Erast Petrovich was an enthusiastic supporter and even, to some extent, inspirer of the initiative undertaken by the Duke of Oldenburg, whose idea was to establish in Russia a genuine, scientifically organised police dog service on the European model. This was a new area, little studied as yet, but it had immediately been given massive backing.
Coaching a good dog to track down a specific smell required only a few hours. The amount of simose needed was allocated from the Artillery Department and work began: fifty-four police instructors thrust the noses of their shaggy helpers into the yellow powder, the air was filled with reproachful and approving exclamations, peals of barking and the cheerful sound of sugar crunching between dog’s teeth.
Melinite had an acrid smell and the tracker dogs recognised it easily, even among sacks of common chemical products. Following a brief training course, His Highness’s protégés set off on their work assignments: twenty-eight dogs went to the western border – two to each of the fourteen crossing points – and the rest went on the special train to Moscow, to receive further instructions from the engineer Fandorin.
Working by day and night in two shifts, the handlers led the dogs through the carriages and depots of all the railway lines of the old capital. Mylnikov did not believe in Fandorin’s plan, but he didn’t try to interfere, just looked on. In any case, the court counsellor had no ideas of his own on how to catch the Japanese agents.
On the fifth day, Erast Petrovich finally received the long-awaited telephone call in the office where he was studying the most vulnerable points of the Trans-Siberian Railway, all marked on a map with little red flags.
‘We’ve got it!’ an excited voice shouted into the receiver over the sound of deafening barking. ‘Mr Engineer, I think we’ve got it! This is trainer Churikov calling from the Moscow Freight Station on the Brest line! We haven’t touched a thing, just as you ordered!’
Erast Petrovich telephoned Mylnikov immediately.
They dashed to the station from different directions, arriving almost simultaneously.
Trainer Churikov introduced his bosses to the heroine of the hour, a Belgian sheepdog of the Grunendal breed:
‘Mignonette.’
Mignonette sniffed at Fandorin’s shoes and wagged her tail. She bared her fangs at Mylnikov.
‘Don’t take offence, she’s in pup,’ the handler said hastily. ‘But it makes the nose keener.’
‘Well, what is it you’ve found?’ the court counsellor demanded impatiently.
Churikov tugged on the dog’s lead and she plodded reluctantly towards the depot, glancing back at the engineer. At the entrance she braced her paws against the ground and even lay down, making it very clear that she was in no hurry to go anywhere. She squinted up at the men to see whether they would scold her.
‘She’s acting up,’ the trainer said, sighing. He squatted down, scratched the bitch’s belly and whispered something in her ear.
Mignonette graciously got up and set off towards the stacks of crates and sacks.
‘There now, there, watch,’ said Churikov, throwing up one hand.
‘Watch what?’
‘The ears and the tail!’
Mignonette’s ears and tail were lowered. She walked slowly along one row, and then another. Halfway along the third, her ears suddenly jerked erect and her tail shot up and then sank back down and stayed there, pressed between her legs. The tracker dog sat down and barked at four neat, medium-sized jute sacks.
The consignment had arrived from France and was intended for the Werner and Pfleiderer Bakery. It had been delivered on the morning train from Novgorod. The contents were a yellow powder that left a distinctive oily sheen on the fingers – no doubt about it, it was melinite.
‘It crossed the border before the dogs got there,’ Fandorin said after checking the accompanying documentation. ‘Right then, Mylnikov, we have work to do.’
They decided to do the work themselves and not trust it to the detectives. Erast Petrovich dressed up as a railwayman and Mylnikov as a loader. They installed themselves in the next goods shed, which gave them an excellent view of the depot and the approaches to it.
The consignee arrived for his delivery at 11.55.
The rather short man, who looked like a shop hand, presented a piece of paper, signed the office book and carried the sacks to a closed wagon himself.
The observers were glued to their binoculars.
‘Japanese, I think,’ Erast Petrovich murmured.
‘Oh, come on!’ Mylnikov exclaimed doubtfully, fiddling with the little focusing wheel. ‘As Russian as they come, with just a touch of the Tatar, the way it ought to be.’
‘Japanese,’ the engineer repeated confidently. ‘Perhaps with an admixture of European blood, but the form of the eyes and the nose… I’ve seen him before somewhere. But where, and when? Perhaps he simply looks like one of my Japanese acquaintances… Japanese faces are not noted for their variety – anthropology distinguishes only twelve basic types. That’s because of their insular isolation. There was no influx of b-blood from other races.’
‘He’s leaving!’ Evstratii Pavlovich exclaimed, interrupting the lecture on anthropology. ‘Quick!’
But there was no need to hurry. A whole fleet of cabs and carriages of various kinds had been assembled to carry out surveillance around the city, and an agent was sitting in every one, so the mark couldn’t get away.
The engineer and the court counsellor lowered themselves on to the springy seat of the carriage bringing up the rear of this cavalcade, which was giving a convincing imitation of a busy stream of traffic, and set off slowly through the streets.
The buildings and lamp-posts were decorated with flags and garlands. Moscow was celebrating the birthday of the Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna far more sumptuously than in previous years. There was a special reason for that: the sovereign’s wife had recently presented Russia with an heir to the throne, after four little girls – or ‘blank shots’, as Mylnikov expressed it disrespectfully.
‘But they say the little lad’s sickly, there’s a hex on him,’ Evstratii Pavlovich said, and sighed. ‘The Lord’s punishing the Romanovs.’
This time the engineer didn’t bother to reply and merely frowned at this provocative gibberish.
Meanwhile the mark demonstrated that he was a conjuror. At the freight station he had loaded four sacks into his closed wagon, but at the left luggage office of the Ryazan-Uralsk line he took out three wooden crates and eight small bundles wrapped in shiny black paper. He let the wagon go. Of course, the agents stopped the wagon round the very first bend, but all they found in it were four empty jute sacks. For some reason the melinite had been extracted from them and repacked.
The clerk at the left luggage office stated that the crates and the bundles had been left as two separate items, with different receipts.
But Fandorin received all this information only later. Since the putative Japanese proceeded on his way from the station as a pedestrian, the engineer and the court counsellor took the surveillance into their own hands once again.
They followed the mark at the greatest possible distance and dispatched the sleuths into the reserve. The most important thing now was not to frighten off the live bait that might attract some other fish.
The shop hand called into two hotels close to the station – the ‘Kazan’ and the ‘Railway’. They prudently decided not to go barging in, and they wouldn’t have had time in any case – the mark spent no more than a minute inside each building.
Erast Fandorin was scowling darkly – his worst fears had been confirmed: the Ryazan-Uralsk line was part of the great transcontinental line on which the engineer’s red pencil had marked at least a hundred vulnerable sectors. For which one of them were the items handed in at the left luggage office intended?