The Coronation: The Further Adventures Of Erast Fandorin (Erast Fandorin 7)

by Boris Akunin

  ‘Never mind,’ Fandorin whispered cheerfully. ‘The Chinese say: “The noble man does not strive for comfort.” Let’s watch the windows.’

  We started watching the windows.

  To tell the truth, I failed to spot anything remarkable – just a vague shadow that flitted across the curtains a couple of times. In all the other houses the windows had gone dark a long time ago, while the inhabitants of our house seemed to have no intention of going to sleep at all – but that was the only thing that might have seemed suspicious.

  ‘And what if there is a fourth?’ I asked after about two hours.

  ‘A fourth what?’

  ‘Alternative.’

  ‘Which is what?’

  ‘What if you were mistaken and the post office employee has nothing to do with Lind?’

  ‘Out of the question,’ Fandorin hissed rather too angrily. ‘He definitely does. And he is bound to lead us to the d-doctor himself.’

  Oh, to taste the honey that your lips drink, I thought, recalling the old folk saying, but I said nothing.

  Another half-hour went by. I started thinking that probably for the first time in my life I had lost track of the days. Was today Friday or Saturday, the seventeenth or the eighteenth? It was not really all that important, but for some reason the question gave me no peace. Finally I could stand it no longer, and I asked in a whisper: ‘Is today the seventeenth?’

  Fandorin took out his Breguet, and the phosphorescent hands flashed in the darkness.

  ‘It has been the eighteenth for five minutes.’

  1 You, shit! Kiss me on—

  18 May

  The previous day had been warm, and so had the evening, but after several hours of sitting still I was chilled right through. My teeth had started to chatter, my legs had gone numb, and any hope that our nocturnal vigil would produce some useful result had almost completely evaporated. But Fandorin remained completely unruffled – indeed, he had not stirred a muscle the whole time, which made me suspect that he was sleeping with his eyes open. And what irritated me most of all was the calm, I would even say complacent, expression on his face, as if he were sitting there listening to some kind of enchanting music or the song of birds of paradise.

  Suddenly, just when I was seriously considering the idea of rebellion, Erast Petrovich, without any visible change in his demeanour, whispered: ‘Attention.’

  I started and looked carefully but failed to see any change. The windows in the house opposite us were still lit up. There was not a single sign of movement, not a single sound.

  I glanced at my companion again and saw that he had not yet emerged from his sleep, swoon, reverie or whatever – his general strange state of trance.

  ‘They are about to come out,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Why do you think that?’

  ‘I have fused into a single reality with the house and allowed the house to enter into myself so that I can feel it b-breathing,’ Erast Petrovich said with a completely serious air. ‘It is an oriental t-technique. It would take too long to explain. But a minute ago the house began creaking and swaying. It is preparing to expel people from within itself.’

  It was hard for me to tell if Fandorin was joking or was simply raving. I rather inclined towards the latter option, because it was not funny enough to be a joke.

  ‘Mr Fandorin, are you asleep?’ I enquired, and at that very moment the windows suddenly went dark.

  Half a minute later the door opened and two people came out.

  ‘There is no one left in the house; it is empty n-now,’ Fandorin pronounced slowly, then suddenly grabbed hold of my elbow and whispered rapidly. ‘It’s Lind, Lind, Lind!’

  I jerked my head round with a start and saw that Erast Petrovich had completely changed: his face was tense, his eyes were narrowed in an expression of intense concentration.

  Could it really be Lind after all?

  One of the two who had come out was the Postman – I recognised his build and the peaked cap. The other man was average in height, wearing a long operatic cloak like an almaviva thrown over his shoulders and a Calabrian hat with a sagging brim that hung very low.

  ‘Number two,’ Fandorin whispered, squeezing my elbow in a grip that was extremely painful.

  ‘Eh? What?’ I muttered in confusion. ‘Alternative number two. Lind is here, but the hostages are somewhere else.’

  ‘But are you certain it really is Lind?’

