The Death of Achilles (17 page)

Bending over to his left, the jester nudged the sleeping girl: “Hey, little darling, ya sweet plump starling! Whose might you be? Would you fancy pleasuring an old man?”

And then he did something that made the waiter gasp: What a gay old granddad this was! The waiter advised him, “Don’t you go pestering Fiska; she’s not for the likes of you. If you want a bit of cuddling and coddling, get yourself up those stairs over there. And take fifty kopecks and half a bottle with you.”

The old man got his bottle, but he was in no hurry to go upstairs — he seemed to feel quite comfortable where he was. He knocked his glass over, then started humming a song in a thin little voice and darting glances in all directions out of those sharp eyes with their youthful gleam. In an instant he had examined everybody there, taken a good look at the ‘businessmen,’ and turned toward the bar, where the innkeeper, Abdul, a placid, powerfully built Tartar who was known and feared by the whole of Khitrovka, was chatting about something in a low voice with an itinerant junk dealer. The junk man was doing most of the talking, and the innkeeper was answering reluctantly, in monosyllables, as he slowly wiped a glass tumbler with a dirty rag. But the gray-bearded junk dealer, who was wearing a good-quality nankeen coat and galoshes over his boots, would not give up — he kept on whispering something, leaning in over the counter and every now and then prodding a box that hung over the shoulder of his companion, a young Kirghiz who was glancing around cautiously with his sharp, narrow eyes.

So far everything was going according to plan. Erast Petrovich knew that Grushin was playing the part of a dealer in stolen goods who had come across a full set of fine housebreaking tools and was looking for a buyer who knew the value of the goods. The idea was sensible enough, but Fandorin was terribly alarmed by the keen attention that the ‘businessmen’ were paying to the junk merchant and his assistant. Could they really have seen through them? But how? Why? Xavier Feofilaktovich’s disguise was magnificent — there was no way anyone could have recognized him.

Now he saw that Masa had also sensed the danger — he stood up, thrust his hands into his sleeves, and half-closed his thick eyelids. He had a dagger in his sleeve, and his pose indicated readiness to repel a blow from whichever side it might be struck.

“Hey, slanty-eyes!” one of the ‘businessmen’ shouted, “which tribe would you be from, then?”

The junk dealer swung around abruptly.

“He’s a Kirghiz, my dear man,” he said politely but without a trace of timidity. “A wretched orphan; the infidels cut his tongue out. But he suits me very well.” Xavier Feofilaktovich made some cunning sign with his fingers. “I deal in gold, and peddle dope, so I can do without talkative partners.”

Masa also turned his back to the counter, realizing where the real danger lay. He closed his eyes almost completely, leaving just a small spark barely gleaming between his eyelids.

The ‘businessmen’ glanced at one another. The junk dealer’s words seemed to have had a reassuring effect on them. Erast Petrovich was greatly relieved — Grushin was nobody’s fool, and he could look after himself. Fandorin sighed in relief and took the hand that had been about to grasp the butt of his Herstal back out from under the table.

He ought not to have done that.

Taking advantage of the fact that both of them had turned their backs to him, the innkeeper suddenly grabbed a two-pound weight on a string off the counter and, with a movement that looked easy and yet was appallingly powerful, swung it against the round back of the Kirghiz’s head. There was a sickening crunch and Masa slumped to the floor in a sitting position. Then the treacherous Tartar, who had clearly had plenty of practice, struck Grushin’s left temple just as he began to turn around.

Absolutely astounded, Erast Petrovich threw his chair back and pulled out his revolver.

“Nobody move!” he shouted in a wild voice. “Police!”

One of the ‘businessmen’ dropped his hand under the table and Fan-dorin immediately fired. The young man screamed, clutched at his chest with both hands, collapsed on the floor, and began thrashing about in convulsions. The others froze.

“Anybody move and I’ll fire!”

Erast Petrovich waved his gun about rapidly, shifting his aim from the ‘businessmen’ to the innkeeper as he tried feverishly to work out whether there would be enough bullets for all of them and what to do next. A doctor, they needed a doctor! Although the blows with the weight had been so shattering that a doctor was unlikely to be required… He glanced rapidly around the room. He had the wall at his back, and his flanks also appeared to be covered. The blind man was still sitting in the same place, merely turning his head this way and that and blinking his terrible white walleyes; the girl had been woken by the shot and she raised a pretty face made haggard by drink. She had gleaming black eyes — evidently a gypsy.

