The Cleansing Flames (St Petersburg Mystery)

by R. N. Morris

  Thus Kozodavlev reassured himself that he was not a monster.

  Then, at last the boy re-emerged, and Kozodavlev saw that he could swim as well as his fellows, despite being somewhat slighter in build. His reluctance perhaps had been feigned, or it was simply the prospect of the icy shock that had put him off.

  There was something about this sailor’s face that attracted Kozodavlev’s attention. Broad-nosed and narrow-eyed, he was from peasant stock, undoubtedly, but his expression was intelligent, and therefore vulnerable. To think – to think deeply and honestly and freely – was to make yourself vulnerable. It involved cutting yourself loose from the security of received ideas and laying yourself open to new ones. It was an unsettling activity. Eventually, if one persevered, it led to greater strength. But first there was a period of uncertainty and anxiety to endure, from which some never emerged. They would spend their whole lives in a state of crippling doubt, cowering beneath a shell of cynicism.

  Hence the wariness behind the young sailor’s hesitancy. The quick darting glance of his eyes was questioning and slightly remote. He was less spontaneous, less natural. Happiest when he was swimming away from the ugly braying of his fellows. But still, not wholly content alone. Always he would come back to the group, to make himself again the butt of their stupid jokes.

  He was a potential revolutionary, judged Kozodavlev. They needed young peasants like this, who could think for themselves – up to a point, it always had to be up to a point – and then take the word back to their villages. Loyalty to the cause is always stronger when the individual believes he has come to his convictions himself.

  The young sailor executed an untidy but efficient duck dive, his two pale legs splayed as they kicked against the air.

  Kozodavlev’s apprehension returned. But this time he was not anxious about the swimmer’s abilities.

  It was there, just there, where the boy was diving that . . .

  The boy’s head broke the surface of the river, pushing aside two bobbing slabs of ice with a fierce shake of denial. A circle of spray shot out from his drenched hair. Immediately, he began shouting and gesticulating urgently to his comrades, his finger repeatedly stabbing downwards towards the bottom of the canal.

  Kozodavlev bit down on his thumbnail, finally severing it, so sharply that the clash of his incisors scratched the enamel.

  He took a step back from the balustrade but did not move away.

  The nail fragment caught in the back of his throat, setting him coughing. Eventually, he was able to spit out the nail.

  Kozodavlev now watched in horror as the mood of the other sailors changed gradually from hilarity to confusion, and then to a kind of hyper-alert tension. With varying levels of skill, they duck-dived beneath the broken ice.

  The moment seemed longer than humanly possible: all the sailors gone from sight, the canal unnaturally quiet in their absence. If Kozodavlev was going to run, now would be the time to do it.

  Then, one by one, they broke the surface, with huge, life-swallowing gasps, their lungs strained to the edge of endurance. The young boy who had caught Kozodavlev’s eye was the last to emerge, his skin now turning blue with the cold.

  Now, almost immediately, there was something else there with them, another presence, or almost a presence, not quite. A smooth, black, glistening mound nudged aside the suddenly agitated chunks of ice.

  The sailors shouted excitedly amongst themselves. Then one of them, Kozodavlev’s boy in fact, noticed Kozodavlev on the embankment watching them. Treading water, he waved his hands and called out to Kozodavlev.

  ‘Hey, you! Mister! Find a policeman, will you? Or the City Guard.’

  Kozodavlev frowned, as if he couldn’t understand Russian, or had never heard it spoken with a Volga accent.

  ‘What’s the matter with you? Get the police, for Christ’s sake!’

  ‘The police?’ Kozodavlev’s voice had never sounded more false to his ears.

  ‘There’s a dead body here. It was tied to some rocks. We got it free. Someone must have dumped it in the canal. Before the water froze over.’

  ‘A dead body, you say? Are you sure? My goodness, a dead body! Who would have thought it? And with all the fires last night.’

  Now all the sailors were watching Kozodavlev, their faces dumbfounded. ‘He’s some kind of . . . madman,’ pronounced one of them, a man with an unruly moustache that stuck out at right angles before him.

