The Cleansing Flames (St Petersburg Mystery)

by R. N. Morris

  Soon after this, Botkin returned. The three of them came together into the main room, bearing down on Virginsky with the angry glowers of wolves that had been cheated of their prey. ‘It seems you have been granted a reprieve,’ said Botkin. ‘According to the late edition of the Police Gazette, your magistrate’s condition has deteriorated sharply. The central committee has decided to await the outcome of your attack before determining your fate. If he dies, you will be hailed as a hero of the revolution.’

  ‘And if he lives?’

  ‘If I were you, I would pray that he dies. And that his death is verifiable.’

  ‘And in the meantime, I am to be treated like a convict?’

  ‘Of course. Or, to be more exact, like a condemned man who has received a stay of execution.’ The old sarcastic smile settled once more on Botkin’s lips, like an animal that had been driven from its lair at last returning.

  35

  ‘What will it be like to die?’

  He had the sense of someone standing over him.

  Give up the fight, my dear! It’s time to give up the fight.

  It was his father’s voice, but where was his father? Did his father exist now just as a voice?

  Release your grip! Let go!

  ‘Papa?’

  I am inside you. The pain – that pain that you feel – you do feel it, don’t you? That pain is me.

  ‘You can heal me!’ cried Porfiry. He opened his eyes. And opening his eyes was like throwing open the shutters of a window in a Swiss chalet. In fact, that was what he was doing. He was in the bedroom of a Swiss chalet, throwing open the shutters. A blinding light rushed in, with the eagerness of a sniffing hound. The initial fierceness of the light settled into an amber glow on the planks of the chalet’s cladding.

  Porfiry turned to where the voice of his father had come from. He had the sense that it had been located in the corner of the room. But his father had said that he was inside him. Did that mean that his father had lied?

  The man standing in the corner of the room was not his father. It was Prince Dolgoruky but somehow Porfiry confused him with another prince. He remembered a question that had been on his mind, one that he very much wanted to ask the Prince for whom he mistook Dolgoruky. ‘Did you find him?’

  ‘He’s not here,’ said Dolgoruky, as if he too mistook himself for someone else.

  ‘No,’ said Porfiry, as if he had expected this answer. Another question occurred to him. ‘Where are we? In Switzerland?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ said Prince Dolgoruky.

  ‘What will it be like to die?’ asked Porfiry.

  Give up the fight, my dear! You must give up the fight.

  Porfiry looked up. It seemed to him that his father’s voice came from above.

  A terrible weight was pushing down on him now. He was lying on his back, pinned to the ground by an enormous stone. It seemed to be a stone, but he couldn’t be sure. All he knew was that he had to push it off him. Otherwise it would crush him.

  Give up the fight!

  His father’s voice was in the stone now. His father’s voice was crushing him.

  ‘Heal me!’ pleaded Porfiry with the weight of the stone.

  Don’t you think if I could, I would have healed myself?

  ‘But God?’ implored Porfiry. ‘There is a God?’

  His father’s answering laughter was devastating.

  It is not so difficult. Simply decide that you will give up the fight, and lo!

  His father’s voice seemed to be answering a question that Porfiry had asked earlier.

  ‘Why can’t I see you?’

  You must give up the fight if you want to see me.

  Porfiry closed his eyes and pushed with both hands. The great weight suddenly became nothing. He looked down to see that he was holding a painted egg in his hands. And somehow, he was standing again.

  He heard children’s laughter. The five Prokharchin children circled him, arms outstretched, hands linked. They moved around him with half-dancing, half-skipping steps.

  Porfiry was overjoyed to see them. ‘You did not die after all! It was all a ruse!’

  The children giggled back at him. There was a mindless, empty quality to their laughter that began to unsettle Porfiry. He decided that he wanted no part of it. ‘That’s enough now, children.’

  But the children’s dance continued and in fact grew faster, until they were whirling around him at an impossible speed. Their faces blurred into a streak of flesh encircling him, their laughter merging into a single scream.

