ADJUTANT GENERAL LAVRENTII ARKADIEVICH MIZINOV, head of the Third Section and chief of the corps of gendarmes, rubbed his eyes, which were red with fatigue. The golden aiguillettes on his dress uniform jingled dully. During the last twenty-four hours he had had no chance to change his clothes, let alone to get any sleep. The previous evening a special messenger had dragged General Mizinov away from the ball in honor of the Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich’s name day. And then it had all begun…
The general cast an unfriendly glance at the boy with the disheveled hair and badly scratched nose who was sitting beside him, poring over some papers. He hadn’t slept for two nights and he was still as fresh as a Yaroslavl cucumber. And he acted as if he had been sitting around in high-level offices all his life. Very well, let him work his sorcery. But this Brilling business! It simply defied comprehension!
“Well, Fandorin, will you be long? Or have you been distracted by yet another of your ‘ideas’?” the general asked strictly, feeling that after a sleepless night and an exhausting day he was unlikely to be having any more ideas himself.
“Just a moment, Your Excellency, just a moment,” the young whip-persnapper mumbled. “There are just five entries left. I did warn you that the list might be in code. See what a cunning code it is. They haven’t been able to identify half the letters, and I don’t remember everyone who was in it myself…Aha, this is the postmaster from Denmark, that’s who he is. Right, then, what’s this? The first letter’s not decoded. There’s a cross, and a cross for the second one, too, and the third and the fourth—two m’s, then another cross, then an n, then a dwith a question mark, and the last two are missing. That gives us cross cross MM cross ND(?) cross cross.”
“Such gibberish.” General Mizinov sighed. “Brilling would have guessed it in a moment. Are you quite sure it wasn’t just a fit of temporary insanity? It’s impossible even to imagine that…”
“Absolutely sure, Your Excellency,” Erast Fandorin repeated for the umpteenth time. “And I quite distinctly heard him say ‘Azazel.’ Wait! I’ve remembered! Bezhetskaya had some commander or other on her list. We must assume this is him.”
“Commander is a rank in the British and American fleets,” Mizinov explained. “It corresponds to our captain second class.” He strode angrily across the room. “Azazel, Azazel, what is this Azazel that has come to plague us? So far we clearly don’t know a single thing about it! Brilling’s Moscow investigation is totally worthless! We must assume it’s all nonsense, invention, lies—including all those terrorists and that attempt on the tsarevich’s life! He’s bound to have tucked away all the loose ends! Palmed us off with a few corpses. Or did he really hand us some nihilist idiots? That would be just like him—he was a very, very capable man…Curses—where can the results of that search have got to? They’ve been rummaging in there for days now!”
The door opened quietly and a glum, skinny face wearing gold-rimmed spectacles was thrust through the crack.
“Captain Belozerov, Your Excellency.”
“At last! Talk of the devil! Send him in.”
A middle-aged officer of the gendarmes, whom Fandorin had seen the previous day at Cunningham’s house, walked into the office, squinting and screwing up his weary eyes.
“We have it, Your Excellency,” he reported in a low voice. “We divided the entire house and the garden into squares and turned everything upside down and went through it all with a fine-tooth comb—not a thing. Then Agent Ailenson, a detective with an excellent nose for a lead, thought of sounding out the walls in the basement of the Astair House. And what do you think, General? We discovered a hidden compartment containing twenty boxes with about two hundred cards in each. The cipher was strange—some kind of hieroglyphs, quite different from the one in the letter. I gave instructions for the boxes to be brought here. I’ve set the entire cryptography section onto it and they’re about to start work.”
“Well done, Belozerov, well done,” said the general in a more generous mood now. “And that man with the nose, recommend him for a decoration. Well, then, let us pay a visit to the cipher room. Come along, Fandorin—it will be interesting for you, too. You can finish up later—there’s no great hurry now.”
They went up two floors and set off quickly along an endless corridor. As they turned a corner they saw an official running toward them, waving his hands in the air.
“Disaster, Your Excellency, disaster! The ink is fading before our very eyes. We can’t understand it!”
Mizinov set off at a trot, which did not at all suit his corpulent figure: the gold tassels on his epaulets fluttered like the wings of a moth. Belozerov and Fandorin disrespectfully overtook their high-ranking superior and were the first to burst in through the tall white doors.
The large room completely filled with tables was in absolute turmoil. About a dozen officials were dashing about, fussing over stacks of neat white cards set out across the tables. Erast Fandorin snatched one up and caught a brief glimpse of barely discernible figures resembling Chinese hieroglyphs. Before his eyes the hieroglyphs disappeared and the card was left absolutely blank.
“What devil’s work is this?” exclaimed the general, panting heavily. “Some kind of invisible ink?”
“I’m afraid it is far worse than that, Your Excellency,” said a gentleman with the appearance of a professor, examining a card against the light. “Captain, didn’t you say the card file was kept in something like a photographic booth?”
“Precisely so, sir,” Belozerov confirmed.
“And can you recall what kind of lighting it had? Perhaps a red lamp?”
“Absolutely right. It was a red electrical lamp.”
“Just as I thought. Alas, General Mizinov, the card archive has been lost to us and cannot be restored.”
“How’s that?” the general exclaimed furiously. “Not good enough, Mister Collegiate Counselor, you must think of something. You’re a master of your trade, a leading light—”
“But not a magician, Your Excellency. The cards were obviously treated with a special solution and it is only possible to work with them in red light. Now the layer to which the characters were applied has been exposed to daylight. Very clever, you must admit. It’s the first time I’ve come across anything of the sort.”
The general knitted his shaggy eyebrows and began snorting menacingly. The room fell silent, with the silence that comes before a storm. But the peal of thunder never came.
“Let’s go, Fandorin,” Mizinov said in a dejected tone. “You have work to finish.”
THE FINAL TWO ENCODED ENTRIES remained undeciphered. They contained information that had arrived on the final day, the thirtieth of June, and Fandorin was unable to identify them. The time had come to sum up the situation.
Striding to and fro across his office, the weary General Mizinov reasoned out loud. “So, let us draw together the little that we do have. There exists a certain international organization with the provisional name of Azazel. To judge from the number of cards, which we shall now never be able to read, it has three thousand eight hundred and fifty-four members. We know something at least about forty-seven of them, or rather forty-five, since two of the entries remained undeciphered. However, that something amounts to no more than their nationality and the positions that they occupy. No name, no age, no address…What else do we know? The names of two dead Azazelians, Cunningham and Brilling. And, in addition, there is Amalia Bezhetskaya in England—if this Zurov of yours has not killed her, if she is still in England, and if that really is her name…Azazel acts aggressively, killing without hesitation. There is clearly some global purpose involved. But what is it? They are not Masons, because I myself am a member of a Masonic lodge, and no ordinary one either. Hmm…Remember, Fandorin, you didn’t hear that.”