by R. N. Morris
‘One day . . .’ Tolya began.
But Salytov’s mocking, questioning leer discouraged him from saying more.
‘How nice that you have come to visit us,’ said Natalya Ivanovna, holding Virginsky by both hands. Her smile uplifted him. He felt it pour into him.
‘At last!’ added Virginsky’s father warmly.
Virginsky chose to take offence. ‘You could have come to see me at any time.’ He let go of his stepmother’s hands.
‘Please. Let’s not argue. The important thing is that you are here. And we are glad of it.’ Natalya Ivanovna’s smile now was anxious, straining to hold on to a moment already gone.
‘What do you think of the suite?’ said Virginsky’s father with a satisfied smile, as the sweep of his arm offered the sitting room to Virginsky. ‘A good set of rooms, is it not? And the view, of course. Natasha had to have her view of the river. It is an extra expense. But I am not the man to begrudge a beautiful woman that which she has set her heart upon.’
Virginsky looked about without commenting on the quality or size of the accommodation. At last he said: ‘I’m surprised you have requested a room overlooking one of the city’s stinking waterways. However, you must dispose of your money in whatever way you deem appropriate, father. It matters not to me. Please be assured that I expect nothing from you in that respect.’
The elder Virginsky’s lips twitched apprehensively. ‘There is no need to talk like this. Your inheritance is secure, you must know that.’
‘Then let us talk no more of it,’ said Virginsky, with some attempt at magnanimity. ‘Well, I have some news for you,’ he resumed briskly, but immediately regretted his tone and dampened it. ‘It concerns your friend, the gentleman you were visiting the day I met you. Colonel Setochkin.’
‘You know Setochkin?’
‘No. I don’t know him. Not personally, at least.’ One side of Virginsky’s mouth contracted. ‘I am afraid to have to tell you that Colonel Setochkin is dead.’ Virginsky looked down immediately.
‘No!’ cried his father. Out of the corner of his eye, Virginsky noticed his father’s arm float uselessly.
‘I am sorry,’ said Virginsky. He had the sense that he had unleashed something he could not control. To that extent, his apology was sincere. He thought of Porfiry Petrovich, of the power he seemed to draw from such disclosures: it repelled him, and he judged himself loathsome for having coveted it. ‘I had no idea you were such good friends. I have never heard you talk of him.’
‘It is just the shock of it, that’s all,’ said his father. ‘My dear, if you are to deliver such messages in future, it would be as well to adopt a more appropriate demeanour. So, Setochkin is dead. It was his heart, I suppose. But he was still a relatively young man, and he seemed quite healthy the last time we saw him.’
‘He was shot,’ said Virginsky. ‘Murdered. It is one of the cases I am working on with Porfiry Petrovich.’
‘How extraordinary.’ Virginsky senior found a chair and sank into it. His expression clouded, then he looked at his son wonderingly. ‘But this unfortunate event, it is not the reason for your visit, surely?’
‘You are my father, I am your son. Is it not natural that I should visit you? I recollect that you invited me.’ Virginsky looked away, abashed. ‘I merely mentioned Setochkin’s death because I believe you were coming from visiting him that day when I met you. It is just one of those connections that the mind makes.’
‘I see.’ His father’s tone was guarded. ‘Then it is not the case that you suspect me of somehow being involved in Setochkin’s death?’
Virginsky waited perhaps too long before replying. ‘No.’ After a further pause, he added, rather self-consciously, ‘It is merely that it is a striking coincidence. As an investigator, one learns to distrust coincidence.’
‘As an investigator?’ His father seemed to grow in his chair as he loomed forward threateningly. ‘What about as a son?’
Virginsky looked at Natalya Ivanovna. Her beauty was indisputable; his need to confirm it was a compulsion that he felt destroying him. ‘What was your business with Setochkin?’ Virginsky’s voice was cold. He did not look at his father as he asked the question.
‘Has he sent you here to interrogate me, this Porfiry Petrovich of yours?’
‘Porfiry Petrovich does not know I am here. He does not even know of your connection with Setochkin. I have kept that from him. There are other things I have kept from him too. This visit is not part of the official investigation. As you see, I am not in my uniform. I am here as your son. I ask you these questions as your son. Please answer me candidly as my father.’
‘Then I am suspected. By you, at least.’
‘I am trying to keep you out of it. For that reason I must learn as much as possible about your association with this man. If you knew the full details of the case, you would understand why.’
‘Then enlighten me.’
‘I cannot.’
‘I have always been too lenient with you. I listened too much to your mother. And this is how I am repaid.’
‘I would ask you not to speak of my mother in that way. Not here.’ Virginsky’s glance towards Natalya Ivanovna was sullen and pointed.
A related anger held father and son to silence. Natalya Ivanovna’s mediating smile was sweetly pained. ‘This breaks my heart,’ she said, ‘to see the two men I love most dearly at war.’
