by James L. May
That was clear enough. Establishing his premises through careful observation, Holmes would have proceeded logically, systematically. So did I. Pinkerton would have no time or patience for equivocating about the evidence before him; he’d face the facts manfully, letting them dictate his strategy. Having reached a conclusion, he’d stop thinking, and act.
So did I, so did I.
Start from the fact most basic and salient: the night before, three feet below me, men had wedged apart my friend Foma’s ribs and hammered a chisel through his heart. From this a number of conclusions could be drawn: there must have been several of them, since hammering a chisel through a man’s heart is difficult and he must be held down tightly. Four or five, in fact, since one had been busy hitting me, and even so Foma had barely been able to struggle. And—my mind stuttered over the next step, despite my having known it was coming—these men could not have known it was Foma’s heart they were hammering, since he and I had switched bunks after the lights had been put out.
It had been me they meant to kill.
There. Confronting it squarely sped my heart’s pounding. I’d intuited it the night before, but it was easier to acknowledge here, subordinated to a chain of inference. Imagination loops, spirals, returns you to the same horrible ideas again and again. Reasoning proceeds. And to proceed was what I needed.
Who might have reason to kill me? I could conceive of three possibilities, which I listed in order of increasing likelihood. (But why was it so important to proceed? To escape a corollary, perhaps: Foma had died because of me. If fear gaped on one side of my trail of logic, guilt loomed on the other.)
First, thieves. It wouldn’t be unheard of to be targeted, even attacked, for a share of food like the portion of Antonov’s ration I’d smuggled into Quarantine. However, no one knew about it. I didn’t think the bulges in my coat were very noticeable, and Foma, the only one I’d shared any of my new wealth with, hadn’t been out of my sight in the interval between my giving him the spoon and his death.
On to the next hypothesis, then. I’d learned from Petrovich that the Chekist, and perhaps others in Infosec, suspected me of involvement in an escape plot. Suspicions in those quarters could certainly be deadly—see the executions of two nights before. However, Infosec and the Camp Administration would not dispatch their victims via a squad of killers wielding a hammer and chisel in the night. They had better methods. See, again, the executions.
No, not the Chekist then. That left as most likely the possibility that was also most frightening: someone believed we’d learned something about Antonov’s death that made me worth killing, too, even with a stop having been put to our investigation. What the deadly information was, I couldn’t say, but it did look disturbingly like I had it. I’d been stalked through the forest already, of course: Petrovich had taken it as a sign our investigation was on the right path. If the persons behind that were still after me, wouldn’t they arrange something like what had happened to Foma?
Ratiocination had produced a result, then: because of what I knew, I was a target. Someone wanted to kill me. Swapping beds with Foma last night had saved my life, but by now the killers would have realized their mistake. I could see no reason for them not to correct it after lights-out this evening. There was little chance I’d prevail against four or five experienced men, even being more prepared for them than Foma, and escaping them would be difficult, not to say impossible, while I remained confined within the cathedral.
And even if I somehow managed to survive the night, it wouldn’t be warranted to assume my enemy would stop there. If the same party was behind the attack in the forest and the men last night—and it stood to reason they were—it meant their reach was long. There were many ways to be killed on Solovetsky. Not knowing who my unknown enemy was, I couldn’t say which they might be capable of bringing to bear against me. How could I protect myself? How could I act against them?
The questions brought me to a blank halt, surrounded by the sounds of axes in the forest. Reasoning had proceeded, but nothing had changed. Panko was at the other end of the tree we were working on; my own cut branches lay around me. The air was already frigid, but now I began to feel the cold in my chest, in my throat. Soon I would be shivering.
It was fear coming on. I struggled for mental purchase on the dilemma—how to protect myself? how to act against my enemy?—but could find none. I couldn’t answer. The fear seethed, threatening to overturn my careful train of logic and leave it lying in the snow like so many pine needles.
