The Diamond Chariot Read online

  THE DIAMOND CHARIOT

  The Further Adventures

  of Erast Fandorin

  BORIS AKUNIN

  Translated by Andrew Bromfield

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dragonfly-Catcher

  KAMI-NO-KU

  The first syllable, which has a certain connection with the East

  The second syllable, in which two earthly vales terminate abruptly

  The third syllable, in which Vasilii Alexandrovich visits the WC

  The fourth syllable, in which a hired gun sets out on the hunt

  The fifth syllable, which features an interesting passenger

  NAKA-NO-KU

  The first syllable, in which Vasilii Alexandrovich takes leave

  The second syllable, in which Masa violates his neutrality

  The third syllable, in which Rybnikov gets into a jam

  The fourth syllable, in which Fandorin feels afraid

  The fifth syllable, consisting almost completely of face-to-face conversations

  The sixth syllable, in which a tail and ears play an important part

  The seventh syllable, in which it emerges that not all Russians love Pushkin

  SHIMO-NO-KU

  The first syllable, in which iron stars rain down from the sky

  The second syllable, entirely about railways

  The third syllable, in which Rybnikov gives free rein to his passion

  The fourth syllable, in which the name of the Japanese God is taken in vain

  The final syllable, the longest one of all

  Between the Lines

  A butterfly’s flight

  The old kuruma

  A hero’s eyes

  The blue die does not like Badger

  The blue die loves the gaijin

  The flag of a great power

  A cobbled street running down a hill

  A perfectly healthy corpse

  Sparks of light on a katana blade

  The ermine’s glassy stare

  The silver slipper

  The first ray of sunlight

  A mamusi’s heart

  Snow at the New Year

  A white horse in a lather

  The final smile

  Early plum rain

  Sirius

  Horse dung

  A tiger on the loose

  The scent of irises

  Love’s call

  The garden gate

  The science of jojutsu

  A one-handed clap

  A spray of acacia

  A little piece of happiness

  2.18

  The scales fall from his eyes

  A word once given must be kept

  An autumn leaf

  Insane happiness

  Ticklish

  Off with his head

  The photograph of his wife

  Dong, dong

  A headache

  A quiet voice

  A dragonfly’s rainbow wings

  A blue star

  A briar pipe

  Two hands tightly clasped

  A dead tree

  The glowing coals

  The death of an enemy

  The love of two moles

  The nocturnal melding of the world

  Spilled sake

  A big fire

  He didn’t answer

  A postman

  The real akunin

  Thus spake Tamba

  PS

  Also by Boris Akunin

  Copyright

  THE DIAMOND CHARIOT

  In Two Books

  Book 1: Dragonfly-Catcher

  Book 2: Between the Lines

  BOOK 1

  DRAGONFLY-CATCHER

  Russia, 1905

  KAMI-NO-KU

  The first syllable, which has a certain connection with the East

  On the very day when the appalling rout and destruction of the Russian fleet near the island of Tsushima was approaching its end and the first vague and alarming rumours of this bloody Japanese triumph were sweeping across Europe – on that very day, Staff Captain Vasilii Alexandrovich Rybnikov, who lived on a small street with no name in the St Petersburg district of Peski, received the following telegram from Irkutsk: ‘Dispatch sheets immediately watch over patient pay expenses’.

  Thereupon Staff Captain Rybnikov informed the landlady of his apartment that business would take him to St Petersburg for a day or two and she should not, therefore, be alarmed by his absence. Then he dressed, left the house and never went back there again.

  Initially Vasilii Alexandrovich’s day proceeded entirely as usual – that is, in a bustle of ceaseless activity. After first riding to the centre of the city in a horse cab, he continued his peregrinations exclusively on foot and, despite his limp (the staff captain dragged one foot quite noticeably), he managed to visit an incredible number of places.

