‘Get up,’ said Fandorin, shaking the witness by the shoulder. ‘Sh-sh-sh-sh. It is I, do not be afraid.’
But the idea of being afraid never entered Onokoji’s head. He opened his bleary eyes and smiled even more widely, still under the influence of the narcotic.
‘Get up. Get dressed. We’re going out.’
‘For a walk?’ The prince giggled. ‘With you, my dear friend – to the ends of the earth.’
As he pulled on his trousers and shoes, he jigged and twirled around, jabbering away without a pause – the vice-consul had to tell him to be quiet.
Fandorin led his disorderly companion out of the building by the elbow. To be on the safe side, he kept his other hand in his pocket, on the butt of his Herstal, but he didn’t take the gun out, in order not to frighten the prince.
It was drizzling and there was a smell of fog. As the fresh air started bringing Onokoji to his senses, he glanced round at the empty promenade and asked:
‘Where are you taking me?’
‘To a safer place,’ the titular counsellor explained, and Onokoji immediately calmed down.
‘I heard a woman’s voice in your apartment,’ he said in a sly voice. ‘And that voice sounded very familiar. Ve-ry, ve-ry familiar.’
‘That’s none of your business.’
It was a long walk to the thirty-seventh pier, long enough for the effect of the dope to wear off. The witness stopped jabbering and looked around nervously more and more often, but he didn’t ask any more questions. He must have been feeling cold – his shoulders were trembling slightly. Or perhaps the trembling was the result of the drug?
This looked like the place. Fandorin saw the number ‘37’ daubed in white paint on a low godaun. A long pier stretched out from the shore into the sea, its beginning lit up by a street lamp, and its far end lost in darkness. Set along it were the black silhouettes of boats, with their mooring cables creaking.
The wooden boards rumbled hollowly under their feet and water splashed somewhere down below. The darkness was not completely impenetrable, for the sky had already begun turning grey in anticipation of dawn.
Eventually the end of the pier came into sight. There was a mast jutting up from a large boat, and Inspector Asagawa in his police uniform, sitting on a bollard: they could see his cap and broad cloak with a hood.
Relieved, Erast Petrovich let go of his companion’s elbow and waved to the inspector.
Asagawa waved back. They were only about twenty steps away from the boat now.
Strange, the titular counsellor suddenly thought, why didn’t he get up to greet us?
‘Stop,’ Fandorin said to the prince, and he stopped walking himself.
The seated man got up then, and he turned out to be a lot shorter than Asagawa. Has he sent another policeman instead of coming himself? Erast Petrovich wondered, but his hand was already pulling the revolver out of his pocket: God takes care of those who take care of themselves.
What happened next was quite incredible.
The policeman whipped the cap off his head, dropped the cloak – and he disappeared. There was no one under the cloak, just blackness!
The prince cried out in a shrill voice, and even Fandorin was seized by mystical horror. But the next moment the darkness stirred and they saw a figure in black, approaching them rapidly.
A ninja!
With a plaintive howl, Onokoji turned and took to his heels, and the vice-consul flung up his Herstal and fired.
The black figure was not running in a straight line, but in zigzags, squatting down or jumping up as it went, and performing all these manoeuvres with unbelievable speed – too fast for Fandorin to follow it with the barrel of his gun.
A second shot, a third, a fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh. Could every shot really have missed the target? The distance was only fifteen, ten, five paces!
When he was at close quarters with Erast Petrovich, the invisible man leapt high into the air and kicked the Herstal (now entirely useless anyway) out of Fandorin’s hand. The revolver rattled across the wooden decking and there, right in front of his face, the vice-consul saw two slanting eyes, like two blazing coals, in the slits of a black mask.
Once seen, those eyes could never be forgotten.
It was him! Him! The snake-charmer, the man with no face! He was alive!
The titular counsellor simply couldn’t understand how this was possible; in fact he couldn’t understand anything at all any more, but he was determined to sell his life dearly.
He assumed a combat pose, just as he had done with Suga and – hoorah! – succeeded in parrying the first kick with his elbow. Now, according to the science of jujitsu, he should build on his success by moving on to the attack. Erast Petrovich lunged (in a way more suited to boxing), but missed his opponent, who ducked under the fist and straightened up again like a spring, and then Fandorin’s feet parted company with the pier. The titular counsellor flew, tumbling over and over in the air, and for as long as this flight lasted, he thought of nothing. And he didn’t think at all after he struck his head against the edge of the pier: he saw a flash, heard an extremely unpleasant crunch, and that was all.
But the cold water in which the body of the vanquished vice-consul landed with a loud splash brought him round again. And his first thought (even before he surfaced) was: Why didn’t he kill me? Bullcox must have ordered me to be killed!
Blood was streaming down his face, and there was a ringing sound in his ears, but Erast Petrovich was determined not to lose consciousness. He grabbed hold of a slippery beam, clutched at a transverse pile, hauled himself up and managed to scramble on to the pier.
A second thought forced its way through the noise and the fiery circles in front of his eyes. What about the prince? Had he managed to escape? He had had enough time. And if he had escaped, where could the titular counsellor search for him now?
But there was no need to search for the prince. Erast Petrovich realised that when he saw a dark heap lying under the only street lamp in the distance – as if someone had dumped a pile of old rags there.
Fandorin staggered along the pier with his fingers over his bleeding wound. He wasn’t thinking about the invisible man, because he knew for certain that if the ninja had wanted to kill him, he would have done.
The high-society playboy was lying face down. A glittering steel star had bitten deep into his neck just above the collar. The titular counsellor pulled it out with his finger and thumb, and blood immediately started seeping from the wound. A throwing weapon, the vice-consul guessed, carefully touching the sharpened edges of the small star. And it appeared to be smeared with something.
Once again he was astounded. Why had the invisible man taken the risk of dodging the bullets? All he had to do was fling this thing and it would have been all over.
He leaned down (the sharp movement set everything around him swaying) and turned the dead man over on to his back.
And he saw that Onokoji was still alive.
There was horror dancing in the open eyes and the trembling lips fumbling at the air.
‘Nan jya? Nan jya?,’ the dying man babbled. (‘What happened? What happened?’)
He must not have realised yet what disaster had overtaken him. He had been running for grim death, at full tilt, he couldn’t see anything around him, and suddenly – a blow to the back of his neck…