He wanted to hold her back, but he could not. She ducked, slipped under his arm and dashed out into the corridor. The door slammed in Erast Petrovich’s face. He grabbed hold of the handle, but the key had already turned in the lock.
‘Wait!’ the titular counsellor called out in horror. ‘Don’t go!’
Catch her, stop her, apologise.
But no – he heard subdued sobbing in the corridor, and then the sound of light footsteps moving rapidly away.
His reason cringed and shrank, cowering back into the farthest corner of his mind. The only feelings in Fandorin’s heart now were passion, horror and despair. The most powerful of all was the feeling of irreparable loss. And what a loss! As if he had lost everything in the world and had nobody to blame for it but himself.
‘Damn! Damn! Damn!’ the miserable vice-consul exclaimed through clenched teeth, and he slammed his fist into the doorpost.
Curses on his police training! A woman of reckless passion, who lived by her heart – the most precious woman in the whole world – had thrown herself into his embraces. She must have taken great risks to do it, perhaps she could even have risked her life. And he had interrogated her: ‘Have you been following?’ – ‘Have you been eavesdropping?’ – ‘What’s your part in all this?’
Oh, God, how horrible, how shameful!
A groan burst from the titular counsellor’s chest. He staggered across to the bed (the very same bed on which heavenly bliss could have been his!) and collapsed on it face down.
For a while Erast Petrovich lay there without moving, but trembling all over. If he could have sobbed, then he certainly would have, but Fandorin had been denied that kind of emotional release for ever.
It had been a long time, a very long time, since he had felt such intense agitation – and it seemed so completely out of proportion with what had happened. As if his soul, fettered for so long by a shell of ice, had suddenly started aching as it revived, oozing thawing blood.
‘What is this? What is happening to me?’ he kept repeating at first – but his thoughts were about her, not himself.
When his numbed brain started recovering slightly, the next question, far more urgent, arose of its own accord.
‘What do I do now?’
Erast Petrovich jerked upright on the bed. The trembling had passed off, his heart was beating rapidly, but steadily.
What should he do? Find her. Immediately. Come what may.
Anything else would mean brain fever, heart failure, the death of his very soul.
The titular counsellor dashed to the locked door, ran his hands over it rapidly and forced his shoulder against it.
Although the door was solid, it could probably be broken out. But then there would be a crash and the hotel staff would come running. He pictured the headline in bold type in the next day’s Japan Gazette: RUSSIAN VICE-CONSUL FOUND DEBAUCHING IN GRAND HOTEL.
Erast Petrovich glanced out of the window. The first floor was high up, and in the darkness he couldn’t see where he was jumping. What if there was a heap of stones, or a rake forgotten by some gardener?
These misgivings, however, did not deter the crazed titular counsellor. Deciding that it was obviously his fate for the day to climb over windowsills and jump out into the night, he dangled by his hands from the window and then opened his fingers.
His was lucky with his landing – he came down on a lawn. He brushed off his soiled knees and looked around.
It was an enclosed garden, surrounded on all sides by a high fence. But a little thing like that did not bother Fandorin. He took a run up, grabbed hold of the top of the fence, pulled himself up nimbly and sat there.
He tried to jump down into the side street, but couldn’t. His coat-tail had snagged on a nail. He tugged and tugged, but it was no good. It was fine, strong fabric – the coat had been made in Paris.
‘RUSSIAN VICE-CONSUL STUCK ON TOP OF FENCE,’ Erast Petrovich muttered to himself. He tugged harder, and the frock coat tore with a sharp crack.
Oops-a-daisy!
In ten paces Fandorin was on the Bund, which was brightly lit by street lamps, even though it was deserted.
He had to call back home.
In order to find Bullcox’s address – that was one. And to collect his means of transport – that was two. It would take too long to walk there, and even if he compromised his principles, there was no way he could take a kuruma – he didn’t want any witnesses to this business.
Thank God, he managed to avoid the most serious obstacle, by the name of ‘Masa’: there was no light in the window of the small room where the meddlesome valet had his lodgings. He was asleep, the bandit.
The vice-consul tiptoed into the hallway and listened.
No, Masa wasn’t asleep. There were strange sounds coming from his room – either sobs or muffled groans.
Alarmed, Fandorin crept over to the Japanese-style sliding door. Masa did not care for European comfort and he had arranged his dwelling to suit his own taste: he had covered the floor with straw mats, removed the bed and bedside locker and hung bright-coloured pictures of ferocious bandits and elephantine sumo wrestlers on the walls.
On closer investigation, the sounds coming through the open door proved to be entirely unambiguous, and in addition, the titular counsellor discovered two pairs of sandals on the floor: one larger pair and one smaller pair.
That made the vice-consul feel even more bitter. He heaved a sigh and consoled himself: Well, let him. At least he won’t latch on to me.
Lying on the small table in the drawing room was a useful brochure entitled ‘Alphabetical List of Yokohama Residents for the Year 1878’. By the light of a match, it took Erast Petrovich only a moment to locate the address of ‘His Right Honourable A.-F.-C. Bullcox, Senior Adviser to the Imperial Government’ – 129, The Bluff. And there was a plan of the Settlement on the table too. House number 129 was located at the very edge of the fashionable district, at the foot of Hara Hill. Erast Petrovich lit another match and ran a pencil along the route from the consulate to his destination. He whispered, committing it to memory:
‘Across Yatobashi Bridge, past the customs post, past Yatozaka Street on the right, through the Hatacho Qu-quarter, then take the second turn to the left…’
He put on the broad-brimmed hat he had worn for taking turns around the deck during the evenings of his long voyage. And he swathed himself in a black cloak.
His carried his means of transport – the tricycle – out on to the porch very carefully, but even so, at the very last moment he caught the large wheel on the door handle. The doorbell trilled treacherously, but there was no catching Fandorin now.
He pulled the hat down over his eyes, leapt up on to the saddle at a run and started pressing hard on the pedals.
The moon was shining brightly in the sky – as round and buttery as the lucky lover Masa’s face.
On the promenade the titular counsellor encountered only two living souls: a French sailor wrapped in the arms of a Japanese tart. The sailor opened his mouth and pushed his beret with a pom-pom to the back of his head: the Japanese girl squealed.
And with good reason. Someone black, in a flapping cloak, came hurtling at the couple out of the darkness, then went rustling by on rubber tyres and instantly dissolved into the gloom.
At night the Bluff, with its Gothic bell towers, dignified villas and neatly manicured lawns, seemed unreal, like some enchanted little town that had been spirited away from Old Mother Europe at the behest of some capricious wizard and dumped somewhere at the very end of the world.
Here there were no tipsy sailors or women of easy virtue, everything was sleeping, and the only sound was the gentle pealing of the chimes in the clock tower.
The titular counsellor burst into this Victorian paradise in a monstrously indecent fashion. His ‘Royal Crescent’ tricycle startled a pack of homeless dogs sleeping peacefully on the bridge. In the first second or so they scattered, squealing, but, emboldened by seeing the monster of the night fleeing from them, they set off in pursuit, barking loudly.