by R. N. Morris
‘That is unfortunate.’
‘I wonder, do you have the letter that you were sent?’
‘I destroyed it and thought no more of it. Until today, that is. He never sent me another.’
‘A pity. Nevertheless, what’s done is done. I don’t suppose you can remember the content of it?’
‘It was nonsense. The ramblings, frankly, of a madman. That is why I assumed that Rostanev had sent it.’
‘Is Rostanev in the department today?’
‘Yes.’
‘We would be grateful if you could point him out to us.’
Yefimov nodded distractedly and gnawed a thumbnail. ‘Of course. Please, come this way.’
They threaded their way between the desks. At one point, Salytov brushed one of the columns of files, causing it to totter precariously. All the heads in the room turned towards the swaying paperwork. The collective sigh of relief as it settled without toppling sounded like the wind passing through a forest. The copyists bowed once again over their work.
Yefimov took them deep into the warren of desks and stopped next to that of a short, barrel-shaped man with a squashed face and a sharply angled forehead. His civil service coat was frayed and grubby. He had very black lank hair, which he wore long. In contravention of service regulations, he was bearded. His thick black beard was twisted into four points, giving it the appearance of a dark fuzzy star. The man worked with great concentration, with his tongue stuck out and twisted to one side. The childish habit gave his expression a trusting simplicity.
‘Axenty Ivanovich,’ said Yefimov.
Rostanev looked up, mildly curious. He inspected Porfiry, Virginsky and Salytov with detached and unsuspecting interest.
‘These gentlemen wish to talk to you. They are magistrates.’ Confusion rather than concern clouded his face.
‘You are Axenty Ivanovich Rostanev?’ said Porfiry.
Rostanev nodded. One hand moved to tighten the points of his beard.
‘Your beard-,’ began Porfiry, registering his surprise.
‘You have come about my beard? I have a dispensation on health grounds.’ An uneasy look passed between Rostanev and his superior.
‘No. It is about another matter. I have a letter here that I would like you to look at.’ Porfiry handed him the letter sent to Meyer. ‘Do you recognise it?’
Rostanev read it through and nodded. ‘Oh yes. I do. I wrote it, you see.’ His smile appeared almost facetious. But Porfiry decided it most closely resembled the smile of a child who is surprised by the silliness of adults.
‘You admit that you wrote it?’
‘Yes.’
‘And that you sent it to a gentleman called Dr Meyer?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you also send a similar letter to Ruslan Vladimirovich Vakhramev?’
Rostanev thought for a moment, his face becoming momentarily serious. It then lit up with pleasure, as if he believed himself to be playing a game, and doing unexpectedly well at it. ‘Yes!’ The same hand went back to maintaining his whiskery prongs. He held a quill in the other hand.
‘Did you also send another letter to this gentleman, your superior, Collegiate Registrar Yefimov?’
‘Yes!’
‘But why did you write these letters?’
‘The voices told me to.’
‘I beg your pardon? The voices, did you say?’
‘Yes. At night the voices speak to me. They tell me to write the letters. If I write the letters the voices go away. But they always come back, eventually.’
‘Good heavens, how perplexing for you! Tell me though, were you once a pupil at the Chermak Private High School in Moscow?’
Rostanev let out a chuckle like a repeated high note on a muted trumpet. ‘Yes!’
Porfiry’s gaze softened and became almost pitying. ‘I must ask you to come with us, sir, to the police bureau. There are further questions I wish to ask you and it will be better if we conduct the rest of the interview in private.’
For the first time Rostanev’s expression grew anxious. His beard-tightening fingers quickened. The quill in the other hand trembled. ‘But I have work to do.’ He looked to Yefimov for confirmation.
‘You must go with them,’ said Yefimov.
‘If your hand offends you, cut it off.’ Rostanev’s tone was despairing.
‘Now now, don’t worry. Everything will be all right.’ To Porfiry, Yefimov added: ‘He can’t possibly be held responsible. The new courts will find him insane. You can see for yourself. And this talk of voices . . .’
Porfiry said nothing.
Yefimov nodded commandingly to Rostanev. The copyist laid down his quill and slipped off his high stool. Standing on the floor, he turned out to be even shorter and more rotund than Porfiry. He looked up at them all with untroubled innocence. Now he used both hands to sharpen the points of his beard.
Salytov grasped him firmly by the arm, pulling that hand away from its task. A look of shock and bewilderment descended on Rostanev, and - suddenly - fear.
‘It’s all right, Axenty Ivanovich,’ insisted Yefimov. ‘Go with the gentlemen.’ He spoke slowly, with precise enunciation. His eyes stared steadily into Rostanev’s in a way that was perhaps meant to be reassuring.
Rostanev nodded and obeyed.
