The Death of Achilles (40 page)

Achimas did not see what happened in the apartment after that, because Knabe closed the windows, and for about three hours all he could do was admire the bright spots of sunlight glittering on the window-panes. Glancing down every now and then at the sleuth loitering in the street, he imagined to himself how his castle would look when it sprang up on the tallest cliff of the island of Santa Croce sometime in the near future. The castle would be reminiscent of the kind of towers that guarded the peace of mountain villages in the Caucasus, but on the flat roof there had to be a garden. The palm trees would have to be planted in tubs, of course, but turf could be laid in, and shrubs.

Achimas was trying to solve the problem of providing water for his hanging garden when Knabe emerged from the entrance to the building. First the sleuth in the street started fidgeting, then he skipped away from the door and hid around a corner, and a second later the German agent appeared in person. He halted outside the entrance, waiting for something. It soon became clear what it was.

A single-seater carriage harnessed to a dun horse rolled out of an en-tryway. The groom jumped down from the box and handed the reins to Knabe, who leapt nimbly into the carriage, and the dun set off at a brisk trot.

This was all quite unexpected. Knabe was escaping surveillance and there was absolutely no possibility of following him. Achimas peered hard through his binoculars just in time to see the spy put on a ginger beard. What idea had he come up with now?

The sleuth, however, reacted quite calmly. He watched the carriage drive off, jotted something down in his notebook, and walked away. He apparently knew where Knabe had gone and what for.

Well, since the German agent had taken nothing with him, he was certain to come back again. It was time for Achimas to prepare his operation.

Five minutes later, Achimas was in the apartment. He took a leisurely look around and found two hiding places. The first contained a small chemical laboratory: invisible ink, poisons, an entire bottle of nitroglycerine (was he planning to blow up the Kremlin, then?). In the other there were several revolvers, some money — about thirty thousand rubles, at a glance — and a book of logarithmic tables, which had to be the key to the code.

Achimas didn’t touch the contents of the hiding places. The gendarmes could have them. Unfortunately Knabe had burned the decoded telegram — there were traces of ash in the kitchen sink.

It was bad that the apartment had no rear entrance. A window in the corridor overlooked the roof of an extension. Achimas climbed out, walked around for a while on the rumbling iron sheeting, and confirmed that the roof was a dead end. The drainpipe was rusted through; you couldn’t climb down it. All right.

He sat down by the window and prepared himself for a long wait.

Sometime after nine, when the light of the long summer day had begun to fade, the familiar single-seater carriage came hurtling out from behind a corner. The dun was pushing as hard as it could, scattering thick flakes of lather behind it. Knabe was standing in the carriage and brandishing his whip frantically.

A chase?

Apparently not; Achimas couldn’t hear anything.

Knabe dropped the reins and vanished into the entrance of the building.

It was time.

Achimas took up the position he had scouted out in advance, behind the coat stand in the hallway. He was holding a sharp knife taken from the kitchen.

The apartment was already prepared — everything turned upside down, the contents of the cupboards scattered about, even the eiderdown had been slit open. A crude imitation of a burglary. Mr. Fandorin ought to conclude that Herr Knabe had been eliminated by his own people, who had made a clumsy attempt to fake an ordinary, everyday crime.

The act itself took only a moment.

The key scraped in the lock, and Knabe had only run a few steps along the dark corridor before he died without realizing what was happening.

Achimas looked around carefully to make sure everything was in place and went out to the staircase.

A door slammed downstairs and he heard voices talking loudly. Someone was running up the stairs. That was bad.

He backed into the apartment and slammed the door perhaps a bit louder than was necessary.

He had fifteen seconds at most.

He opened the window at the end of the corridor and hid behind the coat stand again. Literally the very next instant a man burst into the apartment. He looked like a merchant.

The merchant was holding a revolver, a Herstal-Agent. A fine little gun; at one time Achimas had used one himself. The merchant froze over the motionless body for a moment, then did what he was supposed to, dashing around the rooms and finally vaulting through the window onto the roof.

