The scent of skin and hair set the pulse pounding in Fandorin’s temples.
‘Where did you…’ he whispered breathlessly, but didn’t finish – hot lips covered his mouth.
Not another word was spoken in the bedroom. In the world into which the titular counsellor had been drawn by those gentle hands and fragrant lips, there were no words, there could not be any, they would only have confused and disrupted the enchantment.
After his recent adventure in Calcutta, which had led to his missing the steamship, Erast Petrovich regarded himself as an experienced man of the world, but in O-Yumi’s embrace he did not feel like a man, but some incredible musical instrument – sometimes a seductive flute, sometimes a divine violin or a sweet reed pipe, and the virtuoso magical musician played on all of them, mingling heavenly harmony with earthly algebra.
In the brief intermissions the intoxicated vice-consul attempted to babble something, but the only reply was kisses, the touch of tender fingertips and quiet laughter.
When grey streaks of dawn started filtering in through the window, Fandorin made an incredible effort of will and surfaced from the hypnotic haze. He had enough strength for only a single question – the most important one of all, nothing else had any meaning. He put his hands on her temples and held her so that those huge eyes filled with mysterious light were very close.
‘Will you stay with me?’
She shook her head.
‘But… but you will come again?’
O-Yumi also put her hands on his temples, made a light circular movement and pressed gently, and Fandorin instantly fell asleep without realising it. He simply fell into a deep sleep and didn’t even feel her hands gently supporting his head as they laid it on the pillow.
At that moment Erast Petrovich was already dreaming. In his dream he was rushing straight up to the sky in a blue chariot that glittered with an icy sheen, rushing higher and higher. His road led to a star that was drawing the diamond chariot towards it with its transparent rays. Little gold stars went rushing past, wafting fresh, icy breezes into his face. Erast Petrovich felt very good, and the only thing he remembered was that he mustn’t look back, no matter what – or he would fall and be dashed to pieces.
But he didn’t look back. He rushed onwards and upwards, towards the star. The star called Sirius.
It shines, unaware
Even of its own true name.
The star Sirius
HORSE DUNG
Fandorin was woken by someone patting him gently but insistently on the cheek.
‘O-Yumi,’ he whispered, and saw before him a face with slanting eyes, but, alas, it was not the sorceress of the night, but the secretary Shirota.
‘I beg your pardon,’ said the secretary, ‘but you simply would not wake up, and I was starting to feel alarmed…’
The titular counsellor sat up in bed and looked around. The bedroom was illumined by the slanting rays of the early sun. There no O-Yumi, nor any sign at all of her recent presence.
‘Mr Vice-Consul, I am ready to make my report,’ Shirota began, holding a sheet of paper at the ready.
‘Yes, yes, of course,’ Fandorin muttered, glancing under the blanket.
The bedsheet was crumpled, but that didn’t mean anything. Maybe there was something left – a long hair, a crumb of powder, a scarlet trace of lipstick?
Not a thing.
Had it all been a dream?
‘Following your instructions, I concealed myself in the bushes beside the fork at which the two roads separate. At forty-three minutes past two a running man appeared from the direction of the wasteland…’
‘Sniff that!’ Fandorin interrupted, burying his nose in the pillow. ‘What is that scent?’
The secretary took the pillow and conscientiously drew air in through his nose.
‘That is the aroma of ayameh. What is that in Russian, now… iris.’
The titular counsellor’s face lit up in a happy smile.
It wasn’t a dream!
She had been here! It was the aroma of her perfume!
‘Iris is the main aroma of the present season,’ Shirota explained. ‘Women scent themselves with it and they steep the laundry in it at the washhouses. In April the aroma of the season was wistaria, in June it will be azalea.’
The smile slid off Erast Petrovich’s face.
‘May I continue?’ the Japanese asked, handing back the pillow.
And he continued his report. A minute later Fandorin had completely stopped thinking about the scent of irises and his nocturnal apparition.
The paddy fields shone unbearably brightly in the sunlight, as if the entire valley had been transformed into one immense cracked mirror. The dark cracks in the effulgent surface were the boundaries that divided the plots into little rectangles, and in each rectangle there was a figure in a broad straw hat, pottering through the water, bent double. The peasants were weeding the rice fields.
At the centre of the fields there was a small, wooded hill, crowned by a red roof with its edges curled upwards. Erast Petrovich already knew that it was an abandoned Shinto shrine.
‘The peasants don’t go there any more,’ said Shirota. ‘It’s haunted. Last year they found a dead tramp by the door. Semushi was right to choose a place like this to hide. It’s a very fine refuge for a bad man. And it has a clear view of all the approaches.’
‘And what will happen to the shrine now?’
‘Either they will burn it down and build a new one, or they will perform a ceremony of purification. The village elder and the kannusi, the priest, have not decided yet.’
A narrow embankment no more than five paces wide ran through the fields to the shrine. Erast Petrovich examined the path to the hill carefully, then the moss-covered steps leading up to the strange red wooden gateway: just two verticals and a crosspiece, an empty gateway with no gates and no fence. A gateway that did not separate anything from anything.
‘That is the torii,’ the secretary explained. ‘The gate to the Other World.’
Well, that made sense, if it led to the Other World.
The titular counsellor had an excellent pair of binoculars with twelve-fold magnification, a souvenir of the siege of Plevna.
‘I can’t see Masa,’ said Fandorin. ‘Where is he?’
‘You are looking in the wrong direction. Your servant is over there, in the communal plot. Farther left, farther left.’
The vice-consul and his assistant were lying in the thick grass at the edge of a rice field. Erast Petrovich caught Masa in the twin circles. He was no different from the peasants: entirely naked, apart from a loincloth, with a fan hanging behind his back. Except perhaps that his sides were rounder than those of the other workers.
The round-sided peasant straightened up, fanned himself and looked round towards the village. It was definitely him: fat cheeks and half-closed eyes. He looked close enough for Fandorin to flick him on the nose.
‘He has been here since the morning. He took a job as a field-hand for ten sen. We agreed that if he noticed anything special, he would hang the fan behind his back. See, the fan is behind his back. He has spotted something!’
Fandorin focused his binoculars on the hill again and started slowly examining the hunchback’s hiding place, square by square.
‘Did he come straight here from Yokohama? He d-didn’t stop off anywhere along the way?’
‘He came straight here.’
What was that white patch there, among the branches?
Erast Petrovich turned the little wheel and gave a quiet whistle. There was a man sitting in a tree. The hunchback? What was he doing up there?
But last night Semushi had been wearing a dark brown kimono, not a white one.
The man sitting in the tree turned his head. Fandorin still couldn’t make out the face, but the shaved nape glinted.