by James L. May
Petrovich opened its door, but there was only coal ash inside. “You brought this in yourself?”
Kologriev grinned. “Well … could have been here when we got here. Who’s to say?”
“And this is your bunk?” said Petrovich, indicating the one closest to the stove.
“Sure. I get cold.”
The other improvement was a set of curtains that had been hung over a window—again, the one nearest Kologriev’s bed. These Petrovich only pushed out of the way with his cane.
It was clear we were not going to find anything. The first floor was no better. We combed through it in a cursory way before leaving the building, but even if the gold leaf had been there, I doubt we could have found it. The space was smaller than the warehouse, but more disorganized, and with as many places to hide something. I poked around the dusty equipment without much hope. Kologriev brought down a lantern, and even helped me move a few barrels, but soon Petrovich called a halt.
“At some point the chances of turning anything up aren’t worth the time it takes anymore,” he said. “This was a good start. We still have those men on the list for this afternoon.”
Outside, Kologriev took his leave. It appeared we had reached the end of our investigation into the leaf, for the moment. The rest of the afternoon would be spent on the list. First we headed back to the cell to eat.
“Listen,” I said as we went by the bay. “Why don’t you let me go to Veronika tonight? Alone, I mean. Even if we’re still working on the Whites, you won’t need my help. And with her I’ll—I’ll see if I can talk something more out of her. You can always give her until tomorrow morning before you go to Spagovsky, can’t you?”
Petrovich sighed. “What are you going to say to her that you haven’t said already, walking her back from Spagovsky’s place?”
“I don’t know,” I began. “But one of us should be on her side, at least. She needs someone to trust, if we’re going to learn anything from her.”
He stopped. “Tolya, I’ve teased you before. But, fine, I see you like her. You’re taken with her. Sometimes this happens in an investigation, particularly when you’re young. You begin to uncover a woman’s secrets, it’s like being invited into her boudoir. It’s exciting. But you must not let an infatuation interfere with your case. You can like her, but be suspicious.”
“I’m telling you, you can’t expect to convince her with threats.”
“Threats. All right, then. Tell me, why do you think I’m not annoyed at having spent all this time searching that warehouse without turning up the leaf? It looks like we wasted the morning, doesn’t it?”
“Well, we had to look, didn’t we?”
“We did. But there’s a reason it’s not a disaster that we didn’t find anything. It’s because Zhenov’s men saw us looking. Now we’ll wait and see what kind of trouble is stirred up by that. None yet. But something may still come from our banging around.”
That made a certain amount of sense. We had certainly demanded their attention. “I don’t see what that has to do with Veronika,” I said.
“In my professional life, Tolya,” said Petrovich slowly, “I had two tools. The first was men, the police force. That’s good for when you need to find a pistol thrown into the long grass, or when every train leaving the city needs to be checked for your suspect. Men are a broom, they sweep up. Throw enough of them at a search, usually they find something, whether that’s a book of gold leaf or a witness. Here, unfortunately, I have only you. Zhenov’s men helped well enough, but since any one of them might have been in on the theft, you couldn’t say that using them was what you could call a failproof method. And even if I had a hundred trustworthy officers, it wouldn’t make the job of talking to Fitneva any easier. Piling uniforms into a room wouldn’t make that one talk.”
The temperature had dropped as the sun began to go down. Petrovich coughed and rubbed at his shoulder. “That is a job for the second tool, one I still have at my disposal. It is knowing secrets. A secret is a hammer. It knocks away wedges that hold your suspects in place and prevent them colliding. Once they’ve smashed pieces off each other, you sift the gravel to see what they’ve left behind. Then you use that to plan your next blow. This is detective work, do you understand? I don’t care about threatening her. I need to put her in motion. Maybe she turns against him. Maybe she sets him on us. Maybe she calls in a favor from a friend we haven’t heard of yet. You see? And it sets him in motion as well. I’m not hoping he hurts her. The most interesting outcome would be that I tell him about Antonov and he does nothing. That would mean he knew already, you see?”
It put what we had been doing in a new light. Yet another reconfiguration of my image of the old man—only the mustache and blue eyes seemed to be constant. “All right,” I said. “All right, I see what you mean. But I still think we should give her one more chance to talk to us. Then if you still need to tell Spagovsky, we can do it in a way that’s safe, make sure she’s protected …”
Petrovich mused. “Whatever she knows, you’re probably right she won’t give it up just because of the threat. If Spagovsky does beat her up, she’d be the kind to hold it back from us, just out of spite.”
“I don’t want her smashed,” I admitted.
Both of us raised our eyes to the kremlin’s wall, first him, then me. Its stones were massive. “This is what I have been telling you, Tolya,” he said. “You need to think: what are you going to do if she proves not to be so innocent?”
19
A secret is a hammer. That was Petrovich’s approach to mystery. A different one than Sherlock Holmes’s or Nat Pinkerton’s, but as effective, I suppose, for driving a story forward as deduction or adventure.
With Vasily there has been more literary discussion, though its focus is belles lettres rather than the mechanics of detective pulp. His subject remains Chekhov. I must have let something slip—the lie about “A Story Without an End” did not put him off.
