The Coronation (40 page)

‘He’s in a hurry,’ Erast Petrovich whispered. ‘That’s very good. It means he was not able to telephone or has nowhere to phone to. I wonder how he informed Lind about your arrival? By note? That would mean that the doctor’s lair is somewhere quite close. All right. Time to go.’

We walked out quickly into the street. I started looking around, trying to spot a free cab – after all, if the Postman was in a hurry, he was sure to take a carriage. But no, the hurrying figure in the black post office uniform crossed the boulevard and disappeared into a narrow little street. So Erast Petrovich had guessed right, and Lind was somewhere not far away.

Without stopping, Fandorin told me: ‘Drop back about ten
sazhens
behind me and keep your distance. But d-do not run!’

It was easy for him to say ‘Do not run!’ Erast Petrovich himself has a miraculous way of striding along rapidly but without any visible signs of haste, and so I was obliged to move in the manner of a wounded hare: I walked for about twenty steps, and then ran for a brief stretch, walked and ran, walked and ran. Otherwise I would have fallen behind. It was already completely dark, which was most opportune since otherwise I fear that my strange manoeuvres would have attracted the attention of the occasional passer-by. The Postman wound his way through the side streets for a little while and suddenly stopped in front of a small detached wooden house with a door that opened straight onto the pavement. There was light at one of the curtained windows – someone was at home – but the Postman did not ring the doorbell; he opened the door with a key and slipped inside.

‘What are we going to do?’ I asked, catching up with Fandorin. He took hold of my elbow and led me away from the little house.

‘I don’t know. Let’s t-try to work that out.’ By the light of a street lamp, I saw the smooth forehead below the lacquered peak of the police cap gather into wrinkles. ‘There are several possibilities. The first: Doctor Lind and the hostages are here. Then we need to keep watch on the windows and wait. If they try to leave, then we strike. The second possibility: only Lind is here and Emilie and the boy are somewhere else. We still have to wait until the doctor comes out and follow him until he leads us to the hostages. The third possibility: neither Lind nor the p-prisoners are here, only the postman and his family. After all, there was someone in the house, was there not? In that case, someone has to come to the Postman from Lind. There is hardly likely to be a telephone connection in this little house. So once again we need to wait. We can see who comes, and then act according to the circumstances. So, there are three alternatives, and in every case we have to wait. Let’s m-make ourselves comfortable – the wait might drag on for a while.’ Erast Petrovich looked around. ‘I tell you what, Ziukin, get a cabby from the boulevard. Don’t tell him where he’s going. Just say that you’re hiring him for a long time, and he’ll be generously paid. And meanwhile I’ll look for a comfortable spot.’

When I drove back to the corner in a cab a quarter of an hour later, Fandorin emerged from the dense shadows to meet us. Straightening his sword belt, he said in a stern commanding voice: ‘Badge number 345?You’ll be with us all night long. Secret business. You’ll be paid twenty-five roubles for your work. Drive into that entranceway and wait. And no sleeping now, Vologda. Understand?’

‘I understand, what’s so hard to understand?’ the cabby replied briskly. He was a young peasant with a clever snub-nosed face. I didn’t understand how Fandorin guessed from his appearance that he was from Vologda, but the cabby certainly did stretch his vowels to the limit.

‘Let’s go, Afanasii Petrovich. I’ve found a most comfortable spot.’

Opposite the little wooden house was a more impressive detached property surrounded by a trellis fence. Erast Petrovich bounded over the fence in an instant and beckoned for me to follow his example. Compared with the railings at the Neskuchny Park it was simple.

‘Well, not bad, is it?’ Fandorin asked proudly, pointing to the other side of the street.

The view of the Postman’s house from there really was ideal, but our observation point could only have been called ‘most comfortable’ by a masochistic (I believe I have remembered the word correctly) habitué of the chamber at the Elysium club. Right behind the fence there were thick prickly bushes that immediately started catching at my clothes and scratching my forehead. I groaned as I tried to free my elbow. Would I really have to sit here all night?

‘Never mind,’ Fandorin whispered cheerfully. ‘The Chinese say: “The noble man does not strive for comfort.” Let’s watch the windows.’

We started watching the windows.