  ‘Who is it?’ said Kozodavlev, brightly. Even he knew it was a stupid thing to say, possibly the most stupid thing he could have said in the circumstances.

  ‘Who is it?’ exploded the sailor with the bristling moustache. ‘How the fuck should we know?’

  ‘Turn him over, I mean,’ answered Kozodavlev. ‘Let’s have a look at his face.’ The truth was, he was simply incapable of tearing himself away from that spot until he knew for sure.

  The sailors exchanged consultative glances and decided, wordlessly, that there was some merit in the suggestion, even if it had come from a madman.

  They clustered around the low cylindrical form that barely broke the surface of the water.

  Like flies, thought Kozodavlev. Around the proverbial.

  The slabs of ice seemed to shun the alien matter in their midst. Kozodavlev could now see it was the back of a frock coat, taut and filled with bloated mass.

  At a signal from the sailor with the bristling moustache, the men gripped and heaved. It was clear they were used to working together. Kozodavlev felt a momentary pang of envy, the envy of the intellectual for the common man, always excluded. At the same time, he envied them their co-operative ease. What he could do with such men, if only he could recruit them to the cause!

  He allowed his mind to run on like this only for as long as it took them to turn the sodden trunk, its limbs flailing in protest at the disturbance.

  The sailors backed away, to lay bare the strange doll-like face for the madman on the embankment to see. But when they looked up, they saw that he had already gone.

  3

  A strange-looking fellow

  ‘Do we have any idea who he is?’ asked Porfiry Petrovich with a grunt. The granite pavement pressed sharply against his tender knees: he was crouched on all fours on the embankment of the Winter Canal, beside a mound of sodden matter that had once been a man. Additional stabs of pain danced along his spine, spreading out across his lower back. The smell from the body was unusually foul and fetid. Porfiry felt like he was diving into the heart of a rotting swamp.

  The Easter fair in Admiralty Square was in full swing. Porfiry could hear the clash of competing barrel organs, and the roar of the crowd. The sounds were close enough to be distracting.

  ‘According to Ptitsyn,’ Virginsky enunciated the name distastefully, almost spitting it out, ‘no means of identification were found on the body.’ Virginsky looked down at the corpse with a recriminatory glance, as if he held the dead man to blame for this oversight.

  Sergeant Ptitsyn clicked his heels in confirmation. The young policeman had been recently promoted to this rank, and, evidently, transferred to the Admiralty District Police Bureau, which was how he came to be on the scene. He seemed to have grown in confidence with his new position, though he gave the impression of being as eager to please as ever. He was still capable of showing due deference to his superiors.

  Porfiry squinted into a blasted hole in the side of the man’s head. ‘It appears that he was shot. In the head. Therefore it is reasonable to assume that he was dead before he entered the water.’

  ‘Of course, we will need a medical examination to confirm that,’ Virginsky reminded his superior.

  ‘That goes without saying, Pavel Pavlovich,’ agreed Porfiry, without removing his eye from the side of the man’s head. ‘Which is why I did not trouble myself to say it.’

  ‘He must have been there all winter,’ said Ptitsyn. ‘Beneath the ice.’ His tone was pitying. He narrowed his eyes compassionately.

  ‘It surely made no di
fference to him,’ said Virginsky. ‘He was dead, after all.’

  The young police officer’s brows dipped reproachfully.

  Virginsky was unrepentant. ‘At least he is well preserved.’

  Porfiry Petrovich straightened himself up with a grunt. He held a hand out to Virginsky to steady him as he got to his feet. The lumbar pains stayed with him. In fact, they had been with him for months now, settling themselves in over the winter. He had hoped that the warmer weather would see them off. But they gave no indication of going anywhere.

  Porfiry was long past the age when he welcomed each new spring with unequivocal enthusiasm. Granted it was the return of life to the natural world. Rivers began to flow again. Trembling buds forced their way through the dwindling layers of snow to bask in the warmth of the waxing sun. According to conventional wisdom, the sap was rising in the boughs. But the truth was, Porfiry no longer believed in this rising sap. For him personally, each new spring marked only the passing of another year, and consequently the shortening of his remaining portion. And now it seemed he could not even count on it to dispel his aches and pains. The long winters, that in his youth had seemed to be endless, went by in the blink of an eye. He looked back on the winter just gone as he looked back on every moment of his life so far, with a pang of nostalgia.

