The Diamond Chariot

The fourth syllable, in which Fandorin feels afraid

Sombre fury would be the best name to give the mood in which Erast Petrovich found himself. In his long life he had known both the sweetness of victory and the bitterness of defeat, but he could not remember ever feeling so stupid before. This must be the way a whaler felt when, instead of impaling a sperm whale, his harpoon merely scattered a shoal of little fish.

But how could he possibly have doubted that the thrice-cursed dark-haired man was the Japanese agent responsible for the sabotage? The absurd concatenation of circumstances was to blame, but that was poor comfort to the engineer.

Precious time had been wasted, the trail was irredeemably lost.

The mayor of Moscow and the detective police wished to express their heartfelt gratitude to Fandorin for catching the brazen band of crooks, but Erast Petrovich withdrew into the shadows, and all the glory went to Mylnikov and his agents, who had merely delivered the bound bandits to the nearest police station.

There was a clearing of the air between the engineer and the court counsellor, and Mylnikov did not even attempt to be cunning. Gazing at Fandorin with eyes bleached colourless by his disappointment in humankind, Mylnikov admitted without the slightest trace of embarrassment that he had set his agents on the case and come to Moscow himself because he knew from the old days that Fandorin had a uniquely keen nose, and it was a surer way of picking up the trail than wearing out his own shoe leather. He might not have picked up any saboteurs, but he hadn’t come off too badly – the hold-up artists from Warsaw would earn him the gratitude of his superiors and a gratuity.

‘And instead of name-calling, you’d be better off deciding what’s the best way for you and me to rub along,’ Mylnikov concluded amicably. ‘What can you do without me? That railway outfit of yours doesn’t even have the right to conduct an investigation. But I do, and then again, I’ve brought along the finest sleuths in Peter, grand lads, every last one of them. Come on, Fandorin, let’s come to friendly terms, comradely like. The head will be yours, the arms and legs will be ours.’

The proposal made by this rather less than honourable gentleman was certainly not devoid of merit.

‘On a friendly basis, so be it. Only bear in mind, Mylnikov,’ Fandorin warned him, ‘if you take it into your head to be cunning and act behind my b-back, I shan’t beat about the bush. I shan’t write a complaint to your superiors, I’ll simply press the secret bakayaro point on your stomach, and that will be the end of you. And no one will ever guess.’

There was no such thing as a bakayaro point, but Mylnikov, knowing how skilled Fandorin was in all sorts of Japanese tricks, turned pale.

‘Don’t frighten me, my health’s already ruined as it is. Why should I get cunning with you? We’re on the same side. I’m of the opinion that without your Japanese devilry, we’ll never catch the fiend who blew up that bridge. We have to fight fire with fire, sorcery with sorcery.’

Fandorin raised one eyebrow slightly, wondering whether the other man could be playing the fool, but the court counsellor had a very serious air, and little sparks had lit up in his eyes.

‘Do you really think old Mylnikov has no brains and no heart? That I don’t see anything or ponder what’s going on?’ Mylnikov glanced round and lowered his voice. ‘Who is our sovereign, eh? The Lord’s anointed, right? So the Lord should protect him from the godless Japanese, right? But what’s happening? The Christ-loving army’s taking a right battering, left, right and centre. And who’s battering it? A tiny little nation with no strength at all. That’s because Satan stands behind the Japanese, he’s the one who’s giving the yellow bastards their strength. And the Supreme Arbiter of fate has forsaken our sovereign, He doesn’t want to help. Just recently I read a secret report in the Police Department, from the Arkhangelsk province. There’s a holy man prophesying up there, an Old Believer: he says the Romanovs were given three hundred years to rule and no longer, that’s the limit they were set. And those three hundred years are running out. And the whole of Russia is bearing the punishment for that. Doesn’t that sound like the truth?’

The engineer had had enough of listening to this drivel. He frowned and said:

‘Stop all this street sleuth’s drivel. If I want to discuss the fate of the tsarist dynasty, I won’t choose to do it with a member of the Special Section. Are you going to work or just arrange stupid provocations?’