  He started with the Major General Commandant’s Office, where he sought out a clerk from the transport accounts section and returned with a solemn air one rouble, borrowed from the clerk two days previously. Then he called into the Cossack Forces Directorate on Simeonovskaya Square, to enquire about a petition he had submitted two months ago, which had got bogged down in red tape. From there he moved on to the Military Department of Railways – he had been trying for a long time to obtain a position as an archivist in the drafting office there. On that day his small, fidgety figure was also seen in the Office of the Inspector General of Artillery on Zakharievskaya Street, and the Office of Repairs on Morskaya Street, and even at the Committee for the Wounded on Kirochnaya Street (Rybnikov had been attempting without any success to obtain an official note concerning a concussion suffered at Luoyang).

  The agile army man managed to show his face everywhere. Clerks in offices nodded offhandedly to their old acquaintance and quickly turned away, immersing themselves, with an emphatically preoccupied air, in their documents and conversations about work. They knew from experience that once the staff captain latched on to someone, he could worry the life out of them.

  Vasilii Alexandrovich turned his short-cropped head this way and that for a while, sniffing with his plum-shaped nose as he selected his victim. Having chosen, he seated himself unceremoniously right there on the victim’s desk and started swaying one foot in a shabby boot, waving his arms around and spouting all sorts of drivel: about the imminent victory over the Japanese macaques, his own heroic war exploits, the high cost of living in the capital. They couldn’t just tell him to go to hell – after all, he was an officer, and he’d been wounded at Mukden. They poured Rybnikov tea, regaled him with papiroses, answered his gormless questions and dispatched him with all possible haste to some other section, where the whole business was repeated all over again.

  Between two and three o’clock in the afternoon, the staff captain, who had called into the office of the St Petersburg Arsenal on a procurement matter, suddenly glanced at his wristwatch with the mirror-bright glass (everyone had heard the story of this chronometer at least a thousand times – it had supposedly been presented to him by a captured Japanese marquis) and became terribly agitated. Blinking his yellowish-brown eyes at the two shipping clerks, who by now were completely exhausted by his gabbling, he told them:

  ‘Well, that was a great chat. I’m sorry, but I have to leave you now. Entre nous, an assignation with a lovely lady. The fever-heat of passion and all that. As the Jappos say, strike while the iron’s hot.’

  He gave a brief snort of laughter and took his leave.

  ‘What a character,’ said the first shipping clerk, a young warrant officer. ‘But even he’s managed to find himself some woman or other.’

  ‘He’s lying, just talking big,’ the
second clerk said reassuringly – he held the same rank, but was much older. ‘Who could ever be seduced by an old Marlborough like that?’

  The worldly-wise shipping clerk was right. In the apartment on Nadezhdinskaya Square, to which Rybnikov made his way via a long, roundabout route through connecting courtyards, the staff captain was not met by a lovely lady, but a young man in a speckled jacket.

  ‘What on earth took you so long?’ the young man exclaimed nervously when he opened the door at the prearranged knock (twice, then three times, then a pause and twice again). ‘You’re Rybnikov, right? I’ve been waiting forty minutes for you!’

  ‘I had to weave around a bit. Thought I saw something …’ replied Vasilii Alexandrovich, sauntering round the tiny apartment and even looking into the toilet and outside the back door. ‘Did you bring it? Let me have it.’

  ‘Here, from Paris. You know, I was ordered not to come straight to Petersburg, but go via Moscow, so that …’

  ‘I know,’ the staff captain interrupted before he could finish, taking the two envelopes – one quite thick, the other very slim.

  ‘Crossing the border was really easy, incredibly easy, in fact. They didn’t even glance at my suitcase, never mind tap it for secret compartments. But the reception I got in Moscow was strange. That Thrush person wasn’t exactly polite,’ declared the speckled young man, who obviously wanted very much to have a chat. ‘After all, I am risking my own head, and I have a right to expect …’

  ‘Goodbye,’ Vasilii Alexandrovich interrupted him again after examining both envelopes and even feeling along their seams with his fingers. ‘Don’t leave straight after me. Stay here for at least an hour, then you can go.’

