The Cleansing Flames (St Petersburg Mystery)

by R. N. Morris

  ‘With luck, we should see something later today, or perhaps tomorrow morning. I emphasised the urgency of the material in my application to the Imperial State Printing Works.’

  Porfiry turned the pages of the paper. His eye was caught by an article headed ‘The Devil’s Professor’. ‘Tatiscev, Professor Tatiscev. He must have taught you at the University, did he not?’

  ‘Yes. What of it?’

  ‘There is a piece about him. They call him “The Devil’s Professor”.’

  ‘There you are! That proves my point.’

  ‘It seems you are a rare exception, Pavel Pavlovich,’ said Porfiry as he scanned the article. ‘By far the majority of his former students have gone on to be defence attorneys. And very successful ones, it seems, with extraordinarily high rates of acquittal for their clients. The Russian Soil links this to the demise of law and order, and the general decline of society.’

  ‘Preposterous.’

  ‘It makes the point that the state is being undermined in its own law courts.’

  ‘Please, Porfiry Petrovich. I can well imagine what those reactionaries have to say about him. I do not need to hear you recite it.’

  ‘In short, they lay all the evils of the present day at Professor Tatiscev’s door.’

  ‘It really does pain me to hear you parrot their venomous lies. It’s almost as if you believe them.’

  ‘I wonder what prompted them to write this article though.’

  ‘They are his enemies. They print lies about him in almost every issue.’

  ‘What is behind it though?’ wondered Porfiry as he folded the newspaper carefully and placed it thoughtfully on his desk.

  ‘Nothing is behind it. Or will you arrest people on the basis of libellous newspaper articles?’

  ‘Not at all. You misunderstand me, Pavel Pavlovich. I rather wondered if they had not been put up to it. Perhaps by our old friends from the Third Section. Such tactics are not without precedent.’ Porfiry consulted his pocket watch. ‘My goodness, is it that time already?’ He rose sharply from his seat.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Admiralty District. The medical examination is scheduled to take place there this morning.’

  ‘Do you wish me to accompany you?’

  ‘Unless you have something better to do?’ Porfiry looked meaningfully at the sofa. ‘Such as catch up on your sleep.’

  ‘Would that be permitted?’

  ‘Most certainly not, Pavel Pavlovich. Really, do you not know when I am teasing you, even after all this time?’

  *

  The gilt dome of St Isaac’s Cathedral caught fire in a blaze of easy splendour. A roar of approval greeted the effect, although the stone angels on the cathedral roof seemed about to take wing in panic. The sudden flare gave them a weightless, flighty vivacity. Porfiry imagined the boundless blue around the cathedral filled with the celestial beings, swooping and flapping as they sought a safe alighting place in the godless city, like seagulls swarming a fishing boat. Of course, the appearance of combustion had been caused by a shift in the sun’s position in relation to the one, wispy cloud in the sky. The angels remained attached to the roof, steadfastly static.

  Below, under the gaze of the stone angels, crowds of people were streaming around the cathedral on every side, all heading in one direction: north, drawn by the noise and bustle that possessed Admiralty Square. One corner of the fair was visible from where Porfiry and Virginsky were standing, at the end of Malaya Morskaya Street where it joined St Isaac’s Square. The carnival colours and teeming movement held their gaze.

  There was an undeniably savage edge to the rumble of the crowd, a ferocious hunger for something other than the simple pleasures of the fairground. No doubt many of them were already drunk. The mood seemed fractious, rather than celebratory, bordering on nasty. The grating whine of the barrel organs, incessantly churning out fragments of melody, repeated and overlapping, unmusical, meaningless and quite unpleasant, did nothing to lighten it.

  ‘Yarilo,’ murmured Porfiry.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘They greet the ancient deity of spring. Yarilo. Sometimes I wonder if we are a Christian nation at all.’

  Virginsky offered no reply.

  ‘Those who wish to remove the deity from men’s affairs would do well to stand here and watch the crowds assemble at the coming of spring. It is an old, elemental instinct, and it cannot be denied.’ Porfiry turned to Virginsky and met his gaze without speaking for several moments. ‘Only delayed.’

  ‘You talk as though you wish to join them.’

  ‘Oh but I do, Pavel Pavlovich. I would far rather go with them to the fair than go where we must go.’

