‘If I had noticed the inuoka bumps at the sides of your forehead in time, I would not have set the adder on you. Dogs do not bite people like you, snakes leave you alone, wasps do not sting you. Things and animals love you. You are a man of a very rare breed. That is why I assigned my daughter to you.’
Erast Petrovich did not interrupt him any more. O-Yumi had mentioned that her father was an unsurpassed master of ninso! Could what he was saying really be true?
‘Midori took a look at you and said yes, you were special. It would be a shame to kill someone like that. Properly employed, you could be very helpful.’
‘Where is she?’ Fandorin asked in a dejected voice. ‘I must see her…’
At that Tamba reached out one hand to the wall, pressed something, and the wall slid sideways.
O-Yumi was sitting in the next room, wearing a white and red kimono, with her hair in a tall style. Completely motionless, her face absolutely still, she looked like a beautiful doll. Erast Petrovich was no more than five steps away from her.
He shot forward towards her, but O-Yumi didn’t stir and he didn’t dare to embrace her.
‘She’s drugged!’ – the thought flashed through his mind; but her gaze was perfectly clear and calm. This was a strange, incomprehensible O-Yumi sitting in front of him, close enough for him to reach out and touch her, but that distance seemed quite insurmountable. It was not this woman he loved, but another, who, as it turned out, had never existed…
‘What? Why? What for?’ poor Fandorin babbled incoherently. ‘Are you a ninja?’
‘The very best in the Momochi clan,’ Tamba declared proudly. ‘She can do almost everything that I can do. But in addition, she has mastered arts that are inaccessible to me.’
‘I know,’ the titular counsellor said with a bitter laugh. ‘For instance, jojutsu. You sent her to a brothel to study that wisdom.’
‘Yes. I sent her to Yokohama to study. Here in the mountains no one would have taught her to be a woman. And Midori had to study the foreign barbarians, because Japan needs them.’
‘Did he order you to study me too?’ Erast Petrovich asked the woman of stone.
Tamba answered again.
‘Yes. I will tell you how it happened. I received a commission to protect the samurai who were pursuing Minister Okubo. My men could easily have killed him themselves, but it had to be done by the samurai. Then the killing would have a meaning that was clear to everyone and no one would suspect my client.’
‘Don Tsurumaki?’
‘Yes. The Momochi clan has been receiving commissions from him for several years. A serious man, he pays promptly. When one of the client’s men told me that an old foreigner was sitting in the Rakuen gambling house and telling everybody about the group led by Ikemura with the withered arm, the tattler’s mouth had to be stopped. The job was done very neatly, but then you turned up, most inappropriately. Ikemura and his men had to hide. And I also found out that you had taken as your servant a man who had seen me and could identify me.’
‘How did you find that out?’ Fandorin asked, turning towards the jonin for the first time since the partition had slid aside.
‘From the client. And he got his information from police chief Suga.’
For whom the efficient Asagawa wrote his reports, the titular counsellor added to himself. Events that had seemed mysterious, even inexplicable, began arranging themselves in a logical sequence, and this process was so fascinating that the vice-consul forgot about his broken heart for a while.
‘I had to kill your servant. Everything would have fitted nicely – the bite of the mamusi would have rid me of the witness. But then you showed up again. At first I almost made a mistake, I almost killed you. But the snake proved cleverer. It did not wish to bite you. Of course, I could easily have killed you myself, but the mamusi’s strange behaviour forced me to take a closer look at you. I saw that you were an unusual man and it would be a shame to kill someone like that. And in any case, the death of a foreign diplomat would have created too much commotion. You had seen me – that was bad, but you would not be able to find me. That was how I reasoned.’ The old man finished smoking his pipe and shook out the ash. ‘And then I made another mistake, which happens to me very, very rarely. The client informed me that I had left a clue. An unheard-of kind of clue – the print of a finger, and I had done it twice. It turned out that European science can find a man from such a small thing as that. Very interesting. I instructed one of my genins to find out more about fingerprints, it could be useful to us. Another genin broke into the police station and destroyed the clues. He was a good shinobi, one of my cousins. He didn’t manage to escape his pursuers, but he died like a genuine ninja, without leaving his face to his enemies…’
All this was extraordinarily interesting, but one strange thing was bothering Erast Petrovich. Why was the jonin taking so much trouble to enlighten his prisoner, why did he think it necessary to offer any explanations? This was a riddle!
‘By that time Midori had already started working with you,’ Tamba went on. ‘I found you more and more interesting. How artfully you tracked down Ikemura’s group! If not for Suga, who corrected the situation, my client could have had serious problems. But Suga was not cautious enough, and you exposed him. You acquired new clues, even more dangerous than the previous ones. The client ordered me to finish you off, once and for all. To kill Prince Onokoji, who had caused him too much trouble, to kill you alclass="underline" the head of the foreign police, Asagawa, the bald doctor. And you.’
‘Me too?’ Fandorin asked with a start. ‘You say the Don ordered me to be killed too?’
‘Especially you.’
‘Why didn’t you do it? There on the pier?’
The old man heaved a sigh and shifted his gaze to his daughter.
‘Why, why… And why am I wasting time on you, instead of wringing your neck?’
The titular counsellor, who was very much concerned about this question, held his breath.
‘I have already told you. I am a poor, weak jonin. My daughter does as she likes with me. She forbade me to kill you, and I deceived the client. How shameful…’
Tamba lowered his head on to his chest and sighed even more bitterly. Fandorin turned round towards O-Yumi, who was really called something else.
‘B-but why?’ he asked with just his lips.
‘The shinobi are degenerating,’ Tamba said mournfully. ‘In former times a ninja girl, the daughter of a jonin, would never have fallen in love with an outsider, and a barbarian.’
‘What!’ Erast Petrovich gasped, and suddenly saw a blush appear on Midori’s doll-like cheeks.
‘I did not kill you, I gave part of the money back to the Don and said you had been saved by a miracle. But my shame was not enough for her, she decided to destroy me. When you fought the Englishman with swords, Midori concealed herself in the bushes. She fired a sleeping dart into the redheaded man from a fukubari. It was a terribly stupid thing to do. When Tsurumaki was taking the Englishman home, he discovered the dart sticking out of his throat and realised that this was the work of shinobi. The Don imagined that I was playing a double game. He took precautions, crammed his house full of guards – he was afraid that I would come to kill him. And you, not knowing anything, walked straight into the den of the tiger…’
‘And you didn’t say anything to me?’ Fandorin said to Midori.