A Vengeful Longing: A Novel (St. Petersburg Mysteries)

by R. N. Morris

  He set off at a run after the dogs; somehow it seemed important not to let them out of his sight. He was chasing not a pack of wild dogs, but the idea of kinship.

  The idea took him across the empty parade ground, where the unseen ghosts of dead battalions were marshalled, into the Summer Garden.

  As he entered the enclosure he had the sense of crossing over into a place of magic and awe, a grotto. The dumbstruck, sightless men and women that lined the criss-crossing avenues slowed his step and cowed him. Naked allegories, fabulous pagan beings, they inspired an irrational dread in him. He had a sense of them moving behind his back, but whenever he turned, they were frozen in their original positions, the lyre unplucked, the sweep of concealing drapery still miraculously in place.

  In amongst the statuary, people of flesh and blood moved, a congregation of sinners, for the most part eschewing the formal paths, the women undoubtedly whores, the men drunks. Ferfichkin slurringly repeated the words of the Psalm: ‘I have hated the company of evildoers.’ There was laughter from the trees. He threw out a hand towards it and stumbled on, his step unsteady as much from exhaustion as from the drink now.

  He lurched from statue to statue, passed now between a different set of strangers, who showed their disgust by keeping their stony heads averted from him.

  He could no longer see the dogs but the din of their hunt was louder than ever.

  He staggered into one of the sinners, who had wandered on to the path.

  Ferfichkin looked into this man’s face. ‘You!’ he cried.

  The man pushed him away, with the same disgust that those on Millionnaya had shown. Ferfichkin fell to the ground. The man stepped over him and went on his way.

  Ferfichkin did not stir. No one troubled themselves about the drunk fallen to the ground. No doubt they had themselves slept in places just as strange.

  Morning came more stealthily than usual. With infinite gradation, the soft etiolated light became emboldened. The old drunk was still there. He had not changed his position. The politseisky who found him couldn’t rouse him and when he turned the man over, he saw why.

  The fine, long handle of a bladed weapon protruded from a circle of blood on the man’s chest, exactly where you might estimate his heart to be.

  2

  Nikolai Nobody

  The day grew heavy with the humidity of a storm held back. The sweltering pressure affected the flies in Porfiry’s room badly. They became reckless, crazed, hurling themselves at the panes of the window and into the faces of the men who came and went. As for the men, a short-tempered impatience characterised their dealings as they awaited barometric release. The morning was a series of obstacles they had to move through.

  Virginsky, for whom a desk had been installed in the corner by the window, continued to sort through the records of the confectioner’s, comparing the names there to those he had gleaned from the school lists. But it was hard to concentrate, not just because of the heat and the intrusive buzz of the flies around his head. Frequently he would look up from his task, peering out of the window in anxious expectation. Whenever there was a knock at the door of the chambers, he would start in his seat, turning a drained and apprehensive face to see who entered. Invariably, it was one of the clerks with correspondence for Porfiry; Virginsky would bow his head once more over the ledger book, relieved for the moment, only to nourish his apprehension for a while longer.

  ‘How are you getting on?’ The sound of Porfiry’s voice suddenly so close startled him.

  ‘Nothing so far,’ said Virginsky, his voice unexpectedly tremulous. He waited for Porfiry to go but the magistrate remained silently at his shoulder. Virginsky turned his head and looked up. The other man’s expression was mildly distracted.

  ‘Porfiry Petrovich?’

  Porfiry seemed taken aback by the brusqueness of Virginsky’s tone. He creased his brow.

  ‘May I make an observation?’

  Porfiry nodded.

  ‘This method strikes me as inherently flawed.’

  ‘Indeed?’

  ‘I would go so far as to say that it is a waste of my time. A fruitless exercise.’

  ‘I regret that you find it so.’

  ‘For one thing, can we really suppose that the murderer was so foolish as to give his real name to the shop from which he bought the chocolates he intended to poison? For another, not every customer who shops at Ballet’s will have his name entered here. These books only record those who have accounts, or place orders. The casual transaction, paid for in cash, will leave no trace. Is that not the case?’

  Porfiry’s eyelashes batted away Virginsky’s objections. ‘We can make no assumptions. We must investigate every possibility, however remote. This search may turn up a name, or it may not. One thing is certain though: if we do not look, we will not find. A criminal investigation does not proceed by guesswork, but by painstaking, methodical examination of all available evidence.’

  ‘But even if I find a name, it could mean nothing.’

  ‘That is perfectly true. However, it could, on the other hand, mean something. I’m afraid, Pavel Pavlovich, that there will be times when you will have almost nothing to go on. And that almost nothing may be so close to nothing as to be mistaken for it.’

  ‘But . . .’

  Porfiry raised an eyebrow forbiddingly. Virginsky shook his head and turned away in disappointment. He did not see Porfiry’s relenting smile.

  ‘Pavel Pavlovich, is there something else you wish to say to me?’

