by Boris Akunin
To be quite honest, he did not look very promising: swarthy-skinned, with a long, drooping nose and a stoop. They said he had been hired from the famous St Petersburg firm of Rubinstein and Rubinstein by a person unknown and had the reputation of an expert in criminal matters. However, the defender's appearance was distinctly unprepossessing. When he stepped out to the front, sneezed loudly into a pink handkerchief and then hiccupped as well, Anisii was seized by foreboding. Oh, that mean rogue Momos had been too miserly to hire a good lawyer; he'd sent some mangy scruff, and a Jew into the bargain. Just look at the way those anti-Semitic jurors were glowering at him; they wouldn't believe a single word he said.
Tulipov's neighbour on the left, an impressive gentleman with a bushy beard and gold-rimmed spectacles who looked like a Kalmyk, examined the lawyer, shook his head and whispered conspiratorially to Anisii: 'He'll ruin the whole case, you'll see.'
The defender stood facing the jurors, pressed his hands to his sides and declared in a sing-song accent: 'Ah, Mr Judge and gentlemen of the jury, can you explain to me what this man has been talking about for the best part of an hour?' He jabbed his thumb derisively in the direction of the prosecutor. 'I would be interested to learn what all the commotion is about. On what is the money of honest taxpayers, such as you and I, being spent?'
The 'honest taxpayers' looked at this over-familiar windbag with evident distaste, but the barrister was not embarrassed in the least.
'What does the prosecution have?' he inquired sceptically. A certain swindler, whom, just between you and me, our valiant police have failed to find, organised a fraud. He hired this sweet, modest young lady to give out tickets, saying that the money would go to a good cause. Look at this young woman, gentlemen of the jury. I appeal to you: how is it possible to suspect such an innocent creature of such villainy?'
The jurors looked at the accused. Anisii looked too, and sighed. The case looked hopeless. Perhaps somebody else might have moved the court to pity, but not this hook-nose.
'Come now,' said the defender with a wave of his hand, 'she is as much a victim as the others. Even more so than the others, since the cashbox of the so-called lottery was arrested and all those who presented a ticket were given their money back. Do not ruin the life of this young creature, gentlemen of the jury; do not condemn her to a life among criminals.'
The lawyer sneezed again and pulled a heap of papers out of his briefcase.
'That's pretty feeble,' Anisii's bearded neighbour commented with cool, professional confidence. 'They'll find the girl guilty. How would you like a wager?' And he winked from behind his spectacles.
A fine sense of humour! Anisii moved away angrily, preparing for the worst.
But the defender had not finished yet. He pinched at his goatee beard in the manner of Lord Beaconsfield and genially pressed one hand to a shirt that was none too fresh.
'That is approximately the speech that I would have made to you, gentlemen of the jury, if there were anything to discuss here. But there is nothing to discuss, because I have here' - he shook the papers in the air - 'statements from all the plaintiffs. They are withdrawing their suits. Close the proceedings, Mr Judge. There is no case to be tried.' The barrister approached the judge and slapped the statements down on the table in front of him.
'But that's smart,' Anisii's neighbour whispered, growing excited. 'What will the prosecutor have to say to that?'
The prosecutor sprang to his feet and began shouting in a voice breaking under the weight of righteous indignation: 'This is plain bribery! And I shall prove it! The proceedings cannot be stopped! This is a case of public importance!'
The defender turned to the shouting man and began taunting him: '"Plain bribery"? What new Cato do we have here? It would have been cheaper to bribe you, Mr Prosecutor. Everybody knows that your rate is not very high. As it happens, by the way, I have one of your receipts here. Where is it now? Ah, here!' He pulled some other piece of paper out of his briefcase and thrust it under the judge's nose. 'For a mere one and a half thousand our prosecutor cancelled the bigamist Brutyan's sentence, and Brutyan fled.'
The prosecutor clutched at his heart and slumped down on to his chair. A hubbub broke out in the hall and the correspondents, who had so far been feeling bored, came to life and started scribbling in their notepads.
