His thoughts grew even shorter, even more rapid.
Start with the passenger, he’s a professional… A heart attack… I live here, help me carry him in, old mate… Beatrice would be annoyed. Never mind, she was in this up to her neck. What about the cab? In the evening, that could be done in the evening.
He finished thinking it all out on the move. He walked unhurriedly out on to the steps, yawned and stretched. His hand casually flourished a long cigarette holder – empty, with no papirosa in it. Rybnikov also extracted a small, flat pillbox from his pocket and took out of it something that he put in his mouth.
As he walked past the cabby, he noticed the man squinting sideways at him.
Vasilii Alexandrovich paid no attention to the driver. He gripped the cigarette holder in his teeth, quickly jerked back the flap of the cab – and froze.
Lidina was sitting in the carriage.
Suddenly deathly pale, Rybnikov jerked the cigarette holder out of his mouth, coughed and spat into his handkerchief.
Not looking even slightly embarrassed, she said with a cunning smile:
‘So this is where you live, Mr Conspirator! Your auntie has a lovely house.’
‘You followed me?’ said Vasilii Alexandrovich, forcing out the words with a struggle, thinking: One more second, a split second, and…
‘Cunning, isn’t it?’ Glyceria Romanovna laughed. ‘I switched cabs, ordered the driver to drive at walking pace, at a distance. I said you were my husband and I suspected you of being unfaithful.’
‘But… what for?’
She turned serious.
‘You gave me such a look when I said “until tomorrow”… I suddenly felt that you wouldn’t come tomorrow. And you wouldn’t come again at all. And I don’t even know where to look for you… I can see that our meetings are a burden on your conscience. You think you’re putting me in danger. Do you know what I’ve thought of?’ Lidina exclaimed brightly. ‘Introduce me to your aunt. She’s your relative, I’m your friend. You have no idea of the power of two women who join forces!’
‘No!’ said Rybnikov, staggering back. ‘Absolutely not!’
‘Then I shall go in myself,’ Lidina declared, and her face took on the same expression it had worn in the corridor of the train.
‘All right, if you want to so badly… But I have to warn my aunt. She has a bad heart, and she’s not very fond of surprises in general,’ said Vasilii Alexandrovich, spouting nonsense in his panic. ‘My aunt runs a boarding house for girls from noble families. It has certain rules. Let’s do it tomorrow… Yes, yes, tomorrow. In the early eve-’
‘Ten minutes,’ she snapped. ‘I’ll wait ten minutes, then I’ll go in myself.’
And she emphatically raised the small diamond watch hanging round her neck.
Countess Bovada was an exceptionally resourceful individual, Rybnikov already knew that. She understood his meaning from a mere hint, didn’t waste a single second on questions and went into action immediately.
Probably no other woman would have been capable of transforming a bordello into a boarding house for daughters of the nobility in ten minutes.
After exactly ten minutes (Rybnikov was watching from behind the curtains) Glyceria Romanovna paid her cabby and got out of the carriage with a determined air.
The door was opened for her by the respectable-looking porter, who bowed and led her along the corridor towards the sound of a pianoforte.
Lidina was pleasantly surprised by the rich decor of the boarding house. She thought it rather strange that there were nails protruding from the walls in places – as if pictures had been hanging there, but they had been taken down. They must have been taken away to be dusted, she thought absentmindedly, feeling rather flustered before her important conversation.
In the cosy salon two pretty girls in grammar school uniform were playing the ‘Dog’s Waltz’ for four hands.
They got up, performed a clumsy curtsy and chorused: ‘Bonjour, madame.’
Glyceria Romanovna smiled affectionately at their embarrassment. She had once been a shy young thing just like them, she had grown up in the artificial world of the Smolny Institute: childish young dreams, reading Flaubert in secret, virginal confessions in the quiet of the dormitory…
Vasya was standing there, by the piano – with a bashful look on his plain but sweet face.
‘My auntie’s waiting for you. I’ll show you the way,’ he muttered, letting Lidina go on ahead.
Fira Ryabchik (specialisation ‘grammar school girl’) held Rybnikov back for a moment by the hem of his jacket.
‘Vas, is that your ever-loving? An interesting little lady. Don’t get in a funk. It’ll go all right. We’ve locked the others in their rooms.’
Thank God that she and Lionelka didn’t have any make-up on yet because it was still daytime.
And there was Beatrice, already floating out of the doors to meet them like the Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna.
‘Countess Bovada,’ she said, introducing herself with a polite smile. ‘Vasya has told me so much about you!’
‘Countess?’ Lidina gasped.
‘Yes, my late husband was a Spanish grandee,’ Beatrice explained modestly. ‘Please do come into the study.’
Before she followed her hostess, Glyceria Romanovna whispered:
‘So you have Spanish grandees among your kin? Anyone else would certainly have boasted about that. You are definitely unusual.’
In the study things were easier. The countess maintained a confident bearing and held the initiative firmly in her own grip.
She warmly approved of the idea of an escape abroad. She said she would obtain documents for her nephew, entirely reliable ones. Then the two ladies’ conversation took a geographical turn as they considered where to evacuate their adored ‘Vasya’. In the process it emerged that the Spanish grandee’s widow had travelled almost all over the world. She spoke with special affection of Port Said and San Francisco.
Rybnikov took no part in the conversation, merely cracked his knuckles nervously.
Never mind, he thought to himself. It’s the twenty-fifth tomorrow, and after that it won’t matter.
The fourth syllable, in which Fandorin feels afraid
Sombre fury would be the best name to give the mood in which Erast Petrovich found himself. In his long life he had known both the sweetness of victory and the bitterness of defeat, but he could not remember ever feeling so stupid before. This must be the way a whaler felt when, instead of impaling a sperm whale, his harpoon merely scattered a shoal of little fish.
But how could he possibly have doubted that the thrice-cursed dark-haired man was the Japanese agent responsible for the sabotage? The absurd concatenation of circumstances was to blame, but that was poor comfort to the engineer.
Precious time had been wasted, the trail was irredeemably lost.
The mayor of Moscow and the detective police wished to express their heartfelt gratitude to Fandorin for catching the brazen band of crooks, but Erast Petrovich withdrew into the shadows, and all the glory went to Mylnikov and his agents, who had merely delivered the bound bandits to the nearest police station.
There was a clearing of the air between the engineer and the court counsellor, and Mylnikov did not even attempt to be cunning. Gazing at Fandorin with eyes bleached colourless by his disappointment in humankind, Mylnikov admitted without the slightest trace of embarrassment that he had set his agents on the case and come to Moscow himself because he knew from the old days that Fandorin had a uniquely keen nose, and it was a surer way of picking up the trail than wearing out his own shoe leather. He might not have picked up any saboteurs, but he hadn’t come off too badly – the hold-up artists from Warsaw would earn him the gratitude of his superiors and a gratuity.
‘And instead of name-calling, you’d be better off deciding what’s the best way for you and me to rub along,’ Mylnikov concluded amicably. ‘What can you do without me? That railway outfit of yours doesn’t even have the right to conduct an investigation. But I do, and then again, I’ve brought along the finest sleuths in Peter, grand lads, every last one of them. Come on, Fandorin, let’s come to friendly terms, comradely like. The head will be yours, the arms and legs will be ours.’