There wasn’t a sound on the staircase. Achimas slipped silently out of the apartment. Now he only had to take care of the koelner at the Metro-pole and he could consider the first point of his plan completed.

Before he could proceed to the second point of his plan, a little brain-work was required. That night Achimas lay in his room in the Trinity, staring up at the ceiling and thinking.

The tidying-up had been completed.

The koelner had been dealt with. There was no need to worry about the police. The German line of inquiry would keep them busy for a long time yet.

Now for the matter of his stolen fee.

Question: How could he find the bandit called Little Misha?

What did he know about him?

He was the leader of a gang — otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to track Achimas down and then send someone to kill him. So far that seemed to be all.

Now for the safecracker who had stolen the briefcase. What could be said about him? No normal-sized man could have squeezed through the small window opening. So it was a juvenile? No, it was unlikely that a juvenile could have opened the safe so skillfully; that required experience. On the whole it had been a rather neat job: no broken glass, no signs of breaking and entering. The thief had even locked the safe when he was finished. So it was a small man, not a juvenile. And the gang leader was called Little Misha. Which made it reasonable to assume that he and the safecracker were one and the same person. So this Misha must have the briefcase.

To sum up, he had a slim, agile little man known as ‘Little Misha’ who knew how to crack safes and was the leader of a serious gang.

That was really quite a lot.

He could be quite sure that a conspicuous specialist like that would be well known in Khitrovka.

But that was precisely why he would be far from easy to find. Pretending to be a criminal would be pointless — you had to know their customs, their slang, their rules of etiquette. It would make more sense to play the part of a ‘gull’ who required the services of a good safecracker. Say, a shop assistant who dreamed in secret of getting his hands into his master’s safe.

Early on Sunday, before heset out for Khitrovka, Achimas was unable to resist the temptation to turn into Myasnitskaya Street and watch the funeral procession.

It was an impressive spectacle. None of the many operations he had carried out in the course of a long career had produced such an impressive result.

Standing in the crowd of people weeping and crossing themselves, Achimas felt as if he were the central character in this grandiose theatrical production, its invisible center. It was an unfamiliar, intoxicating feeling.

Riding behind the hearse on a black horse was a pompous-looking general. Arrogant and pretentious. Certain that in this spectacle he was the only star of the first magnitude.

But, like all the others, he was no more than a puppet. The puppet master was standing modestly on the pavement, lost to view among the sea of faces. Nobody knew him, nobody looked at him, but the awareness of his unique importance set his head spinning faster than any wine.

“That’s Kirill Alexandrovich, the tsar’s brother,” someone said, referring to the mounted general. “A fine figure of a man.”

Suddenly a woman in a black shawl pushed aside one of the gendarmes in the cordon and dashed out of the crowd to the hearse.

“Whose care have you left us to, our dear father?” she keened in a shrill whine, pressing her face down against the crimson velvet.

The Grand Duke’s Arabian steed flared its nostrils in fright at this heart-rending wail and reared up on its hind legs.

One of the adjutants made to seize the panicking horse’s bridle, but Kirill Alexandrovich checked him with his powerful resonant voice: “Back, Neplyuev. Don’t interfere! I’ll handle it!”

Retaining his seat without any difficulty, he brought his mount to its senses in an instant. Snorting nervously, it began ambling sideways in small steps, then straightened up again. The hysterical female mourner was taken by the arms and led back into the crowd, and the minor incident was over.

But Achimas’s mood had changed. He no longer felt like the master pulling the strings in the puppet theater.

The voice that had ordered the adjutant not to interfere had been only too familiar. Once heard, a voice like that could never be confused with any other.

What a surprise to meet you like this, my dear Monsieur NN.

Achimas cast an eye over the portly figure in the Cavalry Guards uniform. This was the true puppet master, the one who pulled all the strings, and the Cavaliere Welde, otherwise the future Count of Santa Croce, was a mere stage prop. So be it.