  Virginsky turned quickly in his seat. ‘I had thought that your methods were more subtle than this. I believed that you used psychology and the exercise of intellect to solve your cases. I had hoped to learn the art of deductive reasoning from you. But I see that you repeatedly have recourse to the bluntest of tools, trial and error. And more frequently the latter than the former, if I am honest.’

  ‘Please do be honest. Indeed, I would not have you be otherwise. ’

  Virginsky paused briefly as he weighed Porfiry’s smile. ‘I have said too much.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘It is not for me to criticise you. You are my superior. I must obey you without challenging your commands, however nonsensical they appear.’

  ‘I do not want that kind of obedience. I . . . I welcome your challenging comments.’

  ‘I find that hard to believe.’

  ‘But it’s true, I assure you. So much so that I command you to continue your observations.’

  Virginsky regarded Porfiry sceptically for a moment. But he found that there was so much he wished to say that he did not allow his doubts to restrain him. ‘Very well, if you insist. You have so far arrested two men, both of whom you have since been forced to release, as you once arrested and released me. Would it not have been better to have first made sure of the evidence against these individuals? You allowed, it seems to me, your prejudices to influence your actions. Most poisonings are committed by doctors, therefore the doctor must have done it. Vakhramev was found with the pistol in his hand, therefore he must have shot Setochkin. This simplistic reasoning has led to elementary mistakes, has it not?’

  Porfiry smiled, though the colour at his cheeks revealed his pique. ‘One can always release an innocent man whom one has detained. It is less easy to bring back to life the victim of a murderer one has allowed to go free. Now if I may make an observation of my own. You seem to be out of sorts this morning, Pavel Pavlovich. Your present ill mood would not be occasioned by the imminent arrival of your father and stepmother, would it?’

  Virginsky turned sharply away from Porfiry.

  ‘It’s natural that you should experience a feeling of tension at the prospect; equally understandable that you should transfer your complicated, but largely negative, feelings towards your father on to me. It could be said that I stand in loco parentis to you here at the bureau.’ Now it was Virginsky who felt the heat rise in his face; he was thankful he was looking away from Porfiry. A sky laden with hostile energ
y pressed at the window. ‘You are in a difficult position as far as your father is concerned,’ continued Porfiry. ‘You entertain an unhealthy resentment towards him, which derives from your inadmissible feelings for your stepmother. In the exercise of your official duty, you have brought your father into our investigation. In all conscience, you could not have done otherwise, and I commend you. And yet, you cannot dispel from your heart the suspicion that you are acting out of revenge. This in its turn generates powerful feelings of unworthiness, disloyalty and guilt. You cannot forget that, whatever he has done to you, indeed whatever crime at all he may be guilty of, he is still your father and you are still his son. Naturally, you do not wish your father to be found a murderer, or even a man of reduced honour. You have already discovered that he is not the hero you once imagined him to be. You can never put him back on the pedestal. All that is left for you to do, it seems, is to witness his further degradation, each step of which you experience as if it were your own. In his fall from grace, your father takes you down with him. In addition to that, the day is oppressively humid.’

  Still without turning, Virginsky stiffened in his seat. ‘So you do not accept any of my criticisms. You dismiss them with this psychology? ’

  ‘I accept that there is some truth in everything you have said. And yet you must accept too that I had no choice but to act in the way that I did. Necessity guided my steps. A criminal investigation is like a journey to an unknown destination. We have neither map nor itinerary. The only determination we are allowed is that of choosing a direction when we come to a fork in the road. Perhaps there will be signs along the way, but we must never forget that they may be pointing in the wrong direction and may even have been positioned deliberately to mislead us. All we can do is set out and continue upon our way. If we take a wrong turning, we must simply retrace our steps. In any event, one must remain calm and decisive.’

  ‘I distrust fanciful analogies,’ said Virginsky.

  ‘Really?’ answered Porfiry. ‘I have to confess I am rather fond of them.’

  The door opened with barely a warning rap. Virginsky looked round at last. ‘There are some people here,’ said Zamyotov. ‘Will you see them?’

  Virginsky and Porfiry exchanged a colluding smile. ‘Would it be possible for you to give me more information than that upon which to base my decision?’ asked Porfiry.

  ‘They appear to be related to him.’ Zamyotov gave the most minimal of glances in Virginsky’s direction.

  Virginsky’s apprehension solidified into a sickening weight above his stomach. It appalled him to see Porfiry’s chipper step as he turned in welcome. ‘Of course! Show them in. We are expecting them.’

  Natalya Ivanovna came into the room first. Her step was brisk and possessing; her face lit up with a simple - Virginsky might even have said natural - eagerness. There was no hint from her of the tensions that had arisen during the last family meeting. And yet it was certainly significant that she led the way while Virginsky’s father hung back as if hiding behind her beauty, or rather sending it before him as a peace offering. Virginsky had no eye for, or understanding of, fashion. Even so, he judged her dress to be startlingly advanced in style, as well as exquisitely cut from emerald-green shot silk. Its curves were fuller and more indicative of the body beneath than he was used to seeing; the white muslin underskirt, more revealed. The hoops of the crinoline, if indeed it could be called a crinoline, projected only at the back. As agitatingly novel as all this struck him, there was also an undeniable rightness to it, a perfect, unbrookable inevitability. It was a dress designed to set everything right, and it very nearly did. She brought with her too a freshness which alleviated the day.