‘Work, work,’ said Mylnikov, dissolving in spasms of wooden laughter, but the sparks were still dancing in his eyes.

Meanwhile the experts had concluded their examination of the site of the disaster and presented a report that completely confirmed Fandorin’s version of events.

The explosion of moderate force that had caused the collapse was produced by a charge of melinite weighing twelve to fourteen pounds – that is, its power was approximately equal to a six-inch artillery shell. Any other bridge on the Nicholas line would probably have survived a shock of that power, but not the decrepit Tezoimenitsky, especially while a heavy train was crossing it. The saboteurs had chosen the spot and the moment with professional competence.

An answer had also been found to the riddle of how the perpetrators had managed to place a mine on a tightly guarded target and explode it right under the wheels of the military train. At the point of the fracture, the experts had discovered scraps of leather from some unknown source and microscopic particles of dense laboratory glass. After racking their brains for a while, they offered their conclusion: a long, cylindrical leather case and a narrow spiral glass tube.

That was enough for Erast Petrovich to reconstruct a picture of what had happened.

The melinite charge had been placed in a leather package, something like a case for a clarinet or other narrow-bodied wind instrument. There had not been any hard casing at all – it would only have made the mine heavier and weakened the blast. The explosive used was chemical, with a retardant – the engineer had read about those. A glass tube holding fulminate of mercury is pierced by a needle, but the fulminate does not flow out immediately, it takes thirty seconds or a minute, depending on the length and shape of the tube.

No doubt remained: the bomb had been dropped from the express travelling directly in front of the special.

The situation by which the two trains were in dangerously close proximity to each other had been arranged by artifice, using the false telegram that was passed on by the telegraph clerk at Kolpino (who, naturally, had disappeared without a trace).

Fandorin racked his brains for a while over the question of exactly how the mine had been dropped. Through the window of a compartment? Hardly. The risk was too great that when the case hit the covering of the bridge, it would go flying off into the river. Then he guessed – through the flush aperture in the toilet. That was what the narrow case was for. Ah, if only that witness hadn’t interfered, with her comments about the suspicious dark-haired man! He should have acted as he had planned to do from the start: make a list of the passengers, and question them too. Even if he’d had to let them all go, he could have interrogated them again now – they would definitely have remembered a travelling musician, and it was quite probable that he wasn’t alone, but in a group …

Once the mystery of the disaster had been solved, Erast Petrovich had no time for wounded pride, for more compelling concerns came to light.

The engineer’s work in the Railway Gendarmerie (or, as Mylnikov called it, the ‘Randarmerie’) had already been going on for an entire year already, directed to a single goal: to protect the most vulnerable section in the anatomy of the ailing Russian dinosaur – its one major artery. The enterprising Japanese predator that had been attacking the wounded giant from all sides must realise sooner or later that he did not need to knock his opponent off its feet, it was enough simply to gnaw through the single major vessel of its blood supply – the Trans-Siberian main line. Left without ammunition, provisions and reinforcements, the Manchurian army would be doomed.

The Tezoimenitsky Bridge was no more than a test run. Traffic over it would be completely restored in two weeks, and meanwhile trains were making a detour via the Pskov-Starorusskoe branch, losing only a few hours. But if a similar blow were to be struck at any point beyond Samara, from where the main line extended as a single thread for eight thousand versts, it would bring traffic to a halt for at least a month. Linevich’s army would be left in a catastrophic position. And apart from that, what was to stop the Japanese from arranging one act of sabotage after another?

Of course, the Trans-Siberian was a new line, built using modern technology. And the last year had not been wasted – a decent system of security was up and running, and the Siberian bridges could in no way be compared with the Tezoimenitsky – you wouldn’t blow them up with ten pounds of melinite dumped through the outlet of a water closet. But the Japanese were shrewd, they would come up with something else. The worst thing had already happened – they had already launched their war on the railways. Just wait and see what would come next.