  ‘No doubt about it. Those precise, economical and yet elegant movements. That way of wearing the hat. And finally that walk. It is he.’

  My voice trembled as I asked: ‘Are we going to take him now?’

  ‘You have forgotten everything, Ziukin. We would detain Lind if he had come out with the hostages, according to alternative number one. But this is number two. We follow the doctor; he leads us to the boy and Emilie.’

  ‘But what if—’

  Erast Petrovich put his hand over my mouth again, in the same way as he had done before so recently. The man in the long cloak had looked round, although we were talking in whispers and he could not possibly have heard us.

  I pushed Fandorin’s hand away angrily and asked my question anyway: ‘But what if they are not going to the hostages?’

  ‘The time is five minutes past three,’ he replied, apropos of nothing at all.

  ‘I didn’t ask you the time,’ I said, angered by his evasiveness. ‘You are always making me out—’

  ‘Have you really forgotten,’ Fandorin interrupted, ‘that we made an appointment with the doctor at four in the morning? If Lind wishes to be punctual, he needs to collect the prisoners as quickly as possible in order to get to the waste g-ground by the Petrovsky Palace on time.’

  The fact that Erast Petrovich had started stammering again suggested that he was feeling a little less tense. And for some reason I also stopped trembling and feeling angry.

  The moment Lind (if it was indeed he) and the Postman turned the corner, we skipped back over the fence. I thought in passing that since I had met Mr Fandorin I had climbed more walls and fences than at any other time in my life, even when was I was a child.

  ‘Get into the carriage and follow me with caution,’ Erast Petrovich instructed me as he walked along. ‘Get out at every corner and look round it. I shall signal to you to drive on or to wait.’

  And in precisely that unhurried manner we reached the boulevard, where Fandorin suddenly beckoned for us to drive up to him.

  ‘They have taken a cab and are going to Sretenka Street,’ he said as he sat down beside me. ‘Come on now, Vologda. Follow them, only don’t get too close.’

  For quite a long time we drove along a succession of boulevards, sometimes moving downhill at a spanking pace and then slowing to drive up an incline. Although it was the middle of the night, the streets were not empty. There were small groups of people walking along, making lively conversation, and several times we were overtaken by other carriages. In St Petersburg they like to poke fun at the old capital city for supposedly taking to its bed with the dusk, but apparently this was far from true. You would never see so many people out walking on Nevsky Prospect at three o’clock in the morning.

  We kept driving straight ahead, and turned only once, at the statue of Pushkin, onto a large street that I immediately recognised as Tverskaya. From here to the Petrovsky Palace it was three or four versts straight along the same route that the imperial procession had followed during the ceremonial entry into the old capital, only in the opposite direction.

  On Tverskaya Street there were even more people and carriages, and they were all moving in the same direction as we were. This seemed very strange to me, but I was thinking about something else.

  ‘They are not stopping anywhere!’ I eventually exclaimed, unable to contain myself. ‘I think they are going straight to the meeting place!’

  Fandorin did not answer. In the dim light of the gas lamps his face looked pale and lifeless.

  ‘Perhaps Lind still has some acco
mplices after all, and the hostages will be delivered directly to the rendezvous?’ he speculated after a long pause, but his voice somehow lacked its habitual self-confidence.

  ‘What if they have already been . . .’ I could not bring myself to finish the dreadful thought.

  Erast Petrovich spoke slowly, in a quiet voice, but his reply sent shivers running down my spine: ‘Then at least we still have Lind.’

  After the Triumphal Gates and the Alexander Railway Station, the separate groups of people fused into a single continuous stream that spread across the roadway as well as the pavements and our horse was forced to slow to a walk. But Lind’s carriage was not moving any faster – I could still see the two hats beyond the lowered leather hood ahead of us: the doctor’s floppy headgear and the Postman’s peaked cap.

