The Lieutenant Colonel laughed, apparently very pleased at having shown himself in a positive light and also having paid his future superior a smart compliment.
Fandorin, however, followed his usual habit and suddenly started talking about something else: ‘Ivan Petrovich, are you familiar with a certain lady by the name of Diana?'
Burlyaev stopped laughing and his face turned to stone, shedding some of its usual expression of coarse, soldierly forth-rightness - his glance was suddenly sharp and cautious.
'May I enquire, Mr State Counsellor, why you are interested in that lady?'
'You may,' Fandorin replied dispassionately. 'I am seeking the source from which information about our plan reached the t-terrorists. So far I have managed to establish that outside the Police Department the details were known only to you, Mylnikov, Zubtsov, Sverchinsky and his adjutant. Colonel Sverchinsky thinks it possible that the collaborator with the c-conspiratorial alias of Diana could have been informed of the security measures. You are acquainted with her, are you not?'
Burlyaev replied with sudden rancour: 'I am. She's a splendid collaborator, no doubt about it, but Sverchinsky's hints are misplaced. A clear case of the pot calling the kettle black! If anyone could have let something slip to her, then it's him. She can twist him round her little finger!'
'What, you mean Stanislav Filippovich is her lover?' the State Counsellor asked in astonishment, barely managing to swallow the words 'as well'.
"The devil only knows,' the Lieutenant Colonel growled in the same furious tone. 'It's very possible!'
The bewildered State Counsellor took a moment to gather his thoughts. 'And is she so very attractive, this Diana?'
'I really don't know! I've never seen her face.'
Pyotr Ivanovich emphasised the final word, which lent the entire phrase a distinct air of ambiguity. The Lieutenant Colonel evidently felt this himself, because he found it necessary to explain: 'You see, Diana doesn't show her face to any of our people. All the meetings take place at the secret apartment, in semi-darkness, and she wears a veil as well.'
'But that's quite unheard of!'
'She plays the romantic heroine,' Burlyaev said with a scowl. 'I'm sure Sverchinsky hasn't seen her face either. The other parts of her body - very probably; but our Diana conceals her face like a Turkish odalisque. That was a strict condition of her collaboration. She threatens to stop providing us with any help if there is even the slightest attempt to discover her real identity. There was a special instruction from the Police Department not to make any such attempts. Let her play the mysterious heroine, they said, just as long as she provides information.'
Erast Petrovich mentally compared the manner in which Burlyaev and Sverchinsky spoke about the mysterious collaborator and discovered distinct elements of similarity in the words and intonations of the two staff officers. Apparently the rivalry between the Office and the Department was not limited to the field of police work.
'I'll tell you what, Pyotr Ivanovich,' Fandorin said with a perfectly serious expression: 'you have intrigued me with this mysterious Diana of yours. Contact her and say I wish to see her immediately.'
CHAPTER 2
The man of steel rests
Seven hundred and eighty-two, seven hundred and eighty-three, seven hundred and eighty-four ...
The lean, muscular man with the stony face, calm grey eyes and resolute vertical crease in the centre of his forehead lay on the parquet floor, counting the beats of his own heart. The count proceeded automatically, without involving his thoughts or hindering them in any way. When the man was lying down, each heartbeat was precisely one second - that had been verified many times. The old habit, acquired during imprisonment at hard labour, of listening to the workings of his internal motor while he rested had become such an integral part of the man's very existence that sometimes he would wake in the middle of the night with a four-figure number in his mind and realise that he hadn't stopped counting even in his sleep.
There was a point to this arithmetic: it trained and disciplined his heart, heightened his endurance, strengthened his will and -most importantly - allowed him to relax his muscles and restore his strength in the space of only fifteen minutes (nine hundred heartbeats) just as well as he could have done in three hours of sound sleep. Once the man had had to go without sleep for a long time, when the common convicts in the Akatuisk penal prison had decided to kill him. Too afraid to come near him during the day, they had waited for darkness to come, and the same scene had been played out over and over again for many nights in a row.
The practice of lying on a hard surface had remained with him since the days of his early youth, when Green (that was what his comrades called him - no one knew his real name) had worked hard to develop his self-discipline and wean himself of everything that he regarded as 'luxury', including in this category any habits that were harmful or simply unnecessary for survival.
He could hear muted voices behind the closed door: the members of the Combat Group were excitedly discussing the details of the successful operation. Sometimes Bullfinch got carried away and raised his voice, and then the other two hissed at him. They thought Green was asleep. But he wasn't sleeping. He was resting, counting the beats of his heart and thinking about the old man who had grabbed hold of his wrist just before he died. He could still feel the touch of those dry, hot fingers on his skin. It prevented him from feeling any satisfaction in the neat execution of the operation - and the grey-eyed man had no other pleasures apart from the feeling of duty fulfilled.
Green knew the English meaning of his alias, but he experienced his own colour differently. Everything in the world had a colour, every object and concept, every person - that was something Green had felt since he was a little child; it was one of the special things about him. For instance, the word 'earth' was a clay-brown colour, the word 'apple' was bright pink even for a green winter apple, 'empire' was maroon, 'father' was a dense purple and 'mother' was crimson. Even the letters of the alphabet had their own coloration: 'A' was scarlet, 'B' was bright lemon-yellow, 'C was pale yellow. Green made no attempt to analyse why for him the sound and meaning of a thing, a phenomenon or a person had these particular colours and no others - he simply took note of this information, and the information rarely misled him. The fact was that every colour also had its own secret meaning on a scale that was an integral, fundamental element of Green's soul. Blue was doubt and unreliability, white was joy, red was sadness, and that made the Russian flag a strange combination: it had joy and sadness, both of them strangely equivocal. If the glow given off by a new acquaintance was blue, Green didn't exacdy regard him with overt mistrust, but he watched a person like that closely and assessed him with particular caution. And there was another thing: people were the only items in the whole of existence capable of changing their colour over time - as a result of their own actions, the company they kept and their age.