by James L. May
“I suppose they have records,” I said.
We needed to look at things; the files would be things to look at. So far, so good. But notwithstanding what Petrovich had said about deduction, I still didn’t feel certain he’d hit on the answer.
The old man must have seen me thinking. After we’d gone along in silence for a minute, he said: “You have something to add?”
I tried to run through every possibility in my mind. “Maybe they knew each other in Yaroslavl. You were saying it earlier, sometimes people run into old friends here.”
“That’s a possibility. There are ways of finding out. There might be a list of known associates in Antonov’s file. In fact, reading that file might fill in some background we’re missing. We report back to our friend in the Cheka tomorrow morning. We can ask then.”
The hospital was northeast of the kremlin, within view of the administration building. As we approached the door, I noticed more blood on the ground. I’d kept noticing traces of it in the snow, all the way from Warehouse Three.
Petrovich had warned me there would be no thread to lead us. And Luka’s track of blood hadn’t, after all, been what led to the hospital. Even so, we’d followed it. What did that mean—following a thread not because it was a clue, but only by accident, despite its unrelatedness to your case? Sherlock Holmes would not have liked it. I doubted Petrovich would appreciate my pointing it out either.
The hospital’s main door opened onto the front hall and a stale smell. There was no one there. In one corner, unlaundered gowns and blankets had been gathered up in several baskets.
“No use our wandering the halls,” said Petrovich. “Probably they’re busy with the fellow Zhenov just brought in. Someone will show up.” There was a desk in the corner opposite the gowns, with a chair behind it. The old man lowered himself into it with a pained exhalation. He seemed glad for the chance to sit down.
“This woman we’re looking for,” I said after we’d been waiting a few minutes. “Do you think she was Antonov’s lover?”
“It was that kind of note.”
“It just doesn’t seem like him,” I said.
“Like him? What’s like him?” Petrovich pulled a long face. “If he had a woman to bump up and down in bed with, that’s what he was like, and what we thought he was like before was wrong. What he was like is what we’re trying to find out.”
“I only mean the note surprised me.”
“To me it would make some sense for there to be a woman in it. That’s one of the things you look for, when a man’s been killed. Money, women, or drink. Mostly drink—those are easy to solve. Next is money, of course. But women are pretty common.”
I wasn’t sure what to say to that. Somewhere deeper in the hospital, someone had begun calling piteously for a doctor. The old man thought about it for a minute, then continued: “There would have to be another man, as well. She wouldn’t have killed him herself.”
“Why not?”
“Women who murder don’t do what was done to Antonov. Blow to the back of the head—I’ve arrested a few who were strong enough, maybe, but it’s not what they choose. Your lady murderer does it with poison, occasionally a gun. Men are the ones who strangle you or beat you to death.” He mused. “Both sexes like a knife. Ladies are used to it from cooking, maybe.”
At length an orderly appeared, expressing surprise at finding Petrovich in his seat. Once the old man had explained what we were looking for and shown our papers, he led us upstairs.
The hospital had three floors, each organized around a central hallway with wards on either side. Men and women slept in separate wards, the orderly explained, but as long as they could move under their own power, nothing prevented them walking across the hall to meet a member of the opposite sex.
At the top he unlocked the door to the records room, an unheated garret. We spent the next several hours in our coats, searching through intake-and-discharge ledgers for the letter V. Slow work: the hospital’s files were all written by hand, some so sloppily that, in the dim light coming from the single small window, they were hard to make out. As often as actual admittance records, I found myself reading outdated diagnoses, or orders for more medicine. The latter had mostly been stamped “DENIED.” Making the job even more time-consuming was the hospital’s practice of recording admissions not in a master list organized by date, but in logs devoted to different illnesses and injuries. By the time Petrovich was convinced we’d been through everything that might help us, my eyes ached and I’d started to shiver. But the search was successful. In the typhus log we discovered one Varvara Grishkina, a Veronika Fitneva in bruising-and-broken-bones. Their stays overlapped with Antonov’s.
Our questions were directed to a doctor who, queried in his examination room, could say nothing about Grishkina. He thought he recognized the name “Fitneva,” however. It took being reminded of her injury—she’d been admitted with broken ribs and internal bleeding—for him to recall her fully. “Yes, that’s right. I didn’t notice her until the swelling in her face went down,” he said. He leaned back in his tilting chair and looked at us with glassy eyes. “Although … you know, she wore her hair a certain way. A bob. Modern. It’s always attractive when a woman takes care about her hair and wants it to be modern. Yes … You notice that even when her face is too swollen and out of shape to be good-looking …” He trailed off.
When Petrovich pressed him, he allowed that, before her stint in the hospital, she might have been one of the women assigned to digging peat over the summer. But he had no idea what had become of her now. How she’d gotten smashed up so badly—he couldn’t say that either.
On the way down the stairs, Petrovich grumbled about morphine-addict medics, and wondered how the man kept himself in supply. Even so, he seemed pleased.