Last night he asked whether I knew A Journey to Sakhalin, our great writer’s survey of the tsarist penal colony. “A masterpiece,” Vasily says. “An example of the way genius may be put into the service of true social transformation. The man’s humanity, his attention to material forces!” And more in this vein.
By “attention to material forces,” I believe Vasily Feodorovich means that the illustrious Anton Pavlovich spent months conducting a census of Sakhalin, a godforsaken island in the Sea of Okhotsk that the Imperial Army once seized from the Japanese. He presents the results to the reader hamlet by miserable hamlet. “In Upper Muckstead live twenty-three men, twelve women, and three children. All of the men are under sentence, and eight of the women, with the rest being the wives of those transported under sentence. Sixty-eight percent of the population is between twenty-five and forty-five years old, prime working age. For each household or single man there is a third of a hectare of arable land and half a hectare of hay meadow. People here give the impression of being morose and complain of the climate. In Lower Muckstead …” I informed Vasily of the truth, that this is exactly as boring to read as it must have been to carry out.
He refuses to believe I am serious at such moments. When had I read it, he wanted to know? Was it after my own imprisonment? Then hadn’t I recognized my own sufferings in what he described? Hadn’t I felt myself to be known and empathized with by a capacious intelligence?
Since Chekhov describes the horrors of the tsars’ prisons, not ours, the book is approved of by the censors, available in all libraries. I did read it after my release, in the time before the war. I wanted—well, who knows what I wanted from the thing? All I found to recognize in it was the story of a doctor who, when a shoemaker arrives with the latest shipment of convicts, commits the man, perfectly healthy, to the hospital, to be released only once a pair of shoes has been made for the doctor’s son. That sounds like the camps I know. Whatever else it was I was looking for, I
did not find it.
Not even the usual pleasures of reading Chekhov are there. His prose is that of a punctilious functionary throughout—or, at best, that of a man who has put off genius and taken on responsibility. Two occasions only do I remember when his writing rises up to its usual intensity. One, a description of a prisoner wedding in a remote church. The other, a recaptured escapee receiving ninety strokes with the lash. What inspires the writer in Chekhov, then? Religious ceremony, and torture.
There is perversity in everyone who puts words to paper, if you only look.
Vasily does have some taste, evidenced by the thoughtfulness with which he took my remarks about style. I went on to venture with him the observation I put down before, that Chekhov writes as though he is telling a detective story, only without the crime or the revelation of guilt. I maintain that my basic insight is correct. However, my neighbor points out that one of Chekhov’s early works, and his only true novel, The Shooting Party, concerns a murder at a provincial estate. By his account it is a more or less normal mystery, with an unfaithful wife murdered in a forest, several suspects, and a magistrate who tells the story of his investigation. I gather there is some ambiguity about the narrator’s reliability, which is perhaps an artistic touch; Vasily suggests the magistrate himself may bear some of the guilt. But otherwise it sounds as lurid as Nat Pinkerton.
I am forced, therefore, to acknowledge that Chekhov did, at least once, write a mystery that could be solved. Still, a minor work, one I could not be expected to have read. Chekhov is, of course, not known as a novelist.
In the end Petrovich and I agreed that I would go to Veronika, and I set off along the southern road just after the sun had gone down. Even in the dark, it was familiar; I’d walked this stretch twice in the past two days. The last redness died from the sky, like the reflection of candlelight licking out over a glass dome. The trees were silhouettes against the night air, with the fishery’s lamps visible through them before its outline appeared.
When I knocked, Veronika’s voice called out for me to come in. It was the same room we’d found her in the other day; she was sitting again on the box beneath the lamp. The nets spread from her lap across the floor, yards and yards of them in the shadows, filling the room like an impossible skirt.
“Anatoly Bogomolov,” she said. “Where’s your partner?”
“It’s just me.”
“The two of you are duplicating your efforts. You do know he came to see me again the other day? We were quite the pair. I couldn’t decide which of us was more beautiful.” Now that I was closer, I could see where the bruises bloomed around both eyes and on her left cheek. Even the bridge of her nose was swollen, but in fact she didn’t look quite as bad as the old man. “He told you about his ultimatum?”
“I didn’t know he had that in mind. It wasn’t something I wanted.”
“I see. So, you intend for us to continue being friends, is that it?” The anger thrilled in her voice. She hadn’t stopped moving her hands in the net. “Why are you here, then, my friend?”
“I want to help,” I said. “If you tell me what you know now, he won’t feel he has to say anything to Spagovsky. We could protect you.”
“You want the same as your partner! Only you want me to think you’re doing me a favor, as well.”
The truth of what she said bit at me, but I couldn’t see any other way to spare her. “We don’t have to be enemies. There’s nothing sinister or secret about what we’re doing. Antonov was murdered. We’re only finding out who killed him.”
“Maybe you even believe that!”
I didn’t stop to ask what she meant. “It doesn’t look good, your refusing to help. Petrovich is convinced you know something you’re not telling. If there is, you should tell me. If not—you could just tell me more about what your friendship with him was like. Whatever you don’t mind saying. Maybe there will be something useful in it.”
