‘She’s my daughter. I decided to bury her separately. Come, you can say goodbye.’
But the titular counsellor didn’t move from the spot – he just shook his head desperately.
‘Don’t be afraid. Her body is shattered, but I have covered it. And half of her face survived. Only don’t go close.’
Tamba didn’t wait, but set off towards the pyre first. He threw back the corner of the cover and Fandorin saw Midori’s profile. White, slim, calm – and as beautiful as in life.
Erast Petrovich dashed towards her, but the jonin blocked his way.
‘No closer!’
Why not? Why not?
The titular counsellor tossed Tamba aside like a dry twig, but the old man grabbed him at a slant round the waist.
‘Don’t! She wouldn’t have wanted it!’
The damned old man was tenacious and Erast Petrovich couldn’t move another step farther forward. He went up on tiptoe to see more than just the profile.
And he saw.
The other half of her face was black and charred, like some terrible African mask.
Fandorin recoiled in horror and Tamba shouted angrily:
‘Why do you shrink away? Dead ninjas have no faces, but she still has half of one. Because Midori had become only a half-ninja – and that’s because of you!’ The jonin’s voice shook. He lit another torch. ‘But never mind. Fire purges everything. Watch. Her body will bend and unbend in the tongues of purifying flame and then crumble into ash.’
But Erast Petrovich didn’t want to watch her poor body writhing. He strode off towards the forest, gulping in air with his mouth.
Something had happened to his lungs. The air didn’t fill his chest. The small, convulsive breaths were excruciating.
Why, oh why had he not listened to Tamba! Why had he gone up close to the pyre? She had wanted to part beautifully, following all the rules, so that her tender face and her words of farewell would remain in her beloved’s memory. But now – and he knew this for certain – everything would be overshadowed by a black-and-white mask: one half indescribably beautiful, the other half the very incarnation of horror and death.
But what was this that had happened to his lungs? His breaths had become short and jerky. And it wasn’t that he couldn’t breathe in – on the contrary, he couldn’t breathe out. The poisoned air of this accursed morning had stuck in his chest and absolutely refused to come back out.
‘Your skin is blue,’ said Tamba, coming up to him.
The old man’s face was calm, even sleepy somehow.
‘I can’t breathe,’ Fandorin explained abruptly.
The jonin looked into his eyes and shook his head.
‘And you won’t be able to. You need to let the bad energy out. Otherwise it will suffocate you. You have to shatter the ice that has gripped your heart so tightly.’
He’s talking about the Don again, Erast Petrovich realised.
‘All right. I’ll go with you. It’s not very likely to warm my heart, but perhaps I’ll be able to breathe again.’
Behind the titular counsellor’s back the flames raged and roared, but he didn’t look round.
‘I have no weaknesses any more,’ said the jonin. ‘Now I shall become a genuine Tamba. You will also become stronger. You are young. There are very many good women in the world, far more than there are good men. Women will love you, and you will love them.’
Erast Petrovich explained to him:
‘I mustn’t love anybody. My love brings disaster. I cannot love. I cannot love.’
Tamba didn’t answer.
Nothing is worse than
When someone knows everything
But will not answer
A POSTMAN
They set out for Yokohama at night, Fandorin on his tricycle, Tamba running. The tricyclist turned his pedals smoothly and powerfully, but soon fell behind – the ninja moved faster, and he didn’t have to stop to tauten a chain or negotiate a stony patch. They hadn’t actually arranged to travel together, merely agreed a meeting place: in the Bluff, on the hill that overlooked Don Tsurumaki’s house.
Erast Petrovich immersed himself completely in the rhythm of travelling, thinking of nothing but breathing correctly. Breathing was still as difficult as ever for him, but otherwise the titular counsellor felt a lot better than he had during the day. The movement helped. It was as if he had been transformed from a man into a chain-transmission and ball-bearing mechanism. His soul was filled, not so much with peace, as with a certain blessed emptiness, without any thoughts or feelings. If he could have had his way, he would have carried on like this through the sleeping valley until the end of his life, never feeling tired.
There really was no tiredness. Before setting out, Tamba had made Fandorin swallow kikatsu-maru, an ancient food that ninjas took with them as rations for long journeys. It was a small, almost tasteless ball moulded out of powder: grated carrot, buckwheat flour, yam and some cunning root or other. The mixture was supposed to be aged for three years, until all the moisture evaporated. According to Tamba, two or three of these little balls were enough to prevent a grown man feeling any hunger or fatigue all day long. And instead of a bottle of water, Erast Petrovich had been given a supply of suikatsu-maru – three tiny pellets of sugar, malt and the flesh of marinated plums.
And there was one other present, which was obviously supposed to inflame the thirst for vengeance in Fandorin’s indifferent breast: a formal photograph of Midori. The photo seemed to have been taken at the time when she was working in a brothel. Looking out at the titular counsellor from the clumsily coloured portrait was a china doll in a kimono, with a tall hairstyle. He stared at this image for a long time, but didn’t recognise Midori in it. And her beauty had disappeared somehow as well. Erast Petrovich thought abstractedly that genuine beauty was impossible to capture with the camera lens: it was too vital, too anomalous and mercurial. Or perhaps the problem was that genuine beauty was not perceived with the eyes, but in some other way.
The journey from Yokohama to the mountains had taken two days. But Erast Petrovich trundled back in five hours. He didn’t take a single break, but he wasn’t tired at all – no doubt owing to the magical maru.
To get into the Bluff, Fandorin needed to go straight on towards the racecourse, but instead of that he steered his vehicle to the left, towards the river, beyond which lay the crowded roofs of the trading quarter, wreathed in the morning mist.
The titular counsellor raced across the Nisinobasi bridge into the straight streets of the Settlement, and found himself, not on the hill where Tamba was no doubt already tired of waiting for him, but on the promenade, in front of a building with the Russian tricolour flying over it.
Erast Petrovich had not changed his route out of any absentmindedness resulting from the shock that he had suffered. There was no absentmindedness at all. On the contrary, the consequence of the frozen state of his feelings and the hours of mechanical movements was that the titular counsellor’s brain had started to function with the direct, linear precision of an adding machine. Wheels whirled, levers clicked and out popped the answer. In his normal condition Fandorin might possibly have over-intellectualised and produced some fancy construction with bells on, but now, while the non-participation of his emotions was absolute, his plan came out amazingly simple and clear.
Erast Petrovich had called round to the consulate or, rather, to his own apartment, on a matter relating directly to his arithmetically precise plan.
As he walked past the bedroom, he averted his gaze (the instinct of self-preservation prompted him to do that), turned on the light in the study and started rummaging through the books. Methodically picking up a volume, leafing through it and dropping it on the floor.