The Gentle Axe pp-1

by R. N. Morris

  “A magistrate. An investigating magistrate,” corrected Porfiry, with an apologetic smile. “Porfiry Petrovich, madam,” he added with a bow.

  “What is it about?” asked Anna Alexandrovna anxiously.

  “Stepan Sergeyevich,” answered Katya, her voice strained. “He’s dead.”

  Porfiry watched the quick transitions of Anna Alexandrovna’s face with interest. It was difficult to be certain about the precise emotion this news inspired in her, but Porfiry felt that genuine grief was part of it.

  “I’m afraid that’s not all,” said Porfiry. “Borya-your yardkeeper, I believe-is also dead.” Porfiry glanced guiltily toward Katya.

  Anna Alexandrovna shrieked. “Oh, this is terrible! Terrible!” she cried, a hand coming up to her suddenly white face. Katya rushed up to her and embraced her.

  Porfiry’s bow was contrite. “There is no easy way to break such news.”

  “Oh, poor Borya,” cried Anna Alexandrovna, pulling herself away from her maid’s support. “It’s all right, Katya. I’m all right.” But she staggered as Katya released her. Porfiry held out a hand that was rejected with a shake of the head. “Please, sir…?”

  “Porfiry Petrovich,” Porfiry reminded her.

  “Please, Porfiry Petrovich, would you accompany me into the drawing room?” She gestured toward a pair of double doors. “There is a samovar there. Katya, will you serve us some tea, my dear?”

  The samovar gurgled and hissed agitatedly. Porfiry Petrovich and Anna Alexandrovna turned away from it as though with discretion. She gestured for him to sit on a gold and maroon Russian sofa. As he did so, a gust of wind rattled the panes.

  The drawing room was lined in pale blue brocatelle, with gilt work on the rococo moldings. The air was humid with tea-scented steam. Silk curtains of the same blue were draped in swooping sections across three large windows. The light that filtered through cast a milky sheen over Anna Alexandrovna’s dark dress. Within a marble fireplace, short, quick flames peeped shyly out of a mountain of glowing coals.

  “It’s such a shock,” said Anna Alexandrovna, looking out of the window, as if she were commenting on the sudden violence of the weather. “How did it happen?”

  “I’m afraid it seems as if they were both murdered.”

  “No!” She searched his face for a different answer.

  “Their bodies were found together in Petrovsky Park.”

  “Petrovsky Park?” There was no doubt about it. The mention of Petrovsky Park had startled her. But now her expression became guarded. She leaned back slightly from Porfiry. He watched her expectantly, but she gave nothing more away.

  Porfiry accepted a glass of tea from the tray Katya held out to him. He slipped a sugar crystal between his teeth to sweeten it. He placed the glass on the low mahogany table that was in front of the sofa.

  “Katya informed me that Borya and Goryanchikov-Stepan Sergeyevich, that is-quarreled shortly before Stepan Sergeyevich disappeared.”

  “Yes. That’s right. Everyone heard it.”

  “Everyone? Who else lives in the house?”

  “My daughter, Sofiya. And Osip Maximovich. And Vadim Vasilyevich. However, Osip Maximovich was not here on the day of the quarrel.”

  “Who are these gentlemen?”

  “Osip Maximovich rents the second floor. Vadim Vasilyevich lodges with him and serves him in the capacity of a secretary. He also has a manservant, Artur.”

  “Is there anyone else in your household?”

  “Yes, there is Marfa Denisovna. She was Sofiya’s nurse when she was younger. She lives with us still. And Lizaveta, our cook.”

  “You have a cook, and yet you were grinding your own cinnamon?” Porfiry teased her.

  “There are some jobs I like to do in the kitchen, both because they give me pleasure and because I don’t like to leave them to others.”

  Porfiry nodded his understanding and tried to make up for his gentle mockery by blinking repeatedly. Anna Alexandrovna seemed startled. “We will want to speak to everyone in the house,” he said more seriously. “One of my officers will come back this afternoon to take statements.”

  “But Osip Maximovich and Vadim Vasilyevich will be at the publishing house.”

  “The publishing house?”

  “Osip Maximovich is a publisher.”