  He kept his eyes fixed on the man at his feet, as if he found the sight consoling. ‘I want a photograph taken. We will publicise the man’s face.’

  ‘Strange-looking fellow,’ adjudged Virginsky. ‘The white on his face, at his cheeks . . . he doesn’t look quite human. More like a doll, or a mannequin.’

  ‘Adipocere,’ said Porfiry.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Adipocere. Or grave wax. It occurs in bodies that are exposed to moisture. The fatty tissues convert to . . . well, basically, soap. The medical examiner may be able to calculate how long he has been in there based on the degree of conversion.’

  ‘But it makes identification difficult.’

  ‘Yes. However, there may be enough of the original form of his face remaining to prompt someone into coming forward. You will notice that in the areas that have not converted, the skin is disfigured by severe pockmarking. Furthermore, his eyes appear disproportionately small, do they not? Distinctively so, we might say. We can only hope that someone will be able to piece together these distinctive features, prompted perhaps by the disappearance of a friend or loved one.’

  ‘It would be difficult to love that,’ commented Virginsky.

  ‘Show some respect, Pavel Pavlovich. You will be dead yourself one day. I doubt it will be a pretty sight.’ The heat of Porfiry’s ill temper was genuine.

  He turned away from the corpse and looked up. The sky was cornflower blue, an effortless, meaningless expanse of breathtaking colour. He sniffed the vernal air savagely. Spring changed the scent of the city; the thaw released the moisture from the waterways, and the breezes carried wafts of lilacs and bird cherry. But today it was all overpowered by the swampy smell emanating from the corpse. It brought to mind another powerful stench that would soon overwhelm the city. Porfiry wrinkled his nose and settled his gaze on Virginsky. ‘Dear God, it will soon be summer.’

  ‘But Porfiry Petrovich, the ice has only just begun to melt.’

  ‘Today the ice melts. Tomorrow the drains are stinking and the flies are back. You know how it is. It all comes around too quickly these days. A sign of getting old, I know. You don’t need to say it.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to.’

  ‘So the ice melted and the body floated to the top? Is that how it was, Sergeant Ptitsyn?’ Porfiry demanded sharply.

  ‘Not exactly, your Excellency. A group of sailors swimming –’

  ‘Swimming?’ Porfiry stared down at the water, which was still dotted with slabs of ice. ‘In that?’ He glanced incredulously over at a handful of men in naval uniforms, who were standing watchfully at a short distance. He was sensitive to their proprietorial manner, as if they considered their claim over the body greater than his.

  ‘Is it so different from you taking a cold plunge at the banya?’ wondered Virginsky.

  Porfiry did not deign to answer, except to blink rapidly, as if the question was a piece of grit in his eye.

  ‘I have taken statements from the sailors,’ said Ptitsyn. ‘But I ordered them to remain, in case you wished to speak to them yourself.’

  ‘You did well,’ sighed Porfiry, as if it pained him to pay a compliment. ‘You men,’ he called out to the sailors. ‘Which of you discovered the body?’

  The men scowled back, little inclined to answer. Then the youngest of them nodded hesitantly and broke away to approach Porfiry.

  ‘That would be me.’ He was glum but not hostile, but neither was he particularly respectful.

  ‘And you are?’

  ‘Apprentice Seaman Anatoly Ordynov.’

  Porfiry took out an enamelled cigarette case and flicked it open towards Ordynov. The young sailor took a cigarette and allowed Porfiry to light it for him. Porfiry then lit his own and the two men smoked in silence for a while.

  ‘A nasty shock, I imagine, on a fine spring day?’ Porfiry ventured, conversationally.

  The young sailor nodded, Right enough.

  Porfiry read the name on the sailor’s cap tally. ‘You serve on the Peter the Great? A fine ship.’

  The junior sailor gave the most minimal of nods as he inhaled.

  ‘The most modern ship in the Baltic fleet,’ remarked Porfiry.