Virginsky heard his father say: ‘You are right, my dear. Let us talk of other things.’
But it seemed there were no other things left for them to talk of. Virginsky stared, absurdly, at an insignificant point on the floor, as if the fixity of his gaze was holding the room together. In a way it was: he knew that if he looked away from that point, there would be nothing left for him but to leave. Without releasing his gaze, he addressed the floor, his voice charged with aggressive reasonableness: ‘What my father must realise is that my filial loyalty alone will not be enough to protect him from the enquiries that must inevitably ensue once it is discovered that he is an associate of the dead man, and that he visited him the day before his death. He insists that I, as his son, consider him above all suspicion. Very well. I do and I will. However, there are others, more powerful than I, who will be moved by no such familial obligation. I know myself, from bitter experience, what it is to be suspected by them. It is because I wish to preserve him from a similar experience that I have asked a question on my own account. To be under suspicion is indeed unpleasant. To be incarcerated is far worse. I fear that my father, due to his age and habits, would be ill equipped to survive the latter. My belief was that he would prefer the enquiries of a dutiful son to those of an indifferent authority. I am sorry if I was mistaken in this. Good day.’ Virginsky bowed to the point on the floor and began to turn.
‘Sta-ay,’ called Virginsky senior. He managed to charge the elongated word with both contrition and mockery. Virginsky heard his father’s groan as he rose from his chair. ‘Where has it come from, this constraint between us?’
Virginsky’s brows rose and dipped sharply. He allowed the question to remain rhetorical.
‘You speak of your duty,’ continued his father. ‘You speak of your loyalty. But what of your love?’
Virginsky at last looked up from the floor and it was towards Natalya Ivanovna that his gaze directed itself. Her face was horror-struck as she recoiled from him.
‘Father, I cannot answer such a question, other than by my actions. I am able to be of service to you in this current matter. But you must trust me and demonstrate in return that which you demand from me. If you love me, answer my question: what was your business with Setochkin?’ Now Virginsky sought his father’s eyes, only to find them flitting away from him.
‘He had undertaken to act as agent on my behalf in a certain transaction.’
‘What transaction?’
‘A sale.’
‘A sale of what?’
‘A sale of land.’
‘What land?’
‘There’s a small birch coppice that’s getting difficult to manage. The returns are ever-diminishing. Now seemed the right time to sell. And Setochkin said that he knew a potential buyer. So. Why would I kill him? He was acting on my behalf. You could say I needed him.’
Virginsky did not answer.
‘Now may we talk of other things?’ asked his father.
‘Who is this buyer for the birch coppice that Setochkin had found?’
‘Are we back to Setochkin then?’
‘Was a price agreed?’ Virginsky fired out the question, though he had not yet received an answer to his previous one.
‘We were in negotiations.’
‘I understand, of course, that you are in need of funds to support your new life with Natalya Ivanovna.’
‘You have not yet come into your inheritance, Pavel Pavlovich. Therefore I am still in charge of the management of the estate. I am not required to explain my decisions to you, nor to seek your approval for them.’
‘As I think I have made clear, it is no concern of mine how you manage your affairs.’
‘But no, you are right to be interested.’
‘You misunderstand me,’ said Virginsky. ‘I have no interest. Not in the way you imagine. I am merely trying to understand your connection with Setochkin. Perhaps there was a quarrel over the price? Perhaps Setochkin was cheating you?’
‘You think I killed him over the sale of a birch coppice?’
‘These are the questions my superiors will ask.’
‘But why should they? How will they ever know that I visited Setochkin? Unless you tell them?’
‘Are you suggesting that I suppress information which may prove relevant to the case?’
Virginsky’s father smiled. His tone became silky. ‘But isn’t that what you have already done? You haven’t told them yet. Why need you ever?’
‘I may find that I have a duty to do so.’
Now his father put on a wounded air. ‘That could only be if you suspected me of some involvement.’
‘There are other details.’
‘So you have hinted. Perhaps if you shared these details with me, I could set your mind at rest regarding them too.’
‘They cannot be divulged. The case is at a critical point.’
‘Then you have me at a disadvantage. Will you at least inform me what you intend to do?’
‘Regarding?’
‘Regarding my connection with Setochkin.’
‘I fear that I may have no choice but to notify Porfiry Petrovich of it. I advise you, Father, not to leave St Petersburg.’
Virginsky’s father said nothing. Instead, he waved his son from the room, with a sharp, upward flick of his hand, and averted his gaze to the window where the blithe summer light streamed in.
