The Diamond Chariot

by Boris Akunin

  ‘The head of your division, is it?’ he asked when he made out the compartment carriage. ‘The chief of the Corps?’ And finally, lowering his voice to a whisper: ‘Not the minister himself, surely?’

  ‘Exclude all unauthorised individuals!’ Fandorin shouted when he spotted a linesman at the end of the platform.

  Gendarmes went dashing off with a loud tramping of boots, to carry out the order.

  The 369-B came to a halt. Evstratii Pavlovich Mylnikov thrust out his chest and whipped off his bowler, but when the clanging of iron and screeching of brakes stopped, his ears were assaulted by a strange sound very similar to the diabolical ululations that tormented his ailing nerves at night. Mylnikov gave his head a shake to drive away the dark spell, but the howling only grew louder, and then he quite clearly heard barking.

  An officer in a leather pea jacket skipped smartly down the steps, saluted Fandorin and handed him a package bearing a mysterious inscription in black: RSEUDPWUHPHHDAPO.

  ‘What’s that?’ Mylnikov asked in a faltering voice, suspecting that he was dreaming all this – the engineer’s appearance in the middle of the night, the drive through the rain, the dogs’ barking and the unpronounceable word on the envelope,

  Fandorin decoded the abbreviation:

  ‘The Russian Society for the Encouragement of the Use of Dogs in Police Work under the Honorary Presidency of His Highness Duke Alexander Petrovich of Oldenburg. Very well, L-Lieutenant, you can bring them out. The horseboxes are waiting.’

  Police officers started emerging from the carriage one after another, each leading a dog on a leash. There were German shepherds and giant schnauzers and spaniels, and even mongrels.

  ‘What is all this?’ Mylnikov repeated perplexedly. ‘What’s it for?’

  ‘This is Operation Fifth Sense.’

  ‘Fifth? Which one’s the fifth?’

  ‘Smell.’

  Operation Fifth Sense had been planned and prepared with the utmost dispatch in a little over two days.

  In the urgent telegram of 18 May that had so greatly astonished the experienced police telegraph clerk, Fandorin had written to his chief: ‘REQUEST URGENTLY GATHER DUKE’S DOGS DETAILS FOLLOW’.

  Erast Petrovich was an enthusiastic supporter and even, to some extent, inspirer of the initiative undertaken by the Duke of Oldenburg, whose idea was to establish in Russia a genuine, scientifically organised police dog service on the European model. This was a new area, little studied as yet, but it had immediately been given massive backing.

  Coaching a good dog to track down a specific smell required only a few hours. The amount of simose needed was allocated from the Artillery Department and work began: fifty-four police instructors thrust the noses of their shaggy helpers into the yellow powder, the air was filled with reproachful and approving exclamations, peals of barking and the cheerful sound of sugar crunching between dog’s teeth.

  Melinite had an acrid smell and the tracker dogs recognised it easily, even among sacks of common chemical products. Following a brief training course, His Highness’s protégés set off on their work assignments: twenty-eight dogs went to the western border – two to each of the fourteen crossing points – and the rest went on the special train to Moscow, to receive further instructions from the engineer Fandorin.

  Working by day and night in two shifts, the handlers led the dogs through the carriages and depots of all the railway lines of the old capital. Mylnikov did not believe in Fandorin’s plan, but he didn’t try to interfere, just looked on. In any case, the court counsellor had no ideas of his own on how to catch the Japanese agents.

  On the fifth day, Erast Petrovich finally received the long-awaited telephone call in the office where he was studying the most vulnerable points of the Trans-Siberian Railway, all marked on a map with little red flags.

  ‘We’ve got it!’ an excited voice shouted into the receiver over the sound of deafening barking. ‘Mr Engineer, I think we’ve got it! This is trainer Churikov calling from the Moscow Freight Station on the Brest line! We haven’t touched a thing, just as you ordered!’

  Erast Petrovich telephoned Mylnikov immediately.

  They dashed to the station from different directions, arriving almost simultaneously.

  Trainer Churikov introduced his bosses to the heroine of the hour, a Belgian sheepdog of the Grunendal breed:

  ‘Mignonette.’

