Sister Pelagia and the Red Cockerel

by Boris Akunin

  He was standing only two paces away, and the nun pressed her hand to her left breast, afraid that the beating of her heart would betray her.

  “You’ll croak anyway, you’ll croak,” the blind man hissed. “I’ll finish you without the weight, with my bare hands.”

  And he really did put his weapon away in his pocket, stretch out his great paws, and start turning around in circles.

  This was bad. If he got the idea of squatting down, it would all be over.

  Pelagia jerked the spectacles off her nose and flung them into the corner. The killer swung around rapaciously and dashed toward the sound. Pelagia flew to the door and threw her full weight on the bolt: thank God, it opened. Leaping out into the garden, she saw there was another bolt on the outside of the door and quickly shot it home.

  And then she went dashing toward the main building, shouting at the top of her voice, “Over here! Over here! Help!”

  Behind her, she could hear banging and crashing as Glass-Eye struggled with the locked door.

  On resistance to evil, the motherland, and truth

  BY THE TIME all the monks had come running and grasped the meaning of the nun’s fitful shouts, then argued over whether they should go into the garden themselves or call the police, precious minutes had been lost. It would have taken even longer if the bishop himself had not come out to see what all the fuss and bother was about. Grasping the essential points in a few moments, he took hold of Pelagia by the shoulders and asked only one question: “Are you all right?” When she nodded, he set off into the garden with broad strides. He did not run, because unseemly commotion is incompatible with the station of a bishop, and yet the servants running after him could hardly keep up.

  The door of the garden shed was still bolted—Glass-Eye could not have escaped. But there was no sound from inside. The monks and servants timidly surrounded the rough wooden structure.

  “Sir?” Userdov called in a trembling voice. “Are you there? It would be best if you abandoned your thoughts of violence and surrendered yourself into the hands of justice.”

  Mitrofanii took hold of Father Serafim by the shoulder, moved him aside, and pulled back the bolt with no hesitation.

  He stepped inside.

  Pelagia kept her mouth shut tight. She absolutely must not call out—God forbid, the bishop might look around, and to turn away from a wounded, deadly beast would be madness.

  The bishop stood in the doorway for a few seconds. He shook his head and made the sign of the cross. Then the others rushed into the hut, jostling one another aside. They gasped and they too crossed themselves. Pelagia went up on tiptoe to glance over the shoulder of the brother purser.

  In a rectangle of bluish moonlight she could see Glass-Eye sitting in the corner, slumped against the wall. His hands clutched the broken handle of the garden fork, the sharp points of which the suicide had thrust into his own throat, with such force that the prongs had passed straight through and stuck into the wood.

  THAT NIGHT, WHILE the district public prosecutor and the police were carrying out their various duties (the blazing lanterns and torches made the garden as bright as day), Pelagia suffered a belated hysterical reaction, which, fortunately, no one apart from His Eminence observed.

  “What terrible wickedness I have committed to save my own life!” the holy sister lamented, wringing her hands. “I forgot who I am! I behaved like an ordinary woman in fear of her life. But I am a nun! I did not follow the law of Christ, which tells us not to resist evil and to turn the other cheek, but the law of Moses! An eye for an eye! I shall never touch any knitting again in my life!”

  Mitrofanii decided that this fit of self-castigation would best be calmed by a pretense of severity, and he addressed his spiritual daughter strictly: “And what if you are a nun! There are different kinds of monks, too. There are warrior-monks. Take Oslyabya and Peresvet, who fought for the motherland and the truth with weapons in their hands!”

  “But are ‘for the motherland’ and ‘for the truth really the same thing?” Pelagia objected, her teeth chattering. “Every nation has its own motherland, but the truth is the same for all people everywhere. What is so good about your Peresvet? Of course, for the principality of Moscow and for Russians, he is a hero, but Christ did not ascend the Cross for the principality of Moscow or for one single nation, but for the whole of mankind. The Tartar Chelibei, whom Peresvet slew, also had a living soul. A servant of God must never take up a weapon, even if he is facing certain death. Ah, my lord, imagine how terribly afraid a man who has already lost one eye must be of losing the only one he has! He must have had nightmares about going completely blind … But in my cruelty it seemed a small thing to take away his sight, and I even locked the door from the outside so that he couldn’t get away. Where could he have gone, now that he was blind? I can imagine how the poor man groped at the walls, looking for a way out, and couldn’t find it… If he had, perhaps he would not have damned his immortal soul. Surely I am right?”