As they walked Rostanev out of the office, Salytov’s shoulder again clipped a tower of papers, this one even more precariously assembled than the first. As before, all heads turned. The room held its breath; there was a sense of inevitable disaster this time. It was a strangely gradual catastrophe when it came, one which they felt ought to be preventable, but of course was not. The momentum of the collapse built and flowed along the twisting rows of paper, as the originally disturbed column took with it those around it, and they in turn transmitted instability to their neighbours. The sound of the whole event, which left only a few half-towers standing in the room, was like a wave crashing over rocks. All around, sheets flew up and floated in the hot, dusty air, before drifting erratically and ostentatiously to the floor.
It was impossible for Porfiry to resist looking at the faces of men who had just witnessed an unimaginable upheaval of their world and not to feel, seeing the extent and depth of their open-mouthed horror, a sense almost of privilege. Even so, he had no wish to linger. They swept Rostanev from the silenced room.
8
Interview with a madman
‘Empty your pockets!’
The first item Rostanev took out was a small ebony-handled penknife. The police lieutenant snatched it from him and examined it closely, opening and closing each of the blades in turn. While he was doing so, Rostanev cast his unconcerned gaze around the Haymarket District Police Bureau. His face opened up with wonder, as if he were watching the events of a dream unfold. Both hands were at his beard again.
‘Nasty,’ said Salytov, laying the knife on the clerk Zamyotov’s counter. ‘You could do someone a deal of harm with that. Note it down, Alexander Grigorevich. One knife.’
Zamyotov sighed and raised his eyebrows as he was compelled to record the knife’s existence.
‘It’s for the quills,’ explained Rostanev, with a slight smirk that was no doubt involuntary. Its effect on Salytov was unfortunate.
‘Quills?’ Salytov leant down to bark the question in Rostanev’s face.
Perhaps unwisely, Rostanev failed to flinch. ‘For sharpening them.’
Salytov straightened slowly, keeping his narrowed eyes fixed on Rostanev, on whom the menacing glare was wasted: he now enthusiastically produced a bundle of quills from inside his coat. He beamed triumphantly, as if he believed this would be enough to win the officer’s approval. Sensing Salytov’s obduracy, he placed the quills - about six in number - on the counter next to the knife, then plunged a hand into the other side of his coat. A dozen or so more quills were added to those already on the counter. After further searches in unexpected places, the total number of quills reached twenty-five, laboriously and ironically counted off by
Zamyotov. So far Porfiry had been content to stand back and watch as Salytov processed the suspect but now he felt moved to intervene. ‘You will be given a receipt for everything. This is normal procedure. There is no need to be alarmed.’
‘I am not alarmed,’ said Rostanev with disarming simplicity, whiskers rotating under his grinding thumbs.
Porfiry smiled. ‘Good. Now, when you have finished giving Alexander Grigorevich your details, perhaps you would be so good as to join me in my chambers for a little chat.’
Porfiry drew Salytov to one side. ‘I want a search done of his lodgings.’
Salytov nodded without looking at the magistrate.
‘I also want Dr Meyer and Vakhramev brought in. And the old woman, Mikheyeva.’
Salytov could not now prevent himself from meeting Porfiry’s eye. He held the gaze for a moment, before his head twisted away, as though repelled.
‘There is a terrible smell in here,’ said Rostanev as he took the seat opposite Porfiry.
It was several moments before Porfiry was able to speak. He flashed his astonishment at Virginsky, who could not suppress a wry grin. ‘Yes. Quite,’ said Porfiry at last. ‘If you remember, I sent a letter saying as much to your department. And received the reply, signed by you, that I have already shown you. No action was deemed necessary.’
The small smirk that seemed to be Rostanev’s stock reaction to difficulty twisted his lips again. ‘That was the correct response. There was nothing that could be done. That is to say, no action was deemed possible. We are not required to do the impossible. The impossible is by definition unnecessary. One must take no action when no action can be taken.’
Porfiry’s eyes widened as he tried to unravel Rostanev’s argument.‘My friend, you might have surprised yourselves.’
Rostanev’s stifled brass chuckle sounded again. ‘It is not the policy of the department, of any department, to surprise itself. The ministry could not function if departments engaged in surprising themselves.’
‘But, the ministry does not function,’ Porfiry spluttered.
‘It is just that you do not understand what its function is.’
Porfiry realised that he had been blinking to excess because he saw the action mirrored in Rostanev’s face. He made a conscious effort to stop.
‘There are a lot of flies in here,’ observed Rostanev.
Porfiry glanced around distractedly. ‘Yes, that problem is not unconnected with the original problem.’
‘They seem rather lethargic.’
‘They are intoxicated,’ said Porfiry.
‘How did they get into that state?’ There was a note of disapproval in Rostanev’s question.
‘I fed them honey laced with kvas,’ said Porfiry. It was galling to be on the receiving end of the look that came from Rostanev. ‘However, we are not here to talk about flies.’