Porfiry held one hand over his nose and mouth as he hurried over Kokushkin Bridge towards Stolyarny Lane, dipping his head into the noxious air of the canal. He felt the foulness against his eyes and blinked away the moisture that sprang to meet it. The rising arch of the bridge seemed to be shaped by a repulsion for what passed beneath. The pink-hued granite embankments that it spanned were streaked with dark stains, pointed fingers of filth around a slovenly tidemark. In the stone’s permeability he saw the city’s weakness. Here the stone was subtly, but inescapably, breached and into it seeped the water’s malign influence, the turgid darkness Porfiry glimpsed and flinched from.
The thought came to him: Everything is connected.
Embankments linked by bridges, canals connecting rivers, rivers encompassing islands, islands coupled by bridges . . . and over this matrix was superimposed the network of buildings and courtyards, connected by passageways. You could cross the city on foot through the courtyards of apartment buildings.
As he stepped off the bridge, his head still stooped, eyes half-closed, he felt his shoulder hit by the weighted momentum of another human being coming in the opposite direction. Half-turned by the impact, his pardon already begged, he looked up to see Dr Meyer, buffeted and dazed.
‘It’s you,’ said Meyer.
‘Yes.’
‘They let me go.’
‘I know. I ordered it.’
‘But you were the one who had me arrested.’
‘Yes. I am afraid that is sometimes necessary. Before we can apprehend the guilty, we must process the innocent.’
‘Process. That is an interesting euphemism.’
‘What will you do now, Dr Meyer?’
‘I don’t know. Work. There is always work.’
‘Yes. I find that is the case.’
‘You know,’ said Meyer. ‘I loved her once.’
‘I know.’
‘I mean, she was everything to me. It is true that recently . . .’ Meyer frowned at the dirty canal. ‘It is difficult to talk of these things.’
‘Yes,’ said Porfiry.
‘And Grigory.’ Meyer looked up at the investigator in puzzlement. ‘They were all I had. And now they are gone.’
‘What about . . . Polina?’
‘No,’ said Meyer, simply and sharply.
Porfiry nodded. ‘You have your work. Your work is important.’
‘Yes,’ said Dr Meyer. His tone was strange and distant, as if he were thinking of something else entirely, some new thought that had suddenly captivated him. ‘My work is important.’
A residue of despondency from his encounter with Dr Meyer dogged Porfiry as he climbed the stairs to the Haymarket District Police Bureau. As he opened the door to the bureau itself, the din of human crisis and confusion, of people pushed to the edges of tolerance, was released, and other smells and other despondencies mingled with those he had brought with him. Of course, there were those who held themselves aloof from this, who remained silent and impassive and unmoving, who simply waited, with either meek or cunning eyes, as they calculated their fate.
The voice of one man cut through it all.
Lieutenant Salytov’s reflex rage against the daily intrusion of humanity was part of the rhythm of the bureau, especially in the summer. They would come, in all their untidy, unruly variety, the wicked, the indigent, the worthless, victims and villains alike, and he, outraged at their presence, indignant at his own inability to hold them back, would produce from somewhere deep inside himself his snarling, half-strangled commands. And the more he shouted, the less attention they paid him. He may as well have issued orders to the flies that competed for air in the sweltering hall. Of course, this was a lesson that Salytov never learnt.
Porfiry knew from weary experience the difficulty of trying to conduct his own work, which amounted to nothing more or less than thinking, during one of Salytov’s summer storms. This was not to say that he required, or even desired, absolute silence: the answering voice of another, whether an imagined other in his head or, preferably, a physical other in the room with him, was the vehicle by which his thought progressed, stoked of course by the endless supply of cigarette smoke. But now Porfiry felt the looming of a blank despair. He felt it pointless even to go into his chambers, where only the ripening stench from the Ditch and an insidious plague of flies awaited him. He even experienced a sympathetic intimation of Salytov’s anger, and looked about him for an object on which to vent it.
Zamyotov was at his counter, sorting files, his face set in its habitual expression of detached superiority.
‘Alexander Grigorevich.’ Porfiry dispensed with his usual efforts to win over the head clerk. He felt a sense of liberation at the brusqueness of his tone. ‘Have we received a reply to my letter about the Yekaterininsky Canal yet?’
Zamyotov looked up slowly, his startled disdain suggesting that all the impertinence was on Porfiry’s side. He said nothing.
‘I cannot be expected to work in these conditions,’ continued Porfiry, unwisely, he knew.
‘And I cannot be expected to do anything about it.’ Zamyotov looked down dismissively.
‘I merely asked you whether you were in receipt of a response from
the authorities concerning my complaint.’
‘Correct me if I am wrong, Porfiry Petrovich, but is it not the case that you make the same complaint every year? You know as well as I do how long it takes for the department responsible to process such complaints. If previous years are anything to go by, I am confident that we will receive a response, but not before the Yekaterininsky Canal has frozen over. By which time, of course, it will no longer be a problem.’
‘You will inform me as soon as the official response comes in.’
‘My my, it seems this weather is affecting everyone’s -’