The Diamond Chariot

OFF WITH HIS HEAD




In the twilight at the end of a long day Asagawa paid a visit to Pier 37, a special police mooring for arrested boats. The Kappa-maru, a large fishing schooner arrested on suspicion of smuggling, had been standing there for more than two weeks already – in recent times, junks from Hong Kong and Aomin had taken to roaming the bay. They cruised in neutral waters, waiting for a moonless night, when fast boats could put out from the shore to collect crates of wine, sacks of coffee, bundles of tobacco and woven baskets of opium. The Sakai brothers, who owned the schooner, had been caught and were now in jail, but the inspector had thought of a good use for their little ship.

He examined the hold. Dry and roomy. It was immediately obvious that no fish had been carried in it for a long time. A bit cramped as living space, of course, but never mind, it wasn’t for royalty. Ah, but in fact it was – it was for a prince, thought Asagawa, and couldn’t help smiling.

The idea he had come up with was this. Take the important witness from the vice-consul, put him in the hold of the Kappa-maru, move the boat a long way offshore and drop anchor. Take the rubber and the sail away with him and lock the capstan – so that the prince wouldn’t take it into his head to weigh anchor in a morphine haze. Let him bob about on the waves for a day or two: he wouldn’t escape, and no one could touch him. But the inspector would have to post a sentry at the mooring – to keep an eye on all the confiscated craft, of course.

It was not late yet, and there were still people about near the mooring, but just before dawn there would be no one here. Everything should go quite smoothly. Once he had made sure that the fishing schooner was in good condition, the inspector went home.

The previous night and the day that followed it had been very eventful. In every man’s life there is one moment that is the highest point of his existence. Very often we do not realise this and only understand it retrospectively, when we look back: There, that’s it, the reason why I was born. But it’s already too late, we can’t go back to it and we can’t put anything right.

Asagawa, however, was aware that he was living through the supreme moment of his life right now, and he was firmly determined not to disappoint his karma. Who could ever have thought that the son and grandson of ordinary yoriki would find himself at the centre of high political drama? Surely it now depended on him which way Japan would turn, which force would rule the country?

It was not in the inspector’s character to brag, but today really was a special day, the kind of day that a man could be proud of. And so he allowed himself to feel just a little pride, although he didn’t say anything out loud, of course.

The head of the seaboard precinct of the Yokohama police lived on Nogeh Hill, where he rented a room in the Momoya Hotel, a modest establishment, but very neat and clean. The rent was an insignificant sum and the food was beyond all praise (there was an excellent noodle soup shop on the ground floor), and there was also one other circumstance of some importance for a bachelor.

This circumstance (which was female and went by the name of Emiko) was the owner of the Momoya, who immediately brought his supper to his room in person.

Asagawa, having swapped his tight European clothes for a thin yukata, sat on a cushion, watching blissfully as Emiko fussed over the meal, sprinkling dried seaweed powder on the hot noodles and pouring the warmed sake from the little jug. The calico-bound file holding the documents had been concealed under the mattress laid out on the floor.

She did not leave even after the inspector had thanked her and started noisily sucking in the scalding hot soba, occasionally picking pieces of his favourite pickled radish out of a separate little bowl with his chopsticks. It was clear from the bloom on Emiko’s cheeks and her lowered eyes that she was yearning for his amorous attentions. And even though Asagawa was deadly tired and ought to get at least a little sleep before dawn, to offend a woman was impolite. So, having rounded off his meal with a cup of excellent barley tea, he spoke the words that had a special meaning for the two of them:

‘How beautiful you are today.’

Emiko blushed and put her broad hands over her face. She murmured:

‘Ah, why do you say such things …’

But even as she spoke, she was unfastening the cord with which the belt of her kimono was tied.

‘Come here,’ said the inspector, reaching out his arms.

‘I shouldn’t. There are customers waiting,’ she babbled in a voice hoarse with passion, and pulled the pins out of her hair one after another.

In her impatience, she didn’t even unwind her belt completely. She freed one shoulder and pulled the kimono abruptly over her head in a most ungraceful fashion. He liked her best of all like this. It was a shame that today he was in no state to relax and enjoy love.

‘I waited all last night …’ she whispered, crawling on to the bed on hands and knees.

