Fandorin liked these passionate words, and the vice-intendant himself, very much. If only, he thought, our police force was run by enthusiasts like this, instead of stuffy gentlemen from the Department of Police. He was particularly struck by the fact that the police did not take bribes. Was that possible, or did the Japanese general have his head in the clouds?
Discussion of the details of future collaboration was interrupted by an unexpected event.
‘Ee-ee-ee-ee!’ a bevy of female voices squealed with such reckless enthusiasm that the men abandoned their conversation and looked round in amazement.
Don Tsurumaki was dashing across the hall.
‘Surprise!’ he shouted, pointing with a laugh to the curtain that covered one of the walls. That was where the squeal had come from.
The conductor waved his baton dashingly, the firemen rendered a thunderous, rollicking little motif, and the curtain parted to reveal a line of girls in gauzy skirts. They were Japanese, but they were under the command of a redheaded, long-limbed Frenchwoman.
‘Mes poules, allez-op!’ she shouted, and the girls in the line all hoisted their skirts and kicked one leg up into the air.
‘A cancan!’ the guests murmured. ‘A genuine cancan!’
The dancers did not kick their legs up so very high, and the limbs themselves were perhaps rather short, but nonetheless the audience was absolutely delighted. The famous Parisian attraction must have been quite a curiosity in Japan – the surprise was an obvious success.
Erast Petrovich saw Obayasi gazing spellbound at the cancan – she turned pink and put her hand over her mouth. The other ladies were also staring wide-eyed at the stage.
The titular counsellor looked round for O-Yumi.
She was standing with her Briton, beating out the furious rhythm with her fan and moving her finely modelled head slightly as she followed the dancers’ movements. Suddenly O-Yumi did something odd that probably no one but Fandorin could have seen – they were all so engrossed in the cancan. She lifted up the hem of her dress and kicked up her leg in its silk stocking – very high, above her head, far higher than the dancers. It was a long, shapely leg, and the movement was so sudden that the silver slipper slipped off her foot. After performing a glittering somersault in the air, this ephemeral object started falling and was caught deftly by Bullcox. The Englishman and his lady friend laughed, then the Right Honourable went down on one knee, took hold of the foot without a slipper, held the slim ankle slightly longer than was necessary and put the slipper back in its place.
Erast Petrovich felt a sharp, painful sensation and turned his eyes away.
With a true beauty,
Her simple silver slippers
Can also fly high
THE FIRST RAY OF SUNLIGHT
Late in the night, closer to the end of that interminable day, Erast Petrovich was sitting in the office of the head of the municipal police. They were waiting for the third member of the investigative group, the Japanese inspector.
In the not so distant past, Sergeant Walter Lockston had served as a guardian of the law in some cattle town in the Wild West of America, and he had retained all the manners of that uncivilised place. The sergeant sat there with his feet up on the table, swaying on his chair; his uniform cap was pushed forward almost as far as his nose, like a cowboy hat, he had a dead cigar protruding from the corner of his mouth and two massive revolvers hanging on his belt.
The policeman never stopped talking for a moment, cracking jokes and doing everything possible to demonstrate that he was a regular down-to-earth fellow, but Fandorin became more and more convinced that Lockston was not as simple as he was pretending to be.
‘The career I’ve had, you wouldn’t believe it,’ he said, stretching out his vowels mercilessly. ‘Normal people get promoted from sergeants to marshals, but with me it’s all backwards. In that dump that had five thousand cows to five hundred people, where the crime of the century was the theft of sixty-five dollars from the local post office, I was called a marshal. And here in Yokohama, where there are almost ten thousand people, not counting the danged hordes of slanty-eyed locals, I’m only a sergeant. And at the same time, my assistant’s a lieutenant. Ain’t that a hoot! That’s the way it’s set up. A sergeant, eh? When I write letters home, I have to lie, I sign them “Captain Lockston”. That’s what I should rightfully be, a captain. This sergeant business is some European contrivance of yours. So tell me, Rusty, do you have sergeants in Russia?’
‘No,’ replied Erast Petrovich, who had already resigned himself to that appalling ‘Rusty’, which was the result, on the one hand, of Lockston’s inability to pronounce the name ‘Erast’ and, on the other, of the grey hair on the titular counsellor’s temples. The only thing that irritated him was the stubbornness with which the office’s incumbent avoided talking about the matter at hand. ‘We don’t have sergeants in the police. Walter, I asked you what you know about that establishment, the “Rakuen”?’
Lockston took the cigar out of his mouth and spat brown saliva into the wastepaper basket. He looked at the Russian with his watery, slightly bulging eyes and seemed to realise that this man would not give up that easily. He screwed up his copper-red face into a wince and said reluctantly:
‘You see, Rusty, the Rakuen is on the other side of the river, and that’s not the Settlement. That’s to say, legally speaking it’s our territory, but white folks don’t live there, only yellowbellies. So we don’t usually stick our noses in there. Sometimes the Jappos stab each other to death, it happens all the time. But until they touch the white folk, I do nothing. That’s something like an unspoken agreement that we have.’
‘But in this case there is a suspicion that a Russian subject has been killed.’
‘So you told me,’ Lockston said with a nod. ‘And you know what I have to say to that? Bullshit, drivel. If your Mr B. kicked the bucket because some drunk happened to catch him on the neck with a finger, the old man must have been on his last legs already. What damned kind of murder is that? Let me tell you what a real murder looks like. This one time at Buffalo Creek…’
‘But what if Blagolepov was murdered?’ the embassy official interrupted after he had listened to several harrowing stories from the criminal history of the cowboy town.
‘Well then…’ The sergeant screwed his eyes up fiercely. ‘Then the slanty-eyes will answer to me for it. If it really is one of their lousy oriental tricks, they’ll regret they ever did the dirt on my territory. The year before last at the Ogon-basi bridge (and that, note, is already outside the bounds of the Settlement) they stabbed a French officer-boy. From behind, sneaky-like. This psychopath, an ex-samurai, turned nasty because his kind had been forbidden to carry swords. Whatever happens here, for them the whites are always to blame. So I called out all my lads and caught the son of a bitch, he hadn’t even washed the blood off his sword yet. How he begged me to let him slice his belly open! Well, screw him. I dragged him round the native quarter on a rope, to let the yellowbellies get a good look, and afterwards I strung him up with the same rope, no messing. Of course, the Jappos made a big scandal of it. Said they ought to have tried the psycho themselves and chopped his head off, the way they do things round here. I don’t think so. I prefer to pay my own debts. And if I come to believe that your compatriot didn’t kick the bucket on his own, but some Jap gave him a hand…’ Lockston didn’t finish what he was saying: he simply slammed his fist down eloquently on the desk.
‘Do you know the inspector who has been assigned to us from the Japanese police? The g-gentleman is called Goemon Asagawa.’