This thought (which was, unfortunately, quite incontrovertible) made Erast Petrovich feel afraid. But the engineer belonged to that breed of people in whom the response to fear is not paralysis or panic-stricken commotion, but the mobilisation of all their mental resources.

‘Melinite, melinite,’ Fandorin repeated thoughtfully as he strode around the office that he had taken on temporary loan from Danilov. He snapped the fingers of the hand he was holding behind his back, puffed on his cigar and stood at the window for a long time, screwing his eyes up against the bright May sky.

There could be no doubt that the Japanese would also use melinite for subsequent acts of sabotage. They had tested the explosive on the Tezoimenitsky Bridge and the results had been satisfactory.

Melinite was not produced in Russia, the explosive was deployed only in the arsenals of France and Japan, and the Japanese called it simose or, as distorted by the Russian newspapers, ‘shimoza’. It was simose that was given most of the credit for the victory of the Japanese fleet at Tsushima: shells packed with melinite had demonstrated far greater penetrative and explosive power than the Russian powder shells.

Melinite, or picric acid, was ideally suited for sabotage work: powerful, easy to combine with detonators of various kinds and also compact. But even so, to sabotage a large modern bridge would require a charge weighing several poods. Where would the saboteurs get such a large amount of explosive and how would they convey it?

This was the key point – Erast Petrovich realised that straight away – but before he advanced along his primary line of search, he put certain precautions in place on his secondary one.

In case the melinite theory was mistaken and the enemy was intending to use ordinary dynamite or gun cotton, Fandorin gave instructions for a secret circular to be sent to all the military depots and arsenals, warning them of the danger. Of course, this piece of paper would not make the guards any more vigilant, but thieving quartermasters would be more afraid of selling explosive on the side, and that was precisely the way that such lethal materials usually found their way into the hands of Russia’s terrorist bombers.

Having taken this safety measure, Erast Petrovich concentrated on the routes for transporting melinite.

They would deliver it from abroad, and most likely from France (they couldn’t bring it all the way from Japan!).

You can’t ship a load of at least several poods in a suitcase, thought Fandorin, twirling in his fingers a test tube of light yellow powder that he had acquired from an artillery laboratory. He raised it to his face and absentmindedly drew the sharp smell in through his nose – the same ‘fatal aroma of shimoza’ that the Russian war correspondents were so fond of mentioning.

‘Well now, p-perhaps,’ Erast Petrovich murmured.

He quickly got up, ordered his carriage to be brought round, and a quarter of an hour later he was already on Maly Gnezdnikovsky Lane, at the Police Telegraph Office. There he dictated a telegram that set the operator, who had seen all sorts of things in his time, blinking rapidly.





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

On the morning of 25 May, Countess Bovada’s boarder received news of the arrival of the Delivery and the Shipment on the same day, as had been planned. The organisation was working with the precision of a chronometer.

The Delivery consisted of four one-and-a-half-pood sacks of maize flour, sent from Lyons for the Moscow bakery ‘Werner and Pfleiderer’. The consignment was awaiting the consignee at the Moscow Freight Station depot on the Brest line. It was all very simple: turn up, show the receipt and sign. The sacks were extremely durable – jute, waterproof. If an overly meticulous gendarme or railway thief poked a hole in one to try it, the yellow, coarse-grained powder that poured out would pass very well for maize flour in wheat-and-rye-eating Russia.

Things were a little more complicated with the Shipment. The sealed wagon was due to arrive by way of a roundabout route from Naples to Batumi, and from there by railway via Rostov to the Rogozhsk shunting yard. According to the documents, it belonged to the Office of Security Escorts and was accompanied by a guard consisting of a corporal and two privates. The guard was genuine, the documents were fake. That is, the crates really did contain, as the transport documents stated, 8,500 Italian ‘Vetterli’ rifles, 1,500 Belgian ‘Francotte’ revolvers, a million cartridges and blasting cartridges. However, this entire arsenal was not intended for the needs of the Escorts Office, but for a man who went by the alias of Thrush. According to the plan developed by Vasilii Alexandrovich’s father, large-scale disturbances were supposed to break out in Moscow, putting a rapid end to the Russian tsar’s enthusiasm for the Manchurian steppes and Korean concessions.