  The fleshy blur shrank like an elastic band contracting, tightening around his head. He felt it against his face, filmy, acrid with the taste of burning. The film was unspeakably revolting, as if it were a spider’s web, or the web woven by something more repulsive than a spider. He pulled at the web with his fingers.

  ‘Death,’ said Porfiry. And the web that clung to his face rushed into his mouth as soon as he opened it to speak. Once it had gained admittance to his mouth it began to expand. He knew that this did not bode well. The more it expanded, the harder it was for him to breathe. It was suffocating him.

  Give up the fight, my dear! It’s time to give up the fight.

  His father’s voice was suddenly overwhelmingly comforting. He knew that if he relaxed his being, as his father urged, everything would be all right.

  He knew that his father would never lie to him.

  He knew that he must do as his father said.

  He felt the tension go from him. The first thing that happened was that he swallowed the clump of sticky webbing that had entered his mouth.

  There was a sound like the wind chasing itself through a tunnel. The window shutters banged against the outside of the chalet.

  Flakes of snow came in through the window, quickly building to a swirling blizzard that obliterated the interior. The blizzard became denser and darker. He had a sense of it as something infinite. The bedroom no longer existed, nor the chalet. There was only the ever-darkening snowstorm.

  There was the sound of the unseen shutters slamming to. And then all was darkness.

  36

  Dyavol

  It seemed he was not to be left alone from now on. The next day, Botkin sat with him in the morning. Unlike Kirill Kirillovich, he was confident enough of his own revolutionary commitment to engage Virginsky in conversation. ‘Where has she put the clock?’

  ‘She moved it into the bedroom. I think she was afraid I would carry out your threat to smash it.’

  ‘That doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘Perhaps not.’

  ‘I am glad she’s moved it. If it were still here, I would destroy it.’

  ‘A rather pointless act of vandalism.’

  ‘There is no such thing. Vandalism is always to the point.’

  ‘Alyosha Afanasevich, there is no reason now why we may not be completely frank with one another. My fate is already sealed. Either I am to be afforded the revolutionist’s equivalent of canonisation, or I am to be executed. Therefore, you may tell me . . . anything . . . and everything. It can make no difference now.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re getting at.’

  ‘When we met, on Easter Sunday night, at the warehouse blaze . . .’ Virginsky watched the other man closely, looking for an answer to a question he hadn’t asked in the angle of Botkin’s defiance.

  ‘What of it?’

  ‘Did you set the fire?’

  A crack opened in Botkin’s face. From it emerged that sound that Virginsky remembered from the night they met, an axe hacking into soft wood, his laughter. ‘What harm can it do now? Yes, I was the pétroleur that night.’

  ‘And the fire that destroyed Kozodavlev’s apartment?’

  Botkin shrugged. ‘I know nothing about that.’

  ‘Truly?’

  ‘Truly. Why would I lie to you?’

  ‘Because of the children. The children who died.’

  ‘Ah, my friend, I see you do not understand me. Neither do you
understand the nature of the struggle in which we are engaged.’

  ‘What are you saying? That you don’t care about the children?’

  Botkin sighed, as if he were suddenly bored of the conversation. ‘You realise that you have just betrayed yourself?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘A true assassin would never ask such a ridiculous question.’

  ‘But children!’

  ‘Many more may have to die before the revolution is accomplished.’

  Virginsky nodded. Botkin clearly would have had no compunction admitting the crime if he had committed it. ‘But can we be sure these children died in the furtherance of the revolution? That is far from clear.’

  ‘Kozodavlev had become unreliable. Such considerations as you just voiced were distracting him from the cause. He was on the verge of betraying us. The central committee was right to instigate his termination. In this instance, they did not call upon me to execute their orders. Had they done, I would have willingly answered the call.’

  ‘Whom did they call upon?’

