The Gentle Axe pp-1

by R. N. Morris

  Four, five, six…

  He noticed that he was following one particular set of footprints. These seemed to be both the most recent and the most indistinct, lacking any clear heel or toe definition. At times they smudged into long lines, as if the walker had been dragging one foot or the other. Virginsky looked up but saw no one. All the same, he did not believe he had the colonnade to himself. He sensed another presence, concealed behind the shifting blinds of the columns.

  Seven, eight, nine…

  Then he saw the man-the same tramp from beside the canal-darting across the aisle between two columns.

  He moves quickly, thought Virginsky. Yet to look at him, he must be in a worse state than I.

  And it was not that Virginsky had found the courage to move away from the Kazan Cathedral. It was just that he could no longer bear the tramp’s proximity. His terror had crystallized. He was certain now that if he came face to face with this other, he would see his own features staring back at him.

  He stepped out into the Nevsky Prospect, his gaze fixed on a square three-story building on the other side of the street. Fortunately the road was clear of traffic. But the wind shrieked gleefully as it battered into him.

  IWISH TO see Osip Maximovich.”

  Vadim Vasilyevich’s cold, gray eyes looked down on the bedraggled individual who had just presented himself at the offices of Athene Publishing. His small mouth drew itself into a tight pucker of distaste. “And who are you?” The question was strangled by the man’s forced baritone.

  “You know me. You’ve seen me at the house of Anna Alexandrovna. I am Pavel Pavlovich Virginsky.”

  “What is your business here?”

  “I wish to see Osip Maximovich.”

  “He’s a very busy man. You can’t just walk in here demanding to see whomsoever you like.”

  “Tell him I was a friend of Goryanchikov’s.”

  “You will have to do better than that.”

  “I am a writer. Well, a student. But I have written…essays.”

  “Petersburg is full of writers.”

  “Goryanchikov said that I could get work here. Goryanchikov said he would vouch for me.”

  “Unfortunately, Goryanchikov is dead. He can’t vouch for anyone.”

  “Please. Let me see Osip Maximovich. Goryanchikov told me-”

  “Goryanchikov told you what?” A second, higher voice, leavened with relaxed good humor, took over the interrogation. Osip Maximovich himself had just come into the room. A twinkling flash danced across his spectacle lenses.

  “About the work he was doing for you. The translation. The Proudhon. We talked about it.”

  Osip Maximovich took off his spectacles. His face was serious as he assessed Virginsky with his penetrating black eyes. “You talked about Proudhon?”

  “Yes.”

  Osip Maximovich replaced his spectacles. The optical effect was to retract his eyes. “And you think that qualifies you to take over Stepan Sergeyevich’s work?” He had seemed to be on the verge of asking something else entirely, but the thick lenses masked his intentions.

  “We talked about other things.”

  “What other things?”

  “Philosophy in general. Philosophers. Hegel.”

  Osip Maximovich pursed his lips as if impressed. “You talked of Hegel.”

  “Please. I want to work for you. Give me a section to do. If you’re happy with the result, hire me to complete it. I will work for half what you were paying Goryanchikov.”

  “Is that because you are only half as good as him?” quipped Vadim Vasilyevich.

  “I’m not greedy. Just hungry.”

  Osip Maximovich’s smile expressed his approval of the answer. He transmitted some of his beaming pleasure toward Vadim Vasilyevich.

  “There is no point,” said Vadim Vasilyevich bluntly. “The police have confiscated the text of Goryanchikov’s translation. We don’t know how far he got.”

  “I know he didn’t finish it,” said Virginsky.

  A sudden change came over Osip Maximovich’s mood. He sighed despondently. “Poor Stepan Sergeyevich. His death was a terrible blow to us.” He smiled forlornly to Virginsky. “He was like a son to me.”

  Virginsky frowned. “I wonder why people say that. It doesn’t mean very much.”

  “I…miss him.”

  Virginsky said nothing.

  “Did he ever, I wonder, speak of me…warmly?” pressed Osip Maximovich.

  “Would it make any difference to you to know he hated you?”

  “He said that?”