  With a dip of his head, Porfiry indicated a pair of high double doors standing open. Wide enough to admit a carriage, this was the entrance to the building used by the Admiralty District Police Bureau as stables and storeroom. All the various carriages and wagons belonging to the bureau were housed here, together with the horses required to pull them.

  From time to time, an area of the storeroom was put aside for an altogether different purpose.

  A distinguished-looking elderly gentleman, wearing the red and black ribbon of the order of St Vladimir, was seated on a stool that had been placed for him on the wooden pavement, to one side of the entrance. He was propping himself up with both hands on his knees, his face an unhealthy shade of grey, eyes standing out from his face in startled horror. He directed this alarming expression towards the sound of the paving boards creaking, as Porfiry and Virginsky approached.

  A sickly sweet waft of something spirituous hung about him.

  Porfiry acknowledged his presence with a respectful bow. ‘Are you here to witness the medical examination? I am the investigating magistrate in charge of the case.’

  ‘I will not set foot in there again, sir.’

  Porfiry raised one eyebrow for Virginsky’s benefit. ‘But you are here as one of the official witnesses? The law requires that we have two citizens present.’

  ‘You cannot make me go back in there and look at that thing. It is too much to ask of a respectable citizen.’

  ‘The other witness is inside, I take it?’

  ‘The other witness took himself off entirely.’

  ‘That is indeed unfortunate. We do need two witnesses.’

  ‘I can hardly say I blame him.’

  ‘Is it really so bad?’

  The elderly gentleman’s expression became sheepish. ‘I’m afraid there was an unfortunate accident.’

  ‘An accident?’

  ‘At the sight of that thing . . . the smell of it . . . I was not able to hold on to my breakfast. I blame that doctor of yours.’ The elderly gentleman shook his head disapprovingly. He produced a silver flask from his breast pocket and took a quick swig, releasing vodka fumes to the morning. ‘I will be here if you need me. But I will not set foot in there again.’

  Perversely, the witness’s words only quickened Porfiry’s eagerness to be inside.

  As soon as he and Virginsky stepped through the entrance, they were met by the same swampy smell he had noticed by the Winter Canal. The light and air that flooded in with them seemed cowed by it, and hung back.

  They found Dr Pervoyedov chatting blithely to his assistant – or diener, to use the accepted German term – next to a trestle table bearing the body to be examined. The cadaver’s strange, waxwork-like face was uncovered.

  Both Dr Pervoyedov and his assistant were dressed in long leather aprons, darkly stained. The diener was one of the orderlies from the Obukhovsky Men’s Hospital, whom Pervoyedov had picked out on account of his aptitude for the peculiar work of the pathology laboratory. He had proven himself to have a strong stomach, in other words; one that held on to its own contents even when he was required to empty out the contents of others. That he was also a humourless and taciturn individual, as adept at retaining his thoughts as his recent meals, was perhaps understandable: Dr Pervoyedov accepted tha
t here were two sides of the same coin. But he would have found almost any other temperament more amenable and certainly regretted the man’s habit of assuming a doglike snarl whenever he set to work dismembering a cadaver.

  ‘Ah, there you are, Porfiry Petrovich, there you are. And good day to you too, Pavel Pavlovich. At last, you are here. We may begin now, I presume?’

  ‘One moment, doctor. There has been some difficulty with the official witnesses?’

  Dr Pervoyedov winked slyly towards his unresponsive diener. ‘Difficulty, you say? I can’t imagine what you mean by that.’

  ‘One has absented himself and the other refuses to fulfil his civic duty.’

  ‘No matter, no matter. We don’t need them. I always rather feel that the official witnesses are somewhat superfluous on these occasions, don’t you? They haven’t a clue when it comes to forensic medicine. If you ask them to perform the simplest task, they either keel over or vomit.’

  ‘What did you ask them to do?’ Porfiry’s voice was heavy with suspicion. He had worked with Dr Pervoyedov for many years now. He knew the doctor well and liked him, although he did not always trust him. He was confident that such feelings were thoroughly reciprocated.

  ‘Oh nothing really. I merely thought they might be interested. Just trying to educate them, you know. One is never too old for a little education, now, is one? And besides, how can they be expected to bear witness if they haven’t the least idea what’s going on? It will be meaningless to them. Meaningless!’