  ‘That doesn’t matter. In truth, I don’t know. Naturally. That is the way the central committee works.’

  ‘Totsky?’

  ‘There are others. There are many. From time to time, the central committee employs all manner of individuals to do its bidding. Not all are especially motivated by political convictions. Some carry out such deeds for money. Others simply because it is in their natures to destroy – the central committee finds a way to direct their destructive tendencies. There have been common criminals, escaped convicts, used in this way. My guess is that this was the case with Kozodavlev.’

  ‘And Pseldonimov?’

  ‘Pseldonimov was different.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Pseldonimov died . . . so that the group might become stronger. It was not true that he was a threat to us. At least I do not believe so. Dyavol had become tired of him – that certainly was true. We needed him to get the printing press. But once that was acquired, we no longer needed him. Of course, there was a danger that he might betray us. There is always that danger, with every one of us. But it was rather the case that Dyavol saw that he would be more useful to the group dead than alive.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘He would serve to bring the group together. To bind us to one another.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Because we would all have a part in killing him. No one man – or woman – could be said to be responsible for his death. We were all equally culpable. One enticed him. One put him at his ease. One held him. One tied the ropes. One tightened the gag. One kept lookout. One shot him. All conspired to dispose of the body. And now we all have this hold over one another. And it is our mutual fear and suspicion that binds us together. Rather brilliant, don’t you think?’

  Virginsky thought back to Pseldonimov’s body on Dr Pervoyedov’s trestle table. ‘He was a Jew. Did that make it easier?’

  Botkin shrugged, as if the question was of no importance.

  ‘You said woman? There was a woman involved?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Tatyana Ruslanovna?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘You can work it out, can’t you?’

  ‘You. Dolgoruky. Totsky. Kozodavlev?’

  ‘Correct. So far. But you are forgetting someone.’

  ‘Dyavol.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Sometimes it seems to me that Dyavol is the central committee. That everything you do is decided by this individual. Are you sure this is wise? It certainly does not seem democratic, no more democratic than the Tsar.’

  ‘Men like Dyavol are necessary.’

  ‘Unlike Pseldonimov.’

  ‘Pseldonimov served his purpose.’

  ‘Who is Dyavol?’

  ‘Ah, that you shall not know. Unless Dyavol himself wishes you to.’

  ‘But you know his identity? You have met him?’

  One side of Botkin’s mouth shot up and his eyelids fluttered closed in an expression of serene complacency. ‘I have been granted that privilege.’ He now fixed Virginsky with a look charged with contempt, which was possibly as close as Botkin was capable of approaching pity.

  *

  Virginsky lost all track of the days. It was not simply that the newspapers were kept from him. Ever since he had fled Porfiry’s chambers, he had felt himself severed from the ordinary flux of time that ruled his fellow men, giving direction to their lives and binding them one to another on the diurnal treadmill. He had entered another realm, where the moments were measured by the throbbing of his pulse, by the flickering processions of his snatched and anxious dreams and by the infinitely slow growth of his beard. There was a fisheye looking glass in the room. One day he looked up at it and saw a man he did not recognise staring back at him. He knew then that a considerable number of days must have passed.

  At times he was beset by a quaking terror, convinced that Botkin would come for him at any moment, taking him to a desolate spot on the edge of the city, some blasted wasteland strewn with rubbish, overgrown with dingy weeds. And there, alone, weeping like a girl, begging shamelessly for his life, revealing himself at last to be the coward he had always known he was, he would stare down the barrel of his killer’s gun.

  Some days Kirill Kirillovich sat with him, some days Totsky. He was never left alone with Botkin again, who perhaps now regretted all that he had divulged to Virginsky. There was also the possibility that others had decided that Botkin could not be trusted. Neither Totsky nor Kirill Kirillovich addressed a word to him, or responded in any way to the questions he asked.