  ‘The most modern ship in the world,’ corrected Ordynov. His pride was a fierce glimmer in his eye.

  ‘When do you have to be back on board?’

  ‘We have a couple more days in the capital while she undergoes repairs. But now that the ice is melting, we are clear to sail.’

  ‘Two days? Then I am truly sorry we have had to detain you. You will naturally want to make the most of every hour, every minute you are here. You will be off to the fair, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  The boy gave a shrug, non-committal.

  ‘Still, you have time to smoke a cigarette with me, I dare say. And if I ask you a few questions while we smoke . . .’

  Another shrug. ‘It’s all the same to me.’

  ‘Just tell me how you found the body, in your own words.’

  ‘I was swimming with my mates. I dived down to the bottom and there he was. At first I didn’t know what to make of it. Couldn’t tell what it was. It was pretty dark down there, you see. But I felt his hair brush against my fingers as I swam. I thought, Hello, what’s this?’

  ‘So the body was at the bottom of the canal? What prevented it from floating to the top, I wonder?’

  ‘Rocks. It was tied to some rocks that were keeping it down.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Me and my mates went back down to loosen it. Then it came up.’

  ‘And so you raised the alarm immediately?’

  The young sailor glared at Porfiry. ‘Well, yes, but . . .’ He broke off.

  ‘But?’

  ‘Well, there was this fellow. We sent him off to get a policeman. But he never came back.’

  ‘I see. One of your mates?’

  ‘No!’ Ordynov was indignant at the suggestion. ‘Just some fellow. He was watching us, while we were swimming. There was something fishy about him. Not right in the head, if you ask me.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘He asked us who it was! As if we should know. I mean to say!’

  ‘That is odd.’

  ‘It was almost like . . .’

  ‘Go on,’ encouraged Porfiry.

  ‘Almost like he had half an idea who it might be.’

  ‘That’s very interesting. And perceptive, if you don’t mind me saying.’

  ‘We thought he was mad, the way he kept gabbling on. And then he made us turn that one over in the water, so that we could see his face.’

  ‘The body was floating face down, of course.’

  ‘Yes. That’s right.’ Appre
ntice Seaman Ordynov squinted narrowly at Porfiry. ‘I mean why was he so interested in seeing its face?’

  ‘A perfectly reasonable question, my friend. In fact, I would go further than that. A very astute question.’

  ‘And then he ran off. We thought he was going to get the police, but he never came back. So we had to send someone else.’

  ‘Could you give a description this mysterious individual?’

  ‘He was a gent. But like one of them new types of gents.’

  ‘Yes, I know exactly what you mean.’

  ‘You could tell he was educated, but he didn’t bother to keep himself as smart as he might.’

  ‘Long hair?’

  ‘That’s it. Long hair. All over the place. His face was very . . .’

  ‘Pale?’

  ‘Aye, with dark rings around his eyes as if he had been up all night.’

  ‘Beard?’

  ‘He did have a beard.’

  ‘Not a civil servant then. I take it he was not in any kind of uniform?’

  Ordynov shook his head tersely as he blew out his last lungful of smoke. He threw the stub down and ground it under his heel. ‘Finished my smoke.’

  ‘Thank you, my friend. You have been most helpful. If we need to contact you again, we can reach you through your ship. You are in Petersburg for two days, you say?’

  ‘We sail on Wednesday morning. Leastways that’s what they say. I wouldn’t be surprised if it takes longer.’

  ‘And where are you bound once the repairs are completed?’

  ‘Arkhangelsk.’

  ‘How long is the voyage?’

  ‘We are at sea for thirty days. We can’t put in to Arkhangelsk before May, on account of the ice.’

  ‘Do you put in anywhere along the way?’

  ‘For sure.’

  Porfiry waited expectantly. When nothing was forthcoming, he prompted, ‘We may need to get in touch with you.’

  ‘Our first port of call is Helsingfors. After that, Reval, then Riga, then Libau.’

  ‘It is a veritable cruise!’ cried Porfiry.

  ‘His Imperial Majesty likes to show his finest ship off at every opportunity,’ said the young sailor wryly. ‘There are other ports after that. Do you want them all?’