Asagawa glanced to make sure that the file was not sticking out from under the rather thin futon, and lay down first.

When Emiko lowered herself on to him with a moan, the sharp corner dug into his back quite uncomfortably, but there was nothing to be done, he had to bear it.

After his debt of politeness had been paid and Emiko had flitted on her way, Asagawa grunted as he rubbed the bruise on his back and blew out the lamp. Following a habit unchanged since his childhood, he lay on his side, put his hand under his cheek and fell asleep immediately.

All sorts of different sounds came through the paper partitions: the clamour of customers in the noodle shop, the servant girls slipping up and down the stairs, his neighbour – a rice trader – snoring in the next room. All this noise was quite usual and it did not prevent the inspector from falling asleep, even though he was a light sleeper. When a cockroach fell off the ceiling on to the straw mats, Asagawa opened his eyes immediately, and his hand automatically slid in under the wooden pillow, where he kept his revolver. The inspector was woken a second time by the tinkling lid of the china teapot that he always put beside the head of the bed. An earthquake, but only a very small one, Asagawa realised, and went back to sleep.

But after he was woken for the third time, he was not allowed to go to sleep again.

Something extraordinary was happening in the noodle shop. He heard someone yelling in a blood-curdling voice, furniture smashing and then the owner shrieking:

‘Asagawa-san!’

That meant he had to go down – Emiko wouldn’t disturb him over anything trivial. It must be the foreign sailors getting rowdy again, like the last time. Just recently they had taken to wandering around the native districts – the drink was cheaper there.

The inspector sighed, got up and pulled on his yukata. He didn’t take his revolver, there was no need. Instead of a firearm, he grabbed his jitte – an iron spike with two curved hooks on its sides. In the old days a jitte was used to ward off a blow from a sword, but it was also useful for parrying a knife-thrust, or simply hitting someone over the head. Asagawa was a past master in the use of this weapon.

He didn’t leave the file in the room, but stuck it in the back of his belt.

To the inspector’s relief, it was not foreigners who were getting unruly, but two Japanese. They looked like ordinary chimpira – petty thugs of the lowest kind. Not Yakuza, just loudmouths, but very drunk and aggressively boisterous. The table had been turned over and a few bowls had been broken. The old basket weaver Yoichi, who often stayed until late, had a bloody nose. There weren’t any other customers, they must all have run off – all except for a fisherman with a face tanned copper-brown by the wind, sitting in the corner. He wasn’t bothered at all, just kept picking up noodles with his little sticks without even looking around.

‘This is Asagawa-san, a big police boss! Now you’ll answer for all this!’ shouted Emiko, who seemed to have suffered too – her hairstyle had slipped over to one side and her sleeve was torn.

It worked.

One chimpira, wearing a red headband, backed away towards the door.

‘Don’t come near us! We’re not from round here! We’ll go and you’ll never see us again.’

And he pulled out a knife, to stop the policeman from interfering.

‘What do you mean, you’ll go?’ Emiko squealed. ‘Who’s going to pay? Look at all the crockery you’ve broken! And the table’s cracked right across!’

She threw herself at the bullies with her fists up, absolutely fearless.

But the second brawler, with deep pockmarks on his face, swung his fist wildly and struck her on the ear, and the poor woman collapsed on the floor, unconscious. Old Yoichi pulled his head down and went dashing headlong out of the eatery.

Asagawa would not have let the scoundrels get away in any case but, for Emiko’s sake, he decided to teach them a serious lesson.

First of all he ran to the door and blocked the way out, so that they couldn’t get away.

The two men glanced at each other. The one with the red headband raised his knife to shoulder level and the pockmarked one pulled out a more serious weapon – a short wakizashi sword.

‘Right, together!’ he shouted, and they both threw themselves at Asagawa at once.

But how could they compete with a master of the jitte! He easily knocked the knife-thrust aside with his elbow, grabbed the blade of the sword with his hook, tugged, and the wakizashi went flying off into the far corner.

Without wasting so much as an instant, Asagawa smacked the man with the red headband across the wrist, so that he dropped the knife. The pockmarked man retreated to the counter and stood with his back to it. The other chimpira cowered against him. They weren’t kicking up a racket now, or waving their arms about; both their faces were ashen with fear.

Asagawa walked unhurriedly towards them, brandishing his weapon.

