Mylnikov entered the dark hallway first, holding at the ready a most convenient little doodad – a rubber club with a lead core. The Jappo had to be taken alive, so Fandorin wouldn’t cut up nasty afterwards.
After he clicked a little button on his secret torch, Evstratii Pavlovich picked out three white doors with the beam: one straight ahead, one on the left, one on the right.
He pointed with his finger: you go straight on, you go this way, you go that way, only shshhhh.
He stayed in the hallway with Lepinsh and Sapliukin, ready to dash through the door from behind which they heard the agreed signaclass="underline" the squeaking of a mouse.
They stood there, huddled up in their tension, waiting.
A minute went by, then two, and three, and five.
Vague nocturnal rustlings came from the apartment; somewhere behind the wall a gramophone was wailing. A clock started striking midnight – so loudly and suddenly that Mylnikov’s heart almost jumped out of his chest.
What were they mucking about at in there? It only took a moment, just glance in and turn your head this way and that. Had they just disappeared into thin air, or what?
The court counsellor suddenly realised that he wasn’t feeling the thrill of the hunt any longer. And his passionate eagerness had evaporated without a trace – in fact, he felt repulsive, chilly shudders running down his spine. ‘Those damn nerves. I’ll just nab this Jappo, and then I’ll go on the mineral water treatment,’ Evstratii Pavlovich promised himself.
He gestured to his agents to stay put and cautiously stuck his nose inside the door on the left.
It was absolutely quiet in there. And empty, as Mylnikov soon convinced himself by shining his torch about. So there had to be a way through into the next room.
Stepping soundlessly across the parquet, he walked out into the middle of the floor.
What the devil! A table, chairs. A window. A mirror on the wall facing the window. There wasn’t any other door. And agent Mandrykin wasn’t there.
He tried to cross himself, but the club grasped in his hand got in the way.
Feeling the cold sweat breaking out on his forehead, Evstratii Pavlovich went back to the hallway.
‘Well?’ Sapliukin asked with just his lips
The court counsellor just gestured irritably at him. He glanced into the room on the right.
It was exactly like the one on the left – the furniture, the mirror and the window.
Not a soul, empty!
Mylnikov went down on his hands and knees and shone his torch under the table, although it was impossible to imagine that an agent could have decided to play hide-and-seek.
Evstratii Pavlovich tumbled back into the hallway, muttering: ‘Oh, our Lord, and the Blessed Virgin.’
He pushed the agents aside and rushed through the door leading straight ahead – clutching his revolver this time, not his club.
It was the bedroom. A washbasin in the corner, with a bath, a toilet bowl and some other white porcelain contraption screwed to the floor behind a curtain.
No one! The chipped moon squinted in derisively at Mylnikov through the window.
He menaced it with his revolver and started flinging open the cupboard doors with a crash. He glanced under the bed, even under the bath.
The Japanese had disappeared. And he had taken with him three of Mylnikov’s best agents.
Evstratii Pavlovich felt afraid that he might have lost his reason. He shouted hysterically:
‘Sapliukin! Lepinsh!’
When the agents failed to reply, he dashed back to the hallway.
Only there was no one there any longer.
‘Oh, Lord Jesus!’ the court counsellor wailed beseechingly, dropping his revolver and crossing himself with broad gestures. ‘Dispel the sorcery of the Japanese devil!’
When the thrice-repeated sign of the cross failed to help, Evstratii Pavlovich finally realised that the Japanese God was stronger than the Russian one and fell to his knees before His Squintyness.
He rested his forehead on the floor and crawled towards the door, howling loudly: ‘Banzai, banzai, banzai.’
The final syllable, the longest one of all
How could he have failed to recognise her straight away? Well, yes, certainly, he was tired, he was tormented by boredom, waiting impatiently for when he could leave. And, of course, she looked quite different: that first time, at dawn near the sabotaged bridge, she was pale and exhausted, in a dress that was muddy and soaking wet, and this time she glowed with a delicate, well-groomed beauty, and the veil had blurred the features of her face. But even so, some sleuth he was!
Then, when she approached him herself and mentioned the bridge, it was like being struck by lightning. Erast Petrovich had recognised her and remembered her testimony, which had led to his fatal, shameful error, and – most importantly – he had remembered her companion.
At the Moscow Freight Station, when he looked through his binoculars and saw the man who had received the melinite, Fandorin realised immediately that he had seen him somewhere before but, confused by those Japanese facial features, he had taken a wrong turning, imagining that the spy resembled one of his old acquaintances from his time in Japan. But it was all much simpler than that! He had seen this man, dressed in a staff captain’s uniform, at the site of the catastrophe.
Now everything had fallen into place.
The special had been blown up by the Acrobat, as Mylnikov had so aptly christened him. The Japanese saboteur was travelling in the express train, accompanied by his female accomplice -this Lidina woman. How cunningly she had sent the gendarmes off on a false trail!
And now the enemy had decided to strike a blow at the person who was hunting him. One of the favourite tricks of the sect of stealthy ones, it was called ‘The rabbit eats the tiger’. Well, not to worry, there was also a Russian saying: ‘The mouse hunts the cat’.
Glyceria Romanovna’s invitation to go to her apartment had not taken the engineer by surprise – he was prepared for something of the sort. But even so, he tensed up inside when he asked himself whether he could cope with such a dangerous opponent on his own.
‘If I don’t cope, that’s my karma, let them fight on without me,’ Erast Petrovich thought philosophically – and he went.
But at the house on Ostozhenka Street he behaved with extreme caution. Karma was all very well, but he had no intention of playing giveaway chess.
That only made the disappointment all the greater when he realised that the Acrobat was not in the apartment. Fandorin didn’t beat about the bush after that. The dubious lady’s part in everything had to be clarified there and then, without delay.
She was not an agent, he realised that straight away. If she was an accomplice, she was an unwitting one and had not been initiated into any secrets. True, she knew where to find the Acrobat, but she would never tell Fandorin, because she was head over heels in love. He couldn’t subject her to torture, could he?
At this point Erast Petrovich’s eye fell on the telephone apparatus, and the whole idea came to him in an instant. A spy of this calibre had to have a telephone number for emergency contacts.
After frightening Lidina as badly as he could, Fandorin ran down the stairs, out into the street, took a cab and ordered the driver to race as fast as he could to the Central Telephone Exchange.
Lisitsky had set himself up very comfortably in his new place of work. The young ladies on the switchboards had already given him lots of embroidered doilies and he had a bowl of home-made biscuits, jam and a small teapot standing on the desk. The dashing staff captain seemed to be popular here.
On seeing Fandorin, he jumped up, pulled off his earphones and exclaimed enthusiastically:
‘Erast Petrovich, you are a true genius! This is the second day I’ve been sitting here and I never weary of repeating it! Your name should be incised in gold letters on the tablets of police history. You cannot imagine how many curious and savoury facts I have learned in these two days!’