The strange pursuit of a barge sailing down a river by gendarmes on foot did not last for long.
The return fire from the tug rapidly fell off as the revolutionaries became more and more reluctant to show themselves above the iron sides. The glass in the wheelhouse windows had been smashed by bullets and the helmsman was steering the vessel without sticking his head up, by guesswork. The result was that half a verst from the bridge the tug ran on to a shoal and stopped. The current started slowly swinging the barge round sideways.
‘Cease fire,’ ordered Fandorin. ‘Call on them to surrender.’
‘Lay down your arms, you blockheads!’ the lieutenant shouted from the riverbank. ‘Where can you go? Surrender!’
There really was nowhere for the SRs to go. The sparse, pre-dawn mist swirled above the water, the darkness was dissolving before their very eyes, and gendarmes were lying in ambush on both sides of the river, so they couldn’t even get away one at a time, by swimming.
The survivors huddled together beside the wheelhouse – it looked as if they were conferring.
Then one of them straightened up to his full height.
It was him!
Even at that distance it was impossible not to recognise Staff Captain Rybnikov, alias the Acrobat.
The men on the tug started singing tunelessly, and the Japanese spy took a run-up and vaulted across on to the barge.
‘What’s he up to? What’s he doing?’ the lieutenant asked nervously.
‘Our proud “Varangian” surrenders to no foe, for mercy no one is pleading!’ they sang on the tug.
‘Shoot, shoot!’ Fandorin exclaimed when he saw a small flame flare up like Bengal fire in the Acrobat’s hands. ‘That’s a stick of dynamite!’
But it was too late. The stick went flying into the hold of the barge and the false staff captain grabbed a lifebelt from the side of the tug and leapt into the river.
A second later the barge reared up, snapped in two by several powerful explosions. The front half surged up and covered the tug. Chunks of wood and metal flew into the air and blazing fuel spread across the water.
‘Get down!’ the lieutenant roared desperately, but even without his command the gendarmes were already dropping to the ground, covering their heads with their arms.
The bent barrel of a rifle embedded itself in the ground beside Fandorin. Bryantsev gazed in horror at a hand grenade that had thudded down beside him. It was spinning furiously, with its factory grease glittering.
‘Don’t worry, it won’t go off,’ the engineer told him. ‘It’s got no detonator.’
The officer got up, looking abashed.
‘Is everyone all right?’ he bellowed briskly. ‘Line up for a roll-call. Hey, Sergeant Major!’ he shouted, folding his hands to form a megaphone. ‘How are your men?’
‘One got caught, Yeronner!’ a voice replied from the other bank.
On this side two men had been hurt by pieces of debris, but not seriously.
While the wounded were being bandaged up, the engineer went back to the bridge, where he had spotted a buoy-keeper’s hut earlier.
He rode back to the site of the explosion in a boat. The buoy-keeper was rowing, with Fandorin standing in the bow, watching the chips of wood and blotches of oil that covered the entire surface of the river.
‘May I join you?’ Bryantsev had asked. A minute later, already in the boat, he asked, ‘What are you watching for? The revolutionary gentlemen are on the bottom, that’s clear enough. The divers will come and raise the bodies later. And the cargo – what they can find of it.’
‘Is it deep here?’ the engineer asked, turning to the oarsman.
‘Round here it would be about two sazhens. Maybe three in some spots. In summer, when the sun gets hot, it’ll be shallower, but it’s deep as yet.’
The boat floated slowly downstream. Erast Petrovich gazed fixedly at the water.
‘That one who threw the dynamite was a really desperate fellow. The lifebelt didn’t save him. Look, it’s floating over there.’
Yes, there was the red-and-white ring of cork, swaying on the waves.
‘Right th-then, row over there!’
‘What do you want that for?’ asked the lieutenant, watching as Fandorin reached for the lifebelt.
Once again Erast Petrovich did not condescend to answer the garrulous officer. Instead he murmured:
‘Aha, that’s where you are, my boyo.’
He pulled the ring out of the water, exposing to view a red rubber tube attached to its inside surface.
‘A familiar trick,’ the engineer said with a condescending smile. ‘Only in ancient times they used bamboo, not a rubber cable with the core pulled out.’
‘What’s that enema tube for? And what trick do you mean?’
‘Bottom walking. But now I’ll show you an even more interesting trick. Let’s note the time.’ And Fandorin pinched the tube shut.
One minute went by, then another.
The lieutenant looked at the engineer in increasing bewilderment, but the engineer kept glancing from the water to the second hand of his watch and back.
‘Phenomenal,’ he said with a shake of his head. ‘Even for them…’
Halfway through the third minute a head suddenly appeared out of the water about fifteen sazhens from the boat.
‘Row!’ Fandorin shouted at the boatman. ‘Now we’ll take him! He didn’t stay on the bottom, so we’ll take him!’
And, of course, they did take him – there was nowhere for the cunning Acrobat to escape to. But then, he didn’t try to resist. While the gendarmes bound his arms, he sat there with a detached expression on his face and his eyes closed, dirty water streaming out of his hair and green slime clinging to his shirt.
‘You are a strong player, but you have lost,’ Erast Fandorin told him in Japanese.
The prisoner opened his eyes and studied the engineer for a long time. But it still was not clear if he had understood or not.
Then Fandorin leaned down and uttered a strange word:
‘Tamba.’
‘When your number’s up, it’s up,’ the Acrobat remarked indifferently, and that was the only thing he said.
He maintained his silence in the Krutitsk garrison jail, where he was taken from the place of arrest.
All the top brass came to conduct the interrogation – from the gendarmes, and the military courts, and the Okhrana – but neither by threats nor promises were they able to get a single word out of Rybnikov. After being thoroughly searched and dressed in a coarse prisoner’s jacket and trousers, he sat there motionless. He didn’t look at the generals, only occasionally glanced at Erast Petrovich Fandorin, who took no part in the interrogation and generally stood a little distance away.
After labouring in vain over the stubborn prisoner all day long until the evening, the top brass ordered him to be taken away to a cell.
The cell was a special one, for especially dangerous miscreants. For Rybnikov they had taken additional security measures: the bed and stool had been replaced with a palliasse, the table had been taken out and the kerosene lamp removed.
‘We know these Japanese, we’ve read about them,’ the commandant told Fandorin. ‘He smashes his head open against a sharp corner, and we have to answer for it. Or he’ll pour burning kerosene over himself. He can just sit there with a candle instead.’
‘If a man like that wishes to die, it is not possible to prevent him.’
‘Ah, but it’s very possible. A month ago I had an anarchist, a terrible hard case, he spent two weeks lying swaddled, like a newborn infant. He growled, and rolled around on the floor, and tried to smash his head open against the wall – he didn’t want to die on the gallows. But I still delivered the fellow to the executioner in good order.’
The engineer grimaced in revulsion and remarked:
‘This is no anarchist.’ And he left, with a strangely heavy feeling in his heart.