‘Before you go off to the station, I’ll teach you a lesson in how to behave in decent establishments,’ he said, furious at the thought that he had been denied his sleep.

Meanwhile the copper-faced fisherman drank the remains of the broth from his bowl and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. He leaned down, picked up the wakizashi, weighed it on his palm and suddenly flung it, without any swing at all.

The blade entered the inspector’s back slightly above the calico-bound file.

Asagawa looked round with an angry and bewildered look on his face. He swayed, barely able to stay on his feet.

Then, with the speed of lightning, the chimpira in the read headband pulled a short, straight sword out from under his clothes and jerked it from right to left, as easily as if he were batting away a fly: the inspector’s head leapt off his shoulders and went rolling merrily across the floor.

For a few seconds,

Already off the shoulders,

The head still lives on





THE PHOTOGRAPH OF HIS WIFE




If you wrote the word ‘Bullcox’ in the syllabic alphabet, you got five letters: bu-ru-ko-ku-su. But in the circle at the centre of the mysterious diagram, there were only two. That, however, did not mean a thing: the Japanese loved to shorten foreign words and names that were too long, leaving just the first two letters. So the letters in the circle should be ‘bu-ru’.

The doctor put the notebook that he had taken out the day before on the desk. It contained his five-year-old notes on the history of the Japanese ninja, including the secret alphabet of this clan of professional assassins, carefully copied out from a certain ancient treatise.

The green lamp shone with a peaceful light and the cosy shadows lay thick in the corners of the study. The house was sleeping. Both his daughters, Beth and Kate, had already said their prayers and gone to bed. Following a long-established custom very dear to Twigs’ heart, their father had gone to kiss them before they fell asleep – Beth on the right cheek and Kate on the left.

His elder daughter had turned out a genuine beauty, the very image of his dear departed Jenny, thought Twigs (this same thought visited him every evening when he wished his daughters good night). Kate was still an ugly duckling, and if her big, wide mouth and long nose were anything to go by, she was never going to be a good-looker, but he was less worried about her than her elder sister. Beth was the silent type, all she ever wanted to do was read novels, but Kate was bright and lively, the kind of girl that young men liked. The same thing had happened several times already: Beth acquired some new beau and then, before you could blink, he switched his attentions to the younger sister – she was jollier and easier to be with.

In order to keep their correspondence secret, the medieval ninja did not use the standard hieroglyphs, but a special alphabet, the so-called ‘shindai letters’, a very ancient form of writing reminiscent of the marks left by a snake crawling across wet sand.

Right, then, let’s take a look at how the symbol for ‘bu’ is written in these squiggles. There it is.

And now ‘ru’. It looks like this.

But what do we have in the circle? Quite different symbols. The first one looks like three snakes.

And the second one is like a whole knot of snakes.

But wait a moment, good sir! Both of these squiggles are also in the alphabet. The first is the syllable ‘to’, the second is the syllable ‘nu’, or simply ‘n’.

Hmm. Twigs scratched the bridge of his nose, bemused. What on earth is tonu? What has tonu got to do with anything? It doesn’t add up.

Evidently the writing in the diagram was not simply in the secret alphabet of the ninja, it had been additionally enciphered – each letter signified another one. Well now, that was even more interesting.

The doctor drummed his fingers on the table in keen anticipation of a long and fascinating job.

Forward, sir!

Of all the pleasures granted to man, the very greatest is to exercise his brains.

All right, all right.

We know that Suga uses the letter ‘to’ to represent ‘bu’, and the letter ‘nu’ to represent ‘ru’. These letters also occur in other circles: the former three times and the latter once.

So, let us proceed.

He picked up a magnifying glass and inspected the circle more closely. What are these tiny little lines above the three snakes? Dirt? No, they’re written in ink. They look like a nigori, the sign for voicing, which changes the syllable ‘ka’ to ‘ga’, ‘ta’ to ‘da’, ‘sa’ to ‘za’. That fits: ‘bu’ is a voiced syllable, there ought to be a nigori.

Twigs thoughtfully copied out the circle and the two symbols inside it.

Without any encipherment, it would read as a voiced ‘to’ (in other words ‘do’), plus ‘nu’ or ‘n’.