“What makes you think telling you about our friendship wouldn’t be betraying a confidence?”
Her black eyes were huge under the lamp, even with the swelling. It was quiet. Outside, waves slapped against the pier.
She’d identified my youth and inexperience immediately the other day. There was no point in trying to conceal it or act as though I could browbeat her into cooperation.
“The note we found,” I said. “You wrote about his goodness—that it was all that let you continue. I knew what you meant right away, before we had any idea who’d written it. He was a kind man.”
“Yes.”
“We only met because he took pity on me. I was dawdling at the museum after the end of a lecture. He introduced himself when I knew no one. Do you know about the Quarantine Company? I don’t know if they have anything like it for women.” She nodded, and I went on. “He knew how meager my rations were. He was willing to help a—a young person in need. He gave me onions—more than once, in fact. That was kindness. But there was more to him, wasn’t there? He’d have something to say about man living not by bread alone, don’t you think? Or by onions.”
I looked, but couldn’t tell whether she had softened. Anger and sadness were always close together in her face.
“Once he learned I’d studied mathematics at university, he would always ask me to explain the geometry of perspective to him. I think he understood it quite well, really, but I only had to start to explain linear transformation for him to stop me and ask how distorting a distant object’s real shape could be thought to produce a so-called realistic image. We’d end with him shaking his head over anyone ever thinking anything other than its spiritual importance should determine a figure’s size in a painting. The kindness was in giving me a chance to talk, you see? He knew I missed being a student, an intellectual.”
Veronika finally laughed, in spite of herself. “That sounds like him.”
“How did the two of you meet?”
“As you surmised. It was when we were in the hospital.”
“Yes,” I said, “but how did you meet once you were there?”
Her sigh was barely audible. “Ah. That.” Her hands had fallen still, buried in the ropes. “Well, it might as well have been a novel, really. He came in when I’d been there for a week already. They’d put me to work while my ribs healed, helping nurse the sicker ones. He was my patient.”
She was talking, at least. I didn’t want to push her too soon. “What made you like him?”
“He didn’t ask about my beating. Maybe he’d heard about it already from someone else in the hospital. But I appreciated that. How dull, having to explain the hows and why of being beaten up over and over. No, instead we talked about … well, about his work. About Petersburg. How can I say it? The conversations were mundane. But they were like nothing I’d heard since they arrested me. He talked—he talked as though he were a friend of my father’s, one interested in my schooling. You’re right, he was compassionate to youth. But then, of course I am not a little girl. When they were about to discharge me, I begged him tearfully to come and find me when he was well. I said I couldn’t live without him. That wasn’t true, it now appears, but it felt right to say so at the time.”
I swallowed. Whether the sound she’d made was a laugh or a sob, I can’t say. “And he came, when he’d recovered?”
“I wasn’t sure he would. In the hospital he closed his eyes while I expressed my feelings. All he would say was, ‘God bless you, dear girl.’ But then, after another week, he came. He said—he said he’d missed me. He said the ward had been dark after I left. And he said, ‘Veronika Filipovna, I am ready to sin with you.’” Her chin took a new angle. She must have noticed my flushing. “It was while I was at work, out from under Stepnova’s eyes. I’d told him to do that. You didn’t think it was all chaste between us, did you? I’m not ashamed. When we managed to be alone, we slept together.”
“No,” I said, willing myself not to show any awkw
ardness or emotion. “I didn’t think you were chaste.”
“Good. I liked him already, but his frankness was attractive. It wasn’t the customary hypocrisy. Plenty of men will act like they can’t help themselves, their lust is overwhelming them. Not Gennady. He was gentle, but—deliberate. It was like he’d seen us together in bed, and had decided to make it real. He was ready. His thinking it was sinful wouldn’t stop him. It didn’t even trouble him, once he’d made his decision, not really. It was all a scene he’d laid out. He was … unlike anyone else.”
My ears and chest felt hot. She looked away, at the floor, as if she’d said more than she meant to. I cleared my throat, but she was the one who continued: “So, you—you liked him, too, then. That’s why you keep harassing me with these questions?”
“Partly. He didn’t deserve what happened.”
“Partly?”
Our eyes met. I wasn’t expecting it. Always her gaze pushed when I looked for her to pull, pulled when I thought she’d push. Now, just when I thought she’d relented, there was something hard in it. Something that hardened me to the point of honesty in turn.
“The other part is that I’m transferred to Company Ten for the duration of the investigation. The ration is better than in Quarantine. Much better. I’d like a place there, instead of in hard labor, when my term in Quarantine is over. Chances are better if we find the killer.”
She nodded, slowly. “Yes. Even I agree that’s a better reason.”
The nets on the floor kept me from coming any closer. I did not want to lose the progress I thought I’d made. “Did you ever watch him at work on the icons?”
“Yes. Twice. Once recently. That was after I wrote him that letter, when I was able to come inside to go to the commissary.” She pressed her lips together. “It was his way of socializing, wasn’t it? He showed people icons. That was how he spent time with them.”