  “No. But those are the feelings I have toward my own father. If he was like a son to you, you should have expected the same from him.”

  Osip Maximovich laughed abruptly. “I think you will make a very good translator of philosophy. We will try you out with the final section of Proudhon. If you make an adequate job of that, you can have the section before the last. And so on in reverse. With any luck, when we get Goryanchikov’s version back from the police, the two will meet in the middle.”

  “Madness,” said Vadim Vasilyevich, throwing up his arms.

  “Now, now, Vadim Vasilyevich. We’ll find out soon enough if he’s up to the task. Do you accept the commission, my friend?”

  “What about money? We haven’t agreed on the money.”

  “That depends on the quality of the work. If it isn’t up to scratch, I’m afraid we won’t be able to pay you anything.”

  “But I need some money now.” Desperation made Virginsky’s tone aggressive. He quickly softened it. “For materials. Paper…pens…ink…candles.” After a moment Virginsky added, “Et cetera.”

  “Et cetera? What et cetera can there be?” smiled Osip Maximovich.

  “Food.”

  “This is beggary,” commented Vadim Vasilyevich.

  “Well, I’d rather deal with a beggar than a-” Osip Maximovich’s lips closed on the word he had been about to say. “Some other kind of scoundrel.”

  Vadim Vasilyevich averted his eyes, as if Osip Maximovich had just told an off-color joke.

  “At any rate, we can’t let our translator starve,” decided Osip Maximovich brightly. “We’ll give you fifty kopeks in advance. If the work is adequate, you will receive a further five rubles and the next section, that is to say the preceding section, to translate. If the work is not adequate, the fifty kopeks will serve as a severance fee, and we will never see you again. Is that agreed?”

  Virginsky nodded without looking Osip Maximovich in the eye.

  “Vadim Vasilyevich, the money box, please.”

  Vadim Vasilyevich was shaking his head as he withdrew into the back room.

  Out in the open, with the cold air piercing his face, Salytov began to feel cleansed. It didn’t last. He saw a man vomit orange paste into the gutter. Another argued with the wind. At the northeast corner of Haymarket Square, where it spilled over into Spassky Lane, a shivering woman offered her headscarf for sale. The thought occurred to him that she would get a better price for it than for herself.

  Students clustered around the racks and tables outside the secondhand bookshops on Spassky Lane. He had little patience for them. In fact, the sight of them infuriated him. He had no doubt they would consider themselves superior to him, as if their rags for clothes, their battered, crooked hats, even their starving bellies should be objects of envy. What kind of inverted table of ranks was this when the trappings of the most abject poverty were held to be a source of pride? They were no better than the ignorant peasants who scavenged for crusts and rags. No, they were worse, far worse. At least the peasant had a sense of his duty to himself. The peasant too had his soul intact. These educated fools had squandered theirs.

  Salytov imagined himself kicking over the book displays, a kind of Christ among the moneylenders.

  The entrance to number 3 hung open. Salytov skipped up the steps and pulled the door behind him, but it would not close. It was dark in the hallway and rapidly becoming darker. He could just abou
t make out the looming rectangles of the apartment doors on the ground floor. He kicked the front door wide open. It made little difference. Outside the afternoon was dissolving into gloom. He sensed rather than saw the stairs ahead of him, in the same way that he sensed his hand in front of his face.

  Before he lost the light completely, Salytov knocked briskly on the first door he came to. Minutes passed. He knocked again, with renewed urgency. His raps echoed in the dark. He had the sense of a great emptiness behind the door.

  He wondered if perhaps he had made a mistake. Was he wise to have come here alone or at least without informing anyone at the bureau what he was doing?

  He thought about turning around. He imagined himself outside, running, yes, running like a coward away from this place. But he imagined other things too: a knife coming out of the darkness and plunging into his midriff. He imagined a figure stepping out of the shadows. The face was a smooth blank. At the same time Salytov felt a retrospective anger at the way Porfiry Petrovich had tried to make a fool of him over the disappearance of the prostitute’s accuser, the man they now believed was Konstantin Kirillovich Govorov. But it had had nothing to do with him. The man had absconded before he became involved.