It was beginning to get dark. The snow had stopped while we were indoors, and a heavy new layer covered everything. Petrovich wanted to follow up our new lead before curfew.
“You don’t think our pass will be good enough?” I said. Work groups went in and out all night, but after 6:00 Nikolski was closed to individuals, even those with passes, unless the pass authorized it specifically. Ours said we were to be let through under all circumstances, so I’d assumed we were in the privileged category.
“Ought to be,” said Petrovich. “But after that business this morning, I don’t want those thugs to have any reason for harassing us. When we see our friend tomorrow, we can have him add special instructions for the guards.”
At that time of year, only one area of the peat workings was still active. To visit it meant first walking about a mile up the northern road, then turning east and passing over the broken grid of ditches and canals that drained the water from the bog. Plank bridges spanned the gaps in places, but Petrovich found these difficult going with his cane. We took the planks only where they looked sturdier or less slippery, or where we had no choice but to cross. We wended a much longer way than we had to, back and forth around the trenches’ ends. The women were working in one of the eastern pits, near a tongue of forest still not cut down.
I’d never cut peat, but it looked like hard work. On the ground above the cutting trench were a hundred small mounds, spaced regularly, like miniature, snow-covered haystacks. Evidently these were bricks of peat arranged for drying; many mounds-in-progress were visible, being piled up clod by clod by the women. The pilers left careful patterns of space between each active layer, while others packed moss around layers that were finished.
A little distance away, bricks that had dried were stacked in a half-dozen wall-like ranks. These were much larger, forty feet long and ten high. Each must have comprised thousands of clods. Along one side of these larger mounds, a few rusted steel rails were scattered, as well as a single cart, overturned. A smooth stretch of ground headed east in a straight line, showing where there must once have been a track. The train line ran up the islan
d’s eastern shore, from a point just south of the kremlin to the Anzer ferry; I surmised some system for transporting the peat to that line for loading had been dismantled.
Jagged with snow, the nearby pines loomed in the darkening afternoon.
“How will we find out which one is Veronika Fitneva?” I asked. “She may not even be here.”
“You tell a detective by how far the heels of his boots have worn down.” Petrovich coughed thinly at my stare. “Start asking questions. There are thirty women here? It’s not so many. Won’t take long to question them all if we split up. Enjoy the company of the fairer sex. It must have been long enough since you’ve had it. All you have to do is ask them if they know the name.”
Petrovich started among the mounds, leaving me to wander along the trench. Its wall stretched about two hundred feet, with cutters working with long spades over about half that length. Where there was no work, the peat had been covered with insulating moss, the same being used on the mounds. I thought I would start at the end and work my way back. That way Petrovich wouldn’t have so far to come when he’d finished.
When I got there, two girls were readying a new section for cutting. They’d removed the moss and begun hacking through the frozen stuff with axes. Chips of ice and mud flew in the air.
Petrovich’s advice just to ask about the name was fine, as far as it went. But my heart beat faster as I approached. Even in Saint Petersburg I’d never been very good at talking to girls. The fellows most liked were the worker-student types, who left the collars of their shirts open and wore high boots instead of shoes. My friend Arnold Palvo, despite being no great hand with ladies himself, had once tried to explain it to me. “It’s a new age, Tolya. Girls now don’t like you to hide anything. Don’t treat them like they’ve never heard a vulgar word before. They’re insulted: it shows you think they’re sentimental. You and I were raised to think there are things called good manners, and that they matter. But listen, between the sexes, that’s right out—those are just irrational bourgeois prohibitions on natural appetites.” He’d shrugged. “At any rate, it seems they like you better if you’re a little rude.”
There was also the fact of this being my first interrogation as a detective. Apart from spilling news of the murder to Ivanov, which had been a mistake, I’d thus far only hovered behind while Petrovich asked the questions. It was an arrangement that had suited me. Now, however, I would have to work out the approach myself. How should one ask questions so as to get useful answers in return? How to broach the subject of the investigation?
My mind had been on Sherlock Holmes all day, ever since Petrovich had been so dismissive of my reading. When it was necessary to go among strange people to recover information, Holmes commonly disguised himself. His attention to fine details allowed him to pass for a stoker among train workers, a tribesman among Red Indians, a priest in the Vatican of Rome. I couldn’t imagine how that might suit me here, however. Holmes sometimes impersonated an old woman, but I wouldn’t be capable of it.
Nat Pinkerton offered a different sort of model—perhaps, given his nationality, a more American one. He disguised himself only occasionally, preferring to get what he needed simply by force of personality. It seemed his bluff, masculine character made people want to explain themselves to him.
The same couldn’t have been said of me. But I had to say something. So it was in a kind of half-conscious imitation of the King of Detectives that I came out with: “This is where the peat for our stove comes from, then.” One of the women, a girl with a blunt nose and red cheeks, looked up. I was standing above them, at the rim of the pit. My voice sounded louder than I’d meant. Maybe that was good. I went on in the same vein. “Next time I warm my hands, I’ll think of you ladies.”