  Seeing her in such torment, Mitrofanii abandoned severity and took the nun by the hand. “No, you are not right, you are not! Evil must be resisted. I disagree with Count Tolstoy about that and about his interpretation of Christ’s teaching. Life is the overcoming of Evil and the struggle with Evil, not capitulation to villains. You are like David, who defeated Goliath, or Saint George of Cappadocia, who slew the fiery dragon. And I admire you even more than these heroes, because you are a weak woman. Your knitting needle is a far more courageous weapon than David’s sling or George’s lance.”

  But instead of taking pride in these flattering comparisons, Pelagia merely waved a hand at His Eminence and began sobbing even more bitterly.

  So that is the answer

  ALL OF THIS happened during the night of Thursday (which was the feast day of Saint Ioann the Cave-Dweller), and the next Wednesday—that is, before even a week had passed—Matvei Bentsionovich Berdichevsky presented the bishop and Sister Pelagia with a full and exhaustive report on the investigation that had been conducted.

  The attacker’s identity had proved much easier to establish than the public prosecutor had anticipated. First of all, they had found the hotel where the man had been staying. This was not hard, since Zavolzhsk was not a very large town. They had searched his room and found a passport in the name of honorary citizen Mavrikii Iriparkhovich Persikov.

  Berdichevsky had not believed the passport, mindful of the fact that on the steamer the criminal had called himself Ostrolyzhensky, and he had ordered the body to be photographed. Not, of course, in such a highly scientific manner as Sergei Sergeevich Dolinin—he did not comb the dead man’s hair or drop nitroglycerine into his eyes (but then the corpse didn’t have any eyes anyway).

  Together with a verbal portrait, the photographs were sent to all the state security and detective departments in the empire. And only a few days later a prompt response arrived from the Kiev secret police, and a most unexpected reply it was.

  “Not Persikov and not Ostrolyzhensky,” Matvei Bentsionovich said with a significant expression as he moved on to the most important part of his report (having begun with a rapturously eloquent panegyric to Sister Pelagia’s heroism). “He was a certain Bronislav Ratsevich, a hereditary noble of the province of Kovensk.” At this point the public prosecutor paused for effect before announcing his most sensational piece of information: “And, if you please, a former staff captain of the gendarmes. He served in the Volynsk gendarmes department, actually in the town of Zhitomir. The report received from Kiev says that Ratsevich was regarded as a courageous and competent officer, and that during his final period of service he was a member of the flying squad for combating especially dangerous criminals. He lost one eye in an exchange of fire while detaining a gang of dynamiters. He was a decorated officer. But last year he was dismissed from the Corps of Gendarmes for violating its code of honor. The regulations prohibit gendarmes officers from borrowing money, but the staff captain ran up debts, and, even worse, to Jewish moneylend
ers, which his superiors obviously found doubly unacceptable,” said Berdichevsky, unable to resist the jibe, being a Jew by birth himself. “The business went as far as debtor’s prison. That is, to be precise, first Ratsevich was dismissed from the service, and then he was put in prison, because an officer of the Corps of Gendarmes cannot be imprisoned. Soon he managed to buy his way out and pay off his debts in some way or other, but there was no way back into the corps for him. Immediately after he was released, Ratsevich left Zhitomir for parts unknown. The Kiev Department of Security has no information on his subsequent actions and place of residence.”

  His listeners’ shocked response was the best reward the public prosecutor could have hoped for. When he himself had first read the telegram, he had even started running around the office in his excitement, repeating to himself: “Oh, no, it can’t be true!”

  “But… but what explanation can there be for this?” His Eminence asked, spreading his hands in perplexity. “For a gendarmes officer, even a former one … I am totally bewildered!”