  “I see. You said that Osip Maximovich was not here on the day of the argument. Do you know where he was?”

  “He was staying in a monastery in Kaluga province.”

  “Optina Pustyn?”

  “That’s right. He was on retreat.”

  “When did he leave for Optina Pustyn?”

  “Oh, weeks before. I mean, possibly two weeks before.”

  “Did he go alone?”

  “Yes. Vadim Vasilyevich took him to the station and saw him off.”

  “But Vadim Vasilyevich was here in the house at the time of the argument?”

  Anna Alexandrovna thought for a moment before replying: “I think so, yes. It’s hard to say for sure.”

  “And when did Osip Maximovich return?”

  “Last night.”

  “Only last night? I see. And as for Borya…when did you notice that Borya was missing? Presumably you had noticed that Borya was missing.”

  “Yes, of course, but…Borya often disappears. He can go missing for days.”

  “He is a drunkard,” put in Katya, whom Porfiry was surprised to discover had not left the room, merely withdrawn into the peripheral gloom.

  “Was he drunk when he argued with Stepan Sergeyevich?”

  “When wasn’t he drunk?” commented Katya without concealing her disgust.

  “Katya!” pleaded Anna Alexandrovna. Her eyes widened in admonition.

  “Anna Alexandrovna, can you tell me what Borya and Stepan Sergeyevich argued about?”

  “They were always arguing. Stepan Sergeyevich took pleasure in goading Borya. Stepan Sergeyevich was an intellectual. He questioned everything. Borya was a simple man. A man of faith. Everything he believed in, Stepan Sergeyevich ridiculed.”

  “But what brought it to a head?”

  “I don’t know that it was brought to a head. Why do you say it was brought to a head?” There was evasion in her question.

  “Katya informed me that Borya threatened to kill Stepan Sergeyevich.”

  “Borya would never kill anyone,” protested Anna Alexandrovna feelingly.

  “But would you say this row was any worse than any of the others they had had?”

  “Oh, things were said, certainly.”

  “What things?”

  “Please! How can I be expected to know?”

  “Where did the argument take place? Can you tell me that?”

  “In the yard. Borya was in his shed. Stepan Sergeyevich was in the yard, shouting into the shed.”

  “What was he wearing?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Stepan Sergeyevich, what was he wearing?”

  “His shuba, I think. Yes, I’m sure of it. He would have been. He never went out without his shuba on. He was very proud of it. He had it made specially, of course. To fit.”

  “That’s interesting. He owed you money, I understand. And yet he could afford to have a fur coat made.”

  “From time to time Stepan Sergeyevich would do work for Osip Maximovich. Translations. He was paid most generously. But the money never lasted.”

  “I hope you will forgive my next question, but it occurs to me and so I must ask it. That is the way it is with investigations.”

  Anna Alexandrovna looked anxious but said nothing.

  “How did such a man as Stepan Sergeyevich Goryanchikov come to be living in your house?”

  “He came to us when my husband was still alive.”

  “I see. It was your late husband’s wish that Stepan Sergeyevich reside here?”

  “My husband agreed to it, and so I suppose he must have wished it,” said Anna Alexandrovna.

  Porfiry blinked excessively agai
n as he took in the tension in her expression. At last he said: “I would like to search Stepan Sergeyevich’s room. And also to have a look in Borya’s shed. Did Borya have an axe?”

  “Yes, of course. He had many axes.”

  “Of course, what yardkeeper doesn’t have a good collection of axes! Even so, it is useful to have it confirmed. Especially as I expect that I will find one of his axes missing.”

  “He killed him with the axe!” cried Katya.

  “An axe is involved in these crimes, that’s true,” said Porfiry, turning to Katya. “But I’m curious to know why you are so convinced that Borya killed Stepan Sergeyevich. I have not said that.”

  “And Borya was murdered too, Katya.” Anna Alexandrovna appealed to Porfiry: “You did say that they were both murdered?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Was it with the axe?” pressed Katya.

  Porfiry smiled but didn’t answer. “Perhaps you would show me to Stepan Sergeyevich’s room?” He placed the glass on the tray and stood up.