“Do that if you like,” she said. The one she was working with only glanced at me, and kept hacking.
“Some attitude,” I said. “I guess you don’t like the work. You’d rather be doing something easy than out here making sure I don’t freeze.”
That got a grudging laugh, but I could tell my act was failing to make a great success. “It’s not that,” the first one said. “Only that this work’s stupid.” She spat. “Half the bricks we lose to freezing. When the peat freezes, it crumbles up and falls apart. You can’t cut a decent block.” She made a chopping motion with the hand that wasn’t holding the axe. “It should be even, you see? My old dad would have beaten us black and blue for a mess like this, back home.”
“What about you?” I said to her partner. “You’re intent on it, anyway.” She didn’t pause, only shrugged.
The blunt-nosed girl hadn’t stopped looking up at me. “Why don’t you tell us what you want, eh?” she said. She was young but stocky, with a face made for giving men looks that said they were ridiculous.
“I’m looking for a woman named Veronika Fitneva,” I said.
“Oh? And what do you want her for?”
I explained as best I could about Infosec without mentioning the murder, with the result that I came off as both menacing and pompous. I couldn’t seem to stop myself referring to “the investigation,” as though I expected them to have been briefed on it already.
“Haven’t heard of her,” said the girl. She looked at the other, who shook her head. “You? No, she hasn’t heard of her either.”
“She would have been working on the peat in July. Possibly later as well, but we’re not sure about that. There was an accident. She had to be sent to the hospital with broken bones.”
“My friend Masha warned me about this,” the girl explained to her still-unspeaking partner. “The Chekists get jumpy when the last boat is about to go. Think people are going to escape. They send informants around to get us in trouble—slugs.
It hit me like a slap. Everyone knew informants infested the camp like bedbugs; the term she’d used, “slugs,” bespoke the disgust in which all other zeks held them. An exposed slug could expect ostracism and a beating from the men he’d told tales on. That was the best case. In the worst, it would be worth his life. We were not slugs, of course — I told myself I’d never have agreed to help Petrovich if that was what his investigation meant. But in the moment the best way to draw a quick distinction between what we were doing and what was done by Chekist informants eluded me.
“This one’s ridiculous hat and scarf are just meant to put us off our guard.” She turned back to me. “Well, even if she was about to fly away in a balloon, I couldn’t tell you anything about it. I don’t know her.”
I heard myself stammering. “You—you’re mistaken. We only need to ask a few questions. You don’t need to worry.”
“Well,” the blunt-nosed girl said, “we don’t know her. We can’t help you.”
Now staging my questioning in the conspicuous way I had, with the edge of the pit as proscenium, seemed highly imprudent. Perhaps it would have worked for Nat Pinkerton. I only felt myself growing nervous. I was sure I could feel surreptitious, suspicious gazes directed at me from all along the trench.
“My father,” I said. “He taught me to cut peat as well.” The lie had left my mouth before I realized it. My father, a native son of Petersburg, had no more cut a block of peat in his life than I had.
She had been about to start working again. Now she gave me a look I couldn’t read. “Burned peat all winter, mine did, when I was growing up. Gone now, though.”
I’d surprised myself by lying, but somehow her accepting it as truth made me feel a little better. Afterward I changed my approach. First I climbed down into the pit, so as not to be striding quite so stupidly across the horizon. The next peat cutter I approached as if she had been a friend of my mother’s, rather than a girl student I wanted to impress. In this way I avoided being called a slug, but the woman admitted to no more knowledge of Veronika Fitneva than the first two. Neither did the one after that, nor the one after that. One group laughed when I asked if they’d answer a
few questions, but most listened with hardened expressions.
If no one recognized the name, no one was prepared to say positively that Veronika Fitneva hadn’t been there either. The peat operation had been much larger before the first frost. In October it drew only a fraction of the labor it had in July, but even so, women were transferred to and away from the pits every day.
By the time I’d finished, it was getting dark. Where the snow hadn’t been trod into the mud, its surface had formed a crust that glittered in the light that was left.
Petrovich hadn’t come down to help me, though his interrogation of the women working the piles seemed to be finished. I found him warming himself by a small fire. By now the women were preparing to return to their own dormitory. The noises they made carried to us through the still air: voices, and the scrape of tools being piled together.
“Learn anything?” he said.
“Nothing.”
He grunted.
We were about to leave—I was worried about negotiating the crisscross of ditches between us and the road before the light got too dim—when a woman appeared out of the gloaming. At first I didn’t recognize her. When she stepped into the firelight, I saw that it was the red-cheeked girl who’d thought my hat and scarf looked too foolish to be genuine.
“You’re still here, then,” she said. When I agreed, she sniffed. “I thought about what you were asking, after you went on. I still don’t know that girl you were talking about by name. But I was working peat here in July.” She paused. “I’m good at it, so they keep me on. Anyway, I heard about a girl who went to the hospital then. It was because she’d been beaten up. Some man hit her with a pipe.”