The judge rang his bell and gazed in confusion at the compromising receipt, as the disagreeable attorney turned awkwardly, and several photographic prints fell out of his inexhaustible briefcase, scattering on to the table.
Anisii could not see what was in those photographs, but the judge suddenly turned as white as chalk and gaped at them, his eyes wide in horror.
'I do apologise,' said the defender, and yet he appeared in no hurry to gather up the photographs from the table. 'They have absolutely nothing to do with our case here today. They are from another case, concerning the corruption of young boys.'
It seemed to Anisii that the barrister emphasised the words 'today' and 'another' in a somewhat strange manner, but then he did speak with a rather distinctive intonation, and Anisii could have imagined it.
'Well now, shall we close the case?' the advocate asked, looking the judge straight in the eye as he gathered up the photographs. 'On the basis that no crime has been committed, eh?'
A minute later the proceedings were declared concluded.
Anisii stood on the porch in a state of terrible agitation, waiting for the miraculous advocate to lead out his acquitted client.
And there they were: Mimochka was smiling to the left and the right, not looking miserable and pitiful any more. The stooping advocate was leading her along, arm in arm, and waving away the reporters with his other hand, which held the briefcase.
Ah, I'm fed up with you all!' he exclaimed angrily as he helped his companion into the phaeton.
Anisii wanted to go up to Mimochka, but his neighbour from the courtroom, that interested commentator on the legal proceedings, stepped forward first.
'You'll go a long way, colleague,' he said to Mimochka's hooknosed saviour, slapped him patronisingly on the shoulder, and strode away, tapping his cane heavily.
'Who was that?' Anisii asked an usher.
'Him, sir,' the usher replied in a voice filled with unbounded admiration, 'why that was Fedor Nikiforich Plevako himself, the most brilliant lawyer in Russia. Gets people off without speaking more than a single sentence.'
At that moment, as Mimi plumped down on to the springy seat of the phaeton, she suddenly swung round and blew Anisii a kiss. The barrister also swung round. He looked sternly at the young lop-eared functionary in the white uniform jacket and suddenly did a very queer thing: he screwed up his face and stuck out a broad, bright-red tongue.
The carriage picked up speed, rumbling merrily over the cobblestones of the road.
'Stop! Stop!' Anisii shouted and went darting after it, but how could he possibly overtake it?
And what point was there, anyway?
THE DECORATOR
CHAPTER I
A Bad Beginning
Erast Petrovich Fandorin, the Governor-General of Moscow's Deputy for Special Assignments and a state official of the sixth rank, a knight of many Russian and foreign orders, was being violently sick.
The finely moulded but now pale and bluish-tinged features of the Collegiate Counsellor's face were contorted in suffering. One hand, in a white kid glove with silver press-studs, was pressed against his chest, while the other clawed convulsively at the air in an unconvincing attempt by Erast Petrovich to reassure his assistant, as if to say, 'Never mind, it's nothing; I shall be fine in a moment.' However, judging from the intensity with which his distress continued, it was anything but nothing.
Fandorin's assistant, Provincial Secretary Anisii Pitirimovich Tulipov, a skinny, unprepossessing young man of twenty-three, had never before had occasion to see his chief in such a pitiful state. Tulipov himself was in fact a little greenish round the gills, but he had resisted the temptation to vomit
and was now secretly feeling proud of it. However, this ignoble feeling was merely fleeting, and therefore unworthy of our attention, but the unexpected sensitivity of his adored chief, always so cool-headed and not disposed to excessive displays of feeling, had alarmed Anisii quite seriously.
'G-Go ...' said Erast Petrovich, squeezing out the word as he wiped his purple lips with one glove. His constant slight stutter, a reminder of a concussion suffered long ago, had been become noticeably stronger as a result of his nervous discomfiture. 'G-Go in ... T-Take ... d-detailed ... notes. Photographs from all angles. And make sure they don't t-t-trample the evidence
He doubled over again, but this time the extended hand did not tremble - the finger pointed steadfastly at the crooked door of the little planking shed from which only a few moments earlier the Collegiate Counsellor had emerged as pale as a ghost with his legs buckling under him.