  Mignonette sniffed at Fandorin’s shoes and wagged her tail. She bared her fangs at Mylnikov.

  ‘Don’t take offence, she’s in pup,’ the handler said hastily. ‘But it makes the nose keener.’

  ‘Well, what is it you’ve found?’ the court counsellor demanded impatiently.

  Churikov tugged on the dog’s lead and she plodded reluctantly towards the depot, glancing back at the engineer. At the entrance she braced her paws against the ground and even lay down, making it very clear that she was in no hurry to go anywhere. She squinted up at the men to see whether they would scold her.

  ‘She’s acting up,’ the trainer said, sighing. He squatted down, scratched the bitch’s belly and whispered something in her ear.

  Mignonette graciously got up and set off towards the stacks of crates and sacks.

  ‘There now, there, watch,’ said Churikov, throwing up one hand.

  ‘Watch what?’

  ‘The ears and the tail!’

  Mignonette’s ears and tail were lowered. She walked slowly along one row, and then another. Halfway along the third, her ears suddenly jerked erect and her tail shot up and then sank back down and stayed there, pressed between her legs. The tracker dog sat down and barked at four neat, medium-sized jute sacks.

  The consignment had arrived from France and was intended for the Werner and Pfleiderer Bakery. It had been delivered on the morning train from Novgorod. The contents were a yellow powder that left a distinctive oily sheen on the fingers – no doubt about it, it was melinite.

  ‘It crossed the border before the dogs got there,’ Fandorin said after checking the accompanying documentation. ‘Right then, Mylnikov, we have work to do.’

  They decided to do the work themselves and not trust it to the detectives. Erast Petrovich dressed up as a railwayman and Mylnikov as a loader. They installed themselves in the next goods shed, which gave them an excellent view of the depot and the approaches to it.

  The consignee arrived for his delivery at 11.55.

  The rather short man, who looked like a shop hand, presented a piece of paper, signed the office book and carried the sacks to a closed wagon himself.

  The observers were glued to their binoculars.

  ‘Japanese, I think,’ Erast Petrovich murmured.

  ‘Oh, come on!’ Mylnikov exclaimed doubtfully, fiddling with the little focusing wheel. ‘As Russian as they come, with just a touch of the Tatar, the way it ought to be.’

  ‘Japanese,’ the engineer repeated confidently. ‘Perhaps with an admixture of European blood, but the form of the eyes and the nose … I’ve seen him before somewhere. But where, and when? Perhaps he simply looks like one of my Japanese acquaintances … Japanese faces are not noted for their variety – anthropology distinguishes only twelve basic types. That’s because of their insular isolation. There was no influx of b-blood from other races.’

  ‘He’s leaving!’ Evstratii Pavlovich exclaimed, interrupting the lecture on anthropology. ‘Quick!’

  But there was no need to hurry. A whole fleet of cabs and carriages of various kinds had been assembled to carry out surveillance around the city, and an agent was sitting in every one, so the mark couldn’t get away.

  The engineer and the court counsellor lowered themselves on to the springy seat of the carriage bringing up the rear of this cavalcade, which was giving a convincing imitation of a busy stream of traffic, and set off slowly through the streets.

  The buildings and lamp-posts were decorated with flags and garlands. Moscow was celebrating the birthday of the Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna far more sumptuousl
y than in previous years. There was a special reason for that: the sovereign’s wife had recently presented Russia with an heir to the throne, after four little girls – or ‘blank shots’, as Mylnikov expressed it disrespectfully.

  ‘But they say the little lad’s sickly, there’s a hex on him,’ Evstratii Pavlovich said, and sighed. ‘The Lord’s punishing the Romanovs.’

  This time the engineer didn’t bother to reply and merely frowned at this provocative gibberish.

  Meanwhile the mark demonstrated that he was a conjuror. At the freight station he had loaded four sacks into his closed wagon, but at the left luggage office of the Ryazan-Uralsk line he took out three wooden crates and eight small bundles wrapped in shiny black paper. He let the wagon go. Of course, the agents stopped the wagon round the very first bend, but all they found in it were four empty jute sacks. For some reason the melinite had been extracted from them and repacked.