The wise author of the plan had taken everything into account: the fact that the Guards were in St Petersburg, while the old capital had only a scrappy ragbag garrison made up of second-class reservists, and that Moscow was the transport heart of the country, and that the city had 200,000 hungry workers embittered by privation. Ten thousand reckless madcaps could surely be found among them, if only there were weapons. A single spark, and the workers’ quarters would be bristling with barricades.

Rybnikov began as he had been taught in his childhood – that is, with the hardest thing.

The staff captain arrived at the shunting yard. He introduced himself and was given an escort of a minor bureaucrat from the goods arrival section, and they set off to line number three to meet the Rostov special. The clerk felt timid in the company of the gloomy officer, who tapped impatiently on the planking with the scabbard of his sabre. Fortunately, they did not have to wait long – the train arrived exactly on the dot.

The commander of the guard, a corporal who was well past the prime of youth, moved his lips as he read the document presented to him by the staff captain, while the draymen whom Rybnikov had hired drove up to the platform one by one.

But then there was a hitch – there was absolutely no sign of the half-platoon that was supposed to guard the convoy.

Cursing the Russian muddle, the staff captain ran to the telephone. He came back white-faced with fury and let loose a string of such intricately obscene curses that the clerk shrank in embarrassment and the sentries wagged their heads respectfully. There obviously wasn’t going to be any half-platoon for the staff captain.

Having raged for the appropriate length of time, Rybnikov took hold of the corporal by the sleeve.

‘Look, mate, what’s your name … Yekimov, as you can see, this is one almighty cock-up. Help me out here, will you? I know you’ve done your duty and you’re not obliged, but I can’t send it off without a guard, and I can’t leave it here either. I’ll see you all right: three roubles for you and one each for your fine lads here.’

The corporal went to have a word with the privates, who were as long in the tooth and battered by life as he was.

The deal they struck was this: in addition to the money, His Honour would give them a paper saying the squad could spend two days on the town in Moscow. Rybnikov promised.

They loaded up and drove off. The staff captain at the front in a cab, then the drays with the crates, the sentries on foot, one on the left, one on the right, the corporal bringing up the rear of the procession. Pleased with the remuneration and leave pass they had been promised, the privates strode along cheerfully, holding their Mosin rifles at the ready. Rybnikov had warned them to keep their eyes skinned – the slanty-eyed enemy never slept.

Rybnikov had booked a warehouse on the River Moscow in advance. The draymen carried the Shipment in, took their money and left.

The staff captain carefully put the receipt from a member of the workmen’s co-operative away in his pocket as he walked over to the sentries from Rostov.

‘Thanks for the help, lads. I’ll settle up now, a bargain’s a bargain.’

The riverside wharf in front of the warehouse was deserted, and the river water, iridescent from patches of oil, splashed under the planking.

‘But Your Honour, where are the guards?’ Yekimov asked, gazing around. ‘It’s kind of odd. An arms depot with no guards.’

Instead of answering, Rybnikov jabbed him in the throat with a finger of steel, then turned towards the privates. One of them was just about to lend the other some tobacco – and he froze like that, with his mouth hanging open, so the crude shag missed the paper and went showering past. Vasilii Alexandrovich hit the first one with his right hand and the second with his left. It all happened very quickly: the corporal’s body was still falling, and his two subordinates were already dead.

Rybnikov dropped the bodies under the wharf, after first tying a heavy rock to each one of them.

He took off his cap and wiped the sweat off his forehead.

Right, then, it was only half past ten and the most troublesome part of the job was already over.

It only took ten minutes to collect the Delivery. Vasilii Alexandrovich arrived at the Moscow Freight Station in tarred boots, a long coat and a cloth cap – a regular shop counterman. He carried the sacks out himself, wouldn’t even let the cabby help, in case he might ask for an extra ten kopecks. Then he transported the ‘maize flour’ from the Brest line to the Ryazan–Uralsk line, because the Delivery’s onward route led towards the east. On the way across to the other side of the city, he repacked the goods and at the station he checked it in as two lots, with different receipts.

