At Kaluga Square we took a turn to the left, came out on the embankment just before the bridge and then we did not make any more turns for a long time. Thank God, the passengers in the carriage in front did not turn round even once – my green and gold outfitmust have been clearly visible from a long distance away.
The river divided into two. Our route lay along the the narrower of the two channels. On the left I could see the Kremlin towers and eagles between the buildings, and still we kept on driving, further and further, so that I no longer knew what part of Moscow we had reached.
At long last we made another turn and rumbled across a short cobblestoned bridge, then across a longwooden one, then across a third, which bore a plaque: ‘Small Yauza Bridge’.
The houses became poorer and the streets dirtier. And the longer we drove along that atrocious, rutted embankment, the more wretched the buildings became, so that I could not think of any other word to describe them except slums.
The driver suddenly halted his horse.
‘You do what you like, guv’nor, but I’m not going into Khitrovka. They’ll rob me. Take me horse and give me a good battering into the bargain, if not worse. Everyone knows what the place is like, and evening’s coming on.’
And indeed dusk was already falling – how had I failed to notice that?
Realising that it was pointless to argue, I got out of the cab immediately and handed the driver three roubles.
‘Oh no!’ he said, grabbing me by the sleeve. ‘You just look how far we’ve rode, and you promised me double, Your Excellency!’
Fandorin’s carriage disappeared round the corner. In order not to fall behind, I tossed the insolent fellow another two roubles and ran in pursuit.
The people I encountered on the street were unsavoury in the extreme. To put it more simply, they were riff-raff, the same sort as we have on the Ligovka in St Petersburg only probably even worse. What I found particularly unpleasant was that every last one of them was staring at me.
Someone shouted after me familiarly: ‘Hey, you dandy drake, what have you lost around here?’
I pretended not to hear.
The cab was not there round the corner – there was nothing but an empty, crooked little street, crooked street lamps with broken glass covers and half-ruined little houses.
I dashed to the next turn and then jerked back sharply, because right there, only about fifteen paces away, the men I was looking for were getting out of their carriage.
I cautiously peeped round the corner and saw a crowd of repulsive ragamuffins gather round the new arrivals from all sides, gaping curiously at the cabby, from which it was possible to conclude that the appearance of a cab in Khitrovka was a rather extraordinary event.
‘Well, what about a rouble and a half, then?’ the driverwhined plaintively, addressing the disguised state counsellor.
Fandorin swayed back on his heels, keeping his hands in his pockets, baring his teeth in a fierce grin with a glint of gold caps, which had appeared in his mouth out of nowhere, and spat neatly on the driver’s boot. Then he asked mockingly: ‘What about a kick and a poke?’
The idle onlookers chortled.
Oh, what a fine state counsellor this was!
The cabby pulled his head down into his shoulders, lashed his horse and drove off, accompanied by whistling, hallooing and shouts of an obscene nature.
Without even glancing at each other, Fandorin and the Japanese walked off in different directions. Masa ducked into a gateway and seemed to dissolve into the gathering gloom, while Erast Petrovich set off along the very middle of the street. After hesitating for a while, I followed the latter.
It was incredible how much his walk had changed. Hewaddled along as if he were on invisible springs, with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders hunched over. He spat zestfully twice to once side and kicked an empty tin can with his boot. A crudely painted wench in a bright-coloured dress came walking towards him, wiggling her hips. Fandorin deftly extracted one hand from his pocket and pinched her on the side. Strangely enough, this style of courtship seemed very much to the lady’s liking – she squealed, broke into peals of laughter and shouted such a pithy phrase after her admirer that I almost stumbled over my own feet. If only Xenia Georgievna could have seen how little this gentleman cared for her tender feelings!
He turned into a dark narrowalleyway – no more than a chink between two buildings. I went in after him, but before I had even taken ten steps I was grabbed by the shoulders from both sides. A whiff of something rotten and sour blew into my face and a young, nasal voice drawled: ‘Ea-sy now, Mister, ea-sy.’
There were two figures that I could only vaguely make out in the twilight, one standing on my left and one on my right. Right in front of my eyes an icy spark glinted on a strip of steel, and I felt the strange sensation of my knees turning soft, as if they might suddenly bend in the wrong direction, in defiance of all the laws of anatomy.
‘Lookee ’ere,’ hissed a different voice, a bit older and hoarser. ‘A wallet.’
The pocket in which my porte-monnaie was lying suddenly felt suspiciously light, but I realised it would be best not to protest. In any case, the noise might bring Fandorin, and my surveillance of him would be exposed.
‘Take it quickly and leave me in peace,’ I declared quite firmly, but then gagged on my words because a fist came hurtling out of the gloom and struck me on the base of the nose, so that I was immediately blinded, and something hot ran down my chin.
‘Well, isn’t he the feisty one?’ I heard someone say as if he was speaking through a pane of glass. ‘And the skins, look at the skins, with gold trimmints.’
Someone’s hands grabbed hold roughly of my shirt and pulled it out from under my belt.
‘You did wrong to bloody his snout, Seka. That shirt of his is pure cambric, and now look, the whole front’s spattered something rotten. And his pants are good too.’
It was only then I realised that these criminals intended to strip me naked.
‘Them’s women’s pants, but the cloth’s right enough,’ the other voice said and someone tugged at the edge of my culottes. ‘They’ll do Manka for pantaloons. Get ’em off, Mister, get ’em off.’
My eyes had grown accustomed to the dull light, and now I could make out my robbers better.
It would have been better if I hadn’t – the sight was nightmarish. Half the face of one of them was swollen up and covered by a bruise of monstrous proportions, the other was wheezing through a damp, sticky collapsed nose.
‘Take the livery, but I won’t give you the breeches and the shoes,’ I said, for the very idea that I, the butler of the Green Court, might go wandering around Moscow in the nude, was inconceivable.
‘If you don’t get ’em off, we’ll pull ’em off yer corpse,’ the hoarse one threatened and pulled a razor out from behind his back – a perfectly ordinary razor, the same kind that I shave with, except that this one was covered in rust and badly notched.
I began unbuttoning my shirt with trembling fingers, cursing my own folly. How could I have got into such a loathsome mess? I had let Fandorin get away, but that was the least of my worries now – I would be lucky to get out of there alive.
Another shadow appeared behind the backs of the Khitrovka savages and I heard a lazy, sing-song voice say: ‘And what’s this little comedy we ’ave ’ere, then? Right, shrimp, scarper, and quick.’
Erast Petrovich! Butwhere had he come from? He hadwalked away!
‘You what? You what?’ the young robber shrieked, but his voice sounded nervous to me. ‘This here’s our sheep, mine and Tura’s. You live your life, toff, and let honest dogs live too. There’s no law says you can take a sheep off us dogs.’