  He would show Porfiry Petrovich. He would bring Konstantin Kirillovich Govorov in alone.

  But more than anything, it was Salytov’s fear that persuaded him to stay.

  He could hear footsteps in the ground floor apartment now. In a moment he could be dead.

  The door cracked open. The glow of an oil lamp held at chest height flared upward, illuminating a single dark eye, set deep beneath a sprawling, highly animated eyebrow.

  “Govorov?” The hoarseness of his own voice surprised Salytov.

  “Upstairs.” The eyebrow wriggled as if from the effort of producing the word. A waft of pickled cucumber came with it.

  “Show me.”

  The eyebrow plummeted heavily. The movement expressed angry refusal.

  “I am a police officer. It will be better for you if you cooperate.”

  The door swung inward, allowing the halo of light to spread across the hall. The oil lamp was held by a short, balding man of about fifty. The first thing Salytov looked at was his eyebrows. He was impatient to dispel a superstitious sense of evil. Seeing them in the context of the full person only partially reassured him. He remained disturbed by their apparent unruliness and independence. He had to force himself to take in the rest of the man’s face. His skin was sallow, features Asiatic, his face skeletally gaunt beneath high, sharp cheekbones. A large bald head tapered acutely into a pointed beard, like an inverted onion dome.

  “I don’t want any trouble,” said the man. “This is a respectable house.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. You are?”

  “Leonid Simonovich Tolkachenko. I am the yardkeeper here.”

  “You have keys to all the apartments?”

  “Yes.”

  “Bring them.”

  The light went with Tolkachenko as he withdrew. Salytov felt Govorov’s presence fill the darkness.

  “What has he done?” said Tolkachenko sternly, returning with the bobbing light and the keys.

  “It’s no concern of yours,” said Salytov to the caretaker’s back as he followed him up the creaking stairs.

  “I knew it would end badly,” Tolkachenko threw over his shoulder.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I told him it had to stop.”

  “What?”

  “He brought girls here. He denied it. But I saw them and heard them. He tried to sneak them up the stairs. But I know the creak and groan of every step. And there is a board outside his door that calls out to me.”

  They reached the first landing. Tolkachenko pointed to the door on the right and nodded. Salytov gestured for him to open the door.

  The flat was in darkness.

  Tolkachenko cast the lamp’s unfocused glow about the room. “He’s not here.” Tolkachenko seemed surprised. “He was here.” The caretaker crossed to the window and held up the lamp to look out. He tested the window and found it locked. “How strange.”

  “Perhaps he slid down the banister,” said Salytov, grinning in the darkness. “Bring the light over here,” he added sharply. He was aware of an undefined dark shape hovering at shoulder height. “Give me that!” He took the lamp and allowed its flare to wash over the shape, which he was able to identify as a camera on its tripod. “So this is where he takes the photographs,” muttered Salytov. In that instant he hated Govorov. His desire to catch him and see him punished-for something, he didn’t care what-solidified.

  The swing of the sputtering oil lamp gradually revealed the room as a series of unrelated fragments: a sofa draped in a satin throw, a table littered with breadcrumbs and dirty crockery, an unmade bed, an open escritoire, a shelf of books, and propped up beneath it, a seven-stringed gypsy guitar. The escritoire demanded closer examination. Even at a distance Salytov recognized its contents as more of the genre of photographs he had confiscated from the tavern owner. In fact, it contained multiple copies of the same photograph. It was that girl again, the prostitute who had been brought in for stealing the hundred rubles. She was lying naked on Govorov’s sofa, her arms behind her head, her legs at right angles to each other, one knee sticking straight up, the other pointing out. Salytov felt his mouth contract with dehydration, sticking slightly to his teeth. The insistence of the image, repeated on every card he looked at, was dizzying.

  “Filthy whore,” commented Tolkachenko, with a heavy swallow. “And to think, all this has been going on above my head. Wait till I see Govorov.”

  “Say nothing. Do not arouse his suspicions. Do you understand? He may well be dangerous. This is a murder investigation. The moment he returns, send word to me. I am Lieutenant Ilya Petrovich Salytov of the Haymarket District Police Bureau. The Stolyarny Lane station.”