Then, on the brink of panic, I had it.
If what I knew about Antonov’s case marked me for death, then what I knew was dangerous to my enemy. What was dangerous to my enemy was useful to me. If I continued with the investigation Petrovich and I had been working on—if I solved the case of Antonov’s murder—I might learn enough that I could to save myself.
And there were ways of learning more. Petrovich and I had had leads. Before the Chekist revoked our investigation authorization, there had been the note from Veronika, and we’d heard from Golubov about Kologriev’s past life as an urka.
To pursue either lead, of course, would mean defying the Chekist’s explicit order. It would be doing precisely the opposite of what Petrovich had advised: keep my head down, forget about Antonov, submerge myself. It would expose me to a new set of dangers. A bullet to the head in a basement interrogation room would prove just as deadly as a chisel through the heart in the cathedral.
But what else was there to do? The more I considered it, the more impossible remaining in Company Thirteen for even another night appeared. To submerge myself meant to drown. I had to get out from under the point of the chisel that had killed Foma. I had to discover who’d killed Antonov, and whom that knowledge threatened. Any trouble I caused for myself with the Chekist by such ostentatious behavior was secondary.
There: a conclusion. So much for ratiocination. If my story had been a Holmes tale, it would have been nearly over; they tended to end expeditiously once the puzzle was solved.
But, of course, there are variations to the genre. Pinkerton was known less for merciless ratiocination than for feats of bloody derring-do. A true Pinkerton story never concludes without a few pages of cathartic violence. And simply knowing what I had to do was not quite the same thing as knowing how to go about it. (In the back of my mind, Petrovich’s voice whispered: solving a case isn’t ever about reasoning out the truth. What you do is smash together people and facts.)
The King of Detectives solved mysteries, then shot his way out of them; had he needed to escape Quarantine, he’d have done it by punching a hundred jaws and kicking the bellies of a thousand gangsters. If these weren’t entirely realistic options in my case, still I believe the plan I conceived did exhibit a certain Pinkertonian resolve and disdain for physical perils. The fact that it only required me to hurt one person does not, to my mind, diminish these qualities.
On the first attempt at cutting off my smallest finger, I managed only to make myself hyperventilate.
If you are going to mutilate yourself this way, you must not blink. I wanted to preserve as many knuckles as I could. If I was to convince the necessary parties my wound was serious, two would have to go, but I thought I could keep the one at the base of the finger. And I certainly didn’t want to damage my ring finger before it proved necessary.
But let your eye flick from the spot before it’s done, and maybe you’ll hack off more than you intended.
It felt prudent, therefore, to remove my glove. As well as being able to see what I was doing, there would be no dirty wool to contaminate the cut. I raised the hatchet to my shoulder.
The urge to turn my head was so strong I saw spots. I gulped.
Panko gave me a curious look. Once I’d steadied my breath, I cut a few branches to prevent his realizing what I was up to.
His interference could spoil everything. A sort of fiction had to b
e maintained. It wasn’t necessary for your “accident” to be truly plausible, but it had to be plausible enough that your superiors could claim to believe it. Then your bloody stump bought you a pass to the hospital, which guaranteed at least a few days of rest and quiet.
When I was convinced Panko was no longer paying attention, I began again. I stiffened the little finger of my left hand and laid it out before me, using the felled tree as a block. The other fingers I curled beneath my palm. I positioned my hand behind a thick branch that stood out vertically from the trunk, so that I could use it as a guide for the axe. Wrapping my fist around the haft at about its middle, I brought the blade level with my shoulder.
This time I carried out my idea.
It must have been pain I reeled with, but it felt as though my finger had gone suddenly, appallingly weightless. The experience is hard to describe. Perhaps it most resembled losing my balance. An equilibrium I hadn’t known my hand maintained was disrupted. For a long moment, a nauseous blackness swirled before my eyes. I shut them tight and waited.