  The clerk at the left luggage office stated that the crates and the bundles had been left as two separate items, with different receipts.

  But Fandorin received all this information only later. Since the putative Japanese proceeded on his way from the station as a pedestrian, the engineer and the court counsellor took the surveillance into their own hands once again.

  They followed the mark at the greatest possible distance and dispatched the sleuths into the reserve. The most important thing now was not to frighten off the live bait that might attract some other fish.

  The shop hand called into two hotels close to the station – the ‘Kazan’ and the ‘Railway’. They prudently decided not to go barging in, and they wouldn’t have had time in any case – the mark spent no more than a minute inside each building.

  Erast Fandorin was scowling darkly – his worst fears had been confirmed: the Ryazan-Uralsk line was part of the great transcontinental line on which the engineer’s red pencil had marked at least a hundred vulnerable sectors. For which one of them were the items handed in at the left luggage office intended?

  From the station square the mark set off into the centre and circled around in the city for quite a long time. On several occasions he suddenly stopped his cabby right there in the middle of a street and let him go, but he failed to shake off the superbly organised surveillance.

  Shortly after seven o’clock in the evening, he entered a cab drivers’ inn close to Kaluga Square. Since he had spent the previous hour hiding in the gateway of the next building, he had to have an appointment here, and this was an opportunity that must not be missed.

  As soon as the mark entered the inn (that happened at nine minutes past seven), Mylnikov summoned the Flying Brigade’s special carriage with his whistle. This carriage was a highly convenient innovation in modern detective work: it contained a selection of costumes and items of disguise to suit every possible occasion.

  The engineer and the court counsellor dressed up as cabbies and staggered unsteadily into the tavern.

  After casting an eye round the dark room, Evstratii Pavlovich pretended that he couldn’t stay on his feet and collapsed on the floor. When Fandorin leaned down over him he whispered:

  ‘That’s Lagin with him. Codename Thrush. An SR. Extremely dangerous. How about that …’

  The important point had been established, so rather than loiter in the tavern in open view, they allowed themselves to be thrown out in the street.

  After stationing four agents at the back entrance, they hurriedly discussed their alarming discovery.

  ‘Our agents abroad inform us that Colonel Akashi, the senior Japanese foreign agent, is meeting with political émigrés and buying large deliveries of weapons,’ Mylnikov whispered, leaning down from the coach box of his government carriage. ‘But that’s a long way off, in places liked Paris and London, and this is old mother Moscow. We couldn’t have slipped up there, surely? Give the local loudmouths Japanese rifles, and we’ll have real trouble …’

  Erast Petrovich listened with his teeth gritted. Provoking a revolution in the enemy’s rear – a démarche unheard of in the practice of war in Europe – was a hundred times more dangerous than any bombs on railway lines. It threatened not just the outcome of the military campaign, but the fate of the Russian state as a whole. The warriors of the Land of Yamato knew what real war was: there were no means that were impermissible, there was only defeat or victory. How the Japanese had changed in a quarter of a century!

  ‘The **** Asian ***s!’ Mylnikov cursed obscenely, as if he had overheard Fandorin’s thoughts. ‘There’s nothing holy! How do you fight bastards like that?’

  But was this not what Andrei Bolkonsky was talking about before the Battle of Borodino, the engineer objected – not out loud to Mylnikov, naturally, but to himself. Chivalry and war practised by the rules are stupid nonsense, according to the most attractive character in the whole of Russian literature. Kill prisoners, do not negotiate. No indulging noble sentiments. War is not amusement.

  But even so, the side that indulges noble sentiments is the one that will win, Fandorin suddenly thought, but before he could follow this paradoxical idea through to its conclusion, the agent stationed by the door gave the signal, and he had to clamber up on to his coach box at the double.

  The shop hand came out alone. He looked at the line of cabs (every last one belonging to the Okhrana), but didn’t take one. He walked away some distance and stopped a passing cabby – another false one, naturally.

