Fandorin closed his eyes tight, feeling himself brimming over with an unbearable, insane happiness.
A stupid question,
This ‘to be or not to be’,
Once you’ve been happy
TICKLISH
It was by no means the first time Walter Lockston had spent the night in the office. Under the terms of his contract with the city of Yokohama, the head of the municipal police was provided with an official house, and even furniture, but the sergeant had never got used to those palatial halls. The sofas and chairs stood in their dust covers, the large glass chandelier was never lit up even once, the family bed gathered dust for lack of use – the former inhabitant of the prairies felt more at home on a canvas campbed. It was dreary and depressing to be all alone in a two-storey house, the walls and the ceiling oppressed him. The office was a better place. The familiar cramped space there was all his own, every inch of it: the desk, the safe, the gun shelf. It didn’t smell of the emptiness that filled the house. And he slept better here. Walter was always glad to spend the night in the office, and today’s excuse couldn’t possibly have been more legitimate.
He let the duty constable go home – he was a family man. It was so quiet and peaceful in the station. The lock-up was empty – no sailors on a spree, no drunk clients from ‘Number Nine’. Bliss!
He hummed a song about the glorious year of sixty-five as he washed out his shirt. He sniffed his socks and put them back on – he could wear them for one more day. He brewed some strong coffee and smoked a cigar, and then it was time to settle down for the night.
He made himself comfortable on the armchair, took his boots off and put his feet up on a chair. There was a blanket in the office, worn into holes here and there, but it was his favourite blanket, he always had splendid dreams under it.
The sergeant yawned and looked round the room, just to make sure everything was right. Of course, it was hard to imagine English spies or slanty-eyed Jappos trying to creep in and poke around in a police station, but it never hurt to be careful.
The door of the office was locked. So were the window frame and the bars on the window. Only the small windowpane was slightly open, otherwise you could suffocate in here. The distance between the bars was so narrow, a cat could barely get through it.
The rain that had been falling since midday stopped and the moon started shining in the sky, so bright that he had to pull the peak of his cap down over his eyes.
Walter squirmed about, settling down. The sheets of paper with the oaths written in blood crackled inside his shirt. All the weird freaks who live in this world, he thought with a shake of his head.
Lockston always fell asleep quickly, but first (and this was the part he always liked best), coloured pictures of the past flickered through his head, or maybe pictures of things that had never really happened at all. They swirled around, jostling each other for a place in the queue and gradually merged into his first dream, which was the sweetest.
All of this happened now. He saw a horse’s head with its pointed ears quivering, dashing hell-for-leather towards a stretch of land overgrown with brownish grass; then a great, high sky with white clouds, the kind you only get over huge open spaces; then a woman who had loved him (or maybe she was pretending) in Lucyville back in sixty-nine; then from somewhere or other a dwarf in a bright-coloured body stocking, whirling around and jumping through a hoop. And this, the final vision to surface out of the depths of his totally forgotten past, maybe even out of his childhood, merged imperceptibly into a dream.
The sergeant murmured wordlessly as he marvelled at the little circus artist, who turned out to be able to fly and blow tongues of flame out of his mouth.
Then a less pleasant dream began, about a house fire – that was because the sleeping man felt hot under the blanket. He started squirming about, the blanket slipped off on to the floor and once again all was well in the realm of dreams.
Walter woke up long after midnight. Not of his own volition, though – he heard a ringing sound somewhere in the distance. Still groggy with sleep, he didn’t realise straight away that it was the doorbell, the one that had been hung at the entrance to be used during the night.
The agreement with Asagawa and the Russian vice-consul was this: no matter what happened, the sergeant was not to leave the station. To hell with it if there was a fight, or a knifing, or a murder. It could wait until morning.
And so Lockston turned over on to his side and tried to carry on sleeping, but the jangling continued as loud as ever.
Should he go and take a look? Without going outside, of course – who knew what was out there? It could be a trap. Maybe the bad men had come to get their pieces of paper?
He picked up his revolver and walked silently out into the corridor.
There was a cunning little window made of dark glass in the front door. You could see out of it, but you couldn’t see in.
Lockston glanced out and saw a Japanese whore on the porch, wearing a striped kimono, the kind that the staff in the International Hotel had.
The native woman reached up to the bell pull and jerked it with all her might. And then at last she started screeching too.
‘Poriceman-san! Me Kumiko, Hoter Intanasyanaru! Troubur! Sairor kirred! Kirred entirery! Birriard room! Fight stick! Howr in head!’
Clear enough. Some sailors had had a fight with the cues in the billiard room and someone had got his skull stove in. The usual stuff.
‘Tomorrow morning!’ Lockston shouted. ‘Tell the boss I’ll send a constable in the morning!’
‘Impossibur morning! Need now! Sairor die!’
‘What am I supposed to do, glue his head back together? Get away, girl, get away. I told you, tomorrow.’
She started ringing again, but the sergeant, reassured, was already walking back along the corridor. No way was the head of police dashing out in the middle of the night for some stupid nonsense like that. Even without the important papers tucked under his shirt, he still wouldn’t have gone.
When the bell finally stopped sounding, it was really quiet. Walter couldn’t even hear his own footsteps – in the socks his feet moved across the wooden floor without making the slightest sound. If it wasn’t for that absolute silence, the sergeant would never have heard the faintest of faint rustling sounds behind the door of the office.
Someone was in there!
Lockston froze and his heart set off at a gallop. He put his ear to the crack of the door – sure thing! Someone was going through the desk, pulling out the drawers.
Why, the sons of bitches, coming up with something like that! Deliberately luring him out of the room, and then… But how had they got in? When he went out into the corridor, he locked the door behind him!
Now you’ll get yours, you low snakes!
Holding the revolver in his left hand, he slipped the key into the keyhole without making a sound, then turned it, jerked the handle towards him and burst into the room.
‘Don’t move! I’ll kill you!’
And the sergeant would have blasted away, too, but there was a surprise waiting for him, in the form of a tiny figure, about three feet tall, standing by the desk. Just for a moment Walter imagined he was still asleep and dreaming about the dwarf.
But when he clicked the lamp switch and the gas flared up, it wasn’t a dwarf at all, but a little Japanese boy, entirely naked.
‘Who are you?’ Lockston blurted out. ‘Where are you from? How did you get in?’
The little imp darted nimbly towards the window, jumped up like a monkey, squeezed sideways through the bars, squirmed into the opening of the small windowpane and would surely have got clean away, but the sergeant was up to the challenge – he dashed across the room just in time to grab him by the foot and drag him back inside.
At least now he had the answer to his third question. The naked urchin had climbed in through the window. Even for him it was a tight fit, as the bruises on his thighs testified. And that was why he was naked – he couldn’t have squeezed through in clothes.