  Porfiry stooped to enter the room, a tiny space with sloping walls in the apex of the house.

  “It’s very cramped,” he observed to Katya, who had shown him up.

  “Stepan Sergeyevich was comfortable enough,” she answered from the doorway. There was not room for them both inside. “He didn’t need anywhere bigger. He never complained.”

  Porfiry took in the details of the dead man’s lodging: the child-sized bed tucked beneath the eaves, the desk and single chair, both sawed off at the legs. The other furniture consisted of an enormous-seeming ottoman and an ornately carved trunk of dark wood. Through a small dormer window he looked down on Srednyaya Meshchanskaya Street. The sky was darkening. It seemed that there was a blizzard thickening in the air. But the room was warm: the heat of the house rose into it. Unlike the highly varnished parquet of the lower apartments, the floor was of rough boards. The room was clean, however. Porfiry looked around for an icon on the white-painted walls but did not see one.

  On the desk, there was a neat pile of paper and an open book. Porfiry lifted the book to glance at the cover. It was the first volume of Proudhon’s Philosophie de la misère.

  “The Philosophy of Misery,” said Porfiry aloud. The book was open on page 334. A phrase from the middle of the page, underlined in red ink, drew his attention: “J’insiste donc sur mon accusation.” Porfiry returned the book to the desk. He picked up the top sheet from the pile of paper. He saw that it bore-written in a flamboyant hand and also in red ink-a Russian translation of the page he had just glanced at. In it, the phrase “I insist therefore on my accusation” was also underlined. In the Russian version, the words immediately following this were: “The father of Faith will be the destroyer of Wisdom.” Startled by the strange statement, he checked the original French text. There, after the underlined phrase, he read: “Sous le régime aboli par Luther et la révolution française, l’homme, autant que le comportait le progrès de son industrie, pouvait être heureux…” The Russian translation of this phrase-“Under the regime abolished by Luther and the French Revolution man could be happy in proportion to the progress of his industry…”-came only after the interpolation concerning the father of Faith.

  Porfiry placed the sheet back on top of the pile and turned to Katya with a smile. “And you keep it tidy for him. It seems to me Anna Alexandrovna runs a well-ordered household. She is a good mistress, I would say.”

  “The best.”

  “Tell me, did anything else unusual happen on the day of the argument? Did Goryanchikov or Borya have any visitors, for example?”

  “There was a boy,” answered Katya with surprise.

  “A boy? What boy is this?”

  “I don’t know. I had never seen him before. It was strange. He insisted on seeing Stepan Sergeyevich. And on his way out he called on Borya in his shed. Soon after that they had their argument. And soon after that Stepan Sergeyevich went out.”

  “Wearing his shuba?”

  “Of course…as Anna Alexandrovna has said.”

  “And how soon after Stepan Sergeyevich went out did you notice that Borya was missing?”

  “Well, of course, the yard needed clearing. We couldn’t open the door for the snow. We had to ask Osip Maximovich’s man Artur to do it for us. He wasn’t happy about that, I can tell you. Considers himself above such tasks.”

  “And who has kept the yard clear for you in Borya’s absence?”

  “Anna Alexandrovna has come to an arrangement with one of the neighbors’ yardkeepers. He sometimes helps us out when Borya goes missing.”

  “This boy interests me. Was he a friend of Anna Alexandrovna’s daughter perhaps?”

  “No!” cried Katya, outraged at the suggestion. “He was a scruffy little urchin. Sofiya Sergeyevna would have nothing to do with the likes of him. Besides, he was only about ten years old.”

  “And how old is Sofiya Sergeyevna?”

  “She was thirteen at her last birthday.”

  “I see. Tell me more about this boy. Did you speak to him?”

  “I answered the door to him. And I would have shut the door in his filthy face too if Stepan Sergeyevich hadn’t come down and seen him.”

  “Did Stepan Sergeyevich know the boy?”

  “I don’t think so. But he heard him asking for him by name.”

  “So he had the boy admitted and brought him up here to his room? How long did the boy stay?”

  “Not long. Ten minutes at the most. If that.”

  “Does Stepan Sergeyevich give lessons as a tutor?”

