a villain. Three years earlier he had sent five students to the scaffold for planning to kill the Tsar. It had been a dirty case, based from the beginning on entrapment by the police and Yakimovich himself, who was not yet a privy counsellor, but only a modest assistant public prosecutor.
Green had killed him during his Sunday walk in the park -simply, without any fancy business: just walked up and stabbed him through the heart with a dagger, with the letters 'CG' carved into its handle. Before the people around him realised what had happened, he had already left the park - at a quick walk, not a run - and driven away in an ordinary cab.
This terrorist act, the first to be carried out after a long hiatus, had really shaken up public opinion. Everyone had started talking about the mysterious organisation with the mysterious name, and when the party announced what the letters meant and declared that revolutionary war had been renewed, a half-forgotten nervous tremor had run through the country - the tremor without which any social upheavals were unthinkable.
Now Green had everything necessary for serious work: equipment, money, people. He found the people himself or selected them from candidates proposed by the party. He made it a rule that there should be no more than three or four people in the group. For terror that was quite enough.
Big operations were planned, but the next assassination attempt - on the butcher Khrapov - had ended in failure. Not total failure, because a revolver bearing the letters 'CG' had been found on the dead bomber, and that had produced an impression. But even so, the group's reputation had been damaged. There could not be any more flops.
And that had been the situation when Green discovered the sheet of paper with the neatly typed lines of words, lying folded in two on the table. He had burned the paper, but he remembered what was written on it word for word.
Better not touch Khrapov for the time being; he is too well guarded now. When there is a chance to reach him, I shall inform you. Meanwhile, I can tell you that Bogdanov, the Governor of Ekaterinburg, visits house number ten on Mikhelson Street in secret at eight o'clock in the evening on Thursdays. Alone, with no guards. Next Thursday he is
certain to be there. Burn this letter and those that follow as soon as you have read them.
TG
The first thought that had occurred to him was that the party
was overdoing its conspiratorial methods. Why the melodramatic touch of leaving the letter like that? And what did 'TG' mean?
He asked Melnikov. No, the party Central Committee had not sent the note.
Was it a gendarme trap? It didn't look like one. Why beat about the bush like that? Why lure him to Ekaterinburg? If the police knew his clandestine apartment, they would have arrested him right there.
It had to be a third option. Someone wanted to help the Combat Group while remaining in the shadows.
After some hesitation, Green had decided to risk it. Of course, Governor Bogdanov was no major VIP, but the year before he had been condemned to death by the party for his vicious suppression of peasant riots in the Streletsk district. It wasn't a top priority mission, but why not? Green needed a success.
And he had got one. The operation went off wonderfully well, if you disregarded the scuffle with the police. Green left a sheet of paper at the scene - the party's death sentence, signed with the initials 'CG'.
Then, at the very beginning of winter, a second letter had appeared: he found it in the pocket of his own coat. He was at a wedding - not a genuine wedding, of course, but a fictitious one. Two party members had wed for the sake of the cause, and at the same time an opportunity had been provided to meet legally and discuss a few urgent matters. There had not been any letter in his coat when he took it off. But when he put his hand in the pocket as he was leaving, there was the sheet of paper.
The lieutenant general of gendarmes, Selivanov, who is well known to you, is inspecting the foreign agents of the Department of Security incognito. At half past two in the
afternoon on 13 December he will go to a clandestine apartment at 24 rue Annamite in Paris.
TG
And once again everything had happened exacdy as the unknown TG had promised: taking the cunning fox Selivanov had been almost child's play, in fact - something they could never have dreamed of in St Petersburg. They waited for the gendarme in the entrance, Green grabbed him by the elbows, and Rahmet stuck the dagger into him. The Combat Group became the sensation of Europe.
Green had found the third letter on the floor in the entrance hall earlier this year, when the four of them were living on Vasilievsky Island in St Petersburg. This time the writer had directed his attention to Colonel Pozharsky, an artful rogue who was one of the new crop of gendarmes. The previous autumn Pozharsky had destroyed the Warsaw branch of the party, and he had just arrested an anarchist sailors' organisation in Kronstadt that had been planning to blow up the royal yacht. As a reward he had received a high post in the Police Department and an aide-de-camp's monogram for saving the imperial family.
The note had read as follows:
The search for the CG has been entrusted to the new deputy director for political affairs at the Police Department, Count Pozharsky. He is a dangerous opponent who will cause you a lot of trouble. On Wednesday evening between nine and ten he has a meeting with an important agent on Aptekarsky Island near the Kerbel company dacha. A convenient moment: do not let it slip.
TG
They had let the moment slip, even though it really was convenient. Pozharsky had demonstrated quite supernatural agility, returning fire as he melted away into the darkness. His companion had proved less nimble and Rahmet had caught him with a bullet in the back as he was running off.
Even so, the operation had proved useful and caused a sensation, because Green had recognised the man who was killed as Stasov, a member of the party's Central Committee and an old veteran of the Schlisselburg Fortress who had only just returned illegally to Russia from Switzerland. Who could have imagined that the police had people like that among their informers?