And that put an end to his scurrying about from one railway station to another. Rybnikov wasn’t in the least bit tired; on the contrary, he was filled with a fierce, vigorous energy – he had grown weary of idleness and, of course, he was inspired by the importance of his actions.

Expertly dispatched, received on time, competently delivered, he thought. That was the way invincibility was shaped. When everyone acted in his own place as if the outcome of the entire war depended on him alone.

He was slightly concerned about the ‘dummies’ summoned from Samara and Krasnoyarsk. What if they were late? But it was no accident that Rybnikov had chosen those precise two out of the notebook filled with snaky squiggles. The Krasnoyarsk man (Vasilii Alexandrovich thought of him as ‘Tunnel’) was greedy, and his greed made him dependable, and the Samara man (his code name was ‘Bridge’) might not be outstandingly dependable, but he had compelling reasons not to be late – he was a man with not much time left.

And his calculations had proved correct; neither of the ‘dummies’ had let him down. Rybnikov was already aware of this when he left the station for the agreed hotels – the ‘Kazan’ and the ‘Railway’. The hotels were located close to each other, but not actually adjacent. The last thing he needed was for the two dummies to get to know each other through some grotesque coincidence.

At the Railway Hotel, Vasilii Alexandrovich left a note: ‘At three. Goncharov’. The note at the Kazan Hotel read: ‘At four: Goncharov’.

Now it was time to deal with the man with the alias of Thrush, the consignee of the Shipment.

In this matter Rybnikov employed particular caution, for he knew that the Social Revolutionaries were kept under close surveillance by the Okhrana, and the revolutionary riff-raff had plenty of traitors among their own ranks. He could only hope that Thrush realised this as well as he, Rybnikov, did.

Vasilii Alexandrovich made a call from a public telephone (a most convenient innovation that had only recently appeared in the old capital). He asked the lady to give him number 34-81.

He spoke the prearranged words:

‘A hundred thousand pardons. May I ask for the honourable Ivan Konstantinovich to come to the phone?’

After a second’s pause, a woman’s voice replied:

‘He’s not here at present, but he will be soon.’

That meant Thrush was in Moscow and prepared to meet.

‘Please be so good as to let Ivan Konstantinovich know that Professor Stepanov wishes to invite him to his seventy-third birthday.’

‘Professor Stepanov?’ the woman asked, bemused. ‘To his seventy-third?’

‘Yes, that is correct.’

The go-between didn’t need to understand the meaning, her job was to pass on precisely what he said. In the figure 73, the first numeral indicated the time, and the second was a position in a list of previously agreed meeting places. Thrush would understand: at seven o’clock, at place number 3.

If anybody had eavesdropped on Rybnikov’s conversation with the man from Krasnoyarsk, he probably would not have understood a thing.

‘More account books?’ asked Tunnel, a sturdy man with a moustache and eyes that were constantly half closed. ‘We should raise the price. Everything’s so expensive nowadays.’

‘No, not books,’ said Vasilii Alexandrovich, standing in the middle of the cheap hotel room and listening carefully to the footsteps in the corridor. ‘A special delivery. Payment too. Fifteen hundred.’

‘How much?’ the other man gasped.

Rybnikov pulled out a bundle of banknotes.

‘There. You’ll receive the same again in Khabarovsk. If you do everything right.’

‘Three thousand?’

The Krasnoyarsk man’s eyebrows twitched and twitched again, but they didn’t rise up on to his forehead. It’s not easy to gape in astonishment with eyes used to watching the world through a peephole.

The man whom Vasilii Alexandrovich had christened Tunnel had no idea about this nickname, or about the real activities of the people who paid for his services so generously. He was convinced that he was assisting illegal gold miners. The ‘Statute on Private Gold-Mining’ required prospecting cooperatives to hand over their entire output to the state in exchange for so-called ‘assignations’ at a price lower than the market level and with all sorts of other deductions into the bargain. And everybody knew that when the law was unjust or irrational, people found ways to get round it.

