The assistant director raised his round brown eyes and started batting his eyelids.
‘Are you accusing me of murdering Hippolyte? Me?’
For an actor of third-level parts he portrayed astonishment rather well. Erast Petrovich even laughed.
‘Who else?’
‘But surely you did it, didn’t you?’
Fandorin had not often encountered such barefaced insolence. He even felt slightly disconcerted.
‘What?’
‘But you gave yourself away! Today, during the tea break!’ Nonarikin cautiously touched the rapier blade, moving it away from his chest. ‘I’d been tormented by doubt since the day before yesterday. A man like Hippolyte couldn’t kill himself! It simply doesn’t make any sense. He loved himself too much. Then suddenly you started talking about goblets. And it hit me! There was someone there with Hippolyte! Someone drank wine with him. And slipped poison in his drink! I went to the properties room to take a look at the other goblet. And then I saw the Bure watch. It was as if a veil fell from my eyes! It all fitted together! The mysterious Mr Fandorin, who turned up here for no obvious reason, then disappeared and then appeared again – the day after Hippolyte was killed! That slip about the goblets! The lost watch! I guessed that you would come back for it. You know, I’m no great master at solving mysteries, but I believe in the justice of Fate and God’s judgement. So I decided that if you came, I would challenge you to a duel. And if Fandorin was the criminal, Fate would punish him. I went to my dressing room, came back here and started waiting for you, and you came. But you’re still alive, and now I don’t know what to think…’
He shrugged in bewilderment.
‘Raving nonsense!’ Fandorin sniggered. ‘Why on earth would I want to kill Emeraldov?’
‘Out of jealousy.’ Nonarikin gave him a look of weary reproach. ‘Emeraldov was pestering her far too openly. And you’re in love with her, that’s obvious. You’ve lost your head over her too. Like so many others…’
Feeling himself blushing, Fandorin didn’t even bother to ask who Nonarikin meant by that and raised his voice.
‘We’re not talking about me, but you! What was that nonsense you were spouting about the judgement of God? You can’t kill anyone with these twigs!’
The assistant director cast a wary look at the blade.
‘Yes, it’s a stage-prop rapier. But with a precisely directed blow you can pierce the skin with it – I did that with my first thrust.’
‘What of it? No one has ever died from a little scratch.’
‘It depends what kind of scratch. I told you that I went to get something from my dressing room. I have a medicine chest there, with remedies for every possible occasion. All sorts of things happen in the company, you know. Mr Mephistov has epileptic fits, Vasilisa Prokofievna has the vapours, and there are injuries too. And I’m responsible for everything and everyone. I have to be a jack-of-all-trades. They taught us that in the officers’ schooclass="underline" a good commander must know how to do everything.’
‘What are you t-telling me this for? What business is your medicine chest of mine?’ Fandorin interrupted him irritably, annoyed that the secrets of his heart had been so obvious to an outsider.
‘Along with everything else in there I have a little bottle of concentrated venom of the central Asian cobra. I brought it from Turkestan. An indispensable remedy for nervous ailments. Our ladies often suffer very serious hysterics. If Madam Vulpinova gets really carried away, she can go into convulsions. But I just have to put a couple of drops on cotton wool, rub her temples – and it’s gone, like magic.’ Nonarikin demonstrated how he rubbed the venom into the skin. ‘So I got this idea. I smeared the tip of one of the rapiers. The way Laertes did in Hamlet. I thought: if Fandorin poisoned Hippolyte, let him die of poison too, it will be God’s judgement. The rapiers are absolutely the same to look at, I didn’t even know myself which of them was poisoned. So our duel wasn’t theatrical at all, it was absolutely, genuinely, to the death. If the venom gets into the blood, the terminal spasms set in after two minutes, and then the breathing is paralysed.’
Erast Petrovich shook his head – this was raving lunacy after all.
‘But what if you’d been scratched by the poisoned rapier?’
The assistant director shrugged and replied:
‘I told you, I believe in Fate. Those are more than just empty words to me.’
‘But I don’t believe you!’ Fandorin raised the tip of the rapier right up to his eyes. It really did seem to have a damp gleam.
‘Careful, don’t prick yourself! And if you don’t believe me – let me have it.’
Erast Petrovich willingly handed him the weapon, but also lowered his hand into his left pocket, where his revolver lay. This assistant director was a strange individual. It wasn’t clear what to expect from him. Was he pretending to be half-witted? Would he attack again now? That would be the simplest finale. Fandorin deliberately turned his back, since he could follow Nonarikin’s movements from the shadow on the floor.
The former lieutenant’s silhouette swayed, then folded over double at lightning speed, with his outreached arm ending in the thin line of the rapier. Erast Petrovich was prepared for an attack, he jumped to the left and turned round. However, the shadow had misled him. It turned out that Nonarikin had made a thrust in the opposite direction.
With a cry of: ‘I lay a ducat that it is dead!’ he jabbed the rapier at a rat sitting peacefully on the floor, but didn’t run it through, merely pricked it slightly and flung it against the wall. The little beast squealed and darted away, knocking over cardboard goblets and papier-mâché vases.
‘You’ve l-lost your ducat. Now what?’ Erast Petrovich asked spitefully. He felt embarrassed about his desperate leap. At least he hadn’t pulled out his revolver.
But Nonarikin didn’t seem even to have noticed that Fandorin had shied away from him. The assistant director wiped the tip of the blade very cautiously with a handkerchief and started moving out the shelves.
‘Feast your eyes on that.’
The rat was lying there belly up, with all four legs twitching.
‘On this little animal the venom acted almost instantaneously. I told you, I wanted to punish a murderer. But Fate has acquitted you. You have been purged in my eyes.’
Only at this point did Erast Petrovich really believe that he had escaped an absurd, cruel death by a miracle. If not for his eternal good luck, which had prompted him to choose the poisoned weapon without even pausing for thought, he would be lying on the floor now, like that rat, with his open mouth straining convulsively. It would have been an idiotic death…
‘M-merci beaucoup. Only you have not yet been purged in my eyes. Afterwards the poisoner brought the second goblet back to the properties room. You are the only one with free access to the properties room. And you also had a motive: Emeraldov had been given the part that you were counting on.’
‘If we killed each other over parts, the theatres would have turned into graveyards a long time ago. You have an excessively romantic idea of actors.’ Nonarikin actually smiled. ‘As for the properties room, I certainly do have the key. But your example shows that it is possible to gain entry without it. And another thing. Do you know when exactly Hippolyte met his killer?’
‘I do. The nightwatchman saw him shortly after nine. And according to the post-mortem results, death occurred no later than midnight. I enquired from the police.’
‘So the crime was committed some time between shortly after nine and twelve o’clock. Then I have an alibi.’
‘What is it?’