Erast Petrovich did not ask the person on the phone a single question, he simply said:
‘Very well, Leontii Karlovich, I’ll be there straight away.’
Once he was dressed, he stopped for a moment in front of the mirror. He combed his black hair threaded with grey (the kind they call ‘salt-and-pepper’), ran a special little brush over his entirely white temples and his neat moustache, in which there was still not a single silver hair. He frowned after running his hand across his cheek, but there was no time to shave.
He walked out of the apartment.
The Japanese was already sitting in the automobile, holding a travelling bag in his hand.
The most valuable quality of Fandorin’s valet was not that he did everything quickly and precisely, but that he knew how to manage without unnecessary talk. From the choice of footwear, Masa had guessed there was a long journey in prospect, so he had equipped himself accordingly.
With its mighty twenty-horsepower engine roaring, the twin-cylinder Oldsmobile surged down Sadovaya Street, where Fandorin was lodging, and a minute later it was already gliding across the Chernyshevsky Bridge. A feeble drizzle was trickling down from the grey, unconvincing night sky, and glinting on the road. The remarkable ‘Hercules’ brand non-splash tyres glided over the black asphalt.
Two minutes later the automobile braked to a halt at house number 7 on Kolomenskaya Street, where the offices of the St Petersburg Railway Gendarmerie and Police were located.
Fandorin set off up the steps at a run, with a nod to the sentry, who saluted him. But his valet remained sitting in the Oldsmobile, and even demonstratively turned his back.
From the very beginning of the armed conflict between the two empires, Masa – who was Japanese by birth, but a Russian citizen according to his passport – had declared that he would remain neutral, and he had stuck scrupulously to this rule. He had not delighted in the heroic feats of the defenders of Port Arthur, nor had he rejoiced at the victories of Japanese armies. But most importantly of all, as a matter of principle, he had not stepped across the threshold of any military institutions, which at times had caused both him and his master considerable inconvenience.
The valet’s moral sufferings were exacerbated still further by the fact that, following several arrests on suspicion of espionage, he had been obliged to disguise his nationality. Fandorin had procured a temporary passport for his servant in the name of a Chinese gentleman, so that now, whenever Masa left the house, he was obliged to put on a wig with a long pigtail. According to the document, he bore the impossible name of ‘Lianchan Shankhoevich Chaiunevin’. As a consequence of all these ordeals, the valet had lost his appetite and grown lean, and had even given up breaking the hearts of housemaids and seamstresses, with whom he had enjoyed vertiginous success during the pre-war period.
These were hard times, not only for the false Lianchan Shankhoevich, but also for his master.
When Japanese destroyers attacked the Port Arthur squadron without warning, Fandorin was on the other side of the world, in the Dutch West Indies, where he was conducting absolutely fascinating research in the area of underwater navigation.
At first Erast Fandorin had wanted nothing to do with a war between two countries that were both close to his heart, but as the advantage swung more and more towards Japan, Fandorin gradually lost interest in the durability of aluminium, and even in the search for the galleon San Felipe, which had gone down with its load of gold in the year ad 1708 seven miles south-south-east of the island of Aruba. On the very day when Fandorin’s submarine finally scraped its aluminium belly across the stump of the Spanish mainmast protruding from the sea bottom, news came of the loss of the battleship Petropavlosk, together with Commander-in-Chief Admiral Makarov and the entire crew.
The next morning Fandorin set out for his homeland, leaving his associates to deal with raising the gold bars to the surface.
On arriving in St Petersburg, he contacted an old colleague from his time in the Third Section, who now occupied a highly responsible post, and offered his services: Erast Petrovich knew that Russia had catastrophically few specialists on Japan, and he had spent several years living in the Land of the Rising Sun.
The old acquaintance was quite delighted by Fandorin’s visit. He said, however, that he would like to make use of Erast Petrovich in a different capacity.
‘Of course, there aren’t enough experts on Japan, or on many other subjects,’ said the general, blinking rapidly with eyes red from lack of sleep, ‘but there is a far worse rent in our garments, which leaves us exposed, pardon me for saying so, at the most intimate spot. If you only knew, my dear fellow, what a calamitous state our counter-espionage system is in! Things have more or less come together in the army in the field, but in the rear, the confusion is appalling, monstrous. Japanese agents are everywhere, they act with brazen impudence and resourcefulness, and we don’t know how to catch them. We have no experience. We’re used to civilised spies, the European kind, who do their work under cover of an embassy or foreign companies. But the Orientals break all the rules. I’ll tell you what worries me most,’ said the important man, lowering his voice. ‘Our railways. When the war’s happening tens of thousands of versts away from the factories and the conscription centres, victory and defeat depend on the railways, the primary circulatory system of the organism of the state. The entire empire has just one artery from Peter to Arthur. Atrophied, with a feeble pulse, prone to thrombosis and – worst of all – almost completely unprotected. Erast Petrovich, dear fellow, there are two things that I dread in this situation: Japanese sabotage and Russian slovenliness. You have more than enough experience of intelligence work, thank God. And then, they told me that in America you qualified as an engineer. Why not get back in harness, eh? On any terms you like. If you want, we’ll reinstate you in government service; if you want, you can be a freelance, a hired gun. Help us out, will you, put your shoulder to the wheel.’
And so Fandorin found himself engaged at the capital’s Department of Railway Gendarmerie and Police in the capacity of a ‘hired gun’ – that is, a consultant receiving no salary, but endowed with extremely far-reaching powers. The goal set for the consultant was as follows: to develop a security system for the railways, test it in the zone under his jurisdiction and then pass it on to be used by all the Railway Gendarmerie departments of the empire.
It was hectic work, not very much like Erast Fandorin’s preceding activities, but fascinating in its own way. The Department’s jurisdiction extended to two thousand versts of railway lines, hundreds of stations and terminuses, bridges, railway line reservations, depots and workshops – and all this had to be protected against possible attack by the enemy. While the provincial department of gendarmes had several dozen employees, the railway department had more than a thousand. The scale and the responsibility were beyond all comparison. In addition, the duty regulations for the railways’ gendarmes exempted them from performing the functions of a political police, and for Fandorin that was very important: he was not fond of revolutionaries, but he regarded with even greater revulsion the methods by which the Okhrana and the Special Section of the Department of Police endeavoured to eradicate the nihilist contagion. In this sense, Erast Petrovich regarded working for the Railway Gendarmerie Department as ‘clean work’.
Fandorin did not know much about railways, but he could not be classed as a total dilettante. He was, after all, a qualified engineer in the area of self-propelled machines, and twenty years earlier, while investigating a rather complicated case, he had worked on a railway line for a while in the guise of a trainee.