The Diamond Chariot (36 page)

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

1
‘Welcome’ (Japanese)

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.’

Erast Petrovich deliberately spoke about the Japanese with emphatic correctness, making it clear that he did not like the sergeant’s choice of words. The American seemed to take the hint.

‘I know him. He’s in charge of the station on Wagon Street, that’s in the Native Town. Of all the yellow … Of all the Japanese, Go is the smartest. We’ve worked together a couple of times already, on mixed cases when the mischief-makers were whites and yell … I mean natives. He’s a really young guy, only thirty, but experienced. He’s been in the police about fifteen years.’

‘How is that possible?’ Fandorin asked in surprise.

‘Well, he’s a hereditary
yoriki
.’

‘Who?’

‘A
yoriki
, it’s like a precinct cop. Under the old regime, the shoguns, the usual thing was for every trade, even every job, to pass from father to son. For instance, if your father was a water-carrier, then you’re going to spend your entire life carting around barrels of water. If your old man was the deputy head of the fire brigade, then you’ll be the deputy head too. That was why everything here fell apart on them – there was no point in straining yourself, you couldn’t jump any higher than your dear old dad anyway. And Go’s from a family of
yoriki
. When his father was killed by a robber, the lad was only thirteen. But order is order: he hung two swords on his belt, picked up a truncheon and went to work. He told me that the first year he carried the long sword under his arm so that it wouldn’t drag along the ground.’

‘But can a b-boy really maintain order in an entire neighbourhood?’

‘He can here, because the Jappos … the Japanese don’t look at the man so much, they look at the position and the rank. And then, they respect the police here – they’re all samurai to a man. And then, Rusty, bear in mind that guys who were born into
yoriki
families have been taught the whole body of police science since they were little kids: how to catch a thief, how to disarm robbers and tie them up, and they can handle a truncheon in a fight like our cops have never even dreamed of. I think Go could do plenty when he was thirteen.’

Erast Petrovich listened with great interest.

‘And how is their police organised now?’

‘On the English model. There are out-of-work samurai everywhere you look now, so there’s no shortage of volunteers. If you’re interested in the details, ask Go – here he comes.’

Fandorin looked out of the window at the well-lit square and saw a tall Japanese in a black uniform jacket and white trousers, with a sword hanging at his side. He was walking towards the station, swinging his right arm in military style.

‘You see he has a revolver on his belt,’ said Lockston, pointing. ‘That’s unusual for a native. They prefer to use a stick or, at a pinch, a sword.’

Inspector Asagawa was taciturn and calm, with a still face and quick eyes that were surely highly observant. The titular counsellor liked him. The Japanese began by ceremoniously but quite decisively putting the noisy sergeant in his place.

‘I am glad to see you too, Mr Lockston. Only please, if it is not too difficult for you, call me Goemon and not Go, although we Japanese feel more comfortable when we are addressed by our surnames. No thank you, I won’t have any coffee. Concerning my health and so forth, with your permission, we can talk later about that. My superiors have informed me that I come under the command of the vice-consul. What are your orders, Mr Fandorin?’

In this way the conversation was immediately set on business lines.

Erast Petrovich briefly described their goal.

‘Gentlemen, we have to find three samurai from Satsuma whom the Russian subject Captain Blagolepov carried on his launch last night. We have to ascertain if these men were involved in his sudden death.’

Fandorin didn’t say anything about the political background to the investigation. Asagawa understood and apparently approved – at least, he nodded.

‘Well, and how are we going to find them and ascertain that?’ asked Lockston.

‘These men hired the captain to take them to Tokyo again before dawn today, they even p-paid him an advance. So our first action will be as follows: we will go to the spot where the launch is moored and see if the Satsumans show up at the agreed time or not. If they do not, it means they know that the captain is dead. That will serve to strengthen the suspicion that they are involved in his death. That is one.’

‘What’s the point?’ the sergeant asked with a shrug. ‘So it will strengthen the suspicion. But where do we look for those three, that’s the catch.’

‘The daughter of the deceased told me that most of her father’s clients were supplied by the owner of the Rakuen. I assume that these three also made their arrangements with the owner of the launch and not with the captain. I can’t be completely certain of that, but let us not forget that the suspicious blow to his neck was inflicted inside the Rakuen. Which brings me to the second stage of this investigation: if the Satsumans do not show up, we shall turn our attention to Mr Semushi.’

Lockston chewed on his cigar, thinking over what Fandorin had said, but the Japanese was already on his feet.

‘In my humble judgement, your plan is very good,’ he said briefly. ‘I shall take ten experienced police officers. We shall surround the mooring and wait.’

‘And I’ll take six of the lads, the entire night shift,’ said the sergeant, also getting up.

Erast Petrovich summed up the situation.

‘So, if the Satsumans come, they are no longer under suspicion of the captain’s death. We hand them over to the Japanese police, who can deal with finding out who they are and what their intentions were. If the Satsumans do not come, the investigation remains within the competence of the consulate and the m-municipal police …’

‘And make no mistake, we’ll find those sons of bitches, wherever they are,’ the American put in. ‘We’ll go straight from the mooring to the hunchbacked Jappo’s place and shake the very soul out of him.’

Fandorin couldn’t help it, he shuddered at that ‘Jappo’ and was about to rebuke the sergeant for his intemperate speech, but it turned out that Inspector Asagawa had no intention of letting his nation be insulted.

‘The Japanese soul, Mr Lockston, is hidden deeper than it is in white people. It is not so easy to shake out, especially with a man like Semushi. He is an
akunin
, of course, but by no means a weakling.’

‘Who is he?’ Fandorin asked, knitting his brows together at the sound of an unfamiliar word.

‘An
akunin
is like an evil man or a villain,’ Asagawa tried to explain. ‘But not entirely … I don’t think the English language has a precise translation for it. An
akunin
is an evil man, but he is not petty, he is a strong man. He has his own rules, which he defines for himself. They do not conform to the prescriptions of the law, but an
akunin
will sacrifice his life for the sake of his rules, and so he inspires respect as well as hate.’

‘There is no word for that in Russian either,’ Fandorin admitted after a moment’s thought. ‘But g-go on.’

‘Semushi undoubtedly breaks the law. He is a cruel and cunning bandit. But he is not a coward, otherwise he could not hold on to his position. I have been working my way towards him for a long time. I have arrested him twice: for smuggling and on suspicion of murder. But Semushi is one of a new breed. He does not act like the bandits of former times. And most importantly of all, he has protectors in high places …’

Asagawa hesitated and stopped, as if realising that he had said too much.

He doesn’t want to hang out his dirty laundry in front of foreigners, Fandorin guessed, and decided to leave any questions for later, when he got to know the inspector better

‘Know what I have to say to you guys?’ said Lockston, narrowing his eyes sceptically. ‘We’re not going to get anywhere. We won’t prove the old dope-smoker was bumped off. With just a finger. It’s not possible.’