Anisii did not wish to go back into that grey semi-darkness, into that sticky smell of blood and offal. But duty was duty.
He filled his chest right up to the top with the damp April air (he didn't want his own stomach to start churning too), crossed himself and took the plunge.
The little hut was used for storing firewood, but there was hardly any left, because the cold season was already coming to an end. Quite a number of people had gathered inside: an investigator from the Public Prosecutor's Office, detectives from the Criminal Investigation Department, the district superintendent of police, the local police inspector, a forensic medical expert, a photographer, local police constables, and also the yard-keeper Klimuk, first to discover the scene of the monstrous atrocity - that morning he had looked in to get some wood for the stove, seen it there, had a good long yell and gone running for the police.
There were two oil lamps burning, and shadows flickered gently across the low ceiling. It was quiet, except for a young constable gently sobbing and sniffing in the corner.
'Well now, and what do we have here?' forensic medical expert Egor Willemovich Zakharov purred curiously as he lifted some dark, bluish-crimson, porous object from the floor in a rubber-gloved hand. 'I do believe it's the spleen. Yes that's her, the little darling. Excellent. Into the little bag with her, into her little bag. And the womb too, the left kidney, and we'll have the full set, apart from a few odd little bits and pieces ... What's that there under your boot, Monsieur Tulipov? Not the mesentery, is it?'
Anisii glanced down, started in horror and almost stumbled over the outstretched body of the spinster Stepanida Andreichkina, aged thirty-nine years. This information, together with the nature of her occupation, had been obtained from the yellow prostitute's card left lying neatly on her sundered chest. But there was nothing else neat to be observed in the posthumous appearance of the spinster Andreichkina.
One could assume that even in life her face had not been lovely to behold, but in death it had become nightmarish: it was livid blue, covered with blobs of powder, the eyes had slipped out of their sockets and the mouth was frozen in a soundless scream of horror. What could be seen below the face was even more horrific. Someone had slashed open the poor streetwalker's body from top to bottom and from side to side, extracted all of its contents and laid them out on the ground in a fantastic design. By this time, though, Zakharov had already collected up almost the entire exhibition and put it away in little numbered bags. All that was left was the black patch of blood that had spread without hindrance and little scraps of the dress that had been either hacked or torn to shreds.
Leontii Izhitsin, the district prosecutor's Investigator for Especially Important Cases, squatted down beside the doctor and asked briskly: 'Signs of intercourse?'
'That, my darling man, I'll particularise afterwards. I'll compose a little report portraying everything just the way it is, very prettily. In here, as you can see for yourself, we have been cast into the outer darkness.'
Like any foreigner with a perfect mastery of the Russian language, Zakharov was fond of peppering his speech with various quaint and whimsical turns of phrase. Despite his perfectly normal surname, the expert was of English extraction. The doctor's father, also a medical man, had come to the kingdom of our late departed sovereign, put down roots and adapted a name that presented difficulty to the Russian ear - Zacharias - to local conditions, making it into 'Zakharov': Egor Willemovich had told them all about it on the way there in the cab. You could tell just from looking at him that he wasn't one of us Russians: lanky and heavy-boned, with sandy-coloured hair, a broad mouth with thin lips, and fidgety, constantly shifting that terrible pipe from one corner of his mouth to the other.
The investigator Izhitsin pretended to take an interest, clearly putting on a brave face, as the medical expert twirled yet another lump of tormented flesh between his tenacious fingers and inquired sarcastically: "Well, Mr Tulipov, is your superior still taking the air? I told you we would have got by perfectly well without any supervision from the Governor's department. This is no picture for over-dainty eyes, but we've already seen everything there is to see.'
It was clear enough: Leontii Izhitsin was displeased; he was jealous. It was a serious matter to set Fandorin himself to watch over an investigation. What investigator would have been pleased?
'Stop that, Linkov, you're like a little girl!' Izhitsin growled at the sobbing policeman. 'Better get used to it. You're not destined for special assignments; you'll be seeing all sorts of things.'