He spent the whole day in Khitrovka. The funeral chimes of Moscow’s forty times forty churches reached even here, but the denizens of Khitrovka had no interest in the respectable city’s mourning over some general or other. This was a microcosm teeming with its own secret life, like a drop of dirty water under a microscope.

Achimas, dressed as a shop assistant, had suffered two attempts to rob him and three to pick his pocket, one of which had been successful:

Someone had slit his long-waisted cloth coat open with something very sharp and pulled out his purse. There was hardly any money in it, but the skill was most impressive.

For a long time his attempts to find the safecracker produced no results. Most of the local inhabitants wouldn’t enter into conversation at all, and those who would suggested people he didn’t want — someone called Kiriukha, or Shtukar, or Kolsha the Gymnast. It was after four in the afternoon when he first heard Little Misha’s name mentioned.

It happened while Achimas was sitting in the Siberia tavern, where secondhand dealers and the more prosperous professional beggars gathered. He was chatting with a promising ragamuffin whose eyes shifted their focus with that particular alacrity found only among thieves and dealers in stolen goods.

Achimas treated his neighbor to some bad vodka and made himself out to be a cunning but none-too-bright assistant from a haberdashery shop on Tverskaya Street. When he mentioned that his master kept an enormous fortune in cash in the safe, and if only some knowledgeable person would teach him how to open the lock, it would be no problem to take two or three hundred out of it once or twice a week — nobody would miss it — the ragamuffin’s eyes glittered: The foolish prey had delivered itself straight into his hands.

“Misha’s the one you need,” the local expert said confidently. “He’ll do a nice neat job.”

Achimas put on a doubtful expression and asked: “Is he a man with brains? Not some cheap beggar?”

“Who, Little Misha?” said the ragamuffin, giving Achimas a disdainful look. “You look into the Hard Labor this evening; Misha’s lads are in there drinking every night. I’ll call around and drop them a word about you. They’ll give you a grand reception.”

The ragamuffin’s eyes glittered — he evidently had high hopes that Little Misha would pay him a commission for such a nice fat lead.

Achimas was ensconced in the Hard Labor from early in the evening. But he hadn’t arrived dressed as a shop assistant; now he was a blind beggar, dressed in rags and bast sandals, and he had slipped small transparent sheets of calf’s bladder under his eyelids. He could see through them as if he were looking through fog, but they gave a convincing impression of his eyes being obscured by cataracts. Achimas knew from experience that blind men aroused no suspicion and nobody paid any attention to them. If a blind man sat quietly, the people around him stopped noticing him altogether.

He sat quietly. Not so much watching as listening. A company of tipsy men who were clearly bandits had gathered at a table a short distance away. They could be from Misha’s gang, but the agile little weasel wasn’t among them.

Events started moving when darkness had already fallen outside the dim glass of the basement windows.

Achimas took no notice of the new arrivals when they first came in. There were two of them: a junk dealer and a bandy-legged Kirghiz in a greasy kaftan. A minute later another one arrived — a hunchback doubled right over to the ground. It would never have occurred to him that they might be detectives. You had to give the Moscow police their due; they certainly knew their job. And yet somehow the disguised undercover agents were spotted.

It was all over in a moment. Everything was peaceful and quiet and then two of them — the junk dealer and the Kirghiz — were stretched out, probably dead, the hunchback was lying stunned on the floor, and one of the bandits was rolling about and screaming that it ‘hurt something awful’ in a repulsive voice that sounded fake.

The one Achimas had been waiting for appeared on the scene soon after that. A nervous, agile little dandy wearing European clothes, but with his trousers tucked into a pair of box-calf boots polished to a high gleam. Achimas was familiar with this particular criminal type, which he classified according to his own system as ‘weasels” — minor, but dangerous, predators. It was strange that Little Misha had risen to a position of such prominence in Moscow’s criminal underworld. “Weasels’ usually became stool pigeons or double agents.

Never mind; it would be clear soon enough what kind of character he really was.

They dragged the dead police agents behind a partition and carried the stunned one away somewhere else.