The Diamond Chariot Read Free Page A

answer. Then he opened the door with a picklock.
    Twitchy was dangling in a noose, by the window, from the curtain rail. All the signs indicated suicide: no bruises or abrasions, paper and a pencil on a chair, as if the man had been going to write a farewell note, but changed his mind.
    Evstratii Pavlovich had listened to the agent’s agitated jabbering and ordered him to wait for the group of experts to arrive, then sat down at the desk and started drawing the crest – to clear his mind and, even more importantly, to calm his nerves.
    Just recently the court counsellor’s nerves hadn’t been worth a rotten damn. The medical diagnosis read: ‘General neurasthenia resulting from excessive fatigue; enlargement of the pericardium; congestion of the lungs and partial damage to the spinal cord that might pose the threat of paralysis’. Paralysis! You had to pay for everything in this life, and the price was usually much higher than you expected.
    So here he was, a hereditary nobleman, the head of a supremely important section in the Department of Police, with an annual salary of six thousand roubles – and never mind the salary, he had a budget of thirty thousand to use entirely at his own discretion, every functionary’s dream. But without his health, what good was all the gold in the world to him now? Evstratii Pavlovich was tormented by insomnia every night, and if he ever did fall asleep, that was even worse: bad dreams, ghoulish visions, with the devil’s work in them. He woke in a cold sweat, with his teeth chattering wildly. He kept thinking he could see something stirring repulsively in the corners and hear someone chuckling indistinctly, but derisively, or that ‘someone’ might suddenly start howling. In his sixth decade Mylnikov, the scourge of terrorists and foreign spies, had started sleeping with a lighted icon lamp. For the sanctity of it, and to keep away the darkness in the nooks and crannies. All those steep hills had nigh on knackered the old horse …
    The previous year he had applied to retire – and why not, he had a bit of money put by, and a little homestead bought, in a fine area for mushrooms, out on the Gulf of Finland. And then this war happened. The head of the Special Section, the director of the Department and the minister himself had implored him: Don’t betray us, Evstratii Pavlovich, don’t abandon us in dangerous times like these. You can’t refuse!
    The court counsellor forced himself to focus his thoughts on more pressing matters. He tugged on his long Zaporozhian Cossack moustache, then drew two circles on the paper, a wavy line between them and a question mark up above.
    Two little facts, each on its own more or less clear.
    So, Maximenko had died, his overworked heart had given out under the stresses and strains of the service. It happened.
    Honorary citizen Komarovsky, whoever the hell he was (the Moscow lads had picked up his trail the day before yesterday at a secret Socialist Revolutionary meeting place), had hanged himself. That happened with some neurasthenic revolutionaries too.
    But for two existences that were to some degree interconnected, two, so to speak, intersecting earthly vales, both to be broken off abruptly and simultaneously? That was too queer by half. Evstratii Pavlovich had only the vaguest idea of what an earthly vale was, but he liked the sound of the words – he had often imagined himself wandering through life as just such a vale, narrow and tortuous, squeezed in between bleak, rocky cliffs.
    Who was this Kalmyk? Why did he go to see Twitchy – on business or, perhaps, by mistake (he was only there for four minutes)? And what took Maximenko into a dead-end courtyard?
    Oh, Mylnikov didn’t like this Kalmyk at all. He was more like the Angel of Death than a plain staff captain (the court counsellor crossed himself at the thought); he left one man, and he promptly hanged himself; another man followed the Kalmyk, and he died a dog’s death in a filthy