When I could look again, blood was everywhere. Or no, not everywhere. Red dyed the snow by my boots, and the tree was spattered, but I hadn’t imbrued my coat too badly. My sweater was already a mess from Foma, I thought distantly. It would have been inconvenient not to be able to cover up the gore.
Somewhere Panko was shouting: “Oh! Oh! Look what he’s done. Genkin! Look what Anatoly Bogomolov has done!”
I was looking. Where my little finger had been was a stump, shooting one jet of blood after another into the air with surprising force. I shut my eyes again and aimed it away from my clothes. I did not think I would bleed to death.
Pain throbbed now through my entire arm, a root growing out from the wound into the rest of my body. I’d dropped the hatchet, and had to use my now-empty right hand to steady myself on the bloody log.
Oh, said a voice in my head to match Panko’s Look what Tolya Bogomolov’s done! There on the log was my finger, right where I’d left it. It lay on its side, slightly curled by the force of the blow. A kink of flesh and bone. It did not look like it had ever had much to do with me.
“Oh, I’ll tell you what you’ve done now, Bogomolov. You’ve gone and put your cock in the soup. Christ, Christ, Christ.” This was Genkin, arriving panting, ever anxious for excitement. He was followed closely by Buteyko.
“Anatoly Pavelovich! What’s happened?”
“An accident,” I managed to murmur. My throat felt dry. Buteyko was the first person I’d have to involve in the process of receiving a pass to the hospital. He didn’t have the power to issue it himself, but I’d need his support if the man who could was to be convinced. “My hand slipped on the branch.”
Buteyko removed his hat and pulled at his hair with thin, frustrated fingers. It was his job to be sure all could work, so that all could eat. I know he saw me as a kind of shirker. But even so, through the haze of pain, I felt sure of him. Buteyko was one of those men who, if you identified yourself to them as the liberal product of bourgeois parents, would help you out of a sense of social decency. It was a kind of clannish obligation—an atavism, a response evolved to suit them for a vanished environment. Their social glands continued to control their behavior long after there was any use in it. They were, in a word, decent. Their limbs, hacked off, only needed a current run through them to spasm decency.
“Let’s hurry,” he said grimly. “You need to see the site boss before they’ll accept you at the infirmary.”
By now the rest of the section had gathered around. “Put the finger in the snow,” I heard someone say. “Sometimes they can put them back on.” Panko returned from the bog nearby, having fetched a clump of icy moss. I pressed it to the stump to stanch the flow of blood and held my left hand above my head with my right.
I don’t know whether the finger was ever packed into the snow. If it was, I never got it back.
Soon Buteyko and I were out on the road, the others having filtered back to their jobs at his urging. Sounds of axes and saws came from where other platoons worked in the trees around us, syncopated with the pounding in my ears. The pain grew deeper with each throb.
At a certain point it all rose and washed over me in a wave, and I stumbled. Buteyko reached out an arm to steady me, then said, without meeting my eyes: “This is all I can do. First Foma, now you. Whatever’s going on, I am sorry for it. But this is all the help I can provide. Understand?”
The site boss was working beneath a lean-to, a piece of corrugated iron atop four posts. He sat on a stump by a small fire, with two others, guards, standing to either side.
“An accident in my platoon, Igor Sergeyevich. I’m sorry to say that I need a pass for the hospital.”
The man had been staring into the fire. He looked up. “What happened?”
“Anatoly here has lost a finger. You remember that we are limbing and bucking today.”
“Pretty stupid thing to do, boy,” the man said to me, eyeing the bloody moss around my hand.
“My hand slipped,” I said. The pain, and perhaps the loss of blood, were making me nauseous and light-headed. My voice sounded insincere in my ears. “The axe—the axe hit a knot.”
“Bogomolov is a good worker,” said Buteyko. “It was just an accident.”
