‘A wager?’ I asked spitefully, finally losing patience with his bragging. ‘By all means. If you lose, we shall go and give ourselves up to the police today.’
He laughed light-heartedly. ‘And if I win, you will shave off your celebrated sideburns and moustache. Shall we shake on it?’
The bargain was sealed with a handshake.
‘We have to pay a visit to the Hermitage,’ said Fandorin, growing more serious. ‘To collect Masa. He will be very useful to us. And also to pick up a fewessentials. M-money, for example. I did not bring my wallet with me on this operation. I foresaw that the meeting with Lind was certain to involve jumping, brandishing fists, running and all kinds of similar activities, and any superfluous weight, even the slightest, is a hindrance to that. There you have one more proof of the old truth that money is never a superfluous burden. How much do you have with you?’
I put my hand into my pocket and discovered that in one of my numerous tumbles during the night I had dropped my purse. If I was not mistaken, it had contained eight roubles and some small change. I took out a handful of tarnished silver coins and gazed at them ruefully.
‘Is that all that you have?’ Erast Petrovich asked, taking one of the irregular round objects and twirling it in his fingers. ‘A Peter the Great altyn. We are not likely to be able to buy anything with that. Any antique shop would be glad to take your t-treasure, but it is too risky for us to appear in crowds with our present appearance. So, this is a strange situation: we have a diamond that is worth goodness knows how many millions but we can’t even buy a piece of bread. That makes a visit to the Hermitage all the more necessary.’
‘But how is that possible?’ I asked, raising my head above the grass growing on the riverbank. There was a line of soldiers and police standing right round the pond and the open field. ‘Everything here is cordoned off. And even if we broke out of the cordon, there is no way that we can walk right across the city in broad daylight!’
‘It’s easy to see that you know nothing of the geography of the old c-capital, Ziukin. What do you think that is?’ Fandorin jerked his chin towards the river.
‘What do you mean? The Moscow River.’
‘And what do you see every day from the windows of the Hermitage? That wet, g-greenish thing flowing slowly towards the Kremlin? We shall have to commit yet another crime, although not as serious as the theft of the Orlov.’
He walked over to a flimsy little boat moored to the bank, looked it over and nodded.
‘It will do. Of course there are no oars, but I think that p-plank over there will suit perfectly well. Get in, Ziukin. They won’t think of looking for us on the river, and we don’t have very far to sail. I feel sorry for the boat’s owner. The loss will probably be more ruinous for him than the loss of the Orlov would be for the Romanovs. Right then, let’s have your treasure trove.’
He delved into my pocket unceremoniously, clawed out the coins, put them beside the small stake to which the boat was moored and sprinkled a little sand over them.
‘Well, why are you just standing there? Get in. And be careful or this battleship will capsize.’
I got in, soaking my shoes in the water that had accumulated in the bottom of the boat. Fandorin pushed off with the plank, andwe drifted out very, very slowly. Heworked away desperately with his clumsy oar, delving alternately on the left and the right, but despite these Sisyphean labours our bark barely moved at all.
Ten minutes later, when we had still not even reached the middle of the river, I enquired: ‘But just how far do we have to sail to reach the Neskuchny Park?’
‘I th-think about . . . three v-versts,’ Fandorin replied with an effort, bright red from his exertions.
I could not resist a sarcastic comment: ‘At this speedwe should probably get there by tomorrow morning. The current is slow here.’
‘We don’t need the current,’ Erast Petrovich mumbled.
He started brandishing his plank even more vigorously, and the bow of our boat struck a log. A steam tug was passing by, towing a string of logs after it. Fandorin tied the mooring rope to a trimmed branch, dropped the plank in the bottom of the boat and stretched blissfully.
‘That’s it, Ziukin. We can take half an hour’s rest, and we’ll be at our destination.’
Grassy fields and market gardens drifted by slowly on the left; then came thewhitewalls of the Novodevichy Convent, the sight of which I was thoroughly sick by now. On the right there was a tall wooded bank. I saw a white church with a round dome, elegant arbours, a grotto.
‘You see before you Vorobyovsky Park, laid out in the English manner in imitation of a n-natural forest,’ Fandorin told me in the voice of a true guide. ‘Note the hanging bridge across that ravine. I saw a bridge exactly like it in the Himalayas, only it was woven out of shafts of bamboo. Of course, the drop below it was not twenty sazhens, it was a gulf of two versts. But then, for anyone who falls, the difference is immaterial . . . And what have we here?’
He leaned down and took a simple fishing rod out from under the bench. He examined it with interest, then turned his head this way and that and picked a green caterpillar off the side of the boat with an exclamation of joy.
‘Right, now, Ziukin, here’s to luck!’
He tossed the line into the water and almost immediately pulled out a silver carp the size of an open hand.
‘How about that, eh?’ Erast Petrovich exclaimed, thrusting his trembling prey under my nose. ‘Did you see that? It took l-less than a minute! A very good sign! That’s the way we’ll hook Lind!’
A perfect little boy! A boastful irresponsible boy. He put the wet fish in his pocket and it began moving as if his coat were alive.
A familiar bridge appeared ahead of us, the same one that could be seen from the windows of the Hermitage. Soon I spotted the green roof of the palace itself beyond the crowns of the trees.
Fandorin cast off from the log. When the rafts had drifted past us, we set a course for the right bank, and a quarter of an hour later we were at the railings of the Neskuchny Park.
This time I surmounted the obstacle without the slightest difficulty, thanks to the experience I had accumulated. We made ourway into the thickets, but Fandorinwaswary of approaching the Hermitage.
‘They certainly won’t be looking for us here,’ he declared, stretching out on the grass. ‘But it would still be best t-to wait until dark. Are you hungry?’
‘Yes, very. Do you have some provisions with you?’ I asked hopefully because, I must confess, my stomach had been aching from hunger for a long time.
‘Yes, this.’ He took his catch out of his pocket. ‘Have you never tried raw fish? In Japan everybody eats it.’
Naturally I declined such an incredible meal, and watched with some revulsion as Erast Petrovich gulped down the cold slippery carp, daintily extracting the fine bones and sucking them clean.
After completing this barbarous meal, he wiped his fingers on a handkerchief, took out a box of matches and then extracted a cigar from an inside pocket. He shook the matchbox and announced delightedly: ‘They have dried out. You don’t smoke, do you?’
He stretched contentedly and put one hand under his head.
‘What a picnic we are having, eh? Wonderful. Real heaven.’
‘Heaven?’ I half-sat up at that, I felt so indignant. ‘The world is falling apart before our very eyes, and you call it “heaven”?The very foundations of the monarchy are trembling; an innocent child has been tormented by fiends; the most worthy of women is being subjected, perhaps, at this very moment to . . .’ I did not finish the sentence because not all things can be said aloud. ‘Chaos, that is what it is. There is nothing in the world more terrible than chaos, because from chaos comes insanity, the destruction of standards and rules . . .’