‘It was a ninja. Bullcox sent him,’ said Fandorin, fighting his dizziness. ‘I’ll take you to a doctor. To Dr Twigs.’
But it was obvious that no doctor could help the prince now, his eyes were already rolling up and back.
Suddenly he wrinkled up his face, gathered all his strength and said, slowly but clearly:
‘Not Bullcox… Don…’
‘What?’
‘Don… Tsurumaki.’
That was all. His jaw shuddered and dropped open. Only the whites of his eyes were visible under his half-open eyelids.
The name throbbed in the titular counsellor’s bruised head, like the rhythm of a tolling belclass="underline" Don-Don-Don…
This is how life sounds
Ding-ding, tingaling, cuckoo,
Ending with: dong, dong
A HEADACHE
Fandorin thought he had just lain down on the planking for half an hour to wait for the spell of severe dizziness to pass off, but when he opened his eyes again he discovered that he was in his own bedroom, lying on the bed, completely naked under the blanket, with two heads leaning down over him: both had narrow eyes, but one was round, with hair cut in a short, stiff brush, and the other was long and narrow, with a neat parting. It was Masa and Shirota, both gazing at the titular counsellor with expressions of intense anxiety.
‘What… happened… to me?’ asked Erast Petrovich, struggling to force his dry tongue to pronounce the words.
This simple question provoked an entire discussion in Japanese, after which the two men nodded to each other as if they had come to some arrangement, and the secretary began cautiously:
‘At dawn Miss O-Yumi shook your servant awake and told him: “The master is in trouble, I can feel it, let’s go, quickly”. She ran along the seafront towards the cargo wharfs, with Masahiro following her. He says that as she ran, she kept looking at the moorings. At one of the farthest, already in the native town, she found you lying unconscious, covered in blood.’
Fandorin looked at Masa, who narrowed his eyes conspiratorially. Aha, thought Erast Petrovich, they didn’t tell Shirota there was a dead body lying beside me. That’s good. But how did O-Yumi know that I was in trouble? And how did she guess that she should look for me on the seafront? What an amazing woman. Where is she?
He looked around, but she wasn’t in the room.
‘Miss O-Yumi did something – apparently she pressed on some vein – and the bleeding stopped. Then she tore a strip off her dress and bandaged you up. She ordered your servant to carry you home, but she did not come back here. She said that an in fusion of some mountain plant was needed urgently – Masahiro did not remember the name. She told him that if you did not drink this infusion, the blood in your head would dry up and become a little stone, and after a while his master could die. Your servant carried you as far as the boundary of the Settlement, and there he was fortunate enough to meet an early riksha… And this morning the consul ran into your apartment and saw you lying here unconscious with a bandage on your head. He shouted at your servant, called me and sent for the doctor. I went to Mr Twigs, knowing that he is your friend… And the consul left for Tokyo urgently, to go to the embassy…’
So many things in this story were unclear, but Fandorin was struck most forcibly of all by Vsevolod Vitalievich’s strange behaviour.
‘He came running in?’
The punctilious Doronin bursting into his assistant’s apartment first thing in the morning? Something really extraordinary must have happened for him to do that.
Shirota faltered and did not answer.
‘And what did Dr Twigs say?’
The two Japanese exchanged glances again. And once again there was no answer.
Masa said something in an anxious voice and the secretary translated it.
‘You need to lie down and change your compress every hour and you must not worry. Dr Albertini says you have a very serious concussion.’
‘Why Albertini and n-not Twigs?’
Another animated discussion in Japanese, this time without any translation.
Erast Petrovich’s head really was aching terribly, and he felt nauseous, but all this mystery was beginning to get on his nerves.
Damn the doctors and the consul. There was more important business to deal with.
‘Masa, Asagawa-san koko, hayaku!’ [x]
the titular counsellor ordered.
The servant batted his eyelids and gave Shirota a frightened glance. The secretary cleared his throat in warning.
Erast Petrovich’s heart started pounding, beating faster and faster with every second. He jerked upright on the bed and bit his lip to stop himself crying out from the pain.
‘Masa, I must get dressed!’
Fandorin returned to the consulate after two in the morning, shattered by the scale of the catastrophe. He would probably have been even more shaken if not for the constant dizziness and spasms of pain that repeatedly transfixed his cranium from temple to temple, imparting an air of unreality to everything that happened, as if it were some appalling nightmare. The horror of it all made it too far-fetched to believe. Things like that didn’t happen in waking life.
Inspector Asagawa had been killed by hooligans. And, if the Japanese police could be believed, purely by chance, in a pointless, drunken brawl.
Sergeant Lockston had died of a heart attack in his office.
And an autopsy had shown that a blood vessel had burst in Dr Twigs’ brain.
All of this was already highly unlikely, but a coincidence of chance events was possible, in theory – if not for that invisible man, who had killed the witness, and the disappearance of the three clues.
The coded diagram had disappeared from the doctor’s study. No oaths written in blood had been discovered on the sergeant’s body. And the police knew nothing about any file of reports supposedly in the inspector’s possession.
As soon as Fandorin tried to fathom the meaning of this monstrous sequence of events, his dizziness intensified and he was swamped by a wave of nausea. And he simply didn’t have the strength to digest and extrapolate on the ‘Don Tsurumaki’ clue.
But the vice-consul was tormented most of all by O-Yumi’s disappearance. Where was she? Would she come back? What was this damned business about a mountain herb?
Gibberish. Insane, crazy gibberish.
Just as Fandorin was approaching the consulate, a two-seater kuruma drove up from the direction of Main Street, and out got Doronin, with the navy agent Bukhartsev (what the hell was he doing here?). They spotted the vice-consul walking towards them and stared at him dourly.
‘Here he is, the hero,’ the lieutenant captain said loudly to Vsevolod Vitalievich. ‘You told me he was almost at death’s door, but now see how chirpy he looks. If I’d only known, I wouldn’t have come, I’d have ordered him to report to Tokyo.’
This beginning boded nothing good, but then, how could there possibly be anything good in all this?
Doronin looked hard into his assistant’s face, which was as white as if it had been dusted with chalk.
‘How are you feeling? Why did you get up?’
‘Thank you, I am p-perfectly all right.’
Fandorin shook hands with the consul, but merely exchanged hostile glances with Bukhartsev, who demonstratively hid his hands behind his back. Well, at the end of the day, they worked in different departments, and they were both on the ninth level of the table of ranks, so no insubordination was involved.
But rank was one thing, and position was quite another, and the sailor immediately demonstrated who was in charge here.
In the consul’s office, he occupied the incumbent’s place at the desk, without bothering to ask permission. Vsevolod Vitalievich had to take a seat on another chair and Fandorin remained standing – not out of diffidence, but because he was afraid that if he sat down, he would not be able to get up again. He leaned against the wall and crossed his arms.