Tunnel occupied a post that was extremely useful to the Organisation – he escorted the postal wagons along the Trans-Siberian main line. When he carried notebooks filled with columns of figures from the European part of the empire to the Far East and back, he assumed that this was financial correspondence between the miners and the dealers in black-market gold.

But Rybnikov had fished the postman out of his own cunning little notebook for a different purpose.

‘Yes, three thousand,’ he said firmly. ‘And no one pays money like that for nothing, you know that.’

‘What do I have to carry?’ asked Tunnel, licking his lips, which had turned dry with excitement.

Rybnikov snapped:

‘Explosive. Three poods.’

The postman started blinking, thinking it over. Then he nodded.

‘For the diggings? To smash the rocks?’

‘Yes. Wrap the crates in sackcloth, like packages. Do you know tunnel No. Twelve on the Baikal Bypass Line?’

‘The “Half-Tunnel”? Everyone knows that.’

‘Throw the crates off exactly halfway through, at marker 197. Our man will pick them up afterwards.’

‘But … er, won’t it go off bang?’

Rybnikov laughed.

‘It’s obvious you know nothing about using explosives. Haven’t you ever heard of detonators? Go off bang – don’t talk nonsense.’

Satisfied with this reply, Tunnel spat on his fingers, preparing to count the money, and Vasilii Alexandrovich smiled to himself: It won’t go off bang, it will make a boom that sets the Winter Palace shaking. Then just let them try to rake out the smashed rock and drag out the flattened wagons and locomotive.

The Baikal Bypass Tunnel, which had been built at huge expense and opened only recently, ahead of schedule, was the final link in the Trans-Siberian. The military trains used to line up in immense queues at the Lake Baikal ferry crossing, but now the line pulsated three times faster than before. The Half-Tunnel was the longest one on the line; if it was put out of action, the Manchurian army would be back on short rations again.

And that was only half of Rybnikov’s dual ‘project’.

The second half was to be implemented by the man staying at the Kazan Hotel, with whom Vasilii Alexandrovich spoke quite differently – not curtly and abruptly, but soulfully, with compassionate restraint.

He was a man still quite young, with a sallow complexion and protruding Adam’s apple. He made a strange impression: the subtle facial features, nervous gesticulations and spectacles fitted uncomfortably with the worn pea jacket, calico shirt and rough boots.

The man from Samara coughed up blood and was in love, but his feelings were not requited. This made him hate the whole world, especially the world close to him: the people around him, his native city, his own country. There was no need for secrecy with him – Bridge knew who he was working for and he carried out his assignments with lascivious vengefulness.

Six months earlier, on the instructions of the Organisation, he had left university and taken a job as a driver’s mate on the railway. The heat of the firebox was consuming the final remnants of his lungs, but Bridge was not clinging to life, he wanted to die as soon as possible.

‘You told our man that you wish to go out with a bang. I’ll give you the opportunity to do that,’ Rybnikov declared in ringing tones. ‘This bang will be heard right across Russia, right round the world, in fact.’

‘Tell me, tell me,’ the consumptive said eagerly.

‘The Alexander Bridge in Syzran …’ said Rybnikov, and paused for effect. ‘The longest in Europe, seven hundred sazhens. If it is sent crashing into the Volga, the main line will come to a halt. Do you understand what that means?’

The man he called Bridge smiled slowly.

‘Yes, yes. Collapse, defeat, disgrace. Surrender. You Japanese know where to strike! You deserve the victory!’ The former student’s eyes blazed brightly and he spoke faster and faster with every word. ‘It can be done! I can do it! Do you have powerful explosive? I’ll hide it in the tender, under the coal. I take one slab into the cabin. I throw it in the firebox, it explodes, fireworks!’

He burst into laughter.

‘On the seventh span,’ Rybnikov put in gently. ‘That’s very important. Otherwise it might not work. On the seventh, don’t get that wrong.’