‘My lips are sealed,’ said Rostanev, with a wink.
‘No,’ said Porfiry, momentarily bewildered. ‘Let us talk about Raisa Meyer instead.’
‘Who is Raisa Meyer?’
‘Are you serious? Do you really not remember? Earlier, I showed you another letter, this one. It concerns a woman called Raisa Meyer. You sent it to her husband.’
‘Did I?’
‘That’s what you said.’
‘I send so many, you see.’
‘How did you come to know Raisa Meyer?’
‘I don’t know her. I’ve never met her. Who is she?’
‘She is dead.’ Porfiry watched Rostanev closely. The information seemed not to permeate his consciousness at all. ‘You must have known her. How could you write such things about her if you did-n’t know her? Why would you?’
‘The voices.’
‘Did the voices tell you to kill her?’
‘No,’ said Rostanev flatly.
‘Then why did you kill her?’
‘I didn’t kill her.’ He made the statement calmly, without any of the defensive force that Porfiry would have expected; as one disputing a minor point of detail, in fact.
‘In this letter, you said that you had slept with Raisa Meyer when she was a prostitute.’
Rostanev stared open-mouthed at Porfiry. He then turned his incredulous glare on Virginsky and cried: ‘Prostitute! Prostitute!’
‘Please,’ said Porfiry. ‘Try to concentrate. Raisa Meyer was indeed once a prostitute. How could you have known that if you had never met her?’
‘The voices?’ A note of uncertainty had crept into Rostanev’s tone.
‘The voices will not help you. You cannot blame it all on the voices. Is it not true that you once visited a brothel with a former schoolfriend called Golyadkin? There were two other men in your party, one of whom was Vakhramev, to whom you sent another anonymous letter concerning his daughter and a man called Setochkin. It was in the course of that visit that you first made the acquaintance of Raisa Meyer.’
Rostanev became agitated. ‘No! It is most emphatically not true. I admit to sending the letters, but I have never visited one of those places. I am an official in the Department of Public Health. Am I likely to expose myself to the risk of contracting a filthy disease? Would I defile myself with women?’
‘A man may act under any number of compulsions,’ said Porfiry. ‘He may even be driven to do things that are not in his own or others’ interests. That is what it means to be human.’
‘Then I would rather be a fly,’ said Rostanev hotly.
‘Do you think that flies are any less subject to compulsion?’
Rostanev’s head bobbed and oscillated as he followed a drunken fly’s plummeting trajectory.
‘Who is Nikolai Nobody?’ demanded Porfiry.
Rostanev turned his gaze slowly on the magistrate. ‘No one?’ It seemed like a guess.
‘Are you Nikolai Nobody?’
‘Am I?’ Rostanev looked about the room conspiratorially. ‘My lips are sealed,’ he added, at last.
‘Have you ever bought chocolates from Ballet’s the confectioner’s? ’
‘On Nevsky Prospekt? I know it well.’
‘That’s right.’
‘No.’ Rostanev shook his head forlornly, as though he were sorry to disappoint. ‘I cannot afford to shop there.’
‘And yet the name Rostanev shows up in one of their order books.’
Rostanev chuckled. ‘That is a striking coincidence.’
‘The address of this Rostanev is given as care of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Chernyshov Square.’
‘Even more striking!’
‘And outside Ballet’s you contrived to bump into Dr Meyer,’ pressed Porfiry, ‘switching the box of chocolates he purchased for one contaminated with poison.’
‘Who has said this? Who accuses me of this?’
‘Did you also send an anonymous letter to Gorshkov the factory worker?’
‘I don’t know. Did I? I suppose I must have. I have sent a lot of letters. I confess to sending the letters. That I know I did. But I never bumped into anyone. I am not the sort who bumps into people. I would always far rather step to one side. I am a stepper-to-the-side. Not a bumper-into.’
‘What?’
‘The world is divided into three types of men. Steppers-to-the-side, unbudgeables and bumpers-into. I am a stepper-to-the-side.’
‘I see. I confess I have never viewed the world in that light before.’
‘I can see that you are an unbudgeable.’
‘What about Ferfichkin? The tailor who sewed a fur collar on a coat for you. Into which category would you place him?’
‘Unbudgeable.’
‘So you do admit that you know Ferfichkin?’ pressed Porfiry.
‘As you say, he sewed a collar on to a coat.’
‘Yes. A fur collar. It is strange that you could afford a fur collar and yet you say you cannot afford to shop at Ballet’s.’
‘To pay for the collar I was forced to secure an advance on my salary. The necessity of paying that back led to a degree of embarrass
ment that precluded the, uh, aforementioned, herewith, withal, uh, etcetera etcetera, your obedient servant, Rostanev, A. I.’
‘You purchased the collar but could not afford to pay for it to be sewn on to your coat. You owed Ferfichkin money, did you not?’