by R. N. Morris
‘Then I will come with you,’ said Father Anfim, drawing himself up to his full height.
Maria Petrovna rewarded this quixotic offer with a smile of unbounded gratitude. ‘It will not be necessary, dear, kind Father Anfim. I will have these gentlemen with me. As well as being magistrates, they are also my friends, or so I consider them. I hope I am not wrong to do so.’
Absurdly, Virginsky felt himself blush, though whether it was out of pleasure at the favour shown him, or resentment at being grouped together with Porfiry Petrovich, he could not say.
23 A basement room
‘It is as well your colleague came when he did. I was about to set the students the task of removing the facial epidermises.’
The professor, whose name, it turned out, was Bubnov, led the way by candlelight through the dark corridors of the basement, which like every basement in St Petersburg was permeated with the cloying smell of damp rot. His remark, intended for Porfiry Petrovich, was made a little too volubly. It drew a gasp from the darkness behind Virginsky. He turned and waited. Maria Petrovna’s face appeared, wraithlike. She seemed hardly there, the flickering intimation of a presence in the shifting darkness. Virginsky reached out a hand to console her, but lost faith in the gesture before it was completed.
Virginsky ran two steps to catch up with Porfiry. ‘Porfiry Petrovich,’ he hissed through clenched teeth. ‘We cannot, in all conscience, subject her to this.’
‘It’s all right, Pavel Pavlovich.’ Maria’s voice came deep and firm, as if something of the darkness had entered it and given it strength. He thought of her singing in the schoolroom. ‘I must do it.’
‘But you don’t know what it will cost you. You will never be the same after this. What you are about to see, it will enter you and take hold of you, and never let you go.’
‘You wish to spare me. I understand. But I do not wish to be spared.’
‘Pavel Pavlovich.’ Porfiry’s voice was stern as he cut in. ‘You must not presume that everyone will be affected in the same way that you were. Now, please calm yourself. This discussion is not helpful to Maria Petrovna.’
Maria’s presence faded momentarily as she reeled back from their attention. It was as if she could not bear even the feeble glow of the candlelight on her. The force of their dispute, and that she was the subject of it, seemed also to weigh heavily on her.
‘I just want to … get this over with.’ Two bright points glittered in the darkness, then flickered uncertainly before disappearing.
‘Take my arm, Maria Petrovna.’
The glittering points came back, their gleam directed at Porfiry Petrovich. He held out his forearm receptively. Her hand, like a timid creature venturing from its hiding place, bobbed tentatively towards it.
Virginsky felt the pivotal roll of defeat inside him.
*
As they entered the room, the smell of damp intensified, or rather it was overlaid with another smell in a similar register, but sweeter and somehow more insinuating. Professor Bubnov touched a taper to the candle flame and lit an oil lamp suspended from the centre of the ceiling. Its spread of yellow light seemed to take them all by surprise.
There was a glacial chill in the room. The floor was of trodden earth, the walls exposed brick, apart from one wall which was taken up with rows of small, square doors of varnished wood. These doors were numbered from one to twenty four, and had been constructed, Virginsky noted, with evident care and craftsmanship, to precise specifications. The polished brass hinges and fastenings gleamed. A folded stepladder was leaning against this wall.
‘This is where we keep the body parts,’ said Professor Bubnov, placing his candle on a long table in the centre of the room. Virginsky noticed that the surface of the table was stained with blood. ‘Complete cadavers are kept elsewhere. As you may have noticed, the temperature here is several degrees lower than in the corridor, on account of the ice, in which the parts are packed.’
Porfiry addressed himself to Professor Bubnov. ‘We are looking for a boy of about ten years of age. He would not have come to you before, say, the thirteenth of September.’
‘We do keep a record of when we take possession of our cadavers.’ Professor Bubnov took up the candle again and crossed to a desk against one of the brick walls. There was a lamp on this too. He removed the cylindrical glass and lit the wick with unhurried methodical care. Replacing the glass seemed to take an age. At last the professor sat down at the desk, then opened a drawer and took out a ledger book. With the same slow meticulousness, he turned the pages, running his fingers along rows of numbered entries.
