“Go away. Marry someone or other and leave me be.”
“Marry who? I like it here.”
“I don’t like here with you in it.”
“This is what you did to me,” she answered, cold as stone. “This is what I’m fit for, Mary. You. You’re all I’m fit for now. You took the rest away.”
“I’d ne’er dream of touching anything of yours.”
“Liar. You’ve taken three things from me at least, I can prove ’em, and that’s naught to do with my chances with suitors when we were girls, or my lessons you used to copy out in secret, or my reputation after you hinted I let men court me on the sly afore you left Caernarfon.”
I tilted my head, having done all that and then some. One can, after all, accomplish a great deal from the shadows. The Man with the Long Black Coat and I are adepts. Skulking and silence for months, maybe years, but then, oh but then—pour the champagne!
“You took John Davies when he said as he’d wait for me to come of age.” Julia’s voice had turned thick and dark as pitch, a voice calling from a crypt. “That’s one definite thing. You took the shell I found, the one I meant to keep us safe together, warm and fed together. That’s another.”
Nodding, I scratched at a loose end on the cheap lace trim of my sleeve. It’ll have to be mended. Her accusations were nothing short of Testament, but ’pon my soul, I don’t know what difference she thought they made.
“You said three things. That I took,” I urged after a pause.
She stepped down to my level, eyes burning like the sun behind Caernarfon Castle.
“You took yourself away from your sister,” she hissed in my ear. “And don’t think I’ll ever forgive you for it.”
Laying a cool palm to her shoulder, I pressed it. Looked at her direct, meaning listen to me for the last time.
“I weren’t ne’er enough for you.” My hand shook, so I smoothed it down her sleeve and then tucked my fingers around my elbows. “Nothing was. It were always you being the best, being noticed—talking, laughing, studying, singing. Sucking all the marrow from the room until the bones lay scattered, ever since you were born, and I couldn’t help but curse the day. I didn’t even exist with you around. Can’t you see why there weren’t space for me at home, why I had to light out after my own crib, my own family once you’d took the one God gave me? Why can’t you understand, Julia?”
“You didn’t have to ruin me in the process, Mary Jane!” she cried, and then shoved her fingers over her trembling lips.
Shifting from foot to foot, I gave her another definite nod whilst I stared at the filthy carpet. We were through here, had been through long ago and far away.
“Joe came round looking for you,” I said numbly, like the admission was hard. I cast my eyes up to the invisible door of 13 Miller’s Court, studying it as if ’twere a lifeline, and in a way, for me maybe it was. “I think he wants to go away with you. He’s drinking with his porter mates closer to Billingsgate, but he’ll be back between midnight and one, thereabouts. I think you ought to say yes.”
Her blue eyes grew ocean-wide. “You want me to meet Joe here, tonight? You want me to take him for mine?”
“Don’t you love him?”
She pursed her lips, considered. “Yes. What do you care for that? I loved John Davies too. After all you’ve done, why?”
“Because you had the right of it. I owe you tonight,” I replied, touching the oyster shell, drawing it out between us. “I’ll make myself scarce now, and you’ll meet with Joe, and the war will be over for good and all. Those things what I done—copying your sums without asking, taking John Davies though he said he’d wait, telling people you were no better than you should be—you were right. You shouldn’t have kept coming after me, but I’m glad you did, truly. I owe you every single second of the rest of your life.”
Tears spilled from Julia’s eyes. The gap between us closed. We embraced. She said thank you, and goodbye, and I stayed silent, overcome with feeling.
I stepped out into the cold, eyes narrowing at the cutting rays of the dying sun.
Then I went to the pub and set about telling everyone who would listen in strictest confidence—which meant it would spread like wildfire—that Julia were going back to Wales tonight, and that I should be lost without her.
—
I leave the pub with t’other dollymops, who are now weaving about like lushy mayflies.
“What did you say your name was?” the pretty one asks.
The plump one’s arm is about her shoulders. “Yes, do tell us.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I answer, but friendly-like. “Julia will do.”
“Christ, ain’t that the truth.” The shrewish one chuckles. “Can’t recall the last time as anybody wanted to know mine. Cheers, Julia…see you hereabouts again, I trust.”
No, you shan’t, I think as I watch them meander away—ribbing each other, stumbling, slapping at each other’s bums.
Returning slowly to the Thames, I find a dark corner along the embankment beneath London Bridge and count my store of chink again. Might take a week perhaps, but if I’m careful over food and max and not too particular over where I sleep, I can like as not manage it.
Paris. I can’t afford champagne there, but this city isn’t for me any longer.
The lights in the boats twinkle in the sullen waters, and the air is icy enough to scrape the skin. I start humming the tune to “A Violet from Mother’s Grave,” the song the papers say neighbors claim I were singing afore I died so horribly. There’s a weight dissolving from my chest, a hollow feeling replacing it, one filled with possibilities, and I watch the slow progression of the cargo ships.
I wonder how the Man with the Long Black Coat is faring. He was angry, I could guess as much after what he done to her, but I wager he shan’t be cross for long. Rubbing my thumbnail along the shell at my neck, I wonder what he’ll do with her heart. I wonder whether he’s been to Paris. Of course I’ve no address for him, nor name, but anyone can advertise in the Agony Columns, and everyone reads them.
Pulling my red shawl closer about me, I head for the black corridors where the quiet creatures live.
The Decorator
BORIS AKUNIN
Perhaps the most distinguished—certainly the most popular—author in Russia today is Grigory Shalvovich Chkhartishvili (1956– ), better known under his Boris Akunin nom de plume, whose enormously popular series about the nineteenth-century detective Erast Fandorin has made him a household name. He was nominated in 2000 for the Smirnoff-Booker Prize, also known as the British-sponsored Russian Booker Prize (related to the Man Booker Prize). In the same year, he won the Anti-Booker Prize (with a prize of one dollar more than the Russian Booker Prize) for his Fandorin novel Coronation, or the Last of the Romanovs. Also in 2000, Akunin was named the Russian Writer of the Year.
While he is a noted translator and has written under other pseudonyms, it is the Fandorin novels for which Akunin is known in the West. This series of mystery stories began with The Winter Queen (1998; English translation in 2003) and has continued with an additional fourteen books, following Fandorin’s career from his days as a clerk in the police department to his decision to become a private detective. The most popular mystery fiction in post-Soviet Russia has been the lowest type of pulp hackwork, filled with over-the-top violence, gore, and sex. Akunin set out to write novels in the middle ground between Dostoevsky and this trash, and has succeeded.
Four Fandorin works, The Winter Queen, The Turkish Gambit, The State Counsellor, and “The Decorator,” were made into big-budget Russian movies.
“The Decorator” was first published in English in Special Assignments: The Further Adventures of Erast Fandorin (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007).
THE DECORATOR
Boris Akunin
CHAPTER 1
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 treasures 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.”
The Big Book of Jack the Ripper Page 40