  ‘What did you do?’ demanded Porfiry.

  ‘I simply asked them if they wanted to smell some of the adipocere.’

  Porfiry blinked in astonishment. ‘And now we have lost our official witnesses! You are aware that we cannot proceed without them. You may resent the presence of unqualified laymen to supervise you, but the law requires it.’

  ‘Supervise? I hardly think that is the right word.’ A flash of indignation came into the doctor’s tone. ‘As I understand it, Porfiry Petrovich, the law merely requires that they sign the papers affirming that they have presented themselves here today in the capacity of official witnesses. I took the precaution of having them complete that minor administrative detail before uncovering the body.’

  ‘And then you promptly scared them off.’

  ‘Scared them off? Do you really think so?’

  ‘Don’t play the innocent with me.’

  ‘I was only trying to demonstrate to them that the adipocere was the source of the rank smell that they had themselves commented on. I told them it was adipocere, but they looked at me blankly. So I had Valentin Bogdanovich scoop some out on a spatula and offer it to them.’

  As if to confirm the doctor’s account, the diener thrust out a wooden spatula towards Porfiry. On the end of it was a small mound of something soft and white.

  ‘Adipocere is the most interesting substance,’ continued Dr Pervoyedov, as Porfiry leant forward gingerly and inhaled. ‘Many writers, the Englishman Taylor for instance, describe its odour as highly offensive. And yet, I wonder, if you did not know that it had been taken from a corpse, would you necessarily be repelled by the smell? It’s an interesting question, is it not, Porfiry Petrovich?’

  ‘There is no question about it,’ said Porfiry, screwing up his face. ‘It is a disgusting smell. Unequivocally.’

  ‘Un-equivocally, you say? But what do you make of Casper, a German, and one of the foremost authorities of forensic medicine, who, I believe, rather likes the smell. By no means disagreeable, are his words – if memory serves me right. A little cheesy, but by no means disagreeable, is how he describes it.’

  ‘I would say that Dr Casper has become too habituated to the smells of the charnel house.’

  ‘Perhaps! That is certainly possible.’ Dr Pervoyedov chuckled, as if at a private joke. ‘I myself incline to Casper’s view,’ he admitted shyly.

  ‘Then the same may be said of you,’ commented Porfiry.

  ‘But is it really soap?’ asked Virginsky abruptly, having also sniffed at the sample on the diener’s spatula.

  ‘Yes. Soap. Ammoniacal or, sometimes, calcareous soap. In the case of the latter, it is thought that the body first forms ammoniacal soap and that this is subsequently further converted by the presence of lime. But, yes, soap, of one form or another. The process by which the body is converted to adipocere is known as saponification.’

  ‘Could you wash yourself with it?’ wondered Virginsky. He looked down at the face of the unknown man on the trestle table. Two glistening white patches showed where his cheeks once were. ‘He is turning into a bar of soap.’

  ‘He was. Since he has been taken out of the water and dried out somewhat, the process has stopped.’ Dr Pervoyedov took a spatula of his own and prodded gently at one of the white cheeks. ‘You will notice too that the adipocere on his face has hardened, due to its exposure to air.’

  ‘How long does it take for a body to be completely converted to adipocere?’ asked Porfiry.

  ‘In the case of an adult body totally immersed in water, about a year.’

  ‘And so, from the degree of saponification, you will be able to calculate how long he has been in the canal – giving us an approximate date of death?’

  ‘Approximate, very approximate. One may not set one’s watch by adipocere. It is an erratic and inconsistent material. It has no organic structure, you know. How it behaves in one case, on one body, may not necessarily be repeated in another.’

  ‘And as for cause of death?’ asked Porfiry, a little impatiently. ‘Do you have any opinions pertaining to that?’

  ‘All in good time, Porfiry Petrovich. We have not even commenced the examination. I have been waiting for you, you know.’

  ‘You did not wait for me before you started dishing out mortuary wax.’

  ‘I assure you that there is more than enough to go round.’ It seemed that Dr Pervoyedov had misunderstood Porfiry’s objection. He bowed to his diener, who began cutting away the dead man’s clothes.

  ‘But you must have already noticed the wound on the side of the head?’ Porfiry’s voice was imploring. ‘That’s all I meant to suggest.’

