Erast Petrovich could not make out the person holding the lantern, but since it was obvious that no servant would behave in such a suspicious manner, the vice-consul readied himself for more decisive action. He pressed cautiously on the left frame of the window – it was locked. But when he pressed the right frame, it yielded slightly. Excellent! Possibly this was the very route the uninvited visitor had used to gain access, or perhaps the window had been left half open to air the room, but that was not important now. The important thing was that this nightbird could be nabbed.
If only the window frame didn’t creak.
Fandorin started opening the frame slowly, a quarter of an inch at a time, keeping his eyes fixed on the wandering beam of light.
It suddenly stopped, pointing at one of the shelves, which did not look remarkable in any way. There was a gentle thud and the beam stopped trembling.
He had put the lantern down on the floor, the titular counsellor guessed.
Someone standing on all fours appeared or, rather, crept into the circle of light. Narrow shoulders, gleaming black hair, the white stripe of a starched collar. A European?
The titular counsellor pulled himself up higher, so that he could put one knee on the windowsill. Just a little more, and the crack would be wide enough to get through.
But then the damned window frame did creak after all.
The light instantly went out. Abandoning caution, Fandorin pushed the window open and jumped down on to the floor, but could not move any farther than that, since he couldn’t see a thing. He held out his hand with the Herstal in it and strained his ears, listening in case his adversary was creeping up on him.
The man might be invisible now, but he was a mystery no longer. In the brief moment before the lantern went out, the hunched-over individual had looked round, and Erast Petrovich had clearly made out a brilliantined parting, a thin face with a hooked nose, and even a white flower in a buttonhole.
His Excellency Prince Onokoji, the high society spy, in person.
The titular counsellor’s precautions were apparently unnecessary. The Japanese dandy had no intention of attacking him. In fact, to judge from the absolute silence that filled the study, the prince’s trail was already cold. But that was not important now.
Fandorin put his revolver back in its holster and went to find the stairway to the first floor.
Tsurumaki listened to what the vice-consul told him and scratched the bridge of his nose. The grimace that he made suggested that the news was perplexing rather than surprising. He cursed in Japanese and started complaining:
‘Oh, these aristocrats… he lives under my roof, occupies an entire wing, I pay him a pension of five thousand a month, and it’s still not enough. And I know, I know that he deals in secrets and rumours on the side. I use him myself sometimes, for a separate fee. But this is just too much. Our little prince must be completely mired in debt. Ah!’ The fat man sighed mournfully. ‘If his late father were not my onjin, I’d tell him to go to hell. He’s trying to get to my safe.’
Erast Petrovich was astounded by such a phlegmatic response.
‘I truly admire the Japanese attitude to a debt of gratitude, but it seems to m-me that everything has its limits.’
‘Never mind,’ said the Don, with a flourish of his briar pipe. ‘He can’t open the safe in any case. He needs the key for that, and the key is here, I always keep it with me.’
He pulled a little chain up from behind his shirt collar. There was a little gold rose with a thorny stem hanging on it.
‘A beautiful trinket, eh? You hold the bud, put it in, the thorns slip into the slots… There you have it, the “Open sesame” to my magical Aladdin’s cave.’
Tsurumaki kissed the little key and put it away again.
‘Don’t they scratch?’ asked Fandorin. ‘I mean the thorns.’
‘Of course they scratch, and quite painfully too. But it’s the kind of pain that only makes life seem sweeter,’ the millionaire said with a wink. ‘It reminds me of the glittering little stones and the gold ingots. I can bear it.’
‘You keep gold and precious stones at home? But why? There are b-bank vaults for that.’
‘I know. I have a bank of my own. With strong, armour-plated vaults. But we blood-sucking spiders prefer to keep our booty in our own web. All the best to you, Fandorin-san. Thank you for the curious information.’
The titular counsellor took his leave, feeling rather piqued: he had wanted to be a rescuer, and instead he had ended up as an informer. But he went outside, looked in the direction of the pavilion hovering over the smooth black surface of the pond, and felt such a keen, overwhelming rush of happiness that his paltry disappointment was instantly forgotten.
However, the ‘taut bowstring’ reverberated not only in bliss, and not all the arrows that it fired went darting up into the starry sky. A certain poignantly distressful note, some kind of poisoned needle, blighted Erast Petrovich’s happiness. At night he had no time for suffering, because love lives only in the here and now, but when he was far from O-Yumi, in his solitude, Fandorin thought of only one thing.
At their first lover’s tryst, as he kissed O-Yumi on her delightfully protruding little ear, he had suddenly caught a very faint whiff of tobacco smoke – English pipe tobacco. He had pulled away, about to ask the question – but he didn’t ask it. What for? So that she would lie? So that she would answer: ‘No, no, it’s all over between him and me’? Or so that she would tell the truth and make it impossible for them to carry on meeting?
Afterwards he had been tormented by his own cowardice. During the day he prepared an entire speech, made ready to tell her that things couldn’t go on like this, that it was stupid, cruel, unnatural and, in the final analysis, humiliating! She had to leave Bullcox once and for all. He tried a couple of times to start this conversation, but she simply repeated: ‘You don’t understand. Don’t ask me about anything. I can’t tell you the truth, and I don’t want to lie.’ And then she set her hands and lips to work, and he surrendered, and forgot everything else in the world, only to suffer the same resentment and jealousy the next day.
Consul Doronin could undoubtedly see that something out of the ordinary was happening to his assistant, but he didn’t ask any questions. Poor Vsevolod Vitalievich was certain that Fandorin was conducting the investigation at night, and he kept his word, he didn’t interfere. Sometimes the titular counsellor’s conscience bothered him because of this, but it bothered him far less than the smell of English tobacco.
On the sixth night (which was also the second one spent in the pavilion without his beloved) the vice-consul’s suffering reached its highest point. Strictly forbidding himself to think about the reason why O-Yumi had not been able to come this time, Erast Petrovich called on logic to help: if there is a difficult problem, a solution has to be found – what could possibly be easier for a devotee of analytical theory?
And what was the result? A solution was found immediately, and it was so simple, so obvious, that Fandorin was amazed at his own blindness.
He waited for the evening, arrived at the pavilion earlier than usual and, as soon as he heard O-Yumi’s footsteps approaching, he ran out to meet her.
‘What a b-blockhead I am!’ Erast Petrovich declared, taking hold of her hand. ‘You don’t have to be afraid of Bullcox. We’ll get married. You’ll be the wife of a Russian subject, and that man won’t be able to do anything to you!’
The offer of his heart and his hand was greeted in a most surprising fashion.
O-Yumi burst into laughter, as if she had heard a not very clever but terribly funny joke. She kissed the titular counsellor on the nose.
‘Don’t be silly. We can’t be husband and wife.’