Hang on now, hang on …

The doctor rubbed his bald patch in agitation and half-rose out of his chair. But then, just at the crucial moment, the night bell attached to the wall above his desk started growling quietly. It was Lancelot Twigs’ own personal invention – he had had electric wires run from the doorbell to his study and bedroom, so that any late-night patients wouldn’t wake the girls.

Feeling highly annoyed, he set off towards the door, but stopped in the corridor before he got there. He mustn’t! Mr Asagawa had warned him very strictly: no night visitors, no opening the door for anyone.

‘Doctor! Is that you?’ a voice said outside. ‘Dr Twigs? I saw the plate on your door. Help me, for God’s sake!’

It was an agitated, almost tearful male voice with a Japanese accent.

‘I’m Jonathan Yamada, senior sales clerk at Simon, Evers and Company. In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, open up!’

‘Why, what’s happened?’ asked Twigs, without the slightest intention of opening up.

‘My wife’s gone into labour!’

‘But I’m not an obstetrician. You need Dr Buckle, he lives on …’

‘I know, I was taking my wife to Dr Buckle! But the carriage overturned! Just round the corner here! Doctor, I beg you! She’s hurt her head, there’s blood! She’ll die, Doctor!’

Twigs heard low, muffled sobbing.

If it had been anything else, Lancelot Twigs would probably not have opened the door, for he was a man of his word. But he remembered his poor Jenny and his own helplessness and hopeless despair.

‘Just a moment … just a moment.’

And he opened the door slightly, without taking it off the chain.

He saw a plump Japanese man in a bowler hat and frock coat, with his trembling face streaming with tears. The man immediately went down on his knees and held his hands up to the doctor.

‘I beg you! Come quickly!’

There was no one else in the street.

‘You know, I’m not well,’ Twigs muttered in embarrassment. ‘Dr Albertini, an excellent surgeon, lives on Hommura-dori Street. It’s only ten minutes away from here …’

‘While I run there, my wife will bleed to death! Save her!’

‘Ah, what is to be done with you!’

Of course, a man should keep his word, but there was also the Hippocratic oath …

He sighed and took the door off the chain.

The senior sales clerk Jonathan Yamada sobbed.

‘Thank you! Thank you! Allow me to kiss your hand.’

‘Nonsense! Come in. I’ll just change my shoes and get my instruments. Wait in the hallway, I’ll only be a moment.’

The doctor set off quickly towards his study – to get his bag and conceal the secret diagram. Or would it be best to take it with him? No, that probably wasn’t a good idea.

Either the sales clerk didn’t hear that he was supposed to wait in the hallway, or he was too agitated to think clearly, but he tagged along after the doctor, babbling all the time about kissing his hand.

‘At least allow me to shake your noble hand!’

‘Oh, be my guest,’ said Twigs, holding out his open right hand and taking hold of the door with his left. ‘I have to leave you for just a second …’

In his emotional fervour Jonathan Yamada squeezed the doctor’s hand with all his might.

‘Ow!’ Twigs exclaimed. ‘That hurts!’

He raised his hand to his eyes. A small drop of blood oozed out of the base of his middle finger.

The sales clerk started fussing again.

‘For God’s sake, forgive me! I have a ring, an old one, a family heirloom. Sometimes it turns round, it’s a bit too big. Did I scratch you? Did I scratch you? Oh, oh! I’m so sorry! Let me bandage it, I have a handkerchief, it’s clean!’

‘Don’t bother, it’s nothing,’ Twigs said with a frown, licking the wound with his tongue. ‘I’ll only be a moment. Wait.’

He closed the door behind him, walked across to the desk and staggered – everything had suddenly gone dark. He grabbed the top of the desk with both hands.

The sales clerk had apparently not stayed in the corridor after all, he had come into the study too, and now he was coolly rummaging through the doctor’s papers.

Twigs, however, was no longer concerned about Jonathan Yamada’s strange behaviour, he was feeling very unwell indeed.

He looked at the photograph of Jenny in a silver frame, standing on the small chest of drawers, and couldn’t tear his eyes away.

Lancelot’s retouched wife gazed back at him with a trusting, affectionate smile.