To tell the truth, I failed to spot anything remarkable – just a vague shadow that flitted across the curtains a couple of times. In all the other houses the windows had gone dark a long time ago, while the inhabitants of our house seemed to have no intention of going to sleep at all – but that was the only thing that might have seemed suspicious.

‘And what if there is a fourth?’ I asked after about two hours.

‘A fourth what?’

‘Alternative.’

‘Which is what?’

‘What if you were mistaken and the post office employee has nothing to do with Lind?’

‘Out of the question,’ Fandorin hissed rather too angrily. ‘He definitely does. And he is bound to lead us to the d-doctor himself.’

Oh, to taste the honey that your lips drink, I thought, recalling the old folk saying, but I said nothing.

Another half-hour went by. I started thinking that probably for the first time in my life I had lost track of the days. Was today Friday or Saturday, the seventeenth or the eighteenth? It was not really all that important, but for some reason the question gave me no peace. Finally I could stand it no longer, and I asked in a whisper: ‘Is today the seventeenth?’

Fandorin took out his Breguet, and the phosphorescent hands flashed in the darkness.

‘It has been the eighteenth for five minutes.’

¹
You, shit! Kiss me on—

18 May

The previous day had been warm, and so had the evening, but after several hours of sitting still I was chilled right through. My teeth had started to chatter, my legs had gone numb, and any hope that our nocturnal vigil would produce some useful result had almost completely evaporated. But Fandorin remained completely unruffled – indeed, he had not stirred a muscle the whole time, which made me suspect that he was sleeping with his eyes open. And what irritated me most of all was the calm, I would even say
complacent
, expression on his face, as if he were sitting there listening to some kind of enchanting music or the song of birds of paradise.

Suddenly, just when I was seriously considering the idea of rebellion, Erast Petrovich, without any visible change in his demeanour, whispered: ‘Attention.’

I started and looked carefully but failed to see any change. The windows in the house opposite us were still lit up. There was not a single sign of movement, not a single sound.

I glanced at my companion again and saw that he had not yet emerged from his sleep, swoon, reverie or whatever – his general strange state of trance.

‘They are about to come out,’ he said quietly.

‘Why do you think that?’

‘I have fused into a single reality with the house and allowed the house to enter into myself so that I can feel it b-breathing,’ Erast Petrovich said with a completely serious air. ‘It is an oriental t-technique. It would take too long to explain. But a minute ago the house began creaking and swaying. It is preparing to expel people from within itself.’

It was hard for me to tell if Fandorin was joking or was simply raving. I rather inclined towards the latter option, because it was not funny enough to be a joke.

‘Mr Fandorin, are you asleep?’ I enquired, and at that very moment the windows suddenly went dark.

Half a minute later the door opened and two people came out.

‘There is no one left in the house; it is empty n-now,’ Fandorin pronounced slowly, then suddenly grabbed hold of my elbow and whispered rapidly. ‘It’s Lind, Lind, Lind!’

I jerked my head round with a start and saw that Erast Petrovich had completely changed: his face was tense, his eyes were narrowed in an expression of intense concentration.

Could it really be Lind after all?

One of the two who had come out was the Postman – I recognised his build and the peaked cap. The other man was average in height, wearing a long operatic cloak like an almaviva thrown over his shoulders and a Calabrian hat with a sagging brim that hung very low.

‘Number two,’ Fandorin whispered, squeezing my elbow in a grip that was extremely painful.

‘Eh? What?’ I muttered in confusion. ‘Alternative number two. Lind is here, but the hostages are somewhere else.’

‘But are you certain it really is Lind?’

‘No doubt about it. Those precise, economical and yet elegant movements. That way of wearing the hat. And finally that walk. It is he.’

My voice trembled as I asked: ‘Are we going to take him now?’

‘You have forgotten everything, Ziukin. We would detain Lind if he had come out with the hostages, according to alternative number one. But this is number two. We follow the doctor; he leads us to the boy and Emilie.’

‘But what if—’

Erast Petrovich put his hand over my mouth again, in the same way as he had done before so recently. The man in the long cloak had looked round, although we were talking in whispers and he could not possibly have heard us.

I pushed Fandorin’s hand away angrily and asked my question anyway: ‘But what if they are not going to the hostages?’