  Unlike the bishop, Matvei Bentsionovich had had time to recover from his amazement and gather his thoughts, and he had his answer ready. “I think the situation was as follows. Ratsevich bitterly resented the law that he had served so valiantly for so many years and that had cast him off so callously—not for some criminal offense, but for an ordinary civil misdemeanor. So what if he could not pay back his debts on time? That kind of thing is always happening. He had given distinguished service, but he was expelled from the corps he had served, and left without any means of support. How was he supposed to earn the money to feed himself?” Berdichevsky smiled cunningly and answered his own question. “What did Ratsevich know how to do? Tack people down, ferret things out, and also employ violence—and that was all. Do you know what the ‘flying squad’ is? It is a group of highly qualified officers and agents who possess all the skills of armed combat, fisticuffs, and other knowledge required for combating dangerous criminals. And so Mr. Ratsevich found himself an occupation as close as possible to his former profession. It is quite a common occurrence in criminal practice for competent policemen to turn into inveterate enemies of society. Perhaps Ratsevich was acting alone, but perhaps not. Permit me also to remind you that he is a Pole. I would not exclude the possibility of the former staff captain being connected with the Warsaw bandits, the elite of the criminal world. Criminals of this class have little in common with other denizens of the social underworld. They live and they commit their villainies, if you will pardon the vulgar expression, with real swank. Many of them come from the Polish gentry. They have education and decent manners.”

  “But what was his interest in our Pelagia?” asked Mitrofanii, not entirely convinced by this theory.

  Berdichevsky had clearly also prepared his answer to this. “She threw suspicion onto him. I don’t know how he managed to get off the steamer after the murder of Shelukhin and the theft of the treasury casket; most probably by swimming. And it is hardly likely that being forced to swim in icy water was to his liking. He was a spiteful gentleman, and apparently of a psychopathic temperament. Such types, you know, are not rare among criminals—or among those who catch them. They take any difficulties as a personal insult and they pay back the insult in full. I can only repeat what I have said once already: the killer decided to get even with Sister Pelagia and, moreover, to do it creatively, with sadistic imagination. He bided his time in taking his revenge, waiting for inspiration and a convenient opportunity, such as the one that presented itself at Devil’s Rock. But when he learned that he had failed there, he immediately decided to finish the job quickly, by simply staving her head in.”

  Pelagia asked the question that was tormenting her: “But how did he know that he had failed? And especially about the imprint of the boot?”

  The public prosecutor frowned. “If you will permit me to say so, that is hardly squaring the circle. It seems clear enough. When I sent my inquiry to the forensic analysis departments, I had absolutely no suspicion that the criminal was a former gendarme. In addition to the image of the sole of the boot, it included a description of Mr. Ostrolyzhensky—the glass eye and so forth. The inquiry must have caught the eye of one of Ratsevich’s former colleagues. Perhaps they were friends, or perhaps it was a business arrangement—we cannot tell. I have heard it said that certain police officials in the provinces of Little Russia and Poland maintain—how shall I put it?—mutually advantageous relations with the Warsaw bandits. But that, I am afraid, is a matter beyond the sphere of my competence, on a scale far too large for Zavolzhsk. Let us be satisfied with the fact that your ill-wisher has been neutralized—thanks to your own bravery and God’s providence.”

  “Amen,” the bishop said with feeling. “All’s well that ends well.”

  And so they rested content with that.

  A beautiful idea

  IT HAD TAKEN about five days to gather the necessary information. Some hasty hotheads would have got the job done quicker than that, because the mark’s habits and movements were laudably unvaried, but Yakov Mikhailovich was not fond of rushing things, and anyway those types had already done more than enough of their clumsy hustling and bustling. And wasn’t it just remarkable that the moment someone bungled something and made a real mess of it, then straightaway it was “Come on, now, Yakov Mikhailovich, help us out here, clear up all this unsightly litter and make everything neat and tidy.” They could at least give him a fresh job to do once in a while, something that hadn’t already been mangled by someone else, so that he wouldn’t have to shovel up their mess. Who did they take him for, the night soil man?