‘I won’t! I go on duty the day after tomorrow. A goods train to Chelyabinsk. The driver will get what’s coming to him, the bastard, he’s always sneering at my cough, calls me “Tapeworm”. I feel sorry for the stoker, though, he’s only a young boy. But I’ll get him off. At the last station I’ll catch his hand with the shovel. Tell him never mind, I’ll shovel the coal myself. But what about our deal?’ Bridge exclaimed with a sudden shudder. ‘You haven’t forgotten about our deal?’

‘How could we?’ asked Rybnikov, setting his hand to his heart. ‘We remember. Ten thousand. We’ll hand it over exactly as you instructed.’

‘Not hand it over, drop it off,’ the sick man cried out nervously. ‘And the note: “In memory of what might have been”. I’ll write it myself, you’ll get it wrong.’

And he wrote it there and then, splattering ink about.

‘She’ll understand … And if she doesn’t, so much the better,’ he muttered with a sniff. ‘Here, take it.’

‘But bear in mind that the individual who is so precious to you will only receive the money and the note on one condition – if the bridge collapses. Don’t get the count wrong, the seventh span.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said the man from Samara, shaking a tear from his eyelashes. ‘If there’s one thing consumption has taught me, it’s precision – I have to take my pills at the right time. But don’t you trick me. Give me your word of honour as a samurai.’

Vasilii Alexandrovich drew himself up to attention, wrinkled up his forehead and narrowed his eyes. Then he performed a fanciful gesture that he had just invented and solemnly declared:

‘My word of honour as a samurai.’

The most important face-to-face conversation was set for seven o’clock in the evening, in a cab drivers’ inn close to the Kaluga Gates (place number three).

The place had been well chosen: dark, dirty, noisy, but not uproarious. In this place they didn’t drink beverages that heated the brain, but tea, in large amounts, entire samovars of it. The clientele was well mannered and incurious – they’d seen quite enough of the hustle and bustle of the streets, and of their own passengers, during the day. Now all they wanted was to sit in peace and quiet and make staid conversation.

Vasilii Alexandrovich arrived ten minutes late and immediately made for the table in the corner, which was occupied by a sturdy man with a beard, an expressionless face and a piercing gaze that was never still for a moment.

Rybnikov had been watching the entrance to the inn for the last hour from the next gateway and had spotted Thrush as he walked up. When he was certain Thrush wasn’t being trailed, he went in.

‘My greetings to Kuzmich,’ he shouted from a distance, holding up one hand with the fingers spread wide. Thrush didn’t know what he looked like, and they had to act out a meeting between old friends.

The revolutionary was not in the least surprised, and he replied in the same tone:

‘Aha, Mustapha. Sit down, you old Tartar dog, we’ll have a spot of tea.’

He squeezed Rybnikov’s hand tightly and slapped him on the shoulder for good measure.

They sat down.

At the next table a large party was sedately consuming tea with hard bread rings. They glanced incuriously at the two friends and turned away again.

‘Are they following you?’ Vasilii Alexandrovich said quietly, asking the most important question first. ‘Are you sure there’s no police agent in your group?’

‘Certainly they’re following me, quite definitely. And we have a stooge. We’re leaving him alone for the time being. Better to know who – they’ll only plant another one, and then try to figure out who it is.’

‘They are following you?’ Rybnikov tautened like a spring and cast a rapid glance in the direction of the counter – there was an exit into a walk-through courtyard behind it.

‘They’re following me, so what?’ the Socialist Revolutionary said with a shrug. ‘Let them follow, when it doesn’t matter. And when it does, I can give them the slip, I’m well used to it. So don’t you get nervous, my bold samurai. I’m clean today.’

It was the second time in one day that Vasilii Alexandrovich had been a called a samurai, but this time the mockery was obvious.

‘You are Japanese, aren’t you?’ the consignee of the Shipment asked, crunching on a lump of sugar and slurping tea noisily from his saucer. ‘I read that some of the samurais are almost indistinguishable from Europeans.’

‘What the hell difference does it make whether I’m a samurai or not?’ Rybnikov asked, out of habit slipping into the tone of the person he was talking to.