Virginsky craned his neck to peer over Professor Bubnov’s shoulder. ‘Does it tell you from whom the bodies were acquired?’
‘As I informed you this morning, we receive them from the police. There is no need to go into any greater detail than that, as all the bodies come from the same source.’
‘Of course,’ granted Virginsky, frowning enquiringly at Porfiry Petrovich. Porfiry smiled and nodded approval.
‘We did receive such a body, number four three six one, a boy, estimated to be around that age. Received, let me see, on the twenty-third of September.’
‘And these letters here,’ said Virginsky, pointing to a column in the entry Professor Bubnov had his finger on. ‘I. P. S.? What do they signify?’
‘Do you wish me to show you the head of this boy?’ There was a note of aggression in the offer. ‘You will be interested to know that it was one of the heads the students were to have worked on this morning.’
‘I see each entry has a set of similar letters in the same place,’ persisted Virginsky. ‘I. I. D., P. P. Ch., S. D. L. They look like initials to me. Some of them occur more than once. This I. P. S., for example, occurs here, here and here.’
‘It is nothing.’
‘But it must mean something.’
Professor Bubnov closed the ledger. ‘I had the heads from this morning’s class placed in compartment seven. The head of four three six one should be with them.’ He turned sharply away from the desk, consigning the ledger and its contents to the past.
Porfiry treated Virginsky to a significant blink. ‘My dear Professor Bubnov,’ he began smoothly. ‘It really would be most helpful for us to know the meaning of those letters. Perhaps you are embarrassed because you do not know.’ This time, his facial contraction was without doubt a wink. Professor Bubnov’s eyes darted slyly, as he calculated his position. ‘Yes, that must be it,’ continued Porfiry. ‘I cannot believe that you would deliberately withhold information from the judicial authorities.’ The professor looked down in embarrassment. ‘In that case, if you need to consult with the person who entered these letters in order to learn from them directly what they signify, and then pass on that information to us later, that would of course be acceptable. Do you not agree, Pavel Pavlovich?’
‘It will be acceptable,’ said Virginsky.
‘And now, professor, if Maria Petrovna is read y …’
Maria Petrovna bowed her head in heavy assent. Her face was ashen. Her lips were compressed and colourless.
Professor Bubnov rattled open the stepladder and positioned it alongside compartment seven, the first from the left on the third row. He climbed to the second step of the ladder and reached out to turn the brass handle. As the door swung open, Virginsky saw that the back of it was lined with a dull grey metal. A wooden panel came half way up the aperture of the door: the front of a deep drawer. A brass handhold had been inlaid into it. Again Virginsky marvelled at the care that had gone into creating these holding bays for dead matter. Above the drawer front, an impenetrable blackness squatted. It seemed to be an entity released by the opening of the door. But it did not burst out with boundless energy; rather, it began a slow, seeping infiltration of the room.
The professor took hold of the brass handle and pulled. An enormous drawer came out smoothly and easily on a well-oiled sliding mechanism. The black entity shrank back with a grumbling murmur.
The tray of the drawer extended more or less the length of a grown man into the room, supported on iron rods along its bottom edges. The professor lifted the long side nearest him, which turned over and dropped, giving him easier access to the contents: six wooden crates, which could easily have contained the lovingly packed-up possessions of a family removing to their dacha for the summer. The boxes possessed the insolent neutrality of inanimate objects. For it seemed a provocation that anything in the universe could remain unmoved by what Virginsky knew those crates in fact contained.
‘Four three six one, here we are,’ said Professor Bubnov, taking hold of the second crate. ‘May I pass this down to one of you gentlemen?’
Virginsky stepped forward to receive the crate. His heart raced as he took it. He felt also the hot blush of shame. What on earth had impelled him to put himself forward with such unthinking alacrity? Whatever else he might argue, he knew that he had wanted to feel the weight of the crate in his hands. He knew also that this was something he couldn’t blame on Porfiry Petrovich.