  Even when he shouted into Totsky’s face, ‘Surely this must be driving you insane!’ the young radical barely blinked. Virginsky was driven to torturing himself by making speculative remarks about Totsky’s relationship with Tatyana Ruslanovna. He felt sure that they must be lovers. He was inhibited from stating his fears so baldly by the possibility that they might prove founded. Totsky’s silence was infuriating, but in this case it was possibly better than a definite answer. At one time, Virginsky imagined he saw confirmation of one of his more daring insinuations in the curling of a lip and the flood of colour to the cheeks. He was tortured then by jealousy and despair, at which point the realisation hit him that he was in fact in love with Tatyana Ruslanovna. He reeled, as if from a physical blow. The realisation was not a happy one. If anything, he was more devastated after it struck him than before. It was more than likely that Tatyana Ruslanovna was one of those conspiring to kill him. To say that he was afraid his feelings would not be reciprocated was an understatement. On the other hand, it was perhaps equally true that he was conspiring in her arrest. At this moment, however, none of that seemed to matter anymore. All that he wanted was to live, and to be with her. He would have sworn allegiance to any cause, and meant it, to make that possible.

  Now it was even harder for him to keep his bearings amid the staggering past of the hours. Varvara Alexeevna came and went; when she was not in the stagnant apartment, she was bringing new life into the teeming world. Food was prepared, and he was allowed to share in it. The curtains were kept closed at all times, to prevent him from communicating with anyone in the courtyard, even by looks and gestures.

  And so he could not say with any certainty when it was, or how long after that momentous day when he had levelled a gun at Porfiry Petrovich, that Tatyana Ruslanovna came into the apartment and relieved Kirill Kirillovich from the unrewarding task of watching him. He noticed that she was wearing coarse peasant clothes that did not seem to fit her properly, as if they belonged to someone else. In all likelihood, she wore them to look more like one of the people. However, the ill-fitting clothes only emphasised her individuality, at the same time distancing her from the class she sought to assimilate. To Virginsky, she looked like a child dressing up. He found the effect of her clothes inexpressibly touching.

  ‘They will n
ot speak to me,’ he said, as soon as they were alone.

  But she did not speak to him either. She pulled him to her and closed her lips around his, just as he was forming the first of the questions floating into his consciousness. The breath went from him, so completely that it seemed she must have sucked it out of him. His heart was in spasm; he felt it thrashing like a fish stranded on the bank.

  He gasped for air as she released him. Her gaze shone with admiration and – dare he say it? – love. His own gaze back was questioning.

  ‘He’s dead!’ she explained. ‘Your magistrate died. They published an obituary in the paper. And a date has been announced for his funeral. It seems you really killed him.’

  ‘Dead? Really? Let me see!’

  ‘There will be time for that later. Now.’ Her hands were on him again, exploring, guiding, compelling. Pulling away at the fastenings of his clothes. His hands were quick to reciprocate. It seemed an immense privilege to touch those coarse peasant clothes, as if he was being allowed to share in something deeply personal to her, as if his fingers were alighting on her mind. If he had been moved at the sight of the clothes, his feelings now, as he probed and peeled away their layers, were almost too much for him to bear.

  And then the fact of her beauty – her complete beauty, revealed to him without shame or affectation, simple, absolute – was overwhelming. Most affecting of all was the trust that it implied. When he had been denied so much, to be granted this – the tears rose to his eyes. He dared not touch her naked beauty. She had to take his hands and guide him.

  She pulled him down onto her, onto the sofa, into her, and the release from all his suffering came immediately, and he was shaking with tears of gratitude and fear, sobbing himself into her, a sobbing that came from the deepest part of him. And she held him and soothed him and stroked his hair.

  She was more experienced than him, and her experience frightened him. But she put him at his ease and her hands resumed their exploration of his body, and he felt himself want her again, but without the desperate urgency of before: more calmly, more completely, knowing somehow that they had all the time in the world, and that she wouldn’t be taken from him, and that they were not just lovers but also equals in their love.