‘The time is five minutes past three,’ he replied, apropos of nothing at all.

‘I didn’t ask you the time,’ I said, angered by his evasiveness. ‘You are always making me out—’

‘Have you really forgotten,’ Fandorin interrupted, ‘that we made an appointment with the doctor at four in the morning? If Lind wishes to be punctual, he needs to collect the prisoners as quickly as possible in order to get to the waste g-ground by the Petrovsky Palace on time.’

The fact that Erast Petrovich had started stammering again suggested that he was feeling a little less tense. And for some reason I also stopped trembling and feeling angry.

The moment Lind (if it was indeed he) and the Postman turned the corner, we skipped back over the fence. I thought in passing that since I had met Mr Fandorin I had climbed more walls and fences than at any other time in my life, even when was I was a child.

‘Get into the carriage and follow me with caution,’ Erast Petrovich instructed me as he walked along. ‘Get out at every corner and look round it. I shall signal to you to drive on or to wait.’

And in precisely that unhurried manner we reached the boulevard, where Fandorin suddenly beckoned for us to drive up to him.

‘They have taken a cab and are going to Sretenka Street,’ he said as he sat down beside me. ‘Come on now, Vologda. Follow them, only don’t get too close.’

For quite a long time we drove along a succession of boulevards, sometimes moving downhill at a spanking pace and then slowing to drive up an incline. Although it was the middle of the night, the streets were not empty. There were small groups of people walking along, making lively conversation, and several times we were overtaken by other carriages. In St Petersburg they like to poke fun at the old capital city for supposedly taking to its bed with the dusk, but apparently this was far from true. You would never see so many people out walking on Nevsky Prospect at three o’clock in the morning.

We kept driving straight ahead, and turned only once, at the statue of Pushkin, onto a large street that I immediately recognised as Tverskaya. From here to the Petrovsky Palace it was three or four versts straight along the same route that the imperial procession had followed during the ceremonial entry into the old capital, only in the opposite direction.

On Tverskaya Street there were even more people and carriages, and they were all moving in the same direction as we were. This seemed very strange to me, but I was thinking about something else.

‘They are not stopping anywhere!’ I eventually exclaimed, unable to contain myself. ‘I think they are going straight to the meeting place!’

Fandorin did not answer. In the dim light of the gas lamps his face looked pale and lifeless.

‘Perhaps Lind still has some accomplices after all, and the hostages will be delivered directly to the rendezvous?’ he speculated after a long pause, but his voice somehow lacked its habitual self-confidence.

‘What if they have already been . . .’ I could not bring myself to finish the dreadful thought.

Erast Petrovich spoke slowly, in a quiet voice, but his reply sent shivers running down my spine: ‘Then at least we still have Lind.’

After the Triumphal Gates and the Alexander Railway Station, the separate groups of people fused into a single continuous stream that spread across the roadway as well as the pavements and our horse was forced to slow to a walk. But Lind’s carriage was not moving any faster – I could still see the two hats beyond the lowered leather hood ahead of us: the doctor’s floppy headgear and the Postman’s peaked cap.

‘Good Lord, it’s the eighteenth today!’ I exclaimed, almost jumping off the seat when I remembered the significance of the date. ‘Mr Fandorin, there cannot be any meeting on the waste ground! With so many problems on my mind, I completely forgot about the programme of events for the coronation! On Saturday the eighteenth of May there are to be public revels on the open ground opposite the Petrovsky Palace, with free food and drink and the distribution of souvenirs. There must be a hundred thousand people on that waste ground now!’

‘Damn!’ Fandorin swore nervously. ‘I didn’t take that into account either. But then I didn’t think that there would be any meeting. I just wrote down the first thing that came into my head. What an unforgivable blunder!’

On every side we could hear excited voices – some not entirely sober – and jolly laughter. For the most part the crowd consisted of simple people, which was only natural – free honey cakes and sweet spiced drinks were hardly likely to attract a more respectable public, who if they did come to take a look out of curiosity would go into the grandstands, where entrance was by ticket only. They said that at the last coronation as many as three hundred thousand people had gathered for the public festivities, and this time probably even more would come. Well, here they were. People must have been making their way there all night long.