The Diamond Chariot (2 page)

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’.

And now this.

The mark was taken over from an agent of the Moscow Flying Squad at 7.25 at the railway station. The accompanying agent (Detective Gnatiuk) stated that on the way Twitchy had not spoken with anyone and had only left his compartment to answer calls of nature
.

Having taken over the mark, we followed him in two cabs to the Bunting Building on Nadezhdinskaya Street, where Twitchy walked up to the fourth floor, to apartment No. 7, from which he never emerged again. Apartment No. 7 is rented by a certain Zwilling, a resident of Helsingfors, who only appears here very rarely (according to the yard keeper the last time was at the beginning of winter)
.

At 12.38 the mark summoned the yard keeper with the bell. Agent Maximenko went up to him, disguised as the yard keeper. Twitchy gave him a rouble and told him to buy bread, salami and two bottles of beer. There was apparently no one in the flat apart from him
.

When he brought the order, Maximenko was given the change (17 kop.) as a tip. He observed that the mark was extremely nervous. As if he was waiting for someone or something
.

At 3.15 an army officer who has been given the code name ‘Kalmyk’ appeared. (A staff captain with the collar tabs of the Supply Department, a limp on his right leg, short, high cheekbones, black hair.)

He went up to apartment No. 7, but came down 4 minutes later and set off in the direction of Basseinaya Street. Agent Maximenko was dispatched to follow him
.

Twitchy did not emerge from the entrance of the building. At 3.31 he walked over to the window and stood there, looking into the yard, then walked away
.

At this moment Maximenko has still not returned
.

I am presently (8 o’clock in the evening) handing over the surveillance detail to Senior Agent Goltz
.

Sen. Agent Smurov

Short and clear, apparently.

Short enough, certainly, but damn all about it was clear.

An hour and a half ago Evstratii Pavlovich, having only just received the report cited above, also received a phone call from the police station on Basseinaya Street. He was informed that a man had been found dead in the courtyard of a building on Mitavsky Lane, with documents that identified him as Flying Squad agent Vasilii Maximenko. In less than ten minutes the court counsellor himself had arrived at the scene of the incident and ascertained that it really was Maximenko. There were absolutely no signs of violent death, nor any traces of a struggle or of any disorder in the agent’s clothing. The highly experienced medical expert, Karl Stepanovich, had said immediately that all the signs indicated heart failure.

Well, of course, Mylnikov was upset for a while, he even shed a tear for the old comrade with whom he had served shoulder to shoulder for ten years – the number of scrapes they’d been through together! And, as a matter of fact, Vasilii had even been involved in the winning of the Order of Vladimir that had led to the genesis of a new noble line.

In May the previous year, a secret message had been received from the consul in Hong Kong, saying that four Japanese disguised as businessmen were making their way towards the Suez Canal – that is, to the city of Aden. Only they were not businessmen at all, but naval officers: two minelayers and two divers. They intended to place underwater bombs along the route of cruisers from the Black Sea Squadron that had been dispatched to the Far East.

Evstratii Pavlovich had taken six of his best agents, all of them genuine wolfhounds (including the now-deceased Maximenko), skipped across to Aden and there, in the bazaar, disguised as sailors on a spree, they had started a knife fight: they carved the Jappos to shreds and dumped their luggage in the bay. The cruisers had got through without a single hitch. True, those lousy macaques had smashed them to pieces afterwards anyway but, like they say, that wasn’t down to us, was it?

This was the kind of colleague the state counsellor had lost. And not even in some rollicking adventure, but from a heart attack.

After giving instructions concerning the mortal remains, Mylnikov went back to his office on Fontanka Street and reread the report about Twitchy, and something started bothering him. He dispatched Lenka Zyablikov, a very bright young lad, to Nadezhdinskaya Street, to check Apartment No. 7.

And then what came up? Well, the old wolfhound’s nose hadn’t led him astray.

Zyablikov had phoned just ten minutes ago, talked about this and that, said how he’d dressed up as a plumber, and started ringing and knocking at No. 7 – no answer. Then he opened the door with a picklock.

Twitchy was dangling in a noose, by the window, from the curtain rail. All the signs indicated suicide: no bruises or abrasions, paper and a pencil on a chair, as if the man had been going to write a farewell note, but changed his mind.

Evstratii Pavlovich had listened to the agent’s agitated jabbering and ordered him to wait for the group of experts to arrive, then sat down at the desk and started drawing the crest – to clear his mind and, even more importantly, to calm his nerves.

Just recently the court counsellor’s nerves hadn’t been worth a rotten damn. The medical diagnosis read: ‘General neurasthenia resulting from excessive fatigue; enlargement of the pericardium; congestion of the lungs and partial damage to the spinal cord that might pose the threat of paralysis’. Paralysis! You had to pay for everything in this life, and the price was usually much higher than you expected.

So here he was, a hereditary nobleman, the head of a supremely important section in the Department of Police, with an annual salary of six thousand roubles – and never mind the salary, he had a budget of thirty thousand to use entirely at his own discretion, every functionary’s dream. But without his health, what good was all the gold in the world to him now? Evstratii Pavlovich was tormented by insomnia every night, and if he ever did fall asleep, that was even worse: bad dreams, ghoulish visions, with the devil’s work in them. He woke in a cold sweat, with his teeth chattering wildly. He kept thinking he could see something stirring repulsively in the corners and hear someone chuckling indistinctly, but derisively, or that ‘someone’ might suddenly start howling. In his sixth decade Mylnikov, the scourge of terrorists and foreign spies, had started sleeping with a lighted icon lamp. For the sanctity of it, and to keep away the darkness in the nooks and crannies. All those steep hills had nigh on knackered the old horse …