  ‘Good Lord, it’s the eighteenth today!’ I exclaimed, almost jumping off the seat when I remembered the significance of the date. ‘Mr Fandorin, there cannot be any meeting on the waste ground! With so many problems on my mind, I completely forgot about the programme of events for the coronation! On Saturday the eighteenth of May there are to be public revels on the open ground opposite the Petrovsky Palace, with free food and drink and the distribution of souvenirs. There must be a hundred thousand people on that waste ground now!’

  ‘Damn!’ Fandorin swore nervously. ‘I didn’t take that into account either. But then I didn’t think that there would be any meeting. I just wrote down the first thing that came into my head. What an unforgivable blunder!’

  On every side we could hear excited voices – some not entirely sober – and jolly laughter. For the most part the crowd consisted of simple people, which was only natural – free honey cakes and sweet spiced drinks were hardly likely to attract a more respectable public, who if they did come to take a look out of curiosity would go into the grandstands, where entrance was by ticket only. They said that at the last coronation as many as three hundred thousand people had gathered for the public festivities, and this time probably even more would come. Well, here they were. People must have been making their way there all night long.

  ‘Tell me, Mister Policeman, is it true what they say, that they’re going to give everyone a pewter mug and fill it right up to the brim with vodka?’ our driver asked, turning his round animated face towards us. He had obviously been infected by the mood of the festive crowd.

  ‘Halt,’ Erast Petrovich ordered.

  I saw that Lind’s cab had stopped, although there was still a long way to go before the turn to the Petrovsky Palace.

  ‘They’re getting out!’ I exclaimed.

  Fandorin handed the cabby a banknote and we set off at a sprint, pushing through the slow-moving crowd.

  Although there was a half-moon peering through the clouds, it was quite dark, and so we decided to move a little closer, to a distance of about ten paces. There were bonfires blazing in the open field on the left of the road and on the right, behind the bushes, and so the two silhouettes, one taller and the other slightly shorter, were clearly visible.

  ‘We must not lose sight of them,’ I kept repeating to myself over and over, like an incantation.

  During those minutes of pursuit I seemed to forget all about His Highness and Mademoiselle Declique. Some ancient and powerful instinct that had nothing to do with pity and was stronger than fear set my heart pounding rapidly but steadily. I had never understood the attraction of the hunt, but now it suddenly occurred to me that the hounds must feel something like this when the pack is unleashed to run down the wolf.

  We were forcing our way through a genuine crush now, almost like Nevsky Prospect at the height of the day. From time to time we had to put our elbows to work. A hulking factory hand pushed in front of us and blocked our view. I managed somehow to squeeze through under his elbow and gasped in horror. Lind and the Postman had disappeared!

  I looked round despairingly at Fandorin. He drew himself up to his full height and, I think, even stood on tiptoe as he gazed around.

  ‘What can we do?’ I shouted. ‘My God, what can we do?’

  ‘You go right; I’ll go left,’ he said.

  I dashed to the edge of the road. There were people sitting on the grass in large and small groups. Others were wandering aimlessly among the trees, and in the distance a choir was singing out of tune. Lind was not on my side. I rushed back to the road and collided with Erast Petrovich, who was forcing his way through towards me.

  ‘We’ve let them get away . . .’ I wailed.

  It was all over. I covered my face with my hands in order not to see the crowd, the bonfires, the dark dove-grey sky.

  Fandorin shook me impatiently by the shoulder. ‘Don’t give up, Ziukin. Here’s the wasteland where the meeting was set. We’ll walk around, keep looking and wait for the dawn. Lind won’t go anywhere. He needs us as much as we need him.’

  He was right, and I tried to take myself in hand and focus my mind.

  ‘The stone,’ I said, suddenly feeling anxious. ‘You haven’t lost the stone, have you?’

  If we could just get them back alive, and then come what may. That was all I could think of at that moment.

  ‘No, it is here,’ said Fandorin, slapping himself on the chest.

  We were being bumped and jostled from all sides, and he took firm hold of my arm.

  ‘You look to the right, Ziukin, and I shall look to the left. We’ll walk slowly. If you see the men we are looking for, do not shout, simply nudge me in the side.’