Everything changes,

Except for the same old face

In an old photo





DONG, DONG




Erast Petrovich did not sleep for very long, he kept glancing at his watch, and at half-past three he quietly got up. O-Yumi was asleep and he looked at her for half a minute, with an exceptionally powerful feeling that he would have found hard to express in words: never before had the world seemed so fragile and at the same time so durable; it could shatter into glassy fragments at the slightest breath of wind, or it could withstand the onslaught of the most violent hurricane.

The titular counsellor put his boots on in the corridor. Masa was sitting on the floor in front of the cupboard, with his head lowered on to his chest. Fandorin touched him on the shoulder and he jumped to his feet.

‘Go and sleep,’ Fandorin said in a whisper. ‘Neru. I’ll keep watch for a while.’

‘Hai,’ Masa said with a yawn, and set off towards his own room.

Erast Petrovich waited until he heard the sound of peaceful snuffling and smacking lips (he did not have to wait for more than a minute), and paid a visit to the prince.

Onokoji seemed to have made himself rather comfortable in his refuge. The shelves holding Masa’s supplies and small household items had been concealed by a blanket, there was a lamp, now extinguished, standing on the floor, and the remains of supper were lying on an empty crate. The prince himself was sleeping serenely, with his thin lips set in a subtle smile – His Excellency was apparently reposing in the delightful embrace of sweet dreams. After O-Yumi, to watch anyone else sleeping, especially an individual as distasteful as this one, seemed blasphemous to Erast Petrovich. Moreover, the source of the wondrous nocturnal visions was not in any doubt – there was an empty syringe glinting beside the pillow.

‘Get up,’ said Fandorin, shaking the witness by the shoulder. ‘Sh-sh-sh-sh. It is I, do not be afraid.’

But the idea of being afraid never entered Onokoji’s head. He opened his bleary eyes and smiled even more widely, still under the influence of the narcotic.

‘Get up. Get dressed. We’re going out.’

‘For a walk?’ The prince giggled. ‘With you, my dear friend – to the ends of the earth.’

As he pulled on his trousers and shoes, he jigged and twirled around, jabbering away without a pause – the vice-consul had to tell him to be quiet.

Fandorin led his disorderly companion out of the building by the elbow. To be on the safe side, he kept his other hand in his pocket, on the butt of his Herstal, but he didn’t take the gun out, in order not to frighten the prince.

It was drizzling and there was a smell of fog. As the fresh air started bringing Onokoji to his senses, he glanced round at the empty promenade and asked:

‘Where are you taking me?’

‘To a safer place,’ the titular counsellor explained, and Onokoji immediately calmed down.

‘I heard a woman’s voice in your apartment,’ he said in a sly voice. ‘And that voice sounded very familiar. Ve-ry, ve-ry familiar.’

‘That’s none of your business.’

It was a long walk to the thirty-seventh pier, long enough for the effect of the dope to wear off. The witness stopped jabbering and looked around nervously more and more often, but he didn’t ask any more questions. He must have been feeling cold – his shoulders were trembling slightly. Or perhaps the trembling was the result of the drug?

This looked like the place. Fandorin saw the number ‘37’ daubed in white paint on a low godaun. A long pier stretched out from the shore into the sea, its beginning lit up by a street lamp, and its far end lost in darkness. Set along it were the black silhouettes of boats, with their mooring cables creaking.

The wooden boards rumbled hollowly under their feet and water splashed somewhere down below. The darkness was not completely impenetrable, for the sky had already begun turning grey in anticipation of dawn.

Eventually the end of the pier came into sight. There was a mast jutting up from a large boat, and Inspector Asagawa in his police uniform, sitting on a bollard: they could see his cap and broad cloak with a hood.

Relieved, Erast Petrovich let go of his companion’s elbow and waved to the inspector.

Asagawa waved back. They were only about twenty steps away from the boat now.

Strange, the titular counsellor suddenly thought, why didn’t he get up to greet us?

‘Stop,’ Fandorin said to the prince, and he stopped walking himself.

The seated man got up then, and he turned out to be a lot shorter than Asagawa. Has he sent another policeman instead of coming himself? Erast Petrovich wondered, but his hand was already pulling the revolver out of his pocket: God takes care of those who take care of themselves.

What happened next was quite incredible.

The policeman whipped the cap off his head, dropped the cloak – and he disappeared. There was no one under the cloak, just blackness!