  Stepping out of the entrance, the staff captain turned his head left and right, lit up a papirosa and set off along the street with his usual gait – jerky, yet surprisingly brisk. An electric tram went rattling past. Rybnikov suddenly stepped off the pavement into the road, broke into a run and leapt nimbly up on to the platform.

  ‘Now then, sir,’ the conductor said with a reproachful shake of his head. ‘Only the young shavers do that sort of thing. What if you’d come a cropper there? With that gammy leg of yours.’

  ‘Never mind,’ Rybnikov replied brightly. ‘What’s that the Russian soldiers say? A chestful of medals or your head in the bushes. And if I get killed, that’s all right. I’m an orphan, there’s no one to cry over me … No thanks, friend, I just hopped on for a minute,’ he continued, waving aside the ticket, and a minute later he jumped down on to the road in the same boyish fashion.

  He dodged a horse cab, darted in front of the radiator of an automobile that started bellowing hysterically with its horn, and limped nimbly into a side street.

  It was completely deserted there – no carriages, no pedestrians. The staff captain opened both envelopes. He glanced briefly into the thick one, saw the respectful form of address and regular rows of neatly inscribed hieroglyphs and put off reading it all until later – he slipped it into his pocket. But the second letter, written in a hasty cursive hand, engrossed Rybnikov’s attention completely.

  The letter said this:

  My dear son! I am pleased with you, but now the time has come to strike a decisive blow – this time not at the Russian rear line, and not even at the Russian army, but at Russia itself. Our forces have accomplished all that they can, but they are bled dry and the might of our industry is waning. Alas, Time is not on our side. Your task is to ensure that Time will no longer be an ally of the Russians. The tsar’s throne must be made to totter beneath him. Our friend Colonel A. has completed his preparatory work. Your task is to deliver the shipment, which he has dispatched to Moscow, to the consignee, whom you already know. Tell him to hurry. We cannot hold out for longer than three or four months.

  One more thing. We badly need an act of sabotage on the main railway line. Any interruption in supplies to Linevich’s army will help stave off imminent disaster. You wrote that you had been thinking about this and you had some ideas. Put them into action, the time has come.

  I know that what I ask of you is almost impossible. But were you not taught: ‘The almost impossible is possible’?

  Your mother asked me to tell you she is praying for you.

  After he had read the letter, Rybnikov’s high-cheekboned face betrayed no sign of emotion. He struck a match, lit the sheet of paper and the envelope, dropped them on the ground and pulverised the ashes with his heel. He walked on.

  The second missive was from Colonel Akashi, a military agent in Europe, and consisted almost entirely of numbers and dates. The staff captain ran his eyes over it and didn’t bother to read it again – Vasilii Alexandrovich had an exceptionally good memory.

  He lit another match and, while the paper was burning, glanced at his watch, lifting it almost right up to his nose.

  There was an unpleasant surprise waiting for Rybnikov. The mirror-bright glass of the Japanese chronometer reflected the image of a man in a bowler hat with a walking cane. This gentleman was squatting down, inspecting something on the pavement, at the very spot where one minute earlier the staff captain had burned the letter from his father.

  The letter didn’t matter at all, it had been completely incinerated. What alarmed Vasilii Alexandrovich was something else. This wasn’t the first time he had glanced into his cunning little piece of glass, and he hadn’t seen anyone behind him before. Where had the man in the bowler hat come from? That was what concerned him.

  Rybnikov walked on as if nothing had happened, glancing at his watch more frequently than before. However, once again there was no one behind him. The staff captain’s black eyebrows arched up uneasily. The curious gentleman’s disappearance concerned him even more than his sudden appearance.

  Yawning, Rybnikov turned into a gated passage that led him into a deserted stone courtyard. He cast a glance at the windows (they were dead, untenanted) and then suddenly, no longer limping, he ran across to the wall separating this yard from the next one. The barrier was immensely high, but Vasilii Alexandrovich demonstrated quite fantastic springiness – vaulting almost seven feet into the air, he grabbed hold of the edge and pulled himself up. He could have jumped across the wall with no effort, but the staff captain contented himself with glancing over the top.