'God forbid I could ever get used to such sights,' Senior Constable Pribludko muttered in a half-whisper: he was an old, experienced member of the force, known to Anisii from a case of three years before.
It wasn't the first time he'd worked with Leontii Izhitsin, either - an unpleasant gentleman, nervous and jittery, constantly laughing, with piercing eyes; always neat and tidy - his collars looked as if they were made of alabaster and his cuffs were even whiter - always brushing the specks of dust off his own shoulders; a man with ambitions, carving out a career for himself. Last Epiphany, though, he'd come a cropper with the investigation into the merchant Sitnikov's will. It had been a sensational case, and since it also involved the interests of certain influential individuals to some degree, any delay was unacceptable, so His Excellency Prince Dolgorukoi had asked Erast Petrovich to give the Public Prosecutor's Office a helping hand. But everyone knew the kind of assistance the Chief gave - he'd gone and untangled the entire case in one day. No wonder Izhitsin was furious. He could sense that yet again the victor's laurels would not be his.
'That seems to be all,' the investigator declared. 'So what now? The corpse goes to the police morgue, at the Bozhedomka Cemetery. Seal the shed, put a constable on guard. Have detectives question everyone living in the vicinity, and make it thorough - anything they've heard or seen that was suspicious. You, Klimuk. The last time you came to collect firewood was some time between ten and eleven, right?' Izhitsin asked the yard-keeper. And death occurred no later than two o'clock in the morning?' (That was to the medical expert Zakharov.) 'So what we have to look at is the period from ten in the evening to two in the morning.' And then he turned to Klimuk again. 'Perhaps you spoke to someone local? Did they tell you anything?'
The yard-keeper (a broad, thick beard, bushy eyebrows, irregular skull, with a distinctive wart in the middle of his forehead, thought Anisii, practising the composition of a verbal portrait) stood there, kneading a cap that could not possibly be any more crumpled.
'No, Your Honour, not at all. I don't understand a thing. I locked the door of the shed and ran to Mr Pribludko at the station. And they didn't let me out of the station until the bosses arrived. The local folk don't know a thing about it. That is, of course, they can see as lots of police have turned up ... that the gentlemen of the police force have arrived. But the locals don't know anything about this here horror,' said the yard-keeper, with a fearful sideways glance at the corpse.
'We'll check that soon enough,' Izhitsin said with a laugh. 'Right then, detectives, get to work. And you, Mr Zakharov, take your treasu
res away, and let's have a full evaluation, according to the book, by midday'
'Will the gentlemen detectives please stay where they are.' Fandorin's low voice came from behind Izhitsin. Everybody turned around.
How had the Collegiate Counsellor entered the shed, and when? The door had not even creaked. Even in the semi-darkness it was obvious that Anisii's chief was pale and perturbed, but his voice was steady and he spoke in his usual reserved and courteous manner, a manner that did not encourage any objections.
'Mr Izhitsin, even the yard-keeper realised that it would not be good to spread gossip about this incident,' Fandorin told the investigator in a dry voice. 'In fact, I was sent here in order to ensure the very strictest secrecy. No questioning of the locals. And furthermore, I request - in fact I demand - that everyone here present must maintain absolute silence about the circumstances. Explain to the local people that... a st-streetwalker has hanged herself, taken her own life, a perfectly ordinary business. If rumours of what has happened here spread around Moscow, every one of you will be subject to official inquiry, and anyone found guilty of divulging information will be severely punished. I'm sorry, gentlemen, but th-those are the instructions that I was given, and there is good reason for them.'
At a sign from the doctor the constables were about to take the stretcher standing against the wall and place the corpse on it, but the Collegiate Counsellor raised his hand: 'Wait a m-moment. He crouched down beside the dead woman. 'What's this here on her cheek?'
Izhitsin, galled by the reprimand he had received, shrugged his narrow shoulders. A spot of blood; as you may have observed, there's plenty of blood here.'
'But not on her face.' Erast Petrovich cautiously rubbed the oval spot with his finger - a mark was left on the white kid leather of his glove. Speaking in extreme agitation, or so it seemed to Anissii, his chief muttered: 'There's no cut, no bite.'