The prince held his open hand out through the bars.
‘One ampoule in reserve. And the syringe. As an advance.’
‘Give them to him,’ Asagawa told the doctor. ‘If he talks nonsense, we’ll take them away again.’
Savouring the moment, the high-society gent kept his audience in suspense for a brief moment while he brushed a speck of dust off his rather crumpled frock coat and adjusted his lapel. He carefully placed the ampoule in his waistcoat pocket, after first kissing it and whispering: ‘Oh, my little piece of happiness!’ He smiled triumphantly.
‘Ah, how little I am appreciated!’ he exclaimed. ‘And how poorly I am paid. But the moment they need something, they come running to me: “Tell us, find out, pick someone’s brains”. Onokoji knows everything about everybody. Mark my words, gentlemen. In the century to come, which it is unlikely that I shall live to see, owing to my physical frailty, the most valuable commodity will be information. More valuable than gold, diamonds or even morphine!’
‘Stop blabbering!’ the sergeant roared. ‘Or I’ll take it back!’
‘See how the red-hairs talk to the scion of an ancient Japanese family,’ the prince complained to Asagawa, but when the inspector grabbed him menacingly by the lapels, he stopped playing the fool.
‘Mr Suga is a great pedant. A genuine poet of the bureaucratic art. Therein lies the secret of his power. During his years in the police department he has collected a secret archive of hundreds of files.’
‘I’ve never heard about that,’ said the inspector, shaking his head.
‘Naturally. Neither had I. Until one fine day Suga called me into his office and showed me something. Ah, I am a man of lively fantasy, I flit through life like a butterfly. It is not hard to catch my delicate wings with crude fingers. You, gentlemen, are not the first to have done so…’ The prince sighed woefully. ‘On that day, in the course of a conversation that was most unpleasant for me, Suga boasted that he had similar picklocks to open up many highly influential individuals. Oh, Mr Intendant understands perfectly well the great future that lies ahead for information!’
‘What did he want from you?’ Fandorin asked.
‘The same as everyone else. Information about a certain person. And he received it. You see, the contents of my file are such that I did not dare to argue.’
The sergeant chuckled.
‘Underage girls?’
‘Ah, if only… But there’s no need for you to know about it. What matters to you is that I gave Suga what he wanted, but I didn’t want to remain a puppet in his hands for ever afterwards. I turned to certain masters of secret arts for help – not in person, naturally, but through an intermediary.’
‘Masters of secret arts?’ Twigs exclaimed. ‘You wouldn’t be talking about shinobi, would you?’
The doctor and the vice-consul exchanged glances. Was this really possible?
‘Precisely,’ Onokoji said, as if that were perfectly normal, and yawned, putting his elegantly manicured hand over his mouth. ‘To the dear, kind ninja.’
‘S-so… So they do exist?’
Lurid images appeared before Erast Petrovich’s eyes – first the gaping jaws of the snake, then the red mask of the man with no face. The vice-consul shuddered.
The doctor shook his head mistrustfully.
‘If the ninja had survived, people would know about it.’
‘Those who need to know, do know,’ the prince said with a shrug. ‘Those who trade in these arts do not print advertisements in the newspapers. Our family has been employing the services of the Momochi clan for three hundred years.’
‘The same clan? The descendants of the great Momochi Tambi, who killed the witch disguised as a moon with his arrow?’ the doctor asked in a trembling voice.
‘Aha. The very same.’
‘So in 1581 on Mount Hijiyama the samurais didn’t kill all of them? Who escaped?’
‘On which mount?’ Onokoji was clearly not well informed about the history of his own country. ‘I’ve no idea. All I know is that the masters of the Momochi clan serve a very narrow circle of clients and charge very dearly for their services. But they know their job well. My intermediary, my late father’s senior samurai, contacted them and gave them the commission. The shinobi discovered where Suga hides his secrets. If you’re interested in the conspiracy against Okubo, you can be certain that all the information you need is kept there. Suga does not destroy documents, they are his investment in the future.’
‘I have no doubt that my missing reports are there too!’ Asagawa said rapidly, turning to Fandorin.
But the vice-consul was more concerned with the masters of secret arts.
‘But how do people contact the ninja?’ he asked.
‘At our court it was the senior samurai who dealt with that. The prince’s most trusted adviser. They always come from the same family and have served our family for almost four hundred years. That is, they used to serve…’ Onokoji sighed. ‘There are no more principalities or devoted vassals now. But our senior samurai, a most magnanimous man, carried out my request for old times’ sake. He even paid Momochi the advance out of his own funds. An old man with a heart of pure gold – to do that he had to mortgage his family estate. The shinobi did a good job and, as I already said, they found the hiding place, But they didn’t enter it, they wanted more money for that – those were the terms of the arrangement. And as bad luck would have it, I was going through a dry spell at the time, and I couldn’t make the payment. The ninja are very sensitive about that sort of thing. If the client breaks the terms, that’s the end of him. They’ll kill him, and in some nightmarish fashion too. Oh, they’re terrible people, truly terrible.’
‘But you seem to be alive, my friend,’ Lockston remarked.
The prince was astonished.
‘What do I have to do with it? The client was our vassal. And he was the one who had to answer to them. The old man fell ill all of a sudden, out of the blue, with a very strange complaint. His tongue swelled up and fell out of his mouth, then his skin turned black and his eyes melted out of their sockets. The poor fellow screamed in agony for two days and then he died. You know, the shinobi are virtuosos at preparing all sorts of unusual potions, both for healing and for killing. They say that the shinobi can…’
‘Oh, damn the shinobi!’ the sergeant interrupted, to Erast Petrovich’s considerable displeasure. ‘Where’s the hiding place? Did the samurai get a chance to tell you?’
‘Yes, the hiding place is always within Suga’s reach. Last year they built a new headquarters for the police department, in the Yaesu district. Suga, who was vice-intendant at the time, supervised the building work in person, and unknown to almost anyone, he had a secret room built adjacent to his office. The work was carried out by an American architect, who later drowned. Do you remember that sad story? All the newspapers wrote about it. In gratitude for their good work, the police department organised a steamboat cruise for the architect and the best workers, but then, didn’t the boat go and capsize… And the best workers included the three who built the secret room.’
‘What villainy!’ the inspector gasped. ‘Now I understand why Suga stayed in his old office when he was put in charge of the department. And everyone in the department admires his modesty!’
‘How does one gain access to the secret room?’ Fandorin asked.
‘I don’t know exactly. There’s a cunning lever somewhere – that’s all the shinobi told my old samurai. I don’t know any more than that, gentlemen, but you must admit that my information is highly valuable to you. I think you ought to let me go immediately.’
Asagawa and Fandorin glanced at each other.
‘We’ll see about that when we get back,’ said the inspector. ‘But you have earned your little bit of happiness.’