Igor Sergeyevich waited to see if either of us would say anything else. Then he shrugged. “If you say so. He can spend the night in the surgery. Not the hospital—I can’t see this being bad enough for that. The infirmary, just long enough to get bandaged.”
“You know where it is, Anatoly Pavelovich?” said Buteyko.
Going to the surgery inside the kremlin would mean passing through Nikolski. There was no chance of my receiving a pass that would let me go back out again once I’d done that. And, of course, I’d have felt safer with the walls of the kremlin between myself and Foma’s killers.
Nevertheless, I nodded. I’d simply have to do what I intended before having my hand seen to. The plan was working so far.
Buteyko’s softheartedness almost sabotaged me. He said: “I can send someone with him, to be sure he gets there safely.”
I flinched. I wouldn’t be able to investigate either of my leads if they gave me an escort. It would be direct to the surgery, a night or two there, then back to Nativity to be killed.
“You want to disrupt your whole platoon? The camp’s mobilized for lumber. You give me lumber. He can get himself there.”
“Go directly there,” Buteyko said to me quietly. “Don’t stop to rest, even if you’re tired. Do you understand? It’s dangerous to stop, with a wound like that.”
Igor Sergeyevich licked the nib of his pen. “What’s the name?”
Buteyko told him. Anatoly Pavelovich Bogomolov. That was me.
Once again I was free from Company Thirteen.
24
Released from work, I could go where I needed. Zeks’ papers were typically checked only when they passed a guard station, entering or exiting one of the camp’s secured areas. I wouldn’t have to do that. The only other way an agent of authority might find out I belonged in the infirmary was a spot check by a patrol. I did, at one point, see a pair of uniformed guards on the road ahead, but they turned off onto a different path before I met them.
The moss did its job for a while, but by the time I arrived at the fishery, it was sodden with blood. I’d tried to walk with my hand upright, above my heart, but after a few curious looks I’d begun to put it in my pocket whenever someone drew near on the road. My head bobbed, a balloon strung to my body by pain.
It was Veronika I’d come for, again. Luckily I found her in the same back room as before. At first, with her back to the door, considering some piece of work on the table before her, she didn’t notice I’d come in. The way she stood, she might have been posed. It was the relation of her arms to the rest of her: a jutting elbow, a cocked hip, and then the
line of her neck curving smoothly out through her arm to dangle in her wrist on the other side. Her boots were the same dirty gray felt the rest of us wore, with the cuffs of her brown trousers pushed carelessly into their tops. The extra fabric rucked around her calves.
“Veronika Filipovna.”
Is it ever accurate to say a face is beautiful? Or is it that all of its expressions are? I can hardly picture what her face was, only what it did. Her wide mouth perched, billowed through the air, and perched again, a flock of birds rearranged on the same branches.
Seeing it was me, the flock of birds frowned, intent but off-kilter. The bruises on her face had begun to fade.
“Bogomolov,” she said. “I didn’t think I’d see you again.”
“Your letter. You wrote you had something for us.”
“Two days ago I did! I thought you’d be here making a boil over it. Then nothing.” Her eyes moved to the door. “Where’s the old man?”
I couldn’t think of a way to answer that. “Please. I don’t have much time. Whatever you were going to tell us—I need to know. And—” I gulped a breath. “I need you to talk to the monk you work with. Brother Kiril. I need them to let me through the Fish Gate.”
She barked a laugh worthy of Petrovich. “What?”
“You can do it. He is … he’s taken with you.”
“Taken with me!”
“He brought your letter to us. He used the gate for you then, so it would reach us.”
She shook her head. “You scared me, you know. When I didn’t hear from you, I was sure you’d gone to Boris, even with Brother Kiril swearing up and down that the Lord had helped him find you before you did. But here I am, no new broken bones or bruises.” She swept a hand down from her head, showing the extent of her intactness. “Your partner should know that if you don’t follow through on your threats I’m not going to be as intimidated next time. Why should I tell you anything? Why should I help you with the monks, even if I could?”