‘Your skin is blue,’ said Tamba, coming up to him.
The old man’s face was calm, even sleepy somehow.
‘I can’t breathe,’ Fandorin explained abruptly.
The jonin looked into his eyes and shook his head.
‘And you won’t be able to. You need to let the bad energy out. Otherwise it will suffocate you. You have to shatter the ice that has gripped your heart so tightly.’
He’s talking about the Don again, Erast Petrovich realised.
‘All right. I’ll go with you. It’s not very likely to warm my heart, but perhaps I’ll be able to breathe again.’
Behind the titular counsellor’s back the flames raged and roared, but he didn’t look round.
‘I have no weaknesses any more,’ said the jonin. ‘Now I shall become a genuine Tamba. You will also become stronger. You are young. There are very many good women in the world, far more than there are good men. Women will love you, and you will love them.’
Erast Petrovich explained to him:
‘I mustn’t love anybody. My love brings disaster. I cannot love. I cannot love.’
Tamba didn’t answer.
Nothing is worse than
When someone knows everything
But will not answer
A POSTMAN
They set out for Yokohama at night, Fandorin on his tricycle, Tamba running. The tricyclist turned his pedals smoothly and powerfully, but soon fell behind – the ninja moved faster, and he didn’t have to stop to tauten a chain or negotiate a stony patch. They hadn’t actually arranged to travel together, merely agreed a meeting place: in the Bluff, on the hill that overlooked Don Tsurumaki’s house.
Erast Petrovich immersed himself completely in the rhythm of travelling, thinking of nothing but breathing correctly. Breathing was still as difficult as ever for him, but otherwise the titular counsellor felt a lot better than he had during the day. The movement helped. It was as if he had been transformed from a man into a chain-transmission and ball-bearing mechanism. His soul was filled, not so much with peace, as with a certain blessed emptiness, without any thoughts or feelings. If he could have had his way, he would have carried on like this through the sleeping valley until the end of his life, never feeling tired.
There really was no tiredness. Before setting out, Tamba had made Fandorin swallow kikatsu-maru, an ancient food that ninjas took with them as rations for long journeys. It was a small, almost tasteless ball moulded out of powder: grated carrot, buckwheat flour, yam and some cunning root or other. The mixture was supposed to be aged for three years, until all the moisture evaporated. According to Tamba, two or three of these little balls were enough to prevent a grown man feeling any hunger or fatigue all day long. And instead of a bottle of water, Erast Petrovich had been given a supply of suikatsu-maru – three tiny pellets of sugar, malt and the flesh of marinated plums.
And there was one other present, which was obviously supposed to inflame the thirst for vengeance in Fandorin’s indifferent breast: a formal photograph of Midori. The photo seemed to have been taken at the time when she was working in a brothel. Looking out at the titular counsellor from the clumsily coloured portrait was a china doll in a kimono, with a tall hairstyle. He stared at this image for a long time, but didn’t recognise Midori in it. And her beauty had disappeared somehow as well. Erast Petrovich thought abstractedly that genuine beauty was impossible to capture with the camera lens: it was too vital, too anomalous and mercurial. Or perhaps the problem was that genuine beauty was not perceived with the eyes, but in some other way.
The journey from Yokohama to the mountains had taken two days. But Erast Petrovich trundled back in five hours. He didn’t take a single break, but he wasn’t tired at all – no doubt owing to the magical maru.
To get into the Bluff, Fandorin needed to go straight on towards the racecourse, but instead of that he steered his vehicle to the left, towards the river, beyond which lay the crowded roofs of the trading quarter, wreathed in the morning mist.
The titular counsellor raced across the Nisinobasi bridge into the straight streets of the Settlement, and found himself, not on the hill where Tamba was no doubt already tired of waiting for him, but on the promenade, in front of a building with the Russian tricolour flying over it.
Erast Petrovich had not changed his route out of any absentmindedness resulting from the shock that he had suffered. There was no absentmindedness at all. On the contrary, the consequence of the frozen state of his feelings and the hours of mechanical movements was that the titular counsellor’s brain had started to function with the direct, linear precision of an adding machine. Wheels whirled, levers clicked and out popped the answer. In his normal condition Fandorin might possibly have over-intellectualised and produced some fancy construction with bells on, but now, while the non-participation of his emotions was absolute, his plan came out amazingly simple and clear.
Erast Petrovich had called round to the consulate or, rather, to his own apartment, on a matter relating directly to his arithmetically precise plan.
As he walked past the bedroom, he averted his gaze (the instinct of self-preservation prompted him to do that), turned on the light in the study and started rummaging through the books. Methodically picking up a volume, leafing through it and dropping it on the floor.
While doing this he muttered unintelligibly under his breath:
‘Edgar Allan Poe? Nerval? Schopenhauer?’
He was so absorbed by this mysterious activity that he didn’t hear the quiet footsteps behind him.
Suddenly a strident, nervous voice shouted:
‘Don’t move or I’ll shoot!’
Consul Doronin was standing in the doorway of the study, wearing a Japanese dressing gown and holding a revolver in his hand.
‘It is I, Fandorin,’ the titular counsellor said calmly, glancing round for no more than a second before continuing to rustle the pages. ‘Hello, Vsevolod Vitalievich.’
‘You!’ gasped the consul, without lowering his weapon (owing to surprise, one must assume). ‘I saw a light in your windows and the door standing wide open. I thought it was thieves, or something worse… Oh Lord, you’re alive! Where on earth did you get to? You’ve been gone for a whole week! I already… But where’s your Japanese servant?’
‘In Tokyo,’ Fandorin replied briefly, dropping a work by Proudhon and taking up a novel by Disraeli.
‘And… and Miss O-Yumi?’
The titular counsellor froze with the book in his hands, totally overwhelmed by this simple question.
Yes indeed, where was she now? After all, it was impossible for her not to be anywhere at all. Had she migrated to other flesh, in accordance with the Buddhist teachings? Or gone to heaven, where there was a place waiting for all that was truly beautiful? Or gone to hell, which was the right place for sinners?
‘… I don’t know,’ he replied after a long pause, at a loss.
The tone of voice in which this was said was enough to prevent Vsevolod Vitalievich from asking his assistant any more about his lover. If Erast Petrovich had been in his normal condition, he would have noticed that the consul himself looked rather strange: he didn’t have his habitual spectacles, his eyes were blazing excitedly and his hair was dishevelled.
‘What of your expedition to the mountains? Did you discover Tamba’s lair?’ Doronin asked, but without seeming particularly interested.
‘Yes.’
Another book went flying on to the heap.
‘And what then?’
The question was left unanswered, and once again the consul did not persist. He finally lowered his weapon.
‘What are you looking for?’
‘It’s just that I put something away and I c-can’t remember where,’ Fandorin said in annoyance. ‘Perhaps in Bulwer-Lytton?’