  “Not anymore. And this boy was not the sort of boy to have lessons. He had a stupid face.”

  “You took against the boy, I can see.”

  “He left a trail of dirty footprints throughout the house. It was a job to get them out.”

  “And what about Stepan Sergeyevich? Did you like Stepan Sergeyevich?”

  The question went unanswered.

  “Katya?”

  “One should not speak ill of the dead.”

  “He was a difficult man to like, though, wasn’t he?”

  “He was a devil.”

  “Do you know a friend of Goryanchikov’s called Pavel Pavlovich Virginsky?”

  “I believe there is a gentleman of that name who visited from time to time.”

  “Did he visit on the day of Goryanchikov’s disappearance?”

  “No. However, it’s strange you mentioned it…He called to visit Stepan Sergeyevich yesterday.”

  “Yesterday? What time was this?”

  “It was late. Very late. Anna Alexandrovna and her daughter had both gone to bed. He knocked the whole house up.”

  “And he asked to see Stepan Sergeyevich?”

  “He demanded to be admitted to his room.”

  Porfiry fumbled in his pockets for his enameled cigarette case. A severe frown from Katya deterred him from opening it. Nonetheless, in this instance, he found the touch of it stimulating enough.

  OUTSIDE, Porfiry finally lit the cigarette he craved. The blizzard he had seen massing from Goryanchikov’s room had blown itself out. But the courtyard had already been cleared. Porfiry felt sorry for Borya, whose death had been so quickly and easily compensated for, as if erased beneath a snowfall.

  Inside the yardkeeper’s shed it was as if the objects of his life were shaping themselves around the fact of his death, around his physical absence. There was an old paint-spattered wooden chair, its seat worn and polished by many sittings. It was crammed in next to a folding card table, the baize threadbare and stained. The samovar on it seemed to possess an air of mournful disappointment. Chipped cups milled around it without purpose. The sawdust had settled on the floor, around an assortment of bricks and logs. The bottom of a barrel was propped up against one of the shed’s sides. Life continued only in the cobwebs that grew heedless over the tools and tins of his occupation.

  Porfiry backhanded a line in the air, a conjurer’s gesture, as he checked off the row of han
ging axes. But of course, he did not need to do this. He could see perfectly well where the missing axe should be. He could judge too, from its position in the hierarchy of axes, that its size matched that of the bloodied axe found on Borya.

  He stared at the gap and wondered at the mind that had chosen this axe over the three others hanging there. The second-smallest axe had been taken. The chances were that it was snatched in haste. But even so, some exercise of intent must have been involved, whether conscious or unconscious. Why, for example, was the smallest axe not taken, which would surely have been more convenient? The axe, or rather the absence of this particular axe, had to point at something. It was in precisely such a detail that the killer would betray himself.

  Porfiry brought his hand back and in the air drew a vertical line up and then back down the gap formed by the missing axe. He realized that he had crossed himself. His hand came to rest on a small birch box that lay on the shelf beneath the axes. He picked up the box and discovered that it was locked.

  In an upstairs apartment, seated alone at a card table, Marfa Denisovna looked down at hands disfigured by warts. She laid out the cards for a game of solitaire. She accepted the fall of the cards in the same way as she had accepted her warts, and all the other things sent by God. Without pleasure or complaint.

  Marfa Denisovna was sixty-six, as old as the century. It was a convenient coincidence, because if she ever forgot her age, she only had to ask the year.

  Deep peach-stone whorls lined her face. She lacked lips entirely and showed as little as possible of her eyes. Her body was wiry and compact. There was not much to her physically, but she was far from frail. The passage of time had worn away all softness from her, leaving a human kernel. Her shoulders were draped in an enormous black shawl. A delicate lace bonnet seemed out of place on her tightly pinned-up, almost metallically hard gray hair.

  She did not look up as Anna Alexandrovna came in.

  “Has he gone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who was he?”

  “An investigator.”

  “What did he want?”

  “They have found Stepan Sergeyevich and Borya.”

  Marfa Denisovna moved the ace of spades up.

  “Dead. They are both dead.” Anna Alexandrovna’s voice was distant and empty.