‘True enough. Let’s get down to business. Where are the goods?’

‘I took them to a warehouse on the river, as you asked. Why do you need them on the river?’

‘I just do. Where exactly?’

‘I’ll show you later.’

‘Who else knows, apart from you? Unloading, transporting, guarding – that’s quite an operation. Are they reliable people? Know how to keep a still tongue in their heads?’

‘They’ll be as silent as the grave,’ Rybnikov said seriously. ‘I’ll wager my head on that. When will you be ready to collect?’

Thrush scratched his beard.

‘We’re thinking of floating some of the goods, a small part, down the Oka, to Sormovo. A barge will come up from there tomorrow at nightfall. We’ll collect it then.’

‘Sormovo?’ said Vasilii Alexandrovich, narrowing his eyes. ‘That’s good. A good choice. What’s your plan of action?’

‘We’ll start with a strike on the railways. Then a general strike. And when the authorities start getting the jitters, let the Cossacks loose or do a bit of shooting – the combat squads will be out in a flash. Only this time we’ll manage without cobblestones, the weapon of the proletariat.’

‘When are you going to start?’ Rybnikov asked casually. ‘I need it to be within a month.’

The revolutionary’s stony face twisted into an ironic grin.

‘Running out of steam, are you, sons of the Mikado? On your last legs?’

A snigger ran round the room and Vasilii Alexandrovich started in surprise – surely they couldn’t have heard?

He jerked round, and then immediately relaxed.

Two grey-bearded cab drivers had just staggered into the inn, both well oiled. One had missed his footing and fallen, and the other was trying to help him up, muttering:

‘Never mind, Mityukha, a horse has got four legs, and it still stumbles …’

Someone shouted from one of the tables:

‘A horse like that’s ready for the knacker’s yard!’

People cackled with laughter.

Mityukha was about to curse his mockers roundly, but the waiters swooped on him and in half a jiffy they had shoved the two drunken cabbies out: There, don’t you go bringing shame on our establishment.

‘Ah, old Mother Russia,’ Thrush chuckled with another crooked grin. ‘Never mind, soon we’ll give her such a jolt, she’ll jump right out of her pants.’

‘And set off at a run with a bare backside, into the bright future?’

The revolutionary looked intently into the cold eyes of the other man.

I shouldn’t have mocked him, Rybnikov realised immediately. That was going too far.

He held that glance for a few seconds, then pretended that he couldn’t hold out and lowered his eyes.

‘You and we have only one thing in common,’ the SR said contemptuously. ‘A lack of bourgeois sentiment. Only we revolutionaries no longer have any, while you young predators don’t yet have any – you haven’t reached that age yet. You use us, we use you, but you, Mr Samurai, are not my equal. You’re no more than a cog in a machine, and I’m the architect of tomorrow, savvy?’

He is like a cat, Vasilii Alexandrovich decided. Lets you feed him, but he won’t lick your hand – the most he’ll do is purr, and even that’s not very likely.

He had to reply in the same style, but without aggravating the confrontation.

‘All right, Mr Architect, to hell with the fancy words. Let’s discuss the details.’

Thrush even left like a cat, without saying goodbye.

When he had clarified everything he needed to know, he simply got up and darted out through the door behind the counter, leaving Vasilii Alexandrovich to exit via the street.

In front of the inn cabbies were dozing on their coach boxes, waiting for passengers. The first two were the drunks who had been ejected from the inn. The first one was completely out of it, snoring away with his nose down against his knees. The second was more or less holding up, though – he even shook his reins when he caught sight of Rybnikov.

But Vasilii Alexandrovich didn’t take a cab at the inn – that would contravene the rules of conspiracy. He walked quite a long way before he stopped one that happened to be driving past.

At the corner of Krivokolenny Street, at a poorly lit and deserted spot, Rybnikov put a rouble note on the seat, jumped down on to the road – gently, without even making the carriage sway – and ducked into a gateway.

As they say, God takes care of those who take care of themselves.