  But in the end all of Mylnikov’s cunning was wasted. In some incomprehensible manner, the mark disappeared from the carriage. The detective impersonating the driver did not notice when and how this happened: first there was a passenger, and then there wasn’t – just a crumpled rouble note lying on the seat in mockery.

  This was annoying, but not fatal.

  First, there was still the SR Lagin, alias Thrush – they had a man in his inner circle. And secondly, near the left luggage office, an ambush was set up, for which Fandorin had especially high hopes, since the arrangements were made through the Railway Gendarmerie, without Mylnikov involved.

  The clerk was given a thoroughly detailed briefing by the engineer. As soon as the ‘shop hand’ appeared, or anyone else came to present the familiar receipts, he was to press a button that had been installed specially. A lamp would go on in the next room, where a squad was waiting, and the officer in charge would immediately telephone Fandorin, and then, depending on his orders, either make an arrest or continue secret surveillance (through an eyehole) until plainclothes agents arrived. And. of course, the clerk would make sure the luggage was not given out too quickly.

  ‘Now we’ve got the slanty-eyed macaque like this,’ Mylnikov gloated, grabbing a tight fistful of air in his strong fingers.

  The seventh syllable, in which it emerges that not all Russians love Pushkin

  A few days before the long-awaited 25 May, the Moscow life of Vasilii Alexandrovich Rybnikov was punctuated by an episode that may appear insignificant in comparison with subsequent events, but not to mention it at all would amount to dishonesty.

  It happened during the period when the fugitive staff captain was languishing in the tormenting embrace of idleness, which, as already mentioned above, even led him to commit certain acts rather uncharacteristic of him.

  In one of his idle moments, he visited the Address Bureau located on Gnezdnikovsky Lane and started making enquiries about a certain person in whom he was interested.

  Rybnikov did not even think of buying a two-kopeck request form; instead he demonstrated his knowledge of psychology by engaging the clerk in soulful conversation, explaining that he was trying to find an old army comrade of his deceased father. He had lost sight of this man a long time ago and understood perfectly well what a difficult task it was, so he was willing to pay for the all the work involved at a special rate.

  ‘Without a receipt?’ the clerk enquired, raising himself slightly above the counter to make sure that there were no other customers in the premises.

  ‘Why, naturally.
What use would it be to me?’ The expression in the staff captain’s yellowish-brown eyes was imploring and his fingers casually twirled a rather thick-looking wallet. ‘Only it’s not likely that this man is living in Moscow at present.’

  ‘That’s all right, sir. Since it will be a special rate, it’s quite all right. If your acquaintance is still in government service, I have lists of all the departments. If he is retired, then, of course, it will be difficult …’

  ‘He’s still in service, he is!’ Rybnikov assured the clerk. ‘And with a high rank. Perhaps even the equivalent of a general. He and my late father were in the Diplomatic Corps, but I heard that before that he was with the Police Department or, perhaps, the Gendarmes Corps. Perhaps he could have gone back to his old job?’ He delicately placed two paper roubles on the counter.

  The clerk took the money and declared cheerfully:

  ‘It often happens that diplomats are transferred to the gendarmes and then back again. That’s government service for you. In what name does he rejoice? What is his age?’

  ‘Erast Fandorin. Fan-dor-in. He must be about forty-eight or forty-nine now. I was informed that he resides in St Petersburg, but that is not definite.’

  The address wizard rummaged through his plump, tattered books for a long time. Every now and then he declared:

  ‘No one by that name listed with the ministry of foreign affairs … Not with Gendarmes Corps HQ … Not with the Railway Gendarmerie … At the ministry of internal affairs they have a Ferendiukin, Fedul Kharitonovich, director of the Detective Police Material Evidence Depot. Not him?’

  Rybnikov shook his head.

  ‘Maybe you could look in Moscow? I recall that Mr Fandorin was a native Muscovite and resided here for a long period.’

  He proffered another rouble, but the clerk shook his head with dignity.

  ‘A Moscow enquiry is two kopecks. My direct responsibility. I won’t take anything. Anyway, it only takes a moment.’ And indeed, he very soon declared: ‘No one by that name, either living or working here. Of course, I could look through previous years, but that would be by way of an exception …’