Panting for breath, the agents surrounded the wooden kiosk. They raised their heads, waved their arms, shouted something – the only sounds that reached the undertaker’s premises were ‘f***! – f***! – f***!’
Mylnikov chortled feverishly.
‘Like a cat on a fence! Got him!’
Suddenly the engineer exclaimed:
‘Shuriken!’
He flung aside his binoculars, darted out into the street and shouted loudly:
‘Look out!’
But too late.
The circus performer on the roof of the kiosk spun round his own axis, waving his hand through the air rapidly – as if he were thanking the agents on all four sides. One by one, Mylnikov’s ‘aces’ tumbled on to the paved surface.
A second later the spy leapt down, as softly as a cat, and dashed along the street towards the gaping mouth of a nearby gateway.
The engineer ran after him. The court counsellor, shocked and stunned for a moment, darted after him.
‘What happened? What happened?’ he shouted.
‘He’ll get away!’ Fandorin groaned.
‘Not if I have anything to do with it!’
Mylnikov pulled a revolver out from under his armpit and opened fire on the fugitive like a real master, on the run. He had good reason to pride himself on his accuracy, he usually felled a moving figure at fifty paces with the first bullet, but this time he emptied the entire cylinder and failed to hit the target. The damned Japanese was running oddly, with sidelong jumps and zigzags – how can you pop a target like that?
‘The bastard!’ gasped Mylnikov, clicking the hammer of his revolver against an empty cartridge case. ‘Why aren’t you firing?’
‘There’s no p-point.’
The shooting brought the gendarmes tearing out of the station after breaking their cover for the ambush. The public started to panic, there was shouting and jostling, and waving of umbrellas. Local police constables’ whistles could be heard trilling from various directions. But meanwhile the fugitive had already disappeared into the gateway.
‘Along the side street, the side street!’ Fandorin told the gendarmes, pointing. ‘To the left!’
The light-blue uniforms rushed off round the building. Mylnikov swore furiously as he clambered up the fire escape ladder, but Erast Petrovich stopped and shook his head hopelessly.
He took no further part in the search after that. He looked at the gendarmes and police agents bustling about, listened to Mylnikov’s howls from up above his head and set off back towards the square.
A crowd of curious gawkers was jostling around the kiosk, and he caught glimpses of a policeman’s white peaked cap.
As he walked up, the engineer heard a trembling, senile voice declaiming:
‘So is it said in prophecy: and iron stars shall rain down from the heavens and strike down the sinners…’
Fandorin spoke sombrely to the policeman:
‘Clear the public away.’
Even though Fandorin was in civilian garb, the policeman realised from his tone of voice that this man had the right to command, and he immediately blew on his whistle.
To menacing shouts of ‘Move aside! Where do you think you’re shoving?’ Fandorin walked round the site of the slaughter.
All four agents were dead. They were lying in identical poses, on their backs. Each had an iron star with sharp, glittering points protruding from his forehead, where it had pierced deep into the bone.
‘Lord Almighty!’ exclaimed Mylnikov, crossing himself as he walked up.
Squatting down with a sob, he was about to pull a metal star out of a dead head.
‘Don’t touch it! The edges are smeared with p-poison!’
Mylnikov jerked his hand away.
‘What devil’s work is this?’
‘That is a shuriken, also known as a syarinken. A throwing weapon of the “Furtive Ones”, a sect of hereditary sp-spies that exists in Japan.’
‘Hereditary?’ The court counsellor started blinking very rapidly. ‘Is that like our Rykalov from the detective section? His great-grandfather served in the Secret Chancellery, back in Catherine the Great’s time.’
‘Something of the kind. So that’s why he jumped on to the kiosk…’
Fandorin’s last remark was addressed to himself, but Mylnikov jerked his head up and asked:
‘Why?’
‘To throw at standing targets. You and your “cat on a fence”. Well, you’ve made a fine mess of things, Mylnikov.’
‘Never mind the mess,’ said Mylnikov, with tears coursing down his cheeks. ‘If I made it, I’ll answer for it, it won’t be the first time. Zyablikov, Raspashnoi, Kasatkin, Möbius…’
A carriage came flying furiously into the square from the direction of Bolshaya Tartarskaya Street and a pale man with no hat tumbled out of it and shouted from a distance:
‘Evstratpalich! Disaster! Thrush has got away! He’s disappeared!’
‘But what about our plant?’
‘They found him with a knife in his side!’
The court counsellor launched into a torrent of obscenity so wild that someone in the crowd remarked respectfully:
‘He’s certainly making himself clear.’
But the engineer set off at a brisk stride towards the station.
‘Where are you going?’ shouted Mylnikov.
‘To the left luggage office. They won’t come for the melinite now.’
But Fandorin was mistaken.
The clerk was standing there, shifting from one foot to the other in front of the open door.
‘Well, did you catch the two boyos?’ he asked when he caught sight of Fandorin.
‘Which b-boyos?’
‘You know! The two who collected the baggage. I pressed on the button, like you told me to. Then I glanced into the gendarme gentlemen’s room. But when I looked, it was empty.’
The engineer groaned as if afflicted with a sudden, sharp pain.
‘How l-long ago?’
‘The first one came exactly at five. The second was seven or eight minutes later.’
Fandorin’s Breguet showed 5.29.
The court counsellor started swearing again, only not menacingly this time, but plaintively, in a minor key.
‘That was while we were creeping round the courtyards and basements,’ he wailed.
Fandorin summed up the situation in a funereal voice:
‘A worse debacle than Tsushima.’
The second syllable, entirely about railways
The interdepartmental conflict took place there and then, in the corridor. In his fury, Fandorin abandoned his usual restraint and told Mylnikov exactly what he thought about the Special Section, which was fine for spawning informers and agents provocateurs, but proved to be absolutely useless when it came to real work and caused nothing but problems.
‘You gendarmes are a fine lot too,’ snarled Mylnikov. ‘Why did your smart alecs abandon the ambush without any order? They let the bombers get away with the melinite. Now where do we look for them?’
Fandorin fell silent, stung either by the justice of the rebuke or that form of address – ‘you gendarmes’.
‘Our collaboration hasn’t worked out,’ said the man from the Department of Police, sighing. ‘Now you’ll make a complaint to your bosses about me, and I’ll make one to mine about you. Only none of that bumph is going to put things right. A bad peace is better than a good quarrel. Let’s do it this way: you look after your railway and I’ll catch Comrade Thrush. The way we’re supposed to do things according to our official responsibilities. That’ll be safer.’
Hunting for the revolutionaries who had established contact with Japanese intelligence obviously seemed far more promising to Mylnikov than pursuing unknown saboteurs who could be anywhere along an eight-thousand-verst railway line.
But Fandorin was so sick of the court counsellor that he replied contemptuously:
‘Excellent. Only keep well out of my sight.’