  Such were the discontented mutterings of the middle-aged man of unremarkable appearance sitting on the terrace of the Café de Paris on Malaya Borshchovka Street opposite the bishop’s garden, glancing at the street flooded with sunlight over the top of the Zavolzhsk Diocesan Gazette.

  He was dressed to match his own appearance, in a style that was decent but drab, so that there was absolutely nothing for the eye to fasten on: a speckled gray jacket, a collar that was not soiled but not too white, a slightly shabby bowler hat lying on the table. The only even slightly remarkable feature of this extremely modest gentleman was his nasty habit of cracking the joints of his fingers, especially at moments of intense concentration.

  Now, for instance, he quickly seized hold of his left hand with his right and began cracking so loudly that the two young ladies at the next table looked around, and one even wrinkled up her nose.

  “Pardon me,” said Yakov Mikhailovich, smiling guiltily with his plump lips—he was well aware of his own bad habit. “I shan’t disturb you again.”

  The aroma and excessive sweetness of the coffee that he was drinking from a fine china cup were somewhat reminiscent of cocoa, but in his travels through the Russian provinces, Yakov Mikhailovich had had occasion to drink worse slops. In such cases, he usually asked them to bring him a milk pitcher filled to the top with cream (the cream in the provinces was far finer and richer than in Moscow and St. Petersburg), poured as much of it as possible into his cup, and then it was all right, you could drink it and even enjoy it.

  At twenty-nine minutes past seven Yakov Mikhailovich took out his inexpensive silver watch and clicked open the lid, but he didn’t look at the dial; instead he turned his head to the right, as if in expectation of something or someone. He had no more than a minute to wait—a nun appeared around the corner from the direction of the Kazan gates. Wearing spectacles, with a strand of red hair peeping out from under her wimple. And now the seated man ran a hand over his own sparse black hair and glanced at his watch (it showed exactly half past), nodded approvingly, and jotted something down in a little notebook—not a word, and not a number, but some kind of squiggle, which made sense to no one but him.

  When the nun drew level with the terrace, the dark-haired man concealed his face and shoulders with his newspaper. And the moment she disappeared into the gate of the episcopal garden, the café’s inconspicuo
us client immediately paid his bill and left, leaving a tip of eight kopecks.

  The man from out of town seemed not to have any urgent business. He strolled at a leisurely pace around the lovely town of Zavolzhsk, a most pleasant place, especially on such a fine spring day. Swinging his light traveling bag, Yakov Mikhailovich visited all the local sights, and at nine o’clock in the evening he dined on cottage cheese and pancakes in the dairy dining hall. Once again he left an eight-kopeck tip, then asked where the privy was. It turned out to be in the yard.

  The man who had just eaten supper went off to the latrine, and there he disappeared, never to be seen again. Instead of Yakov Mikhailovich, a factory hand emerged from the outhouse, wearing a cap and caftan, with a little graying beard. It was clear straightaway that he was a staid individual, a nondrinker and a man who knew his own worth even though he was not well off. The factory hand had a sack hanging behind his back on a string. Where the dark-haired man in the worn bowler hat had got to remained a mystery. Perhaps he had drowned in the cesspit?

  That was what Yakov Mikhailovich joked to himself. From the habit of solitude, which was required by his profession, he had grown used to holding a continuous internal conversation with himself; discussing, arguing, and sometimes even joking—why not?

  The only points in which the newborn factory hand resembled the gentleman who had sat in the Café de Paris and eaten cottage cheese in the dairy dining hall were his height and his boots, and the latter had been polished and clean before, but now they were gray with dust.

  The proletarian set off toward the edge of town at a leisurely pace. By this time it was already dark and the streetlamps were lit. Yakov Mikhailovich had noted that the streets here were illuminated in a most excellent fashion, and this was no mere idle observation—the fact was important for his job.

  A short while later the man in disguise found himself close to the diocesan college for girls, a rather long, single-story building that was painted yellow and white. The headmistress’s quarters were located at one side, with a separate entrance: white curtains on the two windows, a low porch, a door with a little bronze bell. Yakov Mikhailovich had been in the apartment two days earlier. A tiny lodging of two rooms, rather cozy, even though it was maintained in a state of disorder.