  “I know it. Not that I have ever been in trouble with the police,” added Tolkachenko quickly.

  “What hours does he keep, this Govorov?”

  “It is hard to say. He is not what you would call a regular gentleman. Sometimes he sleeps all day. Sometimes he is out all night.”

  Salytov crossed to the shelf of books. The volumes were all roughly the same size and shape, all in the same maroon cloth binding. He scanned the titles: Hareem Tales, The Adventures of a Rake, Pandora’s Awakening, White Slaves, A Sojourn in Sodom, The Gentleman’s Privilege, The Whip and the Whipped, The Pleasure of Purple (Being a Sequel to The Whip and the Whipped), Flesh and Blood, She Gave Herself to Gypsies, One Thousand and One Maidenheads, The Monk and the Virgins. Each one bore the imprint Priapos.

  Salytov gave an emphatic nod of triumph. It was not for the benefit of the caretaker, to whom he had nothing to prove, and whose presence he had anyway forgotten. He was imagining that he was showing the books to Porfiry Petrovich.

  The Hotel Adrianople

  The drozhki sped north across the Neva over the Dvortsovy Bridge. The driver stood to whip the horse, a bay stallion. The beast’s neck arched and writhed. Its back rippled beneath glistening skin. Steam rose from its flanks. It turned its face sideways into the sharp oncoming air. Under the driver’s cries, the horse’s snorts, and the constant jangle of the harness bells, Porfiry Petrovich could hear the hiss of the runners over the smooth ice. He folded down his fur collar so that the moisture from his breath would not dampen it.

  It was good to be sitting in an open drozhki wrapped in furs, hurtling into the coldest, clearest day of the winter so far.

  “Fools,” muttered Salytov.

  Porfiry turned to see what had provoked the remark. Salytov’s gaze was locked onto a wooden sledding hill built on the frozen river. It was Saturday morning, and the thrill-seekers rushed four abreast up the steps of the great tower. Their shrieks as they came down the other side hung high in the emptied air. It was mostly boys and young men, but there were some girls there too, their faces flushed and intent on excitement. Po
rfiry smiled. He felt vicariously the stomach lurch and the soul’s vertiginous untethering.

  He did not feel inclined to push Salytov for the source of his misanthropy. “You did well, Ilya Petrovich,” he commented instead, shouting over the noises of transit. The sledding hill was behind them now, though the yelps of pleasure and fear could still be heard.

  Salytov did not reply. His expression was hidden from Porfiry.

  “Finding Govorov’s lodging was a breakthrough.”

  “It was nothing but methodical old-fashioned police work. A lead was bound to come eventually. It came sooner rather than later. I was lucky.” Salytov did not face Porfiry as he shouted his reply. The investigator had to strain to catch his words.

  “You know as well as I do, you make your own luck in this game.”

  Salytov grunted.

  “Of course, the question raised by your discovery is, why should a man who has permanent lodgings in Spassky Lane take a hotel room on the Bolshoi Prospect?”

  Salytov’s refusal to face Porfiry became pointed.

  Porfiry frowned. “Ilya Petrovich, if I have offended you in any way…”

  Salytov half-turned in Porfiry’s direction. But he could not bring himself to look the other man in the eye. “You have not offended me,” he said in a stiff tone.

  “I’m glad to hear it. Then may I ask-” Porfiry broke off. “But no, I may be mistaken.” Porfiry’s reticence failed to elicit the openness he had hoped for from Salytov. He watched the other man closely before pressing: “Do I detect a certain antagonism in your demeanor, Ilya Petrovich?”

  Salytov sighed deeply, making sure it could be heard, then faced Porfiry at last. A fierce and undisguised bitterness showed in his eyes. “I know my place. I am a simple police officer. I do whatever is required of me by the office of the investigating magistrate. If you have any complaints concerning the way I have fulfilled my duties, I suggest you take them up with my superior, Nikodim Fomich.”

  “I have no complaints, Ilya Petrovich. I merely wonder why you dislike me so much.” Porfiry’s throat felt tight from shouting. His voice sounded hoarse.