The box was heavier than he had expected, so much so that it almost slipped through his fingers as the professor released his hold. How heavy could a boy’s head be? flashed through his mind.
‘Be careful with it,’ warned Professor Bubnov. He scuttled down the steps to share the load, or rather to hover his hands in a precautionary manner close to the box as Virginsky carried it. ‘On the table, please.’
Virginsky slid it into the centre of the table. It gave a protesting screech. Professor Bubnov lifted the lid, which was only loosely in place. Virginsky peered in. To his disappointment, all he could see was tightly packed crushed ice. He felt a tap on his arm. Porfiry signalled for him to move back, inclining his head at the same time towards Maria Petrovna. Virginsky remembered himself with a grimace; his head hung as he backed off.
Professor Bubnov laid the lid upside down on the table, revealing that it too was backed with lead. He began to transfer ice from the crate to the lid. Virginsky wanted to look inside to see what was being uncovered, but it was not his place to do so. At last, the professor nodded to Maria Petrovna. She stepped forward and stooped over the open crate, as if somehow she was readying herself to dive into it. Indeed, at one point, she seemed about to fall forward. She was forced to take hold of the sides of the crate to steady herself, giving the impression that she was drinking up whatever was contained in that bland cube.
Now, now was the time to look into her face. He might tell himself that it was his official duty to look there, simply for confirmation of the boy’s identity. But he knew that he was looking there because he was guilty of every charge he had laid against Porfiry Petrovich — of a kind of emotional sadism, in fact.
Even so, that self-realisation did not prevent him from looking.
Maria Petrovna closed her eyes, squeezing them tight over the terrible sight within the box. A sob broke from her. Her head nodded forwards once. This movement set in train a spasm of nodding. ‘Yes, yes,’ she gasped. ‘It’s Mitka.’
It was Porfiry who took hold of her, gently, with infinite delicacy, and guided her by the elbows away from the table.
Virginsky stepped into her place.
The boy was looking up at him, his head surrounded by a halo of ice fragments. His face was tinged with blue, eyes almost the same blue, wide open, in boyish wonder and excitement. His lips were parted, in a lung-bursting gasp.
‘Shall I put it back?’ asked Professor Bubnov.
‘No, thank you,’ said Porfiry. ‘Please leave it on the table. I will need to examine it more closely in due course. You may replace the lid, however — for now, that is.’ Porfiry turned his attention to Maria: ‘How are you, my dear? Do you wish to sit down? Pavel Pavlovich, that chair, please.’
Virginsky fetched the chair from the desk. Maria sank into it gratefully. She covered her face with one hand, fingers spread as if to catch her pain and squeeze it into nothing.
‘There are other children missing.’ Porfiry’s voice was low, a husky whisper, awed at its own temerity.
Maria nodded.
‘They may be here.’
A wince as though of acute physical pain contorted Maria’s face.
‘Would you be willing to look at the other children here, to try to identify them too?’
‘Porfiry Petrovich!’ cried Virginsky.
Porfiry was ready for his protest. ‘Surely it is better to face it now, once and for all, and never to have to return to this room?’
‘Porfiry … Petrovich …’ Her voice, though faltering, compelled their attention. ‘ … is right.’
Porfiry nodded decisively to Professor Bubnov, who mounted the steps again.
Five more crates were handed down, with Virginsky and Porfiry taking it in turns to receive them. They placed them side by side on the table. Then Professor Bubnov climbed down the steps to remove the lids. Still wearing the black rubber gloves, he began to scoop ice out of the first of the crates. His hands plunging into the ice made a brittle hawking sound.
There was something hypnotic about his execution of the task. His slow methodical movements seemed to create a haven in time, which would serve to postpone indefinitely the dreadful spectacle to come.
He moved along the row of crates, clearing ice. Each time he worked with the same unhurried persistence.
Eventually, he came to the end of the last crate. He straightened himself above it and turned to Porfiry with a grim dip of his head. Porfiry reached out a hand to Maria Petrovna. Her face was stricken, nauseous. She was shivering, her teeth clattering violently.