  The next yard was residential. A skinny little girl was hopping over chalk marks scrawled across the asphalt. Another, even smaller, was standing nearby, watching.

  Rybnikov did not climb over. He jumped down, ran back to the passage, unbuttoned his fly and started urinating.

  He was surprised in this intimate act by the man with the bowler hat and cane, who came jogging into the passage.

  The man stopped dead, frozen to the spot.

  Vasilii Alexandrovich was embarrassed.

  ‘Beg your pardon, I was desperate,’ he said, shaking himself off and gesticulating at the same time with his free hand. ‘It’s all our swinish Russian ignorance, not enough public latrines. They say there are toilets on every corner in Japan. That’s why we can’t beat the damn monkeys.’

  The expression on the hasty gentleman’s face was wary but, seeing the staff captain smile, he also extended his lips slightly beneath his thick moustache.

  ‘Take your samurai now, how does he fight?’ said Rybnikov, continuing with his buffoonery, buttoning up his trousers and moving closer. ‘Our soldier boys will fill the trench right up to the top with shit, but your samurai, that slanty-eyed freak, he stuffs himself full of rice, so he’s got natural constipation. That way he can go a week without a crap. But then, when he’s posted back to the rear, he’s stuck on the crapper for two whole days.’

  Delighted at his own wittiness, the staff captain broke into shrill laughter and, as if he was inviting the other man to share his merriment, prodded him lightly in the side with one finger.

  The man with the moustache didn’t laugh; instead he gave a strange kind of hiccup, clutched the left side of his chest and sat down on the ground.


  ‘Oh, mother,’ he said in a surprisingly thin little voice. And then again, quietly, ‘Oh, mother …’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Rybnikov asked in sudden alarm, looking around. ‘Heart spasm, is it? Oi-oi, that’s really terrible! I’ll be straight back. With a doctor! In just a jiffy!’

  He ran out into the side street but, once there, decided not to hurry after all.

  The staff captain’s face assumed an intent expression. He swayed to and fro on his heels, thinking something through or trying to reach a decision, and turned back towards Nadezhdinskaya Street.

  The second syllable, in which two earthly vales terminate abruptly

  Evstratii Pavlovich Mylnikov, head of the surveillance service at the Department of Police, sketched a hammer and sickle inside a roundel, drew a bee on each side of it, a peaked cap above and a Latin motto below, on a ribbon: ‘Zeal and Service’. He tilted his balding head sideways and admired his own handiwork.

  He had composed the crest of the House of Mylnikov himself, investing it with profound meaning. As if to say: I’m not trying to sneak into the aristocracy, I’m not ashamed of my common origins: my father was a simple blacksmith (the hammer), my grandfather was a son of the soil (the sickle), but thanks to zeal (the bees) in the sovereign’s service (the cap), I have risen high in accordance with my deserts.

  Evstratii Mylnikov had been awarded the rights and privileges of the hereditary nobility the previous year, along with an Order of Vladimir, Third Class, but the College of Arms was still smothering the approval of the crest in red tape, still nitpicking. It had approved the hammer and sickle, and the bees, but baulked at the peaked cap – supposedly it looked too much like the coronet that was reserved for titled individuals.

  In recent times Mylnikov had got into the habit, when he was in a thoughtful mood, of drawing this emblem so dear to his heart on a piece of paper. At first he couldn’t get the bees right at all, but in time Evstratii Pavlovich got the hang of it so well that they were a real delight to look at. And now here he was again, diligently shading in the stripes on the toilers’ abdomens, glancing every now and again at the pile of papers lying to the left of his elbow. The document that had plunged the court counsellor into a brown study was titled: ‘Log of the surveillance of honorary citizen Andron Semyonov Komarovsky (alias ‘Twitchy’) in the city of St Petersburg on 15 May 1905’. The individual who called himself Komarovsky (there were compelling reasons to believe that his passport was false) had been handed on from the Moscow Department for the Defence of Public Security and Order (the Moscow Okhrana) ‘with a view to establishing contact and communications’.