He was not convinced. After all, he himself had always said that no interests of the Homeland (at least, its geopolitical interests) could be more important than personal honour and dignity. A most honourable activity, this was – to go rifling through other people’s secret hiding places, dressed up like a chimney sweep.
Then he tried to justify things differently, from Asagawa’s point of view. There was such a thing as Justice, and also Truth, which it was the duty of every noble man to defend. One could not allow infamous acts to be committed with impunity. By conniving at them or washing one’s hands of the matter, one became an accomplice, you insulted your own soul and God.
But for all their grandeur, these highly moral considerations somehow failed to touch the titular counsellor very deeply. It was not a matter of defending Justice. After all, in weaving his plot, Suga could have been guided by his own ideas of Truth, which differed from Fandorin’s. In any case, there was no point in Erast Petrovich deceiving himself – he had not embarked on this nocturnal escapade for the sake of words that were written with a capital letter.
He rummaged about inside himself for a bit longer and finally came up with the right reason. Fandorin did not like it, for it was simple, unromantic and even ignominious.
I could not have borne one more sleepless night waiting for a woman who is never going to come again, the titular counsellor told himself honestly. Anything at all, any kind of folly, but not that.
And when the locomotive hooted as it approached the final station of Nihombasi, the vice-consul suddenly thought: I’m poisoned. My brain and my heart have been affected by a slow-acting venom. That is the only possible explanation.
And after thinking that, he calmed down immediately, as if now everything had fallen into place.
While there were still passers-by on the streets, Erast Petrovich maintained his distance from his partner. He walked along with the air of an idle tourist, casually swinging the briefcase that contained his spy’s outfit.
But soon they reached the governmental office district, where there were no people, because office hours had finished ages ago. The titular counsellor cut down the distance until he was almost walking in tandem with the inspector. From time to time Asagawa explained something in a low voice.
‘You see the white building at the far side of the bridge? That is the Tokyo Municipal Court. It’s only a stone’s throw from the department.’
Fandorin saw a white three-storey palace in the European Mauritanian style – rather frivolous for an institution of the judiciary. Behind it he could see a high wooden fence.
‘Over there?’
‘Yes. The estate of the princes Matsudaira used to be there. We won’t go as far as the gates, there’s a sentry.’
A narrow alley ran off to the left. Asagawa looked round, waved his hand, and the accomplices ducked into the dark, crevice-like passage.
They got changed quickly. The inspector also put on something black and close fitting, tied a kerchief round his head and muffled the lower half of his face in a rag.
‘This is exactly how the shinobi dress,’ he whispered with a nervous giggle. ‘Right, forward!’
They gained entrance to the site of the department very easily: Asagawa folded his hands into a stirrup, Fandorin set his foot in it and in an instant he was on top of the fence. Then he helped the inspector to scramble up. The police obviously didn’t have enough imagination to believe that miscreants might take it into their heads to break into the holy of holies of law and order voluntarily. In any case, there was no one patrolling the yard – just a figure in a uniform and cap over on the right, striding to and fro at the main entrance.
Asagawa moved quickly and confidently. Hunching over, he ran across to a low building in a pseudo-Japanese style, then along the white wall, past a long series of blank windows. The inspector stopped beside the window at the corner.
‘I think this is the one. Help me up.’
He put his arms round Fandorin’s neck, then stepped on the vice-consul’s half-bent knee with one foot, put the other on his shoulder, and grabbed hold of the window frame. He scraped with something, clicked something, and the small windowpane opened. Asagawa pulled himself up and seemed to be sucked into the black rectangle, so that only the lower half of his body was left outside. Then that disappeared into the window as well, and a few seconds later the large windowpane opened silently.
For form’s sake, before entering the building Erast Petrovich noted the time: seventeen minutes past eleven.
The arrangement of the Japanese toilet looked strange to him: a row of low cubicles that could only conceal a seated man up to the shoulders.
Fandorin discovered Asagawa in one of the wooden cells.
‘I advise you to relieve yourself,’ the black head with the strip of white for the eyes said in a perfectly natural tone of voice. ‘It is helpful before hazardous work. To prevent any trembling of the hara.’
Erast Petrovich thanked him politely, but declined. His hara was not trembling at all, he was simply oppressed by the melancholy presentiment that this business would not end well. Nonsensical thoughts about the next day’s newspaper headlines kept drifting into his mind, as they had done on that other memorable night: ‘RUSSIAN DIPLOMAT A SPY’, ‘OFFICIAL NOTE FROM JAPANESE GOVERNMENT TO RUSSIAN EMPIRE’ and even ‘JAPAN AND RUSSIA BREAK OFF DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS’.
‘Will you be much longer?’ the vice-consul asked impatiently. ‘It’s twenty-three minutes past eleven. The nights are short now.’
From the toilet they crept down a long, dark corridor, Asagawa on his twisted-straw sandals and Fandorin on his rubber soles. The department of police was sleeping peacefully. That’s what a low level of crime does for you, thought the titular counsellor, not without a twinge of envy. Along the way they encountered only a single office with a light burning, where some kind of night work seemed to be going on, and once a duty officer carrying a candle came out from round a corner. He yawned as he walked past, without even noticing the two black figures pressed back against the wall.
‘We’re here,’ Asagawa whispered, stopping in front of a tall double door.
He put a piece of metal into the keyhole (an ordinary picklock, Erast Petrovich noted), turned it and the accomplices found themselves in a spacious room: a row of chairs along the walls, a secretary’s desk, another door in the far corner. It was clearly the reception area. Consul Doronin had told Fandorin that six years earlier there had been a great bureaucratic reform. The functionaries had all been dressed in uniforms instead of kimonos and forced to sit on chairs, not on the floor. The bureaucracy had almost rebelled at first, but had gradually got accustomed to it. What a shame. It must have been very picturesque before. Imagine arriving at a government office, and the heads of department and clerks and secretaries are all dressed in robes and sitting there cross-legged. Fandorin sighed, lamenting the gradual displacement of the variety of life by European order. In a hundred years’ time everything would be the same everywhere, you wouldn’t be able to tell whether you were in Russia or Siam. How boring.
The room located beyond the reception area was also not in any way remarkable. An ordinary office of some important individual. One broad, short desk, and beyond it a long narrow table. Two armchairs on one side, for official conversations with important visitors. Bookshelves with codes of laws. A photographic portrait of the emperor hanging in the most prominent position. The only unusual thing, from the Japanese point of view, was the crucifixion hanging beside the image of the earthly ruler. Ah, yes, Suga was a Christian, he had a cross hanging round his neck too.