Erast Petrovich quickly estimated the distance (about seventy paces, and the grey hovels of the native town were no more than a hundred away) and turned to the constable.
‘Have you loaded it? Give it to me.’
He took aim according to all the rules of marksmanship. He held his breath and aligned the sight. He made only a slight adjustment for movement – the shot was almost straight in line with the running man. One bullet, he mustn’t miss.
The enchanted fugitive’s legs were twinkling rapidly. No higher than the knees, or you might kill him, the titular counsellor told the bullet, and pressed the trigger.
Got him! The figure in the kimono fell for the third time. Only this time the pursuers didn’t stand still, they dashed forward as fast as they could.
They could see the wounded man moving, trying to get up. Then he did get up and hopped on one leg, but lost his balance and collapsed. He crept towards the water, leaving a trail of blood.
The most incredible thing of all was that he still didn’t look round even once.
When they were only about twenty paces away from the wounded man, he stopped crawling – clearly he had realised that he wouldn’t get away. He made a rapid movement – and a narrow blade glinted in the sun.
‘Quick! He’s going to cut his throat!’ the doctor shouted.
But that wasn’t what the shinobi did. He ran the blade rapidly round his face, as if he wanted to set it in an oval frame. Then he grabbed at his chin with his left hand, tugged with a dull growl – and a limp rag went flying through the air, landing at Erast Petrovich’s feet. Fandorin almost stumbled when he realised what it was – the skin of a face, trimmed and torn off; red on one side, with the other side looking like mandarin peel.
And then the man finally turned round.
In his short life, Erast Petrovich had seen many terrible things; some visions from his past still woke him at night in a cold sweat. But nothing on earth could have been more nightmarish than that crimson mask with its white circles of eyes and the grinning teeth.
‘Kongojyo!’ the lipless mouth said quietly but distinctly, opening wider and wider.
The hand with the bloody knife crept slowly up to the throat.
Only then did Fandorin think to squeeze his eyes shut. And he stood like that until the fit of nausea and dizziness passed off.
‘So that’s what “cutting off your face” means!’ he heard Dr Twigs say in an excited voice. ‘He really did cut it off, it’s not a figure of speech at all!’
Lockston reacted the most calmly of all. He leaned down over the body, which -God be praised – was lying on its stomach. Two holes in the kimono, one slightly higher, one slightly lower, exposed a glint of metal. The sergeant ripped the material apart with his finger and whistled.
‘So that’s what his magic is made of!’
Under his kimono, the dead man was wearing thin tempered-steel armour.
While Lockston explained to the doctor what had happened at the station, Fandorin stood to one side and tried in vain to still the frantic beating of his heart.
His heart was not racing because of the running, or the shooting, or even the ghastly sight of that severed face. The vice-consul had simply recalled the words that a husky woman’s voice had spoken a few minutes earlier: ‘Today you will kill a man’.
‘So Mr Fandorin was right after all,’ the doctor said with a shrug. ‘It really was an absolutely genuine ninja. I don’t know where and how he learned the secrets of their trade, but there’s no doubt about it. The steel plate that saved him from the first two bullets is called a ninja-muneate. The fire egg is a torinoko, an empty shell into which the shinobi introduce a combustible mixture through a small hole. And did you see the way he grinned before he died? I’ve come across a strange term in books about the ninja – the Final Smile – but the books didn’t explain what it was. Well now, not a very appetising sight!’
How fiercely I yearn
To smile with a carefree heart
At least at the last
EARLY PLUM RAIN
Doronin stood at the window, watching the rivulets run down the glass. ‘Baiu, plum rain,’ he said absentmindedly. ‘Somewhat early, it usually starts at the end of May.’
The vice-consul did not pursue the conversation about natural phenomena and silence set in again.
Vsevolod Vitalievich was trying to make sense of his assistant’s report. The assistant was waiting, not interrupting the thought process.
‘I tell you what,’ the consul said eventually, turning round. ‘Before I sit down to write a report for His Excellency, let’s run thought the sequence of facts once more. I state the facts and you tell me if each point is correct or not. All right?’
‘All right.’
‘Excellent. Let’s get started. Once upon a time there was a certain party who possessed almost magical abilities. Let us call him No-Face.’ (Erast Fandorin shuddered as he recalled the ‘final smile’ of the man who had killed himself earlier in the day.) ‘Employing his inscrutable art, No-Face killed Captain Blagolepov – and so adroitly that it would have remained a dark secret, if not for a certain excessively pernickety vice-consul. A fact?’
‘An assumption.’
‘Which I would nonetheless include among the facts, in view of subsequent events. Namely: the attempt to kill your Masa, the witness to the killing. An attempt committed in a manner no less, if not even more, exotic than the murder. As you policemen say, the criminal’s signatures match. A fact?’
‘Arguably.’
‘The criminal did not succeed in eliminating Masa – that damned vice-consul interfered once again. So now, instead of one witness, there were two.’
‘Why didn’t he kill me? I was completely helpless. Even if the snake didn’t bite me, he could probably have finished me off in a thousand other ways.’
Doronin pressed his hand against his chest modestly.
‘My friend, you are forgetting that just at that moment your humble servant appeared on the scene. The murder of the consul of a great power would be a serious international scandal. There has been nothing of the kind since Griboedov’s time. On that occasion, as a sign of his contrition, the Shah of Persia presented the Tsar of Russia with the finest diamond in his crown, which weighed nine hundred carats. What do you think,’ Vsevolod Vitalievich asked brightly, ‘how many carats would they value me at? Of course, I’m not an ambassador, only a consul, but I have more diplomatic experience that Griboedov did. And precious stones are cheaper nowadays… All right, joking aside, the fact is that No-Face did not dare to kill me or did not want to. As you have already had occasion to realise, in Japan even the bandits are patriots of their homeland.’
Erast Petrovich was not entirely convinced by this line of reasoning, but he did not object.
‘And by the way, I do not hear any words of gratitude for saving your life,’ said the consul, pretending his feelings were hurt.
‘Thank you.’
‘Don’t mention it. Let’s move on. After the unsuccessful bit of theatre with the “creeping thing”, No-Face somehow finds out that the investigation has another strange, incredible piece of evidence – the prints of his thumb. Unlike Bukhartsev and – yes, I admit it – your humble servant, No-Face took this circumstance very seriously. And I can guess why. You drew up a verbal portrait of the man whom Masa saw at the Rakuen, did you not?’
‘Yes.’
‘Does it match the description of your uninvited guest?’
‘Marginally. Only as far as the height is concerned – little over four foot six inches – and the slender build. However, in Japan that kind of physique is not unusual. As for all the rest… At the gambling den, Masa saw a doddery old man with a stoop, a trembling head and pigmentation spots on his face. But my old m-man was quite fresh and sprightly. I wouldn’t put his age at more than sixty.’