“The first bullet’s for you, you bastard!” Fandorin shouted at the Tartar. “I won’t wait for your trial, I’ll—”

He didn’t finish what he was saying, because the gypsy girl raised herself up as stealthily as a cat and hit him over the back of the head with a bottle. Erast Petrovich never saw it coming. As far as he was concerned, everything suddenly just went black — for no reason at all.

In which further shocks are in store for Fandorin

Erast Fandorin came around gradually, his senses reviving one by one. The first to recover was his sense of smell, which caught the odor of something sour, mingled with dust and gunpowder. Then his sense of touch revived and he felt a rough wooden surface and a painful aching in his wrists. There was a salty taste in his mouth, which could only be from blood. Hearing and vision were the final senses to recover, and with their return his reason finally began to function.

Fandorin realized that he was lying facedown on the floor with his hands twisted behind his back. Half-opening one eye, the collegiate assessor saw a revoltingly filthy floor, a ginger cockroach scuttling away from him, and several pairs of boots. One pair was foppishly elegant, made of box-calf leather with little silver caps on their toes, and they were very small, as if they ought to belong to a boy. A little farther away, beyond the boots, Erast Petrovich saw something that instantly brought back everything that had happened: the dead eye of Xavier Feofilaktovich staring straight at him. The inspector was also lying on the floor and the expression on his face was disgruntled, even angry, as if to say: “Well, we made a real mess of that!” Beside him Fandorin could see the black hair on the back of Masa’s head, matted with blood. Erast Petrovich squeezed his eyes tightly shut. He wanted to sink back into the blackness, where he would not see anything, he never wanted to see or hear anything again, but the harsh voices reverberating painfully in his brain would not allow it.

“… Well, ain’t Abdul the smart one,” said an excited voice with a syphilitic nasal twang. “The way that ‘un started talking the talk, I thought he was the wrong ‘un, but Abdul whacked ‘im with that weight!”

A low, lazy voice swallowing the endings of its words in the Tartar fashion boomed: “What d’you mean the wrong ‘un, you numskull? We was told — the one with the slanty-eyed Chinee, that’s the one to get.”

“But that ain’t no Chinee, he’s a Kirghiz.”

“He’s no more a Kirghiz than you are! How many slanty-eyes do we ‘ave wandering around Khitrovka? An’ if I’d got it wrong — it wouldn’t ‘ave mattered. We ‘d ‘ave thrown ‘im in the river, and there’s an end o’ the matter.”

“But how about Fiska, then?” put in a third voice that sounded ingratiating, but with a hysterical note. “If it weren’t for ‘er, this grandpa here would have finished us all off. But Misha, you said there ‘d be two of ‘em, an’, see, Mish, there’s three of’em. An’ they put a hole in Lomot over there. Lomot’s dying, Mish. That bullet burned right through ‘is in-sides.”

Catching the name ‘Misha,’ Fandorin finally decided not to sink back into the darkness. The back of his head was bruised and painful, but Erast Petrovich drove the pain away, drove it into the void, into the same darkness from which he himself had only recently emerged. This was no time for pain.

“I ought to lash my whip across your face for drinking,” declared a leisurely, languid falsetto. “But seeing the way things happened, I forgive you. You caught that cop a good belt.”

Two scarlet morocco-leather boots moved closer and stood opposite the box-calf pair.

“Lash me across the face if you like, Mishenka,” a rather hoarse woman’s voice declared, singsong fashion. “Only don’t drive me away. I haven’t seen you for two whole days, my little falcon. I missed you so bad. Come around today and I’ll give you a treat.”

“We can have our treat later.” The dandified boots took a step toward Fandorin. “But meanwhile let’s take a gander at what kind of slimy creature has come calling. Right, roll him over, Shukha. Look at the way his eye’s glinting.”

They turned Erast Petrovich over on his back.

So this was Little Misha. Just a little taller than the gypsy girl’s shoulder, and compared with the ‘businessmen’ he was an absolute midget. A thin, nervous face, with a twitch at the corner of the mouth. Repulsive eyes, as if it were a fish looking at you, not a man. But generally speaking, a handsome little devil. Hair parted precisely into two halves, curling up at the ends. One unpleasant detail: The black mustache was exactly the same as Erast Petrovich’s own, and even curled in the same manner. Fandorin immediately took a solemn vow not to wax his mustache any longer, and was immediately struck by the thought that he would probably never get the chance.