The prince cried out in a shrill voice, and even Fandorin was seized by mystical horror. But the next moment the darkness stirred and they saw a figure in black, approaching them rapidly.

A ninja!

With a plaintive howl, Onokoji turned and took to his heels, and the vice-consul flung up his Herstal and fired.

The black figure was not running in a straight line, but in zigzags, squatting down or jumping up as it went, and performing all these manoeuvres with unbelievable speed – too fast for Fandorin to follow it with the barrel of his gun.

A second shot, a third, a fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh. Could every shot really have missed the target? The distance was only fifteen, ten, five paces!

When he was at close quarters with Erast Petrovich, the invisible man leapt high into the air and kicked the Herstal (now entirely useless anyway) out of Fandorin’s hand. The revolver rattled across the wooden decking and there, right in front of his face, the vice-consul saw two slanting eyes, like two blazing coals, in the slits of a black mask.

Once seen, those eyes could never be forgotten.

It was him! Him! The snake-charmer, the man with no face! He was alive!

The titular counsellor simply couldn’t understand how this was possible; in fact he couldn’t understand anything at all any more, but he was determined to sell his life dearly.

He assumed a combat pose, just as he had done with Suga and – hoorah! – succeeded in parrying the first kick with his elbow. Now, according to the science of jujitsu, he should build on his success by moving on to the attack. Erast Petrovich lunged (in a way more suited to boxing), but missed his opponent, who ducked under the fist and straightened up again like a spring, and then Fandorin’s feet parted company with the pier. The titular counsellor flew, tumbling over and over in the air, and for as long as this flight lasted, he thought of nothing. And he didn’t think at all after he struck his head against the edge of the pier: he saw a flash, heard an extremely unpleasant crunch, and that was all.

But the cold water in which the body of the vanquished vice-consul landed with a loud splash brought him round again. And his first thought (even before he surfaced) was: Why didn’t he kill me? Bullcox must have ordered me to be killed!

Blood was streaming down his face, and there was a ringing sound in his ears, but Erast Petrovich was determined not to lose consciousness. He grabbed hold of a slippery beam, clutched at a transverse pile, hauled himself up and managed to scramble on to the pier.

A second thought forced its way through the noise and the fiery circles in front of his eyes. What about the prince? Had he managed to escape? He had had enough time. And if he had escaped, where could the titular counsellor search for him now?

But there was no need to search for the prince. Erast Petrovich realised that when he saw a dark heap lying under the only street lamp in the distance – as if someone had dumped a pile of old rags there.

Fandorin staggered along the pier with his fingers over his bleeding wound. He wasn’t thinking about the invisible man, because he knew for certain that if the ninja had wanted to kill him, he would have done.

The high-society playboy was lying face down. A glittering steel star had bitten deep into his neck just above the collar. The titular counsellor pulled it out with his finger and thumb, and blood immediately started seeping from the wound. A throwing weapon, the vice-consul guessed, carefully touching the sharpened edges of the small star. And it appeared to be smeared with something.

Once again he was astounded. Why had the invisible man taken the risk of dodging the bullets? All he had to do was fling this thing and it would have been all over.

He leaned down (the sharp movement set everything around him swaying) and turned the dead man over on to his back.

And he saw that Onokoji was still alive.

There was horror dancing in the open eyes and the trembling lips fumbling at the air.

‘Nan jya? Nan jya?,’ the dying man babbled. (‘What happened? What happened?’)

He must not have realised yet what disaster had overtaken him. He had been running for grim death, at full tilt, he couldn’t see anything around him, and suddenly – a blow to the back of his neck …

‘It was a ninja. Bullcox sent him,’ said Fandorin, fighting his dizziness. ‘I’ll take you to a doctor. To Dr Twigs.’

But it was obvious that no doctor could help the prince now, his eyes were already rolling up and back.

Suddenly he wrinkled up his face, gathered all his strength and said, slowly but clearly:

‘Not Bullcox … Don …’

‘What?’

‘Don … Tsurumaki.’

That was all. His jaw shuddered and dropped open. Only the whites of his eyes were visible under his half-open eyelids.

The name throbbed in the titular counsellor’s bruised head, like the rhythm of a tolling bell: Don-Don-Don …

This is how life sounds

Ding-ding, tingaling, cuckoo,

Ending with: dong, dong