She said nothing. Virginsky watched as Porfiry took her hand. He imagined the cold frailty of that hand. All her vulnerability and courage seemed to be concentrated in it. He wanted to be the one who was enclosing it in his own firm hands.
Maria rose shakily from her seat.
She stood over the first of the crates. An inarticulate cry, a gurgle of horror and grief, vibrated in her throat. ‘Lana!’ she cried. ‘That is Lana!’
Porfiry steered her on to the second crate. Maria shook her head, as she did over the third and fourth crates. The fifth crate, however, produced a gasp and a name.
‘Artur.’ She looked up, first into Porfiry’s face, then into Virginsky’s. Her gaze was searching. He felt her trying to look beyond his face, beyond his humanity even, for some explanation of what she had been shown. ‘They were my children,’ she said at last. ‘They came to my school.’ Her eyes narrowed as she processed a difficult thought. ‘Is that why they are dead?’
Virginsky and Porfiry exchanged a brief, almost guilty, glance, but neither answered her question.
24 Strange marks
At Porfiry’s instruction, the three heads were taken out of their crates and laid side by side on the table. Additional lanterns were fetched, their light reflecting garishly back off the livid flesh, lending it the illusion of animation as each lantern was swung into place.
Porfiry looked down at the children. Mitka, Svetlana and Artur. He tried to imagine that they were lying in a big bed, asleep. But their eyes were open, and that horrific emptiness beneath their necks mocked any attempt to take refuge in a sentimental fantasy. Their faces were united by death and childhood, but Porfiry made an effort to appreciate them as individuals before he hardened himself to the task of assessing their remains as evidence. Mitka’s features were elfin, his head coming to a delicate point at the chin. Svetlana, pale and blonde, appeared younger; her features less mature, her nose a mere button, her chin hardly there at all. Artur was the oldest. His features had begun to coarsen, his nose outgrowing the rest of his face. His hair was dark and wiry, and the faint smudge of his first moustache shadowed his upper lip.
Porfiry heard the door close behind him. He half-turned to acknowledge Virginsky’s entrance.
‘How is she?’ Porfiry asked, stooping again over the children.
‘How do you think?’
Porfiry twisted his head in Virginsky’s direct
ion, then quickly faced back towards the table. ‘My dear Pavel Pavlovich, I cannot help remarking a strange, strained tension in your demeanour towards me. One might even call it resentment. May I ask what I have done to cause offence?’
Virginsky seemed to weigh up his options before replying. He gestured towards the heads. ‘You would have sprung this on her, as you once sprung a similar shock on me.’
Porfiry stood up to face Virginsky. ‘I did not want to warn her at the school, that’s true. I saw little point. I wanted to spare her the anguish of imagining this, at least for the duration of our journey here. However, I would have told her before bringing her into this room.’
‘I see,’ said Virginsky stiffly. It was evident that such a consideration had not occurred to him.
‘It makes little difference, I suppose,’ conceded Porfiry. ‘The anguish of imagining such a prospect, which was all I sought to mitigate, is nothing compared to the horror of seeing it.’ Porfiry widened his eyes, inviting a response from Virginsky.
But Virginsky withheld his thoughts.
‘Is there no other reason for your constraint towards me?’
‘I am not aware of any.’
‘So, how do we stand now? Now that I have explained my earlier prevarication. Does my explanation satisfy?’
‘It does.’
‘And may I once again count upon your friendship, as well as your professional assistance?’
Virginsky drew breath noisily before replying: ‘Yes.’
‘A hesitation!’
‘No. That is to say … if I am honest …’
‘Why should you not be honest?’
‘That man. Slava. I confess I do not like him and I fail to understand why you have taken him into your employ. His interest in our cases strikes me as entirely inappropriate. To be frank, Porfiry Petrovich, I do not trust him.’
‘My goodness, Pavel Pavlovich! But he has the most glowing references, albeit from deceased individuals. Tell me, of what do you suspect him?’
