‘Thank you. In addition to being secluded from the main part of the house, where it is sometimes quite noisy at night, the apartment has other conveniences. The rooms are connected by secret doors, which might prove apposite.’
Rybnikov chuckled.
‘I bet it also has false mirrors, conveniently positioned for taking photographs in secret. Like in Arthur, remember?’
The countess smiled and said nothing.
Rybnikov was pleased with his apartment. He spent a few hours arranging it, but not at all in the usual meaning of that word. His domestic bustle had nothing to do with the cosy comforts of home.
Vasilii Alexandrovich went to bed after midnight and took a right royal rest, the kind he had not had in a long time – he slept for an entire four hours, twice as long as usual.
The second syllable, in which Masa violates his neutrality
The passenger from compartment number six did not disappoint Erast Petrovich. On the contrary, the theory appeared ever more promising as time went on.
At the station Fandorin found the driver of the wagon that had transported the passenger who was in such a great hurry away from the banks of the Lomzha. The pretty lady’s testimony was confirmed when the peasant said that the German had indeed forked out a hundred roubles.
‘Why do you say he is German?’ the engineer asked.
The driver was surprised.
‘Well, why would any Russian shell out a hundred note when the price is fifteen kopecks at the outside?’ Then he thought and added, ‘And he had a queer way of speaking too.’
‘Exactly how was it “queer”?’ Erast Petrovich enquired eagerly, but the local couldn’t explain that.
It was much harder to establish where the dark-haired man had gone on to from there. The stationmaster claimed ignorance, the duty supervisor bleated and avoided Fandorin’s eyes, the local gendarme stood to attention and pretended to be a total imbecile. Then, recalling what his invaluable witness had said, the engineer asked point blank where the shunting engine was.
The gendarme instantly came out in large beads of sweat, the duty supervisor turned pale and the stationmaster turned red.
It turned out that the engine, in contravention of all the rules and regulations, had borne the dark-haired man off, full steam ahead, in pursuit of the passenger train that had passed through an hour ahead of the express. The berserk passenger (concerning his nationality, the opinions of the witnesses differed: the stationmaster thought he was a Frenchman, the duty supervisor thought he was a Pole, and the gendarme thought he was a ‘Yid boy’) had thrown so much money about in all directions that it was impossible to resist.
No doubts remained: this was the man Fandorin wanted.
The train that the interesting passenger had set out to chase arrived in Moscow at a quarter to ten, so there was just barely enough time left.
The engineer sent a telegram to the Moscow representative of the Department and an identical one to the head of the Volokolamsk section, Lieutenant Colonel Danilov, telling them to meet the suspect (there follow a detailed description) at the station but not to detain him under any circumstances, simply assign the smartest plainclothes agents they had to shadow him; and to do nothing more until Erast Petrovich arrived.
Because of the wreck, all traffic on the Nicholas line had come to a halt. A long queue of passenger and goods trains had formed in the St Petersburg direction, but in the Moscow direction the line was clear. Fandorin requisitioned the very latest five-axle ‘compound engine’ locomotive and, accompanied by his faithful valet, set off to the east at a speed of eighty versts an hour.
Erast Petrovich had last been in his native city five years earlier – in secret, under an assumed name. The higher authorities of Moscow were not fond of the retired state counsellor; indeed, they disliked him so greatly that even the briefest of stays in Russia’s second capital city could end very unpleasantly for him.
After Fandorin returned to government service without any of the normal formalities being observed, an extremely strange situation had arisen: although he enjoyed the confidence of the government and was invested with extremely wide-ranging powers, the engineer continued to be regarded as persona non grata in the province of Moscow and endeavoured not to extend his journeys beyond the station of Bologoe.
But shortly after the New Year an incident had occurred that put an end to these years of exile, and if Erast Petrovich had not yet got around to visiting his native parts, it was only because of his extraordinarily excessive workload.
Standing beside the driver and gazing absentmindedly into the hot blaze of the firebox, Fandorin thought about the imminent encounter with the city of his youth and the event that had made this encounter possible.
It was an event that shook Moscow, in the literal sense as well as the figurative one. The governor-general of Moscow, Fandorin’s bitter enemy, had been blown to pieces by a Social Revolutionary bomb right in the middle of the Kremlin.
For all his dislike of the deceased, a man of little worth, who had caused only harm to the city, Erast Petrovich was shocked by what had happened.
Russia was seriously ill, running a high fever, shivering hot and cold by turns, with bloody sweat oozing from her pores, and it was not just a matter of the war with Japan. The war had merely brought to light what was already clear in any case to any thinking individuaclass="underline" the empire had become an anachronism, a dinosaur with a body that was huge and a head that was too small, a creature that had outlived its time on earth. Or rather, the actual dimensions of the head were huge, it was swollen up with a multitude of ministries and committees, but hidden at the centre of this head was a tiny little brain, uncomplicated by any convolutions. Any decision that was even slightly complex, any movement of the unwieldy carcass, was impossible without a decision of will by a single individual whose wisdom, unfortunately, fell far short of Solomon’s. But even if he had been an intellectual titan, how was it possible, in the age of electricity, radio and X-rays, to govern a country single-handed, during the breaks between lawn tennis and hunting?
So the poor Russian dinosaur was reeling, tripping over its own mighty feet, dragging its thousand-verst tail aimlessly across the earth. An agile predator of the new generation sprang at it repeatedly, tearing out lumps of flesh, and deep in the entrails of the behemoth, a deadly tumour was burgeoning. Fandorin did not know how to heal the ailing giant, but in any case bombs were not the answer – the jarring concussion would totally confuse the immense saurian’s tiny little brain, the gigantic body would start twitching convulsively in panic, and Russia would die.
As usual, it was the wisdom of the East that helped purge his gloomy and barren thoughts. The engineer fished out of his memory an aphorism that suited the case: ‘The superior man knows that the world is imperfect, but does not lose heart’.
The factor that had disrupted the harmony of Erast Petrovich’s soul should be arriving at the Nicholas station in Moscow any minute now.
He could only hope that Lieutenant Colonel Danilov would not blunder…
Danilov did not blunder. He met his visitor from St Petersburg in person, right beside the reserve line at which the ‘compound’ arrived. The lieutenant colonel’s round face was glowing with excitement. As soon as they had shaken hands he started his report.
He didn’t have a single good agent – they had all been lured into the Okhrana’s Flying Squad, where the pay and the gratuities were better, and there was more freedom. And therefore, knowing that the engineer would not have alarmed him over something trivial, Danilov had decided to reprise the good old days, taken his deputy, Staff Captain Lisitsky, a very capable officer, to help him and followed the mark himself.
Now the engineer understood the reason for bold Nikolai Vasilievich’s agitation. The lieutenant colonel had had enough of sitting in his office, he was weary of having no real work to do, that was why he had gone dashing off so eagerly to play cops and robbers. ‘I’ll have to tell them to transfer him to work in the field,’ Fandorin noted to himself as he listened to the adventurous tale of how Danilov and his deputy had dressed up as petty merchants and how deftly they had arranged the surveillance in two cabs.