  I had never walked arm-in-arm with a man before. Or indeed with a woman, with the exception of one brief affair a very long time before, when I was still very green and stupid. I will not recall it here – the story is really not worth the effort.

  The nights are short in May. There was already a strip of pink along the horizon in the east, and the twilight was beginning to brighten. It was obvious that many people had camped here the evening before, and it was becoming more and more crowded around the campfires. Occasionally I could feel empty bottles under my feet. And the crowds kept on coming along the main road from Moscow.

  On the left, beyond the barriers and lines of police, there was a wide open field covered with specially built fairground booths and pavilions with walls of freshly cut timber. That was probably where the tsar’s gifts to the people were being kept. I cringed at the thought of the pandemonium that would break out here in a few hours time, when this sea of people, their patience exhausted by hours of waiting, went flooding past the barriers.

  We wandered from the barriers to the palace and back – once, twice, three times. It was already light, and every time it was harder to force our way through the ever-denser mass of bodies. I continually turned my head to and fro, surveying the half of the area that had been assigned to me, and I struggled with all my strength against a rising tide of despair.

  Somewhere in the distance a bugle sounded a clamorous reveille, and I remembered that the Khodynsk army camps were not far away.

  I suppose it must be seven o’clock, I thought, trying to recall exactly when reveille was. And at that very second I suddenly saw the familiar Calabrian hat with the civil servant’s cap beside it.

  ‘There they are!’ I howled, tugging on Fandorin’s sleeve with all my might. ‘Thank God!’

  The Postman looked round, saw me and shouted: ‘Ziukin!’

  His companion glanced round for a moment – just long enough for me to catch a glimpse of his spectacles and beard – and then they plunged into the very thickest part of the crowd, where it was jostling right up against the barriers.

  ‘After them!’ cried Erast Petrovich, giving me a furious shove.

  There was a stout merchant in front of us and he simply would not make way. Without the slightest hesitation, Fandorin grabbed his collar with one hand and the hem of his long frock coat with the other, and threw him aside. We went dashing through the crowd, with Erast Petrovich leading the way. He carved through the throng like an admiralty launch slicing through the waves,
leaving rolling breakers on each side. From time to time he jumped incredibly high into the air – obviously to avoid losing sight of Lind again.

  ‘They’re forcing their way through towards the Khodynsk Field!’ Erast Petrovch shouted to me. ‘That’s quite excellent! There’s no crowd there but a lot of police!’

  We’ll catch them now, any moment now, I realised, and suddenly feltmystrength increase tenfold. I drewlevel with Fandorin and barked: ‘Make way there!’

  Closer to the barriers the most prudent and patient of the spectators were standing absolutely chock-a-block, and our rate of progress slowed.

  ‘Move aside!’ I roared. ‘Police!’

  ‘Ha, there’s a cunning one!’

  Someone punched me so hard in the side that everythingwent black and I gasped for breath.

  Erast Petrovich took out his police whistle and blew it. The crowd reeled back and parted at the harsh sound, and we advanced a few more steps with relative ease, but then coarse caftans, pea jackets and peasant shirts closed back together again.

  Lind and the Postman were very close now. I saw them duck under a barrier into the open space right in front of the police cordon. Aha, now they were caught!

  I saw the hat lean across to the cap and whisper something into it.

  The Postman turned back, waved his arms in the air and bellowed: ‘Good Orthodox people! Look! On that side they’re pouring in from the Vaganka! They’ve broken through! They’ll get all the mugs! Forward, lads!’

  A single roar was vented from a thousand throats. ‘Hah, the cunning swine! We’ve been here all night, and they want to grab the lot! Like hell they will!’

  I was suddenly swept forward by a force so irresistible that my feet were lifted off the ground. Everything around me started moving, and everyone scrabbled with their elbows, trying to force a way through to the tents and pavilions.

  I heard whistles trilling and shots fired into the air ahead of me. Then someone roared through a megaphone: ‘Go back! Go back! You’ll all be crushed!’