  Virginsky had to acknowledge that his father’s reticence was mirrored by his own: although he had by now risen from his desk, he positioned himself behind Porfiry, using him as shield and proxy in the same way that his father used his young wife.

  We are more alike than we know. Virginsky dismissed the thought immediately and refused to look directly at his father. He felt a kind of anticipatory disgust at the idea of his father’s face. Knowing the man, knowing what he was capable of, it amazed him that he could walk into a room with his head held high, without any trace of contrition or shame on his features. Brazenly, in other words, for that was how Virginsky felt sure his father would choose to present himself now. Then it occurred to him that the true reason for the bitterness of his feelings lay in the similarity of those features to his own. Just as he resembled his father physically, he was inevitably drawn to the conclusion that he must take after him in other respects, morally for example. How could he be any better than his father? Did he really have the right to set himself above the man? He had in the past pinned his hopes on the admixture of qualities from his mother. But now he was not so sure that he had received anything from her other than a fatal weakness of character, which merely compounded the vicious tendencies he must have inherited from his other parent. All at once, his cherished ideals struck him as alien to his true nature, as much a posture as his father’s self-righteous assumption of integrity. All this was, of course, more reason to hate the man.

  At last his fascination became too much for him. He sought his father’s eye and found its glance at once more complicated and more human than he had allowed for. He saw that his father was seeking him out, and seeking something from him too. But whether it was forgiveness or complicity, he could not tell. His only option was to shake his head and look away.

  Porfiry’s greetings carried them over the moment: ‘Ah, welcome to you, madam . . . sir. I am Porfiry Petrovich.’

  ‘Pavel Pavlovich the elder,’ said Virginsky’s father with a dignified bow. ‘Allow me to introduce my wife, Natalya Ivanovna.’

  ‘It is a pleasure to be able to extend the hand of friendship to the parents of my own dear Pavel Pavlovich the younger.’

  Virginsky wanted to correct the misunderstanding, or misrepresentation, in this. ‘She is not my parent,’ he said, but his father spoke at the same time and it was his words that were attended to.

  ‘I am delighted to receive it. The hand of friendship, that is. I had been led to believe by my son that it would be the finger of suspicion that you would be extending towards us.’

  This, Virginsky thought, was typical of his father: to defuse the issue by making a joke of it, as if he could extricate himself from any difficulty by the exercise of affability. How could such a charming fellow be guilty of involvement in a crime? The very idea was ridiculous, it seemed.

  Porfiry smiled. ‘Yes, your son has informed me of your acquaintance with Colonel Setochkin.’

  ‘A terrible business,’ said Virginsky’s father, suddenly solemn, as if his earlier witticism had been about something entirely different.

  ‘Indeed. Was he a good friend of yours?’

  ‘More of a business associate.’ Virginsky’s father nodded, as if this helped to make his meaning clearer.

  ‘So I understand,’ said Porfiry, unconsciously mirroring the nodding motion.

  ‘Still, it is a shock,’ said Virginsky’s father. His eyes widened emphatically, as if he were experiencing the shock at that moment.

  ‘Had you known him long?’ Porfiry’s tone was casual.

  ‘Not long, really,’ answered Virginsky’s father vaguely. He assumed a carefully judged expression of mild sadness. There was a moment of respectful quiet, which left nowhere else for Porfiry’s enquiries to go, without belying the pretence of conversation.

  ‘Shall we have some tea?’ said Porfiry, to everyone’s relief, it seemed, even Virginsky’s. He discovered that he had little appetite for his father’s cross-examination and potential incrimination after all.

  Natalya Ivanovna and Virginsky’s father bowed and smiled their assent. Porfiry opened the door that led to his private apartment and called out for Zakhar. He turned and smiled reassuringly to the room as they waited for the servant to appear. A kind of embarrassment descended on them. They seemed suspended
, unable to move or speak until the business of the tea had been settled. Even Natalya Ivanovna’s smile appeared strained.

  At last Zakhar appeared at the door. It was the first time Virginsky had seen Porfiry’s manservant in person, although he had known of his existence through the services he performed for Porfiry. The man’s advanced age shocked him and provoked a quickening of indignation. Zakhar had that habit, which Virginsky had often observed in older people, of continually wincing and grimacing, apparently for no reason, though undoubtedly at the private agonies of longevity.

  ‘Zakhar, would you be so good as to bring out some tea?’ Dressed in politeness, disguised as a question, this was nevertheless a command from Porfiry.

  The old man’s eyes were barely open, as though he had just been roused from a nap, as well he might have been. To dispel any impression that he was too old for his duties, he gave a rather overdone spring to his step as he set off on his return. He had to grab the doorframe to steady himself.