The latest message from TG, the fourth and most valuable, had appeared yesterday morning. It was hot in the house, and they had left the small upper window open for the night. In the morning Emelya had found the letter wrapped round a stone on the floor beside the window. He had read it and gone running to wake Green.
And now it is Khrapov's turn. He is leaving for Siberia today by the eleven o'clock express, in a ministerial carriage. I have managed to discover the following: Khrapov will make a stop in Moscow. The person responsible for his security while in Moscow is State Counsellor Fandorin, Prince Dolgorukoi's Deputy for Special Assignments. Description: 35 years old, slim build, tall, black hair, narrow moustache, grey temples, stammers in conversation. Extreme security measures have been planned in St Petersburg and Moscow. It is only possible to get close to Khrapov between these points. Think of something. There will be four agents in the carriage, and a duty guard of gendarmes in both lobbies (the front lobby is blind, with no access to the saloon). The head of Khrapov's guard is Staff Captain von Seidlitz: 32 years of age, very light hair, tall, solidly built. Khrapov's adjutant is Lieutenant Colonel Modzalevsky: 39 years of age, stout, medium height, dark-brown hair, small sideburns.
TG
Green had put together a daring but perfecdy feasible plan and made all the necessary preparations. The group had left for Klin on the three o'clock passenger train.
Once again TG's information had proved to be impeccable. Everything went without a hitch. It was the Combat Group's greatest triumph so far. It might have seemed that now he could afford to relax and congratulate himself on a job well done. The match had not been extinguished, it was still burning, and meanwhile the fire it had kindled was blazing ever more furiously.
But his enjoyment was marred by the mystery. Green could not abide mystery. Where there was mystery, there was unpredictability, and that was dangerous.
He had to work out who TG was - understand what kind of man he was and what he was after.
He had only one possible explanation.
One of his helpers, or even a member of the actual Combat Group, had someone in the secret police from whom he received confidential information that he passed on anonymously to Green. It was clear why he did not make himself known. That was to maintain secrecy; he did not wish to increase the number of people who knew his secret (Green himself always behaved in the same way). Or he was shielding his informant, bound by his word of honour - that sort of thing happened.
But what if it was entrapment?
No, that was out of the question. The blows that the group had struck against the machinery of state with the assistance of TG were too substantial. No tactical expediency could possibly justify an entrapment operation on that level. And most importantly of all: not once in all these past months had they been under surveillance. Green had an especially keen nose for that.
Two abbreviations: CG and TG. The first stood for an organisation. Did the second stand for a name? Why had there been any need for a signature at all?
That was what he must do when he got back to Peter: draw up a list of everyone who had had access to the places where the notes had been left. If he included only those who could have reached all four places, the list was a short one. Only a few people in addition to the members of the group. He had to identify who it was and engage them in candid conversation. One to one, with proper guarantees of confidentiality.
But it was a quarter past twelve already. His two hours were up. It was time to wake Rahmet.
Green walked through the drawing room into the dark bedroom. He heard Bullfinch's regular snuffling, Emelya's gentle snoring.
'Rahmet, get up,' Green whispered, leaning down over the bed and reaching out his hand.
There was nothing there. He squatted down and felt around on the floor: there were no boots.
Rahmet, the cornflower-blue man, was gone. He had either set out in search of adventures or simply run off.
CHAPTER 3
in which the costs of dual subordination are demonstrated
'How much longer will we be subjected to scrutiny?' Erast Petrovich asked drearily, glancing round at Burlyaev.
About five minutes had passed since the State Counsellor and the Lieutenant Colonel (who had changed his blue uniform for civilian clothes) first entered the
gate of the modest townhouse on Arbat Street and rang the bell. At first the curtain in the window of the attic storey had swayed in very promising fashion, but since then nothing had happened.
'I warned you,' the head of the Okhranka said in a low voice: 'a capricious character. Without me here she wouldn't open the door to a stranger at all.' He threw his head back and shouted -not for the first time: 'Diana, it's me, open up! And the gentleman I telephoned you about is with me!'
No reply.
Fandorin already knew that this little townhouse, rented through an intermediary, was one of the Department of Security's clandestine meeting places, and it had been placed entirely at the disposal of the highly valued collaborator. Meetings with her always took place here and nowhere else, and always by prior arrangement, for which purpose a telephone had been specially installed in the house.
'Madam!' said Erast Petrovich, raising his voice, 'you will f-freeze us! This is quite simply impolite! Do you wish to take a better look at me? Then you should have said so straight away'
He took off his top hat, raised his face, swung round to present his left profile, then his right and - oh, wonder of wonders! - a small window frame opened slightly, white fingers were thrust out through it and a bronze key fell at his very feet.
'Ooph,' said the Lieutenant Colonel, bending down. 'Let me do it. There's a trick to the lock..."