In one hand the bandit king was holding the Herstal, in the other the stiletto that Fandorin wore above his ankle. So they had searched him.

“Well, now, and who might you be?” Little Misha growled through his teeth. Seen from below, he didn’t look little at all. Quite the opposite; he seemed like Gulliver. “Which station are you from? Myasnitskaya Street, is it? That’s right, that’s the one. That’s where all my persecutors have gathered, the bloodsucking vampires.”

After registering surprise at the words ‘persecutors’ and ‘vampires,’ Erast Petrovich made a mental note for the future that apparently they did not take bribes at the Myasnitskaya Street station. It was useful information. If, of course, he was ever able to make use of it.

“Why did three of you come?” The meaning of Misha’s question was not entirely clear. “Or are you on your own, and not with those two?”

It was tempting to nod, but Fandorin decided that the right thing was to say nothing. To wait and see what would happen next.

What happened was unpleasant. Misha swung his foot back briefly and kicked the prone man in the crotch. Erast Petrovich spotted the swing and was able to prepare himself. He imagined that he was jumping at a run into a hole in a frozen river. The icy water scorched him so fiercely that by comparison the blow with the silver-tipped boot seemed a mere trifle. Fandorin did not even gasp.

“A real tough old nut,” said Misha, astonished. “Seems like we’ll have to take a bit of trouble over him. But never mind, that just makes things more interesting, and we’ve got plenty of time. Toss him in the cellar for now, boys. We’ll fill our bellies with God’s bounty, and then we’ll have some fun and games. I’ll work up a fine sweat and afterward Fiska can cool me down.”

To the sound of the woman’s squealing laughter, Collegiate Assessor Fandorin was dragged by the legs across the floor and behind the counter, then along a dark corridor. The door to the cellar creaked, and the next moment Erast Petrovich went flying into pitch blackness. He braced himself as best as he could, but he still landed hard on his side and shoulder.

“And here’s your crutches, hunchback!” someone shouted with a laugh from the top of the stairs. “Take a stroll and try a bit of begging down there!”

Fandorin’s crutches fell on him one after the other. The dim square above his head disappeared with a crash, and Erast Petrovich closed his eyes, because he could not see anything anyway.

Flexing his hand, he fingered the bonds restraining his wrists. Nothing to it — ordinary cord. All he needed was a fairly hard, preferably rough surface and a certain amount of patience. What was that there? Ah, the staircase that he just landed on so hard. Fandorin turned so that his back was toward the steps and started rubbing the string against a wooden upright in a rapid rhythm. The job would probably keep him occupied for about thirty minutes.

Erast Petrovich began counting to one thousand eight hundred, not in order to make the time pass more quickly, but to avoid thinking about things that were too horrible. But the counting was powerless to prevent the black thoughts from piercing poor Fandorin’s heart like needles.

What have you done now, Mr. Fandorin? You can never be forgiven for this, never.

How could he have dragged his old teacher into this viper’s pit? Dear old Xavier Feofilaktovich had trusted his young friend, and been delighted that he could still serve the fatherland, and now look how things had turned out! And it wasn’t destiny that was to blame, or some malicious fate, but the indiscretion and incompetence of a person whom the inspector had trusted no less than he trusted himself. The jackals of Khitrovka had been waiting for Fandorin, waiting for him. Or rather, for the man who would come with a ‘Chinee’. The bungling detective Fandorin had led his close friends to certain execution. But hadn’t Grushin warned him that the entire police force was in Little Misha’s pay? The disagreeable Khurtinsky had let it slip to one of his men and he had sent word to Khitrovka. It was all very simple. Afterward, of course, it would become clear just who the Judas in the secret section was, but that wouldn’t bring back Masa and Grushin. It was an unforgivable blunder! No, not a blunder, a crime!

Groaning in unbearable mental anguish, Erast Petrovich began moving his hands even faster, and suddenly the cord parted and went slack before he had expected it. But the collegiate assessor was not gladdened by his success; he simply sank his face into his freed hands and burst into tears. Ah, Masa, Masa…