  ‘As you know, Porfiry Petrovich, I follow the Virchow method.’ Dr Pervoyedov angled his head almost tenderly as he watched the diener work. ‘In the Virchow method, the organs are removed and examined separately. In due order. However, adipocere has a rather interesting attribute that does somewhat compromise any forensic examination, whether by the Virchow method or any other.’

  ‘And what is that?’

  ‘All tissue, including organs, skin, musculature and fat – even blood and blood vessels – all is equally capable of conversion to adipocere. Indeed, in a body that has undergone complete saponification, it is impossible to distinguish the internal organs at all. One is simply confronted by a mass of soapy material. Similarly, it becomes impossible to distinguish flesh that has been subject to trauma from flesh that has not. Damaged tissue simply melts away and becomes one with the undamaged tissue. All is . . .’

  ‘Soap,’ completed Virginsky, wonderingly.

  ‘Yes. And the more of his body that has turned to adipocere, the harder it will be to make any firm conclusions about the cause of death.’

  The body now lay unclothed, the considerable bulk of the belly sprawling out on either side. Further patches of white were visible in certain places, noticeably at the chest, thighs and upper arms. Porfiry noticed that the man was circumcised.

  Dr Pervoyedov looked down at the body wistfully. ‘Even so, one must adhere to the method. If we abandoned the method, where would we be? And the first thing that the method calls for is that the physician conduct a thorough visual examination of the exterior of the body.’ Dr Pervoyedov proceeded to put his words into practice, in a series of exaggerated swoops. He was like a hen pecking at grain, ducking his head sharply down towards the body on the table and back up again. All the time, he continued his explanation: ‘Thorough, Porfiry Petrovich. That’s the watc
hword. I should be a poor pathologist if I confined my observations to the head and offered an opinion based only on what I saw there. What if a further trauma were subsequently revealed, upon removal of the clothing?’

  Porfiry waited impatiently for Dr Pervoyedov to cease his examination. ‘Well then, can you see any other wound, liable to have resulted in the victim’s death?’

  ‘There are a number of abrasions, particularly around the wrists and ankles.’ Dr Pervoyedov pointed out the marks.

  ‘He was tethered to some stones,’ remarked Porfiry. ‘I take it these abrasions could not in themselves have proved fatal.’

  ‘They may even have been inflicted post-mortem. However, I have yet to examine the victim’s back.’ The doctor signalled to his diener, who hefted the body over with a savage grunt. Further white patches showed on the back, at the buttocks and kidneys.

  ‘And yet . . .’ There was a note of exasperation in Porfiry’s voice. ‘And yet, we do have evidence of a major trauma to the head, do we not? The only significant wound visible, as far as I can see. To your expert eye, does that wound appear sufficient to have caused this man’s death?’

  Dr Pervoyedov broke off from his swooping examination of the body and turned to Porfiry. His look was one of wounded disappointment, like a child who had been deprived of a favourite toy. ‘Well, yes, it is difficult to imagine how anyone could survive such a trauma.’

  ‘Thank you. And the blackening around the wound? Consistent with gunshot? A larger exit wound on the other side of the head, also consistent?’

  ‘Porfiry Petrovich, would you prefer to conduct the examination yourself?’

  ‘Not at all. I am not qualified. Although I have encountered similar wounds in the execution of my duties over the years.’

  At a further signal from Dr Pervoyedov, the diener turned the body onto its back again.

  ‘He was a Jew?’ said Porfiry.

  ‘Apparently so, although I have read studies by physicians who call for the removal of the foreskin on hygienic grounds.’

  Porfiry watched as Dr Pervoyedov began the Y-shaped incision that would allow him to open the body up, across from shoulder to shoulder, and down from sternum to groin. No blood raced to his scalpel blade, of course. Instead, Porfiry felt the thump of his own quick pulse. He was intensely aware of the churning turmoil of his heart. It was almost as if he were willing himself to bleed on the dead man’s behalf. He experienced a core of weightlessness in his being, a kind of empty intoxication where his soul should have been. It was an unbearable sensation, in which the instability and fragility of his organism overrode any other consideration. The sense of dread he felt was undeniably personal. It was a moment in which he was horrifically aware of his mortality. And yet he forced himself to continue watching, as Dr Pervoyedov teased his scalpel blade beneath the epidermis.